>Furthermore, just because C/C++ is a "faster" language, that doesn't imply its better suited to web development, or even windows app development.
However, nor would I say that the implied corrolary, that C# is better suited to web development work, is true. Overhead on C# work in the web development sphere is in fact actually driving a lot of companies who HAD gone to ASP.NET to switch over to *nix/Ruby or Python.
Finally a general note - as someone authorized to hire programmers, I generally look for breadth of experience in a number of different languages and backgrounds. I KNOW that these people can learn.NET or Ruby quickly if they don't know it already, whereas I'm likely to be much more dubious about someone who claims.NET experience right out of college. Learn XML and a good declarative language (Haskell, Scheme or Ocaml perhaps), pick up some DECENT Javascript skills, a good strongly typed language like C# or Java, and dome background on work methodologies and design practices, and you'll be eminently more attractive to IT hiring managers.
Actually, both KDE 3.2 and Gnome are integrating SVG into the core of the OS. It's not completely there yet - KDE 3.2 SVG is only marginally interactive, for instance, but much of the key functionality such as element support, linking, patterns, gradients, and the like is supported. Figure full SVG compliance to 1.1 on KDE 3.4; Gnome uses most of the same libs, so will likely end up integrating that as well.
I have had received more than a few patches from Microsost which: a) Failed to solve the problem in the first place, b) Caused another problem to appear in a seemingly unrelated application, resulting in significant time spent debugging, uninstalling, and otherwise wasting time for something I had no control over, c) Ended up adding significantly to the amount of unusable space on my Windows XP system, d) Added considerably to the bloat of the System Registry.
I moved our entire company off Windows to SuSE Linux after one of our primary public facing servers became infected with a worm which enterprising hackers used to store (and later serve) German porn movies. This despite our sysadmin religiously installing patches.
That is a big part of the reason why I no longer find the argument that Windows is just simply the largest target even remotely accurate. My sysadmin also does some coding work, and every patch that needs to be uploaded reduces his profitable time; to have something that compromises the integrity of our system in such an egregious manner is not acceptable.
I would rather have a good sysadmin that knows what he's doing maintaining a secure Linux system than having a less competent sysadmin maintaining a Windows system because the system tools are easier to use, even if it means paying more to the Linux admin.
In all honesty, the XML would be generated at a level where hands would likely never touch it, more likely through a series of transformations. Having written XML generators for C++, C# and Java, I've found that the XML is, by itself, very verbose, because it is fundamentally a meta-level description. You wouldn't write:
In all likelihood, the fragment will have been generated via a UML interface or something similar, and this would then be produced through a simple transformation.
Before objecting to the cost involved, consider that both an XML parser and an XSLT transformation are fairly straightforward finite state machines, and could very easily be dropped into firmware (something that is already beginning to happen). Because of the ubiquity of XML, firmware processing of XML is making more and more sense, and once you have that, it becomes a natural for building ILs and related compiler technology.
The VB.NET implementation illustrates one of the central problems that low level IL seems to be subject to, as alluded to by the previous post. VB.NET is not Visual Basic, requiring a much higher degree of abstraction that many non-tech people (who generally make up the VB audience) find bewildering and cumbersome. It has the form that it has because the language had to be modified in order to work with the underlying.NET CLR, which eliminated many of the inherent advantages of VB in certain circumstances. This can be seen even more with the.NET versions of Perl, which has to sacrifice the highly flexible structure and run-time code construction in order to fit within the constraints of the IL (ditto for Javascript and other "interpreted" languages).
I suspect that the final IL will be XML based, though the encodings will likely be Post Schema Validated Infosets (PSVI) for performance. The idea that you can write a compiler in XSLT is perverse, but nonetheless really, really cool.
SVG IS XML. All of it. Always has been. It's a vector graphics format that's written using XML primitives rather than binary ones, but it's still a vector graphic format. Chances are if the size was too big, it was because either someone embedded all of their font info inside of it, or there were huge number of path directives, but bit for bit SVG files are generally not much bigger than the binary formats they represent (especially if they are gzipped).
In general I would be very distrustful of any candidate who absolutely demanded that we know who won the election RIGHT NOW!
There is a period of eight weeks between the time that an election is held and a president or Congress is sworn in, and a similar period of time for more local officials. Originally this interval existed for transit reasons - it might take two months for a candidate from the far West (at the time, any place to the west of the Appalachian moutains) to get to Washington.
However, as communication and transportation has become faster, it has also served as a means to insure that close races can be verified by recounts. This has certainly been the case since the 1920s, anyway.
There is no imperative that the winner of an election be known immediately. The outcome of the 2000 election was not known for nearly two months (and it can be argued was not known even after that), yet the country did not fall apart. That the news-media doesn't have a Red or Blue person to fill the requisite slots is not a compelling enough reason... indeed, they probably got more air time out of the ambiguities from the 2000 election than they would have if the race had been decisive.
