My point (I'll admit, poorly worded) is that the mechanics of the GPL wouldn't work anymore. BSD philosophy would be (mostly) unaffected, as far as I can tell.
That still won't let anyone figure out what my changes are to re-integrate them into the root. You'd end up with Linux == BSD, more or less. Noticed I picked Linux in particular, because its GPL-ed. BSD-style philosophy would be still viable, but not GPL-style.
You are correct, and I admit I poorly worded it. What I meant is that a lot of things we see today around Linux is only there because copyright laws enable certain parts of the GPL.
If copyright didn't exist, tomorrow you'd see a lot of corporations assimilating linux and making closed source versions, and the only way you'd get source code back from them is by decompiling it. Of course it DOES work, since BSDs revolve around a model much closer to what would be without copyright, and people definately contribute to those.
But many scenarios dear to a large part of the open source community would be gone. You'd never see the changes to your GPL code that was integrated in that brand new router that just came out... and don't think DRM would vanish. People would still obfuscate their code, DRM their videos, copyprotect their CDs... The only thing that would change is not going to jail under the DMCA for breaking these things.
GPL code used by a corporation and redistributed however? Forget about seeing most of it.
I said no such things, and I only picked Linux because it was a bad example, out of all the others given in the discussion. (I don't know what license Python and such use).
If BSD had been used as an example, I wouldn't be able to say much... while BSD style license do use copyright laws, its effect is negligeable, and the general idea would be the same without it. However, the GPL model would simply be impossible: I could take GPL software, modify it, redistribute in binary format, and no one would ever see the code. Or even worse, distribute the code, but in such a way that with every new version I put out, you have to fight to make it buildable in your environment.
Plus, the main additions in GPL3 wouldnt work either: I mean, stuff like Tivos DID release the source, but it was useless...so the GPL is using copyright law to force that source to be useful. It wouldn't be anymore.
And I definately am aware of all the other parts of the copyright market. It simply amuse me when pro-GPL people go against copyright laws in a way or another.
And really, the commercial world wouldn't be super different... without copyright laws, contracts would still be valid. Commercial softwares would simply be available only after signing contracts, and employes of such companies would have to sign NDAs, etc. It would be no different as it is right now (at least, in the enterprise world... obviously making someone sign a contract to buy Bioshock would be an issue). Have fun decompiling Windows.
That being said, it would also totally eliminate certain businesses... Sure a lot of people with talent like to sing, so you'd still have singers, musicians, and such doing it for free (they already do, and many are MUCH better than the commercial junk). However, I don't remember the last time I've seen a FFXIII level production in the free world. Not many people are willing to burn multi-million dollars worth of time and ressources just to give something away for free.
sorry, but stuff like Linux only works BECAUSE of copyright... The only reason if i modify the kernel source and distribute the binary, that I HAVE to give the source with it, is because of copyright. Otherwise I could just take the code that was released, make a closed source software, and watch as people interested are forced to decompile it to figure out my changes. Good luck.
Thats very different than releasing it from copyright.
Im guessing part of the reason is that it takes time to release code in "open source"-able format... Often, commercial software is written assuming that no one else will ever need to use it, so it may very well have weird dependencies...stuff like, to compile it you need a machine named "JOESBUILDER" with a X drive mapping to some network ressource, and all that is hardcoded... internally it didnt matter, but when you open source it, that doesn't work.
Cleaning up code -production code- is often not an option in the commercial world, nevermind code thats not used and doesn't return a profit anymore.
Add to that, that a lot of games, especially more recent ones, are full of middlewares that the company doesn't own...that rules those out.
Correct, and thats why I said that definition is almost arbitrary. We decided that its what makes a specie. But if you think that God created everything, YET that evolution is possible -within- one specie, then you have to also think that our definition "based on reproduction", which, as you pointed out, has flaws, is -exactly- what God was thinking.
Plus, a tiger and a lion can mate together, but they're quite different creatures. A lot more different than many creatures that can't mate together. Thats why you have to add "that produce fertile offsprings". But oh, in many cases, if you have a male of A, and a female of B, the offspring is not fertile, BUT, if you have a female of A, and a male of B, then the offspring will be! Plus, what can and cannot mate may change over time...
