I went through college in the early 2000s at a school where a laptop was required for school.
I did terrible in classes where the teachers expected us to have our laptops. They'd do stuff with Maple, Mathematica, Maple, etc. I went back to keeping the laptop in my backpack and writing the code down along with a verbal description of what each line did.
Transcription errors just forced me to RTFM (StackExchange was still 7 years from existence) and understand what each command actually did along with calling options.
Plus there was "StarCraft", the kid that did nothing but StarCraft all class. Headphones and all.
You are correct, truly out of thin air is very energy expensive. However syngas can be generated from any organic feedstock. We could start mining landfills, use electric heat to get them to put off CO/H2O and then use that to make fuel.
Then step up and use the same fix the last time this bug came up: Unionize.
Coding and programming has made its way into the skilled trade territory. You have 6-18 week hands on training. A skilled trade welder has as much overlap in knowledge and skill with a welding engineer as a 'boot camp coder' has with someone with a CS degree. Both skills are in high demand but the 'boot camp coders' are getting screwed because of their insistence that they are each special snow flakes and a trade union would hurt their earning potential but in reality everyone would be better off.
And no, that doesn't mean CS, CompE or EE degrees are going away either. It just means they're going to change what they're doing just like every other profession with a skilled trade portion has done since the beginning of time. In engineering you have Engineers, Engineering Techs/Technologists and on down. In medicine you have Doctors, PAs, Nurses, and Orderlys. Different skills, different knowledge, different training. But Nurses and Technologists, unlike 'bootcamp coders' are unionized.
It would also take care of the continuing education portion of the job market by putting training back in the hands of the union. I have friends in HVAC and pipefitting unions that get annual education. They are contracted out to companies that need HVAC and pipe fitting and live a pretty good blue collar life.
Or don't. Continue to get screwed by companies by thinking you're the one exception to the rule.
You could never get a new law passed that restricted elderly drivers in Florida even though there are a lot of them that should not be driving anymore.
This is one scenario where I'm all for letting the "free market" take care of the situation.
Over 60 and have a self driving car? Cheap insurance.
Over 60 and have a self stopping car? Moderately priced insurance.
Over 60 and want to drive your 90s Buick? Very high priced insurance.
As already commented there are already dozens of different online "Netflixes" of learning.
What we need is a meat space hands on "teaching on demand" service. You can throw youtube videos and engineering books at me all day long and I may eventually learn. What we need is a hands on skilled trade teaching service. The "hands on" learners are the ones getting left behind in the push for everyone to go to college and learn online.
I have way too many cheap development boards floating around my house. The only truly useless ones are the Allwinners. uBoot is a non-standard locked down version with no source available. The Linux kernel is a custom version with no source available.
While Broadcom isn't exactly great, the RaspPi's success as pushed them into opening some things up and the RaspPi's community has the momentum behind it to keep it going. And my ~10 year old SheevaPlug with a Marvell chip is still going strong. Marvell went the exact opposite way of Allwinner and said "eh, screw it, here's everything" and has their code in the kernel mainline.
$10 is not worth the hassle of dealing with an Allwinner chip.
I have a fairly connected home but nothing is hosted outside of my house. All of the IoT devices and cheap Chinese cameras are on their own firewalled VLAN.
You can do IoT without giving control of your own devices.
Tractors should be outlawed. People don't need to be pulling plows, seed drills and combines with artificial horses. It is, however, a great way to become dependent on petroleum.
ANYTHING a preschooler learns about computers will be irrelevant by the time they are adults, however the social skills and natural language skills they develop are there for life.
I wasn't quite a preschooler but I started coding and 'hacking' around in elementary school. That stuff has stuck with me and evolved over time.
I probably couldn't write a valid line of HyperCard these days but it doesn't mean that the learning was wasted.
You're right. I'm a mechanical engineer that picks the best hammer for the job. In 10 years it'll probably be something different just like it was different 10 years ago.
My boss comes to me and says "I need this done for these people" and it's my job to get it done. Not schedule daily meetings and argue with him over what language is best.
ripe for H1B.
I wish. I'd hire a dozen H1Bs to do the boring parts of my job so I could concentrate on the rest.
Perl won the GenX popularity contest a long time ago. No one is coming after your Perl, don't worry. You can use it until the day you die.
You'll be able to recruit Perl developers long after your death just like they do for COBOL and FORTRAN.
And when Millennials get older hey'll have as many complaints about what ever the next gen programming language is and why Python is the best thing ever. Slashdot will be running stories about "Perl developer shortages" and life will go on.
