I know, I know, acronyms and not necessarily buzzwords BAAS - Backend As A Service FDA - Front-end Driven App Used in the same sentence, it can lewd pretty quickly...

No matter where you go, there you are.

"Key learnings"? Is that even English? Think of it this way: Since learning is "knowledge acquired by systematic study in any field of scholarly application" then in this case there were none - the marketing types didn't learn a thing. They should have told you what their "key learnings" were... They have to do some of the work as well, because I mean let's all be adults here. Did you give them the chance to ask questions? Did they ask you to clarify? No? Well then maybe in part at least, they didn't do their job.

No matter where you go, there you are.

Oh Yes, I DESPISE that!

No matter where you go, there you are.

Sure, they were to prevent you from having to deal with registers and offsets for pointing to memory. And in an embedded world there are many time when you need to get to the data that's at location X in RAM.

No matter where you go, there you are.

I think it comes down to whether you want to teach top-down or bottom up.I think for every serious developer it's a good thing to know about. Bottom Up - bits, machine code, Assembly, C, C++, [C# | Java], [functional language] && scripting [Ruby | JavaScript | Python | etc] The Bottom up wants to impart fundamentals about computers early on (what's a processor, execution cycle, registers, memory, stack, etc.] then proceed to abstract out the details. I think this makes you hungrier to learn the abstractions and make life easier - if you haven't wondered off in another direction like marketing] The Top Down basically reverses the order, get's you involved with making things happen right away then takes you down to the basement to show you how it works. I think a lot of people stop at the top of the stairs and never learn to consider memory management, optimization, etc. since there stuff already works.

No matter where you go, there you are.

Wait a minute...I don't understand what you are saying:

d@nish wrote:

Since one cannot draw a line of length 3^1/2, this triangle is not possible

What's undrawable about 3^(1/2)? It's about 1.73205081 units (to a reasonable level of precision -unless your planning on drawing in a scale of light years or miles)? Yes it's irrational, but so is Pi. It easy to see how moving the triangle off a eucldean/cartesian plane will change everything. Imagine torquing (twisting) the triangle so that it does not "lay flat", and then measuring the angles which now lay in their own planes, unrelated to the planes of the others. It's now an angular measurement in 3 dimensions (solid angle). Interesting and important, but not the same rule as you learnt in school. To think of it anther way, draw your triangle on an orange. This is actually way cool stuff - that I haven't thought about in about 20 years...! :omg:

No matter where you go, there you are.

Back in the day (mid 80's) there was a wide variation in CS curricula. I spent 3 years in a University CS BS program which would've made me a great mathematician - but unemployable as a software engineer. In that time I'd had only 3 programming related courses (Cobol, Univac Assembly and then UCSD Pascal) - then I transferred to a smaller college that was a strong engineering (including Electrical Engineering) school with a strong liberal arts requirement. At the new school I was immersed, up to my eyeballs with coding projects. Solitary and team, microprocessor assembly, Unix and Vax C. Wrote compilers, real-time systems, word processor, database applications, GUI's. It seemed impossible, but it wasn't. I think you need a school that supports a thriving EE program - I think there's a strong correlation and you can get a lot more hands-on courses there. I recently took an online course through University of Iowa for the HCI program - it was basically a machine vision course and it was a delight since there were ton's of coding assignments and a semester project. So, perhaps that (schooling and vagaries therein) has something to do with it.

No matter where you go, there you are.

I think perl is syntactically quirky for my tastes - I think you can get a more orderly syntax from Ruby and also introduce object oriented ideas from the get go. I also like Alice.

No matter where you go, there you are.

Two suggestions (and then some) Alice - http://www.alice.org/ - which gets you going with the graphics right away and provides easy way to make 3D things move. Programming environment allows developing modular code. Supporting materials for teaching since that is it's purpose. Ruby - easiest tool to teach OO since everything's an object and it's better for immediate gratification/feedback as an interpreted language. Potentially harder to do GUI programming in. Javascript could be a fairly direct path to implementing a game of life, though there's some overhead in fitting programs into the whole browser context. Logo - last but not least. I like the lisp like underpinnings and the fact that there's a direct graphics connection. I think you might think in terms of 'good enough' - I don't believe there's one best language and he might be best served by knowing there's more than one way to skin a cat. Another consideration - do your schools offer any AP programming/computer science courses? What languages do they use? What's the best place to start? I've always liked GUI programming since it fulfills my need for instant gratification. But, I usually "plan to throw the first one away". In short - I'd say take a look at Alice.

No matter where you go, there you are.

Do you run with integrated source control? I'm bound to clear case and I find that's a huge source of slow downs - particularly when the intranet bogs down. Shut off the start page and the dynamic web updating of it. It's all that connectedness that really kills it for me

No matter where you go, there you are.

Doh! Guess who weren't readin' too good... Oh OH! I read this http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc301805.aspx[^] In the IMAGE_OPTIONAL_HEADER there are linker version bytes:MajorLinkerVersion and MinorLinkerVersion. MajorLinkerVersion The major version of the linker used to build this executable. For PE files from the Microsoft linker, this version number corresponds to the Visual Studio version number (for example, version 6 for Visual Studio 6.0). BYTE MinorLinkerVersion Otherwise you can do some figuring from linker options that were added/changed in succeeding versions (like /merge?) or perhaps defaults that were used in specific versions? Like didn't the VS6 linker start sections at the same offset which produced larger exe's than the previous version? And while you don't have references, can you look at the run time libraries that are linked in? I hope this redeems me somewhat and helps you somewhat :)

Can you infer the version based on referenced assemblies? Aren't there some assemblies that aren't added automatically to projects in the different versions and doesn't the enterprise version have some assemblies not normally available in the other versions?

You did do a whois on the domain I assume. Did you try pinging the IP? FTP, etc? I like the idea of the link to a page idea. This is the point at which you need to think in terms of social engineering rather than purely technical. Can you get them to do more than download the pdf? Are they tech savvy enough to see through a simple ruse of a mis-labeled exe? Will they login or willingly download anything? Perhaps you can direct them to facebook, where they might reveal more to you? You have checked for the email address on other sites, right? Get them to send to a mailserver that you control so that you can get a better look at the route the mail took. These are all simply ideas - none of which I endorse as I don't know where the legal boundaries exist.