If you're developing J2EE applications, you are taking about server side development, what does.NET being on the desktop of people's computers have anything to do with your problem space? I would say your very senior manager doesn't understand application development/architectures.
Given the very nature of MMORPGs and having played Final Fantasy XI, I can't even imagine you deriving any benefit to playing a MMORPG 2 to 3 hours a week. MMORPGs are time pits, they require a large investment in time before they become fun. True, "World of Warcraft" seems to be breaking the mold but I doubt even with that title 2 to 3 hours a week is enough. Just as a frame of reference, 66% of the FFXI licenses have lapsed into an "inactive" state. As in, people bought the game, played for a time and have *not* returned. This does not surprise me at all. I spent quite a lot of time with FFXI before I truly started having fun with the game nearly quitting several time in the process. About the only thing that kept me going is a friend who I had played with online in another type of game. After playing FFXI, I simply can't imagine a pay as you go MMORPG model. Or perhaps I can, but that's an altogether different experience. My advice would be to either stick to single player titles or simply play a game like "Neverwinter Nights" with some buds if you want some RPG gaming with comradery.
Taking advice from Confucius, namely that "The true measure of a man is his humility" if an organization has no interest in you by simply focusing on the piece of paper called your diploma and nothing else, well, frankly, I don't have time for elitists.
But I do understand that some organizations need to use some sort of filtering criteria when they have a glut of resumes. Something many organizations faced with the dot com implosion and the glut of unemployed tech people.
Disregarding what else your resume says about you and simply focusing on where you went to school seems fairly myopic.
In my experience (every organization I've been at) that where you went to school was irrelevant. If you did well in the interview process, had tech smarts, that counted far more than having gone to school "X".
Work is work. Take what you can get. If you enjoy the work and do a good job you're likely to be there far longer than you think. And if you think "employee" means somehow you won't get canned if finances go south at a company, um, you'd be wrong. Be grateful, take the work.
That price point is fairly common (range) with MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games; I assumed you didn't know the acronym since you posed the question).
MMORPGs are one of those things you are either interested in or not. And whether it's worth it depends on which side you're on. I subscribe to Final Fantasy XI for $12.95/month and I can't complain. That's just two fast food meals.
There's nothing wrong with EMACS. It works fine with dumb terminals and over a serial line and its interface was designed as such... you obviously don't know much about EMACS.
Schwartz spews endless nonsense like McNealy. I like Sun if for no other reason competition is good. I don't subscribe to zealotry for language A vs. language B (I used to... but discovered it's wasted energy and the world doesn't work that way). Sun should stick to producing hardware since that is where they will make money. I must say, for a company that touts Java so much, "Show me the money" comes to mind. Talk is cheap. Sun hasn't made much $$$ on Java... which goes to show a level of ignorance, incompetence and arrogance given all these juxtapositions of Java vs. This or Java vs. That. You can say the aforementioned three items are all sides of the die. McNealy is an idiot, Sun needs new blood. If Schwartz is a "chip off the old block" then woe to Sun.
Who cares... go learn some business, in the long term these debates are pointless. Companies use whatever their situation and the market dictates (vendor support, availability of personnel and other resources) to get business done. Businesses could care less about the minutiae of the respective language grammars and your ability to induct whatever semantics they afford. Hey, that's life, get used to it.
It seems upgrading to the latest Audigy2 drivers has helped... but nevertheless I was a bit surprised and annoyed with the stuttering happening at key moments and putting a damper on my experience.
WindowMaker is too light weight. Yeah, that's one of its "strong points" but other window managers have come around and staked that same claim. Besides, who wants to wait years for an incremental release from a minimalist approach. What the *NIX community needs is a united desktop to compete more effectively with MS. I wish the whole "KDE vs. GNOME" thing didn't even exist. And no, I don't believe we need two dozen window managers.
To anyone who is considering a programming career - you would be wise to enter some other field.
It's amusing to read some of the Slashdot posts about "Tool X" or "Tool Y" or "Book on Z" but in the end it's about business.
Most managers don't really care that you used the adapter design pattern or perhaps your ultra-slick use of Apache's mod_rewrite.