You're doing the technological equivalent of arguing over what hammer is better. No one is going to take away your blacksmith's anvil or coarse hammers. I just prefer something else.
. I'd rather have the choice.
I'd rather just learn how to do both and teach my brain how to switch depending on what I'm developing. It's about as different as learning to speak another language and then doing so. Arguing than Spanish's word order is better than German's isn't going to help you solve any problems nor is screaming at the Germans in Spanish to "just learn Spanish".
Today I'll work in Python, tomorrow Bash, the rest of the week Matlab. Occasionally PHP, C, VBA, JavaScript and a few others. Same reason I have to deal with Git, SVN, and ClearCase. In the corporate wold it's easier to learn to do something new than change the momentum of an entire corporation.
And you can't paste a long program into a single line edit box as the indentation matters.
I take that time to proof read and learn the language and customize the example I copy and pasted for my application.
Whitespace as a statement delimiter is stupid, and it being popular just means that there are a lot of stupid people.
_______ is stupid, and it being popular just means that there are a lot of stupid people.
Somewhere there's an old assembly developer saying something very similar about the C developers. And the C developers about the Perl, and Perl about Python, Python about what ever comes next.
It's pretty clear that Python's going to come out on top of the GenY/Millenial coding club. Ruby got a quick lead making Web 2.0 development easy but Python hit critical mass just by the number of available packages. Numpy, Matplotlib, etc. "How to ___ with Python" nearly always turns up a result.
And peers: No, just like COBOL and FORTRAN, C and your current $favorite_language isn't ever going to go away. I still do a lot of C, Matlab and Simulink at work. But when I have the opportunity Python is just faster due to the shear number of packages that already exist.
Which is why I BSD everything I do/can write. I still have to eat and if you want a custom specialized version I'll write it for you for $$/hr, it's all yours. Turns out it's good business.
Turns out that a lot of companies do end up rolling back. Look at every corporation and commit that touches FreeBSD's code base. How much has Apple contributed to CUPS, LLVM, ZeroConf, etc? Even Microsoft has joined the bandwagon as of late.
No, it's not the Star Trek Unicorns Communist GPLv3 that some people claim is the One True open source, but it puts food on my table and puts the food on the tables of a lot of developers.
In a lot of bigger old companies OpenSource is a forbidden word. Working with AUTOSAR and ISO26262 at separate companies it's sad how many companies are reinventing the wheel on their own because: "Our competitors might steal our work." Our legal team forbid us from sending in bug reports to something as popular as Numpy because: "The information could reveal _____ proprietary information." Despite the fact that where it was found is such a niche of a niche of a part of the programming industry that I could hand out our source code and there may be 1000 people at 10 different companies that even knew what it did.
I'd love to see what VW, BMW, Benz, Caterpillar, Cummins, Ford, and Toyota are doing for their on-highway software certifications. Maybe provide some feedback. I'd like to share with them what I use, maybe they can improve it and save some time doing the same thing.
Go through the Fortune 500 and see how many companies have an active GitHub repository. Everyone on slashdot did a doubletake when Walmart opensourced its cloud ops. It seemed to be a shock that Walmart got as big and efficient as they did without some technology pulling the strings.
NXP just released a $35 development board that is hampered by terrible software and outdated business practices. Despite being "free" you need a license key that multiple people have trouble with. All of the Matlab and Simulink code they released is protected. However for the first time, ever, the GCC source code for e200 core PPC chips with VLE extensions has been released for free. Previously you had to have a WindRiver or GreenHills.
Who knows what random product or software people could come up with if they were allowed to work with peers doing the same thing. Even if it was for a sworn corporate mortal enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
Follow the multitude of other voc tech training paradigms and industry solutions and apply them to coding.
Yes, this does mean coders should unionize if they want to stop getting walked on.
I went through college in the early 2000s at a school where a laptop was required for school.
I did terrible in classes where the teachers expected us to have our laptops. They'd do stuff with Maple, Mathematica, Maple, etc. I went back to keeping the laptop in my backpack and writing the code down along with a verbal description of what each line did.
Transcription errors just forced me to RTFM (StackExchange was still 7 years from existence) and understand what each command actually did along with calling options.
Plus there was "StarCraft", the kid that did nothing but StarCraft all class. Headphones and all.
eBay. For the people that haven't figured out how to cut out the middle men.
Someone needs to resurrect Fucked Company. We're missing a prime opportunity for comedy.
You are correct, truly out of thin air is very energy expensive. However syngas can be generated from any organic feedstock. We could start mining landfills, use electric heat to get them to put off CO/H2O and then use that to make fuel.
