Now imagine you live in such a country where there are idiotic, religious nutjobs running the show so you decide to pack and leave your home, leave everything behind and move to a country where you hopefully won't be bothered by religious nutjobs trying to tell you how to live your life...
...and you move to the exuburbs north of Dallas, Texas? I think I see where this plan went awry...
Sometimes its better to model the proper behavior for impressionable developing minds like Texas school functionaries. Getting in their face about them being wrong just makes them defensive, and they'll never listen then.
And which browser is likely to be the most "secure"? Hint: it won't be the one that's totally in thrall to ABC Megacorp. Even if theirs is pretty secure, how do you know that? Take their word for it? Nobody is allowed to look at the sources. You're completely at their mercy.
Extensibility, and to a lesser extent resource usage also work that way. If users are free to add in things they want themselves, then by definition it will be extensible. If there's some kind of outlandish resource issue, and users can fix it, they will. That's the cool thing about "ownership", it helps cover all the little nitty things that might hit my radar as an issue if they got out of hand. So if I worry about ownership when I first select my go-to browser, I don't have to constantly worry about all the other crap.
Because you have complex applications that run in a browser that you would like to use.
Nope. Any other reasons?
About the most complex application I ever use in a browser is an MMO character builder. I haven't ever felt the need to speed those up, and I suspect they wait for my next selection at the exact same speed no matter which web browser I use. Again, my main considerations here are (1) Does it actually work right in my browser? and (2) If it tries to subvert my browser, do I have the tools to stop it?. These both boil down to support and freedom.
Probably the next most complex things I do are live youtube streams (with comments). I suppose if things got sluggish there I might look for a speedier browser, but generally performance there is limited by the quality of my internet connection, not the speed of my computer.
I've seen that. It almost always seems to have something to do with videos (particularly youtube). It was much worse about a year or two ago. Haven't seen it in a while. I suspect it was flash causing the issue, and since most of the web has moved away from Flash, it just doesn't happen as often now.
Not only that, but there were really analog computers (actual human beings with the job of making computations) that were in fact used for the project. Feynman in his first autobiography talks about getting put in charge of them.
The synopsis sounds even worse than the Jeremy Irons Dungeons & Dragons film from 2000, if such a thing is possible.
It's not.
Seriously, that's about the worst movie I've ever seen. I have trouble believing its possible to make a movie worse and still get it released and seen. That's likely how the script got "lost" in the first place.
To be fair, the first question was kind of a dick question. Politely phrased, true, but still very dismissive and challenging. Badly researched too. For instance, I can think of two full-blown commercial companies off the top of my head that make money off of GPL software development by selling less restrictive licenses. More certainly exist. Why does Stallman have to do this guy's own basic research for him?
As for your second paragraph, I don't think he was saying that at all. Its probably reasonable to be suspicious of everyone. However, what they are doing is not really making it at all difficult for malicious people to mess up a cell network. What they are doing is instead making it difficult for people to use the cell network properly.
I propose we call these categories "hashtags", and we can use a special character, like say the pound sign to designate that a tweet is intended for that category.
When the subset of users interested in moderating this category approve the worthiness of a tweet, they can signal their approval by forwarding it on to all of their followers. We could call this a "retweet". The cool thing about this idea is that not everyone's sense of humor matches up, so individual users can perhaps set themselves up somehow to only receive retweets from people who tend to retweet content they like. They could perhaps even then "retweet" that good content to their followers. Thus the best content would get spread much more widely, with perhaps the same exponential growth one sees in diseases.
A good way to "tag" this joke as a dup might be to use some kind of new feature to look for old tweets with identical content. Let's call that a "search". Then we can "flag" it by "retweeting" only the earliest version of the tweet to our users. Unless the new version has some new contributions that make it superior.
What an amazing insight! Well worth slogging through 16 paragraphs for .
Reading what Stallman has to say is always annoying and appalling. Annoying because he isn't very polite to people he's talking to, and he's always demanding folks take actions almost nobody is going to take in order to stave off a future dystopia. Appalling because you realize that all his previous predictions of future dystopia have come true.
