Bullshit. Medicine requires a lot of analytical thinking - physicians have to apply their natural pattern-matching skills to research a huge database. Then they have to match pieces in a logical way that explains the clinical patterns.
Medicine, in a way is much harder than the normal problem-set of engineers. Each patient is his very own particular, custom-made, very complex system. The reasoning has to be probabilistic. Not that they know how to solve math problems like engineers, but they handle a vast amount of information (ever seen the size of a Cardiology textbook?)
My father was a pathologist, and it was stunning how his eyes could spot the smallest detail under the microscope, sort through what must amount to thousands of similar patterns in his head, and then fact-check a *huge* database about *every* organ system in the human body, integrate that info with other colleague's (say, the surgeon) and then come up with a reasonable explanation that was to be submitted to the scrutiny of other experts. If that was so easy, than physicians wouldn't be recruited among the very best student, and by now cell phones would be able to give you a diagnosis after you tell it a few simple facts. Instead, 50 years of A.I. research and we're still not there yet. Not that I don't think we won't - I hope we get there - but it's been a hard task so far.
If you have to weed out students, the your selection process isn't working: you are waisting time and resources to do something that had to be done before students enrolled in your class.
Also, I haven't read the book you mentioned, but you have to acknowledge the fact that today's student have to handle a larger and harder curriculum. And they also have to use tools that 40 years ago were not available, such as sophisticated software.
Yeah, right. Most engineering students don't understand the first thing about why their doing this or that. They throw too much at them too fast.
Take Physics. You must take a Physics class whose treatment of mechanics is so poor as to be nearly useless (no vectors or tensors, no proper notation for handling coordinate systems, etc.) ? You can't even describe the wheel of a train with that.
And then, what do you do? You take another Mechanics; this time, it's better but wait...Nope, the Lagrange and Hamilton's treatment will have to wait. In some schools, it's graduate-only.
So, in fact, Physics and/or Engineering students might go through 3 Mechanics iteration before they have a minimum grasp of it.
Why waste so much time? Because the professors are too lazy to reformulate the curriculum. To streamline Mechanics, they would have to redo everything, and they would bother the Math department in the process. So what they do is recommend gigantic overpriced textbooks that will grant them rights to a database of exam questions, to they can do what they do best...work in the lab. Students be damned.
If that in fact is the plan, then the noble professors might wanna take some classes in Business school. It's an absolute waste of: physical space, faculty time and human resources. It also means their recruiting methods are completely out of sync with the school's profile when, one supposes and is told, top-notch schools recruit only top-notch human material.
Meaning that: if business ran like engineering schools they would fail...miserably.
The facts point something else entirely different: complete and utter incompetence to teach; widespread laziness in preparing adequate class material (which explains why I used basically the same book my civil engineer uncle did decades earlier - only slightly better and now in full color!); a total indolence in what regards adequate self-evaluation.
What does class give you these days, anyways? Better explanation than books? Nope, no way - there's simply not enough time to explain thoroughly the material. Books are *much* better. If only they would leave students alone and let them study, instead of going to classes where the guy basically repeats what's written in the book, anyways. Maybe, attending class gives you a cozy, comfy feeling, all that human heat only overcrowded rooms can give? Or the knowledge - that only your physical presence can give you - that you just gotta hit-dat-ass? Yes!
Seriously, the only thing the first 2 or 3 years the current undergraduate curricula in maths/engineering/computer science will give you is bring you closer to your diploma. It's a red tape thing. Gonna dance to the music, even though your party sucks, Professor.
Most teachers today are non-productive obsolete pieces in the system.
My school fails half of Physics *every* year. And they have a time series to prove it, too. What does that tell you about the faculty's performance? If you were a CEO and the team your responsible for obtained a 50% performance, would you be still around the next year? Funny thing is, the students attending our engineering classes were the top students out of high school - getting in is real tough competition, and they worked their asses off to get it, so if there's one thing you can't do is assume they are a bunch of slackers...
