Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Math, and so forth, are all degrees aimed at research and study, not commercial production. Why not computing?
If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that a computer science undergraduate degree attempts to prepare you for graduate study AND a career in industry immediately after graduation. An undergraduate degree in math or hard science typically prepares you for graduate-level study only. This distinction is a necessary result of the large demand for programmers in industry -- schools needed to adjust to the expectations of students and the industry. Some programs will separate out these pursuits into different majors (e.g. software engineering vs computer science), but that doesn't change the fact that companies expect a person with a bachelor's degree in computer science to be able to write quality software.
As a result, it tends to get waved away as "magic" or "this will be explained later"
This "magic" is necessary no matter how you teach programming. Even if you teach assembly, there is still some amount of magic in how it is translated into machine language. If you teach machine language, then the way the computer interprets it will be magic. Hell, even if you build a computer out of relays (not recommended for "intro to programming" class), you still have to explain away the "magic" of magnetism.
So you can't do away with magic, so I recommend you choose a suitable level of abstraction and start there. Remember, most programmers will be working on large applications, not low-level systems stuff. So the level of abstraction presented by Java is a great starting point. The students who are talented will then be able to expand the scope of their knowledge in any direction, as necessary.
Desire and drive will get you further than talent.
I've been working in the software industry for a while now and I believe that your statement is, sadly, very true. We constantly have to deal with the products of good intentions and furious labor absent any insight or ability.
Are you looking for ways to justify hiring more experienced candidates instead of less experienced candidates? Are you worried that the older folks you interview won't outshine the younger folks like you want them to? If you want to build a successful team, you should probably just make hiring decisions based on who you think will be more successful. Your pre-interview biases can only hurt your company and the industry.
They buy a lot of used games. My cousins buy them new games for various holidays and birthdays, but whenever they buy games for themselves, it's always used.
That's what I do, too. If there is a game that I want, I will put it on my wish list and someone will buy it for me on my birthday or Christmas (optimally spaced 6 months apart so I never have to wait too long for a new game). If there is a new game that I only "kind of" want, I will wait a year or two and then buy it used. So I am responsible for just as many new game sales as used game sales. However, if I couldn't buy games used, I probably wouldn't even own a console. So the ability to buy games used is the only reason the industry gets any money from me at all.
The idea of a large-scale antimatter warhead being prevented from detonation by mere magnetic fields maintained by the nearest power plant is not an appealing idea.
I'm sure there is some way to get around the need for external power. Maybe the warhead could annihilate tiny amounts of payload in order to power a generator.
And the desire for anti-matter weapons will certainly be there. I agree with you that they probably won't be used in place of nuclear weapons. Instead, anti-matter can be used to create convenient semi-conventional weapons. That is, a small bomb/missile that could completely destroy (for example) a battleship or factory without any residual radiation or WMD-related scorn from the international community.
Massive areas were flooded in the Middle Ages in the Netherlands. Instead of hiding on high ground we beat the water and founded a nation that is mostly below sea level. It takes a certain state of mind to do this. Once you start surrendering to the water, you lose. And you will keep on running from any danger that comes in your path.
When I started here, all there was was ocean. Other leaders said it was daft to build a country in the ocean, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It was flooded by the ocean. So I built a second one. That was flooded by the ocean. So I built a third one. That got hit by a monsoon, destroyed, then flooded by the ocean. But the fourth one stayed above water. And that's what you're gonna get, lad. The strongest country in this world.
It's a terrible idea to let the military commanders tell you when to end a war. The problem is that they have a conflict of interest in that continuing the war will probably be good for their careers. So this is like letting a car salesman tell you when it is time to buy a new car.
I think you may be looking at that accident from the wrong side. A while back I rear-ended a Toyota in my Saturn -- the Saturn bounced off and got fairly bent/banged up. The Toyota didn't have a scratch on it. So maybe we should just put teenagers in light cars so they can't hurt anyone but themselves.
While I would say that there are very few games that have noticeable depth as literature, that doesn't mean that's inherent in the medium.
I completely agree with this statement. In fact, I often get excited about the potential for depth in a video game. People are accustomed to spending 20 hours playing through a video game -- that is plenty of time for a deep story with complex characters. The trick is finding a way to expose the story/characters throughout the game instead of just in the cutscenes.
