When we started our professional careers, we picked up whatever was in demand / the current fad and often stuck with it (because we earned a living with it all these years and had no time nor pressure to pick up new fads). Young programmers who start now will pick up the current fad and specialize in it. That's all there is to it. The "50-60 hours vs. wife and kids" issue is overrated, not everyone has wife and kids or issues with 50-60 hours (try entrepreneurship). Those who have been unemployed for a while and not been able to learn current technologies during that time, are simply slacking (you'll find enough of those in any field I believe).
My PCIe bus isn't accessible (physically) from outside the case, especially not on laptops etc.. Also, I'm not so sure that my OS supports PCIe hotplugging.
Thunderbolt will become famous for its potential for unauthorized access (DMA attack) and nothing else. Let's hope the media outcry will be heard far enough for everyone to disable these ports completely and for vendors to stop using them. These are difficult times for privacy and we do not need such ill-designed interfaces forced down our throats.
I would argue that you learn more from the failure than the success.
That depends on the situation. I'd say you learn from trying (from each attempt), whether you fail or not. If you fail, you might have another go more quickly but if you succeed, you might learn other things along that path.
Learning is a desirable consequence of failure, but failure isn't a prerequisite for learning. You can learn during your attempt and not fail, or you can give up early and not learn. It's up to you, it only depends on your attitude and your persistence.
This is something all the Jobs-worshipping Apple fanboys overlook. He was a notorious asshole boss, known to berate employees until they were reduced to tears or fire employees at the end of an elevator-ride chat if they shared an idea he didn't like. These sudden firings were known to Apple employees as "being Jobs'd."
So basically that's how he built a successful company and products so masterfully craftet that the competition is flattering them through imitation? Every boss should be like that it seems.;-)
, I don't know if you've noticed this, but Firefox autoupdate is PURE CANNED CRAP. It has NO sensitivity about whether you're already using bandwidth
It has disadvantages, yes. But so does the automatic distribution upgrade, especially regarding urgent upgrades that the browser would normally alert you about. Most people keep their browsers running for days to weeks nowdays, so unless the browser (or the distribution's upgrade system) shows an alert box, they will not use the new version until they reboot or for some reason restart the browser. That's why I prefer the builtin upgrade mechanism Firefox (and Opera) has.
EU subsidies deny Africa's farmers of their livelihood. This has to stop NOW, Africa has enough potential for food production and doesn't need our junk subsidized by EU taxpayers. If we cared about them, we'd invest that money in African companies so they can get off the ground faster, but what we do is exactly the opposite. The EU agricultural policy is borderline criminal in many aspects.
Years have passed and I've seen Firefox in various versions still fail to auto-upgrade on Debian, Ubuntu... With browser bugs/exploits becoming a bigger issue, have they finally managed to fix that? Or is relying on apt-get upgrade viable nowdays even for such critical (i.e. short-term) fixes?
If there's some personal data you're missing at some point, just ask Google or the NSA... But seriously, I've never made backups and not even bothered to copy over stuff from old PCs to newer ones when I upgraded (I keep old hard drives in a closet just in case there's something old I'm missing, but I never really do). The only personal stuff I keep safe is images on my iPhone (backed up on the PC) and email (safe-ish on the server at work). If I needed more space, I'd go with Wuala due to its relative safety (redundant storage, client side encryption) - but it's only free for 2GB or so nowdays. But ask yourself: do you really need all that data? I don't think so.
Of course they will want to spam people who haven't registered with their "social" service yet, so they need to harvest plaintext e-mail addresses / names and put the blame on you when they send them a spammy invitation. Remember, this is the "you are the product" market, practical solutions are whatever brings in more users/cash, not things that protect privacy as much as possible...
your example tells me what the article is titled so I can have some clue of what it's about
The anchor text should tell you that, not the link itself, especially when the "hi-google-..." part is completely ignored by the Web server and can be changed by anyone (into something that could fool you into clicking on the link). Try this one for example.
Google basically ruined short URLs by paying too much attention to keyword-ridden URLs. Everyone now has stupid long URLs like http://www.site.com/article/12345-hi-google-this-is-keyword-spam.html or even totally pointless subdomains containing keywords...
Today I was sending an email through Gmail, and a prompt asked if I needed to attach a file, which confused me because the email involved no files. It took me a while to figure out it was because I had the word "attached" in the body of the email.
The same "you are an idiot"-type message exists in recent versions of Thunderbird... Sure, some people always forget their attachments but that's probably because they are not shown inline when messages are composed and generally barely visible when present.
The article seems to ignore modern compiled (and carefully crafted) languages like Scala, Limbo, Go and tries to criticize the wide adoption of scripting languages among people who aren't really pure developers (as if they mattered!) and those developers who value development speed over quality, maintainability and performance or in places where network and/or human input latency abolish any other performance concern.
