I must say that I am profoundly and emotionally touched by your comments. Thank you for sharing your optimistic viewpoint, one which obviously spans several generations.
Research and teaching should be separated. That is, rather than maintain the current U.S. educational system, wherein universities do most of the research, we should move to a separate system:
Universities - teaching only,
Research institutes - research only.
Why do this?
Because the current system sub-optimizes both the researchers' and the teachers' time. Excellent researchers are busy instructing students rather than working in the lab; excellent teachers are writing grant proposals rather than focusing on the classroom.
Researchers as a group don't want to teach nor is teaching an optimal use of their time. The best teachers are usually not excellent researchers. The two fields are so different that it is uncommon to find an individual excellent in both.
Microsoft knows that IT managers, stuck in time, will continue to eagerly read their snail-mail "Visual Studio Weekly" or "Information Week" far beyond the point where they are at all useful. Keeping these IT managers (mis)informed is a key strategy in maintaining revenues from large lazy corporate IT divisions.
The "tech press" have long been the whoredogs of Microsoft and will remain so. Microsoft will continue to fund them well beyond the point that other sponsors have abandoned them.
In the end the only tech press remaining will be completely Microsoft-sponsored and a great big cash black hole. Only then will Microsoft drop funding. But we have at least 10 more years of a wholesome parasitic relationship before that happens. So let the games continue.
I'm amazoned that you could respond in a timely fashion! But even more amazoning is your experience:
Their resumes stated that a comfortable with C#, windows services, windows sockkets, remoting, message queuing, WMI, and other various components of a typical mid-to-high end enterprise system. When asking basic questions they often can't even answer the thoeretical. When asked to write code, they can't remember what to do. When looking at code and asked to either improve it or troubleshoot it, they don't know what to do.
Why so mystified? All of the above can be explained by the preceding sentence:
We're a.NET shop.
IOW what did you expect?.NET programmers today are the leftovers, the dregs; they are the VB6 developers who couldn't make the move to the WWW when it happened. Instead they sat on their collective asses crying "I don't understand the Internet!" until M$ gave them a GUI IDE that looked like VB6. Today they still don't get the Internet.
Anyone who was a good VB6 developer had already transitioned to the WWW with Microsoft's ASP and, when Microsoft abandoned that platform and VB6, the best of these developers went on to Java, Perl, and PHP. That's 3 million developers, please.
as part of a digital hardware design class. Never thought of patenting it! Got an A in the course though.
IBM's suit is based on the notion that running IBM OS software atop PSI hardware will damage IBM's reputation. But IBM has lost such suits before and will probably lose this one. They should bite the bullet and buy PSI's technology.
I'm glad someone is using the idea. But the surprise is that IBM (or someone!) didn't have patents on this long ago since, once you see the idea, it's so trivially easy and useful.
The recently-unclassified actions are minor in scope. They reveal only incidents that make the CIA appear sometimes clumsy, sometimes well-intentioned but misled. The point appears to be to make the CIA appear harmless and ineffectual.
Really juicy incidents, where obvious malfeasance and physical harm occurred and civil rights were grossly denied, likely won't be declassified in our lifetimes if ever. In many cases there are probably no records remaining whatsoever and the only remaining record is in the memories of those involved.
There's probably a job description in the CIA for "Permanent Eraser", a person whose task is to quietly ensure the quiet offing of those knowledgeable of highly clandestine operations. And a second job description for "Permanent Eraser Eraser", just to make sure.
Heck, 360 tons of cash went missing and the public did nothing about it.
As the referenced link clearly states, that was weight of $9 billion U.S. cash shipped into the Civilian Provisional Authority in 2003-2004.
Of the $9 billion, as of 2006 $3.6 billion was unaccounted for. Not that $3.6 billion isn't a hunka change, but the OP is obviously prone to exaggeration. His argument can hardly be worthy of a 5 rating, given his errors and his exaggerations.
Our local university has thousands of PCs freely available. They run XP/IE/MS Office exclusively for desktops. The systems are "locked down".
My readings on/. would indicate that maintaining such a network would be hell but that apparently is not so. IOW I believe that the perception (of many Linux users et al) that Windows/IE is impossible to maintain must therefore be mistaken.
Now I don't want to admit that, I don't like to admit that but the fact was staring me in the face yesterday as I once again stood in the university library and watched hundreds surfing the web apparently untroubled. When I ask technical support people at the university if they have ever have serious problems (with worms, viruses, etc.) they respond in the negative.
Is there any other way to resolve the disparity between what I see at the universities in this area and what I hear from Linux users and/.'ers?
You should know better than to equate hacking skill with programming skill. There are people who can run circles around me with assembly. I couldn't even begin to understand 1/2 the entries in the IOCCC, let alone write one.
OK, point taken. You're not a good assembler programmer.
