You made some good points. I've read both white papers though I honestly only understood half maybe 2/3, since I am no Electrical engineer, or assembly programmer.
The only real benefit I can see from a industry perspective is it will drive down the price of high end systems for corporations. Intel desperately wants to get into the mainframe, research and scientific market, since the margin are much higher. As others have noted, IA64 isn't going to really revolutionize partical physics, astrophysics, realtime weather simulation or any other research requiring massive bandwidth and address space. It might make it easier for smaller universities to build faster, better, and slightly cheaper clusters in 2 years, but for now who cares if AMD's extensions have a limit.
Really, if we want faser 3D graphics, we need faster Bus, memory and GPU's.
I'd agree with you 100% if I didn't see humungous ASP and Perl scripts that are like thousands of lines and over 4 megs. Sure most html editors will eventually open it, but it runs damn slow. No one in their right mind should write long grotesque HTML or scripts that are more 200 lines, but that's in an ideal world. One person maintaining a huge script might find it easier to have just one file, but having to fix/change/update that kind of files drove me nuts in the past using other file/text editors. So like everyone else, I go download VIM and move right along.
I didn't think geeks get out enough to go to bed and breakfast. I guess I deserved that one for not saying bulletin boards. But then again those who actually know that stuff wouldn't bother asking.:P
Point well taken, but then again look at all the musicians like Billy Joel and most of the old time blues/jazz men who got screwed. Some of the greatest guitarists credit John Lee Hooker, BB King, Robert Johnson and dozen others for building the roots of modern day rock.
Statement like "These artists chose to enter into an agreement that stated they gave up the right to market their work. That's the way business works - sometimes you make a good deal, sometimes you don't." is == to "It's ok to exploit those with talent but no education to understand a contract."
It is wrong to steel, pure and simple. If I listen to an MP3 and like enough of the songs, I buy the CD. If not, I delete the one hit wonder and move on. I've seen friends get screwed, the picture is far from accurate. Talk to your local bands and ask about how tough it is to get signed and then have the record label market them aggressively.
What most people don't realize is most bands pay for the marketing, recording and 90% of the cost of producing a record. Only a small percentage of bands/singers get great deals. Musicians who are also great businessmen are rare. The analogy of a 25K explorer is far from accurate comparison. In most cases, the musician composes, records, mixes and performs. Next they actively go out to push their CD by hiring a manager to book dates and locations. Rarely do record companies go way out to help a band they just signed. Most bands do their own marketing, so the argument that labels do all the marketing is swiss cheese.
Blizzard has had a good track record. Even though WC3 has seem some delays, Blizzard has always lived by the motto of only releasing the best product they can produce. Even if it is not worth buying, it is worth signing up for the beta to see what it does.
From the last time I looked at the game specs, it should be interesting.
If you want to know if hackers will find it interesting, the answer is yes. I grew up around hackers and crackers and both would be interested for several reasons. The biggest one is because they can and they have time. I know plenty of teenagers who know 4+ languages including assembly and know more at 13 than I did at 22. I'm not embarrased to admit it, since these kids are smart. Some are misguided, but most stop at 18. I have first hand experience with friends who hacked and got caught by the FBI and crackers are determined to get in.
Just to give you an idea, some crackers during the BB era in southern california were stealing credit cards to buy commercial software, then sold cracked versions to the largest BB in southern CA. They were eventually caught and the FBI took away all the computers. All of them were under-aged, so they didn't do any time. All of them were interested in science, so they would definitely be interested in what your satellite is sending. More interesting is getting control of your satellite.
Also, remember that crackers tend to have parents who have technical careers, but no time to watch their kids. Hackers and crackers have a lot of time, brains and energy to burn. With all the articles recently about amatuer and college programs building their own satellites, it will become a bigger concern. As kids get more technically advanced at a younger age, more systems will get compromised. It's a fact of life.
I found this particular paragraph interesting and shows Bram took a lot of care designing VIM.
