Fired? PhD students aren't employees, they're students.
Most PhD students (specially those in sciences) do not rely exclusively in student loans to pay for classes and make ends meet. They have a department or research-center funded job that includes being a teaching assistant, or even a teacher for freshman courses as well as assist in (or even conduct) writing papers and experiments (sometimes on topics that are not directly relevant to his/her field of research.)
You fuck it up (or you don't work well with whoever happens to supervise you), you lose your assistantship job. You lose that and bye-bye the dreams of getting the piece of goatskin that says "Doctor something something". Most people can't contemplate doing 5-7 (or even more) years of grad studies by student loans alone (or waiting tables), without the stipends, discounts, and most important of all, without the full-time paid immersion in teaching and research that comes with the Ph.D assistantship job.
They might be students, but they aren't like freshmen or sophomores. They have a job related to their field and get paid to do work that helps them (hopefully) do the research they need to become doctors (this is specially true since most are required to be full-time Ph.D students in their last 1-3 years of study.)
In today's legal climate, you have have to go through the academic misconduct process (usually some kind of quasi-judicial hearing & appeals) then expel them. Failing to follow procedure invites a fat lawsuit.
Unfortunately academia sometimes work like a big fucking self-perpetuating mafia. It's only a very serious academic misconduct (borderline scandalous research fraud, sexual harassment or something to that nature) to get a misconduct process going.
When I'm talking about memory management and fine-tunning I'm referring to jvm tunning. Very few people know how to use weak references. There is a dichotomy in the language itself. It touts itself to provide memory management, but at the same time it requires deep knowledge of it.
Obviously this is true no matter what you program with. But in languages without explicit memory management, you have to be explicit on how you allocate and de-allocate resources. I would have preferred if Java had done this. Of all the things Java brought, garbage collection coupled with a lack of explicit destructors is something I've concluded not to have been a good idea, after a decade of doing this stuff.
Disclaimer: this is my personal take on things, and I'm fine if people disagree with it.
I've had a similar experience (14 years, almost a decade with Java), and between 2003 and 2008 I worked two hats, half developer and half weblogic/systems administrators. And I've seen perhaps 3 or 4 cases where there was a leak that could not be pointed to the application container or the app. It was a very specific combination on NT and Linux (never saw it on Solaris or HP-UX). It was severe enough to have to schedule a restart of the container every few weeks.
 
My jab at the poster I was replying to is that you can be a good programmer and end up writing a memory hungry program. For starters, there might be no other way. The realization of a requirement might demand that it be memory hungry.
The Java constructs are not necessarily benign to fine-tuned memory management. One has to play with the jvm args to get it right for many memory intensive applications.
Memory utilization, and all too often, the need to write memory hungry code is not necessarily the sign that one is stupid or that doesn't know how to code. The tasks software engineering attempts to tackle are too complex to be painted in such sophomoric black and white world.
Funny that you mentioned about a lack of C++ training in college. It's horribly sad. I've met graduates who can't visualize an array of structures with members of type pointers to functions, for example. Or even sadder, they have no clue that they are responsible for explicit resource management. Even in Java it is necessary, but nobody teaches them that in college. They just do their thing with the garbage collector doing what they think is magic.
They don't even teach them how to program correctly in Java - it's pretty fucking depressing.
>> I'm assuming here that you're some sort of
>> administrator or something. Based on that
>> assumption I offer this perspective: Your job only
>>exists to enable them to do theirs.
Uhmmm, no. An admin job's is to protect company assets first, and enable users to do their job within organizational constrains second. Users get enabled to do their job and nothing else within those constrains.
In essence, a network is an admin's responsibility. He owns it (and it is his ass), and is in charge of having it operational according to a predefined IT governance. With that, he is in charge of enabling users to do work, in his network, the one he's paid to own, manage, control, monitor and report to the guy above.
In that perfect world of yours that might be true. With the JVM, however, except for toy apps or very small non-general purpose apps, you'll leak up to the waazoo regardless of how you try.
It is a known fact that several JVMs out there do leak just by running. Even if you try, Java, with its language constructs, makes it difficult to control memory management and fine tuning.
In other words, you don't know what you are talking about, college fan boy. Remember that before you assume memory hungriness is the result of stupidity.
That is not to say that there are not shitty, idiotic Java programmers out there.
