considering that I'm immigrant labor in the U.S., and I almost came here on an H1B (I'm on TN-1), and I'm not cheap, I don't agree with that.
I know quite a few H1-B's that aren't cheap.. there may be some horror stories about H1B abuse, but I don't think they represent the majority of cases.
This is about a lack of technical people with even an inkling of talent. Yes, some companies really should train their people more... but I've also been involved in training, and there really is a lack of *talent* out there -- there's only so much training before someone needs the initiative to go the distance...
..and if you don't think so, you really don't live or pay attention to any major urban centres. There's a shortage of *everything* : from McDonald's workers to tech workers. Mr. Greenspan is consistently worried that we're going to see some psycho inflation because of this.
Immigrants usually are the reason we have a successful economy. They attract ambitious people. We like ambitious people, don't we?
Re:Businesses and politicians corrupt people
on
A Letter from 2020
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· Score: 1
"The US is screwed. It's too late to change it. Just like all goverments in the past, time is up for the US goverment"
... people have been saying this for [insert country here] for years. Instead of lying back in your armchair, steadfast in your smug superiority, why don't you actually do something to make the U.S. better?
"uncontrolled", sure. But who controls? Not development, surely. They have their own skeletons in the closet.
Honestly, this is the job of a competent executive team and board of directors. It's unfortunate that on most executive teams the sales people seem to be the biggest wielders of political power, but there are ways to structure a company around that. (see Apple, which seems to have a good balance between development and marketing)
...the duplication of information has a negligable cost. The creation of *new* and *valuable* information has an associated scarcity: the skill and talent of the individuals that do so (write music, write software, orginize data, etc.)
This implies that it makes sense for the market to regulate this industry as it has others. It should allocate funds and resources to those who the public appreciates the most. Whether this should be done in a productized form or as a service remains to be seen, but some notion of intellectual property will be required to protect these artists from blatant profiteers that have no skill or talent of their own.
The above is not a nitpick, it's a correction to what seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of economics and scarcity. Fluid things like skill and talent *do* count as scarcity... they're just harder to measure (productivity don't really say much).
Also, speaking as a Canadian that's living south of the border, one partialy reason Canada is "with it" with the net is because of the diligent efforts of Electronic Frontier Canada, and AOL Canada, both of whom provided solid testimony during the CRTC "regulate the net" hearings. I would also venture that since the U.S. is 10x bigger, it's more prone to tackle these issues before Canada gets to them... So the battle in Canada will get bloodier within time.
Also keep in mind that Canada doesn't protect speech to the extent the U.S. does. (See the Ernst Zundel case)
invention != innovation != marketing
on
The First Mouse
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· Score: 1
all three are needed for popular success.
Invention is the idea.
Innovation is filling the market need.
Marketing is telling the market about it.
Englebart is truly a visionary and lauded figure in Computer Science history, but his ideas were just that, ideas given prototype form. The actual innovations occurred latter at Xerox PARC, then Apple, and eventually Microsoft.
Marketing is the ultimate undoing of the software biz?
Do you realize engineers have been saying this about *everything* for the last 50 years?
"Development" doesn't drive the organization, as the organization is usually aimed towards a goal, presumably defined by people as a "collective itch that needs scratch". It's not development for development's sake, it's for meeting an unfilled market need (even if that market is a small niche of developers).
What drives a business organization is the continual battle between innovation and marketing. Innovation creates the new and destroys the old through research and searching for opportunities. Marketing is about making the world know that you have a product available, and then finding out if there's any enhancements that can be made.
Great post. Totally agree with this sentiment. Peter Drucker, for instance, has been saying this since the days of the first books on management in 1946... apparently all the execs that listen to him skipped that line...
The problem with the more liberalized socialist sentiments is that they're rather circular and inconsistent. Market-driven socialism "isn't" -- there has to be a bat somewhere to whack the market down when it doesn't behave.
Right now we have a hybrid approach.. the bat is actually a slight tap from side to side by Alan Greenspan... and sometimes a wholesale whack, like in the early 1980's.
As for "entrepreneurs" in socialism, this may be popular *now*, but it wasn't for most of the life of the socialist idea... and it's still unclear how this would work in a "market socialist" economy (unless you consider cases like Canada as market socialist).. one can't organize resources when one doesn't have a right to property other than personal possessions & all resources are in the hands of a centralized entity.
A lot of this stuff is fodder for Slashdot paranoia.
