find out what's really going on, hear the latest gossip, associate a face and manner with someone you've corresponded with, and perhaps have a party too, well, that's all really worthwhile.
It's a primate thing I suspect, but while chimps go in for mutual grooming, researchers have conferences.
Sorry, I was in it for the science and not for the soap opera.
And how in the name of Jebuz you expected to get science from a conference? I mean, seriously, think about. You are in a conference. They talk papers. You listen. Do you think in that short, one-way process you would actually *get* the science? Seriously man...
You go there to see who's who, to expand your current (or future) professional network (which you should independently of whether you are in school or not.) To explore possible peers in research and prospective employers. All in all, to do what any person with half a brain does: to actively cultivate your career.
Conferences, like education, are what you make out of them. That you think professional network in a soap opera, that speaks more about your attitude than your intellectual acumen. You can pull that kind of stuff and come on top if you are of Dijkstra caliber. Are you? If not, you better double-check some of science notions you have.
That type attitude towards career networking does not make you smarter or more scientifically-inclined, not one bit. And if that's how you approach opportunities to cultivate your education and career, there is a good chance your professional future is going to be full of blunders, made in haste for holding emotional views that aren't even that intellectual to begin with.
On the other hand, I've yet to see personalized advertising systems which is accurate enough to be of value. I've never clicked any Google or Facebook ads because they have never hit anything that I would want. Until that gets addressed, there's not a huge future in that either.
Hi. This is purely anecdote, so it will be natural if you take this with a grain of salt. In the last couple of months I've been seeing an improvement in the type of advertisements I see (read get) with Facebook. I've not stated in Facebook any interests in training for embedded systems and FPGA stuff and crap (rather, I've done it in other forums, blogs and in StackOverflow.) And yet, I've been getting advertisement for equipment and training that is right up my alley, things that sometimes I never find even with the most extensive of googling efforts. Similarly with other activities I like (crossfit, MMA, etc.) Whatever FB is doing wrt to personalized advertisements, at least on the narrow fields of interest that touch a chord me, they must be doing something right.
Obviously, YMMV, but I just find it curious.
Re:Another great Python 3.x series release
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Python 3.2 Released
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Code written in COBOL still runs and will never be re-writen (not in our lifetimes).
not true at all, I've re-architected major COBOL systems (and their ISAM / VSAM databases) several times in my career, to SQL DBMS with J2EE and scripting languages.
Reading comprehension dude. I didn't say all existing COBOL code, I simply said Code written in COBOL as in "the general case" or as in "on average" (which is the only way to properly interpret such a sentence.) Yes, you can make a living porting COBOL code to other platforms, yes, it does occur. And yes, it can still occur against the backdrop of the obscenely immense COBOL code base that won't be rewritten anytime soon (if ever.) Your statement - while true - does not contradict the later.
Re:Another great Python 3.x series release
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Python 3.2 Released
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and we should have gotten rid of this one-class-def-per-class-file non-sense.
Why? Doing this is almost always a sign of poor design and is usually equivalent to the god code C/C++ source files that are a major pain in the ass to work with. Sure, sometimes the line can be a bit blurry, but is it really THAT hard to split things into distinct pieces? To not be able to do so reeks of either laziness or someone poorly designing their software.
Jesus Christ, et tu? What the hell is wrong with you people?
I did not say one-class-per-java-source-code-file. I said one-class-per-class-file. Here, I highlighted the part for you.
I'm not talking about Java source code for * sakes. I'm not talking about the number of classes within one single java source file (and btw, you can have multiple classes defined in one.java file). I'm talking about the output of the compiler, which generates one.class file (bytecode) per class definition, and the JVM inability to operate otherwise. This has serious implications at runtime when it comes to allocating permanent VM memory and can put the brakes on people designing programs with JVM-based functional languages.
There is a reason why the Dalvik's platform does not have this constrain. Forcing one class definition per compiled bytecode.class file is one thing that we should cut the f* off the JVM independently of whether that is backwards compatible or not.
Not to deviate from the Python-oriented topic of this discussion, but this is a good example of when it is a good time to break backwards compatibility (which is what is being discussed.)
Re:Another great Python 3.x series release
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Python 3.2 Released
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should have gotten rid of this one-class-def-per-class-file non-sense.
I'm actually a fan of this! I do it in my c++ coding as well.
If a class is specialized enough to only really be useful to one class.. it can be defined as part of that class, but I generally avoid that for all but the most trivial stuff (specialized action listeners that need to take parameters being my most common reason for this).
I'm sorry but you don't seem to know what I'm talking about.
I'm not talking about Java source code (where you can have multiple classes defined in one.java file). I'm talking about the output of the compiler, which generates one.class file (bytecode) per class definition, and the JVM inability to operate otherwise. This has serious implications at runtime when it comes to allocating permanent VM memory and can put the brakes on people designing programs with JVM-based functional languages.
Re:Another great Python 3.x series release
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Python 3.2 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This is my biggest complaint with python (I have others, I'll admit I have little love for python). This is not the way to develop a language.
I'll admit I've never developed a programming language, but I have worked on large, long term libraries, and I think the same principle applies. All those stupid design decisions and approaches that are now obsolete and make no sense.. you have to make them still work anyway. You can spew lots of warnings.. but to me breaking backwards compatibility in a _programming language_ is sloppy and completely unacceptable.
Well, you don't have to migrate to Python 3.x. There are a lot of Java 1.2 code out there that will never be migrated, code that sooner or later will not run as intended with new JVMs and JDKs. Code written in COBOL still runs and will never be re-writen (not in our lifetimes).
If it works for you on the 2.x series, most likely it will work fine in years to come. Coming from a Java world, I can tell you I wish the JCP had done the same with many Java crap. Hashtables and vectors should have been deprecated long ago; the '+=' operator in Strings should also have been deprecated; we should have created a damned new collections library so that we could have true generics without type erasure; the JVM should have implemented support for tail recursion; and we should have gotten rid of this one-class-def-per-class-file non-sense.
True, it would have broken a lot of stuff, but only for those that want/need to migrate - many do not. But it would have been a way to get things right and undo a lot of past design wrongs. At some point, it is time to cut backwards compatibility. For those who can't go to the 3.x series, they should simply stay with the 2.x series and work as usual.
Re:Another great Python 3.x series release
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Python 3.2 Released
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That no one will use because there is no compelling reason to port all that cool stuff developed for the 2.x series.
Yeah, because everything that needed to be developed has already been done so under the 2.x series. No one will ever need or think to develop something new on the 3.x series. That's why all we have is COBOL because nothing new has ever been needed after all those apps were written with it, oh wait, never mind.
'I had been out of work for nine months when I was offered a job setting up an [IT] offshore help desk. Would it be ethical to accept the offer?'
Only if you foolishly think the reality of a global economy are strictly a matter of morality. It isn't.
The job seeker, who noted his father's auto-industry job was outsourced, chose to ignore Cohen's ethics advice — as well as his own wife's — and declined the job out of principle. He continues to seek work.
His moral obligation was to get the job, make money here, pay his taxes and infuse his net income back into our national economy. Instead, he chose a false high ground, on a false, absurd principle, unethically denying the realities of a global economy that, for better or worse, is here to stay, ultimately becoming, through his now willful unemployment, a burden to our economy.
