I agree. Of all the Ph.D graduates I know (about a dozen or so), I would say all but maybe two of them are some of the most ignorant people I know. They only know what they study, which is a rather narrow track of a particular field. Completely clueless outside of their field, and only slightly coherent within it. They only continued from their Master's onto their Ph.D because they couldn't find a job after getting their masters, so they just stayed in school. They received their Ph.D because they spent the maximum allowed time there doing work and the professor felt bad for them. Or, they gave their professor (i.e. the PI) a blow job or sex (no, not a joke). Half are ivy, half are state schooled, and all but two are dumb as a freakin' rock. I have zero respect for Ph.D's.
No, Oklahomans are just plan ignorant. I have been doing work here for 5 years, and can't wait to get out of this state. These people would be completely content with a theological dictatorship in this country. They have little concern with the freedoms our founding fathers fought for in the past. It is mind boggling how much they want the government to parent their children. One of the highest divorce rates, and highest teen pregnancy rate in the country due to hypocritical religious zealots contribute to this 'parent my children' mentality.
You can mod this down all you want, but until you've lived in a few places, including here...
That is just pathetic - soon there will be banners "Using Windows - switch to Linux, you will like it better, and maybe we will let you in our website".
Why not? I have encountered numerous banners stating "We only support windows and internet explorer", or "your operating system/browser is not supported at this time". (i've used seamonkey/mozilla since ~v0.92, never been a fan of firefox, and often am on a linux system). Umm, but oddly enough, if I use prefbar and switch my useragent over to "Windows IE 6" I miraculously enter the site! That is just BS. I've always liked to fight fire with fire - yeah, it's a childish vendetta thing, but oh well, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside;)
Would I do it on a professional or high traffic site? Not likely. But, doing it on your own low traffics sites is fun:)
A start up company I once worked for already developed this idea, and proof of concept *working prototype*. The prior work provision would allow it to be an invalid patent if ever challenged.
While that may be true as far as the licensing goes, it is still a BS license that falls under racketeering. Paying twice for the same product, is still paying twice for the same product.
What if I develop at home and also use it for personal use? Am I supposed to re-image my Debug MSDN version of Windows with some hijacked Dell version just to surf the internet? Yeah, that would be the day. Not like you can purchase the Debug version any other way, AFAIK.
Unless you are going to do scientific (e.g. matlab) or security programming (e.g. create a new encryption schema), you probably won't ever use your advanced math skills. I have been programming for 6 years and have never needed them, other than in an interview where they asked me. I have been given lead programmer on all major projects at all the places I have worked, so I guess I am not the worst programmer out there. Considering I don't use all those advanced mathmatical algorigthms, that's not too bad, I guess. I do, however, use all my computer, programming, and database course knowledge. I also always go and extra step with the language I am using to know them inside and out at even the lowest level (e.g. how to reverse engineer them and why, compiler priorities, etc.). I think that is what matters most.
Technology books are different than any other books. Most books can be published and printed, and if they don't sell right away, they can always remain on the shelf until they sell, even after publications of it stop, someone will eventually want that murder mystery. Tech books however, have a shelf life. If it is a book on Windows '95 (for example), it is only as good as long as windows '95 is popular, or around.
So, I have always convinced myself that it is the short life of the necessity of these books that have caused them to be so expensive. Then I ask myself why I would want a book that will be worthless in 3 years time on my bookshelf? My answer was, "I don't", and "that's what libraries are for";)
I never said democratic nations, or democracy itself does any of what you claim. The Truman Doctrine took care of that (i.e. it is a "policy"), not democracy. The US putting its nose in other people's business is anti-American, as per our founding fathers, who argued that our nation should not even have an offensive military. Our constitution actually forbids the president from taking us to war (which has been overturned and abused by some policy put in place in the 70's IIRC). It also forbids us from having a standing military during peace time, or receiving monetary funds longer than 2 years in duration. So, they make things up like "the WAR on drugs" or "the WAR on terrorism" in order to circumvent our constitutional meanings, by keeping us in a perpetual state of war or under 'public danger' in order to get around judicial scrutiny.
