Bill Gates puts his foot in his mouth in this one. We all know Google’s philosophy is “Don’t be evilâ€, so I guess Microsoft is adopting “be evilâ€. It’s always fun to take people’s words out of context.
CNet: So that would be the philosophical difference between Microsoft and what Google is up to at this point?
Gates: Well, we don’t know everything they are up to, but we do know their slogan and we disagree with that.
One of the reasons I decided to return to school to finish my CS degree is that I’ve always thought it would be cool to be self employed as a software developer. When I was a kid I thought I could spend my time creating cool stuff and people would pay me for what resulted. Now I’m older and know the world generally doesn’t work that way, but today I read this really cool article about Paul Graham’s new company that gives seed money to college students to help get their startups off the ground. Ok, so he don’t actually give them the money, but his terms seem really fair.
I’ve been playing around with WordPress for a couple weeks now, and I commented when I first installed it that blogging doesn’t really seem like anything new. Just old concepts with new names. I haven’t really changed my mind on that, but WordPress sure makes things easy. My other sites internetfun.com and realjeep.com are written in php and use mySQL to keep track of things. I spent a few days writing the code behind them and I could have created the exact same sites using WordPress and spending a couple hours creating custom themes. Sure there are benefits of using your own code, but it’s also nice to not spend time on things you don’t need to.
It’s confirmed, I still hate math. Last week was the first of fall trimester, so I’ve now experienced a week of two of my classes. The third is only a 6 week class and don’t start for a few more weeks. I have now confirmed that I’m going to be miserable until calculus is over, and technical communications will be 15 weeks of busywork. How’s this for busywork? For next week I have to write 2 papers to email to my professor, write summaries of them to post to the class bulletin board, and then read other students summaries and post comments and generally discuss them. At least in calculus I’ll be learning something useful while I’m suffering.
I actually do see the value in all of the math classes that are required of CS majors, but that does not make them enjoyable. I have to admit that I have learned something in each of my classes that helps the “big picture” come together, so I can see how my education would be lacking without them. The majority of the MIS, IT, and Digital Communications majors I talk to at school say them chose their major over CS to avoid the math, and maybe it was a good choice for them, but I’m happier with Computer Science.
It’s the first week of a new semester and I’ve been looking over the syllabus for my Applied Calculus class. I hate to say it this soon, but this is one of the few classes that will hurt my GPA. Right now I have a 3.79 with 7 classes left to complete my BS in Computer Science, and the 3 classes I failed to earn an A in were the 3 classes I have taken from the math department. My other classes this semester are Technical Communications and Windows Administration, so they shouldn’t be so bad. The communications class will be all busy work, and the Windows Admin class is a total blow off class since it will teach me to do the job I’ve been doing for the last 6 years. I need the credit hours to meet my electives requirements, so whatever it takes.
Speaking of a CS degree, it isn’t worth as much now as it was in 2000 when I started. Someone at work told me the other day that I should have taken MIS instead since I would have been able to take more business classes that would be more useful. I couldn’t disagree more, but I think this mentality is fairly strong in mega-corporations with emphasis being put hiring people with business related knowledge and offshoring the coding tasks. I have taken several classes that I would not have wanted to miss. My algorithms class taught me a how to evaluate ways of solving problems and figuring out the performance characteristics of different approaches, and my operating systems class gave me experience in creating multithreaded apps and guarding against deadlocks. All things a MIS major would have missed.
A couple semesters ago I wrote a research paper on the outsourcing trend, which is posted here.
I’ve been playing with c# and Windows Forms programming lately, and found a couple articles about making custom non-square windows easily by hiding the frame and making the part of the square you want to get rid of transparent. Super easy to do. Of course, using this technique you still really have a square window, which your users will discover when they are trying to click on a window behind yours to switch focus to another app, and they are really clicking on the invisible part of your window. Still, this would be great for splash screens or windows that don’t really have that much area that you want to make transparent. To really do it right you should research setting the region of your form to a GraphicsPath, but this is much easier.
Anyways, here’s a link to one of the tutorials.
