Not that I would like to deprive any long time user of the possibility of single click activation, but it should really not be the default.
Why not? Just because it isn't what you would usually use. When I am forced to use a Windows machine the first thing I do is change it to single click activation.
I actually had several people making fun of me because I used Windows in this way. I just can't understand it... Why click twice when you could click once? Your mouse button lasts twice as long. I guess I am just lazy.
On a normal desktop you can pick things up for inspection and manipulaiton. Having single click for activation gives the user no easy way to do this.
Umm... the activation doesn't occur until you release the mouse button, so if you click it and hold it, you can move it as you please. Once you start moving it, when you release the button it drops the icon. How does this make it not easy?
I don't know what the old site looked like, but I just took a look at the new one, and it is so bad that I think $300K would be a bargin to have something other than that pile of crap.
Take your money, and hire an attorney. Then proceed to sue everyone you possibly can for copyright infringment. You don't even have to have a decent case. If you sue the right people, their enimies will pump money into your legal fund. Just skim a few million off the top of that, and it is a summer well spent.
While we are on the subject: Visual Basic is the most ass backwards language I have ever seen. I would rather throw all high level constructs out the window and program everything in assembly (quite fun in its own right anyway) than have to do another project in VB.
I went to Washington State University, which is hardly a 1st teir school. I can't imagine that there are so many other schools that are so crappy. But then I wouldn't put much stock in a person's degree if they didn't have a respectable GPA to go along with it. Just because you go through school doesn't mean you did well.
As far as Java goes, it wasn't taught at all in my ciriculum (there was an optional java course for those who didn't feel they could learn the language on their own). In some of my higher level classes they gave us the option of using Java on some assignments, but C/C++ was always acceptable.
Why the attack on Java by the way? I for one think it is an excellent language in some situations. Sytactically it is very similar to C++, and I had no trouble picking it up. I find it to be very intuitive, and a decent choice for many application domains. Garbage collection has its place, particularly in multi-threaded applications (the extra book keeping of ensuring that every thread is done with some object before freeing it in C++ is often more trouble than it is worth).
What is wrong with picking popular imperitive languages for the programming assignments? It isn't very easy to grade an assignment if everyone uses their own language of choice. Most people feel comfortable with imperitive languages, and they are the most widely deployed.
In true theory courses you don't do any programming anyway.
My frustration comes from the fact that graduates can do neither.
And my frustration comes from that gross generalization.
I graduated last May, and I know the answer to your question is a) Hash table, and I would have known that when I graduated. A properly deployed hash table has a O(1) search time (That is not to say I would necessarily think a hash table was the best choice to store name value pairs, but it is the fastest).
Even if my answer to your question is incorrect in your estimation, I clearly learned what all three of those things were in my first year of CS. Any institution that gradauated someone who doesn't know these things should be ashamed, and I just don't buy that they do.
How many of these supposed graduates have you actually talked to? Did they actually graduate? Was it a university, or just a 2 year trade school??? What was their GPA? I can't believe it could have been more than a 2.0 (on a 4 point scale).
I'm starting to wonder if programming and comp-sci should be split at schools.
For the most part I think that is actually a really good idea, and the programming degree should be called "software engineering." I think some schools actually already do this.
I didn't think he was a troll either, or I wouldn't have replied in the first place. I was merely refering to the fact moderators had labeled him has a troll. I figured that perhaps they were right, and that I shouldn't even be bothering with a reply. I'm glad I did reply though, because he had plenty of interesting things to add to his original comment.
He isn't a troll, and his original message should be moded up accordingly.
See, you really don't know what comp-sci actually is. Neither do most of the people posting here. I think I finally see what you mean when you bash on most comp-sci undergraduate programs. They have a lot of focus on stuff that isn't comp-sci (i.e. programming). That doesn't mean that everything you learn while getting your degree is comp-sci. It is important to teach programming in the first year, because understanding how to program helps give a foundation for learning computer science.
In no way is comp-sci engineering, or even applied mathematics. It is a branch of mathematics that deals with computation. When it is applied you get a form of engineering (typically software engineering), but that doesn't make comp-sci engineering. You could spend a life time working in comp-sci and never write a line of code.
