Caudium also has a feature which is unique among the web servers - the supports database. Supports is a mechanism through which you are able to detect what features are or are not supported by the browser viewing your page. It allows one to create sites which use no JavaScript for browser detection. The visitor is handed clean and compact HTML pages not cluttered with JavaScript code. No need to mention that this feature makes the site far more browser-independent and flexible than when JavaScript is used to perform the tasks mentioned above.
Uh, what is this, 2001? What sites DON'T use jscript these days? You HAVE to use it for some cool stuff. I personally really like jscript so this was a pretty big turnoff for me, as I don't see that as an advantage. I'm definitely a thick-client type of guy these days...
In this entire (nerdy) thread, I have yet to see any alternative webservers. Is it that hard to write a basic, fast, secure webserver? I've seen webservers written in perl, ruby, and REBOL in less than a hundred lines... what gives?
If I wanted to store incriminating evidence digitally, here's what I would do:
1) Find a friend with OS X who uses dyndns (or static IP) and exposes their machine to the internet 2) Ask to be able to use some of their drive space as backup 3) Set up an encrypted disk image over there, or just set the whole home directory as encrypted (don't know the repercussions of the latter when working with that login remotely, but that would be an interesting experiment...) 4) On OS X, you can mount and work with encrypted disk images remotely 5) Unmount when you're done and hope nothing's logged (or turn off logging for this) 6) If they ask your friend, he has the "plausible deniability" of "I gave him a login on my machine but have no idea what he did with it" 7) And speaking of which, what if this "friend" is an ISP hosting a site you own?? Are they then "aiding and abetting"?
I don't know if anyone has noticed yet but the wikipedia entry to the peltier effect linked from this post is now headed at the top with two images, a poo and a peenie (as my 6 year old nephew would call them). Um....
To this day I still play the Desert Combat mod with Battlefield 1942. (Actually, I play this and the Secret Weapons mod the most, but it's great to have them all.) Granted, I have a Mac and this game came late to our table, but it's still a game that is fun as hell. Hop in a bike or dune buggy, zip to a flag, slide-break as you switch to the turret position, rat-a-tat-tat the defenders, surprise the guy camping the flag just inside the building. Hasn't gotten old yet!
If you want modern weaponry and vehicles with the old Battlefield game, I highly suggest you try the Desert Combat mod.
I second the priority about investing in a good keyboard. After killing 2 Apple keyboards in 1 year (it was just a little beer! damn...), I recently requested an ice blue Deck keyboard for my birthday, and got it. (Yes, I am a Mac gamer. The few, the proud...) Pretty badass, and rugged as heck. Check the specs on the website. I don't believe it's a buckling-spring-type, but it feels right/smooth/solid to me, and that's enough.
Only issue (from a Mac/OS X perspective) is that the command key is essentially the top-right key, unless you remap it to the control or alt key, but that's also problematic (because then the control or alt/option key will be at the top right...). No matter, because it glows blue, and I like pretty colors;)/damn mac users
Except that it's not. You started to touch on this idea of cost, but it bears repeating/fleshing-out. Say you make 30 an hour at work, which means your time is worth about that much. Around a buck every 2 minutes. Soooo if it takes you more than 2 minutes to find and procure a high-quality version of a song that costs 99 cents at the iTMS (complete with high-res album art, good tags, etc.), you are actually LOSING, from an economic perspective.
This exact same argument can be levied against Windows vs. OS X. If you buy a much cheaper Windows box (instead of an Apple machine) but it takes you, on average, 20 more hours of babysitting/troubleshooting/virus-crapware removal, Windows reinstalls, etc. over the lifetime of the machine vs. OS X maintenance (and I think most of us who use both would agree this is a veeeery conservative estimate), and your time is worth about 30 an hour, you just blew 600 bucks of "value" over and above the purchase price of your Windows box. Which puts it squarely into (and probably well past) an equivalently-configured (but somewhat more expensive) OS X machine. (Granted, this is an oversimplification as I have not included here things like the opportunity cost of not being able to play all the latest games, etc., because the value of that differs from person to person).
Your post rings hugely true. 9am-noon is "dead time". Been at a company for 1.5 yrs now. Despite a stack of great feedback from clients for the work I've done, I am currently dealing with a less-than-stellar feedback rating because my boss is hell-bent (at this point) at getting me in as much before 9am as possible. Man, I was swing-shift in the USAF, I was a night owl in college, and now Corporate America with all its kissass head-down follow-the-leaders is on my ass. I got dinged big-time for the 9:30 arrivals I was starting to get into- even though I REGULARLY work till 7/8- ESPECIALLY if I'm working on something interesting or am on a roll/"in flow". They just didn't have me working on anything, well, interesting, for a couple of months, and eventually it showed. And I get blamed for this shit. Hell, even my initials are P.M.!
