If you've never heard the phrase "software engineer", you've just admitted that you've no industrial experience.
As a software engineer in safety-related software for the last 10 years (first job was power station controls, current job is car engine controllers), I can assure you that we are *very* serious about responsibility for mistakes. You screw up, people die. As a result, only about 10% of our time is spent actually coding; around 30% of the rest is spent on requirements capture and design; and the other 60% is spent testing the living shit out of it until we're sure what we're putting out is safe.
On projects that don't have safety implications, there isn't anything like as much testing. But this is an engineering judgement based on the impact of bugs on the customer - if your car radio bugs out for example, it's annoying but it doesn't kill you. Same in any other engineering discipline - you don't think that the mechanical engineers who design plastic toys use the same level of testing that engine designers would, do you?
You've got the wrong controller then. Go buy a proper geeky controller that'll let you set boiler on-off times for every day of the week. And I only bought one bcos the price came down and it was cheaper than building one myself...
Also on that theme, we're about to buy a UPS because our gas-fired central heating needs mains electricity to turn it on. If the electric craps out, the UPS will let us keep running the heating for a while. And of course there's also the fringe benefit for running the PC.
I built an AMD setup about 4-5 years back. My CPU is an 800MHz Duron, old Socket A. Until a couple of months ago, AMD were still selling CPUs that would fit old Socket A. During that time, the number of different Intel sockets used has been well into the teens. Your chances of getting a replacement Intel CPU should your old one fail? Close to zero. Your chances of getting a better fan for an older Intel CPU if you get tired of the noise? Close to zero. Both of these, it's "replace-the-mobo" time, at a cost of an extra hundred quid on top of whatever the CPU cost.
So for me, it's AMD all the way, and it'll continue to be unless AMD completely lose the plot at some point in the future.
Huh? Clarke is a great futurist. However, as a writer he's awful. I read RwR, and my main thought was "how the hell could someone turn an expedition to an alien spacecraft into something so BORING?!?!"
As for 2 and "Garden": no. Just no. I was half-tempted to get "Revealed" just to find out how it ended, but I realised I didn't give a shit, and in fact I'd stopped giving a shit *before* I started reading "Garden".
Ben Bova, Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson suffer from the same thing. Good ideas, but can't write.
You want a good writer, go read Tad Williams. Like Neal Stephenson, he's still not worked out how to write endings, but the quality of writing will just blow you away. And if the Otherworld series isn't geeky enough, I don't know what is...
PDF file? What muppet uses PDF for writing documents? If you've got something that you want to export to the world but never want to edit again, then PDF is fine. Otherwise forget it - Word/OpenOffice/text files all the way. PDF simply is not designed for "working documents".
35-40MPG only applies on the Ford Escape HEV (disclaimer: I worked on the software for the Ford Escape HEV), where the basic Escape gets less than 20MPG. It's a big fuck-off SUV, which is the reason - you may have noticed some difference in body shape between an Escape and a VW Rabbit, maybe?
Prius and Insight are small saloons, which are much more aerodynamic. They typically get 50-60MPG.
Running cars on hydrogen is easy. Storing enough hydrogen to get a decent range is hard. Generating hydrogen efficiently is harder. Similarly, pure-electric cars have been around for over 100 years, but no-one's yet found batteries that'll hold charge comparable to a full gas tank, or a recharging system as effective as a gas station. Partly the problem is lack of research, and a major reason for lack of research is a lack of "environazi" pressure on governments to wake up and smell the CO2/NO2/particulates/smog. Cost-wise and energy-density-wise, gasoline is a great solution, it just happens to have the problematic side-effect of screwing up the environment (both locally and globally).
I'm afraid so. Sooner or later, even IDists get tired of getting kicked in the nuts the same way. One of these days they'll work out that by changing their ground they're just getting kicked in the nuts a different way, but hey, that's their choice. It's a free world - or at least it will be so long as IDists keep their beliefs to their religious studies classes and don't try to elbow them into science classes.
ID proponents are *absolutely* using Genesis as the reason for what they're doing. Whilst it isn't the reason they're giving in court, the Wedge Strategy is totally based on literal interpretation of Genesis.
