Actually, Ghengis Kahn singled out the aristocracy. Coming from humble beginnings himself, he saw the rich as useless. The poor were left alone. I recently heard a story on NPR (public radio here in America) about how much better life was under the Mongols.
I'm not exactly on topic with regards to the parent, but let me put my 2 cents in here:
Online sites are largely worthless for finding jobs. In "What Color Is Your Parachute", one of the best career-finding books out there, the author quotes that about 5% of people of those who try online services find their jobs there. The problem stems from the fact that anyone who's a member of the site can apply for the job, so you're just one resume in a gigantic stack. The key to finding a job is the personal connection.
The author also cites an importatnt statistic (which I can't recell off the top of my head): small business make up the lion's share of jobs in the US - at least 66% or something like that. So, not only are large organizations like IBM more difficult to get into without a personal contact because of buracracy and infuriating HR departments, they have less jobs than smaller companies! Also, smaller companies are less likely to offshore your job, especially if computing is their core business.
So instead of of trying Dice or Monster to get into IBM if you're unemployed, I would suggest getting a copy of a local business journal, finding some growing, privately owned companies, and calling them directly. You're MUCH more likely to be able to talk directly to the person who makes the hiring decision.
I did just that, left a message for my current boss and said "My name is... and I would like to work for you." He appreciated my initiative, and now I'm a happy employee.
I attended Penn State (CS class of Fall 2001), which had a similar sponsorship with MS campus-wide. However, in my Software Engineering class, the entire lab was purchased by MS, hardware and all. The only rule on the lab machines (which we were in no way obligated to use, by the way) was that you could not change the operating system. All in all, that was a pretty fair deal. The CS department already had boatloads of UltraSPARC's which we also had unlimited access to.
I'm too lazy to look for it, but there's a recording of the room (rather than his microphone feed), and you can't even hear the "scream". He wasn't acting like a maniac when he said that either, he had a smile on his face. Granted, it was somehwat dumb on Dean's part.
There have been some pretty good presidents who were hot-tempered, like Clinton (who early in his first term told a secret service agent "you can't do that, god damn it!"), Truman, and Kennedy. There's a great White House tape of Kennedy absolutely reaming one of the Air Force brass, calling him a "stupid bastard."
This is a laughable argument, so for the sake of laughter, I hope you're trolling. (If so, IHBT, etc.)
Any property itself can be stolen. By your logic, we'd ban have to all property.
A car that isn't roadworthy is the responsiblity of the owner, and s/he would be liable if an accident occured because s/he was driving a car that was not roadworthy. That's why we (in most of the US States) have madatory yearly inspections for all cars.
Third, copying software illicitly is not one of the "little other things that are illegal." That's how gaming companies pay their developers. Yes, we probably all do it, and it's certainly not the worst crime in the world, but it is stealing, espcially if you would've otherwise bought the software.
Also, cars are not specifically constructed (and more importantly MARKETED) to help people violate intellectual property laws, as modhcips are. That is a modchip's main purpose. A car is designed to transport people from place A to place B.
However, I think it would be ok if modchips were only allowed to be sold in conjunction with the purchase of an imported game.
I learned programming in C++ (using vi, too), and I did not like the word-y blocks VB uses either at first. But I've since grown to like it. Here's why:
You know what kind of control statment you're ending: If/End If, Do/Next. With {} you have to keep track of that yourself.
As much as I like the power of C++, they did some truly stupid things when they designed the language. How could they not put a native string type in there? Now there's a million string class implmentations (including the STL's, which isn't always compatible with other stuff) and no consistency.
Since I'm a consultant, I don't get to dictate the language for clients. But I'm not sure I would want to use a.NET language if I HAD the choice because of an article I read on Joel on Software. It appears from what Joel says that the.NET platform isn't going to be around for very long, while the VB6 platform is extremely tried, tested, and it works.
I'll easily admit that VB's OO features are far weaker than C++'s, but the ease of developing UI's,the error handling, and the IDE (particularly the debugger) are absolutely spectacular. If there's a language that's got similar capabilities for *nix, I'd love to know about it. That's Linux's strength and weakness of course - that there's no universal UI and no universal API associated with the OS (kernel) itself.
Let me preface this by saying that I take a moderate stance in the Windows/Linux never-ending holy war and while I haven't developed extensively in PHP or ASP, I think I have a decent grip on the capabilities of both.
