How come this one came in so late in the thread?! Before any (OK, modulo two or three that surely did but that I don't know about) actual schools introduced computers for kids in my country (1985), I went to a computing introduction class during a Summer break. We learned Logo for four hours a day (on Apple//e), for three or four weeks. I *loved* it. Later during that same year, I took several classes at another computing institute, and there I used BASIC on Commodore. Got me hooked. And here I am, over thirty years later, unable to quit Slashdot... Should I sue for damages?
Around ten years ago, I started writing a column for a magazine. My first article was precisely a way to use functional programming for "real" code, using a multi-paradigm language (Ruby).
I didn't jump on the Functional bandwagon first time I saw it; it took me around ten years to understand and embrace what it can do. So we are talking about 20 years of hype. At least.
I am far from proficiently thinking functionally, although I have used it for many interesting things. It is a cool, and very different, way to work. It can make many things faster and simpler, but if you completely bite the bullet and make it your dominant paradigm, it will kill your productivity (with many other things that are not best served by that paradigm.
It has a clear spot under your programmer belt. But it should not be The Only Way to approach a program - unless you are Truly One with the Tao.
I published in 2015 a textbook about operating systems (http://sistop.org/). Besides working for a university full time, I got a grant from the LATIn Initiative from the European commission. They required me to join other authors (a requisite for participation was having at least threee coauthors, located in three different countries in Latin America), and paid each of us a very decent amount (€1200, particularly good given the wages in our region). There was, of course, a quality requirement - But the second requirement was for the licensing to be CC-BY. I won on all fronts due to this.
Back in 1989, Acer introduced a powerful 386 computer, and offered it as a (huge, yes) desktop/tower combo. Both placements were supported. And how did they say they supported your favorite placement? Becuase the square Acer logo in the big bulky box could be rotated 90 degrees. Yay for user-configurability! *That* is what Apple needs.
One of Argentina's natural landmarks is the yearly fall of the Perito Moreno glaciar bridge. People come from around the world to the specific place this natural monument gets formed towards the end of the winter and watch it collapse.
I am a Mexican, and I don't consider myself prone to confuse data types.
Also, mindwhip's version makes sense in many, many C-derived languages where every statement is evaluated to a truth value. Of course, setting interesting=true makes this code less useful for multi-story usage. I would use story.mark_as_interesting() or story.interesting=true... But that's just sugar:-]
Ruby is a beautifully designed language, a pleasure to code in. Even if I cannot stand the Rails Culture and its general attitude, learning Ruby changed me as a programmer. As long as I'm not the only one, Ruby will continue to be used.
Well, yes - But Brazil has close to 200 million inhabitants. Chile has only a tenth of the population. Territory-wise, same story: Over 8 million square kilometers (about the same as the contiguous USA). A country might be vibrant even if it starts from very little!
It is in the long term. This last year, Brazil had a civil coup. The president, in line with over twelve years of impressive economic growth (compare it to Brazil's many neighbouring countries), was outsted and power was given to the vice-president - Who was a bad choice to partner with, coming from the rival party. He immediatly took it to derail the economic path of Lula / Dilma. I am Mexican. My wife is Argentinian. We often travel via Brazil, and have many Brazilian friends. And, yes, the economic growth of Brazil over a decade is quite impressive.
I am a Mexican, grandson of immigrants from Europe. One of the things I don't understand about the USA is how easy people seem to relocate over there. It seems to be most easy to go at age 18 and study the university in a city nobody knows you. Then, you get a job at a different state. Two, three times, you move state because you got a job. Then, you settle... And having a family means it's harder to move (although by far not unheard of).
My grandparents moved quite a bit – Out of Europe due to poverty in the late 1920s (they were all born 1903-1910). My mother's family tried luck in rural Mexico, Panama, Peru, then came back to Mexico; my father's only moved from Northern Mexico to Mexico City.
I am married to an Argentinian woman; we met while travelling. Our only choices of where to live was, close to my family or hers. We came to Mexico, as I had a better, more stable work position. And, were we to move away, we would only consider to go near her family.