In the end it's about business and the IT field in many ways has become a lot like the electricity powering your television - a basic commodity.
One of the only promising jobs in tech are perhaps network engineers and offshoots related to this... because after all, someone has to man, diagnose, install this physical crap and companies do need SOME physical presence - corporations are not going the "pure virtual" route.
But if you're a programmer and you think you're immune and you don't work for the government (the whole clearance thing), forget it, chances are good that in 5 years some portion of what you do or ALL of it will be eliminated as a result of continued consolidation in software categories, further commodization of technology and/or offshoring and/or any combination of these.
When I started my career in 1991 many companies were trying to outdo each other on technical prowess alone. Go back to what I said earlier, namely that your manager doesn't care about your use of the visitor design pattern or use of Apache mod_rewrite - businesses care about business, that is, making money. It sounds trite and oh so obvious but it's easy to forget this. Business people really don't care about Windows' heavily reliance of multithreading vs. the classic *NIX mechanism of forking or GNOME vs. KDE or Windows vs. LINUX or Windows vs. Macintosh.
THEY DON'T CARE. Really, they don't. It's about money. End of story.
Having said that, there is no reason for businesses to continue to pay sky high prices for skills they can get elsewhere at a fraction of the cost.
With globalization and the increased communication bandwidth the Internet has brought we have these two feeding off each other and the process will only accelerate.
This has nothing to do with Sony. There is no notion of central servers with online gaming on the PS2. Square can open whatever ports it wants to on both sides, it squarely (pun intended) controls both ends.
I might also add that PCs are part of this mix. That is, this isn't PS2 only network. FFXI allows PC and PS2 players to mingle.
I like *NIX a lot when it comes to its strengths but until Apple adopted the use of UNIX the reality is the only other decent UNIX desktop I had ever seen was NeXTStep and gee what a shock Apple bought the company.
The LINUX desktops have come a long way but I have a reminder of why UNIX on the desktop never took off. The Sparc blade workstation I have at work due to the fact that I work in an environment that uses them in server side production capacities. No one on my team uses their Sparc blades directly. Everyone simply TELNETs into their respective boxes from Windows. Frankly, I don't blame them. If you saw the choices presented to us on our Sparc boxes you would understand - CDE, OpenWindows.
A few years ago a friend would always pooh pooh MS for the lack of robust command line tools. I too on many occasioned have wished the common suite of command line tools often found on *NIX systems were readily found on every Windows system. But over the years things like Cygwin and a port of the GNU tools as straight Win32 executable (http://unxutils.sourceforge.net) have severely weakened the age old argument he always used to throw out. And now with broadband more pervasive than ever, installing these tools on a Windows box where you might be situated impromptu is no big deal.
Yep I like LINUX and have employed it on multiple occasions to reduce costs as well as having a very high comfort level with bash, EMACS et al. But the desktop I prefer on account of heavy multimedia use is Windows XP Professional. Yeah it would be cool to own a Macintosh but I already contributed to Apple's wealth as being an owner of the original Macintosh in 1984. My CRT, hard drives and video card do not need to be upgraded at the frequency I am inclined for the motherboard, CPU and memory and consequently I can piece together a new system every couple of years or eighteen months at a fraction of the cost of keeping up with the current Macintosh bleeding edge.
At times I've had a secondary LINUX system that I have heavily used (one monitor with Windows, the other with LINUX) but space constraints at the moment don't allow that. But in looking at the various screenshots featured in this article, I have the itch to run LINUX again. I also happen to like Mozilla on LINUX when TrueType fonts are enabled much more than Mozilla on Windows... assuming I am not hitting super fancy web pages that have references to various video codecs... ah yes, there's that multimedia content problem again. And at this point in my career, life et al, I do not really feel like going through hoops to configure this on LINUX. There should be "out of the box" options. I have only so much bandwidth as one individual.
Does UNISYS get what? Posing the question makes it seem as though somehow there's some religious pilgrimage to be made to offer show of support.
