I am almost 70 and I don't have a problem with topics I may have been exposed to in high school or college. I have found that sooner of later you will revisit topics from earlier in your experience. The only issue is flexibility of your mind. A secondary issue is where to begin. I think that one must develop a sense of where topics fit together and then one's own curiosity propels one forward. And it is wise to sip at the font of knowledge and not try to gulp it all down at one sitting. Gluttony will defeat you. You must be patient.
Also, individuals have different abilities to make sense of different kinds of knowledge, so for example, I know that I will never be able to work at a graduate level in mathematics. I only recently realized that poor vision was a big impediment for me in reading mathematical expressions and understanding them; so I have had some recent success in re-reading math, but I will never be expert in it. On the other hand I have had an acute memory for music and have been able to remember large chunks of the classical literature for which it is easy to get and use the printed music and study it. I have been able to contribute at the upper division and graduate level because of this ability.
But what is more important about the OP is the tacit question of why you want to revisit these topics? Is it to earn a professional level of expertise? And the next obvious question is do you intend to pursue an advanced degree in the topics? You are free to do that. If for example, you wouldn't have enough years in a career with an PhD in physics to pay off the tuition needed to get the degree, then maybe you need to be content to enjoy the topic and keep your day job. Maybe, you want to consider getting a teaching degree so you can teach Physics in high school or a community college. There is nothing to stop you from enjoying any topic that passes your attention.
Have you looked at most of the Debian packages, for example? 75% of them are crap for the one reason that developers get a head of steam, no pun intended, write 70% of what would be a complete project and lose interest, and what is left off is the most important part, decent docs. There ARE good projects with decent docs in Debian, but most are poorly documented. That is because developers do the worst job of writing in any clear language what their packages do. So, open source dies not because source goes away, but because not enough effort was spent on explaining what the software does or how it was intended to be used, and so it dies because no one wants to invest the effort needed to figure it out. Very few people can read others' source and intelligently figure out what the code does, and if they can they usually can't string together words in a spoken language to describe it. I think that poor linguistic expression is revealed in another way that obstructs usage in a big way. This is feature bloat, software that attempts to do everything and ends up doing nothing very well because it is too poorly designed to be used by human beings. Open source repositories like Debian are full of this kind of stuff. It isn't that they are not powerful, it is that they are not useful.
Look at the package recordmydesktop and try to make sense of its documentation. Its man page is very complex and its controls are low-level, requiring use of signal.h interrupts. not something you want a novice to have to deal with. It is as though some guy wrote it as an afternoon hack of low-level tools and didn't bother to learn enough GTK to write a few buttons for the GUI it comes with. Far worse than that is trying to figure out the interactions with the system.
Object Oriented Development is not a solution to this problem because refactoring further obscures user logic. Good OOD is not the same as clear user logic, in fact they often work against one another. With OOD documentation is even more important because of this. So FOSS projects really die because the documentation does not support their use so that others can come along and use them without direct community help.
I had to read some COBOL about 30 years ago as part of migrating a database. I had done my first programming in FORTRAN which is almost as old. I suspect that the call for COBOL is that there is need for people to read old code that still needs to be maintained, but my impression of the language is that it was really just about 80% boiler plate and 20% executable. So, couldn't a metalanguage be invented that reads COBOL source and produces some source code that reflects something widely used today, even something much newer?
True enough, for now. The radicals are going to wake the giant, who doesn't want to put boots on the ground against them, maybe the other Arab states will see the threat as too close to home and go in and clean the radicals out. If not, the U.S. has engineering not according to the fundie Islam which can easily decimate ISIL.. And we can make life very hard for them without putting our people on the ground. We could do a Putin on them and mention that we could use nuclear weapons on them, and even if we don't do that we could theoretically make large parts of Eastern Syria and Western Iraq uninhabital for decades. We should have done this in Eastern Afghanistan to the Pashtoon homeland where most of the Taliban insurgants who have fought us there come from. So, we have placed ourselves at a temporary disadvantage because of poor leadership from Obama; he had failed on the international stage too, but we don't have to continue in that vein and because we allow for creative solutions to problems that religious fundies don't use, we can defeat them. After all it could be said that Hitler lost his war because he didn't believe in science, especially Jewish science, and we developed the bomb because of the threat that he might get it; he didn't, and it was because of his racist and religious beliefs. In similar fashion if it came to direct conflict with ISIL we could clobber them with a engineering hammer, either a high energy or particle beam or just unloading our nuclear waste in the middle of the Syrian dessert. We could cook them man by man or en-mass if we have to. We are playing nice-nice trying to pick off individual terrorists with drones and avoiding taking out innocents with them, we don't have to continue with that restraint. So these guys in their Islamic state are going to under estimate us, and we in turn are going to learn how to be leaders and why sometimes it takes a hammer to drive a nail home.
By the way this mess started when American and European businessmen set out to steal the wealth of the Middle East by dividing the factions that exist there. Evey nation that was devised by the Western Powers after WWI in 1921 at the end of the Ottoman Empire was conceived by Brittan and France and later the U.S. as a way to allow for Western businesses to steal from the region or to set up puppet states, the Monarchies of the modern states, including Iraq and Egypt, that allow for foreign companies to garner resources at minimal benefit to the population. we did this by splitting religious sects and ethnicities that have considerable hatred for one another. That is how WE created bin Lauden, who was radicalized by contact with Western businessmen. We sowed dragon's teeth for profits, and we pay the price in terrorism. It looks like Crusades to Islam and even though moderates don't blame us as much, it is rich soil for anyone with a grudge. The point is that if you do not forget history, you can see why these threats arrise, and now it is out of hand and we have to get nasty to address it. We are paying for bad leadership in the past. We are paying for the two Bushes and Clinton using Oil politics to drive our policy in the area. We are paying for how we were set up for 9-11 by ignoring the hatred we had come to invite, because we placed corporation profits and our oil supply above human dignity. About the best thing that could happen in the post-peak-oil era is to find an energy source, invent fusion, that depreciates the value of the oil reserves in the world, but especially those under Iran and Iraq. Then we can gracefully back out of the region. Until then, our options become increasingly distasteful.
