There is nothing wrong with people viewing censored material when they asked for it to be censored for them.
It could be argued that from a societal perspective it's a bad thing for people to be allowed to live in ignorance. This is the same mentality that has led to "flavors" of news to suit your preconceived notions, which is without a doubt harmful to society, since it makes people act based on instinct instead of based on facts.
I would say that a functional society regularly exposes all its citizens to ideas that upset their state of mind. The right to ignorance is selfish and useless.
Now, whether cutting out the naughty bits from movies amounts to letting you live in ignorance, that's another matter...
Obviously, abortion and embryonic stem cell research advocates have assigned human status to some other time as well, or there would be no debate whatsoever on the treatment of infants or children. Some place this milestone at the heartbeat, a level of brain activity, or some arbitrary measure such as the third trimester. These are all judgement calls.
Seems a might odd to say that when a sperm cell and an egg are next to each other, they're not a human, and once they have combined they are a human. The difference is virtually nil. Logically one would expect that if the combined cell deserves a chance to grow into a human being, the separate cells deserve that same chance, which would lead to a requirement that all women be pregnant all the time, and somehow I don't think anyone really wants to go there.
I mean, are you honestly going to argue that the combination of the two cells is so much different than the two cells separate that you could call one a human and the other not? You do realize that the sperm cell is not a necessary component and medical science will one day be able to make egg cells grow into full human beings without the sperm cell, right?
Anyway, all of this is irrelevant. Democracy dictates that the majority rules. If the majority want to outlaw all foods except for cheese because they worship the all-mighty cheese god, then that's what we'll get. The only point to argue is whether a majority of americans really want federal funding cut off from stem cell research.
As for using GTK, I find it hard to believe you consider it the worst cross-platform GUI. I find it the best. I have developed a large number of applications under Linux and deployed on Windows. They of course all work flawlessly. Perhaps you are simply not very good at what you're doing? There are 2 ports of GTK for OS-X. I begun development on my Powerbook, and was using the X11-dependant port at the time. It worked quite well also. Seriously dude, you must have some issues if you can't get GTK working under Windows.
I haven't developed with any of these environments, I'm a web, delphi and java coder. However, I have used software that used all of them, and these are lessons learned from a user. First off: using X11 on a mac is not an option, the integration with the rest of the OS is so bad as to be almost worthless. Secondly, apps written in GTK on windows generally don't look and feel like normal windows apps, and I don't like using them. For a user, cross-platform does not mean "works the same on every platform", it means "works like everything else on the platform, for every platform".
Also, not to be inflammatory, but I looked at all the projects google could find for GTK on the mac, and none of them even come close to letting you build a decent full-featured native mac app, so GTK fails the cross-platform test for me personally.
OK, so you can write a database app in 20 lines of code. Now, how difficult is it for you to figure out, as a newbie, what those 20 lines should be? Most of the gee-whiz technologies I've seen utterly fail the "simple to learn" test. PHP is great because it is very easy to learn (which is why it's used so often, even though it is subpar in almost every other respect).
A lot of people might shoot me for saying this, but it turns out that the Unified Process was pretty much a fad, and those key concepts turn out to be the foundation for "Agile Development" and "Extreme Programming."
This is the most important lesson. Programming sees lots of fads, but few genuine innovations. I've seen lots of technologies and fads come and go, and from my experience all you have to do to stay on top in your field is to keep an ear open and to use your common sense. If you pay some attention to the wider community (for example, by being part of a developers' forum) then you will hear about all the stuff worth hearing about (because the worthwhile stuff travels far in developer communities).
As for what to do with the new hypes in programming you hear about... Generally just pass them through the bullshit detector. Most of them are just BS or common sense rewrapped in book form so they can charge you money to tell you what you already know. Don't get too hung up on "methodologies", regardless of how hyped or widespread they are. Methodologies are like political parties. Once you affiliate yourself to closely with one, you close your mind to any good ideas that aren't included in it (which generally is the majority of good ideas floating around).
