WOW! Now in 1997 this is big news. Probably by 2013 or whatever there'll be hundreds of Calculus courses online and something like this won't be news at all.
Uh, it is news because AFAIK it is the first coursea MOOC (actually the first MOOC afaik) othat is making everything available with github. Every other MOOC I've seen delivers its content in a closed/semi-closed delivery platform. The closest thing I've seen are the MIT Open CourseWare materials made available via iTunes, but those are just content, not actual courses with live exams and grading.
But hey, don't let that stop people from nihilistically dismiss this good stuff. Whatever gets them through the day.
Have you forgotten that companies used to train their employees?
Companies still do, or at least the ones who've figured out that recruiting new talent is more expensive than training existing employees.
And those are few and far between. I noticed this shift of pushing training costs to employees (now contractors) started in the late 90's/early 2000's. It started after the subtle change of renaming "Personnel" Departments into "Human Resources" Departments.
With the exception of good engineering firms or defense contractors, you will not get training reimbursement or in-house training anymore. It is the status quo. It has been for more than 15 years.
We, software/engineer professionals simply have to be more diligent and disciplined about getting trained out-of-pocket. Those golden years of getting trained by our employers, that good shit ain't going to come back.
I mostly agree with you but just a couple of points.
1. Whenever a company uses the word "synergy" it make me believe they are using marketing hype and really don't have a clue if what they are going to try is the right thing or not.
What choice does the company has but to use flowery language? Firing people is never a nice experience, and it can be a PR nightmare. So you find ways to shower flowers over it. With that said, and in this context, "synergy" typically means greater integration of groups and departments that until now had overlapping roles and functions, some of them acting as silos preventing efficiency. Whether that is/was the actual state of affairs, that's another thing.
2. If they really did not need them then why did they hire them in the first place?
Because at one point they needed them and now they don't? I mean, it's not fucking rocket science. You might have become better at doing things which imply you use less people for the same tasks you were doing before with more. Or you find that some line of business are not as profitable or needed anymore, so you cut them off. Or you had a projected need of workforce that never quite materialized. Or you had a spike in your backlogs that necessitated having extra people that you no longer need once your backlog is cleared.
Work and business do not occur in a never-changing vacuum. Things change. Shit changes.
This hire - fire mentality really does just make companies look incompetent.
No. Thinking that you can fix the number of people you need in time and space as if economic conditions were universal constants, that makes you look incompetent and clueless.
Seriously. It. Is. Not. Rocket. Science.
3. Its just a company to help dip shit salesmen darken my door so who really gives a shit anyway.
Compile: to create a set of *machine instructions* from a high-level programming language, using a compiler
Grace Hopper, who coined the term "compile", defined it as "accept things that were people-oriented and then use the computer to translate to *machine code*.”
A primary purpose of compiling code is so that the user doesn't need to have a copy of the matching version of the interpreter. Compiled code runs by itself.
Python bytecode is a couple of steps removed from machine code. Look at how many lines of code are required in the bytecode interpreter to interpret that bytecode and do something with it. Compiled code doesn't need any interpreter, much less hundreds of thousands of lines of interpreter.
*machine code*, *machine code*. As Inigo Montoya would say: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Seriously, what's the point of quoting Grace Hopper if we are willing to ignore the historical definitions of what compiler and *machine*.
The phrase "machine instructions" was never meant to literally stand for "hardware machine instructions" to the exclusion of anything else. From very early on in the evolution of computers, compilers created somewhat portable symbolic instructions meant to be further decoded or translated at start-up run time into the actual hardware level instructions.
From a purely theoretical POV, the concept of a machine that could execute instructions preceded the existence of hardware machines. Think turing machines,
-recursive functions, turing-complete string rewriting systems and lambda calculus. Think of the idea of algorithmic systems that can translate a program representation from one mathematical model of computation to another. That is a compiler. That is, in the world of the computable, a machine has never been exclusively of a hardware nature, and the notion of a compiler has never been constrained by that limitation.
Moving from the esoteric to the mundane, p-code is the most commonly known historical name for this approach that has existed since the 60's (and which is now typically referred to bytecode.) Mainframes and mini-computers sported such compilers in a variety of languages - BCPL, COBOL, PL/1, etc.
The world of practical computing has always moved around and above this notion.
Hell, if languages that produce bytecode/p-code are not compiled because these are not true hardware instructions, then neither is the x86 family of assemblers and native compilers because the x86 family of "native" CICS instructions are not true compilers.
Why? Well, because, unlike RISC hardware platforms, those instructions are interpreted at run-time into the micro-code instructions specific to the hardware.
That is the x86 CISC instruction set is not hardware machine code, but an extremely low-level p-code/bytecode interpreted at run-time by an on-the-die interpreter.
And more to the point, this country more than any other country in the world had hordes and armies of Rosie the Riveters and number crunchers building American industrial and scientific might. We can argue that such a phenomenon stopped when men came back home from the war, but that is only a partial answer. It's not just opportunities that might have dwindle, but the attitudes that compelled women to steer away from those opportunities that need to be explored.
And no, Grace Hopper would not get hired in SV.
She was a woman, and she was already in her late 40's when she started making significant contributions. SV is a haven of ageism.
why are there so few women in a position to be hired in the first place? Why aren't many women choosing to study these subjects. Are they being discouraged from studying computer science? Are they graded more harshly? Is it social pressure?
Maybe they damn well don't want to.
But that is society specific as it is known that in other countries (in many countries actually) women have a greater % of participation in STEM degrees compared to their US counterparts.
