I love bacteria! Bacteria is what makes the difference between me and my spouse (well, that and the boobs). Being an utterly absent-minded ubergeek, I have a lax sense of how long food can survive in the fridge... if it doesn't have martian cheese, I declare it edible. The result of a decade of this dietary abuse is that I hardly ever get indigestion or cramps, while she will get nauseated just at the thought of day-old pizza.
Excellent point. My girlfriend is phillipino. She came to the US about 5 years ago. Her and all her other college friends that acquired H1Bs (physical therapists), have no problem leaving takeout on the kitchen table and eating it for breakfast the next day. However, I am embarrassed to take them to a steak house because medium well is to rare for them.
So I go to the phillipines with here to meet the parents and all that. We end up on an overnight boat. My girlfriend is upset that she could not get the "tourist accommodations" and at some point tells me "we are eating now here is your food" And hands me a burger that was sitting in a bag for 5 hours. Not wanting to argue, I eat it figuring I'll shit out my colong in 3 hours and be fine the next day.
Well different country, different bacteria. It took 3 days and some antibiotics. The good part is she no longer makes fun of me when I put leftovers in the refrigerator.
The company I work for recently (less than 2 yrs) had to purchase a mac so they could test a website they were developing against Mac browsers.
Due to the nature of the site a significant user base use Macs. The user base? People with money; and lots of it.
So tell me; who do you aim for as a market?
Thats quite interesting because I know a MAC user that keeps complaining that he has to use virtual PC to view his Investors Business Daily page http://www.investors.com./
Can you give an example that wasn't from NASA? NASA is a corporation with incredibly unique needs, and it is in a completely different league from the average corporation. Remember that it's easier to make a cheap product more featured than it is a featured product cheaper.
So Kennedy sold the idea to the American people that a man should be put on the moon and then told NASA to go do it. That very similar to how software gets written. We developers develop things like revision control and documentation systems for our internal uses, and they find there way into consumer grade products like document history tracking in word. I wonder if they have TPS reports in NASA.
Of course, just because something is "high-end" doesn't necessarily mean it's a smart product. Look at the zero gravity pen, which NASA spent hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars, to develop for use in space. The Russians, they didn't need a zero gravity pen. A pencil worked just fine for them in space,...;-)
Actually, the space pen was developed independantly, without government funding, and adopted by both the russians and Americans. Grease pencils were used by both parties before its inventions.
Secondly, whats a few million dollars in R&D for something that is cheaply produced and gets issued to every astronaut going up into space.
If something needs to be added, then logically it doesn't work without it. Whether or not it worked for the situation at some time in the past is completely irrelevant.
Actually that and the scope of the change versus the scope of the system is quite relevant. Lets say you have an operating system and the government changes the time zone rules. A small subset of the operating system needs to be updated. Hopefully its not a code change in this case, but it might be for an embedded system. The old code is not broken at this point, it is just designed to handle an old set of rules.
Now if you want to make a business use argument for rewriting versus fixing existing software, whether the legacy system worked yesterday is irrelevant. However, whether it was used yesterday is quite relevant. Users are humans and humans don't like change. Your legacy system is sunk cost, but retraining your homo sapians will cost money.
But digital SLRs weren't the first digital cameras. The early ones were toys, not anywhere near usable for professional photography.
ENIAC may not have been a toy, but the vacuum tubes it used started out as toys, not tools. The transistors replaced the tubes started out in cheap radios, and integrated circuits were used in toys very early on.
The expensive RAID systems in use today are not using specialized hardware for their drives, they are using the same drives home computers do. And almost nobody is using celerons with 64MB RAM any more, but you're more likely to still find one still in use in a business than as someone's home computer.
And audio recording started with the wax cylinder phonograph. It was not a professional technology.
So maybe it works both ways. Velcro and tang started out as "professional grade equiptment" for putting a man on the moon and trickled down. Granted, they remained relatively unchanged when grought to the consumer market as they were always cheap, minus the initial R&D overhead. Cheaper varients of expensive professional products are made for consumers and higher quality versions of consumer products are made for people that have the money for it.
