One problem I have experienced with my CS degree, taken so many years ago, is that it is now utterly irrelevant. The technology and methods we were taught were old and musty then, now 25 years later, they are laughable. Had I done a Romano-greek Art degree, it would be of more benefit today. It's the problem of CS as a Degree. It should not be a degree, it should be a diploma from a technical school. It should have some structure to it that you need to go back to school every 10 years or so to brush up on all the new stuff that you wouldn't otherwise get to learn in all the hours of post-work hacking.
My degree talked of drum storage, punched cards and spend weeks on determining the best sorting algorithms. It did not prepare me for team work, or methodologies, or paperwork. It didn't even do a good job of teaching programming.
Today, I need a course that tells me about Enterprise solutions, and shows me how this software works. It needs to show me about the languages that are coming down the pike after OO tools. It needs to explain how to work in a distributed coding environment. It needs to detail both component re-use and component development. Not to mention what follows the Internet - and show me what it might look like.
There is much I can do on my own to learn new ideas, but it has nothing to do with the CS I took all those long years ago.
I note it only requires "Router configuration concepts", not "Familiarity". Tish, there goes my IBM 5394 config skills. I see no mention of Linux, either.
I didn't bother with the re-install. But yes, the uninstall works just fine. What I was miffed about was that IE6 disappeared while IE7 was on the machine. Won't they learn that we want our cake and eat it, allow multiple browsers, please.
Anyway, Firefox 2.0 (alpha) is still a better product than IE 7 (beta). It's just so much more together. The IE useless, sorry - USER - interface, is 'orrible, just a mess of random UI thoughts.
The model you discuss with respect to thin clients works well for large corporations where the breadth of business is spread over many people. I have spent the last 25 years building small businesses and working in small departments where the breadth of business is no different but is handled by far fewer people. There may be less day to day orders in a small plumbing business than share trades in a large brokerage, but the act of staying in business is the very same, it requires most of the same actions. For a large company to use thin clients involves them spending significant funds in writing their own solutions and integrating the many processes. Small businesses can't afford this and defray that investment by buying fully loaded PC's with all the MS bells and whistles, then grafting in a server to act as a central repository. It works well, and has been easy to implement in the many companies I have worked with.
You're right, Quantum computing will require totally different thinking. I have been through this before when true Parallel processing became available in the form of Inmos Transputers. It took a whole different mind set to think of how to build applications to really utilise this technology. It's not the same as simple (unix like ) threading, not when the whole processor architecture can thread down to the instruction level. My experience was that we could do new things with these, or at least do old things in radically new ways, that made them much more useful. It will come to pass, there will be changes in how we do things. Early PC application development was a radical change from the style used by Mainframe developers, it was much more immediate, and it had the capacity to involve much more hardware interfacing. So too will quantum programming, and each of these new techologies, similarly change our perceptions of how to do a task.
As I said some time before, one shouldn't be allowed those rose tinted spec's at the keyboard!
Anyway, I like my hair on fire, going a million miles an hour, with no clue where I'm going. Do you know where your going? Is your life that pre-ordained that you have to live it ignominiously?;-)
There should be rules about sitting in front of computer screens with rose tinted glasses shielding the user from the glare of a monotonous past.
I programmed some VT100's (actually VT320's, not to mention 3270's and 5260's with HLAPI & EHLAPI) and I can tell you it was no day at the beach. It was ugly and nasty code, that had every hallmark of being legacy code the moment I wrote it - just like every other terminal programmers output.
Back in time, in a land far away... at least from here.
The Gas plant I worked at had a slight contratemps with a local farmer, through whose fields the (36") gas pipeline was run. The farmer decided to use a plough on a path under which he knew there were cables. Took us days to get phones back... This was the early internet, that which operated at 300 baud, took days more to catch up with all the missed data. Good job p0rn in those days was literary.
[deep booming voice] "Knock you socks of with the iAPX 286 Series II. Raging Power. Full ESP facilities. And new the 137.5-bit address bus. That extra half bit to make your crypto more crypto!"
