Actually, that should be an unwritten rule for anyone who dares to call himself "engineer" or "scientist", and if he has a manager who wants the spend the energy micromanaging, a cat and mouse game of "find me not doing exactly what you think I should', will exhaust that person. Most managers I've seen are too lazy to actually know exactly what their employees are doing, so I've known people who have been able to do pretty much whatever they wanted within reason provided they did what was asked, The trick was to appear to be busy. The mistake was to appear to not be busy. But many people lack personal motivation, or they mistakenly believe that they need permission to do what they want. Not really, most of the time no one notices and as long as the task is not playing Candy Crush, maybe it is seen as value add.
I knew a guy who'd once been in the U.S. Navy aboard an aircraft carrier who had learned the art of doing whatever he wanted to do and please the bass who was more interested in asses in seats than quality work. He did what was asked of him and quickly, but because he never appeared to be not busy he was able to do much more of what interested him than was also related to his role and was never questioned by the boss. This takes an attitude that most don't learn that what you do at work can be self-motivated and not micromanaged because micromanaging would exhaust the boss who really wants to be satisfied that you are busy weather or not what you are doing is strictly within the mission of the group or not. The other thing is to keep your mouth shut and be careful what you say.
I can still rail ( no joke) about how stupid Java is. I worked at Sun until 2004 and haven't worked a day since, now at age 67, but I used to be pissed off but I am not as much as I used to be. About six months ago I became enamored with Python, which I still respect. I am very impressed with the concepts of Literate Programming and reproducable results as I started off linking FORTRAN code with math and statistics libraries as a so-called scientific programmer. Now the researchers are able to do all this by themselves using ipython notebook and numpy and matplotlib and a host of other libraries. That is a road I still want to progress further down, but I got destracted in the competition, emacs org.mode. Now I have used emacs pretty much constantly over the years but never really did everything in it. but was really impressed by org.mode which rekindled my interest in emacs and lisp. I had looked at Common-lisp a couple of years ago, and being quite interested in contrapuntal music, I was interested in lisp off and on as the platform for music composition.
But what is amazing to me, as an old man , is how things are coming around, and not only just that but how old things are addressing the weaknesses of things that have had quite a following in the intervening and being told as a result "Your skills are out of date, old fashioned" when the young fools who were interviewing were enamored with Java or PhP or Javascript, all of which make me grumpy to some extant. I am amazed how lisp is now at the center of the Universe both for addressing failings in object oriented programming with side-effects, but offering real solutions to long standing issues such as concurancy and functional verses imparitive programming, and how old these issues are. Relearning elisp and learning something like Clojure really is now center stage for using Java and Javascript and other languages to address their very failings. How Ironic.
Even though I understand the intellectual progression of the evolution of programming represented here, and it is very fun to understand, I don't have much illusion that I could be a productive programmer ever again because even if you understand some useful concepts from computer science and can go back and read Knuth and Dygstra, if you can't type very well due to failing vision, your aren't going to get very far. Like the grumpy programmer I have aspirations as a writer reveraled in what I have written on the Internet over the years even though it is scattered about.
What is the very first thing you have to say to write a Java program as required by Sun's Class Libraries?
It is:
public static void main(String[] args)
This has to be shown to a complete and utter novice in the very first program he can write, and it is "biolerplate", as you put it, which that person will not understand at all without knowing quite a bit about object hierarchy and method prototypes. The design of acm.jar hides this nonsense, behind an object console. The interface for the novice is much simpler.
Sure you need to write a bunch of boilerplate code, but it is just a programming language which happens to be widely used. There is nothing about it which makes it particularly hard to learn or "elite". Python is not "easier". It just takes less boilerplate to do a lot of common things (although in many cases the performance suffers).
Java has been taught as an introductory programming language, and not necessarily to CS majors, only. It is widely used, especially by business, and I think that the way it was designed and sold to them was as a language that was intentionally designed to be hard to learn; only for people who could tough it out through a steep learning curve; lots of up-front concepts and details to learn before you can write your first useful program. I know, I took Sun's Java courses in the 1997 time frame. The most difficult part is not the language design, you can eventually learn the rationale for the way main is called, it is the complexity and number of class libraries. As proof of that note how fat the Java in a Nutshell book from O'Rieley is. Last time I looked it was close to 600 pages of dense text, Like PL/1, I think the language was designed to be obscure and to select for an elite that worked for a bank or financial company in their Glass House, and it was sold that way by Sun as a form of security by obscurity. Java will be used for a long time, but if you note the number of other languages with totally different syntax that use the JVM, that tells you that others think they can readily design a better language. The alternative interface in acm.jar, written by the ACM in 2006 should inform you as to how much it needed improvement as soon as Sun open sourced the class libraries.
