but losing 100,000 tons of matter every second it'll only be around another few hundred million years
It's numbers like this that really make my head spin.
Yes, I get that planets are big items, and space is big and vast... but I can't even begin to imagine the sheer amount of material we're talking about in even just a few hours, let alone the next "few hundred million years".
Anybody got a car analogy or something which might put these numbers into a little better perspective for those of us who don't work on scales like this?
I can't even begin to wrap my head around it... a google search for one of the biggest things I could think of says that a Nimitz class aircraft carrier is about 101,000 tons. I saw one once, and it was utterly huge.
The idea of something that big boiling off every second for a few hundred million years makes my head hurt.
In an urban setting, guns are like fire extinquishers. They're something you hope you never need, but you should have one around anyways.
I suspect without some pretty specialized training, if the average person find themselves in a position where they feel the best way out is to wave around a knife... they're likely going to end up on the losing side of that equation.
I somehow doubt that the average person finding themselves in a knife fight will have any ability to use it like they expect.
Like the scanners at airports... I'm not sure I'd be willing to entrust my health to the lowest bidder on a government contract.
And, of course, no matter what happens with the safety record of this, I'm sure it will become a crime to refuse to be scanned by this. You're not allowed to tell an law enforcement agent that his lack of medical training means he's not qualified to tell you it's perfectly safe.
I know at airports I won't get into it... frisk me down if you like. When you're talking about cops, this is to save them needing to pat you down.
To me this is a violation of the 4th amendment, but I'm sure the NYPD won't care about that and the Attorney General will say it doesn't apply here.
Don't try to go swimming with that GPS unit. The connections to the screen go bad.:-(
Really? It seems ruggedized and like they've specifically made it waterproof. Maybe everywhere except the screen... the battery compartment is a screw down with a rubber gasket
Good to know though... it's never been for a swim so far.
Perhaps she actually *likes* Monty Python. I know girls who do...
To this day, I am surprised by the fact that my wife makes more Python references than I do... and often obscure ones.
She's not into geek things usually, but apparently some old room-mates were huge fans... so occasionally I've looked at her like "WTF are you on about", and then she tells me which Python sketch she's just quoted.
I have to use it at work under OSX and in a lot of ways it's worse than the virii it protects against. I am looking right now at a computer with 2 fully-loaded cores that has been viris scanning for 25 solid hours.
Some years ago at a previous job, IT decided that 10:30 am would be the perfect time to schedule a full scan of the computers. The rationale being that the computers wouldn't be hibernating or powered off.
So, promptly at 10:30 am, my machine would lock up and be 100% CPU and memory bound for about 2 hours or more. I asked IT to reschedule it, as it was interfering with my work.. they said no. I told them that I was going to bill them 2 hours/day for the time lost... they said I can't do that (at the time, they billed customers $1500/day for me).
Then I finally told them that since I had local admin privileges, and unless they were willing to change it, I was simply going to uninstall the AV software... which I ended up doing. And, when people started to uninstall it, they found they had no choice but to change the schedule... because it was making it impossible for people to do their jobs and HR didn't like the fact that everyone was in the break room bitching about the fact that their computers were unavailable to them.
In my experience, most enterprise AV solutions cause more lost productivity than the things they're meant to prevent.
so it pops up a modal dialog box in front of whatever you're trying to do
I'm about one upgrade of AVG away from finding an alternative... because it suddenly decides that it wants to update, and that I need to reboot right now, or postpone as much as 60 minutes. The problem is that I'm using the computer for my job, and I will tell it when it can reboot or update... but when it pops up a modal dialog while you're typing, with "OK" selected by default, you can get a case where you've clicked "sure, go ahead and reboot" before you even realize the dialog has been presented. So all of a sudden your machine starts shutting down out from under you.
AVG didn't always suck, but over the last few versions it has become nag-ware which wants to instal crap toolbars in my browser and otherwise do shit that I've not asked it to do.
The use of a modal dialog box that grabs focus should lead to someone being staked to an ant-hill in the hot sun -- I'm running more than your program, and just because you want to do something doesn't mean I don't get a vote.
Unfortunately, I find that AV in general is far more pushy and annoying about deciding it's in charge.
If you follow the link in the earlier story, 69 of the 92 GPS receivers had issues. That's either a lot of interference or a lot of older GPS units.
I've got a hand-held Magelan SporTrak I bought almost 10 years ago.