Did Amazon play with prices? Sure. Is that their right? Sure. Do I have a problem with it? Not really, though mainly because it wasn't *big* price differences. Did they "do the right thing" in the end? Yes.
Conspiracy theories aside, Amazon has always offered the best customer service for all my transactions. This isn't really bad press outside the geek circle... I don't see how this is a warning sign at all.
The only warning signs, as you say, are Amazon's earning reports.
Speaking as a linux/unix lover that bought a Mac recently, I too really dislike the crashes. But I do enjoy the Mac interface.. so much so that I can "live" with the crashes as long as they'll go away some day.
Mac OS X will help that, almost guaranteed, based on what I've seen of DP4. It's the real deal. UNIX and Macintosh. And Java to boot (which helps since I'm a Java programmer). I'm very excited.
Property in general doesn't exist unless society allows it to, usually based on some form of scarcity. So any form of property is a monopoly. Real estate, anyone?
Physical things do have scarcity, but there is debate as to the form of scarcity involved with intellectual property. Obviously, duplicated works are abundant, but *new* works require scarce skill & talent to make... so it's not so clear.
Hmm. Last I checked, IKEA's core business was selling cool & affordable furniture. How does their bad expereinces with a website lead to the conclusion that they shouldn't be in business?
Many mistakes are made because people don't know any better. Really. "Cheap programmers"? More like "programmers that don't break the bank". It's hard to swallow that anyone with half a brain these days is worth well into a 6 figure salary.
Nick Petreley really hit the nail on the head here. PEOPLE want information to be free, and seem to have a tremendous lack of respect (or perhaps just a tremendous amount of ignorance) about our current economic system, so they just go about circumventing it without allowing the market to operate. The market *needs* at least a minimal notion of intellectual property in order to function.
Very often I see a lot of arguments that "information has no scarcity", and I reel back in horror at that inaccuracy. Raw, unfiltered data has no scarcity. It's just bits. Information, however, is a specific configuration of bits that adds value. The fact that there is a lack of "valuable information" (i.e. good music, good software, good books) implies that there is a form of scarcity involved -- a scarcity of skill and talent to create valuable information.
Information creation is a scarce service.
So this implies that we probably should have mechanisms to require payment for information if the market finds it valuable. What's at question is whether we should have to pay for it as a product, like we currently do, which is clearly inefficient from an economic perspective as it leads to excessive profits, or in english, "rich rock star" syndrome.
So the question really shouldn't be about how to destroy intellectual property. It should be about how to come up with new business models that are much more efficient than the "shrink wrap" business model... and this actually seems to be what the industry is doing. Subscription-based software, ASP's, etc. are all signs of the times.
There is no scarcity of *DATA*. Digital information after all, is just bits. But information is bits organized in a specific way that adds value. That's a good. And there's a scarcity of valuable information.
I really enjoy the tendency to jump on the "no scarcity" bandwagon without a basic Economics 101 understanding of what it means to be "scarce" as opposed to having "negligible duplication costs".
I'm a computer science flunk-out, after 3 years. Good CS marks, poor math marks. I moved into Economics, but my job is still as a software consultant & trainer.
By and large, my experiences goes like so:
- You only use the theory of CS if you love computers.
- Most expert programmers are keen on a balance between theory and practice
- The majority of college graduates really don't remember the theory they were taught because they didn't think they needed it (remember -- you need a LOVE of the subject to remember it).
This pretty much applies to most things -- a college degree is just a piece of paper unless you love the topic. Many college grads don't like computers, they just really want the money.
As a software consultant and teacher to recent college graduates, I can tell you that I've seen a disturbingly high number of college gradatues with *NO* knowledge of networking, multithreading, or using an API. The brain wiring just isn't there. There's a real bell curve out there... and the majority of graduates come out without any major skills.
It's frustrating for me because I never finished my CS degree and I'm teaching them topics that they should be teaching me.
So please, if you're going to go to college, USE IT. If you're there for just the money, please do this industry a favour and move elsewhere. Too many people's careers are stuck cleaning up your shitty code.
Actually I understand all of the political issues surrounding Amazon right now. And I disagree with most of the compliants.
The patent issue does not lie at Amazon's feet, it lies at the feet of the government to start tightening up patents. Bezos is on the side of light, but he's running a business and he wants to make sure he can retain whatever advantages he can over B&N. I don't have a problem with it. On the other hand, I would have an ethical problem if he started doing wide-spreaded attacks with that patent. But he's not.
