No, the problem is 'programmers' who are hostile to the very idea that they be able to program. The stuff he is asking for is really, really basic stuff. As in, a teenager who picked up a basic introduction to C# book and spent a few weeks playing with it would know enough to pass the interview. If you're applying for a C# job (rather you than me...) and you don't know this stuff, there's something wrong with you - why would you even think you were qualified? No one applies for a job as a car mechanic and doesn't know which way to turn a nut - if they're that ignorant and want to be in the field then they'd either do an apprenticeship or some other form of training - yet people like you seem to think it's quite appropriate to apply for an entry-level job without even entry-level skills.
The designer and implementer of BBC BASIC was transgender, and the capabilities of that language (full support for structured programming, integrated assembler, and so on) were the main point that got Acorn the contract to build the BBC Micro.
I didn't RTFA, because I don't like giving clicks to trolls, but a 21,000 strong facebook group is really not an indication of anything. Even if they're all in the USA and are all employed as programmers, that's only about 2% of the total group. If it's worldwide and some of them are idiot fratboys who want to pretend that they're intelligent, then it's probably under 0.5%. If you can find a community of more than a few thousand that doesn't have a group of idiot bigots making up 0.5% of it, then please let me know...
I don't think 'Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister' is a woman. In fact, claiming that he is is probably the most denigrating thing anyone has said about women in this entire thread...
poor programmers can write bad code in any language
Poor programmers can write bad code in any language and good programmers can write good code in any language. Any Turing-complete language can implement any algorithm. Both of these are irrelevant in evaluating the merits of a language. The things that matter are:
Is it easier to write good code than bad code in this language?
Does the language make it easy to implement the kinds of algorithm that you need for this task?
If you're doing a lot of string manipulation, Perl often answers yes to the second, but I've seen no evidence that it ever answers yes to the first.
That's a library, it's not integrated with the language. By the same token, C++ is as good as Mathematica for symbolic algebra manipulation, because you can do everything that Mathematica does via C++ libraries. Syntax matters.
This is more or less the same technique used by the open source nVidia drivers. The important thing is that he is treating the blob as a black box. He feeds it certain inputs and looks at what it outputs. This lets him work out roughly what the blob is doing, but not how it is doing it. His implementation should do roughly the same thing as the blob, but may do it in a very different way.
Are you serious? The amount of plant matter that needs to be digested by an animal to create enough meat to feed a human is far more than the amount of plant matter that needs to be eaten by the human to replace the meat.
The problem is that the division of who is enforcing their beliefs on whom is not always clear. For example, I think murder is bad. If someone else thinks murder is fine, then they are being restricted from practicing their beliefs by laws. I think you'd find it hard to argue that people who think murder is okay should be allowed to commit murders and people who don't should just not murder anyone - society couldn't function that way. In the abortion debate, the people on the pro life side honestly believe that killing a foetus is morally equivalent to killing an adult. They will respond to your assertion just as you would respond to someone likening your opinion that people shouldn't kill other people to the Taliban wanting women to cover their faces.
In September 2001, more people in the USA died as a result of road accidents than as a result of terrorist action. Imagine what would have happened if all of the money spent on the TSA had been spent on road safety instead...
I've found that that kind of anthropomorphization is useful as placeholders for other, complex causations
Exactly, and as such magical thinking is not a long-term advantage, it's a short-term hack. Fully understanding every complex system that you interact with in even one day would take most of a lifetime. You need quick and dirty approximations to be able to get anything done. The problems start when you start to regard these approximations as true, rather than as useful lies. This even applies to human interactions - you can use game theory to work out the best way of cooperating to achieve mutually beneficial goals, or you can just use a quick hack like 'if you help people they'll probably help you' and get almost the same results.
My parents and grandparents? They had the space race. First man in space. First space walk. First moon landing
In short, all of the easy stuff was done before you were born. Getting into orbit has gone from being something on the national news to something that happens so regularly that a vast amount of modern infrastructure depends on it. In fact, it's become so easy that we now worry about the amount of stuff in orbit.
