Apart from the tea lady role, the other good thing about having management around is that when the shit is hitting the fan, at some point you are often going to need to do some rather unconventional and similarly scary things to fix it.
Having the manager a "Hey boss" yell away means you can at least get "approval" for whatever it is straight away. Now the plebs can't be scapegoated or blamed for solving it by doing something against policy. Granted, it would be nice if that wasn't needed, but the fact you CAN get approval for crazy things quickly means the people fixing the problem are less likely to hesitate due to fear for their own skin.
So far I haven't been terribly impressed with Wolfram Alpha.
For example, searching for the price of oil in non-US dollars results in a US dollar timeline multiplied by the CURRENT exchange rate of that foreign currency, not in the historical timeline. It's like Alpha is having a stab at an answer, but isn't smart enough to know when it's answering the question wrong.
One of the things I immediatly noticed is the lack of build-in libraries. The reason I've always preferred Delphi and C# over C/C++ and PHP over Perl is that they all come with a comprehensive build-in function library for wide area of things.
The release of Strawberry Perl Professional in January should resolve your issues then, as we're going to be rolling a ton of stuff into a single install, so it will come with comprehensive built-in function library for a wide area of things.
I hear people complaining about their shitty IT conditions, and I really do sympathise.
I used to be in a similar situation, before I learned a bit more about Economics and applied it to job hunting.
Supply and Demand alone suggest jobs in places like the Games industry (to which most male gamers under the age of about 25 aspire) will be horrible. The massive supply of labour will be chewed up and spat out by the fickle industry, paid low money and treated like crap.
Likewise, many people in IT are on the cost side of the ledger, where a company is always going to be seeking for reductions in cost and increases in efficiency.
My suggestion? Find an industry which is old (and thus has well established work principles), deeply unsexy, and (if you can) look for jobs on the income side of the ledger. And then be the guy that steps up to take responsibility for safe-guarding that income, the guy that can step up and speak truth to power and be taken seriously because it's your job to make sure that $100m, or $1b, or $10b revenue stream never ever ever stops.
In my case, I discovered the logistics industry and found a programming job at the largest company in my country maintaining the codebase responsible for 80% of their sales (and climbing).
Good money, normal 9-5 hours, prohibited from doing overtime, a proper infra team to manage the hardware, a proper ops team to deploy and run our software, and a reasonable ability to requisition just about anything we need, because The Spice Must Flow.
I would imagine that similar jobs to mine exist in all kinds of places that sound really boring, places like power companies and garbage recycling and anywhere else that needs a lot of IT but will never be mentioned on the front page of slashdot.
I work in logistics, which has about the same reputation for being boring as gambling has for being morally distasteful.
If you're configuring networks or doing desktop support or doing the same kind of work that you'd do in any other company, then that might invoke painting an industry stigma.
On the other hand, if you are doing the bits of that industry that are genuinely interesting from an engineering perspective then that's quite a different story.
My industry is boring, but there's something quite interesting about moving billions of dollars of material to 100,000s of people across a whole continent while never going down and never losing data.
Similarly, the gambling industry probably has great areas like those mentioned about. I'd throw in touch screen tech, graphics, electronics and proof-carrying software and a few other areas where experience in that area would be a positive.
And if you were actually involved in the math of the game design, massive bonus points.
Speaking as a long-time "Sidney" resident, I gotta say we were all a bit annoyed by the whole damned thing too, the fact they ripped up half the CBD, the endless news stories, the drama bombs, the wasted money, the roads that were all going to be closed, and all the general getting ready crap. People were wearing "Fuck The Olympics" shirts openly in the streets.
And then the games started.
And it was a fucking awesome enormous city wide party that lasted for 2-3 weeks, all the horrible concrete repeatedly torn up footpaths had been replaced with highly skatable and cable-friendly slate all through the centre city, there were no building sites anywhere, the pubs and bars were all full, and it just generally kicked ass.
While I don't by any means underestimate the ability of Londoners to put a negative light on something, I have this suspicion that it's the same for every city that hosts it. A sort of preparation and drama filled pregnancy, filled with hormonal outbursts and morning sickness.
Wait till the games actually start, it will be a different place.
Indeed, not to mention the rise of Brazil in the world in general (much like China before it) and the chance to finally have one in South America now there's a country competent enough to make it work. Plus the better weather, plus it's cheaper to go to, plus you don't need crazy-priced "Platinum (US Only)" grade medical and lawsuit travel insurance, plus how awesome a Brazillian opening and closing ceremony will be, plus America has had it relatively recently, and on and on.
