I still can't take any writing seriously which begins by preaching the end of the PC. First, every computing-capable non-mainframe computer is a PC. Second, there will always be a need for PCs with "normal" computational capacity (meaning more than a mobile i3 cpu), of course in smaller numbers, but still. Remember, not everyone is only a content consumer living on tablets and small form factor AIO computers.
That said, I like these small devices, they have their use and place, in my home too. And I like that there are nice alternatives to Apple.
Of course it all hangs on the definiton of "fair and reasonable", which is not exactly something easy to do objectively. If I were to require such licences, I'd say zero would sound very reasonable:) If I would to provide such licences, I'd go for as a high price I could get out of you. They will fight this out and come to terms, one way or the other, and both will say the resulting sum is neither fair nor reasonable:) Well, life is unfair, live with it.
So, on one hand they want search engines to not doctor the search results, but on the other hand they want search engines to doctor search results when those results would show someone from a "negative" (which generally means "real") perspective. Nothing new under this sun.
2. No. But the current methodologies of teaching are. Unfortunately, teaching methods do not adapt fast enough, and this in turn causes a lot of trouble, e.g. kids not having enough and up-to-date knowledge and information about certain fields so as they can properly choose their further study fields, which can even result in badly planned and chosen careers (yes, this is a bit on the extreme side, but true nonetheless).
I mean come on, how idiotic this sounds: 'Do you support more use of drone aircraft to attack suspected terrorists?'. More drone aircrafts instead of fighter jets? Instead of bombers? Instead of ground troops? Instead of unnecessarily wasting human lives? Instead of ground vehicle attacks? More than what? More than before? More than planned for the future? At more locations? Attacking suspected terrorists? What does that mean: if we suspect them to be terrorists then we should blow them to hell with a drone and investigate later? Blow them to hell more than before, with more drones than before?
You deal the same with all kinds of arrogant people, it doesn't much matter if they are nerds or not. If they have grounds for being arrogant - which you can usually find out pretty quickly -, then you might just simply acknowledge it, and live with it. If they don't, then just forget about them, get into ignore mode, and move along. Reading too much into it won't do you any good. There's just so much time you spend living, you should minimize wasted time - especially on idiots - to a minimum.
I'm generally against any kind of tracking-related initiatives, but with my kids, I wouldn't mind to have such an option. Hell, they could be implanted at birth with a tracking device which runs out of juice in 14-15 years. I know, it wouldn't be easy for me to accept this - since we know governments, they'd quickly broaden this to cover the entire population... yes, I'm that pessimistic in such matters - but it would be something that at least I would consider thinking about. I don't have kids yet (but I will, hopefully), but I have nephews and nieces, and I care about them, and I don't think most parents would mind to have a way of querying their children's whereabouts below a certain age. Unfortunately this world we're living in is not the safest place.
These guys are crazy. What do you think, how will this affect the number of scientists who work on quake analysis for early warning purposes? And their willingness to report anything? I mean, come on, think about it: a). they don't warn, something happens, they go to prison, or b). they warn - better safe than sorry -, people move out, nothing happens, and they'll get sued for all the costs. I really wouldn't want to be a volcano/quake scientist in Italy right now.
Excuse me, but that's so freaking stupid, that blows all scales of measurement. What do these guys think, how will anyone find their content, if it won't be accessible by search engines? Do they want to go back to pre-search engine times with sites aggregating content sites into categories like a phone book? Go, bury yourselves under a rock and stay there.
Regarding hardware, well, when I was young, 6-7 grader in the mid-90s, we did have some optional computer lab classes we could take (it wasn't part of the official curriculum), where we had some zx-spectrum clones we learned programming on. Later, when I got into highschool, we had XTs, later 286s and 386s, and so on. I never met Commodores in school, but I had a C64 at home before I started highschool, while my friends got C+4s and VIC20s and one of them had an Amiga (don't remember which one), and a year later I got a 286 which I kept for a few years, and switched to a 386 when I started university in '97. I think this was fairly normal for my environment (central-eastern-europe) back in the days.
