It's also in some cases after we paid for their educations through government grants, many of which place no requirements on them remaining in the US.
Case in point, my ex attends college here free, working on her PHD. In fact she said that there's so much free money he plans on getting a second masters as well.
It'd be nice when the US Government would invest in it's own citizens.
I think this is a short sighted point of view.
High tech and highly skilled work is not about filling a single job vacancy. It is about growing an industry. Yeah.. the "foreigner" takes up a job, but highly skilled work puts more jobs into the economy than it takes out. If you lose a top notch scientist then you've lost a business oportunity.
The US is built on immigrants.. so get over it. The whole premise of the country was immigration. So this silly xenophobia is just ignorance plain and simple. During and after the second world war there were people that understood this.
Remember that when you review US history of science and technology you run into names like: Einstein, Von Neumann, Von Braun, Torvalds, and literally thousands of other annonymous contributers to US science and industry.
The US thrives from importing these brains. Losing these people is an important loss. We're not talking about jobless homeless people.
Before 9/11, many Americans were ignorant of the fact that they are largely hated around the world. The media spun the situation, claiming the world hating Americans is a new phenomenon due only to Bush....
It seems to me you haven't spent much time outside the US.
In Latin America, though there certainly were conspiracy theories and negative feelings for the US before Bush, there was also admiration and many assumed that the US stood against torture and for human rights. Many considered the US the "good guys". In fact, right after 9/11 there was a huge wave of shock and sympathy for the US. (Even Iran sent their condolences!)
However, Bush managed to totally mess all that up. Not only did he go on a rampage against immigrants (legal and illegal) that alientated Latin Americans to the extreme that many countries that previously allowed Americans to enter w/no visa (like Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, among others), now require Americans (and in some cases Americans only) to pay for admittance because of the poor treatment their citizens recieve at American Embassies (I'm American and I hate to go to a US Embassy!).
Furthermore, the image of the US became associtated with Gitmo and with Abu Graib. Also, the US took steps against the delicate balance w/ Russia and started treaty busting.
Around the world, the US made a lot of people angry, to the point that throughout many cities of the world people arose to protest the US invasion of Iraq. I never heard of this happening before (at least not in my lifetime).
So I think your thoery on the post-Bush damage in international relations is quite myoptic. I grew up oversees and have lived in several continents. The damage on the ground is very real.
I continue to believe that the best thing that ever happened to Osama bin Laden, Ahmadinejad and even Chavez is Bush. Bush gave these guys an incredible boost. They must truly love him because Bush (and crazy Cheney) made the US look like an evil empire.. exactly what people are likely to rally to oppose.
IT was never good. What you really want to do is work for a software company. That way you work for the central product of the company rather than being the company's expense!
Any programmer that merely follows instructions from some "analyst" will soon not have a job.
In ALL jobs I've been involved in, programmers often had to:
- analyze requirements - design solutions - be aware of the impact on the business - coordinate with other staff - develop the solution - often provide documentation or informal information on the feature to doc writers/testers/management/etc.. - test - sometimes help out giving advice to tech support
The whole "monkey" talk is ridiculous.
In Game Development, there's also a strong element of algorithm design or at least algorithm selection. The design work is NEVER trivial, and may often require a lot of math.
So I really don't see why the myth of the "code monkey" is perpetuated.
Show some respect for the software development profession!
Iranians often call themselves "Persians" and the language they speak is "persian". They ARE persians.
Also, the charge that muslims massacred the natives is just absolutely silly. Your example of Egypt is ridiculous. Egypt was invaded in 639 AD by the Islamic Empire. However it took about 200 years for people to convert to Islam. They were not converted "by the sword" as some critics used to allege in past centuries. See
Also, Muslims != Arabs. Lots of Arabs are Jewish a Christian and worship "Allah" (the Muslim word for God).
Your "facts" about Islam are seriously mistaken.
