Three things of note that happened that day: 1 - We got in a crash with a parked car while delivering newspapers. 2 - My mom felt so guilty about crashing that she offered my brother and I the option to stay home from school "If we felt bad." (Yes, we both stayed home.) 3 - My parents bought our first computer: an IBM PCjr.
While I remember all three events with clarity, I don't think I would remember #1 & #2 quite so viscerally if the computer hadn't shown up that day. Having that computer in my house profoundly affected my life in ways that I probably don't understand.
The first day we had the computer in the house, and didn't have the basic cartridge to run any programs, I would boot it over and over to "play" with the little man that would come out and place the key on the screen you had just pressed on the keyboard. I tried all sorts of combinations: multiple, concurrent key presses; speedy consecutive key presses; top left to bottom right;... you get the idea. It seems silly now that I spent so much time on such a trivial task, but it was amazing to me to be able to press a key and see something change on the screen.
When my cousin who worked at Bell Labs came over and programmed the first line of Beethoven's 5th symphony to play on the PC speaker using Basic, I was hooked. I tweaked his program over and over to change pitch and duration of each note, then revert it back.
And Jumpman. Oh, Jumpman! My parents hated that we played that game so much because we would fight about it, but we would also sit and watch each other play for hours. Of course, it really, really ticked me off when I would play for 3 hours, set the high score, then my oldest brother would come along and blow away my score in one game. Resetting the top score matrix was a big no-no, but my fingers may have slipped once or twice...
All in all, even if it was a failure as a system, it affected me and my career. I write code for a living because of that computer. I am not saying that I wouldn't have had the same experience with a Commodore 64 (which I owned for one blissful weekend until my Mom made me sell it back to the kid I bought it from because I only played Space Invaders even though I swore I would use it to write programs), but it all started with a PC Junior.
There is one major drawback to VR: sharing. If I want a fellow programmer to see my code I have to either be able to slave my display to his helmet as well, or give him my helmet for a minute. The same goes for youtube parties. I am not saying it isn't a solvable problem, but it is a problem. None of the VR systems that I have seen have been able to do this.
One other point: if VR is such a great thing, why don't military flight simulators use it? It would seem to be a really good fit here. Why aren't manufacturers pushing the technology in the places it would fit really well?
In principle I would agree with you.... if there weren't such things as radar, SAMs and standard fighter jets. A highly reflective airplane, even in the clouds, would be a huge target for most modern radars. So, load up your jet with a laser AND a few missiles. Boom. No more pretty, shiny jet.
Even if you don't carry missiles on your fighter jets, fly in such a way to force the enemy to fly over your SAM sites. They would show up just as well for a ground radar.
There is a reason that most military aircraft aren't shiny any more.
Now, if you could create a paint that is highly absorbent to a variety of wavelengths, and can dissipate the heat, that would make more sense.
Makes me wonder just how well our current composite paints for aircraft like the F-117 would absorb a laser hit. I bet someone has the corollary defense contract for this laser.
It was the morning of my wedding. I had stayed the night at my future-in-law's house (sleeping in the hall 'cause the brother-in-law didn't want to share his room). I woke up very early partly due to nerves, but also because I was sleeping in the hall.
I went upstairs and sat at the kitchen table. My soon-to-be-uncle-in-law woke up shortly after I sat down. He had been a programmer for several years. He knew that I had just started working in industry. He sat down and started talking to me about how COBOL was the language of the future. He talked for nearly an hour, and I still wasn't convinced. I mostly just nodded my head and kept playing Solitaire.
This was in 1997. Still waiting for the "future of COBOL" to take hold.
I used to work at a video rental store and saw the catalogs for the movies that were coming available. The cost for a movie that was not a headliner was $90. Headliner movies sometimes worked themselves up into the $125 and higher range. The point of renting a movie was that the video store had to recoup their costs by renting the movie multiple times. The appeal for the customer was that they could spend $3 for a rental and not have to pay upwards of $20 to see a movie they may only watch one more time.