In this case, however, I know more than enough people from China, and Taiwan that have told me more horror stories than I would have liked. Their first hand accounts are what I listen to, not the propaganda my government spins. In this case, however, they happen to be one of the same.
Innocent until proven guilty is a right of the people, not of the government(s).
Exactly. And to expand up this with regards to questioning the Chinese government's viability, let's apply an extra layer as put forth by the US' founding fathers writings and readings...
"Question your government at all times."
So essentially, assuming the worst of your government, is a duty of its citizens.
The ***only*** reason consumers aren't screaming about this yet is because they don't know it exists, nor how it is incompatable with their expectations about what it means to 'buy' something.
By saying "yet", you imply that you believe people will start screaming about it, at some point. I think you give way too much trust in that the general public is actually educated enough to differentiate between propoganda and the truth. I think they will be fed some load of crap about hackers, and theives and such. Then the media will help by putting a bunch of it in the news in a timely manner, and all the people will be like "wow there's a lot of that going on, I understand" then they'll say my favorite line "...besides, I have nothing to hide, I'm not a theif or a hacker" (which is equivilant to what pastor Martin Niemoller is known for saying). Then they will be forced to pay annual fees and all that nonsense, and continually be told new reasons "why" they have to pay more and more, and the general public will just eat it because, the majority of people are just plain stupid.
First they came for the [hackers] and I did not speak out -- because I was not a [hacker]. Then they came for the [music and movie theives] and I did not speak out -- because I [never stole music or movies]. Then they came for the [software pirates] and I did not speak out -- because I was not a [software pirate]. Then they came for me -- and by then there was no one left to speak out for me. (Attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller, German priest during WWII as the Nazis took everyone away to the camps)
I agree. Java IS the alternative. They just need to improve a few areas: 1. Web applications - why would someone pay $20,000 for a java app program to run on top of a web server (i.e. websphere, jrun, etc.). They need an easy, cost efficient web application part that is identical to their client GUI. 2. They need to improve the performance of the GUI, and the creation thereof (i.e. easier creation in an IDE).
Yes, well, I have a/very/ nice 36" sony trinitron HDTV in the living room that works great, which is connected to a high end sony dvd player. For what those cost, I am done giving them money... I understand that you are being sarcastic about it, I just found it funny that I have almost that set up, lol...so sad.
I am through paying them, I won't do it just for a guest room that hardly gets used. Even a $10 RF modular is just an annoying gimick to get more money out of us consumers. I have been getting just so fed up with all the hassle and, well, just plan crap, that coporations have been getting away with, that we have to pay for... Our elected officials don't do anything but collect the lobby money from corporations and let them do whatever they want. They could care less about their constituents. What are we to do about it? Just sit here and take it? I don't have millions to go to court with such a conglomerate over such small amounts of money, but all those little things add up.
I have been trying to purchase a new cheap dvd player for the guest room. I have continually been thwarted by the macrovision "copy protection" because I have to hook it up through the vcr, to a TV set that only has a coaxial connection. Apparently, connecting the dvd player through the vrc causes this macrovision copy protection crap to make the picture all wonky, when you try to play a movie.
Here is the kicker...the only movies that I canNOT play are retail dvds. ALL of my copied movies play GREAT! So, my point is really that all the copy protection stuff accomplished is to give me such a headache that I have decided to just stop maintaining retail dvds in my personal dvd library. So, all that "copy protection" crap really does is make legit people go illigit. Stupid MPAA/RIAA jerkies wasting my time!
A childish one already occurred back in 2001 when the US navy plane (an AWAC or something), was downed, disassembled, and both it and its pilots were retained by China for some time. There was an entire web site defacement war that took place with lots of political propaganda (well, political on the US sites, and non sense like "haha u suck" on the China sites...because we are so intelligent:/...yeah, us). I remember reading about it and some site in Germany kept tallies. IIRC, we won...but it wasn't serious, just a pain in the butt for us sys admins at the time.
That is correct, to an extent. In C#.NET for example, there is no way to know what exceptions a method throws, without looking at the code it self. Whereas, in Java, it is declared as part of the method signature. So, this is actually helpful in C#, especially when throwing custom exceptions (e.g. InvalidStoreLocationException, or something to that nature), but a similar tool for a language such as Java, has little, if any, merit.