But I still write better code than most of those people.
Ummm, aren't you missing some logic here? What is it about the fact that you can't code assembler well that makes you a better programmer than someone (whom, by the way, you know nothing about) who writes assembler extremely well? And how do you know how well assembler programmers document their code? The assembler I've seen (and that's a lot) has had excellent documentation.
Good code is code that is well documented, easy to understand, easy to verify, and easy to maintain.
True, but irrelevant if it doesn't work. Furthermore most assembler code must necessarily be memory and time efficient. So you won't get the job.
I'm sure your father can do amazing things with code. But he doesn't sound like the kind of person I would ever hire to work on a real system.
Sounds like you're applying, not hiring!
But I'd hire a former commercial pilot over a jackass who idly denigrates other highly-skilled programmers anyday. Hell, I might even hire the commercial pilot if he couldn't program at all! Long term he'd be more useful and less likely to come up with such horseshit so early on a Monday morning.
Look at yourself. You're jealous because someone described his father as a "70 year old x86 assembler hack" and here you're doing everything but applying for a job. You're obviously very, very unhappy with your life.
ight behind me were Indian's and Chinese. Why was that? Because they worked at it. When I was studying, so were they. I routinely saw American's cheating at their exams
When I did my undergrad work in CS, all the Chinese and Indian students cheated. They were very open and organized about it. They would split up individual projects, each do a part and then integrate it. I did all my assignments myself since I actually enjoyed CS and coding.
Problem was, usually one or more in a group wouldn't do their part or would go to another person in another group to get his part and therefore wouldn't understand what was presented as "his" code. So their integration sessions were a nightmare with one or two students spending the last two days in the computer lab. While this may be excellent preparation for the real world, it does nothing for learning CS.
After project completion, each student in a group would get a copy of the same code and was to randomly modify variable names and code so the plagiarism wasn't too obvious. Some were too lazy/stupid and got themselves and at least one other person kicked out of the class.
My college roommate was Indian. He said that, of his entire class, only one person in each class did the assignments; the others copied his answers. He said this is routine at Indian universities. The instructors are afraid to fail students because their parents are too well-connected politically. Fail a politician's son and you lose your professorship.
We aren't paying those people any less than their US counterparts, we are bringing them over simply because we can't find people with the specialized skills we need in the US.
No one in the US with those skills? Why don't I believe you?
it means that the remaining person has to work remotely for at least a year (and therefore their taxes go to a foreign government), and its a PITA for us and them. Who wins here?
Obviously you do. Otherwise you would hire a US citizen to do the work!
Is there a limit to this idea? In a hospital should doctors, nurses, and other staff members be armed? [snipped silly list of possible gun possessors] Taken to an extreme it seems ludicrous. So just where does it stop?
Simple: when anyone of legal age who wants one has one. If you don't want one or don't want to carry one, then nobody will force you to carry one.
To me it makes sense for nobody to have guns, except police and the like.
Except that cannot happen.
You cannot name a major single city or country where a person cannot fairly easily obtain a gun and ammunition. Not one! You can _talk_ about theory until you're blue in the face, but Britain, Canada, Japan, Russia (every country) still have shootings. Get my drift?
And why, if the populace is unarmed, should police have guns? IIRC most of Britain's police don't carry firearms.
Can police be trusted with guns? Statistics show police are less accurate than civilians in shootouts and harm more bystanders than civilians.
And police can often be very liberal in their use of firearms, since almost no jury will convict a police officer of shooting a civilian.
Most importantly, police cannot protect you from criminals. They are usually not present when crimes are committed.
Furthermore, the courts have held that police are not legally liable if they do not protect you from crime and that the police and government are immune from lawsuits stemming from police failure to interdict crime.
The only ones whom you can trust to protect you are yourself and your family and friends.
I've had a 7-year credit freeze for more than 5 years. This isn't something new - it's always been available to someone whose identity has been stolen.
What happens when the Mexican immigrant crosses the road? Getting sucked into a hiway turbine is only slightly less romantic than getting sucked into an airplane jet engine. Anyone considered the safety of these things to (granted, illegal) pedestrians?
Near the Mexican border they have yellow road warning signs depicting a migrant family (father, mother, child) holding hands and running across the road. While the signs are humorous they were also an excellent warning for drivers unfamiliar to those parts.
Perhaps for New Jersey a yellow road warning sign depicting a giant meat grinder with two legs dangling out of the top?
"Vitamin D deficiency can be treated easily by giving the patient an oral dose of 50,000 IU of vitamin D once a week for 8 weeks.16 Long-term prevention of vitamin D deficiency can be accomplished by giving 50,000 IU of vitamin D once or twice a month."
But this seems an astonishing dose: I have a bottle of Vitamin D, 400 IU per pill. I would have to take the entire bottle for a single dose as prescribed above!
