Why wouldn't people want to use a secure operating system? I know you're trying to say that the vulnerabilities only show up once the people try to break the system, and crackers only try to break popular systems. However, I don't believe that it's a tautology that a system has to have vulnerabilities. If they developed a system that actually didn't have vulnerabilities, and actually ran all the necessary software, then wouldn't everybody start using that? I think the only thing holding back Linux is good hardware and software support. The "operating system" including the kernel up to the desktop environment is very good. Only problem is that a lot of hardware doesn't work well, and there isn't a lot applications you can run that will run on windows.
They currently have 11 units online at futureshop. I've been watching it for the past couple weeks, and sometimes they are sold out, but it's not hard to get one if you check a couple times a day.
n any case, those sales numbers are probably too small right now to bring them any significant returns.
I see articles every week saying BluRay is outselling HDDVD, or the other way around, they say that 80% of sales were BluRay, but they don't make any announcements about how many sales there were. I would like to know how many people are actually buying these discs, and I don't want units shipped. I would really like to know the number of people interested in BluRay/HDDVD. As it stands right now, I know absolutely nobody with a BluRay or HDDVD player (including a PS3). I also don't know anybody who is looking into buying one.
I don't know. I get 2.5 TB of bandwidth for $7.95 a month. Which at 4 MB per song ends up being 625000 songs. Which ends up costing $0.000013 per song. Now I know there's a difference in the kind of bandwidth that iTunes pays for and the kind of bandwidth I pay for, but I don't think they'd be paying more than.005 cents to actually send a song out. I'm sure some people on slashdot with more experience running large data centres could come up with a much better estimate than I could. Anyway I think if they were smart, they could easily sell songs for $.25 cents each, and have people thousands of songs, instead of selling them for $0.99, and having having people buy maybe 100 or 200 songs.
Most people I know with a real problem being late are the ones who live an hour and a half from work. It's your choice to take a job that you know is so far away from where you live. I live in Canada, and we get some pretty bad weather. I don't know many people who can't make it to work when the weather is bad. Most people know the weather is coming, and leave 10-15 minutes early. The people who choose to live an hour and a half from their jobs are the only ones who are late. But then again, they are the ones who only manage to make it in at 5 minutes to 9 on a bright and sunny day.
The reason I quit was because they kept on losing movies in the mail. Each time one got lost in the mail, I lost a slot in my account for about a month. And they said that I could be held accountable for movies that didn't show up in my locked mail box (I live in an apartment building). Sorry, but that's just about the worst system i've ever had. I don't care if it costs more to rent from blockbuster. I get the movie I want, when I want, and I don't have to worry about getting charged for movies that never came to me.
Most of the stuff they sell at Walmart is the same stuff they are selling at every other department store. Sure they have their own brands, but most of the time for food, clothing, hygiene products, and other essentials, the walmart brand isn't any worse then what you get from the store brand of any other department store. Sure, the walmart $30 DVD player is pretty low quality, and sucks a lot ( I know, I have one) but what do you expect? When even the worst name brand one costs $60, you have to know it's going to suck. I don't see why people get so bent out of shape about walmart. The stuff that isn't walmart brand is the same stuff the other stores are selling. The stuff that is walmart brand is pretty much the same quality as all the other store brand stuff out there.
I've always thought the studios were braindead. I think most people would buy 2 or 3 CDs a week if they only cost $5. Instead, they make them cost around $15, so I'm lucky if I buy 1 a month. Most CDs aren't worth that much. It's even worse with downloads. Why would you pay $11 for the downloaded album, when you can get the CD for $15? iTunes don't really cost anything to distribute, so they should make it smart, and charge $.25 for a song. Absolutely nobody would pirate music because it just wouldn't be worth their time. People would be buying them like hotcakes, and the studios would be making even more money. But instead they inflate the price to the highest number they think anybody would pay, and make very few sales compared to the number of people who actually would like to have a copy of the song.