I'm a TeX/LaTeX fan, but I've had to work on FrameMaker and Word in the past for collaboration with people who were not using LaTeX. The last time I used LaTeX seriously was over a decade ago. I think that was the last time I saw someone using it as well.
My sister is a Mathematics professor, and she has settled with Word and its equation editor. She has developed her own system of churning out hand outs and lectures for her math classes with Word. Like her, many in Academia (including in Computer Science) end up with this route.
It is kind of sad, but that is the natural order of things. My sister, and people like her, have enough in their hands already to learn another system; MS Word is ubiquitous, and - if you are careful with your templates - it's predictable.
The benefits of typing your equations with LaTeX as opposed to doing them the point-n-click way - which btw, it's incredibly obvious to them, it is not incentive enough to break from their established procedure to get their jobs done.
If MS Word really pulls this off - and that's a big IF - it will be a good thing as it will bring to those already familiar with the product a new set of capabilities.
Now, if MS Word doesn't pulls it off - which is possible, then there is still life for LaTeX.
But even now, for many types of jobs, MS Word does an ok "good enough" job, thus making a dent on Tex/LaTeX. I think Lamport predicted something like this would happen. And if it isn't MS Word, it will be some other, more advanced commercial or FOSS product.
Seriously, you are 39, and an engineer to boot, and you still claimed that poor people in malaria-affected countries wouldn't so poor if Windows had come into existence?
I refuse to believe you are 39. I'm 39 myself, and an engineer as well. And I know plenty of the same. I've never seen a 39-year old engineer talking such a stupid thing.
You spent your last post making a whole bunch of red herring shit that has no bearing to the claim you made. By the way, I do agree that there has been a deterioration on the quality of software engineering due to an emphasis on Windows.
But, based on experience and observation, I will counterclaim that 1) the deterioration is, in greater part, to the inordinate focus on Java and C# in education to the detriment of C/C++, Assembly and Pascal-like languages, and 2) this is minimal considering that the overwhelming amount of development is first and foremost in embedded environments and that most of the target platforms are Unix-like, not windows.
So all your babbling is non-sequitor.
Stop weaseling your way out via red herrings and answer the question.
Well, he's a fucking teen. He cannot possibly know that the world existed in the sixties and seventies, much less during the colonial wars of 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.
Without Bill Gates keeping science and engineering from developing, those people wouldn't be poor in the first place.
Your last post hasn't answered the question: how did Windows domination has caused these people (we are talking 3rd world people) to be poor?
Poverty in malaria-affected areas (Africa, Latin America, South/South East Asia) have been poor for centuries. Their poverty predates this technology you so much malign. Their ethnic strife, male/female dynamics, social casting, and all the other variables that created and perpetuated the cycle of poverty have predated the Windows dominance of the last 2 decades.
So forgive me if I don't see a cause/effect relation in this. Somehow it does not make sense chronologically.
* This is not to mention the fact that Microsoft Research is a leading entity when it comes to science, and even facilitator of improvement on quality of life in developing countries (ref. to their work in India.)
See, you keep getting back to Bill. Obsessive compulsive FTW.
You choose to fixate yourself on the crook, rather than on the money that has been donated, regardless of the reason, for a cause that might have positive implications for those in need.
You are twisting the fact of a researcher accepting money for a potential medicinal cure desperately needed by the 3rd world into a hypothetical of you accepting a gift from a rich thief.
False dichotomy.
False analogy.
This is a more appropriate analogy: if a rich thief offers you to give you a tool for free, a tool that you can use to save the lives of a whole bunch of people that live in misery, in a remote part of the world completely disconnected by the cosmic dungeons-n-dragons drama of M$ thievery, what would you do?
Would you refuse because you are standing on some moral soap box?
Or would you accept it in the hopes you can actually save those lives?
At the end of the day, this is not about you. The world does not move around you. The money is not being given to you FOR YOU. Stop making it about you or how you feel about M$ business practices.
When I was in Honduras, I did actually get help, in the form of food and used clothes (and one of my sisters got a pair of glasses, also as donations.) Would you think I would have had objected such help when living in dire need if I know it was given by someone like Gates? Would some fucker living in the comfort of the developed world had a right to judge the acceptance of that type of donation?
Oh boy, you are such a good boy scout. And yet, you still don't know what you are talking about.
In the end, regarding this topic, and on Gates making donations. It. Is. Not. About. You. Or. How. You. Feel.
