"Job satisfaction" is sometimes a big deal for white collar types. It mostly is irrelevant for the other 99.999% of the workforce. I happen to enjoy my job right now, even though I have misgivings about some things my company is doing. OTOH, two days after the WTC incident, the company donated $100,000 to the rescue efforts. I liked that.
I have had some really lousy jobs, working for and with scum-sucking pigs. That helps me keep things in perspective, when I start to get into that "poor poor pitiful me" mode that always initiates the "job satisfaction" debate.
People who say, "oh, just go get another job" are likely either ignorant or fools. Most jobs are going to have some unpleasantness. Some things are intolerable: bigotry, dishonesty, sexism. Yes, you have to realize that most places of employment are going to include those items. You may have to shop for a long time before you find one that doesn't -- if ever.
In the end, you have to determine what combination of pleasantness and unpleasantness suits you best. A good deal of the atmosphere of a job depends on how you approach it. I have a coworker who grumbles a lot, who is rabidly anti-MS (we are pretty much a MS shop), and who can be a real "nattering nabob of negativity" sometimes. He's not doing himself or us a favor by staying in a position he obviously doesn't like. It's important to look at the impact your own behavior has on the atmosphere at work. If you find yourself being nominated "Mr. Negativity," it's probably time to get out -- or do a 180 in attitude.
On being told by a manager that I had a bad attitude, I once said, "I don't change attitude, I change jobs." That's not necessarily the way to get yourself into a job you really want to keep.
Do you call that sentance a slap on the wrist. Thats a rediculous statement. That sentance if overly harsh at best. 8 months in what is basically Jail for teenagers, and 1 year probation? Thats a pretty harsh sentance. Things like this dont make retribution for what hackers did, and in the case of teenagers like Mafiaboy, they only hurt the potential of what a smart young computer nerd could end up becoming, because he was thrown in jail. I personally think all hackers should only be on probation (WITH computer access), or in country club prisons, or forced to work for the government or something of that nature. To incarcirate a hacker is stupid, and puts them in the same ranks as murderers and drug dealers.
Well, perhaps while attending school there, he will learn to spell correctly and to write grammatical sentences. These skills will undoubtedly be beneficial to him when he enters the job market. You can probably testify to that.
When Israelis kill Palestinian women and babies, Americans are silent. When American-trained Argentinian death squads were dropping "communists" out of airplanes to "disappear" them, Americans were silent. When the US gov't fought to prevent free AIDS drugs from being given to South Africans, Americans were silent. When Christians were slaughtering Muslims in Croatia and Bosnia, Americans were silent. When Irish Americans were funding the IRA bombings, Americans were silent. When the US gov't was supporting Batista, Somoza and Noriega, Americans were silent. When the US gov't was funding the Contra murders of innocent villagers, Americans were silent. When the US gov't engineered the murder of Allende, Americans were silent. When the US gov't turned away shiploads of Jews fleeing Hitler's Final Solution, Americans were silent.
Now, the pain of the rest of the world has come to us, and there's a great outcry. All around the world, ordinary, innocent people are living everyday with events such as we have just experienced -- events frequently paid for with American money and carried out with American weapons. Are we somehow so special, that we should inflict and allow to be inflicted, so much misery and death on the rest of the world, and bear none of our own?
Perhaps, some dead men have answered that question already.
The advantage computers have in chess is pure computational power and the reason they do so well in real tournaments is because they have minutes to process for each move. Speed chess games, that take a maximum of 6 minutes (3 minutes for each player) are not the strong point of any respectible computer chess program.
This is backwards. It's much more difficult to beat a computer at speed chess than it is in a game at tournament time control. The reason is simple: the computer can analyze at a rate orders of magnitude more quickly than the human player. It's not uncommon for a computer in a 5-minute game to blitz off 20 moves in under a minute, something very difficult for the human player to do (just the mechanics of moving the piece are a significant time factor). The human player's slower thought process frequently will guarantee a loss on time even if he stays in the game.
Computers don't do nearly as well in tournaments at standard time controls as they do at short time controls. The reasons are two: at the longer time control, the human doesn't give up the computational advantage -- her imagination can come into play; and the human can play a positional game, something at which almost all present chess computers still pretty much suck.
