Saying that they "outsourced to IBM" is corporate doublespeak par excellence.
They fired their technical employees and sent their technical employees' jobs to India.
Behavior like this is why people are voting for Trump in large numbers. And also, by the way, why Sanders won my home state of Michigan. People from both the left and the right have lost tolerance for this behavior. No amount of hired thugs will prevent the backlash that is now upon us.
In the United States, many people are accused of crimes and many people are investigated for crimes. In particular, consider the bitter partisanship that we have in 2016 and take that into consideration when thinking about this case.
Now remember innocent until proven guilty.
And consider further the fact that many people that make a plea deal would not have been convicted of any crime. They do so because they're poor, have bad representation, or they made a miscalculation and the prosecution didn't have a solid case against them. Don't consider deals with prosecutors to be evidence of any guilt.
For all anyone knows, she did something wrong, but just because someone is testifying against her, doesn't mean she is guilty of anything.
Economists are prone to say that everything will be exactly like it was, according to an equation they came up which fits all data up to today.
Scientists should avoid this kind of logic, especially when considering extremely broad areas like cosmology and life. Compared to what life is and how the universe works, we're incredibly brilliant about economics. And then we had that unexpected near depression of 2008. In 2016 we have new data and I'm sure that we have a brand new model that incorporates what happened, and the 2008 events make perfect sense retrospectively using that new model.
There are too many holes in what we know to make any kind of conclusion about whether other life exists or has existed. We can't yet make our own life, so the only data we have for what is possible is the tiny subset of life on Earth that just happens to exist right about now. We can glimpse examples of life that have existed but many attributes can only be inferred mathematically (e.g. no DNA). We don't have a detailed catalog of the life that has existed right here on Earth. We don't even know much about the life that exists inside our own bodies, except crude measurements like total mass. To be able to make conclusions about what might be possible for life elsewhere seems rather premature and any model based upon what we know so far is bound to be naive.
This write up is misleading as it is comparing densities from the laboratory of one item to production densities of another item.
Please compare apples to apples. Hard drives are more dense and cheaper than solid state drives, in addition to being far cheaper: Still, and into the forseeable future.
When it comes to USB, test your equipment, even if you haven't upgraded to Type C yet.
I've personally discovered two counterfeit or substandard (depending upon your personal definitions of the terms) USB charging cables.
What I use to test is a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10-inch tablet. This tablet wants approximately 0.7-0.8 amps at 5 volts, but it will charge in a degraded mode if the charging cable isn't up to snuff, or if it's plugged into a desktop or laptop (which normally only supply 0.5 amps).
Every cable should begin by charging in the degraded mode when plugged into my laptop and then upgrade to normal charging mode when plugged into any of my half dozen or so 2 amp USB chargers. Among over a dozen cables, I detected two that were not up to snuff, and you'd be surprised at my results. One cable from the dollar store was garbage, but another, colored cable from the dollar store that had fancy LEDs was fine. Three 10 feet cables were fine. The other reject was an average-looking cable with an average feel. It did not appear to be substandard or counterfeit.
If you want to get fancy you can get a device from banggood.com that measures current and voltage across the USB port. They cost about $3 shipped. That is how I determined that my tablet will draw approximately 0.7-0.8 amps. From that experience I'd be surprised if many devices actually draw a full 2 amps. It's nice to have a 2 amp supply, though, because it gives you a safety factor if your cables are somewhat substandard. Maybe the newest 2016 phones will draw close to 2 amps. Get the meter and find out!
Based upon my experience, the best USB chargers are from Samsung and anything else that has a counterfeit-resistant UL sticker. And also based upon my experience, if you notice that a charging cable is getting warm, you should probably replace it because it's dissipating electricity as heat rather than conducting it.
As a few others have said, Comcast home routers cannot be considered public Wi-Fi hotspots in any way, shape, or form. They're private Wi-Fi hotspots for Comcast residential customers only. If this is what the article says, then the author is misinformed.
Fight every accusation against you in court, however minor. $10 parking ticket? Fight it.
If everyone contested every civil fine, then there wouldn't be civil fines. There aren't enough hours in the day to adjudicate every fine, and courts know it. They expect you to pay it, and they love for you to pay it online.
If you must pay, for example, a $10 parking ticket, go into the office of the entity during business hours and pay with a $100 bill. If the ticket is some amount of money like 55 or 65 dollars, pay in singles. Do not use the Internet, mail, a credit card, or a drop box. Waste the maximum amount of time possible. If you want to speak with the cashier's supervisor, do it. If you got your ticket in a small town, get the mayor on the phone and have a discussion about it, seeing if he can do something to help you.
These are all things that I do, and they work great. When it costs more than a small percentage of $x to collect $x, people have second thoughts. Nobody wants the hassle of having to look a human being in the eyes. It makes people very uncomfortable.
Why do this? Because when you don't show up they hound you to pay them. Turn the tables and annoy the shit out of them instead. They'll get their money eventually, but there is always the chance that they'll make it go away just to make you go away.
The reason why typewriters and computer keyboards are so US centric is that the English-speaking world happened to be at the top of its game when these products were created. First it was Great Britain and its territories and then the United States. The language of computer science is English. Computer scientists use less Latin than any other scientist that I'm aware of. All common programming languages are based upon the language of mathematics, which is Latin with symbols. English is close enough: All common programming languages read left-to-right, top to bottom. All common programming languages are alphabetic and use mainly SVO, subject-verb-object, just like English. The keywords in all common programming languages are English words. The punctuation marks are the same or more similar to English than any other language. You could say that all common programming languages are Latin with symbols, written in English.
