> But usually it's even dumber: The boss discovers on his own machine that when he resizes the window, > the contents get redrawn so that they fit the new size. This is is what's unacceptable.
Oh, that's easily fixed. Source an external.js file that's served out dynamically by a script that checks the IP address, and if it's his machine, runs a loop that resizes the window to the desired size every two seconds. When the same.js file is loaded from any other IP address, it can just be blank, or consist entirely of a comment that basically says "this is just here to meet internal requirements".
Or, similarly, the size constraints could be in a special CSS file that only gets really served to him and blank to everyone else.
Huh. I did not know that. In fact, I didn't even know it was possible to have a fault line of any significance in the middle of a tectonic plate like that. Interesting.
> The summary makes it seem like there have been two different big quakes. > In actuality there was a moderate 5.2 followed by what is apparently a 4.6 aftershock.
In the midwest, a 4.6 is a pretty big quake. There aren't any fault lines in the area, so we don't often get much above a 3. 5.2 is record-books stuff, no fooling.
We don't get hurricanes either. Our primary form of "natural disaster", in terms of frequency, is probably either ice storm or flood, though of course the first thing everybody thinks when you say "natural disaster" is tornado. We had a blizzard in '78...
But an earthquake big enough that you can actually _feel_ it, even if it just feels like an especially large truck drove down the street past your house, and even if only a small percentage of the population feels it at the time, is the stuff of legend. People who think they might have felt the tremor will talk about it for _years_, I kid you not.
Are you saying that your manager actually opens the page up in setups different from the one he normally uses to check that it does not display correctly, and gets upset if it does just fine and makes you change it so it breaks?
> Long desc on images that are content-heavy or pertinent to the content
This should really only needed if you have images that are so central to the content that a few words in an alt tag is inadequate to take the place of the image.
I'm not blind (indeed, I have 40/20 vision), but I *have* used text-only browsers quite a bit, and normally when I encounter this situation it's usually (by far and away usually, borderline on almost always) because the images are pretty much the whole point, e.g., photo galleries, personal blogs with pictures of the kids, that sort of thing.
There are exceptions, of course. Wikipedia articles for example sometimes have images that are effectively diagrams or otherwise useful, even important, for understanding the content of the article. But these are very much the exception rather than the rule. Most sites don't need longdesc at all.
> Using a proper hierarchy of header tags (H1/2/3/4/5)
One reason webmasters use improper header hierarchies (e.g. h3 directly inside of h1) is because they don't want to bother to restyle the font-size for the header tags on a per-page basis, which in a lot of cases is pretty much what you'd have to do to make a logically correct hierarchy look right. (Well, I suppose you also have the option of getting clever with classes.)
Of course, a lot of sites don't use header tags at all. One reason for this is because a lot of sites, frankly, aren't designed with anything resembling a logical structure, so applying markup to clue the user-agent in to the site's structure would require the site to be redesigned entirely so that it *has* a logical structure.
> Placing the content BEFORE the navigation, or at least providing an internally > linked "skipnav" link (use CSS to hide it)
A small amount of navigation is not a very big deal, especially compared to sites that place vast stretches of sidebars before the content. They do this because it's difficult, especially if you only know basic CSS, to figure out how to get it to display in anything resembling the desired fashion if the sidebars are after the main content in the markup. (CSS, at least on a cursory examination, does not appear to really have a concept of columns, which is kind of unfortunate.) So if you read sites with large sidebars in a text-only browser, you have to hit pgdn about eight times to get anywhere near the main page content. This is *way* worse than a small navbar element with eight or ten links. I can only imagine what a pain it must be for a blind person using a screen reader to get past all those sidebars.
> using title properties on links
Shouldn't the text content of the a element (or, in the case of an img child element, the alt text thereof) normally be adequate? And isn't the title element normally used primarily for a "tooltip" on rollover, and wouldn't that be irrelevant for a screen reader? What am I missing?
> Creating non-flash versions
I would think avoiding Flash would be important only if people who *can* see are going to be looking at your site. I would think blind people would not have the plugin so it would just not be a problem for them.
> of key items
Key items? Flash is used for key items? Besides "key" advertisements that are completely irrelevant to the content of the site? Yeah, okay, YouTube and Google Video use Flash for key items. Well, key insofar as those sites are concerned anyway. But I don't see how a non-Flash version of a video (say, an MPEG) is going to be a lot better for a blind person than the Flash version.
> Using Javascript as an additional convenience, but not a key element. (I *still* see > sites that use window.href onclick events instead of just using an "A" tag.)
