I thought the same and then I started to use OO a lot in PHP.
If you come from C, don't go the "OO is my religion, deliver me from functions" path. Write functional code and use objects in it where it makes sense. I've written computer games as a hobby for most of my life, and in that context you have a lot of natural objects. The player, the weapon, the level, the building, the city, etc. etc. you also encounter inheritance very fast.
I still write largely functional code and my objects are basically containers. It works great for me, even though some pure OO extremists would cringe at it.
I don't see OO as a paradigm. It's a tool, a method, and it mixes nicely with others if you do it right. I'm very thankful to PHP for their approach which offers you a full OO model, but doesn't force it on you.
And every good butcher should be a great farmer, every good soldier an expert weapon maker, every good driver a world class mechanic;)...
Strawman argument.
The OP doesn't argue that people whose profession is different from programming should be able to program. He argues that a good butcher should be able to kill with a mechanical tool, not just the fancy bolt gun the slaughterhouses have now. That a good driver should be able to drive stick-shift even if his car has automatic.
And I agree. When I was in university, I tortured students with proper input handling in C until they got it, until they understood that unless they check their input conforms to whatever specification they make for it, instead of just checking the exceptions they can think of, I will always find a way to break their program by, say, keeping my finger on the "a" key for 3 seconds and overflowing their buffer. I'm pretty sure they're not the ones making web applications less secure today because lazy programmer doesn't do form validation.
Learning the basics of programming on a not-holding-your-hands platform makes you understand what's going on and what can go wrong. If you learn programming on a training wheels framework, your programs will almost certainly be subject to all kinds of injections, overflows and other attacks whenever the framework doesn't protect you 100%, or requires you to make an explicit call to get those benefits.
C is a great language to learn programming. Yes, you'll swear a lot and you'll hate the computer, your teacher and the world in general, but when you come out of that bootcamp, you're a marine and not some third-grade wannabe trooper with a 10 minute life expectancy once the shit hits the fan.
If you need to be efficient, you write in C, end of story. That's why.
C++ and all the other languages there simply have too much overhead and give you not enough control over what's actually happening.
Assembler isn't worth the major hassle for the tiny improvement you get over C.
C, however, is at this unique point between the bare metal and the high-level abstractions where the trade-offs are perfect. You get just enough abstraction to be a) hardware-independent and b) can use a high-level programming language while remaining close enough to the machine that you can be really, really efficient, fast, short, the whole nine yards.
"Steal from the right people" is still worse than "don't steal".
Propaganda.
Stealing is the unlawful taking of someone else's property. There, I even highlighted the important word for you. There are many good reasons for lawfully taking someone's property or rather: Small parts of it. Unless you're a hard-core anarchist, you have to solve the problem of how to keep the government (small or big) working at all, and sooner or later your solution will be taxes, even if you call it by a different name.
The major disagreement between political factions is how much to tax, who to tax and what to spend the money on, but never about taxation itself.
he vast majority are freeriders that contribute nothing to their development
For a lot of software, this simply isn't true. The millions of installs that don't pay a developer to work on the code still provide test environments, installed base to make the product popular and various other advantages. Very few of the highly successful Free Software projects would be where they are today if only people who contribute to their development had been allowed to use them.
However, the best reason to not lie is that it is not ethical. ALWAYS do the ethical thing. Stay above the fray, tell the truth and get the certifications for real. It may take longer and be harder, but in the long run it will be worth it.
Really bad advice.
You'll feel yourself superior and "above the fray", but in reality everyone who understands the business world better will pass you by in both pay and position.
I say that as someone who's listened to this bad advice all his life. Your reasons for not lying or not fucking over your boss or co-workers should be practical, not philosophical. You shouldn't lie because the damage if you're found out is bigger than the advantage you gain. For certifications, in most jurisdictions a lie on the details that got you the job is sufficient grounds for legal immediate termination at the least. That looks really bad on your CV.
So my question is: are any certifications now worth it?
Depends on who pays for them.
Your current employer, or the unemployment agency or someone else? Go for any and all you can get.
You yourself? Check the job offers of jobs you care about. Make a list of the certifications that are mentioned there and check the top two or three (most mentionings). Do them if they are affordable.
