I agree that C++ is generally a better way to go, even if you aren't using the object oriented features (which really should only be used when you need them). All of the languages that have risen up claiming to be better replacements for C because C is basically "enough rope", are really dumbing down of the language by removing useful features (like address pointers and use of free unions). I remember when HP tried to replace a C-like language with Pascal for this reason and it led to years of low productivity and bloated code.
All good points. The USA would be a big gamble at this point. There is a big anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-reason political faction in the USA today that is taking it on a downward path. Perhaps it will self-correct -- perhaps not.
I'm a big fan of Linux (heck, I'm one of the authors of Linux Appliance Design) but if you are looking for "Just Works", I think you have to give the nod to Apple. But they do this by limiting you. They control the hardware and restrict what can go into the App Store. And they pay a lot of attention to the "cool factor". Lots of eye candy. But the biggest benefit of going Apple is that everything pretty much works together out of the box. Phone, tablet, laptop and desktop cooperate nicely, as long as you are doing things the way Apple wants (such as, everything must be registered under one Apple Id if you want certain types of sharing to work right). I have multiple Linux boxes in my house, but do most of my work on my iMac desktop (where I have multiple Linux distributions available in virtualized environments.
I do Linux software all day as my full time job. I find I'm just too lazy (and pressed for time) to struggle with Linux to get my VPN connection to work (this broke when I upgraded to a new Ubuntu release last year) and other things like this. I want the day to day stuff to just work so I can be free to concentrate on my latest Linux-based project. Apple lets me do this. Seems funny, but using Apple gives me more time for my pet Linux projects.
Sorry, but ALGOL is just as awful as Pascal for an engineer. It's a freaking language developed by academics for developers. C on the other hand was the language by developers for developers. Obviously academics chose what's best for them, thus Pascal still survives...
I'm in total agreement. I was at HP when management decreed that we would have to use Pascal for future projects. They were convinced by academics that this would make the code "portable". It just led to a few nightmare years of trying to develop in a severely crippled language. It was about that time I learned C in my spare time. C is hugely powerful while being elegantly simple. The most apt criticism of it is that it gives you enough rope to hang yourself if you are sloppy. But without that rope, lots of things are much harder to do. I've been programming for 45 years now and have never seen a better overall language than C.
Ritchie was a giant in this industry.
And, BTW, bashing Unix is just kind of laughable.
When someone is injured by a self-driving car, who is liable?
This will be determined in court, like every other kind of liability. Attorneys will go after the deepest pockets and see how far they get. Eventually precedent will clarify liability.
Beginners should not start with creating GUIs in the first place. (Neither did early BASICs support such a thing)
I totally agree! I've been programming for almost half a century now and I've never seen languages more worthless than these things that insist on starting with programming the GUI (e.g., Alice). The key to teaching, or learning, programming at the beginning is striking a balance between conveying core concepts and keeping the newbie's interest (especially if that newbie is yourself). Starting with a lecture on machine language and memory layout (I actually took a class like that) is a sure way to put people to sleep. But if you start with putting buttons on the screen you have skipped over a world of core concepts and turned programming into magic where you just memorize incantations.
I think what Apple has done with Obj C is a travesty and makes it very difficult to learn. They have GUI-ized it so thoroughly that it's really hard to tell what's going on under the covers. I was able to teach myself C from Borland's Turbo C, and I learned C++ pretty easily on my own. But Obj C has been hard and that's entirely because all the books insist on teaching it with this GUI Xcode stuff from Apple that keeps changing with each release so the books are always a little out of date. I'm convinced that C++ was easy only because I learned it before MS adopted it and did the same thing to it that Apple did to Obj C.
I remember a time Apple seemed like it was trying to make money by lawsuits rather than coming up with cool new products. The Sculley days? Are they back to that?
i've gotten lost some place. does this mean that a free to use picture posting service is claiming equal copy right ownership to pictures that are freely uploaded which then provides the pictures as proprietary content to proprietary content providers so said proprietary content providers can add the pictures to their proprietary content in order to profit without the freely usable posting service giving equal profits to the originator of the originally free content?
