He thinks it's a crime to teach C++. He says Ruby is much better. His arrogance is equaled only by his ignorance.
C++ has its faults. But at least it means something to say that a program is written in C++. The language and its library are reasonably well-defined. Not perfectly, but well enough that in almost all practical situations, it's possible to say with certainty what a well-written piece of C++ code should do, by reading the said piece of code and the specification of the C++ language and its library.
This is certainly not the case for Ruby. The only way to find out what many Ruby programs are supposed to do is to run them. You then know what they do under one specific release of the interpreter, on your particular machine. Ruby isn't a programming language, it's a learning experience for its author and a toy for its users. Any "programmer" who used it for anything that mattered deserves to be fired on the spot.
Living in a country where the language is spoken is many times more effective than just studying books and recordings - I think your experience confirms that. So obviously it shortens the time needed.
Other than a singularity, what other physical phenomena can produce a black hole
To produce an event horizon, i.e. a closed surface from which light cannot escape, all that's required is a large enough amount of mass/energy inside that surface. In the case of a spherical surface, the amount of mass needed is proportional to the radius of the sphere. So a very large black hole need not even be very dense inside.
the US military has been very determined about dealing harshly with the evildoers it finds in its ranks. If the Army sends you overseas and you rape a local girl, you're going to wish you had brought her home and done it where the US civilian courts could punish you.
Crap. Just one soldier, Calley, was convicted over the murder of over 300 unarmed civilians, including many children, at My Lai. He spent less than 5 years in prison.
As for the US soldiers who rape Japanese children, the penalty for a similar crime in some US states is death, so I don't know what you were smoking when you typed that bit of your comment.
do you think you should be graduated ignorant of the OS with the *vastly* greater market share? What would *that* say about your school?
The purpose of a university is to educate people, not prepare them for today's job market.
When I went to university, Microsoft didn't exist. Unix didn't exist. I find that my education prepared me better for the rapidly-changing job market, than the "education" a lot of kids are getting now.
I studied Latin fairly intensively for 4 years at school (one lesson per day, plus a serious amount of homework - this was 40 years ago, when kids used to do real homework, in a school which had a tough entrance examination). I also studied ancient Greek for 2.5 years, also pretty intensively. Based on my experience, I regard this as a total waste of time. Studying a modern language like Spanish would have been much more useful.
People advance the following fallacious arguments for studying Latin: 1. Latin and Greek are used in the sciences.
They're not. A few words and phrases, which you pick up without any real effort, are used. You don't need to learn Latin for that, any more than you need to learn Italian to say "Ciao!" when you take your leave of someone. 2. Knowledge of Latin makes it easier to learn other southern European languages
To acquire reasonable fluency in a foreign language, starting after age 10, a bright person needs to work at it hard for at least four years. The vast majority of English-speaking people never become fluent in another language. If you want to learn Spanish, the best way to that goal is to study Spanish (duh!), not to spend 4 years on a detour via Latin, the most likely result of which will be that you'll never actually get around to learning any Spanish.
Seeing as you have to be dead to qualify for posthumous copyright, posthumous royalties by definition are not generated within the creator's lifetime, and it's kinda hard for the creator to enjoy them...:-p
An author can enjoy the value of the posthumous copyright by selling the copyright during his/her lifetime. In fact, many authors do this.
Computers play perfectly when it comes to tactics.
It's interesting that people have been saying this since about 1960 (when it was obviously nowhere near true). It still is not true today. It can't be, because to be absolutely certain that a move is tactically the best, you'd have to analyse to the end of the game. At some point in tactical analysis, a player (human or machine) has to make the judgement that a possible position several moves ahead is "quiescent", i.e. it's unnecessary to carry the tactical analysis further.