I'm a builder. I was always pegged as a creative/technical guy, I love to build, and in the line of work I feel I have taken up, that means coding and designing db-driven websites and mastering all related technologies. But they spec it all out for me until there is no "fun interesting part" left. My neat ideas get vetoed for "probably taking too much time to implement." That's right, I work in a Big 4 consulting firm, where every hour not billed directly to a client is a potential waste that shows up in your "utilization". Where you can't even start building a feature until you get at least one client lined up ready to share the cost of developing it. Heck, I guess it reeks of capitalist efficiency, but what a frickin creative buzzkill... This literally cuts out everything that, well, that the client doesn't know they want!;)
It's Wednesday, it's gorgeous out, and it's supposed to rain this weekend. Why can't I ditch the cube and go sailing today, and catch up on some of the work on the rainy weekend, maximizing the time available?? Is the idea here that a person doesn't have enough discipline to do shit unless there is a boss breathing down his/her neck every so often??
I may quit soon and start an LLC due to the lack of flexibility/creativity and the negative tensions that are erupting on both sides due to this. I'm tired of starting at the bottom of the totem pole and being held back all over again. The shit that the managers and senior managers get to do is not rocket science. (This is my second job but first consulting job, so I started at the bottom.)
Not to mention, I hate working on all-Microsoft technologies.
I have some great ideas for work, one possibly very profitable. I don't even care if my pay drops (hey, that rings true with this article, too!) as long as I'm reasonably comfortable. Anyone want to join my flex-time LLC if I start one up? Here's the idea:
1) Monday morning, we try to determine the tasks we're going to try to get done that week, and divide them up into days. 2) When you are done with your tasks for the day, you can go home. 3) When you are done with your tasks for the week, you can take the rest of the week off. Or work on your own stuff. 4) Some XP methodologies used.
The way I'd see this working is a combination of Microsoft-esque flextime and Google-esque work-on-pet-project time.
soon after i started reading slashdot ages ago, i saw references to portman and hot grits and never got a clue what the heck kind of slashdot cultural reference that was. can someone bother to enlighten me?
but hey, all I am is a guy who had a guy in his fraternity date some gal named Tisch who was one of portman's (not her real name, though the actual name escapes me) good friends.
I always thought it was Nicholas Negroponte who said "information wants to be free"...
Programmers come from vastly different backgrounds
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Is Programming Art?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
People who come to enjoy programming, in my experience, come from all sorts of backgrounds. I have met coders who were formerly big into music, or poetry, or photography, etc. I myself was a psych major (albeit a CS minor), which might explain my interface-nazi tendencies with regards to UI design;) I couldn't be a CS major because I kept messing up::cough:: flunking::cough:: my "weedout" engineering calc classes (which were a CS requirement at my school), but in hindsight, I liked being able to take lots of electives. So, although I would be at a loss to create a new useful compression algorithm, and am probably not the BEST programmer out there, i really like to design and develop nice code/nice backend database schemas, that result in something that someone thinks is kickass.
Unlike a lot of coder geeks I know, though, I got A's in advanced english classes, AND art classes;) So I can actually document my own stuff pretty well, and I've been client-facing for a while so I know how to write courteous emails with lots of e-business-speak...;)
My boss at my former job used to play football and now codes. Can you imagine?!?! Football! While I spent summers geeking out, he was learning what a button-hook was. The horror. lol. (i pretty much have zero interest in sports. it seems like a lot of pointy-haired types do, though. oh well, to each his own)
Meanwhile, the two coders I know who I used to secretly idolize because they actually WERE cs majors, got tired of coding and are now both getting MBA's (which seems like a boring thing to do, were I to do it). Their complaint was that coders get shit on at corporate jobs, and they were just tired of the whole design/code/test/deploy/debug/support cycle.
Screw 'em, they also liked football;)
I know what they're talking about in the former case of feeling taken-advantage of (not to mention that I am TIRED, TIRED of working with Microsoft-only technology, from an ideological/stuck-in-the-Microsoft-bubble standpoint!), and my solution to that is probably going to happen soon. Take my savings, quit my corporate job (which has done nothing for my technical development lately) and code freelance for a while. Wish me luck (I'm a little nervous), I have a few ideas and I'll be starting by diving headfirst into Ruby/Rails and seeing where that takes me;)
Perhaps I'll never be a millionaire (or perhaps I will), but building stuff (the craft of it, and the type of creativity required at times) that someone else thinks is cool really floats my boat.
