When you talk about "someone higher up the food chain," are you saying you would prefer autodidacts as coders, but a CS graduate as a software architect?
Basically, yes.
If so, I agree that's a good basic rule, but please don't forget the lessons from sitcoms and kids' books: don't judge a book by its cover, and don't jump to conclusions about people. I've met CS grads who are outstandingly productive coders, and I've met CS grads who are idiots who shouldn't be trusted with anything tech-related. I've met self-taught programmers who were great coders, others who were good even at the "higher up the food chain" tasks, and others who should have chosen some other field.
I am totally with you. I am a self-learner who is now higher up in the food chain;-) So I do know from experience that you better look what the person knows instead of what papers does he hold. The papers can only give you an indication about what minimum level to expect (you can't expect people to understand and remember everything they learned at university). But normally I expect a self-learned to know his language(s) of choice better than some graduate while I expect the graduate to understand more about why or how certain things are working.
BTW, I prefer self learners as programmers (read: coders) over people with degrees. My experience is that they are more dedicated and know more about real world problems. That's simply because a CS degree is not focused on making you a programmer but a more general problem solver.
So when you want a coder you have to check what he really knows, not what diplomas he's having (that only gives a hint). Story is completely different if you're looking for someone higher up the food chain, of course.
Because it is far easier to get "university degrees, a couple of IT certifications, and over ten years of work experience in the industry, with 2-4 years of verifiable employment with each employer, working with a wide range of technologies" without a shred of competence in our field than in most others.
I fully agree. I'm more on the employer side (I do the technical part of our job interviews) I was already fooled by someone who had a degree and whose CV said he has 3 years of C++ experience (with a testimonial from his former employer). So I didn't concentrate on that very much in the interview. But then it turned out he didn't even know what a pointer was and I am willing to bet money that he had never actually done any C++ programming before.
Since then the way I interview applicants has completely changed and I also do a small test (about 5 minutes) now.
Your fsck at boot problem was probably due to the default ext3 config 180 days or whatever. That's configurable and certainly not a reason to switch from ext3. The first time you encountered this, you should have reconfigured it.
The ext3 filesystem has settings that make it force an fsck on boot after N mounts or M days. This is likely what you were running into.
You can use tune2fs to disable these checks completely if you want, but it's not advised. Unless your filesystem is very, very large or you have very, very slow disk drives, this check should never take "several hours". On the other hand, if it was finding errors, then perhaps you should be looking at what might have been causing those errors (usually hardware issues, although it could be software related).
I know about tune2fs and these settings but I can assure you that while we did indeed sometime run into these limits I witnessed at a few occasions where this was not the case: we had a problem in our server room which forced us to shut down the servers several times within a week and we almost always had our development server (which has a LOT of I/O activity) in need for an fsck. But not only that it wanted to an fsck, it always (no exception) found errors that forced a "fsck -y/dev/sda2". That week was the reason for our switch to ReiserFS: in that week our development server was stuck in fsck for about 50% of the work week, to say this is unacceptable is an understatement:-)
And I'm pretty sure the hardware was okay... hardware RAID 5.
Well, especially with filesystems we are in the your mileage may vary boat. We kicked ext3 out of our server room in favour of ReiserFS because we had constant problems with ext3 on several servers. Not data loss (we had with neither), but rebooting our servers (especially the development server) almost always required a fsck at boot and it always had to repair the FS. This meant several hours of down-time just because of a reboot (e.g. because we moved the server to a new UPS) which became unacceptable. No such problems with ReiserFS.
I think by now everyone has his horror stories to back either ext3's or ReiserFS's side so it's a kind of vi vs. emacs war by now, IMHO. I'm happily using ReiserFS and vi for almost a decade now;-)
It's really a shame ZFS is not available on Linux (only via FUSE)... I am really impressed by its capabilities (have an OpenSolaris server).
Well, being in a kind of leading position in a small German company (i.e. I'm a team leader and do the technical part in our job interviews) I can tell you that we do need competent technical people, especially programmers and IT managers.
