I do not foresee "coding" will help anyone in the broader spectrum. Perhaps, it can liberate few talented coders who would've gone to another field.
I'm from the UK and took a "gap year" to teach maths and computing to 9th through 12th graders in India in 1992-1993. Back in the UK I've also taught 5th graders with special needs, and supervised computer science and philosophy to undergraduates and graduates.
I think coding will help an ENORMOUS portion of people to become better citizens. When they're reviewing mortgage or credit card or car purchase stuff, or maybe sometimes even national budget stuff, they'll be more ready to open up a spreadsheet and type in numbers and formulas to see what happens. When there are news stories about "internet of things" they'll know what it is better than the journalists, through the simple expedient of having programmed one and therefore knowing exactly what it does. When they need data for something, or just to back up a pub argument about current affairs, (I'm sure that within a decade there'll be better tools for scraping data), they'll be able to get that data. Some of them will make little games or interactive-fictions as birthday gifts for their friends.
I'm not talking about just smart kids. I'm thinking back to my 9th graders in 1992, who spanned the range from "remedial" to "average" streams, and what they concretely invented and did for their projects. A lot of the modern world is about data. A school level of coding education is a good practical way into harnessing that data to empower everyday folk for their everyday lives.
I tried reading that article on my mobile device (doesn't support ad-blocker). Got ten ads. The first was a full-screen block that, after I clicked through, didn't even take me to the article. The other 9 all caused the article to "repaginate" under my fingers when I reached them (or at least, recalculate vertical spacing) and all blocked further text until they'd spent their 1-2 seconds loading.
What a terrible experience. So sure that I never got to the actual substance of the article before I gave up.
Oh, also a permanent title bar that takes too much of my small device's limited screen real estate.
I'm sick to death of these assholes who believe they can "run the economy". NOBODY knows enough to produce better results than free trade.
-jcr
Free trade will seek out a local maximum of *PROFITS*. That's not the same as better long-term profits, nor even the same as better long-term results. See Enron.
Does this sort of thing really get non-MS employees to contribute to the project? Or is it just a matter of opening the source so people can poke through it for the sake of their own enlightenment? If I were looking for a open source project to contribute my time and effort, I can't imagine that what amounts to a wholly Microsoft project would pull me in.
C# is OSS on GitHub has lots of non-MS contributors. If you add together the non-MS contributors to the compiler, the standard libraries, and the runtime, they add up to about twice that of node.js. See here, particularly the graph on slide 11: http://www.slideshare.net/Kase...
The author of that deck gave me a more recent version of that slide for a talk I gave recently at QCon (I'm on the C# team), on slide 21: https://qconsf.com/system/file...
I think the general story is (1) Microsoft came late to the OSS game so we're working extra hard at being extra open to make up for lost time, e.g. the C# standard library team hold their weekly API design review meetings live online and anyone can join in (and the recordings are kept so that GitHub issues can link to the exact moment in the meeting when the issue is discussed). (2) There seriously are a heck of a lot of C# developers out there in the world, lots of them passionate about the language they use day-in and day-out, so contributing comes naturally. (3) C# has a lot of credibility, e.g. amongst folks who think of it as "java done right", e.g. for its introduction of LINQ and more recently async/await, so you do earn serious geek cred by contributing to C#. (4) Lots of people in Microsoft shops have been itching to get into OSS, and previously had a hard time convincing their bosses to let them, but now they can show that Microsoft does it so it must be okay. A weird thought process I know coming from a Linux background, but it's nevertheless how a lot of bosses in a lot of Microsoft shops think.
I believe that TypeScript, another OSS Microsoft project, has a huge number of non-MS contributors too. Will Chakra get the same? No idea! But I wouldn't be surprised.
I guess the point is: KDE isn't a "window manager" - instead it's a desktop environment, which includes functionality for power management. And it's reasonable architecture for power management controls to depend upon power managing daemons.
C and C++ look radically different when reverse engineering their assembly. Like, it's easy to reverse engineer C and much harder to do C++ without symbols. The allocators they call are different. Folk seem to use more heap allocation in C++. More calls in C++.
At least, that's what I assume is going on. Some things I reverse engineer easily in hours. Other things it takes me days before I give up. I believe this difference comes from C vs X++
Socialism or communism also provide no room for upward movability.
