Isn't that what they call it in the olden days? Memory is a poor man's upgrade?
They did, but honestly, a memory upgrade can be the most bang for the buck and last in the long run.
If you take a machine which has used all of its memory, and is already paging... everything else it does is going to be slow. The machine is now constrained by memory and IO speed, and always will be.
When my wife upgraded her work laptop to more memory, she was suddenly shocked she could launch task manager while the machine was still booting, and have two things up at the same time. It was literally like a whole new machine.. it already had four CPU cores, but they weren't very effective on a machine which was paging. With more memory the machine stopped being her bottleneck for some tasks.
Instead of all of your CPU time servicing disk IO and waiting for page swaps, all of a sudden what it's doing it what you are doing. Which means that what you want to be doing happens much faster.
It may be a poor man's upgrade, but it's probably more effective than making the disk to which your machine is constantly swapping go faster so that the insufficient amount of memory doesn't seem to bad.
Just fix the actual damned problem.
And the problem has existed since machines came with 4MB of RAM instead of 4GB of RAM... you simply need more. A 486 running Windows on 4MB of RAM was almost useless, that same machine with 8MB of RAM was fast.
I am one of those users who thinks having to open and close an application every time I need it is idiotic.
At power up, everything stays open for days or weeks.
Do you want to know the best way possible to make your machine fast and long lived so that your disk performance isn't your bottleneck?
Put a crap ton of memory on the damned thing. Buy an older CPU, but stog it full of as much memory as you can afford, to the point that it seems like a ridiculous amount of memory.
Far too many machines suffer from having useless amounts of memory, which causes the machine to be slow to load, causes lots of paging, makes launching a new app slow as hell.
My old personal desktop was a quad core with 8 GB of RAM. My new personal desktop is an 8 core with 16GB of RAM. The intent is in 5 years I still won't have resource issues.
My wife's several year old laptop at work used to have 4GB of RAM. It was a slow and pathetic dog of a machine, because you use 4GB of RAM by the time you boot and launch Outlook. Running a VM was painful, and keeping a few apps open made the damned thing horrible.
I suggested she nag her boss for more memory. She managed to add 8GB to her existing 4GB and suddenly a machine with 12GB of RAM booted faster, was more responsive, didn't keel over when you launched a new application. Several of her co-workers found this out, asked for more RAM, and suddenly found themselves with blazing fast laptops, even though they were 3 years old.
Because the machine wasn't spending all of its time paging.
You should do some testing... because I'd be willing to bet the average user is going to see FAR more improvements from more RAM than faster SSD. Don't make paging faster, eliminate it.
The vast majority of users are NOT CPU bound, and never will be. They're IO bound, usually from paging and swapping. Give it boatloads of RAM, and watch how much faster the machine is, and how much longer you can keep it without needing to upgrade.
A faster SSD is masking the real problem.. that you r machine is swapping like mad because it doesn't have nearly enough RAM. For some reason I never understand, people think pairing a fast machine with insufficient RAM will make for a usable machine.
A slower CPU with way more memory is actually in the real world a much faster machine. And the recommended amount of memory for a Windows machine has always been pathetically low.
I've been buying older CPUs (I'm not a gamer so I'm not CPU bound) and pairing it with gobs of memory for years, and have been recommending the same to others. My experience tells me it makes for a far more useful machine, because it's not stuck paging constantly, so it's not being slowed by disk speeds.
LOL, again, most of the professionals I know who know to be wary, cautious, paranoid, methodical, and overly attentive to the process at hand have all gotten that way from having seen the process fail (or almost fail) in a place where it really did matter.
There's nothing like that giant "oh, shit" moment to make you realize "I shall never do this carelessly again".
In my experience, the people who have only lost stuff where it doesn't matter can sometimes be an accident waiting to happen, because they don't yet treat it like "if I do this wrong, this will seriously hurt".
Caution is a learned thing, and until you've been bitten, you often don't see the need for it.
You know, that sounds awesome and all... but you'd be utterly shocked at the number of companies who simply don't have testbeds, and have only a live system.
it's the old thing about the cobblers children having no shoes... the internal spending/dilligence/investment on IT in many tech firms can be pretty pathetic.
Often times there's short sighted management who thinks they can't afford these things, right up until they find themselves with a massive and costly outage that can't be easily fixed.
It's like backups and DR planning, sometimes people just think "we can't afford that" or "we don't have time for that". Only to eventually discover that the cost of not having had it can be painful.
You just want to believe that you're somehow special because you can write computer programs.
Sorry, no. You should be able to smell your own bullshit, because I sure as hell can.
I was told about the double-tassel distribution by no less than three people with PhDs in CS who taught at university, all in my first year of university.
I have no need to feel myself as being some special little snowflake because I learned how to program. It certainly isn't something which I feel should be restricted to a specific group of people. But I sure as hell believe that in a random group of students you will not see results which follow a bell curve.
