What the book does, in a way, is extend the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis stating that grammar and vocabulary influence thought
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says the exact opposite of what you suggest--language reflects thought, it doesn't influence thought. And really, it's not really about the "thoughts" of an individual, so much as it's about the circumstances of the culture that speak the language.
Eskimos --err, Inuits, or whatever they are nowadays-- aren't obsessed with snow because they have a lot of words for it...they have a lot of words for snow because they they need to make fine distinctions about snow that other cultures don't need to make.
If there's a sense in which Sapir-Whorf speaks to language's influence on thought, it's about natural categories that transcend language, and out inability to think about those categories as categories. Can my dog think about "furniture", because she doesn't have a word for it and she doesn't use it? Or does she only think about, say, my desk chair and sofa at home, and not make any categorical connection between them? That's really a question that's a few thousand years older than Messrs Sapir & Wharf. (Answer: she only thinks about food.)
--It's impossible for me to believe that an Apple designer would allow the atrocious kerning between the i and the W. We're talking about Apple, after all, and I really think they would change the name rather than let the i's dot bump into the W.
--It's also really, really hard to believe that the physical buttons wouldn't be aquafied.
Still, I haven't replaced my Palm Pilot since I broke it, but I would buy an airport-enabled, OS X-based PDA in a second, at any cost, even if I need to sell my grandma's oxygen tank to do it.
This is cool, and I like perl, if only for while(<>), but I really don't see the application described as having an enterprise architecture, and this is where maintainability is really an issue.
Separating code into MVC layers is a good start, but the real issue is the interfaces between M and V and between V and C. The article really made it sound like these components were coupled pretty tightly. That's not perl's fault, and Java as a language doesn't really offer an special tools for a clean separation, but I think Sun has done a good job of spec'ing out how these interfaces should work, even if you don't like Sun's licensing practices.
Why is this important? I like writing code, and I always prefer to build rather than buy, but sometimes you just need to buy shit, or use an open source thing, or whatever. If my persistence layer (for example) is written to a standard API like JDO, I can swap in a different implementation whenever necessary.
What if eToys had survived the dot-com implosion, and bought or were bought by another company? How well would this system plug into (or be plugged into) any special-needs components of the new system? That's the real acid test of maintainability in the large.
Maybe these standards exist for perl, and I haven't used it enough in an enterprise context to stumble across them. However, you can't help but stumble across the J2EE stuff when you work with Java. Are these standards perfect? No. Are they complete? No. But they're standards, and that's what makes pluggable components possible.
MySQL didn't support transactions back then, did it? I'm not a MySQL expert, but I seem to remember deciding not to use it (c. 1999) on that issue alone...it's hard to imagine storing any financial information without rollbacks.
I used postgres instead, and I find that support is really pretty lame. I'm not paying for it, of course, but I probably would if I had a glimmer of hope about the results from any of the questions or bug supports I submitted as a non-paying user.
I think user interfaces are one of the areas where science fiction (especially Star Trek) has been completely unimaginative. There's still using keyboards and flat screens on the Enterprise? Why isn't the whole freakin' ship a holodeck? In particular, why isn't there a 3-dimensional display to show nearby ships? And wouldn't it be convenient if the consoles (which it seems someone is always fatally banging into) were immaterial? Etc.
The graduates from Podunk U of South Carolina were probably hicks who were never good at thinking to begin with, so even if you sent them to Harvard or Oxford, they wouldn't somehow magically be transformed into critical thinkers with good leadership ability and an inate charisma.
No, they would be transformed into people who had connections to people in power, which is what makes Harvard & Oxford graduates successful more than their critical thinking skills.
P.S. Obviously, the admissions officers at your college didn't weed you out, so it's not a perfect system.
IANAM, but aren't representational images (like photographs containing steganographic messages) against the rules? Of course, so is drinking, which some of the highjackers were reported doing, and, for that matter, so is murder, but I wonder how much "radical Islam" really plays a part in the WTC thing.
