Seriously. To do any serious task requires state, and the problem with a minimal shell is that it can't remember much. The major scripting languages where all written to solve this problem, as well as integrate with embedded code in C. I'm a fan of Tcl myself, but virtually any scripting engine would be an improvement to a network enabled Pseudo-BASH with a whitespace delimited language.

You know a craftsman by his work. Programmers, real programmers, are always fiddling, and love to show off. Imagine if you were hiring a mad scientist, and he came to the interview with zero crazy schemes for world domination and had never grafted a deadly weapon to a deadlier life form. Would you take her seriously? Would you hire an astronomer who never looked through a telescope beyond school hours? No. Would you hire a ballplayer who just majored in the sport, and had never played a single game?

There are doers and couch warmers. Doers know doers. Couch warmers know couches,

...to the first interview without having developed something? I got into programming because I loved programming. I was writhing games in BASIC at 10. By 16 I had picked up C. My freshman year of college I was running servers on my machine in the dorm. By my junior year I was coding professionally. (Never did end up graduating come to think of it...)

When employers want to hear about hobbies, they want to hear about hobbies like mine. Writing web registration apps for large non-profits. Building IPhone apps. Programming micro controllers.

Coding is a lifestyle, it's not a major.

For $600 you could have gotten an iPhone with all of that. In 2007. Today, you could pick up 6 late model, or two high end, or one gold plated latest model with the extended warranty, tinted windows, and curb feelers.

What was the argument for the Android again?

Off topic, but "any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

I'm sure it depends on the building. Some friends and I were talking last week about how irritating it is that the "close door" buttons on the elevators in our building do nothing.

From what I've heard, it's a quarter-truth rather than an outright lie. If Alice finds Bob using friend finder, then this message can appear with Bob's name on it. Because there's no way to tell if a friend request came from friend finder, Bob doesn't know that he's "found friends using friend finder".

It was pretty good for cheap scientific computing clusters. But it's being replaced now by tower computers with 4 GPUs.

To be fair, until recently there were more people in Philadelphia than in all of Utah.

A study that shows that many high-profile websites (which follow the previous best practices) are insecure because they don't take this into account, and proposes enhanced defense mechanisms.

If you can repeatedly find security flaws in web best practices, you're welcome to come join the lab. It pays about $15/hr, plus half your health insurance.

Disclaimer: I work with these guys.

In addition to the CPGPU or whatever what they're calling it, Fusion should finally catch up to (and exceed) Intel in terms of niftilicious vector instructions. For example, it should have crypto and binary-polynomial acceleration, bit-fiddling (XOP), FMA and AVX instructions. As an implementor, I'm looking forward to having new toys to play with.

No actually, I would argue that it's better to simply start with the basic concepts of C and then get more complicated. Sorta-teaching kids a half dozen languages is meaningless, if our stated goal is to turn out competent IT people.

It's not exactly like C::Java as Integral Calculus::Algebra

Java is a complex monster all it's own, and half the complexity is because it tries to get cute with pass by references, garbage collection, and all manner of things that would only take a week of class time to teach a sufficiently curious individual.

With C, most of the complexity is in dealing with the limitations of the computer itself. It can only do one thing at a time. Memory is finite. If you allocated it, you have to free it.

(When you start getting into object systems, my argument is to ditch compiled options and layer on a scripting language like Python or TclOO that can better handle the Kama-Sutra like transformations abstract objects need to perform.)

Well, if you don't understand memory addressing... how do you understand programming to start with? It's so simple "I want a block of memory" is malloc(). I'm done with a block of memory is free(). A pointer points to a block of memory that was malloc()'ed.

I was 16 years old, reading a xerox copy of K&R's "The C Programming Language", and my only prior experience was BASIC. (Where the looping construct was "GOTO")

The problem is, kids aren't learning programming languages because they are fun. They are learning them in class, and under the gun. It takes years of playing with these concepts before they make sense. And we don't have the kinds of curriculum that stress "this is a multi-year discipline in which what you learn in year 1 forms the basis for year 2." Instead, we reward kids one correct answer at a time, and never mind that the 9 questions they got right were useless, and the one question they got wrong betrays a complete misunderstanding of the subject, it's an "A".

A quarter billion seems pretty reasonable for keeping other companies off their turf.

More people have been to Germany than I have.