The generated code is a helping tool, and is only as good as you naming convention of your method. So if your method is named S1, the comment generator is worthless. So, it really helps with your naming convention of your methods, and is only good for jump starting your documentation. But, used properly, it is a great aid but by no means a complete substitute, as you already pointed out.
1. Use a code reviewer like FxCop for.NET stuff. You can build custom rules that your team decides on, and apply them to each program.
2. Automate as much as possible with things like Ant or NAnt. The less people do, the less room for errors or discrepancies from project to project.
3. Use something like Cruise Control.NET which will tie everything together, run coverage reports, automate builds, etc.
4. Make a Utility library so that they have a common place to get repetative processes. (e.g. we have one that validates whether a number and address is a valid store for our company; it is used in 75% of our programs, but only coded once.) You could incorporate some common error handling like log4net or log4j into the utility.
Visual Studio has one called "Ghost Doc" that we use. Also, microsoft has some macros you can download that will create documents for constructors and for any exception within a method. Using these two together, and you have a pretty standardized comment collection that can be compiled by NDoc (the.NET version of JDoc for Java). I have a really good one for Eclipse, also, but can't remember it of the top of my head.
I agree. If your direct manager was doing his job properly, you should never have to talk to upper management. Then that solves the problem. Why are you stressing because someone else isn't doing what they are supposed to do? Explain to your manager that his job is to buffer all the political BS, so that you can do your job. Do what he tells you to do, and if upper management ever questions you, you tell them "I was doing what I was told, if you have a problem with it, talk to my programming manager."
because firefox can't sit by my systray without 3rd party stuff to open faster. because i like having one address bar that can be a url or with a flick of the down arrow, search google instead (yeah, i know firefox has a search bar next to teh address bar, and that's exaclty what i don't like). it's cleaner, more mature, and i've been using since it was version ~0.94. i am used to it, i like it...neh, i love it. because i am not some smoe that has to like a browser just because everyone else is using it. because i tried firefox and it just didn't feel right. or maybe, just because...
so the *why* might be because of people like me that like mozilla instead of firefox.
This is what we do at work. We spend about $5000 on the set up, but remember that this is an enterprise where we scan about 125,000 pages to.pdf a month. It is probably possible for about $500 or so, for what you are looking at (oh, and some programming)
First, you'll need a low-volume scanner. (Check the duty cycle to make sure it can handle you bookshelf of papers.) Then, you'll need something to convert the images to pdf. If you have any programming experience, write a quick app that uses http://www.imagemagick.org/ Image Magick to convert from tiff to pdf. Put each binding in its own folder, and pretend the "untitled1.pdf" says "page1.pdf";)
If you want to get fancier have the front end app rename the untiled1.tiff to whatever you'd like. Also, you can embed extra information into the pdf by using metadata and Adobe XMP SDK (free download from Adobe). Make the meta data like: TITLE="My Book" AUTHOR="Bart Simpson" etc.
They are useful if you are out of high school, or have an unrelated college degree (e.g. history) with no experience.
All that they do, as someone previously stated, is get you to the interview process. After that point, it doesn't make a difference...unless you want to hang them on your cubical wall, and have your fellow employees laugh about you hanging them up;)
If you have a computer related college degree, or substantial experience (note: "I have been running Linux at home for five years" does not qualify), they will get you the interview, instead. Thus, making the certs nothing but wallpaper.
It's obvious that it is a no win situation. Since Linux came this far on its own, why would it matter to participate or not? We just need to keep doing our own thing, and let Microsoft play catch up. They have been marketting lies agains Linux for some time, and obvoiusly it hasn't worked very well. Most likely because all the fine print says "research funded by microsoft". They just want some FUD they can rip out (like that 1 of 100 pages Cohen stated), with some OSS company name on the report instead. That way when some company says, "yeah, that's great the you found Linux to be higher TCO, but our research shows differently", MS can say, "nuh, uh, see this one is from OSDL", and then show them that one page.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Of all the Ph.D graduates I know (about a dozen or so), I would say all but maybe two of them are some of the most ignorant people I know. They only know what they study, which is a rather narrow track of a particular field. Completely clueless outside of their field, and only slightly coherent within it. They only continued from their Master's onto their Ph.D because they couldn't find a job after getting their masters, so they just stayed in school. They received their Ph.D because they spent the maximum allowed time there doing work and the professor felt bad for them. Or, they gave their professor (i.e. the PI) a blow job or sex (no, not a joke). Half are ivy, half are state schooled, and all but two are dumb as a freakin' rock. I have zero respect for Ph.D's.
