Well, this is the recommended course of action. However, Greasemonkey 0.3.5 is crippled. It does not contain the special GM_ functions so the majority of scripts will break.
Anything that uses GM_XMLHttpRequest, GM_setValue or GM_getValue or GM_Log will not function. It was the developers attempt to make sure that no remote exploits popped up while they were working on the best possible fix.
So, no. Don't install the update and expect things to function normally, they will not.
I took a break 3 years after I graduated (this was last year) and went onto a research MSc in the UK. I didn't really find my job boring, and it was certainly well paying, but the challenges seemed to be similar, day in and day out (mostly with insane deadline pressure) and getting a postgraduate degree was a longtime personal goal anyway. Bewarned, this is a long entry *grin*
In the UK, I found that work experience is highly valued. What sort of postgrad you opt to do influences things to a certain extent, but certainly with a taught course, some subjects should be easy for you (with your practical experience).
Unfortunately, I had a lot of difficulty adjusting to the pace and requirements of a research degree. One thing is the amoung of reading and preparation before you actually start doing something. Literature survey and background research is fine, but being somewhat a hands on person, it was personally difficult to motivate myself to read mounds and mounds of papers on the same topic, especially when they mostly seemed to say the same thing. *grin*
Another thing that drove me mad was the lack of real deadlines for a research degree. Because of the hyperfocus on deadlines that I brought from work, I tried to do the best job possible as quickly as possible. It frustrated me a great deal when I had to timeshare my supervisor (for paper reading and revision) and sometimes it would be a good few weeks before he'd get to my latest paper submission. A few weeks after I had submitted the paper, that is. To be fair, he is over worked, but for someone who was used to working closely with a team and seeing visible signs of progress, it was difficult to force myself to schedule things in that way.
Funding wise, international students have to pay a hefty premium over the locals in the UK. About thrice as much. Although this is certainly not as much as the top name US schools, fees average around £10 to £15k, depending on where you get in. As far as fee supplements go, well.. it is possible to do some TA/RA work and be recompensed for it, but I would suggest that it is a folly to expect to pay your entire tuition + living through work on the side. A more reasonable expectation might be to hope to cover (at least part of) your living costs by supplements. The region of the UK you choose also plays a part, with London being relatively expensive, rentwise and the north (AFAIK) being much cheaper.
Either way, the challenges will be different from work. The first six months were the hardest for me, work wise before I settled into a groove of sorts. Your coding and technical prowess will be respected by your peers (not everyone in a CS department is a kickass coder, nor do they want to be) and sometimes, I've found that I have a broader knowledge of the field than some others who've been doing one focused, specific piece of research for a few years. That may or may not be be an advantage. I confess to being intimidated by the grasp of AI (papers, authors) that some people displayed when I was first here:) But all in all, I'm enjoying my stay as a "mature" student and I think I am in a better position to appreciate student life again after a few years "outside". But damn, I miss the monthly paycheck. *sigh*
But we have choice, whereas Windows users do not necessarily have the means to lower their memory footprint.
I personally prefer XFCE, a friend of mine swears by Blackbox. Minimalistic, sure.. But you can't reasonably expecet to optimize both effects and memory footprint/CPU usage.
If you want the eyecandy, get a machine that can handle eyecandy style graphics. But rest assured that you will always have the choice to run on a leaner machine. Not necessarily the same environment, I consider that unrealistic, but you will run Linux.. and for an added bonus, you can even run KDE and Gtk apps on those "minimal" desktops.
Of course, if someone went into this massive optimization and profiling splurge on a major desktop, I can't say it would hurt the performance any... but on the rare occasions that I run KDE, I think it's reasonably fast for my machine, so I don't worry.
To offer a concrete example or two, it is generally better to work for a product oriented company than some place actively looking for projects (send us anything in area X and we will implement it for you). The reason is that product timelines have a bit more flexibility since you're not generally working to please a specific customer, and it also means there will be more planning and (hopefully) fewer adhoc features creeping in.
Another thing is perceptions, though. It's important to make sure that there are other parents in these places. If you're the lone 9 to 5er in a stable full of 20-somethings on the fast track to burnout, then you're going to be noticed and probably not in a positive way (I am narrowly considering the number of hours you have available to put in, of course). My anecdotal evidence, there were subtle cases of discrimination (a loaded term in the US, I know) against programmers with "other" responsbilities when it comes to doing crunch projects. Management tends to favour those who have expressed willingness to throw countless hours into a project. YMMV.
Another thing is, some companies will actually seek to ease your parenting workload, for instance, my last place of work had a daycare facility in the campus itself, so that any employee could drop their toddlers off and pick them up at the end of the working day. It seemed to work out all right and it was only marginally more expensive than conventional daycare (I think.. I don't have any kids;)
Having said all of that, I think you may be surprised at how resilient kids can be about parents who are actually busy doing work some of the time. It may be an unpopular view, but so long as my parents were there some of the time, I didn't really notice the difference. Both of my parents worked (till their retirement a few years back) and I was a latchkey kid for quite a while. I think having siblings also helps:) I have 3 siblings, so it meant a lot of time playing with them:) It also helped me that I am introverted and didn't mind curling up somewhere with a book. The point is that I think your kids won't mind you occasionally staying late at work (so long as it doesn't happen frequently/regularly).
To conclude, I agree with the parent poster, kudos on planning to spend more time with your kids.. if my former co-workers are any indication, I think that will serve to give you a much sharper focus for getting in, getting the job done ASAP and going home..