No. This sounds like the same kind of thing online companies have been doing just about forever to protect their sites from unscrupulous people who download in bulk and repost, or who take content from a site for republication for other purposes. They want to be able to protect their users by using copyright to go after people who misuse the posted images. That means it probably IS for the protection of their users. Otherwise every Twitter user would have to police their own content. It's in Twitter's best interest to make people feel safe about uploading content.
So, tell me, how much of Feyerabend's philosphy of science have you studied?
None. But if he comes out with woo-woo shit like equating science to voodoo, that's already too much.
Be careful about judging a philosopher's whole body of work, and even the whole of the field of philosophy, based on a single post on Slashdot.
That said, it does appear that Feyerabend enjoyed being a bit outrageous. But philosophy is not science. It's not about making "progress", but about following different lines of thought to see where they lead. Sometimes thinking about what we are doing in a new way is useful, even if it isn't the only way to look at things. IMHO, it's worth learning about multiple philosophical schools of thought as long as you don't get caught up in just one and take it too seriously.
Feyerabend was probably talking about Truth in the philosophical sense, which I think is a poorly defined term that assumes there is one best way to view all of reality, which may not be the case. Thankfully, scientists just keep working on better ways to explain what we see and theories that are more predictive of what we haven't seen yet.
Here's a prediction for you - there will be an Apple stylus tablet within 3 years. Until about 6 months before launch, it will continue to be the dumbest idea ever. Then, Steve will proclaim it to be brilliant.
The iPad supports a stylus right now. It just doesn't require one.
A stylus is very handy for some things, like taking notes on a class or meeting, making impromptu sketches, etc.
BTW, I'm still waiting for apps on the new devices that will allow me to ditch my old Palm TX (hopefully, before it dies of old age). I love the new smart phones and tablets for all the new cool stuff they can do, but none of them do the old stuff as well as the Palm devices.
I agree with JoshuaZ. I'm an American who is glad there are other voices out there besides our own. America has a lot to offer, but could also learn a lot from other countries if we could just put aside this nutty idea of "American Exceptionalism". Seems like no politician can be elected in America these days who doesn't claim that America is better than everyone else and Americans are just the best of the best.
No, it's not theft. Theft is when you take away something [an object] that belongs to someone else, with the intention to never return it.
You seem to be referring to English Law, but even there theft refers to "property", which may be something other than an "object" and the definition of "intention never to return it" is liberal enough to cover cases where the thief changes their mind later and returns the property.
Any law that includes intent is, IMHO, poorly conceived as it requires the prosecution to convince a jury of an internal mental state.
In general, absolute statements like "theft is..." are likely to be incorrect. We're talking legal definition here and specifically, in this case, legal definition in California. Also, laws change so the definition of theft can change, so any such statement needs to be qualified by a time frame.
I would advise a complete newbie to keep it very simple in the beginning.
Pick on language and stay with it for a while.
I would suggest something like Python, Perl or TCL.
Find some kind of text file to work on.
Just about anything will do: an HTML file,
contact list,... Anything that you can view
with a simple text editor. (Stay away from
doc files or anything with a lot of special
formatting commands requiring a word process,
like Word, to view.)
Find out how to read lines from this file and
write to standard out (stdout) from your chosen language.
Start playing around writing programs to search
for text and print things out. Maybe read the
file and write it to stdout. Then change some
things before writing it back out (like changing
all "Bill" to "William"). Just play around and
learn how to use the language.
When you get tired of this, set up (or get someone
else to set up for you) a web server that can support
CGI (Common Gateway Interface, NOT Computer Generated
Imagery). (You can do this on your own computer.
Just point your browser at http://localhost/ This will
let you generate simple web pages with the kind of
programming you just learned. You write little programs,
drop them in the right directory and suddenly you can
generate dynamic web pages. This is just to keep it fun.
