This is ridiculous. Why say that the Ipad will kill the $2000 DVD player when.... The $100 DVD player has already killed it????
After all, for $100-$200 you can get a fine portable player which can: 1. Connect to car or home electricity (with Ipad you need to buy more power supplies). 2. Play physical dvd's and/or movies on flash disk or memory cards (Ipad only has internal memory), 3. hang on the front sit's head rest (the ipad doesn't come with any solution for that), 4. Sit comfortably on your horizontal lap while the display is tilted (you can't do this on the flat ipad).
The parent is described as "computer-handicapped", so let's put it in terms he or she will understand: Consider, instead those old-fashed toys of yesteryear. Or consider the TV which many kids of my generation had in their rooms.
Could you imagine a parent asking that his children's toys will automatically stop working on 10pm? Or that his TV cannot be turned on when the child is grounded, or perhaps show only certain channels at certain times? Or the toys checking themselves and letting the parent know when one of them gets broken?
This is all ridiculous, of course. With toys and TV you simply couldn't even imagine doing this. With a computer you can *imagine* doing it, but it doesn't mean it makes sense to do it. A child will always find ways to break such technological rules, especially if the parent is so-called "computer-handicapped".
I don't know about you, but the cocaine isn't the thing that worries me - I'm more worried about the fact that 90% of the bills I use have been up someone's nose!
Zsh has had these features for years
on
BASH 4.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I've been using Zsh (the Z shell) for years, because it had better completion, and a richer bourne-shell and ksh-based programming language including also associative arrays and the co-process. So it would appear that bash finally caught up. But zsh has continued to improve. I'll be sticking with zsh for now, until I see that bash really caught up.
Hi Amigori. You're American, right? I hate to be blunt, but Americans rarely feel that there are other zones, any more than they feel that there are other languages (everyone speaks English). At lot of us non-Americans face this problem all the time - when we buy DVDs on the Internet (often of American movies, from the US) and need to play them in our country, when we go abroad and buy DVDs, or when we relocate temporarily or permanently to another country. Bringing a DVD player with you is non-realistic: what happens when it breaks? And if I spent 2 years in the US and bought there 100 DVDs and want to bring them with me and play them in my country for the next 20 years, do I need to travel every few years back to the US to buy a new DVD player?
Almost everyone I know faces the zone problem very often. Over here, when you buy a DVD player, the first thing you're told (and if you're not told, you always ask) is how to "fix" it to be zone-free (which is against the DVD's cartel's laws, but nobody really cares). A DVD player that can't be "fixed" that way simply cannot be sold here. For computer drives, the Internet is filled with programs to break the zone limitation. So obviously, the DVD zones are real problem for much more than 1% of the people.
The fact that DVD producers can choose not to use zones, ad anti-forwarding, and so on doesn't mean anything. The DVD producers are often greedy bastards, or simply ignorant (as the saying goes, never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity). DVD zones were originally meant for two things. First, as a way to allow DVDs to come out first in one area of the world (e.g., the US) and only a few months later in other areas of the world where the movie was still in theaters. Second, zones were a way to allow different pricing in different regions of the world. But how can you explain the fact that almost no DVD is sold without a zone? Even DVDs of 20 year old movies, and DVDs which aren't sold outside the US, have Zone 1. Why? Similarly, for ads anti-skipping. What does a DVD producer benefit from me not being able to skip his ad, 10 years after I bought the DVD and when the ad is completely irrelevant?
Sure, Joe Sixpack doesn't care about the DRM, in the sense of technology meant to prevent copying. After all, none of the DRM schemes ever invented *ever* prevented copying, and in fact, the stronger DRM methods only encouraged new ways of copying (since it is hard copying a movie to a friend, methods were invented to copy it to 1000 strangers on the Internet).
But Joe Sixpack *does* care about *restrictions* that DRM allow. He cares about his collection of 200 legally-bought DVDs not working any more when he moves to another country. He cares about a DVD he legally bought over the Internet doesn't work. He cares about a DVD he bought for his kids (for full money) having ads that cannot be skipped. He cares about buying a large, expensive collection of music and videos for one device (e.g., think of an iPod), and a year later when he buys another device, he can no longer play the content he bought.
All these problems are caused by just one thing: DRM. Without DRM, the player market would have killed all these restrictions - if Sony's player doesn't skip ads, Toshiba's will and nobody would buy Sony's players. DRM is what allows these restrictions, and why the consumers hate it (even if they don't know on who to put the blame). It's not just us "penguin-huggers" that hate DRM - us penguin-huggers are just more accutely aware of what causes the restrictions we hate.
