Why is it I get the feeling that there is a reason these guys have that much time on their hands?
Nice work and all that, but most decent parties at college include three staple ingredients
1) Alcohol 2) Women 3) Alcohol
Though alcohol appears twice this is on purpose, once to get you drunk enough to ask, then a woman to ask, the second to get her drunk enough to agree. Now an automated party system that achieved that... the guys would be millionaires by next Wednesday.
Re:Pasting for the PS3 because it invents not copi
on
How the PS3 Hit $600
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What percentage of people actually use their consoles as a primary movie player?
People who don't want to buy two? Students? No idea, I just know that we coped for several years with a PS2 as the DVD player.
Doesn't change the fact that the format war does nothing for the consumer whatsoever, hence the pointed tone about proprietary format. The same tone would be taken with HD-DVD, the point is the consumer gets f@#ked again.
So what should Sony be doing, trying to get a large industry group behind their standard to help it.... oh hang on they are doing that... how about trying to use a non-proprietary (not yet Open Source) technology such as Java for the interactivity bits... oh hang on they are doing that.
Let's put it this way. If Microsoft, who had an open choice like Intel, had backed Blu-Ray... do you seriously think there would still be a discussion? Can you think of a SINGLE technical reason to back HD-DVD over Blu-ray if you were Microsoft making that decision, BEYOND considering Sony to be competition?
It isn't the same, and it isn't right to say that consumers always get fucked by these standards wars, often they lead to decent competition that drives the price down, and either leads to a dominant standard (VHS v Betamax) or total compatibility (DVD-R+R etc etc). Monopolar approaches tend to work in markets with lots of standards that need to agree(e.g. WiFi with 802.11x).
Microsoft pushing HD-DVD isn't the same as Sony pushing Blu-ray, one company put energy and investment into inventing and creating something, the other made a political decision.
In theory I'm not going to buy the PS3, and neither will billions of other humans because of the price
Your implication in the first two lines is that "theory" means the opposite so are you saying you will be buying it and so will billions of others? This would certainly make it the biggest selling consumer device of all time, outstripping any other single electronics device in history.
You heard the theory on slashdot first, have you considered a career as an IT analyst?
Ah but then I'd be a Brit... please quote our recent protectionist measures.
Pasting for the PS3 because it invents not copies
on
How the PS3 Hit $600
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Again... because its technology is too cutting edge and too new and therefore too expensive, would have been much better to go with cheap commodity stuff rather than daring to push the boundaries and actually put some THOUGHT into the product.
But what got me most was this
Coupled with Sony's desire to not only push their own content on HD discs, but to control that medium with their proprietary Blu-ray format.
If the PS3 gets reasonable marketshare then this could be considered its master stroke in 2 years time. While the XBox 360 will need a revision to support HD discs, the PS3 won't.
But what irritates me most is the phrase "their proprietary Blu-ray format". I must have missed the bit where the MS Supported HD-DVD was an open standard with no strings attached. So Sony created an HD disc standard, just like they worked with Phillips on CDs and have created several other professional and consumer format standards, some which flew, some which didn't.
Its a sad state of affairs when Slashdot articles don't even celebrate the invention and the investment, but bitch just about the price and want LESS gadgets in the box, and when the MS supported standard is implicitly suggested to be a more "open" option.
WinFX - ooooh its a new GUI WCF - ex-Indigo - WOW its like Spring with annotations... oh but its only client side so half-of Spring but a little bit better, so lets say its 0.6 of Spring without the actual aspect oriented stuff. Or about 1/10th of SCA.
WPF - Rich GUI controls for Data.... on a thick client. So like Java Server Faces stuff but on a thick client, with some thin client stuff... hang on it IS JSF but with less available controls and developers of new controls.
Remember this is the country that considered a milk product manufacturer to be a "national champion", which has opposed the purchase of french companies by foreign companies, and has allowed state owned companies to take advantage of more liberal competition laws abroad.
If Apple was French do you think for a second they'd introduce this law?
You can argue one side or the other on the law in + and - but what you cannot argue about is that the French government have become ever more introverted in the last few years and campaigns against "globalisation", "market reforms" or anything else that aims to reduce the french unemployment rate is going to be opposed.
