As a really fucking smart woman, I'm always stunned by the way that higher-level reasoning always goes out the window when it comes to these types of scare articles.
For one, who says that college enrollments are a good metric? After all, the title isn't "Why the Widening Gender Gap in HIGHER EDUCATION ENROLLMENTS in Computer Science." Which would only be accurate.
You can't be a doctor by learning on the internet, but you can learn to be a top-notch tech jockey.
And that's just one of the serious flaws these things *always* have...
Here's my take on this already-dead-and-rotten-but-still-fun-to-beat horse:
As others have noted, what Rails generates for you are stubs. Even if the stubs are full-featured enough to let you add, edit, view, and delete objects, they're still stubs. It's just that RoR is succinct enough that generating 150 lines of code (including action views and layouts) is all that's necessary to provide all of that functionality in a very basic way.
It's true that "Ask Slashdot" is vehicle for enlightenment, but I didn't think it was a vehicle for the basest laziness. I don't understand why someone would go Ask Slashdot instead of looking at a couple F/OSS Rails app packages and deciding for himself whether or not they look "maintainable."
If the submitter did, he'd find that it's clear that maintaining Rails apps is no problem. You don't have to know much about a given app to even do serious "maintenance" on it. As long as the programmer hasn't tried really hard to break all the benefits Rails brings to the table (regular file structure, MVC separation, clean models, helper classes, etc), then you'll already know a lot about how the app is structured before you even unzip it.
You may be right. Nobody can tell at this point whether or not Ning will succeed, or succeed for long, more importantly. Whether this spark of interest will last, or not. I'm optimistic, but I also recognize that I'm just a teensy bit biased:) That said, I didn't design the system, and there certainly are things I'd do differently. I still think it's an intriguing idea, being run by people who care about it. We'll just have to see.
My company was contracted to work on Ning, and we've been doing it for over 3 months. It makes me a bit sad that everyone seems to be missing the point of what makes Ning truly great.
It's the data. The SHARED data. It's an ecosystem, not just a platform or a hosted framework. Ning is much greater than any individual application, and I personally don't think that the true popularity will come from the dating applications. Ning's much bigger than any given application (and by that I mean piece of software and application as in "the way it's used"), and it's not a mega app. It's an app playground.
It really is a matter of finding the right company. There are plenty of companies which will pay for training, for trips to conferences (or else conferences wouldn't happen! they are driven by employers sending people), and so on. I get to stretch my brain doing new things at work on a regular basis... and frankly, I can't make myself learn new things without something to apply them to, most of the time anyway.
Hence why their cash reserves make up most of their stock price. It's ridiculous. Apple is the bastard child of stocks, with a ridiculously low price-to-earnings/price-to-assets ratio because nobody actually invests in it but fanatics, while some people do pump-and-dump (they let others pump; they only dump) around MacWorlds.
Let's not forget short life-span
on
LCD Overtaking CRT
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· Score: 2, Informative
LCDs don't last very long, comparatively speaking: backlights fade at an alarming rate (noticable within 18 months to 2-3 years, depending on the screen), and the colors can fade. A CRT of comparable price will easily outlive an LCD by 2-3 times -- a good CRT will last 10 years without reduction in quality, minimum.
So not only are they not as bright, not as contrasty, and not color-accurate, with limited viewing angles and severely constricted color gamut, they wear out quickly and cost much more!
The Age of LCDs is not here yet. But let's hope that misguided reports like this spur more development of better, competing technologies:)
Which is carbonized and, I should say, very nice. The fact that it's integrated into Illy/PS and has the same user interface is a tremendous boon.
Quark sucks ass. If you believe otherwise, you're on crack. They laugh at you if you call them for support and say things like "But we know you won't switch." If they're insistent on darwinizing themselves, let them. OS X has been out for over a year. There's no excuse.
You can boot into Classic from Jag if you have Classic all up to date and all. Jag requires the absolute newest version. OS 9 does not ship with Jag but it's available for an additional $20 or $30 from Apple, and yes, you can boot to it. Try updating if you want to.
