It sounds like XMPP (also called jabber) is what you need. XMPP is an open standard for instant messaging, and there are free/open source implementations for both clients and servers. One option for servers is jabberd. One option for a client is Pidgin (which runs in Windows and Linux).
Can you give examples of good Exchange replacements?
Have a look at the PostPath Email and Collaboration Server. It is a mail server that runs on Linux and acts as a drop in replacement for Exchange (i.e. it implements the MAPI protocol so no special plugins are needed). They were recently acquired by Cisco, so I'm not sure what that has done to the availability of their server.
Admitting my biases, I am former employ of PostPath.
The reason to fear Java doesn't really have much at all to do with any merits of the language itself. The reason you should fear Java is that it doesn't really add anything to your resume to distinguish you. There are, frankly, a LOT of extremely mediocre programmers on the market, and a common attribute they share is that they only know Java.
That said, DO learn Java. Not knowing how to use one of the most popular tools in your field is also not a smart idea. Just don't by any means think that your education is done.
For what it's worth, here are the four major things I look for when interviewing programmers.
1. Do you know C? (whether you are going to be programming in C is irrelevant)
If you don't know C, you probably have very little understanding of how computers work. C is language you can depend on to be on pretty much every platform; C is the language external APIs and foreign function interfaces are specified in; C gets the job done when all your layers of abstraction fail you.
2. Do you know a functional language such as Lisp, Scheme, or Haskell?
Programming in a functional language changes the way you think about programming in general. Programmers that understand functional programming generally are able to produce better solutions to problems even in imperative languages. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is available online for free. Read it today and improve your skillset.
3. Can you write a compiler from start to finish?
The theory surrounding language parsing (automata, state machines, regex, grammars, etc) is fundamental to computing. In fact, computing itself is usually defined in terms of it. Once you understand it, you find you apply it all the time.
The ability to translate high level languages into optimized machine instructions requires that you understand your platform at every level. This is important because it lets you understand the tradeoffs you are making when you choose one tool or method over another.
4. What is your current personal project?
What your project is doesn't matter all that much, as long as you have one. Good programmers are usually always working on some personal project that excites them.
99.8% may not care about DRM if directly polled, but do they also not care about the opinions of their geek friends, and the negative reviews they read on the internet? Negative press can be a powerful thing.
I wish phone companies would work on making it a better phone rather than adding useless extras.
This is the same argument that people use against features in "bloated" software. The problem is, that while everybody agrees that there are a lot of "useless extras", no two people can agree on what is useless and what isn't. What is useless to you may be critical for someone else.
It's a very interesting debate about how much, if any, modern society is causing human evolution to grind to a halt.
"Modern society" is just another environment. There are obviously still members of our species that are more successful at reproducing. One's opinion of whether or not the traits being propogated will be an improvement for the species is a different debate.
Given the amount of information DNA encodes... that there's, what, a complete set in every single sperm?... I think my Siemen can squirt more than 107Gbps of data per second down "a series of interconnected pipes" than their Siemens can. The bandwidth of a penis is estimated at 15,600 tb/s.
the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security They really should have called this place the Pacific Institute for Studies in Security, Environment, and Development.
In one camp, you have the guys that see Computer Science as a branch of Mathematics, and find it unfortunate that "Computer" appears in the name. For them Computational Science would be a much better name. Asking whether the software development cycle should be taught as part of a Computer Science curriculum seems just as ridiculous to them as asking whether it should be taught as part of the Mathematics curriculum.
In the other camp, you have the people who are more specifically interested in computers and software development. They see programming as an essential, but far from singular tool in their box, and generally only care about as much computational theory as what is pragmatic. These are the guys that get much more excited about new methodologies than they do about proofs that a language is Turing complete. This group would feel robbed of an essential part of their education were they not taught anything about the software development cycle.
Currently the "real world" has a lot more demand for the second group than the first, but that doesn't make either view more valid than the other. I think the proper thing to do is for colleges to split their Computer Science departments into two entities that give separate degrees. The first, being more properly a science, would retain the name Computer Science, while the other, being more of an Engineering discipline, would be given the name Software Engineering. Then students can choose for themselves which group they belong to. If I'm not mistaken a number of colleges already do that.
There would, of course, be some overlap, but it seems roughly equivalent to the split between Physics and Electrical Engineering, which seems to work out fine at most colleges.
