>As stated by Fung et al. in the revision to the classic engineering text, Foundations of Solid Mechanics: "Engineering is quite different from science. Scientists try to understand nature. Engineers try to make things that do not exist in nature.
>Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been. —Theodore von Kármán
>There exists an overlap between the sciences and engineering practice; in engineering, one applies science. Both areas of endeavor rely on accurate observation of materials and phenomena. Both use mathematics and classification criteria to analyze and communicate observations.
>In the book What Engineers Know and How They Know It,[29] Walter Vincenti asserts that engineering research has a character different from that of scientific research. First, it often deals with areas in which the basic physics and/or chemistry are well understood, but the problems themselves are too complex to solve in an exact manner.
Technology doesn't really go out of date. It just morphs into something slightly different. We learned MS Access in college (ages ago) and the ERD certainly isn't out of date, nor are index, primary keys, efficient SQL and 3rd normal form.
We learned Object Pascal when I was in school. Recursion certainly isn't out of date, nor are link lists, grids, trees, arrays, efficient sorting algorithms, or writing good comments. Good inheritance trees or proper polymorphism and abstraction certainly aren't out of date. Even introspection is quite old.
How about mobile? iOS APIs are written in Objective-C which was created in the 80s. Android uses Java, created in the 90s. C is still very relevant and it was created in the 70s. The only thing I would think that is less relevant would be assembler and that's only because it's machine dependent and C was designed to eradicate it.
I'm a year shy of old school (39) and always wondered where all the Engineer, Architect and Developer titles came from. I started as a hobby in the 80s and it was "coder" or "programmer." You were either a new one, a decent one, a good one or a great one, depending on how much of the lifecycle you could handle, and if you could work through the tough algorithms and so on.
I guess it was for business people to be able to categorize the skill of employees they knew absolutely nothing about. Since "coder" and "programmer" really didn't indicate any sort of skill level other than professional and amateur, fresh programmers latched on to the titles to nurture their egos.
Professional programmers noticed the noobs were calling themselves software engineers and whatnot and noticed that these new titles sounded more experienced than their simple "programmer," so they latched onto the naming convention.
I just made all that stuff up. Am I an opinion engineer or opinion developer?
Well they/we had something even better than the telecom boom, they had worldwide devastation of any economic competition. Who are our primary competitors economically and how were they fairing after WWII? They were all rubble and some didn't even have their own government.
I give that generation credit, but they didn't do it in a vacuum.
I was just augmenting the conversation about how getting behind on skills can creep up on people.
>Of course some older programmers really do slow down, stop learning, and coast along. It might be getting stuck in a rut and not bothering to do anything about it. It might be a matter of changing priorities, family commitments becoming more demanding and the like.
Microsoft just released Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012. A lot of people aren't happy with either Windows 8 or Visual Studio or Windows Store App development, they think it's silly / ugly / too abstract / all of the above.
New kid comes out of high school or college. He wants to learn whatever he can and eventually get paid for it. He embraces Windows 8 and VS 2012 and Windows Store App development because he has Windows 8 at home / school and there is a buzz about it. More and more companies start looking for Windows 8 / VS 2012 developers because they want to move from their clunky WinForms interface to a Windows 8 interface. Microsoft accelerates this by announcing a sunset of support for Windows 7. 3-5 years later, the first group is out of date. If their current job doesn't switch, they most likely stay out of date.
The old folks have seen this pattern before. The gone folks didn't adapt. That's why old folks who are still around are language / OS agnostic.
There were/are other methodologies other than waterfall before agile. Cinnibun was very efficient. It was waterfall broken into smaller pieces and adjusted at every interval, which is pretty much a sprint. No one really implements a true waterfall, it was borrowed from construction company management and quickly morphed into other methodologies when people realized that users couldn't conceptualize an entire system up front. Waterfall is really a baseline to compare other methologies to.
>People lose money investing all the time, would they get those higher taxes back?
They do. They only get taxed on net. If one investment earns $100 and the other loses $100, you have 0 net and therefore pay no taxes.