But from the remainder of that paragraph "... sometimes to prevent other products from getting to market, to prevent people from sharing ideas and to prevent the kind of innovation that the patent system is really trying to spur on"
What they're saying (and I agree with) is that although there isn't anything wrong with having a monopoly, you can't stop competing products from entering the market. In other words, patents are being used as a big stick to threaten those who would enter your (previously monopolized) market. Perhaps things like online shopping and online polls and the like can be seen in this like. So yes, I think it's possible to have a monopoly and STILL engage in anti-competitive practices. (How about Microsoft ? Convicted monopolist, but it's not like there weren't any lack of choices in the browser market)
Indeed..Read this story for instance. The thing is, I don't think the Government there really cares if teens are using it to look at porn or not, although the crackdown on cafes earlier was supposedly to stop this sort of activity.
Any sort of information being freely disseminated by sources other than approved ones is seen there as a threat. I am simply stating a fact, not blindly bashing the Chinese government. They don't like news/information to come to the masses from sources they can't control.
and Microsoft or anyone else who is in this "forbidden" list spins off another company and uses it to do the damage anyway ?
Microsoft using SCO all over again ? You think they wouldn't ? Even if such a clause isn't outright discriminatory, and thus illegal, there are trivial ways to circumvent it.
Ok, I'll bite. Sun is in the application server market, they have their own product. Is it one of the big names? No, it's not. Would they like that to change? I am certain they would. Just that it doesn't seem to be working too well at the moment. If you think for a moment that Sun isn't interested in controlling the direction of Java, google a bit for the rants people have written on how "heavy handed" and "autocratic" (I quote those terms because I don't completely agree) they can be in the JCP process.
IBM already has the source, they have an implementation of the JDK, there is nothing to stop them from making competing products. The fact of the matter is that for IBM or anyone else, once you open source Java, they can fold it back into your own product, but nothing can prevent someone else from doing the same. We, as consumers, have the freedom to decide which implementation we wish to use. Do you honestly think that BEA and other application server makers won't scream blue murder ?
I can't make a decision either way. On one hand, yes, there would be benefits to open sourcing Java. The community *could* get more involved in contributing extensions and patches to how Java works. The developer community surrounding Java being such, I think the pace of development would proceed at a much higher pace than Sun does. Another worrying factor is that if Sun has to fight for it's survival, it needs to make some tough decisions down the road. How many engineers will be pulled off a project which doesn't (strictly speaking) provide Sun with any revenue ? If Java development is left solely in the hands of a company who's survival is uncertain, then Java development will suffer as a result and I don't like seeing that happen.
On the other hand, Sun hasn't done badly in it's role as "steward" of the directions in which Java goes.. They've (their marketing has) driven the Java brand relentlessly forward and I think the sheer size of the developer community is a good thing. I can't think of any reason why it would be advantageous for them to spend 8+ years promoting and developing the product, only to "give" it away to the masses. Even the Linux kernel has Linus at the helm. Who else can be trusted to take the helm of such a commercially valuable piece of intellectual property ? Who would resist the temptation to subvert it to their own ends?
One final note to everyone who wants Java open sourced just so their favourite distro can start packaging it.. please, think a bit. Not all useful software is open sourced now, nor will it be in the foreseeable future. If it's your only reason for Sun to cast out a decade or more of research and development, it's not enough.
What do you *want* to do ? You want to climb the ladder of IT jobs, fine. I hear you. But, higher up the ladder, you don't get an easier job. You may get paid a bit better than $13 an hour, but your expectations will increase accordingly. What are you happy doing ?
I often kicked myself for graduating when I did. I got out of university about an year before the dot-com boom died. This was in 2000. People who graduated a mere year before me were in positions like "architect" and "senior team lead", I was a lowly developer. You can take all the experience you want, but some (most?) places DO look for prior management experience and even if you did nothing except crunch code, you were called an architect, so you get your foot in the door.
I had to go about it differently. I was a lowly developer. I tried to vary my skillset and technology. No job was too controversial, too risky, too cutting edge. I asked for (and got) all the mad projects, with high risk and high gain (and an equally high chance of failing). I am not sure if this will work for you, or even if you want to, but if you're looking for experience, then think carefully about accepting risky jobs. At startups, underfunded companies and the like. Don't expect to double or triple your salary today. Just keep getting that all important project, real-world experience. Contribute to open source projects. Keep your coding skills fresh. Make an effort to learn some technologies in depth. Call me troll if you like, but for now, Java and.NET both seem to be fairly good bets. Each month, each year you spend building up your resume, you're also in contact with coworkers who work in technology. Network. Get a reputation for good work, for not being a slacker, for being a knowledgable, reasonable person to work with.
I've gotten 3 (out of 4) jobs so far purely because of someone I knew who knew someone else who had a vacancy.. or from old university contacts.. or from old coworkers who knew I was looking around for another place...
The difference between you and a lot of other people ? You've got less to lose.
Wonder if this is related, but it might be that surgeons need practice at maintaining attention on something; like everyone else.
The more practice you get concentrating intensely on hand-eye coordination based activities, the better you get. Hey, I should know. I started out sucking rocks at Quake and ALL FPS, but kept on playing and and getting fragged and managed to figure out how to hold my own, just barely.
