I had a job that I liked. The job was in an area that was about as completely lacking in people I could socialize with as possible. I hung on for a year and a half before I moved and got a new job out of desperation. The new job is great, the new place is great, and I'd never think of moving to a place that doesn't have a large community of people to play with again. Not for more money or something more interesting. Period. If it doesn't have the location, there's no way I'll sacrifice the fun part of my life for it.
Software sucks because you make more money with the first software to market than with the ideal product. It's a proven business strategy to come out with the first thing, and throw quality to the wind. Operating systems suck because computer scientists don't design the operating systems... companies with $$ invested in a couple different directions do. Companies are not in the business of making software. They're in the business of making money. Microsoft is a good example of this. They're an excellent company. They make lousy software. A good operating system could be made, they could play well with others, fantastic new standards and protocols could be developed, open to all, and beautiful software could be built that makes us all proud to have CS degrees. But if the money's in keeping the OSs the way they are and shipping software that breaks, but shipping it before anybody else and making buckets of money, well, that's what's going to happen. And although I'd like decent software, I don't know that I could blame them for picking the $$$ being that I've never had to make that choice. Whee. But since I posted this late, two people will read it.. hmm.. oh, well. I feel better anyway.
In florida as of 9:13 AM EST according to CNN Gore is actually ahead in florida with 100% of precincts reporting. That means write-ins, too. Florida is not one of the states that allows write-ins to be just postmarked on the day of the election. It has to *be* there. And it was in that tally. Gore is ahead, though, by 200 votes. Meaning absolutely nothing until after a recount.
Nah.. I learned most of it from this antisocial bitch-ass. Dude.. don't try to read his code, though.. it's fantastic, but his c looks like line noise.
A-freaking-men. College was the best damn time of my life so far, and I will never ever regret it. I got a CS degree, and most of the skills I use on a day to day basis I learned on my own outside of classes. College prepared me for a much more rewarding life, though. There is a great deal more to me now than there was before college. Pre-college I programmed, BBSed, and read sci-fi books. Now I do that, but also read about two books a week that don't even resemble sci-fi. I go to art exhibits. When something important in our culture emerges, I have a pretty decent chance of grasping what's going on. I can easily imagine a completely fullfilling life as a non-programmer. I wouldn't have skipped it for anything.
And I don't mean by teaching you a certain programming language, or by making you into a fantastic programmer. College isn't going to turn a poor programmer into Knuth. That *won't* happen. What college *does* do, though, is prepare you for a more fullfilling life. It teaches you analytical skills. It teaches you how to look at a situation, and figure out what can be changed and what can't. It shows you your place in the world and in history. It teaches you what about yourself is yours, and what is purely stuff you've gleaned from copying other people. It teaches you what in life you can control, and what stuff you can't. It teaches you how to live well with your peers and other people, and it teaches you about how societies and cultures work. It gives you more control over your life. It's a freaking metamorphosis. Literally. You walk in as one person, and you walk out completely transformed. It opens up avenues in your life that you wouldn't have been aware of had you skipped it. Go to college. Don't worry about the fantastic job market. College is the most fantastic four years of your life, and it makes the remaining years all the more fantastic. Don't just go for the classes. Live on campus. Be a part of campus life. Talk to the people you meet. I gaurantee that if you do it with full intention to figure out what college has to offer that you'll come out just as prepared programming-wise, and infinitely more prepared in a whole bunch of ways you didn't even know were important.
Here fricking here. The characters were paper thin. It's hard to keep plots from being derivative in sci-fi, but usually people try to make up for that in some way (self-parody, clever characters, etc). Given the humans in the story, if they'd have lost in the end and been completely annhilated by the Drej, I'd have been hard pressed to give a crap. The story and the characters were unbelievably predictable, and totally non-funny. I think nathan lane's character was supposed to be funny (and I usually like nathan lane), but he wasn't given any fantastic lines. Any animation that didn't have to do with the characters was really pretty, but the characters themselves looked straight out of scooby doo. This is the only place around I've found so many people supporting this movie, and with few exceptions everyone who said they liked this movie did it while playing the call katz an idiot game. There should be some sort of mode to tune out anti-katz rants, so you can actually see some discussions that aren't 99% "This article is just more proof that Jon Katz is a worthless pile of goo".