Basically, what I'm saying is, that definition of a species is simply arbitrary for classification purpose, and it has no real value in nature, thus is not possible for a given phenomenon to be universal, but only "within a species", unless it is part of the definition we gave to the word species, arbitrarly. If memory serves, I think Darwin agreed with me on that one.
Our definition of species is about as "good" as our definition of planet.
And that is definately the right attitude. I'm generally pro-MS, but no matter what, one must always consider alternatives, all the time. If you're a Linux shop or institution, you need to be on the lookout, maybe you'll save money moving to something else, for whatever reason, and obviously, if you're in Windows, you need to look at Linux, Mac, etc. Changing is expensive, and not always worth it (especially for schools who get licenses almost free), no matter what the change actually is, but its never a good idea to stick with whats there just because it is...
That said, I don't know in the UK, but here, outfitting an entire highschool or small college with MS software is so cheap, I could pay it with a few paycheck, so the benifit really has to be there.
One has to be careful with that. In my case, if i had followed that lesson, I'd be one of the people who gets replaced by indian outsourcers.
My first...heck... 6 jobs (within 2 years) would have held me back. If the job doesn't allow you to touch more "in demand" technologies, or technologies with a future, you're not gonna get anywhere, and won't gain value (unless you want to become a business analyst). For example, let say you hit a java job where no one in the company knows what a design pattern is, or the meaning behind unit testing. You stay there for 10 years, then try to find another jobs for kicks. Good luck.
I had to job hop a lot before I found companies that would let me increase in worth for the long term, and now I make a -lot- more money and hit much more interesting jobs than most of the people I've watched... Its really all in making careful decisions, and keeping things in balance.
No, i'm saying that its a good idea to explain to students what a "model" and a "theory" is (the scientific version), so that they can understand that while Evolution works with every last bit of data we have, there is a possibly, even if remote, that its wrong.
Remember: I did say I am as atheist as they come, and I firmly beleive in evolution. However, what we do know does leave holes to other possibilities: that is, evolution definately does happen, and it happened before, and we definately could have evolved from nothing, thats a fact, but there may be other factors out there, evolution might not be the only thing.
In the same way as if we take for granted that an asteroid fell and killed dinosaurs. A rock did fall. It did kill a lot of stuff. But did it kill -everything- alone? Maybe, maybe not, and if we take one thing for granted, we may miss the rest.
Nothing more, nothing less. Btw, I did not have my education "in this country" if you're refering to the US, thank you very much.
Since english is about as far from being my first language as it can come...this is totally going "woosh" over my head. Think you could explain it in more details, because it sure sounds funny.
That reminds me of something interesting... I have a friend who's an independant batist, and he beleives in "evolution within the same specie, but not in how one specie can become another".
The thing is, that just shows how a lot of people going against these theories simply are not aware of what is known so far... If you put every single living thing that currently exist on earth, put them side by side in order of similarity, I feel we'd be freagin hard pressed to draw lines of where a specie starts and another stops...its almost arbitrary, and only really devided by rules humans made (its more than that, but still). So I'm not too sure what "evolution within a single specie" would imply... but I'm not sure said friend is realising how many species there are, and how similar some are to one another, else I don't think he could possibly beleive what he does...
It comes back to what you are saying...you gave some examples, and there are thousand more...and Im not quite sure how anyone who goes through all of em could keep their bneleifs... they seem to think the world is so much more simple than it is, even if we just take the mostly factual, non-ambiguous stuff....
Actually, it was that weird thing called a "compiler". I was coding my solution in straight bytecode. (just kidding, obviously).
As a sidenote, I don't remember when's the last time i used an array in.NET unless some API required it or returned it. IEnumerable interface and collections for the win:)
I agree. Anything's possible really. I'm personally a fairly hardcore atheist, and the thing that always gripes me about intelligent design isn't the idea in itself...I don't see it as impossible. But there's literally no reason whatsoever to think that its what happens. Once there is, I'll change my ideas about in in 5 minutes. But there isn't.