One should be very suspicious of monolithic applications that purport to do better than a debugged pile of tools cobbled together with shell scripts, I mean SysVinit. This is similar to the disaster of Gnome Unity in Ubuntu, and much of the problem with Linux distributions seems to come from young business oriented people who have thinly vailed agendas to create captive markets, even though they are using FOSS to do that. I really don't want a Linux in which I can't use vi from the console with no gui to edit the startup scripts by hand. Nor for that matter do I like a distro that needs to be reinstalled every 18 months or so putting/home on the root filesystem so that a novice is forced to deal with gparted to save their files before they can reinstall, Either do away with the complexity of filesystems are make some install choices readily obvious that work around the pitfalls. Often what happens is that monolithic "easy" applications leave important stuff out and to fix their oversight you have to learn the underlying complexity anyway. Such an install (Ubuntu) should advise the user that it is safer to create two and possibly three new filesystems in the free space, one each for/,/home and swap, and not hide the choice. Either that or make upgrading an install much more robust or remove the filesystem dependancy altogether,
Don't agree. There seems to be even more of a disconnect between what market analysts say and how well an industry or company is doing. This is made worse by financializing, paying too much attention to quarterly bottom line and discouraging strategic vision. It is very much possible for management at a company to pay too much attention to what analysts think. It may be that if a significant number of a company's customers are banks and financial institutions that the management is much more vulnerable to the whims of the analysts. Apple has a much stronger consumer base than any similar computer companies that depended on sales to the finance sector. Maybe this listening too much to analysts is not a cause but just a sign of the real problem which is lack of imagination in the management of the company. If I contrast Steve Jobs with John Scully, it seems that the latter, being primarily a marketer, was more inclined to want to please analysts and industry pundits than think creatively about what he can persuade consumers to want. Steve Jobs had a vision of what his customers wanted and went about selling them to buy it. He was a rare combination of technical and marketing ability that would be hard to match in the run of the mill business school graduate who is outer directed and short on creative thinking. I do not know if Tin Cook is resting on Jobs' laurels or has good ideas of his own. Apple seems to be doing OK so far,
The value measured in about 1 CM of rise over the Western US. In Places which were covered by continental glaciers as recently as 12,00 YA, the change in elevation can be measured in feet and it is uneven. The evidence is that drainages have been reversed in places like Canada in historical time as the crust rebounds. Ice and water are relatively dense, so that the weight of a mile of ice can sufficiently weigh down the crust which floats on the plastically deformable mantle. Although rock seems rigid to you and I, its so-called rheology, over large distances and times makes it behave like putty. Putty and clay can be used in scale models of geology to study effects like faulting and folding because of this. Years ago an important contender for explaining mountain building was gravity tectonics, before active plate motions were found to be the main cause.
Are not that rare. They happen several times a month somewhere on the Earth. Seismicity is subject to selective attention. When quakes, most of them, occur far from population centers no one except geologists notices, and so ordinary people are apt to make false inferences about quakes that occur together in time. I am not saying that theire are no connections, only that the scientific claim requires some mechanism to link them.
I live on the San Francisco Peninsula and did feel the quake. The Initial compression wave (P-wave) woke me up and I felt and heard the 10 seconds of shaking with a very short long period wave coda. Others reported longer periods of rolling motion as different paths through the crust cause more attenuation of the high frequency energy from any distance, especially alluvial fill and wet sediments. That was a big effect of the 1989 quake which was closer to me and in the same basin, the San Francisco Bay pull-apart basin.
The effects up in Napa seemed totally anticipated, remember that most building up there did not fail, that it was old construction or poor construction, mobile home parks and car ports that had the worst damage. There is widespread damage, though, most of it repairable by degrees.
USGS has geologists in the field looking for evidence of ground rupture at the surface that would be associated with a mapped fault, probably the West Napa Fault, but the issue is two fold, the cracks in the ground may not be due directly to tectonic offsets, the geophysical solutions published five minutes after the quake on USGS' site suggest the right lateral strike-slip displacement common to the tectonics of the area; finding that offset on the surface as an expression of a mapped fault is not always found and the cracks that are seen may be due to secondary effects, slope failure and landsliding, not the primary displacements caused by tectonic motion. The quake hypocenter was at 10 Km depth, far deeper than to have been caused by water table effects, and the epicenter, the place above it on the surface, was 5 Km NW of American Canyon in deepening alluvium under San Francisco Bay. I don't think that the West Napa Fault has been mapped that far south. To the north, along the mountain side west of Napa the geologists may find the tell-tale strike-slip that prove the tectonics at the surface, and that the fault that moved was the West Napa Fault. On the other hand they might find evidence of a new fault, a branch or a fault with no surface expression.
Zuckerberg was already going to Harvard when he started Facebook. He was in the club from the beginning.
Correct, the whole idea of The Face Book was an elitist operation. You can begin to categorize people by letting them hang themselves by their own petard. That morphed into what people volunteer about themselves thinking they are having private exchanges is more important to the third parties listening in and using the revealed facts to spy on and manipulate them. I don't know which elitist idea is the more despicable; be be careful what you say if you are on Facebook or any social media for that matter. Zuckerberg may look like a snotty-nosed kid, but in fact he is a class warrior. I think that Social Media, and in particular the blog post, is a disservice to human communication, it gets in the way.
Java became an industry standard not because it was well designed. I balked at diving into it when I worked at Sun Microsystems in 2003; I had hired on there in 1997 because of my experience with system admin, the shell, C and Fortran and absolutely hated the design of Java class libraries, both for their stupid complexity and the fact that the language was, and is very unfriendly to a visually impaired engineer.
The reason for Java's use is that the class library design is complex enough to obscure the code written in Glass Houses and corporate and business applications that programmers would have to be specialized by a long learning curve. This was intentional and it created an artificial elite, and artificial security. It was the PL/1 of the Millenium, and like IBM, Sun marketed it as sufficiently daunting that casual use would be discouraged. There was no manageable subset that one could use without getting on a relatively steep and verbose learning curve. As soon as Java was open sourced in 2006 ACM came out with its own interface that remedied many of the interface flaws of Sun's libraries, see acm.jar. And although that was intended for use in a teaching environment, it was an interface that would have made the language far more useful.
