Even today, despite claims to the contrary, much of programming is still as much art as science.
programming is almost 0 art unless you're working in C or some other language that deals with direct memory access. Then you can get artsy. Java, C#, PHP, Go, Dart, JavaScript etc, they're all pretty much putting pieces together. If you don't understand that, then you probably don't have a good enough understanding of your field, or you're trying to be clever. In general, business plans don't succeed on clever code. Even game engines don't seem to really need that anymore as they get commoditized.
How do you know you could get any "real engineers" to work as programmers?
I consider good programmers to have deep interest in software engineering principles and techniques. My experience has been that it's a real crapshoot to find this in CS degreed people, and almost impossible in other degreed people. (YMMV.)
Because every single programmer I have worked with that I respect over the years have invariably turned out to have at least 1 real engineering degree. This is probably highly likely due to the drop in engineers required since roughly 85 compared with relatively high graduation rates for a while. Since ME/EE/CE/ChemE/etc are all relatively much harder to obtain than CS/Comp E degrees at the time, it doesn't take a rocket scientist (another real engineer btw) to figure out that all these disciplines used computers, generally those underpowered VAX, SGI, Cray, etc simplistic machines, to run relatively simple and small parallelized solutions on. So I suppose none of those folks, in a shrinking market and declining wage growth would consider falling back on a well paying and high demand job that required 1/10th of their training and had large upside potential. Nope, not at all.
The question is why....All that time spent doing stuff in java has rotted their brains.
It has nothing to do with Java, it does, however, have everything to do with the laziness and absolute incompetency of what schools are teaching their students. Any engineer in my day that dealt with computers learned about algorithms, memory management, and how to optimize problems for the hardware you were running on, which included understanding what hardware you were targeting. I swear they don't teach any of that anymore, especially to CS majors. I think their text books must be Sam's How to learn PHP in 21 days, followed by how to learn Java in 21 days. Since PHP was first, they never learn part 2 well, and that explains the incredible lack of competent younger programmers, especially any with "computer" in their degree titles. What amazes me more is that most can't navigate an OS either, and asking them to deal with one outside their "known" one is met with a look like you asked them something in martian.
But you might fit the profile that comes into vogue next week, or next month, or next year. That's the problem with this type of data. Or, worse, you might be associated with someone that fits the profile, and that will be that.
Biggest issue - the USB-C only supports 1080P out at least with the current adapters. If it doesn't support my 2K display, I don't need it as a full laptop (desktop) replacement, although the 2# weight sure does sound appealing. If they came out with a quad or hex core mini, perhaps this and a mini would work.
Actually, no. With Google, I can still opt in or out. With gov backed NSA back-dooring every ISP effectively in the world.... I can't opt out without cutting all internet connectivity. See the admittedly minor difference?
I'd give the watch a 2 year lifespan, personally, no more than that. It's a first gen product, after all, and improvements are bound to occur soon afterwards.
Apple is not a Rolex or Tag Heuer....you want to equate it to a watch, think Timex.
You're correct, it's not a Rolex nor Tag Heuer, but it's not a Timex either. It's something entirely different, much like the iPhone when it came out was something entirely different, but happened to have similarities and all the function of other phones. In this case it functions like a watch, but anyone that buys it as a watch is an idiot. That's like buying a car to use as a wheelbarrow. Sure, it can haul stuff, but it can do so much more.
YouTube hasn't been tied to flash for a couple of months
Oh my... a couple of months? But, apparently they still run flash. The question is "why"? Oh, could it be that their own unsupported Android phones wouldn't be able to visit youtub?
There's a number of ways it phones home, some of which at least can be mitigated: spell check, url suggestions, and default search from the address bar which is my personal pet peeve, what was so hard about hitting the TAB key to go to the search field from the address field so I can control what I search for?
However, ask yourself this, what reason did Google have for making a better independent browser than Firefox, which was at 30+% market share at the time and used Google as it's default search engine? It wasn't altruism, so there must have been a driving reason for it.
The point is whether Google should even have this information. Some of us say no as the potential for abuse is large no matter what today's policy is . (you get my point, I hope, that the policy is merely words on paper with no binding value since there's a clause that says said policy may be updated unilaterally by Google with your only recourse being to not use the service(s) in question?)
It's simple enough to just abandon flash. Apple did, it didn't seem to stop the world nor harm their market share. There are some sites still tied to or using flash (youtube anyone?) so perhaps Google should set about cleaning house first.
