Ah, but signed 32-bit dates have the problem. A quick change to unsigned 32-bit fields extends this from 2038 to 2106. Of course, I can hear the screaming even from here, everyone is mandated to use 64-bits! Except that this is not practical thing in many contexts, when you're on a computer with not enough speed or ram. Or when the date doesn't really matter as it's used in a safer context. Or just admit up front that the system is not POSIX (which they very often are not on small embedded machines), and don't use Jan 1 1970 as the base epoch. But people don't do this, they think this is reinventing the wheel.
The ultimate problems with 2038 I think come from misuse of the time value, and not understanding the range that you need. The seconds since Jan 1 1970 was originally invented to store the time and date of file modifications. That works. Those times will still be entirely correct a thousand years from now. The expected life of a file, on that particular tape or magnetic drum, was going to be much shorter than 68 years. There would also never be any files created before Jan 1 1970 anyway. The snag, which bites so many people, is that this got appropriated into other uses for which it was never intended. As in being used for a general purpose date system, using only 32 bits, completely insane and so many people don't see that. For instance I worked on a medical system that used this time format for birth days, which failed badly for people born before 1902. Few people foresaw this because they just assumed that time was going to work (it's in a library after all, and its sacrilegeous to second guess a library).
Often I reinvent the wheel because there is no other wheel that fits. If someone else has invented then it's proprietary and I can't get to it. Ie, right now I'm working on a new product that has only 16K of RAM when the previous product had 4M, and there's a lot of challenges. I see code that claims to be small and memory efficient doing similar things, but when actually looking at the source they tend to be bulky in practice.
In the past I've seen lots of open source code that while very good for their environment (a big fat computer with lots of horsepower) end up not so great in different environments (size or speed constraints, customer requirements, etc).
Another example: if you've got multiple open libraries doing the same thing, don't just pick the first one. The GNU gettext library was rather largish and more difficult to read than the BSD gettext library. And besides the GNU code is forbidden to be used anyway if you can't use dynamic libraries.
I have sadly seen many cases where the code ends up being crap because some programmer insists on only using preexisting libraries, relying on marketing of the library as to their quality, and it seems no actual code of their own except to slap things together. Ridiculous stuff like using STL maps when a simple look up table would be smaller and faster, or using a boost library when the project already had code that did the same thing in a better way.
I never even heard the u-shaped theory. In professional life, most programmers are mediocre and the "rock stars" are rare. Although the self proclaimed rock stars are common.
The entire point of the books is missed if the eagles drop the ring in. Sorry, not a great ring of power, just a magic bauble of the sorts you find in D&D. It's not just a story of a great big adventure. The point is the struggle with the ring, the struggle between the factions, the struggle most of the people had with themselves, and so forth.
So if we have more job discrimination you think we can keep all our jobs? Refuse to give jobs to old people, women, blacks, people from the wrong political party, and so forth? Technically, I think that would mean that the remaining few people get a bigger choice of jobs. But in the long run the economy would collapse from the weight of all the people who can't get jobs and the humungous amount of skills and experience left lying on the floor. It would solve the immigrant problem by creating an emigrant problem.
Wow, is your newsletter still mimeographed? It seems like you've been inhaling it a bit much.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, even if there are bigots standing in your way. Freedom is not about just you and your own freedoms, but those around you also. You can not exercise your freedom at the expense of others. Thus the existence of governments, created by the citizens in order to protect their freedoms against the freedoms of others. People get together and agree that anarchy just is not working out very well and decide that maybe some laws will improve things for everyone. Fairness is enforced to some extent. So yes, you can't refuse to hire someone just because of the color of their skin, that's unfair and damaging to the economy.
So yes, we give up liberties in order to have liberty. I don't have the liberty to shoot you for being an idiot, and I accept that because it means you also don't have the liberty to shoot me for being an idiot. Except in Texas.
You need to not hire one for a valid reason. Not hiring because of age, even if the salary would be the same as someone younger, is discrimination pure and simple. And old people vote, and a larger percentage of them vote than young people do.
And just because YOU don't want to hire someone old does not mean your company has that as their policy. Sometimes people get fired for discrimination, not because it's against the law but because their own employers don't want to hire bigots.