No, Oklahomans are just plan ignorant. I have been doing work here for 5 years, and can't wait to get out of this state. These people would be completely content with a theological dictatorship in this country. They have little concern with the freedoms our founding fathers fought for in the past. It is mind boggling how much they want the government to parent their children. One of the highest divorce rates, and highest teen pregnancy rate in the country due to hypocritical religious zealots contribute to this 'parent my children' mentality.
You can mod this down all you want, but until you've lived in a few places, including here...
That is just pathetic - soon there will be banners "Using Windows - switch to Linux, you will like it better, and maybe we will let you in our website".
;)
:)
Why not? I have encountered numerous banners stating "We only support windows and internet explorer", or "your operating system/browser is not supported at this time". (i've used seamonkey/mozilla since ~v0.92, never been a fan of firefox, and often am on a linux system). Umm, but oddly enough, if I use prefbar and switch my useragent over to "Windows IE 6" I miraculously enter the site! That is just BS. I've always liked to fight fire with fire - yeah, it's a childish vendetta thing, but oh well, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside
Would I do it on a professional or high traffic site? Not likely. But, doing it on your own low traffics sites is fun
A start up company I once worked for already developed this idea, and proof of concept *working prototype*. The prior work provision would allow it to be an invalid patent if ever challenged.
While that may be true as far as the licensing goes, it is still a BS license that falls under racketeering. Paying twice for the same product, is still paying twice for the same product.
What if I develop at home and also use it for personal use? Am I supposed to re-image my Debug MSDN version of Windows with some hijacked Dell version just to surf the internet? Yeah, that would be the day. Not like you can purchase the Debug version any other way, AFAIK.
As an annual subscriber to a Universal MSDN package I don't think I should have to pay for it twice. That is called racketeering - a federal offense.
Unless you are going to do scientific (e.g. matlab) or security programming (e.g. create a new encryption schema), you probably won't ever use your advanced math skills. I have been programming for 6 years and have never needed them, other than in an interview where they asked me. I have been given lead programmer on all major projects at all the places I have worked, so I guess I am not the worst programmer out there. Considering I don't use all those advanced mathmatical algorigthms, that's not too bad, I guess. I do, however, use all my computer, programming, and database course knowledge. I also always go and extra step with the language I am using to know them inside and out at even the lowest level (e.g. how to reverse engineer them and why, compiler priorities, etc.). I think that is what matters most.
Technology books are different than any other books. Most books can be published and printed, and if they don't sell right away, they can always remain on the shelf until they sell, even after publications of it stop, someone will eventually want that murder mystery. Tech books however, have a shelf life. If it is a book on Windows '95 (for example), it is only as good as long as windows '95 is popular, or around.
;)
So, I have always convinced myself that it is the short life of the necessity of these books that have caused them to be so expensive. Then I ask myself why I would want a book that will be worthless in 3 years time on my bookshelf? My answer was, "I don't", and "that's what libraries are for"
I never said democratic nations, or democracy itself does any of what you claim. The Truman Doctrine took care of that (i.e. it is a "policy"), not democracy. The US putting its nose in other people's business is anti-American, as per our founding fathers, who argued that our nation should not even have an offensive military. Our constitution actually forbids the president from taking us to war (which has been overturned and abused by some policy put in place in the 70's IIRC). It also forbids us from having a standing military during peace time, or receiving monetary funds longer than 2 years in duration. So, they make things up like "the WAR on drugs" or "the WAR on terrorism" in order to circumvent our constitutional meanings, by keeping us in a perpetual state of war or under 'public danger' in order to get around judicial scrutiny.
