What I hated was how the networks treated the show. They'd shift it around in time or cancel it, without giving advance notice to viewers. So it was a real chore at time to keep watching. At once point when it was announced that the next season was moving to the TNT channel the local broadcaster decided to cancel halfway through the season with no warning (but managed to catch a rerun of one of the missed episodes at 2am from a neighboring market that I could just pick up if I held the antenna right).
What was surprising was that the networks picked on B5 so much even though there was nothing else on at the time worth watching (and that includes DS9).
Well, capitalism in general hurts in certain areas can really hurt when you have an entrenched group that dominates an economic area, like power utilities and generators. Then it hurts double if there's a period of de-regulation. Trying to break up dominant players is very difficult if the government is not willing to step in and assist. In California the utilities were put on the control a public utilities commission, and while it certainly doesn't work smoothly all the time and there's a bit of corruption, it has at least put in pricing structures that gives a utility and customers incentives to reduce electricity usage. Prior to the PUC, saving power would have hurt their bottom line and instead they wanted customers to buy more product.
Capitalism is nice when it's individual made goods sold to individuals, but it breaks down when what is being sold is a public commodity, public resource, or a "right" granted by a a government. Regulation absolutely is required for proper operation of a free market.
This depends upon what you think colleges are for. If there are merely suppliers into the labor pool, then head to a tech school. However most colleges and universities were founded with a higher goal in mind, the education of their students, creating a better educated and informed citizenry, and teaching the students how to learn and teach themselves. Job training is a secondary goal of colleges.
I see too many people in the job pool who only know the grungy deails of how one job gets done, which makes them useless if the job I want done doesn't correspond to the minimalist details they know. I want job applicants who know the academic abstractions because they make better longer term employees. I'm sick of interviewees who say "sorry, I didn't learn that in school", and am astounded when an actual employee gives the same excuse.
It's already monetary discrimination, since well design sights with interesting products will show up higher in the rankings than the local mom&pop web site where they could only afford to hire a high schooler to do the design.
The whole point of ranking is not to make sure everybody is perfectly equal, but to help the customer find the most relevant results. If I'm searching for a bank then I most certainly want a bank with security to be ranked higher than one without. However, I can see the issue that it's only Google who gets to decide what's relevant. Perhaps there should be some user specified criteria, such as letting me decide to show only IPv6 capable sites.
Except that it's not really clear that a law was broken. The police in its opinion did not think it had a drone but only had a UAV quadcopter. Their fault was not coming out with a big press release saying "we bought a toy copter with federal money and are going to be trying it out to see if it can help us". When they claimed to not have drones then they weren't lying unless you classify such a device as a drone. Certainly I think that "MuckRock News" thinks this is a drone but it seems from internal memos that the police did not consider it a drone. Yes, there is clearly a confusion about definitions going on here but it is not clear if there were any laws broken, or if they were required to communicate the fact that they were experimenting with an expensive RC copter.
Personally I don't know if it's a drone or not. Every month the definitions change. I'd say that five years ago I would have said such a thing is not a drone. Today however I'm not sure.
What is the crime though? They claim they did not have a drone, and they did not call this thing a drone, and quite a lot of people would not call that device a "drone". If the crime is that they lied when asked if they had a "drone" then it's not clear any crime was committed.
The SJPD really hates their "boss", the mayor. But the mayor's office is the main group to hold them accountable. So when there's a breakdown in that chain of command then there's no surprise that there's a breakdown in relationship with the public as well.
There's also the memo sent to the police chief where it said they only had a UAV and not a drone, and thus not required to be regulated by the FAA. So it make sense that the chief, and even the assistant chief that signed off on it, could claim that they did not have a drone because that's what their executive summary said. I suspect some of the problem here is indeed the definition. The media has started calling just about everything a drone if it can hover with an attached camera, which is not the definition in use even 5 years ago. This thing they have is not much more than a toy in some sense, see the descriptions here: http://www.centuryheli.com/pro...
