Information Science and Computer Science are very broad fields, and much of them requires far more math than programming. Someone with a theory-focused graduate and undergraduate degree may well have never written a single line of code since an introductory programming course. Graduate degrees with large volumes of programming (to the point where it is significant software development experience) are very, very rare. So if one is deliberately hiring for a specialized theory-heavy position, demanding coding knowledge is likely unrealistic.
That apparently wasn't the case here, which would lead me to suspect candidates who don't understand the job's requirements. Or those stretching their qualifications to try and find a job.
Perhaps we should split comp-sci into two paths? One for people intending to get a job in academia and one for those destined for the commercial job market?
In theory, that distinction would be computer science versus software engineering. The former often part of a math department, and the latter in with electrical & computer engineering.
In practice, the people you want to hire are learning on their own anyway. So restricting the pool based on their program omits a lot of the good candidates, and still leaves you with a stack of mediocre resumes to filter through. The best algorithmic developer I know was a physics undergraduate, and only got into programming because of a competition.
Even architects have to know the basics. Or their fancy designs would fall over.
Sounds like the state of software engineering:)
I think software development is a phenomenally complex field. And not one we have a hope of teaching well. There are many different roles required to get working products out the door, all with overlapping requirements and responsibilities. Yet there is so much demand that we don't *get* to specialize much.
I'd object to "all". While it is quite possible less common in other fields, I know lots of CS and SoftEng graduates who got a university education precisely because they wanted to add a strong theoretical background to the technical skills they could acquire on their own.
At risk of trolling: code monkeys get trained, developers learn.
Computer Science and Software Engineering is a big umbrella, and unfortunately a lot of the specialties really aren't trained as developers. Most employers don't get that, and I rather suspect that most students don't either. Makes it a little painful for everyone -- you get mired in unqualified applications, and the people who are qualified have to slog through cynical interviewers asking silly questions.
Do wish you luck finding someone. Most of the good people I know get snagged by big companies, and the little companies always seem to have problems pulling in new talent.
Wait, what? You're looking for basic coding and DB, but asking for candidates with a Master's in Information Science?
IMO that seems more like wandering into an architecture school looking for welders. There will be probably a few, but it's going to take a lot of effort to find them.
There is a funny thing about people. Many of us like to reward people for producing enjoyable media.
The question is, really, whether you're willing to settle for that. Or whether you also demand we punishing anyone with unapproved copies. I, for one, refuse to support anyone invoking force to support their business model. If you decide to send politicians, cops, and lawyers after your desired customers... I am not bloody going to be one of them. And I hope nobody else is.
We need more overly-broad patents on embarrassingly horrible user interfaces. In fact, someone ought to patent *all* the common mistakes. That way their lawyers could run around suing everyone building crap.
wiping the whole disk and then writing 1010 all over it.
Did exactly that. Removed it from a computer. Wiped all over the disk. Then took a marker and wrote all over it. For additional security, wiped it *again* to remove the marker. And you nuts are still claiming there's secrets on it...
If I were going to propose one rule to be enshrined in a constitution, it would be banning any emotional appeal in justifying a law. This will, hopefully, get shot down. But we all know that anyone opposing it will be attacked with "they don't care about cyber-bullying".
Maybe there is actually a case to be made for restricting speech to prevent online bullying. We'll never know, because these nitwits took one unfortunate example and ran off in a fit of paranoia. Even a more reasonable compromise would still be tainted by this idiocy.
Between "save the children", "stop the terrorists", and "save the whales" (natural and financial), it is amazing that any freedoms remain.
Everyone talking about this being irrelevant is missing the point. This attack does not make users significantly more vulnerable. Instead, it makes Windows more vulnerable to users.
Hacking your own machine sounds laughable. But as long as vendors restrict usage, we need to keep reminding them that DRM is a fool's quest.
Great. But what in the "pretty simple folks" helps productive companies that can't enter a market because of patents? Or that do enter, and then get sued into oblivion by the trolls?
We're not going to prevent software patents by boycotting the few companies that both produce a product and sue others. Making Free standards better than the patented ones is a start. But the final change needs to be in the deluded legal systems which equate monopolization and motivation.
Sort of. Because the iPhone and company are much, much smaller than a tabletop, they wind up using a very different set of gestures. The obvious example being that it's hard to do a two-handed gesture while holding a phone.