If anything this sort of schenanighan seems to be becoming more common. And yeah, it breaks a lot more than just screen readers. Some widely-used browsers still don't know how to open such links in a new tab, for instance. For
> A properly crafted site intended to have a printing option has a > stylesheet that has @media print rules for restyling the page for > printing, automatically removing that cruft.
Yes, but most web browsers will only apply that if you're printing, or at least using print preview. However, if the page has a "printable version" link, the user can follow that at will. So, please, don't ask websites to remove their printable versions.
If your website doesn't _need_ a printable version, because the regular version looks just fine when printed, then great. (Sites that I design generally fall into this category. I do use print-specific CSS to style away the colors to black on white and sometimes remove purely-navigational elements. But even if I didn't, they would generally print okay.) If this is the category you are in, that's great.
But a lot of web content creators seem to be unable or unwilling to design that way. If the demand for printability leads them to create a better version of their web pages, I view that as a good thing. If the link to the better version reads "Print this page", try to think of that as strangely-worded UI that, once you know what it means, is no big deal.
If the liberal arts school is a *good* liberal arts school, go there. Your training there will be less targeted, but "less targeted" is another way to say "more general".
In the 1950s, when people expected to get one job fresh out of school and work their way up the ladder to a higher position within the same industry, the technical training might have been better. But today the expectation is that you will build your career by moving laterally every few years from one job to another, building experience across multiple organizations, in different roles, possibly in various industries. The liberal arts school, if it's a good one, will better prepare you for that. You'll take public speaking. You'll take math and science. History. Economics. Composition. Foreign language. An art class or two...
Some of that _might_ not end up being useful in your career. For instance, you might have to take a History of Western Civilization class, and it might not end up being useful. But some of the others will be _very_ useful. Public speaking is invaluable, and (speaking as a network administrator) if I could go back and change one thing about my own college education, I would take more art classes. I'd probably take them in lieu of some of the more irrelevant programming languages that I had (e.g., COBOL).
Speaking of COBOL, it goes without saying that the technical school will also include some things in its curriculum that will not end up being useful. But more to the point, a lot of what they teach you will be stuff you could just as well pick up on your own outside of class, stuff that it's not really _necessary_ to have in the curriculum. After you've learned three or four programming languages, for example, how long does it take you to learn another? Do you really need a whole class for each one? (Do make sure you study at least one functional language, at least one object-oriented language, and at least one modern "scripting" language, for well-roundedness.) You can probably teach yourself SQL in a couple of weeks, and in the real world you're probably going to wrap it in an abstraction layer anyway. What good is a hardware class when everything's going to be different by the time you graduate? And so on.
Go for the liberal-arts degree, with computer science as your major, and consider a double-major, or at least pick up a useful complementary minor, like language or art.
All of that's assuming that this is a real, serious, four-year liberal-arts school we're talking about, with a sane admissions policy and some real academic standards, the kind of school where a significant percentage of the students have to maintain a certain GPA to keep their scholarships or they won't be able to afford to stay in school. If the "liberal arts school" is actually a large state university or anything similar to that, run away screaming.
> > Ever try reading in and storing an arbitrary length string? I'm fairly convinced it's not possible in Ada. > It's not possible anywhere, unless you have access to an arbitrary size memory.
And yet, a language without the capability to attempt that (and only fail if the string actually gets too long for memory, which in practice doesn't happen very often) is pretty much useless for writing real-world programs like, say, an XML parser, or an email proxy, or, you know, anything much beyond classroom-example programs.
I'd like to see the contest be about using the smallest possible amount of fuel to take some pre-defined action, e.g., drive from New York to Los Angeles without breaking any laws, using less fuel than any of your competitors.
The "without breaking any laws" restriction, where real roads and real traffic are involved, would be particularly interesting, IMO, because it simultaneously implies street-legal vehicles *and* something that at least vaguely resembles normal driving. I'm sure there would still be important differences from normal vehicles (e.g., in the safety ratings department) and also differences from normal driving styles, but it would be a *lot* more similar to normal conditions than these extreme multi-thousand-mpg things. Perhaps close enough that the occasional development would be adaptable for normal vehicles.
Other people who support increasing the H1B-Visa program include, for instance, economist Alan Greenspan.
Now, I personally haven't studied the issue enough to know what all the considerations are. But if somebody like Greenspan thinks it's a good idea, I think there's a very real possibility there might be some motivation behind doing it other than just making Microsoft happy. I believe Greenspan said something about enabling the US to better compete in the global economy. Not that Greenspan is right about everything, mind you. He also thinks our schools need to teach less advanced math and more long division because more advanced math is "vacuous" without arithmetic as a foundation -- which is clearly wrong, an idea you could only get if you were yourself never taught any advanced math in school. (Greenspan wouldn't have been, based on when he grew up; that's not his fault, but it is reality nonetheless.) Still, math and education aren't his specialty; economics _is_ his specialty, so maybe he has a rather better idea what he's talking about when he talks about the H1B program.