The blocks with text lines are stored in the swap file without a specific ordering. If the blocks were ordered, inserting a block halfway
into the file would require all remaining blocks to be shifted, which is very slow. To be able to find a line by its number, index blocks
are used. An index block contains a list that tells which line is in which block. If a file is big, this list doesn't fit in a single block. It is then split over several blocks, and another index block is made to refer to these index blocks. This forms a balanced tree of index
blocks, with the text blocks as the leaves. This construction has proven to be very reliable and efficient.
There are several text/html editors and IDE's that would benefit from this type of swap file. I'm sure everyone could list atleast 2-4 programs that have a difficult time handling large files. It's no wonder VIM is able to handle really large files and still respond quickly.
As others have mentioned, E-Business is maturing, though I would say it still hasn't graduated from infant stage. Only now is Microsoft windows really maturing to teenage state. Even though things on the internet progress faster than previous technologies, it's all relative. It took the automotive industry a whole century to mature to the current state.
I would hold judgement about E-business for another ten years before pronouncing it mature. Technology can only move as fast as people's ability to learn and take it for granted. Remember a lot of people still do not have computers or internet access. Those of us fortunate enough to work in the IT industry often forget most of the world doesn't percieve the internet the same way.
We'll know when the internet has matured when everyone takes it for granted. Just like cars, trains, telephone, bicycle and planes.
I'll second, third and forth that sentiment. I just purchased a new vaio with XP and even though it has some nice features, they are poorly thought out. The networking in XP has improved significantly and microsoft finally realized people use their computers on multiple networks. The new network features are nice, except for remote assistance which in it's current state is just screaming "hack me." Having the mouse over become selection is plain old annoying. Single click no longer works like before and by default expands any folder. There are alot of annoying things about XP, but I'd rather not void the stupid warranty on the laptop until I know the hardware is good(the usual 3 months).
XP isn't a total piece of crap, but it sure isn't an improvement over win2K. Most of the so called improvements are useless.
FoodTV has a Unwrap marathon. Candies, drinks, ice cream and other sweet stuff. Not quite as cool as gozilla marathon, but it's an option when you get bored with gozilla.
I consider myself a geek and inceasantly think about programming, design, and other technical topics. When ever a job turns south as described, I leave the job. If you love doing what you do and the people at work are making it hell, then leave. No amount of money is worth the loss of something you love.
I find it helpful to have other hobbies that take my mind off programming and work. Quitting a job before you've found a new one isn't easy to do, but it all depends on your tolerance for political back stabbing and bs. My tolerance is low, so I politely say my goodbyes and find a new job.
Being the victim of descrimination is never an easy thing to take, but rather than just bitch about how bad you have it, remember there are those who have it a lot worse. Try being a gay hispanic catholic woman and see how much worse others have it. You're fortunate enough to work at a job you like, so make the most of a bad situation or simply find a new job.
This article has been out for a while. move on, nothing to see here. You're probably gonna have to complain to get your 802.11 wireless lan cards updated.
NO where in my post did I mention J2EE. Every language and system has it's flaws. Anyone stupid enough to try building an office suit with Java and discovers it crawls deserves the punishment. There are good reasons for using C++, where the architecture requires the benefits of polymorphism, introspection, template pattern, factory pattern, or any design pattern.
J2EE is not a catch all. Only those blinded by the religion of a platform think one language is a cure all.
I don't think I equated.NET to Passport. I was pointing out the statements made in their whitepaper. The white paper did not explicitly state Post as an option. Most browser redirects occur through GET since that is the most expediant method. Sure a person could write to the outputstream manually and send it post. The question is will lazy programmers use Get or Post. If the specification doesn't define clearly the preferred method, any old VB programmer will take the shortest route, simply because ASP projects operate on a "I wanted it last month" basis.
I watched a special on the history of Christmas as it evolved over the years. The earliest image of santa clause was a skinny monk/saint. It was a cartoonist that invented the current big belly santa. Early last century, corporate america took over christmas and made it a shopaholics nightmare.
