I completely agree. I had to use a ThinkPad once, years ago, as a substitute machine, so I experimented with the TrackPoint pointer. I didn't like it at all, and I wouldn't have bought a ThinkPad for myself, but I like to try new things as long as I'm not forced to continue. It took several days of constant use to get used to it, but after I did, I was hooked. I got my own ThinkPad, cranked the sensitivity and acceleration up to the max values, and trained myself to use it. At first it was like my first time on ice skates, but these days, I can rocket the mouse cursor around the screen and stop right where I want just by wanting it to be there, with my fingers still on the keyboard. At that level of sensitivity, and after a lot of practice, you just think about where you want the mouse pointer to be, and it's there. It's just an imperceptible, unconscious twitch or slight pressure. And with my fingers in the home position on the keys/mouse pointer, my thumbs can reach three mouse buttons by merely bending them at the middle thumb joint. Again, just the tiniest twitches combine keys, mouse pointer, and three mouse buttons.
Now, when I'm forced to use a scratchpad, forced to lift my hands off the keyboard and go scratch like a cat in a litterbox to get the mouse to move--jerk, jerk, jerk, slide into place--I feel like I've put down my Nikon to take a picture with a one-button camera. It's unbelievably primitive in comparison. It's not that I can't scratch on a scratchpad--I did it for years and still do when I have to use someone else's machine. Any nitwit can learn to scratch in a few seconds, but for those of us who use computers seriously enough to put time into learning keyboard shortcuts, command line interfaces, scripting for automation, and multiple button / twitch control hardware, nitwit scratchpads don't cut it.
Market economy? Yes, indeed. Now that millions of folks like me use tech like TiVo to skip the ads, ad revenues are dropping, they need to reach wider (and less tech savvy) audiences to compensate, and presto: we have what they warned we would have. So we move on to more intelligent programming, meaning "what are the smart podcasts on the Internet?", TV viewership drops, Internet use booms, ad revenues on the Internet boom, Google booms, we all get ad blockers for our browsers and complain that our favorite websites are getting dumber (because I deserve high-quality, smart programming for free!), rinse and repeat....
We keep evolving ad resistance, starving ad-sponsored programming, and the environment keeps trying to evolve better ads.
Fortunately, there's vastly more room in the state space on the Internet than the hundred or so slots on TV, and much lower cost of entry, so we'll probably get a lot of good stuff, but we can't count on its stability. We're still pretty early in the process of evolving business models in this environment.
Spoken like a true spoiled child - the Standard Slashdot Sophisticate. The TSA is trying to keep you from being murdered on that flight. You think that finding ways to abuse them in return makes you a cool guy like, oh, say, Beavis, or maybe Butthead. A rebel. A free thinker.
Intelligent people can and should debate the costs versus benefits of various security approaches. Adopting bad ideas is a bad idea. But those who think that automatically sneering at all security measures makes them seem sophisticated look like fools to me. They'd probably be glad to walk naked through their gym locker room to get a free beer, but to safeguard their lives....
Still, there's clearly a large market of such sophisticates, so maybe they could start their own "no security hassles, bring whatever you like in carry on or just strap it on and come aboard because we're too sophisticated ever to raise an eyebrow" kinda airline. They could use the hub system to guarantee that most flights had at least one stop somewhere in the Islamic world to buy more sophistication cred. "See, we told you you were worried about nothing" could be stenciled on the sides of the planes.
You can carry a lead-lined backpack today, but once they x-ray it, they'll pull it aside for a visual search. So, it's reasonable to assume that if you cleverly wear a shield when walking through a body scanner, they'll just pull you aside for a traditional strip search.
I'm having trouble imagining how programming would look as a factory worker job.
You might be thinking of a certain type of machine-like assembly line work, but think instead of the Taiwanese electronics factories that do small run circuit board stuffing, part by machine and part by hand, which requires some repetition, some customization, some setup and config of the little board stuffer robots, following the specs, testing, etc., by the factory workers. Back in the '80s, I was involved in outsourcing to these factories. In recent years, I've been involved in outsourcing software to India, and their software factories in Bangalore didn't seem all that different from the board stuffers in Taipei. We didn't outsource strategic design, or have them work on the "crown jewels", but instead sent them specs for auxiliary work seen as what you called "grunt work" here, yet not really amenable to automation.
Yes, in the future more things will go from human-written spec to working code with the implementation done entirely by code generator, just as in the future, more manual assembly operations, robot setup & config, etc. will be able to go from human-written spec to device, untouched by human hand. That evolution has been progressing for years and will continue, both with hardware and software, but where the machines can't yet do the job, you have factory workers.
Factory workers often are more skilled and do more brain work than we "knowledge industry" types give them credit for. Yet there are enough people in the developing and newly developed economies gaining these skills that factory work is not especially lucrative in the developed economies. Their real wages have been falling (in the developed world) for decades. I see programming getting more and more that way. It's useful, important work that requires skills and training, but so is factory work.
And as for the need for computer science, the board stuffers need real electrical engineers, too, but they don't need many of them. And often, the electronic systems can be created by trained technicians without any academic EE education by reading the docs and wiring together preassembled subsystems, like many hardware hackers here do with no formal EE education. You can "wire up" a database-backed Web app by following a pattern involving gluing together components from Java,.Net, Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, etc., without any knowledge of recurrence equations or NP-completeness or context-free grammars or first-order predicate calculus or whatever.
I love informatics (what CS ought to be called), but the demand for it is not what I once thought it would become as every doorknob gets "smart". There will be some fairly good jobs for those with solid theoretical foundations, but most programming jobs will be more like skilled factory jobs, in my opinion, and probably won't pay much more. (In fact, I think a lot of young programmers might be surprised to find out that skilled factory workers often earn more than they do already.)
