> The type of courses I'm taking are essentially useless for getting a job. [snip] Since I'm just > planning to get a job after I grad, am I in the right program?
A majority of college undergraduates go into the workplace after graduating. This varies somewhat from field to field, but I think it's fairly consistent overall. So compare yourself against these people, whose fields of study range from literature to biology, from sociology to art, and so forth. Their undergraduate education doesn't necessarily have a prescribed path to a professional career. In my opinion, computer science is no different. The only thing that sets it aside in people's minds as a pragmatic and lucrative course of study, as far as I've seen, is the technology economy (though I suspect this was more true in 2000 when I graduated than it is now).
In agreement with your hypothesis, the courses you're taking are likely useless for getting a job, in a strictly literal sense. None of the courses I took, including a fairly intensive class that called itself "software engineering," prepared me for what a career as a software engineer really entails. But I think that opting for a primarily vocational curriculum over a liberal education rooted in theory and emphasizing breadth is extremely myopic, failing to recognize the forest for the trees.
Although you pursue a major course of study in college, the nuts and bolts of the major itself doesn't matter as much as you might think. The real purpose of college, in my opinion, is to teach you to think and to communicate. These are habits and skills that cut across all fields of study and professional careers. In my own experience, I find much of what's required of me as a software engineer has nothing to do with straight heads-down coding, and everything to do with finding creative solutions to complicated architectural problems and arguing their relative merits through clear verbal and written communication. For example, every few months at work, we'll be beating our heads against a problem like "how do we refactor this nasty, duplicated code so that we can both share it, and how can we get it done in a way that meets our schedule requirements?" Or better, "product marketing has just given us a new feature requirement that forces us to reset our assumptions and our schedule, how can we compromise?" I find myself writing essays at work to address questions like this, and I think I'd find myself frustrated and ill-equipped for the task if I hadn't taken all those "useless" classes in college.
My advice is to convince yourself that, although some of the courses you take in college might turn out to be practical in a job, college is not for getting you a job. Take the courses that most interest you, and take them for their own intrinsic merits, not for their relative merit in helping you achieve the short term goal of finding a first job. To help kickstart your professional development, you should be looking for summer internships instead. That will help get you the skills and connections you need to find your first full-time job. And don't forget: your education doesn't end when you graduate.
Linux may have an edge up on The Competition by decoupling font size from display resolution! This is serious innova-- oh wait. Dear Slashdot Editors: just because it has the word "Linux" in it doesn't mean it's worth posting.
Certain new cell phones (which shall not be named, due to NDA) have Bluetooth, despite the manufacturer's claims to the contrary. The chips lie dormant in the phones until the company can work a business model around them...
I misread this as Alan Cox calling you a linux-loving fag... not "an AC" but just "AC." Does this mean my geek reflexes have overwhelmed my Slashdot reflexes? Perhaps M-X doctor can help me resolve this internal conflict.
I wanted to say that I appreciated your article about AOL's potential buyout of Red Hat. I worked at Netscape and can definitely understand your opinions. I wanted to point something out, though.
You state, "I couldn't find anyone at the time of the AOL purchase that could find a good reason for [the Netscape buyout]. Apparently, AOL hoped to capitalize on the Netscape home page, which most Netscape users left as their default when starting up their browser."
It's quite true that AOL wanted the revenue generated by Netscape's home page. The revenue is non-negligible, and is basically what pays the Mozilla developers' paychecks. But they had another, very compelling reason to purchase Netscape. AOL is a content provider. Their entire business is to shove their content down as many customers' throats as possible. Not that that's a bad thing, it's just what the media does. But the AOL browser embeds Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser technology, as it's web rendering engine.
You can imagine how that would be a bad thing for AOL. First of all, if there are bugs in IE, AOL has to answer to those bugs, and pay for continuing support. The money AOL loses in running call-centers for customers, and in paying Microsoft to fix their bugs is significant. Second of all, bugs or no bugs, it's a plain fact that IE supports its own breed of de-facto web standards. AOL of course has to make its content presentable to customers, so they have to tailor their HTML and so forth to what IE supports. This is also costly, both in terms of money and strategy, because AOL is effectively at the whim of Microsoft.