I have seen the grade distributions in classes I've marked, been told this by people who taught CS for a very long time, and seen it in classmates.
You can like it or not like it... I simply don't give a shit. But that it's a real, documented, and oft-referenced thing has been true for decades. Is it 100% indicator? I honestly have no idea, because I've not studied it.
But if you think I'm pulling it out of my ass or because I want to feel special... you're a moron.
Clearly, the authors of the paper feel that payola, corruption, and a lack of competition are good things.
Which is kind of the problem with articles from reason.com, which is so droolingly and un-flinchingly geared to a particular kind of fantasy economics as to make it something bordering on religious dogma.
Those who believe it are 100% convinced that it is perfect, complete, and any disagreement with it is heresy.
In fact, as someone who got over the flavor of the Ayn Rand koolaid and saw it for what it was, that's pretty much how it works. It's irrational, it defies both logic and evidence, totally ignores human nature... but somehow it's holy fucking writ.
But you just keep acting like the other guy is beneath contempt and loudly saying things like "ah, but you would say that because you're a leftist who hasn't yet realized governments are tyranny, and our fictonal free market will solve all problems."
There is really nothing more irrational than someone defending this kind of crap.
This is the base of Rand Paul, which means they've drank so damned much of the koolaid there simply is no alternative, and they'll just go apoplectic trying to use their circular logic to defend it.
letting the FCC dictate ISP business practices will result in
The internet not being beholden to ISP business practices.
ISPs are, and should be treated as, conduits of data which has nothing at all to do with their damned business practices.
Egged on by a bootleggers-and-Baptists coalition of rent-seeking industry groups and corporation-hating progressives
Or, you know, supported by corporate ass kissers who would have us believe that whatever the fuck corporations want is somehow good for us, when it's only good for corporations. But the net neutrality movement has had less to do with class struggle than with the familiar delusion of technocrats everywhere: that government can "design" a better future if only it pulls the right levers. Ah, here goes more bullshit and antigovernment everyone-but-me-is-elitist crap which suggests that preventing companies from acting like douchebags is crippling to companies who want to be douchebags.
Look, this is libertarian economic drivel which says corporate rent-seeking assholes should be able to extort a cut of someone because they have a successful product, and that it is really important for ISPs to be able to spy on your content to maximize their ad revenue.
For instance, one of the best ways to route around a big firm's brand recognition is to buy special treatment in the form of promotions, product placement and the like (payola, after all, is how rock and roll circumvented major label contempt for the genre). That will almost certainly be forbidden under the FCC's version of neutrality.
Yes, because we don't want a fucking internet where you have to be kicking up some payola to some greedy asshole who did nothing other than say "nice innovation you have there, shame if something happened to it".
You know what needs to change? Companies who sell the newest stuff as if they really have it, refuse to invest in upgrading their infrastructure to keep it relevant, and then piss and moan when their outdated business model of "do nothing and keep charging more" proves to be useless.
This whole article is written by a corporate apologist who is changing the definitions of "innovation" and "stale business model" to make it sound like encumbant ISPs who are too lazy/cheap to be able to to charge a toll (in the form of payola or blocking traffic) so they can piggy back on the success of companies who actually make stuff.
This is entirely about saying "we should be able to gouge NetFlix, because they've come up with something cool and we haven't".
This is arguing for the right to be a parasite middleman, by companies who are otherwise collapsing under their own crushing weight of incompetence, laziness, and the feeling of being entitled to revenue they do not generate.
Honestly, this was some pretty bright mathematicians who were taking advanced math.
They could understand the concepts of these things, but then something as simple as "when do I use a for loop or a while loop" they'd just completely fall off the rails. They just could not string it together.
But I've known numerous people who did really advanced math, and then took first year CS later in their education and completely failed to grasp it.
These weren't people who couldn't grasp the math, this was people who grokked the math with fullness, but couldn't do the programming.
I just don't believe that 100% of competent mathematicians could write a program to save their damned lives. Because I've seen examples to the contrary.
I am, at best, somewhat middling at math. I can understand what calculus does far better than I can understand how to apply it.
I once asked a prof how I was supposed to know which integration formula/identify I was supposed to be using. He basically said "after a while you just know which ones". Because, apparently, there are no teachable rules for this, just hand waving guidelines which are supposed to make sense at some point.
I could look up the formulae in the book, but was never really good at memorizing them, because I simply can't memorize things.
What I could do, however, was out code most anyone else in my CS classes, debug things that other people gave up on, and spot patterns which allowed me to intuit what was happening when it was almost impossible to articulate to someone else.
I haven't done a scrap of math since university, and spent many years crawling around in low level code, fixing memory leaks, identifying places where code wasn't re-entrant, refactoring existing code.
