I'm 28, and I've been working in IT since 18. I've also had the privilege of working with military officers and some extremely talented employees of defense contracting firms on some pretty interesting projects, a couple of which I managed personally. At one point, I held joint responsibility for the ongoing operations of Bank of America's telephone banking system operations on the VRU side, working for the firm that developed the platform. My experiences have been diverse to say the least.
You don't need administrative privileges to use most Perl modules; they can be installed under a normal user account or referenced from a website's existing directory structure.
Didn't fail to read the parent. Perl has an immense amount of built-in functionality; I'd easily say it eclipses PHP in this regard (perusing the documentation site I linked bears that out). My points regarding CPAN is meant to point of the fact that it augments that built-in functionality in a very standardized manner, and even in cases where you might "use Foo;" a large number of those modules are distributed with Perl's core (in other words, they're installed by default).
I have to agree with a couple of your points, however. It's an unfortunate truth, but a heck of a lot of programmers do qualify as dicks. I've worked with my fair share of them over the years, and I have to say I've never met a truly gifted coder with a CS degree. I'm not saying they don't exist, but I'll be damned if I've found one yet. Oddly, out of the "real asshole" crowd, many of them had a CS degree in addition to sucking at their jobs. The best coders I've worked with never even went to college, didn't finish, or graduated with a degree completely unrelated to computer science or IT.
Perl developers know about this thing called CPAN. PHP doesn't even come close in this regard, and you really can't get a better language reference than perldoc. Honestly, if you can't write an app using Perl's built-in functions and the thousands of modules from CPAN, you probably shouldn't be programming. While choice in languages can vary widely according to the individual coder's personal preferences and particular suitability for a given task, the weakness you've cited is imaginary.
Where's the "!urine" tag on this one? Please, somebody think of the drunken graduate students who might read this story and decide to reproduce the results.
Any one of them could be impoverished in a heart beat if life throws them the right curve ball.
You know, if everyone used that excuse as a reason not to work hard toward their goals, zero progress would be made in the world. Any given world leader, business pioneer, or great contributor to the sciences could have been hit by a bus instead of going on to live a successful life. That didn't stop them, and it shouldn't stop anyone else.
I'm so glad we invite domestic and foreign terrorists to destroy everything America holds dear, makes me feel safer knowing terrorist's freedom isn't being hindered.
You lost any shred of credibility you might have had by attempting to compare journalists to terrorists. Good job.
Working hard when you're young and able to do so is a critical part of success, and depending on how you define "success" to begin with it's 99% of the equation. For example, I don't live in an expensive house. I don't drive a new car. I'm not interested in outdoing my neighbors with flashy purchases; I don't even own a television (my wife and I like to read instead).
As a result, I'll be keeping my money in the bank while my neighbors are struggling to pay their bills.
That's a pretty laughable proposition. My father took a nearly identical course of action, and he's in perfect health. My grandfather (a cardiologist) is in near-perfect health, and calls "retirement" only working 30 hours a week at the hospital. We all take care of ourselves physically with proper diet and exercise (something I have struggled with on occasion, but try very hard to maintain).
Oh, and none of my immediate family are on the government dole. They chose to make good choices in life and work hard, something that's apparently alien to you.
I don't believe I'm missing out on anything. From 17-22 I took an awful lot of leisure time. I've lived in a ton of places, seen an amazing amount of life, and had a heck of a lot of fun. Now it's time to build a future for myself and my family; my first child is due next year. I'd rather not be working full-time when kid hits the teen years, so I make sacrifices now instead. I also don't maintain a very active social life, preferring to spend almost every free hour I have with my wife.
For me, life is about planning and making choices.
It's working for long-term success, which is entirely different from "taking it easy" all the time when you're young. I'm just shy of 30 now, and I'm on track to retire at 40. Whether I actually do so will depend on how I feel then, but I can assure you I won't be working the same schedule then.
Your argument is old and tired. I've achieved success in my life through study and hard work; I still put in 12-14 hour days working to build my future. I've got many friends who have done the same, and none of us have achieved what we have through deception. Working hard in the relative short term for long term payoffs is nothing new; you sound like someone who feels like he's been dealt a "raw deal" in life. Most likely, you just haven't worked hard enough.
I use an old laptop to provide DNS for my home office network. It's running a minimal Debian install; the only post-install commands I issued to get things up and running were "apt-get install unbound" and "nano/etc/unbound/unbound.conf" to allow queries from the LAN (instead of just localhost, which is the default setting). Instant recursive name server, with no more dependence on anything my ISP offers. They're not presently intercepting outbound DNS queries, but should they decide to do so I'll just move the service to a Linode and tunnel to it.