I found ASP MUCH easier to read. It's at least pseudo-OO. There's a reason why Visual Basic (and VBScript-based ASP) is so incredibly popular, even besides the prevalence of MS' operating systems: it's VERY well designed and very readable.
Now, throw in ASP.NET, (which admittedly is a whole different language) and its compiled (rather than interpreted) pages and you've got a much better (IMHO) language. Also, the Interdev IDE is far better than any IDE I've seen for PHP. (Not that one doesn't exist - I just haven't seen one.)
That said, I've found that PHP as a shell scripting language (In Linux of course) has allowed me to accomplish some system administration tasks that would've taken me forever using BASH scripting (because I know very very little).
Theoretically, they CAN. The length of the MD5 result would require at least as many characters as all possible inputs for it to be a 1-1 function (exactly 1 output for every input). But when you consider ASCII characters that are outside the typable range, that possibility becomes far more remote.
What I think the parent meant to say was that while it's theoretically possible to have 2 strings give the same MD5 hash, it's extremely unlikely.
One of the most important reasons software has advanced is exactly BEACUSE of information abstraction - API's, object-oriented computing.
In my experience, it's not a bad thing to be beholden to an API author. The author(s) likely know the system better than you. It's one of the things that helped humanity advance in general - specialization. It shouldn't be taken to the extreme, of course, SOMEONE has to know how the stuff works, but not most programmers.
Assembly language is good to know, but many (most?) coders will not ever have a need to touch it, unless they are doing embedded design or compiler development. There are much more useful things to learn for those of us that write software. For example, I am absolutely shocked at the number of students who graduated with me that had taken a SPARC assembly class (required), but knew zero about relational databases. (Although to be fair to my alma mater, Penn State, I believe that situation has since been rectified.)
By the way, I know assembly. MC68k as an undergraduate, a year of MIPS architecture as a graduate.
Read the question. He explcitly asked not to hear the pros and cons of using Citrix. He asked for the criteria for determining whether or not to use Citrix with a given application.
And I may be reading into it here, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't need any "why bother with Windows at all, just use Linux?" replies.
Frankly, I don't care if anyone bothers to mod the parent down but that's a troll, you retards. If you sincerely think it's okay to undermine your boss' direction because of your political agenda against MS, maybe you should reconsider why you're unemployed and have so much time to moderate on Slashdot.
Not to mention that it's off-topic.
Props to Accord MT for writing something that was just believbale enough.
With all due respect to the parent (and this is not meant to be flamebait), this sounds like the all-too-common Slashdot practice of posting stuff without citing sources. Sources please?
Although I have no sources, I'd heard from a professor as well that someone claimed to have been able to produce cold fusion, but that the results weren't reproducable, ammounting to exactly dick. So even if it's true, who cares? Wake me when they actually achieve something.
By the way, wasn't that the plot of the movie The Saint?
" Your working for a bunch of A$$H0LES running the company who care more about being sadistic to its employees rather than focus on customer satisfacation.
Start looking for a new job and when you get one, get revenge by quiting on the spot with out notice and leave them hanging dry."
I swear to god, you get the worst career advice on this site. No wonder everyone here always bitches about their jobs, or not being able to find a job, etc. You cannot have the arrogant attitude so many geeks have and expect to do well in the workplace.
It's a small world out there. NEVER leave a job without 2 weeks notice unless it's an emergency (or you're being sexually harasses, etc). That's your professional obligation, and if you ignore it, it may come back to bite you in the ass big-time. Never burn a bridge you don't have to, not matter how unfair, exploitative, or justplain lousy a former employer was.
I think you missed my implication (I probably didn't state it very clearly) that these were minimum expectations. Of course non-PhD's or even high school graduates CAN advance Computer Science, but the grandparent post said that BS/MS holders should be expected to be able to advance the science. Research and discovery is really difficult stuff, and my original point was that to expect every BS and MS holder to be able to be able to contribute to research is unrealistic and unfair.
However, if you have a HS diploma or a BS and you can contribute research, then more power to you!
I disagree. Someone with a PhD should be capable of contributing an advancement to the field. Someone with a masters should show exactly that - a mastery of the concepts in computer science or software engineering. And someone with a bachelor's should not be expected to be able to develop a new language.
In general, working Engineers (non-PhD's, software or otherwise) don't contribute to to advancement, i.e. research papers. They work with the tools they're given to solve problems.
