Agreed. Which is why math exams need to have minmally meaningful problems and be long enough to be able to think difficult problems through.
My Algebra and Calculus classes had 4 and 5-hour long exams with 4 or 5 exercises, where all work had to be shown. That's a much better reflection on your capacity to think and concentrate on a thoughtful problem than doing things by rote memory and a quick pencil.
The Qt purists obviously have every reason to defend the superiority of the toolkit in technical terms, and they'd be right about that. Nontheless when making large projects there are more other variables in play which may be more important.
Specifically, more people use a desktop with a GTK base than Qt. It's pretty much as simple as that. GTK may not be as shiny, but it doesn't preclude from being an extremely functional and consistent system that's well documented and tested.
Is Qt as well tested and documented? Probably, and likely much more integrated. But the fact is that if you use it on a GTK desktop, people will notice, and such is life that GTK is the de facto standard.
It's not as if this were an unusual situation. People program with the MFC in Windows for lack of a better alternative despite the fact that is an ancient, bug-ridden POS. Things were still being done in Carbon on OSX despite the availability of Cocoa.
The best course of action would be to take the most frequently used and best-documente libraries and use that. So your code may be more verbose and less orthogonal. Suck it up. All platforms have their own great software written in god-awful libraries and toolkits and somehow we manage.
I got my first summer job at 16 doing software testing and by the time I was 18 I already had a decent job in IT, so I can relate to you.
The thing is that most people outside of out field don't understand that self-teaching is an essential necessity to stay employed, and that unlike many hapless, joy-sucking professions (accountancy comes to mind), learning new things in computing is fun, interesting and fairly engaging.
You should know, now that I'm a bit older, that most people just don't have as much passion for the job as you may have. The fact that you're posting this on a tech site is already indicative of that.
I think people have claimed the same about Vista and IE7, and the critics still turned out to be on the right.
Technically you're right, but this is Microsoft. 95% of the time the issues still make it to production.
Then start lobbying your government to purchase drugs on the behalf of your people at reduced prices like most of the countries that have socialized medicine. There's a reason why their health care is cheaper yet their benefits usually greater than that of places with wholly privatized medicine.
Really, that's a new low for Microsoft lackeys. Being ISV's you'd expect them to be a bit more honest and pragmatic. Turns out they're just like their evil overlords.
Honestly, having worked several years in outsourcing at IBM, our American customers were as full of shit as we were.
American IT workers have a sense of entitlement where they believe that the quality of their work is inherently superior simply because of their origin. Truth is, there's a lot of brilliant minds in the States, but like most places it is full of mediocre people.
One of my ex-customer's IT shop was run by a bunch of 60-year-olds who didn't know how to use SSH or automate user creation on AIX machines. And this was a massive Fortune 500 corporation with operations in dozens of countries. They were quickly fired and replaced by South American kids in their mid-20s who knew UNIX from the inside out and who tripled the level of productivity while reducing head count and increasing end user customer satisfaction.
There are dozens of cases like that, but you won't hear about those simpy because they went well.
IBM's American division is absolutely, completely stuffed with deadwood and worthless project managers who couldn't distinguish a project from their ass. Believe me, most of the people they're getting rid of won't be a loss for them nor their colleagues.
There comes a point where we should simply not listen to criticism from pundits who have no knowledge of Linux and no willingness to understand the Unix/Linux way of doing things.
Just about the only point that is worth something is the audio API, and I believe there's a lot of people working on that issue already.
The rest are just things that he doesn't like because, well, he's unwilling to see the bright side of the way things are already done. They're non-issues, or at least they're a way of doing things by design.
The ABI issue will never change. Comes stright from Linus's mouth. Stop beating the dead horse.
ISVs don't have that many issues with packaging software. Java software works out of the box. We have Opera, Renoise, Oracle, and a host of other ISVs which have solved this issue.
Package management could be unified, but at this point it's a non-issue.
Leave the desktops and X out of the conversation. It's all there by choice and design. Won't change; most users who know a thing of two about it don't want it change.
I seriously don't understand why anyone would want a unified desktop solution. Windows' desktops sucks. OSX's desktop sucks in different ways. With Linux at least I have a choice.
Depends on where you're living. Outside of the US and some European country hardly anyone has or wants Macs. Even the technically inclined users who know and could install themselves a Hackintosh use Ubuntu instead.
Most people are morons unable to read past the headlines and the sound bites.
