Kill all beaver! It's those little bastards that taught us how to do this. The little anti-environmental vermin have been polluting the planet for millennia
We did. The North American population was 60 million animals. There's something less than 12 million of them now. Most were dead by the 1830s.
Absolutely they are happy with Trump's tarring of Muslims and calls for Muslim travel restrictions. They YEARN for a horrible war.
They should be careful what they wish for. If you push the US hard enough, this or this happens.
Daesh thinks America is weak because we try to restrain our sociopaths and psychopaths. They don't seem to understand that we still have our sociopaths and psychopaths. We try to keep them on a tight leash. Push hard enough and—we stop trying.
So has don't buy Canon. Oh and didn't Lexmark start this whole cartridge encoding thing? And then there was Brother's reputation for jamming more than a fruit preservative factory.
The only good advice is to use pencil and hope you never need to duplicate pages at home because quite frankly all printer companies have shown some level of dickish behaviour.
All wannabe's anyway, HP included. I bought a business-class Xerox color laser off-lease and it has never betrayed me. It's ridiculously large and overpowered for what I need, since I turn it on maybe two or three times a year, but it has 4 independent toner cartridges for CMYK and Just Works, Windows and Linux over the network (it has its own Ethernet port). Never dries out, can do color if I need it, driver supports black-only printing so I don't waste color toner needlessly, and it's built like a tank. Weighs about as much as a tank too. When I turn it on, it emails me to tell me how it's feeling. Vast statistics on page counts, drum age, toner quantities, etc.
My Samsung CLP-300 color laser, on the other hand, jams every third page.
A little fine grit sandpaper applied to all the internal rollers will fix that. The rubber rollers get too smooth as they age and harden and begin to grip the paper unevenly, which causes jams. One grips, another doesn't, screws everything up. The sandpaper trick works for quite a while. When it stops working, you just replace the rollers and all is well. There are kits for HP and Xerox laser printer rollers. Might be something for Samsung too. The ones for HP run around $15 for the five or six rollers you need to replace (depending on the model).
I really think an example like yours (except including the addends), or some other easier to see but valid example that adds to a prime like the first example would be more illustrative.
My example without the addends is sort of the point, right? I don't know what the addends are, but I am absolutely certain they exist. There's a proof. Pick any huge odd number you like, and the same guarantee exists. I'm not mathematician enough to guess how difficult it might be to find said addends, and digging around on Wolfram Alpha long enough to find out sounds too much like work for this time of night. But maybe it's difficult enough to be useful. And maybe not. Encryption is generally built on the difficulties of prime factorization. I don't know how difficult it is to find a triple prime partition of a large odd number, and maybe there's a reason cryptographers prefer factorization to partitioning. Maybe it's difficult enough?
But now imagine the cable company wants to cap the number of hours you can watch TV per month. You still pay the same $100 base price, but if you want to watch more than 30 hours per month, you'll need to pay another $10 for every block of 10 hours you want to watch above the base amount.
And since the cable company is delivering TV digitally over the exact same wire using the exact same hardware, this isn't a metaphor. This is a completely literal description of what they're trying to get away with.
Would you say it's false that some young people who hack games in order to cheat may later apply similar skills to "cheat" the law, to be involved in "low level cybercrime"?
I say false, yes. The people I knew in high school and college who hacked games in order to cheat were the type who were already petty criminals to begin with. Chiseling little weasels that shoplifted and vandalized for fun and profit. Cheating in games came later, when they discovered they could troll people by doing it. I fully expected them to be cybercriminals (stupid word though it is), but it wasn't the cheating in games that led to it. It was their life-long habits.
I see Slashdot is too busy bitching about SJWs and global warming to read actual tech news anymore.
In answer to both Bruce Perens and destinyland, Google has open-sourced the TensorFlow library and created a public API to access their pre-trained instance of the library. Both of these announcements were made to a wider audience in March at Google's NEXT cloud conference, but it was publicly known since at least November 2015, when it appeared on Slashdot with a link to the source on GitHub.
That Slashdot posting got 37 comments. You people should be ashamed of yourselves.
