It is a peculiarly (U.S.) American idea, which never caught on, elsewhere.
Care to unpack that? My understanding is that the main ideas in the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence came out of the European Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the development of basic rights in England and the legal principle of equality before the law beginning with Henry the 2nd and the development of the Common Law system over the better part of 1000 years. The radical idea that a commoner could take a ranking landowner to court for redress - a form of freedom of speech in open court - arose with the birth of the Common Law. The huge technical advance of the Common Law and its institutionalization owed much to academic Roman and Canon law going back a further thousand years. Jefferson was a Francophile who lived in Paris for some time and was greatly influenced there. At that time it would have been impossible to be an intellectual and not regard Paris as as a font of ideas.
Looks great, much like I imagined studying Comp Sci ought to be. Ok one can get the book and use the materials for self-learning, but is there a list of institutions using the course for credit?
So many great courses and great teachers around now. Pity they didn't get all this together way back in my day. I've just been working my way through http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/quantum-computing-for-the-determined/ and am astonished at the simplicity and lucidity of Nielsen's teaching.
There are two possible outcomes to the experiment if we are indeed simulations: the simulator cuts corners on the solution and we learn we are in a simulator; or the simulation ends..
Why only two? We might learn we are simulated (whatever that means) when we detect artefacts in physics itself as the resources for the simulation expire but maybe that does not crash the plankel server. Worst case, we get stuck in a hung universe while the Operator is away, reduced to restricted interaction with the universe, interfaces unresponsive, our processes eventually dying and zombied. Maybe that's Hell, or more appropriately, Limbo. And no guarantee we'll ever find the SysRq-REISUB keys in time if something like these exist or that this will work to kill the runaway process (never seem to work for me on a physical machine anyway). As said, we might unintentionally cause a reboot. Maybe we can discover "exploits" and hack the simulation to do currently impossible things (Matrix-like). In a sense, ALL of technology is discovering "exploits" - ways of manipulating reality to our ends - and perhaps we are the runaway processes or hackers in the system.
But seriously, metaphors can lead to insights because they enable us to conceive of a different representation of a system and thus different approaches to solving problems, but metaphors are only metaphors. Thinking of existence as a "simulation" (a semantic contradiction as someone pointed out: there is *only* reality) on a "computer" may open up new ways of tackling the nature of reality, but it is just as likely to be "real" as a caveman's assumption that the sun is a ball of fire. The sun is indeed a ball of fire on one level, so the metaphor does fit, but the tools to understand the nature of that fire are not within the caveman's intellectual grasp. It is possible (though I don't think so and it's a depressing thought) that we will never have big enough brains or knowledge to grasp the deep reality underlying current physics, to get down to that bottom-level turtle. I feel we are close to getting down to that next turtle or two though, the GUT ones.
I don't know if you're still there. Here goes anyway. I've often been curious about Apple's product development process, how they get from raw idea to a final product. Not just design alone, tech also. I've worked with a few ex-Apple managers (one whom I'n sure you'd know) but I never got any information when I ask then about how Apple approached this. Are some of the principles you instilled back in the day still evident in Apple processes do you think?
Muxing into MP4 containers was only semi-working for years and years and couldn't be recommended. This meant making MP4 was broken in mencoder as a consequence. Is it fixed yet? Please?
There are a LOT of commercial projects that use FFmpeg but pay for licensing for the particular codecs enabled. MPEG-LA, VIA (AAC), and Thomson (MP3) have no problem with that or where the codec implementation came from so long as the client the client is paying.
My bigger complaint is an oddity of their H.264 licensing that requires *every* H.263 decoder installed to be paid for separately. This means the H.264 decoder in OSP Flash, the H.264 decoder in the Gstreamer plugin and the H.264 decoder in FFmpeg all count, so it's 3 decoders not one in there and you pay for three decoders per unit Software decoders count separately to hardware decoders. And it's not really clear if the H.264 hw decoder in the GPU is a full decoder or not. MPEG LA agreed with me that it is not a fully functioning decoder since it requires the graphics driver and libva to be useful.
With mp3 and AAC licensing you only pay for *one* decoder no matter how many are installed per device.
