Do you know exactly what you want to do with the rest of your life? Most people that are college age don't, and college is a really good place to start to figure this out. If on the other hand, you wake up in the morning with a desire to program so intense that it almost hurts you might be better off going into the workforce. I left an ivy after 2 years to join a.com consulting company, and haven't really run into any stumbling blocks yet (4+ years later). Don't get me wrong- you have to be better than everyone else with a college degree, but as long as you can pull that off your golden.
The diameter of the event horizon of a black hole is proportional to its entropy. The entropy of a black hole grows as it accretes matter (this preserves the second law of thermodynamics). Thus the event horizon grows as the black hole eats. The event horizon is the point of no return- after you pass it there's no escaping from the black hole. We can't really look inside, but according to general relativity the actual singularity at the center of the hole has no actual size- it's just a point, sort of like an individual photon or electron.
Umm, the world health organization document that you mentioned pretty much blows your point out of the water. To quote from the Russion regional results summary, Since 1994, life expectancy has been improving for males.
The RAND article that you quote was written 4 years ago- conditions have changed pretty dramatically since then. I'm not saying Russia would be a really fun place to move to, but It's a far cry from what it was when Communism was going through its death throws.
Doubleclick is fantastic. It's the best thing since sliced bread. I wish all the major web sites used doubleclick, instead of just most of them. Why? Because doubleclick is incredibly easy to ignore. Drop ad[1-20].doubleclick.net in your host file with a loopback IP address, and all of the doubleclick empire disappears.
Yeah, the only problem is the immense headache the artist get's if he doesn't bother to record the track later... (My apologies to non Terry Pratchet fans)
I'm probably atypical, but I upgraded my thinkpad about 3 months ago to Windows 2000, and the process worked beautifully. Not only that, the built in modem which had mysteriously stopped working some months before started working after the upgrade. Much, much easier than nt35 to 40...
Take a look at the registry on any windows machine. There's a LOCAL_MACHINE hive for global settings, a USERS hive which contains registry settings on a per user basis, and a CURRENT_USER hive, which points to one of the users in the USERS hive.
On the other hand, it won't be too many years after the government has it that we'll be able to walk through all of their security with our desktop quantum computers. Kinda reminds me of Ben Kinsgley in Sneakers, "No more secrets."
A couple points- most of what you've said is valid, but only for SQL 6.5. MS Raided oracle and Sybase for developers for 7.0 and made it almost a complete rewrite, and finished the job in 2000. And varchars in 7.0+ can be at least 2000 bytes long- not bad considering that oracle only gives you 4000. Plus the fact that you can have more than one text field in a table, and have indexes on all of them pretty much eliminate that problem anyway.
(The fallacy here is that the erring vendor -- think Microsoft -- will indeed fix the problems right and right now.)
The sad truth of the matter is that if you're a fortune 500 hundred company microsoft will respond pretty instantly to whatever problem you're having. You have a specific contact who is basically dedicated to your company- perhaps three or four others, based on your size. GE, where I have the most experience, has seperate contacts for each of it's divisions. They're willing to do pretty crazy stuff too- like get the lead developer for exchange on the line to hear about your problem, and send you a binary patch within hours.
I took the time to read through the Gill site, and most of the points that Raph raises seem to stem from the fact that he's trying to cart the dom around in memory to deal with dynamic updates to the document.
While this has its up points, and is rather elegant in the abstract, it's not really how I prefer to do things. Add to that the fact that Gill is implemented in C, and you're just begging for a nightmare.
I've gone a little further afield than I wanted to from my main point: the problems from Gill stem from the W3C DOM API recommendations, not XML. XML by itself really is easy to work with... The dom just isn't capable of being a general purpose document in the MVC paradigm. (Actually, I don't think it's possible to come up with a truly generic way of doing that.)
Napster could be used like you say, but it isn't. Napster is a for profit company. Their business plan is intimately tied to the free availability of copyrighted musical works.
