I've been coding since I was 10 years old. I can write great software. I've written great software at home doing my own projects. However, I've never been able to achieve my potential in the workplace. Why? I think it's because I'm not allowed to be any better than the next guy. If I put my head down and crank out code, I do great things, but inevitably someone else will take credit for my work. If I try to "play the game" the everyone else plays, my productivity goes way down. it's a corporate culture that makes sure that everyone is of equal skill. If you're great, then a big company isn't for you. Your only chance is to work for yourself somehow.
Code that i write is generally read by me, and as such I'd like to see it in a way that is most comfortable and natural for me. In the event that someone else takes it over, they can feel free to format it in whatever way they want. I personally don't understand why anyone would prefer to use spaces over tabs and never will. Forcing people to use language constructs that are unnatural and unappealing to them are inefficiant and generally a waste of time and are generally unnecessary.
I was thinking... When I was a kid, a friend and I defeated a 4 digit (10000 possible combinations) lock in about 2 days by simply trying each possible combo.
Any gun should be locked TWICE. The outer lock or container, should have some sort of way to know that it has been defeated that could be reset. If a perp were to gain access to the outer lock, they would be stopped from accessing the weapons by the inner lock. The owner would then be alerted to the idea that someone has been trying to get at the weapons because of the "flag" that the first lock had been defeated.
I thought that the magic was that you could put a spin on atom A and observe the same spin on atom B instantaneously - even at a great distance. If that's not true, then forget my idea. If it is true, then you could launch a communications probe with any other probe. The communications probe would be at V/2. It would shoot entangled photons both toward the probe and toward earth. The probe would communicate by modifying the spin. Wouldn't this be instantaneous communications? Granted, after years of travel, it would take hours for the photons to reach both the probe and the earth, but since they're constant, there's always something there to modify on one side and observe on the other.
But once a connection is established, why not then would faster than light communications work? IE: You send a space ship away from earth at velocity V. You send a second at velocity V/2. Couldn't that first space ship communicate with earth through the one in the middle at FTL speeds?
Every time we've let the kids go play in the woods, we end up pulling tics off of them and looking for bullseye rashes for the following weeks. I have fond memories of exploring in the woods, but now things are different. At least in the Northeast US.
Why he needs more - by running into the limitations.
When I was 10 I talked my parents into getting my TRS80 coco. I mastered basic, extended and disk basic mostly for the purposes of creating games. I made LOTS of games (and spent LOTS of money (I spent $600 on a floppy disk drive!)). Eventually, I realized that I could never achieve the performance of the real games because the real games weren't written in Basic. I wanted to understand assembler - because I knew that was the only way to get the real performance - but at that time there was really no one to go to who could teach me the concepts. It was really all like black magic to me. I didn't understand the concept of compiling - or really why Basic was so slow.
Anyway, I'd reccomend something simple like Python - where jr could focus on the logic in creating a program. Maybe he too will learn that there are limitations, and want to understand the lower level languages. I tried this a couple years back with my 8 year old... He sort of liked it, but definitely didn't have the drive to learn it like I did at his age.
I've been working at home 80% of the time for the past couple of years. While I've been able to get a great deal of quality work done, and the company has a very distributed workforce (thus there is a great infrastructure for people working from home or elsewhere/anywhere), you learn over time that working from home isn't as great as it sounds... Yes, I don't have to use an alarm clock. Yes, I can work in my pajamas and shower at lunchtime... But I also miss out on a lot of the design/architecture discussions that take place ramdomly throughout the day. There's also a mental factor - there's no satisfaction to "getting home" after a long day of work. As crazy as that sounds, when my work day is done I get up from my office room and utilize the rest of the house, but sometimes it feels as though a human being NEEDS the horrible commute and discomfort during the daytime to actually appreciate the rest of the day.
It could also be said that the internet would make sales people unnecessary in the grand scheme of things, but you certainly don't see the sales crew out promoting the tools of their own demise. Software Engineers just aren't good business people by nature. Open source software - well it changes the way companies make money off of their products. It makes engineers less valuable and puts the power into the hands of people in customer facing roles - sales/support. I've often thought that this model (the open source) is great for engineers that aren't very talented and don't mind being considered as interchangable cogs in any given company - but they're not doing any favors to those of us that consider ourselves to be talented.
