Re feeling secure, could you actually live on just *one* of the jobs? In other words, if one of them canned you tomorrow, could the remaining job keep you alive indefinitely? If not, your feeling of security is probably an illusion. The money coming in is no doubt a good thing, but the time spent away from your GF is a bad thing. (Incidentally, if your GF is also working and you're living together, that's extra financial security in itself.)
Also re security, I think you have to ask yourself whether you couldn't get another similar job just as easily. There really isn't a shortage of low-wage jobs like bartending, so if you go for a higher-paying job and the worst does happen, you're practically certain of being able to get some kind of alternative job (albeit low-paying) inside a week.
Personally, I'd reckon that holding down two jobs is a non-starter. That makes 15 hours a day, plus say another hour for travelling, which leaves 8 hours for sleep, spending time with your GF, and doing anything else you want. No wonder you've got no free time!:-/ As an emergency measure if you get canned from a higher-paying job, maybe; as a full-time solution it just doesn't make any sense. You'll burn out doing that, and I don't see that there's any sense in burning out doing low-paid stuff. Burning out as a financial whizz-kid and making your millions inside 10 years, fair enough - you've got the rest of your life to recover and millions to sit on - but burning out working two minimum-wage jobs is just pointless bcos you'll have nothing to show for it except a wrecked life (no health, no work, no money, no GF and no prospects).
You want novel novels, check out Tad Williams, or Stephen Donaldson's Gap series. Sherri S Tepper is weak on the "hard sci-fi" stuff, but *very* good on characters.
As for *my* novel novel, I don't have one. I'm a critic who can't write himself, I admit it. However, I don't have to be a master shoemaker to say that a pair of shoes don't fit.;-)
Yeah, those Heinlein ones are never hitting the screen!:-) Mind you, I found it pretty sad even when I read them, and I was a sex-starved 18-year-old at the time, so it must be pretty extreme...
Yeah, the alien races (and future humans) and all the background bits actually were well-constructed - lots of thought gone into what makes them the way they are. My gripe is that the individual specimens of the races were *so* predictable. You get a specimen of a cowardly sneaky race to make Louis Wu look brave, and a specimen of a fierce race to make Louis Wu look calm and collected, and a girl for his "softer side". The only character with some kind of depth is Speaker, bcos he's the only one with any kind of realistic inner conflict. Teela is a 1-D cypher (although you could argue that the book *requires* her to be a 1-D cypher). Once we've found Nessus is manic-depressive, nothing new there. And Louis Wu is your category 2 hero (hero using brains, category 1 being hero using muscle).
Throne is even worse - most focus is on the other races killing vampires, and that's all category 1 hero stuff, plus furry sex...
So cliche, character-wise. Let me count the ways...
- We have a brave genius human (male, naturally) who solves the problems. Check. - We have an attractive but ditzy girl for him. Check. - We have some sex. Check. - We have some fierce aliens. Cat people'll do. Check. - We have some cowardly aliens. Check.
But wait! the twist!
- We have *another* attractive girl for him, and the first attractive girl goes off with someone else, hence giving brave genius male some more sex!
I'm not even going to *start* on Engineers and Throne - too many targets, too little time. If erotic furries is your thing, knock yourself out. Otherwise read something better.
Like Asimov and Clarke, Niven has a major failing as an author - he can come up with astounding technical details, and then wrap them with a story that's for shit. Niven's obviously done *amazing* research into stuff, and invented whole civilisations and past histories like Tolkein would be proud of, but the story (which basically means things happening to people and how people react) could be any trash novel from anywhere.
How to make their money? Well, like you say, release it so that it's only free for development of software under specific licenses (say maybe LGPL, GPL or public domain). Companies using it for commercial development would have to stump up the cash - which, let's face it, is the situation today, bcos no-one can afford to develop cross-platform free software using Qt.
If they can bundle a version on a CD with a book, why not let ppl download it? Seems inconsistent.
Maybe he just needs to "try searching". I know assholes post on boards saying "where do I find XYZ?" instead of checking Google first, but it's really come to a pretty sad state when they get an "Ask Slashdot" instead of searching Google!