I program because I love it. I've been doing it since before the Internet boom brought in all the carpetbaggers.
Some years back, before the boom, I decided that Moore's Law (and other economic forces) were going to increase the number of programmable devices exponentially for decades to come, creating an insatiable economic demand for programmers. When the iBoom arrived, I saw it as a short-term overreaction, but still a part of long term extreme ramp up in demand for programmers.
Then I started studying economics seriously and discovered the mistake in my thinking. Demand for programmers is not proportional to the amount of code running in the world. I've written code that will soon be on a billion (with a "B") devices, but it's the same code it was when it was on fewer than 100 M devices, and those of us who wrote it easily fit in one small cubicle pen.
Real demand for programmers depends on how much NEW code has to be written and HOW FAST. (And by "new" I certainly include maintenance, glue code, customization of existing packages, etc.) If the number of programmable devices explodes (as I still believe--and observe), much of it will run code written by very few people, customized a bit, tweaked and glued by a few more people for other devices, and massively replicated. And if that customization can be done slowly enough, it can be done by an arbitrarily small group of programmers. Custom code for your own personal needs and those of your business group will constitute most new code, and that will be supported by tools that do what you want with a minimum of "programming" on your part--tools like Excel.
Then the same Moore's Law and other forces that create the "everything will run software and be connected" world of the future also brings a hundred million or more new potential programmers into the developed world economy (without ever leaving their local undeveloped economies) each year to meet the demand for however much new code needs to be written each year, and the job of "programmer" is going to look more and more like various factory worker jobs (the decent ones, not the dangerous ones.)
So the professor is decrying the falling interest in Computer Science. How would enrollment look in a "Factory Science" department at his university, I wonder....
Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
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Lisp and Ruby
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The most general problem, though is that it's not all static. Forms change, new characters come into use. This is something Unicode isn't really set up to deal with (and neither is any of the other encodings used today), and if the country is going to change to a standard encoding, it may make more sense to make something which can.
Utter nonsense. There is a standards group ("IRG") set up to add characters to the Universal Character Set. This group is made up of government and industry representatives from all East Asian and some non-Asian countries with an interest in Chinese/Han character standards. This group works with the Unicode Consortium and ISO to extend the UCS. The UCS in turn is the character set used by Unicode.
There is room for more than a million characters in the UCS. They aren't anywhere close to filling up, and the rate at which the Chinese and Japanese are finding new characters to add ("look, someone 'misspelled' this character one time in a single 600 year old tax form--we MUST add this character to the standard!") has slowed to a crawl. There just aren't that many old documents that haven't yet been crawled through. And none of them will tolerate "creativity" in the creation of new name characters (the source of most Japanese variants), because these days, if you can't enter the name in a gov't database, it's not a legal name.
I'm not saying that the addition of new characters has stopped, just that the rate has fallen by probably two orders of magnitude, with plenty of room for extension still available. The character set is fully extensible (plenty of room and an active process that continues to extend it with every version), and all Unicode encodings can encode all of the codepoints (assigned and still unused) in the UCS. So the claim that Unicode can't deal with "forms change, new characters come into use" is absurd.
It's so absurd, in fact, that it's not even one of the complaints the Japanese make. (Although I have heard several Japanese complaints of the form, "well, I don't really know anything about all the technical details, but if Unicode was started by American companies, then it can't handle Japanese properly since Americans couldn't possibly understand the extremely unique nature of all things Japanese...." You may find one of THEM making your complaint.)
Could you describe the process a bit? I'm not disputing your claim at all, I'm interested in it. I realize that you can't teach a year's curriculum in a Slashdot post, but can you describe it a bit somehow, provide references to the major texts or other sources, or say, "it's basically the 'such-and-such process', which you can find described in lurid detail via Google", or whatever you think might be useful in describing the problem solving method they teach?
My ideal setup would be one in which my local device is just a write-thru cache for my network storage. The "network computer" notion of fetching your applications on a JIT basis is attractive enough that it will one day succeed, but I'm talking about my personal data, not apps.
Back up should be a server responsibility, not a client responsibility. The client should be responsible for passing data/documents through to the *real* storage location ASAP (ideally, as the data is entered into the client). This wouldn't be considered backup any more than saving from RAM to a disk file now is considered backup. Saving to the server should just be "saving". And pros keep the server backed up, of course.
Since before long all of us will have multiple networked clients capable of serious work (our old laptop, our new laptop, our phone, etc.) and we'll want to be able to move transparently from device to device and keep working, and not lose data when we lose hardware, having our "one place" for data be a server somewhere, with the clients functioning as local caches, seems the natural way to go.
Whoever gets the usability right ought to have a huge hit on their hands. Will it be Microsoft, with their control over such a high percentage of "serious" client OSes? It would make sense to build this in as a transparent feature of every PC/device OS from MS, increasing the attractiveness of MS OSes on devices if that's what you use on your PC. Or will it be Google, with their openness to all clients, regardless of vendor?
Or will they miss the local cache idea altogether and just create an offsite network drive?
The thing about garbage collection is that 80% of the time you don't need it, but the other 20% of the time not having it can really be a pain in the ass.
I think I'd say it somewhat differently: Few programs need MANUAL memory management at all, and those that do need it rarely need it in more than a few spots. However, in those few spots where you need it, it can be critically important. When you use it, though, you DRAMATICALLY increase the likelihood of nasty, hard to reproduce bugs, security holes, etc. So, the natural approach is to make automatic memory management the default. Probably the biggest problem with C is the fact that so many things are done by raw memory manipulation (strings, arrays, etc.) and ALL memory handling/management is manual.
