Imagine you write an application in Java... the Sun JVM is freely downloadable, so you can expect the user to go get it himself. But for the convenience of the user, some companies bundle the JVM with the product. Not a really big licensing issue.
It's not a big issue because Sun explicitly grants developers permission to redistribute the JRE.
Links:
Essentially, you are correct. The US Constitution is the blueprint of what the government can (or can't) do. The part of the Constitution that people usually buzz about (and are buzzing about here) is the First Amendment which says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Notice the specific mention of Congress right there at the beginning.
By and large, private instiutions are not bound by the Constitution. Rather, they are subject to the United States Code, Annotated (USC). I'm sure that there are all kinds of exceptions, but suffice to say that the First Amendment to the Constitution is NOT one of them.
As I read this account, the students in question signed a contract with the school to not make disparaging comments about the school (and likely the faculty, staff, and other students as well). They clearly did so, and thus are in breach of contract with the school. At this point the school is free to exact whatever disciplinary action is called for in the contract, and as I recall from my private school days, such statements are pretty open-ended. The school could probably even file suit in civil court for libel (or maybe no, remember IANAL).
The school was entirely within its rights to suspend the students for the defaming website name. IMHO, the students got off relatively easy. They weren't kicked out, and they weren't sued. It's really a good abject lesson: they broke a contract, got caught & got punished. This is what happens in real life, so the sooner they learn, the better.
As far as the guns thing, all I can say is that they should have tested their code. Can you honestly tell me that we didn't notice that only one line was printing? Here again, the school did nothing wrong, especially in the light of recent events.
but it's not the place for a liberal arts/CS degree
I beg to differ that RPI is not the place to get a CS degree. There are certainly schools with better CS departments, but RPI's CS department is respectable.
The answer to your question is not as clear-cut as you would like. The answer really depends on the universities that you are considering, as I'm sure each one has a slightly different definition of "Computer Engineering". To make matters worse, companies suffer the same lack of uniformity in defining these titles.
Generically speaking, you have five (or more, depending on how you break things down) different types of technical folks involved with computer development (both hardware & software):
1) Electrical Engineers (EE): deal with things like designing processors, peripheral equipment (video cards, sound cards, hard drives, etc.) & physical networking medium. You can think of these folks as designing the actual physical boxes that sit on your desk. (There are also scads of other engineering disciplines involved in designing the actual boxes: Chemical, Materials, Mechanical/Heat-Transfer, but you aren't interested in those, right?:-)
2) Computer Scientists (CS): covers a wide range of job responsibilities. Computer Scientists can do just about anything related to software. That said, most people I know who call themselves Computer Scientists prefer to work on low-level software that is algorithm intensive. Typical examples include operating system kernels, networking protocols (network through session or presentation layers on the OSI model), system libraries, programming language development, compiler design, numerically intensive applications, just to name a few.
3) Computer Engineers (CE): typically act as the glue between the hardcore hardware geeks (Electrical Engineers) and hardcore software geeks (Computer Scientists). Your typical Computer Engineer integrates hardware and software, and as such has to be conversant in both (to a point). Computer Engineers might design hardware (say, a disk controller), or software (a RAID driver) or both. Some computer engineers also get involved in higher-level hardware design (like designing a system architecture, with the low-level software needed to support it). A lot of Computer Engineers get involved with embedded applications (automobile computers, robotics, networking cards, etc.).
4) Software Engineers (SE): this is a VERY broad brush to paint people with. I know Software Engineers (by title) who write operating system code, and I know some who write no code, but are more involved with large software system architectures & project management. In the academic sense, Software Engineers typically operate at the highest level: designing large software systems, implementing quality control schemes & doing very little (if any) coding. In my (limited) industry experience, Software Engineers are typically applications programmers who dabble in the activities that define an "academic" Software Engineer.
5) Information Technology (IT): this is newer, and even less defined than Software Engineering. IT people do a range of activities: maintaining corporate networks, system administration, web design, database administration, help desk staffing, software testing/verification, programming, etc. This is really a catchall for things that don't fit in other categories.
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are relatively straightforward, in that most schools have these departments by name. Computer Engineering usually falls under the auspices of one of these two. In my experience Computer Engineering is more often mated with EE in schools with stronger engineering programs, while the reverse is true of schools that have stronger science programs.
Software Engineering is not, in my experience, available as a named major to undergraduates, though it is increasingly popular as a graduate major. Typically, Software Engineering-type courses will be offered by a Computer Science department, but not always (this was not the case at RPI, where I went to school). If your ultimate goal is to become a Software Engineer (as described above), your best bet is to major in Computer Science and take a long, hard look at courses offered by the EE/CE department.
