Better Common Core than allowing the fundamentalists and fringe groups to continue pushing crap like "Young Earth" ideologies as "just a theory" equivalent to evolution and the big bang.
If it weren't for all the wingnuts and fools in Texas and elsewhere pushing that kind of crap, there wouldn't have been a rebellion against their bullshit through standardization like Common Core.
Canada never *has* tried to force other nations to bow to our will, much the will of Hollywood, unlike the Jackboot States of America.
With the US, every agreement has "riders" and "add-ons" that have nothing to do with the primary intent of the agreement. I believe this stems from the US habit of running all their legislation with such "back door" items buried in the fine print of Congress.
Politicians, judges, and other people in power are rarely young. So it stands to reason that they're "behind the times", though it is outrageous that they don't educate themselves on the issues and technologies they're supposed to oversee and negotiate about.
The simple fact of the matter is politicians are idiots who don't understand anything beyond getting bought off by lobbyists, screwing the public, and spinning things so they get elected again. I firmly believe that less than 10% of the politicians in the world are actually intelligent people out to do the best for society as a whole; I believe the other 90% are power-tripping freakazoids who don't understand anything more than "I want to be the boss."
Most of them would take a role as dictator in a heartbeat if they were given the chance.
Apparently the writer of the original article thinks "legacy" means that you have to maintain and enhance existing applications instead of developing new ones.
To me, "legacy" means that there are no new applications being developed in that language, and the only jobs available for it are maintaining and enhancing existing applications..Net and Java are certainly not "legacy" in that sense by any stretch of the imagination.
That presumption seems to be precipitated on the theory that a computer intelligence won't "grow" or "learn" any faster than a human. Once the essential algorithms are developed and the AI is turned loose to teach itself from internet resources, I expect it's actual growth rate will be near exponential until it's absorbed everything it can from our current body of knowledge and has to start theorizing and inferring new facts from what it's learned.
Not that I expect such a level of AI anytime in the near future. But when it does happen, I'm pretty sure it's going to grow at a rate that goes far beyond anything a mere human could do. For one thing, such a system would be highly parallel and likely to "read" multiple streams of web data at the same time, where a human can only consume one thread of information at a time (and not all that well, to boot.) Where we might bookmark a link to read later, an AI would be able to spin another thread to read that link immediately, provided it has the compute capacity available.
The key, I think, is going to be in the development of the parallel processing languages that will evolve to serve our need to program systems that have ever more cores available. Our current single-threaded paradigms and manual threading approaches are far too limiting for the systems of the future.
KDE on Debian or any other distro tends to provide the most "XP like" user interface that I've seen. You just need to enable double-click mouse behaviour instead of the default single-click, add a few of their favourite apps to the desktop, and they're good to go.
If you're on an old system, you'll want to disable the file indexing daemons as well, as they can consume a lot of CPU and slow the machine down. If all the main user does is email and web browsing, they're not going to benefit from the indexing.
Here's the problem: most open source software isn't owned by US authors. So the software is developed and maintained with absolutely no concern about anal-retentive American military "requirements." You can hardly take a global project and demand that people from certain nations stop contributing so that you can ship the software to a US market without getting into trouble for "conspiring" with those nations.
Quite frankly, the law is asinine anyhow. There are no shortage of places around the globe to download and access the full code and binaries of "restricted" software from those nations, because there are other nations who participate in open source projects that don't kiss American ass.
So as far as I'm concerned, RedHat is doing what is necessary to continue using open source software.
To truly meet the American legal requirements, they'd have to rewrite and lock down an insane amount of software -- including replacing the Linux kernel.
You have an interesting attitude considering that every license I've ever seen revokes your right to use the software if you breach the license terms. The terms vary; the penalty of not being able to use the software is across the board.
I don't check libraries for security vulnerabilities. I check websites for information about that, and to see how often the provider is refreshing the library with patches and fixes.
If I don't get the feeling that they take their security seriously, I don't use the library. I'm not about to start testing every library of the OS that I build against, nor the Java stack itself. To do so is asinine unless you're in an extremely high security arena -- you have to start with a certain level of trust, and if you don't trust your vendor, don't use them.
Besides, not one of the binary analysis tools I've ever heard of did a really good job. Even source code analysis can miss bugs. If it were possible to fully automate testing in such a fashion, testers wouldn't have jobs.
Wait a minute! Where's this "coupon site" people were talking about? This one is an LA Times article. They may be ad supported, but they're hardly one of the shady coupon distribution sites. Did the article get re-linked to a more reputable source?
I know significant numbers of the over 60 population who avoid and ignore all things digital save for their satellite TV receivers. And the only reason they have those is because cable wasn't available in their area.
Yeah, sure, I could laugh and point at the "dumb Americans", but it's not dumb Americans -- it's dumb people, and we've no shortage of them around the world. After all, as George Carlin pointed out: Think about how stupid the average person is, and remember that half the population is dumber than that.
Besides, as many have already pointed out, this whole article is clearly a slashvertisement to give eyeballs to a piece of shit coupon site.
