I'm itching to get back in now... There's excitement, and then there's compulsion.
conditions will be very favorable shortly. So you tell yourself.
I've lost my shirt in the markets already . And should have perhaps learned your lesson. Admission of a problem...
most investors/traders loose their shirts at least once before striking it rich...and justification of why it's not really a problem.
I'm now ready for better returns. Expectation of a better future with no reason. Isn't that one of the layman's definitions of insanity, repeating the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result?
Dude? Seriously. How about a nice savings account? maybe some cd's, short term bond funds?
How's your credit card debt?
No wonder they don't listen to us. Do you think that in your rush to exercise your right to complain you could possibly have paid some attention to your grammar and spelling?
...from its web site, not it's.
..and it in by no means... I assume you meant either "it by no means" or "it in no way".
trade marks....one word.
sillyness? silliness.
Those are just the obvious ones. This isn't a spelling flame, this is a "have some pride in yourself when you open your mouth" flame. If you want people to take the voice of the internet seriously you should start by taking yourself seriously and not just banging out a stream of consciousness when you're pissed off that you don't even bother to run through spell check.
I suspect that your letter will go ignored, as well it should.
Pay off your credit card debt first. Seriously. There's no such thing as "money in savings" if you're paying 12% or more on credit card debt.
Are you saving for something in the 5yr horizon (i.e. down payment on house)? If so, money goes right to money market. Nothing risky.
So many people ask for advice that goes like this, "I want to buy a house in 3 years, so how do I invest my money now to maximize my profit and minimize my risk?" Answer, you don't. You put it in a nice safe money market and get the best you can out of it.
How's your emergency fund? Set aside a hunk of cash (estimates range from 3-6 months living expenses) and don't touch. Especially in this market. I felt stupid and too conservative for a long time doing that. Now I'm living off mine.
Index funds are always a good start. Historically they are always going to go up (yes, even from where they are now).
Magic words: automatic investment plan. The best thing you can do with your money is to invest small *now* and automatically invest a constant amount in the future, such as $100/month. This is called "dollar cost averaging" and is about a zillion times more valuable than just taking $5000 and throwing it into a single fund or stock all at once.
Stocks are fun if you have a strong heart. Something a little less rollercoastery is mutual funds. Go to Morningstar and work with their risk assessment tools to decide what you might want to invest in.
While you're looking at mutual funds, think about throwing some money in to a Roth IRA for retiremnet. It's a great vehicle where the profits grow tax free. I know that the younger you are the less likely you are to care about retirement, but now is the best time to get the money in there, it has more years to grow.
Much of that advice comes from "The Wealthy Barber". But most of it is standard stuff that any Finance 101 course will teach you.
You misunderstood my point. If you have a human expressing a problem to a computer in an elegant, concise and clear manner, you are in the "user" space and therefore I recommend natural language, as you do. But you have alreayd implied in your example that the human is speaking with a general problem solver. What I meant when I said "to make a computer work its best" was when you are making new devices to do entirely new domains of things.
As a simpler example, take a chess playing machine. AS the user, you *could* say things like "E4" or "Nxg". But you'd prefer to just move the pieces and let the computer understand that. Now imagine that you are building a chess playing computer from scratch. Do you plan to sit down and tell it "Ok, what you want to do, see, is try to control the center squares. Make sure that you don't leave your knights on the outer rim for too long. Castle soon, but otherwise try not to move your king until you have to. Watch out for back rank mate....." See my point? In that case you need to develop a language more suited to explaining chess.
Natural language is far too ambiguous, IMHO, and requires a lifetime's worth of context to be practical.
I think part of the bad rep that natural language gets is that people seem to not be satisfied until they find something that the computer can't handle, and then say "See??" I wrote a production-level (i.e. real people used it) natural language search engine. Got about 10,000 sample inputs to play with. Know what I found, that people often forget? You don't want to have a conversation with the computer. Almost every command issued fell into one of the following categories:
Just a list of keywords. We'll assume that these people had no patience for natural language.
Commands, ala "Show me my holdings." Fair enough, and very similar to many programming languages in its imperative nature. A command, some parameters, and some noise. These are your best input because people understand the system and are trying to work within it to find the compromise. In other words, the noise. You could have said "display holdings", but it is more comfortable (particularly when speaking) to say "show me my holdings" or "what is my balance".
Statements. These were the most interesting. Somebody might type in "I am 69 and almost ready to start taking my IRA distributions." This is good for profile updating on the person, but there's no real request there, so it's sort of in the computer's court how to handle it.
