CIS/MIS: All databases and middle management
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CS vs CIS
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· Score: 2
Although there are a lot of cases where a MIS major from my school will get a job doing something else, these seem to be the two fields that most end up in. Some graduates seem limited to middle management because of their degree, or they get relegated to working with databases.
Computer Science is definitely more of a problem solving course, and at most schools tends to have a major math slant to it. Several of my school's classes (at Iowa State University) that are labeled as CS classes are in fact discrete math. These classes, combined with linear algebra, are really useful for programming. There are also dedicated courses on data structures and algorithms.
On the other hand, the MIS majors at my school take a mild C++ class, have few math requirements, and have to take COBOL. As a part of the business college, they also get mired in course like accounting.
It's really a preference thing. If you like middle management and don't especially want to program a lot, go for MIS/CIS. Computer Science is excellent for programming, even though a lot of CS majors often take on organizational roles as well. A minor or double-major in Business would give you the best of both worlds.
A post on bugtraq has clarified this. Basically, the moderators of bugtraq felt that it is still a discussion list, and as such should not have bulletins posted that are just pointers to a website with information. Therefore, the l0pht has compromised and posted a mostly-complete version on bugtraq. Both sides agreed this works best. I really don't see any parallels between this and MS, since Microsoft wanted bugtraq to post less, and bugtraq requested that l0pht post more.
This sounds pretty likely. Ever noticed that the day after Christmas a bunch of hot toys are on the shelves that were in amazingly small quantity before Christmas? Are we supposed to believe a shipment came in on Christmas day, or what?
As for the Playstation 2 madness, I've heard from several people selling them on ebay that the auction winners mysteriously disappeared. Apparently in some cases people who were selling PS2s were bidding on other auctions to drive prices up, keeping them all artificially high.
But you've forgotten Netrunner! While it's out of print, a lot of cards are readily available on ebay for a moderate price. A few friends and I picked up playing recently and it's a great game.
Well, if I was cloned today, it'd be over twenty years before my clone looked and talked like me, since he wouldn't instantly age. I think you're talking about identical twins, and even twins aren't completely identical.
Ok, while I'm sure there have been appearances of TMBG songs in other movies and TV, I've noticed a greater frequency in the last few years. I mean, the theme to Malcolm in the Middle (and a bunch of background music in several episodes), and the theme to Austin Powers 2 have been fairly mainstream appearances. I know at least one Mono Puff song has appeared in the movies as well (Carrie 2, or something).
What's in store for the use of TMBG songs elsewhere? Will they continue to sneak into pop culture, or will the Johns actually make an appearance in a movie? I recently watched Baseketball and noticed Reel Big Fish performing in several scenes. While I'm not a big fan of them, they've cited TMBG as one of their major influences. Would you appear in a movie?
I play Quake III Arena on Linux. I will undoubtedly play Team Arena on Linux, since I'm already planning on buying it as soon as it's released. I didn't buy Q3 for Linux, however.
Why? I bought it the day it came out (two copies, actually... but that's another story). Would I have bought Quake 3 for linux had it come out on the same day? Very possibly. What I'd really like is a CD with the PC, Linux, and Mac versions all there. Because of released schedules very few companies do things like this, though.
I would, however, consider Q3A for Linux a success. Why? Because of the good effects. Loki not only has supported Q3A for Linux, they have also ported QERadiant, the level editor, to Linux. In fact, even on Windows Gtkradiant is now the preferred version of the level editor. It has more features and is considered more complete, and it looks identical on Windows. That's right, the Windows GUI is a copy of the Linux version.
It's interesting how Loki has been able to use their projects to benefit the game community reguardless of platform. Gtkradiant has been an excellent tool. The work on a mpeg library has resulted in the excellent smpeg library that most video apps now rely on. The OpenGL driver that Loki made for Unreal Tournament has been ported back to Windows and is superior to the driver Epic originally had. And while I haven't checked its progress yet, OpenAL is an audio library that has a promising future.
The actual quote wasn't bad at all, it's the way they framed it. It's more than likely just a paraphrase, but to say that MacOS users use it because of the ease of use and not the technical sense isn't true in a lot of cases. Maybe the majority of cases, but the way they put it sounded condescending.
While not all of the apps follow a consistent license, I've found palmopensource.com to have quite a few useful links. I ran across it a while back when searching palmos sites.
