At 8 Mozart was just beginning to write music. At 9 this person obtained professional certification from Microsoft. Obtaining a professional certification is something that is done traditionally after years of experience in the field. Ability to pass without any experience indicates that this is not a professional certification (reguardless of it's name), but a competency test.
Professional certifications which hold true to the "disctinction among those with years of experience" are valueable because they are rare, and indicate that the person is more desirable (due to his expertise) than his peers. Examples of this include the Certified Professional Accountant, and the Certified Professional Engineer, and a handful of others. For Computer Administration, you may wish to look into the SAGE certificaitons, or other item available from the ACM / IEEE.
Hybrid certifications incorporate elements of the compentency test to avoid penalizing those who should already hold the certificate but haven't entered the program. They tend to discount lenght of time in the field for equivalent demonstration of experience. CCIE and RHCE come to mind, as they are both exams where you must demonstrate that you can preform certain tasks.
MCSE and many, many others are not much better than compentency tests. They aren't a demonstration of knowledge, they are a demonstration of information. The difference between these two should be clear, but to demonstrate: You can know that TCP is the Transmission Control Protocol without understanding how to use it. Such certificates can be useful as a prerequiste, but often companies don't want information, they want knowledge. Information can be looked up.
Perhaps it's a fundamental flaw in news reporting and how it rarely interacts well with scientific researchers that explain your jaded state.
For a number of years, I worked in biological research, and twice I had the (dis)pleasure of interacting with reporters.
If you tell them there is an observed improvement in 15% of all cases, then it's a cure. If you tell them there is a statistical corelation, then it "causes". If you tell them about the science, they will latch onto the most trivial detail and make it the entire point of your research effort.
It's because most Science doesn't make good news. Good news (at least as it seems to be presented these days) gives the audience the aura of understanding without any actual understanding. In other words, good news asks the audience to learn almost nothing, but be entertained nonetheless.
To prove my point, cancer is the misbehavior of the patient's own cells, yet nearly everyone refers to it as an item that is "caught" like a transmittable disease, and "cured" like a bacterial infection. Non-scientists rarely differentiate between the reasons why our cells misbehave, instead they concentrate on where the misbehaving cells are located. Finally, people tend to totally ignore the effects of known carcinogens because they have been bombared with so much bad news that started off as:
When rats eat a diet of 80% fat, they have a 12% higher risk of contracting a cancer over a 3 year lifespan, 40% of those cases are self-arresting producing only benign tumors.
becomes:
Scientists find that diets high in fat significantly increase the risk of cancer. People who eat pizza, french-fries, and mayonnaise are at risk, and are 60% more likely to die. So it's time to stock up on those veggies.
No mention that it's rats, not people. No mention that it's a lifetime diet of 80% fat. No mention that it only affects 12% of the rat population studied. No mention that 60% of the affected die, leading to an increase of mortailty of only 8% or so.
Sometimes (just like in my example) they do it so badly that they have internal logical errors in their own reporting. 60% more likely to die (as opposed to 100% certainty that we will eventually die).
So be skeptical, but please don't be skeptical of the science, unless you are one of the few people who actually bother to read the publications without the mind-numbing news filter placed on top of it.
Sorry to feed a troll, but just in case a reasonable person reads your post...
Microsoft's questions are the equivalent of riddles. Although a few people my luckily discover the answers in their brain within the few minutes of thier interview, the majority of people have memorized the answer. They make the assumption that you've never heard the question before, and somehow discovered the answer without reflection. This is especially silly when some of the questions they have asked are classic puzzle examples that took years to find the answer.
If one of these puzzles had anything to do with good coding technique, work habits, programming or design skill set, or any other skill the might be useful in development, then it might garner merit. You could determine much more about a person's understanding of computer systems by asking about memory alignment, how to design a "toy" program to solve a "simple" problem, or how would you isolate and correct a problem in existing code you are unfamiliar with, than about how many people can cross a river in an hour provided that there are X, Y, and Z constraints on a boat.
