Even ignoring the fact that I heard that same line in both 1998 and 1996, it is simply wrong. Web-pages for candidates are afterthoughts. Add-ons. They are done because the candidates don't want to seem techno-illiterate. But they won't change a damn thing. Nothing on a website is going to change the result of the elections. And the candidates know this, which is why the number of dollars spent on television advertising will likely outweight the number of dollars spent on political efforts on the web by a factor of a thousand.
We tend to get insular, thinking that because the internet is a large part of our world, that it must therefore be a large part of the world in general. Yeah, a/. reader might decide who to vote for because of impressions of web-savviness, but then, the number of Oprah viewers in Rhode Island likely outweighs/. in terms of voting strengh.
The ancient Egyptians also wrote a hell of a lot that did not last 3000 years. What we have mostly is what they painted on walls and then buried. They wrote far more on paper, but as you can imagine, that is mostly dust now.
3000 years from now, archealogists will be hard-pressed to find a copy of the constitution, but there will be hundreds of "Chuck E Cheese" signs cluttering up museums.
As an old fart, I'll have to complain about youth misremembering here. C++ was born closer to the mid-eighties. I had the dubious pleasure of working with C++ in my first Data-structures class in 1985. The only documentation was an early photocopied draft of Stroustrup's first book.
(Dubious pleasure because at the time no one, not the grad students, not the professors, not anyone, had any clue what was going on with it.)
But yeah, your point stands.
(Hell, I remember looking at the C output of the C++ preprocessor, back before it was a true compiler. That was illuminating!)
Currently the only way for a teacher to make ends meet is to marry someone with a better paying job, like a programmer. Personally, I find it sick that my wife quite literally earns 1/3rd what I make as a coder to teacher children to read.
It doesn't look quite the same as the peace corps, which needs mostly unskilled labor. I don't think college students are the target here. They seem to be looking more for people who've been in the industry a while. (Hence the "burned out techie".)
There are an increasingly of techies who've "made their fortune" so to speak in the mid-thirties. On the other hand, older people tend to have more commitments, like spouses, mortgages, kids, etc. That could be a big problem here.
In some ways, I think this could be a cool thing to do, but there's no way I could do it. The nice thing about being right out of college is that you have no responsibilities.
I'd say, avoid kitchen-sink languages like Perl or C/C++. They tend to have idiosyncratic syntaxes and are simply too big for a first language.
Remember that the best language is not necessarily the best first language. To introduce programming, language versatility isn't particularly important. What you want is something that implements basic comp. sci. concepts very cleanly, without wierd syntax.
Best to go with things originally designed for learning. BASIC (not VB but just BASIC) or Pascal would be good choices. Even better, something like LEGO mindstorms specifically designed for kids.
Let them learn the basic concepts first. Then introduce them to the more complex languages like C++ or Perl.
I half agree with that. One problem with VB (and Visual C++ using MFC) is that it hides a whole heck of a lot of stuff from the user. Too much pointing and clicking without much understanding. Kids might be able to get something done, but they may not learn as much as with something else.
And how does Visual C++ help me when I need to build the project on Linux or Solaris?
It doesn't, of course. But the problem there is not the concept of the IDE.
What you are missing is the ease with which a good IDE will do much of that stuff. Visual C++ will tell you the parameter info of a function in a tooltip if you just position the mouse over it. It will put the same tooltip info up as you type parameters. Without any user interaction. It will give you a list of member functions to selection from if you type in a class instance and the '.' or '->'. Again, without any user interaction.
Yes, you can get the same information with VIM. But you can't get it as easily, or as transparently.
No, IDEs aren't perfect. But on (for example) a C/C++ project under Windows, IDEs clearly beat any editor I've ever found.
I love VIM. I have it installed on my Windows box. I learned to program C using vi and tutored other people in vi. I even wrote a vi-emulation mode for brief.
But there is a hell of a lot an ide will do for you beyond a compile button. Visual C++ will automatically find where a variable is defined. it will allow me to add files to a project with a mouse click instead of a makefile edit. It will tell me what modules call the symbol I've highlited. It will show me the header comment attached to the function call I've highlited. That's just a few things. IDEs can be incredibly useful if you know how to use them.
No offense, but it is hard to beat "find definition" for speed.