I mean the question is: if the person smokes, but doesn't do it during work hours, then why not hire? Of course with keeping the option of firing if (s)he does? I mean I think those guys drinking energy drinks on an hourly basis are more dangerous than smokers. They should have a rule saying anyone who smells like smoke, and/or smokes during working hours will be fired. I could agree to that. But not even hiring someone for being a smoker? For 12 months no less? That's very much over the edge.
I just hope the next guy you not hire for being a smoker won't turn out to be the next employer's gamechanger genius.
"to prove they don't upset existing business models"
Which means any disruptive new tech - which would be everything really good - would be dead at birth. Such smarta** politicians should be all fired on spot and never again allowed to practice politics. Ignorance and influence are a very dangerous mix, as you all know all too well...
I'll be a bit extreme here, but I can't see the problem when a company promotes its services better than those of the competition. I would go to such an extent to say it's my obligation to promote my offerings better than others'. I see two was to deal with this: i). force each ad every search provider to not promote their own services at all, or ii). let all search providers promore their own services as they see fit. For me both would be acceptable, but doing these investigations over and over again is just a waste of time and resources, and our [EU] taxes.
Actually, since - and including - my very first mobile phone which I bought in '99, I always hae bought phones based on their features. If more of them had the features, then came the looks.
Not surprisingly, the above has also been the cause that I never bought an iPhone up to now (seen, tried, but never bought), and I'm surely no starting now, since I could list about half a dozen phones right now that have better* features and nicer looks.
I mean come on, it has to be the U.S where people actually acept that tethering is some extra special "service" and it's justifiable to ask extra money for "providing" it. If my carrier would ask money for that, I'd leave them on the spot. I changed carriers for less than that, and the world didn't collapse. For a long time I thought the U.S. was the paradise of Internet and mobile phones and unlimited data plans. But then I actually started to go there a lot and it was farly quick to realize most cell companies just take people for fools, take subscribers as granted, rip them off with a lot of stupid stuff, and just see them and an endless money source. And the most weird thing, lots of people are so used so used to this, that they don't even think about it much anymore.
I'm sorry, but I can't take seriously a tech writing which contains lines like "pronounced 'DEE-ram'".
Otherwise, personal computers and personal computing is not dead, it just has several form factors and platforms at this point in time. It's not dead, it's extending, growing and evolving. Of course they might only mean desktop computers as PCs, but then again the whole thing is stupid, since buying a lot of portable crap won't ever mean workstations and servers are dying. It just means there are more portable computers (tablets, phones, whatever) being sold, than - let's call them as - classic PCs. Nothing more, nothing less.
So, now let's find another two numbers which are not equal and write an article about why one is higher than the other, it might be fun.
Let me clean that up for you. In my book, coder is someone who knows at least a language and can write some code which can do something on a computer, while - building on that - a programmer is someone who has knowledge of algorithms, methods, methodologies, architectures, and doesn't just write some code, but understands and knows how and why to write that code.
Of course that's just my take, but it comes from experience.
I have experienced a few education systems (including the US), some myself, some through my sister, some through a lot of relatives, some through my academic contacts' recollections and stories. And I have to tell there are several sides to this matters-doesn't-matter in the case of the US (you know, compulsory Babylon5 reference of the 3-sided sword: my side, your side and the truth).
So, thing is, the education in the US is as it is, but:
- There is a constant high influx of students and researchers from abroad, who become part of the system on the higher level, provide talent, and contribute to the US scientific and economic growth. There are not many countries for which this applies as well as to the US.
- Education in the US might be inferior from some points of view, but there are not many countries where e.g. university labs can afford to spend that much money as at many US universities. And that can count _very_ much, access to journal subscriptions, to expensive equipment, technologies which for a lot of university labs abroad are simply unreachable (some of them for financial reasons, other for export rule reasons, etc.).
Does it matter that the US education system is sometimes inferior? Well, in the long run it might matter, and I personally can't understand how the US managed to stay afloat from this point of view. You know, geniuses manage to find the way to the top even in a bad education system, but in such a system a lot of middle-average level people who might be very very important contributors to the economy might not raise to a level to actually turn out useful, but instead they remain below, simply beacuse the system doesn't help them enough to reach their full potential.