I stand by what you said, family is a wonderful support system. Going anywhere where your family does not live is a huge cost by itself.
Nice for those hospitals who can afford high tech entertainment devices and the attendant communication systems required. Could be iffy though if there is a bad connection.
Right. I am a Mexican. I laughed when I read the summary's Mexico's cash-strapped hospitals (copied straight from TFA)... Yes, our public health care system is cash-strapped. Our private hospitals? I don't think a first-world hospital has much to offer than what we do here. Although the article mentions very poor regions in Guerrero state (South), I really doubt the described case happened there.
Not only can hypnosis distract the patient, it can allow the patient to participate in the procedure. Being fully aware, the patient can move muscles, control blood flow and report to the surgeon various sensations.
Ugh. By far, not my cup of tea.
I personally had three teeth pulled with only a mild hypnotic sedation. There was no pain, no bleeding at the time or after although I was fully aware of the crunching of bone during the extraction and the vigorous muscle applied to get those molars out. I spit chunks of bone for several days after.
You should change your dental specialist. I have a molar pulled out. A mild shot of local anesthesia, and I was completely aware of everything happening throughout the procedure. Yes, the crunching during extraction is... Quite impressive. But the tooth goes out easily. I had a swollen gum for some days, no t a single residual piece of tooth.
Of course, forgot to add — this will *not* include comments, issues, the whole social ecosystem built around your code — but anyway, you don't get to backup it if you replicate your project over several different Git-hosting providers.
Being it a Git repository, you don't have to worry too much about your "centralized" hosting provider – Each developer that has cloned a (non-shallow) repository will locally have everything needed to rebuild history were both providers to disappear. Git is a great backup strategy by itself:-)
It is a third world country, yes. However, were it not for that, it would fare much worse. I work at the largest university in the country; it has (among all of its levels) over 350,000 students. Yet, every year it accepts less than 10% of the applicants. There is a lot of room to grow to make our country fairer and richer (and I hope that's the priority in which it's done!), but following this model is IMO fundamental.
I work at UNAM, the largest university in Mexico (public, of course), and among the largest in the world. Our university does have some athletic "brands" that produce quite a bit of money (as thet "Pumas" soccer team, among the country leaders, selling a lot of merchandise and tickets and whatnot). However, how can you recoup the investment on lesser-known athletic activities? There are not many sponsors for them. Few people practice the disciplines, and the university provides trainers and fields. But that's part of the social mission of a university. Mexico has quite a bit of history of world-known champions of different disciplines that come from quite poor backgrounds. Were it not for the money invested by universities such as ours (that, yes, are funded by taxes that everybody in the country pays), they would have never participated in the sports events that qualified them to improve and excel.
You get a better society, a society where your neighbours' kids have a better understanding of the world, a better future, better job prospects, less likelihood to rob you, and a long great etcetera.
At the not-precisely-first country where I live (Mexico), public universities are free for the Technical and Bachelor degrees, but as postgraduate students are likely to produce more for the society, most postgraduate programs grant scolarship to all of their students so they can devote full-time to them. Of course, we also have private universities of all sorts, from the quite cheap ones to some where tuition rivals the USA one.
I had this mindset for some time, around twenty years ago. I wanted to get a job at something *not* related to computers, because I didn't want to hate my hobby. I am not formally educated (I'm now a university professor, but because I formalized my "knowledge equivalence" after ~15 years of professional experience; I never went to college as a student). I am Mexican... So my outlook at age 18 was somewhat bleak. Maybe work as a store clerk? That'd be a sure way to have enough money for food and leave my mind free after the boring hours......Fortunately, I took a job at a small ISP when the small ISP fever took over, in the late 90s. Then, I moved on as a school systems administrator. I learnt a *lot* (and charged very little... But enough for a 20-year-old). After a couple of years, I became the systems administrator for a smaller campus of the country's main university. And... Well, with some minor fluctuations, I'm still here, and I enjoy my work. Over the years, besides a systems administrator, I also became a programmer, got involved with free software projects, and found that I also enjoy writing — I have two published books, a handful of academic papers, tens of columns...