Electronic voting machines are fine; they can resolve a lot of the ambiguity inherent in any election, they reduce the amount of paper to be transported or stored, and they can often present the information in a form that is easier to follow than confusing paper ballots. But this is ONLY true if such machines are intrinsically auditable. This involves several factors:
A paper trail is produced which shows to the person who voted HOW they voted, that can then be deposited for auditing in a close election.
Any changes made to the system would get noted in a log, and that log could be audited.
The source code for the voting machines is made available to any public governing body that requested it.
Any company that produced such machines should be required by law to disclose any potential conflicts of interest that the company has prior to the sale of such voting machines.
Secretaries of State should be required to hire an IT person who's sole purpose is to publicly certify the integrity of the source code. It's all too easy to upload a "switch" that would only be activated prior to the actual election.
While I do not have hard evidence for this, anecdotal evidence indicates that precincts that received no voting machines tend to have a significant shift in the voting patterns for that precinct, almost invariably toward Republican candidates.
This can be "masked" in the media as being a shift in the way that the county itself voted, but because there were no exit polls in the 2002 elections, it was almost impossible to tell whether the bias that showed up was in fact another significant lurch to the right, or whether some kind of voter fraud occurred.
There is relatively little correlation between being gifted in mathematics and being a strong computer programmer, except either in the very rarified air of academic computer/systems science types or perhaps in simulations/games. A game programmer may very well use difference equations (discrete differential equations) for handling some of the underlying physics, while anyone simulating weather flows or stellar convection dynamics or complex economics may very well utilize PDEs.
However, these people are not likely to be using VB for this task - and indeed would probably prefer to use a home-grown language that's optimized for strong parallel development rather than even use a language such as C++.
I've written a couple of books on Visual Basic over the years (for Coriolis and Sybex, both sadly gone now) and have found that the average VB developer may have math skills up to the level of linear algebra, maybe with some basic calculus. Most know nothing about set or graph theory, topology, real or complex analysis, multivariate calculus (or calculus of variations), tensor calculus, stochastic methods, or complexity theory. In general, if you have a mind capable of dealing with the abstractions implicit in any of those, you are much more likely to seek computer languages that can better handler those abstractions.
The League of Women Voters produces just such a set of pamphlets, at least here in the state of Washington. While it can be argued that the LWV probably leans to the left a little, the pamphlets are generally very well written, extremely balanced, and contain no advertising.
As to the parties issue, I think that a big part of the problem in our Democracy right now is the fact that while the existing power structures support the two party Republican/Democratic split, a fairly wide number of people self-identify with other political parties, from Greens and Socialists to Libertarians and the Freedom Party. They don't always vote for these candidates, however, because they understand that if they do, then their vote will simply not count, even if, by some miracle, they manage to wend their way through the roadblocks set up by the two parties and get a sufficient number of voters aware of their message.
It is worth noting one of the key tenets of the vote swapping arrangement - it is a strictly voluntary arrangement. In essence, two people enter into an unenforceable contract stating that if one person agrees to change his vote, the other person will also do the same. However, there is no binding authority to insure that either of these people do this; when they enter into the voting booth, they could just as readily both revert back to their original thinking, or one or the other could also choose to revert back to her original thinking.
In essence, what this means is that the vote swapping service is an educational tool - it helps to inform both participants about the politics within other states so that they can utilize their vote to maximum effect. This is the principle reason that it was okayed by the Ninth Circuit Court; there was no binding requirements upon either participant, and it served to insure that a voter could better make his vote count.
I think the arguments against this here on Slashdot have been disingenuous. The Electoral College is an artifact of an earlier era which made sure that the election process didn't take several years to accomplish... by voting on representatives to the college, citizens of a state such as Virginia (which stretched west to the Mississippi in the late 18th century) would have their wishes respected in a reasonably timely manner. Moreover, the framers of the Constitution very specifically did not say how these electoral representatives were to be chosen by each state, conceding that political and economic differences would also lead to differences in choosing that representative.
Today, the electoral system is a tool that is used by both parties simply as one more political weapon. The system would be no less corrupt in a direct democracy... it would only be a little less complicated. It does, however, tend to provide a multiplier effect in many cases, as a number of states have adopted a winner take all system that disproportionately hides the popular vote in favor of the states' vote.
Vote swapping is intended to counter this, somewhat. It is actually quite good for third party candidates because it accomplishes two tasks - it insures that voters don't end up giving a vote to an extreme candidate on the other side of the political by splitting the vote between two relatively similar politicians on their side, and it means that third party candidates can be voted on in safe states ensuring that they can get funding under the complex and often grossly biased electoral funding system. It also has a third effect - the leadership for the parties is not in fact elected positions at all; instead they tend to be entrenched political kingmakers with no real checks on their own power. A system such as vote swapping provides a way for the membership of a given party to send a strong message to the leadership without necessarily promoting an extremist candidate.