Hard and full and proper basic education (I mean sub-university levels here) is also very important, in some sense much more important than the university level, since this creates, establishes and retains the average level of intelligence of a country. I think this is a very important point and much more emphasis should be put there. Money-wise and policy-wise as well.
"To bring this back on topic - schools need to teach the logic and the basic techniques - with those, one needs simply to learn a language, which is not that difficult."
I was in high school a bit later, in the mid-90s, in a math-CS spec class, and we got all that (we got 8 math classes, 4 programming and algorithm theory and numerical math classes, 4 programming labs per week), using 4 languages during the years (starting from all kinds of basic, followed by pascal, c and c++). Of course some of us were quite ahead of them in knowing programming languages before they began teaching them, but some of the theoretical stuff we were shown were quite on the level of what they taught us later during university years.
From my experience then and later on, I can wholeheartedly agree with the parent post.
Also, another - maybe interesting - information. From my high school class, 5 got PhDs, almost all (with one exception) got MSc/MEng/MA degrees, and about half of them work in CS or IT related fields.
Yeah. Nice name. Like civil journalists. You can improve yourself, learn new programming languages by yourself, read books by yourself. But without a proper basic education mass, self-taught will almost always remain below the ones who had at least some education in math (algebra, analysis, numerical, statistics) and algorithm theory.
Regarding Bachelor's, the article clearly speaks about the U.S. but I think I can generalize that a BSc/BEng degree is not much, anywhere. If I'd filter based on degree, MSc/MEng would be the first step.
"of the people who earned a computer science degree, most don't know any theory and can't code"
That's somewhat also my experience, but with about >50% with Bachelor's, and about 30% with Masters.
"but most of them teach Java"
Again, I assume it's about the US bachelor's CS education. Has to be because I know of a lot of places where Java is only one of the taught languages.
But, again, languages is what I care less than knowledge. You can pick up a language much easier than pick up theoretical knowledge. And I always thought about a CS education to provide more than coding practice information and teach a language. If done properly, and taken seriously, self-teaching oneself to a Master's degree level could take ages.
"I've stopped relying on computer science degrees as an indicator of anything except a general interest in the field."
Yeah, so you're the one responsible for 12-turn, weeks-long interview processes with gazillion quizzes and on-the-fly by-heart coding drills. Thousands of people must love you very much:P
I have currently 2 linux server out in the open, both behind the same router, in a nice cooled server room. One has its port 22 opened up, the other's ssh is reachable through some obscure port number. The first sometimes sees dozens of different ip addresses per day trying to get in, the other sees maybe one per month (or less). Also, I'm using denyhosts on both, denying all access for an ip for many weeks if they fail access in more than 3 trials. It's been working quite nicely for years now.
"Are we really to entrust our data to a company founded by a man who comes from the world of browser toolbars?"
Why, you trust your data to random apps developed by random people, and suddenly this one poked your eye because the guy made browser bars? Now at least you know he's getting the data, not with some other crap which just uses it, leaks it, etc. Also, if you know what this app does, and you don't agree with it, instead of not using it, you start complaining about it. Yeah, nice:)
I'd never use such an app, or any other app that I know wants any data I don't want to share. But then I just don't use it, and move along, geez.
I mean come on, the one who came up with the notion to call remote storage and computing capabilties as "cloud" should be kicked hard. It was never a good idea, and it's no wonder that common folks don't have a clue about it. Also, the name uses the notion of the cloud, presumably on purpose, to induce the idea of something non-touchable, something that is just "out there" somewhere, so it's even surprising that any average user trusts any data to such a concoction.
I think they are all better off to think weather can endanger their data in the "cloud" and urge them to have local backups and not trust some random remote data storage service with their lives' data.
" Are skeuomorphic designs making technology accessible to the masses, or is it simply a case of an unwillingness to innovate and move forward?""
Neither. It's a move backwards in every sense of the word (Bob is calling and want you back in the middle ages). And we can thank it to Apple (oh my, just look at their sk.m. UIs lately), since lots of people mimic them just because they are Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
"most of the world is convinced the PC is doomed"
I still can't take any writing seriously which begins by preaching the end of the PC. First, every computing-capable non-mainframe computer is a PC. Second, there will always be a need for PCs with "normal" computational capacity (meaning more than a mobile i3 cpu), of course in smaller numbers, but still. Remember, not everyone is only a content consumer living on tablets and small form factor AIO computers.