OMG, still crying for the AARD? Old News!!! How exciting!!!! Not even Caldera cries as they got a $ettlement. I remember when I used to get all rabid on that when running lynx to check billwatch.net every other hour of the day, swearing that I would change the world with my latest copy of Slackware. Good lord I grew up out of that one.
Nobody is asking to worship Bill. Nobody is asking to evaluate Bill on the altruistic work he is doing. Actually, no one is asking you anything but in being objective in judging the value this specific contribution might have for people who suffer from Malaria in 3rd world countries.
And yes, I would expect you to roll something more than some idle CPU time to a computational endeavor. How comfortable of you.
I would expect to, I dunno, once in a while give money to charity, or help in a feeding table for homeless, or donate a few hours of your time to the IT department on a hospital or non-for-profit org. Things that matter. Things that have an actual impact. Not some shit that you let run without much consequence or effort on your life.
I would expect you to do so, because that would be the only way for you to point fingers at contributions like the one you are demonizing. Lead by f* example.
OMG, please someone look at my sig, at my cause and at old news.
Do you actually believe that people who might see some good in this contribution (and who would find your antics pretty much retarded and juvenile) to be MS-fanbois?
That's what happens when disdain for past Microsoft monopolistic tactics turn into drooling hate towards Bill which in turn becomes just complete irrational and idiotic diatribe.
It's amazing how Alex Belits (and people like him) will make just about any form of argument, however infantile and illogical, just to make just one another chance to bash Bill, or whoever happens to be the target of his lunatic rage.
See Alex, if you have to resort to incredibly stupid shit that cannot be substantiated with logic and objective observations to support your beliefs or points of views, then those beliefs and point of views were never valid in the first place.
You are in a geek-related site, so I will assume you have a degree in engineering or science (or at least have completed some course work.) So I'll suggest you dig up your old science and logic books and get some refreshment in logical thinking.
Oh, and I'm really looking forward to see your logical explanation on how Windows dominance during the last 2 decades have been a factor in the continuing, centuries old poverty of developing nations.
I can't wait to tell my grandma and uncles back in Nicaragua that the poverty they (and their ancestors) have been living is due to Windows.
Holy crap, Bill Gates found a time machine, went back in time and made my ancestors dirt poor!!!!(10+1)
Uh, how the hell does one decade of *supposedly* windows-related loss of productivity (which is only localized to the 15-20% of the population in the developed world) have anything to do with the established and entrenched centuries-old poverty that grips the rest of the world?
I know that you are trying to find for a cause to rally and be angry and display some angst and shit. But if you really want to have a true cause, go where poverty is and do something... and let me know how you quantify that poverty in the majority of the world in terms of Windows usage in the cozy and warm world you grew up in.
2.) Assuming that he really doesn't care about malaria? So what?
Do you actually know what it is to live in poverty? With malaria and other infectious diseases around you? I HAVE. If help (medical or monetary) were to come my way, however little and in whatever form, I would accept it. I would not care the ulterior motives.
Now, as for you, as you feel so grand and awesome for the diatribe against the evil Bill, what are you doing? If you are so disdainful of what you call 'false charity', what are you doing about it? I mean, besides posting provocative posts, what sort of tangible help are you producing for those who might be on the receiving end of evil Bill's charitable money?
You really want to feel like you are achieving something, then do something. Talk is cheap, and if that's the only way for you to feel like a just and accomplished dude, then more power to you.
I remember when they went to court. I've been using Java since it's inception, so I remember all that and the J++ crap. But that didn't torpedoed Java. Java continued unscatched.
And no, we are not playing semantics here. When something gets torpedoed, it gets nixed. That what it means. Java didn't get nixed.
And the upper hand is not going to.NET. Not at all. Java still has a greater customer share, and it will retain it so for years to come for the simple fact that it runs in Linux, Solaris and HP-UX (man I hate HP-UX) and in other architectures.
Because of that and other technical merits is that Java has survived this long, not because the developers "wised up" during the J++ debacle.
That fact alone, that it can run in multiple architectures (which is a must in truly large heterogeneous enterprise computing/integration) that Java/J2EE reigns..NET makes sense in large, Windows-only shops (and that type of deployment make sense in some environments.) But by large, it does not, and that's Java strength.
To claim that.NET is gaining the upper hand is a bit silly. Deployment base of Java is larger than.NET; there is no visible trend of migrating Linux/Solaris/HP-UX deployment bases to Windows; hiring trends on both platforms seem to stay the same.