Re:It's still unmaintainable crap
on
The New PHP
·
· Score: 2
The fellow who wrote the original code used a library I'd never heard of for MySQL connectivity. They didn't know how to use SQL properly. They didn't know how to error check results. Hell, they didn't even know how to sort data for the users as they'd been asking him to for months before.
But no, he left the company and the steaming pile of crud was dropped in my lap to fix.
By the time I was done stabilizing the thing, there must have been a whole 10% of the original code left.
Just because it's possible to write readable and maintainable PHP doesn't mean it happens any more often than with PERL.
I've never started a PHP project, but I've been called on to fix several.
Nowadays I deny any and all knowledge of PHP and refuse to get suckered into fixing someone else's hack job of code ever again.
PHP sucks farts off dead chickens in the hands of an amateur, and 99% of the people who "recommend" PHP are amateurs.
Re:It's still unmaintainable crap
on
The New PHP
·
· Score: 1
My response to those demands nowadays?
"Yes, I know PHP. That's why I won't work with it. You couldn't pay me enough to take on a PHP project."
Re:It's still unmaintainable crap
on
The New PHP
·
· Score: 1
No, it means people keep demanding that I work on PHP I didn't create and it's all steaming piles of SHIT.
Like PERL, you can create maintainable and readable PHP. Most people don't. They hack something together thinking they'll need it for a month and be done with it, and the steaming turd keeps on in production for years afterwards.
And then some poor fellow like yours truly is expected to enhance the god damned thing which has no comments, uses perverse libraries that no one else uses and which haven't been maintained in a long time, and best of all, you're expected to do so in record time because it "only took a week" to write the festering gob originally.
It's still unmaintainable crap
on
The New PHP
·
· Score: 1
PHP's biggest problem is lack of modularization and encouragement of inline script hacking. It suffers from SQL that lacks proper commit controls. Implementations I've used leak connections like a seive, forcing restarts of the database servers on a regular basis.
Bottom line: PHP is the one tool I've used that I hate more than JavaScript. JS is functional elegance compared to PHP spaghetti.
How much do you want to bet they end up like most "upgradeable" PCs -- never touched from day of purchase until they hit the landfill or the recycling company.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone wants to provide the presidential vehicles. Does Tesla provide as many jobs as GM?
The votes those employees provide are probably the most important factor when deciding who gets to provide the presidential ride.
Ah yes. I'm going to believe somebody's theories and "research" instead of my own ears.
Better Common Core than allowing the fundamentalists and fringe groups to continue pushing crap like "Young Earth" ideologies as "just a theory" equivalent to evolution and the big bang.
If it weren't for all the wingnuts and fools in Texas and elsewhere pushing that kind of crap, there wouldn't have been a rebellion against their bullshit through standardization like Common Core.
Of course it's sensitive and provides "useful" information. If it didn't provide any information, they wouldn't bother collecting it.
Stazi. NSA. CIA. CSEC. GCHQ.
All the same animal, just different flags.
Yep. I knew a troll would respond to that in no time.
And the deaf will deny that anyone else can hear the difference between 192 and 44.1 kHz sampling because they can't.
I pity the deaf.
Canada never *has* tried to force other nations to bow to our will, much the will of Hollywood, unlike the Jackboot States of America.
With the US, every agreement has "riders" and "add-ons" that have nothing to do with the primary intent of the agreement. I believe this stems from the US habit of running all their legislation with such "back door" items buried in the fine print of Congress.
Politicians, judges, and other people in power are rarely young. So it stands to reason that they're "behind the times", though it is outrageous that they don't educate themselves on the issues and technologies they're supposed to oversee and negotiate about.
The simple fact of the matter is politicians are idiots who don't understand anything beyond getting bought off by lobbyists, screwing the public, and spinning things so they get elected again. I firmly believe that less than 10% of the politicians in the world are actually intelligent people out to do the best for society as a whole; I believe the other 90% are power-tripping freakazoids who don't understand anything more than "I want to be the boss."
Most of them would take a role as dictator in a heartbeat if they were given the chance.
What I find interesting is that despite the popularity of Android apps written in Java, Java was included as a "legacy" language by the article.
Apparently the writer of the original article thinks "legacy" means that you have to maintain and enhance existing applications instead of developing new ones.
To me, "legacy" means that there are no new applications being developed in that language, and the only jobs available for it are maintaining and enhancing existing applications. .Net and Java are certainly not "legacy" in that sense by any stretch of the imagination.
And a pilot who loses an eye does so well without it's sensor, right?
That presumption seems to be precipitated on the theory that a computer intelligence won't "grow" or "learn" any faster than a human. Once the essential algorithms are developed and the AI is turned loose to teach itself from internet resources, I expect it's actual growth rate will be near exponential until it's absorbed everything it can from our current body of knowledge and has to start theorizing and inferring new facts from what it's learned.
Not that I expect such a level of AI anytime in the near future. But when it does happen, I'm pretty sure it's going to grow at a rate that goes far beyond anything a mere human could do. For one thing, such a system would be highly parallel and likely to "read" multiple streams of web data at the same time, where a human can only consume one thread of information at a time (and not all that well, to boot.) Where we might bookmark a link to read later, an AI would be able to spin another thread to read that link immediately, provided it has the compute capacity available.