And I say this as a person who is:
1. Not Muslim 2. Who's family has suffered serious persecution under the "Islamic" regime in Iran
There's a lot of misinformation about Islam floating around. Some of it goes back to the Crusades.. more recently it has been revived by the whole "war on terrorism". But misinformation won't help in the battle against extremists and fanatics. It only makes you look dumb.
The area of the middle east was mostly nomadic tribal peoples. What often happened when two of these groups met? If one group wanted something from the other, often some kind of violent thing happened. There were trade routes and traders, but wars were fought over control of those trade routes.
I beg to differ.. Iran was the seat of the Persian Empire, the land of one of the most famous Zoroastrian Kings: Cirus. These kings are well known in history for their contributions to justice and civilization in general.
Iran was also known in the apex of Islamic Civilization as a center for the learned. In fact al-Ghazalli (the most famous exponent of algebra) was said to be Persian.
So referring to this area as a "tribal" area is a bit disparanging. Don't confuse the tribal Arabs of Saudi Arabia and the tribes of Afghanistan with Persian civilization.
Also, remember where the "cradle of civilization" is?? Baghdad also know as Mesopotamia.
Violence is an ancient tradition.. also much practiced in the West. Lets not all get on our high horses and think ourselves more civilized. World War II happened only 60 some years ago.. and that was primarily a European + US phenomenon.
The problem with math is that it is taught with no reward. Imagine if we studied the formulas of physics w/o ever hearing about the cool stuff like General Relativity, the Uncertanty Principle, etc.. Understanding those interesting paradoxes is what makes physics interesting. Now look at math. How many people know that math can limit the very scope of a scientific theorem (as expressed in a piece of paper), or the odd patterns of primes, or that there is knowledge in the universe that cannot be summarized, etc.. Nobody ever gets to see the cool stuff.. they are just burried under the mechanics.
I believe school should teach people to communicate effectively. Initially this implies imprecise communication like English and Spanish, reading and writing.
But later as we try to describe things more fully we may employ the language of math. For example, lets take a table and see how we can draw it, we can measure it and precisely define its attributes. In fact we can do so so precisely that we can end up telling how heavy it will be, how much room it will take, and how much it will cost.
As school advances and the need to describe things increases we can use math to describe chemical and biological proceses, physical processes, and sociological processes.
In fact, as people advance in their education they tend to need math to precisely describe what happened, their theories of what will happen, etc..
In this manner, students can enjoy the benefits of math in all fields as they advance in its study.
I know so many people that have studied Differential Equations or even basic Algebra and have no idea how that could ever be useful to them.
So from a performance perspective, Java is very good because:
1. There are tons of sophisticated tools for building web apps 2. I manages memory very efficiently 3. People build HUGE servers w/it no problem.. others build distributed apps that run on hundreds of servers 4. The database is usually the bottleneck in this sort of app
C/C++ are not generally used for web apps.. so the comparison is really apples and oranges.
Among the web languages, Java is among the fastest.. and most scalable and has the most tools.
Why not just let them leave? And bar them when they try to come back. What is the point of catching someone you don't want in the country when they are leaving it??
I think the point is that if you know who left, then you also know who didn't leave.
I've been looking for an IDE for quite some time for my students to use in class.
The requirements are: 1. It should be fast 2. Easy to download and not require an online connection to use/activate 3. It should have the usual editing features 4. IT SHOULD HAVE A GREAT DEBUGGER
I'm trying to encourage my students to use a proper debugger. Here's what I know:
Eclipse: weird installation process... compiler/debugger need to be configured separately.. lousy debugger Netbeans: also weird installation process.. compiler/debugger need to be configured separately.. lousy debugger DevCpp: good installation.. ok use.. buggy debugger Visual C++ Express: last time i tried you need internet to install.. hard to configure projects to use pure C.. good debugger.
For now we mostly use DevCpp. Maybe I'll learn Delphi and fix it up a bit.
The problem is that people try to think of kids as little adults when they are in fact just kids. You can't always reason with a kid.. because they don't have the same ability to weigh options that adults do (I know when I was a kid I sure didn't). A little negative re-enforcement (do something wrong.. get punished) is sometimes the best way.