Only by proving that it would not be possible for multiple changes to happen to DNA over multiple generations. Evolution requires that over many generations, the many DNA changes mount up to result in new species.
ID proposes that species are fixed - in other words, a certain amount of DNA changes are possible (so Darwin's finches, moths/flies and other quickly-evolving species are covered), but DNA changes to the extent of new species being created are not possible. So micro-evolution but not macro-evolution.
So far this looks, well, unlikely. Everything we know about DNA says this is possible. Unless the ID crowd come up with a specific chemical for each species that says "stay a bird" or "stay an insect", ID is basically screwed.
ID also proposes that certain features of nature are "irreducably complex", in other words that if you took out one part then it would stop working. The eye was the famous case, although they've relinquished that because it was phemonenally easy to prove that there was a spectrum of qualities of light detection from earthworms to eagles, and each step was an improvement. The latest case is the "flagellum" which propels bacteria - remove one protein and it stops acting as a propulsion mechanism. But it's very close in structure to a secretory attack mechanism, so what you most likely have is something which mutated and then turned out to be useful for something else (like bolting a snowplough on a truck changes what you can use it for). Until they can find something which is utterly unprecedented, again ID is basically screwed. And even then, ID would only be one hypothesis for bridging the gap, the other hypothesis being "it just mutated that way" (ie. randon chance) - this would reduce evolution and ID to the same level, but wouldn't give ID an edge in any way.
When you really get down to it, the only sure proof of ID is to catch God making the changes. I wish them luck...
You need to get the words right according to their real meanings. "Hypothesis" means a wild-ass guess that might just match the data. "Theory" means a hypothesis that has been confirmed to match the data, and therefore can be used as a model to predict further events. A hypothesis can be disproved by failing to match existing data. A theory can be disproved by new data.
Evolution is a theory. Not only can you show it matching the data, but you can also use it to predict what'll happen in future. If someone gets new data then it might be disproved, but to date it's looking good.
ID is a *hypothesis* though. It's been 100% disproved with existing data. No example given by the ID crowd has stood up to scrutiny.
It's a nice idea that we could just ignore ID and it'd go away. Unfortunately it has significantly more political capital in the US than science does, and quite possibly more financial capital too. Ignore it and you're screwed - their PR machine will kill you. ID proponents have carefully assessed how best to fight science, and have come up with PR through with appeals to religious beliefs and claims of being discriminated against by the scientific community. By fighting them and *beating* them on their own ground, we leave them without a leg to stand on.
What ID *doesn't* have is correctness by any standard of measurement. However, ID proponents complained loudly that science wouldn't take them seriously or measure their claims according to scientific principles. Great, so let's do it. By proving without possibility of doubt that ID is a religious stance and not a scientific one, we can force the courts to refuse to allow schools to teach it as science. The court case currently on the go is doing pretty well on this - so far they've forced the main "scientific" ID proponent to admit that if ID is science then astrology is also science, which is a bit of a result.
On a separate front, ID proponents claim that evolution equals atheism and so is also a religious position, hence ID is no better or worse than evolution. The Catholic church have neatly busted the wheels off their wagon on that one, which is nice. Unless they can prove the Pope is an atheist, they're screwed on that front too.
"Halfway mutated" - well, there are plenty of fossils showing transitional forms along evolutionary lines. Humans are the best-known (Cro-Magnon, for instance - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon) because we're most interested in our own species. Others are well-represented as well though - there's at least one proto-bird fossil which are feathered and have wings but can't use the wings to fly (current best guess is that they help over rough ground in the same way as chickens, for example, flap to go fast over the ground). There are at least two intermediate forms of cetacean (whale/dolphin ancestors) with vestigial legs, and whales themselves have vestigial legs evident in the skeleton.
Also, the micro/macro difference is less than you'd think. The old definition of species was anything that could breed with each other and produce viable young. Genetics has crushed that definition pretty thoroughly.
Obviously there are gaps in the fossil record. Remember, we're relying on something to just happen to die in the perfect conditions to preserve it. The chances of that are pretty low, so we don't get a huge number of good examples, but there are enough there that the hypothesis "things were always this way" is simply not a valid starting point.
