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Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
~ Eric S. Raymond (American programmer, open source software advocate, author of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”)
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Absolutely true. However if you have the talent, the education brings it out.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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I understand the technical achievement that this represents, but I have one question... Why?
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde
Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
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Because he/she is 19 and "can" 
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. — Lyall Watson
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Six months after its release, Windows 10 has finally passed 10 percent market share. Which of course means this must be The Year of Linux!
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All the figures shown are based on web-pages being hit. What about the many thousands (perhaps millions) of PCs that don't ever touch web-pages; those that are within the corporate and governmental environments and are update via local IT over internal networks? I suspect the Linux and Mac percentages would dwindle to insignificance and Windows 10 would, probably by definition since most updates are via the web at the moment, be less than 1%. Windows 95/98, XP, Vista are still alive and well in many places and Win7 is still the "greatest" unlike Win10 as this article tries to put it.
This is all true in my office environment where XP is used widely as a NAS and several earlier Windows' versions (but not ME) still are run occasionally (with no web activity) for various compatibility reasons.
Vista is still used as a browsing sandbox so some of the Vista web-hits come from that.
I came across a client using PS/2s running DOS 6.0 for some accounting software that still worked fine for them and drove their venerable HP MX80 and FX80 printers! It worked for them and they were only talking about changing because the PCs were breaking down and the installation disks were giving errors - and they were having trouble finding new ribbons for the printers!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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I would have thought PS/2s would be fossilized by now (like me, and other things of their generation). 
I agree that the numbers are skewed, ignoring internal-only machines, but I don't think there is a way of accurately surveying those. Also, the internal-only machines might also include some Linux boxen - industrial controllers and whatnot.
TTFN - Kent
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Yeah, actual PS/2s (model 55sx - 80486-based "compact" desktop) with a 1.44Mb floppy drive, 4MB of RAM and a 40MB HD. Amazing power! I remember having one of the first ones of these when I was working for a very large British airline (that shall remain nameless) based at Heathrow airport. Being the systems admin at that time, amongst other things such as senior developer, I had the huge 4MB memory version, 1MB or 2MB was standard back then. My current desktop struggles by with a measly 16GB!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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16GB?! Really?!! 
I'm trudging through with 128GB on my video-centric Mac OS X box. 
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Yay!
Decrease the belief in God, and you increase the numbers of those who wish to play at being God by being “society’s supervisors,” who deny the existence of divine standards, but are very serious about imposing their own standards on society.-Neal A. Maxwell
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Wall Street Journal, January 31: Cyberthieves Have a New Target: Children[^]:
When Axton Betz-Hamilton rented an apartment at 19, a utility company required her to pay a $100 deposit because her credit score was low. She was shocked to discover she had a history of canceled credit cards and actions against her by collection agencies, even though she had opened only one credit card and taken out federal student loans in her name, she says.
Theft of her identity at age 11 had saddled her with a credit score "in the second percentile of the whole nation," says Ms. Betz-Hamilton, now 34 and an assistant professor of consumer studies at Eastern Illinois University, where her research includes identity theft.
«In art as in science there is no delight without the detail ... Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all “general ideas” (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to another.» Vladimir Nabokov, commentary on translation of “Eugene Onegin.”
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Not only have a new target, the do have a lot of patience as well.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Stealing kids identities for financial fraud has been going on for decades. Just as with what happened to Axton, crooks like kids IDs because they can abuse them for many years without being caught by the victim; while you or I would probably notice our credit blowing up within a much shorter period of time.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Surfacegate. That’s the name that has been giving to an issue with Microsoft’s Surface tablets, many of which have been malfunctioning recently. Well, they've never done that in the past
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Ahem, their "most loyal customers" do not use Surface. 
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I like your reply 
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Well they are equal opportunity annoyers so why exclude Surface users.
Peter Wasser
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
modified 1-Feb-16 3:46am.
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Google is working in secret at a spaceport in New Mexico to build and test solar-powered internet drones in a new initiative codenamed Project SkyBender. With the added benefit: you can launch a missile strike on your competitors
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EMP makes smaller mess...
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Taking a page from Jules Verne, researchers at Microsoft believe the future of data centers may be under the sea. Computers+high voltage+water. What could go wrong?
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Deep Blue Screen of Death
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Many of today’s computer science students are leaving education insufficiently equipped with the fundamental skills needed for professional coding. How do you teach, "How to blame others for your bugs?"
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I got my BSCS in 1992, and later realized that they had never taught us how to build large systems -- libraries, version control, make files, etc. 
Then again, ‘professional coding’ has advanced a great deal since then as well. Developing large systems today is much easier.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Many of today’s computer science students
Today's? This was going on in the 80's when I dropped out of community college because the IT was so backwards. That's where I learned Fortran on punch card machines.
Having friends that went through the University of California school systems in the late 80's, they complained about the same thing. I suspect that that this has been a problem at throughout history, in just about every field, and is what is generally wrong with education -- it's not about learning, it's about how to pass the test.
Marc
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There is a vast chasm between academia and the business world of computing. As there will always be, academia is there to teach them to think rather than produce, the primary business requirement.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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