It is most definitely at the forefront of privacy invasion, with the possible exception of California whose Attorney-General takes Californian privacy laws - the tightest in the US - seriously.
You misunderstand me and re-reading my post, which in retrospect was a bit over the top, I can see why. Please allow me to qualify that. I'm no US-hater. Quite the opposite. Yours is a great country. I know and have worked with many US citizens and have high regard for them. US technology, culture, entrepreneurship and sheer energy are second to none and I will argue with anyone who says otherwise. The US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are inspiring, great works. It's fair to say that I love your country.
That is why it saddens me to see what the workings of your political system seems to have become. And I don't want to single out the US alone as I said. Democracy is imperfect, and unfortunately vulnerable, but it's far better than the alternatives. I'll take imperfect democracy anytime over any other system. And it requires vigilance to maintain, as Jefferson stressed. That is why, whatever the political persuasion, Americans (or others) really have a duty to speak up when it's obvious that, for example, something's broken eg when foreign policy isn't really much different when the party in power changes. How many presidential campaign promises are ever fulfilled, I wonder? I tend to think John Ralston Saul is right when he says that the old left/right divides of two dominant party systems, like Republican versus Democracy, are really just theatre now, and that all we really get is more of the same.
You're right that would be a better show of strength, but then you have the type of foolishness perpetuated by the Obama administration where we essentially go around appologizing to our enemies inviting them to attack us. They know well that Obama would die at the hands of the enemy before he goes to war over anything. Our enemies know that too. See our foriegn embassies for evidence. So all of the posturing in the world isn't going to help when you've already shown your hand.
Really? You know, to us in the rest of the world, there is no noticeable difference between Obama and Bush. None. The Obama government's foreign policy is much the same as Bush's. Same offshore oil wars went on. Same idiotic sabre-rattling about invading Iran, which would be a total disaster and another oil war. It's republicans and democrat voters that differ. Your politicians are all the same underneath, pandering to the low common denominator in the US for votes, and you end up with the same policies regardless. It's a pseudo democracy, and the UK and Australia are not much better. And patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel (that's a quote). Hence I expect no genuine changes no matter who is elected, just a different tone to the rhetoric.
It's funny how Sci-Fi becomes reality on a relatively short time scale.
That is because we can only imagine most novel developments in technology a limited time ahead of a working invention. Most technology builds on previous technology. Then there's outright magical tech that right now we have scant justification will ever exist because the basic science doesn't yet (eg immortality, time travel in the Dr Who sense, warp drives). There is no "exotic matter" as yet.
I can't say I'm fully self-taught because I was taught Fortran, Pascal, Assembly etc back in those "bare metal" days, not that I remember many specifics. But I didn't enjoy programming at all until many years later when my overpowering interest in Linux, and need to be occupied, drove self-learning in shell, Perl, C/C++ and other stuff, which ended up driving a career re-birth in middle age.
When I needed to solve a simple concurrency issue in a self-education C project, I read up on semaphores and used those to do it. I also wrote knock-ups using different approaches (eg threads Vs. processes) to see which I thought was best and to get some experience with both.
For a while I worked with a rockstar programmer from the Linux userland world (name withheld). When I told him about my use of semaphores in this hobby project, he said: "Mmmm. Never played with those." This guy had *never* used semaphores in his entire career! I was surprised.
No-one will read this on a five-day old thread, however: any interview containing an anal-retentive useless interrogation like this indicates that they didn't want to hire you in the first place. They wasted your time and theirs with an interview because you were on a list and their process required that they cross you off. That's all it was. I've had one those, you can tell straight away that the vibe from the interviewer is wrong. Bureaucrats don't care about wasting everyone's time.
I know a fair few people who would like to stay involved with coding (and they continue to do it in their free time), but they do not become our senior coders because that position has been eliminated in pretty much every company I've worked for.