This is why it is easier to be a programmer for a native English speaker than for any other person. Everything fits like a glove, because we invented a large portion of this technology, not because we're any better than any other person. (*)
As China rises, we're beginning to see things like electronics data sheets written in Chinese with an English translation as an afterthought. Quite clearly the standard computer keyboard is only natural for English users. It's utterly horrible for the Chinese. Imagine if the keyboard was created in the Far East. Our 26 letter alphabet with no accent marks would be the afterthought. Programming languages might have been mostly symbol-oriented with Chinese symbolic keywords. We might have needed to be fairly good Chinese speakers to be any good at programming. Future technologies could be like this.
Any contact with an alien race would be more of the same. We could have roughly the same technology but vastly different ways of interacting with it, depending upon whatever culture was dominant when it was created.
(*) I'm aware that QWERTY was designed to slow down typists but it's actually extremely well suited to type English. All 26 letters and the common punctuation marks require a single keypress, and they're all right at our fingertips.
I rarely post two responses to the same Slashdot article, but I've read everybody else's responses and nobody has yet mentioned the value of his or her time.
When buying the cheapest product, too many people do not factor in the value of their time.
Let's say that I buy a $10 tool instead of a $50 tool. If the $10 tool breaks, then I will probably waste a minimum of an hour of my time replacing it, not to mention wear and tear on my vehicle. To me an hour of my time is worth more than $40. Saving anything less than $50 on a tool that has the possibility of malfunctioning is a losing proposition.
Get yourself the best tool, and save yourself the grief of wasting your valuable time.
Additionally, nobody has mentioned the value of his or her physical or mental health. When a tool malfunctions, it takes a toll on you. Maybe the tool will only injure you slightly, but was it worth it? Stress hormones in your brain shorten your lifespan, so why make it hard on yourself by making your work more stressful due to malfunctioning tools? We are not machines with replaceable parts. We are fragile humans, physically and mentally.
I would agree that the three standard Harbor Freight torque wrenches compare favorably with the 1990's era Craftsman torque wrench that I paid $90 for. I tested the $10 Harbor Freight tool side by side on my vehicle with the Craftsman tool and they are close enough that it would be hard for me to justify paying 10x times the price. I can also leave the $10 Harbor Fright torque wrench in my vehicle and not have to worry about it getting lost, permanently borrowed, or stolen.
My recommendation is to own one set of quality tools made in the United States. Keep this set where you use tools the most. Also buy a set of cheap backup tools. Keep these tools where you wouldn't commonly use them, but they still might come in handy. For example, at your employer or at your significant other's place.
And every time you shop at Harbor Freight, make sure to get your free flashlight and use your 20% discount coupon. I always carry around a stack of Harbor Freight coupons.
If you look back through the archives, you might be able to find a few of my longer and more detailed responses whenever the subject of nuclear energy arises. I'll restate my conclusions here.
Current nuclear energy production techniques produce new waste products that did not exist before. These products are so deadly that touching them for a reasonable period of time will result in your painful death in a few days to a few months. These waste products are dangerous for timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, give or take one order of magnitude. I'll restrict my analysis to this so-called high-level radioactive waste, not low-level radioactive waste like contaminated equipment and clothing.
The earliest written languages are around 5,000 years old, give or take a thousand years. Nobody except for a handful of people in the world can read those languages. Most humans can only read languages a few hundred years old at most. In the poorest regions of the world in 2016, half of the local population can read no language whatsoever, local or remote, ancient or modern, because they are illiterate.
Regions of the globe that formerly had the leading civilizations can fall on hard times due to overly intensive agriculture, drought, earthquakes, other types of natural disasters, or any number of freak occurrences. North America, over thousands of years, could swap places with sub-Saharan Africa in terms of, most importantly, literacy, scientific and otherwise. There is no guarantee of forward technological progress. Simply look at the Roman Empire and the following Dark Ages. It took civilization until the 20th century to recover most of what was lost.
Let's fast forward 25,000 years. Due to climate change, there is a population of mostly illiterate nomadic herders in North America. Quite by accident, they come across our 2016 state of the art nuclear waste containment facility. Over the years all of the security measures have been destroyed by natural disasters of one kind or another. Amazingly there are still legible signs posted in 100 of the most common languages from 2016 Earth. Since these herders can't read, the signs are quite useless. Even if the locals could read, the signs would take weeks for academics living thousands of miles away to decipher. Being curious and in need of building supplies, these individuals clean out the facility, emptying all high-level waste containers, hoping to find useful materials. Over the next few weeks the material spreads to other local tribes. The advanced civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa are unaware of this until after a few more weeks tens of thousands of people from the primitive tribes of North America start dying from radiation poisoning. All because some pretty ignorant people in 2016 thought that nuclear energy was completely safe.
This is what nuclear energy produces: Ticking, deadly time bombs for future civilizations, with no guaranteed way to warn them of the danger.
AI is [or will be] programmed by human programmers.
