I may be comitting a major violation of the groupthink here, but if you are a U.S. citizen, the Air Force or even Air National Guard is a good way to get a jumpstart on an IT career...
Excuse me? Group think? Have you seen any evidence of anti-military bias at Slashdot? True, many of us are opposed to the current administration's policies, but the same can be said for half the people in the services.
You're right about Air Force (and the other services) being good places to get IT skills, and lots of other technical skills as well. Their training programs are widely respected. But we're talking about a high school kid looking for pointers for immediate experience, not major career advice.
Also, there are a lot of people who've joined the Guard in order to get training, and ended up walking a perimeter in some wilderness. A nasty side trip in your life, even if that wilderness isn't infested with Islamic insurgents. When you put on the uniform, you go where they send you, even if it interferes with all the promises the recruiting sergeant made.
If you're feeling patriotic, or just think it's something that would be good to do, by all means join up. But if your only reason for joining up is to get training, there are better ways to go about that.
You're right to want to avoid working in retail. And from what I've seen, your having actual technical experience actually makes it harder to get a retail job!
You're probably not going to get a real job with your limited experience. There are already experienced folks begging for work. But there's always volunteer and internship openings, which give you experience that looks good on your resume. Plus they're good for makign contacts. Suggestions:
Your high school might have somebody in the counseling or career development that can hook you up with an internship.
Community colleges are often magnets for computer geeks. Most will let high school students take classes. If your state lets you enroll out of district, shop around until you find one that has a decent computer lab and interesting people. Hang out, take some classes, acquire some contacts. And they too have internship programs.
Call all the big companies in your area, ask to talk to their Human Resources department, and ask them if they have any internships open.
Check with volunteer programs, see if they have anybody who needs your skills.
If you have any skills people need, like knowing how to clean a system of viruses and spyware, print up some business cards and start handing them out. Work cheap and hard, and soon you'll have a reputation that will lead to something solid.
That book assumes that the physical limitations that make AI impossible don't apply everywhere. It still assumes that the limitations exist. Indeed if I remember the story correctly (it's been a long time, and Vinge is not one of those authors I enjoy re-reading) there initially is a huge region where AI is possible but the good guys destroy it in order to defeat an evil intelligence, a sort of computer virus that infects whole cultures. That leaves most of the galaxy in its current state. Or at least what the anti-AI crowd insists is its current state — I've always found their logic flawed.
He just thought it would be a cute idea if AI never pans out on Earth, because the laws of physics here prohibit it.
You same to think that Vinge invented the AI issue all by himself. If you ever read anything besides SF, you'd know that he's part of a larger stream of thought that says, "AI is fundamentally impossible."
All the Transcend stories do is invent an imaginary physics that say AI is possible under certain circumstances, just as stories with FTL spacecraft invent an imaginary physics where you can travel faster than light. Vinge isn't saying he really thinks AI is possible any more than all those other writers were saying they thought Einstein was an idiot.
Oh please. Creating an imaginary past based on current mythology is not the same thing as speculating about a possible future based on current technology.
...though basically well written, is full of dumb ideas. This particular dumb idea comes from the notion that the development tools we use now are pretty much as sophisticated as they're ever going to get. That's right up there with the famous urban legend about the proposal to close the patent office.
Vinge's problem is that he makes too much of the famous failures of AI, and has fallen in with the camp that believes that software will never be able to compete with wetware. That has yet to be proven, but even if its true, simply replicating human intelligence (so-called "hard AI") is not the only strategy.
If game meat were cheaper than corn, we probably would feed it to pigs and cows. That's not even as bad as the practice of feeding slaughterhouse waste to the very cows being raised for the slaughterhouse. This was extremely common until people started worrying about mad cow disease.
And if you ever watch Deadwood, you'll know that pigs are not very choosy...
There's a fish called the tilapia. Never heard of it until a few months ago when it started appearing in my company cafeteria. Turns out it's suddenly popular because its easy to farm — and a herbivore. Not as tasty as salmon, though.