I always thought the idea behind signatures was to evolve a way of writing your name that looking almost nothing like your name at all, but you can scribble in less than a second with a dramatic flourish?:/
R18+ is not applicable to video games, which has been an ongoing complaint of the industry for a LONG time now.
So in the sense this isn't "banned" as such, it's just that the censors are given the game and told to work out the category.
Normally, anything so bad that it doesn't fit into the R18+ classification (which usually means stuff like "realistic depictions of rape" and varying gradients of behaviour heading towards but falling short of "child pornography") are the only things that end up beyond the available ratings and in the "Refused Classification" area.
The problem is just that they WOULD quite happily give it R18+, but they aren't allowed to. Which leaves violent games like this thrown in with rape video and similar stuff, where they don't belong.
Everyone knows it's fucking ridiculous, and as the game-playing public ages I imagine it will get fixed eventually. It just results in stupid edge cases in the short term.
It's funny, but every time I see stuff like "the politics is so thick" or "there are no levels" and a dozen other things new MMOs say are amazing and novel I keep mentally adding "... like EVE Online".
I swear to god, sometimes I think EVE is becoming the Lisp of the MMO world. Lisp/EVE did it first, Lisp/EVE did that much better, every language/MMO will eventually embed a hacked up, tacked on, bad emulation of Lisp/EVE.
It's that when game designers come up with ideas like "And then we'll unlock him to everyone, and they'll all hunt him blah blah blah" (where designers try to intentionally create spontaneity) is that it USUALLY fails to take into account cycles of adaptation.
If someone has managed to become the number one bad-ass on the server, is it really worth going after them when they almost certainly did it specifically to attract people into a trap/gank?
$30 isn't much to you or I, but for a 13 year old in a rich world country who happens to have cheap/free access to a 'net connection and the game by some means, it might be a worthwhile investment of time otherwise spent doing nothing.
CCP doesn't invent the isk from nowhere and sell it, they only facilitate trade. So, in effect, they provide a method to get money INTO the system, but no way to get money OUT of the system. So the cheap labour doing the ISK farming shifts from being leeching, annoying, out-of-universe professionals, and moves to being young players who can earn enough to subsidise the regular play.
By making it harder to farm, the labour gets more scarce, the value of it goes up, and more young players can earn their way into the game.
> FOSS has no way to deal with a project's sole maintainer dieing
Perl does.
As usual CPAN has a long-established and regularly used method for dealing with issues like this. There's a process of handing off namespace control to new maintainers when previous maintainers go silent or die. With 7000 developers in the system, our experience is that a few dozen are going to die every year (although I imagine this will slowly increase as the median age creeps upwards).
In practice, we tend to see one significant case of death or death-like symptoms a year that requires a little more hand-holding to do proper module hand-off.
In the last few years, we've lost the maintainer of Perl's Tk bindings, a significant DateTime contributor, and a few years ago one of the largest CPAN authors quit programming to become a missionary in Japan and asked for new maintainers for all his work (that would be the "death-like symptoms" part).
There's tons of really bright people around. And the thing about these people is that they, like everyone else that's any good at what they do, have far too much to do and not enough time to do it in.
They are fully invested in the problems that they are involved with right now, and don't have time for doing anything outside their area.
So find the smartest people you know that seem reasonably trustworthy, and that are in a different area to your idea, but are close enough that they have the skills to critique your idea.
They should be able to find any clear technical failings in your idea.
As for the rest, a venture capital guy once gave me a great one minute summary of what you need to make it when you are thinking about doing a new startup.
1. A working product. 2. A confirmed market. 3. A sweetheart customer.
All three? You win. Two, you have a good chance. One, maybe but unlikely.
Notice that the IDEA for the product doesn't feature at all. Unless you get quickly and easily get that idea into a working saleable (first-generation) product, and find either a proven market or a big bootstrap customer, you're venture is dead regardless.
So you have reduced the energy of your efforts (you write less code) and you are solving problems with an increased application of experience and wisdom (you write better code).
Which is entirely my point.
At some point, progressing in the direction you are, you hit a limit. You've solved the problems in your head and in the initial class layout correctly, and the actual overheads of implementation is what is ruining your productivity.
So to break past that barrier you need to start using minions to get that actual legwork done.