Long story short, anything truly worth knowing about you won't be able to avoid if you have an open and inquiring mind. So don't worry about what you're missing, because most likely you're not missing anything important.
Yes, we are seeing more development in non-native code but, it gets it's power from the underlying libraries and core code that is native.
That's the thing. A while back I wrote a web-based CAD application. This app loads autocad drawings from a database, and then shows them in the browser, split up into hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of distinctly manipulatable objects. The user can switch "themes", causing all objects to redraw differently based on the theme's specifications. I wrote the whole thing in PHP and ActionScript (flash), and it's only marginally slower in putting drawings on the screen than the native-code windows app that provides the same functionality (which admittedly is very inefficient). It's even faster in navigating around the drawings once they're shown (as fast as any native app without hardware acceleration that does the same). Interacting with any individual object, once on the screen, is instantaneous.
The trick was making optimal use of native-code libraries on both the PHP and the flash side. The PHP side uses the native regular expression matching functions to convert the autocad drawing streams to SVG (XML). And then the actionscript side uses the native XML parser to read in these SVG files. The structure of the files is done in such a way that very little processing has to happen. Coordinate conversion is not done in my code, it is done by creating flash movieclips with coordinate transformations. Navigating around the drawing is almost entirely native code (flash).
The customer is satisfied, because time-to-market was fast, and performance is good enough (I haven't heard any complaints about performance, at all). My boss is satisfied, because time-to-market was fast, and the bug count low. I'm satisfied because the code is very maintainable, and easy to understand. Native code would have been the wrong tool for the job.
It's more cost-effective and reliable to throw a lot of cheap boxes with redundancy at a problem than one large machine. That's why google is not some gigantic server somewhere in the continental US, but tens of thousands of cheap PC's spread out throughout the world.
Taking a moral path is not about always being right. It is about always striving to be right & taking the care to reevaluate situations based on the current and future situations. I'm just glad there are still companies who know the M word.
Morality is not a relative term. It is absolute. Things that are wrong are always wrong, regardless of how much other wrong there is in the world. Taking the moral path means doing the best you can to do what is right. Clearly being in china is not the best google can, since they could refuse to be in the chinese market.
OK, now transpose that theoretical risk to the real-world and offer scenario's not involving social engineering (google is resistant to that, or we would have heard about it) in which identity theft occurs.
I trust google more to secure my data than I trust myself.
Spoken like someone who's never had an identity theft problem. You probably don't know anyone either, who's ever had their identity stolen.
Kindly explain how the risk for identity theft is increased by you keeping your details on google's servers? There have been several worms which sent personal data to the worm's originator, so your local PC is NOT a safer place for your data (especially given the fact that google has not had a single data theft incident that has been reported).
The 4 year CS program at the university I went to (in Belgium) did not involve any general knowledge courses. General knowledge courses have no place in a university education.
Amazon has a pretty reliable ratings system for computer books. Whenever I want to learn more about a subject I just buy the book recommended in amazon reviews, and I've never really bought anything I regretted (maybe I've been lucky).
I think the problem with a lot of CS educations is that they don't teach enough foundation. Diving straight into java is good from the perspective of drawing in students and getting them "market-ready", but it does little towards actually teaching programming.
There are a number of subjects which you must learn about to truly be able to call yourself a programmer. These I think are important:
Computer architecture
By this I mean the generic computer architecture. You have to be able to understand the internal workings of the CPU, and how it relates to the various types of memory in the system, before you're able to reliably write code that is performance-sensitive or memory-constrained. The book I learned from in my CS education was Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennesy. It was good enough, but there may be better books on the subject out there.
Algorithms and algorithmic complexity
I'm talking about all the basic data structures (lists, stacks, queues, trees, and so on), and all the algorithms that operate on them, plus an understanding of how to build additional data structures and algorithms, and how to analyze the memory size and execution time requirements (aka the complexity) of the algorithms you're designing. A good book on the subject will probably not even be tied to a particular language. Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen seems to be popular. You'll need to be able to write code already to understand books on this subject though.