Farm-raised fish, alas, have their own impacts. If the fish are high on the food chain (like salmon), somebody has to go out and catch fish to feed the farm fish. Plus fish farms cause pollution that impacts the wild environment. Finally, there's a lot of fear that farm fish will be hot zones for diseases that will spread to wild fish. No magic solution here.
The real solution consists of simple, common-sense resource management. You don't fish species that are obviously in trouble. You set aside zones for fish population to breed and recover unmolested. You ban practices like bottom-trawling that kill many more fish than get caught.
The problem is, any time you restrict people's ability to make a living, you get political resistance. So just as lumber companies insist that there's plenty of trees left, and car companies poo-poo global warming as nonsense, fishermen object that all these claims of collapsing fish stocks are nonsense. And countries that are economically dependent on fishing, like Japan and Norway, back them up.
The poster child for this situation is the Patagonian Tooth Fish. Twenty years ago, nobody heard of it. Then other species became hard to get, and somebody realized this dude cooked up nicely, and renamed it Chilean Sea Bass. Now, if this species lived in waters that somebody controlled and could enforce realistic fishing limits, it might have stood a chance. Alas, it mostly lives in antarctic waters, where enforcment is legally and logistically difficult. Should be gone in another 10 years. Thirty years to wipe out a species!
Which everybody thinks Heinlein invented because they first read about it in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. That's one of my favorite books, but that particular thing in it has always irritated me. Several reasons.
First, it's typical geekish language abuse. You take a elegant, memorable, easy-to-understand saying, "There is no free lunch," which Alistair Cooke once suggested should be America's motto, and you convert it into a klunky, unpronouncable, hard-to-remember acronym. But of course an acronym is more cool than a phrase!
Second, although the sentiment is one I agree with, the saying kind of distorts history. The saying comes from the fact that a lot of bars used to (maybe still do in some parts of the country) have signs that say "Free Lunch." Nowadays, this "lunch" usually consists of a jar of pickled eggs, hence the equation of the free lunch with something phony. But originally, the free lunch was a serious meal: in the 1870s, you could go into a bar, buy a whisky or a beer, and have a plate of roast beef and potatoes (or something of similar tastiness) thrown in as a sort of marketing gimmick. This was possible because food was extremely cheap in relation to other kinds of goods. Which might sound terribly cool, until you remember that in those days, most Americans were farmers, and the low prices they got for the food they grew or raised left them in permanent poverty — literally "dirt poor".
Finally, TANSTAAFL gets trotted out over and over by all those libertarian schoolyard revolutionaries who think that the Free Market is the solution to all their problems. That's as brainless as the philosophy of the socialist schoolyard revolutionaries of the 60s, who thought that the Free Market was the cause of all their problems.
You've got to be kidding. Most SUVs are used for offroading and actual work? Not the hundreds I see every day. Most of their owners would be too afraid of scratching the paint!
But in order to adapt to new conditions you have to admit that they exist. It's not enough to say, "Oh well, when things get nasty we'll probably think of something."
Basically, you're arguing that we're so smart, we might as well be stupid. Not a sound strategy.
Dude, cheetahs will go extinct in our lifetime. They were doing fine as long as there were plenty of gazelles to eat. But soon, no more gazelles. And no more oil.
And how do we produce all that food? With petroleum-based fertilizers. We're using a finite resources that's getting harder and harder to come by to feed an exponentially growing number of people.
This topic always has people saying, "There's always been a fix for this kind of problem. We'll find the next one when we need it." OK, probably we will next time. And the next time. But if we keep pushing our luck, we're going to come up dry one of these days.
Now, I'm willing to do that feed people. But to indulge people's SUV habit? Uh uh.
Yeah, people keep talking about how the oil supply is finite, and they keep turning out to be wrong. Obviously it's infinite, so let's just stop worrying!
So you think Google should just rest on their laurels and stick to adsense?