This is not merely the strong typing issue. It is the history of the class libraries, this and other issues such as around inheritance are being addressed by newer languages, such as Julia and Python. Any CS department that makes Java its introductory language should reconsider and Python seems like a good choice. It is a good choice for scientific programmers with the ipython notebook establishing a new standard for literate and reproducable programming.
The UK remaining a Democracy is in doubt..... I cringe when I hear UK English spoken because I fear the elitism and class rigidity of that nation. I am glad to be in the U.S. and not have to deal with that class consciousness, and it is a threat to inclusive institutions under the Cameron government. I am glad I am not a British citizen.
"Might Makes Right", eh? That sounds like the logic of ISIS, alright. So, the cops overstep their powers and shoot first and ask questions second, or they beat someone to a pulp for whatever reason, that too is "Might Makes Right", but fortunately it doesn't end there and it shouldn't. There should be an answer to that, always. Either the courts should review the exercise of power and terrorists should pay with a weapon down their throats; there have been over 100 bombings in ISIS territory since the crime depicted on the video, which I have avoided and am glad it is hard to see. The family has asked people not to see the video and has tried to get it erased. I agree with that. Now, if the message is that without the worst parts, that it is news, than the sanitized parts of it might be left available, but only as a historical artifact, not used for other reasons. I agree with what Twitter and Facebook have done about this. I don't think that I would go as far as the UK has done, talking about a terrorist act is not a crime.
This logic, you "choose" to buy a phone with an irreplacible battery or you "choose" to not find that job, is made by someone who thinks he is earned elite status, someone who has a deal which protects him from the risks of a consumer or a job-seeker, and wishes to project blame to protect his entitlement, his sense of being better than someone else.
Talk about straw men, a market "free" of regulation is a Wild West Free-For-All in which the biggest conglomerate eventually wins by leveraging control and being able to charge according to how much he controls it and what he has to charge to recover his investment. It makes no difference if a corporation seeking access to a market with limited resources, that must be regulated so that the competitors don't stomp on one another's bandwidth, goes to a duopoly-run Congress and seeks favors to cover up-front risk and then passes his costs to consumers. The result is exactly the same, a cartel, which isn't broken until there is creative destruction. Business people will hold on to even an outmoded infrastructure for as long as they can to recover the capital investment and garner profits. They have to be forced by competition to reinvest in newer technology. Places starting out have the luxury of not having to pay off the sunk cost of managing an existing infrastructure. It doesn't matter if companies seek help from the government to defray their costs or if they arrive at their costs through market maturity, the effect is the same and the players end up behaving in the same way. The political rhetoric hides the universal tendency of human behavior to resist change especially if it devalues an investment, It doesn't matter if the price was set by government or by investors. The result is the same. Someone has to pay.
Creating fusion is creative destruction of carbon based infrastructure, the capital investment made by coal, natural gas and oil companies, and they will resist any change until they have paid off their sunk costs even if it means permanently poisoning the biosphere. So, at least the public policy, politics is a dialectic between competing priorities in society, reflects the power of the carbon based industry, and so even if the technical problems can be solved, they will be delayed not by a lack of know-how, but by an active resistance to change by those who have a stake in the current infrastructure and who are owed return on their investment. That is what political economics means. Now, we could change that by edict, even if some calamity causes us to, but it will take some extreme disaster to persuade the most pragmatic financially thinking people that the cost exceeds the benefit. This is a problem when the accounting system doesn't really measure risk or when it is self preserving as many market-based entities are.
This is the same reason why many areas of this nation have slower broadband than is possible in nations that do not have an existing infrastructure. There is disincentive for the carriers to offer faster service even if they have to charge less for it. They are still paying off the cost of the installed infrastructure and will not replace it until either the cost of doing so is less than what they owe or until what they owe is paid off.
This is also why a Roman Emperor has a glass maker executed who had developed a recipe for unbreakable glass, because it would have upset a cartel in glass supported by the emperor.
If anything demand for ROI stunts our overall results, they result from applying knowledge to problems whose application cannot not be anticipated. So it is possible to be too pragmatic and too concerned with immediate profit so that you, as an investor, can't see beyond the end of your nose, and that is most pragmatic business men IMHO.
If their vision were not so narrow, they would have fulfilled the promise they made as they get all of the influence they now have politically that they would create more opportunity and less risk, they they could sustain growth and reduce the bad effects of it. This they have not done. Things have gotten worse. All we did was to give business people and investors more power to abuse the other priorities in society. It is unplanned that the Big Data problem has generality far beyond the social media data mining that draws in capital for it. That is good. The effort has greater hidden payoffs than what sells a group of investors on it. Woe that we give too much wisdom and power to markets and investors.
I will say it yet again, the power of trolls and other abuses is magnified on blogs because blogs lack the structure needed to contain their influence. If blogs had change of topics with sub-threads and contextual reply, these problems would be mitigated just like they were on text USENET 30 years ago and in any decent mail system since. The fact that Facebook and Google decided to strip out structure is the cause for these problems, and that is because of their Big Data business. Either their engineers need to learn how to write better regular expressions or users who get burned by the normal human abuse of conversation ought to avoid social media.
Don't get me wrong. I have been an advocate for *NIX for a long time, but I think that OS X bridges the gap between toolkit users and novices better than any Linux, FOSS or not. I know that people hate Apple for using a closed platform that can deal with FOSS sources, but the critical upside is the level of integration and reliability that is gained. Still, I would hate to see a monopoly given to Apple, especially if its systems end up replacing Windows. The point is Linux has not learned an important lesson from Apple, that control of the hardware and a reliable install of packages in more important to most people than complexity and choice.
