If I had been a resident of a country where they just used the unimproved "components from nature that have been used in the past" that you mentioned, I would have died two years ago. My wife would have died the previous year, along with my child. My brother would have died shortly after birth.
All of us are still alive because of expensive medical research done in the US and no thanks to brainless "political activists".
These are excellent language courses for Japanese speakers trying to learn some other language, such as Chinese or Korean. I already speak Japanese well enough to be able to learn other languages via courses taught in Japanese, so I can use them too, but they are only broadcast in Japan. And even in Japan, if you miss the live half-hour broadcast on AM radio, you're out of luck. (Well, unless you subscribe to cable radio, which rebroadcasts them.)
Though these wouldn't be of much use to most of the English speaking world, they are examples of the type of content that would make great MP3 downloads.
Actually, I find that the educational potential of portable audio players like the iPod is enormous. The problem at the moment is the scarcity of audio course materials.
I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)
If they value "broad, liberal education" so much and have such a hard time finding room for all the people who want to enroll, let them provide their history classes, foreign languages, music appreciation, philosophy, poli sci, etc., as downloadable audio courses that anyone can download and, to the extent possible, let those who want credit take a machine gradable test or series of tests so that attention from a live instructor is not needed.
A lot of classes couldn't be done this way (calculus, circuit analysis, etc.), but many could, and this is one way a university could enable engineering students (for ex.) to get more liberal arts and humanities without the need to double tuition and make the university ever tougher to get in to. And once they did the work to create these audio courses, they could let anyone (not just students) download them for just the marginal cost of additional bandwidth. They could then minimize even that cost by putting the material in the public domain and explicitly allowing P2P sharing.
(For that matter, I'd like to see organizations like the BBC, NPR, NHK, etc. start providing their archives in downloadable OGG or MP3 instead of just streaming RealAudio. NHK has terrific language courses available on the radio every day in Japan, but you have to live in Japan to hear them. As far as I know, you can't download them and that seems absurdly wasteful since they put so much work into creating them.)
Then, universities could require students to have portable audio players capable of playing MP3s & OGGs or provide them with one that can and serve more and better courses to more students with fewer faculty and staff and help reduce the outrageous rate of inflation in costs of higher ed.
One of the advantages of open source is its ability to put the consumer ahead of profit.
This is bordering on nonsense because, though OSS has that "ability", strictly speaking, it certainly doesn't have that *tendency*.
On the contrary, companies that pursue *profits* are more likely to be interested in consumer usability because all profits come from the consumer.
What OSS does is put the developer's needs ahead of those of consumers. If there is no profit to be had, then it has to meet the developer's needs or it won't get written. (This is personally advantageous to me because, as a developer, my preferences tend to resemble that of other developers, but that doesn't mean that their first priority is *me*.)
A system that tends to answer complaints from its consumers with "if you don't like it, write it yourself!" is not one that I would call responsive to consumers, and the fact that they are not after profits doesn't seem to me to make them *more* responsive to consumers. It makes them *less* responsive.
I think the best thing for usability is the entry of corporations (anyone from little Red Hat to giant IBM) into the game. These guys *are* looking for profits, and they are the big drivers behind consumer usability in OSS, for the most part.
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Neither myself nor the other American here have a real familiarity with life in India. Unless "several trips" had unusual duration.
I lived in Asia for many years. I lived in three different Asian countries and traveled frequently (for business and fun) to most of the others.
While I don't experience India the way an Indian would, I have a pretty good feel for cross-country comparisons. I can assure you that anyone who claims that "the vast majority of Americans live in grinding poverty" and then proclaims life in India to be better is either mentally defective or is attempting to take advantage of other people's lack of confidence in their knowledge of "foreign countries" to deceive them for some reason. Perhaps he's one of the virulent strain of Hindu nationalists that have been growing in number over the last several years.
I don't know, but I DO know that his opinions are worthless.
If you want a reasonable Asian comparison with the US in terms of living standards, you would be talking about Japan, Hong Kong, or Singapore, not India, China, Indonesia, etc.
And your comments about the trends in the US and India leading to a meeting in the middle are borderline nonsense because you clearly don't understand the enormous difference between and the enormous inertia of two such huge nations. While it's true that a small sliver of Indians are now solidly 1st world economically (as is true in China), I don't think you can imagine what it's like to have more than a billion fellow countrymen living as they did centuries ago, steeped in leftist "equality by confiscation" dogma, and viewing you with growing envy and hostility--as a pocket ripe for picking rather than as a role model to emulate.
I don't see India and the US "meeting in the middle" anytime in the next century, given the enormous inertia, though I can easily imagine tens of millions of Indians and Chinese (still just a sliver of the total in each country) living better than the *average* American before long.
BTW, the US as far as I'm concerned effectively rejoined the third world some time ago - having been in both california and hyderabad, I know where I'd rather live, and it sure isn't california.
I've thoroughly enjoyed my several trips to India, but unless you're Indian yourself who likes his home (can't blame you for that), I think you're a fool who's just spouting off. The state of California has an economy that is about four times the size of that of the entire *nation* of India with 1/30th as many people. In other words, the economic output of the average Californian is over 10,000% that of the average Indian, yet you claim that it has rejoined the third world. Where would that put India?