Surely, the cost of life-saving medications should not be prohibitive. And dozens of ridiculous patent disputes cannot be good for any industry. But without some means of recouping the often crippling cost of development (for example, 1000s of drugs begin the development process and only a handful make it to the consumer) what incentive is there to investigate new ideas?
Er, I would like to point out that (1) pharmaceutical companies spend more money on advertising than they do on R (2) they get huge tax breaks on R&D investments; (3) they are among the most profitable companies in the world; (4) they farm out research to universities, who do the grunt work and turn over the patents; (5) some research is gov't funded. The "we have to make up for the developmental failures" argument is pure eyewash. One drug like paxel can underwrite the entire R&D budget of a company. That makes everything else candy.
First of all, this email and the ensuing fracas are old news. If they haven't already been covered on slashdot, then that just shows that people here are behind the curve. It's been gummed to death in numerous other places.
Second, eEye already pointed out that the author of the email actually knew nothing about the issue, as the exploit had been used months before they posted their description.
Here's part of a response to that email, from an employee of eEye:
Lets get the facts straight. CodeRed is based off of another worm that was written for a.htr ISAPI buffer overflow. CodeRed is an almost identical copy of the.htr worm. A worm which was released back in April. A worm which exploited an UNPUBLISHED vulnerability within IIS which was silently patched by Microsoft without notification to anyone. Therefore IDS vendors never had a signature and the.htr worm went unnoticed. To bad a security company had not found the flaw, then there would have been details, signatures made, and IDS systems would have detected the first instance of CodeRed back in April.
Okay, so the guy who wrote the letter blaming eEye was a fool, who spouted off without possession of any facts in the case. But, it looks like he has a lot of company on slashdot. Maybe, they ought to rename the site 'slashdork.'
should get full disclosure.. In the case of windows MS, in the case of Linux the community. Doesn't it make sense that if you can't fix it it's only a liability to know all of the details anyway
Why do you assume that eEye was the only group of people on the entire planet that found (or would find) this vulnerability?
Please cite one example where large scale government intrusion in the form of regulation has helped any market.
The interstate highway system, the time system (i.e., time zones), air traffic, medical and scientific research. Do you even realize that almost all the research that subsumes the "internet" was done on government money? Duh!
You actually think we'd all be better off if all email was handled by Exchange Server (product of entrepreneurial "innovation") instead of by sendmail (produced on the gov't dime)! You are on the wrong web site, buddy!
While I can't cite the existance of a totally free market, because like everything else in the real world we deal in shades of grey I can cite many markets that should have been free that have been completely destroyed by government regulation. Example, Phone service, Electricity Generation, Cable TV, Railroad, etc.
Well, then you don't have an argument, you have idle speculation. Your statements are functionally equivalent to the statement, "I believe in God, and therefore he exists."
If the market is really deregulated tehn buying all the polititians in Washington won't do a thing for them sore of regulating th market again. This is exactly why as long as we have government subsidies, preferences, low interst loans, etc. we will not have the benfits of a free market.
I would like you to point out one example in the history of the world where this "free market" existed. Prove by empirical example that your claim is true.
If you don't have a real world example to demonstrate (and I know you don't), then your statements are nothing more than idle speculation.
I installed yet another Debian 2.2r3 box yesterday, the fifth in this room alone. Procedure: put the first CD in the CD drive, boot, answer a few on-screen questions, change CDs when prompted, job done. All distros are getting slicker, all installs are getting easier. Likewise, all package management systems are getting better.
I'd have to call this a gross exaggeration. My last experience with installing Debian was with Potato when it first came out, and it was nothing like the above. It was more than "a few questions" to begin with and I ended up with a non-functional network due to Debian's inability to correctly set up both NICs in the machine. It would set up one or the other, but not both (3c905c, if you must know). This is not rocket science.
How anyone can consider dselect "sophisticated package management" absolutely snows me. Whatever you're smoking -- share.
There are too many screwy things about Debian for it to be a good "starter" linux. For example, the default emacs installation is -- wait for it -- version 19.34!!! It's five years old & completely outdated!! Duh! Fire up your Gnome desktop (your only choice OOB) and try to access the internet. Surprise, no graphical browser. As I recall, in Potato, there actually is a "netscape" icon but it points nowhere.