I had an exchange on Ubuntu Forums recently that illustrates the problem. Now, I know the command line and have done *NIX administration, so none of what I am going to say is out of reach for me to solve, but the gap between me and the average user is large and it could be reduced by some carefully thought out integration which is not happening in Linux distros. There is still too much free-for-all and where that shows is when something is done incorrectly, getting help is not as easy as it seems, and any mission critical system not managed by a competent Linux system admin is vulnerable.
The issue I was discussing on the Ubuntu Forums is the single filesystem install. The revisions of Ubuntu roll out every six months or so and despite the Long Term Support, a system is vulnerable to package and package database corruption within 18 months or 2 years time, requiring a re-install. Ubuntu's upgrade path only extends reliabilly to the next rev. What this means is that users need to get a full reliable backup of their own files from/home for each reinstall. Ubuntu does not ship so that it creates a separate partition for/home that could survive through a re-install. Many *NIX systems allow either for a default separate partition for root and/home, and can reinstal without threatening users' files. I have proposed that either the filesystem concept is too advanced for users coming from Windows, or that the install should give an option to divide free space on the disk between two or three partitions, for root,/home, and swap. I have also asked if there is some way to reconsider the issue of filesystems and partitions in a new way, either an emphesis on virtualization or sandboxing an install within an existing filesystem or freespace. To not have this worked out for users at Install is a reason why Linux does not replace alternatives. Why not either allow for a subdir for any version of linux in an NTFS filesystem or adopt some standard to do the same for an ext4 or ZFS filesystem made up from the freespace. Any Linux you want to try installs in a sub-dir and grub knows how to find subdirs and look for a kernel in them?
There is really no excuse for the complexity of this and not developing a solution that hides this from the kinds of people who don't want to know or care. Dealing with disk partitions is something that ought to vanish with the MBR. I would love to be able to install and boot from 10 Linux distros without having to worry about slicing my disk. If disks are routinely 500 gb or 1-3 tb, why do I still have to worry about 20 GB slices? This should all go away, along with having to worry is/home is preserved during a re-install.
Using a slide rule teaches the skill of thinking about orders of magnitude in results with low precision. Whereas a calculator provides a false sense of accuracy by always reporting lots of precision, too much precision, and shoving the exponent off to the right.
The down side is that if you are visually impaired, like me, you need a magnifier, but the discipline you need to use a slide rule is something young people should be exposed to, I think.
I have been slamming the blog as a degraded medium for communication. This is very much why I have been opposed to the beta format of Slashdot; because of its tendency to the Social Media model of Google and Facebook that rely on the blog and the textarea as the main unit of comm.
Email, has many of the features needed for effective communication that blog posts lack entirely. It is no wonder that marketing and business people wish for e-mail to go away, if they do. It would be because of the amount of control they would get over the conversation they way blog owners get to control content and where conversations tend to go on their sites, which is more often nowhere. Fortunately, MTAs are easy to build and any effort to suppress e-mail could be easily circumvented. The people who are entertaining the possibility will quickly find that it is more effective than any Social Media type of alternative. It is the blog which should go and it should be replaced with something more like the discussion forum idea with contextual reply and with users' ability to set the topic. The is more like what we have on Slashdot and the opposite of Facebook and Google+. which are evil, therefore.
In particular, the vote promoted and editorial promoted topics of Social Media should also go and be replaced with a more neutral topic hierarchy. So, there is much about Social Media I would like to see done away with in the interest of less biased information and free speech. Many of the abuses of Social Media would be answered by a return to discussions in which abuses could find there way into subthreads that can be dealt with separately and ignored. Most of the problems with Social Media are simply due to the lack of structure in a blog. People haven't changed, nor are they going to. It is just that Social Media is a poor model to deal with what people tend to do. What drives the misplaced priorities of Social Media is business and profit, not what people need to communicate effectively. I ignore Social Media more and more as time goes on for that reason.
Back when mailing lists and discussion forums with threading and contextual reply were the standard for Internet communication, trolling was less of a problem. It is because of the flat, linear form of the blog that trolls have more power today. It is also why other forms of disruption in blogs lead to self-censorship and even to the premature end of conversation, that the blog, adopted as a standard for its business value, is actually hurting communication of the Internet.
It doesn't take a new academic study to reveal this or why. It is because of the ox being gored that the press wishes to make this much more of a mystery than it really is, and the solution comes from the past. It existed 30 years ago but was dropped by Google and Facebook because their engineers don't know how to use regular expressions:-) The solution to this is to provide more structure in conversations than the blog allows, to reintroduce some of the features of the discussion forum. These exist in Slashdot and Reddit, somewhat.
What contextual reply and sub-treading to do trolls is that they move the distraction out of the main flow of the conversation and the single out the perp. for a direct response. When uses can create a sub-thread by changing the topic line, they can tag the message with something like "Troll-Alert" and what a reader who sees the list of collapsed threads by topic lines does is to avoid the tagged sub-thread. It doesn't matter if the troll has an identity; he is hung by his own petard. His inane remark can be directly and pointed shown for what it is. This approach applies to other distractions, to change of topic and thread hijacking, Because blogs do not allow flexibility in replying, normal tendencies in conversation are blog killers. We must kill the blog to bring back useful human discourse.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I hear Bangladesh calling!
