The study (and I don't think it represents itself correctly) was presenting code samples and telling people to learn from them how to write a program in that language.
The participants were presented with something which looked a lot like a modern version of basic (Quorum) a random-ish programming language, and perl. The sample programs were written as best as could be written, I suppose, in that language; the Quorum samples were written like you'd expect a basic program to be written; and the perl sample programs (as shown in the PDF) were written like basic programs by someone who clearly had no idea how to write a decent perl program.
None of the syntactic aids which perl is so rich in were used. Variables & function names were chosen like in old basic or fortran. Integers were initialized like reals. The study shows that when incompetent programmers are told how to program by incompetent programmers, it's helpful to make a programming language have a more immediately and superficially helpful syntax.
Duh.
If they'd given these people a book and some time, they would have certainly have written better programs in perl than in the random language. Possibly better than in Quorum, though I doubt it. People have a lot of baggage/experience with basic and the languages which derived ideas from it, so that Quorum (as presented in these code examples) would seem more natural to them. These people weren't programmers, they were people who wanted $10. A random sample of college students will find a bunch of hits on people who have used basic, and some who might have done something in java -- I suspect about 20% to 30%. But how many will have experience with a novel language like perl? One? (I am just guessing on those numbers. Notably missing from this study is any analysis of the experiences of the subjects, which would have given us some clue to those numbers, albeit with this small sample size.)
Cobol would have been alien to them too, and the designers of this study would have tried to make it look like basic, since that's what they seem to know.
Treatment works for these guys. You're far more likely to be molested by someone who's never been caught and thus never gotten treatment. If authorities want to spend money on this with an aim towards helping people, they should make sure that kids know what to do, that parents know what to do, that law enforcement knows what to do, such that the first crime leads to treatment.
But that's not what this game is about. It's not really about protecting the children. It's about scapegoats.
We do spend close to "more than the rest of the world (combined)" on our military (we certainly spend more than the other top 18 spenders combined). We should stop. Not just because it's a fifth of our expenditure (and it's more than that, really, the real costs of the military and the wars they fight are hidden elsewhere in the budget or in places which simply don't show up in the budget at all -- "supplementary appropriations") but because the military takes people out of society and turns them from people who'd earn money and enrich the state to people who cost us money.
If we took half our military budget and popped it into our education budget, we'd be spending roughly SIX times what we currently do on education. I suspect we could come close to promising everyone born in the US a PhD on that budget, if they wanted one. (Some argue that soldiers make better employees. If so, it's the least cost effective way you could imagine to accomplish that goal.)
And as world war one (and modern US history) teaches us, when you have a military, you find places to use it. Which makes all our other costs go up. If we cut our military budget in half, we'd STILL be spending more than the top five countries combined.
I have a computer, my wife has a computer. My daughter has a computer. If they all slurp.4 gig per sec, that's more than a gig.
Yes, the chances are we won't all be needing as much as we can possibly get at the same time, but
A. Computers keep getting faster, and all three machines will be able to slurp 1g in just a few years. Telcos should wait until it's a painful need before acting? (Oh, wait, that's been the model since telcos got into the ISP business: do nothing, get kickbacks from the government for doing it, screw the poor and lie. Skip this point.)
B. When we do need it at the same time, we're annoyed. Better to have more capacity than too little.
C. It seems like the alternative to 1g is not 400m, it's 100m. So we should pick.1g because we can only do.4g? Who's the brainiac arguing for this?
This is slightly amusing. Not hugely amusing. This story will turn actually amusing after the artists win and some small number of artists get the rights to their songs back.
Because a lot of the artists who would be in line to get their rights back are dead. And some clever group/consortium/company is going to call next-of-kins and buy the rights to songs from them, and they wrestle the rights away from the RIAA. That company/consortium/whatever will wind up with a LOT of works, and own them for an absurd amount of time.
There a big yawning gap opening up for a second music industry to appear here.
