It really doesn't seem like it should be, does it?
Yet I swear, 9 out of 10 applicants we get for a job literally can't get much past Hello World. It's mind boggling. And these are the applicants that have made it through the filters, not even the raw stack! I don't care if they have a decade of verifiable experience, they're still bunk. These are the guys applying for "Senior" positions....I can't imagine what we'd scrape up if we were looking for less seasoned canidates.
And we're not even all that picky. We'll quickly jump all over competent.
I think that's the mistake gifted programmers make: This stuff comes naturally to us so we can't really understand that it's difficult for most others.
Or... It could just be that the tech boom is back, with a vengeance.
Everything I hear out of my friends in the San Francisco area is that the industry is booming bigger then even the dot.com days. The unemployment rate for software engineers has fallen through the floor, now nationally around 2% and below 1% in some major markets.
It's far more than simply a question of experience or training.
Developing software (in most realms) is more art than science and few would suggest being a good artist of any sort is simply a matter of experience. No amount of practice is going turn a no talent ass clown into the next Jimmy Page.
Sure, true talent needs to be nurtured to turn potential into greatness, no doubt. But here's the rub: Most software developers in the marketplace (and by a LARGE majority)...simply have no potential. Add on top of that for those few that do have real talent they will largely nurture themselves better and faster then you ever could through your "training programs".
So if the majority can't be helped, and the majority of the minority is going to help themselves anyway, you are left with only a very small slice of the demographic that A) Has the talent yet B) Isn't motivated enough to help themselves improve. THAT is the entirety of the group that you will significantly help through "training and retraining your coders". The group is just so small it isn't worth the time or effort: Employers help those who help themselves.
Once you've wrapped your mind around the math of this reality, you'll begin to understand why the hiring practices of development groups are so strongly skewed towards finding those in the majority minority of "Good Talent + Self-Motivation".
The assertion was that the technology for autonomous operation didn't yet exist or at least wasn't widespread.
And that assertion is utterly false and incredibly naive. Pulling a gun trigger is, from a technological standpoint, no different than snapping a camera's shutter.
The only thing stopping Reaper Drones from pulling their own triggers is a human choosing not to use that (already existing) feature. If that brings you comfort, you're an idiot.
The Pandarian expansion saw the last tiny relevance left of the skill trees erased for good. Any nuance or creativity in builds or play style gone. Blizzard had been working to years to stomp out any actual variety, inventiveness, or frankly skill from the game for years. With Pandarian they finally saw their dreams realized: A utopia for ultra-casual players to button-smash their way to phat lootz.
The actual game of WoW is now so bad even the game designers realized it wasn't worth playing...and added in an entire pokemon-style meta game to play instead. It's no different then when idiots would log into Ultima Online just so they could play chess inside someone's virtual backpack.
Drones are not fully-automated killing machines. They aren't just thrown in the sky to exterminate an area. They're still piloted by humans from a distance.
Your perception of drone technology is at least a decade out of date. Hobby level R/C planes were doing fully-automated flights at least a decade ago (which means they weren't really R/C of course).
Stability comes in many forms, not simply up time.
For example, Linux has a long, long history of badly managed architectural transitions: a.out to ELF libc to glibc virtual memory manager musical chairs filesystem flavor of the month 32bit to 64bit package manager du jour sound MAKEDEV/devfs/udev.
Stack on top of that the variety of distributions, with their own often wildly different ideas about where things should live and how they should be managed, frequently causes stability issues by introducing human error points. Many of those ideas are also inherently bad and affect stability, such as RedHat and friends throwing everything and the kitchen sink into/usr. -Yes, some packages can be retargeted...but not many, and doing so breaks convention (albeit a bad one) causing the same sort of management stability issues that multiple distros cause just on the local level.
All of that ends up being a make-work program for Linux System Administrators...honestly at leat 50% of your daily job only exists because of the instability of the Linux ecosystem.
Linux (all distros, all of it) is a Configuration Manager's worst nightmare.