It's not us vs. them. We *are* the corporations. Human beings. Really.
www.cluetrain.org gives a really good analysis of the direction companies need to head in a marketplace that is about to become so competitive that consumers will have *unprecidented* power.
The privacy problems we're having now require diligence, but they *WILL* be solved.
The success of the open-source movement does not depend on businesses adopting it. It's not "in the market" except in the sense that movement is in the bazzar. Nobody needs to buy it for it to succeed. The success of open-source software depends on people taking pride in their work and in doing it right, and deriving their sense of worth from that. That the products are useful and desirable flows from the success of craftsmanship, not the other way around
Funny. I thought the success of the open source movement was about spreading open source software everywhere so that intellectual property would eventually be made irrelevant.
At least, that's what seems to be the consensus on most of the messages here on Slashdot. And it's RMS' end-goal.
If "success" was how you defined it, then OS/2 developers everywhere are currently a "success" along with all of the old C64 holdouts. By some measure, they are successful -- they're happily enjoying the fruits of their craftsmanship in a tight-knit community. By other measures, they're isolated from the rest of the world -- their not successful outside of their small group.
There are many ways to define success, but the one that seems to matter most to people is success in the marketplace. That's where the bread comes from.
This is not flamebait, this is a happy amazon customer wishing to express his opinion on the matter.
I've been using Amazon.com since 1997. In that time I've bought hundreds of books, CD's, DVD's, VHS's and, more recently, electronics. I have no problems with Amazon keeping my customer info. This way, I actually get things that *I LIKE* on my front page whenever I log in. They have my preferences down quite well. I just bought a 61" TV from Amazon too, and received it in a week with free shipping. That's way better than the local Circuit City was going to do for the same price.
Rob, I have no idea what you're talking about when you say that book buying is so much more annoying now that they sell all kinds of crap. You search for the book, you add it to your shopping cart (or 1-click) and you're done. There's virtually NO difference in book buying now as opposed to before Amazon diversified. Opinions like the ones Rob stated seem to me to be rationalizations of "why we should hate amazon".
My experience that Amazon's customer service and quick delivery has always kept me pleased. WAY more so than Fat Brain or Barnes & Noble who have both delayed several orders by an inordinate amount of time without so much as sending me an email explaining the situation. FatBrain has especially horrible for this -- being out of stock, mis-estimating ship times, messing up shipping information, etc.
If Amazon goes bankrupt, of course I care that my info goes out, but how does this differ from old mail-order catalogues of the past? The technology is more sophisticated, but there is nothing stopping Sears, LL Bean or Eddie Bauer from keeping track of your purchase history. If they go bankrupt or are sold, there's nothing stopping that data from getting out. I care about my privacy, but I also understand that Amazon is not *freely* selling my info, they're just allowing for the possibility of this if they go belly up.
It's quite hypocritical how techies scream when politians want to apply a "new standard" to the Internet in terms of censorship, but themselves want to apply a "new standard" to the Internet for privacy laws.
If they want to try to patent 1-click, that's their choice, and it will be decided in the courts. In the court of customer service, they've won by my experience. It's just a matter if they can turn that into profits some day.
Since each iteration in smalltalk's do: statement is actually just executing a block (i.e. anonymous inner class), it's effectively a method call. So, you just have it return.
I like Java, but I tend to like Smalltalk more.. just because I feel Smalltalk's class libraries tend to be more mature and elegant, and the syntax is more "english like" as opposed to "C like".
For instance, in ST I can iterate through a collection like so:
Iterator it = myCollection.iterator();
while (it.hasNext()) {
(ElementType) eachElement = (ElementType) eachElement.next();
eachElement.doSomething();
}
I donno, I find the first more understandable even though it has less words.
the ST stuff in square-brackets is basically a block, which is pretty much like an anonymous inner class with one method, "value", that is called upon each element iteration by the do: method.
A) could you define, technically, what you mean by "object churn"? Do you mean runtime dispatch overhead? Memory allocation overhead? Garbage collection? Something else? Please be specific, because I'm getting a little sick of your general piss and vinegar towards this subject, and would like to get some hard answers about why you seem to think Java programmers are a bunch of starry-eyed muppets.
B) I'd appreciate it if you would look at some of IBM's whitepapers on their improved Java VM on their site (ibm.com/java). They've done a lot to improve performance at runtime.
No, I'm sick of a language making me buy and pay for synchronization when I may neither want nor need it.
