If your goal is to be a programmer, you may find that only a fraction of the courses that you take are relevant to your career aspirations. CS degree requirements are usually more than just learning how to program. A lot of places will require that you take breadth credits from the humanities or social sciences. Besides that, you'll probably be required to take a number of courses within the CS department that are theory related. Although the material you'll be exposed to in these courses is incredibly interesting (IMHO), you may find yourself becoming cynical about why you have to learn material that doesn't really help you become a professional programmer. You'll also have to take a number of math courses (calculus, linear algebra). This stuff is important, since a lot of areas in CS (e.g., AI, graphics), require that you have a solid math foundation.
Depending on where you want to land a job, and what type of software you want to program, you may or may not need a degree. For example, if you want to land a job as a software developer at IBM, you'll probably need a degree. (The work itself doesn't necessarily require a degree, but IBM tends to hire degreed people.) You'll also need a degree if you want to do any hard-core graphics programming.
However, there are a lot of other types of programming jobs out there for which a college diploma will suffice. A college diploma will also cost a lot less money, and you'll be able to complete it in a lot less time.
Your best bet is probably to look at what kind of jobs are out there now and identify which ones appeal to you the most. Once you've identified this, look at the requirements that these jobs list. Do they want a degree? Will they settle for a diploma? Job ads sometimes say "degree or equivalent experience", which usually means that as long as you can demonstrate you'll be able to do the job competently, they don't care whether you have a "B.Sc" after your name.
Such an ignorantly worded motion should have never passed in the first place. It also took quite sometime for a real apology to be forthcoming, and it was not until after the Carleton president got involved. The initial reaction by CUSA to the backlash was that students and the rest of the country just "didn't get it". Brittany Smyth, the CUSA president, kept trying to explain away the decision as having nothing to do with the clause that said CF was a white male illness. You can hear her here, on CFRA (Ottawa) radio. After a couple of days of public outrage, and a petition to have her impeached, Brittany did finally issue a somewhat mediocre apology.
The real star of this debacle is Donnie Northrup, the 4th year science student who authored the original motion. He made some interesting comments to a reporter of the Ottawa Citizen. Essentially, he regrets that we misunderstood the intent of his motion, and that he should have worded the motion more carefully. He claimed that he slipped up because he had a lot of homework due at the time. And to make himself look like a bigger ass than he's already made himself out to be, he adds that "writing is not something he's focusing his degree on."
So yeah, the decision is being revisited, but the idiots who made it are still idiots, and bringing attention to this stupidity is still worthwhile.
Cuil engineers and executives are probably turning red as we speak. You put in the search term "cuil" and the first page of results includes "Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland - Properazzi", and "Restaurants in Cuil Dabhcha | Restaurants Of The World" but no actual link to cuil.com. You think that would have been one of the most obvious test cases in their test suite... but I digress, after playing around with the search engine, my guess is that they don't even have a test suite, and the experience of other slashdotters seems to confirm this.
The world always needs another example of how not to develop software.
This one should have made the front page
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 1
... there will be about 100 different prefabricated scents on the chip for customers to choose from.
My interpretation of this was that you choose a scent from this list of 100 scents, the 'id' for that scent is sent to the receiver, and then the scent is generated at the receiver based on the id.
So this is very different from photos, videos, and sound clips being sent.
I've read TFA, but I'm confused about what actually got patented. It would make more sense if the patent was related to the chip they're developing as opposed to the use of the chip in a mobile phone. In the former case, the possible applications are extremely broad. Think online games and virtual reality. Imagine playing WoW and having scents recreated for you by a chip in your computer as you wander the landscape.
However, from TFA, it sounds like the patent is more narrow than this. That is, it's specifically about sending the scent in a mobile phone. To me, this seems absurd -- why narrow your patent to one application, when your technology is applicable in many other places? Besides this, when you send a scent, all the phone is doing is sending a representation of the scent (i.e., a command) to the receiver. Such an obvious mechanism seems hardly worth patenting.