Opening things up? When they liberalise their laws around energy and yoghurt produces then fair enough, but until then its just hypocrisy.
But really, the universities and the national laboratories have been key in the region's history. Why else do dozens of Nobel Prize winners live here?
The weather and the geography. Seriously. California is beautiful and paticularly north of SF (Tiburon for instance). Most other High Tech places either have crappy winters (NE US), in a boring place (Cambridge) or are miles from decent cool young rich guy stuff.
I speak as someone who doesn't live in the US, but a place that is 3 hours from the mountains and 30 minutes from the sea with its own vineyards is a combination that is hard to beat. Add in money and a culture (in the US) that wants to make more money then its a rich combination. I can't think of a geographical andcultural location anywhere else in the first world (or indeed the second and third) which comes close.
The only downside of course is that thousands could die when the big one hits and California slips into the Sea. I can't see Nevada having the cache.
Ever wonder how MS get their media coverage? Here is a classic example, we are potentially TWELVE MONTHS away from widespread release on a product thats been in development for FOUR YEARS and people are "impressed" that a SECOND beta is relatively stable. And this is considered a news story.
Talk about generating buzz around a product to make people want it, and to cover up the yet more slipped release dates and the reduced functionality over what was promised. And it all comes down to a new look and feel and a bit of threading and the su command.
WOW FIVE YEARS DEVELOPMENT to get this into production.
I live in awe at Microsoft's ability to generate positive news.
Is it me or did anyone else get the image of King Canute on the beach ordering the sea to go back?
I know that RMS isn't directly attacking Sun here but the reporting, but it would be nice if once in a while he had something positive to say rather than contending that everything is rubbish. And gets in as ever a plug for the GNU project rather than talking about all of the other efforts out there, paticularly the Apache one. He also ignores several contributions to FLOSS that Sun did make around the netbeans IDE and of course the J2EE platform (some of which I had the pleasure of being on stage for the announcement of), but then that probably doesn't count as its not "GNU".
And as for media people not reporting tech stories with 100% accuracy (Sun said that Open Sourcing Java was a matter of when rather than whether) how long has he been working in IT?
If you made your user "superuser" on a Linux box, the did a kernel upgrade and decided this was stupid so just allowed you to sudo certain commands then you'd have a devil of a time accessing all those files that you created while you were the super user.
Or put more simply
XP didn't have sudo so you were always admin, Vista has sudo, enabled via annoying popups rather than a config file.
All of the moaning about Firefox "defaulting" to Google and Safari is missing the point. Google is NOT, despite being heavily used, in a monopoly position in its market, there is lots of choice and it has no way to FORCE people into using their search engine.
Microsoft ARE a monopoly who have consistently abused that position to gain unfair advantage in other parts of their business. Google not bitching about Firefox is NOTHING like the IE 7 element for several reasons
1) IE 7 comes pre-installed on Vista 2) Microsoft operate a monopoly on desktop operating systems 3) Microsoft have been found guilty twice of abusing that position (although only the EU has balls enough)
If Opera had their own browser and search engine then Google WOULDN'T be "bleating" about that as Opera can't force anyone to use their browser. Microsoft DO force people to use theirs as part of the operating system.
The saddest bit about all of this on Slashdot is that ever people reduce it to a technology fight (Firefox v IE, MSN v Google) when in fact its an economic fight between an upcoming company and a convicted monopolist. Bugger whether IE 7 is better or worse, the whole aim of this feature is to use MS Desktop users to increase traffic to MSN while decreasing traffic to Google, this is an abuse of Microsoft's position.
And then of course you have the home computer that I'm currently fixing for my mum (mom to USitiens) which has a very basic graphics card that powers the 17" TFT rather nicely, sitting next to that is the one my wife uses which has a Voodoo 3500 TV, running SUSE, and that works fine for her.
The ONLY people who need these graphics cards are people who place top end games. I find it stunning when I come across work desktops for people who do MS Office stuff that have only 512Mb RAM but a graphics card capable of doing Doom3 at decent framerates. 80%+ of people don't need even the 7900GT let alone the GTX and it would take a completely brain dead operating system to require people to have top line graphics cards just to run a word processor....