The reality is, if YET ANOTHER systems vendor is touting LINUX, it's only good for LINUX, it decreases the chances that big wig decision makers at company X may balk because of the old "lack of vendor support" argument... though these last couple of years that argument has certainly been fleeting.
Still the more pervasive LINUX is and the more companies support it, the greater the chances that LINUX will open doors than were previously closed.
1) Assuming you can track them down 2) Assuming they're somewhere they would care (I'm sure all these Russian kids are just trembling at the idea of a "cease and desist" order from a US court) 3) Assuming the IP addresses you are even logging point to the source
I got news for you mang, this ain't nothing new and there's not much you can do except to run a tight ship and prevent breakins.
It's the yin and yang. Women are very different and the overboard left brain sided nature of the work does not appeal to their nature. There's nothing wrong with that. The sexes are what they are, the yin and yang.
Yeah there's the occasional exception but they're just that exeption... it's been quite a long while since I've had a "technical" female coworker. And currently I'm doing work at a very large company so the odds would be greater there.
I have a BS in CS but I wholeheartedly disagree with you.
"Sofware engineering" is an oxymoron. You can employ strict process control, aka protocol, but that is not engineering per se. For example, the idea of version control or staging to deploy new web applications, that may be "release engineering" but you are stil talking about setting protocols for pushing files around.
Today I muse at some of the research interests of some professors I had back in the day, "software engineering." Yeah sure, they changed the software engineering world.
Given that the number of abstractions the software space allows is infinite (vs. being bound to the physical universe) there is a level of complexity and an opportunity for induction (by drawing from all these abstractions) that ascribing a pithy label such as "software engineering" seems quite moot in my book.
I might add I spent 2-1/2 years at Microsoft and have moved onto the *NIX space. I've seen both ends of the spectrum and I haven't seen any real notion of software engineering except for ONE small company I had occasion to work at. The problem is that 99.9% of the situations that are cranking out code have no semblance of what was going on there.
Because people have business to conduct with the mainstream, that is why. There are lots of people who aren not interested in compiling LINUX kernels and/or engaging in the proclivities of slashdotters. That's life, that's reality. Or said another way, MS Office has become the lingua franca of business documents. I have had cases where when I sent PDFs I was asked "What's this? I don't know how to open it, can you send an MS Word document please." I've done so when I KNEW for a fact the recipient had no reason to modify my document. The idea was to dampen the need for Word one bite at a time, at least that was my thinking. The world is a very different place than my panache to see something else take root, e.g., OpenOffice or the use of PDFs when editing is not necesary.
The people who visit here tends to have "tech" under their skin (me included). But the average person who is considering college does not necessarily enjoy our enthusiasm for open source code, LINUX, cool science news, etc. That's just life. If someone were considering computer science I would tell them, "Unless it's something you think about an awful lot during your day, forget it." That is, unless computing is in your "blood" in some shape way or form, the prospects simply are not worth it. I went to a large Midwestern state university and left the area to be on the West Coast. I kept in touch with different people from my college days (I finished in '91). Nowadays there are quite a number of "engineers" in Chicagoland that are essentially at dead ends the changing dynamics of the tech industry. Unfortunately for them, Chicago had a rather telecom presence and the downturn in that space means there are probably lots of people who won't be in tech jobs anymore. Just yesterday (and also featured on Slashdot) there was a Businessweek article about consolidation in the software space. I see it as a given and it is something I have told people for a couple of years. You see, the railways saw huge growth in the second half of the 1800's then ther was consolidation. Then the auto industry went nuts during its inception, then it too went through consolidation in the first half of the 1900's. Frankly I don't see why the software industry would be any different or immune to these business dynamics. And despite the fact that software doesn't have a material cost, commodization directly (open source) and indirectly has dramatically altered the landscape from 10+ years ago.
Here's a good article on Newsforge that makes my case, "There may never be another software billionaire":
Sure I'm only talking about computer science jobs but the prospects of studying some scientific field and making a living at it are rather grim. I've met my share of electrical engineers and physicists making a living by being code grunts vs. being in employed in their field of study. Nowadays there's a "nuclear engineer" on my team but the company I am currently at in no shape, way or form deals with that space.