I'll readily admit that my country does have a knack for locking people up for non-violent drug offenses. Unfortunately, an absurdly large percentage of the nation's prison population is in the clink for convictions of that nature.
I have several friends from China, and have heard first-hand accounts of the oppression at play there. Visiting China does not give an accurate impression of what it's like to live under the thumb of a regime that doesn't respect free spech, freedom of the press, etc. Foreign nationals who "make trouble" for the Chinese government are routinely asked politely to leave. Of those who decide not to comply, they are removed by force, also known as being escorted out by armed agents. In some cases, they are arrested and confined until their home country can arrange for a quiet release.
I am quite familiar with the methods employed by the Chinese government to paint a pretty picture of the nation for tourists, and I'm not fooled. Let's have a look at the number of people emigrating to the U.S. from China, and contrast it with the number of people moving in the opposite direction.
I can run with that line of reasoning, and wholeheartedly agree that abusive behavior if frequently viewed as "funny" by people around the world. I should have added the observation that U.S. citizens aren't alone in making fun of really sad situations, and shouldn't be singled out as such.
It's better news than hearing that China decided to just shoot them in the head instead.
The larger problem is the fact that efforts by journalists in China to report on such events typically results in said journalists being arrested or simply disappearing.
Prison rape is absolutely nothing to laugh at, nor did my response include any verbiage saying that.
Your reply is a commonly used and rather disingenuous ploy to misdirect attention from the topic being discussed. I could easily rephrase it as "but bad things happen in other parts of the world, so this doesn't matter!" Such silly attacks on the U.S. contribute nothing to attempts at addressing the matter at hand.
Try living in China for a year. Try living in the United States for a year. While the U.S. certainly has its own problems, I'd love to hear your report on how awful things are here compared to China.
The parent should not be modded "flamebait." If this is how people who have been determined to suffer from an addiction to the Internet are treated, imagine what must be happening to those diagnosed with more "serious" addictions to other vices. Add in gross human rights violations against those accused of actual crimes, and the situation begins to look very grim.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm 28, and I've been working in IT since 18. I've also had the privilege of working with military officers and some extremely talented employees of defense contracting firms on some pretty interesting projects, a couple of which I managed personally. At one point, I held joint responsibility for the ongoing operations of Bank of America's telephone banking system operations on the VRU side, working for the firm that developed the platform. My experiences have been diverse to say the least.
Care to share your credentials?
If you knew anything at all about me, you'd already know I'm a huge fan of education and educators. You completely missed the point of my post.
I've worked in places where programmers earn mid-six figure salaries. What was your point, again?
You don't need administrative privileges to use most Perl modules; they can be installed under a normal user account or referenced from a website's existing directory structure.
without it being explicit
What, Go supports naked data structures?
People who write software that runs on Windows. Thankfully, I'm not one of them anymore; it's all Linux and MacOS X for me these days.
Didn't fail to read the parent. Perl has an immense amount of built-in functionality; I'd easily say it eclipses PHP in this regard (perusing the documentation site I linked bears that out). My points regarding CPAN is meant to point of the fact that it augments that built-in functionality in a very standardized manner, and even in cases where you might "use Foo;" a large number of those modules are distributed with Perl's core (in other words, they're installed by default).
I have to agree with a couple of your points, however. It's an unfortunate truth, but a heck of a lot of programmers do qualify as dicks. I've worked with my fair share of them over the years, and I have to say I've never met a truly gifted coder with a CS degree. I'm not saying they don't exist, but I'll be damned if I've found one yet. Oddly, out of the "real asshole" crowd, many of them had a CS degree in addition to sucking at their jobs. The best coders I've worked with never even went to college, didn't finish, or graduated with a degree completely unrelated to computer science or IT.
Perl developers know about this thing called CPAN. PHP doesn't even come close in this regard, and you really can't get a better language reference than perldoc. Honestly, if you can't write an app using Perl's built-in functions and the thousands of modules from CPAN, you probably shouldn't be programming. While choice in languages can vary widely according to the individual coder's personal preferences and particular suitability for a given task, the weakness you've cited is imaginary.
Where's the "!urine" tag on this one? Please, somebody think of the drunken graduate students who might read this story and decide to reproduce the results.
Any one of them could be impoverished in a heart beat if life throws them the right curve ball.
You know, if everyone used that excuse as a reason not to work hard toward their goals, zero progress would be made in the world. Any given world leader, business pioneer, or great contributor to the sciences could have been hit by a bus instead of going on to live a successful life. That didn't stop them, and it shouldn't stop anyone else.
Your excuses seem pretty hollow to me.
