They're an easy topic to *understand*, but integrating that knowledge enough to work with it isn't particularly easy. It's not unlike calculusâ"sure, most kids after Calc I have a rote idea of what a derivative and integral are, but is it well enough ingrained that they'll fully grok the rationale behind how they're used in, say, physics? For many kids, not so much.
C# and Perl pay my bills right now, but I was hired based on an interview question that was something like "how do you reverse a linked list?", which is a classical pointer question. As Joel puts it:
I've come to realize that understanding pointers in C is not a skill, it's an aptitude. In first year computer science classes, there are always about 200 kids at the beginning of the semester, all of whom wrote complex adventure games in BASIC for their PCs when they were 4 years old. They are having a good ol' time learning C or Pascal in college, until one day they professor introduces pointers, and suddenly, they don't get it. They just don't understand anything any more. 90% of the class goes off and becomes Political Science majors, then they tell their friends that there weren't enough good looking members of the appropriate sex in their CompSci classes, that's why they switched. For some reason most people seem to be born without the part of the brain that understands pointers. Pointers require a complex form of doubly-indirected thinking that some people just can't do, and it's pretty crucial to good programming. A lot of the "script jocks" who started programming by copying JavaScript snippets into their web pages and went on to learn Perl never learned about pointers, and they can never quite produce code of the quality you need.
Yes, but what if they say, "tell me how that last job ended, at ScumSoftCo", and you'll have to lie again, and then your lies will grow instead of diminish over time when the next company fires you.
Sounds like you need to stop interviewing kids from Java schools. My school (which isn't even very good!) still has tons of teaching methods like "learn how to do this in your free time because we're not gonna waste class time teaching you" for things that are less difficult than, for instance, writing a file system.
My chess set has majestically sculpted pieces and a beautifully painted wood board but that doesn't make the game of chess art. Even if I listen to Mozart while I'm playing, or instead of using chess pieces, hire Shakespearean actors to walk across a check-boarded marble floor and perform one-on-one battle and death scenes when I make a capture, those are all things attached to the game. It's hard to see this with video games, where the game mechanic is hidden so fully underneath the ornamentation.
All Microsoft is guilty of is wanting to keep people's business even if they don't want to play video games on a PC. Instead of trying to force the customer to change to adapt to their business plan (which is lock-in), MS changed their business plan to adapt to the customer. This is exactly what companies should do.
Why did Jobs wear the black turtleneck when doing the keynotes? Style? Hardly. He blended better into the background. That way whatever he was holding would show up better.
By most accounts, he pretty much wears that exact same outfit every day at work. He's one of those people who decides what to wear once and leaves it at that so he can focus on more important things. Though he has been known to wear shorts when it was hot enough out.
Also while Steve Jobs is a techie, he himself isn't a programmer or engineer.
It does seem worth pointing out that Jobs tinkered with electronics around the same time Woz did. One of Jobs' most arrogant quotes was something like, "Woz was the first person I met who was better at electronics than I was."
Actually, the UI is designed to have sensible common defaults and an easy to use UI, but someone "wanting to type in commands" also has the whole UNIX subsystem to access for more flexibility.
He was talking about the original Macintosh, from 1984, which had no UNIX or command line.
Why would the old Steve Jobs have done that? Being forced out and then coming back with Apple in tatters only reinforced his core belief that his own views on how to run product lines were correct. When did the old Steve Jobs hang onto a product line for emotional reasons? Early accounts don't seem to indicate emotion was involved in decisions much at all.
The old Steve Jobs was fanatical about having the NeXT factory painted specific colors, or the NeXT cube being a perfect black cube made out of magnesium, or about the Mac not having a hard drive or a fan. Being kicked out of Apple humbled Jobs, but so did the difficulties at NeXT.
You know, there's nothing that sinister about a company being all about "openly taking pride in our products". I'd be more wary of a company that wasn't all into what they made.
