This theme is explored in Orson Scott Card's book _Empire_, which I think came out yesterday. I haven't read it, but if you haven't heard of it you might be interested in looking it up.
The insurgents in Iraq seem to be fighting a quite capable war of attrition using, for the most part, arms quite accessible to the general public here.
That "seem to be" is, I believe, what prompted Gingrich's comments. It's clear that the US is losing the propaganda war, and for some reason clueless folks seem to think that muzzling free speech might somehow help.
Michael Yon had a good essay recently about how the US is failing in the information war. It's about getting your story out and rebutting factual errors in the other side's story, which the Pentagon is not doing.
One of the reasons I cannot stand Christianity is that it compels people to spread the word.
When people come to my door trying to share their religion, I always thank them for their concern. They don't want to convert me because they hate me, they want to convert me because they care about what happens to a stranger. In American culture, when you see something bad about to happen, you're supposed to do something to stop it - call the fire department when you see a house on fire, etc. To a Christian, a non-Christian is "unsaved": in imminent danger of death, forever.
It's easy to understand how somebody who thinks they see a clear and present danger might act inappropriately to avoid or prevent it. That doesn't excuse it, but hopefully it makes it easier to endure.
Where did this rant come from? The o.p. didn't mention or allude to Java at all.. it was a question about why people think that cross-platform development effort is hard/useless.
Your parent poster was claiming that people think cross-platform development is hard/useless because Java marketing says "Cross-platform development is hard/useless, unless you use Java!" and lots of people (especially those who have only ever used Java) believe them.
I use a package manager, so I don't get to experience it
Huh? I use a package manager on my Debian installation. I suffer dependency hell.
That's odd; I've only suffered dependency hell on my Debian or Ubuntu installations when I bypassed the package manager. Were you using Unstable?
Dependency hell is not solved by package managers, indeed usually it's made worse, both by the reliance upon them and the degree to which they make resolving some dependencies doubly hard (by making it more difficult to install two versions of the same application.)
I disagree; the problem is incredibly reduced by package managers, because when you want to install a package, you don't have to track down the programs it depends on, the programs that those programs depend on, etc. The only things that a package manager have trouble with are rare corner cases, such as when you want to have two versions of the same application or when you want to have two packages with conflicting dependencies (where success or failure depends on how shared libraries and versioning are implemented, not on whether or not there's a package manager).
That sounds like a system whose package manager has been bypassed.
In other words, a pretty much standard GNU/Linux distribution that's been used for more than a few months and had to be updated a few times.
Bypassing the package manager would make it a nonstandard system. I can't think of a reason why an ordinary user would need to install three different versions of the same program; a developer might, but then all bets are off.
Dependency hell. Don't you just love it?;-)
I use a package manager, so I don't get to experience it (even on Solaris; pkg-get is wonderful.)
Ever tried to compile popular Linux software on another Un*x? Whenever I encounter some piece of GPL-licensed software, I can almost guarantee it won't compile on Solaris, Tru64,.. - without spending hours for #ifdef'ing and patching the source.
That doesn't sound like a Linux problem. Ever try porting a Solaris device driver to Tru64?
He didn't say anything about device drivers. He said "software".
Device drivers are "software". It's natural and expected that software designed, run and tested on only one system will require work to port to another system. Every OS has non-POSIX interfaces that many programs use. Here's a non-device-driver example: ever try porting an application that uses Solaris threads to another platform? It doesn't "just work", but it's doable. There are often basic differences between environments. Linux is the only OS I know of that has a "linux" subdirectory in/usr/include.
It seems like a GPL Solaris would satisfy the needs of people like you, providing everything that people like about Linux with everything that you like about Solaris.
I have a Linux system here, with at least three different versions of, e.g., BerkeleyDB. 1.85 compat, 3.something, 4.idontknow. API changes, incompatibilities, you name it.
That sounds like a system whose package manager has been bypassed.
Ever tried to compile popular Linux software on another Un*x? Whenever I encounter some piece of GPL-licensed software, I can almost guarantee it won't compile on Solaris, Tru64,.. - without spending hours for #ifdef'ing and patching the source.
That doesn't sound like a Linux problem. Ever try porting a Solaris device driver to Tru64? Same thing. (It's easier than it sounds, if one is willing to spend hours #ifdef'ing and patching the source.) Lots of GPL software is already prepackaged for Solaris; if it's not on the Sun extras CD it's probably on blastwave.org or sunfreeware.com.