I suppose in your post you didn't directly state that computer science is applied mathematics, but from who you were repling to it seemed to me that you were implying that programming and comp-sci were the same thing. Which they aren't (admitedly I didn't know that when I started my degree).
You have had serveral posts here since my initial one, and I think they all basicaly come at this wrong. You seem convinced that getting a computer science degree is worthless because most of the recent grads you are exposed to can't "program their way out of a paper box." Just because you have been successful (I will take you at your word on that) with out a degree doesn't mean that you wouldn't have benefited from getting one. I don't think you have any right to be making the generalization you have been making. A CS program will lose its certification if it doesn't teach theory (which it should, because that is the only part of the degree that is actually CS).
The theory is the hard part, and a lot of grads get away with out having properly learned it. That isn't the fault of the instiution. If you learn something for a test, and then forget it, that is your problem, not the university.
Then how the heck do you know what the teachers are teaching? Maybe you have only talked to the morons who go through comp-sci thinking it is a programming degree. I know that there was a large percentage of people I went through school with who chose to ignore things like functional programming simply because they had the mind set that they were there to get a software development job after school. It was taught, but it mostly fell on deaf ears. If it wasn't c++/MFC they thought they wouldn't need it (and hence spent no time trying to learn it). They were the same crop of students who thought it was stupid that they had to take differential equations and physics, because they would never use that in "the field." They just wasted their education.
I personally thought it was really interesting, and as such I am now a graduate student. I love comp-sci for what it actually is, which is not programming.
Why am I replying to a troll??? Oh well, I feel better now.
Are you saying that your life isn't useless? Give me a break.
Keeping yourself oblivious of what's really helping, will keep your life OKAY.
Hey, that sounds like a mature attitude towards life! Obviously the solution to the worlds problems are to ignore them. It makes your life better, so it must be ok!
People like programmers want more out of a life. More of a reason for living, than being attached to a fabricated network with money packets.
Get off your high horse. Maybe if I lived in a socialist/communist nation I could afford to ignore providing myself with an income, but I don't. I live in the US, and though there is welfare, I personally wouldn't take it unless I had children to support. I would rather starve than take handouts, so I get irritated that so many people are willing to give their skills away for free. If I end up working fast-food because the job market has dried up for paid software development, I'm not going to be very happy person. I didn't work so hard for a McJob.
I just want to reiterate that my beef is not with open source, but rather with volunteer developers. Open source is a wonderful development model. If big corporations can afford to subsidize it, I have no problem developing for it, but why would they do that when there is an army of geeks willing to do it for free?
There is nothing wrong with being a geek (I'm one), but come on lets stop letting the rest of the world cash in on us.
This is worse than communism. At least with communism everyone gets screwed. In this system it is just the developers.
Hey I have an idea. Lets convince a bunch of auto mechanics that they would be really cool if they spent all of their free time fixing cars for free. That way the whole community would have cheaper access to auto repair, and we could all benefit!!! And then, maybe we could get doctors, lawyers, etc. to do the same thing.
I mean if these people didn't want to work for free they would obviously be money grubbing bastards. After all, they should love their jobs so much that we would be doing them a favor by letting them work for free. Everything would be so great, because then it really would be like communisim! We could share everything!!!
I can't believe I was marked as a Troll. Nothing I said was irrational. Maybe you don't agree with it, but that doesn't mean it is a deliberate attempt to be argumenative. I really meant it. Why does an oppinion have to be thrashed like that?
My only conclusion is that who ever modded me down can't handle the idea I don't like the current state of the OS movement. Why should the moderator's personal feelings on the matter make me a Troll???
Maybe the leak of the Windows source code a few weeks ago was a CIA plot to sabotage our enimes. The upside for them was that they could release the code without modification.
You are missing the point. Not to mention that the second comment of mine that you quoted was meant jokingly.
I'm mearly trying to get people to realize how valuable their skills are. Why should you be giving them away for free? You have every right to do so, but it does impact other people's lives. I keep hearing about how altruistic it is to develop free software. Why don't you go out and work at the mall for free? At least the jobs you are displacing didn't take years of training to achieve.