Until now the smiley face had been considered in the public domain in the US, and therefore free for anyone to use.
Wal-Mart spokesman John Simley told the Los Angeles Times that it had not moved to register the trademark until Mr Loufrani had threatened to do so.
It is good to know that this was as reaction, rather than some lunacy Wal-Mart thought up on its own. However, I still worry that if they are granted the trademark that they will put the full power of their considerable legal muscle behind "protecting" it.
I guess it would be a silly dream to think that the USPTO might bring the whole issue to an early close.
A newton is a measure of force, the gram is weight.
I don't agree. Grams (or more properly, kilograms) are the SI unit for mass.
The concept of how much you weigh changes depending on where you are. For example, you'd weigh differently on other worlds. Your mass, however, will be just the same, regardless of where you are.
That would lead me to conclude that when you are talking about how much something (such as a car) weighs, you are talking about the force it exerts on the surface of the planet, and so Newtons would be the appropriate choice. (Yes, I realize that in many countries people use grams to express how much they "weigh", though I would argue that they are actually expressing their mass, and using "weight" incorrectly.)
The problem, in my opinion, is that people go about optimizing in the wrong place.
You can spend all day optimizing your code to never have a cache-miss, a branch misprediction, divisions, square roots, or any other "slow" things. But if you designed an O(n^2) algorithm, my non-optimized O(n) algorithm is still going to beat it (for sufficiently large n).
If the asymptotic performance of your algorithm is good, then the author is right, and you may not find it worth your time to worry about further optimizations. If the asymptotic performance of your algorithm is bad, you may quickly find that moving it to better hardware doesn't help you so much.
What is the effect of the MODULE_LICENSE checks? In particular, what benefit does LinuxAnt gain from tricking the kernel into thinking its license string is "GPL"?
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like XMPP (also called jabber) is what you need. XMPP is an open standard for instant messaging, and there are free/open source implementations for both clients and servers. One option for servers is jabberd. One option for a client is Pidgin (which runs in Windows and Linux).
Bah. Sorry for the google search result link. Here is a direct link to microsoft.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/D/D/5DD33FDF-91F5-496D-9884-0A0B0EE698BB/%5BMS-ASDOC%5D.pdf
All the "Activesync Protocol" is, is good old PPP.
Not even close to the same universe as correct.
ActiveSync is an email synchronization protocol (among other things) built on top of WBXML and HTTP(S). See Microsoft's documentation for it here.
Can you give examples of good Exchange replacements?
Have a look at the PostPath Email and Collaboration Server. It is a mail server that runs on Linux and acts as a drop in replacement for Exchange (i.e. it implements the MAPI protocol so no special plugins are needed). They were recently acquired by Cisco, so I'm not sure what that has done to the availability of their server.
Admitting my biases, I am former employ of PostPath.
For some time now I've been using >=3 as an emoticon for "hate". Rarely do people seem to get it, though.
What barriers do you propose might exist that prevent one ancestral population from diverging into two arbitrarily-different ones?
If an individual strays too far genetically, God drops a rock on it.
Is that rock so heavy even God can't lift it?
Than there's the problem of "lowering" that massive cable to the ground.
Actually, I think the idea is that cars would run up and down the cable -- even as simple as, the cable stays put, and the cars use motorized wheels.
I expect he was referring to lowering the cable to the ground during the initial construction of the elevator, rather than for each trip.
The reason to fear Java doesn't really have much at all to do with any merits of the language itself. The reason you should fear Java is that it doesn't really add anything to your resume to distinguish you. There are, frankly, a LOT of extremely mediocre programmers on the market, and a common attribute they share is that they only know Java.
That said, DO learn Java. Not knowing how to use one of the most popular tools in your field is also not a smart idea. Just don't by any means think that your education is done.
For what it's worth, here are the four major things I look for when interviewing programmers.
1. Do you know C? (whether you are going to be programming in C is irrelevant)
If you don't know C, you probably have very little understanding of how computers work. C is language you can depend on to be on pretty much every platform; C is the language external APIs and foreign function interfaces are specified in; C gets the job done when all your layers of abstraction fail you.
2. Do you know a functional language such as Lisp, Scheme, or Haskell?
Programming in a functional language changes the way you think about programming in general. Programmers that understand functional programming generally are able to produce better solutions to problems even in imperative languages. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is available online for free. Read it today and improve your skillset.