So, how many of you have downloaded an open source package, or even read the description posted by the developer and been unable to figure out what is does? How many of you have installed such a package and found that the documentation doesn't help you to use it, or is so complex that it is difficult to figure out where to begin to use it? I think this is a common problem. Either you are forced to read source code if it is available and quite often the source is inscrutable because the code has been refactored to run efficiently as an OOD implementation but the user logic for the package is lost or obscured because the developer either cannot write or didn't make an effort?
I would love to work for LA people who can write and where my challenge is to show that I understand some package by explaining it to them so that they could write the documentation. There is quite a bit of software out there that requires developer skills to figure out and use. The LA types could help developers communicate what their work does. I try to write as well as I can, I think that being able to write is as important as any coding task I have ever faced.
I am quite interested in Literate Programming and Reproducible Results tools that are beginning to become important, for example emacs org-tool and the iPython notebook. There are liberal arts people who can do more than edit MS Word and some of them actually use emacs, although not many, but tools that mix code and markdown could be an area where writers can really help.
This is quite a separate problem from business administration or business politics. I grant you that shit floats and some of the smoozers rise to positions they don't deserve for not being competent technically when the product is technical and engineered. I have worked for a couple of these types and it is no fun.
Don't hold your breath, the U.S. in an Entrapanocracy; business interests have huge power in the U.S. Congress so it is unlikely that the monopoly Microsoft has with its OEM arrangement with PC Makers would result in a rebate if you refuse to Install Windows or scrub it with Linux or something else.
The case with Macs is a little different. Apple doesn't allow you to run OS X on other platforms and it makes no claim that non XS X will run on its systems or is supported on its systems. That is fair. PC Makers have no such claims which is why Microsoft's agreement is anti-competative unless they allow for a rebate for a customer who does not want to run Windows.
I live in California where Hg occurs in nature and was used in extraction of gold from ores and has a latency in sediments shed from mining in the Mother Lode. USGS has been looking for the signature of Hg in sediments and it may be delayed by the mobilization process. More was applied to ores than has yet appeared in sediments. My source for the path of Hg in sediments comes from a video I saw authored by USGS in about 2000. I am sure that there are links to papers on the subject. Part of the problem of Hg in the environment in California is that its ores are found in the Coast Range and so it is a natural constituant of the environment. Most of the time it is pretty insoluable.
I mention this because that is what the chart in the link from the article seems to indicate. The spike in total Hg at 1970 and its elevated concentration is due in part to landfills, but the more recent uptick seems to be due to its mobilization in the atmosphere. This would coincide with the concern from USGS about its path in sediments. The metal is pretty insoluable, but conversion to its salts and organic versions are more volitile and take time, decades, to appear in the environment.
Yeah, Mac OS X is sounding better and better all the time. Apple controls the platform but everything installs and the package management is stable, which is more than I can say for most Linux, and there isn't a zoo of filesystem types and partitions to deal with. To really upbrade Ubuntu I have to create space for a new partition to move/home to and then scrub the boot partition and reinstall. What if I have a 1 TB drive? Why should I have to partiton a 5 GB partition each time I want to use a different Linux? Why not use a simple filesystem and boot from any of a choice of images and don't let RedHat or Connonical control the filesystem?
A hundred years from now Bill Gates will be remembered as a great man. Even today no one gives a shit about you. Slashdot and its users are so sad and pathetic.
Ha, Ha, Ha, by then he will be revealed as a rip-off artist, a business man who stole from and took advantage of people much more creative than he, and someone whose company stole from its consumers. He might have the reputation of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, but will be only a foot note to the people who really made digital technology. By then, John McCarthy will be more famous for inventing lisp than some third rate hack who ripped off a BASIC interpreter, and existing operating system and created a captive market, and maybe by then that kind of exploitation might really be disliked, so it may be Gates that gets revised out of history.
Let's teach kids something they can actually use to contribute and make a living.
UMM, this is an historical artifact of a system or organization that did not exist until the 18th century, and doesn't yet exist in many parts of the world, yet.
So history tells you where your proverbial values come from, how the value of finding a job and contributing in a secular organization that does not use kinship and religion to establish its trusts. Go look at other parts of the world, you seem ignorant of the different ways relationships come about. We live in a ruthless mertiocracy, some guy you have never met gets to decide if you are suitable for his job description after talking to you for five minutes, and he uses information of a sort that wouldn't make any sense in most other places in the world. Everybody has to find a role in their society; has to find a way to get what they need, to earn their way. but the details of that very so much from place to place and over time. That is something that history tells you something about.
As an example, one might find a stronger connection in the mind set of Islamist Jehadists in Africa and the Middle East today and Protestant reformers in Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries, or the Catholics that opposed them, and that may help us understand if it is a good idea for us to be involved as we are in the Middle East today, it isn't. and what is clear is that the poor knowledge of history at the very highest echelons of our government shows in the projection of our values on people in other nations and our vulnerability to pitfalls of history long gone, greed, racism, religious intolerance, ignoring the differences between them and us. It is appauling.
I wouldn't trust Bill Gates to teach me anything, and not his chance to use his wealth to be revisionist on History; but on the other hand, America has such a poor grasp of world history that it may not make all that much difference which liar is in the mix. We already have been feed a load of lies, much of it by omision, so in spite of what Gates is about, the answer is, as it is with many other abuses, the full light of research and disclosure. People tell lies all the time, but careful research eventually catches up with them. So, lets have the careful work undaunted by powerful people throwing their weight around, whether that if Vladimir Putin, Iraq Obama or Dick Chainey of Command.