Google tried to do it for books, but with mixed success. Wouldn't it be just hilarious if they tried it again, and cornered the oldies industry?
He's a Republican Manchurian Candidate. He would have said anything to get in. Now he's only got to say enough to keep a serious contender out of the primary. He's a Republican, and a highly calculating one at that.
Either that or he's just about the most incompetent president in history. Much worse than GW, who wrecked the country but got his way in doing so.
Of course he's right. You're just being defensive. Many people buy SUVs because they feel that they're safe. It's a well known part of the common set of buying reasons. And yet SUVs are not safer. They're significantly less safe than small cars in accidents with stationary objects, accidents with other SUVs and in rolls.
So the buyers/drivers are more heavily people who are frightened. They're a self-selecting group. And they think they're safe, so they can drive less defensively.
I suspect Volvo drivers are also worse than the common set, as well, for the exact same reasons.
It's not so much the size of the vehicle, it's the construction method.
Unibody vehicles are very safe. That safety may scale up.
Truck frame vehicles (vehicles built on a platform, roughly shaped like an H) are not. Trucks frame vehicles don't fare well in accidents. The occupants get killed. They do fine when THEY do the hitting, and the thing they hit is a unibody vehicle which is smaller than them, but in rolling (flipping), side smacks, head-ons with walls, head ons with other trucks, etc. the occupants are much more likely to die.
SUVs exist because the car manufacturers were looking for something that people would buy that could easily roll out of underused truck factories. Meaning most SUVs (all SUVs until recently) were much less safe than smaller cars.
So A. Bigger isn't safer. B. Bigger vehicles (SUVs) can be made safer by changing their construction method, rather than their size. C. There is a specific impact combination (H-frame hitting a small unibody vehicle) which is deadly for small cars.
People think that the more cupholders a vehicle has, the safe it is. (I know this sounds like a joke, but this apparently has been born out by studies -- sorry I haven't got a article reference.) It's something to do with feeling cared for and the assumption of real care versus superficial.
So yes, we need to get unneeded H-frame vehicles off the road. That can be done by increasing the usage cost of trucks and SUVs by taxing non-unibody vehicles. I think vehicles getting smaller would be great, but it's not strictly necessary.
If there's no one on it, it can be so much lighter that it makes sense to make something else. All that fuel we spend to send the thing into orbit costs a fortune.
Bubba saw that we need jobs. That's what this is about. Yes, he wants us to save money, but he's looking for things which create JOBS. He's talking about this now because we have a really bad unemployment problem.
He expects a frenzy of roof painting to put thousands of people to work and at the same time kickstart an industry which does the obvious things necessary to save people money on heating and cooling -- stuff with a payback of less than a year. The white roof work can pay itself back in a MONTH. He's not going all green right now because he's Al Gore. He's just using it with an aim to dampen the Runaway Unemployment.
You're forgetting the health-care industry. As we cut electric power use, we burn less coal and the number and severity of asthma cases go down. This unfortunately makes our insurance rates go down, which also would be bad for the economy. RIGHT?!?
I REALLY don't know. I used to use Gnumeric, but it got in the way when dealing with other people in the office.
A spreadsheet should be small, fast, light and just work. That just doesn't describe any spreadsheet I can use, now. It's why I liked the original Excel. Worked with everything in the environment at the time, did what you wanted and did it cleanly.
We're just hosed.
But if you like open office, for goodness, sake don't second-guess it. You like it -- be happy with it.
Paying more than poppies for something would be a great start. Providing decent education would be a good second step.
But realize we don't have to pay more for poppies. We could pay more than the taliban pay for poppies for anything they can grow. Then they'd stop growing poppies. But from pictures I've seen of Afghanistan, that means we'd have to buy rocks. What else grows there?