There are other implementations of true X Window support for MacOS X, however they are not free. In fact, I believe they are quite costly -- upwards of $200 or so. This obviously won't be the case for much longer, but the notability of this article was that there is finally a free (if somewhat kludgy) solution taht will get the job done FROM within the OS X GUI. Other free solutions require console access.
Er, "idiots" too. There goes my Automatic Typing(TM) again (my hands think for themselves, and seeing as they don't have brains, they don't do it very well).
Maybe in the respect that they clean up what other idiot's trash, but someone who can be a good sysadmin is a lot better than your dime-a-dozen grunt programmers.
PS - And lots of people with college degrees have worse English skills than he does. Big woop.
... And most highly curious people are self-motivated learners. They themselves will teach themselves humanities subjects like communication, philosophy, history, etc., if they so desire. The most interesting question is always "Why?" I don't know any people I consider intelligent who do not have at least better-than-average communications skills. I know a lot of people who consider themselves intelligent and supposedly are 3R337 pr0gr@mmerZ who have awful communications skills, but believe me, they are not the people we should really be worry about. There are lots of pretentious people in reasonably good positions because the people hiring them haven't a clue!
And as for self-learners... I'm one. Which is one good reason I always loathed school. Tthe fact that I lived in a reasonably well-off neighborhood and the parents put pressure on the school system to include their very average, it not below-average, but generally well-behaved kids in the so-called Gifted classes didn't help. (Picture a bunch of 13-year-olds reading Shakespeare in English and the board question saying something about whatshername being skeptical of Lysander's love for her, and all the whispers... "What does skeptical mean?" Shit, the little CHEX boy knows what "skeptical" means). I eventually convinced my mother -- a high school teacher -- to let me 'drop out' and homeschool myself in the middle of my freshmen year. She knew how bored I was and what a struggle it was to drag myself out of bed to go to school -- as it was, I missed about 30 days a year anyway. And still got no C's. Tells you a lot about what kind of effort it takes to get good grades, doesn't it?
So, look at me now. I'm 16 and I just secured my first book contract, a how-to book, for $5500. Not much, but the book won't be much either, and $5500 for 10 weeks of work isn't anything to whine over. That's not the point, though -- it's my ticket. A ticket I wouldn't have gotten had I not left school and had time to run my own web site (and support myself enough from it to move out). For what it's worth, the publisher approached me and not the other way around.
I'm going to have a fun time giving one to the English teacher who gave me a B because I was late often and she wanted to "motivate" me. Despite the fact that I was the best writer and arguably most intelligent student of the entire class.
("Motivate this, bitch!")
So in conclusion... school isn't for everyone. I can damn well tell you I didn't get my language or people skills there, my entrepreneuring spirit or, really, just about anything good about myself. So I'm a high school drop-out, supposedly, and I'm not going to college unless I have to, certainly not full-time.
(PS - I haven't taken college courses myself, but almost all of my friends are college age and they have. Let's just say that colleges obviously don't care if you learn or not when they give you professors who don't speak good english, especially if they're teaching English-like courses such as mythology. This guy didn't know how to conjugate plural verbs, and my brother -- getting his PhD in particle physics, btw -- had a Chinese professor who didn't speak it at all. In the US, very few colleges seem concerned with actual learning, and more about processing meaty pulp. I know it's different in other countries.)
I think that they could put one FireWire jack in the next iMac for those who wish to use their camcorders with a 'consumer' version of FinalCut (notice that they called the first version 'Pro'?). As I recall, there was something similar back on the old Performas where you could plug in your VCR or Camcorder and import small movies into a program that would let you do simple editing, like adding silly sound tracks. (I recall the demo had pictures of an iguana eating a baby at his/her birthday?) Also, DVD is nice. Consider these two articles that I've compiled for my website with the rumors that are abounding arond the next iMacs: http://www.dailyimac.com/articles/fyi/rumors/dvdso rbto.html (DVD Standard or BTO in Next iMacs?) http://www.dailyimac.com/articles/fyi/rumors/kihei .html (General Kihei rumor compilation) Just FYI: Apple makes the current iMacs cheap by making and selling them in such volume, as well as keeping inventory down. Apple sells iMacs to distributors for about $960 or so a pop, and they in turn sell them to small stores -- big stores buy direct from Apple. Apple makes $330 or more off each iMac sold through retail, and around $600 on each sold through the Apple store. That's without any add-ons. They have the money to improve the line without raising the cost! Adding FW is easier if the next iMacs use the UniNorth unified mobo architecture/ASIC combinations. FireWire and AGP 2x, etc, are functionalities already allowed for in UniNorth -- it would be cheaper for Apple to add FireWire than to add Composite video! (And why would Joe Schmoe spend $6k+ if he could or would settle for an iMac?:) More in my articles... (Please, slashdot mee!;)
Oh yea, and EVERYONE has a top-of-the-line G3?