Where did you get this monumentally misplaced sense of entitlement? Where do you get off telling other people how to spend their time?
I have just as much right to be upset about this as the people I am upset with have to work for free.
I'm just saying that people should wake up and see that they are being robbed. The only people who lose with open source are the developers. Everyone else wins, and that is why it is so popular. I just don't see why developers are willing to accomodate this. Don't you value your time???
When you give away your hard work, you devaule the hard work of every other developer who is trying to make a living. Now maybe you have some other career, but I'm counting on living off of my programming skills. With half of the jobs moving overseas the last thing I need is competion from someone who is just doing it for fun.
I'm not saying open source is a bad idea, because I think it creates better software. I am saying that as developers we shouldn't be working on open source unless someone is paying us. The IBMs of the world can make a fortune off the availablity of open source software, but they aren't going to pay much to develop it if everyone is willing to build it for free.
If we refuse to give our work away, it will cause big players (like IBM, Redhat, etc.) to step up to the plate to encourage the growth of open source. Then we can all be paid to be working on quality software. Or, open source will fail miserablly (which is what it should do if it can't produce revenue).
The alternative is the end of computer programming as a high paying career. The bright programmers will have to make a living doing consulting and in-house programming. Not a bad chunk of change, but it isn't what I wanted for a career.
Thanks a lot for ruining my career path you cold hearted, non-money loving, generous, fools!
Yeah, but it isn't because it is free (cost), it is because it is free (open). That is the difference. All these people keep talking about how it is unfair to charge for software. I don't think so.
However, I think open software is supeirior to closed solutions. That doesn't mean it has to be cost free.
That is exactally what I meant. Big corporations that would otherwise have to pay for software can get it for free (and therefore turn a larger profit). It doesn't matter what they are using it for. Their opperating costs are lower, and it is all thanks to some unpaid hobbists! Shouldn't people be compensated for their ideas?
If developers themselves decide that they shouldn't then why would any company do so out of the goodness of their hearts?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... That doesn't mean they aren't good terrorist targets. Wasn't anyone paying attention to what just happened in Spain???
Why not? Just because it isn't what you would usually use. When I am forced to use a Windows machine the first thing I do is change it to single click activation.
I actually had several people making fun of me because I used Windows in this way. I just can't understand it... Why click twice when you could click once? Your mouse button lasts twice as long. I guess I am just lazy.
Umm... the activation doesn't occur until you release the mouse button, so if you click it and hold it, you can move it as you please. Once you start moving it, when you release the button it drops the icon. How does this make it not easy?
what about a beowulf cluster of these things? Now that would be something.
I don't know what the old site looked like, but I just took a look at the new one, and it is so bad that I think $300K would be a bargin to have something other than that pile of crap.
See for yourself...
Take your money, and hire an attorney. Then proceed to sue everyone you possibly can for copyright infringment. You don't even have to have a decent case. If you sue the right people, their enimies will pump money into your legal fund. Just skim a few million off the top of that, and it is a summer well spent.
Clearly you didn't understand the conversation that just transpired. Look up the definition of savvy, and perhaps all will become clear to you.
Do you really want savvy people running Xfree86?
I sure dont. Stupid idiots should stay with their crappy windows and macs, and get the hell away from the complicated shit.
"Stupid idiots" should look up the words they don't know before they speak:
savvy
\Sav"vy\, Savvey \Sav"vey\, n. Comprehension;
knowledge of affairs; mental grasp. [Slang, U. S.]
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, (C) 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
Oh, I agree with that completely.
While we are on the subject: Visual Basic is the most ass backwards language I have ever seen. I would rather throw all high level constructs out the window and program everything in assembly (quite fun in its own right anyway) than have to do another project in VB.
I went to Washington State University, which is hardly a 1st teir school. I can't imagine that there are so many other schools that are so crappy. But then I wouldn't put much stock in a person's degree if they didn't have a respectable GPA to go along with it. Just because you go through school doesn't mean you did well.