In some university systems (I'm not writing about the US system), professors achieve stability - they will never go away - you will, though. So they don't care, because they're not fired. They are actually researchers and would rather be in their Physics lab than explaining Dynamic to a confused young man that can't figure out a moving coordinates system... You're just a wart. For them, students are like herpes - they disappear for some time, but they come again.
I would never want to be a professor. I simply would not be able to stand what's called the Time Paradox of the University Professor. Do you know what that is? It's a very odd phenomenon: you keep getting older, but every year the girls are 18 year-olds.
Do you really mean "graduation"? In the American system, graduation is after undergraduate. Undergraduate is what in some countries is called "graduation". For example, Engineering is "undergraduate" in the U.S. Graduation would be, for example, as master's degree.
Read? You have a day full of classes. In the evenings, you gotta hit the books. Book 1 is 400 pages, book 2 is 500, book 3 is lighter, only 200, except the material is beyond comprehension ("It is easily seen that" type of demonstration - "easily seen" means 1 paragraph = 1 hour and several sheets of paper). Class 4 is a breeze - is just about programming number-crunching stuff on the computer. First problem set for book 1 this week is problems 1 up to 50. Class two expects you to solve 1-70 by the end of the next week. Class 3, 2 weeks later, resembles Klingon script (or are you losing your mind, or is the professor's handwriting really that bad?) and you have ab-so-lu-te-ly no idea what's on the blackboard (shit, never skip class again!) Class 4, a month later, you got all the algorithms wrong, they're not numerically stable, you are an ignorant being when it comes down to floating points...Read? Oh, weekends.
Today, it's always somebody else's fault - the kids are disenfranchised, or they are Gen Y thinkers, and school doesn't have enough visual material for such short spans of attention, or the system is failing, because Public schools need more funding. Etc. I'm quoting what I read in the Brazilian press. Surprised? Sounded just like the US? I bet it's the same rhetoric in France, Italy, UK, etc. So you see, it's a worldwide problem.
Maybe it's just that kids today see more opportunities: they can work at a burger shop, or become a TV celebrity, you know. You can just snort your way to fame, fuck your way to fame, drink and bitch-slap your way to the Celeb Pantheon, etc. If you're a musician, you don't even have to sing. You can just talk over the music. If Gen Y gets a job, Gen Y wants to be an instant CEO and ride in helicopters. Real Life OTOH has many boring, toil-away days. Not like cable TV at all...
It's just a culture problem. Today, we see more bums. If millions of bums are interested in seeing The Bum, then The Bum becomes a millionaire. More channels, more bums. Makes sense...Anyways, thinking is hard - let's go shopping!
Some books are stuck in the 50s, literally (differential equations). Some are stuck in the 60s (Physics). A few cosmetic changes - here and there asking students to solve a problem with Maple - do not make for any real change.
Differential equation is kinda of a bad joke, and the joke is on the students: no one will come up with cute analytical solutions in real life - and they will in fact work *backwards* from the way their classes are taught. Books from the 50s or 60s are just the same as the best-selling author's of today. BTW, if anyone's looking for a book that's done away with the cruft, I suggest Florin Diacu's book.
Today's students have bigger curriculum then their teachers had (sometimes increased by as much as a 40%) and are expected to handle nothing less than a CAS software for analytics (e.g. Maple); something for their number-crunching needs (MATLAB, Scilab, etc.); CAD software; and be reasonably proficient in some programming language (that's adequate for number-crunching - C, C++ or Fortran), which entails a data structure course, and maybe later an algorithm analysis class...then a computational algebra class...a linear/non-linear optimization class...etc. For their teacher's generation, some of this stuff was presented in a graduate setting. Today, it's for undergraduates. Cool, but students have their hands full.
