Thanks for missing his point and giving me this opportunity do demonstrate my brilliance as I correct you. To show my gratitude, I won't make use of it.
You obviously missed the point of my posting, which is simply a refutation of the parent's claim "Yes, HTML is a programming language" including his supporting argument.
I didn't say anything about the rest of his posting and I am obviously not going to discount his anecdotal evidence for his own path to programming.
Gifted students are dragged down to lower levels for two major (and horrific) reasons.
1) The general view in the eyes of "educators*" is that group work is A Good Thing. By putting smart kids with not so smart kids, educators think that this helps out the slower kids academically, while lets the smarter kids benefit from the "social interaction with those not as quick".
But this is at least a noble intention and I wish this method would have worked. Instead, I had to learn all of these social skills in my twenties on my own.
The only kind of social skill smart kids learn during group-work for school, is how to help others with their expertise. This doesn't even teach you the skill to ask for remunerations in return.
Instead of teaching math, science and computing nerds more math, science and computing, there should be social skills classes for them.
[quote]Gifted students are dragged down to lower levels for two major (and horrific) reasons.
1) The general view in the eyes of "educators*" is that group work is A Good Thing. By putting smart kids with not so smart kids, educators think that this helps out the slower kids academically, while lets the smarter kids benefit from the "social interaction with those not as quick".[/quote] But this is at least a noble intention and I wish this method would have worked. Instead I had to learn all of these social skills in my twenties on my own.
The only kind of social skill smart kids learn during group-work for school, is how to help others with their expertise. This doesn't even teach you the skill to ask for remunerations in return.
Instead of teaching math, science and computing nerds more math, science and computing, there should be social skills classes for them.
Instead of action-and-response, you have text that makes the computer do something that does not follow immediately from the text at the time you enter it. This may seem trivial to techies, but it's an enormous conceptual leap for most users -- and once they've made that leap, programming as a concept is no longer nearly so mysterious.
Not all programming languages have daunting edit-compile-debug loops like C++ or PHP. My C-64 executed BASIC expressions right away as does a LISP interpreter.
Sheet music, traditional typesetting, plays and screenplays would all count as code by your definition.
Programs need the ability to react on input and define algorithms. HTML doesn't give you the power to do that and is therefore not a programming language.
Other factors drive the modern geek-ling - such as the notoriety of building your own web page, making javascript programs in the browser that your friends can play with from anywhere in the world, and working on stuff in Flash that's so much cooler than I had ever dreamed possible back when I was saving my BASIC programs to an audio cassette.
I don't see many webpages with unique javascript stuff. Most of the flash-animations that are cool to look at, don't seem to be a programming challenge either. But I am no expert. Most flash scripts appear to me like a collection of pre-coded effects on media which are triggered by simple events.
Yes, HTML, CSS and flash are popular. But these languages seem to be mostly used with an artsy mindset. Artists use all kinds of tools, including, if they have to, scripts. But that doesn't make them geeks, at least not in my book.
I've started to learn drawing recently and I can say that the whole thought-process while drawing is very different from coding. (I had to attend years of mandatory drawing and painting classes in high school, but I produced only crap. I drew like a coder.)
From the initial article:
I keep finding myself in conversations with tertiary educators in the hard sciences (physics, astronomy, chemistry, etc) who note that even the geeksthose who voluntarily choose to major in hard sciencesenter university never having ever programmed a computer.
The definition of "geek" seems to be shifting. A geek who can't code? What exactly does a non-coding geek bring to the table? What, except for lack of social skills, defines a geek nowadays?
Not sure in what oparadise you live in, but Here in Europe, this is not the case.
Geez. Well if it makes you sleep better, let me proclaim the following: All uses of the phrase "here in europe" in my initial comment are supposed to refer only to the better parts of europe.
Really though, at different point in my life I have gone without TV, and I just don't get the whole "TV sucks" thing. Just like anything else, there are good shows, and there are bad shows. There is stupid stuff, and there is really enlightening stuff. Besides, some people need to just unwind sometimes.
Word up! That's what I'm talking about.
