I'm not sure I can really support that. Seems to me IBM's given us:
* General-purpose operating systems (OS/360) * Hard drives (RAMAC) * Relational databases (System R) * RISC architecture
and a ton of non-computer research (e.g., the scanning tunneling microscope). Hell, Mandelbrodt was an IBM researcher when he codified his fractal theories.
I don't know how many IBM researchers have won the Nobel Prize, but it's more than a couple.
Um, you might want to check back more often, latest news is that the Patent Office has admitted it will probably invalidate all of the patents held by NTP that are at the heart of the BlackBerry patent dispute. This will clear the way for RIM to resume "business as usual".
It was largely the same when I contracting with large pharmaceutical companies -- often we'd get put in an empty conference room, maybe five or six of us just sitting around the table, one shared phone, and best of all, one eight-port hub plugged into the room's only 10baseT socket. Yeah, that was great. And of course, we were given the jobs that kept the company humming day-to-day, while the FTEs worked on multi-year, multi-million-dollar projects that would almost never see the light of day. Which was good, because one of my jobs was doing maintenance on one such project, and it was the most godawful mishmash of technologies for technology's sake I have ever seen...
Yeah, no kidding. I took a significant pay cut to work closer to home and landed a govt gig. After a month here (as a contractor) they offered to make me a permanent employee. I would have made $10/hr less, with virtually no chance to advance (I would have been a senior developer, and the manager I would have worked for was in her mid-50s and had been managing that group for over ten years). When I declined their offer, they said they weren't surprised.
It is an interesting group, though. Everybody seems to want to get training on the latest & greatest stuff, but they never want to use it. Lots of CICS/COBOL, and most of the web work is still done in Cold Fusion. My project's using Java, and there's a lot of head-scratching going on (as well as a lot of cutting & pasting). Oh well, it's just a gig, I won't have to stick around and maintain this stuff (although I have made the point several times that it will be nasty to rework when the legislation changes).
How could anyone say that more bandwidth won't find applications? It's dumbfoundingly stupid.
What TFA says is, people aren't using the bandwidth they currently have, so giving them more won't make a difference. It's a win for the service providers, because doubling someone's download rate is just a matter of changing a setting in a switch, but then you can turn around and charge them an additional $N a month for it, while their usage doesn't really change. I know I appreciate being able to download an ISO in minutes, but I really only do this a couple times a year, so 99.99% of my usage is checking e-mail (~8 msgs/day) and surfing (maybe 1/2hr a day). Do I really need a 5Mb downlink? Nope, but that's the standard speed from my provider, they don't support slower connections. They will, however, happily upgrade my connection to their "premium" level of service and give me an 8Mb download for just a few dollars more.
I don't know where you work, but every place that I've worked, I could call a sales rep and get an evaluation version for free. I've done this with Informix and Oracle, I'm sure it's true with DB2 as well (not so sure about SQL Server). They're usually pretty liberal with the trial period too, and the Informix guy kept wanting to send me one of their support engineers to help me port my data over.
...is to just pick up a Sun Ultra 20. It comes with the latest development tools for Java (including an app server), C, C++ and FORTRAN, and is a peppy box to boot. You also get three years of support for the included tools, and it'll run Solaris 10, Linux and Windows. It's also reasonably priced, all things considered.
But if you started with... Lisp (1959), you're stuck with some seriously dead-end knowledge
Actually, one of the cool things people rave about in Python and Ruby are closures, which LISP pioneered. And once you're familiar with S-expressions, you'll see XML in a whole new light...
Yes, I think FORTRAN's best days my be behind it, and I really doubt COBOL will be seeing a resurgence again, but there's still a lot to be learned from LISP.
Re:Lies, Damned lies and Statistics
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
after many, many Java classes for the Bachelors Degree and still more for the Masters, I was not able to get even an entry level position as a Java programmer
What was your Masters in, Art History? Or do you just live in Lower East Nowhere? I live in frickin' Nebraska, for $DEITY's sake, and there's Java jobs a-plenty. Hell, I'm getting cold calls again, and that hasn't happened since the bubble burst.
Heh, I often give places a hard time about buying store-branded stuff. "Wait -- you want me to *pay* to advertise *your store*? How about you just give me the sweatshirt/hat/whatever, and I promise to wear it once a month?"