I'm really more of a punk rock kinda guy, but when I realized that a friend I hadn't seen in a while might have been in one of the towers, I immediately thought of James Taylor's "Fire & Rain" and went out and found it on the 'net. It was pretty shocking to hear in the 3rd verse (which I had forgotten, if I ever knew it):
...sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground
P.S. For bona fide prophesy (or maybe repetition of history, or just good advice) check out W.H. Auden's September 1, 1939
Re:XML is not likely to succeed
on
XML in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 0, Troll
It's comments like these (or another good example, "Java sucks! Applets are really slow!") that make it clear that many self-identified "programmers" on/. are <ahem/> "HTML programmers," the rodeo clowns of our profession.
There are plenty of examples of stuff in establishment art museums that just doesn't pass any tests for craftsmanship or aesthetics or uniqueness. I really don't mean this in a bad way. Look at Jeff Koons, for instance, who floats basketballs in water, calls it art, and makes a lot of money doing it.
If you call it art, it's art. If you ask "is it art?" . . . well, it's probably not. It's the process, not the end product. Art is defined by artists, rather than artists are defined by art.
If it's an internet consulting company, and you are the Chief Technical Officer...aren't you the management?
I don't think that you can simultaneously claim that (1) none of the problems at the company are your fault, and (2) you are so critical to the operation that nothing can go on without you. Maybe you're not getting enough funding, or the sales staff is overselling your services. Sure, you're not making it happen, but if you let it happen, you're not doing your job.
A CTO isn't (or shouldn't be) the writer or the tersest code, or the person who installed Linux first, or the winner of whatever techo-pissing contest you care to name. The CTO coordinates with the other departments. You manage resources, help your people to be productive, and you you protect them. If that's not the job you want, you should do yourself, your employer, and your future employer(s), and your reports a favor, and get a job where your door doesn't say manager or chief. Your "friends" won't miss you.
The article doesn't mention Aaron Bunnel's job description, but I would bet a gram of coke that he wouldn't know a Perl script if it bit him on the ass. There are more English majors and MBAs at dot-coms than there are programmers or even designers, who probably have the best drugs. Working at a dot-com doesn't make you a geek any more than writing code for the army makes you a soldier or laying out pages for a "women's" site makes you a feminist.
Drug use isn't endemic to our geeks. It is endemic to 26-year olds, especially rich ones, and (alas) we often work at the same place.
...that I should be using Visual Basic rather Java. So why ask programmers for legal opinion?
P.S. No one needs a good case to sue you. Maybe they need a good case to win, but going to court can kill you, win or lose. I "won" my divorce case a few months ago and I'll be paying the legal fees for the next few years.
I assume it's still the best place to find young people like yourselves who are also looking for a little action.
But you don't have to go to college right now. It will still be there in five years. College will be a lot more fun if you've got some of money, and you will get a lot more out of things like arts & humanities courses if you bring a little maturity to them. ( I think money & experience is what made the G.I.-Bill college students so successful.)
I think you're exactly right. There was an interesting article by gossip columnist/serious journalist Bob Cringley a year or so ago that said, basically, that Microsoft grows so quickly (about 20% every year) that it loses money if it invests its profits in anything but itself, i.e., by buying more companies. So it buys small, sucessful companies at a furious rate, and small, sucessful companies run Unix. Even if it made sense to move to Windows tools, they couldn't port everything fast enough.
The only thing that MacOS and Linux have in common is that they're not Windows. That's not really something that you can put in a requirements document, is it? IT managers don't say "I need software that isn't from Microsoft", they say "I need software that solves Problem X." As long as we (in both camps, Mac and Linux) define ourselves in terms of what we're not, we have lost. Worse, we have lost to simpletons who don't really solve problem X.
Linux isn't going to steal many desktops from the Mac until it is backwards-compatible with the very, very expensive* software base that the real Mac user base has already bought, and the Mac isn't going to steal any rack space from Linux boxes, even with OS X. Three little words: "orthogonal problem spaces."
*Even free software won't change the cost-of -compatibility issue. You already know this if you've ever tried to train a designer. Sure, you can save $1000 or more for Quark + Photoshop licenses, but you will spend a lot of time training, and you will lose $50 - $200 (or more) in billable hours for every hour a designer or Photoshop guy spends not doing production on top of the considerable cost of the training itself.
A college course is training for the so-called real world. So what do you want your job to be like? It's perfectly appropriate to tell your boss that there are better tools or choices appropriate. It's also perfectly appropriate to stick with the corporate culture. A lot of it depends on your personality and the circumstances. But this is a good, low-risk time to experiment.
