This TIOBE index relies on web queries for each programming language. Frankly, C programmers don't need to ask questions about the language itself since it is so simple.
I'm not questioning the popularity of the various languages but it seems to me that this metric favours the more complex languages.
Finally, in the embedded real-time space, there is still no real substitute for C.
HFS may be thirty years old but we still have major headaches transferring files between Macs and other machines. I truly believe that Apple would be better served if they invested in a open filesystem format.
I strongly recommend Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It will shed a lot of light on the nature of language and help you understand that it cannot be constructed by fiat.
To summarize Pinker's thesis succinctly, language is created by each individual by instinct and at a young age. There are a couple of fascinating examples from recent history that demonstrate the process. One is in a deaf community in Nicaragua: after the Sandinista war when a semblence of calm returned to the country, the authorities were able to create schools for the deaf. Initially, the students were teenagers collected from various villages. They had lived in isolation with their families and no education in sign language. "Instinctively", each had created their own sign language. When they were brought together, the students merged their separate sign languages into a pidgin. The interesting bit is what happened when younger children subsequently joined the school: since their language instinct was still creating language, they were able to adapt the nascent pidgin into a more more coherent sign language complete with grammatical rules; the result was much more expressive and coherent - and completely independent of other established sign languages. Today, it is a recognized sign language.
It is constructive to think of language as something created by each individual; everybody has their own language and they evolve separately and over time, driven by social imperatives.
On the topic of redundancy: it is a necessary part of all languages. It would be a huge mistake to try to design a more efficientlanguage. This is in part because languages must be able to evolve. They are never static.
Regarding rules: one of the reasons that English has been so successful is its forgiving nature and its willingness to absorb shamelessly from other languages.
In short, I think you will find it more enjoyable and fruitful to channel your interest into other aspects of language. Over the past decade there have been huge advances in language recognition and translation; you might like to start with those fields since they are current, topical, and valuable.
You might also wish to check out another one of my favourite books: The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. Both of these books are targeted at the layman and are very enjoyable reads.
I completely misconstrued the title of this post. I interpreted it to refer to IT end-users who are resigned to interminable frustration and poor service. That speaks volumes about the business. How depressing.
Of course but (a) it's no longer an interesting learning exercise, (b) I have 6 devices, and (c) I shouldn't have to. I've been hacking for about 35 years but I've got to the point where I'd rather my hacks were a more productive use of my time.
I've been waiting for Lollipop, especially for my 2012 Nexus 7 which continues to be slow despite clearing the cache partition. I am also still waiting for an update on my Nexus 4, my daughter's Nexus 4, and my other three family members Moto Gs.
My understanding is that 5.0.0 and 5.0.1 both have serious bugs. One of them is especially bad if you are using Canadian French settings. Since I am located in Canada, I wonder if they are slowing down the rollout here out of an abundance of caution.
I wouldn't mind the wait nearly so much if Google was more forthcoming with explanations. Their consumer support leaves much to be desired.
In the meantime, 4.4.4 continues to work perfectly for me.
When I stream video from Netflix, the server chooses an encoding and resolution specific to the device running their client software. I assume that other video streaming servers behave in the same manner: why stream HD to a 320x800 display?
In the case of the Chromecast which is presumably displaying to a 1920x10820 display, is there some sort of passthrough signalling that will let the streaming device use a more appropriate resolution? Or do I only get the same resolution as the intermediate device?
On a related note, can somebody tell me why this device is desirable? I'm still struggling with the use case here. What is the benefit of Chromecast over something like teeny little wdtv box? It's smaller and cheaper but does a lot less.
When I was in engineering at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario) in the mid-80s, it was already mandatory for students to take a humanities course each year (after the first). I took introductory Classics, Philosophy, and Religion. They weren't bird courses but they were a nice break from the applied maths and science courses that filled the rest of my life.
Of course, some engineers gamed the system by taking the Logic course from the Philosophy Department.
then why do we have the problems in the first place?
Seriously, if the problems are that easy to solve, then why aren't they pre-emptively detected and repaired by some of the bloatware installed on enterprise machines these days?
I strongly suspect that this will simply be slightly more sophisticated automated call routing with voice recognition - in otherwords, just a way of delaying the costly, but still inevitable, point where one needs to talk to a human with a clue (i.e. knows where to route the ticket).