It's not something I'd use in my car, because it doesn't have street level maps. But, for hiking/mountain biking in areas where I'm on trails I don't know well, I still expect it to work.
If LightSquared is bitching that the test unfairly shows that older receivers have a problem, well, then they're now claiming that all of the older GPS units are somehow "wrong" and it is "unfair" to test their stuff against things which are already in service.
That to me sounds like a company saying it's not fair they be required that an old car can still drive on their roads and bridges. The GPS spec has been around for quite a while, and there is an expectation that the older devices should still work with it... if their stuff breaks that, then I'd say they're the ones doing something wrong.
I will miss Kodak for nostalgia reasons, not so much for any modern technology that we're losing. Kodachrome got phased out a few years ago, and their consumer cameras and printers, in my experience, are utterly crap.
I haven't used film in several years.
Now, if Nikon goes away, I will weep... but, Kodak as it stands today? Not so much.
Interesting comment, but I'm with Dijkstra on this one:
One of my profs once laughed at me when I said his code had a goto and we shouldn't do it that way (because that's what we'd been taught in class).
Then he sat me down and walked through the code, and explained what the code was doing, and the failure modes that made it necessary to use a goto. This was OS-level code, and performing some very fiddly things, and several layers deep in looping structures. You'd have had to put in twice as much code to check the error conditions necessary to peel out of that, and since it was essentially working on bare metal, there was simply no room to add much more overhead.
He did manage to convince me that a goto isn't something you do because it's convenient, but that in some code, in some languages there simply isn't a better alternative to bail out of some code in the event of a failure.
I have worked in a couple of languages (one being C, the other proprietary) in which a goto was the cleanest/only way to get out of the code, and get to a place where you could do all of your cleanup and get out cleanly.
It has its place, but it should definitely be used sparingly. Blindly saying never use a goto doesn't always give you the best solution.
This only work so long as you're content with what you can get for 7 cents/print. Like everything else in the race to the bottom, you get what you pay for - and the 7 cent print is the equivalent of a Big Mac. Cheap, satisfying in the short term, but utter crap.
Actually, this was from a place that was doing full on photo processing with the machine and all that... a 4x6 glossy print on proper photo paper and with the good inks, not inkjet.
It was as good a quality of print as you'd be able to get from one of those places... and it's a "grandma" gift where she got a bunch of prints of a family event. We weren't looking for poster sized prints, or fine art prints.
Granted, that might have been a sale, because I see now the same place is about 19 cents for a 4x6 print. Still, even at 19 cents, I don't think you could buy the ink and paper for that much.
Why would I want my dev environment to have leaderboards and be "gamified"?
I'm glad it's only a plugin, but to me this is part of the annoying trend that everything we do needs to be tied into social media... I mean, "they can also brag about their achievements on Facebook and Twitter". Why on earth does everything we do nowadays need to be tied into Facebook and Twitter?
I'm waiting for the first wave of toilets with integration to those sites... then we will truly widespread "Twitter Shitters" and other bits of stupidity.
Then again, maybe I'm just old and uncool, and all of the cool kids are doing this... but to me this just sounds like something which is utterly pointless.
Who prints anything at home these days, anyway? Especially photos....
Printing and photocopying we actually do in our house... expense reports and other things like that being the main driver. Not daily, but often enough.
Photos, I've been convinced for the last few years isn't cost effective to print... you can get prints at an actual photo place for so cheap now, you couldn't buy the ink and paper for what it would cost you. I think the last time I got prints it was about 7 cents/print.
However, the last two photo printers we had were Kodak... and they were absolute crap. One failed and got replaced within a month or so, and its replacement died a similar way. It was cheaply made, worked poorly, and didn't last very long. We pretty much decided we'd never buy another Kodak product again.
So, Kodak's demise may have been coming for years... but in the end, I blame the quality of their consumer products. They were trying to compete on the bottom end, but in the end, it was just a race to the bottom.
Event Horizon huh? Scientists have a sick sick humor!
Why is it a sick sense of humor to call a telescope looking at a blockhole Event Horizon? Black Holes are one of the only things that have event horizons I believe.
It is quite obvious that the use of $ meant USD, just like it does 95% of the time on the internet. If you want to have hurt feelings, go right on ahead.
The poster asserted that nobody ever uses the $ sign to represent anything but US dollars, which is clearly false. All I'm saying.