Oh. I just can't wait. Maybe they'll reintroduce segmentation as some sort of improvement, too.
The article this may be based on quite old stuff, though so is the Grauniad article itself. One NERC press release dates back to 2003, while the news article is dated July 25th.
I'm not sure you know diddly about agriculture either, sir.
The issue with these weeds is that they don't grow convieniently on the borders and in the hedgerows, they grow in the midst of the crops. The weeds grow in the midst of crops they are no longer related to either. Getting these invaders out of the grain at harvest time is a nightmare. Now the weeds are impervious to the herbicides that might have been used to rid the crop of them.
Further, these are genetically modified (that's what GM stands for) crops. The traits they are given do not occur in nature, there is no prior plant that exhibited these features, hence Monsanto (et al) can claim patent rights on their use. You can't selectively bread these things. It would be like breading DTD proof mosquitos (and humans, and everything else... DTD was GOOD bad shit.)
The countryside looks cute, but up close is a complex battle ground where a stupid mistake can lead to decades of problems, and sometimes irreversible damage; Nitrate poisoning in So Cal, Soil erosion in the Eastern states during the Dust bowl years, BSE.
I have known a good few farmers in my time, living in Lincolnshire on the English east coast for over 20 years, and they had very mixed views of the benefits of GM crops. Our governments are not up to winowing the chaff from the wheat, as big business tries to expound its profit driven motives for GM crops, the demands by the public for quality food stuffs, the potential for environmental disaster, and domestic agricultural collapse from cheap crops out of the third world.
I did all this, I even fired 25 Pounder Howitzers on Salisbury Plain as a teen, I have ridden motorcycles fast for way too many years (the noise in the helmet is pretty loud above 130 mph). I too have a lot of hearing loss.
But I wouldn't have done it any other way, and besides, it just allows me to ignore everyone saying its bad for me.
In English English there is a colloqualism "genius" that means means the exact reverse; "What genius did this!"
With that in mind, do we really think NASA needs more geniuses (genii?) and visionaries? I think they need more people that can roll up their sleeves, get their thumbs out of their posteriors, and get some darned work done. JPL seems the only bastion of sense and progress in this massive faceless beauracracy. The rest of it seems to be stuck on the vexing question of exactly what color should the foam on the shuttle external tank ramp be? And should the diameter of the CEV be more or less than it was in 1968... Aggghhhh!!!!
(Sorry Douglas Adams)
Call me angry? No, I'm just a voiceless tax payer.
On top of which they seem to be using all this software to pick 'hit tunes', mentioned many times here on/. . What the music industry has forgotten is that there has to be originality in the content, it has to sound fresh. It can't be the same old bubble gum turned out by the next :
I have seen those 2 weeks you longed for turn into a living hell. You are a lame duck in those 2 weeks. No wants to speak to you, except to talk about the weather, or how some dimwit in purchasing just ordered a ton of toilet paper. No one gives you any constructive work to do, just 'write down everything you know about anything this company does, and that you had a hand in programming, over say, the last 99 years...' You were saved from someones timetabled exit startegy that would have had you doing 35 debriefings, none of which would have been attended, and seven planning for the future meetings, none of which you could care a hoot about.
That 2 week notice, and its subsequent conversion into personal TV time, saved you from a whole lot of really boring nothing. Now, go home, get in the car, switch off the GPS and head in which ever direction you see a hawk flying, and don't stop for anything other than gas for 500 miles.
Live a little; the new job is just as likely to suck the life out of you as the old one did.
While we feel close to the 'huge' losses of the dotcom boom/bust, we must not loose sight of the fact that two US corporations (Enrom, $80+ billion, WorldCom $74+ billion in 2000/2001 alone, and Tyco) probably account for more direct losses than all the dotcom spending. It was these big corporate failures trashing the stock market, that led to widespread losses amounting to trillions of dollars (billions from State pensions alone), that then brought down our favourite dotcoms.
The dotcoms may have been pretty fireworks, but they were not the monetary black hole that snak the economy.
I still have one lying around. Battery is dead as a door nail, but it still looks great!