Were the assertion true, one could just say that the oldest trick in the trade is to create and evolve document standards so they ensure a captive market. In fact look at Google Docs as a similar example. Google Docs and Google Drive are really not compatible with the outside or with standards, although they are better now than they once were. Microsoft is going to keep pushing Office formats so that any of the work-alikes will do most but not all of the claimed functionality, even if it doesn't really matter. They understand the psychology of brand recognition enough so that ignorant consumers will pay for their products even if they will never use the added features or if a free alternative never failed to import Office documents, or it the incompatability either didn't matter or was fixable.
And You are paying a pretty penny for Micro$oft stuff when you could get decent workalikes, Libre Office, for free, It maybe that you want to buy Mac and not linux, but you will pay for buying a less expensive PC and installing Linux if you don't know anything about that OS. At least with Mac after the initial investment the access to opensource saves you money. You get access to all of the new stuff because many of the developers code for Mac early on.
Back in the Pleistocene, when I was in college, we used slide rules (gasp!) and then the skill was with three or four digits percision to get the order of magnitude correctly. That is a very useful skill, even if you need to calculate with more precision, to correctly do dimensional analysis and get that exponent correct. I'm sure that is still a stumbling block with kids today.
On the other hand, kids need to learn the new tools of the trade in science, how to present a document with reproduced results. I think that exposing high school kids to iPython Notebook or to emacs org.mode is well within the skill set they will need if they head off to college, and eventually grad school. You kill several birds at once, you get them to write about their results, justify their results, and you teach them coding for scientific use. This can be done on a laptop or tablet.
I understand the concern about the Internet for "cheating" and for social distractions, but I think access to the web outweighs the risks if a student actually has to explain calculations and results; that is the tool they will need in the real world from now on. I even think that non-science disciplines will be swept up in the notebook paradigm as it short-circuits the publishing cycle and it allows to peers to check reported results directly, with integrated text, calculations with code used, results, and graphics of results.
I have a different experience because I am visually impaired. I find that using a 19" screen with a zoomable PDF reader is actually better than reading the hard-copy book. It is a bigger font size and I have the option of reversing the background and forground colors. I don't have the usual eye condition that requires reversal of screen collors for accessability but with a cataract it turns out to be helpful. So it is actually easier for me to read and edit on a computer screen than to use a paper book.
One area where it may not occur to many people where having zoomable fonts would matter is reading any mathematics. When I was in school I tended to gloss over typeset mathematics, it actually interferred with my learning of math in college because reading exponents and subscriipts was hard, A magnifying glass was a help but if you have ever had to use them, they become tedious. Now, reading scientific and technical texts as the PDF is better than owning the hardcopy book, even given some of the downside of reading a book on-line. As for editing, I now tend to run my favorite editors on black or dark backgrounds with white or light colored fonts, emacs and Sublime Text, I actually perferred for a time running editors inside an xterm for that reason. Now emacs under genome fills the screen with a big font on a black background.
The STEM jobs don't matter because only a tiny percentage of people now alive can do them. Now, they may be the most productive jobs that have ever existed, until you factor in the fact that most people now alive are unproductive by comparison, then it doesn't matter. Everybody has to eat and everybody has to find something to do with their time. When more and more people get marginalized; that is a dangerous time for sociey.
I am so happy that Tesla isn't building the plant in California, and not just because of the pollution problem it poses. I honestly wish that more and more companies would leave my state and especially from Silicon Valley, or is that Silly Con-Man Valley. The blush is off between the marriage of Stanford and UC Berkeley scientists and entrapaneurs in Northern California. Let them go almost anywhere else as far as I care. The reason is that the promise of their efforts has resulted in overcrowding and impact on limited resources that far outweighs the benefits they make to a tiny minority of engineers and business people. Collectively, the big companies in Silicon Valley do not benefit that many people. It is the dumb-ass politicians both local and state who bend over and spread for these guys while ordinary and normal people pay too much to share the space with them. I say send 'em packing, to Nevada, to Texas, or wherever. I'd love to see Facebook and Google and others, go elsewhere. I don't think that promoting growth equates to quality of life and this part of California will do just fine if the high tech companies relocated taking their overpaid engineers and their Superfund Sites elsewhere. Good Riddance, and with them maybe we can get 10 million people to leave California, then again maybe another big quake would send 'em packing, too.
So Tesla now gets to PLAYA its trade in batteries in Carson Sink? That way the pollution can't go any lower and is trapped in a closed basin. The CAR could have been a CDR if you went down the rest of the list:=) Elon Musk says with a lisp.
Yeah, I get what you mean, you burn up nuclear waste on your Hitachi and get short-lived isotopes that decay rapidly.Maybe they all come to Californium?
I will only buy a Google pod or whatever they're going to call it when it can safely and legally get me home from a night of alcoholic excess.
You may be defining the best application, SDCs in places well-understood. I think that they would work best for public transit, cabs, or well traveled commute corradors, not rural or off-road applications.
I don't drive due to poor vision. I also hate the bus and other forms of public transit and most cab services are far too expensive, but imagine a city in which cars were discouraged and a fleet of SDCs served the function of local mass transit, removing the need for bus and cab services. You could order a ride to and from particular locations, use the car one-way, and free it for someone else to use and order another one for return trip, but it would cost only a little more than a bus ride and far less than a cab. A city run like this could remove most of its parking and narrow its streets, making a great deal of land to redevelop. If we could get people to let go of owning a car, the savings alone in land values would more than finance the cost of the fleet. This idea is for those use cases within reach, the choice of paths is well-known, well-mapped and the problems cited by the OP are minimized.
Their use for Interstate Highways might be more problematic due to road condition problems cited in the OP, but one possibility, convoying and running at high speed, like high-speed rail, might be used. Imagine getting from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles in 90 minutes in a convoy that can go 250 MPH?