It depends on whether you think the movie is all about Aragorn, or all about Frodo. It very much plays out JRR's experiences in WWI.
Aragorn is your typical uber-hero. He's spent his whole life fighting. He gets through it OK, gets the girl, gets the kingdom and starts the rule of Men in Middle Earth. Merry and Pippin don't start that way, but they are clearly natural rebels to start with, and have extensive support structures in the armies they join.
Frodo though is your typical "normal" person, put in a position where he has to do things totally outside his nature, left pretty much on his own, and fighting against horrors his life hasn't prepared him to deal with. He's the one who wins the battle, but he's completely spiritually broken by the experience, can never get over it, and in the end chooses to opt out of the world because he can't keep living with his experiences in a world that pretends nothing's happened.
Half an hour of gayness? I guess The Deer Hunter was all gayness as well then?
Yes, it could have been done better in the movie - and replacing Elijah Wood with a decent actor would have been a good start. The idea that LotR is all about people with big swords chopping each other up though is very far from the truth. If that's what you went to see, check out Arnie instead - you don't need a film with a plot or any kind of characterisation or character development.
I think we already see mentally challenged people that way. This goes especially for people with mental illnesses (depression, schizophrenia, etc) - it is seen as an illness and hence an aberration, rather than as a fundamental part of what they are trying to be. In other words, a bug.
Off-topic, but the best way to use magnets to scan for brains is to see who's bought magnetic bracelets or magnetic insoles. If you have, you don't have them...
it's easy for young people to be idealistic, because they don't have anything to lose or much to work with
You're dead right on that. The classic examples are music and sport - you want to be a pro musician or a pro athlete, start young. This isn't from the improved learning of skills when you're young, but from the fact that when you have no commitments, it's easy to live on welfare or low-wage part-time stuff and devote the rest of your time to your vocation. You get a family to support, suddenly you've got new priorities - the decision to devote yourself to your vocation affects more people than just yourself. Idealism comes down to believing that you can make life better for other people though, and I don't see that making life better for those you care most about leads to a major conflict there. But post-kids, people often do return to their previous ways.
For an example, I'm into folk music. Most of my friends from the local clubs are 45+ and their kids are flown, so they're no longer required to support them. And it's amazing how many of them are getting back into the semi-professional musicianship that they put down maybe 20 years back!:-) And when my folks retired a couple of years ago, they rented their house out, bought a boat (for which they'd been saving for maybe 5-10 years of work) and are now sailing round the Med. What I'm trying to get at is that conserving money isn't necessarily linked to changing to a conservative political attitude or to adopting a conservative attitude to risk. In fact, I'm pretty sure many young "idealists" are actually people who like the security of being members of a group with known rules - ie. conservatives.;-)
I'm probably 75% with you on dreamers. I think there's two classes of dreamers, one set who produce something and then try to tell the world how good it is, and a second set who try to get the world to change to match their grand design. The first set (the majority) often change the world without meaning to, simply by having something that's worth using (Apple, Wikipedia, OSS), and I would never denigrate them, even if their widget/concept turns out not to work. The second set though are all screwed up and are pretty much doomed, and I can't think of anything good to say about them, because denial of reality really isn't workable. Sadly I think Nelson fits in the second section - although he's working on a technical widget, it's based on the whole of society changing how it works and all people changing how they process information, simply to use his widget, and that ain't going to happen.
Turbo Pascal? Man, you're new-school. I wrote my Breakout game in Commodore Basic. Then I got sick of it moving at about 1 step per second, so I got into assembler and started recoding in assembler. At this point I would have been about 13-14, so I was discovering coding at about the stage other kids were discovering the opposite sex. God that's depressing.:-/
And step 15 is just too cruel, because it lets people think they might reach it...
If you have the buggy code in front of you, and you can reproduce the problem on your machine (or a machine in your office), then great. A debugger will get in there like a scalpel - clean, precise and no damage to the rest of the body.
