because a lot of people are really really bad at what they do.
Amen to that. You only need to work in a couple of places to realize that the competition out there just isn't that good. I expect that many of these places are the ones complaining that they can't find good help.
This all sounds very healthy to me. If kids think they're worth more than they actually are, then they'll learn pretty quickly that that's not the case. If they're leaving jobs in droves because they're being treated better elsewhere, then they're right to think the way they do.
I think the best part would be the immediate flush of jobs to India once the IT union tried to strike the first time.
Unions are a pyramid scheme. It might work out great for the first few people on board, but it puts the company at a competitive disadvantage which in the long run will result in fewer jobs.
"yet most of the power can never be legally used for more than a few seconds."
And an orgasm also only lasts a few seconds, but I'm not giving those up, either.:-)
There's no such thing as "over-horsepowered." It's all a matter of preference once you have more than just enough horsepower to move the vehicle and driver.
The fastest way to understand Lisp is to write a Lisp compiler.
This would be my advice to the original poster anyway. Write a compiler that compiles down to machine code. Play around with Lex and Yacc or write a recursive descent parser in Lisp, think about the different ways to reserve space in memory for data structures and objects, the difference between the stack and the heap, and the limitations and requirements for run time libraries that different language features impose.
Once you've done that, you can easily understand the design decisions made in Java and other high level languages, and things like closures and continuations will no longer seem like mystical abstract concepts.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
LaTeX tries to do a different thing than "desktop publishing," and for what it does, it does it extremely well, and is far better than any alternatives.
Back in the day, we had "word processors," and we had "desktop publishing software," the difference being that the desktop publishing software let you precisely control page layout and were WYSIWYG. Word processors were things you typed documents into and they broke that document into pages to send to a printer. Word processors had extensive features to help you enter your document correctly, like spell and grammar checkers, ways to emphasize text by making it bold or underlined, and not much else. They processed words, not pages.
Then someone had the not-so-bright idea to bring WYSIWYG into word processing, combining Desktop Publishing Software and Word Processing Software into shitty abominations called WordPerfect > 5.1 and Microsoft Word. Putting a small subset of desktop publishing power into cheap, buggy software ensured that secretaries everywhere would abuse Comic Sans and clip art until the end of time, and attach their creations to what should have been plain text email.
My first "office suite" let you type your document into the word processor, then you could set up the page layout in the desktop publishing program and link the text in, where it would flow into the predetermined layout and fill it. Two discrete steps, which couldn't have been easier. Trying to do this all at once is a pain in the ass, especially if you're changing the document around (editing). The problems worsen when multiple people work on the same document.
Initially, it was obvious that word processing and desktop publishing were two very different things, and never the twain shall meet. We'd all be a lot better off if this distinction had stayed, because the problem with word processors today is not that they're trying to be all things to all people, but that they're trying to do two different things at the same time.
It's just like older generations complaining that society is going downhill.
Yeah, every generation does it. But it doesn't mean that they're wrong.
256MB of memory to run an ugly desktop still seems like a ridiculous amount to me. But 1GB is far more ridiculous.
OS's across the board are getting progressively more bloated and slow. An OS and desktop environment coded from scratch would blow them all away in terms of performance and security, but it would take many man-years to create and a huge amount of pain for users to adopt.
What kills me is that I used to do nearly everything I do now, including 3-D modeling and rendering, on an Amiga 500, which had 2MB of RAM and 50 MB of hard drive space for the entire system, and that was double the minimum required for the most demanding apps.
Compared to that, everything today sucks. But still, XP and Ubuntu suck a lot less than Vista.
"It means the poor drive to work in cars with smaller engines."
As someone who had to eat peanut butter sandwiches exclusively for a few months to make the payments on the fourth car I went through in a single summer, I have a bit more sympathy for "the poor." When some idiot on a cellphone in a $40,000 Volvo plows into the Camry that you bought for $2,000, totalling it, and leaving you having to find another reliable car for $2,000 in a single weekend, you might understand that "the poor" aren't able to be as flexible in their purchasing decisions as you seem to think.
The whole problem with this country is that everything thinks they have the solution to everything, and don't realize that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Your solution to this imagined problem leaves a substantial amount of people unable to afford a car and out of work, simply because you took away their right to decide for themselves which car to buy.