A lot of these people accuse Stallman of essentially being consistent with his own ideals, mostly because they feel offended that he doesn't mind if in his ideal world they were out of a job because they used to develop proprietary software. Well, suck it guys, at any rate he doesn't want the development of free software to be forced; he would like users to come to the conclusion that Free software is better and this would not chose proprietary solutions to begin with.
Knowing the basic science behind professions should be a basic requirement of all university curricula. It is one of the things that separate trade schools from universities.
Some might say that it gives an additional burden because it might not be applicable directly to the actual job. But it serves two increasingly important purposes: it teaches you to think, and it gives you the ontological foundations for incorporating more knowledge.
I can only speak from my CS knowledge, but having studied Calculus and Algebra on my first year have truly opened up my mind and helped me become a better programmer, not just a computer scientist. Calculus is essential because it's something that most people in related fields need to apply, and the CS curriculum should be designed so that one can interoperate with physicist, chemists, and engineers who have a need to apply their equations with computers. Algebra completely changed the way I think about every logical construct, helped defined concepts that abstract away numbers, types, and classes, and presented me with some extremely difficult problems for which there was no other recourse than to brighten up and study and practice until one gets it. Forcing one to think and study beyond what one was used to in High School is a necessity.
In later years I was able to understand functional programming, abstract data types and numerical methods much more easily than if I hadn't; your mind clicks and relates all these concepts to each other and your learning accelerates exponentially.
So sure, if you're just a Java drone you don't need this. But Java drones are not true software engineers or computer scientists, and what's worse, they don't really know because they never managed to get into the depth of knowledge the subjects can get.
Take Type Theory and functional programming, for example. Very few people get to learn this in detail, and while you may never apply it fully professionally, the knowledge it brings helps you to define mental frameworks where proof of properties for objects, abstraction away from implementation, and modelling become significantly easier. Or numerical methods; chances are if you haven't taken a class on numerical methods - where you get pounded with rigorous proofs, arduous excercises, and loads of theory on computation, linear algebra, matrixes and such - you'll never really be capable of pulling off complex math problems without introducing slight calculation errors.
In the same vein, if you have the basics of organic chemistry, understanding how cetain medicines and biological processes work become significantly easier as you can get a feel of how that works on a fundamental level. I don't think that's exactly what keeps people from becoming doctors(something tells me it's got to do with being tens of thousands of dollars in debt by the time you graduate). I mean, if you suffer so much from just one course that it prevents you from continuing another 6 years of education, you never really had it in you to keep going, right?
No, you pay more because you don't have large institutions negotiating the price on drugs on larga scale (such as countries with nationalized health care), and because your insurance companies rape you for them, as their interests are aligned with those of the insurers. That, and the fact that the FDA functions in a completely innefficient manner.
Do remember that a lot of big pharma is based on Europe. Take Novartis for example.
have evidently never tried Maya either.
I mean, at least I found tutorials on blender and in 2 minutes I was navigating the screen with easy. Once I learned that it was frustrating as hell to do the equivalent with Maya, at which point I got up and did something else.
From the website:
ASTRÃE analyzes structured C programs, with complex memory usages [17], but without dynamic memory allocation and recursion. This encompasses many embedded programs as found in earth transportation, nuclear energy, medical instrumentation, aeronautic, and aerospace applications, in particular synchronous control/command such as electric flight control [22], [23]. There is a load of research on proving program correctness for limited subsets of languages (especially with no dynamic memory allocation). On functional languages these proofs can be almost trivial, not so much on imperative languages.
Correctness proofs go as far back as computer science itself, so it's an extensively studied area, which is unfortunately mostly relegated to academia on most cases because of the restrictions it places on the expressive power of such systems. But don't underestimate its ability to not get people killed.
I disagree. I would take a small pay cut if that meant having such an extensive range of benefits. You're assuming that it costs the company as much as yourself to give you those benefits as it does to you. In reality, HR can negotiate excellent deals for benefits when they're dealing with thousands of people. Negotiating hotel discounts practically costs them nothing if it guarantees the owners a constant stream of customers for rooms that would otherwise go unused. They could get bicycles, diapers, and whatever much more easily as a volume discount.
To this date the only thing that keeps me here is telecommuting, which is not corporate policy as much as my own team's. What those benefits mean to me, fundamentally, is that there are people that are thinking about how to keep you satisfied and who actually give a shit when people are considering going to work for the competition.
