I'm a systems administrator, but every 3 years or so I need to write some relatively simple program for one reason or the other, so I'd rate myself as a permanent beginner. This time I needed to replace an older MS-DOS Foxpro-based system for barcode scanning and printing with something Windows-based, so after some research there were two languages that seemed to be the right ones currently in vogue, Java and Python. Java seemed to be overkill for a small project that might have to run in machines with little memory, so I settled for Python. I read the tutorials, and bought the book Windows Programming for Windows (O'Reilly).
First thing is that there's no single package to download or buy from a single source like for example Visual Basic, ODBC database support needs some third party module (Egenix) which I'm not sure is free or not. The language itself is very nice, and I was quickly connecting to dbf files which was very hard to do in VB (remember I'm a beginner). Documentation was not very good for some things like scope of variables between modules, so it was trial and error in many parts.
Since it's not included I had to find some package to create a Windows GUI, and wxPython seemed to be the way to go. Making screens was a nightmare, documentation is horrible and incomplete. Back to trial and error for every little thing I needed to add to the screens. Definetly nothing that can be recommended to a novice programmer that needs to create a GUI. It took me like a month or so to create simple screens with menus, text boxes, etc, and they're a pain to modify, and the needed code is very hard to understand, basically you need to copy examples from their tutorials and modify them by trial and error to make them work.
I tried packages like Boa and Pythoncards, but the code they generated was very hard to integrate into my project mainly because of its complexity.
Long story short, Python is probably an excellent language for beginners that plan to become professional programmers, but for programmers in companies where they need to do an ocasional database capture program, Python needs to be a more complete environment, something like Visual Basic. Remember that for every excellent Slashdot programmer there must be 50 to 100 people from other walks of life that need to write simpler programs for use at offices or at home. Whoever comes up with an environment that matches Microsoft's (for simple programs) will make a killing.
All this seems to be an American thing, I taught an introduction to computing course at Mexico to 3 groups at a Technological Institute, one of them oriented to an Informatics degree. Half the group were female. Nothing particular about it. And nowhere do I see something like a social stigma for being interested in computers.
I've read in China almost all of the current political leaders have degrees in Engineering.
I think all this comes from the warrior mentality peoples of Germanic origen have had thoughout their history.
The economic model for the developed countries is to concentrate on owning the higher margin, knowledge-intensive layers of activity while the developing countries handle the more physical aspects like manufacturing.
Problem is, we're in the middle of a information revolution that will be as important and life-changing as the industrial revolution, and if the economy and society want to move on, anything that stands in the way of that revolution must step aside, otherwise society stagnates under an older model that is already in a mode of diminishing returns.
So, they want to handle this new environment the way they're handling the old one, by concentrating ownership of information in a few huge multinational oligopolies through ip laws. They won't get away with it because historically when a new mode of production arrives, the societies attached to the older one stagnate. Just watch the rise of France and England after the Spanish Empire.
The new production mode will be based on information freely available to anyone, and software is basically, information. A new economy will appear, different to the current one, and producing a new kind of society, hopefully more democratic and liberating that the current one, as the infrastructure determines to a great extent the ideological suprastructure of a society.
He obviously got scared. The trick is to look cool, even bored, offer a low amount. They'll start slowly circling toward the police station, will finally get bored and accept your offer. I say 50 dlls would have been fine.
If you ever find one of those cops that don't take money, don't worry, they won't add charges for you trying to bribe them, and don't panic, if you're a non-violent ofender you'll be in a cell with other non-violent drunken drivers, etc, you won't be raped; when out of the cell however you'll stink like hell, hygienic conditions are very poor.
If you loose control and beat up a local police officer, you'll have to spend 15 days in the local jail and be in a cell with other violent detainees, and depending on the population you might have to watch out for your ass.
I'm talking about the city's police. If you get in problems with federal agents (Policia Judicial), then be very careful, politely refuse everything and ask for your lawyer, if they refuse, mention the "Comision de Derechos Humanos" (Human Rights Comission).
With these Judiciary guys you have to be very careful, until recently they were basically a bunch of torturers, killers, rapists, extorters, and it used to be that the governments and the legal establishment supported their behavior. Recently we've seen some change, still, be careful, don't believe anything they say, and get a lawyer. They only intervene in bigger stuff like drug traffic, robbery, murders, etc, they don't deal with traffic, street brawls, drinking driving, etc.
It's just part of the move away from a US-controlled world. First from the dollar to the euro, then from a US-based world economy to an Asia and Europe-based one. Face it, were witnessing the beginning of the end of the US Empire. Is this good or bad? Not sure; as empires go, US has not been so murderous as Germany, Japan, Russia, Spain or China's, although more so than England or France's.