The reason AT&T's profits have gone down is that their business model (employ a vast number of people, keep them busy doing work computers and equipment could be doing, then threaten to lay them off unless law-makers continually pass the legislation you write to protect your current revenue streams) falls down in the face other systems which perform the same service for hundreds of a cent on the dollar. It's amazing and a tribute to their selfish nastiness that they've managed to keep things going this long. You could replace their whole company (doing what it does today -- no change in products/services) with a much smaller company after just a short round of automation work. After they modernize the switches (which they'll have to do at some point -- Qwest did it years ago and laid off a huge proportion of their wires guys) they'll be able to reduce even more headcount. Just in time for their business to completely disappear. Nice work, AT&T.
Lutz drove GM into the ground, though it was headed that way anyhow. So it's a colossal surprise to hear him say something right. But then again, he's only half right. He's not identifying what MBAs actually do to help (which is formidable -- the shoe-maker can't make the right decisions about consumer desires or about management choices on human levels), and he's not pointing to the right areas where they're destroyed American businesses -- the quest for short-term growth over long and even mid-term gain.
Thus is is said that even a blind squirrel finds half a nut some days.
I think these are fundamentally different things. Al Qaeda is a fairly small, traditionally top-down led group. (Though there are a bunch of "Al Qaeda" groups which popped up on their own around the world which don't fit this pattern -- they're also not really Al Qaeda.) The war on drugs, as ill-conceived as it was in the first place and ill-executed it continues to be, is a war on a huge, flat structure, if you can call market forces on everybody a structure of any sort. We could win the war on drugs, but we'd have to stop thinking it was a war and start seeing it as the economic and social problem it is. We won't do that, of course.
Panetta may be either lying of deluding himself, but we should compare these things.
On the other hand, if tomorrow he says that we're close to beating the Taliban, who are broad and flat, A. it'll be OBVIOUS he's lying or deluding himself and B. the war on drugs would be a really good comparison.
You are mistaken in thinking what you want is a college or university. What you want is vocational school or technical school.
DeVry used to be an excellent one, though they have decided to become a university and that may mean you can't go there and get a technical education to turn you into a good worker.
You may have to roll your own. Go to community colleges, which are much cheaper, or pay lots of money to take the same classes at a reputable school and ignore the ignore non-technical requirements. You won't get a degree, but then, you don't want one. A College or University degree is a mark that says to are a smart, well-rounded person, which is something you don't want to be. Socrates said "Know thyself", and you've got it down. Good for you.
One of the problems with American higher education is that people like you don't have a place in colleges and Universities, and vocational schools are either going away or in hiding. This means people like you have no place to go. Instead, people like you try to turn real college and universities into vocational schools. That's bad for people who want an education, and bad for people like you, who wind up paying a bundle for something they don't want: an education.
You can definitely find vocational schools in India. Classes there are taught in English, and it will be far cheaper than an American education, and probably better than the one you'd get in a community college, unless it's one which is far better than the norm. Go live in India for two years.
"The new semi-solid flow batteries pioneered by Chiang and colleagues overcome this limitation, providing a 10-fold improvement in energy density over present liquid flow-batteries, and lower-cost manufacturing than conventional lithium-ion batteries."
It's statements like this that make me cringe when I look at the puffery which comes out of academia. 10 * better than A, and cheaper than B. Is it 10 * better than B? Or as good as B? Or (more likely) 1/10th as good as B.
Slashdot Mirror
The study (and I don't think it represents itself correctly) was presenting code samples and telling people to learn from them how to write a program in that language.
The participants were presented with something which looked a lot like a modern version of basic (Quorum) a random-ish programming language, and perl. The sample programs were written as best as could be written, I suppose, in that language; the Quorum samples were written like you'd expect a basic program to be written; and the perl sample programs (as shown in the PDF) were written like basic programs by someone who clearly had no idea how to write a decent perl program.