I have professionalized myself, I decided to study a Masters degree on Information Security (which I should be finishing this semester), I teach Operating Systems at the College level. Of course, there are issues that get to my nerves in my work, with the people I work with... But overall, after 20 years in the trade, I love what I do and get quite reasonably well payed for it.
I'm quite surprised to see nobody has yet recommended an Acer Aspire One for this use case. I got my first AAO in 2008, when they were still little crappy 9", 1024x600 screens, and when the keys were actualy not at a standard distance. From the period when "Netbook" was being defined. It was far from perfect, but I loved it. Back then, I also had a 12" Dell XPS, wayyyyy heavier and bulkier, but of course, terribly more powerful. I took the AAO with me to way more places than the Dell. Five years later, it was time for an upgrade. I got a new AAO; its models by 2013 had improved to a 10" 1366x768 screen, full-sized keyboard, but kept basically the same weight (the computers are quite thinner than the older generation). I have recommended and bought seven such computers for friends and family. Never regretted it. As the original poster says, I'm after portability much more than power-- And having a US$300 computer that travels with me... Is just great. Of course, I never had a hiccup recognizing all of its modest hardware with Linux.
Though that said, I'd be less than shocked if I found out that a bunch of Cubans had also escaped to Cancun. And I'm sure some did flee to Jamaica and Haiti and whatnot, though that would have been more difficult with Guantanamo (and US military presence) right there in addition to dodging the Cuban military.
I was born and live in Mexico. Over the years, I have met tens of Cubans who came here for different reasons, some exiting legally, some... much less so. Most of those exiting legally returned to Cuba. Yes, not everybody was allowed out — but it was not as dire as you imagine. Now, out of those who left ilegally, basically all of them either had emigrated to the USA (and I met them later, as USA citizens) or were on their way to do so. Mexico is far from a first-world country, but it's also a place where an educated and skilled person can surely make a very good living. Many cubans have stayed here, of course, but there's nothing like Miami — I'd say, just an average Cuban community comparable to other Latin American national communities. As for Haiti and Jamaica... No, that's highly unlikely. In fact, it's way more probable for Haitians to try to immigrate into Cuba.
which is why the REAL Issue is that Mexico has a pay of $3.00 PER DAY.
Average manufacturing wages in Mexico are more than $2 per hour or about $17 / day. That is low compared to America, but the cost-of-living is low in Mexico, so money goes further. The maquiladora close to the US border usually pay even more.
Nope. No, not by a long shot.
I am a Mexican. I work as an academician at a university, and have a quite comfortable lifestyle. I earn about US$20 a day.
Many of my students work part-time to get through life, although the university itself is free. They usually earn between a quarter than what I do.
Basic income (~US$3.5 a day) is not uncommon. Often, those jobs allow for extra income (say, tipping), but that's far from the norm.
Fifteen years ago, I was offered a job at Yahoo, in California, making close to four times my then-current salary in Mexico City. About US$70K a year. That money, even today, is a shitload of money for me. Of course, I declined. I declined even being unaware of the ridiculously high costs of living in the San Francisco Bay area — I declined because I didn't want to stop living at a city I love, close to my family and life-long friends. But yes, digging a bit deeper into what US$70K a year would be for a living there... I never looked back. Currently, I have been employed for 11 years at the same place. The peso has slided against the dollar, so I still make slightly over US$20K a year. I live a very nice life in a house very well located. I don't have much savings, but then again, I did have something to fall on when my kids were born. Have never had a loan. My wife does not currently work, but we estimate she can go back to doing so in 2-3 years, and then we will get some savings again. What would there be in there for me going for a life at a country that will always see me as a foreigner? Not much, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
YES. Same here. I learned Logo in Spanish. Only some time later I found that CAMINA was FORWARD, DERECHA was RIGHT, and so on.
How come this one came in so late in the thread?! //e), for three or four weeks. I *loved* it.
