Not quite the same thing: my undergrad was physics, and I did non-CS things for a good many years. I got my first dev job on the strength of a 3D package I wrote on my own, and the fact that no other Mac guys could be found (this was quite a while ago.) Now I have no problem getting work, but the first one is the hardest.
The main advantage to a formal CS education: sounding like a CS guy. I don't instinctively know all the types of sorts or their O()'s (I think of it as being upfront about having to look stuff up), the names of patterns (almost never need to), or UML (never needed it yet except for HR.) That sort of thing will keep you out of google, but not out of a job.
Being able to interview is by far the most important thing: you'll eventually get past HR somewhere, and then you have to impress someone who knows what they're talking about. We've hired some awful losers (didn't have the gift!) because they could sell themselves. Pursue contract work: the bar is lower, the pay is much better than the average postdoc, and it looks almost as good on a resume. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, you should have no problems.
The comparison to submarine warfare is apt: it's very much like a very slow and deliberate team video game (a very old school one, though), where the enemy is never real (in the sense of an aerial battle), it's just a number on a computer display or a mark on a sheet of chart paper.
My two entries are: The Forever War, a mention of the ship's computer playing mathematical games with the enemy's ship's computer (IIRC; at work.) and Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy: the description of a battle between a freighter and a raider is probably going to be very true to life. It' all about intense pressure as the enemy closes to weapons range (nondestructive; they're slavers) and the freighter scrambles to target them with a nice big nuke (they not after plunder.)
This "feature" sucks so horrendously in Adobe Reader that I'd drop the whole program if it couldn't be turned off. (disclaimer: I mostly use Foxit and Preview anyway.)
It's somewhat usable for reading on an iPhone: easier than scrolling and trying to keep track of the position, but reading a (sequential) book is very different from reading a webpage where one tends to hop around.
Go for it, guys, but make it very easy to disable completely and permanently.
Providing the source is a pretty cynical way to escape liability. Who is going to examine the code? The user who just bought it? Maybe if that user is NASA.
How many accountants can check the code in a new spreadsheet program, or pay someone else to do it (and assume they'll do a better job than whoever wrote it in the first place.) Lawyers won't, if the very existence of the source code means they can't sue anyway.
For 99.9% of users those files will be useless, and since there is no requirement for how they're released (copyleft, etc), the Free Software guys won't be happy either.
The net effect is to disallow EULA liability disclaimers rather than allowing customers to ask (and pay) for high reliability if they need it. If no one wants to offer such a feature, does it make sense to force them if it means that a useful product has to be removed from the market?
This will eradicate any small companies that manage to survive the new US patent laws, or force them to open their sources (which is ethically bad by definition.) Even if sources are only provided under NDA as part of a license, it will make the software cost more with no benefit for 99% of users.
You still have to have the invention, you just don't have to be the inventor.
In other words, if someone invents something and can't afford to patent it, but tries to sell it, someone who can afford a patent will grab a copy, patent it, and sue the inventor for infringing his own invention. The patent is invalid of course (prior art), but if the inventor didn't have tens of thousands of dollars to file first he probably doesn't have hundreds of thousands to challenge.
Actually, if the inventor does manage to invalidate the pirate patent I'm not sure if he can refile, so the best possible outcome might be the patent being permanently lost.
Check out http://www.laserpowersystems.com/ - that's such a classic snake oil company that I can't believe anyone ever took them seriously. (In fairness to the author, he clearly knows so little about technology that it might have looked real; on the other hand, if the rambling and disconnected ravings on that web site didn't tip him off, he's a natural mark for Nigerian scammers, and doesn't wardsauto.com do any reality checking before they publish? They made themselves look like idiots too.)
Bachelors degrees aren't supposed to be about learning to do a job. That's what vocational schools are for, and they generally do a much better job - except with HR.
There's a reason for that: having a degree demonstrates that you can stick to a process for four years, including all the classes you don't like. That is particularly important to the military, which requires all officers to have a college degree (though it can be in English literature or ancient Greek.) It also helps if everybody gets the same jokes, etc - a lot of bad puns come from Shakespeare, and that's the sort of thing you learn in a 4 year college.
