Actually that pretty much boils down about 50% of what you learn in college.
The college way of doing your last paragraph is:
Me: (pings Friend): hey, I'm about to do thus-and-thus, what's the best way? Friend: Why don't you just do [thing]? Me: Yea, that's what I was thinking, wanted to know if you knew a better way / scurries off to read up on new [thing] and does it that way the first time around.
In college you learn that (Friend) is one or more of the following : Google, a peer, someone here in/., a book on the subject, reference materials / whitepapers, etc.
I guess the other 50% you pick up in college is to not dive right into whatever you are working on, but to learn the fundamentals first. My little pokey-poke earlier was making fun of a coworker (self taught coder) from years ago, never really got the hang of those pesky loops. If he needed to print 12 identical lines onto a piece of paper, he would simply cut and paste the print command 12 times. Need 55 lines of text on a page, you got 55 print commands in a row. Never occured to him to sit down and read the language command manual cover to cover (942 pages, I read every one of them over the course of three days, listening to his snide remarks about wasting my time instead of doing my work the entire time) in order to discover all the things he could do with the language - he knew enough to brute force the language to do it his way and that was all he needed.
I'm not saying that every 'self taught coder' can't write loops or conditionals, but I often see the subtle difference between 'If it works, it's right' and 'If it's right, it works'. (I stole that for my.sig today, thanks Sepper!)
How do I do it? I stole a multidimensional 'trick' that I saw first applied to Napoleon's battle history on a wall poster in a museum: The first three dimensions are easy to visualize - you use XYZ coord's that you always did. Envision a Rubic's cube. Fourth dimension : time. Replicate that Rubic's cube from left to right on a poster, one picture for every change. Fifth dimension : alternate time (give time a Y coordinate.) Actually I think the poster used temperature as the fifth dimension, and it stopped at 5 dimenstions, but I broke off from there. Sixth dimensino : alternate time, this time giving time a Z dimension. At this point you have created a much larger opaque Rubic's cube, each cell containing your original solid (XYZ) Rubic's cube.
Anything higher than that and I skip visualizing it and work it similar to how your odometer works, each dimension being one of the little number wheels - you can rotate each one individually if you really need to, but most of the time you access it by rotating the last one until it loops making the next one go up by one, and so on.
Common perception is that 'websites' are the processing and presentation of static pictures and text, and are the graphical recreation of work that could be done by cutting pictures to size and placing them on a piece of paper, and cutting and pasting text onto that same piece of paper and making it asthetically pleasing.
In the context of this discussion, 'programming' is all encompassing to include all the data processing, real time number crunching, computer sims of real life things, and determining how much fuel to put into a rocket to get to the moon and back. This work, if recreated in real life would take engineers, calculators, slide rules, lots and lots of math, and if done incorrectly people could die.
Calculators vs Crayons. I rewrote this three times, the first two came across as implying that doing web pages isn't programming - which I would never say if I thought a web guy was listening (ok, yes I would.) I'm not saying it isn't important, because it is important. I'm just saying it isn't 'programming' in the context that the word 'programming' is being used in this thread.
Bingo! Actually you see this a lot in first year trig or algebra classes being taught by grad students. They are up on the board solving some equation using standard trig or algebra when they see a nice shortcut via calculus, like the area between two curves. Solving the area between two curves is a real bitch using regular algebra or trig, and it is trivial when you use Calculus - like baby slobber trivial. So they do it, but none of the students have a clue what they are doing, because they don't even know that calculus even exists...
Many of the things that programmers take for granted as 'baby slobber trivial' are actually applications of advanced math - stuff like boolean operations, one to many relationships, many to many relationships, arrays with more than 3 dimensions, shortest path, sorting routines, loops, recursion, different types of conditionals, etc. These are simply part of our thought processes, an extension of how we think - but we were not born with this knowledge. Anybody that has spent time reviewing code from a 'self taught coder' knows what I'm talking about (no offense to the self taught coders.)
Only caters to Apple users - umm given that iTunes only work on the iPod, and that you can only buy an iPod from Apple, yes, iTunes only caters to Apple users.
Actually I was thinking MP3. And yes I am pretty sure that they could have EASILY increased their sales by offering MP3 files. I just threw in the ogg format to make the Linux folks happy, personally I'm all about the MP3.