And I truly believe that kids today have more problems as a result of being treated as fragile ornaments who will be screwed up for the rest of their life if you even look at them in a menacing way.
Dumb conclusion.
My wife was never spanked/beaten/slapped as a child and she was always very well behaved.
My teenage daughter was never spanked/beaten/slapped and is very very well behaved, known for her good discipline in school and is a model student and person.
Why do you assume that violence makes people better behaved? There are many ways of instilling discipline w/o the use of violence of any sort (yes: even spanking). That is why I applaud that kids don't get spanked in school anymore.
There are societies that believe that you cannot have discipline if you don't have a strong autocratic police society. But most civilized countries today disagree w/such notions. If such things apply at the level of society why do we assume that we need a strong autocratic police society at home?!
Children will behave if they are rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad behavior (just like adults). But such punishment does not need to include spanking. Other techniques like depriving them of what they want, making them take a "timeout" or stay for a while in their room to cool off.. work quite fine. And in my experience as a parent, such disciplinary actions are generally only necessary during the first few years and then the kid develops enough self-control to not get into trouble as a habit.
To me corporal punishment is the tell-tale mark of a parent w/no better ideas: uncreative, unthinking and often incompetent.
By the way I was "spanked" by my parents as I grew up.. and no.. I was NOT well behaved AT ALL.
I'm glad my wife had the experience she had (a very capable mother). This has allowed us to have a much happier and fear free family.
1. Monty starts db called MySQL, trademarks and has copyright 2. Monty sells trademarks and copyrights to Sun (presumably for a ton of cash) 3. Monty leaves Sun 4. Monty forks MySQL calls it MariaDB
So in the end.
Sun has: 1. A trademark 2. Rights to the code 3. Right to sell MySQl under any license
Monty has: 1. GPL'd code he does not own 2. Credibility as the guy who knows about this 3. The ability to continue selling support services
So in OSS when you buy a product you don't really get too much do you? (At least if you can't hang onto the developers)
I don't agree. I think the issue here is that more popular browsers have TOO MANY FEATURES. That is what is making Firefox unbearably slow and fat, and the same w/IE.
I liked Firefox in the old days when it was a light weight Mozilla. Now it's just a hog.
Nah.. better just get a job and have THEM pay for your Masters!
As an undergrad I got a Co-op, but friends of mine just got themselves hired fulltime. They ended up earning more, getting into better projects and finishing college at the same time I did.
I found that in the US experience rules to a certain extent (because if you don't have ANY degree your market value goes down in spite of experience).
But in Latin America experience means little to nothing compared to degrees. People are big on fancy degrees. A Masters will open much more doors than a Bachellor's. If you have a PhD you're pretty much a God.
Because the business of computer languages has nothing to do with technical merit or academic proof. Languages today are nothing more than brands that are sold (and resold) to programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also in some cases after we paid for their educations through government grants, many of which place no requirements on them remaining in the US.
Case in point, my ex attends college here free, working on her PHD. In fact she said that there's so much free money he plans on getting a second masters as well.
It'd be nice when the US Government would invest in it's own citizens.
I think this is a short sighted point of view.
High tech and highly skilled work is not about filling a single job vacancy. It is about growing an industry. Yeah.. the "foreigner" takes up a job, but highly skilled work puts more jobs into the economy than it takes out. If you lose a top notch scientist then you've lost a business oportunity.
The US is built on immigrants.. so get over it. The whole premise of the country was immigration. So this silly xenophobia is just ignorance plain and simple. During and after the second world war there were people that understood this.
Remember that when you review US history of science and technology you run into names like: Einstein, Von Neumann, Von Braun, Torvalds, and literally thousands of other annonymous contributers to US science and industry.
The US thrives from importing these brains. Losing these people is an important loss. We're not talking about jobless homeless people.
Before 9/11, many Americans were ignorant of the fact that they are largely hated around the world. The media spun the situation, claiming the world hating Americans is a new phenomenon due only to Bush. ...
