In fact it isn't good for society for everyone to carry the cognitive burden of being an expert in every device they interact with--that's kinda the whole point of technology. Just like not everyone needs to know how their automobile or microwave works.
"Literate" != "expert". No one's asking those teachers to be Donald Knuth, but they should have the basics of how the technology works and what it can be used for before trying to deploy it.
TI-83's are like $50 now and they are pieces of crap.
Are the rules of addition different now? Did they change the definition of sine since I graduated? Are the new TI's more ergonomically correct with a food dispenser and foot massager built in?
I wanted a standing desk but my boss wouldn't spring for it. So, I went to Home Depot and bought a set of adjustable plastic garage shelves like you'd use to hold paint cans. I assembled it on top of my office-issued desk, adjusted the top shelf to a comfortable height for my monitor, and set the middle shelf to a good height for my keyboard and trackball. Voila. Standing desk for $20. It wasn't beautiful but it worked perfectly.
Why? For $25 a year, everyone in my household has unlimited access to about 60GB of our iTunes collection. It works like a cache so that you only download a song the first time you listen to it. Whenever any of us takes a picture, it gets uploaded to our photo stream the next time we're on Wi-Fi, and then iPhoto slurps in all the new photos every time you launch it.
"The cloud" is not the answer, but it's good enough now that it's a solid choice for a lot of people.
No argument from me. I just find it fascinating that the current plans are to have 95-year-old airplanes piloted by the great-grandsons of their original aircrews. For as much grief as government engineers get sometimes, they can make stuff really, really good when they need to.
Of course, even for some of those, 35 years is a stretch...
As an interesting counterexample, the B-52 Stratofortress seems to be immortal:
B-52s are periodically refurbished at USAF maintenance depots such as Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma. Even while the Air Force works on its Next-Generation Bomber and 2037 Bomber projects, it intends to keep the B-52H in service until 2045, nearly 90 years after the B-52 first entered service and an unprecedented length of service for a military aircraft.
Also:
At least one B-52 aviator's father and grandfather also flew the [very same] bomber.
That's known as "moving the goalposts". Your parent was responding only to the notion that RIM is a profitable company; he didn't say anything about them going bankrupt.
As to another reply that this is just accounting losses due to write-offs: their revenue was down 25% over last year. That's a bad place to be in when everyone but Apple is seeing slimmer profit margins and needing higher revenue to make up the difference.
My partner works in a government affiliated company and has to use FDE for all PCs. Because of how they have implemented it they virtually all still use the default key (which wasn't random) and if you change it then you thwart the original intent of having quasi-hotdesks.
That kind of stuff drives me crazy. OS X's FileVault does this right by 1) encrypting the drive with a user's own password, so they pretty much have to remember it, 2) providing a recovery key that IT can store somewhere for later recovery if the employee gets hit by a bus, and 3) optionally registering the recovery key with Apple so that they can decrypt it for you (which might be nice for non-paranoid end personal users, even if most companies wouldn't want to use it).
Here's more information about enabling FileVault. While I've mentioned FV a couple of times in these comments, I'm not in love with it or anything. It's just that it works well and conveniently, and if other manufacturers can't do the same, then it's a problem with their implementation and not the concept in general.
The average value of a lost computer to my company--either in terms of profits lost or competitor's profits gained--would have to be $465,000 for the math to work.
Unless you work in a regulated industry that can fine the living crap out of you for releasing confidential information. OK, OK, stop laughing. I know that anyone wealthy enough to have access to that much personal information will be wealthy enough to get a written warning instead of a fine, but hypothetically they could be penalized.
If the information is that sensitive then what is it doing on a portable device in the first place...?
I don't have information that sensitive by a long shot. But I'm currently a contractor who provides my own laptop and I do have some of my employer's sensitive information - pricing plans, campaign strategies, etc. - on my personal computer because that's what I use to do the work for them. I have OS X's full drive encryption enabled and a two-day-old encrypted Time Machine backup at my house. If my laptop gets stolen on the BART, bummer. I have to go fill out a police report, file an insurance claim, and do other inconvenient stuff. And when I bring my new laptop home, I restore it from the backup and I'm up and running again a couple of hours later. The thief has my hardware but not a single byte of my personal or employer's information.