Dude, did you actually read my post? Or perhaps I didn't make a fundamental point clear: all the ad revenue is a trap. It allows Google to spend money on all kinds of blue sky projects that never seem to go anywhere. At most companies, the need to turn a profit adds a sanity check. Somebody comes by and asks, "Is this project ever going to go somewhere, or is it just a Good Idea that didn't pan out?" Or in the case of many Google projects, somebody needs to ask "OK, you have something really great here, but when are you going to stop adding cool features and start doing the boring stuff that needs to get done before you can emerge from Beta?"
The question is not whether Google can make money selling ads on YouTube. Of course they can. But they don't need to buy the company to do that. The only reason (well, the only good reason) to buy the company is for the people and for the technology. Are those worth 1.65 gigabucks? I'm not enough of an expert to say. But to me, this smells more of Google management's lack of accountability than of a bold strategic move.
So, another way of putting it is they are experimenting with entirely new fields of endeavour where *no one* knows exactly what will work in the long term and what won't. Some people would call this empirical research.
It only counts as "research" if somebody is checking the results.
How can I be out of context, when you won't give me a context to be out of? You make a lot of strange, repetitive statements that seem to boil down to "stock isn't money". (Hey, no shit!) And maybe, "stock can change in value" (By golly, you're right!) That really doesn't have anything to do with the issue at hand. Which is really, how much is that 1.5% stake in Google actually worth? Of course it's not exactly the market value of the shares, because the shares are encumbered. But is it a lot less? My intuition is "no". Now, I could be wrong. But if you're going to prove me wrong, you're going to have to come up with something more specific than truisms about the nature of the marketplace.
I'll say it one last time: paying somebody with stock is just a tax dodge. It's not a free lunch. Very few of those on Wall Street.
...what you should be asking yourself is not whether YT is worth $1.65b, but whether it is worth 1.25% of Google.
Oh, bullshit. Something is worth what people are willing to pay for it. Somebody who owns 1.25% of Google is worth $1.65 billion. The fact that they don't have a checking account with a balance $1.65 billion is beside the point.
You're suffering from the common illusion that it doesn't cost a company anything to print stock. That's nonsense. It's very popular nonesense, especially among executives who keep insisting that they don't need to account for the stock options they grant themselves. But it's nonsense all the same. Money doesn't came out of nowhere, and a company doesn't have more value just because it has more shares.
IANAA (figure it out for yourself), but my guess is that they paid off YouTube's owners with stock because of the tax benefits. Give them stock, and they're just trading equity in one company for equity in another. Give them $1.65billion in cash, and they have a huge capital gain to pay tax on.
None of which explains why Google thinks YouTube is worth $1.65 Billion. There are a lot of big profitable high-tech companies that aren't worth that much. Selling text ads? They don't need to buy the company to do that. Selling video ads? They have their own video technology.
Not that it matters. Google can spend its money its money the way it wants, because it has more than it knows what to do with, and because its stockholders are shut out of corporate decision making. So it can buy companies that have no hope of contributing to the bottom line (Picassa, Outride, lots of blogging and social networking providers). It can hire lots of talented people. (And not so talented. Some of the people who've gone there recently are better at self-hype than actually making stuff.) And it can do this without any concern about making money.
Why is this bad? Because you have a lot of money, resources, and talent being used to subsidize what amounts to high-tech masturbation. Google gets bigger and bigger, and yet they release very few new products. And the products they do release stay in beta mode forever.
And please, don't try to tell me that "beta" is just a marketing or legal gimmick. Products like gmail, Google Groups, and Google Maps have lots of cool features, sure. But they're unpolished, inconsistently implemented, and very poorly documented. But most of all, they lack the boring little features that separate a toy project from a a real product.
Financially, Google is big success. But when it comes to pushing technological progress, they're a ship without a rudder. A very fancy ship, mind you, with free gourmet meals for the crew, and lots of conveniences and gadgets. But where is ship going. Nobody seems to know.
For some strange reason, Netflix neglected to call me and say, "We're going to give you an exclusive chance to claim this million dollar prize before we let every other programmer on the planet have a go."
This is pretty impressive given the previously quoted researcher who said: 'You're competing with 15 years of really smart people banging away at the problem.'
