Most parents today are horrible. They do NOT interact with the chile like laying on the floor and playing with them.
Sounds like parenting as always. Statements like X today is horrible imply that X was better before. Most of those statements are rather subjective, praising to some fabled (and false) good old days. Pretty stupid statements, but oh man, do they make a fine soap box!
We are talking about little kids. You tend to get them the Big Blocks instead.
... because little kids don't have the dexterity to use regular Legos. The reason two year old kids can use an iPad and aren't ready for standard Legos is because the latter requires more skill.
How did we go from building blocks for 2-year old kids to standard lego blocks? You know there is a difference, do you? If not, please STFU. Just to help you and those who sadly do not know the difference:
TFA claims claims that exposing kids to technology is causing our civilization to spiral down the drain,
TFA is not claiming that. You are claiming that it does, though.
but provides no evidence whatsoever, other than anecdotes and conjecture.
Anecdotes and conjecture are valid form of preliminary evidence with which to request further scrutiny of something.
Also, from personal anecdote (feel free to dismiss because ZOMFG anecdote!) kids at that early stage require specific stimulus to develop hand fine grained motor skills. Playing with sand, clay or building blocks (not standard lego blocks, but building blocks for toddlers) help do that.
Going into the (ZOMG!) anecdote: One of my nephews had a learning disability co-related to not developing hand fine motor skills, some type of proprioception problem related to ADHD/Asperger/Autism. He simply could not hold a pen without it falling off his fingers. Good fortune it was detected on time, and was put on specific corrective therapy to develop not just finger strength but the necessary coordination to do what he needed to do with his hands during that state of his body/mind development.
Feel free to dismiss this as you wish. Whatever gets your intellectual kicks.
With that said, I'm not against kids using technology. I was delightfully fascinated when I saw my older daughter (now 5) using my smart phone at the age of 2, and I'm fascinated how my youngest one (1.5 year old) fiddled her way into unlocking my phone (despite it being locked with a swipe-shape lock.)
But I keep my daughters away from technology if that precludes them from the other type of tactile-proprioceptive activities that have been developed over time to assist in their development: finger painting, puzzles, blocks, sculpting with silly putty, running around.
All those things are fun, but they are not just for fun. They have an evolutionary purpose.
There is a reason why kids play with soil instinctively. It is not just curiosity. It is the child mind and body instinctively seeking activities that trigger learning and development.
Well, for one thing, Ada compilers do not run on the same range of platforms C compilers do (I'm sorry to say).
Uh, you are conflating "general purpose" with "platform availability". C runs in far more platforms than, say, Java, but, from professional experience as a C/C++ and Java programmer, I would not call C more of a general purpose language in the same way I would do so with Java.
Replying to myself since we have no way to edit our previous posts - I would add that languages of the BASIC and XBase families (in particular VB and FoxPro) are/were more general purpose than either C/C++ or Java despite running in more restricted sets of hardware platforms.
No, but using Ada or another Wirth style language would be a good idea to write some of the critical security libraries in.
Of course, we would have to make sure they are written in such a way to make them callable from C or other languages without too much hassle.
Most modern Wirth-style languages posses syntax-level compiler directives to specify the calling convention. Heck, most modern languages either have such a capability, or an intermediary wrapper or stub generator to do that type of bridging. </itisasolvedproblem>
Well, for one thing, Ada compilers do not run on the same range of platforms C compilers do (I'm sorry to say).
Uh, you are conflating "general purpose" with "platform availability". C runs in far more platforms than, say, Java, but, from professional experience as a C/C++ and Java programmer, I would not call C more of a general purpose language in the same way I would do so with Java.
"If you take productive money and piss it away on boondoggle projects instead of useful purposes then it's a complete loss for the economy."
What about the most massive boondoggle project in history: World War II?
Massive increase in government spending, massing increase in government debt and massive increase in taxes all to build highly specialized equipment, ship it over seas and where it gets blown up.
The result: decades of economic growth and prosperity ending only with the rise of neo-Liberalism.
So they are retiring robots to have humans do their jobs in order to one day build better robots with human modeled efficiency to replace the humans?
