This is also the point of Z, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation amazing how much implicit 'potential wrongness' there is even in a simple bit of code. For me, whilst the demonstrations in the talk have limits [as a previous poster said, better for things that are visual and I can't imagine what the hashes of hashes and random bit of json that I deal with would look like] it's pretty interesting and related to some of the smalltalk attempts at visual programming.
I'm a Brit so I was [thankfully] unaware of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) another piece of paranoid alphabet soup. However these boys [for I expect they are mainly boys] really need to read the Zap Gun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zap_Gun or just go directly to the cited source, The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan. I know the arms race is fun, but it 2012, me might start moving beyond that, at some stage.
Yes, exactly, at a previous job where we were presented with a mad time-recording system, we ended up writing a client to deal with it. I'm sure Friday afternoon commit++ projects will flourish. This is another version of the idiocy of counting number of lines of code per day/month.
Yes agree, tor + freenet + GPG etc. are the basis for something useful. However 'they' own the pipes and country to country gateways, for example. So the new, new thing will really be from the bottom up and may be quite retro to start with. I've been looking backwards at fidonet, packet radio and gopher, for example. Also been thinking about biomimetic systems where the keys, for example are transmitted on one medium and the 'doors' on another, via something that spectrum hops.
This sounds very tinfoil hat stuff but I've been around servers since Prestel, Minitel in France, BBS systems with modems and the current outlook just seems pretty bad. That is intuition rather than science, but really doesn't feel good at all. Even if we 'keep' the internet, it becomes something worse than television.
So agree, I'm 61, I took the Stanford ML course and it was really, really good. Professor Ng is an excellent, very relaxed, non-intimidating teacher. I needed and need a lot more time to get a sure grip on the maths but it was tremendously useful. I've signed up for the model one and the natural language one, new stuff is fun, isn't it?
Yes, I agree. It pains me to boycott I have many American friends and good memories of many places [haven't visited recently though] and boycotting will hurt people rather than politicians. However, it's part of the answer. I've started with everything 'obvious' coca-cola, mcdonalds, KFC [they're franchise but they're also symbols] and am now moving on to banking [the execrable Bob Diamond is head of Barclays in the UK], book purchase, office supplies etc. etc.
In the UK we had two extraditions recently, our government is feeble enough and in vested interests pockets enough that they'll agree to special rendition for downloading soon.
Personally, I'm old and cynical and believed these threats would come as the internet [well, the web mainly] became more dominated by commercial forces. So I think the answer for 'us' is encryption everywhere and structures and tools like Tor: https://www.torproject.org/ and Freenet: http://freenetproject.org/ I know that many people on here know about these, but links for those that don't.
It's no accident that the USA tried and tries to place export limits on encryption methods and tools.
Well brand pollution/dilution if Google Ads just look 'spammy', so self-interest and user-interest coincide somewhat here. Actually websites that are covered in ads and affiliate links + the traditional 'you are a winner' popup aren't my first choice for shopping or reliable information, in fact. Is that a -big- surprise?
I'm looking at all this with some dismay. Of course, learning a little javascript or [better, since it was designed for non-specialists] BASIC won't make people a real-world top-class coder, software engineer etc. Therefore, if people are realistic about expectations, this activity is fine, a little over-hyped perhaps, but fine.
Secondly motivation and progression. Some people just want to learn a little code, for example, to process the csv file for their charity group or simply have fun messing around, learning for simple needs or out of curiosity. Others, especially people who are motivated but haven't access to paid-for tuition can use this [as they used to use teach-yourself etc] as a starting point for a more serious assault on computer science. Learning isn't just about jobs, instant skills or being the 'best' immediately.
It won't teach them to listen hard to users or any humility, but that's another separate matter for a huge flame-filled thread.