There have been a number of posts that have mentioned using encryption to get around the problem of ISPs that throttle bittorrent traffic, but no one has posted a HOWTO for the less enlightened on how to actually enable encryption in a bittorrent client. For those interested, here you go: follow this link for details on how to enable encryption in Azureus, BitComet, and uTorent.
As has been mentioned, this may or may not improve the download speeds that you experience. But it's worth a try.
There are plans in the works for developing new protocols that are even better at bypassing existing throttling techniques.
... we are close to classifying CompSci as a "non degree"
So from what discipline do you plan on recruiting people who have all the training that you so desperately need? Chemistry majors perhaps?
Java is fine for teaching design patterns and classical algorithms like Quicksort, or binary search.
Perhaps I'm misreading you, but your tone seems dismissive, as if teaching design patterns and classical algorithms was somehow unimportant. Design patterns, OO, etc, are all big-buzzwords in any job ad I've seen lately. And
classical algorithms like quicksort and binary search is stuff that will always be taught in computer science. Not teaching that stuff is like not teaching classical mechanics in a physics program. If Java reduces the learning curve and helps students grasp these concepts and algorithms faster, isn't that a good thing?
We have already blacklisted courses like the one at Kings College, because they teach operating systems in Java.
Yes, really.
Their reason apparently is that it is "easier".
I have zero interest in kids who have studied "easy" subjects.
The reason they teach OS concepts with Java is likely because it is more pedagogically effective (in your parlance, "easier"). Let me spell that out for you in more detail, since you probably have difficulty grasping what I mean. Operating Systems encompasses a large array of topics, including stuff like virtual memory, process scheduling, file system structures, etc. Sure, there are certain parts of operating systems that require low-level programming that can only be done with Assembly and C, but that is hardly true about the OS as a whole. Introductory OS courses (regardless of the language they are taught in), typically won't go into excruciating detail about boot loaders and other such components that require low-level programming. They'll talk about the higher-level issues. Using Java to demonstrate these concepts doesn't compromise how hard (or easy) the course is. It simply allows the instructor to focus on the concepts being taught in the course instead of worrying about the language peculiarities that come along other languages.
BTW, ever hear of JavaOS? It's an Operating System written mostly in Java.
Yes, really.
How can someone understand the Linux kernel without C & C++ ?
Good question. One needs to know the language in which something is written to understand it. But just because someone knows English doesn't mean they'll understand Shakespeare. University is about teaching students how to think. Making them learn one language versus another is irrelevant. Understanding the concepts is what's important; picking up the language syntax is secondary.
Tuition at Harvard is $30,000+ . Per year. Are students attending this place really that concerned about saving $30-40 bucks on a textbook?
Having said that, textbooks in general are way overpriced and having a website that does price comparisons is great. There's another one called campusi that is really excellent.
But textbooks are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of tuition nowadays. Even in Canada, tuition is spiraling out of control. It's ridiculous. Students shouldn't be forced to take out loans to get an education.
This is a link to Google's Online Security Blog. Nothing there about the sky falling if you're using Java. Granted, there's some stuff there on virtual machines, but nothing specifically related to JVMs.
I find this an extremely hard story to swallow, especially given the lack of details in the article. I'm surprised this story even passed Slashdot's screening process.
Actually, the article addresses the health concerns.
From the article:
Magnetic coupling is particularly suitable for everyday applications because most common materials interact only very weakly with magnetic fields, so interactions with extraneous environmental objects are suppressed even further. "The fact that magnetic fields interact so weakly with biological organisms is also important for safety considerations," Kurs, a graduate student in physics, points out.
The investigated design consists of two copper coils, each a self-resonant system. One of the coils, attached to the power source, is the sending unit. Instead of irradiating the environment with electromagnetic waves, it fills the space around it with a non-radiative magnetic field oscillating at MHz frequencies. The non-radiative field mediates the power exchange with the other coil (the receiving unit), which is specially designed to resonate with the field. The resonant nature of the process ensures the strong interaction between the sending unit and the receiving unit, while the interaction with the rest of the environment is weak.
after all if you wanted the easy life you wouldn't be using Linux in the first place.