The reality is that you can't put a moral label on something that exists outside of morality. For too long we have been banking our prosperity on the fact that half of the world live in the stone age.
Morality, empathy to our compatriots and feelings aside, it is unreasonable, impractical, and ultimately unethical to expect to keep one's blue collar job here when it can be done by a blue collar worker somewhere else for much less and without possessing any significant educational advantage. It harms our ability to adapt to changing realities. Ergo, by the damage that it inflicts, and by the false sense of correctness that it perpetuates, it becomes unethical.
Offshoring is an inevitability. It's been here since we lost our microchip production capabilities to the Japanese (who rightfully earned it by being capable of producing more and better for less.) The only way to stop jobs going offshore is with massive government subsidies (as in Japan subsidizing the production of rice.) The cost of subsidizing are much more enormous compared to the number of jobs being lost.
The world has changed independently of the colors in our flag, and we either adapt or sink. Morality has very little to do with it if you realize (hopefully) that you don't exist in a world of absolutes, and - more importantly - the realities of the world take place independently of how you feel about them.
Whatever jobs go out shore, they'll go independently of whether you take the job or not. And your individual obligation, your ethical obligation is to take a job, earn the money, and either save it or infuse it back through local consumption back into the economy. That in tandem with actively participating in a long-term solution - artificially keeping jobs here (and thus becoming uncompetitive against the remaining 95% of the population), that is not a long-term solution.
What is needed as a long term is to rebuild our production capabilities, and to find markets and niches on things that nobody else can do in terms of qualities or numbers. Ultimately we might also have to contemplate the possibility of our salaries might have to adjust to the realities of an ever leveling playing field as other people raise their level of industrialization (which is ultimately their God-given right.)
It is ethical to worry about offshoring. It is ethical to be concerned about your compatriots. It is also ethical to buy artifacts made with as little offshoring as possible, whenever possible and without inflicting harm to your budget.
It is not ethical, however, to refuse a job in a time of massive unemployment, on a misguided hope that such a negligible and inconsequential act as a moral value and that somehow is going to stop something that - if you believe in the right of people for pursuing competitiveness and industrialization and in our obligation to be realistically competitive - must happen.
Microsoft has been embracing Linux for over a decade now as well - They're obviously open-source friendly and showing their worth as a team player
http://www.mslinux.org/
Non sequitur. The argument that Dell being or not being a Linux-integrator (or a Windows-only integrator) is logically independent of MS position (and ulterior motives, whichever they might be) with respect to Linux and/or open source.
In fact, the truth or falsehood of one company X using and providing services based technologies Y is based solely on one yes/no question and nothing else: does company X provides services based on Y? Their position, promotions and motivations (ideological or economical) are of no consequence to true/false value of that question.
Besides, the original question and statement centered about whether Dell had experience doing integration with Linux, not about its allegiance to open source (and the former does not depend on the later independently of what the FOSS chickenhawks would like to sing). If that had been the topic under discussion, then maybe your post might have had some logic. But it wasn't.
Well yes... but supporting RHEL is not supporting Linux, just as supporting Ubuntu isn't supporting Linux.
It's kind of like saying a company supports Mac. What version... OS9, OS/X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard?
So to put in a nutshell, they're a RHEL shop.
Which is fine and dandy if you stick to RHEL (and for many shops, it's just a matter of sticking to a single distro.) See, the original question was as follows:
Why buy Linux from a traditionally Windows-only integrator with little Linux experience?
That question itself makes no much sense since 1) there are many distros of Linux, each with its own idiosyncracies, and 2) Dell is not a Windows-only integrator given that they also do integration work with RHEL, a well-known Linux distro (and ergo pointing to the claim of Dell having little Linux experience (they do through RHEL) a fallacy.
The post made by the AC (the one you were replying to) then makes a lot of sense ("No, Dell is not a Windows-only integrator, and they have a lot more than 'little' experience on Linux via RHEL"), more sense that the post it replies to. That is, AC's post points to the fallacy of the post that preceeded it.
So, given that RHEL is a well-known distro, one that is also of widespread use, it is then quite acceptable to say that Dell (or whoever) is a Linux integrator. The opposite of this would inevitably and logically imply and demand a definition of "Linux integration" to cover every single major Linux distribution at best (and to cover every single Linux distribution independent of obscurity or adoption at worse). It makes no sense, and it is a definition that has no practical value beyond the strong distro predilection of people, not companies or needs.
A company wants servers to run on Linux with some type of integration support. Be it Ubuntu or RH, it is of small relevance as the decisions to go with Dell or whoever are more in terms of volume, price and other factors beyond the name of the distro. So, in that backdrop, saying that Dell is a Linux-distro is a legitimate statement.
Mind you that I don't care much about Dell and their equipment TBH.
As bad as Mubarak is, the Islamic Brotherhood is an order of magnitude worse. If democracy can result in the Islamic Brotherhood gaining any amount of power, I'd rather see democracy abolished worldwide.
Not necessarily. I know that anything with "Islamic" on its name ends up being equated to Osama Bin Laden among the apple pie crowd, but give me a fucking break, the Islamic Brotherhood (as it exists in Egypt) is hardly a monolithic religious/political entity. 10% of the population is Christian, and a large segment of the Muslim population is secular (secular being a relative term.) The fear of ZOMG! Sharia as a result of the Muslin Brotherhood winning elections (a possible, but still not sure outcome) is blown way out of proportion buddy.
The truth that China's dictatorship and America's multinational corporations don't want you to know
The overall PISA scores of American students are lowered by the poor results for blacks and Latinos, who make up 35 percent of America’s K-12 student population. Asian-American students have an average score of 541, similar to those of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. The non-Hispanic white American student average of 525 is comparable to the averages of Canada (524), New Zealand (521), and Australia (515). In contrast, the average PISA readings score of Latino students is 446 and black students is 441.
As for college, the claim that Americans must catch up with the more advanced Chinese is absurd. Chinese students yearn to study in American universities -- not vice versa. Twenty-five percent of Americans graduate from college, compared to only 5 percent of Chinese. Yes, that’s a large number in absolute terms, given China’s population. But American CEOs who offshore production have no right to complain that too few Americans are going into science and engineering. Why should young Americans commit career suicide by entering occupations that are going to be offshored?
That item in bold right there is a fallacy. If you enter in science and/or engineering and remain with baseline, comoditizable (sp) skills, then yeah, you will be offshored. If you have talent and become specialized, you will not. Period.
As it stands, we do have a saturation of software developers (not so much with other engineering and science fields.) We have been having it (as well as a lowering of CS standards) since the dot-com guacamole. So it is natural with declining standards and saturation that software developers will feel the brunt of offshoring more than other engineering and science disciplines.
The risk of offshoring is permanent, but not so necessarily real if you work your skills. If you don't enter a career because you fear the Chinese or Indians will take yar jab, then you probably weren't a good candidate for that career anyways. If you are a good candidate, you'll go for it, you'll make it work for you, and you'll develop your skills into specific technical, hard-to-offshore niches... and those niches do not have to involve RF circuit design or rocket science.