Another consideration: a degree is a valuable thing, both for employment and bragging rights, even if you don't really care about learning. Colleges don't require a certain number of credits to be sure you're smart, they require a certain amount of money, but it sounds a lot nicer if they don't say it that way. There is absolutely no motivation for a school to devalue its degree by giving you what you want.
Incidentally, an MS is pretty much what you describe: about the same as taking all your major classes over again (at a higher level, of course) with little or no extraneous extras. Now do you understand why they're so sticky about having a BS first?
I'm an old school developer (1975, anyone?) who still views code as an art rather than a bean-countable process and has no interest whatever in management (job security through non-productivity.) The endless processes I have to deal with nowadays do suck most of the joy out, and despite all the typos I've seen caught by code reviews, I'm not convinced they make better software. What they do is:
- Make managers, who have never known what we do anyway, happy by giving them numbers to look at. Their ultimate (and hopefully futile) goal is to systematize development to the point that monkeys can do it. Then programmers will be screwed just like teachers and firefighters are now. - Make old programmers who saw the way things were going and (unlike me) converted into process inventors while their colleagues were being outsourced, secure and/or tenured.
I'm behind the power curve (none of my startups made me rich) but I still enjoy writing code; my hope is that, by the time I get to stop pumping out crap for corporations (e.g., my dogwalking business takes off), that I still like writing code.
Yeah, they're solving the wrong problem again. I would conceivably use something like this for very small programs where the overhead is greater than the code involved and I don't use it often enough to learn the code thoroughly.
Actually, successful Visual Languages go something like:
Create concept, a new language designed for workplace automation or the like.
Create great (looking) visual IDE that stores all files in text format only. The visual designer doesn't have to work well, but files must be completely accessible using Notepad et al and obsessively documented by engineers.
Sell the visual IDE to managers who think their people will be uber productive when they can write their own automation.
The managers figure out that their people can't write useful programs, by dropping icons or any other way. In desperation, they grab people from the ITdepartment, eventually getting a Real Programmer.
The Programmer hears "visual designer" and shudders. He starts tediously dragging and dropping little programs. Finally he realizes that he can write programs directly in Notepad. How long this takes depends on his experience level.
Productivity goes up. Customers become dependent on the language and pay for upgrades. A secondary market appears for programs. The language becomes an industry standard.
(Everyone) Profit!
I did some work years ago with a product called iShell. It had a gorgeous visual programming UI, but the underlying code was barely human readable, let alone writable, and extensions used a multilanguage, baroque (n) build system that was truly torture (given zero documentation.) The forums were full of users who still couldn't program, and programmers (who could use Director's scripting language with ease) were hobbled by the lack of one.
I hate to just say "This is impossible, forget it and go on." I'd love to see it happen, but I don't think it ever will until we have near human level AI that can replace a human coder. Programming is not about dragging pretty blocks around, it's about visualizing and then creating a logical process that accomplishes something. Programmers have the (inborn, I believe) ability to do this; nonprogrammers don't, and no amount of training or simplified tools makes the slightest difference.
I was in college with them, the ones who never got it and repeatedly asked the sort of questions that made it obvious they wouldn't understand the answers. I've had to work with a few, too. It's pretty easy to spot, after a while.
The problem is that we're attacking the wrong problem, and the result so far has been tools that laymen still can't use and programmers hate because the pretty UI's just slow them down. That describes pretty much any system that makes you click and type stuff into little boxes instead of writing it in a text file.
I don't have that big a problem with taxing people over $200K. What worries me is that enacting any tax makes it a lot easier to add more.
I lived in Tennessee once, where the state constitution says no income tax, period. The government howled constantly about how badly they needed one, but no constitutional amendment seemed to get passed (and reelection was a problem for proponents.) The Attorney General stated publicly that he thought he could beat the constitution in court, but the governor declined to let him try. No one believed that a "nominal" one or two percent tax would stay nominal, once our constitutional protection was gone.
