...what will 100 million US citizens do for 4 years while attending school to retrain to become robot programmers?
Did you know that the percentage of income spent on housing has increased steadily since the 1960s? Did you also know that the concentration of wealth has increased steadily?
I don't know that business owners really control their business as much as we imagine they do.
For one thing, when businesses get really really big and complex, I suppose the left hand doesn't know what the right hands doing, and the business "owners" don't really know what it's doing either. It just sort of runs, but they don't really know how.
Maybe, theoretically, they could issue an order down, like "Hey, only package your chips over here," right? But could it actually work? Maybe not! Maybe that'd cause all these huge social uphevals.
Maybe businesses, once formed, are like parts of a gigantic organic system. You might not be able to just suddenly uproot a major artery, and move it somewhere else, without having major effects on yourself, your environment, and whatever else plays a part (who really knows what, right?).
So, I don't know. Is it really hypocracy? Maybe powerful people aren't really as powerful as we imagine them to be?
I've read some things by some very wealthy people. I can't understand it all. But some of these people seem to me to be pretty sincerely interested in doing what's right.
Now, granted, the vast majority of these people seem pretty skanky to me. Enron? Right? I suspect that most big business is like that.
But when I read about people who really seem to be trying to do good, like O'Rielly, I just don't think it's a PR thing. I think these people are serious.
I don't know; Maybe someone who knows better can reply to me.
This is a good thing; I disagree with the negative tone.
The judges reasoning is sound. If it were otherwise: Do you think it would be illegal for a future web browser to not display what it detects to be advertisements? Mozilla pop-up blocking might be deemed illegal as well, if the judge reasoned otherwise.
Remember!: Your paper must have five (5) paragraphs. An intro paragraph, concluding with your thesis sentence, followed by three paragraphs supporting your thesis sentence, followed by a conclusion..."
Augmented Reality. Quake2025 will be played outdoors.
Robots take over Work.Marshall Brain talks a lot about this. So, when your job goes to the robots, what are you going to do while you retrain for one of the few jobs not done by robots? Would you rather give up the notion that you must work for money and housing, or would you have us place you in an enormous welfare dormatory? Something to think about, the next time you self-check-out at the grocery store.
Community Networks. You and your neighbors are well connected. You've got your own currency, and you've got things you want to share (for a small exchange of some form currency) tagged with RFID, for easy registration on the local network. Does every single resident in an apartment really need to have their own vacuum cleaner? Does someone need a couch, when you're throwing yours away?
Micropayments. I already use BitKeeper because I keep up with Scott McCloud and Patrick Farley. I will probably pay for some OpenSource dev's book one day for a quarter or two.
Semantic Web. Your computer will have the intelligence of the Internet. When you read someone's review of a movie, your computer will be gathering local showtimes and listings. This is a major destabilizing technology. Markets will be cut and dry, not something that you have to deduce. It doesn't matter if you're a 16 year old that wants to cut lawns, or Sony- this will change your life.
Genetic Engineering. This will take a little longer to figure out, but we'll get there. In response, humanity will fragment into hoards of species.
Visual Language. Comics, notations, shorthands, schematics, visual explanation boxes. Write in one notation, read in another. You'll be able to learn two semesters of Chem in half a semester, with the properly coded books.
Programming is Easy, incidentally. Programming gets easier and easier, every year, if you haven't noticed.
Big Education Changes. Something big will happen in education, but I don't know what. I believe it will have to do with self-education, the certification process, and canonicalization. This is on top of the changes coming via Visual Language.
One of the most exciting things happening now is Aggregators. There was a slashdot story on them just a day ago. They really change everything about the web, wiki, etc.,. Everything becomes real-time.
I've been programming since I was 7 years old. I attended Harvey Mudd College. No, I didn't graduate, due to my poor chemistry grades, but regardless- I did great in my Computer Science and Math courses.
I've worked on several Open Source and Free Software projects. I taught free classes on programming for 2 years, 1ce a week for 6 hours a time, and while the boom was going, got two of my students (out of 8) employed quickly. There's hardly a time in my life where I don't have some programming job going or not.
I have sent dozens of resumes and even made a dozen interviews. I have put Free Software projects (and not) on my resume, just to see if it makes a difference. As far as I can tell, it does not. If anything, it seems to add an air of unprofessionalism to my resume.
