Bah, I'm 25, and I make 115k a year plus 100k stock options for a startup in the Valley. If you're getting passed over, or treated as a child, then perhaps you should consider that you aren't nearly as qualified, talented, or experienced as you think.
Hard to believe, I know, but I started in this industry when I dropped out of college at 16 in 1992, and I've never once been regarded as anything less than what I am.
In truth, your employer will reward you with responsibility and money if you are experienced and mature, regardless of age. What you are penalized for is immaturity, and I suspect that is the true root of your complaints.
When I get pissed, frustrated, or bored, I just traipse out to my car and spark up a bowl of california's finest.
While truly medicine, I'm not sure if I should feel good that I have to medicate myself to keep myself at a desk writing c++, or just happy that I can be stoned and still make 85 an hour.
Also, when making a 3 or 4 day deadline run, crystal meth is without peer when it comes to having a focused, hi-revving mind that can maintain a high concentration level for 12-16 hour stretches without letdown.
Oh, yeah, and I like my coffee in the morning too.
Same way you manage to find any hole... just keep poking until the rod goes in. And you say "...aaaah, there we go".
CrHacking is much like sex as a single man... lots of hunting, trial and error, but sooner or later you can always find a hole. Some systems are locked too tight to be worth the time it takes - frigid bitches, and quite a few Microsoft setups tend to be real sluts, spreading wide and giving a choice of holes to anyone who wants in.
Personally, I find that with occasional and judicious use of speed/meth, I can maintain a high stress c++ job at a startup, and 2 separate consulting contracts at 85/hour. True, it's unmaintainable over the long haul, but I'm making almost 55k a month pre tax.
Speed and caffeine are the only drugs I'll use as chemical tools, I smoke weed recreationally.
Try reading some Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden to see how the use of pharmaceuticals as a tool was one of the critical elements in enabling our evolutionary branch to excel and get to this point. This is why we have receptors _specifically_ in our brain for THC that nothing else can fit - we've co-evolved with herbal drugs. We're drug-using animals - it's the way we are.
I don't disregard the dangers of some drugs - my personal demon was cocaine for a while. However, I don't use it and haven't for 4 years. Just because danger exists down certain paths certainly doesn't preclude the potential value and usefulness of other paths. Just ask every programmer who starts the day with a cup of java.
Bah, this isn't an "embarrasing hole" [sic], but rather, a little known feature of Adobe Acrobat, widely known as a "fsckwit alert feature".
I'm not sure why the above post was moderated up... it's both obvious and redundant to question the objective nature of the handpicked reviewers.
This instance beautifully illustrates exactly why the government cannot be trusted to monitor our communications, police itself, or store and protect the information of private individuals.
Damnit, it sounds so fscking trite, but our rights must be fought for! Do something about it besides muttering inside a cubicle and posting on Slashdot - support the EFF, support the ACLU. And don't just support them with your voice - cough up just a little bit of that new hardware fund, or spend some time as a volunteer.
It's in the nature of a governmental organism to constantly expand bureaucracy and enlarge the scope and scale of the powers it possesses. The cold hard truth is that the people reading this bear the responsibility to ensure their own freedom.
Well. This review just rocks, and I thought I would share a couple of choice snippets with the audience.
Under Windoze95/NT, it screamed (well, for Windoze) but under Linux and X windows, it was a real dog! The problem certainly wasn't the hardware! Also, I knew that it couldn't be the software, as I've seen it run fast under Windoze... Sort of. The problem was that the Imagine 128 card was supported but not accelerated. That is, all of it's hardware acceleration features were completely unused. Without them, the board was a plain old VGA with high resolutions. I knew exactly what I needed, having heard of Accelerated-X before.
Ah-ha! Good thing this unbiased reviewer had heard so many good things about Xi's products before, or he might not have even done this review!
Unfortunately, we find out towards the end of the glowing review copy this somewhat interesting fact:
I want to clear up one misconception right off the bat. Neither Accelerated-X or even Metro-X support hardware 3D acceleration! They do it through software. Curious that Metro-X mentions this on their site, but not Xi Graphics. However, Xi Graphics is developing a 3D hardware accelerated X server. See their Website for more information. Basically it's still under development though.