The mechanism used by GTA (conversations while you are driving to/from the mission, shouting conversations during the missions, etc) is really good, but the characters are so one-dimensional that there is not much depth to expose. I would love to see the next GTA introduce more complex characters so we can get a more interesting story.
Another good example is Shadow of the Colossus. The story and themes are fairly simple, but I appreciated how every moment of the game served to illustrate just how lonely and desperate the main character is. This game also shows one way that a video game *can* be like Moby Dick -- the story is fixed, and even if you win, you still lose.
Actually, 100% of people act solely for personal gain all the time. I know people believe that their sense of morality causes them to perform selfless acts, but the reason people perform such acts is to satisfy their sense of morality. This satisfaction makes them happy/fulfilled/righteous/etc. So the act was actually selfish after all.
If you don't want to screw people over in order to be more successful at work, it doesn't mean that your morality is some how "better" than people who act like this. It only means that being nice to people, retaining friends at work, and reapong other benefits of being nice are more important to you than it is to them. In other words, your priorities are different.
At some point, there has to be reality or exsistance is meaningless.
That sounds like the sort of thing that someone would really want to believe, and then said person would warp his reality in order to find evidence for this assertion.
I accept the possibility that existence is meaningless. I wouldn't even mind if this was the case -- I happen to enjoy meaninglessness.
FYI -- there is no such thing as a "good" Perl developer. What you are looking for is a good programmer/software engineer/computer scientist. Such a person would easily be able to learn Perl even if (s?)he doesn't know it.
Agreed. Perhaps our current political parties are just pilot systems (i.e. prototypes)? There is a school of thought that says you *will* build at least one pilot system, whether you intend to or not. Once you recognize that you are building a pilot system, the prudent thing to do is take everything you have learned and start over.
I can't think of any reason they would want to hide it -- except to hide the fact that most customers are using only a few percent of what they are paying for.
Here's another possibility: they aren't going to actively track the consumption of every subscriber. Maybe they just want to have some policies in place that will allow them to boot gluttonous P2P users later on.
Did the MBTA learn a lesson here about making a mountain out of a molehill?
Obviously not since they have not fully dropped this case yet. The MBTA doesn't seem to have a full understanding of consequences either. In the interview, Anderson says that he still isn't planning on sharing the details of the hacks, even though there is nothing preventing him from doing so. I know if I were on the wrong end of a lawsuit, I would probably publish every detail of this information out of spite (unless I really thought I needed it for leverage).
I sometimes think that we are starting to move toward a standard charging interface with USB. I have several battery-powered devices that charge with USB (TomTom, iPod, digital camera, etc), and I just use an "AC to USB" adapter to charge them all. I still have to keep several "device to USB" cables around as they don't all have the same connector on the device, but it still seems like a step in the right direction. So maybe we will see "power-only" USB ports in wall sockets in the future.
...the individual has such minuscule bargaining power compared to a large company.
I've heard someone make this claim in the past, but I've never heard any support for this. Can you please explain why this is true? I've always considered the act of selling my labor to be a typical capitalist transaction -- one in which neither party would participate unless they thought they were getting a good deal. I recently started a new job and I had to negotiate through about a half dozen offers in order to pick the best one (and get a higher salary in the process, of course). So I believe that I had at least as much bargaining power as those large companies. Why am I wrong?
I don't think the Web OS paradigm (ugh!) necessarily requires an internet connection. A company would probably have a web server on their LAN that serves the office-style web applications and saves the data to the users' network shares. Even a home or small office user could conceivably run a web server on the local machine and just save all the data locally. I don't think any of this going to significantly reduce hardware requirements, but there will be significant interoperability benefits.
But the rudiments of survival and life should be considered a basic right, and as such each person should have the right to water, health care, and rations of enough calories to survive.
I would like to see an argument against this, that doesn't resort to the neo-Darwinian fallacy.
I can tell that you are likely to discard my argument, but I will provide it anyway for the benefit of others.
The problem with providing basic sustenance to everybody is that it never ends. If people are unable to feed themselves and the government provides for them (by taking from the wealthy), then there will be even more people who are unable to feed themselves in the next generation. Under your suggested plan, each generation will see more resources taken from the wealthy and used for sustenance for the poor. The end result of this is communism, but wealthy people would change the system (via revolution if necessary) before they lose everything. Even if we progressed to full-on communism where everyone was given exactly what they needed to survive and nothing more(because we've reached the end of our excess resources), people would continue breed and then (some of) their offspring would starve.