#2 is that no one in their right mind should use Chrome, at least not without blackholing every google address. My order of browsers is Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE in a dedicated windows VM, and then, only then, Chrome. I think I'm 20 revs behind in Chrome because it hasn't been run in a year, nor has IE actually... What a blissful year.
Sounds like Firefox may get a bump in NetStat numbers, however small, and Chrome will drop. I still don't get why anyone would use that phone home spyware, but over 40% of the market can't be wrong, can it? Think about the windows users!
You know what? I'm not paranoid about Google. They don't care about me individually, and I opt out of their ad targeting. The rest I just don't care about.
You're can't be paranoid about google, paranoia is thinking that someone's watching you, with Google, they boldly state they're watching you and in your case you're aware of that. I personally do care what Google knows and have taken steps to limit that significantly, by using as little of their services as possible and making tracking me much more difficult. A random Jane or John at Google shouldn't be able to tell you you're on your period this week, for instance.
Sometimes a standard is bad even if everyone uses it. Take COBOL, for instance, the "standard" language of financial and reservation systems in the day. Everyone used it, and pretty much everyone hated it except for the few that didn't mind the money flow over having to work with a horrible system. There are still systems out there from the 70s running today. I personally know of 2 relatively large ones. They cost a fortune, but the people working with them haven't been able to replace them with something more modern (wrong people for the job).
I'm aware, but the thinking is the same - monolithic binary architecture (with logs, as an example). I only have to go to one place and everything's there. Not having things packaged in a component oriented manner is only begging for trouble down the road IMNSHO.
We already intercept missiles with bullets. A bullet is only a little over an order of magnitude smaller in diameter than at least this anti-ship missile?, and it should be noted that those missiles can change trajectory. Most bullets cannot, although this one can.
.. talk about Pokeyman and make references to '10 era teen comedies or whatever
Not Pokeyoureyeoutman!!! I was hoping that died out with the now over 30 crowd. As for '10 era teen comedies, did they make any? Scott Pilgrim, for example, is not a comedy even on beer binge day.
We get that with every new MS OS release (Win Vista: whole new user subsystem, Win7: fixed a bunch of Vista's issues, Win8: whole new interface etc, Win9: oops, missed the date we'll call it Win10: revert a bunch of Win 8's issues, cross their fingers, and hope and pray that the enterprise will embrace it like they did Win7.
These Linux distros must have watched MS's registry cause lots and lots of service contracts and work. Even though the registry isn't hard to understand or work with, the sheer amount of crap shoved into it and its constant morphing for any system change make working with it challenging enough that most won't do it. Undoing a bad install of Oracle 8 on Windows 2K Server so it could be reinstalled, for instance, was loads of fun as you tracked down every single badly inserted key. Other apps and malware especially require similar work in cases where the uninitiated don't have backups. There's a case to be made for individual startup files, it's easy to see what changed when, and to only backout or replace that set of items instead of corrupting the entire binary POS (a la the MS registry). Somehow, I get the feeling that systemd is closer to that latter vision and will raise the bar for true system operators, while possibly allowing the currently unemployed Windows certified sysop to take over some Linux boxes too, much like exists in the MS world.
In short, it's probably an improvement for desktop & mobile users who mostly don't care and it's a pretty big inconvenience and possible downgrade for systems administrators who manage servers.
I'd say in short, it sounds like a terrible idea. If it takes something that people already have issues dealing with because it's too complicated, and makes it more complicated and non-standard to boot, what's the benefit? And binary log files? I must be missing something here. Haven't run a "new" Linux server in a year, so haven't really dealt with nor read anything on systemd at all, other than to know there's a large contingent of folks that don't like it, have lots of reasons for hating it, and the "pro" side is "just because we like it". BSD could be solidly in my future for the next rollout if systemd sucks even half as badly as detractors claim, although I can guarantee I won't need to make that call anytime soon as current systems planned and running will remain on pre-systemd releases for the foreseeable future, so someone else can take all those hits with the inevitable bugs and failures that will ensue.