Who cares what programming "is", as long as people stop frickin' stereotyping us. The only thing that all programmers have in common, is that they program. The rest of it, like the difficulty in dating the opposite sex, is just positive correlation;)
... piracy. Wil runs a successful boutique-app company called Delicious Monster and is something of a geek celeb in the Mac world.
Replace "applications" with "movies" and I bet it still applies.
It is my informed impression that the large majority of the people downloading this stuff (i.e., the market) either A) can't afford it due to youth or income and therefore wouldn't have bought it anyway (i.e., it's not a lost sale), or B) don't have it available to them via normal channels.
If you like what Wil had to say about this, definitely check out the PDF of his presentation on "doing your own thing". It is pretty inspiring stuff if you are a creative geek who is tired of not doing what you'd really like to be doing.
I was actually looking to get a Commodore 64 like everyone else in the neighborhood when my family and I walked into a random computer store in December of '84. It turned out to be an Apple store (thank God). I was 12, our family didn't have a computer yet (although I had taken some computer classes and shown strong interest), I hadn't heard too much about Macs at the time. So the young sales guy does the "completely blew me away" Mac demo, I was smitten. When we wondered what time it was and he pulled out the Alarm Clock desk accessory, I went from "smitten" to "sheer desperate hardware-lust mania". I have never before, or since (sadly), had an experience like that for a man-made object, and I feel bad for people who were not a part of that, it was so amazing. It was way more expensive than a C64, but my parents luckily didn't know any better (and luckily had the money) because when I said "Mom! Dad! WE HAVE TO GET THIS MACHINE", they bought the whole shebang, mac, imagewriter, even a 300 baud modem (the latter for $300!). I proceeded to kill most of the next summer (such a nerd...) learning Microsoft BASIC and playing various early Mac games, and dialing up various BBS'es. This is a kid who used to spend his summers on the beach...
I think it's why I stuck with Apple through the dark years of the mid-90's, and use OS X to this day (although, alas, my job currently is coding on Windows, and has been for some time). I just had a high opinion of Apple's whole point, and I figured they'd eventually pull through. I suppose it must be some crazy sort of love, why else would you stick around "through thick and thin"? Why else would I wait for the Mac version of a game instead of just caving and buying a PC? Stubborn loyalty with lots of feeling behind it... which all started with that initial rush. Sounds strangely like a good relationship.
The irony is, I am currently getting multiple emails from Microsoft requesting an interview for their AppDev group. I guess I've been doing development using Microsoft tools for long enough now that it's worth something to the Borg;) Thing is, my heart is not in it (literally) and I'm at a point where I'd like to work with some non-Microsoft tech for a change, even at reduced pay. I frequent non-Microsoft sites (like this one) all the time, I'm always a closeted Apple (and to a slightly lesser extent, *nix) fanboy. I'd love an Apple dev job (or at least any job where I could use Macs for work) but the only opportunity I had so far (besides striking out on my own- thank you for your inspiring presentation PDF, Wil Shipley!) was working in the dungeon of some office building for Nikon, having no design input whatsoever. No thanks...
Idealism is costly;) Not to mention, I'm only achieving mediocre "performance" in my jobs, and I wonder if my "Apple affair" has anything to do with it!
If this is the case, can anyone explain why the middle-of-the-road product seems to always be more successful than the best-of-breed product? Is it a timing issue? Is it a "personality characteristics of the founders are more salesman than engineer" phenomenon? (Or vice-versa?)
Actually, what I thought was more impressive than this was noting the number of female grandmasters in that FIDE link above. It's about time! (Is the fact that none of them are American have something to say about cultural discouragement of intellectual excellence in women here?)
So it was freshman year in Cornell, 1990, and I had doubly no hope of getting laid, being a freshman and also a geek guy, the one girl on my floor that I had a crush on ended up dating some jock, so I fell in with a group of cool malcontent geeks who liked to play early Mac network games looong before they existed on PC's (all hail Spectre, Bolo, and NetTrek 3!) and got to breaking some rules.
At the time, Cornell was Mac-dominated (oh, happy memories) and the Upson lab had a network of IIci's just waiting to have their security hacked. I forget the tool that was used, but we figured out that it stored the password in a certain file that we could reach by bypassing the file security with Norton Utilities for Macintosh (haha Mac OS 6 security, bah). We procured a copy of the software, installed it and created a password on my own IIci, then took a copy of that file (with the obfuscated password) and replaced the file on the lab IIci. Instant admin access.