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 3, Informative
In the mid-1880s, at the (well-renumerated) insistence of the Railroad companies, corporations were given all of the rights that hitherto had been assigned only to individuals via the Bill of Rights. Until that time, the rights and abilities of corporations were highly restricted, in great part because Jefferson, Madison and Franklin were all quite aware of what would happen if corporations did gain these rights. In many ways the original Revolutionary war was a corporate war - much of the exploration of the American colonies was carried out by corporations that were looking for a cheaper source of raw materials and a captive market for their goods. When the American revolutionaries began to fight back, it was these same corporations that paid for the British troops, ships, and armaments, because they saw the actions as being harmful to their corporate interests.
I entered the field professionally in the mid-1980s, at the mid-point of a smaller "dot-com" like crash that basically had the college counselors and profs saying that there was no future in computing. The rise of GUI computing was just around the corner.
There are a number of fascinating things going on at the edges right now - distributed computing, web services, semiotics and ontologies, and that's only in one fairly small sector. None of these have immediate business application, but I personally believe that the age of agressive business computing by itself is probably past. You can have only so many CRM packages... however, its worth noting that most (if not all) of the significant innovations that HAVE come about from computing have not emerged from business computing. Instead, they were intended to solve immediate problems (I need to keep track of my personal data -- how about writing a database engine; I need to display physics abstracts for the post-docs that work around here -- I've got it I'll whip up this SGML language and throw in a few links so I don't have to look this stuff up manually). Computing hasn't failed here - only the (largely irrational) belief that one can make money through computing, when computing only means that you speed up the transactions (and hence the level of complexity) within a system.
The pendulum needs to swing back, gain some energy in the R&D fields, before the border applications really hit maturation to an extent that they can be exploited again. That's been the cycle since I started working with computers in the 1970s, and I don't see it changing.
Sun is hurting right now - their share prices are in the toilet. IBM could very easily buy Sun, incorporate their servers into the IBM line (or phase them out altogether) and then Open Source Java. Given that IBM currently has more Java developers than Sun does, and sees Linux/Java as being the weapon to reduce Microsoft's dominance, it would be a perfectly reasonable course of action.
X - in Greek is pronounced as ghee, where gh is a soft gutteral similar to the ch sound of Bach when pronounced in German. English really doesn't have an equivalent sound. Only ignorant frat boys actually say X as kye.
One of the most famous pages of the Book of Kells, one of the earlierst Celtic illustrated Bibles, is the XP (ghee-rho) page, where the two letters dominate the layout of the page.
However, XP was something of a late choice for Microsoft, from what I understand, and almost certainly comes from eXPerience. It was also a direct nod (or rip-off) of OS-X, and a tendency by Microsoft to put X in the names of practically any consumer technology because the letter has a certain mystery and cachet in marketing circles (it is also the principle sound of SeX, and there is no doubt some subliminaly attempts here to make XP "sexy"). Windows Y, for instance, would have raised questions about the viability of Windows (Windows Why?) and Windows YP is not even worth thinking about, because it brings up questions about prostate conditions.
XP is a fancy new shell on top of Windows 2K, and all kinds of interesting hooks to eliminate competitors: WMA, Passport, Photo Manager, Firewall software, etc. I personally have a basic question about all this, however... Microsoft is clearly intending to dominate every potential software market it can, which means that Windows will continue to include more and more "core" technology that reduces their competitors, but also means that developers will have fewer and fewer opportunities to create products that keep them employed. Perhaps it is this reason that I have occasionally thought XP really stood for eX-Programmer...
What a program like this does is teach the kids (and you are talking kids here) that they are able to work with a computer, to produce something that can be seen by the whole world, and that they too can play in the bigger ponds. A significant amount of gang activity occurs because of three factors:
* boredom - when there are no jobs or other activities you have to do something to keep from going crazy.
* status - kids go into gangs because of peer pressure, to prove that they are as good as all of the other kids
* money - significant if you're fairly high up in the gang, but for most gang members, the amount of money that they actually see is considerably less than what they'd see as a developer.
They don't go into gangs because they deliberately want to be evil; that usually seeps in after a while because most gangs are also little more than the ground troops of more highly developed organized crime syndicates - the drug suppliers, the auto-theft operations, and so forth.
You provide these kids access to systems that they otherwise would have neither money nor interest in touching on their own, you teach them that they can build their own presences on the web, and eventually they probably will make the effort to go after the good jobs, to get more formal training (in college or trade schools) and so on. It isn't about money, it's about respect.
I am on the OASIS Human Markup Language committee, and I find a lot of the comments here quite fascinating. I would very much be interested in hearing what people have to say concerning their concerns about misuse of the standard as well as where people see potential applications that should be considered by the committee. I'll try to pass on as many of these concerns as possible.