I would worry if important projects with large budgets and generous timeframes switched from Java to e.g. Ruby, but this won't happen. The existing compiled languages for such purposes are obviously very good already, so why should it matter that a new compiled-to-JS-language pops up every day?
That's a faster implementation, but "much, much faster" is an exaggeration.
Anything parallel enough to run on GPGPU
Just because stuff can run on faster or more parallel hardware nowdays, it doesn't make the used algorithm faster... In the old days, we had specialized algorithms for specialized hardware (DSPs) too.
Either you weren't around back then or you are too young to remember but...
Both wrong.
The lavish 33MHz and 8MB RAM (compared to the older generations of 16 bitters and 8 bitters) allowed lazy programmers to write such terrible algorithms and waste vast numbers of cycles on interpretd languaes like Visual Basic etc etc. My god, I mean windows 95 wasted so much CPU just to look a bit prettier. Real programmers still did everything in DOS.
In 1994 I still used my Atari Mega STe every day as well as a SPARCstation IPC running SunOS and later NetBSD. In 1996 I switched to Linux on a PC, which had none of that bloated feeling Windows 3.11 and later 95 exhibited. I recall that while VB was widely used on Windows, none of the everyday tasks involved it directly (email, editing, programming). We used (fast!) native code email clients and IDEs on Windows that felt faster than Eclipse and Thunderbird today. I would still use Linux on a desktop PC, but the non-bloated options for everyday tasks have been greatly reduced, so it doesn't seem worth the hassle.
A script I can today code in 30 minutes and run for 5 minutes is better than an application I had to write 15 years ago that took 4 hours to write, just to be able to run it under an hour of processing.
I don't dispute that when it concerns code you write for yourself. But when "optimized developer time" results in e.g. 5% of millions of Thunderbird users having to wait 3+ minutes to read their email because they have large inboxes and TB is terrible at sorting/storing/displaying mails in large folders, it does not seem to be a good trade-off. As one of the affected users, I'd much prefer it if they stabilized their ever-growing bloatware feature set (that has translated into no visible gain for users) and took some time to optimize their code.
This has made certain things practical--such as...
Such as using unsuitable or bad algorithms, wasting enormous amounts of memory, disk space and bandwidth on trivial tasks, using layer upon layer of badly structured APIs and on top of that a browser with an interpreted language running software we use daily (like gmail). Who would have thought it possible back then?
Many companies would be more than happy to get rid of the incompatible, bug-ridden mess called MS Office and Outlook. Why can't the businessinsider folks just learn to use Numbers or some other app? What is so special about their charting needs? Typically, such users are just attached to Excel because they've mastered (or so they think) the shoody MS UI and find themselves unable (or unwilling) to learn anything else...
Then when you look at the server market, they do not compete at all anymore. Performance per watt and per dollar both lag badly behind the Xeon.
That's untrue in my experience and has been for 5+ years. In the higher-end 2-4 CPU server range, AMD has had the best performance/price ratings for a long time because competitive Xeons are much too expensive. For example, the highest-performing 4P Linux servers (e.g. SPECint2006 rate) are currently Xeon E7-4870 based, followed closely by Opteron 6282 SE, but for the Xeons you'll pay 4 times as much as for the Opterons. A typical server configuration with 256GB memory will cost you ~8000 EUR ($10500) if you go with the Opterons and ~20000 EUR ($26000) if you go with the E7-4870 (and if you can actually find one on the market). More affordable Intel-based servers are not competitive performance-wise with the 6282 SE. If you don't need much parallelism and a lot of RAM, you might be able to get a more affordable offer using Xeons (with 2 of their 4C CPUs e.g.), but even there C32 based Opterons will offer much better performance per Dollar at comparable or lower TDP even (e.g. 2 x X7542 vs 2 x Opteron 4238). We've always been comparing closely when purchasing beefy 1U/2U servers over the past 10 years and Intel has not had competitive offers since their socket 604/Clarksboro Xeons when they allowed decent amounts of RAM (24 FB-DIMM sockets) in 1U compared with socket 940 Opterons (at somewhat sane prices). YMMV if your CPU needs are different, although I'd like to know how...
Everyone knows that metacritic is suffering from biased user reviews and most of the press is corrupt as ever (write a bad review - don't get early peeks on the next game - lose page views and money).
If you want to know what a "good game" is, look at the top played games on Steam. They don't represent the whole market (since not everything is available on Steam), but are a much better indicator for games people actually play longer than a few hours.
