Just to clarify, the instructor was FANTASTIC. He was from Sun's old guard and new Unix inside out. Honestly, it was inspirational just to be in the same room with him.
You may be correct about the nature of programmers sticking to their niches but gee, at least they could have been more discrete about it. Someone was paying for them to learn something useful and basic gratitude (if not self-preservation) dictate that they should at least feign interest.
Forget , what about stock options?
on
Sun to Cut 5000 Jobs
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I took a Unix systems programming class from Sun about five years ago and it was very good. The only downside to the class were the attitudes of some of the Sun employees that were in there. They repeatedly told the rest of the class that they "didn't really need to know this stuff" and that they were "web guys" or "java gui guys" and that the nuts and bolts of Unix were tangential. When they were in the room they spent most of their time talking about the price of Sun's stock. It was hard to imagine how the company was going to go forward when so many employees seemed to think that their core products (Unix servers) were not really worthy of learning about.
I really like Sun's stuff and I hope that they are able to make a big comeback; but they are not going to do it counting on the folks that were in my class.
Does anyone remember those ads? Lots of smiling happy people shown with their free.Mac email addresses, because, after all, we're all part of the Mac family, right!! Apple played on the sense of community around the Mac and marketed a social identity based on that community, which it then promptly decided it could cash in on by making.Mac a paid service. Not only did they start charging, but the refused to even forward incoming mail to the stiffs that thought they had this great free email address forever.
Okay, it has been years and I'm still bitter. I've still got an Apple ][e on my desk (and yes, I still use it) and I've been a Mac user for years but I have absolutely no illusions that Apple cares about me anymore than the hot dog cart guy down the street, probably less. Your think getting good products and good customer service, fine, but don't forget you're paying a premium for it.
I personally think people love Macs because of the absolutely staggeringly amount of incredibly high quality free software that is available for it.
I was playing rugby in college when a Sri Lankan exchange student came running out onto the field. No problem, right, always room for one more person that loves the game. Then we looked down: no cleats, no shoes. We begged him, "Are you sure you want to do this?" It was bad enough the average guy out there had 100 pounds on him, but no shoes? I wish I could say that there was a happy ending to this, but it did not end well. Of course two practices later I blew out both my collarbones, so what do I know.
The funny things is that, as terrible as this episode was, it was still less troubling than our other idea: coed rugby. Just trust me on this one; there is no way that it works out well for anybody.
Right on. Look at the two articles published the other day in the New England Journal of Medicine regarding the use of hypertonic saline in patients with Cystic Fibrosis. Both of those studies were supported by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation which has done a tremendous job marshalling resources toward finding a cure and new treatments for a rare disease.
I do research at a university and we are constantly buying new systems. We are choosing Linux more and more because it simply runs all of the software that we need it to run. We have a lot of code that was originally written on big Solaris machines and the great majority of it needs very little tweaking to run perfectly under Linux. On the flip side, a lot of vendors that sold desktop apps for Windows or Mac now have excellent Linux version as well. Linux bridges the gaps and provides an environment that people can use on their desktops and on big servers running the software that they need for their work.
Twenty years ago I went to look for a computer to bring to college and started looking at everything from Commodores to KayPros. My father said, "Find the software you want to run, then pick the hardware that runs it." That advice still seems good today and it is why I have a Linux box running right next to the Apple//e that I took to school.
I agree, bravo Apple. I don't have a TV since I live in a rural area and could never justify the cost of cable or a dish. I would definitely pay $2 to download a show that I heard people talking about at work though, or even better, a sports event. In my case the network is accessing a customer that they never would have been able to reach before which cannot be bad for their bottom line.
Don't bet on the promise of private companies making the trains run more efficiently. Remember that Amtrak was only created when scores of railways (e.g. Boston & Maine, Erie - Lackawanna, Lehigh Valley, Reading) were in bankruptcy court and it looked like passenger service was going to cease to exist in the US. The number of passenger trains in the US had decreased from 15K to about 500 under private control.
If you don't want passenger service, fine, but don't bet on the private sector so save the railways. The return on investment for most US trains has been so low for such a long time that most shareholders would earn more by selling the real estate and the engines for scrap (the exception being some of the long haul West Coast freight trains that are actually profitable).
This has a long history going back to Amtrack's predecessors -- which were not so great either. The bottom line (in my limited understanding) is that we keep giving Amtrak conflicting mandates, e.g. continue unprofitable long distance runs through congressional districts and break even financially; operate a high speed train on curved tracks but make sure that it meets stringent safety requirements that dramatically increase the weight.