Not to mention that you're trying to compare a whole state the size of California to a single Indian city as a place to live...
Foolish little AC. How can I trust any "insights" you might claim to have about something subtle like IP laws when you make comments like those above?
If a scientist can't fund his own research, he can't do it. If he wants someone else to pay for it, he has to prove that his work is more valuable to that "investor" than anything else that investor could do with his money.
That investor could be a person, a corporation, a non-profit, a government, whatever. It doesn't matter. Any of the above have more things they could do with their money than they have money.
So with this in mind, consider your advice: "Mass disregard for IP laws is the duty of a scientist." There are plenty of countries that exhibit a mass disregard for IP laws. How does their scientific productivity compare to countries with strong IP protection? How much funding do their scientists attract?
People are not usually inspired to invest their own money in scientists who consider it their "duty" to rip off the investor.
(This does not mean that I think that the stronger the IP laws, the better. I think productivity falls off at either extreme, and the US is less productive than it could be because IP laws have gotten ridiculously constraining. The solution is not to disregard the laws and rejoin the third world, though. The solution is to fix the laws.)
It's just a hypothesis, but I would guess that the reason for the decline in "literary" reading is related to the decline in network TV viewing: more options.
Literary reading (outside of school, which is what they were counting) is a form of entertainment, and the number of entertainment options has steadily increased over the years. Older forms of enterainment have probbably all declined as a roughly fixed amount of time is divided among an ever growing variety of activities.
Sorry, but I followed the link and read the description of Screen, and I don't understand the difference between that description and an ordinary Xterm-like terminal window. I'm not disputing your point, I'm trying to understand it.
If I'm using a GUI, I can already open as many independent terminal windows as I like with their own scrollbacks, copy/paste between windows etc. It sounds as though that's all Screen claims to do, so I'm obviously missing some important distinction between Screen and ordinary terminal programs.
Is Screen perhaps a character mode app that partitions your screen into multiple window panes, each the equivalent of an Xterm window in a GUI, providing the benefits of multiple terminal windows in a GUI without the GUI overhead, or is Screen something different entirely?
I think fair.org is just another website that ensures that the left is represented, not that the right is represented nor--more importantly--that even the truth is represented.
Absolutely. Everytime I hear a representative of FAIR interviewed, every example he cites is one of how some news story is leaving out important facts that would have strengthened a liberal argument if they had been included.
Then I tune in to some conservative talk radio program and hear how that day's big news article in some mainstream media source left out important facts that would strengthen a conservative argument.
So, FAIR ends up merely being the mirror image of conservative talk radio, as far as its media analysis is concerned, but without the honesty of the conservatives (or of liberal talk show hosts, for that matter) regarding how they identify themselves.
By attempting to "set the record straight" only for cases where doing so would promote liberal causes, they become yet another liberal advocacy group, not a credible media fact checker, even if every point they make is true.
No, my question wasn't why the new products encourage.Net and discourage MFC, my question was why MS didn't just give away the dev tools, thereby increasing the supply of Windows apps, thereby making Windows harder for end users to abandon.
That's my impression, too, though I think that any student interested in learning Windows programming now would probably do well to avoid wasting time on the vast and absurdly complicated Windows "SDK" and MFC programming models and just concentrate on.Net. There might not be enough years of life left in the old models to pay off the effort required to learn them.
I am not sure I understand you completely (exactly what do you mean by "with the granularity of C"? that everything doesn't have to be a class?)
That's right. Although I enjoy strong OO languages such as Java, C#, Ruby, or Eiffel, that nicely abstract away the machine details such as memory addresses and replace them with conceptual data types (instances of nifty classes), sometimes one needs to program a little "closer to the metal" for optimization of some sort (size of executable, memory usage, execution speed, or whatever.)
For these tasks, I'd be interested in having a language that's just a little higher-level (of abstraction) than C. The idea would be to use the non-linearity of costs/benefits ("80/20 rule") to try to gain as much convenience and reliability as possible in exchange for giving up as little of the advantages of C as possible.
I don't have much experience with Ada. I've done more with Eiffel, but nothing commercial for the practical reasons that hamper all non-mainstream languages. I like it, though, and wish that the really good "melting ICE" stuff were free, because nobody is going to buy non-mainstream tools for me. Unfortunately, Eiffel's time has passed, I'm afraid. I suspect the same is true of Ada, but I don't follow it enough to know.
Previously, they had the very expensive VS Pro with all of the languages, plus several "Standard" editions, one for each language, at about $99 each.
People who only wanted to develop in C++ would always be interested in Visual C++ Standard. "Why do I care about Visual Basic or Visual J#?" they would ask.
But then inevitably the question would arise whether the Visual C++ Standard license allowed you to write commercial software and for some reason the answer was never very clear. Most people thought the answer was no (see Google Groups), but MS's website never managed to include that most frequently asked question in its FAQ, despite year after year of people asking the question.
I notice now that the new C++ Express Edition doesn't include MFC or ATL, which are what most people doing commercial C++ for Windows would be using, but it does make a big deal about how you can write.Net "managed C++" apps, which almost nobody is interested in.
It's a bit puzzling why MS doesn't just make the best possible development tools, including everything (MFC, ATL,.Net, fancy compiler, profiler, nice editor, etc.) and give them away to ensure a steady stream of new apps that make Windows a "must have" in order to stave off Linux.