But if the buggy code only manifests itself on one guy's machine in Romania (seriously, this has happened to me in one of my home OSS projects!) then you're screwed. Your Romanian friend is unlikely to have a debugger, and even if he does, he's not going to search through your code to find the problem. And unless he's willing to email you a core dump, you can't get at it either. At this point a scalpel is no use - you need a sodding great morningstar to bludgeon the bug until it tells you everything you want to know. printf statements at every meaningful bomb-out point would be that morningstar. Printf, or assert, or whatever you want to use. The only important thing is that a large amount of arbitrary text goes to a window or a file, from which it can be emailed to you, and that this arbitrary text gives you enough info to know why things failed and how.
Me, if a function returns an error I wasn't expecting then that gets written to a log file, giving the filename, line number and error description. If the error isn't recoverable, the next function up also gives the same info, and so on back up the stack. So if something bombs out, I can trace it back to a specific line getting invalid data, and I know what value that data was. That's enough for finding and eliminating 99.9% of bugs, and this is info that every user can generate and email back.
No, the OP is looking for a way to get into programming. That doesn't mean learning the principles, it means getting his/her hands dirty and actually *doing* it.
That said, colleges are pointless. The *best* way of learning is to pick a language and buy 3 or 4 tutorial books relating to that language off Amazon. It really doesn't matter which 3 or 4, because each will have their advantages and disadvantages, so with 3 or 4 you should get a good overall coverage. Just make sure you choose ones with good review feedback, is all. Also get a compiler for that language - if you can get a free one then great (many tutorial books include one with the book), otherwise factor in the cost when choosing the language and books.
C is probably a good place to start, simply bcos it's so universally used. It also provides a straightforward migration path to C++ and Java for learning object orientation, and C++ then gives you the default way into Windows programming (I suggest using wxWindows for Windows programming if you ever get that far).
Alternatively you could start with Python. It's free to download, and it's very easy to pick up. It also comes with a good tutorial, so you probably don't need any extra books. However it has some ideosyncrasies which are not very portable, so if you get trapped in the Python mindset then you might not adapt as easily to other languages.
More realistic is that between the ideals of those who want free love, free food and free internet, and the ideals of those who'd like to make a living and not have to work from a cardboard box under a bridge, we get the latest iteration of society. Society does change - compare attitudes to minorities today to what they were 30-40 years back, and especially compare attitudes to women today to what they were even 20 years back.
Why does society change like that? Well, all the young idealists may have got co-opted by "the system", but they've maintained some core beliefs of things that work. Whilst the stuff that doesn't work (freedom from copyright, or unlimited use of the mellotron in prog-rock) has been ditched because experience has shown that it's blatantly impossible, stuff that *does* work is kept - maybe it makes you more successful at work, or more successful with the opposite sex, or maybe it simply makes you happier. Whatever, some values stay around.
The problem is that things like Ted Nelson's Xanadu simply *cannot* succeed. Either they make it impossible to carry out "normal" functions (consider trying to construct a tutorial without an order in which to carry out instructions, or a blog without an order for entries), or they suppose a structure which is non-maintainable. Lack of copyright is one such issue - without copyright, there is no system for authors to get paid for their work. Ted Nelson may be happy with this, but most professional authors would not be!
Glad this got modded as "funny". This has been reported extensively in the news for a full 3 months now. Nice to see Zonk is keeping up with the world...
NT development started in June 1989. In October the team estimated they'd be done in March 1991. NT3.1 actually shipped in July 1993, never mind how long fixing bugs took. And this is with a team who had experience developing the original Win3.x and in developing other OSes, mind. There's a big tendency for engineers *and* managers to look at a number and say "oh yeah, that's ages away, we must be able to make that". Except it ain't so - it just means it's going to take longer before you realise you're screwed.:-/
Slashdot Mirror
If you've never heard the phrase "software engineer", you've just admitted that you've no industrial experience.
As a software engineer in safety-related software for the last 10 years (first job was power station controls, current job is car engine controllers), I can assure you that we are *very* serious about responsibility for mistakes. You screw up, people die. As a result, only about 10% of our time is spent actually coding; around 30% of the rest is spent on requirements capture and design; and the other 60% is spent testing the living shit out of it until we're sure what we're putting out is safe.