First revolution was the agricultural, then the industrial, and now the information revolution. He who controls information and its infrastructure will rule the world, thus the importance for concerned people to spread everything that reduces people's dependence on their governments and big corporations, otherwise it's back to the hen's house with it's pecking hierarchies, etc.
Between 10,000 - 30,000 death depending on who you believe to. Government's help broke down, people organized themselves to help each other all over the city. Still mentioned in radio and TV.
Easy, just open console programming to the people, publish the specs, sell development kits to anybodythat wants them, let an ecosystem grow up, pick the best and support them with money.
Would a concentration camp run efficiently directed by mentally healthy people?
Of course we don't work in concentration camps, but in childhood we're forced into fenced big buildings, later, at work we stay all day in somewhat restrictive places, all of them a much lighter version of a concentration camp, so I guess it's a matter of degree.
Right on the main streets of Mexico City's downtown.
The city is invaded by street vendors selling all kinds of stuff. Once in a while there are police operatives to try to clear a few streets, but the vendors fight the police back. It's a political issue, with high unemployment in Mexico, it would not be a good idea for any politician to face the informal economy. Now, since every new law they come up with it's only used by corrupt officers to complicate and extort people engaged in the formal economy, it's like it's not possible to do business legally.
As a funny or pathetic aside, in northern Mexico, close to the border with the US, many professionals find it easier to register their business in the US, and pay taxes to the US, despite the fact that they live and work in Mexico for Mexican customers!
This is a sign of a much bigger problem, many people in the US cannot afford the cost of official medicine, they're trying to find less costly alternatives.
In other countries with more or less socialized medical care (of widely varying levels of efficiency), doctors and transnational companies are trying to force the governments to have "American style" medicine, that is a carefully controlled supply of doctors, (high) prices set by medical associations, exclusive regions, constant effort to legally marginalize alternative medicine, profit-oriented control of your medical history, legally mandated medical procedures, and the creation of new categories of sicknesses that require new costly, patented medicine.
So, maybe there is some reason in not fully trusting all doctor's advice and look for a second opinion.
I'm glad to see somebody in Slashdot willing to accept that current science might not have all the answers. Energy meridians not detected by current technology? And why not? Just some 20-30 years ago it was accepted science your fat and meat intake had to be much greater than today. And now official medicine is finally accepting fruit and vegetable intake can help with certain conditions, that some yoga excercises do benefit the body, etc. Just think what other "qwack" theories will be accepted wisdom in the future.
It's not male chauvinism, kids under 7 need female tenderness. No amount of male help on those first years is going to make up for it.
And on the whole subject, a woman needs to have a child to feel complete. However, our current society, or explotation system, however you want to call it, requires full time dedication to your job, hence the dilema. When humanity evolves away from it's current competition, fear, loneliness and violence-based institutions, a woman would have time to be full time with her baby in the first years, and gradually dedicate more hours of the day to a career without producing one more of the current generation of alienated and parent-starved kids.
First revolution: Agricultural
Second revolution: Industrial
Third revolution: Informatics
Each revolution changes drastically the production mode of a society, thereby changing its institutions, ideology, etc. Companies like Google, Ebay, Amazon, the Open Source movement, etc are enabling millions of people to participate in a new economy not restricted by a fear and privilege based productive structure. We're seeing history in the making.
The main buyers of big companies products are other companies, so it doesn't matter if the common people has less money. Money is concentrating in the big companies.
The outsourcers don't hire Indian IT personnel directly, they go through middlemen, so it's not like outsourcing reduces the cost of a project to a 20% of the original cost, it's more like it reduces the cost by 20%. So, a group of talented people, with no big company manager salary overhead, and maybe willing to give up a little on their salaries, should be able to offer competitive pricing for the same project than an Indian firm, remembering also that a very good programmer is more efficient than 10 average programmers.
"Matt wrote SafeSearch, which is Google's family filter. In addition to his experience at Google, Matt held a top-secret clearance while working for the Department of Defense"
"Oh well, I'm sure someone will find a good use for it."
If you don't live in the US but buy in the internet from US companies you'll find most of them, specially the smaller ones, don't accept international credit cards, even if the same cards can be used in the US when you shop in person, and even if the shipping address is in the US. So, something like Paypal and Western Union money orders by internet are invaluable since they accept international cards. Problem is many business don't accept Paypal. Hope Google Wallet becomes more popular among business.