Woot, Xi sure is great. Keep checking that website, cause this is next on their list after the massive impact of a (dramatic trumpet flourish)Standard CDE Interface!
Read: We've taken an interface that sucked even when people used it years ago, and standardized a proprietary version of it, all for you! With all this time you waste asking questions, you could be upgrading to Xi-CDE and zooming along with Xi-Accelerator. And it's all free, and best of all, no one will ever be able to write those tricky little improvements to our codebase.
Hmm, a computer science student that uses an original iMac as their primary development system?
Strikes me as just a little bit fearsome. iMacs seem to work just fine for grandma to plug in ( 2 easy steps! ) or 5 year old Suzy to use, but I'm not sure it would be my first choice. Be careful, you might get your geek credentials revoked if word gets out.
You can't even be a decent gamer on that setup - what kind of comp sci students are they raising these days?
You know you're in geekdom when the whole house heads out at 1am for "burritos as big as your head" and/or Pizza.
Grin, and you know you're getting old when you think of 1am as late.
A defining geekdom meal to me would seem more like a trip to Denny's or the Waffle House at 6 in the morning for a fine meal of all-the-grease-you-can-swallow after gnawing hunger finally interrupts yet another marathon gaming session.
Jesus, I utterly fear the temerity of someone in the Bay Area bitching about 650 dollars a month for rent.
Try 1550 a month for an unexceptional 1 bdrm apartment in San Jose. Try buying a house in this market and figure up what your monthly payment will be.
On the plus side, even though the rent sucks ass, the apartment was prewired for 10/100 ethernet with dual t1's coming out of the complex. I'm stupid enough to pay 250 a month extra in rent to avoid 6 weeks of dial-up access while I wait for the great DSL god in the sky to send an installation avatar up.
The other facet you ignore is, even as expensive as the bay area is, if you have even a shard of skill at programming, you can make as much money as you want to pursue. 1550 a month for a 1 bedroom doesn't look quite as bad when the checks keep rolling in at 95 an hour.
Of course, even 95 an hour doesn't look that good when the median house price is 474k in Santa Clara county.
Read my earlier post regarding this type of useless assumption.
This statement assumes that your crystal ball reveals KwH prices remain roughly the same over the next 25 years. Glad you made that call, cause I wouldn't want to bet on it.
With escalating demand, it just wouldn't shock me to see prices follow. Suddenly that 15 cents per KwH doesn't seem like the worst deal after all.
It basically works out like this... with a solar installation, you've just prepaid for somewhere around 25 years of operation at a fixed rate.
Your alternative is trusting in megacorp altruism, government regulation, and capacity expansion to keep prices low for the next 25 years. After all, corporations just hate to raise price to match demand.
While it is true that, using the numbers you have provided for cost per KwH, solar power has a higher cost.
However, you reach this figure by dividing the initial expense of a solar power setup over a projected lifespan of 25 years.
It seems this reasoning lacks a crucial piece to be an accurate comparison of cost. Can you really make the assumption that the price charged by electric companies will remain stable over the next 25 years?
Personally, I suspect that prices will continue to increase as demand continues ever upward. Trying to estimate how much more electricity will cost 10 years from now in San Jose is hard enough, but 25 years? Perhaps your $.15 per KwH would seem like a pretty damn good deal then.
Alternatively, a breakthrough that sneaks through the corporate radar could drastically lower electrical cost, but don't expect it soon.
Admittedly and perhaps appropriately, the text-based adventure genre is dead.
I love to play FPS and RTS games, and spend entirely too much time with Counterstrike, RA3 on q3, and q3f. I've finally weaned myself away from a grevious Starcraft addiction.
However, I've never, ever played a game with more tactical thinking, visceral impact, and unbelievably fast-paced action than Genocide from late 1992 to (kind of) the present. Nothing has even come close. Not close.
And you know what?
Genocide is completely and entirely written and played through a text interface. The combat was real-time and unbelievably intense - the difference between the ping monkeys at shsu and us mortals with a ping of 125 could make even more of a difference than in a FPS like q3.