Actually, that should be an unwritten rule for anyone who dares to call himself "engineer" or "scientist", and if he has a manager who wants the spend the energy micromanaging, a cat and mouse game of "find me not doing exactly what you think I should', will exhaust that person. Most managers I've seen are too lazy to actually know exactly what their employees are doing, so I've known people who have been able to do pretty much whatever they wanted within reason provided they did what was asked, The trick was to appear to be busy. The mistake was to appear to not be busy. But many people lack personal motivation, or they mistakenly believe that they need permission to do what they want. Not really, most of the time no one notices and as long as the task is not playing Candy Crush, maybe it is seen as value add.
Not to mention that finance is fiction, an accounting shell-game, a non-productive exercise that only serves the exercise of flimsy agreements,
Go take these old PCs and give them a second life as a Linux server.
I knew a guy who'd once been in the U.S. Navy aboard an aircraft carrier who had learned the art of doing whatever he wanted to do and please the bass who was more interested in asses in seats than quality work. He did what was asked of him and quickly, but because he never appeared to be not busy he was able to do much more of what interested him than was also related to his role and was never questioned by the boss. This takes an attitude that most don't learn that what you do at work can be self-motivated and not micromanaged because micromanaging would exhaust the boss who really wants to be satisfied that you are busy weather or not what you are doing is strictly within the mission of the group or not. The other thing is to keep your mouth shut and be careful what you say.
I can still rail ( no joke) about how stupid Java is. I worked at Sun until 2004 and haven't worked a day since, now at age 67, but I used to be pissed off but I am not as much as I used to be. About six months ago I became enamored with Python, which I still respect. I am very impressed with the concepts of Literate Programming and reproducable results as I started off linking FORTRAN code with math and statistics libraries as a so-called scientific programmer. Now the researchers are able to do all this by themselves using ipython notebook and numpy and matplotlib and a host of other libraries. That is a road I still want to progress further down, but I got destracted in the competition, emacs org.mode. Now I have used emacs pretty much constantly over the years but never really did everything in it. but was really impressed by org.mode which rekindled my interest in emacs and lisp. I had looked at Common-lisp a couple of years ago, and being quite interested in contrapuntal music, I was interested in lisp off and on as the platform for music composition.
But what is amazing to me, as an old man , is how things are coming around, and not only just that but how old things are addressing the weaknesses of things that have had quite a following in the intervening and being told as a result "Your skills are out of date, old fashioned" when the young fools who were interviewing were enamored with Java or PhP or Javascript, all of which make me grumpy to some extant. I am amazed how lisp is now at the center of the Universe both for addressing failings in object oriented programming with side-effects, but offering real solutions to long standing issues such as concurancy and functional verses imparitive programming, and how old these issues are. Relearning elisp and learning something like Clojure really is now center stage for using Java and Javascript and other languages to address their very failings. How Ironic.
Even though I understand the intellectual progression of the evolution of programming represented here, and it is very fun to understand, I don't have much illusion that I could be a productive programmer ever again because even if you understand some useful concepts from computer science and can go back and read Knuth and Dygstra, if you can't type very well due to failing vision, your aren't going to get very far. Like the grumpy programmer I have aspirations as a writer reveraled in what I have written on the Internet over the years even though it is scattered about.
Why is java obscure?
What is the very first thing you have to say to write a Java program as required by Sun's Class Libraries?
It is:
public static void main(String[] args)
This has to be shown to a complete and utter novice in the very first program he can write, and it is "biolerplate", as you put it, which that person will not understand at all without knowing quite a bit about object hierarchy and method prototypes. The design of acm.jar hides this nonsense, behind an object console. The interface for the novice is much simpler.
Sure you need to write a bunch of boilerplate code, but it is just a programming language which happens to be widely used. There is nothing about it which makes it particularly hard to learn or "elite". Python is not "easier". It just takes less boilerplate to do a lot of common things (although in many cases the performance suffers).
Java has been taught as an introductory programming language, and not necessarily to CS majors, only. It is widely used, especially by business, and I think that the way it was designed and sold to them was as a language that was intentionally designed to be hard to learn; only for people who could tough it out through a steep learning curve; lots of up-front concepts and details to learn before you can write your first useful program. I know, I took Sun's Java courses in the 1997 time frame. The most difficult part is not the language design, you can eventually learn the rationale for the way main is called, it is the complexity and number of class libraries. As proof of that note how fat the Java in a Nutshell book from O'Rieley is. Last time I looked it was close to 600 pages of dense text, Like PL/1, I think the language was designed to be obscure and to select for an elite that worked for a bank or financial company in their Glass House, and it was sold that way by Sun as a form of security by obscurity. Java will be used for a long time, but if you note the number of other languages with totally different syntax that use the JVM, that tells you that others think they can readily design a better language. The alternative interface in acm.jar, written by the ACM in 2006 should inform you as to how much it needed improvement as soon as Sun open sourced the class libraries.