I think you have an excellent point there. Compiler design one of the areas of research I left out of my argument, but I would say that the real work of language/compiler design and definition is more related to discrete math than it is to the implementation in assembly.
Even compilers are oftentimes written in C - correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Java compiler and virtual machine were written in C.
ASM and architecture is, of course, relevant to many (but probably not all) CS majors in their careers, but idea of the article was that assembly could/should be used to introduce CS students to coding. That's silly. I don't know of any CS cirriculums that don't teach assembly at all, but to start students out with it would be like starting physics or mechanical engineering students out with quantum mechanics.
I disagree. Assembly has little to nothing to do with either programming or computer science anymore. Computer science (IMHO) deals with the study of software engineering and algorithms (network protocols, etc). Computer engineering deals with custom integrated circuit development, including processor architecture.
I learned assembly as an undergraduate at Penn State (before attending a year of grad school at Drexel), but what I got out of the course had far more to do with understanding architecture (something not relevant for most developers, but much more relevant for hardware engineers).
Assembly does not have any of the high-level features (OOP, libraries, etc) features that developers need to know these days. It's rarely used, even in embedded programming since C/C++ compilers have gotten quite efficient and are available even for open-core (similar to open source) procesors for use on FPGA's.
On the other hand, assembly is important to know for computer engineering undergrads and graduates interested in architecture, and having taught in the CompEng department there, I can say that the depth of assembly in the cirriculum there is not sufficient.
Most of the world cannot afford a computer. (2/3 of the world can't even read.) Hell, there's a good percentage of the poor in America who can't afford a computer (let alone a broadband connection), and you think they're going to get rid of the POTS and everyone's going to use the Internet? Not too likely, and if it does happen, we're just widening the digital divide.
And besides that, as the parent poster has noted, internet technology has a way to go before it compares to the POTS, cost aside.
Slashdot Mirror
They could use it to deliver grams of weed in Amsterdamn's cafes. That's a gimmick!
That's what I said after I took a hit of their best stuff: AmsterDAMN, this is some good shit!!!
Seriously? For real? Nuh-uh!
Actually, Ghengis Kahn singled out the aristocracy. Coming from humble beginnings himself, he saw the rich as useless. The poor were left alone. I recently heard a story on NPR (public radio here in America) about how much better life was under the Mongols.
That's why I said I was offtopic from your original post. I was really just taking an opportunity to rant about how to conduct a job search. :)
If you look at my posting history, a lot of my posts are about that, because I was sitting at home jobless and reading slashdot all day.
I'm not exactly on topic with regards to the parent, but let me put my 2 cents in here:
... and I would like to work for you." He appreciated my initiative, and now I'm a happy employee.
Online sites are largely worthless for finding jobs. In "What Color Is Your Parachute", one of the best career-finding books out there, the author quotes that about 5% of people of those who try online services find their jobs there. The problem stems from the fact that anyone who's a member of the site can apply for the job, so you're just one resume in a gigantic stack. The key to finding a job is the personal connection.
The author also cites an importatnt statistic (which I can't recell off the top of my head): small business make up the lion's share of jobs in the US - at least 66% or something like that. So, not only are large organizations like IBM more difficult to get into without a personal contact because of buracracy and infuriating HR departments, they have less jobs than smaller companies! Also, smaller companies are less likely to offshore your job, especially if computing is their core business.
So instead of of trying Dice or Monster to get into IBM if you're unemployed, I would suggest getting a copy of a local business journal, finding some growing, privately owned companies, and calling them directly. You're MUCH more likely to be able to talk directly to the person who makes the hiring decision.
I did just that, left a message for my current boss and said "My name is
PE certification is also particularly important to architectural engineers.
I attended Penn State (CS class of Fall 2001), which had a similar sponsorship with MS campus-wide. However, in my Software Engineering class, the entire lab was purchased by MS, hardware and all. The only rule on the lab machines (which we were in no way obligated to use, by the way) was that you could not change the operating system. All in all, that was a pretty fair deal. The CS department already had boatloads of UltraSPARC's which we also had unlimited access to.
Just an anecdote.
I'm too lazy to look for it, but there's a recording of the room (rather than his microphone feed), and you can't even hear the "scream". He wasn't acting like a maniac when he said that either, he had a smile on his face. Granted, it was somehwat dumb on Dean's part.