Actually, I have evidence that not only is emacs and vi are very much alive, but that lisp, which is what emacs is written in, is not only very much alive, but very possibly moved to the top of the list of "new" solutions to programming problems. Go follow the developments with Clojure and Clojurescript. Clojure is lisp with a few enhancements that might solve some nasty problems in newer languages with persistence and concurrency. It runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine and its scripted version translates to Javascript. It can use libraries available to Java and Javascript and yet it addresses the need of functional programs to use immutable objects and not complex locking mechanisms. It uses namespaces but allows for separate copies of objects between them in a memory efficient way. The only worry I have about Clojure's immutabiliuity is wheather its garbage collection scheme can destroy data prematurely while it is being handled between namespaces. The more common problem of threads treading on each other's data needing locks may return.
I haven't addressed the Vi vs. Emacs issue except to say that it is the learning curve and muscle memory that determines which one a person adopts, not that one is basically superior. I learned emacs first and use it to this day, but if you have ever been a system administrator in single user or recovery mode on a *NIX box you had better know at least some minimal Vi and even Ex, the line editor form that underlies the screen editor. (I had one case where I couldn't boot a workstation in screen mode and had to edit a critical system file with Ex, or what used to be called Ed, )
Something to note is that Emacs was an integrated environment long before there were GUIs. You can still run a shell, a REPL, a file manager (dired), and numerous other applications for mail and IRC and netnews, all within a single emacs instance using multiple windows. I have tried this recently and am amazed at how useful it still is, and you can have as many buffers open as you want.
The only issue I have is that I need to upgrade my OS to get Emacs 24 running on it so that I can dive into lisp and Clojure, as Emacs 23 is not fully ready for Clojure. But I know some common lisp and have delved into a little e-lisp, and am obviously interested in Clojure now, is reason enough for Emacs.
Have you edited Wikipedia lately? It's a fucking nightmare of committee-watched articles and instantaneous reversions.
There we go, the real reason.
I mean, face it, men are just more willing to be the trolls and make life miserable for each other. Women see that and avoid the whole issue altogether.
It is just that people are not critical enough to avoid age-old ploys to cover up lies. Constraining human nature and deceit isn't going to make them go away, nor is sticking your head in the sand and demanding everyone be nice-nice. Instead, see to it that the design of media helps you manage human foibles so that you can answer these assaults. The design of social media and blogs in particular magnifies the power of distractions like changing topics and abuse like trolling. You are not going to be able to remove these tactics but you can do something to reduce their effectiveness.
I have been advocating a return to the USENET-style of newsgroup for discussions now done on blogs. We have some of the features on slashdot now, these include the ability to quote from another article and reply in context to it, and the ability to change the subject line. The only thing I would change here is to make the neutral categories richer and more prominant than the headlines which are chosen by an editorial board. Promotion of topics by voting or "likes" is actually determental, especially if the bias in introduced by a controlling editorial board.
Sub-threads are the best way to deal with the two main abuses of blogs, the change in topic and the troll. Trolls do not last if called personally to account. They are cowards, really, who post hit and run assaults with no desire to see the consequences, or to get their charge out of the initial shock. What sub-threading "Re: TROLL Alert..." does to them is to expose the ridiculousness of their statement to public exposure. Facebook should allow for the use of the Markdown editing language to support quoting, something they won't do because they want to squeeze every last byte out of the flat text blocks they need to give to their business partners' reg-exp engines for data mining. The engineers are not smart enough to deal with quoted text. The other thing they need to do is to allow for conversation owners to fork sub-threads to handle the abuses cited above. The reason Facebook is such a banal self-censored medium is because the blog model, the one Mark Zuckerberg things is "Simple", is a failed idea unless all you are after is the banality. I think there are signs that many people are getting tired of that.
This raises the question of how peer-reviewed literature, scientific journals, stack up in gender biased terms? Women has been doing science for a long time, they may not be demographically represented, and maybe, as the article suggests, the reason for this may be that women want more immediate acknowledgement of their ideas from their peers that they can get on Facebook and other social media that is withheld on Wikipedia because of the review process. What about sites that hold comments for review? Do these discourage female participants?
Facebook seems to thrive on empathy between friends, even though that has nothing to do with the company's business model, which is to spy on its users and develop profile information useful to marketers (and others?). I have been a sharp critic of Social Media because conversations really go nowhere; but I want a style of communication that is analytic and a little contentious. Maybe that is the very thing that turns women off. I just think there is too much of this empathic yes-man, or is that yes-woman?:-) kind of communication with social media and blogs, particularly. But clearly this issue is the other side of the story. Maybe something like Google+ is also more appealing to women as a result, and the banality of social media generally is more appealing to women, too.
I have been saying that social media and the blog is a muzzle on effective communication driven by a commercial motive. That creators of web pages and blog posts want to control conversations and not have distractions and change of topic and trolling. People have been persuaded that arguing in public is a bad thing and the reason may be that the design of media doesn't support it, but I would argue that we need to have argument, disagreements and contentiouslness to have quality citizenship and that discussion forums of which wikis are a form are necessary and that blogs and social media generally are detrimental to civic if not civil discourse as a result. This is somewhat the obverse of the issue presented in the OP which was that Wikipedia discourages female participation. Maybe the truth is that social media in general discourages reasoning and argument, that our critical muscles are underexcercized because in the aftermath of the idea of "Political Correctness" that we mistakenly think that arguing in public is rude and people have learned to avoid it. One reason is that people are out of practice in reasoning and debating and theat they need to get back in the game as if their very freedom depends on it. I have no doubt that quite a few politicians and business people, especially those who want to perpetuate the fallacies of public relations and advertising, don't want this to happen; that included the social media corporations in the main.
