Yeah but only if you have a 5.0 GPA. I have a find who works in the admissions office at UC Berkeley by the way.
The problem is collage snobbery. You can get a fine education at a lot of state schools, but when hiring times come around the two resumes are side by side and one says Harvard and the other says Whats Amada U and you guess which one gets the job.
Please read my post above and a couple of other ones as well. We have LOTS of very smart people in this country. I know how to use a lathe because I took metal shop in high school. I could learn how to run a CNC lathe pretty quickly. But you know how many machining jobs are in this country, not very damn many. Why? Because I can have a factory floor full of CNC lathes cranking widgets that ONE guy sets in motion because they are doing a production run of the same things. We used to have a floor full of lathes with a guy at each lathe cranking out the same widgets.
The point is that we have created all this technology to make things easier and we have not figured out what to do with all the people that are not needed to operate those lathes to crank out widgets.
There is a machine shop that is fully automated close by and it employees about 10 machine techs that work three shifts just walking around the shop floor watching the machines make stuff. They employee 3 machinist's.
Ok, while I agree with your overall opinion I have to take umbrage with a few things.
The problem is that the "invisible hand" does not take the human quotient into consideration.
If this were 2405, star date whatever the fuck, then invisible hand not matter because, "material needs are seen to, there is no hunger there is no disease there is no...", but since this is 2010 none of that is true.
There used to be excellent blue collar jobs in the semi-conductor manufacturing sector in the Santa Clara valley ( aka silicon valley ) but those are gone. My sister worked in wafer fab, QA for some of the biggest. Those are gone, overseas where they can get cheap labor and very little if any environmental regulation.
When I was graduating from High School in Fremont CA I had a neighbor who would have walked my application into the GM assembly plant, aka NUMI aka Now Closed, and I could have had starting pay of 8.50 an hour in 1977 and at that time it was a good wage. I could buy a car and a house and raise a family. There was also a Peterbuilt plant, a Mack plant and a Ford plant and now those are all gone.
There used to be foundries and all sorts of manufacturing in the San Francisco bay Area. We had two Naval Shipyards , Hunters Point and Vallejo. Hunters point is now light manufacturing but will soon be a SF-49'rs stadium and more shopping malls. The City of Vallejo is pretty much Bankrupt.
The cities of Oakland and San Francisco are not far behind and that is because the manufacturing base is gone. Bank of America used to have a huge Development Center in Concord California and now that is gone. Off-shored to India with the usual kicker of, "Want your severance package? Guess what you have to sit and train the guy from India that is replacing your job because we can pay 1/10 of what we pay you. People were so distraught that one woman picked up her package after she had trained her replacement, walked out to her car and blew her brains out. Bank of America moved to North Carolina where they pay people half of what they used to pay people here and nothing has taken its place.
So while this might be good for BofA and its shareholders it is not so good for the rest of the people that used to have good jobs.
The problem is we have 200 million or so people in this country. Not everyone can be a programmer or a web designer. Not everyone can be the garbage collector, not everyone can go and work the fields. Not everyone can be an engineer or a doctor or even a lawyer.
We used to be a diverse working country that did a lot of everything, now we don't do nearly as much as we used to do, and what is left we try and do with as little human intervention as we can get away with because robots don't get tired and make mistakes and they don't go on vacation or have kids and need to take time off.
The cycle has shown that manufacturing will move to the cheapest labor pool and the least regulation. The problem is that the labor pool will demand more and the regulation will increase as the next love canal's happen etc. etc. They went to Japan, then to Korea and then Malaysia, then hear and there and now they are going to China.
One would think that as things move around the world that they would eventually find their way back to the USA when we are a 2nd world country and our people will take whatever job they can get because it will put food on the table.
I am not sure that will actually happen because you know what? There are over 2 billion people in China and their government is very happy to ram just about anything up their peoples asses if it will make the old fuckers in the party look god and get them rich in the process. Wait.... Hmm reminds of the old robber baron days of the USA. I guess they paid attention. Unfortunately I see no change on the horizon as they will not yield to the calls to get the breaker boys out of the coal mines.
