That may be true about arming everybody, but if you have a significant portion of the population armed at all times then the chance of a mentally unstable person overreacting or flying into a rage and using their weapon when they shouldn't goes way up. Considering how few terrorists there really are running around committing terrorist acts on a daily basis inside the US, it's not hard to believe that the number of accidental or inappropriate shootings would eclipse any reduction in the number of thwarted terrorist threats.
You'd really be surprised by how few candidates can write even the simplest code on a whiteboard when prompted in an interview. *A lot* of people just stand there confused when asked about something simple like writing atoi or reversing a list or searching a binary tree for a key. It's particularly true for candidates straight out of college who have no or limited experience coding outside of class projects.
This point is actually more important than you're making it out to be. Why is college fun compared to all the other things somebody in the typical age group could be doing? Because you're surrounded by lots of other young, motivated people who are exploring their independence for the first time while figuring out what they stand for, what they want to do with their lives, what their identity is, etc. The reasons that make it fun are precisely the same reasons it's personally and academically enriching.
... and I've been writing almost entirely in C/C++ without any SQL since finishing undergrad over 5 years ago (grad school followed by a desktop application development job). The bottom line is that students should be learning a broad range of skills because it's hard to say where any of them are going to end up right out of school or especially within a few years of finishing school.
It really depends what you're trying to teach when. A few years ago I taught a data structures course (second out of a three course lower division sequence) in Java and thought it worked fairly well. About a year before that, I was a teaching assistant for a data structures class taught in C++.
Language choice affected the content of both courses quite a bit. In the Java course, students spent more time understanding how specific data structures worked and working on more interesting programming assignments. Students got to a working knowledge of Java fairly quickly after having only a semester of Scheme under their belt. In the C++ course (which followed a semester taught in ML), the students as a whole spent a lot more time learning about memory management along with the ins and outs of C++. Instruction on data structures was much more limited. Both sets of skills are valuable for practicing engineers, but I think it's fair to say that both the staff (myself and the teaching assistants) and the students enjoyed the class taught in Java more than the class taught in C++, probably because the interesting parts of such a class have to do with efficient data structures more than fighting with pointers and copy constructors.
Following the Java course, those students normally took an introductory hardware class. That course was taught in both assembly language, C and Verilog where learning pointers fit in better with the other material. Following the C++ course, I don't think those students saw much more C or C++ programming for a while (possibly not until upper division topic-specific course work) and instead went off to complete 4 more semesters of more theoretical Computer Science.
In NC both houses of the legislature and the governor's mansion are held by Democrats, but Bush still won the state 56/43 in 2004. State politics != federal politics.
Is it laziness or is it just choosing to expend development effort in the areas that customers are more likely to care about? Every hour spent fixing some crufty old parsing code for 20 year old Word documents is an hour that can't be spent improving security in ways that regularly affect users or adding new features that will improve their productivity.
I think the anti-virus issue is always an interesting one to bring up. Customers would probably be happy if Windows came with anti-virus software, because it would mean one less thing to worry about, one less thing to buy and one less hassle. However, you can bet that Norton and McAfee and all the rest would have an anti-trust lawsuit on Microsoft's plate before the product was even released because it would mean they'd sell fewer pieces of software. In fact, if Windows could be made significantly more hardened to viruses without even writing an actual separate piece of anti-virus software, those same companies could quite likely be out of business in short order.
Interestingly, it seems fair to say that the expectation of a web browser included with the OS exists because of Microsoft's decision to put IE into Windows for free back in the day. Before that happened, Netscape even sold its browser in commercial boxes on store shelves. The idea of downloading software for free was simply not an option except for those in the BBS scene and those who had connections to the internet (largely techies, academics and scientists). Most people went to their local mall and bought their software in a box, no matter how trivial or commoditized
In many ways, the bundling of IE set the stage for the internet to break into mainstream consumer computing. Without that bundling, you have to wonder if adoption of the internet would have happened as quickly and to such an extent.
Which is why this is really all just a bunch of political posturing. Candidate X claims that he or she will do something about those evil video games. Voters with kids nod their heads in agreement. When push comes to shove, the video game makers and retailers work out a deal by announcing some rather insignificant changes to keep direct government regulation out of their business.