I live in Canada, so I have a little to say about this. First of all, the government has noticed a problem with wait times for certain surgeries and has started to do something about it. Also, I know many people who needed surgery, and when they need it they get it. Fast. The things that you typically see long wait times on is things like knee replacement, hip replacement, and other non-life threatening although still important surgeries. Personally, I'd rather have Canada's system, where I know I won't go bankrupt because I end up with some unexpected illness, or even something as common as a premature baby.
I immediately thought of the Milgram experiment when I was reading the summary. People just typed in their password, because they were aware they were participating in a scientific study, and hence thought that they wouldn't be going to any phishing sites.
One they couldn't teach for shit and I lost interest!!
So did everyone else fail too? I find this to be a real cop out. I've had some pretty bad teachers in my day, but I don't think i've ever once blamed the teacher for my failing to do well in a course. When it comes to the point that everyone fails, I think the university starts to look into why. The university heads know it doesn't look good when an entire class fails a course. I've taken lots of courses with bad professors, and non-interesting material, and bad professors who make it even less interesting. But I didn't let that stop me from at least getting a passing grade in the course. In the real world, once you start working, you won't always be working on interesting stuff. Taking boring classes with terrible profs is great preparation for real life.
We took classes with students from all those disciplines. Let me tell you. As far as real world software design goes, and hard courses go, software engineering was at the top. Just because it was engineering, we had to take a lot of maths and sciences that students in CS and other courses did not. We also had to take a bunch of computer science courses, business courses, and other unrelated courses. We were able to do this because we had 6 courses a semester, while all the other disciplines had 5 courses a semester. I guess it seems kind of elitist that we put ourselves at the top, but after seeing the courses that the other disciplines take, and the amount of actual experience they got, I don't think it was a bad judgement. Case in point. Fourth year project. Software engineering did a year long project in a group of 4-6, for a real company which had to fulfill all the design, development, testing, deployment stages of coding. CS Students had a 1 semester "project" where they had a month to think up what they were doing, and then had to have the project completed 2 weeks before exams, giving them about a month and half to do a project. Oh, and they were only in groups of 2. And they didn't have to be real projects, you could just write a little program, none of the other testing/design/deployment stages were needed.
CS is somewhere between Information Technology and Engineering in terms of math
I took software engineering, and I actually find it kind of odd that the software engineers took more math courses than the computer science students. We took Calculus 1 and 2, Algebra (I took an Algebra 2 as an elective), Discrete 1 and 2, Physics (lots of math), Statistics, along with lots of other courses that needed a lot of math. Considering the software engineers are supposed to be more involved in dealing with high level things, while computer scientists are supposed to be working very close to the hardware, developing algorithms for dataprocessing and such, I found it weird that they wouldn't take more math than us.
University of Ottawa. One of the few schools at the time that actually had an accredited software engineering program. I've taken courses with students from all of those disciplines. That is the exact progression of programmes that will prepare you for software development in the real world. Not that computer science isn't as important as software engineering. They are just different programmes, with different goals. Computer science doesn't really aim to train people in the task of software development of large systems.
I took software engineering in university. We used to say, that if you couldn't handle software engineering, you took computer science. If you couldn't handle that, you took Information management systems. If you couldn't handle that, you took Management information systems (yes, there was a differnce), and finally if you couldn't hand that, you took some business administration course.
I think the reason that you wouldn't expect to see "web development" at a university is that it is entirely too narrow in scope. It would be more the kind of thing that you would see at a community college. Not to say that web development isn't a good discipline, but rather that they don't tend to focus on one area, or at least not in the undergrad degrees. They usually try to teach a more broad subject area so that if the next wave comes along, and all of a sudden web development isn't cool anymore than the students who got the degree can adapt to the changing job market. I took software engineering, and work in web development currently (E-Commerce systems on ASP.Net). But I don't know if I'll be working in web development my entire life. I'm happy that i'm prepared, at least somewhat to work in other disciplines, if web development ever takes a nose dive.
Actually, according to wikipedia it isn't. It's the hardest natural material (which I think is what you meant, not metal). There are actually 2 known matericals that are stronger, and probably a third material after the one in this article is added to the article.
Maybe this is the fabled adamantium we have been waiting for. What I want to know, is how likely is it that this stuff can be produced with any kind of industrial volume in the next 10 years.