Also, just try to do some programming while being interrupted every 20-30 mins. Programming requires concentration for long periods of time. Your boss will say "it's only 3-5 mins of your time to fix each of these problems for a total of 55-60 mins a day, that still leaves you 7 hours to do your programming!" No way....
Slashdot Mirror
First thing is that there's no single package to download or buy from a single source like for example Visual Basic, ODBC database support needs some third party module (Egenix) which I'm not sure is free or not. The language itself is very nice, and I was quickly connecting to dbf files which was very hard to do in VB (remember I'm a beginner). Documentation was not very good for some things like scope of variables between modules, so it was trial and error in many parts.
Since it's not included I had to find some package to create a Windows GUI, and wxPython seemed to be the way to go. Making screens was a nightmare, documentation is horrible and incomplete. Back to trial and error for every little thing I needed to add to the screens. Definetly nothing that can be recommended to a novice programmer that needs to create a GUI. It took me like a month or so to create simple screens with menus, text boxes, etc, and they're a pain to modify, and the needed code is very hard to understand, basically you need to copy examples from their tutorials and modify them by trial and error to make them work.
I tried packages like Boa and Pythoncards, but the code they generated was very hard to integrate into my project mainly because of its complexity.
Long story short, Python is probably an excellent language for beginners that plan to become professional programmers, but for programmers in companies where they need to do an ocasional database capture program, Python needs to be a more complete environment, something like Visual Basic. Remember that for every excellent Slashdot programmer there must be 50 to 100 people from other walks of life that need to write simpler programs for use at offices or at home. Whoever comes up with an environment that matches Microsoft's (for simple programs) will make a killing.
I've read in China almost all of the current political leaders have degrees in Engineering.
I think all this comes from the warrior mentality peoples of Germanic origen have had thoughout their history.
In Soviet Russia SAP opens YOU
The economic model for the developed countries is to concentrate on owning the higher margin, knowledge-intensive layers of activity while the developing countries handle the more physical aspects like manufacturing.
Problem is, we're in the middle of a information revolution that will be as important and life-changing as the industrial revolution, and if the economy and society want to move on, anything that stands in the way of that revolution must step aside, otherwise society stagnates under an older model that is already in a mode of diminishing returns.
So, they want to handle this new environment the way they're handling the old one, by concentrating ownership of information in a few huge multinational oligopolies through ip laws. They won't get away with it because historically when a new mode of production arrives, the societies attached to the older one stagnate. Just watch the rise of France and England after the Spanish Empire.
The new production mode will be based on information freely available to anyone, and software is basically, information. A new economy will appear, different to the current one, and producing a new kind of society, hopefully more democratic and liberating that the current one, as the infrastructure determines to a great extent the ideological suprastructure of a society.
Pathetic. MS trying to hurriedly imitate Google.
Which gives me an idea, why not run Wine on Windows? No more viruses!
He obviously got scared. The trick is to look cool, even bored, offer a low amount. They'll start slowly circling toward the police station, will finally get bored and accept your offer. I say 50 dlls would have been fine.
If you ever find one of those cops that don't take money, don't worry, they won't add charges for you trying to bribe them, and don't panic, if you're a non-violent ofender you'll be in a cell with other non-violent drunken drivers, etc, you won't be raped; when out of the cell however you'll stink like hell, hygienic conditions are very poor.
If you loose control and beat up a local police officer, you'll have to spend 15 days in the local jail and be in a cell with other violent detainees, and depending on the population you might have to watch out for your ass.
I'm talking about the city's police. If you get in problems with federal agents (Policia Judicial), then be very careful, politely refuse everything and ask for your lawyer, if they refuse, mention the "Comision de Derechos Humanos" (Human Rights Comission).
With these Judiciary guys you have to be very careful, until recently they were basically a bunch of torturers, killers, rapists, extorters, and it used to be that the governments and the legal establishment supported their behavior. Recently we've seen some change, still, be careful, don't believe anything they say, and get a lawyer. They only intervene in bigger stuff like drug traffic, robbery, murders, etc, they don't deal with traffic, street brawls, drinking driving, etc.
Xochitl, Yolanda and Zenaida. Maybe for Hurricanes starting in the Spanish-speaking area.
It's just part of the move away from a US-controlled world. First from the dollar to the euro, then from a US-based world economy to an Asia and Europe-based one. Face it, were witnessing the beginning of the end of the US Empire. Is this good or bad? Not sure; as empires go, US has not been so murderous as Germany, Japan, Russia, Spain or China's, although more so than England or France's.
First revolution was the agricultural, then the industrial, and now the information revolution. He who controls information and its infrastructure will rule the world, thus the importance for concerned people to spread everything that reduces people's dependence on their governments and big corporations, otherwise it's back to the hen's house with it's pecking hierarchies, etc.