At the time the justification was "saving" TennCare (state run insurance that had just gone broke; I made too much to use it, not enough to buy my own anywhere.) I would have been highly annoyed to work and pay taxes to provide free insurance to others, while my family stayed one major illness from bankruptcy (maybe we could have gotten TennCare then.)
Another difficulty for the TN Taxers was North Carolina next door: very high taxes (for the southeast, anyway ; ) ), more and higher fees on just about everything (slightly lower sales tax, though), no TennCare, and just as big a budget crisis.
I've been saying for a while that the US will never land on the moon again. This doesn't change anything, it's happening because the US no longer has the national will to commit to anything that big. No foreseeable amount of technology is going to change that, even if it solved all the other problems we have (that are more pressing.)
I see the 60's as pretty much the high point of modern civilization Project Apollo happened to come along at the only time in human history thus far when both technology and society were capable of it, and society started to seriously decline about that time.
China may make it to the moon; I doubt anyone is going to Mars, at least not until we've been through a new dark age and (hopefully) renaissance.
I have tremendous respect for Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes): he realized that he was running out of new stuff to say and quit. Peanuts (for example) took the opposite approach, traded on its fame, and turned into very sad and boring garbage for many years.
I read Mad cover to cover in the 60's and early 70's, at which point it turned into crap for the amusement of semiliterate 11 year olds. I can't blame them for wanting to stay in business, though I wish they'd had the integrity to accept a dignified end when society deteriorated too far to appreciate what Mad was. I feel deprived of the chance to mourn for an old friend who languished for years in a nursing home rather than going out with dignity, continence, and decent hygiene.
It's remotely possibly that the government has information about alien visits, possibly even artifacts / bodies (that would likely have suicided when they saw the savages closing in) but that's a far cry from Contact. Consider:
- If aliens were hostile, we'd all know about it.
- If they weren't (i.e., the "enlightened" sort) they wouldn't have anything to do with any current Earth government. Aside from the Prime Directive (or whatever you call it), most governments represent the absolute worst of humanity and as such wouldn't have much to say to a civilized race.
I sympathize with the attitude that one has more "control" by doing everything from scratch, but I don't have the luxury of a huge team or reasonable deadlines. I get burned regularly by using third party code, paid for or not, but given the source code it can usually be made to work, or scrapped early if it clearly won't. One non-developer exec bought us a bunch of code from some third world outfit: we junked it all and rewrote when we realized that would be faster than fixing it.
Everyone I know uses http://codeproject.com/, especially for oddball MFC controls. It's usually necessary to do significant debugging and extending, but you get ready-to-go starter code with most of the skanky MFC issues and gotchas already handled, plus usually a demo project, for less effort than writing from scratch.
One coworker was an advocate of third party ActiveX controls: after one disaster too many I finally ActiveX entirely and we've almost completely replaced what we had. The issue, aside from extreme ugliness and painfulness to use, is that most commercial ActiveX is closed or unusable source, and is at least as incomplete/buggy as CodeProject source code.
Unlike most/. readers, I remember sending paper letters. When I first got access to email (mid 90's) I didn't use it much because I had no one to communicate with.
I now use email for everything. Spam is annoying but I have a handle on it and the value of email more than outweighs the extra effort. I regret paper letters, but I have no one to send one to. I get laughed at occasionally because I proofread email and rarely send one with misspellings or sloppy writing.
I loathe and despise IM: I'm forced to leave it running as a price of telecommuting, but I actively hate having to stop what I'm doing to receive a message and I never use it if I can possibly avoid it, except with young nimrods who don't answer email promptly.
I finally did get the cheapest cell phone I could find, they're just too useful not to have. My wife and I use maybe two hundred minutes per month; she has texting disabled, so I receive them for both of us. I've never learned to send one from the phone, though, I use gizmosms.com when I absolutely must.
I don't feel like a fossil yet: I just use what I enjoy using. I take pride in writing emails with complete sentences; I don't enjoy (even when I have the time) having "real time" conversations that actually waste huge amounts of time waiting for some cretin to IM "LOL" or;-) .