What we need for someone to instead of talk, perform two experiments:
1. Create 10 new email addresses, and post them around the net with 10 obfuscation tricks (plenty of examples can be found in this thread). Which of these tricks actually foiled the spammers, and which did not? Obviously, spammers can theoretically get around any obfuscation, but which obfuscations are still "safe"?
2. Do an experiment to figure how how "safer" is an address that was never posted on the Web. Does it just cause a small delay in spam (say, you only start getting spam after a month) or does it get noticably less spam?
The answer to #2 isn't as obvious as some may think. One important problem to consider is spamming worms which use fake "from" addresses. These worms take your friends' email addresses - potentially addresses which have never been published - and use them as spam to random people. If a spammer also receives these mails, he gets a constant stream of real email addresses which were never published on the web. Another obvious issue is dictionary attacks, which are especially practical on large domains (e.g., gmail).
I have heard rumors that one of the reasons that Vista was not ready, was Microsoft's attempt to use "dot net", basically an virtual-machine based (interpreted) language similar in many aspects to Java, but the resulting code was huge, slow, and simply put - useless. Do these rumors have any basis?
The reason I'm asking this is that I am getting the feeling that while companies (like the one I work for) love to code in Java, the users actually hate the resulting software, saying something like "Wow, this is nice software, but it's so easy to see it's written in Java - it takes half a gig of memory for doing almost nothing. If it were rewritten to something else, I would use it...". If Microsoft ran into the same problem with its dot-net, I would conclude once and for all that Java and its offsprings are hopeless (at least for this decade, until memory and CPU speed continues to grow until nobody cares about them any more).
I can't believe that after Firefox actually implemented tabbed browsing *well*, people insist on ruining it in the name of "progress".
The fact that firefox has just one "x" button that closes the current tab, rather then a close button per tab, is a *feature*, not a bug. Users of Lotus Notes, like myself, are all too familiar with what happens when each tab has a close button: you often click on the wrong one, and destroy the wrong tab! With Firefox 1.5's single tab close button, you can never accidentally close any tab: you can only close the tab you are now seeing.
So I hope that if the "improvement" of having many close buttons makes it to FireFox 2, it will at least be configurable, so that users made miserable by the new feature could at least disable it.
There's a huge flaw in the logic of the statistics used for this article!
Let's consider what would you would see in that "book of inventions" even if inventions really do grow exponentially. If the book always documented, say, 1% of the inventions, then much of the book of inventions in 1700-2000 that he studied would be devoted to recent years. However, I'm sure that the people who wrote that book factored this out, and (conciously or unconciously) tried to even this effect out, and to choose, say, the 100 most important inventions of this century. When you divide this constant by the number of people (why??), you end up with the number of "innovations" in the book per person going down. And it doesn't mean anything.
If you don't do what I described above (pick a constant number of most important innovations per century), it's almost impossible to decide what's more important. What is more important - the invention of a new and more efficient steam engine, or the invention of a new and more efficient programming languge? Does the fact that every year computer chips get faster mean that they are a series of important inventions, or does it count as just one invention?
I think the author of this article isn't really interested in inventions, but rather in paradigm shifts. The move from sword to pistol is one. The move from carriage to automobile is one. The invention of the Internet is one. BUT, when you already have paradigms that work, why shift them? We are using "cars" for 100 years, because they work pretty well - does this mean that there was no more innovation in this century, any more than the fact that we still use Euclid's geometry means that there has been no innovation for two millenia?
Take a university that has thousands of people actively using email, and thousands of computers, probably a hundred of which function as mail server. Now, decide that "we need a central mail server to filter viruses and spam". Take a few useless machines lying in the computer center, and make them the mail server that's supposed to replace the hundred you had previously. Then slow down the new mail server by applying every concievable virus and spam filtering.
What do you get? Incredibly slow service (sometimes mails get stuck for hours or more in the queue), single point of failure, and officially-mandated false positives (noone in the university can avoid them). AND, you still get a lot of spam.
Computer centers must know that if they want to centralize a service that was previously decentralized (different departments and individual running their own mail servers and filters), they must be prepared. Prepared to handle the load (Google had to buy 100,000 machines to handle their load!), prepared to handle the humans who use their service, and prepared to handle exceptions (a person or department that doesn't want the centralized filtering). Often, these computer centers don't think of these issues in advance, causing things like described in this article.