Ergo, there is no significant evidence to suggest.NET is actually increasing to a degree that it will somehow overcome JVM deployments. However,.NET is becoming a richer environment to develop than the JVM. Java is showing its age, and both Sun and the Java community are too complacent and very unsupporting of new languages running on the JVM. This has the ability to hurt development productivity on the JVM on the mid-long run.
I still don't see this hell in interoperability, though. Hurdles and annoyances, yes. Hell? No. In all my years using Java for developing web applications, web services and J2EE apps (throwing some Perl, VB, Oracle HTMLDB and stuff glued together with awk, shell scripts and rsync here and there) on Linux, Solaris and Windows with JBoss, Tomcat or WebLogic, sometimes on top of some weird network infrastructure (on top of years of doing Tier II/III support) with customer bases spread from the US to Scandinavian countries, Latin America, China and India (and sometimes forced to support on-the-fly translation to multiple languages) I have never seen this unsurmountable interoperability hell, just the standard glitches that you get with any type of heterogeneous platforms spread across multiple data centers with people telling you "I need this shit done by... yesterday."
C# implementation of generics, autoboxing, properties and annotations predate the ones in Java, and are much better. C# generics utilize reification, as opposed to the type-erasure abomination we ended up getting in Java.
Partial classes do not exist in Java (though this is a matter of philosophy in terms of separating concerns.)
C# nullable types do not exist in Java. We have been having to create our own concotions since day one to get the same effect.
Anonymous delegates/monads are another example of good stuff not readily supported by Java. Going back to generics, in C#, you can mark them as contra-variant if you want. Try that in Java and see what you get.
The implementation of annotations in C# is clean, and its generic collection classes are equally so. Not so with the collections classes in Java.
The worst thing of all is the stupid Java "+" operator for Strings. I still cannot understand why that shit hasn't been revamped so as to not create an extra String object per "+" operation. This is, perhaps, one of the main factors in seeing poorly written apps getting tanked by their garbage collectors.
The JVM is bar none, the best there is. And to this date, there is nothing competing with Java when it comes to heterogeneous enterprise integration. But Java, as a language, it is a land of missed opportunities.
In fact, the JVM now is a land of missed opportunities; Sun, the JCP and the Java community in general is extremelly unsupportive of using the JVM as a platform for running multiple languages. They are now, grudgingly by many, supporting Scala, and there is nothing but lack of support (even mockery) for folks trying to make Groovy and Clojure work.
Land of missed opportunities.
The fact that Anders Hejlsberg is/was the main honcho in developing C# should be reason enough to really take a look at the language and get some good lessons from it.
The fact that MS Research has employed C.A.R. Hoare, Leslie Lamport, Jim Gray (rip) and so many other Ph.Ds in Computer Science and Mathematics, in close collaboration with some of the top notch universities should be reason enough to really pay attention to what they are doing.
Microsoft is fully pushing for research of new languages in their.NET platform (in startk contract to Sun). Objections to their business practices aside, this can only be good things on matter of language research.
So yes, your opinion that C# is a relatively uninspired improvement of Java is very subjective. It is not based on reality of application development or language theory. Putting aside the J++ fiasco, M$ does not have a spotty history in language design.
For better or worse, VB was a major improvement in what we had back in 1993. Hell, even QuickBasic was a good tool to develop stuff back then. FoxPro took to implement really nice features as Visual Foxpro under Microsoft. And the list can go and on (and of course, detractors can always find something to point a finger at.)
*** now consider this, I'm a Java/Linux developer who develops on Linux whenever possible***
But I give credit where credit is due. M$ history on language design is not spotty. They have a lot of real talent, Ph.D caliber working at Microsoft Research. Their research in distributed computing, software architecture, new language design is among the best.
It is important to separate criticism of business practices from unwarranted criticism on technical merits of some of the excellent work M$ research is pursuing.
Wait a second. Microsoft torpedoed Java? Java is well, alive and kicking last time I checked. Plus, you still haven't provided a concrete example of broken internet interoperability (and no, browser compatibility is a minuscule example of internet interoperability.)
ODF is not part of the Internet architecture. Please stay on topic.
Also, please provide me an example, a pervarsive example of M$ glop breaking SNMP and SMTP. There are far more important Internet architecture characteristics than the annoying interoperability hiccups between a selected number of client software.
I would disagree regarding 1) what an average student constitutes, and 2) the risk of not having a superb thesis.