More than half of the people in our company are foreigners mostly because we don't have enough competent programmers in Germany. So your chances of finding a job here are pretty good, I guess.
If you'd like to go to Germany you might want to have a look at Berlin or Munich (where I live). Munich may be a bit more expensive to live but it's a very nice place to live and you can go to France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Czech Republic by car or train in a matter of a few hours. Munich is also a technology center, a lot of high tech companies (not only IT but also biotech) are located here.
At least at work the language barrier shouldn't be a big issue, most Germans understand english and some can even speak it;-) Seriously, in our company we now have two people who can't speak german at all or very badly so we speak english with them. And our company is just about 16 people or so. I've also been in another company where we had someone who didn't speak english, it wasn't a problem there either.
There are a lot of language schools that will help you learn German if you're interested, of course. Sometimes the company you work at even pays the course or at least part of it, just ask your potential employer.
As some other poster already wrote, a good entry would be joining a US based company that has a branch in Germany or looking into job sites like Monster or StepStone (just replace the ".com" with ".de" for their german sites). Some companies even post job offers on these sites in english language. Even if the offer is in german a lot of technical terms will be english and Babelfish might help you as well.
Since virtually all companies now allow (or even demand) online job applications the distance is no problem here. And if you're interesting for the company it will do a first interview by phone with you before both sides agree on whether to fly over for a face-to-face interview.
No matter where you go, I hope you have fun ! Working in another country with another language (no matter which) will be something that will make you a different person:-)
No, but the implaction of 24 handicap on 19x19 is much less than 9 handicap on 9x9:-) I'm a weak amateur in the 20kyu range, and I imagine that losing in a 24 handicap on 19x19 against a higher amateur dan or a professional dan is not unlikely:-)
I think you misread the 9 stone handicap as meaning 9x9 board... if you just open the article you immediately see a picture of a 19x19 board. And have you ever played a 9 stone handicap on a 9x9 game and lost ?:-)
Heh, funny thing is: just a few days ago I ranted about how I think the UNIX handling of terminals is severely broken because an application (library) looks up in a file what it THINKS your terminal is capable of, instead of the terminal telling your application (or better yet: system) what it can do, except for its size. Because of this, I get no colors in OpenSolaris unless I set TERM=xterm-color. And it doesn't know about xterm-256color, which would be the correct value. This also causes my "delete" key to not work on OpenSolaris, even when logged in directly to X Window instead of SSH (I experienced the same in the past on Linux as well, but at least it has readline and I was able to fix it in/etc/inputrc). Similar problems when using iTerm or Terminal.app on Mac OS X when logging in to a Linux machine via SSH... I like UNIX, but the terminal handling is driving me crazy.
The first instinct of the engineer is always to tear it down and build it again, it is a useful function of the PHB (gasp!) that he prevents this from happening all the time. Yes, you are completely right with that. Doesn't change the fact that I hate x86, though;-)
Oh my god, no ! Die already ! The design is bad, the instruction set is dumb, too much legacy stuff from 1978 still around and making CPUs costly, too complex and slow. Anyone who's written assembler code for x86 and other 32-bit CPUs will surely agree that the x86 is just ugly.
Even Intel didn't want it to live that long. The 8086 was hack, a beefed up 8085 (8-bit, a better 8080) and they wanted to replace it with a better design, but iAPX 432 turned out to be a desaster.
The attempts to improve the design with 80286 and 80386 were not very successful... they merely did the same shit to the 8086 that the 8086 already did to the 8085: double the register size, this time adding a prefix "E" instead of the suffix "X". Oh, and they added the protected mode... which is nice, but looks like a hack compared to other processors, IMHO.
And here we are: we still have to live with some of the limitations and ugly things from the hastily hacked together CPU that was the 8086, for example no real general purpose registers: all the "normal" registers (E)AX, (E)BX, etc. pp. are bound to certain jobs at least for some opcodes. No neat stuff like register windows and shit. Oh, I hate the 8086 and that it became successful. The world could be much more beautiful (and faster) without it. But I rant that for over ten years now and I guess I will rant about it on my deathbead.