How about public libraries? Every one I've seen in the last 10 years has public access PC's. Those are free. Convenience isn't always great, but it beats the heck out of $170. Find out where all the branches in your district are, and hand out a sheet with that to your students (Bonus: Libraries are a good safeish space to do homework in. Even some of your wealthy students may not have that at home)
Don't assume $170, or $100, or even $20 is no burden. "Middle-class neighborhood" or no, I guarantee you that you have students who are so destitute they don't eat on days the school isn't running their meal program. Plus you aren't the only teacher that kid has, nor is that kid necessarily the only school-age kid that family is trying to support. What looks like "just a bit more money" to you can be yet another brick on the pile of unpayable bills on the head of that family. You should be shooting for $0, not $170.
But in general, if you don't want to be further disadvantaging kids who don't have access to computers, you should probably rethink your entire strategy of basing all coursework around them. The school district I live in got around this issue by issuing all students their own loaner chromebooks for the year at no extra charge. That's one way to do it, but this also happens to be the wealthiest school district in my state.
The first time I ever even heard of C++ that I remember was in 1993 or so, and even then it was that interesting little project by that guy with the funny name over on the comp.lang.c++ newsgroup. And this is from a guy who had an interest in languages and compilers, and a subscription to SIGPLAN. I don't think I ever encountered it being used professionally until 1997 (and that was with VS6, which barely ought to count as C++).
In 1985 just getting a C compiler for your microcomputer was a really really big deal. It was a big mark of status. Most folks I know used the BASIC that came with their box, Assember, or some Wirth language (usually an extended Pascal of some kind or Modula-2).
How was the Apple II better or superior to the Commodore, TRS 80, Sinclaire Pet, or whatever the hell was out during the 1980's?
Those are some very different machines. As someone who was *really* into Microcomputers in the 80's...
The TRS-80 was black-and-white, and its graphics were....kinda cruddy. The Z-80 that ran it was kind of weak too, but that didn't matter so much because of the previously mentioned issues. Much worse machine than an Apple II, but they were cheap and you could buy one at any Radio Shack.
The C64 (and the Atari 800 it was apeing) were later machines than the Apple II. They used the same 6502 that the Apple II had, but they had better graphics and sound, and in the Atari's case a whole bunch of extra hardware to help drive this stuff (co-processor chips, 4 controller ports, 2 ROM cartridge slots, etc). They were much better machines than the Apple II, and few people bought the Apple II's once those other systems were widely available. At this point, I believe Apples were only really better for labs, due to the superior accessibility to the internals the machine provided (which was all Woz, and most assuredly was never designed into another Apple product).
I'm not real sure what point you were trying to drive at here, but I think its a miss. Jobs' big contribution to that first generation of Microcomputers was simply the insight and drive to make a product of it. Once "Apple" did that, and others saw there was an actual market there, much better machines started appearing relatively quickly.
So based on these numbers for "All NTs", you'd expect to see about a 2:1 male:female ratio in the industry. Let's test this against the real-world data.
What we see is that there was indeed a time when we saw that ratio in CS programs. It was back in 1984. Today, its greater than 5:1. So something else, starting in 1984, happened to CS. Also, it only happened to CS. Not Law School, not Medical School, not the physical sciences. Just CS. For example, INTJ is supposedly the best personality type for scientists. M-B would predict a 5:1 ratio there. Today women are north of 40% of students in the physical sciences.
Conclusions:
Meyer's Briggs personality types do not explain the gender distribution in CS
Meyer's Briggs personality types do not have the data to explain the difference between the delta between CS and other "INTJ" career types.
Meyer's Briggs personality types do not explain the gender distribution in the Physical Sciences. There's a good chance they won't for other careers, if checked.
Well, to be fair, wouldn't the remaining 52.6% qualify as "most?" They didn't say things like, "an overwhelming majority."