So AOL bought Netscape and kept the Mozilla project alive for some pretty sound reasons. As you can see, they have a vested interest in the existence of a standards-compliant browser, and moreover a browser they can control. And they want to get rid of the IE technology embedded in the AOL client, and replace it with Netscape ("Gecko," "Komodo" or whatever other code names you may have heard of the Netscape embedding project by). Since the AOL and Compuserve clients (which are now the exact same codebase, only with different branding) have something on the order of 50% of the "browser share," embedding Netscape in them instead of IE will give them the control they need over how their content comes to their users.
I should say that working at Netscape didn't give me much confidence in AOL's strategy, so I think your warnings to Red Hat are far from unfounded, but you should know that there may well be a method to the madness after all.
Mozilla, everybody's favorite huge-ass software project, uses autoconf. I worked at Netscape last year, and I can tell you for sure, build issues were something I was quite glad to have been able to avoid in a project that size. There were only a couple bits of old code in Mozilla (last time I checked) left over from the Netscape 4.x days that were non-autoconf.
If you're looking for a case study to present to your pointy-hairs, look no further than Mozilla.
Seriously, check out Mozilla's approach with XUL and I18N. They separate out the text using entity substitution, and the rest using CSS. And that's a very basic, moderately unsafe way to go about things. A more intelligent way would be to have one XML doctype for your basic document, an XML doctype for your content (of which you would have n instances for each of your n languages), and XHTML for your formatted result. You would also have two XSLT transformations: one to merge in the I18N, and another to merge in the HTML design.
The next release of Apache Cocoon is expected to be very efficient in terms of XML/XSLT processing, but I don't know how it racks up in comparison to hardcoded PHP.
I thought I'd take this opportunity to mention that the Mandrake 7 installer eats my balls. Although Mandrake is very responsible in terms of internationalization (and it shows, no doubt -- you can install in Serbian, Welsh, Esperanto, and tons of other languages) the install program itself is one huge, monolithic X-based perl script, which is fairly easy to break. Problems I had with it include dying outright, not recognizing en_US as a proper locale for perl, sleeping for a half-hour before and after package installation, not being able to configure X, and others.
I am far from a newbie. I've used Linux since 1996, when my somewhat obscure hardware was basically unsupported. And I've never had this much frustration installing a distribution of Linux, ever.
I wholeheartedly agree with those who believe that the RedHat family is sacrificing correctness for quick fixes in terms of novice ease-of-use, and furthermore assert that the sacrifices of correctness and solidity will hurt novice users in the long-run, due to the effects they will have on these distributions in general.
On 5 May 1999 the W3C issued a recommendation (i.e. an official specification on par with HTML and other standards) for web content accessibility guidelines, containing different tiers of potential conformance:
Okay, I know a bunch about this, since it's an important part of what I'm studying... Pay attention.
First of all, the Internet -- porn or not -- is growing at an absurd rate. Any single search engine, regardless of how good its ranking algorithm is, will not be able to keep up either with new or more difficult to use technologies (such as databases, as the post mentions). Some of my research is directed towards the idea of distributed indexing. I can't get into it now, but imagine Napster except with metadata instead of MP3s. These distributed mini-engines would know how to answer very specific queries (some would know how to deal with databases, some with PHP, some with other mini-engines, and so forth). It's a pretty complicated idea, and has some problems (such as response time for searches), but is the only real scalable solution for the growing Internet.
Second, XML is becoming more prevalent on the Internet in general (see Apache XML), but unfortunately is not quite there yet. However, as a poster alluded to, RDF (an XML flavor used to describe site metadata) is usable today. The state of RDF, however, is that it's currently used more for the purposes of Slashboxes for example than web spidering.
Anyway, be sure to keep an eye out. Expect things to change dramatically in the next year or so. The Internet is still a baby, and it's just now learning to walk...
I've got to disagree with you, but let me be clear. Knuth, I believe, has done so much more for Computer Science than a lot of people have, including de Icaza. He has contributed a great deal, and regardless of how many awards he has won, he will always deserve more. However, I believe that the Free Software award is statedly for people who have specifically advanced the cause of Free Software; not that Knuth hasn't, but I believe de Icaza has directed his work much more specifically towards the cause of Free Software. It's a tough choice, I'll certainly admit, but I believe de Icaza to be a better candidate for this award.
for your information, the creator of this website is yoda (high openness), mon mothma (high conscientiousness), lando calrissian (very high extroversion), boba fett (low agreeableness), and a tuscan warrior (very high neuroticism). he's also a very lucky little brown university student of whose success on the web i am deeply envious.