As most of us are aware, the standard IT support strategy for the truly meaty problems is simply to delay, delay, delay, until the customer gives up and goes away. Certainly, that's how HP does it (using well-meaning Indian, Malaysian, Costa Rican, and Bulgarian staff who don't have the authority to actually investigate problems).
and have never noticed a problem. This has always struck me as a no-brainer and it's annoyed the hell out of me that I have to modify the setting on every platform for each of my five family members.
I can't wait for them to change the default behaviour and I'll be very interested to see if they uncover any side effects that could conceivably be considered undesirable by the user.
My biggest worry is what the websites might do to circumvent the change.
Talking on a phone is different from talking to the passenger beside you. When one talks to a remote person, the brain creates a remote environment and moves its attention to that space. I'm not sure what is going on neurologically but the effect is very strong and I don't see an easy way around the problem. Perhaps we need to create an avatar for the other party that sits beside the driver in the car.
I'm fed up with banks, Paypal, Interac, and other middlemen taking a cut of every transaction. My governments have a legal right and a need to tax us but I didn't sign up for a 3% premium on all goods just to benefit the banks.
I don't particularly trust my government but I don't distrust them as much as banks and other commercial enterprises.
The author writes How would you change if you were twice as smart as you are now...Or whenever it is you'll think we'd have the technology to travel to another solar system
Having the technology to travel to another solar system does not necessarily require a super-human intelligence. The author's conclusion may be correct but not due to this very weak argument.
One might instead argue that a race that has the capability of travelling to another solar system would be strongly motivated to do so simply because they have nearly exhausted the mysteries of their own system.
Consider an extremely long-lived race with a very slow metabolism. Unlike humans, they might very well have the patience for such a long trip and and a biological advantage that makes the prospect less daunting.
And back on the topic of intelligence, my experience is that curiosity is strongly correlated with intelligence. Furthermore, what would be the imperative driving the development of such intelligence? It would most likely be either curiosity or a threat. In either case, migration/exploration is likely.
In a nutshell, I still use Perl heavily because I get paid to produce software - mostly embedded realtime telecom s/w but also a lot of tools as well. Pragmatism dictates that I use the tools with which I am proficient and which are universally available.
Twenty years ago, I had to use Bourne shell more than I liked because I could only count on the availability of/bin/sh. Now, I have the luxury of being able to expect/bin/perl (version 5 no less). This counts for a lot in an environment where my hundreds of colleagues and I use hundreds of different servers with different operating systems, distributions, versions, and architectures.
Yes, there is a lot to complain about with Perl but at the end of the day, Perl is still an excellent tool for many many problems and won't disappear from industrial applications any time soon.
His points may be correct but his coarse behaviour reflects poorly on him. I like Linux. I love Git. I think he's brilliant. But I don't think he's a particularly nice or admirable person.
And, because he is a public figure, I think his comments reflect poorly on the community that he (in part) represents.
Didn't his mom ever scold him for potty mouth? Or is that an unpalatable trait that he acquired to voice his arrogance?
An entire industry was spawned because Windows was conceived without security in mind. Now that Microsoft is redressing the oversight, I don't think many people outside the third-party AV industry will be crying foul.
I'm no fan of Microsoft but I'm happy with MSSE and do not foresee an antitrust suit because of it.
It's more important to provide a rich suite of libraries such as "CPAN".
Students (and new-grads) aren't realistically going to have that great an influence in most business environments.
Most programmers will happily learn a new language for personal interest but before they start using it professionally, they need all manner of additional features such as support from third party libraries, code analysis tools, IDEs and SCMs, and debugging tools.
This standalone book walks the reader episodically through the history of man from a proto-mammal surviving the K-Pg mass extinction event 65 million years ago, through the evolution of primates, to the modern day where mankind dooms itself, and then through the future in increasingly depressing steps while our decendents are farmed like cattle to the far far distant end of life on Earth.
"Evolution" is a great cautionary tale but the finale where our descendents and the planet are literally unrecognizable is depressing and continues to haunt my immortal imagination.
You don't mention which grades she is teaching. Is it possible that she is teaching the wrong age group for her style of teaching? You mention "disrespectful criminals" which makes me think of inner city middle school. Perhaps a change of venue would be more satisfying than abandoning her dream.