Slashdot Mirror
Even today, despite claims to the contrary, much of programming is still as much art as science.
programming is almost 0 art unless you're working in C or some other language that deals with direct memory access. Then you can get artsy. Java, C#, PHP, Go, Dart, JavaScript etc, they're all pretty much putting pieces together. If you don't understand that, then you probably don't have a good enough understanding of your field, or you're trying to be clever. In general, business plans don't succeed on clever code. Even game engines don't seem to really need that anymore as they get commoditized.
tl;dr: "Someone who learns how to design can design anything" is about as true as MBA schools' "someone who learns how to manage can manage anything".
tl: "Someone who has a superset of skills can do the subset easily"
How do you know you could get any "real engineers" to work as programmers?
I consider good programmers to have deep interest in software engineering principles and techniques. My experience has been that it's a real crapshoot to find this in CS degreed people, and almost impossible in other degreed people. (YMMV.)
Because every single programmer I have worked with that I respect over the years have invariably turned out to have at least 1 real engineering degree. This is probably highly likely due to the drop in engineers required since roughly 85 compared with relatively high graduation rates for a while. Since ME/EE/CE/ChemE/etc are all relatively much harder to obtain than CS/Comp E degrees at the time, it doesn't take a rocket scientist (another real engineer btw) to figure out that all these disciplines used computers, generally those underpowered VAX, SGI, Cray, etc simplistic machines, to run relatively simple and small parallelized solutions on. So I suppose none of those folks, in a shrinking market and declining wage growth would consider falling back on a well paying and high demand job that required 1/10th of their training and had large upside potential. Nope, not at all.
The question is why....All that time spent doing stuff in java has rotted their brains.
It has nothing to do with Java, it does, however, have everything to do with the laziness and absolute incompetency of what schools are teaching their students. Any engineer in my day that dealt with computers learned about algorithms, memory management, and how to optimize problems for the hardware you were running on, which included understanding what hardware you were targeting. I swear they don't teach any of that anymore, especially to CS majors. I think their text books must be Sam's How to learn PHP in 21 days, followed by how to learn Java in 21 days. Since PHP was first, they never learn part 2 well, and that explains the incredible lack of competent younger programmers, especially any with "computer" in their degree titles. What amazes me more is that most can't navigate an OS either, and asking them to deal with one outside their "known" one is met with a look like you asked them something in martian.
But you might fit the profile that comes into vogue next week, or next month, or next year. That's the problem with this type of data. Or, worse, you might be associated with someone that fits the profile, and that will be that.
Biggest issue - the USB-C only supports 1080P out at least with the current adapters. If it doesn't support my 2K display, I don't need it as a full laptop (desktop) replacement, although the 2# weight sure does sound appealing. If they came out with a quad or hex core mini, perhaps this and a mini would work.
Actually, no. With Google, I can still opt in or out. With gov backed NSA back-dooring every ISP effectively in the world.... I can't opt out without cutting all internet connectivity. See the admittedly minor difference?
I'd give the watch a 2 year lifespan, personally, no more than that. It's a first gen product, after all, and improvements are bound to occur soon afterwards.
I guess it depends, in my case, I got a Ferrari for the price of a Ford focus (MBP :)
That I'd agree with... I'm sure the battery is replaceable (I'd hope)
Apple is not a Rolex or Tag Heuer. ...you want to equate it to a watch, think Timex.
You're correct, it's not a Rolex nor Tag Heuer, but it's not a Timex either. It's something entirely different, much like the iPhone when it came out was something entirely different, but happened to have similarities and all the function of other phones. In this case it functions like a watch, but anyone that buys it as a watch is an idiot. That's like buying a car to use as a wheelbarrow. Sure, it can haul stuff, but it can do so much more.
YouTube hasn't been tied to flash for a couple of months
Oh my... a couple of months? But, apparently they still run flash. The question is "why"? Oh, could it be that their own unsupported Android phones wouldn't be able to visit youtub?
There's a number of ways it phones home, some of which at least can be mitigated: spell check, url suggestions, and default search from the address bar which is my personal pet peeve, what was so hard about hitting the TAB key to go to the search field from the address field so I can control what I search for?
However, ask yourself this, what reason did Google have for making a better independent browser than Firefox, which was at 30+% market share at the time and used Google as it's default search engine? It wasn't altruism, so there must have been a driving reason for it.
The point is whether Google should even have this information. Some of us say no as the potential for abuse is large no matter what today's policy is . (you get my point, I hope, that the policy is merely words on paper with no binding value since there's a clause that says said policy may be updated unilaterally by Google with your only recourse being to not use the service(s) in question?)