There have been some pretty good presidents who were hot-tempered, like Clinton (who early in his first term told a secret service agent "you can't do that, god damn it!"), Truman, and Kennedy. There's a great White House tape of Kennedy absolutely reaming one of the Air Force brass, calling him a "stupid bastard."
Unfortunately, as I saw on a 60 Minutes segment, the AARP lobbies hard against mandatory testing for drivers license renewals for the elderly.
This is a laughable argument, so for the sake of laughter, I hope you're trolling. (If so, IHBT, etc.)
Any property itself can be stolen. By your logic, we'd ban have to all property.
A car that isn't roadworthy is the responsiblity of the owner, and s/he would be liable if an accident occured because s/he was driving a car that was not roadworthy. That's why we (in most of the US States) have madatory yearly inspections for all cars.
Third, copying software illicitly is not one of the "little other things that are illegal." That's how gaming companies pay their developers. Yes, we probably all do it, and it's certainly not the worst crime in the world, but it is stealing, espcially if you would've otherwise bought the software.
Also, cars are not specifically constructed (and more importantly MARKETED) to help people violate intellectual property laws, as modhcips are. That is a modchip's main purpose. A car is designed to transport people from place A to place B.
However, I think it would be ok if modchips were only allowed to be sold in conjunction with the purchase of an imported game.
I learned programming in C++ (using vi, too), and I did not like the word-y blocks VB uses either at first. But I've since grown to like it. Here's why:
.NET language if I HAD the choice because of an article I read on Joel on Software. It appears from what Joel says that the .NET platform isn't going to be around for very long, while the VB6 platform is extremely tried, tested, and it works.
You know what kind of control statment you're ending: If/End If, Do/Next. With {} you have to keep track of that yourself.
As much as I like the power of C++, they did some truly stupid things when they designed the language. How could they not put a native string type in there? Now there's a million string class implmentations (including the STL's, which isn't always compatible with other stuff) and no consistency.
Since I'm a consultant, I don't get to dictate the language for clients. But I'm not sure I would want to use a
I'll easily admit that VB's OO features are far weaker than C++'s, but the ease of developing UI's,the error handling, and the IDE (particularly the debugger) are absolutely spectacular. If there's a language that's got similar capabilities for *nix, I'd love to know about it. That's Linux's strength and weakness of course - that there's no universal UI and no universal API associated with the OS (kernel) itself.
Let me preface this by saying that I take a moderate stance in the Windows/Linux never-ending holy war and while I haven't developed extensively in PHP or ASP, I think I have a decent grip on the capabilities of both.
I found ASP MUCH easier to read. It's at least pseudo-OO. There's a reason why Visual Basic (and VBScript-based ASP) is so incredibly popular, even besides the prevalence of MS' operating systems: it's VERY well designed and very readable.
Now, throw in ASP.NET, (which admittedly is a whole different language) and its compiled (rather than interpreted) pages and you've got a much better (IMHO) language. Also, the Interdev IDE is far better than any IDE I've seen for PHP. (Not that one doesn't exist - I just haven't seen one.)
That said, I've found that PHP as a shell scripting language (In Linux of course) has allowed me to accomplish some system administration tasks that would've taken me forever using BASH scripting (because I know very very little).
Theoretically, they CAN. The length of the MD5 result would require at least as many characters as all possible inputs for it to be a 1-1 function (exactly 1 output for every input). But when you consider ASCII characters that are outside the typable range, that possibility becomes far more remote.
What I think the parent meant to say was that while it's theoretically possible to have 2 strings give the same MD5 hash, it's extremely unlikely.
One of the most important reasons software has advanced is exactly BEACUSE of information abstraction - API's, object-oriented computing.
In my experience, it's not a bad thing to be beholden to an API author. The author(s) likely know the system better than you. It's one of the things that helped humanity advance in general - specialization. It shouldn't be taken to the extreme, of course, SOMEONE has to know how the stuff works, but not most programmers.
Assembly language is good to know, but many (most?) coders will not ever have a need to touch it, unless they are doing embedded design or compiler development. There are much more useful things to learn for those of us that write software. For example, I am absolutely shocked at the number of students who graduated with me that had taken a SPARC assembly class (required), but knew zero about relational databases. (Although to be fair to my alma mater, Penn State, I believe that situation has since been rectified.)