While I feel for your plight, the idea of running without hardware acceleration in 2013 is pretty uncommon. It's certainly nothing any sane person would bother optimizing for. We're optimistically talking about 0.1% of users. You'd effectively be optimizing for actually broken systems. That's like optimizing a car's high speed handling for cases where one tire is flat; The answer isn't to optimize for conditions of only 3 healthy tires...the answer is to change out the flat tire.
On my not-so-hot computer I regularly open very complex, 400+ page PDFs (music scores mostly). We're talking 30MB w/o any imbedded images, just pure intensive processing instructions.
Chrome, from a total standstill (the process not even running yet), takes just slightly longer then it takes me to blink to start, load the PDF, and render. It's an order of magnitude faster in every way then every other PDF viewer I've tried, and I've tried quite a few.
It lacks features (PDF bookmarks, etc), but render speed is fantastic.
Math is a symbolic representation of the computational laws of the universe. When we eventually find intelligent life on another planet, they too will understand that 1 + 1 = 2. Guaranteed. The written symbols they use will differ, but the math won't. Not the teeniest, tiniest bit.
Programs are creative thought. There isn't anything even slightly creative about math any more then there's anything creative about discovering the Higgs boson.
Just because you can think about math in no way suggests that math is thought. I can think about cute puppies too, but that doesn't mean my dog is just an abstract thought.
By that logic programs are also all particles, electrons to be precise.
You can't say something isn't patentable simply because it can be described by math...because absolutely everything can be described with math, very much including the thought in your head at this very moment.
You can't use math as a distinction because math makes no distinctions.
A) Pull its own weight without lagging on common sites despite being run on incredibly powerful systems.
B) Stops forcing incredibly stupid "features" and UI design failures.
----
With our test labs and such we're running every browser across an array of configurations and performance levels. On Javascript intensive sites Firefox simply lags far behind everything else. That didn't matter so much pre "Web 2.0", but today when JQuery is considered lightweight compared to many common frameworks in use, it matters a whole hell of a lot.
Of course, hardware is all physics, and physics is all math, therefore hardware is all math. The universe is nothing but math.
If everything is math (and reductively, it is), then "math" has no useful meaning. It may be good for boosting the egos of mathematicians living in their own little bubbles, but as a practical matter it has pissall to do with anything back in the real world.
I won't argue for software patents (I think they're asinine), but trying to make that point using the "software is math" argument just isn't honest or helpful to the cause.
Because everyone and their mom must be running Firefox either without Javascript or with no more than a single tab open. And heaven help you if you open any dev tools with Firefox...yee gads!
Although I do find it amusing that if you trust Firebug's load time metrics it's just as fast as everyone else....never mind it hasn't actually rendered everything it says is "completed" yet, or gotten half way through the billion lines of javascript that most serious sites now run.
I run Firefox constantly, albeit grudgingly, because it's sadly a browser we have to support. Across dozens of systems of a variety of hardware configurations and platforms. This isn't a case of "just my PC is funky". If it ever actually improves I'll be one of the first to notice.
I haven't seen anything but significant degradation from Firefox for years. Every update is a downgrade. In performance, in functionality, in usability. You are right that Firefox it isn't at its low point today...only because it keeps digging its grave a bit deeper with each passing update.
I harped on IE just as bad when they were the crappiest browser on Earth, but that hasn't been the case for years. I still hate the UI, but at least it's fast. More over Firefox's wounds are all self-inflicted.
The only reason I pay Firefox any attention whatsoever is that it still has significant market share and thus, sadly must continue to be supported. I long for the future where it's as relevant as Opera and I can just not even bother having the turd installed at all.
The fact is they have to focus on performance, especially their Javascript engine...precisely because their performance sucks big harry balls, most especially their Javascript engine!
Call me back when/if they ever actually make progress. All I've seen as a user is a browser that has gotten nothing but slower and slower with each release, a sharp contrast to Chrome and IE.
Which seems more evidence of how badly Tom's Hardware botched the testing than anything else.
In real use Chrome is so wildly faster than Firefox it's incredible, thanks largely to its Javascript engine and the fact most modern web sites are incredibly JS heavy. I'm not even talking 20% faster, but closer to 200%, literally running circles around Firefox.