There are some definite mixed messages in this article. While some of the apps being written can be seen as restoring a past functionality (such as the process menu), I really question whether this isn't just a bad way of not learning where the new equivalent is.
It would be interesting to hear about differences from the perspective of key shortcuts or the like, since this article seems to concentrate mostly on visual aesthetics.
BTW, is it just me, or did the Ars Technica guy come out of this sounding like an asshole? The actual quote that was stated sounded normal, but the intro was horrible:
"John Siracusa, a programmer who has written reviews of Mac OS X for Ars Technica , said that while the new system is more powerful, no one uses the Mac for technical reasons, they use it because of the interface."
I can't really find any information on the site that confirms that this is grounded in hard research, like studying people working at software firms or companies.
It's sort of suspicious that the company reporting this is in the business of selling planning tools... this sounds like a great sale line: "Your current process is amazingly inefficient, but using our tools, you can streamline productivity!"
I'm not bashing planning tools or a good development process, but this number seems to be a bit sketchy.
I've read through this article noticing the number of posts bashing AMD for a past lack of innovation. However, right now (with Pentium III vs. Athlon), AMD has a pretty decent leg up on the competition. I think everyone's ignoring what Intel's biggest problem is right now -- itself.
In the name of catching up to AMD on raw speed, Intel released and then pulled back their 1.13GHz processor. It shipped on a special motherboard, with a special heatsink and special microcode. To all those people I talked to who worked at Intel or saw one of these, it was unstable as hell.
In addition to this, the Pentium IV is getting pushed back repeatedly. Has anyone noticed that two new TV commercials have appeared for the Pentium III? I keep wondering why the hell they're promoting it so much, and I think the answer is pretty obvious: the Pentium IV is not going to be a part marketable to consumers for a while because of the price, and we will not see systems based on it before Christmas.
But what about the Celeron? Well, with prices that aren't competing well with the Durons (although a Duron motherboard will set you back more) and the fact that they are just now introducing the 100MHz FSB Celeron chips, they've practically killed Celeron from lack of attention.
According to someone I've heard from at Intel, some of the problems of the Pentium IV weren't worked out before final silicon, and it sometimes falls back on slower methods to get things done.
Don't get me wrong, AMD still has problems. They're still working on a laptop chip that won't have the heat and power issues of the Athlon (the transmeta partnership should fix that), they've made some bad decisions with SMP (only Tyan was given the go-ahead to make a SMP motherboard with the 750 chipset and never did... that mistake won't be made again). But at least they haven't tied themselves to RDRAM or pushed anything out with obvious flaws lately.
I don't seem to recall that saying a project is Open Source automatically means that it is completely developed by a bunch of loosely grouped people that develop it during their spare time. Yes, a lot of the major developers of Mozilla work at Netscape. A lot of people working on major Open Source projects do work at companies, and code these projects as their day jobs. This is the idealogy at its best, in my opinion, where we have companies not only willing to flow with the Open Source philosophy but work on it in-house.
If I wanted to make my own commercially-oriented branch of KDE and insert advertisements in it, I could as long as I did so in a fashion that adheres to the GPL. In my opinion, the fact that Netscape funds developers gives them more of a right to do this, but it's irrelevant.
The Dreamcast has a VGA connector you can buy, along with a keyboard and mouse. While the VGA connector is a bit limited on output and I haven't personally played with the mouse, it's not like this sort of thing doesn't already exist for current consoles.
In seperate cases, police officers who were representatives of the DARE program were found selling drugs. If that's not a contradictory message, I don't know what is.:)
Yes, it could remain "open source," but not FREE SOFTWARE! Stallman is stating you can't deal with any entity that doesn't uphold your idealogy. Working with Sony would corrupt the project and make it dirty, apparently.
He wrote quite a few things, years ago. He started many of the FSF's pet projects, like gcc, gdb, and the like.
What is interesting is when someone else comes up with a code branch, something he praises the GPL for. While there were a great many other issues involved, someday read about the emacs/xemacs conflict.
I'm not free to have the exact specifications on my microwave, and I'm sure the company wouldn't give me exact specifications. True, I'm not developing for it, but by your reasoning, since I bought it, I should be able to know how to make it interoperate with other devices.
Many companies, and people, view game consoles as such an appliance. Why must Sony keep the information secret? Because that is their marketing model. Console makers often sell the hardware at a loss and rely on game licenses to make money.