None of the syntactic aids which perl is so rich in were used. Variables & function names were chosen like in old basic or fortran. Integers were initialized like reals. The study shows that when incompetent programmers are told how to program by incompetent programmers, it's helpful to make a programming language have a more immediately and superficially helpful syntax.
Duh.
If they'd given these people a book and some time, they would have certainly have written better programs in perl than in the random language. Possibly better than in Quorum, though I doubt it. People have a lot of baggage/experience with basic and the languages which derived ideas from it, so that Quorum (as presented in these code examples) would seem more natural to them. These people weren't programmers, they were people who wanted $10. A random sample of college students will find a bunch of hits on people who have used basic, and some who might have done something in java -- I suspect about 20% to 30%. But how many will have experience with a novel language like perl? One? (I am just guessing on those numbers. Notably missing from this study is any analysis of the experiences of the subjects, which would have given us some clue to those numbers, albeit with this small sample size.)
Cobol would have been alien to them too, and the designers of this study would have tried to make it look like basic, since that's what they seem to know.
After they're caught, it's very rare for these guys to repeat offend.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sex_offender#Recidivism_rates
Treatment works for these guys. You're far more likely to be molested by someone who's never been caught and thus never gotten treatment. If authorities want to spend money on this with an aim towards helping people, they should make sure that kids know what to do, that parents know what to do, that law enforcement knows what to do, such that the first crime leads to treatment.
But that's not what this game is about. It's not really about protecting the children. It's about scapegoats.
It does not. We're talking about Lawn Gnome 3, here.
AC, if they can save money on education in the form of books, they can spend that on toilets.
1. Mark some nice decks of cards in ultraviolet ink and give them to all your friends.
2. Develop an interest in poker.
3. Show restraint.
I want silence. COMPLETE silence.
I want a computer you can barely find, it's so small and unobtrusive.
I want a computer so cool it can be covered in papers and crap without me worrying about it overheating.
I want devices that are dirt cheap to buy and dirt cheap to run, because I want them in every room, on all the time.
I want ARM.
You're right in general, though getting jumped on for your hyperbole.
This will help you get an idea (it's not the real budget -- but it's not far off) of where the US tax money goes.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html
We do spend close to "more than the rest of the world (combined)" on our military (we certainly spend more than the other top 18 spenders combined). We should stop. Not just because it's a fifth of our expenditure (and it's more than that, really, the real costs of the military and the wars they fight are hidden elsewhere in the budget or in places which simply don't show up in the budget at all -- "supplementary appropriations") but because the military takes people out of society and turns them from people who'd earn money and enrich the state to people who cost us money.
If we took half our military budget and popped it into our education budget, we'd be spending roughly SIX times what we currently do on education. I suspect we could come close to promising everyone born in the US a PhD on that budget, if they wanted one. (Some argue that soldiers make better employees. If so, it's the least cost effective way you could imagine to accomplish that goal.)
And as world war one (and modern US history) teaches us, when you have a military, you find places to use it. Which makes all our other costs go up. If we cut our military budget in half, we'd STILL be spending more than the top five countries combined.
See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures -- it's a little out of date but it gets you the general idea.
I have a computer, my wife has a computer. My daughter has a computer. If they all slurp .4 gig per sec, that's more than a gig.
Yes, the chances are we won't all be needing as much as we can possibly get at the same time, but .1g because we can only do .4g? Who's the brainiac arguing for this?
A. Computers keep getting faster, and all three machines will be able to slurp 1g in just a few years. Telcos should wait until it's a painful need before acting? (Oh, wait, that's been the model since telcos got into the ISP business: do nothing, get kickbacks from the government for doing it, screw the poor and lie. Skip this point.)
B. When we do need it at the same time, we're annoyed. Better to have more capacity than too little.
C. It seems like the alternative to 1g is not 400m, it's 100m. So we should pick
This is slightly amusing. Not hugely amusing. This story will turn actually amusing after the artists win and some small number of artists get the rights to their songs back.