Believe me, I love cash on hand as much as the next guy, but even something as simple as a Christmas present or a real discount on our own products, which has a practically null effect on the bottom line, would be a nice gesture and a reflection of the value placed on the employees. Or not...
Here's a nice example of why the current generation has no loyalty to its employers.
I work in the same place my father did. He's been working at the same company for 25 years. When he got there there was a clear expectation that it was a place where you could develop a carreer, and the company made efforts to retain employees. Good maternal/paternal leave, extended health benefits, country club, child care, discounts for many vacation places, gifts for employees' children for Christmas (I recall they were amazing gifts; I got a chemistry set and a bicycle on two of those years), a baby shower gift package for newborns with towels, diapers and food.
20 years later, and all of that has completely vanished. One generation later and none of that is to be seen, and I doubt if there's some corporation today that has such an extensive benefits package on what once were excellent benefits but were considered within the norm.And the thing is, some of those benefits didn't add up to that much monetarily, but they did at least give the impression that the company took extra steps to take care of you.
So, tell me again, why do these people deserve my loyalty now when it is clear that I could be laid off any minute without them looking back?
So does that mean Bill will embrace Free Software on public institutions of poor countries to save cost and dependence from corporations which don't necessarily have their best interests at hand?
I have a very difficult time believing the writer has anything to do with computer science. In my university, and all other universities I know of, practically all new projects are open source. Computer science as a branch of mathematics has ALWAYS been based on open source, and it will always be that way because that is the nature of science.
If he wants to discuss products, that's another thing. Yeah, not all open source products are "polished". So what? Product by themselves are not innovative; they're built upon years of research which is innovative by itself, a lot of which is published in papers that are open to all (at least in this discipline).
Oh, and name me a better closed-source network scanner than Nmap or a better wireless browser than Kismet, or a more capable remote execution system than OpenSSH. Would you really say that Amarok is not an innovative media player? How about Plan 9, which is a hell of an innovative, open-source operating system? The closest thing closed source has to ZFS is the Veritas File system, and with ZFS being free there's no reason not to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Which is why math exams need to have minmally meaningful problems and be long enough to be able to think difficult problems through. My Algebra and Calculus classes had 4 and 5-hour long exams with 4 or 5 exercises, where all work had to be shown. That's a much better reflection on your capacity to think and concentrate on a thoughtful problem than doing things by rote memory and a quick pencil.
The Qt purists obviously have every reason to defend the superiority of the toolkit in technical terms, and they'd be right about that. Nontheless when making large projects there are more other variables in play which may be more important. Specifically, more people use a desktop with a GTK base than Qt. It's pretty much as simple as that. GTK may not be as shiny, but it doesn't preclude from being an extremely functional and consistent system that's well documented and tested. Is Qt as well tested and documented? Probably, and likely much more integrated. But the fact is that if you use it on a GTK desktop, people will notice, and such is life that GTK is the de facto standard. It's not as if this were an unusual situation. People program with the MFC in Windows for lack of a better alternative despite the fact that is an ancient, bug-ridden POS. Things were still being done in Carbon on OSX despite the availability of Cocoa. The best course of action would be to take the most frequently used and best-documente libraries and use that. So your code may be more verbose and less orthogonal. Suck it up. All platforms have their own great software written in god-awful libraries and toolkits and somehow we manage.
I got my first summer job at 16 doing software testing and by the time I was 18 I already had a decent job in IT, so I can relate to you.
The thing is that most people outside of out field don't understand that self-teaching is an essential necessity to stay employed, and that unlike many hapless, joy-sucking professions (accountancy comes to mind), learning new things in computing is fun, interesting and fairly engaging.
You should know, now that I'm a bit older, that most people just don't have as much passion for the job as you may have. The fact that you're posting this on a tech site is already indicative of that.
I think people have claimed the same about Vista and IE7, and the critics still turned out to be on the right.
Technically you're right, but this is Microsoft. 95% of the time the issues still make it to production.
Then start lobbying your government to purchase drugs on the behalf of your people at reduced prices like most of the countries that have socialized medicine. There's a reason why their health care is cheaper yet their benefits usually greater than that of places with wholly privatized medicine.
Really, that's a new low for Microsoft lackeys. Being ISV's you'd expect them to be a bit more honest and pragmatic. Turns out they're just like their evil overlords.
American IT workers have a sense of entitlement where they believe that the quality of their work is inherently superior simply because of their origin. Truth is, there's a lot of brilliant minds in the States, but like most places it is full of mediocre people.