But we didn't stop there. We had such organization that we managed, as a team, to use this trick to install a fun little background process called NetBunny... on ALL the macs in ALL the labs. NetBunny does nothing on its own, but paired with a little utility called StartWabbit that we pointed at any campus AppleTalk network we wished, would begin the chain reaction. What then happened is that the Energizer Bunny would walk across the screen thumping the drum, going literally from screen to screen across the whole lab. It was pretty much a riot, if you were in on the joke, but the admins couldn't figure it out (we had hidden the executable well through obfuscation by renaming it and pasting another icon on it) and after they heard the recognizable "thump, thump, thump" sound would jump up and run around helplessly yelling "It's the bunny!!" We did it a few times with "agents" at each location to witness the mayhem. Good geek times.
I think it's the nature of very talented people, that when The System is not challenging them sufficiently (or when they refuse to take on the offered challenge due to lack of interest or motivation), that they seek out their own challenges, and fun.
I don't think these kids should get punished this harshly. Felony charges? Simply for trying to break the rules? Please. Face it, it takes some effort and talent to break in, it's just misplaced effort and talent. Find a way to redirect it. I mean come on, it probably started with some high-school geek starving for attention who wanted to seem cool.
1) The WMP video check is useless, as I have a Mac with Windows Media Player installed and it still fails. 2) Using the workaround cited above to get it to work on Linux (go straight to http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html), I can see the video fine. 3) [rant] I am sick and tired of browser-specific, OS-specific content on the mother-friggin' Internet! [/rant]
Oh, I'll just give the Google link to the ton of search results: here
Regardless, I was (once) a physics major and I couldn't easily find a flaw with it. Implementing it would require some funky spacetime/gravity manipulation, however. If you have not read it yet (it's been out a while), it will certainly fire up your imagination!
I find it interesting that all this sci-fi stuff seems intimately linked to gravity, which is not well-understood (yet).
1) there are more than one, each with different ideas about morality, religious figures, afterlife, etc. (despite similarities) 2) people incorporate religious ideas into their worldview and cling to them 3) a person's worldview is ridiculously difficult to change, for some unknown human reason, and people will sometimes fight to the death to protect it
There's just way too much action based on ignorance/lack of real communication/fear of the unknown in this world. I mean, OK, what if the particular miracle-performing prophet you've been indoctrinated to worship your whole life, wasn't the ONLY prophet? Would it be so bad? Would the sky fall? Is it possible that the founders of a new religion, perhaps even yours, had just a bit of self-interest going on? Is it possible that human interests over the years have distorted the original message of some of these prophets (especially the religions that are much older than Gutenberg's invention)? Why is it always that members of the OTHER religion are going to hell, or are the infidels, or what have you? Why must people constantly insist on thinking of everything using an "us vs. them" paradigm?
Is the practice of brainwashing a human from birth with just 1 holy book (whether it's the bible, the koran, the torah, or whatever), as opposed to educating children about ALL religions, really going to help us communicate our religious needs/feelings, as a people? Are we that afraid that someone, perhaps even one of our very children, is going to like "their" religion more? And would that be so terrible?
(A good friend of mine's family practically disowned his sister because she converted to orthodox judaism. I say, let it be.)
Open your minds and stop the fighting, folks.
Disclaimer: While raised Catholic (I was even an altar boy, once), I took a few religious studies electives in college and they were VERY eye-opening. To the point where I felt angry for having been kept in a "catholic bubble" for the first half of my existence. While I am not strict any more, I feel in my gut that there is some kind of spirituality to life as we know it.)
The vitriol between Apple and Dell is legendary at this point. Michael Dull has talked more smack about Apple than possibly any other single executive in history. He most DEFINITELY is merely trying to whore a lower licensing from Microsoft. Sorry, mr. beige-box king, I hope you will live to eat your words.
Goddamn, I'll take your Intel Macs, Steve, but I'll REALLY get angry if you even THINK of licensing to Dull. Let him continue to get force-fed that other famous geek's package. You know, the one who is stifling innovation in my industry with its convicted monopoly practices... Argh, you sheep, you lemmings, are infuriating.
You seem to imply a mutual exclusivity between a good server OS and a good desktop OS. Does such a division actually exist? Can Apple fix the thread problem without impacting the "user experience"? (incidentally, this is my first post ever from my cellphone)
Slashdot Mirror
Caudium also has a feature which is unique among the web servers - the supports database. Supports is a mechanism through which you are able to detect what features are or are not supported by the browser viewing your page. It allows one to create sites which use no JavaScript for browser detection. The visitor is handed clean and compact HTML pages not cluttered with JavaScript code. No need to mention that this feature makes the site far more browser-independent and flexible than when JavaScript is used to perform the tasks mentioned above.