Oh please. It took them years before they figured out how to handle multi-disk sets correctly. Yes, their people must be smart (designing a orders database that scales up to a rapidly growing customer base is not easy), but none of their smarts has been directed at customer-facing technology.
The shortcomings of Netflix recommendation system really have more to do with bureaucratic inertia than lack of technical insight. They started out as a simple online video store, so they designed their site with a "You must rent this movie!" model. When it became obvious that they had to do something really original to survive, they switched to the current business. When they did that, it no longer made sense to use the web site to hype individual movies — but they still do it. Which is why you get recommended a Kung Fu movie just because it was popular among some of the people who liked the Ivory-Marchant movie you also liked. Anybody could design a better recommendation system than that.
...is just a con to get the federal government to adopt fuel efficiency standards. That will force people to drive smaller cars, which will force them to have smaller families. It's just a conspiracy to impose involuntary birth control by a bunch of latte-swilling liberals who hate children!
Sounds like I'm flamebaiting, right? But that's pretty much the party line with the Eagle Forum crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me? Group think? Have you seen any evidence of anti-military bias at Slashdot? True, many of us are opposed to the current administration's policies, but the same can be said for half the people in the services.
You're right about Air Force (and the other services) being good places to get IT skills, and lots of other technical skills as well. Their training programs are widely respected. But we're talking about a high school kid looking for pointers for immediate experience, not major career advice.
Also, there are a lot of people who've joined the Guard in order to get training, and ended up walking a perimeter in some wilderness. A nasty side trip in your life, even if that wilderness isn't infested with Islamic insurgents. When you put on the uniform, you go where they send you, even if it interferes with all the promises the recruiting sergeant made.
If you're feeling patriotic, or just think it's something that would be good to do, by all means join up. But if your only reason for joining up is to get training, there are better ways to go about that.
You're right to want to avoid working in retail. And from what I've seen, your having actual technical experience actually makes it harder to get a retail job!
You're probably not going to get a real job with your limited experience. There are already experienced folks begging for work. But there's always volunteer and internship openings, which give you experience that looks good on your resume. Plus they're good for makign contacts. Suggestions:
That book assumes that the physical limitations that make AI impossible don't apply everywhere. It still assumes that the limitations exist. Indeed if I remember the story correctly (it's been a long time, and Vinge is not one of those authors I enjoy re-reading) there initially is a huge region where AI is possible but the good guys destroy it in order to defeat an evil intelligence, a sort of computer virus that infects whole cultures. That leaves most of the galaxy in its current state. Or at least what the anti-AI crowd insists is its current state — I've always found their logic flawed.
You same to think that Vinge invented the AI issue all by himself. If you ever read anything besides SF, you'd know that he's part of a larger stream of thought that says, "AI is fundamentally impossible."
All the Transcend stories do is invent an imaginary physics that say AI is possible under certain circumstances, just as stories with FTL spacecraft invent an imaginary physics where you can travel faster than light. Vinge isn't saying he really thinks AI is possible any more than all those other writers were saying they thought Einstein was an idiot.
Oh please. Creating an imaginary past based on current mythology is not the same thing as speculating about a possible future based on current technology.
...though basically well written, is full of dumb ideas. This particular dumb idea comes from the notion that the development tools we use now are pretty much as sophisticated as they're ever going to get. That's right up there with the famous urban legend about the proposal to close the patent office.
Vinge's problem is that he makes too much of the famous failures of AI, and has fallen in with the camp that believes that software will never be able to compete with wetware. That has yet to be proven, but even if its true, simply replicating human intelligence (so-called "hard AI") is not the only strategy.
If game meat were cheaper than corn, we probably would feed it to pigs and cows. That's not even as bad as the practice of feeding slaughterhouse waste to the very cows being raised for the slaughterhouse. This was extremely common until people started worrying about mad cow disease.
And if you ever watch Deadwood, you'll know that pigs are not very choosy...
There's a fish called the tilapia. Never heard of it until a few months ago when it started appearing in my company cafeteria. Turns out it's suddenly popular because its easy to farm — and a herbivore. Not as tasty as salmon, though.