Can they survive without the support of the developers that are threatening to drop support?
Very likely. There is no obvious VR killer app so far. Is one of the people currently running their yap likely to write it? Not really.
I like how the creators of Job Simulator are keeping quiet. The people who created a "game" called Job Simulator are looking at their jobs and their business and saying not a word. Go figure. It must be a highly accurate simulation.
... since they'll use it to spy on me, they should pay me instead.
All that effort to create the Alphabet name with the publicly stated purpose of being able to sell hardware while disassociating it from the Panopticon and every single upcoming product has Google in the name.
Is the Google brand really that strong, despite the Panopticon? Or is calling a company Alphabet really that dumb? Or has Google's attention span gotten so incredibly poor they can't remember why they created Alphabet? Or all of the above? Or should they have called it Cowboy Neal's Chips and Bits?
Computers are shit at security because you can not see what is going on...
Uh, what? Yes you can. I very regularly punch the button that says "add this asshat's IP to the firewall drop rules" because I can see the pathetic script kiddie attempting to brute force the password on the SSH server for the Administrator account and it annoys me. Are they going to get in? No, my system is not at risk. There is no Administrator account. So do I really need to start dropping all packets from this assclown? Not really, no. But my monitoring systems are lit up, and that's just obnoxious.
Having said that, I'm on board with the one ton safe idea. Now if only I could afford the umpty-thousand dollars to get one...
I think most US citizens are going to get fucking upset when they suddenly find most of the items they use on a day to day basis become unavailable or cost 10 times more.
Nonsense.
Americans don't travel much. If they did, they would realize something. Americans already pay all the traffic will bear! Do you really think it costs some large fraction of $120 to make a pair of sneakers? Do you really think t-shirts cost $25 to make so they have to be sold for $30? Do you really think department stores take a loss when they puts jeans on clearance for $20? Have you seen pictures of the world lately? Everybody looks the same. All that ethnic tribalwear crap is gone. The whole world, from the Yukon to the Amazon, is wearing the same shirts, the same pants, the same shoes, made from American cotton in Chinese factories for far less money than you can possibly imagine.
The labor was exported to China and Malaysia for profit Vast, enormous, fantastically mind-boggling amounts of profit. That lingerie you buy for $80 from Victoria's Secret? Less than $1 in materials, less than $1 in labor. You are already paying prices that can support 100% American labor. It would just reduce the profit of the banksters. A lot. Which is why Trump's isolationism will remain a personal quirk, and not a policy, even if he does get elected.
If by some bizarre machination Trump actually managed to implement his isolationism, prices would spike only short term, and mostly speculatively. No one, not even Trump, is going to implement isolationist economic policies overnight. There would be time to bring the factories back and start manufacturing all the consumer crap in the US again, and it would indeed cause a boom in labor. Funny thing is, the quality would drop for a while. Americans don't know how to manufacture a toaster anymore. It hasn't been done in 40 years. The people who knew how it was done well have retired or died. Regaining manufacturing experience takes time, and until it returns, mistakes get made.
But it's moot. Isolationism will not be allowed to return. They'll kill him first.
You are overlooking an important factor: People are stupid.
I don't just mean a bit dim. I mean incomprehensibly dumb.
Funny you should say that. I happened to look at my spam today, and saw the subject line "Obama and Putin panicked when they saw...". The rest of it got cut off. Needless to say, I didn't bother to open it to find out what else it said. But... the fact that I've received that email multiple times tells me that somebody must be clicking the link in it. And I was momentarily appalled. You used precisely the right word: it is literally incomprehensible to me how dumb a person would have to be to click that link.
I should have been a little more clear in my last paragraph. Everywhere I say "you" I really mean "your email program will automatically...". The only part where a person has to do something is no different than it ever was. The "communicate a string of letters, numbers and dots" part remains the same. I left out the easy way to share public keys directly. If we're standing next to each other, I open my email program and tap the Show My Address button and my phone shows a QR code of my public key. You open your email program and tap the Capture Address button and take a picture of my phone. Even easier than trying to say "a-r-e-y-o-u-k-i-d-d-i-n-g-m-e-@-g-m-a-i-l-.-c-o-m". There's nothing I can do about the incomprehensibly dumb people in the world, but I don't think what I'm describing is any more incomprehensible to them than the current situation.