The fact that C ALLOWS you to do everything by raw, manual memory manipulation is the source of its power, but you wouldn't HAVE to do everything manually in order to get that power. You only need the ABILITY to do everything that way, which is the D approach. The default is D's first class strings, first class arrays, automatic memory mgt for everything, but anything can be taken over and done manually with ease when the programmer feels like doing so.
I can feel myself waiting a few months, then ordering an updated Objective C coding book to pick this language up now.
I might consider it, too, if I hadn't discovered the D programming language. I can't do a proper comparison because I discovered D shortly after I started experimenting with Obj-C and lost all interest in the latter and no longer remember much about it except that it belonged to the "fast, not convenient" camp, like C and C++.
D was designed from the ground up as a memory managed Super C. The intention was to provide both the power of C and the convenience features of today's most popular scripting languages in a natively-compiled C-like language, with a host of other modern features such as full-fledged Eiffel-style design by contract, native Unicode strings, real arrays, etc. In order to offer as much of C's power as possible, it lets you manually override the memory management where you want to.
I'm not sure what's going on with D at the moment, though. The forums stopped working a few weeks ago, and today the whole website (digitalmars.com) seems to have gone offline. I hope everything is okay....
And you're BOTH right! As he said, Thinkpads have the best keyboard ever. It took me a week to get used to it when I was forced to use a Thinkpad as a loaner and I was forced to use that "awful eraserhead" pointer", as I described it. After I got good at it that awful eraserhead right under my index finger and the three mousebuttons always under my thumbs became so fast and natural that I refused to go back to my own computer and bought myself a Thinkpad.
With the mouse and three buttons essentially under your fingers at all times in the home position on the keyboard, the arguments between mouse/GUI vs keyboard/CLI vanished for me. The mouse and buttons were just more superpower keys on the keyboard.
In contrast, I find the pathetic "take your hand off the keyboard and scratch-scratch-scratch", single mouse button nonsense of the PowerBook UI to be far worse than using a traditional mouse. (And I had a PowerBook and PCs, Macs, and a Linux box, all with traditional keyboards & mice.)
Until Apple makes a PowerBook with the trackpoint/3-mouse-button type of keyboard I have on my ThinkPad, I won't even consider buying another PowerBook. (If they did, I WOULD consider it.)
They could do this by implementing a pluggable keyboard configuration that allowed customers to specify keyboard type just like RAM and HD size at time of ordering. It seems very UN-Apple to allow such freedom of choice, though. Steve "I have better taste than you" Jobs will tell us what's actually the best for us, and we'll like it or go elsewhere.
So why is this modded down as a troll? The notion that tricking out a rapidly evolving system with rapidly evolving hacks might not be smart is worth considering, unless you are a "political activist".
I would certainly use more extensions if they didn't risk make Firefox even more unstable than it already is. I'm sick of Firefox crashes, Firefox often going into manic 95% CPU burning mode on return from laptop suspends, etc. I keep using it because of its net advantages, but it simply is not as stable as IE yet. Something like SessionSaver ought to be a standard feature of Firefox (at least available from the Tools > Options... dialog) because losing your work is a problem in any app, even when they *are* stable (your computer itself has its own instabilities that the app can't do anything about except to frequently save your work for recovery in case of crash. Firefox should have a "restore everything on restart" option no matter how stable it is.)
I lost about 20 windows when Firefox crashed on me a couple of hours ago. I would use SessionSaver now if it didn't have the reputation of actually *increasing* the chance of crashes and occasionally nuking all of your windows for whatever random reason.
Does it maintain table layouts in plain text? It would be very convenient to have the option of copying data from an HTML table and pasting a properly formatted plain text data table.
I have measurement data that is structurally simple enough that a single "flat file" might even be enough, but I have tens of millions of records (with perhaps a hundred or so fields each, both text and numeric). I'd like to be able to search, filter, sort, do arbitrary SQL queries, etc. as quickly as possible, but this would usually just be on a Windows laptop with a single user or perhaps a Linux server with a single user. Would the power of Postgres be advantageous, or is that the wrong kind of power and would something like SQLite be more "powerful" in a case like this (LOTS of data, simple structure)?
Making the user pay attention to irrelevant options is extremely poor usability design, not some sort of badge of honor. From what I hear, Postres is outstanding in terms of technical functionality. To have a product like that crippled by such poor usability design (if it is as you describe) would be a real waste of its potential.
I worked in the field for quite a while, with a formal background in physics and a personal background in linguistics, and I agree with the parent. Major in CS, emphasizing the mathematical side over the technological side (e.g., algorithms vs. memorizing C++ trivia). Minor in linguistics (not "humanities", but real linguistics, which can be quite hard core.) Don't bother trying to officially create a "major". If you do what I (and the parent) suggest, you can always claim to have gotten your B.S. in computational linguistics and your transcripts will back you up.
You can follow an officially published "medieval literature" track in the "French Department" from the "School of Fine Arts and Humanities", take every required course, follow the rules for that track to the letter and graduate. Will your diploma say "Bachelor of Arts in Medieval French Literature"? No, it will say something like, "...successfully completed the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts from the School of Fine Arts and Humanities", (though if you graduate from Harvard College it may say it in Latin.) So what degree do you have? You have a B.A. In what? Pretty much whatever you want to call it as long as it describes the classes on your transcript.
So, you want a bachelor's in Computational Linguistics. Get a BSCS, minor in linguistics, and that's what you'll have. (And it won't be lying. That's what you really *will* have.)
I know that C++ needed a replacement - I'm just frustrated with disappointment in what we got.
It's not over yet. Walter Bright, one of the best commercial C++ compiler writers of the last generation has created his own C++ replacement based on his intimate knowledge of the internal details of C++.