You want DTrace? Zones? Use Solaris. Is there any technical reason (no politics, please) where using Linux actually offers any benefit?
The rapid change of the Linux kernel results in new ideas and improvements being tried sooner and shortens the shelf life of cruft. Some aspect of the kernel look gross? All it takes to remove it is something better. Want hotpluggable SATA drivers? You don't have to wait long.
I installed a recent version of Solaris and on x86_64 hardware the minimum memory requirement is 512 MB. Maybe it's not really 512 MB - maybe omitting Gnome etc. would make it much smaller - but all I know is what the installer tells me. Linux is easy to install on machines with less memory (though it was annoying when RHEL started requiring 256 MB).
This might have changed since the last time I tried it, but Solaris x86 wants to be installed to a primary partition, which is sometimes not optimal.
Linux has a greater variety of filesystems available. It sounds like ZFS is great, but undoubtedly there is some niche that it's not optimal for. If XFS had been available for Solaris 5 years ago it would have saved me a ton of work.
I hope this has improved, but one area where Solaris used to really drop the ball was ATA controller support. With Sun selling x86_64 hardware, though, I can't imagine they'd let that situation continue.
I was amazed to learn that reviews often have a higher rate than testing of defects found per hour. It stands to reason that when you test, you have to spend time reasoning from symptom back to cause, and when you review, you detect causes directly. There are good and bad ways to review, though, so it's worth reading about first.
Some people even call unit testing a crutch, saying that those bugs should be found in reviews, but I'm not one of them.
A technique that goes a step farther than that takes so much institutional discipline that it's rare, but that produces very high quality code: the programmer does not actually compile their code. They write it, and then send it to a QA group that compiles it and reports bugs back to the programmer. It sounds terribly inefficient, but it causes the programmer to thoroughly review the code.
Those are good recommendations, but if one's college doesn't have a good CS/IT program, the answer is to find one that does. Self-education can give the tools needed for a career, but it's hard to convince HR departments of that. Not having that piece of paper that (appropriately) says "BS" is a hurdle.
If you can't afford what you consider to be a "good" university, maybe you're setting your sights too high. You don't need an undergrad degree from a top 10 department; a top 100 department will set you up for a career or for grad school at a more prestigious university just fine, and if money is an issue, a year or two at a community college can be an inexpensive stepping stone to that.
In my experience, even a good undergraduate education still benefits from reading the links in the parent's post. The undergrad level isn't about teaching you everything you need to know, it's about giving you the ability (or certifying that you already have it) to learn everything you need to know.
When I was in a similar place to the submitter, I started by reading the usual recommended programming books and doing small projects to learn new languages, but what had a more positive impact was starting a CS or SE Master's program
I think you're missing the point of my post. The submitter claims to already have a CompSci degree. Which means that the items listed should be redundant.
I don't think it means that. An undergraduate degree introduces the items listed, but it can't teach everything about them.
I think you're missing the point of my post, which is that a structured program can be beneficial even for somebody who's been working for a few years, reading the right books and writing hobby programs to learn new languages and stretch their boundaries. Let me append to that "especially if they already have a CS undergraduate degree," because then they probably have the breadth requirements covered.
The conclusion one might come to is that there is just as much (if not more) value in simply learning the topic on your own.
One might come to that conclusion, unless one has already been doing all the right things and remains unsatisfied. If one is desperate enough to ask slashdot how to improve oneself, one should evaluate the available local graduate programs (if any).
Mod parent up. When I was in a similar place to the submitter, I started by reading the usual recommended programming books and doing small projects to learn new languages, but what had a more positive impact was starting a CS or SE Master's program. Some courses are boring but others are amazing; I'm taking a course now that has weekly programming assignments, and I'm seeing benefits from putting new ideas into practice over and over again. The fast pace is stretching me and forcing me to improve; I know that if I were going through the book on my own, I wouldn't be doing an assignment a week. Being in an official program is, for me, like hiring a personal trainer to kick me in the butt and force me to keep the pace.
What, you don't consider genetic algorithms elegant? I think they're quite neat, as long as your subway doesn't stop working when the station wall clock's battery runs out.