In this case, however, I know more than enough people from China, and Taiwan that have told me more horror stories than I would have liked. Their first hand accounts are what I listen to, not the propaganda my government spins. In this case, however, they happen to be one of the same.
Innocent until proven guilty is a right of the people, not of the government(s).
Exactly. And to expand up this with regards to questioning the Chinese government's viability, let's apply an extra layer as put forth by the US' founding fathers writings and readings...
"Question your government at all times."
So essentially, assuming the worst of your government, is a duty of its citizens.
It can be that great if you still have to defrag it.
The ***only*** reason consumers aren't screaming about this yet is because they don't know it exists, nor how it is incompatable with their expectations about what it means to 'buy' something.
By saying "yet", you imply that you believe people will start screaming about it, at some point. I think you give way too much trust in that the general public is actually educated enough to differentiate between propoganda and the truth. I think they will be fed some load of crap about hackers, and theives and such. Then the media will help by putting a bunch of it in the news in a timely manner, and all the people will be like "wow there's a lot of that going on, I understand" then they'll say my favorite line "...besides, I have nothing to hide, I'm not a theif or a hacker" (which is equivilant to what pastor Martin Niemoller is known for saying). Then they will be forced to pay annual fees and all that nonsense, and continually be told new reasons "why" they have to pay more and more, and the general public will just eat it because, the majority of people are just plain stupid.
First they came for the [hackers] and I did not speak out -- because I was not a [hacker].
Then they came for the [music and movie theives] and I did not speak out -- because I [never stole music or movies].
Then they came for the [software pirates] and I did not speak out -- because I was not a [software pirate].
Then they came for me -- and by then there was no one left to speak out for me.
(Attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller, German priest during WWII as the Nazis took everyone away to the camps)
I agree. Java IS the alternative. They just need to improve a few areas:
1. Web applications - why would someone pay $20,000 for a java app program to run on top of a web server (i.e. websphere, jrun, etc.). They need an easy, cost efficient web application part that is identical to their client GUI.
2. They need to improve the performance of the GUI, and the creation thereof (i.e. easier creation in an IDE).
Yes, well, I have a /very/ nice 36" sony trinitron HDTV in the living room that works great, which is connected to a high end sony dvd player. For what those cost, I am done giving them money... I understand that you are being sarcastic about it, I just found it funny that I have almost that set up, lol...so sad.
I am through paying them, I won't do it just for a guest room that hardly gets used. Even a $10 RF modular is just an annoying gimick to get more money out of us consumers. I have been getting just so fed up with all the hassle and, well, just plan crap, that coporations have been getting away with, that we have to pay for... Our elected officials don't do anything but collect the lobby money from corporations and let them do whatever they want. They could care less about their constituents. What are we to do about it? Just sit here and take it? I don't have millions to go to court with such a conglomerate over such small amounts of money, but all those little things add up.
I have been trying to purchase a new cheap dvd player for the guest room. I have continually been thwarted by the macrovision "copy protection" because I have to hook it up through the vcr, to a TV set that only has a coaxial connection. Apparently, connecting the dvd player through the vrc causes this macrovision copy protection crap to make the picture all wonky, when you try to play a movie.
Here is the kicker...the only movies that I canNOT play are retail dvds. ALL of my copied movies play GREAT! So, my point is really that all the copy protection stuff accomplished is to give me such a headache that I have decided to just stop maintaining retail dvds in my personal dvd library. So, all that "copy protection" crap really does is make legit people go illigit. Stupid MPAA/RIAA jerkies wasting my time!
A childish one already occurred back in 2001 when the US navy plane (an AWAC or something), was downed, disassembled, and both it and its pilots were retained by China for some time. There was an entire web site defacement war that took place with lots of political propaganda (well, political on the US sites, and non sense like "haha u suck" on the China sites...because we are so intelligent :/ ...yeah, us). I remember reading about it and some site in Germany kept tallies. IIRC, we won...but it wasn't serious, just a pain in the butt for us sys admins at the time.
That is correct, to an extent. In C# .NET for example, there is no way to know what exceptions a method throws, without looking at the code it self. Whereas, in Java, it is declared as part of the method signature. So, this is actually helpful in C#, especially when throwing custom exceptions (e.g. InvalidStoreLocationException, or something to that nature), but a similar tool for a language such as Java, has little, if any, merit.