That's a nice situation to be in. If I did lose my laptop, I can tell my supervisor "sorry for the inconvenience while I get a replacement. Don't worry, though; your stuff is locked up and the thief can't get to it." That is infinitely preferable to the alternative of "umm, we might have a problem."
Almost all distros that I know of have some form of netboot install method that does exactly what you describe.
I used to play football. As long as we're tossing out irrelevant factoids, I mean...
Those netboot installs require you to install the system. That's what he doesn't want to do. Suppose you already have a working Ubuntu system. What he's asking for is a little installer that applies the delta between what you need and what you already have installed and running on your system. Suppose you're only 8 packages short of having, say, a Mint desktop system. Wouldn't, it be easier to apt-get install those 8 packages than download an entire CD or DVD ISO to reinstall the entire thing from scratch?
No stupid compositors that require ridiculous effects that are recipe for X crashes and stalls...
Funny how often that completely invalid position is repeated. Your graphics card is optimized for 3D acceleration. You have a little supercomputer sitting there waiting for you to ask it for help. Compositors take a lot of the workload off your slow main CPU and offload it to that supercomputer. If you can get the round corners and wiggly windows for free because your graphics card is the end result of a few billion R&D dollars making it good at that stuff, why not? Especially with something as slow and power-hungry as your P4, I'd rather let the coprocessors do as much of my desktop's work as possible.
I LOL'd. But I bought a developer account because I love Twitter but think they're in the long process of shooting their foot off with a BB gun. For example, they recently announced that it was going to be essentially impossible for third-party clients to distribute more than 100,000 copies. I hate - I mean, just plainly detest - their native clients and some of those third-party apps they're killing are wonderful. For those straggling apps that hang in there anyway, Twitter is enforcing a style guide that essentially forces them to look identical while simultaneously stating that they'll stop allowing apps that are too similar.
Basically, their ideal world is one where it's really easy for advertisers to bid for the right to push content into your stream of reading, and really difficult for you to avoid it because the only user interface left is the one they deign to let you use.
App.Net aims to invert that by charging just enough long-term to turn a profit while encouraging a broad third-party ecosystem. They're also far more developer friendly. Twitter has been talking about adding "annotations" (read: metadata attached to tweets) for ages and has announced that they might support them next year. The App.Net guys added them last week. Their example use case for that might be you post from a restaurant and invite your friends to join you. Your post's metadata - up to 8KB of JSON - contains the OpenTable ID of the place you're at. Your buddy decides to join you and taps the "make a reservation" button on his client. Maybe it includes the song you're listening to instead. Maybe the encapsulated, non-shortened URL that you're viewing. Who knows? But they plan to find out.
And all that is why I bought into App.Net. I love Twitter. I get value from it, even though people who aren't into it make fun of it. But Twitter's chosen a path I don't want to follow them down, and App.Net aims to pick up the slack and provide a service that prioritizes on the stuff I wish Twitter would have. I'd spend more than $50 on a video game, and I'll spend that much on a useful service I'll likely use many times every single day. It's work the risk to me.
Call me when you can write a 300,000 line C++ or Java monster on the thing without ending up with debilitating eye or wrist strain injuries.
Python seems to be between 10 and 20 times more expressive than Java. That is, a line of Python does a lot more than a line of Java. I've written a 20,000 line library of Python code for my last employeer, so that's about the equivalent of your 300,000 line Java spaghetti bowl. I can still see. I can still type. And I still have the sanity to want to write in intelligent, high-level languages like Python, Ruby, or even Haskell over your grandfatherly favorites.
I admit that Python idiomatically lacks InterfaceProxyFactoryFactories, but yet we still manage to get work done.
If people couldn't write software without modern amenities, we'd never have had the modern amenities.
I mostly agree, but my one absolute-must-have, dealbreaker, litmus test, can't-live-without amenity is a shell prompt. There will never be an IDE that will let me drop in any version control system I want, any remote file access app, any build system, and any scripting language I like. I can write a Fabric script (in Python) that runs a unit test suite against my code, commits it if it passes, SSHs to a remote server, then checks out, builds, and deploys the new version there. You could probably find an IDE that can duplicate that one exact workflow - as long as you're happy with doing it exactly the way that the IDE provides.