Ok. Read through the imprecise language and the overused metaphors, and Jon Katz has a point. Our culture is influenced in most aspects that form people's beliefs and values by big business. People watch tv, listen to the radio, read their newspapers, etc.. a steady stream of daily media. If you don't read books, and it appears most people don't, your prime source of influence becomes media. You buy it, you watch it, it fills your life. People sit their kids in front of the tv to keep them quiet. They buy them magazines, they give them video games. They take them to movies. By age twelve, the kids are all little images of each other, and images of whatever they've absorbed during their formative years watching TV. The corporations *do not care* what they put in the media as long as it sells. People's values are shaped by the random whim of someone who'd rather the world didn't change. Even if *you* have a point of view, and you think you're right, you can't influence anywhere near as many people as big business. You'll die, and four people who hold values dictated by a lifetime of tv-watching will replace you. I think this is part of what jon katz was getting at, and I personally find it *damned* disturbing.
: just download the patch, patch the kernel, recompile it, reboot, and wala! You're done
Except, unfortunately, that that's not the way the world always works with embedded stuff. Often embedded stuff will be on a system with no permanent storage, and most of the time no compiler/development environment. You may have a system that has 1-8 megs of ram, no hard drive, and a meg or so of flash. Redhat or debian *wouldn't* fscking fit on a good portion of the embedded systems out there. What you want is a kernel that works and that you can extend, and some additional functionality for downloading a new binary image to the board. Real men don't need files with programs in them.. they just link into the big honkin' image.
If they're at all intelligent (and I don't think they'd let something this simple break that bad), they'd put some sort of flag on the duplicated files that tells them to give it it's own binary when the original is changed.
It sounds like this thing is more like an agent that actively seeks out duplicated files than an operating system mechanism. It stores a value that's relatively unique to each file. When it encounters two that are the same, it's found a duplicated binary, and it just uses one binary for two files. But that doesn't sound exactly 'innovative' enough to warrant a web page, so there must be something I'm missing.
Do you really want people grow up with a language that has distinction
between non-immediate objects on the heap and stack, no automatic garbage collection, pointers, no initialization, no higher-order anything?
I would say they should learn them at some point during the neophyte stage of developerhood. There are computer engineers and computer science majors just graduating that don't know how memory allocation and memory management work, and they're unaware that their use of language features can have any affect on runtime. I work on a project that develops OS-like things, and we're seeing a barrage of new grads that are confused by having to do their own memory management or pay attention to what language features actually do. There were actually some fairly bright people interviewed recently that had to have pointers explained to them. Regardless of language, not knowing the realities of memory usage/management has serious potential to make you a lousy developer in other languages. Now, that said, I'm not a blanket advocate of non-OOP languages. I think there are many oop language features that ease development and make maintainance easier. I even use some of them in projects I do outside of work (I'm actively learning c++, and I've programmed in smalltalk for a while), it's just that a good chunk of the software development world does work where real-time issues and hardware constraints are an issue. Not knowing how to use a pointer pretty much rules a person out as an embedded developer, compiler-writer, operating system developer, as well as many other things. Hell, even for programming in a language that doesn't explicitly have pointers, and that has garbage collection, I'd still like the person to know how to work with memory. I'd think a java or smalltalk developer that had never used a language that didn't keep track of memory for you would make a pretty lousy developer in their respective language.
I'd say it probably depends on this Type Security thing they talk about. They talk about partitioning the kernel into discrete parts, each one getting specific permissions. That's not what openbsd has. Openbsd has done a very thorough security audit. If openbsd doesn't already use their security technique, it'd probably be just as much work to use this on openbsd. Linux has the advantage of having more functionality and devices working with it, so if it's going to take just as much work for either kernel, why not go with the one with more toys?
Do you see slashdot staying primarily as it's been in the past (collecting links to news on other sites and having discussions), or are you planning on running with the idea of gathering new material as you have recently with the interviews? In short, do you see slashdot doing more original journalism in the future?