 
For one, what is an average student? Even from institution to institution, this changes. I've seen students doing innane master thesis/projects still landing jobs. It's all about developing connections while in grad school.
An "average" student that cannot do so will be an average student regarless, MS or no MS degree. Certainly he will get a job, and it is all fair to say that it might be a good paying one. But in the development of one's career, a MS can prove invaluable.
Is it a sure thing? Of course not, but neither it is sure that having a BS degree will guarantee the owner of it has what it takes to be a good developer independently of the number of years of experience he gets after graduation.
I will say that, based on my own personal observations, even a Ph.D. will not hurt your chances of getting a job outside of academics. It will change the landscape in which you will work. You would not need for the typical enterprise computing jobs, but it could help you in consulting for large projects in large scale enterprises, software manufactures and in the defense sector if you specialize in software engineering,security, compilers or distributed/high performance computing.
Any ammount of cummulative education and experience has the potential to hurt you or help you. The variables that come into play are social, economical, personal and geographical. It is not solely dependent on one's professional or academic background.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice strawman.
Fired? PhD students aren't employees, they're students.
Most PhD students (specially those in sciences) do not rely exclusively in student loans to pay for classes and make ends meet. They have a department or research-center funded job that includes being a teaching assistant, or even a teacher for freshman courses as well as assist in (or even conduct) writing papers and experiments (sometimes on topics that are not directly relevant to his/her field of research.)
You fuck it up (or you don't work well with whoever happens to supervise you), you lose your assistantship job. You lose that and bye-bye the dreams of getting the piece of goatskin that says "Doctor something something". Most people can't contemplate doing 5-7 (or even more) years of grad studies by student loans alone (or waiting tables), without the stipends, discounts, and most important of all, without the full-time paid immersion in teaching and research that comes with the Ph.D assistantship job.
They might be students, but they aren't like freshmen or sophomores. They have a job related to their field and get paid to do work that helps them (hopefully) do the research they need to become doctors (this is specially true since most are required to be full-time Ph.D students in their last 1-3 years of study.)
In today's legal climate, you have have to go through the academic misconduct process (usually some kind of quasi-judicial hearing & appeals) then expel them. Failing to follow procedure invites a fat lawsuit.
Unfortunately academia sometimes work like a big fucking self-perpetuating mafia. It's only a very serious academic misconduct (borderline scandalous research fraud, sexual harassment or something to that nature) to get a misconduct process going.
At 8PM, TNA Impact "Roar of the Redneck!"
At 9PM, Shitty Monster Movie with Cheap CGI
At 11PM, Watch an Ultimate Gamer Cry Like a Fucking Emo - Life is so fucking hard man!
At 1AM, Another Fucking Infomercial - look, the Aussie guy is selling pills to get a 6-pack!
At 2AM, Highlander vs Al Quaeda.
Obviously this is true no matter what you program with. But in languages without explicit memory management, you have to be explicit on how you allocate and de-allocate resources. I would have preferred if Java had done this. Of all the things Java brought, garbage collection coupled with a lack of explicit destructors is something I've concluded not to have been a good idea, after a decade of doing this stuff.
Disclaimer: this is my personal take on things, and I'm fine if people disagree with it.
 
My jab at the poster I was replying to is that you can be a good programmer and end up writing a memory hungry program. For starters, there might be no other way. The realization of a requirement might demand that it be memory hungry.
The Java constructs are not necessarily benign to fine-tuned memory management. One has to play with the jvm args to get it right for many memory intensive applications.
Memory utilization, and all too often, the need to write memory hungry code is not necessarily the sign that one is stupid or that doesn't know how to code. The tasks software engineering attempts to tackle are too complex to be painted in such sophomoric black and white world.
Funny that you mentioned about a lack of C++ training in college. It's horribly sad. I've met graduates who can't visualize an array of structures with members of type pointers to functions, for example. Or even sadder, they have no clue that they are responsible for explicit resource management. Even in Java it is necessary, but nobody teaches them that in college. They just do their thing with the garbage collector doing what they think is magic.
They don't even teach them how to program correctly in Java - it's pretty fucking depressing.
No need to run an antivirus and security updates on the VM? You wish.
In essence, a network is an admin's responsibility. He owns it (and it is his ass), and is in charge of having it operational according to a predefined IT governance. With that, he is in charge of enabling users to do work, in his network, the one he's paid to own, manage, control, monitor and report to the guy above.