I'm familiar with strong and weak atheism, and with the fact that common usage of "agnostic" doesn't fit the historical origins of the word. I was using the following terminology:
Atheism: what your second link calls Strong Atheism
Agnosticism: what your first link calls Weak Atheism, often phrased as "I don't know". The common usage doesn't take a position on whether or not the existence of a god is knowable because most people who use it don't take such a position. In a sense, this definition of agnosticism is more agnostic than Weak Agnosticism or Strong Agnosticism because it says "I don't know" about more than one thing.
To apply all this to the discussion, both Strong Agnosticism and Weak Agnosticism fit the definition of "religious belief" in the same way that atheism (what a philosopher would call Strong Atheism) does. So, if the Boy Scouts say "you must have religious belief," only an agnostic/Weak Atheist would be excluded. (I suspect that if an atheist used the arguments that I've used to argue for inclusion in the Boy Scouts, they'd be told "That doesn't count. What we mean is that you have to believe in The One True God to have religion.")
What about agnosticism? How would atheism somehow be more acceptible?
Atheism is a positive belief in the lack of a supernatural. Agnosticism says "I don't know." Atheism takes a stand and says "This is what I believe." That makes it easier to call it a set of religious beliefs. I don't know if "I don't know" counts as a belief or not, but "this is how things are" definitely counts as a belief.
Atheism is not a lack of a belief, it is a belief in the lack of. It is a positive belief that there are no gods or other supernatural beings.
I agree that most atheists don't see atheism as a religion, but they're wrong. Religion is a set of religious beliefs or practices. Everybody has religious beliefs of one sort or another, possibly except for the truly agnostic. It doesn't require belief *in* the supernatural, it requires belief *about* the supernatural, and believing that there is no supernatural is such a belief.
Not that I expect the Boy Scouts to necessarily agree.
Thanks to all those who are "offended" by ignorant, belligerent, and on rare occasions insightful opinions, we have the PC phrase "hate speech." This phrase is a wonderful thing, being so flexible that it can be applied almost without limitation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech
"Hate speech is a controversial term for speech intended to degrade, intimidate, or incite violence or prejudicial action against a person or group of people based on their race, gender, age, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, moral or political views, etc."
Are we working fom the same definition of hate speech?
Whether or not that definition covers the phrase "neocons are dumb" hinges on the intent of the speaker, which is easy to fudge whichever way one is so inclined. That's pretty flexible. Note that whether or not a statement is true has nothing to do with whether or not it falls under that definition of hate speech.
Lots of things are not nice to say, but just because something's not nice doesn't mean that it should be against the law. This is addressed by a fundamental question of the social contract: should government/society enforce as many of my beliefs as it can (at the expense of those who disagree with me), or should it enforce as few of my beliefs as are necessary for society to function?
It's the divisive politics of Illegal immigration. I know and have read of no one who is against immigration in the U.S. We're all too closely descended from immigrants.
I see opposition whenever I suggest unlimited legal immigration, which is the most practical way to solve the illegal immigration problem. If we let all (except criminals, etc.) immigrants in, illegal immigration would be within the capabilities of DHS to tackle. That some people still object to this tells me that it's not just about the fact that many immigrants are illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
This theme is explored in Orson Scott Card's book _Empire_, which I think came out yesterday. I haven't read it, but if you haven't heard of it you might be interested in looking it up.
Ah, thread drift...
That "seem to be" is, I believe, what prompted Gingrich's comments. It's clear that the US is losing the propaganda war, and for some reason clueless folks seem to think that muzzling free speech might somehow help.
Michael Yon had a good essay recently about how the US is failing in the information war. It's about getting your story out and rebutting factual errors in the other side's story, which the Pentagon is not doing.
When people come to my door trying to share their religion, I always thank them for their concern. They don't want to convert me because they hate me, they want to convert me because they care about what happens to a stranger. In American culture, when you see something bad about to happen, you're supposed to do something to stop it - call the fire department when you see a house on fire, etc. To a Christian, a non-Christian is "unsaved": in imminent danger of death, forever.
It's easy to understand how somebody who thinks they see a clear and present danger might act inappropriately to avoid or prevent it. That doesn't excuse it, but hopefully it makes it easier to endure.
That's pretty impressive. What cross-platform libraries do you use?
