An 8-bit processor with limited RAM breeds tight, bug free code. Exactly what you need in the embedded (any?) world. Help get the kids away from bad habits!!
hehe, that was great! Go on, pull the other one.:)
and greybeards/hams tend to use obsolete hardware and chant "right tool for the job" because they refuse to learn new things. same guys show up for an interview and wonder why they don't get hired.
Us greybeards would be impressed with these things if there was anything to be impressed about. This thing is far too little far too late. for $10, you can get one of these.
You young uns don't even understand enough to know what to get excited about...
This severely penalises small content producers in favour of massive corporations, all a publisher needs to do is wait five years and they can leverage their marketing and distribution might to completely own a franchise while the original creator gets nada.
If after 5 years, any producer of content is relying on that content for income, then they effectively have no further value to society.
Another way to say it is that if you haven't made your money on it within 5 years, you almost certainly never will.
You don't even need to replace the brake pads, because regenerative braking means they don't wear out.
Be a little cautious with that one. Regenerative braking requires a large enough battery to handle the charging current. The Tesla Batteries are fine, and you'll never need the actual brake pads. The $30k commuters like the leaf, volt and iMiev, do not have a large enough pack to absorb the full brunt of regenerative braking, so they use the brake pads a lot. It kills their actual range, and burns up the undersized pads they put on those cars. The only way to avoid the problem is to get a car with a large enough pack to do 0-60 in less than 8 seconds (braking is simply that same stunt in reverse...), or learn to drive extremely defensively: begin slowing down 1/2 mile from red lights and expected turns, keep at least 10 seconds following distance, etc...
The reality of the matter is that in order to have real regenerative braking, you need a pack that will give you at least 300 miles range. The only alternative is a design that uses ultra-caps to store some of the energy recovered during braking, a radically new (and better) battery chemistry than anything commercially available, or both.
It's the same reason that, despite being absolutely awful, WinCE is widely used. The same reason that ATMs run Windows XP.
Wince isn't widely used. There are a few large customers who (for reasons passing baffling) stay with microsoft. Most everyone else in the embedded space uses linux, or spins their own OS. There are 15 Billion embedded devices connected to the internet, and approximately 10x that many standalone embedded single board computers. Of those, less than 80 Million run Wince, with that number steadily dwindling. That's less than 1/2 of 1%. Microsoft makes relatively little money on embedded systems (to get companies to use their products at all, the per unit cost has to be ridiculously low). It's part of the reason that Microsoft largely ignored the embedded devices markets (including MP3 players among others) until after other companies exploded the markets, and suddenly microsoft realised they had missed the boat and jumped in the water to try and swim after.
At the end of the day, microsoft has nothing to offer the embedded market that others aren't already better at, cheaper at, and less likely to pull the rug out from under their legs.
We are treated this worse then a safety issue where people died.
This is a safety issue where people are dying. NOx causes premature death and a whole host of respiratory illness'. Just because you can't grab a single person out of the mix and say "this person is specifically dead because of it", doesn't mean that people are not dying as a result of the deception. Its people like you who keep voting for the liars and scumbags that are ruining every democracy in the world. If someone came up with a law to disqualify people with your demonstrated lack of ability to understand consequences, I would support that law, no matter how flawed the test was, just on the basis of having some chance of keeping you and your ilk out of my political system.
Stop buying their software? Windows 10 is free, nobody has to buy it.
Just because you didn't give them money up front, doesn't mean there aren't other costs associated with using the products. One has to ask how long before microsoft starts selling advertising services to customers that can't be blocked because its the OS that’s feeding you the ads? Only way out is to buy enterprise edition? Guess what, that costs $200 per seat, and unlike past generations of PCs, when you buy a PC now, you're getting the free version of windows, so now that $500 PC is actually going to cost you $700 to get what you used to get. You as the tech support guy need to warn your friends and family that this is what they have signed up for with windows 10. Beyond that warning, refuse to support it, and tell grandma that you would be happy to install Ubuntu or Debian, or some other such that really *is* free.
As long as you keep trying to do free tech support for microsoft, they're going to keep shitting on people like you. If the product doesn't work, why are you fixing it for microsoft? tell the people that if they have trouble they need to contact microsoft for tech support, and when microsoft refuses, that's when you offer one of the Linux variants.