As far as Java goes, it wasn't taught at all in my ciriculum (there was an optional java course for those who didn't feel they could learn the language on their own). In some of my higher level classes they gave us the option of using Java on some assignments, but C/C++ was always acceptable.
Why the attack on Java by the way? I for one think it is an excellent language in some situations. Sytactically it is very similar to C++, and I had no trouble picking it up. I find it to be very intuitive, and a decent choice for many application domains. Garbage collection has its place, particularly in multi-threaded applications (the extra book keeping of ensuring that every thread is done with some object before freeing it in C++ is often more trouble than it is worth).
What is wrong with picking popular imperitive languages for the programming assignments? It isn't very easy to grade an assignment if everyone uses their own language of choice. Most people feel comfortable with imperitive languages, and they are the most widely deployed.
In true theory courses you don't do any programming anyway.
I graduated last May, and I know the answer to your question is a) Hash table, and I would have known that when I graduated. A properly deployed hash table has a O(1) search time (That is not to say I would necessarily think a hash table was the best choice to store name value pairs, but it is the fastest).
Even if my answer to your question is incorrect in your estimation, I clearly learned what all three of those things were in my first year of CS. Any institution that gradauated someone who doesn't know these things should be ashamed, and I just don't buy that they do.
How many of these supposed graduates have you actually talked to? Did they actually graduate? Was it a university, or just a 2 year trade school??? What was their GPA? I can't believe it could have been more than a 2.0 (on a 4 point scale).
I didn't think he was a troll either, or I wouldn't have replied in the first place. I was merely refering to the fact moderators had labeled him has a troll. I figured that perhaps they were right, and that I shouldn't even be bothering with a reply. I'm glad I did reply though, because he had plenty of interesting things to add to his original comment.
He isn't a troll, and his original message should be moded up accordingly.
See, you really don't know what comp-sci actually is. Neither do most of the people posting here. I think I finally see what you mean when you bash on most comp-sci undergraduate programs. They have a lot of focus on stuff that isn't comp-sci (i.e. programming). That doesn't mean that everything you learn while getting your degree is comp-sci. It is important to teach programming in the first year, because understanding how to program helps give a foundation for learning computer science.
In no way is comp-sci engineering, or even applied mathematics. It is a branch of mathematics that deals with computation. When it is applied you get a form of engineering (typically software engineering), but that doesn't make comp-sci engineering. You could spend a life time working in comp-sci and never write a line of code.
I suppose in your post you didn't directly state that computer science is applied mathematics, but from who you were repling to it seemed to me that you were implying that programming and comp-sci were the same thing. Which they aren't (admitedly I didn't know that when I started my degree).
You have had serveral posts here since my initial one, and I think they all basicaly come at this wrong. You seem convinced that getting a computer science degree is worthless because most of the recent grads you are exposed to can't "program their way out of a paper box." Just because you have been successful (I will take you at your word on that) with out a degree doesn't mean that you wouldn't have benefited from getting one. I don't think you have any right to be making the generalization you have been making. A CS program will lose its certification if it doesn't teach theory (which it should, because that is the only part of the degree that is actually CS).
The theory is the hard part, and a lot of grads get away with out having properly learned it. That isn't the fault of the instiution. If you learn something for a test, and then forget it, that is your problem, not the university.
Then how the heck do you know what the teachers are teaching? Maybe you have only talked to the morons who go through comp-sci thinking it is a programming degree. I know that there was a large percentage of people I went through school with who chose to ignore things like functional programming simply because they had the mind set that they were there to get a software development job after school. It was taught, but it mostly fell on deaf ears. If it wasn't c++/MFC they thought they wouldn't need it (and hence spent no time trying to learn it). They were the same crop of students who thought it was stupid that they had to take differential equations and physics, because they would never use that in "the field." They just wasted their education.
I personally thought it was really interesting, and as such I am now a graduate student. I love comp-sci for what it actually is, which is not programming.
Why am I replying to a troll??? Oh well, I feel better now.
Are you saying that your life isn't useless? Give me a break.