Again, I haven't studied the issues surrounding H1B Visa program in any detail myself, so I won't make a claim one way or another about whether it's beneficial to ramp up the program. What I will say is that it's extremely stupid to dismiss it as just a measure to keep Microsoft happy, when it's also supported by, frankly, the leading economist in the world.
It's a question of what you believe about the dude's motivations. Is he showing you what's behind door number three in an attempt to get you to reconsider your choice? Does he want you to pick the door with the car, or would he prefer that you pick the door with the goat?
The truth, of course, is that he doesn't care as much about what effect showing the goat behind door number three will have on *you*, as he does about the effect it will have on the audience. What effect will it have on you, the participant? Who can say? From his perspective that's not very predictable, and it's not the point anyhow. But the effect it has on the audience matters very much. He's a showman, building dramatic tension. That's his job. He'd do the same thing whether the car was behind the door you picked, or the other one. So we're back at 50/50.
But not everyone understands this, so if they try to second-guess his motivation, that _can_ have an impact on their choice.
Rule Number One, if you're going to be looking at it for long hours, is to use the darker color as background and the lighter color as foreground.
Rule Number Two, if you're going to be looking at it for long hours, is to go with a medium contrast. Bright white on black is too sharp, but don't go with colors so similar you have to squint, either.
Green on black, like old Apple monitors, isn't too bad. Amber on black, like old DEC monitors, is better,
But the _best_ combination I have found, bar none, is #FFE6BC on #294D4A, wheat on dark slate green. You can look at that for sixteen, eighteen hours a day, and it doesn't hurt.
I would say the customers are the people who make the decisions about what gets bought.
In some cases (I don't pretend to know exactly how many), that is the ISV. At work we have two servers (one production and one for training) that run Windows Server 2003 and MS SQL Server. We (my employer) would NEVER have chosen that operating system and database engine for a server, not with me as Technology Coordinator. (Postgres on some kind of Unix, that's what I'd have selected.) But we bought the Microsoft stuff anyway, because the ILS software we use does not run on any other platform. It was, effectively, chosen for us.
(Yes, we made the decision to buy that ILS, as opposed to one of the other ones we looked at. We chose the one we did because it was quoted to us ten thousand dollars cheaper than the next-cheapest competitor. Needless to say the license cost of the operating system did not enter into the decision. I didn't even put that down in the negatives column. I did put some other things about the OS in the negatives column, and more things about the database engine, and also some things about the ILS software itself, but for us they didn't add up to ten grand, when we were looking at potential budget cuts in our projected immediate future.)
There's this thing called a 'shift'. I think it was a military invention originally, but the principle carries over well to other industries. It's really cool. Basically, you get at least three people, and you *take turns* being the one who has to be available at all times -- for a few (usually eight) hours at a time, and then the next guy relieves you and takes the next shift, and you're free to go home and sleep and stuff.
It seems to be really catching on. Might be the next big thing. You should try it.
> Just think of the marketing budget of any of the standard delivery > places (Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, etc). This is not even a blip on that radar.
They still have to advertise the domain to get any real value out of it. But it's a fantastically easy domain to remember, so if a major pizza chain wants to introduce online ordering, the purchase might make sense. An extremely easy-to-remember domain like that means you don't have to expend nearly as much of your advertising space/time/effort/whatever getting the domain name to stick, so you can spend more of it on connecting with the selling points (see the available toppings at a glance, view the specials, order in two clicks, free breadsticks for ordering online, whatever). You only have to say "pizza dot com" about three times for people to be able to remember it.
So yeah, a major pizza chain could maybe get significant value out of this.
I don't know about "a steal" though. I mean, they could always do more or less the same thing with an "order now" button on pizzahut.com or littlecaesars.com or whatever. Having pizza.com is better, maybe even better enough to be worth the 1.6 mil, but it's not insanely valuable.
> Except that nobody has done that in 20 years or more.
Apple did it circa 2000, and they needed to very desperately.
> How come other every other OS vendor can build on a perfectly good codebase (Unix) and > not wind up with a fragmented, unsupportable mess which requires tricks like WinSxS?
Unix systems don't need WinSxS because they don't try to maintain long-term binary compatibility with numerous versions of most libraries. In the Unix world, it's normal for an application to be recompiled for each major OS version. So as long as you've got source compatibility, binary compatibility isn't important. (If you take this to its logical extreme, you get something like the FreeBSD ports system, where if you want to upgrade anything you end up spending a week or so recompiling more than half the software on your system. On a workstation with a lot of software installed, that gets old real fast. However, most Linux distributions take an approach where the distributor does all that recompiling for you, which is much more convenient for the user. Even FreeBSD has a precompiled-binary packages system, although its coverage is rather less comprehensive than ports last I checked.)