It's to the point that just taking raw performance into consideration, I can't stand using Firefox lately even on very powerful hardware. I frequently have to fire it up for work, but man...what a drag.
So you'll forgive me if I can't take Tom's "benchmarking" seriously.
Sorry, but ALL software is an expression of math..
It's much more correct to say software is implemented ultimately with math, but it's rarely ever an expression of math.
The vast majority of software is little more than an automated (via math...) flow chart... Flow charts that express business processes or artistic ideas. There's a reason why trained mathematicians on the whole make for some of the worst software developers you'll ever find, and that reason is because aside from a few niche domains the practice of programming has fuck all to do with math.
It really depends on what the patents are all about.
Chances are near certain that they are all a bunch of the typical BS software patents we see all the time and never should have been granted. It's just cheaper to pay the troll than to fight him.
In other words, while your assertion that "practically every business on earth bends over backwards to avoid the free market at all costs" is essentially correct, your understanding of *why* this is the case is so wrong as to be dangerous.
You say this, yet you've failed to even try to suggest an alternate motivation, to suggest an alternate "why"?
The "why" is very simple; The motivation is money. Whatever strategy will garner the most money is most often the strategy used. On the whole it's exceptionally rare to find another motivation and thus exceptionally rare to find another strategy employed. And the few that are motivated by other factors almost always get eaten alive quickly; It's hard to last in a game when you have no interest in actually succeeding at it.
The telcos, for all the reasons you've detailed and more, have plenty of opportunity to avoid and discourage free markets so of course they do so. This isn't rocket science.
Free markets are simply NEVER in the best interest of ANY business. They're in the best interest of consumers, sure, but consumers have very little power in a capitalistic model. At best they have fleeting moments of the allusion of power.
Capital (ie business) avoids free markets simply because it is in their strong self interest to do so, and no other reason.
The reality is it's simply not practical to allow any random person to dig up the streets or put up new telephone poles willy-nilly to run new lines, especially considering the extreme risk both to existing lines (corporate property) and personal residences.
If my neighbor signs up with a shotty power, water, gas, or even Internet company...my home is at higher risk of fire or flooding.
It's not (simply) about inefficiencies. It's about safety, reliability, and accountability.
The fact is there are many businesses which, at least with current technology, are either natural monopolies (municipalities for example) or for which the "free market" incentives bad behavior rather than good (eg, healthcare). Forcing them into a "free market" for shear ideological reasons is simply foolish.
America is the home of capitalism, which means competition,
Horrendously wrong.
Capitalism is a game in which the goal is simply to make the most money (with the least effort). The "free market" (aka competition) is just one of many possible strategies to make the most money. Competing in the free market however, is without question the most expensive, the riskiest, and the least rewarding possible strategy available to most business...which is precisely why practically every business on earth bends over backwards to avoid the free market at all costs.
Going into "new markets", forming monopolies, getting regulations passed to raise the barriers to entry, avoiding "mature markets", etc are all entirely about avoiding the free market and thus avoiding competition.
This is the biggest mental issue free market advocates face: The ironic reality that if you want an actual free market...you must drag people into it kicking and screaming (most effectively through tight regulation...).
If all the robo-cars were completely autonomous, sure. But from an engineering perspective that would be an incredibly stupid design.
With all the robo-cars able to communicate and respond collectively both with each other and the road itself, nearly everything that requires us to limit speeds vanishes. Not being able to see more than a car or two ahead, not being able to see around turns, not knowing the maintenance state of the cars ahead (bald tires, etc), not knowing the skill, distraction, or intoxication level of the drivers ahead, and of course the naturally low reaction time of the average human.
The nano-second one of those robo-cars blows a tire every single car behind them for miles will take emergency action. Be it slamming on the breaks, all swerving out of the lane, etc, or a mix of actions. All in perfect unison.
Slashdot Mirror
So clearly I must be imagining the Samsung WI-FI All-Share Cast Hub, Wireless HDMI Display Adapter, which...and I quote, "Mirrors phone screen on HDTV".
