Re:Certified or NOT?????!!!!!!
on
Network Warrior
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· Score: 1
It depends. Usually, lower level certifications are there to get rid of the silly crap. Lets take Microsoft's certs for example, cuz its the ones I did. If you apply for an intermediate or (god forbid) a junior position, get ready for the basic questions. "Do you know what a class is". "Do you know what a dataset is". "Do you know how to connect to a database?!". And only once you answered to all of those well, do they push the interview to the interesting bits.
If you're certified, usually they'll skip those questions and the interview can focus more on your actual assets and what you can bring to the company, rather than if you actually know the basics.
Then there's the thing where entry level certs are often requirements for the higher up ones, which actually DO mean something. If you have an MCPD:Enteprise and a MCITP:Business Intelligence, chances are employers will just ask you 2-3 situation-based questions to make sure you didn't brain dump your way through, then not even look at the rest of your resume and just ask personality questions. God forbid you have an MCA, then they'll probably be crawling at your feet or something.
It also depends where you live. The culture of the area (and I'm not just talking about countries here, but as granular as cities) matters: if you're in an area where braindumps are the norm, certifications are gonna be worth NOTHING. In other areas, a cert is a garenteed job. So really, it depends.
Those 2:1 ratio come from a world where a vast amount of the mainstream "next gen" movie players were sold as a trojan horse, so to speak. On top of (most likely) background deals, these studios MAY (thats the key word here, im just saying an hypothesis) feel that this is a situation that wont last...once most of those players sold are stand alone, blu ray would not be in their best interest (that is, it would have crushed HD-DVD, but only because no one aside hardcores and PS3 gamers got players...which isn't good in the long run), and thus they decided to try and shift the market.
A large amount of people buying blu ray disks didn't "choose" their player, it was "forced" on them, so to speak.
Actually, one of SQL Server's best feature compared to most RDBMS is performance. I mean, for enterprise level operations (read: not just serving semi-static wiki-style data), there really is only Oracle that can pump something faster (maybe DB2?), and not even close to doing so in all scenarios, so...
The dev tools, are another story:) "Minimum requirement: Intel Core 2 Quad * 2, 16 gigs of RAM..." or something.
Though the above error message is almost surely a stupid programmer error, as someone else already pointed out...
Its fairly simple. Alienware appeals to people who want an above average system, without wanting to know what makes an above average system. I used to be a do-it-myself guy, and honestly, if I used my usual hourly rate, the time I spent looking up parts, benchmarks, what works well together, etc ended up being a FEW times more than the markup on alienware (or any other similar enthousiast pre-built), god forbid I assemble the computer myself. So its just easier that way.
Now, not saying I'd buy an alienware -today- (they don't seem to take as much care in their system specs as they used to), but thats kindda why they got popular.
I definately agree. Especially since the push of Microsoft toward more "open" models is often coming from within, that is, from the developers, engineers, architects, etc that see the world from a different perspective as the managers and shareholders. Many of em are trying quite hard to improve things, convincing their superiors and risking (to some extent) their "reputation", so to speak.
Don't quote me, but if I remember well, I think I read a post from Scott Guthrie (one of the main guys in the.NET stuff) that was pushing for MS to help Miguel with some of his projects. He probably had to convince someone who sign checks to go through with it, and thats never easy.
So MS should be encouraged, not given crap, else that same person who signed the check will go "SEE?! I told you it was a bad idea!" and scrap the thing altogether, and thats not good for anyone: MS, the customers, the community, everyone.
It means they can stop you from hosting any kind of server if they see fit. The "if they see fit" is the important part here. Can we agree there's a huge difference between remote desktop and seeding a torrent? Thank you.
This should have ended the discussion altogether (don't know if someone mentionned it before the parent though). For residential service, most ISPs say "No server". Of course, server is an overly broad term thats up to interpretation, but in this case it is used correctly I feel. Complain when they start throttling Youtube downloads or something.
