Can someone please explain this obsession with the Commodore 64?
Nostalgia.
These were the first computers many people used, and and the games were quite legendary to some people.
Because they can.
Now that they're all grown up and have these spiffy new toys to play with, you have to do something with it.
Vanity.
It has always been true that programmers tend to play with projects that appeal to them and which they find fun and interesting. That there's already a crap ton of the same kind of app is irrelevant. This one is mine dammit.
Why not?
So if in the process of learning to use something new, you decide to re-implement/emulate something old, what's the harm in it? Do you care that someone nerded out and created an emulator?
Girls.
Because, really, the ultimate pick up line is "Hey baby, wanna see my C64 emulator on my Raspberry Pi"? Right? Anyone?
The Japanese actors would play the part seriously, and the people who did the voice over just went "oh, it's just a cartoon, I'm supposed to sound silly".
Akira is pretty famous for that... it was a good movie, and the translation wasn't terrible, but some of the voice performances were pretty bad. It got re-released several years (probably more by now) in which they did a much better job on the voices.
Some of the recent stuff which came out of Studio Ghibli did a lot better job of this, because good actors who took it seriously were employed from the beginning.
And, nowadays, when you can have Lucy Liu and Dustin Hoffman doing Kung Fu Panda, people have realized that you can't treat the voice overs as an afterthought and just throw any old terrible performance at it.
There have been numerous movies (in numerous languages) over the years that I've decided were far better in their original language with subtitles. Hindi/Bollywood movies are an example of this.. most of them don't have voice over, and some of the ones which do just completely ruin the tone of the film.
If you start out with the intent and resources to do a good job of it, it can be quite good. But for many years it was just a thrown together afterthought with really terrible results.
Though, one of my all time favorite examples of what happens when people do it badly is the movie Ultraviolet. The supposed Chins (ethnic Chinese I assume) are supposed to be speaking Chinese, but they can be heard saying "sin loi", which is Vietnamese for "I'm sorry" and which is one of a handful of Vietnamese words I know. I don't believe a single word of Chinese is spoken.
I asked a Vietnamese friend about it, and his response was something along the lines of "white people don't care, just any Asian language you can find because you think we all look alike".
instead of make procrastinate, for your next appointment you should try make clean; make depmod; make procrastinate; make install; make clean. Its way more efficient.
Bah, make procrastinate does all of the same things eventually.
So what's your arbitrary criteria for actually being a programmer?
Not arbitrary. Spend time at it. Get proficient.
In my experience, a first year programming does not a programmer make. It lays the foundation, but it doesn't get you there.
My old manager who spent a year writing JCL and then moved into management? He might have been a programmer at one point, but he had long since stopped by the time I knew him.
Me, I haven't written code in several years. And I'm not sure I'd consider myself a programmer any more.
Depends on the consequences of something bad happening.
Finding out the next flavor of Ben and Gerry's ice cream? Not such a big deal.
Finding out exactly where you can strike critical infrastructure by getting your report about how vulnerable the critical infrastructure is? Absolutely.
If you knew that the information was sensitive, and you didn't safeguard it... then, I would argue you really missed the point.
A programmer is one who programs. Write a program: You're a programmer now.
So, if I get you to tighten a bolt, are you a mechanical engineer? If I scribble on a piece of paper am I an artist? If I add two numbers am I mathematician? Does putting on a bandaid make me a doctor?
I think not.
Write a program, and that's all you've done. Write a bunch of programs and demonstrate some proficiency at it, and then you can be a programmer. Same as with anything else.
"we need more girls in STEM" article recently. Why? Why do we need more girls in STEM, or everybody to be programmers?
Honest answer? Because it offends people's sensibilities that what are being hailed as the lucrative jobs and the future of the economy aren't being pursued by a large chunk of the population.
No, a couple are in HR as well, and there is at least one in the Finance department. Some days I'm not so sure about IT.
Have you ever been told you need to submit accurate time sheets for the week on Wednesdays? How the hell do you expect me to give you accurate timesheets for the entire week on a Wednesday when I usually work Wednesday and Friday evenings for an unknown period of time??? And if I had to submit it on Wednesday, don't grumble that I had to submit a correction on Monday to come up with the real number.