Course if you were using a breadboard you'd know how unsuitable they are for certain things, which is why you'd need prototype pcbs in the first place.
Anything that would cause issues when done on a breadboard is going to have just as many issues with a home-etched PCB.
Breadboarding works for hole-mounted stuff. I haven't done that in 10 years. I need a PCB within an hour so that I can build two or three prototypes within a day.
You stated that Jews should have the right to live there, yet before 1945, they weren't there in any appreciable quantity, and they sure as hell didn't have a political entity there. They took the land where others were living and booted large numbers of them out of their land. All because they hold a "sincere religious belief" that the land belonged to them...
If you go back far enough, pretty much anyone of earth can lay claim to pretty much any patch of dirt through some lineage or other. Claiming a religious right should be treated for the absurdity that it is. If someone is claiming that God gives them the right to something that otherwise wouldn't be theirs, I would propose that they should have to provide proof by some method other than circular arguments. They should first have to prove that God exists...
If the Jews believe that Jerusalem is holy, they should be able to live there.
Fuck what??!?
Do you also believe that Kim Davis has the right to impose her religious beliefs on the rest of the country? My religious belief is that the White house is holy land, and that god has commanded me to live there. By your reasoning, this should be perfectly acceptable, and Obama should turn the keys over to me forth-with. People need to get past the idea that religion gives anyone the right to anything. Religion is between a person and their god, and has no business interfering with anyone else. As soon as you allow one persons religion to be imposed on another, no ones freedoms are safe. It's high time that we take active steps to prevent *all* religions of the world from being politically active. Mixing religion and politics always ends in someone being persecuted. Always.
Because otherwise what the system runs is irrelevant and makes very little sense to tinker with it. If you *really* enjoy the tinkering, install a primary security system and get a secondary as an add-on to play with.
The entire point of a security system is deterrence. The thing you have to understand is that, even if you have 4k video, DNA evidence, and a signed confession, the police will not do a damned thing to help you. If you're in a tough enough area, they wont even send a cop; just take a statement over the phone. At the end of the day, once the crooks have your stuff, you've already lost, so your only hope is to scare them off before hand.
Why not a network of some raspberry Pi's outfitted with cameras and IR lights. One could even add a $8 usb sound dongle for sound detection. Couple that with either a WiFi or Cellular network, and instant home security.
Could even add voice recognition "panic switch", something like "Linus, compile my kernel" which would call the police/911/999 with an automated message.
Add a few cheap servo motors, and you can get pan/tilt cameras. Total cost of a camera, with servos, power supply, camera, raspi, about $60-$80. Still almost 2X cheaper than the crappy "ip cameras" dlink/linksys et al peddle.
Then add 1000 hours of labor to get it all working. The OP was looking for a *pre-existing* system that he could tinker with, not ideas for something he would build from scratch. Even at minimum wage, 1000 hours is $10,000. That'll buy one very spiffy security system.
In the case of consumer cartridges, HP, Lexmark, and Epson would be deeply upset if a bunch of the customers complained about "empty" cartridges that still said they had 5% capacity left. To prevent complaints, add a little bit of ink...
There are two obvious solutions to that problem:
1: Stop lying to your customer by claiming to be measuring the remaining ink in a cartridge when you're not.
2: Actually measure the ink in the cartridge and report that amount to the user. I understand that from the printer manufacturers point of view, the ink is cheap, but from the customers point of view, ink is hideously expensive. Given the customers cost of ink, they would be better served by an accurate mechanism to measure the remaining ink, rather than stupid tricks like this to claim a feature that the product really doesn't have. There have to be dozens of different ways to measure ink remaining, some of which are bound to be dirt cheap and far more accurate than the current method of "guessing"
In America, even people on welfare have television. That's not a need.
It is if you don’t want your citizens to revolt. Its been well understood for literally thousands of years, that if you want to foment revolution, the quickest way is to have an otherwise bored population. Provide a distraction, and you can get away with a lot of oppression.
As for health care, our present system ensures that those on the bottom get substandard health care, thereby causing a significant difference in the quality and length of life of those on the bottom as compared to those on the top. In a society with so much surplus, there is no need for it. If the income inequality were not so great, everyone could have top quality health care too, and the top 1% could still be obscenely wealthy.
If you were planning an economy, that's kind of what you'd want, right? The ones with most potential getting the most capability to use their potential?
