We hear all the time that "any trade school code monkey could write that software" or "my nephew could program that" or "it's a small matter of programming". Yet here we have a prime example that it's not that easy, is it? I think people (both individually and in aggregate) *still* don't really understand software. It's understandable, because it really is different. Name another product where the design/is/ the product.
Let me just put a word in here from a DoD employee: the government gets this, and says it's okay for smartphones (even with cameras!), just don't bring them into sensitive areas. The policy is different from place to place, but I have to say that if the *government* gets this, then it's basically over and private industry should adapt or die. Of course, where I work, we have very technical people, people who know the value of having a general purpose computer in their pocket; in decades of yore, you would have found them carrying HP and TI calculators, and if you told them they couldn't bring them in "due to security", you'd be looking for a new employee real quick.
A perfect program/OS would very quickly gobble up all available memory by storing and caching useful stuff...and then free it up the instant it was needed elsewhere. That turns out to be harder than it sounds, since procs generally don't know or care about totally memory usage,
Maybe if we had some sort of super-program, something that could monitor the other programs and decide what RAM is needed where. It would operate on behalf of these programs to make sure that the most commonly used data was cached in RAM, even between different processes. Why, there could even be a system so that processes could just ask for data and this super-program would cache it. On second thought, that would never work.
At least they believe in something that actually exists unlike the billions of nutjobs who believe in an imaginary deity.
I'd have to take issue with that; most Apple fanbois believe in the technological superiority of Apple products over everything else, which is questionable at best. Many of them also tend to proseletize quite strongly, and ignore the bad things that Apple does, much like catholics gloss over pederasty.
Simply not believing in a god figure is not atheism.
So what would you call it? I think you fail etymology. Theism = belief in a deity; adding the 'a' prefix means you negate the meaning, ie Atheism = no belief in a deity. Just like apolitical, asexual, etc, etc.
You know, it's farcical that we have a word for people who lack a belief in a deity, yet we don't have a word for people who lack a belief in other mythical things. Where's the word for people who don't believe in unicorns? Or leprechauns? An even better question would be, why can't the theists just leave atheists alone, instead of trying to force their beliefs on them?
When we were saying the same thing to apple fans here, we were getting bashed, modded down etc.
Im wondering what will they come up with against this article.
They will bash it and tag it "flamebait" and "troll", as well as mod you down. I'm also figuring someone will claim that "it's okay because Microsoft and Google have the same effects", someone else will claim that "people love Apple because their products are technically superior", and other fallacious apologetics will be spewed. That's why I have people like you friended, so my reading habits (I mostly read slashdot for the comments) aren't affected by the fanbois. Just waiting for jedidiah and others who dare to question Apple to show up. This ought to be good:)
Each of these cults correspond to one of the two antagonists in the age of Reformation. In the realm of the Apple Macintosh, as in catholic Europe, worshipers peer devoutly into screens filled with "icons." All is sound and imagery and Appledom. Even words look like decorative filigree in exotic typeface. The greatest icon of all, the inviolable Apple itself, stands in the dominate position at the upper-left corner of the screen. A central corporate headquarters decrees the form of all rites and practices. Infallible doctrine issues from one executive officer whose selection occurs in a sealed board room. Should anyone in his curia question his powers, the offender is excommunicated into outer darkness. The expelled heretic founds a new company, mutters obscurely of the coming age and the next computer, then disappears into silence, taking his stockholders with him. The mother company forbids financial competition as sternly as it stifles ideological competition; if you want to use computer programs that conform to Apple's orthodoxy, you must buy a computer made and sold by Apple itself.
-- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988
Could someone explain how this works? Is this some sort of speckle interferometer? I don't understand how you can get the ridge profile by separating the light polarities unless you're shining the laser at very steep angles
I have no idea how this works, but I was immediately reminded of hyperspectral imaging which can do things like pick out days old tracks that are invisible to regular cameras and the naked eye. I am only vaguely acquainted with HSI, so make of that what you will.
My friend has a verizon Droid which has made random calls and sent random texts since new.