I just ordered me a Unicomp keyboard yesterday (a SpaceSaver). And I expect to pay a bit more than just $69: I live in Germany, shipping and taxes will drive it up to about $100, I think.
I'm a programmer like so many of you, and I don't understand why most programmers don't care for their keyboards: it's the tool we work with all day. Ask any craftsman and he will tell you that tools are important. For example, I know that a lot of coiffeurs buy a scissor for a few hundred bucks after their apprenticeship. That's a crazy amount of money for a scissor, but this scissor lasts until they retire (if they care for it) and feels better than normal scissors. Same thing with cooks and knifes.
I hope the keyboard holds up to my expectations. I ordered a Model-M clone because I have an old Model-M like keyboard back from my 286 at home (still with the old AT connecter, had to get an AT-to-PS/2 converter) and I won't ever use any other keyboard at home except if it breaks: the feel of it so good, no rubber-dome keyboard can compete.
But I guess I have to get an office on my own soon, my colleague will kill me after a few days with the clicking keyboard:-)
At least this worked in Windows NT4 (I actually tried it out and demonstrated it at work back then; the admin didn't find it funny:-)). And I think it is the same hack and it has the same consequences: you replace something Windows calls with system privileges without any validation and gain a shell that has the right to manipulate and/or destroy the whole system.
I've taken a look at the documentation, and as always it's excellent. Lot's of examples and stuff, so the SDK itself seems to be really good. And I personally think that their distribution system is a good idea (they NEED control for various reasons). I also have no problem with the fact that they don't allow voice services over the cellular network, only via WLAN (they have to, the providers would kick Apple in the nuts if they'd allow that).
But the limitation that instantly kills a ton of useful potential apps is the fact that you can't run an app in the background. If you switch away from your app (say, accept a phone call), your application quits. Bye bye instant messaging and every other application that needs to run for a long time/wait for events.
Yes, that might be a better example... but maybe not as striking as the house;-) Oh, and don't underestimate the knowledge of carpenters and other craftsmen:-)
I don't want a small "ruling" class, but I want people who are able to do the job they've applied for. What's the point of having everyone make a CS degree while that's not what the industry needs ? I think it's BAD if everyone held a CS degree: suddenly it wouldn't be special, BTW. When you build a house, just not everyone can be architect. So now you have CS people working as code monkeys. Do you think this is a good idea ? I don't. It's a waste of money (people with degree earn more than degree-less people but in this case aren't necessary), it's a waste of time (the time that poor guy spent on studying), it's a waste of resources (the universities' resources, the guy's resources), and it doesn't make those people happy: after having obtained a CS degree, do YOU want to work as a code monkey ?
I have no idea why we would need so many Computer Scientists... at least the company I work for needs developers, and writing good software is NOT what you learn at a university. That's not the focus of a university degree: the focus is to create scientiest or maybe managers, but not "workers". But you just can't run a business with 10 managers and 1 worker.
I don't want to say a CS degrees is worthless, au contraire. But I think the focus should shift more to other means of computer education. Most companies don't need people who know all the math theory you can find in The Art Of Computer Programming, but people who can write solid code for the small everyday software development tasks that make up the majority of a software project. They must know their tools (softwares and APIs) and need to know the common mechanisms (e.g. what's a linked list and how does it work, what's a singleton pattern, etc. pp.). For most of this stuff you really don't need to study to understand them, IMHO:-) When you build a house you need one or a few architects but you need a lot more construction workers that actually implement the architect's vision. And I think in the software industry we don't have enough of these (trained) construction workers as the focus seems to be almost exclusivly on the architects.
... are technical. There ARE things MS does well, even technically, but sometimes it's just astonishing how bad the Windows design is. Vista now made that gap to UN*X systems (including Mac OS X) smaller (e.g. symlinks) or even surpassed it (I consider the MS PowerShell to be technically superior to what we have on UN*X systems). But it still amuses me that with all the money, all the people MS has, their OS is still not far ahead of the competition.