As some people mentioned, America is a gift giving culture. The insideousness of the whole gift giving culture is it de-values intangible things like friendship, love, loyalty and appreciation into 1 or several objects. Though I doubt our culture will change over-night, I hope more people resort to making their gifts instead of buying it. I would rather cook my family a gourmet meal for christmas, than buy some stupid gizmo.
On the recieving side, I prefer something that is memorable and not an object that will break and be thrown away.
I've already posted earlier 2758892, but another thought popped into my head.
It may be a bit off topic, but the question I keep asking is "will getting paid more make you happy or happier?" Recently, I relocated to the east coast and found the a lack of a Bach CS degree was hindering my job hunt. Luckily, I'm employed again. Even though I read up on AI, algorithms, electrical engineering, distributed processing and other advanced theories on my own, I know my knowledge is still missing huge gaps. I considered getting a MS in CS, but finally decided it wouldn't make me any happier. The clincher was the realization I don't have what it takes to "play the politics game." I love programming and plan on coding the rest of my life (though not as a career). The thought of "kissing butt" for 2-3 years makes me cringe, so the choice was obvious. Plus, would you want to work for a company that cares more about a piece of paper than what you have to offer?
The argument that a degree is a better assurance of qualifications for a company is flawed on two fronts.
1. if the person interviewing you can't tell your skills without a degree, they probably don't understand the technical problems in the first place. Do you want to work for/with people who don't know?
2. As others have mentioned, people with advanced degrees trained in research have a different mind set than a programmer. Individuals great at both research and application development are rare. Each job requires a different way of thinking and working. You may want a researchers opinion about the architecture, but at the low levels an experienced programmer is what you need.
A lot of responses bring up good points and some people even mentioned "being well balanced." Here is my take on it.
I have family members who have degrees in CS or are Computer scientists with Phd. If you love programming and can pick up theory on your own, then spending 1-3 years on a degree may not be the right choice. If on the other hand you feel a desire to learn advance computer science topics as others have mentioned, then a degree is likely to be beneficial.
My own criteria for "to degree or not to degree" is purely internal and has nothing to do with "will I reach a ceiling without a degree." If you're not getting the degree to fullfill a deep desire, then forget it. Having gone to grad school, advanced degrees require a lot of "butt kissing" and bs. Ask anyone with an advanced degree and they will tell you.
Whether or not to get a degree also depends on where you live. If you live on the west coast, degrees are secondary. If you live on the east coast and want to work for a large financial institution, then getting a degree is pretty important. In the end, you have to ask yourself, "will all this matter when I am 80?"
Trying to find a short cut to getting a degree tells me you should seriously question your motivations first and find out exactly why you should even consider getting a degree.
Reguardless of what ever language, platform or server you pick, use encryption for sensitive information like credit card number, expiration date, and name for the credit card (in case it's different). Typically in an enterprise environment you want to use one way Hash for the password and dis-allow retrieval of the password. If the user forgets their password, they get a new password and are forced to change it when they login the first time. Yeah, it's more of a pain for the user, but it's the responsible thing to do.
Use DESEDE or something equal. The main goal is to make it so if someone break into your database, they can't get clear text passwords, credit card numbers or expiration date. If you want to be really hardcore, you can have a different secret key for each user, which is decrypted at runtime to generate the appropriate key used to decrypt the credit card information. Make so that once the system is up, no one can get credit card information without asking the customer. This way the information is only in plain text when the charges are made to the card.
I've been following the development of.NET a little and the only thing I don't like about.NET is the architecture is flawed. According to the official.NET passport white paper http://www.microsoft.com/myservices/passport/Secur ity.doc, the E-commerce server redirects the user's browser to Microsoft's.NET server. Now that may seem fine on the surface, there are several flaws to this way of thinking.