So to say they may damn well don't want to is pretty much a TBU (true but useless.) If they do not want to, here in the US as opposed to their counterparts in Eastern Europe, China or India, why so? That is a question worth asking and solving. When half of a country's population is steered away from some of the most financially rewarding and productive fields, then than has a significant impact in a country's potential.
I agree with you I have tried both 10 inch tablets and 7 inch tables and my 4 inch phone and I can't stand reading off of them.
Meh, I used to think that way. Now most of my technical books are on Kindle (reading them off a 10" Galaxy Tab.) It's all right and it serves the purpose. The amount of space I've reduced is so insane that I've been willing to pay for a kindle version of a book I already had in print (selling or tossing away the printed one.) The convenience pays itself over time (not to mention that the tablet is a more versatile, utilitarian tool than three shelves of printed books ever will be.)
So the question is what if the student doesn't want to go paperless?
The thing about a college system is that it is not a democratic system. It never has been. You sign up for a class and you follow all the requirements that a professor gives you (so long as they are legal.) He/she can tell you to submit all your homeworks by e-mail and that no other methods are acceptable. Your choice is to take it or leave it. That's how it works.
That principle is also extended out of the individual classroom and over the entire campus/university system.
Or what if the student doesn't want to use Apple products at all, like me I'm a MS software kind of guy been that way since 1987.
Subjective personal preferences are not absolute rights preserved by the law. Shit, if school requires that you learn x86 assembly but you want to do ARM assembly, what right do you think you have on the matter? Or if you are at work and corporate decides that everyone will use X or Y computing system for whatever standardization reason, what are you going to do? Quit? That's just silly.
Please don't mod me down for that.
What do you care if complete strangers were to mod you down? That's the kind of shit that has no impact whatsoever in real life. So why care? Speak your peace and let others agree or have a heart attack if they are so dumb to let that affect them so.
i don't remember a time when i could refrain from spending hundreds of dollars on textbooks because they were all free at the library.
I do! Spent a total of $50 on books for my entire college degree (1992-1995, Computer Science, University of Cambridge, England).
So you were able to pull a statistical anomaly at a time when a CS degree was still obscure and when technology wasn't changing at today's pace (which necessitates buying books.) Horray! You have a solution to the expensive college book bubble!
You either had a benign and incredibly flexible tutelage, or you are just selling a bs story. See, when I did my CS degree, I remember plenty that we had about 30 people in my trig class, and a similar amount in my Calc I/II and Physics I/II classes. No way in hell that all of us could have gotten books from the libraries to do the lectures and homeworks precisely as laid out by our instructors. In our programming courses we had typically 20 students. How the hell was a university library keep an inventory of all the necessary books for that many students in all the required subjects?
And how about the non-technical requirements (Humanities, Composition, Biology, etc) which typically have a larger number of students enrolled per class at any given time? For all practical purposes, the Pigeonhole Principle suggests what you experienced constitutes an impossibility for the general student population.
In other words, what you are saying is either bullshit or TBU (true but useless).
Uh, yes. I was there too, I saw how workstations were. They were more powerful obviously, but they were equally more expensive. Even before Windows 3.0/3.1 came, there was already a commercial ecosystem of spreadsheets, word processors and database systems that, though simple and primitive, provided a good ROI for the little investment you had to put in for the non-technical masses. Right in their work places. That. Was. A. Computer. Revolution.
No workstation system of the time had that. Computing power and windowing systems mean shit if platforms cost you an eye and a kidney while providing no productivity tools for the common non-technical person.
Us Unix workstation folks laughed at Windows users when it was first released. It was a cheap, crap, toy windowing system compared to Sun workstations and the like.
But since they were meant to be development or backend workhorses as opposed to office/home productivity tools, they were crap for what the general-case world needed the most, all the while we workstation guys were laughing with history giving us the bird while passing by.
It was only with Windows 95 and NT that it started to look comparable to the Unix alternatives, at a much lower price.
Again, just focusing on the windowing-system factor, you are missing the point. Even though you still had to rely on collaborative multitasking, Windows 3.0/3.1 was already well versed running in protected mode with which to run multiple DOS-based or Windows-based business applications or multimedia (rudimentary but effective at the time.)
We all thought workstations were the shit. And they were... on a very narrow niche market. They were the corvettes that could take you from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds, but that can only go in a straight line. PCs with Windows 3.0/3.1x were the dutiful Toyota Corollas that could un-glamorously take the common working man to the grocery store and other vital places around your neighborhood.
To use a workstation, you needed to be a fucking programmer or engineer. To use a PC and do things you needed or enjoyed, all you needed was one or two manuals bought from your local bookstore. That's why the former was crap, regardless of niche-specific computing powah!
This is different to the upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2007 because of what?
Exaaaaactly. It's like some people in/. have no clue as of the ridiculously unnecessary training costs that Office 2007 introduced. MS Office till v2003 set a paradigm of usage, an operational lingua franca of sorts that most people using MS products knew rather well.
It worked. It was fine, and people were efficient with it. There was no reason to change the UI paradigms considering that:
1 - MS Office 2007 did not introduce significant functionality changes, and
2 - the UI changes are not truly needed to use new functionality missing from previous versions.
In other words, fuck you Microsoft for violating the "if it ain't broken, don't fix it."
Migrating from Office 2003 to Libreoffice constitutes a smaller cost in training and compatibilty than the move to Office 2007.
