Yes, Dijkstra's old saw "Computer Science has as much to do with computers as Astronomy has to do with Telescopes" and it's true to a point but there are some fine points worth mentioning. Because CS isn't strictly about coding a CS student should have written code in multiple languages. This is a big deal if you work in a heterogeneous environment. Far, far, far too many "coders" have exactly one thing on their resume: Java. I've seen a number of these people attempt to work in a different environment and fail. At first I found this inexplicable: Was it really so hard for someone to see the commonalities between one programming language and another? Apparently. Another point is because CS isn't strictly about writing code you're going to see people who *plan* their development a little more. Almost any primate can write code but not just anyone knows how to tackle a large project or see how not to code themselves into a corner.

IMHO hire a "coder" if you need specific language expertise or just someone to churn out code. If you need someone who is more broadly skilled then you might do better with a CS grad (of course there's an inherent problem that CS is often used synonymously with "software developer" even in educational programs). Finding someone who has a passion for development is always a plus regardless of their education.

...and make it a useful system for POS. 10 min transaction clearing might be barely tolerable for internet transactions but I'm not interested in waiting for 10 min for my groceries payment to clear. Also 10 min is not necessarily the maximal amount of time as the block chain grows the length of time to get confirmation increases. You can do it in less time by forgoing confirmation but then you lose one of it's primary benefits.

Please. just. die. Just go, get a hammer and hit yourself repeatedly until you stop moving.

Firstly you confuse the point of analyzing cryptography - it's not that X *can* be weaker than *y* - that could be true for just about any two systems. Rather it's a question of the amount of entropy the system delivers. Yes sentences will follow a Markov chain where each word narrows the potential pool of the next word however there is a rather large number of words that can initialize the system *STILL* makes it better than 8 character passwords. However that's ONLY if the person uses a sentence. If it's just a string of five nouns then you're SOL.

Secondly you seem to misunderstand that targeted attacks might narrow the amount of entropy - it also narrows the number of people who can even attempt the attack.

No, not really. It is just a rather impractical way of making a serial number that can't be forged.

Same argument for Mainframes. IBM would fly people out to us when there was an emergency. All this says is that when you can afford it the right hand side of the curve responds very well. Which means you can afford to hire know-nothings (no offense) for your day-to-day work.

I don't think this model fits most businesses. In which case Linux might make more sense. A bright person who works in a Linux environment has far more power to act in an emergency than someone in a Windows environment.

w.r.t Contracts, I've never seen an exclusive one like the OP mentions but I do notice that MS tends to bundle stuff in their site licenses. Our Sharepoint project was begat due to the fact that it was "free".

Now we just make BT look like skype traffic.

True but the alternative is to seek out some kind of bias which people will pretend is meaningful but very likely isn't. In fact it is significantly more likely that the coin toss would reflect the will of the people than some slim majority vote.

It's funny sometimes it seems no matter the principle there's someone out there who wants to vastly inflate it's importance. Tyranny of the normal distribution I guess. You very rarely ever attempt to determine a value from a graph (Such as in the OECD science example). For example if I want to know the dose of anesthetic a patient gets I don't trot out a graph and take a ruler and do some back of the envelope calculation. With regard to your ideas about fraudulent information in graphs. This is exactly what these exams are teaching people. That graphs are a trusted source of information. IMHO if you taught students the exact opposite lesson - graphs are generally lies - you would probably end up no worse off and possibly better.

Interestingly as a maths student nobody ever needed to teach us to "read" graphs. Make graphs yes, understand how to annotate experimental error, sure but there's no need to do mindless exercises all concerned with deriving data from a graph which is probably beyond it's accuracy anyway.

Given that the article is somewhat focused on the ScienceDebate questions and with the notable exception of the one about climate change. The third option I'd see is that those questions are pretty unfocused and in one case - education a little deceptive.