We had this LONG before the internet ( as we know it ) came into being.
Back then it was called dial up time share or (DUTS).
There is a guy that has a tiny warehouse space and inside it lives an HP-3000 that is as maxed out as he could get it when he purchased it used from Stanford University. Instead of Dial up you connect to it over the net and it runs legacy applications that are still considered to be quite valuable. He makes himself enough money to pay for the bandwidth, the space and the electric bill AND all his hobbies since he retired from, you guessed it, HP.
But really it is about controlling the machine and more importantly the user experience on the machine.
Why does the iPhone / iPad attract so many users? I will give you a hint, not because it has the apple logo on it.
It is because you have an extremely well thought out AND consistent U/I that just plain works. The iPhone was a paradigm change plain and simple. If you could use one application on the iPhone you could use them all no matter what the task was. Apple has no, I repeat NO, upside in introducing a program that does not conform it is as simple as that.
Steve Jobs may in fact be a salesman but he knows quality when he sees it and dropping Flash into the middle of the iPhone ecosystem would diminish that quality it is as simple as that.
RFC's are like democracy, it is the worst form of government known on the face of the planet, it is just better then everything else we have tried thus far.
At their best they are precise and ambiguous, at their worst they are inscrutable and comprehensible.
Specifications via consensus means that every pissant and their cousin gets to have a whack at making sure their sacred ox does not get gored, or conversely making sure that the sacred ox of someone they don't like does in fact get gored and gored badly.
Having actually sat down and traced through a few of these I feel your pain. At some point they pretty much kinda work, sorta, maybe. After a couple of cocktails and a few huffy e-mails you might actually get to grips with whatever the problem is and get some work done. Unfortunately by then you have forgotten what the hell you were trying to do in the 1st place.
Yeah, the article didn't dispute that either. The reason techie geeks want alternatives (inferior as they may be) is Apple's tyrannical control over the platform.
Android is a fairly large paradigm shift and it remains to be seen just how it will fall out. It is already being morf'd by the carriers and tied up and tied down. There is no longer one consistent version of Android and they are now attempting to bring it back into one stream sort of like the kernel itself, but I doubt this will be successful given that all the carriers are using it in different ways and have wildly different attitudes when it comes to giving back.
Well as long as the code meets Linus's guidelines yes.
I do realize that Google provides time for employees to work on outside projects but this is a bit more then that. These are some fundamental changes to the kernel.
Google has proven to be benevolent, but I am not sure I want their hooks in my Linux kernel. Google exists to make money and do things in their own self interest. The problem is if their fork gets merged that they will become the maintainers for this. I believe as long as it remains in their self interest they will maintain the code but as soon as it is no longer in their self interest it will be abandoned and where will that leave us should we all decide to begin uses that functionality?
I think they should put the parts that are different out there, lets us all examine them and then let us decide if we want their frankencode or not.
If you are building kits and the like, you are correct. Someone else has already done the math for you. Yes you can even tweak them a bit and still not have the thing go up in a puff of smoke.
If you want to do something like build a speaker from scratch or design even the most basic amplifier ( I am talking a basic common collector circuit ) and wonder why the thing makes a better oscillator then an amplifier you have to be able to apply the formulas that every engineer uses to design amplifiers.
When i was WAY younger I would try and do things without doing the math and for the most part they did not work, or worked badly. Once I understood the math and then actually did the math things started to do what i actually wanted them to do the vast majority of the time. Unfortunately electronics is not inherently intuitive, you still need to know how to calculate the correct values for your bias resister or filter cap or RC tank circuit that will resonate at the right frequency.
You need to understand the basics. Get familiar with Ohms law first and foremost. Once you have that down a lot of things slide into place.
You need to understand Electrical Reactance since those are the most basic equations for building speakers!
