Why don't you just do it right the first time and use valid HTML?
Nobody gets paid the big bucks for writing valid HTML. At least not unless it also happens to look exactly the way the employer wants it to
look, on "both" browsers.
A lot of the folks reading/. probably understand that the web is simply not designed for exact control (by the designer) over fonts, colors, images, etc.
But the business world that pays
(most of) or salaries does not understand this, and probably never will.
Undergrads from Caltech are averaging $55k in industry jobs on graduation. PhDs are averaging over $70k. It all depends on whether you're learning hard stuff that few people can do, or how to drag and drop your way to a VB application.
Also remember that you're naturally going to get paid more in California than in, say, Missouri. Just a cost of living thing.
Of course opportunity is everywhere... you can get paid 35-45K a year to install print drivers for helpless business users. Sure it ain't 60K but it beats working in a restaurant or something.
write a censoring proxy that denies access to French-language webpages, or a filter that alters French content in a mocking way. Some French can be awfully uptight about their langauge, and they are likely to be the same sort of busybodies who would support this action against Yahoo.
Just translate it to English. That would probably piss them off sufficiently.
While it is a little extreme to not understand the difference between RAM and disk drives, the minutiae of PC hardware and configuration is not for everyone. At least not at first.
Turn this kid on to some suitably high-level language. For most of the people reading this site, this was probably BASIC. There have been discussions recently about what you should use today, but I will stay away from that can of worms.
If he has the hacker nature he will get hooked and want to know more. He will learn that his favorite toy HLL runs on top of lower level code, and he will want to start coding down there for more power and control. He will learn about how the OS itself works, and he might want to hack on that as well. By this point he will have a reason to learn about hardware.
That's pretty much what we do now in Linux - when you write it doesn't go to disk, it goes onto memory pages. When you read you're reading from memory pages and if they're not there, they get 'swapped in' from your file using the same mechanism we use for virtual memory, though we bypass the paging hardware in this case (it's faster that way).
A Multics process accesses all the data (it is allowed to) on the system as part of a huge, two-dimensional address space (see segmentation). There is no "file I/O", no buffers, no read-in, no write-out.
I take this to mean that Multics had no read(2) or write(2)... from the application-writer's point of view, the equivalent to these system calls was simple memory access.
Presenting this analogy to programmers as their primary means of file access is different from using such tricks down at a level where (theoretically) no one except kernel programmers needs to know ahout them.
It shows a completely different point of view... instead of "everything is a file", the MULTICS way seems to be "everything is core".
And does anyone know of Java compilers that would work disant on a 386sx (with no cd-rom support),
because I hate being tied to my desk.
Don't know about Java, but I might still have a copy of Turbo C++ lying around. Worked fine on my 386. I'm not sure how much of C++ it really supports, since I mainly used it as a C compiler.
I would second the Eckel recommendation, but note that Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++ are almost the same book except for the language specifics, so if you read them both you will have a lot of "hey, didn't I read this already?" moments.
By age 15 a smart young person should be able to handle C/C++ and a good graphics library with some work. But at age 12 just being able to create a game as simple as pong in basic would be really cool
I have explained to people who have asked me about programming careers:
Unless you are the kind of person who can watch a computer do something that most people take for granted, like printing "Hello world", or doing some simple arithmetic, or drawing a few simple shapes on the screen, and get a rush simply because it was you that made it do this thing, then you will not enjoy being a programmer.
If you are intelligent, you will be able to learn programming, and you will be able to make money at it. Possibly very good money. And you can become very good at your craft and be respected by your peers. But you will really and truly be happier if you choose some other line of work.
The thing I wonder is, does everything have the ability to realize a feeling of accomplishment from programming ? I know for a fact that only certain adults do, but what about children? Could everybody love programming if they were exposed to it at a young enough age, without enough positive feedback ?
Give the kids something simple, clean, and yet which supplies intuitive abstraction constructs.
Without having seen any YABASIC code, can we really presume to know what its like ?
The definition of 'BASIC' has always been somewhat vague anyway. Yes, there have been standards but they have been largely ignored.
If the category of 'BASIC' is broad enough to cover everything from the original Dartmouth language to VBScript, then its also broad enough to include just about anything you can imagine. In other words, BASIC doesn't really mean much as a label.
