I've always felt that it's stupid to pigeon-hole yourself into being a _______ developer. I'm a professional graphic designer, just a hobby programmer, and a pretty experienced web designer and have done more than my share of front-end work over the years (including JavaScript in the bad old days).
I realize that there is time and energy involved in learning a particular programming language/environment, but isn't that kind of what you signed up for? When I applied somewhere that used Quark I didn't say "sorry, I only design with InDesign and Photoshop." I warned them I didn't have much experience in it and that might slow me down a bit at first, then I sucked it up and learned the new environment when they hired me. The tools were different (in some places radically so), and took quite a lot of learning to acclimate myself, but surprise surprise the basic design skills I've developed over the years still applied.
Similarly, the concepts of programming are the concepts of programming. Once you get good enough you aught to be able to transfer those skills to other languages. A loop is a loop, an array is an array, etc.
That said, if you do put all your professional skill development eggs in one proprietary basket you completely deserve any harm that befalls you because of that dumb-shit decision. Doubly so if you're so dense that you can't transfer anything you learned writing VB in.NET to big boy programming.
If you use your workstation exclusively for 10-year-old programs or 20-year-old programs I think it's very likely your job is stupid and could be automated in a pinch.
For example, at my workplace we have 20 processes (software written 15 years ago) on an old AS/400 that handle an absolutely business critical task that is executed at the behest of terminals state-wide. There's a (fairly common) case that (luckily only during business hours) causes one of those process to fail and not restart. Somebody in IT has to be watching those 20 tasks at all times to restart any that fail.
There's a fix available, but nobody has felt like coming in overnight to apply it when the box resets at 3:00 in the morning. So for the last six months there's been a man-day wasted every single day to watching the AS/400 like a hawk every minute of every hour.
I find that often needing to touch extremely dated applications on a daily basis is a symptom of larger, nastier IT atrophy.
This story is one of the many reasons I thank my lucky stars almost daily that I switched my major partway through and went into graphic design instead of IT or programming.
I'm from New Mexico, and I'm wondering where our fearless new leader left her fiery campaign promises about the budget.
So far her big accomplishments have been:
To dissolve environmental regulations to the best of her abilities (to pay back her big energy campaign donors, even if her methods were possibly illegal)
Try to institute a very expensive overhaul of our drivers' licenses (because despite being named Martinez she seems to hate brown people enough that it clouds her judgement. Illegal immigrants get licenses for a very simple reason here: so they can get insurance -- so that the rest of us don't pay absurd[er] premiums.)
After campaigning on a promise to balance the budget without cutting education say "oh, never mind, we might have to cut education" within a week of being elected.
Now she's instituting this? I can't imagine it'll be cheap either.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Republicans talk a big talk on fiscal responsibility, but can't walk the walk unless it's going to help them shit on the heads of poor people. All promises of fiscal responsibility also go right out the window when it comes to chances to edge closer to a police state or go to war.
1) You may well be right about that. Pepper spray on a small scale isn't illegal though, but I would imagine dusting a whole city with it might run afoul of international law.
2) It grows on trees - only valid if the processing to weaponize is easy enough.
I don't think Google was pirating anything on YouTube. That would be like saying T-Mobile is part of a conspiracy if I make a plan to buy drugs in a cell phone call.
There are safe harbor laws for a reason. It's up to the copyright holder to police their property, otherwise how is YouTube supposed to know which videos are piracy and which are just being uploaded by Viacom's idiot guerrilla marketers?
Of course they are. They don't have enough money to be of concern to a government.
In all seriousness though, this is how it always goes: somebody has a halfway decent idea but somewhere along the line of being implemented it gets perverted by the special interest with the most money. It's always subtle though, that way the special interests get what they need and the politicians still get PR points.
Remember the increase in tobacco taxes here in the US recently? Pre-rolled cigarettes (made by giant corporations) saw a modest increase in taxation of about 150%. Rolling tobacco (mostly made by smaller, often local businesses) saw their taxes increase by 2,200%.
The net result? Big tobacco actually gets more business as people ditch the now-obscenely-expensive rolling tobacco, so they're happy. Politicians get to say they're raising money and helping the budget. In reality though, we're driving small businesses down and moving smokers into spending their money to buy an arguably more dangerous cigarette while at the same time not supporting their own local economies.