Obviously yes. But also, and this is a very Japanese thing, to ensure people know how to build shit. From my short experience with Japanese culture, these people are not afraid to automate the crap out of things, but are afraid to lose what the government (and the nation) considers core competencies, from manufacturing to cultivation of rice. It is enshrined in their government's policies and in their ethos. I am not making this up.
You have to know how to do something before you automate it effetively.
more at 11.
It is breaking news for most of us in the US, managers and otherwise. The implications of that last statement of mine are not pretty for our culture </weareabunchofludditeswithourheadsupourasses>
> taking any kind of IP and running away with it, which would basically kill the industry
How do you get from 'taking IP' to 'killing the industry'?
The free flow of ideas and techniques is what drives technology and industry.
Correct, sort of. There is the concept of running away from intellectual property (say, you work on Coca-Cola, and you run away with patented/secret drink recipes and formulas, and go work with PepsiCo or make your own company. This is obviously stealing IP property. Non-compete agreements do nothing of the sort to prevent this, and there are already Federal and State laws to deal with such situations.
Similar laws and situations arise when, for example, a employee at, say, an insurance company, takes contact information on the company's clients, and leaves to make a competing company, using company-owned client information to poach those clients. That is unethical (and possibly unlawful). An ideal non-compete should be aimed at preventing that.
Sadly, non-compete agreements have a greater, nefarious scope: Non-compete agreements are of a complete different sort - you work at an insurance company and you leave to create your own. Then your former company comes to sue you out of work, forbidding you from establishing your own company in the same metropolitan area/county (or state!).
This is the type of non-compete agreements that should be illegal, or at the very least be time-limited (say, 6 months) instead of being open-ended. And these are not limited to tech companies mind you.
Names and locations omitted for obvious reasons:I know of a person who was a professional dancer in his country of origin, came to the US and continued training (and working) at a local dance school.
Being the young, inexperienced foreigner that he was, he signed a non-compete. When it was time to finish his training, he decided to open up his own school on a different area of the metropolitan area he and his former school/employer resided.
Long story short: school tried to sue the living crap out of him, that he could not open up a "competing" school in the whole multi-county metropolitan area. He was being pretty much forced into a situation of forced unemployment vs change careers vs get-out-of-dodge.
Ah, America, land of the free, home of the brave... and ridiculous lawsuits, where enough money can buy you the power to shake up young, starting entrepreneurs.
Fortunately, a lawyer was able to advise him well, and a judge pretty much ruled that the dance company was in effect trying to force the young man into unemployment. Although the young man signed the NC agreement, the judge ruled that the agreement was unreasonable and illegal.
Banning such types of NC agreements explicitly is a good thing; it will stop harassing entrepreneours and former employees; and it will free judges from having to deal with such ridiculous cases
I would like to start with a NoSQL solution for scaling,
This is a solution looking for a problem. Or more precisely, you are looking for an excuse to use a piece of technology or paradigm. Don't get me wrong, your systems requirements might indeed be best served using a NoSQL solution, but what exactly has your analysis shown regarding this?
Scaling is not just a technical feature (NoSQL, SQL, Jedi mind-meld tricks). Scaling is a function of your architecture. You can NoSQL the shit out of your solution, but if your software and system architecture is not scalable, then having NoSQL will mean chicken poop as solutions go.
and ideally it would be dead simple if possible.
If you want simple, put a simple RDBMs schema (a properly normalized that) in place, and have your code use a simple, technology-agnostic persistence layer that maps your domain-level artifacts to database artifacts. If you ever had to replace the back-end, then you can do so with minimal changes to the API that domain-level artifacts use to persist themselves with the persistence layer.
Design your domain solution around domain-specific artifacts. Persistence technology is typically a low-level design/implementation detail, an important one obviously (and a critical one for some classes of systems).
But for what you are describing, the choice shouldn't even be coming into the picture without first having an architectural notion of your solution.
In addition to Option Explicit. Friends indeed. But to the OP's behalf, Option Explicit is relatively new (2005 I think). There is still a lot of VB code out there that predates that feature.
