Not Learnn the API - Learn the Language
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The point of the parent poster, and though I haven't read it, I assume the book - is that once you have a few good years under your belt, any decent programmer will tell you that all languages are essentially the same. Sure, you have some that are OO, some are more procedural, some have some weird syntax to get used to - but, for the most part, they are all the same basic constructs and concepts, and anyone with a moderate level of skill can pick up a new language fairly rapidly. Sure, they will be no expert at first, but given 6 months to a year and they would be proficient enough that you just may have a hard time picking them out of a lineup with people who had 10 times the experience.
Programming is about algorithms and design. The language you use to implement those ideas is nothing more than a tool. If I was interviewing anyone this is where I would be focusing my evaluation.
The days of needing to know the language's API inside and out are over - Google took care of that. I don't want to know if you know what the method of creating a vector in Java is - any monkey can find that out with Google in less time than it took you to read this sentence. I want to know if you know what the *difference is* between a vector and a list, and if you instantly know when to use which. This is not something you find in 2 seconds on Google, and this is what you should look for in a good coder - the ability to quickly and easily identify the best algorithm for the situation.
It's not impossible. But, why would anyone spend hundreds (actually, more like thousands) of dollars on the custom CMTS hardware required? They would be spending *WAY* more than the business class internet access would for a number of years.
The bad news is that SpaceShipOne will be retired straight to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum...
This has to be the stupidest comment I have seen in a/. article posting in a long time. Does this person have any regard at all for the enormous historical value this space ship has?
Imagine it was *not* retired, then went down in flames in a subsequent mission. A very important part of humanity's history would be lost, forever.
Try to think beyond the next few years for once in your life. You can send up payloads in SpaceShipTwo, or SpaceShipThree, or SpaceShipNineteen. But there is only one SpaceShipOne. And I for one would like it to still be around in 80 years, so I can go to the museum with my great-grandchildren and say "Look what some people of my generation accomplished".
Hibernate has totally different SQL translation engines for each database, and does indeed optimize in many cases.
Hobernate itsn't like DBI or ODBC. When you use Hibernate, you don't "write" SQL. You manipulate objects. When you compile your objects, you generate an object SQL mapping that is RDBMS specific - a hibernate PostgreSQL mapping will not transparantly run on a MySQL system, you have to re-generate it.
In this way Hibernate is usually very efficient, and still provides for excellent abstraction.
I worked for a Telco a few years back experimenting with TV over DSL. It failed miserably. The last mile problem is the kicker.
DSL, even the best DSL, just doesn't have the bandwidth available to compete with cable in terms of content delivery. Our biggest problem turned out to be multiple channels - we had the bandwidth for one channel easily, but if the customer wanted to be able to have two STBs on different channels (the horror!!!) they were SOL. And this was only a normal TV stream - image HDTV. In order for a Telco to broadcast two HDTV channels they would have to support speeds on the order of 50 MBps over their DSL. No one but people within the first few hundred feet of the co-lo would be able to manage that with current technology. And what about three channels?
Sure - maybe the technology will improve, compression will improve, and it may one day be possible. But you've got to remember, that the laws of physics dictate that you simply can not cram as much information down a phone line as you can down a coaxial cable. When analog cable is scrapped eventually in favour of digital only content, the cable companies will have so much bandwidth available it will be ridiculous.
Unless the Telcos all roll out FTTH, they will be in for a bumpy ride.
Etymology: Middle English stelen, from Old English stelan; akin to Old High German stelan to steal
intransitive senses 1 : to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as an habitual or regular practice
No one took the bike, or any property for that matter. Same in the Woz's case, no one took any property from anyone.
Ah, so without having to think about whether you're stealing from a fellow citizen, you blame it on an unspecified, undefined "philosophy". Ridiculous.
You really don't understand the hacker mindset. This whole thing has nothign to do with stealing - hell, I would not be surprised if these guys *never* rode a bike in their life. It is all about the challenge and bragging rights.