To add insult to injury, because of this non-optimized curriculum, faculty has to squeeze class material - which results in students being thrown a brutal quantity of math mumbo jumbo (Statistics, Fourier transform comes to mind...) for which very little basis is provided - so it's just sink or swim, where "swim" means "learn to apply patterns mindlessly without knowing what the hell you're doing *at all* to your problem sets, and be confident that the exam will be just more of the same". The successful student in these classes has basically the mindset of a high-school student - approaching math as if it were a constellation of cookie recipes - the only difference is that this iteration is way harder. Stop to actually read a book and dig deeper, and that might cost you your approval grade (better luck next time, and do remember to read less theorems). One whiz kid I knew simply never read a book. He only used class notes and a huge pile of previous exams. I think that's awful...
I think the only way to fix this situation is adding a year or two to the engineering (etc.) curricula.
BTW, what does the future hold? Will we all have strong analytical skills, or will we have to leave that to number-crunching software specialists? And will math software still be done like today - hand-crafted, a model from the 50s, too - or will this stuff be handled like all other engineering things are - pluggable and standardized? Will formal analysis and automated theorem-proving software (Isabelle, ACL2, HOL, Maude, etc.) make inroads and become mainstream? Nothing today seems to *scale*. Or scales in a crazy, exponential way... Just look at the size a nuclear physics experiment is today - particle accelerators, with more than a thousand-strong team to handle it.
What's the skill set for the future? Is it like today's - mechanical thought-steps? Or will it be "creative thinking" (whatever that means...the catch-phrase sounds like a huge ball of superficial knowledge to me...what marketers tried to label as "Gen Y" thinking)? Just "thinking"? Or thinking *about* thinking - "meta thinking"?
This is not what you asked for specifically, but FYI Netflix works just fine in Brazil, as of last month. I use my PS3 with a cable internet/tv provider.
You know what? Linux users will go right on using plain Linux. Not SE Linux, not OpenBSD, and certainly not Windows.
Maybe the Ubuntu users. Myself, I like a kernel enhanced with capabilities. It saved my butt once from the bugs the mighty kernel developers introduce ever so often in the kernel, with their "release early, release often" philosophy (we see now where that leads with this incident).
Microsoft's sites are indeed a stinking pile of goo. Take something like Power Shell. Power Shell is awsome. Unix/Linux shell lovers should really be ashamed of how little they expect from their tools - their 70s text-based poorly engineered tools, in contrast to the Power Shell that pipes objects. Now, where does the mortal Windows user learn about it? Typically on non-Microsoft sites. If not by some random event, or actively searching for geeky stuff, Joe Six Pack can spend a decade using Microsft products in the most unproductive way possible, never learning about the advanced stuff. Now look at Apple. It's the oposite. They don't hide the automator, for instance (which, someday in 2020, is what Unix/Linux shell users will wish for). It isn't something you have to download separetely like Power Shell was. It's just there.
Now, last year, I wanted to buy the professional box version of Visual Studio for some number-crunching project, because I keep pinching myself, I can't believe F# even exists - it's like the f*ing Berlin Wall of Functional Programming came down. Coz, you know, Microsoft is the underdog now, and they keep churning out superior tech - that is just a fact (C#, F#, WPF, Power Shell, VS, etc.)
Anyways, try as I may, I couldn't get me a (legal) copy (this is for Microsoft/Brazil). Yet, I contacted all the resellers they listed on their site, but either they were only volume sellers or they sold the old version of VS. One of them had an attendant on the phone that didn't know shit about what I was talking about. They wouldn't sell via credit card/download either. This must because we all live on the treetops in Brazil, swinging from branch to branch, so we have no credit card. It struck me that it would be wise to call someone inside the local Microsoft fortress. One page had a wrong number! Well I finally punch through this wall of secrecy, I get to hear the dumb stupid Microsoftee on the other end of the line sent me to some outdated corner of the Microsoft web orbis that had obsolete info. And then they wonder why there's some much software piracy...It made me angry that they made it so hard for the honest person who felt that it's only fair to pay for their work. In comparison, Linux La-la-land feels like soul food - so many calories you're just happy all the way home. In fact, we get to eat so much starch in Linux La-la-land that we now have a generation of young developer dudes who, even though they went to MITor smth, they actually expect to pay less for their power tools than the blue-collar metal shop owner pays for his power tools. It turns out, the paid-for tools are better...Now, pass me that ol' hippie LSD!