I'd much prefer a proof of work system. Want a vanity domain? Go rent yourself an AWS compute farm for a few weeks.
How would that work? If someone else also rented an AWS compute farm for a few weeks + 1 day, do I lose my vanity domain to them?
Do we even need domain names at all? Google effectively auctions off the entire Internet already. If you show up first for your search terms, you get the traffic. What your real domain name is doesn't seem all that relevant in the face of search engines. Basically no one is typing domain names into the browser address bar, hoping to find what they want. That's why the browser bar isn't an address bar anymore. That feature is essentially useless.
As far as I can see, the only use of domain names today is as something to use to construct an email address. In theory they're also used to ensure https security, but that system has so many gaping holes we really need to throw it out in favor of a proper PKI system. Is there anything else?
Ok, the email address thing is a big one.... I guess we're stuck with domain names for a while.
Although... a PKI solves that too. If there's no easy way for me to give you my public key directly, look it up using whatever identifier I care to give you. It could even have dots and ampersats in it. You give me yours the same way. Then consult the global DHT for where to send messages. I've used my private key to inject a signed location into the DHT, so you can verify I'll be the recipient. Encrypt with my public key and send the resulting bytes to the IP you found in the DHT. Prove you're you by signing your message first, or get a nasty spam score if you don't. Two birds with one stone: no domain names required at all to send me an email, and all email is encrypted by default, because it's just as easy to encrypt as it is to sign, since you have my key and I have yours, simply as a side effect of exchanging addresses. Add a few wrinkles, like redirects, cancellation, expiration, and replacement of DHT registrations and you've actually done better than email, which only has redirects and bounces. (PKI does have those things for keys.)
Is there an RFC for this already? I feel like there should be. I can't be the first person to have typed that paragraph.
Coding is moving into the classroom because it's an effective way to teach logic and problem-solving.
No it's not. It's about the most ass-backwards, crippled way to teach logic and problem-solving you can imagine.
Logic and problem-solving have been around, taught, and used for thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands of years. They're best taught with puzzles and games and the simple exigencies of life.
Coding is about making an incredibly limited, restricted, literal machine do what you want. It's about taking ideas and figuring out how to turn them and twist them just so, so you can wedge them into an electro-mechanical mechanism and get something other than Null Program back. We compare computers today to where they were 30 years ago and go completely gaga over how powerful they are. But it's an illusion. Yes, they can flip bits back and forth faster than ever, but the process of getting them to flip bits in the particular pattern we want is completely unchanged. People in this thread (and everywhere else on the Internet) tell me about marvelous things like Scheme and Haskell and Swift and Go and blah blah blah and at the end of the day...?
At the end of the day, a sequence of instructions is loaded into the processor and the processor sends electrons here or there depending on the instructions. That's all. There's no magic, despite the very best efforts of compiler and interpreter authors to make it look like magic. The machine still loads and executes instructions, one after the other. If you want a particular pattern of bits at the end, you must give the machine the correct sequence of instructions.
Why, by all that's holy, would you subject children to such an awful environment to teach them logic and problem-solving? Why would you advocate the use of the most unfriendly, unforgiving, unbending, unsympathetic, unreasonable, unyielding, unrelenting learning environment yet devised as a teaching tool for young minds? Children need room for error. Children need "good enough." Children need "almost." There's no room for any of that in a computer.
Accuracy and precision come with time and practice, with maturity and experience, with encouragement and determination. Teach logic. Teach problem-solving. Teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. Teach algebra. And then, tell them, "Take all of things you have learned, everything you have practiced, everything you know, and fine it all down to the most excruciatingly detailed level you can imagine—and that's coding."
Me and my friends had optimization competitions. We built games. We started long before we knew algebra or boolean logic... formally, at least.