By the way, I know assembly. MC68k as an undergraduate, a year of MIPS architecture as a graduate.
You are an anal rententive douchebag. Who cares?
Read the question. He explcitly asked not to hear the pros and cons of using Citrix. He asked for the criteria for determining whether or not to use Citrix with a given application.
And I may be reading into it here, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't need any "why bother with Windows at all, just use Linux?" replies.
Frankly, I don't care if anyone bothers to mod the parent down but that's a troll, you retards. If you sincerely think it's okay to undermine your boss' direction because of your political agenda against MS, maybe you should reconsider why you're unemployed and have so much time to moderate on Slashdot.
Not to mention that it's off-topic.
Props to Accord MT for writing something that was just believbale enough.
With all due respect to the parent (and this is not meant to be flamebait), this sounds like the all-too-common Slashdot practice of posting stuff without citing sources. Sources please?
Although I have no sources, I'd heard from a professor as well that someone claimed to have been able to produce cold fusion, but that the results weren't reproducable, ammounting to exactly dick. So even if it's true, who cares? Wake me when they actually achieve something.
By the way, wasn't that the plot of the movie The Saint?
I swear to god, you get the worst career advice on this site. No wonder everyone here always bitches about their jobs, or not being able to find a job, etc. You cannot have the arrogant attitude so many geeks have and expect to do well in the workplace.
It's a small world out there. NEVER leave a job without 2 weeks notice unless it's an emergency (or you're being sexually harasses, etc). That's your professional obligation, and if you ignore it, it may come back to bite you in the ass big-time. Never burn a bridge you don't have to, not matter how unfair, exploitative, or justplain lousy a former employer was.
I for one would welcome our new arthopod overlords.
Sorry. Couldn't be helped.
I think you missed my implication (I probably didn't state it very clearly) that these were minimum expectations. Of course non-PhD's or even high school graduates CAN advance Computer Science, but the grandparent post said that BS/MS holders should be expected to be able to advance the science. Research and discovery is really difficult stuff, and my original point was that to expect every BS and MS holder to be able to be able to contribute to research is unrealistic and unfair.
However, if you have a HS diploma or a BS and you can contribute research, then more power to you!
I disagree. Someone with a PhD should be capable of contributing an advancement to the field. Someone with a masters should show exactly that - a mastery of the concepts in computer science or software engineering. And someone with a bachelor's should not be expected to be able to develop a new language.
In general, working Engineers (non-PhD's, software or otherwise) don't contribute to to advancement, i.e. research papers. They work with the tools they're given to solve problems.
I think you have an excellent point there. Compiler design one of the areas of research I left out of my argument, but I would say that the real work of language/compiler design and definition is more related to discrete math than it is to the implementation in assembly.
Even compilers are oftentimes written in C - correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Java compiler and virtual machine were written in C.
ASM and architecture is, of course, relevant to many (but probably not all) CS majors in their careers, but idea of the article was that assembly could/should be used to introduce CS students to coding. That's silly. I don't know of any CS cirriculums that don't teach assembly at all, but to start students out with it would be like starting physics or mechanical engineering students out with quantum mechanics.
I disagree. Assembly has little to nothing to do with either programming or computer science anymore. Computer science (IMHO) deals with the study of software engineering and algorithms (network protocols, etc). Computer engineering deals with custom integrated circuit development, including processor architecture.
I learned assembly as an undergraduate at Penn State (before attending a year of grad school at Drexel), but what I got out of the course had far more to do with understanding architecture (something not relevant for most developers, but much more relevant for hardware engineers).
Assembly does not have any of the high-level features (OOP, libraries, etc) features that developers need to know these days. It's rarely used, even in embedded programming since C/C++ compilers have gotten quite efficient and are available even for open-core (similar to open source) procesors for use on FPGA's.
On the other hand, assembly is important to know for computer engineering undergrads and graduates interested in architecture, and having taught in the CompEng department there, I can say that the depth of assembly in the cirriculum there is not sufficient.
Most of the world cannot afford a computer. (2/3 of the world can't even read.) Hell, there's a good percentage of the poor in America who can't afford a computer (let alone a broadband connection), and you think they're going to get rid of the POTS and everyone's going to use the Internet? Not too likely, and if it does happen, we're just widening the digital divide.
And besides that, as the parent poster has noted, internet technology has a way to go before it compares to the POTS, cost aside.