"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
A programmer should be able to pick up another language in a matter of weeks and master it within a year. Do your best in whatever language you like or need now. While it's fun to talk about the pros and cons of different languages, the idea of being stuck in a language is silly.
DISCLAIMER: You may have to network socially to bypass those who rely too much on words in resumes. You may have to do a couple hobby projects. You may have to take a pay cut while an employer waits for you to get up to speed.
I don't know of any services. The only way I know would be to get my own gear:
1. S-VHS VCR. Even if your tapes weren't recorded in this higher-resolution format, S-VHS VCRs make VHS tapes look better.
2. Analog-to-digital capture card, like from Blackmagic Design or Grass Valley. Make sure it has an S-video input jack.
3. S-video cables. This cable keeps the brightness and color portions of the picture separate as it goes from the VCR to your computer. This is the best you can do from VHS. The only thing better would be RGB cables or some kind of digital output from the VCR, but no VCR has such outputs. The best is S-video, and only S-VHS VCRs have that. However, it is noticeably better than the standard composite cable, the single RCA jack, typically yellow, on most VCRs.
4. Time-base corrector (optional). The capture card might do this well enough. If not, this device would stabilize and correct the video signal. So you would connect your VCR to the time-base corrector, and the time-base corrector to your VCR --- all with S-video cables.
For your capture format, I guess you could go completely uncompressed, but ProRes is 10-bit 4:2:2 and already overkill for VHS.
Is anyone else unnerved by the short notice of passing asteroids? Anyone who finds themselves assuming that some agency has this taken care of?
On the one hand, I say, "Hey, it's 2014. We should see these months or even years ahead of time. Furthermore, we should have an asteroid defense system. Don't ask me exactly what. But it's 2014, man."
On the other hand, I say, "Hey's it's only sixty feet wide. How could we possibly have seen it much sooner in the whole sky surrounding the earth? We're not so advanced. I don't care if it's the twenty-first century. Look at global warming, how long it took to uncover Osama Bin Laden. Look at Windows, systemd, Slashdot beta;)
Last night I finally started reading an old book, HTML: The Definitive Guide, 3rd. ed., published in 1998. "HTML is a young language, barely five years old," it begins, "but already in its fourth interation. Don't be surprised if another version appears before you finish reading this book."
I smiled to myself. If only he had known that HTML 4 would stay with us for eleven years, and that when 5 came out, they said they wouldn't update the version numbers anymore.
But the book was right: another version came out before I finished it.
I liked the part about poetry. That rings true. I came to programming from writing. They have a lot in common.
I am not sure there's much advice us older programmers can give new developers because the industry is a lot different now.
Experience counts. It's wiser to hire someone with 25 instead of 5 years experience. I generally get better results from the elders, whether they are my server admin, plumber, or barber. The years round off rough edges, and they're just more relaxed. They may be grumpy, but they always seem ready to make a joke. In their work they are more methodical and deliberate. They seem to be working slowly, but they finish sooner. They're mainly just less frantic, less wasted motion, more thoughful. There's no problem they can't figure out, eventually. They also are more likely to be the ones to insist on doing the job right, or thoroughly, more than the customer is asking them to. They are more likely to describe something as elegant or know what the word means.
This obsession with youth is sort of like how everything's new "on the Internet." Eventually the gleam will wear off, and society hopefully will realize that it's better to hire old people, just like it's better to hire master plumbers, 60-year-old architects, and gray-haired graphic designers. Steve Jobs, for NeXT's logo, paid $100,000 to Paul Rand, who was 72.
I recently worked with a younger programmer on a project and it was miserable. He couldn't give me 20 lines of code that didn't have a bug in it, because he was dependent upon having some QA person test his work and an IDE that would hilight every mistake.
I'm a web programmer in my 30s, but I use vi, psql, and --- well, that's about it.
I thought this was a nice response, and I would be interested in the naysayers' response to this response: The Biggest Myths, by Lennart Poettering.
Also, the main complaint against systemd is that it is big and monolithic, instead of a series of simple tools strung together, like cat, awk, and sed. But what about Apache, OpenOffice, and PostgreSQL?
Disclaimer: I am just a lowly web programmer, not an operating system developer or even a sysadmin.
I'm going to answer this in a different way: what I knew when I started that I think most programmers, and most people, don't. That may sound arrogant, but I keep seeing it every day of my working life.
I wasn't a computer science major or anywhere close: I was a film major and English minor. It was the English that has helped me more than anything learn very quickly certain secrets to programming effectively. And yet it wasn't even the English classes themselves, because a lot of what is fashionable to teach in English is misleading or harmful.
