You kind of prove my point. General population don't need to learn how to do programming, but they need to be able to take a complex problem and break it down into small steps which they can run using existing tools.
In the case of the CSV first/last name splitting, the solution was to add a column with a formula that contained the position of the first space, a second column that contained the part of the full name up to that position and a third column with the rest. This gets you ~90% of the way. Finally a single manual pass to find and fix the exceptional cases. Very little technical skill required, but saved a lot of time.
Many people don't have a software developer readily available, and even if they do, their time is often a lot more expensive. Besides, requiring two people to solve the problem
You changing your oil costs you the price of the oil plus markup, labour costs, time to make a garage appointment, drive to and from the garage, wait for them to finish and hope you didn't have to shuffle around too much of your time in order to fit in the appointment in the first place. For me it costs five minutes and the price of the oil.
I believe basic "coding" should be a part of general education. The kind you would do in BASIC or a spreadsheet. Everybody has a computer, they could be using them more effectively if they knew how to automate stuff.
In my office, I sometimes get called in to split CSV files of addresses into street and streetnumbers; everybody should be able to do that in any spreadsheet. Nobody should have to call in a professional developer for such tasks.
Heck, just learning how to make complex iTunes and Google searches would be a huge time-saver for most people.
In that respect I agree with TFA's notion that modeling (breaking down a problem) is the core requirement, not some random programming language's syntax.
This Omand guy should be fired immediately for even mentioning the possibility of a government service using unethical methods. A government that is anything less than completely ethical should be no government at all.
Does science say womens' and mens' brains are identical? No, it doesn't. There are differences. If you don't believe me, ask your doctor. Also, try to explain why most women feel like woman and most men feel like man.
Did I say men don't have feelings? No, I didn't. I merely suggested they might _EXPERIENCE_ them _LESS INTENSELY_. Basically like all humans experience emotions at a different level of intensity. I was merely suggesting there might be some bias coming from gender.
Do you have any numbers to back up your claim of "so many men in prison for crimes of passion"? I couldn't find any. Only thing I could find even remotely applicable was an article on how men are more likely to get longer sentences for crimes of passion. http://www.psmag.com/legal-aff...
I'm sure you'll continue fighting your imaginary strawman, but I shall have no further part in it.
First of all, why would this be unlikely? Women's and men's brains are wired slightly differently, why would that not have an impact on how intensely the brain perceives emotions considering it has an impact on a lot of other things.
Secondly; why would this be insulting? You're good at some things and not as good at other things. So what? Why would you have a need to feel better than the average person at everything? More importantly though; whether you feel insulted by something doesn't make any difference to whether it's true or not.
I'm a man and personally I don't feel insulted by the notion that my half of humanity might feel emotions slightly less intensely on average than the other half of humanity.
Every type of backup method has drawbacks and benefits. If there existed a perfect backup method, we would have only that method.
Redundancy makes it very easy and fast to recover data, but lacks security against localized physical problems and malicious software. It would be a perfectly valid first layer of backup and sufficient for backing up reproducable information such as downloaded/scanned/ripped media. It protects against accidentally deleting files or hardware problems. For less easily reproducable information you probably want some additional backup layers.
There are several hundred other countries to choose from. My own country is slowly turning into a nanny state as well, but we're not nearly at USA-levels of government control yet. When we do, there are some fine scandinavian countries still keeping it relatively sane and some other regions on the earth where you still have some freedoms.
The trauma caused by the police and child protective services far outweigh any damage that could have rationally and reasonably been expected otherwise.
Only for sufficiently big companies, and even then it's not going to happen overnight. If you can build a solid product to fill that transition gap for a ~10 year period, you can make a lot of money.
defending free speech as not only a fundamental human right but a duty to speak one's mind for the sake of the common good.
Here's the thing; what YOU think might be "common good" might not be what other people think is "common good". I'm pretty sure the assholes that kill cartoonists think they are doing it for the "common good".
Subjective values must never limit freedom of speech.
How do I translate "trampoline" without reading the entire freakin' maillist history? This is slang and you won't find the intended meaning it in a dictionary.
The summary could use a bit of translation, instead of merely copying content off a maillist post intended for a very specific group of kernel specialists using slang terminology.
To be fair, since download.com and entire CNET is actively involved in pushing malware, I wouldn't be surprised if any non-Windows downloads they might offer would try to push malware as well.
There's nothing about either Node or PHP that forces you to use or not use HTML or service calls. Same for separation of concerns (which pretty much boils down to the same thing). For instance; both PHP and Node handle SQL equally well, i.e. they can both hook up to most databases and let them deal with SQL. Same for JSON. Just because it kinda looks like Javascript and started out loosely based on it, doesn't mean Javascript handles it differently. I also don't think these two were ever "old friends who went separate ways". They started out separate.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have a drone, the question is; why WOULDN'T you be flying the drone at 3AM?
8x8 = chess
10x10 = checkers
It has a visual representation of the board, which is more than would be required to qualify as a complete chess program.
But how else would the law enforcement industry guarentee continued profit growth?
Won't somebody please think of the corporations?
You kind of prove my point. General population don't need to learn how to do programming, but they need to be able to take a complex problem and break it down into small steps which they can run using existing tools.
In the case of the CSV first/last name splitting, the solution was to add a column with a formula that contained the position of the first space, a second column that contained the part of the full name up to that position and a third column with the rest. This gets you ~90% of the way. Finally a single manual pass to find and fix the exceptional cases. Very little technical skill required, but saved a lot of time.