But apparently you can't proofread your sentences! ; )
Busted! That's what I get for doing this stuff while I work -- next time, I'll bag work and pay attention!:)
I hate to tell you, but actual Computer Science "stuff" doesn't get obsolete
Well, kinda. Which are you more likely to do, write your own interpreter for a scripting language or just embed TCL/Scheme/Python/Perl? And are you going to write your own queueing code, or just use the Java/.NET/SourceForge QueueManager component? Sure, it's important to know language design and queueing theory, but it's often not expedient to actually use it to write code. I dare say that in another ten years, we'll have so many components in so many layers it'll be difficult to write bad code and impossible to write really good code in mainstream applications. Already we've got apps written in languages that run on JVMs that themselves emit CISC instructions that get translated to RISC opcodes before they're finally executed. And with the new trend to virtualization, even the RISC opcodes will be executing on a virtual CPU!
I'm not bashing the CS curriculum, just that a lot of the degreed CS folks I've worked with had trouble keeping up with the changes in technology, their knowledge of "stuff" notwithstanding.
Well, let's see: Big house, check; Porsche, check; happy wife and child, check; pick and choose from a variety of jobs wherever I choose to live (so far: Chicago, Philadelphia, Portland): check. Currently making big zorkmids as a systems architect. And I don't even *have* the English degree -- I was hired out of college (for a programming gig) in the middle of my junior year. So year, you can do OK in the software world with an English degree. I certainly tend to do better than a lot of the CS grads, since I'm continually learning new stuff, not just hoping I make manager before the stuff I learned in school becomes obsolete.
This is interesting. I have two domains, both registered with GoDaddy, but with my complete contact info. I have received exactly ONE (1) piece of snail-mail spam associated with this info. In reading the responses here, I really started to wonder about all these people who complained about getting inundated with spam. Now I wonder if it's just the fact that I registered with an "off-brand" registrar, or if GoDaddy is just good at being proactive about filtering or blocking that kind of stuff (although I can't imagine how they'd do that, beyond not selling their list).
The only scenario where any of this makes sense, would be if I were aggressively attacking someone else's net resource
You -- or someone who's hijacked your server? Wouldn't you want to know if your domain were the source of 30m V1agra! spams? I know I would, and if you wouldn't, then maybe someone should look into whether you're responsible enough to have your own domain. You wouldn't let someone sell crack out of your basement, would you, regardless of whether you ever went down there or not?
Actually, falling gas tax income is what spurred this development in Oregon. One of the state senators decided that people who drove fuel-efficient cars weren't "contributing" (read: being taxed) enough, so he dreamed up this scheme to supplement the gax tax.
Actually, I got the middle model (2.2GHz / 1G / 80G / nVidia NVS 280) for ~$1300, it's a nice box. The video card supports dual-head displays, 1G of memory (expandable to 4G) is tolerable, and the SATA drive is nice and quick. And the best part is -- it's quiet. It's probably just me, but my last box had noisy fans and drives. This thing, while not silent, is probably several orders of magnitude quieter (my guess is it's probably about 40dB).
That said, if I had it to do over today, I'd get a 20" iMac. I'd get a slightly slower processor (2.1GHz PPC vs 2.2Ghz Opteron), half the memory, a much bigger drive (250G vs. 80G), a flat panel display and wireless (which I don't really need, but it might be nice). Oh, and I'd be able to sync my iPod with my own box and not have to borrow the wife's laptop...:/
Oh, but the Sun development tools are pretty nice. I was used to a hodgepodge of FOSS stuff (Eclipse / ArgoUML / JBoss / PostgreSQL) that worked pretty well, but not together. Now I can just use the Sun IDE and app server (and PostgreSQL;), and deployments are quicker and debugging support is a little nicer (although the Eclipse debugger worked great with JBoss).
Personally, I want one of these devices that works on senior citizens
It's called a "radio tuned to a rap station", and it's quite effective. I understand there's even a pocket version, although the difficulty of projecting the noise through the supplied headphones is an issue. Based on evidence I collected on my last bus trip, though, I can assure you that there a a *lot* of research being done in this area.
... you can't just pop the old drive into your desktop box. Sure, the adapter's cheap, but it's not like buying a new 3.5" drive and just stuffing it in.
we could finally get rid of the explicit barrier between primary and secondary memory
Which primary and secondary do you mean? Registers and L-1 cache? L-1 and L-2 cache? Cache and system memory? System memory and drive controller/disk cache?
I think what you're looking for is a return to core memory. Persistent, fast (1 cycle access times*, same as a register), and durable. I'm all for it, but I haven't seen anything like it for a reasonable price. I know Intel and some other companies are working on it, but I doubt it'll ever be much faster than the SDRAMs we have today that is to say, a couple orders of magnitude slower than the CPU cache (which is itself slower than the internal register sets).
* as long as your cycle times are measured in milliseconds
Slashdot Mirror
It lacks the culture for creative invention
I'm not sure I can really support that. Seems to me IBM's given us:
* General-purpose operating systems (OS/360)
* Hard drives (RAMAC)
* Relational databases (System R)
* RISC architecture
and a ton of non-computer research (e.g., the scanning tunneling microscope). Hell, Mandelbrodt was an IBM researcher when he codified his fractal theories.