No thanks. Slackware buries Debian in easy of installation and use. As for "package management," this not-so-grizzled user gets along fine with./configure, make and make install.
They also targeted deep blue to specifically beat Kasparov by analising all of his previous games (such that deep blue was more effective against Kasparov than other players, though it would still be extremely difficult (understatement) to beat). I think he actually complained about it because he didnt have any information on how deep blue played but deep blue had information on him
Two things caused Kasparov to lose that match. One, he was cocky. He'd already beaten the machine in a previous match. He didn't start training for the match until 10 days prior -- a typical training period for a normal match would be several months. Two, he was sandbagged. An integral part of training for a match is to study all available games of the opponent. This enables the match player to learn the techniques and weaknesses of the opposing player. The IBM team consistently refused to make available to him the games of the Deep Blue, despite his repeated requests. They did this because they knew that with in depth knowledge of how their machine played, he would be able to beat it. At the same time, they hired several Grandmasters to analyze the games of Kasparov and coded the results of that analysis into the play of Deep Blue.
Also, let me note in passing that in one game, Kasparov lost by playing a horrible blunder that is well-known in chess literature and written up in numerous beginning chess opening books. In other games, he also played suboptimally, in ways that suggested at the time that he simply suffered from lack of preparation. The general agreement among top players at the time was that Deep Blue did not win the match, Kasparov lost it through atypically inferior play.
Kramnik will not make these mistakes. He will win.
The computer was not his. He used it in an unauthorized manner.
Did he? Then, you must also think that personal web surfing at work is "unauthorized" and you never do it. Yeah, sure you don't. Just remember next time you're doing it, you are engaging in theft from your company and, according to your own theorizing, you can and should be sent to jail and fined for that theft.
Also, remember that your employer may choose to wait 2 years to prosecute you. Keep lookin' over your shoulder, bub.
Noone can pass off a version of your software as their own unless you explicitly allow them to, and the BSD license explicitly forbids it just as much as the GPL does.
It does no such thing. It states that the copyright notice in the code has to be preserved. Big deal, when it's a closed source project. Any company is free to take your BSD-licensed code, enclose it in a closed-source project and call it their own. That is explicitly allowed by the license and BSD license enthusiasts give this ability to pirate code as the main benefit of the BSD license. In practical terms, the BSD license is meaningless. It gives the author no useful rights regarding his code. The BSD license is a fig leaf for public domain code.
It seems to me that the critical issue that is going to come out of this choice of language is going to be the attitude of the student at end-of-term. My experience with OO zealots is that they simply wish to eliminate procedural and functional languages altogether -- from the curriculum and the marketplace. I've seen too many slugfests in comp.programming. OO enthusiasts are 'black-box' programmers -- they believe that you should know nothing about the underlying processes invoked by your language. The only knowledge they want you to have is the knowledge of how to manipulate 'objects' within the language framework. It often appears to me that in the perfect world of OOP, your only knowledge of the computer would be the location of the 'on' button and how to start your IDE.
That being so, my prediction would be that OO courses as a groundwork for programming would discourage students from pursuing the 'science' in 'computer science.' People say it's difficult to go from procedural to OO -- imagine going the other way! And more than one contributor to this discussion has stated outright that he/she does not want the programmer 'tainted' with the procedural paradigm. In other words, in the OO mindset, ignorance is the preferable state.
It seems to me that a lot of the push toward OO is based on the hidden premise that OO makes it possible for dumber people to be competent programmers. By straightjacketing the programmer, it not only 'frees' the programmer from issues like memory management and hardware manipulation, it 'frees' him or her from the necessity of thinking deeply about the processes he or she is invoking. I'm not saying that OO programmers are dumber than procedural programmers, I'm saying that most of the reasons given for preferring OO (such as above) in fact lead in exactly that direction.