In this case, it's not a question of buying the product or not, it's letting *others* develop for people who have the product.
No, what RMS would prefer is that you completely boycott the Playstation 2 completely, since Sony does not provide the ability to make Free Software for that platform. It's all or nothing.
I found it a little disturbing that during the course of the discussion a few points came up:
RMS has no idea what a game console is, or how the licensing works.
The Free Software movement would be idealogically opposed to not only developing for such a console (following a traditional licensing scheme), but is probably opposed to their existence.
I found the two most telling statements to be "..the PS2 is so proprietary that it doesn't seem worth spending time on," meaning that if you're idealogically opposed to the way a console company makes money, you're screwed out of that market.
The other statement would be "It would be better to tell people that if they want to use this game they should install GNU/Linux." There will be a lot of PS2 owners who don't have computers, or have computers that lag behind the hardware of the PS2. Or maybe they want to play on a TV, not a monitor. Either way, while this stands by the beliefs of the FSF, it pretty much kills the chance of working on a console.
Sony has had SACD for quite a while now. I remember picking up some audiophile magazines over a year ago and reading about it. They've released a lot of Sony Classical stuff on it.
However, a lot of the systems to play SACD cost over $1K for the cd player. Not to mention you're not going to get the nice dolby surround of DVD at the same price....
Other than the fact that it's a little bit shiny on the outside case, I'm not seeing any resemblance to the iBook. The main problem I have with the iBook is the odd shape, and this VAIO looks pretty rectangular.
So why does it look like it's for schoolchildren? The silver piping around the edges? I'm really not seeing that much of an issue with it. Sure, the handle looks a little silly, but hell, what if it's useful? The VAIO logo is expected, it's on the current models too.
As for the purple color... remember in the mid 1980s when purple and pink were "cool" colors? And this wasn't for girls, this was a male thing. This seems to have mysteriously disappeared around the turn of the 1990s. I remember seeing some poor kid being harassed about his "cool" 80s bicycle, while the other kids thought it looked like a girl's bike.
Aesthetics be damned, if it's still small, and works well, good enough.
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Although there are a lot of cases where a MIS major from my school will get a job doing something else, these seem to be the two fields that most end up in. Some graduates seem limited to middle management because of their degree, or they get relegated to working with databases.
Computer Science is definitely more of a problem solving course, and at most schools tends to have a major math slant to it. Several of my school's classes (at Iowa State University) that are labeled as CS classes are in fact discrete math. These classes, combined with linear algebra, are really useful for programming. There are also dedicated courses on data structures and algorithms.
On the other hand, the MIS majors at my school take a mild C++ class, have few math requirements, and have to take COBOL. As a part of the business college, they also get mired in course like accounting.
It's really a preference thing. If you like middle management and don't especially want to program a lot, go for MIS/CIS. Computer Science is excellent for programming, even though a lot of CS majors often take on organizational roles as well. A minor or double-major in Business would give you the best of both worlds.
A post on bugtraq has clarified this. Basically, the moderators of bugtraq felt that it is still a discussion list, and as such should not have bulletins posted that are just pointers to a website with information. Therefore, the l0pht has compromised and posted a mostly-complete version on bugtraq. Both sides agreed this works best. I really don't see any parallels between this and MS, since Microsoft wanted bugtraq to post less, and bugtraq requested that l0pht post more.
Are you sure you're not describing Windows programing with MFC and not Perl? I think most, if not all, of your points apply for that. :)
(Only meant as a joke, I'm not blindly bashing.)
This sounds pretty likely. Ever noticed that the day after Christmas a bunch of hot toys are on the shelves that were in amazingly small quantity before Christmas? Are we supposed to believe a shipment came in on Christmas day, or what?
As for the Playstation 2 madness, I've heard from several people selling them on ebay that the auction winners mysteriously disappeared. Apparently in some cases people who were selling PS2s were bidding on other auctions to drive prices up, keeping them all artificially high.
But you've forgotten Netrunner! While it's out of print, a lot of cards are readily available on ebay for a moderate price. A few friends and I picked up playing recently and it's a great game.
Well, if I was cloned today, it'd be over twenty years before my clone looked and talked like me, since he wouldn't instantly age. I think you're talking about identical twins, and even twins aren't completely identical.
You can't have one..
...'cause there's no such thing.