On projects that don't have safety implications, there isn't anything like as much testing. But this is an engineering judgement based on the impact of bugs on the customer - if your car radio bugs out for example, it's annoying but it doesn't kill you. Same in any other engineering discipline - you don't think that the mechanical engineers who design plastic toys use the same level of testing that engine designers would, do you?
Grab.
I refer you to the original post. I'm a *cost-effective* kind of geek... :-)
"Criticises the design of the controller"?
You've got the wrong controller then. Go buy a proper geeky controller that'll let you set boiler on-off times for every day of the week. And I only bought one bcos the price came down and it was cheaper than building one myself...
Also on that theme, we're about to buy a UPS because our gas-fired central heating needs mains electricity to turn it on. If the electric craps out, the UPS will let us keep running the heating for a while. And of course there's also the fringe benefit for running the PC.
Grab.
Too true.
I built an AMD setup about 4-5 years back. My CPU is an 800MHz Duron, old Socket A. Until a couple of months ago, AMD were still selling CPUs that would fit old Socket A. During that time, the number of different Intel sockets used has been well into the teens. Your chances of getting a replacement Intel CPU should your old one fail? Close to zero. Your chances of getting a better fan for an older Intel CPU if you get tired of the noise? Close to zero. Both of these, it's "replace-the-mobo" time, at a cost of an extra hundred quid on top of whatever the CPU cost.
So for me, it's AMD all the way, and it'll continue to be unless AMD completely lose the plot at some point in the future.
Grab.
Huh? Clarke is a great futurist. However, as a writer he's awful. I read RwR, and my main thought was "how the hell could someone turn an expedition to an alien spacecraft into something so BORING?!?!"
As for 2 and "Garden": no. Just no. I was half-tempted to get "Revealed" just to find out how it ended, but I realised I didn't give a shit, and in fact I'd stopped giving a shit *before* I started reading "Garden".
Ben Bova, Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson suffer from the same thing. Good ideas, but can't write.
You want a good writer, go read Tad Williams. Like Neal Stephenson, he's still not worked out how to write endings, but the quality of writing will just blow you away. And if the Otherworld series isn't geeky enough, I don't know what is...
Grab.
PDF file? What muppet uses PDF for writing documents? If you've got something that you want to export to the world but never want to edit again, then PDF is fine. Otherwise forget it - Word/OpenOffice/text files all the way. PDF simply is not designed for "working documents".
Grab.
Don't know about /. but Which? in the UK certainly came to that conclusion. Cost of ink cartridges is enough that it's not worth printing your own.
35-40MPG only applies on the Ford Escape HEV (disclaimer: I worked on the software for the Ford Escape HEV), where the basic Escape gets less than 20MPG. It's a big fuck-off SUV, which is the reason - you may have noticed some difference in body shape between an Escape and a VW Rabbit, maybe?
Prius and Insight are small saloons, which are much more aerodynamic. They typically get 50-60MPG.
Running cars on hydrogen is easy. Storing enough hydrogen to get a decent range is hard. Generating hydrogen efficiently is harder. Similarly, pure-electric cars have been around for over 100 years, but no-one's yet found batteries that'll hold charge comparable to a full gas tank, or a recharging system as effective as a gas station. Partly the problem is lack of research, and a major reason for lack of research is a lack of "environazi" pressure on governments to wake up and smell the CO2/NO2/particulates/smog. Cost-wise and energy-density-wise, gasoline is a great solution, it just happens to have the problematic side-effect of screwing up the environment (both locally and globally).
Grab.
Got grits...?
I'm afraid so. Sooner or later, even IDists get tired of getting kicked in the nuts the same way. One of these days they'll work out that by changing their ground they're just getting kicked in the nuts a different way, but hey, that's their choice. It's a free world - or at least it will be so long as IDists keep their beliefs to their religious studies classes and don't try to elbow them into science classes.
Grab.
True; however the main ID proponents are doing so from a Christian belief structure.
Grab.