Indeed as well. I'm not a LibreOffice fan, but I know that a person well-versed in MS Office 2003 can make the leap quite easily to LibreOffice.
The reality is that MS Office users have continuously been struggling to use MS Office 2007 and newer. Let us do a google for usage questions regarding MS Office 2007. That it was released eons ago (in internet years) and that people still struggle with it, that is an indictment in the whole UI change malarkey.
Companies are forced to waste money in retraining or in loss of productivity by users that have to constantly google for ways to do shit the were able to do with their eyes closed for over a decade. The whole counter-argument of LibreOffice retraining costs is completely bogus considering that you will have to retrain or lose productivity the moment you go to Office 2007 or newer.
Windows sucks, but not because of backwards compatibility. That is the positive aspect of windows.
Bleh, subjective, emotional. And I love Linux, and all *nix flavors in general (except HP-UX), been working with them for years (in web, enterprise and embedded). Still, even I won't be found saying that in such gross generic terms.
This is my #1 reason for not using Python. Why use a language that has no commitment to backwards compatibility when there are plenty that do?
Sometimes backward compatibility is not necessarily a good thing. Look how long Windows was dragged by the back-ward compatibility specter.
Or another example is Java. For fucks' sake, we never got Vector and Hashtable deprecated because ZOMG backward compatibility. And as result, we still get idiots using those god-forsaken-uber-synchronized classes instead of using their modern List and Map implementation counterparts.
I'm not saying that the Python 3.0 breakage from 2.7 is necessarily a good thing (that all depends of who uses or implements what and for what goal.) But that is not to say that backward compatibility is always a good thing. Counter examples of this abounds in the software world.
Because instead of replacing 1 HP-UX server with 8 Windows servers, it could have been replaced by 1 Linux server.
That's a bullshit script kiddie argument. Requirements (technical and business) dictate what you can or should do. Some requirements would call for a bunch of linux servers. Others for Windows servers.
For many situations, Windows servers do fine, and by the way, I've work predominantly in the *NIX world (web/enterprise/embedded) for most of my career. I'm hardly a Windows promoter, but I don't engage is mindless OS fanboyism, either. I would always prefer Linux over anything else in the absence of specific requirements. But I would never spew RAARR-RAAARH MAH LINUX BEATS YOUR WINDOOZE kind of bs. That's just useless silliness.
you stop at the DoD??? pfft, the same could be said of ALL federal employees. We could cut the federal government by 90% overnight and the vast majority of americans would not even feel a bee sting out of it. Plain and simple the federal government is suposed to be small, the states are suposed to be the ones with the power. Sometime about 100 years ago (some would argue the progressive movement) things changed and we started giving the federal government more power.
No. Not 100 years ago, but 148 years ago, with the end of the civil war, which settled once and for all the supremacy of the federal government over states powers (including the power to keep slavery legal.) Let us not skip the nitty gritty details, shall we?
Master's degree. You will have already dropped $100k on your 4-year degree before ponying up another $6k for this one.
Only idiots pony $100K on a BS/BA degree. Even when college prices have ballooned since 2008, the previous statement still remains true. $6K for a MS in CS, hell even $12 or $20 is still worth it, considering that, in the hands of capable professionals, a MS degree will pay over itself for the life of one's professional career.
An article at Ars makes the case that this is not necessarily a bad thing, because Google has enough good products that simply need iteration now, making the more innovative 20% time less useful.
A change from a work environment where you can spend 20% of your time experimenting with new ideas you have, and 80% working on the "regular" mainline products, to one where you're expected to spend at least 100% of a regular workweek iterating on the "regular" products, seems like a bad thing from the perspective of the engineer at least.
Those engineers at google are getting paid sums way over the standard (even by SF standards.) Not counting all the perks they have, shit, it would be goddamned fucking stupid of them if they were to feel the 20%-reversal is "unfair".
Ars seems to be arguing that it's not necessarily a bad thing for Google's stockholders, which is a pretty different question.
Or Google as a whole (stockholders + employees who are getting quite a good compensation package.) A regular employee might find the change a bad thing, but considering everything he/she is getting in return of his employment, that opinion would be extremely subjective and emotional.
If, OTH, google has matured (or "corrupted" according to some nerdtards) to the point that "discovery" is no longer the company's battle cry, then Ars' argument leans to the side of the objective.
A more practical scenario is Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (no surprise), where a utopian arcology is built adjacent to a dystopian urban slum. Their conclusion was that the arcology can only be successful when both benefit, despite the perceived unfairness. The practical concepts of Elysium are ridiculous, its a thinly veiled metaphor to make a political statement about rich people being evil and the poor deserving unlimited free health care. Sound like any administration we know?
The rich in the form of shareholders do not have to live on Earth. In fact, rich shareholders owning Walmarts or McDonalds do not live next to those stores, do they? Given enough technological advances, it is not at all impractical (though not necessarily optimal) for a ruling class to live in an isolated, safe and hygienic bubble away from the plebe with wealth transmitted electronically. Think gated communities, mansions and private islands with private security guards, and then extrapolate all the way up outside Earth's gravity well.
Has it ever been alive in the browser?????? Other than applets at the end of the dot-com bubble 13 years ago, I've not seen any major use, if any, of Java on the browser. It has always been a de-facto server-side technology.
While it has a nice niche on the server, it's not really a significant player.
That doesn't make any sense either. Every major banking, online transaction or e-commerce system out there is in Java. Ebay? Java. Amazon? Java. Office Depot? Java? Anything enterprisey? Java. There is a lot more going on in terms of custom software development than web sites.