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Q3T on Mac First
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· Score: 1
Hmm, I'm pretty sure it was a G3/300 vs a P2 400. I know the PII was a hundred megahertz faster (or at least, that's what they say) than the G3. I remember doing a little news blurb on my web site about that article... and yes, PC World did it as well. Or was it PC MAgazine? One of the two.
Yes, we do too have a right to privacy
on
Why Kids Kill
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· Score: 1
How do you expect children to grow up into normal adults when they were mistrusted their entire lives and treated like second-class citizens? If it were an employer doing that sort of thing to their staff, it would be illegal. That's as bad as sexism and racism, only in a more dangerous form. People who are shown again and again that they are not worthy of privacy and they are not trustworthy enough to handle their own affairs, or have even some semblance of a normal, respectable life, do not grow up into normal people, they grow up and they rebel, they grow up and they lose theirselves in addictive substances, or they end up causing themselves to never grow up at all.
The signature of a healthy culture is one that respects its young people for being what they are: the future. They are not subcitizens, they are as important as every adult, if not more important. You don't have school massacres occuring in countries where the children and young people are respected and treated as equals---inexperienced, perhaps, but equal nonetheless. It does not happen. If you tell a child he is stupid, he will think he is stupid; if you tell a child he is bad, he will think he is bad; if you tell a child that he is untrustworthy, he will be untrustworthy. Children are absorbent... they are what society tells them they should be. And in America... well. You see the products.
-- very concerned/opinionated 14-year-old (whose parents never snooped in her stuff)
Closed? Gee, LinuxPPC works, Be works, etc., etc.
on
MacMafia
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· Score: 1
Some people swear by their LinuxPPC boxes. A lot of people viciously support Be. To the point of rabidity (and no, don't cite that entire Apple-wont-give-out-specs-to-Be bullshit because they have more than they need and they're just not getting off their lazy asses. If LinuxPPC will work, so can Be if they want to try). The Mac is most certainly as open as any PC system, if not more so due to OpenFirmware (or are you not of the initiated?). Just because their (Apple's) OS doesn't run on anything else HARDLY means that their hardware is not 'open.' Amy
... the P1 has been promised to run a *full* (read it, *full*) version of Mac OS, which would be 8.6 by that time (unless plans are changed). Sure, G3s are low power consumption compared to the Pentium chips, but who are we *kidding*? 2lbs or so of the Powerbook G3's 7lbs is batteries. Huge batteries. Heavy batteries that take hours to charge. The eMate's 4x2x.5 NiMH battery takes an average of 1 hour, 15 minutes (I own one). It weighs very little. Sure, you can crank that baby---on 1 hour of charging, you get up to 40 hours of work time w/o backlight. That's feasible, sure.
I learned BASIC at 6 or 7 on my Apple IIc, and it really helped me grasp things like variables and loops and such before I ever actually did much programming at all. Let your kid try his/her hand at a little BASIC... It's really easy and forgiving, and it does make a great jumping-off point.
if s/he really isn't interested in programming, I'd say don't push it. Nobody taught me---I did it all of my own volition. And now, years later, I can't describe the giddy feeling of looking at PERL and going "Oh wow---I know how to do this!":) If you're looking for something a little more complex, I do recommend PERL as a second language (after BASIC). C is a lot harder to master at first without real instruction, and even though C++ is more "logical," (or should I say humanized?) it's still pretty hard as well.
Slashdot Mirror
As a really fucking smart woman, I'm always stunned by the way that higher-level reasoning always goes out the window when it comes to these types of scare articles.