From the standpoint of the market, this makes sense. Every business will be glad to pick up a programmer more cheaply. But, I don't think it makes sense in terms of the serious student who wants to become a programmer. Most individuals who become race car drivers start out with their heads under the hood, working on their own rods. They know cars inside and out. I think that is a good metaphor for the experience of mastering computer science (or any other discipline). You divide your time between cursing under the hood and grinning behind the wheel. Eventually, you wind up in control of the wheel and give off the cursing to someone else. Who, mayhap, will follow in your path.
I prefer Outlook Express to all other email clients I've tried, including Communicator (Netscape or Moz), KMail, Pine, Mutt, Eudora, Mulberry, Sylpheed, Kiltdown and probably another half dozen which I've forgotten the names of.
Why do I prefer Outlook Express? It's ONE app for mail and news. It's straightforward, has pretty damn good filtering (No I don't need regexps, thanks for asking), multiple POP, IMAP and NNTP accounts, works with LDAP, doesn't barf on attachments or HTML mail (ewww...), I've never had it crash out on me and it is pretty damn fast unless there's a 10M attachment. NO OTHER EMAIL APP WORKS AS WELL FOR ME. Get it? Got it? Good.
Oh well. You could do all that with emacs and have a real editor to work with besides. And, you could be doing other, real work, instead of farting around pointing and clicking on menus when two or three commands on the keyboard would have the job done.
Everybody has their own favorite or non-favorite email app. I will never, in all the time I'm on this earth, understand why people obsess with mousing around on menus. It is demonstrably NOT faster than using the keyboard to do the same job.
Like a lot of other people, I've used multiple clients and I have no doubt that the text-based clients are the fastest and easiest to use. You can't do anything with fatal OE that I can't do as well or better in emacs -- well, except produce HTML mail.
"Prior art" means prior to the time the patent was filed. If they filed for the patent before those games came into existence, or before they began using their present architecture, then the patent is enforceable.
So, you claim that without patents (which came into force a bare 200 years ago) there would be no scientific progress? Have you ever actually read a history book? How about a history of science? Obviously, not.
I suggest you read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a few other historical documents and then get back with us when you have some familiarity with the subject.
The "sad, sick thing" is that you put personal profit above intellectual honesty.
Just to enter a fact into the discussion (shocking, I know). In at least one country that I know of (Britain), a "tax" is added to the price of used books sold in shops. This tax is used to reimburse the authors of used books for the continuing sales. The notion that authors should be so compensated is not new (although, obviously it's quite new to the majority of readers of slashdot).
ObHumor: One of the books offered by the Guild as an example of a new book already being sold as used -- has already been remaindered! You can buy it off the web at a discount as a remaindered book! Whoops, reckon they need a fact-checker at the Guild.
The truth, of course, is that along with higher pay also comes more job security and less stress. The reason for this is because you don't get the big bucks unless you're good, and if you're good, you quickly become very difficult to replace without seriously setting back the product schedule.
Written by a guy without much experience in the corporate world.
I'm currently working a contract for Microsoft and I'm pretty far from being "chained to my desk". I've got my own office, I come and go as I please, I wear whatever I want, I'm "in the loop" as much as I care to be, and I make scads of money -- enough to remove about 90% of the stress from the rest of my life.
And you'll still be in the same position 10 years from now. That may well be okay for you. OTOH, seeing yourself bypassed by people with more ambition and more work ethic may irk you -- as you will be "sure" that you are so much more "skilled" than they are.
When the hard times come, who will be retained -- the arrogant 30-hr-a-week man or the 50-hr-a-week man who was always there when the company needed him. No contest. You'll be on the dole along with a million other "indespensible" slackers just like yourself.
Right, this is an important distinction. Barring people from actually making purchases of certain items might (or might not) be one thing, but barring them from simply viewing certain classes of items is dangerous.
Right, it's okay to view child porn or snuff films, as long as you don't buy them.
One other point that the article get's wrong is that PKZIP was never free in the early days, but shareware with a $49 registration.
Not exactly. PKzip was free to use. Registration was "encouraged" for private users and registration got you a printed manual. Registration for commercial entities was required.
At any rate, there's no doubt that PKZip was a great improvement over ARC and PAK and it was a very significant part of the BBS world.