Farm-raised fish, alas, have their own impacts. If the fish are high on the food chain (like salmon), somebody has to go out and catch fish to feed the farm fish. Plus fish farms cause pollution that impacts the wild environment. Finally, there's a lot of fear that farm fish will be hot zones for diseases that will spread to wild fish. No magic solution here.
The real solution consists of simple, common-sense resource management. You don't fish species that are obviously in trouble. You set aside zones for fish population to breed and recover unmolested. You ban practices like bottom-trawling that kill many more fish than get caught.
The problem is, any time you restrict people's ability to make a living, you get political resistance. So just as lumber companies insist that there's plenty of trees left, and car companies poo-poo global warming as nonsense, fishermen object that all these claims of collapsing fish stocks are nonsense. And countries that are economically dependent on fishing, like Japan and Norway, back them up.
The poster child for this situation is the Patagonian Tooth Fish. Twenty years ago, nobody heard of it. Then other species became hard to get, and somebody realized this dude cooked up nicely, and renamed it Chilean Sea Bass. Now, if this species lived in waters that somebody controlled and could enforce realistic fishing limits, it might have stood a chance. Alas, it mostly lives in antarctic waters, where enforcment is legally and logistically difficult. Should be gone in another 10 years. Thirty years to wipe out a species!
Which everybody thinks Heinlein invented because they first read about it in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. That's one of my favorite books, but that particular thing in it has always irritated me. Several reasons.
First, it's typical geekish language abuse. You take a elegant, memorable, easy-to-understand saying, "There is no free lunch," which Alistair Cooke once suggested should be America's motto, and you convert it into a klunky, unpronouncable, hard-to-remember acronym. But of course an acronym is more cool than a phrase!
Second, although the sentiment is one I agree with, the saying kind of distorts history. The saying comes from the fact that a lot of bars used to (maybe still do in some parts of the country) have signs that say "Free Lunch." Nowadays, this "lunch" usually consists of a jar of pickled eggs, hence the equation of the free lunch with something phony. But originally, the free lunch was a serious meal: in the 1870s, you could go into a bar, buy a whisky or a beer, and have a plate of roast beef and potatoes (or something of similar tastiness) thrown in as a sort of marketing gimmick. This was possible because food was extremely cheap in relation to other kinds of goods. Which might sound terribly cool, until you remember that in those days, most Americans were farmers, and the low prices they got for the food they grew or raised left them in permanent poverty — literally "dirt poor".
Finally, TANSTAAFL gets trotted out over and over by all those libertarian schoolyard revolutionaries who think that the Free Market is the solution to all their problems. That's as brainless as the philosophy of the socialist schoolyard revolutionaries of the 60s, who thought that the Free Market was the cause of all their problems.
I think I speak for all present when I say: HUH?
You've got to be kidding. Most SUVs are used for offroading and actual work? Not the hundreds I see every day. Most of their owners would be too afraid of scratching the paint!
But in order to adapt to new conditions you have to admit that they exist. It's not enough to say, "Oh well, when things get nasty we'll probably think of something."
Basically, you're arguing that we're so smart, we might as well be stupid. Not a sound strategy.
Dude, cheetahs will go extinct in our lifetime. They were doing fine as long as there were plenty of gazelles to eat. But soon, no more gazelles. And no more oil.
And how do we produce all that food? With petroleum-based fertilizers. We're using a finite resources that's getting harder and harder to come by to feed an exponentially growing number of people.
This topic always has people saying, "There's always been a fix for this kind of problem. We'll find the next one when we need it." OK, probably we will next time. And the next time. But if we keep pushing our luck, we're going to come up dry one of these days.
Now, I'm willing to do that feed people. But to indulge people's SUV habit? Uh uh.
Yeah, people keep talking about how the oil supply is finite, and they keep turning out to be wrong. Obviously it's infinite, so let's just stop worrying!