Given my complete lack of knowledge about that problem domain, it sounds like you hardly need the projector. In which case a DYI tabletop would run more like fifty bucks.:)
Or, if you don't need a surface at all, there are lots of ways to (ab)use a Wiimote.
You have to move your hands, without resting support.
That is actually one of the advantages of FTIR over things like Microsoft Surface* or traditional touch technologies. Because FTIR winds up detecting pressure, an application can easily differentiate between a finger resting on the surface, and one pressing down. Shape sensitivity comes into play as well, since a lightly resting arm is very different from a pressing finger.
I agree that there is work to be done before applications are useful. However, I've had enough hands-on time to be convinced that the interaction style will become useful. And getting the tables cheap enough for people to hack away at was the first step. Give it five years, and I hope we'll be seeing consoles -- and appropriate single- and multi-player games -- in a table form-factor.
*: Microsoft Surface does detect a range between touch and no-touch. Unfortunately it is determined by how high you hover above the surface, so probably worsens arm strain.
Considering we're not even agreed on what gestures a user *should* do to zoom and resize things, there is definitely work to be done:)
However, building these digital tabletops with a few hundred dollars and a projector makes them accessible to the dozens of research groups and hundreds (or thousands) of varied hackers who might have good ideas. Gestures are chronically tricky things to make natural and detect reliably, so we're going to need both the bazaar and the cathedrals chewing on it.
I would be hesitant to sink much work into multiple mice. You would be stuck with a very small number of touches, and probably wind up using buttons to emulate multi-finger gestures. Without good guidelines for designing applications on large touch-sensitive surfaces, you're going to have trust the 'feel' of the application. Not sure how that would play out with mice.
The reacTIVision folks have an input simulator that might be a good place to start. The TUIO protocol is common enough that you wouldn't be committed to a single toolkit down the road, though it does focus on individual touches. I heard some discussion of multi-touch-and-pressure-sensitive tablets (about a foot square) last year, but don't know if it has developed into actual products yet.
I imagine it would be quite sensitive to grease from the fingers and any other dirt that changes the refractive index at the surface of the acrylic?
That would be one of the reasons they put material over the acrylic, rather than touching it directly.
Will be interesting to see how that design ages. My group experimented with textured silicone rubber. However, after a few months of use it had flattened out and bonded to the acrylic. Painting a clear layer onto the acrylic seems to survive better, though it limits the selection of projection materials.
Fatal Error: Argument rejected due to straw man and false dichotomy. Please contact your argument distributor for more information.
Proving the set of operations executable by a general application is really hard. Which is why they greatly restrict the structure of the application.
Exclusively verifying code at runtime is expensive. Which is why they only use a few processor-provided features.
I have no intention of researching extensively enough to determine for myself whether the system really works. However, it is nowhere near as impossible or idiotic as you seem bent on portraying it.
I'm not even sure how to respond to that. Would it be excessively belittling to point out that cameras detect _light_?
Please, let's not get/. confused with Digg. If you want to present incorrect fictions as being fact, at least have the decency to educate yourself once corrected, rather than trolling.
Uhm, no. Saying it detects "motion" is even less accurate than "touch". Proximity within a few inches is good enough for many demos, and a few limited applications... like the over-hyped kiosk advertising they are actually pursuing at the moment.
Large touch interfaces are a completely different beast than Apple's. Microsoft is a long way from a useful peripheral, but comparing it with an iPhone is laughable.
Yes, a single person (or developer+artist) can easily produce a decent computer game. The problems are the quantity of art, the complexity of the game, and how much custom code is needed. One person is simply not going to rewrite Half-Life 2. But they might well be able to do Civilization 1...
Leaning C++ and OpenGL sufficiently to write a little game is not a huge undertaking. However, players still have to download and install it. Flash and Java are more convenient for players, and performance penalty is often not a sticking point.
Any idea what would motivate someone to add a "so-called" to geothermal in the summary? It's used following its so-called "definition", and is certainly a more so-called "established" term than the so-called "geo-exchange"...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not interested in teaching a twit with a CS degree how to code.
Unfortunately for the students who didn't figure it out before starting a university program, neither is much of computer science.
And unfortunately for all of us, teaching people to code is easy compared to teaching them to think algorithmically.