Just cause its art doesn't prevent it from being an eyesore.
So, you're categorically saying all graffiti is an eye sore? You've seen all of the graffiti in the world and concluded none of it has merit? You've discounted the possibility that people have asked people to put up murals in some places?
Wow, you are good. What's it like to be omniscient? Did you know I was going to ask that?
Just because people collect it doesn't make these eyesore art or these vandals artists.
Just because you don't like it doesn't prevent it from being art.
There has been graffiti for thousands of years in one form or another, and there will continue to be. Hell, cave paintings can be considered some of the first forms of graffiti.
There are places which have dedicated graffiti walls, because some of the art is pretty damned incredible.
Does changing it from being on a wall where you have permission magically turn it into art? Or does it just make it legitimate vandalism?
Graffiti and tagging are destructive acts, only slightly better than tossing a rock through a window.
Meh, by the time you learn to be one of these 'muralists' you've gone through a lot of bad graffiti.
Sometimes graffiti is political or culturally significant (think "Eric Clapton is God"), and has been with us since the ancient Greeks. It's not likely to go away.
Dunno, but I think law enforcement should ideally be held to a higher standard than someone running around calling themselves the Japanese word for breaded pork tenderloin.
So, what do we infer about a poster calling themselves 'interkin3tic'?
Does this convey credibility to you? Or should we discount your opinion as that of someone who has allowed l337 speak to become a factor in his life?
If you teach someone to program, by definition they'll be a programmer.
Not really. Not by a long shot.
I can teach you to take a photograph, that doesn't make you a photographer.
You can teach someone the concept of coding, and they might even make a couple of simple programs.
That doesn't make you a 'programmer' any more than giving someone a driving lesson makes them a race car driver.
I've encountered people who could, in some ways, write code. But since they didn't have the slightest idea of how to do it well or effectively, they were dangerous amateurs who believed they were programmers. We had one guy (lasted less than a month) who wrote garbage code like a first year student with no real understanding. Trying to make him understand the difference between what he wrote and what we needed was futile. I eventually walked away from him, told him he was useless, and stopped giving him tasks. My manager, upon seeing his code, went the next step and got rid of him
Trust me. In practice, there is a very large difference between "knowing how to write some code 'n stuff" and actually being proficient at designing, writing, and maintaining software.
Hell, I've know a few people with Masters degrees in CS who are actually terrible programmers. They can make something which kinda works for their area of research, but in general, they were useless.
I even knew one guy who said he had a Masters in CS who had never coded before -- how that happened boggles my mind. That's like being a chemist who has never been in a lab.
The problem is that by running with the most plausible interpretation, you give up the opportunity to shake your head sadly whilst piously intoning moral platitudes.
Well, it is still a fact that I think Zuckerschmuck is a clueless wanker who believes in a simplistic solution to a complex problem, while at the same time being a massive douchebag.
How was that? I'm not sure I know which words are meant to convey piety, and I may have missed the whole platitude thing, I'm not sure.;-)
I'm good to very good at math and interested in computers. So I thought I would be a programmer.
I'm middling at math, but gravitated to programming.
When I was in university, I knew people who were brilliant at math but couldn't code worth shit and couldn't grasp some of the basic concepts or programming. (Once had to explain to a fellow student why if her numerical analysis project was going to take 9 months to run as she'd written it, she would fail the course -- she was scary brilliant at math, but couldn't figure out how to use loops and if statements, it just made no sense to her.)
As much as everybody says "programming is just math", it really really isn't. It's rooted in math, but the actual practice of coding is nothing like it (not to me at least).
There's a reason why computer courses have a double tassel distribution... not everybody can wrap their head around what it means. I have no idea of why that is, but it's been a real thing for a very long time.
Assuming a Coal Miner can't code is presupposing a lot about their work duties and abilities.
Again, nobody is saying a specific coal miner can't ever learn to code. But to say that you expect to teach all coal miners to become coders is absurd. It simply won't work.
