ridiculously cheap licenses of MS software from Open Charity Licensing (a copy of windows is like $30 and office is like $12.)
Please don't tell me that charities actually spend money on software licenses, especially when $30 is far from "ridiculously cheap" when every university (and students) gets it cheaper...
One of the problems I find I encounter more these days than in the past is that there the coder is increasingly at the mercy of more and more layers of underlying code which is more or less impervious to reasonable debugging.
True, but not tragic, because nowdays you can "google" for a solution or post on SO to get help, while 25 years ago, all you could do was figure it out by yourself or try to ask around whether anyone knows someone with a deeper knowledge of the matter... I really don't want to go back to those dark times, but we sure could file more bug reports or flame programmers publicly for writing crappy libraries.;-)
Driven by the web (and possibly games) industry, programming has become a race: whoever ships the product or new feature first, gains an advantage. So development speed is much more important than in the old days, when you could still win something by cramming more features into 64KB RAM or when you paid for your rented computing time and could spend months optimizing your code. Consequently, architectural decisions are still important, but optimizing your code - unless it becomes a specific requirement, for example, when you simply cannot afford to buy a box with 512GB RAM that can run your current stuff unmodified - is not.
If your - reasonable sounding - arguments were correct,
- Apple would rule the desktop due to the superior aesthetics and usability of OSX
- Ubuntu's Market share would far surpass that of Windows XP (same reason plus it's much cheaper)
So what is really happening? It's called momentum. Microsoft has trained users over the past decades to accept inferior usability and engineering - not necessarily to Linux in many aspects, but to various alternatives that existed over the years - as the industry standard. People simply refuse to learn how to use an OSX or Linux desktop, the same way they do not accept a new spreadsheet software unless it's called Excel (even if it is totally different from the previous version - they simply trust it!). The iPod and IPad were not the first products in their respective markets by far, but people weren't trained to one particular look & feel (physically and regarding the UI), so Apple had a chance to succeed and used it well. Now it's up to Apple to establish an industry standard, at least for smartphones and tablets and make use of the momentum they're gaining over the next 10+ years to dominate the market...
Whether you like it or not, both engineering and usabilty/asthetics are less important than people's habits. If you are old enough to remember the home computer platform wars, you'll know...
... but I'm still waiting for something to follow up on the nVidia tech demo. My guess is that current games are using far too many effects specifically designed to use current hardware that cannot be easily implemented using voxels. Also, I haven't seen much info regarding animated scenes with sparse voxel octrees and I can't think of a straightforward way to do this... Here's a youtube video with some info though: animated sparse voxel octrees.
If said island is comprised of a few objects that are repeated over and over again (looks like it), keeping the data in memory is easy... Data structures can have shared nodes etc.
... the iPad is what I sincerely hope "normal" people will buy since with Android, the risk of getting another 10s of millions of trojan-infected zombie devices on the 'net, used and not maintained properly by clueless users, is just too high. Whether they'll get the best value for money from their personal perspective, I don't really care.
I doubt the long term returns justify what this does to people.
What does society measure one's success by? Yearly salary (regardless of lifespan), or perhaps whether the subject will die happily at the age of 95 while having 30 grand-grandchildren? In fact, we glorify those who die young - after becoming famous for some work that took a huge toll on their lives - much more than those who live long in spite of it...
It seems to me that the HFT industry and the wall street crooks who employ it are desperately trying to portray HFT as the sophisticated work of some extremely talented programmers who are just smart enough to help brokers earn more money, while in reality the whole system seems to be half inside trading (having access to information other traders don't know yet and methods other traders cannot employ) and half DoS attacks on regular traders (the same order will not work for them because HFT is preventing it). Therefore, it should (IMO) be illegal and perhaps such spin posts exist mostly to counter sensible attempts to ban it.
Disclaimer: I do not own or trade shares of public companies.
So you would actually prefer to pay MORE for your "younger self" then for the same output.
Not for the same output, no. My younger self was suitable for different tasks than I am now and I'm probably not the best choice as a hired programmer at my current age and habits(!). Realistically, there's simply too much I would not do for the kind of salary I'd deserve as a plain coder.
they tend to lack some crucial non-technical experience that will lead to mistakes if not in a team with more experienced coders
coders or team leaders / management / software architects...
The "study" that doesn't deserve to be called one claims that people who write more answers and ask fewer questions on SO are better programmers. That is as dumb as saying that business consultants are better CEOs or football trainers are better football players... As far as I am concerned, I am 38 now and I'd say that I've become more experienced and much lazier, but I wouldn't pay myself a higher salary for a programming job than I'd have for the younger me at 25. Among other things, because I could spend 20 hours in a row trying to solve a particular problem back then, i.e. what I lacked in experience, I more than made up for with persistence and enthusiasm.
Why don't people understand. They use children to deliver bombs,
"THEY"? You should go see a doctor, you're paranoid.
This is the result of being at war with terrorists. No one likes it, but it's reality.
