You mean the mathematically based languages which are built from the ground up for dealing with data sets like Haskell wouldn't know how to handle a record of data as well? Me thinks you have limited language exposure..

You're missing the real magic here. They hooked this thing up to 4 kinect sensors so imagine waving your hand in front of your face and the 3d-glasses showing it because the kinect sensors know what movements your whole body are making.

Otherwise I find what you're talking about here pretty interesting but still, the kinect attachment is really a game changer, imagine paying 20 bucks to go for a half-hour into a huge warehouse where the kinect sensors watch you and let you actually walk physically around any virtual land scapes. Hook it into google street-view data and it could become quite realistic.

I once got distracted and poked myself in the eye while reading. -- Article #1 as evidence to counter your last dictate.

How did this even make the frontpage of slashdot? This guy's an idiot. He thinks he's being left in the dust learning the fundamentals, but thinks learning a single application framework to develop web-pages with won't mean he's left in the dust when it goes away and he doesn't know the fundamentals well enough to transfer to different technology with all his skills in tact. The fundamentals mean when you go from one language to another you aren't starting from square one in any of them. The fundamentals mean in any given technology old or new you can reason about appropriate ways to do things without having to go read endless descriptions of idiomatic techniques for the language which you then use haphazardly because you have no reasoning skills to correctly compose them.

Seriously the dude who wrote this question just needs to hear: You're wrong. Just wrong. So wrong. Keep on keeping on because you don't see what value it has to you, but it's significantly more than you clearly have any idea. You're wrong, the end.

I have no degree, I had to study so bloody hard to get these fundamentals over so many years that I wish to death I had just got the stupid loans and done the stupid CS degree. I screwed the pooch and made up for it the hard way, don't make the same mistakes.

A CS degree does pigeon hole you, and you spelled pigeon wrong. A mechanical or aerospace engineer can learn to program and get a job programming, a CS degree will however not get you working on designing engines or aeronautical devices.

I am so torn on this issue. We all know every fresh CS grad that walks into a junior role on our team knows basically nothing and needs significant mentoring to really have any useful skills. Yet there are so many important things they teach in the schools around data structures, computational analysis, and how to generally apply formal math to programming to achieve correctness as well as efficiency.

I just don't understand it I guess, how does one go from studying such important concepts to being completely incapable of applying them in the real world. I think the study of them is ever important so he should complete his CS degree, but he's not wrong in that he will still be useless when he walks out of the door with his diploma in hand and will need to be trained up from scratch all over again in the first 2 years in the real world.

My suggestion though: Finish your degree and create a portfolio of random crap and do everything you can to get recruited by MS/Apple/Google as you will get guaranteed training in proper skills at any of them (yes even MS, I did a 1 year contract stent there and half the people I worked with had CS Phds and were smart as can be, I learned a lot from that gig, there's plenty of notables who worked up through MS as well even if you don't like their products)

It's a lot harder to get into other countries, especially with the shit education we have because we were raised here. And that's the people who even had the money to afford one anyway (aka GenX and before, the rest of us are in huge debt or for future generations when loans get tight, just out of luck)

ever since I realized that's the inevitable conclusion of that mule thing I can't stop imagining one of those in "search mode" chasing somebody down. That is some scary shit.

None. But my company is a proven brain damagedly stupid company, so there's that.

Trying? Sorry, they won the war in the mid-thousands when linux became trendy so the hipsters came over but decided it was hard and so they remodeled it in the image of what they're used to. Now it's like some half-windows-half-mac cluster. Works well I'm not complaining, but it has gone so far off the highway from it's initial purpose it's hilarious. BSD is the only real option anymore that is still fullfilling the idea of "a bunch of independent pieces that work on their own". Linux is now one big thing that works altogether, and if all pieces of the system aren't working in lock-step huge portions of it will come crashing down (even including the console soon). Just like windows. Just like mac. Whatever, it's a good OS just like windows and just like macOS, but it's no longer a purpose-built OS for stability and modularity like it was. Nowadays if you want a different desktop environment you need a completely different distro for it to work. Just let that fact sink in, and remember what changing desktop-environments meant back around '99. The war was lost, only BSD is left standing; and only because it isn't trendy since the hipsters presume it's just like linux so they don't bother.

Could you imagine actually having your terminal displayed in stereoscopic 3D? Watching your DMESG print up all sticking out 3 feet off your screen in your face. I totally disagree with what this dude is doing, but that aside; that would just be totally fucking cool. :D

I'm ok with that.

I just noticed an *LPT* port card is installed on my work desktop! What brain damage did my IT team have to think my .NET development workstation would have any reason for an *LPT* port! Just hilarious.

Or to be more succinct... http://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html linux has become worse to become better.

I have already accepted that the linux I grew up on in the late nineties was killed (sometime in the mid-thousands I think, I was too busy working in .NET at the time to notice until I moved back to linux ~2009) and replaced by a completely opaque box, where everyone chides you for even thinking of recompiling your kernel ever because it will break everything, just choose one of the pre-compiled ones made by your linux masters.

I remember a beautiful simple system where everyone recompiled their kernels, it was simple and expected; and the system's components were independent enough to roll with changes like this, where running console-only didn't make you out to be a weirdo and switching versions of X wouldn't break every piece of your system, rather it would just switch your X.

Recently the linux I have met is a nice windows replacement. It acts like windows, I use it like windows, and the whole thing breaks if I try to change anything under the hood like windows.

Perhaps it's time to go back to FreeBSD, where simplicity was always the purpose, I sure hope in my time away from it (10 years now) it hasn't been won over by the dark side like linux was...