One of my ex-customer's IT shop was run by a bunch of 60-year-olds who didn't know how to use SSH or automate user creation on AIX machines. And this was a massive Fortune 500 corporation with operations in dozens of countries. They were quickly fired and replaced by South American kids in their mid-20s who knew UNIX from the inside out and who tripled the level of productivity while reducing head count and increasing end user customer satisfaction.
There are dozens of cases like that, but you won't hear about those simpy because they went well.
IBM's American division is absolutely, completely stuffed with deadwood and worthless project managers who couldn't distinguish a project from their ass. Believe me, most of the people they're getting rid of won't be a loss for them nor their colleagues.
If you dislike whitespace, don't use Python. Whitespace is a design decision and most python users consider it wonderful. Go away.
There comes a point where we should simply not listen to criticism from pundits who have no knowledge of Linux and no willingness to understand the Unix/Linux way of doing things.
Just about the only point that is worth something is the audio API, and I believe there's a lot of people working on that issue already.
The rest are just things that he doesn't like because, well, he's unwilling to see the bright side of the way things are already done. They're non-issues, or at least they're a way of doing things by design.
The ABI issue will never change. Comes stright from Linus's mouth. Stop beating the dead horse.
ISVs don't have that many issues with packaging software. Java software works out of the box. We have Opera, Renoise, Oracle, and a host of other ISVs which have solved this issue.
Package management could be unified, but at this point it's a non-issue.
Leave the desktops and X out of the conversation. It's all there by choice and design. Won't change; most users who know a thing of two about it don't want it change.
I seriously don't understand why anyone would want a unified desktop solution. Windows' desktops sucks. OSX's desktop sucks in different ways. With Linux at least I have a choice.
Depends on where you're living. Outside of the US and some European country hardly anyone has or wants Macs. Even the technically inclined users who know and could install themselves a Hackintosh use Ubuntu instead.
Most people are morons unable to read past the headlines and the sound bites.
A lot of these people accuse Stallman of essentially being consistent with his own ideals, mostly because they feel offended that he doesn't mind if in his ideal world they were out of a job because they used to develop proprietary software. Well, suck it guys, at any rate he doesn't want the development of free software to be forced; he would like users to come to the conclusion that Free software is better and this would not chose proprietary solutions to begin with.
Keep trolling. Come back when you've actually read and understood what the Free Software movement is about.
Someone should tell this guy about SAGE http://www.sagemath.org/
Knowing the basic science behind professions should be a basic requirement of all university curricula. It is one of the things that separate trade schools from universities.
Some might say that it gives an additional burden because it might not be applicable directly to the actual job. But it serves two increasingly important purposes: it teaches you to think, and it gives you the ontological foundations for incorporating more knowledge.
I can only speak from my CS knowledge, but having studied Calculus and Algebra on my first year have truly opened up my mind and helped me become a better programmer, not just a computer scientist.
Calculus is essential because it's something that most people in related fields need to apply, and the CS curriculum should be designed so that one can interoperate with physicist, chemists, and engineers who have a need to apply their equations with computers.
Algebra completely changed the way I think about every logical construct, helped defined concepts that abstract away numbers, types, and classes, and presented me with some extremely difficult problems for which there was no other recourse than to brighten up and study and practice until one gets it. Forcing one to think and study beyond what one was used to in High School is a necessity.
In later years I was able to understand functional programming, abstract data types and numerical methods much more easily than if I hadn't; your mind clicks and relates all these concepts to each other and your learning accelerates exponentially.
So sure, if you're just a Java drone you don't need this. But Java drones are not true software engineers or computer scientists, and what's worse, they don't really know because they never managed to get into the depth of knowledge the subjects can get.
Take Type Theory and functional programming, for example. Very few people get to learn this in detail, and while you may never apply it fully professionally, the knowledge it brings helps you to define mental frameworks where proof of properties for objects, abstraction away from implementation, and modelling become significantly easier. Or numerical methods; chances are if you haven't taken a class on numerical methods - where you get pounded with rigorous proofs, arduous excercises, and loads of theory on computation, linear algebra, matrixes and such - you'll never really be capable of pulling off complex math problems without introducing slight calculation errors.