If electricity is cheap enough you can generate 'oil-based' fuels out of air and water.
Boston is.
http://news.nationalgeographic...
That's all fine and well and is the equivalent of writing your own code at home.
Are you also volunteering to plumb new hospitals? Volunteering to wire new factories?
The point stands and trades still have their place.
Then step up and use the same fix the last time this bug came up: Unionize.
Coding and programming has made its way into the skilled trade territory. You have 6-18 week hands on training. A skilled trade welder has as much overlap in knowledge and skill with a welding engineer as a 'boot camp coder' has with someone with a CS degree. Both skills are in high demand but the 'boot camp coders' are getting screwed because of their insistence that they are each special snow flakes and a trade union would hurt their earning potential but in reality everyone would be better off.
And no, that doesn't mean CS, CompE or EE degrees are going away either. It just means they're going to change what they're doing just like every other profession with a skilled trade portion has done since the beginning of time. In engineering you have Engineers, Engineering Techs/Technologists and on down. In medicine you have Doctors, PAs, Nurses, and Orderlys. Different skills, different knowledge, different training. But Nurses and Technologists, unlike 'bootcamp coders' are unionized.
It would also take care of the continuing education portion of the job market by putting training back in the hands of the union. I have friends in HVAC and pipefitting unions that get annual education. They are contracted out to companies that need HVAC and pipe fitting and live a pretty good blue collar life.
Or don't. Continue to get screwed by companies by thinking you're the one exception to the rule.
You could never get a new law passed that restricted elderly drivers in Florida even though there are a lot of them that should not be driving anymore.
This is one scenario where I'm all for letting the "free market" take care of the situation.
Over 60 and have a self driving car? Cheap insurance.
Over 60 and have a self stopping car? Moderately priced insurance.
Over 60 and want to drive your 90s Buick? Very high priced insurance.
As already commented there are already dozens of different online "Netflixes" of learning.
What we need is a meat space hands on "teaching on demand" service. You can throw youtube videos and engineering books at me all day long and I may eventually learn. What we need is a hands on skilled trade teaching service. The "hands on" learners are the ones getting left behind in the push for everyone to go to college and learn online.
Most of the Allwinner boards will quite happily boot and run on 100% open source code these days,
Awesome! Can you provide any instructions or links to make my CubieBoard 4 with Allwiner A80 not useless?
sunxi linux still lists most things as not supported and not worked on: http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_m...
Under GPL violations they list:
As is usual, there are the libnand and libisp violations. But with A80, Allwinner decided to step this up a notch, or two, or all the way to 11.
I haven't checked recently but Ubuntu and Debian were both at least 1-2 versions out of date.
And that's putting aside the reset issues if you put it under any sort of load for over a few minutes.
I have way too many cheap development boards floating around my house. The only truly useless ones are the Allwinners. uBoot is a non-standard locked down version with no source available. The Linux kernel is a custom version with no source available.
While Broadcom isn't exactly great, the RaspPi's success as pushed them into opening some things up and the RaspPi's community has the momentum behind it to keep it going. And my ~10 year old SheevaPlug with a Marvell chip is still going strong. Marvell went the exact opposite way of Allwinner and said "eh, screw it, here's everything" and has their code in the kernel mainline.
$10 is not worth the hassle of dealing with an Allwinner chip.
IoT != DaaS.
I have a fairly connected home but nothing is hosted outside of my house. All of the IoT devices and cheap Chinese cameras are on their own firewalled VLAN.
You can do IoT without giving control of your own devices.
Tractors should be outlawed. People don't need to be pulling plows, seed drills and combines with artificial horses. It is, however, a great way to become dependent on petroleum.
It would be a huge win for horse breeders.
More like Intel was playing too much catchup to ARM, AVR, ESP8266, MIPS, PPC and the other embedded chipsets.
Turns out "But it's x86!" isn't as much of a selling point as they thought it was.
So all of the automatic buy/sell triggers realized this and no one dumped their stocks in a firesale, right?
ANYTHING a preschooler learns about computers will be irrelevant by the time they are adults, however the social skills and natural language skills they develop are there for life.
I wasn't quite a preschooler but I started coding and 'hacking' around in elementary school. That stuff has stuck with me and evolved over time.
I probably couldn't write a valid line of HyperCard these days but it doesn't mean that the learning was wasted.
And most people were better off with a horse than a Model T.
you're no programmer
You're right. I'm a mechanical engineer that picks the best hammer for the job. In 10 years it'll probably be something different just like it was different 10 years ago.