All it would take to stop this from happening, is for people to stop being assholes, and to let you through, when you're trying to get into an exit, 1/4 mile away.
You obviously don't live in Seattle. Many drivers here are actually way too polite in that they'll do stupid things in traffic. They'll slam on their brakes to let somebody in on the freeway. They'll stop in the middle of the road to let a waiting jay walker cross. They'll drive on a freeway in the left lane going below the speed limit when there's not any serious traffic, often in concert with other drivers doing the same thing thereby clogging up the road for those who actually would like to just drive the speed limit.
A certain degree of aggressiveness and self-interest is required to keep traffic flowing optimally. You don't want cars dangerously road raging or speeding, but you also don't want everybody driving like an out to lunch grandma.
The internal name for the product was NetDocs. It was basically supposed to be a suped up version 7 years ago of what Google apps is today. Ultimately, it was killed and a few of the pieces collected together into what is now InfoPath.
Interestingly, this is pretty much what OOXML does too--directories containing XML for text/structure and binary files for images, movies, etc. zipped up and renamed docx/xlsx/pptx.
Unless (and it is a big if) they are saying that possession of mp3s in his shared folder is an unauthorized format. But I can't quite follow that.
Remember, these are RIAA lawyers we're talking about, not techies. What's the same format in different locations to you could be described entirely differently by these guys.
It's well known inside Microsoft that the marketing sucks. The fact of the matter is that Microsoft scours the globe for good developers, program managers and testers while hiring mostly locally for marketroids. Moreover, I've heard that the turnover is much higher in marketing since climbing your way up in the marketing world usually requires switching companies for each promotion. That leads to more people who don't know a whole lot about the products and the business who are just spending those 2-3 years learning the ropes while angling for their next position at WaMu or Starbucks or Paccar or another local non-tech corporation.
This article is a bit more relevant to what you're looking for I think. Their figures point to only between about one fifth to one third of Linux kernel development (just one piece of the OSS pie of course) being done by actual unpaid volunteers.
The phone almost certainly would roam onto T-Mobile's US GSM network. Visual voicemail work or it might not. The subscriber would be paying exorbitant roaming rates and would of course still have a German phone number though. AT&T has roaming agreements in most countries that have a GSM network right now, which means you can take a US iPhone on AT&T to Germany and have it work on one or more of T-Mobile, O2 or Vodafone's network.
As a dev at Microsoft, I'd be curious to see a source for that 1,000 lines per year number. That said, I do write fewer lines of code per unit of time here than at either of the startups I worked for. That's not because I'm being micromanaged or filling out paperwork or even spending all my time in meetings (although during planning there are a lot of meetings), but rather because modifying an enormous code base that has been around for over 20 years (in my case Office) is not trivial. I spend a lot of time reading through code just to figure out how I'm going to fix a bug or how I'm going to integrate a new feature or how I'm going to refactor something. In college and in previous jobs I learned a lot about how to write code, because usually I was building something brand new from scratch or from a small existing code base. In this job, I really have learned a lot about how to dive into a large, unknown piece of code and figure out where the action of the small slice I'm interested in is at and make changes to it without compromising stability. That's a very important skill that in my experience is harder to find in a programmer than a skill like cranking a thousand lines in one evening.
Nurses don't do too bad. Here in the Seattle area according to BLS they earn about $70K/year compared to $91K/year for programmers. If you think IT workers get no respect from management, ask nurses about how much respect they get from doctors.
I can't find the reference right now, but Facebook supposedly is already profitable and has an annual revenue of around $150 million. At $15 billion, that's 100 years of revenue (not even profit) at the current rate. Compare that Microsoft with $44 billion in revenue per year and a $293 billion market cap (6.7) or Google with $10 billion in revenue to $210 billion market cap (21).
Thank goodness! Gmail's POP support on the iPhone sucks. I've been forwarding everything from my Gmail account to an IMAP mailbox elsewhere while sending out new messages through smtp.gmail.com so that I can get decent integration. This solution works ok but the read messages get out of sync, I need to constantly clean out the IMAP inbox and I can't start a draft on Gmail then continue it on my phone (or vice versa).
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, pretty much all full time employees at Microsoft get an office, in most cases their own office even.