As in the real world, there are a lot of possible reactions by your instructor and TAs. A boss might be delighted that you're thinking for your self or looking to improve the system, or they might feel like you're threatening their authority. That's just the way people are (in any context), and it's not gonna change. If they say "no", the best thing you can do is try understand why. Maybe it's not an arbitrary decision, and maybe there are some very sound technical reasons. Maybe not. Either way, you'll learn something by figuring out why things are they way that they are, rather than assuming that someone just went down to CompUSA and stocked up on whatever was on the shelves.
The hard question to ask yourself: is this really a technical issue for you? Or is it a way to indicate to your instructor(s) that "I already know a lot about programming?" The best way to differentiate yourself is to write really good code, and the worst way to learn is to start out assuming that you're smarter than the people you're learning from. Maybe it's true, but save that assessment for the end of the semester.
If you're smart and you're doing work that interests you, someone will pay you to do what you like. Sooner or later. Really. In the meantime, stock up on ramen and keep the faith.
That said, the end of high school is pretty early to decide on your career. It's certainly not too early to decide what you think your career should be, and make plans accordingly, but you should avoid getting too specific until you get a feel for what's out there.
Warning: History as taught at an American University can be very different from the stuff that you learn in high school. Universities really hire humanities faculty based on intellectual fashion, and the current fashion strongly favors politics over substance. I've been a card-carrying Green for ten years and I'm shocked by the hoohaa that my friends in the Social Sciences brought home from graduate courses.
P.S. Do yourself a favor and go to a liberal arts college.
It's certainly an oversimplification to think that corporate money can affect Universities in only one way. There's a huge difference between:
Making tenure and hiring choices based on profitability
Making curriculum choices based on profitablity
Making research choices based on profitability
Cooking reseach results based on profitability.
All of these things happen, and some are worse than others. For me, the most dramatic example is what happened across campus in the social sciences departments 20 to 30 years ago. It's really expensive to keep people institutionalized in mental hospitals, and the government (on many levels) wanted to get out of the business. Voila! A bunch of social scientists decided that "mainstreaming" (i.e., kicking people out of hospitals) was good for the patients, and came up with a lot of evidence that neatly supported the desired outcome.
"I'll get funding if my research returns the right answer" is the really dangerous inteface between universities and capitalists, and as scientists and engineers, we should see the danger, no matter what our political affiliations might be.
Of course, there's nothing new, or nerdy, about it. It's as old as education, and it's not particular to any department.
The next time you find yourself grumbling about HTML that was written by designers, managers and secretaries who have declared themselves "programmers," remember the programmers on/. who think that they're lawyers...
...would be lots and lots of public KVM kiosks that would let us use the watches (and other portables) in a ergonomic and wireless kinda way. I would even vote for <insert objectionable political candidate here> to see such a thing.
Slashdot Mirror
What the book does, in a way, is extend the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis stating that grammar and vocabulary influence thought
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says the exact opposite of what you suggest--language reflects thought, it doesn't influence thought. And really, it's not really about the "thoughts" of an individual, so much as it's about the circumstances of the culture that speak the language.
Eskimos --err, Inuits, or whatever they are nowadays-- aren't obsessed with snow because they have a lot of words for it...they have a lot of words for snow because they they need to make fine distinctions about snow that other cultures don't need to make.
If there's a sense in which Sapir-Whorf speaks to language's influence on thought, it's about natural categories that transcend language, and out inability to think about those categories as categories. Can my dog think about "furniture", because she doesn't have a word for it and she doesn't use it? Or does she only think about, say, my desk chair and sofa at home, and not make any categorical connection between them? That's really a question that's a few thousand years older than Messrs Sapir & Wharf. (Answer: she only thinks about food.)
Apart from the shadow issues:
--It's impossible for me to believe that an Apple designer would allow the atrocious kerning between the i and the W. We're talking about Apple, after all, and I really think they would change the name rather than let the i's dot bump into the W.
--It's also really, really hard to believe that the physical buttons wouldn't be aquafied.
Still, I haven't replaced my Palm Pilot since I broke it, but I would buy an airport-enabled, OS X-based PDA in a second, at any cost, even if I need to sell my grandma's oxygen tank to do it.
This is cool, and I like perl, if only for while(<>), but I really don't see the application described as having an enterprise architecture, and this is where maintainability is really an issue.