I've yet to see engineers that work for the DoD, DoE being offshored. No way no how. Same with health care. I'd like to see HIPAA-regulated jobs (including software) being offshored.
Besides, what would the option be for science and engineering? Management? Incidentally, the number of MBA graduates from a local university was like three times more than all the graduate level science and engineering graduates combined two years ago. That's a localized picture of what's wrong with this offshore-boogie-man fearmongering. We are not going to MBA it out.
There are other careers that are hard to offshore: medical, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, agriculture, energy. Of course, none of those will be options for the majority who are too concerned with being offshored if they go into science or engineering. Being offshored is not a strong fear for people who really, really want to get into engineering and sciences (which is the type of people we want in those fields.)
The article does have a point in saying that American CEO's don't have a right to complain for a lack of scientists and engineers... but it points it out for the wrong reasons. There is no shortage (at least quantitatively speaking.)
lolwut? Since when has math NOT been a big part of computer science when computer science is a branch of mathematics? You must conflate computer science with programming or software engineering.
Math shmath. It's much more logic than math.
It is Axiomatic Mathematical Logic, a branch of Mathematics. So to say CS is "more logic than math" does not make any sense, unless you are conflating Axiomatic Mathematical Logic with Logic in the broader/philosophical sense.
Unless you count logic as part of math, but I don't.
How does it feel to stand in a does-not-compute vantage point? Seriously, any CS graduate worth its CS salt knows (or should know) that the logic piece in computer science is simply axiomatic mathematical logic and set theory.
Finite State Machines? Logic
Grammars? Logic
Resource Contention? Logic
Composite Systems? Logic
Encryption? Logic and the ability to multiply and divide numbers, which is about as "math-centered" as paying your bills.
No.
Yes. Every single example you mentioned involves theory of computation (which utilizes but it is not the same as axiomatic mathematical logic) in addition to discrete mathematics, combinatorics, axiomatic set and category theories, and graph theory. Please entertain me by telling me that the last four are not branches of mathematics.
As for encryption, it is based on number theory and abstract algebra. Fields, rings, eliptic curves, that's all way above the ability of multiplication and division, serious subjects in Mathematics proper. Seriously, where did you get your CS education from?
Who needs a distributed source control system if everyone on my team works in the same office?
Says the person who's job is about to be exported to India.
1. Maybe your is going to be exported to India. After all, what do you know about the OP's job to make that assertion? Or are you one of those who think offshoring is both a) inevitable and b) a tragedy?
2. What does distributed source control has to do with remote teams? People have done offshoring with CVS successfully for cry out loud. The distributed part in the "distributed version control" name is not what you think it is. It is not about physical distribution/networking per see.
It seems like a fairly logical list, but I've noticed that the list is geared more toward waterfall, and not for, say, Agile
Que?
for instance "Do you have a spec?" doesn't really apply because the requirements become the spec.
In other words you still have a spec... in agile. And specs have always been about requirements, as in requirements specifications. To be honest, I don't understand your differentiation between specs and requirements, and neither the supposed applicability of the list to waterfall vs agile. I'm my own personal experience (having done strict waterfall, iterative and agile), the list seems to apply rather well in a general sense to each type of development cycle.
Also Agile often has non-dedicated roles
That's YOUR definition. There are agile teams with defined roles and ownerships. There is nothing in agility that calls for a removal of roles.
- for instance, I work in Product Validation and in waterfall I do nothing but write test plans and run tests, but in Agile I manage the Lab Manager VMs, write schema, and run unit tests, none of which I would do in my traditional role (it doesn't hurt that I am a programmer originally hired into automation, but that got outsourced, and I've filled a variety of roles since then like US government security testing, which the US doesn't allow to be outsourced).
That's YOUR experience. Nothing wrong with that, but it should be obvious that you cannot define the general "agile" experience using your anecdotal experiences. Also, and no offense, the more that your job and skills can be commoditized, the more that they will be offshore. Specially in the commercial sector, the best way not to get offshored is to become a highly specialized expert on a particular field or niche.
To reiterate, thinking and coding are not mutually exclusive activities with respect of time. Yes, good developers spend a lot of time thinking... but it just so happen that such thinking is highly interactive with the activities of coding and documenting and communicating via chat or e-mail. There is simply no way for someone to work in such an environment for long enough without developing some decent typing skills. No way. No how. You show me someone that claims to be a programmer but who struggles with the keyboard at less than 40 words per minute, that will make me go "uh huh."
Good programmers spend the vast majority of their time thinking, not typing. A better music analogy than Atwood's hunt-and-peck pianist is composers. Composers reiterate over their ideas for a period of time then write to paper only when they feel the ideas may be worth committing to.
Yes, but that thinking doesn't necessarily happen while constantly staring at the monitor, nor it occurs uninterrupted until you discover the meaning of life. Beyond required phases of analysis and design, or as a response to inevitable interruptions to one's thinking muse, we do a lot of prototyping and experimentation. There is this thinking process that occurs by tinkering and exploring. Barring areas of high criticality, software development is a highly iterative process that involves bout of (sometimes aggressive) coding. I cannot see how someone can translate their streams of thought into code while struggling with the keyboard. Either a person develops decent typing skills or that person never really gets into that *zone* of coding productivity.
Another example is when you are not necessarily doing new design and development, but repetitive maintenance and extension of simple systems that you understand well. Say, adding simple struts actions, or modifying deployment scripts or one-time shell scripts to take care of something. You cannot do those by drawing a design on paper before coding. You code and try as you go.
The only time that you see good programmers spending much more time without actual coding is when working with highly formal processes (.ie. like those required by the DoD or DoE.) But even then, you spend a lot of time typing documenting what is on your head, your vision of what the system will be like and your arguments (and sometimes proofs) of why it should be so.
No matter how you cut it, the majority of time might not be into coding, but a substantial chunk of it will be typing in one manner or another.
There is a reasonable basis to assume that a slow typist is not a decent coding. After all, typing speed is something which is naturally developed as the person keeps hammering away at the keyboard. So, although typing speed does not guarantee coding proficiency, if someone does not pass enough time in front of a keyboard to develop any decent speed then it is expected that that person hasn't spent much time writing software. And if someone hasn't invested all that time writing code then quite certainly that person sucks at coding.
For my own personal case, I was a typist for about 8 years before I went down the coding path so my views might be a bit skewed and subjective.
With that out of the way...
I would tend to agree that there is a correlation of typing speed and software development experience (or there should be for a proficient programmer with a shitload of coding man-hours.) A person that doesn't spend enough time coding will simply code at sucking. And if that person does not have typing skills a-priori then that person will not have good typing skills. So, it is fair to assume that a person that works as a programmer should have decent typing skills, not because he/she needs them for coding, but as a side-effect of programming exposure, in a manner proportional to the amount of work hours doing coding.
That is, I would see it as suspect to see a programmer that cannot type proficiently, be it with all 10 fingers or simply with their index fingers. And I would not reserve that suspicion only to senior programmers but even to fresh-out-of-school ones. Not just good, but passionate CS/MIS students (either BS or AS degree seekers) will have sufficient coding hours under their belt to inevitably develop some typing dexterity. Passionate art students paint and sculpt a shitload. Passionate electrical engineers spend a shitload of hours building circuits. Passionate CS/MIS students spend a shitload of hours coding. In all cases, it is a shitload of hours beyond the minimum requirement to get a degree.