>Money being invested has already been taxed, why should it even be taxed again just because you invested it and it paid off?
All income is taxed. There are exceptions like income from a Roth IRA, but these exceptions have caps.
>Let alone be taxed MORE or even the same as standard income?
Capital gains tax (tax on investment income) is 20%. Most tech earning brackets are higher than that, plus you have to pay payroll and SS tax. During my early working years (Clinton) capital gains was taxed at 20% if you held your stock for a full year. Now it's 20% for day traders too.
I don't think the Ds are the party of peace. I think that moniker came out when Bush II pushed for war in Iraq when everyone else wanted to wait for the weapons inspections / sanctions.
Here's the 20th century wars the US fought in and the president in charge (if I remember correctly)
WWI - Wilson (D) WWII - FDR (D) Korea - Truman (D) Vietnam - Kennedy (D) , ramped up by LBJ (D) (some feel this started with Ike (R) in the 50s with aid to the French) Gulf War I - Bush (R) Afghan War - Bush II (R) Gulf War II - Bush II (R)
I've been paying attention to most of it I could bear. To me, his debt reduction plan was:
Lower Taxes ??? No Deficit!
To lower taxes that much, you have to make up for it if you are trying to reduce the deficit. He just refused to say how he was going to do that. If you are bold enough to lay out number for tax reductions, you better damn well be bold enough to say how you are gonna pay for it.
I agree with the war on color. I liked Snow Leopard color here and there to Lion and Mt.Lion. The skeuomorphic doesn't really bother me as much as some people. I can't even spell it.
The only issue I have with your comment is whether Ive prefers color or drab. He did design the original iMac which was massive color in a beige box world. I suspect his taste changes with the times.
The US is the sweetest marketplace in the world, by far. It was build by generations before mine and generations before theirs. It was fought for in Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe, The Pacific, Japan, and others. It's been hammered to the ground, yet Americans managed to bring it back to life, over and over. It was nourished and brooded over and caressed and cared for by generations. Americans for the most part, built the US marketplace, not Hondurans, not South Americans, not Europeans, not Russians.
The Nand2Tetris is a great resource and I am working through it myself. I wish there was something like this available when I started college 20 years ago. The start of our instruction centered around a variable, then loops, data types, etc. I assume it's because students could related to variables through Algebra. It worked well enough though.
Don't go to a technical school. Go to a state sponsored 4 year university. They're cheaper, better value, and your professors, if you impress them, have some really good in's into hiring companies.
Get your foundation there. Understand *why* companies are willing to pay you 6 figures. Understand the value of scalability and maintainability. Understand how to build a proper ERD. Understand your data structures and why coding something one way is inefficient and doing it another way will make it 1000 times faster. Become an engineer, not a mechanic.
Not true, you can have a single man operation that doesn't create any jobs. Look at all the contractors out there filling demand. Whether they file as an individual or as a business entity makes no difference.
>A binary file is significantly faster to parse and search then a big-ass text file.
Yes, but compared to the registry.ini files are only a fraction of the size. They may contain at most a hundred or so config items (and that's pushing it) versus thousands or tens of thousands. They're also cached (or should be) so it's a small hit on app open, then memory all the way.
>The registry also has a minor benefit that you can guarantee the syntax is valid.
I'll give you that. Strong typing is good.
>Apps are free to do whatever they want including writing.ini files... that soo many have chosen to use the registry for configuration should speak for itself.
Not really, especially after Microsoft recommended it and the Microsoft Certified program required it. I mean there was a whole book from MS Press about the registry. It made terrible toilet paper too.
>Configuration store is automatically safe against concurrent access..try rewriting a.ini file by multiple apps at the same time and let me know how it goes.
Why would I ever do that on a client? Remember, with the.ini setup, each app had it's own.ini (or several). If it was multi-user, each user would have an.ini file for their personal preferences.
>Today bulk registry operations can be fully transactional thanks to windows KTM.
That's fair, but if I need something to be transactional, I'll use a database. Drop a simple Access database with a table or two and you're golden for a stand-alone client app.