Catch a clue indeed. Sony owns the copyrights to these songs, and pretty much can tell the RIAA to go fsck themselves. It sounds good on paper though, and scored you two nifty +1 Insightful mods - good job.
Bandwidth on a 256bit MP3 would be maybe 8 megs? That's like a nickle, maybe a dime unless Sony can arrange a nice provider.
I thought one of the strong selling points of this was that Sony owned the copyright to the songs. Given that, Sony can tell the RIAA to get bent. Unlike you or I when we say we 'own' a song, Sony really does own this music.
Apple has sold 70M songs, only caters to Apple users and only works on the iPod. Seventy million dollars. Whoever sells to the common man (ie, MP3 players) has a market a LOT bigger than the iTunes store, and given that Sony owns the copyrights they get to keep all the money that is pretty much pure profit, ya? I have no doubt that if iTunes sold the music with your choice of file formats they could have done easily a quarter billion dollars in business instead of $70M (not too far a stretch, figure 4x the business considering the first half of their existance they only worked to Apple computers) - and if they owned all the copyrights (ie, got all that as pure profit) they would have CLEANED UP!
That's all I'm saying. Sony could be the one that gets it right, but not if they insist on doing it propritary - Apple already has those bases covered.
Want to make a zillion dollars, beat Apple at this whole 'music' thing?
99c per download, format of choice. Have them available as 128bit, 192bit, 256bit MP3s. Have them available as ogg/vorbis files, flac files,.WMA files,.ipod files (or whatever.) At a dollar apiece, with good bandwidth, no restrictions on how / where we can use them, know what we are getting, have a MASSIVE selection (ie, every song known to man all in one place), no worries of spyware or viruses in the client, no hassles by the RIAA... and guess what : customers (myself included) will go absolutely bat-shit lining themselves to suck your servers dry. For a dollar it really isn't worth all the shit I used to go through to get the songs I wanted (I gave the P2P crap up a long time ago out of frustration, long before the RIAA got upset about it.)
There you go. Catch a clue, before Microsoft or Google or someone else does it - whoever gets there first is going to be the one that takes the title away from Apple.
Bah - check my journal, I'm at least trying to come up to speed in the Linux environment. Got it running nicely too, if Debian counts:) Well I got RH9 running also, does RH Linux stuff pretty well and lets me do a few things I can't do in my current Windows environments.
I did check into it after I posted that - evidently the way this is being positioned is as a desktop machine in a corporate infrastructure that already has Tier 1 support people that field calls from the users. If one of the in-house support people can't figure it out they have contacts at RH to call for Tier 2 support, the RH folks put the in-house guys on the right track and let them deal with the mouth breathing, knuckle dragging end users.
Next thing you know those pesky Russians are going to claim to be first in putting a man into space. Hah!
Just kidding Yuri, I know all about Gagarin - I spend hours contemplating the meaning of life while sitting at the base of a statue of him a few years ago.
As for the education, I was quite simply amazed a few years ago when chatting with a beautiful young woman there who was saying exactly what you were saying so I held my left hand up in the air with my thumb pointing up, index finger pointed straight, middle finger 90 degrees bent and the two little fingers curled and asked her 'what's this mean?' She said that when you have electricity flowing through a wire in the direction indicated by the thumb, the magnetic field will go clockwise as indicated by the directions indicated by the fingers. That did it for me, hell I found a woman that knew basic gaussian physics - I married her. (No joke, btw. Ended up divorcing her psychotic ass a few years later - let that be a lesson : understanding basic gaussian physics does not mean a woman is going to be a great wife.)
I have seen this done with my own two eyes. The system was running Windows 2000 Professional, and the drive was not 'hot swap' hardware.
The drive came out real easy. No problem. Well the computer crashed, but I was sort of expecting that. That guy's computer didn't really like him much, considering he also tried to hot swap a video card. Was funny as hell to watch, through my laughing / crying eyes.
Actually the article said that the $5 per month included Tier 2 escalation support and assumed that the company (customer) would be handling all Tier 1 calls. The users can call the in-house techs, and if they can't figure it out the in-house techs can call RedHat to get help figuring it out.