It is a myth that employers want seasoned programmers. While it is TRUE that PROGRAMMERS would hire seasoned programmers, it is NOT TRUE that EMPLOYERS would hire seasoned programmers. It is the employers and HR people who hire programmers, and I can tell you exactly what the are looking for right now: BUZZ WORDS. I know this from talking with good people in the industry who are hiring people (and not programmers themselves), as well as people placing people. It makes no difference how much programming you've done before, just as long as you have 5 years Oracle, 4 years C#, COM/ADO/.NET, and speak and write both English and Japanese fluently. NOTHING else matters.
Now as for your claim that "sending in resumes doesn't hurt"- what are you talking about? You obviously don't have a wife and kids. Custom resume construction takes time- a LOT of time. And not just any old time- it takes Daughter-and-wife-free time. That's time you could be hauling furniture to make some money, or doing chores, or tutoring people for some money to help pay for things. Sending resumes hurts a lot.
I challenge you NOW to tell us why anyone should listen to what you have to say about what gets people hired. How old are you? How many people have you hired? How many years have you been paid to work tech? What do you know about the industry right now?
Legend of Mana is basically repackaged, Japanese Michael Ende. (His wife was Japanese.) I tried to play that game 3 times after I got it, but it never "worked" for me. I couldn't get into it. A couple years later, I was really angry with a lot of people around me. For some reason, I was drawn to the game and started playing it. It made me really rethink through some ideas about how I live, and how I think about and treat others. It also inspired a love of gardening, and got me working on some free software projects again.
Final Fantasy affected me way back, during high school. The world around me was so depressing, and the people in it were (justifiably) very cynical. The Final Fantasy series, however, gave me hope and values that I needed to get through high school, and introduced me to the complexities of the world. It also helped introduce me to metaphysical notions of Love and Spirit.
Secret of Mana has changed me in ways that I don't understand, and thus can't articulate.
Non-Square games include Starflight, and Robot Oddysey.
Due to Robot Oddysey, I got to snooze through a month of CS classes and breeze through homework, having learned binary logic when I was 10 years old fooling around on the computer. It wasn't that I am smart, it's just that the game is incredibly good at introducing binarly logic and circuitry.
Go in the pattern direction, and add language support to make good practice easy.
C# has already started this process, by including event schemes and automatic get/setters.
Now what we need is language support to be able to remap functions from member objects. That frees you up from having to inherit when you don't want to, and allows you to make really good cuts of functionality cheaply.
There are so many good object structures that are just totally impractical to write, because 99% of your code would look like:
If you are a programmer, look at how the game runs, think about it technically. No offence to the writers (I admire y'all greatly), but those games are relatively technically simple. One's an RPG, one's sort of a myst-like adventure. But the games sell, and they are paying for themselves well. Woo hoo!
Anyone of you, if you learn to sell, can sell your games. A good salesman can sell anything, they say. So if you learn that _one_ thing, provided that you have all the programming skills, and can get a friend to do some artwork for you, or can spare a couple K for art and music, you can sell your indie game.
Secret of Mana is... absolutely amazing; It continues to haunt me to this day.
FF *did* go bad post-VI.
I often wonder: How? Maybe the games lost thematic unity: They just became looong sequences of events and side story lines without real connection.
Another idea is that they stopped making Japanese games as they realized that people in the USA liked their games, and wanted to broaden western appeal. Bye-bye romantic Japan and Shinto, hello dark Blade-Runner Western appeal.
When I was 13, I could beat an RPG in about a week and a half. I would spend my whole weekend playing, and many hours during the week.
Now I'm older, but my love of RPGs (and other games) has not ceased. However, the playing time for these RPGs has become prohibitive. It takes me a month to beat XCom, several months to beat FF8. I still haven't beat FF8, and it's become something more of a CHORE (work) than play.
What needs to happen is for games to become more numerous, shorter, and cheaper. We need the equivalent of the SitCom (static) or Babylon5 (dynamic plot, optional episodes) for games.
Ignore aging gamers at your own peril. My dad told me when I was 13, that when I was older, I wouldn't be playing games. It's an understandable prediction, but in my experience, it's false- my friends, with jobs and children and family, are STILL playing games. It's just turning a little sour, because the games are so long.
Something interesting is happening- I'm finding myself far more attracted to short-run games such as Strange Adventures in Infinite Space. Time will tell whether my friends do the same; I suspect they will.
I thought about working through the kitchen cabinet.