The environment was immersive and massive, and the systems for combat, hunting, and item management/environment interaction were both complex and easy to use in a simple manner. The ability to create aliases for any/all actions allowed tremendous flexibility.
There was always a tremendous amount of communication intra-team and outside of combat.
Once you became accustomed to the shockingly fast pace that textual information arrived it was amazing how much data could be processed and acted on through this interface. The learning curve was steep, but good lord, the neurons would be firing and the adrenaline would be flowing in the heat of battle. The high complexity and nature of the game also allowed for a tremendous differentiation of skill and capability- the best players were absolute and frightening killers, and everyone else sorted themselves out somewhere on the spectrum.
The other great thing about gameplay was that, once you died, you were dead, and would have to wait until the ongoing war finished to play again, which could take an hour. It really, really meant something to die; you hated it - no respawns here. On the plus side, you then had a full hour to map another area, work on better aliases, and improve your game.
Although it's now a skeleton of the game it used to be - there's no longer new blood, just a lot of reg/developers sitting around writing code and talking over old war stories, I still feel a sense of longing every time I play another game.
Nothing has given me an experience as consistently enjoyable, challenging or intense before or since. Sigh.
And you know what? It was all text based.
Don't underestimate the power of the textual medium. As is usually true, and overlooked, the real power in a game lies in the gameplay, not the medium.
James/Daemon
Hehe, I almost don't mind losing my scholarship to the damn game, or spending 4500 hours in game over 3 years of steady play. In reality, it put me on the path towards programming and the money I make today more than any degree could have.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah, I'm 25, and I make 115k a year plus 100k stock options for a startup in the Valley. If you're getting passed over, or treated as a child, then perhaps you should consider that you aren't nearly as qualified, talented, or experienced as you think.
Hard to believe, I know, but I started in this industry when I dropped out of college at 16 in 1992, and I've never once been regarded as anything less than what I am.
In truth, your employer will reward you with responsibility and money if you are experienced and mature, regardless of age. What you are penalized for is immaturity, and I suspect that is the true root of your complaints.
JDaemon
When I get pissed, frustrated, or bored, I just traipse out to my car and spark up a bowl of california's finest.
While truly medicine, I'm not sure if I should feel good that I have to medicate myself to keep myself at a desk writing c++, or just happy that I can be stoned and still make 85 an hour.
Also, when making a 3 or 4 day deadline run, crystal meth is without peer when it comes to having a focused, hi-revving mind that can maintain a high concentration level for 12-16 hour stretches without letdown.
Oh, yeah, and I like my coffee in the morning too.
JDaemon
Same way you manage to find any hole... just keep poking until the rod goes in. And you say "...aaaah, there we go".
CrHacking is much like sex as a single man... lots of hunting, trial and error, but sooner or later you can always find a hole. Some systems are locked too tight to be worth the time it takes - frigid bitches, and quite a few Microsoft setups tend to be real sluts, spreading wide and giving a choice of holes to anyone who wants in.
Woot.
JDaemon
Personally, I find that with occasional and judicious use of speed/meth, I can maintain a high stress c++ job at a startup, and 2 separate consulting contracts at 85/hour. True, it's unmaintainable over the long haul, but I'm making almost 55k a month pre tax.
Speed and caffeine are the only drugs I'll use as chemical tools, I smoke weed recreationally.
Try reading some Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden to see how the use of pharmaceuticals as a tool was one of the critical elements in enabling our evolutionary branch to excel and get to this point. This is why we have receptors _specifically_ in our brain for THC that nothing else can fit - we've co-evolved with herbal drugs. We're drug-using animals - it's the way we are.
I don't disregard the dangers of some drugs - my personal demon was cocaine for a while. However, I don't use it and haven't for 4 years. Just because danger exists down certain paths certainly doesn't preclude the potential value and usefulness of other paths. Just ask every programmer who starts the day with a cup of java.
JDaemon
Bah, this isn't an "embarrasing hole" [sic], but rather, a little known feature of Adobe Acrobat, widely known as a "fsckwit alert feature".
I'm not sure why the above post was moderated up... it's both obvious and redundant to question the objective nature of the handpicked reviewers.
