Other than France? Yes. It's just a matter of practicality. English is simply the most widespread language in the world. If there is a non-native language used by the most people, it would be English. A lot of technical manuals are written in English or are available in English. Code comments are often in English, even when worked on by non-native English programmers. If a non-English company is trying to be more international, their best return would be translating their documentation into English. It's sort of a network effect here akin to how the world coalesced around TCP/IP, even for networks that don't connect to the Internet. If there is one set of protocol you want to support for your networking or networked product, it would be TCP/IP. Likewise for English.
One habit I've taken up is to always remember all the times I've screwed up and done something idiotic. I also try to remember how graceful people have been about those occasions. That's not to say that I'm always all forgiving -- I've been known to go unhinged on programmers who don't bother testing their code at least once. Still, when someone screws up and if their intention is benign, I recall similar situations I've been in and it makes it easier to say "No worries". Some of you might have never been in a situation where you were the idiot but I'm thankful that I'm been the idiot a few times at least.
I am not Dutch but I've traveled to the Netherlands. It's an awesome country with people who speak multiple languages, including English without any accent. Utrecht, IIRC, is the tech hub of the Netherlands with an university that offers computer science courses. See if you can take a course there. You'll meet some very friendly people and taste great beer while being able to travel easily throughout Europe. Plus there's also a bunch of American students there, which could be a good thing depending on what you want.
Just because the output of an organization is socially desirable, it doesn't mean it's economically sound. What if I started a company to build electric cars for everyone, not just at $100,000, but at a severe lost, should the government subsidize me? Most of the time loans should be made for economically sound reasons. Low interest loans to risky borrowers is dumb and is what got us into our current financial crisis. Yes, housing for everyone is socially desirable but it doesn't make good financial sense.
Either we nationalize the company or nothing. Think about it for a minute. When you loan someone money at a low interest rate, they get almost all the upside and none of the downside. If Tesla goes bankrupt, what are we left with? Nothing. If Tesla does well, what do we get? Low interest payments. We the taxpayers are bearing the risks, not Tesla or its investors. If they want us to bear the risks, then we must get a share of the prize. Then we should buy preferred shares from Tesla.
Personally, I'm against both. The US government should not be in the business of making loans. Under what criteria does the government give out loans? Who qualifies? Why shouldn't we give the low interest loans to our students to go to college? What about mom and pop stores? What about Toyota and BMW? These questions are normally answered by the lenders and judged on the merit of the borrower's business proposal.
It's rare to have such nuanced views on Slashdot. As much as I wanted Stevens out of the Senate, your perspective on him is quite believable. The world isn't black and white or good vs. evil. People are often shades in between. It doesn't help our understanding of the world to type cast someone or see only one perspective/side of a person, a nation, or an issue.
It is indeed sad to see someone with such a long service to fall to such lows.
The idea behind a VM isn't simply to run multiple OSes. That's just one benefit. Imagine behind able to transfer the entire state of your machine between different physical hardware. VMware can already do this with x86 machines with VMotion. How they're looking for possible wider applications. How about being able to transfer everything on your old phone to a new phone? Or how about backing up everything on the phone somewhere? Or if you work in IT for a large company, wouldn't it be nice for your users if the loaner Blackberry can be customized and always stay the same for the user no matter which physical device is assigned? Don't forget how limited the Internet's applications were when it was first started. Innovation can happen when we apply old ideas to new areas.
Anyone know why they took "hide preview" away from the Gmail gadget? On the Gmail gadget's blog, almost all the comments are complains about this change. I've stopped using it because of this. It might now seem so important at first glance but I think a lot of us use iGoogle as our homepage and leave our browser on it. I don't want someone passing by to glance at my email. When I click and go to Gmail, there's only a brief period when someone can pass by and see it. Knowing this, I would only check my email when I have some measure of privacy. However little that privacy is, it's better than none. I'm not trying to guard against intruders or determined snoopers. I just don't want innocent glances reading my email.
I ended up doing IT out of college (between the first Internet bubble and the Web 2.0 one). I did manage to convince the IT department that a few custom scripts/programs here and there would be helpful to their operations. Still, 75% of my time was spent moving computers around, helping people with issues, and graduated to managing servers. That, however, made me really hunger for programming so I ended up thinking up projects on my own and coding them. I learned web related programming and AJAX when it was relatively new. I would create games for fun, etc. Finally I got a call from a recruiter at a company that I admired and applied for the job. I told them what my situation was. I told them a good part of what I know I learned on my own and that I was looking for the chance to really learn to do software engineering, not necessarily better compensation. That attitude probably impressed them quite a bit. Obviously I had to pass all the technical questions and coding tests. At the end, I got hired and that's where I've been for the lats 1.5 years.