I agree about the 'control' aspect. I taught my son in about 1988: 10 print "hello" ; 20 goto 10 ; [as one does or did then] just the stupidity + the power [because computers are basically leverage of some kind] was very attractive. These are things that you can do immediately, control the machine. So graphics, logo, messing around, mindstorms will probably be attractive to many, even those that can't deal with discrete math etc. etc.
Also, if the policy and schools are actually intelligent, peering learning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_by_teaching#Peer_Learning_and_Teaching_in_Higher_Education can play a big part in this, that's how most professionals and open source people expand their range, they look at other people's stuff, get help, ask questions and, above all, explain to others [meaning that they explain to themselves].
As an East Ender, this is much more complex than that. Hackney has become very gentrified in parts and is full of new-media-tossers further south, also quite rich, but some parts are still dirt-poor. Tower Hamlets, my borough, contains Canary Wharf and many riverside yuppie-hutches to serve the banking 'community' AND national records for deprivation. Some bits of Kensington [north] and Westminster are poor. The only thing all this proves is that trickle-down economics certainly doesn't work.
I'm guessing, however, that all the hotspots will be in the 'nice' bits, so we proles don't pull them off the lamp posts and try and swallow them, our usual reaction to anything new.
Two ways of looking at that, brains well preserved because unused or brains decaying because unused. I'm only half-joking about this. I spent nearly 10 years as the 'help' [a consultant] at the European Commission, I've never seen such a concentration of bright people, so totally unchallenged, except for sporadic inter-departmental turf wars. Use it or lose it?
Related to this issue, often shopping centres and in London, Canary Wharf are not 'public realm'. So although, in many cases you appear to be in public space, you are not, you are in the jaws of some corporation or other [Westfield, Canary Wharf etc. etc.] Anna Minton's book, Ground Control: http://www.annaminton.com/Ground_Control.htm has a good exposition and explanation of this. Parts of our so-called 'Olympic Village' [which nearly all East Enders didn't want] are apparently private.
So, surveillance at will, no street musicians and no pesky protests about stuff. Welcome to the new world of the new enclosures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts buy something and be grateful to be tracked 'for your safety and convenience'. Thank you for your cooperation.
As a 61 year old science fiction [and 'reading' actually] fan, I'm usually delighted to show the kids I'm throwing off my lawn, some older S-F books, so:
3. For Disch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disch Camp Concentration [there's a glancing reference to the hero in Sladek's Reproductive System] Echo Round His Bones and On the Wings of Song
Once every few years I find i need to re-read one or more of these. Enjoy!
Oh I do so agree, especially as I write and maintain Perl. 'Good' variable names, comments and simplicity make things so much easier for the next person. I'm 61 and the ration quoted is one unit of development to five units of maintenance, so these simple and sensible things become really, really important. There's no virtue whatsoever in 'clever', terse, hard-to-understand and probably badly formatted code.
At the grapefruits, I chance upon some Chinese tourists who are taking pictures of the fruit and conversing. I try some very rusty mandarin, they laugh delightedly and they don't slap me [easily possible because tone-error changes question-mark into 'horse', for example].
Immediately arrives lady security guard, telling them that they are not allowed to take any pictures of fruit. I remonstrate and ask for her name. She replies [she has an east european accent and perhaps yearns for the good old days, although she is a youngish woman] that she is 'security' and cannot give me a name, obviously not, I think. So I ask for the name of her boss who is 'on holiday'. I ask where he works and she says that he is 'on holiday', not understanding that I want to know whether he is head-office or wharf. Finally I go away with a name, though she might have lied for 'security purposes'.
I used to admire and give a lot of custom to Waitrose, because of the partnership structure etc. but now, after this, it's demonstrating that it's just another sleazebag corporation with its best years behind it. I have a cooperative card now, perhaps we'll go there for grapefruit photography and purchase from henceforth, forward.