And that's my standard for a development environment. The coolest programming editor in the world is dead to me if I can't have a shell full of my personal favorite commands to use alongside it.
I wouldn't even use a MacBook Pro keyboard for coding more than a few minutes.
That's a shame. Is there a cure for your physical ailment or are you stuck with it? I switched from a Model M to a MacBook Pro. In theory, I should find this nearly unbearable and utterly inferior. In practice, I stopped noticing the difference after about 20 minutes.
I've cranked out several thousand lines of JavaScript as part of a work project I'd been assigned to help out with. As it turns out, you can do some pretty neat functional (as opposed to procedural) stuff with it. HTML is a markup language, but the web is much more than that these days.
Free software is very much a threat to software engineers. See, we get paid to write software for systems. It's a nice gig. Gives me income to pay the bills. I'd much rather do this than be a ditch digger who hacks at software in my free time.
Your work arrangement with your employer sucks. My boss pays me to create things that don't already exist because my company needs their output. A good chunk of the time, they then let me release it as Free Software so that 1) we're not the only people in the world maintaining it, and 2) the Free Software ecosystem (which we benefit greatly from) grows.
Software engineers have earned good money for decades. All this free stuff undermines that.
Only if you're not good at it. Lots of software engineers make good money writing Free Software.
Since computers began we have had hierarchal memory systems.
And always will. It's physically impossible for distant RAM to be as fast as CPU registers (the lowest addressable layer of the hierarchy). I don't imagine a future where fast random-access modules will have the capacity of slower stores that have the luxury of time to do their work. For instance, add "cloud storage" or "network fileserver" as yet another common layer of that hierarchy. It's many orders of magnitude slower than my laptop's memory, but my laptop doesn't have 100TB of RAM.
No, that hierarchy isn't going anywhere. I love that we have previously-unheard of fast storage available in cheap, small packages, but that's been accompanied by an ever greater demand for huge quantities of slower storage.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact it isn't good for society for everyone to carry the cognitive burden of being an expert in every device they interact with--that's kinda the whole point of technology. Just like not everyone needs to know how their automobile or microwave works.
"Literate" != "expert". No one's asking those teachers to be Donald Knuth, but they should have the basics of how the technology works and what it can be used for before trying to deploy it.
TI-83's are like $50 now and they are pieces of crap.
Are the rules of addition different now? Did they change the definition of sine since I graduated? Are the new TI's more ergonomically correct with a food dispenser and foot massager built in?
I wanted a standing desk but my boss wouldn't spring for it. So, I went to Home Depot and bought a set of adjustable plastic garage shelves like you'd use to hold paint cans. I assembled it on top of my office-issued desk, adjusted the top shelf to a comfortable height for my monitor, and set the middle shelf to a good height for my keyboard and trackball. Voila. Standing desk for $20. It wasn't beautiful but it worked perfectly.
Note: "the cloud" is not the answer.
Why? For $25 a year, everyone in my household has unlimited access to about 60GB of our iTunes collection. It works like a cache so that you only download a song the first time you listen to it. Whenever any of us takes a picture, it gets uploaded to our photo stream the next time we're on Wi-Fi, and then iPhoto slurps in all the new photos every time you launch it.
"The cloud" is not the answer, but it's good enough now that it's a solid choice for a lot of people.
No argument from me. I just find it fascinating that the current plans are to have 95-year-old airplanes piloted by the great-grandsons of their original aircrews. For as much grief as government engineers get sometimes, they can make stuff really, really good when they need to.
Of course, even for some of those, 35 years is a stretch...
As an interesting counterexample, the B-52 Stratofortress seems to be immortal:
Also:
That's known as "moving the goalposts". Your parent was responding only to the notion that RIM is a profitable company; he didn't say anything about them going bankrupt.
As to another reply that this is just accounting losses due to write-offs: their revenue was down 25% over last year. That's a bad place to be in when everyone but Apple is seeing slimmer profit margins and needing higher revenue to make up the difference.
It slows down so bad when looking at a Flash video that it is practically unusable.
Think I found the problem.
My partner works in a government affiliated company and has to use FDE for all PCs. Because of how they have implemented it they virtually all still use the default key (which wasn't random) and if you change it then you thwart the original intent of having quasi-hotdesks.