Re:Better not click on the orange fox or the red O
on
Don't Click on the Blue E
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How could this possibly be insightful?
If you don't read a book, website, or other source of information about web browers, then how are you going to learn anything about using a web browser?
Web browsing isn't genetically transferred knowledge, and I don't care how good you are at kicking tires and banging things until they work, if you know exactly where to go and exactly which option to set, you'll do much better than the crowd that is told, "Click on that thing and mess around with it until you get an idea how it works."
I can imagine people not using some incredibly useful features of their browser for years if they have to learn the hard way. Bookmarks, Cookie management, Password management, History browsing, Ad blocking all are items that someone will eventually stumble upon, but why make them wait the months to years to discover them haphazardly?
I read the most condescending, hand-holding, trivializing book on PowerPoint at one time, and I still (despite being a developer) found useful time-saving stuff that I didn't know. Heaven help me if I had to find out all of that information via hunt-and-peck.
Art concerns itself with Asthetics, Beauty, Form and Composition. These elments transcend the medium. You can find art in nearly any subject, as examples of Quality tend to parallel examples of Art.
Now, for those more scientifcally inclined, let's uses the science litmus test to determine once and for all if programming is an Art. To do this we require to Lemmas:
1. The observation that programming is an art form is reproducible.
2. The observation that programming is an art form is nullifiable.
For #1, you get some reproducibility, but it's not consistent (how art like is that code you wrote in a hurry, etc.) Some code seems as elegant as art, and other code seems as inelegant as garbage.
For #2 you cannot determine if programming can declaratively be determined to not be an art form. That is, the assertion that programming is not an art form suffers from exactly the same indefinate support that the argument for progamming as an art form suffers from.
So, scientifcally programming can not be proven an art form, nor can it be disproven as an art form. In such cases, provability becomes irrelevant and it becomes a matter of asthetics (or more bluntly, opinion).
I don't care if it's an art form, but I know a good bit of code when I read it.:)
Although I agree that developers could exert more effort to make their software LUA friendly, note that most developers code to "common" standards. These standards, whether written or culturally imposed, are what people (including clients) expect.
As a developer, if I want to code for LUA, I need to make sure that all of my dependant libraries are LUA friendly. Not a hard job for the likely system libraries, but next to imposbbile for most popular 3rd party libraries. Resons differ from case to case, but I can't sell a solution to the common company if it requires heavy reworking of the host OS. Things get worse much more quickly when considering installation issues and broad platform compatibility.
Now if Microsoft had actually bothered to make security more than an advertisement priority, we would all be forced to start at LUA and then add in various permissions as necessary. Unfortunately, last I checked you can't even tie an executable to launch at startup (basic requirement for always on software) using LUA.
It's not ridiculous when you account for the failure scenario.
It has always been cheaper to buy a single big disk than it is to buy a raid, but do tell us, how do you expect to:
1. Replace the disk while still allowing access to it's contents? 2. Recover your data after your single disk has failed?
Raid has more advantages than just size, and although it's easy to point out that the storage size could be had more cheaply, that's not the same thing as saying that a hardware controller based RAID 5 system could be had more cheaply.
Talk about bending the definition to fit the desired results.
Unemployment should be the percentage of all who are not currently employed. Then you can back off the percentage of those who are not employable, those who have been unemployed for more than 2 years, etc. (if you desire). Then call that the "Adjusted employment index" or something similar.
The problem in defining the rate to be the "cooked" result, is that you hide most of the definition into a formula that hides the orginial figures. Over time, you should expect groups with special interests in the unemployment rate to attempt to change the formula in thier favor, which is exactly why only publishing and promoting the true unemployment rate should be the standard.
I wonder how readable the obscure terse Indian comments will be for the future Chinese that has to debug them.
Even changing experienced developers within the same city and country has an impact. It takes time for someone to learn what, how, and why something is being done. Any develpment project will fail if people just do what they are told. It's a problem with the resolution of the request.