I know if I were on the board of directors, I'd be asking for the head of the person who cost me this fine
No, you wouldn't. You'd be pushing to give him/her a bonus, because the amount of illegal additional profit was $480 million and the fine only $67 million. And you'd make sure the message gets round in your company that thinking up scams like this will result in BONUSES, because the net result was to add more than $400 million to the bottom line over a 5-year period. Never forget that the bottom line is... the bottom line.
Of course some part of the illegal profit probably went towards bribing a judge or some people in the DOJ to approve this settlement, but that would be a negligible cost. Couple of million, something like that.
And somewhere in this topic some American will post "America is the freest country in the world..."
In the country I live in, not only are my reading habits unchecked, but get this: I can go to the airport, buy a ticket to a destination outside the country, and pay cash for it, without being harassed by "law enforcement". It's a long time since you had that freedom in the United States. Elsewhere it's pretty common. The really sad thing is that for a few years in the 70s and 80s, after the worst racial discrimination ended but before the drug war started, the United States actually was one of the freest countries in the world.
At the time of the War of 1812....the only other great power in the world that could lay claim to anything approaching the degree of freedom the US offered...
I take it you are not black. Your choice of 1812 is particularly unfortunate, because one of the (several) causes of that war was the Royal Navy's attempts to stop the slave trade. If you think the USA was a bastion of freedom in the 19th century, I suggest you read Uncle Tom's Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe did not agree with you.
The best value is almost always to be found in commodity hardware for which there are many competing suppliers. In the world of personal computing, that means 80x86-compatible.
Of course, if the things you value include things like "cool", image, computer-as-furniture, computer-as-fashion-accessory, etc then that doesn't apply. But in that case, it's a bit pointless to ask a bunch of nerds for their opnions, isn't it?
You know I really cannot stand when people say nonsense like this. The US is, overall, the richest.... If they want, they can have the best of every technology worldwide
Anybody can have the best of every technology, by buying it. That's what free markets are about. Why did this empty rant get modded up to 4?
The true statement is that no country leads in every technology. The US, having a slightly freer economy than most of Europe, leads in many technologies, but not in all (and never has).
shortening their warranty (previously 3 years, now 1 year)
Obviously these devices are not for storing data - people who store data generally expect to keep it for more than a year - so what are they for?
If you figure in the cost of replacing the drive 3 times as often as you had to replace the old ones, the new drives even cost more per bit than the old ones. This seems to be a product destined for oblivion even before it starts shipping.
It deserved a Hugo IMO even though it is *not* SF in the classical sense.
The consensus of people who've read it is clearly that it deserved some kind of award. I'm sure they're right.
But I feel it would be nice for the Hugo to be given to a Sci Fi book. Isn't that what it was created for? Weren't any readable Sci Fi books written in the last two years?
A large reason why many in this industry find themselves working long hours and weekends is that management makes unreasonable expectations and deadlines. An even larger reason is that many employees in this industry are immature. No manager can make an employee work more than 40 hours a week. All a manager can do is make an employee look for another job.
How many people have jobs that can actually be done from anywhere they can get email and web access?
Probably most desk jobs could be done remotely. That's a huge number of jobs; I'm guessing, but maybe of the order of a tenth of all jobs. Something like 10 million jobs in the US alone. But that's the wrong question. The real question is, how many organizations will actually hire people to do jobs remotely? And how many managers in those organizations will hire teleworkers? Very few.
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He thinks it's a crime to teach C++. He says Ruby is much better. His arrogance is equaled only by his ignorance.
C++ has its faults. But at least it means something to say that a program is written in C++. The language and its library are reasonably well-defined. Not perfectly, but well enough that in almost all practical situations, it's possible to say with certainty what a well-written piece of C++ code should do, by reading the said piece of code and the specification of the C++ language and its library.
This is certainly not the case for Ruby. The only way to find out what many Ruby programs are supposed to do is to run them. You then know what they do under one specific release of the interpreter, on your particular machine. Ruby isn't a programming language, it's a learning experience for its author and a toy for its users.