That kind of stuff drives me crazy. OS X's FileVault does this right by 1) encrypting the drive with a user's own password, so they pretty much have to remember it, 2) providing a recovery key that IT can store somewhere for later recovery if the employee gets hit by a bus, and 3) optionally registering the recovery key with Apple so that they can decrypt it for you (which might be nice for non-paranoid end personal users, even if most companies wouldn't want to use it).
Here's more information about enabling FileVault. While I've mentioned FV a couple of times in these comments, I'm not in love with it or anything. It's just that it works well and conveniently, and if other manufacturers can't do the same, then it's a problem with their implementation and not the concept in general.
The average value of a lost computer to my company--either in terms of profits lost or competitor's profits gained--would have to be $465,000 for the math to work.
Unless you work in a regulated industry that can fine the living crap out of you for releasing confidential information. OK, OK, stop laughing. I know that anyone wealthy enough to have access to that much personal information will be wealthy enough to get a written warning instead of a fine, but hypothetically they could be penalized.
If the information is that sensitive then what is it doing on a portable device in the first place...?
I don't have information that sensitive by a long shot. But I'm currently a contractor who provides my own laptop and I do have some of my employer's sensitive information - pricing plans, campaign strategies, etc. - on my personal computer because that's what I use to do the work for them. I have OS X's full drive encryption enabled and a two-day-old encrypted Time Machine backup at my house. If my laptop gets stolen on the BART, bummer. I have to go fill out a police report, file an insurance claim, and do other inconvenient stuff. And when I bring my new laptop home, I restore it from the backup and I'm up and running again a couple of hours later. The thief has my hardware but not a single byte of my personal or employer's information.
That's a nice situation to be in. If I did lose my laptop, I can tell my supervisor "sorry for the inconvenience while I get a replacement. Don't worry, though; your stuff is locked up and the thief can't get to it." That is infinitely preferable to the alternative of "umm, we might have a problem."
Almost all distros that I know of have some form of netboot install method that does exactly what you describe.
I used to play football. As long as we're tossing out irrelevant factoids, I mean...
Those netboot installs require you to install the system. That's what he doesn't want to do. Suppose you already have a working Ubuntu system. What he's asking for is a little installer that applies the delta between what you need and what you already have installed and running on your system. Suppose you're only 8 packages short of having, say, a Mint desktop system. Wouldn't, it be easier to apt-get install those 8 packages than download an entire CD or DVD ISO to reinstall the entire thing from scratch?
No stupid compositors that require ridiculous effects that are recipe for X crashes and stalls...
Funny how often that completely invalid position is repeated. Your graphics card is optimized for 3D acceleration. You have a little supercomputer sitting there waiting for you to ask it for help. Compositors take a lot of the workload off your slow main CPU and offload it to that supercomputer. If you can get the round corners and wiggly windows for free because your graphics card is the end result of a few billion R&D dollars making it good at that stuff, why not? Especially with something as slow and power-hungry as your P4, I'd rather let the coprocessors do as much of my desktop's work as possible.
I LOL'd. But I bought a developer account because I love Twitter but think they're in the long process of shooting their foot off with a BB gun. For example, they recently announced that it was going to be essentially impossible for third-party clients to distribute more than 100,000 copies. I hate - I mean, just plainly detest - their native clients and some of those third-party apps they're killing are wonderful. For those straggling apps that hang in there anyway, Twitter is enforcing a style guide that essentially forces them to look identical while simultaneously stating that they'll stop allowing apps that are too similar.
Basically, their ideal world is one where it's really easy for advertisers to bid for the right to push content into your stream of reading, and really difficult for you to avoid it because the only user interface left is the one they deign to let you use.
App.Net aims to invert that by charging just enough long-term to turn a profit while encouraging a broad third-party ecosystem. They're also far more developer friendly. Twitter has been talking about adding "annotations" (read: metadata attached to tweets) for ages and has announced that they might support them next year. The App.Net guys added them last week. Their example use case for that might be you post from a restaurant and invite your friends to join you. Your post's metadata - up to 8KB of JSON - contains the OpenTable ID of the place you're at. Your buddy decides to join you and taps the "make a reservation" button on his client. Maybe it includes the song you're listening to instead. Maybe the encapsulated, non-shortened URL that you're viewing. Who knows? But they plan to find out.