When the Woz was using his blue-boxing skills to call all over Asia and Euorpe for free in the 60's, it was not because he sat around one day and thought "hey, how cna I steal from the phone company???". Nor was it becaus ehe had relatives there he had to keep in touch with. It was because he saw it as a challenge. Once the system blocking them access is defeated, hackers generally quickly lose interest and move on to the next challenge. They don't "keep stealing" the thing forever, since that was not their intention.
Hell, it is debatable if it is even stealing anyway - if you procure a service, which you have no desire to really use, and which you would never have paid to use in the first place, through a non-standard means, is that stealing? Doesn't stealing mean to deprive someone of something? What are these guys depriving anyone of? They aren't depriving the bike company of bikes. They aren't depriving them of profit since they never would have used them anyway.
The article is about limiting spam *period*, not classifying spam, which GMail already does. The author even states this:
First of all, I'll say that none of the messages which were marked as spam were legitimate messages. However, I'm not using these accounts very heavily yet. All of them have received under 10 legitimate messages since I set them up. So far, Gmail is doing a good job of classifying the spam.
Your homebrew setup is no better off than a stock GMail account. And I don't have to maintain my own SpamAssassin, GMail does it for me.
The GP is correct, this is nothing new. It may be new to *you* and many/. readers, but to anyone who is into web development this is old hack. NOt ot put down Google's web team, but I mean, I could write this myself in a week or two.
XmlHttpRequest to fetch data on demand has been around for a long time. For example, MSDN has been using this technique for years now. I have been using it for 9+ months on an application that recently went into production.
The reason you have not seen it in use much is
it is not readily visible, therefore you don't hear about it until Google (who everyone knows) does it an it makes news
Because not many public websites have the kind of horsepower needed at the backend to do this kind of thing, so it is rarely used.. Google does.
Google's best engineering continues to be in the back end - that is what makes this thing possible, and why no one else would likely be able to replicate this. The ability to search billions of records that fast is simply staggaring.
What you are talking about is bad logic. You can't take a theory and test it by looking for its outcome.
If A implies B, and B is found, that can *not* lead you to conclude that A is valid. All it means is that A *could* be valid. There could also be an X than implies B. You don't know that.
Ther testing of the thoretical outcome of a theory does not prove it, it only "does not disprove" it.
creationism (or "intelligent design") is not a scientific theory. it has no predicative power, it offers no real explanation, nor can it be tested.
Just to make the argument - all of the above apply to "big bang" theory as well.
Did the universe come from somewhere, or not? This is the fundamental question - and no theory surrounding this can ever meet any of your above criteria, unless we invent some time machine that could withstand the collapse of the universe and go check it out.
I agree with you that creationism is not science. Evolution certainly is, and can be proven. But there are certain areas of upper-level theoretical physics that are encroaching on what I would call "philosophy" as well.
A professor at any decent university does *not* want his whole class (or even a large portion) to fail. It reflects poorly on him as a teacher, and on the class he is teaching as subject matter for the level of students it is registered for. The professor has zero incentive to try to make you fail, he has every incentive to try and make you succeed.
A professor, teaching a new course, and faced with a disproportionately large number of failures, will without doubt adjust the marks at the end of the term by grading on a curve - otherwise he would be at risk of having his class cancelled by the dean.
In fact, the very site you mention does not say that this one is false, it says it's truth is unknown:
The earliest account of the "barometer" legend we've found so far comes from a 1958 Reader's Digest collection, and the tale is usually identified as being the invention of Dr. Alexander Calandra, who included a first-person account of it in a 1961 textbook (The Teaching of Elementary Science of Mathematics) and published it as an article in Saturday Review in 1968. The various responses mentioned in the legend have also been included in lists of supposedly "real" answers given by physics students when confronted by this same question. (One such list was submitted to the periodical Current Science by Dr. Calandra himself.)
Whether a real incident was the basis for Dr. Calandra's creation of this parable is unknown.
He doesn't even say what it's worth. Hell, it could be worth *nothing*.
I was given lots of assignments at university. Often, we wouldn't know until the end of the term what would count and what wouldn't. If the entire class did poorly on an assignment, it often does *not* count toward your grade.