So yeah, if I had to start all over and had the business savvy, mindset, drive and acumen I would go do something else.
After all, how many CEOs in corporate America have engineering and/or scientific degress?
I lived in Seattle for six years. Tried to get into Amazon more out of desperation than anything else when the dot com implosion occurred. Still I knew back then they were LINUX and *NIX is primarily the platform I like to do my work.
But based on things I've heard, it's probably best I did not get hired.
1) That assembly has major relevance today 2) The best implementations are written by those who've mastered assembly language
On point #2, "best" is very subjective and subject to interpretation. Does this mean, minimum # of defects per X lines of code? Extensibility?
As someone who learned assembly in the early 80's (when I got started on 8 bit microcomputers) I don't see much relevance for intimately assembly language today.
It would be like me arguing that I should learn the power industry since one day I might need to build my own generators to run equipment.
At some point we have to resist the urge to think we can "know it all" and simply stand on the shoulders of others.
While learning assembly is fun, after 10+ years of being a software professional, it would be nice if people know f*cking high level languages. Back in '99 when I was with an Internet company and we were interviewing for "software engineers" I was amazed at how many people claimed they knew C and could not write a f*cking strcpy routine. I didn't care about the prototype (ANSI or not) I just want to see code that did this:
while (*dest++ = *src++);
Sure that's the super compact one line version with no C prototype but the prototype is NOT what I was interested in, e.g., "What's the ANSI C prototype for strcpy?" I simply wanted to see if a person knew C... and if you do not know basic pointers, you don't know C.
As it turned out, not one person I asked this question answered it. In fact, an amazing number of people made no attempt at it. I guess the Internet boom created lots of a people who saw dollar signs and were applying for jobs way out of their league.
That's C mind you. When you look at the fact that C++ was crazily popular I can add to my anecdotes. I used to inteview people on C++ and I often asked people to rate their C++ skills. I gave them a scale and qualified 7 through 10. Mind you the scale was arbitrary but the point was to clue people in as to what my expectation of a 7 might be. One of the points I would make about a 7 (out of 10) is "You should be able to tell me off the top of your head why you would want to write a copy constructor." An amazing number of people would rate themselves 7 or higher. Want to take a stab at what the first question I asked was? Yes, "When would you want to write a copy constructor?" And like strcpy in C, most "C++ developers" seemed to be clueless on just that one question.
Thinking in assembly language is not something that happens overnight but once you do you definitely have an understanding that few people have. Problem is, the applicability of this skillset for most "developers" is incredibly niche. Unless you're writing a compiler, debugger, writing firmware directed at embedded systems or reverse engineering some piece of code (regardless of the source media), assembly is pretty much irrelevant given the rich number of abstractions the software development community has created.
Some of it you can attribute to open source some of it is purely Moore's Law (computing doubles every 18 months). Today we don't think twice about having a virtual machine on top of our "real computer" running our code but back in the 80's, forget it, the IBM PC was running at a mere 4.77 MHz and the performance of Pascal code compiled with Borland's Turbo Pascal completely blew away performance coming from byte code Pascal compilers employing the University of California San Diego's P-Code system.
If you've entered computing in just the last ten years it's hard to appreciate all this but back then it made all the difference in the world.
However, today we are not obsessed with CPU performance since performance gains coming from CPU speed increases have become minor with respect to the applications most people use, e.g., Intel has decided to stop using "GHz" to rate its processors. Besides, anyone who understands computer architecture clearly knew it was Intel's way of
In the past a game was considered a "hit" in PC gaming if it sells 100,000 units... whereas a hit on a game console is more like 2,000,000 units.
If you're a business person, which would you opt for?
Sure business people may not be developing games directly but they're the financiers and like it or not, the people with money have LOTS of say in this whole process.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're developing J2EE applications, you are taking about server side development, what does .NET being on the desktop of people's computers have anything to do with your problem space? I would say your very senior manager doesn't understand application development/architectures.