Sure. And that's probably the best way. But we were talking about formalities. Classroom instruction. If we insist on formal instruction, rather than letting curiosity take its course and only giving formal instruction to those children who naturally gravitate to the subject (an approach which is apparently unacceptable to our overlords), then at least give them a fighting chance.
PS, I'm right now looking for an excellent java developer working on free software that enables storage for huge data science, like the LHC experiments. This is the kind of role that is part of the infrastructure needed to make science happen these days:
Academia always befuddles me. I work on software that processes a new 450GB dataset in 8 hours, every weekday. It's written in C++. I wouldn't even consider trying it in Java. One of our competitors processes the same data using a Java solution. It does about a quarter as much data normalization and processing as ours does.
Not so very long ago, CPUs were so far ahead and storage was so far behind that it didn't much matter what language you used. Those days have passed. We live in a world of terabyte nvme flash drives barely bigger than a bank card and commodity 10 Gb ethernet over copper.[1] It's now possible to keep the multicore beast fed with data. Choice of language matters again.
The excellent Java developer you are seeking will be able to produce throughput that can be matched by a merely competent C++ developer. An excellent C++ developer could produce two to four times the throughput on the same hardware, or the same throughput on half as much hardware. It's unfortunate that you're now locked into maintenance of a distinctly disadvantageous codebase.
--- [1] Here's a mindboggling build: two Fractal Design Node 804 cases packed with Seagate's 60TB SSDs gives you 1.2 petabytes that can sit on the corner of your desk with throughput that can saturate as many as six 10 Gb links to each chassis, operating nearly silently even at full load. If money is no object.
I really hope you are kidding. While it is true that C teaches some very important low level concepts... those can be taught on their own, without the mess that is C programming. Pointers alone would present a major challenge for kids, adults who know how to program in other languages have problems with pointers, much less kids.
Not even a little bit. Pointers are precisely what I was thinking of when I recommended C. Pointers are fundamental to how the machine works. Learning them learns the machine. If you do not know how the machine works, you are a bad programmer.
As for teaching abstract concepts... Nope. Humans learn by doing. There's a reason there are exercises at the end of every chapter in a math book. In order to understand the machine, you must program the machine, and you must do so in a language that does not insulate you from the machine. You can be told about stacks and heaps and the von Neumann architecture, but until you scribble all over your stack with an out of bounds write, you don't understand it. Are pointers hard? Yes. Difficulty is necessary for learning. Does C's almost total lack of a standard library mean you're going to reinvent the wheel a lot? Of course. Students always reinvent wheels. It's how to learn.
I'm not saying that newly fledged programmers will be writing a lot of C. They won't be. I'm saying C is an appropriate, if not the appropriate teaching language. Their third class can be in Python. Their first and second classes should be in C.
I normally never answer Slashdot questions, but I feel the urge to answer this one.
What would I teach? C.
You heard me. C.
As you may have guessed, I learned to ride a bicycle without ever having training wheels. The first language I learned was C. Kids should learn C. The ones that can't should never be programmers. The ones that can will be able to handle any high level language ever invented, including whatever wankery the Apples and Googles of the world come up with next. Teach them C. At the command line. All else is puffery.
I also feel obliged to respond to the blithering idiocy of the Code.org CEO. Early elementary students? Wtf are you babbling about you drooling moron? Coding has prerequisites. A student who wishes to learn code must read and write at least one natural language well and must know not only arithmetic but also elementary algebra. A student's first coding class will teach Boolean algebra. The combination of those three things is what coding is. Written language combining Boolean logic with algebraic equations. If you're not doing that, you're not coding.
Slashdot Mirror
Kill all beaver! It's those little bastards that taught us how to do this. The little anti-environmental vermin have been polluting the planet for millennia
We did. The North American population was 60 million animals. There's something less than 12 million of them now. Most were dead by the 1830s.
Crap. Posting to undo moderation. Meant to mod you up and missed.
Absolutely they are happy with Trump's tarring of Muslims and calls for Muslim travel restrictions. They YEARN for a horrible war.
They should be careful what they wish for. If you push the US hard enough, this or this happens.