Slashdot Mirror
I am almost 70 and I don't have a problem with topics I may have been exposed to in high school or college. I have found that sooner of later you will revisit topics from earlier in your experience. The only issue is flexibility of your mind. A secondary issue is where to begin. I think that one must develop a sense of where topics fit together and then one's own curiosity propels one forward. And it is wise to sip at the font of knowledge and not try to gulp it all down at one sitting. Gluttony will defeat you. You must be patient.
Also, individuals have different abilities to make sense of different kinds of knowledge, so for example, I know that I will never be able to work at a graduate level in mathematics. I only recently realized that poor vision was a big impediment for me in reading mathematical expressions and understanding them; so I have had some recent success in re-reading math, but I will never be expert in it. On the other hand I have had an acute memory for music and have been able to remember large chunks of the classical literature for which it is easy to get and use the printed music and study it. I have been able to contribute at the upper division and graduate level because of this ability.
But what is more important about the OP is the tacit question of why you want to revisit these topics? Is it to earn a professional level of expertise? And the next obvious question is do you intend to pursue an advanced degree in the topics? You are free to do that. If for example, you wouldn't have enough years in a career with an PhD in physics to pay off the tuition needed to get the degree, then maybe you need to be content to enjoy the topic and keep your day job. Maybe, you want to consider getting a teaching degree so you can teach Physics in high school or a community college. There is nothing to stop you from enjoying any topic that passes your attention.
Have you looked at most of the Debian packages, for example? 75% of them are crap for the one reason that developers get a head of steam, no pun intended, write 70% of what would be a complete project and lose interest, and what is left off is the most important part, decent docs. There ARE good projects with decent docs in Debian, but most are poorly documented. That is because developers do the worst job of writing in any clear language what their packages do. So, open source dies not because source goes away, but because not enough effort was spent on explaining what the software does or how it was intended to be used, and so it dies because no one wants to invest the effort needed to figure it out. Very few people can read others' source and intelligently figure out what the code does, and if they can they usually can't string together words in a spoken language to describe it. I think that poor linguistic expression is revealed in another way that obstructs usage in a big way. This is feature bloat, software that attempts to do everything and ends up doing nothing very well because it is too poorly designed to be used by human beings. Open source repositories like Debian are full of this kind of stuff. It isn't that they are not powerful, it is that they are not useful.
Look at the package recordmydesktop and try to make sense of its documentation. Its man page is very complex and its controls are low-level, requiring use of signal.h interrupts. not something you want a novice to have to deal with. It is as though some guy wrote it as an afternoon hack of low-level tools and didn't bother to learn enough GTK to write a few buttons for the GUI it comes with. Far worse than that is trying to figure out the interactions with the system.
Object Oriented Development is not a solution to this problem because refactoring further obscures user logic. Good OOD is not the same as clear user logic, in fact they often work against one another. With OOD documentation is even more important because of this. So FOSS projects really die because the documentation does not support their use so that others can come along and use them without direct community help.
I had to read some COBOL about 30 years ago as part of migrating a database. I had done my first programming in FORTRAN which is almost as old. I suspect that the call for COBOL is that there is need for people to read old code that still needs to be maintained, but my impression of the language is that it was really just about 80% boiler plate and 20% executable. So, couldn't a metalanguage be invented that reads COBOL source and produces some source code that reflects something widely used today, even something much newer?
True enough, for now. The radicals are going to wake the giant, who doesn't want to put boots on the ground against them, maybe the other Arab states will see the threat as too close to home and go in and clean the radicals out. If not, the U.S. has engineering not according to the fundie Islam which can easily decimate ISIL.. And we can make life very hard for them without putting our people on the ground. We could do a Putin on them and mention that we could use nuclear weapons on them, and even if we don't do that we could theoretically make large parts of Eastern Syria and Western Iraq uninhabital for decades. We should have done this in Eastern Afghanistan to the Pashtoon homeland where most of the Taliban insurgants who have fought us there come from. So, we have placed ourselves at a temporary disadvantage because of poor leadership from Obama; he had failed on the international stage too, but we don't have to continue in that vein and because we allow for creative solutions to problems that religious fundies don't use, we can defeat them. After all it could be said that Hitler lost his war because he didn't believe in science, especially Jewish science, and we developed the bomb because of the threat that he might get it; he didn't, and it was because of his racist and religious beliefs. In similar fashion if it came to direct conflict with ISIL we could clobber them with a engineering hammer, either a high energy or particle beam or just unloading our nuclear waste in the middle of the Syrian dessert. We could cook them man by man or en-mass if we have to. We are playing nice-nice trying to pick off individual terrorists with drones and avoiding taking out innocents with them, we don't have to continue with that restraint. So these guys in their Islamic state are going to under estimate us, and we in turn are going to learn how to be leaders and why sometimes it takes a hammer to drive a nail home.
By the way this mess started when American and European businessmen set out to steal the wealth of the Middle East by dividing the factions that exist there. Evey nation that was devised by the Western Powers after WWI in 1921 at the end of the Ottoman Empire was conceived by Brittan and France and later the U.S. as a way to allow for Western businesses to steal from the region or to set up puppet states, the Monarchies of the modern states, including Iraq and Egypt, that allow for foreign companies to garner resources at minimal benefit to the population. we did this by splitting religious sects and ethnicities that have considerable hatred for one another. That is how WE created bin Lauden, who was radicalized by contact with Western businessmen. We sowed dragon's teeth for profits, and we pay the price in terrorism. It looks like Crusades to Islam and even though moderates don't blame us as much, it is rich soil for anyone with a grudge. The point is that if you do not forget history, you can see why these threats arrise, and now it is out of hand and we have to get nasty to address it. We are paying for bad leadership in the past. We are paying for the two Bushes and Clinton using Oil politics to drive our policy in the area. We are paying for how we were set up for 9-11 by ignoring the hatred we had come to invite, because we placed corporation profits and our oil supply above human dignity. About the best thing that could happen in the post-peak-oil era is to find an energy source, invent fusion, that depreciates the value of the oil reserves in the world, but especially those under Iran and Iraq. Then we can gracefully back out of the region. Until then, our options become increasingly distasteful.