Let's draw an analogy. Suppose someone set up a search engine where the main purpose was to track down kiddie porn. Now even if some legitimate pornography (I've always wanted to use that phrase) slipped through the cracks, the majority of the content is still kiddie porn. I know that yes, I'd want the individual sites taken down, but I'd also really want the search engine gone as well.
Now, the way that you and I feel about kiddie porn is the same way that the RIAA feels about people trading music that it currently owns the copyright for.
5 years ago sure. But that's becoming less and less true. Hp has a research system called Dynamo that does this. Code run through dynamo runs faster than code natively optimized. Granted dynamo is a research system, and transforms PA-8000 binary code into PA-8000 binary code, but the techniques they used in principle could transform an arbitrary instruction set into another one. Ars Technica has a good article with some performance numbers here.
It seems to me that a law like this would only be useful if a large number of people banded together and sued a spammer. Ten dollars here or there will not really impact a large spammer- they'll just roll it into operating costs, and instead of charging pennies an address, they'll be charging, well... pennies an address.
However, lawyers will be on this like flies on honey. The best profit margin that a lawyer can have is on a class action suit, and this has to be one of the easiest ones for them to find claimants. Lawyers will make a bit of money, and if we're really lucky they'll litigate the spammers into non-existence.
Sure, you can obtain pointers to memory in vb, but you can't do anything with them but treat them as integers. If you notice, all the examples you gave were VB code calling into code that is unsafe, quite a different thing from writing code in VB that is unsafe.
Unfortunately, the protections offered by the first amendment regarding freedom of expression are much stronger for adults than children in school. People in public malls have basically the same rights as someone walking down the street- they're considered to be in a public meeting place.
Having said that, I would be interested to see if you're board of ed would withstand a serious legal challenge to its policies. The definitive opinion for expression by students and teachers by the supreme court is TINKER v. DES MOINES SCHOOL DIST., 393 U.S. 503 (1969) . Quoting from the majority opinion:
It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.
Take a look at this link. It's about a remote surgery being performed by doctor using a robot and a camera. I know if I was going under the knife, I'd really want my doctor to have one of these. Think of the alternatives- No 3d, or glasses that give you a migraine after wearing them for a couple of hours.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know exactly what you want to do with the rest of your life? Most people that are college age don't, and college is a really good place to start to figure this out. If on the other hand, you wake up in the morning with a desire to program so intense that it almost hurts you might be better off going into the workforce. I left an ivy after 2 years to join a .com consulting company, and haven't really run into any stumbling blocks yet (4+ years later). Don't get me wrong- you have to be better than everyone else with a college degree, but as long as you can pull that off your golden.
I certainly like the fact that the cheap fares I get when I take a vacation are subsidized by the full fare tickets I buy for business trips.
A little black hole, Eating all of its neighbors Microsoft is proud.
The diameter of the event horizon of a black hole is proportional to its entropy. The entropy of a black hole grows as it accretes matter (this preserves the second law of thermodynamics). Thus the event horizon grows as the black hole eats. The event horizon is the point of no return- after you pass it there's no escaping from the black hole. We can't really look inside, but according to general relativity the actual singularity at the center of the hole has no actual size- it's just a point, sort of like an individual photon or electron.
And how long after that before we start hearing people moaning on slashdot about "paper" CLE's?
Since 1994, life expectancy has been improving for males.
The RAND article that you quote was written 4 years ago- conditions have changed pretty dramatically since then. I'm not saying Russia would be a really fun place to move to, but It's a far cry from what it was when Communism was going through its death throws.
Doubleclick is fantastic. It's the best thing since sliced bread. I wish all the major web sites used doubleclick, instead of just most of them. Why? Because doubleclick is incredibly easy to ignore. Drop ad[1-20].doubleclick.net in your host file with a loopback IP address, and all of the doubleclick empire disappears.
Yeah, the only problem is the immense headache the artist get's if he doesn't bother to record the track later... (My apologies to non Terry Pratchet fans)
1) Microsoft can't buy Linux
2) Windows NT outperformed linux.