I think this is the wrong attitude to have. People may decide to change to Linux for a number of reasons. There's a large segment of users that feel linux is a more "socially conscious" choice. These same people may not be technical gurus, and may have no idea what to do when an upgrade barfs on them. Linux is trying to be more than just an alternative for the uber-geek crowd.
Replace the title with one of "Smart Bridge Building on an Impossible Schedule", "Smart High-Rise Construction on an Impossible Schedule", or "Smart Heart Surgeries on an Impossible Schedule", and I ask you, how many people would want to cross that bridge, live in that building, or get that surgery? No one!
"Smart... on an Impossible Schedule" is just management/corporate speak for "How to minimize the crapiness of a project when we know we can't spend the proper time required." You can dress it up all you like with sleak catch-phrases, and call it a rose if you want, but it still stinks.
Romans also had the same problem with slaves. For some reason they couldn't exercise as much influence over their slaves when they worked from home. Of course, instead of whips and chains, HP has employee surveillance and the threat of outsourcing to keep their staff in line.
But now you are saying that if talented people ever become management then the company will start spitting out poor quality products.... I think it is absurd to think that a company should keep their best people in low level coding positions and only let "management types" with no knowledge of what your company is producing make all of the decisions.
I'm not saying that at all. The problem is with companies that force these roles on people who don't want to do them. Some people are happy in coding positions, and don't view them as "low-level" at all. If it weren't for these engineering positions, the product would never get built.
Forcing people into management roles because they've excelled as coders is what is absurd. Have you ever heard of the Peter Principle? Look it up.
Companies should really try filling management level positions with people who are both technically experienced and who want to be in those positions. By taking people who are happy with their jobs and excel at them, and putting them into positions where they are supposedly at a "higher level", you end up with a severely incompetent management team.
I applaud IBM for expecting their best people to have good management and people skills.
Of course, every developer should have top-notch management skills. Because when the real manager fails to do his/her job (perhaps they were too busy with meetings), it's the developers duty to step in and clean up the mess. And the developer can't neglect his/her development responsibilities either. So in between managing the people that the real manager should have been managing, the features still need to be delivered. Yup. Sounds like a recipe for a real successful company.
I'm not saying "people skills" are a bad thing to have. But you need technical competence as well. People skills and the ability to talk-the-talk is not a substitute for technical skill. Unfortunately, too many management types within IBM, because they lack technical skill themselves, end up assuming it is a valid substitute.
You may not like the products that IBM produces, but they dont seam to be going bankrupt from what I can tell.
I have a friend who works there. She's been told by various managers:
Anyone can code. What sets you apart is the "other" stuff you do. By "other" stuff, they mean giving presentations, writing articles, and the biggest BS line: "exhibiting leadership skills". Basically, they want you to be in marketing even though that's not in your job description, because at IBM "everyone sells."
Tasks that involve digging into the code and knowing it at an intimate level can only be given to new graduates and new hires. The employees that have been around for longer, if they're worth anything, are busy doing the "other" stuff (see previous point.)
Developers who know a system inside and out "have little value" to the company.
What the oh-so-clever managers and execs at IBM fail to realize is that if everyone's busy selling, then developing the product becomes a lower-priority item and you end up with crap products. With a few notable exceptions (e.g., the Eclipse core), this is why IBM has such a bad reputation for producing poor-quality software.
Anyone remember that old monster.com commercial? You know the one where the kids list off their career aspirations for when they grow up? "When I grow up, I want to claw my way to middle-management. When I grow up, I want to be a yes-man. Yes sir, coming sir." Check it out here.
Anyone else see the irony in this? Why did you go into the IT business? It's because you enjoy technology and you enjoy problem solving. And now you're being told the only way to save your job is by going into management?