Used this for several years (late 80's, early 90's) loved the fact that the chord keyboard allowed me to type away without having to hunt and peck on the silly little keys.
Shame about those rechargeable batteries though - sealed in the case. They would hold less and less charge until running on charger power was all you could do.
(actually I was older than a kid, but semantics aside...)
Auntie Beeb (TV Channels 1 & 2, in the days we only had 4 buttons to play with) used to put out BBC Micro and Sinclair (Timex) Z80 software on the TV. Mostly it was done through CeeFax but every now and then the screen would go funny and the speaker would hiss at you, in prime time.
You were expected to put the microphone from your cassette recorder to the TV speaker. As you might imagine the baud rates were not great.
Microsoft was caught flatfooted by the web, and the ramifications of this were evident through the entire product range for the better part of the last decade. Just how far back do wish to go. It is clear from your discussion of MySQL being from 'back when' that you have no semblance of time scale here. MySQL is a newcomer, and as such no one frets about its percieved lack of features, especially when those features it has are implemented well.
Old versions of NT were licensed on a client or seat basis and it made for very expensive installations.
Windows 2000 was also a client or seat based licensing scheme, it too costalottadough if you built up big installations.
Solaris was always priced differently to windows. It was priced on type and number of processors, not how many people sat in front of screens. Therefore, when you got above a certain level of users, Solaris ended up being a cheaper option. But at that level it didn't really have the applications to justify it.
When the web came along, most people just threw their windows boxes on the end of a wire and ignored the implications of thousands of surfers hitting the machine. It could sort of be justified by the fact that IIS uses a single account to log people in on. But that was not what MS wanted.
That Win2K3 version you like pointing at for $399 is cheap, but it is not secure nor can it be clustered. It is intended to serve departments (say 50 - 100 people), not to be put on the web. The internet product would best be described as the Datacenter version, and that my friend, costs. It costs big time, partially because you can only buy it on datacenter approved hardware.
Linux has ALWAYS been a viable alternative to Windows. I have used Linux since 1995, and found it to be a surprisingly adept platform for business needs.
You're not comparing apples with apples here. (how did steve jobs get in this discussion??)
Win2K3 Web edition is essentially crippleware. Sun Solaris is full featured (if you consider Solaris featured at all - I am no great lover of Solaris.) Win2K3 has a limited set of features, lots of functionality has been removed. Thus to compare Win2K3 Web edition to a minimal installation of Debian or Fedora would be more appropriate, and as these are free, things get back to normal.
Note also that to do a website with dynamic content pretty much requires a database, and Microsoft SQLServer for unlimited access starts at $5000, goes through $12,000. The cost of such a Windows based server starts to get a little more pricey. Even Solaris, with a single processor and Postgres or MySql, starts to look appealing.
Microsoft didn't waste millions on antitrust lawyers, so much as threw millions at politicians. Thus, when the Bush administration came to office in 2000, the Department of Justice was cleaned out and all the antitrust lawyers they had on the MS case were told to shut up or get out.
Actually before Microsoft, PC software was pretty pricey. Even after Microsoft brought out software, the prices didn't change much. It was Borland that changed the PC software price world; Turbo Pascal at $29 was a steal, even if it cost those of us in the UK the same number of pounds. Compared to the Microsoft Pascal compiler, which sold for about $700, the Borland product was an instant revolution.
It's worth noting that the Enterprise version of Visual Studio now retails for something like $2000.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. I don't even have one, and they still lower my productivity.
;-)
I want my email read tomorrow, after I have fled the building.
At least I have two good thumbs, even if one is stuck where the sun don't shine.
One problem I have experienced with my CS degree, taken so many years ago, is that it is now utterly irrelevant. The technology and methods we were taught were old and musty then, now 25 years later, they are laughable. Had I done a Romano-greek Art degree, it would be of more benefit today. It's the problem of CS as a Degree. It should not be a degree, it should be a diploma from a technical school. It should have some structure to it that you need to go back to school every 10 years or so to brush up on all the new stuff that you wouldn't otherwise get to learn in all the hours of post-work hacking.