So, how many of you have downloaded an open source package, or even read the description posted by the developer and been unable to figure out what is does? How many of you have installed such a package and found that the documentation doesn't help you to use it, or is so complex that it is difficult to figure out where to begin to use it? I think this is a common problem. Either you are forced to read source code if it is available and quite often the source is inscrutable because the code has been refactored to run efficiently as an OOD implementation but the user logic for the package is lost or obscured because the developer either cannot write or didn't make an effort?
I would love to work for LA people who can write and where my challenge is to show that I understand some package by explaining it to them so that they could write the documentation. There is quite a bit of software out there that requires developer skills to figure out and use. The LA types could help developers communicate what their work does. I try to write as well as I can, I think that being able to write is as important as any coding task I have ever faced.
I am quite interested in Literate Programming and Reproducible Results tools that are beginning to become important, for example emacs org-tool and the iPython notebook. There are liberal arts people who can do more than edit MS Word and some of them actually use emacs, although not many, but tools that mix code and markdown could be an area where writers can really help.
This is quite a separate problem from business administration or business politics. I grant you that shit floats and some of the smoozers rise to positions they don't deserve for not being competent technically when the product is technical and engineered. I have worked for a couple of these types and it is no fun.
Is it pro Bono?
Don't hold your breath, the U.S. in an Entrapanocracy; business interests have huge power in the U.S. Congress so it is unlikely that the monopoly Microsoft has with its OEM arrangement with PC Makers would result in a rebate if you refuse to Install Windows or scrub it with Linux or something else.
The case with Macs is a little different. Apple doesn't allow you to run OS X on other platforms and it makes no claim that non XS X will run on its systems or is supported on its systems. That is fair. PC Makers have no such claims which is why Microsoft's agreement is anti-competative unless they allow for a rebate for a customer who does not want to run Windows.
I live in California where Hg occurs in nature and was used in extraction of gold from ores and has a latency in sediments shed from mining in the Mother Lode. USGS has been looking for the signature of Hg in sediments and it may be delayed by the mobilization process. More was applied to ores than has yet appeared in sediments. My source for the path of Hg in sediments comes from a video I saw authored by USGS in about 2000. I am sure that there are links to papers on the subject. Part of the problem of Hg in the environment in California is that its ores are found in the Coast Range and so it is a natural constituant of the environment. Most of the time it is pretty insoluable.
I mention this because that is what the chart in the link from the article seems to indicate. The spike in total Hg at 1970 and its elevated concentration is due in part to landfills, but the more recent uptick seems to be due to its mobilization in the atmosphere. This would coincide with the concern from USGS about its path in sediments. The metal is pretty insoluable, but conversion to its salts and organic versions are more volitile and take time, decades, to appear in the environment.
Yeah, Mac OS X is sounding better and better all the time. Apple controls the platform but everything installs and the package management is stable, which is more than I can say for most Linux, and there isn't a zoo of filesystem types and partitions to deal with. To really upbrade Ubuntu I have to create space for a new partition to move /home to and then scrub the boot partition and reinstall. What if I have a 1 TB drive? Why should I have to partiton a 5 GB partition each time I want to use a different Linux? Why not use a simple filesystem and boot from any of a choice of images and don't let RedHat or Connonical control the filesystem?
A hundred years from now Bill Gates will be remembered as a great man. Even today no one gives a shit about you. Slashdot and its users are so sad and pathetic.
Ha, Ha, Ha, by then he will be revealed as a rip-off artist, a business man who stole from and took advantage of people much more creative than he, and someone whose company stole from its consumers. He might have the reputation of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, but will be only a foot note to the people who really made digital technology. By then, John McCarthy will be more famous for inventing lisp than some third rate hack who ripped off a BASIC interpreter, and existing operating system and created a captive market, and maybe by then that kind of exploitation might really be disliked, so it may be Gates that gets revised out of history.
Let's teach kids something they can actually use to contribute and make a living.
UMM, this is an historical artifact of a system or organization that did not exist until the 18th century, and doesn't yet exist in many parts of the world, yet. So history tells you where your proverbial values come from, how the value of finding a job and contributing in a secular organization that does not use kinship and religion to establish its trusts. Go look at other parts of the world, you seem ignorant of the different ways relationships come about. We live in a ruthless mertiocracy, some guy you have never met gets to decide if you are suitable for his job description after talking to you for five minutes, and he uses information of a sort that wouldn't make any sense in most other places in the world. Everybody has to find a role in their society; has to find a way to get what they need, to earn their way. but the details of that very so much from place to place and over time. That is something that history tells you something about.
As an example, one might find a stronger connection in the mind set of Islamist Jehadists in Africa and the Middle East today and Protestant reformers in Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries, or the Catholics that opposed them, and that may help us understand if it is a good idea for us to be involved as we are in the Middle East today, it isn't. and what is clear is that the poor knowledge of history at the very highest echelons of our government shows in the projection of our values on people in other nations and our vulnerability to pitfalls of history long gone, greed, racism, religious intolerance, ignoring the differences between them and us. It is appauling.
I wouldn't trust Bill Gates to teach me anything, and not his chance to use his wealth to be revisionist on History; but on the other hand, America has such a poor grasp of world history that it may not make all that much difference which liar is in the mix. We already have been feed a load of lies, much of it by omision, so in spite of what Gates is about, the answer is, as it is with many other abuses, the full light of research and disclosure. People tell lies all the time, but careful research eventually catches up with them. So, lets have the careful work undaunted by powerful people throwing their weight around, whether that if Vladimir Putin, Iraq Obama or Dick Chainey of Command.