I'm 60 and I'm coding, but I don't demand top dollar [pound] because I don't need to. Also I'm a Perl person who is used to big codebases. I've just discussed this with a young [50] colleague. We agreed that a lot of people my age can code but are not used to modern development tools, subversion, continuous builds, test-based and [ugh] agile. Also they often re-invent, pure stupidity for Perl because CPAN is one of the best [and worst] things about it,
I don't want and probably can't get a permanent job either. I agree with the top post in this bit, most agencies are useless, clueless and sometimes fairly unethical. Hey, time for a startup, anyone?
This has been going on since the 1970s when I entered the industry. It was called 'functional pricing' then, very popular with IBM. Pay $x more per month for a big printer you are renting, they will remove a couple of resistors and it will go faster [OK more complex than that, but you see the principle].
If companies can do this systematically, it's [another] sign of market failure, in my opinion. Again in the 1970 Amdahl began to eat IBM's lunch with a lot of cheaper plug-compatible equipment and spoilt this little game somewhat.
Well, I'm 60, in the UK and someone had the bad taste to hire me for code-monkeying, recently. You're not old. I'm very lucky in that my apartment is paid, so I only work part of the year:
1. Although I'm old, I sell myself in at market for the job, rather than market for experience, so someone gets a bargain.
2. I like being a code-monkey because I enjoy coding and it keeps me away from 'management' stuff
3. It's something like shelf-stacking++ that I can do for a few months and stop doing
4. I code somewhat on open source projects [including my own] when I'm not in paid work
5. I took in Ruby in the past few years and am considering Erlang and/or Haskell, I'm slower but I can still learn stuff
6. I keep my head clear with exercise, not caffeine but I am slower than a 20 or 30 year old
7. On the other hand, given point 6, I've a lot more experience of coding misteaks and design misteaks than a 20/30 year old
So I'm genuinely sorry and feel your pain, but my experience [possibly because I only do freelance, never really had a 'job'] as an older person has been different. I do call people on stuff too, but usually not in front of a room full of their peers, I give them wriggle room to escape from something 'wrong'. Since life-expectancy is now changed too, I'm ready to code for 4/5 more years, if anyone will have me, unless I feel really sharp decline.
Please do not use 'anarchists' in this sense, mainly it's a peaceful philosophy that happens not to believe in the conventional apparatus of government. Often that belief is as an end-point, not an immediate objective, gained by smashing up the place. You mean 'rioters', 'looters' or 'idiots'. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism for a more wide ranging explanation.
First to declare interest, I'm 60 pre-internet and generation COBOL/Assembler, get off my lawn generation too!
That said, there's a great many good reasons for doing things economically, concisely and elegantly, Occam's razor, optimal use of resources [a financial matter too], no constant upgrades and server/desktop refreshes. No endless addition of extra storage because stuff is duplicated everywhere. By the way, if someone starts a project to de-duplicate the web down to a 'safe' evel [only ten copies of each thing not 2K] , I'll sign up.
I also resent, mainly government who send me half a dozen self-congratulatory jpegs with each email. You're wasting bandwidth and blocking up the pipes, you folks.
So, if we pay a little attention, we won't need the sprawling power-hungry data centres that all the big players seem to be building. WE won;t need the constant hardware refreshes [admittedly a lot of those are Windows 'upgrades'].
I think that printing parts could contribute to repairing things again. We used to do that in the 1950s and the 1960s, but now we throw away as the default settin, especially when we don't have a part.
I'm currently missing some simple valve components in the hot water system in my appartment, result the whole valve needs to be changed, what a waste. The current set of printers won't solve this [because it needs solid metal for the part] but they're edging towards it with sintering and laser shaping.
Of course this requires some sea-changes in our culture and economies too, maybe that's the hardest part. Perhaps we should 3d print some new leaders and politicians?
Actually, my main feeling about this is, we've never [recently: previously we had Utopia, News from Nowhere and Island, for example] had transparent debates about how humans would like to live. We are told, a great deal [see Guy Debord for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle ] and, in my opinion, the machine is running out of control, but we don't really debate or decide.