It's trivial for the typical digicam user who just takes snapshots. A professional photographer can easily amass 100 GB of photos in a couple weeks. So "spending a few hours every few years doing a backup" simply isn't viable.
You talk about this as if it is a huge, insurmountable number. Unfortunately, you fail to take into account how much vastly more dense the newer generations of storage are than the previous generation.
In the 3-4 years time between media generations, the same timeframe after which you will want to transfer your data all to new formats, assuming it follows all previous rates, you could reasonably expect the density of your average hard drive to have increased by nearly 100 fold.
You could have no problem backing up 100GB of data. In fact you could probably fit 1 TB onto media the size of a current CD.
Is my data somehow less worthwhile if I am not around to copy it?
To put it bluntly, yes.
If you are a person of any kind of relative historical importance, local or otherwise, you can ensure someone with an agenda will archive your data.
Similarly, if your family members care about your old Blog postings, they will also archive it.
Otherwise, you're out of luck, and frankly, I seriously doubt that the would would be a much better place in the year 3025 if they had access to OzPeter's musings on Microsoft and his IM messages to HotPink18.
... is you no longer ever have to say "I don't know" when Johnny asks you "why is the sky blue?"
You say "I am not exactly sure Johnny. Let's go find out together", and look it up. I can say now, I wish upon wishes that I had the Internet as a resource when I was a young child. There is nothing more stifling to a child's creativity than being unable to have all their questions answered.
When your child is inquisitive, encourage them. Look up the information together. Discuss it afterwards. Any young child will undoubtably ask a myriad of questions about the world, so there is no need to set aside time to do this - just taking the fifteen minutes out of your busy schedule when they *do* ask is often the hard part. But it will also gain the greatest rewards.
You will be surprised how far fostering a thirst for knowledge form a young age can go.
Um.. I hate to burst your bubble, but can I remind you about the dutch group (name escapes me and I can't be bothered to google, and I was sure it was reported here) who stored a variety of CDs away for 2 years and found significant degredation in over half of them?
I find this remark highly dubious. I have CDRs ( cheap 0.05 cent no-name ones) that i burt over 5 years ago that I still regularly use. And I most certianly have *not* taken good care of them - half of them don't even have cases, I just toss them in a drawer.
As for perfect savings of digital data, the data is only as good as long as someone has the desire to copy from an older to newer medium.
Well, it is *your* data. If *you* want to keep it then *you* copy it. Seeing how relatively trivial it is to spend a few hours every few years doing some backup, when compared to printing photos to hard copy, I really don't see any merit to this argument whatsoever.
Just look at the number of 8 inch floppy drives around, and think about how hard it is to re-copy the data on them.
So what? That's like saying "look at all the 1920 Chevs around and how hard it is to get parts for them" - the point is do you **want/need** to get parts for them.
If you wanted the data off these devices, why didn't you copy it off long ago? Obviously the data is not very important to you if you couldn't even spend an hour every 5 years backing it up.
During light traffic hours, a large group of cars will get the light over a single car, though the single car will get the light immediately after passing.
These can't be the only three rules. Take the above for example, and assume heavy traffic on the order of rush-hour, and you are that one car wiating to get onto the busy road. Unless many others start lining up as awell, you would be waiting a *loooonnngggg* time.
There must also be some maximum length for a light to remain red.
Even forget about the "Perl is lightweight" stuff (although I totally agree with you!) They also describe **English** as a lightweight language.
The English language has one of the largest vocabilaries in the world. It grows by something like 10,000 entries a year. In order to use it in any real-world setting you have to learn thousands of colloquialisms and slang terms. People who learn it as a second language are still learning new words and phrases 10 years later. It is nowhere near "lightweight".
I think the people discussed in this article live in some kind of upside-down universe where black is white and white is black. That is the only explanation for the idiocy presented here.