Well, let's see: apparently Xen lets you run hyped Linux applications (such as Apache) on your Windows machine, letting you stay with the operating system you're addicted to.
At the same time, if you're a Linux user and want to run Windows applications, you're screwed because you'll have to wait for Microsoft to release the Xen-patched version of Windows XP. And guess what pigs will do when that happens?
So, tell me again why this Xen doesn't *exectly* fit Microsoft's usual M.O. ?
As a person who prefers Linux over Microsoft Windows, and works in Linux almost all the time, how will I be able to use Xen? I don't want to run Linux inside Windows - I want to run Windows programs inside Linux! And since Microsoft is not likely to sell the ported XP anytime soon (why would they??) I probably won't be able to do that.
It sounds like Xen will only be of use to Microsoft users who want to try out Linux... That's good, but there are already plenty of solutions for that (e.g., Knopix) and they are not really useful to me.
It's also not clear how, if at all, Xen can support displaying graphics from Windows (say, a Microsoft Word window) inside X-Windows.
> I've proposed before, as well as now, a "none of the above" option.
The 1985 comedy, "Brewster's Millions" took this idea to its peak, when a wacky millionaire determined to lose all his money starts an ad capaign asking for people to vote for "none of the above":)
Originally, patents were used to allow inventors to share their non-obvious discoveries with others. Imagine, say, the airplane. Many people tried to make a flying machine, and failed. Now the Wright brothers succeeded. People all over would be asking them "Wow, how did you do that?". Without patents, they would have to answer "We can't tell you, because then you'd take profits away from us". Patents would allow them to share their discovery with the world, while controlling the use of the new technology for a specified amount of time.
The way software patents are used, on the other hand, is different. Once some idea spreads openly (e.g Lempel and Ziv's compression algorithm), anybody (or at least hundreds of good programmers around the world) can implement it on their own. There are no real secrets that people would be shaking their heads about saying "how did they do that?". None of the software patents that I know of ever gave the companies making them any incentive to publish the code they patented.
Summary: patents were meant to promote sharing of information and research. I don't see software patents doing that. Ergo, software patents suck.
The system promises fewer computer crashes and will allow users to delete data from their hard drive.
I don't know why deleting data is supposed to be an advantage(?), but if XP is really more stable than Microsoft's previous OS's, we'll need to think of better reaons to disparage Microsoft's OS than it being "much less stable than Linux".
One good reason to avoid the new Windows XP is Microsoft's rediculous new "internet activation code" scheme. Not only does it violate your privacy, it also will cause you major hassles if you need to upgrade your computer or reinstall it (a typical occurance with previous MS O/Ss). Worse: this scheme is impossible to pull off in many commercial situation, in which individual Windows machines are not connected to the Internet, a phone, or anything else.
I'd bet that within a week we'll hear about "cracks" that let criminals install illegal copies of Windows XP - while us "good guys" still have to struggle with the hassles of this new copy-protection scheme...
Can I play downloaded MP3 files on the Nokia 5510?
Yes, the Nokia 5510 can play MP3 files in protected format. Copies of the downloaded music files are added to the Nokia Audio Manager database. Nokia Audio Manager encrypts the music files and downloads the protected MP3 format to the memory of the Nokia 5510.
True, working in a team is a useful skill. It is something you may need to learn (though most people already have that skill by the time they leave high-school and polish it on their first job), and maybe even practice.
But if a typical CS student (say) 40 classes, isn't it enough to practice teamwork in, say, 4 of those classes? If all those classes, or even half of those classes, emphesized teamwork, you'll end up generating graduates who are great at team work (this includes professional slackers, who have perfected the ability to cause others to work for them), rather than people who actually know the material.
If you want to be a "programming drone", then by all means, perfect your skills of choosing and working in teams that will make you look good (regardless or not if you actually did good). But if you want to be a really good programmer, worthy of your CS degree, you'll need to always be tell yourself the following: I *can* do this all on my own. I *am* good enough. The reason I am cooperating with others now is to finish the job more quickly. However, If you are cooperating because others know more than you, especially when you're in a stage where you're supposed to be learning (i.e., during your CS studies), you're just hurting yourself.
I get roughly 300 emails a day (including mailing lists, spam, and "real" email). The only solution to dealing with such a deluge (without hiring a secretary) is writing filters: my filtering programs now total over 2500 (!) lines of code (perl, procmail, C, awk and shell) and data, and filter out 99% of the spam, and all the mailing-list mail into seperate folders.