But even then I think one should not need to rely on such things.
I used to be a QuickBasic and VB programmer back in Pre-(Internet)-Cambian times (and, oh, the horrror, PickBasic with numeric goto statements). We guarded ourselves (or I least I did) by using strict coding conventions and Hungarian notation on variable names and function names indicating the return values.
To a similar degree I did the same when I shifted from VB to FoxBase/FoxPro/VFP (what a nice product it was for its time). Anyways, it was obviously impossible to guarantee a type-mixing mistake would not occur, but software written this way tended to be very reliable and sufficiently type-safe.
Done this way, type mistakes were easy to spot by just looking at the code. At the end of the day, as Joel Spolsky once wrote, it is about making wrong code look wrong.
No one really gets that much out of killing another person, which is pretty much the only crime that ever gets the death penalty. Murder, in and of itself, puts you outside the bounds of classically rational self-interest.
The mob would think otherwise (and sometimes they have the financial data to back it up.) Or a criminal caught by a homeowner in the middle of his third break in a state with a three-strike law - killing homeowner -> increase changes of avoiding an automatic 20-year-to-life sentence.
Heck, from drug lords to mobsters, killing is well within the bound of rational self-interest. Not everyone that commits a murder is a mumbling idiot without forethought (and THAT is a very scary, horrifying concept.)
The system you describe is closer to mercantilism than it is to capitalism. In capitalism, whatever is beneficial to me is good.
By that logic, I I were to engage in loan-sharking and racketeering, those are good because they benefit me (so long as I can get away with it, of course). In fact, if I had the power to change the law so that I can get away with it, then that would be good as well.
See, there is good, and there is right. Knowing or ignoring the difference indicates more the type of person you are than the economic system that is in place.
Fact is as long as they can turn the cameras on or off and the video is in police custody this will do almost nothing to reduce police abuse.
You are wrong. See, a significant number of cases involving police abuse are based on cops' allegations that the victim is/was a perp and that they acted in self-defense to explain why the victim/perp was beaten to a pulp or whatever. Now it will be harder for them to claim they acted in self-defense or that the person was acting irrationally or disobeying orders while claiming "ooops my camera was broken, take my word for it."
Also, the rate at which cameras "get broken" will become public record. A high incident of "broken video recorders" will raise eyebrows and closer scrutiny (specially if a strong correlation is found between those incidents and citizen's complains of abuse.)
It is not perfect. No solution is. And sure there will be ways corrupt/abuse cops will try to (and succeed) circumvent the system. But it will make such acts harder to commit. Your assertion that this will do little to nothing is erroneous.
It's precisely those very topics that makes it relevant! High school students need Shakespeare because it is morally relevant, it teaches them about conflict
Yeah, but people don't care about moral and intellectual questions. They care about whether Kim Kardashian is going to have another royal wedding, in yet again another white dress!!!!
Even accounting for the cost of living, Seattle should have made the top 10.
I suspect that what they did was looking at the cost of living in the cities proper, rather than the entire metro area. Living in the city of Seattle itself is expensive, yes. But working there and living somewhere on the Eastside is a much more profitable proposition, and has its conveniences, as well.
Good point. Similarly, Boston proper is very expensive, but some of the suburbs have real state cost of living closer to, say, South Florida, and thus the overall COL is not as murderous.
My rebuttal to Denver being a "hidden treasure": Aurora.
That is a stupid rebuttal, for one could say that "Newport" is a rebuttal against Boston. Shit happens anywhere. And, as horrible as it might have been, if the Aurora shooting is a statistical anomaly, then, it has no effect on the positive conditions that would make people call Denver a "hidden treasure".
Well, the jobs numbers don't lie. The most in demand language is Java.
And and a lot of those positions have mediocre pay and require not that much of technology depth. I know. I've worked on Java for a long time, and really, most web/enterprise stuff is really simple integration. It's barely engineering, and more plumbing.
Openings for C and C++ remain constant and will remain so simply because they cater to specific needs that won't go away with managed code.
