I think you put the emphasis on the wrong part of the quote.

The point isn't that you can't learn programming by reading a book and experimenting.

The point is that this is not something everyone can learn (at least that way).

Those who are interested in computers will learn that way. But most people will not learn anything.

SeekWell wouldn't be a half bad name for a language used to access databases.

The fundamental issue I have with C++ as a language is it has a "improv theater style" design where the answer is always "Yes, and...". A more sensible language tends to be designed with "No, because ..." answers to at least some features.

Considering his main complaint is about replacing the users vision with that from a camera is moot I think it's fair to say that the skepticism is well placed.

Google Glass doesn't have a complete AR viewfinder. It's screen is only in the corner of your eye, so you don't have to look at it unless you want to.

And testing the effect he describes doesn't take any fancy equipment either. Just try walking around by looking through the viewfinder of your smartphone or compact camera. Even that is quite disorienting.

Considering that the two were on stage together at QuakeCon talking about this issues I don't think it's all that strange. ;-)

The Virtual Insanity session (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gaqQdyfAz8) is well worth watching if you are interested in these things. As is Carmacks keynote from QuakeCon 2012.

I looked into this claim when the Oculus Rift was first presented (and the same references were made). BTW the experiments were funded by Sega as they were also looking into making a VR headset.

The only claims I could find are made by one guy. (Who I can't remember the name of right now, but he was involved in the Sega VR project.) And it seems like this is the only person to have said that there are medical problems with using VR. (IIRC he was also involved in the more recent scare that 3D TVs could hurt your eyes.)

The research results done for Sega VR were never published, they only said that it wouldn't be a good idea. (Not specifying if this was for medical reasons or that the VR experience just wasn't good.)

Palmer Luckey (the guy behind the Oculus Rift) has a sizeable collection of VR stuff already. And has apparently worked with some military VR stuff, so I'm pretty sure he knows what they are doing.

Carmack, Abrash and Palmer Luckey talked about this during the Virtual Insanity session at QuakeCon (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gaqQdyfAz8), And they point out that augmented reality is harder than VR for a few reasons.

The biggest ones are that your latency tolerances are much lower since you are comparing with reality. So any latency you add will be very obvious to the user as the things will seem to "float" on top of the real objects. Furthermore the way our eyes perceive depth makes it very difficult to completely fool the eyes that what they are seeing is real. Eg most systems today will cause you to focus at infinity. This works well enough in a VR environment, because everything is the same. But in a AR situation if you are looking at something you hold in your hand and replace part of it with AR then that part will be at infinite focus. So when you look at it it looks wrong. (It's similar to if you see a reflection in a screen, and you can consciously shift focus to the screen or to the object being reflected.)

You also don't need to completely fool the brain in order to get feelings of height and stuff like that. Even people who try Cave systems say that you get a feeling of falling if you jump of a virtual cliff.

And there are systems which actually do directly manipulate your sense of balance and movement. Look up galvanic vestibular stimulation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_vestibular_stimulation),

Yes and no.

I'd point out that modern computer programs are often extremely complicated when compared to other things. It's less like building a house as it is building an entire city at once. It's also worth pointing out that building houses usually has a lot more stable requirements and environments (the laws of physics), software is changed all the time.

And the final nail in the coffin for me is that we have tried building software like "houses" or other large scale engineering projects. They tend to fail. (See the waterfall method, or "Mythical man month".) Assuming that software engineers are not simply less intelligent than other forms of engineers I think it's safe to conclude that the same methods may not work.

I was expecting your post to go "the most interesting programmer in the world" route with that start. Now I'm kind of disappointed. :-)

Regarding making diagrams and such... I find it depends on what kind of program I'm writing and in what language I'm writing it. If I'm working with low level stuff (like asm, or low level C) then I'd be a lot more inclined to diagram things first with quite a lot of detail. If I'm coding applications for phones I can usually do with making a rough sketch (usually starting with the first UI screens) and work from there quite free form.

Reuse is something I find I rarely do outright (unless I know that something will be used in multiple places). Modern IDEs make refactoring easy so my experience is that I'm better off doing that work when I need to. (Usually you will still have to adapt the code anyways because your new use will not match perfectly with what the old code did.)

I agree with you that this is "the way it is" but I really think it's just an example of the monumental waste that goes on in most companies.

A lot of the office programs are wide open for disruption for this reason. As a software engineer I find it fascinating that people willingly put "business critical" code in anything that can't be tested and can't be source controlled. (I'm sure you can do that in VB script if you really put your mind to it. But it's not something that will be done.)

The only reason it's considered economically viable is because all the time and money that is wasted is invisible.

But yeah, today these features are required for corporate use. Hopefully we can fix that for the future.

Yeah, MTP support in Linux is not really good enough. Hopefully more devices requiring it will push that through faster through.

I work with developing for mobile phones and having to support a storage location which can at any time be removed (ie if the user plugs their phone into the computer and it takes over the SD card) is a big pain. Having a global storage pool makes life a lot simpler. (A decent compromise is perhaps to have a micro-sd in a slot so it's not possible to remove without removing the battery. That makes it easier to handle.)

And while the micro sd card slot in and of itself doesn't really cost that much it does become more expensive when you figure in extra testing, more complex hardware design and new software requirements. (Although some of those only need to be done once, it does typically mean that some other feature is removed.)

I definitely agree with that. Although I found out that it was easy to just reflash the device with a "region free" firmware and get updates quickly. I have no idea what the hell Samsung Sweden were doing during the 2 months it took them to "verify" the Jelly Bean update. Someone claimed that they were working on a Swedish dictionary for spell check, but there was one included in the generic version as well so I'm doubtful.

I looked into that article and the guy who wrote it. The quote you're quoting comes from a book he wrote himself (although the quote is from a chapter written by some other guy.)

Unfortunately I couldn't find an online reference however, so it's impossible to know just how the measurements "Dr Van Voorheis" mentions were made. So far I've had a hard time to find any examples of people who have actually reproduced the large scale effects that Tesla claimed to achieve.

If you look for the author of the article (Thomas F. Valone) you find some YouTube clips where he's presenting a talk about UFO power sources. And he seems to be part of a MUFON which is apparently a group of UFO hunter enthusiasts. Now there's nothing really wrong with that, but it does mean that I'm not likely to take his claims at face value. And even he doesn't claim that the Tesla stuff is real, he only quotes other people (mostly Tesla himself).

Meanwhile you have an article at IEEE (http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/mass-transit/a-critical-look-at-wireless-power/0) which seems to support the common understanding of wireless transmission of power. Basically that you can transmit power on roughly the same distance as the diameter of your coils. So a "charging pad" works, but powering a ship on the other side of the Earth doesn't.

To summarize I have to say that I'm quite convinced that if Telsas "World Wireless System" would have worked the results would have been reproduced today. The economic benefits are way to large for it not to. I'm sure the military would have loved to have remote powered drones and stuff like that if it was possible.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point, but the idea of the salt is not to keep it secret. The idea is that each users password is combined with a unique string (the salt) so that if you try to attack the password database with a dictionary attack you have to process each password individually.

It can be frustrating, but it's really not that complicated and it is for a good reason.

You can't alter things directly on Wikipedia (ie you can't do "original research") because there is no way for anyone else to check the references. If people just added stuff to wikipedia pages without supporting it with references then that would quickly mean that articles became a mish-mash of "facts" with no way to check them.

That's why everything on Wikipedia should have a reference to it. That way it's possible for other people to verify that the referenced article actually state what is claimed in the Wiki article. Furthermore it also means that if the referenced article is amended, corrected or disputed it is possible to track this in the Wikipedia article.