It's not the concept that people have trouble with, its the particular gradient we have now that is the problem... Far too top heavy, with the bottom half actually seeing a significantly decreasing standard of living. On average, no part of society should have to live a decreasing standard of living so long as the aggregate wealth keeps on growing.
Free monitors tend to be VGA only : CRT, 1280x1024 LCD and the cheap wide monitors (in fact some narrow ones do have DVI, but the cheap wides never do)
That makes the Pis incompatible with them. Although a HDMI TV may be increasingly common.
Although many poor households do not have a computer, 96.1% of households below the poverty line have TV's, with one third of those being large screen high def TVs. These will work just fine for the Pi. Even the 1 in 20 that are left needing a monitor, some of those could be convinced to get a second hand used TV to be used as a computer monitor. All else failing, there are plenty of computer recycling places out there that could be convinced to donate a few older HDMI TVs / monitors.
The Pi has the additional advantage that the school can legally provide a ubuntu image for the students to use, and could easily re-image a messed up SD-card, allowing the students to tinker as much as they like without fear of bricking their computer, and not having any technical support to get it working again.
All things considered, the lack of easy access to broadband is a far bigger problem
Or how about we stop pretending that rent-seeking in the name of capitalism is in the best interests of society.
We are becoming a society the produces nothing, yet expects to get money for the nearly nothing that we are doing. At the end of the day, what really is the difference between that and welfare?
I thought that was the Baby Boomers. They're going to be the ones that cause the Federal government to implode under the massive amount of debt racked up by Social Security.
To be sure, it was the Tail end of the boomers that supported the reagonomics, but the younger generations who were getting screwed by the whole thing had abdicated their responsibility with some of the lowest voting turnouts of any generation. If Gen X had stood up for themselves and their children and forced a balanced budget instead of allowing the politicians to strip mine social security, we wouldn't be in half the fiscal trouble we are in today. By nearly any measure, the cut and spend economics is good for older generations and royally screws the younger generations. The only permanent fix is a constitutional amendment banning deficit spending.
Biased opinions like yours regarding millennials is what discourages younger generations from respecting those who are: already established, who didn't have to worry about a great recession caused by the previous generation that is constantly threatening the potential job and stock markets, who didn't have to be concerned with competing against off-shore, who knows that they will at least be able to collect Social Security, who is the generation that put little to no effort in raising their children (these now millennials) other than shoving a TV in front of them while said parent is partying in a garbage can downing beers and listening to Sting.
Forgetting about the reasons for a minute, Millennials are less capable, less motivated, more self important and harder to manage than any generation in the memories of any one alive. We have two openings for developers (read as real programmers who can solve problems). We have gotten and processed over 1000 applications so far. The vast majority of the resumes we have received, I would have killed myself before ever submitting such an under-qualified application for a job. Millennials (statistically speaking) seem to have no problem spraying their defective crap on the work force. The ones we have interviewed have almost all ended up not living up to what their resume implied they could do. One of them even admitted in the interview to outright falsifying large parts of his resume. One of them, when we called some of his references, they painted a picture of a typical millennial. He'd been through several manual labor jobs while attending college and hadn’t lasted more than a month at any of them. His former supervisors all stated quite bluntly that the kid felt he was too good for manual labor. He might have even been qualified for the position, but that attitude ruled him out right away, even though there is no manual labor involved. If he wasn’t cut out for it, then why did he keep applying for and taking jobs he knew he would be keeping any ways? Did he think that behaviour was acceptable? Did he think it wouldn't come back to bite him?
All that having been said, once they get on the job, I can fully understand why a lot of millennials don’t give a damn any more. Their whole lives, they have been raised being a precious snowflake. Their parents lived the American dream in a big way (spent us waaay the hell into debt doing it too I might add), and raised their kids to expect the same without having to work hard for anything. Even the school taught the students that they were winners just for showing up. After that wind up, they get into the work force, and except the lucky few, they discover that they have been woefully under prepared for the reality of the working world. Their early performance reviews are mediocre (the first time many of them have even heard negative feedback!!!), and their world falls apart. Its a downward spiral that even a blind man could see coming.
At the end of the day, we have an entire generation that is borderline useless, and the gen Xers have no one to blame for the problem except themselves. The Millennials mark the beginning of the end of the golden age of America, and we can lay it at the feet of the Gen Xers like many of our other problems. After all their self righteous blustering, they turned out to be far worse then the parents they were rebelling against.