I work in a company that is very management heavy, where there's tonnes of rhetoric about about developing leadership skills. I've had more than one manager tell me that the heads-down coder who knows the system inside-out has "very little value to the company." They want leaders, not specialists. Unfortunately, most of the managers who spout this nonsense would have trouble leading a horse out of a barn. They're all very good talkers, but once you start listening to what they say, you realize it's all BS.
The best "leaders" I've ever worked with are the ones who would never stand up and call themselves leaders. They're the ones who've worked in the trenches, have been the heads down coders and learned multiple systems inside and out over the years. They're the ones who have developed an instinct for what will work and what won't. They're not the boot-licking smooth-talking managers who promise the world to upper-management and then have to claw back features near the end of development because they had no clue what was involved in the work that they were committing to.
So yeah, if you want to save your job, go ahead and practice these lines "Yes, sir. Coming sir." Just like the kid from the commercial. Go into management, kiss up to your boss and your boss's boss. Learn to be a smooth-talker. In the end you'll be nothing more than a used car salesman in a more expensive suit, but at least you won't be outsourced.
On the other hand, if you want to save your dignity and have any passion left for the job that you originally signed up for, do not listen to the article. If you're at a company that respects the work that you do, then great. If not, find a different company to work for. They do exist.
You've got one life to live. Doing something that makes you miserable just because it will save you from being outsourced isn't worth it.
The point I was trying to make was independent of the validity of RIM's or NTP's patents.
RIM contributes to the patent-madness that currently engulfs the software industry as much as NTP or any other sue-happy company that holds numerous patents. When the system works towards RIM's benefit, they're happy with it; when it works against them, they cry foul. They're hypocrites.
Of course, it's all rather ironic given RIM's history of using the courts to challenge what it claims are other firms' attempts to cash in on its intellectual property. During the first quarter of its current fiscal year, the company - better known, perhaps, as Lawsuits In Motion - saw the cost of its litigation rise from $700,000 to $8.2 million.
RIM is currently suing NTP and Good Technology for alleged intellectual property violations. Last year, it pursued legal action against Palm and Handspring - both firms latter settled out of court. Microsoft and Symbian signed have signed licensing deals with the company.
Now they're crying that the patent system is against them and that they're being extorted:
From BlackBerry decision delayed:
"It turned out to be not good enough," RIM lawyer Henry Bunsow said outside court, adding he was "cautiously optimistic" a settlement could still be reached.
"They basically want it all. God bless RIM, they refuse to be extorted under these circumstances, which is why we're here."
Whatever. They should be taken to the cleaners. They deserve it.
She said NASA once had a policy of what to do, whom to call, and how to announce the news if someone detected a signal of intelligent life from space.
"Today it is in fact a group of very generous philanthropists who will get the call before we get a press conference," Tarter said. They include Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold.
Does anyone else find it disturbing that funding for basic science is suffering from such severe cuts? It seems that unless the government can use science for political purposes (e.g., the space race of the 60's, "lets beat the commies"), they really don't care.
It's a depressing state of affairs when basic research has to turn to private investment to be funded. Check out the above quote. "It is in fact a group of very generous philanthropists who will get the call before we get a press conference." While this condition on the research funding provided by the private investors may seem minor, what happens in other situations when basic research perhaps comes to conclusions that the investors don't agree with? Private investors can have agendas that aren't in the best interest of the public at large. Sure, governments can have agendas too. But with government it's the people who voted that government in -- and who can vote it out again. We can't do that with "private investors".
The headline of the story comes from the following quote in the article
Canadian researchers are finding evidence that the high-speed, multitasking of the young and wireless can help protect their brains from aging.
This appears to be pure editorializing. The closest evidence that gets cited to support this claim are the following quotes:
Dr. Grady said the results suggest that the brains of today's youth might grow up differently.
Saying that your brain might grow up differently is a far cry from saying it won't age. The other quote:
"Young people using all of these gadgets all of the time, at the same time, it may actually make a difference when they're old, like bilingualism does," she said. "We know that practice changes the brain, as with playing an instrument, a motor task -- it makes physical changes in the brain. Maybe those kids who play video games and who are also bilingual will be the best of older adults at filtering out distractions."