It seems to me you haven't spent much time outside the US.
In Latin America, though there certainly were conspiracy theories and negative feelings for the US before Bush, there was also admiration and many assumed that the US stood against torture and for human rights. Many considered the US the "good guys". In fact, right after 9/11 there was a huge wave of shock and sympathy for the US. (Even Iran sent their condolences!)
However, Bush managed to totally mess all that up. Not only did he go on a rampage against immigrants (legal and illegal) that alientated Latin Americans to the extreme that many countries that previously allowed Americans to enter w/no visa (like Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, among others), now require Americans (and in some cases Americans only) to pay for admittance because of the poor treatment their citizens recieve at American Embassies (I'm American and I hate to go to a US Embassy!).
Furthermore, the image of the US became associtated with Gitmo and with Abu Graib. Also, the US took steps against the delicate balance w/ Russia and started treaty busting.
Around the world, the US made a lot of people angry, to the point that throughout many cities of the world people arose to protest the US invasion of Iraq. I never heard of this happening before (at least not in my lifetime).
So I think your thoery on the post-Bush damage in international relations is quite myoptic. I grew up oversees and have lived in several continents. The damage on the ground is very real.
I continue to believe that the best thing that ever happened to Osama bin Laden, Ahmadinejad and even Chavez is Bush. Bush gave these guys an incredible boost. They must truly love him because Bush (and crazy Cheney) made the US look like an evil empire.. exactly what people are likely to rally to oppose.
IT was never good. What you really want to do is work for a software company. That way you work for the central product of the company rather than being the company's expense!
Damn, now I'll have to put my solar sail project on hold till I can find a relitivistic navigator! I wish they'd said something before!
I'm not a PHP expert, but why does this work?
$key = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9]/i', '', $key);
if ( empty( $key ) )
return new WP_Error('invalid_key', __('Invalid key'));
$user = $wpdb->get_row($wpdb->prepare("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->users WHERE
user_activation_key = %s", $key));
if ( empty( $user ) )
return new WP_Error('invalid_key', __('Invalid key'));
Is it because the $key is an array and that somehow makes the $user get a value?
The latest version of Cobol (eagerly expected by 6 people) will also be delayed till January 2011.
I've never met a "code monkey."
Any programmer that merely follows instructions from some "analyst" will soon not have a job.
In ALL jobs I've been involved in, programmers often had to:
- analyze requirements
- design solutions
- be aware of the impact on the business
- coordinate with other staff
- develop the solution
- often provide documentation or informal information on the feature to doc writers/testers/management/etc..
- test
- sometimes help out giving advice to tech support
The whole "monkey" talk is ridiculous.
In Game Development, there's also a strong element of algorithm design or at least algorithm selection. The design work is NEVER trivial, and may often require a lot of math.
So I really don't see why the myth of the "code monkey" is perpetuated.
Show some respect for the software development profession!
I disagree.. it is good for the Government to gamble a bit on loans as long as overall they have more success stories than failures.
Even failures can pay off in the long run by producing new technology and new know-how. Otherwise, why invest in education?
Telsa has a good idea and has shown some ability to execute. If they succeed the taxpayer will benefit in more ways than just monetary.
If we were to follow what you suggest then you might as well just give all your money to banks and let them do the lending.
The parent post is most definitely mistaken.
Iranians often call themselves "Persians" and the language they speak is "persian". They ARE persians.
Also, the charge that muslims massacred the natives is just absolutely silly. Your example of Egypt is ridiculous. Egypt was invaded in 639 AD by the Islamic Empire. However it took about 200 years for people to convert to Islam. They were not converted "by the sword" as some critics used to allege in past centuries. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Arab_Egypt
for a summary.
Also, Muslims != Arabs. Lots of Arabs are Jewish a Christian and worship "Allah" (the Muslim word for God).
Your "facts" about Islam are seriously mistaken.