Sadly, we are not immune to the laws of nature just because we are civilized. There is a finite amount of resources in existence, so people will have to die in large numbers due to starvation, disease, or warfare in order to keep the population in check. This is never going to change.
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If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that a computer science undergraduate degree attempts to prepare you for graduate study AND a career in industry immediately after graduation. An undergraduate degree in math or hard science typically prepares you for graduate-level study only. This distinction is a necessary result of the large demand for programmers in industry -- schools needed to adjust to the expectations of students and the industry. Some programs will separate out these pursuits into different majors (e.g. software engineering vs computer science), but that doesn't change the fact that companies expect a person with a bachelor's degree in computer science to be able to write quality software.
This "magic" is necessary no matter how you teach programming. Even if you teach assembly, there is still some amount of magic in how it is translated into machine language. If you teach machine language, then the way the computer interprets it will be magic. Hell, even if you build a computer out of relays (not recommended for "intro to programming" class), you still have to explain away the "magic" of magnetism.
So you can't do away with magic, so I recommend you choose a suitable level of abstraction and start there. Remember, most programmers will be working on large applications, not low-level systems stuff. So the level of abstraction presented by Java is a great starting point. The students who are talented will then be able to expand the scope of their knowledge in any direction, as necessary.
Translation: Try to find a group of people who believe they are smart enough to write code, but not smart enough to write an interesting story.
For those reading who don't know any programmers and therefore don't get the joke: such people don't exist.
I've been working in the software industry for a while now and I believe that your statement is, sadly, very true. We constantly have to deal with the products of good intentions and furious labor absent any insight or ability.
Are you looking for ways to justify hiring more experienced candidates instead of less experienced candidates? Are you worried that the older folks you interview won't outshine the younger folks like you want them to? If you want to build a successful team, you should probably just make hiring decisions based on who you think will be more successful. Your pre-interview biases can only hurt your company and the industry.
That's what I do, too. If there is a game that I want, I will put it on my wish list and someone will buy it for me on my birthday or Christmas (optimally spaced 6 months apart so I never have to wait too long for a new game). If there is a new game that I only "kind of" want, I will wait a year or two and then buy it used. So I am responsible for just as many new game sales as used game sales. However, if I couldn't buy games used, I probably wouldn't even own a console. So the ability to buy games used is the only reason the industry gets any money from me at all.
I'm sure there is some way to get around the need for external power. Maybe the warhead could annihilate tiny amounts of payload in order to power a generator.
And the desire for anti-matter weapons will certainly be there. I agree with you that they probably won't be used in place of nuclear weapons. Instead, anti-matter can be used to create convenient semi-conventional weapons. That is, a small bomb/missile that could completely destroy (for example) a battleship or factory without any residual radiation or WMD-related scorn from the international community.
When I started here, all there was was ocean. Other leaders said it was daft to build a country in the ocean, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It was flooded by the ocean. So I built a second one. That was flooded by the ocean. So I built a third one. That got hit by a monsoon, destroyed, then flooded by the ocean. But the fourth one stayed above water. And that's what you're gonna get, lad. The strongest country in this world.
It's a terrible idea to let the military commanders tell you when to end a war. The problem is that they have a conflict of interest in that continuing the war will probably be good for their careers. So this is like letting a car salesman tell you when it is time to buy a new car.
I agree. We need to come up with some way to prevent all these censorship freaks from talking about censorship.
I think you may be looking at that accident from the wrong side. A while back I rear-ended a Toyota in my Saturn -- the Saturn bounced off and got fairly bent/banged up. The Toyota didn't have a scratch on it. So maybe we should just put teenagers in light cars so they can't hurt anyone but themselves.
I completely agree with this statement. In fact, I often get excited about the potential for depth in a video game. People are accustomed to spending 20 hours playing through a video game -- that is plenty of time for a deep story with complex characters. The trick is finding a way to expose the story/characters throughout the game instead of just in the cutscenes.