There are lots of answers that a professional (read as highly paid) programmer might need math. If you want to make the big bucks, you want to work at google, or do embedded programming, you're going to use advanced math once in a while. A great example is a problem I recently faced. I needed a heating device that consumed 2kwatts average power, and to make it as cheaply as possible, it needed to do so directly from 110V AC. The heater core had a very low resistance, so it needed to be PWM driven, with a sensor to turn it on and off based on the instantaneous line voltage. When the mains were below a certain voltage, it would turn on the current, and when it was above that amount, it would turn off. So now the problem is, for 2kW average power, what is the approximate cut off voltage. This needs to be within about 5 volts plus or minus so that we can pack all of our available sensor range into that small range to get very accurate outputs.
I could spend a week using trial and error, and blow up several hundred dollars worth of parts getting it wrong, or I could spend 2 hours doing the calculus to get the actual answer (I'm pretty rusty at calc, and came up with an absurd answer on my first attempt). My boss hired me, and I make a lot of money because I could handle problems of this calibre. If all you want is a 35k / year job then not knowing math is fine, but if you want a career with a future, then the math is critical. Math doesn't make products work, it makes them cheaper to build and cheaper to design, and as a programmer, your value to the company is a function of how big a difference your work product makes to the bottom line. The more money the company has at the end of the day because of you, the more money they will pay you to be there.
Web design these days is less and less about programming, and more and more about aesthetic and design. It has become so much so that the programming parts of it are largely unnecessary to be relatively successful.
That having been said, almost no one considers a web designer to be a programmer. There is minimal overlap, but the tasks for which one would need a programmer are largely beyond a web designer, and visa-versa.
Slashdot Mirror
"How-to Scrum" (qualifies as a PE credit)
I thought that class was underwater synchronized scrumming? I remember taking it just after wine tasting.
Come to think of it, I don’t remember registering for that class... or the wine tasting for that matter.
An 8-bit processor with limited RAM breeds tight, bug free code. Exactly what you need in the embedded (any?) world. Help get the kids away from bad habits!!
hehe, that was great! Go on, pull the other one. :)
and greybeards/hams tend to use obsolete hardware and chant "right tool for the job" because they refuse to learn new things. same guys show up for an interview and wonder why they don't get hired.
Us greybeards would be impressed with these things if there was anything to be impressed about. This thing is far too little far too late. for $10, you can get one of these.
You young uns don't even understand enough to know what to get excited about...
This severely penalises small content producers in favour of massive corporations, all a publisher needs to do is wait five years and they can leverage their marketing and distribution might to completely own a franchise while the original creator gets nada.
If after 5 years, any producer of content is relying on that content for income, then they effectively have no further value to society.
Another way to say it is that if you haven't made your money on it within 5 years, you almost certainly never will.
You don't even need to replace the brake pads, because regenerative braking means they don't wear out.
Be a little cautious with that one. Regenerative braking requires a large enough battery to handle the charging current. The Tesla Batteries are fine, and you'll never need the actual brake pads. The $30k commuters like the leaf, volt and iMiev, do not have a large enough pack to absorb the full brunt of regenerative braking, so they use the brake pads a lot. It kills their actual range, and burns up the undersized pads they put on those cars. The only way to avoid the problem is to get a car with a large enough pack to do 0-60 in less than 8 seconds (braking is simply that same stunt in reverse...), or learn to drive extremely defensively: begin slowing down 1/2 mile from red lights and expected turns, keep at least 10 seconds following distance, etc...
The reality of the matter is that in order to have real regenerative braking, you need a pack that will give you at least 300 miles range. The only alternative is a design that uses ultra-caps to store some of the energy recovered during braking, a radically new (and better) battery chemistry than anything commercially available, or both.
It's the same reason that, despite being absolutely awful, WinCE is widely used. The same reason that ATMs run Windows XP.