One should be very suspicious of monolithic applications that purport to do better than a debugged pile of tools cobbled together with shell scripts, I mean SysVinit. This is similar to the disaster of Gnome Unity in Ubuntu, and much of the problem with Linux distributions seems to come from young business oriented people who have thinly vailed agendas to create captive markets, even though they are using FOSS to do that. I really don't want a Linux in which I can't use vi from the console with no gui to edit the startup scripts by hand. Nor for that matter do I like a distro that needs to be reinstalled every 18 months or so putting /home on the root filesystem so that a novice is forced to deal with gparted to save their files before they can reinstall, Either do away with the complexity of filesystems are make some install choices readily obvious that work around the pitfalls. Often what happens is that monolithic "easy" applications leave important stuff out and to fix their oversight you have to learn the underlying complexity anyway. Such an install (Ubuntu) should advise the user that it is safer to create two and possibly three new filesystems in the free space, one each for /, /home and swap, and not hide the choice. Either that or make upgrading an install much more robust or remove the filesystem dependancy altogether,
Don't agree. There seems to be even more of a disconnect between what market analysts say and how well an industry or company is doing. This is made worse by financializing, paying too much attention to quarterly bottom line and discouraging strategic vision. It is very much possible for management at a company to pay too much attention to what analysts think. It may be that if a significant number of a company's customers are banks and financial institutions that the management is much more vulnerable to the whims of the analysts. Apple has a much stronger consumer base than any similar computer companies that depended on sales to the finance sector. Maybe this listening too much to analysts is not a cause but just a sign of the real problem which is lack of imagination in the management of the company. If I contrast Steve Jobs with John Scully, it seems that the latter, being primarily a marketer, was more inclined to want to please analysts and industry pundits than think creatively about what he can persuade consumers to want. Steve Jobs had a vision of what his customers wanted and went about selling them to buy it. He was a rare combination of technical and marketing ability that would be hard to match in the run of the mill business school graduate who is outer directed and short on creative thinking. I do not know if Tin Cook is resting on Jobs' laurels or has good ideas of his own. Apple seems to be doing OK so far,
The value measured in about 1 CM of rise over the Western US. In Places which were covered by continental glaciers as recently as 12,00 YA, the change in elevation can be measured in feet and it is uneven. The evidence is that drainages have been reversed in places like Canada in historical time as the crust rebounds. Ice and water are relatively dense, so that the weight of a mile of ice can sufficiently weigh down the crust which floats on the plastically deformable mantle. Although rock seems rigid to you and I, its so-called rheology, over large distances and times makes it behave like putty. Putty and clay can be used in scale models of geology to study effects like faulting and folding because of this. Years ago an important contender for explaining mountain building was gravity tectonics, before active plate motions were found to be the main cause.
Are not that rare. They happen several times a month somewhere on the Earth. Seismicity is subject to selective attention. When quakes, most of them, occur far from population centers no one except geologists notices, and so ordinary people are apt to make false inferences about quakes that occur together in time. I am not saying that theire are no connections, only that the scientific claim requires some mechanism to link them.
I live on the San Francisco Peninsula and did feel the quake. The Initial compression wave (P-wave) woke me up and I felt and heard the 10 seconds of shaking with a very short long period wave coda. Others reported longer periods of rolling motion as different paths through the crust cause more attenuation of the high frequency energy from any distance, especially alluvial fill and wet sediments. That was a big effect of the 1989 quake which was closer to me and in the same basin, the San Francisco Bay pull-apart basin.
The effects up in Napa seemed totally anticipated, remember that most building up there did not fail, that it was old construction or poor construction, mobile home parks and car ports that had the worst damage. There is widespread damage, though, most of it repairable by degrees.
USGS has geologists in the field looking for evidence of ground rupture at the surface that would be associated with a mapped fault, probably the West Napa Fault, but the issue is two fold, the cracks in the ground may not be due directly to tectonic offsets, the geophysical solutions published five minutes after the quake on USGS' site suggest the right lateral strike-slip displacement common to the tectonics of the area; finding that offset on the surface as an expression of a mapped fault is not always found and the cracks that are seen may be due to secondary effects, slope failure and landsliding, not the primary displacements caused by tectonic motion. The quake hypocenter was at 10 Km depth, far deeper than to have been caused by water table effects, and the epicenter, the place above it on the surface, was 5 Km NW of American Canyon in deepening alluvium under San Francisco Bay. I don't think that the West Napa Fault has been mapped that far south. To the north, along the mountain side west of Napa the geologists may find the tell-tale strike-slip that prove the tectonics at the surface, and that the fault that moved was the West Napa Fault. On the other hand they might find evidence of a new fault, a branch or a fault with no surface expression.
Zuckerberg was already going to Harvard when he started Facebook. He was in the club from the beginning.
Correct, the whole idea of The Face Book was an elitist operation. You can begin to categorize people by letting them hang themselves by their own petard. That morphed into what people volunteer about themselves thinking they are having private exchanges is more important to the third parties listening in and using the revealed facts to spy on and manipulate them. I don't know which elitist idea is the more despicable; be be careful what you say if you are on Facebook or any social media for that matter. Zuckerberg may look like a snotty-nosed kid, but in fact he is a class warrior. I think that Social Media, and in particular the blog post, is a disservice to human communication, it gets in the way.
Java became an industry standard not because it was well designed. I balked at diving into it when I worked at Sun Microsystems in 2003; I had hired on there in 1997 because of my experience with system admin, the shell, C and Fortran and absolutely hated the design of Java class libraries, both for their stupid complexity and the fact that the language was, and is very unfriendly to a visually impaired engineer.
The reason for Java's use is that the class library design is complex enough to obscure the code written in Glass Houses and corporate and business applications that programmers would have to be specialized by a long learning curve. This was intentional and it created an artificial elite, and artificial security. It was the PL/1 of the Millenium, and like IBM, Sun marketed it as sufficiently daunting that casual use would be discouraged. There was no manageable subset that one could use without getting on a relatively steep and verbose learning curve. As soon as Java was open sourced in 2006 ACM came out with its own interface that remedied many of the interface flaws of Sun's libraries, see acm.jar. And although that was intended for use in a teaching environment, it was an interface that would have made the language far more useful.