What really happened was a certain approach to writing. It is taught clearly in just a few books, like The Elements of Style and On Writing Well. Reading these books literally changed my life. If I were to try to summarize it, it would be that the goal of writing is to reach the reader as plainly as possible, instead of writing in a flowery, fancy, or important-sounding way. To do that actually is the greatest amount of work. It actually is the opposite of everyone's inclination. Even for professional, longtime writers, it doesn't happen on the first draft or even the seventh draft. It involves adhering to certain non-glamorous principles like using as few words as possible and preferring the short word over the long one. It means putting yourself in the background. In short, in trying to be elegant.
Just $20 a month? And that's from someone biased towards it?
Anyway, now let's see a study of how much advertising has cost each of us from: - clicking, scrolling, and squinting for the actual content - giving up, quitting, clicking back, and missing something - buying, setting up, and using antivirus and adblocking software - buying some of the frivolous things advertised, after at last being worn down by it, even a bit - waiting for the page to load - waiting for computer to run at all, given the heavy load some of our protective software puts on our computers
GMail is a good example of an interface that you don't need to read a user guide first for --- although they do have short articles for those who get stuck. Google in general does user interfaces well. I credit it to: (1) using one-word, plain-English text labels instead of icons (or at least they used to), (2) clean and simple layout (which, by the way, is anything but simple to make) and (3) just a thousand little things to make the user's life easier. For example, while most email programs showed just the subject in the list, GMail showed as much as the message as possible. After all, people are bad at writing subjects. Little things like that, a hundred times over. There's no one big thing that turns it from a bad UI to a good one. It's just lots and lots and lots of polishing.
37Signals at least writes about what I think is the most efficient route to good software. See their book, Getting Real. I haven't used their software much, so I don't know how well they execute, but lots of people like it.
I think you should major in UI and minor in documentation. I think you will always need some documentation. And maybe your software needs a lot. Some software does. And a few of those projects have outstanding documentation. I don't know, see how PostgreSQL keeps theirs up to date.
I'm taking this quote totally out of context, I know, but I think the idea of The United States, instead of The Large Monolithic Country Spanning This Much People and Land was ingenious. Like anything, it can be abused. No matter how many laws you make, you can't stomp out wickedness. By the way, this was the original meaning phrase, "You can't legislate morality."
I loved school, but I'm for summer break, a generous one from Memorial through Labor Day. In fact I've been mulling whether grown-ups should have summer breaks too, if we could.
School is a narrow, weird world. It readied me in some ways, but in others I was a seedling. There are other ways a child must grow. Playing at home and in the neighborhood, hanging from trees, exploring, etc., are very good for the brain and the heart. Some kids go to camp, whether it be outdoor, sports, music, or whatever. You can't very well spend a month concentrating on a certain field when you have to go to school. I myself wasn't a joiner. I rejected Boy Scouts, band, and all sports. But I made up for it when I discovered moviemaking. In high school I made about 40 movies, short ones, but they had screenplays, multiple camera angles, special effects, editing, the best I could do.
I lament that I no longer have that creativity, and I blame it on the year-round non-stop drudgery that is the American way. Someone once said that a Frenchman told them you need five weeks: one week to get ready, two weeks to go somewhere, and two weeks to recover from vacation. Here we nary get more than week off at a time. There's just never a chance to recharge.
"Unsupported" is the magic word to get huge companies like mine to at last move on. I can't tell you how happy that will make me, an intranet programmer, if my company's official browser is IE 11 or something.
Right now it's 8. It and 7 were wonderful improvements in CSS from IE 6, which our official browser until just a few years ago. I fought with IE 6 for years and it felt like it would it never quite go away. I know that there are some poor souls in the world still using IE 6, but since it's no longer our company's official browser, I don't have to think about it. The thing that made my company finally upgrade was because a vendor forced them to, saying that their web app would no longer work in IE 6.
While IE 7 and 8 brought real improvements in CSS support, JavaScript is quirky until at least 9. Microsoft's unpredictable implementation of JavaScript is part of the reason JavaScript has a shady reputation. If Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari were the only browsers I had to write against, it would have been a different life.
Okay, y'all can stop mentioning how vi and emacs do everything these do plus come preinstalled on Linux systems. From the article:
Two of most popular and powerful plain text editors are Emacs and Vim. However, we didn’t include them in this group test for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if you are using either, congratulations: you don’t need to switch. Secondly, both of these have a steep learning curve, especially to the GUI-oriented desktop generation who have access to alternatives that are much more inviting.