>Security ACLs per entry..ini file security as far as the operating system is concerned is for the whole file.
That's fair, but it doesn't seem to be preventative. A lot of viruses attack the registry. All it takes is a user to click "OK."
At the time, Netscape pioneered the browser for the common guy. They started on *nix but brought the browser to Windows. Their IPO was the biggest skyrocket in history (at the time I believe). Shot up from 16 or so to 80 in a few hours. Netscape was the world's darling at the dawn of the public internet.
Microsoft was in denial of the internet's staying power and just thought it was a fad. They (not so) quickly realized their mistake and attempted to force their way into the market. At the time, the browser and web servers were really the only commercially viable product for software venders to get into the market.
They bought a company and labeled their product MSIE. To kill off netscape (which had started making servers using NSAPI technology) they bundled their browser in the OS, so now, Netscape had to compete with free. At the time, that was a very novel concept. Microsoft implemented ISAPI in IIS which was essentially the same thing.
In making custom HTML tags that only MS used, MS attempted to make the WWW a proprietary standard that MS controlled. Other browsers wouldn't render sites made using proprietary IE tags and they risked getting sued for implementing MS custom tag rendering algorithms in their browsers.
This also gave them a shoehorn into the server market. IIS/NT 3.5/4.0 was pretty horrible compared to Unix/Novell but they wanted to get into that market. (read: dominate). What better to serve proprietary IE tags than IIS.
I know you are being funny, but the myth about teachers not working much is misguided. Don't forget they have to grade the papers, tests and quizzes after hours (for 30+ students x 5-6 classes); attend PTA meetings; attend parent teachers conferences; and attend after school activities. Also, they have to go to school a week earlier than the students to prepare for the year, they have to attend administrative meetings before and after hours, and to boot, most of them have to take some menial job during the summer just to make ends meet.
Also, teachers have to deal with sue scared school districts, so they can no longer do standard discipline like make students write sentences and hesitate for detention. Also, they can't kick out the criminals (because everyone has a right, not an opportunity for an education in this country) so it's awful hard to teach Algebra to 30 7th graders when 5 of them are disrupting every 5 minutes and there isn't anything you can do about it.
Oh, and all this requires a college education and a certification. It's a thankless job most of the time and gratifying sometimes only to be overshadowed a few minutes later. I should know, both my parents were teachers. My mother taught in a low income district for 20 years and my dad taught at a private school for 40+. The private school was much better because the disruptive students could be disciplined and expelled, but the pay was a lot lower for that privilege. This was 15 years ago, I can't imagine how bad it has gotten since then.
Thank goodness we didn't roll back the Bush era tax cut to pay for the last round of hysterical speculation by Wall Street.. Massive cuts in education on Main Street seem to be a much better prospect for the future.
I appreciate and agree with your premise, but the flip side to the coin, if I may is:
There are two types of programmers (to paint with a broad brush).
1. Those who got into programming because of the money.
2. Those who got into programming because it's fun and they would do it even if it wasn't their job.
The trick is, I'm #2, but let me tell ya, waking up at 6:30 am, getting dressed, fighting traffic to sit in a petrie dish office to write boring ass business logic for boring ass business apps which rarely amount to much more than glorified CRUD code with lipstick is pushing the "fun" a bit.
Just because I love programming doesn't mean I love programming boring ass shit, and there is a 90 percent chance the algorithms you need coded are boring ass shit.
Therefore:
If you have to be a whore, at least be a well paid whore.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, how about Wikipedia:
>As stated by Fung et al. in the revision to the classic engineering text, Foundations of Solid Mechanics:
"Engineering is quite different from science. Scientists try to understand nature. Engineers try to make things that do not exist in nature.
>Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been.
—Theodore von Kármán
>There exists an overlap between the sciences and engineering practice; in engineering, one applies science. Both areas of endeavor rely on accurate observation of materials and phenomena. Both use mathematics and classification criteria to analyze and communicate observations.