Were the assertion true, one could just say that the oldest trick in the trade is to create and evolve document standards so they ensure a captive market. In fact look at Google Docs as a similar example. Google Docs and Google Drive are really not compatible with the outside or with standards, although they are better now than they once were. Microsoft is going to keep pushing Office formats so that any of the work-alikes will do most but not all of the claimed functionality, even if it doesn't really matter. They understand the psychology of brand recognition enough so that ignorant consumers will pay for their products even if they will never use the added features or if a free alternative never failed to import Office documents, or it the incompatability either didn't matter or was fixable.
And You are paying a pretty penny for Micro$oft stuff when you could get decent workalikes, Libre Office, for free, It maybe that you want to buy Mac and not linux, but you will pay for buying a less expensive PC and installing Linux if you don't know anything about that OS. At least with Mac after the initial investment the access to opensource saves you money. You get access to all of the new stuff because many of the developers code for Mac early on.
Back in the Pleistocene, when I was in college, we used slide rules (gasp!) and then the skill was with three or four digits percision to get the order of magnitude correctly. That is a very useful skill, even if you need to calculate with more precision, to correctly do dimensional analysis and get that exponent correct. I'm sure that is still a stumbling block with kids today.
On the other hand, kids need to learn the new tools of the trade in science, how to present a document with reproduced results. I think that exposing high school kids to iPython Notebook or to emacs org.mode is well within the skill set they will need if they head off to college, and eventually grad school. You kill several birds at once, you get them to write about their results, justify their results, and you teach them coding for scientific use. This can be done on a laptop or tablet.
I understand the concern about the Internet for "cheating" and for social distractions, but I think access to the web outweighs the risks if a student actually has to explain calculations and results; that is the tool they will need in the real world from now on. I even think that non-science disciplines will be swept up in the notebook paradigm as it short-circuits the publishing cycle and it allows to peers to check reported results directly, with integrated text, calculations with code used, results, and graphics of results.
I have a different experience because I am visually impaired. I find that using a 19" screen with a zoomable PDF reader is actually better than reading the hard-copy book. It is a bigger font size and I have the option of reversing the background and forground colors. I don't have the usual eye condition that requires reversal of screen collors for accessability but with a cataract it turns out to be helpful. So it is actually easier for me to read and edit on a computer screen than to use a paper book.
One area where it may not occur to many people where having zoomable fonts would matter is reading any mathematics. When I was in school I tended to gloss over typeset mathematics, it actually interferred with my learning of math in college because reading exponents and subscriipts was hard, A magnifying glass was a help but if you have ever had to use them, they become tedious. Now, reading scientific and technical texts as the PDF is better than owning the hardcopy book, even given some of the downside of reading a book on-line. As for editing, I now tend to run my favorite editors on black or dark backgrounds with white or light colored fonts, emacs and Sublime Text, I actually perferred for a time running editors inside an xterm for that reason. Now emacs under genome fills the screen with a big font on a black background.
The STEM jobs don't matter because only a tiny percentage of people now alive can do them. Now, they may be the most productive jobs that have ever existed, until you factor in the fact that most people now alive are unproductive by comparison, then it doesn't matter. Everybody has to eat and everybody has to find something to do with their time. When more and more people get marginalized; that is a dangerous time for sociey.
Its a PR term, hence meaningless.
I am so happy that Tesla isn't building the plant in California, and not just because of the pollution problem it poses. I honestly wish that more and more companies would leave my state and especially from Silicon Valley, or is that Silly Con-Man Valley. The blush is off between the marriage of Stanford and UC Berkeley scientists and entrapaneurs in Northern California. Let them go almost anywhere else as far as I care. The reason is that the promise of their efforts has resulted in overcrowding and impact on limited resources that far outweighs the benefits they make to a tiny minority of engineers and business people. Collectively, the big companies in Silicon Valley do not benefit that many people. It is the dumb-ass politicians both local and state who bend over and spread for these guys while ordinary and normal people pay too much to share the space with them. I say send 'em packing, to Nevada, to Texas, or wherever. I'd love to see Facebook and Google and others, go elsewhere. I don't think that promoting growth equates to quality of life and this part of California will do just fine if the high tech companies relocated taking their overpaid engineers and their Superfund Sites elsewhere. Good Riddance, and with them maybe we can get 10 million people to leave California, then again maybe another big quake would send 'em packing, too.
So Tesla now gets to PLAYA its trade in batteries in Carson Sink? That way the pollution can't go any lower and is trapped in a closed basin. The CAR could have been a CDR if you went down the rest of the list :=) Elon Musk says with a lisp.
Yeah, I get what you mean, you burn up nuclear waste on your Hitachi and get short-lived isotopes that decay rapidly.Maybe they all come to Californium?
I think he was talking about "In the current directory" :-)
I will only buy a Google pod or whatever they're going to call it when it can safely and legally get me home from a night of alcoholic excess.
You may be defining the best application, SDCs in places well-understood. I think that they would work best for public transit, cabs, or well traveled commute corradors, not rural or off-road applications.
I don't drive due to poor vision. I also hate the bus and other forms of public transit and most cab services are far too expensive, but imagine a city in which cars were discouraged and a fleet of SDCs served the function of local mass transit, removing the need for bus and cab services. You could order a ride to and from particular locations, use the car one-way, and free it for someone else to use and order another one for return trip, but it would cost only a little more than a bus ride and far less than a cab. A city run like this could remove most of its parking and narrow its streets, making a great deal of land to redevelop. If we could get people to let go of owning a car, the savings alone in land values would more than finance the cost of the fleet. This idea is for those use cases within reach, the choice of paths is well-known, well-mapped and the problems cited by the OP are minimized.