A very relevant post appeared on rec.humor.funny a week ago:
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
From: chris@cjones.org (Chris Jones)
Subject: on the building of automation
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 19:30:00 PDT
I received this message from a friend whose job involves responding
to a ludicrous amount of email:
>I replaced myself with a small shell script today.
>
>I am trying to figure out if that makes me insignificant or
>impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
This is ridiculous. Why say that the Ipad will kill the $2000 DVD player when.... The $100 DVD player has already killed it????
After all, for $100-$200 you can get a fine portable player which can: 1. Connect to car or home electricity (with Ipad you need to buy more power supplies). 2. Play physical dvd's and/or movies on flash disk or memory cards (Ipad only has internal memory), 3. hang on the front sit's head rest (the ipad doesn't come with any solution for that), 4. Sit comfortably on your horizontal lap while the display is tilted (you can't do this on the flat ipad).
So what is so new with the ipad in this sense?
The parent is described as "computer-handicapped", so let's put it in terms he or she will understand: Consider, instead those old-fashed toys of yesteryear. Or consider the TV which many kids of my generation had in their rooms.
Could you imagine a parent asking that his children's toys will automatically stop working on 10pm? Or that his TV cannot be turned on when the child is grounded, or perhaps show only certain channels at certain times? Or the toys checking themselves and letting the parent know when one of them gets broken?
This is all ridiculous, of course. With toys and TV you simply couldn't even imagine doing this. With a computer you can *imagine* doing it, but it doesn't mean it makes sense to do it. A child will always find ways to break such technological rules, especially if the parent is so-called "computer-handicapped".
I don't know about you, but the cocaine isn't the thing that worries me - I'm more worried about the fact that 90% of the bills I use have been up someone's nose!
I've been using Zsh (the Z shell) for years, because it had better completion, and a richer bourne-shell and ksh-based programming language including also associative arrays and the co-process.
So it would appear that bash finally caught up. But zsh has continued to improve. I'll be sticking with zsh for now, until I see that bash really caught up.
Hi Amigori. You're American, right? I hate to be blunt, but Americans rarely feel that there are other zones, any more than they feel that there are other languages (everyone speaks English). At lot of us non-Americans face this problem all the time - when we buy DVDs on the Internet (often of American movies, from the US) and need to play them in our country, when we go abroad and buy DVDs, or when we relocate temporarily or permanently to another country. Bringing a DVD player with you is non-realistic: what happens when it breaks? And if I spent 2 years in the US and bought there 100 DVDs and want to bring them with me and play them in my country for the next 20 years, do I need to travel every few years back to the US to buy a new DVD player?
Almost everyone I know faces the zone problem very often. Over here, when you buy a DVD player, the first thing you're told (and if you're not told, you always ask) is how to "fix" it to be zone-free (which is against the DVD's cartel's laws, but nobody really cares). A DVD player that can't be "fixed" that way simply cannot be sold here. For computer drives, the Internet is filled with programs to break the zone limitation. So obviously, the DVD zones are real problem for much more than 1% of the people.
The fact that DVD producers can choose not to use zones, ad anti-forwarding, and so on doesn't mean anything. The DVD producers are often greedy bastards, or simply ignorant (as the saying goes, never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity). DVD zones were originally meant for two things. First, as a way to allow DVDs to come out first in one area of the world (e.g., the US) and only a few months later in other areas of the world where the movie was still in theaters. Second, zones were a way to allow different pricing in different regions of the world. But how can you explain the fact that almost no DVD is sold without a zone? Even DVDs of 20 year old movies, and DVDs which aren't sold outside the US, have Zone 1. Why?
Similarly, for ads anti-skipping. What does a DVD producer benefit from me not being able to skip his ad, 10 years after I bought the DVD and when the ad is completely irrelevant?
Sure, Joe Sixpack doesn't care about the DRM, in the sense of technology meant to prevent copying. After all, none of the DRM schemes ever invented *ever* prevented copying, and in fact, the stronger DRM methods only encouraged new ways of copying (since it is hard copying a movie to a friend, methods were invented to copy it to 1000 strangers on the Internet).
But Joe Sixpack *does* care about *restrictions* that DRM allow. He cares about his collection of 200 legally-bought DVDs not working any more when he moves to another country. He cares about a DVD he legally bought over the Internet doesn't work. He cares about a DVD he bought for his kids (for full money) having ads that cannot be skipped. He cares about buying a large, expensive collection of music and videos for one device (e.g., think of an iPod), and a year later when he buys another device, he can no longer play the content he bought.