No, just strongly implied it. Also implied it is enough to explain the discrepancy, which would be a flat out lie. As they say, statistics don't lie, but liars use statistics.
No he isn't. He's throwing up something he just thought up off the top of his head as an excuse not to look into this issue any further. We know this because he could easily have spent 3 minutes googling this question himself and come up with data one way or the other. (What am I, his personal Google monkey?) The fact that he didn't bother proves he doesn't give a shit about getting to the bottom of the issue; just about finding an excuse for ignoring it.
Having said that, the numbers presented here don't seem to tally with the numbers graduating. Could women be switching to programming after graduation?
They actually don't jibe with any numbers I've seen. It was a self-selected internet survey, so about the furthest thing from scientific that could be imagined.
It would be nice if it were true, and we've finally got this issue on the way to being fixed. But the survey just being an outlier seems the more likely explanation right now.
But you should see that same effect with every industry, not just with CS. Toddlers aren't more expensive to care for when you program computers for a living. There clearly has to be something else going on, something specific to CS.
*Most* women want much more inter-personal interaction. That's a fact.
No, its not, Its a either a theory or a belief. If its a belief, then no amount of data will sway you from it. If its a theory, we should be able to test it with data.
Myers-Briggs personality tests measure this exact thing, and are very widespread. The resulting data is that 47.4% of women are introverts (a minority, but barely), while 54.7% of men are introverts (barely a majority). When you add in the fact that there are more women than men, in absolute numbers it should be pretty close to a wash. But at best this explanation of yours should, according to your theory, result in women only being about 47% of SW developers instead of 50%.
How you react to this data IMHO determines whether your supposed "fact" was a theory or part of a belief system...
You need to look at the decade running up to it, not 2 years. There was a great increase in money chasing enrollment running up to the peak. At 2 year difference in the peak isn't likely statistically significant.
Again, I'm through chasing zephyrs on this subject. Do you have data that shows "money chasing enrollment"? Because I could counter-speculate that the whole argument is BS, based on specialist doctors and lawyers being options making far more money for about the same intellectual requirements if you don't care about anything but money, and then you could argue they aren't the same because of the extra education required, and we can be here forever arguing over made up BS.
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason, I'm hearing the AC/DC song Jailbreak running through my head.
Now imagine you live in such a country where there are idiotic, religious nutjobs running the show so you decide to pack and leave your home, leave everything behind and move to a country where you hopefully won't be bothered by religious nutjobs trying to tell you how to live your life...
...and you move to the exuburbs north of Dallas, Texas? I think I see where this plan went awry...
Sometimes its better to model the proper behavior for impressionable developing minds like Texas school functionaries. Getting in their face about them being wrong just makes them defensive, and they'll never listen then.
And which browser is likely to be the most "secure"? Hint: it won't be the one that's totally in thrall to ABC Megacorp. Even if theirs is pretty secure, how do you know that? Take their word for it? Nobody is allowed to look at the sources. You're completely at their mercy.
Extensibility, and to a lesser extent resource usage also work that way. If users are free to add in things they want themselves, then by definition it will be extensible. If there's some kind of outlandish resource issue, and users can fix it, they will. That's the cool thing about "ownership", it helps cover all the little nitty things that might hit my radar as an issue if they got out of hand. So if I worry about ownership when I first select my go-to browser, I don't have to constantly worry about all the other crap.
Because you have complex applications that run in a browser that you would like to use.
Nope. Any other reasons?
About the most complex application I ever use in a browser is an MMO character builder. I haven't ever felt the need to speed those up, and I suspect they wait for my next selection at the exact same speed no matter which web browser I use. Again, my main considerations here are (1) Does it actually work right in my browser? and (2) If it tries to subvert my browser, do I have the tools to stop it?. These both boil down to support and freedom.
Probably the next most complex things I do are live youtube streams (with comments). I suppose if things got sluggish there I might look for a speedier browser, but generally performance there is limited by the quality of my internet connection, not the speed of my computer.
