Office is, I think, one of the big revenue earners for Microsoft, so it does kinda make sense for them to make sure they can try to sell it to everybody regardless of which OS they run.
There is quite simply a vast array of libraries out there that every developer has access to. As Ben points out at the 10:50 mark, looking at GitHub we can find something on the order of 150,000 C projects.
That's great, unless your employer/client/etc. is allergic to open source. I really can't consider something part of the language unless it's in a standard library that comes out of the box with the major compilers.
Wow, I would have been a "poor fit" when I was 20-30 because (1) I can't stand the taste of most alcoholic beverages, (2) I can't stand being around drunks, and (3) I thought the purpose of having a job was to do some damned work, not find a social club.
For me, work is about doing something that produces value for the shareholders so they can afford write me a paycheck on a regular basis. When I've finished doing that, I'd like to use my time the way I see fit, thank you very much.
Surely by now somebody's managed to get Linux on a Surface RT? It sounds from the review like the hardware is pretty good, just the software that's lacking.
I tried scanning the article to find out what made it illegal, and was fairly disappointed to find that (once again) I'd been lured by a sensationalist headline.
My true story of the door-desk is that it made me think, "Wow, they're making everybody use desks that look like they were built from things they swiped from a dumpster behind Home Depot...how much are they going to nickel and dime me when it comes to compensation?"
Sure, the work sounded interesting and the people seemed competent and friendly, but the view of an open floor plan filled with those desks really dampened any excitement I had about working there.
> He crewed on a sub (initially im sure it said commanded) yet doesn't get on with computers...
This should be no more surprising than running across a CEO that doesn't get on with computers (if he actually commanded), or an electrician or car mechanic that doesn't get on with computers (if he was an enlisted crew member).
There are lots of jobs on Navy ships that have absolutely nothing to do with computers, and some of the things you might assume are run by computers are controlled with very old (and coincidentally reliable and/or fixable with common tools) technology like switches, relays, reach rods, and magamps. (Or at least this was the case on many ships that were in use during the Gulf war.)
...even with the wealth of information developers tend to make public about themselves.
I guess I'm gonna be a negative Nancy here, but I know some very good developers that don't make anything about themselves public. I expect some of the very best are completely invisible on the internet, at least by their real name, because they're too busy working on things their employers would rather keep as trade secrets.
Of course, for most programmers(let alone people in general) this is nearly useless information today. It's obsolete. And that's good.
Damn right it's good--for me--that most programmers think low-level programming/machine knowledge is obsolete. I'm pretty certain it means I'll never want for a (good) job as long as I can still think and move enough to edit code.
I don't often see things on HN and think, "wow, I absolutely must have that," but this is one of those times. Thank you for releasing this; if you do a kickstarter page or put up a donation link somewhere I'll throw some money at you. :)
Oil would last a lot longer if car makers would provide the 60mpg cars they have in Europe, here in the USA too.
Toyota's Prius C will do 55-60mpg if you're not out on the highway a lot, provided you adjust your driving habits to fit with the hybrid system behavior. Highway mileage is closer to the advertised 48 or so.
"In this and the next decade, we will begin to make energy and food abundant, inexpensively purify and sanitize water from any source, cure disease, and educate the world’s masses."
I may just be cynical, but I don't see how that automatically follows from rapid tech advances. I thought most of the problems of distributing food and education were "people problems" that won't just go away because you have fancy gadgets.
"John only started programming in college. He has 3 years of “experience” – much of it spent working on school assignments, not projects – and Norman has 10. John’s not as experienced or capable, but he may well be just as talented as Norman. Norman will get snapped up by a top company and snowball into a “rockstar” developer, whereas John will start (and maybe spend) his programming career in relative obscurity."
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to gather from this John/Norman comparison. If John has the same amount of natural talent as Norman, after a few years of full-time professional development work he's likely to be just as valuable as Norman. There's plenty of time to become really competent and valuable even if you start very late (like in your 30's or 40's, which I assume classifies as "freaking ancient" in many companies' eyes). I don't see how one person having some imagined head start figures into whether there's a shortage or not; but then, I don't live in the valley, so perhaps this is a cultural thing there.
I do agree, though, that there's a lot of companies out there that seem to want the top 1% (all the while offering bottom 25% rates).
Let me suggest that a lot of the pressures you feel in high school probably have little to do with "real life." It's amusing to think back to all the things I (and authority figures around me) worried about when I was in high school, because it's all long since irrelevant to me now. I can't really comment on college pressures because I didn't go to college until I was over 30, so I don't know what it's like to be a real college student.
My own experience suggests this: If you've learned to work hard when necessary to meet your own internal standards, and make sure you keep pushing those standards up, you'll probably wake up one day to find you're way more competent than most people in at least one area. That can be really fun (and sometimes lucrative), even if at the same time you're self-aware enough to know you're not a world-class expert that somebody would find interesting enough for an article.
I was thinking about going to graduate school there in 2008, but somehow it was cheaper to take 3 classes remotely at out-of-state rates (at a higher-ranked school, mind you) than to drive 15 miles into town and take 1 class at UVa as an in-state student, so I decided against it.
Edited to add: I later moved to start a PhD program at the other school, stayed here and got a job, so UVa's high tuition indirectly removed me from the pool of people that would work and pay taxes in VA.
>you would have to believe that the average person would pick a passphrase like "gastroenteritis jurisprudence algorithm aberration", which is clearly ridiculous.
Oh how I wish my bank and mortgage lender would let me choose easy-to-remember passwords like that.
Gow appears to automatically make all those Unix utilities available right inside the normal Windows command line without having to manually kludge them in there like you do in Cygwin. I usually just find myself missing the kinds of utilities that are included in Gow, so I don't really need the entire Cygwin universe available. The fact that I can download and have it installed in 15 seconds and get 99% of what I would like added to Windows will make me choose it by default when I have to work on Windows.
Adding the "Command line here" context menu item is nice, too (although that's available by Ctrl+right-click in at least Windows 7 anyway).