Slashdot Mirror
Site is already really slow.. save them some bandwidth
e ngl/fotos-opening-e.htm
http://www.my-tropical-islands.com.nyud.net:8090/
The point of the parent poster, and though I haven't read it, I assume the book - is that once you have a few good years under your belt, any decent programmer will tell you that all languages are essentially the same. Sure, you have some that are OO, some are more procedural, some have some weird syntax to get used to - but, for the most part, they are all the same basic constructs and concepts, and anyone with a moderate level of skill can pick up a new language fairly rapidly. Sure, they will be no expert at first, but given 6 months to a year and they would be proficient enough that you just may have a hard time picking them out of a lineup with people who had 10 times the experience.
Programming is about algorithms and design. The language you use to implement those ideas is nothing more than a tool. If I was interviewing anyone this is where I would be focusing my evaluation.
The days of needing to know the language's API inside and out are over - Google took care of that. I don't want to know if you know what the method of creating a vector in Java is - any monkey can find that out with Google in less time than it took you to read this sentence. I want to know if you know what the *difference is* between a vector and a list, and if you instantly know when to use which. This is not something you find in 2 seconds on Google, and this is what you should look for in a good coder - the ability to quickly and easily identify the best algorithm for the situation.
It's not impossible. But, why would anyone spend hundreds (actually, more like thousands) of dollars on the custom CMTS hardware required? They would be spending *WAY* more than the business class internet access would for a number of years.
The bad news is that SpaceShipOne will be retired straight to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum...
This has to be the stupidest comment I have seen in a /. article posting in a long time. Does this person have any regard at all for the enormous historical value this space ship has?
Imagine it was *not* retired, then went down in flames in a subsequent mission. A very important part of humanity's history would be lost, forever.
Try to think beyond the next few years for once in your life. You can send up payloads in SpaceShipTwo, or SpaceShipThree, or SpaceShipNineteen. But there is only one SpaceShipOne. And I for one would like it to still be around in 80 years, so I can go to the museum with my great-grandchildren and say "Look what some people of my generation accomplished".
Hibernate has totally different SQL translation engines for each database, and does indeed optimize in many cases.
Hobernate itsn't like DBI or ODBC. When you use Hibernate, you don't "write" SQL. You manipulate objects. When you compile your objects, you generate an object SQL mapping that is RDBMS specific - a hibernate PostgreSQL mapping will not transparantly run on a MySQL system, you have to re-generate it.
In this way Hibernate is usually very efficient, and still provides for excellent abstraction.
You must have a crappy setup if you can't fit a taller-than-average rack into your entertainment centre. Ever heard of a Game Cube?
My GameCube fits fine in mine, and I am sure this would fit fine filling the space beside it.
I worked for a Telco a few years back experimenting with TV over DSL. It failed miserably. The last mile problem is the kicker.
DSL, even the best DSL, just doesn't have the bandwidth available to compete with cable in terms of content delivery. Our biggest problem turned out to be multiple channels - we had the bandwidth for one channel easily, but if the customer wanted to be able to have two STBs on different channels (the horror!!!) they were SOL. And this was only a normal TV stream - image HDTV. In order for a Telco to broadcast two HDTV channels they would have to support speeds on the order of 50 MBps over their DSL. No one but people within the first few hundred feet of the co-lo would be able to manage that with current technology. And what about three channels?
Sure - maybe the technology will improve, compression will improve, and it may one day be possible. But you've got to remember, that the laws of physics dictate that you simply can not cram as much information down a phone line as you can down a coaxial cable. When analog cable is scrapped eventually in favour of digital only content, the cable companies will have so much bandwidth available it will be ridiculous.
Unless the Telcos all roll out FTTH, they will be in for a bumpy ride.
It is not to sit on your desk, it is to augment your home theatre and replace your DVD player / PVR / MP3 player.
As such, I think it looks quite similar to every other hi-fi device I won - black, with a colored LED-ish LCD panel.
A white or ivory pansy mac-like system would not be going anywhere near my home theatre.
Not according to the dictionary:
Etymology: Middle English stelen, from Old English stelan; akin to Old High German stelan to steal
intransitive senses
1 : to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as an habitual or regular practice
No one took the bike, or any property for that matter. Same in the Woz's case, no one took any property from anyone.