Granted, this was back in the early 90s when the rental business model may have been different. It used to be that the studios would release the movies in this order: theater, rental, pay-per-view, pay channels, consumer purchase. Now movies are released for rental the same day they are available at Walmart for $14.
I will still keep my Netflix account active, and use it frequently because I may only want to watch a movie one time. With kids I don't get out to the theater that often any more unless it is a family friendly movie. With Netflix I can watch movies at home without having to pay the babysitter $60 on top of the $20+ it costs me and my wife to purchase theater tickets. As long as there are situations like mine out there, video rental businesses will make money on us.
I found it interesting that in the video showing the dodging subjects there was no audio. The subjects appeared to move according to the presence of the foam ball, however, it is also possible they were reacting to audio stimulus.
Flying at 50,000ft (just short of 10 miles!), with a really small engine, it would probably be hard to even hear the aircraft at all, especially in any kind of Urban environment. If you can't hear the aircraft, you don't know it is there. I couldn't find any information on a radar cross section, but I could imagine that it might be hard to target from the ground with a shoulder-mounted SAM.
For those that have seen Transformers, there is a scene when the Special Ops team calls in fire support and a Predator (or what is supposed to be one) comes over the sand dunes. From what I understand that is NOT how a Predator is used. They stand off a ways and take pictures from a high altitude (25,000ft).
What I would be really interested in hearing are anecdotal accounts by soldiers/airmen who have been either supported by or used the Predator systems. Assuming, of course, that they are allowed to talk about it.
While I appreciate the sentiment expressed here, I have a couple of questions:
When Timmy wants to play a game that requires the CD/DVD to be present in the machine, is he going to be willing to stomp down the stairs every time he wants to play? And how is Susie going to react when Timmy takes out the latest teeny-bopper movie she was watching in order to play Halo 8? Plus, when he fires up the game Daddy's Skype conference call with the important client on the other side of the world pauses at a critical moment in the conversation.
Also, TFA seems to imply that this box doesn't give multiple separate desktops, but one enlarged one (like most other multi-headed cards). Like the other poster to this thread, you are talking about a mainframe in the house.
Of course, you could have been suggesting that each person in the house gets their own computer, but the physical locality of the computer is still an issue when media other than USB gets introduced into the equation. Also, even if the price did come down to a consumer version, I don't know how many parents would be willing to shell out even $150 extra per-computer just to keep the noise down in a teenager's room, if the teenager is allowed to have one in their room. Of course, the parent then does have the option of restricting usage: "If you don't clean your room, I am taking your Extio!"
I personally would love to move my loud machines into a closet, especially since I work from home and screen desk real estate and room noise (not to mention heat!) are real concerns for me. But I don't think that I would want to move my computer further away from than the closet because I do have to put disks into my machines from time to time.
One last thought: how much does it cost and how difficult is it to run fiber in a house? I like to keep my network connections in the wall for cleanliness' sake, so I would have to be able to have two terminated ends to my fiber.... While I know how to, and have, run Cat5 in my house, I have no idea how hard it would be to get that sort of fiber working.
Here are two of the possible things at play here:
1 - You are getting Senioritis. This is a common occurance when you are nearing the end of your college career. You begin to feel very apathetic about your classes. You start to miss class. Your grades become unimportant other than the bare minimum to pass. Etc, etc, etc.
2 - You are beginning to realize that programming is no longer magical, it takes a lot of work to get something working to spec, and clients (teachers) are demanding more of you than you feel is necessary.
As others have said: Welcome to the "real" world. However, I am not going to continue on the thread that others have started. There is HOPE! While certainly there will be times in your life where you will be asked to do things that seem to be drudgery, there will also be times that you will sit back and watch a program that you wrote do something apparently simple, and you will be awed by what you have done. You will know the ins and outs of the code so intimately that it will feel like you are personally executing the code. These are the times to live for and cherish.