I for one write much less code than I used to, but I get much more solved because I can solve all the serious design problems in a way that will be straight forward to implement, then you get a minion working on finishing off and testing the implementation.
It's nearly impossible to maintain the energy and volume of coding that you do in your 20s.
As you get older, your energy and raw intelligence is going to fall, but your experience and wisdom is going to increase.
If you can, you need to find some way to channel and adapt to this change.
On the pure technical side, that is going to mean heading up from coding into higher level design and architecture, solving the conceptual level problems (with a reliably high level of correctness) of how a big system will work and then steering teams of people for the implementation. You'll still be coding semi-regularly, but if you're lucky you will only have to step in to solve the REALLY hard/interesting bits that the lower level people can't handle. Sometimes this means picking a specialisation and sticking with it, certainly.
If you aren't one of the technical elites in this way, management can be another way to utilise your experience and wisdom. This is especially the case if you've worked a lot with medium to large teams on projects, and you've gained an understanding of how to set up effective development teams. Management also carries with it a political/social/personality requirement. If you've got enough geek cred to know your field, but you can hang out with the sales and marketing people and be comfortable, then perhaps that is your direction.
Methinks someone has been reading the Economist
on
On the Humble Default
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If you read The Economist, you may have noticed a recent review of the book "Nudge".
I have more than a sneaking suspicion the original poster (and TFA) have been reading this as well.
Suffice it to say that the shallow commentary here pales in comparison to the jaunt through behavioural economics that the book provides. If you can get past it's focus on public policy and just absorb all the core information, the book provides good advice than you'd ever think existed on the art of defaults.
Slashdot Mirror
Apart from the tea lady role, the other good thing about having management around is that when the shit is hitting the fan, at some point you are often going to need to do some rather unconventional and similarly scary things to fix it.
Having the manager a "Hey boss" yell away means you can at least get "approval" for whatever it is straight away. Now the plebs can't be scapegoated or blamed for solving it by doing something against policy. Granted, it would be nice if that wasn't needed, but the fact you CAN get approval for crazy things quickly means the people fixing the problem are less likely to hesitate due to fear for their own skin.
In Australia we buy oil from the Singapore exchange, which STILL isn't in Australian dollars.
So even using that market, the need for translation is still useful.
Or what about the gold price, or Chicago exchange coffee prices...
The problem here is not the question, it's that the answer is illogical
So far I haven't been terribly impressed with Wolfram Alpha.
For example, searching for the price of oil in non-US dollars results in a US dollar timeline multiplied by the CURRENT exchange rate of that foreign currency, not in the historical timeline. It's like Alpha is having a stab at an answer, but isn't smart enough to know when it's answering the question wrong.
The release of Strawberry Perl Professional in January should resolve your issues then, as we're going to be rolling a ton of stuff into a single install, so it will come with comprehensive built-in function library for a wide area of things.
Or at least, it will fix it on Windows...
I hear people complaining about their shitty IT conditions, and I really do sympathise.
I used to be in a similar situation, before I learned a bit more about Economics and applied it to job hunting.
Supply and Demand alone suggest jobs in places like the Games industry (to which most male gamers under the age of about 25 aspire) will be horrible. The massive supply of labour will be chewed up and spat out by the fickle industry, paid low money and treated like crap.
Likewise, many people in IT are on the cost side of the ledger, where a company is always going to be seeking for reductions in cost and increases in efficiency.
My suggestion? Find an industry which is old (and thus has well established work principles), deeply unsexy, and (if you can) look for jobs on the income side of the ledger. And then be the guy that steps up to take responsibility for safe-guarding that income, the guy that can step up and speak truth to power and be taken seriously because it's your job to make sure that $100m, or $1b, or $10b revenue stream never ever ever stops.
In my case, I discovered the logistics industry and found a programming job at the largest company in my country maintaining the codebase responsible for 80% of their sales (and climbing).
Good money, normal 9-5 hours, prohibited from doing overtime, a proper infra team to manage the hardware, a proper ops team to deploy and run our software, and a reasonable ability to requisition just about anything we need, because The Spice Must Flow.
I would imagine that similar jobs to mine exist in all kinds of places that sound really boring, places like power companies and garbage recycling and anywhere else that needs a lot of IT but will never be mentioned on the front page of slashdot.
The other place the money could have gone was that the government could have just sucked it all back into "General Revenue".
It's great to see that they left the money inside of the CSIRO.