Microsoft doesn't really have the option of expecting all the software to be recompiled for each new version of Windows, because they rely too heavily on third-party proprietary ISVs. If you've been paying attention to all the friction between Apple and Adobe for the last eight years or so (and Adobe _still_ hasn't moved to Cocoa), and then realize that Microsoft has even more third-party ISVs to worry about, you'll see where that wouldn't be an attractive option for them.
Hence, stuff like WinSxS. Or, speculatively, emulation along the lines of Apple's Classic, but I don't know where this Corvin guy gets his information or how reliable it is.
In mathematics, "complex" does not mean complicated any more than "proper" means correct or "rational" means sane or "group" means any old gathering or collection. These words have very specific meanings in mathematics, and using them for their general-English meaning, in the context of math, is at best confusing and at worst outright misleading.
You can talk about a "complex algorithm", and people will generally understand you mean a complicated one, because the word "algorithm" lends more of a computer-science context. You can say "complex way of doing things" and convey the idea of complicatedness, because "way of doing things" is sufficiently general that it doesn't really imply any particular context at all. But saying "complex math" very much conveys the idea of the use of complex numbers (i.e., numbers with a real part and an imaginary part, either or neither or both of which may be zero for any given number) because the word "math" strongly implies a mathematics context and draws the math-jargon sense of the word "complex" to the forefront. Only someone who doesn't *know* what the word "complex" means in mathematics would think of any other meaning.
It's like saying "hedge fund" and expecting people to get the idea that you're collecting money for shrubberies. Only someone with no idea what a hedge fund is would get that impression.
> What does that even mean? I don't know many people, let alone > high-schoolers, who have "goals." Do you mean like a list?
Everyone *has* goals, of one sort or another. Most people don't sit down and make a list, and indeed some people don't even really pay attention to what their goals are. But everyone has things they try to accomplish, at least in the short term.
> Being a CS student and surrounded by men for the majority of my days I've > become a little more understanding of the difficulties I can pose when > I'm not being clear but it's kinda hard to stop doing it all together.
As a man who majored in computer science when I was in school, I think I am on safe ground saying that _on average_ (though there is a lot of variation in individuals), male CS students are going to tend to have an even harder time reading non-verbal cues than the male population in general. It's also true that the male population in at large has a harder time with it, on average, then the female population.
Many of us are *aware* of the fact that we don't really "get" non-verbal communication. But that doesn't make us any better at it. (Some of us have learned to partially compensate by asking clarifying questions. You may encounter this -- a guy asking questions that _seem_ unnecessary and the answers obvious, basically asking you to confirm aspects of what you just said. Please try not to be too annoyed. When this happens, there's an excellent chance that the guy doing this has had bad experiences in the past with people getting mad at him because he thought he understood what they said but missed some nuance he was supposed to have read between the lines.)
So yeah, if you want to be really sure we understand what you're getting at, generally the most surefire way to do that is to double-check that every part of what you're saying was actually expressed in the _words_ that you said. Use words. Words, of course, still can be misunderstood. But on the whole your chances of getting your point across successfully are better with words than with any other method, especially if you are talking to men, and extra-especially if they're also computer geeks.
I suppose it's probably annoying to have to say everything in words all the time. Then again, there's no real need to bother with it except when you actually care about being understood;-)
> I've been told that younger girls tend to [hit people] as a way of > 'fitting in' with the guys (since their view of guys is that they > do this to one another and apparently enjoy it).
As a (male) geek, that has kind of always been my view of _jocks_, irrespective of gender. I never had the urge to start hitting people in order to fit in, but then, I never had a crush on an athlete, so what would have been the point? (Fitting in, as an end unto itself, had pretty much ceased being a goal for me by the time I was in high school. I realize that's not true for quite everyone.)
> The error lies in the exploitable system that should be more secure.
Technically, the only way to really secure a system against trojans is to remove the ability to install software that doesn't come with the system from the factory. In other words, throw out the general-purpose computer and buy all hardwired appliances instead.
The problem with that is, programmability is a very useful feature.
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> But usually it's even dumber: The boss discovers on his own machine that when he resizes the window,
.js file that's served out dynamically by a script that checks the IP address, and if it's his machine, runs a loop that resizes the window to the desired size every two seconds. When the same .js file is loaded from any other IP address, it can just be blank, or consist entirely of a comment that basically says "this is just here to meet internal requirements".