My only worry is, "What about all that other stuff they put in there?"
Bleach isn't just Sodium Hypochlorite (or whatever it's supposed to be- it's been ages),
it also has a bunch of other stuff in it.
I always worry about the unknown additions reacting with other unknown additions and making something terribly wrong.
Yes, Yes, and Yes. I've been programming since I first saw a computer at age 7 and started plugging BASIC games from Family Computing into it.
Oooh yeah. I finished our semesters worth of 6th grade LOGO assignments in 1 week, and played adventure games with the rest. I won Science
Fairs by decrypting computer entrails. I programmed ASM in 8th grade. I've been with it for ages. I did CS, always. After school, I started teaching, myself, for free. For two years, I taught free classes on programming; The "Fledging Unix Programmers" classes. It was great fun, and I loved seeing people find the same joy that I did.
A year and a half ago, after 4 years paid programming, with no complaints about quality and many kudos and raises, I was laid off, and nobody is biting. I am 25 years old. I have sent out hoards of resumes.
OT, but worth saying: I am actually happy being away from the computer, studying insurance law. I understand far more about business, law, insurance, than I ever did before. You'd be amazed how much wisdom transfers between business and programming. Optimizations, histories, techniques, hacks- It's all there. There are "bugs" in contracts, but they are called holes. Some are parts of workarounds in legacy code- excuse me, previous contracts. There are optimizations, interesting bonding strategies. It's a big world, but the truly fundamental part of programming, the wisdom of revered knowledge, is actually far more global than I ever imagined. I used to think the business guys were just rich playboys, doing their thing. No! Not at all; they are Hackers. They program. Not just a metaphor- they actually CODE. And I don't just mean in contract writing- have you ever seen Gregg script? They work systems and optimizations just as much as we do.
Ha! When I read about TNIK, I thought, "Oh! A success book about programmers!" I don't know that it's really a success book, but it is in that domain of higher level approach to world problems that success books belong to.
I have been a programmer my entire life. I recently read Napoleon Hill, Frank Bettger, and Dale Carnegy for the first time. Wow! My life changed completely. And I realized that us programmers have a LOT to learn from sales people, both in terms of culture and skills.
Us programmers need a Napoleon Hill of our own.
Any rate- thanks for trying to understand our mindset.
There are a lot of Monorail commuters- I used it every day for a few months, morning and evening. The thing is to use it Mon-Fri mornings and evenings; then you'll see the regulars.
Slashdot Mirror
...what will 100 million US citizens do for 4 years while attending school to retrain to become robot programmers?
Did you know that the percentage of income spent on housing has increased steadily since the 1960s? Did you also know that the concentration of wealth has increased steadily?
I don't know that business owners really control their business as much as we imagine they do.
For one thing, when businesses get really really big and complex, I suppose the left hand doesn't know what the right hands doing, and the business "owners" don't really know what it's doing either. It just sort of runs, but they don't really know how.
Maybe, theoretically, they could issue an order down, like "Hey, only package your chips over here," right? But could it actually work? Maybe not! Maybe that'd cause all these huge social uphevals.
Maybe businesses, once formed, are like parts of a gigantic organic system. You might not be able to just suddenly uproot a major artery, and move it somewhere else, without having major effects on yourself, your environment, and whatever else plays a part (who really knows what, right?).
So, I don't know. Is it really hypocracy? Maybe powerful people aren't really as powerful as we imagine them to be?
I've read some things by some very wealthy people. I can't understand it all. But some of these people seem to me to be pretty sincerely interested in doing what's right.
Now, granted, the vast majority of these people seem pretty skanky to me. Enron? Right? I suspect that most big business is like that.
But when I read about people who really seem to be trying to do good, like O'Rielly, I just don't think it's a PR thing. I think these people are serious.
I don't know; Maybe someone who knows better can reply to me.
Are you sure you aren't basing your beliefs on a Simulacra?
This is a good thing; I disagree with the negative tone.
The judges reasoning is sound. If it were otherwise: Do you think it would be illegal for a future web browser to not display what it detects to be advertisements? Mozilla pop-up blocking might be deemed illegal as well, if the judge reasoned otherwise.
Remember!: Your paper must have five (5) paragraphs. An intro paragraph, concluding with your thesis sentence, followed by three paragraphs supporting your thesis sentence, followed by a conclusion..."