It's not a secret we have it, but there is a formal promise to the Americans we absolutely won't tell anyone else how we did it.
I concur with the parent.
I work in logistics, which has about the same reputation for being boring as gambling has for being morally distasteful.
If you're configuring networks or doing desktop support or doing the same kind of work that you'd do in any other company, then that might invoke painting an industry stigma.
On the other hand, if you are doing the bits of that industry that are genuinely interesting from an engineering perspective then that's quite a different story.
My industry is boring, but there's something quite interesting about moving billions of dollars of material to 100,000s of people across a whole continent while never going down and never losing data.
Similarly, the gambling industry probably has great areas like those mentioned about. I'd throw in touch screen tech, graphics, electronics and proof-carrying software and a few other areas where experience in that area would be a positive.
And if you were actually involved in the math of the game design, massive bonus points.
Speaking as a long-time "Sidney" resident, I gotta say we were all a bit annoyed by the whole damned thing too, the fact they ripped up half the CBD, the endless news stories, the drama bombs, the wasted money, the roads that were all going to be closed, and all the general getting ready crap. People were wearing "Fuck The Olympics" shirts openly in the streets.
And then the games started.
And it was a fucking awesome enormous city wide party that lasted for 2-3 weeks, all the horrible concrete repeatedly torn up footpaths had been replaced with highly skatable and cable-friendly slate all through the centre city, there were no building sites anywhere, the pubs and bars were all full, and it just generally kicked ass.
While I don't by any means underestimate the ability of Londoners to put a negative light on something, I have this suspicion that it's the same for every city that hosts it. A sort of preparation and drama filled pregnancy, filled with hormonal outbursts and morning sickness.
Wait till the games actually start, it will be a different place.
Indeed, not to mention the rise of Brazil in the world in general (much like China before it) and the chance to finally have one in South America now there's a country competent enough to make it work. Plus the better weather, plus it's cheaper to go to, plus you don't need crazy-priced "Platinum (US Only)" grade medical and lawsuit travel insurance, plus how awesome a Brazillian opening and closing ceremony will be, plus America has had it relatively recently, and on and on.
I always thought the idea behind signatures was to evolve a way of writing your name that looking almost nothing like your name at all, but you can scribble in less than a second with a dramatic flourish? :/
R18+ is not applicable to video games, which has been an ongoing complaint of the industry for a LONG time now.
So in the sense this isn't "banned" as such, it's just that the censors are given the game and told to work out the category.
Normally, anything so bad that it doesn't fit into the R18+ classification (which usually means stuff like "realistic depictions of rape" and varying gradients of behaviour heading towards but falling short of "child pornography") are the only things that end up beyond the available ratings and in the "Refused Classification" area.
The problem is just that they WOULD quite happily give it R18+, but they aren't allowed to. Which leaves violent games like this thrown in with rape video and similar stuff, where they don't belong.
Everyone knows it's fucking ridiculous, and as the game-playing public ages I imagine it will get fixed eventually. It just results in stupid edge cases in the short term.
It's funny, but every time I see stuff like "the politics is so thick" or "there are no levels" and a dozen other things new MMOs say are amazing and novel I keep mentally adding "... like EVE Online".
I swear to god, sometimes I think EVE is becoming the Lisp of the MMO world. Lisp/EVE did it first, Lisp/EVE did that much better, every language/MMO will eventually embed a hacked up, tacked on, bad emulation of Lisp/EVE.
Oh how I wish that they had called it the Bly Sky Mine.
> Today, leaders of teams are faced with a bewildering array of choices ranging from Subversion to the more popular Git and Mercurial.
I think you might be confusing Internet "buzz" with popularity.
It's that when game designers come up with ideas like "And then we'll unlock him to everyone, and they'll all hunt him blah blah blah" (where designers try to intentionally create spontaneity) is that it USUALLY fails to take into account cycles of adaptation.
If someone has managed to become the number one bad-ass on the server, is it really worth going after them when they almost certainly did it specifically to attract people into a trap/gank?
$30 isn't much to you or I, but for a 13 year old in a rich world country who happens to have cheap/free access to a 'net connection and the game by some means, it might be a worthwhile investment of time otherwise spent doing nothing.
CCP doesn't invent the isk from nowhere and sell it, they only facilitate trade. So, in effect, they provide a method to get money INTO the system, but no way to get money OUT of the system. So the cheap labour doing the ISK farming shifts from being leeching, annoying, out-of-universe professionals, and moves to being young players who can earn enough to subsidise the regular play.