Just to clear things up: Mozilla "skins" (the politically correct name is "chrome," though) are defined in XUL which is basically XML. All the images, mouseovers, style, etc. is done via XML, JavaScript, CSS, DOM and other XP standards and implementations. In other words, to create a mozilla chrome, check out www.w3.org:)
Neoplanet does use "raptor," which is mozilla's rendering engine, to display HTML, XML, and all that other good stuff. But their browser UI is their own. Mozilla's "skins" are different: they are created using RDF (resource definition format or something???) which is related to SGML. I'd guess that as browser stability becomes less of an issue in the coming milestones, more flashy things will be worked on, including skins...
For those of you who aren't on the gtk+ and related devel lists, which I assume is quite a bunch, you ought to know that Havoc is just about the most knowledgeable and consistently helpful person I (and I likely speak for many of us) have encountered on the internet. Period.
I'm slightly amused that he's gone to work for Red Hat, since he's a Debian developer if I'm not mistaken. But I'm sure he'll be happier with a paycheck than without. And maybe the "man who never sleeps" will finally get some sleep...
I was very pleased to see this article. It's not perfect (somebody made mention of "grey hats," which isn't a common term to my knowledge, but is definitely descriptive of a few people I know), but it is leaps and bounds ahead of piles of previous articles I've seen on the topic.
And I was real amused at the description of security hole-stricken Windows NT as "porous." I'll need to remember that one.
I had a similar problem when working on a fairly large-scale game for a software engineering class. I turned up, in my monumental search for the Perfect API, something called SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer. I can't attest to its flexibility or ease of use, since I didn't end up using it, but it boasts "portable low level access to a video framebuffer, audio output, mouse, and keyboard." It is LGPL'ed and impressively platform independent. But what I, or even its website, have to say is probably not so gleaming; Probably a more solid endorsement is the fact that Civ:CTP was written using it.
Slashdot Mirror
> The type of courses I'm taking are essentially useless for getting a job. [snip] Since I'm just
> planning to get a job after I grad, am I in the right program?
A majority of college undergraduates go into the workplace after graduating. This varies somewhat from field to field, but I think it's fairly consistent overall. So compare yourself against these people, whose fields of study range from literature to biology, from sociology to art, and so forth. Their undergraduate education doesn't necessarily have a prescribed path to a professional career. In my opinion, computer science is no different. The only thing that sets it aside in people's minds as a pragmatic and lucrative course of study, as far as I've seen, is the technology economy (though I suspect this was more true in 2000 when I graduated than it is now).
In agreement with your hypothesis, the courses you're taking are likely useless for getting a job, in a strictly literal sense. None of the courses I took, including a fairly intensive class that called itself "software engineering," prepared me for what a career as a software engineer really entails. But I think that opting for a primarily vocational curriculum over a liberal education rooted in theory and emphasizing breadth is extremely myopic, failing to recognize the forest for the trees.
Although you pursue a major course of study in college, the nuts and bolts of the major itself doesn't matter as much as you might think. The real purpose of college, in my opinion, is to teach you to think and to communicate. These are habits and skills that cut across all fields of study and professional careers. In my own experience, I find much of what's required of me as a software engineer has nothing to do with straight heads-down coding, and everything to do with finding creative solutions to complicated architectural problems and arguing their relative merits through clear verbal and written communication. For example, every few months at work, we'll be beating our heads against a problem like "how do we refactor this nasty, duplicated code so that we can both share it, and how can we get it done in a way that meets our schedule requirements?" Or better, "product marketing has just given us a new feature requirement that forces us to reset our assumptions and our schedule, how can we compromise?" I find myself writing essays at work to address questions like this, and I think I'd find myself frustrated and ill-equipped for the task if I hadn't taken all those "useless" classes in college.
My advice is to convince yourself that, although some of the courses you take in college might turn out to be practical in a job, college is not for getting you a job. Take the courses that most interest you, and take them for their own intrinsic merits, not for their relative merit in helping you achieve the short term goal of finding a first job. To help kickstart your professional development, you should be looking for summer internships instead. That will help get you the skills and connections you need to find your first full-time job. And don't forget: your education doesn't end when you graduate.