Many people don't have a software developer readily available, and even if they do, their time is often a lot more expensive. Besides, requiring two people to solve the problem
You changing your oil costs you the price of the oil plus markup, labour costs, time to make a garage appointment, drive to and from the garage, wait for them to finish and hope you didn't have to shuffle around too much of your time in order to fit in the appointment in the first place. For me it costs five minutes and the price of the oil.
For once, a car analogy that makes sense!
I believe basic "coding" should be a part of general education. The kind you would do in BASIC or a spreadsheet. Everybody has a computer, they could be using them more effectively if they knew how to automate stuff.
In my office, I sometimes get called in to split CSV files of addresses into street and streetnumbers; everybody should be able to do that in any spreadsheet. Nobody should have to call in a professional developer for such tasks.
Heck, just learning how to make complex iTunes and Google searches would be a huge time-saver for most people.
In that respect I agree with TFA's notion that modeling (breaking down a problem) is the core requirement, not some random programming language's syntax.
This Omand guy should be fired immediately for even mentioning the possibility of a government service using unethical methods.
A government that is anything less than completely ethical should be no government at all.
You've got it the wrong way around; he doesn't understand it because he's NOT a moron.
Whenever I hear the name "J.J. Abrams", I can't help but hear that SNL "More cowbell!" sketch but with the words "More lensflare!".
Does science say womens' and mens' brains are identical? No, it doesn't. There are differences. If you don't believe me, ask your doctor. Also, try to explain why most women feel like woman and most men feel like man.
Did I say men don't have feelings? No, I didn't. I merely suggested they might _EXPERIENCE_ them _LESS INTENSELY_. Basically like all humans experience emotions at a different level of intensity. I was merely suggesting there might be some bias coming from gender.
Do you have any numbers to back up your claim of "so many men in prison for crimes of passion"? I couldn't find any. Only thing I could find even remotely applicable was an article on how men are more likely to get longer sentences for crimes of passion. http://www.psmag.com/legal-aff...
I'm sure you'll continue fighting your imaginary strawman, but I shall have no further part in it.
First of all, why would this be unlikely? Women's and men's brains are wired slightly differently, why would that not have an impact on how intensely the brain perceives emotions considering it has an impact on a lot of other things.
Secondly; why would this be insulting? You're good at some things and not as good at other things. So what? Why would you have a need to feel better than the average person at everything? More importantly though; whether you feel insulted by something doesn't make any difference to whether it's true or not.
I'm a man and personally I don't feel insulted by the notion that my half of humanity might feel emotions slightly less intensely on average than the other half of humanity.
so they bottle it inside, get frustrated, angry, and when it finally comes out, run for cover.
Or perhaps men just experience emotions less intensely, thus have less need to vent them.
There's a difference between offering lots of nannying for those that want it and forcing your nannying upon everybody.
It is. It just protects against fewer problems.
Every type of backup method has drawbacks and benefits.
If there existed a perfect backup method, we would have only that method.
Redundancy makes it very easy and fast to recover data, but lacks security against localized physical problems and malicious software. It would be a perfectly valid first layer of backup and sufficient for backing up reproducable information such as downloaded/scanned/ripped media. It protects against accidentally deleting files or hardware problems. For less easily reproducable information you probably want some additional backup layers.
There are several hundred other countries to choose from.
My own country is slowly turning into a nanny state as well, but we're not nearly at USA-levels of government control yet.
When we do, there are some fine scandinavian countries still keeping it relatively sane and some other regions on the earth where you still have some freedoms.
The trauma caused by the police and child protective services far outweigh any damage that could have rationally and reasonably been expected otherwise.
If everybody wants to use that technology, why would it be sad?
Only for sufficiently big companies, and even then it's not going to happen overnight. If you can build a solid product to fill that transition gap for a ~10 year period, you can make a lot of money.
defending free speech as not only a fundamental human right but a duty to speak one's mind for the sake of the common good.
Here's the thing; what YOU think might be "common good" might not be what other people think is "common good".
I'm pretty sure the assholes that kill cartoonists think they are doing it for the "common good".
Subjective values must never limit freedom of speech.
How do I translate "trampoline" without reading the entire freakin' maillist history?
This is slang and you won't find the intended meaning it in a dictionary.
The summary could use a bit of translation, instead of merely copying content off a maillist post intended for a very specific group of kernel specialists using slang terminology.
Not jump like a fucking monkey, not wave hands in the air like a cheerleader, etc.
You're not alone; none of us want to bring our work home.
Software doesn't want anything, it just does what it's told.
Your labour though, definitely DOES want to be free, so why are you getting paid for it?
To be fair, since download.com and entire CNET is actively involved in pushing malware, I wouldn't be surprised if any non-Windows downloads they might offer would try to push malware as well.
And plain wrong in many places.
There's nothing about either Node or PHP that forces you to use or not use HTML or service calls.
Same for separation of concerns (which pretty much boils down to the same thing).
For instance; both PHP and Node handle SQL equally well, i.e. they can both hook up to most databases and let them deal with SQL.
Same for JSON. Just because it kinda looks like Javascript and started out loosely based on it, doesn't mean Javascript handles it differently.
I also don't think these two were ever "old friends who went separate ways". They started out separate.