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Comment: Re:Teaching programmer? (Score 1) 381

by Sneftel (#45510599) Attached to: Code.org: More Money For CS Instructors Who Teach More Girls

Bullshit, I self taught myself. I had no teacher and my parents were computer illiterate, and many of the greatest programmers I know followed the exact same pattern.

Wonderful! If, as you say, the greatest programmers are entirely self-made, purely because some god-given vocatio made them start BASICing up roguelikes, then applying incentives to teachers won't matter one way or another.

But if, on the other hand, this stuff isn't genetic but rather a matter of environment and upbringing, of a word of encouragement at the right time, of giving a seed of talent a place to grow.... well, but no. No, all you need is a computer and to be the chosen one.

Comment: Re:Teaching programmer? (Score 3, Interesting) 381

by Sneftel (#45509129) Attached to: Code.org: More Money For CS Instructors Who Teach More Girls

You don't know a single competent programmer who just started programming just because they wanted to. They started programming because they had the opportunity to, and the support. And if manipulating teachers is effective in countering their (probably unconscious, but nevertheless well-researched and documented) bias towards offering opportunity and support towards mostly boys, then it's the right thing to do.

Comment: TTIs (heh) (Score 2) 68

by Sneftel (#45163193) Attached to: Printable Smart Labels Tell You When the Milk's Gone Bad

There are already time-temperature indicators, which are low-cost, (usually) non-electronic devices affixed to perishable products to check whether they've remained in the appropriate range, and how long they were out of that range. Those are what this new tech is competing with, not the temperature-sensitive LCD strips you see on aquariums.

Comment: ugh (Score 5, Insightful) 479

by Sneftel (#45110207) Attached to: Charlie Stross: Why Microsoft Word Must Die

Yes, let's enumerate all the structural untidinesses of Word. Let's blame that application -- which held its own, against many, many competitors, not because of a megacorporation strong-arming it (remember, MS was not always a megacorp) but because it was good at doing what users wanted it to do -- for the inelegance of its data model. Let's compare it to SGML, which is so much nicer and easier and so much more elegant if you're a programmer and can appreciate that sort of elegance, and if you're not a programmer, well then for god's sake why are you touching a computer?

If you want SGML, you know where to download it.

Comment: Re:Traffic analysis; diverse double compiling (Score 1) 319

by Sneftel (#44987689) Attached to: RMS On Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before

00 FF AA 55 and AA FF 55 00 are both serialized data, but are not the same. You are confusing the idea that data will exist on disk as a serial stream with the idea that two sets of data written to disk in parallel will somehow have the same order.

Erm. How do you think compilers work?

Comment: Yay (Score 1) 130

by Sneftel (#43909595) Attached to: Hackers Spawn Web Supercomputer On Way To Chess World Record

I'm... kind of okay with this? Modern operating systems are hella-good at maintaining usability under high CPU loads, and the extra electricity consumed by the increased load wouldn't make much of a difference to me. If this is how they want to monetize web content, I'll take it over click-to-mute popunders any day. The "crooks" thing seems like it's just thrown in to increase the shock factor. Why wouldn't the site owners do this?


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