And my wife has a Samsung Galaxy with T-Mobile that has worked perfectly. My anecdote cancels yours out. Perhaps your friend's problems are with Verizon or Motorola? Both have been known to screw customers over, and shoddy products and service from them wouldn't surprise me. Also, if it's really an Android problem, file a bug report. Bitching on slashdot won't do anything.
PS - I've got mod points, but decided to respond. Problems do need to be pointed out and fixed, but bitching on slashdot will do jack shit.
And right there in the summary, it says De Icaza's company will make.NET dev tools for iOS and Android. Bad me, for not RTFS. What can I say? I come to slashdot for the comments. I still think that De Icaza is tilting at windmills (but with less wits and foresight than Quixote) and.NET on Android will be the second (at best) preferred dev tool. Not to mention that the legal issues (and MS changing C# at a whim and breaking tons of existing apps) still makes this a non-starter. Yes, good riddance.NET and C#. Some of us haven't had to think about MS for years, and would rather not ever have to again.
these recent events might be the beginning of the demise of widespread use of Mono and other.NETiness in open source software, a good thing
Surely thats a matter of opinion?
Please cite, specifically, what Mono or C# brings to open source platforms that aren't already there and done better. There's nothing new in C#, and the JVM is already taking off with new programming languages, plus it's finally fast enough for most everything. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that C# is exposing programmers to advanced language features, but these features have already existed in other programming languages for decades. Add to that the threat of patent violation lawsuits (which are *not* protected in OSS by MS's RAND licensing, no matter how loudly the fanbois scream), and you have a non-starter when it comes to Mono and C#. People don't trust Microsoft, and with good reason.
I myself have avoided C# as a heavy software engineer, partly because I'm already pretty good at C and C++ (which C# will not replace in my field, embedded and OS), but also because I'd rather dabble in more interesting and truly free programming languges, such as Scala, Clojure, Haskell, OCaml, and Go. Not to mention that economically speaking, Mono and C# don't run on Android or iPhone (and I'm sure someone will point out some project or software shop trying to push their C# for Android/iPhone package, but I doubt the efficacy of those solutions).
As far as simple costs go, the sticker price on another monitor might be $200, but there are often large costs beyond sticker price in the corporate world. The purchase has to be requested formally, then approved, then ordered, received, and installed. The real cost in accounting, paperwork, and labor could be a surprisingly large percentage of the final cost.
And does it not occur to management that perhaps there is some other way to save money? A way that would save money for every purchase made by the company? Streamlining the purchasing process would seem to be the solution here.
Oh, please let the answer be "yes". Why should those of us who don't want to be coddled by the Evil Empire be forced to pay an extra $90 for garbage we won't need or use? (Just try and find the non-iPod version for sale - I've looked and I can't find it).
I think Sergey Brin is just off his rocker. I've had Windows XP for almost ten years now, and I don't have to "manage" anything. Every year or so I wipe the drive with a fresh XP-CD install, and need to reinstall my favorite programs, . . . Otherwise WinXP just works.
I think you are off your rocker. You think that having to reinstall every year or so is the definition of "just works"? Seriously? Wow. Then Debian must be incredibly fucking amazing, because I've had it running without reinstall (or having to go out and find apps, drivers, etc, etc) for years on my servers, desktop and laptop. The phone (Maemo) is getting there, but it's relatively new. I'll get back to you in 2015.
but that would be true of any OS, whether it's Mac, Lubuntu, or Chrome.
If you believe that, I kind of doubt you've actually used other OSes much. I can't speak for MacOS (I dropped that shit like a hot potato years ago), but as I mentioned above, Debian Just Works very well for me. Thanks to preventitive maintenance and foresight, I've only had to reinstall my wife's WinXP laptop once in the last couple of years, but that's still more times than I've had to for Debian over the past 10 years on many machines.