Your parent poster was claiming that people think cross-platform development is hard/useless because Java marketing says "Cross-platform development is hard/useless, unless you use Java!" and lots of people (especially those who have only ever used Java) believe them.
That's odd; I've only suffered dependency hell on my Debian or Ubuntu installations when I bypassed the package manager. Were you using Unstable?
I disagree; the problem is incredibly reduced by package managers, because when you want to install a package, you don't have to track down the programs it depends on, the programs that those programs depend on, etc. The only things that a package manager have trouble with are rare corner cases, such as when you want to have two versions of the same application or when you want to have two packages with conflicting dependencies (where success or failure depends on how shared libraries and versioning are implemented, not on whether or not there's a package manager).
Bypassing the package manager would make it a nonstandard system. I can't think of a reason why an ordinary user would need to install three different versions of the same program; a developer might, but then all bets are off.
I use a package manager, so I don't get to experience it (even on Solaris; pkg-get is wonderful.)
Device drivers are "software". It's natural and expected that software designed, run and tested on only one system will require work to port to another system. Every OS has non-POSIX interfaces that many programs use. Here's a non-device-driver example: ever try porting an application that uses Solaris threads to another platform? It doesn't "just work", but it's doable. There are often basic differences between environments. Linux is the only OS I know of that has a "linux" subdirectory in /usr/include.
It seems like a GPL Solaris would satisfy the needs of people like you, providing everything that people like about Linux with everything that you like about Solaris.
That sounds like a system whose package manager has been bypassed.
That doesn't sound like a Linux problem. Ever try porting a Solaris device driver to Tru64? Same thing. (It's easier than it sounds, if one is willing to spend hours #ifdef'ing and patching the source.) Lots of GPL software is already prepackaged for Solaris; if it's not on the Sun extras CD it's probably on blastwave.org or sunfreeware.com.
The rapid change of the Linux kernel results in new ideas and improvements being tried sooner and shortens the shelf life of cruft. Some aspect of the kernel look gross? All it takes to remove it is something better. Want hotpluggable SATA drivers? You don't have to wait long.
I installed a recent version of Solaris and on x86_64 hardware the minimum memory requirement is 512 MB. Maybe it's not really 512 MB - maybe omitting Gnome etc. would make it much smaller - but all I know is what the installer tells me. Linux is easy to install on machines with less memory (though it was annoying when RHEL started requiring 256 MB).
This might have changed since the last time I tried it, but Solaris x86 wants to be installed to a primary partition, which is sometimes not optimal.
Linux has a greater variety of filesystems available. It sounds like ZFS is great, but undoubtedly there is some niche that it's not optimal for. If XFS had been available for Solaris 5 years ago it would have saved me a ton of work.
I hope this has improved, but one area where Solaris used to really drop the ball was ATA controller support. With Sun selling x86_64 hardware, though, I can't imagine they'd let that situation continue.
Absolutely. Mod parent up.
I was amazed to learn that reviews often have a higher rate than testing of defects found per hour. It stands to reason that when you test, you have to spend time reasoning from symptom back to cause, and when you review, you detect causes directly. There are good and bad ways to review, though, so it's worth reading about first.
Some people even call unit testing a crutch, saying that those bugs should be found in reviews, but I'm not one of them.
A technique that goes a step farther than that takes so much institutional discipline that it's rare, but that produces very high quality code: the programmer does not actually compile their code. They write it, and then send it to a QA group that compiles it and reports bugs back to the programmer. It sounds terribly inefficient, but it causes the programmer to thoroughly review the code.
The beauty of this approach is that you don't have to worry about electing somebody who then turns around and does something you disagree with.
Those are good recommendations, but if one's college doesn't have a good CS/IT program, the answer is to find one that does. Self-education can give the tools needed for a career, but it's hard to convince HR departments of that. Not having that piece of paper that (appropriately) says "BS" is a hurdle.
If you can't afford what you consider to be a "good" university, maybe you're setting your sights too high. You don't need an undergrad degree from a top 10 department; a top 100 department will set you up for a career or for grad school at a more prestigious university just fine, and if money is an issue, a year or two at a community college can be an inexpensive stepping stone to that.
In my experience, even a good undergraduate education still benefits from reading the links in the parent's post. The undergrad level isn't about teaching you everything you need to know, it's about giving you the ability (or certifying that you already have it) to learn everything you need to know.
