I got my first programming job only knowing basic algebra and trigonometry. I went on to study calculus, statistics and discrete math ending up with a Computer Science degree. There was precious little in any of these math courses that were useful to me as a programmer. I worked in data compression, image and signal processing, and pattern recognition. These fields required higher math but that is what mathematicians were for. They understood the how and why. My job was to determine the requirements and code it in a way that was robust, efficient and maintainable. There were a lot of programs I wrote where I had a general feel for how they worked but the math was way over my head. I say don't try to understand 'em, just rope 'em, tie 'em, and brand 'em.
Computer Science can be entirely theoretical. When I was working at my university as a system administrator we were replacing the 10base2 cabling with 10baseT. A CS professor took me out to lunch. He published many papers on networks in peer reviewed journals. I was explaining the advantages of 10baseT over 10base2 and was shocked when he asked me how ethernet coordinated different hosts transmissions. I explained how ethernet used collision detection and waited an increasing and partially random length of time before retransmission to avoid subsequent collisions (remember, this was when half-duplex routed rather than switched networks were the norm). Learning this he started explaining a mathematical model of how throughput would be impacted as congestion increased. I found it interesting that he knew all about networks at a theoretical level but didn't know how the network he used every day worked. Another CS professor claimed to have multiple chemical sensitivities and maintained that anything electronic gives off fumes that make him ill. I think he was a full-blown hypochondriac but he still taught computer science even though he hadn't been near a terminal or computer in years. Personally I like a mix of theoretical and practical.
A few years back I ran my own test. I had an unused 16 MB Canon SD card that came with one of my digital cameras (I bought a much larger one with the camera). Since it was unused I decided to see how long it would last. I wrote a script that repeatedly overwrote the entire card with one of several files of random data then checked it against the original. Each time overwriting, reading, and verifying the card took about 17 seconds. I had my first error after 120K writes. After that I got errors every 20K to 60K writes. Someone suggested I reformat the card and afterword it came out 114K smaller so I guess it marked some cells as bad. After this it went the longest stretch without an error, from write 1.9M to 2.5M without a single error. From this test one might conclude that there are a small number of frail cells that fail early on and the rest more robust that just keep going.
The purpose of US public education is to produce reliable employees, loyal soldiers, and eager consumers. The only sort of critical thinking that will ever be taught would include a rigid set of premises that can not be questioned. As long as you don't color outside of these lines you can be as creative and critical as you want to be. I think the skill businesses worry about is problem solving not critical thinking. Given the constraints of a problem find a solution. It does involve some analysis but within the microcosm of solving the problem at hand.
My wife used to drive a Ford Explorer. After she got a Mazda Miata she got 3 speeding tickets in the first week. She maintains that she didn't drive her Miata any faster than her Explorer and I have no doubt that she didn't. She learned the hard way that when driving a sporty car you get a lot more attention from law enforcement. I have been driving Miatas for years and long noticed this. When I drive my Miata through a nearby small town more than half of the time I notice a police car following me; usually all the way to the city limit sign before turning around. I know they are just itching for me to do something wrong so they can ticket me. When I drive through the same town in our Toyota Sienna I'm never followed; guess the Sienna is invisible to police. If you want to drive fast the worst car to own is a sports car. Sleeper cars are fast but look like bone stock ordinary boring car models and are what you need if you intend to drive fast.
When I was in grade school math class always started with a sheet of arithmetic problems to quickly solve in class before we even started our daily lesson. The idea was that we needed daily practice because being able to quickly add, subtract, multiply, and divide was an essential skill. Now calculators and computers have made this ability obsolete because nobody is tasked with doing a lot of arithmetic by hand. In high school I learned how to calculate square roots by hand and how to use a slide rule which are more tasks that are obsolete. I'd argue that if a certain task can be accomplished with a key on a calculator than being able to do it by hand is also an obsolete skill. As an exercise to understand the concept you might work through a few by hand but once understood abstract and automate it. If we need to limit students to crippled calculators than perhaps we are teaching the wrong things. The one time I'll admit to cheating in college was in statistics. After an entire semester of allowing any calculator in class or for tests my professor informed us on the morning of the final exam that if we had an advanced calculator we were only allowed to use it as a 4 function calculator. If he warned us before the exam I would have been able to memorize the necessary formulae but his sudden requirement was so unfair that I cheated and used the statistical functions of my calculator with a clear conscience. Had I crammed for the exam and memorized the formulae for the exam would I still remember them today? Of course not and nor should I clutter my mind up with what is now trivia. I do see some advantage to standardize for classrooms but were it up to me I'd have kids use Wolfram Alpha on their phone, tablet, or laptop. Cheap, easy to use, and powerful.