Just that since there aren't so many surgical procedures to practice on, playing games are a means of tuning the hand eye coordination. A friend of mine plays a lot of squash for the same reason (although he's pretty careful of his fingers and wrists)
In my experience, there are basically two things that are *MOST* commonly seen in academic networks; one is either internal or external parties trying to take advantage (and misuse) the massive bandwidth that campuses have available, or someone trying to discover and manipulate potentially sensitive documents (such as grades).
I think firewalls have their place, you're right. But being at the receiving end of a rather draconian installation/firewalling policy for no apparent reason other than just reducing work for the systems operators (and increasing work for students, supervisors in general); I'm thinking that there should at least be a set of carefully monitored, but open machines for people to just mess around with. It's a campus, a seat of learning. Sometimes, when you're trying to learn something, things break. Do you want to be too worried about breaking a piece of "mandated" software and having a risk of getting your ass chewed, instead of experimenting ?
Campuses have different security requirements and needs from commercial outfits, IMHO. Sometimes, administrators just don't understand that and try to implement the same policies willy nilly. Security isn't just about procedures and blanket firewalling.
For Microsoft and for a lot of other companies, I think the realization has dawned that concentrating on hardware is a losing proposition.. (Hello, Sun ? are you listening ? Maybe you know better than these guys). As a counterpoint, though, I'd like to offer Apple and their iPod/iTunes strategy. Offer software on the cheap to push out the hardware..
You may upgrade your machine once every 6 months to an year.. However, your software would be service oriented, so you'd be bled dry as updates/small missing features and patches were charged for. A constant stream of revenue, with margins that can't be squeezed out due to competing manufacturers and improving manufacturing processes. A steadier way of earning revenue, if you will. This is what I would imagine Microsoft to want.
Here's the problem, though. The free software genie has been let out of the bottle. Just like the lowered price on the XBox made several people (myself included) think about buying one for a low cost machine and installing Linux on it, if there is a free software alternative that will run on this free hardware, you will get people using it. Ultimately, this will just lead to stronger protection against "illegal" modifications to the software.. For example, if you get a PC free, you must run Windows on it, and never format it to install Linux.. something along those lines. He wants it. I personally do not. Cheaper hardware is good, but I want choice in what software I use and I don't think being locked into one company will offer me this.
I agree with his point about visual software though. VB was tremendously popular for that reason. Because it let people quickly design interfaces and software that sort of worked. For folks who don't do programming for a living (and maybe a few who do), the thought of whipping out something that they can actually use on their own computer is a tremendously appealing notion. More than anything else, Visual Basic helped a whole new bunch of people (who might otherwise have not programmed at all) get into the software industry. The problem is: who will write the server side software ? Who will perform the tweaks ? Who will administer and optimize and tune things ? The need for programmers and for code crunching won't go away overnight, and I doubt it will go away at all. There are advantages to textual representations (as opposed to visual ones) in existing tool support, and there are also advantages in that textual means of representing a problem work on many different paradigms (not just client interfaces).
Irony (yes, the proper usage of the word) is seeing a link for an earlier story, more doom and gloom for Apple.
Honestly, more power to Apple. I thought (hoped?) the mini was a mistake price wise, but a second, honest look told me this was more like sour grapes (or apples, even ? ). They did their market research, they got the product out of the door and perhaps most importantly, they cashed in on the almost unbelievable hype surrounding iPods and Apple products.
Hey, I'm a geek. I don't necessarily like mass market toys and my values (and what is attractive to me) may be different from the mass market. I *like* Apple succeeding with this, because the next generation could be a. cheaper b. have more storage capacity
They might even make the next models more attractive, price wise, for a poor student. I hope they sell a million of 'em:)
For some people, heck for most, money can buy you conveniences.. This is just an additional service offered by them for a nice round number of years. They're just promising to take care of the hassle of domain renewal. At the end of the day, 10 year or 100 year renewal makes little difference. The person/organization which is organized won't need ANY renewal services, while others may opt for this service.
Some people pay money to buy tax software, while others hire an accountant and yet others do their taxes by themselves. It's the degree of customization and service which differs. Isn't that all there is to it ?
I'm not sure if the internet as we know it will exist in a 100 years, but then, people were arguing that snail mail would be extinct and there would be paperless offices throughout the planet. That hasn't happened yet. Let those who want this service spend some additional cash and buy themselves peace of mind, if they have the cash to spare and wish to do so.. Simple.
Well, I don't see how this person could offer up a tool for extortion without figuring out how to spoof IP addresses, anyway. Surely, it would raise an alert if most, if not ALL of your clickthroughs came from a single small set of IPs ? Also, one nitpick about the article, since when does Google offer popup advertising ?
I'm quite certain plenty of programmers know how to fake clickthroughs, or they could sit down and figure it out. Spoofing IP addresses, on the other hand, would be slightly more difficult.. and there are only so many open proxies and so on.
On a slightly more depressing note, this sounds like a perfect scheme for all those zombie machines that are being spawned out there (with email worms). Instead of doing a Distributed DOS or sending out spam (which are their current uses, and can be easily traced back), if they were used to randomly send out a few million clicks, or to host a mini link farm for Googlebot's eyes only.... the possibilities for spamming become endless. Scary thought.
First, the speed at which the exploit was translated from advisory to a malicious worm.. Second, this is one of the few old-school "do as much damage as you can" worms. At least it makes a change from the monotony of the mass mailing attachment exploit variety of viruses..Not a welcome change for the people who got hit by it of course:(
By the way, in case you get prompted for registration and your principles don't allow you to give out your email address, use Bugme Not to find a login. Click here
An interesting quote was: Instead of including paid listings within search results, which critics say results in misleading search results, MSN said it will display paid listings separately at the top and to the right of search results generated by its search engine.