What? There's more social mobility in the UK -- with its national health service, heavy-handed nanny state and ingrained class system -- then there is in America.
My guess is that work/life balance isn't for us in the trenches, it's for the guys in the corner offices who make more than a $Million per year, own 6 fancy cars, and talk about their "Vacation Home" in Hawaii.
I'm in the trenches too. I realized that my company will happily drain everything out of me, every possible waking hour. But on the other hand, it will also be happy with merely taking 35-40 hours per week out of me.
The company has no insight into my personal work/life balance. Only I do. It's up to me to set limits. The company won't set limits itself, has no way of setting limits itself, but it will happily respect the limits I set.
Example: last year I told my manager "Every Thursday I will work from home. I won't answer emails. I'll pursue whatever programming things interest me. Still get paid of course." He was entirely happy with this. It helps that my company produces tools for developers, so by being a developer myself I'm basically doing market research.
Example: I realized that over the past years, every really valuable contribution that I've made has come from the projects I get into from curiosity or personal passion or hobby development. They haven't come from the daily grind of answering emails and attending emails. I set up Outlook rules to filter out about 80% of my incoming email, so I only see 15-20 work emails a day now. I unilaterally decided not to accept or attend any meetings on Mondays or Thursdays. It's done wonders for my productivity and creativity.
Example: I always used to do 1-2 hours of work in the evening, mostly catching up on emails so I could start the next day with a clean slate. Then due to severe storms and a fallen tree in early September, my house had no power for 2 weeks and no internet for 2 weeks more and I couldn't do any work in the evenings. And surprisingly -- I was still just as productive, still as respected by my team members! Since then, I've only done one piece of work in the evenings, preparing a conference talk that I gave last week. My family has loved it, and I've loved it. And I've got to play some Dragon Age: Inquisition too. First video gaming I've done since my toddler was born.
Example: I'll be taking three months (paid) paternity leave next year when my twins are born.
It helps that I'm in a larger team, so there are people who can take over my workload when I'm away. Maybe that's the key. I am in the trenches. I don't have 6 cars. Only one, a 1988 model, and since its engine cracked I've switched to public transport.
Where do you get 13% the article you linked said 5%, and suggested the motive behind those 5% was likely to be either admiration of ISIS military victories, or sympathy with goal of establishing a caliphate. Neither motive has anything to do with killing the person who takes them in.
The same guy demonstrated some fairly scary exploits that could detect a sequence of scanned barcodes and override the payment subroutines so that you paid $0. That way your buddies could go and checkout, say, two boxes of Tic Tacs, one Oh Henry chocolate bar, and an avocado, and walk away paying nothing no matter how big the final bill was.
The final bill was $2.52 for the tic-tacs, $1.29 for the Oh Henry, $2 for the avocado -- $5.81 in total.
If I could get stuff for free no matter the size of the final bill I'd get WAY more than that! Like, maybe five Oh Henry bars!
This sounds like an advertiser pipe dream, not something that has been tried with real technology in realistic settings.
What? The article claimed that a dozen companies had products that do this, and that SilverPush is the industry leader having been doing it for over a year and a half. It made it sound like a real technology.
I've also never understood the necessity to invoke an improbable planetary collision to explain the moon. It's not like binary pairs of large objects are rare in the universe.
Earth and the Moon have different compositions. So they can't both have been formed in the same way.
I suppose any app that takes advantage of this would have a disclosure about the recording buried deep in its legalese.
More likely the app author has no clue what's going on, and merely uses a 3rd-party library to provide advertising, and the 3rd-party library is doing these shenanigans secretly for its own benefit.
The militant jihadis could never operate without the tacit approval of many millions of their less violent but none the less supportive co-religionists.
Why couldn't they operate?
I think that IRA terrorists, Basque terrorists, ETA terrorists, Red Hand Brigade terrorists, heck even Timothy McVeigh managed to operate quite well without needing the tacit approval of millions. I'm not sure why militant jihadis would be any different?
Good thing [a gender pay gap] doesn't [exist]. That myth was busted years ago. Why are you still believing in it? Do you also believe in Santa Claus? http://www.forbes.com/sites/re... Stop parroting stupid shit just because you think it makes you look sensitive and enlightened. It doesn't. It just makes you look like an asshole with no critical thinking skills.