Re:So can we now be told...
on
iMac Turns 10
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· Score: 1
The original purpose of this port was to connect a logic analyzer and quickly diagnose board problems. It was intended to make servicing the boards easier. It was never intended at any time for an upgrade card, and thus, the PCI loads were calculated for that board with the intention of no real PCI load being present.
Amelio, partly through the emergency funding, partly through some critical downsizing, and partly through buying NeXT, had a crucial part in Apple's recovery. But even if we assume Amelio could have gotten Apple to remain stable and profitable, everything above and beyond that that Jobs has done is still remarkable.
People weren't criticizing USB on the iMac as a replacement for ADB; they were criticizing it as a replacement for serial and parallel.
You mean serial and SCSI. Macs never had parallel ports, and they had different serial ports (Mac serial ports used a Mini-DIN connector not unlike ADB and S-Video).
It's still probably easier to rob a mail truck than break RSA. And I'm sure somewhere in the vast world of the postal service there are some people who can be bribed.
We've had 8 years of George Bush for no other reason than
xian moral conservatives are blindsided immediately and
completely by any sort of "moral issue" even when it doesn't
have any direct impact on them.
Caring about moral issues only when they have a direct impact on you is called "selfishness". Christianity preaches against that.
Free will means that you are not bound to act in a particular way based on initial conditions and some laws.
No, that's "indeterminism". A lot of indeterminism is randomness. Whether or not free will is indeterministic or deterministic is a subject of great dispute.
Naively, a Newtonian system is deterministic - give the initial conditions and the laws of motion we can predict its behaviour at any point in the future. For simple Newtonian systems like the solar system that is true. But for slightly less simple ones, chaos takes over and we cannot.
Even chaotic systems are deterministic; they're just unpredictable. Now, Newtonian physics allows for indeterminism, but not for reasons of chaos. Here's a discussion of that that's probably over your head. Executive summary: Newtonian physics allows for point masses to come in and out of spacial infinity.
And hence it has free will like us, but not like the solar system or the automaton.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why, throughout history, farmers have left the fields and come to the cities in droves simply to be sweatshop laborers.
They're an easy topic to *understand*, but integrating that knowledge enough to work with it isn't particularly easy. It's not unlike calculusâ"sure, most kids after Calc I have a rote idea of what a derivative and integral are, but is it well enough ingrained that they'll fully grok the rationale behind how they're used in, say, physics? For many kids, not so much.
C# and Perl pay my bills right now, but I was hired based on an interview question that was something like "how do you reverse a linked list?", which is a classical pointer question. As Joel puts it:
I've come to realize that understanding pointers in C is not a skill, it's an aptitude. In first year computer science classes, there are always about 200 kids at the beginning of the semester, all of whom wrote complex adventure games in BASIC for their PCs when they were 4 years old. They are having a good ol' time learning C or Pascal in college, until one day they professor introduces pointers, and suddenly, they don't get it. They just don't understand anything any more. 90% of the class goes off and becomes Political Science majors, then they tell their friends that there weren't enough good looking members of the appropriate sex in their CompSci classes, that's why they switched. For some reason most people seem to be born without the part of the brain that understands pointers. Pointers require a complex form of doubly-indirected thinking that some people just can't do, and it's pretty crucial to good programming. A lot of the "script jocks" who started programming by copying JavaScript snippets into their web pages and went on to learn Perl never learned about pointers, and they can never quite produce code of the quality you need.
Yes, but what if they say, "tell me how that last job ended, at ScumSoftCo", and you'll have to lie again, and then your lies will grow instead of diminish over time when the next company fires you.
Sounds like you need to stop interviewing kids from Java schools. My school (which isn't even very good!) still has tons of teaching methods like "learn how to do this in your free time because we're not gonna waste class time teaching you" for things that are less difficult than, for instance, writing a file system.