Reducing the cost of VS Pro + MSDN from thousands to zero would almost certainly increase the quantity and variety of commercial-quality apps for Windows, much of it free, making it harder for people to abandon the platform.
They've previously commented that they don't want to do that because it would destroy the 3rd party dev tools market for Windows, but given their history, that explanation seems laughable.
It can't be that they're trying to protect their Office apps from free competitors, because those are so huge that the resources needed by any challenger dwarf the cost of a few copies of VS Pro.
Maybe they're trying to protect the idea of commercial software in general, or trying to lock developers into the platform by getting them to commit money to it, or just trying to make short run money by selling tools, but those seem like pretty shaky theories.
That's where I think the author completely failed to make his case for changing programming languages not being a solution.
People who program in C/C++ are vulnerable to all of the security risks Java and C# programmers are vulnerable to, plus quite a few more that Java and C# programmers are NOT vulnerable to.
So, if you have a program that could reasonably be written in either Java or C++, and you choose C++, you've just increased the number of security vulnerabilities you'll have to check for. Given the same development deadlines, but with more areas to check, you're going to be handicapped from a security perspective if you choose C++.
Then add to that the fact that almost everybody with equivalent experience is more productive at implementing a feature in Java or C# vs. in C++, with the same deadline pressures you have even less time available for security checking on top of more things to check if you work in C++.
Of course there are some tasks for which C or C++ are the still best choice for other reasons, so I still use both frequently and applaud any attempt at adding better security scanning to the compiler.
I can't help thinking, though, that even in those cases a language with the granularity of C but with built-in strings (UTF-8), arrays that are checked by default but with an override, with fixed built in data types (e.g., a 'byte' type that isn't signed in some places and unsigned in others), and yet without all of the massive baggage of C++, would go a long way to improving C's bug proneness without removing its power.
Unfortunately, most developers value such things as security, globalization and, frankly, reliability so little, resist change so much, and are so arrogant about their l33t ski11z that would only be impeded by "guard rails", that a language that offered only these improvements on top of C would never put a dent in C's popularity.
And to that extent only I agree with his thesis that bad programmers are the root of the problem.
Yes, it DOES address the underlying issue. Just because part of the problem remains doesn't mean that the problem hasn't been addressed at all.
If you stop using C/C++ by default and use safer languages such as Java or C#, your code will become more secure. The fact that it still isn't 100% secure doesn't mean you've made no progress. And with fewer vulnerabilities, you can pay more attention to the types of vulnerabilities that remain.
I suspect that what you call "listening" is merely someone else sharing your attitude
No. I call "listening" actually discussing the problem.
Okay, then, I hope what I'm doing will qualify as listening. You're not my child, so I'm not going to put much more into this, but I'll take another shot just in case it ends up helping. You may just be really discouraged and really hoping that someone will talk you out of being so discouraged, so for what it's worth:
You said something telling here:
I know precisely ONE PERSON who has been gainfully employed in a job that pays an adequate wage for more than three months. Everyone else I know is either a) self-employed and broke or b) unemployed and broke.
If it were just me, that would be an attitude problem. Since it is everyone I know, it's not an attitude problem.
What you say doesn't disprove the attitude problem at all. Birds of a feather, and all that. At the risk of seeming flippant here, maybe you need to cultivate some better friends.;-)
I think there are some useful observations within your "rant" that you could build on. You came close to saying that it's better to work for yourself, and I think that's true for many people, including me. I think that having the right attitude is even more important for the self-employed, though, so you would be well served to start finding successful self-employed people to hang around if you want to take advantage of this insight of yours.
You also said, "'Get an education and work hard' isn't enough anymore," and I'm glad you can see that. As far as I can tell, there has only been a thin sliver of human history (in time and place) where that advice was correct: in the developed economies over the last couple of generations or so.
Prior to that, an education was mostly irrelevant to the types of work that existed. These days, it is essentially a necessity for all jobs, so having an education today is like being able to read was a generation ago: completely necessary and totally insufficient to guarantee anything.
So now what? I think the answer is to give up ASAP any notion that there is some degree or certification or whatever that you can get that will be a guarantee of security. Forget static security as in getting into a good situation that you can stay in for life. Not much of that around anymore, as you are painfully aware.
But so what? Look for dynamic security, which is hopping from opportunity to opportunity with an aggressive program of self-improvement (learning new skills) and trying to expand your network to include more successful people. You'll lose frequently, but you can probably end up winning more than you lose, and it's only the total that matters.
All economic opportunities arise from problems, so if you think there are more problems these days, then it's also likely that there are more opportunities for somebody who looks at problems in a useful way.
If you continue to stew in your own resentment, though, and to hang around with others just like you, then I'm afraid things will not go well for you.
This is a danger you should take seriously, but it is NOT a foregone conclusion. You CAN avoid this fate, but to do so will probably require you to take all of the energy and attention you are devoting to your grievances and focus it on the search for opportunities.
This is the basic inequity of W-4 employment: All sources of income are temporary. All expenses are contracts.... But a company can walk away from that employee's paycheck any time they feel like it.
Many, probably most, states in the US have what is called "at will" employment. That means that, with only a few exceptions such as firing based on race, your employer can do exactly what you said: stop your employment and paycheck at any moment for any reason they like.