Object Orientation
This one is pretty obvious, but you can't figure this stuff out without learning it from a book (or something equivalent). I learned it from my second-year programming course, so I can't recommend a book, but I'm sure they're out there.
Parallel programming / concurrent programming
This stuff is really tricky, and sooner or later you're going to have to write multi-threaded code. It really helps to know the fundamentals. Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming has some good reviews, but may not cover enough practice to really get you going writing parallel code.
Numerical computation (floating point arithmetic)
Another subject impossible to avoid and that you must understand the fundamentals of or you're going to have code that "is only slightly wrong". Again I can't point to any books I've actually read (it was all from courses that had only loose coupling with books), but Numerical Computing with IEEE Floating Point Arithmetic seems like it has the right stuff.
There are some other subjects that are very useful, but not absolutely required, like learning about compiler design (fascinating and useful), databases (from a theoretical standpoint), networking, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, code verification and so on. I used to think that my CS education was overkill, until I took a programming job in the real world, and found that I did in fact use almost all of the knowledge in my daily job. My AI and code verification knowledge hasn't proved to be of much use in the real world though.
It's kind of cool technology, but is it a solution in search of a problem?
Am I the only person who realizes this thing doesn't have moving parts?
First of all there's the reliability factor that this produces (moving parts are always first to break), but more importantly, it doesn't produce any noise. This is a completely quiet computer. That's a major advantage in my book. You don't realize how much the PC's hum annoys you until you work a while without it.
The introductory price is a bit too steep, but if it falls, I could see myself being a prime candidate for purchasing one of these.
It's not the phone, it's the operator. I live in Belgium and I only get dropped calls when the train I'm in is travelling through a tunnel or at really high speed (apparently GSM starts failing at 100+ mph). Even indoors I have excellent reception most of the time (unless you go really deep into a building). I recently took a ski trip to austria, and the whole time (including the travelling by bus part) I had good reception, even on the ski slopes themselves, and in the valleys between.
My phone is nothing special (qtek 8020), so I know it's the operators that make the difference. Still, it's a smartphone, so I get good reception and internet on my phone. Which came in handy when I hurt my knee and had to sit one out, cause I could spend my days browsing slashdot from a little bar down in the valley.
Actually, we have tried that in the past, but we've found that the cost of teaching these people what they need to know is so cost-prohibitive, and the overhead so demanding, that it's just not worth it. So we'd rather not hire people than hire someone who requires that much hand-holding and burn-in.
Let me be clear: we don't have any requirements with regards to technology. It doesn't matter if you're a cobol or a lisp programmer. As long as you can actually program, and you know the fundamentals of data structures, algorithms and (ideally) some OO, you're a serious candidate for hiring.
The programming challenge we make applicants take can be taken in the language of their choice. And if they don't feel confident in any language, they can write it in pseudo-code. Even then most are unable to even start at solving it.
I work at a small software development company, and am often involved in the hiring of new programmers (for Delphi-based software projects). You can roughly divide them into two categories: the ones who know their stuff, and the drag-and-droppers.
The drag-and-droppers solve every problem with ready-made components. They depend on the components provided to them by the IDE to such a degree that they generally are not able to design an actual algorithm. Yes, they know how to make a function, and a loop, or use an if structure, but they can't build a sorting algorithm, or build a data structure in memory and perform calculations across it. For what we do these people are useless.
Here's the rub: most of them have programming degrees of one form or another, and almost all of them have years of experience as a programmer, with adequate references.
We've learned the hard way to make everyone that comes to apply for a job with us take a basic programming knowledge test, where they have to design and implement an algorithm to solve a relatively easy problem that can not be solved with ready-made components (we place no requirements on the solution, other than that it should work), but can be solved by a competent programmer in less than an hour, and we give them four hours to do it. Most of the people that apply are incapable of even getting close to a solution. Some people with years of experience can't even produce one line of code towards the solution (after four hours they literally have nothing at all).