Another thing. Look at Java job postings for the very best and brightest of companies (Adobe, Google, Apple, Lockheed Martin). Typically they desire (or even require that) people understand C and C++. Why do you think is that? I know that this is going off the tangent, but it should make you think about your claims that unmanaged code is going away.
I mean, for fucks sake, what language do you think the runtimes required for managed languages are going to be written? And if less and less people are competent in hard languages that are absolutely needed for problems that will not go away, who do you think will get paid the most.
The one thing I hate about many Java programmers (I am a Java developer btw) is that they look at technology from a lowest-common-and-dumb-denominator POV. They pigeonhole themselves into being one-trick ponies believing that such approach will provide stability in the future. This eventually shows in their quality of work and in their limited understanding of how software and hardware is supposed to work (which influences how systems are architected, designed and implemented.)
Which is great for very important and specific classes of problems.
so code written in them tends to be rife with security holes, buffer overruns, and memory leaks.
And a significant % of web applications written in Java,.NET or, say, Ruby, have security holes up to the wazzo.
You might not get buffer over runs, but you certainly get null pointer, illegal arguments, index out of range, and invalid state exceptions (corresponding types as per each language.)
Memory leaks? You get similar manifestations of those in managed languages (abandoned file handles, database connections that are never released). Memory specific, you can bring a VM to the ground if the creation rate of objects is so large that it causes the garbage collector to utilize CPU beyond a given threshold. In Java, for example, you can get an OutOfMemoryException if the GC is trashing the CPU even if you have plenty of memory allocated to the VM
.
Anyone who works in software for a living (and that is at least decently good at it) knows these issues. Anyone else thinks these problems are exclusively the domain of unmanaged code.
Also their standard libraries are incredibly poor compared to other languages, so you have to fall back on 3rd party libraries that may or may not be available on the platform you need them on, and may or may not be maintained and supported.
A lot of times you do not require such rich language libraries in unmanaged code. If you are writing a device driver for a memory constrained platform, you wouldn't (shouldn't) be needed a, let's say, uber-rich concurrent container class with even richer iterator semantics. That is just one example.
If you are finding yourself with a significant need for a rich library, then you should be using a higher-level language.
70's style languages are going away for good reasons.
This only shows the significantly shallow view (or exposure) you have with respect of software technology. Look around you. There are more devices using unmanaged code that managed. Your toasters. Your microwaves and termostats. Your termometers. Your remote control. The cable/dsl/wireless modem that allows you to connect internet to post ignorant shit. The operating system and the myriad of hardware device drivers that make your computing experience possible.
What language do you think they are written with?
It is absolutely disturbing to see people think that unmanaged code is somehow waning away. That is where the money is. Those jobs are not decreasing. The jobs using managed code, that is the number that is increasing (and their salaries for the most part decreasing unless you are really a very good, Sr-or-Principal-level Java/.NET/Ruby/Python software engineer or architect.)
* source : 18 years of programming experience as a Java/JEE application and C/C++ systems developer in both the commercial and defense sector.
Jobs using those languages are waning.
And our jobs will go to India or China, and programs will begin to write other programs making us developers obsolete, the earth is flat and the sun orbits it, blah blah blah.
If you want to be employed in 10 years, you need to change with the times.
That is an oxymoron. Of course you have to change with the times. But changing with the times does not necessarily mean changing languages. It means evolving your skill set. You are looking at the problem of being up-to-date and marketable as if it meant one should become a language-trick pony. There are code monkeys, and there as software engineers.
Sure, there are still COBOL programmers and even well paid ones, but that doesn't mean COBOL is the language to learn if you want to do well in the industry. It's effectively a dead language even
Slashdot Mirror
Most parents today are horrible. They do NOT interact with the chile like laying on the floor and playing with them.
Sounds like parenting as always. Statements like X today is horrible imply that X was better before. Most of those statements are rather subjective, praising to some fabled (and false) good old days. Pretty stupid statements, but oh man, do they make a fine soap box!
We are talking about little kids. You tend to get them the Big Blocks instead.
... because little kids don't have the dexterity to use regular Legos. The reason two year old kids can use an iPad and aren't ready for standard Legos is because the latter requires more skill.