IT is a fledgling major at schools that do offer it (which I don't think is too many). At RPI it was (is?) largely a joke: basically CS for those who can't hack CS. This might not be true anymore at RPI, or at other schools (but I doubt it).
My advice is to delay declaring a major as long as possible. Most universities won't make you do it until you are a junior. By then you should have experienced enough to make up your mind.
The Palm V is a very pleasing to look at piece of personal electronics; the Visor is rather visually appealing as well. This new Sony montrousity is just downright ugly!
I think I'll stick with my Visor thankyouverymuch.
Re:MacOS Rumors: Not Very Credible
on
Darwin on Crusoe?
·
· Score: 1
I don't dispute what you're saying here (being a long time reader of MOSR), but keep in mind it is a RUMORS site! The whole purpose of MOSR is to feed news and speculation to people interested in the Mac platform. Sure, they've been wrong on a lot of things, but they've also hit the nail on the head sometimes. I'm willing to bet that a lot of the time they were "wrong" were times when products never made it to actual release.
Maybe Apple won't have to do it...
on
Darwin on Crusoe?
·
· Score: 1
AFAIK, Darwin is liscensed under Apple's "Public Source" agreement. Now, I'm not nearly as current on MacOS X architecture as I would like, but doesn't all of MacOS X sit on top of Darwin?
Couln't one simply port Darwin to other platforms, and them move all of OS X? Apple wouldn't even need to do it, we could!
The National Security Agency (NSA) is headquartered on the lovely grounds of Ft. Meade, Maryland. There is a "NSA Employees Only" exit on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway (Maryland Route 295). The main NSA building is near the intersection of Emory Road and Maryland Route 32. The Engineering building is located on O'Brien Road. There are numerous antenna farms all over Ft. Meade which, presumably, are operated by NSA. NSA is the single largest employer in Maryland's Anne Arundel County.
NSA has two primary missions: Information Security (INFOSEC) and Signals Intelligence (SIGINT). The NSA is responsible for ensuring that US government communications, both civilian and military, are secure (the INFOSEC role). The NSA works in conjunction with other government agencies to fulfil this responsibility. The NSA is also responsible for intercepting and cracking foreign communications (the SIGINT role).
Living in Northern Anne Arundel County, I know many people who work for "the Agency" (as people around here call it). These are normal, everyday Americans. They aren't spooky or evil. Driving around the NSA campus is really no different then driving around any military base. There are lots of MPs (Military Police), and lots of DoD cops around, but unless you are doing something you shouldn't be (like speeding - MPs don't give an inch on the speed limit) they don't hassle you. I've been in the main building (but not the secured area, just the lobby where the bank is), and there aren't people pointing machine guns at you or anything like that.
People who work at NSA are rather secretive about what they do, but they are required to be. I play softball for the Agency during the summer and the people who I play with have all sorts of jobs there: some are engineers, some are secretaries, one guy is actually a lawyer. Nobody talks about work (because they can't), so they are a fun bunch to be around.
The NSA presumably has tremendous amounts of raw computing power. Given their mission and the shear volume of work they have, that much is a given. I'm sure that the engineers at NSA work with technology that won't be released to the general public for years, or maybe never.
Recent movies have portrayed the NSA as an agency that conducts operations and spies on the American people. In truth the NSA does not conduct covert operations (that's what the CIA is for). The only field personal employed by the Agency are those who work at overseas monitoring stations. The NSA does not operate spy satellites: that is the territory of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
I don't think that anyone disputes the fact that Bill Gates is a shrewd businessman, but the issue is not his intelligence or business savvy. The issue is his complete lack of ethics. It is possible to get rich via legitimate means, but Bill Gates didn't. Every product that Microsoft has released has been either copied or outright stolen. MS set this standard with their first product (an implementation of Basic), that was developed on stolen academic computer time.
Bill Gates has been on a philanthropic binge recently. He is also in the middle of an anti-trust suit. It doesn't take someone with a genius IQ to notice the coincidence there.
I do code for the fun of it, and I don't care about money (in so far that I have enough to maintain the standard of living to which I am accustom). What I do care about is the quality of the products that the computing world is using; and quality is a fleeting commodity in Microsoft products.
I've heard it said that Sony actually losses money on Playstation consoles and that the real money comes from the games. IF that's true, I don't see how an emulator could hurt their business; in fact; it seems that an emulator could be a real benefit to the market.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's pychosomatic; you need a lombotomy; I'll get a saw."