I also believe that arguments that are framed by socialism, capitalism, conservatism etc., especially as presented by political parties are now dead-ended, because there are so many subsets of conflicting interests within them.
Anyway, if oil runs out, the climate changes, water is short and we have 10 billion to feed, that's an 'interesting' world.
Slashdot Mirror
This is also the point of Z, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation amazing how much implicit 'potential wrongness' there is even in a simple bit of code. For me, whilst the demonstrations in the talk have limits [as a previous poster said, better for things that are visual and I can't imagine what the hashes of hashes and random bit of json that I deal with would look like] it's pretty interesting and related to some of the smalltalk attempts at visual programming.
I'm a Brit so I was [thankfully] unaware of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) another piece of paranoid alphabet soup. However these boys [for I expect they are mainly boys] really need to read the Zap Gun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zap_Gun or just go directly to the cited source, The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan. I know the arms race is fun, but it 2012, me might start moving beyond that, at some stage.
Yes, exactly, at a previous job where we were presented with a mad time-recording system, we ended up writing a client to deal with it. I'm sure Friday afternoon commit++ projects will flourish. This is another version of the idiocy of counting number of lines of code per day/month.
Yes agree, tor + freenet + GPG etc. are the basis for something useful. However 'they' own the pipes and country to country gateways, for example. So the new, new thing will really be from the bottom up and may be quite retro to start with. I've been looking backwards at fidonet, packet radio and gopher, for example. Also been thinking about biomimetic systems where the keys, for example are transmitted on one medium and the 'doors' on another, via something that spectrum hops.
This sounds very tinfoil hat stuff but I've been around servers since Prestel, Minitel in France, BBS systems with modems and the current outlook just seems pretty bad. That is intuition rather than science, but really doesn't feel good at all. Even if we 'keep' the internet, it becomes something worse than television.
So agree, I'm 61, I took the Stanford ML course and it was really, really good. Professor Ng is an excellent, very relaxed, non-intimidating teacher. I needed and need a lot more time to get a sure grip on the maths but it was tremendously useful. I've signed up for the model one and the natural language one, new stuff is fun, isn't it?
Yes, I agree. It pains me to boycott I have many American friends and good memories of many places [haven't visited recently though] and boycotting will hurt people rather than politicians. However, it's part of the answer. I've started with everything 'obvious' coca-cola, mcdonalds, KFC [they're franchise but they're also symbols] and am now moving on to banking [the execrable Bob Diamond is head of Barclays in the UK], book purchase, office supplies etc. etc.
In the UK we had two extraditions recently, our government is feeble enough and in vested interests pockets enough that they'll agree to special rendition for downloading soon.
Personally, I'm old and cynical and believed these threats would come as the internet [well, the web mainly] became more dominated by commercial forces. So I think the answer for 'us' is encryption everywhere and structures and tools like Tor: https://www.torproject.org/ and Freenet: http://freenetproject.org/ I know that many people on here know about these, but links for those that don't.
It's no accident that the USA tried and tries to place export limits on encryption methods and tools.
Well brand pollution/dilution if Google Ads just look 'spammy', so self-interest and user-interest coincide somewhat here. Actually websites that are covered in ads and affiliate links + the traditional 'you are a winner' popup aren't my first choice for shopping or reliable information, in fact. Is that a -big- surprise?
I'm looking at all this with some dismay. Of course, learning a little javascript or [better, since it was designed for non-specialists] BASIC won't make people a real-world top-class coder, software engineer etc. Therefore, if people are realistic about expectations, this activity is fine, a little over-hyped perhaps, but fine.
Secondly motivation and progression. Some people just want to learn a little code, for example, to process the csv file for their charity group or simply have fun messing around, learning for simple needs or out of curiosity. Others, especially people who are motivated but haven't access to paid-for tuition can use this [as they used to use teach-yourself etc] as a starting point for a more serious assault on computer science. Learning isn't just about jobs, instant skills or being the 'best' immediately.