As opposed to evolution that has a tons. But that still doesn't mean its what happened. I -think- its what happened. But I can see so many possibilities that could someday invalidate it...including hybrids... I mean, what if we were actually designed...but by aliens, not a god? What if a god did create life...but all he did was create the first mono-cellular stuff and let it go, so technically we did evolve by "chance", but a god still created life...
Or my personal favorite. What if the laws of physics and biology were NOT made from a god...but a god used them to create us? Which means we COULD have been made from evolution, it just so happens that we weren't (and maybe some civilisation on another planet actually came purely from evolution, even though a god somewhere could have just created them).
In short, it indeed is definately good to show many theories... else we'll look damn stupid the day that BOTH evolution AND god are proven wrong:) I personally welcome our Alien Creator overlords.
That list is very, VERY good in my opinion, if obvious (but not so obvious to HR people).
However, two things came to mind. The variety part. Yes, its good. I personally am fluent in just about all programming environments known to man, more data storage techs than I can count, too many business types, and things vastly different, like business intelligence and biology (I started as a programmer for R&D biotech softwares).
The catch is, that tends to show that you're too much everywhere. You can take one "enterprise" stack, let say J2EE or.NET, and even if you worked with them constantly for the next 10 years, learning something new every day, you'd still have more to find (and by more, I mean significant things). Thats why once, in.NET, I coded some tool, it took let say 50000 lines of code, then learned about some obscure feature that could have reduced it to 500. Yes, 500.
Those are things that makes the difference between a project taking a year, and one taking a month. Once I realised that (and people hiring know this just too well), I specialised in a 2-3 technologies (specialising in just one isn't enough to keep track of the evolution of the field), and I've been a much better developer since then.
You need to have a broad VIEW of the field, but still be specialised, to be efficient at what you do. Knowing 10 technologies equaly well means that you don't know either of them at their peek.
Secondly, the certification thing. We all know certification means crap, I agree, but like the article does state, it helps hiring people to spend less time interviewing you about the obvious. If you say you're Java certified, they can only ask 2-3 questions to make sure you truly are, and forget about testing you on a Java hello world. That way, they can spend more time testing you on the important stuff, like actual development expertise, as opposed to syntax knowledge. Also, having a lot of certifications, if you can prove you didn't brain dump them, can go in the "broad knowledge" and "passionate" part. If you have 12 certifications with 12 technologies, well, it shows you like knowing your stuff (those tests can sometime ask for pretty pointy things...)
What exactly does asp.net have to do with it? By default, all of the out of the box controls will render the same in all mainstream browsers, and third party components are even better at it... also, in asp.net, the use of ActiveX controls are heavily discouraged... if you see them, its usually because the app is ported from ASP or something, and they didn't finish yet.
The only thing that will really make an asp.net app not work in firefox is the html/css/javascript code that you write manually...and thats true be it in PERL/CGI, Ruby, PHP, J2EE, or anything else...so I'm not sure what it has to do with it.
Updates that don't require reboot don't force you to reboot... I agree too many of em do, but its been a heck of a long time since I had to reboot because of windows update...
And personally, what I always do, is update, then just say "reboot later"
You get a popup every 4 hours (I wish it could be pushed to more than that, but bleh), and then just turn my computer off at night.
Also, in Vista there's something I like. If you simply don't update, the shutdown button turns into a "update and shutdown". I don't remember if XP did this (maybe, but I didn't notice it until Vista), so you just pospone the update until the next shutdown, no big deal. I used to never reboot my machines, but after a while, and as computers started adding up, it started to hit my electricity bill, and in the summer it just gets too warm and I end up spending even more money on AC, so I stopped that.
Its not quite that easy... There's a question of convenience here, and do too much, and your customers get fed up.
Take Visa's "Verified By Visa" program. For a long time I'd systematically avoid online stores requiring it. Its just one more password I have to remember or store in a password manager, I always forget the darn thing, and if it takes me more than 3 tries to remember it, I have to call my back to get the freagin card unblocked. Its total hell.