Wince isn't widely used. There are a few large customers who (for reasons passing baffling) stay with microsoft. Most everyone else in the embedded space uses linux, or spins their own OS. There are 15 Billion embedded devices connected to the internet, and approximately 10x that many standalone embedded single board computers. Of those, less than 80 Million run Wince, with that number steadily dwindling. That's less than 1/2 of 1%. Microsoft makes relatively little money on embedded systems (to get companies to use their products at all, the per unit cost has to be ridiculously low). It's part of the reason that Microsoft largely ignored the embedded devices markets (including MP3 players among others) until after other companies exploded the markets, and suddenly microsoft realised they had missed the boat and jumped in the water to try and swim after.
At the end of the day, microsoft has nothing to offer the embedded market that others aren't already better at, cheaper at, and less likely to pull the rug out from under their legs.
We are treated this worse then a safety issue where people died.
This is a safety issue where people are dying. NOx causes premature death and a whole host of respiratory illness'. Just because you can't grab a single person out of the mix and say "this person is specifically dead because of it", doesn't mean that people are not dying as a result of the deception. Its people like you who keep voting for the liars and scumbags that are ruining every democracy in the world. If someone came up with a law to disqualify people with your demonstrated lack of ability to understand consequences, I would support that law, no matter how flawed the test was, just on the basis of having some chance of keeping you and your ilk out of my political system.
Stop buying their software? Windows 10 is free, nobody has to buy it.
Just because you didn't give them money up front, doesn't mean there aren't other costs associated with using the products. One has to ask how long before microsoft starts selling advertising services to customers that can't be blocked because its the OS that’s feeding you the ads? Only way out is to buy enterprise edition? Guess what, that costs $200 per seat, and unlike past generations of PCs, when you buy a PC now, you're getting the free version of windows, so now that $500 PC is actually going to cost you $700 to get what you used to get. You as the tech support guy need to warn your friends and family that this is what they have signed up for with windows 10. Beyond that warning, refuse to support it, and tell grandma that you would be happy to install Ubuntu or Debian, or some other such that really *is* free.
As long as you keep trying to do free tech support for microsoft, they're going to keep shitting on people like you. If the product doesn't work, why are you fixing it for microsoft? tell the people that if they have trouble they need to contact microsoft for tech support, and when microsoft refuses, that's when you offer one of the Linux variants.
Course if you were using a breadboard you'd know how unsuitable they are for certain things, which is why you'd need prototype pcbs in the first place.
Anything that would cause issues when done on a breadboard is going to have just as many issues with a home-etched PCB.
Breadboarding works for hole-mounted stuff. I haven't done that in 10 years. I need a PCB within an hour so that I can build two or three prototypes within a day.
Then you want these.
skype will make sure any naughty keywords you use while sitting at your computer are also promptly forwarded to the NSA as well.
And your mom...
You stated that Jews should have the right to live there, yet before 1945, they weren't there in any appreciable quantity, and they sure as hell didn't have a political entity there. They took the land where others were living and booted large numbers of them out of their land. All because they hold a "sincere religious belief" that the land belonged to them...
If you go back far enough, pretty much anyone of earth can lay claim to pretty much any patch of dirt through some lineage or other. Claiming a religious right should be treated for the absurdity that it is. If someone is claiming that God gives them the right to something that otherwise wouldn't be theirs, I would propose that they should have to provide proof by some method other than circular arguments. They should first have to prove that God exists...
Are you a MAC user? Do you need a plug and play system, with only one button and voice recognition?
Did yours have the sound activation, voice recognition, remote access, automated 911 dispatch, servo motor control for pan/tilt, etc...
If it does, then you spent way more than a few hours on it, and you should market it.
If the Jews believe that Jerusalem is holy, they should be able to live there.
Fuck what??!?
Do you also believe that Kim Davis has the right to impose her religious beliefs on the rest of the country? My religious belief is that the White house is holy land, and that god has commanded me to live there. By your reasoning, this should be perfectly acceptable, and Obama should turn the keys over to me forth-with. People need to get past the idea that religion gives anyone the right to anything. Religion is between a person and their god, and has no business interfering with anyone else. As soon as you allow one persons religion to be imposed on another, no ones freedoms are safe. It's high time that we take active steps to prevent *all* religions of the world from being politically active. Mixing religion and politics always ends in someone being persecuted. Always.
Because otherwise what the system runs is irrelevant and makes very little sense to tinker with it. If you *really* enjoy the tinkering, install a primary security system and get a secondary as an add-on to play with.