Any "programmer" who used it for anything that mattered deserves to be fired on the spot.
Let's make this clear - NOBODY is in favor of adding pornography to the libraries.
Let's make this clear. I am in favor of libraries carrying materials which you and many others would call "pornography".
You cannot specifically exclude a company from licensing your patents (it's one of the fundamentals),
As I understand patents, the holder of a patent is under no obligation to license it at all. Can some lawyer comment?
3 pages of instructions to get decent fonts?
... That's not how to do it.
Download this, unpack that, login as root
Decent on-screen fonts in the default installation: that's the only way to do it. Linux fonts are seriously broken until it's done like that.
I can't convince my parents, and my wife's parents to pick up and move. I don't want to seperate my children from their grandparents.
If your ancestors had felt as you do, you wouldn't have been born in the United States.
Does living there count...
Living in a country where the language is spoken is many times more effective than just studying books and recordings - I think your experience confirms that. So obviously it shortens the time needed.
Other than a singularity, what other physical phenomena can produce a black hole
To produce an event horizon, i.e. a closed surface from which light cannot escape, all that's required is a large enough amount of mass/energy inside that surface. In the case of a spherical surface, the amount of mass needed is proportional to the radius of the sphere. So a very large black hole need not even be very dense inside.
Did you know that about 90% of todays enterprise data is stored in EBCDIC
Nearly right. Did you know that about 90% of enterprise data is out of date?
A singularity is the "center" of a black hole; it is an infinitely dense point in space, of enormous mass.
Not quite. There need not be a singularity inside a black hole; though there will always be a black hole around a point singularity.
the US military has been very determined about dealing harshly with the evildoers it finds in its ranks. If the Army sends you overseas and you rape a local girl, you're going to wish you had brought her home and done it where the US civilian courts could punish you.
Crap. Just one soldier, Calley, was convicted over the murder of over 300 unarmed civilians, including many children, at My Lai. He spent less than 5 years in prison.
As for the US soldiers who rape Japanese children, the penalty for a similar crime in some US states is death, so I don't know what you were smoking when you typed that bit of your comment.
do you think you should be graduated ignorant of the OS with the *vastly* greater market share? What would *that* say about your school?
The purpose of a university is to educate people, not prepare them for today's job market.
When I went to university, Microsoft didn't exist. Unix didn't exist. I find that my education prepared me better for the rapidly-changing job market, than the "education" a lot of kids are getting now.
I studied Latin fairly intensively for 4 years at school (one lesson per day, plus a serious amount of homework - this was 40 years ago, when kids used to do real homework, in a school which had a tough entrance examination). I also studied ancient Greek for 2.5 years, also pretty intensively. Based on my experience, I regard this as a total waste of time. Studying a modern language like Spanish would have been much more useful.
People advance the following fallacious arguments for studying Latin:
1. Latin and Greek are used in the sciences.
They're not. A few words and phrases, which you pick up without any real effort, are used. You don't need to learn Latin for that, any more than you need to learn Italian to say "Ciao!" when you take your leave of someone.
2. Knowledge of Latin makes it easier to learn other southern European languages
To acquire reasonable fluency in a foreign language, starting after age 10, a bright person needs to work at it hard for at least four years. The vast majority of English-speaking people never become fluent in another language. If you want to learn Spanish, the best way to that goal is to study Spanish (duh!), not to spend 4 years on a detour via Latin, the most likely result of which will be that you'll never actually get around to learning any Spanish.
Seeing as you have to be dead to qualify for posthumous copyright, posthumous royalties by definition are not generated within the creator's lifetime, and it's kinda hard for the creator to enjoy them... :-p
An author can enjoy the value of the posthumous copyright by selling the copyright during his/her lifetime. In fact, many authors do this.
Computers play perfectly when it comes to tactics.