As for school, I am in my last semester (Yahooo!) and the only way that I am surviving is that I am taking classes that _I_ wanted to take, not any that the college or university forces me to take for prerequisites or core competencies. Hopefully your university allows some "electives" in your major to finish off the degree. Find something that you are interested in, the more difficult the better, and challenge yourself to get a 4.0 your last semester. You may or may not get it, but you will have a goal. That can make all the difference in the world.
Also, attend any job fairs that the school sponsors. While some say that there are no high-tech jobs available, many larger companies are recruiting newly graduated engineering/science majors right and left. By receiving offers from the various compainies you will gain a little bit of confidence in the market. Remember, the most pessimistic of the pundits say that the market will be turning up in the middle of next year!
Finally, find something to do that you find enjoyable that doesn't have to do with computers, or at least coding. I find that I need a break every once in a while to break up the nearly constant stream of code that I am asked to create. Go to a move, go on a date, read a fictional book, go minature golfing, build a model, etc. I understand that as a CS major you have virtually no free time, but if you don't want to go crazy you need an outlet. That is something that we need to do our whole lives.
There is a form of encryption that will always be secure with one exception. Conversations that are based on prior conversation will always be secure, unless the prior conversation was recorded.
Because computers have such a difficult time with semantics this means that a human will have had to have heard the original conversation in order for detection of the "encryption" and its meaning. This is why tracking criminals is such a difficult task. Until we can get computers to understand and infer semantics, and then record ALL conversations, there will be no way to decode all transmissions. As I am sure that many on this forum will agree, this is most likely not going to happen in the near future. This is why undercover work is so important.
To give an example, if I were to say the word "Fjornborgi" to a complete stranger (as most of you are) he would have no idea what I was talking about. On the other hand, if I say that to my brother-in-law, he knows exactly what I am saying and why. This is because we have a history of conversations where the word "Fjornborgi" has been discussed and defined.
As for computed encryption, with RSA no longer under patent and many very good mathemeticians coming up with interesting functions everyday, I see it being more and more difficult for government to monitor and control information. I don't see this as a bad thing, since it gives the citizens of the world more freedom to express their ideas to their audiences in a secure way. There is little fear of being overheard when not desired. Of course, many will abuse the priviledge, but that has been the case for centuries and not a new problem that has shown up just because of encryption.
In thinking about this quite a bit over the years I have come to some conclusions about work:
I work to live, not live to work. My family and my personal interests are much more important to me than my career.
Now, having said that I have to make the point that I do not feel that a job where you do not enjoy yourself is worth wasting your time with. HOWEVER, I also learned early on that with every job, no matter what it is or how much you love to do it, there will always be times where you are not having "fun". If you weather those times, very often you will be given projects to do that are more challenging and fun. That of course depends on your management.
How do you find such a job? That can be as easy as looking. Despite the "downturn" that the pundits and "experts" seem to feel that we are in there are so many jobs available for qualified technical individuals that every year the recruiters are begging universities to graduate more CS/CE/EE majors.
Notice that I said that there are positions for qualified individuals. I really think what is happening in America right now is that companies are getting rid of the flack. Suddenly managers seemed to figure out that a self-taught individual is generally not able to do large-scale programming tasks due to lack of training. Notice, I said generally! There are always exceptions.
Having said all that here are the answers to your questions:
1. Can you have a fun tech job, without the worry of being suddenly unemployed?
Absolutely, especially if you have some experience and possibly a degree. There are many companies that are doing very interesting and cool stuff. Most are not dot com companies. Look for a medical company that needs a sys admin, a small company that needs sales tools written in something other than Fortran, etc. It has been stated in other comments that whatever you want to do you can find a job doing it.
If you can't find a company that you want to work for, start a company/product on your own that you could market. Remember, Open Source does not mean that you cannot sell support. You may fall on your face, but you will have learned something and very possilby had fun on the way.
2. If you are you forced (as I am) to get your fun on the side what are some good projects to get involved in?
There are so many as to be impossible to give you a specific example. The trick is just to find something that you love. Go to Freshmeat, SourceForge, or any of the other repositories and see if the killer app you want to work on is there. If it is not, start one yourself.