His "D" programming language has what I want from a C replacement. It is garbage collected by default, but you can manually "free" and "malloc" anytime you want, doing 100% manual memory management if you like.
It's like C but with real, native strings (100% Unicode), real arrays, foreach, and dozens of other features from high-level languages such as real Eiffel-style Design by Contract, C#-style delegates, templates, exceptions, etc.
The nonsense of header files is gone. You "import" modules as in Python.
Even so, it is still so close to C that you can statically link D code and existing C libraries into a single executable as if it were all written in pure C, and compiled D code is usually *faster* than the equivalent C++ code (see the Great Language Shootout for evidence.) It's always natively compiled into small, fast, standalone executables, like C. No big "runtime environments" are required.
Check it out at digitalmars.com.
(I'm promoting it here for the typical reason that I like it a lot and think that popularity will eventually benefit me as a user through more libraries, tools, books, and other resources.)
Re:If everyone has to re-write the fix ...
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Sun Eyes PostgreSQL
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So if Sun fixes a bug, they don't have to release that fix to anyone. So the bug will still exist in the base.
You may be right, but I doubt it. If Sun were a small company selling a database-backed app to a proprietary niche who didn't know and didn't care what the database was, this could be true.
But Sun has bigger strategic interests. If they want to sell a service based on PG, it is in their best interest to make PG's reputation as good as possible without any confusing "issues" regarding PG's reputation. Imagine them trying to sell against Oracle with the explanation, "well, our version of PG has some bug fixes that may not be in other versions of PG," leaving the buyers to wonder what bug fixes the OTHER versions may have that Sun's doesn't have, while Oracle is simply selling "there is only ONE Oracle--The Real Thing--the One Everyone Uses."
Also Sun has a thing about competing with Microsoft. They'd rather take revenue away from Microsoft and have it themselves, but they'd settle for simply taking revenue away from MS with nobody getting it. MS positions SQLServer as easier to use and lower cost. Sun could fight back with "our service-based PG is even easier to use and if lowest cost is what you want, just use PG without our service for free. Either way it's better than the deal from MS, so why use Microsoft?" In other words, Sun will either get the business or nobody will, but either way they'll hurt MS. But if only their in-house fork of PG has the bug fixes, that strategy goes nowhere. They can't very well recommend the public version as an alternative to MS or Oracle. If it's so good, why did Sun have to fix it, etc.
The parent's link makes it pretty clear that the murderous Chinese communist government was responsible for even MORE than 30 million deaths, perhaps more than any other murderous regime in history, but that the number in "the Cultural Revolution alone" was far less than 30 million. The Kuomintang were murderous SOBs, too, but don't hold a candle to the Chinese Communist Party.
If you are also arguing that China takes patent protection very seriously, and that the portion of the world where patent protection is notoriously lax is too small to even be called "much of the world", and that believing otherwise is evidence that one is "uninformed and arrogant", then I think we have enough information to determine the credibility of your argument.
Cringely: "Of course, much of the rest of the world also ignores or gleefully violates patent law."
You: "First of all, "the rest of the world" has had strong patent protection a lot longer than the US; US companies were infamous for flaunting patents."
It appears that the uninformed, arrogant flaming is yours. Cringely's comment is absolutely correct. "Much of the rest of the world" does EXACTLY what he said, as he said.
If you had simply added that there were countries that had had strong patent protection longer than the US, that would have been correct and even informative (to some).
But that wouldn't have contradicted Cringely at all, much less proven his ignorance or arrogance. Nor would it have had the tone of anti-US moral outrage that seems to matter to some people more than factual correctness.
So to get the outrage part right, you spout off that the rest of the world had strong patent protection before the US? "The rest of the world" in your claim either refers to all of the rest of the world, or some of it.
If it means all, it's wrong. If it means some, then it doesn't contradict Cringely, who was talking about the rest. (He was also referring to the present, not the past.) I think it's meant to *sound* as though it means all to meet the requirements of expressing outrage at Americans ("all of the rest of the world is better than the US"), while still giving you room to retreat to the some meaning if challenged ("Some of Europe had it, and Europe is in the rest of the world, therefore the rest of the world had it.") Yeah, some did, and much of the rest of the world still doesn't, which is exactly what Cringely said.
And your comment that "US companies WERE infamous for flaunting patents" is true but irrelevant. The US WAS infamous for slavery, too. Both were generations ago. But Cringely's sentences that you quote are in the present tense. To counter, your rebuttal would have to be about the present, too. It's not--that would be obviously incorrect--so you make do with a critcism of the past and hope no one will notice.
So, since you can't actually contradict him without being obviously wrong, but you have a need to make a show of indignant outrage at the US, you do the best you can, right?
If you want to get technical, Virginia doesn't call itself a state...and if you want to get legal, the federal government DOES call it a state.
And so does Virginia itself. The "state government" of Virginia calls itself a "state" at least as often as it calls itself a commonwealth. They refer officially to their "state senators". There are no "commonwealth taxes" in Virginia, for example, only "state taxes". State government agencies use the term "state" in their names, and so on.
The fact that it doesn't use "state" in its name is irrelevant. At the time it became an "independent state", France was also an independent state, and it was not called the "State of France".
The fact that this confuses some people now is because so many people mistakenly think that "state" is the American term for "province". The intent of the founders was always that these be a federation of independent states so that, for example, if California declared marijuana legal for medical purposes, other states would have no say in the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the $25,000 will come from taxpayers, because these people are too big to fail (to collect their bonuses).