Life story people. These are the ones that really *do* want to have a conversation with the computer. Normally this takes the form of a small paragraph in which 50% of the words are misspelled. They're fun.:)
In short, I don't think you'd ever tell a computer "Get me that thing I need for that meeting on that day" unless you knew that it wouldn't work and you were only trying to prove a point. Something very similar, like "Computer, do I have everything I need for the big meeting?" could be parsed just fine, if we assume that there is some way for the computer to determine relative importance of your meetings (such as who it is with, subject, and so on) and generate a todo list that includes things to bring.
By really bizarre coincidence just this morning I read "The Electric Ant", by Philip K. Dick. In it, a business executive discovers that he is actually a robot. Now aware of this fact he goes about attempting to fiddle with his own programming in an attempt to "unprogram" himself, thus freeing him from his perceived lack of free will. Interesting story.
I think that the question of whether natural language is the "way to go" misses out an important distinction. There will always be users of technology, and creators of new technology, and they must speak different languages. I do not need the same skills to drive a car as I do to build an engine. Being able to type does not make me a novelist. There are two different cultures at work.
Having said that, I expect that the user language should certainly be natural language -- the "computers should understand people talk, not the other way around" argument. People know what they want out of their machines, for the most part. Whether it is "change my background to blue and put up a new picture of the baby" or "Find me a combination of variables that will result in the company not failing with a probability of greater than 90%", people want to do lots of things. They just need a way to say it. Pretty much every Star Trek reference you'll ever see that involves somebody talking to the computer is an input/output problem, NOT the creation of a new technology.
It's when you build something entirely new that you need a new, efficient way to say it. Anybody remember APL? Fascinating language, particularly in that it used symbols rather than words to get its ideas across (those ideas primarily being focused on matrix manipulation, if I recall). Very hard for people to communicate about APL because you can't speak it. But the fact is that for what it did, it was a very good language. And I think that will always hold true. In order to make a computer work at its best, speak to it in a language it understands. When you are building a new device, very frequently you should go ahead and create a new language.
I know that's a scary word because it sounds like "self-aware". But I expect that in 100 years one of the inherent aspects of any computer language will be in detecting and working with other devices in a robust manner. In other words, being aware of what is around the programmed device. Not requiring a mandatory connection of type X. Instead I'm thinking about a device that can run just fine by itself, and then if another device of the same sort happens to come within 10 feet, then maybe they automatically attempt some sort of handshake (with encryption up the wazoo, of course) and then have the option of communicating. This would be useful for automatic transmittal of business cards, appointment schedules, and so on. Or it could be more of a client/server thing, where devices that do not have the power to get a certain job done will just naturally plug into "the grid" and request more power. The device won't have to deal with where the computing power comes from or how it is distributed.
Imagine cars that, before changing lanes, signal to the surrounding cars' navigation systems and they work out for themselves how to let the car into the lane. A computer can be told to slow down, rather than speed up, when someone wants to change lanes. Or detectors in the dotted yellow lines that sense when you changed lanes without signalling, and alert the traffic authority to bump your points (ala Fifth Element).
I always liked the idea of my PDA phonebook being more of a recently-used cache of numbers instead of a local store. I just punch up a number. If it's one of my commonly used ones, it comes right up (and dials, of course). But if it's not, then my PDA connects to the phone company, gets the information (and probably pays the phone company a micropayment for the service) and now I have that number locally on my PDA until it gets scrolled off if it's not used much.
Also I expect lots of pseudo-intelligent content filtering software. You'll get 1000 emails a day and your spam filter will not only remove 99% of them, but it will also identify and prioritize the remaining ones. In order for this to be useful there needs to be languages that deal with expression of rules and logic in a meaningful way (far more than just and or not). No one 100 years from now will say "if subject ~=/*mom*/" (or however the hell you say it), they will expect to say "Give email from mom a higher priority", or sometihng very close.
Once upon a time computers were thought to be really fancy calculators.
Then people started thinking about them as fancy typewriters.
Then, databases. I remember working at a retail computer store in the late 80's and actually using the "mom can store her recipes" argument.
Somewhere in there they were seen as having the potential to be generic problem solvers. But I think that view was only ever held by developers, not users.
I think kids see the computer as a communication device. IM is the world to lots of them.