The mechanism used by GTA (conversations while you are driving to/from the mission, shouting conversations during the missions, etc) is really good, but the characters are so one-dimensional that there is not much depth to expose. I would love to see the next GTA introduce more complex characters so we can get a more interesting story.
Another good example is Shadow of the Colossus. The story and themes are fairly simple, but I appreciated how every moment of the game served to illustrate just how lonely and desperate the main character is. This game also shows one way that a video game *can* be like Moby Dick -- the story is fixed, and even if you win, you still lose.
Actually, 100% of people act solely for personal gain all the time. I know people believe that their sense of morality causes them to perform selfless acts, but the reason people perform such acts is to satisfy their sense of morality. This satisfaction makes them happy/fulfilled/righteous/etc. So the act was actually selfish after all.
If you don't want to screw people over in order to be more successful at work, it doesn't mean that your morality is some how "better" than people who act like this. It only means that being nice to people, retaining friends at work, and reapong other benefits of being nice are more important to you than it is to them. In other words, your priorities are different.
That sounds like the sort of thing that someone would really want to believe, and then said person would warp his reality in order to find evidence for this assertion.
I accept the possibility that existence is meaningless. I wouldn't even mind if this was the case -- I happen to enjoy meaninglessness.
FYI -- there is no such thing as a "good" Perl developer. What you are looking for is a good programmer/software engineer/computer scientist. Such a person would easily be able to learn Perl even if (s?)he doesn't know it.
-1 unable to locate parent?
Uncloneable means cloneable? What a country!
"This Rank Garden" -- sounds like a 90s post-grunge band.
Agreed. Perhaps our current political parties are just pilot systems (i.e. prototypes)? There is a school of thought that says you *will* build at least one pilot system, whether you intend to or not. Once you recognize that you are building a pilot system, the prudent thing to do is take everything you have learned and start over.
Here's another possibility: they aren't going to actively track the consumption of every subscriber. Maybe they just want to have some policies in place that will allow them to boot gluttonous P2P users later on.
Obviously not since they have not fully dropped this case yet. The MBTA doesn't seem to have a full understanding of consequences either. In the interview, Anderson says that he still isn't planning on sharing the details of the hacks, even though there is nothing preventing him from doing so. I know if I were on the wrong end of a lawsuit, I would probably publish every detail of this information out of spite (unless I really thought I needed it for leverage).
I sometimes think that we are starting to move toward a standard charging interface with USB. I have several battery-powered devices that charge with USB (TomTom, iPod, digital camera, etc), and I just use an "AC to USB" adapter to charge them all. I still have to keep several "device to USB" cables around as they don't all have the same connector on the device, but it still seems like a step in the right direction. So maybe we will see "power-only" USB ports in wall sockets in the future.
I've heard someone make this claim in the past, but I've never heard any support for this. Can you please explain why this is true? I've always considered the act of selling my labor to be a typical capitalist transaction -- one in which neither party would participate unless they thought they were getting a good deal. I recently started a new job and I had to negotiate through about a half dozen offers in order to pick the best one (and get a higher salary in the process, of course). So I believe that I had at least as much bargaining power as those large companies. Why am I wrong?
I don't think the Web OS paradigm (ugh!) necessarily requires an internet connection. A company would probably have a web server on their LAN that serves the office-style web applications and saves the data to the users' network shares. Even a home or small office user could conceivably run a web server on the local machine and just save all the data locally. I don't think any of this going to significantly reduce hardware requirements, but there will be significant interoperability benefits.
I can tell that you are likely to discard my argument, but I will provide it anyway for the benefit of others.
The problem with providing basic sustenance to everybody is that it never ends. If people are unable to feed themselves and the government provides for them (by taking from the wealthy), then there will be even more people who are unable to feed themselves in the next generation. Under your suggested plan, each generation will see more resources taken from the wealthy and used for sustenance for the poor. The end result of this is communism, but wealthy people would change the system (via revolution if necessary) before they lose everything. Even if we progressed to full-on communism where everyone was given exactly what they needed to survive and nothing more(because we've reached the end of our excess resources), people would continue breed and then (some of) their offspring would starve.
Sadly, we are not immune to the laws of nature just because we are civilized. There is a finite amount of resources in existence, so people will have to die in large numbers due to starvation, disease, or warfare in order to keep the population in check. This is never going to change.