So to end my sobbing story, I would like to say that little poor ol' me thinks Microsoft shows no love for individual developers, and sometimes finding stuff is just hard!, be it info or tools.
In conclusion, they desperately need information designers for their sites. The day they suffer like I suffered, they'll be a better company. Being a fat elephant is no excuse for stepping on the mouse!
As for the pythonista tools, well, more power to them!
inventing a new programming language for that end is unnecessary and, in fact, will become a burden
Skimming through the language ref (*), this is very much ML-oid (SML, OCaml, F#).
So it doens't seem to be "new", bizarre, or some gratutitous stupidity (like Javascript, for example).
That is, except if you haven't ever looked at these functional languages. Which means that around a decade and a half of programming language state-of-the-art tech whisked right by you.
For one thing, ML-oid languages have Hindley-Milner type inference.
This is a formal ("mathematical") guarantee at code safety/correctness (in the web scenario it means code injection attacks do not type-check). All C-oid languages (and Java, Python, etc.) cannot offer a true (i.e., *formal* guarantee), simply because, compared to the theoretical background of ML-oid languages, they are merelly hacks, with lots of corner cases, ad-hoc "featuritis" and many loopholes - which, BTW, spawned a whole industry (anti-virus software). Talk about giving you a problem and then selling the solution...
Even though ML-oid languages were developed by true brainiacs, we're now witnessing inroads at mainstream programming (F#, for example, from Microsoft, or the use of OCaml in the financial sector (*))
Being statically-typed, these systems are also good for performance (**)
For a nice layman-friendly explanation of Hindley-Milner you may like: http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/what-is-hindley-milner-and-why-is-it-cool ------- (*) Many years before these new commercial uses of ML-oid languages, the French Aerospace industry used OCaml to formally verify C programs that were deployed in at least one model of Airbus aircrafts. Also, the makers of Matlab (Mathworks) sell a code-checking tool that relies on SML (Standard ML) (see: http://www.mathworks.com/products/polyspace/index.html) (**) This guy claims his OpenGL bindings for MLTon whole code optimizing compiler yielded faster than C++ performance at 10% of the code. MLTon may be found here: http://mlton.org/.
Are you trolling? Or are you really clueless? QT and GCC used the GPL, not Affero GPL. Seems to me you don't understand the differences between the GPL and Affero GPL.
Rather than using some obscure thingo nobody's heard of, made by whats-his-name, I would speculate that the FreeBSD is safer, because they have people who understand crypto.
Philip Zimmer (of PGP fame) used to say that most people screw up in the implementation part.
Now, TrueCrypt you can trust, because it was used in a high-profile financial case in Brazil (it was mentioned here in Slashdot) and the Feds from Brazil and the USA (Brazilians asked for help) couldn't get the data out.
All charges against the banker Daniel Dantas (although this had nothing to do with TrueCrypt).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, ok. I thought that was kinda of what I said, but I guess not :-)
Bullshit. Medicine requires a lot of analytical thinking - physicians have to apply their natural pattern-matching skills to research a huge database. Then they have to match pieces in a logical way that explains the clinical patterns.
Medicine, in a way is much harder than the normal problem-set of engineers. Each patient is his very own particular, custom-made, very complex system. The reasoning has to be probabilistic. Not that they know how to solve math problems like engineers, but they handle a vast amount of information (ever seen the size of a Cardiology textbook?)
