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Education

Bjarne Stroustrup On Educating Software Developers 538

Posted by kdawson from the way-it-spozed-to-be dept.
jammag writes "Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++ and a professor at Texas A&M, weighs in on the problems in today's CS programs. In particular, Java (there's too much of it), the quality of graduates (companies aren't happy), and the need to balance the theoretical and the practical (long overdue). Not pulling punches, Stroustrup even talks about high schools — 'High schools could teach students to work hard at something (just about anything), to search out information as needed, and learn to express their ideas in writing and orally.' He finishes by giving advice to working developers: 'Serious programming is a team sport, brush up on your social skills. The sloppy fat geek computer genius semi-buried in a pile of pizza boxes and cola cans is a mythical creature, best buried deep, never to be seen again.'" Read on for more choice quotes from the quotable professor.
Earth

Chemical Pollution Is Destroying Masculinity 773

Posted by kdawson from the lower-your-voice-and-say-that dept.
myrdos2 writes "A host of common chemicals is feminizing males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people. Many have been identified as 'endocrine disruptors' or gender-benders because they interfere with hormones. Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia, and Italy have given birth to twice as many girls as boys, which may offer a clue to the mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide. And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys. It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminized genitals. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone. And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per milliliter of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years."
Windows

Windows Drops Below 90% Market Share 595

Posted by kdawson from the easing-the-stranglehold dept.
ozmanjusri writes "Online market share of the dominant Windows operating system has taken its biggest monthly fall in years to drop below 90%, according to Net Applications Inc. Computerworld reports that Microsoft's flagship product has been steadily losing ground to Mac OS X and Linux, and is at its lowest ebb in the market since 1995. 'Mac OS X... [ended] the month at 8.9%. November was the third month running that Apple's operating system remained above 8%.' The stats show that while some customers are 'upgrading' from XP to Vista, many are jumping ship to Apple, while Linux is also steadily gaining ground. A Net Applications executive suggests the slide may be caused by many of the same factors that caused the fall in Internet Explorer use. 'The more home users who are online, using Macs and Firefox and Safari, the more those shares go up,' he said. November has more weekend days, as well Thanksgiving in the US, a result that emphasizes the importance of corporate sales to Microsoft."

Comment Re:Wanting it both ways.. (Score 1) 302

by malahoo (#17811702) Attached to: Apple Mac/PC Ads With a UK Twist
Yeah it does both.
I use Ableton Live for Mac. My friend just got one. In 10 minutes we
  • set up an adhoc wireless network with AirPort
  • Used Audio & Midi Settings (part of OS X) to get the Macs to talk to MIDI each other
  • Had his copy of Live on the Mac start & stop recording on my copy of Live.
Stuff just works. Much less "turn it (comptuer/program/driver) off, then back on" crap.

Also, the Live rarely crashes on the Mac, which was pretty frequent on my XP SP2 machine. Even when you unplug the cheap M-audio Firewire Solo, while recording, Live keeps running - plug the firewire box back in and you're back up. On my Win machine, you had to at least stop & restart Live (and often log out or reboot).
Plus, when a program does crash on the Mac, I've always gotten my data back. It's like they have auto-save built in to the OS.

My friend and I both have extensive sysadmin & programming experience on Win & Linux/FreeBSD.

The Mac is just easier to create with. Guy
User Journal

Journal Journal: Apple iPhone 2

Journal by XMLsucks
Pending questions regarding the iPhone:
  • Can the iPhone route Internet traffic to a laptop, particularly sharing Edge with a laptop over WLAN?
  • Can ISV's ship complementary software for the iPhone? It is running Mac OS X, and thus technically this should have a chance; but does Apple provide APIs for third party software to smoothly integrate with the remaining phone software, and to smoothly interact with the touch screen interface? Will the iPhone be another target in Xcode

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