Reminds me of the GS60's I worked on a few years ago. They were expensive enough that trading them in could buy housing for my whole extended family, and NICE housing at that.
And no, it wasn't a client with deep pockets and no common sense. Some software isn't architectured to work nicely on a distributed cluster, and people cannot wait for a solution to be developed. These GS60's paid for themselves in the first few months of deployment because they were used to reduce the over-generation margin of the power companies while still keep an acceptable safety margin for unexpected demand spikes.
Sure, another software architecture could be developed, but who's going to wait the two to three years for a prototype? And in some fields, they expect several years of proven technology before making the switch to "new" and less-tried solutions.
According to a friend of mine in the local Sheriff's Department, it is impossible to drive a car in Texas without breaking at least one traffic law.
At first I thought he was joking (Texas driver's jokes came to mind) but he clarified. "There's so many laws out there, that it's pratically impossible to be in compilance with all of them." Then he started a long description of some of the more esoteric things you can be in violation of.
My favorite was that (if suspected of such) you could have your car lifted by tow truck to inspect the exhaust system for pinhole leaks. Finding such a leak would result in a ticket, and the expense of lifting the car is payed by the driver of the vechile in either case.
I think that there are probably enough laws that it's highly unlikely that people are not in violation most of the time.
10BaseT (mabye even 100BaseT) isn't slamming the bus with interrupts at the rates possible for Gigabit Ethernet. Add enough interrupts to the CPU and you're going to have the CPU running the network interrupt handler at the cost of moving whatever it was working on off of the CPU. Even modest gains can make a big difference in performance.
If there's a group of people believing it would be more cost effective to buy "super" network cards than to rewrite their applications to use a distributed server farm, there will be a market for this. Hardware solutions always come to the rescue for code that won't be redesigned.
Looking on the other side of the fence is fine, but somebody has to lead. Leadership often breaks into factions because of differences in opinions, and it's not clear until many years later which choices were better (if it is possible to decide that at all).
However, considering the accomplishments that Linux has garnered and how they compare to those of Windows, I'd say that no amount of "looking at the competition" would allow Linus to code in an entrenched distribution chain that forces pre-installation on the retailers distributing to people who don't know if or why one is better than the other.
Sure, Microsoft is moving in the right direction; however, I would call it more of a shove than a move. Microsoft's not doing the pushing in this case, which makes it so hard to understand without some context.
Microsoft has become synonymous with bad software. Why else would a company as powerful as Microsoft become so desparate as pull off this latest stunt?
This story includes: 1. Uncooperative Black Hats that somehow manage to cooperate with Microsoft to assist in securing the OS, yet remain blacker than india ink. 2. Wiley engineers that manage to out-think the black hat by applying a token of common sense (the off switch). 3. Engineers that become one with the enemy to make a better product for us. 4. Flat out admittance that Microsoft makes a security challenged product, but will do much better because they've been shown that it can be compromised. 5. Direct quotes from Microsoft insiders, implying that press was standing by. 6. A specific agenda of diffusing the security issue by admitting it, then appealing to Microsoft's software genius as having the solution in hand (now that they know what the problem is).
Basically, the article can be summarized:
Microsoft didn't know that Windows XP has problems, but now that someone has shown them, they'll get right on fixing those issues.
Which is nearly the same spin we've been hearing since they first added networking to Win98.
Yes, we are human, but then again, not all engineers are equal.
I once worked for a company that hired an outside consultant to ask how they could get their product into a "better place". It was nasty code that contained snippets of Fortran, C, C++, and three other scripting languages. Some of the newer portions were being developed in JAVA with a database as the "inter-system" communication protocol. It compiled on one specific version of UNIX and threw memory alignment errors.
The consultant did an excellent job, and he really should be commended for identifying key weaknesses in the product; however, when he presented his findings, most of the managers grew visibly upset, and a few raised their voices (but I wouldn't call it yelling). People defend their collections of bad ideas, and rationalize that it's much more costly to fix problems than to just live with them a little longer.