Like most people over 30, I remember a past that, in spite of all the gadgets we have now, was a better place than the brainless, illiterate, ADD-inspired constant entertainment "future" we're flying towards.
I had never heard of this one, sounded interesting... then I went to the movie site and found a synopsis.
Come on guys, does every SF movie have to be so utterly silly and stupid? Granted, written SF (actually, written anything) has pretty well died in the last few decades, but there's still lots of good stuff to make movies from, if anyone would bother. All the way out special effects and artistry don't change the fact that the "science" is pre-kindergarten level (at best) and the story (assuming it's at the level of previous atrocities like Supernova or that... thing about bombing the center of the Earth) is mostly an excuse to showcase boobs and explosions that hopefully distract from the plot and dialog.
You know how much I'd like having just one new movie to look forward to? You know how embarrassing it is when the best you can hope for is Star Trek XXX or Star Wars: Attack of the One Dimensional Hero (either of which would beat this, from the sound of it.)
A warning about Kensington input devices
on
Mouse or Trackball?
·
· Score: 1
Every single Kensington mouse/trackball I've ever owned (admittedly, I haven't in a while, and don't plan to again) has had problems with its buttons (10 mouse clicks for the price of 1 / random dropouts while dragging.) They were nice about it and replaced several mice with no argument (none of the replacements lasted long either.)
The $90 trackball (I loved it too) lasted a week or two past its warranty date before dying. Be prepared! If the buttons start getting even slightly wonky, don't wait to get another.
Considering that the vast, vast majority of gcc users are in fact USERS, not contributors, what real difference does it make?
Given that they *do* use gcc, it's even possible that the majority actually cares what the license is (I'm an outspoken exception), but if every single contributor outside the core team decided to protest by keeping patches private, I can't see it making much difference in the grand scheme of things.
Virtualizing the cheap versions is a big problem for MS.
Anyone who wants to virtualize obviously has another OS they like. The cheap Vista versions limit features to the point of uselessness: they're there to be sold to OEM's cheap, to let MS advertise a low entry price, and to encourage users to upgrade.
Virtualizing Vista Home would let me have a "real" copy to play with and test stuff on, with no limitation since I have the (almost always better) facilities of another OS available. No motivation to upgrade -> no reason for Vista Home to exist. For my purposes Vista is easy enough to install that there's no real need even to activate it, just don't keep any important data there.
The fact that they care at all about this suggests that there are a lot of people who might be interested in virtualizing Vista. Maybe because they want/need to play with it but realize it's nowhere near ready to be a primary OS yet?
I concede that given our current understanding of things, it is impossible to predict whether it will ever be possible to visit another star. We don't know how much we don't know: while warp drive, for example, appears to "work" on paper, we have no idea how to start to determine whether building a working model is even potentially possible. The problem with articles like these is the failure of most scientists to separate fact from fancy from their own beliefs. I am reminded of an article about Star Trek's Transporter: a long dissertation about converting matter and energy and beaming through space, followed by a seriously-intended conclusion that it was impossible because it was fundamentally impossible to resolve individual molecules from orbit, therefore they couldn't be "scanned" successfully. Science-indistinguishable-from-magic has been popping up for millenia; trying to extrapolate beyond the point where the missing pieces make describing the end result impossible leads to hilarity.
Colonizing is a very different thing from visiting: colonization implies moving a significant number of existing people from one place to another. Technologically we could probably reach the Moon and establish a presence there, but the condition (and current headlong decline) of civilization on Earth makes such a large undertaking unlikely, and visiting Mars virtually inconceivable. The necessary changes to society dwarf the technological advances needed, and invalidate any prediction of them.
Carrying frozen cells and growing colonists on arrival might technically be considered "colonization," but not something most people will get excited about. At best, we will have produced indigenous life that looks more or less like us and could probably interbreed for a while (if we could get to them.) That might be worthwhile from the standpoint of species security, depending on one's definition of "species."