That of course is where my theory breaks down, Vista... you might not play games... but our developers do.
I know relatively few schools that offer "software engineering" as its own major.
And those are "oddly" the ones that produce the best paid and most effective graduates.
I say this as some one who recruits people, a decent Software Engineering graduate is hard to find, but damn they are worth it when you find them.
My order is Soft Eng, CS, Maths/Physics then the rest. I'd definately prefer a Maths graduate to someone who has done Information Systems or Computing with Business Studies.
Bottom line though is skills are great, but you need to communicate.
This is not your average enter the 16digit code/password to use the software it is the Windows XP thing where internet access is required.
Sort of true, but in reality its exactly the same but instead of the code being a simple hash and that is it, it does a remote authentication of the hash to validate it. This remote validation is either done at the initial point (patent 1) or using a timer (option 2).
Sort of like a dongle, but on a bloody long cable. Patent 1 does the validation by going to the dongle, Patent 2 has a temporary hash which you wait for the Dongle via the post.
There is NOTHING new here, just old ideas re-badged with the word "Internet".
So if you have a name that others don't have then you'll be fine. Of course if you are in the vast majority of people who don't have a unique name then unless you are quick its not going to work for you.
Genius idea, formed on the fact that "John Smith" is of course unique. Hell there have been TWO US presidents in the last 20 years who would have to argue over who got the domain name. This is before we get to countries where its more common to be known as lastname.firstname rather than firstname.lastname.
Or is part of this wonderful suggestion to have every person in the world given a unique name?
Oh hang on... its actually just a simple scam to get people to pay more money isn't it? Damn I was nearly taken in thinking it was trying to be a sensible suggestion.
Next week ".rocks" and ".sucks" you would of course what johnsmith.rocks and would want to prevent people registering johnsmith.sucks, double your money and double the fun.
Wiki to be created to solve Grand Unified Theory of Everything, this will take over because physicists, chemists, mathematicians have failed to do it, so the idea is to lob it out there. First step will be to resolve the problems between gravity and quantum mechanics.
Lets put it this way, if there was a Wiki on solving complex DNA evolution problems, 50%+ of the posts would be from wackos talking about ID and Creationism.
I hate to break it to people, but Maths and Physics make computing look like a liberal arts degree.
Re:Woz and Jobs
on
I, Woz
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
With only two differences
1) Paul Allen doesn't hold a technical candle to Woz 2) Bill Gates doesn't hold a visionary candle to Jobs
Without Jobs there would be no Apple, Woz would have stuck at HP and written printer drivers.
I'm not after people who can learn "lots" of languages, I'm after people who understand the principles and practice of language structure and design, the challenges of multi-threaded code, distributed code and enterprise challenges. These are the bits that an IT degree helps with.
As a recommendation I'd be looking to be seen as a specialist in one language rather than trying to be a jobbing generalist, and be getting the certifications that prove you know it. And in the MS world the language with cash is C#.
Probably in cheap labor willing to work overtime without pay, but you aren't explicit enough to be sure.
I think I was pretty clear that what I was after is QUALITY rather than quantity, in other words I'm looking for top quality CS majors who know the basics, the theory and understand the challenges of multi-threaded code, language design and generally how to properly structure software.
Oh but that said, I do want people who can actually COMMUNICATE with others, not a geek who thinks that his "great coding" is all that matters. I want smart people who can break down the problem, do the complicated bits and then lay the foundations for the folks in India & China to do the bulk of the effort.
I'm a CompSci graduate, and given the choice again... I'd do CompSci but tell the ladies in college I was doing Art History. Computer Science is a great area to be in, as long as you have the skills and you can communicate with others.
Aren't the ones that require CS majors, they are the ones that arts majors who have "re-trained, were doing or the ones who did CS as a minor with "business" or media studies.
As someone who has tried over the past few years to hire top rate people I can safely say that CS majors from good universities are still very much in demand. What we don't need is volume, what we need is quality. Volume is what India and China give us, quality is what top rate CS gives us. And the more volume that comes on tap, the more quality people we need.
IT is a GROWING industry, its good to see someone talking intelligently about off-shoring.