This is for people moving to a text editor from Word.
Malicious actors could create a malicious mobile application with a digital identity certificate that claims to be issued by Adobe Systems.
It's a good thing most actors aren't good at programming.
Seriously, why do we feel we must constantly reel words, which were perfectly content in their familiar habitat, into the jargonic fold? "Actor"? Couldn't we have used one of dozens of words already used in everyday English: programmers, hackers, thieves, people? That last suggestion brings up another question: which of the two instances of the word "malicious" could safely be removed from the sentence? Both. After a long introduction about a security hole, we're so ready for a scenario about villainy that we would be positively thrown off otherwise. At least they said "could create" and not "could potentially create."
Someone could put a fake certificate from Adobe into their mobile app.
There.
The flaw appears to have been introduced to Android through an open source component, Apache Harmony. Google turned to Harmony as an alternative means of supporting Java in the absence of a deal with Oracle to license Java directly.
After the lawsuit from Oracle and now this, if I were the one who chose Java as Android's language, I would be kicking myself just about every day now.
Forgotten? Not by anyone who was in broadcasting in the early 90's. It was quite a machine for us, even though it took all night to render an animated flame-effect title overlay.
I also will always remember it. In my formative junior high years, I took a video class that had among its gear an Amiga 2500, and I tried to make something like a live-action take on Animator's Revenge with Daffy Duck. From the article:
With the Video Toaster card, it was now possible to do with video editing and special effects what before took literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to do.
In the hands of an imaginative seventh grader, the Amiga Toaster was a ton of fun. For the same reason, the execution severely lacking, my videos were hard to watch for anyone but family and friends.
Slashdot Mirror
Silverlight and Flash had a reason when they were created.
Flash had a reason when it was created. Silverlight did not.
"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
--- JFK, 1962
So as the ultimate hipster, I will use desktop Linux and Windows Phone.
Compared to the Microsofty cacophony of yesteryear:
- Windows Starter
- Windows Home Basic
- Windows Home Premium
- Windows Professional
- Windows Enterprise
- Windows Ultimate
and that's just for the Desktop edition. I'll take a move in the opposite direction, hoping they'll eventually settle on a happy medium.
A programmer should be able to pick up another language in a matter of weeks and master it within a year. Do your best in whatever language you like or need now. While it's fun to talk about the pros and cons of different languages, the idea of being stuck in a language is silly.
DISCLAIMER: You may have to network socially to bypass those who rely too much on words in resumes. You may have to do a couple hobby projects. You may have to take a pay cut while an employer waits for you to get up to speed.
I don't know of any services. The only way I know would be to get my own gear:
1. S-VHS VCR. Even if your tapes weren't recorded in this higher-resolution format, S-VHS VCRs make VHS tapes look better.
2. Analog-to-digital capture card, like from Blackmagic Design or Grass Valley. Make sure it has an S-video input jack.
3. S-video cables. This cable keeps the brightness and color portions of the picture separate as it goes from the VCR to your computer. This is the best you can do from VHS. The only thing better would be RGB cables or some kind of digital output from the VCR, but no VCR has such outputs. The best is S-video, and only S-VHS VCRs have that. However, it is noticeably better than the standard composite cable, the single RCA jack, typically yellow, on most VCRs.
4. Time-base corrector (optional). The capture card might do this well enough. If not, this device would stabilize and correct the video signal. So you would connect your VCR to the time-base corrector, and the time-base corrector to your VCR --- all with S-video cables.
For your capture format, I guess you could go completely uncompressed, but ProRes is 10-bit 4:2:2 and already overkill for VHS.
Is anyone else unnerved by the short notice of passing asteroids? Anyone who finds themselves assuming that some agency has this taken care of?
On the one hand, I say, "Hey, it's 2014. We should see these months or even years ahead of time. Furthermore, we should have an asteroid defense system. Don't ask me exactly what. But it's 2014, man."
On the other hand, I say, "Hey's it's only sixty feet wide. How could we possibly have seen it much sooner in the whole sky surrounding the earth? We're not so advanced. I don't care if it's the twenty-first century. Look at global warming, how long it took to uncover Osama Bin Laden. Look at Windows, systemd, Slashdot beta ;)
I would be interested in the anyone's response to Lennart Poetterings rebuttal to the common complaints about systemd.
I'm too n00b to know who's right.
Judging from this description in an older story, I'm wondering why the Linux community didn't embrace depinit.
Just in case anyone else but me is having a hard time finding out what the book actually is, it's called What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions.