In my experience, first year CS culls out the entrants by about 50% or so. Either because of the way it is taught, or something about how you have to think. But, as you said, not everybody groks it.
The reach-through feature allows the user to switch from interacting with the personal screen to reaching through it to interact with the tabletop or the space above it.
Right, and god forbid what I want to interact with involves electricity.
Brilliant, I'll just reach through this veil of mist and unplug this power cord or grab my cell phone.
Sounds like neat tech, but the whole getting sprayed in order to reach through it seems like something I could live without.
I despise the MAFIAA, but if the telecom doesn't have the right to disclose reasonable information upon request then that puts the copyright holders in a situation that gives them some real ammo to demand more law enforcement involvement.
You still need a legally acceptable threshold instead of "because we say so".
And Canada has privacy legislation which this more or less completely ignores.
Essentially it puts the rights of copyright holders (without requiring proof) above those of the people they claim to be investigating. And since we know the *AAs are pretty much incompetent (or malevolent) in how they do their searches, this will be abused and have very bad results.
Unfortunately, since the American *AAs are more or less writing draft legislation to put in the hands of lawmakers, the net result is a very one-sided piece of legislation which is designed to give them everything they want, and completely fuck the rest of us over.
The possibility of abuse of this law if it's passed is mind-boggling.
And that's kind of the point. The current government here is a "law and order, pro business, we can spy too" type of conservative.
They've been steadily trying to expand what government can do, ignoring our own national privacy laws, and generally trying to remake the laws into how they perceive how they should be (and generally ignoring anybody telling them why they can't).
Since we've got a First Past the Post electoral system, and even though they only got about 39% of the popular vote, they have a majority government and have more or less been doing as they please.
I do hope the Canadian people wakes up and take their politicians to task.
Trust me, we're trying.
The problem is the government wants to pass laws which do not adhere to either our Constitution or some of our other legal frameworks. And they more or less act like their will supercedes our laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Nostalgia.
These were the first computers many people used, and and the games were quite legendary to some people.
Because they can.
Now that they're all grown up and have these spiffy new toys to play with, you have to do something with it.
Vanity.
It has always been true that programmers tend to play with projects that appeal to them and which they find fun and interesting. That there's already a crap ton of the same kind of app is irrelevant. This one is mine dammit.
Why not?
So if in the process of learning to use something new, you decide to re-implement/emulate something old, what's the harm in it? Do you care that someone nerded out and created an emulator?
Girls.
Because, really, the ultimate pick up line is "Hey baby, wanna see my C64 emulator on my Raspberry Pi"? Right? Anyone?
Oh, I don't know ... some times it seems increasingly like the penalty for digital crimes outweighs the penalty for crimes done in person.
Which is why you can get more jail time for "hacking" a system put together by chimps than you could for manslaughter.
I don't think much has changed since Dickens to be honest.
The specifics change, but human nature doesn't.
This has been a problem for a *very* long time.
The Japanese actors would play the part seriously, and the people who did the voice over just went "oh, it's just a cartoon, I'm supposed to sound silly".
Akira is pretty famous for that ... it was a good movie, and the translation wasn't terrible, but some of the voice performances were pretty bad. It got re-released several years (probably more by now) in which they did a much better job on the voices.
Some of the recent stuff which came out of Studio Ghibli did a lot better job of this, because good actors who took it seriously were employed from the beginning.
And, nowadays, when you can have Lucy Liu and Dustin Hoffman doing Kung Fu Panda, people have realized that you can't treat the voice overs as an afterthought and just throw any old terrible performance at it.
There have been numerous movies (in numerous languages) over the years that I've decided were far better in their original language with subtitles. Hindi/Bollywood movies are an example of this .. most of them don't have voice over, and some of the ones which do just completely ruin the tone of the film.
If you start out with the intent and resources to do a good job of it, it can be quite good. But for many years it was just a thrown together afterthought with really terrible results.