Certifications are largely a scam or a shakedown, take your pick. They teach you nothing, and they check your ability to memorize test questions more than they test your actual abilities. I've got the test papers from CISM still here, and while my 15 years of IT security experience helped me pass it almost without learning, any buffon who's never even seen a computer could've passed the test by simply learning by heart the contents of one folder.
This is not a USA topic. European governments are already falling in line and falling over themselves to lick the telcos boots as well. It's disgusting, really.
The problem here is one of marketing. The parties interested (read: Telcos) are big corporations with millions of PR budgets. They've managed to create terms like two-tier Internet and "fast lane" and all the other PR bullshit. They've created a story to sell, that what they want would be good and has many advantages. It's really text-book PR work.
Some people didn't see the thing being built and are falling for the smoke and mirrors. The simple truth they need to be told is that yes, the story sounds compelling, maybe even convincing. But the reality is that anything that can be abused for profit will be abused for profit, and it will look nothing like the story they're being sold now.
ABP used to be great, then they sold out, and now they're basically a protection racket. Once again, we the users are not the customers, we're the product. I've long jumped ship to one of the forks (AdBlock Edge, in case anyone cares).
It was obvious that turning it into a "nice ads you have there, would be a pity..." game would land them in trouble sooner or later, so my sympathies are very limited. Especially once you dig through the connections between the various companies belonging to the same corporate network and realize that magically, their own or ally companies are all on the whitelist.
To the publishers, meanwhile: If your business model is threatened by users telling you to fuck off because you've become obnoxious, then maybe the problem is in your business model, isn't it?
That some of the adaptations were things like rewarding skill not seniority.
And you're going to do that how, exactly? Skill is not as easy to measure as your average MMORPG makes you believe. And almost every way to take a measurement can be gamed. Skill is also a very vague word. Skill in what, exactly, just for starters.
There's a lot that goes into making a successful magazine, and the recipe is so unknown that the best publishing houses have come up with in the past 50 years is to simply do field-tests - start the magazine and after some months decide whether to continue or pull the plug.
Maybe the staff overreacted to some BS corporate email?
From the summary it sounds as if the staff reacted explicitly to the BS - by making it clear they don't want to work for someone who thinks throwing BS around in internal mails is in any way a meaningful contribution.
The Great Flood wiped out all but one human family from the world
That's not the ethically questionable part. You could argue that they brought it upon themselves by not worshipping the right god in the right way or something. It's a weak argument, but it can be made.
But it also wiped out all the animals in existence (except 2 of each species), creatures who by the alleged gods own design were not responsible. That's a lot of collateral damage that barely gets a mentioning, but from an ethical perspective I think we pretty much agree that punishment on innocents is a big no-no and capital punishment doubly so.
The worst thing I can think of in The Bible is the Great Flood.
In a book filled to the brim with instructions to kill people, from individuals to whole tribes, including god-commands to kill all the men, rape the women and enslave the children, a natural catastrophy is the worst you can think of?
Did you miss I was talking about ethics and not death count? Three people dying in a landslide is a tragedy, but one of them slaughtering the other brutally and eating his heart is certain ethically quite worse even though fewer people die.
The above is a fantastic example of just how arbitrary our ethics are. It's not just the bible - things ten times worse than what any game or movie show happen in real life and we accept them as "collateral damage". The same as 50,000 years ago, our attitude depends a lot more on who does to whom than it does on what is being done.
First understand your position in the company and whose turf you're going to piss on if you make a move like that. You don't want your efforts to fail because you rubbed some manager the wrong way and he sabotages everything just because he can.
Secondly, make sure your system is really better in all regards, especially the failure cases. People leaving the company or getting ill for a long time? Password sharing (no matter what your policy says, people are doing it, especially bosses and secretaries)? Password recovery?
Third, make sure of user acceptance. People don't like change, and if the new system is not considerably more easy to use than the old one, you will face resistance.
Fourth, pack all of that research into a presentation and make your case. Good luck, you'll need it.
From my experience, #1 is the most important. Also take into account decision factors you may not know about. I've had a real-world experience where we (the security department) wanted to introduce an identity management system and were totally stonewalled. Three months later the company was sold - management already knew it would happen and they didn't want to commit to anything major or expensive just before the sale.
How does an app with no functionality get through the approval process to start with?
Because no process is flawless. 3 out of 1.2 mio. Heck, in a lot of touristic areas, the percentage of brick-and-mortar stores that are scams is higher.