This is not merely the strong typing issue. It is the history of the class libraries, this and other issues such as around inheritance are being addressed by newer languages, such as Julia and Python. Any CS department that makes Java its introductory language should reconsider and Python seems like a good choice. It is a good choice for scientific programmers with the ipython notebook establishing a new standard for literate and reproducable programming.
It is Depend, not depends. there I rub your nose in it :\)
The UK remaining a Democracy is in doubt..... I cringe when I hear UK English spoken because I fear the elitism and class rigidity of that nation. I am glad to be in the U.S. and not have to deal with that class consciousness, and it is a threat to inclusive institutions under the Cameron government. I am glad I am not a British citizen.
"Might Makes Right", eh? That sounds like the logic of ISIS, alright. So, the cops overstep their powers and shoot first and ask questions second, or they beat someone to a pulp for whatever reason, that too is "Might Makes Right", but fortunately it doesn't end there and it shouldn't. There should be an answer to that, always. Either the courts should review the exercise of power and terrorists should pay with a weapon down their throats; there have been over 100 bombings in ISIS territory since the crime depicted on the video, which I have avoided and am glad it is hard to see. The family has asked people not to see the video and has tried to get it erased. I agree with that. Now, if the message is that without the worst parts, that it is news, than the sanitized parts of it might be left available, but only as a historical artifact, not used for other reasons. I agree with what Twitter and Facebook have done about this. I don't think that I would go as far as the UK has done, talking about a terrorist act is not a crime.
This logic, you "choose" to buy a phone with an irreplacible battery or you "choose" to not find that job, is made by someone who thinks he is earned elite status, someone who has a deal which protects him from the risks of a consumer or a job-seeker, and wishes to project blame to protect his entitlement, his sense of being better than someone else.
Talk about straw men, a market "free" of regulation is a Wild West Free-For-All in which the biggest conglomerate eventually wins by leveraging control and being able to charge according to how much he controls it and what he has to charge to recover his investment. It makes no difference if a corporation seeking access to a market with limited resources, that must be regulated so that the competitors don't stomp on one another's bandwidth, goes to a duopoly-run Congress and seeks favors to cover up-front risk and then passes his costs to consumers. The result is exactly the same, a cartel, which isn't broken until there is creative destruction. Business people will hold on to even an outmoded infrastructure for as long as they can to recover the capital investment and garner profits. They have to be forced by competition to reinvest in newer technology. Places starting out have the luxury of not having to pay off the sunk cost of managing an existing infrastructure. It doesn't matter if companies seek help from the government to defray their costs or if they arrive at their costs through market maturity, the effect is the same and the players end up behaving in the same way. The political rhetoric hides the universal tendency of human behavior to resist change especially if it devalues an investment, It doesn't matter if the price was set by government or by investors. The result is the same. Someone has to pay.
Creating fusion is creative destruction of carbon based infrastructure, the capital investment made by coal, natural gas and oil companies, and they will resist any change until they have paid off their sunk costs even if it means permanently poisoning the biosphere. So, at least the public policy, politics is a dialectic between competing priorities in society, reflects the power of the carbon based industry, and so even if the technical problems can be solved, they will be delayed not by a lack of know-how, but by an active resistance to change by those who have a stake in the current infrastructure and who are owed return on their investment. That is what political economics means. Now, we could change that by edict, even if some calamity causes us to, but it will take some extreme disaster to persuade the most pragmatic financially thinking people that the cost exceeds the benefit. This is a problem when the accounting system doesn't really measure risk or when it is self preserving as many market-based entities are.
This is the same reason why many areas of this nation have slower broadband than is possible in nations that do not have an existing infrastructure. There is disincentive for the carriers to offer faster service even if they have to charge less for it. They are still paying off the cost of the installed infrastructure and will not replace it until either the cost of doing so is less than what they owe or until what they owe is paid off.
This is also why a Roman Emperor has a glass maker executed who had developed a recipe for unbreakable glass, because it would have upset a cartel in glass supported by the emperor.
If anything demand for ROI stunts our overall results, they result from applying knowledge to problems whose application cannot not be anticipated. So it is possible to be too pragmatic and too concerned with immediate profit so that you, as an investor, can't see beyond the end of your nose, and that is most pragmatic business men IMHO.
If their vision were not so narrow, they would have fulfilled the promise they made as they get all of the influence they now have politically that they would create more opportunity and less risk, they they could sustain growth and reduce the bad effects of it. This they have not done. Things have gotten worse. All we did was to give business people and investors more power to abuse the other priorities in society. It is unplanned that the Big Data problem has generality far beyond the social media data mining that draws in capital for it. That is good. The effort has greater hidden payoffs than what sells a group of investors on it. Woe that we give too much wisdom and power to markets and investors.
I will say it yet again, the power of trolls and other abuses is magnified on blogs because blogs lack the structure needed to contain their influence. If blogs had change of topics with sub-threads and contextual reply, these problems would be mitigated just like they were on text USENET 30 years ago and in any decent mail system since. The fact that Facebook and Google decided to strip out structure is the cause for these problems, and that is because of their Big Data business. Either their engineers need to learn how to write better regular expressions or users who get burned by the normal human abuse of conversation ought to avoid social media.