Though, one of my all time favorite examples of what happens when people do it badly is the movie Ultraviolet. The supposed Chins (ethnic Chinese I assume) are supposed to be speaking Chinese, but they can be heard saying "sin loi", which is Vietnamese for "I'm sorry" and which is one of a handful of Vietnamese words I know. I don't believe a single word of Chinese is spoken.
I asked a Vietnamese friend about it, and his response was something along the lines of "white people don't care, just any Asian language you can find because you think we all look alike".
If you mean "drinking beer and figuring out new ways to pass the winter", sure.
But if you think Americans aren't sitting around drinking beer and coming up with novel uses for a shotgun, I assure you, you are misinformed.
The four words in the English language most likely to precede getting a Darwin award are "Hey guys, watch this".
Oh, man, does your wife do that to you too?
I hate it when she does that.
Bah, make procrastinate does all of the same things eventually.
Well, most of them anyway. :-P
Not arbitrary. Spend time at it. Get proficient.
In my experience, a first year programming does not a programmer make. It lays the foundation, but it doesn't get you there.
My old manager who spent a year writing JCL and then moved into management? He might have been a programmer at one point, but he had long since stopped by the time I knew him.
Me, I haven't written code in several years. And I'm not sure I'd consider myself a programmer any more.
Depends on the consequences of something bad happening.
Finding out the next flavor of Ben and Gerry's ice cream? Not such a big deal.
Finding out exactly where you can strike critical infrastructure by getting your report about how vulnerable the critical infrastructure is? Absolutely.
If you knew that the information was sensitive, and you didn't safeguard it ... then, I would argue you really missed the point.
So, if I get you to tighten a bolt, are you a mechanical engineer? If I scribble on a piece of paper am I an artist? If I add two numbers am I mathematician? Does putting on a bandaid make me a doctor?
I think not.
Write a program, and that's all you've done. Write a bunch of programs and demonstrate some proficiency at it, and then you can be a programmer. Same as with anything else.
Honest answer? Because it offends people's sensibilities that what are being hailed as the lucrative jobs and the future of the economy aren't being pursued by a large chunk of the population.
No, a couple are in HR as well, and there is at least one in the Finance department. Some days I'm not so sure about IT.
Have you ever been told you need to submit accurate time sheets for the week on Wednesdays? How the hell do you expect me to give you accurate timesheets for the entire week on a Wednesday when I usually work Wednesday and Friday evenings for an unknown period of time??? And if I had to submit it on Wednesday, don't grumble that I had to submit a correction on Monday to come up with the real number.
But, I digress. ;-)
So, you're categorically saying all graffiti is an eye sore? You've seen all of the graffiti in the world and concluded none of it has merit? You've discounted the possibility that people have asked people to put up murals in some places?
Wow, you are good. What's it like to be omniscient? Did you know I was going to ask that?
Just because you don't like it doesn't prevent it from being art.
There has been graffiti for thousands of years in one form or another, and there will continue to be. Hell, cave paintings can be considered some of the first forms of graffiti.
There are places which have dedicated graffiti walls, because some of the art is pretty damned incredible.
Does changing it from being on a wall where you have permission magically turn it into art? Or does it just make it legitimate vandalism?
Meh, by the time you learn to be one of these 'muralists' you've gone through a lot of bad graffiti.
Sometimes graffiti is political or culturally significant (think "Eric Clapton is God"), and has been with us since the ancient Greeks. It's not likely to go away.
So, what do we infer about a poster calling themselves 'interkin3tic'?
Does this convey credibility to you? Or should we discount your opinion as that of someone who has allowed l337 speak to become a factor in his life?
Don't confuse "tagging" with "graffiti".
Tagging requires neither skill nor talent and is done by bored kids who think they're gang members.
Actual graffiti artists (think Banksy) can create some really good pieces which people actually collect.
Some graffiti artists have some pretty mad skills, and create some really good pieces.
Not really. Not by a long shot.
I can teach you to take a photograph, that doesn't make you a photographer.
You can teach someone the concept of coding, and they might even make a couple of simple programs.
That doesn't make you a 'programmer' any more than giving someone a driving lesson makes them a race car driver.