The flip side is that, in such states, the employees are accorded the same prvilege. You can be the key developer working on a product that simply MUST ship on time because manufacturing is already contracted, the press has already been notified, etc., and you can announce at the worst possible time for the company that you are quitting, and (again, with a few exceptions) there is nothing they can do about it.
Your comment about all sources of income being temporary with expenses being contracts goes both ways. If you are worth having at all you are a source of income to the company. If you walk out the door and they can't ship on time, they are still stuck with the manufacturing contracts, the advertising, the rent....
Now that's the typical US system, though there are variations state to state.
In Europe and Japan, they have more protections for the employee. Employees are much harder to get rid of. Because companies know that, they respond by being far more reluctant to hire you in the first place.
Once you're hired, they know they can only get rid of you if you quit, so if they decide--for whatever reason, just like the US--that they don't want you around, they can't just fire you so they have to make you want to quit.
I've worked in Europe, the US, and Japan, and if you think office politics are intense in the US, well, you haven't seen anything until you've seen politics in a place where your company wants to make you miserable enough to quit, but you're too afraid to quit because other employers are afraid to hire anybody and, therefore, will be extra careful to weed out applicants who had to be forced out by a previous employer.
Talk about career impediments! When you can't easily hop from job to job, as you can in the US, and neither can your bosses or coworkers, then you are stuck in a political game from which there is no retreat.
The only thing like it that I've seen in the US is in academia or government, where you can't easily go do the same work for the competitor down the street if you don't like your current management.
W-4 employment is so unfair that no business would EVER agree to its terms as an agreement with another business.
Businesses have no choice but to agree to these terms. "At will" employment applies to both parties. An entire team of engineers can walk out the door and cripple a company. Old fashioned strikes can do likewise. And I run a small company that has entered into agreements with big companies of the sort that you say a business would never enter into. You can essentially sell them the security of being able to get out of the contract "at will". We trade away some security for some money.
I can explain the problem, but very few people listen.
Since almost every adult you know works in the same world as you, you might consider that the chances that you have discovered something that all of the rest of us have missed is pretty small. As far as I can tell, you are providing no new information, just a bitter attitude that almost all of us can see at a glance is likely to impede your progress.
I suspect that what you call "listening" is merely someone else sharing your attitude, but since most people know everything that you know about the world of work and, in addition, recognize the self-destructiveness of your attitude, they aren't going to adopt that attitude, which you define as not listening.
I hope you'll discover the amazing opportunities of such a flexible employment system and learn how to use them to advance your career instead of letting a few failures convince you that you can't win.
Look, I got laid off from my last job, too, and I think that your reaction to this is absurd.
"Office politics" is the big problem? That's just another term for people interacting with each other. The only place with no politics is a place with no other people. Everyone has his own agenda in this world, at work and everywhere else, but I don't see any sense in complaining about that. Most people's agendas aren't evil. They're just primarily driven by personal considerations. Isn't yours?
Business is nothing more than trying to get others to advance your personal agenda by finding ways whereby you can advance theirs. Call it politics or just call it business. So what?
And when you say that there is "no such thing" as a company that appreciates you, I'm sure that either you are wrong or it's your attitude that makes you right--but only as it applies to you.
My previous employer didn't appreciate me enough to keep me, but it was because the types of problems I was good at solving weren't high priorities to the senior execs who ended up running the place. So, too bad for me, but that doesn't make them evil.
Either I need to find some place that does care about the type of problems I'm good at solving, or I need to learn to solve other types of problems that other people care more about. Either way, I can and will deal with it, probably effectively, and you probably can too if you change your approach.
I agree with almost all of what you said. Providing value to the customer in ways that the customer (not you) values is a major key to success.
I will have to say, though, that there are many stochastic inputs to the success function. At one of my previous jobs, I did work that I thought was important for the company, and which was greatly appreciated by many people at the company with no direct ability to reward me, but which senior management showed little interest in.
One day, a new senior guy showed up and it was rumored that he was being groomed to be the next CEO. That guy spotted my work and thought that it was so important to the company that suddenly I became a big shot.
Our "future CEO" must have offended the wrong person, though, because one day he just vanished. Within a week or two, the board replaced him with one of the Old Guard senior execs and after another month or so, I got laid off.
All along, I was doing the same work, so its intrinsic value to the *company* was the same, but my star rose or fell depending on the outcomes of boardroom battles that had nothing to do with me or my work.
I still believe that you are correct about providing value to customers, but it only increases your chances on average. It doesn't guarantee success in any individual case because of the numerous random factors over which you have no control. Still, by trying again and again, you can often get the random factors to cancel each other out over the long run, which is why I mainly support your thesis.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I mean what I said: MEDICAL research.
If I had been a resident of a country where they just used the unimproved "components from nature that have been used in the past" that you mentioned, I would have died two years ago. My wife would have died the previous year, along with my child. My brother would have died shortly after birth.
All of us are still alive because of expensive medical research done in the US and no thanks to brainless "political activists".
Only if they're evil capitalists. Not everyone spends anything close to what the USA does...
...on medical research.