Given the very nature of MMORPGs and having played Final Fantasy XI, I can't even imagine you deriving any benefit to playing a MMORPG 2 to 3 hours a week. MMORPGs are time pits, they require a large investment in time before they become fun. True, "World of Warcraft" seems to be breaking the mold but I doubt even with that title 2 to 3 hours a week is enough. Just as a frame of reference, 66% of the FFXI licenses have lapsed into an "inactive" state. As in, people bought the game, played for a time and have *not* returned. This does not surprise me at all. I spent quite a lot of time with FFXI before I truly started having fun with the game nearly quitting several time in the process. About the only thing that kept me going is a friend who I had played with online in another type of game. After playing FFXI, I simply can't imagine a pay as you go MMORPG model. Or perhaps I can, but that's an altogether different experience. My advice would be to either stick to single player titles or simply play a game like "Neverwinter Nights" with some buds if you want some RPG gaming with comradery.
Taking advice from Confucius, namely that "The true measure of a man is his humility" if an organization has no interest in you by simply focusing on the piece of paper called your diploma and nothing else, well, frankly, I don't have time for elitists.
But I do understand that some organizations need to use some sort of filtering criteria when they have a glut of resumes. Something many organizations faced with the dot com implosion and the glut of unemployed tech people.
Disregarding what else your resume says about you and simply focusing on where you went to school seems fairly myopic.
In my experience (every organization I've been at) that where you went to school was irrelevant. If you did well in the interview process, had tech smarts, that counted far more than having gone to school "X".
Welcome to the real world.
-M
PS: "Those who can't, teach." -Proverb
Work is work. Take what you can get. If you enjoy the work and do a good job you're likely to be there far longer than you think. And if you think "employee" means somehow you won't get canned if finances go south at a company, um, you'd be wrong. Be grateful, take the work.
That price point is fairly common (range) with MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games; I assumed you didn't know the acronym since you posed the question).
MMORPGs are one of those things you are either interested in or not. And whether it's worth it depends on which side you're on. I subscribe to Final Fantasy XI for $12.95/month and I can't complain. That's just two fast food meals.
There's nothing wrong with EMACS. It works fine with dumb terminals and over a serial line and its interface was designed as such... you obviously don't know much about EMACS.
Schwartz spews endless nonsense like McNealy. I like Sun if for no other reason competition is good. I don't subscribe to zealotry for language A vs. language B (I used to... but discovered it's wasted energy and the world doesn't work that way). Sun should stick to producing hardware since that is where they will make money. I must say, for a company that touts Java so much, "Show me the money" comes to mind. Talk is cheap. Sun hasn't made much $$$ on Java... which goes to show a level of ignorance, incompetence and arrogance given all these juxtapositions of Java vs. This or Java vs. That. You can say the aforementioned three items are all sides of the die. McNealy is an idiot, Sun needs new blood. If Schwartz is a "chip off the old block" then woe to Sun.
Who cares... go learn some business, in the long term these debates are pointless. Companies use whatever their situation and the market dictates (vendor support, availability of personnel and other resources) to get business done. Businesses could care less about the minutiae of the respective language grammars and your ability to induct whatever semantics they afford. Hey, that's life, get used to it.
It seems upgrading to the latest Audigy2 drivers has helped... but nevertheless I was a bit surprised and annoyed with the stuttering happening at key moments and putting a damper on my experience.
It's not as severe now but still there.
WindowMaker is too light weight. Yeah, that's one of its "strong points" but other window managers have come around and staked that same claim. Besides, who wants to wait years for an incremental release from a minimalist approach. What the *NIX community needs is a united desktop to compete more effectively with MS. I wish the whole "KDE vs. GNOME" thing didn't even exist. And no, I don't believe we need two dozen window managers.
To anyone who is considering a programming career - you would be wise to enter some other field.
It's amusing to read some of the Slashdot posts about "Tool X" or "Tool Y" or "Book on Z" but in the end it's about business.
Most managers don't really care that you used the adapter design pattern or perhaps your ultra-slick use of Apache's mod_rewrite.
In the end it's about business and the IT field in many ways has become a lot like the electricity powering your television - a basic commodity.
