I've used calculus and trigonometry for UI animation with some regularity. Sinusoidal easing makes for very comfortable and natural interaction, for example, and it takes a combination of calculus and trigonometry to code it properly. For that matter, it requires familiarity with both to even think of using the technique. So, yeah, it's worth knowing your math even if your CS work is just polishing user interfaces.
If the output is naive (i.e. uses the canvas tag to draw individual pixels), you'll have the problems you're worried about. If it makes good use of sprites, SVG, and even WebGL it has a much better chance of performing well. And even if the first version of the HTML5 output is naive, one can hope that Adobe will be responsive to the complaints of their paying customers (i.e. those who actually buy this authoring tool) and improve upon it.
Sure, YouTube is the 900-pound gorilla of web video, but pornography has been an underground driver of video formats since 8mm film. Until the iPhone, Flash was the de facto standard for web video, including porn. iOS devices, however, offer only one avenue for porn (the web, since porn apps are not allowed in the App Store), and only one supported video format (H.264). You can bet that porn sites want to capture mobile porn customers (don't look so shocked, of course people want to watch porn on the go, and don't forget iPads). There has been plenty of time for petabytes of pornographic video to be delivered to iOS devices, probably starting mere minutes after the release of the original 2G iPhone.
Will porn sites start delivering WebM video? They tend to be run with an eye toward keeping costs down, so hosting multiple versions of the same video, and especially recoding existing video, probably isn't in the cards. The cost for MPEG-LA licensing may be prepaid (especially for whatever encoder they use), may be negligible, or they may simply ignore the licensing entirely and expect that any individual site is too small to be worth suing. I'd bet on porn video on the web quietly ignoring WebM and sticking with H.264 delivered directly or to a Flash player. Anyone savvy enough to insist on a Free/free codec is probably unwilling to pay for porn anyway, so they are hardly hurting their market.
Ultimately, Google can't force WebM on anyone. The only weapon they have to wield in this is YouTube (Chrome really isn't much of a weapon in the market at this point in time), and they'd alienate everyone using iOS, not to mention everyone with an Android phone too slow or old to run Flash, if they stopped delivering H.264. Would it change anyone's mind, or would the YouTube app on the iPhone be replaced with a Vimeo app? Supporting less rather than more has worked for no one but Apple, they only pull it off by making it up in other ways (e.g. polish), and even then they alienate a segment of the market as a result; Apple's high margins allows them to concentrate on a smaller market, whereas Google's need for eyeballs for ad revenue means they can't afford to alienate large groups of people.
Whether you believe that none of the (enforceable) MPEG-LA patents apply to WebM or not (I suspect some do), and whether you believe that there is something morally superior to WebM over H.264 (iffy), it's hard to believe that it has any chance of defeating H.264 in the market (I obviously don't). I'm prepared to be wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.
Another vote for iSSH on iPhone. Even if you don't have a hardware keyboard, it has a keyboard mode that makes it semi-transparent and another that keeps the text from scrolling under it. Great use of configurable pie menus for macros and keys that aren't on the virtual keyboard. The X server works very nicely, and I believe it does VNC as well (though I've never used it). It also takes advantage of iOS's almost-multitasking to keep connections open in the background while you switch to another app. It's even better running on the iPad, and it's a universal app (i.e. buy it once for both devices). I find it indispensable. I've even done HTML/JS/SVG development by switching between it and Mobile Safari.
There are three parts to.NET: the VM/runtime, the APIs, and the compilers,
so I'll address them separately.
The VM and runtime are just good technology. They are also standardized
(through ECMA), Microsoft's implementation is reasonably efficient, and the
design is at least as good as the competition (i.e. the JVM, and I'll vent
on my pet peeve here when I say that making properties a first-class,
reflectable part of an object/class is much easier to deal with than the
JavaBeans method naming convention).
The APIs are, like any other system platform, huge. They are reasonably
well-designed, however, and Windows.Forms is far nicer to program to than
Swing or AWT (I haven't played with SWT or
Qt's
Jambi). Simply by virtue of being designed with the lessons learned
from Java in mind, they avoid some of the pitfalls and backward
compatibility issues that Java faces.
The compilers are decent (though I'm told that the Fortran compiler
produces terribly inefficient code), but the important part is that there
are compilers for a broad range of languages. C++, C# and VB.NET (which is
really just a verbose dialect of C# with some additional gotchas) are there
out of the box, but there is also an ML compiler (F#), a Ruby compiler
(IronRuby, to be released with SilverLight), ECMAScript (available with
SilverLight, but I think it might be right up there with C++, C#, and
VB.NET), a Python compiler (IronPython), a COBOL compiler (available
commercially if this is actually something you need, ugh) and more that
don't come to mind right off.
That's the good technology part. The good for technology part is
competition. Flash is good, but Flash being developed under competitive
pressure from SilverLight is better. Java is good, but Java being developed
under competitive pressure from.NET is better. Even if you have no
interest in.NET's technology for itself, be glad that both Sun and Adobe
have a vested interest in making their respective technologies better and
more pleasant to use.
That said, I make my money programming Ruby on Rails on a Mac. Despite my
previous experience with C, C++, Obj-C, awk, sed, Java, JavaScript, C#,
VB.NET, ASP.NET, etc. (and only the.NET stuff on Windows), I'm just a
spectator here unless and until I'm looking for a new job.
You can even automate the snapshotting. It only keeps track of pages that differ, so it doesn't use up much disk space unless/until the writable filesystem and the snapshot diverge a *lot*. The snapshots are presented as readonly block devices that can be left mounted somewhere so you can grab older versions or deleted copies of files. It isn't quite as nice as the Veritas.snapshot directory in every directory, but it's still really nice.