For one, who says that college enrollments are a good metric? After all, the title isn't "Why the Widening Gender Gap in HIGHER EDUCATION ENROLLMENTS in Computer Science." Which would only be accurate.
You can't be a doctor by learning on the internet, but you can learn to be a top-notch tech jockey.
And that's just one of the serious flaws these things *always* have...
Here's my take on this already-dead-and-rotten-but-still-fun-to-beat horse:
http://www.slash7.com/articles/2008/10/19/can-we-can-it-with-the-damn-where-are-the-women-crap-already
As others have noted, what Rails generates for you are stubs. Even if the stubs are full-featured enough to let you add, edit, view, and delete objects, they're still stubs. It's just that RoR is succinct enough that generating 150 lines of code (including action views and layouts) is all that's necessary to provide all of that functionality in a very basic way.
l -from-scaffolding
But, two links for your consumption.
My article on the topic of what I call Scaffold Withdrawal
http://www.slash7.com/articles/2005/12/07/the-fal
Structure generation vs code generation (from the Rails' creator's blog)
http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/2005_10.html
It's true that "Ask Slashdot" is vehicle for enlightenment, but I didn't think it was a vehicle for the basest laziness. I don't understand why someone would go Ask Slashdot instead of looking at a couple F/OSS Rails app packages and deciding for himself whether or not they look "maintainable."
If the submitter did, he'd find that it's clear that maintaining Rails apps is no problem. You don't have to know much about a given app to even do serious "maintenance" on it. As long as the programmer hasn't tried really hard to break all the benefits Rails brings to the table (regular file structure, MVC separation, clean models, helper classes, etc), then you'll already know a lot about how the app is structured before you even unzip it.
Gee, that's almost as bad as corporate whores posing as institutes of learning.
Donnacha,
:) That said, I didn't design the system, and there certainly are things I'd do differently. I still think it's an intriguing idea, being run by people who care about it. We'll just have to see.
You may be right. Nobody can tell at this point whether or not Ning will succeed, or succeed for long, more importantly. Whether this spark of interest will last, or not. I'm optimistic, but I also recognize that I'm just a teensy bit biased
My company was contracted to work on Ning, and we've been doing it for over 3 months. It makes me a bit sad that everyone seems to be missing the point of what makes Ning truly great.
e s-startup-launches
It's the data. The SHARED data. It's an ecosystem, not just a platform or a hosted framework. Ning is much greater than any individual application, and I personally don't think that the true popularity will come from the dating applications. Ning's much bigger than any given application (and by that I mean piece of software and application as in "the way it's used"), and it's not a mega app. It's an app playground.
See my blog post on the subject: http://www.slash7.com/articles/2005/10/05/fun-tim
It really is a matter of finding the right company. There are plenty of companies which will pay for training, for trips to conferences (or else conferences wouldn't happen! they are driven by employers sending people), and so on. I get to stretch my brain doing new things at work on a regular basis... and frankly, I can't make myself learn new things without something to apply them to, most of the time anyway.
You just have to shop around.
In states like mine (MD), it's already law. I can get free credit reports every 60 days if I want.
:)
Despite being a pseudo-tech wasteland, MD has its finer points.
Hence why their cash reserves make up most of their stock price. It's ridiculous. Apple is the bastard child of stocks, with a ridiculously low price-to-earnings/price-to-assets ratio because nobody actually invests in it but fanatics, while some people do pump-and-dump (they let others pump; they only dump) around MacWorlds.
LCDs don't last very long, comparatively speaking: backlights fade at an alarming rate (noticable within 18 months to 2-3 years, depending on the screen), and the colors can fade. A CRT of comparable price will easily outlive an LCD by 2-3 times -- a good CRT will last 10 years without reduction in quality, minimum.
:)
So not only are they not as bright, not as contrasty, and not color-accurate, with limited viewing angles and severely constricted color gamut, they wear out quickly and cost much more!
The Age of LCDs is not here yet. But let's hope that misguided reports like this spur more development of better, competing technologies
Which is carbonized and, I should say, very nice. The fact that it's integrated into Illy/PS and has the same user interface is a tremendous boon.