PHP is practically ubiquitous, and owns quite a bit of the web (~80%). With lots of companies deeply invested in PHP for both public-facing sites and internal intranet apps, it's not going away any time soon. That makes it a very safe choice for new projects.
Where do you get the statistics for that claim? Just a quick look at Dice, Monster for job openings do not a demand that would go hand in hand with that statistic.
But the languages used to program on the web are changing all the time.
So? Where have you been in the last two decades?
You are describing the same thing that has been happening on the desktop, and what occurred in the Client-Server arena. On the later, I remember when people rabidly debated about products based on AS/400, or AIX or OS/360, or Honewell-Bull or PICK. How about network platforms? Ethernet or Novell's token ring? And on the desktop, hmmm, VB or PowerBuilder or Delphi or FoxPro or Clipper or DBase? Or maybe Fujitsu COBOL? Sometimes straight up C++ with Borland or Symantec or Watcom or MS?
Technology changes all the time. All. The. Time. It changes because as we push the limits of hardware and software, we find new ways to create value. We also find, with experience, that some stuff wasn't really that great if we are lucky (and might actually cause considerable problems at worst.) So new custom techniques come to solve them. And eventually those custom techniques become "common practices". And those "common practices" eventually make it up as syntactic or semantic elements built-in right into new languages and tools.
So what's the surprise?
And stuff on the web doesn't change that often, at least within the broad stacks. Once you are in a Python stack or a Ruby/RoR stack, or a Java stack or a.NET stack, things do not change that much other than improvements and bug fixes to the languages and frameworks on the stack.
Even with JavaScript, which is pretty much the backbone of the web, how often does it change. Once you stick to a Javascript stack (ExtJs, or JQuery for instance), that doesn't change. And if you know one, you can easily extrapolate into the other.
Changing from one broad stack (say from Python to Java or Ruby to.NET), that's a lot trickier, but those changes occur infrequently. Very rarely does a person jumps through multiple stacks within a decade (which is an eternity in this profession), since it is usually companies (and sometimes geography) which dictate what stacks are in use. And the major challenges are not related to language or framework changes, but to changes in architectural paradigms, which can vary significantly from one to the other.
But again, that type of change is a) infrequent, and b) not impossible to overcome, and c) necessary to keep one's knives sharp.
That's true, and it's sad. People overspecialize these days, and underestimate themselves as a result. If you can optimize integer math, you can think big picture, and vice versa. Creativity is creativity.
The professional and academic worlds in all disciplines (not only software) are sooooo goddamned fucking full of counter examples my friend that, a) it is not even funny, and b) your statement is disconcerting and disturbing.
Seriously. I sold dew worms to fishermen for a year to buy my first computer (which I had to solder together myself). I taught myself to program, got hired to train other people, worked at solution delivery for a while, moved into architecture, then management, and now I'm the 1% that people complain about.
Everybody wants it all but doesn't want to work for it. Guess what? It doesn't work that way. Bitching and whining about what you don't have and how others have it all and how come you don't blah blah blah won't cut it. You have to work hard. While I was building my first computer my house didn't even have running water.
Ask me if I'm sympathetic.
You are awesome. That was sarcasm btw. Great that you went from the bottom to the top. Want a cookie or a start for that? A documentary by Michael Moore? You are not the only one. I came to this country with no language skills, working at McDonalds or driving fork lifts. I climbed all the way up so now I'm a nice, comfortable upper-middle class position.
Your house didn't have running water? Woopie doo! I was in a god-forsaken, roach-infested shanty town nothing but with water and sugar for food and nothing more. Since you pretty much went on a dick contest (mine is better than you, you lazy slobs), I might as well join and show you mine.
Seriously, you are one conceited cookie. Your struggles? Big. Fucking. Deal. You think your struggles and successes somehow make you fundamentally better than those who don't make it?
Newsflash. They. Fucking. Don't. They. Don't. Qualify. You. To. Assign. Ethical. Scores. On. People's. Successes. Or. Misfortunes.
More newsflash. That was what you just did by making a work ethics comparison between yourself against the less fortunate.
Yes you worked hard, and no one will ever take that away from you. But guess what, you were lucky to live at a particular place and time and circumstances that allowed you to fully reap the rewards of your hard labor, rewards that were rightfully yours.
No one makes it out to the top 100% by themselves, without any assistance of social circumstances and luck, independently of hard they work. Anyone who thinks otherwise is full of hubris.
Despite all my successes that came out from a zero that most folks (possibly not even you) would never even come to understand, I would never come to believe, despite my success, that people fighting for better working conditions is bitching and winning about what they don't have. Things have changed to the point that they are truly dysfunctional. It doesn't really matter why as the problem is extremely complex and defies simple (simpleton) characterizations.
It is absolutely stupid of you to characterize protesting, low-wage folks as bitching bitches that do not work hard, regardless of circumstances and context. But hey, if characterizing complex socio-economic phenomena with simpleton generalizations rock your boat... let them eat cake and shit like that.
It all depends on location. In my part of the country, that's the lower end of middle class. You can have the house with the white picket fence for that. Middle class homes start at $40k. The poor people houses start at $5k...
That said, even the unskilled manufacturing jobs around here pay more than that. $13.50/hr is the standard now...
True that, but with the population shifts moving to more urbane (and thus, more costly) areas, what you are describing is - quite sadly - not the American norm anymore. We live in truly dysfunctional times.
Slashdot Mirror
WOW! Now in 1997 this is big news. Probably by 2013 or whatever there'll be hundreds of Calculus courses online and something like this won't be news at all.