Don't get me wrong. I have been an advocate for *NIX for a long time, but I think that OS X bridges the gap between toolkit users and novices better than any Linux, FOSS or not. I know that people hate Apple for using a closed platform that can deal with FOSS sources, but the critical upside is the level of integration and reliability that is gained. Still, I would hate to see a monopoly given to Apple, especially if its systems end up replacing Windows. The point is Linux has not learned an important lesson from Apple, that control of the hardware and a reliable install of packages in more important to most people than complexity and choice.
I had an exchange on Ubuntu Forums recently that illustrates the problem. Now, I know the command line and have done *NIX administration, so none of what I am going to say is out of reach for me to solve, but the gap between me and the average user is large and it could be reduced by some carefully thought out integration which is not happening in Linux distros. There is still too much free-for-all and where that shows is when something is done incorrectly, getting help is not as easy as it seems, and any mission critical system not managed by a competent Linux system admin is vulnerable.
The issue I was discussing on the Ubuntu Forums is the single filesystem install. The revisions of Ubuntu roll out every six months or so and despite the Long Term Support, a system is vulnerable to package and package database corruption within 18 months or 2 years time, requiring a re-install. Ubuntu's upgrade path only extends reliabilly to the next rev. What this means is that users need to get a full reliable backup of their own files from /home for each reinstall. Ubuntu does not ship so that it creates a separate partition for /home that could survive through a re-install. Many *NIX systems allow either for a default separate partition for root and /home, and can reinstal without threatening users' files. I have proposed that either the filesystem concept is too advanced for users coming from Windows, or that the install should give an option to divide free space on the disk between two or three partitions, for root, /home, and swap. I have also asked if there is some way to reconsider the issue of filesystems and partitions in a new way, either an emphesis on virtualization or sandboxing an install within an existing filesystem or freespace. To not have this worked out for users at Install is a reason why Linux does not replace alternatives. Why not either allow for a subdir for any version of linux in an NTFS filesystem or adopt some standard to do the same for an ext4 or ZFS filesystem made up from the freespace. Any Linux you want to try installs in a sub-dir and grub knows how to find subdirs and look for a kernel in them?
There is really no excuse for the complexity of this and not developing a solution that hides this from the kinds of people who don't want to know or care. Dealing with disk partitions is something that ought to vanish with the MBR. I would love to be able to install and boot from 10 Linux distros without having to worry about slicing my disk. If disks are routinely 500 gb or 1-3 tb, why do I still have to worry about 20 GB slices? This should all go away, along with having to worry is /home is preserved during a re-install.
Using a slide rule teaches the skill of thinking about orders of magnitude in results with low precision. Whereas a calculator provides a false sense of accuracy by always reporting lots of precision, too much precision, and shoving the exponent off to the right.
The down side is that if you are visually impaired, like me, you need a magnifier, but the discipline you need to use a slide rule is something young people should be exposed to, I think.
I have been slamming the blog as a degraded medium for communication. This is very much why I have been opposed to the beta format of Slashdot; because of its tendency to the Social Media model of Google and Facebook that rely on the blog and the textarea as the main unit of comm.
Email, has many of the features needed for effective communication that blog posts lack entirely. It is no wonder that marketing and business people wish for e-mail to go away, if they do. It would be because of the amount of control they would get over the conversation they way blog owners get to control content and where conversations tend to go on their sites, which is more often nowhere. Fortunately, MTAs are easy to build and any effort to suppress e-mail could be easily circumvented. The people who are entertaining the possibility will quickly find that it is more effective than any Social Media type of alternative. It is the blog which should go and it should be replaced with something more like the discussion forum idea with contextual reply and with users' ability to set the topic. The is more like what we have on Slashdot and the opposite of Facebook and Google+. which are evil, therefore.
In particular, the vote promoted and editorial promoted topics of Social Media should also go and be replaced with a more neutral topic hierarchy. So, there is much about Social Media I would like to see done away with in the interest of less biased information and free speech. Many of the abuses of Social Media would be answered by a return to discussions in which abuses could find there way into subthreads that can be dealt with separately and ignored. Most of the problems with Social Media are simply due to the lack of structure in a blog. People haven't changed, nor are they going to. It is just that Social Media is a poor model to deal with what people tend to do. What drives the misplaced priorities of Social Media is business and profit, not what people need to communicate effectively. I ignore Social Media more and more as time goes on for that reason.
Back when mailing lists and discussion forums with threading and contextual reply were the standard for Internet communication, trolling was less of a problem. It is because of the flat, linear form of the blog that trolls have more power today. It is also why other forms of disruption in blogs lead to self-censorship and even to the premature end of conversation, that the blog, adopted as a standard for its business value, is actually hurting communication of the Internet.
It doesn't take a new academic study to reveal this or why. It is because of the ox being gored that the press wishes to make this much more of a mystery than it really is, and the solution comes from the past. It existed 30 years ago but was dropped by Google and Facebook because their engineers don't know how to use regular expressions :-) The solution to this is to provide more structure in conversations than the blog allows, to reintroduce some of the features of the discussion forum. These exist in Slashdot and Reddit, somewhat.
What contextual reply and sub-treading to do trolls is that they move the distraction out of the main flow of the conversation and the single out the perp. for a direct response. When uses can create a sub-thread by changing the topic line, they can tag the message with something like "Troll-Alert" and what a reader who sees the list of collapsed threads by topic lines does is to avoid the tagged sub-thread. It doesn't matter if the troll has an identity; he is hung by his own petard. His inane remark can be directly and pointed shown for what it is. This approach applies to other distractions, to change of topic and thread hijacking, Because blogs do not allow flexibility in replying, normal tendencies in conversation are blog killers. We must kill the blog to bring back useful human discourse.