Point out that the vendor can and will kill off a product and support for that product OR charge like a wounded bull for specialised support OR that the company may fold, and that they are not legally obligated to continue a product that the company may become dependent up. Then point out that in the case of open source, it is possible to hire someone to develop the product further and support it, and that even if there is a cost penalty it won't be extortionate.
All other arguments are a waste of time for mission critical applications. Open source may or may not be cheaper.
After all that discussion about whether it really is a problem with the language specification, I have to say that this example is the lamest reason to damn an entire programming language. It is like damning staplers because they shoot staples into your face when you hold it backwards. Here's a tip: don't do that.
You failed to use a car analogy so I'll fix that for you. It's more like a driver crashing their car at high speed because the power stearing was made over-sensitive to aid in parking, then blaming the driver as they're dying on the side of the road. In this case it was a learner driver too.
There is a difference between a language handing you enough rope to hang yourself and actively tying the noose, constructing the gallows, putting the noose around your neck and kicking the bucket away from under you.
Wasn't that a Startrek film? Startrek VI - The Recently Undiscovered Country. (I wonder what recently undiscovered translates to in the original Klingon)
Alternative new terms: never-will-be-discovered, goldi-no-locks, goldi-unlocks, goldi-not-there, goldi-byebye, goldi-cried-wolf.
Or perhaps we could just add a new zone: The imaginary zone (Pity Superman's already taken The Phantom Zone)
OK, when you're done ripping on the pope, stop and consider his point of view and what he has to say. Whether you agree or disagree, his point deserves some honest thought and debate.
When he stops telling me virgins give birth, or that magic crackers and wine can transform into flesh and blood, or that a person can come back from the dead, he might be taken seriously on what is and isn't real.
My French is a little rusty and I'm lazy so I threw it into Babel Fish because I knew I'd get a laugh. I wasn't disappointed:
"You know, I know that this sheep shit n' do not exist. I know that when I l' put in my mouth, the Matrix says my brain qu' it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, do you know what I realised? L' ignorance is a blessing. But funniest, c' how I am not even in the Matrix! It was reality! J' really have ate sheep shit!"
How come you get terrified by an array of microphones with an impressive spatial detection capability? The thing is technically impressive, whether or not it "terrifies" a certain person is about perspective, and that person's tendency towards becoming terrified by mundane objects.
Pffftt! I had teachers with ears that could do this when I was in primary school in the 80s! Every time I talked trash about them I'd end up in detention!;-)
The network effect has more to do with being in the right place at the right time than on the technical merits of the application. A much better solution that occurred 1 year earlier or 1 year later would have failed in the market. Facebook was "good enough" and that is all that was needed.
But let's not confuse this with innovation.
It also has a lot to do with self promotion and the ability to convince others that you're brilliant (and in some cases even take credit for the work of others). Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Ellison. Not known as being nice people.
True genius is rare. You do get people who think so far outside the box that they are decades ahead of eventual discoveries. It's rare. Most of these people don't become famous.
I don't usually complain about the summaries (because I know they're all bad) but this one was a real disappointment to me. Carnivorous swamp beast?? I'm looking for this bad boy. But no, it's just a little cute furry guy, a little irate because someone is holding him by the throat. I would be irate too. OK, I know it's news, but such a disappointment.
If it was a slashdotter vs that cute little guy, I'd put money on the beaver like thing. You're forgetting what years of living in a basement does to muscle. To most of us that is a BEAST.
I have seen grown adults struggle with a mouse. The reason you've never seen this with kids is that no child growing up today living in a technologically developed nation would have gotten through to the age of 10 without having encountered a mouse. If you want realistic data about how long it takes to learn to use a mouse etc Google hole in the wall computer project India. What's stunning there is how much a child can learn just watching the use of technology (although the kids that watch instead of do tend to make mistakes when they do get a turn).
But unless people have failed to notice, europe(and the UK along with it) is in some pretty bad financial straights. Science is a necessary thing, but if people and government has to take the pick between funding science or covering things like civil protection(police), medical/fire services(hospitals, doctors, ems response). It's pretty easy to tell where the cuts are going to happen first.
Usually science, followed by teachers and police, followed by fire services, then medical.
Have you even been paying any attention to the state of education, medicine and the police force lately? I don't know how you can say this with a straight face.
What's being cut is everything that doesn't put money in the politician's pocket.
If you understand math, it takes about a half hour to learn how to use a spreadsheet program.
Not if you've never seen a spreadsheet program before. It takes longer than that to learn to use a mouse. What's more you don't progress to advanced use of a spreadsheet in under an hour. In fact effective use of a calculator or spreadsheet software takes years to master. I learn new things on Excel quite regularly. You're quite simply being disingenuous.