My boss comes to me and says "I need this done for these people" and it's my job to get it done. Not schedule daily meetings and argue with him over what language is best.
ripe for H1B.
I wish. I'd hire a dozen H1Bs to do the boring parts of my job so I could concentrate on the rest.
I still find people who haven't benchmarked file processing or heavy business logic.
It doesn't take much time to reveal performance gaps.
And sometimes it's cheaper to throw hardware at it. Our engineering workstations are a $75/mo lease.
You *could* just rewrite the business logic in assembly with SSE optimizations and all if you really wanted speed.
Perl won the GenX popularity contest a long time ago. No one is coming after your Perl, don't worry. You can use it until the day you die.
You'll be able to recruit Perl developers long after your death just like they do for COBOL and FORTRAN.
And when Millennials get older hey'll have as many complaints about what ever the next gen programming language is and why Python is the best thing ever. Slashdot will be running stories about "Perl developer shortages" and life will go on.
You're doing the technological equivalent of arguing over what hammer is better. No one is going to take away your blacksmith's anvil or coarse hammers. I just prefer something else.
. I'd rather have the choice.
I'd rather just learn how to do both and teach my brain how to switch depending on what I'm developing. It's about as different as learning to speak another language and then doing so. Arguing than Spanish's word order is better than German's isn't going to help you solve any problems nor is screaming at the Germans in Spanish to "just learn Spanish".
Today I'll work in Python, tomorrow Bash, the rest of the week Matlab. Occasionally PHP, C, VBA, JavaScript and a few others. Same reason I have to deal with Git, SVN, and ClearCase. In the corporate wold it's easier to learn to do something new than change the momentum of an entire corporation.
And you can't paste a long program into a single line edit box as the indentation matters.
I take that time to proof read and learn the language and customize the example I copy and pasted for my application.
Whitespace as a statement delimiter is stupid, and it being popular just means that there are a lot of stupid people.
_______ is stupid, and it being popular just means that there are a lot of stupid people.
Somewhere there's an old assembly developer saying something very similar about the C developers. And the C developers about the Perl, and Perl about Python, Python about what ever comes next.
It's a language, not a religion.
It's pretty clear that Python's going to come out on top of the GenY/Millenial coding club. Ruby got a quick lead making Web 2.0 development easy but Python hit critical mass just by the number of available packages. Numpy, Matplotlib, etc. "How to ___ with Python" nearly always turns up a result.
And peers: No, just like COBOL and FORTRAN, C and your current $favorite_language isn't ever going to go away. I still do a lot of C, Matlab and Simulink at work. But when I have the opportunity Python is just faster due to the shear number of packages that already exist.
Which is why I BSD everything I do/can write. I still have to eat and if you want a custom specialized version I'll write it for you for $$/hr, it's all yours. Turns out it's good business.
Turns out that a lot of companies do end up rolling back. Look at every corporation and commit that touches FreeBSD's code base. How much has Apple contributed to CUPS, LLVM, ZeroConf, etc? Even Microsoft has joined the bandwagon as of late.
No, it's not the Star Trek Unicorns Communist GPLv3 that some people claim is the One True open source, but it puts food on my table and puts the food on the tables of a lot of developers.
In a lot of bigger old companies OpenSource is a forbidden word. Working with AUTOSAR and ISO26262 at separate companies it's sad how many companies are reinventing the wheel on their own because: "Our competitors might steal our work." Our legal team forbid us from sending in bug reports to something as popular as Numpy because: "The information could reveal _____ proprietary information." Despite the fact that where it was found is such a niche of a niche of a part of the programming industry that I could hand out our source code and there may be 1000 people at 10 different companies that even knew what it did.
I'd love to see what VW, BMW, Benz, Caterpillar, Cummins, Ford, and Toyota are doing for their on-highway software certifications. Maybe provide some feedback. I'd like to share with them what I use, maybe they can improve it and save some time doing the same thing.
Go through the Fortune 500 and see how many companies have an active GitHub repository. Everyone on slashdot did a doubletake when Walmart opensourced its cloud ops. It seemed to be a shock that Walmart got as big and efficient as they did without some technology pulling the strings.
NXP just released a $35 development board that is hampered by terrible software and outdated business practices. Despite being "free" you need a license key that multiple people have trouble with. All of the Matlab and Simulink code they released is protected. However for the first time, ever, the GCC source code for e200 core PPC chips with VLE extensions has been released for free. Previously you had to have a WindRiver or GreenHills.
Who knows what random product or software people could come up with if they were allowed to work with peers doing the same thing. Even if it was for a sworn corporate mortal enemy.