Right on. I like the commercial microwaves that have numbers 1-10 that correspond not to seconds, but to reasonable amounts of cook times. They also don't have a "start" button, it just goes. I don't need to cook something for 29 seconds as opposed to 30, and if I'm cooking less than 30 seconds it's unlikely that I'll walk away and not be able to stop the process after 10.
And the only extra feature I want in a microwave is an option to disable the beep that plays every time you press anything. If you live in a small house with sleeping kids...being able to easily disable noisy functions is a godsend.
"She made her money designing targetting systems for missiles. Interesting? I doubt it."
Don't doubt it, that's probably one of the most interesting problems there is. Imagine writing software that controls incredibly complex systems and must do so reliably in a hostile environment.
Amen to everything else you said:-)
Teachers are actually overpaid, because there is a teacher surplus right now. Pay really isn't the problem, its the systemic removal of any freedom a teacher once had in the classroom. Public schools push a political agenda, they hardly teach at all.
Amen to that. Those guys were great, after a slow start until about level 8 or 9.
Nearly as awesome was three black belts and fighter, which allowed you to actually use the really good equipment you got later on, and made the first eight levels a bit more bearable.
Really? I doubt it, simply because there's currently no economic benefit to exploring space. Yeah, you might make a profit on the first round of ultra-rich space tourists paying $100 grand each to go 100 miles up, but after the novelty wears off, what then? A lot of people might give their life's savings to go up, but you can't do that twice, so unless there's something compelling up there to do, it's not a sustainable business.
It won't be until conditions on this planet become so bad that living on Mars seems like a better option, and getting there is cheap enough so that even the dirt poor can afford to do it.
We're not even close with our level of technology today. We haven't even begun to explore our own ocean floors, which are many times less hostile than Mars. Space exploration currently doesn't make economic sense, nor will it in the foreseable future.
All that we can do now is plant a flag and cheer. I can understand the desire to do that, but calling it something other than what it is is folly.
Capitalism works because customers always have a choice between buying and not buying. Even if you're the only game in town, you have to price your products and services attractively, because there's always the other option that people simply won't buy your stuff. People still have a choice to do without general-purpose desktop computers at all (many do) if they don't feel they are worth the investment. Society does not collapse.
When people say capitalism works, they don't mean "the marketplace will find the absolute best possible solution to all problems." They simply mean that a free market, left to its own devices, will find an acceptable solution much more often and quickly than all other alternatives.
You can pokes holes in any system by comparing it to some arbitrary ideal, but realistically, unless we as humans all change our nature, join hands, gain some profound insight that enables us to predict all current and future unknowns, a free market is our next best shot at finding a workable allocation of scarce resources.
That's not what I mean. I mean that this should be possible without the for loop.
A parsed CSS stylesheet should form some type of tree with attributes for each tag type. It would be great to be able to change the style dynamically for the "a" tag, just as if I had edited the style sheet and reloaded it.
It's possible to change everything else on the web page dynamically, just not that. To me, that's a glaring limitation, but it also has nothing to do with HTML.
I like the getElementsByCSSSelector() idea. Better yet would be a way to change css styles dynamically and have the browser respond. Say if I wanted to change the default color of all "a" tags on a page -- in other words, I want javascript access to the css parse tree just like with the DOM. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's an easy way to implement this currently.
Elimination of DOCTYPES in favor of a version attribute to the html tag is just semantics, and kind of silly.
"There is only one scripting language allowed on a page."
That's just arbitrary and short-sighted. His reasoning that it would make things simpler is correct, in the same way that not being allowed to drive makes planning your commute to work simpler, since you can only walk or bike.
I guess the reason we stopped making such things is that they didn't really serve any purpose anymore.
I'm kinda torn on this whole thing. I love NASA and the cool stuff they do, but the reason to put men on Mars is just gone. In the good old days, we wanted to show the USSR that we could rain nuclear hell on them from the fucking moon if we wanted to, and that served a significant purpose. But guys on Mars? Why? There's no economic, scientific, or otherwise reason other than being able to say, "hell yeah, we did it!"
That might be reason enough, but why Mars then? Why not colonize the moon, which would be just as cool and probably less costly? How about exploring the ocean, which is nearly as difficult but would probably have a much greater impact?
The answer is, he was hit forcefully on the back with a club made of ice, which shattered. He fell on one of the shattered pieces, piercing the cell phone battery causing it to melt. The ice melted, leaving no evidence of what had happened...