Main Entry: maculation Function: noun Date: 15th century 1 archaic : the state of being spotted 2 a : a blemish in the form of a discrete spot b : the arrangement of spots and markings on an animal or plant
It's not just the speed.. vi follows the 'Do one thing and do it well' philosophy of unix more truly than emacs. vi is a fantastic text editor.. able to conquer large codebases in a fraction of a second. emacs does damned near everything except sort socks. In fact, I'm probably wrong about that. There's probably some lisp code out there that enables emacs to sort socks. My bad.
Man pages are complete, concise, and way to technical for most linux newbies to read.
Concise, yes. Technical, certainly. Complete, not always. Or more accurately, man pages aren't always complete in the right way. Although one can learn how to use unix tools through reading a well-written man-page, the learning curve is often quite a bit steeper than by learning via a good book. I learned to use various things through man-pages when I was first learning unix in college (a college which was several hours from anywhere I could get a good technical book on every tool I wanted to learn). There was a whole wealth of tools whose learning curve was huge in relation to their ultimate benefit. Useful tools, yes. Was the time it took to learn all of them through man-pages always short enough that one could both become expert in them *and* retain some semblance of a social life? Not always. If reading a book rather than being hardcore and reading the man page will save me time, well, then I'm going with the book. If my boss tells me I have to learn a tool for my job, and I can either read the man page *or* buy a book in the form of a tutorial, I'm going for the book *every* time (although my reaction time would certainly be affected by whether or not it's an o'reilly book:) Also, there's a great deal of tools whose existence isn't readily apparent. I've been constantly learning about the various development tools in unix for the last 5 years, and I'm still finding new ones. There are several tools whose functionality I was about to duplicate on my own, just because I didn't know they existed (cs/cscope and expect immediately come to mind) And with just man pages, how the hell do you know where to start? If someone just hands you a unix machine, and you've never used unix before, how the hell do you know enough to even find HOWTOs, info pages, and man pages? Now that I've gotten over the annoying parts of the learning curve where you don't know what to learn next, I'm a much happier person. And thanks to dead-tree manuals, I actually have some spare time as well.
These people should go out right now and buy a copy of LINUX FOR DUMMIES, or even better if somewhat redundant REDHAT LINUX FOR DUMMIES.
What do you care whether a person uses RedHat and takes a million easy-to-read books to learn Unix? Does the fact that you already know unix, and have come to it quicker than they mean that you have to make being arrogant about it a moral crusade?
However if some brave soul would remake all the man pages to an extent that they would be understood by most newbies, and make a nice little index, I beleive that the newbies wanted to read the manuals themselfs could.
??? The last part of this sentence is pretty incomprehensible. If you're going to be arrogant, you might as well learn how to write first.
Now, I'm almost expecting to sound like an idiot for asking this, but I've been hearing about it for a while and still can't figure it out. Why would a person want ppp over ethernet? If you have an ethernet connection, what good would layering a ppp connection on top of it do?
Although most of this article was pretty expected, when the author mentioned the mental division between home life and work life he brought to mind something I've noticed in myself lately. In college I pretty much geeked around non-stop. There were some nice breaks in the day where I'd have non-geek related classes between the usual programming/reading cs stuff activities. Programming till 2 in the morning after a day of non-cs related work didn't seem like so bad an idea. Now that I do 8-10 hours of programming at work every day, I want no mentally taxing contact with computers when I get home. Occasionally a video game or two, but beyond that it's dinner, TV or book, and relaxation. Is this just me, or has this happened to other people, too?