In most engineering fields, engineers don't stay engineers all that long. If they're any good they become managers and stop doing working at the lathe, so to speak. Also, large design exercises are a speciality in some fields and are handled by a department that does only that. In the field, an engineer may be both a manager and a technical problem-solver, but for anything *really* hard specialists are called in. And, tue or not, employers think new graduates will have all this up-to-date fancy shite in their heads, while at the same time, they want managers to have had experience on the shop floor, so they promote upwards from there and replace with cannon fodder CS grads.
BTW, Google prefers to hire maths grads as programmers. Google say that the problem-solving skills of maths grads are better than those of CS grads, and anyone with a maths background will certainly have done some programming during their education and can cope with learning new languages and technologies.
Programming classes at reputable colleges have an horrible attrition rate that can be largely laid at the door of people just not being able to grasp it.
Citation required. There's also the level of interest of the student which goes to motivation. And a lot of boring, awful courses and teaching. I looked at some introductory CS course materials from a particular Harvard U program recently and was amazed at how good these were: readable, enjoyable, relevant stuff. By contrast, my alma mater did everything it could to kill any nascent interest in computing in general. I only got interested years later.
I think it requires a certain level of intelligence as a minimum. Nothing incredibly special but above average and an interest in learning how to control that box. Interest can drive aptitude. But a low IQ is going to hamper working in, say, C. Object-oriented and the workings of inheritance in C++ are going to be hard to work with if you're plain dumb.
Documentation for libraries is not infrequently poor or even wrong and there seems to be some tacit assumption that programmers will work out how things work anyway, even if that just means knowing where to get help.
And it depends what you call "programming". If that includes designing solutions to complex or novel (hence no off-the-shelf libraries) solutions, then you have to design complex algorithms, which requires creativity. You need to be able to evaluate and select the right solution, too, something even very smart programmers get wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a peculiarly (U.S.) American idea, which never caught on, elsewhere.
Care to unpack that? My understanding is that the main ideas in the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence came out of the European Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the development of basic rights in England and the legal principle of equality before the law beginning with Henry the 2nd and the development of the Common Law system over the better part of 1000 years. The radical idea that a commoner could take a ranking landowner to court for redress - a form of freedom of speech in open court - arose with the birth of the Common Law. The huge technical advance of the Common Law and its institutionalization owed much to academic Roman and Canon law going back a further thousand years. Jefferson was a Francophile who lived in Paris for some time and was greatly influenced there. At that time it would have been impossible to be an intellectual and not regard Paris as as a font of ideas.
Forbiding personal beliefs is not freedom at all
Tolerating insane, unprovable beliefs that fester and encourage acts of great cruelty and inhumanity is not freedom at all.
Looks great, much like I imagined studying Comp Sci ought to be. Ok one can get the book and use the materials for self-learning, but is there a list of institutions using the course for credit?
So many great courses and great teachers around now. Pity they didn't get all this together way back in my day. I've just been working my way through http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/quantum-computing-for-the-determined/ and am astonished at the simplicity and lucidity of Nielsen's teaching.
There are two possible outcomes to the experiment if we are indeed simulations: the simulator cuts corners on the solution and we learn we are in a simulator; or the simulation ends..
Why only two? We might learn we are simulated (whatever that means) when we detect artefacts in physics itself as the resources for the simulation expire but maybe that does not crash the plankel server. Worst case, we get stuck in a hung universe while the Operator is away, reduced to restricted interaction with the universe, interfaces unresponsive, our processes eventually dying and zombied. Maybe that's Hell, or more appropriately, Limbo. And no guarantee we'll ever find the SysRq-REISUB keys in time if something like these exist or that this will work to kill the runaway process (never seem to work for me on a physical machine anyway). As said, we might unintentionally cause a reboot. Maybe we can discover "exploits" and hack the simulation to do currently impossible things (Matrix-like). In a sense, ALL of technology is discovering "exploits" - ways of manipulating reality to our ends - and perhaps we are the runaway processes or hackers in the system.