That said, I like these small devices, they have their use and place, in my home too. And I like that there are nice alternatives to Apple.
Of course it all hangs on the definiton of "fair and reasonable", which is not exactly something easy to do objectively. If I were to require such licences, I'd say zero would sound very reasonable :) If I would to provide such licences, I'd go for as a high price I could get out of you. They will fight this out and come to terms, one way or the other, and both will say the resulting sum is neither fair nor reasonable :) Well, life is unfair, live with it.
So, on one hand they want search engines to not doctor the search results, but on the other hand they want search engines to doctor search results when those results would show someone from a "negative" (which generally means "real") perspective. Nothing new under this sun.
are teachers going the way of the Dodo?
1. See Betteridge's law of headlines.
2. No. But the current methodologies of teaching are. Unfortunately, teaching methods do not adapt fast enough, and this in turn causes a lot of trouble, e.g. kids not having enough and up-to-date knowledge and information about certain fields so as they can properly choose their further study fields, which can even result in badly planned and chosen careers (yes, this is a bit on the extreme side, but true nonetheless).
When was the last time you heard of an airplane hijack after we pumped up security?
Yupp, the bear patrol is working like a charm.
I mean come on, how idiotic this sounds: 'Do you support more use of drone aircraft to attack suspected terrorists?'. More drone aircrafts instead of fighter jets? Instead of bombers? Instead of ground troops? Instead of unnecessarily wasting human lives? Instead of ground vehicle attacks? More than what? More than before? More than planned for the future? At more locations? Attacking suspected terrorists? What does that mean: if we suspect them to be terrorists then we should blow them to hell with a drone and investigate later? Blow them to hell more than before, with more drones than before?
Yes? No? Don't know? Are you an idiot?
You deal the same with all kinds of arrogant people, it doesn't much matter if they are nerds or not. If they have grounds for being arrogant - which you can usually find out pretty quickly -, then you might just simply acknowledge it, and live with it. If they don't, then just forget about them, get into ignore mode, and move along. Reading too much into it won't do you any good. There's just so much time you spend living, you should minimize wasted time - especially on idiots - to a minimum.
I'm generally against any kind of tracking-related initiatives, but with my kids, I wouldn't mind to have such an option. Hell, they could be implanted at birth with a tracking device which runs out of juice in 14-15 years. I know, it wouldn't be easy for me to accept this - since we know governments, they'd quickly broaden this to cover the entire population... yes, I'm that pessimistic in such matters - but it would be something that at least I would consider thinking about. I don't have kids yet (but I will, hopefully), but I have nephews and nieces, and I care about them, and I don't think most parents would mind to have a way of querying their children's whereabouts below a certain age. Unfortunately this world we're living in is not the safest place.
These guys are crazy. What do you think, how will this affect the number of scientists who work on quake analysis for early warning purposes? And their willingness to report anything? I mean, come on, think about it: a). they don't warn, something happens, they go to prison, or b). they warn - better safe than sorry -, people move out, nothing happens, and they'll get sued for all the costs. I really wouldn't want to be a volcano/quake scientist in Italy right now.
Excuse me, but that's so freaking stupid, that blows all scales of measurement. What do these guys think, how will anyone find their content, if it won't be accessible by search engines? Do they want to go back to pre-search engine times with sites aggregating content sites into categories like a phone book? Go, bury yourselves under a rock and stay there.
Regarding hardware, well, when I was young, 6-7 grader in the mid-90s, we did have some optional computer lab classes we could take (it wasn't part of the official curriculum), where we had some zx-spectrum clones we learned programming on. Later, when I got into highschool, we had XTs, later 286s and 386s, and so on. I never met Commodores in school, but I had a C64 at home before I started highschool, while my friends got C+4s and VIC20s and one of them had an Amiga (don't remember which one), and a year later I got a 286 which I kept for a few years, and switched to a 386 when I started university in '97. I think this was fairly normal for my environment (central-eastern-europe) back in the days.