Information Science and Computer Science are very broad fields, and much of them requires far more math than programming. Someone with a theory-focused graduate and undergraduate degree may well have never written a single line of code since an introductory programming course. Graduate degrees with large volumes of programming (to the point where it is significant software development experience) are very, very rare. So if one is deliberately hiring for a specialized theory-heavy position, demanding coding knowledge is likely unrealistic.
That apparently wasn't the case here, which would lead me to suspect candidates who don't understand the job's requirements. Or those stretching their qualifications to try and find a job.
Perhaps we should split comp-sci into two paths? One for people intending to get a job in academia and one for those destined for the commercial job market?
In theory, that distinction would be computer science versus software engineering. The former often part of a math department, and the latter in with electrical & computer engineering.
In practice, the people you want to hire are learning on their own anyway. So restricting the pool based on their program omits a lot of the good candidates, and still leaves you with a stack of mediocre resumes to filter through. The best algorithmic developer I know was a physics undergraduate, and only got into programming because of a competition.
Even architects have to know the basics. Or their fancy designs would fall over.
Sounds like the state of software engineering :)
I think software development is a phenomenally complex field. And not one we have a hope of teaching well. There are many different roles required to get working products out the door, all with overlapping requirements and responsibilities. Yet there is so much demand that we don't *get* to specialize much.
I'd object to "all". While it is quite possible less common in other fields, I know lots of CS and SoftEng graduates who got a university education precisely because they wanted to add a strong theoretical background to the technical skills they could acquire on their own.
At risk of trolling: code monkeys get trained, developers learn.
Sorry. Misread your comment.
Computer Science and Software Engineering is a big umbrella, and unfortunately a lot of the specialties really aren't trained as developers. Most employers don't get that, and I rather suspect that most students don't either. Makes it a little painful for everyone -- you get mired in unqualified applications, and the people who are qualified have to slog through cynical interviewers asking silly questions.
Do wish you luck finding someone. Most of the good people I know get snagged by big companies, and the little companies always seem to have problems pulling in new talent.
Wait, what? You're looking for basic coding and DB, but asking for candidates with a Master's in Information Science?
IMO that seems more like wandering into an architecture school looking for welders. There will be probably a few, but it's going to take a lot of effort to find them.
Then you sell albums.
There is a funny thing about people. Many of us like to reward people for producing enjoyable media.
The question is, really, whether you're willing to settle for that. Or whether you also demand we punishing anyone with unapproved copies. I, for one, refuse to support anyone invoking force to support their business model. If you decide to send politicians, cops, and lawyers after your desired customers... I am not bloody going to be one of them. And I hope nobody else is.
We need more overly-broad patents on embarrassingly horrible user interfaces. In fact, someone ought to patent *all* the common mistakes. That way their lawyers could run around suing everyone building crap.
wiping the whole disk and then writing 1010 all over it.
Did exactly that. Removed it from a computer. Wiped all over the disk. Then took a marker and wrote all over it. For additional security, wiped it *again* to remove the marker. And you nuts are still claiming there's secrets on it...
</fiction>
If I were going to propose one rule to be enshrined in a constitution, it would be banning any emotional appeal in justifying a law. This will, hopefully, get shot down. But we all know that anyone opposing it will be attacked with "they don't care about cyber-bullying".
Maybe there is actually a case to be made for restricting speech to prevent online bullying. We'll never know, because these nitwits took one unfortunate example and ran off in a fit of paranoia. Even a more reasonable compromise would still be tainted by this idiocy.
Between "save the children", "stop the terrorists", and "save the whales" (natural and financial), it is amazing that any freedoms remain.
Everyone talking about this being irrelevant is missing the point. This attack does not make users significantly more vulnerable. Instead, it makes Windows more vulnerable to users.
Hacking your own machine sounds laughable. But as long as vendors restrict usage, we need to keep reminding them that DRM is a fool's quest.
Great. But what in the "pretty simple folks" helps productive companies that can't enter a market because of patents? Or that do enter, and then get sued into oblivion by the trolls?
We're not going to prevent software patents by boycotting the few companies that both produce a product and sue others. Making Free standards better than the patented ones is a start. But the final change needs to be in the deluded legal systems which equate monopolization and motivation.
Aren't we? The iPhone & iPod Touch say we are.