At present there are two alarming trends in programming. One, companies are unwilling to pay properly trained Western-educated programmers and are increasingly outsourcing programming to inexperienced programmers in Third World countries. Once these programmers become better at their craft, they demand higher pay and/or move to the West and the companies move to even cheaper countries. Two, despite outsourcing, there are probably not enough competent programmers in the world to fulfill current and future demand, so there will always be many incompetent programmers being utilized, regardless of economics.
While the world's best programmers are true craftsmen, the worst programmers are the ones we have to worry about. Some company looking to save a few dollars will hire a few incompetents and, rather than your word processor crashing causing you to lose a few minutes of work, your AI's built-in curbs will malfunction and it will go rogue. How many programmers in the world today can design a bug-free security sandbox? As AIs become more sophisticated, every programmer will have to be able to do this. AIs have to be contained, yet what intelligent human would willingly consent to being imprisoned? In the battle between an inexperienced programmer from sub-Saharan Africa in 2100 who is the first generation of his tribe to not be a shepherd, and an AI, can you guess who will lose?
Unless we can change the way our field works, we must assume that the worst and least experienced programmers in the world will be working on AI. There is no basic competency required in programming. Companies will simply pay the least amount of money that they can get away with, like they always do. The AI that kills us won't come from research labs at MIT, it will come from the Microsoft outsourcer office in Bhutan.
I'd rather have Apple put a micro SD card slot where the headphone jack is. I'll never buy an Apple smartphone, but Samsung and the other Android device makers have been issuing close copies of Apple products lately in terms of hardware specs.
Wires hanging off of wireless devices for ordinary use cases seems wrong. I'm 100% wireless charging now as well, even though I have an older device without the capability built in.
The only downside of Bluetooth is occasional audio interruptions. I'm not sure why this happens, but I have a feeling it has to do with misbehaving apps eating up too many CPU cycles.
I personally purchased things in the mid-1980's online using Quantum Link, but CompuServe dates back to 1969 so people were obviously making online purchases throughout the 1970's. BBSes were active and often linked together in massive networks from the 1970's through the 1990's. Whether that counts is up for debate.
If you're speaking strictly about the Internet, the Usenet forsale groups have been around for a long time. My first use of the Internet was in 1992 to sell some old computer junk, but Usenet dates back to the 1980's.
It's amazing how ignorant people are of the online world before 1995.
If you're afraid that what you write on Slashdot could jeopardize your job, then I advise you to quit. Specifically, though, we're talking about unionizing. I'll talk with anyone at any company I work for about unionizing, its pluses and minuses. Being a programmer is about intellectual freedom. If you can't speak your mind, then your ability to program the way you should is probably equally constrained.
The chief benefit of a union for a programmer is this. Let's say that you were injured in a car accident and your intellectual abilities have suffered, but they may eventually recover. A union is the type of organization that might go to bat for you. For a man under 35, the biggest risk of substantial injury is in a vehicle accident.
Programmers are supposed to be smart enough to be able to deal with the business side of their careers. But clearly we are NOT. Hence, Google offers to completely take over its employees financial affairs to get them in order. This benefit seems like Big Brother but to me it's actually quite a nice thing that Google is doing. Going to engineering school virtually bankrupted me, and it costs twice as much today.
As a living thing, the most important thing in life is to reproduce. It isn't to worship a deity, or to eat, or to work, or to sleep. More politely, the most important thing for a heterosexual man to do is to meet women. (Substitute all of the pronouns you want for women and for people in the LGBT community.)
For years I tried to convince myself that working on technical projects was the most interesting thing that I could possibly be doing, and I denied my basic biology. By your 30's the defects in our society's social structure become readily apparent. The social norm for nerd behavior does not favor us in any way whatsoever. It distances us from the requirements of our biology. Is it self-imposed? In part, I suppose. For the most part, though, we're brainwashed. Programming is not preferable to having sex. Programming should be something you do after you're exhausted from sex. The value that companies get from the software that we write means that we should be getting paid 10 times what we do at the very least, or work one day a week and spend the rest of our lives doing what we should be doing.
This individual has it completely backwards. His job at Google and money are his god. He is a brainwashed automaton, exactly who Google wants to work for them.
I began programming casually in elementary school on Commodore Pets. I started programming on my own computer in fifth grade on a Commodore 64. Afterwards, I had plenty of short work stints during junior high school, high school, and my 7 years at the university, but I didn't begin programming full time for more than an 8 month period until I was 24. Even then, I was still very green.
The best developers have been at it for 10-20 years at a minimum, and I'd even go as far as to say I prefer programmers who've been at it for 30 years.
What I don't care about is your physical age. If you started programming at five years old, and you kept at it continuously until age 25 then you'd meet my criteria.
Developers are created over many years, they've worked on many generations of technology, and they've proved flexible with time. Many of the good ones have been at it since childhood, but I don't think that should disqualify anyone.
That's why developers need to get paid so much. Training over a decade to achieve basic competence at something is expensive. Many have a very expensive university education they have to repay. For me, I had to forgo my social life pretty significantly from age 15-25, and I'll never get that time back. The only way I can be repaid for that is with money.
If you're trying to shortcut the process somehow by picking up someone who knows nothing about creating software, hope to train him or her in a few years, and expect to pay him or her poorly then you're going to produce some pretty awful software.
Over my 25+ years of programming, being able to estimate my time was the last and hardest thing for me to learn how to do.
No matter how much you've mastered computer science and how many clever encryption algorithms you're capable of writing, estimating how much time your work will take is a completely separate ability having nothing to do with your actual programming and/or mathematical skills.
