Agreed totally. It was a FUNCTIONAL language. That was part of it's awesomeness in terms of laying down "correct thinking patterns". Made it a better starter language than python or js or java. Some of my students used it for pure text things without graphics, eg. a Cosmo style personality quiz.
At what age did Tim Cook learn to program? Probably wasn't in 4th grade and yet, he seems to be pretty successful. Instead of teaching kids to program, how about teaching them how to be creative thinkers. Teach them to be problem solvers. Then, if they do decide to program, they will have something to program.
In the UK in my generation, a large portion of kids learnt to program in 4th or 5th grade using "BBC B" computers and the "Logo" turtle graphics programming language. I think it was more common than not to have it connected via RS232 to a little turtle robot.
I myself volunteered to teach in India for a year back in 1992 and I taught my 9th and 10th graders Logo too. It was a HUGE enabling vehicle for them to be creative thinkers and problem solvers, more so than any of the other classes they were taking.
There are so many naysayers in these discussions who can only imagine a single intended outcome of "learn to code" which is that people will join the job market as coders. But it's far more than that...
Coding is the best classroom activity for developing a child's intellectual+logical problem solving skills (craft+shop is for developing their practical problem solving skills; literature+debate for developing their rhetorical problem solving skills).
Coding also enables them to be more intellectually adept participants in their society, by equipping them with the tools to make sense of the information-saturated world around them. They'll be able to whip up a spreadsheet to check their mortgage payments. They'll be able to scrape websites to make sense of a talking point, or just to have the autonomy to pick what media they consume rather than accepting what big media shovels down their throats.
Not even my bike fits under that bus. And although a Whike is quite high, it is road legal and conforms to the traffic sizes (which are based on a firetruck where I live). 2 meters is way too low to be able to pass regular traffic. The first van or truck would stop the bus dead in its tracks.
If the bus runs on surface streets (like they do today) then it will be stopped dead in its tracks by a whike, van and truck. So this proposal is clearly no worse than the status quo.
But this bus won't take space away from other vehicles, and won't be stopped by regular cars. So this proposal is clearly better than the status quo in the majority of situations.
"Please don't learn maths. Teaching maths assumes that the world needs more math theorems in the world. It assumes that adding more poorly-trained professional mathematicians to the world is a desirable thing when it's not; we already have enough professional mathematicians. It implies there's a thin easily permeable membrane between those learning Algebra-1 and those who work in Field Theory -- but there's a huge gap."
(I've copied out the arguments from those blogs but replaced "code" with "maths" to show it's ridiculous. Like learn-maths, the benefit of learn-code isn't to produce professionals, but instead to produce citizens who are empowered by it to live their lives better. How does a small amount of coding know-how help you live better lives? because you no longer have to consume the rubbish that gets thrown at you, and you can instead whip up a small spreadsheet to test how your mortgage payments will work, or a small web-scraper to extract out price information, or you can explain a non-coding task algorithmically to someone.)
Long story short, they seem to be telling us at least one of two things: - you shouldn't bother with "environment friendly" detergents and washing techniques if you have kids, dogs or ever work out - we now know why filthy hippies smell that way
I couldn't find any mention in the articles of eco-friendly washes being unable to clean the smells. Was that an invention of the submitter? (or am I just blind and failed to notice it in the articles?)
You can't just throw "money" at drugs, poverty, disease, hunger, and despair, and expect them to go away. In most cases, the money you're throwing goes directly into the hands of people who do the most harm with the most money.
Strangely enough, you can just throw money directly into the hands of the people who suffer poverty and hunger (rather than the middle-men) and it does actually seem to work. Here's an example from The Economist:
"Now enough of these programmes are up and running to make a first assessment. Early results are encouraging: giving money away pulls people out of poverty, with or without conditions. Recipients of unconditional cash do not blow it on booze and brothels, as some feared. Households can absorb a surprising amount of cash and put it to good use. But conditional cash transfers still seem to work better when the poor face an array of problems beyond just a shortage of capital."
(I remember another funny quote from someone but can't find it just now, along the lines "The common characteristic of the poor is they don't have money, and it turns out that by giving them money we can change that.")
By your own admission that you know they are false statements, those are not actual assertions that you are making. Asserting something requires confidently believing that it is true. If you actually asserted either of those things, you'd probably run into some legal trouble if you pushed hard enough.
I think we're getting lost in the weeds here. The DMCA doesn't use the term "assertion" so maybe we should avoid it too.