Uh, it is news because AFAIK it is the first coursea MOOC (actually the first MOOC afaik) othat is making everything available with github. Every other MOOC I've seen delivers its content in a closed/semi-closed delivery platform. The closest thing I've seen are the MIT Open CourseWare materials made available via iTunes, but those are just content, not actual courses with live exams and grading.
But hey, don't let that stop people from nihilistically dismiss this good stuff. Whatever gets them through the day.
Have you forgotten that companies used to train their employees?
Companies still do, or at least the ones who've figured out that recruiting new talent is more expensive than training existing employees.
And those are few and far between. I noticed this shift of pushing training costs to employees (now contractors) started in the late 90's/early 2000's. It started after the subtle change of renaming "Personnel" Departments into "Human Resources" Departments.
With the exception of good engineering firms or defense contractors, you will not get training reimbursement or in-house training anymore. It is the status quo. It has been for more than 15 years.
We, software/engineer professionals simply have to be more diligent and disciplined about getting trained out-of-pocket. Those golden years of getting trained by our employers, that good shit ain't going to come back.
I mostly agree with you but just a couple of points. 1. Whenever a company uses the word "synergy" it make me believe they are using marketing hype and really don't have a clue if what they are going to try is the right thing or not.
What choice does the company has but to use flowery language? Firing people is never a nice experience, and it can be a PR nightmare. So you find ways to shower flowers over it. With that said, and in this context, "synergy" typically means greater integration of groups and departments that until now had overlapping roles and functions, some of them acting as silos preventing efficiency. Whether that is/was the actual state of affairs, that's another thing.
2. If they really did not need them then why did they hire them in the first place?
Because at one point they needed them and now they don't? I mean, it's not fucking rocket science. You might have become better at doing things which imply you use less people for the same tasks you were doing before with more. Or you find that some line of business are not as profitable or needed anymore, so you cut them off. Or you had a projected need of workforce that never quite materialized. Or you had a spike in your backlogs that necessitated having extra people that you no longer need once your backlog is cleared.
Work and business do not occur in a never-changing vacuum. Things change. Shit changes.
This hire - fire mentality really does just make companies look incompetent.
No. Thinking that you can fix the number of people you need in time and space as if economic conditions were universal constants, that makes you look incompetent and clueless.
Seriously. It. Is. Not. Rocket. Science. 3. Its just a company to help dip shit salesmen darken my door so who really gives a shit anyway.
Compile: to create a set of *machine instructions* from a high-level programming language, using a compiler
Grace Hopper, who coined the term "compile", defined it as "accept things that were people-oriented and then use the computer to translate to *machine code*.”
A primary purpose of compiling code is so that the user doesn't need to have a copy of the matching version of the interpreter. Compiled code runs by itself. Python bytecode is a couple of steps removed from machine code. Look at how many lines of code are required in the bytecode interpreter to interpret that bytecode and do something with it. Compiled code doesn't need any interpreter, much less hundreds of thousands of lines of interpreter.
*machine code*, *machine code*. As Inigo Montoya would say: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Seriously, what's the point of quoting Grace Hopper if we are willing to ignore the historical definitions of what compiler and *machine*.
The phrase "machine instructions" was never meant to literally stand for "hardware machine instructions" to the exclusion of anything else. From very early on in the evolution of computers, compilers created somewhat portable symbolic instructions meant to be further decoded or translated at start-up run time into the actual hardware level instructions.
From a purely theoretical POV, the concept of a machine that could execute instructions preceded the existence of hardware machines. Think turing machines, -recursive functions, turing-complete string rewriting systems and lambda calculus. Think of the idea of algorithmic systems that can translate a program representation from one mathematical model of computation to another. That is a compiler. That is, in the world of the computable, a machine has never been exclusively of a hardware nature, and the notion of a compiler has never been constrained by that limitation.
Moving from the esoteric to the mundane, p-code is the most commonly known historical name for this approach that has existed since the 60's (and which is now typically referred to bytecode.) Mainframes and mini-computers sported such compilers in a variety of languages - BCPL, COBOL, PL/1, etc.
The world of practical computing has always moved around and above this notion.
Hell, if languages that produce bytecode/p-code are not compiled because these are not true hardware instructions, then neither is the x86 family of assemblers and native compilers because the x86 family of "native" CICS instructions are not true compilers.
Why? Well, because, unlike RISC hardware platforms, those instructions are interpreted at run-time into the micro-code instructions specific to the hardware.
That is the x86 CISC instruction set is not hardware machine code, but an extremely low-level p-code/bytecode interpreted at run-time by an on-the-die interpreter.
And no, Grace Hopper would not get hired in SV.
She was a woman, and she was already in her late 40's when she started making significant contributions. SV is a haven of ageism.
why are there so few women in a position to be hired in the first place? Why aren't many women choosing to study these subjects. Are they being discouraged from studying computer science? Are they graded more harshly? Is it social pressure?
Maybe they damn well don't want to.
But that is society specific as it is known that in other countries (in many countries actually) women have a greater % of participation in STEM degrees compared to their US counterparts.
So to say they may damn well don't want to is pretty much a TBU (true but useless.) If they do not want to, here in the US as opposed to their counterparts in Eastern Europe, China or India, why so? That is a question worth asking and solving. When half of a country's population is steered away from some of the most financially rewarding and productive fields, then than has a significant impact in a country's potential.
I agree with you I have tried both 10 inch tablets and 7 inch tables and my 4 inch phone and I can't stand reading off of them.