The bits of math you cite as essential to CS are things which can be done symbolically, and enough to get the point across without finishing up with all the fiddly bits. They're more descriptive and high level than specific applications in math. The concepts are more important than the specific. I can write you a finite state automata without being able to do the math behind one.
Now, I'm by no means insinuating I'm awesome at CS, but I as certainly one of the smarter ones in my graduating class (which was at a small-ish school, to be fair), and paid for my university marking CS courses and writing code/doing research with my prof. I then spent 15+ years doing it commercially before I moved a little further into user-level stuff and the like.
These days I don't write much code, but I can still read it and occasionally debug it if I have to.
But I've worked with people with Masters degrees in CS who had done theoretical/math heavy disciplines... and they wrote some of the worst code I've ever seen. For them code was a means to implement math. But the code was often badly written and inflexible.
So, I will agree that some degree of understanding of math is necessary. I maintain that a knowledge of math is not sufficient to have an understanding of CS, because some of the aspects of CS are very different from math.
And because my 20 years in the industry tells me that, other than foundational stuff, or unless you are writing highly domain specific code... you simply will not use the math bits in most cases.
CS might be an economically important subject, but it's hardly core. It's a composition of math, electronics and engineering.
And then, in my considered opinion and experience, it becomes more than the sum of its parts.
I've known mathematicians who couldn't be taught to code. I've known electrical engineers who couldn't even remotely be taught to code. I've known engineers who made awesome coders. I've known people with no formal education who were awesome programmers and mathematicians in their own right.
But I do not agree that it is simply a combination of those things. There's as much intuition, art, and a "knack" for programming as for anything else.. and that part seems to the stuff that is hardest of all to teach. I've found debugging code can often lead to a leap that someone else looks at and says "how the heck did you conclude that from this".
They're quite similar, and they're also quite different.
You know, my personal experience, both while I was getting my education and since.. is that computers and math are intrinsically linked right up to a point.
And then they become very different things understood by different people in completely different ways.
I went to school with a woman who I now know to be a math teacher. But she couldn't be coached through first year programming. Not by the profs, not by paid tutors, and not by me, not by anybody else. She just couldn't wrap her head around it.
I don't buy the statement that CS is a subset of math. I think there is ovelap. And then I think it becomes a thing unto itself.
Because I've known a couple of PhDs in math who could barely use email, let alone anything more advanced.
So, is there anything which has overcome the double tassel distribution which programming has always had?
For literally decades, it's been "these people get it, these people don't" with very little in the middle.
Have we fixed this? Have we found way to teach it which prevent this? Have we even explained it?
Otherwise this is fairly meaningless drivel which is little more intelligent than "Children should be 3% taller for each of the next 10 years".
I've know really smart mathematicians who couldn't be made to understand computer programming. And, likewise, I've known some awesome CS people who struggled with math.
So what makes us think your average school children will be any different?
As usual, I worry when Microsoft and Google are telling us what the future should be. Because it's all about the future as they want it to be and as it benefits them.
As long as Microsoft and Google are so reliant on H1B workers, educating American kids to code is a pointless exercise.
This has been known for a very very long time. This is completely not news.
Bullshit.
What the team has seen, however, are the chemical signs of three complex organic molecules in the cyanide family--an astronomical first, Oberg says. Although astronomers have spotted hydrogen cyanide in other star systems, the two more complicated chemical relatives detected in this study have never been seen in a protoplanetary disk.
While this matches with previous observations and predictions, this is, in fact, some actual new science which confirms stuff,and which certainly is news.
Know what is idiotic? Dismissing actual new results on the basis that you heard something similar a bunch of years ago.
Well, quite honestly, evolution can be skewed by silly things unrelated to survival.
If a bird selected mates on pretty plumage which killed them faster, that's still the same mechanism.
if you look at the aggregate of who is procreating, do you conclude the fittest and best of humans are the ones procreating? Or do you conclude that it's pretty much the opposite?
Evolution never goes away. But that doesn't mean it can't end up explaining some trends.
Honestly, look at Wal Mart some day to see who is most contributing to the gene pool. Now ask yourself if this is progress, or just "anybody who gets laid is creating the next generation".
The process is continuous, but the outcomes might not always be what you expect.
Of course what will happen in reality is companies will use this to maximize the amount of shit and abuse they can heap on employees before they actually leave, and ensure that by the time they do you no longer need to care.
The sociopaths who run corporations don't give a crap about employee retention or loyalty, just grinding them down into compliance.
There's no fucking way corporations will use this in some enlightened, self-aware attempt to keep employees happy.
So if you have a population of short, fat, uneducated people breeding like rabbits... your population is going to skew to that.
If you have a population of tall, thin, athletic, smart and healthy people breeding, that's what you're going to be getting as well.
Any time a population selects based on a set of criteria, evolution happens and the traits selected become prominent.
Honestly, walk around a mall and look at who is pushing baby carriages. That is who is providing the inputs for evolution.