...sure it proves some talent but 9 out of 10 recruiters will go with the C++ guy.
Might as well make that 99 out of 100, and that 1 will generally be out of business pretty quickly.
It's simple enough to just abandon flash. Apple did, it didn't seem to stop the world nor harm their market share. There are some sites still tied to or using flash (youtube anyone?) so perhaps Google should set about cleaning house first.
#2 is that no one in their right mind should use Chrome, at least not without blackholing every google address. My order of browsers is Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE in a dedicated windows VM, and then, only then, Chrome. I think I'm 20 revs behind in Chrome because it hasn't been run in a year, nor has IE actually... What a blissful year.
Sounds like Firefox may get a bump in NetStat numbers, however small, and Chrome will drop. I still don't get why anyone would use that phone home spyware, but over 40% of the market can't be wrong, can it? Think about the windows users!
You know what? I'm not paranoid about Google. They don't care about me individually, and I opt out of their ad targeting. The rest I just don't care about.
You're can't be paranoid about google, paranoia is thinking that someone's watching you, with Google, they boldly state they're watching you and in your case you're aware of that. I personally do care what Google knows and have taken steps to limit that significantly, by using as little of their services as possible and making tracking me much more difficult. A random Jane or John at Google shouldn't be able to tell you you're on your period this week, for instance.
Sometimes a standard is bad even if everyone uses it. Take COBOL, for instance, the "standard" language of financial and reservation systems in the day. Everyone used it, and pretty much everyone hated it except for the few that didn't mind the money flow over having to work with a horrible system. There are still systems out there from the 70s running today. I personally know of 2 relatively large ones. They cost a fortune, but the people working with them haven't been able to replace them with something more modern (wrong people for the job).
I'm aware, but the thinking is the same - monolithic binary architecture (with logs, as an example). I only have to go to one place and everything's there. Not having things packaged in a component oriented manner is only begging for trouble down the road IMNSHO.
We already intercept missiles with bullets. A bullet is only a little over an order of magnitude smaller in diameter than at least this anti-ship missile?, and it should be noted that those missiles can change trajectory. Most bullets cannot, although this one can.
.. talk about Pokeyman and make references to '10 era teen comedies or whatever
Not Pokeyoureyeoutman!!! I was hoping that died out with the now over 30 crowd. As for '10 era teen comedies, did they make any? Scott Pilgrim, for example, is not a comedy even on beer binge day.
We get that with every new MS OS release (Win Vista: whole new user subsystem, Win7: fixed a bunch of Vista's issues, Win8: whole new interface etc, Win9: oops, missed the date we'll call it Win10: revert a bunch of Win 8's issues, cross their fingers, and hope and pray that the enterprise will embrace it like they did Win7.
These Linux distros must have watched MS's registry cause lots and lots of service contracts and work. Even though the registry isn't hard to understand or work with, the sheer amount of crap shoved into it and its constant morphing for any system change make working with it challenging enough that most won't do it. Undoing a bad install of Oracle 8 on Windows 2K Server so it could be reinstalled, for instance, was loads of fun as you tracked down every single badly inserted key. Other apps and malware especially require similar work in cases where the uninitiated don't have backups. There's a case to be made for individual startup files, it's easy to see what changed when, and to only backout or replace that set of items instead of corrupting the entire binary POS (a la the MS registry). Somehow, I get the feeling that systemd is closer to that latter vision and will raise the bar for true system operators, while possibly allowing the currently unemployed Windows certified sysop to take over some Linux boxes too, much like exists in the MS world.
In short, it's probably an improvement for desktop & mobile users who mostly don't care and it's a pretty big inconvenience and possible downgrade for systems administrators who manage servers.
I'd say in short, it sounds like a terrible idea. If it takes something that people already have issues dealing with because it's too complicated, and makes it more complicated and non-standard to boot, what's the benefit? And binary log files? I must be missing something here. Haven't run a "new" Linux server in a year, so haven't really dealt with nor read anything on systemd at all, other than to know there's a large contingent of folks that don't like it, have lots of reasons for hating it, and the "pro" side is "just because we like it". BSD could be solidly in my future for the next rollout if systemd sucks even half as badly as detractors claim, although I can guarantee I won't need to make that call anytime soon as current systems planned and running will remain on pre-systemd releases for the foreseeable future, so someone else can take all those hits with the inevitable bugs and failures that will ensue.