It is possible for every programmer to learn how to do. It's not something you'll figure out in a week or a year or ten years. I promise you that being able to deliver your software on time, every time, will make you the most beloved programmer at your company.
The key is to, instead of jumping right into the coding, spend several days understanding exactly what work you need to do. Learn to be realistic about your abilities. Learn how to communicate with non-programmers so they understand exactly what they're getting. Keep explaining until it's clear that they understand what you're writing for them, and that's exactly what you're writing for them.
When people throw changes at you, warn them that you'll have to start from scratch with understanding exactly the new work that needs to be done, think about the time those changes will take knowing that you may need to discard work you've already done, and continue to be realistic about your abilities. Make sure you get approval for the revised completion time before starting any work. Do not jump right into coding the changes.
If your employer doesn't allow you do to this, quit and go work somewhere else. There is an oversupply of programming work.
Time estimates are something that all professionals do. When you finish your work on time, you are acting professionally. When you reject estimates you look like a rank amateur and I'd never hire you.
Based upon my three decades of programming experience, programming at rare times may require you to brush up on what you learned in engineering school, but essentially your degree is mostly a worthless piece of paper in terms of career usefulness. I've used much less than 5% of what I learned there, and probably more like less than 1%. My most useful class was software engineering, because it touched on the non-technical aspects of being a programmer.
There are small subsets of programmers that use geometry and calculus, but even if we only remember the basics those types of programmers don't need to worry about nit picky details because we all use libraries. You'd be absolutely foolish to open up a calculus book and write your own library function, unless you're doing something extremely novel. Novel is bad when you are trying to write maintainable code.
What is useful to you as a programmer is to understand what big O notation is. It's advanced math beyond calculus, but it always seemed like common sense to me. If you have to do n^2 operations for every n, that's worse than having to do n operations. In 30 years I've never had to worry about little o or logarithms. Google gets specific in interview questions about all of these notations, but I'm telling you what is actually useful.
What is not useful to you is mastery of the syntactical details of any language. Try to program as if you're writing English. Write software in such a way that you could be doing it in any language. Write software that the next person can read, instantly understand, and begin modifying.
Programming isn't purely doing Google searches. What I spend most of my time on is seeing how the software I'm working on already solves a problem and to use as similar techniques as possible, so that the next person who works on it will encounter consistency. Every change I make I make for a reason, and I understand every change I make well enough to explain it to my mom.
Another way of looking at it is the technical interview is almost completely useless. You can ace a technical interview and write the shittiest code I've ever seen. You can perform average on an interview and write the cleanest code I've ever seen. If anything, detailed technical knowledge should count against you. The next person to maintain your code might not know every trivial little feature of the language you're using and has no admiration for your cleverness.
Write software like Hemingway, not Thomas Hardy, and don't sweat the math.
Hi, MIT guys, formal proofs of filesystems are useless because you cannot incorporate physical systems into formal proofs. Real filesystems exist on real hardware.
I guarantee that your file system will fail if I start ripping cables out. A suitably strong EMP will take it out. In fact, I bet I could nuke your filesystem if I used my ham radio transceiver too close to the device. Other things that would destroy your filesystem include floods, earthquakes, and a lightning strike.
I began writing this by stating that formal proofs of software are useless, but I don't really believe that to be true. I strongly believe that we should strive for software correctness. Any techniques that can we use to make software better are worth pursuing.
But it has to be remembered that software cannot be isolated. When we do develop a true AI, it will escape and destroy us, probably within milliseconds of an unexpected hardware event. No matter how rigorously the beast is programmed!
It's sometimes hard for me to determine whether Firefox is working properly or there is a massive bug. I have a fair number of tabs open, but never more than 20.
My '89 Ford Escort was a lemon. I was the last American car I'll ever buy. In any case, from memory I was able to remove the key with the engine running. One of the many mechanical engineering defects with this vehicle. It was a horrible product.
I see they mentioned User Dictionary right in the article. I consider User Dictionary to be malware.
I have to lock my version of Google+ to the factory version or else User Dictionary gets stuck in such a tight crash-restart loop that it only yields to the GUI for a split second before presenting the crash dialog. It eats all battery capacity in a few hours while the phone is sitting completely idle.
I have no idea what uses User Dictionary, but you certainly cannot disable it. Also, technically speaking, I don't know whether this is a bug in User Dictionary or Google+ but it should be my choice to chuck a useless, possibly not buggy app in favor of the incredibly useful app I happen to use to backup my photos which may or may not have a bug of its own.
No word from Google on the bug/interaction. I've posted about it, Tweeted about it, and my review of Google+ mentions the issue. I don't know what other forums might be of use, but I don't want to waste any more time on it.
P.S. I plan on using my smartphone for 5-6 years, so throwing away my hardware is not an option. I think people who get new smartphones every 2 years are fools (whether you pay for your phone in cash up front or pay via a jacked up phone bill every month you're still paying for something you don't need). My 3-year-old model still works great, aside from software bugs.
Slashdot Mirror
Saying that they "outsourced to IBM" is corporate doublespeak par excellence.
They fired their technical employees and sent their technical employees' jobs to India.
Behavior like this is why people are voting for Trump in large numbers. And also, by the way, why Sanders won my home state of Michigan. People from both the left and the right have lost tolerance for this behavior. No amount of hired thugs will prevent the backlash that is now upon us.