Hey, thanks for that URL. I didn't know it existed, but I was referring to:
a ku .html
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/toppage/program_index/gog
These are excellent language courses for Japanese speakers trying to learn some other language, such as Chinese or Korean. I already speak Japanese well enough to be able to learn other languages via courses taught in Japanese, so I can use them too, but they are only broadcast in Japan. And even in Japan, if you miss the live half-hour broadcast on AM radio, you're out of luck. (Well, unless you subscribe to cable radio, which rebroadcasts them.)
Though these wouldn't be of much use to most of the English speaking world, they are examples of the type of content that would make great MP3 downloads.
Actually, I find that the educational potential of portable audio players like the iPod is enormous. The problem at the moment is the scarcity of audio course materials.
I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)
If they value "broad, liberal education" so much and have such a hard time finding room for all the people who want to enroll, let them provide their history classes, foreign languages, music appreciation, philosophy, poli sci, etc., as downloadable audio courses that anyone can download and, to the extent possible, let those who want credit take a machine gradable test or series of tests so that attention from a live instructor is not needed.
A lot of classes couldn't be done this way (calculus, circuit analysis, etc.), but many could, and this is one way a university could enable engineering students (for ex.) to get more liberal arts and humanities without the need to double tuition and make the university ever tougher to get in to. And once they did the work to create these audio courses, they could let anyone (not just students) download them for just the marginal cost of additional bandwidth. They could then minimize even that cost by putting the material in the public domain and explicitly allowing P2P sharing.
(For that matter, I'd like to see organizations like the BBC, NPR, NHK, etc. start providing their archives in downloadable OGG or MP3 instead of just streaming RealAudio. NHK has terrific language courses available on the radio every day in Japan, but you have to live in Japan to hear them. As far as I know, you can't download them and that seems absurdly wasteful since they put so much work into creating them.)
Then, universities could require students to have portable audio players capable of playing MP3s & OGGs or provide them with one that can and serve more and better courses to more students with fewer faculty and staff and help reduce the outrageous rate of inflation in costs of higher ed.
From the article:
One of the advantages of open source is its ability to put the consumer ahead of profit.
This is bordering on nonsense because, though OSS has that "ability", strictly speaking, it certainly doesn't have that *tendency*.
On the contrary, companies that pursue *profits* are more likely to be interested in consumer usability because all profits come from the consumer.
What OSS does is put the developer's needs ahead of those of consumers. If there is no profit to be had, then it has to meet the developer's needs or it won't get written. (This is personally advantageous to me because, as a developer, my preferences tend to resemble that of other developers, but that doesn't mean that their first priority is *me*.)
A system that tends to answer complaints from its consumers with "if you don't like it, write it yourself!" is not one that I would call responsive to consumers, and the fact that they are not after profits doesn't seem to me to make them *more* responsive to consumers. It makes them *less* responsive.
I think the best thing for usability is the entry of corporations (anyone from little Red Hat to giant IBM) into the game. These guys *are* looking for profits, and they are the big drivers behind consumer usability in OSS, for the most part.
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Neither myself nor the other American here have a real familiarity with life in India. Unless "several trips" had unusual duration.
I lived in Asia for many years. I lived in three different Asian countries and traveled frequently (for business and fun) to most of the others.
While I don't experience India the way an Indian would, I have a pretty good feel for cross-country comparisons. I can assure you that anyone who claims that "the vast majority of Americans live in grinding poverty" and then proclaims life in India to be better is either mentally defective or is attempting to take advantage of other people's lack of confidence in their knowledge of "foreign countries" to deceive them for some reason. Perhaps he's one of the virulent strain of Hindu nationalists that have been growing in number over the last several years.
I don't know, but I DO know that his opinions are worthless.
If you want a reasonable Asian comparison with the US in terms of living standards, you would be talking about Japan, Hong Kong, or Singapore, not India, China, Indonesia, etc.
And your comments about the trends in the US and India leading to a meeting in the middle are borderline nonsense because you clearly don't understand the enormous difference between and the enormous inertia of two such huge nations. While it's true that a small sliver of Indians are now solidly 1st world economically (as is true in China), I don't think you can imagine what it's like to have more than a billion fellow countrymen living as they did centuries ago, steeped in leftist "equality by confiscation" dogma, and viewing you with growing envy and hostility--as a pocket ripe for picking rather than as a role model to emulate.
I don't see India and the US "meeting in the middle" anytime in the next century, given the enormous inertia, though I can easily imagine tens of millions of Indians and Chinese (still just a sliver of the total in each country) living better than the *average* American before long.
I really think you're the fool here. Hey, at least in India I get decent medical care!
...the bulk of [America's] inhabitants in crushing poverty with a tiny but astronomically wealthy ruling class...
Yes, yes. Anyone who visits Calcutta is immediately overwhelmed by the experience of encountering the results of India's world famous medical system.
One wonders why Mother Theresa wasted so much time in India when the average suburban Californian could only dream of a Calcuttan lifestyle.
That's the sort of 'enlightened' leftist analysis one expects from a Slashdot AC.
I have no doubt that your opinions regarding IP laws are of similar calibre.
BTW, the US as far as I'm concerned effectively rejoined the third world some time ago - having been in both california and hyderabad, I know where I'd rather live, and it sure isn't california.