It is not necessarily a bad idea to teach programing in school, but besides that (and a few other specific domains where computers have a logical role) students in K-12 should be using pencil and paper.
They should be exposed to as wide a variety of things that they're expected to work with in every day life as possible. That includes both low tech and high tech. They'll be using a computer far more than pencil and paper in today's workforce. In fact pencil and paper is something that's becoming more and more specialised.
If you think kids today are anything like older people in how they relate to technology, you haven't been around kids much lately, there is no danger of producing a generation of "Almish".
There is that danger if you have your way. I'm glad kids today are intelligent enough to use the technology in new and interesting ways. Children play. By the time they're adults many have that sense of curiousity and play beaten out of them.
By the way I have 2 children of my own, so your insinuation just makes you look foolish.
Which is why I still prefer books today. A book can survive a lot more than a laptop or Kindle can.
Well thanks to the Internet I can have very current information. For example i can go to arxiv and read the latest scientific papers in physics or astronomy. I can use Stellarium and Cartes Du Ceil to do amateur Astronomy. I can download entire texts and read things i'd never have access to in paper form.
Then again I could just use the word processor to write banal letters, surf for porn and celebrity gossip and read pointless updates on Facebook and idiotic videos on Youtube all day, then blame the technology for making me stupid. Thing is tech doesn't make you stupid, misusing it stupidly makes you stupid. If you want some down time go for it but don't spend all day consuming garbage while ignoring the good stuff then blaming the tech for your own shortcomings. Clever people get bored quickly with that anyway.
The only thing the "Technology in classrooms" crowd accomplishes is addicting kids to technology. They don't think any better. They don't solve problems any better. All they do is become better consumers. Of tech toys. You're seeing the results now in kids who can't read a map, dial a frigging phone or think without a device in their paws that allows them to "friend" somebody. P.S. I've been a IT Director for various organizations for over 20 years - I'm no Luddite but neither am I a shill for the industry.
I'm amazed that this ignorant attitude previals on techy geek board.
The reason kids can't read maps is that they're not properly taught to read maps anymore. It has nothing to do with technology. You could teach them to read maps on a paper street directory or on google maps and you'd have a similar outcome if you did it well.
When they enter the workforce, kids who've had no exposure to technology and can't understand where it can be applied to solve a problem more efficiently will suffer. This is knowledge employers know expect.
I don't buy the argument that tech is a distraction either. Newspapers and even books provide plenty of distraction if misused. Then there's always daydreaming which is preferable to the student to listening to you if you're teaching badly.
Nothing has managed to replace the blackboard (and its more modern equivalent the whiteboard). I have some first hand observations from junior changing 3 schools in 3 years. The lower the tech in the classroom - the better the teaching.
Have you ever used an interactive whiteboard? They're pretty impressive but require a slightly different set of skills. It's amazing how much neater and more readable the results are. They're not perfect and there are things about them I hate, but despite their cost I think where they can be afforded they will replace the blackboard, and for good reason.
First thing, ban calculators. They aren't necessary before needing to deal with sines and cosines.
This attitude is a prime example of the reason education is failing. People think they know how everyone else should learn. You don't.
Calculators should not be used lazily to do basic math that can be learnt in your head, a student should still know how to use one, and an advanced student should still be allowed to learn about what that fancy sin or cosine button does before he gets to the point where it's in the official curriculum.
I wouldn't ban calculators, but if I were it would be in favour of spreadsheets. Learning to enter data into them gives you repeatable and easily correctable calculation.
You teach kids by opening up the world to them, not banning things. You should only ban something truely dangerous.
So, to anyone who says that classrooms haven't changed in 100 years, I say to them this: has the human brain changed in the last 100 years? What's different about the way the brain learns now as opposed to 100 years ago? As a third grade teacher at my school once said, "It's amazing how much a child can learn when you hand them a popsicle stick dipped in molasses." I say stick to the field trips, the classroom projects, the crayons, and the Elmer's glue. Let a child experience our world, rather than just view it through a monitor.
What the brain is expected to do when you enter the workforce and how it processes information has changed. You don't teach kids how to use common tools by shutting them out. Our kids would not be better off if they were Almish. If you've never seen a spreadsheet or word processor it takes time to learn to use them. Want to see how kids would cope without exposure to technology? Take a look at older people who can't cope using a computer and think they can do it all better the way they always use to.
Our world you want them to experience includes ipads and iphones and computers.