You've missed wxWindows (now renamed wxWidgets to avoid potential MS lawyer-evil:-( as the major alternative to QT. I'm a wxWindows novice myself, but it's looking good so far.
What really put me off Qt was the MONEY! $1550 for a license may be OK for a company, but that's a serious wad of cash for one person to shell out. And I think it's the dumbest thing in the world to choose a multiplatform toolkit where multiplatform support is too expensive to use!
That's what I've never understood about KDE. I mean, why use a cross-platform toolkit to develop for a single platform, when there's several good single-platform toolkits for that platform already? The word "DOH" springs to mind!;-)
Also Python is cross-platform if you can put up with using an interpreted language (ie. if you don't need your code to do any serious processing).
There's also the FLTK as well, which is free (money and beer) and cross-platform. Never used it myself, so I can't say what it's like.
Finally, you could simply use Cygwin to make your *nix-based code run on Windows, or Wine to make your Windows-based code run on *nix.
Definitely agree on the LCD monitor - for desktop work, CRTs are just no competition.
As far as size goes though, I don't agree with going for monster monitors. I find that 17" is about optimal for me, as this is almost exactly the size of my eye's main focus. I used to use a 19" monitor and found that I was getting tired eyes because I couldn't see the whole screen at once - 1" of the screen on each side was outside my main focus and only visible in peripheral vision, so my eyes had to move around to see what was on the screen, and that tires out the muscles.
Personally, I reckon the ideal solution would be two 17" monitors, rather than one enormous single monitor. With two monitors, you tend to move yourself (either turning head or whole body) to look at the second monitor. That tends to work much better ergonomically.
Get rid of the damn cat. Seriously. If you've got a one-room apartment you have no business owning a cat. It hasn't got room to exercise in the apartment, and it's seriously antisocial to let it out on the streets to crap in everyone else's gardens.
(The standard cat owner argument: "Oh, but cats are wild animals and do that." Yeah, and I'll buy a bear and let it run loose so it can maul your kid sister to death. Bears are wild animals and do that. It doesn't mean having a bear as a pet is a good idea, now does it?)
Yeah, PnP was lousy in Win98. But how good was Linux at PnP 6 years ago? WinXP is just fine on USB, and that's what would be used. I suppose USB might be used on consumer devices to offload recorded TV programs or music files onto a USB stick, maybe.
Re driver inclusion, this is no argument at all. This is a consumer electrical device, remember? Everything included in one box. Any drivers needed would be preloaded.
The main argument for Linux would be efficiency. Consumer electronics needs to be cheap, so if OS ABC needs a 2GHz processor and 512MB RAM, and OS XYZ needs a 500MHz processor and 64MB RAM, the second one will generally win. That's where Linux would score over WinXP.
The other argument for Linux is software availability. There's a zillion programs available for DVD and whatever on WinXP, but they're all commercial, so reusing them as the basis of a PVR or whatever would cost money. If reusing open source code turns out to be cheaper bcos you don't need to pay stacks for licensing, that'll be a strong influence.
When I was a young kid, Sticklebrix and Duplo were just fine. As I got older, I progressed to Technic Lego and Mechano. As a teenager, I got a computer and played that, but simple games like Space Invaders became less interesting than more complex ones like StarGlider 2.
As an adult, my range of games has extended to physical pursuits which I couldn't have enjoyed earlier on. I now get enjoyment from building stuff which will last for some time, and may outlast me - home improvement and gardening, for example. I enjoy tinkering with cars. I play guitar, and own several. Software-wise, although I still play the odd FPS, my coding and electronics projects occupy most of my time, developing software under GPL which will be useable by other people. And I'm married and considering a family (don't tell me that sex isn't playing!;-)
In other words, as you grow up, you get more advanced ways of playing. As an adult, you take pleasure in more sophisticated activities which have a long-term payoff, which are beyond a child.