It really doesn't seem like it should be, does it?
Yet I swear, 9 out of 10 applicants we get for a job literally can't get much past Hello World. It's mind boggling. And these are the applicants that have made it through the filters, not even the raw stack! I don't care if they have a decade of verifiable experience, they're still bunk. These are the guys applying for "Senior" positions....I can't imagine what we'd scrape up if we were looking for less seasoned canidates.
And we're not even all that picky. We'll quickly jump all over competent.
I think that's the mistake gifted programmers make: This stuff comes naturally to us so we can't really understand that it's difficult for most others.
Or... It could just be that the tech boom is back, with a vengeance.
Everything I hear out of my friends in the San Francisco area is that the industry is booming bigger then even the dot.com days. The unemployment rate for software engineers has fallen through the floor, now nationally around 2% and below 1% in some major markets.
It's far more than simply a question of experience or training.
Developing software (in most realms) is more art than science and few would suggest being a good artist of any sort is simply a matter of experience. No amount of practice is going turn a no talent ass clown into the next Jimmy Page.
Sure, true talent needs to be nurtured to turn potential into greatness, no doubt. But here's the rub: Most software developers in the marketplace (and by a LARGE majority)...simply have no potential. Add on top of that for those few that do have real talent they will largely nurture themselves better and faster then you ever could through your "training programs".
So if the majority can't be helped, and the majority of the minority is going to help themselves anyway, you are left with only a very small slice of the demographic that A) Has the talent yet B) Isn't motivated enough to help themselves improve. THAT is the entirety of the group that you will significantly help through "training and retraining your coders". The group is just so small it isn't worth the time or effort: Employers help those who help themselves.
Once you've wrapped your mind around the math of this reality, you'll begin to understand why the hiring practices of development groups are so strongly skewed towards finding those in the majority minority of "Good Talent + Self-Motivation".
The assertion was that the technology for autonomous operation didn't yet exist or at least wasn't widespread.
And that assertion is utterly false and incredibly naive. Pulling a gun trigger is, from a technological standpoint, no different than snapping a camera's shutter.
The only thing stopping Reaper Drones from pulling their own triggers is a human choosing not to use that (already existing) feature. If that brings you comfort, you're an idiot.
Good god no...not WoW.
The Pandarian expansion saw the last tiny relevance left of the skill trees erased for good. Any nuance or creativity in builds or play style gone. Blizzard had been working to years to stomp out any actual variety, inventiveness, or frankly skill from the game for years. With Pandarian they finally saw their dreams realized: A utopia for ultra-casual players to button-smash their way to phat lootz.
The actual game of WoW is now so bad even the game designers realized it wasn't worth playing...and added in an entire pokemon-style meta game to play instead. It's no different then when idiots would log into Ultima Online just so they could play chess inside someone's virtual backpack.
WoW is dead.
Your perception of drone technology is at least a decade out of date. Hobby level R/C planes were doing fully-automated flights at least a decade ago (which means they weren't really R/C of course).
Stability comes in many forms, not simply up time.
For example, Linux has a long, long history of badly managed architectural transitions:
a.out to ELF
libc to glibc
virtual memory manager musical chairs
filesystem flavor of the month
32bit to 64bit
package manager du jour
sound
MAKEDEV/devfs/udev.
Stack on top of that the variety of distributions, with their own often wildly different ideas about where things should live and how they should be managed, frequently causes stability issues by introducing human error points. Many of those ideas are also inherently bad and affect stability, such as RedHat and friends throwing everything and the kitchen sink into /usr. -Yes, some packages can be retargeted...but not many, and doing so breaks convention (albeit a bad one) causing the same sort of management stability issues that multiple distros cause just on the local level.
All of that ends up being a make-work program for Linux System Administrators...honestly at leat 50% of your daily job only exists because of the instability of the Linux ecosystem.
Linux (all distros, all of it) is a Configuration Manager's worst nightmare.