Meh, I used to think that way. Now most of my technical books are on Kindle (reading them off a 10" Galaxy Tab.) It's all right and it serves the purpose. The amount of space I've reduced is so insane that I've been willing to pay for a kindle version of a book I already had in print (selling or tossing away the printed one.) The convenience pays itself over time (not to mention that the tablet is a more versatile, utilitarian tool than three shelves of printed books ever will be.)
So the question is what if the student doesn't want to go paperless?
The thing about a college system is that it is not a democratic system. It never has been. You sign up for a class and you follow all the requirements that a professor gives you (so long as they are legal.) He/she can tell you to submit all your homeworks by e-mail and that no other methods are acceptable. Your choice is to take it or leave it. That's how it works.
That principle is also extended out of the individual classroom and over the entire campus/university system.
Or what if the student doesn't want to use Apple products at all, like me I'm a MS software kind of guy been that way since 1987.
Subjective personal preferences are not absolute rights preserved by the law. Shit, if school requires that you learn x86 assembly but you want to do ARM assembly, what right do you think you have on the matter? Or if you are at work and corporate decides that everyone will use X or Y computing system for whatever standardization reason, what are you going to do? Quit? That's just silly.
Please don't mod me down for that.
What do you care if complete strangers were to mod you down? That's the kind of shit that has no impact whatsoever in real life. So why care? Speak your peace and let others agree or have a heart attack if they are so dumb to let that affect them so.
i don't remember a time when i could refrain from spending hundreds of dollars on textbooks because they were all free at the library.
I do! Spent a total of $50 on books for my entire college degree (1992-1995, Computer Science, University of Cambridge, England).
So you were able to pull a statistical anomaly at a time when a CS degree was still obscure and when technology wasn't changing at today's pace (which necessitates buying books.) Horray! You have a solution to the expensive college book bubble!
You either had a benign and incredibly flexible tutelage, or you are just selling a bs story. See, when I did my CS degree, I remember plenty that we had about 30 people in my trig class, and a similar amount in my Calc I/II and Physics I/II classes. No way in hell that all of us could have gotten books from the libraries to do the lectures and homeworks precisely as laid out by our instructors. In our programming courses we had typically 20 students. How the hell was a university library keep an inventory of all the necessary books for that many students in all the required subjects?
And how about the non-technical requirements (Humanities, Composition, Biology, etc) which typically have a larger number of students enrolled per class at any given time? For all practical purposes, the Pigeonhole Principle suggests what you experienced constitutes an impossibility for the general student population.
In other words, what you are saying is either bullshit or TBU (true but useless).
Back when Windows was released, Unix was sort of crap, too.
Uh, no.
Uh, yes. I was there too, I saw how workstations were. They were more powerful obviously, but they were equally more expensive. Even before Windows 3.0/3.1 came, there was already a commercial ecosystem of spreadsheets, word processors and database systems that, though simple and primitive, provided a good ROI for the little investment you had to put in for the non-technical masses. Right in their work places. That. Was. A. Computer. Revolution.
No workstation system of the time had that. Computing power and windowing systems mean shit if platforms cost you an eye and a kidney while providing no productivity tools for the common non-technical person.
Us Unix workstation folks laughed at Windows users when it was first released. It was a cheap, crap, toy windowing system compared to Sun workstations and the like.
But since they were meant to be development or backend workhorses as opposed to office/home productivity tools, they were crap for what the general-case world needed the most, all the while we workstation guys were laughing with history giving us the bird while passing by.
It was only with Windows 95 and NT that it started to look comparable to the Unix alternatives, at a much lower price.
Again, just focusing on the windowing-system factor, you are missing the point. Even though you still had to rely on collaborative multitasking, Windows 3.0/3.1 was already well versed running in protected mode with which to run multiple DOS-based or Windows-based business applications or multimedia (rudimentary but effective at the time.)
We all thought workstations were the shit. And they were... on a very narrow niche market. They were the corvettes that could take you from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds, but that can only go in a straight line. PCs with Windows 3.0/3.1x were the dutiful Toyota Corollas that could un-glamorously take the common working man to the grocery store and other vital places around your neighborhood.
To use a workstation, you needed to be a fucking programmer or engineer. To use a PC and do things you needed or enjoyed, all you needed was one or two manuals bought from your local bookstore. That's why the former was crap, regardless of niche-specific computing powah!
This is different to the upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2007 because of what?
Exaaaaactly. It's like some people in /. have no clue as of the ridiculously unnecessary training costs that Office 2007 introduced. MS Office till v2003 set a paradigm of usage, an operational lingua franca of sorts that most people using MS products knew rather well.
It worked. It was fine, and people were efficient with it. There was no reason to change the UI paradigms considering that:
1 - MS Office 2007 did not introduce significant functionality changes, and
2 - the UI changes are not truly needed to use new functionality missing from previous versions.
In other words, fuck you Microsoft for violating the "if it ain't broken, don't fix it."
Migrating from Office 2003 to Libreoffice constitutes a smaller cost in training and compatibilty than the move to Office 2007.
Indeed as well. I'm not a LibreOffice fan, but I know that a person well-versed in MS Office 2003 can make the leap quite easily to LibreOffice.
The reality is that MS Office users have continuously been struggling to use MS Office 2007 and newer. Let us do a google for usage questions regarding MS Office 2007. That it was released eons ago (in internet years) and that people still struggle with it, that is an indictment in the whole UI change malarkey.