I haven't owned a TV for years for various reasons. But I am not one of these elitist TV ascets that everybody hates. Some folks believe that throwing out their TV instantaneously increases their IQ by 20 points. That isn't the case.
In fact the TV provides certain informations that you can't or won't easily get otherwise. A lot of politics and news is boring, yet important. I can watch a newscast about a financial scandal or party politics, but I wouldn't read about it, if I could choose to read other stuff. (Here in europe, the political landscape is changing over time. New parties form, some split, others join and some disappear, so you have to keep on top of these things)
TV is low effort. This is btw. why many in more stressfull jobs who don't have the luxury of unproblematic internet access during the day, like to watch TV. Hunting for information on the Internet, or reading a complicated newspaper is no fun after a long day of hard work.
Also, the TV gives its viewers a set of common and current references and stories that can be used to start small talk. That's very practical.
I mean, I have been 10 years now without a car, and I could certainly make comments like "What I find constantly amazing is seeing otherwise intelligent people I know throwing away tens of thousands of dollars just so they can be fat and lazy and not have to walk to the store."
Well this analogy is kind of flawed. It would be a good analogy, if car users admitted outright that they just like to drive cars and to possess them as status symbols and would always prefer them to cheaper, quicker and less stressful means of transportation. Instead they come up with all of these lame rationalizations for car driving. Over here in europe, this is totally ridiculous. We do have great bike lanes and cheap and realiable public transportaion 24/7 on one hand and traffic jam plus scarce parking space on the other. In my town, the majority doesn't own a car, yet everybody somehow manages to do everything from commuting to shopping to raising kids. Yet the car drivers among my coworkers insist that all of this is absolutely impossible to do without a car. These same folks complain about high gaz-prices every six months or so, whining that it is impossible live anymore and concocting wild conspiracy theories about which evil polititions and companies are allegedly ripping them off. Also, car use has a huge environmental footprint. Oil can and should be put to better uses.
To be frank. This is one reason why I have no pity for %90 of AIDS patients.
This must then be an example of the love thy neighbour thing, christians keep talking about.
Do you also feel no pity for victims of traffic accidents? Everybody knows after all that road users can die in traffic.
I think the most wonderful thing a man could offer a woman on their wedding night is the assurance that he has never lusted over another woman in his life.
No, the most beautiful thing a man can give to a women at any night, not just wedding night, is an orgasm. You, my friend, will fail horribly at this task. Your marriage will start with bad sex. Good look with that.
God gave us some rules about sexuality in the Bible.
Your proof of that would be? (Meaning proof of god's existance, his interest in our specie's sexuality and his authorship of the bible)
The European gene pool had little to do with their spread. Read
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
or watch it on PBS. Basically everyone was equal, but some had better resources / environment.
Well, didn't you understand the "Germs" part in "Guns, Germs and Steel"? We europeans are genetically hardened against a lot of deseases due to centuries of exposure. As we conquered the world, we took various germs with us, which then caused pandemias within the native populations.
DS9 was the only Trek series where I thought I might be looking at real human beings. Other Trek series treated their characters as if they were greedless, religionless, sexless robots incapable of even the slightest moral failing or ambiguity.
And DS9 was a pretty lame and awkward attempt to overcome that.
The first tv show that had real human beings in it was Seinfeld. Everything before that was way to PC.
Real human beings simply don't fit into all genres or stories anyway.
The kernel developers could simply ban closed source drivers by stating that in their licence, or rather declaring that the requirements of the GPL are also meant to apply to drivers. Likewise all closed source user space applications could be banned.
An unstable ABI does discourage the development of drivers in general, not just of closed source drivers.
No matter how much pressure the EU puts on the US to gain partial control of the root servers the bottom line is by splitting the internet you are going to piss off 225 million+ internet users in the EU who no longer can get to all their favorite sites anymore.
Only a couple of million of these users have adequate enough english skills to even read english sites. Everybody else reads sites which are provided in his mother tongue.
Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Ebay all do have localized versions of their websites and local branch offices. The average internet user would experience no change whatsoever, if this was implemented.
please. it certainly does mean they were right, by Gates's own admission.
Bill Gates is the arbiter of absolute truth now? And here I was, thinking that the Ratzinger became the new pope...