Computer Science is one thing. Electrical Engineering is another thing, Software Engineering is yet another. You can study all of these things in college. Programming and coding are skills. Most people studying CS, EE, or SE pick up some programming along the way. In my experience most CS majors don't even like programming; they view it as a necessary evil. They don't want a job as a programmer unless perhaps if it is a stepping stone to a "real job." If you really like programming and want to do it than a lot of CS will seem like a waste of time. Personally I always enjoyed both theory and programming. I enjoyed learning theory and how computers and system software works and got a CS degree. I learned more about programming from a few Plum hall books than all my CS courses combined though.
Health care is probably the most future proof career. People are going to keep getting injured and sick and our aging population will have more health problems over time. Doctor, nurse, pharmacist, radiologist, physical therapist, etc. You really can't automate health care.
At many businesses it is standard operating procedure to purge all emails older than 90 days that they are not required by law to retain and this includes backups of email. The issue is more financial than anything else. Let's say Joe Blow gets caught downloading kiddie porn. Law enforcement subpoenas all his work email which since Mr Blow worked for Big Corporation for 15 years is a boatload. All the operators end up working for weeks restoring 400,000 emails from hundreds of backups then 3rd party consultants charge a few bucks to examine each email. All of a sudden Mr. Blow's behavior off the clock ends up costing his employer $millions. Is it possible that some of the purged emails ended up saved in other people's mailboxes or in backups of other MTAs? Certainly, but digging those up is someone else's problem.
Getting back to the original issue. Is it really that surprising that the IRS would flag groups with "Tea Party" in their name as more political than not? Does anyone think that Tea Party groups are purely philanthropic? Indeed they should give extra scrutiny to groups with liberal terms like "progressive" and "justice" which as I understand it the IRS was already doing. While the Tea Party started as a grass roots group of wild eyed libertarians it quickly evolved as a way for money from big oil to stoke feelings of racial resentment among angry white men to convince them to vote against their own interests and for policies that benefit their wealthy puppet masters.
Russia is strapped for cash. They would probably sell Canada a fleet of Su-27 fighters cheep. The F-35 is plagued with quality control issues, expensive, fragile and maintenance intensive. Mechanics and pilots candidly admit that there are entire systems on the plane that simply do not work yet. Su-27's carry more armaments, have greater range and can outrun, outclimb, and outmaneuver F-35's.
I have a CS degree. I know people who don't have degrees who are great and make more than I do. I know people with degrees who can't do shit. There is a misunderstanding about what a degree means. An undergrad CS degree means that you know a little about several broad areas of computers. A little about programming, a little about data structures, a little about algorithms, a little about digital logic, a little about system software, a little about operating systems, and a little about how computers work. Someone who goes through the program doing the minimum necessary to get by will not know enough about any one area to be immediately useful to employers even if they did learn what they were supposed to. It is what they do above and beyond their degree requirements that define what direction they will go professionally. The degree says that even if candidate is a specialist in one area that (s)he knows the basics about the rest of the areas. This broader base of knowledge hopefully allows the degreed candidate to rise to new challenges better than someone who only knows the narrow requirements of their position. I taught one computer course at my university. One of the most frustrating things for me was when I was lecturing on a difficult topic and a student would raise their hand and ask if this was going to be on the test. What kind of stupid question is this? I guess they don't want to waste their time learning something that won't even be on the test! Even if it isn't on the test it could be something that they need to know to do their job in the future. Their first concern should be learning and the second should be getting a satisfactory grade; for the most part if they do the former the later won't be a problem. I think it is students like this that give people with degrees a bad name.
Police can show discretion. So using a dedicated GPS for directions is legal but using a phone for the same purpose is illegal? While that may be the letter of the law, does enforcing it make roads safer? Is someone texting at a red light putting the public in significant danger or are they guilty of a technicality? Cops who enforce stupid laws just because they can give law enforcement a bad name and breed contempt for laws.