I don't think that C&C gets enough recognition in the RTS genre. It's my favourite series, and I really don't get why more people don't like like it. My biggest problem with most of the other ones are too many resources. In C&C you had tiberium, and that's all you had to collect. In Warcraft 2, you had wood, gold, and oil, and you need varying amounts of each for building units. Then there's games like starcraft where you have to constantly click around your base figuring out which buidlings you can finally upgrade, and which ones you can start doing research on. On C&C everything could be controlled on the right hand part of your screen. No reason to click on your barracks to build a soldier, or you factory to build a jeep.
Re:It needs more professionalism
on
Why Software is Hard
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I think this is one of the biggest problems with software today. Too many untrained/undertrained people working on too much software that they are not qualified to be working on. The only reason the term software engineering is a joke to most people is that most people who work on software do anything but engineering. It's not just me either. Everybody I talk to works with people who have no idea what they are doing, and should not be working in the software field. Granted, neither I nor any of my friends that work with these people are perfect, but some of the stories i've heard are almost unbelievable. I'm surprised software ends up working at all in most cases.
I bet that's what they thought when they built the first bridges thousands of years ago. Back then there was no mathematical formulas, or even consistent materials for building a bridge. Using a tree of one thickness didn't always mean that a tree of equal thickness would be as strong. Now that we use steel to build bridges, we can rely a lot more on the consistency of its strength. And we also have mathematical formulas to figure out how much steel we need. The problem with software is that we have gone from the stage of tipping a tree over to cross a river to the stage of building the Confederation Bridge, in less than 50 years. Bridge building has had lots of time to mature. Software is still an extremely new field. I'm not sure if things will get more reliable in my lifetime, but I'm sure that eventually we'll get stuff figured out, just like we have for bridges.
And even if the program operated exactly as intended, with no bugs, the software would still not be perfect. People would still find flaws, because they find flaws in the specifications. One such thing could be the 17 shutdown/sleep options on Vista. Sure it was designed that way, but a lot of people see it as too complex, and think it should be designed differently with less options. Even if program never crashes, and always performs all calculations as they were intended, you still have program with lots of room for improvement.
I would also like to point out that the GP was correct. There is no mathematical way to prove a program is correct. Sure in theory it can be done, but we don't build software in theory. We build software in practice, in the real world. In the real world, there is no way to prove a program is correct, so we are left with things that are incorrect in the program.
If they report it as a firing, then you are entitled to EI. All the better for the employee. They don't usually give you EI if you quit. Unless you have good reasons such as excessive stress for leaving. I don't see how it would be a disadvantage to be fired, when if you're leaving on that short notice, you're probably not expecting a good reference. I don't see a problem, unless future employers can look at your record of employment, not sure if they can, and if they can, not sure if many do.
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Why wouldn't people want to use a secure operating system? I know you're trying to say that the vulnerabilities only show up once the people try to break the system, and crackers only try to break popular systems. However, I don't believe that it's a tautology that a system has to have vulnerabilities. If they developed a system that actually didn't have vulnerabilities, and actually ran all the necessary software, then wouldn't everybody start using that? I think the only thing holding back Linux is good hardware and software support. The "operating system" including the kernel up to the desktop environment is very good. Only problem is that a lot of hardware doesn't work well, and there isn't a lot applications you can run that will run on windows.
They currently have 11 units online at futureshop. I've been watching it for the past couple weeks, and sometimes they are sold out, but it's not hard to get one if you check a couple times a day.
It just gives the police another thing to charge them with if they do catch them.
I don't know. I get 2.5 TB of bandwidth for $7.95 a month. Which at 4 MB per song ends up being 625000 songs. Which ends up costing $0.000013 per song. Now I know there's a difference in the kind of bandwidth that iTunes pays for and the kind of bandwidth I pay for, but I don't think they'd be paying more than .005 cents to actually send a song out. I'm sure some people on slashdot with more experience running large data centres could come up with a much better estimate than I could. Anyway I think if they were smart, they could easily sell songs for $.25 cents each, and have people thousands of songs, instead of selling them for $0.99, and having having people buy maybe 100 or 200 songs.