The entire point of a security system is deterrence. The thing you have to understand is that, even if you have 4k video, DNA evidence, and a signed confession, the police will not do a damned thing to help you. If you're in a tough enough area, they wont even send a cop; just take a statement over the phone. At the end of the day, once the crooks have your stuff, you've already lost, so your only hope is to scare them off before hand.
Why not a network of some raspberry Pi's outfitted with cameras and IR lights. One could even add a $8 usb sound dongle for sound detection. Couple that with either a WiFi or Cellular network, and instant home security. Could even add voice recognition "panic switch", something like "Linus, compile my kernel" which would call the police/911/999 with an automated message. Add a few cheap servo motors, and you can get pan/tilt cameras. Total cost of a camera, with servos, power supply, camera, raspi, about $60-$80. Still almost 2X cheaper than the crappy "ip cameras" dlink/linksys et al peddle.
Then add 1000 hours of labor to get it all working. The OP was looking for a *pre-existing* system that he could tinker with, not ideas for something he would build from scratch. Even at minimum wage, 1000 hours is $10,000. That'll buy one very spiffy security system.
In the case of consumer cartridges, HP, Lexmark, and Epson would be deeply upset if a bunch of the customers complained about "empty" cartridges that still said they had 5% capacity left. To prevent complaints, add a little bit of ink ...
There are two obvious solutions to that problem:
1: Stop lying to your customer by claiming to be measuring the remaining ink in a cartridge when you're not.
2: Actually measure the ink in the cartridge and report that amount to the user. I understand that from the printer manufacturers point of view, the ink is cheap, but from the customers point of view, ink is hideously expensive. Given the customers cost of ink, they would be better served by an accurate mechanism to measure the remaining ink, rather than stupid tricks like this to claim a feature that the product really doesn't have. There have to be dozens of different ways to measure ink remaining, some of which are bound to be dirt cheap and far more accurate than the current method of "guessing"
In America, even people on welfare have television. That's not a need.
It is if you don’t want your citizens to revolt. Its been well understood for literally thousands of years, that if you want to foment revolution, the quickest way is to have an otherwise bored population. Provide a distraction, and you can get away with a lot of oppression.
As for health care, our present system ensures that those on the bottom get substandard health care, thereby causing a significant difference in the quality and length of life of those on the bottom as compared to those on the top. In a society with so much surplus, there is no need for it. If the income inequality were not so great, everyone could have top quality health care too, and the top 1% could still be obscenely wealthy.
If you were planning an economy, that's kind of what you'd want, right? The ones with most potential getting the most capability to use their potential?
It's not the concept that people have trouble with, its the particular gradient we have now that is the problem... Far too top heavy, with the bottom half actually seeing a significantly decreasing standard of living. On average, no part of society should have to live a decreasing standard of living so long as the aggregate wealth keeps on growing.
Free monitors tend to be VGA only : CRT, 1280x1024 LCD and the cheap wide monitors (in fact some narrow ones do have DVI, but the cheap wides never do) That makes the Pis incompatible with them. Although a HDMI TV may be increasingly common.
Although many poor households do not have a computer, 96.1% of households below the poverty line have TV's, with one third of those being large screen high def TVs. These will work just fine for the Pi. Even the 1 in 20 that are left needing a monitor, some of those could be convinced to get a second hand used TV to be used as a computer monitor. All else failing, there are plenty of computer recycling places out there that could be convinced to donate a few older HDMI TVs / monitors.
The Pi has the additional advantage that the school can legally provide a ubuntu image for the students to use, and could easily re-image a messed up SD-card, allowing the students to tinker as much as they like without fear of bricking their computer, and not having any technical support to get it working again.
All things considered, the lack of easy access to broadband is a far bigger problem
Just stop trying to defend piracy.
Or how about we stop pretending that rent-seeking in the name of capitalism is in the best interests of society.
We are becoming a society the produces nothing, yet expects to get money for the nearly nothing that we are doing. At the end of the day, what really is the difference between that and welfare?
I thought that was the Baby Boomers. They're going to be the ones that cause the Federal government to implode under the massive amount of debt racked up by Social Security.
To be sure, it was the Tail end of the boomers that supported the reagonomics, but the younger generations who were getting screwed by the whole thing had abdicated their responsibility with some of the lowest voting turnouts of any generation. If Gen X had stood up for themselves and their children and forced a balanced budget instead of allowing the politicians to strip mine social security, we wouldn't be in half the fiscal trouble we are in today. By nearly any measure, the cut and spend economics is good for older generations and royally screws the younger generations. The only permanent fix is a constitutional amendment banning deficit spending.