This instance beautifully illustrates exactly why the government cannot be trusted to monitor our communications, police itself, or store and protect the information of private individuals.
Damnit, it sounds so fscking trite, but our rights must be fought for! Do something about it besides muttering inside a cubicle and posting on Slashdot - support the EFF, support the ACLU. And don't just support them with your voice - cough up just a little bit of that new hardware fund, or spend some time as a volunteer.
It's in the nature of a governmental organism to constantly expand bureaucracy and enlarge the scope and scale of the powers it possesses. The cold hard truth is that the people reading this bear the responsibility to ensure their own freedom.
If you don't help do it, it won't get done.
JDaemon
Woot, another pro-Xi post from Mr. Unbiased Observer, with the stench faintly masked by the light batter of faintly critical user-talk.
Check out an earlier response of mine to his "review", cause I'm not going to put it here again.
That great Xi buzz continues.
JDaemon
Well. This review just rocks, and I thought I would share a couple of choice snippets with the audience.
Under Windoze95/NT, it screamed (well, for Windoze) but under Linux and X windows, it was a real dog! The problem certainly wasn't the hardware! Also, I knew that it couldn't be the software, as I've seen it run fast under Windoze... Sort of. The problem was that the Imagine 128 card was supported but not accelerated. That is, all of it's hardware acceleration features were completely unused. Without them, the board was a plain old VGA with high resolutions. I knew exactly what I needed, having heard of Accelerated-X before.
Ah-ha! Good thing this unbiased reviewer had heard so many good things about Xi's products before, or he might not have even done this review!
Unfortunately, we find out towards the end of the glowing review copy this somewhat interesting fact:
I want to clear up one misconception right off the bat. Neither Accelerated-X or even Metro-X support hardware 3D acceleration! They do it through software. Curious that Metro-X mentions this on their site, but not Xi Graphics. However, Xi Graphics is developing a 3D hardware accelerated X server. See their Website for more information. Basically it's still under development though.
Woot, Xi sure is great. Keep checking that website, cause this is next on their list after the massive impact of a (dramatic trumpet flourish) Standard CDE Interface!
Read: We've taken an interface that sucked even when people used it years ago, and standardized a proprietary version of it, all for you! With all this time you waste asking questions, you could be upgrading to Xi-CDE and zooming along with Xi-Accelerator. And it's all free, and best of all, no one will ever be able to write those tricky little improvements to our codebase.
Mmmmm.
JDaemon
If it seems like I'm bitter, it's because I am.
Good Lord, how do you play Quake and not hear about strafe jumping. Have you tried reading an single tutorial or article online, even once?
And you probably wonder why you keep respawning every 10 seconds or so like clockwork.
Hmm, a computer science student that uses an original iMac as their primary development system?
Strikes me as just a little bit fearsome. iMacs seem to work just fine for grandma to plug in ( 2 easy steps! ) or 5 year old Suzy to use, but I'm not sure it would be my first choice. Be careful, you might get your geek credentials revoked if word gets out.
You can't even be a decent gamer on that setup - what kind of comp sci students are they raising these days?
You know you're in geekdom when the whole house heads out at 1am for "burritos as big as your head" and/or Pizza.
Grin, and you know you're getting old when you think of 1am as late.
A defining geekdom meal to me would seem more like a trip to Denny's or the Waffle House at 6 in the morning for a fine meal of all-the-grease-you-can-swallow after gnawing hunger finally interrupts yet another marathon gaming session.
But, maybe that's just me, grin.
Jesus, I utterly fear the temerity of someone in the Bay Area bitching about 650 dollars a month for rent.
Try 1550 a month for an unexceptional 1 bdrm apartment in San Jose. Try buying a house in this market and figure up what your monthly payment will be.
On the plus side, even though the rent sucks ass, the apartment was prewired for 10/100 ethernet with dual t1's coming out of the complex. I'm stupid enough to pay 250 a month extra in rent to avoid 6 weeks of dial-up access while I wait for the great DSL god in the sky to send an installation avatar up.