And if you know the history of MS, the reason for their dominance is ALSO (not purely) a lot of luck: they were in the right place at the right time, but I think it could all have turned out totally different. Nobody would know MicroSoft today if IBM would have used CP/M on the IBM PC, or if the MS guys wouldn't have known QDOS/86-DOS.
If I'd interview you and you'd tell me that you repeated one year to get higher scores (and that you got low scores because you were working) I'd say that would be a plus. On the other hand I value work experience higher than a degree: I've seen too many people who come from university and can't code their way out of a paper bag. And noone will ask for your score if you have a few years of work experience (it's more important to say "I've worked on this project, implemented that, etc. pp."). So I'd personally recommend finishing your degree, but I think it's way more important that you do what you feel more comfortable with. Repeating a year isn't bad, IMHO, and if you feel safer with better scores then do that.
Maybe I'm not understanding the question, or maybe it came from a Windows user, but the KDE kwallet and the Apple KeyChain serve me very well for managing my various passwords... especially since they get filled in automatically in Konqueror and Safari.
The thing is, why is Nintendo automatically labeled "enabler of innovation"?
Because they innovate and inspire others. A few the things they've invented about joypads and that you now take for granted:
The cross on your joypad (sorry, I'm not a native speaker, I don't know the english name for it).
Shoulder buttons.
I'm not sure about the trigger button.
Analog stick.
Since Wii:
Acceleration/motion sensors.
So, that's why they're labeled "innovative" and enable others to be innovative: they allow for new types of games and gameplays that previously were impossible or awkward.
Slashdot Mirror
I was about to submit this one as well, it's one of my favourite shell scripts :-) But I think the "&" is not necessary.
When you talk about "someone higher up the food chain," are you saying you would prefer autodidacts as coders, but a CS graduate as a software architect?
Basically, yes.
If so, I agree that's a good basic rule, but please don't forget the lessons from sitcoms and kids' books: don't judge a book by its cover, and don't jump to conclusions about people. I've met CS grads who are outstandingly productive coders, and I've met CS grads who are idiots who shouldn't be trusted with anything tech-related. I've met self-taught programmers who were great coders, others who were good even at the "higher up the food chain" tasks, and others who should have chosen some other field.
I am totally with you. I am a self-learner who is now higher up in the food chain ;-) So I do know from experience that you better look what the person knows instead of what papers does he hold. The papers can only give you an indication about what minimum level to expect (you can't expect people to understand and remember everything they learned at university). But normally I expect a self-learned to know his language(s) of choice better than some graduate while I expect the graduate to understand more about why or how certain things are working.
BTW, I prefer self learners as programmers (read: coders) over people with degrees. My experience is that they are more dedicated and know more about real world problems. That's simply because a CS degree is not focused on making you a programmer but a more general problem solver.
So when you want a coder you have to check what he really knows, not what diplomas he's having (that only gives a hint). Story is completely different if you're looking for someone higher up the food chain, of course.
Because it is far easier to get "university degrees, a couple of IT certifications, and over ten years of work experience in the industry, with 2-4 years of verifiable employment with each employer, working with a wide range of technologies" without a shred of competence in our field than in most others.
I fully agree. I'm more on the employer side (I do the technical part of our job interviews) I was already fooled by someone who had a degree and whose CV said he has 3 years of C++ experience (with a testimonial from his former employer). So I didn't concentrate on that very much in the interview. But then it turned out he didn't even know what a pointer was and I am willing to bet money that he had never actually done any C++ programming before.
Since then the way I interview applicants has completely changed and I also do a small test (about 5 minutes) now.
Your fsck at boot problem was probably due to the default ext3 config 180 days or whatever. That's configurable and certainly not a reason to switch from ext3. The first time you encountered this, you should have reconfigured it.
Nope, see my response to nabsltd.
The ext3 filesystem has settings that make it force an fsck on boot after N mounts or M days. This is likely what you were running into.