You don't pay for it unless you use the "synchronized" keyword. period. One should never used that keyword unless they have good experience with concurrency.
You cannot get around using your head on threads, and when you do, C++ will be a much more satisfactory choice.
C++ has no inherent support for multiple threads. Pretty much everything is done through an OS api. Note that many people feel that API-based multithreading constructs are MUCH more unsafe and error prone than something that is inherent in the language. [On a tangental note, I believe there's actually academic research that suggests this as well.]
I look at WinNT's threading model and I cringe at the lack of consistency. Sure, it gives me a lot more choice in IPC constructs, but they're all quite painful to use. System V's IPC is a bit better, but still not as consistent & simple as monitors.
Find me ten average Java programmers who can point out the synchronized objects and the non-synchronized objects they are instantiating.
I'm a half consultant/half trainer in C++, Java, etc. and I get to deal with a lot of variation in levels of comprehension and competence. One thing I'm pretty certain of is after they make it through my class, they understand that A) all of the Java 2 collections aren't thread safe, and B) we shouldn't use the Java 1.1 collections because they ARE thread-safe and are, hence, slower for no good reason. They may not understand *WHY* synchronization slows stuff down, but they do understand that it does.
I can fully understand your complaints about the Java 1.1 Vector & Hashtable being synchronized with no choice in the matter, but that changed quite a while ago with the release of List, Set, and Map. Furthermore, String, which you alluded to in a prior message, is *not* synchronized because it is immutable. StringBuffer *is* mutable, so it is logically synchronized. One tends not to use StringBuffer all that often for this reason. This is pretty much identical to the way NSMutableString and NSImmutableString were designed in NeXTStep.
To this my response is that yes, straight C makes stack smashes a reality. C++, when used with the standard libraries, can correct this issue.
C++ corrects this? How? I can still take the address of a stack allocated object and it still will smash. A good C++ programmer would never make this mistake (they'd use new, and they'd actually read the compiler warnings that scream at me for taking the address of a local variable), but a newbie might make this mistake (because they don't understand compiler warnings that well).
I would also say that this sort of bug is much more debilitating than newbies making mistakes about synchronized keywords. One makes your code slower, one makes your code crash with a seg fault.
Added to which, generic programming is entirely more useful than OO, and C++ is the only language the implements it usefully.
Look, I've read your prior messages and your rants against OO, but let me make something perfectly clear: just because you have a hard time making a paradigm-shift in thinking, that does not make that paradigm mumbo-jumbo.
There are many people that like OO but also detest "UML myopia" and "top heavy" methodologies that just generate lots of paper. These people tend to flock to more pragmatic approaches such as extreme programming. I like OO because I can create simple abstractions when I need to, and complex ones when I need to. The patterns movement is also a great body of literature to learn techniques from. Again, it's a tradeoff in that it allows newbies to think they're design gods just because they can cram 15 patterns into their systems ("look ma! I can use a visitor here, and a chain of responsibility here! it's 15-class, 150 line hello world with 6 levels of indirection! aren't ya proud??")... but that's hubris. Do we stop a good thing just because some people abuse it? That's burning the house to roast the pig.
Choosing a multi-paradigm approach has its trade-offs, just like choosing a single paradigm. With the multi-paradigm approach, you have to be extra good at providing readable constructs and abstractions because you've effectively thrown consistency out the window. You'll need a patient programmer versed in several paradigms to be able to maintain your code. If you pick ONE paradigm for a system, though, you at least have consistency and readability on your side.
One should not choose a multi-paradigm approach for just performance reasons, as this reeks of premature optimization. I feel profilers are a must in *ANY* paradigm.
Now, on to generics. Generic programming is quite useful, and actually I would say LISP and Modula-3 do it better than C++, but I digress.
Generics is a different paradigm from OO -- and I wouldn't say it's more or less useful in general over OO. Alexander Stepanov may think so, but Stroustroup certainly doesn't, reading his arguments in favor of OO in his books on C++.
In some cases, generic programming is definitely needed, such as when you want to implement generic mathematical functions for matrix arithmetic in a large numerical computation system or simulation. Those situations warrant generics.
Beyond the above though, compile-time type checking of containers is not what I call "entirely more useful" -- it's more of a "nice thing to add". Java takes an 80/20 approach where it gives you strong typing most of the time, but basically takes the Smalltalk approach to collections/containers. This line of argument tends to degenerate to the classic strong vs. weakly typed polymorphism & language debate, so I'll leave it at that.