I basically assume anything I hear on the news or from a government press conference is at least a gross misrepresentation - if not a flat-out lie.
2 and 3: the contact lenses moving with the eye is exactly the problem. If the image remains locked to the same point in your field of view your brain will quickly assume it's a problem and correct for it (by ignoring it).
Unless eye tracking can make the projected image appear to be floating in front of you somehow (by adjusting its location in your FOV based on eye alignment) this will never work. For purely biological reasons.
The system actually enables him to walk and read unaided.
Granted, at the moment I'm sure they mean stuff like signs. Once it's upgraded to 4,000 points though I would imagine reading larger print books would be no problem.
I read the SAIC article, and found something fascinating.
The FBI found 400 notable bugs in the software SAIC provided them. SAIC said the FBI requested 399 spec changes over 15 months. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
I've seem some private industry that works really well, some not. The same goes for government-run operations. Ultimately I think government and private industry don't have terribly compatible business processes.
You cannot just throw Math.random() at a problem and stir the pot and expect good results
You can expect good enough results though. This particular application isn't exactly rocket science or cryptography, slightly non-random is good enough for me.
Granted, it's a silly mistake to make. I would imagine they didn't put their best and brightest on this one though. Interns, anyone?
If you actually hit something of value with that tiny drone it's not going to do much really except maybe cause a few more oppressive/stupid laws to be passed.
As someone who has always been more responsible than the majority of my cohort I have an insight here: I learned to be responsible for one reason - my parents expected me to be responsible. I firmly believe people will be no more responsible than you expect them to be.
At work I have to do a lot of press checks, where I go to a print shop and approve the final production of various projects. I have coworkers who do the same thing, and the fact is we get radically different results out of the same press operators.
My coworkers feel the need to always change something, and they check everything with a fine-tooth comb, and I think often they ask for fiddling with plate alignment just because they feel like they need to do something. As a result when they get to a press check there's always something wrong.
When I get to a press check though, it's almost always perfect. I think it's because all the press guys know that if it's right the first time I won't waste everyone's time noodling over it - I'll just sign off on it, say "great job" and we'll all go about our business.
I expect them to be good at their jobs, and lo-and-behold they are! My coworkers seem to expect them to screw everything up every chance they get, and lo-and-behold they do! I think when other people are going in they just don't bother getting the plate alignment just so, because they want my coworkers to have something to change.
Kids are the same. I was working professionally as a graphic designer and probably would have been able to survive in the real world at 15; it's because my parents expected me to be responsible.
Not exactly. If I break into somebody's house to take pictures of their drug paraphernalia those photos might be admissible as evidence in court. Unfortunately they'd also be permissible as evidence against me - for breaking and entering.
That's beside the point. Maybe the cameras themselves aren't hidden, but that doesn't make recording with them willy-nilly acceptable. I have a webcam on my computer at home, and I know it's there. I also have a reasonable expectation that it can't be turned on remotely without my consent.
I predict overpriced rentals that expire at the drop of a hat, then use of the lack of interest as evidence against the viability of online business models.
The MPAA doesn't want change, and they will screw their consumers and their own potential profits to make a case against it.
You know what? You're probably right. The best way to attract talent for education is definitely to keep paying them like they're cleaning toilets.
If we're going to say "the children are our future" and constantly scream "think of the children" let's put our money where our mouth is, and try actually funding things that help our children. I assure you higher wages won't make things worse, and they'll cost roughly as much as a couple new, better-than-our-already-the-best airplanes.
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I've always felt that it's stupid to pigeon-hole yourself into being a _______ developer. I'm a professional graphic designer, just a hobby programmer, and a pretty experienced web designer and have done more than my share of front-end work over the years (including JavaScript in the bad old days).
I realize that there is time and energy involved in learning a particular programming language/environment, but isn't that kind of what you signed up for? When I applied somewhere that used Quark I didn't say "sorry, I only design with InDesign and Photoshop." I warned them I didn't have much experience in it and that might slow me down a bit at first, then I sucked it up and learned the new environment when they hired me. The tools were different (in some places radically so), and took quite a lot of learning to acclimate myself, but surprise surprise the basic design skills I've developed over the years still applied.