Almost any high-level, allegedly-easy-to-learn language that doesn't use curly brackets to enclose blocks of code could be referred to as 'BASIC' and very few people would dispute the claim.
Of course, maybe it is like the BASICs of yore where you have to do everything good with PEEK and POKE! Why not just give the kids an assembler?
The only thing that you can get from college that you cannot from real-world experience are those non-practical concepts that are applicable in some positions (like traditional engineering and design).
I agree whole-heartedly, but I think the truth is even more general than that.
If I could go back to college (and I don't mean if I went back now... I mean if I was 18 again and had those years of my life to re-live) I would taken more of those "non-practical" courses like philosophy, psych, linguistics, literature, history, etc...
Unless you plan to become a professor in one of those subjects, college is the only time in your life when you can be totally free to devote yourself to learning such things. And most certainly, it is the only time in your life when you will have true experts (which might even include your friends as well as your professors) in these fields at your disposal. No one should waste such an opportunity.
Learn how to code? Of course! Learn something about current technologoy? Certainly! But that's not all there is to an education.
Around my old college, the familiar mantra is "I learned more from working at the Help Desk than I did in 4 years of CS/CIS."
Sadly, I had to agree.
Remember, not all helpdesks are equal. There's a big range.
I worked at an institution where in order to maintain your position at the HD you were expected to carry out projects for the benefit of the computer lab, which sometimes involved programming, but which always involved solving some problem or meeting some need of our customers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H students.
You know, the kind of stuff that many of us do for a living now. Helpdesk people who failed to branch out from basic user-assistance mode didn't last very long around that place. Its still the most enoyable job I ever had.
OTOH, I am aware of many other places where the student HD staff is basically expected to keep the printers unjammed and occasionally re-image a Windows box, and that's about it.
If they really decide it's in the best interest of Java® to have libraries like
import java.win32api.*;
then, by all means, let them!
What's to stop them now?
They should probably be more like
com.microsoft.win32api or something.
They can't claim this to be an intrinsic part of Java, of course.
Did they actually write the class loader in Java? It seems to me that you'd have to try hard to make it this slow.
In case someone hasn't already posted this, you can download the source from
http://www.sun.com/communitysource. Sorry if this is already common knowledge.
Interestingly, the virtual machine is written in C, not C++.
The class loading functionality (at least the low level parts of it) appears to be implemented by
src/share/javavm/runtime/classload.c.
"email" as a solid word certainly evolved because some programmer was either too lazy or too ignorant to correctly insert the hyphen in the first place.
If you're going to blame things on programmers, at least realize that it's just correct code to write it without the hyphen. I know that this has no bearing on its use in English, but the article tries to make that point.
The problem described here is not the OS but the browser and specifically JVM. The coders should be simply coding more closely to the Java Standard (teehee, atleast what there is of one) - and hard HTML. Simple enough, with a proper browser the OS is truely unimportant.
Wait a minute... JVM ? Weren't we talking about Javascript ?
We've all meet the IT guys who's solution is to reinstall windows with the "standard install" or do some such fuckery. The guy usually doesn't come across like he picked a lot up in high school and he's certainly not a Rhodes scollar, he's a guy who knows how to navigate a few windows apps and run installshield.
Well, having been one of these guys, I can tell you that you have a point. That job is a sort of purgatory for technies who want to be somewhere else but have to pay their dues.
Write your IT department or supervisior, explain what benefits you *and* the company will get from installing Linux on that one machine. Make sure you explain you'll be completely responsible for that box from technical support to making sure it works with any priopritary protocols on the current network to making sure that it's secure.
My war story:
I managed to get permission to set up a Linux-based departmental server at an an otherwise all-closed-source company (yes, official company policy, set by the legal department not IT, forbade the use of GPL'd software.) on the grounds that it was purely experimental, and that I would be solely responsible for it.
I developed some cgi apps on it that turned out to be very useful within my department, so useful that other departments wanted to use them. I tried to have these apps moved to a "Real" server, but they had been written in Perl, which was verboten on the production boxes! (their stated technical reason for disallowing Perl was that it required a new heavyweight process each time the script was envoked... I'm sure I don't need to discuss everything that's wrong with that argument here)
I was not about to re-write these apps in another language for reasons as stupid as these, so everybody just keep using the Linux server, even though this was technically not a production server.