That may be true about arming everybody, but if you have a significant portion of the population armed at all times then the chance of a mentally unstable person overreacting or flying into a rage and using their weapon when they shouldn't goes way up. Considering how few terrorists there really are running around committing terrorist acts on a daily basis inside the US, it's not hard to believe that the number of accidental or inappropriate shootings would eclipse any reduction in the number of thwarted terrorist threats.
You'd really be surprised by how few candidates can write even the simplest code on a whiteboard when prompted in an interview. *A lot* of people just stand there confused when asked about something simple like writing atoi or reversing a list or searching a binary tree for a key. It's particularly true for candidates straight out of college who have no or limited experience coding outside of class projects.
This point is actually more important than you're making it out to be. Why is college fun compared to all the other things somebody in the typical age group could be doing? Because you're surrounded by lots of other young, motivated people who are exploring their independence for the first time while figuring out what they stand for, what they want to do with their lives, what their identity is, etc. The reasons that make it fun are precisely the same reasons it's personally and academically enriching.
... and I've been writing almost entirely in C/C++ without any SQL since finishing undergrad over 5 years ago (grad school followed by a desktop application development job). The bottom line is that students should be learning a broad range of skills because it's hard to say where any of them are going to end up right out of school or especially within a few years of finishing school.
It really depends what you're trying to teach when. A few years ago I taught a data structures course (second out of a three course lower division sequence) in Java and thought it worked fairly well. About a year before that, I was a teaching assistant for a data structures class taught in C++.
Language choice affected the content of both courses quite a bit. In the Java course, students spent more time understanding how specific data structures worked and working on more interesting programming assignments. Students got to a working knowledge of Java fairly quickly after having only a semester of Scheme under their belt. In the C++ course (which followed a semester taught in ML), the students as a whole spent a lot more time learning about memory management along with the ins and outs of C++. Instruction on data structures was much more limited. Both sets of skills are valuable for practicing engineers, but I think it's fair to say that both the staff (myself and the teaching assistants) and the students enjoyed the class taught in Java more than the class taught in C++, probably because the interesting parts of such a class have to do with efficient data structures more than fighting with pointers and copy constructors.
Following the Java course, those students normally took an introductory hardware class. That course was taught in both assembly language, C and Verilog where learning pointers fit in better with the other material. Following the C++ course, I don't think those students saw much more C or C++ programming for a while (possibly not until upper division topic-specific course work) and instead went off to complete 4 more semesters of more theoretical Computer Science.
In NC both houses of the legislature and the governor's mansion are held by Democrats, but Bush still won the state 56/43 in 2004. State politics != federal politics.
Is it laziness or is it just choosing to expend development effort in the areas that customers are more likely to care about? Every hour spent fixing some crufty old parsing code for 20 year old Word documents is an hour that can't be spent improving security in ways that regularly affect users or adding new features that will improve their productivity.
I think the anti-virus issue is always an interesting one to bring up. Customers would probably be happy if Windows came with anti-virus software, because it would mean one less thing to worry about, one less thing to buy and one less hassle. However, you can bet that Norton and McAfee and all the rest would have an anti-trust lawsuit on Microsoft's plate before the product was even released because it would mean they'd sell fewer pieces of software. In fact, if Windows could be made significantly more hardened to viruses without even writing an actual separate piece of anti-virus software, those same companies could quite likely be out of business in short order.
Interestingly, it seems fair to say that the expectation of a web browser included with the OS exists because of Microsoft's decision to put IE into Windows for free back in the day. Before that happened, Netscape even sold its browser in commercial boxes on store shelves. The idea of downloading software for free was simply not an option except for those in the BBS scene and those who had connections to the internet (largely techies, academics and scientists). Most people went to their local mall and bought their software in a box, no matter how trivial or commoditized
In many ways, the bundling of IE set the stage for the internet to break into mainstream consumer computing. Without that bundling, you have to wonder if adoption of the internet would have happened as quickly and to such an extent.
Which is why this is really all just a bunch of political posturing. Candidate X claims that he or she will do something about those evil video games. Voters with kids nod their heads in agreement. When push comes to shove, the video game makers and retailers work out a deal by announcing some rather insignificant changes to keep direct government regulation out of their business.