If you are willing to accept the small size and long lead time, there are better solutions. How about a solar sail? How about giving it a static charge (perhaps spraying from an ion drive, but cathode rays would do the job, too) and using big-ass magnets? If it's icy you can just focus lots of heat (big-ass mirrors) on one side and make its eruptions change its course. Hell, if it's that small, just fire lots of small, fast projectiles (magnetic acceleration of moon-mined iron, perhaps). There are innumerable ways of providing the energy for the dV needed to alter the asteroid's course that do not involve that much mass, that much expense, that much Earth-provided energy, that much fine control, or even that lack of reusability. What a godawful idea.
Yes, a Mac version is in the works (being ported by Feral Interactive). Of course, there is no stated release date on the press release, but what can you expect?
Plenty of others have covered reasons why one might block ads. Not all of the reasons are my reasons, but I don't feel the need to add another voice to that chorus. To cover the question of magazines, I avoid buying magazines because my life is plenty cluttered enough. It has nothing to do with advertising. Receiving a wad of paper on a regular basis increases, rather than decreases, clutter. How I block ads is probably more interesting. There are three major ways: 1) Firefox's popup prevention, 2) the flashblock Firefox extension, 3) the Platypus extension, which relies on the GreaseMonkey extension, and 4) privoxy. Of these, privoxy really does the most work. The following is my adblock.action file:
It isn't complete, but if I start being annoyed by a bunch of ads on some site then I'll Copy image location and add the site to my adblock.action so it's getting better every time. You'll also notice that Google ads are not blocked; this is because they haven't annoyed me (yet?).
But wait, there's more! I also filter at least one RSS feed with privoxy. It's mostly because of pagination annoyances, but it has the side effect of avoiding ads. I subscribe to a feed from my university newspaper, but I alter the links it provides to the "printer friendly" versions of the pages. These pages are, most importantly, the complete article in simply formatted text, but they are also free of ads.
I also use Platypus more to alleviate formatting annoyances than for ad-blocking, but it has the side effect of blocking a lot of ads. The Isolate and Relax commands are my friends. I don't like reading text in a long, skinny column. I have a lot of screen real estate, and I like to use it. I also like to read content in large fonts. Why would I want my text trapped between sidebars of non-content, especially when the width of the entire page, sidebars and all, does not stretch across my screen? Granted, the rough width limit for comfortable reading (as I remember from my days on the middle school newspaper) is 2.5 alphabets, but I'd rather increase the font size until my window width is roughly that than tolerate a narrow column of small text. A (very) few websites define their column widths in ems or exes so they change size with the font, and for those I have no need to strip away sidebars and the like.
I am currently in an MS-centric work environment and I experienced the same problem. I found it infuriating to receive these meeting invitations and not even have the attachment show up as an attachment I could save. What I wound up doing was writing a dead simple awk script to extract the VCS attachment. It's still a multistep process:
in Thunderbird, save email somewhere handy as $email
in a shell (cygwin, on Windows), run extract_ics.awk $email > $ical
in Sunbird/calendar extension, import $ical and accept the prompts
remove $email and $ical
At least it's possible. Here's the awk script:
#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN { found = 0; }
found == 2 && $0 == "" { exit; }
found == 2
found == 1 && $0 == "" { found = 2; }
found == 0 && $0 ~/^Content-Type: text\/calendar;/ { found = 1; }
I am for pooing in the toilet and against pooing elsewhere; these are not opposing viewpoints because they are different contexts. People who are for the death penalty and against abortion are not both for and against life (so-called "culture of life" notwithstanding); in the context of criminals who are dangerous to society (note the loaded words) they are for killing and in the context of the lives of innocent babies (again, the loaded words) they are against killing. Information in the context of knowledge valuable to the world at large wants to be free, but information that can be used to make my life unpleasant does not.
You can think of this as inconsistent policy, but you can't seriously expect anyone to keep a purely consistent policy. The world is just more complicated than that. Consider that one can be the most pacifistic person in the world, yet nearly everyone will fight tooth and nail for the safety of their (respective) offspring. Reconciling these apparently opposing viewpoints is as simple as recognizing the contexts in which they actually apply.
When I decided to go to grad school, it was because I wanted to be a professor and, in particular, a professor in a large, well-respected CS department (i.e. well-funded with a large pool of talented professors, grad students, and undergrads). Despite a B+ average as an undergrad (though my B.S. came from a well-respected CS department and I had taken many more courses than were required), I aimed high and applied to three highly-rated and well-respected universities for grad school. All of them required the CS GRE, though they simply used it as an easy first cut (anyone under a particular score, maybe 750 or 800, is out of the running immediately).
I was accepted by an Ivy League school with full funding (RA/TA, not fellowship). And I went. And I slogged my way through candidacy (which got me a Master's) with much friction and suffering. And I gave up and got a real job. And I'm far, far happier for it.
If you are convinced that you want to be a professor in CS, the only way to get there (in any CS department that expects any level of research from their faculty) is with a Ph.D. If you want to work at a serious research institution (e.g. Google or MS Research), get the Ph.D. If you just want the extra boost of a Master's for the money, get MS certifications instead (yes, I mean it, they actually mean something these days). If you feel that you can be better prepared as a computer scientist/software engineer/whatever by getting a Master's, you probably don't really know what you want and should take a closer look at your motivation. If you are treating grad school like the snooze button on the alarm clock of life, you are in good company and you should make sure that you are at least aiming for a Ph.D. even if you don't know if you'll finish it; the snooze button approach is all about leaving options open.