Our schools *need* teachers with a love of math. Please don't give up.
My experience is that hotel/internet-cafe access is too slow and/or flaky and/or expensive for the purpose you describe. Pay-as-you-go HSPA cell access is very expensive (in Europe and even more-so in North America). I guess if you're only taking 300 small jpegs per day, you might be able to afford the Internet access charges but my experience, even in Europe, is that your best bet is to make your own local backups as you go.
My strategy is to travel with a small netbook and a USB drive. Each evening, I offload my SD cards onto both devices and then keep the netbook in the hotel safe or car and the USB drive with my camera.
For example, I just returned from two weeks in Tuscany and am currently importing 34GB of photos into a new Lightroom catalog. There's no way that I could have transferred that data over the Internet while on the road without wasting a lot of valuable travel time. Heck, it's taking 20 minutes just to copy the photos off the USB drive at 30MB/s! How much time can you spend drinking espresso waiting for uploads?
In many industries such as telecom, targets have moved from proprietary operating systems (such as VxWorks) to embedded Linux. When your target is Linux, there are obvious advantages to having a Linux-based development environment, especially around emulation tools.
While some (okay, most) employers might still use Windows for the office side of the business, it is often possible, especially in R&D, to relegate the Windows world to a VM on your Linux development box.
Good luck in your hunt.
Facebook is full of underage users and lets them "go legit" when they turn 13. As a consequence, they've captured this audience and all of the adults that they'll grow into (as well as a goodly number of their parents).
Google+ requires that users be eighteen. That's ridiculous. Ostensibly, it is temporary but I've seen no suggestion from Google that this is any sort of priority.
This is why Google+ will never challenge Facebook. When Amazon and Facebook merge, they'll rule the world.
How very unfortunate.
This will be interesting for food images. Photographs of real food are invariably unappetizing; we're hard-wired to recognize food that is just a little bit off.
Professional food images are invariably made attractive through the use of some pretty unappetizing material, some of it not even edible.
Slashdot Mirror
It's incredible how misleading this headline is. Technical terminology confuses the lay public once again.
This TIOBE index relies on web queries for each programming language. Frankly, C programmers don't need to ask questions about the language itself since it is so simple.
I'm not questioning the popularity of the various languages but it seems to me that this metric favours the more complex languages.
Finally, in the embedded real-time space, there is still no real substitute for C.
HFS may be thirty years old but we still have major headaches transferring files between Macs and other machines. I truly believe that Apple would be better served if they invested in a open filesystem format.
I strongly recommend Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It will shed a lot of light on the nature of language and help you understand that it cannot be constructed by fiat.
To summarize Pinker's thesis succinctly, language is created by each individual by instinct and at a young age . There are a couple of fascinating examples from recent history that demonstrate the process. One is in a deaf community in Nicaragua: after the Sandinista war when a semblence of calm returned to the country, the authorities were able to create schools for the deaf. Initially, the students were teenagers collected from various villages. They had lived in isolation with their families and no education in sign language. "Instinctively", each had created their own sign language. When they were brought together, the students merged their separate sign languages into a pidgin. The interesting bit is what happened when younger children subsequently joined the school: since their language instinct was still creating language, they were able to adapt the nascent pidgin into a more more coherent sign language complete with grammatical rules; the result was much more expressive and coherent - and completely independent of other established sign languages. Today, it is a recognized sign language.
It is constructive to think of language as something created by each individual; everybody has their own language and they evolve separately and over time, driven by social imperatives.
On the topic of redundancy: it is a necessary part of all languages. It would be a huge mistake to try to design a more efficientlanguage. This is in part because languages must be able to evolve. They are never static.
Regarding rules: one of the reasons that English has been so successful is its forgiving nature and its willingness to absorb shamelessly from other languages.
In short, I think you will find it more enjoyable and fruitful to channel your interest into other aspects of language. Over the past decade there have been huge advances in language recognition and translation; you might like to start with those fields since they are current, topical, and valuable.
You might also wish to check out another one of my favourite books: The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. Both of these books are targeted at the layman and are very enjoyable reads.
I completely misconstrued the title of this post. I interpreted it to refer to IT end-users who are resigned to interminable frustration and poor service. That speaks volumes about the business. How depressing.
