Stormbringer

That, plus the tendency of people from other specialties cough astrophysicists especially cough to wax lyrical and ascribe amazing powers to 'evolution' and the casual observer would be entirely forgiven for thinking that anyone talking about "intelligent design" must be talking about evolution and that those are simply two terms for the same thing.

Before you start flaming me, my issue is not with Science! but it is with how Science! is reported on, which involves both watering down the message (turning everything into a Kipling-esque "Just so story"), and gussying up the message to make it seem more important (gotta get that funding somehow).

A not insignificant portion of the people taking those courses will not be command line savvy.

Also, I think that the fascination some programmers have for tools that are cumbersome and difficult to use is unhealthy.

The tool should not itself be the problem.

The tool should be a force multiplier that lets you solve other problems more easily.

// not sure if this is a reflection of the techno-cluelessness of the legal system, or a very astute/cynical technical assessment of Facebooks so called security.

It is the Orwellian overtones implicit in these kind of glowing references for LinkedIn that I find disturbing.

Oh yes, that and the fact that everyone who seems to be heavily into LinkedIn is a colossal douchebag.

Next up I thought I would take a snippet from the linked stackoverflow discussion and see what JSLint made of it:

127.0.0.1.toInt();

And... it complained

So I did this:

var = function() {

127.0.0.1.toInt();

}

And it complained (yes, there's a typo)

var foo = function() {

127.0.0.1.toInt();

}

And... it 'compiles' fine, no complaints. So I thought I'd push the syntax tree button to see what was going on and it tells me:

Tree:

""

Which is less than spectacularly useful.

Oh, I went back and hit the JSLint button again and now it givess me lots of errors for the above code.

Including, but not limited to complaining that 127 occurs in column 1 instead of column 9. But then I try to enter a tab at the start of the line to achieve proper indentation... and of course it doesn't work because it is in the browser and so tab just goes and selects the next control.

Sensational.

If I had to enter all my indentation as spaces, by hand, I'd conclude that the Professor teaching this was a colossal idiot.

"The policy when I went to school was to start everyone with LISP. That way, if they never got past CompSci 101, they wouldn’t be capable of impersonating a real programmer. " -- Dave Edelhart

(sorry, couldn't resist)

It's also not free as in GnuBeer either, since as a general rule they generously decline to explain the reverses in policy (pet theory: it is based on the retrograde motion of Sirius the dogstar, since Apple is clearly controlled by the reptillian lizard-people from there)

That knowing things is more important than knowing people

Hence (most good) programmers will find dealing with customers and doing phone support a tedious chore.

What you are looking for then is a programmer that doesn't passionately love programming. If you find them I am willing to bet that as far as their programming skills go they are not so good.

----

Alternately, look for someone who used to be a hot-shot programmer, but then dialled it back, "got a life". Look for programmers in their 40s or 50s who are more into the social aspect of life. The problem is, they won't work 80 hours if you're only paying them for 32.

If we accept the initial premise that designers who are also engineers are as rare as ninja-unicorns, then surely the logical thing to do is to turn them into managers?

edit (since it won't let me reply) - sorry, I meant Canada doesn't count as 'Outside the US'. Bad humour, no biscuit.

The take home lesson is that getting your language onto every desktop is hard and probably not worth the effort.

Which is sad because the best thing about Java was always how it was OS agnostic. People always used to say about Java "write once, run anywhere"... but that was wrong. It was better than that. It was _compile_ once, run anywhere.

I recently grabbed some of my old (1996) Java code from storage and then ran it on my desktop. The desktop was using a different OS, different chip architecture, everything was different from the machine it was originally compiled on. After 15 years it still ran perfectly.

C is a "write once run anywhere" language, but you have to recompile it for each different platform, which often turns out to be non-trivial. There's no way I could take C code from a Windows 386 machine and run it on a Mac or Linux multi-core 64bit machine over a decade later.

Even better would be if it didn't require Flash.

The problem is that not all elections are equally important, and it is easy for the voters to either (a) go to sleep at the wheel or (b) vote themselves more pork.