Quark sucks ass. If you believe otherwise, you're on crack. They laugh at you if you call them for support and say things like "But we know you won't switch." If they're insistent on darwinizing themselves, let them. OS X has been out for over a year. There's no excuse.
You can boot into Classic from Jag if you have Classic all up to date and all. Jag requires the absolute newest version. OS 9 does not ship with Jag but it's available for an additional $20 or $30 from Apple, and yes, you can boot to it. Try updating if you want to.
... we know it wasn't Metallica!
There are other implementations of true X Window support for MacOS X, however they are not free. In fact, I believe they are quite costly -- upwards of $200 or so. This obviously won't be the case for much longer, but the notability of this article was that there is finally a free (if somewhat kludgy) solution taht will get the job done FROM within the OS X GUI. Other free solutions require console access.
Conspiracy? You mean like using a cute, cuddly, fuzzy mascot to market evil opensource to children?
Ha ha ha.
It's not a conspiracy, it's good business.
Er, "idiots" too. There goes my Automatic Typing(TM) again (my hands think for themselves, and seeing as they don't have brains, they don't do it very well).
Maybe in the respect that they clean up what other idiot's trash, but someone who can be a good sysadmin is a lot better than your dime-a-dozen grunt programmers.
PS - And lots of people with college degrees have worse English skills than he does. Big woop.
... And most highly curious people are self-motivated learners. They themselves will teach themselves humanities subjects like communication, philosophy, history, etc., if they so desire. The most interesting question is always "Why?" I don't know any people I consider intelligent who do not have at least better-than-average communications skills. I know a lot of people who consider themselves intelligent and supposedly are 3R337 pr0gr@mmerZ who have awful communications skills, but believe me, they are not the people we should really be worry about. There are lots of pretentious people in reasonably good positions because the people hiring them haven't a clue!
And as for self-learners... I'm one. Which is one good reason I always loathed school. Tthe fact that I lived in a reasonably well-off neighborhood and the parents put pressure on the school system to include their very average, it not below-average, but generally well-behaved kids in the so-called Gifted classes didn't help. (Picture a bunch of 13-year-olds reading Shakespeare in English and the board question saying something about whatshername being skeptical of Lysander's love for her, and all the whispers... "What does skeptical mean?" Shit, the little CHEX boy knows what "skeptical" means). I eventually convinced my mother -- a high school teacher -- to let me 'drop out' and homeschool myself in the middle of my freshmen year. She knew how bored I was and what a struggle it was to drag myself out of bed to go to school -- as it was, I missed about 30 days a year anyway. And still got no C's. Tells you a lot about what kind of effort it takes to get good grades, doesn't it?
So, look at me now. I'm 16 and I just secured my first book contract, a how-to book, for $5500. Not much, but the book won't be much either, and $5500 for 10 weeks of work isn't anything to whine over. That's not the point, though -- it's my ticket. A ticket I wouldn't have gotten had I not left school and had time to run my own web site (and support myself enough from it to move out). For what it's worth, the publisher approached me and not the other way around.
I'm going to have a fun time giving one to the English teacher who gave me a B because I was late often and she wanted to "motivate" me. Despite the fact that I was the best writer and arguably most intelligent student of the entire class.
("Motivate this, bitch!")
So in conclusion... school isn't for everyone. I can damn well tell you I didn't get my language or people skills there, my entrepreneuring spirit or, really, just about anything good about myself. So I'm a high school drop-out, supposedly, and I'm not going to college unless I have to, certainly not full-time.
(PS - I haven't taken college courses myself, but almost all of my friends are college age and they have. Let's just say that colleges obviously don't care if you learn or not when they give you professors who don't speak good english, especially if they're teaching English-like courses such as mythology. This guy didn't know how to conjugate plural verbs, and my brother -- getting his PhD in particle physics, btw -- had a Chinese professor who didn't speak it at all. In the US, very few colleges seem concerned with actual learning, and more about processing meaty pulp. I know it's different in other countries.)
Egad! For some reason, my linebreaks didn't work. And there I could have sworn I had "Plain Old Text" selected. Alas... Sorry for the mess :\
And here are the HTMLized links: DVD Standard or BTO in Next iMacs?, and General Kihei Rumor Compilation.