One of the most exciting things happening now is Aggregators. There was a slashdot story on them just a day ago. They really change everything about the web, wiki, etc.,. Everything becomes real-time.
The most USEFUL directories you can create are three personal tmp directories, like so:
- tmp
- tmpSep
- tmp2003
When you do that, you instantly get rid of clutter: small files that you don't really care about, but want to keep for some finite amount of time.There are many more techniques. I'd like to write about them some time, but now is not that time.
Not only is your "friend" buying expensive cars, a new house, stereo, and "whatever",-
He's also buying the latest and greatest weaponry in the world, and threatening anyone who tries to get close to his level of armaments!
We should mandate free software for government not because "it's the best widget for the woozle problem," but because it's _public_.
The government shouldn't be subsidizing some _private_ interest if there is a public alternative.
I've been programming since I was 7 years old. I attended Harvey Mudd College. No, I didn't graduate, due to my poor chemistry grades, but regardless- I did great in my Computer Science and Math courses.
I've worked on several Open Source and Free Software projects. I taught free classes on programming for 2 years, 1ce a week for 6 hours a time, and while the boom was going, got two of my students (out of 8) employed quickly. There's hardly a time in my life where I don't have some programming job going or not.
I have sent dozens of resumes and even made a dozen interviews. I have put Free Software projects (and not) on my resume, just to see if it makes a difference. As far as I can tell, it does not. If anything, it seems to add an air of unprofessionalism to my resume.
It is a myth that employers want seasoned programmers. While it is TRUE that PROGRAMMERS would hire seasoned programmers, it is NOT TRUE that EMPLOYERS would hire seasoned programmers. It is the employers and HR people who hire programmers, and I can tell you exactly what the are looking for right now: BUZZ WORDS. I know this from talking with good people in the industry who are hiring people (and not programmers themselves), as well as people placing people. It makes no difference how much programming you've done before, just as long as you have 5 years Oracle, 4 years C#, COM/ADO/.NET, and speak and write both English and Japanese fluently. NOTHING else matters.
Now as for your claim that "sending in resumes doesn't hurt"- what are you talking about? You obviously don't have a wife and kids. Custom resume construction takes time- a LOT of time. And not just any old time- it takes Daughter-and-wife-free time. That's time you could be hauling furniture to make some money, or doing chores, or tutoring people for some money to help pay for things. Sending resumes hurts a lot.
I challenge you NOW to tell us why anyone should listen to what you have to say about what gets people hired. How old are you? How many people have you hired? How many years have you been paid to work tech? What do you know about the industry right now?
Legend of Mana is basically repackaged, Japanese Michael Ende. (His wife was Japanese.) I tried to play that game 3 times after I got it, but it never "worked" for me. I couldn't get into it. A couple years later, I was really angry with a lot of people around me. For some reason, I was drawn to the game and started playing it. It made me really rethink through some ideas about how I live, and how I think about and treat others. It also inspired a love of gardening, and got me working on some free software projects again.
Final Fantasy affected me way back, during high school. The world around me was so depressing, and the people in it were (justifiably) very cynical. The Final Fantasy series, however, gave me hope and values that I needed to get through high school, and introduced me to the complexities of the world. It also helped introduce me to metaphysical notions of Love and Spirit.
Secret of Mana has changed me in ways that I don't understand, and thus can't articulate.
Non-Square games include Starflight, and Robot Oddysey.
Due to Robot Oddysey, I got to snooze through a month of CS classes and breeze through homework, having learned binary logic when I was 10 years old fooling around on the computer. It wasn't that I am smart, it's just that the game is incredibly good at introducing binarly logic and circuitry.
There is plenty of room for OOP to evolve.
Go in the pattern direction, and add language support to make good practice easy.
C# has already started this process, by including event schemes and automatic get/setters.
Now what we need is language support to be able to remap functions from member objects.
That frees you up from having to inherit when you don't want to, and allows you to make really good
cuts of functionality cheaply.
There are so many good object structures that are just totally impractical to write, because 99% of your code would look like:
ThisObject::MethodA(all-the-params) { return mySubObject::MethodA( all-the-params ); }
If you could remap quickly and easily, we'd be in the Haranya Loka of design.
Rediculous!
The Sun Never Sets on the American Empire.
Why should it set on Her acts?
Sure. But you must understand, it is the nature of Samurai to seek out a better technique where they can.