This is why I'm distrustful of teaching programming with IDE's. Sure, use IDE's, but please give them tasks that require them to understand about data structures, algorithms, and actual programming. It doesn't even have to be OOP (from my experience you can teach that afterwards). Just teach them programming beyond ifs, loops and functions. Make them build data storage facilities that use self-balancing trees for quick lookup. Make them implement various sorting algorithms and test their relative performance. Just make them do stuff that demonstrates actual competence.
Above all, we need to make it a criminal offence for a company to attempt to buy laws. How many of our problems can be traced back to corporate/politician corruption?
I say bring back dissolution of the corporate charter. If corporations are people, they should be able to die or be put to death, just like real people. If corporations had a fixed lifespan (as they originally did), and they could be dissolved for egregious violation of the law (as humans can be), then you would see far less excesses.
It's not right that humans have to die and corporations don't.
Corporations are the modern-day equals of government. If corporations can restrict your speech, in practice that is exactly the same thing as government restricting your speech.
I fall onto the side that you should be able to say anything you genuinely believe, whenever you want, to whomever you want (if you can get them to listen to you). No words that leave someone's mouth should ever be illegal, unless they are knowingly lying (the one exception I make, because the entire point of free speech is defending the truth, not instituting a lie).
I've never understood the (frequently European) mindset that when there is a possibility of making money, people instantly turn completely evil and ruthless. Do imagine hospital CEO's sitting around thinking how they can make people sick to get more money out of them?
It's not about evil, it's about the bottom line. CEO's have to turn a profit that is as good or better than the market performance. So, obviously, they will look at the most profitable ways of doing that. Treating a disease instead of curing it is generally more profitable, so more effort goes into the r&d of drugs that treat instead of cure.
If a CEO does not turn a profit because he "is a good guy", he is guaranteed to be fired by the board/shareholders. Shareholders are only interested in ROI. When was the last time you heard someone say "you know, I've got shares in Xyzzy, and they're turning a loss, but they do so many charitable works, so I'm buying some more stock!"? It just doesn't work that way.
Only people who have never used javascript and DHTML would even dream such madness. Or possibly fanatical Javascript zealots, if they exist in some cave somewhere.
What I don't get is why people always are talking about javascript for building a Web OS to the exclusion of the platforms that could actually be used for it, like java or flash. Especially flash. You can build amazing stuff in flash, and easily too. It's orders of magnitude more easy to develop cross-platform web apps in flash than in javascript.
Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction
on
An Alternate Human
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· Score: 1
But if we could redesign humanity the way we want it we could design it so that the brainless head, when dismembered, would regrow within a few months. Then losing your head becomes just a period of forced down-time. Annoying, but not disastrous.
I think you are confusing HTTP and HTML. I am quite certain that what makes web browsers complex is not the high-level transport protocol (HTTP) but the rendering of poorly written HTML. Nobody said HTML was the ideal situation for web applications, but don't blame HTTP for that...
Agreed. A flash app that loads data (in XML format) from a web server across http is much easier to develop. Less bandwidth needed, better responsiveness, a lot more capability, and a shorter development time. Yahoo and google are catching on this, as demonstrated by yahoo maps and google finance.
Oh, and did you know that you can make flash apps using nothing but open source software?
I have said for years that X should have been the standard that MS used for their windowing, but MS didn't own X, so they settled for creating their own, much-less-useable windowing environment (that at least they owned and could control).
X was overkill for the hardware early windows ran on. Remember, in the days of windows 1.0, a 286 with 1 megabyte of ram was a beefy machine. By the time windows 3.0 was out (the first version that mattered), people were still predominately using 386's with 4 megs of ram. The overhead of X was prohibitive. Not using it was a straightforward technical decision.
And ofcourse, once there was legacy... Nobody does legacy on the desktop better than microsoft, which is windows' curse as well as its boon.
Incidentally, X isn't THAT wonderful. It doesn't do anything better than the other windowing systems apart from networking, and VNC/citrix/... mostly make up for windows' deficiencies in that area.
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing wrong with people viewing censored material when they asked for it to be censored for them.
It could be argued that from a societal perspective it's a bad thing for people to be allowed to live in ignorance. This is the same mentality that has led to "flavors" of news to suit your preconceived notions, which is without a doubt harmful to society, since it makes people act based on instinct instead of based on facts.