Slashdot Mirror
When we started our professional careers, we picked up whatever was in demand / the current fad and often stuck with it (because we earned a living with it all these years and had no time nor pressure to pick up new fads). Young programmers who start now will pick up the current fad and specialize in it. That's all there is to it. The "50-60 hours vs. wife and kids" issue is overrated, not everyone has wife and kids or issues with 50-60 hours (try entrepreneurship). Those who have been unemployed for a while and not been able to learn current technologies during that time, are simply slacking (you'll find enough of those in any field I believe).
If airlines that do not fly to/from the US are exempt, someone should compile a list and post it ...
My PCIe bus isn't accessible (physically) from outside the case, especially not on laptops etc.. Also, I'm not so sure that my OS supports PCIe hotplugging.
Thunderbolt will become famous for its potential for unauthorized access (DMA attack) and nothing else. Let's hope the media outcry will be heard far enough for everyone to disable these ports completely and for vendors to stop using them. These are difficult times for privacy and we do not need such ill-designed interfaces forced down our throats.
I would argue that you learn more from the failure than the success.
That depends on the situation. I'd say you learn from trying (from each attempt), whether you fail or not. If you fail, you might have another go more quickly but if you succeed, you might learn other things along that path.
Just my €0.02.
This is something all the Jobs-worshipping Apple fanboys overlook. He was a notorious asshole boss, known to berate employees until they were reduced to tears or fire employees at the end of an elevator-ride chat if they shared an idea he didn't like. These sudden firings were known to Apple employees as "being Jobs'd."
So basically that's how he built a successful company and products so masterfully craftet that the competition is flattering them through imitation? Every boss should be like that it seems. ;-)
, I don't know if you've noticed this, but Firefox autoupdate is PURE CANNED CRAP. It has NO sensitivity about whether you're already using bandwidth
It has disadvantages, yes. But so does the automatic distribution upgrade, especially regarding urgent upgrades that the browser would normally alert you about. Most people keep their browsers running for days to weeks nowdays, so unless the browser (or the distribution's upgrade system) shows an alert box, they will not use the new version until they reboot or for some reason restart the browser. That's why I prefer the builtin upgrade mechanism Firefox (and Opera) has.
EU subsidies deny Africa's farmers of their livelihood. This has to stop NOW, Africa has enough potential for food production and doesn't need our junk subsidized by EU taxpayers. If we cared about them, we'd invest that money in African companies so they can get off the ground faster, but what we do is exactly the opposite. The EU agricultural policy is borderline criminal in many aspects.
Years have passed and I've seen Firefox in various versions still fail to auto-upgrade on Debian, Ubuntu ... With browser bugs/exploits becoming a bigger issue, have they finally managed to fix that? Or is relying on apt-get upgrade viable nowdays even for such critical (i.e. short-term) fixes?
If there's some personal data you're missing at some point, just ask Google or the NSA ... But seriously, I've never made backups and not even bothered to copy over stuff from old PCs to newer ones when I upgraded (I keep old hard drives in a closet just in case there's something old I'm missing, but I never really do). The only personal stuff I keep safe is images on my iPhone (backed up on the PC) and email (safe-ish on the server at work). If I needed more space, I'd go with Wuala due to its relative safety (redundant storage, client side encryption) - but it's only free for 2GB or so nowdays. But ask yourself: do you really need all that data? I don't think so.
Of course they will want to spam people who haven't registered with their "social" service yet, so they need to harvest plaintext e-mail addresses / names and put the blame on you when they send them a spammy invitation. Remember, this is the "you are the product" market, practical solutions are whatever brings in more users/cash, not things that protect privacy as much as possible ...
(*) lethal
your example tells me what the article is titled so I can have some clue of what it's about
The anchor text should tell you that, not the link itself, especially when the "hi-google-..." part is completely ignored by the Web server and can be changed by anyone (into something that could fool you into clicking on the link). Try this one for example.
Google basically ruined short URLs by paying too much attention to keyword-ridden URLs. Everyone now has stupid long URLs like http://www.site.com/article/12345-hi-google-this-is-keyword-spam.html or even totally pointless subdomains containing keywords...
Today I was sending an email through Gmail, and a prompt asked if I needed to attach a file, which confused me because the email involved no files. It took me a while to figure out it was because I had the word "attached" in the body of the email.
The same "you are an idiot"-type message exists in recent versions of Thunderbird... Sure, some people always forget their attachments but that's probably because they are not shown inline when messages are composed and generally barely visible when present.
The article seems to ignore modern compiled (and carefully crafted) languages like Scala, Limbo, Go and tries to criticize the wide adoption of scripting languages among people who aren't really pure developers (as if they mattered!) and those developers who value development speed over quality, maintainability and performance or in places where network and/or human input latency abolish any other performance concern.