Similarly, the concepts of programming are the concepts of programming. Once you get good enough you aught to be able to transfer those skills to other languages. A loop is a loop, an array is an array, etc.
That said, if you do put all your professional skill development eggs in one proprietary basket you completely deserve any harm that befalls you because of that dumb-shit decision. Doubly so if you're so dense that you can't transfer anything you learned writing VB in .NET to big boy programming.
If you use your workstation exclusively for 10-year-old programs or 20-year-old programs I think it's very likely your job is stupid and could be automated in a pinch.
For example, at my workplace we have 20 processes (software written 15 years ago) on an old AS/400 that handle an absolutely business critical task that is executed at the behest of terminals state-wide. There's a (fairly common) case that (luckily only during business hours) causes one of those process to fail and not restart. Somebody in IT has to be watching those 20 tasks at all times to restart any that fail.
There's a fix available, but nobody has felt like coming in overnight to apply it when the box resets at 3:00 in the morning. So for the last six months there's been a man-day wasted every single day to watching the AS/400 like a hawk every minute of every hour.
I find that often needing to touch extremely dated applications on a daily basis is a symptom of larger, nastier IT atrophy.
This story is one of the many reasons I thank my lucky stars almost daily that I switched my major partway through and went into graphic design instead of IT or programming.
It's only people with vested interests pretending to be more people than they are who don't.
I'm from New Mexico, and I'm wondering where our fearless new leader left her fiery campaign promises about the budget.
So far her big accomplishments have been:
To dissolve environmental regulations to the best of her abilities (to pay back her big energy campaign donors, even if her methods were possibly illegal)
Try to institute a very expensive overhaul of our drivers' licenses (because despite being named Martinez she seems to hate brown people enough that it clouds her judgement. Illegal immigrants get licenses for a very simple reason here: so they can get insurance -- so that the rest of us don't pay absurd[er] premiums.)
After campaigning on a promise to balance the budget without cutting education say "oh, never mind, we might have to cut education" within a week of being elected.
Now she's instituting this? I can't imagine it'll be cheap either.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Republicans talk a big talk on fiscal responsibility, but can't walk the walk unless it's going to help them shit on the heads of poor people. All promises of fiscal responsibility also go right out the window when it comes to chances to edge closer to a police state or go to war.
Do you actually read the comments you snark at anonymously?
1) You may well be right about that. Pepper spray on a small scale isn't illegal though, but I would imagine dusting a whole city with it might run afoul of international law.
2) It grows on trees - only valid if the processing to weaponize is easy enough.
Yeah, and cars have already had the native ability to drive, turn and stop for a century. The DARPA Grand Challenge isn't really adding anything new.
Those robotic cars are basically just intelligent automated versions of cars, on steroids.
Just because it happens in software does not make it trivial.
I don't think Google was pirating anything on YouTube. That would be like saying T-Mobile is part of a conspiracy if I make a plan to buy drugs in a cell phone call.
There are safe harbor laws for a reason. It's up to the copyright holder to police their property, otherwise how is YouTube supposed to know which videos are piracy and which are just being uploaded by Viacom's idiot guerrilla marketers?
If I crash a rear-wheel-drive car while cornering in the rain can I sue the manufacturer for not giving it all-wheel-drive?
Of course they are. They don't have enough money to be of concern to a government.
In all seriousness though, this is how it always goes: somebody has a halfway decent idea but somewhere along the line of being implemented it gets perverted by the special interest with the most money. It's always subtle though, that way the special interests get what they need and the politicians still get PR points.
Remember the increase in tobacco taxes here in the US recently? Pre-rolled cigarettes (made by giant corporations) saw a modest increase in taxation of about 150%. Rolling tobacco (mostly made by smaller, often local businesses) saw their taxes increase by 2,200%.
The net result? Big tobacco actually gets more business as people ditch the now-obscenely-expensive rolling tobacco, so they're happy. Politicians get to say they're raising money and helping the budget. In reality though, we're driving small businesses down and moving smokers into spending their money to buy an arguably more dangerous cigarette while at the same time not supporting their own local economies.