Only the future will show, who was right. I, personally don't take either side, since I have no insight whatsoever into the development of windows or how it is structured. I have in fact barely used Windows during the last seven years. My point is that for any software project, there are always those who want a rewrite and promise it to be lean, clean and so on. Sometimes, they are right, sometimes they aren't.
In the case of operating systems, there is the additional problem that at least the interfaces can't be dumped. So you end up with yet another widget set/API/object model/etc.
This is a Wall Street Journal article. It has no technical details whatsoever since it was written for business people.
Just look at this quote:
The second man Mr. Allchin tapped was Amitabh Srivastava, now 49, a fellow purist among computer scientists. A newcomer to the Windows group, Mr. Srivastava had his team draw up a map of how Windows' pieces fit together. It was 8 feet tall and 11 feet wide and looked like a haphazard train map with hundreds of tracks crisscrossing each other.
That was just the opposite of how Microsoft's new rivals worked. Google and others developed test versions of software and shipped them over the Internet. The best of the programs from rivals were like Lego blocks -- they had a single function and were designed to be connected onto a larger whole. Google and even Microsoft's own MSN online unit could quickly respond to changes in the way people used their PCs and the Web by adding incremental improvements.
They are comparing an operating system, which has to be backward compatible with a dozen or so earlier versions of Windows and DOS and support an oodle of devices and subsystems, with a bunch of mostly unrelated web-applications and gimmicks from Google.
All I'm getting from the article is that the "let's rewrite from scratch" crowd got the upper hand within Microsoft. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they are right or that the end result will be better than continuous improvements. At the beginning, it is easy to maintain a nice, clean and simple system. But a complex set of requirements can't always be broken down into simple Legolike blocks, as the article suggests.
Mac's already use PC video cards, only difference is a slightly different BIOS just to impose Mac only conditions on them. 90% of a Mac is a PC these days anyways, only the 10% dedicated to CPU bus is different. It made so much sense for Apple to adopt a 100% PC internal core although it will be customized enough (with BIOS and Firmware, etc) to remain "uniquely" Apple.
Do you actually have any evidence that there will be significant customization? Why shouldn't the reason you give for Apple's adoption of Intel CPUs apply to the BIOS too? In fact the differing BIOSes are the very reason for the need of different video cards. By using a PC-BIOS, another obstacle would be out of the way.
At what point would you consider a Mac not to be unique anymore? Mac fans seem to stretch the concept of "uniqueness" a bit far it seems.
For a school, thin client is definately the way to go.
I'm generally pro thin-client, but there is one drawback, especially for schools: Video.
Also, the main advantage of thin clients are not that they are thin and powerless, but that they need less maintainance, break less often and consume less power.
To offload computing to the servers is not necessarily more efficient and/or cheaper. In fact it may even be more expensive.
What about the residents of Frankfurt you insensitive clod?
You see, this is our masterplan. As soon as they stop refering to these sausages as "Wiener", we will cease to call them "Frankfurter". Instead, we will use the name of another city. Rinse, repeat until the whole world is cleansed of Wiener Würstchen. *insert evil laghter here*
So does the Viennese governement. They'got Windows licenced until 2008. That's why they don't have to make a complete switch to Linux at once but can gather experience in the mean time.
In Munich the licences ran out much earlier, which is why they switched ahead of us. Expect to see the same procedure in many other bureaucracuies soon. Licence runs out -> switch to Linux
We call them "Frankfurter" over here. We are in general proud of the fact that they were invented over here in 1805. (Hey, that's 200 years! Let's party!) But we are not so happy about everybody calling them "Wiener".
Living at the birthplace of a widespread and popular food - good Having your cultural background identified with sausage - not so good
The texts of Paul, which are the earliest of the NT, don't contain any references to what Jesus supposedly did. Paul saw Christ only in a vision, as he claimed himself. And this was after the time-frame Jesus supposedly died. Theologians say that he wasn't interested in his earthly life.