I only read your Forbes link, not the others. But the Forbes article says that (1) a wage gap does exist, (2) it doesn't seem to be caused by on-the-job discrimination, and is instead caused by women being disproportionately employed in lower-paying roles.
I mean teaching people to use highly abstract concepts like events before they have mastered basic control flow is certainly the path to their developing a greater understanding.
STUPID!
HyperCard for the Mac starts with events. HyperCard was hugely successful at getting people to dip their toes into code, and more importantly to empower them to tinker and via code make their computer serve their needs. I think events are a good starting point!
Because the money you send is taken from YOUR BANK ACCOUNT, duh! Doesn't mean you can't just physically give them cash, but if they're elsewhere, or the cash is in your bank account, how else are you going to do it? Go to the bank, take out the money, and send it by courier?
Then it's not peer-to-peer; it's peer-to-server-to-server-to-peer.
Thank you so much anti-nuke extremists. Thanks to your inability to look at the bigger picture, we get to enjoy nuclear reactors using designs from the 1950's well into the 21st century instead of actually using safer, modern designs.
Is it actually a problem to be using the existing reactor? I understand modern designs are better. But if there's an existing plant that seems to be working well, is it really cost effective to decommission it, tear it down, and build a new one in its place? Or to find a new location, build a new reactor there, and still decommission this one?
(my impression was that decommissioning costs are extremely high because there's so much material that has levels of radioactivity that are perfectly fine and safe in their normal place inside a working reactor, but can't be released where environmental forces will break them down and spread them around).
Slashdot Mirror
That 12% figure is interesting. Do you have any links? Where did you read it?
I do not foresee "coding" will help anyone in the broader spectrum. Perhaps, it can liberate few talented coders who would've gone to another field.
I'm from the UK and took a "gap year" to teach maths and computing to 9th through 12th graders in India in 1992-1993. Back in the UK I've also taught 5th graders with special needs, and supervised computer science and philosophy to undergraduates and graduates.
I think coding will help an ENORMOUS portion of people to become better citizens. When they're reviewing mortgage or credit card or car purchase stuff, or maybe sometimes even national budget stuff, they'll be more ready to open up a spreadsheet and type in numbers and formulas to see what happens. When there are news stories about "internet of things" they'll know what it is better than the journalists, through the simple expedient of having programmed one and therefore knowing exactly what it does. When they need data for something, or just to back up a pub argument about current affairs, (I'm sure that within a decade there'll be better tools for scraping data), they'll be able to get that data. Some of them will make little games or interactive-fictions as birthday gifts for their friends.
I'm not talking about just smart kids. I'm thinking back to my 9th graders in 1992, who spanned the range from "remedial" to "average" streams, and what they concretely invented and did for their projects. A lot of the modern world is about data. A school level of coding education is a good practical way into harnessing that data to empower everyday folk for their everyday lives.
I tried reading that article on my mobile device (doesn't support ad-blocker). Got ten ads. The first was a full-screen block that, after I clicked through, didn't even take me to the article. The other 9 all caused the article to "repaginate" under my fingers when I reached them (or at least, recalculate vertical spacing) and all blocked further text until they'd spent their 1-2 seconds loading.
What a terrible experience. So sure that I never got to the actual substance of the article before I gave up.
Oh, also a permanent title bar that takes too much of my small device's limited screen real estate.
Forbes is a disaster on mobile.
I'm sick to death of these assholes who believe they can "run the economy". NOBODY knows enough to produce better results than free trade.
-jcr
Free trade will seek out a local maximum of *PROFITS*. That's not the same as better long-term profits, nor even the same as better long-term results. See Enron.
Does this sort of thing really get non-MS employees to contribute to the project? Or is it just a matter of opening the source so people can poke through it for the sake of their own enlightenment? If I were looking for a open source project to contribute my time and effort, I can't imagine that what amounts to a wholly Microsoft project would pull me in.
C# is OSS on GitHub has lots of non-MS contributors. If you add together the non-MS contributors to the compiler, the standard libraries, and the runtime, they add up to about twice that of node.js. See here, particularly the graph on slide 11:
http://www.slideshare.net/Kase...