1. using a browser redirect is inherently limits the level of security
2. any transfer of sensitive information between companies should rely on encryption stronger than 128 SSL
3. using browser redirects means using GET, instead of POST
4. storing user information in plain text as others have mentioned is simply wrong
5. the trust relationship should be two way, not one as stated in microsoft's whitepaper.
Anyone can make RPC fast by limiting security and encryption, which is exactly what.NET does in the current form. Any business foolish enough to implement.NET as microsoft prescribes can say good bye to my business..NET could really be useful and ground breaking, but it is far from enterprise level in terms of reliability, scalability and security. Microsoft's white paper is devoid of specific details about how.NET servers should be clustered for fail-over, state replication/management, load-balancing, using server-to-server authentication and profile retrieval, and security monitoring.
All these little details are needed for real enterprise applications. Without it, it is just begging for trouble. It's great that dotGNU has made so much progress, but perhaps they should have gone a step further than they have http://www.dotgnu.org/web-services.html. dotGNU makes some great points about weaknesses/flaws in.NET, but they still don't go further to really provide a complete solution. The solutions proposed by the dotGNU web services page still fails to address alot of important issues.
Sure it is great to have everyone use the same productivity applications (MS Office and windows), but the down side is the smallest weakness can kill the entire population (windows machines). Any virologist will tell you it is evolutionarily bad to have monoculture, since a virus will happen. It is just a matter of time.
If one were to look at history and see which animals survived drastic changes, the most adaptive wins. Microsoft does provide some great products like excel and maybe word. But at some point, it's size becomes an barrier to rapid adaptation. As George C Scott said in the movie patton "all glory is fleeting."
I've rebuilt dynamic sites from scratch twice. First and foremost, if you're rewriting because of serious scalability or design weakneses, then it is unavoidable. If it's just to get rid of annoying things, then I would say don't even try it. I consulted at a fairly big E-Commerce site that was crawling and couldn't handle the traffic. The original site was built by a programmer who scaled examples provided by MS. After it was done the whole site was a dog and would crash constantly. They finally brought in a programmer who was able to rewrite parts of it and make it work. After 7 months of intensive work, they 2 people stabilized the site. They decided to completely rewrite the site and I was contracted to help.
In this particular case, it was necessary because the site was right at the max. If the traffic increased, it would kill the site. Since it was an E-Commerce site, rewriting it was fairly straight forward. The old code kept running, until we were able to finish the new system and make sure it was stable and ready.
As a consultant, one of the most important aspects is detailed documentation that explains both the high and low level details. Often I will include very specific details about why a design was chosen and what limitations it has. When applicable, I will also describe how to extend, or modify the code to support additional features. This means you spend a lot of time doing documentation, but it forces you to think about a design more thoroughly and will expose weaknesses. Always keep an open mind and never fall in love with your design. There is no right way to build something, only right for the situation you are given.
For us hardcore geeks who live, breathe, eat, sleep and pee technology, the reward is not money. For those who have enough brains and feel they can make a living or get rich at programming are sadly mistaken.
The only thing the survey tells me is a large percentage of the people in CS and IT are in it for money pure and simple. It's not because they lay awake at night thinking in code, abtraction layers or regular expressions. Every industry has the same problem.
There will always be a significantly larger percentage of people in an industry for the money than those in it for love. Will microsoft kill linux? Hardly, the source it already out there. Will linux kill windows? Hardly, something else will kill windows. I don't get people's pre-occupation with platform wars. First and foremost surveys like these tell more about the person giving the survey than those taking it. The message is only useful if you know who is telling it and why.
Although it's great more kids are getting help, part of me feels something isn't right. The article debates the issues and proposes a combination of nature and nurture as the cause for increased cases the last 2 years. A lot of different opinions are given in the posts, but I can't help but wonder did the chicken or the egg come first.