3. What do you to unwind and have a bit of 'fun' in the workplace?"
I code. I interact with my co-workers. The building I work in has a pool table. I listen to music. I read slashdot (blatant plug). I play Mahjongg (that game is evil!). adcritic is your friend.
If you think that coding is not relaxing enough then perhaps you are in the wrong field. Debugging is what is stressful. Sometimes I have to code to get over the stress of debugging.:)
Yes, Java is much easier to learn than C++. (Although, I have heard some purists argue the point.) Yes, Java does teach basic "object orientedness," but if the aim of the Board is to teach true object oriented programming they ought to teach/endorse SmallTalk where EVERYTHING is either an object or a message between objects. Granted, we want our high-schoolers to stay sane, however, there is something to be said for teaching the right way the first time.
Sometimes I worry that our high-schoolers are being taught tools instead of concepts. I know that univerities go much more in depth than any high school can. At the same time, I sure wish that I had had a stronger theoretical background in computer science from my high school that only taught Word Processing and Basic.
Since it is obvious that this show would never use models who weren't technically inclined... I want to know which University has these kind of women in the EE or CS deparments! I want to transfer!
"Richard Stallman is the original developer of what became the Linux OS..."
Wired just all credibility in my book as a news service. Where are they getting their information?
As far as the boycott goes, I have joined the ranks of the many who will not shop at amazon.com until they realize that they are patenting something that is not really a new technology.
Slashdot Mirror
October 31, 1985
Three things of note that happened that day:
1 - We got in a crash with a parked car while delivering newspapers.
2 - My mom felt so guilty about crashing that she offered my brother and I the option to stay home from school "If we felt bad." (Yes, we both stayed home.)
3 - My parents bought our first computer: an IBM PCjr.
While I remember all three events with clarity, I don't think I would remember #1 & #2 quite so viscerally if the computer hadn't shown up that day. Having that computer in my house profoundly affected my life in ways that I probably don't understand.
The first day we had the computer in the house, and didn't have the basic cartridge to run any programs, I would boot it over and over to "play" with the little man that would come out and place the key on the screen you had just pressed on the keyboard. I tried all sorts of combinations: multiple, concurrent key presses; speedy consecutive key presses; top left to bottom right; ... you get the idea. It seems silly now that I spent so much time on such a trivial task, but it was amazing to me to be able to press a key and see something change on the screen.
When my cousin who worked at Bell Labs came over and programmed the first line of Beethoven's 5th symphony to play on the PC speaker using Basic, I was hooked. I tweaked his program over and over to change pitch and duration of each note, then revert it back.
And Jumpman. Oh, Jumpman! My parents hated that we played that game so much because we would fight about it, but we would also sit and watch each other play for hours. Of course, it really, really ticked me off when I would play for 3 hours, set the high score, then my oldest brother would come along and blow away my score in one game. Resetting the top score matrix was a big no-no, but my fingers may have slipped once or twice...
All in all, even if it was a failure as a system, it affected me and my career. I write code for a living because of that computer. I am not saying that I wouldn't have had the same experience with a Commodore 64 (which I owned for one blissful weekend until my Mom made me sell it back to the kid I bought it from because I only played Space Invaders even though I swore I would use it to write programs), but it all started with a PC Junior.
Actually, if you read the article ... uh, crap. Yeah, anyway, the article does say that it is lithium iron phosphate. Just sayin'.
There is one major drawback to VR: sharing. If I want a fellow programmer to see my code I have to either be able to slave my display to his helmet as well, or give him my helmet for a minute. The same goes for youtube parties. I am not saying it isn't a solvable problem, but it is a problem. None of the VR systems that I have seen have been able to do this.
One other point: if VR is such a great thing, why don't military flight simulators use it? It would seem to be a really good fit here. Why aren't manufacturers pushing the technology in the places it would fit really well?
I wonder if the folks over at the W3C were recently gifted with free MSDN subscriptions...