Perhaps most significant about this story is that dollars earned and comfort of lifestyle are not an accurate measurement of "success." And I can't resist pointing out that alcohol is a drug -- you can die of an overdose of it just like you can die from an overdose of any other drug.
Slashdot Mirror
I have had some really lousy jobs, working for and with scum-sucking pigs. That helps me keep things in perspective, when I start to get into that "poor poor pitiful me" mode that always initiates the "job satisfaction" debate.
People who say, "oh, just go get another job" are likely either ignorant or fools. Most jobs are going to have some unpleasantness. Some things are intolerable: bigotry, dishonesty, sexism. Yes, you have to realize that most places of employment are going to include those items. You may have to shop for a long time before you find one that doesn't -- if ever.
In the end, you have to determine what combination of pleasantness and unpleasantness suits you best. A good deal of the atmosphere of a job depends on how you approach it. I have a coworker who grumbles a lot, who is rabidly anti-MS (we are pretty much a MS shop), and who can be a real "nattering nabob of negativity" sometimes. He's not doing himself or us a favor by staying in a position he obviously doesn't like. It's important to look at the impact your own behavior has on the atmosphere at work. If you find yourself being nominated "Mr. Negativity," it's probably time to get out -- or do a 180 in attitude.
On being told by a manager that I had a bad attitude, I once said, "I don't change attitude, I change jobs." That's not necessarily the way to get yourself into a job you really want to keep.
mp
Well, perhaps while attending school there, he will learn to spell correctly and to write grammatical sentences. These skills will undoubtedly be beneficial to him when he enters the job market. You can probably testify to that.
mp
Now, the pain of the rest of the world has come to us, and there's a great outcry. All around the world, ordinary, innocent people are living everyday with events such as we have just experienced -- events frequently paid for with American money and carried out with American weapons. Are we somehow so special, that we should inflict and allow to be inflicted, so much misery and death on the rest of the world, and bear none of our own?
Perhaps, some dead men have answered that question already.
mp
This is backwards. It's much more difficult to beat a computer at speed chess than it is in a game at tournament time control. The reason is simple: the computer can analyze at a rate orders of magnitude more quickly than the human player. It's not uncommon for a computer in a 5-minute game to blitz off 20 moves in under a minute, something very difficult for the human player to do (just the mechanics of moving the piece are a significant time factor). The human player's slower thought process frequently will guarantee a loss on time even if he stays in the game.
Computers don't do nearly as well in tournaments at standard time controls as they do at short time controls. The reasons are two: at the longer time control, the human doesn't give up the computational advantage -- her imagination can come into play; and the human can play a positional game, something at which almost all present chess computers still pretty much suck.
mp
Er, I would like to point out that (1) pharmaceutical companies spend more money on advertising than they do on R (2) they get huge tax breaks on R&D investments; (3) they are among the most profitable companies in the world; (4) they farm out research to universities, who do the grunt work and turn over the patents; (5) some research is gov't funded. The "we have to make up for the developmental failures" argument is pure eyewash. One drug like paxel can underwrite the entire R&D budget of a company. That makes everything else candy.
mp
Thanks, I'm going to have to check that out. I never was that big a fan of the comics, but that is a great one-liner.
mp
Second, eEye already pointed out that the author of the email actually knew nothing about the issue, as the exploit had been used months before they posted their description.
Here's part of a response to that email, from an employee of eEye:
Lets get the facts straight. CodeRed is based off of another worm that was written for a .htr ISAPI buffer overflow. CodeRed is an almost identical copy of the .htr worm. A worm which was released back in April. A worm which exploited an UNPUBLISHED vulnerability within IIS which was silently patched by Microsoft without notification to anyone. Therefore IDS vendors never had a signature and the .htr worm went unnoticed. To bad a security company had not found the flaw, then there would have been details, signatures made, and IDS systems would have detected the first instance of CodeRed back in April.
Okay, so the guy who wrote the letter blaming eEye was a fool, who spouted off without possession of any facts in the case. But, it looks like he has a lot of company on slashdot. Maybe, they ought to rename the site 'slashdork.'
mp
I love this tag line, where did you get it?
mp
Why do you assume that eEye was the only group of people on the entire planet that found (or would find) this vulnerability?
mp
The interstate highway system, the time system (i.e., time zones), air traffic, medical and scientific research. Do you even realize that almost all the research that subsumes the "internet" was done on government money? Duh! You actually think we'd all be better off if all email was handled by Exchange Server (product of entrepreneurial "innovation") instead of by sendmail (produced on the gov't dime)! You are on the wrong web site, buddy!