I've been gone from there for almost a yeat, and last I heard they are still using it. I moved on and left them infected, I guess.
Say I boot my G4 up and happily share my printer or let my workgroup mount a hard drive via Appletalk. I take it, that under DiComo's rules...I'd be fired for not using a Microsoft solution. What if I used a Mac SMB client, or SAMBA if I ran LinuxPPC? Would I be fired then too?
When I worked in large-corporate IT, if you shared the hard drive of you *NT* box with your department, you were frowned upon. Or if you wanted any Microsoft operating system other than NT.
Of course nobody got fired for this kind of stuff, but our attitude was that if we didn't set it up and we didn't admin it, then we didn't have to fix it when it broke. I think that's pretty standard.
Just my opinion. Java has it's place and its uses. I *do* like it for network programming. Nice easy applications that can talk over a network. But, it will never be fast enough to program usefull cutting edge programs.
"Nice, easy applications that can talk over a network" are the cutting edge.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody gets paid the big bucks for writing valid HTML. At least not unless it also happens to look exactly the way the employer wants it to look, on "both" browsers.
A lot of the folks reading /. probably understand that the web is simply not designed for exact control (by the designer) over fonts, colors, images, etc.
But the business world that pays
(most of) or salaries does not understand this, and probably never will.
Maybe the advertizers demand that their ads run as GIFs not PNGs.
Also remember that you're naturally going to get paid more in California than in, say, Missouri. Just a cost of living thing.
Of course opportunity is everywhere... you can get paid 35-45K a year to install print drivers for helpless business users. Sure it ain't 60K but it beats working in a restaurant or something.
Just translate it to English. That would probably piss them off sufficiently.
That's the whole point... in France it is illegal to buy such things. There is nothing new about that.
If they have already been willing and able to place such restrictions on their own people, why are we surprised when they want to censor the Net ?
Turn this kid on to some suitably high-level language. For most of the people reading this site, this was probably BASIC. There have been discussions recently about what you should use today, but I will stay away from that can of worms.
If he has the hacker nature he will get hooked and want to know more. He will learn that his favorite toy HLL runs on top of lower level code, and he will want to start coding down there for more power and control. He will learn about how the OS itself works, and he might want to hack on that as well. By this point he will have a reason to learn about hardware.
What pages would these be ? Pages that use <LAYER>?
IE is much closer to being standard than Netscape (by which I mean Netscape 4.x, as I haven't looked at 6 yet) when it comes to DHTML and CSS.
From the Multics Glossary entry on virtual memory:
I take this to mean that Multics had no read(2) or write(2)... from the application-writer's point of view, the equivalent to these system calls was simple memory access.
Presenting this analogy to programmers as their primary means of file access is different from using such tricks down at a level where (theoretically) no one except kernel programmers needs to know ahout them.
It shows a completely different point of view... instead of "everything is a file", the MULTICS way seems to be "everything is core".
Don't know about Java, but I might still have a copy of Turbo C++ lying around. Worked fine on my 386. I'm not sure how much of C++ it really supports, since I mainly used it as a C compiler.
I would second the Eckel recommendation, but note that Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++ are almost the same book except for the language specifics, so if you read them both you will have a lot of "hey, didn't I read this already?" moments.
I have explained to people who have asked me about programming careers:
Unless you are the kind of person who can watch a computer do something that most people take for granted, like printing "Hello world", or doing some simple arithmetic, or drawing a few simple shapes on the screen, and get a rush simply because it was you that made it do this thing, then you will not enjoy being a programmer.
If you are intelligent, you will be able to learn programming, and you will be able to make money at it. Possibly very good money. And you can become very good at your craft and be respected by your peers. But you will really and truly be happier if you choose some other line of work.
The thing I wonder is, does everything have the ability to realize a feeling of accomplishment from programming ? I know for a fact that only certain adults do, but what about children? Could everybody love programming if they were exposed to it at a young enough age, without enough positive feedback ?
Without having seen any YABASIC code, can we really presume to know what its like ? The definition of 'BASIC' has always been somewhat vague anyway. Yes, there have been standards but they have been largely ignored.
If the category of 'BASIC' is broad enough to cover everything from the original Dartmouth language to VBScript, then its also broad enough to include just about anything you can imagine. In other words, BASIC doesn't really mean much as a label.