My degree talked of drum storage, punched cards and spend weeks on determining the best sorting algorithms. It did not prepare me for team work, or methodologies, or paperwork. It didn't even do a good job of teaching programming.
Today, I need a course that tells me about Enterprise solutions, and shows me how this software works. It needs to show me about the languages that are coming down the pike after OO tools. It needs to explain how to work in a distributed coding environment. It needs to detail both component re-use and component development. Not to mention what follows the Internet - and show me what it might look like.
There is much I can do on my own to learn new ideas, but it has nothing to do with the CS I took all those long years ago.
I note it only requires "Router configuration concepts", not "Familiarity". Tish, there goes my IBM 5394 config skills. I see no mention of Linux, either.
This job is beneath me!
I didn't bother with the re-install. But yes, the uninstall works just fine. What I was miffed about was that IE6 disappeared while IE7 was on the machine. Won't they learn that we want our cake and eat it, allow multiple browsers, please.
Anyway, Firefox 2.0 (alpha) is still a better product than IE 7 (beta). It's just so much more together. The IE useless, sorry - USER - interface, is 'orrible, just a mess of random UI thoughts.
The model you discuss with respect to thin clients works well for large corporations where the breadth of business is spread over many people. I have spent the last 25 years building small businesses and working in small departments where the breadth of business is no different but is handled by far fewer people. There may be less day to day orders in a small plumbing business than share trades in a large brokerage, but the act of staying in business is the very same, it requires most of the same actions. For a large company to use thin clients involves them spending significant funds in writing their own solutions and integrating the many processes. Small businesses can't afford this and defray that investment by buying fully loaded PC's with all the MS bells and whistles, then grafting in a server to act as a central repository. It works well, and has been easy to implement in the many companies I have worked with.
You're right, Quantum computing will require totally different thinking. I have been through this before when true Parallel processing became available in the form of Inmos Transputers. It took a whole different mind set to think of how to build applications to really utilise this technology. It's not the same as simple (unix like ) threading, not when the whole processor architecture can thread down to the instruction level. My experience was that we could do new things with these, or at least do old things in radically new ways, that made them much more useful. It will come to pass, there will be changes in how we do things. Early PC application development was a radical change from the style used by Mainframe developers, it was much more immediate, and it had the capacity to involve much more hardware interfacing. So too will quantum programming, and each of these new techologies, similarly change our perceptions of how to do a task.
Things you for sure do not want are "exciting", "fashionable" or "latest"
;-)
20 years from now, on "Slashdot, The Next Dimension©", the old hacks will be looking back at xhtml 2.0 and regaling the newbies with how they were around when it was bright and flashy. They will be mocking the latest in light based, trans-dimensional, quantum computing, and its young bright eyed groupies. And just like when VT52 and VT100 were stunning, exciting, innovative technologies, the latest thing, from a power house, new wave computer company called Digital - that was really going places - you were probably wow'ed too.
As I said some time before, one shouldn't be allowed those rose tinted spec's at the keyboard!
Anyway, I like my hair on fire, going a million miles an hour, with no clue where I'm going. Do you know where your going? Is your life that pre-ordained that you have to live it ignominiously?
There should be rules about sitting in front of computer screens with rose tinted glasses shielding the user from the glare of a monotonous past.
I programmed some VT100's (actually VT320's, not to mention 3270's and 5260's with HLAPI & EHLAPI) and I can tell you it was no day at the beach. It was ugly and nasty code, that had every hallmark of being legacy code the moment I wrote it - just like every other terminal programmers output.
Makes me cringe just thinking about it.
Back in time, in a land far away... at least from here.
The Gas plant I worked at had a slight contratemps with a local farmer, through whose fields the (36") gas pipeline was run. The farmer decided to use a plough on a path under which he knew there were cables. Took us days to get phones back... This was the early internet, that which operated at 300 baud, took days more to catch up with all the missed data. Good job p0rn in those days was literary.
Or will it be...
[deep booming voice] "Knock you socks of with the iAPX 286 Series II. Raging Power. Full ESP facilities. And new the 137.5-bit address bus. That extra half bit to make your crypto more crypto!"