My father was a pathologist, and it was stunning how his eyes could spot the smallest detail under the microscope, sort through what must amount to thousands of similar patterns in his head, and then fact-check a *huge* database about *every* organ system in the human body, integrate that info with other colleague's (say, the surgeon) and then come up with a reasonable explanation that was to be submitted to the scrutiny of other experts. If that was so easy, than physicians wouldn't be recruited among the very best student, and by now cell phones would be able to give you a diagnosis after you tell it a few simple facts. Instead, 50 years of A.I. research and we're still not there yet. Not that I don't think we won't - I hope we get there - but it's been a hard task so far.
If you have to weed out students, the your selection process isn't working: you are waisting time and resources to do something that had to be done before students enrolled in your class.
Also, I haven't read the book you mentioned, but you have to acknowledge the fact that today's student have to handle a larger and harder curriculum. And they also have to use tools that 40 years ago were not available, such as sophisticated software.
Yeah, right. Most engineering students don't understand the first thing about why their doing this or that. They throw too much at them too fast.
Take Physics. You must take a Physics class whose treatment of mechanics is so poor as to be nearly useless (no vectors or tensors, no proper notation for handling coordinate systems, etc.) ? You can't even describe the wheel of a train with that.
And then, what do you do? You take another Mechanics; this time, it's better but wait...Nope, the Lagrange and Hamilton's treatment will have to wait. In some schools, it's graduate-only.
So, in fact, Physics and/or Engineering students might go through 3 Mechanics iteration before they have a minimum grasp of it.
Why waste so much time? Because the professors are too lazy to reformulate the curriculum. To streamline Mechanics, they would have to redo everything, and they would bother the Math department in the process. So what they do is recommend gigantic overpriced textbooks that will grant them rights to a database of exam questions, to they can do what they do best...work in the lab. Students be damned.
If that in fact is the plan, then the noble professors might wanna take some classes in Business school. It's an absolute waste of: physical space, faculty time and human resources. It also means their recruiting methods are completely out of sync with the school's profile when, one supposes and is told, top-notch schools recruit only top-notch human material.
Meaning that: if business ran like engineering schools they would fail...miserably.
The facts point something else entirely different: complete and utter incompetence to teach; widespread laziness in preparing adequate class material (which explains why I used basically the same book my civil engineer uncle did decades earlier - only slightly better and now in full color!); a total indolence in what regards adequate self-evaluation.
What does class give you these days, anyways? Better explanation than books? Nope, no way - there's simply not enough time to explain thoroughly the material. Books are *much* better. If only they would leave students alone and let them study, instead of going to classes where the guy basically repeats what's written in the book, anyways. Maybe, attending class gives you a cozy, comfy feeling, all that human heat only overcrowded rooms can give? Or the knowledge - that only your physical presence can give you - that you just gotta hit-dat-ass? Yes!
Seriously, the only thing the first 2 or 3 years the current undergraduate curricula in maths/engineering/computer science will give you is bring you closer to your diploma. It's a red tape thing. Gonna dance to the music, even though your party sucks, Professor.
Most teachers today are non-productive obsolete pieces in the system.
s/your/you're
My school fails half of Physics *every* year. And they have a time series to prove it, too. What does that tell you about the faculty's performance? If you were a CEO and the team your responsible for obtained a 50% performance, would you be still around the next year? Funny thing is, the students attending our engineering classes were the top students out of high school - getting in is real tough competition, and they worked their asses off to get it, so if there's one thing you can't do is assume they are a bunch of slackers...
In some university systems (I'm not writing about the US system), professors achieve stability - they will never go away - you will, though. So they don't care, because they're not fired. They are actually researchers and would rather be in their Physics lab than explaining Dynamic to a confused young man that can't figure out a moving coordinates system... You're just a wart. For them, students are like herpes - they disappear for some time, but they come again.
I would never want to be a professor. I simply would not be able to stand what's called the Time Paradox of the University Professor. Do you know what that is? It's a very odd phenomenon: you keep getting older, but every year the girls are 18 year-olds.