Hey, that sounds like a mature attitude towards life! Obviously the solution to the worlds problems are to ignore them. It makes your life better, so it must be ok!
Get off your high horse. Maybe if I lived in a socialist/communist nation I could afford to ignore providing myself with an income, but I don't. I live in the US, and though there is welfare, I personally wouldn't take it unless I had children to support. I would rather starve than take handouts, so I get irritated that so many people are willing to give their skills away for free. If I end up working fast-food because the job market has dried up for paid software development, I'm not going to be very happy person. I didn't work so hard for a McJob.
I just want to reiterate that my beef is not with open source, but rather with volunteer developers. Open source is a wonderful development model. If big corporations can afford to subsidize it, I have no problem developing for it, but why would they do that when there is an army of geeks willing to do it for free?
There is nothing wrong with being a geek (I'm one), but come on lets stop letting the rest of the world cash in on us.
This is worse than communism. At least with communism everyone gets screwed. In this system it is just the developers.
Hey I have an idea. Lets convince a bunch of auto mechanics that they would be really cool if they spent all of their free time fixing cars for free. That way the whole community would have cheaper access to auto repair, and we could all benefit!!! And then, maybe we could get doctors, lawyers, etc. to do the same thing.
I mean if these people didn't want to work for free they would obviously be money grubbing bastards. After all, they should love their jobs so much that we would be doing them a favor by letting them work for free. Everything would be so great, because then it really would be like communisim! We could share everything!!!
Horray for the revolution!!!
I can't believe I was marked as a Troll. Nothing I said was irrational. Maybe you don't agree with it, but that doesn't mean it is a deliberate attempt to be argumenative. I really meant it. Why does an oppinion have to be thrashed like that?
My only conclusion is that who ever modded me down can't handle the idea I don't like the current state of the OS movement. Why should the moderator's personal feelings on the matter make me a Troll???
Maybe the leak of the Windows source code a few weeks ago was a CIA plot to sabotage our enimes. The upside for them was that they could release the code without modification.
I'm mearly trying to get people to realize how valuable their skills are. Why should you be giving them away for free? You have every right to do so, but it does impact other people's lives. I keep hearing about how altruistic it is to develop free software. Why don't you go out and work at the mall for free? At least the jobs you are displacing didn't take years of training to achieve.
I have just as much right to be upset about this as the people I am upset with have to work for free.
I'm just saying that people should wake up and see that they are being robbed. The only people who lose with open source are the developers. Everyone else wins, and that is why it is so popular. I just don't see why developers are willing to accomodate this. Don't you value your time???
When you give away your hard work, you devaule the hard work of every other developer who is trying to make a living. Now maybe you have some other career, but I'm counting on living off of my programming skills. With half of the jobs moving overseas the last thing I need is competion from someone who is just doing it for fun.
I'm not saying open source is a bad idea, because I think it creates better software. I am saying that as developers we shouldn't be working on open source unless someone is paying us. The IBMs of the world can make a fortune off the availablity of open source software, but they aren't going to pay much to develop it if everyone is willing to build it for free.
If we refuse to give our work away, it will cause big players (like IBM, Redhat, etc.) to step up to the plate to encourage the growth of open source. Then we can all be paid to be working on quality software. Or, open source will fail miserablly (which is what it should do if it can't produce revenue).
The alternative is the end of computer programming as a high paying career. The bright programmers will have to make a living doing consulting and in-house programming. Not a bad chunk of change, but it isn't what I wanted for a career.
Thanks a lot for ruining my career path you cold hearted, non-money loving, generous, fools!
Yeah, but it isn't because it is free (cost), it is because it is free (open). That is the difference. All these people keep talking about how it is unfair to charge for software. I don't think so.
However, I think open software is supeirior to closed solutions. That doesn't mean it has to be cost free.
That is exactally what I meant. Big corporations that would otherwise have to pay for software can get it for free (and therefore turn a larger profit). It doesn't matter what they are using it for. Their opperating costs are lower, and it is all thanks to some unpaid hobbists! Shouldn't people be compensated for their ideas?
If developers themselves decide that they shouldn't then why would any company do so out of the goodness of their hearts?