> the contents get redrawn so that they fit the new size. This is is what's unacceptable.
Oh, that's easily fixed. Source an external
Or, similarly, the size constraints could be in a special CSS file that only gets really served to him and blank to everyone else.
Actually, the most PHB-like person I've ever met loved Dilbert and thought it was great.
Whereas, I'm the sort of guy who laughs at Larry Wall's jokes, and I don't think Dilbert is all that funny.
Huh. I did not know that. In fact, I didn't even know it was possible to have a fault line of any significance in the middle of a tectonic plate like that. Interesting.
> The summary makes it seem like there have been two different big quakes.
> In actuality there was a moderate 5.2 followed by what is apparently a 4.6 aftershock.
In the midwest, a 4.6 is a pretty big quake. There aren't any fault lines in the area, so we don't often get much above a 3. 5.2 is record-books stuff, no fooling.
We don't get hurricanes either. Our primary form of "natural disaster", in terms of frequency, is probably either ice storm or flood, though of course the first thing everybody thinks when you say "natural disaster" is tornado. We had a blizzard in '78...
But an earthquake big enough that you can actually _feel_ it, even if it just feels like an especially large truck drove down the street past your house, and even if only a small percentage of the population feels it at the time, is the stuff of legend. People who think they might have felt the tremor will talk about it for _years_, I kid you not.
Wait...
Are you saying that your manager actually opens the page up in setups different from the one he normally uses to check that it does not display correctly, and gets upset if it does just fine and makes you change it so it breaks?
I must be missing something.
> Long desc on images that are content-heavy or pertinent to the content
This should really only needed if you have images that are so central to the content that a few words in an alt tag is inadequate to take the place of the image.
I'm not blind (indeed, I have 40/20 vision), but I *have* used text-only browsers quite a bit, and normally when I encounter this situation it's usually (by far and away usually, borderline on almost always) because the images are pretty much the whole point, e.g., photo galleries, personal blogs with pictures of the kids, that sort of thing.
There are exceptions, of course. Wikipedia articles for example sometimes have images that are effectively diagrams or otherwise useful, even important, for understanding the content of the article. But these are very much the exception rather than the rule. Most sites don't need longdesc at all.
> Using a proper hierarchy of header tags (H1/2/3/4/5)
One reason webmasters use improper header hierarchies (e.g. h3 directly inside of h1) is because they don't want to bother to restyle the font-size for the header tags on a per-page basis, which in a lot of cases is pretty much what you'd have to do to make a logically correct hierarchy look right. (Well, I suppose you also have the option of getting clever with classes.)
Of course, a lot of sites don't use header tags at all. One reason for this is because a lot of sites, frankly, aren't designed with anything resembling a logical structure, so applying markup to clue the user-agent in to the site's structure would require the site to be redesigned entirely so that it *has* a logical structure.
> Placing the content BEFORE the navigation, or at least providing an internally
> linked "skipnav" link (use CSS to hide it)
A small amount of navigation is not a very big deal, especially compared to sites that place vast stretches of sidebars before the content. They do this because it's difficult, especially if you only know basic CSS, to figure out how to get it to display in anything resembling the desired fashion if the sidebars are after the main content in the markup. (CSS, at least on a cursory examination, does not appear to really have a concept of columns, which is kind of unfortunate.) So if you read sites with large sidebars in a text-only browser, you have to hit pgdn about eight times to get anywhere near the main page content. This is *way* worse than a small navbar element with eight or ten links. I can only imagine what a pain it must be for a blind person using a screen reader to get past all those sidebars.
> using title properties on links
Shouldn't the text content of the a element (or, in the case of an img child element, the alt text thereof) normally be adequate? And isn't the title element normally used primarily for a "tooltip" on rollover, and wouldn't that be irrelevant for a screen reader? What am I missing?
> Creating non-flash versions
I would think avoiding Flash would be important only if people who *can* see are going to be looking at your site. I would think blind people would not have the plugin so it would just not be a problem for them.
> of key items
Key items? Flash is used for key items? Besides "key" advertisements that are completely irrelevant to the content of the site? Yeah, okay, YouTube and Google Video use Flash for key items. Well, key insofar as those sites are concerned anyway. But I don't see how a non-Flash version of a video (say, an MPEG) is going to be a lot better for a blind person than the Flash version.
> Using Javascript as an additional convenience, but not a key element. (I *still* see
> sites that use window.href onclick events instead of just using an "A" tag.)
If anything this sort of schenanighan seems to be becoming more common. And yeah, it breaks a lot more than just screen readers. Some widely-used browsers still don't know how to open such links in a new tab, for instance. For
> A properly crafted site intended to have a printing option has a
> stylesheet that has @media print rules for restyling the page for
> printing, automatically removing that cruft.