In the same vein, if you have the basics of organic chemistry, understanding how cetain medicines and biological processes work become significantly easier as you can get a feel of how that works on a fundamental level. I don't think that's exactly what keeps people from becoming doctors(something tells me it's got to do with being tens of thousands of dollars in debt by the time you graduate). I mean, if you suffer so much from just one course that it prevents you from continuing another 6 years of education, you never really had it in you to keep going, right?
No, you pay more because you don't have large institutions negotiating the price on drugs on larga scale (such as countries with nationalized health care), and because your insurance companies rape you for them, as their interests are aligned with those of the insurers. That, and the fact that the FDA functions in a completely innefficient manner.
Do remember that a lot of big pharma is based on Europe. Take Novartis for example.
have evidently never tried Maya either.
I mean, at least I found tutorials on blender and in 2 minutes I was navigating the screen with easy. Once I learned that it was frustrating as hell to do the equivalent with Maya, at which point I got up and did something else.
ASTRÃE analyzes structured C programs, with complex memory usages [17], but without dynamic memory allocation and recursion. This encompasses many embedded programs as found in earth transportation, nuclear energy, medical instrumentation, aeronautic, and aerospace applications, in particular synchronous control/command such as electric flight control [22], [23]. There is a load of research on proving program correctness for limited subsets of languages (especially with no dynamic memory allocation). On functional languages these proofs can be almost trivial, not so much on imperative languages.
Correctness proofs go as far back as computer science itself, so it's an extensively studied area, which is unfortunately mostly relegated to academia on most cases because of the restrictions it places on the expressive power of such systems. But don't underestimate its ability to not get people killed.
News at 11.
'Orto' means 'ass' in Spanish.
I disagree. I would take a small pay cut if that meant having such an extensive range of benefits. You're assuming that it costs the company as much as yourself to give you those benefits as it does to you. In reality, HR can negotiate excellent deals for benefits when they're dealing with thousands of people. Negotiating hotel discounts practically costs them nothing if it guarantees the owners a constant stream of customers for rooms that would otherwise go unused. They could get bicycles, diapers, and whatever much more easily as a volume discount.
To this date the only thing that keeps me here is telecommuting, which is not corporate policy as much as my own team's. What those benefits mean to me, fundamentally, is that there are people that are thinking about how to keep you satisfied and who actually give a shit when people are considering going to work for the competition.
Believe me, I love cash on hand as much as the next guy, but even something as simple as a Christmas present or a real discount on our own products, which has a practically null effect on the bottom line, would be a nice gesture and a reflection of the value placed on the employees. Or not...
Here's a nice example of why the current generation has no loyalty to its employers.
I work in the same place my father did. He's been working at the same company for 25 years. When he got there there was a clear expectation that it was a place where you could develop a carreer, and the company made efforts to retain employees. Good maternal/paternal leave, extended health benefits, country club, child care, discounts for many vacation places, gifts for employees' children for Christmas (I recall they were amazing gifts; I got a chemistry set and a bicycle on two of those years), a baby shower gift package for newborns with towels, diapers and food.
20 years later, and all of that has completely vanished. One generation later and none of that is to be seen, and I doubt if there's some corporation today that has such an extensive benefits package on what once were excellent benefits but were considered within the norm.And the thing is, some of those benefits didn't add up to that much monetarily, but they did at least give the impression that the company took extra steps to take care of you.
So, tell me again, why do these people deserve my loyalty now when it is clear that I could be laid off any minute without them looking back?
Earth!
Now with delicious soft filling and an irresistably crunchy core!
So does that mean Bill will embrace Free Software on public institutions of poor countries to save cost and dependence from corporations which don't necessarily have their best interests at hand?
You could just, you know, use a bike or a motorcycle if it's just 10 miles?
I have a very difficult time believing the writer has anything to do with computer science. In my university, and all other universities I know of, practically all new projects are open source. Computer science as a branch of mathematics has ALWAYS been based on open source, and it will always be that way because that is the nature of science.
If he wants to discuss products, that's another thing. Yeah, not all open source products are "polished". So what? Product by themselves are not innovative; they're built upon years of research which is innovative by itself, a lot of which is published in papers that are open to all (at least in this discipline).
Oh, and name me a better closed-source network scanner than Nmap or a better wireless browser than Kismet, or a more capable remote execution system than OpenSSH. Would you really say that Amarok is not an innovative media player? How about Plan 9, which is a hell of an innovative, open-source operating system? The closest thing closed source has to ZFS is the Veritas File system, and with ZFS being free there's no reason not to use it.