Judea Pe(a)rl is actually a computer program... and has therefore won both the Turing Award and the Turing Test!

One behaviorist meets another in the hall, and says "You're fine, how am I?"

2a) Good measurements may take up more time and effort than is involved in actually doing the work.
2b) Most measurements that take up more time and effort than is involved in doing the work are bad.
2c) Knowing the difference between 2a) and 2b) is also time consuming.

Please mod this up... and any other post that asks for an explanation of some obscure acronym/initial-ism.

It may be true that what you term 'Gen Ed' classes may not advance your career, but there's more to life than a career. I'm a computer programmer, and I love the job, but some days I'd go crazy if I were staring at a computer screen... luckly, there's a very bright gentleman (let's call him Tom) who works down the hall from me who I can talk to... and the conversation is a lot more interesting because he knows more than computer science. I can make an oblique reference to Shakespeare, and he'll catch it. I can talk about quantum physics or electronics or biology, and he'll be right there with me.

Now let's say that you were working in the office next to mine. The two of us have roughly the same programming experience. Tom has moved to a different job. The company that you and I are working for goes tits up, and we're both looking for a new job. Tom's company is hiring, and Tom is likely to have some say in the hiring process... who is Tom likely to hire, me, or you?

Ouch. Some 'Gen Ed' classes would have been nice.

Here's another thing to consider... you live in a country that has some really substantial problems that it needs to address... our economy isn't looking too good, our political system is having serious problems because people are pigeonholing themselves into groups who agree with their own narrow political beliefs, we have serious environmental issues that need to be addressed... say... If you have a petri dish, where bacteria are doubling every 20 minutes. You know the size of the bacteria, and that about 2 million of the little critters will live in the dish. You do some math, and figure out that it will take about 7 hours to fill the petri dish. When will the petri dish be half full? At 6:40 ... 20 minutes before it fills up, of course. Extrapolate that to the use of environmental resources in this country, and the fact that we only solve political problems in this country when we see them... gee wouldn't it be nice to have some smart people around who actually understand exponential growth, and could actually warn people that this is a really bad way to go, before we're one doubling away from really bad things happening? ... And wouldn't it be nice to be able to convince the nice conservative southern half of the country (who aren't big on science, because science tells them that the earth is more than 4000 years old) that just maybe the scientists have it right this time, and we actually have to make major economic changes, or we're fooked...

How's your computer science education going to help you there? You need political science and math and economics to even get a handle on the problem.

See what I did there? Analogy. You learn it in English class. You'll need some really good symbolism to bring the religious right on to the table on environmental issues, because right now, the business critters have their ear, and the business critters are all focused on next quarter's profits... say... did the guys setting up the bonus structure for CEOs take that 'exponential use of environmental resources' thing into account? Maybe they could have used a broader education...

I would run the unix commands 'file' (you might get lucky and get a file type that it understands), 'strings' (to find any ASCII strings within the data) and 'hd' (hex dump) to figure out the structure of the data. My guess is that the data format isn't very complicated. If you figure out how the file is structured, you should be able to use C, or something akin to the 'pack' function found in Perl or Ruby to extract data, which you can load into a database.