Gosh, those are a lot of "maybes" couched in double-speak. If a researcher actually tried publishing claims worded like that in a peer reviewed journal, I doubt very much that the article would even get accepted.
Another problem is the population sample: 100 university students. This is hardly representative of the population at large. I realize this is an issue with a lot of psychological research. Psychology departments tend to use undergrads as their research subjects because they are the most available. However, in this study, I think the problem becomes even more pronounced. If you take a sample of university students, I bet you the group that plays videogames the most will have a larger proportion of students that are enrolled in computer science and engineering than the group that plays less or doesn't play any videogames at all. So what, you ask? Well, the "mental tasks" that were used to test the students are probably the type that math/compsci/engineering students will generally perform better on than sociology or history students. It may have nothing to do with videogame playing at all. Good research would take this into account.
Another problem I had with the article is that it fails to point out some of the research that has been done to indicate that videogaming actually retards brain development:
This doesn't include all the research that has been done to indicate the negative effect of violent videogames. To the article's credit, though, it does mention this fact at the end.
Slashdot Mirror
If your goal is to be a programmer, you may find that only a fraction of the courses that you take are relevant to your career aspirations. CS degree requirements are usually more than just learning how to program. A lot of places will require that you take breadth credits from the humanities or social sciences. Besides that, you'll probably be required to take a number of courses within the CS department that are theory related. Although the material you'll be exposed to in these courses is incredibly interesting (IMHO), you may find yourself becoming cynical about why you have to learn material that doesn't really help you become a professional programmer. You'll also have to take a number of math courses (calculus, linear algebra). This stuff is important, since a lot of areas in CS (e.g., AI, graphics), require that you have a solid math foundation.
Depending on where you want to land a job, and what type of software you want to program, you may or may not need a degree. For example, if you want to land a job as a software developer at IBM, you'll probably need a degree. (The work itself doesn't necessarily require a degree, but IBM tends to hire degreed people.) You'll also need a degree if you want to do any hard-core graphics programming.
However, there are a lot of other types of programming jobs out there for which a college diploma will suffice. A college diploma will also cost a lot less money, and you'll be able to complete it in a lot less time.
Your best bet is probably to look at what kind of jobs are out there now and identify which ones appeal to you the most. Once you've identified this, look at the requirements that these jobs list. Do they want a degree? Will they settle for a diploma? Job ads sometimes say "degree or equivalent experience", which usually means that as long as you can demonstrate you'll be able to do the job competently, they don't care whether you have a "B.Sc" after your name.
Good luck, whatever you decide to do.
http://plif.courageunfettered.com/archive/wc019.gif
Such an ignorantly worded motion should have never passed in the first place. It also took quite sometime for a real apology to be forthcoming, and it was not until after the Carleton president got involved. The initial reaction by CUSA to the backlash was that students and the rest of the country just "didn't get it". Brittany Smyth, the CUSA president, kept trying to explain away the decision as having nothing to do with the clause that said CF was a white male illness. You can hear her here, on CFRA (Ottawa) radio. After a couple of days of public outrage, and a petition to have her impeached, Brittany did finally issue a somewhat mediocre apology.
The real star of this debacle is Donnie Northrup, the 4th year science student who authored the original motion. He made some interesting comments to a reporter of the Ottawa Citizen. Essentially, he regrets that we misunderstood the intent of his motion, and that he should have worded the motion more carefully. He claimed that he slipped up because he had a lot of homework due at the time. And to make himself look like a bigger ass than he's already made himself out to be, he adds that "writing is not something he's focusing his degree on."
So yeah, the decision is being revisited, but the idiots who made it are still idiots, and bringing attention to this stupidity is still worthwhile.
Cuil engineers and executives are probably turning red as we speak. You put in the search term "cuil" and the first page of results includes "Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland - Properazzi", and "Restaurants in Cuil Dabhcha | Restaurants Of The World" but no actual link to cuil.com. You think that would have been one of the most obvious test cases in their test suite ... but I digress, after playing around with the search engine, my guess is that they don't even have a test suite, and the experience of other slashdotters seems to confirm this.