Kurt Cagle,
Co-Author, Professional XSL, Wrox
I met Poul once at a science fiction convention back in the late 1980s. He was very gracious and generous, and I was struck by his wit and insight. When I started my own writing career a few years later, Poul was one of my icons and inspirations, along with the late Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Bloch. Sadly, they are all passing into the night now, mortal in body if not in spirit. That he was able to hear that he was loved and will be truly missed before he died must have been truly bitter-sweet, though I am glad that he could hear them.
To Poul, may you find the new universe on the other side of the singularity.
It's funny. I hear this come up a lot from recruiters, that most people were rejected out of hand for simply not being sufficiently qualified, but realistically I have to wonder how many of those people out there were skilled in other similar areas but didn't have the right buzzwords on their resumes. Most technologies that I've seen have analogs -- someone may not be an Oracle programmer, but if they can write a serviceable SQL statement against SQL Server or DB2 they know 85% of everything they need to be an Oracle DBA.
Yes, you have opportunists, people who got into the field because HTML was easy to learn; I actually stayed out of the field at the time because it was obvious to me from 1993 to 1996 that anybody who could string together two tagged expressions was calling themselves a programmer.
However, in the past few years this has changed dramatically. I have written a number of books on XML, which could be taken as being an "easy" language. However, it is now becoming the underpinnings on which almost all programming in the next decade are being built on, and some of it rivals some of the most gnarled C programming that I've ever seen (which, by the way, was also considered a scripting language in its day -- all the recruiters were too busy looking for people who knew how to program COBOL).
I think the one thing that is not mentioned in all of this is the rise of the "placement companies" where people who didn't have the first clue about how a technology were actively shoving hundreds of thousands of resumes under hiring company's noses. I don't really think that they ended up doing either their clients or the people they "represented" any real favors.
Actually, most apps don't use math, beyond fairly simple algebra. If you're doing graphics, figure some trigonometry and linear algebra. I think I did use Runge-Katta once for a pretty hairy bit of game physics. Compression schemes and encryption algorithms obviously require a certain amount of mathematics. You can create complex system models in programming without ever actually realizing that you're doing graph theory work.
The underpinnings of all programming is ultimately linguistic -- the manipulation of symbols. This is where it shares its' similarity to math, but in point of fact biology probably uses more math on a day to day basis than programming does.
Personally, I would be more inclined to say that while near the end there was probably some justification in questioning the extreme salaries, in point of fact, the wages were probably simply moving to a more reasonable value. Until the late 1980s, most programmers were seen as being basically clerical types by management because they typed on keyboards. When I started working in programming I was basically making about $23,000 a year in an area that was already becoming expensive. This was in 1990.
Housing prices shot up in response to the increasing demand for all kinds of workers, especially technical workers, in the mid-1990s. The same house in Bellevue, WA went from about $65,000 a year to $390,000 a year, and other costs rose accordingly. You had to ask $80,000 in Bellevue or Seattle because after you paid for housing, groceries, etc., what you had at the end of the day didn't go all that far.
Of course, on the flip-side, I think that there was also a population of nouveau riche, those that had cashed out their stock options early and made out like bandits, and these people also tended to inflate the value of those same houses.
But they were generally in the minority.
Now, many of these same people are in a world of hurt, because while the jobs have become scarcer and many have seen what wealth they've had evaporate, housing prices still remain artificially high. Some may see it as comeupance (yes, there was a wee bit of arrogance there) but I think you'll find that most IT people generally fared far worse than the people who employed them.
The Microsoft "entrance exam", where a PM or senior programmer basically throws you an algorithm problem out of a book (perhaps but not necessarily a computing program) is something I've taken several times in various interviews. The intent is not to see if you are a deep thinker but that you can think quickly on your feet, come up with a facile solution to a facile problem. In many ways, this is a mode that is pervasive with most computing companies.
The irony is that, for those people who HAVE been around for a while, the really truly gifted programmers were not the facile ones who could regurgitate an algorithm off the top of their heads. They were the ones who would be given a problem, would wander off, have a cup of coffee, sleep on it, maybe even toy with it for a few days, then come back and provide an answer so insightful and powerful that it challenged the very notion of how things were done.
One of the purposes of University is to provide a degree of insulation from the real world for precisely those kinds of problem, but it is not something that most people (sometimes programmers, but far more often program managers and up) really understood. All too often, they want an answer now, because they have no real comprehension of the fact that solving a complex problem, unlike managing people, was not something that could be easily scheduled.
I am a slow thinker, and a slow programmer. When I design something, however, it is flexible enough that it can be used again and again. I wrote a presentation application for which I was late on, and was penalized accordingly by losing that contract. Yet the last I checked, the same application was being used four years later for completely unrelated purposes, because I designed it not only for the immediate need but the unanticipated needs.
We teach our programmers to write throw-away products because the perceived need for speed is always greater than the need for flexibility, and then we throw-away the programmer and perpetuate the cycle. Perhaps this bust WAS inevitable.
Slashdot Mirror
>Furthermore, just because C/C++ is a "faster" language, that doesn't imply its better suited to web development, or even windows app development.