It is my experience with C/C++ code, that much of the ugliness comes from optimization. When code was written 20+ years ago, processors were not the powerhouses they are now. Lots of effort went into making sure that the system not only worked, but worked fast enough for people to care about the result by the time it arrived. To some extent, making code really fast tends to make it ugly.
Many times you can contain the ugliness. For example, you can use macros and inline functions to avoid having a really large function. Or you could break the parts into sections with comments. You can also use comments to explain the ugliness. Sometimes a comment of "I don't know why this works" when you fix a bug in someone else's ugly code is a good thing to put in in case someone else has to fix the ugly code with your band aids.
Also, there are more elegant ways to optimize these days. Many of the good optimizations are tucked into readily available libraries.
Maybe it's a pain in the ass to work with, but for now, it works
If you need to maintain it, then by definition it doesn't work.
My car works now, but it needs gas and oil ocassionally. The air and fuel filters will eventually totally clog up. The anti-freeze is only good for 1,000,000 miles if the radiator lasts that long.
Also I'm thinking of adding an intake fan for more horsepower, and perhaps replacing the current audio system with something that can handle MP3s
Granted, code does not break down. But the computers it runs on does. Sometimes the same old code that ran fine on NT 3.51 needs to be made to work on Vista.
Sometimes a new feature needs to be added. The linux kernel 2.0 worked just fine. It probably will boot just fine on modern hardware, although only using one core of one CPU and 4 gigs of ram. Sometimes a bug is discovered.
Sometimes code is so well written for such a small scope of purpose that it rarely gets altered. Larry Wall's patch program comes to mind. However, sometimes a program needs new features as its use cases are growing and its users constantly rething how they want to use it. This is the case with perl.
Nice work staying consistent by installing ZoneAlarm!
I would think blindly following a "install no security software" rule would be just as bad as blindly running all of it.
Re:I don't like business at HP
on
The HP Way 2.0
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Afterwards they couldn't afford living in the United States - her husband had already retired - and they had to move back to Australia. She knew it was going to happen, too, it was just one big waiting game. Just out of curiosity, is it that much cheaper to live in Australia or was she just able to find a better job in her home country? I would think if your resume said "big executive" and "in charge of a business unit spanning multiple countries," one could make a living wage in whatever developed country one wished. I would be wrong though.
Put another way. Take a personal liberty away in one swoop and people will complain. Slowly erode it over a period of decades and the 'shortsighted' among us will say "it is just a little cut, get over it".
Okay, then why are the folks who are so worried about the erosion of the 2nd amendment often the ones who are willing to let the 1st amendment be eroded?
What are you talking about? The gun nuts generally are for free speech and religion.
I guess some people don't really care if a truck driver that gets drunk and kills a few people while driving, is allowed to drive in Montana because he hasn't been revoked there. LET'S all get some DUI's and head over to MONTANA!! WOOOHOOO!!!
Uh its pretty easy to check for DUI's out of state without a national ID. They can just make 50 queries against 50 databases for this persons SSN, name and whatever else.
Of course they need to understand that a manager does not necessarily mean a pay scale increase.
If there's no pay scale increase for becoming a manager, then what's the incentive to give up an engineering job to become a manager? It seems like the only people who'd be interested in management in this situation are those who are poor/mediocre engineers and/or more interested in politics and empire-building than actually doing productive work. This is exactly what I saw in my last company, which was another big tech company where managers were all former engineers, and there wasn't necessarily more pay for going into management.
What about the people that want to teach? Do you not have any of those in your company? How about not promoting people unless they teach. Require management candidates to teach workshops and such. The problem with your company seems that they got it half right. If you give managers a higher payscale, people will sell out, and not be happy. However, positions of power always attract those that seek power. You have to cultivate an environment of teaching. That involves rewarding those that teach. Put up a wiki for the developers and thank those that contribute to it.