Here is a real shocker. Did you know that you can be arrested for DWI even if your car is parked and you are sleeping it off? Having keys in your pocket means you are in control and the law makes no distinction whether your car is moving or stationary with the engine off. All I have to say is I don't know how police can sleep at night knowing they screwed up someone's entire future for no good reason and I can't believe that any jury would convict a motorist under these circumstances.
The revenue model of the Free Software Foundation was basically give away software and charge for media and support (ok, with the Internet nobody really needs media).
There is no requirement in GPL to donate any specific number of lines of code, the only requirement is if you distribute its software you have to give away the source. If Red Hat wants to be able to close the door to cloners than they should switch to the BSD kernel and be done with it. Everything Red Hat does to make it difficult for other entities to use their code goes against the spirit if not the letter of the GPL.
Instead of licensing their distribution Red Hat shoulld give away the software then charge for support. That is how it worked before RHEL and is the way it should work today. Red Hat should be happy that other people are using their contributed code rather than feeling violated.
One doesn't need to be Muslim to be a terrorist.
Timothy McVeigh was a Christian. The terrorists who assassinate doctors who perform abortions are Christians.
Wikipedia says Bruce E. Ivins was a Roman Catholic.
Terrorists can be any religion.
As someone with a CS degree and having worked in a university CS department for 7 years as a researcher and system administrator I know a lot of CS majors aren't very good coders. Most of the students I knew didn't like coding that much and only looked at it like dues to be paid until they got a real job. Being stuck as a coder was considered a dead-end.
The question I have is if the person asking this question is actually good at anything in CS. Ok, so they aren't much of a coder, what else do you got? What do you enjoy doing in CS if you don't like coding (I got interested in CS because I liked to code, what drew you to it?). If you don't actually like CS than you should tangent to something you do like. If you are going to work in a field for a decade or two you should do something you love (or at least like).
I was good in math in high school. I took 10 years off then signed up for college calculus. I forgot almost everything in those 10 years. The thing that helped me pass my calculus class was a book,
Mathematics for the Million
by Lancelot Hogben. This book is fun, mathematics unfolds in its historical context. It is not an easy read but I found a very good supliment for my school work, anything that makes math more interesting gets you doing more of it.
I think that what is being observed here is the fact that most thoughtful individuals go through a Libertarian stage at some point in their lives. I went through a Libertarian stage in my mid-20's; it made perfect sense to me at the time. A lot of the younger people I work with in their 20's sound just like I did at their age; Libertarian or libertarian-leaning Republicans. I think it is good to "try on" varous viewpoints. While I'm now much more liberal than I was as a young man I'm eclectic and retain many libertarian viewpoints. As a pragmatist I'm more concerned if something works than how well it adheres to any ideology.
The solution I see is to use tickets resolved as the metric than require a ticket for every thing you do no mater how trivial. Before every ticket is worked require it to be approved by the Sr. VP of their department. Open a ticket for every single patch you apply to every system and require a Sr. VP to approve it. Ideally you will end up spending 3 times as much time approving, acknowledging, updating, and closing tickets as you spend working on the systems and the backlog will grow to the point where users are waiting weeks to have their forgotten passwords reset. When anyone complains explain that your administrator's productivity as measured by tickets closed is higher than ever. Soon everyone will long for the old days.
I've worked jobs that fall into Computer Science, Information Technology, and Electrical Engineering. For me there is a lot of overlap in these fields. I have a bachelor's degree in CS. I'll admit to being overwelmed working in EE (especially by the math involved) and that there was a long learning curve for me in IT. I still think CS is a good background. In IT I find that often the hardest IT problems boil down to CS problems and at these times my background is a strong plus. e.g. sometimes having actually written a virtual memory manager in college gives me an edge when tuning a server.
If I did get my Master's degree I'd likely get an IT degree. CS in grad school gets rather theoretical and less useful in the real world.
I caught the bit about 400 speed color film in the mid-80's. I distinctly remember shooting Kodacolor 400 in '79. I looked it up and Kodacolor 400 came out in '77.
My advice is to find a sub-area within CS that you particularily are interested in and study it more on your own.
Your program will be designed to make you a well rounded graduate with knowledge in a number of areas. This is all good but to be marketable you have to have strengths.
For me my early specalty was systems. After taking several CS classes I didn't really know how computers and operating systems worked until I took a class called "Computer Organization." I had many epiphanies in that class and knew that systems would be my area. In spite of my interest my first job wasn't doing systems work, I was researching and developing software for pattern recognition, data compression, and digital signal processing. I did some good work here but I was really over my head in math but my strengh in systems work allowed me to get into systems work for my next and all subsequent jobs.