I completely agree. I had to use a ThinkPad once, years ago, as a substitute machine, so I experimented with the TrackPoint pointer. I didn't like it at all, and I wouldn't have bought a ThinkPad for myself, but I like to try new things as long as I'm not forced to continue. It took several days of constant use to get used to it, but after I did, I was hooked. I got my own ThinkPad, cranked the sensitivity and acceleration up to the max values, and trained myself to use it. At first it was like my first time on ice skates, but these days, I can rocket the mouse cursor around the screen and stop right where I want just by wanting it to be there, with my fingers still on the keyboard. At that level of sensitivity, and after a lot of practice, you just think about where you want the mouse pointer to be, and it's there. It's just an imperceptible, unconscious twitch or slight pressure. And with my fingers in the home position on the keys/mouse pointer, my thumbs can reach three mouse buttons by merely bending them at the middle thumb joint. Again, just the tiniest twitches combine keys, mouse pointer, and three mouse buttons.
Now, when I'm forced to use a scratchpad, forced to lift my hands off the keyboard and go scratch like a cat in a litterbox to get the mouse to move--jerk, jerk, jerk, slide into place--I feel like I've put down my Nikon to take a picture with a one-button camera. It's unbelievably primitive in comparison. It's not that I can't scratch on a scratchpad--I did it for years and still do when I have to use someone else's machine. Any nitwit can learn to scratch in a few seconds, but for those of us who use computers seriously enough to put time into learning keyboard shortcuts, command line interfaces, scripting for automation, and multiple button / twitch control hardware, nitwit scratchpads don't cut it.
We need that option on netbooks.
Market economy? Yes, indeed. Now that millions of folks like me use tech like TiVo to skip the ads, ad revenues are dropping, they need to reach wider (and less tech savvy) audiences to compensate, and presto: we have what they warned we would have. So we move on to more intelligent programming, meaning "what are the smart podcasts on the Internet?", TV viewership drops, Internet use booms, ad revenues on the Internet boom, Google booms, we all get ad blockers for our browsers and complain that our favorite websites are getting dumber (because I deserve high-quality, smart programming for free!), rinse and repeat....
We keep evolving ad resistance, starving ad-sponsored programming, and the environment keeps trying to evolve better ads.
Fortunately, there's vastly more room in the state space on the Internet than the hundred or so slots on TV, and much lower cost of entry, so we'll probably get a lot of good stuff, but we can't count on its stability. We're still pretty early in the process of evolving business models in this environment.
Spoken like a true spoiled child - the Standard Slashdot Sophisticate. The TSA is trying to keep you from being murdered on that flight. You think that finding ways to abuse them in return makes you a cool guy like, oh, say, Beavis, or maybe Butthead. A rebel. A free thinker.
Intelligent people can and should debate the costs versus benefits of various security approaches. Adopting bad ideas is a bad idea. But those who think that automatically sneering at all security measures makes them seem sophisticated look like fools to me. They'd probably be glad to walk naked through their gym locker room to get a free beer, but to safeguard their lives....
Still, there's clearly a large market of such sophisticates, so maybe they could start their own "no security hassles, bring whatever you like in carry on or just strap it on and come aboard because we're too sophisticated ever to raise an eyebrow" kinda airline. They could use the hub system to guarantee that most flights had at least one stop somewhere in the Islamic world to buy more sophistication cred. "See, we told you you were worried about nothing" could be stenciled on the sides of the planes.
You can carry a lead-lined backpack today, but once they x-ray it, they'll pull it aside for a visual search. So, it's reasonable to assume that if you cleverly wear a shield when walking through a body scanner, they'll just pull you aside for a traditional strip search.
And what, exactly, is an "Internet cultural unit"?
It appears that this is Marxist political terminology for, um, Slashdot.
"... must conscientiously take on the responsibility of encouraging development of a system of core socialist values"
I'm having trouble imagining how programming would look as a factory worker job.
.Net, Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, etc., without any knowledge of recurrence equations or NP-completeness or context-free grammars or first-order predicate calculus or whatever.
You might be thinking of a certain type of machine-like assembly line work, but think instead of the Taiwanese electronics factories that do small run circuit board stuffing, part by machine and part by hand, which requires some repetition, some customization, some setup and config of the little board stuffer robots, following the specs, testing, etc., by the factory workers. Back in the '80s, I was involved in outsourcing to these factories. In recent years, I've been involved in outsourcing software to India, and their software factories in Bangalore didn't seem all that different from the board stuffers in Taipei. We didn't outsource strategic design, or have them work on the "crown jewels", but instead sent them specs for auxiliary work seen as what you called "grunt work" here, yet not really amenable to automation.
Yes, in the future more things will go from human-written spec to working code with the implementation done entirely by code generator, just as in the future, more manual assembly operations, robot setup & config, etc. will be able to go from human-written spec to device, untouched by human hand. That evolution has been progressing for years and will continue, both with hardware and software, but where the machines can't yet do the job, you have factory workers.
Factory workers often are more skilled and do more brain work than we "knowledge industry" types give them credit for. Yet there are enough people in the developing and newly developed economies gaining these skills that factory work is not especially lucrative in the developed economies. Their real wages have been falling (in the developed world) for decades. I see programming getting more and more that way. It's useful, important work that requires skills and training, but so is factory work.
And as for the need for computer science, the board stuffers need real electrical engineers, too, but they don't need many of them. And often, the electronic systems can be created by trained technicians without any academic EE education by reading the docs and wiring together preassembled subsystems, like many hardware hackers here do with no formal EE education. You can "wire up" a database-backed Web app by following a pattern involving gluing together components from Java,
I love informatics (what CS ought to be called), but the demand for it is not what I once thought it would become as every doorknob gets "smart". There will be some fairly good jobs for those with solid theoretical foundations, but most programming jobs will be more like skilled factory jobs, in my opinion, and probably won't pay much more. (In fact, I think a lot of young programmers might be surprised to find out that skilled factory workers often earn more than they do already.)