Daesh thinks America is weak because we try to restrain our sociopaths and psychopaths. They don't seem to understand that we still have our sociopaths and psychopaths. We try to keep them on a tight leash. Push hard enough and—we stop trying.
So has don't buy Canon. Oh and didn't Lexmark start this whole cartridge encoding thing? And then there was Brother's reputation for jamming more than a fruit preservative factory.
The only good advice is to use pencil and hope you never need to duplicate pages at home because quite frankly all printer companies have shown some level of dickish behaviour.
All wannabe's anyway, HP included. I bought a business-class Xerox color laser off-lease and it has never betrayed me. It's ridiculously large and overpowered for what I need, since I turn it on maybe two or three times a year, but it has 4 independent toner cartridges for CMYK and Just Works, Windows and Linux over the network (it has its own Ethernet port). Never dries out, can do color if I need it, driver supports black-only printing so I don't waste color toner needlessly, and it's built like a tank. Weighs about as much as a tank too. When I turn it on, it emails me to tell me how it's feeling. Vast statistics on page counts, drum age, toner quantities, etc.
My Samsung CLP-300 color laser, on the other hand, jams every third page.
A little fine grit sandpaper applied to all the internal rollers will fix that. The rubber rollers get too smooth as they age and harden and begin to grip the paper unevenly, which causes jams. One grips, another doesn't, screws everything up. The sandpaper trick works for quite a while. When it stops working, you just replace the rollers and all is well. There are kits for HP and Xerox laser printer rollers. Might be something for Samsung too. The ones for HP run around $15 for the five or six rollers you need to replace (depending on the model).
I really think an example like yours (except including the addends), or some other easier to see but valid example that adds to a prime like the first example would be more illustrative.
My example without the addends is sort of the point, right? I don't know what the addends are, but I am absolutely certain they exist. There's a proof. Pick any huge odd number you like, and the same guarantee exists. I'm not mathematician enough to guess how difficult it might be to find said addends, and digging around on Wolfram Alpha long enough to find out sounds too much like work for this time of night. But maybe it's difficult enough to be useful. And maybe not. Encryption is generally built on the difficulties of prime factorization. I don't know how difficult it is to find a triple prime partition of a large odd number, and maybe there's a reason cryptographers prefer factorization to partitioning. Maybe it's difficult enough?
But now imagine the cable company wants to cap the number of hours you can watch TV per month. You still pay the same $100 base price, but if you want to watch more than 30 hours per month, you'll need to pay another $10 for every block of 10 hours you want to watch above the base amount.
And since the cable company is delivering TV digitally over the exact same wire using the exact same hardware, this isn't a metaphor. This is a completely literal description of what they're trying to get away with.
Adding 3 odd numbers gets you an odd number has never really astonished me.
Sure, but now we know that 206702934571364971352346820353 is guaranteed to have three prime addends.
And that ain't hay.
Would you say it's false that some young people who hack games in order to cheat may later apply similar skills to "cheat" the law, to be involved in "low level cybercrime"?
I say false, yes. The people I knew in high school and college who hacked games in order to cheat were the type who were already petty criminals to begin with. Chiseling little weasels that shoplifted and vandalized for fun and profit. Cheating in games came later, when they discovered they could troll people by doing it. I fully expected them to be cybercriminals (stupid word though it is), but it wasn't the cheating in games that led to it. It was their life-long habits.
Google's cloud speech API is a paid service
It was completely free when it was announced. It's still completely free for the first 60 minutes of recognition time.
And I only mentioned it because somebody asked if there's an API. There is.
TensorFlow is an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs.
Which is the basis of machine learning. Do you expect somebody to hold your dick for you while you pee, too?
Is this Slashdot or is this Gawker?
In the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, STOP WHINING!
I see Slashdot is too busy bitching about SJWs and global warming to read actual tech news anymore.
In answer to both Bruce Perens and destinyland, Google has open-sourced the TensorFlow library and created a public API to access their pre-trained instance of the library. Both of these announcements were made to a wider audience in March at Google's NEXT cloud conference, but it was publicly known since at least November 2015, when it appeared on Slashdot with a link to the source on GitHub.
