To answer that question, compare 'Hello world' in Java, versus Python or Ruby.
The barrier to entry is lower for the scripting languages, and furthermore, they are more concise and powerful later. Java is only now just getting lambdas.
If you have to make learning to code 'fun', you're probably doing it wrong.
It shouldn't need to be made 'fun', as it's the intrinsic motivation of getting the computer to do something is its own reward.
Anyway, you don't go out of your way to make it _un-fun_, by forcing loads of sophisticated concepts and useless syntactic sugar on people right from the get-go, you start by, keeping things simple, doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, only introducing abstractions and concepts when they're absolutely needed, and by being powerful enough to let people 'scratch their own itch' to solve interesting and useful problems.
C++, C#, Java, Ada are terrible choices for a beginners language (yet the fucking idiots at my university changed to Java, because it was "practical", although it completely blew their pass rate.) Python, Ruby, Scheme are far better choices.
It's ultimately the same guy on the trigger finger, regardless of whether or not the weapon is a youth fresh out of boot camp, a remotely-operated weapon, or a drone.
People should be looking harder at the people agitating for higher military spending and starting the foreign wars.
Like it or not, a lot of crap line-of-business/enterprise software still uses old, hacked-together garbage applets, and they need to be supported.
There's quite a few games out there written as applets too (e.g. Minecraft, the Jin Chess Client), and speaking for myself, I want to run one or two of them without feeling like I'm holidaying in Baghdad.
To elaborate, models are only as good as their power to explain and predict. So if those models improve (explain/predict more, get simpler) over time, so much the better.
Clinical records are the last big domain that resists computerisation.
Why? Because it's really hard to get right. You have a massive quagmire of competing interests, egos, a very complicated domain model and legal/regulatory environment that changes constantly and is different in every country. And to top this off, you have privacy whingers.
Common sense suggests that if it was an easy problem, they've have cracked it by now. As it is, I walk into my local GP for a checkup, and behind the reception, there's a massive wall of paper patient records. In 2013.
You have government of course (let's face it, governments have few very good people, and hire literally millions of bozos), but I'm not sure if it's any worse than the privatized, Balkanized carpetbagger-fest that passes as a health system in the US...
Absolutely not excusing the disgraceful and self-serving behaviour of the big integrators here (CSC and BT, amongst others), but they've blown billions for a reason.
Although we're comparing apples with oranges here. Many of Elon's technical choices are extremely conservative, e.g. old gas-generator cycle engines, pintle injectors, etc. OTOH, DARPA is doing what DARPA does best -- highly speculative, high-risk, high-payoff research which may or may not result in a working launch vehicle.
What _will_ be interesting, is if DARPA comes up with totally new ways of building tough, low maintenance hypersonic vehicles cheaply.
If somebody comes into your flat to extort and threaten you, and they subsequently disappear forever, is anybody going to know where they ever went? Especially if they're crooks with few friends?
In a country, where people are dying like flies from all sorts of preventable causes, and where illiteracy, ignorance and fanaticism are rife, will they REALLY welcome this?
Given that HIV/AIDS has made the population growth rates in certain places explode, and that these places have very young populations, would a definitive cure for HIV/AIDS set off a massive population timebomb? Has any thought been given to the consequences of very suddenly removing a big source of mortality?
What's probably more important, is not that the information is being collected (it has many uses), but that greedy and unethical insurers (especially those who don't get the "pooling risk" part), who will game, cheat and generally be scummy, by refusing to insure people (or charging higher premiums) for people with certain bad genes.
Private health insurers are generally greedy fucksticks who are happy to charge exorbitant amounts of money for a rubbish product, and are quite happy to use any means to ignore the fact that they're being paid to pool risk, and cheat their customers.
Maybe this cloud has a silver lining -- if the "free" market destroys itself through genetic discrimination (as tends to happen), then universal health coverage (or at least single-payer insurance) in the US, could become a reality.
I'm not sure it's that easy to distinguish the message and the messenger.