Long story short, you can learn quite a bit on your own, enough so that you can get an entry level job in programming. The right attitude helps.
Agreed. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article a while back about car safety by comparing active and passive safety. A lot of people these days prefer passive safety and would rather delegate their responsibility over to their vehicle rather than trying to actively avoid the accident. His example are SUVs where some owners already assumes that they will be in accident so rather than getting a nimble car to avoid one, they get the biggest one possible. In turns out that statistically speaking, it's usually a bad trade-off.
I can see the parallel in here. Instead of getting into the kids' head that driving recklessly is a bad idea, we try to take responsibility out of their hands. I don't know how effective that will be in the long run. It seems that you can still do a lot of damage in relatively low speeds. Even at 45 MPH, an accident can still be fatal, especially if you head an oncoming car. I question the value of this device.
Finance is one of the biggest consumers of IT and development resources. My first job out of college was at a hedge fund as a IT developer. Many people don't realize that finance is heavily computer and information driven these days. The days of people working on gut feeling is dying out. At the hedge fund, there was only two traders who actually traded in financial instruments. The rest of the non-support people were analysts who came up with strategies based on models and information provided to them by quants and programmed into their infrastructure by CS people. Their infrastructure was maintained by IT people.
My point is that finance going downhill is bad for IT and CS because that's one of the most information driven sectors outside of software and hire a lot of CS people out of college.
Just because you wrote it, doesn't mean it's worth keeping. I don't know if your company does any sort of code review. If someone points out where your written code could be made better, don't get defensive about it. If they're right, they're right. The real gem is when someone points out how you can do the same or more by deleting some code. In any case, expect there to be drafts of code and rewrites. The hope is that once you've become more proficient and experience there would be less drafts and rewrites.
VMware isn't claiming these ideas are new. IBM and computer science departments around the world has been talking about these ideas for many years. The difference is that VMware has an implementation that will work on x86 hardware that can bring the benefits of these ideas to a large market. In some sense we've come full circle as we moved from mainframes and room size computers to PCs and commodity hardware and now back to computers in a datacenter (a very big room). However, you can't just dismiss the new-old idea and say "I told you so" because there are differences between the current implementation and the old one. The x86 hardware is one difference. Another is the fact that the computing hardware are clusters of relatively inexpensive servers rather than a few large boxes. These kinds of hardware are more much prolific than the IBM hardware and thus the VMware solution is more accessible. I can't say if one solution is technically better than the other. However, the VMware solution works in the current x86 environment/market that is a result of the history of the industry.
I've been a tutor before and am still one but it's harder than you would think. It's not so much knowing the material as it is explaining to the student that's difficult. A lot of times I find myself explain things in an abstract way that only confuses the hell out of my students. It's so obvious to me but it makes no sense to them, which is of course why they need help in the first place. My point is that a good teacher/tutor isn't always one who knows the material the best but one who is the best at explaining it to someone. I'm not saying that the OP isn't good at this but it tends to be that nerds/engineers aren't very good with communications.
"Whether people like it or not, there ARE two major theories that both have evidence that can point to it, and plenty of credible scientists who think it happened that way"
If you put Creationism and evolution in the same category, then there are way more than just two. There will be as many theories as there are religions around the world plus one for evolution. The trouble with all of those, with the exception of evolution, is that people who believe them are quite certain that they're correct without the need for evidence or testing. Evolution isn't something you based purely on faith; there is a possibility that evolution can be wrong. All the religious theories don't have that quality. Hence, evolution and Creationism (or any other creation myth held by other religions) are not in the same category.
Anyone know why India is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? I'm not sure if this makes a significant difference or not but it's strange that India wouldn't join it and give some measure of assurance to other countries who could be supplying the technology. There must be a good reason why though.
I read a paper when I was in college that takes care of the 2nd problem. Basically you have a home station that is always aware of where you are. When you're at your home network, everything is fine. When you move into another network, you inform your home station of your new location. Everytime you send out a packet, you continue using your home station as the "reply-to" address. As far as everyone else is concerned, you haven't moved at all. When your home station receives the packet destined for you, it forwards it to your current network, which then hands it off to you. Not exactly the most efficient protocol in the world but it gets the job done.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than France? Yes. It's just a matter of practicality. English is simply the most widespread language in the world. If there is a non-native language used by the most people, it would be English. A lot of technical manuals are written in English or are available in English. Code comments are often in English, even when worked on by non-native English programmers. If a non-English company is trying to be more international, their best return would be translating their documentation into English. It's sort of a network effect here akin to how the world coalesced around TCP/IP, even for networks that don't connect to the Internet. If there is one set of protocol you want to support for your networking or networked product, it would be TCP/IP. Likewise for English.