Somehow this smells of 1998's dot-comminess.
It is a known fact that several JVMs out there do leak just by running. Even if you try, Java, with its language constructs, makes it difficult to control memory management and fine tuning.
In other words, you don't know what you are talking about, college fan boy. Remember that before you assume memory hungriness is the result of stupidity.
That is not to say that there are not shitty, idiotic Java programmers out there.
My sister is a Mathematics professor, and she has settled with Word and its equation editor. She has developed her own system of churning out hand outs and lectures for her math classes with Word. Like her, many in Academia (including in Computer Science) end up with this route.
It is kind of sad, but that is the natural order of things. My sister, and people like her, have enough in their hands already to learn another system; MS Word is ubiquitous, and - if you are careful with your templates - it's predictable.
The benefits of typing your equations with LaTeX as opposed to doing them the point-n-click way - which btw, it's incredibly obvious to them, it is not incentive enough to break from their established procedure to get their jobs done.
If MS Word really pulls this off - and that's a big IF - it will be a good thing as it will bring to those already familiar with the product a new set of capabilities.
Now, if MS Word doesn't pulls it off - which is possible, then there is still life for LaTeX.
But even now, for many types of jobs, MS Word does an ok "good enough" job, thus making a dent on Tex/LaTeX. I think Lamport predicted something like this would happen. And if it isn't MS Word, it will be some other, more advanced commercial or FOSS product.
Welcome to 1998.
Explain me the economics of it, IN DETAIL, not with slogans passed as hypothetical.
I refuse to believe you are 39. I'm 39 myself, and an engineer as well. And I know plenty of the same. I've never seen a 39-year old engineer talking such a stupid thing.
You spent your last post making a whole bunch of red herring shit that has no bearing to the claim you made. By the way, I do agree that there has been a deterioration on the quality of software engineering due to an emphasis on Windows.
But, based on experience and observation, I will counterclaim that 1) the deterioration is, in greater part, to the inordinate focus on Java and C# in education to the detriment of C/C++, Assembly and Pascal-like languages, and 2) this is minimal considering that the overwhelming amount of development is first and foremost in embedded environments and that most of the target platforms are Unix-like, not windows.
So all your babbling is non-sequitor.
Stop weaseling your way out via red herrings and answer the question.
answer the question
Well, he's a fucking teen. He cannot possibly know that the world existed in the sixties and seventies, much less during the colonial wars of 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.
Without Bill Gates keeping science and engineering from developing, those people wouldn't be poor in the first place.
Your last post hasn't answered the question: how did Windows domination has caused these people (we are talking 3rd world people) to be poor?
Poverty in malaria-affected areas (Africa, Latin America, South/South East Asia) have been poor for centuries. Their poverty predates this technology you so much malign. Their ethnic strife, male/female dynamics, social casting, and all the other variables that created and perpetuated the cycle of poverty have predated the Windows dominance of the last 2 decades.
So forgive me if I don't see a cause/effect relation in this. Somehow it does not make sense chronologically.
* This is not to mention the fact that Microsoft Research is a leading entity when it comes to science, and even facilitator of improvement on quality of life in developing countries (ref. to their work in India.)
So answer the question or shut up.
You choose to fixate yourself on the crook, rather than on the money that has been donated, regardless of the reason, for a cause that might have positive implications for those in need.
You are twisting the fact of a researcher accepting money for a potential medicinal cure desperately needed by the 3rd world into a hypothetical of you accepting a gift from a rich thief.
False dichotomy.
False analogy.
This is a more appropriate analogy: if a rich thief offers you to give you a tool for free, a tool that you can use to save the lives of a whole bunch of people that live in misery, in a remote part of the world completely disconnected by the cosmic dungeons-n-dragons drama of M$ thievery, what would you do?
Would you refuse because you are standing on some moral soap box?
Or would you accept it in the hopes you can actually save those lives?
At the end of the day, this is not about you. The world does not move around you. The money is not being given to you FOR YOU. Stop making it about you or how you feel about M$ business practices.
When I was in Honduras, I did actually get help, in the form of food and used clothes (and one of my sisters got a pair of glasses, also as donations.) Would you think I would have had objected such help when living in dire need if I know it was given by someone like Gates? Would some fucker living in the comfort of the developed world had a right to judge the acceptance of that type of donation?
Oh boy, you are such a good boy scout. And yet, you still don't know what you are talking about.
