Comment Re:not going to find it (Score 2) 361
Apparently Slashdot has decided Informative is Funny?
I give up moderating.
Apparently Slashdot has decided Informative is Funny?
I give up moderating.
Most went to college because it was a way to have mommy and daddy pay their way for another 6 years.
How's that relevant? Yes, I get that it's easier than the real world, but especially if you're this sort of person, you probably don't realize that yet. There are going to be plenty of times when dropping out seems like a good option. However much easier it may be, if you've got a degree that took 6 years, that means you actually stayed in school and didn't do terribly for 6 years.
A degree is probably the most generic, least useful (in terms of assessing someone's qualifications) certification out there, but somehow people think it's important.
A certification is sort of the equivalent of a degree mill -- you can get one very quickly with very little effort, literally from a book, without having any understanding of how stuff actually works.
A degree, on the other hand... Hopefully, there will have been classes which force you to actually do research, actually complete projects in your related field, etc.
Also, while relevant experience is important, one downside is that it leads to all these job postings with "15 years experience in
For the record, I wrote a single 3 paragraph report in my university's entrance exam (in the 90s), and that got me out of all English requirements. Through appropriate elective selections, I wrote a total of 0 papers in that 5 year engineering program.
Neither of these are an option for me. Even my physics course -- required for engineers, also -- had several projects which involved both math and writing.
Maybe I have led an extremely unusual life, or something. Surely, I'm not the only person in the world to have identified a lot of "educated" people, who occupy niches at the bottom end of the food chain. I've met doctors driving truck, professors working as sales clerks...
Out of curiosity, where are you? There are a lot of places, particularly (I'd guess) close to college towns, where there's a high concentration of highly-educated people and a low concentration of actual jobs.
We hear all the hype about college graduates earning a million dollars and more than their non-educated counterparts. As a generality, that is probably close to the truth.
"Generality", nothing. As a statistic it is true. Yes, you can become a billionaire without an education, and you can become homeless with an education, and where you end up probably has a lot to do with who you are. Still, if you've got a chance to be educated, it seems like it does give you a real advantage. And if nothing else, you're a much more enriched, intelligent truck driver.
Oh - the OTHER reason for all those degrees is, colleges make money based on bodies. The more bodies packed into their classrooms, the more money they get from all the various funding sources.
And yet, in order to get those bodies into those classrooms, it helps to not be known as a degree mill. Not that degree mills don't exist, or that they don't make money, but that's why it's in a college's best interests to have high standards.
It doesn't much matter to THEM that there is already a surplus in any given field, and that none of the grads will ever find work for which they are prepared.
Well, it also helps to have a high job placement rate in order to get those bodies. I know my school's comp sci program boasts a 100% job placement rate of graduates, and that's in comp sci related fields, with each graduate getting multiple job offers before graduation. We also have a lot more freshmen than graduating seniors any given year.
But maybe that's just comp sci. Maybe the people who fail comp sci don't get kicked for academic honesty or anything like that, and instead go into business or kinesiology, so they get a degree anyway.
Well, let me put it this way:
Would you rather do business with an honest guy who doesn't know what he's doing, or a dishonest guy who knows exactly how to scam you for every penny you're worth?
Never mind that they're also scamming themselves out of the sort of education which might help them with exactly this...
Do you have better criteria?
In my career, I've found a bit of both. There's a lot that people don't get in school, but there's also a lot that people don't seem to get anywhere except school. There's also the fact that a degree shows, or is supposed to show, that you have some persistence and some base level of understanding of things like, say, English and communication.
In any case, I wouldn't get my hopes up too much. What it's likely to do is cause job requirements to be tightened. That is, if it turns out more and more people are graduating without being able to write a coherent paper, you might demand a sample of writing from them during the interview process, but you're probably still going to want a degree.
Most people never use their degree for anything other than as a line-item in a HR checklist.
In which case, WTF is the point of the degree in the first place?
We're not talking about engineering here, we're talking about business majors.
"We" are? I was talking about everyone, but ok, let's talk about business majors. We're teaching said business majors that the way to get ahead is to cheat and not get caught. Is that who you want running your business?
Moreover, we don't get people actually earning their degrees, which causes problems when we rely on people to actually know what they were supposed to have learned in school. The cheater also likely doesn't get what they want, ultimately, given that if you cheat your way into a degree, you're not going to be competent at what you do, and I can't imagine how you'd actually hold down a job.
No, it's not. Under the Gold Standard, I could take my currency and trade it in for an equivalent amount of gold. What can I trade a set of Bitcoins for?
Missing the point. Bitcoins are the otherwise-useless item which we all agree has value. With the Gold Standard, it'd be gold. If Bitcoin were to somehow take over (which seems unlikely), you'd likely have things like paper currency which would be backed by actual bitcoins being held in reserve somewhere, assuming the bitcoins themselves can't be made convenient enough (which is likely).
You speak as though gold is incredibly more valuable than data for some reason other than that gold is actually used for trade. Then you say this:
Oh, bullshit. How much would it actually be worth if we only valued it for its industrial applications?
Nowhere near what it's worth now.
Which was my point. The actual inherent value of a currency is almost entirely based on how much it's actually being used as a medium of exchange, and not some intrinsic properties of it. Dollars, for example, are not backed by the gold standard and have almost no use other than as a medium of exchange, and are more often digital than physical anyway -- so you could at best exchange "virtual" dollars in your bank account for "real" paper dollars.