Of course, why would they test the stuff we actually use?
Pictures, please!
It's too bad the muggers weren't pirates 'cause this could have finally answered the age-old question.
In principle I would agree with you .... if there weren't such things as radar, SAMs and standard fighter jets. A highly reflective airplane, even in the clouds, would be a huge target for most modern radars. So, load up your jet with a laser AND a few missiles. Boom. No more pretty, shiny jet.
Even if you don't carry missiles on your fighter jets, fly in such a way to force the enemy to fly over your SAM sites. They would show up just as well for a ground radar.
There is a reason that most military aircraft aren't shiny any more.
Now, if you could create a paint that is highly absorbent to a variety of wavelengths, and can dissipate the heat, that would make more sense.
Makes me wonder just how well our current composite paints for aircraft like the F-117 would absorb a laser hit. I bet someone has the corollary defense contract for this laser.
Think of the paper cuts you might get!
Just don't drink lemonade while reading the paper, and you should be ok.
Didn't we already have this discussion once after someone had already done it?
When he was wandering around at night looking for someone to "plug him in" .... Talk about reaching out and touching someone. Wow!
It was the morning of my wedding. I had stayed the night at my future-in-law's house (sleeping in the hall 'cause the brother-in-law didn't want to share his room). I woke up very early partly due to nerves, but also because I was sleeping in the hall.
I went upstairs and sat at the kitchen table. My soon-to-be-uncle-in-law woke up shortly after I sat down. He had been a programmer for several years. He knew that I had just started working in industry. He sat down and started talking to me about how COBOL was the language of the future. He talked for nearly an hour, and I still wasn't convinced. I mostly just nodded my head and kept playing Solitaire.
This was in 1997. Still waiting for the "future of COBOL" to take hold.
I used to work at a video rental store and saw the catalogs for the movies that were coming available. The cost for a movie that was not a headliner was $90. Headliner movies sometimes worked themselves up into the $125 and higher range. The point of renting a movie was that the video store had to recoup their costs by renting the movie multiple times. The appeal for the customer was that they could spend $3 for a rental and not have to pay upwards of $20 to see a movie they may only watch one more time.
Granted, this was back in the early 90s when the rental business model may have been different. It used to be that the studios would release the movies in this order: theater, rental, pay-per-view, pay channels, consumer purchase. Now movies are released for rental the same day they are available at Walmart for $14.
I will still keep my Netflix account active, and use it frequently because I may only want to watch a movie one time. With kids I don't get out to the theater that often any more unless it is a family friendly movie. With Netflix I can watch movies at home without having to pay the babysitter $60 on top of the $20+ it costs me and my wife to purchase theater tickets. As long as there are situations like mine out there, video rental businesses will make money on us.
I found it interesting that in the video showing the dodging subjects there was no audio. The subjects appeared to move according to the presence of the foam ball, however, it is also possible they were reacting to audio stimulus.
Interesting technology if it really works.
Flying at 50,000ft (just short of 10 miles!), with a really small engine, it would probably be hard to even hear the aircraft at all, especially in any kind of Urban environment. If you can't hear the aircraft, you don't know it is there. I couldn't find any information on a radar cross section, but I could imagine that it might be hard to target from the ground with a shoulder-mounted SAM.
For those that have seen Transformers, there is a scene when the Special Ops team calls in fire support and a Predator (or what is supposed to be one) comes over the sand dunes. From what I understand that is NOT how a Predator is used. They stand off a ways and take pictures from a high altitude (25,000ft).
What I would be really interested in hearing are anecdotal accounts by soldiers/airmen who have been either supported by or used the Predator systems. Assuming, of course, that they are allowed to talk about it.
Obligatory wikipedia links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MQ-1_Predator Predator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MQ-9_Reaper Reaper
While I appreciate the sentiment expressed here, I have a couple of questions:
When Timmy wants to play a game that requires the CD/DVD to be present in the machine, is he going to be willing to stomp down the stairs every time he wants to play? And how is Susie going to react when Timmy takes out the latest teeny-bopper movie she was watching in order to play Halo 8? Plus, when he fires up the game Daddy's Skype conference call with the important client on the other side of the world pauses at a critical moment in the conversation.