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite the same thing: my undergrad was physics, and I did non-CS things for a good many years. I got my first dev job on the strength of a 3D package I wrote on my own, and the fact that no other Mac guys could be found (this was quite a while ago.) Now I have no problem getting work, but the first one is the hardest.
The main advantage to a formal CS education: sounding like a CS guy. I don't instinctively know all the types of sorts or their O()'s (I think of it as being upfront about having to look stuff up), the names of patterns (almost never need to), or UML (never needed it yet except for HR.) That sort of thing will keep you out of google, but not out of a job.
Being able to interview is by far the most important thing: you'll eventually get past HR somewhere, and then you have to impress someone who knows what they're talking about. We've hired some awful losers (didn't have the gift!) because they could sell themselves. Pursue contract work: the bar is lower, the pay is much better than the average postdoc, and it looks almost as good on a resume. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, you should have no problems.
I wonder when Dell will announce the first computer with a HEMI.
The comparison to submarine warfare is apt: it's very much like a very slow and deliberate team video game (a very old school one, though), where the enemy is never real (in the sense of an aerial battle), it's just a number on a computer display or a mark on a sheet of chart paper.
My two entries are:
The Forever War, a mention of the ship's computer playing mathematical games with the enemy's ship's computer (IIRC; at work.)
and
Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy: the description of a battle between a freighter and a raider is probably going to be very true to life. It' all about intense pressure as the enemy closes to weapons range (nondestructive; they're slavers) and the freighter scrambles to target them with a nice big nuke (they not after plunder.)
This "feature" sucks so horrendously in Adobe Reader that I'd drop the whole program if it couldn't be turned off. (disclaimer: I mostly use Foxit and Preview anyway.)
It's somewhat usable for reading on an iPhone: easier than scrolling and trying to keep track of the position, but reading a (sequential) book is very different from reading a webpage where one tends to hop around.
Go for it, guys, but make it very easy to disable completely and permanently.
it's Guy Fawkes! Again!
Providing the source is a pretty cynical way to escape liability. Who is going to examine the code? The user who just bought it? Maybe if that user is NASA.
How many accountants can check the code in a new spreadsheet program, or pay someone else to do it (and assume they'll do a better job than whoever wrote it in the first place.) Lawyers won't, if the very existence of the source code means they can't sue anyway.
For 99.9% of users those files will be useless, and since there is no requirement for how they're released (copyleft, etc), the Free Software guys won't be happy either.
The net effect is to disallow EULA liability disclaimers rather than allowing customers to ask (and pay) for high reliability if they need it. If no one wants to offer such a feature, does it make sense to force them if it means that a useful product has to be removed from the market?
This will eradicate any small companies that manage to survive the new US patent laws, or force them to open their sources (which is ethically bad by definition.) Even if sources are only provided under NDA as part of a license, it will make the software cost more with no benefit for 99% of users.
You still have to have the invention, you just don't have to be the inventor.
In other words, if someone invents something and can't afford to patent it, but tries to sell it, someone who can afford a patent will grab a copy, patent it, and sue the inventor for infringing his own invention. The patent is invalid of course (prior art), but if the inventor didn't have tens of thousands of dollars to file first he probably doesn't have hundreds of thousands to challenge.
Actually, if the inventor does manage to invalidate the pirate patent I'm not sure if he can refile, so the best possible outcome might be the patent being permanently lost.
But hey, America invents. If they're stupid.
It not only violates physics, but common sense.
Check out http://www.laserpowersystems.com/ - that's such a classic snake oil company that I can't believe anyone ever took them seriously. (In fairness to the author, he clearly knows so little about technology that it might have looked real; on the other hand, if the rambling and disconnected ravings on that web site didn't tip him off, he's a natural mark for Nigerian scammers, and doesn't wardsauto.com do any reality checking before they publish? They made themselves look like idiots too.)
... overnight your luggage under an assumed name the next time you need to fly in the US.
Bachelors degrees aren't supposed to be about learning to do a job. That's what vocational schools are for, and they generally do a much better job - except with HR.