That Slashdot posting got 37 comments. You people should be ashamed of yourselves.
Can they survive without the support of the developers that are threatening to drop support?
Very likely. There is no obvious VR killer app so far. Is one of the people currently running their yap likely to write it? Not really.
I like how the creators of Job Simulator are keeping quiet. The people who created a "game" called Job Simulator are looking at their jobs and their business and saying not a word. Go figure. It must be a highly accurate simulation.
... since they'll use it to spy on me, they should pay me instead.
All that effort to create the Alphabet name with the publicly stated purpose of being able to sell hardware while disassociating it from the Panopticon and every single upcoming product has Google in the name.
Is the Google brand really that strong, despite the Panopticon? Or is calling a company Alphabet really that dumb? Or has Google's attention span gotten so incredibly poor they can't remember why they created Alphabet? Or all of the above? Or should they have called it Cowboy Neal's Chips and Bits?
Slashdot poll!
Computers are shit at security because you can not see what is going on...
Uh, what? Yes you can. I very regularly punch the button that says "add this asshat's IP to the firewall drop rules" because I can see the pathetic script kiddie attempting to brute force the password on the SSH server for the Administrator account and it annoys me. Are they going to get in? No, my system is not at risk. There is no Administrator account. So do I really need to start dropping all packets from this assclown? Not really, no. But my monitoring systems are lit up, and that's just obnoxious.
Having said that, I'm on board with the one ton safe idea. Now if only I could afford the umpty-thousand dollars to get one...
"And He who made kittens put snakes in the grass"
Something had to eat all those kittens, or we'd be overrun.
I think most US citizens are going to get fucking upset when they suddenly find most of the items they use on a day to day basis become unavailable or cost 10 times more.
Nonsense.
Americans don't travel much. If they did, they would realize something. Americans already pay all the traffic will bear! Do you really think it costs some large fraction of $120 to make a pair of sneakers? Do you really think t-shirts cost $25 to make so they have to be sold for $30? Do you really think department stores take a loss when they puts jeans on clearance for $20? Have you seen pictures of the world lately? Everybody looks the same. All that ethnic tribalwear crap is gone. The whole world, from the Yukon to the Amazon, is wearing the same shirts, the same pants, the same shoes, made from American cotton in Chinese factories for far less money than you can possibly imagine.
The labor was exported to China and Malaysia for profit Vast, enormous, fantastically mind-boggling amounts of profit. That lingerie you buy for $80 from Victoria's Secret? Less than $1 in materials, less than $1 in labor. You are already paying prices that can support 100% American labor. It would just reduce the profit of the banksters. A lot. Which is why Trump's isolationism will remain a personal quirk, and not a policy, even if he does get elected.
If by some bizarre machination Trump actually managed to implement his isolationism, prices would spike only short term, and mostly speculatively. No one, not even Trump, is going to implement isolationist economic policies overnight. There would be time to bring the factories back and start manufacturing all the consumer crap in the US again, and it would indeed cause a boom in labor. Funny thing is, the quality would drop for a while. Americans don't know how to manufacture a toaster anymore. It hasn't been done in 40 years. The people who knew how it was done well have retired or died. Regaining manufacturing experience takes time, and until it returns, mistakes get made.
But it's moot. Isolationism will not be allowed to return. They'll kill him first.
And those swarms have zero seeds and zero participants and fall off the bottom of search results so about 5 people get infected, if that.
Torrents are cleaner than SourceForge ad banners were before they got sold. But.. be afraid! Be very afraid!
You are overlooking an important factor: People are stupid.
I don't just mean a bit dim. I mean incomprehensibly dumb.
Funny you should say that. I happened to look at my spam today, and saw the subject line "Obama and Putin panicked when they saw...". The rest of it got cut off. Needless to say, I didn't bother to open it to find out what else it said. But... the fact that I've received that email multiple times tells me that somebody must be clicking the link in it. And I was momentarily appalled. You used precisely the right word: it is literally incomprehensible to me how dumb a person would have to be to click that link.