I've thoroughly enjoyed my several trips to India, but unless you're Indian yourself who likes his home (can't blame you for that), I think you're a fool who's just spouting off. The state of California has an economy that is about four times the size of that of the entire *nation* of India with 1/30th as many people. In other words, the economic output of the average Californian is over 10,000% that of the average Indian, yet you claim that it has rejoined the third world. Where would that put India?
Not to mention that you're trying to compare a whole state the size of California to a single Indian city as a place to live...
Foolish little AC. How can I trust any "insights" you might claim to have about something subtle like IP laws when you make comments like those above?
If a scientist can't fund his own research, he can't do it. If he wants someone else to pay for it, he has to prove that his work is more valuable to that "investor" than anything else that investor could do with his money.
That investor could be a person, a corporation, a non-profit, a government, whatever. It doesn't matter. Any of the above have more things they could do with their money than they have money.
So with this in mind, consider your advice: "Mass disregard for IP laws is the duty of a scientist." There are plenty of countries that exhibit a mass disregard for IP laws. How does their scientific productivity compare to countries with strong IP protection? How much funding do their scientists attract?
People are not usually inspired to invest their own money in scientists who consider it their "duty" to rip off the investor.
(This does not mean that I think that the stronger the IP laws, the better. I think productivity falls off at either extreme, and the US is less productive than it could be because IP laws have gotten ridiculously constraining. The solution is not to disregard the laws and rejoin the third world, though. The solution is to fix the laws.)
It's just a hypothesis, but I would guess that the reason for the decline in "literary" reading is related to the decline in network TV viewing: more options.
Literary reading (outside of school, which is what they were counting) is a form of entertainment, and the number of entertainment options has steadily increased over the years. Older forms of enterainment have probbably all declined as a roughly fixed amount of time is divided among an ever growing variety of activities.
Sorry, but I followed the link and read the description of Screen, and I don't understand the difference between that description and an ordinary Xterm-like terminal window. I'm not disputing your point, I'm trying to understand it.
If I'm using a GUI, I can already open as many independent terminal windows as I like with their own scrollbacks, copy/paste between windows etc. It sounds as though that's all Screen claims to do, so I'm obviously missing some important distinction between Screen and ordinary terminal programs.
Is Screen perhaps a character mode app that partitions your screen into multiple window panes, each the equivalent of an Xterm window in a GUI, providing the benefits of multiple terminal windows in a GUI without the GUI overhead, or is Screen something different entirely?
Ah, that clears it up. Just as C# runs on .Net, Java 1.5 runs on Java 2 and is called Java 5.
Yep. Clears it right up.
I think fair.org is just another website that ensures that the left is represented, not that the right is represented nor--more importantly--that even the truth is represented.
Absolutely. Everytime I hear a representative of FAIR interviewed, every example he cites is one of how some news story is leaving out important facts that would have strengthened a liberal argument if they had been included.
Then I tune in to some conservative talk radio program and hear how that day's big news article in some mainstream media source left out important facts that would strengthen a conservative argument.
So, FAIR ends up merely being the mirror image of conservative talk radio, as far as its media analysis is concerned, but without the honesty of the conservatives (or of liberal talk show hosts, for that matter) regarding how they identify themselves.
By attempting to "set the record straight" only for cases where doing so would promote liberal causes, they become yet another liberal advocacy group, not a credible media fact checker, even if every point they make is true.
No, my question wasn't why the new products encourage .Net and discourage MFC, my question was why MS didn't just give away the dev tools, thereby increasing the supply of Windows apps, thereby making Windows harder for end users to abandon.
That's my impression, too, though I think that any student interested in learning Windows programming now would probably do well to avoid wasting time on the vast and absurdly complicated Windows "SDK" and MFC programming models and just concentrate on .Net. There might not be enough years of life left in the old models to pay off the effort required to learn them.
I am not sure I understand you completely (exactly what do you mean by "with the granularity of C"? that everything doesn't have to be a class?)
That's right. Although I enjoy strong OO languages such as Java, C#, Ruby, or Eiffel, that nicely abstract away the machine details such as memory addresses and replace them with conceptual data types (instances of nifty classes), sometimes one needs to program a little "closer to the metal" for optimization of some sort (size of executable, memory usage, execution speed, or whatever.)
For these tasks, I'd be interested in having a language that's just a little higher-level (of abstraction) than C. The idea would be to use the non-linearity of costs/benefits ("80/20 rule") to try to gain as much convenience and reliability as possible in exchange for giving up as little of the advantages of C as possible.
I don't have much experience with Ada. I've done more with Eiffel, but nothing commercial for the practical reasons that hamper all non-mainstream languages. I like it, though, and wish that the really good "melting ICE" stuff were free, because nobody is going to buy non-mainstream tools for me. Unfortunately, Eiffel's time has passed, I'm afraid. I suspect the same is true of Ada, but I don't follow it enough to know.
Previously, they had the very expensive VS Pro with all of the languages, plus several "Standard" editions, one for each language, at about $99 each.
.Net "managed C++" apps, which almost nobody is interested in.
.Net, fancy compiler, profiler, nice editor, etc.) and give them away to ensure a steady stream of new apps that make Windows a "must have" in order to stave off Linux.
People who only wanted to develop in C++ would always be interested in Visual C++ Standard. "Why do I care about Visual Basic or Visual J#?" they would ask.