Re:There must be constant challenge
on
Failing Our Geniuses
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I hear that a lot. It actually happened to my girlfriend (yes, I have one!), even with me warning her about it (since I had finished college before she started, being a few years apart and all).
The thing is, how much you know, or how skilled you are, is completly insignificant in life. I use daily less than 1% of what I've learned between 7th grade and the end of college, even though I'm working in exactly the field I studied for. The world changes, things change.
The only thing that really matters, is how good one is at learning, at self control (thats a big deal that all of the kids that say they are bored in school and thus have behavior problems should realise), at dealing with things. In all my years after elementary I was a top of the class, didn't do anything, didn't need to study, nothing. But I quickly realised that that was never the point. I could see that what I was learning was meaningless. So I gave myself my own challenges. Didn't use the books and tried to figure out equations on my own, did tests without calculators even if they were designed to be, tried to figure out ways to apply what I was "learning" to my own problems.
By the time I hit college, I -knew- things wouldn't be different, and I had looked ahead at what it would be like, so from the get go I was ready. I actually ended up with -much- higher grades there (went from "usualy first or second of class" to "first of the program, consistantly"), simply because I had taught myself how to "learn", as opposed to teaching myself "what I needed to get good grades". Thats something that no teacher can teach you, and its a lesson that I was simply told by people who knew better, and that I kept at heart.
Patience, disciple and self control and organisational skills are quite a bit more useful than all the algebra in the world. I don't remember anything I learned in school (as can be seen by my sub par writing skill, though to be fair, english isn't my first language by a long shot), but if I ever got in a situation where I'd need any of those skills back, or new skills, I could take them back up in minutes. Even in schools when everything is too easy, you can still "learn" that if you try. Being pushed will just make you learn more stuff, but it might not necessarly give you those skills. In real life, if you've been prepared well academically and in various trainings, you WILL find yourself in "wavy" situations (where things look too easy, and quickly change), far more often than you'll simply be pushed to your limit...
At least thats how I see things, and its been working both in school, college, and in the real world for decades:)
Good point. When I posted that, I had in mind the typical mainstream sites, like news web sites, this very one, etc. Web sites made by professionals. Even blog web sites tend to have a few software engineers behind em, the bloggers don't make the engine.
Don't see THAT many ad driven web site made in MS Word these days...
Personally what irks me with popup blockers and such, is that web sites owners will always find a way... So it is a bit like all these articles we keep seeing, about how not to use antibiotics and such unless we really need to, with the fear of creating "super bacterias" and whatsnot. Same deal: since ad blockers became mainstream, web sites became increasingly annoying about ads. Blocking popups and host files can only go so far, and eventually you have to keep up with the "improvements" in ads delivery...
I don't mind simple banners and stuff. If only it had stayed that way.
They don't want to, obviously, because you may end up going away from the page (cuz you realised it wasnt the right one) before the ad loads, unfortunately.
Its actually stupidly easy. I have a lot of business data driven web apps that do some heavy data mining and display them as charts, and obviously, that can be pretty slow if the customer wants their data real time (so no heavy caching allowed), so I simply render everything -else- first, then display the graphs and charts as they are rendered. I don't remember exactly how many lines of code it takes to do that, but it fits in one screen, thats for sure.
Well, according to the summary, its not just the ads that are the issue, its the behavior of the users, too. A business decision like any other: why waste ressources on people that aren't likely to be customers. It is no different than why web sites won't, for example, be "accessible", and thus why there are laws forcing them to. But as far as I know, there aren't any laws forcing anyone to do business with nerds.
Different purposes. CardSpace, part of.NET 3.0 and up, is made as a way to authenticate and share data on a site by site basis, as opposed to the central system of Live ID. One could say Cardspace is a "mini-LifeID" thing, so to speak. Still quite useful if implemented right.
What do you mean?! We know how its used! Have you seen JSP?! Its exactly like PHP! You stick all your logic and your tags in one big file with a bunch of conditionals, and you're set! Of course we know how java is used. Oh, and servlets? Same thing as PERL/CGI! Wha? Whats a design pattern? MVC? Strut? Bah, buzzwords!