It's reality in your sick mind. In fact, "THEY" don't even need to plant bombs anywhere, they are probably laughing hard every time they read a story about TSA x-raying, taking nude pictures of, groping your women and small children everyhwere. Do you really think a few bombs could do as much lasting damage as your retarded administration and its dumb followers have done in the past 10 years? They won, you lost, just look at yourselves. You're alive, but you're scared shitless, humiliated every day and the laughing stock of the world.
. Glad he's fighting for the rights of people who really aren't discriminated against in today's society instead of actually helping people.
He is in fact fighting against preferential treatment for mainstream religions, i.e. for secularism, which is often not really thorough in so-called modern democracies. Members of the Catholic Church get tax cuts to compensate their membership fees, religious people get to teach ethics classes at school, crosses are still hanging on the wall in many classrooms. He chose this way to protest against lack of secularism and will apparently try to claim all other unjustified favours the Catholic Church gets for Pastafarianism as well, to get authorities to rethink this favouritism.
It's going away one little bit at a time, so we won't notice until it's too late. Can you still buy a prepaid phone where you live and use it without registering with your real name?
Cash withdrawals and deposits have been severely limited in the last couple of years in the EU (money laundering must be a new phenomenon!), the noose will be tightened until you are required to pay with a card / mobile phone for any amount over XX EUR/USD and one day that XX will be 0...
"My privacy is *very* important to me. Who wants to look after my email?"
I don't want anyone to "look after my email", I simply want someone to provide transport, storage and protocols / user interface required for me to access it, without any privacy implications that are not mandated by that service. If you think that a business would be unable to provide this without stealing/exploiting private information, you're overly paranoid and should have grave concerns when seeing a doctor, or talking to a lawyer.
Buy your own domain and server. It's dirt-cheap nowadays and you can use it for lots of other things too.
I would as a last resort, but I'd rather pay someone to look after it for security fixes, upgrades, spam filter configuration etc. than do everything on my own. Surely there must be providers that have a strict policy regarding privacy / personal information and that can be trusted to stick to it and not consider it something temporary until not sticking to it is profitable enough?
somewhat OT, but can anyone recommend a good webmail provider whose business is not selling and analyzing our private communication, but providing a good webmail client? I don't mind paying, my privacy is worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
ridiculously cheap licenses of MS software from Open Charity Licensing (a copy of windows is like $30 and office is like $12.)
Please don't tell me that charities actually spend money on software licenses, especially when $30 is far from "ridiculously cheap" when every university (and students) gets it cheaper ...
unless they shot themselves in the foot or something
And, please tell me you'd rather have Larry Ellison rather than Larry Page influencing your web experience
I'd rather have several alternatives, some of them without the hunger for personal information that Google has, thank you ...
No "insider" would ever do something like this, right?
SSL certainly does matter when you want to perform a secure transaction with confidence.
Oh, really? Because at that moment you can verify the credibilty of the CA any more than you can verify the credibility of the site you're visiting?
One of the problems I find I encounter more these days than in the past is that there the coder is increasingly at the mercy of more and more layers of underlying code which is more or less impervious to reasonable debugging.
True, but not tragic, because nowdays you can "google" for a solution or post on SO to get help, while 25 years ago, all you could do was figure it out by yourself or try to ask around whether anyone knows someone with a deeper knowledge of the matter... I really don't want to go back to those dark times, but we sure could file more bug reports or flame programmers publicly for writing crappy libraries. ;-)
Driven by the web (and possibly games) industry, programming has become a race: whoever ships the product or new feature first, gains an advantage. So development speed is much more important than in the old days, when you could still win something by cramming more features into 64KB RAM or when you paid for your rented computing time and could spend months optimizing your code. Consequently, architectural decisions are still important, but optimizing your code - unless it becomes a specific requirement, for example, when you simply cannot afford to buy a box with 512GB RAM that can run your current stuff unmodified - is not.
So what is really happening? It's called momentum. Microsoft has trained users over the past decades to accept inferior usability and engineering - not necessarily to Linux in many aspects, but to various alternatives that existed over the years - as the industry standard. People simply refuse to learn how to use an OSX or Linux desktop, the same way they do not accept a new spreadsheet software unless it's called Excel (even if it is totally different from the previous version - they simply trust it!). The iPod and IPad were not the first products in their respective markets by far, but people weren't trained to one particular look & feel (physically and regarding the UI), so Apple had a chance to succeed and used it well. Now it's up to Apple to establish an industry standard, at least for smartphones and tablets and make use of the momentum they're gaining over the next 10+ years to dominate the market...
Whether you like it or not, both engineering and usabilty/asthetics are less important than people's habits. If you are old enough to remember the home computer platform wars, you'll know ...
... but I'm still waiting for something to follow up on the nVidia tech demo. My guess is that current games are using far too many effects specifically designed to use current hardware that cannot be easily implemented using voxels. Also, I haven't seen much info regarding animated scenes with sparse voxel octrees and I can't think of a straightforward way to do this ... Here's a youtube video with some info though: animated sparse voxel octrees.