The numbers on the site you were refering to are way optimistic for some kind of christianity. There is evidence that one of todays gospels existed 110AD, but that's it. Even the catholic church would disagree with the figures you gave. In fact, the catholic church is much more open to historically acurate research about the NT, since they don't depend on it to be the direct and historical word of god anyway. The NT was put together by the catholic church, so it's basically their book. Since they basically claim to be god's one and only branch office on earth, the book is automatically godly, since the church produced it and everything done by the church is guided by the holy ghost.
There used to be numerous alternative gospels which disagreed in major points. They were destroyed but some were rediscovered, or at least quoted or outlined in secondary literature.
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously missed the point of my posting, which is simply a refutation of the parent's claim "Yes, HTML is a programming language" including his supporting argument.
I didn't say anything about the rest of his posting and I am obviously not going to discount his anecdotal evidence for his own path to programming.
But this is at least a noble intention and I wish this method would have worked. Instead, I had to learn all of these social skills in my twenties on my own.
The only kind of social skill smart kids learn during group-work for school, is how to help others with their expertise. This doesn't even teach you the skill to ask for remunerations in return.
Instead of teaching math, science and computing nerds more math, science and computing, there should be social skills classes for them.
[quote]Gifted students are dragged down to lower levels for two major (and horrific) reasons.
1) The general view in the eyes of "educators*" is that group work is A Good Thing. By putting smart kids with not so smart kids, educators think that this helps out the slower kids academically, while lets the smarter kids benefit from the "social interaction with those not as quick".[/quote]
But this is at least a noble intention and I wish this method would have worked. Instead I had to learn all of these social skills in my twenties on my own.
The only kind of social skill smart kids learn during group-work for school, is how to help others with their expertise. This doesn't even teach you the skill to ask for remunerations in return.
Instead of teaching math, science and computing nerds more math, science and computing, there should be social skills classes for them.
Not all programming languages have daunting edit-compile-debug loops like C++ or PHP. My C-64 executed BASIC expressions right away as does a LISP interpreter.
Sheet music, traditional typesetting, plays and screenplays would all count as code by your definition.
Programs need the ability to react on input and define algorithms. HTML doesn't give you the power to do that and is therefore not a programming language.
I don't see many webpages with unique javascript stuff. Most of the flash-animations that are cool to look at, don't seem to be a programming challenge either. But I am no expert. Most flash scripts appear to me like a collection of pre-coded effects on media which are triggered by simple events.
Yes, HTML, CSS and flash are popular. But these languages seem to be mostly used with an artsy mindset. Artists use all kinds of tools, including, if they have to, scripts. But that doesn't make them geeks, at least not in my book.
I've started to learn drawing recently and I can say that the whole thought-process while drawing is very different from coding. (I had to attend years of mandatory drawing and painting classes in high school, but I produced only crap. I drew like a coder.)
From the initial article:
The definition of "geek" seems to be shifting. A geek who can't code? What exactly does a non-coding geek bring to the table? What, except for lack of social skills, defines a geek nowadays?
Would it be possible to connect two computers via eSATA for the purpose of networking or clustering?
Geez. Well if it makes you sleep better, let me proclaim the following: All uses of the phrase "here in europe" in my initial comment are supposed to refer only to the better parts of europe.
Word up! That's what I'm talking about.
I haven't owned a TV for years for various reasons. But I am not one of these elitist TV ascets that everybody hates. Some folks believe that throwing out their TV instantaneously increases their IQ by 20 points. That isn't the case.
In fact the TV provides certain informations that you can't or won't easily get otherwise. A lot of politics and news is boring, yet important. I can watch a newscast about a financial scandal or party politics, but I wouldn't read about it, if I could choose to read other stuff.
(Here in europe, the political landscape is changing over time. New parties form, some split, others join and some disappear, so you have to keep on top of these things)
TV is low effort. This is btw. why many in more stressfull jobs who don't have the luxury of unproblematic internet access during the day, like to watch TV. Hunting for information on the Internet, or reading a complicated newspaper is no fun after a long day of hard work.
Also, the TV gives its viewers a set of common and current references and stories that can be used to start small talk. That's very practical.
