I have to agree, Melbourne is just too cold to live in year round.
Huh? I thought... well let me go check Wikipedia:
Melbourne is colder than other mainland Australian state capital cities in the winter. The lowest temperature on record is −2.8 °C (27.0 °F), on 4 July 1901
−2.8 °C - Ahaha! Oh my sweet summer child, what do you know of cold? Today I learned the secret weakness of Australians - so called "cold" weather.
I am actually Canadian complaining of how cold Melbourne was when I lived there. And I was there during the record breaking 47C day and the Victoria fires.
The problem with Melbourne is a combination of no humidity to retain the heat a wind chill from Antarctica. The combination of these means that 27C, on a sunny afternoon, requires a light jacket and the evenings/nights are never warm. I am used to 80-90% humidity and going out at 3am in shorts and a t-shirt in the summer. Melbourne rarely has this.
Granted, there are two months were the weather is very nice (january, february), but that is about it. Yes, it never gets to -40C, so cold is very relative here, but for a city that you would expect to be comparable to Sydney, Perth or Miami, it is cold.
I make no bones about being raised in a tropical climate and being unable to deal with cold effectively. In the same way that people who come from a cold climate can't deal with a bit of tropical summer heat.
If MS continues with their ideas for Windows 8, then Windows 7 will be the last OS I own from them. I really do not understand the rational for wanting to make desktop PCs look and act like tablets. I really don't want full screen apps on my 24" monitor. And that start screen looks like it was written for 5 year olds.
> And that start screen looks like it was written for 5 year olds.
That's how the average user IS. That's what Apple has shown us with the phenomenal success of their iPhone, iPad products. It's the "Don't make me think" philosophy taken to an extreme.
I'm guessing that you are probably like me, a command line aficionado. They call it "simplification" of the user interface, but we feel that there's an element of idioticization there, too! :-) I mean, how do they get things done when there's no place to TYPE?! It's scary to have no place to type. :-)
It's funny that you say that because as a programmer I feel the same way.
On the other hand, my girlfriend is not as tech savvy and, for the first time, has been stolen away from the clutches of her Apple products to play with Windows 8.
The simplicity and intuitiveness have really opened the doors for the real consumer market on this one (remember, we aren't the target market).
The real problem today is that the majority of people view children as accessories. They put them in front of the TV and let other people raise them, i.e., teachers, sitcoms, and the internet. They don't really care about the kids.
However, those kids are viewed as an extension of themselves and so any attack on the kids is an attack on them. if you say that the kid has behavioral problems, what the parent hears is that they are a bad parent/person. They don't care about the kid, they care about how it reflects on them. This is the same reason that you have parents beating up and murdering hockey coaches and referees when they pull their kid. In the mind of the parent, the call is against them.
We have moved from a society were the entire village raised the kids and parents had the support, training, and coaching they needed. They were raised in an environment in which kids were actually cared for and that was passed onto new parents. Today, we move away from home, most of us don't have contact with parents, grandparents, siblings, etc and we raise kids because they either make us look good or it is simply the expected thing to do. Unfortunately, they don't actually have any understanding of how to raise kids and they are too busy to do a proper job anyway.
I am a firm believer that we are getting very close to the day when we will have to issue licences before people are allowed to have kids. Not that we should police who has them, but to ensure that people have the needed support systems and knowledge in place before trying to be parents.
Excellent comment. Far to many developers concentrate on becoming a better programmer to the complete exclusion of becoming a better software developer. Software development is all about how well you can deliver business value and the ability to program, although an important skill, is not the most important. It is simply one of many, many skills that are needed.
Like the comment above, my advice is learn how to deliver software instead of just program. Learn how to interact with customers and become an expert in your business' domain. In addition, learn how to solve real problems without using technology or programming.
Being a great programmer will get you in the door for an interview, but it is all the other soft skills that will get you the job (and the money that you want).
Interesting article; however, I would suggest that the Universities themselves are to blame. There were very few courses that I took where the professor encouraged us to talk to one another about problems and assignments. Usually it was the reverse. We were told in no uncertain terms that we were not to talk to anyone else, nor were we to work with other students in the class. Any collaboration was considered cheating and plagiarism.
Obviously, this did not apply to things like study groups, but once you have had it drilled in to your head that collaboration was bad, it is very difficult to then create the network necessary for a study group.
Universities need to change the way they teach and mark such that collaboration is not only suggested, but required. In addition, I think universities, if they really care about these differences, need to create some form of mentoring program for incoming students.
I would guess that this is handled differently between universities and even between departments at the same university. My math and science profs went out of their way to encourage collaboration. The courses were typically weighted so that test results were the majority of your grade. If you were cheating on the homework by copying everything from your study group you'd be found out on the test. The CS department was a mixed bag. Lots of group projects, lots of collaboration encouragement, but some of the intro courses like algorithms took the collaborating is cheating approach.
Where I encountered the most resistance to collaboration was in the humanities. Any course that had lots of writing or research pretty much had a work by yourself mandate. I blew through those courses without much effort and wouldn't have worked in groups anyway, but I always found it odd how often plagiarism was brought up and threats about academic suspension were made.
Interesting. In my university collaboration was greatly encouraged. However, I'd say the subjects which I learned best were those in which I worked on the problem sets by myself. The problem sets were hard, so if I could do them on my own, it meant I really had a good grasp on the subject.
I'm not saying collaboration is bad. It's great. But individual work can be just as valuable.
The idea of the site is interesting and the pictures are great, but I strongly object to any website that hijacks the standard method of navigating websites in order to move the user through images. When I press Command-left arrow, I should move backwards through my browser's history. I should be shown the previous photo in a series.
If you are going to name your company a bunch of letters, shouldn't you put somewhere on your site what those letters stand for? So what the hell does BCIC mean?
From their site: "BCIC develops entrepreneurial talent and commercializes technology through startup companies and partnerships between industry and academia. BCIC focuses on competitively positioning British Columbia in today's global knowledge economy in order to provide significant employment opportunities and a high standard of living for British Columbians."
As others have said, I checked the site and couldn't find the meaning anywhere I looked. Granted, I did not check the entire site word for word, but you would think they would make it obviously clear somewhere what the letters stood for.