The US will not have real high speed train service any time in the future because there will never be the political will (or the checkbook) to acquire the necessary rights of way for good track. Many parts of the world as much more urbanized that the US which has vast suburban sprawl populated by politically savvy NIMBY voters.
The Shinkansen (which I have ridden) is the flagship of Japanese rail and a tremendous source of national pride. However, if you take some of the more rural routes around Japan you'll find out that the great majority of these trains are not nearly as well maintained. The Shinkansen takes up a lot of the transportation budget that could be used to keep other modes in better shape.
The int vs. Integer is one sticking point, I'd like to throw out another one. My memory may be off, but I seem to remember that you could not start doing even simple input in Java without covering exception handling. Now to my way of thinking, having to handle throw/catch on Day 1 before you can get even simple "add the two integers" together programs running is a problem.
I've seen some Java books that come with CDs and a collection of classes that encapsulate that part of the logic and provide some basic functions like "getInt" or "getFloat," which brings me to the next issue. ..
Starting with Java you eventually have to turn to someone and say, "Now, I'm going to throw something big at you right now and you don't really need to understand all of what it does. We will come back to it." You then write "public static void main" on the board and people immediately want to know what the heck you are doing. Not wanting to get bogged down in things they are not really ready to handle yet, you try and breeze through a quick description. BAM!! Half of all people think you're condescending, the other half think that you could not explain how to make a sandwich, let alone program a computer.
I think languages like Scheme are perfect, you can start off with things like "define x()" on Day 1 and never have to promise to "come back" to things that you had to gloss over the first time.
Don't forget, you don't need to sit there counting parentheses in order to follow Lisp code -- emacs (and other Lisp/Scheme editors) indent the code as you type it. While the whitespace is not important to the function of the program (unlike Python for example), it is critical to readability.
On a related note, I can't imagine using an editor (such as emacs) that does not indent code automatically regardless of the language. The Lisp way is 'anti-bugging,' finding errors as they occur. Having an editor that enforces indentation helps enormously in finding all sorts of typos (missing quotes, etc.) before you run your code.
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Just to clarify, the instructor was FANTASTIC. He was from Sun's old guard and new Unix inside out. Honestly, it was inspirational just to be in the same room with him.
You may be correct about the nature of programmers sticking to their niches but gee, at least they could have been more discrete about it. Someone was paying for them to learn something useful and basic gratitude (if not self-preservation) dictate that they should at least feign interest.
I took a Unix systems programming class from Sun about five years ago and it was very good. The only downside to the class were the attitudes of some of the Sun employees that were in there. They repeatedly told the rest of the class that they "didn't really need to know this stuff" and that they were "web guys" or "java gui guys" and that the nuts and bolts of Unix were tangential. When they were in the room they spent most of their time talking about the price of Sun's stock. It was hard to imagine how the company was going to go forward when so many employees seemed to think that their core products (Unix servers) were not really worthy of learning about.
I really like Sun's stuff and I hope that they are able to make a big comeback; but they are not going to do it counting on the folks that were in my class.
Does anyone remember those ads? Lots of smiling happy people shown with their free .Mac email addresses, because, after all, we're all part of the Mac family, right!! Apple played on the sense of community around the Mac and marketed a social identity based on that community, which it then promptly decided it could cash in on by making .Mac a paid service. Not only did they start charging, but the refused to even forward incoming mail to the stiffs that thought they had this great free email address forever.
Okay, it has been years and I'm still bitter. I've still got an Apple ][e on my desk (and yes, I still use it) and I've been a Mac user for years but I have absolutely no illusions that Apple cares about me anymore than the hot dog cart guy down the street, probably less. Your think getting good products and good customer service, fine, but don't forget you're paying a premium for it.
I personally think people love Macs because of the absolutely staggeringly amount of incredibly high quality free software that is available for it.
I was playing rugby in college when a Sri Lankan exchange student came running out onto the field. No problem, right, always room for one more person that loves the game. Then we looked down: no cleats, no shoes. We begged him, "Are you sure you want to do this?" It was bad enough the average guy out there had 100 pounds on him, but no shoes? I wish I could say that there was a happy ending to this, but it did not end well. Of course two practices later I blew out both my collarbones, so what do I know.
The funny things is that, as terrible as this episode was, it was still less troubling than our other idea: coed rugby. Just trust me on this one; there is no way that it works out well for anybody.