Do you really mean "graduation"? In the American system, graduation is after undergraduate. Undergraduate is what in some countries is called "graduation". For example, Engineering is "undergraduate" in the U.S. Graduation would be, for example, as master's degree.
Read? You have a day full of classes. In the evenings, you gotta hit the books. Book 1 is 400 pages, book 2 is 500, book 3 is lighter, only 200, except the material is beyond comprehension ("It is easily seen that" type of demonstration - "easily seen" means 1 paragraph = 1 hour and several sheets of paper). Class 4 is a breeze - is just about programming number-crunching stuff on the computer. First problem set for book 1 this week is problems 1 up to 50. Class two expects you to solve 1-70 by the end of the next week. Class 3, 2 weeks later, resembles Klingon script (or are you losing your mind, or is the professor's handwriting really that bad?) and you have ab-so-lu-te-ly no idea what's on the blackboard (shit, never skip class again!) Class 4, a month later, you got all the algorithms wrong, they're not numerically stable, you are an ignorant being when it comes down to floating points...Read? Oh, weekends.
Today, it's always somebody else's fault - the kids are disenfranchised, or they are Gen Y thinkers, and school doesn't have enough visual material for such short spans of attention, or the system is failing, because Public schools need more funding. Etc. I'm quoting what I read in the Brazilian press. Surprised? Sounded just like the US? I bet it's the same rhetoric in France, Italy, UK, etc. So you see, it's a worldwide problem.
Maybe it's just that kids today see more opportunities: they can work at a burger shop, or become a TV celebrity, you know. You can just snort your way to fame, fuck your way to fame, drink and bitch-slap your way to the Celeb Pantheon, etc. If you're a musician, you don't even have to sing. You can just talk over the music. If Gen Y gets a job, Gen Y wants to be an instant CEO and ride in helicopters. Real Life OTOH has many boring, toil-away days. Not like cable TV at all...
It's just a culture problem. Today, we see more bums. If millions of bums are interested in seeing The Bum, then The Bum becomes a millionaire. More channels, more bums. Makes sense...Anyways, thinking is hard - let's go shopping!
Some books are stuck in the 50s, literally (differential equations). Some are stuck in the 60s (Physics). A few cosmetic changes - here and there asking students to solve a problem with Maple - do not make for any real change.
Differential equation is kinda of a bad joke, and the joke is on the students: no one will come up with cute analytical solutions in real life - and they will in fact work *backwards* from the way their classes are taught. Books from the 50s or 60s are just the same as the best-selling author's of today. BTW, if anyone's looking for a book that's done away with the cruft, I suggest Florin Diacu's book.
Today's students have bigger curriculum then their teachers had (sometimes increased by as much as a 40%) and are expected to handle nothing less than a CAS software for analytics (e.g. Maple); something for their number-crunching needs (MATLAB, Scilab, etc.); CAD software; and be reasonably proficient in some programming language (that's adequate for number-crunching - C, C++ or Fortran), which entails a data structure course, and maybe later an algorithm analysis class...then a computational algebra class...a linear/non-linear optimization class...etc. For their teacher's generation, some of this stuff was presented in a graduate setting. Today, it's for undergraduates. Cool, but students have their hands full.
To add insult to injury, because of this non-optimized curriculum, faculty has to squeeze class material - which results in students being thrown a brutal quantity of math mumbo jumbo (Statistics, Fourier transform comes to mind...) for which very little basis is provided - so it's just sink or swim, where "swim" means "learn to apply patterns mindlessly without knowing what the hell you're doing *at all* to your problem sets, and be confident that the exam will be just more of the same". The successful student in these classes has basically the mindset of a high-school student - approaching math as if it were a constellation of cookie recipes - the only difference is that this iteration is way harder. Stop to actually read a book and dig deeper, and that might cost you your approval grade (better luck next time, and do remember to read less theorems). One whiz kid I knew simply never read a book. He only used class notes and a huge pile of previous exams. I think that's awful...