For example are they referring to the OECD exam results? I downloaded and wrote that math exam and I found it to be weird. In some cases I'm not sure the questions were even about math and very often not the kind of math you use in science (there were huge numbers of graph reading questions). Not to mention that the purveyors of the exam themselves only recognized three statistically significant groups (those working at, beneath and above the median). Not to mention when people start throwing ordinal values around it often makes me wonder how much they actually know about science or math. Ordinals provide zero information about the distance between ranks which is far more important than being 1st or 17th.

Thanks for the link to the current exam. I wrote the 58 question 2008 one in about an hour. This one seems harder and I agree it is oddly worded and while I'm not in a position to comment on what children are capable of. It seems at least plausible that it's obscure enough to be testing something other than the ability to solve mathematical problems.

That said, I think the idea of the article is one of bounding. i.e. If an adult can't do this then... or if an adult can be successful and not know a single question then... which is probably my greatest objection. I would expect that any person who does some degree of quantitative research to be able to pass this kind of test. Likewise I would expect someone with an undergraduate degree in science to be able to do most of these things. I also expect these people to be able to write an exam without having anxiety problems.

The underlying misunderstanding with the argument presented is that while it may be possible for person X to succeed while being terrible at math may in fact be true but that doesn't make it likely nor does it mean that school isn't supposed to prepare people for a wide variety of careers not just ones where they need to do more math than just make change.

I think the general idea then would be that these offices are not necessarily linked to a single business - in most cases. You have co-workers but they may not be from your business. Clearly this raises some IP/Trade Secret questions but probably not insurmountable ones.

We use take-home problems. We also do some verbal testing on concepts - to see how well they can talk about things developers tend to discuss. We have used written tests but they weren't that good.

I'm actually working on trying out a "live" requirements gathering test but as hiring is only a small part of my job it's not yet been validated.

Depends on what you need from ZFS. I've been using it under Linux for two years now. I don't have to use PPS for anything so I can't comment on that but considering that the context of the OP was "on the desktop" I'd think this is out of scope. Anyway Linux while doing a good job of being most things to most people. It's unlikely that anyone here is claiming it's everything to everyone.

Just to let you know I'm not disagreeing with you but I do think what you are saying needs to be highlighted given the number of times I have to deal with "BSD is X" nonsense from people who have absolutely abysmal math skills. Not only are you correct about the variability of the data but the netcraft chart is a weighted ranking of a number of metrics and while these may be perfectly reasonable for evaluating a hosting provider. None of them are intrinsically OS related and only two have to do with reliability. One of those two is the same for every system down to #30 (on the Feb 2011 data)! For example in Feb 2011 # 6 serverbeach (a Linux based provider) outperforms BSD (and everyone above it) in connect latency, first byte, total and kb/s. The only reason this is in #6 is because it's failed requests differs by 0.008%. While someone might argue that this difference is important in some context as we can see from the two samples you gave it's not entirely clear how much each one of these OS's vary. While I wouldn't necessarily expect the "best" os to always be in the top. I would expect that - over time - the variance in the data to be smaller. Without this, it's impossible to derive anything about the OS from the "failed req %" (assuming it isn't simply a function of completely irrelevant things like their upstream ISP's)

I don't really see that point of the implication that Android Linux isn't optimized everywhere. It isn't, nothing is, there's no point really.

The question isn't when will Intel create a power efficient CPU (as you could argue that they have - such as the Atom Z series) but what will it take them to match ARM's performance per watt. In other words once we have a 1W Atom - which is probably pretty close to the consumption of the A8. What did Intel give up to close that gap? Die shrink? Die size? (aka drop functionality) Or will some other factor make it all moot? (battery tech, market change)

So far you haven't made much of an argument for ARM being more incompatible than various versions of x86. - ie. I can't run AES instructions on anything but the 2nd Gen Nehelem. Not only that (and this may be true for ARM but I don't code in that much) but there are lots of contradictory optimizations in x86. For example just taking block moves what is optimal for 286 (Unrolled loop if move can fit in cache or REP MOV), is suboptimal for 386-486 (unrolled loop for in cache move otherwise REP MOVS - for blocks aligned on word or double word boundaries) which is suboptimal for Pentium (MMX), etc.. this isn't even counting dealing with the wide variety of cache sizes.