So, we really DON'T have the freedom not to listen, unless we want to go crawl under a rock somewhere.
Let me rephrase, if I manage to avoid listening I am not at fault. The media is not obligated to let the world know that I made some sort of offensive comment.
Have fun trying to get a job without being able to implement or use the binary trees in a language, and being able to convey that knowledge in an interview. Because if you aren't proficient in at least one marketable language, or your aren't from a top CS school like MIT, you're going to be fucked. I've known people with Masters in CS from GA Tech who couldn't code for shit. I don't care what kinds of algorithms or advanced math they learned, if they can't apply it,(i.e. code), to design and build a decent application, they're fucking incompetent. I know people who got their CS degrees go never got a decent job because they never learned a decent language.
Lean all the CS you can, AND make sure you can code. Learning to code will get you the first job, learning the CS will hopefully keep you employed.
You naild it perfectly. You need practical skills and theory. The theory to describe things in abstract terms and the practical skills to get things done.
That translates to lower taxes and smaller government without a reduction of services. Thats a great thing.
Not if they make decisions based on obsolete data. As in, "We'll route this highway over here because it's agricultural land we can take for cheap." That's obviously such a huge issue that nobody would rely on Google Earth. But there are smaller ones that might be made.
Yes, but they can find a few locations for the highway with google earth, and then check them with more expensive software. If your a small county without a license for "real" mapping software, you,ight be able to request maps of specific areas from the state, as opposed to driving a county owned Crown Victoria up to the state capital to sit in front of the computer with the mapping software yourself. Also, it seems that google earth has post Katrinia images still.
The problem with government GIS is that there isn't meaningful competition in the market to supply them with tools to make them productive. There is only one vendor, ESRI, that really matters. While ESRI makes powerful tools, they have a product line that interlocks, so that if you want to use their Internet map server, you are going to be tilted towards using their spacial data engine and desktop GIS tools. Not to mention that you'll probably need to buy both consultancy services and training to make everything work.
Well if google caused enough of a stir to get congresses attention, perhaps they can become a competitor of ESRI themselves.
Out without a degree, but making "real money". Did it set me back a few years? Yes. Would I recommend it to anyone? I'm not sure, give me another 10 years of hindsite. I know I'm making 2k less than a a friend I started college with that graduated, 3k more than another that graduated and is now a manager, and 17k less than another friend without a degree that was doing ASP programming while he was in college.
What makes me sound like I'm in college? Do I stress theory to much? I like to program in C as a hobby and write my own linked lists. Tutorials I read to learn postgres threw around the phrase tuples calculus a lot so I do the same. I don't go writing binary trees in something like C# or Java when there are classes that can sort a list of numbers and find duplicates for me. However, its nice to know how everything works under the hood.
Seriously if you leave a CS program knowing more about math than programming you are fucked. Have fun learning on the job while making 2/3 what you would otherwise be worth.
And have fun being out of a job when your language of choice falls out of favor. Part of learning a lot of math in a CS degree is also learning a lot of CS theory. Understanding linked lists, stacks, queues, binary trees, and the like will help you to switch between programming languages. Sometimes you will realize that you need to represent data in a way that your language does not have a standard library for. Usually that means you're not looking hard enough for someone else's solution to your problem. But sometimes it means that you have to implement a binary tree yourself. That is becoming less and less the case these days, but just being able to phrase a SQL question in terms of tuples calculus can help you abstract the question in your mind and solve it better.
When you on occasion not like the actions of your elected officials you would take corrective action at the next election, something you can't do with a Google.
Except it seems the government cannot provide a mapping service adequate for its needs. They should find a way to facilitate competition for google maps if they do not cooperate. They could provide grant money to someone that would make an open source version of google maps where you could download the data and source code and run your own map web site.
My guess is that one reason the senator cares is that his staff rely on Google to get their job done. It's interesting to see that throughout the federal government, workers are becoming dependent on various Google information services despite the fact that the govt. has put a lot of effort into building its own mapping services.