While I think that open source software is cool, and allows people to make contributions to the collective benefit of everyone: I don't know that it necessarily costs jobs, but I think it does cost "higher paying software engineering jobs". When a company tries to use an open source project to make money, the company generally will use the strategy of adding some infrastructure around the project and then making the money on the support side. It means that the value of the quality of your engineering staff is lessened to a degree, and jobs are created on the sales and support side. So while I have gratitude toward anyone who contributes their art of any kind to the greater good, I don't think it's the best strategy for software engineers themselves to be successful in the long term.
I was the same way, but looking back - school is as much about "conforming" as it is about learning. Teachers want you to take notes, and will give students better grades that do so.
Maybe the ideal solution is a device that does text to speech and stores the contents of the lecture in (time-tracked) text format. The student might want to click a key to occasionally record video if something important is being demonstrated visually.
The system is what it is because the people in charge want it to be that way. This way, they can take the giant sum of money that is 'tax' and divide it up amongst whoever is deemed worthy. It's not something that those people want to fix, because there's no way they can justify their salaries. Look, I did engineering because it was hard. You can't tell me that I can't do any one of my buddies' jobs that pay them many multiples of what I make, as well or better than they do. I remember these classes in college - they were electives and they were all bullshit.
Does that make any sense? What if the robots that we create are, in some sense, our evolutionary ancestors? We send them out into space and tens of thousands of years from now they begin to self-replicate and send information back to the motherland, as they spread themselves out to viable planets in the galaxy. I know that doesn't appeal to my own sense that some day I'd be able to see, touch and feel the universe with my own body, but the reality of the vastness of space and the physical limits that appear to be in play - seemingly make that impossible. Perhaps these robots would tote along human embryos in stasis, such that if another earthlike planet were ever found they could be 'grown' and educated.
And the famous... My kids got all excited about the news too. My counter was - "well hundreds of people in the world died yesterday, why is Steve Jobs any more important? They all had their own story, it's just that we didn't know about it"
If this were true, how come my golden retriever is more like my neighbors golden retriever then he is like my poodle? They're all dogs... Somehow the retrievers are better at fetching balls and sticks. Is that racist to say that?
Part of your statement is true. Golf and tennis, which are historically country club sports definitely put black athletes at a disadvantage by raw numbers since country clubs are very white places
I just watched "Apocolypto" the other night. In the end of the movie, it was pretty evident that while the different tribes were busy fighting amongst themselves and making sacrifices to god, the Europeans were busy making ships and advanced weapons. I don't mean to put the native americans down - just to say that they were on a completely different timescale versus their eventual conquerors. I think that has less to do with genetics and more to do with population density. The Europeans were on the fast track to technology because the competition to survive demanded it.
You're suggesting that everyone starts off the same, and that's just not the case. If you haven't recognized patterns in the thought processes and skills of races of people, then you're either naieve, ignorant, or just stupid (COMPARED TO AVERAGE).
How about that men grow up with more testosterone and are more prone to compete and make themselves better at sports? I don't understand how you could NOT understand that secluded pools of genetics over thousands of generations would yield offspring that would have tendancies to excel at different things.
Can't we just face the reality that some races are actually better are certain things than others due to millions of years of evolution? Let's face it - historically, the Europeans showed up to the Americas and Africa with guns while the natives were all throwing spears. A country as small as Germany almost took over the world 60 years ago. Why is that? Couldn't it be because something in the German evolutionary history has made their brains such that they're better engineers (ON AVERAGE) ?
So you only have to hit 5 numbers out of 6 to get the payout once it gets over 2M... But that means in order to have all combinations, don't you have to buy 46*45*44*43*42 = 164,490,480 different tickets? Then I suppose if you get lucky, you hit the other number that you picked as well... But it also depends on how many other people did the same thing, doesn't it?