Uh, what is this, 2001? What sites DON'T use jscript these days? You HAVE to use it for some cool stuff. I personally really like jscript so this was a pretty big turnoff for me, as I don't see that as an advantage. I'm definitely a thick-client type of guy these days...
How can they do this with a 8^| , I mean, a straight face? ;) I think they have definitely jumped teh shark with this stunt.
In this entire (nerdy) thread, I have yet to see any alternative webservers. Is it that hard to write a basic, fast, secure webserver? I've seen webservers written in perl, ruby, and REBOL in less than a hundred lines... what gives?
If I wanted to store incriminating evidence digitally, here's what I would do:
1) Find a friend with OS X who uses dyndns (or static IP) and exposes their machine to the internet
2) Ask to be able to use some of their drive space as backup
3) Set up an encrypted disk image over there, or just set the whole home directory as encrypted (don't know the repercussions of the latter when working with that login remotely, but that would be an interesting experiment...)
4) On OS X, you can mount and work with encrypted disk images remotely
5) Unmount when you're done and hope nothing's logged (or turn off logging for this)
6) If they ask your friend, he has the "plausible deniability" of "I gave him a login on my machine but have no idea what he did with it"
7) And speaking of which, what if this "friend" is an ISP hosting a site you own?? Are they then "aiding and abetting"?
I don't know if anyone has noticed yet but the wikipedia entry to the peltier effect linked from this post is now headed at the top with two images, a poo and a peenie (as my 6 year old nephew would call them). Um....
To this day I still play the Desert Combat mod with Battlefield 1942. (Actually, I play this and the Secret Weapons mod the most, but it's great to have them all.) Granted, I have a Mac and this game came late to our table, but it's still a game that is fun as hell. Hop in a bike or dune buggy, zip to a flag, slide-break as you switch to the turret position, rat-a-tat-tat the defenders, surprise the guy camping the flag just inside the building. Hasn't gotten old yet!
If you want modern weaponry and vehicles with the old Battlefield game, I highly suggest you try the Desert Combat mod.
I second the priority about investing in a good keyboard. After killing 2 Apple keyboards in 1 year (it was just a little beer! damn...), I recently requested an ice blue Deck keyboard for my birthday, and got it. (Yes, I am a Mac gamer. The few, the proud...) Pretty badass, and rugged as heck. Check the specs on the website. I don't believe it's a buckling-spring-type, but it feels right/smooth/solid to me, and that's enough.
;) /damn mac users
Only issue (from a Mac/OS X perspective) is that the command key is essentially the top-right key, unless you remap it to the control or alt key, but that's also problematic (because then the control or alt/option key will be at the top right...). No matter, because it glows blue, and I like pretty colors
B.Cost. It's very hard to beat free.
Except that it's not. You started to touch on this idea of cost, but it bears repeating/fleshing-out. Say you make 30 an hour at work, which means your time is worth about that much. Around a buck every 2 minutes. Soooo if it takes you more than 2 minutes to find and procure a high-quality version of a song that costs 99 cents at the iTMS (complete with high-res album art, good tags, etc.), you are actually LOSING, from an economic perspective.
This exact same argument can be levied against Windows vs. OS X. If you buy a much cheaper Windows box (instead of an Apple machine) but it takes you, on average, 20 more hours of babysitting/troubleshooting/virus-crapware removal, Windows reinstalls, etc. over the lifetime of the machine vs. OS X maintenance (and I think most of us who use both would agree this is a veeeery conservative estimate), and your time is worth about 30 an hour, you just blew 600 bucks of "value" over and above the purchase price of your Windows box. Which puts it squarely into (and probably well past) an equivalently-configured (but somewhat more expensive) OS X machine. (Granted, this is an oversimplification as I have not included here things like the opportunity cost of not being able to play all the latest games, etc., because the value of that differs from person to person).
Your post rings hugely true. 9am-noon is "dead time". Been at a company for 1.5 yrs now. Despite a stack of great feedback from clients for the work I've done, I am currently dealing with a less-than-stellar feedback rating because my boss is hell-bent (at this point) at getting me in as much before 9am as possible. Man, I was swing-shift in the USAF, I was a night owl in college, and now Corporate America with all its kissass head-down follow-the-leaders is on my ass. I got dinged big-time for the 9:30 arrivals I was starting to get into- even though I REGULARLY work till 7/8- ESPECIALLY if I'm working on something interesting or am on a roll/"in flow". They just didn't have me working on anything, well, interesting, for a couple of months, and eventually it showed. And I get blamed for this shit. Hell, even my initials are P.M.!