I, like many Slashdotters, saw my first computer at the age of about 10 where if you wanted a new video game you learned assembly language and wrote your own. I spend the next 20 years listening to people say things like "Oh, my 2yr old is into the computer just like you were!" Yeah, sure. The 2yr old likes to wiggle the mouse, I was hacking 6809 assembly. That's the same thing. But kids now have simply learned to see the computer for its communication ability, and don't necessarily care to see it as a machine that can be turned into new things. Sure, they like to personalize the hell out of it. Skinning your programs, generating new icons, that's all the rage. But the percentage of 10yr olds that are out there thinking about new IM programs to write is probably about the same as its always been. I've always been a firm believer that hackers are born, not made, a kid who is destined to hack will show an intuition for it from the minute she sits down at the keyboard, and a kid who isn't will be bored and distracted in programming classes.
I had a box of Wheat Thins. Silly us arrived at the hospital at noon, having skipped lunch. I asked the nurse if Kerry, who was starving (and now on IV drugs) could have some crackers, she said "Are you nuts? Do you want the anesthesiologist to yell at all of us?"
Our first child, Katherine, was born just about 9 months ago. Here's my thoughts, in no special order:
Get her honest opinion on her career versus raising a child. Does she want to go back to work eventually? Fulltime? My wife is a physical therapist who very clearly wants to be a fulltime mom, but not give up on her career. So she works 1 weekend a month.
Financially speaking, are you where you need to be if she wants to stop working? Personally I'm dead set against families that just plain can't afford a child but decide to have one anyway. Not a big fan of dropping a 1month old in daycare 5 days a week. People do it, sure. But when we bought our house last year I made it a point to do all the finances on the assumption that there would only be my salary, not hers, so that we have the option of letting her be the mom she wants to be.
Insurance. Decide up front whose insurance the baby will be on, since by default the hospital will put the baby on mom's. But since my wife was quitting and thus would not have insurance (well, not as a part timer) then I needed to put them both on mine. The ensuing confusion (since we both had the smae company, just different accounts) lasted months.
Babies do not always come on time, so get things ready at least a month ahead of time.
Your wife will "nest" whether she acknowledges it or not. That's scientific talk for "Oh my god we have to paint this room pink RIGHT NOW" when she's only 5 months along. Go with it. Buy the furniture. Then realize that most people have the baby sleep in the same room as the parents for the firsts 6 months anyway.
If you have any fear of dropping the baby or otherwise not holding her properly, forget it. Instinct kicks in and you'll do just fine.
Come labor and delivery, your job is to do what your wife says. If she wants mom and dad there, fine. If she doesn't, then no matter what mom and dad say, take a stand and kick them out. Same with visitors. After the baby is born people will want to come see. If your wife is tired, or breastfeeding, or whatever, by all means scoot the visitors out firmly. She should NOT feel uncomfortable or otherwise upset by anybody, not after what she's just gone through.
Recording things is cool. Personally I kept a paper diary of every day of her pregnancy from the day she told me to the birth. Went home, printed and bound it (with newborn pictures) and gave it to her as a present. I have no opinion on the couple who recently broadcast the entire delivery on their weblog. Not a big fan of recording the actual birth.
Pack *your* bag for the hospital. They will give your wife most of what she needs (in terms of food and clothing), but not you. You may be there the better part of the week.
Speaking of which, discuss the plans for immediately after the baby is born. Will you be by her side 24hrs a day? Because odds are that you want to get the house ready for her (not to mention the impending flood of visitors). Also, you probably have limited paternity leave that you might be better off using up once you get home. My wife's mother was with her every day in the hospital, which gave me a chance to go home, get the mail and newspapers, shower, and make sure that the air conditioning contractor hadn't stolen the jewelry.
If somebody suggests sometihng that sounds like a silly idea to you, skip it. One we heard was "Bring scented oils to get rid of the hospital smell, a bathing suit for dad in case mom wants to go in the shower while in labor, and your favorite CDs to listen to." We used none of that. Some people might like it, though -- thus, to them, it doesn't sound silly.
Do not research yourself silly, you'll only get an ulcer out of it. The doctors will probably tell you many things that *could* happen, which your brain will hear as "will" happen, and therefore you brace yourself for the worst. If it is something to worry about, they will tell you. Ask. I remember when my wife was a
I know that the value of printed texts, to me, decreased when we started including CDs with every book (or downloads for every magazine). Why? Because when all you're doing is running somebody else's code, usually without even looking at the source, you never get a chance to internalize it. You never have to say "What's this and why does it do that?" other than to answer "Because that's what the author chose to do and it's supposed to work like that." Back in the old days when you actually had to type code in, every line of the source went from print to eyes to brain to fingers. So whether you knew it or not you got a flow for what was going on. And you saw parts that interested you that you could come back to.