I don't think it means that. An undergraduate degree introduces the items listed, but it can't teach everything about them.
I think you're missing the point of my post, which is that a structured program can be beneficial even for somebody who's been working for a few years, reading the right books and writing hobby programs to learn new languages and stretch their boundaries. Let me append to that "especially if they already have a CS undergraduate degree," because then they probably have the breadth requirements covered.
One might come to that conclusion, unless one has already been doing all the right things and remains unsatisfied. If one is desperate enough to ask slashdot how to improve oneself, one should evaluate the available local graduate programs (if any).
Mod parent up. When I was in a similar place to the submitter, I started by reading the usual recommended programming books and doing small projects to learn new languages, but what had a more positive impact was starting a CS or SE Master's program. Some courses are boring but others are amazing; I'm taking a course now that has weekly programming assignments, and I'm seeing benefits from putting new ideas into practice over and over again. The fast pace is stretching me and forcing me to improve; I know that if I were going through the book on my own, I wouldn't be doing an assignment a week. Being in an official program is, for me, like hiring a personal trainer to kick me in the butt and force me to keep the pace.
If someone cares about security, why store passwords in Gaim to begin with?
Does Gaim automatically save passwords to a file, even when you tell it to prompt you for a password at the beginning of each session?
What, you don't consider genetic algorithms elegant? I think they're quite neat, as long as your subway doesn't stop working when the station wall clock's battery runs out.
I'm familiar with strong and weak atheism, and with the fact that common usage of "agnostic" doesn't fit the historical origins of the word. I was using the following terminology:
Atheism: what your second link calls Strong Atheism
Agnosticism: what your first link calls Weak Atheism, often phrased as "I don't know". The common usage doesn't take a position on whether or not the existence of a god is knowable because most people who use it don't take such a position. In a sense, this definition of agnosticism is more agnostic than Weak Agnosticism or Strong Agnosticism because it says "I don't know" about more than one thing.
To apply all this to the discussion, both Strong Agnosticism and Weak Agnosticism fit the definition of "religious belief" in the same way that atheism (what a philosopher would call Strong Atheism) does. So, if the Boy Scouts say "you must have religious belief," only an agnostic/Weak Atheist would be excluded. (I suspect that if an atheist used the arguments that I've used to argue for inclusion in the Boy Scouts, they'd be told "That doesn't count. What we mean is that you have to believe in The One True God to have religion.")
Not collecting stamps is more like agnosticism. Atheism is like only collecting a certain kind of stamp.
Atheism is a positive belief in the lack of a supernatural. Agnosticism says "I don't know." Atheism takes a stand and says "This is what I believe." That makes it easier to call it a set of religious beliefs. I don't know if "I don't know" counts as a belief or not, but "this is how things are" definitely counts as a belief.
Atheism is not a lack of a belief, it is a belief in the lack of. It is a positive belief that there are no gods or other supernatural beings.
I agree that most atheists don't see atheism as a religion, but they're wrong. Religion is a set of religious beliefs or practices. Everybody has religious beliefs of one sort or another, possibly except for the truly agnostic. It doesn't require belief *in* the supernatural, it requires belief *about* the supernatural, and believing that there is no supernatural is such a belief.
Not that I expect the Boy Scouts to necessarily agree.
If necessary you could point out that atheism is a religious belief.
Whether or not that definition covers the phrase "neocons are dumb" hinges on the intent of the speaker, which is easy to fudge whichever way one is so inclined. That's pretty flexible. Note that whether or not a statement is true has nothing to do with whether or not it falls under that definition of hate speech.
Lots of things are not nice to say, but just because something's not nice doesn't mean that it should be against the law. This is addressed by a fundamental question of the social contract: should government/society enforce as many of my beliefs as it can (at the expense of those who disagree with me), or should it enforce as few of my beliefs as are necessary for society to function?
That's definitely true. When quotas were introduced during and after WW1, immigration policy became a lot less fair.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a petabox in an 18 wheeler?
I see opposition whenever I suggest unlimited legal immigration, which is the most practical way to solve the illegal immigration problem. If we let all (except criminals, etc.) immigrants in, illegal immigration would be within the capabilities of DHS to tackle. That some people still object to this tells me that it's not just about the fact that many immigrants are illegal.