Languages best suited their users in their original environment. If the environment changes, you need new words. Either you invent new words for your old language, you pillage other languages for relevant words, or you adopt a new language as being better suited. This doesn't necessarily mean that anything's lost, just that you communicate the same concepts in a different way.
It's perfectly possible to preserve a culture with a different language - look at how different the cultures are in different places in the same country. Britain would be an example - the cultural attitudes of the Scots and Welsh are not changed by speaking English. This is not extermination of culture.
Wow, you really have picked your jobs then, haven't you?! If you can't tell the truth about where your project's at when it gets into trouble, you're screwed. If you know you're in trouble and it worries you, you're in deep enough that you can't retrieve it on your own and you need help (more expertise, more people, whatever). Your managers would rather find out about it sooner, when something can be done about it, than a week before the deadline when you say "oh by the way, we're not going to be ready until next year". The former may get you bawled out for bad estimating/planning; the latter will get you fired for gross negligence.
Work can be a game of perfect information on a political level. If one person says one thing and 99 others say something else, the one person is screwed. In addition, if one person is obviously screwing over you and your team members, that's the purpose of an appraisal system. If 99 people independently say "this guy is a weasel" then the manager should be doing something. If the manager is prepared to let it slide without doing anything, then did you really want that job that much anyway? If the scheming liar *is* the manager, his project is going down the toilet anyway bcos his team won't work for him.
OK, what's the proper answer to "Does this dress make me look fat?"
The proper answer is "Yes". Usually adding "the skirt flares out at the hips where you go in", or something like that. If your GF can't stand you saying "that dress is really unflattering", then what, is she going to go out in public wearing something that looks crap? Would she rather she went out and her friends said "what *are* you wearing?!" Then you get it in the neck big-style for not being honest.
In other words, better to be honest where the consequences now may be uncomfortable but small, than to lie when the consequences later will be hideous and huge. If you've not discovered that, I'm not at all surprised you're screwing up every job and relationship you hit.
Check out "Grass" by Sheri S Tepper. I've got to get round to reading some of her other stuff, but "Grass" is stunning if you're into character-driven stuff.
Yes, this is a totally flawed experiment. All it proves is that when you've been awake for 16 hours straight, you're not as alert as someone who's just had a good sleep.
They're missing another basic test, which is how many people found the "secret method" when allowed one double-length session of working, ie. without a sleep break between testing sessions.
As far as the article goes as well, Coleridge wrote "Kublai Khan" under the influence of opium - sleep was a fairly minor issue!
I'd say this isn't a problem, will never be a problem, and the person who posted that initial question really doesn't know shit about embedded.
Embedded devices come in all sorts of varieties from 4-bit to 64-bit, and will do for the foreseeable future. When you're producing X million chips, the software is amortised to basically nothing and the hardware cost becomes the primary concern, so there is no chance that lower-spec chips will ever go away in the future.
So you're not going to be forced to use a 64-bit chip in your design, just because the chip company has stopped selling the lower spec ones. In the PC business this does happen, because there's no demand for older, lower-spec chips. In the embedded market though, the demand is there and will continue to be there, so the situation has not and will not arise.
If your target application needs 64-bit processing, you choose a device that does 64-bit processing, and you choose RAM size to suit. If you don't need it, you don't choose it. Simple.
Someone elsewhere had some questions about internal registers/internal RAM. Well as with all processors, some give you enough registers and some don't. Again, the engineer just has to pick the processor that gives the capabilities they want.
Slashdot Mirror
Re feeling secure, could you actually live on just *one* of the jobs? In other words, if one of them canned you tomorrow, could the remaining job keep you alive indefinitely? If not, your feeling of security is probably an illusion. The money coming in is no doubt a good thing, but the time spent away from your GF is a bad thing. (Incidentally, if your GF is also working and you're living together, that's extra financial security in itself.)
:-/ As an emergency measure if you get canned from a higher-paying job, maybe; as a full-time solution it just doesn't make any sense. You'll burn out doing that, and I don't see that there's any sense in burning out doing low-paid stuff. Burning out as a financial whizz-kid and making your millions inside 10 years, fair enough - you've got the rest of your life to recover and millions to sit on - but burning out working two minimum-wage jobs is just pointless bcos you'll have nothing to show for it except a wrecked life (no health, no work, no money, no GF and no prospects).