Yes, but most web browsers will only apply that if you're printing, or at least using print preview. However, if the page has a "printable version" link, the user can follow that at will. So, please, don't ask websites to remove their printable versions.
If your website doesn't _need_ a printable version, because the regular version looks just fine when printed, then great. (Sites that I design generally fall into this category. I do use print-specific CSS to style away the colors to black on white and sometimes remove purely-navigational elements. But even if I didn't, they would generally print okay.) If this is the category you are in, that's great.
But a lot of web content creators seem to be unable or unwilling to design that way. If the demand for printability leads them to create a better version of their web pages, I view that as a good thing. If the link to the better version reads "Print this page", try to think of that as strangely-worded UI that, once you know what it means, is no big deal.
If the liberal arts school is a *good* liberal arts school, go there. Your training there will be less targeted, but "less targeted" is another way to say "more general".
In the 1950s, when people expected to get one job fresh out of school and work their way up the ladder to a higher position within the same industry, the technical training might have been better. But today the expectation is that you will build your career by moving laterally every few years from one job to another, building experience across multiple organizations, in different roles, possibly in various industries. The liberal arts school, if it's a good one, will better prepare you for that. You'll take public speaking. You'll take math and science. History. Economics. Composition. Foreign language. An art class or two...
Some of that _might_ not end up being useful in your career. For instance, you might have to take a History of Western Civilization class, and it might not end up being useful. But some of the others will be _very_ useful. Public speaking is invaluable, and (speaking as a network administrator) if I could go back and change one thing about my own college education, I would take more art classes. I'd probably take them in lieu of some of the more irrelevant programming languages that I had (e.g., COBOL).
Speaking of COBOL, it goes without saying that the technical school will also include some things in its curriculum that will not end up being useful. But more to the point, a lot of what they teach you will be stuff you could just as well pick up on your own outside of class, stuff that it's not really _necessary_ to have in the curriculum. After you've learned three or four programming languages, for example, how long does it take you to learn another? Do you really need a whole class for each one? (Do make sure you study at least one functional language, at least one object-oriented language, and at least one modern "scripting" language, for well-roundedness.) You can probably teach yourself SQL in a couple of weeks, and in the real world you're probably going to wrap it in an abstraction layer anyway. What good is a hardware class when everything's going to be different by the time you graduate? And so on.
Go for the liberal-arts degree, with computer science as your major, and consider a double-major, or at least pick up a useful complementary minor, like language or art.
All of that's assuming that this is a real, serious, four-year liberal-arts school we're talking about, with a sane admissions policy and some real academic standards, the kind of school where a significant percentage of the students have to maintain a certain GPA to keep their scholarships or they won't be able to afford to stay in school. If the "liberal arts school" is actually a large state university or anything similar to that, run away screaming.
> > Ever try reading in and storing an arbitrary length string? I'm fairly convinced it's not possible in Ada.
> It's not possible anywhere, unless you have access to an arbitrary size memory.
And yet, a language without the capability to attempt that (and only fail if the string actually gets too long for memory, which in practice doesn't happen very often) is pretty much useless for writing real-world programs like, say, an XML parser, or an email proxy, or, you know, anything much beyond classroom-example programs.
> Microsoft still leads in the server space too
Only in scenarios where there's third-party-vendor line-of-business software involved.
Which, granted, is a very high percentage of intranet servers and a fairly significant percentage of externally-facing servers.
I'd like to see the contest be about using the smallest possible amount of fuel to take some pre-defined action, e.g., drive from New York to Los Angeles without breaking any laws, using less fuel than any of your competitors.
The "without breaking any laws" restriction, where real roads and real traffic are involved, would be particularly interesting, IMO, because it simultaneously implies street-legal vehicles *and* something that at least vaguely resembles normal driving. I'm sure there would still be important differences from normal vehicles (e.g., in the safety ratings department) and also differences from normal driving styles, but it would be a *lot* more similar to normal conditions than these extreme multi-thousand-mpg things. Perhaps close enough that the occasional development would be adaptable for normal vehicles.
Other people who support increasing the H1B-Visa program include, for instance, economist Alan Greenspan.
Now, I personally haven't studied the issue enough to know what all the considerations are. But if somebody like Greenspan thinks it's a good idea, I think there's a very real possibility there might be some motivation behind doing it other than just making Microsoft happy. I believe Greenspan said something about enabling the US to better compete in the global economy. Not that Greenspan is right about everything, mind you. He also thinks our schools need to teach less advanced math and more long division because more advanced math is "vacuous" without arithmetic as a foundation -- which is clearly wrong, an idea you could only get if you were yourself never taught any advanced math in school. (Greenspan wouldn't have been, based on when he grew up; that's not his fault, but it is reality nonetheless.) Still, math and education aren't his specialty; economics _is_ his specialty, so maybe he has a rather better idea what he's talking about when he talks about the H1B program.