I have a Garmin iQue 3600 GPS/PDA.
I feel like I'm a safer driver when I use my GPS. Instead of looking for addresses or street names I just listen to my speaker to tell me when to turn. I'm able to give my driving much more of my concentration than if I had to try to find my way on my own. When I'm following written directions if I miss a turn I'm usually screwed, I have to do a U-turn and go back and try to find where I made my mistake. With my GPS I can continue on and it will recalculate a route from whereever I am.
My unit isn't perfect but nothing is. I noticed that when I mapped a route with Mapquest, Yahoo Maps, and my GPS I was given 3 different routes! None were optmum but any of them would get me there. I ended up taking a hybrid route but my GPS simply recalculated the way from wherever I was. Sometimes it gives contradictory directions like "stay left than turn right" Sometimes this is to get you in the right place before the road forks but other times it is just wrong and it gets you in the wrong lane for your exit or turn.
One amusing this is that some of new tollways near me aren't in my PDA's detailed maps. Sometimes on these roads I'll look down and it will say I'm going 70 MPH through a field. Other times it assumes I'm on a road roughly parallel to the new road. Hopefully updated maps will cure this.
I think the range is larger than 2-5 years. I picked up a spindle of cheap ($.20/disc) blanks to copy CD's onto for the car knowing they will get scratched up and none of them lasted even a year (even the ones that didn't bake in the Texas sun failed within a year). I have some CD's I burned in '97 from some HP disc's marketed for long term storage and to date not a single one of these have failed.
Personally for my photography I shoot both film and digital. I have prints and negatives from 25 years ago that are still good though a little faded. You can't beat the convenience of shooting digital but I hate to have so many images at risk. I want to be sure at least some of the pictures I take of my daughter will be around decades from now.
My problem with the suggestion of using magnetic tape is that magnetic tape isn't a sure thing either; we have lots of backup tapes at work that go bad; especially ones that have been stored for years.
I hear people complaining about driver support but to tell the truth with server class machines I never really had a problem with not having drivers. If you are trying to run it on every machine that comes down the bend your results may be different.
As far as SVr4 IP in Solaris, remember that Sun has a very liberal UNIX license from when they were cozy with AT&T (remember the stock swap that sent ripples through the industry leading to everyone else forming OSF?). If anyone can get away with this Sun can.
True Solaris code can't be GPL'ed. Nothting is preventing anyone from using FSF tools under Solaris though.
2.6 buggy? In my experience every version of Solaris since 2.5.1 has been more robust than any version of Linux I've ever tried.
We currently have a lot of Solaris on SPARC and a lot of Linux on Intel. Our Lintel customers have no interest in trying Solaris of any flavor so in the case of our company we still don't see growth in Solaris from OpenSolaris
I started as a music major at one of the best music schools in the US. After 3 years of playing in every ensemble I could and practicing every free waking hour it was obvious that I just wasn't good enough to do what I wanted to do as a performer.
Trying to find something else music related I decided on musicology. (for those who don't know musicology is the scholarly study of music). There were no undergrad degrees in musicology but music history is considered perperation for a Master's degree in it. I took my first semester of music history from the head of the musicology department. The professor was encyclopedic in his knowledge and his lectures were brilliant and inspiring. One thing the prof blated on about is what he called "grade inflation." He told us that he didn't believe in awarding a passing grade because a student shows up for class and tries hard; they have to produce. He said, "if you get a 'D' in my class it means that you know the minimum amount necessary to continue work in the field, if you get a 'C' in my class it means that you have demonstrated that beyone just learning a lot of facts you are beginning to be able to combine facts to synthesize your own thesis and observations; if you get a "B" in my class it means that you have demonstrated scholarship in the field; if you get an "A" in my class it means you should be teaching it. I took this as a challenge; some semesters this professor doesn't award a single 'A' in any of the classes he teaches so I was going to earn one of his few but coveted A's. I cut back on my work hours and studied and listened to the material every free moment; often 4-5 hours/day for this one class. I took the mid-term confident that I would get 100 or close to it. The test was *HARD* but handing it in I was still confident; I got it back and I scored a 78, 2 points short of a 'B.'