You can use tune2fs to disable these checks completely if you want, but it's not advised. Unless your filesystem is very, very large or you have very, very slow disk drives, this check should never take "several hours". On the other hand, if it was finding errors, then perhaps you should be looking at what might have been causing those errors (usually hardware issues, although it could be software related).
I know about tune2fs and these settings but I can assure you that while we did indeed sometime run into these limits I witnessed at a few occasions where this was not the case: we had a problem in our server room which forced us to shut down the servers several times within a week and we almost always had our development server (which has a LOT of I/O activity) in need for an fsck. But not only that it wanted to an fsck, it always (no exception) found errors that forced a "fsck -y /dev/sda2". That week was the reason for our switch to ReiserFS: in that week our development server was stuck in fsck for about 50% of the work week, to say this is unacceptable is an understatement :-)
And I'm pretty sure the hardware was okay... hardware RAID 5.
Well, especially with filesystems we are in the your mileage may vary boat. We kicked ext3 out of our server room in favour of ReiserFS because we had constant problems with ext3 on several servers. Not data loss (we had with neither), but rebooting our servers (especially the development server) almost always required a fsck at boot and it always had to repair the FS. This meant several hours of down-time just because of a reboot (e.g. because we moved the server to a new UPS) which became unacceptable. No such problems with ReiserFS.
I think by now everyone has his horror stories to back either ext3's or ReiserFS's side so it's a kind of vi vs. emacs war by now, IMHO. I'm happily using ReiserFS and vi for almost a decade now ;-)
It's really a shame ZFS is not available on Linux (only via FUSE)... I am really impressed by its capabilities (have an OpenSolaris server).
Well, being in a kind of leading position in a small German company (i.e. I'm a team leader and do the technical part in our job interviews) I can tell you that we do need competent technical people, especially programmers and IT managers.
More than half of the people in our company are foreigners mostly because we don't have enough competent programmers in Germany. So your chances of finding a job here are pretty good, I guess.
If you'd like to go to Germany you might want to have a look at Berlin or Munich (where I live). Munich may be a bit more expensive to live but it's a very nice place to live and you can go to France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Czech Republic by car or train in a matter of a few hours. Munich is also a technology center, a lot of high tech companies (not only IT but also biotech) are located here.
At least at work the language barrier shouldn't be a big issue, most Germans understand english and some can even speak it ;-) Seriously, in our company we now have two people who can't speak german at all or very badly so we speak english with them. And our company is just about 16 people or so. I've also been in another company where we had someone who didn't speak english, it wasn't a problem there either.
There are a lot of language schools that will help you learn German if you're interested, of course. Sometimes the company you work at even pays the course or at least part of it, just ask your potential employer.
As some other poster already wrote, a good entry would be joining a US based company that has a branch in Germany or looking into job sites like Monster or StepStone (just replace the ".com" with ".de" for their german sites). Some companies even post job offers on these sites in english language. Even if the offer is in german a lot of technical terms will be english and Babelfish might help you as well.
Since virtually all companies now allow (or even demand) online job applications the distance is no problem here. And if you're interesting for the company it will do a first interview by phone with you before both sides agree on whether to fly over for a face-to-face interview.
For legal informations I recommend you have a look at the German Embassy in the US website.
No matter where you go, I hope you have fun ! Working in another country with another language (no matter which) will be something that will make you a different person :-)
No, but the implaction of 24 handicap on 19x19 is much less than 9 handicap on 9x9 :-) I'm a weak amateur in the 20kyu range, and I imagine that losing in a 24 handicap on 19x19 against a higher amateur dan or a professional dan is not unlikely :-)
I think you misread the 9 stone handicap as meaning 9x9 board... if you just open the article you immediately see a picture of a 19x19 board. And have you ever played a 9 stone handicap on a 9x9 game and lost ? :-)
Heh, funny thing is: just a few days ago I ranted about how I think the UNIX handling of terminals is severely broken because an application (library) looks up in a file what it THINKS your terminal is capable of, instead of the terminal telling your application (or better yet: system) what it can do, except for its size. Because of this, I get no colors in OpenSolaris unless I set TERM=xterm-color. And it doesn't know about xterm-256color, which would be the correct value. This also causes my "delete" key to not work on OpenSolaris, even when logged in directly to X Window instead of SSH (I experienced the same in the past on Linux as well, but at least it has readline and I was able to fix it in /etc/inputrc). Similar problems when using iTerm or Terminal.app on Mac OS X when logging in to a Linux machine via SSH... I like UNIX, but the terminal handling is driving me crazy.