Computers, iPads, iPhones, cell phones, iPods, you name it. Anything that gets in the way of learning stuff.
We want to make this the most distracted, empty-headed generation ever, don't we?
Part of what you're meant to be learning is how to cope with distractions. The sunshine outside, a newspaper or magazine, paper (which you can make paper planes from), pencils for drawing doodles - all things that can be distractions. If at the end of their education kids can't cope with having these things, their education has failed.
It's not 10/10/10, it's 10/10/2010 which is not so terribly remarkable.
Killjoy! Do you walk into every party and bring people down???
12/12/1212 and all significant repedative dates have already passed centuries before you were born and as there are only 12 month's there's nothing with complete repetition..
Unless the calendar changes in some sort of civilization raising event, you've only got 10/10/2010 at 10:10:10, 11/11/2011 at 11:11:11, 12/12/2012 at 12:12:12 (both local and GMT) to go take some pics and tell your grandkids about.
It's just geeky cool and significant as a talking point for your kids and grandkids when they grow up. The calendar itself has arbitrary aspects, so why not have fun with it and why ridicule others for having some fun with it?
The original poster did not contradict the evidence for the big bang, rather the explanation.
The CMB *IS* part of the evidence for the Big Bang.
The CMB is the afterglow - of a very consistent temperature produced by the Big Bang. This explanation is greatly oversimplified: The Universe being very compact in the past resulting in a uniform distribution of energy at the point at which it went from being opaque to translucent is the only good explanation we have for a uniform glow in all directions.
WMAP mapped the very minor variations in the CMB that tell us about conditions at the point in time when the universe had cooled enough to allow light to travel freely. It tells us a little about what conditions were like at that time and you can calculate what must be the age of the Universe based on this variation. (Yes some assumptions do need to be made, but our modelling has gotten good enough for scientists to be very confident about the age of the Universe).
Why do people insist on talking garbage about things they clearly know nothing about?
Slashdot Mirror
Point out that the vendor can and will kill off a product and support for that product OR charge like a wounded bull for specialised support OR that the company may fold, and that they are not legally obligated to continue a product that the company may become dependent up. Then point out that in the case of open source, it is possible to hire someone to develop the product further and support it, and that even if there is a cost penalty it won't be extortionate.
All other arguments are a waste of time for mission critical applications. Open source may or may not be cheaper.
After all that discussion about whether it really is a problem with the language specification, I have to say that this example is the lamest reason to damn an entire programming language. It is like damning staplers because they shoot staples into your face when you hold it backwards. Here's a tip: don't do that.
You failed to use a car analogy so I'll fix that for you. It's more like a driver crashing their car at high speed because the power stearing was made over-sensitive to aid in parking, then blaming the driver as they're dying on the side of the road. In this case it was a learner driver too.
There is a difference between a language handing you enough rope to hang yourself and actively tying the noose, constructing the gallows, putting the noose around your neck and kicking the bucket away from under you.
Go bad analogies! Go!
What the fuck do iPhone owners do with their phones? Crack open coconuts with them?
That would be gentler and less likely to damage them than putting them in some of the women's handbags I've seen.
A+B+C, its easy as 1-2-3...
If they've got it wrong it'll put the Doh! in Doe-Rae-Me!
New scientific term
Wasn't that a Startrek film? Startrek VI - The Recently Undiscovered Country. (I wonder what recently undiscovered translates to in the original Klingon)
Alternative new terms: never-will-be-discovered, goldi-no-locks, goldi-unlocks, goldi-not-there, goldi-byebye, goldi-cried-wolf.
Or perhaps we could just add a new zone: The imaginary zone (Pity Superman's already taken The Phantom Zone)
OK, when you're done ripping on the pope, stop and consider his point of view and what he has to say. Whether you agree or disagree, his point deserves some honest thought and debate.
When he stops telling me virgins give birth, or that magic crackers and wine can transform into flesh and blood, or that a person can come back from the dead, he might be taken seriously on what is and isn't real.
In Soviet Russia, Confusion Between Reality and Fiction Causes Religion.
In Soviet Confusion Fiction Between Russian and Religion Causes Reality
My French is a little rusty and I'm lazy so I threw it into Babel Fish because I knew I'd get a laugh. I wasn't disappointed:
"You know, I know that this sheep shit n' do not exist. I know that when I l' put in my mouth, the Matrix says my brain qu' it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, do you know what I realised? L' ignorance is a blessing. But funniest, c' how I am not even in the Matrix! It was reality! J' really have ate sheep shit!"
Not so Nice after all...
I hear they're thinking of renaming the city Merde.