;)
I'm a builder. I was always pegged as a creative/technical guy, I love to build, and in the line of work I feel I have taken up, that means coding and designing db-driven websites and mastering all related technologies. But they spec it all out for me until there is no "fun interesting part" left. My neat ideas get vetoed for "probably taking too much time to implement." That's right, I work in a Big 4 consulting firm, where every hour not billed directly to a client is a potential waste that shows up in your "utilization". Where you can't even start building a feature until you get at least one client lined up ready to share the cost of developing it. Heck, I guess it reeks of capitalist efficiency, but what a frickin creative buzzkill... This literally cuts out everything that, well, that the client doesn't know they want!
It's Wednesday, it's gorgeous out, and it's supposed to rain this weekend. Why can't I ditch the cube and go sailing today, and catch up on some of the work on the rainy weekend, maximizing the time available?? Is the idea here that a person doesn't have enough discipline to do shit unless there is a boss breathing down his/her neck every so often??
I may quit soon and start an LLC due to the lack of flexibility/creativity and the negative tensions that are erupting on both sides due to this. I'm tired of starting at the bottom of the totem pole and being held back all over again. The shit that the managers and senior managers get to do is not rocket science. (This is my second job but first consulting job, so I started at the bottom.)
Not to mention, I hate working on all-Microsoft technologies.
I have some great ideas for work, one possibly very profitable. I don't even care if my pay drops (hey, that rings true with this article, too!) as long as I'm reasonably comfortable. Anyone want to join my flex-time LLC if I start one up? Here's the idea:
1) Monday morning, we try to determine the tasks we're going to try to get done that week, and divide them up into days.
2) When you are done with your tasks for the day, you can go home.
3) When you are done with your tasks for the week, you can take the rest of the week off. Or work on your own stuff.
4) Some XP methodologies used.
The way I'd see this working is a combination of Microsoft-esque flextime and Google-esque work-on-pet-project time.
Thoughts?
soon after i started reading slashdot ages ago, i saw references to portman and hot grits and never got a clue what the heck kind of slashdot cultural reference that was. can someone bother to enlighten me?
but hey, all I am is a guy who had a guy in his fraternity date some gal named Tisch who was one of portman's (not her real name, though the actual name escapes me) good friends.
I always thought it was Nicholas Negroponte who said "information wants to be free"...
People who come to enjoy programming, in my experience, come from all sorts of backgrounds. I have met coders who were formerly big into music, or poetry, or photography, etc. I myself was a psych major (albeit a CS minor), which might explain my interface-nazi tendencies with regards to UI design ;) I couldn't be a CS major because I kept messing up ::cough:: flunking ::cough:: my "weedout" engineering calc classes (which were a CS requirement at my school), but in hindsight, I liked being able to take lots of electives. So, although I would be at a loss to create a new useful compression algorithm, and am probably not the BEST programmer out there, i really like to design and develop nice code/nice backend database schemas, that result in something that someone thinks is kickass.
;) So I can actually document my own stuff pretty well, and I've been client-facing for a while so I know how to write courteous emails with lots of e-business-speak... ;)
;)
;)
;)
Unlike a lot of coder geeks I know, though, I got A's in advanced english classes, AND art classes
My boss at my former job used to play football and now codes. Can you imagine?!?! Football! While I spent summers geeking out, he was learning what a button-hook was. The horror. lol. (i pretty much have zero interest in sports. it seems like a lot of pointy-haired types do, though. oh well, to each his own)
Meanwhile, the two coders I know who I used to secretly idolize because they actually WERE cs majors, got tired of coding and are now both getting MBA's (which seems like a boring thing to do, were I to do it). Their complaint was that coders get shit on at corporate jobs, and they were just tired of the whole design/code/test/deploy/debug/support cycle.
Screw 'em, they also liked football
I know what they're talking about in the former case of feeling taken-advantage of (not to mention that I am TIRED, TIRED of working with Microsoft-only technology, from an ideological/stuck-in-the-Microsoft-bubble standpoint!), and my solution to that is probably going to happen soon. Take my savings, quit my corporate job (which has done nothing for my technical development lately) and code freelance for a while. Wish me luck (I'm a little nervous), I have a few ideas and I'll be starting by diving headfirst into Ruby/Rails and seeing where that takes me
Perhaps I'll never be a millionaire (or perhaps I will), but building stuff (the craft of it, and the type of creativity required at times) that someone else thinks is cool really floats my boat.