I don't know how many IBM researchers have won the Nobel Prize, but it's more than a couple.
Um, you might want to check back more often, latest news is that the Patent Office has admitted it will probably invalidate all of the patents held by NTP that are at the heart of the BlackBerry patent dispute. This will clear the way for RIM to resume "business as usual".
It was largely the same when I contracting with large pharmaceutical companies -- often we'd get put in an empty conference room, maybe five or six of us just sitting around the table, one shared phone, and best of all, one eight-port hub plugged into the room's only 10baseT socket. Yeah, that was great. And of course, we were given the jobs that kept the company humming day-to-day, while the FTEs worked on multi-year, multi-million-dollar projects that would almost never see the light of day. Which was good, because one of my jobs was doing maintenance on one such project, and it was the most godawful mishmash of technologies for technology's sake I have ever seen...
heathen hoards [sic] should cow [sic] in shame
Lemme guess -- math major?
Nobody gets rich but it's a living
Yeah, no kidding. I took a significant pay cut to work closer to home and landed a govt gig. After a month here (as a contractor) they offered to make me a permanent employee. I would have made $10/hr less, with virtually no chance to advance (I would have been a senior developer, and the manager I would have worked for was in her mid-50s and had been managing that group for over ten years). When I declined their offer, they said they weren't surprised.
It is an interesting group, though. Everybody seems to want to get training on the latest & greatest stuff, but they never want to use it. Lots of CICS/COBOL, and most of the web work is still done in Cold Fusion. My project's using Java, and there's a lot of head-scratching going on (as well as a lot of cutting & pasting). Oh well, it's just a gig, I won't have to stick around and maintain this stuff (although I have made the point several times that it will be nasty to rework when the legislation changes).
How could anyone say that more bandwidth won't find applications? It's dumbfoundingly stupid.
What TFA says is, people aren't using the bandwidth they currently have, so giving them more won't make a difference. It's a win for the service providers, because doubling someone's download rate is just a matter of changing a setting in a switch, but then you can turn around and charge them an additional $N a month for it, while their usage doesn't really change. I know I appreciate being able to download an ISO in minutes, but I really only do this a couple times a year, so 99.99% of my usage is checking e-mail (~8 msgs/day) and surfing (maybe 1/2hr a day). Do I really need a 5Mb downlink? Nope, but that's the standard speed from my provider, they don't support slower connections. They will, however, happily upgrade my connection to their "premium" level of service and give me an 8Mb download for just a few dollars more.
I don't know where you work, but every place that I've worked, I could call a sales rep and get an evaluation version for free. I've done this with Informix and Oracle, I'm sure it's true with DB2 as well (not so sure about SQL Server). They're usually pretty liberal with the trial period too, and the Informix guy kept wanting to send me one of their support engineers to help me port my data over.
...is to just pick up a Sun Ultra 20. It comes with the latest development tools for Java (including an app server), C, C++ and FORTRAN, and is a peppy box to boot. You also get three years of support for the included tools, and it'll run Solaris 10, Linux and Windows. It's also reasonably priced, all things considered.
pear reviewed publications
Is that where they compare the apples and the oranges?
But if you started with ... Lisp (1959), you're stuck with some seriously dead-end knowledge
Actually, one of the cool things people rave about in Python and Ruby are closures, which LISP pioneered. And once you're familiar with S-expressions, you'll see XML in a whole new light...
Yes, I think FORTRAN's best days my be behind it, and I really doubt COBOL will be seeing a resurgence again, but there's still a lot to be learned from LISP.
after many, many Java classes for the Bachelors Degree and still more for the Masters, I was not able to get even an entry level position as a Java programmer
What was your Masters in, Art History? Or do you just live in Lower East Nowhere? I live in frickin' Nebraska, for $DEITY's sake, and there's Java jobs a-plenty. Hell, I'm getting cold calls again, and that hasn't happened since the bubble burst.
Heh, I often give places a hard time about buying store-branded stuff. "Wait -- you want me to *pay* to advertise *your store*? How about you just give me the sweatshirt/hat/whatever, and I promise to wear it once a month?"
But apparently you can't proofread your sentences! ; )
:)
Busted! That's what I get for doing this stuff while I work -- next time, I'll bag work and pay attention!