How did we go from building blocks for 2-year old kids to standard lego blocks? You know there is a difference, do you? If not, please STFU. Just to help you and those who sadly do not know the difference:
TFA claims claims that exposing kids to technology is causing our civilization to spiral down the drain,
TFA is not claiming that. You are claiming that it does, though.
but provides no evidence whatsoever, other than anecdotes and conjecture.
Anecdotes and conjecture are valid form of preliminary evidence with which to request further scrutiny of something.
Also, from personal anecdote (feel free to dismiss because ZOMFG anecdote!) kids at that early stage require specific stimulus to develop hand fine grained motor skills. Playing with sand, clay or building blocks (not standard lego blocks, but building blocks for toddlers) help do that.
Going into the (ZOMG!) anecdote: One of my nephews had a learning disability co-related to not developing hand fine motor skills, some type of proprioception problem related to ADHD/Asperger/Autism. He simply could not hold a pen without it falling off his fingers. Good fortune it was detected on time, and was put on specific corrective therapy to develop not just finger strength but the necessary coordination to do what he needed to do with his hands during that state of his body/mind development.
Feel free to dismiss this as you wish. Whatever gets your intellectual kicks.
With that said, I'm not against kids using technology. I was delightfully fascinated when I saw my older daughter (now 5) using my smart phone at the age of 2, and I'm fascinated how my youngest one (1.5 year old) fiddled her way into unlocking my phone (despite it being locked with a swipe-shape lock.)
But I keep my daughters away from technology if that precludes them from the other type of tactile-proprioceptive activities that have been developed over time to assist in their development: finger painting, puzzles, blocks, sculpting with silly putty, running around.
All those things are fun, but they are not just for fun. They have an evolutionary purpose.
There is a reason why kids play with soil instinctively. It is not just curiosity. It is the child mind and body instinctively seeking activities that trigger learning and development.
Well, for one thing, Ada compilers do not run on the same range of platforms C compilers do (I'm sorry to say).
Uh, you are conflating "general purpose" with "platform availability". C runs in far more platforms than, say, Java, but, from professional experience as a C/C++ and Java programmer, I would not call C more of a general purpose language in the same way I would do so with Java.
Replying to myself since we have no way to edit our previous posts - I would add that languages of the BASIC and XBase families (in particular VB and FoxPro) are/were more general purpose than either C/C++ or Java despite running in more restricted sets of hardware platforms.
No, but using Ada or another Wirth style language would be a good idea to write some of the critical security libraries in.
Of course, we would have to make sure they are written in such a way to make them callable from C or other languages without too much hassle.
Most modern Wirth-style languages posses syntax-level compiler directives to specify the calling convention. Heck, most modern languages either have such a capability, or an intermediary wrapper or stub generator to do that type of bridging. </itisasolvedproblem>
Well, for one thing, Ada compilers do not run on the same range of platforms C compilers do (I'm sorry to say).
Uh, you are conflating "general purpose" with "platform availability". C runs in far more platforms than, say, Java, but, from professional experience as a C/C++ and Java programmer, I would not call C more of a general purpose language in the same way I would do so with Java.
"If you take productive money and piss it away on boondoggle projects instead of useful purposes then it's a complete loss for the economy."
What about the most massive boondoggle project in history: World War II?
Massive increase in government spending, massing increase in government debt and massive increase in taxes all to build highly specialized equipment, ship it over seas and where it gets blown up.
The result: decades of economic growth and prosperity ending only with the rise of neo-Liberalism.
Stop it. You are making too much sense.
So they are retiring robots to have humans do their jobs in order to one day build better robots with human modeled efficiency to replace the humans?
Obviously yes. But also, and this is a very Japanese thing, to ensure people know how to build shit. From my short experience with Japanese culture, these people are not afraid to automate the crap out of things, but are afraid to lose what the government (and the nation) considers core competencies, from manufacturing to cultivation of rice. It is enshrined in their government's policies and in their ethos. I am not making this up.
You have to know how to do something before you automate it effetively. more at 11.