All these problems are caused by just one thing: DRM. Without DRM, the player market would have killed all these restrictions - if Sony's player doesn't skip ads, Toshiba's will and nobody would buy Sony's players. DRM is what allows these restrictions, and why the consumers hate it (even if they don't know on who to put the blame). It's not just us "penguin-huggers" that hate DRM - us penguin-huggers are just more accutely aware of what causes the restrictions we hate.
What we need for someone to instead of talk, perform two experiments:
1. Create 10 new email addresses, and post them around the net with 10 obfuscation tricks (plenty of examples can be found in this thread). Which of these tricks actually foiled the spammers, and which did not? Obviously, spammers can theoretically get around any obfuscation, but which obfuscations are still "safe"?
2. Do an experiment to figure how how "safer" is an address that was never posted on the Web. Does it just cause a small delay in spam (say, you only start getting spam after a month) or does it get noticably less spam?
The answer to #2 isn't as obvious as some may think. One important problem to consider is spamming worms which use fake "from" addresses. These worms take your friends' email addresses - potentially addresses which have never been published - and use them as spam to random people. If a spammer also receives these mails, he gets a constant stream of real email addresses which were never published on the web. Another obvious issue is dictionary attacks, which are especially practical on large domains (e.g., gmail).
Wouldn't it be appropriate to call this project, "The Little Engine That Could"? :-)
I have heard rumors that one of the reasons that Vista was not ready, was Microsoft's attempt to use "dot net", basically an virtual-machine based (interpreted) language similar in many aspects to Java, but the resulting code was huge, slow, and simply put - useless. Do these rumors have any basis?
The reason I'm asking this is that I am getting the feeling that while companies (like the one I work for) love to code in Java, the users actually hate the resulting software, saying something like "Wow, this is nice software, but it's so easy to see it's written in Java - it takes half a gig of memory for doing almost nothing. If it were rewritten to something else, I would use it...". If Microsoft ran into the same problem with its dot-net, I would conclude once and for all that Java and its offsprings are hopeless (at least for this decade, until memory and CPU speed continues to grow until nobody cares about them any more).
I can't believe that after Firefox actually implemented tabbed browsing *well*, people insist on ruining it in the name of "progress".
The fact that firefox has just one "x" button that closes the current tab, rather then a close button per tab, is a *feature*, not a bug. Users of Lotus Notes, like myself, are all too familiar with what happens when each tab has a close button: you often click on the wrong one, and destroy the wrong tab! With Firefox 1.5's single tab close button, you can never accidentally close any tab: you can only close the tab you are now seeing.
So I hope that if the "improvement" of having many close buttons makes it to FireFox 2, it will at least be configurable, so that users made miserable by the new feature could at least disable it.
There's a huge flaw in the logic of the statistics used for this article!
Let's consider what would you would see in that "book of inventions" even if inventions really do grow exponentially. If the book always documented, say, 1% of the inventions, then much of the book of inventions in 1700-2000 that he studied would be devoted to recent years. However, I'm sure that the people who wrote that book factored this out, and (conciously or unconciously) tried to even this effect out, and to choose, say, the 100 most important inventions of this century. When you divide this constant by the number of people (why??), you end up with the number of "innovations" in the book per person going down. And it doesn't mean anything.
If you don't do what I described above (pick a constant number of most important innovations per century), it's almost impossible to decide what's more important. What is more important - the invention of a new and more efficient steam engine, or the invention of a new and more efficient programming languge? Does the fact that every year computer chips get faster mean that they are a series of important inventions, or does it count as just one invention?
I think the author of this article isn't really interested in inventions, but rather in paradigm shifts. The move from sword to pistol is one. The move from carriage to automobile is one. The invention of the Internet is one. BUT, when you already have paradigms that work, why shift them? We are using "cars" for 100 years, because they work pretty well - does this mean that there was no more innovation in this century, any more than the fact that we still use Euclid's geometry means that there has been no innovation for two millenia?
I've seen this happen in my local University too.
Take a university that has thousands of people actively using email, and thousands of computers, probably a hundred of which function as mail server. Now, decide that "we need a central mail server to filter viruses and spam". Take a few useless machines lying in the computer center, and make them the mail server that's supposed to replace the hundred you had previously. Then slow down the new mail server by applying every concievable virus and spam filtering.
What do you get? Incredibly slow service (sometimes mails get stuck for hours or more in the queue), single point of failure, and officially-mandated false positives (noone in the university can avoid them). AND, you still get a lot of spam.