Dude, did you actually read my post? Or perhaps I didn't make a fundamental point clear: all the ad revenue is a trap. It allows Google to spend money on all kinds of blue sky projects that never seem to go anywhere. At most companies, the need to turn a profit adds a sanity check. Somebody comes by and asks, "Is this project ever going to go somewhere, or is it just a Good Idea that didn't pan out?" Or in the case of many Google projects, somebody needs to ask "OK, you have something really great here, but when are you going to stop adding cool features and start doing the boring stuff that needs to get done before you can emerge from Beta?"
The question is not whether Google can make money selling ads on YouTube. Of course they can. But they don't need to buy the company to do that. The only reason (well, the only good reason) to buy the company is for the people and for the technology. Are those worth 1.65 gigabucks? I'm not enough of an expert to say. But to me, this smells more of Google management's lack of accountability than of a bold strategic move.
I'll say it one last time: paying somebody with stock is just a tax dodge. It's not a free lunch. Very few of those on Wall Street.
Oh, bullshit. Something is worth what people are willing to pay for it. Somebody who owns 1.25% of Google is worth $1.65 billion. The fact that they don't have a checking account with a balance $1.65 billion is beside the point.
You're suffering from the common illusion that it doesn't cost a company anything to print stock. That's nonsense. It's very popular nonesense, especially among executives who keep insisting that they don't need to account for the stock options they grant themselves. But it's nonsense all the same. Money doesn't came out of nowhere, and a company doesn't have more value just because it has more shares.
IANAA (figure it out for yourself), but my guess is that they paid off YouTube's owners with stock because of the tax benefits. Give them stock, and they're just trading equity in one company for equity in another. Give them $1.65billion in cash, and they have a huge capital gain to pay tax on.
None of which explains why Google thinks YouTube is worth $1.65 Billion. There are a lot of big profitable high-tech companies that aren't worth that much. Selling text ads? They don't need to buy the company to do that. Selling video ads? They have their own video technology.
Not that it matters. Google can spend its money its money the way it wants, because it has more than it knows what to do with, and because its stockholders are shut out of corporate decision making. So it can buy companies that have no hope of contributing to the bottom line (Picassa, Outride, lots of blogging and social networking providers). It can hire lots of talented people. (And not so talented. Some of the people who've gone there recently are better at self-hype than actually making stuff.) And it can do this without any concern about making money.
Why is this bad? Because you have a lot of money, resources, and talent being used to subsidize what amounts to high-tech masturbation. Google gets bigger and bigger, and yet they release very few new products. And the products they do release stay in beta mode forever.
And please, don't try to tell me that "beta" is just a marketing or legal gimmick. Products like gmail, Google Groups, and Google Maps have lots of cool features, sure. But they're unpolished, inconsistently implemented, and very poorly documented. But most of all, they lack the boring little features that separate a toy project from a a real product.
Financially, Google is big success. But when it comes to pushing technological progress, they're a ship without a rudder. A very fancy ship, mind you, with free gourmet meals for the crew, and lots of conveniences and gadgets. But where is ship going. Nobody seems to know.
Please read the whole post. It's not that long!
For some strange reason, Netflix neglected to call me and say, "We're going to give you an exclusive chance to claim this million dollar prize before we let every other programmer on the planet have a go."
Oh please. It took them years before they figured out how to handle multi-disk sets correctly. Yes, their people must be smart (designing a orders database that scales up to a rapidly growing customer base is not easy), but none of their smarts has been directed at customer-facing technology.
The shortcomings of Netflix recommendation system really have more to do with bureaucratic inertia than lack of technical insight. They started out as a simple online video store, so they designed their site with a "You must rent this movie!" model. When it became obvious that they had to do something really original to survive, they switched to the current business. When they did that, it no longer made sense to use the web site to hype individual movies — but they still do it. Which is why you get recommended a Kung Fu movie just because it was popular among some of the people who liked the Ivory-Marchant movie you also liked. Anybody could design a better recommendation system than that.
...is just a con to get the federal government to adopt fuel efficiency standards. That will force people to drive smaller cars, which will force them to have smaller families. It's just a conspiracy to impose involuntary birth control by a bunch of latte-swilling liberals who hate children!
Sounds like I'm flamebaiting, right? But that's pretty much the party line with the Eagle Forum crowd.