Again, I haven't studied the issues surrounding H1B Visa program in any detail myself, so I won't make a claim one way or another about whether it's beneficial to ramp up the program. What I will say is that it's extremely stupid to dismiss it as just a measure to keep Microsoft happy, when it's also supported by, frankly, the leading economist in the world.
It's a question of what you believe about the dude's motivations. Is he showing you what's behind door number three in an attempt to get you to reconsider your choice? Does he want you to pick the door with the car, or would he prefer that you pick the door with the goat?
The truth, of course, is that he doesn't care as much about what effect showing the goat behind door number three will have on *you*, as he does about the effect it will have on the audience. What effect will it have on you, the participant? Who can say? From his perspective that's not very predictable, and it's not the point anyhow. But the effect it has on the audience matters very much. He's a showman, building dramatic tension. That's his job. He'd do the same thing whether the car was behind the door you picked, or the other one. So we're back at 50/50.
But not everyone understands this, so if they try to second-guess his motivation, that _can_ have an impact on their choice.
Rule Number One, if you're going to be looking at it for long hours, is to use the darker color as background and the lighter color as foreground.
Rule Number Two, if you're going to be looking at it for long hours, is to go with a medium contrast. Bright white on black is too sharp, but don't go with colors so similar you have to squint, either.
Green on black, like old Apple monitors, isn't too bad. Amber on black, like old DEC monitors, is better,
But the _best_ combination I have found, bar none, is #FFE6BC on #294D4A, wheat on dark slate green. You can look at that for sixteen, eighteen hours a day, and it doesn't hurt.
> Customers are people who buy
Almost.
I would say the customers are the people who make the decisions about what gets bought.
In some cases (I don't pretend to know exactly how many), that is the ISV. At work we have two servers (one production and one for training) that run Windows Server 2003 and MS SQL Server. We (my employer) would NEVER have chosen that operating system and database engine for a server, not with me as Technology Coordinator. (Postgres on some kind of Unix, that's what I'd have selected.) But we bought the Microsoft stuff anyway, because the ILS software we use does not run on any other platform. It was, effectively, chosen for us.
(Yes, we made the decision to buy that ILS, as opposed to one of the other ones we looked at. We chose the one we did because it was quoted to us ten thousand dollars cheaper than the next-cheapest competitor. Needless to say the license cost of the operating system did not enter into the decision. I didn't even put that down in the negatives column. I did put some other things about the OS in the negatives column, and more things about the database engine, and also some things about the ILS software itself, but for us they didn't add up to ten grand, when we were looking at potential budget cuts in our projected immediate future.)
There's this thing called a 'shift'. I think it was a military invention originally, but the principle carries over well to other industries. It's really cool. Basically, you get at least three people, and you *take turns* being the one who has to be available at all times -- for a few (usually eight) hours at a time, and then the next guy relieves you and takes the next shift, and you're free to go home and sleep and stuff.
It seems to be really catching on. Might be the next big thing. You should try it.
I think you missed the words "or so" from the quote. Those are important words.
> Just think of the marketing budget of any of the standard delivery
> places (Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, etc). This is not even a blip on that radar.
They still have to advertise the domain to get any real value out of it. But it's a fantastically easy domain to remember, so if a major pizza chain wants to introduce online ordering, the purchase might make sense. An extremely easy-to-remember domain like that means you don't have to expend nearly as much of your advertising space/time/effort/whatever getting the domain name to stick, so you can spend more of it on connecting with the selling points (see the available toppings at a glance, view the specials, order in two clicks, free breadsticks for ordering online, whatever). You only have to say "pizza dot com" about three times for people to be able to remember it.
So yeah, a major pizza chain could maybe get significant value out of this.
I don't know about "a steal" though. I mean, they could always do more or less the same thing with an "order now" button on pizzahut.com or littlecaesars.com or whatever. Having pizza.com is better, maybe even better enough to be worth the 1.6 mil, but it's not insanely valuable.
> Except that nobody has done that in 20 years or more.
Apple did it circa 2000, and they needed to very desperately.
> How come other every other OS vendor can build on a perfectly good codebase (Unix) and
> not wind up with a fragmented, unsupportable mess which requires tricks like WinSxS?