I enjoyed my time there, but I moved on because I couldn't stand to see good ideas replaced with bad.
Next they will implement a mouse that handles all of it's navigation through the touchpad. That way you wouldn't need to move the thing around on your desk.
And don't even start with the rpm / apt crowd. It seems that every question there is answered using the same template:
Well in all you have to do is . It's really superior in every way, so why don't you switch?
As if you really want to switch package managers, or use code to wrap the one your distro prefers with foreign command support. Of course, these people then follow up with, "That's why I use distro X, because I don't waste time doing what you are doing!"
Most touch pads can interpert a tap as a click. I doubt that this one will lack that ability, especially since the ability is implmeneted on the software side.
And the elite still have more money than they need. Even if they do work, it is still not a requirement.
The reason parents push thier kids into college is status. Everyone wants something a bit better for thier children, and college is another symbol of status that now can be afforded to the middle classes.
Eventually, this changed the meaning of a college education. Before it was a differentiator, something that indicated you were superior (in education). Now, mass college education implies that a college education is the norm, and those lacking one should be treated as inferior.
Some day, a college education will hold similar value to a high school education of old. There are already indicators of this happening (cultural change is a slow process). Just look at the numerous advertisements for employees with a "Degree", but no indication of which degree is desired.
This means that the next differentiator will likely become graduate degrees; however, eventually the middle class needs to start working, so there are limits on the time they can afford to spend at a brick and mortar schools.
Slashdot Mirror
Even Mozart's work improved with age.
At 8 Mozart was just beginning to write music. At 9 this person obtained professional certification from Microsoft. Obtaining a professional certification is something that is done traditionally after years of experience in the field. Ability to pass without any experience indicates that this is not a professional certification (reguardless of it's name), but a competency test.
Professional certifications which hold true to the "disctinction among those with years of experience" are valueable because they are rare, and indicate that the person is more desirable (due to his expertise) than his peers. Examples of this include the Certified Professional Accountant, and the Certified Professional Engineer, and a handful of others. For Computer Administration, you may wish to look into the SAGE certificaitons, or other item available from the ACM / IEEE.
Hybrid certifications incorporate elements of the compentency test to avoid penalizing those who should already hold the certificate but haven't entered the program. They tend to discount lenght of time in the field for equivalent demonstration of experience. CCIE and RHCE come to mind, as they are both exams where you must demonstrate that you can preform certain tasks.
MCSE and many, many others are not much better than compentency tests. They aren't a demonstration of knowledge, they are a demonstration of information. The difference between these two should be clear, but to demonstrate: You can know that TCP is the Transmission Control Protocol without understanding how to use it. Such certificates can be useful as a prerequiste, but often companies don't want information, they want knowledge. Information can be looked up.
I think "almost no side effects" in this case is about the equivalent effect of taking sugar pills.
Well, a lot of sugar pills.
About 890,450 sugar pills (appx. 80 lbs 7 oz), to be exact.
Taken rapidly, with no water.
Over the span of approximately 3 minutes 12 seconds.
It's not pretty, sort of like an explosion from within.
Perhaps it's a fundamental flaw in news reporting and how it rarely interacts well with scientific researchers that explain your jaded state.
For a number of years, I worked in biological research, and twice I had the (dis)pleasure of interacting with reporters.
If you tell them there is an observed improvement in 15% of all cases, then it's a cure. If you tell them there is a statistical corelation, then it "causes". If you tell them about the science, they will latch onto the most trivial detail and make it the entire point of your research effort.
It's because most Science doesn't make good news. Good news (at least as it seems to be presented these days) gives the audience the aura of understanding without any actual understanding. In other words, good news asks the audience to learn almost nothing, but be entertained nonetheless.