[1] The DMCA process allows for Fox News to submit a notification of infringement. [2] This notification includes a statement that the information in the notification is correct (e.g. the claim that Fox News owns copyright). However, the claim and the statement ARE NOT UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY. [3] This notification also includes a statement that the complainant is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner. This statement IS UNDER penalty of perjury.
I assumed, when the OP talked about Fox "asserting ownership", that they were referring to the content of the claim [1] or the statement of it being correct [2]. As the DMCA says, there's no penalty for making these things incorrectly.
You made no legal assertion, you just said stuff. If you attempt to sue someone for infringing on "your" source code (or, for example, attempt to DMCA Ubuntu) or a picture of "your" tower, you will have made a legal assertion.
The word "legal assertion" is a pretty vague term in general. But specifically in the context of DMCA it has a precise meaning:
Fox News sends out a notification that they own the clip
They accompany this with a statement ("legal assertion" if you will) that the information is accurate. However this statement is NOT UNDER penalty of perjury, as per the DMCA
They also accompany it with a statement ("legal assertion" if you will) that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner. This statement IS UNDER penalty of perjury.
So once again, there's no legal penalty to Fox News for incorrectly asserting ownership of the clip.
There is no need to quote stole here. Fox has not only copied the video (which would justify the quotes), they have asserted ownership of the work (actual theft).
How is it actual theft?
I ASSERT THAT I OWN THE EIFFEL TOWER, AND THE SOURCE CODE TO LINUX.
There. Simple assertions (that happen to be false). No theft involved. There's no perjury in my assertions nor Fox's, because that's not how the perjury laws are written.
Can you imagine if this attitude was taken by any other company? "Keurig agents have been sneaking into people's houses and replacing their Keurig coffeemakers with the new, fancy Keurig 10.0. However, the Keurig 10.0 is incompatible with all old 3rd party k-cups."
What are the incompatibilities between Windows7 and Windows10 that you're referring to?
UWP just seems like another stupid layer of bloated crap between the game and the hardware.
That's incorrect. UWP isn't "another layer". If you write a DirectX UWP app then it goes through the same DirectX APIs as it would if you were doing a regular win32 app.
UWP has some replacement APIs -- e.g. it removes the gdi32.dll drawing APIs from win32, replacing them with faster rendering that's more hardware-accelerated, and it bypasses the user32.dll window-managed APIs from win32 replacing them with its own model. But those things are irrelevant to games.
UWP has a couple of new entry-point APIs, e.g. if you want start playing audio, you'd use one API in win32 to enumerate the audio device but a different sandbox-friendly API in UWP. But once you've gotten hold of the audio device, you use exactly the same APIs.
UWP has new sandbox-friendly installers that are performed by the OS, rather than requiring each individual app to do the installing (and trusting that the app's installer doesn't install any system-wide rubbish).
But all in all, no, UWP isn't an additional layer between the game and the hardware. In most cases it's actually a *thinner* layer between app and hardware than what was there before.
But I'm sure Microsoft did not profit in any way financially from that ad.
Your phrase "not profit financially" is shifting the goalposts. The thread was about whether the telemetry data is being monetized.
Your first link was about pointing users, based on their usage, to apps that might might be relevant but they hadn't considered or noticed. Unless and until MS goes down Apple's allegedly planned route of paid app-store search, that's not an example.
Your second example was about an ad for Tomb Raider being shown on the lock screen. Again, unless the telemetry influenced the decision to show that ad in such a way as to make Microsoft more money, it's again not an example. Maybe the ad would only be shown to users who have launched non-casual games in the past six months based on telemetry? and this would have made Microsoft money because they could sell the ad spot to Square Enix for a higher price? I can imagine that. (and indeed have never seen the ad myself, nor launched any games myself...)
We don't need to cite that data harvesting makes a company money. It's literally the business plan of several dot-coms.
Actually, I rather think you do. Those business plans are typically (1) harvest data, (2) ???, (3) profit.
Sometimes that mystery step (2) is sell it on to advertisers, or use it for targeted advertising. I myself work at Microsoft -- not in the Windows division; our division's product Visual Studio does collect opt-in telemetry, and our missing step (2) is nothing more sinister than "improve the product so that future customers are more likely to want to use it".
Do you think that mystery step (2) in Windows is using it for targeted advertising? or something else? I find it hard to make the leap from telemetry like "anonymized data shows Solitaire is the third-most popular program" (made up datapoint) to "targeting ads to this customer is worth $XYZ", but maybe there's something there that I'm just not seeing.
I worked to earn some money, got some financial help from the local rotary club, and flew to India to volunteer teaching maths and computing for 8 months in a school that provided board and lodging.
Not a millionaire. Zero financial help from parents except food and lodging while I worked.