I am in complete agreement that the current booming market for people to develop new applications won't last forever. At some point IT will cease being a place where a skilled person has a non-zero chance of becoming a millionaire. There is one thing, however, that will keep the more skilled programmers paying the rent long after the businesses have their e-commerce in place. As poorly as this bodes for what I'll be doing with the rest of my life, I'm guessing that even after the gold rush is over we'll all be doing bug-fixes and maintainance (sp?) for the rest of our careers. People will become dependant upon the applications we're writing now. Unfortunately, for most applications there is a certain development life-cycle at the end of which is a decline in quality. The original programmers are gone, the new people doing the bug-fixes don't have as complete a grasp of the big picture as the original programmers, new bug-fixes are not quite as consistent with the original design as they could be, code-quality degenerates, maintainability degrades rapidly, and a new code base is required. The only way I'm going to be humping a gas-station job 25 years from now is if somewhere along the line people figure out how to write software that becomes perfect and then stays so. I don't see it happening. Don't get me wrong.. I'm investing and saving my money, as there's never any gaurantee that I wont' need it tommorrow.. I'm just not going to try looking for that next killer industry any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a job that I liked. The job was in an area that was about as completely lacking in people I could socialize with as possible. I hung on for a year and a half before I moved and got a new job out of desperation. The new job is great, the new place is great, and I'd never think of moving to a place that doesn't have a large community of people to play with again. Not for more money or something more interesting. Period. If it doesn't have the location, there's no way I'll sacrifice the fun part of my life for it.
:(
:)
Before (bad, bad suburb) -
Now (happy, happy city) -
I wore black today. Was tempted to find some place to hock loogies on lovers in the park...
Software sucks because you make more money with the first software to market than with the ideal product. It's a proven business strategy to come out with the first thing, and throw quality to the wind. Operating systems suck because computer scientists don't design the operating systems... companies with $$ invested in a couple different directions do. Companies are not in the business of making software. They're in the business of making money. Microsoft is a good example of this. They're an excellent company. They make lousy software. A good operating system could be made, they could play well with others, fantastic new standards and protocols could be developed, open to all, and beautiful software could be built that makes us all proud to have CS degrees. But if the money's in keeping the OSs the way they are and shipping software that breaks, but shipping it before anybody else and making buckets of money, well, that's what's going to happen. And although I'd like decent software, I don't know that I could blame them for picking the $$$ being that I've never had to make that choice. Whee. But since I posted this late, two people will read it.. hmm.. oh, well. I feel better anyway.
In florida as of 9:13 AM EST according to CNN Gore is actually ahead in florida with 100% of precincts reporting. That means write-ins, too. Florida is not one of the states that allows write-ins to be just postmarked on the day of the election. It has to *be* there. And it was in that tally. Gore is ahead, though, by 200 votes. Meaning absolutely nothing until after a recount.
Nah.. I learned most of it from this antisocial bitch-ass. Dude.. don't try to read his code, though.. it's fantastic, but his c looks like line noise.
A-freaking-men. College was the best damn time of my life so far, and I will never ever regret it. I got a CS degree, and most of the skills I use on a day to day basis I learned on my own outside of classes. College prepared me for a much more rewarding life, though. There is a great deal more to me now than there was before college. Pre-college I programmed, BBSed, and read sci-fi books. Now I do that, but also read about two books a week that don't even resemble sci-fi. I go to art exhibits. When something important in our culture emerges, I have a pretty decent chance of grasping what's going on. I can easily imagine a completely fullfilling life as a non-programmer. I wouldn't have skipped it for anything.
And I don't mean by teaching you a certain programming language, or by making you into a fantastic programmer. College isn't going to turn a poor programmer into Knuth. That *won't* happen. What college *does* do, though, is prepare you for a more fullfilling life. It teaches you analytical skills. It teaches you how to look at a situation, and figure out what can be changed and what can't. It shows you your place in the world and in history. It teaches you what about yourself is yours, and what is purely stuff you've gleaned from copying other people. It teaches you what in life you can control, and what stuff you can't. It teaches you how to live well with your peers and other people, and it teaches you about how societies and cultures work. It gives you more control over your life. It's a freaking metamorphosis. Literally. You walk in as one person, and you walk out completely transformed. It opens up avenues in your life that you wouldn't have been aware of had you skipped it. Go to college. Don't worry about the fantastic job market. College is the most fantastic four years of your life, and it makes the remaining years all the more fantastic. Don't just go for the classes. Live on campus. Be a part of campus life. Talk to the people you meet. I gaurantee that if you do it with full intention to figure out what college has to offer that you'll come out just as prepared programming-wise, and infinitely more prepared in a whole bunch of ways you didn't even know were important.