Will lack of typing dexterity mean with utmost infallibility that someone sucks at coding (or that was a slacker in school)? Obviously not. But it would be hard not to see it as suspect.
Another thing is that yes, typing dexterity helps with coding, with prototyping, with hacking. Yes, we need to plan and design before we code, but when you know exactly what needs to be done, or when you have a sufficiently good idea to start prototyping (or when you are in the middle of a hack that *must happen*), bro, you better be able to get those streams of thought fluently down to your keyboard via your fingers. If you have done coding work for real, getting down to some really nice (or ugly but necessary) code, you know what I mean - that you are in your mojo coding that thing down.
I cannot imagine getting myself into that *zone* of coding while struggling with the keyboard. No way, no how. I cannot see how someone could get into that *zone* without good typing skills. Period.
You don't need typing skills for design. But you certainly need it to crank some code when the muse inspire you. And if the muse doesn't inspire you often, you are either in the wrong career choice, or you suck.
Then, you'll probably explain how India managed to launch 30+ rockets successfully in the past, and launched one rocket successfully to the moon as well?
See, this is what I detest about Americans. The sheer smugness, ignorance, arrogance and incredible lack of knowledge is mind boggling. We have all this careful "analysis" and "observation" in the parent's post, and I'll bet my ass that this chap didn't know anything about the past record of the Indian space program and simply jumped in to post an inane comment, assuming that "hey, it's Eeeendiaaa, them tech support guys, laaats of them can't speak proper English, so how can they launch rockets?" Disgusting.
Either you are that stupid to not realize not all Americans are like, or you have been waiting for a "good" opportunity to level a disgusting generalization of us. Either way, you are not that much better from those you seek to criticize. I've meet quite a few tards from your own country (and from Pakistan) that claim as scientific stupid shit like the Romans couldn't do arithmetic while the Indians of the time could or some other inane shit to prop themselves above every other single race in the world.
It would never cross my mind to think about generalizing that stupidity over all people of your country. Guess why? It's called brains. You (and I mean you Bangalorean), you might be educated, but intelligent and decent, you are not. Until you realize how stupid it is to generalize, you will never be.
Eh, kinda. Advanced logic is the foundation for a lot of modern philosophy, but Wittgenstein and the rest of the 20th century analytics were just responding to the tremendous success of physics at figuring shit out, and wanted to smear some of that patina on themselves. Well, logic has always been a part of philosophy (think Socrates and his syllogisms) but reading the Tractatus is like reading a modern computer science proof.
Which isn't surprising, either, given that computer science is essentially applied philosophy in a lot of ways. (cf Bertrand Russell, etc.) If you've ever sat through a class where philosophers have sat there talking themselves in circles about how an object can't both be is-a and has-a at the same time, you (if you're like me) feel like leaping up and just telling them to fucking encode whatever paradox they're trying to create in a object hierarchy, and be done with it. I've long longed to write a book called "Computer Science has figured a lot of your shit out in practice, Philosophers".
It does kind of bug me though, that a person who graduates with a degree in mathematics (which is a fairly difficult, hard-nosed subject) gets a wishy-washy BA degree, whereas a hippie with a degree in "environmental engineering" gets a BS, but ultimately I think there's a lot of problems with our current conception with categorizing things into "science" and "not-science". Economics and Climatology are very analogous in terms of what they do - gathering tons of data, running analyses on it, and projecting things out into the future, and both are essentially "empirical studies of the world about us" (i.e. a sort of base level of science, though with the testing, replication and confirmation bits left out), but we consider one to be a social science and another to be hard science. There's also a huge debate now over Anthropology, after the American Anthropology Association dropped "science" from its official bits.
A patio or balcony still within view of the street. The underlying point is the Google Maps van didn't have to hop a fence and avoid Chopper to get pics of her underthings.
Just because it's the internet it doesn't mean it is in Kansas anymore. Having been in Japan, I can understand the cultural specifities that would lead this lady to expect privacy for something that for us, corn-bread and pumpkin pie folks might not be so. In Japanese culture, it is not appropriate to "look", and this is so strong in the Japanese ethos that indeed you would have satisfaction on what they expect as "privacy" over there.
Here Google (or whatever 3rd party on its behalf) did not obey the local customs, most likely an accidental turn of events. This simply showcases the fine lines that "Internet" companies must deal with when going global...
... though I won't be surprised to see quite a few/.ers failing to understand this point and mock this woman (that is living in Japan, within a Japanese context) for failing to bend over backwards to Western notions of privacy (or the comical interpretations of them found on/.) in this era of the interweebz. Who knows, maybe someone will berate her for not speaking English or something.
I mean seriously, stop expecting people to follow your notions of "privacy" specially when they are living in their own country and not yours.
I know it should not even register a blip in the grand scheme of business'ey things. But the whole application of technology on something so uber-stupid shoud be listed among some of the dumbest tech things seen in 2010... me thinks.
I doubt there are millions of admins running heavy shit. Linux is used by all accounts by at least 1% of Internet users, that's millions, and no, they are not all admins.
That argument would make sense if there was a one-to-one relation between an admin and a box running linux. Fortunately for the sane minded, it is not. Any minimum exposure to actual development and deployment on companies big and small would show you that the number of Linux non-desktop deployments is much larger than the number of desktop deployments. Plain and simple.
Now, if all you know is internet browsing usage, then I guess I can see why it seems to you that the number of Linux deployments are overwhelmingly of the desktop type. But that's a reflection of your experience, not work reality.
"The majority of Linux users are... *tada* admins running heavy shit on Linux, not desktop users."
You really shouldn't be proud of yourself for broadcasting your ignorance, and should definitely not be fooled by any mod ups. Perhaps you have heard of Mandriva? Ubuntu? The hundreds of other desktop distributions you can find with distrowatch? Linux is very popular on the desktop in Europe, and gaining popularity here in the US. Wallowing in your ignorance doesn't cure it.
You clueless Linux geek-wannabe. The number of distros have no bearing whatsoever on the linux desktop/server usage ratio. Not. At. All.
It is called logic, and it should be evident to anyone with a modicum of logic and arithmetic skills (which one would think a real geek would have) to see that you cannot deduce an abundance of desktop users over server deployments simply by looking at the number of distros. How stupid to make that type of leap.
I hate to toot my own horn, but Jesus, you are so clueless. I've been using Linux, UNIX, VAX and PICK systems for over 17 years now, in private and public sectors, on the enterprise and on defense. I've been using Linux for real usage since I was downloading the slackware distros through CompuServe on slow-as-molasses dial-up, way back when you had to configure everything by hand on a shell prompt (as opposed to point-n-click on whatever distro-specific GUI tool running on Gnome, KDE or whatever.) I dunno, I'm not a l33t hax0r rock start, but shit, maybe I might know a thing or two about Linux and how it is actually used.
It would be the day that some kookamimee distro fanboy is going to tell me about my ignorance about Linux.