The world always needs another example of how not to develop software.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tech-fun/how-to-turn-this-computer-off-dell-tech-support-audio/
So this is very different from photos, videos, and sound clips being sent.
I've read TFA, but I'm confused about what actually got patented. It would make more sense if the patent was related to the chip they're developing as opposed to the use of the chip in a mobile phone. In the former case, the possible applications are extremely broad. Think online games and virtual reality. Imagine playing WoW and having scents recreated for you by a chip in your computer as you wander the landscape.
However, from TFA, it sounds like the patent is more narrow than this. That is, it's specifically about sending the scent in a mobile phone. To me, this seems absurd -- why narrow your patent to one application, when your technology is applicable in many other places? Besides this, when you send a scent, all the phone is doing is sending a representation of the scent (i.e., a command) to the receiver. Such an obvious mechanism seems hardly worth patenting.
There have been a number of posts that have mentioned using encryption to get around the problem of ISPs that throttle bittorrent traffic, but no one has posted a HOWTO for the less enlightened on how to actually enable encryption in a bittorrent client. For those interested, here you go: follow this link for details on how to enable encryption in Azureus, BitComet, and uTorent.
As has been mentioned, this may or may not improve the download speeds that you experience. But it's worth a try.
There are plans in the works for developing new protocols that are even better at bypassing existing throttling techniques.
BTW, ever hear of JavaOS? It's an Operating System written mostly in Java.
Yes, really.
Good question. One needs to know the language in which something is written to understand it. But just because someone knows English doesn't mean they'll understand Shakespeare. University is about teaching students how to think. Making them learn one language versus another is irrelevant. Understanding the concepts is what's important; picking up the language syntax is secondary.Judging from all the security holes in Microsoft products, I suspect this is more representative of the war room at Microsoft.
Tuition at Harvard is $30,000+ . Per year. Are students attending this place really that concerned about saving $30-40 bucks on a textbook? Having said that, textbooks in general are way overpriced and having a website that does price comparisons is great. There's another one called campusi that is really excellent. But textbooks are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of tuition nowadays. Even in Canada, tuition is spiraling out of control. It's ridiculous. Students shouldn't be forced to take out loans to get an education.
... welcome our non-thinking, non-discerning theater manager overlords.
I find this an extremely hard story to swallow, especially given the lack of details in the article. I'm surprised this story even passed Slashdot's screening process.
"Smart ... on an Impossible Schedule" is just management/corporate speak for "How to minimize the crapiness of a project when we know we can't spend the proper time required." You can dress it up all you like with sleak catch-phrases, and call it a rose if you want, but it still stinks.
Romans also had the same problem with slaves. For some reason they couldn't exercise as much influence over their slaves when they worked from home. Of course, instead of whips and chains, HP has employee surveillance and the threat of outsourcing to keep their staff in line.
Forcing people into management roles because they've excelled as coders is what is absurd. Have you ever heard of the Peter Principle? Look it up. Companies should really try filling management level positions with people who are both technically experienced and who want to be in those positions. By taking people who are happy with their jobs and excel at them, and putting them into positions where they are supposedly at a "higher level", you end up with a severely incompetent management team.
Of course, every developer should have top-notch management skills. Because when the real manager fails to do his/her job (perhaps they were too busy with meetings), it's the developers duty to step in and clean up the mess. And the developer can't neglect his/her development responsibilities either. So in between managing the people that the real manager should have been managing, the features still need to be delivered. Yup. Sounds like a recipe for a real successful company.
I'm not saying "people skills" are a bad thing to have. But you need technical competence as well. People skills and the ability to talk-the-talk is not a substitute for technical skill. Unfortunately, too many management types within IBM, because they lack technical skill themselves, end up assuming it is a valid substitute.