I mean the question is: if the person smokes, but doesn't do it during work hours, then why not hire? Of course with keeping the option of firing if (s)he does? I mean I think those guys drinking energy drinks on an hourly basis are more dangerous than smokers. They should have a rule saying anyone who smells like smoke, and/or smokes during working hours will be fired. I could agree to that. But not even hiring someone for being a smoker? For 12 months no less? That's very much over the edge.
I just hope the next guy you not hire for being a smoker won't turn out to be the next employer's gamechanger genius.
"to prove they don't upset existing business models"
Which means any disruptive new tech - which would be everything really good - would be dead at birth. Such smarta** politicians should be all fired on spot and never again allowed to practice politics. Ignorance and influence are a very dangerous mix, as you all know all too well...
I'll be a bit extreme here, but I can't see the problem when a company promotes its services better than those of the competition. I would go to such an extent to say it's my obligation to promote my offerings better than others'. I see two was to deal with this: i). force each ad every search provider to not promote their own services at all, or ii). let all search providers promore their own services as they see fit. For me both would be acceptable, but doing these investigations over and over again is just a waste of time and resources, and our [EU] taxes.
"buy iPhones lost these features?"
Actually, since - and including - my very first mobile phone which I bought in '99, I always hae bought phones based on their features. If more of them had the features, then came the looks.
Not surprisingly, the above has also been the cause that I never bought an iPhone up to now (seen, tried, but never bought), and I'm surely no starting now, since I could list about half a dozen phones right now that have better* features and nicer looks.
[*] of course it's just my opinion
I mean come on, it has to be the U.S where people actually acept that tethering is some extra special "service" and it's justifiable to ask extra money for "providing" it. If my carrier would ask money for that, I'd leave them on the spot. I changed carriers for less than that, and the world didn't collapse. For a long time I thought the U.S. was the paradise of Internet and mobile phones and unlimited data plans. But then I actually started to go there a lot and it was farly quick to realize most cell companies just take people for fools, take subscribers as granted, rip them off with a lot of stupid stuff, and just see them and an endless money source. And the most weird thing, lots of people are so used so used to this, that they don't even think about it much anymore.
I'm sorry, but I can't take seriously a tech writing which contains lines like "pronounced 'DEE-ram'".
Otherwise, personal computers and personal computing is not dead, it just has several form factors and platforms at this point in time. It's not dead, it's extending, growing and evolving. Of course they might only mean desktop computers as PCs, but then again the whole thing is stupid, since buying a lot of portable crap won't ever mean workstations and servers are dying. It just means there are more portable computers (tablets, phones, whatever) being sold, than - let's call them as - classic PCs. Nothing more, nothing less.
So, now let's find another two numbers which are not equal and write an article about why one is higher than the other, it might be fun.
"Can Anyone Become a Programmer?"
No.
But anyone can become a coder.
Let me clean that up for you. In my book, coder is someone who knows at least a language and can write some code which can do something on a computer, while - building on that - a programmer is someone who has knowledge of algorithms, methods, methodologies, architectures, and doesn't just write some code, but understands and knows how and why to write that code.
Of course that's just my take, but it comes from experience.
I have experienced a few education systems (including the US), some myself, some through my sister, some through a lot of relatives, some through my academic contacts' recollections and stories. And I have to tell there are several sides to this matters-doesn't-matter in the case of the US (you know, compulsory Babylon5 reference of the 3-sided sword: my side, your side and the truth).
So, thing is, the education in the US is as it is, but:
- There is a constant high influx of students and researchers from abroad, who become part of the system on the higher level, provide talent, and contribute to the US scientific and economic growth. There are not many countries for which this applies as well as to the US.
- Education in the US might be inferior from some points of view, but there are not many countries where e.g. university labs can afford to spend that much money as at many US universities. And that can count _very_ much, access to journal subscriptions, to expensive equipment, technologies which for a lot of university labs abroad are simply unreachable (some of them for financial reasons, other for export rule reasons, etc.).
Does it matter that the US education system is sometimes inferior? Well, in the long run it might matter, and I personally can't understand how the US managed to stay afloat from this point of view. You know, geniuses manage to find the way to the top even in a bad education system, but in such a system a lot of middle-average level people who might be very very important contributors to the economy might not raise to a level to actually turn out useful, but instead they remain below, simply beacuse the system doesn't help them enough to reach their full potential.