Frontpage IS already dead. Expression Web replaced it a little while ago, and it is quite decent. Funny enough, the WYSIWYG editor is by -far- more standard compliant than IE =P (That is, if I make something in pure XHTML/CSS 2.1, and then open it in Opera, it will look virtually the same, but then if I open it in IE.....)
I want an example of a -common- uninformative or wrong error messages. I've seen 1-2, usually from actual BUGs in the product (and hey, its sure as hell is better than "Segmentation Fault"), which are unfortunately a given, but the example that was given above was quite precise and obvious for anyone above begginer level (a simple newbie mistake for people new to the.net boxing model), so can we have a significant one for kicks?
The debugger is also first class and definately can give you the information you want through the tracers and the stack traces (and a lot more through smart use of annotations and instrumentation), so I'd be interested in knowing what exactly its lacking and what are the alternative. I can't claim to know everything (no one does), so it would be interesting to see really what its missing, because having tried quite a few debuggers, and definately all of the mainstreams ones, I'm curious.
One thing though, is that Silverlight isn't really there to fight Flash. Microsoft's pathetically useless marketing department (when it comes to.NET technologies at least... anyone who develops in MS land probably remember the WinFX vs.NET 3.0 crap) decided they could push Silverlight as a Flash "killer" because it had similarities, but seriously...
Silverlight was originally more meant as a kind of "better Java Applets" deal. Its a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation that can be used across platforms (to some extent), since the full WPF is windows-only, and thats not always ideal, so a compromise was made. Its just part of the.NET framework "easy to deploy" client options, along with Click Once, XBAP, and so on. Seen that way, it makes a heck of a lot more sense. Seen as a "Flash wannabe", it is totally useless and bound to fail.
I'll be using Silverlight, you can be sure of it. But not on the open web. I'll be using it for internal thin client front ends in environments that are windows dominant but not windows-exclusive (which is one of the most common business environments I've seen). For that, it really shines.
I understand what you say, though I heavily disagree, as from my experience (and I've worked quite extensively in just about every environments you can imagine), it is definately not the case, but (especially if you're in a team that don't quite understand the higher level language...remember, stuff like Java and C# doesn't mean you can hire crap programmers, no matter how much the project managers think so!!!), it definately can happen, experience may vary, and thus, I can't really argue with you... different experience, different results...
What I can say, though it is not quite relevent to the discussion, but I will anyway... the issue with calling the GC directly -is- an incredibly easy to find bug =P In my opinion, ANYTIME the GC is called directly, thats a bug right there, so finding it can even be automated!!! Tadah! (Seriously though, NEVER EVER EVER call the GC directly. If you THINK you have to, its because there's an architecture problem somewhere...).
I know you were just trying to make a point, but I had to say it, sorry!:)
The catch is, you're not trying to make an idiot proof language. You're trying to make an error proof language. Why? Because even the best programmer in the universe, when stressed against a crazy deadline, will go faster and make more mistakes.
The point of eliminating pointers isn't to make the language easier (though it is a side goal I suppose), it is to make it error proof. That is just one example. Most (by faaaaaaaaaaaar) software that are written aren't new server engines, data components, or operating systems. They are business management front ends. That doesn't require any of this stuff, and having it just forces developers (no matter how good!) to spend more effort on things that can be automated and handle 80% of the cases well enough. By doing so, you save time (read: money), and at the end of the day, 99% of software developers write software so someone, somewhere, can save money.
Of course, aside for multiple inheritance, virtually all of what you mentionned can be done in C# Operator overloading is in, you can pass primitives by reference, and if you want to play with pointer arithmetics and toy with the memory directly, its in, too.
There will never ever be a language that can be perfect for all scenarios, but C# is pretty good at hitting the middle sweet spot. "By default you can't shoot yourself in the foot, but if you really, REALLY want to, just wrap it up in an unsafe{ } block and go to town".