Evolution is pretty much a constant process. Whether or not it's choosing the "best" of the species or not depends on the population... and birth rates by demographic for the last few decades suggests that it isn't the educated or wealthy who are producing offspring.
Saying that evolution might no longer be applicable is failing to understand what it is in the big picture in terms of evolution. It skews towards survival of the fittest. But modern society could be skewing it to "survival of the ones who fail to avoid having children".
Many many people simply self select out of the next iteration of evolution and choose not to have kids.
Yup, we live in a world where the police increasingly either don't know, or don't care, what the law says.
They've been told repeatedly they don't have the right to stop photography, confiscate cameras, or insist on deleting of images. But they do it anyway.
Which means we've reached the point where every cop needs to be wearing a body camera, and we need to stop taking their word for the outcomes of things. If your camera was magically not working you better have someone else who was there to support your version.
Far too often the police outright lie about what happened, and you simply can't trust them.. maybe not all of them, but since there's no way of knowing which are crooks and which aren't, it's time to assume they're all potentially dishonest.
Police need to understand they are there to enforce the law, not make up their own damned law. And if they can't do that, they need to be fired, or arrested depending on what they do.
These days it's hard not to arrive at the blanket conclusion of "Fuck the Police". Because enough of them are saying "fuck you" to us and totally ignoring what the law is.
There have been far too many incidents in which the police give a version of events, only to have that proven completely false when the video/pics show up. And yet we never seem to fire them or charge them with perjury, and they always seem to clear themselves of wrong doing.
The police have guns and the ability to screw up lives, which means they damned well need to be held to a very high standard.
English is the lingua franca because it already exists, has a lot of inertia behind it, and due to historical quirks of how it spread around the world.
I rank your chances of making up a new language, trying to convince people to use it, and actually getting anywhere with that as essentially zero.
People in general aren't interested in new made up languages.
If you construct a new language with strict rules and elegant syntax... nobody will give a crap.
You will end up with a purely academic exercise of how you make up a language... and you'll probably end up with a language which is very antiseptic, formalized, and boring as hell. And quite possibly woefully incomplete and highly constrained. How do you define in advance things like nuance and double entendres?
There's simply no motivation for anybody to be interested in your new language, because nobody else knows it, and it serves no actual pressing need.
Human languages are not a construct you sit down and write the rules for and expect people to use. They're much more organic than that.
Indeed, if it was rigidly defined you couldn't have it evolve the way it has... the cromulency of new words is not defined in advance, but by how much people feel embiggened by them.
You would not have vernacular, you would have a boring, lifeless, rigid language... Latin already did that.
I agree that some of the greatest weaknesses of English (lack of rigid structure and syntax) are also some of its greatest strengths. Because it's a fluid, evolving language which has plenty of room to be played with.
English is NOT a "constructed" language, because that implies intent.
English is more of a trash heap of things we borrowed from all those other languages that over time people have grafted rules onto to try to decode and standardize.:-P
But (and I say this in the nicest possible way because it's my native language), English is a dog's breakfast of bits and pieces string together with loose rules and exceptions which require you to know from which language we stole the various bits and pieces.
The more I know about the English language, and the longer I know people whose native language isn't English... it's harder to justify some of the "rules" as being anything other than arbitrary, and I've discovered that the ways that non-native speakers "mangle" English actually often leads to a better expression for the context, but which is grammatically incorrect.
Because it's hard to rely on knowing this came from French, and this came from German to know how you treat the words.
More specifically: How could the language be made as easy as possible to learn coming from any linguistic background? How could interest in the language be fostered in as many people as possible?
So, I've known a few people who were learning Esperanto on this premise... but, seriously, who the hell do you think is interested in replacing the English language? Do you think Esperanto has stormed the world yet?
Humans don't have a whole lot of interest in swapping out their language with some constructed thing because someone on the internet thinks it's a cool idea.
Like it or not, languages evolve over time, and aren't something you just whip up and design and expect people to use them.
Honestly, if you like the idea of this, have fun with it. But you might as well try to teach Klingon to yak herders for all the actual results you'll get out of it.
On behalf of native speakers of English, we don't want a replacement.
With all of its warts, borrowed syntax, and aggregation from half a dozen other languages which creates even more exceptions and borrowed syntax which can't be explained to non-native speakers -- English is a workable, expressive, and useful language.
What you're proposing is a kinda neat thing in an abstract, nerdy, and not very useful sense of the words. But outside of you and your BFF talking in secret code at the local pub and looking like smug wankers... nobody else will give a damn.
LOL... honestly, if you can have a cloud of alcohol in space which is 288 billion miles across... given the sheer size of the universe, if there isn't a puddle of WD40 someplace in the universe I'll be surprised.
Billions and billions of galaxies containing billions and billions of stars... there's probably an an entire Astro Glide Nebula or something, and one made of just chocolate pudding.;-)
Am I somehow supposed to feel bad that due to the extensive tracking by Big Brother of everything that we do that all of a sudden Big Brother is having a hard time of it?