Certainly easier than trying to figure out which of the forty instances of the symbol you just grepped for is the definition. Especially if the code was written by an #ifdef crazy programmer.
Basic supply and demand. It costs that much because people are willing to pay that much.
However, if you look through the record store, I think you'll find that older albums are typically cheaper. For example, the latest Metallica album costs $17.99, while "Ride the Lightening" only casts $13.49 at cdnow.
Neither of those prices is anywhere than $1, but then, in very few products, not CDs, not books, not Cheerios, does the cost of product make up the major part of the total cost.
Somebody has to pay to get it to the store. Pay the rent on the store. Pay the rent on the warehouse. Pay the taxes. Pay the salaries. Etc, etc.
Just because the development costs apply only to the first copy doesn't me that they don't exist. Saying that it only costs $1 implies that record companies could sell CDs for $1 and still make a profit. That's pure and utter crap and I'd be amazed if even the person making the claim believes it.
If you want to talk about record company profit margins, that's fine. I'll probably agree that they're outragous. But implying that those profit margins are 90%, which is what a claim that it "only costs them $1" is doing, is pure FUD, and nothing else.
Re:Jon, corporations are not the danger
on
At The Crossroads
·
· Score: 1
You are making the mistake of assuming that it is a black and white world where there can be only one danger. Government is a danger. Corporations are a danger. The world is (unfortunately) full of danger.
Dangers to freedom lie wherever power is concentrated. Whether that is a government, corporation, military, rebel group, whatever. It doesn't really matter. It is any center of power that must be watched.
That's already the case. If you want to buy the latest Stephen King book, xerox 5,000 copies of it and stack them in your closet, your are within your rights to do so. It only becomes a copyright issue if you give one of those copies to a friend.
That's why it is perfectly legal (despite what the RIAA says) to rip a CD. You can make all the copies of that copyrighted data you want as long as you don't give that data to anyone else.
The point is that the moderation system doesn't stop something from reaching anyone unless they personally decide they don't want to see it.
Censorship is making a choice for someone against their will. That distinction is crucial.
Moderation does not stop a person from speaking. It may stop a person from being heard. That is a crucial difference. Free speech is about the right to speak. It is not about the right to be heard. The reason for this is that any "right to be heard" would infringe on someone else's right to choose what they listen to. Free speech means being allowed to stand on your soapbox and shout to anyone who will listen. It does not mean that you can demand that everyone must come listen.
The fact that people may decide not to post because they don't think anyone will willingly listen is does not show censorship, no more than the fact that people may decide that standing on a soapbox and shouting is pointless shows censorship.
You have a right to speak, not a right to force people to listen. The moderation system is merely a means whereby people decide what to listen to.
You could moderate tomatoes all the way to the bottom, and it wouldn't bother me, as I would simply stop using your "recipe moderation system" after discovering that it was not working for me.
Some people here may find moderation to not work for them, and chose the -1, oldest message first option.
It is only censorship when you force someone to read a certain way. The/. moderation gives increased freedom in that it provides multiple ways of looking at the data. Removing the moderation system and thereby forcing everyone to wade through the -1, trolls would represent less freedom. It would be forcing me to read a certain way because you want me to read that way.
The moderation system here is no more censorship then a spam filter is censorship.
I just want to point out that the main reason that it is a great deal of work to find a gem among the -1 trolls is not so much the moderation as the low number of gems and high number of trolls. It is trivial to browse at -1, but it is not so trivial to find anything worth reading at -1.
Were there no moderation system, hence no "censorship", you'd not have any easier time finding those gems. Likely you'd have a worse time, as there'd be even more trolls.
/. moderation is a filtering system, not a censorship system. The difference being that it is voluntary for the reader. This means that if 99.99999% of/. readers decide to browse at 1, that one lone reader willing to wade through the crap still can. That's why it is not censorship. Censorship is me telling you what you can't read. It is not me telling you what you ought not read. The latter is merely reviewing as it restricts you in no way whatsoever. And that's all/. moderation is. A reviewing system.
Too many people equate the freedom to not read what you don't want to read with censorship of the writer.
Slashdot Mirror
Diablo had one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard. It is one of the few games where I never turned it off.
Yeah, but they get really perturbed when you start firing at cohorts on the firing range.
uh huh...Yeah...right.
/. reader might decide who to vote for because of impressions of web-savviness, but then, the number of Oprah viewers in Rhode Island likely outweighs /. in terms of voting strengh.