The other facet you ignore is, even as expensive as the bay area is, if you have even a shard of skill at programming, you can make as much money as you want to pursue. 1550 a month for a 1 bedroom doesn't look quite as bad when the checks keep rolling in at 95 an hour.
Of course, even 95 an hour doesn't look that good when the median house price is 474k in Santa Clara county.
Read my earlier post regarding this type of useless assumption.
This statement assumes that your crystal ball reveals KwH prices remain roughly the same over the next 25 years. Glad you made that call, cause I wouldn't want to bet on it.
With escalating demand, it just wouldn't shock me to see prices follow. Suddenly that 15 cents per KwH doesn't seem like the worst deal after all.
It basically works out like this... with a solar installation, you've just prepaid for somewhere around 25 years of operation at a fixed rate.
Your alternative is trusting in megacorp altruism, government regulation, and capacity expansion to keep prices low for the next 25 years. After all, corporations just hate to raise price to match demand.
Woot.
Yeah, that's just great.
Like the idea of a hot_shower_ really appeals to most of the people reading this. Hehe.
Actually, that reminds me of something. Doh.
While it is true that, using the numbers you have provided for cost per KwH, solar power has a higher cost.
However, you reach this figure by dividing the initial expense of a solar power setup over a projected lifespan of 25 years.
It seems this reasoning lacks a crucial piece to be an accurate comparison of cost.
Can you really make the assumption that the price charged by electric companies will remain stable over the next 25 years?
Personally, I suspect that prices will continue to increase as demand continues ever upward. Trying to estimate how much more electricity will cost 10 years from now in San Jose is hard enough, but 25 years? Perhaps your $.15 per KwH would seem like a pretty damn good deal then.
Alternatively, a breakthrough that sneaks through the corporate radar could drastically lower electrical cost, but don't expect it soon.
BTW, to look around what's left of Geno today, telnet to geno.org:2222. J
Admittedly and perhaps appropriately, the text-based adventure genre is dead.
I love to play FPS and RTS games, and spend entirely too much time with Counterstrike, RA3 on q3, and q3f. I've finally weaned myself away from a grevious Starcraft addiction.
However, I've never, ever played a game with more tactical thinking, visceral impact, and unbelievably fast-paced action than Genocide from late 1992 to (kind of) the present. Nothing has even come close. Not close.
And you know what?
Genocide is completely and entirely written and played through a text interface. The combat was real-time and unbelievably intense - the difference between the ping monkeys at shsu and us mortals with a ping of 125 could make even more of a difference than in a FPS like q3.
The environment was immersive and massive, and the systems for combat, hunting, and item management/environment interaction were both complex and easy to use in a simple manner. The ability to create aliases for any/all actions allowed tremendous flexibility.
There was always a tremendous amount of communication intra-team and outside of combat. Once you became accustomed to the shockingly fast pace that textual information arrived it was amazing how much data could be processed and acted on through this interface. The learning curve was steep, but good lord, the neurons would be firing and the adrenaline would be flowing in the heat of battle. The high complexity and nature of the game also allowed for a tremendous differentiation of skill and capability- the best players were absolute and frightening killers, and everyone else sorted themselves out somewhere on the spectrum.
The other great thing about gameplay was that, once you died, you were dead, and would have to wait until the ongoing war finished to play again, which could take an hour. It really, really meant something to die; you hated it - no respawns here. On the plus side, you then had a full hour to map another area, work on better aliases, and improve your game.
Although it's now a skeleton of the game it used to be - there's no longer new blood, just a lot of reg/developers sitting around writing code and talking over old war stories, I still feel a sense of longing every time I play another game. Nothing has given me an experience as consistently enjoyable, challenging or intense before or since. Sigh.
And you know what? It was all text based.
Don't underestimate the power of the textual medium. As is usually true, and overlooked, the real power in a game lies in the gameplay, not the medium.
James/Daemon
Hehe, I almost don't mind losing my scholarship to the damn game, or spending 4500 hours in game over 3 years of steady play. In reality, it put me on the path towards programming and the money I make today more than any degree could have.
What I really want to know is if I can hack this to run Windows CE.
Now that would really make it useful....
Plus, the pretty BSOD could be used as a night light.
Secret Windows Settings