Now, not long ago, I got my debit card cloned (ironic, considering I am far far more careful than most with it, and always keep my eyes on it when I use it to avoid a moron swiping it twice or other schemes...but guess I must have been sleepy on that one day...). Now, after getting it fixed, as a security policy, my bank's web site requested I answered security questions (You know the kind...whats the name of your first dog, whats your favorite food, what school did you attend...).
Well, the darn questions required a case sensitive, exact answers, and I entered the questions YEARS AGO. So the question comes in. "Whats your favorite food". Well, first, my favorite food changes every so often... but luckily for me, it hadn't since I had entered it. Its a curry dish, so I go: I enter "Curry". Wrong, try 1. Ok, its case sensitive, so: I enter curry. Wrong, try 2. Oh right, its not curry, its curry CHICKEN. OK. Curry chicken. Wrong, try 3. "You must contact the bank at this phone number blah blah your account has been locked..." It was curry chicken, all lower case, blah.
Now I call the bank. "Can you give us the last few transactions you made please?". I provide them. "What was the exact date, time and amount?" OK WHAT THE HELL. I dont remember. "Sorry sir, you'll have to go to the bank and talk to a representative in person.
Well UGH. So I go. You need 2 ids to get it reset, two PHOTO ids... I have two. A state id card, and a passport (even though i'm pushing on my thirties, I never learned to drive...never needed to, with subways next door and buses coming every 5 minutes). They wouldn't take a passport, people usually show a driver's license, so they didn't know how to handle it. Had to wack at the supervisor, but eventually I got through. Result: quite a few days without access to my money.
My personal budget fits on one page. The specs for a 1 person software development project that would take about a month of work could spawn anywhere between 5 and 100 pages.
Specs for just about anything (software or otherwise) are always much bigger than an average budget of the same scale.
Well, technically, they don't need to -hire- some consultant companies to do it... While it WILL be under extreme DNA, it is not uncommon for Microsoft's customers to be allowed to get access to the source, if they're big enough.
Now, I realise it doesn't change your point at all, but its not like MS is the only entity with access to their own code: they have dedicated programs to share even their most closed pieces of code with their customers (if they're important enough).
You know, once upon a time, people went against the whole saturated fat stuff like it was a plague (and it is bad, but...). One thing that became very popular, was margarine, which at the time was basically pure trans fat. It was the groups that wanted healthier lifestyles that pushed trans fats originaly, as a replacement for saturated fats... And look how that turned out (now margarine doesn't have that issue, but back then it definately did).
Now, the thing is, when something isn't 100% sure, nothing you can do will eliminate the risk. You just pick which risks you want to take.
What if the higher rate of autism came from -another- component in the vaccin, and when they removed the mercury based stuff, they replaced it with more of the "safer" component... By picking a mercury free vaccin, you'd be RAISING the odds against your kids.
Thats why. You were not more or less risking your kid than someone who hadn't made the same choice as you. You just picked on which front to fight those risk, and where to gamble. Its definately your right, and its much better than the alternative (that is, not asking any questions and doing whatever is the norm at any given time, following the flow like a moron), but people who didn't make the same choice aren't necessarly putting their kids at more risk than you are.
Where do people get that Microsoft is backing HDDVD anyway? If you brush aside (quite likely) assumptions that Microsoft wanted to stall the "war" to push downloadable content, they really were behind both. Their only direct support of HDDVD was the player for 360, and that decision had little to do with the format itself, and more to do with the -console- war and price (they simply could not have pushed a 400$ addon, which is probably what it would have cost at the time)
All around, Microsoft doesn't care for HDDVD any more, or less than it does for Blu Ray.
Im not expert, and only go by my own observations... Farsighted or not, focusing on something so close normally is a pain, mainly because your eyes have to shift toward your nose to be able to look in the right direction... But with things like these, the image, I presume (I didn't look into it...I mean, this is Slashdot and all) has the picture adjusted for your eyes focusing the same way as if you were looking at something far, so most of the issue doesn't apply. I can see other problems, but not the focusing one.
Wow, holy freudian slip. That was supposed to be "Kicking and Screaming", not scripting. My above post makes absolutely no sense the way I wrote it. Oups.
Slashdot Mirror
My point (I'll admit, poorly worded) is that the mechanics of the GPL wouldn't work anymore. BSD philosophy would be (mostly) unaffected, as far as I can tell.