My chess set has majestically sculpted pieces and a beautifully painted wood board but that doesn't make the game of chess art. Even if I listen to Mozart while I'm playing, or instead of using chess pieces, hire Shakespearean actors to walk across a check-boarded marble floor and perform one-on-one battle and death scenes when I make a capture, those are all things attached to the game. It's hard to see this with video games, where the game mechanic is hidden so fully underneath the ornamentation.
By that argument, Nestle has a monopoly on blue containers with Oreos inside.
Well, with the 'U' and a "British" in front of it, maybe.
All Microsoft is guilty of is wanting to keep people's business even if they don't want to play video games on a PC. Instead of trying to force the customer to change to adapt to their business plan (which is lock-in), MS changed their business plan to adapt to the customer. This is exactly what companies should do.
You are both wrong. Apple makes decent money on both.
Obligatory
Why did Jobs wear the black turtleneck when doing the keynotes? Style? Hardly. He blended better into the background. That way whatever he was holding would show up better.
By most accounts, he pretty much wears that exact same outfit every day at work. He's one of those people who decides what to wear once and leaves it at that so he can focus on more important things. Though he has been known to wear shorts when it was hot enough out.
Also while Steve Jobs is a techie, he himself isn't a programmer or engineer.
It does seem worth pointing out that Jobs tinkered with electronics around the same time Woz did. One of Jobs' most arrogant quotes was something like, "Woz was the first person I met who was better at electronics than I was."
Actually, the UI is designed to have sensible common defaults and an easy to use UI, but someone "wanting to type in commands" also has the whole UNIX subsystem to access for more flexibility.
He was talking about the original Macintosh, from 1984, which had no UNIX or command line.
Why would the old Steve Jobs have done that? Being forced out and then coming back with Apple in tatters only reinforced his core belief that his own views on how to run product lines were correct. When did the old Steve Jobs hang onto a product line for emotional reasons? Early accounts don't seem to indicate emotion was involved in decisions much at all.
The old Steve Jobs was fanatical about having the NeXT factory painted specific colors, or the NeXT cube being a perfect black cube made out of magnesium, or about the Mac not having a hard drive or a fan. Being kicked out of Apple humbled Jobs, but so did the difficulties at NeXT.
You know, there's nothing that sinister about a company being all about "openly taking pride in our products". I'd be more wary of a company that wasn't all into what they made.
Source.
Amelio, partly through the emergency funding, partly through some critical downsizing, and partly through buying NeXT, had a crucial part in Apple's recovery. But even if we assume Amelio could have gotten Apple to remain stable and profitable, everything above and beyond that that Jobs has done is still remarkable.
You mean serial and SCSI. Macs never had parallel ports, and they had different serial ports (Mac serial ports used a Mini-DIN connector not unlike ADB and S-Video).
It's still probably easier to rob a mail truck than break RSA. And I'm sure somewhere in the vast world of the postal service there are some people who can be bribed.
Caring about moral issues only when they have a direct impact on you is called "selfishness". Christianity preaches against that.
No, that's "indeterminism". A lot of indeterminism is randomness. Whether or not free will is indeterministic or deterministic is a subject of great dispute.
Naively, a Newtonian system is deterministic - give the initial conditions and the laws of motion we can predict its behaviour at any point in the future. For simple Newtonian systems like the solar system that is true. But for slightly less simple ones, chaos takes over and we cannot.Even chaotic systems are deterministic; they're just unpredictable. Now, Newtonian physics allows for indeterminism, but not for reasons of chaos. Here's a discussion of that that's probably over your head. Executive summary: Newtonian physics allows for point masses to come in and out of spacial infinity.
And hence it has free will like us, but not like the solar system or the automaton.That's the worst argument I've seen in my life.
Not from him.
People who follow laws, and people who are bound by laws, are not the people you should be worried about securing data from.
I certainly hope you send it by encrypted snail mail. Paper envelopes are not a particularly secure channel.