RH isn't going to be answering the 'where is the any key?' and 'broke my cupholder' support calls.
Just who is going to be on the other phone?
on
Red Hat Desktop Unveiled
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I just have to ask - who is going to be manning the phones?
If I thought I could get quality (geek level) support whenever I was having a Linux problem I would drop a five spot / month in a serious hurry, but if the clown on the other end of the phone is neighbor to the guys giving phone support for Belkin and Dell... screw that. Has nothing to do with nationality and everything to do with getting intelligent answers as opposed to someone following a diagnostic script.
Do you think that this is what is driving the schoolchildren into the state of mind that the OP proposed (bunch of drive-lacking slackers that are just coasting, cheating on exams and not really applying themselves?)
Damn, if you are right - it is all starting to make sense. I understand and recognize 'what' is happening, I just didn't understand 'why' it was happening. Same thing with the CCCP - I saw 'what' happened but I never understood 'why'.
Einstein sent a letter to Roosevelt advising him of the possibility. That sounds a lot like 'insight' to me. And 'marginally correct' data from someone posting with an account is significantly more substantial than the inconsequential rantings of an AC.
Is it my imagination or does this whole "India's Secret Army Of Online Ad 'Clickers'" thing seem a little unscrupulous? I mean, is there no honor left in this world? Surely there isn't an entire country full of unscrupulous people just looking for ways to exploit the things being done for genuine commercial business in America...
In the mid '70s the Russian Ruble was pretty much on par with the US dollar. $1000USD was worth roughly 1000USSR. Through woeful misguided social direction towards wherever their glorious leaders allowed them to be guided their economy imploded and right now the dollar is worth 29,000 rubles (the Ruble went through massive inflation during the mid 90's and eventually went through a 1000:1 devaluation.) Thus if you had a million rubles in the bank in 1975 (worth roughly a million dollars then) today it would be worth $34.50 - enough for a modest dinner for four people.
The parent is suggesting that what the Benedict Arnold CEOs of today (Hi Carly!) are doing is setting the United States on a path towards the same effect. It isn't impossible, I watched it happen with my own eyes in Russia.
I was -:- that close to giving the Germans rocket engineering also, but remembered Robert Goddard was the guy credited with the initial rockets (Worcester MA, if I recall correctly.) Germans took that idea and ran with it, did a pretty spiffy job turning Goddard's toys into contributing members of society:-)
Without getting into the whole 'Canadians are / are not Americans' debate, a whole 32 foreigners helped with the NASA team that put men on the moon? Well golly, that's gotta be more than half, couldn't have taken more than 64 people total to do the entire couple of dozen space shots from Mercury I to the last Apollo mission.
Just out of curiosity, where exactly were the Germans living when they were the best rocket scientists during the space race? Rhetorical question of course, they were in AMERICA. And the Canadians that helped with the moon shots? Again rhetorical, they were in AMERICA. Perhaps the point I was trying to make was that the talent the Benedict Arnold CEOs say they can't find in America... really is here, has always been here, and until they get through destroying that particular class of people will always be here.
That's funny, I was under the impression that the US Army Corps of Engineers did most of the work on the Manhattan Project, aided of course by the insight from one Mr Albert Einstein. So no, the Manhattan Project was not 'almost entirely done by Germans'.
Germans invented the RADAR, and then the English improved on that design, so I will give you partial credit on that one simply because I had incorrectly attributed it to the Americans (which was incorrect.)
In 1963 - 1968? If I had to guess, I would say that a most if not ALL of the tech nerds at NASA were Americans.
Regardless, my point still stands that there are plenty of ultra high caliber people in America just dying to go to work to do R&D for companies like the Aerospace Corporation, NASA, JPL, NSA, PARC, Intel, etc. To suggest otherwise is akin to suggesting that a Benedict Arnold CEO needs to be stabbed in the throat - it sounds real nice but that doesn't make it necessarily true.
Slashdot Mirror
Just read the article. Why didn't they simply walk around from machine to machine popping in a Knoppix CD? Computer acting up, just reboot it.
Actually that pretty much boils down about 50% of what you learn in college.
:
/., a book on the subject, reference materials / whitepapers, etc.
.sig today, thanks Sepper!)