Re:why name Gates and Jobs?
on
Google Goes Green
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Resources do not have to be infinite in order for the game to not be zero sum. They simply have to increase over time.
The total amount of energy available to the Earth increases over time. We haven't even scratched the surface of exploiting what we have, let alone optimized the exploitation of energy that comes in continuously that is currently unused.
Hence, no zero sum game. In other words, I don't have to take energy from you in order to increase the energy available to me, there are many other ways I can increase usage or efficiency.
In the U.S. we are not currently taking advantage of this fact, to our great discredit. It's short sighted and results in conflict.
Re:why name Gates and Jobs?
on
Google Goes Green
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"Earth is a zero sum game"
That's simply not true, and renewable resources (plants, trees, etc.) are evidence of that. We are not a zero sum game because we have, for all intents and purposes, an inexhaustible supply of energy from the sun. Think back through the chain --> sun causes plants to grow, animals eat plants, etc. We're all solar powered, ultimately.
More efficient exploitation of that energy results in an increase in available resources. Sure, there's a limit, but we have even begun to tap into it, even with existing technology.
That's why projects like Google's are important. Any increase in efficient production of renewable energy ensures that we continue to not be a zero sum game.
There may come a point where no further technological innovation is possible, but it looks like when we get to that advanced state that the population will contract voluntarily. Witness the below-replacement birth rates in first world countries.
"Worse, they actually do care and have only the best intentions."
I used to completely disagree. I figured that someone who could get elected to a prominent political office couldn't possibly be that stupid and must be deliberately making poor decisions in the interest of looking good and getting re-elected.
Then I received a letter in the mail written by Annapolis mayor Ellen Moyer, congratulating the populace on weathering a hurricane. It was so poorly written that after reading it I was certain she had been educated in the Annapolis public school system and must have just squeaked by.
I guess you really can never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
Slashdot Mirror
because a lot of people are really really bad at what they do.
Amen to that. You only need to work in a couple of places to realize that the competition out there just isn't that good. I expect that many of these places are the ones complaining that they can't find good help.
This all sounds very healthy to me. If kids think they're worth more than they actually are, then they'll learn pretty quickly that that's not the case. If they're leaving jobs in droves because they're being treated better elsewhere, then they're right to think the way they do.
I think the best part would be the immediate flush of jobs to India once the IT union tried to strike the first time.
Unions are a pyramid scheme. It might work out great for the first few people on board, but it puts the company at a competitive disadvantage which in the long run will result in fewer jobs.
You can't get something for nothing.
It was probably a Volvo 240, like my first car.
"yet most of the power can never be legally used for more than a few seconds."
:-)
And an orgasm also only lasts a few seconds, but I'm not giving those up, either.
There's no such thing as "over-horsepowered." It's all a matter of preference once you have more than just enough horsepower to move the vehicle and driver.
I know! He oh so conveniently leaves out the part about Hell and how committing suicide is a sure way to get you there.
Fucker, I hope nobody listens to him and commits suicide, unless they're Styx fans.
The fastest way to understand Lisp is to write a Lisp compiler.
This would be my advice to the original poster anyway. Write a compiler that compiles down to machine code. Play around with Lex and Yacc or write a recursive descent parser in Lisp, think about the different ways to reserve space in memory for data structures and objects, the difference between the stack and the heap, and the limitations and requirements for run time libraries that different language features impose.
Once you've done that, you can easily understand the design decisions made in Java and other high level languages, and things like closures and continuations will no longer seem like mystical abstract concepts.
LaTeX tries to do a different thing than "desktop publishing," and for what it does, it does it extremely well, and is far better than any alternatives.
Back in the day, we had "word processors," and we had "desktop publishing software," the difference being that the desktop publishing software let you precisely control page layout and were WYSIWYG. Word processors were things you typed documents into and they broke that document into pages to send to a printer. Word processors had extensive features to help you enter your document correctly, like spell and grammar checkers, ways to emphasize text by making it bold or underlined, and not much else. They processed words, not pages.
Then someone had the not-so-bright idea to bring WYSIWYG into word processing, combining Desktop Publishing Software and Word Processing Software into shitty abominations called WordPerfect > 5.1 and Microsoft Word. Putting a small subset of desktop publishing power into cheap, buggy software ensured that secretaries everywhere would abuse Comic Sans and clip art until the end of time, and attach their creations to what should have been plain text email.