And all that is why I bought into App.Net. I love Twitter. I get value from it, even though people who aren't into it make fun of it. But Twitter's chosen a path I don't want to follow them down, and App.Net aims to pick up the slack and provide a service that prioritizes on the stuff I wish Twitter would have. I'd spend more than $50 on a video game, and I'll spend that much on a useful service I'll likely use many times every single day. It's work the risk to me.
Call me when you can write a 300,000 line C++ or Java monster on the thing without ending up with debilitating eye or wrist strain injuries.
Python seems to be between 10 and 20 times more expressive than Java. That is, a line of Python does a lot more than a line of Java. I've written a 20,000 line library of Python code for my last employeer, so that's about the equivalent of your 300,000 line Java spaghetti bowl. I can still see. I can still type. And I still have the sanity to want to write in intelligent, high-level languages like Python, Ruby, or even Haskell over your grandfatherly favorites.
I admit that Python idiomatically lacks InterfaceProxyFactoryFactories, but yet we still manage to get work done.
If people couldn't write software without modern amenities, we'd never have had the modern amenities.
I mostly agree, but my one absolute-must-have, dealbreaker, litmus test, can't-live-without amenity is a shell prompt. There will never be an IDE that will let me drop in any version control system I want, any remote file access app, any build system, and any scripting language I like. I can write a Fabric script (in Python) that runs a unit test suite against my code, commits it if it passes, SSHs to a remote server, then checks out, builds, and deploys the new version there. You could probably find an IDE that can duplicate that one exact workflow - as long as you're happy with doing it exactly the way that the IDE provides.
And that's my standard for a development environment. The coolest programming editor in the world is dead to me if I can't have a shell full of my personal favorite commands to use alongside it.
I wouldn't even use a MacBook Pro keyboard for coding more than a few minutes.
That's a shame. Is there a cure for your physical ailment or are you stuck with it? I switched from a Model M to a MacBook Pro. In theory, I should find this nearly unbearable and utterly inferior. In practice, I stopped noticing the difference after about 20 minutes.
I've cranked out several thousand lines of JavaScript as part of a work project I'd been assigned to help out with. As it turns out, you can do some pretty neat functional (as opposed to procedural) stuff with it. HTML is a markup language, but the web is much more than that these days.
for the cost of refusing to hire him
...you presume. I remain unconvinced.
Free software is very much a threat to software engineers. See, we get paid to write software for systems. It's a nice gig. Gives me income to pay the bills. I'd much rather do this than be a ditch digger who hacks at software in my free time.
Your work arrangement with your employer sucks. My boss pays me to create things that don't already exist because my company needs their output. A good chunk of the time, they then let me release it as Free Software so that 1) we're not the only people in the world maintaining it, and 2) the Free Software ecosystem (which we benefit greatly from) grows.
Software engineers have earned good money for decades. All this free stuff undermines that.
Only if you're not good at it. Lots of software engineers make good money writing Free Software.
Since computers began we have had hierarchal memory systems.
And always will. It's physically impossible for distant RAM to be as fast as CPU registers (the lowest addressable layer of the hierarchy). I don't imagine a future where fast random-access modules will have the capacity of slower stores that have the luxury of time to do their work. For instance, add "cloud storage" or "network fileserver" as yet another common layer of that hierarchy. It's many orders of magnitude slower than my laptop's memory, but my laptop doesn't have 100TB of RAM.
No, that hierarchy isn't going anywhere. I love that we have previously-unheard of fast storage available in cheap, small packages, but that's been accompanied by an ever greater demand for huge quantities of slower storage.
You have to file stuff somewhere, and I for one thought it was an interesting and entertaining story. As always: don't read it if you don't like it.
Watch this, then come back.
Well, I can run a mile in about 9 minutes, and I'm guesstimating that the tires turn about 400 times per mile.
Dashing the hopes of legions of skinny Slashdotters who had been keeping themselves in optimal physical condition for the arrival of the Singularity.
I had burgers and beer last night out of sheer anguish and not because that's the kind of crap most of us here would be eating anyway.