How can you tell the difference between a good, experienced developer and a mediocre, inexperienced developer? The good developer already has "processes" (habits and self-discipline) that she has learned and honed through hard experience, knows they work, and resents when someone tries to force her to change for the sake of change or waste time on things that she has already tried and found wanting. Processes will only hamper good developers. The bad developer also resents "processes", but that's because they don't have any self-discipline. Processes probably won't help bad developers either. The trick is to hire good developers that get along; the only way to tell a good developer from a bad is to look at their code, which also requires . . . good developers. A good place to start, though, is to make sure they can actually program. Another good sign, though, is a good developer will occasionally approach you and suggest possibly trying a new "process" to see if it will make your shop more productive or reduce bugs.
There's a saying that you "shouldn't throw good money after bad." When someone keeps reducing their quality and their product consistently disappoints, DON"T GIVE THEM MORE MONEY.
Replace "New Guy" with "applicant" ("experienced" or otherwise) in the title and you will basically have something that tech company interviewers have been noticing for a while:
The article is good reading, and links to the even more controversial supposition: a large percentage of people *cannot* be taught to program. Highly recommended reading; both of those links would make for good slashdot fodder, if they haven't been posted already.
Nice how the summary and article left Apple off the list for some reason (can never guess why . . . ). Next time editors (and submitters), try finding a more informative article. Took me all of two seconds to find that. Fucking hypocritical fanbois.
I don't like two-party systems either, but you can mitigate this by voting in the primaries.
Fuck primaries! First and foremost, I'm not going to lie and say I support your corrupt little party just so I can have a say in which candidates you field. Second, even if you let undeclared/third party voters vote in your primary, it's a bunch of bullshit. If a candidate is good enough to get into the primary, why not present him or her on the final ballot? Yeah, yeah, you might have to spread campaign money around (which should be illegal anyways), or you're afraid voters will be confused. What's so hard about presenting candidate's positions and letting people vote based on that? There are websites where you can plug in your position on different issues and they will match up which candidate most closely matches your positions.
You can't help but think that this is the way all programming will be done in the future.
Every decade or so, someone comes up with "visual programming" or a "programming system that anyone can use" and claims it will make programmers obsolete or some such other nonsense. Yet here we are, in 2011, still programming in C (and assembly), and I can't name a single successful "visual" programming environment. The reasons are legion; I'm not going to rehash them here (especially since others have), but I can tell you a good place to start would be to read some of Paul Graham's writings or really anyone who has actually designed a programming language or studied CS or CS history. As a quick hint, there is a reason film didn't make books obsolete.
I can't believe there are people on Slashdot arguing in favor of crippled, DRM'd, locked-down systems.
I'm not surprised; it's Apple. Apple fanbois will excuse anything Apple does, and spin it if they can. Yet when Google makes an App Market (which you aren't forced to use, either as a developer or user), or does tracking (which you can opt out of or firewall), the Apple fanbois jump all over it and scream bloody murder. Fucking hypocrites.
I've started marking just about all Apple stories in the firehose as either "binspam" or "offtopic", as I'm pretty sure that Apple has not been "for nerds" for a/long/ time, and most of the Apple stories are just glowing salespieces anyway (white iPhone anyone?).
It is amazing what marketing can save, isn't it? I've always thought that Apple was a smashing sales company, similar to Microsoft. Microsoft just knows how to market to managers; Apple knows how to market to hipsters.
Slashdot Mirror
We hear all the time that "any trade school code monkey could write that software" or "my nephew could program that" or "it's a small matter of programming". Yet here we have a prime example that it's not that easy, is it? I think people (both individually and in aggregate) *still* don't really understand software. It's understandable, because it really is different. Name another product where the design /is/ the product.
As for "dumbing down" courses, or not expecting people to learn to program in X weeks, maybe we should just admit that most people cannot learn to program, no matter how long you take trying to teach them. Maybe sometimes some children *should* be left behind, or better yet, directed to things they can actually learn to do.
Let me just put a word in here from a DoD employee: the government gets this, and says it's okay for smartphones (even with cameras!), just don't bring them into sensitive areas. The policy is different from place to place, but I have to say that if the *government* gets this, then it's basically over and private industry should adapt or die. Of course, where I work, we have very technical people, people who know the value of having a general purpose computer in their pocket; in decades of yore, you would have found them carrying HP and TI calculators, and if you told them they couldn't bring them in "due to security", you'd be looking for a new employee real quick.
