verdant

The hard part would be to convince a business that these skills provide value. It can be a large benefit to a company to effectively leverage its own data, and having someone that can not only extract and interpret, but also put the right visualizations in the hands of the decision-makers would be a great benefit to help a company, it can be hard to get those that hire to buy into the soft benefits. Its usually a major obstacle in any business intelligence project.

"Look, the thing about my family is there's five of us. Marge, Bart, Girl Bart, the one who doesn't talk, and the fat guy. How I loathe him." - Homer Simpson (while intoxicated)

What of people using those 4 letters who have no affiliation with the university, or who may have never heard of it? I hope this goes nowhere. It could open a pandora's box of lawsuits that might never be closed.

Spelling and punctuation were much less standardized in the 19th century than they are today. We look at those symbols with a modern eye and we recognize patterns that we use today. But the way we interpret those symbols would likely be nothing similar to the way a person from 1862 would.

Very odd. I do enjoy Google's sense of humor, though.

Its kind of disappointing that they aren't trying to parse natural language. I know that would make it a ton more complex (and possibly beyond our capacity to do), but to me that would be truly the next generation from our current flavor of search engines. If I could truly ask a question and have the computer understand what I'm talking about to return an answer, rather than just trying to match keywords. That's Wolfram's goal, I think, but I don't know if they can really get there without parsing human language.

Is a college degree an absolute indicator for expertise? Of course not. But a college degree is hardly going to be made obsolete by the internet. Networking has always been an important part of getting a job, perhaps more important than any other one factor. The internet can certainly help networking. But I don't believe you can equate networking on the internet with having a degree. The degree points out particular things about you to the potential employer (that you can stick with and complete a degree program, for instance) and I don't think that necessarily equates to "someone vouching for you"

I had to do some research for a paper a few years ago that reminds me of this - I learned that juvenile delinquency statistics could not be correlated across income level, race, or geography. However, once family situation was taken into account (stable two parent households vs. other situations), a correlation was found.

I definitely believe parents matter.

And, as an aside, some parents have no choice but to raise children single, and they do a great job. It just isn't the ideal situation, according to research.

It never ceases to amaze me how many predictions about the demise of a software product (in this case Windows 7), and it hasn't even been released yet!

Some reviews of Windows 7 have been very positive, some have been negative, but only time will really tell how well it will fare. Microsoft should be looking at ways to avoid the missteps of Vista and its adoption, but to say that IT departments can hold out forever on XP, or to think they will mass adopt Mac or Linux is less likely than the prognosticators will care to admit.

It totally depends on the type of programming. A lot of programming these days deals with business systems (after all, business tends to generate money. At least, I think that's the point). You may not need any kind of complex math to present interesting web applications or generate reports, or process credit cards. However, if you're in the business of developing applications to sell, or figuring the shortest path to send parts down a conveyor, or writing a compiler, you can see how you might need differing levels of complex mathematics. It all depends on your situation.

I do, however, agree with the point that in the general case, programmers tend to be able to learn quickly, and learn the types of things to help them with their current problem. But if you don't have a grounding to even know where to begin looking for answers, you have a bigger problem.

Certainly all programmers do not need heavy math skills. But it certainly never hurts. All things being equal, I know which one I would rather go with.

There are simply so many browsers and devices being used today, it is hard (impossible?) for a site, particularly a small startup, to support everything. I think its important to figure out who your target is. Do I need support on cell phone browsers? What types of interactions do I need with my users? What groups will be my "bread and butter" so to speak? If I'm selling Macintosh accessories, perhaps I don't need to support IE6.

I think you have to make some decisions about what you want to support. I really don't think complaining to your users about the browser they have chosen helps. If anything, it drives them away. I do think that no matter what you choose, you should always give your users back something. You may not be able to support all browsers, but don't return a page that simply doesn't work and leaves the user wondering why. This may be easier said than done, but I think its a good middle ground between the complexities of trying to support everything and alienating users by only supporting your "chosen path"

Another example of this would be in music composition where Italian is the language used (to describe tempo, dynamics, etc.) regardless of native tongue.

I'm not an expert, but I would suspect there many disciplines have a language that is commonly used, and it so happens that Comp Sci happens to be English.

Does anyone know the reason behind this change? Is it a measure because of cost of operation in certain countries or is it a legal issue?

If we've learned anything from history, it's that we've learned nothing from history

Edit: My mistake - I wrote Black Hat, but it was actually Pwn2Own. Sorry for any confusion.

This would seem to address some of the concerns about Safari that are being discussed along side the recent Black Hat conference. It was mentioned earlier that Chrome had been the only browser not to fall due to the sandbox method of thinking. Seeing as Chrome is based on webkit, it is basically "Safari in a sandbox".

Google, obviously, doesn't do everything it tries well, but I've always been impressed with the way they integrate different services. I also have always appreciated the cleanliness of the UI on their products. Even their ads have always been text-based, where many other sites went wrong with giant "flashing text" banners and animation. If Google did build a social networking service, combined with Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Chat, etc. I think they would have a strong hand. Since they just announced targeted advertising based on profiling, gather social data about their users would make perfect sense. I know its been brought up recently why Facebook doesn't do something similar with all the data they have. It sounds as if Google is making moves in that direction, testing the "privacy waters" so to speak.

I agree, and to be fair to Jeff, he does point this out. It kind of gets lost in the main idea of his post.

FTA: "Don't get me wrong. Your error messages should always be informative and helpful. That's not optional."

Typically, though, if the browser could display some kind of information on the nature of the error, this could give a savvy user something they could type into a search engine or ask an intelligent question about on a forum, which might help them fix whatever is causing their problem.

This might not apply as much to the web, where the problem is likely a malfunctioning network connection, or a problem with the web server (or server side code). But it could help where the user is having a problem trying to accomplish something with an application which they will never be able to do until they change something on their end, or attempt it a different way.

I believe the point was simply that the cost isn't fixed. It rises in hardware costs, storage, bandwidth, labor, etc. with a user base. It would most likely be very much worth it to have the increased user base. But the profit/cost isn't a fixed ratio.