These days code is so big that this is unfeasible. So it seems like Fowler has chosen an interesting strategy -- give you most of it. That way you still have to get into the editor and experience the source, but you don't have to spend days in order to do it. Nice. Learn by doing at its finest.
I like OpenOffice. I use it on the primary Win box at home and the linux laptop. But dear God I must have offended some deity because not only will it only run as root for me (on Linux, obviously) but the thing takes several minutes to boot up, if I'm lucky! Sometimes it just complains about missing some printer related binaries (that I can't ever find to get installed) and crashes completely. Once up, though, it stays up, so that's a goodness.
Nice. Last year's challenge was to build a "wizard" that would find and shoot other wizards with spells. Very similar to the zillion C-Robots type games that are out there these days from the looks of it. Just with a bit more flavor.
If I'm reading the rules correctly, you can rapidly test your creation by constantly dropping it into a private snapshot world and seeing how it does. XP anybody?
I so want to play with this. Obligatory geek comment: What would be cool is to put all the brains into some sort of externally defined data file and then run it as a genetic algorithm. Whenever there are two wizards left use them to populate the next round. See how many generations it takes before you've got an MCP.
Pretty much sum up a huge portion of the slashdot audience, I think. I consider myself a good programmer who loves a challenge and wants to stay technical. Therefore I should look for technologies that will not be outsourced, teach myself those technologies via open source, and write articles / speak/ otherwise become recognized expert in that area.
In general I think the first half of the presentation just says why things are bad and why stuff like "rely on government to fix the h1 problem" won't work, so it's only really the second half that has the advice.
I think it's a little ambiguous that in the beginning it says the half life for typical technology is 7-2.5 years, but in the end suggests planning for the future 5-10 years out. That's pretty hard.
Or that specific skills, like "I'm a java programmer", are bad. Sure, all programmers *want* to use the line "A good programmer can pick up any language easily" but in THIS job market? Are ya kidding? Sure, 3 years ago we were desperate enough that we took C++ or Smalltalk people when we wanted Java. But in today's market do I really expect that people who want C# are going to take me the Java geek and say "Oh, sure, he can pick up C# no sweat?" When there are 500 other guys applying for the same job that already have C# and couldn't hack Java to save their lives?
I'd like to recommend the "write articles" approach, by the way. Quite a fun way to learn a new technology when you don't have a boss who is making you learn it but still need the motivation. The two problems are that a) there are so many people doing this that many magazines don't pay $$ anymore, just "recognition", and b) I've had recruiters chop the "Publications" section out of my resume because they claim that it's never the thing that gets you the interview (although you can certainly talk about it once you do get the interview).
Lastly, sometimes bad things happen to companies and a whole geographic region goes away. Don't blame yourself. My boss once told me that I was part of his baseline for the team and I was leaving that meant the team was gone. Well, the team is being dissolved, therefore I'm gone. But I can't have any hard feelings or say "Damnit I wish I'd learned technology X." I can only look forward toward my next job, whatever it may be.
In college I was heavily involved in a program known as "Science through Society Technology Studies." Basically the premise was that you could teach science better by putting it into social context that kids could understand. Examples of curricula developed while I was there included:
Acid rain, where kids looked at what acid rain was as well as what sort of industrial polution could cause it (complete with field work of testing the rain that fell in their own neighborhood)
Dead Fish, where statistics were taught by doing a computer simulation that involved determining the amount of dead fish in the local lake due to pollution. Kids of course love this one due to the gross factor.
One about having a nuclear reactor in your backyard, but I can't really remember the context.
Another outstanding textbook was "From Gaia to Selfish Genes", by I think Lynn Margulis. This was a collection of short essays on various biology topics, all highly radical, that was given to a "weed out" biology course for majors in college. THe results of the study I saw were interesting -- the non majors loved it because it was more interesting that the traditional approach, and all the majors hated it because they basically said "Just teach us what you're supposed to teach us so we can get the degree, don't screw with tradition."
Lastly, a great module was done where a teacher doing a unit on evolution began teaching that the dinosaurs were wiped out by space aliens. The program was complete with a staged firing of the teacher who was warned not to teach that. Afterward the class held a mock trial where they decided her fate.
When the first story came out I suggested a "new type of game" that "follows me around". Another recent story on Slashdot informs me that those are called "Alternate Reality" games. You know, the kind that email you with clues or have AIs call you on your cell phone.
Make one of those, please. The dependence on the 3D card of the user will be minimal. The influence of Linux will be huge. It'll be a new new thing, not a copy of the old new thing. It'll be a challenge.
I do *not* write "proggies". Nor do I give out my email "addy".