Thinking abstractly helps problem solving. Whether that abstract thinking ability was exercise and strengthened through assembly language versus studying ancient Greek logic versus analyzing the structure of a novel, all are useful. The student that avoided all extended thinking practice by only taking the minimal number of classes is the one that will have the most problems here.
Ie, finding a bug in code. I see some people who read each line on its own and declares that each line is correct and thus they can't find any bug and are stumped. Because they don't look at all the lines at once, or can't deduce the underlying model that is being used and then think about if that model is correct or not. In many programming jobs, knowing how to program is maybe 1% of the actual job.
Here's the problem: all that old stuff never went away. People today still write operating systems, they still write compilers, they still write runtime systems, they still write databases, they still design brand new CPUs and systems. So SOMEBODY coming out of the schools has to know this stuff.
I think people take the view that Microsoft writes the operating system but fail to understand that Microsoft needs to hire someone to do this rather than rely on the shoe-repairing gnomes. If they buy a smart phone they need to remember that someone had to write the smarts for it (not the dumbed down idiotic apps).
When a fresh graduate says "no one needs to know how to manage memory anymore, the language does it for you" then that student is absolutely unprepared for the real world where a company has to hire someone to write a memory management system, or a company hiring for a language that doesn't do it for you, and so on. If a student says "I never optimize code because I learned that premature optimization is bad", then that student is unprepared for the real world where the job requirements are to optimize the code or to fit it into a too-small memory footprint or to make it run with a real time requirement.
And yes, someone out there still writes bignum stuff to put in libraries used for professional applications.
I think another part of the problem is that the schools are focused on making generic programmers for generic jobs to satisfy the demand from the corporate funders. They're basically becoming trade schools instead of universities. A decade away from being a University of Phoenix clone.
Students should at least be required to have some sort of longer term complex projects (ie, a full semester). It's not just that these are Java-only students but that the projects they've done aren't necessarily that big. Or they're big but relatively straight forward. A project that brings together all of the stuff they have learned would be very useful.
Stuff I wish programmers knew after leaving school: - Algorithms and studying the properties of algorithms. Ie, can they prove that std::map is optimal and under what conditions. - Data structures. It doesn't matter if the fashionable languages all have dictionaries and maps built in, the students must learn this stuff. - Computability theory. Basically anything with "theory". It's very important to teach the student how to think about computation abstractly. - Compilers, or at least assembly language. Students must understand how computer languages actually work when they're running. Otherwise the language is just a magic genie. - Computer architecture and design. Students also must understand how computers work in the hardware. Such as knowing what's fast, what's slow, what's the bottleneck, and to understand the computation model that their program sits on top of. Memory hierarchies, locality of reference, communication busses, etc. - Concurrency. Ie, multiple cooperating processes (not just how to program with "threads"). That is, understand the dining philosophers problem, counting semaphores, atomicity, shared resources, and all that stuff that is very widely used everywhere in programming and is not some obscure topic. - Learn at LEAST three different unrelated languages, not counting assembler.
I know quote a lot of big companies using Qt. I wonder who these people are who think nothing happens in the world unless it's on.NET. Are they sheltered inside of IT caves or something? Many of those companies use a variety of platforms and toolkits, so the same company that might be.NET in one area might be using Qt elsewhere. There are some very big companies that just about everyone in the world has heard of that uses Qt (including a company that dwarfs Microsoft).
And while that's a significant platform, it's still just a fraction of platforms that developers use. In fact Windows is probably in the minority of target platforms that are out there, it's overwhelmed by the number of embedded and mobile devices..NET may be ok on Windows but it's nearly useless for designing a cross platform application that can also work on MacOS and Linux (and mono doesn't solve that problem either).
Developers use lots of things. I still use C, some use C++, some Python, some Java, even a few still use C#. Certainly it may make sense as a hiring manager to look for people who only know the currently fashionable trends in languages, but that shouldn't drive a technology choice.