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I've been coding since I was 10 years old. I can write great software. I've written great software at home doing my own projects. However, I've never been able to achieve my potential in the workplace. Why? I think it's because I'm not allowed to be any better than the next guy. If I put my head down and crank out code, I do great things, but inevitably someone else will take credit for my work. If I try to "play the game" the everyone else plays, my productivity goes way down. it's a corporate culture that makes sure that everyone is of equal skill. If you're great, then a big company isn't for you. Your only chance is to work for yourself somehow.
Code that i write is generally read by me, and as such I'd like to see it in a way that is most comfortable and natural for me. In the event that someone else takes it over, they can feel free to format it in whatever way they want. I personally don't understand why anyone would prefer to use spaces over tabs and never will. Forcing people to use language constructs that are unnatural and unappealing to them are inefficiant and generally a waste of time and are generally unnecessary.
I was thinking... When I was a kid, a friend and I defeated a 4 digit (10000 possible combinations) lock in about 2 days by simply trying each possible combo. Any gun should be locked TWICE. The outer lock or container, should have some sort of way to know that it has been defeated that could be reset. If a perp were to gain access to the outer lock, they would be stopped from accessing the weapons by the inner lock. The owner would then be alerted to the idea that someone has been trying to get at the weapons because of the "flag" that the first lock had been defeated.
I thought that the magic was that you could put a spin on atom A and observe the same spin on atom B instantaneously - even at a great distance. If that's not true, then forget my idea. If it is true, then you could launch a communications probe with any other probe. The communications probe would be at V/2. It would shoot entangled photons both toward the probe and toward earth. The probe would communicate by modifying the spin. Wouldn't this be instantaneous communications? Granted, after years of travel, it would take hours for the photons to reach both the probe and the earth, but since they're constant, there's always something there to modify on one side and observe on the other.
But once a connection is established, why not then would faster than light communications work? IE: You send a space ship away from earth at velocity V. You send a second at velocity V/2. Couldn't that first space ship communicate with earth through the one in the middle at FTL speeds?
Every time we've let the kids go play in the woods, we end up pulling tics off of them and looking for bullseye rashes for the following weeks. I have fond memories of exploring in the woods, but now things are different. At least in the Northeast US.
Why he needs more - by running into the limitations. When I was 10 I talked my parents into getting my TRS80 coco. I mastered basic, extended and disk basic mostly for the purposes of creating games. I made LOTS of games (and spent LOTS of money (I spent $600 on a floppy disk drive!)). Eventually, I realized that I could never achieve the performance of the real games because the real games weren't written in Basic. I wanted to understand assembler - because I knew that was the only way to get the real performance - but at that time there was really no one to go to who could teach me the concepts. It was really all like black magic to me. I didn't understand the concept of compiling - or really why Basic was so slow. Anyway, I'd reccomend something simple like Python - where jr could focus on the logic in creating a program. Maybe he too will learn that there are limitations, and want to understand the lower level languages. I tried this a couple years back with my 8 year old... He sort of liked it, but definitely didn't have the drive to learn it like I did at his age.
Yes - you get it. For me it's not the distracted part - it's the 'missing' physical part that feels like it starts to lead to mental abnormality.
I've been working at home 80% of the time for the past couple of years. While I've been able to get a great deal of quality work done, and the company has a very distributed workforce (thus there is a great infrastructure for people working from home or elsewhere/anywhere), you learn over time that working from home isn't as great as it sounds... Yes, I don't have to use an alarm clock. Yes, I can work in my pajamas and shower at lunchtime... But I also miss out on a lot of the design/architecture discussions that take place ramdomly throughout the day. There's also a mental factor - there's no satisfaction to "getting home" after a long day of work. As crazy as that sounds, when my work day is done I get up from my office room and utilize the rest of the house, but sometimes it feels as though a human being NEEDS the horrible commute and discomfort during the daytime to actually appreciate the rest of the day.
It could also be said that the internet would make sales people unnecessary in the grand scheme of things, but you certainly don't see the sales crew out promoting the tools of their own demise. Software Engineers just aren't good business people by nature. Open source software - well it changes the way companies make money off of their products. It makes engineers less valuable and puts the power into the hands of people in customer facing roles - sales/support. I've often thought that this model (the open source) is great for engineers that aren't very talented and don't mind being considered as interchangable cogs in any given company - but they're not doing any favors to those of us that consider ourselves to be talented.