Biased opinions like yours regarding millennials is what discourages younger generations from respecting those who are: already established, who didn't have to worry about a great recession caused by the previous generation that is constantly threatening the potential job and stock markets, who didn't have to be concerned with competing against off-shore, who knows that they will at least be able to collect Social Security, who is the generation that put little to no effort in raising their children (these now millennials) other than shoving a TV in front of them while said parent is partying in a garbage can downing beers and listening to Sting.
Forgetting about the reasons for a minute, Millennials are less capable, less motivated, more self important and harder to manage than any generation in the memories of any one alive. We have two openings for developers (read as real programmers who can solve problems). We have gotten and processed over 1000 applications so far. The vast majority of the resumes we have received, I would have killed myself before ever submitting such an under-qualified application for a job. Millennials (statistically speaking) seem to have no problem spraying their defective crap on the work force. The ones we have interviewed have almost all ended up not living up to what their resume implied they could do. One of them even admitted in the interview to outright falsifying large parts of his resume. One of them, when we called some of his references, they painted a picture of a typical millennial. He'd been through several manual labor jobs while attending college and hadn’t lasted more than a month at any of them. His former supervisors all stated quite bluntly that the kid felt he was too good for manual labor. He might have even been qualified for the position, but that attitude ruled him out right away, even though there is no manual labor involved. If he wasn’t cut out for it, then why did he keep applying for and taking jobs he knew he would be keeping any ways? Did he think that behaviour was acceptable? Did he think it wouldn't come back to bite him?
All that having been said, once they get on the job, I can fully understand why a lot of millennials don’t give a damn any more. Their whole lives, they have been raised being a precious snowflake. Their parents lived the American dream in a big way (spent us waaay the hell into debt doing it too I might add), and raised their kids to expect the same without having to work hard for anything. Even the school taught the students that they were winners just for showing up. After that wind up, they get into the work force, and except the lucky few, they discover that they have been woefully under prepared for the reality of the working world. Their early performance reviews are mediocre (the first time many of them have even heard negative feedback!!!), and their world falls apart. Its a downward spiral that even a blind man could see coming.
At the end of the day, we have an entire generation that is borderline useless, and the gen Xers have no one to blame for the problem except themselves. The Millennials mark the beginning of the end of the golden age of America, and we can lay it at the feet of the Gen Xers like many of our other problems. After all their self righteous blustering, they turned out to be far worse then the parents they were rebelling against.
Who needs fucking math when you can Google?
There are lots of answers that a professional (read as highly paid) programmer might need math. If you want to make the big bucks, you want to work at google, or do embedded programming, you're going to use advanced math once in a while. A great example is a problem I recently faced. I needed a heating device that consumed 2kwatts average power, and to make it as cheaply as possible, it needed to do so directly from 110V AC. The heater core had a very low resistance, so it needed to be PWM driven, with a sensor to turn it on and off based on the instantaneous line voltage. When the mains were below a certain voltage, it would turn on the current, and when it was above that amount, it would turn off. So now the problem is, for 2kW average power, what is the approximate cut off voltage. This needs to be within about 5 volts plus or minus so that we can pack all of our available sensor range into that small range to get very accurate outputs.
I could spend a week using trial and error, and blow up several hundred dollars worth of parts getting it wrong, or I could spend 2 hours doing the calculus to get the actual answer (I'm pretty rusty at calc, and came up with an absurd answer on my first attempt). My boss hired me, and I make a lot of money because I could handle problems of this calibre. If all you want is a 35k / year job then not knowing math is fine, but if you want a career with a future, then the math is critical. Math doesn't make products work, it makes them cheaper to build and cheaper to design, and as a programmer, your value to the company is a function of how big a difference your work product makes to the bottom line. The more money the company has at the end of the day because of you, the more money they will pay you to be there.
Web design these days is less and less about programming, and more and more about aesthetic and design. It has become so much so that the programming parts of it are largely unnecessary to be relatively successful.
That having been said, almost no one considers a web designer to be a programmer. There is minimal overlap, but the tasks for which one would need a programmer are largely beyond a web designer, and visa-versa.