If Google sinks without a trace tomorrow, at least they've forced other competitors to follow suit and remove paid listings as a revenue option.
Actually, I'd be very interested in how Microsoft decide to differentiate themselves in terms of a search product. Obviously, sinking this much money into a completely different search means they must have some sort of strategy for toppling Google off the throne, right ? That's what I want to see.
The more competition, the better for everyone, as far as search is concerned and where the cost of switching is so low (just point your browser elsewhere)
These are just the type of guys who think it's grand fun to fake an alert box saying "your internet connection needs to be optimized". In that sense, not much to see, we should move on. More of their kind inhabit companies that try to install spyware on your machine too.
I disagree with their definition of "trojan". If a user inititated a download, they argue, then it's not a trojan. To take a random example, the makers of Winzip would love to replace "7zip.exe" with a "smart" application like theirs, which says.. Oh, don't go for this rotten free unarchiver, try out our wonderful product.
Finally, it's an act of utter irresponsibility on their part to post these IP addresses out on the world wide web. Yes, I agree. What they did was very very clever. They may have valid reasons for grandiosely "declaring war on file sharing". But I think that posting IP addresses, locations and filenames onto the public eye transformed what they did from a "clever social experiment" to an exercise in maliciousness.
Now, by the same token, if I should disagree with what they did, should I post their names, email and contact numbers for anyone to see, right here on Slashdot ? Nope. I would not stoop so low.
I've often wondered how the professionals, or even people with more than an average ability to recall do it. I've heard of two different ways. One is to make up a rhyme or a "keyword" to jog your memory of some object, or some series of objects.. The other is to have a snapshot or a visualized picture of something in your head.
I seem to personally work along the snapshot method, as I suspect many others do. If I close my eyes, I can visualize a page in a text, or a license plate, or a face. Somewhat imperfectly, but it's possible. However, these seem to be for details that I've observed. If I didn't consciously "notice" some aspect of a car, for instance, I couldn't recall it later; it's not in my mental picture of the car.
Unfortunately, this method seems to suck for memorizing sequences of things, such as a deck of cards. I simply cannot remember more than 20-30 cards in sequence using this method.. For things like poetry, complete with punctuation and spelling as in the original, I'd assume that the "snapshot" method would prove more accurate. But card decks require a completely different method of memorization..?
I took heart from the "practice daily" advice though.. Admittedly, it's more than a bit frustrating when you can't even remember all of one card pack, but these people can just breeze through 22!! card packs and get 90% of their answers correct
But the problems are twofold.. If you're in charge of a large installation of servers, and you get this public confessional type "mea culpa" every few weeks or months from your vendor, how easy would you feel ? Still want to run a piece of software that needs to be patched every so often ? Shades of Sendmail, anyone ?
Secondly, the whole point of accountability comes up. If your vendor isn't responsible for how your infrastructure runs and how timely security updates are made available, what's the point having a vendor anyway ? I'm not advocating a lawsuit, but you can either sue or you can take your business elsewhere. This sounds like "confess your sins and they will be absolved" sort of scenario.
And for added benefit, imagine the delight of a black hat who manages to break into one of this top secret archives. A whole list of vulnerabilities that haven't been publicly disclosed. A motherlode of h4xorz potential, if there ever was any..
You've all heard the "you can write unreadable code in any programming language" argument, so I'll spare you the repetition.. (No, wait.. I didn't, did I? ) *grin*
But also bear in mind that Perl is the first language that I know of that used the foreach construct in the same form as the more sought after languages.. Java has iterators and enumerators, but they introduced a foreach because it is darn easy to understand.
Perl innovated in regular expressions. Even Jeffery Friedl's Mastering Regex (sic) says that other languages aspire to be called "Perl 5 compatible" when they don't necessarily support all the features of Perl 5.6". Love it or hate it, regular expressions are like the microwave in your kitchen. Once you get used to it, it's darn hard to manage without:)
I am not going to go into Perl 6 the moment it is released. But I guess that's ok, because I didn't adopt 5.8 the day it was released either. I just think that Larry Wall has made enough good calls in the language so far, to be worth trusting him for another version. Even one that promises to break some of the idioms that I am accustomed to in it's present incarnation. Hey, I didn't like Perl 5 when I first saw it either, but I notice the difference in my productivity when I got the hang of things.
I cannot claim to intimately know Perl 5, but I started learning it a few years back. I belong to the camp of Perl programmers (and I know there are a few of these) who are adopting a "wait and see" attitude to Perl 6.
If you're interested in learning Perl now, you should probably go for the cookbook approach, ie: get a copy of OReilly's Perl cookbook and just try applying the solution to your problem. Then, trying tweaking and figuring out how it works.
As for learning Perl 5, I'd probably point out that there are still some places that run 5.005_03 (certainly Solaris used to ship with that version by default), and that version is at LEAST 5-6 years old:) There are even some places I've heard of that run Perl 4:) So, I think there is plenty of time to have your investment in learning Perl pay off before people start switching to Perl 6 en masse.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this is the recommended course of action. However, Greasemonkey 0.3.5 is crippled. It does not contain the special GM_ functions so the majority of scripts will break.
Anything that uses GM_XMLHttpRequest, GM_setValue or GM_getValue or GM_Log will not function. It was the developers attempt to make sure that no remote exploits popped up while they were working on the best possible fix.