While I feel for your plight, the idea of running without hardware acceleration in 2013 is pretty uncommon. It's certainly nothing any sane person would bother optimizing for. We're optimistically talking about 0.1% of users. You'd effectively be optimizing for actually broken systems. That's like optimizing a car's high speed handling for cases where one tire is flat; The answer isn't to optimize for conditions of only 3 healthy tires...the answer is to change out the flat tire.
Any chance you can offer a link to any of these particularly intensive PDFs?
I'm not discounting your experience, I just have yet to encounter anything like you're describing.
That's completely opposite of my experience.
On my not-so-hot computer I regularly open very complex, 400+ page PDFs (music scores mostly). We're talking 30MB w/o any imbedded images, just pure intensive processing instructions.
Chrome, from a total standstill (the process not even running yet), takes just slightly longer then it takes me to blink to start, load the PDF, and render. It's an order of magnitude faster in every way then every other PDF viewer I've tried, and I've tried quite a few.
It lacks features (PDF bookmarks, etc), but render speed is fantastic.
Wait, I thought they were math?
Math is not abstract. Math is not thought.
Math is a symbolic representation of the computational laws of the universe. When we eventually find intelligent life on another planet, they too will understand that 1 + 1 = 2. Guaranteed. The written symbols they use will differ, but the math won't. Not the teeniest, tiniest bit.
Programs are creative thought. There isn't anything even slightly creative about math any more then there's anything creative about discovering the Higgs boson.
Just because you can think about math in no way suggests that math is thought. I can think about cute puppies too, but that doesn't mean my dog is just an abstract thought.
By that logic programs are also all particles, electrons to be precise.
You can't say something isn't patentable simply because it can be described by math...because absolutely everything can be described with math, very much including the thought in your head at this very moment.
You can't use math as a distinction because math makes no distinctions.
I'll forgive Firefox when it can
A) Pull its own weight without lagging on common sites despite being run on incredibly powerful systems.
B) Stops forcing incredibly stupid "features" and UI design failures.
----
With our test labs and such we're running every browser across an array of configurations and performance levels. On Javascript intensive sites Firefox simply lags far behind everything else. That didn't matter so much pre "Web 2.0", but today when JQuery is considered lightweight compared to many common frameworks in use, it matters a whole hell of a lot.
Of course, hardware is all physics, and physics is all math, therefore hardware is all math. The universe is nothing but math.
If everything is math (and reductively, it is), then "math" has no useful meaning. It may be good for boosting the egos of mathematicians living in their own little bubbles, but as a practical matter it has pissall to do with anything back in the real world.
I won't argue for software patents (I think they're asinine), but trying to make that point using the "software is math" argument just isn't honest or helpful to the cause.
Because everyone and their mom must be running Firefox either without Javascript or with no more than a single tab open. And heaven help you if you open any dev tools with Firefox...yee gads!
Although I do find it amusing that if you trust Firebug's load time metrics it's just as fast as everyone else....never mind it hasn't actually rendered everything it says is "completed" yet, or gotten half way through the billion lines of javascript that most serious sites now run.
I run Firefox constantly, albeit grudgingly, because it's sadly a browser we have to support. Across dozens of systems of a variety of hardware configurations and platforms. This isn't a case of "just my PC is funky". If it ever actually improves I'll be one of the first to notice.
I haven't seen anything but significant degradation from Firefox for years. Every update is a downgrade. In performance, in functionality, in usability. You are right that Firefox it isn't at its low point today...only because it keeps digging its grave a bit deeper with each passing update.
I harped on IE just as bad when they were the crappiest browser on Earth, but that hasn't been the case for years. I still hate the UI, but at least it's fast. More over Firefox's wounds are all self-inflicted.
The only reason I pay Firefox any attention whatsoever is that it still has significant market share and thus, sadly must continue to be supported. I long for the future where it's as relevant as Opera and I can just not even bother having the turd installed at all.
The fact is they have to focus on performance, especially their Javascript engine...precisely because their performance sucks big harry balls, most especially their Javascript engine!
Call me back when/if they ever actually make progress. All I've seen as a user is a browser that has gotten nothing but slower and slower with each release, a sharp contrast to Chrome and IE.