I should have been a little more clear in my last paragraph. Everywhere I say "you" I really mean "your email program will automatically...". The only part where a person has to do something is no different than it ever was. The "communicate a string of letters, numbers and dots" part remains the same. I left out the easy way to share public keys directly. If we're standing next to each other, I open my email program and tap the Show My Address button and my phone shows a QR code of my public key. You open your email program and tap the Capture Address button and take a picture of my phone. Even easier than trying to say "a-r-e-y-o-u-k-i-d-d-i-n-g-m-e-@-g-m-a-i-l-.-c-o-m". There's nothing I can do about the incomprehensibly dumb people in the world, but I don't think what I'm describing is any more incomprehensible to them than the current situation.
I'd much prefer a proof of work system. Want a vanity domain? Go rent yourself an AWS compute farm for a few weeks.
How would that work? If someone else also rented an AWS compute farm for a few weeks + 1 day, do I lose my vanity domain to them?
Do we even need domain names at all? Google effectively auctions off the entire Internet already. If you show up first for your search terms, you get the traffic. What your real domain name is doesn't seem all that relevant in the face of search engines. Basically no one is typing domain names into the browser address bar, hoping to find what they want. That's why the browser bar isn't an address bar anymore. That feature is essentially useless.
As far as I can see, the only use of domain names today is as something to use to construct an email address. In theory they're also used to ensure https security, but that system has so many gaping holes we really need to throw it out in favor of a proper PKI system. Is there anything else?
Ok, the email address thing is a big one.... I guess we're stuck with domain names for a while.
Although... a PKI solves that too. If there's no easy way for me to give you my public key directly, look it up using whatever identifier I care to give you. It could even have dots and ampersats in it. You give me yours the same way. Then consult the global DHT for where to send messages. I've used my private key to inject a signed location into the DHT, so you can verify I'll be the recipient. Encrypt with my public key and send the resulting bytes to the IP you found in the DHT. Prove you're you by signing your message first, or get a nasty spam score if you don't. Two birds with one stone: no domain names required at all to send me an email, and all email is encrypted by default, because it's just as easy to encrypt as it is to sign, since you have my key and I have yours, simply as a side effect of exchanging addresses. Add a few wrinkles, like redirects, cancellation, expiration, and replacement of DHT registrations and you've actually done better than email, which only has redirects and bounces. (PKI does have those things for keys.)
Is there an RFC for this already? I feel like there should be. I can't be the first person to have typed that paragraph.
Coding is moving into the classroom because it's an effective way to teach logic and problem-solving.
No it's not. It's about the most ass-backwards, crippled way to teach logic and problem-solving you can imagine.
Logic and problem-solving have been around, taught, and used for thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands of years. They're best taught with puzzles and games and the simple exigencies of life.
Coding is about making an incredibly limited, restricted, literal machine do what you want. It's about taking ideas and figuring out how to turn them and twist them just so, so you can wedge them into an electro-mechanical mechanism and get something other than Null Program back. We compare computers today to where they were 30 years ago and go completely gaga over how powerful they are. But it's an illusion. Yes, they can flip bits back and forth faster than ever, but the process of getting them to flip bits in the particular pattern we want is completely unchanged. People in this thread (and everywhere else on the Internet) tell me about marvelous things like Scheme and Haskell and Swift and Go and blah blah blah and at the end of the day...?
At the end of the day, a sequence of instructions is loaded into the processor and the processor sends electrons here or there depending on the instructions. That's all. There's no magic, despite the very best efforts of compiler and interpreter authors to make it look like magic. The machine still loads and executes instructions, one after the other. If you want a particular pattern of bits at the end, you must give the machine the correct sequence of instructions.
Why, by all that's holy, would you subject children to such an awful environment to teach them logic and problem-solving? Why would you advocate the use of the most unfriendly, unforgiving, unbending, unsympathetic, unreasonable, unyielding, unrelenting learning environment yet devised as a teaching tool for young minds? Children need room for error. Children need "good enough." Children need "almost." There's no room for any of that in a computer.