Before any (OK, modulo two or three that surely did but that I don't know about) actual schools introduced computers for kids in my country (1985), I went to a computing introduction class during a Summer break. We learned Logo for four hours a day (on Apple
Later during that same year, I took several classes at another computing institute, and there I used BASIC on Commodore.
Got me hooked. And here I am, over thirty years later, unable to quit Slashdot... Should I sue for damages?
But it seems that I will.
Around ten years ago, I started writing a column for a magazine. My first article was precisely a way to use functional programming for "real" code, using a multi-paradigm language (Ruby).
I didn't jump on the Functional bandwagon first time I saw it; it took me around ten years to understand and embrace what it can do. So we are talking about 20 years of hype. At least.
I am far from proficiently thinking functionally, although I have used it for many interesting things. It is a cool, and very different, way to work. It can make many things faster and simpler, but if you completely bite the bullet and make it your dominant paradigm, it will kill your productivity (with many other things that are not best served by that paradigm.
It has a clear spot under your programmer belt. But it should not be The Only Way to approach a program - unless you are Truly One with the Tao.
That US-Americans haven't learned to use that metric. Nor any decent metric. They are still stuck using Imperial.
(hmmm, quite fitting for Mr. Trump!)
I published in 2015 a textbook about operating systems (http://sistop.org/). Besides working for a university full time, I got a grant from the LATIn Initiative from the European commission. They required me to join other authors (a requisite for participation was having at least threee coauthors, located in three different countries in Latin America), and paid each of us a very decent amount (€1200, particularly good given the wages in our region). There was, of course, a quality requirement - But the second requirement was for the licensing to be CC-BY.
I won on all fronts due to this.
Back in 1989, Acer introduced a powerful 386 computer, and offered it as a (huge, yes) desktop/tower combo. Both placements were supported. And how did they say they supported your favorite placement? Becuase the square Acer logo in the big bulky box could be rotated 90 degrees. Yay for user-configurability! *That* is what Apple needs.
Now, if we had an all-set Kodi box that used Tor by default...
One of Argentina's natural landmarks is the yearly fall of the Perito Moreno glaciar bridge. People come from around the world to the specific place this natural monument gets formed towards the end of the winter and watch it collapse.
Fortunately, it is a repeatable build.
I am a Mexican, and I don't consider myself prone to confuse data types.
Also, mindwhip's version makes sense in many, many C-derived languages where every statement is evaluated to a truth value. Of course, setting interesting=true makes this code less useful for multi-story usage. I would use story.mark_as_interesting() or story.interesting=true... But that's just sugar :-]
Ruby is a beautifully designed language, a pleasure to code in. Even if I cannot stand the Rails Culture and its general attitude, learning Ruby changed me as a programmer. As long as I'm not the only one, Ruby will continue to be used.
Well, yes - But Brazil has close to 200 million inhabitants. Chile has only a tenth of the population. Territory-wise, same story: Over 8 million square kilometers (about the same as the contiguous USA). A country might be vibrant even if it starts from very little!
It is in the long term. This last year, Brazil had a civil coup. The president, in line with over twelve years of impressive economic growth (compare it to Brazil's many neighbouring countries), was outsted and power was given to the vice-president - Who was a bad choice to partner with, coming from the rival party. He immediatly took it to derail the economic path of Lula / Dilma.
I am Mexican. My wife is Argentinian. We often travel via Brazil, and have many Brazilian friends. And, yes, the economic growth of Brazil over a decade is quite impressive.
I am a Mexican, grandson of immigrants from Europe. One of the things I don't understand about the USA is how easy people seem to relocate over there. It seems to be most easy to go at age 18 and study the university in a city nobody knows you. Then, you get a job at a different state. Two, three times, you move state because you got a job. Then, you settle... And having a family means it's harder to move (although by far not unheard of).
My grandparents moved quite a bit – Out of Europe due to poverty in the late 1920s (they were all born 1903-1910). My mother's family tried luck in rural Mexico, Panama, Peru, then came back to Mexico; my father's only moved from Northern Mexico to Mexico City.