It is breaking news for most of us in the US, managers and otherwise. The implications of that last statement of mine are not pretty for our culture </weareabunchofludditeswithourheadsupourasses>
Jedi mind-meld tricks
That's definitely a mix of incompatible technologies right there.
I know!!(10+1) ;)
> taking any kind of IP and running away with it, which would basically kill the industry
How do you get from 'taking IP' to 'killing the industry'?
The free flow of ideas and techniques is what drives technology and industry.
Correct, sort of. There is the concept of running away from intellectual property (say, you work on Coca-Cola, and you run away with patented/secret drink recipes and formulas, and go work with PepsiCo or make your own company. This is obviously stealing IP property. Non-compete agreements do nothing of the sort to prevent this, and there are already Federal and State laws to deal with such situations.
Similar laws and situations arise when, for example, a employee at, say, an insurance company, takes contact information on the company's clients, and leaves to make a competing company, using company-owned client information to poach those clients. That is unethical (and possibly unlawful). An ideal non-compete should be aimed at preventing that.
Sadly, non-compete agreements have a greater, nefarious scope: Non-compete agreements are of a complete different sort - you work at an insurance company and you leave to create your own. Then your former company comes to sue you out of work, forbidding you from establishing your own company in the same metropolitan area/county (or state!).
This is the type of non-compete agreements that should be illegal, or at the very least be time-limited (say, 6 months) instead of being open-ended. And these are not limited to tech companies mind you.
Names and locations omitted for obvious reasons:I know of a person who was a professional dancer in his country of origin, came to the US and continued training (and working) at a local dance school.
Being the young, inexperienced foreigner that he was, he signed a non-compete. When it was time to finish his training, he decided to open up his own school on a different area of the metropolitan area he and his former school/employer resided.
Long story short: school tried to sue the living crap out of him, that he could not open up a "competing" school in the whole multi-county metropolitan area. He was being pretty much forced into a situation of forced unemployment vs change careers vs get-out-of-dodge.
Ah, America, land of the free, home of the brave... and ridiculous lawsuits, where enough money can buy you the power to shake up young, starting entrepreneurs.
Fortunately, a lawyer was able to advise him well, and a judge pretty much ruled that the dance company was in effect trying to force the young man into unemployment. Although the young man signed the NC agreement, the judge ruled that the agreement was unreasonable and illegal.
Banning such types of NC agreements explicitly is a good thing; it will stop harassing entrepreneours and former employees; and it will free judges from having to deal with such ridiculous cases
I would like to start with a NoSQL solution for scaling,
This is a solution looking for a problem. Or more precisely, you are looking for an excuse to use a piece of technology or paradigm. Don't get me wrong, your systems requirements might indeed be best served using a NoSQL solution, but what exactly has your analysis shown regarding this?
Scaling is not just a technical feature (NoSQL, SQL, Jedi mind-meld tricks). Scaling is a function of your architecture. You can NoSQL the shit out of your solution, but if your software and system architecture is not scalable, then having NoSQL will mean chicken poop as solutions go.
and ideally it would be dead simple if possible.
If you want simple, put a simple RDBMs schema (a properly normalized that) in place, and have your code use a simple, technology-agnostic persistence layer that maps your domain-level artifacts to database artifacts. If you ever had to replace the back-end, then you can do so with minimal changes to the API that domain-level artifacts use to persist themselves with the persistence layer.
Design your domain solution around domain-specific artifacts. Persistence technology is typically a low-level design/implementation detail, an important one obviously (and a critical one for some classes of systems).
But for what you are describing, the choice shouldn't even be coming into the picture without first having an architectural notion of your solution.
Option Strict is your friend.
In addition to Option Explicit. Friends indeed. But to the OP's behalf, Option Explicit is relatively new (2005 I think). There is still a lot of VB code out there that predates that feature.
But even then I think one should not need to rely on such things.
I used to be a QuickBasic and VB programmer back in Pre-(Internet)-Cambian times (and, oh, the horrror, PickBasic with numeric goto statements). We guarded ourselves (or I least I did) by using strict coding conventions and Hungarian notation on variable names and function names indicating the return values.