Seriously, if you guys are the future users of real world Linux, we are screwed. The only difference between you people and Windows users is that you actually believe you are technical.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I was in it for the science and not for the soap opera.
And how in the name of Jebuz you expected to get science from a conference? I mean, seriously, think about. You are in a conference. They talk papers. You listen. Do you think in that short, one-way process you would actually *get* the science? Seriously man...
You go there to see who's who, to expand your current (or future) professional network (which you should independently of whether you are in school or not.) To explore possible peers in research and prospective employers. All in all, to do what any person with half a brain does: to actively cultivate your career.
Conferences, like education, are what you make out of them. That you think professional network in a soap opera, that speaks more about your attitude than your intellectual acumen. You can pull that kind of stuff and come on top if you are of Dijkstra caliber. Are you? If not, you better double-check some of science notions you have.
That type attitude towards career networking does not make you smarter or more scientifically-inclined, not one bit. And if that's how you approach opportunities to cultivate your education and career, there is a good chance your professional future is going to be full of blunders, made in haste for holding emotional views that aren't even that intellectual to begin with.
On the other hand, I've yet to see personalized advertising systems which is accurate enough to be of value. I've never clicked any Google or Facebook ads because they have never hit anything that I would want. Until that gets addressed, there's not a huge future in that either.
Hi. This is purely anecdote, so it will be natural if you take this with a grain of salt. In the last couple of months I've been seeing an improvement in the type of advertisements I see (read get) with Facebook. I've not stated in Facebook any interests in training for embedded systems and FPGA stuff and crap (rather, I've done it in other forums, blogs and in StackOverflow.) And yet, I've been getting advertisement for equipment and training that is right up my alley, things that sometimes I never find even with the most extensive of googling efforts. Similarly with other activities I like (crossfit, MMA, etc.) Whatever FB is doing wrt to personalized advertisements, at least on the narrow fields of interest that touch a chord me, they must be doing something right.
Obviously, YMMV, but I just find it curious.
Code written in COBOL still runs and will never be re-writen (not in our lifetimes). not true at all, I've re-architected major COBOL systems (and their ISAM / VSAM databases) several times in my career, to SQL DBMS with J2EE and scripting languages.
Reading comprehension dude. I didn't say all existing COBOL code, I simply said Code written in COBOL as in "the general case" or as in "on average" (which is the only way to properly interpret such a sentence.) Yes, you can make a living porting COBOL code to other platforms, yes, it does occur. And yes, it can still occur against the backdrop of the obscenely immense COBOL code base that won't be rewritten anytime soon (if ever.) Your statement - while true - does not contradict the later.
and we should have gotten rid of this one-class-def-per-class-file non-sense.
Why? Doing this is almost always a sign of poor design and is usually equivalent to the god code C/C++ source files that are a major pain in the ass to work with. Sure, sometimes the line can be a bit blurry, but is it really THAT hard to split things into distinct pieces? To not be able to do so reeks of either laziness or someone poorly designing their software.
Jesus Christ, et tu? What the hell is wrong with you people?
I did not say one-class-per-java-source-code-file. I said one-class-per-class-file. Here, I highlighted the part for you.
I'm not talking about Java source code for * sakes. I'm not talking about the number of classes within one single java source file (and btw, you can have multiple classes defined in one .java file). I'm talking about the output of the compiler, which generates one .class file (bytecode) per class definition, and the JVM inability to operate otherwise. This has serious implications at runtime when it comes to allocating permanent VM memory and can put the brakes on people designing programs with JVM-based functional languages.
There is a reason why the Dalvik's platform does not have this constrain. Forcing one class definition per compiled bytecode .class file is one thing that we should cut the f* off the JVM independently of whether that is backwards compatible or not.
Not to deviate from the Python-oriented topic of this discussion, but this is a good example of when it is a good time to break backwards compatibility (which is what is being discussed.)
should have gotten rid of this one-class-def-per-class-file non-sense.
I'm actually a fan of this! I do it in my c++ coding as well.
If a class is specialized enough to only really be useful to one class.. it can be defined as part of that class, but I generally avoid that for all but the most trivial stuff (specialized action listeners that need to take parameters being my most common reason for this).
I'm sorry but you don't seem to know what I'm talking about.
I'm not talking about Java source code (where you can have multiple classes defined in one .java file). I'm talking about the output of the compiler, which generates one .class file (bytecode) per class definition, and the JVM inability to operate otherwise. This has serious implications at runtime when it comes to allocating permanent VM memory and can put the brakes on people designing programs with JVM-based functional languages.
This is my biggest complaint with python (I have others, I'll admit I have little love for python). This is not the way to develop a language.
I'll admit I've never developed a programming language, but I have worked on large, long term libraries, and I think the same principle applies. All those stupid design decisions and approaches that are now obsolete and make no sense.. you have to make them still work anyway. You can spew lots of warnings.. but to me breaking backwards compatibility in a _programming language_ is sloppy and completely unacceptable.
Well, you don't have to migrate to Python 3.x. There are a lot of Java 1.2 code out there that will never be migrated, code that sooner or later will not run as intended with new JVMs and JDKs. Code written in COBOL still runs and will never be re-writen (not in our lifetimes).
If it works for you on the 2.x series, most likely it will work fine in years to come. Coming from a Java world, I can tell you I wish the JCP had done the same with many Java crap. Hashtables and vectors should have been deprecated long ago; the '+=' operator in Strings should also have been deprecated; we should have created a damned new collections library so that we could have true generics without type erasure; the JVM should have implemented support for tail recursion; and we should have gotten rid of this one-class-def-per-class-file non-sense.
True, it would have broken a lot of stuff, but only for those that want/need to migrate - many do not. But it would have been a way to get things right and undo a lot of past design wrongs. At some point, it is time to cut backwards compatibility. For those who can't go to the 3.x series, they should simply stay with the 2.x series and work as usual.
That no one will use because there is no compelling reason to port all that cool stuff developed for the 2.x series.
Yeah, because everything that needed to be developed has already been done so under the 2.x series. No one will ever need or think to develop something new on the 3.x series. That's why all we have is COBOL because nothing new has ever been needed after all those apps were written with it, oh wait, never mind.
'I had been out of work for nine months when I was offered a job setting up an [IT] offshore help desk. Would it be ethical to accept the offer?'
Only if you foolishly think the reality of a global economy are strictly a matter of morality. It isn't.
The job seeker, who noted his father's auto-industry job was outsourced, chose to ignore Cohen's ethics advice — as well as his own wife's — and declined the job out of principle. He continues to seek work.
His moral obligation was to get the job, make money here, pay his taxes and infuse his net income back into our national economy. Instead, he chose a false high ground, on a false, absurd principle, unethically denying the realities of a global economy that, for better or worse, is here to stay, ultimately becoming, through his now willful unemployment, a burden to our economy.
The reality is that you can't put a moral label on something that exists outside of morality. For too long we have been banking our prosperity on the fact that half of the world live in the stone age.
Morality, empathy to our compatriots and feelings aside, it is unreasonable, impractical, and ultimately unethical to expect to keep one's blue collar job here when it can be done by a blue collar worker somewhere else for much less and without possessing any significant educational advantage. It harms our ability to adapt to changing realities. Ergo, by the damage that it inflicts, and by the false sense of correctness that it perpetuates, it becomes unethical.