If you are a programmer, look at how the game runs, think about it technically. No offence to the writers (I admire y'all greatly), but those games are relatively technically simple. One's an RPG, one's sort of a myst-like adventure. But the games sell, and they are paying for themselves well. Woo hoo!
Anyone of you, if you learn to sell, can sell your games. A good salesman can sell anything, they say. So if you learn that _one_ thing, provided that you have all the programming skills, and can get a friend to do some artwork for you, or can spare a couple K for art and music, you can sell your indie game.
Now excuse me, I've got to go play Strange Adventures in Infinite Space.
Actually, I remembered it, I just forgot whether it was before or after Herzog Zwei.
I played Modem Wars on my PC.
Not the "A" word!
Not here, on Slashdot!
Herzog Zwei is the earliest RTS that I know of.
Secret of Mana is... absolutely amazing; It continues to haunt me to this day.
FF *did* go bad post-VI.
I often wonder: How? Maybe the games lost thematic unity: They just became looong sequences of events and side story lines without real connection.
Another idea is that they stopped making Japanese games as they realized that people in the USA liked their games, and wanted to broaden western appeal. Bye-bye romantic Japan and Shinto, hello dark Blade-Runner Western appeal.
Now I'm older, but my love of RPGs (and other games) has not ceased. However, the playing time for these RPGs has become prohibitive. It takes me a month to beat XCom, several months to beat FF8. I still haven't beat FF8, and it's become something more of a CHORE (work) than play.
What needs to happen is for games to become more numerous, shorter, and cheaper. We need the equivalent of the SitCom (static) or Babylon5 (dynamic plot, optional episodes) for games.
Ignore aging gamers at your own peril. My dad told me when I was 13, that when I was older, I wouldn't be playing games. It's an understandable prediction, but in my experience, it's false- my friends, with jobs and children and family, are STILL playing games. It's just turning a little sour, because the games are so long.
Something interesting is happening- I'm finding myself far more attracted to short-run games such as Strange Adventures in Infinite Space. Time will tell whether my friends do the same; I suspect they will.
We need the Elerium-115!
I thought about working through the kitchen cabinet. My only worry is, "What about all that other stuff they put in there?" Bleach isn't just Sodium Hypochlorite (or whatever it's supposed to be- it's been ages), it also has a bunch of other stuff in it. I always worry about the unknown additions reacting with other unknown additions and making something terribly wrong.
Oooh yeah. I finished our semesters worth of 6th grade LOGO assignments in 1 week, and played adventure games with the rest. I won Science Fairs by decrypting computer entrails. I programmed ASM in 8th grade. I've been with it for ages. I did CS, always. After school, I started teaching, myself, for free. For two years, I taught free classes on programming; The "Fledging Unix Programmers" classes. It was great fun, and I loved seeing people find the same joy that I did.
A year and a half ago, after 4 years paid programming, with no complaints about quality and many kudos and raises, I was laid off, and nobody is biting. I am 25 years old. I have sent out hoards of resumes.
OT, but worth saying: I am actually happy being away from the computer, studying insurance law. I understand far more about business, law, insurance, than I ever did before. You'd be amazed how much wisdom transfers between business and programming. Optimizations, histories, techniques, hacks- It's all there. There are "bugs" in contracts, but they are called holes. Some are parts of workarounds in legacy code- excuse me, previous contracts. There are optimizations, interesting bonding strategies. It's a big world, but the truly fundamental part of programming, the wisdom of revered knowledge, is actually far more global than I ever imagined. I used to think the business guys were just rich playboys, doing their thing. No! Not at all; they are Hackers. They program. Not just a metaphor- they actually CODE. And I don't just mean in contract writing- have you ever seen Gregg script? They work systems and optimizations just as much as we do.
Ha! When I read about TNIK, I thought, "Oh! A success book about programmers!" I don't know that it's really a success book, but it is in that domain of higher level approach to world problems that success books belong to.
I have been a programmer my entire life. I recently read Napoleon Hill, Frank Bettger, and Dale Carnegy for the first time. Wow! My life changed completely. And I realized that us programmers have a LOT to learn from sales people, both in terms of culture and skills.
Us programmers need a Napoleon Hill of our own.
Any rate- thanks for trying to understand our mindset.
There are a lot of Monorail commuters- I used it every day for a few months, morning and evening. The thing is to use it Mon-Fri mornings and evenings; then you'll see the regulars.