Oh. I just can't wait. Maybe they'll reintroduce segmentation as some sort of improvement, too.
The article this may be based on quite old stuff, though so is the Grauniad article itself. One NERC press release dates back to 2003, while the news article is dated July 25th.
NERC seems to run the lab mentioned, they are here: http://www.nerc.ac.uk/
Defra also has a site about the long term tests: http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/gm/fse/
I'm not sure you know diddly about agriculture either, sir.
The issue with these weeds is that they don't grow convieniently on the borders and in the hedgerows, they grow in the midst of the crops. The weeds grow in the midst of crops they are no longer related to either. Getting these invaders out of the grain at harvest time is a nightmare. Now the weeds are impervious to the herbicides that might have been used to rid the crop of them.
Further, these are genetically modified (that's what GM stands for) crops. The traits they are given do not occur in nature, there is no prior plant that exhibited these features, hence Monsanto (et al) can claim patent rights on their use. You can't selectively bread these things. It would be like breading DTD proof mosquitos (and humans, and everything else... DTD was GOOD bad shit.)
The countryside looks cute, but up close is a complex battle ground where a stupid mistake can lead to decades of problems, and sometimes irreversible damage; Nitrate poisoning in So Cal, Soil erosion in the Eastern states during the Dust bowl years, BSE.
I have known a good few farmers in my time, living in Lincolnshire on the English east coast for over 20 years, and they had very mixed views of the benefits of GM crops. Our governments are not up to winowing the chaff from the wheat, as big business tries to expound its profit driven motives for GM crops, the demands by the public for quality food stuffs, the potential for environmental disaster, and domestic agricultural collapse from cheap crops out of the third world.
I did all this, I even fired 25 Pounder Howitzers on Salisbury Plain as a teen, I have ridden motorcycles fast for way too many years (the noise in the helmet is pretty loud above 130 mph). I too have a lot of hearing loss.
But I wouldn't have done it any other way, and besides, it just allows me to ignore everyone saying its bad for me.
In English English there is a colloqualism "genius" that means means the exact reverse; "What genius did this!"
With that in mind, do we really think NASA needs more geniuses (genii?) and visionaries? I think they need more people that can roll up their sleeves, get their thumbs out of their posteriors, and get some darned work done. JPL seems the only bastion of sense and progress in this massive faceless beauracracy. The rest of it seems to be stuck on the vexing question of exactly what color should the foam on the shuttle external tank ramp be? And should the diameter of the CEV be more or less than it was in 1968... Aggghhhh!!!!
(Sorry Douglas Adams)
Call me angry? No, I'm just a voiceless tax payer.
On top of which they seem to be using all this software to pick 'hit tunes', mentioned many times here on /. . What the music industry has forgotten is that there has to be originality in the content, it has to sound fresh. It can't be the same old bubble gum turned out by the next :
pretty
ugly
moronic
wasted
green
Boy
Girl
Reggae
Rock
Rap
Punk
MOR
Band
Troupe
emsemble
Pick your music genre.
I have seen those 2 weeks you longed for turn into a living hell. You are a lame duck in those 2 weeks. No wants to speak to you, except to talk about the weather, or how some dimwit in purchasing just ordered a ton of toilet paper. No one gives you any constructive work to do, just 'write down everything you know about anything this company does, and that you had a hand in programming, over say, the last 99 years...' You were saved from someones timetabled exit startegy that would have had you doing 35 debriefings, none of which would have been attended, and seven planning for the future meetings, none of which you could care a hoot about.
That 2 week notice, and its subsequent conversion into personal TV time, saved you from a whole lot of really boring nothing. Now, go home, get in the car, switch off the GPS and head in which ever direction you see a hawk flying, and don't stop for anything other than gas for 500 miles.
Live a little; the new job is just as likely to suck the life out of you as the old one did.
While we feel close to the 'huge' losses of the dotcom boom/bust, we must not loose sight of the fact that two US corporations (Enrom, $80+ billion, WorldCom $74+ billion in 2000/2001 alone, and Tyco) probably account for more direct losses than all the dotcom spending. It was these big corporate failures trashing the stock market, that led to widespread losses amounting to trillions of dollars (billions from State pensions alone), that then brought down our favourite dotcoms.