Most people I know with a real problem being late are the ones who live an hour and a half from work. It's your choice to take a job that you know is so far away from where you live. I live in Canada, and we get some pretty bad weather. I don't know many people who can't make it to work when the weather is bad. Most people know the weather is coming, and leave 10-15 minutes early. The people who choose to live an hour and a half from their jobs are the only ones who are late. But then again, they are the ones who only manage to make it in at 5 minutes to 9 on a bright and sunny day.
The reason I quit was because they kept on losing movies in the mail. Each time one got lost in the mail, I lost a slot in my account for about a month. And they said that I could be held accountable for movies that didn't show up in my locked mail box (I live in an apartment building). Sorry, but that's just about the worst system i've ever had. I don't care if it costs more to rent from blockbuster. I get the movie I want, when I want, and I don't have to worry about getting charged for movies that never came to me.
Most of the stuff they sell at Walmart is the same stuff they are selling at every other department store. Sure they have their own brands, but most of the time for food, clothing, hygiene products, and other essentials, the walmart brand isn't any worse then what you get from the store brand of any other department store. Sure, the walmart $30 DVD player is pretty low quality, and sucks a lot ( I know, I have one) but what do you expect? When even the worst name brand one costs $60, you have to know it's going to suck. I don't see why people get so bent out of shape about walmart. The stuff that isn't walmart brand is the same stuff the other stores are selling. The stuff that is walmart brand is pretty much the same quality as all the other store brand stuff out there.
I've always thought the studios were braindead. I think most people would buy 2 or 3 CDs a week if they only cost $5. Instead, they make them cost around $15, so I'm lucky if I buy 1 a month. Most CDs aren't worth that much. It's even worse with downloads. Why would you pay $11 for the downloaded album, when you can get the CD for $15? iTunes don't really cost anything to distribute, so they should make it smart, and charge $.25 for a song. Absolutely nobody would pirate music because it just wouldn't be worth their time. People would be buying them like hotcakes, and the studios would be making even more money. But instead they inflate the price to the highest number they think anybody would pay, and make very few sales compared to the number of people who actually would like to have a copy of the song.
I live in Canada, so I have a little to say about this. First of all, the government has noticed a problem with wait times for certain surgeries and has started to do something about it. Also, I know many people who needed surgery, and when they need it they get it. Fast. The things that you typically see long wait times on is things like knee replacement, hip replacement, and other non-life threatening although still important surgeries. Personally, I'd rather have Canada's system, where I know I won't go bankrupt because I end up with some unexpected illness, or even something as common as a premature baby.
Wouldn't that mean that you would have to testify against yourself? What about the right to remain silent?
I immediately thought of the Milgram experiment when I was reading the summary. People just typed in their password, because they were aware they were participating in a scientific study, and hence thought that they wouldn't be going to any phishing sites.
We took classes with students from all those disciplines. Let me tell you. As far as real world software design goes, and hard courses go, software engineering was at the top. Just because it was engineering, we had to take a lot of maths and sciences that students in CS and other courses did not. We also had to take a bunch of computer science courses, business courses, and other unrelated courses. We were able to do this because we had 6 courses a semester, while all the other disciplines had 5 courses a semester. I guess it seems kind of elitist that we put ourselves at the top, but after seeing the courses that the other disciplines take, and the amount of actual experience they got, I don't think it was a bad judgement. Case in point. Fourth year project. Software engineering did a year long project in a group of 4-6, for a real company which had to fulfill all the design, development, testing, deployment stages of coding. CS Students had a 1 semester "project" where they had a month to think up what they were doing, and then had to have the project completed 2 weeks before exams, giving them about a month and half to do a project. Oh, and they were only in groups of 2. And they didn't have to be real projects, you could just write a little program, none of the other testing/design/deployment stages were needed.
University of Ottawa. One of the few schools at the time that actually had an accredited software engineering program. I've taken courses with students from all of those disciplines. That is the exact progression of programmes that will prepare you for software development in the real world. Not that computer science isn't as important as software engineering. They are just different programmes, with different goals. Computer science doesn't really aim to train people in the task of software development of large systems.