To prove my point, cancer is the misbehavior of the patient's own cells, yet nearly everyone refers to it as an item that is "caught" like a transmittable disease, and "cured" like a bacterial infection. Non-scientists rarely differentiate between the reasons why our cells misbehave, instead they concentrate on where the misbehaving cells are located. Finally, people tend to totally ignore the effects of known carcinogens because they have been bombared with so much bad news that started off as:
When rats eat a diet of 80% fat, they have a 12% higher risk of contracting a cancer over a 3 year lifespan, 40% of those cases are self-arresting producing only benign tumors.
becomes:
Scientists find that diets high in fat significantly increase the risk of cancer. People who eat pizza, french-fries, and mayonnaise are at risk, and are 60% more likely to die. So it's time to stock up on those veggies.
No mention that it's rats, not people. No mention that it's a lifetime diet of 80% fat. No mention that it only affects 12% of the rat population studied. No mention that 60% of the affected die, leading to an increase of mortailty of only 8% or so.
Sometimes (just like in my example) they do it so badly that they have internal logical errors in their own reporting. 60% more likely to die (as opposed to 100% certainty that we will eventually die).
So be skeptical, but please don't be skeptical of the science, unless you are one of the few people who actually bother to read the publications without the mind-numbing news filter placed on top of it.
Sorry to feed a troll, but just in case a reasonable person reads your post...
Microsoft's questions are the equivalent of riddles. Although a few people my luckily discover the answers in their brain within the few minutes of thier interview, the majority of people have memorized the answer. They make the assumption that you've never heard the question before, and somehow discovered the answer without reflection. This is especially silly when some of the questions they have asked are classic puzzle examples that took years to find the answer.
If one of these puzzles had anything to do with good coding technique, work habits, programming or design skill set, or any other skill the might be useful in development, then it might garner merit. You could determine much more about a person's understanding of computer systems by asking about memory alignment, how to design a "toy" program to solve a "simple" problem, or how would you isolate and correct a problem in existing code you are unfamiliar with, than about how many people can cross a river in an hour provided that there are X, Y, and Z constraints on a boat.
How could this possibly be insightful?
If you don't read a book, website, or other source of information about web browers, then how are you going to learn anything about using a web browser?
Web browsing isn't genetically transferred knowledge, and I don't care how good you are at kicking tires and banging things until they work, if you know exactly where to go and exactly which option to set, you'll do much better than the crowd that is told, "Click on that thing and mess around with it until you get an idea how it works."
I can imagine people not using some incredibly useful features of their browser for years if they have to learn the hard way. Bookmarks, Cookie management, Password management, History browsing, Ad blocking all are items that someone will eventually stumble upon, but why make them wait the months to years to discover them haphazardly?
I read the most condescending, hand-holding, trivializing book on PowerPoint at one time, and I still (despite being a developer) found useful time-saving stuff that I didn't know. Heaven help me if I had to find out all of that information via hunt-and-peck.
Only Geroge's brain is encased in carbonite.
Art concerns itself with Asthetics, Beauty, Form and Composition. These elments transcend the medium. You can find art in nearly any subject, as examples of Quality tend to parallel examples of Art.
:)
Now, for those more scientifcally inclined, let's uses the science litmus test to determine once and for all if programming is an Art. To do this we require to Lemmas:
1. The observation that programming is an art form is reproducible.
2. The observation that programming is an art form is nullifiable.
For #1, you get some reproducibility, but it's not consistent (how art like is that code you wrote in a hurry, etc.) Some code seems as elegant as art, and other code seems as inelegant as garbage.
For #2 you cannot determine if programming can declaratively be determined to not be an art form. That is, the assertion that programming is not an art form suffers from exactly the same indefinate support that the argument for progamming as an art form suffers from.
So, scientifcally programming can not be proven an art form, nor can it be disproven as an art form. In such cases, provability becomes irrelevant and it becomes a matter of asthetics (or more bluntly, opinion).
I don't care if it's an art form, but I know a good bit of code when I read it.
Although I agree that developers could exert more effort to make their software LUA friendly, note that most developers code to "common" standards. These standards, whether written or culturally imposed, are what people (including clients) expect.