Is there any scientific research to show that the decay problem is a result of current environment vs the past influences on the trees?
Probably there is. The fact alone that it happens here, but not everywhere else with nuclear reactors, or even everywhere else with old-style soviet nuclear reactors is a pretty good evidence. Strong enough that "it's not the result of his really big unique event" is the extraordinary claim that needs to be proven, not the other way around.
Is like a discussion I had with someone who pointed out a genetic mutation in an animal, he didn't seen to comprehend that just because the radiation disappears that the animal won't magical become normal again.
Trees don't not decay because something irradiated them once. The actor in tree decay is not the tree, it's the microbes and fungi etc.
most of the studies we do on these zones are the result of visual inspection of what is there [...] what the risk really is right now.
Bullshit. If you enter the zone, you're given radiometers. We know the effect of radiation on the human body. We know that there is still radiation in the zone. That is the risk that is really there right now.
Our mission isn't to add to the cacophany of the news, but to organize it.
Doing it through "wisdom of the crowd" will lead to positive reinforcement loops, resulting in news biased in the direction of what most people already believed anyways. This self-reinforcement will make these news irrelevant.
Who wouldn't want a news stream that thinks porn stars and manga characters are right up there in importance with world politics and science, but local events and locations are not notable enough to be mentioned?
For all its goods, WP has many downsides as well and in a news stream, they would come out more strongly and more visibly, because they wouldn't be hidden under layers of administrative control, aggressive editing and irrelevance.
"The show is full of fascinating contrasts between what the cameras show to the audience and what the narrator tells the audience that they should believe.
Because you can't see radiation? Or even most of its effects?
That the trees aren't rotting, even after 30 years, is as visual as it gets, but even that needs narration or you won't realize that this tree hasn't fallen yesterday, but in 1986 or whenever.
Please, that's just saying you shot the guy that most people looked at. It doesn't make them responsible for you pulling the trigger.
Before Google appeared, nobody was even aware that linking to another website made you a participant in a consensus vote. Many people still don't see it that way.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the same and then I started to use OO a lot in PHP.
If you come from C, don't go the "OO is my religion, deliver me from functions" path. Write functional code and use objects in it where it makes sense. I've written computer games as a hobby for most of my life, and in that context you have a lot of natural objects. The player, the weapon, the level, the building, the city, etc. etc. you also encounter inheritance very fast.
I still write largely functional code and my objects are basically containers. It works great for me, even though some pure OO extremists would cringe at it.
I don't see OO as a paradigm. It's a tool, a method, and it mixes nicely with others if you do it right. I'm very thankful to PHP for their approach which offers you a full OO model, but doesn't force it on you.
And every good butcher should be a great farmer, every good soldier an expert weapon maker, every good driver a world class mechanic ;)...
Strawman argument.
The OP doesn't argue that people whose profession is different from programming should be able to program. He argues that a good butcher should be able to kill with a mechanical tool, not just the fancy bolt gun the slaughterhouses have now. That a good driver should be able to drive stick-shift even if his car has automatic.
And I agree. When I was in university, I tortured students with proper input handling in C until they got it, until they understood that unless they check their input conforms to whatever specification they make for it, instead of just checking the exceptions they can think of, I will always find a way to break their program by, say, keeping my finger on the "a" key for 3 seconds and overflowing their buffer. I'm pretty sure they're not the ones making web applications less secure today because lazy programmer doesn't do form validation.
Learning the basics of programming on a not-holding-your-hands platform makes you understand what's going on and what can go wrong. If you learn programming on a training wheels framework, your programs will almost certainly be subject to all kinds of injections, overflows and other attacks whenever the framework doesn't protect you 100%, or requires you to make an explicit call to get those benefits.
C is a great language to learn programming. Yes, you'll swear a lot and you'll hate the computer, your teacher and the world in general, but when you come out of that bootcamp, you're a marine and not some third-grade wannabe trooper with a 10 minute life expectancy once the shit hits the fan.
If you need to be efficient, you write in C, end of story. That's why.
C++ and all the other languages there simply have too much overhead and give you not enough control over what's actually happening.
Assembler isn't worth the major hassle for the tiny improvement you get over C.
C, however, is at this unique point between the bare metal and the high-level abstractions where the trade-offs are perfect. You get just enough abstraction to be a) hardware-independent and b) can use a high-level programming language while remaining close enough to the machine that you can be really, really efficient, fast, short, the whole nine yards.