It won't teach them to listen hard to users or any humility, but that's another separate matter for a huge flame-filled thread.
I agree about the 'control' aspect. I taught my son in about 1988: 10 print "hello" ; 20 goto 10 ; [as one does or did then] just the stupidity + the power [because computers are basically leverage of some kind] was very attractive. These are things that you can do immediately, control the machine. So graphics, logo, messing around, mindstorms will probably be attractive to many, even those that can't deal with discrete math etc. etc.
Also, if the policy and schools are actually intelligent, peering learning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_by_teaching#Peer_Learning_and_Teaching_in_Higher_Education can play a big part in this, that's how most professionals and open source people expand their range, they look at other people's stuff, get help, ask questions and, above all, explain to others [meaning that they explain to themselves].
As an East Ender, this is much more complex than that. Hackney has become very gentrified in parts and is full of new-media-tossers further south, also quite rich, but some parts are still dirt-poor. Tower Hamlets, my borough, contains Canary Wharf and many riverside yuppie-hutches to serve the banking 'community' AND national records for deprivation. Some bits of Kensington [north] and Westminster are poor. The only thing all this proves is that trickle-down economics certainly doesn't work.
I'm guessing, however, that all the hotspots will be in the 'nice' bits, so we proles don't pull them off the lamp posts and try and swallow them, our usual reaction to anything new.
Two ways of looking at that, brains well preserved because unused or brains decaying because unused. I'm only half-joking about this. I spent nearly 10 years as the 'help' [a consultant] at the European Commission, I've never seen such a concentration of bright people, so totally unchallenged, except for sporadic inter-departmental turf wars. Use it or lose it?
Related to this issue, often shopping centres and in London, Canary Wharf are not 'public realm'. So although, in many cases you appear to be in public space, you are not, you are in the jaws of some corporation or other [Westfield, Canary Wharf etc. etc.] Anna Minton's book, Ground Control: http://www.annaminton.com/Ground_Control.htm has a good exposition and explanation of this. Parts of our so-called 'Olympic Village' [which nearly all East Enders didn't want] are apparently private.
So, surveillance at will, no street musicians and no pesky protests about stuff. Welcome to the new world of the new enclosures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts buy something and be grateful to be tracked 'for your safety and convenience'. Thank you for your cooperation.
As a 61 year old science fiction [and 'reading' actually] fan, I'm usually delighted to show the kids I'm throwing off my lawn, some older S-F books, so:
1. For Sladek: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Thomas_Sladek Roderick, Roderick at Random, The Reproductive System and Tik-Tok the sociopathic robot
2. For Bester, in my opinion, the first cyberpunk author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Bester the Demolished Man and The Stars my Destination
3. For Disch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disch Camp Concentration [there's a glancing reference to the hero in Sladek's Reproductive System] Echo Round His Bones and On the Wings of Song
Once every few years I find i need to re-read one or more of these. Enjoy!
Oh I do so agree, especially as I write and maintain Perl. 'Good' variable names, comments and simplicity make things so much easier for the next person. I'm 61 and the ration quoted is one unit of development to five units of maintenance, so these simple and sensible things become really, really important. There's no virtue whatsoever in 'clever', terse, hard-to-understand and probably badly formatted code.
I learnt on Babbage's Difference Engine but Lady Ada Lovelace helped me with the harder bits.
Using some string left over from string theory?
I'm 60 and I'm coding, but I don't demand top dollar [pound] because I don't need to. Also I'm a Perl person who is used to big codebases. I've just discussed this with a young [50] colleague. We agreed that a lot of people my age can code but are not used to modern development tools, subversion, continuous builds, test-based and [ugh] agile. Also they often re-invent, pure stupidity for Perl because CPAN is one of the best [and worst] things about it,
I don't want and probably can't get a permanent job either. I agree with the top post in this bit, most agencies are useless, clueless and sometimes fairly unethical. Hey, time for a startup, anyone?