You obviously don't live in Seattle. Many drivers here are actually way too polite in that they'll do stupid things in traffic. They'll slam on their brakes to let somebody in on the freeway. They'll stop in the middle of the road to let a waiting jay walker cross. They'll drive on a freeway in the left lane going below the speed limit when there's not any serious traffic, often in concert with other drivers doing the same thing thereby clogging up the road for those who actually would like to just drive the speed limit.
A certain degree of aggressiveness and self-interest is required to keep traffic flowing optimally. You don't want cars dangerously road raging or speeding, but you also don't want everybody driving like an out to lunch grandma.
The internal name for the product was NetDocs. It was basically supposed to be a suped up version 7 years ago of what Google apps is today. Ultimately, it was killed and a few of the pieces collected together into what is now InfoPath.
Interestingly, this is pretty much what OOXML does too--directories containing XML for text/structure and binary files for images, movies, etc. zipped up and renamed docx/xlsx/pptx.
Actually, DC has had Presidential electoral votes since 1961. However, it doesn't have Senate representation and only a non-voting member in the House.
Unless (and it is a big if) they are saying that possession of mp3s in his shared folder is an unauthorized format. But I can't quite follow that.
Remember, these are RIAA lawyers we're talking about, not techies. What's the same format in different locations to you could be described entirely differently by these guys.
It's well known inside Microsoft that the marketing sucks. The fact of the matter is that Microsoft scours the globe for good developers, program managers and testers while hiring mostly locally for marketroids. Moreover, I've heard that the turnover is much higher in marketing since climbing your way up in the marketing world usually requires switching companies for each promotion. That leads to more people who don't know a whole lot about the products and the business who are just spending those 2-3 years learning the ropes while angling for their next position at WaMu or Starbucks or Paccar or another local non-tech corporation.
One word: headphones.
This article is a bit more relevant to what you're looking for I think. Their figures point to only between about one fifth to one third of Linux kernel development (just one piece of the OSS pie of course) being done by actual unpaid volunteers.
The phone almost certainly would roam onto T-Mobile's US GSM network. Visual voicemail work or it might not. The subscriber would be paying exorbitant roaming rates and would of course still have a German phone number though. AT&T has roaming agreements in most countries that have a GSM network right now, which means you can take a US iPhone on AT&T to Germany and have it work on one or more of T-Mobile, O2 or Vodafone's network.
Yup, the fastest profit growth since 1999 and MSFT is definitely in a downward spiral...
As a dev at Microsoft, I'd be curious to see a source for that 1,000 lines per year number. That said, I do write fewer lines of code per unit of time here than at either of the startups I worked for. That's not because I'm being micromanaged or filling out paperwork or even spending all my time in meetings (although during planning there are a lot of meetings), but rather because modifying an enormous code base that has been around for over 20 years (in my case Office) is not trivial. I spend a lot of time reading through code just to figure out how I'm going to fix a bug or how I'm going to integrate a new feature or how I'm going to refactor something. In college and in previous jobs I learned a lot about how to write code, because usually I was building something brand new from scratch or from a small existing code base. In this job, I really have learned a lot about how to dive into a large, unknown piece of code and figure out where the action of the small slice I'm interested in is at and make changes to it without compromising stability. That's a very important skill that in my experience is harder to find in a programmer than a skill like cranking a thousand lines in one evening.
Nurses don't do too bad. Here in the Seattle area according to BLS they earn about $70K/year compared to $91K/year for programmers. If you think IT workers get no respect from management, ask nurses about how much respect they get from doctors.
I can't find the reference right now, but Facebook supposedly is already profitable and has an annual revenue of around $150 million. At $15 billion, that's 100 years of revenue (not even profit) at the current rate. Compare that Microsoft with $44 billion in revenue per year and a $293 billion market cap (6.7) or Google with $10 billion in revenue to $210 billion market cap (21).
Thank goodness! Gmail's POP support on the iPhone sucks. I've been forwarding everything from my Gmail account to an IMAP mailbox elsewhere while sending out new messages through smtp.gmail.com so that I can get decent integration. This solution works ok but the read messages get out of sync, I need to constantly clean out the IMAP inbox and I can't start a draft on Gmail then continue it on my phone (or vice versa).