Maybe if we had some sort of super-program, something that could monitor the other programs and decide what RAM is needed where. It would operate on behalf of these programs to make sure that the most commonly used data was cached in RAM, even between different processes. Why, there could even be a system so that processes could just ask for data and this super-program would cache it. On second thought, that would never work.
I'd have to take issue with that; most Apple fanbois believe in the technological superiority of Apple products over everything else, which is questionable at best. Many of them also tend to proseletize quite strongly, and ignore the bad things that Apple does, much like catholics gloss over pederasty.
So what would you call it? I think you fail etymology. Theism = belief in a deity; adding the 'a' prefix means you negate the meaning, ie Atheism = no belief in a deity. Just like apolitical, asexual, etc, etc.
You know, it's farcical that we have a word for people who lack a belief in a deity, yet we don't have a word for people who lack a belief in other mythical things. Where's the word for people who don't believe in unicorns? Or leprechauns? An even better question would be, why can't the theists just leave atheists alone, instead of trying to force their beliefs on them?
They will bash it and tag it "flamebait" and "troll", as well as mod you down. I'm also figuring someone will claim that "it's okay because Microsoft and Google have the same effects", someone else will claim that "people love Apple because their products are technically superior", and other fallacious apologetics will be spewed. That's why I have people like you friended, so my reading habits (I mostly read slashdot for the comments) aren't affected by the fanbois. Just waiting for jedidiah and others who dare to question Apple to show up. This ought to be good :)
I have no idea how this works, but I was immediately reminded of hyperspectral imaging which can do things like pick out days old tracks that are invisible to regular cameras and the naked eye. I am only vaguely acquainted with HSI, so make of that what you will.
And my wife has a Samsung Galaxy with T-Mobile that has worked perfectly. My anecdote cancels yours out. Perhaps your friend's problems are with Verizon or Motorola? Both have been known to screw customers over, and shoddy products and service from them wouldn't surprise me. Also, if it's really an Android problem, file a bug report. Bitching on slashdot won't do anything.
PS - I've got mod points, but decided to respond. Problems do need to be pointed out and fixed, but bitching on slashdot will do jack shit.
And right there in the summary, it says De Icaza's company will make .NET dev tools for iOS and Android. Bad me, for not RTFS. What can I say? I come to slashdot for the comments. I still think that De Icaza is tilting at windmills (but with less wits and foresight than Quixote) and .NET on Android will be the second (at best) preferred dev tool. Not to mention that the legal issues (and MS changing C# at a whim and breaking tons of existing apps) still makes this a non-starter. Yes, good riddance .NET and C#. Some of us haven't had to think about MS for years, and would rather not ever have to again.
Please cite, specifically, what Mono or C# brings to open source platforms that aren't already there and done better. There's nothing new in C#, and the JVM is already taking off with new programming languages, plus it's finally fast enough for most everything. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that C# is exposing programmers to advanced language features, but these features have already existed in other programming languages for decades. Add to that the threat of patent violation lawsuits (which are *not* protected in OSS by MS's RAND licensing, no matter how loudly the fanbois scream), and you have a non-starter when it comes to Mono and C#. People don't trust Microsoft, and with good reason.
I myself have avoided C# as a heavy software engineer, partly because I'm already pretty good at C and C++ (which C# will not replace in my field, embedded and OS), but also because I'd rather dabble in more interesting and truly free programming languges, such as Scala, Clojure, Haskell, OCaml, and Go. Not to mention that economically speaking, Mono and C# don't run on Android or iPhone (and I'm sure someone will point out some project or software shop trying to push their C# for Android/iPhone package, but I doubt the efficacy of those solutions).
And does it not occur to management that perhaps there is some other way to save money? A way that would save money for every purchase made by the company? Streamlining the purchasing process would seem to be the solution here.
Seriously. What retard thought this was news when the infographic describing the HDMI rip-off has been out for over a year?
From TFA:
Oh, please let the answer be "yes". Why should those of us who don't want to be coddled by the Evil Empire be forced to pay an extra $90 for garbage we won't need or use? (Just try and find the non-iPod version for sale - I've looked and I can't find it).