And I say this as a person who is:
1. Not Muslim
2. Who's family has suffered serious persecution under the "Islamic" regime in Iran
There's a lot of misinformation about Islam floating around. Some of it goes back to the Crusades.. more recently it has been revived by the whole "war on terrorism". But misinformation won't help in the battle against extremists and fanatics. It only makes you look dumb.
The area of the middle east was mostly nomadic tribal peoples. What often happened when two of these groups met? If one group wanted something from the other, often some kind of violent thing happened. There were trade routes and traders, but wars were fought over control of those trade routes.
I beg to differ.. Iran was the seat of the Persian Empire, the land of one of the most famous Zoroastrian Kings: Cirus. These kings are well known in history for their contributions to justice and civilization in general.
Iran was also known in the apex of Islamic Civilization as a center for the learned. In fact al-Ghazalli (the most famous exponent of algebra) was said to be Persian.
So referring to this area as a "tribal" area is a bit disparanging. Don't confuse the tribal Arabs of Saudi Arabia and the tribes of Afghanistan with Persian civilization.
Also, remember where the "cradle of civilization" is?? Baghdad also know as Mesopotamia.
Violence is an ancient tradition.. also much practiced in the West. Lets not all get on our high horses and think ourselves more civilized. World War II happened only 60 some years ago.. and that was primarily a European + US phenomenon.
The problem with math is that it is taught with no reward. Imagine if we studied the formulas of physics w/o ever hearing about the cool stuff like General Relativity, the Uncertanty Principle, etc.. Understanding those interesting paradoxes is what makes physics interesting. Now look at math. How many people know that math can limit the very scope of a scientific theorem (as expressed in a piece of paper), or the odd patterns of primes, or that there is knowledge in the universe that cannot be summarized, etc.. Nobody ever gets to see the cool stuff.. they are just burried under the mechanics.
I believe school should teach people to communicate effectively. Initially this implies imprecise communication like English and Spanish, reading and writing.
But later as we try to describe things more fully we may employ the language of math. For example, lets take a table and see how we can draw it, we can measure it and precisely define its attributes. In fact we can do so so precisely that we can end up telling how heavy it will be, how much room it will take, and how much it will cost.
As school advances and the need to describe things increases we can use math to describe chemical and biological proceses, physical processes, and sociological processes.
In fact, as people advance in their education they tend to need math to precisely describe what happened, their theories of what will happen, etc..
In this manner, students can enjoy the benefits of math in all fields as they advance in its study.
I know so many people that have studied Differential Equations or even basic Algebra and have no idea how that could ever be useful to them.
Guys: Java is generally used for web apps.
So from a performance perspective, Java is very good because:
1. There are tons of sophisticated tools for building web apps
2. I manages memory very efficiently
3. People build HUGE servers w/it no problem.. others build distributed apps that run on hundreds of servers
4. The database is usually the bottleneck in this sort of app
C/C++ are not generally used for web apps.. so the comparison is really apples and oranges.
Among the web languages, Java is among the fastest.. and most scalable and has the most tools.
That is what mostly matters.
Wow.. did I wake up in another dimension? Are slashdotters actually recommending MS products today??
Why not just let them leave? And bar them when they try to come back. What is the point of catching someone you don't want in the country when they are leaving it??
I think the point is that if you know who left, then you also know who didn't leave.
I've been looking for an IDE for quite some time for my students to use in class.
The requirements are:
1. It should be fast
2. Easy to download and not require an online connection to use/activate
3. It should have the usual editing features
4. IT SHOULD HAVE A GREAT DEBUGGER
I'm trying to encourage my students to use a proper debugger.
Here's what I know:
Eclipse: weird installation process... compiler/debugger need to be configured separately.. lousy debugger
Netbeans: also weird installation process.. compiler/debugger need to be configured separately.. lousy debugger
DevCpp: good installation.. ok use.. buggy debugger
Visual C++ Express: last time i tried you need internet to install.. hard to configure projects to use pure C.. good debugger.
For now we mostly use DevCpp. Maybe I'll learn Delphi and fix it up a bit.