Seriously though, for currency, other than USD?
Not if they want people to know what the hell they're talking about.
Have you ever been outside of the US? Or are you just talking out of your ass?
In Canada we have a dollar... the symbol is the standard '$' used by most places that have currency they call dollars. There is no other symbol on the keyboard, the way you differentiate is something like "$100 CDN" -- and within Canada, we don't even do that.
If it wasn't SOPA protest blackout day, you could read a list of places, but this will pretty much show you what is used. Almost 30 countries besides the US express their currency with the $ sign.
I'm afraid if you're claiming that only the US dollar is described using the $ sign you're completely mistaken... because it's a pretty widespread symbol.
Apple is "exciting" people about "technology" the same way Louis Vuitton is "exciting" people about, you know, apparel design and textile technology. Both companies sell an image and the fashion accessories to build it, and most people buy their products exactly as a fashion accessory.
With Apple it can actually get worse -- if you make the Apple device the dominant way you access information. That's fine and dandy, until you consider that when you buy the shiny little toy, you only get permission to access the world through it the way the designers of the technology believe it should be accessed, through their "approved" modes.
The flipside to this is that people who would ordinarily be afraid of/uninterested in technology actually use it.
My mother in law said a few months ago she'd like an iPod... now, she's in her mid 60's, so if you believe she's buying it as a fashion accessory, then you're an idiot who only sees this one way.
She only recently got herself a laptop, and isn't exactly the most computer savvy person there is. However, we set her up with iTunes since we figured it would be the easiest to use (and we already use it ourselves). She has successfully learned to rip her CDs -- all she does is pop it into the drive, and click "OK" to import it. She's decided she's like an iPod for her walks, and, as she put it, "as soon as you start hiding from these things, you're basically dead".
She doesn't give a rats bum about how people will see her with this... and quite frankly, neither do 99% of all the people I know with Apple devices. It really is function, not fashion.
My mother in law isn't going to want to buy some generic MP3 player, learn to manage the files on it, understand what MP3s actually are, or worry about the open-ness of the format. She wants to click the buttons, and have the device work -- which, quite frankly, is why I like my iPods/iPad/Apple TV... because they do what I want them to, integrate well with each other, and generally provide a nice user experience.
So, maybe Apple's biggest strength is that they can make technology which is accessible to people? Sure, the geeks here on Slashdot will bitch and moan about the walled garden (and apparently bent straws)... but in terms of an integrated, functional user experience, there's a lot to be said for it.
Maybe in high school or Hollywood these things are fashion accessories... but the reality is that Apple has made their money by selling technology to people who don't want to know much about technology.
The people who insist on ogg vorbis or who want to port the Linux kernel to their device? Well, they're a different market... and one I would argue is smaller than the niche Apple is pursuing.
Put another way: just because the general population has a makeup of a certain distribution, why do we assume some activity Y with a distribution different to that global distribution indicates some kind of undesirable situation?
Because, in trying to explain it, you end up with a few undesirable/lacking/weak answers:
One group is inherently better at that type of task due to a specific trait
One group doesn't like something because they've been socialized that way
One group doesn't like something because it's a cultural thing
In the end, most of those are found to be lousy answers... it seems preposterous that one group should be inherently better at the task if there's no provable difference in that kind of task... if they've been socialized that way, they can be socialized the other way... why should it be cultural?
It seems absurd to assume a normal distribution in all populations being measures... but it also seems bizarre to see something grossly skewed to one side or the other.
So far, there's no credible evidence that women should fare less well at programming than men simply because they're women... but, there's also not much in the way of a good, definable reason why women wouldn't be interested in it either, other than socialization or the fact that they've not done it yet.
Even in the early/mid 80's when I was getting into computers, people were wondering why it was that it was largely men who were pursuing it. Now almost 30 years later... we still are.
I must confess, after well over a decade in the industry, plus school before that... the number of female programmers I've known is quite small.
I've known one or two women with PhDs who were more like the architects, not sure how much they coded any more. I've worked with a couple of women who were consultants... very technical, again, very smart... but I'm only talking about 1-2 people over 15 years. In university I remember a maximum of about 5 women who were pursuing CS as a major, and I'm pretty sure at least half of them transferred out.
But full on 'code monkey' kinda geeks with all that entails? I'm not sure I've actually ever known any. Does anybody have any accurate statistics as to what percentage of programmers are women?