The key, I think, is going to be in the development of the parallel processing languages that will evolve to serve our need to program systems that have ever more cores available. Our current single-threaded paradigms and manual threading approaches are far too limiting for the systems of the future.
KDE on Debian or any other distro tends to provide the most "XP like" user interface that I've seen. You just need to enable double-click mouse behaviour instead of the default single-click, add a few of their favourite apps to the desktop, and they're good to go.
If you're on an old system, you'll want to disable the file indexing daemons as well, as they can consume a lot of CPU and slow the machine down. If all the main user does is email and web browsing, they're not going to benefit from the indexing.
Here's the problem: most open source software isn't owned by US authors. So the software is developed and maintained with absolutely no concern about anal-retentive American military "requirements." You can hardly take a global project and demand that people from certain nations stop contributing so that you can ship the software to a US market without getting into trouble for "conspiring" with those nations.
Quite frankly, the law is asinine anyhow. There are no shortage of places around the globe to download and access the full code and binaries of "restricted" software from those nations, because there are other nations who participate in open source projects that don't kiss American ass.
So as far as I'm concerned, RedHat is doing what is necessary to continue using open source software.
To truly meet the American legal requirements, they'd have to rewrite and lock down an insane amount of software -- including replacing the Linux kernel.
You have an interesting attitude considering that every license I've ever seen revokes your right to use the software if you breach the license terms. The terms vary; the penalty of not being able to use the software is across the board.
I don't check libraries for security vulnerabilities. I check websites for information about that, and to see how often the provider is refreshing the library with patches and fixes.
If I don't get the feeling that they take their security seriously, I don't use the library. I'm not about to start testing every library of the OS that I build against, nor the Java stack itself. To do so is asinine unless you're in an extremely high security arena -- you have to start with a certain level of trust, and if you don't trust your vendor, don't use them.
Besides, not one of the binary analysis tools I've ever heard of did a really good job. Even source code analysis can miss bugs. If it were possible to fully automate testing in such a fashion, testers wouldn't have jobs.
Ah. I get it. The coupon site sponsored the "research."
Well, if they did their research by calling their own customers, no wonder we got the low end of the IQ scale responding. :P
Wait a minute! Where's this "coupon site" people were talking about? This one is an LA Times article. They may be ad supported, but they're hardly one of the shady coupon distribution sites. Did the article get re-linked to a more reputable source?
I know significant numbers of the over 60 population who avoid and ignore all things digital save for their satellite TV receivers. And the only reason they have those is because cable wasn't available in their area.
Yeah, sure, I could laugh and point at the "dumb Americans", but it's not dumb Americans -- it's dumb people, and we've no shortage of them around the world. After all, as George Carlin pointed out: Think about how stupid the average person is, and remember that half the population is dumber than that.
Besides, as many have already pointed out, this whole article is clearly a slashvertisement to give eyeballs to a piece of shit coupon site.
The fellow who wrote the original code used a library I'd never heard of for MySQL connectivity. They didn't know how to use SQL properly. They didn't know how to error check results. Hell, they didn't even know how to sort data for the users as they'd been asking him to for months before.
But no, he left the company and the steaming pile of crud was dropped in my lap to fix.
By the time I was done stabilizing the thing, there must have been a whole 10% of the original code left.
Just because it's possible to write readable and maintainable PHP doesn't mean it happens any more often than with PERL.
I've never started a PHP project, but I've been called on to fix several.
Nowadays I deny any and all knowledge of PHP and refuse to get suckered into fixing someone else's hack job of code ever again.
PHP sucks farts off dead chickens in the hands of an amateur, and 99% of the people who "recommend" PHP are amateurs.
My response to those demands nowadays?
"Yes, I know PHP. That's why I won't work with it. You couldn't pay me enough to take on a PHP project."
No, it means people keep demanding that I work on PHP I didn't create and it's all steaming piles of SHIT.
Like PERL, you can create maintainable and readable PHP. Most people don't. They hack something together thinking they'll need it for a month and be done with it, and the steaming turd keeps on in production for years afterwards.
And then some poor fellow like yours truly is expected to enhance the god damned thing which has no comments, uses perverse libraries that no one else uses and which haven't been maintained in a long time, and best of all, you're expected to do so in record time because it "only took a week" to write the festering gob originally.
PHP's biggest problem is lack of modularization and encouragement of inline script hacking. It suffers from SQL that lacks proper commit controls. Implementations I've used leak connections like a seive, forcing restarts of the database servers on a regular basis.
Bottom line: PHP is the one tool I've used that I hate more than JavaScript. JS is functional elegance compared to PHP spaghetti.
How much do you want to bet they end up like most "upgradeable" PCs -- never touched from day of purchase until they hit the landfill or the recycling company.
George Lucas will love this. He'll finally have what it takes to get rid of all those embarassing copies of a Star Wars Christmas.
And every actor or actress that has appeared in a steaming shitpile can claim they were "duped" and demand that those films be pulled, too.
If she got paid, she got paid. Her rights ended at getting paid.