That still won't let anyone figure out what my changes are to re-integrate them into the root. You'd end up with Linux == BSD, more or less. Noticed I picked Linux in particular, because its GPL-ed. BSD-style philosophy would be still viable, but not GPL-style.
You are correct, and I admit I poorly worded it. What I meant is that a lot of things we see today around Linux is only there because copyright laws enable certain parts of the GPL.
If copyright didn't exist, tomorrow you'd see a lot of corporations assimilating linux and making closed source versions, and the only way you'd get source code back from them is by decompiling it. Of course it DOES work, since BSDs revolve around a model much closer to what would be without copyright, and people definately contribute to those.
But many scenarios dear to a large part of the open source community would be gone. You'd never see the changes to your GPL code that was integrated in that brand new router that just came out... and don't think DRM would vanish. People would still obfuscate their code, DRM their videos, copyprotect their CDs... The only thing that would change is not going to jail under the DMCA for breaking these things.
GPL code used by a corporation and redistributed however? Forget about seeing most of it.
I said no such things, and I only picked Linux because it was a bad example, out of all the others given in the discussion. (I don't know what license Python and such use).
If BSD had been used as an example, I wouldn't be able to say much... while BSD style license do use copyright laws, its effect is negligeable, and the general idea would be the same without it. However, the GPL model would simply be impossible: I could take GPL software, modify it, redistribute in binary format, and no one would ever see the code. Or even worse, distribute the code, but in such a way that with every new version I put out, you have to fight to make it buildable in your environment.
Plus, the main additions in GPL3 wouldnt work either: I mean, stuff like Tivos DID release the source, but it was useless...so the GPL is using copyright law to force that source to be useful. It wouldn't be anymore.
And I definately am aware of all the other parts of the copyright market. It simply amuse me when pro-GPL people go against copyright laws in a way or another.
And really, the commercial world wouldn't be super different... without copyright laws, contracts would still be valid. Commercial softwares would simply be available only after signing contracts, and employes of such companies would have to sign NDAs, etc. It would be no different as it is right now (at least, in the enterprise world... obviously making someone sign a contract to buy Bioshock would be an issue). Have fun decompiling Windows.
That being said, it would also totally eliminate certain businesses... Sure a lot of people with talent like to sing, so you'd still have singers, musicians, and such doing it for free (they already do, and many are MUCH better than the commercial junk). However, I don't remember the last time I've seen a FFXIII level production in the free world. Not many people are willing to burn multi-million dollars worth of time and ressources just to give something away for free.
sorry, but stuff like Linux only works BECAUSE of copyright... The only reason if i modify the kernel source and distribute the binary, that I HAVE to give the source with it, is because of copyright. Otherwise I could just take the code that was released, make a closed source software, and watch as people interested are forced to decompile it to figure out my changes. Good luck.
Thats very different than releasing it from copyright.
Im guessing part of the reason is that it takes time to release code in "open source"-able format... Often, commercial software is written assuming that no one else will ever need to use it, so it may very well have weird dependencies...stuff like, to compile it you need a machine named "JOESBUILDER" with a X drive mapping to some network ressource, and all that is hardcoded... internally it didnt matter, but when you open source it, that doesn't work.
Cleaning up code -production code- is often not an option in the commercial world, nevermind code thats not used and doesn't return a profit anymore.
Add to that, that a lot of games, especially more recent ones, are full of middlewares that the company doesn't own...that rules those out.
Correct, and thats why I said that definition is almost arbitrary. We decided that its what makes a specie. But if you think that God created everything, YET that evolution is possible -within- one specie, then you have to also think that our definition "based on reproduction", which, as you pointed out, has flaws, is -exactly- what God was thinking.
Plus, a tiger and a lion can mate together, but they're quite different creatures. A lot more different than many creatures that can't mate together. Thats why you have to add "that produce fertile offsprings". But oh, in many cases, if you have a male of A, and a female of B, the offspring is not fertile, BUT, if you have a female of A, and a male of B, then the offspring will be! Plus, what can and cannot mate may change over time...