Between 10,000 - 30,000 death depending on who you believe to. Government's help broke down, people organized themselves to help each other all over the city. Still mentioned in radio and TV.
You're assuming that in 35 years the western countries will still rule the world.
Easy, just open console programming to the people, publish the specs, sell development kits to anybodythat wants them, let an ecosystem grow up, pick the best and support them with money.
Would a concentration camp run efficiently directed by mentally healthy people?
Of course we don't work in concentration camps, but in childhood we're forced into fenced big buildings, later, at work we stay all day in somewhat restrictive places, all of them a much lighter version of a concentration camp, so I guess it's a matter of degree.
Right on the main streets of Mexico City's downtown.
The city is invaded by street vendors selling all kinds of stuff. Once in a while there are police operatives to try to clear a few streets, but the vendors fight the police back. It's a political issue, with high unemployment in Mexico, it would not be a good idea for any politician to face the informal economy. Now, since every new law they come up with it's only used by corrupt officers to complicate and extort people engaged in the formal economy, it's like it's not possible to do business legally.
As a funny or pathetic aside, in northern Mexico, close to the border with the US, many professionals find it easier to register their business in the US, and pay taxes to the US, despite the fact that they live and work in Mexico for Mexican customers!
This is a sign of a much bigger problem, many people in the US cannot afford the cost of official medicine, they're trying to find less costly alternatives.
In other countries with more or less socialized medical care (of widely varying levels of efficiency), doctors and transnational companies are trying to force the governments to have "American style" medicine, that is a carefully controlled supply of doctors, (high) prices set by medical associations, exclusive regions, constant effort to legally marginalize alternative medicine, profit-oriented control of your medical history, legally mandated medical procedures, and the creation of new categories of sicknesses that require new costly, patented medicine.
So, maybe there is some reason in not fully trusting all doctor's advice and look for a second opinion.
I'm glad to see somebody in Slashdot willing to accept that current science might not have all the answers. Energy meridians not detected by current technology? And why not? Just some 20-30 years ago it was accepted science your fat and meat intake had to be much greater than today. And now official medicine is finally accepting fruit and vegetable intake can help with certain conditions, that some yoga excercises do benefit the body, etc. Just think what other "qwack" theories will be accepted wisdom in the future.
It's not male chauvinism, kids under 7 need female tenderness. No amount of male help on those first years is going to make up for it. And on the whole subject, a woman needs to have a child to feel complete. However, our current society, or explotation system, however you want to call it, requires full time dedication to your job, hence the dilema. When humanity evolves away from it's current competition, fear, loneliness and violence-based institutions, a woman would have time to be full time with her baby in the first years, and gradually dedicate more hours of the day to a career without producing one more of the current generation of alienated and parent-starved kids.
First revolution: Agricultural Second revolution: Industrial Third revolution: Informatics Each revolution changes drastically the production mode of a society, thereby changing its institutions, ideology, etc. Companies like Google, Ebay, Amazon, the Open Source movement, etc are enabling millions of people to participate in a new economy not restricted by a fear and privilege based productive structure. We're seeing history in the making.
On the average big companies sell to other big companies, that common citizens are poor doesn't really matter to them.
The main buyers of big companies products are other companies, so it doesn't matter if the common people has less money. Money is concentrating in the big companies.
The outsourcers don't hire Indian IT personnel directly, they go through middlemen, so it's not like outsourcing reduces the cost of a project to a 20% of the original cost, it's more like it reduces the cost by 20%. So, a group of talented people, with no big company manager salary overhead, and maybe willing to give up a little on their salaries, should be able to offer competitive pricing for the same project than an Indian firm, remembering also that a very good programmer is more efficient than 10 average programmers.
The future impulse from Linux will come from the 3rd world and from Asia. Macs, OSX? Expensive, closed, controlled by foreign companies.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/conference/bios/matt _cutts.htm
"Oh well, I'm sure someone will find a good use for it." If you don't live in the US but buy in the internet from US companies you'll find most of them, specially the smaller ones, don't accept international credit cards, even if the same cards can be used in the US when you shop in person, and even if the shipping address is in the US. So, something like Paypal and Western Union money orders by internet are invaluable since they accept international cards. Problem is many business don't accept Paypal. Hope Google Wallet becomes more popular among business.
Also, just try to do some programming while being interrupted every 20-30 mins. Programming requires concentration for long periods of time. Your boss will say "it's only 3-5 mins of your time to fix each of these problems for a total of 55-60 mins a day, that still leaves you 7 hours to do your programming!" No way....