If it sounds like I don't think much of a Master's in CS, it's because I don't. I have one from an Ivy League school and while I learned a lot doing it and had fun and was exposed to all sorts of knowledge along the way, the four years I wound up spending on it have earned me a piece of paper that excuses me from not having any certifications yet. The best things that came out of my time there were social, not academic or career-related.
(On a side note, if you think you'd like to go to grad school because it's easier to meet a mate in school than in the real world, you're right. I doubt I'd be happily married now if not for grad school. See the snooze button approach above.)
No amount of studying will prepare you if you don't know the subject. On the other hand, due to the constraints of the test (length and multiple choice) and the breadth of the field, it can't go particularly deeply into any topic.
The really important thing is to know what you have a good, current grasp of and what you need to learn/relearn/refresh: Do you remember what LALR stands for? Can you calculate the cost of a pipeline bubble or a branch misprediction? What information would you need to do so? How is depth-first/breadth-first related to stacks/queues related to LIFO/FIFO? What is the stack pointer? What is the frame pointer? What is an interrupt? What are the three primary elements of OOP? What is modus ponens/tolens (sp)? What kinds of race conditions are there? What is a critical section? What is the difference between a monitor and a semaphore? Define NP-complete. And so on.
I recommend picking up some practice tests (from the library if possible). Don't worry about taking them, per se, but go through them and make sure you remember something about the topics the questions cover. Think of it as sort of a checklist. If there's anything in the practice tests (or the list above) that you can't bring to mind, or feel fuzzy about, or never learned, go look it up (on the web, in your old textbooks, whatever) and brush up on it. Don't expect to learn about compilers if you've never learned them, but you should be able to answer questions about different categories of languages with regard to parsing requirements, for example. Go through the practice tests with a pen and paper and write yourself a list of topics for which you need greater clarity, then brush up on it from whatever materials you have handy. (You *did* save all your old textbooks, right?)
This is what site certificates are intended to be. The problem is that (some of) the root certificate authorities will issue a certificate to anyone with sufficient cash in hand. To make the certificate system useful again requires two changes to the way things are done.
First, the user must have the secure site's public certificate installed in his/her browser. This can be achieved by providing it to the user on physical media (e.g. a CD or USB key). Furthermore, each user can be issued his/her own certificate for use as part of the authentication process. This is both cheaper and easier than the RSA SecurID that some banks are providing to some (their biggest and best) customers. That's the easy part.
The second and much harder part is providing a user interface such that whenever the user opens an URL from a mail client (or IM client, or any other non-browser I suppose) the user is either told "This is your bank" or "This is an insecure site" or "This is a secure site but not one you know." This message should be prominently visible in the browser window, not merely a dialog that can be trivially dismissed.
Both parts require changes to all browsers (including and especially IE6/7), particularly if there is any hope of making it cross-platform. Right now, installing a certificate in a browser is a task that requires more user sophistication, if only to discern when one should or should not install a certificate, than can be expected of your average user.
A user should be able to double-click on a file with the right extension (.pks or.pk7 or something, I can't remember) and have the browser ask for a friendly name for it (e.g. "My bank"). While it's fine to keep using the root CAs installed in the browsers out there; sites signed by the root CAs, however, should not be presented as authentic; the user should have the option of identifying a site's certificate with a friendly name, perhaps, but until the user has identified it it must remain at least partly suspect.
Oh, and incidentally, the "thus and such is wrong with the site's certificate. Proceed?" dialogs are completely useless.
Yeah, certifications mean nothing to people who know anything about the
craft of software engineering. That right there tells you why you'd bother
getting them. I've just started with a consulting company, and they require
their developers to get four certifications a year (and give a bonus for
each one). It isn't because the certifications make the developers better,
but because it makes them more marketable to potential clients who know
neither jack nor shit about software. The only criteria those potential
clients have to judge a consulting company on are 1) case studies of
previous projects, and 2) arbitrary measures of skill like "90% of our
developers hold MCSE certifications."
Forget for the moment that you know anything about software development.
Forget that you give a damn about the differences between C#, Java, C, and
Perl. Forget that you actually comprehend why an object-oriented
programming paradigm benefits certain kinds of software projects. You're
just a guy at some company who has a business or even liberal arts degree,
who understands just enough about computers to expect email to be sent and
received by Outlook, and who has been tasked with replacing/upgrading some
mission-critical software system by the end of the fiscal year. How do you
judge who should do the work? You know all the computers at work run
Microsoft [sic]. You are told by these consulting companies who are bidding
on your project that the M in MCSE stands for Microsoft. You figure that's
got to be good, so the company with the most MCSE thud factor sounds the
best, especially if their bid is near the lowest.
That's how business is conducted in the real world. This also applies to
hiring developers internally. I refer you to Paul
Graham's essay on how it takes
a good hacker to know a good hacker. For those unfortunate companies who do
not have good hackers in their employ to judge the quality of potential
developer employees/contractors, the certifications are the next best
thing (however sad that may be).
I don't have any certifications at the moment, but I expect to have an MCSE
within a year or so. I need to know the material so I can do my job, and
that will come by actually doing it. I also need to know the material well
enough to pass the tests, and for that I recommend hitting the library.
I'll be damned if I'm going to buy books for this crap if I can possibly
avoid it. My colleagues at this company recommend the Exam Cram series, but
I found MCAD/MCSD Self-Paced Training books (from Microsoft Press) at my
library, so that's what I'm using.