In the United States, many people are accused of crimes and many people are investigated for crimes. In particular, consider the bitter partisanship that we have in 2016 and take that into consideration when thinking about this case.
Now remember innocent until proven guilty.
And consider further the fact that many people that make a plea deal would not have been convicted of any crime. They do so because they're poor, have bad representation, or they made a miscalculation and the prosecution didn't have a solid case against them. Don't consider deals with prosecutors to be evidence of any guilt.
For all anyone knows, she did something wrong, but just because someone is testifying against her, doesn't mean she is guilty of anything.
Economists are prone to say that everything will be exactly like it was, according to an equation they came up which fits all data up to today.
Scientists should avoid this kind of logic, especially when considering extremely broad areas like cosmology and life. Compared to what life is and how the universe works, we're incredibly brilliant about economics. And then we had that unexpected near depression of 2008. In 2016 we have new data and I'm sure that we have a brand new model that incorporates what happened, and the 2008 events make perfect sense retrospectively using that new model.
There are too many holes in what we know to make any kind of conclusion about whether other life exists or has existed. We can't yet make our own life, so the only data we have for what is possible is the tiny subset of life on Earth that just happens to exist right about now. We can glimpse examples of life that have existed but many attributes can only be inferred mathematically (e.g. no DNA). We don't have a detailed catalog of the life that has existed right here on Earth. We don't even know much about the life that exists inside our own bodies, except crude measurements like total mass. To be able to make conclusions about what might be possible for life elsewhere seems rather premature and any model based upon what we know so far is bound to be naive.
This write up is misleading as it is comparing densities from the laboratory of one item to production densities of another item.
Please compare apples to apples. Hard drives are more dense and cheaper than solid state drives, in addition to being far cheaper: Still, and into the forseeable future.
When it comes to USB, test your equipment, even if you haven't upgraded to Type C yet.
I've personally discovered two counterfeit or substandard (depending upon your personal definitions of the terms) USB charging cables.
What I use to test is a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10-inch tablet. This tablet wants approximately 0.7-0.8 amps at 5 volts, but it will charge in a degraded mode if the charging cable isn't up to snuff, or if it's plugged into a desktop or laptop (which normally only supply 0.5 amps).
Every cable should begin by charging in the degraded mode when plugged into my laptop and then upgrade to normal charging mode when plugged into any of my half dozen or so 2 amp USB chargers. Among over a dozen cables, I detected two that were not up to snuff, and you'd be surprised at my results. One cable from the dollar store was garbage, but another, colored cable from the dollar store that had fancy LEDs was fine. Three 10 feet cables were fine. The other reject was an average-looking cable with an average feel. It did not appear to be substandard or counterfeit.
If you want to get fancy you can get a device from banggood.com that measures current and voltage across the USB port. They cost about $3 shipped. That is how I determined that my tablet will draw approximately 0.7-0.8 amps. From that experience I'd be surprised if many devices actually draw a full 2 amps. It's nice to have a 2 amp supply, though, because it gives you a safety factor if your cables are somewhat substandard. Maybe the newest 2016 phones will draw close to 2 amps. Get the meter and find out!
Based upon my experience, the best USB chargers are from Samsung and anything else that has a counterfeit-resistant UL sticker. And also based upon my experience, if you notice that a charging cable is getting warm, you should probably replace it because it's dissipating electricity as heat rather than conducting it.
As a few others have said, Comcast home routers cannot be considered public Wi-Fi hotspots in any way, shape, or form. They're private Wi-Fi hotspots for Comcast residential customers only. If this is what the article says, then the author is misinformed.
Fight every accusation against you in court, however minor. $10 parking ticket? Fight it.
If everyone contested every civil fine, then there wouldn't be civil fines. There aren't enough hours in the day to adjudicate every fine, and courts know it. They expect you to pay it, and they love for you to pay it online.
If you must pay, for example, a $10 parking ticket, go into the office of the entity during business hours and pay with a $100 bill. If the ticket is some amount of money like 55 or 65 dollars, pay in singles. Do not use the Internet, mail, a credit card, or a drop box. Waste the maximum amount of time possible. If you want to speak with the cashier's supervisor, do it. If you got your ticket in a small town, get the mayor on the phone and have a discussion about it, seeing if he can do something to help you.
These are all things that I do, and they work great. When it costs more than a small percentage of $x to collect $x, people have second thoughts. Nobody wants the hassle of having to look a human being in the eyes. It makes people very uncomfortable.
Why do this? Because when you don't show up they hound you to pay them. Turn the tables and annoy the shit out of them instead. They'll get their money eventually, but there is always the chance that they'll make it go away just to make you go away.
The reason why typewriters and computer keyboards are so US centric is that the English-speaking world happened to be at the top of its game when these products were created. First it was Great Britain and its territories and then the United States. The language of computer science is English. Computer scientists use less Latin than any other scientist that I'm aware of. All common programming languages are based upon the language of mathematics, which is Latin with symbols. English is close enough: All common programming languages read left-to-right, top to bottom. All common programming languages are alphabetic and use mainly SVO, subject-verb-object, just like English. The keywords in all common programming languages are English words. The punctuation marks are the same or more similar to English than any other language. You could say that all common programming languages are Latin with symbols, written in English.