Slashdot: home of the best comment moderation system and the worst article summaries.
Last night I finally started reading an old book, HTML: The Definitive Guide, 3rd. ed., published in 1998. "HTML is a young language, barely five years old," it begins, "but already in its fourth interation. Don't be surprised if another version appears before you finish reading this book."
I smiled to myself. If only he had known that HTML 4 would stay with us for eleven years, and that when 5 came out, they said they wouldn't update the version numbers anymore.
But the book was right: another version came out before I finished it.
I liked the part about poetry. That rings true. I came to programming from writing. They have a lot in common.
I am not sure there's much advice us older programmers can give new developers because the industry is a lot different now.
Experience counts. It's wiser to hire someone with 25 instead of 5 years experience. I generally get better results from the elders, whether they are my server admin, plumber, or barber. The years round off rough edges, and they're just more relaxed. They may be grumpy, but they always seem ready to make a joke. In their work they are more methodical and deliberate. They seem to be working slowly, but they finish sooner. They're mainly just less frantic, less wasted motion, more thoughful. There's no problem they can't figure out, eventually. They also are more likely to be the ones to insist on doing the job right, or thoroughly, more than the customer is asking them to. They are more likely to describe something as elegant or know what the word means.
This obsession with youth is sort of like how everything's new "on the Internet." Eventually the gleam will wear off, and society hopefully will realize that it's better to hire old people, just like it's better to hire master plumbers, 60-year-old architects, and gray-haired graphic designers. Steve Jobs, for NeXT's logo, paid $100,000 to Paul Rand, who was 72.
I recently worked with a younger programmer on a project and it was miserable. He couldn't give me 20 lines of code that didn't have a bug in it, because he was dependent upon having some QA person test his work and an IDE that would hilight every mistake.
I'm a web programmer in my 30s, but I use vi, psql, and --- well, that's about it.
I thought this was a nice response, and I would be interested in the naysayers' response to this response: The Biggest Myths, by Lennart Poettering.
Also, the main complaint against systemd is that it is big and monolithic, instead of a series of simple tools strung together, like cat, awk, and sed. But what about Apache, OpenOffice, and PostgreSQL?
Disclaimer: I am just a lowly web programmer, not an operating system developer or even a sysadmin.
I'm going to answer this in a different way: what I knew when I started that I think most programmers, and most people, don't. That may sound arrogant, but I keep seeing it every day of my working life.
I wasn't a computer science major or anywhere close: I was a film major and English minor. It was the English that has helped me more than anything learn very quickly certain secrets to programming effectively. And yet it wasn't even the English classes themselves, because a lot of what is fashionable to teach in English is misleading or harmful.
What really happened was a certain approach to writing. It is taught clearly in just a few books, like The Elements of Style and On Writing Well. Reading these books literally changed my life. If I were to try to summarize it, it would be that the goal of writing is to reach the reader as plainly as possible, instead of writing in a flowery, fancy, or important-sounding way. To do that actually is the greatest amount of work. It actually is the opposite of everyone's inclination. Even for professional, longtime writers, it doesn't happen on the first draft or even the seventh draft. It involves adhering to certain non-glamorous principles like using as few words as possible and preferring the short word over the long one. It means putting yourself in the background. In short, in trying to be elegant.
Just $20 a month? And that's from someone biased towards it?
Anyway, now let's see a study of how much advertising has cost each of us from:
- clicking, scrolling, and squinting for the actual content
- giving up, quitting, clicking back, and missing something
- buying, setting up, and using antivirus and adblocking software
- buying some of the frivolous things advertised, after at last being worn down by it, even a bit
- waiting for the page to load
- waiting for computer to run at all, given the heavy load some of our protective software puts on our computers
there are inevitably going to be complaints; that happens any time *anything* changes
Obligatory
GMail is a good example of an interface that you don't need to read a user guide first for --- although they do have short articles for those who get stuck. Google in general does user interfaces well. I credit it to: (1) using one-word, plain-English text labels instead of icons (or at least they used to), (2) clean and simple layout (which, by the way, is anything but simple to make) and (3) just a thousand little things to make the user's life easier. For example, while most email programs showed just the subject in the list, GMail showed as much as the message as possible. After all, people are bad at writing subjects. Little things like that, a hundred times over. There's no one big thing that turns it from a bad UI to a good one. It's just lots and lots and lots of polishing.
37Signals at least writes about what I think is the most efficient route to good software. See their book, Getting Real. I haven't used their software much, so I don't know how well they execute, but lots of people like it.