Ok, while I'm sure there have been appearances of TMBG songs in other movies and TV, I've noticed a greater frequency in the last few years. I mean, the theme to Malcolm in the Middle (and a bunch of background music in several episodes), and the theme to Austin Powers 2 have been fairly mainstream appearances. I know at least one Mono Puff song has appeared in the movies as well (Carrie 2, or something).
What's in store for the use of TMBG songs elsewhere? Will they continue to sneak into pop culture, or will the Johns actually make an appearance in a movie? I recently watched Baseketball and noticed Reel Big Fish performing in several scenes. While I'm not a big fan of them, they've cited TMBG as one of their major influences. Would you appear in a movie?
I play Quake III Arena on Linux. I will undoubtedly play Team Arena on Linux, since I'm already planning on buying it as soon as it's released. I didn't buy Q3 for Linux, however.
Why? I bought it the day it came out (two copies, actually... but that's another story). Would I have bought Quake 3 for linux had it come out on the same day? Very possibly. What I'd really like is a CD with the PC, Linux, and Mac versions all there. Because of released schedules very few companies do things like this, though.
I would, however, consider Q3A for Linux a success. Why? Because of the good effects. Loki not only has supported Q3A for Linux, they have also ported QERadiant, the level editor, to Linux. In fact, even on Windows Gtkradiant is now the preferred version of the level editor. It has more features and is considered more complete, and it looks identical on Windows. That's right, the Windows GUI is a copy of the Linux version.
It's interesting how Loki has been able to use their projects to benefit the game community reguardless of platform. Gtkradiant has been an excellent tool. The work on a mpeg library has resulted in the excellent smpeg library that most video apps now rely on. The OpenGL driver that Loki made for Unreal Tournament has been ported back to Windows and is superior to the driver Epic originally had. And while I haven't checked its progress yet, OpenAL is an audio library that has a promising future.
The actual quote wasn't bad at all, it's the way they framed it. It's more than likely just a paraphrase, but to say that MacOS users use it because of the ease of use and not the technical sense isn't true in a lot of cases. Maybe the majority of cases, but the way they put it sounded condescending.
While not all of the apps follow a consistent license, I've found palmopensource.com to have quite a few useful links. I ran across it a while back when searching palmos sites.
There are some definite mixed messages in this article. While some of the apps being written can be seen as restoring a past functionality (such as the process menu), I really question whether this isn't just a bad way of not learning where the new equivalent is.
It would be interesting to hear about differences from the perspective of key shortcuts or the like, since this article seems to concentrate mostly on visual aesthetics.
BTW, is it just me, or did the Ars Technica guy come out of this sounding like an asshole? The actual quote that was stated sounded normal, but the intro was horrible:
"John Siracusa, a programmer who has written reviews of Mac OS X for Ars Technica , said that while the new system is more powerful, no one uses the Mac for technical reasons, they use it because of the interface."
I've never seen CmdrTaco try to be hip, I really don't know what the hell you're talking about.
I like using slang from the 1920s, but that's just me. If some white boy from Michigan wants to say "yum," more power to him.
I can't really find any information on the site that confirms that this is grounded in hard research, like studying people working at software firms or companies.
It's sort of suspicious that the company reporting this is in the business of selling planning tools... this sounds like a great sale line: "Your current process is amazingly inefficient, but using our tools, you can streamline productivity!"
I'm not bashing planning tools or a good development process, but this number seems to be a bit sketchy.
I've read through this article noticing the number of posts bashing AMD for a past lack of innovation. However, right now (with Pentium III vs. Athlon), AMD has a pretty decent leg up on the competition. I think everyone's ignoring what Intel's biggest problem is right now -- itself.
In the name of catching up to AMD on raw speed, Intel released and then pulled back their 1.13GHz processor. It shipped on a special motherboard, with a special heatsink and special microcode. To all those people I talked to who worked at Intel or saw one of these, it was unstable as hell.
In addition to this, the Pentium IV is getting pushed back repeatedly. Has anyone noticed that two new TV commercials have appeared for the Pentium III? I keep wondering why the hell they're promoting it so much, and I think the answer is pretty obvious: the Pentium IV is not going to be a part marketable to consumers for a while because of the price, and we will not see systems based on it before Christmas.
But what about the Celeron? Well, with prices that aren't competing well with the Durons (although a Duron motherboard will set you back more) and the fact that they are just now introducing the 100MHz FSB Celeron chips, they've practically killed Celeron from lack of attention.