It's interesting that people have been saying this since about 1960 (when it was obviously nowhere near true). It still is not true today. It can't be, because to be absolutely certain that a move is tactically the best, you'd have to analyse to the end of the game. At some point in tactical analysis, a player (human or machine) has to make the judgement that a possible position several moves ahead is "quiescent", i.e. it's unnecessary to carry the tactical analysis further.
I know if I were on the board of directors, I'd be asking for the head of the person who cost me this fine
... the bottom line.
No, you wouldn't. You'd be pushing to give him/her a bonus, because the amount of illegal additional profit was $480 million and the fine only $67 million. And you'd make sure the message gets round in your company that thinking up scams like this will result in BONUSES, because the net result was to add more than $400 million to the bottom line over a 5-year period. Never forget that the bottom line is
Of course some part of the illegal profit probably went towards bribing a judge or some people in the DOJ to approve this settlement, but that would be a negligible cost. Couple of million, something like that.
Is this what the world is coming to?
No, it's what the United States has come to.
And somewhere in this topic some American will post "America is the freest country in the world..."
In the country I live in, not only are my reading habits unchecked, but get this: I can go to the airport, buy a ticket to a destination outside the country, and pay cash for it, without being harassed by "law enforcement".
It's a long time since you had that freedom in the United States. Elsewhere it's pretty common.
The really sad thing is that for a few years in the 70s and 80s, after the worst racial discrimination ended but before the drug war started, the United States actually was one of the freest countries in the world.
At the time of the War of 1812....the only other great power in the world that could lay claim to anything approaching the degree of freedom the US offered...
I take it you are not black. Your choice of 1812 is particularly unfortunate, because one of the (several) causes of that war was the Royal Navy's attempts to stop the slave trade. If you think the USA was a bastion of freedom in the 19th century, I suggest you read Uncle Tom's Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe did not agree with you.
The best value is almost always to be found in commodity hardware for which there are many competing suppliers. In the world of personal computing, that means 80x86-compatible.
Of course, if the things you value include things like "cool", image, computer-as-furniture, computer-as-fashion-accessory, etc then that doesn't apply. But in that case, it's a bit pointless to ask a bunch of nerds for their opnions, isn't it?
You know I really cannot stand when people say nonsense like this. The US is, overall, the richest .... If they want, they can have the best of every technology worldwide
Anybody can have the best of every technology, by buying it. That's what free markets are about. Why did this empty rant get modded up to 4?
The true statement is that no country leads in every technology. The US, having a slightly freer economy than most of Europe, leads in many technologies, but not in all (and never has).
Yup, the 3-year warranty is what really makes this drive a winner. Should have been mentioned in the original story.
shortening their warranty (previously 3 years, now 1 year)
Obviously these devices are not for storing data - people who store data generally expect to keep it for more than a year - so what are they for?
If you figure in the cost of replacing the drive 3 times as often as you had to replace the old ones, the new drives even cost more per bit than the old ones. This seems to be a product destined for oblivion even before it starts shipping.
It deserved a Hugo IMO even though it is *not* SF in the classical sense.
The consensus of people who've read it is clearly that it deserved some kind of award. I'm sure they're right.
But I feel it would be nice for the Hugo to be given to a Sci Fi book. Isn't that what it was created for? Weren't any readable Sci Fi books written in the last two years?
A large reason why many in this industry find themselves working long hours and weekends is that management makes unreasonable expectations and deadlines.
An even larger reason is that many employees in this industry are immature. No manager can make an employee work more than 40 hours a week. All a manager can do is make an employee look for another job.
How many people have jobs that can actually be done from anywhere they can get email and web access?
Probably most desk jobs could be done remotely. That's a huge number of jobs; I'm guessing, but maybe of the order of a tenth of all jobs. Something like 10 million jobs in the US alone.
But that's the wrong question. The real question is, how many organizations will actually hire people to do jobs remotely? And how many managers in those organizations will hire teleworkers? Very few.
...VMS...
Did you ever hear a proverb about flogging a dead horse?