The problem is that people try to think of kids as little adults when they are in fact just kids. You can't always reason with a kid.. because they don't have the same ability to weigh options that adults do (I know when I was a kid I sure didn't). A little negative re-enforcement (do something wrong.. get punished) is sometimes the best way.
And I truly believe that kids today have more problems as a result of being treated as fragile ornaments who will be screwed up for the rest of their life if you even look at them in a menacing way.
Dumb conclusion.
My wife was never spanked/beaten/slapped as a child and she was always very well behaved.
My teenage daughter was never spanked/beaten/slapped and is very very well behaved, known for her good discipline in school and is a model student and person.
Why do you assume that violence makes people better behaved? There are many ways of instilling discipline w/o the use of violence of any sort (yes: even spanking). That is why I applaud that kids don't get spanked in school anymore.
There are societies that believe that you cannot have discipline if you don't have a strong autocratic police society. But most civilized countries today disagree w/such notions. If such things apply at the level of society why do we assume that we need a strong autocratic police society at home?!
Children will behave if they are rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad behavior (just like adults). But such punishment does not need to include spanking. Other techniques like depriving them of what they want, making them take a "timeout" or stay for a while in their room to cool off.. work quite fine. And in my experience as a parent, such disciplinary actions are generally only necessary during the first few years and then the kid develops enough self-control to not get into trouble as a habit.
To me corporal punishment is the tell-tale mark of a parent w/no better ideas: uncreative, unthinking and often incompetent.
By the way I was "spanked" by my parents as I grew up.. and no.. I was NOT well behaved AT ALL.
I'm glad my wife had the experience she had (a very capable mother). This has allowed us to have a much happier and fear free family.
A lesson in Open Source acquisitions:
1. Monty starts db called MySQL, trademarks and has copyright
2. Monty sells trademarks and copyrights to Sun (presumably for a ton of cash)
3. Monty leaves Sun
4. Monty forks MySQL calls it MariaDB
So in the end.
Sun has:
1. A trademark
2. Rights to the code
3. Right to sell MySQl under any license
Monty has:
1. GPL'd code he does not own
2. Credibility as the guy who knows about this
3. The ability to continue selling support services
So in OSS when you buy a product you don't really get too much do you? (At least if you can't hang onto the developers)
I don't agree. I think the issue here is that more popular browsers have TOO MANY FEATURES. That is what is making Firefox unbearably slow and fat, and the same w/IE.
I liked Firefox in the old days when it was a light weight Mozilla. Now it's just a hog.
Regards,
A Chrome user
Nah.. better just get a job and have THEM pay for your Masters!
As an undergrad I got a Co-op, but friends of mine just got themselves hired fulltime. They ended up earning more, getting into better projects and finishing college at the same time I did.
I found that in the US experience rules to a certain extent (because if you don't have ANY degree your market value goes down in spite of experience).
But in Latin America experience means little to nothing compared to degrees. People are big on fancy degrees. A Masters will open much more doors than a Bachellor's. If you have a PhD you're pretty much a God.
Because the business of computer languages has nothing to do with technical merit or academic proof. Languages today are nothing more than brands that are sold (and resold) to programmers.
The language to get most mindshare wins.
True..
But I wouldn't rewrite the code.. just get the extra HW or host everything on EC2 where you can scale up as needed.
Awesome! I was getting so sick and tired of proprietary and closed source Lasers.
Lasers should be free as in speech.
All users should be able to change them for their needs. Closed source lasers are inmoral!
Agreed. TMI is actually an example of safety success! Everything failed.. but the containment vessel kept us safe.
So figure out what the other things are so you don't have to use your last line of defense (which could fail like in Chernobyl).
I think people don't like nuclear mainly because of nuclear weapons. They don't understand that reactors are a fundamentally different technology.
Lynx rules! I recently discovered it and decided to swtich from FF (FF is so bloated these days).
I also hear that they'll be porting V8 to Lynx soon.. I can't wait!