I program because I love it. I've been doing it since before the Internet boom brought in all the carpetbaggers.
Some years back, before the boom, I decided that Moore's Law (and other economic forces) were going to increase the number of programmable devices exponentially for decades to come, creating an insatiable economic demand for programmers. When the iBoom arrived, I saw it as a short-term overreaction, but still a part of long term extreme ramp up in demand for programmers.
Then I started studying economics seriously and discovered the mistake in my thinking. Demand for programmers is not proportional to the amount of code running in the world. I've written code that will soon be on a billion (with a "B") devices, but it's the same code it was when it was on fewer than 100 M devices, and those of us who wrote it easily fit in one small cubicle pen.
Real demand for programmers depends on how much NEW code has to be written and HOW FAST. (And by "new" I certainly include maintenance, glue code, customization of existing packages, etc.) If the number of programmable devices explodes (as I still believe--and observe), much of it will run code written by very few people, customized a bit, tweaked and glued by a few more people for other devices, and massively replicated. And if that customization can be done slowly enough, it can be done by an arbitrarily small group of programmers. Custom code for your own personal needs and those of your business group will constitute most new code, and that will be supported by tools that do what you want with a minimum of "programming" on your part--tools like Excel.
Then the same Moore's Law and other forces that create the "everything will run software and be connected" world of the future also brings a hundred million or more new potential programmers into the developed world economy (without ever leaving their local undeveloped economies) each year to meet the demand for however much new code needs to be written each year, and the job of "programmer" is going to look more and more like various factory worker jobs (the decent ones, not the dangerous ones.)
So the professor is decrying the falling interest in Computer Science. How would enrollment look in a "Factory Science" department at his university, I wonder....
The most general problem, though is that it's not all static. Forms change, new characters come into use. This is something Unicode isn't really set up to deal with (and neither is any of the other encodings used today), and if the country is going to change to a standard encoding, it may make more sense to make something which can.
Utter nonsense. There is a standards group ("IRG") set up to add characters to the Universal Character Set. This group is made up of government and industry representatives from all East Asian and some non-Asian countries with an interest in Chinese/Han character standards. This group works with the Unicode Consortium and ISO to extend the UCS. The UCS in turn is the character set used by Unicode.
There is room for more than a million characters in the UCS. They aren't anywhere close to filling up, and the rate at which the Chinese and Japanese are finding new characters to add ("look, someone 'misspelled' this character one time in a single 600 year old tax form--we MUST add this character to the standard!") has slowed to a crawl. There just aren't that many old documents that haven't yet been crawled through. And none of them will tolerate "creativity" in the creation of new name characters (the source of most Japanese variants), because these days, if you can't enter the name in a gov't database, it's not a legal name.
I'm not saying that the addition of new characters has stopped, just that the rate has fallen by probably two orders of magnitude, with plenty of room for extension still available. The character set is fully extensible (plenty of room and an active process that continues to extend it with every version), and all Unicode encodings can encode all of the codepoints (assigned and still unused) in the UCS. So the claim that Unicode can't deal with "forms change, new characters come into use" is absurd.
It's so absurd, in fact, that it's not even one of the complaints the Japanese make. (Although I have heard several Japanese complaints of the form, "well, I don't really know anything about all the technical details, but if Unicode was started by American companies, then it can't handle Japanese properly since Americans couldn't possibly understand the extremely unique nature of all things Japanese...." You may find one of THEM making your complaint.)
Could you describe the process a bit? I'm not disputing your claim at all, I'm interested in it. I realize that you can't teach a year's curriculum in a Slashdot post, but can you describe it a bit somehow, provide references to the major texts or other sources, or say, "it's basically the 'such-and-such process', which you can find described in lurid detail via Google", or whatever you think might be useful in describing the problem solving method they teach?
Thanks.
My ideal setup would be one in which my local device is just a write-thru cache for my network storage. The "network computer" notion of fetching your applications on a JIT basis is attractive enough that it will one day succeed, but I'm talking about my personal data, not apps.
Back up should be a server responsibility, not a client responsibility. The client should be responsible for passing data/documents through to the *real* storage location ASAP (ideally, as the data is entered into the client). This wouldn't be considered backup any more than saving from RAM to a disk file now is considered backup. Saving to the server should just be "saving". And pros keep the server backed up, of course.
Since before long all of us will have multiple networked clients capable of serious work (our old laptop, our new laptop, our phone, etc.) and we'll want to be able to move transparently from device to device and keep working, and not lose data when we lose hardware, having our "one place" for data be a server somewhere, with the clients functioning as local caches, seems the natural way to go.
Whoever gets the usability right ought to have a huge hit on their hands. Will it be Microsoft, with their control over such a high percentage of "serious" client OSes? It would make sense to build this in as a transparent feature of every PC/device OS from MS, increasing the attractiveness of MS OSes on devices if that's what you use on your PC. Or will it be Google, with their openness to all clients, regardless of vendor?
Or will they miss the local cache idea altogether and just create an offsite network drive?
The thing about garbage collection is that 80% of the time you don't need it, but the other 20% of the time not having it can really be a pain in the ass.
I think I'd say it somewhat differently: Few programs need MANUAL memory management at all, and those that do need it rarely need it in more than a few spots. However, in those few spots where you need it, it can be critically important. When you use it, though, you DRAMATICALLY increase the likelihood of nasty, hard to reproduce bugs, security holes, etc. So, the natural approach is to make automatic memory management the default. Probably the biggest problem with C is the fact that so many things are done by raw memory manipulation (strings, arrays, etc.) and ALL memory handling/management is manual.