A lot of comments posted and the view of the article focuses on good and bad. Ideas like these are human constructs. There is a saying in philosophy "there is no natural law." Definitions of good/bad are false constructs of what people expect. People seem to have a hard time realizing humans have no more control over their own destiney than a worm. Sure we can build computers, rockets, cars and other insane devices, but we have no more control over the fate of the world than a rock. Diseases or illnesses are problems when society defines it unacceptable. As the article states, Asperger's idea of the continium seems to be a better way of approaching the problem "how to help kids who are different." The execution of diagnosis and treatment is where I find fault.
Who does it really benefit? People need to focus less on money, greed, and status. If my child had some problem, the obvious thing to do is change my life so that i can spend as much time as i can with my child. Running from doctor to doctor to gets tons of tests and diagnosis so that I can keep a high paying job and state funding for my child's treatment just doesn't seem right. People need to step back and look at how "stupid" some of our choices and actions are.
In reality, it's neither good or bad to be different. Everyone is different and everyone has some odd behavior. That is what makes the world fun and exciting. Trying to weed out some gene is eugenics, plain and simple. Scientists need to consider the depth of their actions before they cross the line of "helping humanity" into "destroying humanity."
Having worked with wireless location determination
on
Mid-Air Messaging?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The things mentioned in the article aren't new. Back in 99 when WAP was the hot thing, a lot of companies were already throwing out those ideas. Most of the them didn't understand it, nor did the carriers for political reasons.
A corporation that owns most of the malls in America has already considered deploying Mobile switching centers (MSC) in malls to get highly accurate location determination. They already have a shopping service during the holidays where a person can make a list of the items and give it to a mall staff. The staff person then goes to all the stores, stands in line, buys the item, wraps it and then bags it.
An extension to that service would be to use your cell phone. When you enter the mall, it sends you a WAP or SMS message asking you if you want to turn on shopping service. You go to the stores, and use your phone to scan the barcode. When you're done, you download the list to service and a starving college student stands in line for you. Of course there are a lot more ideas for commerce applications, but that is just one of them.
Wireless data by itself is worthless and a nitch service. Once you have accurate GPS with transparent data exchange, the service becomes a necessity.
On the fun side of things, there are tremendous opportunity to use GPS and wireless data for gaming purposes. Let your imagination run wild and you will see that things like RPG, Real-Time Strategy and Turn-Based Strategy games can move into a whole new world. Nokia already has a division for wireless games and there are several companies in Europe developing wireless games. Some people have even suggested using wireless data and GPS for dating services.
Slashdot Mirror
The only real benefit I can see from a industry perspective is it will drive down the price of high end systems for corporations. Intel desperately wants to get into the mainframe, research and scientific market, since the margin are much higher. As others have noted, IA64 isn't going to really revolutionize partical physics, astrophysics, realtime weather simulation or any other research requiring massive bandwidth and address space. It might make it easier for smaller universities to build faster, better, and slightly cheaper clusters in 2 years, but for now who cares if AMD's extensions have a limit.
Really, if we want faser 3D graphics, we need faster Bus, memory and GPU's.
probably get modded redundant, but who cares.
I'd agree with you 100% if I didn't see humungous ASP and Perl scripts that are like thousands of lines and over 4 megs. Sure most html editors will eventually open it, but it runs damn slow. No one in their right mind should write long grotesque HTML or scripts that are more 200 lines, but that's in an ideal world. One person maintaining a huge script might find it easier to have just one file, but having to fix/change/update that kind of files drove me nuts in the past using other file/text editors. So like everyone else, I go download VIM and move right along.
I didn't think geeks get out enough to go to bed and breakfast. I guess I deserved that one for not saying bulletin boards. But then again those who actually know that stuff wouldn't bother asking. :P
Statement like "These artists chose to enter into an agreement that stated they gave up the right to market their work. That's the way business works - sometimes you make a good deal, sometimes you don't." is == to "It's ok to exploit those with talent but no education to understand a contract."