So, no. Don't install the update and expect things to function normally, they will not.
I took a break 3 years after I graduated (this was last year) and went onto a research MSc in the UK. I didn't really find my job boring, and it was certainly well paying, but the challenges seemed to be similar, day in and day out (mostly with insane deadline pressure) and getting a postgraduate degree was a longtime personal goal anyway. Bewarned, this is a long entry *grin*
In the UK, I found that work experience is highly valued. What sort of postgrad you opt to do influences things to a certain extent, but certainly with a taught course, some subjects should be easy for you (with your practical experience).
Unfortunately, I had a lot of difficulty adjusting to the pace and requirements of a research degree. One thing is the amoung of reading and preparation before you actually start doing something. Literature survey and background research is fine, but being somewhat a hands on person, it was personally difficult to motivate myself to read mounds and mounds of papers on the same topic, especially when they mostly seemed to say the same thing. *grin*
Another thing that drove me mad was the lack of real deadlines for a research degree. Because of the hyperfocus on deadlines that I brought from work, I tried to do the best job possible as quickly as possible. It frustrated me a great deal when I had to timeshare my supervisor (for paper reading and revision) and sometimes it would be a good few weeks before he'd get to my latest paper submission. A few weeks after I had submitted the paper, that is. To be fair, he is over worked, but for someone who was used to working closely with a team and seeing visible signs of progress, it was difficult to force myself to schedule things in that way.
Funding wise, international students have to pay a hefty premium over the locals in the UK. About thrice as much. Although this is certainly not as much as the top name US schools, fees average around £10 to £15k, depending on where you get in. As far as fee supplements go, well.. it is possible to do some TA/RA work and be recompensed for it, but I would suggest that it is a folly to expect to pay your entire tuition + living through work on the side. A more reasonable expectation might be to hope to cover (at least part of) your living costs by supplements. The region of the UK you choose also plays a part, with London being relatively expensive, rentwise and the north (AFAIK) being much cheaper.
Either way, the challenges will be different from work. The first six months were the hardest for me, work wise before I settled into a groove of sorts. Your coding and technical prowess will be respected by your peers (not everyone in a CS department is a kickass coder, nor do they want to be) and sometimes, I've found that I have a broader knowledge of the field than some others who've been doing one focused, specific piece of research for a few years. That may or may not be be an advantage. I confess to being intimidated by the grasp of AI (papers, authors) that some people displayed when I was first here :) But all in all, I'm enjoying my stay as a "mature" student and I think I am in a better position to appreciate student life again after a few years "outside". But damn, I miss the monthly paycheck. *sigh*
Good luck with your hunt.
But we have choice, whereas Windows users do not necessarily have the means to lower their memory footprint.
I personally prefer XFCE, a friend of mine swears by Blackbox. Minimalistic, sure.. But you can't reasonably expecet to optimize both effects and memory footprint/CPU usage.
If you want the eyecandy, get a machine that can handle eyecandy style graphics. But rest assured that you will always have the choice to run on a leaner machine. Not necessarily the same environment, I consider that unrealistic, but you will run Linux.. and for an added bonus, you can even run KDE and Gtk apps on those "minimal" desktops.
Of course, if someone went into this massive optimization and profiling splurge on a major desktop, I can't say it would hurt the performance any... but on the rare occasions that I run KDE, I think it's reasonably fast for my machine, so I don't worry.
To offer a concrete example or two, it is generally better to work for a product oriented company than some place actively looking for projects (send us anything in area X and we will implement it for you). The reason is that product timelines have a bit more flexibility since you're not generally working to please a specific customer, and it also means there will be more planning and (hopefully) fewer adhoc features creeping in.
Another thing is perceptions, though. It's important to make sure that there are other parents in these places. If you're the lone 9 to 5er in a stable full of 20-somethings on the fast track to burnout, then you're going to be noticed and probably not in a positive way (I am narrowly considering the number of hours you have available to put in, of course). My anecdotal evidence, there were subtle cases of discrimination (a loaded term in the US, I know) against programmers with "other" responsbilities when it comes to doing crunch projects. Management tends to favour those who have expressed willingness to throw countless hours into a project. YMMV.
Another thing is, some companies will actually seek to ease your parenting workload, for instance, my last place of work had a daycare facility in the campus itself, so that any employee could drop their toddlers off and pick them up at the end of the working day. It seemed to work out all right and it was only marginally more expensive than conventional daycare (I think.. I don't have any kids ;)
Having said all of that, I think you may be surprised at how resilient kids can be about parents who are actually busy doing work some of the time. It may be an unpopular view, but so long as my parents were there some of the time, I didn't really notice the difference. Both of my parents worked (till their retirement a few years back) and I was a latchkey kid for quite a while. I think having siblings also helps :) I have 3 siblings, so it meant a lot of time playing with them :) It also helped me that I am introverted and didn't mind curling up somewhere with a book. The point is that I think your kids won't mind you occasionally staying late at work (so long as it doesn't happen frequently/regularly).
To conclude, I agree with the parent poster, kudos on planning to spend more time with your kids.. if my former co-workers are any indication, I think that will serve to give you a much sharper focus for getting in, getting the job done ASAP and going home..