Accuracy and precision come with time and practice, with maturity and experience, with encouragement and determination. Teach logic. Teach problem-solving. Teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. Teach algebra. And then, tell them, "Take all of things you have learned, everything you have practiced, everything you know, and fine it all down to the most excruciatingly detailed level you can imagine—and that's coding."
Me and my friends had optimization competitions. We built games. We started long before we knew algebra or boolean logic... formally, at least.
Sure. And that's probably the best way. But we were talking about formalities. Classroom instruction. If we insist on formal instruction, rather than letting curiosity take its course and only giving formal instruction to those children who naturally gravitate to the subject (an approach which is apparently unacceptable to our overlords), then at least give them a fighting chance.
PS, I'm right now looking for an excellent java developer working on free software that enables storage for huge data science, like the LHC experiments. This is the kind of role that is part of the infrastructure needed to make science happen these days:
Academia always befuddles me. I work on software that processes a new 450GB dataset in 8 hours, every weekday. It's written in C++. I wouldn't even consider trying it in Java. One of our competitors processes the same data using a Java solution. It does about a quarter as much data normalization and processing as ours does.
Not so very long ago, CPUs were so far ahead and storage was so far behind that it didn't much matter what language you used. Those days have passed. We live in a world of terabyte nvme flash drives barely bigger than a bank card and commodity 10 Gb ethernet over copper.[1] It's now possible to keep the multicore beast fed with data. Choice of language matters again.
The excellent Java developer you are seeking will be able to produce throughput that can be matched by a merely competent C++ developer. An excellent C++ developer could produce two to four times the throughput on the same hardware, or the same throughput on half as much hardware. It's unfortunate that you're now locked into maintenance of a distinctly disadvantageous codebase.
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[1] Here's a mindboggling build: two Fractal Design Node 804 cases packed with Seagate's 60TB SSDs gives you 1.2 petabytes that can sit on the corner of your desk with throughput that can saturate as many as six 10 Gb links to each chassis, operating nearly silently even at full load. If money is no object.
I really hope you are kidding. While it is true that C teaches some very important low level concepts... those can be taught on their own, without the mess that is C programming. Pointers alone would present a major challenge for kids, adults who know how to program in other languages have problems with pointers, much less kids.
Not even a little bit. Pointers are precisely what I was thinking of when I recommended C. Pointers are fundamental to how the machine works. Learning them learns the machine. If you do not know how the machine works, you are a bad programmer.
As for teaching abstract concepts... Nope. Humans learn by doing. There's a reason there are exercises at the end of every chapter in a math book. In order to understand the machine, you must program the machine, and you must do so in a language that does not insulate you from the machine. You can be told about stacks and heaps and the von Neumann architecture, but until you scribble all over your stack with an out of bounds write, you don't understand it. Are pointers hard? Yes. Difficulty is necessary for learning. Does C's almost total lack of a standard library mean you're going to reinvent the wheel a lot? Of course. Students always reinvent wheels. It's how to learn.
I'm not saying that newly fledged programmers will be writing a lot of C. They won't be. I'm saying C is an appropriate, if not the appropriate teaching language. Their third class can be in Python. Their first and second classes should be in C.
I normally never answer Slashdot questions, but I feel the urge to answer this one.
What would I teach? C.
You heard me. C.
As you may have guessed, I learned to ride a bicycle without ever having training wheels. The first language I learned was C. Kids should learn C. The ones that can't should never be programmers. The ones that can will be able to handle any high level language ever invented, including whatever wankery the Apples and Googles of the world come up with next. Teach them C. At the command line. All else is puffery.
I also feel obliged to respond to the blithering idiocy of the Code.org CEO. Early elementary students? Wtf are you babbling about you drooling moron? Coding has prerequisites. A student who wishes to learn code must read and write at least one natural language well and must know not only arithmetic but also elementary algebra. A student's first coding class will teach Boolean algebra. The combination of those three things is what coding is. Written language combining Boolean logic with algebraic equations. If you're not doing that, you're not coding.
This study should be taken with a giant heap of salt.
How about with a pillar of salt?