The college way of doing your last paragraph is
Me: (pings Friend): hey, I'm about to do thus-and-thus, what's the best way?
Friend: Why don't you just do [thing]?
Me: Yea, that's what I was thinking, wanted to know if you knew a better way / scurries off to read up on new [thing] and does it that way the first time around.
In college you learn that (Friend) is one or more of the following : Google, a peer, someone here in
I guess the other 50% you pick up in college is to not dive right into whatever you are working on, but to learn the fundamentals first. My little pokey-poke earlier was making fun of a coworker (self taught coder) from years ago, never really got the hang of those pesky loops. If he needed to print 12 identical lines onto a piece of paper, he would simply cut and paste the print command 12 times. Need 55 lines of text on a page, you got 55 print commands in a row. Never occured to him to sit down and read the language command manual cover to cover (942 pages, I read every one of them over the course of three days, listening to his snide remarks about wasting my time instead of doing my work the entire time) in order to discover all the things he could do with the language - he knew enough to brute force the language to do it his way and that was all he needed.
I'm not saying that every 'self taught coder' can't write loops or conditionals, but I often see the subtle difference between 'If it works, it's right' and 'If it's right, it works'. (I stole that for my
How do I do it? I stole a multidimensional 'trick' that I saw first applied to Napoleon's battle history on a wall poster in a museum :
The first three dimensions are easy to visualize - you use XYZ coord's that you always did. Envision a Rubic's cube.
Fourth dimension : time. Replicate that Rubic's cube from left to right on a poster, one picture for every change.
Fifth dimension : alternate time (give time a Y coordinate.) Actually I think the poster used temperature as the fifth dimension, and it stopped at 5 dimenstions, but I broke off from there.
Sixth dimensino : alternate time, this time giving time a Z dimension. At this point you have created a much larger opaque Rubic's cube, each cell containing your original solid (XYZ) Rubic's cube.
Anything higher than that and I skip visualizing it and work it similar to how your odometer works, each dimension being one of the little number wheels - you can rotate each one individually if you really need to, but most of the time you access it by rotating the last one until it loops making the next one go up by one, and so on.
Common perception is that 'websites' are the processing and presentation of static pictures and text, and are the graphical recreation of work that could be done by cutting pictures to size and placing them on a piece of paper, and cutting and pasting text onto that same piece of paper and making it asthetically pleasing.
In the context of this discussion, 'programming' is all encompassing to include all the data processing, real time number crunching, computer sims of real life things, and determining how much fuel to put into a rocket to get to the moon and back. This work, if recreated in real life would take engineers, calculators, slide rules, lots and lots of math, and if done incorrectly people could die.
Calculators vs Crayons. I rewrote this three times, the first two came across as implying that doing web pages isn't programming - which I would never say if I thought a web guy was listening (ok, yes I would.) I'm not saying it isn't important, because it is important. I'm just saying it isn't 'programming' in the context that the word 'programming' is being used in this thread.
I had to change the idea that:
'If it works, it's right'
to
'If it's right, it works'...
Shit, that's the most insightful thing I have read all week. Good job Sepper, I'm going to keep that one handy.
Bingo! Actually you see this a lot in first year trig or algebra classes being taught by grad students. They are up on the board solving some equation using standard trig or algebra when they see a nice shortcut via calculus, like the area between two curves. Solving the area between two curves is a real bitch using regular algebra or trig, and it is trivial when you use Calculus - like baby slobber trivial. So they do it, but none of the students have a clue what they are doing, because they don't even know that calculus even exists ...
Many of the things that programmers take for granted as 'baby slobber trivial' are actually applications of advanced math - stuff like boolean operations, one to many relationships, many to many relationships, arrays with more than 3 dimensions, shortest path, sorting routines, loops, recursion, different types of conditionals, etc. These are simply part of our thought processes, an extension of how we think - but we were not born with this knowledge. Anybody that has spent time reviewing code from a 'self taught coder' knows what I'm talking about (no offense to the self taught coders.)
Only caters to Apple users - umm given that iTunes only work on the iPod, and that you can only buy an iPod from Apple, yes, iTunes only caters to Apple users.
Actually I was thinking MP3. And yes I am pretty sure that they could have EASILY increased their sales by offering MP3 files. I just threw in the ogg format to make the Linux folks happy, personally I'm all about the MP3.