There is no way around doing the math, there just isn't. If on the other hand you want to put together circuits that others have designed and can follow detailed instructions and learn to use some basic test equipment, then just learn how to solder well and have a blast, it can be very satisfying and enjoyable.
However if you are really interested, go down to your local Radio Shack, buy a simple VOM a good soldering iron ( spend more then 10 bucks ) and a hand full of resisters of assorted values, a couple of potentiometers,AA battery holder, some alligator clips and start putting them together and measuring and watching what the voltage and current does in simple DC circuits. Learn why a voltage divider works, if you want to do something exciting, get some capacitors and diodes and make a voltage doubler!
RF is VERY complicated and a lot of it is just pure fucking black magic. I remember the very first RF project I tried to build. It was from a kit. I had to hand wind a couple of inductors. I followed the instructions to the letter and the damn thing would not work!!! I checked all my solder joints, I rechecked all the components and still now joy. Finally in frustration I just tossed the thing across the room. I cursed myself, picked it up and hooked it back up to the test rig and the god damned thing was working!!! I spent hours trying to figure out why it was working! One of the inductors ( an air choke ) had gotten bent just ever so slightly so that it was no longer this perfect coil it was now a little pinched in the middle. So I removed it ( very carefully ) and wound a brand new one and again the thing would not work. I then just barely pinched it a little and it started working.
Then I compile this in objective C have I not created the resulting executable from source?
Now as silly as it seems this is a realistic. Also I believe what they are talking about when they say, "Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited" is a runtime situation. This would definitely apply to say compiling the PHP interpreter under objective C to allow PHP to access the documented APi's. This would also apply if you were creating wrappers for the documented API's like most all applications in the Windows world currently do, especially if they are dealing with the Win32 API. I mean the Win32 API is prety well documented bust almost no one uses it directly, they instead creaet wrappers for it, hell even MS does this.
Ok, from what I can gather in this whole argument it is Apple saying, "No we are not going to allow the installation of RTL's for Python, PHP, ADA, Pascal, Haskel etc. etc.".
You guys write your stuff in Java which is in turn translated to C or C++ or Obj-C and then compiled as an iPhone App, yes ?
Your code calls the Apple RTL and libs that are specifically designed for the iPhone correct?
I am pretty sure Apple does not care how you get there, I am pretty sure as long as you conform to their standards they are fine with it.
My SWAG ( Sonarmans Wild Ass Guess) is that it has to repeatedly move up and down through the water column. One you are past the main thermocline the ocean is a pretty constant temp. It might be based on sterling or something like that.
Because we are visual creatures. If we weren't then the GUI would not have been invented.
As some other posters have noted it removes flexibility. I like another poster frequently throw stuff against the left margin so that I visually know it is something that I am experimenting with or testing and mean to delete at a later point.
And personally I like my tabs to be 8 spaces most of the time, thank you very much.
An appropriate visual block closing symbol allows me to glance and know it is the end of the block. White space is called white space for a reason, it is inherently non-visual and blends right into the background. This is not conducive to being able to tell at a glance where my block closes.
And it is just a guess but I am pretty sure whoever came up with this did so purely as a gimmick to try and make Python stand out from the rest of the scripting languages.
Yeah... Null pointer problems are NOT caused by the language but by the programmer and please don't try and dispute that because that is simply a fail from the start.
And no, there are LOTS and LOTS of programmers who know how to write code wherein they do not blindly dereference pointers and assume something is there and let it fly.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but only if you have a 5.0 GPA. I have a find who works in the admissions office at UC Berkeley by the way.
The problem is collage snobbery. You can get a fine education at a lot of state schools, but when hiring times come around the two resumes are side by side and one says Harvard and the other says Whats Amada U and you guess which one gets the job.