It is wrong to steel, pure and simple. If I listen to an MP3 and like enough of the songs, I buy the CD. If not, I delete the one hit wonder and move on. I've seen friends get screwed, the picture is far from accurate. Talk to your local bands and ask about how tough it is to get signed and then have the record label market them aggressively.
What most people don't realize is most bands pay for the marketing, recording and 90% of the cost of producing a record. Only a small percentage of bands/singers get great deals. Musicians who are also great businessmen are rare. The analogy of a 25K explorer is far from accurate comparison. In most cases, the musician composes, records, mixes and performs. Next they actively go out to push their CD by hiring a manager to book dates and locations. Rarely do record companies go way out to help a band they just signed. Most bands do their own marketing, so the argument that labels do all the marketing is swiss cheese.
From the last time I looked at the game specs, it should be interesting.
Just to give you an idea, some crackers during the BB era in southern california were stealing credit cards to buy commercial software, then sold cracked versions to the largest BB in southern CA. They were eventually caught and the FBI took away all the computers. All of them were under-aged, so they didn't do any time. All of them were interested in science, so they would definitely be interested in what your satellite is sending. More interesting is getting control of your satellite.
Also, remember that crackers tend to have parents who have technical careers, but no time to watch their kids. Hackers and crackers have a lot of time, brains and energy to burn. With all the articles recently about amatuer and college programs building their own satellites, it will become a bigger concern. As kids get more technically advanced at a younger age, more systems will get compromised. It's a fact of life.
The blocks with text lines are stored in the swap file without a specific ordering. If the blocks were ordered, inserting a block halfway into the file would require all remaining blocks to be shifted, which is very slow. To be able to find a line by its number, index blocks are used. An index block contains a list that tells which line is in which block. If a file is big, this list doesn't fit in a single block. It is then split over several blocks, and another index block is made to refer to these index blocks. This forms a balanced tree of index blocks, with the text blocks as the leaves. This construction has proven to be very reliable and efficient.
There are several text/html editors and IDE's that would benefit from this type of swap file. I'm sure everyone could list atleast 2-4 programs that have a difficult time handling large files. It's no wonder VIM is able to handle really large files and still respond quickly.
Hats off to bram!
I would hold judgement about E-business for another ten years before pronouncing it mature. Technology can only move as fast as people's ability to learn and take it for granted. Remember a lot of people still do not have computers or internet access. Those of us fortunate enough to work in the IT industry often forget most of the world doesn't percieve the internet the same way.
We'll know when the internet has matured when everyone takes it for granted. Just like cars, trains, telephone, bicycle and planes.
XP isn't a total piece of crap, but it sure isn't an improvement over win2K. Most of the so called improvements are useless.
FoodTV has a Unwrap marathon. Candies, drinks, ice cream and other sweet stuff. Not quite as cool as gozilla marathon, but it's an option when you get bored with gozilla.
GOD just might spite you for that remark. That or the host of the show.
I find it helpful to have other hobbies that take my mind off programming and work. Quitting a job before you've found a new one isn't easy to do, but it all depends on your tolerance for political back stabbing and bs. My tolerance is low, so I politely say my goodbyes and find a new job.
Being the victim of descrimination is never an easy thing to take, but rather than just bitch about how bad you have it, remember there are those who have it a lot worse. Try being a gay hispanic catholic woman and see how much worse others have it. You're fortunate enough to work at a job you like, so make the most of a bad situation or simply find a new job.
This article has been out for a while. move on, nothing to see here. You're probably gonna have to complain to get your 802.11 wireless lan cards updated.
J2EE is not a catch all. Only those blinded by the religion of a platform think one language is a cure all.
I don't think I equated .NET to Passport. I was pointing out the statements made in their whitepaper. The white paper did not explicitly state Post as an option. Most browser redirects occur through GET since that is the most expediant method. Sure a person could write to the outputstream manually and send it post. The question is will lazy programmers use Get or Post. If the specification doesn't define clearly the preferred method, any old VB programmer will take the shortest route, simply because ASP projects operate on a "I wanted it last month" basis.