I am married to an Argentinian woman; we met while travelling. Our only choices of where to live was, close to my family or hers. We came to Mexico, as I had a better, more stable work position. And, were we to move away, we would only consider to go near her family.
I stand by what you said, family is a wonderful support system. Going anywhere where your family does not live is a huge cost by itself.
Nice for those hospitals who can afford high tech entertainment devices and the attendant communication systems required. Could be iffy though if there is a bad connection.
Right. I am a Mexican. I laughed when I read the summary's Mexico's cash-strapped hospitals (copied straight from TFA)... Yes, our public health care system is cash-strapped. Our private hospitals? I don't think a first-world hospital has much to offer than what we do here. Although the article mentions very poor regions in Guerrero state (South), I really doubt the described case happened there.
Not only can hypnosis distract the patient, it can allow the patient to participate in the procedure. Being fully aware, the patient can move muscles, control blood flow and report to the surgeon various sensations.
Ugh. By far, not my cup of tea.
I personally had three teeth pulled with only a mild hypnotic sedation. There was no pain, no bleeding at the time or after although I was fully aware of the crunching of bone during the extraction and the vigorous muscle applied to get those molars out. I spit chunks of bone for several days after.
You should change your dental specialist. I have a molar pulled out. A mild shot of local anesthesia, and I was completely aware of everything happening throughout the procedure. Yes, the crunching during extraction is... Quite impressive. But the tooth goes out easily. I had a swollen gum for some days, no t a single residual piece of tooth.
Of course, forgot to add — this will *not* include comments, issues, the whole social ecosystem built around your code — but anyway, you don't get to backup it if you replicate your project over several different Git-hosting providers.
Being it a Git repository, you don't have to worry too much about your "centralized" hosting provider – Each developer that has cloned a (non-shallow) repository will locally have everything needed to rebuild history were both providers to disappear. Git is a great backup strategy by itself :-)
It is a third world country, yes. However, were it not for that, it would fare much worse.
I work at the largest university in the country; it has (among all of its levels) over 350,000 students. Yet, every year it accepts less than 10% of the applicants. There is a lot of room to grow to make our country fairer and richer (and I hope that's the priority in which it's done!), but following this model is IMO fundamental.
I work at UNAM, the largest university in Mexico (public, of course), and among the largest in the world. Our university does have some athletic "brands" that produce quite a bit of money (as thet "Pumas" soccer team, among the country leaders, selling a lot of merchandise and tickets and whatnot). However, how can you recoup the investment on lesser-known athletic activities? There are not many sponsors for them. Few people practice the disciplines, and the university provides trainers and fields. But that's part of the social mission of a university.
Mexico has quite a bit of history of world-known champions of different disciplines that come from quite poor backgrounds. Were it not for the money invested by universities such as ours (that, yes, are funded by taxes that everybody in the country pays), they would have never participated in the sports events that qualified them to improve and excel.
You get a better society, a society where your neighbours' kids have a better understanding of the world, a better future, better job prospects, less likelihood to rob you, and a long great etcetera.
At the not-precisely-first country where I live (Mexico), public universities are free for the Technical and Bachelor degrees, but as postgraduate students are likely to produce more for the society, most postgraduate programs grant scolarship to all of their students so they can devote full-time to them.
Of course, we also have private universities of all sorts, from the quite cheap ones to some where tuition rivals the USA one.
I had this mindset for some time, around twenty years ago. I wanted to get a job at something *not* related to computers, because I didn't want to hate my hobby. I am not formally educated (I'm now a university professor, but because I formalized my "knowledge equivalence" after ~15 years of professional experience; I never went to college as a student). I am Mexican... So my outlook at age 18 was somewhat bleak. Maybe work as a store clerk? That'd be a sure way to have enough money for food and leave my mind free after the boring hours... ...Fortunately, I took a job at a small ISP when the small ISP fever took over, in the late 90s. Then, I moved on as a school systems administrator. I learnt a *lot* (and charged very little... But enough for a 20-year-old). After a couple of years, I became the systems administrator for a smaller campus of the country's main university. And... Well, with some minor fluctuations, I'm still here, and I enjoy my work. Over the years, besides a systems administrator, I also became a programmer, got involved with free software projects, and found that I also enjoy writing — I have two published books, a handful of academic papers, tens of columns...