Who cares what programming "is", as long as people stop frickin' stereotyping us. The only thing that all programmers have in common, is that they program. The rest of it, like the difficulty in dating the opposite sex, is just positive correlation
Good to see that Apple seems to finally be gaining some marketshare, and that Microsoft is resting on its laurels...
... piracy. Wil runs a successful boutique-app company called Delicious Monster and is something of a geek celeb in the Mac world.
Replace "applications" with "movies" and I bet it still applies.
It is my informed impression that the large majority of the people downloading this stuff (i.e., the market) either A) can't afford it due to youth or income and therefore wouldn't have bought it anyway (i.e., it's not a lost sale), or B) don't have it available to them via normal channels.
If you like what Wil had to say about this, definitely check out the PDF of his presentation on "doing your own thing". It is pretty inspiring stuff if you are a creative geek who is tired of not doing what you'd really like to be doing.
I was actually looking to get a Commodore 64 like everyone else in the neighborhood when my family and I walked into a random computer store in December of '84. It turned out to be an Apple store (thank God). I was 12, our family didn't have a computer yet (although I had taken some computer classes and shown strong interest), I hadn't heard too much about Macs at the time. So the young sales guy does the "completely blew me away" Mac demo, I was smitten. When we wondered what time it was and he pulled out the Alarm Clock desk accessory, I went from "smitten" to "sheer desperate hardware-lust mania". I have never before, or since (sadly), had an experience like that for a man-made object, and I feel bad for people who were not a part of that, it was so amazing. It was way more expensive than a C64, but my parents luckily didn't know any better (and luckily had the money) because when I said "Mom! Dad! WE HAVE TO GET THIS MACHINE", they bought the whole shebang, mac, imagewriter, even a 300 baud modem (the latter for $300!). I proceeded to kill most of the next summer (such a nerd...) learning Microsoft BASIC and playing various early Mac games, and dialing up various BBS'es. This is a kid who used to spend his summers on the beach...
;) Thing is, my heart is not in it (literally) and I'm at a point where I'd like to work with some non-Microsoft tech for a change, even at reduced pay. I frequent non-Microsoft sites (like this one) all the time, I'm always a closeted Apple (and to a slightly lesser extent, *nix) fanboy. I'd love an Apple dev job (or at least any job where I could use Macs for work) but the only opportunity I had so far (besides striking out on my own- thank you for your inspiring presentation PDF, Wil Shipley!) was working in the dungeon of some office building for Nikon, having no design input whatsoever. No thanks...
;) Not to mention, I'm only achieving mediocre "performance" in my jobs, and I wonder if my "Apple affair" has anything to do with it!
I think it's why I stuck with Apple through the dark years of the mid-90's, and use OS X to this day (although, alas, my job currently is coding on Windows, and has been for some time). I just had a high opinion of Apple's whole point, and I figured they'd eventually pull through. I suppose it must be some crazy sort of love, why else would you stick around "through thick and thin"? Why else would I wait for the Mac version of a game instead of just caving and buying a PC? Stubborn loyalty with lots of feeling behind it... which all started with that initial rush. Sounds strangely like a good relationship.
The irony is, I am currently getting multiple emails from Microsoft requesting an interview for their AppDev group. I guess I've been doing development using Microsoft tools for long enough now that it's worth something to the Borg
Idealism is costly
If this is the case, can anyone explain why the middle-of-the-road product seems to always be more successful than the best-of-breed product? Is it a timing issue? Is it a "personality characteristics of the founders are more salesman than engineer" phenomenon? (Or vice-versa?)
Is my impression false?
Actually, what I thought was more impressive than this was noting the number of female grandmasters in that FIDE link above. It's about time! (Is the fact that none of them are American have something to say about cultural discouragement of intellectual excellence in women here?)
So it was freshman year in Cornell, 1990, and I had doubly no hope of getting laid, being a freshman and also a geek guy, the one girl on my floor that I had a crush on ended up dating some jock, so I fell in with a group of cool malcontent geeks who liked to play early Mac network games looong before they existed on PC's (all hail Spectre, Bolo, and NetTrek 3!) and got to breaking some rules.
At the time, Cornell was Mac-dominated (oh, happy memories) and the Upson lab had a network of IIci's just waiting to have their security hacked. I forget the tool that was used, but we figured out that it stored the password in a certain file that we could reach by bypassing the file security with Norton Utilities for Macintosh (haha Mac OS 6 security, bah). We procured a copy of the software, installed it and created a password on my own IIci, then took a copy of that file (with the obfuscated password) and replaced the file on the lab IIci. Instant admin access.