In the end, regarding this topic, and on Gates making donations. It. Is. Not. About. You. Or. How. You. Feel.
Nobody is asking to worship Bill. Nobody is asking to evaluate Bill on the altruistic work he is doing. Actually, no one is asking you anything but in being objective in judging the value this specific contribution might have for people who suffer from Malaria in 3rd world countries.
And yes, I would expect you to roll something more than some idle CPU time to a computational endeavor. How comfortable of you.
I would expect to, I dunno, once in a while give money to charity, or help in a feeding table for homeless, or donate a few hours of your time to the IT department on a hospital or non-for-profit org. Things that matter. Things that have an actual impact. Not some shit that you let run without much consequence or effort on your life.
I would expect you to do so, because that would be the only way for you to point fingers at contributions like the one you are demonizing. Lead by f* example.
OMG, please someone look at my sig, at my cause and at old news.
Do you actually believe that people who might see some good in this contribution (and who would find your antics pretty much retarded and juvenile) to be MS-fanbois?
Are you that e-tarded?
It's amazing how Alex Belits (and people like him) will make just about any form of argument, however infantile and illogical, just to make just one another chance to bash Bill, or whoever happens to be the target of his lunatic rage.
See Alex, if you have to resort to incredibly stupid shit that cannot be substantiated with logic and objective observations to support your beliefs or points of views, then those beliefs and point of views were never valid in the first place.
You are in a geek-related site, so I will assume you have a degree in engineering or science (or at least have completed some course work.) So I'll suggest you dig up your old science and logic books and get some refreshment in logical thinking.
Oh, and I'm really looking forward to see your logical explanation on how Windows dominance during the last 2 decades have been a factor in the continuing, centuries old poverty of developing nations.
I can't wait to tell my grandma and uncles back in Nicaragua that the poverty they (and their ancestors) have been living is due to Windows.
Holy crap, Bill Gates found a time machine, went back in time and made my ancestors dirt poor!!!!(10+1)
I know that you are trying to find for a cause to rally and be angry and display some angst and shit. But if you really want to have a true cause, go where poverty is and do something... and let me know how you quantify that poverty in the majority of the world in terms of Windows usage in the cozy and warm world you grew up in.
2.) Assuming that he really doesn't care about malaria? So what?
Do you actually know what it is to live in poverty? With malaria and other infectious diseases around you? I HAVE. If help (medical or monetary) were to come my way, however little and in whatever form, I would accept it. I would not care the ulterior motives.
Now, as for you, as you feel so grand and awesome for the diatribe against the evil Bill, what are you doing? If you are so disdainful of what you call 'false charity', what are you doing about it? I mean, besides posting provocative posts, what sort of tangible help are you producing for those who might be on the receiving end of evil Bill's charitable money?
You really want to feel like you are achieving something, then do something. Talk is cheap, and if that's the only way for you to feel like a just and accomplished dude, then more power to you.
And no, we are not playing semantics here. When something gets torpedoed, it gets nixed. That what it means. Java didn't get nixed.
And the upper hand is not going to .NET. Not at all. Java still has a greater customer share, and it will retain it so for years to come for the simple fact that it runs in Linux, Solaris and HP-UX (man I hate HP-UX) and in other architectures.
Because of that and other technical merits is that Java has survived this long, not because the developers "wised up" during the J++ debacle.
That fact alone, that it can run in multiple architectures (which is a must in truly large heterogeneous enterprise computing/integration) that Java/J2EE reigns. .NET makes sense in large, Windows-only shops (and that type of deployment make sense in some environments.) But by large, it does not, and that's Java strength.
To claim that .NET is gaining the upper hand is a bit silly. Deployment base of Java is larger than .NET; there is no visible trend of migrating Linux/Solaris/HP-UX deployment bases to Windows; hiring trends on both platforms seem to stay the same.
Ergo, there is no significant evidence to suggest .NET is actually increasing to a degree that it will somehow overcome JVM deployments. However, .NET is becoming a richer environment to develop than the JVM. Java is showing its age, and both Sun and the Java community are too complacent and very unsupporting of new languages running on the JVM. This has the ability to hurt development productivity on the JVM on the mid-long run.