Unix systems don't need WinSxS because they don't try to maintain long-term binary compatibility with numerous versions of most libraries. In the Unix world, it's normal for an application to be recompiled for each major OS version. So as long as you've got source compatibility, binary compatibility isn't important. (If you take this to its logical extreme, you get something like the FreeBSD ports system, where if you want to upgrade anything you end up spending a week or so recompiling more than half the software on your system. On a workstation with a lot of software installed, that gets old real fast. However, most Linux distributions take an approach where the distributor does all that recompiling for you, which is much more convenient for the user. Even FreeBSD has a precompiled-binary packages system, although its coverage is rather less comprehensive than ports last I checked.)
Microsoft doesn't really have the option of expecting all the software to be recompiled for each new version of Windows, because they rely too heavily on third-party proprietary ISVs. If you've been paying attention to all the friction between Apple and Adobe for the last eight years or so (and Adobe _still_ hasn't moved to Cocoa), and then realize that Microsoft has even more third-party ISVs to worry about, you'll see where that wouldn't be an attractive option for them.
Hence, stuff like WinSxS. Or, speculatively, emulation along the lines of Apple's Classic, but I don't know where this Corvin guy gets his information or how reliable it is.
> That's "complex" as in "complicated" math
In mathematics, "complex" does not mean complicated any more than "proper" means correct or "rational" means sane or "group" means any old gathering or collection. These words have very specific meanings in mathematics, and using them for their general-English meaning, in the context of math, is at best confusing and at worst outright misleading.
You can talk about a "complex algorithm", and people will generally understand you mean a complicated one, because the word "algorithm" lends more of a computer-science context. You can say "complex way of doing things" and convey the idea of complicatedness, because "way of doing things" is sufficiently general that it doesn't really imply any particular context at all. But saying "complex math" very much conveys the idea of the use of complex numbers (i.e., numbers with a real part and an imaginary part, either or neither or both of which may be zero for any given number) because the word "math" strongly implies a mathematics context and draws the math-jargon sense of the word "complex" to the forefront. Only someone who doesn't *know* what the word "complex" means in mathematics would think of any other meaning.
It's like saying "hedge fund" and expecting people to get the idea that you're collecting money for shrubberies. Only someone with no idea what a hedge fund is would get that impression.
> What does that even mean? I don't know many people, let alone
> high-schoolers, who have "goals." Do you mean like a list?
Everyone *has* goals, of one sort or another. Most people don't sit down and make a list, and indeed some people don't even really pay attention to what their goals are. But everyone has things they try to accomplish, at least in the short term.
> And what is this "fitting in?"
Ask a sixth-grader.
> Being a CS student and surrounded by men for the majority of my days I've
;-)
> become a little more understanding of the difficulties I can pose when
> I'm not being clear but it's kinda hard to stop doing it all together.
As a man who majored in computer science when I was in school, I think I am on safe ground saying that _on average_ (though there is a lot of variation in individuals), male CS students are going to tend to have an even harder time reading non-verbal cues than the male population in general. It's also true that the male population in at large has a harder time with it, on average, then the female population.
Many of us are *aware* of the fact that we don't really "get" non-verbal communication. But that doesn't make us any better at it. (Some of us have learned to partially compensate by asking clarifying questions. You may encounter this -- a guy asking questions that _seem_ unnecessary and the answers obvious, basically asking you to confirm aspects of what you just said. Please try not to be too annoyed. When this happens, there's an excellent chance that the guy doing this has had bad experiences in the past with people getting mad at him because he thought he understood what they said but missed some nuance he was supposed to have read between the lines.)
So yeah, if you want to be really sure we understand what you're getting at, generally the most surefire way to do that is to double-check that every part of what you're saying was actually expressed in the _words_ that you said. Use words. Words, of course, still can be misunderstood. But on the whole your chances of getting your point across successfully are better with words than with any other method, especially if you are talking to men, and extra-especially if they're also computer geeks.
I suppose it's probably annoying to have to say everything in words all the time. Then again, there's no real need to bother with it except when you actually care about being understood
> I've been told that younger girls tend to [hit people] as a way of
> 'fitting in' with the guys (since their view of guys is that they
> do this to one another and apparently enjoy it).
As a (male) geek, that has kind of always been my view of _jocks_, irrespective of gender. I never had the urge to start hitting people in order to fit in, but then, I never had a crush on an athlete, so what would have been the point? (Fitting in, as an end unto itself, had pretty much ceased being a goal for me by the time I was in high school. I realize that's not true for quite everyone.)
> The error lies in the exploitable system that should be more secure.
Technically, the only way to really secure a system against trojans is to remove the ability to install software that doesn't come with the system from the factory. In other words, throw out the general-purpose computer and buy all hardwired appliances instead.
The problem with that is, programmability is a very useful feature.
CP/M is too bleeding edge. Real computer historians run TOPS-10.