But from the remainder of that paragraph
"... sometimes to prevent other products from getting to market, to prevent people from sharing ideas and to prevent the kind of innovation that the patent system is really trying to spur on"
What they're saying (and I agree with) is that although there isn't anything wrong with having a monopoly, you can't stop competing products from entering the market. In other words, patents are being used as a big stick to threaten those who would enter your (previously monopolized) market. Perhaps things like online shopping and online polls and the like can be seen in this like. So yes, I think it's possible to have a monopoly and STILL engage in anti-competitive practices. (How about Microsoft ? Convicted monopolist, but it's not like there weren't any lack of choices in the browser market)
Indeed..Read this story for instance. The thing is, I don't think the Government there really cares if teens are using it to look at porn or not, although the crackdown on cafes earlier was supposedly to stop this sort of activity.
Any sort of information being freely disseminated by sources other than approved ones is seen there as a threat. I am simply stating a fact, not blindly bashing the Chinese government. They don't like news/information to come to the masses from sources they can't control.
and Microsoft or anyone else who is in this "forbidden" list spins off another company and uses it to do the damage anyway ?
Microsoft using SCO all over again ? You think they wouldn't ? Even if such a clause isn't outright discriminatory, and thus illegal, there are trivial ways to circumvent it.
Ok, I'll bite. Sun is in the application server market, they have their own product. Is it one of the big names? No, it's not. Would they like that to change? I am certain they would. Just that it doesn't seem to be working too well at the moment. If you think for a moment that Sun isn't interested in controlling the direction of Java, google a bit for the rants people have written on how "heavy handed" and "autocratic" (I quote those terms because I don't completely agree) they can be in the JCP process.
IBM already has the source, they have an implementation of the JDK, there is nothing to stop them from making competing products. The fact of the matter is that for IBM or anyone else, once you open source Java, they can fold it back into your own product, but nothing can prevent someone else from doing the same. We, as consumers, have the freedom to decide which implementation we wish to use. Do you honestly think that BEA and other application server makers won't scream blue murder ?
I can't make a decision either way. On one hand, yes, there would be benefits to open sourcing Java. The community *could* get more involved in contributing extensions and patches to how Java works. The developer community surrounding Java being such, I think the pace of development would proceed at a much higher pace than Sun does. Another worrying factor is that if Sun has to fight for it's survival, it needs to make some tough decisions down the road. How many engineers will be pulled off a project which doesn't (strictly speaking) provide Sun with any revenue ? If Java development is left solely in the hands of a company who's survival is uncertain, then Java development will suffer as a result and I don't like seeing that happen.
On the other hand, Sun hasn't done badly in it's role as "steward" of the directions in which Java goes.. They've (their marketing has) driven the Java brand relentlessly forward and I think the sheer size of the developer community is a good thing. I can't think of any reason why it would be advantageous for them to spend 8+ years promoting and developing the product, only to "give" it away to the masses. Even the Linux kernel has Linus at the helm. Who else can be trusted to take the helm of such a commercially valuable piece of intellectual property ? Who would resist the temptation to subvert it to their own ends?
One final note to everyone who wants Java open sourced just so their favourite distro can start packaging it.. please, think a bit. Not all useful software is open sourced now, nor will it be in the foreseeable future. If it's your only reason for Sun to cast out a decade or more of research and development, it's not enough.
What do you *want* to do ? You want to climb the ladder of IT jobs, fine. I hear you. But, higher up the ladder, you don't get an easier job. You may get paid a bit better than $13 an hour, but your expectations will increase accordingly. What are you happy doing ?
I often kicked myself for graduating when I did. I got out of university about an year before the dot-com boom died. This was in 2000. People who graduated a mere year before me were in positions like "architect" and "senior team lead", I was a lowly developer. You can take all the experience you want, but some (most?) places DO look for prior management experience and even if you did nothing except crunch code, you were called an architect, so you get your foot in the door.
I had to go about it differently. I was a lowly developer. I tried to vary my skillset and technology. No job was too controversial, too risky, too cutting edge. I asked for (and got) all the mad projects, with high risk and high gain (and an equally high chance of failing). I am not sure if this will work for you, or even if you want to, but if you're looking for experience, then think carefully about accepting risky jobs. At startups, underfunded companies and the like. Don't expect to double or triple your salary today. Just keep getting that all important project, real-world experience. Contribute to open source projects. Keep your coding skills fresh. Make an effort to learn some technologies in depth. Call me troll if you like, but for now, Java and .NET both seem to be fairly good bets. Each month, each year you spend building up your resume, you're also in contact with coworkers who work in technology. Network. Get a reputation for good work, for not being a slacker, for being a knowledgable, reasonable person to work with.
I've gotten 3 (out of 4) jobs so far purely because of someone I knew who knew someone else who had a vacancy.. or from old university contacts .. or from old coworkers who knew I was looking around for another place...
The difference between you and a lot of other people ? You've got less to lose.
Good luck
Wonder if this is related, but it might be that surgeons need practice at maintaining attention on something; like everyone else.
The more practice you get concentrating intensely on hand-eye coordination based activities, the better you get. Hey, I should know. I started out sucking rocks at Quake and ALL FPS, but kept on playing and and getting fragged and managed to figure out how to hold my own, just barely.
Just that since there aren't so many surgical procedures to practice on, playing games are a means of tuning the hand eye coordination. A friend of mine plays a lot of squash for the same reason (although he's pretty careful of his fingers and wrists)
In my experience, there are basically two things that are *MOST* commonly seen in academic networks; one is either internal or external parties trying to take advantage (and misuse) the massive bandwidth that campuses have available, or someone trying to discover and manipulate potentially sensitive documents (such as grades).