I'm sure you can even find a lot of ASP in use within IBM.
No, you will find very little use of ASP @ IBM.
Essentially, you are correct. The US Constitution is the blueprint of what the government can (or can't) do. The part of the Constitution that people usually buzz about (and are buzzing about here) is the First Amendment which says:
Notice the specific mention of Congress right there at the beginning.By and large, private instiutions are not bound by the Constitution. Rather, they are subject to the United States Code, Annotated (USC). I'm sure that there are all kinds of exceptions, but suffice to say that the First Amendment to the Constitution is NOT one of them.
As I read this account, the students in question signed a contract with the school to not make disparaging comments about the school (and likely the faculty, staff, and other students as well). They clearly did so, and thus are in breach of contract with the school. At this point the school is free to exact whatever disciplinary action is called for in the contract, and as I recall from my private school days, such statements are pretty open-ended. The school could probably even file suit in civil court for libel (or maybe no, remember IANAL).
The school was entirely within its rights to suspend the students for the defaming website name. IMHO, the students got off relatively easy. They weren't kicked out, and they weren't sued. It's really a good abject lesson: they broke a contract, got caught & got punished. This is what happens in real life, so the sooner they learn, the better.
As far as the guns thing, all I can say is that they should have tested their code. Can you honestly tell me that we didn't notice that only one line was printing? Here again, the school did nothing wrong, especially in the light of recent events.
but it's not the place for a liberal arts/CS degree
I beg to differ that RPI is not the place to get a CS degree. There are certainly schools with better CS departments, but RPI's CS department is respectable.
The answer to your question is not as clear-cut as you would like. The answer really depends on the universities that you are considering, as I'm sure each one has a slightly different definition of "Computer Engineering". To make matters worse, companies suffer the same lack of uniformity in defining these titles.
:-)
Generically speaking, you have five (or more, depending on how you break things down) different types of technical folks involved with computer development (both hardware & software):
1) Electrical Engineers (EE): deal with things like designing processors, peripheral equipment (video cards, sound cards, hard drives, etc.) & physical networking medium. You can think of these folks as designing the actual physical boxes that sit on your desk. (There are also scads of other engineering disciplines involved in designing the actual boxes: Chemical, Materials, Mechanical/Heat-Transfer, but you aren't interested in those, right?
2) Computer Scientists (CS): covers a wide range of job responsibilities. Computer Scientists can do just about anything related to software. That said, most people I know who call themselves Computer Scientists prefer to work on low-level software that is algorithm intensive. Typical examples include operating system kernels, networking protocols (network through session or presentation layers on the OSI model), system libraries, programming language development, compiler design, numerically intensive applications, just to name a few.
3) Computer Engineers (CE): typically act as the glue between the hardcore hardware geeks (Electrical Engineers) and hardcore software geeks (Computer Scientists). Your typical Computer Engineer integrates hardware and software, and as such has to be conversant in both (to a point). Computer Engineers might design hardware (say, a disk controller), or software (a RAID driver) or both. Some computer engineers also get involved in higher-level hardware design (like designing a system architecture, with the low-level software needed to support it). A lot of Computer Engineers get involved with embedded applications (automobile computers, robotics, networking cards, etc.).
4) Software Engineers (SE): this is a VERY broad brush to paint people with. I know Software Engineers (by title) who write operating system code, and I know some who write no code, but are more involved with large software system architectures & project management. In the academic sense, Software Engineers typically operate at the highest level: designing large software systems, implementing quality control schemes & doing very little (if any) coding. In my (limited) industry experience, Software Engineers are typically applications programmers who dabble in the activities that define an "academic" Software Engineer.
5) Information Technology (IT): this is newer, and even less defined than Software Engineering. IT people do a range of activities: maintaining corporate networks, system administration, web design, database administration, help desk staffing, software testing/verification, programming, etc. This is really a catchall for things that don't fit in other categories.
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are relatively straightforward, in that most schools have these departments by name. Computer Engineering usually falls under the auspices of one of these two. In my experience Computer Engineering is more often mated with EE in schools with stronger engineering programs, while the reverse is true of schools that have stronger science programs.
Software Engineering is not, in my experience, available as a named major to undergraduates, though it is increasingly popular as a graduate major. Typically, Software Engineering-type courses will be offered by a Computer Science department, but not always (this was not the case at RPI, where I went to school). If your ultimate goal is to become a Software Engineer (as described above), your best bet is to major in Computer Science and take a long, hard look at courses offered by the EE/CE department.