I have professionalized myself, I decided to study a Masters degree on Information Security (which I should be finishing this semester), I teach Operating Systems at the College level. Of course, there are issues that get to my nerves in my work, with the people I work with... But overall, after 20 years in the trade, I love what I do and get quite reasonably well payed for it.
So, no, it's not a rule you will hate your work.
I'm quite surprised to see nobody has yet recommended an Acer Aspire One for this use case. I got my first AAO in 2008, when they were still little crappy 9", 1024x600 screens, and when the keys were actualy not at a standard distance. From the period when "Netbook" was being defined. It was far from perfect, but I loved it. Back then, I also had a 12" Dell XPS, wayyyyy heavier and bulkier, but of course, terribly more powerful. I took the AAO with me to way more places than the Dell.
Five years later, it was time for an upgrade. I got a new AAO; its models by 2013 had improved to a 10" 1366x768 screen, full-sized keyboard, but kept basically the same weight (the computers are quite thinner than the older generation).
I have recommended and bought seven such computers for friends and family. Never regretted it. As the original poster says, I'm after portability much more than power-- And having a US$300 computer that travels with me... Is just great.
Of course, I never had a hiccup recognizing all of its modest hardware with Linux.
Though that said, I'd be less than shocked if I found out that a bunch of Cubans had also escaped to Cancun. And I'm sure some did flee to Jamaica and Haiti and whatnot, though that would have been more difficult with Guantanamo (and US military presence) right there in addition to dodging the Cuban military.
I was born and live in Mexico. Over the years, I have met tens of Cubans who came here for different reasons, some exiting legally, some... much less so. Most of those exiting legally returned to Cuba. Yes, not everybody was allowed out — but it was not as dire as you imagine. Now, out of those who left ilegally, basically all of them either had emigrated to the USA (and I met them later, as USA citizens) or were on their way to do so.
Mexico is far from a first-world country, but it's also a place where an educated and skilled person can surely make a very good living. Many cubans have stayed here, of course, but there's nothing like Miami — I'd say, just an average Cuban community comparable to other Latin American national communities.
As for Haiti and Jamaica... No, that's highly unlikely. In fact, it's way more probable for Haitians to try to immigrate into Cuba.
which is why the REAL Issue is that Mexico has a pay of $3.00 PER DAY.
Average manufacturing wages in Mexico are more than $2 per hour or about $17 / day. That is low compared to America, but the cost-of-living is low in Mexico, so money goes further. The maquiladora close to the US border usually pay even more.
Nope. No, not by a long shot.
I am a Mexican. I work as an academician at a university, and have a quite comfortable lifestyle. I earn about US$20 a day.
Many of my students work part-time to get through life, although the university itself is free. They usually earn between a quarter than what I do.
Basic income (~US$3.5 a day) is not uncommon. Often, those jobs allow for extra income (say, tipping), but that's far from the norm.
Fifteen years ago, I was offered a job at Yahoo, in California, making close to four times my then-current salary in Mexico City. About US$70K a year. That money, even today, is a shitload of money for me.
Of course, I declined. I declined even being unaware of the ridiculously high costs of living in the San Francisco Bay area — I declined because I didn't want to stop living at a city I love, close to my family and life-long friends. But yes, digging a bit deeper into what US$70K a year would be for a living there... I never looked back.
Currently, I have been employed for 11 years at the same place. The peso has slided against the dollar, so I still make slightly over US$20K a year. I live a very nice life in a house very well located. I don't have much savings, but then again, I did have something to fall on when my kids were born. Have never had a loan. My wife does not currently work, but we estimate she can go back to doing so in 2-3 years, and then we will get some savings again.
What would there be in there for me going for a life at a country that will always see me as a foreigner? Not much, I guess.