I see this as a good thing. Lets have massive reductions in the government mapping department. Fire some unnecessary employees and make whatever raw photos and GIS data the government collects easily available to google maps and potential competitors.
I can't stand MSFT products, I see them as cheap rip offs of other peoples ideas for most of their products.
As opposed to Linux or FreeBSD? Apache was a derivative work of the original httpd. HTML was SGML simplified. Everyone steals ideas, Open Source projects just don't print there works cited page in 8 point type.
This is complete nonsense. There is no royalty required to use the "likeness" of a city. NYC doesn't even charge for shooting permits; you can literally get a permit and close down streets for a shoot without paying the city a dime.
Not entirely true. The permit is free, but you have to pay for police and traffic officers that are assigned to your detail. The city decides if you need police and traffic enforcement officers. Actually closing down a whole city street involves police and traffic officer involvement. That being said, you can setup cameras on a sidewalk and get a parking permit for a few vans if your doing a low budget movie not involving anything like a chase scene. Also, you only need a permit if your putting a tripod down on the ground. You can use hand held and shoulder mounted cameras without a permit.
Actually, it shows that (big companies != innovation). Big Box retail is profitable by following the formula.
As TFA and closing of CompUSA stores indicate, not for electronic items.
Let me rephrase. Big box retail attempts to be profitable by following the formula. It tends to be most profitable when it does so. In recent years this has changed.
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Excellent point. My girlfriend is phillipino. She came to the US about 5 years ago. Her and all her other college friends that acquired H1Bs (physical therapists), have no problem leaving takeout on the kitchen table and eating it for breakfast the next day. However, I am embarrassed to take them to a steak house because medium well is to rare for them.
So I go to the phillipines with here to meet the parents and all that. We end up on an overnight boat. My girlfriend is upset that she could not get the "tourist accommodations" and at some point tells me "we are eating now here is your food" And hands me a burger that was sitting in a bag for 5 hours. Not wanting to argue, I eat it figuring I'll shit out my colong in 3 hours and be fine the next day.
Well different country, different bacteria. It took 3 days and some antibiotics. The good part is she no longer makes fun of me when I put leftovers in the refrigerator.
The company I work for recently (less than 2 yrs) had to purchase a mac so they could test a website they were developing against Mac browsers.
Due to the nature of the site a significant user base use Macs. The user base? People with money; and lots of it.
So tell me; who do you aim for as a market?
Thats quite interesting because I know a MAC user that keeps complaining that he has to use virtual PC to view his Investors Business Daily page http://www.investors.com./
So Kennedy sold the idea to the American people that a man should be put on the moon and then told NASA to go do it. That very similar to how software gets written. We developers develop things like revision control and documentation systems for our internal uses, and they find there way into consumer grade products like document history tracking in word. I wonder if they have TPS reports in NASA.
Actually, the space pen was developed independantly, without government funding, and adopted by both the russians and Americans. Grease pencils were used by both parties before its inventions.
Secondly, whats a few million dollars in R&D for something that is cheaply produced and gets issued to every astronaut going up into space.
Actually that and the scope of the change versus the scope of the system is quite relevant. Lets say you have an operating system and the government changes the time zone rules. A small subset of the operating system needs to be updated. Hopefully its not a code change in this case, but it might be for an embedded system. The old code is not broken at this point, it is just designed to handle an old set of rules.
Now if you want to make a business use argument for rewriting versus fixing existing software, whether the legacy system worked yesterday is irrelevant. However, whether it was used yesterday is quite relevant. Users are humans and humans don't like change. Your legacy system is sunk cost, but retraining your homo sapians will cost money.
ENIAC may not have been a toy, but the vacuum tubes it used started out as toys, not tools. The transistors replaced the tubes started out in cheap radios, and integrated circuits were used in toys very early on.