Even ignoring the fact that I heard that same line in both 1998 and 1996, it is simply wrong. Web-pages for candidates are afterthoughts. Add-ons. They are done because the candidates don't want to seem techno-illiterate. But they won't change a damn thing. Nothing on a website is going to change the result of the elections. And the candidates know this, which is why the number of dollars spent on television advertising will likely outweight the number of dollars spent on political efforts on the web by a factor of a thousand.
We tend to get insular, thinking that because the internet is a large part of our world, that it must therefore be a large part of the world in general. Yeah, a
3000 years from now, archealogists will be hard-pressed to find a copy of the constitution, but there will be hundreds of "Chuck E Cheese" signs cluttering up museums.
As an old fart, I'll have to complain about youth misremembering here. C++ was born closer to the mid-eighties. I had the dubious pleasure of working with C++ in my first Data-structures class in 1985. The only documentation was an early photocopied draft of Stroustrup's first book.
(Dubious pleasure because at the time no one, not the grad students, not the professors, not anyone, had any clue what was going on with it.)
But yeah, your point stands.
(Hell, I remember looking at the C output of the C++ preprocessor, back before it was a true compiler. That was illuminating!)
Currently the only way for a teacher to make ends meet is to marry someone with a better paying job, like a programmer. Personally, I find it sick that my wife quite literally earns 1/3rd what I make as a coder to teacher children to read.
(34, and still coding.)
It doesn't look quite the same as the peace corps, which needs mostly unskilled labor. I don't think college students are the target here. They seem to be looking more for people who've been in the industry a while. (Hence the "burned out techie".)
There are an increasingly of techies who've "made their fortune" so to speak in the mid-thirties. On the other hand, older people tend to have more commitments, like spouses, mortgages, kids, etc. That could be a big problem here.
In some ways, I think this could be a cool thing to do, but there's no way I could do it. The nice thing about being right out of college is that you have no responsibilities.
I'd say, avoid kitchen-sink languages like Perl or C/C++. They tend to have idiosyncratic syntaxes and are simply too big for a first language.
Remember that the best language is not necessarily the best first language. To introduce programming, language versatility isn't particularly important. What you want is something that implements basic comp. sci. concepts very cleanly, without wierd syntax.
Best to go with things originally designed for learning. BASIC (not VB but just BASIC) or Pascal would be good choices. Even better, something like LEGO mindstorms specifically designed for kids.
Let them learn the basic concepts first. Then introduce them to the more complex languages like C++ or Perl.
I half agree with that. One problem with VB (and Visual C++ using MFC) is that it hides a whole heck of a lot of stuff from the user. Too much pointing and clicking without much understanding. Kids might be able to get something done, but they may not learn as much as with something else.
At some point, will the "Plain Old Text" posting option get fixed so that it really posts exactly what gets typed?
You know, like not processing tags and not removing anything that looks like a tag?
(Previewing, I see now that it has just somehow been swapped with the "Extrans" option.)
It doesn't, of course. But the problem there is not the concept of the IDE.
What you are missing is the ease with which a good IDE will do much of that stuff. Visual C++ will tell you the parameter info of a function in a tooltip if you just position the mouse over it. It will put the same tooltip info up as you type parameters. Without any user interaction. It will give you a list of member functions to selection from if you type in a class instance and the '.' or '->'. Again, without any user interaction.
Yes, you can get the same information with VIM. But you can't get it as easily, or as transparently.
No, IDEs aren't perfect. But on (for example) a C/C++ project under Windows, IDEs clearly beat any editor I've ever found.
I love VIM. I have it installed on my Windows box. I learned to program C using vi and tutored other people in vi. I even wrote a vi-emulation mode for brief.
But there is a hell of a lot an ide will do for you beyond a compile button. Visual C++ will automatically find where a variable is defined. it will allow me to add files to a project with a mouse click instead of a makefile edit. It will tell me what modules call the symbol I've highlited. It will show me the header comment attached to the function call I've highlited. That's just a few things. IDEs can be incredibly useful if you know how to use them.
Damn /. doesn't know what "plain old text" means. That should be [right-click]"find definition".
No offense, but it is hard to beat "find definition" for speed.
Certainly easier than trying to figure out which of the forty instances of the symbol you just grepped for is the definition. Especially if the code was written by an #ifdef crazy programmer.