Linux may have an edge up on The Competition by decoupling font size from display resolution! This is serious innova-- oh wait. Dear Slashdot Editors: just because it has the word "Linux" in it doesn't mean it's worth posting.
Certain new cell phones (which shall not be named, due to NDA) have Bluetooth, despite the manufacturer's claims to the contrary. The chips lie dormant in the phones until the company can work a business model around them...
I misread this as Alan Cox calling you a linux-loving fag... not "an AC" but just "AC." Does this mean my geek reflexes have overwhelmed my Slashdot reflexes? Perhaps M-X doctor can help me resolve this internal conflict.
[15 minutes pass...]
D'oh!!
I sent the following email to Andy Oram.
Hi, Mr. Oram,
I wanted to say that I appreciated your article about AOL's potential buyout of Red Hat. I worked at Netscape and can definitely understand your opinions. I wanted to point something out, though.
You state, "I couldn't find anyone at the time of the AOL purchase that could find a good reason for [the Netscape buyout]. Apparently, AOL hoped to capitalize on the Netscape home page, which most Netscape users left as their default when starting up their browser."
It's quite true that AOL wanted the revenue generated by Netscape's home page. The revenue is non-negligible, and is basically what pays the Mozilla developers' paychecks. But they had another, very compelling reason to purchase Netscape. AOL is a content provider. Their entire business is to shove their content down as many customers' throats as possible. Not that that's a bad thing, it's just what the media does. But the AOL browser embeds Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser technology, as it's web rendering engine.
You can imagine how that would be a bad thing for AOL. First of all, if there are bugs in IE, AOL has to answer to those bugs, and pay for continuing support. The money AOL loses in running call-centers for customers, and in paying Microsoft to fix their bugs is significant. Second of all, bugs or no bugs, it's a plain fact that IE supports its own breed of de-facto web standards. AOL of course has to make its content presentable to customers, so they have to tailor their HTML and so forth to what IE supports. This is also costly, both in terms of money and strategy, because AOL is effectively at the whim of Microsoft.
So AOL bought Netscape and kept the Mozilla project alive for some pretty sound reasons. As you can see, they have a vested interest in the existence of a standards-compliant browser, and moreover a browser they can control. And they want to get rid of the IE technology embedded in the AOL client, and replace it with Netscape ("Gecko," "Komodo" or whatever other code names you may have heard of the Netscape embedding project by). Since the AOL and Compuserve clients (which are now the exact same codebase, only with different branding) have something on the order of 50% of the "browser share," embedding Netscape in them instead of IE will give them the control they need over how their content comes to their users.
I should say that working at Netscape didn't give me much confidence in AOL's strategy, so I think your warnings to Red Hat are far from unfounded, but you should know that there may well be a method to the madness after all.
Best regards,
Dan Rosen
Here is what you're looking for.
Mozilla, everybody's favorite huge-ass software project, uses autoconf. I worked at Netscape last year, and I can tell you for sure, build issues were something I was quite glad to have been able to avoid in a project that size. There were only a couple bits of old code in Mozilla (last time I checked) left over from the Netscape 4.x days that were non-autoconf.
If you're looking for a case study to present to your pointy-hairs, look no further than Mozilla.
Anybody read Snow Crash recently?...
...Or I'll beat you. No kidding.
Seriously, check out Mozilla's approach with XUL and I18N. They separate out the text using entity substitution, and the rest using CSS. And that's a very basic, moderately unsafe way to go about things. A more intelligent way would be to have one XML doctype for your basic document, an XML doctype for your content (of which you would have n instances for each of your n languages), and XHTML for your formatted result. You would also have two XSLT transformations: one to merge in the I18N, and another to merge in the HTML design.
The next release of Apache Cocoon is expected to be very efficient in terms of XML/XSLT processing, but I don't know how it racks up in comparison to hardcoded PHP.
I thought I'd take this opportunity to mention that the Mandrake 7 installer eats my balls. Although Mandrake is very responsible in terms of internationalization (and it shows, no doubt -- you can install in Serbian, Welsh, Esperanto, and tons of other languages) the install program itself is one huge, monolithic X-based perl script, which is fairly easy to break. Problems I had with it include dying outright, not recognizing en_US as a proper locale for perl, sleeping for a half-hour before and after package installation, not being able to configure X, and others.
I am far from a newbie. I've used Linux since 1996, when my somewhat obscure hardware was basically unsupported. And I've never had this much frustration installing a distribution of Linux, ever.