One of the only promising jobs in tech are perhaps network engineers and offshoots related to this... because after all, someone has to man, diagnose, install this physical crap and companies do need SOME physical presence - corporations are not going the "pure virtual" route.
But if you're a programmer and you think you're immune and you don't work for the government (the whole clearance thing), forget it, chances are good that in 5 years some portion of what you do or ALL of it will be eliminated as a result of continued consolidation in software categories, further commodization of technology and/or offshoring and/or any combination of these.
When I started my career in 1991 many companies were trying to outdo each other on technical prowess alone. Go back to what I said earlier, namely that your manager doesn't care about your use of the visitor design pattern or use of Apache mod_rewrite - businesses care about business, that is, making money. It sounds trite and oh so obvious but it's easy to forget this. Business people really don't care about Windows' heavily reliance of multithreading vs. the classic *NIX mechanism of forking or GNOME vs. KDE or Windows vs. LINUX or Windows vs. Macintosh.
THEY DON'T CARE. Really, they don't. It's about money. End of story.
Having said that, there is no reason for businesses to continue to pay sky high prices for skills they can get elsewhere at a fraction of the cost.
With globalization and the increased communication bandwidth the Internet has brought we have these two feeding off each other and the process will only accelerate.
-M
I don't care if it is coming from Sun.
This has nothing to do with Sony. There is no notion of central servers with online gaming on the PS2. Square can open whatever ports it wants to on both sides, it squarely (pun intended) controls both ends.
I might also add that PCs are part of this mix. That is, this isn't PS2 only network. FFXI allows PC and PS2 players to mingle.
-M
I like *NIX a lot when it comes to its strengths but until Apple adopted the use of UNIX the reality is the only other decent UNIX desktop I had ever seen was NeXTStep and gee what a shock Apple bought the company.
The LINUX desktops have come a long way but I have a reminder of why UNIX on the desktop never took off. The Sparc blade workstation I have at work due to the fact that I work in an environment that uses them in server side production capacities. No one on my team uses their Sparc blades directly. Everyone simply TELNETs into their respective boxes from Windows. Frankly, I don't blame them. If you saw the choices presented to us on our Sparc boxes you would understand - CDE, OpenWindows.
A few years ago a friend would always pooh pooh MS for the lack of robust command line tools. I too on many occasioned have wished the common suite of command line tools often found on *NIX systems were readily found on every Windows system. But over the years things like Cygwin and a port of the GNU tools as straight Win32 executable (http://unxutils.sourceforge.net) have severely weakened the age old argument he always used to throw out. And now with broadband more pervasive than ever, installing these tools on a Windows box where you might be situated impromptu is no big deal.
Yep I like LINUX and have employed it on multiple occasions to reduce costs as well as having a very high comfort level with bash, EMACS et al. But the desktop I prefer on account of heavy multimedia use is Windows XP Professional. Yeah it would be cool to own a Macintosh but I already contributed to Apple's wealth as being an owner of the original Macintosh in 1984. My CRT, hard drives and video card do not need to be upgraded at the frequency I am inclined for the motherboard, CPU and memory and consequently I can piece together a new system every couple of years or eighteen months at a fraction of the cost of keeping up with the current Macintosh bleeding edge.
At times I've had a secondary LINUX system that I have heavily used (one monitor with Windows, the other with LINUX) but space constraints at the moment don't allow that. But in looking at the various screenshots featured in this article, I have the itch to run LINUX again. I also happen to like Mozilla on LINUX when TrueType fonts are enabled much more than Mozilla on Windows... assuming I am not hitting super fancy web pages that have references to various video codecs... ah yes, there's that multimedia content problem again. And at this point in my career, life et al, I do not really feel like going through hoops to configure this on LINUX. There should be "out of the box" options. I have only so much bandwidth as one individual.
Because you've assumed all the arguments you USED to pass have not changed.
Somehow I doubt an API call will just "stop."
If not the argument(s), then perhaps your expectations, i.e. pre conditions for your invoking it.
-M
Does UNISYS get what? Posing the question makes it seem as though somehow there's some religious pilgrimage to be made to offer show of support.