But seriously, metaphors can lead to insights because they enable us to conceive of a different representation of a system and thus different approaches to solving problems, but metaphors are only metaphors. Thinking of existence as a "simulation" (a semantic contradiction as someone pointed out: there is *only* reality) on a "computer" may open up new ways of tackling the nature of reality, but it is just as likely to be "real" as a caveman's assumption that the sun is a ball of fire. The sun is indeed a ball of fire on one level, so the metaphor does fit, but the tools to understand the nature of that fire are not within the caveman's intellectual grasp. It is possible (though I don't think so and it's a depressing thought) that we will never have big enough brains or knowledge to grasp the deep reality underlying current physics, to get down to that bottom-level turtle. I feel we are close to getting down to that next turtle or two though, the GUT ones.
Proof?
I don't know if you're still there. Here goes anyway. I've often been curious about Apple's product development process, how they get from raw idea to a final product. Not just design alone, tech also. I've worked with a few ex-Apple managers (one whom I'n sure you'd know) but I never got any information when I ask then about how Apple approached this. Are some of the principles you instilled back in the day still evident in Apple processes do you think?
Muxing into MP4 containers was only semi-working for years and years and couldn't be recommended. This meant making MP4 was broken in mencoder as a consequence. Is it fixed yet? Please?
Won't someone please ....[obvious]
that requires *every* H.263 decoder
should read
that requires *every* H.264 decoder
There are a LOT of commercial projects that use FFmpeg but pay for licensing for the particular codecs enabled. MPEG-LA, VIA (AAC), and Thomson (MP3) have no problem with that or where the codec implementation came from so long as the client the client is paying.
My bigger complaint is an oddity of their H.264 licensing that requires *every* H.263 decoder installed to be paid for separately. This means the H.264 decoder in OSP Flash, the H.264 decoder in the Gstreamer plugin and the H.264 decoder in FFmpeg all count, so it's 3 decoders not one in there and you pay for three decoders per unit Software decoders count separately to hardware decoders. And it's not really clear if the H.264 hw decoder in the GPU is a full decoder or not. MPEG LA agreed with me that it is not a fully functioning decoder since it requires the graphics driver and libva to be useful.
With mp3 and AAC licensing you only pay for *one* decoder no matter how many are installed per device.
It is most definitely at the forefront of privacy invasion, with the possible exception of California whose Attorney-General takes Californian privacy laws - the tightest in the US - seriously.
You misunderstand me and re-reading my post, which in retrospect was a bit over the top, I can see why. Please allow me to qualify that. I'm no US-hater. Quite the opposite. Yours is a great country. I know and have worked with many US citizens and have high regard for them. US technology, culture, entrepreneurship and sheer energy are second to none and I will argue with anyone who says otherwise. The US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are inspiring, great works. It's fair to say that I love your country.
That is why it saddens me to see what the workings of your political system seems to have become. And I don't want to single out the US alone as I said. Democracy is imperfect, and unfortunately vulnerable, but it's far better than the alternatives. I'll take imperfect democracy anytime over any other system. And it requires vigilance to maintain, as Jefferson stressed. That is why, whatever the political persuasion, Americans (or others) really have a duty to speak up when it's obvious that, for example, something's broken eg when foreign policy isn't really much different when the party in power changes. How many presidential campaign promises are ever fulfilled, I wonder? I tend to think John Ralston Saul is right when he says that the old left/right divides of two dominant party systems, like Republican versus Democracy, are really just theatre now, and that all we really get is more of the same.
You're right that would be a better show of strength, but then you have the type of foolishness perpetuated by the Obama administration where we essentially go around appologizing to our enemies inviting them to attack us. They know well that Obama would die at the hands of the enemy before he goes to war over anything. Our enemies know that too. See our foriegn embassies for evidence. So all of the posturing in the world isn't going to help when you've already shown your hand.
Really? You know, to us in the rest of the world, there is no noticeable difference between Obama and Bush. None. The Obama government's foreign policy is much the same as Bush's. Same offshore oil wars went on. Same idiotic sabre-rattling about invading Iran, which would be a total disaster and another oil war. It's republicans and democrat voters that differ. Your politicians are all the same underneath, pandering to the low common denominator in the US for votes, and you end up with the same policies regardless. It's a pseudo democracy, and the UK and Australia are not much better. And patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel (that's a quote). Hence I expect no genuine changes no matter who is elected, just a different tone to the rhetoric.