3. Can you write a compiler from start to finish?
The theory surrounding language parsing (automata, state machines, regex, grammars, etc) is fundamental to computing. In fact, computing itself is usually defined in terms of it. Once you understand it, you find you apply it all the time.
The ability to translate high level languages into optimized machine instructions requires that you understand your platform at every level. This is important because it lets you understand the tradeoffs you are making when you choose one tool or method over another.
4. What is your current personal project?
What your project is doesn't matter all that much, as long as you have one. Good programmers are usually always working on some personal project that excites them.
99.8% may not care about DRM if directly polled, but do they also not care about the opinions of their geek friends, and the negative reviews they read on the internet? Negative press can be a powerful thing.
I would (without any legal training) guess that you don't necessarily have to transfer the entirety of song to infringe on its copyright.
Were I running bittorrent, and transferred a 1K chunk to 10 million people, one might could argue that I've infringed 10 million times.
Of course, I'm too lazy to check whether that theory is at all applicable to Jammie Thomas's case.
In one camp, you have the guys that see Computer Science as a branch of Mathematics, and find it unfortunate that "Computer" appears in the name. For them Computational Science would be a much better name. Asking whether the software development cycle should be taught as part of a Computer Science curriculum seems just as ridiculous to them as asking whether it should be taught as part of the Mathematics curriculum.
In the other camp, you have the people who are more specifically interested in computers and software development. They see programming as an essential, but far from singular tool in their box, and generally only care about as much computational theory as what is pragmatic. These are the guys that get much more excited about new methodologies than they do about proofs that a language is Turing complete. This group would feel robbed of an essential part of their education were they not taught anything about the software development cycle.
Currently the "real world" has a lot more demand for the second group than the first, but that doesn't make either view more valid than the other. I think the proper thing to do is for colleges to split their Computer Science departments into two entities that give separate degrees. The first, being more properly a science, would retain the name Computer Science, while the other, being more of an Engineering discipline, would be given the name Software Engineering. Then students can choose for themselves which group they belong to. If I'm not mistaken a number of colleges already do that.
There would, of course, be some overlap, but it seems roughly equivalent to the split between Physics and Electrical Engineering, which seems to work out fine at most colleges.
It is good to know that this was as reaction, rather than some lunacy Wal-Mart thought up on its own. However, I still worry that if they are granted the trademark that they will put the full power of their considerable legal muscle behind "protecting" it.
I guess it would be a silly dream to think that the USPTO might bring the whole issue to an early close.
The universe would not allow such a coincidence. The guy's name, according the the article, is actually John Simley.
This is poor advice. First you GET. Did you even look at the article?
Alan
I don't agree. Grams (or more properly, kilograms) are the SI unit for mass.
The concept of how much you weigh changes depending on where you are. For example, you'd weigh differently on other worlds. Your mass, however, will be just the same, regardless of where you are.
That would lead me to conclude that when you are talking about how much something (such as a car) weighs, you are talking about the force it exerts on the surface of the planet, and so Newtons would be the appropriate choice. (Yes, I realize that in many countries people use grams to express how much they "weigh", though I would argue that they are actually expressing their mass, and using "weight" incorrectly.)
Alan
The problem, in my opinion, is that people go about optimizing in the wrong place.
You can spend all day optimizing your code to never have a cache-miss, a branch misprediction, divisions, square roots, or any other "slow" things. But if you designed an O(n^2) algorithm, my non-optimized O(n) algorithm is still going to beat it (for sufficiently large n).
If the asymptotic performance of your algorithm is good, then the author is right, and you may not find it worth your time to worry about further optimizations. If the asymptotic performance of your algorithm is bad, you may quickly find that moving it to better hardware doesn't help you so much.
Alan
I took the test both in Pascal, and then again the next year in C++ (I believe the 98-99 school year was the one in which the exam was in C++).
Anyhow, the Pascal exam focused quite a lot on whether you understood basic algorithms and data structures.
The C++ exam, in contrast, focused on whether or not you knew C++.
For the record, I got a 4 the first time, and a 5 the second.
Alan
I found this link elsewhere in the discussion, which answers my question.
1 10 .1/1048.html
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0
-Alan
What is the effect of the MODULE_LICENSE checks? In particular, what benefit does LinuxAnt gain from tricking the kernel into thinking its license string is "GPL"?
-Alan