Separating code into MVC layers is a good start, but the real issue is the interfaces between M and V and between V and C. The article really made it sound like these components were coupled pretty tightly. That's not perl's fault, and Java as a language doesn't really offer an special tools for a clean separation, but I think Sun has done a good job of spec'ing out how these interfaces should work, even if you don't like Sun's licensing practices.
Why is this important? I like writing code, and I always prefer to build rather than buy, but sometimes you just need to buy shit, or use an open source thing, or whatever. If my persistence layer (for example) is written to a standard API like JDO, I can swap in a different implementation whenever necessary.
What if eToys had survived the dot-com implosion, and bought or were bought by another company? How well would this system plug into (or be plugged into) any special-needs components of the new system? That's the real acid test of maintainability in the large.
Maybe these standards exist for perl, and I haven't used it enough in an enterprise context to stumble across them. However, you can't help but stumble across the J2EE stuff when you work with Java. Are these standards perfect? No. Are they complete? No. But they're standards, and that's what makes pluggable components possible.
MySQL didn't support transactions back then, did it? I'm not a MySQL expert, but I seem to remember deciding not to use it (c. 1999) on that issue alone...it's hard to imagine storing any financial information without rollbacks.
I used postgres instead, and I find that support is really pretty lame. I'm not paying for it, of course, but I probably would if I had a glimmer of hope about the results from any of the questions or bug supports I submitted as a non-paying user.
I think user interfaces are one of the areas where science fiction (especially Star Trek) has been completely unimaginative. There's still using keyboards and flat screens on the Enterprise? Why isn't the whole freakin' ship a holodeck? In particular, why isn't there a 3-dimensional display to show nearby ships? And wouldn't it be convenient if the consoles (which it seems someone is always fatally banging into) were immaterial? Etc.
No, they would be transformed into people who had connections to people in power, which is what makes Harvard & Oxford graduates successful more than their critical thinking skills.
P.S. Obviously, the admissions officers at your college didn't weed you out, so it's not a perfect system.
IANAM, but aren't representational images (like photographs containing steganographic messages) against the rules? Of course, so is drinking, which some of the highjackers were reported doing, and, for that matter, so is murder, but I wonder how much "radical Islam" really plays a part in the WTC thing.
I'm really more of a punk rock kinda guy, but when I realized that a friend I hadn't seen in a while might have been in one of the towers, I immediately thought of James Taylor's "Fire & Rain" and went out and found it on the 'net. It was pretty shocking to hear in the 3rd verse (which I had forgotten, if I ever knew it):
...sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground
P.S. For bona fide prophesy (or maybe repetition of history, or just good advice) check out W.H. Auden's September 1, 1939
It's comments like these (or another good example, "Java sucks! Applets are really slow!") that make it clear that many self-identified "programmers" on /. are <ahem/> "HTML programmers," the rodeo clowns of our profession.
It's "once more into the breech"
> If they can make five gigs this small when will I see it on my Palm Pilot?
When they shrink car batteries down to the same size.
How much did the guitarist drink before the test? What did they smoke?
What instruments did the second classical musician play? Oboe? Piano? Percussion?
Does the audio saleman sell Harmon-Kardon or NAD?
It's hard to believe that the Washington Post could be so sloppy with important details! Who do they think is reading these articles, anyway?
There are plenty of examples of stuff in establishment art museums that just doesn't pass any tests for craftsmanship or aesthetics or uniqueness. I really don't mean this in a bad way. Look at Jeff Koons, for instance, who floats basketballs in water, calls it art, and makes a lot of money doing it.
If you call it art, it's art. If you ask "is it art?" . . . well, it's probably not. It's the process, not the end product. Art is defined by artists, rather than artists are defined by art.
I don't think that you can simultaneously claim that (1) none of the problems at the company are your fault, and (2) you are so critical to the operation that nothing can go on without you. Maybe you're not getting enough funding, or the sales staff is overselling your services. Sure, you're not making it happen, but if you let it happen, you're not doing your job.
A CTO isn't (or shouldn't be) the writer or the tersest code, or the person who installed Linux first, or the winner of whatever techo-pissing contest you care to name. The CTO coordinates with the other departments. You manage resources, help your people to be productive, and you you protect them. If that's not the job you want, you should do yourself, your employer, and your future employer(s), and your reports a favor, and get a job where your door doesn't say manager or chief. Your "friends" won't miss you.