Please read my post above and a couple of other ones as well. We have LOTS of very smart people in this country. I know how to use a lathe because I took metal shop in high school. I could learn how to run a CNC lathe pretty quickly. But you know how many machining jobs are in this country, not very damn many. Why? Because I can have a factory floor full of CNC lathes cranking widgets that ONE guy sets in motion because they are doing a production run of the same things. We used to have a floor full of lathes with a guy at each lathe cranking out the same widgets.
The point is that we have created all this technology to make things easier and we have not figured out what to do with all the people that are not needed to operate those lathes to crank out widgets.
There is a machine shop that is fully automated close by and it employees about 10 machine techs that work three shifts just walking around the shop floor watching the machines make stuff. They employee 3 machinist's.
Ok, while I agree with your overall opinion I have to take umbrage with a few things.
The problem is that the "invisible hand" does not take the human quotient into consideration.
If this were 2405, star date whatever the fuck, then invisible hand not matter because, "material needs are seen to, there is no hunger there is no disease there is no ...", but since this is 2010 none of that is true.
There used to be excellent blue collar jobs in the semi-conductor manufacturing sector in the Santa Clara valley ( aka silicon valley ) but those are gone. My sister worked in wafer fab, QA for some of the biggest. Those are gone, overseas where they can get cheap labor and very little if any environmental regulation.
When I was graduating from High School in Fremont CA I had a neighbor who would have walked my application into the GM assembly plant, aka NUMI aka Now Closed, and I could have had starting pay of 8.50 an hour in 1977 and at that time it was a good wage. I could buy a car and a house and raise a family. There was also a Peterbuilt plant, a Mack plant and a Ford plant and now those are all gone.
There used to be foundries and all sorts of manufacturing in the San Francisco bay Area. We had two Naval Shipyards , Hunters Point and Vallejo. Hunters point is now light manufacturing but will soon be a SF-49'rs stadium and more shopping malls. The City of Vallejo is pretty much Bankrupt.
The cities of Oakland and San Francisco are not far behind and that is because the manufacturing base is gone. Bank of America used to have a huge Development Center in Concord California and now that is gone. Off-shored to India with the usual kicker of, "Want your severance package? Guess what you have to sit and train the guy from India that is replacing your job because we can pay 1/10 of what we pay you. People were so distraught that one woman picked up her package after she had trained her replacement, walked out to her car and blew her brains out. Bank of America moved to North Carolina where they pay people half of what they used to pay people here and nothing has taken its place.
So while this might be good for BofA and its shareholders it is not so good for the rest of the people that used to have good jobs.
The problem is we have 200 million or so people in this country. Not everyone can be a programmer or a web designer. Not everyone can be the garbage collector, not everyone can go and work the fields. Not everyone can be an engineer or a doctor or even a lawyer.
We used to be a diverse working country that did a lot of everything, now we don't do nearly as much as we used to do, and what is left we try and do with as little human intervention as we can get away with because robots don't get tired and make mistakes and they don't go on vacation or have kids and need to take time off.
The cycle has shown that manufacturing will move to the cheapest labor pool and the least regulation. The problem is that the labor pool will demand more and the regulation will increase as the next love canal's happen etc. etc. They went to Japan, then to Korea and then Malaysia, then hear and there and now they are going to China.
One would think that as things move around the world that they would eventually find their way back to the USA when we are a 2nd world country and our people will take whatever job they can get because it will put food on the table.
I am not sure that will actually happen because you know what? There are over 2 billion people in China and their government is very happy to ram just about anything up their peoples asses if it will make the old fuckers in the party look god and get them rich in the process. Wait.... Hmm reminds of the old robber baron days of the USA. I guess they paid attention. Unfortunately I see no change on the horizon as they will not yield to the calls to get the breaker boys out of the coal mines.
We had this LONG before the internet ( as we know it ) came into being.
Back then it was called dial up time share or (DUTS).
There is a guy that has a tiny warehouse space and inside it lives an HP-3000 that is as maxed out as he could get it when he purchased it used from Stanford University. Instead of Dial up you connect to it over the net and it runs legacy applications that are still considered to be quite valuable. He makes himself enough money to pay for the bandwidth, the space and the electric bill AND all his hobbies since he retired from, you guessed it, HP.