The author of that deck gave me a more recent version of that slide for a talk I gave recently at QCon (I'm on the C# team), on slide 21: https://qconsf.com/system/file...
I think the general story is (1) Microsoft came late to the OSS game so we're working extra hard at being extra open to make up for lost time, e.g. the C# standard library team hold their weekly API design review meetings live online and anyone can join in (and the recordings are kept so that GitHub issues can link to the exact moment in the meeting when the issue is discussed). (2) There seriously are a heck of a lot of C# developers out there in the world, lots of them passionate about the language they use day-in and day-out, so contributing comes naturally. (3) C# has a lot of credibility, e.g. amongst folks who think of it as "java done right", e.g. for its introduction of LINQ and more recently async/await, so you do earn serious geek cred by contributing to C#. (4) Lots of people in Microsoft shops have been itching to get into OSS, and previously had a hard time convincing their bosses to let them, but now they can show that Microsoft does it so it must be okay. A weird thought process I know coming from a Linux background, but it's nevertheless how a lot of bosses in a lot of Microsoft shops think.
I believe that TypeScript, another OSS Microsoft project, has a huge number of non-MS contributors too. Will Chakra get the same? No idea! But I wouldn't be surprised.
Can someone explain me why emojis are in Unicode at all?
So that people can exchange written communication in a standard way, interoperable among vendors and software systems.
A lot of not very good engineers like these absolute answers and like things to be black or white... That is an epic fail in the real world
Maybe it's just a "shade of grey" fail rather than an epic fail? Not all failures are black or white.
I guess the point is: KDE isn't a "window manager" - instead it's a desktop environment, which includes functionality for power management. And it's reasonable architecture for power management controls to depend upon power managing daemons.
Even if Nest/Google the corporation has fully honorable intentions the situation still seems liable to potential abuse.
And you can't get much more honorable intentions than "data-mine your every activity to sell it to advertisers to serve you more advertising".
C and C++ look radically different when reverse engineering their assembly. Like, it's easy to reverse engineer C and much harder to do C++ without symbols. The allocators they call are different. Folk seem to use more heap allocation in C++. More calls in C++.
At least, that's what I assume is going on. Some things I reverse engineer easily in hours. Other things it takes me days before I give up. I believe this difference comes from C vs X++
Socialism or communism also provide no room for upward movability.
What? There's more social mobility in the UK -- with its national health service, heavy-handed nanny state and ingrained class system -- then there is in America.
Each time a new RAW format comes out, how many machines does your IT staff have to update? And how frequently does this happen?
My guess is that work/life balance isn't for us in the trenches, it's for the guys in the corner offices who make more than a $Million per year, own 6 fancy cars, and talk about their "Vacation Home" in Hawaii.
I'm in the trenches too. I realized that my company will happily drain everything out of me, every possible waking hour. But on the other hand, it will also be happy with merely taking 35-40 hours per week out of me.
The company has no insight into my personal work/life balance. Only I do. It's up to me to set limits. The company won't set limits itself, has no way of setting limits itself, but it will happily respect the limits I set.
Example: last year I told my manager "Every Thursday I will work from home. I won't answer emails. I'll pursue whatever programming things interest me. Still get paid of course." He was entirely happy with this. It helps that my company produces tools for developers, so by being a developer myself I'm basically doing market research.
Example: I realized that over the past years, every really valuable contribution that I've made has come from the projects I get into from curiosity or personal passion or hobby development. They haven't come from the daily grind of answering emails and attending emails. I set up Outlook rules to filter out about 80% of my incoming email, so I only see 15-20 work emails a day now. I unilaterally decided not to accept or attend any meetings on Mondays or Thursdays. It's done wonders for my productivity and creativity.
Example: I always used to do 1-2 hours of work in the evening, mostly catching up on emails so I could start the next day with a clean slate. Then due to severe storms and a fallen tree in early September, my house had no power for 2 weeks and no internet for 2 weeks more and I couldn't do any work in the evenings. And surprisingly -- I was still just as productive, still as respected by my team members! Since then, I've only done one piece of work in the evenings, preparing a conference talk that I gave last week. My family has loved it, and I've loved it. And I've got to play some Dragon Age: Inquisition too. First video gaming I've done since my toddler was born.