These people have a radical and fairly crude ant-secrecy agenda, and the stuff they bring to light may be done in a highly selective and self-serving manner. And regardless of whether you think governments should be allowed to keep secrets or spy on people, I dispute that these vigilantes should decide what should be "declassified" or what isn't. It's only slightly better when the leaks are channelled through the media, given that journalism is a "soft option", and that journalists are only slight better qualified than the leakers themselves to decide what's safe to leak or not.
As for secrecy and spying, that debate needs to happen, and it's happening. That's a happy byproduct of what is going on. I just strongly object to the methods being used by the anti-secrecy crowd, and I don't trust their motivations at all.
I don't have time for leakers, traitors and narcissistic wreckers like Snowdon and Assange. And it has been easy for me to dismiss their statements, and those of their camp followers out of hand.
For me, having somebody as credible as Bruce Schneier take such a stand, changes everything. He's not just some criminally insane lunatic like Julian Assange, or some spotty kid out to make a name for himself -- he's an erudite, wise man with a proven track record of good judgement. If credentials matter -- then I think that having Schneier weigh in on this side of the political debate will have a major impact on people who are formerly undecided about the issue, including myself.
Elon is _not_ the kind of guy to bow to conventional wisdom. SpaceX is one giant experiment to reevaluate 'conventional wisdom' about access to space, from the ground up. They're learning that while certain corners cannot be cut, there _are_ ways to economise.
Tom Markusic has come right out and said that they can develop Merlin 2 (engine for their super-heavy lift vehicle) in three years for $1b. I don't know the odds of a company the size of SpaceX getting their hands on that kind of money any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Like Microsoft Surface RT? :)
To answer that question, compare 'Hello world' in Java, versus Python or Ruby.
The barrier to entry is lower for the scripting languages, and furthermore, they are more concise and powerful later. Java is only now just getting lambdas.
I know which one I'd rather show my kid cousin...
So if selling 9 million high-end smartphones, according to the pundits, is "jumping the shark", I wonder what success looks like?
If you have to make learning to code 'fun', you're probably doing it wrong.
It shouldn't need to be made 'fun', as it's the intrinsic motivation of getting the computer to do something is its own reward.
Anyway, you don't go out of your way to make it _un-fun_, by forcing loads of sophisticated concepts and useless syntactic sugar on people right from the get-go, you start by, keeping things simple, doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, only introducing abstractions and concepts when they're absolutely needed, and by being powerful enough to let people 'scratch their own itch' to solve interesting and useful problems.
C++, C#, Java, Ada are terrible choices for a beginners language (yet the fucking idiots at my university changed to Java, because it was "practical", although it completely blew their pass rate.)
Python, Ruby, Scheme are far better choices.
It's ultimately the same guy on the trigger finger, regardless of whether or not the weapon is a youth fresh out of boot camp, a remotely-operated weapon, or a drone.
People should be looking harder at the people agitating for higher military spending and starting the foreign wars.
Microsoft's problems are bigger than continually "missing the boat" on long-term technology trends.
Their problems are managerial, and this particular fish is rotting from the head.
I wish them luck finding a better replacement for monkey-dance boy. They're going to need it.
"Write once, test everywhere"
Like it or not, a lot of crap line-of-business/enterprise software still uses old, hacked-together garbage applets, and they need to be supported.
There's quite a few games out there written as applets too (e.g. Minecraft, the Jin Chess Client), and speaking for myself, I want to run one or two of them without feeling like I'm holidaying in Baghdad.
To elaborate, models are only as good as their power to explain and predict. So if those models improve (explain/predict more, get simpler) over time, so much the better.
Clinical records are the last big domain that resists computerisation.
Why? Because it's really hard to get right. You have a massive quagmire of competing interests, egos, a very complicated domain model and legal/regulatory environment that changes constantly and is different in every country. And to top this off, you have privacy whingers.
Common sense suggests that if it was an easy problem, they've have cracked it by now. As it is, I walk into my local GP for a checkup, and behind the reception, there's a massive wall of paper patient records. In 2013.
You have government of course (let's face it, governments have few very good people, and hire literally millions of bozos), but I'm not sure if it's any worse than the privatized, Balkanized carpetbagger-fest that passes as a health system in the US...