Microsoft notices competitors well before they are better than MS- that's why they're still on top.
I'm probably atypical, but I upgraded my thinkpad about 3 months ago to Windows 2000, and the process worked beautifully. Not only that, the built in modem which had mysteriously stopped working some months before started working after the upgrade. Much, much easier than nt35 to 40...
Take a look at the registry on any windows machine. There's a LOCAL_MACHINE hive for global settings, a USERS hive which contains registry settings on a per user basis, and a CURRENT_USER hive, which points to one of the users in the USERS hive.
On the other hand, it won't be too many years after the government has it that we'll be able to walk through all of their security with our desktop quantum computers. Kinda reminds me of Ben Kinsgley in Sneakers, "No more secrets."
A couple points- most of what you've said is valid, but only for SQL 6.5. MS Raided oracle and Sybase for developers for 7.0 and made it almost a complete rewrite, and finished the job in 2000. And varchars in 7.0+ can be at least 2000 bytes long- not bad considering that oracle only gives you 4000. Plus the fact that you can have more than one text field in a table, and have indexes on all of them pretty much eliminate that problem anyway.
The sad truth of the matter is that if you're a fortune 500 hundred company microsoft will respond pretty instantly to whatever problem you're having. You have a specific contact who is basically dedicated to your company- perhaps three or four others, based on your size. GE, where I have the most experience, has seperate contacts for each of it's divisions. They're willing to do pretty crazy stuff too- like get the lead developer for exchange on the line to hear about your problem, and send you a binary patch within hours.
Sure. And no one will ever need more than 640k of ram...
While this has its up points, and is rather elegant in the abstract, it's not really how I prefer to do things. Add to that the fact that Gill is implemented in C, and you're just begging for a nightmare.
I've gone a little further afield than I wanted to from my main point: the problems from Gill stem from the W3C DOM API recommendations, not XML. XML by itself really is easy to work with... The dom just isn't capable of being a general purpose document in the MVC paradigm. (Actually, I don't think it's possible to come up with a truly generic way of doing that.)
Britney Spears?
Let's draw an analogy. Suppose someone set up a search engine where the main purpose was to track down kiddie porn. Now even if some legitimate pornography (I've always wanted to use that phrase) slipped through the cracks, the majority of the content is still kiddie porn. I know that yes, I'd want the individual sites taken down, but I'd also really want the search engine gone as well.
Now, the way that you and I feel about kiddie porn is the same way that the RIAA feels about people trading music that it currently owns the copyright for.
5 years ago sure. But that's becoming less and less true. Hp has a research system called Dynamo that does this. Code run through dynamo runs faster than code natively optimized. Granted dynamo is a research system, and transforms PA-8000 binary code into PA-8000 binary code, but the techniques they used in principle could transform an arbitrary instruction set into another one. Ars Technica has a good article with some performance numbers here.
However, lawyers will be on this like flies on honey. The best profit margin that a lawyer can have is on a class action suit, and this has to be one of the easiest ones for them to find claimants. Lawyers will make a bit of money, and if we're really lucky they'll litigate the spammers into non-existence.
That has to be the silliest thing I've ever heard. What exactly do you lose by not having type safe enums in the core language?
Sure, you can obtain pointers to memory in vb, but you can't do anything with them but treat them as integers. If you notice, all the examples you gave were VB code calling into code that is unsafe, quite a different thing from writing code in VB that is unsafe.
Having said that, I would be interested to see if you're board of ed would withstand a serious legal challenge to its policies. The definitive opinion for expression by students and teachers by the supreme court is TINKER v. DES MOINES SCHOOL DIST., 393 U.S. 503 (1969) . Quoting from the majority opinion:
It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.
Shh. Stop encouraging him to vote. The more stupid people that don't vote increases the weight of my vote proportionally.
Take a look at this link. It's about a remote surgery being performed by doctor using a robot and a camera. I know if I was going under the knife, I'd really want my doctor to have one of these. Think of the alternatives- No 3d, or glasses that give you a migraine after wearing them for a couple of hours.