I basically assume anything I hear on the news or from a government press conference is at least a gross misrepresentation - if not a flat-out lie.
2 and 3: the contact lenses moving with the eye is exactly the problem. If the image remains locked to the same point in your field of view your brain will quickly assume it's a problem and correct for it (by ignoring it).
Unless eye tracking can make the projected image appear to be floating in front of you somehow (by adjusting its location in your FOV based on eye alignment) this will never work. For purely biological reasons.
The system actually enables him to walk and read unaided.
Granted, at the moment I'm sure they mean stuff like signs. Once it's upgraded to 4,000 points though I would imagine reading larger print books would be no problem.
No, it isn't. This would be like the mailman taking that letter, copying it, delivering it Bob and then reading it in town square.
And vice versa.
They go apeshit over salt, but can't be bothered to completely remove the sentencing disparity between rock and powder cocaine.
One is a "think of the children" and one disproportionately targets minorities. Guess which is which?
That's the reason I don't have an i-Anything. I refuse to play the walled garden game.
I read the SAIC article, and found something fascinating.
The FBI found 400 notable bugs in the software SAIC provided them. SAIC said the FBI requested 399 spec changes over 15 months. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
I've seem some private industry that works really well, some not. The same goes for government-run operations. Ultimately I think government and private industry don't have terribly compatible business processes.
You cannot just throw Math.random() at a problem and stir the pot and expect good results
You can expect good enough results though. This particular application isn't exactly rocket science or cryptography, slightly non-random is good enough for me.
Granted, it's a silly mistake to make. I would imagine they didn't put their best and brightest on this one though. Interns, anyone?
If you actually hit something of value with that tiny drone it's not going to do much really except maybe cause a few more oppressive/stupid laws to be passed.
I think that's kind of the point.
As someone who has always been more responsible than the majority of my cohort I have an insight here: I learned to be responsible for one reason - my parents expected me to be responsible. I firmly believe people will be no more responsible than you expect them to be.
At work I have to do a lot of press checks, where I go to a print shop and approve the final production of various projects. I have coworkers who do the same thing, and the fact is we get radically different results out of the same press operators.
My coworkers feel the need to always change something, and they check everything with a fine-tooth comb, and I think often they ask for fiddling with plate alignment just because they feel like they need to do something. As a result when they get to a press check there's always something wrong.
When I get to a press check though, it's almost always perfect. I think it's because all the press guys know that if it's right the first time I won't waste everyone's time noodling over it - I'll just sign off on it, say "great job" and we'll all go about our business.
I expect them to be good at their jobs, and lo-and-behold they are! My coworkers seem to expect them to screw everything up every chance they get, and lo-and-behold they do! I think when other people are going in they just don't bother getting the plate alignment just so, because they want my coworkers to have something to change.
Kids are the same. I was working professionally as a graphic designer and probably would have been able to survive in the real world at 15; it's because my parents expected me to be responsible.
Not exactly. If I break into somebody's house to take pictures of their drug paraphernalia those photos might be admissible as evidence in court. Unfortunately they'd also be permissible as evidence against me - for breaking and entering.
The ends don't justify the means.
That's beside the point. Maybe the cameras themselves aren't hidden, but that doesn't make recording with them willy-nilly acceptable. I have a webcam on my computer at home, and I know it's there. I also have a reasonable expectation that it can't be turned on remotely without my consent.
So when do I get a firmware update to turn my HandyCam into a high-speed video monster?
I don't think their goal is to "punish" the masses. More like confuse, frighten and constantly spy on the masses.
In Soviet Amerika internet browses you! (Sorry, I couldn't resist)
I predict overpriced rentals that expire at the drop of a hat, then use of the lack of interest as evidence against the viability of online business models.
The MPAA doesn't want change, and they will screw their consumers and their own potential profits to make a case against it.
You know what? You're probably right. The best way to attract talent for education is definitely to keep paying them like they're cleaning toilets.
If we're going to say "the children are our future" and constantly scream "think of the children" let's put our money where our mouth is, and try actually funding things that help our children. I assure you higher wages won't make things worse, and they'll cost roughly as much as a couple new, better-than-our-already-the-best airplanes.
Moron.