I think firewalls have their place, you're right. But being at the receiving end of a rather draconian installation/firewalling policy for no apparent reason other than just reducing work for the systems operators (and increasing work for students, supervisors in general); I'm thinking that there should at least be a set of carefully monitored, but open machines for people to just mess around with. It's a campus, a seat of learning. Sometimes, when you're trying to learn something, things break. Do you want to be too worried about breaking a piece of "mandated" software and having a risk of getting your ass chewed, instead of experimenting ?
Campuses have different security requirements and needs from commercial outfits, IMHO. Sometimes, administrators just don't understand that and try to implement the same policies willy nilly. Security isn't just about procedures and blanket firewalling.
For Microsoft and for a lot of other companies, I think the realization has dawned that concentrating on hardware is a losing proposition .. (Hello, Sun ? are you listening ? Maybe you know better than these guys). As a counterpoint, though, I'd like to offer Apple and their iPod/iTunes strategy. Offer software on the cheap to push out the hardware..
You may upgrade your machine once every 6 months to an year.. However, your software would be service oriented, so you'd be bled dry as updates/small missing features and patches were charged for. A constant stream of revenue, with margins that can't be squeezed out due to competing manufacturers and improving manufacturing processes. A steadier way of earning revenue, if you will. This is what I would imagine Microsoft to want.
Here's the problem, though. The free software genie has been let out of the bottle. Just like the lowered price on the XBox made several people (myself included) think about buying one for a low cost machine and installing Linux on it, if there is a free software alternative that will run on this free hardware, you will get people using it. Ultimately, this will just lead to stronger protection against "illegal" modifications to the software.. For example, if you get a PC free, you must run Windows on it, and never format it to install Linux.. something along those lines. He wants it. I personally do not. Cheaper hardware is good, but I want choice in what software I use and I don't think being locked into one company will offer me this.
I agree with his point about visual software though. VB was tremendously popular for that reason. Because it let people quickly design interfaces and software that sort of worked. For folks who don't do programming for a living (and maybe a few who do), the thought of whipping out something that they can actually use on their own computer is a tremendously appealing notion. More than anything else, Visual Basic helped a whole new bunch of people (who might otherwise have not programmed at all) get into the software industry. The problem is: who will write the server side software ? Who will perform the tweaks ? Who will administer and optimize and tune things ? The need for programmers and for code crunching won't go away overnight, and I doubt it will go away at all. There are advantages to textual representations (as opposed to visual ones) in existing tool support, and there are also advantages in that textual means of representing a problem work on many different paradigms (not just client interfaces).
Irony (yes, the proper usage of the word) is seeing a link for an earlier story, more doom and gloom for Apple.
Honestly, more power to Apple. I thought (hoped?) the mini was a mistake price wise, but a second, honest look told me this was more like sour grapes (or apples, even ? ). They did their market research, they got the product out of the door and perhaps most importantly, they cashed in on the almost unbelievable hype surrounding iPods and Apple products.
Hey, I'm a geek. I don't necessarily like mass market toys and my values (and what is attractive to me) may be different from the mass market. I *like* Apple succeeding with this, because the next generation could be a. cheaper b. have more storage capacity
They might even make the next models more attractive, price wise, for a poor student. I hope they sell a million of 'em :)
I hear these hackers are going to release the source
Err.. no. Stop right there, please. I can explain sore wrists, sore fingers from scrolling the wheel on the mouse..
How the HECK do I explain "sore ass cheeks" ?
Just let that thought die quickly, thanks. Usability engineers trolling for ideas on Slashdot, move on. these are not the ideas you want.. carry on.
For some people, heck for most, money can buy you conveniences.. This is just an additional service offered by them for a nice round number of years. They're just promising to take care of the hassle of domain renewal. At the end of the day, 10 year or 100 year renewal makes little difference. The person/organization which is organized won't need ANY renewal services, while others may opt for this service.
Some people pay money to buy tax software, while others hire an accountant and yet others do their taxes by themselves. It's the degree of customization and service which differs. Isn't that all there is to it ?
I'm not sure if the internet as we know it will exist in a 100 years, but then, people were arguing that snail mail would be extinct and there would be paperless offices throughout the planet. That hasn't happened yet. Let those who want this service spend some additional cash and buy themselves peace of mind, if they have the cash to spare and wish to do so.. Simple.
Well, I don't see how this person could offer up a tool for extortion without figuring out how to spoof IP addresses, anyway. Surely, it would raise an alert if most, if not ALL of your clickthroughs came from a single small set of IPs ? Also, one nitpick about the article, since when does Google offer popup advertising ?
I'm quite certain plenty of programmers know how to fake clickthroughs, or they could sit down and figure it out. Spoofing IP addresses, on the other hand, would be slightly more difficult.. and there are only so many open proxies and so on.
On a slightly more depressing note, this sounds like a perfect scheme for all those zombie machines that are being spawned out there (with email worms). Instead of doing a Distributed DOS or sending out spam (which are their current uses, and can be easily traced back), if they were used to randomly send out a few million clicks, or to host a mini link farm for Googlebot's eyes only.... the possibilities for spamming become endless. Scary thought.
First, the speed at which the exploit was translated from advisory to a malicious worm.. Second, this is one of the few old-school "do as much damage as you can" worms. At least it makes a change from the monotony of the mass mailing attachment exploit variety of viruses..Not a welcome change for the people who got hit by it of course :(
By the way, in case you get prompted for registration and your principles don't allow you to give out your email address, use Bugme Not to find a login. Click here
An interesting quote was:
Instead of including paid listings within search results, which critics say results in misleading search results, MSN said it will display paid listings separately at the top and to the right of search results generated by its search engine.