As a developer, if I want to code for LUA, I need to make sure that all of my dependant libraries are LUA friendly. Not a hard job for the likely system libraries, but next to imposbbile for most popular 3rd party libraries. Resons differ from case to case, but I can't sell a solution to the common company if it requires heavy reworking of the host OS. Things get worse much more quickly when considering installation issues and broad platform compatibility.
Now if Microsoft had actually bothered to make security more than an advertisement priority, we would all be forced to start at LUA and then add in various permissions as necessary. Unfortunately, last I checked you can't even tie an executable to launch at startup (basic requirement for always on software) using LUA.
It's not ridiculous when you account for the failure scenario.
It has always been cheaper to buy a single big disk than it is to buy a raid, but do tell us, how do you expect to:
1. Replace the disk while still allowing access to it's contents?
2. Recover your data after your single disk has failed?
Raid has more advantages than just size, and although it's easy to point out that the storage size could be had more cheaply, that's not the same thing as saying that a hardware controller based RAID 5 system could be had more cheaply.
Talk about bending the definition to fit the desired results.
Unemployment should be the percentage of all who are not currently employed. Then you can back off the percentage of those who are not employable, those who have been unemployed for more than 2 years, etc. (if you desire). Then call that the "Adjusted employment index" or something similar.
The problem in defining the rate to be the "cooked" result, is that you hide most of the definition into a formula that hides the orginial figures. Over time, you should expect groups with special interests in the unemployment rate to attempt to change the formula in thier favor, which is exactly why only publishing and promoting the true unemployment rate should be the standard.
That would improve my ski-boxing, like, immensely!
So many had pointed out the transistor that I decided to dig a bit deeper. If it were an all-inclusive list. I'd still be writing it today!
I wonder how readable the obscure terse Indian comments will be for the future Chinese that has to debug them.
Even changing experienced developers within the same city and country has an impact. It takes time for someone to learn what, how, and why something is being done. Any develpment project will fail if people just do what they are told. It's a problem with the resolution of the request.
Well, if it came to buying 4 of these network cards, or rewriting pieces of code to fit the new load balancing architecture, I'd buy the cards.
$2000 is nothing compared to extended development costs.
Not everything can be load balanced, and load balancing can incur more overhead if the protocol you are considering is a bad match for load balancing.
You can't load balance a database transaction, a backup file, or a streaming video feed. Don't assume that it's all HTTP / only HTTP.
Reminds me of the GS60's I worked on a few years ago. They were expensive enough that trading them in could buy housing for my whole extended family, and NICE housing at that.
And no, it wasn't a client with deep pockets and no common sense. Some software isn't architectured to work nicely on a distributed cluster, and people cannot wait for a solution to be developed. These GS60's paid for themselves in the first few months of deployment because they were used to reduce the over-generation margin of the power companies while still keep an acceptable safety margin for unexpected demand spikes.
Sure, another software architecture could be developed, but who's going to wait the two to three years for a prototype? And in some fields, they expect several years of proven technology before making the switch to "new" and less-tried solutions.
Good luck meeting your representative in person without an appointment over the next 48 hours.
According to a friend of mine in the local Sheriff's Department, it is impossible to drive a car in Texas without breaking at least one traffic law.
At first I thought he was joking (Texas driver's jokes came to mind) but he clarified. "There's so many laws out there, that it's pratically impossible to be in compilance with all of them." Then he started a long description of some of the more esoteric things you can be in violation of.
My favorite was that (if suspected of such) you could have your car lifted by tow truck to inspect the exhaust system for pinhole leaks. Finding such a leak would result in a ticket, and the expense of lifting the car is payed by the driver of the vechile in either case.
I think that there are probably enough laws that it's highly unlikely that people are not in violation most of the time.
The biggest thing that has changed is the speed.
10BaseT (mabye even 100BaseT) isn't slamming the bus with interrupts at the rates possible for Gigabit Ethernet. Add enough interrupts to the CPU and you're going to have the CPU running the network interrupt handler at the cost of moving whatever it was working on off of the CPU. Even modest gains can make a big difference in performance.