.NET or Ruby quickly if they don't know it already, whereas I'm likely to be much more dubious about someone who claims.NET experience right out of college. Learn XML and a good declarative language (Haskell, Scheme or Ocaml perhaps), pick up some DECENT Javascript skills, a good strongly typed language like C# or Java, and dome background on work methodologies and design practices, and you'll be eminently more attractive to IT hiring managers.
However, nor would I say that the implied corrolary, that C# is better suited to web development work, is true. Overhead on C# work in the web development sphere is in fact actually driving a lot of companies who HAD gone to ASP.NET to switch over to *nix/Ruby or Python.
Finally a general note - as someone authorized to hire programmers, I generally look for breadth of experience in a number of different languages and backgrounds. I KNOW that these people can learn
Damn! If I'd known I was supposed to get rich off a keynote speech, I'd have asked for more money!!
-- Kurt Cagle
Actually, both KDE 3.2 and Gnome are integrating SVG into the core of the OS. It's not completely there yet - KDE 3.2 SVG is only marginally interactive, for instance, but much of the key functionality such as element support, linking, patterns, gradients, and the like is supported. Figure full SVG compliance to 1.1 on KDE 3.4; Gnome uses most of the same libs, so will likely end up integrating that as well.
I have had received more than a few patches from Microsost which:
a) Failed to solve the problem in the first place,
b) Caused another problem to appear in a seemingly unrelated application, resulting in significant time spent debugging, uninstalling, and otherwise wasting time for something I had no control over,
c) Ended up adding significantly to the amount of unusable space on my Windows XP system,
d) Added considerably to the bloat of the System Registry.
I moved our entire company off Windows to SuSE Linux after one of our primary public facing servers became infected with a worm which enterprising hackers used to store (and later serve) German porn movies. This despite our sysadmin religiously installing patches.
That is a big part of the reason why I no longer find the argument that Windows is just simply the largest target even remotely accurate. My sysadmin also does some coding work, and every patch that needs to be uploaded reduces his profitable time; to have something that compromises the integrity of our system in such an egregious manner is not acceptable.
I would rather have a good sysadmin that knows what he's doing maintaining a secure Linux system than having a less competent sysadmin maintaining a Windows system because the system tools are easier to use, even if it means paying more to the Linux admin.
In all honesty, the XML would be generated at a level where hands would likely never touch it, more likely through a series of transformations. Having written XML generators for C++, C# and Java, I've found that the XML is, by itself, very verbose, because it is fundamentally a meta-level description. You wouldn't write:
<func optargn="burp">arg1 arg2 arg3 lst</func>
you'd write
<function name="foo">
<param name="arg1" type="xs:string"/>
<param name="arg2" type="xs:integer"/>
<param name="arg3" type="cplxOpj"/>
<param name="arg4" type="xs:string" optional="yes"/>
<!-- implementation code -->
</function>
In all likelihood, the fragment will have been generated via a UML interface or something similar, and this would then be produced through a simple transformation.
Before objecting to the cost involved, consider that both an XML parser and an XSLT transformation are fairly straightforward finite state machines, and could very easily be dropped into firmware (something that is already beginning to happen). Because of the ubiquity of XML, firmware processing of XML is making more and more sense, and once you have that, it becomes a natural for building ILs and related compiler technology.
(Trying this again)
Aarggh -- if you're going to doing this, do it right:
<code label="start">
<instruction name="MOV" type="REGISTER">
<source bits="16" name="CX"/>
<destination bits="16" name="AX"/>
</instruction>
</code>
Aarggh -- if you're going to doing this, do it right:
The VB.NET implementation illustrates one of the central problems that low level IL seems to be subject to, as alluded to by the previous post. VB.NET is not Visual Basic, requiring a much higher degree of abstraction that many non-tech people (who generally make up the VB audience) find bewildering and cumbersome. It has the form that it has because the language had to be modified in order to work with the underlying .NET CLR, which eliminated many of the inherent advantages of VB in certain circumstances. This can be seen even more with the .NET versions of Perl, which has to sacrifice the highly flexible structure and run-time code construction in order to fit within the constraints of the IL (ditto for Javascript and other "interpreted" languages).
I suspect that the final IL will be XML based, though the encodings will likely be Post Schema Validated Infosets (PSVI) for performance. The idea that you can write a compiler in XSLT is perverse, but nonetheless really, really cool.
SVG IS XML. All of it. Always has been. It's a vector graphics format that's written using XML primitives rather than binary ones, but it's still a vector graphic format. Chances are if the size was too big, it was because either someone embedded all of their font info inside of it, or there were huge number of path directives, but bit for bit SVG files are generally not much bigger than the binary formats they represent (especially if they are gzipped).
There is a period of eight weeks between the time that an election is held and a president or Congress is sworn in, and a similar period of time for more local officials. Originally this interval existed for transit reasons - it might take two months for a candidate from the far West (at the time, any place to the west of the Appalachian moutains) to get to Washington.