The expensive RAID systems in use today are not using specialized hardware for their drives, they are using the same drives home computers do. And almost nobody is using celerons with 64MB RAM any more, but you're more likely to still find one still in use in a business than as someone's home computer.
And audio recording started with the wax cylinder phonograph. It was not a professional technology.
So maybe it works both ways. Velcro and tang started out as "professional grade equiptment" for putting a man on the moon and trickled down. Granted, they remained relatively unchanged when grought to the consumer market as they were always cheap, minus the initial R&D overhead. Cheaper varients of expensive professional products are made for consumers and higher quality versions of consumer products are made for people that have the money for it.
It is my experience with C/C++ code, that much of the ugliness comes from optimization. When code was written 20+ years ago, processors were not the powerhouses they are now. Lots of effort went into making sure that the system not only worked, but worked fast enough for people to care about the result by the time it arrived. To some extent, making code really fast tends to make it ugly.
Many times you can contain the ugliness. For example, you can use macros and inline functions to avoid having a really large function. Or you could break the parts into sections with comments. You can also use comments to explain the ugliness. Sometimes a comment of "I don't know why this works" when you fix a bug in someone else's ugly code is a good thing to put in in case someone else has to fix the ugly code with your band aids.
Also, there are more elegant ways to optimize these days. Many of the good optimizations are tucked into readily available libraries.
My car works now, but it needs gas and oil ocassionally. The air and fuel filters will eventually totally clog up. The anti-freeze is only good for 1,000,000 miles if the radiator lasts that long.
Also I'm thinking of adding an intake fan for more horsepower, and perhaps replacing the current audio system with something that can handle MP3s
Granted, code does not break down. But the computers it runs on does. Sometimes the same old code that ran fine on NT 3.51 needs to be made to work on Vista.
Sometimes a new feature needs to be added. The linux kernel 2.0 worked just fine. It probably will boot just fine on modern hardware, although only using one core of one CPU and 4 gigs of ram. Sometimes a bug is discovered.
Sometimes code is so well written for such a small scope of purpose that it rarely gets altered. Larry Wall's patch program comes to mind. However, sometimes a program needs new features as its use cases are growing and its users constantly rething how they want to use it. This is the case with perl.
I would think blindly following a "install no security software" rule would be just as bad as blindly running all of it.
Okay, then why are the folks who are so worried about the erosion of the 2nd amendment often the ones who are willing to let the 1st amendment be eroded?
What are you talking about? The gun nuts generally are for free speech and religion.
Uh its pretty easy to check for DUI's out of state without a national ID. They can just make 50 queries against 50 databases for this persons SSN, name and whatever else.
If there's no pay scale increase for becoming a manager, then what's the incentive to give up an engineering job to become a manager? It seems like the only people who'd be interested in management in this situation are those who are poor/mediocre engineers and/or more interested in politics and empire-building than actually doing productive work. This is exactly what I saw in my last company, which was another big tech company where managers were all former engineers, and there wasn't necessarily more pay for going into management.
What about the people that want to teach? Do you not have any of those in your company? How about not promoting people unless they teach. Require management candidates to teach workshops and such. The problem with your company seems that they got it half right. If you give managers a higher payscale, people will sell out, and not be happy. However, positions of power always attract those that seek power. You have to cultivate an environment of teaching. That involves rewarding those that teach. Put up a wiki for the developers and thank those that contribute to it.
Let me rephrase, if I manage to avoid listening I am not at fault. The media is not obligated to let the world know that I made some sort of offensive comment.
I was unaware people complaining has any legal binding. Freedom of speech does not mean anyone has to listen.
Have fun trying to get a job without being able to implement or use the binary trees in a language, and being able to convey that knowledge in an interview. Because if you aren't proficient in at least one marketable language, or your aren't from a top CS school like MIT, you're going to be fucked. I've known people with Masters in CS from GA Tech who couldn't code for shit. I don't care what kinds of algorithms or advanced math they learned, if they can't apply it ,(i.e. code), to design and build a decent application, they're fucking incompetent. I know people who got their CS degrees go never got a decent job because they never learned a decent language.