Nope, they don't seem to be going bankrupt. Laying off thousands of employees every few years, and ransacking the company's pension plan probably has no small part in that.What the oh-so-clever managers and execs at IBM fail to realize is that if everyone's busy selling, then developing the product becomes a lower-priority item and you end up with crap products. With a few notable exceptions (e.g., the Eclipse core), this is why IBM has such a bad reputation for producing poor-quality software.
And now they post this article that makes it sound like they actually want to hire real developers? Whatever. These comments said it best: "The real title should be:", and "And we believe an article from IBM?".
Anyone else see the irony in this? Why did you go into the IT business? It's because you enjoy technology and you enjoy problem solving. And now you're being told the only way to save your job is by going into management?
I work in a company that is very management heavy, where there's tonnes of rhetoric about about developing leadership skills. I've had more than one manager tell me that the heads-down coder who knows the system inside-out has "very little value to the company." They want leaders, not specialists. Unfortunately, most of the managers who spout this nonsense would have trouble leading a horse out of a barn. They're all very good talkers, but once you start listening to what they say, you realize it's all BS.
The best "leaders" I've ever worked with are the ones who would never stand up and call themselves leaders. They're the ones who've worked in the trenches, have been the heads down coders and learned multiple systems inside and out over the years. They're the ones who have developed an instinct for what will work and what won't. They're not the boot-licking smooth-talking managers who promise the world to upper-management and then have to claw back features near the end of development because they had no clue what was involved in the work that they were committing to.
So yeah, if you want to save your job, go ahead and practice these lines "Yes, sir. Coming sir." Just like the kid from the commercial. Go into management, kiss up to your boss and your boss's boss. Learn to be a smooth-talker. In the end you'll be nothing more than a used car salesman in a more expensive suit, but at least you won't be outsourced.
On the other hand, if you want to save your dignity and have any passion left for the job that you originally signed up for, do not listen to the article. If you're at a company that respects the work that you do, then great. If not, find a different company to work for. They do exist.
You've got one life to live. Doing something that makes you miserable just because it will save you from being outsourced isn't worth it.
RIM contributes to the patent-madness that currently engulfs the software industry as much as NTP or any other sue-happy company that holds numerous patents. When the system works towards RIM's benefit, they're happy with it; when it works against them, they cry foul. They're hypocrites.
RIM sues Handspring, Good
RIM wins patent, sues rival
and from Lawsuits In Motion files suit against Xerox:
Now they're crying that the patent system is against them and that they're being extorted: From BlackBerry decision delayed: Whatever. They should be taken to the cleaners. They deserve it.It's a depressing state of affairs when basic research has to turn to private investment to be funded. Check out the above quote. "It is in fact a group of very generous philanthropists who will get the call before we get a press conference." While this condition on the research funding provided by the private investors may seem minor, what happens in other situations when basic research perhaps comes to conclusions that the investors don't agree with? Private investors can have agendas that aren't in the best interest of the public at large. Sure, governments can have agendas too. But with government it's the people who voted that government in -- and who can vote it out again. We can't do that with "private investors".
Another problem is the population sample: 100 university students. This is hardly representative of the population at large. I realize this is an issue with a lot of psychological research. Psychology departments tend to use undergrads as their research subjects because they are the most available. However, in this study, I think the problem becomes even more pronounced. If you take a sample of university students, I bet you the group that plays videogames the most will have a larger proportion of students that are enrolled in computer science and engineering than the group that plays less or doesn't play any videogames at all. So what, you ask? Well, the "mental tasks" that were used to test the students are probably the type that math/compsci/engineering students will generally perform better on than sociology or history students. It may have nothing to do with videogame playing at all. Good research would take this into account.
Another problem I had with the article is that it fails to point out some of the research that has been done to indicate that videogaming actually retards brain development:
Video games: bad for your brain?
Researchers: Video games hurt brain development
This doesn't include all the research that has been done to indicate the negative effect of violent videogames. To the article's credit, though, it does mention this fact at the end.
Windows Vista will require much more than 640k on the video card alone.
Logical conclusion: Bill Gates believes nobody will ever need Windows Vista.