An AC above said the same thing! Now you'll be mod'ed "Redundant".
That's what you get for ignoring us! Bwahahahaha!
But I also provided hints that can be ignored as well :-)
And would have posted before him if I didn't have to fight with Slashdot's $#@! formatting (why isn't <pre> working ?)
I love Zenburn. I use it on all my machines now and at work.
But there is one thing you should do in your .vimrc prior to setting :colorscheme zenburn, and that is forcing the use of 256 colors:
Also I found that the search highlighting wasn't visible enough for my taste, so I tuned it. After :colorscheme zenburn I have:
And if you like to have a little more contrast, then insert the following before your :colorscheme zenburn:
which together makes for this:
Happy birthday and long live, x86.
Oh my god, no ! Die already ! The design is bad, the instruction set is dumb, too much legacy stuff from 1978 still around and making CPUs costly, too complex and slow. Anyone who's written assembler code for x86 and other 32-bit CPUs will surely agree that the x86 is just ugly.
Even Intel didn't want it to live that long. The 8086 was hack, a beefed up 8085 (8-bit, a better 8080) and they wanted to replace it with a better design, but iAPX 432 turned out to be a desaster.
The attempts to improve the design with 80286 and 80386 were not very successful... they merely did the same shit to the 8086 that the 8086 already did to the 8085: double the register size, this time adding a prefix "E" instead of the suffix "X". Oh, and they added the protected mode... which is nice, but looks like a hack compared to other processors, IMHO.
And here we are: we still have to live with some of the limitations and ugly things from the hastily hacked together CPU that was the 8086, for example no real general purpose registers: all the "normal" registers (E)AX, (E)BX, etc. pp. are bound to certain jobs at least for some opcodes. No neat stuff like register windows and shit. Oh, I hate the 8086 and that it became successful. The world could be much more beautiful (and faster) without it. But I rant that for over ten years now and I guess I will rant about it on my deathbead.
I just ordered me a Unicomp keyboard yesterday (a SpaceSaver). And I expect to pay a bit more than just $69: I live in Germany, shipping and taxes will drive it up to about $100, I think.
:-)
I'm a programmer like so many of you, and I don't understand why most programmers don't care for their keyboards: it's the tool we work with all day. Ask any craftsman and he will tell you that tools are important. For example, I know that a lot of coiffeurs buy a scissor for a few hundred bucks after their apprenticeship. That's a crazy amount of money for a scissor, but this scissor lasts until they retire (if they care for it) and feels better than normal scissors. Same thing with cooks and knifes.
I hope the keyboard holds up to my expectations. I ordered a Model-M clone because I have an old Model-M like keyboard back from my 286 at home (still with the old AT connecter, had to get an AT-to-PS/2 converter) and I won't ever use any other keyboard at home except if it breaks: the feel of it so good, no rubber-dome keyboard can compete.
But I guess I have to get an office on my own soon, my colleague will kill me after a few days with the clicking keyboard
At least this worked in Windows NT4 (I actually tried it out and demonstrated it at work back then; the admin didn't find it funny :-)). And I think it is the same hack and it has the same consequences: you replace something Windows calls with system privileges without any validation and gain a shell that has the right to manipulate and/or destroy the whole system.
I've taken a look at the documentation, and as always it's excellent. Lot's of examples and stuff, so the SDK itself seems to be really good. And I personally think that their distribution system is a good idea (they NEED control for various reasons). I also have no problem with the fact that they don't allow voice services over the cellular network, only via WLAN (they have to, the providers would kick Apple in the nuts if they'd allow that).