Wow - a double insightful tag.
Catch a clue indeed. Sony owns the copyrights to these songs, and pretty much can tell the RIAA to go fsck themselves. It sounds good on paper though, and scored you two nifty +1 Insightful mods - good job.
Bandwidth on a 256bit MP3 would be maybe 8 megs? That's like a nickle, maybe a dime unless Sony can arrange a nice provider.
I thought one of the strong selling points of this was that Sony owned the copyright to the songs. Given that, Sony can tell the RIAA to get bent. Unlike you or I when we say we 'own' a song, Sony really does own this music.
Apple has sold 70M songs, only caters to Apple users and only works on the iPod. Seventy million dollars. Whoever sells to the common man (ie, MP3 players) has a market a LOT bigger than the iTunes store, and given that Sony owns the copyrights they get to keep all the money that is pretty much pure profit, ya? I have no doubt that if iTunes sold the music with your choice of file formats they could have done easily a quarter billion dollars in business instead of $70M (not too far a stretch, figure 4x the business considering the first half of their existance they only worked to Apple computers) - and if they owned all the copyrights (ie, got all that as pure profit) they would have CLEANED UP!
That's all I'm saying. Sony could be the one that gets it right, but not if they insist on doing it propritary - Apple already has those bases covered.
Sony (et.al) - here we go again. Listen up.
.WMA files, .ipod files (or whatever.) At a dollar apiece, with good bandwidth, no restrictions on how / where we can use them, know what we are getting, have a MASSIVE selection (ie, every song known to man all in one place), no worries of spyware or viruses in the client, no hassles by the RIAA ... and guess what : customers (myself included) will go absolutely bat-shit lining themselves to suck your servers dry. For a dollar it really isn't worth all the shit I used to go through to get the songs I wanted (I gave the P2P crap up a long time ago out of frustration, long before the RIAA got upset about it.)
Want to make a zillion dollars, beat Apple at this whole 'music' thing?
99c per download, format of choice. Have them available as 128bit, 192bit, 256bit MP3s. Have them available as ogg/vorbis files, flac files,
There you go. Catch a clue, before Microsoft or Google or someone else does it - whoever gets there first is going to be the one that takes the title away from Apple.
Bah - check my journal, I'm at least trying to come up to speed in the Linux environment. Got it running nicely too, if Debian counts :) Well I got RH9 running also, does RH Linux stuff pretty well and lets me do a few things I can't do in my current Windows environments.
I did check into it after I posted that - evidently the way this is being positioned is as a desktop machine in a corporate infrastructure that already has Tier 1 support people that field calls from the users. If one of the in-house support people can't figure it out they have contacts at RH to call for Tier 2 support, the RH folks put the in-house guys on the right track and let them deal with the mouth breathing, knuckle dragging end users.
Next thing you know those pesky Russians are going to claim to be first in putting a man into space. Hah!
Just kidding Yuri, I know all about Gagarin - I spend hours contemplating the meaning of life while sitting at the base of a statue of him a few years ago.
As for the education, I was quite simply amazed a few years ago when chatting with a beautiful young woman there who was saying exactly what you were saying so I held my left hand up in the air with my thumb pointing up, index finger pointed straight, middle finger 90 degrees bent and the two little fingers curled and asked her 'what's this mean?' She said that when you have electricity flowing through a wire in the direction indicated by the thumb, the magnetic field will go clockwise as indicated by the directions indicated by the fingers. That did it for me, hell I found a woman that knew basic gaussian physics - I married her. (No joke, btw. Ended up divorcing her psychotic ass a few years later - let that be a lesson : understanding basic gaussian physics does not mean a woman is going to be a great wife.)
-Can you remove it again, while the server is on?
I have seen this done with my own two eyes. The system was running Windows 2000 Professional, and the drive was not 'hot swap' hardware.
The drive came out real easy. No problem. Well the computer crashed, but I was sort of expecting that. That guy's computer didn't really like him much, considering he also tried to hot swap a video card. Was funny as hell to watch, through my laughing / crying eyes.
DRM'ed out the ass, doesn't work on anything besides Sony players, doesn't work on any of the players people already own.