And besides, Qt has started moving away from fast and smooth compiled languages to a markup-style QML. There are bindings to many different languages.
The problem with . NET is that it is Windows only. Mono is just a partially working proof of concept that does nothing more than try to obscure the fact that.NET is Microsoft controlled and intended by design to only be for Windows.
Internet service only downgraded over time (I thought verizon was internet provider not phone stuff, so I made a mistake there). Early broadband adopters with cable modems got huge bandwidth, more than they could use. However overtime it degraded as more and more customers started using the shared lines because it was broadcast and not point-to-point links, and those early customers indeed started complaining.
My HD signal does drop in quality when the network is congested.
Now I do think the ISPs *should* upgrade their networks. However they don't have the legal requirement to do so, or the responsibility. If they want to be a substandard hated company then that is their right. And customers can decicde to change services. If they hate Verizon then they should drop Verizon.
Well, I had not realized this was about phones and was thinking about internet services where they advertise "up to 12Mbps" or things like that, rather than guaranteeing a minimum bandwidth (do phones do that, I don't know, I don't have a data plan).
Why do they have to upgrade? It is not necessarily their responsibility. The cables were good enough back when the customers signed up for the service. The only reason they're not good enough now is that the customer's usage has gone up (more movies to watch). What next, cable TV now has the responsibility to upgrade the quality of their television shows? If you don't like the provider then drop the service.
I would be in favor of throttling them after they exceed a certain download amount. Ie, first they have to prove that they're a heavy user.
Ie, they get exactly the same service as most normal non-entitled humans until they reach the normal human data cap. Once they hit that then their service is throttled, and the good thing is that they're still more special than normal humans like you or me in that they continue getting huge amounts of data without paying metered penalty rates only it comes slower (still fast enough to stream HD all day long).
I think they can handle "unlimited" plans, the problem is with users who think unlimited means maximum bandwidth and no limits on how much data is downloaded a month, whereas the ISPs really intended for unlimited to mean how much data can be downloaded a month. Even a dialup plan can be unlimited. Everyone I *hope* understood that "unlimited" did not mean "infinite" no matter what metric they thought it applied to.
What user honestly thought that "unlimited" meant "unlimited bandwidth"? I remember some of these people whining when their fast internet got slow merely because their neighbors started using the shared cables. What was unlimited was the cap on how much data could be downloaded per month, not a cap on the actual speed.
Don't cancel them completely, just cancel the current contract and replace them the lower tier contract (call it "unlimited data limit over limited bandwidth").
Verizon is still providing unlimited data, as much as the user can download. It is only the speed of the download that is changing. Did the original service agreement provide for maximum available bandwidth, or a guaranteed minimum bandwidth? If not then the problem is only with the perception of the user.
I'm not a customer and not a heavy user so I don't know what the level of "throttling" really is and if the throttled rate is still useful. Say I got 50Mbps and it was throttled to 25Mbps, but still unlimited, I'd say that was good service. However if it was 50Mbps and dropped to 50kbps then I'd say it sucked.
But for PR reasons I'd rather let the current service agreement run out and then implement throttling when the sign up for a new service agreement (unless Verizon was so stupid as to provide a lifetime contract).
Bill Gates is probably on the autism spectrum, but we all love to make fun of him. Mostly because if we made fun of Ballmer we'd have chairs thrown at us.
So does that then make Family Guy be "stupid people in black face"? Friends is "cool people in black face"? Sex in the City is "maladjusted rich women in black face"? Or Cosby is "black people in black face"?
There really is not such as thing as "geek culture", as everyone is an individual. The geek who likes model trains may hate science, and the trekkie may hate D&D, and the computer nerd may hate everything to do with youtube and facebook. The only thing that defines "geek culture" is that it is not mainstream.