I think you should major in UI and minor in documentation. I think you will always need some documentation. And maybe your software needs a lot. Some software does. And a few of those projects have outstanding documentation. I don't know, see how PostgreSQL keeps theirs up to date.
InfoWorld sucks.
We've been snydeq rolled. This story was submitted by snydeq, whose every link points to InfoWorld.
It's crazy that each state has its own laws!
I'm taking this quote totally out of context, I know, but I think the idea of The United States, instead of The Large Monolithic Country Spanning This Much People and Land was ingenious. Like anything, it can be abused. No matter how many laws you make, you can't stomp out wickedness. By the way, this was the original meaning phrase, "You can't legislate morality."
I loved school, but I'm for summer break, a generous one from Memorial through Labor Day. In fact I've been mulling whether grown-ups should have summer breaks too, if we could.
School is a narrow, weird world. It readied me in some ways, but in others I was a seedling. There are other ways a child must grow. Playing at home and in the neighborhood, hanging from trees, exploring, etc., are very good for the brain and the heart. Some kids go to camp, whether it be outdoor, sports, music, or whatever. You can't very well spend a month concentrating on a certain field when you have to go to school. I myself wasn't a joiner. I rejected Boy Scouts, band, and all sports. But I made up for it when I discovered moviemaking. In high school I made about 40 movies, short ones, but they had screenplays, multiple camera angles, special effects, editing, the best I could do.
I lament that I no longer have that creativity, and I blame it on the year-round non-stop drudgery that is the American way. Someone once said that a Frenchman told them you need five weeks: one week to get ready, two weeks to go somewhere, and two weeks to recover from vacation. Here we nary get more than week off at a time. There's just never a chance to recharge.
"Unsupported" is the magic word to get huge companies like mine to at last move on. I can't tell you how happy that will make me, an intranet programmer, if my company's official browser is IE 11 or something.
Right now it's 8. It and 7 were wonderful improvements in CSS from IE 6, which our official browser until just a few years ago. I fought with IE 6 for years and it felt like it would it never quite go away. I know that there are some poor souls in the world still using IE 6, but since it's no longer our company's official browser, I don't have to think about it. The thing that made my company finally upgrade was because a vendor forced them to, saying that their web app would no longer work in IE 6.
While IE 7 and 8 brought real improvements in CSS support, JavaScript is quirky until at least 9. Microsoft's unpredictable implementation of JavaScript is part of the reason JavaScript has a shady reputation. If Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari were the only browsers I had to write against, it would have been a different life.
Okay, y'all can stop mentioning how vi and emacs do everything these do plus come preinstalled on Linux systems. From the article:
Two of most popular and powerful plain text editors are Emacs and Vim. However, we didn’t include them in this group test for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if you are using either, congratulations: you don’t need to switch. Secondly, both of these have a steep learning curve, especially to the GUI-oriented desktop generation who have access to alternatives that are much more inviting.
This is for people moving to a text editor from Word.
I am nonplussed and yet, not nonplussed. Figure that out ;)
Malicious actors could create a malicious mobile application with a digital identity certificate that claims to be issued by Adobe Systems.
It's a good thing most actors aren't good at programming.
Seriously, why do we feel we must constantly reel words, which were perfectly content in their familiar habitat, into the jargonic fold? "Actor"? Couldn't we have used one of dozens of words already used in everyday English: programmers, hackers, thieves, people? That last suggestion brings up another question: which of the two instances of the word "malicious" could safely be removed from the sentence? Both. After a long introduction about a security hole, we're so ready for a scenario about villainy that we would be positively thrown off otherwise. At least they said "could create" and not "could potentially create."
Someone could put a fake certificate from Adobe into their mobile app.
There.
The flaw appears to have been introduced to Android through an open source component, Apache Harmony. Google turned to Harmony as an alternative means of supporting Java in the absence of a deal with Oracle to license Java directly.
After the lawsuit from Oracle and now this, if I were the one who chose Java as Android's language, I would be kicking myself just about every day now.
Forgotten? Not by anyone who was in broadcasting in the early 90's. It was quite a machine for us, even though it took all night to render an animated flame-effect title overlay.
I also will always remember it. In my formative junior high years, I took a video class that had among its gear an Amiga 2500, and I tried to make something like a live-action take on Animator's Revenge with Daffy Duck. From the article:
With the Video Toaster card, it was now possible to do with video editing and special effects what before took literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to do.
In the hands of an imaginative seventh grader, the Amiga Toaster was a ton of fun. For the same reason, the execution severely lacking, my videos were hard to watch for anyone but family and friends.