ID proponents are *absolutely* using Genesis as the reason for what they're doing. Whilst it isn't the reason they're giving in court, the Wedge Strategy is totally based on literal interpretation of Genesis.
Grab.
Only by proving that it would not be possible for multiple changes to happen to DNA over multiple generations. Evolution requires that over many generations, the many DNA changes mount up to result in new species.
ID proposes that species are fixed - in other words, a certain amount of DNA changes are possible (so Darwin's finches, moths/flies and other quickly-evolving species are covered), but DNA changes to the extent of new species being created are not possible. So micro-evolution but not macro-evolution.
So far this looks, well, unlikely. Everything we know about DNA says this is possible. Unless the ID crowd come up with a specific chemical for each species that says "stay a bird" or "stay an insect", ID is basically screwed.
ID also proposes that certain features of nature are "irreducably complex", in other words that if you took out one part then it would stop working. The eye was the famous case, although they've relinquished that because it was phemonenally easy to prove that there was a spectrum of qualities of light detection from earthworms to eagles, and each step was an improvement. The latest case is the "flagellum" which propels bacteria - remove one protein and it stops acting as a propulsion mechanism. But it's very close in structure to a secretory attack mechanism, so what you most likely have is something which mutated and then turned out to be useful for something else (like bolting a snowplough on a truck changes what you can use it for). Until they can find something which is utterly unprecedented, again ID is basically screwed. And even then, ID would only be one hypothesis for bridging the gap, the other hypothesis being "it just mutated that way" (ie. randon chance) - this would reduce evolution and ID to the same level, but wouldn't give ID an edge in any way.
When you really get down to it, the only sure proof of ID is to catch God making the changes. I wish them luck...
Grab.
You need to get the words right according to their real meanings. "Hypothesis" means a wild-ass guess that might just match the data. "Theory" means a hypothesis that has been confirmed to match the data, and therefore can be used as a model to predict further events. A hypothesis can be disproved by failing to match existing data. A theory can be disproved by new data.
Evolution is a theory. Not only can you show it matching the data, but you can also use it to predict what'll happen in future. If someone gets new data then it might be disproved, but to date it's looking good.
ID is a *hypothesis* though. It's been 100% disproved with existing data. No example given by the ID crowd has stood up to scrutiny.
It's a nice idea that we could just ignore ID and it'd go away. Unfortunately it has significantly more political capital in the US than science does, and quite possibly more financial capital too. Ignore it and you're screwed - their PR machine will kill you. ID proponents have carefully assessed how best to fight science, and have come up with PR through with appeals to religious beliefs and claims of being discriminated against by the scientific community. By fighting them and *beating* them on their own ground, we leave them without a leg to stand on.
What ID *doesn't* have is correctness by any standard of measurement. However, ID proponents complained loudly that science wouldn't take them seriously or measure their claims according to scientific principles. Great, so let's do it. By proving without possibility of doubt that ID is a religious stance and not a scientific one, we can force the courts to refuse to allow schools to teach it as science. The court case currently on the go is doing pretty well on this - so far they've forced the main "scientific" ID proponent to admit that if ID is science then astrology is also science, which is a bit of a result.
On a separate front, ID proponents claim that evolution equals atheism and so is also a religious position, hence ID is no better or worse than evolution. The Catholic church have neatly busted the wheels off their wagon on that one, which is nice. Unless they can prove the Pope is an atheist, they're screwed on that front too.
Grab.
"Halfway mutated" - well, there are plenty of fossils showing transitional forms along evolutionary lines. Humans are the best-known (Cro-Magnon, for instance - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon) because we're most interested in our own species. Others are well-represented as well though - there's at least one proto-bird fossil which are feathered and have wings but can't use the wings to fly (current best guess is that they help over rough ground in the same way as chickens, for example, flap to go fast over the ground). There are at least two intermediate forms of cetacean (whale/dolphin ancestors) with vestigial legs, and whales themselves have vestigial legs evident in the skeleton.
Also, the micro/macro difference is less than you'd think. The old definition of species was anything that could breed with each other and produce viable young. Genetics has crushed that definition pretty thoroughly.