If I'm reading between the lines correctly, the boss you refer to is pretty near the top of the company and there isn't much in the way of an HR department. Policy is probably in short supply, and you may not even have a real contract. If any of this is accurate, you should consult with a lawyer (which does not necessarily mean hiring one; try to get a free consultation).
Really, there are two issues: your reputation and money you are/will be owed. Given that you already have a job to go to, your reputation is pretty safe as long as you behave well. That means staying through the time you committed to staying when you gave notice. You will have to balance the money you will lose by forfeiting your last paycheck against the time and money it would cost you to deal with it legally. That consultation with a lawyer will help with determining that.
I've been waiting for this for, literally, years. I kept hearing that it was coming, then wasn't, then was, then wasn't. Very frustrating. Since I'd heard it was coming early on I'd put all my information on it, but some stuff I could only bring to it by hand (e.g. my list of friends' birthdays that I'd imported into iCal), and everything on it I could only get off by hand. For that matter, I'll be moving soon and intend to get a nextgen HipTop (not sure if I'll wait for the one that should come out some time this year, if they keep to their release-every-year schedule) cheap by taking advantage of a new activation and a new number, but I need to take my info with me. At long last, I can.
I guess I'm happy, but it might just be relief from years of frustration.
So I discovered something really nice in Win2K (and probably earlier versions, too). You can put the contents of a folder in the taskbar. In fact, on of the default toolbars you can display from the contextual menu is the contents of your Links folder (%USERPROFILE%\Favorites\Links). That alone is pretty useless, but folder shortcuts make it useful. You see, when you click on a normal shortcut to a folder in a folder toolbar, it just opens the folder. If it's a folder shortcut, however, it gives a menu with the contents of the folder (and submenus for subfolders, etc.).
First, you have to realize that folder shortcuts are a horrible, crackheaded hack. There are also some gotchas with copying, moving, or deleting them that are better covered elsewhere. With that understanding, here's how you make one. A folder shortcut is nothing but an ordinary folder that contains an ordinary shortcut named target.lnk, a Desktop.ini file with appropriate contents, and has been made read-only. To make a folder shortcut:
1) Create a folder with the name you want the folder shortcut to have, and in the folder you want it to be in. (It's safer not to have to move or rename it later.)
2) Create a shortcut to the target folder, name it target.lnk, and place it in the folder-shortcut-to-be.
3) Create a Desktop.ini file in the folder-shortcut-to-be with the following lines:
4) Open the properties for the folder-shortcut-to-be, make it read-only, and hit Okay.
If you open the properties again, you will see that it is a folder shortcut. You may need to logout and log back in, or even reboot, to have it show up properly in the taskbar.
You can't just ask what RAID solution to use; you need to specify your optimization criteria. For example, if you are going for inexpensive, high capacity, and good redundancy but don't care about hotswapping, you can go with a reasonably cheap PATA or SATA hardware RAID. If you are willing to skip high capacity you can get an external SCSI SCA rack, an inexpensive SCSI card, and a bunch of small SCSI SCA drives. If you want high capacity and high performance without too much cost, get a bunch of large PATA drives, a similar number of FireWire or USB 2.0 (or both) enclosures, as many FireWire or USB 2.0 interface cards as necessary, and do it that way (which also gives you hotswap). If you are willing to spend lots and lots of money, get a Network Appliance server.
Personally, I'm not worried about performance beyond being able to play full-motion video. I have a PPC 604 180MHz from 1997 with a SCSI card and a RAID rack. 8x18GB at RAID 5 gives me 118GB or so of redundant storage, and I serve it over NFS to my other machines. Just for kicks, I have it going through a cryptoloop, too (LVM on cryptoloop on Linux RAID5 on SCSI). The initial cost was low (the drives were $15 each, the rack was around $100 on eBay, the trays were given to me, the SCSI card was under $40 on eBay, the 100Mbit ethernet card was about $20, and the computer had been a doorstop until I put Linux on it). The ongoing (electricity and cooling) costs are a little high (they are 10K drives), but that's life. I can play an MPEG or AVI from two machines on the network at once without hiccups, so I'm happy.
If I were going to build a RAID server today, I'd probably buy a Mac Mini, four large PATA drives, and four FireWire enclosures. Assuming 160GB drives, I'd have 320GB of RAID5 storage available over NFS (with a spare drive to swap in) for an investment of under $1200, and I can vary that cost with the size and number of drives. Yes, I'd be daisy-chaining FireWire, which means that each drive has only a portion of the total bandwidth. Then again, my network card will only manage 100MBit, so 3/4 of the FireWire bandwidth will be of minimal use anyway (except for reducing latency due to readahead and such, of course).
This is really a matter of low-hanging fruit (I hope). If Congress can come to a reasonable decision with sufficient support to vote it into law in a reasonable amount of time, why should all the other problems that they can't agree on block it? Sure, all those things are (or should be) higher priority, but they also involve months or years of knock-down, drag-out fights. If nothing else can be considered until the high priority, high controversy items are dealt with, nothing else gets done. (Discussions of the virtues of King Log will be gleefully ignored.)
The main thing that's missing with a SuSE install as compared to a Debian install is more than just apt. It's much more a matter of the strict adherence to Debian packaging policy and the hundreds and hundreds of Debian developers who do. There is a tremendous amount of software in the Debian repository, and I can install any of it with near 100% confidence that it will not make unexpected problems for other parts of my system. It isn't something that can be handled by a piece of software, it's a human management issue.