Lean all the CS you can, AND make sure you can code. Learning to code will get you the first job, learning the CS will hopefully keep you employed.
You naild it perfectly. You need practical skills and theory. The theory to describe things in abstract terms and the practical skills to get things done.Not if they make decisions based on obsolete data. As in, "We'll route this highway over here because it's agricultural land we can take for cheap." That's obviously such a huge issue that nobody would rely on Google Earth. But there are smaller ones that might be made.
Yes, but they can find a few locations for the highway with google earth, and then check them with more expensive software. If your a small county without a license for "real" mapping software, you ,ight be able to request maps of specific areas from the state, as opposed to driving a county owned Crown Victoria up to the state capital to sit in front of the computer with the mapping software yourself. Also, it seems that google earth has post Katrinia images still.
The problem with government GIS is that there isn't meaningful competition in the market to supply them with tools to make them productive. There is only one vendor, ESRI, that really matters. While ESRI makes powerful tools, they have a product line that interlocks, so that if you want to use their Internet map server, you are going to be tilted towards using their spacial data engine and desktop GIS tools. Not to mention that you'll probably need to buy both consultancy services and training to make everything work.Well if google caused enough of a stir to get congresses attention, perhaps they can become a competitor of ESRI themselves.
That translates to lower taxes and smaller government without a reduction of services. Thats a great thing.
Out without a degree, but making "real money". Did it set me back a few years? Yes. Would I recommend it to anyone? I'm not sure, give me another 10 years of hindsite. I know I'm making 2k less than a a friend I started college with that graduated, 3k more than another that graduated and is now a manager, and 17k less than another friend without a degree that was doing ASP programming while he was in college.
What makes me sound like I'm in college? Do I stress theory to much? I like to program in C as a hobby and write my own linked lists. Tutorials I read to learn postgres threw around the phrase tuples calculus a lot so I do the same. I don't go writing binary trees in something like C# or Java when there are classes that can sort a list of numbers and find duplicates for me. However, its nice to know how everything works under the hood.
And have fun being out of a job when your language of choice falls out of favor. Part of learning a lot of math in a CS degree is also learning a lot of CS theory. Understanding linked lists, stacks, queues, binary trees, and the like will help you to switch between programming languages. Sometimes you will realize that you need to represent data in a way that your language does not have a standard library for. Usually that means you're not looking hard enough for someone else's solution to your problem. But sometimes it means that you have to implement a binary tree yourself. That is becoming less and less the case these days, but just being able to phrase a SQL question in terms of tuples calculus can help you abstract the question in your mind and solve it better.
Except it seems the government cannot provide a mapping service adequate for its needs. They should find a way to facilitate competition for google maps if they do not cooperate. They could provide grant money to someone that would make an open source version of google maps where you could download the data and source code and run your own map web site.
I see this as a good thing. Lets have massive reductions in the government mapping department. Fire some unnecessary employees and make whatever raw photos and GIS data the government collects easily available to google maps and potential competitors.
As opposed to Linux or FreeBSD? Apache was a derivative work of the original httpd. HTML was SGML simplified. Everyone steals ideas, Open Source projects just don't print there works cited page in 8 point type.
Not entirely true. The permit is free, but you have to pay for police and traffic officers that are assigned to your detail. The city decides if you need police and traffic enforcement officers. Actually closing down a whole city street involves police and traffic officer involvement. That being said, you can setup cameras on a sidewalk and get a parking permit for a few vans if your doing a low budget movie not involving anything like a chase scene. Also, you only need a permit if your putting a tripod down on the ground. You can use hand held and shoulder mounted cameras without a permit.
As TFA and closing of CompUSA stores indicate, not for electronic items.
Let me rephrase. Big box retail attempts to be profitable by following the formula. It tends to be most profitable when it does so. In recent years this has changed.