Slashdot Mirror
considering that I'm immigrant labor in the U.S., and I almost came here on an H1B (I'm on TN-1), and I'm not cheap, I don't agree with that.
I know quite a few H1-B's that aren't cheap.. there may be some horror stories about H1B abuse, but I don't think they represent the majority of cases.
This is about a lack of technical people with even an inkling of talent. Yes, some companies really should train their people more... but I've also been involved in training, and there really is a lack of *talent* out there -- there's only so much training before someone needs the initiative to go the distance...
..and if you don't think so, you really don't live or pay attention to any major urban centres. There's a shortage of *everything* : from McDonald's workers to tech workers. Mr. Greenspan is consistently worried that we're going to see some psycho inflation because of this.
Immigrants usually are the reason we have a successful economy. They attract ambitious people. We like ambitious people, don't we?
"The US is screwed. It's too late to change it. Just like all goverments in the past, time is up for the US goverment"
... people have been saying this for [insert country here] for years. Instead of lying back in your armchair, steadfast in your smug superiority, why don't you actually do something to make the U.S. better?
"uncontrolled", sure. But who controls? Not development, surely. They have their own skeletons in the closet.
Honestly, this is the job of a competent executive team and board of directors. It's unfortunate that on most executive teams the sales people seem to be the biggest wielders of political power, but there are ways to structure a company around that. (see Apple, which seems to have a good balance between development and marketing)
...the duplication of information has a negligable cost. The creation of *new* and *valuable* information has an associated scarcity: the skill and talent of the individuals that do so (write music, write software, orginize data, etc.)
This implies that it makes sense for the market to regulate this industry as it has others. It should allocate funds and resources to those who the public appreciates the most. Whether this should be done in a productized form or as a service remains to be seen, but some notion of intellectual property will be required to protect these artists from blatant profiteers that have no skill or talent of their own.
The above is not a nitpick, it's a correction to what seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of economics and scarcity. Fluid things like skill and talent *do* count as scarcity... they're just harder to measure (productivity don't really say much).
Also, speaking as a Canadian that's living south of the border, one partialy reason Canada is "with it" with the net is because of the diligent efforts of Electronic Frontier Canada, and AOL Canada, both of whom provided solid testimony during the CRTC "regulate the net" hearings. I would also venture that since the U.S. is 10x bigger, it's more prone to tackle these issues before Canada gets to them... So the battle in Canada will get bloodier within time.
Also keep in mind that Canada doesn't protect speech to the extent the U.S. does. (See the Ernst Zundel case)
all three are needed for popular success.
Invention is the idea.
Innovation is filling the market need.
Marketing is telling the market about it.
Englebart is truly a visionary and lauded figure in Computer Science history, but his ideas were just that, ideas given prototype form. The actual innovations occurred latter at Xerox PARC, then Apple, and eventually Microsoft.
Marketing is the ultimate undoing of the software biz?
Do you realize engineers have been saying this about *everything* for the last 50 years?
"Development" doesn't drive the organization, as the organization is usually aimed towards a goal, presumably defined by people as a "collective itch that needs scratch". It's not development for development's sake, it's for meeting an unfilled market need (even if that market is a small niche of developers).
What drives a business organization is the continual battle between innovation and marketing. Innovation creates the new and destroys the old through research and searching for opportunities. Marketing is about making the world know that you have a product available, and then finding out if there's any enhancements that can be made.
It's just the nature of the economy.
Great post. Totally agree with this sentiment. Peter Drucker, for instance, has been saying this since the days of the first books on management in 1946... apparently all the execs that listen to him skipped that line...
The problem with the more liberalized socialist sentiments is that they're rather circular and inconsistent. Market-driven socialism "isn't" -- there has to be a bat somewhere to whack the market down when it doesn't behave.
.. one can't organize resources when one doesn't have a right to property other than personal possessions & all resources are in the hands of a centralized entity.
Right now we have a hybrid approach.. the bat is actually a slight tap from side to side by Alan Greenspan... and sometimes a wholesale whack, like in the early 1980's.
As for "entrepreneurs" in socialism, this may be popular *now*, but it wasn't for most of the life of the socialist idea... and it's still unclear how this would work in a "market socialist" economy (unless you consider cases like Canada as market socialist)
A lot of this stuff is fodder for Slashdot paranoia.
Did Amazon play with prices? Sure. Is that their right? Sure. Do I have a problem with it? Not really, though mainly because it wasn't *big* price differences. Did they "do the right thing" in the end? Yes.