Nice! I will look into it. Of course, I still want all the other good things that Debian has and SuSE does not, but I might simply fork Yast (it's GPL'd nowadays, isn't it) to make it just a service management tool for Debian.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used calculus and trigonometry for UI animation with some regularity. Sinusoidal easing makes for very comfortable and natural interaction, for example, and it takes a combination of calculus and trigonometry to code it properly. For that matter, it requires familiarity with both to even think of using the technique. So, yeah, it's worth knowing your math even if your CS work is just polishing user interfaces.
If the output is naive (i.e. uses the canvas tag to draw individual pixels), you'll have the problems you're worried about. If it makes good use of sprites, SVG, and even WebGL it has a much better chance of performing well. And even if the first version of the HTML5 output is naive, one can hope that Adobe will be responsive to the complaints of their paying customers (i.e. those who actually buy this authoring tool) and improve upon it.
Sure, YouTube is the 900-pound gorilla of web video, but pornography has been an underground driver of video formats since 8mm film. Until the iPhone, Flash was the de facto standard for web video, including porn. iOS devices, however, offer only one avenue for porn (the web, since porn apps are not allowed in the App Store), and only one supported video format (H.264). You can bet that porn sites want to capture mobile porn customers (don't look so shocked, of course people want to watch porn on the go, and don't forget iPads). There has been plenty of time for petabytes of pornographic video to be delivered to iOS devices, probably starting mere minutes after the release of the original 2G iPhone.
Will porn sites start delivering WebM video? They tend to be run with an eye toward keeping costs down, so hosting multiple versions of the same video, and especially recoding existing video, probably isn't in the cards. The cost for MPEG-LA licensing may be prepaid (especially for whatever encoder they use), may be negligible, or they may simply ignore the licensing entirely and expect that any individual site is too small to be worth suing. I'd bet on porn video on the web quietly ignoring WebM and sticking with H.264 delivered directly or to a Flash player. Anyone savvy enough to insist on a Free/free codec is probably unwilling to pay for porn anyway, so they are hardly hurting their market.
Ultimately, Google can't force WebM on anyone. The only weapon they have to wield in this is YouTube (Chrome really isn't much of a weapon in the market at this point in time), and they'd alienate everyone using iOS, not to mention everyone with an Android phone too slow or old to run Flash, if they stopped delivering H.264. Would it change anyone's mind, or would the YouTube app on the iPhone be replaced with a Vimeo app? Supporting less rather than more has worked for no one but Apple, they only pull it off by making it up in other ways (e.g. polish), and even then they alienate a segment of the market as a result; Apple's high margins allows them to concentrate on a smaller market, whereas Google's need for eyeballs for ad revenue means they can't afford to alienate large groups of people.
Whether you believe that none of the (enforceable) MPEG-LA patents apply to WebM or not (I suspect some do), and whether you believe that there is something morally superior to WebM over H.264 (iffy), it's hard to believe that it has any chance of defeating H.264 in the market (I obviously don't). I'm prepared to be wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.
Another vote for iSSH on iPhone. Even if you don't have a hardware keyboard, it has a keyboard mode that makes it semi-transparent and another that keeps the text from scrolling under it. Great use of configurable pie menus for macros and keys that aren't on the virtual keyboard. The X server works very nicely, and I believe it does VNC as well (though I've never used it). It also takes advantage of iOS's almost-multitasking to keep connections open in the background while you switch to another app. It's even better running on the iPad, and it's a universal app (i.e. buy it once for both devices). I find it indispensable. I've even done HTML/JS/SVG development by switching between it and Mobile Safari.
There are three parts to .NET: the VM/runtime, the APIs, and the compilers,
so I'll address them separately.
The VM and runtime are just good technology. They are also standardized (through ECMA), Microsoft's implementation is reasonably efficient, and the design is at least as good as the competition (i.e. the JVM, and I'll vent on my pet peeve here when I say that making properties a first-class, reflectable part of an object/class is much easier to deal with than the JavaBeans method naming convention).
The APIs are, like any other system platform, huge. They are reasonably well-designed, however, and Windows.Forms is far nicer to program to than Swing or AWT (I haven't played with SWT or Qt's Jambi). Simply by virtue of being designed with the lessons learned from Java in mind, they avoid some of the pitfalls and backward compatibility issues that Java faces.
The compilers are decent (though I'm told that the Fortran compiler produces terribly inefficient code), but the important part is that there are compilers for a broad range of languages. C++, C# and VB.NET (which is really just a verbose dialect of C# with some additional gotchas) are there out of the box, but there is also an ML compiler (F#), a Ruby compiler (IronRuby, to be released with SilverLight), ECMAScript (available with SilverLight, but I think it might be right up there with C++, C#, and VB.NET), a Python compiler (IronPython), a COBOL compiler (available commercially if this is actually something you need, ugh) and more that don't come to mind right off.
That's the good technology part. The good for technology part is competition. Flash is good, but Flash being developed under competitive pressure from SilverLight is better. Java is good, but Java being developed under competitive pressure from .NET is better. Even if you have no
interest in .NET's technology for itself, be glad that both Sun and Adobe
have a vested interest in making their respective technologies better and
more pleasant to use.
That said, I make my money programming Ruby on Rails on a Mac. Despite my previous experience with C, C++, Obj-C, awk, sed, Java, JavaScript, C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, etc. (and only the .NET stuff on Windows), I'm just a
spectator here unless and until I'm looking for a new job.
Two words: LVM snapshot
.snapshot directory in every directory, but it's still really nice.