I am a grown adult, you see. I am capable of speaking in complete words.
Duane
"The kids today used to say stuff like hizzook when they meant hook, like "off the hizzook". Now they just say 'hizzle'. It's as if, having added a syllable to the word, they're now too ignorant and lazy to bother finishing the damned thing."
Smart cards are at least partly failing to catch on because of what I call "the wallet problem". Fine, you have a cash card for the subway. and one for the parking lot. And one for the office cafeteria. And the mall. Pretty soon you have a wallet of nothing but cash cards, each carrying $20 here or $50 there and none of them interchangeable.
Visa and MC work because there's a single standard with multiple providers. Everybody takes Visa, nobody says "Oh, whoa, hey, we don't take the GM Visa, we only take the Wachovia Visa." So there's a massive hurdle to overcome for cash cards to really catch on. You want to make a generic cash card that people can use anywhere. But if you do that, then naturally you will want to fill it with more cash...which, in turn, makes it more risky to lose it, which makes less people want to sponsor them. Note that I don't say "to use them", because I think that people would put $100+ on a cash card and want to use it to go shopping (think of the new "gift cards" that people get for the mall). I said sponsor because once you get beyond a certain amount, if somebody loses it, they're gonna scream and say "I don't care about your policy, I demand you get me my money back."
Know what I mean? What's a good solution that that problem? I suppose the solution is for Visa to sponsor a cash card, which seems like it would be very similar to the whole "debit card" concept that caught on very rapidly once the banks were able to say "Use your checking account money just like Visa."
Well I've gotta go back a few years...
on
Good Job Experiences?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
During my first 6 months at the job I've now been at for five years, a meeting came around. My boss asked me if my demo was ready. I said no. He went off to the meeting. During his meeting I got my bug worked out, and my demo was ready. I was so excited that I wandered up to his meeting hoping to signal him. I even wrote a note saying "demo works" and slipped it to him. He said aloud, "Your demo works? I guess we're having a demo." I was invited in to the metting (of primarily marketing vp's) to run my demo. When I was done the head of marketing said "I think Duane deserves a round of applause for being the only person to actually bring something working to the meeting today." And I got an ovation.
As I was leaving I heard my boss say to the marketing guy, "I've seen the full demo...this is gonna be alot cooler than we thought it could." That made me all proud.
:) All people in this story have long ago left the company.
We could even make stuff up, like, "Reportedly Douglas Adams was enjoying a tuna sandwich with pickles when the idea for 'So Long and thanks for all the Fish' struck him."
Major time waster and brain filler : Turn on the tv. Find movie. Look movie up. Read Trivia, Goofs, Memorable Quotes, Alternate Versions, and Movie Connections in that order. On Movie Connections, click another movie that looks interesting. Repeat. My wife wonders why I'm always saying I'm going to go pick up my office but it takes days.
Obviously, if you're a Java web programmer who substantially contributed to Jakarta Struts and you're interviewing for a job that asks for Struts experience, then yeah, you want to highlight that in a big way.
After that, though, do try to keep in mind that anybody can start any kind of open source project at any time, so you need to ask yourself how you're going to appear to your potential boss. Really now, are all your projects serious efforts that could be career-level if somebody would just pay you? Or are some of them more like hobbies? Don't just say to yourself, "Hey, I want credit for everything I can get credit for", and don't just say "Am I proud of these things?" Ask, "Is my potential employer going to be blown away by this stuff, and see the obvious connection to the job I'm trying to get?"
Nobody out there is going to say "all open source good. You do open source? You good." The people out there that "get" open source in the biz world also get that for every killer project like an apache, tomcat, ant, sendmail, etc... there are a million others that are really just glory grabs or some kiddie someplace that said "Dood I have an idea and want to be the first one to say that so i get all the credit...I just don't want to do any of the work...."
See what I'm saying? I don't know anything about your projects, so I'm not trying to put them into either category. Just suggesting that you take a serious look at them and ask if your potential employers are really going to care.
Slashdot Mirror
But they're coming Memorial Day weekend, and I will be out of town. That's just wrong. :(
- I'm itching to get back in now... There's excitement, and then there's compulsion.
- conditions will be very favorable shortly. So you tell yourself.
- I've lost my shirt in the markets already . And should have perhaps learned your lesson. Admission of a problem...
- most investors/traders loose their shirts at least once before striking it rich...and justification of why it's not really a problem.
- I'm now ready for better returns. Expectation of a better future with no reason. Isn't that one of the layman's definitions of insanity, repeating the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result?