The fact that C ALLOWS you to do everything by raw, manual memory manipulation is the source of its power, but you wouldn't HAVE to do everything manually in order to get that power. You only need the ABILITY to do everything that way, which is the D approach. The default is D's first class strings, first class arrays, automatic memory mgt for everything, but anything can be taken over and done manually with ease when the programmer feels like doing so.
And digitalmars.com is back up again, so check out this feature comparison table: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/comparison.html
I can feel myself waiting a few months, then ordering an updated Objective C coding book to pick this language up now.
I might consider it, too, if I hadn't discovered the D programming language. I can't do a proper comparison because I discovered D shortly after I started experimenting with Obj-C and lost all interest in the latter and no longer remember much about it except that it belonged to the "fast, not convenient" camp, like C and C++.
D was designed from the ground up as a memory managed Super C. The intention was to provide both the power of C and the convenience features of today's most popular scripting languages in a natively-compiled C-like language, with a host of other modern features such as full-fledged Eiffel-style design by contract, native Unicode strings, real arrays, etc. In order to offer as much of C's power as possible, it lets you manually override the memory management where you want to.
I'm not sure what's going on with D at the moment, though. The forums stopped working a few weeks ago, and today the whole website (digitalmars.com) seems to have gone offline. I hope everything is okay....
Personally I found the opposite.
And you're BOTH right! As he said, Thinkpads have the best keyboard ever. It took me a week to get used to it when I was forced to use a Thinkpad as a loaner and I was forced to use that "awful eraserhead" pointer", as I described it. After I got good at it that awful eraserhead right under my index finger and the three mousebuttons always under my thumbs became so fast and natural that I refused to go back to my own computer and bought myself a Thinkpad.
With the mouse and three buttons essentially under your fingers at all times in the home position on the keyboard, the arguments between mouse/GUI vs keyboard/CLI vanished for me. The mouse and buttons were just more superpower keys on the keyboard.
In contrast, I find the pathetic "take your hand off the keyboard and scratch-scratch-scratch", single mouse button nonsense of the PowerBook UI to be far worse than using a traditional mouse. (And I had a PowerBook and PCs, Macs, and a Linux box, all with traditional keyboards & mice.)
Until Apple makes a PowerBook with the trackpoint/3-mouse-button type of keyboard I have on my ThinkPad, I won't even consider buying another PowerBook. (If they did, I WOULD consider it.)
They could do this by implementing a pluggable keyboard configuration that allowed customers to specify keyboard type just like RAM and HD size at time of ordering. It seems very UN-Apple to allow such freedom of choice, though. Steve "I have better taste than you" Jobs will tell us what's actually the best for us, and we'll like it or go elsewhere.
Okay. Hello new ThinkPad....
So why is this modded down as a troll? The notion that tricking out a rapidly evolving system with rapidly evolving hacks might not be smart is worth considering, unless you are a "political activist".
I would certainly use more extensions if they didn't risk make Firefox even more unstable than it already is. I'm sick of Firefox crashes, Firefox often going into manic 95% CPU burning mode on return from laptop suspends, etc. I keep using it because of its net advantages, but it simply is not as stable as IE yet. Something like SessionSaver ought to be a standard feature of Firefox (at least available from the Tools > Options... dialog) because losing your work is a problem in any app, even when they *are* stable (your computer itself has its own instabilities that the app can't do anything about except to frequently save your work for recovery in case of crash. Firefox should have a "restore everything on restart" option no matter how stable it is.)
I lost about 20 windows when Firefox crashed on me a couple of hours ago. I would use SessionSaver now if it didn't have the reputation of actually *increasing* the chance of crashes and occasionally nuking all of your windows for whatever random reason.
Does it maintain table layouts in plain text? It would be very convenient to have the option of copying data from an HTML table and pasting a properly formatted plain text data table.
Under what circumstances is SQLite a good choice?
I have measurement data that is structurally simple enough that a single "flat file" might even be enough, but I have tens of millions of records (with perhaps a hundred or so fields each, both text and numeric). I'd like to be able to search, filter, sort, do arbitrary SQL queries, etc. as quickly as possible, but this would usually just be on a Windows laptop with a single user or perhaps a Linux server with a single user. Would the power of Postgres be advantageous, or is that the wrong kind of power and would something like SQLite be more "powerful" in a case like this (LOTS of data, simple structure)?
...makes you pay attention to these options...
Making the user pay attention to irrelevant options is extremely poor usability design, not some sort of badge of honor. From what I hear, Postres is outstanding in terms of technical functionality. To have a product like that crippled by such poor usability design (if it is as you describe) would be a real waste of its potential.
I worked in the field for quite a while, with a formal background in physics and a personal background in linguistics, and I agree with the parent. Major in CS, emphasizing the mathematical side over the technological side (e.g., algorithms vs. memorizing C++ trivia). Minor in linguistics (not "humanities", but real linguistics, which can be quite hard core.) Don't bother trying to officially create a "major". If you do what I (and the parent) suggest, you can always claim to have gotten your B.S. in computational linguistics and your transcripts will back you up.
You can follow an officially published "medieval literature" track in the "French Department" from the "School of Fine Arts and Humanities", take every required course, follow the rules for that track to the letter and graduate. Will your diploma say "Bachelor of Arts in Medieval French Literature"? No, it will say something like, "...successfully completed the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts from the School of Fine Arts and Humanities", (though if you graduate from Harvard College it may say it in Latin.) So what degree do you have? You have a B.A. In what? Pretty much whatever you want to call it as long as it describes the classes on your transcript.
So, you want a bachelor's in Computational Linguistics. Get a BSCS, minor in linguistics, and that's what you'll have. (And it won't be lying. That's what you really *will* have.)