As some people mentioned, America is a gift giving culture. The insideousness of the whole gift giving culture is it de-values intangible things like friendship, love, loyalty and appreciation into 1 or several objects. Though I doubt our culture will change over-night, I hope more people resort to making their gifts instead of buying it. I would rather cook my family a gourmet meal for christmas, than buy some stupid gizmo.
On the recieving side, I prefer something that is memorable and not an object that will break and be thrown away.
It may be a bit off topic, but the question I keep asking is "will getting paid more make you happy or happier?" Recently, I relocated to the east coast and found the a lack of a Bach CS degree was hindering my job hunt. Luckily, I'm employed again. Even though I read up on AI, algorithms, electrical engineering, distributed processing and other advanced theories on my own, I know my knowledge is still missing huge gaps. I considered getting a MS in CS, but finally decided it wouldn't make me any happier. The clincher was the realization I don't have what it takes to "play the politics game." I love programming and plan on coding the rest of my life (though not as a career). The thought of "kissing butt" for 2-3 years makes me cringe, so the choice was obvious. Plus, would you want to work for a company that cares more about a piece of paper than what you have to offer?
The argument that a degree is a better assurance of qualifications for a company is flawed on two fronts.
1. if the person interviewing you can't tell your skills without a degree, they probably don't understand the technical problems in the first place. Do you want to work for/with people who don't know?
2. As others have mentioned, people with advanced degrees trained in research have a different mind set than a programmer. Individuals great at both research and application development are rare. Each job requires a different way of thinking and working. You may want a researchers opinion about the architecture, but at the low levels an experienced programmer is what you need.
I have family members who have degrees in CS or are Computer scientists with Phd. If you love programming and can pick up theory on your own, then spending 1-3 years on a degree may not be the right choice. If on the other hand you feel a desire to learn advance computer science topics as others have mentioned, then a degree is likely to be beneficial.
My own criteria for "to degree or not to degree" is purely internal and has nothing to do with "will I reach a ceiling without a degree." If you're not getting the degree to fullfill a deep desire, then forget it. Having gone to grad school, advanced degrees require a lot of "butt kissing" and bs. Ask anyone with an advanced degree and they will tell you.
Whether or not to get a degree also depends on where you live. If you live on the west coast, degrees are secondary. If you live on the east coast and want to work for a large financial institution, then getting a degree is pretty important. In the end, you have to ask yourself, "will all this matter when I am 80?"
Trying to find a short cut to getting a degree tells me you should seriously question your motivations first and find out exactly why you should even consider getting a degree.
Use DESEDE or something equal. The main goal is to make it so if someone break into your database, they can't get clear text passwords, credit card numbers or expiration date. If you want to be really hardcore, you can have a different secret key for each user, which is decrypted at runtime to generate the appropriate key used to decrypt the credit card information. Make so that once the system is up, no one can get credit card information without asking the customer. This way the information is only in plain text when the charges are made to the card.
1. using a browser redirect is inherently limits the level of security
.NET does in the current form. Any business foolish enough to implement .NET as microsoft prescribes can say good bye to my business. .NET could really be useful and ground breaking, but it is far from enterprise level in terms of reliability, scalability and security. Microsoft's white paper is devoid of specific details about how .NET servers should be clustered for fail-over, state replication/management, load-balancing, using server-to-server authentication and profile retrieval, and security monitoring.
2. any transfer of sensitive information between companies should rely on encryption stronger than 128 SSL
3. using browser redirects means using GET, instead of POST
4. storing user information in plain text as others have mentioned is simply wrong
5. the trust relationship should be two way, not one as stated in microsoft's whitepaper.
Anyone can make RPC fast by limiting security and encryption, which is exactly what
All these little details are needed for real enterprise applications. Without it, it is just begging for trouble. It's great that dotGNU has made so much progress, but perhaps they should have gone a step further than they have http://www.dotgnu.org/web-services.html. dotGNU makes some great points about weaknesses/flaws in .NET, but they still don't go further to really provide a complete solution. The solutions proposed by the dotGNU web services page still fails to address alot of important issues.