I would say that a functional society regularly exposes all its citizens to ideas that upset their state of mind. The right to ignorance is selfish and useless.
Now, whether cutting out the naughty bits from movies amounts to letting you live in ignorance, that's another matter...
Obviously, abortion and embryonic stem cell research advocates have assigned human status to some other time as well, or there would be no debate whatsoever on the treatment of infants or children. Some place this milestone at the heartbeat, a level of brain activity, or some arbitrary measure such as the third trimester. These are all judgement calls.
Seems a might odd to say that when a sperm cell and an egg are next to each other, they're not a human, and once they have combined they are a human. The difference is virtually nil. Logically one would expect that if the combined cell deserves a chance to grow into a human being, the separate cells deserve that same chance, which would lead to a requirement that all women be pregnant all the time, and somehow I don't think anyone really wants to go there.
I mean, are you honestly going to argue that the combination of the two cells is so much different than the two cells separate that you could call one a human and the other not? You do realize that the sperm cell is not a necessary component and medical science will one day be able to make egg cells grow into full human beings without the sperm cell, right?
Anyway, all of this is irrelevant. Democracy dictates that the majority rules. If the majority want to outlaw all foods except for cheese because they worship the all-mighty cheese god, then that's what we'll get. The only point to argue is whether a majority of americans really want federal funding cut off from stem cell research.
As for using GTK, I find it hard to believe you consider it the worst cross-platform GUI. I find it the best. I have developed a large number of applications under Linux and deployed on Windows. They of course all work flawlessly. Perhaps you are simply not very good at what you're doing? There are 2 ports of GTK for OS-X. I begun development on my Powerbook, and was using the X11-dependant port at the time. It worked quite well also. Seriously dude, you must have some issues if you can't get GTK working under Windows.
I haven't developed with any of these environments, I'm a web, delphi and java coder. However, I have used software that used all of them, and these are lessons learned from a user. First off: using X11 on a mac is not an option, the integration with the rest of the OS is so bad as to be almost worthless. Secondly, apps written in GTK on windows generally don't look and feel like normal windows apps, and I don't like using them. For a user, cross-platform does not mean "works the same on every platform", it means "works like everything else on the platform, for every platform".
Also, not to be inflammatory, but I looked at all the projects google could find for GTK on the mac, and none of them even come close to letting you build a decent full-featured native mac app, so GTK fails the cross-platform test for me personally.
OK, so you can write a database app in 20 lines of code. Now, how difficult is it for you to figure out, as a newbie, what those 20 lines should be? Most of the gee-whiz technologies I've seen utterly fail the "simple to learn" test. PHP is great because it is very easy to learn (which is why it's used so often, even though it is subpar in almost every other respect).
A lot of people might shoot me for saying this, but it turns out that the Unified Process was pretty much a fad, and those key concepts turn out to be the foundation for "Agile Development" and "Extreme Programming."
This is the most important lesson. Programming sees lots of fads, but few genuine innovations. I've seen lots of technologies and fads come and go, and from my experience all you have to do to stay on top in your field is to keep an ear open and to use your common sense. If you pay some attention to the wider community (for example, by being part of a developers' forum) then you will hear about all the stuff worth hearing about (because the worthwhile stuff travels far in developer communities).
As for what to do with the new hypes in programming you hear about... Generally just pass them through the bullshit detector. Most of them are just BS or common sense rewrapped in book form so they can charge you money to tell you what you already know. Don't get too hung up on "methodologies", regardless of how hyped or widespread they are. Methodologies are like political parties. Once you affiliate yourself to closely with one, you close your mind to any good ideas that aren't included in it (which generally is the majority of good ideas floating around).
Long story short, anything truly worth knowing about you won't be able to avoid if you have an open and inquiring mind. So don't worry about what you're missing, because most likely you're not missing anything important.
Yes, we are seeing more development in non-native code but, it gets it's power from the underlying libraries and core code that is native.