At this point I decided I just wasn't tallented or smart enough to do anything in music so I took the easy way out and studied engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
I got my first programming job only knowing basic algebra and trigonometry. I went on to study calculus, statistics and discrete math ending up with a Computer Science degree. There was precious little in any of these math courses that were useful to me as a programmer. I worked in data compression, image and signal processing, and pattern recognition. These fields required higher math but that is what mathematicians were for. They understood the how and why. My job was to determine the requirements and code it in a way that was robust, efficient and maintainable. There were a lot of programs I wrote where I had a general feel for how they worked but the math was way over my head. I say don't try to understand 'em, just rope 'em, tie 'em, and brand 'em.
Computer Science can be entirely theoretical. When I was working at my university as a system administrator we were replacing the 10base2 cabling with 10baseT. A CS professor took me out to lunch. He published many papers on networks in peer reviewed journals. I was explaining the advantages of 10baseT over 10base2 and was shocked when he asked me how ethernet coordinated different hosts transmissions. I explained how ethernet used collision detection and waited an increasing and partially random length of time before retransmission to avoid subsequent collisions (remember, this was when half-duplex routed rather than switched networks were the norm). Learning this he started explaining a mathematical model of how throughput would be impacted as congestion increased. I found it interesting that he knew all about networks at a theoretical level but didn't know how the network he used every day worked. Another CS professor claimed to have multiple chemical sensitivities and maintained that anything electronic gives off fumes that make him ill. I think he was a full-blown hypochondriac but he still taught computer science even though he hadn't been near a terminal or computer in years. Personally I like a mix of theoretical and practical.
A few years back I ran my own test. I had an unused 16 MB Canon SD card that came with one of my digital cameras (I bought a much larger one with the camera). Since it was unused I decided to see how long it would last. I wrote a script that repeatedly overwrote the entire card with one of several files of random data then checked it against the original. Each time overwriting, reading, and verifying the card took about 17 seconds. I had my first error after 120K writes. After that I got errors every 20K to 60K writes. Someone suggested I reformat the card and afterword it came out 114K smaller so I guess it marked some cells as bad. After this it went the longest stretch without an error, from write 1.9M to 2.5M without a single error. From this test one might conclude that there are a small number of frail cells that fail early on and the rest more robust that just keep going.
The purpose of US public education is to produce reliable employees, loyal soldiers, and eager consumers. The only sort of critical thinking that will ever be taught would include a rigid set of premises that can not be questioned. As long as you don't color outside of these lines you can be as creative and critical as you want to be. I think the skill businesses worry about is problem solving not critical thinking. Given the constraints of a problem find a solution. It does involve some analysis but within the microcosm of solving the problem at hand.
My wife used to drive a Ford Explorer. After she got a Mazda Miata she got 3 speeding tickets in the first week. She maintains that she didn't drive her Miata any faster than her Explorer and I have no doubt that she didn't. She learned the hard way that when driving a sporty car you get a lot more attention from law enforcement. I have been driving Miatas for years and long noticed this. When I drive my Miata through a nearby small town more than half of the time I notice a police car following me; usually all the way to the city limit sign before turning around. I know they are just itching for me to do something wrong so they can ticket me. When I drive through the same town in our Toyota Sienna I'm never followed; guess the Sienna is invisible to police. If you want to drive fast the worst car to own is a sports car. Sleeper cars are fast but look like bone stock ordinary boring car models and are what you need if you intend to drive fast.
When I was in grade school math class always started with a sheet of arithmetic problems to quickly solve in class before we even started our daily lesson. The idea was that we needed daily practice because being able to quickly add, subtract, multiply, and divide was an essential skill. Now calculators and computers have made this ability obsolete because nobody is tasked with doing a lot of arithmetic by hand. In high school I learned how to calculate square roots by hand and how to use a slide rule which are more tasks that are obsolete. I'd argue that if a certain task can be accomplished with a key on a calculator than being able to do it by hand is also an obsolete skill. As an exercise to understand the concept you might work through a few by hand but once understood abstract and automate it. If we need to limit students to crippled calculators than perhaps we are teaching the wrong things. The one time I'll admit to cheating in college was in statistics. After an entire semester of allowing any calculator in class or for tests my professor informed us on the morning of the final exam that if we had an advanced calculator we were only allowed to use it as a 4 function calculator. If he warned us before the exam I would have been able to memorize the necessary formulae but his sudden requirement was so unfair that I cheated and used the statistical functions of my calculator with a clear conscience. Had I crammed for the exam and memorized the formulae for the exam would I still remember them today? Of course not and nor should I clutter my mind up with what is now trivia. I do see some advantage to standardize for classrooms but were it up to me I'd have kids use Wolfram Alpha on their phone, tablet, or laptop. Cheap, easy to use, and powerful.