Absolutely not excusing the disgraceful and self-serving behaviour of the big integrators here (CSC and BT, amongst others), but they've blown billions for a reason.
Amen. Somebody stands to make a fortune, when they figure out how to get business-class passengers from LA to Tokyo in 2 hours or less.
Competition is good.
Although we're comparing apples with oranges here. Many of Elon's technical choices are extremely conservative, e.g. old gas-generator cycle engines, pintle injectors, etc. OTOH, DARPA is doing what DARPA does best -- highly speculative, high-risk, high-payoff research which may or may not result in a working launch vehicle.
What _will_ be interesting, is if DARPA comes up with totally new ways of building tough, low maintenance hypersonic vehicles cheaply.
If somebody comes into your flat to extort and threaten you, and they subsequently disappear forever, is anybody going to know where they ever went? Especially if they're crooks with few friends?
And what are the odds of the Democrats going after them? Probably none, since lawyers are in bed with the Democrats.
Or /b/. That'd be hilarious.
In a country, where people are dying like flies from all sorts of preventable causes, and where illiteracy, ignorance and fanaticism are rife, will they REALLY welcome this?
Oh -- and pearls before swine, and all that.
Given that HIV/AIDS has made the population growth rates in certain places explode, and that these places have very young populations, would a definitive cure for HIV/AIDS set off a massive population timebomb? Has any thought been given to the consequences of very suddenly removing a big source of mortality?
What's probably more important, is not that the information is being collected (it has many uses), but that greedy and unethical insurers (especially those who don't get the "pooling risk" part), who will game, cheat and generally be scummy, by refusing to insure people (or charging higher premiums) for people with certain bad genes.
Private health insurers are generally greedy fucksticks who are happy to charge exorbitant amounts of money for a rubbish product, and are quite happy to use any means to ignore the fact that they're being paid to pool risk, and cheat their customers.
Maybe this cloud has a silver lining -- if the "free" market destroys itself through genetic discrimination (as tends to happen), then universal health coverage (or at least single-payer insurance) in the US, could become a reality.
I'm not sure it's that easy to distinguish the message and the messenger.
These people have a radical and fairly crude ant-secrecy agenda, and the stuff they bring to light may be done in a highly selective and self-serving manner. And regardless of whether you think governments should be allowed to keep secrets or spy on people, I dispute that these vigilantes should decide what should be "declassified" or what isn't. It's only slightly better when the leaks are channelled through the media, given that journalism is a "soft option", and that journalists are only slight better qualified than the leakers themselves to decide what's safe to leak or not.
As for secrecy and spying, that debate needs to happen, and it's happening. That's a happy byproduct of what is going on. I just strongly object to the methods being used by the anti-secrecy crowd, and I don't trust their motivations at all.
Maybe if they renamed it "Darwin Bait" (after Trayvon), it'd be funnier, punchier and more to-the-point.
With the likes of Julian Assange, "character assassination" is hardly necessary. The guy is a walking PR disaster area.
I don't have time for leakers, traitors and narcissistic wreckers like Snowdon and Assange. And it has been easy for me to dismiss their statements, and those of their camp followers out of hand.
For me, having somebody as credible as Bruce Schneier take such a stand, changes everything. He's not just some criminally insane lunatic like Julian Assange, or some spotty kid out to make a name for himself -- he's an erudite, wise man with a proven track record of good judgement. If credentials matter -- then I think that having Schneier weigh in on this side of the political debate will have a major impact on people who are formerly undecided about the issue, including myself.
Elon is _not_ the kind of guy to bow to conventional wisdom. SpaceX is one giant experiment to reevaluate 'conventional wisdom' about access to space, from the ground up. They're learning that while certain corners cannot be cut, there _are_ ways to economise.
Tom Markusic has come right out and said that they can develop Merlin 2 (engine for their super-heavy lift vehicle) in three years for $1b. I don't know the odds of a company the size of SpaceX getting their hands on that kind of money any time soon.
Be aware of the distinction between routine access to LEO, and science and exploration in deep space.
NASA is getting out of the former -- and rightly so.
Yep, performance and payload capability always goes down. Mass and costs always goes up. That's part of what doomed Ares.