Of course but (a) it's no longer an interesting learning exercise, (b) I have 6 devices, and (c) I shouldn't have to. I've been hacking for about 35 years but I've got to the point where I'd rather my hacks were a more productive use of my time.
I've been waiting for Lollipop, especially for my 2012 Nexus 7 which continues to be slow despite clearing the cache partition. I am also still waiting for an update on my Nexus 4, my daughter's Nexus 4, and my other three family members Moto Gs.
My understanding is that 5.0.0 and 5.0.1 both have serious bugs. One of them is especially bad if you are using Canadian French settings. Since I am located in Canada, I wonder if they are slowing down the rollout here out of an abundance of caution.
I wouldn't mind the wait nearly so much if Google was more forthcoming with explanations. Their consumer support leaves much to be desired.
In the meantime, 4.4.4 continues to work perfectly for me.
In the case of the Chromecast which is presumably displaying to a 1920x10820 display, is there some sort of passthrough signalling that will let the streaming device use a more appropriate resolution? Or do I only get the same resolution as the intermediate device?
On a related note, can somebody tell me why this device is desirable? I'm still struggling with the use case here. What is the benefit of Chromecast over something like teeny little wdtv box? It's smaller and cheaper but does a lot less.
This sounds like it is just what the world needs. Is this stuff economically recyclable? And is the material environmentally benign?
I find it depressing that everybody is so excited about cheaper plastic junk. I'd rather invest in an "unMakerBot" that consumed household clutter.
Now the printed trachea that saved that girls life: that's a worthwhile application of this technology!
When I was in engineering at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario) in the mid-80s, it was already mandatory for students to take a humanities course each year (after the first). I took introductory Classics, Philosophy, and Religion. They weren't bird courses but they were a nice break from the applied maths and science courses that filled the rest of my life.
Of course, some engineers gamed the system by taking the Logic course from the Philosophy Department.
then why do we have the problems in the first place?
Seriously, if the problems are that easy to solve, then why aren't they pre-emptively detected and repaired by some of the bloatware installed on enterprise machines these days?
I strongly suspect that this will simply be slightly more sophisticated automated call routing with voice recognition - in otherwords, just a way of delaying the costly, but still inevitable, point where one needs to talk to a human with a clue (i.e. knows where to route the ticket).
As most of us are aware, the standard IT support strategy for the truly meaty problems is simply to delay, delay, delay, until the customer gives up and goes away. Certainly, that's how HP does it (using well-meaning Indian, Malaysian, Costa Rican, and Bulgarian staff who don't have the authority to actually investigate problems).
and have never noticed a problem. This has always struck me as a no-brainer and it's annoyed the hell out of me that I have to modify the setting on every platform for each of my five family members.
I can't wait for them to change the default behaviour and I'll be very interested to see if they uncover any side effects that could conceivably be considered undesirable by the user.
My biggest worry is what the websites might do to circumvent the change.
Talking on a phone is different from talking to the passenger beside you. When one talks to a remote person, the brain creates a remote environment and moves its attention to that space. I'm not sure what is going on neurologically but the effect is very strong and I don't see an easy way around the problem. Perhaps we need to create an avatar for the other party that sits beside the driver in the car.
I'm fed up with banks, Paypal, Interac, and other middlemen taking a cut of every transaction. My governments have a legal right and a need to tax us but I didn't sign up for a 3% premium on all goods just to benefit the banks. I don't particularly trust my government but I don't distrust them as much as banks and other commercial enterprises.
The author writes How would you change if you were twice as smart as you are now...Or whenever it is you'll think we'd have the technology to travel to another solar system
Having the technology to travel to another solar system does not necessarily require a super-human intelligence. The author's conclusion may be correct but not due to this very weak argument.
One might instead argue that a race that has the capability of travelling to another solar system would be strongly motivated to do so simply because they have nearly exhausted the mysteries of their own system.
Consider an extremely long-lived race with a very slow metabolism. Unlike humans, they might very well have the patience for such a long trip and and a biological advantage that makes the prospect less daunting.
And back on the topic of intelligence, my experience is that curiosity is strongly correlated with intelligence. Furthermore, what would be the imperative driving the development of such intelligence? It would most likely be either curiosity or a threat. In either case, migration/exploration is likely.