I would worry if important projects with large budgets and generous timeframes switched from Java to e.g. Ruby, but this won't happen. The existing compiled languages for such purposes are obviously very good already, so why should it matter that a new compiled-to-JS-language pops up every day?
MapReduce?
That's not an algorithm ...
FFTW
That's a faster implementation, but "much, much faster" is an exaggeration.
Anything parallel enough to run on GPGPU
Just because stuff can run on faster or more parallel hardware nowdays, it doesn't make the used algorithm faster... In the old days, we had specialized algorithms for specialized hardware (DSPs) too.
Either you weren't around back then or you are too young to remember but...
Both wrong.
The lavish 33MHz and 8MB RAM (compared to the older generations of 16 bitters and 8 bitters) allowed lazy programmers to write such terrible algorithms and waste vast numbers of cycles on interpretd languaes like Visual Basic etc etc. My god, I mean windows 95 wasted so much CPU just to look a bit prettier. Real programmers still did everything in DOS.
In 1994 I still used my Atari Mega STe every day as well as a SPARCstation IPC running SunOS and later NetBSD. In 1996 I switched to Linux on a PC, which had none of that bloated feeling Windows 3.11 and later 95 exhibited. I recall that while VB was widely used on Windows, none of the everyday tasks involved it directly (email, editing, programming). We used (fast!) native code email clients and IDEs on Windows that felt faster than Eclipse and Thunderbird today. I would still use Linux on a desktop PC, but the non-bloated options for everyday tasks have been greatly reduced, so it doesn't seem worth the hassle.
Many algorithms have got much, much faster.
Examples please. "
A script I can today code in 30 minutes and run for 5 minutes is better than an application I had to write 15 years ago that took 4 hours to write, just to be able to run it under an hour of processing.
I don't dispute that when it concerns code you write for yourself. But when "optimized developer time" results in e.g. 5% of millions of Thunderbird users having to wait 3+ minutes to read their email because they have large inboxes and TB is terrible at sorting/storing/displaying mails in large folders, it does not seem to be a good trade-off. As one of the affected users, I'd much prefer it if they stabilized their ever-growing bloatware feature set (that has translated into no visible gain for users) and took some time to optimize their code.
This has made certain things practical--such as ...
Such as using unsuitable or bad algorithms, wasting enormous amounts of memory, disk space and bandwidth on trivial tasks, using layer upon layer of badly structured APIs and on top of that a browser with an interpreted language running software we use daily (like gmail). Who would have thought it possible back then?
... connected to my smartphone. Perhaps even one without maximum privacy impact. Existing designs: terminally-incoherent.com blog
Many companies would be more than happy to get rid of the incompatible, bug-ridden mess called MS Office and Outlook. Why can't the businessinsider folks just learn to use Numbers or some other app? What is so special about their charting needs? Typically, such users are just attached to Excel because they've mastered (or so they think) the shoody MS UI and find themselves unable (or unwilling) to learn anything else...
Then when you look at the server market, they do not compete at all anymore. Performance per watt and per dollar both lag badly behind the Xeon.
That's untrue in my experience and has been for 5+ years. In the higher-end 2-4 CPU server range, AMD has had the best performance/price ratings for a long time because competitive Xeons are much too expensive. For example, the highest-performing 4P Linux servers (e.g. SPECint2006 rate) are currently Xeon E7-4870 based, followed closely by Opteron 6282 SE, but for the Xeons you'll pay 4 times as much as for the Opterons. A typical server configuration with 256GB memory will cost you ~8000 EUR ($10500) if you go with the Opterons and ~20000 EUR ($26000) if you go with the E7-4870 (and if you can actually find one on the market). More affordable Intel-based servers are not competitive performance-wise with the 6282 SE. If you don't need much parallelism and a lot of RAM, you might be able to get a more affordable offer using Xeons (with 2 of their 4C CPUs e.g.), but even there C32 based Opterons will offer much better performance per Dollar at comparable or lower TDP even (e.g. 2 x X7542 vs 2 x Opteron 4238). We've always been comparing closely when purchasing beefy 1U/2U servers over the past 10 years and Intel has not had competitive offers since their socket 604/Clarksboro Xeons when they allowed decent amounts of RAM (24 FB-DIMM sockets) in 1U compared with socket 940 Opterons (at somewhat sane prices). YMMV if your CPU needs are different, although I'd like to know how ...
If you want to know what a "good game" is, look at the top played games on Steam. They don't represent the whole market (since not everything is available on Steam), but are a much better indicator for games people actually play longer than a few hours.
Steam & Game Stats
The awesome storytelling of L4D2, CIV 5 and CS must be responsible for their staying power. ;-)