Boo fucking hoo.
You assholes created this surveillance society. You don't get to bitch when the same fucking issues we all face suddenly bit you in your own ass.
That these clowns are now stepping in the pile of shit they helped to create is too fucking bad.
Slashdot Mirror
They did, but honestly, a memory upgrade can be the most bang for the buck and last in the long run.
If you take a machine which has used all of its memory, and is already paging ... everything else it does is going to be slow. The machine is now constrained by memory and IO speed, and always will be.
When my wife upgraded her work laptop to more memory, she was suddenly shocked she could launch task manager while the machine was still booting, and have two things up at the same time. It was literally like a whole new machine .. it already had four CPU cores, but they weren't very effective on a machine which was paging. With more memory the machine stopped being her bottleneck for some tasks.
Instead of all of your CPU time servicing disk IO and waiting for page swaps, all of a sudden what it's doing it what you are doing. Which means that what you want to be doing happens much faster.
It may be a poor man's upgrade, but it's probably more effective than making the disk to which your machine is constantly swapping go faster so that the insufficient amount of memory doesn't seem to bad.
Just fix the actual damned problem.
And the problem has existed since machines came with 4MB of RAM instead of 4GB of RAM ... you simply need more. A 486 running Windows on 4MB of RAM was almost useless, that same machine with 8MB of RAM was fast.
The exact same thing is true with 4GB vs 8GB.
I am one of those users who thinks having to open and close an application every time I need it is idiotic.
At power up, everything stays open for days or weeks.
Do you want to know the best way possible to make your machine fast and long lived so that your disk performance isn't your bottleneck?
Put a crap ton of memory on the damned thing. Buy an older CPU, but stog it full of as much memory as you can afford, to the point that it seems like a ridiculous amount of memory.
Far too many machines suffer from having useless amounts of memory, which causes the machine to be slow to load, causes lots of paging, makes launching a new app slow as hell.
My old personal desktop was a quad core with 8 GB of RAM. My new personal desktop is an 8 core with 16GB of RAM. The intent is in 5 years I still won't have resource issues.
My wife's several year old laptop at work used to have 4GB of RAM. It was a slow and pathetic dog of a machine, because you use 4GB of RAM by the time you boot and launch Outlook. Running a VM was painful, and keeping a few apps open made the damned thing horrible.
I suggested she nag her boss for more memory. She managed to add 8GB to her existing 4GB and suddenly a machine with 12GB of RAM booted faster, was more responsive, didn't keel over when you launched a new application. Several of her co-workers found this out, asked for more RAM, and suddenly found themselves with blazing fast laptops, even though they were 3 years old.
Because the machine wasn't spending all of its time paging.
You should do some testing ... because I'd be willing to bet the average user is going to see FAR more improvements from more RAM than faster SSD. Don't make paging faster, eliminate it.
The vast majority of users are NOT CPU bound, and never will be. They're IO bound, usually from paging and swapping. Give it boatloads of RAM, and watch how much faster the machine is, and how much longer you can keep it without needing to upgrade.
A faster SSD is masking the real problem .. that you r machine is swapping like mad because it doesn't have nearly enough RAM. For some reason I never understand, people think pairing a fast machine with insufficient RAM will make for a usable machine.
A slower CPU with way more memory is actually in the real world a much faster machine. And the recommended amount of memory for a Windows machine has always been pathetically low.
I've been buying older CPUs (I'm not a gamer so I'm not CPU bound) and pairing it with gobs of memory for years, and have been recommending the same to others. My experience tells me it makes for a far more useful machine, because it's not stuck paging constantly, so it's not being slowed by disk speeds.
LOL, again, most of the professionals I know who know to be wary, cautious, paranoid, methodical, and overly attentive to the process at hand have all gotten that way from having seen the process fail (or almost fail) in a place where it really did matter.
There's nothing like that giant "oh, shit" moment to make you realize "I shall never do this carelessly again".
In my experience, the people who have only lost stuff where it doesn't matter can sometimes be an accident waiting to happen, because they don't yet treat it like "if I do this wrong, this will seriously hurt".
Caution is a learned thing, and until you've been bitten, you often don't see the need for it.
You know, that sounds awesome and all ... but you'd be utterly shocked at the number of companies who simply don't have testbeds, and have only a live system.
it's the old thing about the cobblers children having no shoes ... the internal spending/dilligence/investment on IT in many tech firms can be pretty pathetic.
Often times there's short sighted management who thinks they can't afford these things, right up until they find themselves with a massive and costly outage that can't be easily fixed.
It's like backups and DR planning, sometimes people just think "we can't afford that" or "we don't have time for that". Only to eventually discover that the cost of not having had it can be painful.
Which is kind of like saying "you're not becoming taller, you're becoming less short".