The dotcoms may have been pretty fireworks, but they were not the monetary black hole that snak the economy.
I still have one lying around. Battery is dead as a door nail, but it still looks great!
Used this for several years (late 80's, early 90's) loved the fact that the chord keyboard allowed me to type away without having to hunt and peck on the silly little keys.
Shame about those rechargeable batteries though - sealed in the case. They would hold less and less charge until running on charger power was all you could do.
It's not late if you consider it a software project; It's merely suffering from feature creap.
(actually I was older than a kid, but semantics aside...)
Auntie Beeb (TV Channels 1 & 2, in the days we only had 4 buttons to play with) used to put out BBC Micro and Sinclair (Timex) Z80 software on the TV. Mostly it was done through CeeFax but every now and then the screen would go funny and the speaker would hiss at you, in prime time.
You were expected to put the microphone from your cassette recorder to the TV speaker. As you might imagine the baud rates were not great.
Furthermore, there is no Corporation on the planet that can borrow 8 trillion dollars, then say they are not interested in the scale of their debt.
Wrong!!!
Microsoft was caught flatfooted by the web, and the ramifications of this were evident through the entire product range for the better part of the last decade. Just how far back do wish to go. It is clear from your discussion of MySQL being from 'back when' that you have no semblance of time scale here. MySQL is a newcomer, and as such no one frets about its percieved lack of features, especially when those features it has are implemented well.
Old versions of NT were licensed on a client or seat basis and it made for very expensive installations.
Windows 2000 was also a client or seat based licensing scheme, it too costalottadough if you built up big installations.
Solaris was always priced differently to windows. It was priced on type and number of processors, not how many people sat in front of screens. Therefore, when you got above a certain level of users, Solaris ended up being a cheaper option. But at that level it didn't really have the applications to justify it.
When the web came along, most people just threw their windows boxes on the end of a wire and ignored the implications of thousands of surfers hitting the machine. It could sort of be justified by the fact that IIS uses a single account to log people in on. But that was not what MS wanted.
That Win2K3 version you like pointing at for $399 is cheap, but it is not secure nor can it be clustered. It is intended to serve departments (say 50 - 100 people), not to be put on the web. The internet product would best be described as the Datacenter version, and that my friend, costs. It costs big time, partially because you can only buy it on datacenter approved hardware.
Linux has ALWAYS been a viable alternative to Windows. I have used Linux since 1995, and found it to be a surprisingly adept platform for business needs.
You're not comparing apples with apples here.
(how did steve jobs get in this discussion??)
Win2K3 Web edition is essentially crippleware. Sun Solaris is full featured (if you consider Solaris featured at all - I am no great lover of Solaris.) Win2K3 has a limited set of features, lots of functionality has been removed. Thus to compare Win2K3 Web edition to a minimal installation of Debian or Fedora would be more appropriate, and as these are free, things get back to normal.
Note also that to do a website with dynamic content pretty much requires a database, and Microsoft SQLServer for unlimited access starts at $5000, goes through $12,000. The cost of such a Windows based server starts to get a little more pricey. Even Solaris, with a single processor and Postgres or MySql, starts to look appealing.
Not with 40 user licenses it ain't!!!
(each 20 CAL pack is officially $799)
Microsoft didn't waste millions on antitrust lawyers, so much as threw millions at politicians. Thus, when the Bush administration came to office in 2000, the Department of Justice was cleaned out and all the antitrust lawyers they had on the MS case were told to shut up or get out.
Actually before Microsoft, PC software was pretty pricey. Even after Microsoft brought out software, the prices didn't change much. It was Borland that changed the PC software price world; Turbo Pascal at $29 was a steal, even if it cost those of us in the UK the same number of pounds. Compared to the Microsoft Pascal compiler, which sold for about $700, the Borland product was an instant revolution.
.
It's worth noting that the Enterprise version of Visual Studio now retails for something like $2000