mitchi

Nice presentation. Did you use a tool to create the slides?

This is hilarious :) So we won't be seeing Watson talk about the marvels of broscience!

Awesome story!! What an amazing guy.

You are required to give 4 classes a year. If you give 2 in the Autumn and 2 in the winter you have your summer free.

I'm learning a lot thank you. Felix is pretty impressive!

That's not a bad system. However, I have to grade on the paper directly and I don't want a computer near me if possible when I correct. Too many distractions. I just grade each question then I add them all up if I predict the grade is gonna be bad or I subtract if the grade's gonna be good.

Interesting story. Do you know they moved on to what? Java?

Linux and Zed Shaw have the best rants. All the others are disappointing :P

yea, I never said that. I was just describing what the vacations are. If you think that they don't do research you are partially right because of a lot them don't do it after their permanent status.

I just woke up from an all-nighter of correcting exam papers for my professor here. I'm being paid $15 an hour to grade all the homework assignments and the exams. I'm a regular teaching assistant at my university, I can usually handle the load of correcting assignments in time but correcting exams is actually the worst thing in the world. Depending on how the exam is made of course. If you care about being fair to everyone, you will usually have to backtrack through your first copies (when you were more severe) to add points. Any professors who grade their exams here? Do you use any heuristics (if you know what I mean) to correct faster? That being said, as you can see, professors in Canada can "offshore" the job of correcting to students. After that, you are left with the best part of the job. Preparing the course material, preparing the presentations and giving it every week. It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary.

I'm in Canada though, I don't know how professors are treated in the US. I know that for students it's shit! Graduating with mountains of debt, I don't know if I could celebrate that.

Guido van Rosseum left Google a while ago because he was annoyed they weren't using Python enough! Python is a nice language but I don't think it's the language of the decade. The langage of the decade is something that has been used from 2000 to 2012 a lot in entreprise and by individuals. Give that price to PHP for all it's worth. PHP was the language for the web for a very long time.... It was used to create facebook. It was a lot more influential than Python. Ask 50 persons in the street if they know what PHP is, then ask them if they know what Python is. I guarantee you that more people know of PHP.

Predicting what will be the next language of the decade is more interesting. My bet is on Javascript for now.

What you say is true. But the way the human memory works makes the PHP library thing a non-issue. Even if it's badly designed, even if it's not well made, you will probably remember it in the same time frame. Maybe a little slower but not much. That's the flexibility of the humain brain for you. It's not picky at all. I'm a C++ programmer but I remember myself learning and remembering the PHP functions very fast a few years ago. The PHP library is just a bunch of stuff put together and yet I still remember a lot of them today. Even the parameter names. Even in spoken languages this applies. In French, you have to memorize the spelling of every word if you want to write without making too many mistakes because the spelling of most of the words doesn't make any sense sometimes. Sometimes the word is coherent with the sound, sometimes the word has mute characters, sometimes the word is bizzare because it comes from Old French... You have to remember everything. Ok maybe I shouldn't have picked French because we do have a big problem about dixlexia and the average teen douchebag can't even spell the word poker.

I agree with you and I like your last point. It is indeed a problem that we have many languages and many libraries when many of them do the same thing. One big library to rule them all. Some day we will have that. There will be many algorithms in there, containers, network stack, everything you want and need. And cross platform of course.

These are very good optimisations indeed. Inlining adds a lot more speed than people think. I don't understand why people want closures in their languages. You basically want a function that cheats her own scope... I don't get where the big deal is.

In my last remark I am not entirely right but you get the idea. Microsoft employs almost 100 000 individuals and most of them are US taxpayers. If you give them a big contract, it's good for the company, good for jobs in the US and it stimulates the economy in some way. Of course that money doesn't come back automatically the next day. But consider an alternative. Let's say that they get a contract with Samsung instead, the biggest korean company. Let's assume we had the means to follow the flow of money, how much of that money that goes to Korea will return to the US? One can start thinking about this for a long time. It's easier to assume that money spent on Microsoft = jobs and salaries and other things = taxes for govt.

I think too. It's funny you mention PKD because he sold Paycheck $200 and another only $2500

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/philip.html

I like that the song doesn't restart at the beginning but resumes! What a nice project.

a Ruby programmer is now a "hacker" too...

I have to agree that this is invaluable.

keep on reading, they got their money in the end. Besides, their books were making piles of bacon

He really doesn't like the movies Peter Jackson made? Shit. Other authors weren't so lucky with their movies... The LOTR series is a real success.

I don't mind him charging that price to

- Lawyers

- Dentists

- Doctors

- Notarys

But charging $1000/h for making trivial things is making the rest of us look bad. Especially when people do projects with 10000000 times the difficulty... for free.

meanwhile, some people are using lynx :p

College is a great place to make friends, bond with other intelligent people and learn of course. Even though when you reach some point, you have to do all the learning by yourself with books and articles anyway... If you were Canadian / French/ German / Finish, studies would be very affordable. Maybe you could go over there to study? My sister is in Finland right now and she tells me that school is free for everyone, even foreigners. Go burst that bubble !

The other option is to stay home, be discipled and learn everything from books and online courses. Then you impress the hell out of interviewers and you get the job anyway because some companies care more about skills than diplomas.

Do you have an idea of how much an IT project costs a Government? The firearm registry in Canada, a country much smaller than the US and with a lot less firearms, costs 66M a year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry

I don't see where the big deal is. MS is an American company that employs a lot of people. That money will come back to the government in taxes and spending someday.

Which high level optimisations are we talking about?

Before, 99 % of internet surfers were anonymous. Now, when they browse their facebook intranet, everything they do is logged and recorded. And now, we see the same with Google. I tried to register a youtube account for my foosball association a few days back. It wouldn't let me use a nickname. It had to be a real name with a gender, a google+ account and a gmail. I ended up using my own youtube account. They've asked me about 15 times if I want to use my real name on youtube, I always say no.

I agree with you. But I'm probably not teaching you anything by saying that mastering important frameworks like :

  - Win32 API  

  - Write device drivers WDM or other 

  - .NET / ASP.NET  

  - Java standard library 

  - Sockets, UNICODE  

  - DOM, HTML, CSS, Javascript

These things take a lot of time to learn properly. You have to read for a long time and know a lot of things. It's not true to say that anyone with algorithm smarts can do this.

You have basically just described the advantages of the D language too. Do you plan on trying D?

I have some questions. Are you on Linux or Windows? Did you have to use a debugger or no need?