>In the book What Engineers Know and How They Know It,[29] Walter Vincenti asserts that engineering research has a character different from that of scientific research. First, it often deals with areas in which the basic physics and/or chemistry are well understood, but the problems themselves are too complex to solve in an exact manner.
Technology doesn't really go out of date. It just morphs into something slightly different. We learned MS Access in college (ages ago) and the ERD certainly isn't out of date, nor are index, primary keys, efficient SQL and 3rd normal form.
We learned Object Pascal when I was in school. Recursion certainly isn't out of date, nor are link lists, grids, trees, arrays, efficient sorting algorithms, or writing good comments. Good inheritance trees or proper polymorphism and abstraction certainly aren't out of date. Even introspection is quite old.
How about mobile? iOS APIs are written in Objective-C which was created in the 80s. Android uses Java, created in the 90s. C is still very relevant and it was created in the 70s. The only thing I would think that is less relevant would be assembler and that's only because it's machine dependent and C was designed to eradicate it.
IEEE disagrees with you.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/engineering-is-not-science
He said limits of knowledge, not limits of your knowledge.
My definition would be in science you discover things, in engineering you create things.
It's all BS anyway. A CS can create things and a SE can discover things, they overlap.
In my CS101/2 classes we sure learned about Big O and OOP and recursion and whatnot which some would consider an element of SE.
I'm a year shy of old school (39) and always wondered where all the Engineer, Architect and Developer titles came from. I started as a hobby in the 80s and it was "coder" or "programmer." You were either a new one, a decent one, a good one or a great one, depending on how much of the lifecycle you could handle, and if you could work through the tough algorithms and so on.
I guess it was for business people to be able to categorize the skill of employees they knew absolutely nothing about. Since "coder" and "programmer" really didn't indicate any sort of skill level other than professional and amateur, fresh programmers latched on to the titles to nurture their egos.
Professional programmers noticed the noobs were calling themselves software engineers and whatnot and noticed that these new titles sounded more experienced than their simple "programmer," so they latched onto the naming convention.
I just made all that stuff up. Am I an opinion engineer or opinion developer?
>Of course, it will never happen, since it suits both major parties perfectly well to keep the voters ignorant.
I don't see how you came to that conclusion. Blue states have much better educational systems than red states for K-12.
Well they/we had something even better than the telecom boom, they had worldwide devastation of any economic competition. Who are our primary competitors economically and how were they fairing after WWII? They were all rubble and some didn't even have their own government.
I give that generation credit, but they didn't do it in a vacuum.
I was just augmenting the conversation about how getting behind on skills can creep up on people.
>Of course some older programmers really do slow down, stop learning, and coast along. It might be getting stuck in a rut and not bothering to do anything about it. It might be a matter of changing priorities, family commitments becoming more demanding and the like.
What the hell industry do you work in? You're trolling, right?
Here's how it works:
Microsoft just released Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012. A lot of people aren't happy with either Windows 8 or Visual Studio or Windows Store App development, they think it's silly / ugly / too abstract / all of the above.
New kid comes out of high school or college. He wants to learn whatever he can and eventually get paid for it. He embraces Windows 8 and VS 2012 and Windows Store App development because he has Windows 8 at home / school and there is a buzz about it. More and more companies start looking for Windows 8 / VS 2012 developers because they want to move from their clunky WinForms interface to a Windows 8 interface. Microsoft accelerates this by announcing a sunset of support for Windows 7. 3-5 years later, the first group is out of date. If their current job doesn't switch, they most likely stay out of date.
The old folks have seen this pattern before. The gone folks didn't adapt. That's why old folks who are still around are language / OS agnostic.
There were/are other methodologies other than waterfall before agile. Cinnibun was very efficient. It was waterfall broken into smaller pieces and adjusted at every interval, which is pretty much a sprint. No one really implements a true waterfall, it was borrowed from construction company management and quickly morphed into other methodologies when people realized that users couldn't conceptualize an entire system up front. Waterfall is really a baseline to compare other methologies to.
>People lose money investing all the time, would they get those higher taxes back?
They do. They only get taxed on net. If one investment earns $100 and the other loses $100, you have 0 net and therefore pay no taxes.