You can even automate the snapshotting. It only keeps track of pages that differ, so it doesn't use up much disk space unless/until the writable filesystem and the snapshot diverge a *lot*. The snapshots are presented as readonly block devices that can be left mounted somewhere so you can grab older versions or deleted copies of files. It isn't quite as nice as the Veritas
If you are willing to accept the small size and long lead time, there are better solutions. How about a solar sail? How about giving it a static charge (perhaps spraying from an ion drive, but cathode rays would do the job, too) and using big-ass magnets? If it's icy you can just focus lots of heat (big-ass mirrors) on one side and make its eruptions change its course. Hell, if it's that small, just fire lots of small, fast projectiles (magnetic acceleration of moon-mined iron, perhaps). There are innumerable ways of providing the energy for the dV needed to alter the asteroid's course that do not involve that much mass, that much expense, that much Earth-provided energy, that much fine control, or even that lack of reusability. What a godawful idea.
Yes, a Mac version is in the works (being ported by Feral Interactive). Of course, there is no stated release date on the press release, but what can you expect?
Plenty of others have covered reasons why one might block ads. Not all of the reasons are my reasons, but I don't feel the need to add another voice to that chorus. To cover the question of magazines, I avoid buying magazines because my life is plenty cluttered enough. It has nothing to do with advertising. Receiving a wad of paper on a regular basis increases, rather than decreases, clutter. How I block ads is probably more interesting. There are three major ways: 1) Firefox's popup prevention, 2) the flashblock Firefox extension, 3) the Platypus extension, which relies on the GreaseMonkey extension, and 4) privoxy. Of these, privoxy really does the most work. The following is my adblock.action file:
It isn't complete, but if I start being annoyed by a bunch of ads on some site then I'll Copy image location and add the site to my adblock.action so it's getting better every time. You'll also notice that Google ads are not blocked; this is because they haven't annoyed me (yet?).
But wait, there's more! I also filter at least one RSS feed with privoxy. It's mostly because of pagination annoyances, but it has the side effect of avoiding ads. I subscribe to a feed from my university newspaper, but I alter the links it provides to the "printer friendly" versions of the pages. These pages are, most importantly, the complete article in simply formatted text, but they are also free of ads.
I also use Platypus more to alleviate formatting annoyances than for ad-blocking, but it has the side effect of blocking a lot of ads. The Isolate and Relax commands are my friends. I don't like reading text in a long, skinny column. I have a lot of screen real estate, and I like to use it. I also like to read content in large fonts. Why would I want my text trapped between sidebars of non-content, especially when the width of the entire page, sidebars and all, does not stretch across my screen? Granted, the rough width limit for comfortable reading (as I remember from my days on the middle school newspaper) is 2.5 alphabets, but I'd rather increase the font size until my window width is roughly that than tolerate a narrow column of small text. A (very) few websites define their column widths in ems or exes so they change size with the font, and for those I have no need to strip away sidebars and the like.
I am currently in an MS-centric work environment and I experienced the same problem. I found it infuriating to receive these meeting invitations and not even have the attachment show up as an attachment I could save. What I wound up doing was writing a dead simple awk script to extract the VCS attachment. It's still a multistep process:
At least it's possible. Here's the awk script:
#!/usr/bin/awk -fBEGIN { found = 0; }
found == 2 && $0 == "" { exit; }
found == 2
found == 1 && $0 == "" { found = 2; }
found == 0 && $0 ~
See the last paragraph of the first page of this article on Walt Mossberg in Wired. He returns everything sent to him.
I am for pooing in the toilet and against pooing elsewhere; these are not opposing viewpoints because they are different contexts. People who are for the death penalty and against abortion are not both for and against life (so-called "culture of life" notwithstanding); in the context of criminals who are dangerous to society (note the loaded words) they are for killing and in the context of the lives of innocent babies (again, the loaded words) they are against killing. Information in the context of knowledge valuable to the world at large wants to be free, but information that can be used to make my life unpleasant does not.
You can think of this as inconsistent policy, but you can't seriously expect anyone to keep a purely consistent policy. The world is just more complicated than that. Consider that one can be the most pacifistic person in the world, yet nearly everyone will fight tooth and nail for the safety of their (respective) offspring. Reconciling these apparently opposing viewpoints is as simple as recognizing the contexts in which they actually apply.
When I decided to go to grad school, it was because I wanted to be a professor and, in particular, a professor in a large, well-respected CS department (i.e. well-funded with a large pool of talented professors, grad students, and undergrads). Despite a B+ average as an undergrad (though my B.S. came from a well-respected CS department and I had taken many more courses than were required), I aimed high and applied to three highly-rated and well-respected universities for grad school. All of them required the CS GRE, though they simply used it as an easy first cut (anyone under a particular score, maybe 750 or 800, is out of the running immediately).
I was accepted by an Ivy League school with full funding (RA/TA, not fellowship). And I went. And I slogged my way through candidacy (which got me a Master's) with much friction and suffering. And I gave up and got a real job. And I'm far, far happier for it.
If you are convinced that you want to be a professor in CS, the only way to get there (in any CS department that expects any level of research from their faculty) is with a Ph.D. If you want to work at a serious research institution (e.g. Google or MS Research), get the Ph.D. If you just want the extra boost of a Master's for the money, get MS certifications instead (yes, I mean it, they actually mean something these days). If you feel that you can be better prepared as a computer scientist/software engineer/whatever by getting a Master's, you probably don't really know what you want and should take a closer look at your motivation. If you are treating grad school like the snooze button on the alarm clock of life, you are in good company and you should make sure that you are at least aiming for a Ph.D. even if you don't know if you'll finish it; the snooze button approach is all about leaving options open.