Because a lot of the artists who would be in line to get their rights back are dead. And some clever group/consortium/company is going to call next-of-kins and buy the rights to songs from them, and they wrestle the rights away from the RIAA. That company/consortium/whatever will wind up with a LOT of works, and own them for an absurd amount of time.
There a big yawning gap opening up for a second music industry to appear here.
Google tried to do it for books, but with mixed success. Wouldn't it be just hilarious if they tried it again, and cornered the oldies industry?
He's a Republican Manchurian Candidate. He would have said anything to get in. Now he's only got to say enough to keep a serious contender out of the primary. He's a Republican, and a highly calculating one at that.
Either that or he's just about the most incompetent president in history. Much worse than GW, who wrecked the country but got his way in doing so.
I'm really not sure which.
Why didn't you buy a minivan? They're safer.
You should hate both. The vehicles are more dangerous than they need to be.
Of course he's right. You're just being defensive. Many people buy SUVs because they feel that they're safe. It's a well known part of the common set of buying reasons. And yet SUVs are not safer. They're significantly less safe than small cars in accidents with stationary objects, accidents with other SUVs and in rolls.
So the buyers/drivers are more heavily people who are frightened. They're a self-selecting group. And they think they're safe, so they can drive less defensively.
I suspect Volvo drivers are also worse than the common set, as well, for the exact same reasons.
It's not so much the size of the vehicle, it's the construction method.
Unibody vehicles are very safe. That safety may scale up.
Truck frame vehicles (vehicles built on a platform, roughly shaped like an H) are not. Trucks frame vehicles don't fare well in accidents. The occupants get killed. They do fine when THEY do the hitting, and the thing they hit is a unibody vehicle which is smaller than them, but in rolling (flipping), side smacks, head-ons with walls, head ons with other trucks, etc. the occupants are much more likely to die.
SUVs exist because the car manufacturers were looking for something that people would buy that could easily roll out of underused truck factories. Meaning most SUVs (all SUVs until recently) were much less safe than smaller cars.
So A. Bigger isn't safer. B. Bigger vehicles (SUVs) can be made safer by changing their construction method, rather than their size. C. There is a specific impact combination (H-frame hitting a small unibody vehicle) which is deadly for small cars.
People think that the more cupholders a vehicle has, the safe it is. (I know this sounds like a joke, but this apparently has been born out by studies -- sorry I haven't got a article reference.) It's something to do with feeling cared for and the assumption of real care versus superficial.
So yes, we need to get unneeded H-frame vehicles off the road. That can be done by increasing the usage cost of trucks and SUVs by taxing non-unibody vehicles. I think vehicles getting smaller would be great, but it's not strictly necessary.
If there's no one on it, it can be so much lighter that it makes sense to make something else. All that fuel we spend to send the thing into orbit costs a fortune.
Bubba saw that we need jobs. That's what this is about. Yes, he wants us to save money, but he's looking for things which create JOBS. He's talking about this now because we have a really bad unemployment problem.
He expects a frenzy of roof painting to put thousands of people to work and at the same time kickstart an industry which does the obvious things necessary to save people money on heating and cooling -- stuff with a payback of less than a year. The white roof work can pay itself back in a MONTH. He's not going all green right now because he's Al Gore. He's just using it with an aim to dampen the Runaway Unemployment.
Bill's a very smart boy.
You're forgetting the health-care industry. As we cut electric power use, we burn less coal and the number and severity of asthma cases go down. This unfortunately makes our insurance rates go down, which also would be bad for the economy. RIGHT?!?
I REALLY don't know. I used to use Gnumeric, but it got in the way when dealing with other people in the office.
A spreadsheet should be small, fast, light and just work. That just doesn't describe any spreadsheet I can use, now. It's why I liked the original Excel. Worked with everything in the environment at the time, did what you wanted and did it cleanly.
We're just hosed.