Dude? Seriously. How about a nice savings account? maybe some cd's, short term bond funds? How's your credit card debt?- ...from its web site, not it's.
- ..and it in by no means... I assume you meant either "it by no means" or "it in no way".
- trade marks....one word.
- sillyness? silliness.
Those are just the obvious ones. This isn't a spelling flame, this is a "have some pride in yourself when you open your mouth" flame. If you want people to take the voice of the internet seriously you should start by taking yourself seriously and not just banging out a stream of consciousness when you're pissed off that you don't even bother to run through spell check.I suspect that your letter will go ignored, as well it should.
- Pay off your credit card debt first. Seriously. There's no such thing as "money in savings" if you're paying 12% or more on credit card debt.
- Are you saving for something in the 5yr horizon (i.e. down payment on house)? If so, money goes right to money market. Nothing risky.
So many people ask for advice that goes like this, "I want to buy a house in 3 years, so how do I invest my money now to maximize my profit and minimize my risk?" Answer, you don't. You put it in a nice safe money market and get the best you can out of it.
- How's your emergency fund? Set aside a hunk of cash (estimates range from 3-6 months living expenses) and don't touch. Especially in this market. I felt stupid and too conservative for a long time doing that. Now I'm living off mine.
- Index funds are always a good start. Historically they are always going to go up (yes, even from where they are now).
- Magic words: automatic investment plan. The best thing you can do with your money is to invest small *now* and automatically invest a constant amount in the future, such as $100/month. This is called "dollar cost averaging" and is about a zillion times more valuable than just taking $5000 and throwing it into a single fund or stock all at once.
- Stocks are fun if you have a strong heart. Something a little less rollercoastery is mutual funds. Go to Morningstar and work with their risk assessment tools to decide what you might want to invest in.
- While you're looking at mutual funds, think about throwing some money in to a Roth IRA for retiremnet. It's a great vehicle where the profits grow tax free. I know that the younger you are the less likely you are to care about retirement, but now is the best time to get the money in there, it has more years to grow.
Much of that advice comes from "The Wealthy Barber". But most of it is standard stuff that any Finance 101 course will teach you.As a simpler example, take a chess playing machine. AS the user, you *could* say things like "E4" or "Nxg". But you'd prefer to just move the pieces and let the computer understand that. Now imagine that you are building a chess playing computer from scratch. Do you plan to sit down and tell it "Ok, what you want to do, see, is try to control the center squares. Make sure that you don't leave your knights on the outer rim for too long. Castle soon, but otherwise try not to move your king until you have to. Watch out for back rank mate....." See my point? In that case you need to develop a language more suited to explaining chess.
I think part of the bad rep that natural language gets is that people seem to not be satisfied until they find something that the computer can't handle, and then say "See??" I wrote a production-level (i.e. real people used it) natural language search engine. Got about 10,000 sample inputs to play with. Know what I found, that people often forget? You don't want to have a conversation with the computer. Almost every command issued fell into one of the following categories:
In short, I don't think you'd ever tell a computer "Get me that thing I need for that meeting on that day" unless you knew that it wouldn't work and you were only trying to prove a point. Something very similar, like "Computer, do I have everything I need for the big meeting?" could be parsed just fine, if we assume that there is some way for the computer to determine relative importance of your meetings (such as who it is with, subject, and so on) and generate a todo list that includes things to bring.
By really bizarre coincidence just this morning I read "The Electric Ant", by Philip K. Dick. In it, a business executive discovers that he is actually a robot. Now aware of this fact he goes about attempting to fiddle with his own programming in an attempt to "unprogram" himself, thus freeing him from his perceived lack of free will. Interesting story.
Having said that, I expect that the user language should certainly be natural language -- the "computers should understand people talk, not the other way around" argument. People know what they want out of their machines, for the most part. Whether it is "change my background to blue and put up a new picture of the baby" or "Find me a combination of variables that will result in the company not failing with a probability of greater than 90%", people want to do lots of things. They just need a way to say it. Pretty much every Star Trek reference you'll ever see that involves somebody talking to the computer is an input/output problem, NOT the creation of a new technology.
It's when you build something entirely new that you need a new, efficient way to say it. Anybody remember APL? Fascinating language, particularly in that it used symbols rather than words to get its ideas across (those ideas primarily being focused on matrix manipulation, if I recall). Very hard for people to communicate about APL because you can't speak it. But the fact is that for what it did, it was a very good language. And I think that will always hold true. In order to make a computer work at its best, speak to it in a language it understands. When you are building a new device, very frequently you should go ahead and create a new language.