IT is a fledgling major at schools that do offer it (which I don't think is too many). At RPI it was (is?) largely a joke: basically CS for those who can't hack CS. This might not be true anymore at RPI, or at other schools (but I doubt it).
My advice is to delay declaring a major as long as possible. Most universities won't make you do it until you are a junior. By then you should have experienced enough to make up your mind.
Good luck!.
Maryland has had 10-digit dailing for quite some time now. It took some getting used to sure, but what change doesn't?
The Palm V is a very pleasing to look at piece of personal electronics; the Visor is rather visually appealing as well. This new Sony montrousity is just downright ugly!
I think I'll stick with my Visor thankyouverymuch.
Screw you pal, and the MIT horse you rode in on.
I don't dispute what you're saying here (being a long time reader of MOSR), but keep in mind it is a RUMORS site! The whole purpose of MOSR is to feed news and speculation to people interested in the Mac platform. Sure, they've been wrong on a lot of things, but they've also hit the nail on the head sometimes. I'm willing to bet that a lot of the time they were "wrong" were times when products never made it to actual release.
AFAIK, Darwin is liscensed under Apple's "Public Source" agreement. Now, I'm not nearly as current on MacOS X architecture as I would like, but doesn't all of MacOS X sit on top of Darwin?
Couln't one simply port Darwin to other platforms, and them move all of OS X? Apple wouldn't even need to do it, we could!
The National Security Agency (NSA) is headquartered on the lovely grounds of Ft. Meade, Maryland. There is a "NSA Employees Only" exit on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway (Maryland Route 295). The main NSA building is near the intersection of Emory Road and Maryland Route 32. The Engineering building is located on O'Brien Road. There are numerous antenna farms all over Ft. Meade which, presumably, are operated by NSA. NSA is the single largest employer in Maryland's Anne Arundel County.
NSA has two primary missions: Information Security (INFOSEC) and Signals Intelligence (SIGINT). The NSA is responsible for ensuring that US government communications, both civilian and military, are secure (the INFOSEC role). The NSA works in conjunction with other government agencies to fulfil this responsibility. The NSA is also responsible for intercepting and cracking foreign communications (the SIGINT role).
Living in Northern Anne Arundel County, I know many people who work for "the Agency" (as people around here call it). These are normal, everyday Americans. They aren't spooky or evil. Driving around the NSA campus is really no different then driving around any military base. There are lots of MPs (Military Police), and lots of DoD cops around, but unless you are doing something you shouldn't be (like speeding - MPs don't give an inch on the speed limit) they don't hassle you. I've been in the main building (but not the secured area, just the lobby where the bank is), and there aren't people pointing machine guns at you or anything like that.
People who work at NSA are rather secretive about what they do, but they are required to be. I play softball for the Agency during the summer and the people who I play with have all sorts of jobs there: some are engineers, some are secretaries, one guy is actually a lawyer. Nobody talks about work (because they can't), so they are a fun bunch to be around.
The NSA presumably has tremendous amounts of raw computing power. Given their mission and the shear volume of work they have, that much is a given. I'm sure that the engineers at NSA work with technology that won't be released to the general public for years, or maybe never.
Recent movies have portrayed the NSA as an agency that conducts operations and spies on the American people. In truth the NSA does not conduct covert operations (that's what the CIA is for). The only field personal employed by the Agency are those who work at overseas monitoring stations. The NSA does not operate spy satellites: that is the territory of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
They do, at least Bell Atlantic does.
I don't think that anyone disputes the fact that Bill Gates is a shrewd businessman, but the issue is not his intelligence or business savvy. The issue is his complete lack of ethics. It is possible to get rich via legitimate means, but Bill Gates didn't. Every product that Microsoft has released has been either copied or outright stolen. MS set this standard with their first product (an implementation of Basic), that was developed on stolen academic computer time.
Bill Gates has been on a philanthropic binge recently. He is also in the middle of an anti-trust suit. It doesn't take someone with a genius IQ to notice the coincidence there.
I do code for the fun of it, and I don't care about money (in so far that I have enough to maintain the standard of living to which I am accustom). What I do care about is the quality of the products that the computing world is using; and quality is a fleeting commodity in Microsoft products.
Since I'm a Mac/LinuxPPC user, Rebate Day doesn't apply, but if I did have Windows, you had better believe I'd be returning that copy.
I've heard it said that Sony actually losses money on Playstation consoles and that the real money comes from the games. IF that's true, I don't see how an emulator could hurt their business; in fact; it seems that an emulator could be a real benefit to the market.
Oh, and Metal Gear Solid kicks ass.