Their use for Interstate Highways might be more problematic due to road condition problems cited in the OP, but one possibility, convoying and running at high speed, like high-speed rail, might be used. Imagine getting from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles in 90 minutes in a convoy that can go 250 MPH?
Actually, I have evidence that not only is emacs and vi are very much alive, but that lisp, which is what emacs is written in, is not only very much alive, but very possibly moved to the top of the list of "new" solutions to programming problems. Go follow the developments with Clojure and Clojurescript. Clojure is lisp with a few enhancements that might solve some nasty problems in newer languages with persistence and concurrency. It runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine and its scripted version translates to Javascript. It can use libraries available to Java and Javascript and yet it addresses the need of functional programs to use immutable objects and not complex locking mechanisms. It uses namespaces but allows for separate copies of objects between them in a memory efficient way. The only worry I have about Clojure's immutabiliuity is wheather its garbage collection scheme can destroy data prematurely while it is being handled between namespaces. The more common problem of threads treading on each other's data needing locks may return.
I haven't addressed the Vi vs. Emacs issue except to say that it is the learning curve and muscle memory that determines which one a person adopts, not that one is basically superior. I learned emacs first and use it to this day, but if you have ever been a system administrator in single user or recovery mode on a *NIX box you had better know at least some minimal Vi and even Ex, the line editor form that underlies the screen editor. (I had one case where I couldn't boot a workstation in screen mode and had to edit a critical system file with Ex, or what used to be called Ed, )
Something to note is that Emacs was an integrated environment long before there were GUIs. You can still run a shell, a REPL, a file manager (dired), and numerous other applications for mail and IRC and netnews, all within a single emacs instance using multiple windows. I have tried this recently and am amazed at how useful it still is, and you can have as many buffers open as you want.
The only issue I have is that I need to upgrade my OS to get Emacs 24 running on it so that I can dive into lisp and Clojure, as Emacs 23 is not fully ready for Clojure. But I know some common lisp and have delved into a little e-lisp, and am obviously interested in Clojure now, is reason enough for Emacs.
There we go, the real reason.
I mean, face it, men are just more willing to be the trolls and make life miserable for each other. Women see that and avoid the whole issue altogether.
It is just that people are not critical enough to avoid age-old ploys to cover up lies. Constraining human nature and deceit isn't going to make them go away, nor is sticking your head in the sand and demanding everyone be nice-nice. Instead, see to it that the design of media helps you manage human foibles so that you can answer these assaults. The design of social media and blogs in particular magnifies the power of distractions like changing topics and abuse like trolling. You are not going to be able to remove these tactics but you can do something to reduce their effectiveness.
I have been advocating a return to the USENET-style of newsgroup for discussions now done on blogs. We have some of the features on slashdot now, these include the ability to quote from another article and reply in context to it, and the ability to change the subject line. The only thing I would change here is to make the neutral categories richer and more prominant than the headlines which are chosen by an editorial board. Promotion of topics by voting or "likes" is actually determental, especially if the bias in introduced by a controlling editorial board.
Sub-threads are the best way to deal with the two main abuses of blogs, the change in topic and the troll. Trolls do not last if called personally to account. They are cowards, really, who post hit and run assaults with no desire to see the consequences, or to get their charge out of the initial shock. What sub-threading "Re: TROLL Alert..." does to them is to expose the ridiculousness of their statement to public exposure. Facebook should allow for the use of the Markdown editing language to support quoting, something they won't do because they want to squeeze every last byte out of the flat text blocks they need to give to their business partners' reg-exp engines for data mining. The engineers are not smart enough to deal with quoted text. The other thing they need to do is to allow for conversation owners to fork sub-threads to handle the abuses cited above. The reason Facebook is such a banal self-censored medium is because the blog model, the one Mark Zuckerberg things is "Simple", is a failed idea unless all you are after is the banality. I think there are signs that many people are getting tired of that.
This raises the question of how peer-reviewed literature, scientific journals, stack up in gender biased terms? Women has been doing science for a long time, they may not be demographically represented, and maybe, as the article suggests, the reason for this may be that women want more immediate acknowledgement of their ideas from their peers that they can get on Facebook and other social media that is withheld on Wikipedia because of the review process. What about sites that hold comments for review? Do these discourage female participants?
Facebook seems to thrive on empathy between friends, even though that has nothing to do with the company's business model, which is to spy on its users and develop profile information useful to marketers (and others?). I have been a sharp critic of Social Media because conversations really go nowhere; but I want a style of communication that is analytic and a little contentious. Maybe that is the very thing that turns women off. I just think there is too much of this empathic yes-man, or is that yes-woman? :-) kind of communication with social media and blogs, particularly. But clearly this issue is the other side of the story. Maybe something like Google+ is also more appealing to women as a result, and the banality of social media generally is more appealing to women, too.
I have been saying that social media and the blog is a muzzle on effective communication driven by a commercial motive. That creators of web pages and blog posts want to control conversations and not have distractions and change of topic and trolling. People have been persuaded that arguing in public is a bad thing and the reason may be that the design of media doesn't support it, but I would argue that we need to have argument, disagreements and contentiouslness to have quality citizenship and that discussion forums of which wikis are a form are necessary and that blogs and social media generally are detrimental to civic if not civil discourse as a result. This is somewhat the obverse of the issue presented in the OP which was that Wikipedia discourages female participation. Maybe the truth is that social media in general discourages reasoning and argument, that our critical muscles are underexcercized because in the aftermath of the idea of "Political Correctness" that we mistakenly think that arguing in public is rude and people have learned to avoid it. One reason is that people are out of practice in reasoning and debating and theat they need to get back in the game as if their very freedom depends on it. I have no doubt that quite a few politicians and business people, especially those who want to perpetuate the fallacies of public relations and advertising, don't want this to happen; that included the social media corporations in the main.