However, as communication and transportation has become faster, it has also served as a means to insure that close races can be verified by recounts. This has certainly been the case since the 1920s, anyway.
There is no imperative that the winner of an election be known immediately. The outcome of the 2000 election was not known for nearly two months (and it can be argued was not known even after that), yet the country did not fall apart. That the news-media doesn't have a Red or Blue person to fill the requisite slots is not a compelling enough reason
Electronic voting machines are fine; they can resolve a lot of the ambiguity inherent in any election, they reduce the amount of paper to be transported or stored, and they can often present the information in a form that is easier to follow than confusing paper ballots. But this is ONLY true if such machines are intrinsically auditable. This involves several factors:
While I do not have hard evidence for this, anecdotal evidence indicates that precincts that received no voting machines tend to have a significant shift in the voting patterns for that precinct, almost invariably toward Republican candidates.
This can be "masked" in the media as being a shift in the way that the county itself voted, but because there were no exit polls in the 2002 elections, it was almost impossible to tell whether the bias that showed up was in fact another significant lurch to the right, or whether some kind of voter fraud occurred.
There is relatively little correlation between being gifted in mathematics and being a strong computer programmer, except either in the very rarified air of academic computer/systems science types or perhaps in simulations/games. A game programmer may very well use difference equations (discrete differential equations) for handling some of the underlying physics, while anyone simulating weather flows or stellar convection dynamics or complex economics may very well utilize PDEs.
However, these people are not likely to be using VB for this task - and indeed would probably prefer to use a home-grown language that's optimized for strong parallel development rather than even use a language such as C++.
I've written a couple of books on Visual Basic over the years (for Coriolis and Sybex, both sadly gone now) and have found that the average VB developer may have math skills up to the level of linear algebra, maybe with some basic calculus. Most know nothing about set or graph theory, topology, real or complex analysis, multivariate calculus (or calculus of variations), tensor calculus, stochastic methods, or complexity theory. In general, if you have a mind capable of dealing with the abstractions implicit in any of those, you are much more likely to seek computer languages that can better handler those abstractions.
The League of Women Voters produces just such a set of pamphlets, at least here in the state of Washington. While it can be argued that the LWV probably leans to the left a little, the pamphlets are generally very well written, extremely balanced, and contain no advertising.
As to the parties issue, I think that a big part of the problem in our Democracy right now is the fact that while the existing power structures support the two party Republican/Democratic split, a fairly wide number of people self-identify with other political parties, from Greens and Socialists to Libertarians and the Freedom Party. They don't always vote for these candidates, however, because they understand that if they do, then their vote will simply not count, even if, by some miracle, they manage to wend their way through the roadblocks set up by the two parties and get a sufficient number of voters aware of their message.
It is worth noting one of the key tenets of the vote swapping arrangement - it is a strictly voluntary arrangement. In essence, two people enter into an unenforceable contract stating that if one person agrees to change his vote, the other person will also do the same. However, there is no binding authority to insure that either of these people do this; when they enter into the voting booth, they could just as readily both revert back to their original thinking, or one or the other could also choose to revert back to her original thinking.
... by voting on representatives to the college, citizens of a state such as Virginia (which stretched west to the Mississippi in the late 18th century) would have their wishes respected in a reasonably timely manner. Moreover, the framers of the Constitution very specifically did not say how these electoral representatives were to be chosen by each state, conceding that political and economic differences would also lead to differences in choosing that representative.
... it would only be a little less complicated. It does, however, tend to provide a multiplier effect in many cases, as a number of states have adopted a winner take all system that disproportionately hides the popular vote in favor of the states' vote.
In essence, what this means is that the vote swapping service is an educational tool - it helps to inform both participants about the politics within other states so that they can utilize their vote to maximum effect. This is the principle reason that it was okayed by the Ninth Circuit Court; there was no binding requirements upon either participant, and it served to insure that a voter could better make his vote count.
I think the arguments against this here on Slashdot have been disingenuous. The Electoral College is an artifact of an earlier era which made sure that the election process didn't take several years to accomplish
Today, the electoral system is a tool that is used by both parties simply as one more political weapon. The system would be no less corrupt in a direct democracy
Vote swapping is intended to counter this, somewhat. It is actually quite good for third party candidates because it accomplishes two tasks - it insures that voters don't end up giving a vote to an extreme candidate on the other side of the political by splitting the vote between two relatively similar politicians on their side, and it means that third party candidates can be voted on in safe states ensuring that they can get funding under the complex and often grossly biased electoral funding system. It also has a third effect - the leadership for the parties is not in fact elected positions at all; instead they tend to be entrenched political kingmakers with no real checks on their own power. A system such as vote swapping provides a way for the membership of a given party to send a strong message to the leadership without necessarily promoting an extremist candidate.