Computer Science is one thing. Electrical Engineering is another thing, Software Engineering is yet another. You can study all of these things in college. Programming and coding are skills. Most people studying CS, EE, or SE pick up some programming along the way. In my experience most CS majors don't even like programming; they view it as a necessary evil. They don't want a job as a programmer unless perhaps if it is a stepping stone to a "real job." If you really like programming and want to do it than a lot of CS will seem like a waste of time. Personally I always enjoyed both theory and programming. I enjoyed learning theory and how computers and system software works and got a CS degree. I learned more about programming from a few Plum hall books than all my CS courses combined though.
Health care is probably the most future proof career. People are going to keep getting injured and sick and our aging population will have more health problems over time. Doctor, nurse, pharmacist, radiologist, physical therapist, etc. You really can't automate health care.
At many businesses it is standard operating procedure to purge all emails older than 90 days that they are not required by law to retain and this includes backups of email. The issue is more financial than anything else. Let's say Joe Blow gets caught downloading kiddie porn. Law enforcement subpoenas all his work email which since Mr Blow worked for Big Corporation for 15 years is a boatload. All the operators end up working for weeks restoring 400,000 emails from hundreds of backups then 3rd party consultants charge a few bucks to examine each email. All of a sudden Mr. Blow's behavior off the clock ends up costing his employer $millions. Is it possible that some of the purged emails ended up saved in other people's mailboxes or in backups of other MTAs? Certainly, but digging those up is someone else's problem. Getting back to the original issue. Is it really that surprising that the IRS would flag groups with "Tea Party" in their name as more political than not? Does anyone think that Tea Party groups are purely philanthropic? Indeed they should give extra scrutiny to groups with liberal terms like "progressive" and "justice" which as I understand it the IRS was already doing. While the Tea Party started as a grass roots group of wild eyed libertarians it quickly evolved as a way for money from big oil to stoke feelings of racial resentment among angry white men to convince them to vote against their own interests and for policies that benefit their wealthy puppet masters.
Russia is strapped for cash. They would probably sell Canada a fleet of Su-27 fighters cheep. The F-35 is plagued with quality control issues, expensive, fragile and maintenance intensive. Mechanics and pilots candidly admit that there are entire systems on the plane that simply do not work yet. Su-27's carry more armaments, have greater range and can outrun, outclimb, and outmaneuver F-35's.
I have a CS degree. I know people who don't have degrees who are great and make more than I do. I know people with degrees who can't do shit. There is a misunderstanding about what a degree means. An undergrad CS degree means that you know a little about several broad areas of computers. A little about programming, a little about data structures, a little about algorithms, a little about digital logic, a little about system software, a little about operating systems, and a little about how computers work. Someone who goes through the program doing the minimum necessary to get by will not know enough about any one area to be immediately useful to employers even if they did learn what they were supposed to. It is what they do above and beyond their degree requirements that define what direction they will go professionally. The degree says that even if candidate is a specialist in one area that (s)he knows the basics about the rest of the areas. This broader base of knowledge hopefully allows the degreed candidate to rise to new challenges better than someone who only knows the narrow requirements of their position. I taught one computer course at my university. One of the most frustrating things for me was when I was lecturing on a difficult topic and a student would raise their hand and ask if this was going to be on the test. What kind of stupid question is this? I guess they don't want to waste their time learning something that won't even be on the test! Even if it isn't on the test it could be something that they need to know to do their job in the future. Their first concern should be learning and the second should be getting a satisfactory grade; for the most part if they do the former the later won't be a problem. I think it is students like this that give people with degrees a bad name.