What MS are after is the same fair treatment that received in US courts, they find it unbelievable that they should actually have to PROVE compliance with a courts decisions and that being found as a monopoly engaged in deliberately predatory approaches should have any punishment doesn't make sense for an organisation used to dealing with the good ole DoJ.
Its quite simply ridiculous that the EU should find a company guilty of being a monopoly that uses that position to crush its opposition AND THEN require the company to change its behaviour. This is a very childish position for the EU to take in this globalised era, sure it might have been okay back with Standard Oil and Bell to force monopolies to change, but that was a different time when goverments actually had some say in how the world worked.
The EU should clearly back down, pay Microsoft compensation for wasting their time, sign software patents into Law and give Microsoft the job of validating them.
Its either that or Microsoft would have to operate legally.
Seriously, who would be surprised if a Chinese company (remember the Chinese? They're still Communists!!) was encouraged to spy on U.S. Government agencies? To think otherwise is, IMO, incredibly naïve.
Seriously, who would be suprised if a US Company (remember the US, they invaded Cuba, supported the Contras and recently invaded two countries and have taken part in illegal renditions and torture) was encouraged to spy on Foreign Goverment agencies, like the French, Russians, Chinese or Germans who opposed the 2nd UN resolution? To think otherwise is, IMO, incredibly naive.
Equally you could say the same about the Brits, French, German, Russian etc etc etc Goverments who have ALL at sometime or another (like the US) used companies abroad to "help" with intelligence or the enforcement of policy (like the recent Cubans in the Hotel debacle).
The reason for picking on China is xenophobia, plain, old and simple, dressed up in McCarthy era justifications around communism.
Your argument appears to be that scientists should not publish information that could effect public policy. This would mean that they should not talk about vaccination programmes being able to save millions of lives, of smoking causing cancer, of smog causing breathing problems, of the reduction of salt-marshes increasing the risks of flooding nor the other million or so things that have changed public policy based on science.
Out of interest, what should be used as a basis for public policy if not science? Claiming that this is just politicians returning the favour is like arguing that goverment censorship is the price people pay for a free press.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it I get the feeling that there is a reason these guys have that much time on their hands?
Nice work and all that, but most decent parties at college include three staple ingredients
1) Alcohol
2) Women
3) Alcohol
Though alcohol appears twice this is on purpose, once to get you drunk enough to ask, then a woman to ask, the second to get her drunk enough to agree. Now an automated party system that achieved that... the guys would be millionaires by next Wednesday.
What percentage of people actually use their consoles as a primary movie player?
People who don't want to buy two? Students? No idea, I just know that we coped for several years with a PS2 as the DVD player.
Doesn't change the fact that the format war does nothing for the consumer whatsoever, hence the pointed tone about proprietary format. The same tone would be taken with HD-DVD, the point is the consumer gets f@#ked again.
So what should Sony be doing, trying to get a large industry group behind their standard to help it.... oh hang on they are doing that... how about trying to use a non-proprietary (not yet Open Source) technology such as Java for the interactivity bits... oh hang on they are doing that.
Let's put it this way. If Microsoft, who had an open choice like Intel, had backed Blu-Ray... do you seriously think there would still be a discussion? Can you think of a SINGLE technical reason to back HD-DVD over Blu-ray if you were Microsoft making that decision, BEYOND considering Sony to be competition?
It isn't the same, and it isn't right to say that consumers always get fucked by these standards wars, often they lead to decent competition that drives the price down, and either leads to a dominant standard (VHS v Betamax) or total compatibility (DVD-R+R etc etc). Monopolar approaches tend to work in markets with lots of standards that need to agree(e.g. WiFi with 802.11x).
Microsoft pushing HD-DVD isn't the same as Sony pushing Blu-ray, one company put energy and investment into inventing and creating something, the other made a political decision.
In theory I'm not going to buy the PS3, and neither will billions of other humans because of the price
Your implication in the first two lines is that "theory" means the opposite so are you saying you will be buying it and so will billions of others? This would certainly make it the biggest selling consumer device of all time, outstripping any other single electronics device in history.
You heard the theory on slashdot first, have you considered a career as an IT analyst?
Ah but then I'd be a Brit... please quote our recent protectionist measures.