35 year old bosses? What about when you have 24 year old bosses who got the job because it evolved out of a school job from the startup days? I've had two of those.
I quit grad school without the PhD. I already had prior work experience, however it turned out that to the real world it meant little. No recent job and no recent graduation meant that I didn't fit into any good categories. So I was applying for entry level jobs in my early thirties. Very brutal. Yes, some people thought I was overqualified, which I was, even though their HR thought I had no qualifications. So I ended up with an entry level salary, but given that I had no savings left that was better than nothing.
The thing is, a mere 5 years ago, email was the primary communication method. Even today, when at work, you almost always communicate with email. No one sends a twitter saying "staff meeting in ten minutes", documentation doesn't get sent via snapchat (though it approximates this when I can't find it ten minutes later), and so forth. Tough IRC type stuff does get used, but that's been around for over 30 years as well so there's not much new there.
I see a lot of jobs where you really can't be overqualified. The more qualifications you have the more job duties they give you. For an entry level job, overqualified is a real thing since they are afraid you'll switch jobs the monent Burger King has an opening. For senior positions it's not necessarily the case, because at that level they really do want some skill and experience.
There has to be *someone* around at least that can answer all the kid's questions.
I think asking that question is technicallyl illegal in many places. I was meeting once when I was in my late 30s, with a few other people who were older than 40 and 50, to evaluate a candidate. The recruiter, who to be fair was a moron, said "I'm surprised he's kept up his skills at his age", intending it to be a compliment. But he got a lot of very dirty looks from the rest of us and we had to point out company policy about age discrimination.
When I was a kid, the job I wanted when I grew up was to be the TV repairman. Everyone knew things did not "just work", so there were repair people. And they were NOT the same as the Apple "geniuses" or the Best Buy people trying to sell you stuff.
That's true. The "digital natives" have too much hand holding, and I suspect a lot of them just treat computers as a magical black box. They don't look inside the box, because it's magic and that would mean bad mojo. Instead, stick with the API your boss gives you and code to it blindly. If things seem sluggish afterwords then just get a faster magic box. If anything complex comes up then just head to google, wikipedia, or stackoverflow to get your answer.
Old people for entry level jobs isn't that bad of an idea (except that it screws up your social security earnings probably). Entry level jobs in tech are often much easier, no one pressures your for more patentable ideas, you're often doing simpler programming like fixing bugs rather than designing major systems from scratch, no one cares about your opinion so you're left alone more to get more work done, and you can go home before it's dark.
Hiring someone intentionally who is "new to the business" is dumb, unless the goal is to get an outsider's view which is rarely if ever needed in an engineering job. The "new to the business" person needs a lot more training, they may be utterly incompetent as well and you'll never know from the interview.
If it weren't for us old guys, there wouldn't be a tech world today. No internet, no PC (no matter how badly designed it is), no smart phones, no hi-fi audio for music players, none of the top ten programming languages, no Windows or Unix or MacOS, no web browser, etc.
If hardware knowledge is useless then we'll never have any new hardware, ever. The only thing a VM is good for is if you're on a stupid PC, it has nothing whatsoever to do with concepts of hardware. Or are you talking about "hardware knowledge" meaning the ability to manage a PC? I think "hardware knowledge" is knowing about how machines work, designing and building new and better machines, debugging the machines, etc.
Ignorance is a bad thing. Everyone has some ignorance of course, but everyone should be trying to reduce it. Knowing more than you need to know for your job is a great way to get ahead, and get out of that low end job and into something better.
I've used email longer than any of those kids have been alive. That makes me more of a native than they are I suppose, even though I'm not on Facebook. If they want a cutting language then I can code one up.
Never heard of Sheryl. Susan Stanberg is too close to Susan Stamberg who is well known. which is why a lot of news sites got it wrong I guess. But a COO? Who knows the name of any COO, I don't even know the name of the COO in my company... A non-celebrity, even within facebook I suspect.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but signed 32-bit dates have the problem. A quick change to unsigned 32-bit fields extends this from 2038 to 2106.