Once you've got into orbit, you're most of the way to the moon, in terms of energy usage. Going to other planets is harder, although we've done that with probes. But after that there's the question of motivation. There are lots of reasons to want to get into orbit - it's the ultimate high ground and gives you an unparalleled view of the Earth. Getting to the moon? Well, you can wave a flag, but after that it's a pretty uninteresting lump of rock. Mars? Even if it were made entirely of gold (or something actually useful, like refined uranium) then the cost involved in getting things back from there would make it largely uninteresting.
And the step beyond that, travelling to other stars, doesn't just require better engineering, it requires new physics. If anyone works out how to build a superluminal engine, then you can bet that there will be a huge amount of funding devoted to building it, but until then the problem with space is finding something useful to do there. Even scientific missions are better done by small unmanned probes.
On the other hand, do you think your iPad will last 5 years?
In five years, you will be able to get a new one with a higher resolution display, a much faster processor, much more RAM and storage space, and support for the latest mobile network standards. Your current model can do more processing in an hour than the computer on the Voyager probes can do in a year.
In contrast, the Voyager probes were very expensive to produce one-off products and are in a location that is almost impossible - and totally impractical - to service or even get replacement parts to. In other words,they were both built with completely different sets of design requirements.
Because this driver will continue to be supported for as long as there is interest in it, not just until nVidia decides that it's time for you to buy a new GPU. A few years ago, nVidia released a driver with a remotely exploitable (kernel mode arbitrary code execution) vulnerability. When this was publicly disclosed (about a year after being reported to nVidia), they released a driver update that fixed it, but which didn't provide support for all of the cards that were vulnerable. You had two choices then if you had slightly older hardware: you could run a driver with a known vulnerability, or you could use the VESA driver and have no hardware acceleration at all. Now you'd have a third choice: run a slower driver that is maintained and constantly improving.
It copies a lot of semantics from Smalltalk and Objective-C. If either can be copyrighted then they're infringing the copyright of others, if neither can then they don't have anything that can be copyrighted.
This could probably be enacted as a state level. It's been a good few years since I looked at the relevant bits of US law, but I believe that it's already technically possible for state governments to recall their representatives and senators.
The researchers can't be this far removed from the state of the art
They aren't. The way this works is a conversation something like this:
MIT PR: We want to write about your research, what do you do? Researcher: We're looking at highly scalable interconnects for future manycore systems. MIT PR: Interconnects? Like wires? Researcher: No, the way in which the cores on a chip communicate. MIT PR: So how does that work? Researcher: {long explanation} MIT PR: {blank expression} Researcher: You know how the Internet works? With packet switching? MIT PR: I guess... Researcher: Well, kind-of like that. MIT PR: Our researchers are putting the Internet in a CPU!!1!111eleventyone
The reason they weren't a huge success was because nobody had found a need for them yet
It was more the fact that processors at the time kept getting faster. The number of transistors doubled every 12-18 months, and this translated to at least a doubling in performance. As with other massively parallel systems, you needed to rewrite your software to take advantage of it, while you could just wait a year and your single-threaded system got faster. This is why multicore is suddenly interesting: chip designers have run out of obvious (and even not-so-obvious) things to do with extra transistors to make existing code faster. Extra cache worked for a while. FPUs, then vector units worked a bit. Wider superscalar systems did until we'd got as much ILP out of the code as was generally possible.
The idea is to make people say 'MIT? They're full of really smart people!' As with the last dozen or so MIT press releases published on Slashdot, it describes, in very vague term, an idea that people in the field have been working on in various institutions for a decade or so. I don't know what MIT is like for research these days, but their press office is probably the best of any university in the world.
cpu6502 is in the USA, where local telephone calls are usually free. If your ISP has a local POP then the telephone bill will be nothing beyond your line rental. This is a big part of the reason why dialup was more popular in the US than in Europe, where a per-minute fee was more common. It's also part of the reason why mobile phone adoption was slower in the US.
I think there is one that works on Windows. For other platforms, the setup involves running Windows in VirtualBox or similar. Unfortunately this is a requirement because Netflix streaming uses Silverlight with some DRM that is not compatible with Moonlight, so is only available on Windows. Want to fix it? Write to the movie studios and tell them that this is why they're not getting any of your money.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the problem is 'programmers' who are hostile to the very idea that they be able to program. The stuff he is asking for is really, really basic stuff. As in, a teenager who picked up a basic introduction to C# book and spent a few weeks playing with it would know enough to pass the interview. If you're applying for a C# job (rather you than me...) and you don't know this stuff, there's something wrong with you - why would you even think you were qualified? No one applies for a job as a car mechanic and doesn't know which way to turn a nut - if they're that ignorant and want to be in the field then they'd either do an apprenticeship or some other form of training - yet people like you seem to think it's quite appropriate to apply for an entry-level job without even entry-level skills.