Again... because its technology is too cutting edge and too new and therefore too expensive, would have been much better to go with cheap commodity stuff rather than daring to push the boundaries and actually put some THOUGHT into the product.
But what got me most was this
Coupled with Sony's desire to not only push their own content on HD discs, but to control that medium with their proprietary Blu-ray format.
If the PS3 gets reasonable marketshare then this could be considered its master stroke in 2 years time. While the XBox 360 will need a revision to support HD discs, the PS3 won't.
But what irritates me most is the phrase "their proprietary Blu-ray format". I must have missed the bit where the MS Supported HD-DVD was an open standard with no strings attached. So Sony created an HD disc standard, just like they worked with Phillips on CDs and have created several other professional and consumer format standards, some which flew, some which didn't.
Its a sad state of affairs when Slashdot articles don't even celebrate the invention and the investment, but bitch just about the price and want LESS gadgets in the box, and when the MS supported standard is implicitly suggested to be a more "open" option.
WinFX - ooooh its a new GUI
WCF - ex-Indigo - WOW its like Spring with annotations... oh but its only client side so half-of Spring but a little bit better, so lets say its 0.6 of Spring without the actual aspect oriented stuff. Or about 1/10th of SCA.
WPF - Rich GUI controls for Data.... on a thick client. So like Java Server Faces stuff but on a thick client, with some thin client stuff... hang on it IS JSF but with less available controls and developers of new controls.
Influence or "copy"?
Remember this is the country that considered a milk product manufacturer to be a "national champion", which has opposed the purchase of french companies by foreign companies, and has allowed state owned companies to take advantage of more liberal competition laws abroad.
If Apple was French do you think for a second they'd introduce this law?
You can argue one side or the other on the law in + and - but what you cannot argue about is that the French government have become ever more introverted in the last few years and campaigns against "globalisation", "market reforms" or anything else that aims to reduce the french unemployment rate is going to be opposed.
Opening things up? When they liberalise their laws around energy and yoghurt produces then fair enough, but until then its just hypocrisy.
But really, the universities and the national laboratories have been key in the region's history. Why else do dozens of Nobel Prize winners live here?
The weather and the geography. Seriously. California is beautiful and paticularly north of SF (Tiburon for instance). Most other High Tech places either have crappy winters (NE US), in a boring place (Cambridge) or are miles from decent cool young rich guy stuff.
I speak as someone who doesn't live in the US, but a place that is 3 hours from the mountains and 30 minutes from the sea with its own vineyards is a combination that is hard to beat. Add in money and a culture (in the US) that wants to make more money then its a rich combination. I can't think of a geographical andcultural location anywhere else in the first world (or indeed the second and third) which comes close.
The only downside of course is that thousands could die when the big one hits and California slips into the Sea. I can't see Nevada having the cache.
Ever wonder how MS get their media coverage? Here is a classic example, we are potentially TWELVE MONTHS away from widespread release on a product thats been in development for FOUR YEARS and people are "impressed" that a SECOND beta is relatively stable. And this is considered a news story.
Talk about generating buzz around a product to make people want it, and to cover up the yet more slipped release dates and the reduced functionality over what was promised. And it all comes down to a new look and feel and a bit of threading and the su command.
WOW FIVE YEARS DEVELOPMENT to get this into production.
I live in awe at Microsoft's ability to generate positive news.
Is it me or did anyone else get the image of King Canute on the beach ordering the sea to go back?
I know that RMS isn't directly attacking Sun here but the reporting, but it would be nice if once in a while he had something positive to say rather than contending that everything is rubbish. And gets in as ever a plug for the GNU project rather than talking about all of the other efforts out there, paticularly the Apache one. He also ignores several contributions to FLOSS that Sun did make around the netbeans IDE and of course the J2EE platform (some of which I had the pleasure of being on stage for the announcement of), but then that probably doesn't count as its not "GNU".
And as for media people not reporting tech stories with 100% accuracy (Sun said that Open Sourcing Java was a matter of when rather than whether) how long has he been working in IT?
If you made your user "superuser" on a Linux box, the did a kernel upgrade and decided this was stupid so just allowed you to sudo certain commands then you'd have a devil of a time accessing all those files that you created while you were the super user.