To a similar degree I did the same when I shifted from VB to FoxBase/FoxPro/VFP (what a nice product it was for its time). Anyways, it was obviously impossible to guarantee a type-mixing mistake would not occur, but software written this way tended to be very reliable and sufficiently type-safe.
Done this way, type mistakes were easy to spot by just looking at the code. At the end of the day, as Joel Spolsky once wrote, it is about making wrong code look wrong.
Yeah, if only cryptographers knew about such novel concepts as confusion and diffusion...
Hahaha, bingo.
No one really gets that much out of killing another person, which is pretty much the only crime that ever gets the death penalty. Murder, in and of itself, puts you outside the bounds of classically rational self-interest.
The mob would think otherwise (and sometimes they have the financial data to back it up.) Or a criminal caught by a homeowner in the middle of his third break in a state with a three-strike law - killing homeowner -> increase changes of avoiding an automatic 20-year-to-life sentence.
Heck, from drug lords to mobsters, killing is well within the bound of rational self-interest. Not everyone that commits a murder is a mumbling idiot without forethought (and THAT is a very scary, horrifying concept.)
It would take a revolution, or people disliking the way things are for change .
So, by your own admission, governments do change. Now, again, should I bring counter-examples that do not involve a revolution?
The system you describe is closer to mercantilism than it is to capitalism. In capitalism, whatever is beneficial to me is good.
By that logic, I I were to engage in loan-sharking and racketeering, those are good because they benefit me (so long as I can get away with it, of course). In fact, if I had the power to change the law so that I can get away with it, then that would be good as well.
See, there is good, and there is right. Knowing or ignoring the difference indicates more the type of person you are than the economic system that is in place.
He comments aré thoughtfull but history tell us goverment do not change and aré not efficent.
Should I bring a couple of counter-examples from, you know, history to counter that claim (the one I made in bold)?
Can an Old Programmer Learn New Tricks?
Talking about self-deprecating titles. The problem here is not age, but confidence, direction and determination.
Fact is as long as they can turn the cameras on or off and the video is in police custody this will do almost nothing to reduce police abuse.
You are wrong. See, a significant number of cases involving police abuse are based on cops' allegations that the victim is/was a perp and that they acted in self-defense to explain why the victim/perp was beaten to a pulp or whatever. Now it will be harder for them to claim they acted in self-defense or that the person was acting irrationally or disobeying orders while claiming "ooops my camera was broken, take my word for it."
Also, the rate at which cameras "get broken" will become public record. A high incident of "broken video recorders" will raise eyebrows and closer scrutiny (specially if a strong correlation is found between those incidents and citizen's complains of abuse.)
It is not perfect. No solution is. And sure there will be ways corrupt/abuse cops will try to (and succeed) circumvent the system. But it will make such acts harder to commit. Your assertion that this will do little to nothing is erroneous.
It's precisely those very topics that makes it relevant! High school students need Shakespeare because it is morally relevant, it teaches them about conflict
Yeah, but people don't care about moral and intellectual questions. They care about whether Kim Kardashian is going to have another royal wedding, in yet again another white dress!!!!
That's an argument for why it's bad, not for why it stops universal literacy.
Pretty obviously, those are one in the same. Or maybe not.
So you argument boils down to obviously maybe ?
Even accounting for the cost of living, Seattle should have made the top 10.
I suspect that what they did was looking at the cost of living in the cities proper, rather than the entire metro area. Living in the city of Seattle itself is expensive, yes. But working there and living somewhere on the Eastside is a much more profitable proposition, and has its conveniences, as well.
Good point. Similarly, Boston proper is very expensive, but some of the suburbs have real state cost of living closer to, say, South Florida, and thus the overall COL is not as murderous.
My rebuttal to Denver being a "hidden treasure": Aurora.
That is a stupid rebuttal, for one could say that "Newport" is a rebuttal against Boston. Shit happens anywhere. And, as horrible as it might have been, if the Aurora shooting is a statistical anomaly, then, it has no effect on the positive conditions that would make people call Denver a "hidden treasure".