This is why it is easier to be a programmer for a native English speaker than for any other person. Everything fits like a glove, because we invented a large portion of this technology, not because we're any better than any other person. (*)
As China rises, we're beginning to see things like electronics data sheets written in Chinese with an English translation as an afterthought. Quite clearly the standard computer keyboard is only natural for English users. It's utterly horrible for the Chinese. Imagine if the keyboard was created in the Far East. Our 26 letter alphabet with no accent marks would be the afterthought. Programming languages might have been mostly symbol-oriented with Chinese symbolic keywords. We might have needed to be fairly good Chinese speakers to be any good at programming. Future technologies could be like this.
Any contact with an alien race would be more of the same. We could have roughly the same technology but vastly different ways of interacting with it, depending upon whatever culture was dominant when it was created.
(*) I'm aware that QWERTY was designed to slow down typists but it's actually extremely well suited to type English. All 26 letters and the common punctuation marks require a single keypress, and they're all right at our fingertips.
I rarely post two responses to the same Slashdot article, but I've read everybody else's responses and nobody has yet mentioned the value of his or her time.
When buying the cheapest product, too many people do not factor in the value of their time.
Let's say that I buy a $10 tool instead of a $50 tool. If the $10 tool breaks, then I will probably waste a minimum of an hour of my time replacing it, not to mention wear and tear on my vehicle. To me an hour of my time is worth more than $40. Saving anything less than $50 on a tool that has the possibility of malfunctioning is a losing proposition.
Get yourself the best tool, and save yourself the grief of wasting your valuable time.
Additionally, nobody has mentioned the value of his or her physical or mental health. When a tool malfunctions, it takes a toll on you. Maybe the tool will only injure you slightly, but was it worth it? Stress hormones in your brain shorten your lifespan, so why make it hard on yourself by making your work more stressful due to malfunctioning tools? We are not machines with replaceable parts. We are fragile humans, physically and mentally.
I would agree that the three standard Harbor Freight torque wrenches compare favorably with the 1990's era Craftsman torque wrench that I paid $90 for. I tested the $10 Harbor Freight tool side by side on my vehicle with the Craftsman tool and they are close enough that it would be hard for me to justify paying 10x times the price. I can also leave the $10 Harbor Fright torque wrench in my vehicle and not have to worry about it getting lost, permanently borrowed, or stolen.
My recommendation is to own one set of quality tools made in the United States. Keep this set where you use tools the most. Also buy a set of cheap backup tools. Keep these tools where you wouldn't commonly use them, but they still might come in handy. For example, at your employer or at your significant other's place.
And every time you shop at Harbor Freight, make sure to get your free flashlight and use your 20% discount coupon. I always carry around a stack of Harbor Freight coupons.
If you look back through the archives, you might be able to find a few of my longer and more detailed responses whenever the subject of nuclear energy arises. I'll restate my conclusions here.
Current nuclear energy production techniques produce new waste products that did not exist before. These products are so deadly that touching them for a reasonable period of time will result in your painful death in a few days to a few months. These waste products are dangerous for timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, give or take one order of magnitude. I'll restrict my analysis to this so-called high-level radioactive waste, not low-level radioactive waste like contaminated equipment and clothing.
The earliest written languages are around 5,000 years old, give or take a thousand years. Nobody except for a handful of people in the world can read those languages. Most humans can only read languages a few hundred years old at most. In the poorest regions of the world in 2016, half of the local population can read no language whatsoever, local or remote, ancient or modern, because they are illiterate.
Regions of the globe that formerly had the leading civilizations can fall on hard times due to overly intensive agriculture, drought, earthquakes, other types of natural disasters, or any number of freak occurrences. North America, over thousands of years, could swap places with sub-Saharan Africa in terms of, most importantly, literacy, scientific and otherwise. There is no guarantee of forward technological progress. Simply look at the Roman Empire and the following Dark Ages. It took civilization until the 20th century to recover most of what was lost.
Let's fast forward 25,000 years. Due to climate change, there is a population of mostly illiterate nomadic herders in North America. Quite by accident, they come across our 2016 state of the art nuclear waste containment facility. Over the years all of the security measures have been destroyed by natural disasters of one kind or another. Amazingly there are still legible signs posted in 100 of the most common languages from 2016 Earth. Since these herders can't read, the signs are quite useless. Even if the locals could read, the signs would take weeks for academics living thousands of miles away to decipher. Being curious and in need of building supplies, these individuals clean out the facility, emptying all high-level waste containers, hoping to find useful materials. Over the next few weeks the material spreads to other local tribes. The advanced civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa are unaware of this until after a few more weeks tens of thousands of people from the primitive tribes of North America start dying from radiation poisoning. All because some pretty ignorant people in 2016 thought that nuclear energy was completely safe.
This is what nuclear energy produces: Ticking, deadly time bombs for future civilizations, with no guaranteed way to warn them of the danger.
AI is [or will be] programmed by human programmers.
At present there are two alarming trends in programming. One, companies are unwilling to pay properly trained Western-educated programmers and are increasingly outsourcing programming to inexperienced programmers in Third World countries. Once these programmers become better at their craft, they demand higher pay and/or move to the West and the companies move to even cheaper countries. Two, despite outsourcing, there are probably not enough competent programmers in the world to fulfill current and future demand, so there will always be many incompetent programmers being utilized, regardless of economics.