This has been going on since the 1970s when I entered the industry. It was called 'functional pricing' then, very popular with IBM. Pay $x more per month for a big printer you are renting, they will remove a couple of resistors and it will go faster [OK more complex than that, but you see the principle].
If companies can do this systematically, it's [another] sign of market failure, in my opinion. Again in the 1970 Amdahl began to eat IBM's lunch with a lot of cheaper plug-compatible equipment and spoilt this little game somewhat.
Well, I'm 60, in the UK and someone had the bad taste to hire me for code-monkeying, recently. You're not old. I'm very lucky in that my apartment is paid, so I only work part of the year:
1. Although I'm old, I sell myself in at market for the job, rather than market for experience, so someone gets a bargain.
2. I like being a code-monkey because I enjoy coding and it keeps me away from 'management' stuff
3. It's something like shelf-stacking++ that I can do for a few months and stop doing
4. I code somewhat on open source projects [including my own] when I'm not in paid work
5. I took in Ruby in the past few years and am considering Erlang and/or Haskell, I'm slower but I can still learn stuff
6. I keep my head clear with exercise, not caffeine but I am slower than a 20 or 30 year old
7. On the other hand, given point 6, I've a lot more experience of coding misteaks and design misteaks than a 20/30 year old
So I'm genuinely sorry and feel your pain, but my experience [possibly because I only do freelance, never really had a 'job'] as an older person has been different. I do call people on stuff too, but usually not in front of a room full of their peers, I give them wriggle room to escape from something 'wrong'. Since life-expectancy is now changed too, I'm ready to code for 4/5 more years, if anyone will have me, unless I feel really sharp decline.
Please do not use 'anarchists' in this sense, mainly it's a peaceful philosophy that happens not to believe in the conventional apparatus of government. Often that belief is as an end-point, not an immediate objective, gained by smashing up the place. You mean 'rioters', 'looters' or 'idiots'. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism for a more wide ranging explanation.
First to declare interest, I'm 60 pre-internet and generation COBOL/Assembler, get off my lawn generation too!
That said, there's a great many good reasons for doing things economically, concisely and elegantly, Occam's razor, optimal use of resources [a financial matter too], no constant upgrades and server/desktop refreshes. No endless addition of extra storage because stuff is duplicated everywhere. By the way, if someone starts a project to de-duplicate the web down to a 'safe' evel [only ten copies of each thing not 2K] , I'll sign up.
I also resent, mainly government who send me half a dozen self-congratulatory jpegs with each email. You're wasting bandwidth and blocking up the pipes, you folks.
So, if we pay a little attention, we won't need the sprawling power-hungry data centres that all the big players seem to be building. WE won;t need the constant hardware refreshes [admittedly a lot of those are Windows 'upgrades'].
Anyways, don't listen to me, I'm old and grumpy, but take a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_computing especially Product Longevity.
I think that printing parts could contribute to repairing things again. We used to do that in the 1950s and the 1960s, but now we throw away as the default settin, especially when we don't have a part.
I'm currently missing some simple valve components in the hot water system in my appartment, result the whole valve needs to be changed, what a waste. The current set of printers won't solve this [because it needs solid metal for the part] but they're edging towards it with sintering and laser shaping.
Of course this requires some sea-changes in our culture and economies too, maybe that's the hardest part. Perhaps we should 3d print some new leaders and politicians?
I like cheese too.
Actually, my main feeling about this is, we've never [recently: previously we had Utopia, News from Nowhere and Island, for example] had transparent debates about how humans would like to live. We are told, a great deal [see Guy Debord for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle ] and, in my opinion, the machine is running out of control, but we don't really debate or decide.
I also believe that arguments that are framed by socialism, capitalism, conservatism etc., especially as presented by political parties are now dead-ended, because there are so many subsets of conflicting interests within them.
Anyway, if oil runs out, the climate changes, water is short and we have 10 billion to feed, that's an 'interesting' world.