According to someone I've heard from at Intel, some of the problems of the Pentium IV weren't worked out before final silicon, and it sometimes falls back on slower methods to get things done.
Don't get me wrong, AMD still has problems. They're still working on a laptop chip that won't have the heat and power issues of the Athlon (the transmeta partnership should fix that), they've made some bad decisions with SMP (only Tyan was given the go-ahead to make a SMP motherboard with the 750 chipset and never did... that mistake won't be made again). But at least they haven't tied themselves to RDRAM or pushed anything out with obvious flaws lately.
I don't seem to recall that saying a project is Open Source automatically means that it is completely developed by a bunch of loosely grouped people that develop it during their spare time. Yes, a lot of the major developers of Mozilla work at Netscape. A lot of people working on major Open Source projects do work at companies, and code these projects as their day jobs. This is the idealogy at its best, in my opinion, where we have companies not only willing to flow with the Open Source philosophy but work on it in-house.
If I wanted to make my own commercially-oriented branch of KDE and insert advertisements in it, I could as long as I did so in a fashion that adheres to the GPL. In my opinion, the fact that Netscape funds developers gives them more of a right to do this, but it's irrelevant.
The Dreamcast has a VGA connector you can buy, along with a keyboard and mouse. While the VGA connector is a bit limited on output and I haven't personally played with the mouse, it's not like this sort of thing doesn't already exist for current consoles.
In seperate cases, police officers who were representatives of the DARE program were found selling drugs. If that's not a contradictory message, I don't know what is. :)
Yes, it could remain "open source," but not FREE SOFTWARE! Stallman is stating you can't deal with any entity that doesn't uphold your idealogy. Working with Sony would corrupt the project and make it dirty, apparently.
He wrote quite a few things, years ago. He started many of the FSF's pet projects, like gcc, gdb, and the like.
What is interesting is when someone else comes up with a code branch, something he praises the GPL for. While there were a great many other issues involved, someday read about the emacs/xemacs conflict.
I'm not free to have the exact specifications on my microwave, and I'm sure the company wouldn't give me exact specifications. True, I'm not developing for it, but by your reasoning, since I bought it, I should be able to know how to make it interoperate with other devices.
Many companies, and people, view game consoles as such an appliance. Why must Sony keep the information secret? Because that is their marketing model. Console makers often sell the hardware at a loss and rely on game licenses to make money.
In this case, it's not a question of buying the product or not, it's letting *others* develop for people who have the product.
No, what RMS would prefer is that you completely boycott the Playstation 2 completely, since Sony does not provide the ability to make Free Software for that platform. It's all or nothing.
- RMS has no idea what a game console is, or how the licensing works.
- The Free Software movement would be idealogically opposed to not only developing for such a console (following a traditional licensing scheme), but is probably opposed to their existence.
I found the two most telling statements to be "..the PS2 is so proprietary that it doesn't seem worth spending time on," meaning that if you're idealogically opposed to the way a console company makes money, you're screwed out of that market.The other statement would be "It would be better to tell people that if they want to use this game they should install GNU/Linux." There will be a lot of PS2 owners who don't have computers, or have computers that lag behind the hardware of the PS2. Or maybe they want to play on a TV, not a monitor. Either way, while this stands by the beliefs of the FSF, it pretty much kills the chance of working on a console.
Sony has had SACD for quite a while now. I remember picking up some audiophile magazines over a year ago and reading about it. They've released a lot of Sony Classical stuff on it.
However, a lot of the systems to play SACD cost over $1K for the cd player. Not to mention you're not going to get the nice dolby surround of DVD at the same price....
Other than the fact that it's a little bit shiny on the outside case, I'm not seeing any resemblance to the iBook. The main problem I have with the iBook is the odd shape, and this VAIO looks pretty rectangular.
So why does it look like it's for schoolchildren? The silver piping around the edges? I'm really not seeing that much of an issue with it. Sure, the handle looks a little silly, but hell, what if it's useful? The VAIO logo is expected, it's on the current models too.
As for the purple color... remember in the mid 1980s when purple and pink were "cool" colors? And this wasn't for girls, this was a male thing. This seems to have mysteriously disappeared around the turn of the 1990s. I remember seeing some poor kid being harassed about his "cool" 80s bicycle, while the other kids thought it looked like a girl's bike.
Aesthetics be damned, if it's still small, and works well, good enough.