Offshoring is an inevitability. It's been here since we lost our microchip production capabilities to the Japanese (who rightfully earned it by being capable of producing more and better for less.) The only way to stop jobs going offshore is with massive government subsidies (as in Japan subsidizing the production of rice.) The cost of subsidizing are much more enormous compared to the number of jobs being lost.
The world has changed independently of the colors in our flag, and we either adapt or sink. Morality has very little to do with it if you realize (hopefully) that you don't exist in a world of absolutes, and - more importantly - the realities of the world take place independently of how you feel about them.
Whatever jobs go out shore, they'll go independently of whether you take the job or not. And your individual obligation, your ethical obligation is to take a job, earn the money, and either save it or infuse it back through local consumption back into the economy. That in tandem with actively participating in a long-term solution - artificially keeping jobs here (and thus becoming uncompetitive against the remaining 95% of the population), that is not a long-term solution.
What is needed as a long term is to rebuild our production capabilities, and to find markets and niches on things that nobody else can do in terms of qualities or numbers. Ultimately we might also have to contemplate the possibility of our salaries might have to adjust to the realities of an ever leveling playing field as other people raise their level of industrialization (which is ultimately their God-given right.)
It is ethical to worry about offshoring. It is ethical to be concerned about your compatriots. It is also ethical to buy artifacts made with as little offshoring as possible, whenever possible and without inflicting harm to your budget.
It is not ethical, however, to refuse a job in a time of massive unemployment, on a misguided hope that such a negligible and inconsequential act as a moral value and that somehow is going to stop something that - if you believe in the right of people for pursuing competitiveness and industrialization and in our obligation to be realistically competitive - must happen.
Microsoft has been embracing Linux for over a decade now as well - They're obviously open-source friendly and showing their worth as a team player http://www.mslinux.org/
Non sequitur. The argument that Dell being or not being a Linux-integrator (or a Windows-only integrator) is logically independent of MS position (and ulterior motives, whichever they might be) with respect to Linux and/or open source.
In fact, the truth or falsehood of one company X using and providing services based technologies Y is based solely on one yes/no question and nothing else: does company X provides services based on Y? Their position, promotions and motivations (ideological or economical) are of no consequence to true/false value of that question.
Besides, the original question and statement centered about whether Dell had experience doing integration with Linux, not about its allegiance to open source (and the former does not depend on the later independently of what the FOSS chickenhawks would like to sing). If that had been the topic under discussion, then maybe your post might have had some logic. But it wasn't.
Well yes... but supporting RHEL is not supporting Linux, just as supporting Ubuntu isn't supporting Linux. It's kind of like saying a company supports Mac. What version... OS9, OS/X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard?
So to put in a nutshell, they're a RHEL shop.
Which is fine and dandy if you stick to RHEL (and for many shops, it's just a matter of sticking to a single distro.) See, the original question was as follows:
Why buy Linux from a traditionally Windows-only integrator with little Linux experience?
That question itself makes no much sense since 1) there are many distros of Linux, each with its own idiosyncracies, and 2) Dell is not a Windows-only integrator given that they also do integration work with RHEL, a well-known Linux distro (and ergo pointing to the claim of Dell having little Linux experience (they do through RHEL) a fallacy.
The post made by the AC (the one you were replying to) then makes a lot of sense ("No, Dell is not a Windows-only integrator, and they have a lot more than 'little' experience on Linux via RHEL"), more sense that the post it replies to. That is, AC's post points to the fallacy of the post that preceeded it.
So, given that RHEL is a well-known distro, one that is also of widespread use, it is then quite acceptable to say that Dell (or whoever) is a Linux integrator. The opposite of this would inevitably and logically imply and demand a definition of "Linux integration" to cover every single major Linux distribution at best (and to cover every single Linux distribution independent of obscurity or adoption at worse). It makes no sense, and it is a definition that has no practical value beyond the strong distro predilection of people, not companies or needs.
A company wants servers to run on Linux with some type of integration support. Be it Ubuntu or RH, it is of small relevance as the decisions to go with Dell or whoever are more in terms of volume, price and other factors beyond the name of the distro. So, in that backdrop, saying that Dell is a Linux-distro is a legitimate statement.
Mind you that I don't care much about Dell and their equipment TBH.
Fuck democracy.
As bad as Mubarak is, the Islamic Brotherhood is an order of magnitude worse. If democracy can result in the Islamic Brotherhood gaining any amount of power, I'd rather see democracy abolished worldwide.
Not necessarily. I know that anything with "Islamic" on its name ends up being equated to Osama Bin Laden among the apple pie crowd, but give me a fucking break, the Islamic Brotherhood (as it exists in Egypt) is hardly a monolithic religious/political entity. 10% of the population is Christian, and a large segment of the Muslim population is secular (secular being a relative term.) The fear of ZOMG! Sharia as a result of the Muslin Brotherhood winning elections (a possible, but still not sure outcome) is blown way out of proportion buddy.
The truth that China's dictatorship and America's multinational corporations don't want you to know
The overall PISA scores of American students are lowered by the poor results for blacks and Latinos, who make up 35 percent of America’s K-12 student population. Asian-American students have an average score of 541, similar to those of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. The non-Hispanic white American student average of 525 is comparable to the averages of Canada (524), New Zealand (521), and Australia (515). In contrast, the average PISA readings score of Latino students is 446 and black students is 441.
As for college, the claim that Americans must catch up with the more advanced Chinese is absurd. Chinese students yearn to study in American universities -- not vice versa. Twenty-five percent of Americans graduate from college, compared to only 5 percent of Chinese. Yes, that’s a large number in absolute terms, given China’s population. But American CEOs who offshore production have no right to complain that too few Americans are going into science and engineering. Why should young Americans commit career suicide by entering occupations that are going to be offshored?
http://mobile.salon.com/politics/war_room/2011/01/25/lind_myth_china/index.html
That item in bold right there is a fallacy. If you enter in science and/or engineering and remain with baseline, comoditizable (sp) skills, then yeah, you will be offshored. If you have talent and become specialized, you will not. Period.
As it stands, we do have a saturation of software developers (not so much with other engineering and science fields.) We have been having it (as well as a lowering of CS standards) since the dot-com guacamole. So it is natural with declining standards and saturation that software developers will feel the brunt of offshoring more than other engineering and science disciplines.
The risk of offshoring is permanent, but not so necessarily real if you work your skills. If you don't enter a career because you fear the Chinese or Indians will take yar jab, then you probably weren't a good candidate for that career anyways. If you are a good candidate, you'll go for it, you'll make it work for you, and you'll develop your skills into specific technical, hard-to-offshore niches... and those niches do not have to involve RF circuit design or rocket science.
I've yet to see engineers that work for the DoD, DoE being offshored. No way no how. Same with health care. I'd like to see HIPAA-regulated jobs (including software) being offshored.
Besides, what would the option be for science and engineering? Management? Incidentally, the number of MBA graduates from a local university was like three times more than all the graduate level science and engineering graduates combined two years ago. That's a localized picture of what's wrong with this offshore-boogie-man fearmongering. We are not going to MBA it out.