How come you get terrified by an array of microphones with an impressive spatial detection capability? The thing is technically impressive, whether or not it "terrifies" a certain person is about perspective, and that person's tendency towards becoming terrified by mundane objects.
Pffftt! I had teachers with ears that could do this when I was in primary school in the 80s! Every time I talked trash about them I'd end up in detention! ;-)
International Space Station: 229 miles
Geosynchronous orbit: 26,200 miles
Moon: 236,216 miles
What about the important stuff? Nearest McDonalds?
The network effect has more to do with being in the right place at the right time than on the technical merits of the application. A much better solution that occurred 1 year earlier or 1 year later would have failed in the market. Facebook was "good enough" and that is all that was needed.
But let's not confuse this with innovation.
It also has a lot to do with self promotion and the ability to convince others that you're brilliant (and in some cases even take credit for the work of others). Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Ellison. Not known as being nice people.
True genius is rare. You do get people who think so far outside the box that they are decades ahead of eventual discoveries. It's rare. Most of these people don't become famous.
I don't usually complain about the summaries (because I know they're all bad) but this one was a real disappointment to me. Carnivorous swamp beast?? I'm looking for this bad boy. But no, it's just a little cute furry guy, a little irate because someone is holding him by the throat. I would be irate too. OK, I know it's news, but such a disappointment.
If it was a slashdotter vs that cute little guy, I'd put money on the beaver like thing. You're forgetting what years of living in a basement does to muscle. To most of us that is a BEAST.
The same article links to an actual programming language called Curry based on Haskell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry_programming_language
I have seen grown adults struggle with a mouse. The reason you've never seen this with kids is that no child growing up today living in a technologically developed nation would have gotten through to the age of 10 without having encountered a mouse. If you want realistic data about how long it takes to learn to use a mouse etc Google hole in the wall computer project India. What's stunning there is how much a child can learn just watching the use of technology (although the kids that watch instead of do tend to make mistakes when they do get a turn).
But unless people have failed to notice, europe(and the UK along with it) is in some pretty bad financial straights. Science is a necessary thing, but if people and government has to take the pick between funding science or covering things like civil protection(police), medical/fire services(hospitals, doctors, ems response). It's pretty easy to tell where the cuts are going to happen first.
Usually science, followed by teachers and police, followed by fire services, then medical.
Have you even been paying any attention to the state of education, medicine and the police force lately? I don't know how you can say this with a straight face.
What's being cut is everything that doesn't put money in the politician's pocket.
If you understand math, it takes about a half hour to learn how to use a spreadsheet program.
Not if you've never seen a spreadsheet program before. It takes longer than that to learn to use a mouse. What's more you don't progress to advanced use of a spreadsheet in under an hour. In fact effective use of a calculator or spreadsheet software takes years to master. I learn new things on Excel quite regularly. You're quite simply being disingenuous.
It is not necessarily a bad idea to teach programing in school, but besides that (and a few other specific domains where computers have a logical role) students in K-12 should be using pencil and paper.
They should be exposed to as wide a variety of things that they're expected to work with in every day life as possible. That includes both low tech and high tech. They'll be using a computer far more than pencil and paper in today's workforce. In fact pencil and paper is something that's becoming more and more specialised.
If you think kids today are anything like older people in how they relate to technology, you haven't been around kids much lately, there is no danger of producing a generation of "Almish".
There is that danger if you have your way. I'm glad kids today are intelligent enough to use the technology in new and interesting ways. Children play. By the time they're adults many have that sense of curiousity and play beaten out of them.
By the way I have 2 children of my own, so your insinuation just makes you look foolish.
Which is why I still prefer books today. A book can survive a lot more than a laptop or Kindle can.
Well thanks to the Internet I can have very current information. For example i can go to arxiv and read the latest scientific papers in physics or astronomy. I can use Stellarium and Cartes Du Ceil to do amateur Astronomy. I can download entire texts and read things i'd never have access to in paper form.
Then again I could just use the word processor to write banal letters, surf for porn and celebrity gossip and read pointless updates on Facebook and idiotic videos on Youtube all day, then blame the technology for making me stupid. Thing is tech doesn't make you stupid, misusing it stupidly makes you stupid. If you want some down time go for it but don't spend all day consuming garbage while ignoring the good stuff then blaming the tech for your own shortcomings. Clever people get bored quickly with that anyway.
Bravo.
The only thing the "Technology in classrooms" crowd accomplishes is addicting kids to technology. They don't think any better. They don't solve problems any better. All they do is become better consumers. Of tech toys. You're seeing the results now in kids who can't read a map, dial a frigging phone or think without a device in their paws that allows them to "friend" somebody. P.S. I've been a IT Director for various organizations for over 20 years - I'm no Luddite but neither am I a shill for the industry.