Right on. Look at the two articles published the other day in the New England Journal of Medicine regarding the use of hypertonic saline in patients with Cystic Fibrosis. Both of those studies were supported by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation which has done a tremendous job marshalling resources toward finding a cure and new treatments for a rare disease.
New England Journal of Medicine: http://content.nejm.org/
Cystic Fibrosis Foundation: http://www.cff.org/
I do research at a university and we are constantly buying new systems. We are choosing Linux more and more because it simply runs all of the software that we need it to run. We have a lot of code that was originally written on big Solaris machines and the great majority of it needs very little tweaking to run perfectly under Linux. On the flip side, a lot of vendors that sold desktop apps for Windows or Mac now have excellent Linux version as well. Linux bridges the gaps and provides an environment that people can use on their desktops and on big servers running the software that they need for their work.
//e that I took to school.
Twenty years ago I went to look for a computer to bring to college and started looking at everything from Commodores to KayPros. My father said, "Find the software you want to run, then pick the hardware that runs it." That advice still seems good today and it is why I have a Linux box running right next to the Apple
I agree, bravo Apple. I don't have a TV since I live in a rural area and could never justify the cost of cable or a dish. I would definitely pay $2 to download a show that I heard people talking about at work though, or even better, a sports event. In my case the network is accessing a customer that they never would have been able to reach before which cannot be bad for their bottom line.
Don't bet on the promise of private companies making the trains run more efficiently. Remember that Amtrak was only created when scores of railways (e.g. Boston & Maine, Erie - Lackawanna, Lehigh Valley, Reading) were in bankruptcy court and it looked like passenger service was going to cease to exist in the US. The number of passenger trains in the US had decreased from 15K to about 500 under private control.
If you don't want passenger service, fine, but don't bet on the private sector so save the railways. The return on investment for most US trains has been so low for such a long time that most shareholders would earn more by selling the real estate and the engines for scrap (the exception being some of the long haul West Coast freight trains that are actually profitable).
This has a long history going back to Amtrack's predecessors -- which were not so great either. The bottom line (in my limited understanding) is that we keep giving Amtrak conflicting mandates, e.g. continue unprofitable long distance runs through congressional districts and break even financially; operate a high speed train on curved tracks but make sure that it meets stringent safety requirements that dramatically increase the weight.
The US will not have real high speed train service any time in the future because there will never be the political will (or the checkbook) to acquire the necessary rights of way for good track. Many parts of the world as much more urbanized that the US which has vast suburban sprawl populated by politically savvy NIMBY voters.
The Shinkansen (which I have ridden) is the flagship of Japanese rail and a tremendous source of national pride. However, if you take some of the more rural routes around Japan you'll find out that the great majority of these trains are not nearly as well maintained. The Shinkansen takes up a lot of the transportation budget that could be used to keep other modes in better shape.
The int vs. Integer is one sticking point, I'd like to throw out another one. My memory may be off, but I seem to remember that you could not start doing even simple input in Java without covering exception handling. Now to my way of thinking, having to handle throw/catch on Day 1 before you can get even simple "add the two integers" together programs running is a problem.
.
I've seen some Java books that come with CDs and a collection of classes that encapsulate that part of the logic and provide some basic functions like "getInt" or "getFloat," which brings me to the next issue. .
Starting with Java you eventually have to turn to someone and say, "Now, I'm going to throw something big at you right now and you don't really need to understand all of what it does. We will come back to it." You then write "public static void main" on the board and people immediately want to know what the heck you are doing. Not wanting to get bogged down in things they are not really ready to handle yet, you try and breeze through a quick description. BAM!! Half of all people think you're condescending, the other half think that you could not explain how to make a sandwich, let alone program a computer.
I think languages like Scheme are perfect, you can start off with things like "define x()" on Day 1 and never have to promise to "come back" to things that you had to gloss over the first time.
Don't forget, you don't need to sit there counting parentheses in order to follow Lisp code -- emacs (and other Lisp/Scheme editors) indent the code as you type it. While the whitespace is not important to the function of the program (unlike Python for example), it is critical to readability.
On a related note, I can't imagine using an editor (such as emacs) that does not indent code automatically regardless of the language. The Lisp way is 'anti-bugging,' finding errors as they occur. Having an editor that enforces indentation helps enormously in finding all sorts of typos (missing quotes, etc.) before you run your code.