Here fricking here. The characters were paper thin. It's hard to keep plots from being derivative in sci-fi, but usually people try to make up for that in some way (self-parody, clever characters, etc). Given the humans in the story, if they'd have lost in the end and been completely annhilated by the Drej, I'd have been hard pressed to give a crap. The story and the characters were unbelievably predictable, and totally non-funny. I think nathan lane's character was supposed to be funny (and I usually like nathan lane), but he wasn't given any fantastic lines. Any animation that didn't have to do with the characters was really pretty, but the characters themselves looked straight out of scooby doo. This is the only place around I've found so many people supporting this movie, and with few exceptions everyone who said they liked this movie did it while playing the call katz an idiot game. There should be some sort of mode to tune out anti-katz rants, so you can actually see some discussions that aren't 99% "This article is just more proof that Jon Katz is a worthless pile of goo".
Ok. Read through the imprecise language and the overused metaphors, and Jon Katz has a point. Our culture is influenced in most aspects that form people's beliefs and values by big business. People watch tv, listen to the radio, read their newspapers, etc.. a steady stream of daily media. If you don't read books, and it appears most people don't, your prime source of influence becomes media. You buy it, you watch it, it fills your life. People sit their kids in front of the tv to keep them quiet. They buy them magazines, they give them video games. They take them to movies. By age twelve, the kids are all little images of each other, and images of whatever they've absorbed during their formative years watching TV. The corporations *do not care* what they put in the media as long as it sells. People's values are shaped by the random whim of someone who'd rather the world didn't change. Even if *you* have a point of view, and you think you're right, you can't influence anywhere near as many people as big business. You'll die, and four people who hold values dictated by a lifetime of tv-watching will replace you. I think this is part of what jon katz was getting at, and I personally find it *damned* disturbing.
If they're at all intelligent (and I don't think they'd let something this simple break that bad), they'd put some sort of flag on the duplicated files that tells them to give it it's own binary when the original is changed.
It sounds like this thing is more like an agent that actively seeks out duplicated files than an operating system mechanism. It stores a value that's relatively unique to each file. When it encounters two that are the same, it's found a duplicated binary, and it just uses one binary for two files. But that doesn't sound exactly 'innovative' enough to warrant a web page, so there must be something I'm missing.
I would say they should learn them at some point during the neophyte stage of developerhood. There are computer engineers and computer science majors just graduating that don't know how memory allocation and memory management work, and they're unaware that their use of language features can have any affect on runtime. I work on a project that develops OS-like things, and we're seeing a barrage of new grads that are confused by having to do their own memory management or pay attention to what language features actually do. There were actually some fairly bright people interviewed recently that had to have pointers explained to them. Regardless of language, not knowing the realities of memory usage/management has serious potential to make you a lousy developer in other languages. Now, that said, I'm not a blanket advocate of non-OOP languages. I think there are many oop language features that ease development and make maintainance easier. I even use some of them in projects I do outside of work (I'm actively learning c++, and I've programmed in smalltalk for a while), it's just that a good chunk of the software development world does work where real-time issues and hardware constraints are an issue. Not knowing how to use a pointer pretty much rules a person out as an embedded developer, compiler-writer, operating system developer, as well as many other things. Hell, even for programming in a language that doesn't explicitly have pointers, and that has garbage collection, I'd still like the person to know how to work with memory. I'd think a java or smalltalk developer that had never used a language that didn't keep track of memory for you would make a pretty lousy developer in their respective language.
I'd say it probably depends on this Type Security thing they talk about. They talk about partitioning the kernel into discrete parts, each one getting specific permissions. That's not what openbsd has. Openbsd has done a very thorough security audit. If openbsd doesn't already use their security technique, it'd probably be just as much work to use this on openbsd. Linux has the advantage of having more functionality and devices working with it, so if it's going to take just as much work for either kernel, why not go with the one with more toys?
Do you see slashdot staying primarily as it's been in the past (collecting links to news on other sites and having discussions), or are you planning on running with the idea of gathering new material as you have recently with the interviews? In short, do you see slashdot doing more original journalism in the future?