Conspiracy theories aside, Amazon has always offered the best customer service for all my transactions. This isn't really bad press outside the geek circle... I don't see how this is a warning sign at all.
The only warning signs, as you say, are Amazon's earning reports.
Speaking as a linux/unix lover that bought a Mac recently, I too really dislike the crashes. But I do enjoy the Mac interface.. so much so that I can "live" with the crashes as long as they'll go away some day.
Mac OS X will help that, almost guaranteed, based on what I've seen of DP4. It's the real deal. UNIX and Macintosh. And Java to boot (which helps since I'm a Java programmer). I'm very excited.
Property in general doesn't exist unless society allows it to, usually based on some form of scarcity. So any form of property is a monopoly. Real estate, anyone?
Physical things do have scarcity, but there is debate as to the form of scarcity involved with intellectual property. Obviously, duplicated works are abundant, but *new* works require scarce skill & talent to make... so it's not so clear.
Hmm. Last I checked, IKEA's core business was selling cool & affordable furniture. How does their bad expereinces with a website lead to the conclusion that they shouldn't be in business?
Many mistakes are made because people don't know any better. Really. "Cheap programmers"? More like "programmers that don't break the bank". It's hard to swallow that anyone with half a brain these days is worth well into a 6 figure salary.
Nick Petreley really hit the nail on the head here. PEOPLE want information to be free, and seem to have a tremendous lack of respect (or perhaps just a tremendous amount of ignorance) about our current economic system, so they just go about circumventing it without allowing the market to operate. The market *needs* at least a minimal notion of intellectual property in order to function.
Very often I see a lot of arguments that "information has no scarcity", and I reel back in horror at that inaccuracy. Raw, unfiltered data has no scarcity. It's just bits. Information, however, is a specific configuration of bits that adds value. The fact that there is a lack of "valuable information" (i.e. good music, good software, good books) implies that there is a form of scarcity involved -- a scarcity of skill and talent to create valuable information.
Information creation is a scarce service.
So this implies that we probably should have mechanisms to require payment for information if the market finds it valuable. What's at question is whether we should have to pay for it as a product, like we currently do, which is clearly inefficient from an economic perspective as it leads to excessive profits, or in english, "rich rock star" syndrome.
So the question really shouldn't be about how to destroy intellectual property. It should be about how to come up with new business models that are much more efficient than the "shrink wrap" business model... and this actually seems to be what the industry is doing. Subscription-based software, ASP's, etc. are all signs of the times.
There is no scarcity of *DATA*. Digital information after all, is just bits. But information is bits organized in a specific way that adds value. That's a good. And there's a scarcity of valuable information.
I really enjoy the tendency to jump on the "no scarcity" bandwagon without a basic Economics 101 understanding of what it means to be "scarce" as opposed to having "negligible duplication costs".
I'm a computer science flunk-out, after 3 years. Good CS marks, poor math marks. I moved into Economics, but my job is still as a software consultant & trainer.
By and large, my experiences goes like so:
- You only use the theory of CS if you love computers.
- Most expert programmers are keen on a balance between theory and practice
- The majority of college graduates really don't remember the theory they were taught because they didn't think they needed it (remember -- you need a LOVE of the subject to remember it).
This pretty much applies to most things -- a college degree is just a piece of paper unless you love the topic. Many college grads don't like computers, they just really want the money.
As a software consultant and teacher to recent college graduates, I can tell you that I've seen a disturbingly high number of college gradatues with *NO* knowledge of networking, multithreading, or using an API. The brain wiring just isn't there. There's a real bell curve out there... and the majority of graduates come out without any major skills.
It's frustrating for me because I never finished my CS degree and I'm teaching them topics that they should be teaching me.
So please, if you're going to go to college, USE IT. If you're there for just the money, please do this industry a favour and move elsewhere. Too many people's careers are stuck cleaning up your shitty code.
Actually I understand all of the political issues surrounding Amazon right now. And I disagree with most of the compliants.
The patent issue does not lie at Amazon's feet, it lies at the feet of the government to start tightening up patents. Bezos is on the side of light, but he's running a business and he wants to make sure he can retain whatever advantages he can over B&N. I don't have a problem with it. On the other hand, I would have an ethical problem if he started doing wide-spreaded attacks with that patent. But he's not.
It's not us vs. them. We *are* the corporations. Human beings. Really.
www.cluetrain.org gives a really good analysis of the direction companies need to head in a marketplace that is about to become so competitive that consumers will have *unprecidented* power.