Or put more simply
XP didn't have sudo so you were always admin, Vista has sudo, enabled via annoying popups rather than a config file.
All of the moaning about Firefox "defaulting" to Google and Safari is missing the point. Google is NOT, despite being heavily used, in a monopoly position in its market, there is lots of choice and it has no way to FORCE people into using their search engine.
Microsoft ARE a monopoly who have consistently abused that position to gain unfair advantage in other parts of their business. Google not bitching about Firefox is NOTHING like the IE 7 element for several reasons
1) IE 7 comes pre-installed on Vista
2) Microsoft operate a monopoly on desktop operating systems
3) Microsoft have been found guilty twice of abusing that position (although only the EU has balls enough)
If Opera had their own browser and search engine then Google WOULDN'T be "bleating" about that as Opera can't force anyone to use their browser. Microsoft DO force people to use theirs as part of the operating system.
The saddest bit about all of this on Slashdot is that ever people reduce it to a technology fight (Firefox v IE, MSN v Google) when in fact its an economic fight between an upcoming company and a convicted monopolist. Bugger whether IE 7 is better or worse, the whole aim of this feature is to use MS Desktop users to increase traffic to MSN while decreasing traffic to Google, this is an abuse of Microsoft's position.
And then of course you have the home computer that I'm currently fixing for my mum (mom to USitiens) which has a very basic graphics card that powers the 17" TFT rather nicely, sitting next to that is the one my wife uses which has a Voodoo 3500 TV, running SUSE, and that works fine for her.
The ONLY people who need these graphics cards are people who place top end games. I find it stunning when I come across work desktops for people who do MS Office stuff that have only 512Mb RAM but a graphics card capable of doing Doom3 at decent framerates. 80%+ of people don't need even the 7900GT let alone the GTX and it would take a completely brain dead operating system to require people to have top line graphics cards just to run a word processor....
That of course is where my theory breaks down, Vista... you might not play games... but our developers do.
Any free-swappping IRA members?
The Crying Game has some pretty serious swapping going on by an IRA member.
Maybe this is what Gonzales is worried about, MP3 file swapping money going to fund terrorists gender swapping operations.
I know relatively few schools that offer "software engineering" as its own major.
And those are "oddly" the ones that produce the best paid and most effective graduates.
I say this as some one who recruits people, a decent Software Engineering graduate is hard to find, but damn they are worth it when you find them.
My order is Soft Eng, CS, Maths/Physics then the rest. I'd definately prefer a Maths graduate to someone who has done Information Systems or Computing with Business Studies.
Bottom line though is skills are great, but you need to communicate.
This is not your average enter the 16digit code/password to use the software it is the Windows XP thing where internet access is required.
Sort of true, but in reality its exactly the same but instead of the code being a simple hash and that is it, it does a remote authentication of the hash to validate it. This remote validation is either done at the initial point (patent 1) or using a timer (option 2).
Sort of like a dongle, but on a bloody long cable. Patent 1 does the validation by going to the dongle, Patent 2 has a temporary hash which you wait for the Dongle via the post.
There is NOTHING new here, just old ideas re-badged with the word "Internet".
So if you have a name that others don't have then you'll be fine. Of course if you are in the vast majority of people who don't have a unique name then unless you are quick its not going to work for you.
Genius idea, formed on the fact that "John Smith" is of course unique. Hell there have been TWO US presidents in the last 20 years who would have to argue over who got the domain name. This is before we get to countries where its more common to be known as lastname.firstname rather than firstname.lastname.
Or is part of this wonderful suggestion to have every person in the world given a unique name?
Oh hang on... its actually just a simple scam to get people to pay more money isn't it? Damn I was nearly taken in thinking it was trying to be a sensible suggestion.
Next week ".rocks" and ".sucks" you would of course what johnsmith.rocks and would want to prevent people registering johnsmith.sucks, double your money and double the fun.
Wiki to be created to solve Grand Unified Theory of Everything, this will take over because physicists, chemists, mathematicians have failed to do it, so the idea is to lob it out there. First step will be to resolve the problems between gravity and quantum mechanics.