While I think that open source software is cool, and allows people to make contributions to the collective benefit of everyone: I don't know that it necessarily costs jobs, but I think it does cost "higher paying software engineering jobs". When a company tries to use an open source project to make money, the company generally will use the strategy of adding some infrastructure around the project and then making the money on the support side. It means that the value of the quality of your engineering staff is lessened to a degree, and jobs are created on the sales and support side. So while I have gratitude toward anyone who contributes their art of any kind to the greater good, I don't think it's the best strategy for software engineers themselves to be successful in the long term.
I was the same way, but looking back - school is as much about "conforming" as it is about learning. Teachers want you to take notes, and will give students better grades that do so.
err.. Speech to text obviously :-)
Maybe the ideal solution is a device that does text to speech and stores the contents of the lecture in (time-tracked) text format. The student might want to click a key to occasionally record video if something important is being demonstrated visually.
The system is what it is because the people in charge want it to be that way. This way, they can take the giant sum of money that is 'tax' and divide it up amongst whoever is deemed worthy. It's not something that those people want to fix, because there's no way they can justify their salaries. Look, I did engineering because it was hard. You can't tell me that I can't do any one of my buddies' jobs that pay them many multiples of what I make, as well or better than they do. I remember these classes in college - they were electives and they were all bullshit.
Does that make any sense? What if the robots that we create are, in some sense, our evolutionary ancestors? We send them out into space and tens of thousands of years from now they begin to self-replicate and send information back to the motherland, as they spread themselves out to viable planets in the galaxy. I know that doesn't appeal to my own sense that some day I'd be able to see, touch and feel the universe with my own body, but the reality of the vastness of space and the physical limits that appear to be in play - seemingly make that impossible. Perhaps these robots would tote along human embryos in stasis, such that if another earthlike planet were ever found they could be 'grown' and educated.
And the famous... My kids got all excited about the news too. My counter was - "well hundreds of people in the world died yesterday, why is Steve Jobs any more important? They all had their own story, it's just that we didn't know about it"
If this were true, how come my golden retriever is more like my neighbors golden retriever then he is like my poodle? They're all dogs... Somehow the retrievers are better at fetching balls and sticks. Is that racist to say that?
Part of your statement is true. Golf and tennis, which are historically country club sports definitely put black athletes at a disadvantage by raw numbers since country clubs are very white places
I just watched "Apocolypto" the other night. In the end of the movie, it was pretty evident that while the different tribes were busy fighting amongst themselves and making sacrifices to god, the Europeans were busy making ships and advanced weapons. I don't mean to put the native americans down - just to say that they were on a completely different timescale versus their eventual conquerors. I think that has less to do with genetics and more to do with population density. The Europeans were on the fast track to technology because the competition to survive demanded it.
You're suggesting that everyone starts off the same, and that's just not the case. If you haven't recognized patterns in the thought processes and skills of races of people, then you're either naieve, ignorant, or just stupid (COMPARED TO AVERAGE).
How about that men grow up with more testosterone and are more prone to compete and make themselves better at sports? I don't understand how you could NOT understand that secluded pools of genetics over thousands of generations would yield offspring that would have tendancies to excel at different things.
Can't we just face the reality that some races are actually better are certain things than others due to millions of years of evolution? Let's face it - historically, the Europeans showed up to the Americas and Africa with guns while the natives were all throwing spears. A country as small as Germany almost took over the world 60 years ago. Why is that? Couldn't it be because something in the German evolutionary history has made their brains such that they're better engineers (ON AVERAGE) ?
So you only have to hit 5 numbers out of 6 to get the payout once it gets over 2M... But that means in order to have all combinations, don't you have to buy 46*45*44*43*42 = 164,490,480 different tickets? Then I suppose if you get lucky, you hit the other number that you picked as well... But it also depends on how many other people did the same thing, doesn't it?
Planet or not, I'm really looking forward to the arrival of New Horizons in a few years from now (2015?)