In the mid-1880s, at the (well-renumerated) insistence of the Railroad
companies, corporations were given all of the rights that hitherto had been assigned only to individuals via the Bill of Rights. Until that time, the rights and abilities of
corporations were highly restricted, in great part because Jefferson, Madison and Franklin
were all quite aware of what would happen if corporations did gain these rights. In many ways the original Revolutionary war was a corporate war - much of the exploration of the
American colonies was carried out by corporations that were looking for a cheaper source of raw materials and a captive market for their goods. When the American revolutionaries began to fight back, it was these same corporations that paid for the British troops, ships, and armaments, because they saw the actions as being harmful to their corporate interests.
I entered the field professionally in the mid-1980s,
... however, its worth noting that
at the mid-point of a smaller "dot-com" like crash that basically had
the college counselors and profs saying that there
was no future in computing. The rise of GUI
computing was just around the corner.
There are a number of fascinating things going on
at the edges right now - distributed computing,
web services, semiotics and ontologies, and that's
only in one fairly small sector. None of these have
immediate business application, but I personally
believe that the age of agressive business computing
by itself is probably past. You can have only so many
CRM packages
most (if not all) of the significant innovations
that HAVE come about from computing have not emerged
from business computing. Instead, they were intended
to solve immediate problems (I need to keep track
of my personal data -- how about writing a database
engine; I need to display physics abstracts for
the post-docs that work around here -- I've got it
I'll whip up this SGML language and throw in a few
links so I don't have to look this stuff up manually).
Computing hasn't failed here - only the (largely
irrational) belief that one can make money through
computing, when computing only means that you speed
up the transactions (and hence the level of complexity)
within a system.
The pendulum needs to swing back, gain some energy in
the R&D fields, before the border applications really
hit maturation to an extent that they can be exploited
again. That's been the cycle since I started working
with computers in the 1970s, and I don't see it changing.
Sun is hurting right now - their share prices are in the toilet.
IBM could very easily buy Sun, incorporate their servers into the IBM line (or phase them out altogether) and then Open Source Java. Given that IBM currently has more Java developers than Sun does, and sees Linux/Java as being the weapon to reduce Microsoft's dominance, it would be a perfectly reasonable course of action.
Of course deionized water doesn't stay deionized for long ...hmmm?
X - in Greek is pronounced as ghee, where gh is a soft gutteral similar to the ch sound of Bach when pronounced in German. English really doesn't have an equivalent sound. Only ignorant frat boys actually say X as kye.
... Microsoft is clearly intending to dominate every potential software market it can, which means that Windows will continue to include more and more "core" technology that reduces their competitors, but also means that developers will have fewer and fewer opportunities to create products that keep them employed. Perhaps it is this reason that I have occasionally thought XP really stood for eX-Programmer ...
One of the most famous pages of the Book of Kells, one of the earlierst Celtic illustrated Bibles, is the XP (ghee-rho) page, where the two letters dominate the layout of the page.
However, XP was something of a late choice for Microsoft, from what I understand, and almost certainly comes from eXPerience. It was also a direct nod (or rip-off) of OS-X, and a tendency by Microsoft to put X in the names of practically any consumer technology because the letter has a certain mystery and cachet in marketing circles (it is also the principle sound of SeX, and there is no doubt some subliminaly attempts here to make XP "sexy"). Windows Y, for instance, would have raised questions about the viability of Windows (Windows Why?) and Windows YP is not even worth thinking about, because it brings up questions about prostate conditions.
XP is a fancy new shell on top of Windows 2K, and all kinds of interesting hooks to eliminate competitors: WMA, Passport, Photo Manager, Firewall software, etc. I personally have a basic question about all this, however
What a program like this does is teach the kids (and you are talking kids here) that they are able to work with a computer, to produce something that can be seen by the whole world, and that they too can play in the bigger ponds. A significant amount of gang activity occurs because of three factors:
* boredom - when there are no jobs or other activities you have to do something to keep from going crazy.
* status - kids go into gangs because of peer pressure, to prove that they are as good as all of the other kids
* money - significant if you're fairly high up in the gang, but for most gang members, the amount of money that they actually see is considerably less than what they'd see as a developer.
They don't go into gangs because they deliberately want to be evil; that usually seeps in after a while because most gangs are also little more than the ground troops of more highly developed organized crime syndicates - the drug suppliers, the auto-theft operations, and so forth.
You provide these kids access to systems that they otherwise would have neither money nor interest in touching on their own, you teach them that they can build their own presences on the web, and eventually they probably will make the effort to go after the good jobs, to get more formal training (in college or trade schools) and so on. It isn't about money, it's about respect.