While the world's best programmers are true craftsmen, the worst programmers are the ones we have to worry about. Some company looking to save a few dollars will hire a few incompetents and, rather than your word processor crashing causing you to lose a few minutes of work, your AI's built-in curbs will malfunction and it will go rogue. How many programmers in the world today can design a bug-free security sandbox? As AIs become more sophisticated, every programmer will have to be able to do this. AIs have to be contained, yet what intelligent human would willingly consent to being imprisoned? In the battle between an inexperienced programmer from sub-Saharan Africa in 2100 who is the first generation of his tribe to not be a shepherd, and an AI, can you guess who will lose?
Unless we can change the way our field works, we must assume that the worst and least experienced programmers in the world will be working on AI. There is no basic competency required in programming. Companies will simply pay the least amount of money that they can get away with, like they always do. The AI that kills us won't come from research labs at MIT, it will come from the Microsoft outsourcer office in Bhutan.
Good luck with Michigan's unplowed roads and potholes! I doubt an autonomous car will ever be able to handle it here without killing people.
How about writing code that runs well on both compilers?
Bluetooth isn't perfect, but I'm a happy convert.
I'd rather have Apple put a micro SD card slot where the headphone jack is. I'll never buy an Apple smartphone, but Samsung and the other Android device makers have been issuing close copies of Apple products lately in terms of hardware specs.
Wires hanging off of wireless devices for ordinary use cases seems wrong. I'm 100% wireless charging now as well, even though I have an older device without the capability built in.
The only downside of Bluetooth is occasional audio interruptions. I'm not sure why this happens, but I have a feeling it has to do with misbehaving apps eating up too many CPU cycles.
I personally purchased things in the mid-1980's online using Quantum Link, but CompuServe dates back to 1969 so people were obviously making online purchases throughout the 1970's. BBSes were active and often linked together in massive networks from the 1970's through the 1990's. Whether that counts is up for debate.
If you're speaking strictly about the Internet, the Usenet forsale groups have been around for a long time. My first use of the Internet was in 1992 to sell some old computer junk, but Usenet dates back to the 1980's.
It's amazing how ignorant people are of the online world before 1995.
If you're afraid that what you write on Slashdot could jeopardize your job, then I advise you to quit. Specifically, though, we're talking about unionizing. I'll talk with anyone at any company I work for about unionizing, its pluses and minuses. Being a programmer is about intellectual freedom. If you can't speak your mind, then your ability to program the way you should is probably equally constrained.
The chief benefit of a union for a programmer is this. Let's say that you were injured in a car accident and your intellectual abilities have suffered, but they may eventually recover. A union is the type of organization that might go to bat for you. For a man under 35, the biggest risk of substantial injury is in a vehicle accident.
Programmers are supposed to be smart enough to be able to deal with the business side of their careers. But clearly we are NOT. Hence, Google offers to completely take over its employees financial affairs to get them in order. This benefit seems like Big Brother but to me it's actually quite a nice thing that Google is doing. Going to engineering school virtually bankrupted me, and it costs twice as much today.
As a living thing, the most important thing in life is to reproduce. It isn't to worship a deity, or to eat, or to work, or to sleep. More politely, the most important thing for a heterosexual man to do is to meet women. (Substitute all of the pronouns you want for women and for people in the LGBT community.)
For years I tried to convince myself that working on technical projects was the most interesting thing that I could possibly be doing, and I denied my basic biology. By your 30's the defects in our society's social structure become readily apparent. The social norm for nerd behavior does not favor us in any way whatsoever. It distances us from the requirements of our biology. Is it self-imposed? In part, I suppose. For the most part, though, we're brainwashed. Programming is not preferable to having sex. Programming should be something you do after you're exhausted from sex. The value that companies get from the software that we write means that we should be getting paid 10 times what we do at the very least, or work one day a week and spend the rest of our lives doing what we should be doing.
This individual has it completely backwards. His job at Google and money are his god. He is a brainwashed automaton, exactly who Google wants to work for them.
You can't churn out developers like automobiles.
I began programming casually in elementary school on Commodore Pets. I started programming on my own computer in fifth grade on a Commodore 64. Afterwards, I had plenty of short work stints during junior high school, high school, and my 7 years at the university, but I didn't begin programming full time for more than an 8 month period until I was 24. Even then, I was still very green.
The best developers have been at it for 10-20 years at a minimum, and I'd even go as far as to say I prefer programmers who've been at it for 30 years.
What I don't care about is your physical age. If you started programming at five years old, and you kept at it continuously until age 25 then you'd meet my criteria.
Developers are created over many years, they've worked on many generations of technology, and they've proved flexible with time. Many of the good ones have been at it since childhood, but I don't think that should disqualify anyone.
That's why developers need to get paid so much. Training over a decade to achieve basic competence at something is expensive. Many have a very expensive university education they have to repay. For me, I had to forgo my social life pretty significantly from age 15-25, and I'll never get that time back. The only way I can be repaid for that is with money.
If you're trying to shortcut the process somehow by picking up someone who knows nothing about creating software, hope to train him or her in a few years, and expect to pay him or her poorly then you're going to produce some pretty awful software.
Over my 25+ years of programming, being able to estimate my time was the last and hardest thing for me to learn how to do.
No matter how much you've mastered computer science and how many clever encryption algorithms you're capable of writing, estimating how much time your work will take is a completely separate ability having nothing to do with your actual programming and/or mathematical skills.