Of course, I can hear the screaming even from here, everyone is mandated to use 64-bits! Except that this is not practical thing in many contexts, when you're on a computer with not enough speed or ram. Or when the date doesn't really matter as it's used in a safer context. Or just admit up front that the system is not POSIX (which they very often are not on small embedded machines), and don't use Jan 1 1970 as the base epoch. But people don't do this, they think this is reinventing the wheel.
The ultimate problems with 2038 I think come from misuse of the time value, and not understanding the range that you need. The seconds since Jan 1 1970 was originally invented to store the time and date of file modifications. That works. Those times will still be entirely correct a thousand years from now. The expected life of a file, on that particular tape or magnetic drum, was going to be much shorter than 68 years. There would also never be any files created before Jan 1 1970 anyway. The snag, which bites so many people, is that this got appropriated into other uses for which it was never intended. As in being used for a general purpose date system, using only 32 bits, completely insane and so many people don't see that. For instance I worked on a medical system that used this time format for birth days, which failed badly for people born before 1902. Few people foresaw this because they just assumed that time was going to work (it's in a library after all, and its sacrilegeous to second guess a library).
Often I reinvent the wheel because there is no other wheel that fits. If someone else has invented then it's proprietary and I can't get to it.
Ie, right now I'm working on a new product that has only 16K of RAM when the previous product had 4M, and there's a lot of challenges. I see code that claims to be small and memory efficient doing similar things, but when actually looking at the source they tend to be bulky in practice.
In the past I've seen lots of open source code that while very good for their environment (a big fat computer with lots of horsepower) end up not so great in different environments (size or speed constraints, customer requirements, etc).
Another example: if you've got multiple open libraries doing the same thing, don't just pick the first one. The GNU gettext library was rather largish and more difficult to read than the BSD gettext library. And besides the GNU code is forbidden to be used anyway if you can't use dynamic libraries.
I have sadly seen many cases where the code ends up being crap because some programmer insists on only using preexisting libraries, relying on marketing of the library as to their quality, and it seems no actual code of their own except to slap things together. Ridiculous stuff like using STL maps when a simple look up table would be smaller and faster, or using a boost library when the project already had code that did the same thing in a better way.
I never even heard the u-shaped theory. In professional life, most programmers are mediocre and the "rock stars" are rare. Although the self proclaimed rock stars are common.
The entire point of the books is missed if the eagles drop the ring in. Sorry, not a great ring of power, just a magic bauble of the sorts you find in D&D. It's not just a story of a great big adventure. The point is the struggle with the ring, the struggle between the factions, the struggle most of the people had with themselves, and so forth.
Or to use a word from Pratchett: narrativium.
And the answer has been given out for years and years, yet there is always a generation who thinks they are the first to consider the idea.
So if we have more job discrimination you think we can keep all our jobs? Refuse to give jobs to old people, women, blacks, people from the wrong political party, and so forth? Technically, I think that would mean that the remaining few people get a bigger choice of jobs. But in the long run the economy would collapse from the weight of all the people who can't get jobs and the humungous amount of skills and experience left lying on the floor. It would solve the immigrant problem by creating an emigrant problem.
Wow, is your newsletter still mimeographed? It seems like you've been inhaling it a bit much.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, even if there are bigots standing in your way. Freedom is not about just you and your own freedoms, but those around you also. You can not exercise your freedom at the expense of others. Thus the existence of governments, created by the citizens in order to protect their freedoms against the freedoms of others. People get together and agree that anarchy just is not working out very well and decide that maybe some laws will improve things for everyone. Fairness is enforced to some extent. So yes, you can't refuse to hire someone just because of the color of their skin, that's unfair and damaging to the economy.
So yes, we give up liberties in order to have liberty. I don't have the liberty to shoot you for being an idiot, and I accept that because it means you also don't have the liberty to shoot me for being an idiot. Except in Texas.
You need to not hire one for a valid reason. Not hiring because of age, even if the salary would be the same as someone younger, is discrimination pure and simple. And old people vote, and a larger percentage of them vote than young people do.
And just because YOU don't want to hire someone old does not mean your company has that as their policy. Sometimes people get fired for discrimination, not because it's against the law but because their own employers don't want to hire bigots.