My first "office suite" let you type your document into the word processor, then you could set up the page layout in the desktop publishing program and link the text in, where it would flow into the predetermined layout and fill it. Two discrete steps, which couldn't have been easier. Trying to do this all at once is a pain in the ass, especially if you're changing the document around (editing). The problems worsen when multiple people work on the same document.
Initially, it was obvious that word processing and desktop publishing were two very different things, and never the twain shall meet. We'd all be a lot better off if this distinction had stayed, because the problem with word processors today is not that they're trying to be all things to all people, but that they're trying to do two different things at the same time.
It's just like older generations complaining that society is going downhill.
Yeah, every generation does it. But it doesn't mean that they're wrong.
256MB of memory to run an ugly desktop still seems like a ridiculous amount to me. But 1GB is far more ridiculous.
OS's across the board are getting progressively more bloated and slow. An OS and desktop environment coded from scratch would blow them all away in terms of performance and security, but it would take many man-years to create and a huge amount of pain for users to adopt.
What kills me is that I used to do nearly everything I do now, including 3-D modeling and rendering, on an Amiga 500, which had 2MB of RAM and 50 MB of hard drive space for the entire system, and that was double the minimum required for the most demanding apps.
Compared to that, everything today sucks. But still, XP and Ubuntu suck a lot less than Vista.
"It means the poor drive to work in cars with smaller engines."
As someone who had to eat peanut butter sandwiches exclusively for a few months to make the payments on the fourth car I went through in a single summer, I have a bit more sympathy for "the poor." When some idiot on a cellphone in a $40,000 Volvo plows into the Camry that you bought for $2,000, totalling it, and leaving you having to find another reliable car for $2,000 in a single weekend, you might understand that "the poor" aren't able to be as flexible in their purchasing decisions as you seem to think.
The whole problem with this country is that everything thinks they have the solution to everything, and don't realize that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Your solution to this imagined problem leaves a substantial amount of people unable to afford a car and out of work, simply because you took away their right to decide for themselves which car to buy.
Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of Stallman's weight, especially if it's being thrown around.
Right on. I like the commercial microwaves that have numbers 1-10 that correspond not to seconds, but to reasonable amounts of cook times. They also don't have a "start" button, it just goes. I don't need to cook something for 29 seconds as opposed to 30, and if I'm cooking less than 30 seconds it's unlikely that I'll walk away and not be able to stop the process after 10.
And the only extra feature I want in a microwave is an option to disable the beep that plays every time you press anything. If you live in a small house with sleeping kids...being able to easily disable noisy functions is a godsend.
"She made her money designing targetting systems for missiles. Interesting? I doubt it."
:-)
Don't doubt it, that's probably one of the most interesting problems there is. Imagine writing software that controls incredibly complex systems and must do so reliably in a hostile environment.
Amen to everything else you said
Teachers are actually overpaid, because there is a teacher surplus right now. Pay really isn't the problem, its the systemic removal of any freedom a teacher once had in the classroom. Public schools push a political agenda, they hardly teach at all.
Amen to that. Those guys were great, after a slow start until about level 8 or 9.
Nearly as awesome was three black belts and fighter, which allowed you to actually use the really good equipment you got later on, and made the first eight levels a bit more bearable.
I like your post, but re-reading it with the Simpson's Comic Book Store guy's voice in my head made it three times as funny.
Try it, you'll see.
You can see the strings on top! Typical Japanese. Just like those Rodan vs. Godzilla movies.
I don't think that would happen. Instead, the sites trying to do this would lose a ton of traffic to sites that weren't deliberately being inflexible.
Those "Optimized For...(browser)" web sites were an abomination, just like "This page best viewed at 800x600 resolution".
Really? I doubt it, simply because there's currently no economic benefit to exploring space. Yeah, you might make a profit on the first round of ultra-rich space tourists paying $100 grand each to go 100 miles up, but after the novelty wears off, what then? A lot of people might give their life's savings to go up, but you can't do that twice, so unless there's something compelling up there to do, it's not a sustainable business.
It won't be until conditions on this planet become so bad that living on Mars seems like a better option, and getting there is cheap enough so that even the dirt poor can afford to do it.
We're not even close with our level of technology today. We haven't even begun to explore our own ocean floors, which are many times less hostile than Mars. Space exploration currently doesn't make economic sense, nor will it in the foreseable future.