It's not just the speed.. vi follows the 'Do one thing and do it well' philosophy of unix more truly than emacs. vi is a fantastic text editor.. able to conquer large codebases in a fraction of a second. emacs does damned near everything except sort socks. In fact, I'm probably wrong about that. There's probably some lisp code out there that enables emacs to sort socks. My bad.
Concise, yes. Technical, certainly. Complete, not always. Or more accurately, man pages aren't always complete in the right way. Although one can learn how to use unix tools through reading a well-written man-page, the learning curve is often quite a bit steeper than by learning via a good book. I learned to use various things through man-pages when I was first learning unix in college (a college which was several hours from anywhere I could get a good technical book on every tool I wanted to learn). There was a whole wealth of tools whose learning curve was huge in relation to their ultimate benefit. Useful tools, yes. Was the time it took to learn all of them through man-pages always short enough that one could both become expert in them *and* retain some semblance of a social life? Not always. If reading a book rather than being hardcore and reading the man page will save me time, well, then I'm going with the book. If my boss tells me I have to learn a tool for my job, and I can either read the man page *or* buy a book in the form of a tutorial, I'm going for the book *every* time (although my reaction time would certainly be affected by whether or not it's an o'reilly book :) Also, there's a great deal of tools whose existence isn't readily apparent. I've been constantly learning about the various development tools in unix for the last 5 years, and I'm still finding new ones. There are several tools whose functionality I was about to duplicate on my own, just because I didn't know they existed (cs/cscope and expect immediately come to mind) And with just man pages, how the hell do you know where to start? If someone just hands you a unix machine, and you've never used unix before, how the hell do you know enough to even find HOWTOs, info pages, and man pages? Now that I've gotten over the annoying parts of the learning curve where you don't know what to learn next, I'm a much happier person. And thanks to dead-tree manuals, I actually have some spare time as well.
What do you care whether a person uses RedHat and takes a million easy-to-read books to learn Unix? Does the fact that you already know unix, and have come to it quicker than they mean that you have to make being arrogant about it a moral crusade?
??? The last part of this sentence is pretty incomprehensible. If you're going to be arrogant, you might as well learn how to write first.
Now, I'm almost expecting to sound like an idiot for asking this, but I've been hearing about it for a while and still can't figure it out. Why would a person want ppp over ethernet? If you have an ethernet connection, what good would layering a ppp connection on top of it do?
Although most of this article was pretty expected, when the author mentioned the mental division between home life and work life he brought to mind something I've noticed in myself lately. In college I pretty much geeked around non-stop. There were some nice breaks in the day where I'd have non-geek related classes between the usual programming/reading cs stuff activities. Programming till 2 in the morning after a day of non-cs related work didn't seem like so bad an idea. Now that I do 8-10 hours of programming at work every day, I want no mentally taxing contact with computers when I get home. Occasionally a video game or two, but beyond that it's dinner, TV or book, and relaxation. Is this just me, or has this happened to other people, too?
I am in complete agreement that the current booming market for people to develop new applications won't last forever. At some point IT will cease being a place where a skilled person has a non-zero chance of becoming a millionaire. There is one thing, however, that will keep the more skilled programmers paying the rent long after the businesses have their e-commerce in place. As poorly as this bodes for what I'll be doing with the rest of my life, I'm guessing that even after the gold rush is over we'll all be doing bug-fixes and maintainance (sp?) for the rest of our careers. People will become dependant upon the applications we're writing now. Unfortunately, for most applications there is a certain development life-cycle at the end of which is a decline in quality. The original programmers are gone, the new people doing the bug-fixes don't have as complete a grasp of the big picture as the original programmers, new bug-fixes are not quite as consistent with the original design as they could be, code-quality degenerates, maintainability degrades rapidly, and a new code base is required. The only way I'm going to be humping a gas-station job 25 years from now is if somewhere along the line people figure out how to write software that becomes perfect and then stays so. I don't see it happening. Don't get me wrong.. I'm investing and saving my money, as there's never any gaurantee that I wont' need it tommorrow.. I'm just not going to try looking for that next killer industry any time soon.