Requiring English in tech isn't a bias. It's almost a de facto standard.
One habit I've taken up is to always remember all the times I've screwed up and done something idiotic. I also try to remember how graceful people have been about those occasions. That's not to say that I'm always all forgiving -- I've been known to go unhinged on programmers who don't bother testing their code at least once. Still, when someone screws up and if their intention is benign, I recall similar situations I've been in and it makes it easier to say "No worries". Some of you might have never been in a situation where you were the idiot but I'm thankful that I'm been the idiot a few times at least.
I am not Dutch but I've traveled to the Netherlands. It's an awesome country with people who speak multiple languages, including English without any accent. Utrecht, IIRC, is the tech hub of the Netherlands with an university that offers computer science courses. See if you can take a course there. You'll meet some very friendly people and taste great beer while being able to travel easily throughout Europe. Plus there's also a bunch of American students there, which could be a good thing depending on what you want.
Sure the isolation sounds terrible but apparently those clever scientists have figured out a good way to pass the time, huddle up with other researchers, feeling cold, and needing warmth...
Just because the output of an organization is socially desirable, it doesn't mean it's economically sound. What if I started a company to build electric cars for everyone, not just at $100,000, but at a severe lost, should the government subsidize me? Most of the time loans should be made for economically sound reasons. Low interest loans to risky borrowers is dumb and is what got us into our current financial crisis. Yes, housing for everyone is socially desirable but it doesn't make good financial sense.
Either we nationalize the company or nothing. Think about it for a minute. When you loan someone money at a low interest rate, they get almost all the upside and none of the downside. If Tesla goes bankrupt, what are we left with? Nothing. If Tesla does well, what do we get? Low interest payments. We the taxpayers are bearing the risks, not Tesla or its investors. If they want us to bear the risks, then we must get a share of the prize. Then we should buy preferred shares from Tesla.
Personally, I'm against both. The US government should not be in the business of making loans. Under what criteria does the government give out loans? Who qualifies? Why shouldn't we give the low interest loans to our students to go to college? What about mom and pop stores? What about Toyota and BMW? These questions are normally answered by the lenders and judged on the merit of the borrower's business proposal.
Only as far as East Asia is from you...
It's rare to have such nuanced views on Slashdot. As much as I wanted Stevens out of the Senate, your perspective on him is quite believable. The world isn't black and white or good vs. evil. People are often shades in between. It doesn't help our understanding of the world to type cast someone or see only one perspective/side of a person, a nation, or an issue.
It is indeed sad to see someone with such a long service to fall to such lows.
The idea behind a VM isn't simply to run multiple OSes. That's just one benefit. Imagine behind able to transfer the entire state of your machine between different physical hardware. VMware can already do this with x86 machines with VMotion. How they're looking for possible wider applications. How about being able to transfer everything on your old phone to a new phone? Or how about backing up everything on the phone somewhere? Or if you work in IT for a large company, wouldn't it be nice for your users if the loaner Blackberry can be customized and always stay the same for the user no matter which physical device is assigned? Don't forget how limited the Internet's applications were when it was first started. Innovation can happen when we apply old ideas to new areas.
You mean like VMware's VMotion, HA, and DRS functionalities?
Anyone know why they took "hide preview" away from the Gmail gadget? On the Gmail gadget's blog, almost all the comments are complains about this change. I've stopped using it because of this. It might now seem so important at first glance but I think a lot of us use iGoogle as our homepage and leave our browser on it. I don't want someone passing by to glance at my email. When I click and go to Gmail, there's only a brief period when someone can pass by and see it. Knowing this, I would only check my email when I have some measure of privacy. However little that privacy is, it's better than none. I'm not trying to guard against intruders or determined snoopers. I just don't want innocent glances reading my email.
I ended up doing IT out of college (between the first Internet bubble and the Web 2.0 one). I did manage to convince the IT department that a few custom scripts/programs here and there would be helpful to their operations. Still, 75% of my time was spent moving computers around, helping people with issues, and graduated to managing servers. That, however, made me really hunger for programming so I ended up thinking up projects on my own and coding them. I learned web related programming and AJAX when it was relatively new. I would create games for fun, etc. Finally I got a call from a recruiter at a company that I admired and applied for the job. I told them what my situation was. I told them a good part of what I know I learned on my own and that I was looking for the chance to really learn to do software engineering, not necessarily better compensation. That attitude probably impressed them quite a bit. Obviously I had to pass all the technical questions and coding tests. At the end, I got hired and that's where I've been for the lats 1.5 years.