Basically, what I'm saying is, that definition of a species is simply arbitrary for classification purpose, and it has no real value in nature, thus is not possible for a given phenomenon to be universal, but only "within a species", unless it is part of the definition we gave to the word species, arbitrarly. If memory serves, I think Darwin agreed with me on that one.
Our definition of species is about as "good" as our definition of planet.
And that is definately the right attitude. I'm generally pro-MS, but no matter what, one must always consider alternatives, all the time. If you're a Linux shop or institution, you need to be on the lookout, maybe you'll save money moving to something else, for whatever reason, and obviously, if you're in Windows, you need to look at Linux, Mac, etc. Changing is expensive, and not always worth it (especially for schools who get licenses almost free), no matter what the change actually is, but its never a good idea to stick with whats there just because it is...
That said, I don't know in the UK, but here, outfitting an entire highschool or small college with MS software is so cheap, I could pay it with a few paycheck, so the benifit really has to be there.
One has to be careful with that. In my case, if i had followed that lesson, I'd be one of the people who gets replaced by indian outsourcers.
My first...heck... 6 jobs (within 2 years) would have held me back. If the job doesn't allow you to touch more "in demand" technologies, or technologies with a future, you're not gonna get anywhere, and won't gain value (unless you want to become a business analyst). For example, let say you hit a java job where no one in the company knows what a design pattern is, or the meaning behind unit testing. You stay there for 10 years, then try to find another jobs for kicks. Good luck.
I had to job hop a lot before I found companies that would let me increase in worth for the long term, and now I make a -lot- more money and hit much more interesting jobs than most of the people I've watched... Its really all in making careful decisions, and keeping things in balance.
Oh...yeah...of course! I...err...yeah, definately always use base two when typing numbers!
I fail at geek for not picking that up.
No, i'm saying that its a good idea to explain to students what a "model" and a "theory" is (the scientific version), so that they can understand that while Evolution works with every last bit of data we have, there is a possibly, even if remote, that its wrong.
Remember: I did say I am as atheist as they come, and I firmly beleive in evolution. However, what we do know does leave holes to other possibilities: that is, evolution definately does happen, and it happened before, and we definately could have evolved from nothing, thats a fact, but there may be other factors out there, evolution might not be the only thing.
In the same way as if we take for granted that an asteroid fell and killed dinosaurs. A rock did fall. It did kill a lot of stuff. But did it kill -everything- alone? Maybe, maybe not, and if we take one thing for granted, we may miss the rest.
Nothing more, nothing less. Btw, I did not have my education "in this country" if you're refering to the US, thank you very much.
Since english is about as far from being my first language as it can come...this is totally going "woosh" over my head. Think you could explain it in more details, because it sure sounds funny.
PS: I'm serious.
That reminds me of something interesting... I have a friend who's an independant batist, and he beleives in "evolution within the same specie, but not in how one specie can become another".
The thing is, that just shows how a lot of people going against these theories simply are not aware of what is known so far... If you put every single living thing that currently exist on earth, put them side by side in order of similarity, I feel we'd be freagin hard pressed to draw lines of where a specie starts and another stops...its almost arbitrary, and only really devided by rules humans made (its more than that, but still). So I'm not too sure what "evolution within a single specie" would imply... but I'm not sure said friend is realising how many species there are, and how similar some are to one another, else I don't think he could possibly beleive what he does...
It comes back to what you are saying...you gave some examples, and there are thousand more...and Im not quite sure how anyone who goes through all of em could keep their bneleifs... they seem to think the world is so much more simple than it is, even if we just take the mostly factual, non-ambiguous stuff....
Actually, it was that weird thing called a "compiler". I was coding my solution in straight bytecode. (just kidding, obviously).
.NET unless some API required it or returned it. IEnumerable interface and collections for the win :)
As a sidenote, I don't remember when's the last time i used an array in
I agree. Anything's possible really. I'm personally a fairly hardcore atheist, and the thing that always gripes me about intelligent design isn't the idea in itself...I don't see it as impossible. But there's literally no reason whatsoever to think that its what happens. Once there is, I'll change my ideas about in in 5 minutes. But there isn't.