Hard and full and proper basic education (I mean sub-university levels here) is also very important, in some sense much more important than the university level, since this creates, establishes and retains the average level of intelligence of a country. I think this is a very important point and much more emphasis should be put there. Money-wise and policy-wise as well.
"To bring this back on topic - schools need to teach the logic and the basic techniques - with those, one needs simply to learn a language, which is not that difficult."
I was in high school a bit later, in the mid-90s, in a math-CS spec class, and we got all that (we got 8 math classes, 4 programming and algorithm theory and numerical math classes, 4 programming labs per week), using 4 languages during the years (starting from all kinds of basic, followed by pascal, c and c++). Of course some of us were quite ahead of them in knowing programming languages before they began teaching them, but some of the theoretical stuff we were shown were quite on the level of what they taught us later during university years.
From my experience then and later on, I can wholeheartedly agree with the parent post.
Also, another - maybe interesting - information. From my high school class, 5 got PhDs, almost all (with one exception) got MSc/MEng/MA degrees, and about half of them work in CS or IT related fields.
The high school wasn't in the U.S. though.
"Self-taught technologists"
:P
Yeah. Nice name. Like civil journalists. You can improve yourself, learn new programming languages by yourself, read books by yourself. But without a proper basic education mass, self-taught will almost always remain below the ones who had at least some education in math (algebra, analysis, numerical, statistics) and algorithm theory.
Regarding Bachelor's, the article clearly speaks about the U.S. but I think I can generalize that a BSc/BEng degree is not much, anywhere. If I'd filter based on degree, MSc/MEng would be the first step.
"of the people who earned a computer science degree, most don't know any theory and can't code"
That's somewhat also my experience, but with about >50% with Bachelor's, and about 30% with Masters.
"but most of them teach Java"
Again, I assume it's about the US bachelor's CS education. Has to be because I know of a lot of places where Java is only one of the taught languages.
But, again, languages is what I care less than knowledge. You can pick up a language much easier than pick up theoretical knowledge. And I always thought about a CS education to provide more than coding practice information and teach a language. If done properly, and taken seriously, self-teaching oneself to a Master's degree level could take ages.
"I've stopped relying on computer science degrees as an indicator of anything except a general interest in the field."
Yeah, so you're the one responsible for 12-turn, weeks-long interview processes with gazillion quizzes and on-the-fly by-heart coding drills. Thousands of people must love you very much
I have currently 2 linux server out in the open, both behind the same router, in a nice cooled server room. One has its port 22 opened up, the other's ssh is reachable through some obscure port number. The first sometimes sees dozens of different ip addresses per day trying to get in, the other sees maybe one per month (or less). Also, I'm using denyhosts on both, denying all access for an ip for many weeks if they fail access in more than 3 trials. It's been working quite nicely for years now.
"Are we really to entrust our data to a company founded by a man who comes from the world of browser toolbars?"
:)
Why, you trust your data to random apps developed by random people, and suddenly this one poked your eye because the guy made browser bars? Now at least you know he's getting the data, not with some other crap which just uses it, leaks it, etc. Also, if you know what this app does, and you don't agree with it, instead of not using it, you start complaining about it. Yeah, nice
I'd never use such an app, or any other app that I know wants any data I don't want to share. But then I just don't use it, and move along, geez.
I mean come on, the one who came up with the notion to call remote storage and computing capabilties as "cloud" should be kicked hard. It was never a good idea, and it's no wonder that common folks don't have a clue about it. Also, the name uses the notion of the cloud, presumably on purpose, to induce the idea of something non-touchable, something that is just "out there" somewhere, so it's even surprising that any average user trusts any data to such a concoction.
I think they are all better off to think weather can endanger their data in the "cloud" and urge them to have local backups and not trust some random remote data storage service with their lives' data.
" Are skeuomorphic designs making technology accessible to the masses, or is it simply a case of an unwillingness to innovate and move forward?""
Neither. It's a move backwards in every sense of the word (Bob is calling and want you back in the middle ages). And we can thank it to Apple (oh my, just look at their sk.m. UIs lately), since lots of people mimic them just because they are Apple.