Now you can start learning HTML, which can start out really
simple using just 5 or 6 lines of HTML.
At this point you will have the basics down and can start doing more complicated things.
Some other suggestions:
Keep away from anything Object Oriented at first.
You don't need that complication and will appreciate
it more later.
C is a good language for starting out, but it
requires a compile and link step that can confuse some
beginners. If this doesn't bother you, C is an excellent
foundation for anything that will come later, especially C++
(for the MS/Windows world) or Objective C (for Apple Mac,
iPhone, iPad).
The whole concept of patents is to protect the patent inventor against competition and give him or her a monopoly. 'Patents are anticompetitive' is a tautology. It never in the past therefore was considered a valid argument against patents.
Giving the inventor a temporary monopoly is not the purpose of patents. The purpose of patents has always been to encourage innovation. The means to that end is to ensure just compensation to inventors. Today so many trivial things are patented that it's almost impossible for the small developer (AKA, software inventor) to be sure they aren't violating someone's software patent.
My favorite example is when Xerox forced Palm to abandon Graffiti because it violated Xerox's Unistrokes patent. It's not that Graffiti represented letters the same way Unistrokes did. But Xerox was granted a patent on the very idea of using a single unbroken stroke for each letter. I would definitely call that anticompetitive.
If Apple can make boatloads of money without having to spend time responding to protests by offended groups, it makes business sense for them to do so. It is unreasonable to expect a for-profit corporation to engage in activity to its own financial detriment just because the public would be better served if they did so. Apple makes some terrific products and deserves the credit for that. However, I do think the public would be better served to have a more open distribution channel for apps and content. I just don't expect that we can get there through corporate distribution channels. Maybe if we had a Newman's Own distribution channel.:-)
I just looked at the Freelancer's Union site and it appears that health insurance though it is only available in NY state. Did I miss something?
Also checked my local CoC. No health insurance there. When you say "most COCs offer health insurance packages", where are you getting your data?
Someone elsewhere mentioned COBRA as if it covered you for 2 - 3 years. My experience is that it generally covers you for 18 month, though some plans can offer longer periods. I'm on COBRA right now.
The best options I've been able to find are (1) health coverage for students and (2) Group of One coverage if you have your own business (not available everywhere -- check your state). Some colleges offer relatively cheap group health coverage if you take some minimum number of units, sometimes a fairly light load. This can give you group insurance but leave you enough time to freelance. The Group of One lets someone set up a small (i.e., just themselves) business and still get group coverage. Check for costs of business license and any necessary taxes you may have to pay.
The same aspect that makes this interesting for the 3rd world makes it interesting for homeland security: removal of the need for a massive (and vulnerable) distribution grid. Just make sure the fuel for these things isn't all natural gas piped in through the same network of pipes. It would be nice to get rid of those massive power outages every time there's a big storm.
As a 60 year old software developer, I'd advise you to go into mgmt if you think you'd like it just as much as staying the techie. But be aware that mgmt these days is mostly about having a high tolerance for sitting in meetings, learning to sound confident even when you don't know what everyone is talking about, and being able to spin a failure as either a misunderstood success or someone else's fault. If that's your cup of tea, go for it. It certainly has more potential financial upside than staying techie. Plus it can be nice being in a place where you can actually participate in decision making.
The problem is people think they have all kinds of ridiculous rights and entitlements.
Like thinking they have the right to someone else's work for free?
Though I generally agree with the arguments, I get very tired of this kind of tone. Writing a book is a heck of a lot of work and deserves some respect if people find it helpful enough to pirate. Becoming incensed when the author dares to ask for recompense for the time and effort is just bad form.
That said, I agree that authors of technical books can't expect to make a real living from writing books alone. You can make more money from seminars you give once the book has made you a reputation. Thus the advantage of piracy. The more people find your book worth pirating, the more your reputation grows and the more seminars you can give.