I think the only way to fix this situation is adding a year or two to the engineering (etc.) curricula.
BTW, what does the future hold? Will we all have strong analytical skills, or will we have to leave that to number-crunching software specialists? And will math software still be done like today - hand-crafted, a model from the 50s, too - or will this stuff be handled like all other engineering things are - pluggable and standardized? Will formal analysis and automated theorem-proving software (Isabelle, ACL2, HOL, Maude, etc.) make inroads and become mainstream? Nothing today seems to *scale*. Or scales in a crazy, exponential way... Just look at the size a nuclear physics experiment is today - particle accelerators, with more than a thousand-strong team to handle it.
What's the skill set for the future? Is it like today's - mechanical thought-steps? Or will it be "creative thinking" (whatever that means...the catch-phrase sounds like a huge ball of superficial knowledge to me...what marketers tried to label as "Gen Y" thinking)? Just "thinking"? Or thinking *about* thinking - "meta thinking"?
Wrong. It's official: Netflix has landed in Brazil.
http://www.netflix.com.br/
The PS3 + hdtv combination works just fine, thank you.
Next time you comment or give out advice, don't talk out of your ass. Instead, check your facts.
This is not what you asked for specifically, but FYI Netflix works just fine in Brazil, as of last month. I use my PS3 with a cable internet/tv provider.
Maybe he ought to use a laptop with OpenBSD, you think?
You know what? Linux users will go right on using plain Linux. Not SE Linux, not OpenBSD, and certainly not Windows.
Maybe the Ubuntu users. Myself, I like a kernel enhanced with capabilities. It saved my butt once from the bugs the mighty kernel developers introduce ever so often in the kernel, with their "release early, release often" philosophy (we see now where that leads with this incident).
Do admins get more hardcore than that administer key servers like Kernel.org's, RedHat's, Debian's ?
Yeah, they do. Such as Open Wall Linux Project, spearheaded by one Solar Designer.
Microsoft's sites are indeed a stinking pile of goo. Take something like Power Shell. Power Shell is awsome. Unix/Linux shell lovers should really be ashamed of how little they expect from their tools - their 70s text-based poorly engineered tools, in contrast to the Power Shell that pipes objects. Now, where does the mortal Windows user learn about it? Typically on non-Microsoft sites. If not by some random event, or actively searching for geeky stuff, Joe Six Pack can spend a decade using Microsft products in the most unproductive way possible, never learning about the advanced stuff. Now look at Apple. It's the oposite. They don't hide the automator, for instance (which, someday in 2020, is what Unix/Linux shell users will wish for). It isn't something you have to download separetely like Power Shell was. It's just there.
Now, last year, I wanted to buy the professional box version of Visual Studio for some number-crunching project, because I keep pinching myself, I can't believe F# even exists - it's like the f*ing Berlin Wall of Functional Programming came down. Coz, you know, Microsoft is the underdog now, and they keep churning out superior tech - that is just a fact (C#, F#, WPF, Power Shell, VS, etc.)
Anyways, try as I may, I couldn't get me a (legal) copy (this is for Microsoft/Brazil). Yet, I contacted all the resellers they listed on their site, but either they were only volume sellers or they sold the old version of VS. One of them had an attendant on the phone that didn't know shit about what I was talking about. They wouldn't sell via credit card/download either. This must because we all live on the treetops in Brazil, swinging from branch to branch, so we have no credit card. It struck me that it would be wise to call someone inside the local Microsoft fortress. One page had a wrong number! Well I finally punch through this wall of secrecy, I get to hear the dumb stupid Microsoftee on the other end of the line sent me to some outdated corner of the Microsoft web orbis that had obsolete info. And then they wonder why there's some much software piracy...It made me angry that they made it so hard for the honest person who felt that it's only fair to pay for their work. In comparison, Linux La-la-land feels like soul food - so many calories you're just happy all the way home. In fact, we get to eat so much starch in Linux La-la-land that we now have a generation of young developer dudes who, even though they went to MITor smth, they actually expect to pay less for their power tools than the blue-collar metal shop owner pays for his power tools. It turns out, the paid-for tools are better...Now, pass me that ol' hippie LSD!