Slashdot Mirror
What I hated was how the networks treated the show. They'd shift it around in time or cancel it, without giving advance notice to viewers. So it was a real chore at time to keep watching. At once point when it was announced that the next season was moving to the TNT channel the local broadcaster decided to cancel halfway through the season with no warning (but managed to catch a rerun of one of the missed episodes at 2am from a neighboring market that I could just pick up if I held the antenna right).
What was surprising was that the networks picked on B5 so much even though there was nothing else on at the time worth watching (and that includes DS9).
Well, capitalism in general hurts in certain areas can really hurt when you have an entrenched group that dominates an economic area, like power utilities and generators. Then it hurts double if there's a period of de-regulation. Trying to break up dominant players is very difficult if the government is not willing to step in and assist. In California the utilities were put on the control a public utilities commission, and while it certainly doesn't work smoothly all the time and there's a bit of corruption, it has at least put in pricing structures that gives a utility and customers incentives to reduce electricity usage. Prior to the PUC, saving power would have hurt their bottom line and instead they wanted customers to buy more product.
Capitalism is nice when it's individual made goods sold to individuals, but it breaks down when what is being sold is a public commodity, public resource, or a "right" granted by a a government. Regulation absolutely is required for proper operation of a free market.
This depends upon what you think colleges are for. If there are merely suppliers into the labor pool, then head to a tech school. However most colleges and universities were founded with a higher goal in mind, the education of their students, creating a better educated and informed citizenry, and teaching the students how to learn and teach themselves. Job training is a secondary goal of colleges.
I see too many people in the job pool who only know the grungy deails of how one job gets done, which makes them useless if the job I want done doesn't correspond to the minimalist details they know. I want job applicants who know the academic abstractions because they make better longer term employees. I'm sick of interviewees who say "sorry, I didn't learn that in school", and am astounded when an actual employee gives the same excuse.
It's already monetary discrimination, since well design sights with interesting products will show up higher in the rankings than the local mom&pop web site where they could only afford to hire a high schooler to do the design.
The whole point of ranking is not to make sure everybody is perfectly equal, but to help the customer find the most relevant results. If I'm searching for a bank then I most certainly want a bank with security to be ranked higher than one without. However, I can see the issue that it's only Google who gets to decide what's relevant. Perhaps there should be some user specified criteria, such as letting me decide to show only IPv6 capable sites.
Except that it's not really clear that a law was broken. The police in its opinion did not think it had a drone but only had a UAV quadcopter. Their fault was not coming out with a big press release saying "we bought a toy copter with federal money and are going to be trying it out to see if it can help us". When they claimed to not have drones then they weren't lying unless you classify such a device as a drone. Certainly I think that "MuckRock News" thinks this is a drone but it seems from internal memos that the police did not consider it a drone. Yes, there is clearly a confusion about definitions going on here but it is not clear if there were any laws broken, or if they were required to communicate the fact that they were experimenting with an expensive RC copter.
Personally I don't know if it's a drone or not. Every month the definitions change. I'd say that five years ago I would have said such a thing is not a drone. Today however I'm not sure.
What is the crime though? They claim they did not have a drone, and they did not call this thing a drone, and quite a lot of people would not call that device a "drone". If the crime is that they lied when asked if they had a "drone" then it's not clear any crime was committed.
The SJPD really hates their "boss", the mayor. But the mayor's office is the main group to hold them accountable. So when there's a breakdown in that chain of command then there's no surprise that there's a breakdown in relationship with the public as well.
There's also the memo sent to the police chief where it said they only had a UAV and not a drone, and thus not required to be regulated by the FAA. So it make sense that the chief, and even the assistant chief that signed off on it, could claim that they did not have a drone because that's what their executive summary said. I suspect some of the problem here is indeed the definition. The media has started calling just about everything a drone if it can hover with an attached camera, which is not the definition in use even 5 years ago. This thing they have is not much more than a toy in some sense, see the descriptions here: http://www.centuryheli.com/pro...