Obviously there are gaps in the fossil record. Remember, we're relying on something to just happen to die in the perfect conditions to preserve it. The chances of that are pretty low, so we don't get a huge number of good examples, but there are enough there that the hypothesis "things were always this way" is simply not a valid starting point.
Grab.
It depends on whether you think the movie is all about Aragorn, or all about Frodo. It very much plays out JRR's experiences in WWI.
Aragorn is your typical uber-hero. He's spent his whole life fighting. He gets through it OK, gets the girl, gets the kingdom and starts the rule of Men in Middle Earth. Merry and Pippin don't start that way, but they are clearly natural rebels to start with, and have extensive support structures in the armies they join.
Frodo though is your typical "normal" person, put in a position where he has to do things totally outside his nature, left pretty much on his own, and fighting against horrors his life hasn't prepared him to deal with. He's the one who wins the battle, but he's completely spiritually broken by the experience, can never get over it, and in the end chooses to opt out of the world because he can't keep living with his experiences in a world that pretends nothing's happened.
Half an hour of gayness? I guess The Deer Hunter was all gayness as well then?
Yes, it could have been done better in the movie - and replacing Elijah Wood with a decent actor would have been a good start. The idea that LotR is all about people with big swords chopping each other up though is very far from the truth. If that's what you went to see, check out Arnie instead - you don't need a film with a plot or any kind of characterisation or character development.
Grab.
I think we already see mentally challenged people that way. This goes especially for people with mental illnesses (depression, schizophrenia, etc) - it is seen as an illness and hence an aberration, rather than as a fundamental part of what they are trying to be. In other words, a bug.
Grab.
Off-topic, but the best way to use magnets to scan for brains is to see who's bought magnetic bracelets or magnetic insoles. If you have, you don't have them...
Grab.
Thanks man. :-)
:-) And when my folks retired a couple of years ago, they rented their house out, bought a boat (for which they'd been saving for maybe 5-10 years of work) and are now sailing round the Med. What I'm trying to get at is that conserving money isn't necessarily linked to changing to a conservative political attitude or to adopting a conservative attitude to risk. In fact, I'm pretty sure many young "idealists" are actually people who like the security of being members of a group with known rules - ie. conservatives. ;-)
it's easy for young people to be idealistic, because they don't have anything to lose or much to work with
You're dead right on that. The classic examples are music and sport - you want to be a pro musician or a pro athlete, start young. This isn't from the improved learning of skills when you're young, but from the fact that when you have no commitments, it's easy to live on welfare or low-wage part-time stuff and devote the rest of your time to your vocation. You get a family to support, suddenly you've got new priorities - the decision to devote yourself to your vocation affects more people than just yourself. Idealism comes down to believing that you can make life better for other people though, and I don't see that making life better for those you care most about leads to a major conflict there. But post-kids, people often do return to their previous ways.
For an example, I'm into folk music. Most of my friends from the local clubs are 45+ and their kids are flown, so they're no longer required to support them. And it's amazing how many of them are getting back into the semi-professional musicianship that they put down maybe 20 years back!
I'm probably 75% with you on dreamers. I think there's two classes of dreamers, one set who produce something and then try to tell the world how good it is, and a second set who try to get the world to change to match their grand design. The first set (the majority) often change the world without meaning to, simply by having something that's worth using (Apple, Wikipedia, OSS), and I would never denigrate them, even if their widget/concept turns out not to work. The second set though are all screwed up and are pretty much doomed, and I can't think of anything good to say about them, because denial of reality really isn't workable. Sadly I think Nelson fits in the second section - although he's working on a technical widget, it's based on the whole of society changing how it works and all people changing how they process information, simply to use his widget, and that ain't going to happen.
Grab.
Turbo Pascal? Man, you're new-school. I wrote my Breakout game in Commodore Basic. Then I got sick of it moving at about 1 step per second, so I got into assembler and started recoding in assembler. At this point I would have been about 13-14, so I was discovering coding at about the stage other kids were discovering the opposite sex. God that's depressing. :-/
And step 15 is just too cruel, because it lets people think they might reach it...
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Debugger-wise, it depends on what you're doing.