The designer and implementer of BBC BASIC was transgender, and the capabilities of that language (full support for structured programming, integrated assembler, and so on) were the main point that got Acorn the contract to build the BBC Micro.
I didn't RTFA, because I don't like giving clicks to trolls, but a 21,000 strong facebook group is really not an indication of anything. Even if they're all in the USA and are all employed as programmers, that's only about 2% of the total group. If it's worldwide and some of them are idiot fratboys who want to pretend that they're intelligent, then it's probably under 0.5%. If you can find a community of more than a few thousand that doesn't have a group of idiot bigots making up 0.5% of it, then please let me know...
I don't think 'Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister' is a woman. In fact, claiming that he is is probably the most denigrating thing anyone has said about women in this entire thread...
poor programmers can write bad code in any language
Poor programmers can write bad code in any language and good programmers can write good code in any language. Any Turing-complete language can implement any algorithm. Both of these are irrelevant in evaluating the merits of a language. The things that matter are:
If you're doing a lot of string manipulation, Perl often answers yes to the second, but I've seen no evidence that it ever answers yes to the first.
That's a library, it's not integrated with the language. By the same token, C++ is as good as Mathematica for symbolic algebra manipulation, because you can do everything that Mathematica does via C++ libraries. Syntax matters.
This is more or less the same technique used by the open source nVidia drivers. The important thing is that he is treating the blob as a black box. He feeds it certain inputs and looks at what it outputs. This lets him work out roughly what the blob is doing, but not how it is doing it. His implementation should do roughly the same thing as the blob, but may do it in a very different way.
If it makes you feel any better, Android has the same idiocy.
Are you serious? The amount of plant matter that needs to be digested by an animal to create enough meat to feed a human is far more than the amount of plant matter that needs to be eaten by the human to replace the meat.
The problem is that the division of who is enforcing their beliefs on whom is not always clear. For example, I think murder is bad. If someone else thinks murder is fine, then they are being restricted from practicing their beliefs by laws. I think you'd find it hard to argue that people who think murder is okay should be allowed to commit murders and people who don't should just not murder anyone - society couldn't function that way. In the abortion debate, the people on the pro life side honestly believe that killing a foetus is morally equivalent to killing an adult. They will respond to your assertion just as you would respond to someone likening your opinion that people shouldn't kill other people to the Taliban wanting women to cover their faces.
In September 2001, more people in the USA died as a result of road accidents than as a result of terrorist action. Imagine what would have happened if all of the money spent on the TSA had been spent on road safety instead...
Any language that contains functions and variables could be convincingly argued to be a derived work of lambda calculus.
I've found that that kind of anthropomorphization is useful as placeholders for other, complex causations
Exactly, and as such magical thinking is not a long-term advantage, it's a short-term hack. Fully understanding every complex system that you interact with in even one day would take most of a lifetime. You need quick and dirty approximations to be able to get anything done. The problems start when you start to regard these approximations as true, rather than as useful lies. This even applies to human interactions - you can use game theory to work out the best way of cooperating to achieve mutually beneficial goals, or you can just use a quick hack like 'if you help people they'll probably help you' and get almost the same results.
My parents and grandparents? They had the space race. First man in space. First space walk. First moon landing
In short, all of the easy stuff was done before you were born. Getting into orbit has gone from being something on the national news to something that happens so regularly that a vast amount of modern infrastructure depends on it. In fact, it's become so easy that we now worry about the amount of stuff in orbit.
Once you've got into orbit, you're most of the way to the moon, in terms of energy usage. Going to other planets is harder, although we've done that with probes. But after that there's the question of motivation. There are lots of reasons to want to get into orbit - it's the ultimate high ground and gives you an unparalleled view of the Earth. Getting to the moon? Well, you can wave a flag, but after that it's a pretty uninteresting lump of rock. Mars? Even if it were made entirely of gold (or something actually useful, like refined uranium) then the cost involved in getting things back from there would make it largely uninteresting.