Thinking abstractly helps problem solving. Whether that abstract thinking ability was exercise and strengthened through assembly language versus studying ancient Greek logic versus analyzing the structure of a novel, all are useful. The student that avoided all extended thinking practice by only taking the minimal number of classes is the one that will have the most problems here.
Ie, finding a bug in code. I see some people who read each line on its own and declares that each line is correct and thus they can't find any bug and are stumped. Because they don't look at all the lines at once, or can't deduce the underlying model that is being used and then think about if that model is correct or not. In many programming jobs, knowing how to program is maybe 1% of the actual job.
Here's the problem: all that old stuff never went away. People today still write operating systems, they still write compilers, they still write runtime systems, they still write databases, they still design brand new CPUs and systems. So SOMEBODY coming out of the schools has to know this stuff.
I think people take the view that Microsoft writes the operating system but fail to understand that Microsoft needs to hire someone to do this rather than rely on the shoe-repairing gnomes. If they buy a smart phone they need to remember that someone had to write the smarts for it (not the dumbed down idiotic apps).
When a fresh graduate says "no one needs to know how to manage memory anymore, the language does it for you" then that student is absolutely unprepared for the real world where a company has to hire someone to write a memory management system, or a company hiring for a language that doesn't do it for you, and so on. If a student says "I never optimize code because I learned that premature optimization is bad", then that student is unprepared for the real world where the job requirements are to optimize the code or to fit it into a too-small memory footprint or to make it run with a real time requirement.
And yes, someone out there still writes bignum stuff to put in libraries used for professional applications.
I think another part of the problem is that the schools are focused on making generic programmers for generic jobs to satisfy the demand from the corporate funders. They're basically becoming trade schools instead of universities. A decade away from being a University of Phoenix clone.
Students should at least be required to have some sort of longer term complex projects (ie, a full semester). It's not just that these are Java-only students but that the projects they've done aren't necessarily that big. Or they're big but relatively straight forward. A project that brings together all of the stuff they have learned would be very useful.
Stuff I wish programmers knew after leaving school:
- Algorithms and studying the properties of algorithms. Ie, can they prove that std::map is optimal and under what conditions.
- Data structures. It doesn't matter if the fashionable languages all have dictionaries and maps built in, the students must learn this stuff.
- Computability theory. Basically anything with "theory". It's very important to teach the student how to think about computation abstractly.
- Compilers, or at least assembly language. Students must understand how computer languages actually work when they're running. Otherwise the language is just a magic genie.
- Computer architecture and design. Students also must understand how computers work in the hardware. Such as knowing what's fast, what's slow, what's the bottleneck, and to understand the computation model that their program sits on top of. Memory hierarchies, locality of reference, communication busses, etc.
- Concurrency. Ie, multiple cooperating processes (not just how to program with "threads"). That is, understand the dining philosophers problem, counting semaphores, atomicity, shared resources, and all that stuff that is very widely used everywhere in programming and is not some obscure topic.
- Learn at LEAST three different unrelated languages, not counting assembler.
I know quote a lot of big companies using Qt. I wonder who these people are who think nothing happens in the world unless it's on .NET. Are they sheltered inside of IT caves or something? Many of those companies use a variety of platforms and toolkits, so the same company that might be .NET in one area might be using Qt elsewhere. There are some very big companies that just about everyone in the world has heard of that uses Qt (including a company that dwarfs Microsoft).
And while that's a significant platform, it's still just a fraction of platforms that developers use. In fact Windows is probably in the minority of target platforms that are out there, it's overwhelmed by the number of embedded and mobile devices. .NET may be ok on Windows but it's nearly useless for designing a cross platform application that can also work on MacOS and Linux (and mono doesn't solve that problem either).
Developers use lots of things. I still use C, some use C++, some Python, some Java, even a few still use C#. Certainly it may make sense as a hiring manager to look for people who only know the currently fashionable trends in languages, but that shouldn't drive a technology choice.