All that we can do now is plant a flag and cheer. I can understand the desire to do that, but calling it something other than what it is is folly.
Capitalism works because customers always have a choice between buying and not buying. Even if you're the only game in town, you have to price your products and services attractively, because there's always the other option that people simply won't buy your stuff. People still have a choice to do without general-purpose desktop computers at all (many do) if they don't feel they are worth the investment. Society does not collapse.
When people say capitalism works, they don't mean "the marketplace will find the absolute best possible solution to all problems." They simply mean that a free market, left to its own devices, will find an acceptable solution much more often and quickly than all other alternatives.
You can pokes holes in any system by comparing it to some arbitrary ideal, but realistically, unless we as humans all change our nature, join hands, gain some profound insight that enables us to predict all current and future unknowns, a free market is our next best shot at finding a workable allocation of scarce resources.
That's not what I mean. I mean that this should be possible without the for loop.
A parsed CSS stylesheet should form some type of tree with attributes for each tag type. It would be great to be able to change the style dynamically for the "a" tag, just as if I had edited the style sheet and reloaded it.
It's possible to change everything else on the web page dynamically, just not that. To me, that's a glaring limitation, but it also has nothing to do with HTML.
I like the getElementsByCSSSelector() idea. Better yet would be a way to change css styles dynamically and have the browser respond. Say if I wanted to change the default color of all "a" tags on a page -- in other words, I want javascript access to the css parse tree just like with the DOM. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's an easy way to implement this currently.
Elimination of DOCTYPES in favor of a version attribute to the html tag is just semantics, and kind of silly.
"There is only one scripting language allowed on a page."
That's just arbitrary and short-sighted. His reasoning that it would make things simpler is correct, in the same way that not being allowed to drive makes planning your commute to work simpler, since you can only walk or bike.
I guess the reason we stopped making such things is that they didn't really serve any purpose anymore.
I'm kinda torn on this whole thing. I love NASA and the cool stuff they do, but the reason to put men on Mars is just gone. In the good old days, we wanted to show the USSR that we could rain nuclear hell on them from the fucking moon if we wanted to, and that served a significant purpose. But guys on Mars? Why? There's no economic, scientific, or otherwise reason other than being able to say, "hell yeah, we did it!"
That might be reason enough, but why Mars then? Why not colonize the moon, which would be just as cool and probably less costly? How about exploring the ocean, which is nearly as difficult but would probably have a much greater impact?
The answer is, he was hit forcefully on the back with a club made of ice, which shattered. He fell on one of the shattered pieces, piercing the cell phone battery causing it to melt. The ice melted, leaving no evidence of what had happened...
Resources do not have to be infinite in order for the game to not be zero sum. They simply have to increase over time.
The total amount of energy available to the Earth increases over time. We haven't even scratched the surface of exploiting what we have, let alone optimized the exploitation of energy that comes in continuously that is currently unused.
Hence, no zero sum game. In other words, I don't have to take energy from you in order to increase the energy available to me, there are many other ways I can increase usage or efficiency.
In the U.S. we are not currently taking advantage of this fact, to our great discredit. It's short sighted and results in conflict.
"Earth is a zero sum game"
That's simply not true, and renewable resources (plants, trees, etc.) are evidence of that. We are not a zero sum game because we have, for all intents and purposes, an inexhaustible supply of energy from the sun. Think back through the chain --> sun causes plants to grow, animals eat plants, etc. We're all solar powered, ultimately.
More efficient exploitation of that energy results in an increase in available resources. Sure, there's a limit, but we have even begun to tap into it, even with existing technology.
That's why projects like Google's are important. Any increase in efficient production of renewable energy ensures that we continue to not be a zero sum game.
There may come a point where no further technological innovation is possible, but it looks like when we get to that advanced state that the population will contract voluntarily. Witness the below-replacement birth rates in first world countries.
"Worse, they actually do care and have only the best intentions."
I used to completely disagree. I figured that someone who could get elected to a prominent political office couldn't possibly be that stupid and must be deliberately making poor decisions in the interest of looking good and getting re-elected.
Then I received a letter in the mail written by Annapolis mayor Ellen Moyer, congratulating the populace on weathering a hurricane. It was so poorly written that after reading it I was certain she had been educated in the Annapolis public school system and must have just squeaked by.
I guess you really can never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.