Back in the days when CompuServe was the way you got on-line, Borland used to hold a CompuServe party each summer in Scotts Valley, CA (their original headquarters). Free food and free software. That was back when Microsoft was charging hundreds of $$$ for their C compiler and Borland came out with one for about $70. Borland was into compilers, utilites, database and even had a word processor for a while. But that was also back in the day when SCO was still a few miles away in Santa Cruz and were the good guys producing Unix for PCs. Things sure change.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that C++ is generally a better way to go, even if you aren't using the object oriented features (which really should only be used when you need them). All of the languages that have risen up claiming to be better replacements for C because C is basically "enough rope", are really dumbing down of the language by removing useful features (like address pointers and use of free unions). I remember when HP tried to replace a C-like language with Pascal for this reason and it led to years of low productivity and bloated code.
If we're going to destroy Earth, why would we want to spread humanity to other planets? We'd be like an infection that kills its hosts.
All good points. The USA would be a big gamble at this point. There is a big anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-reason political faction in the USA today that is taking it on a downward path. Perhaps it will self-correct -- perhaps not.
I'm a big fan of Linux (heck, I'm one of the authors of Linux Appliance Design) but if you are looking for "Just Works", I think you have to give the nod to Apple. But they do this by limiting you. They control the hardware and restrict what can go into the App Store. And they pay a lot of attention to the "cool factor". Lots of eye candy. But the biggest benefit of going Apple is that everything pretty much works together out of the box. Phone, tablet, laptop and desktop cooperate nicely, as long as you are doing things the way Apple wants (such as, everything must be registered under one Apple Id if you want certain types of sharing to work right). I have multiple Linux boxes in my house, but do most of my work on my iMac desktop (where I have multiple Linux distributions available in virtualized environments.
I do Linux software all day as my full time job. I find I'm just too lazy (and pressed for time) to struggle with Linux to get my VPN connection to work (this broke when I upgraded to a new Ubuntu release last year) and other things like this. I want the day to day stuff to just work so I can be free to concentrate on my latest Linux-based project. Apple lets me do this. Seems funny, but using Apple gives me more time for my pet Linux projects.
Sorry, but ALGOL is just as awful as Pascal for an engineer. It's a freaking language developed by academics for developers. C on the other hand was the language by developers for developers. Obviously academics chose what's best for them, thus Pascal still survives...
I'm in total agreement. I was at HP when management decreed that we would have to use Pascal for future projects. They were convinced by academics that this would make the code "portable". It just led to a few nightmare years of trying to develop in a severely crippled language. It was about that time I learned C in my spare time. C is hugely powerful while being elegantly simple. The most apt criticism of it is that it gives you enough rope to hang yourself if you are sloppy. But without that rope, lots of things are much harder to do. I've been programming for 45 years now and have never seen a better overall language than C. Ritchie was a giant in this industry. And, BTW, bashing Unix is just kind of laughable.
Yeah, I hear Cobol and Fortran are going away any decade now.
When someone is injured by a self-driving car, who is liable?
This will be determined in court, like every other kind of liability. Attorneys will go after the deepest pockets and see how far they get. Eventually precedent will clarify liability.
Beginners should not start with creating GUIs in the first place. (Neither did early BASICs support such a thing)
I totally agree! I've been programming for almost half a century now and I've never seen languages more worthless than these things that insist on starting with programming the GUI (e.g., Alice). The key to teaching, or learning, programming at the beginning is striking a balance between conveying core concepts and keeping the newbie's interest (especially if that newbie is yourself). Starting with a lecture on machine language and memory layout (I actually took a class like that) is a sure way to put people to sleep. But if you start with putting buttons on the screen you have skipped over a world of core concepts and turned programming into magic where you just memorize incantations.
I think what Apple has done with Obj C is a travesty and makes it very difficult to learn. They have GUI-ized it so thoroughly that it's really hard to tell what's going on under the covers. I was able to teach myself C from Borland's Turbo C, and I learned C++ pretty easily on my own. But Obj C has been hard and that's entirely because all the books insist on teaching it with this GUI Xcode stuff from Apple that keeps changing with each release so the books are always a little out of date. I'm convinced that C++ was easy only because I learned it before MS adopted it and did the same thing to it that Apple did to Obj C.