But then inevitably the question would arise whether the Visual C++ Standard license allowed you to write commercial software and for some reason the answer was never very clear. Most people thought the answer was no (see Google Groups), but MS's website never managed to include that most frequently asked question in its FAQ, despite year after year of people asking the question.
I notice now that the new C++ Express Edition doesn't include MFC or ATL, which are what most people doing commercial C++ for Windows would be using, but it does make a big deal about how you can write
It's a bit puzzling why MS doesn't just make the best possible development tools, including everything (MFC, ATL,
Reducing the cost of VS Pro + MSDN from thousands to zero would almost certainly increase the quantity and variety of commercial-quality apps for Windows, much of it free, making it harder for people to abandon the platform.
They've previously commented that they don't want to do that because it would destroy the 3rd party dev tools market for Windows, but given their history, that explanation seems laughable.
It can't be that they're trying to protect their Office apps from free competitors, because those are so huge that the resources needed by any challenger dwarf the cost of a few copies of VS Pro.
Maybe they're trying to protect the idea of commercial software in general, or trying to lock developers into the platform by getting them to commit money to it, or just trying to make short run money by selling tools, but those seem like pretty shaky theories.
Anybody know?
That's where I think the author completely failed to make his case for changing programming languages not being a solution.
People who program in C/C++ are vulnerable to all of the security risks Java and C# programmers are vulnerable to, plus quite a few more that Java and C# programmers are NOT vulnerable to.
So, if you have a program that could reasonably be written in either Java or C++, and you choose C++, you've just increased the number of security vulnerabilities you'll have to check for. Given the same development deadlines, but with more areas to check, you're going to be handicapped from a security perspective if you choose C++.
Then add to that the fact that almost everybody with equivalent experience is more productive at implementing a feature in Java or C# vs. in C++, with the same deadline pressures you have even less time available for security checking on top of more things to check if you work in C++.
Of course there are some tasks for which C or C++ are the still best choice for other reasons, so I still use both frequently and applaud any attempt at adding better security scanning to the compiler.
I can't help thinking, though, that even in those cases a language with the granularity of C but with built-in strings (UTF-8), arrays that are checked by default but with an override, with fixed built in data types (e.g., a 'byte' type that isn't signed in some places and unsigned in others), and yet without all of the massive baggage of C++, would go a long way to improving C's bug proneness without removing its power.
Unfortunately, most developers value such things as security, globalization and, frankly, reliability so little, resist change so much, and are so arrogant about their l33t ski11z that would only be impeded by "guard rails", that a language that offered only these improvements on top of C would never put a dent in C's popularity.
And to that extent only I agree with his thesis that bad programmers are the root of the problem.
Yes, it DOES address the underlying issue. Just because part of the problem remains doesn't mean that the problem hasn't been addressed at all.
If you stop using C/C++ by default and use safer languages such as Java or C#, your code will become more secure. The fact that it still isn't 100% secure doesn't mean you've made no progress. And with fewer vulnerabilities, you can pay more attention to the types of vulnerabilities that remain.
I'm sick and tired of the stale Marxism I read again and again on Slashdot. Prosperity through confiscation.
Your comments are a refreshing breath of fresh air.
I suspect that what you call "listening" is merely someone else sharing your attitude
;-)
No. I call "listening" actually discussing the problem.
Okay, then, I hope what I'm doing will qualify as listening. You're not my child, so I'm not going to put much more into this, but I'll take another shot just in case it ends up helping. You may just be really discouraged and really hoping that someone will talk you out of being so discouraged, so for what it's worth:
You said something telling here:
I know precisely ONE PERSON who has been gainfully employed in a job that pays an adequate wage for more than three months. Everyone else I know is either a) self-employed and broke or b) unemployed and broke.
If it were just me, that would be an attitude problem. Since it is everyone I know, it's not an attitude problem.
What you say doesn't disprove the attitude problem at all. Birds of a feather, and all that. At the risk of seeming flippant here, maybe you need to cultivate some better friends.
I think there are some useful observations within your "rant" that you could build on. You came close to saying that it's better to work for yourself, and I think that's true for many people, including me. I think that having the right attitude is even more important for the self-employed, though, so you would be well served to start finding successful self-employed people to hang around if you want to take advantage of this insight of yours.
You also said, "'Get an education and work hard' isn't enough anymore," and I'm glad you can see that. As far as I can tell, there has only been a thin sliver of human history (in time and place) where that advice was correct: in the developed economies over the last couple of generations or so.
Prior to that, an education was mostly irrelevant to the types of work that existed. These days, it is essentially a necessity for all jobs, so having an education today is like being able to read was a generation ago: completely necessary and totally insufficient to guarantee anything.
So now what? I think the answer is to give up ASAP any notion that there is some degree or certification or whatever that you can get that will be a guarantee of security. Forget static security as in getting into a good situation that you can stay in for life. Not much of that around anymore, as you are painfully aware.
But so what? Look for dynamic security, which is hopping from opportunity to opportunity with an aggressive program of self-improvement (learning new skills) and trying to expand your network to include more successful people. You'll lose frequently, but you can probably end up winning more than you lose, and it's only the total that matters.
All economic opportunities arise from problems, so if you think there are more problems these days, then it's also likely that there are more opportunities for somebody who looks at problems in a useful way.
If you continue to stew in your own resentment, though, and to hang around with others just like you, then I'm afraid things will not go well for you.