In my experience, it has always been well below 10%.. not saying that's how it "should" be, just that in my experience you're already talking about a smaller percentage of all coders... and then the number of people I've known actively involved in Open Source projects goes down by another huge jump.
Even the women I have known who work in tech have always manifested as a different 'kind' of geek... more like the guy I knew who played university football but had a Master's in comp sci; smart, capable, but away from the office didn't have any of the 'geek' traits of the stereotype. Not as obsessed with the minutia of things or Star Trek, and generally with better developed social skills.;-)
There were plenty of doofuses that spent high school throwing a pencil at the kid in front of them. Trade school is good for them.
Now, that's highly unfair.
Not everyone who isn't going to go to university/college is a "doofus". I know loads of people who are very smart, but who had no interest in academia.
One of my friends has a son who is going to culinary school because he has no interest in going into tech like his dad. One of the smartest coders I know skipped university altogether, travelled the world, and taught himself to code. I also know at least one person who likely has a genius IQ, but who is a welder because he can't bear the thought of sitting at a desk and would rather work with his hands (and, likely has a little ADD to be honest).
I agree with everything else you say, and I concede there are doofuses... but that doesn't mean trade school is their exclusive domain. As you say, a lot of kids will do far better in this kind of environment than the usual high school.
This sounds like a trade school. High School should be about learning how to think and process information.
Well, let's face it... not everybody is going to go to university. Nor should they be expected to.
A high-school that focuses on a specific trade is at least trying to ensure that they're teaching the kids something they can use. Because, it's entirely possible that nothing they'd learn in history class is going to help them get jobs.
Trade schools at least recognize that not all of us are (or want to be) academics. It's more beneficial to ensure that these people are still getting an education that is of use to them than it is to discourage them and lead them to drop out.
Why does there need to be a "one size fits all" approach to schooling? Better to help them get somewhere better than being a high-school drop-out with no trade than to assume they should all be taught stuff they're not interesting in/don't have the aptitude for.
That wouldn't have anything to do with finally having the computing power to do whole Earth weather modelling, would it?
Could be... could be crank science... could be conspiracy theories, aliens, Mayan Doomsday calendars, bad breath... or irrefutable fact.
My point was up until the first time most of us heard of El Nino a decade or so ago... well, nobody had ever heard of it. And then the next year it was El Nina... and then every year of so since it's been one or the other that's causing something or another.
It may well actually be causing all sorts of things... but my perception is that it's now being flogged as the cause of so many things as to make one a little skeptical.
Holy cow, up until 10-15 years ago (I don't remember exactly when) most of us had never even heard of el nino/la nina.
Now it seems like there's a fairly regular interval at which people come out and say that one or the other of these is the cause of all sorts of great weirdness.
I honestly can't decide if there's any validity to it, or if people are just spending their research grants to tie their research to something which is on a 5-year (ish) cycle... if you need to wait for the next cycle to continue your research, you get funded for longer.
It may well be that this does drive some of this... but I've heard it used to try to explain to many things by now it's hard not to think of it as the bogeyman.
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I think you're off by a couple of orders of magnitude on that one ... unless an H3 weighs 5000 tons
I'd say it would be closer to 50,000 H3s per second based on a little quick math and assumption of 2 tons each.
It's numbers like this that really make my head spin.
Yes, I get that planets are big items, and space is big and vast ... but I can't even begin to imagine the sheer amount of material we're talking about in even just a few hours, let alone the next "few hundred million years".
Anybody got a car analogy or something which might put these numbers into a little better perspective for those of us who don't work on scales like this?
I can't even begin to wrap my head around it ... a google search for one of the biggest things I could think of says that a Nimitz class aircraft carrier is about 101,000 tons. I saw one once, and it was utterly huge.
The idea of something that big boiling off every second for a few hundred million years makes my head hurt.
I suspect without some pretty specialized training, if the average person find themselves in a position where they feel the best way out is to wave around a knife ... they're likely going to end up on the losing side of that equation.
I somehow doubt that the average person finding themselves in a knife fight will have any ability to use it like they expect.
Like the scanners at airports ... I'm not sure I'd be willing to entrust my health to the lowest bidder on a government contract.
And, of course, no matter what happens with the safety record of this, I'm sure it will become a crime to refuse to be scanned by this. You're not allowed to tell an law enforcement agent that his lack of medical training means he's not qualified to tell you it's perfectly safe.