The privacy problems we're having now require diligence, but they *WILL* be solved.
The success of the open-source movement does not depend on businesses adopting it. It's not "in the market" except in the sense that movement is in the bazzar. Nobody needs to buy it for it to succeed. The success of open-source software depends on people taking pride in their work and in doing it right, and deriving their sense of worth from that. That the products are useful and desirable flows from the success of craftsmanship, not the other way around
Funny. I thought the success of the open source movement was about spreading open source software everywhere so that intellectual property would eventually be made irrelevant.
At least, that's what seems to be the consensus on most of the messages here on Slashdot. And it's RMS' end-goal.
If "success" was how you defined it, then OS/2 developers everywhere are currently a "success" along with all of the old C64 holdouts. By some measure, they are successful -- they're happily enjoying the fruits of their craftsmanship in a tight-knit community. By other measures, they're isolated from the rest of the world -- their not successful outside of their small group.
There are many ways to define success, but the one that seems to matter most to people is success in the marketplace. That's where the bread comes from.
This is not flamebait, this is a happy amazon customer wishing to express his opinion on the matter.
I've been using Amazon.com since 1997. In that time I've bought hundreds of books, CD's, DVD's, VHS's and, more recently, electronics. I have no problems with Amazon keeping my customer info. This way, I actually get things that *I LIKE* on my front page whenever I log in. They have my preferences down quite well. I just bought a 61" TV from Amazon too, and received it in a week with free shipping. That's way better than the local Circuit City was going to do for the same price.
Rob, I have no idea what you're talking about when you say that book buying is so much more annoying now that they sell all kinds of crap. You search for the book, you add it to your shopping cart (or 1-click) and you're done. There's virtually NO difference in book buying now as opposed to before Amazon diversified. Opinions like the ones Rob stated seem to me to be rationalizations of "why we should hate amazon".
My experience that Amazon's customer service and quick delivery has always kept me pleased. WAY more so than Fat Brain or Barnes & Noble who have both delayed several orders by an inordinate amount of time without so much as sending me an email explaining the situation. FatBrain has especially horrible for this -- being out of stock, mis-estimating ship times, messing up shipping information, etc.
If Amazon goes bankrupt, of course I care that my info goes out, but how does this differ from old mail-order catalogues of the past? The technology is more sophisticated, but there is nothing stopping Sears, LL Bean or Eddie Bauer from keeping track of your purchase history. If they go bankrupt or are sold, there's nothing stopping that data from getting out. I care about my privacy, but I also understand that Amazon is not *freely* selling my info, they're just allowing for the possibility of this if they go belly up.
It's quite hypocritical how techies scream when politians want to apply a "new standard" to the Internet in terms of censorship, but themselves want to apply a "new standard" to the Internet for privacy laws.
If they want to try to patent 1-click, that's their choice, and it will be decided in the courts. In the court of customer service, they've won by my experience. It's just a matter if they can turn that into profits some day.
Since each iteration in smalltalk's do: statement is actually just executing a block (i.e. anonymous inner class), it's effectively a method call. So, you just have it return.
Thanks. Your post made my day. :)
I like Java, but I tend to like Smalltalk more.. just because I feel Smalltalk's class libraries tend to be more mature and elegant, and the syntax is more "english like" as opposed to "C like".
:eachElement | eachElement doSomething ].
For instance, in ST I can iterate through a collection like so:
myCollection do: [
which in the Java is basically:
Iterator it = myCollection.iterator();
while (it.hasNext()) {
(ElementType) eachElement = (ElementType) eachElement.next();
eachElement.doSomething();
}
I donno, I find the first more understandable even though it has less words.
the ST stuff in square-brackets is basically a block, which is pretty much like an anonymous inner class with one method, "value", that is called upon each element iteration by the do: method.
A) could you define, technically, what you mean by "object churn"? Do you mean runtime dispatch overhead? Memory allocation overhead? Garbage collection? Something else? Please be specific, because I'm getting a little sick of your general piss and vinegar towards this subject, and would like to get some hard answers about why you seem to think Java programmers are a bunch of starry-eyed muppets.
B) I'd appreciate it if you would look at some of IBM's whitepapers on their improved Java VM on their site (ibm.com/java). They've done a lot to improve performance at runtime.
No, I'm sick of a language making me buy and pay for synchronization when I may neither want nor need it.