Imagine cars that, before changing lanes, signal to the surrounding cars' navigation systems and they work out for themselves how to let the car into the lane. A computer can be told to slow down, rather than speed up, when someone wants to change lanes. Or detectors in the dotted yellow lines that sense when you changed lanes without signalling, and alert the traffic authority to bump your points (ala Fifth Element).
I always liked the idea of my PDA phonebook being more of a recently-used cache of numbers instead of a local store. I just punch up a number. If it's one of my commonly used ones, it comes right up (and dials, of course). But if it's not, then my PDA connects to the phone company, gets the information (and probably pays the phone company a micropayment for the service) and now I have that number locally on my PDA until it gets scrolled off if it's not used much.
Also I expect lots of pseudo-intelligent content filtering software. You'll get 1000 emails a day and your spam filter will not only remove 99% of them, but it will also identify and prioritize the remaining ones. In order for this to be useful there needs to be languages that deal with expression of rules and logic in a meaningful way (far more than just and or not). No one 100 years from now will say "if subject ~= /*mom*/" (or however the hell you say it), they will expect to say "Give email from mom a higher priority", or sometihng very close.
Then people started thinking about them as fancy typewriters.
Then, databases. I remember working at a retail computer store in the late 80's and actually using the "mom can store her recipes" argument.
Somewhere in there they were seen as having the potential to be generic problem solvers. But I think that view was only ever held by developers, not users.
I think kids see the computer as a communication device. IM is the world to lots of them.
I, like many Slashdotters, saw my first computer at the age of about 10 where if you wanted a new video game you learned assembly language and wrote your own. I spend the next 20 years listening to people say things like "Oh, my 2yr old is into the computer just like you were!" Yeah, sure. The 2yr old likes to wiggle the mouse, I was hacking 6809 assembly. That's the same thing. But kids now have simply learned to see the computer for its communication ability, and don't necessarily care to see it as a machine that can be turned into new things. Sure, they like to personalize the hell out of it. Skinning your programs, generating new icons, that's all the rage. But the percentage of 10yr olds that are out there thinking about new IM programs to write is probably about the same as its always been. I've always been a firm believer that hackers are born, not made, a kid who is destined to hack will show an intuition for it from the minute she sits down at the keyboard, and a kid who isn't will be bored and distracted in programming classes.
I had a box of Wheat Thins. Silly us arrived at the hospital at noon, having skipped lunch. I asked the nurse if Kerry, who was starving (and now on IV drugs) could have some crackers, she said "Are you nuts? Do you want the anesthesiologist to yell at all of us?"
These days code is so big that this is unfeasible. So it seems like Fowler has chosen an interesting strategy -- give you most of it. That way you still have to get into the editor and experience the source, but you don't have to spend days in order to do it. Nice. Learn by doing at its finest.
I like OpenOffice. I use it on the primary Win box at home and the linux laptop. But dear God I must have offended some deity because not only will it only run as root for me (on Linux, obviously) but the thing takes several minutes to boot up, if I'm lucky! Sometimes it just complains about missing some printer related binaries (that I can't ever find to get installed) and crashes completely. Once up, though, it stays up, so that's a goodness.
If I'm reading the rules correctly, you can rapidly test your creation by constantly dropping it into a private snapshot world and seeing how it does. XP anybody?
I so want to play with this. Obligatory geek comment: What would be cool is to put all the brains into some sort of externally defined data file and then run it as a genetic algorithm. Whenever there are two wizards left use them to populate the next round. See how many generations it takes before you've got an MCP.
In general I think the first half of the presentation just says why things are bad and why stuff like "rely on government to fix the h1 problem" won't work, so it's only really the second half that has the advice.
I think it's a little ambiguous that in the beginning it says the half life for typical technology is 7-2.5 years, but in the end suggests planning for the future 5-10 years out. That's pretty hard.
Or that specific skills, like "I'm a java programmer", are bad. Sure, all programmers *want* to use the line "A good programmer can pick up any language easily" but in THIS job market? Are ya kidding? Sure, 3 years ago we were desperate enough that we took C++ or Smalltalk people when we wanted Java. But in today's market do I really expect that people who want C# are going to take me the Java geek and say "Oh, sure, he can pick up C# no sweat?" When there are 500 other guys applying for the same job that already have C# and couldn't hack Java to save their lives?
I'd like to recommend the "write articles" approach, by the way. Quite a fun way to learn a new technology when you don't have a boss who is making you learn it but still need the motivation. The two problems are that a) there are so many people doing this that many magazines don't pay $$ anymore, just "recognition", and b) I've had recruiters chop the "Publications" section out of my resume because they claim that it's never the thing that gets you the interview (although you can certainly talk about it once you do get the interview).