Ah, so without having to think about whether you're stealing from a fellow citizen, you blame it on an unspecified, undefined "philosophy". Ridiculous.
You really don't understand the hacker mindset. This whole thing has nothign to do with stealing - hell, I would not be surprised if these guys *never* rode a bike in their life. It is all about the challenge and bragging rights.
When the Woz was using his blue-boxing skills to call all over Asia and Euorpe for free in the 60's, it was not because he sat around one day and thought "hey, how cna I steal from the phone company???". Nor was it becaus ehe had relatives there he had to keep in touch with. It was because he saw it as a challenge. Once the system blocking them access is defeated, hackers generally quickly lose interest and move on to the next challenge. They don't "keep stealing" the thing forever, since that was not their intention.
Hell, it is debatable if it is even stealing anyway - if you procure a service, which you have no desire to really use, and which you would never have paid to use in the first place, through a non-standard means, is that stealing? Doesn't stealing mean to deprive someone of something? What are these guys depriving anyone of? They aren't depriving the bike company of bikes. They aren't depriving them of profit since they never would have used them anyway.
First of all, I'll say that none of the messages which were marked as spam were legitimate messages. However, I'm not using these accounts very heavily yet. All of them have received under 10 legitimate messages since I set them up. So far, Gmail is doing a good job of classifying the spam.
Your homebrew setup is no better off than a stock GMail account. And I don't have to maintain my own SpamAssassin, GMail does it for me.
XmlHttpRequest to fetch data on demand has been around for a long time. For example, MSDN has been using this technique for years now. I have been using it for 9+ months on an application that recently went into production.
The reason you have not seen it in use much is
Google's best engineering continues to be in the back end - that is what makes this thing possible, and why no one else would likely be able to replicate this. The ability to search billions of records that fast is simply staggaring.
What you are talking about is bad logic. You can't take a theory and test it by looking for its outcome. If A implies B, and B is found, that can *not* lead you to conclude that A is valid. All it means is that A *could* be valid. There could also be an X than implies B. You don't know that. Ther testing of the thoretical outcome of a theory does not prove it, it only "does not disprove" it.
creationism (or "intelligent design") is not a scientific theory. it has no predicative power, it offers no real explanation, nor can it be tested.
Just to make the argument - all of the above apply to "big bang" theory as well.
Did the universe come from somewhere, or not? This is the fundamental question - and no theory surrounding this can ever meet any of your above criteria, unless we invent some time machine that could withstand the collapse of the universe and go check it out.
I agree with you that creationism is not science. Evolution certainly is, and can be proven. But there are certain areas of upper-level theoretical physics that are encroaching on what I would call "philosophy" as well.
A professor at any decent university does *not* want his whole class (or even a large portion) to fail. It reflects poorly on him as a teacher, and on the class he is teaching as subject matter for the level of students it is registered for. The professor has zero incentive to try to make you fail, he has every incentive to try and make you succeed.
A professor, teaching a new course, and faced with a disproportionately large number of failures, will without doubt adjust the marks at the end of the term by grading on a curve - otherwise he would be at risk of having his class cancelled by the dean.
The earliest account of the "barometer" legend we've found so far comes from a 1958 Reader's Digest collection, and the tale is usually identified as being the invention of Dr. Alexander Calandra, who included a first-person account of it in a 1961 textbook (The Teaching of Elementary Science of Mathematics) and published it as an article in Saturday Review in 1968. The various responses mentioned in the legend have also been included in lists of supposedly "real" answers given by physics students when confronted by this same question. (One such list was submitted to the periodical Current Science by Dr. Calandra himself.) Whether a real incident was the basis for Dr. Calandra's creation of this parable is unknown.
He doesn't even say what it's worth. Hell, it could be worth *nothing*.
I was given lots of assignments at university. Often, we wouldn't know until the end of the term what would count and what wouldn't. If the entire class did poorly on an assignment, it often does *not* count toward your grade.
(W)ine (I)s (N)ot an (EW)mulator... hell even the name spells it out for you!