Companies are forced to waste money in retraining or in loss of productivity by users that have to constantly google for ways to do shit the were able to do with their eyes closed for over a decade. The whole counter-argument of LibreOffice retraining costs is completely bogus considering that you will have to retrain or lose productivity the moment you go to Office 2007 or newer.
Windows sucks, but not because of backwards compatibility. That is the positive aspect of windows.
Bleh, subjective, emotional. And I love Linux, and all *nix flavors in general (except HP-UX), been working with them for years (in web, enterprise and embedded). Still, even I won't be found saying that in such gross generic terms.
^^^ THIS.
This is my #1 reason for not using Python. Why use a language that has no commitment to backwards compatibility when there are plenty that do?
Sometimes backward compatibility is not necessarily a good thing. Look how long Windows was dragged by the back-ward compatibility specter.
Or another example is Java. For fucks' sake, we never got Vector and Hashtable deprecated because ZOMG backward compatibility. And as result, we still get idiots using those god-forsaken-uber-synchronized classes instead of using their modern List and Map implementation counterparts.
I'm not saying that the Python 3.0 breakage from 2.7 is necessarily a good thing (that all depends of who uses or implements what and for what goal.) But that is not to say that backward compatibility is always a good thing. Counter examples of this abounds in the software world.
Because instead of replacing 1 HP-UX server with 8 Windows servers, it could have been replaced by 1 Linux server.
That's a bullshit script kiddie argument. Requirements (technical and business) dictate what you can or should do. Some requirements would call for a bunch of linux servers. Others for Windows servers.
For many situations, Windows servers do fine, and by the way, I've work predominantly in the *NIX world (web/enterprise/embedded) for most of my career. I'm hardly a Windows promoter, but I don't engage is mindless OS fanboyism, either. I would always prefer Linux over anything else in the absence of specific requirements. But I would never spew RAARR-RAAARH MAH LINUX BEATS YOUR WINDOOZE kind of bs. That's just useless silliness.
Plain and simple the federal government is suposed to be small, the states are suposed to be the ones with the power.
And who is supposing this? Also, people might have had more sympathy for States' Rights if states didn't use them to oppress people.
Don't say that, for the people who call the Civil War "The War of Northern Aggression" might get offended with facts and shit like that.
you stop at the DoD??? pfft, the same could be said of ALL federal employees. We could cut the federal government by 90% overnight and the vast majority of americans would not even feel a bee sting out of it. Plain and simple the federal government is suposed to be small, the states are suposed to be the ones with the power. Sometime about 100 years ago (some would argue the progressive movement) things changed and we started giving the federal government more power.
No. Not 100 years ago, but 148 years ago, with the end of the civil war, which settled once and for all the supremacy of the federal government over states powers (including the power to keep slavery legal.) Let us not skip the nitty gritty details, shall we?
Master's degree. You will have already dropped $100k on your 4-year degree before ponying up another $6k for this one.
Only idiots pony $100K on a BS/BA degree. Even when college prices have ballooned since 2008, the previous statement still remains true. $6K for a MS in CS, hell even $12 or $20 is still worth it, considering that, in the hands of capable professionals, a MS degree will pay over itself for the life of one's professional career.
A change from a work environment where you can spend 20% of your time experimenting with new ideas you have, and 80% working on the "regular" mainline products, to one where you're expected to spend at least 100% of a regular workweek iterating on the "regular" products, seems like a bad thing from the perspective of the engineer at least. Those engineers at google are getting paid sums way over the standard (even by SF standards.) Not counting all the perks they have, shit, it would be goddamned fucking stupid of them if they were to feel the 20%-reversal is "unfair".
Ars seems to be arguing that it's not necessarily a bad thing for Google's stockholders, which is a pretty different question.
Or Google as a whole (stockholders + employees who are getting quite a good compensation package.) A regular employee might find the change a bad thing, but considering everything he/she is getting in return of his employment, that opinion would be extremely subjective and emotional.
If, OTH, google has matured (or "corrupted" according to some nerdtards) to the point that "discovery" is no longer the company's battle cry, then Ars' argument leans to the side of the objective.
A more practical scenario is Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (no surprise), where a utopian arcology is built adjacent to a dystopian urban slum. Their conclusion was that the arcology can only be successful when both benefit, despite the perceived unfairness. The practical concepts of Elysium are ridiculous, its a thinly veiled metaphor to make a political statement about rich people being evil and the poor deserving unlimited free health care. Sound like any administration we know?
The rich in the form of shareholders do not have to live on Earth. In fact, rich shareholders owning Walmarts or McDonalds do not live next to those stores, do they? Given enough technological advances, it is not at all impractical (though not necessarily optimal) for a ruling class to live in an isolated, safe and hygienic bubble away from the plebe with wealth transmitted electronically. Think gated communities, mansions and private islands with private security guards, and then extrapolate all the way up outside Earth's gravity well.
Java is essentially dead on the browser.
Has it ever been alive in the browser?????? Other than applets at the end of the dot-com bubble 13 years ago, I've not seen any major use, if any, of Java on the browser. It has always been a de-facto server-side technology.
While it has a nice niche on the server, it's not really a significant player.
That doesn't make any sense either. Every major banking, online transaction or e-commerce system out there is in Java. Ebay? Java. Amazon? Java. Office Depot? Java? Anything enterprisey? Java. There is a lot more going on in terms of custom software development than web sites.
PHP is practically ubiquitous, and owns quite a bit of the web (~80%). With lots of companies deeply invested in PHP for both public-facing sites and internal intranet apps, it's not going away any time soon. That makes it a very safe choice for new projects.