I hate to tell you, but actual Computer Science "stuff" doesn't get obsolete
Well, kinda. Which are you more likely to do, write your own interpreter for a scripting language or just embed TCL/Scheme/Python/Perl? And are you going to write your own queueing code, or just use the Java/.NET/SourceForge QueueManager component? Sure, it's important to know language design and queueing theory, but it's often not expedient to actually use it to write code. I dare say that in another ten years, we'll have so many components in so many layers it'll be difficult to write bad code and impossible to write really good code in mainstream applications. Already we've got apps written in languages that run on JVMs that themselves emit CISC instructions that get translated to RISC opcodes before they're finally executed. And with the new trend to virtualization, even the RISC opcodes will be executing on a virtual CPU!
I'm not bashing the CS curriculum, just that a lot of the degreed CS folks I've worked with had trouble keeping up with the changes in technology, their knowledge of "stuff" notwithstanding.
Well, let's see: Big house, check; Porsche, check; happy wife and child, check; pick and choose from a variety of jobs wherever I choose to live (so far: Chicago, Philadelphia, Portland): check. Currently making big zorkmids as a systems architect. And I don't even *have* the English degree -- I was hired out of college (for a programming gig) in the middle of my junior year. So year, you can do OK in the software world with an English degree. I certainly tend to do better than a lot of the CS grads, since I'm continually learning new stuff, not just hoping I make manager before the stuff I learned in school becomes obsolete.
This is interesting. I have two domains, both registered with GoDaddy, but with my complete contact info. I have received exactly ONE (1) piece of snail-mail spam associated with this info. In reading the responses here, I really started to wonder about all these people who complained about getting inundated with spam. Now I wonder if it's just the fact that I registered with an "off-brand" registrar, or if GoDaddy is just good at being proactive about filtering or blocking that kind of stuff (although I can't imagine how they'd do that, beyond not selling their list).
The only scenario where any of this makes sense, would be if I were aggressively attacking someone else's net resource
You -- or someone who's hijacked your server? Wouldn't you want to know if your domain were the source of 30m V1agra! spams? I know I would, and if you wouldn't, then maybe someone should look into whether you're responsible enough to have your own domain. You wouldn't let someone sell crack out of your basement, would you, regardless of whether you ever went down there or not?
in an industry where most want to settle for "good enough for Government work."
Hey, some of us are doing government work, you insensitive clod!
Actually, falling gas tax income is what spurred this development in Oregon. One of the state senators decided that people who drove fuel-efficient cars weren't "contributing" (read: being taxed) enough, so he dreamed up this scheme to supplement the gax tax.
Actually, I got the middle model (2.2GHz / 1G / 80G / nVidia NVS 280) for ~$1300, it's a nice box. The video card supports dual-head displays, 1G of memory (expandable to 4G) is tolerable, and the SATA drive is nice and quick. And the best part is -- it's quiet. It's probably just me, but my last box had noisy fans and drives. This thing, while not silent, is probably several orders of magnitude quieter (my guess is it's probably about 40dB).
:/
;), and deployments are quicker and debugging support is a little nicer (although the Eclipse debugger worked great with JBoss).
That said, if I had it to do over today, I'd get a 20" iMac. I'd get a slightly slower processor (2.1GHz PPC vs 2.2Ghz Opteron), half the memory, a much bigger drive (250G vs. 80G), a flat panel display and wireless (which I don't really need, but it might be nice). Oh, and I'd be able to sync my iPod with my own box and not have to borrow the wife's laptop...
Oh, but the Sun development tools are pretty nice. I was used to a hodgepodge of FOSS stuff (Eclipse / ArgoUML / JBoss / PostgreSQL) that worked pretty well, but not together. Now I can just use the Sun IDE and app server (and PostgreSQL
Hey! Why do you think they called it Remote Job Entry?
I would argue that it's a great way to deter people who *are* great programmers from recommending you for that new team lead position....
Personally, I want one of these devices that works on senior citizens
It's called a "radio tuned to a rap station", and it's quite effective. I understand there's even a pocket version, although the difficulty of projecting the noise through the supplied headphones is an issue. Based on evidence I collected on my last bus trip, though, I can assure you that there a a *lot* of research being done in this area.
... you can't just pop the old drive into your desktop box. Sure, the adapter's cheap, but it's not like buying a new 3.5" drive and just stuffing it in.
Oh, you want this!
we could finally get rid of the explicit barrier between primary and secondary memory
Which primary and secondary do you mean? Registers and L-1 cache? L-1 and L-2 cache? Cache and system memory? System memory and drive controller/disk cache?
I think what you're looking for is a return to core memory. Persistent, fast (1 cycle access times*, same as a register), and durable. I'm all for it, but I haven't seen anything like it for a reasonable price. I know Intel and some other companies are working on it, but I doubt it'll ever be much faster than the SDRAMs we have today that is to say, a couple orders of magnitude slower than the CPU cache (which is itself slower than the internal register sets).
* as long as your cycle times are measured in milliseconds