But we didn't stop there. We had such organization that we managed, as a team, to use this trick to install a fun little background process called NetBunny... on ALL the macs in ALL the labs. NetBunny does nothing on its own, but paired with a little utility called StartWabbit that we pointed at any campus AppleTalk network we wished, would begin the chain reaction. What then happened is that the Energizer Bunny would walk across the screen thumping the drum, going literally from screen to screen across the whole lab. It was pretty much a riot, if you were in on the joke, but the admins couldn't figure it out (we had hidden the executable well through obfuscation by renaming it and pasting another icon on it) and after they heard the recognizable "thump, thump, thump" sound would jump up and run around helplessly yelling "It's the bunny!!" We did it a few times with "agents" at each location to witness the mayhem. Good geek times.
I think it's the nature of very talented people, that when The System is not challenging them sufficiently (or when they refuse to take on the offered challenge due to lack of interest or motivation), that they seek out their own challenges, and fun.
I don't think these kids should get punished this harshly. Felony charges? Simply for trying to break the rules? Please. Face it, it takes some effort and talent to break in, it's just misplaced effort and talent. Find a way to redirect it. I mean come on, it probably started with some high-school geek starving for attention who wanted to seem cool.
1) The WMP video check is useless, as I have a Mac with Windows Media Player installed and it still fails.
2) Using the workaround cited above to get it to work on Linux (go straight to http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html), I can see the video fine.
3) [rant] I am sick and tired of browser-specific, OS-specific content on the mother-friggin' Internet! [/rant]
Wikipedia entry on the alcubierre drive
;)
Read this, then reconsider all those UFO sightings and abduction claims in this new light
Oh, I'll just give the Google link to the ton of search results: here
Regardless, I was (once) a physics major and I couldn't easily find a flaw with it. Implementing it would require some funky spacetime/gravity manipulation, however. If you have not read it yet (it's been out a while), it will certainly fire up your imagination!
I find it interesting that all this sci-fi stuff seems intimately linked to gravity, which is not well-understood (yet).
The problem with religion, as I see it, is that
1) there are more than one, each with different ideas about morality, religious figures, afterlife, etc. (despite similarities)
2) people incorporate religious ideas into their worldview and cling to them
3) a person's worldview is ridiculously difficult to change, for some unknown human reason, and people will sometimes fight to the death to protect it
There's just way too much action based on ignorance/lack of real communication/fear of the unknown in this world. I mean, OK, what if the particular miracle-performing prophet you've been indoctrinated to worship your whole life, wasn't the ONLY prophet? Would it be so bad? Would the sky fall? Is it possible that the founders of a new religion, perhaps even yours, had just a bit of self-interest going on? Is it possible that human interests over the years have distorted the original message of some of these prophets (especially the religions that are much older than Gutenberg's invention)? Why is it always that members of the OTHER religion are going to hell, or are the infidels, or what have you? Why must people constantly insist on thinking of everything using an "us vs. them" paradigm?
Is the practice of brainwashing a human from birth with just 1 holy book (whether it's the bible, the koran, the torah, or whatever), as opposed to educating children about ALL religions, really going to help us communicate our religious needs/feelings, as a people? Are we that afraid that someone, perhaps even one of our very children, is going to like "their" religion more? And would that be so terrible?
(A good friend of mine's family practically disowned his sister because she converted to orthodox judaism. I say, let it be.)
Open your minds and stop the fighting, folks.
Disclaimer: While raised Catholic (I was even an altar boy, once), I took a few religious studies electives in college and they were VERY eye-opening. To the point where I felt angry for having been kept in a "catholic bubble" for the first half of my existence. While I am not strict any more, I feel in my gut that there is some kind of spirituality to life as we know it.)
The vitriol between Apple and Dell is legendary at this point. Michael Dull has talked more smack about Apple than possibly any other single executive in history. He most DEFINITELY is merely trying to whore a lower licensing from Microsoft. Sorry, mr. beige-box king, I hope you will live to eat your words.
Goddamn, I'll take your Intel Macs, Steve, but I'll REALLY get angry if you even THINK of licensing to Dull. Let him continue to get force-fed that other famous geek's package. You know, the one who is stifling innovation in my industry with its convicted monopoly practices... Argh, you sheep, you lemmings, are infuriating.
You seem to imply a mutual exclusivity between a good server OS and a good desktop OS. Does such a division actually exist? Can Apple fix the thread problem without impacting the "user experience"? (incidentally, this is my first post ever from my cellphone)
That is, unless Apple fixes this little issue outlined in this article:
p =7
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&
(disclaimer: i'm an apple fan and was disappointed to see this)