If there's a group of people believing it would be more cost effective to buy "super" network cards than to rewrite their applications to use a distributed server farm, there will be a market for this. Hardware solutions always come to the rescue for code that won't be redesigned.
There have to be best pratices to follow.
Looking on the other side of the fence is fine, but somebody has to lead. Leadership often breaks into factions because of differences in opinions, and it's not clear until many years later which choices were better (if it is possible to decide that at all).
However, considering the accomplishments that Linux has garnered and how they compare to those of Windows, I'd say that no amount of "looking at the competition" would allow Linus to code in an entrenched distribution chain that forces pre-installation on the retailers distributing to people who don't know if or why one is better than the other.
Sure, Microsoft is moving in the right direction; however, I would call it more of a shove than a move. Microsoft's not doing the pushing in this case, which makes it so hard to understand without some context.
Microsoft has become synonymous with bad software. Why else would a company as powerful as Microsoft become so desparate as pull off this latest stunt?
This story includes:
1. Uncooperative Black Hats that somehow manage to cooperate with Microsoft to assist in securing the OS, yet remain blacker than india ink.
2. Wiley engineers that manage to out-think the black hat by applying a token of common sense (the off switch).
3. Engineers that become one with the enemy to make a better product for us.
4. Flat out admittance that Microsoft makes a security challenged product, but will do much better because they've been shown that it can be compromised.
5. Direct quotes from Microsoft insiders, implying that press was standing by.
6. A specific agenda of diffusing the security issue by admitting it, then appealing to Microsoft's software genius as having the solution in hand (now that they know what the problem is).
Basically, the article can be summarized:
Microsoft didn't know that Windows XP has problems, but now that someone has shown them, they'll get right on fixing those issues.
Which is nearly the same spin we've been hearing since they first added networking to Win98.
Yes, we are human, but then again, not all engineers are equal.
I once worked for a company that hired an outside consultant to ask how they could get their product into a "better place". It was nasty code that contained snippets of Fortran, C, C++, and three other scripting languages. Some of the newer portions were being developed in JAVA with a database as the "inter-system" communication protocol. It compiled on one specific version of UNIX and threw memory alignment errors.
The consultant did an excellent job, and he really should be commended for identifying key weaknesses in the product; however, when he presented his findings, most of the managers grew visibly upset, and a few raised their voices (but I wouldn't call it yelling). People defend their collections of bad ideas, and rationalize that it's much more costly to fix problems than to just live with them a little longer.
I enjoyed my time there, but I moved on because I couldn't stand to see good ideas replaced with bad.
Next they will implement a mouse that handles all of it's navigation through the touchpad. That way you wouldn't need to move the thing around on your desk.
And don't even start with the rpm / apt crowd. It seems that every question there is answered using the same template:
Well in all you have to do is . It's really superior in every way, so why don't you switch?
As if you really want to switch package managers, or use code to wrap the one your distro prefers with foreign command support. Of course, these people then follow up with, "That's why I use distro X, because I don't waste time doing what you are doing!"
Most touch pads can interpert a tap as a click. I doubt that this one will lack that ability, especially since the ability is implmeneted on the software side.
And the elite still have more money than they need. Even if they do work, it is still not a requirement.
The reason parents push thier kids into college is status. Everyone wants something a bit better for thier children, and college is another symbol of status that now can be afforded to the middle classes.
Eventually, this changed the meaning of a college education. Before it was a differentiator, something that indicated you were superior (in education). Now, mass college education implies that a college education is the norm, and those lacking one should be treated as inferior.
Some day, a college education will hold similar value to a high school education of old. There are already indicators of this happening (cultural change is a slow process). Just look at the numerous advertisements for employees with a "Degree", but no indication of which degree is desired.
This means that the next differentiator will likely become graduate degrees; however, eventually the middle class needs to start working, so there are limits on the time they can afford to spend at a brick and mortar schools.