If it sounds like I don't think much of a Master's in CS, it's because I don't. I have one from an Ivy League school and while I learned a lot doing it and had fun and was exposed to all sorts of knowledge along the way, the four years I wound up spending on it have earned me a piece of paper that excuses me from not having any certifications yet. The best things that came out of my time there were social, not academic or career-related.
(On a side note, if you think you'd like to go to grad school because it's easier to meet a mate in school than in the real world, you're right. I doubt I'd be happily married now if not for grad school. See the snooze button approach above.)
No amount of studying will prepare you if you don't know the subject. On the other hand, due to the constraints of the test (length and multiple choice) and the breadth of the field, it can't go particularly deeply into any topic.
The really important thing is to know what you have a good, current grasp of and what you need to learn/relearn/refresh: Do you remember what LALR stands for? Can you calculate the cost of a pipeline bubble or a branch misprediction? What information would you need to do so? How is depth-first/breadth-first related to stacks/queues related to LIFO/FIFO? What is the stack pointer? What is the frame pointer? What is an interrupt? What are the three primary elements of OOP? What is modus ponens/tolens (sp)? What kinds of race conditions are there? What is a critical section? What is the difference between a monitor and a semaphore? Define NP-complete. And so on.
I recommend picking up some practice tests (from the library if possible). Don't worry about taking them, per se, but go through them and make sure you remember something about the topics the questions cover. Think of it as sort of a checklist. If there's anything in the practice tests (or the list above) that you can't bring to mind, or feel fuzzy about, or never learned, go look it up (on the web, in your old textbooks, whatever) and brush up on it. Don't expect to learn about compilers if you've never learned them, but you should be able to answer questions about different categories of languages with regard to parsing requirements, for example. Go through the practice tests with a pen and paper and write yourself a list of topics for which you need greater clarity, then brush up on it from whatever materials you have handy. (You *did* save all your old textbooks, right?)
This is what site certificates are intended to be. The problem is that (some of) the root certificate authorities will issue a certificate to anyone with sufficient cash in hand. To make the certificate system useful again requires two changes to the way things are done.
.pk7 or something, I can't remember) and have the browser ask for a friendly name for it (e.g. "My bank"). While it's fine to keep using the root CAs installed in the browsers out there; sites signed by the root CAs, however, should not be presented as authentic; the user should have the option of identifying a site's certificate with a friendly name, perhaps, but until the user has identified it it must remain at least partly suspect.
First, the user must have the secure site's public certificate installed in his/her browser. This can be achieved by providing it to the user on physical media (e.g. a CD or USB key). Furthermore, each user can be issued his/her own certificate for use as part of the authentication process. This is both cheaper and easier than the RSA SecurID that some banks are providing to some (their biggest and best) customers. That's the easy part.
The second and much harder part is providing a user interface such that whenever the user opens an URL from a mail client (or IM client, or any other non-browser I suppose) the user is either told "This is your bank" or "This is an insecure site" or "This is a secure site but not one you know." This message should be prominently visible in the browser window, not merely a dialog that can be trivially dismissed.
Both parts require changes to all browsers (including and especially IE6/7), particularly if there is any hope of making it cross-platform. Right now, installing a certificate in a browser is a task that requires more user sophistication, if only to discern when one should or should not install a certificate, than can be expected of your average user.
A user should be able to double-click on a file with the right extension (.pks or
Oh, and incidentally, the "thus and such is wrong with the site's certificate. Proceed?" dialogs are completely useless.
Yeah, certifications mean nothing to people who know anything about the craft of software engineering. That right there tells you why you'd bother getting them. I've just started with a consulting company, and they require their developers to get four certifications a year (and give a bonus for each one). It isn't because the certifications make the developers better, but because it makes them more marketable to potential clients who know neither jack nor shit about software. The only criteria those potential clients have to judge a consulting company on are 1) case studies of previous projects, and 2) arbitrary measures of skill like "90% of our developers hold MCSE certifications."
Forget for the moment that you know anything about software development. Forget that you give a damn about the differences between C#, Java, C, and Perl. Forget that you actually comprehend why an object-oriented programming paradigm benefits certain kinds of software projects. You're just a guy at some company who has a business or even liberal arts degree, who understands just enough about computers to expect email to be sent and received by Outlook, and who has been tasked with replacing/upgrading some mission-critical software system by the end of the fiscal year. How do you judge who should do the work? You know all the computers at work run Microsoft [sic]. You are told by these consulting companies who are bidding on your project that the M in MCSE stands for Microsoft. You figure that's got to be good, so the company with the most MCSE thud factor sounds the best, especially if their bid is near the lowest.
That's how business is conducted in the real world. This also applies to hiring developers internally. I refer you to Paul Graham's essay on how it takes a good hacker to know a good hacker. For those unfortunate companies who do not have good hackers in their employ to judge the quality of potential developer employees/contractors, the certifications are the next best thing (however sad that may be).
I don't have any certifications at the moment, but I expect to have an MCSE within a year or so. I need to know the material so I can do my job, and that will come by actually doing it. I also need to know the material well enough to pass the tests, and for that I recommend hitting the library. I'll be damned if I'm going to buy books for this crap if I can possibly avoid it. My colleagues at this company recommend the Exam Cram series, but I found MCAD/MCSD Self-Paced Training books (from Microsoft Press) at my library, so that's what I'm using.
If I'm reading between the lines correctly, the boss you refer to is pretty near the top of the company and there isn't much in the way of an HR department. Policy is probably in short supply, and you may not even have a real contract. If any of this is accurate, you should consult with a lawyer (which does not necessarily mean hiring one; try to get a free consultation).