>Money being invested has already been taxed, why should it even be taxed again just because you invested it and it paid off?
All income is taxed. There are exceptions like income from a Roth IRA, but these exceptions have caps.
>Let alone be taxed MORE or even the same as standard income?
Capital gains tax (tax on investment income) is 20%. Most tech earning brackets are higher than that, plus you have to pay payroll and SS tax. During my early working years (Clinton) capital gains was taxed at 20% if you held your stock for a full year. Now it's 20% for day traders too.
I don't think the Ds are the party of peace. I think that moniker came out when Bush II pushed for war in Iraq when everyone else wanted to wait for the weapons inspections / sanctions.
Here's the 20th century wars the US fought in and the president in charge (if I remember correctly)
WWI - Wilson (D)
WWII - FDR (D)
Korea - Truman (D)
Vietnam - Kennedy (D) , ramped up by LBJ (D) (some feel this started with Ike (R) in the 50s with aid to the French)
Gulf War I - Bush (R)
Afghan War - Bush II (R)
Gulf War II - Bush II (R)
>Nixon pulled the US out of Vietnam
He also sabotaged the peace talks in 1968 which would have gotten us out earlier.
His slogan was "Withdrawl with Honor" which happened 4 years after he was elected with not much honor.
>enforced desegregation of southern schools
That was Kennedy and Johnson.
>created the EPA
I believe he did do that. He also created the drug schedule we now all know and love.
I've been paying attention to most of it I could bear. To me, his debt reduction plan was:
Lower Taxes
???
No Deficit!
To lower taxes that much, you have to make up for it if you are trying to reduce the deficit. He just refused to say how he was going to do that. If you are bold enough to lay out number for tax reductions, you better damn well be bold enough to say how you are gonna pay for it.
I agree with the war on color. I liked Snow Leopard color here and there to Lion and Mt.Lion. The skeuomorphic doesn't really bother me as much as some people. I can't even spell it.
The only issue I have with your comment is whether Ive prefers color or drab. He did design the original iMac which was massive color in a beige box world. I suspect his taste changes with the times.
Time will tell.
The US is the sweetest marketplace in the world, by far. It was build by generations before mine and generations before theirs. It was fought for in Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe, The Pacific, Japan, and others. It's been hammered to the ground, yet Americans managed to bring it back to life, over and over. It was nourished and brooded over and caressed and cared for by generations. Americans for the most part, built the US marketplace, not Hondurans, not South Americans, not Europeans, not Russians.
That's why it matters where you were born.
The Nand2Tetris is a great resource and I am working through it myself. I wish there was something like this available when I started college 20 years ago. The start of our instruction centered around a variable, then loops, data types, etc. I assume it's because students could related to variables through Algebra. It worked well enough though.
Don't go to a technical school. Go to a state sponsored 4 year university. They're cheaper, better value, and your professors, if you impress them, have some really good in's into hiring companies.
Get your foundation there. Understand *why* companies are willing to pay you 6 figures. Understand the value of scalability and maintainability. Understand how to build a proper ERD. Understand your data structures and why coding something one way is inefficient and doing it another way will make it 1000 times faster. Become an engineer, not a mechanic.
Not true, you can have a single man operation that doesn't create any jobs. Look at all the contractors out there filling demand. Whether they file as an individual or as a business entity makes no difference.
>A binary file is significantly faster to parse and search then a big-ass text file.
Yes, but compared to the registry .ini files are only a fraction of the size. They may contain at most a hundred or so config items (and that's pushing it) versus thousands or tens of thousands. They're also cached (or should be) so it's a small hit on app open, then memory all the way.
>The registry also has a minor benefit that you can guarantee the syntax is valid.
I'll give you that. Strong typing is good.
>Apps are free to do whatever they want including writing .ini files... that soo many have chosen to use the registry for configuration should speak for itself.
Not really, especially after Microsoft recommended it and the Microsoft Certified program required it. I mean there was a whole book from MS Press about the registry. It made terrible toilet paper too.