Computer centers must know that if they want to centralize a service that was previously decentralized (different departments and individual running their own mail servers and filters), they must be prepared. Prepared to handle the load (Google had to buy 100,000 machines to handle their load!), prepared to handle the humans who use their service, and prepared to handle exceptions (a person or department that doesn't want the centralized filtering). Often, these computer centers don't think of these issues in advance, causing things like described in this article.
Well, let's see: apparently Xen lets you run hyped Linux applications (such as Apache) on your Windows machine, letting you stay with the operating system you're addicted to.
At the same time, if you're a Linux user and want to run Windows applications, you're screwed because you'll have to wait for Microsoft to release the Xen-patched version of Windows XP. And guess what pigs will do when that happens?
So, tell me again why this Xen doesn't *exectly* fit Microsoft's usual M.O. ?
As a person who prefers Linux over Microsoft Windows, and works in Linux almost all the time, how will I be able to use Xen? I don't want to run Linux inside Windows - I want to run Windows programs inside Linux! And since Microsoft is not likely to sell the ported XP anytime soon (why would they??) I probably won't be able to do that.
It sounds like Xen will only be of use to Microsoft users who want to try out Linux... That's good, but there are already plenty of solutions for that (e.g., Knopix) and they are not really useful to me.
It's also not clear how, if at all, Xen can support displaying graphics from Windows (say, a Microsoft Word window) inside X-Windows.
The 1985 comedy, "Brewster's Millions" took this idea to its peak, when a wacky millionaire determined to lose all his money starts an ad capaign asking for people to vote for "none of the above" :)
Yes, it should have been "OpenSSH Gets Even More Suspecting", not "Suspicious"... Maybe "Paranoid" would fit even better :)
The way software patents are used, on the other hand, is different. Once some idea spreads openly (e.g Lempel and Ziv's compression algorithm), anybody (or at least hundreds of good programmers around the world) can implement it on their own. There are no real secrets that people would be shaking their heads about saying "how did they do that?". None of the software patents that I know of ever gave the companies making them any incentive to publish the code they patented.
Summary: patents were meant to promote sharing of information and research. I don't see software patents doing that. Ergo, software patents suck.
One good reason to avoid the new Windows XP is Microsoft's rediculous new "internet activation code" scheme. Not only does it violate your privacy, it also will cause you major hassles if you need to upgrade your computer or reinstall it (a typical occurance with previous MS O/Ss). Worse: this scheme is impossible to pull off in many commercial situation, in which individual Windows machines are not connected to the Internet, a phone, or anything else.
I'd bet that within a week we'll hear about "cracks" that let criminals install illegal copies of Windows XP - while us "good guys" still have to struggle with the hassles of this new copy-protection scheme...
Can I play downloaded MP3 files on the Nokia 5510?
Yes, the Nokia 5510 can play MP3 files in protected format. Copies of the downloaded music files are added to the Nokia Audio Manager database. Nokia Audio Manager encrypts the music files and downloads the protected MP3 format to the memory of the Nokia 5510.
True, working in a team is a useful skill. It is something you may need to learn (though most people already have that skill by the time they leave high-school and polish it on their first job), and maybe even practice.
But if a typical CS student (say) 40 classes, isn't it enough to practice teamwork in, say, 4 of those classes? If all those classes, or even half of those classes, emphesized teamwork, you'll end up generating graduates who are great at team work (this includes professional slackers, who have perfected the ability to cause others to work for them), rather than people who actually know the material.
If you want to be a "programming drone", then by all means, perfect your skills of choosing and working in teams that will make you look good (regardless or not if you actually did good). But if you want to be a really good programmer, worthy of your CS degree, you'll need to always be tell yourself the following: I *can* do this all on my own. I *am* good enough. The reason I am cooperating with others now is to finish the job more quickly. However, If you are cooperating because others know more than you, especially when you're in a stage where you're supposed to be learning (i.e., during your CS studies), you're just hurting yourself.
I get roughly 300 emails a day (including mailing lists, spam, and "real" email). The only solution to dealing with such a deluge (without hiring a secretary) is writing filters: my filtering programs now total over 2500 (!) lines of code (perl, procmail, C, awk and shell) and data, and filter out 99% of the spam, and all the mailing-list mail into seperate folders.
A very relevant post appeared on rec.humor.funny a week ago:
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
From: chris@cjones.org (Chris Jones)
Subject: on the building of automation
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 19:30:00 PDT
I received this message from a friend whose job involves responding
to a ludicrous amount of email:
>I replaced myself with a small shell script today.
>
>I am trying to figure out if that makes me insignificant or
>impressive.