I know at airports I won't get into it ... frisk me down if you like. When you're talking about cops, this is to save them needing to pat you down.
To me this is a violation of the 4th amendment, but I'm sure the NYPD won't care about that and the Attorney General will say it doesn't apply here.
Papers please, comrade!
Really? It seems ruggedized and like they've specifically made it waterproof. Maybe everywhere except the screen ... the battery compartment is a screw down with a rubber gasket
Good to know though ... it's never been for a swim so far.
To this day, I am surprised by the fact that my wife makes more Python references than I do ... and often obscure ones.
She's not into geek things usually, but apparently some old room-mates were huge fans ... so occasionally I've looked at her like "WTF are you on about", and then she tells me which Python sketch she's just quoted.
Some years ago at a previous job, IT decided that 10:30 am would be the perfect time to schedule a full scan of the computers. The rationale being that the computers wouldn't be hibernating or powered off.
So, promptly at 10:30 am, my machine would lock up and be 100% CPU and memory bound for about 2 hours or more. I asked IT to reschedule it, as it was interfering with my work .. they said no. I told them that I was going to bill them 2 hours/day for the time lost ... they said I can't do that (at the time, they billed customers $1500/day for me).
Then I finally told them that since I had local admin privileges, and unless they were willing to change it, I was simply going to uninstall the AV software ... which I ended up doing. And, when people started to uninstall it, they found they had no choice but to change the schedule ... because it was making it impossible for people to do their jobs and HR didn't like the fact that everyone was in the break room bitching about the fact that their computers were unavailable to them.
In my experience, most enterprise AV solutions cause more lost productivity than the things they're meant to prevent.
I'm about one upgrade of AVG away from finding an alternative ... because it suddenly decides that it wants to update, and that I need to reboot right now, or postpone as much as 60 minutes. The problem is that I'm using the computer for my job, and I will tell it when it can reboot or update ... but when it pops up a modal dialog while you're typing, with "OK" selected by default, you can get a case where you've clicked "sure, go ahead and reboot" before you even realize the dialog has been presented. So all of a sudden your machine starts shutting down out from under you.
AVG didn't always suck, but over the last few versions it has become nag-ware which wants to instal crap toolbars in my browser and otherwise do shit that I've not asked it to do.
The use of a modal dialog box that grabs focus should lead to someone being staked to an ant-hill in the hot sun -- I'm running more than your program, and just because you want to do something doesn't mean I don't get a vote.
Unfortunately, I find that AV in general is far more pushy and annoying about deciding it's in charge.
I've got a hand-held Magelan SporTrak I bought almost 10 years ago.
It's not something I'd use in my car, because it doesn't have street level maps. But, for hiking/mountain biking in areas where I'm on trails I don't know well, I still expect it to work.
If LightSquared is bitching that the test unfairly shows that older receivers have a problem, well, then they're now claiming that all of the older GPS units are somehow "wrong" and it is "unfair" to test their stuff against things which are already in service.
That to me sounds like a company saying it's not fair they be required that an old car can still drive on their roads and bridges. The GPS spec has been around for quite a while, and there is an expectation that the older devices should still work with it ... if their stuff breaks that, then I'd say they're the ones doing something wrong.
I will miss Kodak for nostalgia reasons, not so much for any modern technology that we're losing. Kodachrome got phased out a few years ago, and their consumer cameras and printers, in my experience, are utterly crap.
I haven't used film in several years.
Now, if Nikon goes away, I will weep ... but, Kodak as it stands today? Not so much.
One of my profs once laughed at me when I said his code had a goto and we shouldn't do it that way (because that's what we'd been taught in class).
Then he sat me down and walked through the code, and explained what the code was doing, and the failure modes that made it necessary to use a goto. This was OS-level code, and performing some very fiddly things, and several layers deep in looping structures. You'd have had to put in twice as much code to check the error conditions necessary to peel out of that, and since it was essentially working on bare metal, there was simply no room to add much more overhead.
He did manage to convince me that a goto isn't something you do because it's convenient, but that in some code, in some languages there simply isn't a better alternative to bail out of some code in the event of a failure.
I have worked in a couple of languages (one being C, the other proprietary) in which a goto was the cleanest/only way to get out of the code, and get to a place where you could do all of your cleanup and get out cleanly.
It has its place, but it should definitely be used sparingly. Blindly saying never use a goto doesn't always give you the best solution.