In a nutshell, I still use Perl heavily because I get paid to produce software - mostly embedded realtime telecom s/w but also a lot of tools as well. Pragmatism dictates that I use the tools with which I am proficient and which are universally available. Twenty years ago, I had to use Bourne shell more than I liked because I could only count on the availability of /bin/sh. Now, I have the luxury of being able to expect /bin/perl (version 5 no less). This counts for a lot in an environment where my hundreds of colleagues and I use hundreds of different servers with different operating systems, distributions, versions, and architectures.
Yes, there is a lot to complain about with Perl but at the end of the day, Perl is still an excellent tool for many many problems and won't disappear from industrial applications any time soon.
His points may be correct but his coarse behaviour reflects poorly on him. I like Linux. I love Git. I think he's brilliant. But I don't think he's a particularly nice or admirable person. And, because he is a public figure, I think his comments reflect poorly on the community that he (in part) represents. Didn't his mom ever scold him for potty mouth? Or is that an unpalatable trait that he acquired to voice his arrogance?
An entire industry was spawned because Windows was conceived without security in mind. Now that Microsoft is redressing the oversight, I don't think many people outside the third-party AV industry will be crying foul. I'm no fan of Microsoft but I'm happy with MSSE and do not foresee an antitrust suit because of it.
It's more important to provide a rich suite of libraries such as "CPAN".
Students (and new-grads) aren't realistically going to have that great an influence in most business environments.
Most programmers will happily learn a new language for personal interest but before they start using it professionally, they need all manner of additional features such as support from third party libraries, code analysis tools, IDEs and SCMs, and debugging tools.
That is a steep barrier to entry.
This standalone book walks the reader episodically through the history of man from a proto-mammal surviving the K-Pg mass extinction event 65 million years ago, through the evolution of primates, to the modern day where mankind dooms itself, and then through the future in increasingly depressing steps while our decendents are farmed like cattle to the far far distant end of life on Earth.
"Evolution" is a great cautionary tale but the finale where our descendents and the planet are literally unrecognizable is depressing and continues to haunt my immortal imagination.
You don't mention which grades she is teaching. Is it possible that she is teaching the wrong age group for her style of teaching? You mention "disrespectful criminals" which makes me think of inner city middle school. Perhaps a change of venue would be more satisfying than abandoning her dream. Our schools *need* teachers with a love of math. Please don't give up.
My experience is that hotel/internet-cafe access is too slow and/or flaky and/or expensive for the purpose you describe. Pay-as-you-go HSPA cell access is very expensive (in Europe and even more-so in North America). I guess if you're only taking 300 small jpegs per day, you might be able to afford the Internet access charges but my experience, even in Europe, is that your best bet is to make your own local backups as you go. My strategy is to travel with a small netbook and a USB drive. Each evening, I offload my SD cards onto both devices and then keep the netbook in the hotel safe or car and the USB drive with my camera. For example, I just returned from two weeks in Tuscany and am currently importing 34GB of photos into a new Lightroom catalog. There's no way that I could have transferred that data over the Internet while on the road without wasting a lot of valuable travel time. Heck, it's taking 20 minutes just to copy the photos off the USB drive at 30MB/s! How much time can you spend drinking espresso waiting for uploads?
In many industries such as telecom, targets have moved from proprietary operating systems (such as VxWorks) to embedded Linux. When your target is Linux, there are obvious advantages to having a Linux-based development environment, especially around emulation tools. While some (okay, most) employers might still use Windows for the office side of the business, it is often possible, especially in R&D, to relegate the Windows world to a VM on your Linux development box. Good luck in your hunt.
Facebook is full of underage users and lets them "go legit" when they turn 13. As a consequence, they've captured this audience and all of the adults that they'll grow into (as well as a goodly number of their parents). Google+ requires that users be eighteen. That's ridiculous. Ostensibly, it is temporary but I've seen no suggestion from Google that this is any sort of priority. This is why Google+ will never challenge Facebook. When Amazon and Facebook merge, they'll rule the world. How very unfortunate.
This will be interesting for food images. Photographs of real food are invariably unappetizing; we're hard-wired to recognize food that is just a little bit off. Professional food images are invariably made attractive through the use of some pretty unappetizing material, some of it not even edible.