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It depends. Usually, lower level certifications are there to get rid of the silly crap. Lets take Microsoft's certs for example, cuz its the ones I did. If you apply for an intermediate or (god forbid) a junior position, get ready for the basic questions. "Do you know what a class is". "Do you know what a dataset is". "Do you know how to connect to a database?!". And only once you answered to all of those well, do they push the interview to the interesting bits.
If you're certified, usually they'll skip those questions and the interview can focus more on your actual assets and what you can bring to the company, rather than if you actually know the basics.
Then there's the thing where entry level certs are often requirements for the higher up ones, which actually DO mean something. If you have an MCPD:Enteprise and a MCITP:Business Intelligence, chances are employers will just ask you 2-3 situation-based questions to make sure you didn't brain dump your way through, then not even look at the rest of your resume and just ask personality questions. God forbid you have an MCA, then they'll probably be crawling at your feet or something.
It also depends where you live. The culture of the area (and I'm not just talking about countries here, but as granular as cities) matters: if you're in an area where braindumps are the norm, certifications are gonna be worth NOTHING. In other areas, a cert is a garenteed job. So really, it depends.
Those 2:1 ratio come from a world where a vast amount of the mainstream "next gen" movie players were sold as a trojan horse, so to speak. On top of (most likely) background deals, these studios MAY (thats the key word here, im just saying an hypothesis) feel that this is a situation that wont last...once most of those players sold are stand alone, blu ray would not be in their best interest (that is, it would have crushed HD-DVD, but only because no one aside hardcores and PS3 gamers got players...which isn't good in the long run), and thus they decided to try and shift the market.
A large amount of people buying blu ray disks didn't "choose" their player, it was "forced" on them, so to speak.
Actually, one of SQL Server's best feature compared to most RDBMS is performance. I mean, for enterprise level operations (read: not just serving semi-static wiki-style data), there really is only Oracle that can pump something faster (maybe DB2?), and not even close to doing so in all scenarios, so...
:) "Minimum requirement: Intel Core 2 Quad * 2, 16 gigs of RAM..." or something.
The dev tools, are another story
Though the above error message is almost surely a stupid programmer error, as someone else already pointed out...
Its fairly simple. Alienware appeals to people who want an above average system, without wanting to know what makes an above average system. I used to be a do-it-myself guy, and honestly, if I used my usual hourly rate, the time I spent looking up parts, benchmarks, what works well together, etc ended up being a FEW times more than the markup on alienware (or any other similar enthousiast pre-built), god forbid I assemble the computer myself. So its just easier that way.
Now, not saying I'd buy an alienware -today- (they don't seem to take as much care in their system specs as they used to), but thats kindda why they got popular.
I definately agree. Especially since the push of Microsoft toward more "open" models is often coming from within, that is, from the developers, engineers, architects, etc that see the world from a different perspective as the managers and shareholders. Many of em are trying quite hard to improve things, convincing their superiors and risking (to some extent) their "reputation", so to speak.
.NET stuff) that was pushing for MS to help Miguel with some of his projects. He probably had to convince someone who sign checks to go through with it, and thats never easy.
Don't quote me, but if I remember well, I think I read a post from Scott Guthrie (one of the main guys in the
So MS should be encouraged, not given crap, else that same person who signed the check will go "SEE?! I told you it was a bad idea!" and scrap the thing altogether, and thats not good for anyone: MS, the customers, the community, everyone.
It means they can stop you from hosting any kind of server if they see fit. The "if they see fit" is the important part here. Can we agree there's a huge difference between remote desktop and seeding a torrent? Thank you.
This should have ended the discussion altogether (don't know if someone mentionned it before the parent though). For residential service, most ISPs say "No server". Of course, server is an overly broad term thats up to interpretation, but in this case it is used correctly I feel. Complain when they start throttling Youtube downloads or something.
I hear that a lot. It actually happened to my girlfriend (yes, I have one!), even with me warning her about it (since I had finished college before she started, being a few years apart and all).
:)
The thing is, how much you know, or how skilled you are, is completly insignificant in life. I use daily less than 1% of what I've learned between 7th grade and the end of college, even though I'm working in exactly the field I studied for. The world changes, things change.