That's the thing. A while back I wrote a web-based CAD application. This app loads autocad drawings from a database, and then shows them in the browser, split up into hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of distinctly manipulatable objects. The user can switch "themes", causing all objects to redraw differently based on the theme's specifications. I wrote the whole thing in PHP and ActionScript (flash), and it's only marginally slower in putting drawings on the screen than the native-code windows app that provides the same functionality (which admittedly is very inefficient). It's even faster in navigating around the drawings once they're shown (as fast as any native app without hardware acceleration that does the same). Interacting with any individual object, once on the screen, is instantaneous.
The trick was making optimal use of native-code libraries on both the PHP and the flash side. The PHP side uses the native regular expression matching functions to convert the autocad drawing streams to SVG (XML). And then the actionscript side uses the native XML parser to read in these SVG files. The structure of the files is done in such a way that very little processing has to happen. Coordinate conversion is not done in my code, it is done by creating flash movieclips with coordinate transformations. Navigating around the drawing is almost entirely native code (flash).
The customer is satisfied, because time-to-market was fast, and performance is good enough (I haven't heard any complaints about performance, at all). My boss is satisfied, because time-to-market was fast, and the bug count low. I'm satisfied because the code is very maintainable, and easy to understand. Native code would have been the wrong tool for the job.
It's more cost-effective and reliable to throw a lot of cheap boxes with redundancy at a problem than one large machine. That's why google is not some gigantic server somewhere in the continental US, but tens of thousands of cheap PC's spread out throughout the world.
Taking a moral path is not about always being right. It is about always striving to be right & taking the care to reevaluate situations based on the current and future situations. I'm just glad there are still companies who know the M word.
Morality is not a relative term. It is absolute. Things that are wrong are always wrong, regardless of how much other wrong there is in the world. Taking the moral path means doing the best you can to do what is right. Clearly being in china is not the best google can, since they could refuse to be in the chinese market.
OK, now transpose that theoretical risk to the real-world and offer scenario's not involving social engineering (google is resistant to that, or we would have heard about it) in which identity theft occurs.
I trust google more to secure my data than I trust myself.
Spoken like someone who's never had an identity theft problem. You probably don't know anyone either, who's ever had their identity stolen.
Kindly explain how the risk for identity theft is increased by you keeping your details on google's servers? There have been several worms which sent personal data to the worm's originator, so your local PC is NOT a safer place for your data (especially given the fact that google has not had a single data theft incident that has been reported).
The 4 year CS program at the university I went to (in Belgium) did not involve any general knowledge courses. General knowledge courses have no place in a university education.
Amazon has a pretty reliable ratings system for computer books. Whenever I want to learn more about a subject I just buy the book recommended in amazon reviews, and I've never really bought anything I regretted (maybe I've been lucky).
I think the problem with a lot of CS educations is that they don't teach enough foundation. Diving straight into java is good from the perspective of drawing in students and getting them "market-ready", but it does little towards actually teaching programming.
There are a number of subjects which you must learn about to truly be able to call yourself a programmer. These I think are important:
Computer architecture
By this I mean the generic computer architecture. You have to be able to understand the internal workings of the CPU, and how it relates to the various types of memory in the system, before you're able to reliably write code that is performance-sensitive or memory-constrained. The book I learned from in my CS education was Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennesy. It was good enough, but there may be better books on the subject out there.
Algorithms and algorithmic complexity
I'm talking about all the basic data structures (lists, stacks, queues, trees, and so on), and all the algorithms that operate on them, plus an understanding of how to build additional data structures and algorithms, and how to analyze the memory size and execution time requirements (aka the complexity) of the algorithms you're designing. A good book on the subject will probably not even be tied to a particular language. Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen seems to be popular. You'll need to be able to write code already to understand books on this subject though.
Object Orientation
This one is pretty obvious, but you can't figure this stuff out without learning it from a book (or something equivalent). I learned it from my second-year programming course, so I can't recommend a book, but I'm sure they're out there.
Parallel programming / concurrent programming
This stuff is really tricky, and sooner or later you're going to have to write multi-threaded code. It really helps to know the fundamentals. Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming has some good reviews, but may not cover enough practice to really get you going writing parallel code.