The reality is, if YET ANOTHER systems vendor is touting LINUX, it's only good for LINUX, it decreases the chances that big wig decision makers at company X may balk because of the old "lack of vendor support" argument... though these last couple of years that argument has certainly been fleeting.
Still the more pervasive LINUX is and the more companies support it, the greater the chances that LINUX will open doors than were previously closed.
Sending cease and desist orders?
1) Assuming you can track them down
2) Assuming they're somewhere they would care (I'm sure all these Russian kids are just trembling at the idea of a "cease and desist" order from a US court)
3) Assuming the IP addresses you are even logging point to the source
I got news for you mang, this ain't nothing new and there's not much you can do except to run a tight ship and prevent breakins.
Welcome to the Internet,
-M
It's the yin and yang. Women are very different and the overboard left brain sided nature of the work does not appeal to their nature. There's nothing wrong with that. The sexes are what they are, the yin and yang.
Yeah there's the occasional exception but they're just that exeption... it's been quite a long while since I've had a "technical" female coworker. And currently I'm doing work at a very large company so the odds would be greater there.
-M
I have a BS in CS but I wholeheartedly disagree with you.
"Sofware engineering" is an oxymoron. You can employ strict process control, aka protocol, but that is not engineering per se. For example, the idea of version control or staging to deploy new web applications, that may be "release engineering" but you are stil talking about setting protocols for pushing files around.
Today I muse at some of the research interests of some professors I had back in the day, "software engineering." Yeah sure, they changed the software engineering world.
Given that the number of abstractions the software space allows is infinite (vs. being bound to the physical universe) there is a level of complexity and an opportunity for induction (by drawing from all these abstractions) that ascribing a pithy label such as "software engineering" seems quite moot in my book.
I might add I spent 2-1/2 years at Microsoft and have moved onto the *NIX space. I've seen both ends of the spectrum and I haven't seen any real notion of software engineering except for ONE small company I had occasion to work at. The problem is that 99.9% of the situations that are cranking out code have no semblance of what was going on there.
-M
Because people have business to conduct with the mainstream, that is why. There are lots of people who aren not interested in compiling LINUX kernels and/or engaging in the proclivities of slashdotters. That's life, that's reality. Or said another way, MS Office has become the lingua franca of business documents. I have had cases where when I sent PDFs I was asked "What's this? I don't know how to open it, can you send an MS Word document please." I've done so when I KNEW for a fact the recipient had no reason to modify my document. The idea was to dampen the need for Word one bite at a time, at least that was my thinking. The world is a very different place than my panache to see something else take root, e.g., OpenOffice or the use of PDFs when editing is not necesary.
C'est la vie,
-M
The people who visit here tends to have "tech" under their skin (me included). But the average person who is considering college does not necessarily enjoy our enthusiasm for open source code, LINUX, cool science news, etc. That's just life. If someone were considering computer science I would tell them, "Unless it's something you think about an awful lot during your day, forget it." That is, unless computing is in your "blood" in some shape way or form, the prospects simply are not worth it. I went to a large Midwestern state university and left the area to be on the West Coast. I kept in touch with different people from my college days (I finished in '91). Nowadays there are quite a number of "engineers" in Chicagoland that are essentially at dead ends the changing dynamics of the tech industry. Unfortunately for them, Chicago had a rather telecom presence and the downturn in that space means there are probably lots of people who won't be in tech jobs anymore. Just yesterday (and also featured on Slashdot) there was a Businessweek article about consolidation in the software space. I see it as a given and it is something I have told people for a couple of years. You see, the railways saw huge growth in the second half of the 1800's then ther was consolidation. Then the auto industry went nuts during its inception, then it too went through consolidation in the first half of the 1900's. Frankly I don't see why the software industry would be any different or immune to these business dynamics. And despite the fact that software doesn't have a material cost, commodization directly (open source) and indirectly has dramatically altered the landscape from 10+ years ago.
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Here's a good article on Newsforge that makes my case, "There may never be another software billionaire":
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/03/2
Sure I'm only talking about computer science jobs but the prospects of studying some scientific field and making a living at it are rather grim. I've met my share of electrical engineers and physicists making a living by being code grunts vs. being in employed in their field of study. Nowadays there's a "nuclear engineer" on my team but the company I am currently at in no shape, way or form deals with that space.