For that matter, what's the industrial application of any "real money", like the dollar?
Facilitating trade.
Oh, zing!
Except you just contradicted yourself. If "facilitating trade" counts, then the dollar would be worth exactly what it's worth now. You just admitted it wouldn't be worth nearly that much. Clearly, you weren't talking about "facilitating trade" as an application of gold.
Erm...
People are using real resources (computers and electricity) and paying for that with real money to produce a digital puff of smoke called a bitcoin,
I also use real resources (computers, electricity, and time) and I both pay for and am paid for these things with real money, in order to produce a digital puff of smoke called software.
in which they then place more trust than the money issued by the government they elected themselves.
This may be your most relevant argument, if you actually fleshed it out. But the rest of it...
Bitcoin isn't even close to the gold standard.
It's actually very close to the gold standard. People use real resources and real money to dig up a metal whose only real use is that it's kind of shiny, so people place value on it...
When a virtual currency is backed by gold, there is actual, physical gold in a repository to imbue the virtual representation of it with real value.
Only as much value as the actual gold contains. So let's see...
Even if you don't value gold for its own properties, at least it has industrial applications that are valuable.
Oh, bullshit. How much would it actually be worth if we only valued it for its industrial applications? By that logic, silicon should be our currency.
For that matter, what's the industrial application of any "real money", like the dollar? Unless people value it for its intrinsic properties, or for what it will buy, it's not like you're going to take those bills and build something out of them. Not that it would really matter, since more dollars these days are digital anyway than physical.
Bitcoin on the other hand is backed by unnecessary environmental pollution,
Which is again pretty much like the gold standard. I can't imagine that if we started distributing the gold in Fort Knox to industry, that we would actually need any mining for the next few decades, if not centuries.
For that matter, we need to be switching to alternative energy anyway. Electricity is possible to generate cleanly. Gold isn't.
My guess is that, at some point in time, all those geeks will realize they wasted numerous hours and real money costing resources to produce exactly nothing and that it ultimately was only their own misguided belief that gave it a shine of value.
And you could say the same thing about any other currency, except that we have collectively decided that these other currencies have value, but Bitcoin doesn't.
Most of your argument amounts to an argument against characteristics Bitcoin has in common with other currencies, and particularly with the gold standard. I'm not saying you're wrong, and it's true that Bitcoin will have no value if no one values it -- which is much more likely to happen to Bitcoin than to other forms of currency -- but to say that it isn't even close to the gold standard, and then enumerate a list of complaints about it that apply as easily to gold, makes no sense.
That does help, but even if I grant everything you said, it implies that Perl is approaching Ruby in terms of features I care about, and performance is still going to be python or worse. So I think my point about why C# is interesting still stands.
A few more points that would likely still irritate me about perl:
But everything you've said will be helpful if I am forced into Perl again. It'd be nice for it to be a decent language, instead of "Well, it's an improvement on C."
Every couple years you'll buy a better CPU/Graphics card/etc.
You could get away with every four or five years, and you can buy an entire new gaming machine for ~$500. At 4 years, that's about $10/mo. And it's not like games are the only reason a new desktop would be nice.
As for games... There are some pretty fantastic deals out there. I bought the entire Star Wars: Jedi Knight (or Dark Forces) series for $20 on Steam, and it took an hour or two to download ALL of them. (More like one minute to download Dark Forces -- the thing is only 70 megs or so!)
more importantly, it's not extra money out of my wallet.
It's still money out of your wallet. I don't see the difference between paying that on a copy of Windows you can use on your own computer for anything you want, or paying indirectly for a VM license you can only use for one thing.
I don't think it was a troll, or at least I don't read it as a troll. Notice, I started with:
I think that's a valid criticism of GP's point...
Python is less obect-oriented and less featureful in general than Ruby, but executes faster. It is more fun to work with than Java, but slower. It doesn't change my point about having a language be as cool as Ruby, but as fast as Java -- python is neither, it's somewhere in between.
And here, again, Ruby wins. Bundler is a way to have gems installed system-wide, and managed/updated during development with dependency handling and everything else you'd expect of a good package manager, but precisely the correct version will be enabled in each app at runtime.
Essentially, it means that it's trivially easy to tell your app "Hey, go depend on (and download) the latest version of all libraries you're using." It just records those versions, all the way down, so that at deploy time, you can tell it "Install exactly what we had installed on my dev machine when all our tests passed."
The only configuration you as a developer need to set up is a tiny config file, written in Ruby -- check out the sample Gemfile on the Bundler homepage. Seriously, look at it -- tiny. I never want to go back to XML bloat again!
And rvm means I can trivially have a separate set of gems per Ruby version, which is where I actually do want duplication -- nokogiri will depend on and use very different things in MRI vs JRuby. Since rvm tends to install new Rubies by at least downloading if not compiling them from scratch, it will provide you with a Ruby that's more or less consistent across Unices, let alone distros.
All these things can be installed per-user, but they can also be installed to the entire system. So you get the best of both worlds -- reproducible behavior, but I can type 'bundle update' and roll all dependency versions forward, or add a line and type 'bundle install' to add a new library.
The downside to all of the above is that everything I just said is really about installing stuff on a Unix machine, likely a production server. For desktop apps, Java has a much more easily portable system, since you can't trust the user to have anything sane at the system level. (Of course, when users do, it'd be nice to have a Debian package or something.)
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. - Voltaire