Which seems more evidence of how badly Tom's Hardware botched the testing than anything else.
In real use Chrome is so wildly faster than Firefox it's incredible, thanks largely to its Javascript engine and the fact most modern web sites are incredibly JS heavy. I'm not even talking 20% faster, but closer to 200%, literally running circles around Firefox.
It's to the point that just taking raw performance into consideration, I can't stand using Firefox lately even on very powerful hardware. I frequently have to fire it up for work, but man...what a drag.
So you'll forgive me if I can't take Tom's "benchmarking" seriously.
It's much more correct to say software is implemented ultimately with math, but it's rarely ever an expression of math.
The vast majority of software is little more than an automated (via math...) flow chart... Flow charts that express business processes or artistic ideas. There's a reason why trained mathematicians on the whole make for some of the worst software developers you'll ever find, and that reason is because aside from a few niche domains the practice of programming has fuck all to do with math.
It really depends on what the patents are all about.
Chances are near certain that they are all a bunch of the typical BS software patents we see all the time and never should have been granted. It's just cheaper to pay the troll than to fight him.
You're spending how much video hardware and you're still running air cooling?
Put in a good water loop already, sheesh... :-/
You say this, yet you've failed to even try to suggest an alternate motivation, to suggest an alternate "why"?
The "why" is very simple; The motivation is money. Whatever strategy will garner the most money is most often the strategy used. On the whole it's exceptionally rare to find another motivation and thus exceptionally rare to find another strategy employed. And the few that are motivated by other factors almost always get eaten alive quickly; It's hard to last in a game when you have no interest in actually succeeding at it.
The telcos, for all the reasons you've detailed and more, have plenty of opportunity to avoid and discourage free markets so of course they do so. This isn't rocket science.
Free markets are simply NEVER in the best interest of ANY business. They're in the best interest of consumers, sure, but consumers have very little power in a capitalistic model. At best they have fleeting moments of the allusion of power.
Capital (ie business) avoids free markets simply because it is in their strong self interest to do so, and no other reason.
Alternatives?
The reality is it's simply not practical to allow any random person to dig up the streets or put up new telephone poles willy-nilly to run new lines, especially considering the extreme risk both to existing lines (corporate property) and personal residences.
If my neighbor signs up with a shotty power, water, gas, or even Internet company...my home is at higher risk of fire or flooding.
It's not (simply) about inefficiencies. It's about safety, reliability, and accountability.
The fact is there are many businesses which, at least with current technology, are either natural monopolies (municipalities for example) or for which the "free market" incentives bad behavior rather than good (eg, healthcare). Forcing them into a "free market" for shear ideological reasons is simply foolish.
Horrendously wrong.
Capitalism is a game in which the goal is simply to make the most money (with the least effort). The "free market" (aka competition) is just one of many possible strategies to make the most money. Competing in the free market however, is without question the most expensive, the riskiest, and the least rewarding possible strategy available to most business...which is precisely why practically every business on earth bends over backwards to avoid the free market at all costs.
Going into "new markets", forming monopolies, getting regulations passed to raise the barriers to entry, avoiding "mature markets", etc are all entirely about avoiding the free market and thus avoiding competition.
This is the biggest mental issue free market advocates face: The ironic reality that if you want an actual free market...you must drag people into it kicking and screaming (most effectively through tight regulation...).
If all the robo-cars were completely autonomous, sure. But from an engineering perspective that would be an incredibly stupid design.
With all the robo-cars able to communicate and respond collectively both with each other and the road itself, nearly everything that requires us to limit speeds vanishes. Not being able to see more than a car or two ahead, not being able to see around turns, not knowing the maintenance state of the cars ahead (bald tires, etc), not knowing the skill, distraction, or intoxication level of the drivers ahead, and of course the naturally low reaction time of the average human.
The nano-second one of those robo-cars blows a tire every single car behind them for miles will take emergency action. Be it slamming on the breaks, all swerving out of the lane, etc, or a mix of actions. All in perfect unison.