While I can't cite the existance of a totally free market, because like everything else in the real world we deal in shades of grey I can cite many markets that should have been free that have been completely destroyed by government regulation. Example, Phone service, Electricity Generation, Cable TV, Railroad, etc.
Well, then you don't have an argument, you have idle speculation. Your statements are functionally equivalent to the statement, "I believe in God, and therefore he exists."
mp
I would like you to point out one example in the history of the world where this "free market" existed. Prove by empirical example that your claim is true.
If you don't have a real world example to demonstrate (and I know you don't), then your statements are nothing more than idle speculation.
mp
I'd have to call this a gross exaggeration. My last experience with installing Debian was with Potato when it first came out, and it was nothing like the above. It was more than "a few questions" to begin with and I ended up with a non-functional network due to Debian's inability to correctly set up both NICs in the machine. It would set up one or the other, but not both (3c905c, if you must know). This is not rocket science.
How anyone can consider dselect "sophisticated package management" absolutely snows me. Whatever you're smoking -- share.
There are too many screwy things about Debian for it to be a good "starter" linux. For example, the default emacs installation is -- wait for it -- version 19.34!!! It's five years old & completely outdated!! Duh! Fire up your Gnome desktop (your only choice OOB) and try to access the internet. Surprise, no graphical browser. As I recall, in Potato, there actually is a "netscape" icon but it points nowhere.
No thanks. Slackware buries Debian in easy of installation and use. As for "package management," this not-so-grizzled user gets along fine with ./configure, make and make install.
mp
Two things caused Kasparov to lose that match. One, he was cocky. He'd already beaten the machine in a previous match. He didn't start training for the match until 10 days prior -- a typical training period for a normal match would be several months. Two, he was sandbagged. An integral part of training for a match is to study all available games of the opponent. This enables the match player to learn the techniques and weaknesses of the opposing player. The IBM team consistently refused to make available to him the games of the Deep Blue, despite his repeated requests. They did this because they knew that with in depth knowledge of how their machine played, he would be able to beat it. At the same time, they hired several Grandmasters to analyze the games of Kasparov and coded the results of that analysis into the play of Deep Blue.
Also, let me note in passing that in one game, Kasparov lost by playing a horrible blunder that is well-known in chess literature and written up in numerous beginning chess opening books. In other games, he also played suboptimally, in ways that suggested at the time that he simply suffered from lack of preparation. The general agreement among top players at the time was that Deep Blue did not win the match, Kasparov lost it through atypically inferior play.
Kramnik will not make these mistakes. He will win.
mp
"Jaywalking. Fork in toaster. Unlicensed Business Software.
Don't Risk Being Targeted By the BSA
Take advantage of a free software consultation"
M$ is the sponsor.
They also are running another one that says The BSA is targeting Portland. Yikes!
mp
Did he? Then, you must also think that personal web surfing at work is "unauthorized" and you never do it. Yeah, sure you don't. Just remember next time you're doing it, you are engaging in theft from your company and, according to your own theorizing, you can and should be sent to jail and fined for that theft.
Also, remember that your employer may choose to wait 2 years to prosecute you. Keep lookin' over your shoulder, bub.
mp
alias setprompt 'set prompt="(`uname -sr`)[$cwd] %t\\
{\!} --> "'
alias cd 'chdir \!* ; setprompt'
setprompt
And my root shell is bash:
PS1="(`uname -sr`) [\u] [ \w] \n \! \$ --> "
mp
It does no such thing. It states that the copyright notice in the code has to be preserved. Big deal, when it's a closed source project. Any company is free to take your BSD-licensed code, enclose it in a closed-source project and call it their own. That is explicitly allowed by the license and BSD license enthusiasts give this ability to pirate code as the main benefit of the BSD license. In practical terms, the BSD license is meaningless. It gives the author no useful rights regarding his code. The BSD license is a fig leaf for public domain code.
mp
That being so, my prediction would be that OO courses as a groundwork for programming would discourage students from pursuing the 'science' in 'computer science.' People say it's difficult to go from procedural to OO -- imagine going the other way! And more than one contributor to this discussion has stated outright that he/she does not want the programmer 'tainted' with the procedural paradigm. In other words, in the OO mindset, ignorance is the preferable state.