It's a fairly pointless distinction.
Sorry, no. You should be able to smell your own bullshit, because I sure as hell can.
I was told about the double-tassel distribution by no less than three people with PhDs in CS who taught at university, all in my first year of university.
I can cite references, can you?
I have no need to feel myself as being some special little snowflake because I learned how to program. It certainly isn't something which I feel should be restricted to a specific group of people. But I sure as hell believe that in a random group of students you will not see results which follow a bell curve.
I have seen the grade distributions in classes I've marked, been told this by people who taught CS for a very long time, and seen it in classmates.
You can like it or not like it ... I simply don't give a shit. But that it's a real, documented, and oft-referenced thing has been true for decades. Is it 100% indicator? I honestly have no idea, because I've not studied it.
But if you think I'm pulling it out of my ass or because I want to feel special ... you're a moron.
Clearly, the authors of the paper feel that payola, corruption, and a lack of competition are good things.
Which is kind of the problem with articles from reason.com, which is so droolingly and un-flinchingly geared to a particular kind of fantasy economics as to make it something bordering on religious dogma.
Those who believe it are 100% convinced that it is perfect, complete, and any disagreement with it is heresy.
In fact, as someone who got over the flavor of the Ayn Rand koolaid and saw it for what it was, that's pretty much how it works. It's irrational, it defies both logic and evidence, totally ignores human nature ... but somehow it's holy fucking writ.
But you just keep acting like the other guy is beneath contempt and loudly saying things like "ah, but you would say that because you're a leftist who hasn't yet realized governments are tyranny, and our fictonal free market will solve all problems."
There is really nothing more irrational than someone defending this kind of crap.
This is the base of Rand Paul, which means they've drank so damned much of the koolaid there simply is no alternative, and they'll just go apoplectic trying to use their circular logic to defend it.
The internet not being beholden to ISP business practices.
ISPs are, and should be treated as, conduits of data which has nothing at all to do with their damned business practices.
Or, you know, supported by corporate ass kissers who would have us believe that whatever the fuck corporations want is somehow good for us, when it's only good for corporations.
But the net neutrality movement has had less to do with class struggle than with the familiar delusion of technocrats everywhere: that government can "design" a better future if only it pulls the right levers.
Ah, here goes more bullshit and antigovernment everyone-but-me-is-elitist crap which suggests that preventing companies from acting like douchebags is crippling to companies who want to be douchebags.
Look, this is libertarian economic drivel which says corporate rent-seeking assholes should be able to extort a cut of someone because they have a successful product, and that it is really important for ISPs to be able to spy on your content to maximize their ad revenue.
Yes, because we don't want a fucking internet where you have to be kicking up some payola to some greedy asshole who did nothing other than say "nice innovation you have there, shame if something happened to it".
You know what needs to change? Companies who sell the newest stuff as if they really have it, refuse to invest in upgrading their infrastructure to keep it relevant, and then piss and moan when their outdated business model of "do nothing and keep charging more" proves to be useless.
This whole article is written by a corporate apologist who is changing the definitions of "innovation" and "stale business model" to make it sound like encumbant ISPs who are too lazy/cheap to be able to to charge a toll (in the form of payola or blocking traffic) so they can piggy back on the success of companies who actually make stuff.
This is entirely about saying "we should be able to gouge NetFlix, because they've come up with something cool and we haven't".
This is arguing for the right to be a parasite middleman, by companies who are otherwise collapsing under their own crushing weight of incompetence, laziness, and the feeling of being entitled to revenue they do not generate.
Honestly, this was some pretty bright mathematicians who were taking advanced math.
They could understand the concepts of these things, but then something as simple as "when do I use a for loop or a while loop" they'd just completely fall off the rails. They just could not string it together.
But I've known numerous people who did really advanced math, and then took first year CS later in their education and completely failed to grasp it.
These weren't people who couldn't grasp the math, this was people who grokked the math with fullness, but couldn't do the programming.
I just don't believe that 100% of competent mathematicians could write a program to save their damned lives. Because I've seen examples to the contrary.
I am, at best, somewhat middling at math. I can understand what calculus does far better than I can understand how to apply it.
I once asked a prof how I was supposed to know which integration formula/identify I was supposed to be using. He basically said "after a while you just know which ones". Because, apparently, there are no teachable rules for this, just hand waving guidelines which are supposed to make sense at some point.
I could look up the formulae in the book, but was never really good at memorizing them, because I simply can't memorize things.
What I could do, however, was out code most anyone else in my CS classes, debug things that other people gave up on, and spot patterns which allowed me to intuit what was happening when it was almost impossible to articulate to someone else.
I haven't done a scrap of math since university, and spent many years crawling around in low level code, fixing memory leaks, identifying places where code wasn't re-entrant, refactoring existing code.