Is this correct? If so, the daily requirement for vitamin D seems far too low.
Even cod liver oil has 400 IU of vitamin D per teaspoon. Again, half a bottle of cod liver oil would meet the above requirement of 50,000 IU!
It would seem that, very much as you state, it would be difficult to overdose on D(even _with_ cod liver oil or prescription-strength supplements).
Thank you very much for providing this information. I am due for an appointment re osteopenia, suffer generalized skeletal pain even though I workout regularly and I will ask my doctor to prescribe a vitamin D supplement.
Microsoft (and Borland and others) have been writing far superior development tools for the past ten years that actually increase developer productivity and having great success at it
And every 4 years they toss out the old tools and create another toolset that is incompatible.
Slashdot Mirror
I must say that I am profoundly and emotionally touched by your comments. Thank you for sharing your optimistic viewpoint, one which obviously spans several generations.
Why do this?
Because the current system sub-optimizes both the researchers' and the teachers' time. Excellent researchers are busy instructing students rather than working in the lab; excellent teachers are writing grant proposals rather than focusing on the classroom.
Researchers as a group don't want to teach nor is teaching an optimal use of their time. The best teachers are usually not excellent researchers. The two fields are so different that it is uncommon to find an individual excellent in both.
should be
I say "Good riddance!"
Microsoft knows that IT managers, stuck in time, will continue to eagerly read their snail-mail "Visual Studio Weekly" or "Information Week" far beyond the point where they are at all useful. Keeping these IT managers (mis)informed is a key strategy in maintaining revenues from large lazy corporate IT divisions.
The "tech press" have long been the whoredogs of Microsoft and will remain so. Microsoft will continue to fund them well beyond the point that other sponsors have abandoned them.
In the end the only tech press remaining will be completely Microsoft-sponsored and a great big cash black hole. Only then will Microsoft drop funding. But we have at least 10 more years of a wholesome parasitic relationship before that happens. So let the games continue.
I'm amazoned that you could respond in a timely fashion! But even more amazoning is your experience:
Why so mystified? All of the above can be explained by the preceding sentence:
IOW what did you expect?
Anyone who was a good VB6 developer had already transitioned to the WWW with Microsoft's ASP and, when Microsoft abandoned that platform and VB6, the best of these developers went on to Java, Perl, and PHP. That's 3 million developers, please.
You were scraping the bottom of an empty barrel.
as part of a digital hardware design class. Never thought of patenting it! Got an A in the course though.
IBM's suit is based on the notion that running IBM OS software atop PSI hardware will damage IBM's reputation. But IBM has lost such suits before and will probably lose this one. They should bite the bullet and buy PSI's technology.
I'm glad someone is using the idea. But the surprise is that IBM (or someone!) didn't have patents on this long ago since, once you see the idea, it's so trivially easy and useful.
The recently-unclassified actions are minor in scope. They reveal only incidents that make the CIA appear sometimes clumsy, sometimes well-intentioned but misled. The point appears to be to make the CIA appear harmless and ineffectual.
Really juicy incidents, where obvious malfeasance and physical harm occurred and civil rights were grossly denied, likely won't be declassified in our lifetimes if ever. In many cases there are probably no records remaining whatsoever and the only remaining record is in the memories of those involved.
There's probably a job description in the CIA for "Permanent Eraser", a person whose task is to quietly ensure the quiet offing of those knowledgeable of highly clandestine operations. And a second job description for "Permanent Eraser Eraser", just to make sure.
As the referenced link clearly states, that was weight of $9 billion U.S. cash shipped into the Civilian Provisional Authority in 2003-2004.
Of the $9 billion, as of 2006 $3.6 billion was unaccounted for. Not that $3.6 billion isn't a hunka change, but the OP is obviously prone to exaggeration. His argument can hardly be worthy of a 5 rating, given his errors and his exaggerations.
I wrote a simple web server in Perl that runs locally. Works fine.
Why would I do such a thing?
BECAUSE I CAN! BWAHAHAHAAAAHHH!8-))
Cringely will (finally) no longer exist and the universe will be at peace.
still be a jobs program employing thousands of physicists.
Our local university has thousands of PCs freely available. They run XP/IE/MS Office exclusively for desktops. The systems are "locked down".
/. would indicate that maintaining such a network would be hell but that apparently is not so. IOW I believe that the perception (of many Linux users et al) that Windows/IE is impossible to maintain must therefore be mistaken .
/.'ers?
My readings on
Now I don't want to admit that, I don't like to admit that but the fact was staring me in the face yesterday as I once again stood in the university library and watched hundreds surfing the web apparently untroubled. When I ask technical support people at the university if they have ever have serious problems (with worms, viruses, etc.) they respond in the negative.