I took software engineering in university. We used to say, that if you couldn't handle software engineering, you took computer science. If you couldn't handle that, you took Information management systems. If you couldn't handle that, you took Management information systems (yes, there was a differnce), and finally if you couldn't hand that, you took some business administration course.
I think the reason that you wouldn't expect to see "web development" at a university is that it is entirely too narrow in scope. It would be more the kind of thing that you would see at a community college. Not to say that web development isn't a good discipline, but rather that they don't tend to focus on one area, or at least not in the undergrad degrees. They usually try to teach a more broad subject area so that if the next wave comes along, and all of a sudden web development isn't cool anymore than the students who got the degree can adapt to the changing job market. I took software engineering, and work in web development currently (E-Commerce systems on ASP.Net). But I don't know if I'll be working in web development my entire life. I'm happy that i'm prepared, at least somewhat to work in other disciplines, if web development ever takes a nose dive.
Actually, according to wikipedia it isn't. It's the hardest natural material (which I think is what you meant, not metal). There are actually 2 known matericals that are stronger, and probably a third material after the one in this article is added to the article.
Maybe this is the fabled adamantium we have been waiting for. What I want to know, is how likely is it that this stuff can be produced with any kind of industrial volume in the next 10 years.
I don't think that C&C gets enough recognition in the RTS genre. It's my favourite series, and I really don't get why more people don't like like it. My biggest problem with most of the other ones are too many resources. In C&C you had tiberium, and that's all you had to collect. In Warcraft 2, you had wood, gold, and oil, and you need varying amounts of each for building units. Then there's games like starcraft where you have to constantly click around your base figuring out which buidlings you can finally upgrade, and which ones you can start doing research on. On C&C everything could be controlled on the right hand part of your screen. No reason to click on your barracks to build a soldier, or you factory to build a jeep.
I think this is one of the biggest problems with software today. Too many untrained/undertrained people working on too much software that they are not qualified to be working on. The only reason the term software engineering is a joke to most people is that most people who work on software do anything but engineering. It's not just me either. Everybody I talk to works with people who have no idea what they are doing, and should not be working in the software field. Granted, neither I nor any of my friends that work with these people are perfect, but some of the stories i've heard are almost unbelievable. I'm surprised software ends up working at all in most cases.
I bet that's what they thought when they built the first bridges thousands of years ago. Back then there was no mathematical formulas, or even consistent materials for building a bridge. Using a tree of one thickness didn't always mean that a tree of equal thickness would be as strong. Now that we use steel to build bridges, we can rely a lot more on the consistency of its strength. And we also have mathematical formulas to figure out how much steel we need. The problem with software is that we have gone from the stage of tipping a tree over to cross a river to the stage of building the Confederation Bridge, in less than 50 years. Bridge building has had lots of time to mature. Software is still an extremely new field. I'm not sure if things will get more reliable in my lifetime, but I'm sure that eventually we'll get stuff figured out, just like we have for bridges.
And even if the program operated exactly as intended, with no bugs, the software would still not be perfect. People would still find flaws, because they find flaws in the specifications. One such thing could be the 17 shutdown/sleep options on Vista. Sure it was designed that way, but a lot of people see it as too complex, and think it should be designed differently with less options. Even if program never crashes, and always performs all calculations as they were intended, you still have program with lots of room for improvement.
I would also like to point out that the GP was correct. There is no mathematical way to prove a program is correct. Sure in theory it can be done, but we don't build software in theory. We build software in practice, in the real world. In the real world, there is no way to prove a program is correct, so we are left with things that are incorrect in the program.
If they report it as a firing, then you are entitled to EI. All the better for the employee. They don't usually give you EI if you quit. Unless you have good reasons such as excessive stress for leaving. I don't see how it would be a disadvantage to be fired, when if you're leaving on that short notice, you're probably not expecting a good reference. I don't see a problem, unless future employers can look at your record of employment, not sure if they can, and if they can, not sure if many do.