The only thing that really matters, is how good one is at learning, at self control (thats a big deal that all of the kids that say they are bored in school and thus have behavior problems should realise), at dealing with things. In all my years after elementary I was a top of the class, didn't do anything, didn't need to study, nothing. But I quickly realised that that was never the point. I could see that what I was learning was meaningless. So I gave myself my own challenges. Didn't use the books and tried to figure out equations on my own, did tests without calculators even if they were designed to be, tried to figure out ways to apply what I was "learning" to my own problems.
By the time I hit college, I -knew- things wouldn't be different, and I had looked ahead at what it would be like, so from the get go I was ready. I actually ended up with -much- higher grades there (went from "usualy first or second of class" to "first of the program, consistantly"), simply because I had taught myself how to "learn", as opposed to teaching myself "what I needed to get good grades". Thats something that no teacher can teach you, and its a lesson that I was simply told by people who knew better, and that I kept at heart.
Patience, disciple and self control and organisational skills are quite a bit more useful than all the algebra in the world. I don't remember anything I learned in school (as can be seen by my sub par writing skill, though to be fair, english isn't my first language by a long shot), but if I ever got in a situation where I'd need any of those skills back, or new skills, I could take them back up in minutes. Even in schools when everything is too easy, you can still "learn" that if you try. Being pushed will just make you learn more stuff, but it might not necessarly give you those skills. In real life, if you've been prepared well academically and in various trainings, you WILL find yourself in "wavy" situations (where things look too easy, and quickly change), far more often than you'll simply be pushed to your limit...
At least thats how I see things, and its been working both in school, college, and in the real world for decades
Thats the main issue. I have Office 2007, and had it for a while. I almost always save in normal DOC for people still using Office 2003...
Good point. When I posted that, I had in mind the typical mainstream sites, like news web sites, this very one, etc. Web sites made by professionals. Even blog web sites tend to have a few software engineers behind em, the bloggers don't make the engine.
Don't see THAT many ad driven web site made in MS Word these days...
Personally what irks me with popup blockers and such, is that web sites owners will always find a way... So it is a bit like all these articles we keep seeing, about how not to use antibiotics and such unless we really need to, with the fear of creating "super bacterias" and whatsnot. Same deal: since ad blockers became mainstream, web sites became increasingly annoying about ads. Blocking popups and host files can only go so far, and eventually you have to keep up with the "improvements" in ads delivery...
I don't mind simple banners and stuff. If only it had stayed that way.
They don't want to, obviously, because you may end up going away from the page (cuz you realised it wasnt the right one) before the ad loads, unfortunately.
Its actually stupidly easy. I have a lot of business data driven web apps that do some heavy data mining and display them as charts, and obviously, that can be pretty slow if the customer wants their data real time (so no heavy caching allowed), so I simply render everything -else- first, then display the graphs and charts as they are rendered. I don't remember exactly how many lines of code it takes to do that, but it fits in one screen, thats for sure.
Well, according to the summary, its not just the ads that are the issue, its the behavior of the users, too. A business decision like any other: why waste ressources on people that aren't likely to be customers. It is no different than why web sites won't, for example, be "accessible", and thus why there are laws forcing them to. But as far as I know, there aren't any laws forcing anyone to do business with nerds.
Note: I am a firefox user.
Different purposes. CardSpace, part of .NET 3.0 and up, is made as a way to authenticate and share data on a site by site basis, as opposed to the central system of Live ID. One could say Cardspace is a "mini-LifeID" thing, so to speak. Still quite useful if implemented right.
What do you mean?! We know how its used! Have you seen JSP?! Its exactly like PHP! You stick all your logic and your tags in one big file with a bunch of conditionals, and you're set! Of course we know how java is used. Oh, and servlets? Same thing as PERL/CGI! Wha? Whats a design pattern? MVC? Strut? Bah, buzzwords!