A poor kid like me who works for my gap tear gets a lot more out of it than a rich kid who just goofs off around the world.
My $75 smartphone isn't "good enough" - it's fine for most apps and phone tasks, but is too slow at complex webpages (usually because of ads, specifically video ads).
I wonder if there's still market opportunity for budget smartphones?
I'm confused. TFA says that "Ancillary Mercy" is in the Sad Puppies' list. But I thought the earlier books in this series were books that the Puppies specifically disliked and thought represented the weird academic leftist trend they were complaining about?
I figured it out in 1995, started trying RAID as my solution in 2005, and by 2010 I'd come to the realization that I myself would never do as good a job as a cloud storage vendor.
They are no longer your photos, music, etc. Now they belong to Microsoft and they can revoke your ability to use them whenever they want and for whatever reason they want. "The cloud" is not a long term storage medium.
Maybe not, but it's proven more reliable than the software RAID1 hard disk plus external hard drive that I was using on my OpenSUSE basement server previously. That server sort of ground to a halt, maybe because of a fan issue. I recovered data off one of the disks, took more backups, bought a new server, and that one worked fine for two years until it too failed. This time I wasn't able to recover a large chunk of my taped radio material. I tried switching to Windows for my server, hoping its "Storage Spaces" would be a good fit, but it was more awkward to administer remotely than OpenSUSE so I gave up.
In summary: Microsoft's offering has been cheaper and less risky than when I did it myself.
I first used started using hard disks around 1990, and have come to the complete certainty that every hard disk I use will fail. The work to preserve my files on my own hard disks has become just too hard for me, too time-consuming, and requiring too much expertise.
What sold me on Office365 is that for the $99/year I get 5 terrabytes of cloud storage in OneDrive - 1 terabyte each for me and 4 others.
It's enough for me to keep all my photos over the decades, my 200GB music collection, and for the past five years I've been "taping" some internet radio stations 24/7 and keep them online too.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed totally. It was a FUNCTIONAL language. That was part of it's awesomeness in terms of laying down "correct thinking patterns". Made it a better starter language than python or js or java. Some of my students used it for pure text things without graphics, eg. a Cosmo style personality quiz.
At what age did Tim Cook learn to program? Probably wasn't in 4th grade and yet, he seems to be pretty successful. Instead of teaching kids to program, how about teaching them how to be creative thinkers. Teach them to be problem solvers. Then, if they do decide to program, they will have something to program.
In the UK in my generation, a large portion of kids learnt to program in 4th or 5th grade using "BBC B" computers and the "Logo" turtle graphics programming language. I think it was more common than not to have it connected via RS232 to a little turtle robot.
I myself volunteered to teach in India for a year back in 1992 and I taught my 9th and 10th graders Logo too. It was a HUGE enabling vehicle for them to be creative thinkers and problem solvers, more so than any of the other classes they were taking.
There are so many naysayers in these discussions who can only imagine a single intended outcome of "learn to code" which is that people will join the job market as coders. But it's far more than that...
Coding is the best classroom activity for developing a child's intellectual+logical problem solving skills (craft+shop is for developing their practical problem solving skills; literature+debate for developing their rhetorical problem solving skills).
Coding also enables them to be more intellectually adept participants in their society, by equipping them with the tools to make sense of the information-saturated world around them. They'll be able to whip up a spreadsheet to check their mortgage payments. They'll be able to scrape websites to make sense of a talking point, or just to have the autonomy to pick what media they consume rather than accepting what big media shovels down their throats.
Not even my bike fits under that bus. And although a Whike is quite high, it is road legal and conforms to the traffic sizes (which are based on a firetruck where I live). 2 meters is way too low to be able to pass regular traffic. The first van or truck would stop the bus dead in its tracks.
If the bus runs on surface streets (like they do today) then it will be stopped dead in its tracks by a whike, van and truck. So this proposal is clearly no worse than the status quo.
But this bus won't take space away from other vehicles, and won't be stopped by regular cars. So this proposal is clearly better than the status quo in the majority of situations.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/please-dont-learn-to-code/
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/please-dont-learn-to-code/
What ridiculous arguments.
"Please don't learn maths. Teaching maths assumes that the world needs more math theorems in the world. It assumes that adding more poorly-trained professional mathematicians to the world is a desirable thing when it's not; we already have enough professional mathematicians. It implies there's a thin easily permeable membrane between those learning Algebra-1 and those who work in Field Theory -- but there's a huge gap."