Enjoy...
Amy
I think that they could put one FireWire jack in the next iMac for those who wish to use their camcorders with a 'consumer' version of FinalCut (notice that they called the first version 'Pro'?). As I recall, there was something similar back on the old Performas where you could plug in your VCR or Camcorder and import small movies into a program that would let you do simple editing, like adding silly sound tracks. (I recall the demo had pictures of an iguana eating a baby at his/her birthday?) Also, DVD is nice. Consider these two articles that I've compiled for my website with the rumors that are abounding arond the next iMacs: http://www.dailyimac.com/articles/fyi/rumors/dvdso rbto.html (DVD Standard or BTO in Next iMacs?) http://www.dailyimac.com/articles/fyi/rumors/kihei .html (General Kihei rumor compilation) Just FYI: Apple makes the current iMacs cheap by making and selling them in such volume, as well as keeping inventory down. Apple sells iMacs to distributors for about $960 or so a pop, and they in turn sell them to small stores -- big stores buy direct from Apple. Apple makes $330 or more off each iMac sold through retail, and around $600 on each sold through the Apple store. That's without any add-ons. They have the money to improve the line without raising the cost! Adding FW is easier if the next iMacs use the UniNorth unified mobo architecture/ASIC combinations. FireWire and AGP 2x, etc, are functionalities already allowed for in UniNorth -- it would be cheaper for Apple to add FireWire than to add Composite video! (And why would Joe Schmoe spend $6k+ if he could or would settle for an iMac? :) More in my articles... (Please, slashdot mee! ;)
Hmm, I'm pretty sure it was a G3/300 vs a P2 400. I know the PII was a hundred megahertz faster (or at least, that's what they say) than the G3. I remember doing a little news blurb on my web site about that article... and yes, PC World did it as well. Or was it PC MAgazine? One of the two.
How do you expect children to grow up into normal adults when they were mistrusted their entire lives and treated like second-class citizens? If it were an employer doing that sort of thing to their staff, it would be illegal. That's as bad as sexism and racism, only in a more dangerous form. People who are shown again and again that they are not worthy of privacy and they are not trustworthy enough to handle their own affairs, or have even some semblance of a normal, respectable life, do not grow up into normal people, they grow up and they rebel, they grow up and they lose theirselves in addictive substances, or they end up causing themselves to never grow up at all.
The signature of a healthy culture is one that respects its young people for being what they are: the future. They are not subcitizens, they are as important as every adult, if not more important. You don't have school massacres occuring in countries where the children and young people are respected and treated as equals---inexperienced, perhaps, but equal nonetheless. It does not happen. If you tell a child he is stupid, he will think he is stupid; if you tell a child he is bad, he will think he is bad; if you tell a child that he is untrustworthy, he will be untrustworthy. Children are absorbent... they are what society tells them they should be. And in America... well. You see the products.
-- very concerned/opinionated 14-year-old (whose parents never snooped in her stuff)
Some people swear by their LinuxPPC boxes. A lot of people viciously support Be. To the point of rabidity (and no, don't cite that entire Apple-wont-give-out-specs-to-Be bullshit because they have more than they need and they're just not getting off their lazy asses. If LinuxPPC will work, so can Be if they want to try). The Mac is most certainly as open as any PC system, if not more so due to OpenFirmware (or are you not of the initiated?). Just because their (Apple's) OS doesn't run on anything else HARDLY means that their hardware is not 'open.'
Amy
But on a regular G3 laptop? Get outta here!
Amy
I learned BASIC at 6 or 7 on my Apple IIc, and it really helped me grasp things like variables and loops and such before I ever actually did much programming at all. Let your kid try his/her hand at a little BASIC... It's really easy and forgiving, and it does make a great jumping-off point.
:) If you're looking for something a little more complex, I do recommend PERL as a second language (after BASIC). C is a lot harder to master at first without real instruction, and even though C++ is more "logical," (or should I say humanized?) it's still pretty hard as well.
if s/he really isn't interested in programming, I'd say don't push it. Nobody taught me---I did it all of my own volition. And now, years later, I can't describe the giddy feeling of looking at PERL and going "Oh wow---I know how to do this!"
Amy