The generated code is a helping tool, and is only as good as you naming convention of your method. So if your method is named S1, the comment generator is worthless. So, it really helps with your naming convention of your methods, and is only good for jump starting your documentation. But, used properly, it is a great aid but by no means a complete substitute, as you already pointed out.
Great post. Some additions...
.NET stuff. You can build custom rules that your team decides on, and apply them to each program.
.NET which will tie everything together, run coverage reports, automate builds, etc.
1. Use a code reviewer like FxCop for
2. Automate as much as possible with things like Ant or NAnt. The less people do, the less room for errors or discrepancies from project to project.
3. Use something like Cruise Control
4. Make a Utility library so that they have a common place to get repetative processes. (e.g. we have one that validates whether a number and address is a valid store for our company; it is used in 75% of our programs, but only coded once.) You could incorporate some common error handling like log4net or log4j into the utility.
Visual Studio has one called "Ghost Doc" that we use. Also, microsoft has some macros you can download that will create documents for constructors and for any exception within a method. Using these two together, and you have a pretty standardized comment collection that can be compiled by NDoc (the .NET version of JDoc for Java). I have a really good one for Eclipse, also, but can't remember it of the top of my head.
I agree. If your direct manager was doing his job properly, you should never have to talk to upper management. Then that solves the problem. Why are you stressing because someone else isn't doing what they are supposed to do? Explain to your manager that his job is to buffer all the political BS, so that you can do your job. Do what he tells you to do, and if upper management ever questions you, you tell them "I was doing what I was told, if you have a problem with it, talk to my programming manager."
because firefox can't sit by my systray without 3rd party stuff to open faster. because i like having one address bar that can be a url or with a flick of the down arrow, search google instead (yeah, i know firefox has a search bar next to teh address bar, and that's exaclty what i don't like). it's cleaner, more mature, and i've been using since it was version ~0.94. i am used to it, i like it...neh, i love it. because i am not some smoe that has to like a browser just because everyone else is using it. because i tried firefox and it just didn't feel right. or maybe, just because...
so the *why* might be because of people like me that like mozilla instead of firefox.
This is what we do at work. We spend about $5000 on the set up, but remember that this is an enterprise where we scan about 125,000 pages to .pdf a month. It is probably possible for about $500 or so, for what you are looking at (oh, and some programming)
;)
First, you'll need a low-volume scanner. (Check the duty cycle to make sure it can handle you bookshelf of papers.) Then, you'll need something to convert the images to pdf. If you have any programming experience, write a quick app that uses http://www.imagemagick.org/ Image Magick to convert from tiff to pdf. Put each binding in its own folder, and pretend the "untitled1.pdf" says "page1.pdf"
If you want to get fancier have the front end app rename the untiled1.tiff to whatever you'd like. Also, you can embed extra information into the pdf by using metadata and Adobe XMP SDK (free download from Adobe). Make the meta data like:
TITLE="My Book"
AUTHOR="Bart Simpson"
etc.
well, that depends...
Was Cthulhu written prior to December 14, 2000? That is when it was filed.
They are useful if you are out of high school, or have an unrelated college degree (e.g. history) with no experience.
;)
All that they do, as someone previously stated, is get you to the interview process. After that point, it doesn't make a difference...unless you want to hang them on your cubical wall, and have your fellow employees laugh about you hanging them up
If you have a computer related college degree, or substantial experience (note: "I have been running Linux at home for five years" does not qualify), they will get you the interview, instead. Thus, making the certs nothing but wallpaper.
It's obvious that it is a no win situation. Since Linux came this far on its own, why would it matter to participate or not? We just need to keep doing our own thing, and let Microsoft play catch up. They have been marketting lies agains Linux for some time, and obvoiusly it hasn't worked very well. Most likely because all the fine print says "research funded by microsoft". They just want some FUD they can rip out (like that 1 of 100 pages Cohen stated), with some OSS company name on the report instead. That way when some company says, "yeah, that's great the you found Linux to be higher TCO, but our research shows differently", MS can say, "nuh, uh, see this one is from OSDL", and then show them that one page.