I miss MIPS and Alpha; at least there's still ARM.
Don't forget, Apple and Microsoft are members of the BSA. As a side note, Google is not a member of the BSA.
I think you are off your rocker. You think that having to reinstall every year or so is the definition of "just works"? Seriously? Wow. Then Debian must be incredibly fucking amazing, because I've had it running without reinstall (or having to go out and find apps, drivers, etc, etc) for years on my servers, desktop and laptop. The phone (Maemo) is getting there, but it's relatively new. I'll get back to you in 2015.
If you believe that, I kind of doubt you've actually used other OSes much. I can't speak for MacOS (I dropped that shit like a hot potato years ago), but as I mentioned above, Debian Just Works very well for me. Thanks to preventitive maintenance and foresight, I've only had to reinstall my wife's WinXP laptop once in the last couple of years, but that's still more times than I've had to for Debian over the past 10 years on many machines.
How can you tell the difference between a good, experienced developer and a mediocre, inexperienced developer? The good developer already has "processes" (habits and self-discipline) that she has learned and honed through hard experience, knows they work, and resents when someone tries to force her to change for the sake of change or waste time on things that she has already tried and found wanting. Processes will only hamper good developers. The bad developer also resents "processes", but that's because they don't have any self-discipline. Processes probably won't help bad developers either. The trick is to hire good developers that get along; the only way to tell a good developer from a bad is to look at their code, which also requires . . . good developers. A good place to start, though, is to make sure they can actually program. Another good sign, though, is a good developer will occasionally approach you and suggest possibly trying a new "process" to see if it will make your shop more productive or reduce bugs.
There's a saying that you "shouldn't throw good money after bad." When someone keeps reducing their quality and their product consistently disappoints, DON"T GIVE THEM MORE MONEY.
Replace "New Guy" with "applicant" ("experienced" or otherwise) in the title and you will basically have something that tech company interviewers have been noticing for a while:
The article is good reading, and links to the even more controversial supposition: a large percentage of people *cannot* be taught to program. Highly recommended reading; both of those links would make for good slashdot fodder, if they haven't been posted already.
Nice how the summary and article left Apple off the list for some reason (can never guess why . . . ). Next time editors (and submitters), try finding a more informative article. Took me all of two seconds to find that. Fucking hypocritical fanbois.
Fuck primaries! First and foremost, I'm not going to lie and say I support your corrupt little party just so I can have a say in which candidates you field. Second, even if you let undeclared/third party voters vote in your primary, it's a bunch of bullshit. If a candidate is good enough to get into the primary, why not present him or her on the final ballot? Yeah, yeah, you might have to spread campaign money around (which should be illegal anyways), or you're afraid voters will be confused. What's so hard about presenting candidate's positions and letting people vote based on that? There are websites where you can plug in your position on different issues and they will match up which candidate most closely matches your positions.
Every decade or so, someone comes up with "visual programming" or a "programming system that anyone can use" and claims it will make programmers obsolete or some such other nonsense. Yet here we are, in 2011, still programming in C (and assembly), and I can't name a single successful "visual" programming environment. The reasons are legion; I'm not going to rehash them here (especially since others have), but I can tell you a good place to start would be to read some of Paul Graham's writings or really anyone who has actually designed a programming language or studied CS or CS history. As a quick hint, there is a reason film didn't make books obsolete.
I'm not surprised; it's Apple. Apple fanbois will excuse anything Apple does, and spin it if they can. Yet when Google makes an App Market (which you aren't forced to use, either as a developer or user), or does tracking (which you can opt out of or firewall), the Apple fanbois jump all over it and scream bloody murder. Fucking hypocrites.
I've started marking just about all Apple stories in the firehose as either "binspam" or "offtopic", as I'm pretty sure that Apple has not been "for nerds" for a /long/ time, and most of the Apple stories are just glowing salespieces anyway (white iPhone anyone?).
It is amazing what marketing can save, isn't it? I've always thought that Apple was a smashing sales company, similar to Microsoft. Microsoft just knows how to market to managers; Apple knows how to market to hipsters.