:) I personally welcome our Alien Creator overlords.
As opposed to evolution that has a tons. But that still doesn't mean its what happened. I -think- its what happened. But I can see so many possibilities that could someday invalidate it...including hybrids... I mean, what if we were actually designed...but by aliens, not a god? What if a god did create life...but all he did was create the first mono-cellular stuff and let it go, so technically we did evolve by "chance", but a god still created life...
Or my personal favorite. What if the laws of physics and biology were NOT made from a god...but a god used them to create us? Which means we COULD have been made from evolution, it just so happens that we weren't (and maybe some civilisation on another planet actually came purely from evolution, even though a god somewhere could have just created them).
In short, it indeed is definately good to show many theories... else we'll look damn stupid the day that BOTH evolution AND god are proven wrong
That list is very, VERY good in my opinion, if obvious (but not so obvious to HR people).
.NET, and even if you worked with them constantly for the next 10 years, learning something new every day, you'd still have more to find (and by more, I mean significant things). Thats why once, in .NET, I coded some tool, it took let say 50000 lines of code, then learned about some obscure feature that could have reduced it to 500. Yes, 500.
However, two things came to mind. The variety part. Yes, its good. I personally am fluent in just about all programming environments known to man, more data storage techs than I can count, too many business types, and things vastly different, like business intelligence and biology (I started as a programmer for R&D biotech softwares).
The catch is, that tends to show that you're too much everywhere. You can take one "enterprise" stack, let say J2EE or
Those are things that makes the difference between a project taking a year, and one taking a month. Once I realised that (and people hiring know this just too well), I specialised in a 2-3 technologies (specialising in just one isn't enough to keep track of the evolution of the field), and I've been a much better developer since then.
You need to have a broad VIEW of the field, but still be specialised, to be efficient at what you do. Knowing 10 technologies equaly well means that you don't know either of them at their peek.
Secondly, the certification thing. We all know certification means crap, I agree, but like the article does state, it helps hiring people to spend less time interviewing you about the obvious. If you say you're Java certified, they can only ask 2-3 questions to make sure you truly are, and forget about testing you on a Java hello world. That way, they can spend more time testing you on the important stuff, like actual development expertise, as opposed to syntax knowledge. Also, having a lot of certifications, if you can prove you didn't brain dump them, can go in the "broad knowledge" and "passionate" part. If you have 12 certifications with 12 technologies, well, it shows you like knowing your stuff (those tests can sometime ask for pretty pointy things...)
What exactly does asp.net have to do with it? By default, all of the out of the box controls will render the same in all mainstream browsers, and third party components are even better at it... also, in asp.net, the use of ActiveX controls are heavily discouraged... if you see them, its usually because the app is ported from ASP or something, and they didn't finish yet.
The only thing that will really make an asp.net app not work in firefox is the html/css/javascript code that you write manually...and thats true be it in PERL/CGI, Ruby, PHP, J2EE, or anything else...so I'm not sure what it has to do with it.
Updates that don't require reboot don't force you to reboot... I agree too many of em do, but its been a heck of a long time since I had to reboot because of windows update...
And personally, what I always do, is update, then just say "reboot later"
You get a popup every 4 hours (I wish it could be pushed to more than that, but bleh), and then just turn my computer off at night.
Also, in Vista there's something I like. If you simply don't update, the shutdown button turns into a "update and shutdown". I don't remember if XP did this (maybe, but I didn't notice it until Vista), so you just pospone the update until the next shutdown, no big deal. I used to never reboot my machines, but after a while, and as computers started adding up, it started to hit my electricity bill, and in the summer it just gets too warm and I end up spending even more money on AC, so I stopped that.
Its not quite that easy... There's a question of convenience here, and do too much, and your customers get fed up.
Take Visa's "Verified By Visa" program. For a long time I'd systematically avoid online stores requiring it. Its just one more password I have to remember or store in a password manager, I always forget the darn thing, and if it takes me more than 3 tries to remember it, I have to call my back to get the freagin card unblocked. Its total hell.
Now, not long ago, I got my debit card cloned (ironic, considering I am far far more careful than most with it, and always keep my eyes on it when I use it to avoid a moron swiping it twice or other schemes...but guess I must have been sleepy on that one day...).