I still don't see this hell in interoperability, though. Hurdles and annoyances, yes. Hell? No. In all my years using Java for developing web applications, web services and J2EE apps (throwing some Perl, VB, Oracle HTMLDB and stuff glued together with awk, shell scripts and rsync here and there) on Linux, Solaris and Windows with JBoss, Tomcat or WebLogic, sometimes on top of some weird network infrastructure (on top of years of doing Tier II/III support) with customer bases spread from the US to Scandinavian countries, Latin America, China and India (and sometimes forced to support on-the-fly translation to multiple languages) I have never seen this unsurmountable interoperability hell, just the standard glitches that you get with any type of heterogeneous platforms spread across multiple data centers with people telling you "I need this shit done by... yesterday."
Partial classes do not exist in Java (though this is a matter of philosophy in terms of separating concerns.)
C# nullable types do not exist in Java. We have been having to create our own concotions since day one to get the same effect.
Anonymous delegates/monads are another example of good stuff not readily supported by Java. Going back to generics, in C#, you can mark them as contra-variant if you want. Try that in Java and see what you get.
The implementation of annotations in C# is clean, and its generic collection classes are equally so. Not so with the collections classes in Java.
The worst thing of all is the stupid Java "+" operator for Strings. I still cannot understand why that shit hasn't been revamped so as to not create an extra String object per "+" operation. This is, perhaps, one of the main factors in seeing poorly written apps getting tanked by their garbage collectors.
The JVM is bar none, the best there is. And to this date, there is nothing competing with Java when it comes to heterogeneous enterprise integration. But Java, as a language, it is a land of missed opportunities.
In fact, the JVM now is a land of missed opportunities; Sun, the JCP and the Java community in general is extremelly unsupportive of using the JVM as a platform for running multiple languages. They are now, grudgingly by many, supporting Scala, and there is nothing but lack of support (even mockery) for folks trying to make Groovy and Clojure work.
Land of missed opportunities.
The fact that Anders Hejlsberg is/was the main honcho in developing C# should be reason enough to really take a look at the language and get some good lessons from it.
The fact that MS Research has employed C.A.R. Hoare, Leslie Lamport, Jim Gray (rip) and so many other Ph.Ds in Computer Science and Mathematics, in close collaboration with some of the top notch universities should be reason enough to really pay attention to what they are doing.
Microsoft is fully pushing for research of new languages in their .NET platform (in startk contract to Sun). Objections to their business practices aside, this can only be good things on matter of language research.
So yes, your opinion that C# is a relatively uninspired improvement of Java is very subjective. It is not based on reality of application development or language theory. Putting aside the J++ fiasco, M$ does not have a spotty history in language design.
For better or worse, VB was a major improvement in what we had back in 1993. Hell, even QuickBasic was a good tool to develop stuff back then. FoxPro took to implement really nice features as Visual Foxpro under Microsoft. And the list can go and on (and of course, detractors can always find something to point a finger at.)
*** now consider this, I'm a Java/Linux developer who develops on Linux whenever possible***
But I give credit where credit is due. M$ history on language design is not spotty. They have a lot of real talent, Ph.D caliber working at Microsoft Research. Their research in distributed computing, software architecture, new language design is among the best.
It is important to separate criticism of business practices from unwarranted criticism on technical merits of some of the excellent work M$ research is pursuing.
ODF is not part of the Internet architecture. Please stay on topic.
Also, please provide me an example, a pervarsive example of M$ glop breaking SNMP and SMTP. There are far more important Internet architecture characteristics than the annoying interoperability hiccups between a selected number of client software.
 
For one, what is an average student? Even from institution to institution, this changes. I've seen students doing innane master thesis/projects still landing jobs. It's all about developing connections while in grad school.
An "average" student that cannot do so will be an average student regarless, MS or no MS degree. Certainly he will get a job, and it is all fair to say that it might be a good paying one. But in the development of one's career, a MS can prove invaluable.
Is it a sure thing? Of course not, but neither it is sure that having a BS degree will guarantee the owner of it has what it takes to be a good developer independently of the number of years of experience he gets after graduation.
I will say that, based on my own personal observations, even a Ph.D. will not hurt your chances of getting a job outside of academics. It will change the landscape in which you will work. You would not need for the typical enterprise computing jobs, but it could help you in consulting for large projects in large scale enterprises, software manufactures and in the defense sector if you specialize in software engineering ,security, compilers or distributed/high performance computing.
Any ammount of cummulative education and experience has the potential to hurt you or help you. The variables that come into play are social, economical, personal and geographical. It is not solely dependent on one's professional or academic background.