Example: I'll be taking three months (paid) paternity leave next year when my twins are born.
It helps that I'm in a larger team, so there are people who can take over my workload when I'm away. Maybe that's the key. I am in the trenches. I don't have 6 cars. Only one, a 1988 model, and since its engine cracked I've switched to public transport.
Where do you get 13% the article you linked said 5%, and suggested the motive behind those 5% was likely to be either admiration of ISIS military victories, or sympathy with goal of establishing a caliphate. Neither motive has anything to do with killing the person who takes them in.
The same guy demonstrated some fairly scary exploits that could detect a sequence of scanned barcodes and override the payment subroutines so that you paid $0. That way your buddies could go and checkout, say, two boxes of Tic Tacs, one Oh Henry chocolate bar, and an avocado, and walk away paying nothing no matter how big the final bill was.
The final bill was $2.52 for the tic-tacs, $1.29 for the Oh Henry, $2 for the avocado -- $5.81 in total.
If I could get stuff for free no matter the size of the final bill I'd get WAY more than that! Like, maybe five Oh Henry bars!
This sounds like an advertiser pipe dream, not something that has been tried with real technology in realistic settings.
What? The article claimed that a dozen companies had products that do this, and that SilverPush is the industry leader having been doing it for over a year and a half. It made it sound like a real technology.
I've also never understood the necessity to invoke an improbable planetary collision to explain the moon. It's not like binary pairs of large objects are rare in the universe.
Earth and the Moon have different compositions. So they can't both have been formed in the same way.
I suppose any app that takes advantage of this would have a disclosure about the recording buried deep in its legalese.
More likely the app author has no clue what's going on, and merely uses a 3rd-party library to provide advertising, and the 3rd-party library is doing these shenanigans secretly for its own benefit.
The militant jihadis could never operate without the tacit approval of many millions of their less violent but none the less supportive co-religionists.
Why couldn't they operate?
I think that IRA terrorists, Basque terrorists, ETA terrorists, Red Hand Brigade terrorists, heck even Timothy McVeigh managed to operate quite well without needing the tacit approval of millions. I'm not sure why militant jihadis would be any different?
Good thing [a gender pay gap] doesn't [exist]. That myth was busted years ago. Why are you still believing in it? Do you also believe in Santa Claus?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/re...
Stop parroting stupid shit just because you think it makes you look sensitive and enlightened. It doesn't. It just makes you look like an asshole with no critical thinking skills.
I only read your Forbes link, not the others. But the Forbes article says that (1) a wage gap does exist, (2) it doesn't seem to be caused by on-the-job discrimination, and is instead caused by women being disproportionately employed in lower-paying roles.
I mean teaching people to use highly abstract concepts like events before they have mastered basic control flow is certainly the path to their developing a greater understanding.
STUPID!
HyperCard for the Mac starts with events. HyperCard was hugely successful at getting people to dip their toes into code, and more importantly to empower them to tinker and via code make their computer serve their needs. I think events are a good starting point!
Because the money you send is taken from YOUR BANK ACCOUNT, duh! Doesn't mean you can't just physically give them cash, but if they're elsewhere, or the cash is in your bank account, how else are you going to do it? Go to the bank, take out the money, and send it by courier?
Then it's not peer-to-peer; it's peer-to-server-to-server-to-peer.
What does it mean for a bank to "let" you do peer-to-peer payments? Isn't that an oxymoron? If it's peer-to-peer why is a bank involved?
It's called a "prediction market". It's been experimentally found to have better success in getting close to the truth than other techniques we have.
Thank you so much anti-nuke extremists. Thanks to your inability to look at the bigger picture, we get to enjoy nuclear reactors using designs from the 1950's well into the 21st century instead of actually using safer, modern designs.
Is it actually a problem to be using the existing reactor? I understand modern designs are better. But if there's an existing plant that seems to be working well, is it really cost effective to decommission it, tear it down, and build a new one in its place? Or to find a new location, build a new reactor there, and still decommission this one?
(my impression was that decommissioning costs are extremely high because there's so much material that has levels of radioactivity that are perfectly fine and safe in their normal place inside a working reactor, but can't be released where environmental forces will break them down and spread them around).