Where do you get the statistics for that claim? Just a quick look at Dice, Monster for job openings do not a demand that would go hand in hand with that statistic.
But the languages used to program on the web are changing all the time.
So? Where have you been in the last two decades?
You are describing the same thing that has been happening on the desktop, and what occurred in the Client-Server arena. On the later, I remember when people rabidly debated about products based on AS/400, or AIX or OS/360, or Honewell-Bull or PICK. How about network platforms? Ethernet or Novell's token ring? And on the desktop, hmmm, VB or PowerBuilder or Delphi or FoxPro or Clipper or DBase? Or maybe Fujitsu COBOL? Sometimes straight up C++ with Borland or Symantec or Watcom or MS?
Technology changes all the time. All. The. Time. It changes because as we push the limits of hardware and software, we find new ways to create value. We also find, with experience, that some stuff wasn't really that great if we are lucky (and might actually cause considerable problems at worst.) So new custom techniques come to solve them. And eventually those custom techniques become "common practices". And those "common practices" eventually make it up as syntactic or semantic elements built-in right into new languages and tools.
So what's the surprise?
And stuff on the web doesn't change that often, at least within the broad stacks. Once you are in a Python stack or a Ruby/RoR stack, or a Java stack or a .NET stack, things do not change that much other than improvements and bug fixes to the languages and frameworks on the stack.
Even with JavaScript, which is pretty much the backbone of the web, how often does it change. Once you stick to a Javascript stack (ExtJs, or JQuery for instance), that doesn't change. And if you know one, you can easily extrapolate into the other.
Changing from one broad stack (say from Python to Java or Ruby to .NET), that's a lot trickier, but those changes occur infrequently. Very rarely does a person jumps through multiple stacks within a decade (which is an eternity in this profession), since it is usually companies (and sometimes geography) which dictate what stacks are in use. And the major challenges are not related to language or framework changes, but to changes in architectural paradigms, which can vary significantly from one to the other.
But again, that type of change is a) infrequent, and b) not impossible to overcome, and c) necessary to keep one's knives sharp.
I thought I was alone in this until a few weeks ago I found a site called xkcdsucks, and it appears I'm not alone in thinking this.
Hey, look at me! My opinion is valid because I found a website that says the same thing.
I'm making a sig out of that.
That's true, and it's sad. People overspecialize these days, and underestimate themselves as a result. If you can optimize integer math, you can think big picture, and vice versa. Creativity is creativity.
The professional and academic worlds in all disciplines (not only software) are sooooo goddamned fucking full of counter examples my friend that, a) it is not even funny, and b) your statement is disconcerting and disturbing.
Seriously. I sold dew worms to fishermen for a year to buy my first computer (which I had to solder together myself). I taught myself to program, got hired to train other people, worked at solution delivery for a while, moved into architecture, then management, and now I'm the 1% that people complain about.
Everybody wants it all but doesn't want to work for it. Guess what? It doesn't work that way. Bitching and whining about what you don't have and how others have it all and how come you don't blah blah blah won't cut it. You have to work hard. While I was building my first computer my house didn't even have running water.
Ask me if I'm sympathetic.
You are awesome. That was sarcasm btw. Great that you went from the bottom to the top. Want a cookie or a start for that? A documentary by Michael Moore? You are not the only one. I came to this country with no language skills, working at McDonalds or driving fork lifts. I climbed all the way up so now I'm a nice, comfortable upper-middle class position.
Your house didn't have running water? Woopie doo! I was in a god-forsaken, roach-infested shanty town nothing but with water and sugar for food and nothing more. Since you pretty much went on a dick contest (mine is better than you, you lazy slobs), I might as well join and show you mine.
Seriously, you are one conceited cookie. Your struggles? Big. Fucking. Deal. You think your struggles and successes somehow make you fundamentally better than those who don't make it?
Newsflash. They. Fucking. Don't. They. Don't. Qualify. You. To. Assign. Ethical. Scores. On. People's. Successes. Or. Misfortunes.
More newsflash. That was what you just did by making a work ethics comparison between yourself against the less fortunate.
Yes you worked hard, and no one will ever take that away from you. But guess what, you were lucky to live at a particular place and time and circumstances that allowed you to fully reap the rewards of your hard labor, rewards that were rightfully yours.
No one makes it out to the top 100% by themselves, without any assistance of social circumstances and luck, independently of hard they work. Anyone who thinks otherwise is full of hubris.
Despite all my successes that came out from a zero that most folks (possibly not even you) would never even come to understand, I would never come to believe, despite my success, that people fighting for better working conditions is bitching and winning about what they don't have. Things have changed to the point that they are truly dysfunctional. It doesn't really matter why as the problem is extremely complex and defies simple (simpleton) characterizations.
It is absolutely stupid of you to characterize protesting, low-wage folks as bitching bitches that do not work hard, regardless of circumstances and context. But hey, if characterizing complex socio-economic phenomena with simpleton generalizations rock your boat... let them eat cake and shit like that.
It all depends on location. In my part of the country, that's the lower end of middle class. You can have the house with the white picket fence for that. Middle class homes start at $40k. The poor people houses start at $5k...
That said, even the unskilled manufacturing jobs around here pay more than that. $13.50/hr is the standard now...
True that, but with the population shifts moving to more urbane (and thus, more costly) areas, what you are describing is - quite sadly - not the American norm anymore. We live in truly dysfunctional times.