There are other careers that are hard to offshore: medical, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, agriculture, energy. Of course, none of those will be options for the majority who are too concerned with being offshored if they go into science or engineering. Being offshored is not a strong fear for people who really, really want to get into engineering and sciences (which is the type of people we want in those fields.)
The article does have a point in saying that American CEO's don't have a right to complain for a lack of scientists and engineers... but it points it out for the wrong reasons. There is no shortage (at least quantitatively speaking.)
lolwut? Since when has math NOT been a big part of computer science when computer science is a branch of mathematics? You must conflate computer science with programming or software engineering.
Math shmath. It's much more logic than math.
It is Axiomatic Mathematical Logic, a branch of Mathematics. So to say CS is "more logic than math" does not make any sense, unless you are conflating Axiomatic Mathematical Logic with Logic in the broader/philosophical sense.
Unless you count logic as part of math, but I don't.
How does it feel to stand in a does-not-compute vantage point? Seriously, any CS graduate worth its CS salt knows (or should know) that the logic piece in computer science is simply axiomatic mathematical logic and set theory.
Finite State Machines? Logic Grammars? Logic Resource Contention? Logic Composite Systems? Logic Encryption? Logic and the ability to multiply and divide numbers, which is about as "math-centered" as paying your bills.
No.
Yes. Every single example you mentioned involves theory of computation (which utilizes but it is not the same as axiomatic mathematical logic) in addition to discrete mathematics, combinatorics, axiomatic set and category theories, and graph theory. Please entertain me by telling me that the last four are not branches of mathematics.
As for encryption, it is based on number theory and abstract algebra. Fields, rings, eliptic curves, that's all way above the ability of multiplication and division, serious subjects in Mathematics proper. Seriously, where did you get your CS education from?
This, and many similar workplace situations:
1. Have zero debt. 2. Have, in a money market account, distinct from your investments, one year of your carefully budgeted living expenses.
When these two conditions are true, conversations with your boss will tend to take a very different tone from most people's expectations.
I love you! Best. Post. Ever.
Says the person who's job is about to be exported to India.
1. Maybe your is going to be exported to India. After all, what do you know about the OP's job to make that assertion? Or are you one of those who think offshoring is both a) inevitable and b) a tragedy?
2. What does distributed source control has to do with remote teams? People have done offshoring with CVS successfully for cry out loud. The distributed part in the "distributed version control" name is not what you think it is. It is not about physical distribution/networking per see.
It seems like a fairly logical list, but I've noticed that the list is geared more toward waterfall, and not for, say, Agile
Que?
for instance "Do you have a spec?" doesn't really apply because the requirements become the spec.
In other words you still have a spec... in agile. And specs have always been about requirements, as in requirements specifications. To be honest, I don't understand your differentiation between specs and requirements, and neither the supposed applicability of the list to waterfall vs agile. I'm my own personal experience (having done strict waterfall, iterative and agile), the list seems to apply rather well in a general sense to each type of development cycle.
Also Agile often has non-dedicated roles
That's YOUR definition. There are agile teams with defined roles and ownerships. There is nothing in agility that calls for a removal of roles.
- for instance, I work in Product Validation and in waterfall I do nothing but write test plans and run tests, but in Agile I manage the Lab Manager VMs, write schema, and run unit tests, none of which I would do in my traditional role (it doesn't hurt that I am a programmer originally hired into automation, but that got outsourced, and I've filled a variety of roles since then like US government security testing, which the US doesn't allow to be outsourced).
That's YOUR experience. Nothing wrong with that, but it should be obvious that you cannot define the general "agile" experience using your anecdotal experiences. Also, and no offense, the more that your job and skills can be commoditized, the more that they will be offshore. Specially in the commercial sector, the best way not to get offshored is to become a highly specialized expert on a particular field or niche.
To reiterate, thinking and coding are not mutually exclusive activities with respect of time. Yes, good developers spend a lot of time thinking... but it just so happen that such thinking is highly interactive with the activities of coding and documenting and communicating via chat or e-mail. There is simply no way for someone to work in such an environment for long enough without developing some decent typing skills. No way. No how. You show me someone that claims to be a programmer but who struggles with the keyboard at less than 40 words per minute, that will make me go "uh huh."
Good programmers spend the vast majority of their time thinking, not typing. A better music analogy than Atwood's hunt-and-peck pianist is composers. Composers reiterate over their ideas for a period of time then write to paper only when they feel the ideas may be worth committing to.
Yes, but that thinking doesn't necessarily happen while constantly staring at the monitor, nor it occurs uninterrupted until you discover the meaning of life. Beyond required phases of analysis and design, or as a response to inevitable interruptions to one's thinking muse, we do a lot of prototyping and experimentation. There is this thinking process that occurs by tinkering and exploring. Barring areas of high criticality, software development is a highly iterative process that involves bout of (sometimes aggressive) coding. I cannot see how someone can translate their streams of thought into code while struggling with the keyboard. Either a person develops decent typing skills or that person never really gets into that *zone* of coding productivity.
Another example is when you are not necessarily doing new design and development, but repetitive maintenance and extension of simple systems that you understand well. Say, adding simple struts actions, or modifying deployment scripts or one-time shell scripts to take care of something. You cannot do those by drawing a design on paper before coding. You code and try as you go.
The only time that you see good programmers spending much more time without actual coding is when working with highly formal processes (.ie. like those required by the DoD or DoE.) But even then, you spend a lot of time typing documenting what is on your head, your vision of what the system will be like and your arguments (and sometimes proofs) of why it should be so.
No matter how you cut it, the majority of time might not be into coding, but a substantial chunk of it will be typing in one manner or another.
There is a reasonable basis to assume that a slow typist is not a decent coding. After all, typing speed is something which is naturally developed as the person keeps hammering away at the keyboard. So, although typing speed does not guarantee coding proficiency, if someone does not pass enough time in front of a keyboard to develop any decent speed then it is expected that that person hasn't spent much time writing software. And if someone hasn't invested all that time writing code then quite certainly that person sucks at coding.
For my own personal case, I was a typist for about 8 years before I went down the coding path so my views might be a bit skewed and subjective.
With that out of the way...
I would tend to agree that there is a correlation of typing speed and software development experience (or there should be for a proficient programmer with a shitload of coding man-hours.) A person that doesn't spend enough time coding will simply code at sucking. And if that person does not have typing skills a-priori then that person will not have good typing skills. So, it is fair to assume that a person that works as a programmer should have decent typing skills, not because he/she needs them for coding, but as a side-effect of programming exposure, in a manner proportional to the amount of work hours doing coding.
That is, I would see it as suspect to see a programmer that cannot type proficiently, be it with all 10 fingers or simply with their index fingers. And I would not reserve that suspicion only to senior programmers but even to fresh-out-of-school ones. Not just good, but passionate CS/MIS students (either BS or AS degree seekers) will have sufficient coding hours under their belt to inevitably develop some typing dexterity. Passionate art students paint and sculpt a shitload. Passionate electrical engineers spend a shitload of hours building circuits. Passionate CS/MIS students spend a shitload of hours coding. In all cases, it is a shitload of hours beyond the minimum requirement to get a degree.