Long story short, you can learn quite a bit on your own, enough so that you can get an entry level job in programming. The right attitude helps.
Yes well that's what in these days. Acting stupid, inarticulate, and like a hick is so 2000 and 2004.
Agreed. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article a while back about car safety by comparing active and passive safety. A lot of people these days prefer passive safety and would rather delegate their responsibility over to their vehicle rather than trying to actively avoid the accident. His example are SUVs where some owners already assumes that they will be in accident so rather than getting a nimble car to avoid one, they get the biggest one possible. In turns out that statistically speaking, it's usually a bad trade-off.
I can see the parallel in here. Instead of getting into the kids' head that driving recklessly is a bad idea, we try to take responsibility out of their hands. I don't know how effective that will be in the long run. It seems that you can still do a lot of damage in relatively low speeds. Even at 45 MPH, an accident can still be fatal, especially if you head an oncoming car. I question the value of this device.
Tell them that it drives away all the girls and the little boys will think it's such an awesome thing. At least you got half the class covered.
Windows "Pie in the Sky" Edition
Just in case anyone is late to this discussion, let's be very clear about one thing: "These are not homework problems!"*
*Thanks to George Dantzig this is now a requisite warning whenever people talk about lists of difficult problems.
Finance is one of the biggest consumers of IT and development resources. My first job out of college was at a hedge fund as a IT developer. Many people don't realize that finance is heavily computer and information driven these days. The days of people working on gut feeling is dying out. At the hedge fund, there was only two traders who actually traded in financial instruments. The rest of the non-support people were analysts who came up with strategies based on models and information provided to them by quants and programmed into their infrastructure by CS people. Their infrastructure was maintained by IT people.
My point is that finance going downhill is bad for IT and CS because that's one of the most information driven sectors outside of software and hire a lot of CS people out of college.
Just because you wrote it, doesn't mean it's worth keeping. I don't know if your company does any sort of code review. If someone points out where your written code could be made better, don't get defensive about it. If they're right, they're right. The real gem is when someone points out how you can do the same or more by deleting some code. In any case, expect there to be drafts of code and rewrites. The hope is that once you've become more proficient and experience there would be less drafts and rewrites.
VMware isn't claiming these ideas are new. IBM and computer science departments around the world has been talking about these ideas for many years. The difference is that VMware has an implementation that will work on x86 hardware that can bring the benefits of these ideas to a large market. In some sense we've come full circle as we moved from mainframes and room size computers to PCs and commodity hardware and now back to computers in a datacenter (a very big room). However, you can't just dismiss the new-old idea and say "I told you so" because there are differences between the current implementation and the old one. The x86 hardware is one difference. Another is the fact that the computing hardware are clusters of relatively inexpensive servers rather than a few large boxes. These kinds of hardware are more much prolific than the IBM hardware and thus the VMware solution is more accessible. I can't say if one solution is technically better than the other. However, the VMware solution works in the current x86 environment/market that is a result of the history of the industry.
I've been a tutor before and am still one but it's harder than you would think. It's not so much knowing the material as it is explaining to the student that's difficult. A lot of times I find myself explain things in an abstract way that only confuses the hell out of my students. It's so obvious to me but it makes no sense to them, which is of course why they need help in the first place. My point is that a good teacher/tutor isn't always one who knows the material the best but one who is the best at explaining it to someone. I'm not saying that the OP isn't good at this but it tends to be that nerds/engineers aren't very good with communications.
"Whether people like it or not, there ARE two major theories that both have evidence that can point to it, and plenty of credible scientists who think it happened that way"
If you put Creationism and evolution in the same category, then there are way more than just two. There will be as many theories as there are religions around the world plus one for evolution. The trouble with all of those, with the exception of evolution, is that people who believe them are quite certain that they're correct without the need for evidence or testing. Evolution isn't something you based purely on faith; there is a possibility that evolution can be wrong. All the religious theories don't have that quality. Hence, evolution and Creationism (or any other creation myth held by other religions) are not in the same category.
Anyone know why India is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? I'm not sure if this makes a significant difference or not but it's strange that India wouldn't join it and give some measure of assurance to other countries who could be supplying the technology. There must be a good reason why though.
I read a paper when I was in college that takes care of the 2nd problem. Basically you have a home station that is always aware of where you are. When you're at your home network, everything is fine. When you move into another network, you inform your home station of your new location. Everytime you send out a packet, you continue using your home station as the "reply-to" address. As far as everyone else is concerned, you haven't moved at all. When your home station receives the packet destined for you, it forwards it to your current network, which then hands it off to you. Not exactly the most efficient protocol in the world but it gets the job done.