I've encountered people who could, in some ways, write code. But since they didn't have the slightest idea of how to do it well or effectively, they were dangerous amateurs who believed they were programmers. We had one guy (lasted less than a month) who wrote garbage code like a first year student with no real understanding. Trying to make him understand the difference between what he wrote and what we needed was futile. I eventually walked away from him, told him he was useless, and stopped giving him tasks. My manager, upon seeing his code, went the next step and got rid of him
Trust me. In practice, there is a very large difference between "knowing how to write some code 'n stuff" and actually being proficient at designing, writing, and maintaining software.
Hell, I've know a few people with Masters degrees in CS who are actually terrible programmers. They can make something which kinda works for their area of research, but in general, they were useless.
I even knew one guy who said he had a Masters in CS who had never coded before -- how that happened boggles my mind. That's like being a chemist who has never been in a lab.
Well, it is still a fact that I think Zuckerschmuck is a clueless wanker who believes in a simplistic solution to a complex problem, while at the same time being a massive douchebag.
How was that? I'm not sure I know which words are meant to convey piety, and I may have missed the whole platitude thing, I'm not sure. ;-)
I'm middling at math, but gravitated to programming.
When I was in university, I knew people who were brilliant at math but couldn't code worth shit and couldn't grasp some of the basic concepts or programming. (Once had to explain to a fellow student why if her numerical analysis project was going to take 9 months to run as she'd written it, she would fail the course -- she was scary brilliant at math, but couldn't figure out how to use loops and if statements, it just made no sense to her.)
As much as everybody says "programming is just math", it really really isn't. It's rooted in math, but the actual practice of coding is nothing like it (not to me at least).
There's a reason why computer courses have a double tassel distribution ... not everybody can wrap their head around what it means. I have no idea of why that is, but it's been a real thing for a very long time.
Again, nobody is saying a specific coal miner can't ever learn to code. But to say that you expect to teach all coal miners to become coders is absurd. It simply won't work.
In my experience, first year CS culls out the entrants by about 50% or so. Either because of the way it is taught, or something about how you have to think. But, as you said, not everybody groks it.
Let them eat code.
I don't think anybody is saying "there is no coal miner on the planet you can teach to code".
What they're saying is "do not count on training all coal miners to write code and expect that to work".
Zuckerschmuck saying "teach them to code and everything will be great", then he really is clueless and out of touch. But, we knew that anyway.
Right, and god forbid what I want to interact with involves electricity.
Brilliant, I'll just reach through this veil of mist and unplug this power cord or grab my cell phone.
Sounds like neat tech, but the whole getting sprayed in order to reach through it seems like something I could live without.
I'm afraid my poor little brain is ill equipped to understand this.
So, if there was 'nothing', WTF is there to be 'quantum fluctuating'?
A fluctuation of nothing produced everything?
Sometimes (okay, often) ... when people speak of quantum mechanics I have no idea of WTF they're saying or how it translates into reality.
You still need a legally acceptable threshold instead of "because we say so".
And Canada has privacy legislation which this more or less completely ignores.
Essentially it puts the rights of copyright holders (without requiring proof) above those of the people they claim to be investigating. And since we know the *AAs are pretty much incompetent (or malevolent) in how they do their searches, this will be abused and have very bad results.
Unfortunately, since the American *AAs are more or less writing draft legislation to put in the hands of lawmakers, the net result is a very one-sided piece of legislation which is designed to give them everything they want, and completely fuck the rest of us over.
And that's kind of the point. The current government here is a "law and order, pro business, we can spy too" type of conservative.
They've been steadily trying to expand what government can do, ignoring our own national privacy laws, and generally trying to remake the laws into how they perceive how they should be (and generally ignoring anybody telling them why they can't).
Since we've got a First Past the Post electoral system, and even though they only got about 39% of the popular vote, they have a majority government and have more or less been doing as they please.
Trust me, we're trying.
The problem is the government wants to pass laws which do not adhere to either our Constitution or some of our other legal frameworks. And they more or less act like their will supercedes our laws.