Now, after getting it fixed, as a security policy, my bank's web site requested I answered security questions (You know the kind...whats the name of your first dog, whats your favorite food, what school did you attend...).
Well, the darn questions required a case sensitive, exact answers, and I entered the questions YEARS AGO.
So the question comes in. "Whats your favorite food". Well, first, my favorite food changes every so often... but luckily for me, it hadn't since I had entered it. Its a curry dish, so I go:
I enter "Curry". Wrong, try 1.
Ok, its case sensitive, so:
I enter curry. Wrong, try 2. Oh right, its not curry, its curry CHICKEN. OK.
Curry chicken. Wrong, try 3. "You must contact the bank at this phone number blah blah your account has been locked..." It was curry chicken, all lower case, blah.
Now I call the bank. "Can you give us the last few transactions you made please?". I provide them. "What was the exact date, time and amount?" OK WHAT THE HELL. I dont remember. "Sorry sir, you'll have to go to the bank and talk to a representative in person.
Well UGH. So I go. You need 2 ids to get it reset, two PHOTO ids... I have two. A state id card, and a passport (even though i'm pushing on my thirties, I never learned to drive...never needed to, with subways next door and buses coming every 5 minutes). They wouldn't take a passport, people usually show a driver's license, so they didn't know how to handle it. Had to wack at the supervisor, but eventually I got through. Result: quite a few days without access to my money.
Now I'm semi patient. Most average joes aren't.
My personal budget fits on one page.
The specs for a 1 person software development project that would take about a month of work could spawn anywhere between 5 and 100 pages.
Specs for just about anything (software or otherwise) are always much bigger than an average budget of the same scale.
Well, technically, they don't need to -hire- some consultant companies to do it... While it WILL be under extreme DNA, it is not uncommon for Microsoft's customers to be allowed to get access to the source, if they're big enough.
Now, I realise it doesn't change your point at all, but its not like MS is the only entity with access to their own code: they have dedicated programs to share even their most closed pieces of code with their customers (if they're important enough).
You know, once upon a time, people went against the whole saturated fat stuff like it was a plague (and it is bad, but...). One thing that became very popular, was margarine, which at the time was basically pure trans fat. It was the groups that wanted healthier lifestyles that pushed trans fats originaly, as a replacement for saturated fats... And look how that turned out (now margarine doesn't have that issue, but back then it definately did).
Now, the thing is, when something isn't 100% sure, nothing you can do will eliminate the risk. You just pick which risks you want to take.
What if the higher rate of autism came from -another- component in the vaccin, and when they removed the mercury based stuff, they replaced it with more of the "safer" component... By picking a mercury free vaccin, you'd be RAISING the odds against your kids.
Thats why. You were not more or less risking your kid than someone who hadn't made the same choice as you. You just picked on which front to fight those risk, and where to gamble. Its definately your right, and its much better than the alternative (that is, not asking any questions and doing whatever is the norm at any given time, following the flow like a moron), but people who didn't make the same choice aren't necessarly putting their kids at more risk than you are.
Where do people get that Microsoft is backing HDDVD anyway? If you brush aside (quite likely) assumptions that Microsoft wanted to stall the "war" to push downloadable content, they really were behind both. Their only direct support of HDDVD was the player for 360, and that decision had little to do with the format itself, and more to do with the -console- war and price (they simply could not have pushed a 400$ addon, which is probably what it would have cost at the time)
All around, Microsoft doesn't care for HDDVD any more, or less than it does for Blu Ray.
Im not expert, and only go by my own observations... Farsighted or not, focusing on something so close normally is a pain, mainly because your eyes have to shift toward your nose to be able to look in the right direction... But with things like these, the image, I presume (I didn't look into it...I mean, this is Slashdot and all) has the picture adjusted for your eyes focusing the same way as if you were looking at something far, so most of the issue doesn't apply. I can see other problems, but not the focusing one.
Wow, holy freudian slip. That was supposed to be "Kicking and Screaming", not scripting. My above post makes absolutely no sense the way I wrote it. Oups.