If you have the buggy code in front of you, and you can reproduce the problem on your machine (or a machine in your office), then great. A debugger will get in there like a scalpel - clean, precise and no damage to the rest of the body.
But if the buggy code only manifests itself on one guy's machine in Romania (seriously, this has happened to me in one of my home OSS projects!) then you're screwed. Your Romanian friend is unlikely to have a debugger, and even if he does, he's not going to search through your code to find the problem. And unless he's willing to email you a core dump, you can't get at it either. At this point a scalpel is no use - you need a sodding great morningstar to bludgeon the bug until it tells you everything you want to know. printf statements at every meaningful bomb-out point would be that morningstar. Printf, or assert, or whatever you want to use. The only important thing is that a large amount of arbitrary text goes to a window or a file, from which it can be emailed to you, and that this arbitrary text gives you enough info to know why things failed and how.
Me, if a function returns an error I wasn't expecting then that gets written to a log file, giving the filename, line number and error description. If the error isn't recoverable, the next function up also gives the same info, and so on back up the stack. So if something bombs out, I can trace it back to a specific line getting invalid data, and I know what value that data was. That's enough for finding and eliminating 99.9% of bugs, and this is info that every user can generate and email back.
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No, the OP is looking for a way to get into programming. That doesn't mean learning the principles, it means getting his/her hands dirty and actually *doing* it.
That said, colleges are pointless. The *best* way of learning is to pick a language and buy 3 or 4 tutorial books relating to that language off Amazon. It really doesn't matter which 3 or 4, because each will have their advantages and disadvantages, so with 3 or 4 you should get a good overall coverage. Just make sure you choose ones with good review feedback, is all. Also get a compiler for that language - if you can get a free one then great (many tutorial books include one with the book), otherwise factor in the cost when choosing the language and books.
C is probably a good place to start, simply bcos it's so universally used. It also provides a straightforward migration path to C++ and Java for learning object orientation, and C++ then gives you the default way into Windows programming (I suggest using wxWindows for Windows programming if you ever get that far).
Alternatively you could start with Python. It's free to download, and it's very easy to pick up. It also comes with a good tutorial, so you probably don't need any extra books. However it has some ideosyncrasies which are not very portable, so if you get trapped in the Python mindset then you might not adapt as easily to other languages.
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Sounds a bit depressing. :-)
More realistic is that between the ideals of those who want free love, free food and free internet, and the ideals of those who'd like to make a living and not have to work from a cardboard box under a bridge, we get the latest iteration of society. Society does change - compare attitudes to minorities today to what they were 30-40 years back, and especially compare attitudes to women today to what they were even 20 years back.
Why does society change like that? Well, all the young idealists may have got co-opted by "the system", but they've maintained some core beliefs of things that work. Whilst the stuff that doesn't work (freedom from copyright, or unlimited use of the mellotron in prog-rock) has been ditched because experience has shown that it's blatantly impossible, stuff that *does* work is kept - maybe it makes you more successful at work, or more successful with the opposite sex, or maybe it simply makes you happier. Whatever, some values stay around.
The problem is that things like Ted Nelson's Xanadu simply *cannot* succeed. Either they make it impossible to carry out "normal" functions (consider trying to construct a tutorial without an order in which to carry out instructions, or a blog without an order for entries), or they suppose a structure which is non-maintainable. Lack of copyright is one such issue - without copyright, there is no system for authors to get paid for their work. Ted Nelson may be happy with this, but most professional authors would not be!
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Glad this got modded as "funny". This has been reported extensively in the news for a full 3 months now. Nice to see Zonk is keeping up with the world...
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Re my example of WinNT, see http://windows.about.com/od/pastnews/l/blhistory19 80.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_nt.
:-/
NT development started in June 1989. In October the team estimated they'd be done in March 1991. NT3.1 actually shipped in July 1993, never mind how long fixing bugs took. And this is with a team who had experience developing the original Win3.x and in developing other OSes, mind. There's a big tendency for engineers *and* managers to look at a number and say "oh yeah, that's ages away, we must be able to make that". Except it ain't so - it just means it's going to take longer before you realise you're screwed.
Grab.