Lets put it this way, if there was a Wiki on solving complex DNA evolution problems, 50%+ of the posts would be from wackos talking about ID and Creationism.
I hate to break it to people, but Maths and Physics make computing look like a liberal arts degree.
With only two differences
1) Paul Allen doesn't hold a technical candle to Woz
2) Bill Gates doesn't hold a visionary candle to Jobs
Without Jobs there would be no Apple, Woz would have stuck at HP and written printer drivers.
Simply put... and sorry to be harsh....
No.
I'm not after people who can learn "lots" of languages, I'm after people who understand the principles and practice of language structure and design, the challenges of multi-threaded code, distributed code and enterprise challenges. These are the bits that an IT degree helps with.
As a recommendation I'd be looking to be seen as a specialist in one language rather than trying to be a jobbing generalist, and be getting the certifications that prove you know it. And in the MS world the language with cash is C#.
Probably in cheap labor willing to work overtime without pay, but you aren't explicit enough to be sure.
I think I was pretty clear that what I was after is QUALITY rather than quantity, in other words I'm looking for top quality CS majors who know the basics, the theory and understand the challenges of multi-threaded code, language design and generally how to properly structure software.
Oh but that said, I do want people who can actually COMMUNICATE with others, not a geek who thinks that his "great coding" is all that matters. I want smart people who can break down the problem, do the complicated bits and then lay the foundations for the folks in India & China to do the bulk of the effort.
I'm a CompSci graduate, and given the choice again... I'd do CompSci but tell the ladies in college I was doing Art History. Computer Science is a great area to be in, as long as you have the skills and you can communicate with others.
Aren't the ones that require CS majors, they are the ones that arts majors who have "re-trained, were doing or the ones who did CS as a minor with "business" or media studies.
As someone who has tried over the past few years to hire top rate people I can safely say that CS majors from good universities are still very much in demand. What we don't need is volume, what we need is quality. Volume is what India and China give us, quality is what top rate CS gives us. And the more volume that comes on tap, the more quality people we need.
IT is a GROWING industry, its good to see someone talking intelligently about off-shoring.
What MS are after is the same fair treatment that received in US courts, they find it unbelievable that they should actually have to PROVE compliance with a courts decisions and that being found as a monopoly engaged in deliberately predatory approaches should have any punishment doesn't make sense for an organisation used to dealing with the good ole DoJ.
Its quite simply ridiculous that the EU should find a company guilty of being a monopoly that uses that position to crush its opposition AND THEN require the company to change its behaviour. This is a very childish position for the EU to take in this globalised era, sure it might have been okay back with Standard Oil and Bell to force monopolies to change, but that was a different time when goverments actually had some say in how the world worked.
The EU should clearly back down, pay Microsoft compensation for wasting their time, sign software patents into Law and give Microsoft the job of validating them.
Its either that or Microsoft would have to operate legally.
Seriously, who would be surprised if a Chinese company (remember the Chinese? They're still Communists!!) was encouraged to spy on U.S. Government agencies? To think otherwise is, IMO, incredibly naïve.
Seriously, who would be suprised if a US Company (remember the US, they invaded Cuba, supported the Contras and recently invaded two countries and have taken part in illegal renditions and torture) was encouraged to spy on Foreign Goverment agencies, like the French, Russians, Chinese or Germans who opposed the 2nd UN resolution? To think otherwise is, IMO, incredibly naive.
Equally you could say the same about the Brits, French, German, Russian etc etc etc Goverments who have ALL at sometime or another (like the US) used companies abroad to "help" with intelligence or the enforcement of policy (like the recent Cubans in the Hotel debacle).
The reason for picking on China is xenophobia, plain, old and simple, dressed up in McCarthy era justifications around communism.
Your argument appears to be that scientists should not publish information that could effect public policy. This would mean that they should not talk about vaccination programmes being able to save millions of lives, of smoking causing cancer, of smog causing breathing problems, of the reduction of salt-marshes increasing the risks of flooding nor the other million or so things that have changed public policy based on science.
Out of interest, what should be used as a basis for public policy if not science? Claiming that this is just politicians returning the favour is like arguing that goverment censorship is the price people pay for a free press.