There's a reason for that: having a degree demonstrates that you can stick to a process for four years, including all the classes you don't like. That is particularly important to the military, which requires all officers to have a college degree (though it can be in English literature or ancient Greek.) It also helps if everybody gets the same jokes, etc - a lot of bad puns come from Shakespeare, and that's the sort of thing you learn in a 4 year college.
Another consideration: a degree is a valuable thing, both for employment and bragging rights, even if you don't really care about learning. Colleges don't require a certain number of credits to be sure you're smart, they require a certain amount of money, but it sounds a lot nicer if they don't say it that way. There is absolutely no motivation for a school to devalue its degree by giving you what you want.
Incidentally, an MS is pretty much what you describe: about the same as taking all your major classes over again (at a higher level, of course) with little or no extraneous extras. Now do you understand why they're so sticky about having a BS first?
I'm an old school developer (1975, anyone?) who still views code as an art rather than a bean-countable process and has no interest whatever in management (job security through non-productivity.) The endless processes I have to deal with nowadays do suck most of the joy out, and despite all the typos I've seen caught by code reviews, I'm not convinced they make better software. What they do is:
- Make managers, who have never known what we do anyway, happy by giving them numbers to look at. Their ultimate (and hopefully futile) goal is to systematize development to the point that monkeys can do it. Then programmers will be screwed just like teachers and firefighters are now.
- Make old programmers who saw the way things were going and (unlike me) converted into process inventors while their colleagues were being outsourced, secure and/or tenured.
I'm behind the power curve (none of my startups made me rich) but I still enjoy writing code; my hope is that, by the time I get to stop pumping out crap for corporations (e.g., my dogwalking business takes off), that I still like writing code.
Yeah, they're solving the wrong problem again. I would conceivably use something like this for very small programs where the overhead is greater than the code involved and I don't use it often enough to learn the code thoroughly.
Actually, successful Visual Languages go something like:
Create great (looking) visual IDE that stores all files in text format only. The visual designer doesn't have to work well, but files must be completely accessible using Notepad et al and obsessively documented by engineers.
Sell the visual IDE to managers who think their people will be uber productive when they can write their own automation.
The managers figure out that their people can't write useful programs, by dropping icons or any other way. In desperation, they grab people from the ITdepartment, eventually getting a Real Programmer.
The Programmer hears "visual designer" and shudders. He starts tediously dragging and dropping little programs. Finally he realizes that he can write programs directly in Notepad. How long this takes depends on his experience level.
Productivity goes up. Customers become dependent on the language and pay for upgrades. A secondary market appears for programs. The language becomes an industry standard.
(Everyone) Profit!
I did some work years ago with a product called iShell. It had a gorgeous visual programming UI, but the underlying code was barely human readable, let alone writable, and extensions used a multilanguage, baroque (n) build system that was truly torture (given zero documentation.) The forums were full of users who still couldn't program, and programmers (who could use Director's scripting language with ease) were hobbled by the lack of one.
I hate to just say "This is impossible, forget it and go on." I'd love to see it happen, but I don't think it ever will until we have near human level AI that can replace a human coder. Programming is not about dragging pretty blocks around, it's about visualizing and then creating a logical process that accomplishes something. Programmers have the (inborn, I believe) ability to do this; nonprogrammers don't, and no amount of training or simplified tools makes the slightest difference.
I was in college with them, the ones who never got it and repeatedly asked the sort of questions that made it obvious they wouldn't understand the answers. I've had to work with a few, too. It's pretty easy to spot, after a while.
The problem is that we're attacking the wrong problem, and the result so far has been tools that laymen still can't use and programmers hate because the pretty UI's just slow them down. That describes pretty much any system that makes you click and type stuff into little boxes instead of writing it in a text file.
I don't have that big a problem with taxing people over $200K. What worries me is that enacting any tax makes it a lot easier to add more.
I lived in Tennessee once, where the state constitution says no income tax, period. The government howled constantly about how badly they needed one, but no constitutional amendment seemed to get passed (and reelection was a problem for proponents.) The Attorney General stated publicly that he thought he could beat the constitution in court, but the governor declined to let him try. No one believed that a "nominal" one or two percent tax would stay nominal, once our constitutional protection was gone.