I'm so glad we invite domestic and foreign terrorists to destroy everything America holds dear, makes me feel safer knowing terrorist's freedom isn't being hindered.
You lost any shred of credibility you might have had by attempting to compare journalists to terrorists. Good job.
Working hard when you're young and able to do so is a critical part of success, and depending on how you define "success" to begin with it's 99% of the equation. For example, I don't live in an expensive house. I don't drive a new car. I'm not interested in outdoing my neighbors with flashy purchases; I don't even own a television (my wife and I like to read instead).
As a result, I'll be keeping my money in the bank while my neighbors are struggling to pay their bills.
That's a pretty laughable proposition. My father took a nearly identical course of action, and he's in perfect health. My grandfather (a cardiologist) is in near-perfect health, and calls "retirement" only working 30 hours a week at the hospital. We all take care of ourselves physically with proper diet and exercise (something I have struggled with on occasion, but try very hard to maintain).
Oh, and none of my immediate family are on the government dole. They chose to make good choices in life and work hard, something that's apparently alien to you.
I don't believe I'm missing out on anything. From 17-22 I took an awful lot of leisure time. I've lived in a ton of places, seen an amazing amount of life, and had a heck of a lot of fun. Now it's time to build a future for myself and my family; my first child is due next year. I'd rather not be working full-time when kid hits the teen years, so I make sacrifices now instead. I also don't maintain a very active social life, preferring to spend almost every free hour I have with my wife.
For me, life is about planning and making choices.
It's working for long-term success, which is entirely different from "taking it easy" all the time when you're young. I'm just shy of 30 now, and I'm on track to retire at 40. Whether I actually do so will depend on how I feel then, but I can assure you I won't be working the same schedule then.
Your argument is old and tired. I've achieved success in my life through study and hard work; I still put in 12-14 hour days working to build my future. I've got many friends who have done the same, and none of us have achieved what we have through deception. Working hard in the relative short term for long term payoffs is nothing new; you sound like someone who feels like he's been dealt a "raw deal" in life. Most likely, you just haven't worked hard enough.
I use an old laptop to provide DNS for my home office network. It's running a minimal Debian install; the only post-install commands I issued to get things up and running were "apt-get install unbound" and "nano /etc/unbound/unbound.conf" to allow queries from the LAN (instead of just localhost, which is the default setting). Instant recursive name server, with no more dependence on anything my ISP offers. They're not presently intercepting outbound DNS queries, but should they decide to do so I'll just move the service to a Linode and tunnel to it.
I'll readily admit that my country does have a knack for locking people up for non-violent drug offenses. Unfortunately, an absurdly large percentage of the nation's prison population is in the clink for convictions of that nature.
I have several friends from China, and have heard first-hand accounts of the oppression at play there. Visiting China does not give an accurate impression of what it's like to live under the thumb of a regime that doesn't respect free spech, freedom of the press, etc. Foreign nationals who "make trouble" for the Chinese government are routinely asked politely to leave. Of those who decide not to comply, they are removed by force, also known as being escorted out by armed agents. In some cases, they are arrested and confined until their home country can arrange for a quiet release.
I am quite familiar with the methods employed by the Chinese government to paint a pretty picture of the nation for tourists, and I'm not fooled. Let's have a look at the number of people emigrating to the U.S. from China, and contrast it with the number of people moving in the opposite direction.
I can run with that line of reasoning, and wholeheartedly agree that abusive behavior if frequently viewed as "funny" by people around the world. I should have added the observation that U.S. citizens aren't alone in making fun of really sad situations, and shouldn't be singled out as such.
I'll believe what you're saying as soon as I can verify it with independent media reports from a free press in China. I'm not holding my breath.
It's better news than hearing that China decided to just shoot them in the head instead.
The larger problem is the fact that efforts by journalists in China to report on such events typically results in said journalists being arrested or simply disappearing.
Prison rape is absolutely nothing to laugh at, nor did my response include any verbiage saying that.
Your reply is a commonly used and rather disingenuous ploy to misdirect attention from the topic being discussed. I could easily rephrase it as "but bad things happen in other parts of the world, so this doesn't matter!" Such silly attacks on the U.S. contribute nothing to attempts at addressing the matter at hand.
Try living in China for a year. Try living in the United States for a year. While the U.S. certainly has its own problems, I'd love to hear your report on how awful things are here compared to China.
The parent should not be modded "flamebait." If this is how people who have been determined to suffer from an addiction to the Internet are treated, imagine what must be happening to those diagnosed with more "serious" addictions to other vices. Add in gross human rights violations against those accused of actual crimes, and the situation begins to look very grim.
Wanna go out? Don't tell my wife I asked...