But if you like open office, for goodness, sake don't second-guess it. You like it -- be happy with it.
Paying more than poppies for something would be a great start. Providing decent education would be a good second step.
But realize we don't have to pay more for poppies. We could pay more than the taliban pay for poppies for anything they can grow. Then they'd stop growing poppies. But from pictures I've seen of Afghanistan, that means we'd have to buy rocks. What else grows there?
The reason AT&T's profits have gone down is that their business model (employ a vast number of people, keep them busy doing work computers and equipment could be doing, then threaten to lay them off unless law-makers continually pass the legislation you write to protect your current revenue streams) falls down in the face other systems which perform the same service for hundreds of a cent on the dollar. It's amazing and a tribute to their selfish nastiness that they've managed to keep things going this long. You could replace their whole company (doing what it does today -- no change in products/services) with a much smaller company after just a short round of automation work. After they modernize the switches (which they'll have to do at some point -- Qwest did it years ago and laid off a huge proportion of their wires guys) they'll be able to reduce even more headcount. Just in time for their business to completely disappear. Nice work, AT&T.
Lutz drove GM into the ground, though it was headed that way anyhow. So it's a colossal surprise to hear him say something right. But then again, he's only half right. He's not identifying what MBAs actually do to help (which is formidable -- the shoe-maker can't make the right decisions about consumer desires or about management choices on human levels), and he's not pointing to the right areas where they're destroyed American businesses -- the quest for short-term growth over long and even mid-term gain.
Thus is is said that even a blind squirrel finds half a nut some days.
I think these are fundamentally different things. Al Qaeda is a fairly small, traditionally top-down led group. (Though there are a bunch of "Al Qaeda" groups which popped up on their own around the world which don't fit this pattern -- they're also not really Al Qaeda.) The war on drugs, as ill-conceived as it was in the first place and ill-executed it continues to be, is a war on a huge, flat structure, if you can call market forces on everybody a structure of any sort. We could win the war on drugs, but we'd have to stop thinking it was a war and start seeing it as the economic and social problem it is. We won't do that, of course.
Panetta may be either lying of deluding himself, but we should compare these things.
On the other hand, if tomorrow he says that we're close to beating the Taliban, who are broad and flat, A. it'll be OBVIOUS he's lying or deluding himself and B. the war on drugs would be a really good comparison.
Excel used to be amazing. But that was version 1.0 and on the Mac.
Now it's a big pile of UI vomit, just like everything else MS does.
You are mistaken in thinking what you want is a college or university. What you want is vocational school or technical school.
DeVry used to be an excellent one, though they have decided to become a university and that may mean you can't go there and get a technical education to turn you into a good worker.
You may have to roll your own. Go to community colleges, which are much cheaper, or pay lots of money to take the same classes at a reputable school and ignore the ignore non-technical requirements. You won't get a degree, but then, you don't want one. A College or University degree is a mark that says to are a smart, well-rounded person, which is something you don't want to be. Socrates said "Know thyself", and you've got it down. Good for you.
One of the problems with American higher education is that people like you don't have a place in colleges and Universities, and vocational schools are either going away or in hiding. This means people like you have no place to go. Instead, people like you try to turn real college and universities into vocational schools. That's bad for people who want an education, and bad for people like you, who wind up paying a bundle for something they don't want: an education.
You can definitely find vocational schools in India. Classes there are taught in English, and it will be far cheaper than an American education, and probably better than the one you'd get in a community college, unless it's one which is far better than the norm. Go live in India for two years.
"The new semi-solid flow batteries pioneered by Chiang and colleagues overcome this limitation, providing a 10-fold improvement in energy density over present liquid flow-batteries, and lower-cost manufacturing than conventional lithium-ion batteries."
It's statements like this that make me cringe when I look at the puffery which comes out of academia. 10 * better than A, and cheaper than B. Is it 10 * better than B? Or as good as B? Or (more likely) 1/10th as good as B.