Police can show discretion. So using a dedicated GPS for directions is legal but using a phone for the same purpose is illegal? While that may be the letter of the law, does enforcing it make roads safer? Is someone texting at a red light putting the public in significant danger or are they guilty of a technicality? Cops who enforce stupid laws just because they can give law enforcement a bad name and breed contempt for laws. Here is a real shocker. Did you know that you can be arrested for DWI even if your car is parked and you are sleeping it off? Having keys in your pocket means you are in control and the law makes no distinction whether your car is moving or stationary with the engine off. All I have to say is I don't know how police can sleep at night knowing they screwed up someone's entire future for no good reason and I can't believe that any jury would convict a motorist under these circumstances.
The revenue model of the Free Software Foundation was basically give away software and charge for media and support (ok, with the Internet nobody really needs media). There is no requirement in GPL to donate any specific number of lines of code, the only requirement is if you distribute its software you have to give away the source. If Red Hat wants to be able to close the door to cloners than they should switch to the BSD kernel and be done with it. Everything Red Hat does to make it difficult for other entities to use their code goes against the spirit if not the letter of the GPL. Instead of licensing their distribution Red Hat shoulld give away the software then charge for support. That is how it worked before RHEL and is the way it should work today. Red Hat should be happy that other people are using their contributed code rather than feeling violated.
One doesn't need to be Muslim to be a terrorist. Timothy McVeigh was a Christian. The terrorists who assassinate doctors who perform abortions are Christians. Wikipedia says Bruce E. Ivins was a Roman Catholic. Terrorists can be any religion.
As someone with a CS degree and having worked in a university CS department for 7 years as a researcher and system administrator I know a lot of CS majors aren't very good coders. Most of the students I knew didn't like coding that much and only looked at it like dues to be paid until they got a real job. Being stuck as a coder was considered a dead-end. The question I have is if the person asking this question is actually good at anything in CS. Ok, so they aren't much of a coder, what else do you got? What do you enjoy doing in CS if you don't like coding (I got interested in CS because I liked to code, what drew you to it?). If you don't actually like CS than you should tangent to something you do like. If you are going to work in a field for a decade or two you should do something you love (or at least like).
- Mathematics for the Million
by Lancelot Hogben. This book is fun, mathematics unfolds in its historical context. It is not an easy read but I found a very good supliment for my school work, anything that makes math more interesting gets you doing more of it.I think that what is being observed here is the fact that most thoughtful individuals go through a Libertarian stage at some point in their lives. I went through a Libertarian stage in my mid-20's; it made perfect sense to me at the time. A lot of the younger people I work with in their 20's sound just like I did at their age; Libertarian or libertarian-leaning Republicans. I think it is good to "try on" varous viewpoints. While I'm now much more liberal than I was as a young man I'm eclectic and retain many libertarian viewpoints. As a pragmatist I'm more concerned if something works than how well it adheres to any ideology.
The solution I see is to use tickets resolved as the metric than require a ticket for every thing you do no mater how trivial. Before every ticket is worked require it to be approved by the Sr. VP of their department. Open a ticket for every single patch you apply to every system and require a Sr. VP to approve it. Ideally you will end up spending 3 times as much time approving, acknowledging, updating, and closing tickets as you spend working on the systems and the backlog will grow to the point where users are waiting weeks to have their forgotten passwords reset. When anyone complains explain that your administrator's productivity as measured by tickets closed is higher than ever. Soon everyone will long for the old days.
I've worked jobs that fall into Computer Science, Information Technology, and Electrical Engineering. For me there is a lot of overlap in these fields. I have a bachelor's degree in CS. I'll admit to being overwelmed working in EE (especially by the math involved) and that there was a long learning curve for me in IT. I still think CS is a good background. In IT I find that often the hardest IT problems boil down to CS problems and at these times my background is a strong plus. e.g. sometimes having actually written a virtual memory manager in college gives me an edge when tuning a server. If I did get my Master's degree I'd likely get an IT degree. CS in grad school gets rather theoretical and less useful in the real world.
I caught the bit about 400 speed color film in the mid-80's. I distinctly remember shooting Kodacolor 400 in '79. I looked it up and Kodacolor 400 came out in '77.
My advice is to find a sub-area within CS that you particularily are interested in and study it more on your own. Your program will be designed to make you a well rounded graduate with knowledge in a number of areas. This is all good but to be marketable you have to have strengths. For me my early specalty was systems. After taking several CS classes I didn't really know how computers and operating systems worked until I took a class called "Computer Organization." I had many epiphanies in that class and knew that systems would be my area. In spite of my interest my first job wasn't doing systems work, I was researching and developing software for pattern recognition, data compression, and digital signal processing. I did some good work here but I was really over my head in math but my strengh in systems work allowed me to get into systems work for my next and all subsequent jobs.