(I've copied out the arguments from those blogs but replaced "code" with "maths" to show it's ridiculous. Like learn-maths, the benefit of learn-code isn't to produce professionals, but instead to produce citizens who are empowered by it to live their lives better. How does a small amount of coding know-how help you live better lives? because you no longer have to consume the rubbish that gets thrown at you, and you can instead whip up a small spreadsheet to test how your mortgage payments will work, or a small web-scraper to extract out price information, or you can explain a non-coding task algorithmically to someone.)
Long story short, they seem to be telling us at least one of two things:
- you shouldn't bother with "environment friendly" detergents and washing techniques if you have kids, dogs or ever work out
- we now know why filthy hippies smell that way
I couldn't find any mention in the articles of eco-friendly washes being unable to clean the smells. Was that an invention of the submitter? (or am I just blind and failed to notice it in the articles?)
You can't just throw "money" at drugs, poverty, disease, hunger, and despair, and expect them to go away. In most cases, the money you're throwing goes directly into the hands of people who do the most harm with the most money.
Strangely enough, you can just throw money directly into the hands of the people who suffer poverty and hunger (rather than the middle-men) and it does actually seem to work. Here's an example from The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/news/...
"Now enough of these programmes are up and running to make a first assessment. Early results are encouraging: giving money away pulls people out of poverty, with or without conditions. Recipients of unconditional cash do not blow it on booze and brothels, as some feared. Households can absorb a surprising amount of cash and put it to good use. But conditional cash transfers still seem to work better when the poor face an array of problems beyond just a shortage of capital."
(I remember another funny quote from someone but can't find it just now, along the lines "The common characteristic of the poor is they don't have money, and it turns out that by giving them money we can change that.")
By your own admission that you know they are false statements, those are not actual assertions that you are making. Asserting something requires confidently believing that it is true. If you actually asserted either of those things, you'd probably run into some legal trouble if you pushed hard enough.
I think we're getting lost in the weeds here. The DMCA doesn't use the term "assertion" so maybe we should avoid it too.
[1] The DMCA process allows for Fox News to submit a notification of infringement.
[2] This notification includes a statement that the information in the notification is correct (e.g. the claim that Fox News owns copyright). However, the claim and the statement ARE NOT UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY.
[3] This notification also includes a statement that the complainant is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner. This statement IS UNDER penalty of perjury.
I assumed, when the OP talked about Fox "asserting ownership", that they were referring to the content of the claim [1] or the statement of it being correct [2]. As the DMCA says, there's no penalty for making these things incorrectly.
You made no legal assertion, you just said stuff. If you attempt to sue someone for infringing on "your" source code (or, for example, attempt to DMCA Ubuntu) or a picture of "your" tower, you will have made a legal assertion.
The word "legal assertion" is a pretty vague term in general. But specifically in the context of DMCA it has a precise meaning:
So once again, there's no legal penalty to Fox News for incorrectly asserting ownership of the clip.
There is no need to quote stole here. Fox has not only copied the video (which would justify the quotes), they have asserted ownership of the work (actual theft).
How is it actual theft?
I ASSERT THAT I OWN THE EIFFEL TOWER, AND THE SOURCE CODE TO LINUX.
There. Simple assertions (that happen to be false). No theft involved. There's no perjury in my assertions nor Fox's, because that's not how the perjury laws are written.
You think even the Martian was bad? You must have very exacting tastes. So which year in your past produced more than 2 movies that you did enjoy?
Can you imagine if this attitude was taken by any other company? "Keurig agents have been sneaking into people's houses and replacing their Keurig coffeemakers with the new, fancy Keurig 10.0. However, the Keurig 10.0 is incompatible with all old 3rd party k-cups."
What are the incompatibilities between Windows7 and Windows10 that you're referring to?
Dear Google, please also ban ads with great big "download" buttons on software-download pages. I hate those. Their sole point is to deceive.
UWP just seems like another stupid layer of bloated crap between the game and the hardware.
That's incorrect. UWP isn't "another layer". If you write a DirectX UWP app then it goes through the same DirectX APIs as it would if you were doing a regular win32 app.
UWP has some replacement APIs -- e.g. it removes the gdi32.dll drawing APIs from win32, replacing them with faster rendering that's more hardware-accelerated, and it bypasses the user32.dll window-managed APIs from win32 replacing them with its own model. But those things are irrelevant to games.
UWP has a couple of new entry-point APIs, e.g. if you want start playing audio, you'd use one API in win32 to enumerate the audio device but a different sandbox-friendly API in UWP. But once you've gotten hold of the audio device, you use exactly the same APIs.
UWP has new sandbox-friendly installers that are performed by the OS, rather than requiring each individual app to do the installing (and trusting that the app's installer doesn't install any system-wide rubbish).