Also re security, I think you have to ask yourself whether you couldn't get another similar job just as easily. There really isn't a shortage of low-wage jobs like bartending, so if you go for a higher-paying job and the worst does happen, you're practically certain of being able to get some kind of alternative job (albeit low-paying) inside a week.
Personally, I'd reckon that holding down two jobs is a non-starter. That makes 15 hours a day, plus say another hour for travelling, which leaves 8 hours for sleep, spending time with your GF, and doing anything else you want. No wonder you've got no free time!
Grab.
You want novel novels, check out Tad Williams, or Stephen Donaldson's Gap series. Sherri S Tepper is weak on the "hard sci-fi" stuff, but *very* good on characters.
;-)
As for *my* novel novel, I don't have one. I'm a critic who can't write himself, I admit it. However, I don't have to be a master shoemaker to say that a pair of shoes don't fit.
Grab.
Yeah, those Heinlein ones are never hitting the screen! :-) Mind you, I found it pretty sad even when I read them, and I was a sex-starved 18-year-old at the time, so it must be pretty extreme...
Yeah, the alien races (and future humans) and all the background bits actually were well-constructed - lots of thought gone into what makes them the way they are. My gripe is that the individual specimens of the races were *so* predictable. You get a specimen of a cowardly sneaky race to make Louis Wu look brave, and a specimen of a fierce race to make Louis Wu look calm and collected, and a girl for his "softer side". The only character with some kind of depth is Speaker, bcos he's the only one with any kind of realistic inner conflict. Teela is a 1-D cypher (although you could argue that the book *requires* her to be a 1-D cypher). Once we've found Nessus is manic-depressive, nothing new there. And Louis Wu is your category 2 hero (hero using brains, category 1 being hero using muscle).
Throne is even worse - most focus is on the other races killing vampires, and that's all category 1 hero stuff, plus furry sex...
Grab.
So cliche, character-wise. Let me count the ways...
- We have a brave genius human (male, naturally) who solves the problems. Check.
- We have an attractive but ditzy girl for him. Check.
- We have some sex. Check.
- We have some fierce aliens. Cat people'll do. Check.
- We have some cowardly aliens. Check.
But wait! the twist!
- We have *another* attractive girl for him, and the first attractive girl goes off with someone else, hence giving brave genius male some more sex!
I'm not even going to *start* on Engineers and Throne - too many targets, too little time. If erotic furries is your thing, knock yourself out. Otherwise read something better.
Like Asimov and Clarke, Niven has a major failing as an author - he can come up with astounding technical details, and then wrap them with a story that's for shit. Niven's obviously done *amazing* research into stuff, and invented whole civilisations and past histories like Tolkein would be proud of, but the story (which basically means things happening to people and how people react) could be any trash novel from anywhere.
Grab.
Or indeed contracts with seals - I seem to remember the aquatics and others trying to work out how to hook up in Ringworld Throne...
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I think you'll find that's a *hamster* bastard. Oh, wrong one, sorry...
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On the other hand, there's 2000 people in Moss Side with AK-47s. Just a good job they've not got internet connections, eh?
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How to make their money? Well, like you say, release it so that it's only free for development of software under specific licenses (say maybe LGPL, GPL or public domain). Companies using it for commercial development would have to stump up the cash - which, let's face it, is the situation today, bcos no-one can afford to develop cross-platform free software using Qt.
If they can bundle a version on a CD with a book, why not let ppl download it? Seems inconsistent.
Grab.
Maybe he just needs to "try searching". I know assholes post on boards saying "where do I find XYZ?" instead of checking Google first, but it's really come to a pretty sad state when they get an "Ask Slashdot" instead of searching Google!
Grab.
You've missed wxWindows (now renamed wxWidgets to avoid potential MS lawyer-evil :-( as the major alternative to QT. I'm a wxWindows novice myself, but it's looking good so far.