35 year old bosses? What about when you have 24 year old bosses who got the job because it evolved out of a school job from the startup days? I've had two of those.
I quit grad school without the PhD. I already had prior work experience, however it turned out that to the real world it meant little. No recent job and no recent graduation meant that I didn't fit into any good categories. So I was applying for entry level jobs in my early thirties. Very brutal. Yes, some people thought I was overqualified, which I was, even though their HR thought I had no qualifications. So I ended up with an entry level salary, but given that I had no savings left that was better than nothing.
"Have you ever used Fortran or COBOL?"
The thing is, a mere 5 years ago, email was the primary communication method. Even today, when at work, you almost always communicate with email. No one sends a twitter saying "staff meeting in ten minutes", documentation doesn't get sent via snapchat (though it approximates this when I can't find it ten minutes later), and so forth. Tough IRC type stuff does get used, but that's been around for over 30 years as well so there's not much new there.
I see a lot of jobs where you really can't be overqualified. The more qualifications you have the more job duties they give you. For an entry level job, overqualified is a real thing since they are afraid you'll switch jobs the monent Burger King has an opening. For senior positions it's not necessarily the case, because at that level they really do want some skill and experience.
There has to be *someone* around at least that can answer all the kid's questions.
I think asking that question is technicallyl illegal in many places.
I was meeting once when I was in my late 30s, with a few other people who were older than 40 and 50, to evaluate a candidate. The recruiter, who to be fair was a moron, said "I'm surprised he's kept up his skills at his age", intending it to be a compliment. But he got a lot of very dirty looks from the rest of us and we had to point out company policy about age discrimination.
When I was a kid, the job I wanted when I grew up was to be the TV repairman. Everyone knew things did not "just work", so there were repair people. And they were NOT the same as the Apple "geniuses" or the Best Buy people trying to sell you stuff.
As an old-un, I wish gramps was still around so that I could fix the time and date on his VCR again, just so I could chat with him again.
That's true. The "digital natives" have too much hand holding, and I suspect a lot of them just treat computers as a magical black box. They don't look inside the box, because it's magic and that would mean bad mojo. Instead, stick with the API your boss gives you and code to it blindly. If things seem sluggish afterwords then just get a faster magic box. If anything complex comes up then just head to google, wikipedia, or stackoverflow to get your answer.
Old people for entry level jobs isn't that bad of an idea (except that it screws up your social security earnings probably). Entry level jobs in tech are often much easier, no one pressures your for more patentable ideas, you're often doing simpler programming like fixing bugs rather than designing major systems from scratch, no one cares about your opinion so you're left alone more to get more work done, and you can go home before it's dark.
Hiring someone intentionally who is "new to the business" is dumb, unless the goal is to get an outsider's view which is rarely if ever needed in an engineering job. The "new to the business" person needs a lot more training, they may be utterly incompetent as well and you'll never know from the interview.
If it weren't for us old guys, there wouldn't be a tech world today. No internet, no PC (no matter how badly designed it is), no smart phones, no hi-fi audio for music players, none of the top ten programming languages, no Windows or Unix or MacOS, no web browser, etc.
If hardware knowledge is useless then we'll never have any new hardware, ever. The only thing a VM is good for is if you're on a stupid PC, it has nothing whatsoever to do with concepts of hardware. Or are you talking about "hardware knowledge" meaning the ability to manage a PC? I think "hardware knowledge" is knowing about how machines work, designing and building new and better machines, debugging the machines, etc.
Ignorance is a bad thing. Everyone has some ignorance of course, but everyone should be trying to reduce it. Knowing more than you need to know for your job is a great way to get ahead, and get out of that low end job and into something better.
I've used email longer than any of those kids have been alive. That makes me more of a native than they are I suppose, even though I'm not on Facebook. If they want a cutting language then I can code one up.
True. In Silicon Valley we have more techies who don't know how anything works than we have actual engineers.
But if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit. Catch-22.
Oh, the files are IN the computer!
Never heard of Sheryl. Susan Stanberg is too close to Susan Stamberg who is well known. which is why a lot of news sites got it wrong I guess. But a COO? Who knows the name of any COO, I don't even know the name of the COO in my company... A non-celebrity, even within facebook I suspect.