At the time the justification was "saving" TennCare (state run insurance that had just gone broke; I made too much to use it, not enough to buy my own anywhere.) I would have been highly annoyed to work and pay taxes to provide free insurance to others, while my family stayed one major illness from bankruptcy (maybe we could have gotten TennCare then.)
Another difficulty for the TN Taxers was North Carolina next door: very high taxes (for the southeast, anyway ; ) ), more and higher fees on just about everything (slightly lower sales tax, though), no TennCare, and just as big a budget crisis.
I've been saying for a while that the US will never land on the moon again. This doesn't change anything, it's happening because the US no longer has the national will to commit to anything that big. No foreseeable amount of technology is going to change that, even if it solved all the other problems we have (that are more pressing.)
I see the 60's as pretty much the high point of modern civilization Project Apollo happened to come along at the only time in human history thus far when both technology and society were capable of it, and society started to seriously decline about that time.
China may make it to the moon; I doubt anyone is going to Mars, at least not until we've been through a new dark age and (hopefully) renaissance.
I have tremendous respect for Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes): he realized that he was running out of new stuff to say and quit. Peanuts (for example) took the opposite approach, traded on its fame, and turned into very sad and boring garbage for many years.
I read Mad cover to cover in the 60's and early 70's, at which point it turned into crap for the amusement of semiliterate 11 year olds. I can't blame them for wanting to stay in business, though I wish they'd had the integrity to accept a dignified end when society deteriorated too far to appreciate what Mad was. I feel deprived of the chance to mourn for an old friend who languished for years in a nursing home rather than going out with dignity, continence, and decent hygiene.
It's remotely possibly that the government has information about alien visits, possibly even artifacts / bodies (that would likely have suicided when they saw the savages closing in) but that's a far cry from Contact. Consider:
- If aliens were hostile, we'd all know about it.
- If they weren't (i.e., the "enlightened" sort) they wouldn't have anything to do with any current Earth government. Aside from the Prime Directive (or whatever you call it), most governments represent the absolute worst of humanity and as such wouldn't have much to say to a civilized race.
I sympathize with the attitude that one has more "control" by doing everything from scratch, but I don't have the luxury of a huge team or reasonable deadlines. I get burned regularly by using third party code, paid for or not, but given the source code it can usually be made to work, or scrapped early if it clearly won't. One non-developer exec bought us a bunch of code from some third world outfit: we junked it all and rewrote when we realized that would be faster than fixing it.
Everyone I know uses http://codeproject.com/, especially for oddball MFC controls. It's usually necessary to do significant debugging and extending, but you get ready-to-go starter code with most of the skanky MFC issues and gotchas already handled, plus usually a demo project, for less effort than writing from scratch.
One coworker was an advocate of third party ActiveX controls: after one disaster too many I finally ActiveX entirely and we've almost completely replaced what we had. The issue, aside from extreme ugliness and painfulness to use, is that most commercial ActiveX is closed or unusable source, and is at least as incomplete/buggy as CodeProject source code.
Unlike most /. readers, I remember sending paper letters. When I first got access to email (mid 90's) I didn't use it much because I had no one to communicate with.
;-) .
I now use email for everything. Spam is annoying but I have a handle on it and the value of email more than outweighs the extra effort. I regret paper letters, but I have no one to send one to. I get laughed at occasionally because I proofread email and rarely send one with misspellings or sloppy writing.
I loathe and despise IM: I'm forced to leave it running as a price of telecommuting, but I actively hate having to stop what I'm doing to receive a message and I never use it if I can possibly avoid it, except with young nimrods who don't answer email promptly.
I finally did get the cheapest cell phone I could find, they're just too useful not to have. My wife and I use maybe two hundred minutes per month; she has texting disabled, so I receive them for both of us. I've never learned to send one from the phone, though, I use gizmosms.com when I absolutely must.