;-)
What really put me off Qt was the MONEY! $1550 for a license may be OK for a company, but that's a serious wad of cash for one person to shell out. And I think it's the dumbest thing in the world to choose a multiplatform toolkit where multiplatform support is too expensive to use!
That's what I've never understood about KDE. I mean, why use a cross-platform toolkit to develop for a single platform, when there's several good single-platform toolkits for that platform already? The word "DOH" springs to mind!
Also Python is cross-platform if you can put up with using an interpreted language (ie. if you don't need your code to do any serious processing).
There's also the FLTK as well, which is free (money and beer) and cross-platform. Never used it myself, so I can't say what it's like.
Finally, you could simply use Cygwin to make your *nix-based code run on Windows, or Wine to make your Windows-based code run on *nix.
Grab.
Or maybe they could hire the rabbit puppet from Monty Python...
"That's nae ordinary bunny! That rabbit's got a mean streak a mile wide!"
Grab.
Definitely agree on the LCD monitor - for desktop work, CRTs are just no competition.
As far as size goes though, I don't agree with going for monster monitors. I find that 17" is about optimal for me, as this is almost exactly the size of my eye's main focus. I used to use a 19" monitor and found that I was getting tired eyes because I couldn't see the whole screen at once - 1" of the screen on each side was outside my main focus and only visible in peripheral vision, so my eyes had to move around to see what was on the screen, and that tires out the muscles.
Personally, I reckon the ideal solution would be two 17" monitors, rather than one enormous single monitor. With two monitors, you tend to move yourself (either turning head or whole body) to look at the second monitor. That tends to work much better ergonomically.
Grab.
Get rid of the damn cat. Seriously. If you've got a one-room apartment you have no business owning a cat. It hasn't got room to exercise in the apartment, and it's seriously antisocial to let it out on the streets to crap in everyone else's gardens.
(The standard cat owner argument: "Oh, but cats are wild animals and do that." Yeah, and I'll buy a bear and let it run loose so it can maul your kid sister to death. Bears are wild animals and do that. It doesn't mean having a bear as a pet is a good idea, now does it?)
Grab.
Yeah, PnP was lousy in Win98. But how good was Linux at PnP 6 years ago? WinXP is just fine on USB, and that's what would be used. I suppose USB might be used on consumer devices to offload recorded TV programs or music files onto a USB stick, maybe.
Re driver inclusion, this is no argument at all. This is a consumer electrical device, remember? Everything included in one box. Any drivers needed would be preloaded.
The main argument for Linux would be efficiency. Consumer electronics needs to be cheap, so if OS ABC needs a 2GHz processor and 512MB RAM, and OS XYZ needs a 500MHz processor and 64MB RAM, the second one will generally win. That's where Linux would score over WinXP.
The other argument for Linux is software availability. There's a zillion programs available for DVD and whatever on WinXP, but they're all commercial, so reusing them as the basis of a PVR or whatever would cost money. If reusing open source code turns out to be cheaper bcos you don't need to pay stacks for licensing, that'll be a strong influence.
Grab.
When I was a young kid, Sticklebrix and Duplo were just fine. As I got older, I progressed to Technic Lego and Mechano. As a teenager, I got a computer and played that, but simple games like Space Invaders became less interesting than more complex ones like StarGlider 2.
;-)
As an adult, my range of games has extended to physical pursuits which I couldn't have enjoyed earlier on. I now get enjoyment from building stuff which will last for some time, and may outlast me - home improvement and gardening, for example. I enjoy tinkering with cars. I play guitar, and own several. Software-wise, although I still play the odd FPS, my coding and electronics projects occupy most of my time, developing software under GPL which will be useable by other people. And I'm married and considering a family (don't tell me that sex isn't playing!
In other words, as you grow up, you get more advanced ways of playing. As an adult, you take pleasure in more sophisticated activities which have a long-term payoff, which are beyond a child.
Grab.
Languages best suited their users in their original environment. If the environment changes, you need new words. Either you invent new words for your old language, you pillage other languages for relevant words, or you adopt a new language as being better suited. This doesn't necessarily mean that anything's lost, just that you communicate the same concepts in a different way.