I remember a time Apple seemed like it was trying to make money by lawsuits rather than coming up with cool new products. The Sculley days? Are they back to that?
i've gotten lost some place. does this mean that a free to use picture posting service is claiming equal copy right ownership to pictures that are freely uploaded which then provides the pictures as proprietary content to proprietary content providers so said proprietary content providers can add the pictures to their proprietary content in order to profit without the freely usable posting service giving equal profits to the originator of the originally free content?
No. This sounds like the same kind of thing online companies have been doing just about forever to protect their sites from unscrupulous people who download in bulk and repost, or who take content from a site for republication for other purposes. They want to be able to protect their users by using copyright to go after people who misuse the posted images. That means it probably IS for the protection of their users. Otherwise every Twitter user would have to police their own content. It's in Twitter's best interest to make people feel safe about uploading content.
None. But if he comes out with woo-woo shit like equating science to voodoo, that's already too much.
Be careful about judging a philosopher's whole body of work, and even the whole of the field of philosophy, based on a single post on Slashdot.
That said, it does appear that Feyerabend enjoyed being a bit outrageous. But philosophy is not science. It's not about making "progress", but about following different lines of thought to see where they lead. Sometimes thinking about what we are doing in a new way is useful, even if it isn't the only way to look at things. IMHO, it's worth learning about multiple philosophical schools of thought as long as you don't get caught up in just one and take it too seriously.
Feyerabend was probably talking about Truth in the philosophical sense, which I think is a poorly defined term that assumes there is one best way to view all of reality, which may not be the case. Thankfully, scientists just keep working on better ways to explain what we see and theories that are more predictive of what we haven't seen yet.
Here's a prediction for you - there will be an Apple stylus tablet within 3 years. Until about 6 months before launch, it will continue to be the dumbest idea ever. Then, Steve will proclaim it to be brilliant.
The iPad supports a stylus right now. It just doesn't require one.
A stylus is very handy for some things, like taking notes on a class or meeting, making impromptu sketches, etc.
BTW, I'm still waiting for apps on the new devices that will allow me to ditch my old Palm TX (hopefully, before it dies of old age). I love the new smart phones and tablets for all the new cool stuff they can do, but none of them do the old stuff as well as the Palm devices.
Everyone with a brain works incrementally. In a democracy, this is what we call finding common ground and reaching compromises.
I agree with JoshuaZ. I'm an American who is glad there are other voices out there besides our own. America has a lot to offer, but could also learn a lot from other countries if we could just put aside this nutty idea of "American Exceptionalism". Seems like no politician can be elected in America these days who doesn't claim that America is better than everyone else and Americans are just the best of the best.
No, it's not theft. Theft is when you take away something [an object] that belongs to someone else, with the intention to never return it.
You seem to be referring to English Law, but even there theft refers to "property", which may be something other than an "object" and the definition of "intention never to return it" is liberal enough to cover cases where the thief changes their mind later and returns the property.
Any law that includes intent is, IMHO, poorly conceived as it requires the prosecution to convince a jury of an internal mental state.
In general, absolute statements like "theft is..." are likely to be incorrect. We're talking legal definition here and specifically, in this case, legal definition in California. Also, laws change so the definition of theft can change, so any such statement needs to be qualified by a time frame.
Find some kind of text file to work on. Just about anything will do: an HTML file, contact list, ... Anything that you can view
with a simple text editor. (Stay away from
doc files or anything with a lot of special
formatting commands requiring a word process,
like Word, to view.)
Start playing around writing programs to search for text and print things out. Maybe read the file and write it to stdout. Then change some things before writing it back out (like changing all "Bill" to "William"). Just play around and learn how to use the language.
At this point you will have the basics down and can start doing more complicated things.