I don't feel like a fossil yet: I just use what I enjoy using. I take pride in writing emails with complete sentences; I don't enjoy (even when I have the time) having "real time" conversations that actually waste huge amounts of time waiting for some cretin to IM "LOL" or
Like most people over 30, I remember a past that, in spite of all the gadgets we have now, was a better place than the brainless, illiterate, ADD-inspired constant entertainment "future" we're flying towards.
I had never heard of this one, sounded interesting... then I went to the movie site and found a synopsis.
Come on guys, does every SF movie have to be so utterly silly and stupid? Granted, written SF (actually, written anything) has pretty well died in the last few decades, but there's still lots of good stuff to make movies from, if anyone would bother. All the way out special effects and artistry don't change the fact that the "science" is pre-kindergarten level (at best) and the story (assuming it's at the level of previous atrocities like Supernova or that... thing about bombing the center of the Earth) is mostly an excuse to showcase boobs and explosions that hopefully distract from the plot and dialog.
You know how much I'd like having just one new movie to look forward to? You know how embarrassing it is when the best you can hope for is Star Trek XXX or Star Wars: Attack of the One Dimensional Hero (either of which would beat this, from the sound of it.)
Every single Kensington mouse/trackball I've ever owned (admittedly, I haven't in a while, and don't plan to again) has had problems with its buttons (10 mouse clicks for the price of 1 / random dropouts while dragging.) They were nice about it and replaced several mice with no argument (none of the replacements lasted long either.)
The $90 trackball (I loved it too) lasted a week or two past its warranty date before dying. Be prepared! If the buttons start getting even slightly wonky, don't wait to get another.
Considering that the vast, vast majority of gcc users are in fact USERS, not contributors, what real difference does it make?
Given that they *do* use gcc, it's even possible that the majority actually cares what the license is (I'm an outspoken exception), but if every single contributor outside the core team decided to protest by keeping patches private, I can't see it making much difference in the grand scheme of things.
Virtualizing the cheap versions is a big problem for MS.
Anyone who wants to virtualize obviously has another OS they like. The cheap Vista versions limit features to the point of uselessness: they're there to be sold to OEM's cheap, to let MS advertise a low entry price, and to encourage users to upgrade.
Virtualizing Vista Home would let me have a "real" copy to play with and test stuff on, with no limitation since I have the (almost always better) facilities of another OS available. No motivation to upgrade -> no reason for Vista Home to exist. For my purposes Vista is easy enough to install that there's no real need even to activate it, just don't keep any important data there.
The fact that they care at all about this suggests that there are a lot of people who might be interested in virtualizing Vista. Maybe because they want/need to play with it but realize it's nowhere near ready to be a primary OS yet?
I concede that given our current understanding of things, it is impossible to predict whether it will ever be possible to visit another star. We don't know how much we don't know: while warp drive, for example, appears to "work" on paper, we have no idea how to start to determine whether building a working model is even potentially possible. The problem with articles like these is the failure of most scientists to separate fact from fancy from their own beliefs. I am reminded of an article about Star Trek's Transporter: a long dissertation about converting matter and energy and beaming through space, followed by a seriously-intended conclusion that it was impossible because it was fundamentally impossible to resolve individual molecules from orbit, therefore they couldn't be "scanned" successfully. Science-indistinguishable-from-magic has been popping up for millenia; trying to extrapolate beyond the point where the missing pieces make describing the end result impossible leads to hilarity.
Colonizing is a very different thing from visiting: colonization implies moving a significant number of existing people from one place to another. Technologically we could probably reach the Moon and establish a presence there, but the condition (and current headlong decline) of civilization on Earth makes such a large undertaking unlikely, and visiting Mars virtually inconceivable. The necessary changes to society dwarf the technological advances needed, and invalidate any prediction of them.
Carrying frozen cells and growing colonists on arrival might technically be considered "colonization," but not something most people will get excited about. At best, we will have produced indigenous life that looks more or less like us and could probably interbreed for a while (if we could get to them.) That might be worthwhile from the standpoint of species security, depending on one's definition of "species."