>Configuration store is automatically safe against concurrent access..try rewriting a .ini file by multiple apps at the same time and let me know how it goes.
Why would I ever do that on a client? Remember, with the .ini setup, each app had it's own .ini (or several). If it was multi-user, each user would have an .ini file for their personal preferences.
>Today bulk registry operations can be fully transactional thanks to windows KTM.
That's fair, but if I need something to be transactional, I'll use a database. Drop a simple Access database with a table or two and you're golden for a stand-alone client app.
>Security ACLs per entry. .ini file security as far as the operating system is concerned is for the whole file.
That's fair, but it doesn't seem to be preventative. A lot of viruses attack the registry. All it takes is a user to click "OK."
At the time, Netscape pioneered the browser for the common guy. They started on *nix but brought the browser to Windows. Their IPO was the biggest skyrocket in history (at the time I believe). Shot up from 16 or so to 80 in a few hours. Netscape was the world's darling at the dawn of the public internet.
Microsoft was in denial of the internet's staying power and just thought it was a fad. They (not so) quickly realized their mistake and attempted to force their way into the market. At the time, the browser and web servers were really the only commercially viable product for software venders to get into the market.
They bought a company and labeled their product MSIE. To kill off netscape (which had started making servers using NSAPI technology) they bundled their browser in the OS, so now, Netscape had to compete with free. At the time, that was a very novel concept. Microsoft implemented ISAPI in IIS which was essentially the same thing.
In making custom HTML tags that only MS used, MS attempted to make the WWW a proprietary standard that MS controlled. Other browsers wouldn't render sites made using proprietary IE tags and they risked getting sued for implementing MS custom tag rendering algorithms in their browsers.
This also gave them a shoehorn into the server market. IIS/NT 3.5/4.0 was pretty horrible compared to Unix/Novell but they wanted to get into that market. (read: dominate). What better to serve proprietary IE tags than IIS.
No it's not, its a television station that plays music. MTV, Music Television, duh. Biff, is that you?
I know you are being funny, but the myth about teachers not working much is misguided. Don't forget they have to grade the papers, tests and quizzes after hours (for 30+ students x 5-6 classes); attend PTA meetings; attend parent teachers conferences; and attend after school activities. Also, they have to go to school a week earlier than the students to prepare for the year, they have to attend administrative meetings before and after hours, and to boot, most of them have to take some menial job during the summer just to make ends meet.
Also, teachers have to deal with sue scared school districts, so they can no longer do standard discipline like make students write sentences and hesitate for detention. Also, they can't kick out the criminals (because everyone has a right, not an opportunity for an education in this country) so it's awful hard to teach Algebra to 30 7th graders when 5 of them are disrupting every 5 minutes and there isn't anything you can do about it.
Oh, and all this requires a college education and a certification. It's a thankless job most of the time and gratifying sometimes only to be overshadowed a few minutes later. I should know, both my parents were teachers. My mother taught in a low income district for 20 years and my dad taught at a private school for 40+. The private school was much better because the disruptive students could be disciplined and expelled, but the pay was a lot lower for that privilege. This was 15 years ago, I can't imagine how bad it has gotten since then.
Thank goodness we didn't roll back the Bush era tax cut to pay for the last round of hysterical speculation by Wall Street.. Massive cuts in education on Main Street seem to be a much better prospect for the future.
I appreciate and agree with your premise, but the flip side to the coin, if I may is:
There are two types of programmers (to paint with a broad brush).
1. Those who got into programming because of the money.
2. Those who got into programming because it's fun and they would do it even if it wasn't their job.
The trick is, I'm #2, but let me tell ya, waking up at 6:30 am, getting dressed, fighting traffic to sit in a petrie dish office to write boring ass business logic for boring ass business apps which rarely amount to much more than glorified CRUD code with lipstick is pushing the "fun" a bit.
Just because I love programming doesn't mean I love programming boring ass shit, and there is a 90 percent chance the algorithms you need coded are boring ass shit.
Therefore:
If you have to be a whore, at least be a well paid whore.