I know that C++ needed a replacement - I'm just frustrated with disappointment in what we got.
It's not over yet. Walter Bright, one of the best commercial C++ compiler writers of the last generation has created his own C++ replacement based on his intimate knowledge of the internal details of C++.
His "D" programming language has what I want from a C replacement. It is garbage collected by default, but you can manually "free" and "malloc" anytime you want, doing 100% manual memory management if you like.
It's like C but with real, native strings (100% Unicode), real arrays, foreach, and dozens of other features from high-level languages such as real Eiffel-style Design by Contract, C#-style delegates, templates, exceptions, etc.
The nonsense of header files is gone. You "import" modules as in Python.
Even so, it is still so close to C that you can statically link D code and existing C libraries into a single executable as if it were all written in pure C, and compiled D code is usually *faster* than the equivalent C++ code (see the Great Language Shootout for evidence.) It's always natively compiled into small, fast, standalone executables, like C. No big "runtime environments" are required.
Check it out at digitalmars.com.
(I'm promoting it here for the typical reason that I like it a lot and think that popularity will eventually benefit me as a user through more libraries, tools, books, and other resources.)
So if Sun fixes a bug, they don't have to release that fix to anyone.
So the bug will still exist in the base.
You may be right, but I doubt it. If Sun were a small company selling a database-backed app to a proprietary niche who didn't know and didn't care what the database was, this could be true.
But Sun has bigger strategic interests. If they want to sell a service based on PG, it is in their best interest to make PG's reputation as good as possible without any confusing "issues" regarding PG's reputation. Imagine them trying to sell against Oracle with the explanation, "well, our version of PG has some bug fixes that may not be in other versions of PG," leaving the buyers to wonder what bug fixes the OTHER versions may have that Sun's doesn't have, while Oracle is simply selling "there is only ONE Oracle--The Real Thing--the One Everyone Uses."
Also Sun has a thing about competing with Microsoft. They'd rather take revenue away from Microsoft and have it themselves, but they'd settle for simply taking revenue away from MS with nobody getting it. MS positions SQLServer as easier to use and lower cost. Sun could fight back with "our service-based PG is even easier to use and if lowest cost is what you want, just use PG without our service for free. Either way it's better than the deal from MS, so why use Microsoft?" In other words, Sun will either get the business or nobody will, but either way they'll hurt MS. But if only their in-house fork of PG has the bug fixes, that strategy goes nowhere. They can't very well recommend the public version as an alternative to MS or Oracle. If it's so good, why did Sun have to fix it, etc.
The parent's link makes it pretty clear that the murderous Chinese communist government was responsible for even MORE than 30 million deaths, perhaps more than any other murderous regime in history, but that the number in "the Cultural Revolution alone" was far less than 30 million. The Kuomintang were murderous SOBs, too, but don't hold a candle to the Chinese Communist Party.
If you are also arguing that China takes patent protection very seriously, and that the portion of the world where patent protection is notoriously lax is too small to even be called "much of the world", and that believing otherwise is evidence that one is "uninformed and arrogant", then I think we have enough information to determine the credibility of your argument.
Cringely: "Of course, much of the rest of the world also ignores or gleefully violates patent law."
You: "First of all, "the rest of the world" has had strong patent protection a lot longer than the US; US companies were infamous for flaunting patents."
It appears that the uninformed, arrogant flaming is yours. Cringely's comment is absolutely correct. "Much of the rest of the world" does EXACTLY what he said, as he said.
If you had simply added that there were countries that had had strong patent protection longer than the US, that would have been correct and even informative (to some).
But that wouldn't have contradicted Cringely at all, much less proven his ignorance or arrogance. Nor would it have had the tone of anti-US moral outrage that seems to matter to some people more than factual correctness.
So to get the outrage part right, you spout off that the rest of the world had strong patent protection before the US? "The rest of the world" in your claim either refers to all of the rest of the world, or some of it.
If it means all, it's wrong. If it means some, then it doesn't contradict Cringely, who was talking about the rest. (He was also referring to the present, not the past.) I think it's meant to *sound* as though it means all to meet the requirements of expressing outrage at Americans ("all of the rest of the world is better than the US"), while still giving you room to retreat to the some meaning if challenged ("Some of Europe had it, and Europe is in the rest of the world, therefore the rest of the world had it.") Yeah, some did, and much of the rest of the world still doesn't, which is exactly what Cringely said.
And your comment that "US companies WERE infamous for flaunting patents" is true but irrelevant. The US WAS infamous for slavery, too. Both were generations ago. But Cringely's sentences that you quote are in the present tense. To counter, your rebuttal would have to be about the present, too. It's not--that would be obviously incorrect--so you make do with a critcism of the past and hope no one will notice.
So, since you can't actually contradict him without being obviously wrong, but you have a need to make a show of indignant outrage at the US, you do the best you can, right?
Who's the ignorant, arrogant flamer?
If you want to get technical, Virginia doesn't call itself a state ...and if you want to get legal, the federal government DOES call it a state.
And so does Virginia itself. The "state government" of Virginia calls itself a "state" at least as often as it calls itself a commonwealth. They refer officially to their "state senators". There are no "commonwealth taxes" in Virginia, for example, only "state taxes". State government agencies use the term "state" in their names, and so on.
The fact that it doesn't use "state" in its name is irrelevant. At the time it became an "independent state", France was also an independent state, and it was not called the "State of France".
The fact that this confuses some people now is because so many people mistakenly think that "state" is the American term for "province". The intent of the founders was always that these be a federation of independent states so that, for example, if California declared marijuana legal for medical purposes, other states would have no say in the matter.