Also, TFA seems to imply that this box doesn't give multiple separate desktops, but one enlarged one (like most other multi-headed cards). Like the other poster to this thread, you are talking about a mainframe in the house.
Of course, you could have been suggesting that each person in the house gets their own computer, but the physical locality of the computer is still an issue when media other than USB gets introduced into the equation. Also, even if the price did come down to a consumer version, I don't know how many parents would be willing to shell out even $150 extra per-computer just to keep the noise down in a teenager's room, if the teenager is allowed to have one in their room. Of course, the parent then does have the option of restricting usage: "If you don't clean your room, I am taking your Extio!"
I personally would love to move my loud machines into a closet, especially since I work from home and screen desk real estate and room noise (not to mention heat!) are real concerns for me. But I don't think that I would want to move my computer further away from than the closet because I do have to put disks into my machines from time to time.
One last thought: how much does it cost and how difficult is it to run fiber in a house? I like to keep my network connections in the wall for cleanliness' sake, so I would have to be able to have two terminated ends to my fiber.... While I know how to, and have, run Cat5 in my house, I have no idea how hard it would be to get that sort of fiber working.
Just saw the new commercial last night. They were singing some hip-hop song that I didn't recognize (it was not the Devo - Whip It).
All I have to say is that it would be funnier if the cow could carry a freakin' tune! Man!
This is not a new idea. This has been done before.
Here are two of the possible things at play here:
1 - You are getting Senioritis. This is a common occurance when you are nearing the end of your college career. You begin to feel very apathetic about your classes. You start to miss class. Your grades become unimportant other than the bare minimum to pass. Etc, etc, etc.
2 - You are beginning to realize that programming is no longer magical, it takes a lot of work to get something working to spec, and clients (teachers) are demanding more of you than you feel is necessary.
As others have said: Welcome to the "real" world. However, I am not going to continue on the thread that others have started. There is HOPE! While certainly there will be times in your life where you will be asked to do things that seem to be drudgery, there will also be times that you will sit back and watch a program that you wrote do something apparently simple, and you will be awed by what you have done. You will know the ins and outs of the code so intimately that it will feel like you are personally executing the code. These are the times to live for and cherish.
As for school, I am in my last semester (Yahooo!) and the only way that I am surviving is that I am taking classes that _I_ wanted to take, not any that the college or university forces me to take for prerequisites or core competencies. Hopefully your university allows some "electives" in your major to finish off the degree. Find something that you are interested in, the more difficult the better, and challenge yourself to get a 4.0 your last semester. You may or may not get it, but you will have a goal. That can make all the difference in the world.
Also, attend any job fairs that the school sponsors. While some say that there are no high-tech jobs available, many larger companies are recruiting newly graduated engineering/science majors right and left. By receiving offers from the various compainies you will gain a little bit of confidence in the market. Remember, the most pessimistic of the pundits say that the market will be turning up in the middle of next year!
Finally, find something to do that you find enjoyable that doesn't have to do with computers, or at least coding. I find that I need a break every once in a while to break up the nearly constant stream of code that I am asked to create. Go to a move, go on a date, read a fictional book, go minature golfing, build a model, etc. I understand that as a CS major you have virtually no free time, but if you don't want to go crazy you need an outlet. That is something that we need to do our whole lives.
There is a form of encryption that will always be secure with one exception. Conversations that are based on prior conversation will always be secure, unless the prior conversation was recorded.
Because computers have such a difficult time with semantics this means that a human will have had to have heard the original conversation in order for detection of the "encryption" and its meaning. This is why tracking criminals is such a difficult task. Until we can get computers to understand and infer semantics, and then record ALL conversations, there will be no way to decode all transmissions. As I am sure that many on this forum will agree, this is most likely not going to happen in the near future. This is why undercover work is so important.