But the limitation that instantly kills a ton of useful potential apps is the fact that you can't run an app in the background. If you switch away from your app (say, accept a phone call), your application quits. Bye bye instant messaging and every other application that needs to run for a long time/wait for events.
Yes, that might be a better example... but maybe not as striking as the house ;-) Oh, and don't underestimate the knowledge of carpenters and other craftsmen :-)
I don't want a small "ruling" class, but I want people who are able to do the job they've applied for. What's the point of having everyone make a CS degree while that's not what the industry needs ? I think it's BAD if everyone held a CS degree: suddenly it wouldn't be special, BTW. When you build a house, just not everyone can be architect. So now you have CS people working as code monkeys. Do you think this is a good idea ? I don't. It's a waste of money (people with degree earn more than degree-less people but in this case aren't necessary), it's a waste of time (the time that poor guy spent on studying), it's a waste of resources (the universities' resources, the guy's resources), and it doesn't make those people happy: after having obtained a CS degree, do YOU want to work as a code monkey ?
I have no idea why we would need so many Computer Scientists... at least the company I work for needs developers, and writing good software is NOT what you learn at a university. That's not the focus of a university degree: the focus is to create scientiest or maybe managers, but not "workers". But you just can't run a business with 10 managers and 1 worker.
:-) When you build a house you need one or a few architects but you need a lot more construction workers that actually implement the architect's vision. And I think in the software industry we don't have enough of these (trained) construction workers as the focus seems to be almost exclusivly on the architects.
I don't want to say a CS degrees is worthless, au contraire. But I think the focus should shift more to other means of computer education. Most companies don't need people who know all the math theory you can find in The Art Of Computer Programming, but people who can write solid code for the small everyday software development tasks that make up the majority of a software project. They must know their tools (softwares and APIs) and need to know the common mechanisms (e.g. what's a linked list and how does it work, what's a singleton pattern, etc. pp.). For most of this stuff you really don't need to study to understand them, IMHO
... are technical. There ARE things MS does well, even technically, but sometimes it's just astonishing how bad the Windows design is. Vista now made that gap to UN*X systems (including Mac OS X) smaller (e.g. symlinks) or even surpassed it (I consider the MS PowerShell to be technically superior to what we have on UN*X systems). But it still amuses me that with all the money, all the people MS has, their OS is still not far ahead of the competition. And if you know the history of MS, the reason for their dominance is ALSO (not purely) a lot of luck: they were in the right place at the right time, but I think it could all have turned out totally different. Nobody would know MicroSoft today if IBM would have used CP/M on the IBM PC, or if the MS guys wouldn't have known QDOS/86-DOS.
If I'd interview you and you'd tell me that you repeated one year to get higher scores (and that you got low scores because you were working) I'd say that would be a plus. On the other hand I value work experience higher than a degree: I've seen too many people who come from university and can't code their way out of a paper bag. And noone will ask for your score if you have a few years of work experience (it's more important to say "I've worked on this project, implemented that, etc. pp."). So I'd personally recommend finishing your degree, but I think it's way more important that you do what you feel more comfortable with. Repeating a year isn't bad, IMHO, and if you feel safer with better scores then do that.
Maybe I'm not understanding the question, or maybe it came from a Windows user, but the KDE kwallet and the Apple KeyChain serve me very well for managing my various passwords... especially since they get filled in automatically in Konqueror and Safari.
The thing is, why is Nintendo automatically labeled "enabler of innovation"?
Because they innovate and inspire others. A few the things they've invented about joypads and that you now take for granted:
- The cross on your joypad (sorry, I'm not a native speaker, I don't know the english name for it).
- Shoulder buttons.
- I'm not sure about the trigger button.
- Analog stick.
Since Wii:So, that's why they're labeled "innovative" and enable others to be innovative: they allow for new types of games and gameplays that previously were impossible or awkward.