Yet another wonderful idea from the Sales Prevention Team at Sony!
Crap, the article didn't say that (what I wrote about Tier 2 support), but this did : http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/desktop/
Actually the article said that the $5 per month included Tier 2 escalation support and assumed that the company (customer) would be handling all Tier 1 calls. The users can call the in-house techs, and if they can't figure it out the in-house techs can call RedHat to get help figuring it out.
RH isn't going to be answering the 'where is the any key?' and 'broke my cupholder' support calls.
I just have to ask - who is going to be manning the phones?
... screw that. Has nothing to do with nationality and everything to do with getting intelligent answers as opposed to someone following a diagnostic script.
If I thought I could get quality (geek level) support whenever I was having a Linux problem I would drop a five spot / month in a serious hurry,
but if the clown on the other end of the phone is neighbor to the guys giving phone support for Belkin and Dell
Do you think that this is what is driving the schoolchildren into the state of mind that the OP proposed (bunch of drive-lacking slackers that are just coasting, cheating on exams and not really applying themselves?)
Damn, if you are right - it is all starting to make sense. I understand and recognize 'what' is happening, I just didn't understand 'why' it was happening. Same thing with the CCCP - I saw 'what' happened but I never understood 'why'.
Einstein sent a letter to Roosevelt advising him of the possibility. That sounds a lot like 'insight' to me. And 'marginally correct' data from someone posting with an account is significantly more substantial than the inconsequential rantings of an AC.
Is it my imagination or does this whole "India's Secret Army Of Online Ad 'Clickers'" thing seem a little unscrupulous? I mean, is there no honor left in this world? Surely there isn't an entire country full of unscrupulous people just looking for ways to exploit the things being done for genuine commercial business in America ...
In the mid '70s the Russian Ruble was pretty much on par with the US dollar. $1000USD was worth roughly 1000USSR. Through woeful misguided social direction towards wherever their glorious leaders allowed them to be guided their economy imploded and right now the dollar is worth 29,000 rubles (the Ruble went through massive inflation during the mid 90's and eventually went through a 1000:1 devaluation.) Thus if you had a million rubles in the bank in 1975 (worth roughly a million dollars then) today it would be worth $34.50 - enough for a modest dinner for four people.
The parent is suggesting that what the Benedict Arnold CEOs of today (Hi Carly!) are doing is setting the United States on a path towards the same effect. It isn't impossible, I watched it happen with my own eyes in Russia.
I was -:- that close to giving the Germans rocket engineering also, but remembered Robert Goddard was the guy credited with the initial rockets (Worcester MA, if I recall correctly.) Germans took that idea and ran with it, did a pretty spiffy job turning Goddard's toys into contributing members of society :-)
... really is here, has always been here, and until they get through destroying that particular class of people will always be here.
Without getting into the whole 'Canadians are / are not Americans' debate, a whole 32 foreigners helped with the NASA team that put men on the moon? Well golly, that's gotta be more than half, couldn't have taken more than 64 people total to do the entire couple of dozen space shots from Mercury I to the last Apollo mission.
Just out of curiosity, where exactly were the Germans living when they were the best rocket scientists during the space race? Rhetorical question of course, they were in AMERICA. And the Canadians that helped with the moon shots? Again rhetorical, they were in AMERICA. Perhaps the point I was trying to make was that the talent the Benedict Arnold CEOs say they can't find in America
That's funny, I was under the impression that the US Army Corps of Engineers did most of the work on the Manhattan Project, aided of course by the insight from one Mr Albert Einstein. So no, the Manhattan Project was not 'almost entirely done by Germans'.
Germans invented the RADAR, and then the English improved on that design, so I will give you partial credit on that one simply because I had incorrectly attributed it to the Americans (which was incorrect.)
In 1963 - 1968? If I had to guess, I would say that a most if not ALL of the tech nerds at NASA were Americans.
Regardless, my point still stands that there are plenty of ultra high caliber people in America just dying to go to work to do R&D for companies like the Aerospace Corporation, NASA, JPL, NSA, PARC, Intel, etc. To suggest otherwise is akin to suggesting that a Benedict Arnold CEO needs to be stabbed in the throat - it sounds real nice but that doesn't make it necessarily true.