Drug use isn't endemic to our geeks. It is endemic to 26-year olds, especially rich ones, and (alas) we often work at the same place.
P.S. No one needs a good case to sue you. Maybe they need a good case to win, but going to court can kill you, win or lose. I "won" my divorce case a few months ago and I'll be paying the legal fees for the next few years.
But you don't have to go to college right now. It will still be there in five years. College will be a lot more fun if you've got some of money, and you will get a lot more out of things like arts & humanities courses if you bring a little maturity to them. ( I think money & experience is what made the G.I.-Bill college students so successful.)
I think you're exactly right. There was an interesting article by gossip columnist/serious journalist Bob Cringley a year or so ago that said, basically, that Microsoft grows so quickly (about 20% every year) that it loses money if it invests its profits in anything but itself, i.e., by buying more companies. So it buys small, sucessful companies at a furious rate, and small, sucessful companies run Unix. Even if it made sense to move to Windows tools, they couldn't port everything fast enough.
Linux isn't going to steal many desktops from the Mac until it is backwards-compatible with the very, very expensive* software base that the real Mac user base has already bought, and the Mac isn't going to steal any rack space from Linux boxes, even with OS X. Three little words: "orthogonal problem spaces."
*Even free software won't change the cost-of -compatibility issue. You already know this if you've ever tried to train a designer. Sure, you can save $1000 or more for Quark + Photoshop licenses, but you will spend a lot of time training, and you will lose $50 - $200 (or more) in billable hours for every hour a designer or Photoshop guy spends not doing production on top of the considerable cost of the training itself.
As in the real world, there are a lot of possible reactions by your instructor and TAs. A boss might be delighted that you're thinking for your self or looking to improve the system, or they might feel like you're threatening their authority. That's just the way people are (in any context), and it's not gonna change. If they say "no", the best thing you can do is try understand why. Maybe it's not an arbitrary decision, and maybe there are some very sound technical reasons. Maybe not. Either way, you'll learn something by figuring out why things are they way that they are, rather than assuming that someone just went down to CompUSA and stocked up on whatever was on the shelves.
The hard question to ask yourself: is this really a technical issue for you? Or is it a way to indicate to your instructor(s) that "I already know a lot about programming?" The best way to differentiate yourself is to write really good code, and the worst way to learn is to start out assuming that you're smarter than the people you're learning from. Maybe it's true, but save that assessment for the end of the semester.
Yeah, more jobs working for loopy liberal arts graduates.
That said, the end of high school is pretty early to decide on your career. It's certainly not too early to decide what you think your career should be, and make plans accordingly, but you should avoid getting too specific until you get a feel for what's out there.
Warning: History as taught at an American University can be very different from the stuff that you learn in high school. Universities really hire humanities faculty based on intellectual fashion, and the current fashion strongly favors politics over substance. I've been a card-carrying Green for ten years and I'm shocked by the hoohaa that my friends in the Social Sciences brought home from graduate courses.
P.S. Do yourself a favor and go to a liberal arts college.
- Making tenure and hiring choices based on profitability
- Making curriculum choices based on profitablity
- Making research choices based on profitability
- Cooking reseach results based on profitability.
All of these things happen, and some are worse than others. For me, the most dramatic example is what happened across campus in the social sciences departments 20 to 30 years ago. It's really expensive to keep people institutionalized in mental hospitals, and the government (on many levels) wanted to get out of the business. Voila! A bunch of social scientists decided that "mainstreaming" (i.e., kicking people out of hospitals) was good for the patients, and came up with a lot of evidence that neatly supported the desired outcome."I'll get funding if my research returns the right answer" is the really dangerous inteface between universities and capitalists, and as scientists and engineers, we should see the danger, no matter what our political affiliations might be.
Of course, there's nothing new, or nerdy, about it. It's as old as education, and it's not particular to any department.
The next time you find yourself grumbling about HTML that was written by designers, managers and secretaries who have declared themselves "programmers," remember the programmers on /. who think that they're lawyers...
...would be lots and lots of public KVM kiosks that would let us use the watches (and other portables) in a ergonomic and wireless kinda way. I would even vote for <insert objectionable political candidate here> to see such a thing.