It is possible for every programmer to learn how to do. It's not something you'll figure out in a week or a year or ten years. I promise you that being able to deliver your software on time, every time, will make you the most beloved programmer at your company.
The key is to, instead of jumping right into the coding, spend several days understanding exactly what work you need to do. Learn to be realistic about your abilities. Learn how to communicate with non-programmers so they understand exactly what they're getting. Keep explaining until it's clear that they understand what you're writing for them, and that's exactly what you're writing for them.
When people throw changes at you, warn them that you'll have to start from scratch with understanding exactly the new work that needs to be done, think about the time those changes will take knowing that you may need to discard work you've already done, and continue to be realistic about your abilities. Make sure you get approval for the revised completion time before starting any work. Do not jump right into coding the changes.
If your employer doesn't allow you do to this, quit and go work somewhere else. There is an oversupply of programming work.
Time estimates are something that all professionals do. When you finish your work on time, you are acting professionally. When you reject estimates you look like a rank amateur and I'd never hire you.
Based upon my three decades of programming experience, programming at rare times may require you to brush up on what you learned in engineering school, but essentially your degree is mostly a worthless piece of paper in terms of career usefulness. I've used much less than 5% of what I learned there, and probably more like less than 1%. My most useful class was software engineering, because it touched on the non-technical aspects of being a programmer.
There are small subsets of programmers that use geometry and calculus, but even if we only remember the basics those types of programmers don't need to worry about nit picky details because we all use libraries. You'd be absolutely foolish to open up a calculus book and write your own library function, unless you're doing something extremely novel. Novel is bad when you are trying to write maintainable code.
What is useful to you as a programmer is to understand what big O notation is. It's advanced math beyond calculus, but it always seemed like common sense to me. If you have to do n^2 operations for every n, that's worse than having to do n operations. In 30 years I've never had to worry about little o or logarithms. Google gets specific in interview questions about all of these notations, but I'm telling you what is actually useful.
What is not useful to you is mastery of the syntactical details of any language. Try to program as if you're writing English. Write software in such a way that you could be doing it in any language. Write software that the next person can read, instantly understand, and begin modifying.
Programming isn't purely doing Google searches. What I spend most of my time on is seeing how the software I'm working on already solves a problem and to use as similar techniques as possible, so that the next person who works on it will encounter consistency. Every change I make I make for a reason, and I understand every change I make well enough to explain it to my mom.
Another way of looking at it is the technical interview is almost completely useless. You can ace a technical interview and write the shittiest code I've ever seen. You can perform average on an interview and write the cleanest code I've ever seen. If anything, detailed technical knowledge should count against you. The next person to maintain your code might not know every trivial little feature of the language you're using and has no admiration for your cleverness.
Write software like Hemingway, not Thomas Hardy, and don't sweat the math.
Hi, MIT guys, formal proofs of filesystems are useless because you cannot incorporate physical systems into formal proofs. Real filesystems exist on real hardware.
I guarantee that your file system will fail if I start ripping cables out. A suitably strong EMP will take it out. In fact, I bet I could nuke your filesystem if I used my ham radio transceiver too close to the device. Other things that would destroy your filesystem include floods, earthquakes, and a lightning strike.
I began writing this by stating that formal proofs of software are useless, but I don't really believe that to be true. I strongly believe that we should strive for software correctness. Any techniques that can we use to make software better are worth pursuing.
But it has to be remembered that software cannot be isolated. When we do develop a true AI, it will escape and destroy us, probably within milliseconds of an unexpected hardware event. No matter how rigorously the beast is programmed!
A better discussion for Slashdot might be how much RAM is enough for developers.
I can barely squeak by on 6 GB, but my next laptop will need to be at least 16 GB, if not 32.
Funnily enough in my current configuration the biggest memory hog isn't VMWare or Oracle. It's Firefox.
5326 jgotts 20 0 21.584g 1.891g 108628 R 82.1 33.0 287:20.13 firefox
It's sometimes hard for me to determine whether Firefox is working properly or there is a massive bug. I have a fair number of tabs open, but never more than 20.
My '89 Ford Escort was a lemon. I was the last American car I'll ever buy. In any case, from memory I was able to remove the key with the engine running. One of the many mechanical engineering defects with this vehicle. It was a horrible product.
I see they mentioned User Dictionary right in the article. I consider User Dictionary to be malware.
I have to lock my version of Google+ to the factory version or else User Dictionary gets stuck in such a tight crash-restart loop that it only yields to the GUI for a split second before presenting the crash dialog. It eats all battery capacity in a few hours while the phone is sitting completely idle.
I have no idea what uses User Dictionary, but you certainly cannot disable it. Also, technically speaking, I don't know whether this is a bug in User Dictionary or Google+ but it should be my choice to chuck a useless, possibly not buggy app in favor of the incredibly useful app I happen to use to backup my photos which may or may not have a bug of its own.
No word from Google on the bug/interaction. I've posted about it, Tweeted about it, and my review of Google+ mentions the issue. I don't know what other forums might be of use, but I don't want to waste any more time on it.
P.S. I plan on using my smartphone for 5-6 years, so throwing away my hardware is not an option. I think people who get new smartphones every 2 years are fools (whether you pay for your phone in cash up front or pay via a jacked up phone bill every month you're still paying for something you don't need). My 3-year-old model still works great, aside from software bugs.