So to end my sobbing story, I would like to say that little poor ol' me thinks Microsoft shows no love for individual developers, and sometimes finding stuff is just hard!, be it info or tools.
In conclusion, they desperately need information designers for their sites. The day they suffer like I suffered, they'll be a better company. Being a fat elephant is no excuse for stepping on the mouse!
As for the pythonista tools, well, more power to them!
inventing a new programming language for that end is unnecessary and, in fact, will become a burden
Skimming through the language ref (*), this is very much ML-oid (SML, OCaml, F#).
So it doens't seem to be "new", bizarre, or some gratutitous stupidity (like Javascript, for example).
That is, except if you haven't ever looked at these functional languages. Which means that around a decade and a half of programming language state-of-the-art tech whisked right by you.
(*) http://doc.opalang.org/index.html#_the_core_language
For one thing, ML-oid languages have Hindley-Milner type inference.
This is a formal ("mathematical") guarantee at code safety/correctness (in the web scenario it means code injection attacks do not type-check). All C-oid languages (and Java, Python, etc.) cannot offer a true (i.e., *formal* guarantee), simply because, compared to the theoretical background of ML-oid languages, they are merelly hacks, with lots of corner cases, ad-hoc "featuritis" and many loopholes - which, BTW, spawned a whole industry (anti-virus software). Talk about giving you a problem and then selling the solution...
Even though ML-oid languages were developed by true brainiacs, we're now witnessing inroads at mainstream programming (F#, for example, from Microsoft, or the use of OCaml in the financial sector (*))
Being statically-typed, these systems are also good for performance (**)
For a nice layman-friendly explanation of Hindley-Milner you may like: http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/what-is-hindley-milner-and-why-is-it-cool
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(*) Many years before these new commercial uses of ML-oid languages, the French Aerospace industry used OCaml to formally verify C programs that were deployed in at least one model of Airbus aircrafts. Also, the makers of Matlab (Mathworks) sell a code-checking tool that relies on SML (Standard ML) (see: http://www.mathworks.com/products/polyspace/index.html)
(**) This guy claims his OpenGL bindings for MLTon whole code optimizing compiler yielded faster than C++ performance at 10% of the code. MLTon may be found here: http://mlton.org/.
Are you trolling? Or are you really clueless? QT and GCC used the GPL, not Affero GPL.
Seems to me you don't understand the differences between the GPL and Affero GPL.
Sorry, that was "all charges were dropped"
Rather than using some obscure thingo nobody's heard of, made by whats-his-name, I would speculate that the FreeBSD is safer, because they have people who understand crypto.
Philip Zimmer (of PGP fame) used to say that most people screw up in the implementation part.
Now, TrueCrypt you can trust, because it was used in a high-profile financial case in Brazil (it was mentioned here in Slashdot) and the Feds from Brazil and the USA (Brazilians asked for help) couldn't get the data out.
All charges against the banker Daniel Dantas (although this had nothing to do with TrueCrypt).
http://news.techworld.com/security/3228701/fbi-hackers-fail-to-crack-truecrypt/
Needs translating:
http://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2010/06/nem-fbi-consegue-decifrar-arquivos-de-daniel-dantas-diz-jornal.html
Geez, moderators, where's your sense of humor ?! :_))
LMAO at this guy's pun...
Are the Chinese running their stuff on Kylin-on-clusters? a FreeBSD officially sanctioned by the government as "the" official OS, see:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/china-chooses-freebsd-as-basis-for-secure-os/1682
http://www.freebsdnews.net/2011/01/04/kylin-chinese-freebsd-based-secure-os/
Are you kidding? Do you have any idea about how many banks run on Microsoft solutions?