I've seen that. It almost always seems to have something to do with videos (particularly youtube). It was much worse about a year or two ago. Haven't seen it in a while. I suspect it was flash causing the issue, and since most of the web has moved away from Flash, it just doesn't happen as often now.
Why on earth would I care at all about "performance" in my web browser. Unless its 10x slower, seriously who cares?
What I care about are:
Obviously you can't get perfect in either, but I'll err on the side of coming closest to these marks.
Not only that, but there were really analog computers (actual human beings with the job of making computations) that were in fact used for the project. Feynman in his first autobiography talks about getting put in charge of them.
The synopsis sounds even worse than the Jeremy Irons Dungeons & Dragons film from 2000, if such a thing is possible.
It's not.
Seriously, that's about the worst movie I've ever seen. I have trouble believing its possible to make a movie worse and still get it released and seen. That's likely how the script got "lost" in the first place.
To be fair, the first question was kind of a dick question. Politely phrased, true, but still very dismissive and challenging. Badly researched too. For instance, I can think of two full-blown commercial companies off the top of my head that make money off of GPL software development by selling less restrictive licenses. More certainly exist. Why does Stallman have to do this guy's own basic research for him?
As for your second paragraph, I don't think he was saying that at all. Its probably reasonable to be suspicious of everyone. However, what they are doing is not really making it at all difficult for malicious people to mess up a cell network. What they are doing is instead making it difficult for people to use the cell network properly.
I propose we call these categories "hashtags", and we can use a special character, like say the pound sign to designate that a tweet is intended for that category.
When the subset of users interested in moderating this category approve the worthiness of a tweet, they can signal their approval by forwarding it on to all of their followers. We could call this a "retweet". The cool thing about this idea is that not everyone's sense of humor matches up, so individual users can perhaps set themselves up somehow to only receive retweets from people who tend to retweet content they like. They could perhaps even then "retweet" that good content to their followers. Thus the best content would get spread much more widely, with perhaps the same exponential growth one sees in diseases.
A good way to "tag" this joke as a dup might be to use some kind of new feature to look for old tweets with identical content. Let's call that a "search". Then we can "flag" it by "retweeting" only the earliest version of the tweet to our users. Unless the new version has some new contributions that make it superior.
What an amazing insight! Well worth slogging through 16 paragraphs for .
Hasn't comedy *always* been the domain of people stealing jokes
It was a running gag on the old Milton Berle shows that he'd steal anything funny a guest said.
Reading what Stallman has to say is always annoying and appalling. Annoying because he isn't very polite to people he's talking to, and he's always demanding folks take actions almost nobody is going to take in order to stave off a future dystopia. Appalling because you realize that all his previous predictions of future dystopia have come true.
But in general, if you don't want to be further disadvantaging kids who don't have access to computers, you should probably rethink your entire strategy of basing all coursework around them. The school district I live in got around this issue by issuing all students their own loaner chromebooks for the year at no extra charge. That's one way to do it, but this also happens to be the wealthiest school district in my state.
I disagree. I want someone in government who isnt in government for the single reason that they are not in government.
But then they'd be in government, and you'd have to impeach them to replace them with someone who isn't in government.
The first time I ever even heard of C++ that I remember was in 1993 or so, and even then it was that interesting little project by that guy with the funny name over on the comp.lang.c++ newsgroup. And this is from a guy who had an interest in languages and compilers, and a subscription to SIGPLAN. I don't think I ever encountered it being used professionally until 1997 (and that was with VS6, which barely ought to count as C++).
In 1985 just getting a C compiler for your microcomputer was a really really big deal. It was a big mark of status. Most folks I know used the BASIC that came with their box, Assember, or some Wirth language (usually an extended Pascal of some kind or Modula-2).
How was the Apple II better or superior to the Commodore, TRS 80, Sinclaire Pet, or whatever the hell was out during the 1980's?
Those are some very different machines. As someone who was *really* into Microcomputers in the 80's...