... but that's hubris. Do we stop a good thing just because some people abuse it? That's burning the house to roast the pig.
You don't pay for it unless you use the "synchronized" keyword. period. One should never used that keyword unless they have good experience with concurrency.
You cannot get around using your head on threads, and when you do, C++ will be a much more satisfactory choice.
C++ has no inherent support for multiple threads. Pretty much everything is done through an OS api. Note that many people feel that API-based multithreading constructs are MUCH more unsafe and error prone than something that is inherent in the language. [On a tangental note, I believe there's actually academic research that suggests this as well.]
I look at WinNT's threading model and I cringe at the lack of consistency. Sure, it gives me a lot more choice in IPC constructs, but they're all quite painful to use. System V's IPC is a bit better, but still not as consistent & simple as monitors.
Find me ten average Java programmers who can point out the synchronized objects and the non-synchronized objects they are instantiating.
I'm a half consultant/half trainer in C++, Java, etc. and I get to deal with a lot of variation in levels of comprehension and competence. One thing I'm pretty certain of is after they make it through my class, they understand that A) all of the Java 2 collections aren't thread safe, and B) we shouldn't use the Java 1.1 collections because they ARE thread-safe and are, hence, slower for no good reason. They may not understand *WHY* synchronization slows stuff down, but they do understand that it does.
I can fully understand your complaints about the Java 1.1 Vector & Hashtable being synchronized with no choice in the matter, but that changed quite a while ago with the release of List, Set, and Map. Furthermore, String, which you alluded to in a prior message, is *not* synchronized because it is immutable. StringBuffer *is* mutable, so it is logically synchronized. One tends not to use StringBuffer all that often for this reason. This is pretty much identical to the way NSMutableString and NSImmutableString were designed in NeXTStep.
To this my response is that yes, straight C makes stack smashes a reality. C++, when used with the standard libraries, can correct this issue.
C++ corrects this? How? I can still take the address of a stack allocated object and it still will smash. A good C++ programmer would never make this mistake (they'd use new, and they'd actually read the compiler warnings that scream at me for taking the address of a local variable), but a newbie might make this mistake (because they don't understand compiler warnings that well).
I would also say that this sort of bug is much more debilitating than newbies making mistakes about synchronized keywords. One makes your code slower, one makes your code crash with a seg fault.
Added to which, generic programming is entirely more useful than OO, and C++ is the only language the implements it usefully.
Look, I've read your prior messages and your rants against OO, but let me make something perfectly clear: just because you have a hard time making a paradigm-shift in thinking, that does not make that paradigm mumbo-jumbo.
There are many people that like OO but also detest "UML myopia" and "top heavy" methodologies that just generate lots of paper. These people tend to flock to more pragmatic approaches such as extreme programming. I like OO because I can create simple abstractions when I need to, and complex ones when I need to. The patterns movement is also a great body of literature to learn techniques from. Again, it's a tradeoff in that it allows newbies to think they're design gods just because they can cram 15 patterns into their systems ("look ma! I can use a visitor here, and a chain of responsibility here! it's 15-class, 150 line hello world with 6 levels of indirection! aren't ya proud??")
Choosing a multi-paradigm approach has its trade-offs, just like choosing a single paradigm. With the multi-paradigm approach, you have to be extra good at providing readable constructs and abstractions because you've effectively thrown consistency out the window. You'll need a patient programmer versed in several paradigms to be able to maintain your code. If you pick ONE paradigm for a system, though, you at least have consistency and readability on your side.
One should not choose a multi-paradigm approach for just performance reasons, as this reeks of premature optimization. I feel profilers are a must in *ANY* paradigm.
Now, on to generics. Generic programming is quite useful, and actually I would say LISP and Modula-3 do it better than C++, but I digress.
Generics is a different paradigm from OO -- and I wouldn't say it's more or less useful in general over OO. Alexander Stepanov may think so, but Stroustroup certainly doesn't, reading his arguments in favor of OO in his books on C++.
In some cases, generic programming is definitely needed, such as when you want to implement generic mathematical functions for matrix arithmetic in a large numerical computation system or simulation. Those situations warrant generics.
Beyond the above though, compile-time type checking of containers is not what I call "entirely more useful" -- it's more of a "nice thing to add". Java takes an 80/20 approach where it gives you strong typing most of the time, but basically takes the Smalltalk approach to collections/containers. This line of argument tends to degenerate to the classic strong vs. weakly typed polymorphism & language debate, so I'll leave it at that.