Well, the jobs numbers don't lie. The most in demand language is Java.
And and a lot of those positions have mediocre pay and require not that much of technology depth. I know. I've worked on Java for a long time, and really, most web/enterprise stuff is really simple integration. It's barely engineering, and more plumbing.
Openings for C and C++ remain constant and will remain so simply because they cater to specific needs that won't go away with managed code.
Another thing. Look at Java job postings for the very best and brightest of companies (Adobe, Google, Apple, Lockheed Martin). Typically they desire (or even require that) people understand C and C++. Why do you think is that? I know that this is going off the tangent, but it should make you think about your claims that unmanaged code is going away.
I mean, for fucks sake, what language do you think the runtimes required for managed languages are going to be written? And if less and less people are competent in hard languages that are absolutely needed for problems that will not go away, who do you think will get paid the most.
The one thing I hate about many Java programmers (I am a Java developer btw) is that they look at technology from a lowest-common-and-dumb-denominator POV. They pigeonhole themselves into being one-trick ponies believing that such approach will provide stability in the future. This eventually shows in their quality of work and in their limited understanding of how software and hardware is supposed to work (which influences how systems are architected, designed and implemented.)
Suit yourself.
C/C++ are unmanaged languages,
Which is great for very important and specific classes of problems.
so code written in them tends to be rife with security holes, buffer overruns, and memory leaks.
And a significant % of web applications written in Java, .NET or, say, Ruby, have security holes up to the wazzo.
You might not get buffer over runs, but you certainly get null pointer, illegal arguments, index out of range, and invalid state exceptions (corresponding types as per each language.)
Memory leaks? You get similar manifestations of those in managed languages (abandoned file handles, database connections that are never released). Memory specific, you can bring a VM to the ground if the creation rate of objects is so large that it causes the garbage collector to utilize CPU beyond a given threshold. In Java, for example, you can get an OutOfMemoryException if the GC is trashing the CPU even if you have plenty of memory allocated to the VM
. Anyone who works in software for a living (and that is at least decently good at it) knows these issues. Anyone else thinks these problems are exclusively the domain of unmanaged code.
Also their standard libraries are incredibly poor compared to other languages, so you have to fall back on 3rd party libraries that may or may not be available on the platform you need them on, and may or may not be maintained and supported.
A lot of times you do not require such rich language libraries in unmanaged code. If you are writing a device driver for a memory constrained platform, you wouldn't (shouldn't) be needed a, let's say, uber-rich concurrent container class with even richer iterator semantics. That is just one example.
If you are finding yourself with a significant need for a rich library, then you should be using a higher-level language.
70's style languages are going away for good reasons.
This only shows the significantly shallow view (or exposure) you have with respect of software technology. Look around you. There are more devices using unmanaged code that managed. Your toasters. Your microwaves and termostats. Your termometers. Your remote control. The cable/dsl/wireless modem that allows you to connect internet to post ignorant shit. The operating system and the myriad of hardware device drivers that make your computing experience possible.
What language do you think they are written with?
It is absolutely disturbing to see people think that unmanaged code is somehow waning away. That is where the money is. Those jobs are not decreasing. The jobs using managed code, that is the number that is increasing (and their salaries for the most part decreasing unless you are really a very good, Sr-or-Principal-level Java/.NET/Ruby/Python software engineer or architect.)
* source : 18 years of programming experience as a Java/JEE application and C/C++ systems developer in both the commercial and defense sector.
Jobs using those languages are waning.
And our jobs will go to India or China, and programs will begin to write other programs making us developers obsolete, the earth is flat and the sun orbits it, blah blah blah.
If you want to be employed in 10 years, you need to change with the times.
That is an oxymoron. Of course you have to change with the times. But changing with the times does not necessarily mean changing languages. It means evolving your skill set. You are looking at the problem of being up-to-date and marketable as if it meant one should become a language-trick pony. There are code monkeys, and there as software engineers.
Sure, there are still COBOL programmers and even well paid ones, but that doesn't mean COBOL is the language to learn if you want to do well in the industry. It's effectively a dead language even