Numerical computation (floating point arithmetic)
Another subject impossible to avoid and that you must understand the fundamentals of or you're going to have code that "is only slightly wrong". Again I can't point to any books I've actually read (it was all from courses that had only loose coupling with books), but Numerical Computing with IEEE Floating Point Arithmetic seems like it has the right stuff.
There are some other subjects that are very useful, but not absolutely required, like learning about compiler design (fascinating and useful), databases (from a theoretical standpoint), networking, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, code verification and so on. I used to think that my CS education was overkill, until I took a programming job in the real world, and found that I did in fact use almost all of the knowledge in my daily job. My AI and code verification knowledge hasn't proved to be of much use in the real world though.
It's kind of cool technology, but is it a solution in search of a problem?
Am I the only person who realizes this thing doesn't have moving parts?
First of all there's the reliability factor that this produces (moving parts are always first to break), but more importantly, it doesn't produce any noise. This is a completely quiet computer. That's a major advantage in my book. You don't realize how much the PC's hum annoys you until you work a while without it.
The introductory price is a bit too steep, but if it falls, I could see myself being a prime candidate for purchasing one of these.
Fun little game; answer these two questions, then look up the answers:
- What are the odds of an american citizen dying by lightning strike on american soil?
- What are the odds of an american citizen dying by terrorist attack on american soil?
It's not the phone, it's the operator. I live in Belgium and I only get dropped calls when the train I'm in is travelling through a tunnel or at really high speed (apparently GSM starts failing at 100+ mph). Even indoors I have excellent reception most of the time (unless you go really deep into a building). I recently took a ski trip to austria, and the whole time (including the travelling by bus part) I had good reception, even on the ski slopes themselves, and in the valleys between.
My phone is nothing special (qtek 8020), so I know it's the operators that make the difference. Still, it's a smartphone, so I get good reception and internet on my phone. Which came in handy when I hurt my knee and had to sit one out, cause I could spend my days browsing slashdot from a little bar down in the valley.
Actually, we have tried that in the past, but we've found that the cost of teaching these people what they need to know is so cost-prohibitive, and the overhead so demanding, that it's just not worth it. So we'd rather not hire people than hire someone who requires that much hand-holding and burn-in.
Let me be clear: we don't have any requirements with regards to technology. It doesn't matter if you're a cobol or a lisp programmer. As long as you can actually program, and you know the fundamentals of data structures, algorithms and (ideally) some OO, you're a serious candidate for hiring.
The programming challenge we make applicants take can be taken in the language of their choice. And if they don't feel confident in any language, they can write it in pseudo-code. Even then most are unable to even start at solving it.
I work at a small software development company, and am often involved in the hiring of new programmers (for Delphi-based software projects). You can roughly divide them into two categories: the ones who know their stuff, and the drag-and-droppers.
The drag-and-droppers solve every problem with ready-made components. They depend on the components provided to them by the IDE to such a degree that they generally are not able to design an actual algorithm. Yes, they know how to make a function, and a loop, or use an if structure, but they can't build a sorting algorithm, or build a data structure in memory and perform calculations across it. For what we do these people are useless.
Here's the rub: most of them have programming degrees of one form or another, and almost all of them have years of experience as a programmer, with adequate references.
We've learned the hard way to make everyone that comes to apply for a job with us take a basic programming knowledge test, where they have to design and implement an algorithm to solve a relatively easy problem that can not be solved with ready-made components (we place no requirements on the solution, other than that it should work), but can be solved by a competent programmer in less than an hour, and we give them four hours to do it. Most of the people that apply are incapable of even getting close to a solution. Some people with years of experience can't even produce one line of code towards the solution (after four hours they literally have nothing at all).
This is why I'm distrustful of teaching programming with IDE's. Sure, use IDE's, but please give them tasks that require them to understand about data structures, algorithms, and actual programming. It doesn't even have to be OOP (from my experience you can teach that afterwards). Just teach them programming beyond ifs, loops and functions. Make them build data storage facilities that use self-balancing trees for quick lookup. Make them implement various sorting algorithms and test their relative performance. Just make them do stuff that demonstrates actual competence.