It is the "My Dick is bigger then yours!" fight.
But really it is about controlling the machine and more importantly the user experience on the machine.
Why does the iPhone / iPad attract so many users? I will give you a hint, not because it has the apple logo on it.
It is because you have an extremely well thought out AND consistent U/I that just plain works. The iPhone was a paradigm change plain and simple. If you could use one application on the iPhone you could use them all no matter what the task was. Apple has no, I repeat NO, upside in introducing a program that does not conform it is as simple as that.
Steve Jobs may in fact be a salesman but he knows quality when he sees it and dropping Flash into the middle of the iPhone ecosystem would diminish that quality it is as simple as that.
RFC's are like democracy, it is the worst form of government known on the face of the planet, it is just better then everything else we have tried thus far.
At their best they are precise and ambiguous, at their worst they are inscrutable and comprehensible.
Specifications via consensus means that every pissant and their cousin gets to have a whack at making sure their sacred ox does not get gored, or conversely making sure that the sacred ox of someone they don't like does in fact get gored and gored badly.
Having actually sat down and traced through a few of these I feel your pain. At some point they pretty much kinda work, sorta, maybe. After a couple of cocktails and a few huffy e-mails you might actually get to grips with whatever the problem is and get some work done. Unfortunately by then you have forgotten what the hell you were trying to do in the 1st place.
Yeah, the article didn't dispute that either. The reason techie geeks want alternatives (inferior as they may be) is Apple's tyrannical control over the platform.
There, fixed that for ya
Not to trivialize your concerns, but that is why they invented the mainframe and dumb terminals.
It is already happening. Look for the AppWeb project towards the end of the year.
Not so much.
Android is a fairly large paradigm shift and it remains to be seen just how it will fall out. It is already being morf'd by the carriers and tied up and tied down. There is no longer one consistent version of Android and they are now attempting to bring it back into one stream sort of like the kernel itself, but I doubt this will be successful given that all the carriers are using it in different ways and have wildly different attitudes when it comes to giving back.
Well as long as the code meets Linus's guidelines yes.
I do realize that Google provides time for employees to work on outside projects but this is a bit more then that. These are some fundamental changes to the kernel.
And here is why.
Google has proven to be benevolent, but I am not sure I want their hooks in my Linux kernel. Google exists to make money and do things in their own self interest. The problem is if their fork gets merged that they will become the maintainers for this. I believe as long as it remains in their self interest they will maintain the code but as soon as it is no longer in their self interest it will be abandoned and where will that leave us should we all decide to begin uses that functionality?
I think they should put the parts that are different out there, lets us all examine them and then let us decide if we want their frankencode or not.
Pretty Pictures
If you are building kits and the like, you are correct. Someone else has already done the math for you. Yes you can even tweak them a bit and still not have the thing go up in a puff of smoke.
If you want to do something like build a speaker from scratch or design even the most basic amplifier ( I am talking a basic common collector circuit ) and wonder why the thing makes a better oscillator then an amplifier you have to be able to apply the formulas that every engineer uses to design amplifiers.
When i was WAY younger I would try and do things without doing the math and for the most part they did not work, or worked badly. Once I understood the math and then actually did the math things started to do what i actually wanted them to do the vast majority of the time. Unfortunately electronics is not inherently intuitive, you still need to know how to calculate the correct values for your bias resister or filter cap or RC tank circuit that will resonate at the right frequency.
I am laughing so damn hard. I loved tossing a noob a charged bathtub cap!!!!
Resisters is series R = R1+R2+R3+Rn
Resisters in parallel R = sum(R) / count(R)
It gets fun when you have both!
You need to understand the basics. Get familiar with Ohms law first and foremost. Once you have that down a lot of things slide into place.
You need to understand Electrical Reactance since those are the most basic equations for building speakers!
