Call me selfish, but I’m really glad that few people like this sort of
work:
-
Better jobs; more of them; better pay; let’s me do what I want to a
reasonable degree. On that nore, as I spend most of time, reverse
engineering things, I also don’t lament Windows not being open source. -
We more or less missed the entire interminably tedious saga known
as Fourth Generation Languages. Not that they all sucked, and may have
sucked much less than what came before (I don’t know; well before my
time), and there most certainly are places for them, but so many kept
insisting (those with many letters after their name seemed to like to
write about this) how they were actually more productive (missing (1)
that what you produced abjectly sucked in a curiously homogenous way, if
it runs at all with the memory you had; (2) was totally proprietary and
essentially given to not exist in, say, two years), and, then, when that
got just preposterously untenable, moved on to the totally absurd idea
that these massive entities were a great way to right something
“portably,” and finally on to “safe.” This people most definitely sucked
a whole bunch. Although to be fair, I suppose it would be accurate to
say that these languages worked - virtually. -
Also mostly missed all the nonsense about the Internet being a
business advantage (if it qualifies, so does a telephone), and Y2K, the
later being one of the silliest scams of all time, that while
profitable, surely must have been the most tedious of work. -
While there is much banter on this list about the right and wrong
way to do things in the kernel, anyone who really thinks that things are
dire, needs to take a hiatus and hit user mode for a while. Just
frightening. Mother make it stop. There are a lot of phenominally
talented people who prefer user mode work, but, there are also a huge
number of people who take zero pride in their craft, mostly because they
see what they see themselves as “practical people who like to get things
done,” and accordingly make statements like “You know, if you learned
HTML, you’d get more interesting work.” I had someone tell me that. I
understand why they think we (or at least some of us) are just making
things needlessly difficult, as they seem to feel that there’s very
little that can’t be done in an afternoon in, say, Frontpage or Clipper
Pro, but the part I really don’t get is that they seem to think of us as
sort of academic. -
On a practical note, it gives me an out when I’m on a plane and
someone feels he needs to tell me about he wrote some word macros on his
TRS-80 to control the lights in the basement of his mother’s house in
which he still lives, as an ice breaker to ask how to download a certain
type of internet content, as it were, at work without getting caught. I
just say something about being hopelessly impractical, and, in fact,
useless, because I only know about the kernel or assembler, and, after a
he kindly offers a little career advice, usually leaves me alone.
Just my thoughts,
mm
>> xxxxx@bitdefender.com 2007-04-04 03:58:48 >>>
lists.osr.com wrote:
> What on earth
> does the typical computer science curricula teach these days?
Visual C#
> .NET and nothing else?
>
>Since I’m currently working on my Masters in CompSci right now, I’d
like to
report that the language of choice at the school I’m attending
appears to be
Java, followed (way behind) by C. The OS(s) of choice are Solaris
and
Linux.No classes even exist for anything like Device Drivers, Low level OS
architecture, or Embedded Systems, at least not through Computer
Science.*sigh*
I’m also very sad about the fact, that low level programming, OS
architecture (NT / Linux,
anything), driver programming and so on are almost entirely missing
from
all CS curricula
in practically all faculties which I know about around me (Romania). It
there is anything,
then that is *very* theoretical and has little to do with real life
practical stuffs.
On the other hand, I taught last year a one semester course for Masters
degree students
about low level processor architecture and programming, basics of the
NT
architecture and
some little NT driver programming. I was deeply sad by the fact, that
even that I was
showing up real life examples most students where just not interested
about the topics.
I got the feedback repeatedly from over 80% of the students, that
databases, Java, C# and
.NET are much more fun and much easier to do than stuffs like ASM, OS
kernel stuffs or
driver programming. Even coding Win32 with C, or concepts like
synchronizations, thread
contexts, semaphores, events and so on tend to be scary for quite a lot
of the students.
Did somebody experienced similar results? Why is that as the years are
passing, it is
more and more difficult to find somebody really interested in low-level
stuffs?
have a nice day,
Sandor LUKACS
Virus Analyst, SOFTWIN
www.bitdefender.com
Questions? First check the Kernel Driver FAQ at
http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?id=256
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