But all in all, no, UWP isn't an additional layer between the game and the hardware. In most cases it's actually a *thinner* layer between app and hardware than what was there before.
Story1: Of the 100 million credentials leaked, 98% are bogus
Story2: 2 million valid credentials have been leaked
The second story still seems pretty serious to me...
Oh, look! It's already happening.
But I'm sure Microsoft did not profit in any way financially from that ad.
Your phrase "not profit financially" is shifting the goalposts. The thread was about whether the telemetry data is being monetized.
Your first link was about pointing users, based on their usage, to apps that might might be relevant but they hadn't considered or noticed. Unless and until MS goes down Apple's allegedly planned route of paid app-store search, that's not an example.
Your second example was about an ad for Tomb Raider being shown on the lock screen. Again, unless the telemetry influenced the decision to show that ad in such a way as to make Microsoft more money, it's again not an example. Maybe the ad would only be shown to users who have launched non-casual games in the past six months based on telemetry? and this would have made Microsoft money because they could sell the ad spot to Square Enix for a higher price? I can imagine that. (and indeed have never seen the ad myself, nor launched any games myself...)
We don't need to cite that data harvesting makes a company money. It's literally the business plan of several dot-coms.
Actually, I rather think you do. Those business plans are typically (1) harvest data, (2) ???, (3) profit.
Sometimes that mystery step (2) is sell it on to advertisers, or use it for targeted advertising. I myself work at Microsoft -- not in the Windows division; our division's product Visual Studio does collect opt-in telemetry, and our missing step (2) is nothing more sinister than "improve the product so that future customers are more likely to want to use it".
Do you think that mystery step (2) in Windows is using it for targeted advertising? or something else? I find it hard to make the leap from telemetry like "anonymized data shows Solitaire is the third-most popular program" (made up datapoint) to "targeting ads to this customer is worth $XYZ", but maybe there's something there that I'm just not seeing.
I wonder if there's any potential to beam power to a plane by microwave, either from a satellite or from a network of ground stations?
(I'd read a proposal to do space ship launches this way, to save on fuel weight.)
I worked to earn some money, got some financial help from the local rotary club, and flew to India to volunteer teaching maths and computing for 8 months in a school that provided board and lodging.
Not a millionaire. Zero financial help from parents except food and lodging while I worked.
A poor kid like me who works for my gap tear gets a lot more out of it than a rich kid who just goofs off around the world.
I don't think that's how a gap year normally works.
I worked a bit and also got aid from my local rotary club to volunteer teach math's and computing in India where the school gave me board and lodging.
You can travel abroad in your gap tear while poor pretty easily.
Vegetarianism a current fad?
I'm not sure how to reconcile your claim with it being the dominant diet in the Indian subcontinent for millennia....
My $75 smartphone isn't "good enough" - it's fine for most apps and phone tasks, but is too slow at complex webpages (usually because of ads, specifically video ads).
I wonder if there's still market opportunity for budget smartphones?
I'm confused. TFA says that "Ancillary Mercy" is in the Sad Puppies' list. But I thought the earlier books in this series were books that the Puppies specifically disliked and thought represented the weird academic leftist trend they were complaining about?
It took you this long to figure it out?
I figured it out in 1995, started trying RAID as my solution in 2005, and by 2010 I'd come to the realization that I myself would never do as good a job as a cloud storage vendor.
They are no longer your photos, music, etc. Now they belong to Microsoft and they can revoke your ability to use them whenever they want and for whatever reason they want. "The cloud" is not a long term storage medium.
Maybe not, but it's proven more reliable than the software RAID1 hard disk plus external hard drive that I was using on my OpenSUSE basement server previously. That server sort of ground to a halt, maybe because of a fan issue. I recovered data off one of the disks, took more backups, bought a new server, and that one worked fine for two years until it too failed. This time I wasn't able to recover a large chunk of my taped radio material. I tried switching to Windows for my server, hoping its "Storage Spaces" would be a good fit, but it was more awkward to administer remotely than OpenSUSE so I gave up.
In summary: Microsoft's offering has been cheaper and less risky than when I did it myself.
I first used started using hard disks around 1990, and have come to the complete certainty that every hard disk I use will fail. The work to preserve my files on my own hard disks has become just too hard for me, too time-consuming, and requiring too much expertise.
What sold me on Office365 is that for the $99/year I get 5 terrabytes of cloud storage in OneDrive - 1 terabyte each for me and 4 others.
It's enough for me to keep all my photos over the decades, my 200GB music collection, and for the past five years I've been "taping" some internet radio stations 24/7 and keep them online too.
Very happy camper.