I wholeheartedly agree with those who believe that the RedHat family is sacrificing correctness for quick fixes in terms of novice ease-of-use, and furthermore assert that the sacrifices of correctness and solidity will hurt novice users in the long-run, due to the effects they will have on these distributions in general.
On 5 May 1999 the W3C issued a recommendation (i.e. an official specification on par with HTML and other standards) for web content accessibility guidelines, containing different tiers of potential conformance:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT
Okay, I know a bunch about this, since it's an important part of what I'm studying... Pay attention.
First of all, the Internet -- porn or not -- is growing at an absurd rate. Any single search engine, regardless of how good its ranking algorithm is, will not be able to keep up either with new or more difficult to use technologies (such as databases, as the post mentions). Some of my research is directed towards the idea of distributed indexing. I can't get into it now, but imagine Napster except with metadata instead of MP3s. These distributed mini-engines would know how to answer very specific queries (some would know how to deal with databases, some with PHP, some with other mini-engines, and so forth). It's a pretty complicated idea, and has some problems (such as response time for searches), but is the only real scalable solution for the growing Internet.
Second, XML is becoming more prevalent on the Internet in general (see Apache XML), but unfortunately is not quite there yet. However, as a poster alluded to, RDF (an XML flavor used to describe site metadata) is usable today. The state of RDF, however, is that it's currently used more for the purposes of Slashboxes for example than web spidering.
Anyway, be sure to keep an eye out. Expect things to change dramatically in the next year or so. The Internet is still a baby, and it's just now learning to walk...
I've got to disagree with you, but let me be clear. Knuth, I believe, has done so much more for Computer Science than a lot of people have, including de Icaza. He has contributed a great deal, and regardless of how many awards he has won, he will always deserve more. However, I believe that the Free Software award is statedly for people who have specifically advanced the cause of Free Software; not that Knuth hasn't, but I believe de Icaza has directed his work much more specifically towards the cause of Free Software. It's a tough choice, I'll certainly admit, but I believe de Icaza to be a better candidate for this award.
for your information, the creator of this website is yoda (high openness), mon mothma (high conscientiousness), lando calrissian (very high extroversion), boba fett (low agreeableness), and a tuscan warrior (very high neuroticism). he's also a very lucky little brown university student of whose success on the web i am deeply envious.
Just to clear things up: Mozilla "skins" (the politically correct name is "chrome," though) are defined in XUL which is basically XML. All the images, mouseovers, style, etc. is done via XML, JavaScript, CSS, DOM and other XP standards and implementations. In other words, to create a mozilla chrome, check out www.w3.org :)
Neoplanet does use "raptor," which is mozilla's rendering engine, to display HTML, XML, and all that other good stuff. But their browser UI is their own. Mozilla's "skins" are different: they are created using RDF (resource definition format or something???) which is related to SGML. I'd guess that as browser stability becomes less of an issue in the coming milestones, more flashy things will be worked on, including skins...
For those of you who aren't on the gtk+ and related devel lists, which I assume is quite a bunch, you ought to know that Havoc is just about the most knowledgeable and consistently helpful person I (and I likely speak for many of us) have encountered on the internet. Period.
I'm slightly amused that he's gone to work for Red Hat, since he's a Debian developer if I'm not mistaken. But I'm sure he'll be happier with a paycheck than without. And maybe the "man who never sleeps" will finally get some sleep...
Good luck, Havoc.
Microsoft Windows is one of the base requirements for participation in the Zone.
I was very pleased to see this article. It's not perfect (somebody made mention of "grey hats," which isn't a common term to my knowledge, but is definitely descriptive of a few people I know), but it is leaps and bounds ahead of piles of previous articles I've seen on the topic.
And I was real amused at the description of security hole-stricken Windows NT as "porous." I'll need to remember that one.
I had a similar problem when working on a fairly large-scale game for a software engineering class. I turned up, in my monumental search for the Perfect API, something called SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer. I can't attest to its flexibility or ease of use, since I didn't end up using it, but it boasts "portable low level access to a video framebuffer, audio output, mouse, and keyboard." It is LGPL'ed and impressively platform independent. But what I, or even its website, have to say is probably not so gleaming; Probably a more solid endorsement is the fact that Civ:CTP was written using it.
Hope this helps,
Dan