Almost any high-level, allegedly-easy-to-learn language that doesn't use curly brackets to enclose blocks of code could be referred to as 'BASIC' and very few people would dispute the claim.
Of course, maybe it is like the BASICs of yore where you have to do everything good with PEEK and POKE! Why not just give the kids an assembler?
I agree whole-heartedly, but I think the truth is even more general than that.
If I could go back to college (and I don't mean if I went back now... I mean if I was 18 again and had those years of my life to re-live) I would taken more of those "non-practical" courses like philosophy, psych, linguistics, literature, history, etc...
Unless you plan to become a professor in one of those subjects, college is the only time in your life when you can be totally free to devote yourself to learning such things. And most certainly, it is the only time in your life when you will have true experts (which might even include your friends as well as your professors) in these fields at your disposal. No one should waste such an opportunity.
Learn how to code? Of course! Learn something about current technologoy? Certainly! But that's not all there is to an education.
Remember, not all helpdesks are equal. There's a big range.
I worked at an institution where in order to maintain your position at the HD you were expected to carry out projects for the benefit of the computer lab, which sometimes involved programming, but which always involved solving some problem or meeting some need of our customers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H students.
You know, the kind of stuff that many of us do for a living now. Helpdesk people who failed to branch out from basic user-assistance mode didn't last very long around that place. Its still the most enoyable job I ever had.
OTOH, I am aware of many other places where the student HD staff is basically expected to keep the printers unjammed and occasionally re-image a Windows box, and that's about it.
Java supports CORBA. I don't know for a fact that Ada supports CORBA, but I don't see a reason why it couldn't.
then, by all means, let them!
What's to stop them now? They should probably be more like com.microsoft.win32api or something. They can't claim this to be an intrinsic part of Java, of course.
In case someone hasn't already posted this, you can download the source from http://www.sun.com/communitysource. Sorry if this is already common knowledge.
Interestingly, the virtual machine is written in C, not C++.
The class loading functionality (at least the low level parts of it) appears to be implemented by src/share/javavm/runtime/classload.c.
Is it just me, or does "just a ping" not imply that we are only talking about ICMP echo packets, or else the TCP or UDP echo port ?
A connection to any other port means that somebody is checking for something specific, not just for connectivity.
Or Pegasus Mail.
Yeah, well just try to compile this:
main() {
char* e-mail = "Hello, e-mail world!\n";
printf(e-mail);
}
If you're going to blame things on programmers, at least realize that it's just correct code to write it without the hyphen. I know that this has no bearing on its use in English, but the article tries to make that point.
Wait a minute... JVM ? Weren't we talking about Javascript ?
Well, having been one of these guys, I can tell you that you have a point. That job is a sort of purgatory for technies who want to be somewhere else but have to pay their dues.
My war story:
I managed to get permission to set up a Linux-based departmental server at an an otherwise all-closed-source company (yes, official company policy, set by the legal department not IT, forbade the use of GPL'd software.) on the grounds that it was purely experimental, and that I would be solely responsible for it.
I developed some cgi apps on it that turned out to be very useful within my department, so useful that other departments wanted to use them. I tried to have these apps moved to a "Real" server, but they had been written in Perl, which was verboten on the production boxes! (their stated technical reason for disallowing Perl was that it required a new heavyweight process each time the script was envoked... I'm sure I don't need to discuss everything that's wrong with that argument here)
I was not about to re-write these apps in another language for reasons as stupid as these, so everybody just keep using the Linux server, even though this was technically not a production server.
I've been gone from there for almost a yeat, and last I heard they are still using it. I moved on and left them infected, I guess.
When I worked in large-corporate IT, if you shared the hard drive of you *NT* box with your department, you were frowned upon. Or if you wanted any Microsoft operating system other than NT.
Of course nobody got fired for this kind of stuff, but our attitude was that if we didn't set it up and we didn't admin it, then we didn't have to fix it when it broke. I think that's pretty standard.
"Nice, easy applications that can talk over a network" are the cutting edge.
=begin CONSPIRACY_THEORY
I'm wondering how this could effect "home recording" in the sense of a band using SDMI-compliant equipment to record their own music.
Maybe their ultimate plan is to take back the technology that is enabling artists to go the DYI route instead of depending on the record companies...
=end CONSPIRACY_THEORY