Will lack of typing dexterity mean with utmost infallibility that someone sucks at coding (or that was a slacker in school)? Obviously not. But it would be hard not to see it as suspect.
Another thing is that yes, typing dexterity helps with coding, with prototyping, with hacking. Yes, we need to plan and design before we code, but when you know exactly what needs to be done, or when you have a sufficiently good idea to start prototyping (or when you are in the middle of a hack that *must happen*), bro, you better be able to get those streams of thought fluently down to your keyboard via your fingers. If you have done coding work for real, getting down to some really nice (or ugly but necessary) code, you know what I mean - that you are in your mojo coding that thing down.
I cannot imagine getting myself into that *zone* of coding while struggling with the keyboard. No way, no how. I cannot see how someone could get into that *zone* without good typing skills. Period.
You don't need typing skills for design. But you certainly need it to crank some code when the muse inspire you. And if the muse doesn't inspire you often, you are either in the wrong career choice, or you suck.
Then, you'll probably explain how India managed to launch 30+ rockets successfully in the past, and launched one rocket successfully to the moon as well?
See, this is what I detest about Americans. The sheer smugness, ignorance, arrogance and incredible lack of knowledge is mind boggling. We have all this careful "analysis" and "observation" in the parent's post, and I'll bet my ass that this chap didn't know anything about the past record of the Indian space program and simply jumped in to post an inane comment, assuming that "hey, it's Eeeendiaaa, them tech support guys, laaats of them can't speak proper English, so how can they launch rockets?" Disgusting.
Either you are that stupid to not realize not all Americans are like, or you have been waiting for a "good" opportunity to level a disgusting generalization of us. Either way, you are not that much better from those you seek to criticize. I've meet quite a few tards from your own country (and from Pakistan) that claim as scientific stupid shit like the Romans couldn't do arithmetic while the Indians of the time could or some other inane shit to prop themselves above every other single race in the world.
It would never cross my mind to think about generalizing that stupidity over all people of your country. Guess why? It's called brains. You (and I mean you Bangalorean), you might be educated, but intelligent and decent, you are not. Until you realize how stupid it is to generalize, you will never be.
>>Mathematics is the foundation for philosophy
Eh, kinda. Advanced logic is the foundation for a lot of modern philosophy, but Wittgenstein and the rest of the 20th century analytics were just responding to the tremendous success of physics at figuring shit out, and wanted to smear some of that patina on themselves. Well, logic has always been a part of philosophy (think Socrates and his syllogisms) but reading the Tractatus is like reading a modern computer science proof.
Which isn't surprising, either, given that computer science is essentially applied philosophy in a lot of ways. (cf Bertrand Russell, etc.) If you've ever sat through a class where philosophers have sat there talking themselves in circles about how an object can't both be is-a and has-a at the same time, you (if you're like me) feel like leaping up and just telling them to fucking encode whatever paradox they're trying to create in a object hierarchy, and be done with it. I've long longed to write a book called "Computer Science has figured a lot of your shit out in practice, Philosophers".
It does kind of bug me though, that a person who graduates with a degree in mathematics (which is a fairly difficult, hard-nosed subject) gets a wishy-washy BA degree, whereas a hippie with a degree in "environmental engineering" gets a BS, but ultimately I think there's a lot of problems with our current conception with categorizing things into "science" and "not-science". Economics and Climatology are very analogous in terms of what they do - gathering tons of data, running analyses on it, and projecting things out into the future, and both are essentially "empirical studies of the world about us" (i.e. a sort of base level of science, though with the testing, replication and confirmation bits left out), but we consider one to be a social science and another to be hard science. There's also a huge debate now over Anthropology, after the American Anthropology Association dropped "science" from its official bits.
I love you!
A patio or balcony still within view of the street. The underlying point is the Google Maps van didn't have to hop a fence and avoid Chopper to get pics of her underthings.
Just because it's the internet it doesn't mean it is in Kansas anymore. Having been in Japan, I can understand the cultural specifities that would lead this lady to expect privacy for something that for us, corn-bread and pumpkin pie folks might not be so. In Japanese culture, it is not appropriate to "look", and this is so strong in the Japanese ethos that indeed you would have satisfaction on what they expect as "privacy" over there.
Here Google (or whatever 3rd party on its behalf) did not obey the local customs, most likely an accidental turn of events. This simply showcases the fine lines that "Internet" companies must deal with when going global...
I mean seriously, stop expecting people to follow your notions of "privacy" specially when they are living in their own country and not yours.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9WeTv4Q-QY
I know it should not even register a blip in the grand scheme of business'ey things. But the whole application of technology on something so uber-stupid shoud be listed among some of the dumbest tech things seen in 2010... me thinks.
"The majority of Linux users are ... *tada* admins running heavy shit on Linux, not desktop users. "
[citation needed]
Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems Now go beat around the bushes and bemoan that I dared to ZOMG! use wikipedia as a reference.
I doubt there are millions of admins running heavy shit. Linux is used by all accounts by at least 1% of Internet users, that's millions, and no, they are not all admins.
That argument would make sense if there was a one-to-one relation between an admin and a box running linux. Fortunately for the sane minded, it is not. Any minimum exposure to actual development and deployment on companies big and small would show you that the number of Linux non-desktop deployments is much larger than the number of desktop deployments. Plain and simple.
Now, if all you know is internet browsing usage, then I guess I can see why it seems to you that the number of Linux deployments are overwhelmingly of the desktop type. But that's a reflection of your experience, not work reality.
You really shouldn't be proud of yourself for broadcasting your ignorance, and should definitely not be fooled by any mod ups. Perhaps you have heard of Mandriva? Ubuntu? The hundreds of other desktop distributions you can find with distrowatch? Linux is very popular on the desktop in Europe, and gaining popularity here in the US. Wallowing in your ignorance doesn't cure it.
You clueless Linux geek-wannabe. The number of distros have no bearing whatsoever on the linux desktop/server usage ratio. Not. At. All.
It is called logic, and it should be evident to anyone with a modicum of logic and arithmetic skills (which one would think a real geek would have) to see that you cannot deduce an abundance of desktop users over server deployments simply by looking at the number of distros. How stupid to make that type of leap.
I hate to toot my own horn, but Jesus, you are so clueless. I've been using Linux, UNIX, VAX and PICK systems for over 17 years now, in private and public sectors, on the enterprise and on defense. I've been using Linux for real usage since I was downloading the slackware distros through CompuServe on slow-as-molasses dial-up, way back when you had to configure everything by hand on a shell prompt (as opposed to point-n-click on whatever distro-specific GUI tool running on Gnome, KDE or whatever.) I dunno, I'm not a l33t hax0r rock start, but shit, maybe I might know a thing or two about Linux and how it is actually used.
It would be the day that some kookamimee distro fanboy is going to tell me about my ignorance about Linux.
Seriously, if you guys are the future users of real world Linux, we are screwed. The only difference between you people and Windows users is that you actually believe you are technical.
where's the Linux client? Julie188 hasent started it yet.
And he/she/whatever never will. I can f* guarantee it!!!!