Is there any other way to resolve the disparity between what I see at the universities in this area and what I hear from Linux users and
OK, point taken. You're not a good assembler programmer.
Ummm, aren't you missing some logic here? What is it about the fact that you can't code assembler well that makes you a better programmer than someone (whom, by the way, you know nothing about) who writes assembler extremely well? And how do you know how well assembler programmers document their code? The assembler I've seen (and that's a lot) has had excellent documentation.
True, but irrelevant if it doesn't work. Furthermore most assembler code must necessarily be memory and time efficient. So you won't get the job.
Sounds like you're applying, not hiring!
But I'd hire a former commercial pilot over a jackass who idly denigrates other highly-skilled programmers anyday. Hell, I might even hire the commercial pilot if he couldn't program at all! Long term he'd be more useful and less likely to come up with such horseshit so early on a Monday morning.
Look at yourself. You're jealous because someone described his father as a "70 year old x86 assembler hack" and here you're doing everything but applying for a job. You're obviously very, very unhappy with your life.
When I did my undergrad work in CS, all the Chinese and Indian students cheated. They were very open and organized about it. They would split up individual projects, each do a part and then integrate it. I did all my assignments myself since I actually enjoyed CS and coding.
Problem was, usually one or more in a group wouldn't do their part or would go to another person in another group to get his part and therefore wouldn't understand what was presented as "his" code. So their integration sessions were a nightmare with one or two students spending the last two days in the computer lab. While this may be excellent preparation for the real world, it does nothing for learning CS.
After project completion, each student in a group would get a copy of the same code and was to randomly modify variable names and code so the plagiarism wasn't too obvious. Some were too lazy/stupid and got themselves and at least one other person kicked out of the class.
My college roommate was Indian. He said that, of his entire class, only one person in each class did the assignments; the others copied his answers. He said this is routine at Indian universities. The instructors are afraid to fail students because their parents are too well-connected politically. Fail a politician's son and you lose your professorship.
No one in the US with those skills? Why don't I believe you?
Obviously you do. Otherwise you would hire a US citizen to do the work!
Guess who, penrodyn!-))
/. and get back to work or you'll be on the next boat to Bangalore.
Now quit posting to
Simple: when anyone of legal age who wants one has one. If you don't want one or don't want to carry one, then nobody will force you to carry one.
Except that cannot happen.
You cannot name a major single city or country where a person cannot fairly easily obtain a gun and ammunition. Not one! You can _talk_ about theory until you're blue in the face, but Britain, Canada, Japan, Russia (every country) still have shootings. Get my drift?
And why, if the populace is unarmed, should police have guns? IIRC most of Britain's police don't carry firearms.
Can police be trusted with guns? Statistics show police are less accurate than civilians in shootouts and harm more bystanders than civilians.
And police can often be very liberal in their use of firearms, since almost no jury will convict a police officer of shooting a civilian.
Most importantly, police cannot protect you from criminals. They are usually not present when crimes are committed.
Furthermore, the courts have held that police are not legally liable if they do not protect you from crime and that the police and government are immune from lawsuits stemming from police failure to interdict crime.
The only ones whom you can trust to protect you are yourself and your family and friends.
to do this to a web page or paragraph, please. So I can trigger and reformat a web page. Maybe a dynamic CSS + JavaScript would do it?
Doesn't look too hard to get close to their model.
'Cuz that's all the Windows I got!8-))
I've had a 7-year credit freeze for more than 5 years. This isn't something new - it's always been available to someone whose identity has been stolen.
What happens when the Mexican immigrant crosses the road? Getting sucked into a hiway turbine is only slightly less romantic than getting sucked into an airplane jet engine. Anyone considered the safety of these things to (granted, illegal) pedestrians?
Near the Mexican border they have yellow road warning signs depicting a migrant family (father, mother, child) holding hands and running across the road. While the signs are humorous they were also an excellent warning for drivers unfamiliar to those parts.
Perhaps for New Jersey a yellow road warning sign depicting a giant meat grinder with two legs dangling out of the top?
But this seems an astonishing dose: I have a bottle of Vitamin D, 400 IU per pill. I would have to take the entire bottle for a single dose as prescribed above!
Is this correct? If so, the daily requirement for vitamin D seems far too low.
Even cod liver oil has 400 IU of vitamin D per teaspoon. Again, half a bottle of cod liver oil would meet the above requirement of 50,000 IU!
It would seem that, very much as you state, it would be difficult to overdose on D(even _with_ cod liver oil or prescription-strength supplements).
Thank you very much for providing this information. I am due for an appointment re osteopenia, suffer generalized skeletal pain even though I workout regularly and I will ask my doctor to prescribe a vitamin D supplement.
And every 4 years they toss out the old tools and create another toolset that is incompatible.