Some other suggestions:
The whole concept of patents is to protect the patent inventor against competition and give him or her a monopoly. 'Patents are anticompetitive' is a tautology. It never in the past therefore was considered a valid argument against patents.
Giving the inventor a temporary monopoly is not the purpose of patents. The purpose of patents has always been to encourage innovation. The means to that end is to ensure just compensation to inventors. Today so many trivial things are patented that it's almost impossible for the small developer (AKA, software inventor) to be sure they aren't violating someone's software patent.
My favorite example is when Xerox forced Palm to abandon Graffiti because it violated Xerox's Unistrokes patent. It's not that Graffiti represented letters the same way Unistrokes did. But Xerox was granted a patent on the very idea of using a single unbroken stroke for each letter. I would definitely call that anticompetitive.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Gotta wonder what the world would be like if it were not just illegal to steal a car, but also illegal for anyone else to build one.
If Apple can make boatloads of money without having to spend time responding to protests by offended groups, it makes business sense for them to do so. It is unreasonable to expect a for-profit corporation to engage in activity to its own financial detriment just because the public would be better served if they did so. Apple makes some terrific products and deserves the credit for that. However, I do think the public would be better served to have a more open distribution channel for apps and content. I just don't expect that we can get there through corporate distribution channels. Maybe if we had a Newman's Own distribution channel. :-)
Honestly! You feel threatened by Venezuela?! Good thing we've had those nukes keeping Venezuela from attacking us!
I just looked at the Freelancer's Union site and it appears that health insurance though it is only available in NY state. Did I miss something?
Also checked my local CoC. No health insurance there. When you say "most COCs offer health insurance packages", where are you getting your data?
Someone elsewhere mentioned COBRA as if it covered you for 2 - 3 years. My experience is that it generally covers you for 18 month, though some plans can offer longer periods. I'm on COBRA right now.
The best options I've been able to find are (1) health coverage for students and (2) Group of One coverage if you have your own business (not available everywhere -- check your state). Some colleges offer relatively cheap group health coverage if you take some minimum number of units, sometimes a fairly light load. This can give you group insurance but leave you enough time to freelance. The Group of One lets someone set up a small (i.e., just themselves) business and still get group coverage. Check for costs of business license and any necessary taxes you may have to pay.
The same aspect that makes this interesting for the 3rd world makes it interesting for homeland security: removal of the need for a massive (and vulnerable) distribution grid. Just make sure the fuel for these things isn't all natural gas piped in through the same network of pipes. It would be nice to get rid of those massive power outages every time there's a big storm.
As a 60 year old software developer, I'd advise you to go into mgmt if you think you'd like it just as much as staying the techie. But be aware that mgmt these days is mostly about having a high tolerance for sitting in meetings, learning to sound confident even when you don't know what everyone is talking about, and being able to spin a failure as either a misunderstood success or someone else's fault. If that's your cup of tea, go for it. It certainly has more potential financial upside than staying techie. Plus it can be nice being in a place where you can actually participate in decision making.
The problem is people think they have all kinds of ridiculous rights and entitlements.
Like thinking they have the right to someone else's work for free? Though I generally agree with the arguments, I get very tired of this kind of tone. Writing a book is a heck of a lot of work and deserves some respect if people find it helpful enough to pirate. Becoming incensed when the author dares to ask for recompense for the time and effort is just bad form.
That said, I agree that authors of technical books can't expect to make a real living from writing books alone. You can make more money from seminars you give once the book has made you a reputation. Thus the advantage of piracy. The more people find your book worth pirating, the more your reputation grows and the more seminars you can give.
Back in the days when CompuServe was the way you got on-line, Borland used to hold a CompuServe party each summer in Scotts Valley, CA (their original headquarters). Free food and free software. That was back when Microsoft was charging hundreds of $$$ for their C compiler and Borland came out with one for about $70. Borland was into compilers, utilites, database and even had a word processor for a while. But that was also back in the day when SCO was still a few miles away in Santa Cruz and were the good guys producing Unix for PCs. Things sure change.