I have a Garmin iQue 3600 GPS/PDA. I feel like I'm a safer driver when I use my GPS. Instead of looking for addresses or street names I just listen to my speaker to tell me when to turn. I'm able to give my driving much more of my concentration than if I had to try to find my way on my own. When I'm following written directions if I miss a turn I'm usually screwed, I have to do a U-turn and go back and try to find where I made my mistake. With my GPS I can continue on and it will recalculate a route from whereever I am. My unit isn't perfect but nothing is. I noticed that when I mapped a route with Mapquest, Yahoo Maps, and my GPS I was given 3 different routes! None were optmum but any of them would get me there. I ended up taking a hybrid route but my GPS simply recalculated the way from wherever I was. Sometimes it gives contradictory directions like "stay left than turn right" Sometimes this is to get you in the right place before the road forks but other times it is just wrong and it gets you in the wrong lane for your exit or turn. One amusing this is that some of new tollways near me aren't in my PDA's detailed maps. Sometimes on these roads I'll look down and it will say I'm going 70 MPH through a field. Other times it assumes I'm on a road roughly parallel to the new road. Hopefully updated maps will cure this.
I think the range is larger than 2-5 years. I picked up a spindle of cheap ($.20/disc) blanks to copy CD's onto for the car knowing they will get scratched up and none of them lasted even a year (even the ones that didn't bake in the Texas sun failed within a year). I have some CD's I burned in '97 from some HP disc's marketed for long term storage and to date not a single one of these have failed. Personally for my photography I shoot both film and digital. I have prints and negatives from 25 years ago that are still good though a little faded. You can't beat the convenience of shooting digital but I hate to have so many images at risk. I want to be sure at least some of the pictures I take of my daughter will be around decades from now. My problem with the suggestion of using magnetic tape is that magnetic tape isn't a sure thing either; we have lots of backup tapes at work that go bad; especially ones that have been stored for years.
I hear people complaining about driver support but to tell the truth with server class machines I never really had a problem with not having drivers. If you are trying to run it on every machine that comes down the bend your results may be different. As far as SVr4 IP in Solaris, remember that Sun has a very liberal UNIX license from when they were cozy with AT&T (remember the stock swap that sent ripples through the industry leading to everyone else forming OSF?). If anyone can get away with this Sun can. True Solaris code can't be GPL'ed. Nothting is preventing anyone from using FSF tools under Solaris though. 2.6 buggy? In my experience every version of Solaris since 2.5.1 has been more robust than any version of Linux I've ever tried. We currently have a lot of Solaris on SPARC and a lot of Linux on Intel. Our Lintel customers have no interest in trying Solaris of any flavor so in the case of our company we still don't see growth in Solaris from OpenSolaris
I started as a music major at one of the best music schools in the US. After 3 years of playing in every ensemble I could and practicing every free waking hour it was obvious that I just wasn't good enough to do what I wanted to do as a performer. Trying to find something else music related I decided on musicology. (for those who don't know musicology is the scholarly study of music). There were no undergrad degrees in musicology but music history is considered perperation for a Master's degree in it. I took my first semester of music history from the head of the musicology department. The professor was encyclopedic in his knowledge and his lectures were brilliant and inspiring. One thing the prof blated on about is what he called "grade inflation." He told us that he didn't believe in awarding a passing grade because a student shows up for class and tries hard; they have to produce. He said, "if you get a 'D' in my class it means that you know the minimum amount necessary to continue work in the field, if you get a 'C' in my class it means that you have demonstrated that beyone just learning a lot of facts you are beginning to be able to combine facts to synthesize your own thesis and observations; if you get a "B" in my class it means that you have demonstrated scholarship in the field; if you get an "A" in my class it means you should be teaching it. I took this as a challenge; some semesters this professor doesn't award a single 'A' in any of the classes he teaches so I was going to earn one of his few but coveted A's. I cut back on my work hours and studied and listened to the material every free moment; often 4-5 hours/day for this one class. I took the mid-term confident that I would get 100 or close to it. The test was *HARD* but handing it in I was still confident; I got it back and I scored a 78, 2 points short of a 'B.' At this point I decided I just wasn't tallented or smart enough to do anything in music so I took the easy way out and studied engineering.