I'm glad to see that the moderators still are able to separate opinion from moderation
Yes, if you ignore all the other costs that go into getting a CD to the customer.
There are a lot of costs associated with selling something that have nothing to do with the production. A lot. The majority, in fact.
Basic supply and demand. It costs that much because people are willing to pay that much.
However, if you look through the record store, I think you'll find that older albums are typically cheaper. For example, the latest Metallica album costs $17.99, while "Ride the Lightening" only casts $13.49 at cdnow.
Neither of those prices is anywhere than $1, but then, in very few products, not CDs, not books, not Cheerios, does the cost of product make up the major part of the total cost.
Somebody has to pay to get it to the store. Pay the rent on the store. Pay the rent on the warehouse. Pay the taxes. Pay the salaries. Etc, etc.
Just because the development costs apply only to the first copy doesn't me that they don't exist. Saying that it only costs $1 implies that record companies could sell CDs for $1 and still make a profit. That's pure and utter crap and I'd be amazed if even the person making the claim believes it.
If you want to talk about record company profit margins, that's fine. I'll probably agree that they're outragous. But implying that those profit margins are 90%, which is what a claim that it "only costs them $1" is doing, is pure FUD, and nothing else.
You are making the mistake of assuming that it is a black and white world where there can be only one danger. Government is a danger. Corporations are a danger. The world is (unfortunately) full of danger.
Dangers to freedom lie wherever power is concentrated. Whether that is a government, corporation, military, rebel group, whatever. It doesn't really matter. It is any center of power that must be watched.
That's already the case. If you want to buy the latest Stephen King book, xerox 5,000 copies of it and stack them in your closet, your are within your rights to do so. It only becomes a copyright issue if you give one of those copies to a friend.
That's why it is perfectly legal (despite what the RIAA says) to rip a CD. You can make all the copies of that copyrighted data you want as long as you don't give that data to anyone else.
Nobody who has access to broadband internet access buys CD's anymore.I>
I do.
The point is that the moderation system doesn't stop something from reaching anyone unless they personally decide they don't want to see it.
Censorship is making a choice for someone against their will. That distinction is crucial.
Moderation does not stop a person from speaking. It may stop a person from being heard. That is a crucial difference. Free speech is about the right to speak. It is not about the right to be heard. The reason for this is that any "right to be heard" would infringe on someone else's right to choose what they listen to. Free speech means being allowed to stand on your soapbox and shout to anyone who will listen. It does not mean that you can demand that everyone must come listen.
The fact that people may decide not to post because they don't think anyone will willingly listen is does not show censorship, no more than the fact that people may decide that standing on a soapbox and shouting is pointless shows censorship.
You have a right to speak, not a right to force people to listen. The moderation system is merely a means whereby people decide what to listen to.
But only because you choose to read what they tell you to read!
If choice is involved, it is not censorship, and not even close to censorship.
Censorship would be me telling you that you must browse at 2 or, for that matter, that you must browse at -1.
"Censoring yourself" is not choosing what to read. It is choosing what to write.
Some people here may find moderation to not work for them, and chose the -1, oldest message first option.
It is only censorship when you force someone to read a certain way. The /. moderation gives increased freedom in that it provides multiple ways of looking at the data. Removing the moderation system and thereby forcing everyone to wade through the -1, trolls would represent less freedom. It would be forcing me to read a certain way because you want me to read that way.
The moderation system here is no more censorship then a spam filter is censorship.
I just want to point out that the main reason that it is a great deal of work to find a gem among the -1 trolls is not so much the moderation as the low number of gems and high number of trolls. It is trivial to browse at -1, but it is not so trivial to find anything worth reading at -1.
/. readers decide to browse at 1, that one lone reader willing to wade through the crap still can. That's why it is not censorship. Censorship is me telling you what you can't read. It is not me telling you what you ought not read. The latter is merely reviewing as it restricts you in no way whatsoever. And that's all /. moderation is. A reviewing system.
Were there no moderation system, hence no "censorship", you'd not have any easier time finding those gems. Likely you'd have a worse time, as there'd be even more trolls.
/. moderation is a filtering system, not a censorship system. The difference being that it is voluntary for the reader. This means that if 99.99999% of
Too many people equate the freedom to not read what you don't want to read with censorship of the writer.