Actually, this was from a place that was doing full on photo processing with the machine and all that ... a 4x6 glossy print on proper photo paper and with the good inks, not inkjet.
It was as good a quality of print as you'd be able to get from one of those places ... and it's a "grandma" gift where she got a bunch of prints of a family event. We weren't looking for poster sized prints, or fine art prints.
Granted, that might have been a sale, because I see now the same place is about 19 cents for a 4x6 print. Still, even at 19 cents, I don't think you could buy the ink and paper for that much.
Why would I want my dev environment to have leaderboards and be "gamified"?
I'm glad it's only a plugin, but to me this is part of the annoying trend that everything we do needs to be tied into social media ... I mean, "they can also brag about their achievements on Facebook and Twitter". Why on earth does everything we do nowadays need to be tied into Facebook and Twitter?
I'm waiting for the first wave of toilets with integration to those sites ... then we will truly widespread "Twitter Shitters" and other bits of stupidity.
Then again, maybe I'm just old and uncool, and all of the cool kids are doing this ... but to me this just sounds like something which is utterly pointless.
Printing and photocopying we actually do in our house ... expense reports and other things like that being the main driver. Not daily, but often enough.
Photos, I've been convinced for the last few years isn't cost effective to print ... you can get prints at an actual photo place for so cheap now, you couldn't buy the ink and paper for what it would cost you. I think the last time I got prints it was about 7 cents/print.
However, the last two photo printers we had were Kodak ... and they were absolute crap. One failed and got replaced within a month or so, and its replacement died a similar way. It was cheaply made, worked poorly, and didn't last very long. We pretty much decided we'd never buy another Kodak product again.
So, Kodak's demise may have been coming for years ... but in the end, I blame the quality of their consumer products. They were trying to compete on the bottom end, but in the end, it was just a race to the bottom.
Holy crap! It's the lesser known cubic blockhole ... much more sneaky and secretive than blackholes.
I spell goodly! :-P
Why is it a sick sense of humor to call a telescope looking at a blockhole Event Horizon? Black Holes are one of the only things that have event horizons I believe.
The poster asserted that nobody ever uses the $ sign to represent anything but US dollars, which is clearly false. All I'm saying.
Have you ever been outside of the US? Or are you just talking out of your ass?
In Canada we have a dollar ... the symbol is the standard '$' used by most places that have currency they call dollars. There is no other symbol on the keyboard, the way you differentiate is something like "$100 CDN" -- and within Canada, we don't even do that.
If it wasn't SOPA protest blackout day, you could read a list of places, but this will pretty much show you what is used. Almost 30 countries besides the US express their currency with the $ sign.
I'm afraid if you're claiming that only the US dollar is described using the $ sign you're completely mistaken ... because it's a pretty widespread symbol.
The flipside to this is that people who would ordinarily be afraid of/uninterested in technology actually use it.
My mother in law said a few months ago she'd like an iPod ... now, she's in her mid 60's, so if you believe she's buying it as a fashion accessory, then you're an idiot who only sees this one way.
She only recently got herself a laptop, and isn't exactly the most computer savvy person there is. However, we set her up with iTunes since we figured it would be the easiest to use (and we already use it ourselves). She has successfully learned to rip her CDs -- all she does is pop it into the drive, and click "OK" to import it. She's decided she's like an iPod for her walks, and, as she put it, "as soon as you start hiding from these things, you're basically dead".
She doesn't give a rats bum about how people will see her with this ... and quite frankly, neither do 99% of all the people I know with Apple devices. It really is function, not fashion.
My mother in law isn't going to want to buy some generic MP3 player, learn to manage the files on it, understand what MP3s actually are, or worry about the open-ness of the format. She wants to click the buttons, and have the device work -- which, quite frankly, is why I like my iPods/iPad/Apple TV ... because they do what I want them to, integrate well with each other, and generally provide a nice user experience.
So, maybe Apple's biggest strength is that they can make technology which is accessible to people? Sure, the geeks here on Slashdot will bitch and moan about the walled garden (and apparently bent straws) ... but in terms of an integrated, functional user experience, there's a lot to be said for it.
Maybe in high school or Hollywood these things are fashion accessories ... but the reality is that Apple has made their money by selling technology to people who don't want to know much about technology.
The people who insist on ogg vorbis or who want to port the Linux kernel to their device? Well, they're a different market ... and one I would argue is smaller than the niche Apple is pursuing.