Frontpage IS already dead. Expression Web replaced it a little while ago, and it is quite decent. Funny enough, the WYSIWYG editor is by -far- more standard compliant than IE =P (That is, if I make something in pure XHTML/CSS 2.1, and then open it in Opera, it will look virtually the same, but then if I open it in IE.....)
Not the holy grail, but its "good".
I want an example of a -common- uninformative or wrong error messages. I've seen 1-2, usually from actual BUGs in the product (and hey, its sure as hell is better than "Segmentation Fault"), which are unfortunately a given, but the example that was given above was quite precise and obvious for anyone above begginer level (a simple newbie mistake for people new to the .net boxing model), so can we have a significant one for kicks?
The debugger is also first class and definately can give you the information you want through the tracers and the stack traces (and a lot more through smart use of annotations and instrumentation), so I'd be interested in knowing what exactly its lacking and what are the alternative. I can't claim to know everything (no one does), so it would be interesting to see really what its missing, because having tried quite a few debuggers, and definately all of the mainstreams ones, I'm curious.
One thing though, is that Silverlight isn't really there to fight Flash. Microsoft's pathetically useless marketing department (when it comes to .NET technologies at least... anyone who develops in MS land probably remember the WinFX vs .NET 3.0 crap) decided they could push Silverlight as a Flash "killer" because it had similarities, but seriously...
.NET framework "easy to deploy" client options, along with Click Once, XBAP, and so on. Seen that way, it makes a heck of a lot more sense. Seen as a "Flash wannabe", it is totally useless and bound to fail.
Silverlight was originally more meant as a kind of "better Java Applets" deal. Its a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation that can be used across platforms (to some extent), since the full WPF is windows-only, and thats not always ideal, so a compromise was made. Its just part of the
I'll be using Silverlight, you can be sure of it. But not on the open web. I'll be using it for internal thin client front ends in environments that are windows dominant but not windows-exclusive (which is one of the most common business environments I've seen). For that, it really shines.
That point really just shows one thing: that switching from one environment to another isn't easy. Oh, and that your collegues suck :)
I understand what you say, though I heavily disagree, as from my experience (and I've worked quite extensively in just about every environments you can imagine), it is definately not the case, but (especially if you're in a team that don't quite understand the higher level language...remember, stuff like Java and C# doesn't mean you can hire crap programmers, no matter how much the project managers think so!!!), it definately can happen, experience may vary, and thus, I can't really argue with you... different experience, different results...
:)
What I can say, though it is not quite relevent to the discussion, but I will anyway... the issue with calling the GC directly -is- an incredibly easy to find bug =P In my opinion, ANYTIME the GC is called directly, thats a bug right there, so finding it can even be automated!!! Tadah! (Seriously though, NEVER EVER EVER call the GC directly. If you THINK you have to, its because there's an architecture problem somewhere...).
I know you were just trying to make a point, but I had to say it, sorry!
The catch is, you're not trying to make an idiot proof language. You're trying to make an error proof language. Why? Because even the best programmer in the universe, when stressed against a crazy deadline, will go faster and make more mistakes.
The point of eliminating pointers isn't to make the language easier (though it is a side goal I suppose), it is to make it error proof. That is just one example. Most (by faaaaaaaaaaaar) software that are written aren't new server engines, data components, or operating systems. They are business management front ends. That doesn't require any of this stuff, and having it just forces developers (no matter how good!) to spend more effort on things that can be automated and handle 80% of the cases well enough. By doing so, you save time (read: money), and at the end of the day, 99% of software developers write software so someone, somewhere, can save money.
Of course, aside for multiple inheritance, virtually all of what you mentionned can be done in C# Operator overloading is in, you can pass primitives by reference, and if you want to play with pointer arithmetics and toy with the memory directly, its in, too.
There will never ever be a language that can be perfect for all scenarios, but C# is pretty good at hitting the middle sweet spot. "By default you can't shoot yourself in the foot, but if you really, REALLY want to, just wrap it up in an unsafe{ } block and go to town".
Internal stuff, usually happens when an architect decides that a web app should be using "real" XHTML internally for various reasons.