The bits of math you cite as essential to CS are things which can be done symbolically, and enough to get the point across without finishing up with all the fiddly bits. They're more descriptive and high level than specific applications in math. The concepts are more important than the specific. I can write you a finite state automata without being able to do the math behind one.
Now, I'm by no means insinuating I'm awesome at CS, but I as certainly one of the smarter ones in my graduating class (which was at a small-ish school, to be fair), and paid for my university marking CS courses and writing code/doing research with my prof. I then spent 15+ years doing it commercially before I moved a little further into user-level stuff and the like.
These days I don't write much code, but I can still read it and occasionally debug it if I have to.
But I've worked with people with Masters degrees in CS who had done theoretical/math heavy disciplines ... and they wrote some of the worst code I've ever seen. For them code was a means to implement math. But the code was often badly written and inflexible.
So, I will agree that some degree of understanding of math is necessary. I maintain that a knowledge of math is not sufficient to have an understanding of CS, because some of the aspects of CS are very different from math.
And because my 20 years in the industry tells me that, other than foundational stuff, or unless you are writing highly domain specific code ... you simply will not use the math bits in most cases.
And then, in my considered opinion and experience, it becomes more than the sum of its parts.
I've known mathematicians who couldn't be taught to code. I've known electrical engineers who couldn't even remotely be taught to code. I've known engineers who made awesome coders. I've known people with no formal education who were awesome programmers and mathematicians in their own right.
But I do not agree that it is simply a combination of those things. There's as much intuition, art, and a "knack" for programming as for anything else .. and that part seems to the stuff that is hardest of all to teach. I've found debugging code can often lead to a leap that someone else looks at and says "how the heck did you conclude that from this".
They're quite similar, and they're also quite different.
You know, my personal experience, both while I was getting my education and since .. is that computers and math are intrinsically linked right up to a point.
And then they become very different things understood by different people in completely different ways.
I went to school with a woman who I now know to be a math teacher. But she couldn't be coached through first year programming. Not by the profs, not by paid tutors, and not by me, not by anybody else. She just couldn't wrap her head around it.
I don't buy the statement that CS is a subset of math. I think there is ovelap. And then I think it becomes a thing unto itself.
Because I've known a couple of PhDs in math who could barely use email, let alone anything more advanced.
So, is there anything which has overcome the double tassel distribution which programming has always had?
For literally decades, it's been "these people get it, these people don't" with very little in the middle.
Have we fixed this? Have we found way to teach it which prevent this? Have we even explained it?
Otherwise this is fairly meaningless drivel which is little more intelligent than "Children should be 3% taller for each of the next 10 years".
I've know really smart mathematicians who couldn't be made to understand computer programming. And, likewise, I've known some awesome CS people who struggled with math.
So what makes us think your average school children will be any different?
As usual, I worry when Microsoft and Google are telling us what the future should be. Because it's all about the future as they want it to be and as it benefits them.
As long as Microsoft and Google are so reliant on H1B workers, educating American kids to code is a pointless exercise.
OK, am I the only one to read that summary and thin "shattered impactor" would be an awesome name for a band?
Bullshit.
While this matches with previous observations and predictions, this is, in fact, some actual new science which confirms stuff,and which certainly is news.
Know what is idiotic? Dismissing actual new results on the basis that you heard something similar a bunch of years ago.
What was your scientific breakthrough today?
Well, quite honestly, evolution can be skewed by silly things unrelated to survival.
If a bird selected mates on pretty plumage which killed them faster, that's still the same mechanism.
if you look at the aggregate of who is procreating, do you conclude the fittest and best of humans are the ones procreating? Or do you conclude that it's pretty much the opposite?
Evolution never goes away. But that doesn't mean it can't end up explaining some trends.
Honestly, look at Wal Mart some day to see who is most contributing to the gene pool. Now ask yourself if this is progress, or just "anybody who gets laid is creating the next generation".
The process is continuous, but the outcomes might not always be what you expect.
Of course what will happen in reality is companies will use this to maximize the amount of shit and abuse they can heap on employees before they actually leave, and ensure that by the time they do you no longer need to care.
The sociopaths who run corporations don't give a crap about employee retention or loyalty, just grinding them down into compliance.
There's no fucking way corporations will use this in some enlightened, self-aware attempt to keep employees happy.
Evolution is always applicable.
So if you have a population of short, fat, uneducated people breeding like rabbits ... your population is going to skew to that.
If you have a population of tall, thin, athletic, smart and healthy people breeding, that's what you're going to be getting as well.
Any time a population selects based on a set of criteria, evolution happens and the traits selected become prominent.
Honestly, walk around a mall and look at who is pushing baby carriages. That is who is providing the inputs for evolution.
Evolution is pretty much a constant process. Whether or not it's choosing the "best" of the species or not depends on the population ... and birth rates by demographic for the last few decades suggests that it isn't the educated or wealthy who are producing offspring.