Well this analogy is kind of flawed. It would be a good analogy, if car users admitted outright that they just like to drive cars and to possess them as status symbols and would always prefer them to cheaper, quicker and less stressful means of transportation. Instead they come up with all of these lame rationalizations for car driving. Over here in europe, this is totally ridiculous. We do have great bike lanes and cheap and realiable public transportaion 24/7 on one hand and traffic jam plus scarce parking space on the other. In my town, the majority doesn't own a car, yet everybody somehow manages to do everything from commuting to shopping to raising kids.
Yet the car drivers among my coworkers insist that all of this is absolutely impossible to do without a car.
These same folks complain about high gaz-prices every six months or so, whining that it is impossible live anymore and concocting wild conspiracy theories about which evil polititions and companies are allegedly ripping them off.
Also, car use has a huge environmental footprint. Oil can and should be put to better uses.
Kilo=1000
Yeah, right. That's what the power companies want you to believe.
A Kilowatt would be 1024 Watts. So shame on you!
Well, didn't you understand the "Germs" part in "Guns, Germs and Steel"? We europeans are genetically hardened against a lot of deseases due to centuries of exposure. As we conquered the world, we took various germs with us, which then caused pandemias within the native populations.
And DS9 was a pretty lame and awkward attempt to overcome that.
The first tv show that had real human beings in it was Seinfeld. Everything before that was way to PC.
Real human beings simply don't fit into all genres or stories anyway.
The kernel developers could simply ban closed source drivers by stating that in their licence, or rather declaring that the requirements of the GPL are also meant to apply to drivers. Likewise all closed source user space applications could be banned.
An unstable ABI does discourage the development of drivers in general, not just of closed source drivers.
Only the future will show, who was right. I, personally don't take either side, since I have no insight whatsoever into the development of windows or how it is structured. I have in fact barely used Windows during the last seven years. My point is that for any software project, there are always those who want a rewrite and promise it to be lean, clean and so on. Sometimes, they are right, sometimes they aren't.
In the case of operating systems, there is the additional problem that at least the interfaces can't be dumped. So you end up with yet another widget set/API/object model/etc.
Just look at this quote:
They are comparing an operating system, which has to be backward compatible with a dozen or so earlier versions of Windows and DOS and support an oodle of devices and subsystems, with a bunch of mostly unrelated web-applications and gimmicks from Google.
All I'm getting from the article is that the "let's rewrite from scratch" crowd got the upper hand within Microsoft. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they are right or that the end result will be better than continuous improvements. At the beginning, it is easy to maintain a nice, clean and simple system. But a complex set of requirements can't always be broken down into simple Legolike blocks, as the article suggests.
At what point would you consider a Mac not to be unique anymore? Mac fans seem to stretch the concept of "uniqueness" a bit far it seems.
So does the Viennese governement. They'got Windows licenced until 2008. That's why they don't have to make a complete switch to Linux at once but can gather experience in the mean time.
In Munich the licences ran out much earlier, which is why they switched ahead of us. Expect to see the same procedure in many other bureaucracuies soon. Licence runs out -> switch to Linux
We call them "Frankfurter" over here. We are in general proud of the fact that they were invented over here in 1805. (Hey, that's 200 years! Let's party!) But we are not so happy about everybody calling them "Wiener".
Living at the birthplace of a widespread and popular food - good
Having your cultural background identified with sausage - not so good
The texts of Paul, which are the earliest of the NT, don't contain any references to what Jesus supposedly did. Paul saw Christ only in a vision, as he claimed himself. And this was after the time-frame Jesus supposedly died. Theologians say that he wasn't interested in his earthly life.
The numbers on the site you were refering to are way optimistic for some kind of christianity. There is evidence that one of todays gospels existed 110AD, but that's it. Even the catholic church would disagree with the figures you gave. In fact, the catholic church is much more open to historically acurate research about the NT, since they don't depend on it to be the direct and historical word of god anyway. The NT was put together by the catholic church, so it's basically their book. Since they basically claim to be god's one and only branch office on earth, the book is automatically godly, since the church produced it and everything done by the church is guided by the holy ghost.
There used to be numerous alternative gospels which disagreed in major points. They were destroyed but some were rediscovered, or at least quoted or outlined in secondary literature.
Alternative Gospels can be found here
An article about the formation of the NT, based on current scholarship, by Richard Carrier (an eval atheist)