This is a danger you should take seriously, but it is NOT a foregone conclusion. You CAN avoid this fate, but to do so will probably require you to take all of the energy and attention you are devoting to your grievances and focus it on the search for opportunities.
I wish you well.
This is the basic inequity of W-4 employment: All sources of income are temporary. All expenses are contracts. ...
But a company can walk away from that employee's paycheck any time they feel like it.
Many, probably most, states in the US have what is called "at will" employment. That means that, with only a few exceptions such as firing based on race, your employer can do exactly what you said: stop your employment and paycheck at any moment for any reason they like.
The flip side is that, in such states, the employees are accorded the same prvilege. You can be the key developer working on a product that simply MUST ship on time because manufacturing is already contracted, the press has already been notified, etc., and you can announce at the worst possible time for the company that you are quitting, and (again, with a few exceptions) there is nothing they can do about it.
Your comment about all sources of income being temporary with expenses being contracts goes both ways. If you are worth having at all you are a source of income to the company. If you walk out the door and they can't ship on time, they are still stuck with the manufacturing contracts, the advertising, the rent....
Now that's the typical US system, though there are variations state to state.
In Europe and Japan, they have more protections for the employee. Employees are much harder to get rid of. Because companies know that, they respond by being far more reluctant to hire you in the first place.
Once you're hired, they know they can only get rid of you if you quit, so if they decide--for whatever reason, just like the US--that they don't want you around, they can't just fire you so they have to make you want to quit.
I've worked in Europe, the US, and Japan, and if you think office politics are intense in the US, well, you haven't seen anything until you've seen politics in a place where your company wants to make you miserable enough to quit, but you're too afraid to quit because other employers are afraid to hire anybody and, therefore, will be extra careful to weed out applicants who had to be forced out by a previous employer.
Talk about career impediments! When you can't easily hop from job to job, as you can in the US, and neither can your bosses or coworkers, then you are stuck in a political game from which there is no retreat.
The only thing like it that I've seen in the US is in academia or government, where you can't easily go do the same work for the competitor down the street if you don't like your current management.
W-4 employment is so unfair that no business would EVER agree to its terms as an agreement with another business.
Businesses have no choice but to agree to these terms. "At will" employment applies to both parties. An entire team of engineers can walk out the door and cripple a company. Old fashioned strikes can do likewise. And I run a small company that has entered into agreements with big companies of the sort that you say a business would never enter into. You can essentially sell them the security of being able to get out of the contract "at will". We trade away some security for some money.
I can explain the problem, but very few people listen.
Since almost every adult you know works in the same world as you, you might consider that the chances that you have discovered something that all of the rest of us have missed is pretty small. As far as I can tell, you are providing no new information, just a bitter attitude that almost all of us can see at a glance is likely to impede your progress.
I suspect that what you call "listening" is merely someone else sharing your attitude, but since most people know everything that you know about the world of work and, in addition, recognize the self-destructiveness of your attitude, they aren't going to adopt that attitude, which you define as not listening.
I hope you'll discover the amazing opportunities of such a flexible employment system and learn how to use them to advance your career instead of letting a few failures convince you that you can't win.
Look, I got laid off from my last job, too, and I think that your reaction to this is absurd.
"Office politics" is the big problem? That's just another term for people interacting with each other. The only place with no politics is a place with no other people. Everyone has his own agenda in this world, at work and everywhere else, but I don't see any sense in complaining about that. Most people's agendas aren't evil. They're just primarily driven by personal considerations. Isn't yours?
Business is nothing more than trying to get others to advance your personal agenda by finding ways whereby you can advance theirs. Call it politics or just call it business. So what?
And when you say that there is "no such thing" as a company that appreciates you, I'm sure that either you are wrong or it's your attitude that makes you right--but only as it applies to you.
My previous employer didn't appreciate me enough to keep me, but it was because the types of problems I was good at solving weren't high priorities to the senior execs who ended up running the place. So, too bad for me, but that doesn't make them evil.
Either I need to find some place that does care about the type of problems I'm good at solving, or I need to learn to solve other types of problems that other people care more about. Either way, I can and will deal with it, probably effectively, and you probably can too if you change your approach.
I agree with almost all of what you said. Providing value to the customer in ways that the customer (not you) values is a major key to success.
I will have to say, though, that there are many stochastic inputs to the success function. At one of my previous jobs, I did work that I thought was important for the company, and which was greatly appreciated by many people at the company with no direct ability to reward me, but which senior management showed little interest in.
One day, a new senior guy showed up and it was rumored that he was being groomed to be the next CEO. That guy spotted my work and thought that it was so important to the company that suddenly I became a big shot.
Our "future CEO" must have offended the wrong person, though, because one day he just vanished. Within a week or two, the board replaced him with one of the Old Guard senior execs and after another month or so, I got laid off.
All along, I was doing the same work, so its intrinsic value to the *company* was the same, but my star rose or fell depending on the outcomes of boardroom battles that had nothing to do with me or my work.
I still believe that you are correct about providing value to customers, but it only increases your chances on average. It doesn't guarantee success in any individual case because of the numerous random factors over which you have no control. Still, by trying again and again, you can often get the random factors to cancel each other out over the long run, which is why I mainly support your thesis.