An emulator emulates another architecture's CPU. All WINE does is impliment Win32 API calls so that they are native on Linux.
WINE is no more an emulator than the Linux binary support in FreeBSD is.
I am pretty sure there is a FireFox plugin too
It's trivial for the typical digicam user who just takes snapshots. A professional photographer can easily amass 100 GB of photos in a couple weeks. So "spending a few hours every few years doing a backup" simply isn't viable.
You talk about this as if it is a huge, insurmountable number. Unfortunately, you fail to take into account how much vastly more dense the newer generations of storage are than the previous generation.
In the 3-4 years time between media generations, the same timeframe after which you will want to transfer your data all to new formats, assuming it follows all previous rates, you could reasonably expect the density of your average hard drive to have increased by nearly 100 fold.
You could have no problem backing up 100GB of data. In fact you could probably fit 1 TB onto media the size of a current CD.
Who copies my data when I am dead?
Is my data somehow less worthwhile if I am not around to copy it?
To put it bluntly, yes.
If you are a person of any kind of relative historical importance, local or otherwise, you can ensure someone with an agenda will archive your data.
Similarly, if your family members care about your old Blog postings, they will also archive it.
Otherwise, you're out of luck, and frankly, I seriously doubt that the would would be a much better place in the year 3025 if they had access to OzPeter's musings on Microsoft and his IM messages to HotPink18.
... is you no longer ever have to say "I don't know" when Johnny asks you "why is the sky blue?"
You say "I am not exactly sure Johnny. Let's go find out together", and look it up. I can say now, I wish upon wishes that I had the Internet as a resource when I was a young child. There is nothing more stifling to a child's creativity than being unable to have all their questions answered.
When your child is inquisitive, encourage them. Look up the information together. Discuss it afterwards. Any young child will undoubtably ask a myriad of questions about the world, so there is no need to set aside time to do this - just taking the fifteen minutes out of your busy schedule when they *do* ask is often the hard part. But it will also gain the greatest rewards.
You will be surprised how far fostering a thirst for knowledge form a young age can go.
Um .. I hate to burst your bubble, but can I remind you about the dutch group (name escapes me and I can't be bothered to google, and I was sure it was reported here) who stored a variety of CDs away for 2 years and found significant degredation in over half of them?
I find this remark highly dubious. I have CDRs ( cheap 0.05 cent no-name ones) that i burt over 5 years ago that I still regularly use. And I most certianly have *not* taken good care of them - half of them don't even have cases, I just toss them in a drawer.
As for perfect savings of digital data, the data is only as good as long as someone has the desire to copy from an older to newer medium.
Well, it is *your* data. If *you* want to keep it then *you* copy it. Seeing how relatively trivial it is to spend a few hours every few years doing some backup, when compared to printing photos to hard copy, I really don't see any merit to this argument whatsoever.
Just look at the number of 8 inch floppy drives around, and think about how hard it is to re-copy the data on them.
So what? That's like saying "look at all the 1920 Chevs around and how hard it is to get parts for them" - the point is do you **want/need** to get parts for them.
If you wanted the data off these devices, why didn't you copy it off long ago? Obviously the data is not very important to you if you couldn't even spend an hour every 5 years backing it up.
During light traffic hours, a large group of cars will get the light over a single car, though the single car will get the light immediately after passing.
These can't be the only three rules. Take the above for example, and assume heavy traffic on the order of rush-hour, and you are that one car wiating to get onto the busy road. Unless many others start lining up as awell, you would be waiting a *loooonnngggg* time.
There must also be some maximum length for a light to remain red.
Even forget about the "Perl is lightweight" stuff (although I totally agree with you!) They also describe **English** as a lightweight language.
The English language has one of the largest vocabilaries in the world. It grows by something like 10,000 entries a year. In order to use it in any real-world setting you have to learn thousands of colloquialisms and slang terms. People who learn it as a second language are still learning new words and phrases 10 years later. It is nowhere near "lightweight".
I think the people discussed in this article live in some kind of upside-down universe where black is white and white is black. That is the only explanation for the idiocy presented here.