It seems to me that a lot of the push toward OO is based on the hidden premise that OO makes it possible for dumber people to be competent programmers. By straightjacketing the programmer, it not only 'frees' the programmer from issues like memory management and hardware manipulation, it 'frees' him or her from the necessity of thinking deeply about the processes he or she is invoking. I'm not saying that OO programmers are dumber than procedural programmers, I'm saying that most of the reasons given for preferring OO (such as above) in fact lead in exactly that direction.
From the standpoint of the market, this makes sense. Every business will be glad to pick up a programmer more cheaply. But, I don't think it makes sense in terms of the serious student who wants to become a programmer. Most individuals who become race car drivers start out with their heads under the hood, working on their own rods. They know cars inside and out. I think that is a good metaphor for the experience of mastering computer science (or any other discipline). You divide your time between cursing under the hood and grinning behind the wheel. Eventually, you wind up in control of the wheel and give off the cursing to someone else. Who, mayhap, will follow in your path.
mp
Why do I prefer Outlook Express? It's ONE app for mail and news. It's straightforward, has pretty damn good filtering (No I don't need regexps, thanks for asking), multiple POP, IMAP and NNTP accounts, works with LDAP, doesn't barf on attachments or HTML mail (ewww...), I've never had it crash out on me and it is pretty damn fast unless there's a 10M attachment. NO OTHER EMAIL APP WORKS AS WELL FOR ME. Get it? Got it? Good.
Oh well. You could do all that with emacs and have a real editor to work with besides. And, you could be doing other, real work, instead of farting around pointing and clicking on menus when two or three commands on the keyboard would have the job done.
Everybody has their own favorite or non-favorite email app. I will never, in all the time I'm on this earth, understand why people obsess with mousing around on menus. It is demonstrably NOT faster than using the keyboard to do the same job.
Like a lot of other people, I've used multiple clients and I have no doubt that the text-based clients are the fastest and easiest to use. You can't do anything with fatal OE that I can't do as well or better in emacs -- well, except produce HTML mail.
mp
mp
I suggest you read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a few other historical documents and then get back with us when you have some familiarity with the subject.
The "sad, sick thing" is that you put personal profit above intellectual honesty.
mp
ObHumor: One of the books offered by the Guild as an example of a new book already being sold as used -- has already been remaindered! You can buy it off the web at a discount as a remaindered book! Whoops, reckon they need a fact-checker at the Guild.
mp
Written by a guy without much experience in the corporate world.
I'm currently working a contract for Microsoft and I'm pretty far from being "chained to my desk". I've got my own office, I come and go as I please, I wear whatever I want, I'm "in the loop" as much as I care to be, and I make scads of money -- enough to remove about 90% of the stress from the rest of my life.
And you'll still be in the same position 10 years from now. That may well be okay for you. OTOH, seeing yourself bypassed by people with more ambition and more work ethic may irk you -- as you will be "sure" that you are so much more "skilled" than they are.
When the hard times come, who will be retained -- the arrogant 30-hr-a-week man or the 50-hr-a-week man who was always there when the company needed him. No contest. You'll be on the dole along with a million other "indespensible" slackers just like yourself.
mp
Right, it's okay to view child porn or snuff films, as long as you don't buy them.
Not.
mp
Not exactly. PKzip was free to use. Registration was "encouraged" for private users and registration got you a printed manual. Registration for commercial entities was required.
At any rate, there's no doubt that PKZip was a great improvement over ARC and PAK and it was a very significant part of the BBS world.
Perhaps most significant about this story is that dollars earned and comfort of lifestyle are not an accurate measurement of "success." And I can't resist pointing out that alcohol is a drug -- you can die of an overdose of it just like you can die from an overdose of any other drug.
mp