And besides, Qt has started moving away from fast and smooth compiled languages to a markup-style QML. There are bindings to many different languages.
The problem with . NET is that it is Windows only. Mono is just a partially working proof of concept that does nothing more than try to obscure the fact that .NET is Microsoft controlled and intended by design to only be for Windows.
I agree, it's important for people to learn stuff that they don't want to learn.
Internet service only downgraded over time (I thought verizon was internet provider not phone stuff, so I made a mistake there). Early broadband adopters with cable modems got huge bandwidth, more than they could use. However overtime it degraded as more and more customers started using the shared lines because it was broadcast and not point-to-point links, and those early customers indeed started complaining.
My HD signal does drop in quality when the network is congested.
Now I do think the ISPs *should* upgrade their networks. However they don't have the legal requirement to do so, or the responsibility. If they want to be a substandard hated company then that is their right. And customers can decicde to change services. If they hate Verizon then they should drop Verizon.
Well, I had not realized this was about phones and was thinking about internet services where they advertise "up to 12Mbps" or things like that, rather than guaranteeing a minimum bandwidth (do phones do that, I don't know, I don't have a data plan).
Why do they have to upgrade? It is not necessarily their responsibility. The cables were good enough back when the customers signed up for the service. The only reason they're not good enough now is that the customer's usage has gone up (more movies to watch). What next, cable TV now has the responsibility to upgrade the quality of their television shows? If you don't like the provider then drop the service.
I would be in favor of throttling them after they exceed a certain download amount. Ie, first they have to prove that they're a heavy user.
Ie, they get exactly the same service as most normal non-entitled humans until they reach the normal human data cap. Once they hit that then their service is throttled, and the good thing is that they're still more special than normal humans like you or me in that they continue getting huge amounts of data without paying metered penalty rates only it comes slower (still fast enough to stream HD all day long).
I think they can handle "unlimited" plans, the problem is with users who think unlimited means maximum bandwidth and no limits on how much data is downloaded a month, whereas the ISPs really intended for unlimited to mean how much data can be downloaded a month. Even a dialup plan can be unlimited. Everyone I *hope* understood that "unlimited" did not mean "infinite" no matter what metric they thought it applied to.
What user honestly thought that "unlimited" meant "unlimited bandwidth"? I remember some of these people whining when their fast internet got slow merely because their neighbors started using the shared cables. What was unlimited was the cap on how much data could be downloaded per month, not a cap on the actual speed.
Don't cancel them completely, just cancel the current contract and replace them the lower tier contract (call it "unlimited data limit over limited bandwidth").
Verizon is still providing unlimited data, as much as the user can download. It is only the speed of the download that is changing. Did the original service agreement provide for maximum available bandwidth, or a guaranteed minimum bandwidth? If not then the problem is only with the perception of the user.
I'm not a customer and not a heavy user so I don't know what the level of "throttling" really is and if the throttled rate is still useful. Say I got 50Mbps and it was throttled to 25Mbps, but still unlimited, I'd say that was good service. However if it was 50Mbps and dropped to 50kbps then I'd say it sucked.
But for PR reasons I'd rather let the current service agreement run out and then implement throttling when the sign up for a new service agreement (unless Verizon was so stupid as to provide a lifetime contract).
I don't think Yelp started with good intentions, from my perspective, unless they were really naive.
Bill Gates is probably on the autism spectrum, but we all love to make fun of him. Mostly because if we made fun of Ballmer we'd have chairs thrown at us.
So does that then make Family Guy be "stupid people in black face"?
Friends is "cool people in black face"?
Sex in the City is "maladjusted rich women in black face"?
Or Cosby is "black people in black face"?
There really is not such as thing as "geek culture", as everyone is an individual. The geek who likes model trains may hate science, and the trekkie may hate D&D, and the computer nerd may hate everything to do with youtube and facebook. The only thing that defines "geek culture" is that it is not mainstream.