"Steal from the right people" is still worse than "don't steal".
Propaganda.
Stealing is the unlawful taking of someone else's property. There, I even highlighted the important word for you. There are many good reasons for lawfully taking someone's property or rather: Small parts of it. Unless you're a hard-core anarchist, you have to solve the problem of how to keep the government (small or big) working at all, and sooner or later your solution will be taxes, even if you call it by a different name.
The major disagreement between political factions is how much to tax, who to tax and what to spend the money on, but never about taxation itself.
he vast majority are freeriders that contribute nothing to their development
For a lot of software, this simply isn't true. The millions of installs that don't pay a developer to work on the code still provide test environments, installed base to make the product popular and various other advantages. Very few of the highly successful Free Software projects would be where they are today if only people who contribute to their development had been allowed to use them.
However, the best reason to not lie is that it is not ethical. ALWAYS do the ethical thing. Stay above the fray, tell the truth and get the certifications for real. It may take longer and be harder, but in the long run it will be worth it.
Really bad advice.
You'll feel yourself superior and "above the fray", but in reality everyone who understands the business world better will pass you by in both pay and position.
I say that as someone who's listened to this bad advice all his life. Your reasons for not lying or not fucking over your boss or co-workers should be practical, not philosophical. You shouldn't lie because the damage if you're found out is bigger than the advantage you gain. For certifications, in most jurisdictions a lie on the details that got you the job is sufficient grounds for legal immediate termination at the least. That looks really bad on your CV.
So my question is: are any certifications now worth it?
Depends on who pays for them.
Your current employer, or the unemployment agency or someone else? Go for any and all you can get.
You yourself? Check the job offers of jobs you care about. Make a list of the certifications that are mentioned there and check the top two or three (most mentionings). Do them if they are affordable.
Certifications are largely a scam or a shakedown, take your pick. They teach you nothing, and they check your ability to memorize test questions more than they test your actual abilities. I've got the test papers from CISM still here, and while my 15 years of IT security experience helped me pass it almost without learning, any buffon who's never even seen a computer could've passed the test by simply learning by heart the contents of one folder.
The fact that the United States ...
This is not a USA topic. European governments are already falling in line and falling over themselves to lick the telcos boots as well. It's disgusting, really.
The problem here is one of marketing. The parties interested (read: Telcos) are big corporations with millions of PR budgets. They've managed to create terms like two-tier Internet and "fast lane" and all the other PR bullshit. They've created a story to sell, that what they want would be good and has many advantages. It's really text-book PR work.
Some people didn't see the thing being built and are falling for the smoke and mirrors. The simple truth they need to be told is that yes, the story sounds compelling, maybe even convincing. But the reality is that anything that can be abused for profit will be abused for profit, and it will look nothing like the story they're being sold now.
ABP used to be great, then they sold out, and now they're basically a protection racket. Once again, we the users are not the customers, we're the product. I've long jumped ship to one of the forks (AdBlock Edge, in case anyone cares).
It was obvious that turning it into a "nice ads you have there, would be a pity..." game would land them in trouble sooner or later, so my sympathies are very limited. Especially once you dig through the connections between the various companies belonging to the same corporate network and realize that magically, their own or ally companies are all on the whitelist.
To the publishers, meanwhile: If your business model is threatened by users telling you to fuck off because you've become obnoxious, then maybe the problem is in your business model, isn't it?
That some of the adaptations were things like rewarding skill not seniority.
And you're going to do that how, exactly? Skill is not as easy to measure as your average MMORPG makes you believe. And almost every way to take a measurement can be gamed. Skill is also a very vague word. Skill in what, exactly, just for starters.
There's a lot that goes into making a successful magazine, and the recipe is so unknown that the best publishing houses have come up with in the past 50 years is to simply do field-tests - start the magazine and after some months decide whether to continue or pull the plug.
Maybe the staff overreacted to some BS corporate email?
From the summary it sounds as if the staff reacted explicitly to the BS - by making it clear they don't want to work for someone who thinks throwing BS around in internal mails is in any way a meaningful contribution.
The Great Flood wiped out all but one human family from the world
That's not the ethically questionable part. You could argue that they brought it upon themselves by not worshipping the right god in the right way or something. It's a weak argument, but it can be made.