It's perfectly possible to preserve a culture with a different language - look at how different the cultures are in different places in the same country. Britain would be an example - the cultural attitudes of the Scots and Welsh are not changed by speaking English. This is not extermination of culture.
Grab.
SNES?! I think of those little LCD hand-held games. You know, the ones that folded in half.
Grab.
Wow, you really have picked your jobs then, haven't you?! If you can't tell the truth about where your project's at when it gets into trouble, you're screwed. If you know you're in trouble and it worries you, you're in deep enough that you can't retrieve it on your own and you need help (more expertise, more people, whatever). Your managers would rather find out about it sooner, when something can be done about it, than a week before the deadline when you say "oh by the way, we're not going to be ready until next year". The former may get you bawled out for bad estimating/planning; the latter will get you fired for gross negligence.
Work can be a game of perfect information on a political level. If one person says one thing and 99 others say something else, the one person is screwed. In addition, if one person is obviously screwing over you and your team members, that's the purpose of an appraisal system. If 99 people independently say "this guy is a weasel" then the manager should be doing something. If the manager is prepared to let it slide without doing anything, then did you really want that job that much anyway? If the scheming liar *is* the manager, his project is going down the toilet anyway bcos his team won't work for him.
OK, what's the proper answer to "Does this dress make me look fat?"
The proper answer is "Yes". Usually adding "the skirt flares out at the hips where you go in", or something like that. If your GF can't stand you saying "that dress is really unflattering", then what, is she going to go out in public wearing something that looks crap? Would she rather she went out and her friends said "what *are* you wearing?!" Then you get it in the neck big-style for not being honest.
In other words, better to be honest where the consequences now may be uncomfortable but small, than to lie when the consequences later will be hideous and huge. If you've not discovered that, I'm not at all surprised you're screwing up every job and relationship you hit.
Grab.
Check out "Grass" by Sheri S Tepper. I've got to get round to reading some of her other stuff, but "Grass" is stunning if you're into character-driven stuff.
Grab.
Trying to make up for its bad writing by making some grand political or theological "statement"?
Strike Heinlein then, for the ultra-libertarian politics.
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Yes, this is a totally flawed experiment. All it proves is that when you've been awake for 16 hours straight, you're not as alert as someone who's just had a good sleep.
They're missing another basic test, which is how many people found the "secret method" when allowed one double-length session of working, ie. without a sleep break between testing sessions.
As far as the article goes as well, Coleridge wrote "Kublai Khan" under the influence of opium - sleep was a fairly minor issue!
Grab.
I'd say this isn't a problem, will never be a problem, and the person who posted that initial question really doesn't know shit about embedded.
Embedded devices come in all sorts of varieties from 4-bit to 64-bit, and will do for the foreseeable future. When you're producing X million chips, the software is amortised to basically nothing and the hardware cost becomes the primary concern, so there is no chance that lower-spec chips will ever go away in the future.
So you're not going to be forced to use a 64-bit chip in your design, just because the chip company has stopped selling the lower spec ones. In the PC business this does happen, because there's no demand for older, lower-spec chips. In the embedded market though, the demand is there and will continue to be there, so the situation has not and will not arise.
If your target application needs 64-bit processing, you choose a device that does 64-bit processing, and you choose RAM size to suit. If you don't need it, you don't choose it. Simple.
Someone elsewhere had some questions about internal registers/internal RAM. Well as with all processors, some give you enough registers and some don't. Again, the engineer just has to pick the processor that gives the capabilities they want.
Grab.
Come on, there have always been turkeys.
- "Sam Fox Strip Poker" for the C-64 has to feature somewhere
- All ports of Outrun
- Any US Gold film tie-in title in the 80s
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I'd vote for a weapon of RMS destruction, myself.
And call the target the GNU NURD, where NURD is a NERD who Undoubtedly Requires Destruction, and a NERD is a NURD who Evidently Rates Death...
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Abbreviation of "perambulator". It's a Britishism.
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