Because, in trying to explain it, you end up with a few undesirable/lacking/weak answers:
In the end, most of those are found to be lousy answers ... it seems preposterous that one group should be inherently better at the task if there's no provable difference in that kind of task ... if they've been socialized that way, they can be socialized the other way ... why should it be cultural?
It seems absurd to assume a normal distribution in all populations being measures ... but it also seems bizarre to see something grossly skewed to one side or the other.
So far, there's no credible evidence that women should fare less well at programming than men simply because they're women ... but, there's also not much in the way of a good, definable reason why women wouldn't be interested in it either, other than socialization or the fact that they've not done it yet.
Even in the early/mid 80's when I was getting into computers, people were wondering why it was that it was largely men who were pursuing it. Now almost 30 years later ... we still are.
I must confess, after well over a decade in the industry, plus school before that ... the number of female programmers I've known is quite small.
I've known one or two women with PhDs who were more like the architects, not sure how much they coded any more. I've worked with a couple of women who were consultants ... very technical, again, very smart ... but I'm only talking about 1-2 people over 15 years. In university I remember a maximum of about 5 women who were pursuing CS as a major, and I'm pretty sure at least half of them transferred out.
But full on 'code monkey' kinda geeks with all that entails? I'm not sure I've actually ever known any. Does anybody have any accurate statistics as to what percentage of programmers are women?
In my experience, it has always been well below 10% .. not saying that's how it "should" be, just that in my experience you're already talking about a smaller percentage of all coders ... and then the number of people I've known actively involved in Open Source projects goes down by another huge jump.
Even the women I have known who work in tech have always manifested as a different 'kind' of geek ... more like the guy I knew who played university football but had a Master's in comp sci; smart, capable, but away from the office didn't have any of the 'geek' traits of the stereotype. Not as obsessed with the minutia of things or Star Trek, and generally with better developed social skills. ;-)
No, I got that from the rest of the post ... I just wouldn't want to imply that trade school is only for "doofuses".
As the duly elected representative of doofuses everywhere ... apology accepted. ;-)
Now, that's highly unfair.
Not everyone who isn't going to go to university/college is a "doofus". I know loads of people who are very smart, but who had no interest in academia.
One of my friends has a son who is going to culinary school because he has no interest in going into tech like his dad. One of the smartest coders I know skipped university altogether, travelled the world, and taught himself to code. I also know at least one person who likely has a genius IQ, but who is a welder because he can't bear the thought of sitting at a desk and would rather work with his hands (and, likely has a little ADD to be honest).
I agree with everything else you say, and I concede there are doofuses ... but that doesn't mean trade school is their exclusive domain. As you say, a lot of kids will do far better in this kind of environment than the usual high school.
Well, let's face it ... not everybody is going to go to university. Nor should they be expected to.
A high-school that focuses on a specific trade is at least trying to ensure that they're teaching the kids something they can use. Because, it's entirely possible that nothing they'd learn in history class is going to help them get jobs.
Trade schools at least recognize that not all of us are (or want to be) academics. It's more beneficial to ensure that these people are still getting an education that is of use to them than it is to discourage them and lead them to drop out.
Why does there need to be a "one size fits all" approach to schooling? Better to help them get somewhere better than being a high-school drop-out with no trade than to assume they should all be taught stuff they're not interesting in/don't have the aptitude for.
Could be ... could be crank science ... could be conspiracy theories, aliens, Mayan Doomsday calendars, bad breath ... or irrefutable fact.
My point was up until the first time most of us heard of El Nino a decade or so ago ... well, nobody had ever heard of it. And then the next year it was El Nina ... and then every year of so since it's been one or the other that's causing something or another.
It may well actually be causing all sorts of things ... but my perception is that it's now being flogged as the cause of so many things as to make one a little skeptical.
Holy cow, up until 10-15 years ago (I don't remember exactly when) most of us had never even heard of el nino/la nina.
Now it seems like there's a fairly regular interval at which people come out and say that one or the other of these is the cause of all sorts of great weirdness.
I honestly can't decide if there's any validity to it, or if people are just spending their research grants to tie their research to something which is on a 5-year (ish) cycle ... if you need to wait for the next cycle to continue your research, you get funded for longer.
It may well be that this does drive some of this ... but I've heard it used to try to explain to many things by now it's hard not to think of it as the bogeyman.