But it also wiped out all the animals in existence (except 2 of each species), creatures who by the alleged gods own design were not responsible. That's a lot of collateral damage that barely gets a mentioning, but from an ethical perspective I think we pretty much agree that punishment on innocents is a big no-no and capital punishment doubly so.
The worst thing I can think of in The Bible is the Great Flood.
In a book filled to the brim with instructions to kill people, from individuals to whole tribes, including god-commands to kill all the men, rape the women and enslave the children, a natural catastrophy is the worst you can think of?
Did you miss I was talking about ethics and not death count? Three people dying in a landslide is a tragedy, but one of them slaughtering the other brutally and eating his heart is certain ethically quite worse even though fewer people die.
True, they're out in the open, preaching, not hiding in basements.
The above is a fantastic example of just how arbitrary our ethics are. It's not just the bible - things ten times worse than what any game or movie show happen in real life and we accept them as "collateral damage". The same as 50,000 years ago, our attitude depends a lot more on who does to whom than it does on what is being done.
First understand your position in the company and whose turf you're going to piss on if you make a move like that. You don't want your efforts to fail because you rubbed some manager the wrong way and he sabotages everything just because he can.
Secondly, make sure your system is really better in all regards, especially the failure cases. People leaving the company or getting ill for a long time? Password sharing (no matter what your policy says, people are doing it, especially bosses and secretaries)? Password recovery?
Third, make sure of user acceptance. People don't like change, and if the new system is not considerably more easy to use than the old one, you will face resistance.
Fourth, pack all of that research into a presentation and make your case. Good luck, you'll need it.
From my experience, #1 is the most important. Also take into account decision factors you may not know about. I've had a real-world experience where we (the security department) wanted to introduce an identity management system and were totally stonewalled. Three months later the company was sold - management already knew it would happen and they didn't want to commit to anything major or expensive just before the sale.
How does an app with no functionality get through the approval process to start with?
Because no process is flawless. 3 out of 1.2 mio. Heck, in a lot of touristic areas, the percentage of brick-and-mortar stores that are scams is higher.
So from that perspective, it sounds like a win for those selling the ads on it, and a depressing loss for the rest of humanity.
Good summary of most of the commercial activity on the Internet today.
Is there any scientific research to show that the decay problem is a result of current environment vs the past influences on the trees?
Probably there is. The fact alone that it happens here, but not everywhere else with nuclear reactors, or even everywhere else with old-style soviet nuclear reactors is a pretty good evidence. Strong enough that "it's not the result of his really big unique event" is the extraordinary claim that needs to be proven, not the other way around.
Is like a discussion I had with someone who pointed out a genetic mutation in an animal, he didn't seen to comprehend that just because the radiation disappears that the animal won't magical become normal again.
Trees don't not decay because something irradiated them once. The actor in tree decay is not the tree, it's the microbes and fungi etc.
most of the studies we do on these zones are the result of visual inspection of what is there [...] what the risk really is right now.
Bullshit. If you enter the zone, you're given radiometers. We know the effect of radiation on the human body. We know that there is still radiation in the zone. That is the risk that is really there right now.
Our mission isn't to add to the cacophany of the news, but to organize it.
Doing it through "wisdom of the crowd" will lead to positive reinforcement loops, resulting in news biased in the direction of what most people already believed anyways. This self-reinforcement will make these news irrelevant.
Who wouldn't want a news stream that thinks porn stars and manga characters are right up there in importance with world politics and science, but local events and locations are not notable enough to be mentioned?
For all its goods, WP has many downsides as well and in a news stream, they would come out more strongly and more visibly, because they wouldn't be hidden under layers of administrative control, aggressive editing and irrelevance.
"The show is full of fascinating contrasts between what the cameras show to the audience and what the narrator tells the audience that they should believe.
Because you can't see radiation? Or even most of its effects?
That the trees aren't rotting, even after 30 years, is as visual as it gets, but even that needs narration or you won't realize that this tree hasn't fallen yesterday, but in 1986 or whenever.
Please, that's just saying you shot the guy that most people looked at. It doesn't make them responsible for you pulling the trigger.
Before Google appeared, nobody was even aware that linking to another website made you a participant in a consensus vote. Many people still don't see it that way.
The heck were you driving?
BMW M3
420 PS
listed max speed is 280 km/h, but as with most cars, it actually goes to 11.