The TRS-80 was black-and-white, and its graphics were....kinda cruddy. The Z-80 that ran it was kind of weak too, but that didn't matter so much because of the previously mentioned issues. Much worse machine than an Apple II, but they were cheap and you could buy one at any Radio Shack.
The C64 (and the Atari 800 it was apeing) were later machines than the Apple II. They used the same 6502 that the Apple II had, but they had better graphics and sound, and in the Atari's case a whole bunch of extra hardware to help drive this stuff (co-processor chips, 4 controller ports, 2 ROM cartridge slots, etc). They were much better machines than the Apple II, and few people bought the Apple II's once those other systems were widely available. At this point, I believe Apples were only really better for labs, due to the superior accessibility to the internals the machine provided (which was all Woz, and most assuredly was never designed into another Apple product).
I'm not real sure what point you were trying to drive at here, but I think its a miss. Jobs' big contribution to that first generation of Microcomputers was simply the insight and drive to make a product of it. Once "Apple" did that, and others saw there was an actual market there, much better machines started appearing relatively quickly.
Nice to see they've finally found a use for all those old obsolete public telephone stands.
Yay! Best high-modded post I've seen.
So based on these numbers for "All NTs", you'd expect to see about a 2:1 male:female ratio in the industry. Let's test this against the real-world data.
What we see is that there was indeed a time when we saw that ratio in CS programs. It was back in 1984. Today, its greater than 5:1. So something else, starting in 1984, happened to CS. Also, it only happened to CS. Not Law School, not Medical School, not the physical sciences. Just CS. For example, INTJ is supposedly the best personality type for scientists. M-B would predict a 5:1 ratio there. Today women are north of 40% of students in the physical sciences.
Conclusions:
Well, to be fair, wouldn't the remaining 52.6% qualify as "most?" They didn't say things like, "an overwhelming majority."
No, just strongly implied it. Also implied it is enough to explain the discrepancy, which would be a flat out lie. As they say, statistics don't lie, but liars use statistics.
RedK is asking a completely fair question:
No he isn't. He's throwing up something he just thought up off the top of his head as an excuse not to look into this issue any further. We know this because he could easily have spent 3 minutes googling this question himself and come up with data one way or the other. (What am I, his personal Google monkey?) The fact that he didn't bother proves he doesn't give a shit about getting to the bottom of the issue; just about finding an excuse for ignoring it.
Having said that, the numbers presented here don't seem to tally with the numbers graduating. Could women be switching to programming after graduation?
They actually don't jibe with any numbers I've seen. It was a self-selected internet survey, so about the furthest thing from scientific that could be imagined.
It would be nice if it were true, and we've finally got this issue on the way to being fixed. But the survey just being an outlier seems the more likely explanation right now.
But you should see that same effect with every industry, not just with CS. Toddlers aren't more expensive to care for when you program computers for a living. There clearly has to be something else going on, something specific to CS.
*Most* women want much more inter-personal interaction. That's a fact.
No, its not, Its a either a theory or a belief. If its a belief, then no amount of data will sway you from it. If its a theory, we should be able to test it with data.
Myers-Briggs personality tests measure this exact thing, and are very widespread. The resulting data is that 47.4% of women are introverts (a minority, but barely), while 54.7% of men are introverts (barely a majority). When you add in the fact that there are more women than men, in absolute numbers it should be pretty close to a wash. But at best this explanation of yours should, according to your theory, result in women only being about 47% of SW developers instead of 50%.
How you react to this data IMHO determines whether your supposed "fact" was a theory or part of a belief system...
You need to look at the decade running up to it, not 2 years. There was a great increase in money chasing enrollment running up to the peak. At 2 year difference in the peak isn't likely statistically significant.
Again, I'm through chasing zephyrs on this subject. Do you have data that shows "money chasing enrollment"? Because I could counter-speculate that the whole argument is BS, based on specialist doctors and lawyers being options making far more money for about the same intellectual requirements if you don't care about anything but money, and then you could argue they aren't the same because of the extra education required, and we can be here forever arguing over made up BS.
Data, or it isn't an argument.