No, it's a *fundamental physics* problem. No engineering without physics.
Think of the children! They have every right to go under buses, too!
It's funny how Sci-Fi becomes reality on a relatively short time scale.
That is because we can only imagine most novel developments in technology a limited time ahead of a working invention. Most technology builds on previous technology. Then there's outright magical tech that right now we have scant justification will ever exist because the basic science doesn't yet (eg immortality, time travel in the Dr Who sense, warp drives). There is no "exotic matter" as yet.
>. Don't get into semaphores. .
I can't say I'm fully self-taught because I was taught Fortran, Pascal, Assembly etc back in those "bare metal" days, not that I remember many specifics. But I didn't enjoy programming at all until many years later when my overpowering interest in Linux, and need to be occupied, drove self-learning in shell, Perl, C/C++ and other stuff, which ended up driving a career re-birth in middle age.
When I needed to solve a simple concurrency issue in a self-education C project, I read up on semaphores and used those to do it. I also wrote knock-ups using different approaches (eg threads Vs. processes) to see which I thought was best and to get some experience with both.
For a while I worked with a rockstar programmer from the Linux userland world (name withheld). When I told him about my use of semaphores in this hobby project, he said: "Mmmm. Never played with those." This guy had *never* used semaphores in his entire career! I was surprised.
No-one will read this on a five-day old thread, however: any interview containing an anal-retentive useless interrogation like this indicates that they didn't want to hire you in the first place. They wasted your time and theirs with an interview because you were on a list and their process required that they cross you off. That's all it was. I've had one those, you can tell straight away that the vibe from the interviewer is wrong. Bureaucrats don't care about wasting everyone's time.
Google have said they prefer to hire maths grads over CS grads because they believe mathematics grads have better problem solving skills.
In fact, mathematicians can be the worst: they think computer science is a subset of math and it really isn't.
Totally wrong. Computer science is *ALL* mathematics. It's programming that isn't maths, for the most part.
I know a fair few people who would like to stay involved with coding (and they continue to do it in their free time), but they do not become our senior coders because that position has been eliminated in pretty much every company I've worked for.
In most engineering fields, engineers don't stay engineers all that long. If they're any good they become managers and stop doing working at the lathe, so to speak. Also, large design exercises are a speciality in some fields and are handled by a department that does only that. In the field, an engineer may be both a manager and a technical problem-solver, but for anything *really* hard specialists are called in. And, tue or not, employers think new graduates will have all this up-to-date fancy shite in their heads, while at the same time, they want managers to have had experience on the shop floor, so they promote upwards from there and replace with cannon fodder CS grads.
BTW, Google prefers to hire maths grads as programmers. Google say that the problem-solving skills of maths grads are better than those of CS grads, and anyone with a maths background will certainly have done some programming during their education and can cope with learning new languages and technologies.
With simplified programming languages like Java, that take care of the "hard stuff", anyone can string together some code and do tasks.
And anyone can also make a hell of a mess.
Programming classes at reputable colleges have an horrible attrition rate that can be largely laid at the door of people just not being able to grasp it.
Citation required. There's also the level of interest of the student which goes to motivation. And a lot of boring, awful courses and teaching. I looked at some introductory CS course materials from a particular Harvard U program recently and was amazed at how good these were: readable, enjoyable, relevant stuff. By contrast, my alma mater did everything it could to kill any nascent interest in computing in general. I only got interested years later.
Yes, but that's nothing to do with intelligence.
I think it requires a certain level of intelligence as a minimum. Nothing incredibly special but above average and an interest in learning how to control that box. Interest can drive aptitude. But a low IQ is going to hamper working in, say, C. Object-oriented and the workings of inheritance in C++ are going to be hard to work with if you're plain dumb.
Documentation for libraries is not infrequently poor or even wrong and there seems to be some tacit assumption that programmers will work out how things work anyway, even if that just means knowing where to get help.
And it depends what you call "programming". If that includes designing solutions to complex or novel (hence no off-the-shelf libraries) solutions, then you have to design complex algorithms, which requires creativity. You need to be able to evaluate and select the right solution, too, something even very smart programmers get wrong.