I'm amazed that this ignorant attitude previals on techy geek board.
The reason kids can't read maps is that they're not properly taught to read maps anymore. It has nothing to do with technology. You could teach them to read maps on a paper street directory or on google maps and you'd have a similar outcome if you did it well.
When they enter the workforce, kids who've had no exposure to technology and can't understand where it can be applied to solve a problem more efficiently will suffer. This is knowledge employers know expect.
I don't buy the argument that tech is a distraction either. Newspapers and even books provide plenty of distraction if misused. Then there's always daydreaming which is preferable to the student to listening to you if you're teaching badly.
Nothing has managed to replace the blackboard (and its more modern equivalent the whiteboard). I have some first hand observations from junior changing 3 schools in 3 years. The lower the tech in the classroom - the better the teaching.
Have you ever used an interactive whiteboard? They're pretty impressive but require a slightly different set of skills. It's amazing how much neater and more readable the results are. They're not perfect and there are things about them I hate, but despite their cost I think where they can be afforded they will replace the blackboard, and for good reason.
First thing, ban calculators. They aren't necessary before needing to deal with sines and cosines.
This attitude is a prime example of the reason education is failing. People think they know how everyone else should learn. You don't.
Calculators should not be used lazily to do basic math that can be learnt in your head, a student should still know how to use one, and an advanced student should still be allowed to learn about what that fancy sin or cosine button does before he gets to the point where it's in the official curriculum.
I wouldn't ban calculators, but if I were it would be in favour of spreadsheets. Learning to enter data into them gives you repeatable and easily correctable calculation.
You teach kids by opening up the world to them, not banning things. You should only ban something truely dangerous.
So, to anyone who says that classrooms haven't changed in 100 years, I say to them this: has the human brain changed in the last 100 years? What's different about the way the brain learns now as opposed to 100 years ago? As a third grade teacher at my school once said, "It's amazing how much a child can learn when you hand them a popsicle stick dipped in molasses." I say stick to the field trips, the classroom projects, the crayons, and the Elmer's glue. Let a child experience our world, rather than just view it through a monitor.
What the brain is expected to do when you enter the workforce and how it processes information has changed. You don't teach kids how to use common tools by shutting them out. Our kids would not be better off if they were Almish. If you've never seen a spreadsheet or word processor it takes time to learn to use them. Want to see how kids would cope without exposure to technology? Take a look at older people who can't cope using a computer and think they can do it all better the way they always use to.
Our world you want them to experience includes ipads and iphones and computers.
Computers, iPads, iPhones, cell phones, iPods, you name it. Anything that gets in the way of learning stuff.
We want to make this the most distracted, empty-headed generation ever, don't we?
Part of what you're meant to be learning is how to cope with distractions. The sunshine outside, a newspaper or magazine, paper (which you can make paper planes from), pencils for drawing doodles - all things that can be distractions. If at the end of their education kids can't cope with having these things, their education has failed.
It's not 10/10/10, it's 10/10/2010 which is not so terribly remarkable.
Killjoy! Do you walk into every party and bring people down???
12/12/1212 and all significant repedative dates have already passed centuries before you were born and as there are only 12 month's there's nothing with complete repetition..
Unless the calendar changes in some sort of civilization raising event, you've only got 10/10/2010 at 10:10:10, 11/11/2011 at 11:11:11, 12/12/2012 at 12:12:12 (both local and GMT) to go take some pics and tell your grandkids about.
It's just geeky cool and significant as a talking point for your kids and grandkids when they grow up. The calendar itself has arbitrary aspects, so why not have fun with it and why ridicule others for having some fun with it?
The original poster did not contradict the evidence for the big bang, rather the explanation.
The CMB *IS* part of the evidence for the Big Bang.
The CMB is the afterglow - of a very consistent temperature produced by the Big Bang. This explanation is greatly oversimplified: The Universe being very compact in the past resulting in a uniform distribution of energy at the point at which it went from being opaque to translucent is the only good explanation we have for a uniform glow in all directions.
WMAP mapped the very minor variations in the CMB that tell us about conditions at the point in time when the universe had cooled enough to allow light to travel freely. It tells us a little about what conditions were like at that time and you can calculate what must be the age of the Universe based on this variation. (Yes some assumptions do need to be made, but our modelling has gotten good enough for scientists to be very confident about the age of the Universe).
Why do people insist on talking garbage about things they clearly know nothing about?