There is no way around doing the math, there just isn't. If on the other hand you want to put together circuits that others have designed and can follow detailed instructions and learn to use some basic test equipment, then just learn how to solder well and have a blast, it can be very satisfying and enjoyable.
However if you are really interested, go down to your local Radio Shack, buy a simple VOM a good soldering iron ( spend more then 10 bucks ) and a hand full of resisters of assorted values, a couple of potentiometers,AA battery holder, some alligator clips and start putting them together and measuring and watching what the voltage and current does in simple DC circuits. Learn why a voltage divider works, if you want to do something exciting, get some capacitors and diodes and make a voltage doubler!
RF is VERY complicated and a lot of it is just pure fucking black magic. I remember the very first RF project I tried to build. It was from a kit. I had to hand wind a couple of inductors. I followed the instructions to the letter and the damn thing would not work!!! I checked all my solder joints, I rechecked all the components and still now joy. Finally in frustration I just tossed the thing across the room. I cursed myself, picked it up and hooked it back up to the test rig and the god damned thing was working!!! I spent hours trying to figure out why it was working! One of the inductors ( an air choke ) had gotten bent just ever so slightly so that it was no longer this perfect coil it was now a little pinched in the middle. So I removed it ( very carefully ) and wound a brand new one and again the thing would not work. I then just barely pinched it a little and it started working.
Really? I don't see how. If I have a tool that translates pascal to Objective C then I think I have satisfied the requirement, eg:
function foo(x:integer): integer ; := sqr(x);
begin
result
end;
Which is translated to:
-(int)method:(int)i {
return [self square_root: i];
}
Then I compile this in objective C have I not created the resulting executable from source?
Now as silly as it seems this is a realistic. Also I believe what they are talking about when they say, "Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited" is a runtime situation. This would definitely apply to say compiling the PHP interpreter under objective C to allow PHP to access the documented APi's. This would also apply if you were creating wrappers for the documented API's like most all applications in the Windows world currently do, especially if they are dealing with the Win32 API. I mean the Win32 API is prety well documented bust almost no one uses it directly, they instead creaet wrappers for it, hell even MS does this.
Ok, from what I can gather in this whole argument it is Apple saying, "No we are not going to allow the installation of RTL's for Python, PHP, ADA, Pascal, Haskel etc. etc.".
You guys write your stuff in Java which is in turn translated to C or C++ or Obj-C and then compiled as an iPhone App, yes ?
Your code calls the Apple RTL and libs that are specifically designed for the iPhone correct?
I am pretty sure Apple does not care how you get there, I am pretty sure as long as you conform to their standards they are fine with it.
Which is written in C
My SWAG ( Sonarmans Wild Ass Guess) is that it has to repeatedly move up and down through the water column. One you are past the main thermocline the ocean is a pretty constant temp. It might be based on sterling or something like that.
Because we are visual creatures. If we weren't then the GUI would not have been invented.
As some other posters have noted it removes flexibility. I like another poster frequently throw stuff against the left margin so that I visually know it is something that I am experimenting with or testing and mean to delete at a later point.
And personally I like my tabs to be 8 spaces most of the time, thank you very much.
An appropriate visual block closing symbol allows me to glance and know it is the end of the block. White space is called white space for a reason, it is inherently non-visual and blends right into the background. This is not conducive to being able to tell at a glance where my block closes.
And it is just a guess but I am pretty sure whoever came up with this did so purely as a gimmick to try and make Python stand out from the rest of the scripting languages.
gets() is not a language, gets() is a function, in the stdio lib. Sheesh.
Yeah... Null pointer problems are NOT caused by the language but by the programmer and please don't try and dispute that because that is simply a fail from the start.
And no, there are LOTS and LOTS of programmers who know how to write code wherein they do not blindly dereference pointers and assume something is there and let it fly.
Python is a C wrapper with the absolutely moronic idea that white space is an appropriate closing curly brace.