What happened to those weapons of terror? Well, the Kurds can probably tell you. Suffice it to say that not everyone was a big fan of Saddam, and some people were legitimately happy to see the US overthrow Saddam.

The main problems are this

1) bogus pretext for the war, lying to your own people

2) the means they used (bombing civilian infrastructure, cutting off power supplies to hospitals etc)

And on that note, the US has this insane idea that if they interfere with other countries, mess with their economics etc then it makes people upset with $local_dictator... but it doesn't work like that, it just makes them and everyone else in the world pissed off at the US.

3) What they did afterwards. Sticking around and trying to make the Iraqis pay for it all by looting their resources. Not good.

Afghanistan is even worse. The soviet union stuck their dick in the meat-grinder that is Afghanistan and were there for 20 years and it destroyed them and bankrupted them economically. How is the US going to fare any differently? Oh, you spent a trillion dollars on this war and your economy is in the hole for a trillion dollars. What a mysterious coincidence!

When Agile became super popular they started saying that 70% of all software projects failed.

Hmmm....

Whereas in practice, if you find something wrong or confusing with the specification, you just hunt down the business analysts and ask them what drugs they were on when they pooped out the spec. And then after walking them through their mistake, you get a new and better spec.

If you do it often enough, they will start to catch on and actually do their job better. Don't think of that as a poke at BA's either, everybody puts more effort in if they know that someone gives a crap about what they do. They may not like it at first, but you're actually empowering them.

Everything else is just smoke and mirrors, where the Freshdesk guys are trying to pretend that it is all about name calling, it isn't. Based only on what they themselves say, it is obvious that Freshdesk is a copy of Zendesk.

Copying your competitors features... well, that happens a lot. Copying their name and their features, and then acting surprised when people call you on it? That's pretty much textbook douchebaggery.

But the copying doesn't stop there, because they even copied the pricing structure!

And then they act all upset when they get accused of copying.

As for the racially inflamatory remarks... go check the last big discussion on hacker news about the state of the Indian education system. The Indians themselves say that cheating is blatant and pervasive. So while that kind of strawman argument doesn't do much for the intellectual quality of the argument.... you shouldn't complain about being stereotyped if what you are doing conforms exactly to the stereotype.

In other words, if the shoe fits, wear it. If not, then throw it.

A good tool should be a force multiplier, not just another damn hurdle.

For instance one 'perfectly naive' implementation of F(n) would be: return 1.6 ^ n;

or whatever your language of choice's equivalent is (depending on your syntax)

This strikes me as a bad thing. Didn't Orkut and Wave and other 'failed' similar services from other companies have the same problem? Limited appeal? Too recursively tied up in their own cleverness?

The thing people hate about Facebook is the trivial uses the muggles put it to. But there are not 500 million techos in the world.

Unless and until people start talking about mundane non-techo stuff, I won't consider Google+ to have succeeded.

Normal people don't care. And that is why the tablets fail.. the market doesn't care, and the pundits can't _make_ them care. The dirty little secret of the tech press is that no one pays attention to it anymore.

I think that with procrastination, one of the other elements to it is how far away the "pay-off" is. Take my client-server writing friend here. The finished product is a long way in the future, so his brain sees a lot of hard work with no 'reward', hence procrastination. Whereas if he spices it up with some short term pay-offs, then the brain may perceive a better cost/benefit scenario.

Additionally - meditate on the following koan: if a vendor builds a platform, and nobody builds a device for it, will it still be hyped by the tech-press?

It was back when early versions of Struts were 'the designated alternative', and in the bad old days of J2EE and JAX-RPC.

Then Java EE 5 came out, which solved large chunks of the pain that J2EE inflicted, JAX-RPC got replaced with the infinitely better JAX-WS and there was a new breed of web frameworks as well, which blew Struts out of the water.

About that time REST essentially became 'yesterdays technology, solving yesterdays problems'.

I find it interesting that the guy banging the REST drum is a Ruby fan. Has REST always been part of Rails? Or is it something that has crept in over the last couple of years?

Is there anything genuinely new here, or is it the same old story, some dude clinging desperately to an obsolete technology?

Has more info on this. Not sure how accurate/up to date the stats are.