If Google sinks without a trace tomorrow, at least they've forced other competitors to follow suit and remove paid listings as a revenue option.
Actually, I'd be very interested in how Microsoft decide to differentiate themselves in terms of a search product. Obviously, sinking this much money into a completely different search means they must have some sort of strategy for toppling Google off the throne, right ? That's what I want to see.
The more competition, the better for everyone, as far as search is concerned and where the cost of switching is so low (just point your browser elsewhere)
These are just the type of guys who think it's grand fun to fake an alert box saying "your internet connection needs to be optimized". In that sense, not much to see, we should move on. More of their kind inhabit companies that try to install spyware on your machine too.
I disagree with their definition of "trojan". If a user inititated a download, they argue, then it's not a trojan. To take a random example, the makers of Winzip would love to replace "7zip.exe" with a "smart" application like theirs, which says .. Oh, don't go for this rotten free unarchiver, try out our wonderful product.
Finally, it's an act of utter irresponsibility on their part to post these IP addresses out on the world wide web. Yes, I agree. What they did was very very clever. They may have valid reasons for grandiosely "declaring war on file sharing". But I think that posting IP addresses, locations and filenames onto the public eye transformed what they did from a "clever social experiment" to an exercise in maliciousness.
Now, by the same token, if I should disagree with what they did, should I post their names, email and contact numbers for anyone to see, right here on Slashdot ? Nope. I would not stoop so low.
I've often wondered how the professionals, or even people with more than an average ability to recall do it. I've heard of two different ways. One is to make up a rhyme or a "keyword" to jog your memory of some object, or some series of objects.. The other is to have a snapshot or a visualized picture of something in your head.
I seem to personally work along the snapshot method, as I suspect many others do. If I close my eyes, I can visualize a page in a text, or a license plate, or a face. Somewhat imperfectly, but it's possible. However, these seem to be for details that I've observed. If I didn't consciously "notice" some aspect of a car, for instance, I couldn't recall it later; it's not in my mental picture of the car.
Unfortunately, this method seems to suck for memorizing sequences of things, such as a deck of cards. I simply cannot remember more than 20-30 cards in sequence using this method.. For things like poetry, complete with punctuation and spelling as in the original, I'd assume that the "snapshot" method would prove more accurate. But card decks require a completely different method of memorization..?
I took heart from the "practice daily" advice though.. Admittedly, it's more than a bit frustrating when you can't even remember all of one card pack, but these people can just breeze through 22!! card packs and get 90% of their answers correct
The setting you require is in 0.5
Go to Tools->Options -> Advanced -> General Settings -> Mark message read after X seconds (x defaults to 5)
You need to keep the message viewed for so many seconds before it stop
But the problems are twofold.. If you're in charge of a large installation of servers, and you get this public confessional type "mea culpa" every few weeks or months from your vendor, how easy would you feel ? Still want to run a piece of software that needs to be patched every so often ? Shades of Sendmail, anyone ?
Secondly, the whole point of accountability comes up. If your vendor isn't responsible for how your infrastructure runs and how timely security updates are made available, what's the point having a vendor anyway ? I'm not advocating a lawsuit, but you can either sue or you can take your business elsewhere. This sounds like "confess your sins and they will be absolved" sort of scenario.
And for added benefit, imagine the delight of a black hat who manages to break into one of this top secret archives. A whole list of vulnerabilities that haven't been publicly disclosed. A motherlode of h4xorz potential, if there ever was any..
A few points to ponder ..
You've all heard the "you can write unreadable code in any programming language" argument, so I'll spare you the repetition.. (No, wait.. I didn't, did I? ) *grin*
But also bear in mind that Perl is the first language that I know of that used the foreach construct in the same form as the more sought after languages.. Java has iterators and enumerators, but they introduced a foreach because it is darn easy to understand.
Perl innovated in regular expressions. Even Jeffery Friedl's Mastering Regex (sic) says that other languages aspire to be called "Perl 5 compatible" when they don't necessarily support all the features of Perl 5.6". Love it or hate it, regular expressions are like the microwave in your kitchen. Once you get used to it, it's darn hard to manage without :)
I am not going to go into Perl 6 the moment it is released. But I guess that's ok, because I didn't adopt 5.8 the day it was released either. I just think that Larry Wall has made enough good calls in the language so far, to be worth trusting him for another version. Even one that promises to break some of the idioms that I am accustomed to in it's present incarnation. Hey, I didn't like Perl 5 when I first saw it either, but I notice the difference in my productivity when I got the hang of things.
I cannot claim to intimately know Perl 5, but I started learning it a few years back. I belong to the camp of Perl programmers (and I know there are a few of these) who are adopting a "wait and see" attitude to Perl 6.
If you're interested in learning Perl now, you should probably go for the cookbook approach, ie: get a copy of OReilly's Perl cookbook and just try applying the solution to your problem. Then, trying tweaking and figuring out how it works.
As for learning Perl 5, I'd probably point out that there are still some places that run 5.005_03 (certainly Solaris used to ship with that version by default), and that version is at LEAST 5-6 years old :) There are even some places I've heard of that run Perl 4 :) So, I think there is plenty of time to have your investment in learning Perl pay off before people start switching to Perl 6 en masse.