Lastly, sometimes bad things happen to companies and a whole geographic region goes away. Don't blame yourself. My boss once told me that I was part of his baseline for the team and I was leaving that meant the team was gone. Well, the team is being dissolved, therefore I'm gone. But I can't have any hard feelings or say "Damnit I wish I'd learned technology X." I can only look forward toward my next job, whatever it may be.
Another outstanding textbook was "From Gaia to Selfish Genes", by I think Lynn Margulis. This was a collection of short essays on various biology topics, all highly radical, that was given to a "weed out" biology course for majors in college. THe results of the study I saw were interesting -- the non majors loved it because it was more interesting that the traditional approach, and all the majors hated it because they basically said "Just teach us what you're supposed to teach us so we can get the degree, don't screw with tradition."
Lastly, a great module was done where a teacher doing a unit on evolution began teaching that the dinosaurs were wiped out by space aliens. The program was complete with a staged firing of the teacher who was warned not to teach that. Afterward the class held a mock trial where they decided her fate.
Make one of those, please. The dependence on the 3D card of the user will be minimal. The influence of Linux will be huge. It'll be a new new thing, not a copy of the old new thing. It'll be a challenge.
Christopher Reeve walked in that commercial.
Sounds like CGI time to me. That is, where a regular stuntman won't serve the same purpose.
I am a grown adult, you see. I am capable of speaking in complete words.
Duane
"The kids today used to say stuff like hizzook when they meant hook, like "off the hizzook". Now they just say 'hizzle'. It's as if, having added a syllable to the word, they're now too ignorant and lazy to bother finishing the damned thing."
Visa and MC work because there's a single standard with multiple providers. Everybody takes Visa, nobody says "Oh, whoa, hey, we don't take the GM Visa, we only take the Wachovia Visa." So there's a massive hurdle to overcome for cash cards to really catch on. You want to make a generic cash card that people can use anywhere. But if you do that, then naturally you will want to fill it with more cash...which, in turn, makes it more risky to lose it, which makes less people want to sponsor them. Note that I don't say "to use them", because I think that people would put $100+ on a cash card and want to use it to go shopping (think of the new "gift cards" that people get for the mall). I said sponsor because once you get beyond a certain amount, if somebody loses it, they're gonna scream and say "I don't care about your policy, I demand you get me my money back."
Know what I mean? What's a good solution that that problem? I suppose the solution is for Visa to sponsor a cash card, which seems like it would be very similar to the whole "debit card" concept that caught on very rapidly once the banks were able to say "Use your checking account money just like Visa."
As I was leaving I heard my boss say to the marketing guy, "I've seen the full demo...this is gonna be alot cooler than we thought it could." That made me all proud.
:) All people in this story have long ago left the company.
We could even make stuff up, like, "Reportedly Douglas Adams was enjoying a tuna sandwich with pickles when the idea for 'So Long and thanks for all the Fish' struck him."
Major time waster and brain filler : Turn on the tv. Find movie. Look movie up. Read Trivia, Goofs, Memorable Quotes, Alternate Versions, and Movie Connections in that order. On Movie Connections, click another movie that looks interesting. Repeat. My wife wonders why I'm always saying I'm going to go pick up my office but it takes days.
Mike Tyson just destroyed Clifford "Black Rhino" Etienne about a week ago, ya see.)
"I got nothin against Linux....but I'm definitely gonna make orphans of its child processes."
After that, though, do try to keep in mind that anybody can start any kind of open source project at any time, so you need to ask yourself how you're going to appear to your potential boss. Really now, are all your projects serious efforts that could be career-level if somebody would just pay you? Or are some of them more like hobbies? Don't just say to yourself, "Hey, I want credit for everything I can get credit for", and don't just say "Am I proud of these things?" Ask, "Is my potential employer going to be blown away by this stuff, and see the obvious connection to the job I'm trying to get?"
Nobody out there is going to say "all open source good. You do open source? You good." The people out there that "get" open source in the biz world also get that for every killer project like an apache, tomcat, ant, sendmail, etc... there are a million others that are really just glory grabs or some kiddie someplace that said "Dood I have an idea and want to be the first one to say that so i get all the credit...I just don't want to do any of the work...."
See what I'm saying? I don't know anything about your projects, so I'm not trying to put them into either category. Just suggesting that you take a serious look at them and ask if your potential employers are really going to care.