Sort of. Because the iPhone and company are much, much smaller than a tabletop, they wind up using a very different set of gestures. The obvious example being that it's hard to do a two-handed gesture while holding a phone.
Given my complete lack of knowledge about that problem domain, it sounds like you hardly need the projector. In which case a DYI tabletop would run more like fifty bucks. :)
Or, if you don't need a surface at all, there are lots of ways to (ab)use a Wiimote.
You have to move your hands, without resting support.
That is actually one of the advantages of FTIR over things like Microsoft Surface* or traditional touch technologies. Because FTIR winds up detecting pressure, an application can easily differentiate between a finger resting on the surface, and one pressing down. Shape sensitivity comes into play as well, since a lightly resting arm is very different from a pressing finger.
I agree that there is work to be done before applications are useful. However, I've had enough hands-on time to be convinced that the interaction style will become useful. And getting the tables cheap enough for people to hack away at was the first step. Give it five years, and I hope we'll be seeing consoles -- and appropriate single- and multi-player games -- in a table form-factor.
*: Microsoft Surface does detect a range between touch and no-touch. Unfortunately it is determined by how high you hover above the surface, so probably worsens arm strain.
Considering we're not even agreed on what gestures a user *should* do to zoom and resize things, there is definitely work to be done :)
However, building these digital tabletops with a few hundred dollars and a projector makes them accessible to the dozens of research groups and hundreds (or thousands) of varied hackers who might have good ideas. Gestures are chronically tricky things to make natural and detect reliably, so we're going to need both the bazaar and the cathedrals chewing on it.
I would be hesitant to sink much work into multiple mice. You would be stuck with a very small number of touches, and probably wind up using buttons to emulate multi-finger gestures. Without good guidelines for designing applications on large touch-sensitive surfaces, you're going to have trust the 'feel' of the application. Not sure how that would play out with mice.
The reacTIVision folks have an input simulator that might be a good place to start. The TUIO protocol is common enough that you wouldn't be committed to a single toolkit down the road, though it does focus on individual touches. I heard some discussion of multi-touch-and-pressure-sensitive tablets (about a foot square) last year, but don't know if it has developed into actual products yet.
I imagine it would be quite sensitive to grease from the fingers and any other dirt that changes the refractive index at the surface of the acrylic?
That would be one of the reasons they put material over the acrylic, rather than touching it directly.
Will be interesting to see how that design ages. My group experimented with textured silicone rubber. However, after a few months of use it had flattened out and bonded to the acrylic. Painting a clear layer onto the acrylic seems to survive better, though it limits the selection of projection materials.
Fatal Error: Argument rejected due to straw man and false dichotomy. Please contact your argument distributor for more information.
Proving the set of operations executable by a general application is really hard. Which is why they greatly restrict the structure of the application.
Exclusively verifying code at runtime is expensive. Which is why they only use a few processor-provided features.
I have no intention of researching extensively enough to determine for myself whether the system really works. However, it is nowhere near as impossible or idiotic as you seem bent on portraying it.
I'm not even sure how to respond to that. Would it be excessively belittling to point out that cameras detect _light_?
Please, let's not get /. confused with Digg. If you want to present incorrect fictions as being fact, at least have the decency to educate yourself once corrected, rather than trolling.
Uhm, no. Saying it detects "motion" is even less accurate than "touch". Proximity within a few inches is good enough for many demos, and a few limited applications... like the over-hyped kiosk advertising they are actually pursuing at the moment.
Large touch interfaces are a completely different beast than Apple's. Microsoft is a long way from a useful peripheral, but comparing it with an iPhone is laughable.
Yes, a single person (or developer+artist) can easily produce a decent computer game. The problems are the quantity of art, the complexity of the game, and how much custom code is needed. One person is simply not going to rewrite Half-Life 2. But they might well be able to do Civilization 1...
Leaning C++ and OpenGL sufficiently to write a little game is not a huge undertaking. However, players still have to download and install it. Flash and Java are more convenient for players, and performance penalty is often not a sticking point.
// "their" is the possessive you were looking for
Any idea what would motivate someone to add a "so-called" to geothermal in the summary? It's used following its so-called "definition", and is certainly a more so-called "established" term than the so-called "geo-exchange"...
Politicians and related busy-bodies regularly and repeatedly link video games and media to aggressive behavior.
Science and reality don't seem to agree, but who cares about them?