I am on the OASIS Human Markup Language committee, and I find a lot of the comments here quite fascinating. I would very much be interested in hearing what people have to say concerning their concerns about misuse of the standard as well as where people see potential applications that should be considered by the committee. I'll try to pass on as many of these concerns as possible. Kurt Cagle, Co-Author, Professional XSL, Wrox
I met Poul once at a science fiction convention back in the late 1980s. He was very gracious and generous, and I was struck by his wit and insight. When I started my own writing career a few years later, Poul was one of my icons and inspirations, along with the late Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Bloch. Sadly, they are all passing into the night now, mortal in body if not in spirit. That he was able to hear that he was loved and will be truly missed before he died must have been truly bitter-sweet, though I am glad that he could hear them. To Poul, may you find the new universe on the other side of the singularity.
It's funny. I hear this come up a lot from recruiters, that most people were rejected out of hand for simply not being sufficiently qualified, but realistically I have to wonder how many of those people out there were skilled in other similar areas but didn't have the right buzzwords on their resumes. Most technologies that I've seen have analogs -- someone may not be an Oracle programmer, but if they can write a serviceable SQL statement against SQL Server or DB2 they know 85% of everything they need to be an Oracle DBA. Yes, you have opportunists, people who got into the field because HTML was easy to learn; I actually stayed out of the field at the time because it was obvious to me from 1993 to 1996 that anybody who could string together two tagged expressions was calling themselves a programmer. However, in the past few years this has changed dramatically. I have written a number of books on XML, which could be taken as being an "easy" language. However, it is now becoming the underpinnings on which almost all programming in the next decade are being built on, and some of it rivals some of the most gnarled C programming that I've ever seen (which, by the way, was also considered a scripting language in its day -- all the recruiters were too busy looking for people who knew how to program COBOL). I think the one thing that is not mentioned in all of this is the rise of the "placement companies" where people who didn't have the first clue about how a technology were actively shoving hundreds of thousands of resumes under hiring company's noses. I don't really think that they ended up doing either their clients or the people they "represented" any real favors.
Actually, most apps don't use math, beyond fairly simple algebra. If you're doing graphics, figure some trigonometry and linear algebra. I think I did use Runge-Katta once for a pretty hairy bit of game physics. Compression schemes and encryption algorithms obviously require a certain amount of mathematics. You can create complex system models in programming without ever actually realizing that you're doing graph theory work. The underpinnings of all programming is ultimately linguistic -- the manipulation of symbols. This is where it shares its' similarity to math, but in point of fact biology probably uses more math on a day to day basis than programming does.
Personally, I would be more inclined to say that while near the end there was probably some justification in questioning the extreme salaries, in point of fact, the wages were probably simply moving to a more reasonable value. Until the late 1980s, most programmers were seen as being basically clerical types by management because they typed on keyboards. When I started working in programming I was basically making about $23,000 a year in an area that was already becoming expensive. This was in 1990. Housing prices shot up in response to the increasing demand for all kinds of workers, especially technical workers, in the mid-1990s. The same house in Bellevue, WA went from about $65,000 a year to $390,000 a year, and other costs rose accordingly. You had to ask $80,000 in Bellevue or Seattle because after you paid for housing, groceries, etc., what you had at the end of the day didn't go all that far. Of course, on the flip-side, I think that there was also a population of nouveau riche, those that had cashed out their stock options early and made out like bandits, and these people also tended to inflate the value of those same houses. But they were generally in the minority. Now, many of these same people are in a world of hurt, because while the jobs have become scarcer and many have seen what wealth they've had evaporate, housing prices still remain artificially high. Some may see it as comeupance (yes, there was a wee bit of arrogance there) but I think you'll find that most IT people generally fared far worse than the people who employed them.
The Microsoft "entrance exam", where a PM or senior programmer basically throws you an algorithm problem out of a book (perhaps but not necessarily a computing program) is something I've taken several times in various interviews. The intent is not to see if you are a deep thinker but that you can think quickly on your feet, come up with a facile solution to a facile problem. In many ways, this is a mode that is pervasive with most computing companies. The irony is that, for those people who HAVE been around for a while, the really truly gifted programmers were not the facile ones who could regurgitate an algorithm off the top of their heads. They were the ones who would be given a problem, would wander off, have a cup of coffee, sleep on it, maybe even toy with it for a few days, then come back and provide an answer so insightful and powerful that it challenged the very notion of how things were done. One of the purposes of University is to provide a degree of insulation from the real world for precisely those kinds of problem, but it is not something that most people (sometimes programmers, but far more often program managers and up) really understood. All too often, they want an answer now, because they have no real comprehension of the fact that solving a complex problem, unlike managing people, was not something that could be easily scheduled. I am a slow thinker, and a slow programmer. When I design something, however, it is flexible enough that it can be used again and again. I wrote a presentation application for which I was late on, and was penalized accordingly by losing that contract. Yet the last I checked, the same application was being used four years later for completely unrelated purposes, because I designed it not only for the immediate need but the unanticipated needs. We teach our programmers to write throw-away products because the perceived need for speed is always greater than the need for flexibility, and then we throw-away the programmer and perpetuate the cycle. Perhaps this bust WAS inevitable.