IMNHO
If one were to look at history and see which animals survived drastic changes, the most adaptive wins. Microsoft does provide some great products like excel and maybe word. But at some point, it's size becomes an barrier to rapid adaptation. As George C Scott said in the movie patton "all glory is fleeting."
In this particular case, it was necessary because the site was right at the max. If the traffic increased, it would kill the site. Since it was an E-Commerce site, rewriting it was fairly straight forward. The old code kept running, until we were able to finish the new system and make sure it was stable and ready.
As a consultant, one of the most important aspects is detailed documentation that explains both the high and low level details. Often I will include very specific details about why a design was chosen and what limitations it has. When applicable, I will also describe how to extend, or modify the code to support additional features. This means you spend a lot of time doing documentation, but it forces you to think about a design more thoroughly and will expose weaknesses. Always keep an open mind and never fall in love with your design. There is no right way to build something, only right for the situation you are given.
The only thing the survey tells me is a large percentage of the people in CS and IT are in it for money pure and simple. It's not because they lay awake at night thinking in code, abtraction layers or regular expressions. Every industry has the same problem.
There will always be a significantly larger percentage of people in an industry for the money than those in it for love. Will microsoft kill linux? Hardly, the source it already out there. Will linux kill windows? Hardly, something else will kill windows. I don't get people's pre-occupation with platform wars. First and foremost surveys like these tell more about the person giving the survey than those taking it. The message is only useful if you know who is telling it and why.
A lot of comments posted and the view of the article focuses on good and bad. Ideas like these are human constructs. There is a saying in philosophy "there is no natural law." Definitions of good/bad are false constructs of what people expect. People seem to have a hard time realizing humans have no more control over their own destiney than a worm. Sure we can build computers, rockets, cars and other insane devices, but we have no more control over the fate of the world than a rock. Diseases or illnesses are problems when society defines it unacceptable. As the article states, Asperger's idea of the continium seems to be a better way of approaching the problem "how to help kids who are different." The execution of diagnosis and treatment is where I find fault.
Who does it really benefit? People need to focus less on money, greed, and status. If my child had some problem, the obvious thing to do is change my life so that i can spend as much time as i can with my child. Running from doctor to doctor to gets tons of tests and diagnosis so that I can keep a high paying job and state funding for my child's treatment just doesn't seem right. People need to step back and look at how "stupid" some of our choices and actions are.
In reality, it's neither good or bad to be different. Everyone is different and everyone has some odd behavior. That is what makes the world fun and exciting. Trying to weed out some gene is eugenics, plain and simple. Scientists need to consider the depth of their actions before they cross the line of "helping humanity" into "destroying humanity."
A corporation that owns most of the malls in America has already considered deploying Mobile switching centers (MSC) in malls to get highly accurate location determination. They already have a shopping service during the holidays where a person can make a list of the items and give it to a mall staff. The staff person then goes to all the stores, stands in line, buys the item, wraps it and then bags it.
An extension to that service would be to use your cell phone. When you enter the mall, it sends you a WAP or SMS message asking you if you want to turn on shopping service. You go to the stores, and use your phone to scan the barcode. When you're done, you download the list to service and a starving college student stands in line for you. Of course there are a lot more ideas for commerce applications, but that is just one of them.
Wireless data by itself is worthless and a nitch service. Once you have accurate GPS with transparent data exchange, the service becomes a necessity.
On the fun side of things, there are tremendous opportunity to use GPS and wireless data for gaming purposes. Let your imagination run wild and you will see that things like RPG, Real-Time Strategy and Turn-Based Strategy games can move into a whole new world. Nokia already has a division for wireless games and there are several companies in Europe developing wireless games. Some people have even suggested using wireless data and GPS for dating services.