So yeah, if I had to start all over and had the business savvy, mindset, drive and acumen I would go do something else.
After all, how many CEOs in corporate America have engineering and/or scientific degress?
Point made.
-M
I lived in Seattle for six years. Tried to get into Amazon more out of desperation than anything else when the dot com implosion occurred. Still I knew back then they were LINUX and *NIX is primarily the platform I like to do my work.
But based on things I've heard, it's probably best I did not get hired.
Living in Boston,
Betelgeuse
Then start sending resumes out.
I don't buy either of these premises:
1) That assembly has major relevance today
2) The best implementations are written by those who've mastered assembly language
On point #2, "best" is very subjective and subject to interpretation. Does this mean, minimum # of defects per X lines of code? Extensibility?
As someone who learned assembly in the early 80's (when I got started on 8 bit microcomputers) I don't see much relevance for intimately assembly language today.
It would be like me arguing that I should learn the power industry since one day I might need to build my own generators to run equipment.
At some point we have to resist the urge to think we can "know it all" and simply stand on the shoulders of others.
While learning assembly is fun, after 10+ years of being a software professional, it would be nice if people know f*cking high level languages. Back in '99 when I was with an Internet company and we were interviewing for "software engineers" I was amazed at how many people claimed they knew C and could not write a f*cking strcpy routine. I didn't care about the prototype (ANSI or not) I just want to see code that did this:
while (*dest++ = *src++);
Sure that's the super compact one line version with no C prototype but the prototype is NOT what I was interested in, e.g., "What's the ANSI C prototype for strcpy?" I simply wanted to see if a person knew C... and if you do not know basic pointers, you don't know C.
As it turned out, not one person I asked this question answered it. In fact, an amazing number of people made no attempt at it. I guess the Internet boom created lots of a people who saw dollar signs and were applying for jobs way out of their league.
That's C mind you. When you look at the fact that C++ was crazily popular I can add to my anecdotes. I used to inteview people on C++ and I often asked people to rate their C++ skills. I gave them a scale and qualified 7 through 10. Mind you the scale was arbitrary but the point was to clue people in as to what my expectation of a 7 might be. One of the points I would make about a 7 (out of 10) is "You should be able to tell me off the top of your head why you would want to write a copy constructor." An amazing number of people would rate themselves 7 or higher. Want to take a stab at what the first question I asked was? Yes, "When would you want to write a copy constructor?" And like strcpy in C, most "C++ developers" seemed to be clueless on just that one question.
Thinking in assembly language is not something that happens overnight but once you do you definitely have an understanding that few people have. Problem is, the applicability of this skillset for most "developers" is incredibly niche. Unless you're writing a compiler, debugger, writing firmware directed at embedded systems or reverse engineering some piece of code (regardless of the source media), assembly is pretty much irrelevant given the rich number of abstractions the software development community has created.
Some of it you can attribute to open source some of it is purely Moore's Law (computing doubles every 18 months). Today we don't think twice about having a virtual machine on top of our "real computer" running our code but back in the 80's, forget it, the IBM PC was running at a mere 4.77 MHz and the performance of Pascal code compiled with Borland's Turbo Pascal completely blew away performance coming from byte code Pascal compilers employing the University of California San Diego's P-Code system.
If you've entered computing in just the last ten years it's hard to appreciate all this but back then it made all the difference in the world.
However, today we are not obsessed with CPU performance since performance gains coming from CPU speed increases have become minor with respect to the applications most people use, e.g., Intel has decided to stop using "GHz" to rate its processors. Besides, anyone who understands computer architecture clearly knew it was Intel's way of
In the past a game was considered a "hit" in PC gaming if it sells 100,000 units... whereas a hit on a game console is more like 2,000,000 units.
If you're a business person, which would you opt for?
Sure business people may not be developing games directly but they're the financiers and like it or not, the people with money have LOTS of say in this whole process.
C'est la vie.