To give an example, if I were to say the word "Fjornborgi" to a complete stranger (as most of you are) he would have no idea what I was talking about. On the other hand, if I say that to my brother-in-law, he knows exactly what I am saying and why. This is because we have a history of conversations where the word "Fjornborgi" has been discussed and defined.
As for computed encryption, with RSA no longer under patent and many very good mathemeticians coming up with interesting functions everyday, I see it being more and more difficult for government to monitor and control information. I don't see this as a bad thing, since it gives the citizens of the world more freedom to express their ideas to their audiences in a secure way. There is little fear of being overheard when not desired. Of course, many will abuse the priviledge, but that has been the case for centuries and not a new problem that has shown up just because of encryption.
I work to live, not live to work. My family and my personal interests are much more important to me than my career.
Now, having said that I have to make the point that I do not feel that a job where you do not enjoy yourself is worth wasting your time with. HOWEVER, I also learned early on that with every job, no matter what it is or how much you love to do it, there will always be times where you are not having "fun". If you weather those times, very often you will be given projects to do that are more challenging and fun. That of course depends on your management.
How do you find such a job? That can be as easy as looking. Despite the "downturn" that the pundits and "experts" seem to feel that we are in there are so many jobs available for qualified technical individuals that every year the recruiters are begging universities to graduate more CS/CE/EE majors.
Notice that I said that there are positions for qualified individuals. I really think what is happening in America right now is that companies are getting rid of the flack. Suddenly managers seemed to figure out that a self-taught individual is generally not able to do large-scale programming tasks due to lack of training. Notice, I said generally! There are always exceptions.
Having said all that here are the answers to your questions:
1. Can you have a fun tech job, without the worry of being suddenly unemployed?
Absolutely, especially if you have some experience and possibly a degree. There are many companies that are doing very interesting and cool stuff. Most are not dot com companies. Look for a medical company that needs a sys admin, a small company that needs sales tools written in something other than Fortran, etc. It has been stated in other comments that whatever you want to do you can find a job doing it. If you can't find a company that you want to work for, start a company/product on your own that you could market. Remember, Open Source does not mean that you cannot sell support. You may fall on your face, but you will have learned something and very possilby had fun on the way.
2. If you are you forced (as I am) to get your fun on the side what are some good projects to get involved in?
There are so many as to be impossible to give you a specific example. The trick is just to find something that you love. Go to Freshmeat, SourceForge, or any of the other repositories and see if the killer app you want to work on is there. If it is not, start one yourself.
3. What do you to unwind and have a bit of 'fun' in the workplace?"
I code. I interact with my co-workers. The building I work in has a pool table. I listen to music. I read slashdot (blatant plug). I play Mahjongg (that game is evil!). adcritic is your friend. If you think that coding is not relaxing enough then perhaps you are in the wrong field. Debugging is what is stressful. Sometimes I have to code to get over the stress of debugging. :)
Has anyone else noticed that the sheep on the right on the cover has three legs, and one of them is facing backwards?
Yes, Java is much easier to learn than C++. (Although, I have heard some purists argue the point.) Yes, Java does teach basic "object orientedness," but if the aim of the Board is to teach true object oriented programming they ought to teach/endorse SmallTalk where EVERYTHING is either an object or a message between objects. Granted, we want our high-schoolers to stay sane, however, there is something to be said for teaching the right way the first time.
Sometimes I worry that our high-schoolers are being taught tools instead of concepts. I know that univerities go much more in depth than any high school can. At the same time, I sure wish that I had had a stronger theoretical background in computer science from my high school that only taught Word Processing and Basic.
*grin*
Operating system == kernel
# returns true
Utilities != kernel
# returns true # returns true
Utilities != kernel
Wired just all credibility in my book as a news service. Where are they getting their information?
As far as the boycott goes, I have joined the ranks of the many who will not shop at amazon.com until they realize that they are patenting something that is not really a new technology.
Consumers, unite! We control the market!