By making it harder to farm, the labour gets more scarce, the value of it goes up, and more young players can earn their way into the game.
> FOSS has no way to deal with a project's sole maintainer dieing
Perl does.
As usual CPAN has a long-established and regularly used method for dealing with issues like this. There's a process of handing off namespace control to new maintainers when previous maintainers go silent or die. With 7000 developers in the system, our experience is that a few dozen are going to die every year (although I imagine this will slowly increase as the median age creeps upwards).
In practice, we tend to see one significant case of death or death-like symptoms a year that requires a little more hand-holding to do proper module hand-off.
In the last few years, we've lost the maintainer of Perl's Tk bindings, a significant DateTime contributor, and a few years ago one of the largest CPAN authors quit programming to become a missionary in Japan and asked for new maintainers for all his work (that would be the "death-like symptoms" part).
The article quotes the requirement as being "contains no material hidden defects".
That idea would superficially (I am not a lawyer) appear to allow any open source off the hook as long as you have a public bug tracker.
First, technical reviewing.
There's tons of really bright people around. And the thing about these people is that they, like everyone else that's any good at what they do, have far too much to do and not enough time to do it in.
They are fully invested in the problems that they are involved with right now, and don't have time for doing anything outside their area.
So find the smartest people you know that seem reasonably trustworthy, and that are in a different area to your idea, but are close enough that they have the skills to critique your idea.
They should be able to find any clear technical failings in your idea.
As for the rest, a venture capital guy once gave me a great one minute summary of what you need to make it when you are thinking about doing a new startup.
1. A working product.
2. A confirmed market.
3. A sweetheart customer.
All three? You win. Two, you have a good chance. One, maybe but unlikely.
Notice that the IDEA for the product doesn't feature at all. Unless you get quickly and easily get that idea into a working saleable (first-generation) product, and find either a proven market or a big bootstrap customer, you're venture is dead regardless.
"I don't know, therefore God"
I keep meaning to get shirts done up in Latin for this...
I work with some front-line coders in their 40s and 50s.
I find them to be competent, responsible, diligent and consistent.
But the spark is gone... that ability to look a new, hard, problem right in the face and say "Right, lets go solve that" seems to be reduced.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing. These guys are happy where they are, and if you treat them well they stay with you forever.
But I wouldn't want more than about a third (maybe half if it's a low-creativity project) of the team like this.
So you have reduced the energy of your efforts (you write less code) and you are solving problems with an increased application of experience and wisdom (you write better code).
Which is entirely my point.
At some point, progressing in the direction you are, you hit a limit. You've solved the problems in your head and in the initial class layout correctly, and the actual overheads of implementation is what is ruining your productivity.
So to break past that barrier you need to start using minions to get that actual legwork done.
I for one write much less code than I used to, but I get much more solved because I can solve all the serious design problems in a way that will be straight forward to implement, then you get a minion working on finishing off and testing the implementation.
Then you move on to the next problem.
It's nearly impossible to maintain the energy and volume of coding that you do in your 20s.
As you get older, your energy and raw intelligence is going to fall, but your experience and wisdom is going to increase.
If you can, you need to find some way to channel and adapt to this change.
On the pure technical side, that is going to mean heading up from coding into higher level design and architecture, solving the conceptual level problems (with a reliably high level of correctness) of how a big system will work and then steering teams of people for the implementation. You'll still be coding semi-regularly, but if you're lucky you will only have to step in to solve the REALLY hard/interesting bits that the lower level people can't handle. Sometimes this means picking a specialisation and sticking with it, certainly.
If you aren't one of the technical elites in this way, management can be another way to utilise your experience and wisdom. This is especially the case if you've worked a lot with medium to large teams on projects, and you've gained an understanding of how to set up effective development teams. Management also carries with it a political/social/personality requirement. If you've got enough geek cred to know your field, but you can hang out with the sales and marketing people and be comfortable, then perhaps that is your direction.
If you read The Economist, you may have noticed a recent review of the book "Nudge".
I have more than a sneaking suspicion the original poster (and TFA) have been reading this as well.
Suffice it to say that the shallow commentary here pales in comparison to the jaunt through behavioural economics that the book provides. If you can get past it's focus on public policy and just absorb all the core information, the book provides good advice than you'd ever think existed on the art of defaults.