Really, there are two issues: your reputation and money you are/will be owed. Given that you already have a job to go to, your reputation is pretty safe as long as you behave well. That means staying through the time you committed to staying when you gave notice. You will have to balance the money you will lose by forfeiting your last paycheck against the time and money it would cost you to deal with it legally. That consultation with a lawyer will help with determining that.
I've been waiting for this for, literally, years. I kept hearing that it was coming, then wasn't, then was, then wasn't. Very frustrating. Since I'd heard it was coming early on I'd put all my information on it, but some stuff I could only bring to it by hand (e.g. my list of friends' birthdays that I'd imported into iCal), and everything on it I could only get off by hand. For that matter, I'll be moving soon and intend to get a nextgen HipTop (not sure if I'll wait for the one that should come out some time this year, if they keep to their release-every-year schedule) cheap by taking advantage of a new activation and a new number, but I need to take my info with me. At long last, I can.
I guess I'm happy, but it might just be relief from years of frustration.
So I discovered something really nice in Win2K (and probably earlier versions, too). You can put the contents of a folder in the taskbar. In fact, on of the default toolbars you can display from the contextual menu is the contents of your Links folder (%USERPROFILE%\Favorites\Links). That alone is pretty useless, but folder shortcuts make it useful. You see, when you click on a normal shortcut to a folder in a folder toolbar, it just opens the folder. If it's a folder shortcut, however, it gives a menu with the contents of the folder (and submenus for subfolders, etc.).
1 87-B532F1E9575D}
First, you have to realize that folder shortcuts are a horrible, crackheaded hack. There are also some gotchas with copying, moving, or deleting them that are better covered elsewhere. With that understanding, here's how you make one. A folder shortcut is nothing but an ordinary folder that contains an ordinary shortcut named target.lnk, a Desktop.ini file with appropriate contents, and has been made read-only. To make a folder shortcut:
1) Create a folder with the name you want the folder shortcut to have, and in the folder you want it to be in. (It's safer not to have to move or rename it later.)
2) Create a shortcut to the target folder, name it target.lnk, and place it in the folder-shortcut-to-be.
3) Create a Desktop.ini file in the folder-shortcut-to-be with the following lines:
[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID2={0AFACED1-E828-11D1-9
Flags=2
ConfirmFileOp=0
4) Open the properties for the folder-shortcut-to-be, make it read-only, and hit Okay.
If you open the properties again, you will see that it is a folder shortcut. You may need to logout and log back in, or even reboot, to have it show up properly in the taskbar.
Who said anything about OSX? I figured on loading Debian on it.
You can't just ask what RAID solution to use; you need to specify your optimization criteria. For example, if you are going for inexpensive, high capacity, and good redundancy but don't care about hotswapping, you can go with a reasonably cheap PATA or SATA hardware RAID. If you are willing to skip high capacity you can get an external SCSI SCA rack, an inexpensive SCSI card, and a bunch of small SCSI SCA drives. If you want high capacity and high performance without too much cost, get a bunch of large PATA drives, a similar number of FireWire or USB 2.0 (or both) enclosures, as many FireWire or USB 2.0 interface cards as necessary, and do it that way (which also gives you hotswap). If you are willing to spend lots and lots of money, get a Network Appliance server.
Personally, I'm not worried about performance beyond being able to play full-motion video. I have a PPC 604 180MHz from 1997 with a SCSI card and a RAID rack. 8x18GB at RAID 5 gives me 118GB or so of redundant storage, and I serve it over NFS to my other machines. Just for kicks, I have it going through a cryptoloop, too (LVM on cryptoloop on Linux RAID5 on SCSI). The initial cost was low (the drives were $15 each, the rack was around $100 on eBay, the trays were given to me, the SCSI card was under $40 on eBay, the 100Mbit ethernet card was about $20, and the computer had been a doorstop until I put Linux on it). The ongoing (electricity and cooling) costs are a little high (they are 10K drives), but that's life. I can play an MPEG or AVI from two machines on the network at once without hiccups, so I'm happy.
If I were going to build a RAID server today, I'd probably buy a Mac Mini, four large PATA drives, and four FireWire enclosures. Assuming 160GB drives, I'd have 320GB of RAID5 storage available over NFS (with a spare drive to swap in) for an investment of under $1200, and I can vary that cost with the size and number of drives. Yes, I'd be daisy-chaining FireWire, which means that each drive has only a portion of the total bandwidth. Then again, my network card will only manage 100MBit, so 3/4 of the FireWire bandwidth will be of minimal use anyway (except for reducing latency due to readahead and such, of course).
This is really a matter of low-hanging fruit (I hope). If Congress can come to a reasonable decision with sufficient support to vote it into law in a reasonable amount of time, why should all the other problems that they can't agree on block it? Sure, all those things are (or should be) higher priority, but they also involve months or years of knock-down, drag-out fights. If nothing else can be considered until the high priority, high controversy items are dealt with, nothing else gets done. (Discussions of the virtues of King Log will be gleefully ignored.)
The main thing that's missing with a SuSE install as compared to a Debian install is more than just apt. It's much more a matter of the strict adherence to Debian packaging policy and the hundreds and hundreds of Debian developers who do. There is a tremendous amount of software in the Debian repository, and I can install any of it with near 100% confidence that it will not make unexpected problems for other parts of my system. It isn't something that can be handled by a piece of software, it's a human management issue.
[SuSE Yast]
Nice! I will look into it. Of course, I still want all the other good things that Debian has and SuSE does not, but I might simply fork Yast (it's GPL'd nowadays, isn't it) to make it just a service management tool for Debian.