Above all, we need to make it a criminal offence for a company to attempt to buy laws. How many of our problems can be traced back to corporate/politician corruption?
I say bring back dissolution of the corporate charter. If corporations are people, they should be able to die or be put to death, just like real people. If corporations had a fixed lifespan (as they originally did), and they could be dissolved for egregious violation of the law (as humans can be), then you would see far less excesses.
It's not right that humans have to die and corporations don't.
Corporations are the modern-day equals of government. If corporations can restrict your speech, in practice that is exactly the same thing as government restricting your speech.
I fall onto the side that you should be able to say anything you genuinely believe, whenever you want, to whomever you want (if you can get them to listen to you). No words that leave someone's mouth should ever be illegal, unless they are knowingly lying (the one exception I make, because the entire point of free speech is defending the truth, not instituting a lie).
The two-step program to realizing how wrong you are:
1. Go to a place without government (any war zone will do).
2. Take a look at the local prices.
I could go in-depth about the economic reasons why an unregulated market becomes unfree over time, but hey, why bother?
Over here (Belgium) the actual prescriptions of doctors are registered, and if a doctor prescribes too many non-generics, they face consequences.
I've never understood the (frequently European) mindset that when there is a possibility of making money, people instantly turn completely evil and ruthless. Do imagine hospital CEO's sitting around thinking how they can make people sick to get more money out of them?
It's not about evil, it's about the bottom line. CEO's have to turn a profit that is as good or better than the market performance. So, obviously, they will look at the most profitable ways of doing that. Treating a disease instead of curing it is generally more profitable, so more effort goes into the r&d of drugs that treat instead of cure.
If a CEO does not turn a profit because he "is a good guy", he is guaranteed to be fired by the board/shareholders. Shareholders are only interested in ROI. When was the last time you heard someone say "you know, I've got shares in Xyzzy, and they're turning a loss, but they do so many charitable works, so I'm buying some more stock!"? It just doesn't work that way.
Only people who have never used javascript and DHTML would even dream such madness. Or possibly fanatical Javascript zealots, if they exist in some cave somewhere.
What I don't get is why people always are talking about javascript for building a Web OS to the exclusion of the platforms that could actually be used for it, like java or flash. Especially flash. You can build amazing stuff in flash, and easily too. It's orders of magnitude more easy to develop cross-platform web apps in flash than in javascript.
But if we could redesign humanity the way we want it we could design it so that the brainless head, when dismembered, would regrow within a few months. Then losing your head becomes just a period of forced down-time. Annoying, but not disastrous.
I think you are confusing HTTP and HTML. I am quite certain that what makes web browsers complex is not the high-level transport protocol (HTTP) but the rendering of poorly written HTML. Nobody said HTML was the ideal situation for web applications, but don't blame HTTP for that...
Agreed. A flash app that loads data (in XML format) from a web server across http is much easier to develop. Less bandwidth needed, better responsiveness, a lot more capability, and a shorter development time. Yahoo and google are catching on this, as demonstrated by yahoo maps and google finance.
Oh, and did you know that you can make flash apps using nothing but open source software?
I have said for years that X should have been the standard that MS used for their windowing, but MS didn't own X, so they settled for creating their own, much-less-useable windowing environment (that at least they owned and could control).
X was overkill for the hardware early windows ran on. Remember, in the days of windows 1.0, a 286 with 1 megabyte of ram was a beefy machine. By the time windows 3.0 was out (the first version that mattered), people were still predominately using 386's with 4 megs of ram. The overhead of X was prohibitive. Not using it was a straightforward technical decision.
And ofcourse, once there was legacy... Nobody does legacy on the desktop better than microsoft, which is windows' curse as well as its boon.
Incidentally, X isn't THAT wonderful. It doesn't do anything better than the other windowing systems apart from networking, and VNC/citrix/... mostly make up for windows' deficiencies in that area.