If said island is comprised of a few objects that are repeated over and over again (looks like it), keeping the data in memory is easy... Data structures can have shared nodes etc.
Sounds a bit like you have a "clueless idiot" type of problem, for really advanced Linux issues you can almost always find useful info using Google.
... the iPad is what I sincerely hope "normal" people will buy since with Android, the risk of getting another 10s of millions of trojan-infected zombie devices on the 'net, used and not maintained properly by clueless users, is just too high. Whether they'll get the best value for money from their personal perspective, I don't really care.
I doubt the long term returns justify what this does to people.
What does society measure one's success by? Yearly salary (regardless of lifespan), or perhaps whether the subject will die happily at the age of 95 while having 30 grand-grandchildren? In fact, we glorify those who die young - after becoming famous for some work that took a huge toll on their lives - much more than those who live long in spite of it ...
It seems to me that the HFT industry and the wall street crooks who employ it are desperately trying to portray HFT as the sophisticated work of some extremely talented programmers who are just smart enough to help brokers earn more money, while in reality the whole system seems to be half inside trading (having access to information other traders don't know yet and methods other traders cannot employ) and half DoS attacks on regular traders (the same order will not work for them because HFT is preventing it). Therefore, it should (IMO) be illegal and perhaps such spin posts exist mostly to counter sensible attempts to ban it.
Disclaimer: I do not own or trade shares of public companies.
... till we have the first robot suicide then, I suppose.
Let's see how the US handles this.
Chances are, they will probably bomb Nigeria ...
So you would actually prefer to pay MORE for your "younger self" then for the same output.
Not for the same output, no. My younger self was suitable for different tasks than I am now and I'm probably not the best choice as a hired programmer at my current age and habits(!). Realistically, there's simply too much I would not do for the kind of salary I'd deserve as a plain coder.
they tend to lack some crucial non-technical experience that will lead to mistakes if not in a team with more experienced coders
coders or team leaders / management / software architects...
The "study" that doesn't deserve to be called one claims that people who write more answers and ask fewer questions on SO are better programmers. That is as dumb as saying that business consultants are better CEOs or football trainers are better football players... As far as I am concerned, I am 38 now and I'd say that I've become more experienced and much lazier, but I wouldn't pay myself a higher salary for a programming job than I'd have for the younger me at 25. Among other things, because I could spend 20 hours in a row trying to solve a particular problem back then, i.e. what I lacked in experience, I more than made up for with persistence and enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley was spot on ...
Why don't people understand. They use children to deliver bombs,
"THEY"? You should go see a doctor, you're paranoid.
This is the result of being at war with terrorists. No one likes it, but it's reality.
It's reality in your sick mind. In fact, "THEY" don't even need to plant bombs anywhere, they are probably laughing hard every time they read a story about TSA x-raying, taking nude pictures of, groping your women and small children everyhwere. Do you really think a few bombs could do as much lasting damage as your retarded administration and its dumb followers have done in the past 10 years? They won, you lost, just look at yourselves. You're alive, but you're scared shitless, humiliated every day and the laughing stock of the world.
. Glad he's fighting for the rights of people who really aren't discriminated against in today's society instead of actually helping people.
He is in fact fighting against preferential treatment for mainstream religions, i.e. for secularism, which is often not really thorough in so-called modern democracies. Members of the Catholic Church get tax cuts to compensate their membership fees, religious people get to teach ethics classes at school, crosses are still hanging on the wall in many classrooms. He chose this way to protest against lack of secularism and will apparently try to claim all other unjustified favours the Catholic Church gets for Pastafarianism as well, to get authorities to rethink this favouritism.
And won't be going away any time soon.
It's going away one little bit at a time, so we won't notice until it's too late. Can you still buy a prepaid phone where you live and use it without registering with your real name?
Cash withdrawals and deposits have been severely limited in the last couple of years in the EU (money laundering must be a new phenomenon!), the noose will be tightened until you are required to pay with a card / mobile phone for any amount over XX EUR/USD and one day that XX will be 0...
"My privacy is *very* important to me. Who wants to look after my email?"
I don't want anyone to "look after my email", I simply want someone to provide transport, storage and protocols / user interface required for me to access it, without any privacy implications that are not mandated by that service. If you think that a business would be unable to provide this without stealing/exploiting private information, you're overly paranoid and should have grave concerns when seeing a doctor, or talking to a lawyer.
Buy your own domain and server. It's dirt-cheap nowadays and you can use it for lots of other things too.
I would as a last resort, but I'd rather pay someone to look after it for security fixes, upgrades, spam filter configuration etc. than do everything on my own. Surely there must be providers that have a strict policy regarding privacy / personal information and that can be trusted to stick to it and not consider it something temporary until not sticking to it is profitable enough?
somewhat OT, but can anyone recommend a good webmail provider whose business is not selling and analyzing our private communication, but providing a good webmail client? I don't mind paying, my privacy is worth it.