Saying that evolution might no longer be applicable is failing to understand what it is in the big picture in terms of evolution. It skews towards survival of the fittest. But modern society could be skewing it to "survival of the ones who fail to avoid having children".
Many many people simply self select out of the next iteration of evolution and choose not to have kids.
Yup, we live in a world where the police increasingly either don't know, or don't care, what the law says.
They've been told repeatedly they don't have the right to stop photography, confiscate cameras, or insist on deleting of images. But they do it anyway.
Which means we've reached the point where every cop needs to be wearing a body camera, and we need to stop taking their word for the outcomes of things. If your camera was magically not working you better have someone else who was there to support your version.
Far too often the police outright lie about what happened, and you simply can't trust them .. maybe not all of them, but since there's no way of knowing which are crooks and which aren't, it's time to assume they're all potentially dishonest.
Police need to understand they are there to enforce the law, not make up their own damned law. And if they can't do that, they need to be fired, or arrested depending on what they do.
These days it's hard not to arrive at the blanket conclusion of "Fuck the Police". Because enough of them are saying "fuck you" to us and totally ignoring what the law is.
There have been far too many incidents in which the police give a version of events, only to have that proven completely false when the video/pics show up. And yet we never seem to fire them or charge them with perjury, and they always seem to clear themselves of wrong doing.
The police have guns and the ability to screw up lives, which means they damned well need to be held to a very high standard.
English is the lingua franca because it already exists, has a lot of inertia behind it, and due to historical quirks of how it spread around the world.
I rank your chances of making up a new language, trying to convince people to use it, and actually getting anywhere with that as essentially zero.
People in general aren't interested in new made up languages.
If you construct a new language with strict rules and elegant syntax ... nobody will give a crap.
You will end up with a purely academic exercise of how you make up a language ... and you'll probably end up with a language which is very antiseptic, formalized, and boring as hell. And quite possibly woefully incomplete and highly constrained. How do you define in advance things like nuance and double entendres?
There's simply no motivation for anybody to be interested in your new language, because nobody else knows it, and it serves no actual pressing need.
Human languages are not a construct you sit down and write the rules for and expect people to use. They're much more organic than that.
Indeed, if it was rigidly defined you couldn't have it evolve the way it has ... the cromulency of new words is not defined in advance, but by how much people feel embiggened by them.
You would not have vernacular, you would have a boring, lifeless, rigid language ... Latin already did that.
I agree that some of the greatest weaknesses of English (lack of rigid structure and syntax) are also some of its greatest strengths. Because it's a fluid, evolving language which has plenty of room to be played with.
English is NOT a "constructed" language, because that implies intent.
English is more of a trash heap of things we borrowed from all those other languages that over time people have grafted rules onto to try to decode and standardize. :-P
But (and I say this in the nicest possible way because it's my native language), English is a dog's breakfast of bits and pieces string together with loose rules and exceptions which require you to know from which language we stole the various bits and pieces.
The more I know about the English language, and the longer I know people whose native language isn't English ... it's harder to justify some of the "rules" as being anything other than arbitrary, and I've discovered that the ways that non-native speakers "mangle" English actually often leads to a better expression for the context, but which is grammatically incorrect.
Because it's hard to rely on knowing this came from French, and this came from German to know how you treat the words.
So, I've known a few people who were learning Esperanto on this premise ... but, seriously, who the hell do you think is interested in replacing the English language? Do you think Esperanto has stormed the world yet?
Humans don't have a whole lot of interest in swapping out their language with some constructed thing because someone on the internet thinks it's a cool idea.
Like it or not, languages evolve over time, and aren't something you just whip up and design and expect people to use them.
Honestly, if you like the idea of this, have fun with it. But you might as well try to teach Klingon to yak herders for all the actual results you'll get out of it.
On behalf of native speakers of English, we don't want a replacement.
With all of its warts, borrowed syntax, and aggregation from half a dozen other languages which creates even more exceptions and borrowed syntax which can't be explained to non-native speakers -- English is a workable, expressive, and useful language.
What you're proposing is a kinda neat thing in an abstract, nerdy, and not very useful sense of the words. But outside of you and your BFF talking in secret code at the local pub and looking like smug wankers ... nobody else will give a damn.
LOL ... honestly, if you can have a cloud of alcohol in space which is 288 billion miles across ... given the sheer size of the universe, if there isn't a puddle of WD40 someplace in the universe I'll be surprised.
Billions and billions of galaxies containing billions and billions of stars ... there's probably an an entire Astro Glide Nebula or something, and one made of just chocolate pudding. ;-)
Am I somehow supposed to feel bad that due to the extensive tracking by Big Brother of everything that we do that all of a sudden Big Brother is having a hard time of it?
Boo fucking hoo.
You assholes created this surveillance society. You don't get to bitch when the same fucking issues we all face suddenly bit you in your own ass.
That these clowns are now stepping in the pile of shit they helped to create is too fucking bad.