And the step beyond that, travelling to other stars, doesn't just require better engineering, it requires new physics. If anyone works out how to build a superluminal engine, then you can bet that there will be a huge amount of funding devoted to building it, but until then the problem with space is finding something useful to do there. Even scientific missions are better done by small unmanned probes.
On the other hand, do you think your iPad will last 5 years?
In five years, you will be able to get a new one with a higher resolution display, a much faster processor, much more RAM and storage space, and support for the latest mobile network standards. Your current model can do more processing in an hour than the computer on the Voyager probes can do in a year.
In contrast, the Voyager probes were very expensive to produce one-off products and are in a location that is almost impossible - and totally impractical - to service or even get replacement parts to. In other words,they were both built with completely different sets of design requirements.
Because this driver will continue to be supported for as long as there is interest in it, not just until nVidia decides that it's time for you to buy a new GPU. A few years ago, nVidia released a driver with a remotely exploitable (kernel mode arbitrary code execution) vulnerability. When this was publicly disclosed (about a year after being reported to nVidia), they released a driver update that fixed it, but which didn't provide support for all of the cards that were vulnerable. You had two choices then if you had slightly older hardware: you could run a driver with a known vulnerability, or you could use the VESA driver and have no hardware acceleration at all. Now you'd have a third choice: run a slower driver that is maintained and constantly improving.
It copies a lot of semantics from Smalltalk and Objective-C. If either can be copyrighted then they're infringing the copyright of others, if neither can then they don't have anything that can be copyrighted.
It's his accent. He actually said bacon of the world. It was his plan to combat obesity in the USA...
IBM,
IBM, as in 'nobody ever got fired for abusing a monopoly' IBM?
Intel,
Intel, as in the company responsible for price fixing, dumping, and bribing companies not to use its competitor's products?
Lockheed Martin,
You mean a big part of the military industrial complex?
Oracle?
Seriously?
This could probably be enacted as a state level. It's been a good few years since I looked at the relevant bits of US law, but I believe that it's already technically possible for state governments to recall their representatives and senators.
The researchers can't be this far removed from the state of the art
They aren't. The way this works is a conversation something like this:
MIT PR: We want to write about your research, what do you do?
Researcher: We're looking at highly scalable interconnects for future manycore systems.
MIT PR: Interconnects? Like wires?
Researcher: No, the way in which the cores on a chip communicate.
MIT PR: So how does that work?
Researcher: {long explanation}
MIT PR: {blank expression}
Researcher: You know how the Internet works? With packet switching?
MIT PR: I guess...
Researcher: Well, kind-of like that.
MIT PR: Our researchers are putting the Internet in a CPU!!1!111eleventyone
The reason they weren't a huge success was because nobody had found a need for them yet
It was more the fact that processors at the time kept getting faster. The number of transistors doubled every 12-18 months, and this translated to at least a doubling in performance. As with other massively parallel systems, you needed to rewrite your software to take advantage of it, while you could just wait a year and your single-threaded system got faster. This is why multicore is suddenly interesting: chip designers have run out of obvious (and even not-so-obvious) things to do with extra transistors to make existing code faster. Extra cache worked for a while. FPUs, then vector units worked a bit. Wider superscalar systems did until we'd got as much ILP out of the code as was generally possible.
The idea is to make people say 'MIT? They're full of really smart people!' As with the last dozen or so MIT press releases published on Slashdot, it describes, in very vague term, an idea that people in the field have been working on in various institutions for a decade or so. I don't know what MIT is like for research these days, but their press office is probably the best of any university in the world.
cpu6502 is in the USA, where local telephone calls are usually free. If your ISP has a local POP then the telephone bill will be nothing beyond your line rental. This is a big part of the reason why dialup was more popular in the US than in Europe, where a per-minute fee was more common. It's also part of the reason why mobile phone adoption was slower in the US.
I think there is one that works on Windows. For other platforms, the setup involves running Windows in VirtualBox or similar. Unfortunately this is a requirement because Netflix streaming uses Silverlight with some DRM that is not compatible with Moonlight, so is only available on Windows. Want to fix it? Write to the movie studios and tell them that this is why they're not getting any of your money.