I have no doubt my company will do the same thing. I've often wondered about this, and I do understand their position, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. To this day, I discourage anyone I know from entering this field, all for reasons like this.
Does a carpenter need 5+ years of experience using Craftsman drill presses? No, they just need a few years of experience in carpentry and facets thereof. Why does someone need 5+ years as an Oracle DBA, if they already have the same amount of experience with multiple databases that just didn't happen to be Oracle? Database theory doesn't really change from implementation to implementation, yet the requirements are firm.
I haven't really found an easy way to deal with things like this, since they currently hold all the cards.
If it were as simple as lowering standards, I might agree with you. Something interesting has been happening in this sector recently however. Not a single person I know, not even the guy getting a double Ph.D. in CS and Engineering, with an IQ over 160 and a photographic memory, quallifies for 90% of the jobs I've seen posted. I'm not talking overquallified, he doesn't fulfill their minimum requirements.
What's that? Not possible, you say? I'm gainfully employed, and have been for the past six years. But I've been keeping an eye on the job market, mostly as an exercise in curiousity. So far, everything I've seen is "Must have 5+ years in skill X, 5+ years in skill Y working specifically in the Z industry using tools Q, R, and S." I think this is actually done specifically so they can claim there's a shortage of quallified tech-workers.
Either that, or a department just had someone quit, and they're attempting to replace her with another person with her exact skillset, right down to any certifications and experience she may have gained while working there. Take the skills of the person who left, roll it back to when she started, use that as the requirements, and they'd be no worse off. The last person worked out fine with that level of knowledge, right? But they want a drop-in replacement. They're likely to be looking for a long time using that reasoning.
It's a pretty smart move considering the average salary in the US for coders is over $90k.
What sir, are you smoking... and may I have some? Unless you live in Cali, where everything is ridiculously expensive and requires an equally insane income, salaries of 90k, even for someone like an experienced Oracle DBA, is wishful thinking.
Your situation is very similar to mine. I also grew up poor, and just happened to have an old TRS-80 I fiddled with for years. I figured that CS being a field with pretty good money was a lucky break from my past. I never considered CS hard, and I also majored in Math and Physics while I was in college. I'm a DBA now and make respectable income, but that's only because I graduated in '99, and missed the crash barely, by a single year.
These days, I couldn't in good conscience recommend anyone take a major in CS if they want to make a living wage. There's just no point to it unless you have 5+ years of experience in *everything* judging by all the job ads I see in the paper.
To be honest, this doesn't really surprise me. I work for a company that provides newspaper-centric ISP services, and we've fought with AP for years over feeds, images, you name it. We host many of their partners, and we reduce the overal bandwidth between us and AP by doing a single aggregate feed which is only enabled for genuine AP-carriers. Yet time after time, we've had to argue with AP over the article posting rights of their own customers.
This is yet another kink they're throwing into the mix, as now we have to know which of the AP partners have actually paid for online publishing rights. This will likely irritate our programmers, and probably reduce the amount of our customers re-publishing AP data, but that's about it.
Personally, I don't understand the point of publishing AP online if you're a local paper, anyway. Often this data isn't differentiated from the paper's own articles, and ends up getting archived as such. Many papers these days require registration or pay-access to their archives, which are now diluted with articles that have been replicated thousands of times over by newspapers all over the country.
I don't know... I just never watched it because there is no UPN affiliate in this area. I suppose putting the show on a network that... oh, people actually watch, might have helped the situation.
Please people, don't feed the trolls... The line between American Made (tm) products and foreign products is very thin these days. My Mitsubishi for example, was manufactured in Springfield, Illinois. An "American" X-box was likely made in Mexico. Unless you painstakingly track every product you ever buy, it's almost impossible to buy American, aside from labor and services.
You might want to try another example. Almost every language out there currently considers an if statement a precursor to an element. An element may consist of one statement, or a block of statements. Thus in your example, the first if does not require the curly braces. Had you used two statements in the block, your point would stand.
The semantic meaning of {} is "consider anything in here, part of a single element." One would even argue that it makes more sense, since you can say that anything within the curly braces, belongs with the if statement. With only indentation, what happens when you have two if statements that are many pages long? You scroll until you find something not as indented as the rest, prefixed with "if, while, for, etc." But where does your block end?
When I end a {}, I always append a statement about what I'm ending:
//... 100 lines of code...
}// End wombat smacking block.
How would you do that in a language with no explicit block delimiter? I find languages like Ada the ideal, since they force you to say what block element you are terminating. Does that mean they're inherently better, somehow? Sure, it's more "clutter", but it conveys meaning. You sound like the kind of person that may describe commenting as clutter - in which case, stay away from me, foul beast.;)
Now, call me when python enforces 40% commenting, standard variable, function, and class naming schemes complete with javadoc-style interface declaration headers, and named blocks, and I might care. Otherwise it's Just Another Language(tm).
Don't forget "emulate". My editor, and in fact any editor I will use, is set to display all indentation as two spaces, and convert any tabs to two spaces. If I press tab, I also get two virtual spaces that don't really exist until I actually type something on that line. It means all code looks the same to me, no matter how many tabs vs. spaces it may contain. Other people though...
Really, there is no point. A good editor will hide inconsistent spacing, so why bother?
No, actually... it doesn't. I've seen python code that uses *only* the indentation rule - there was no other extra whitespace or comments anywhere. Not between functions, not between class declarations, not between loops, nowhere. Not only was this code unreadable, but it proved to me that you can't make someone a good programmer by enforcing semantic rules in the language. While we're at it, why not build a language that enforces javadoc-style comments at a rate of 40% or more to code? How about one that enforces a standard naming scheme on variables?
Personally, my code usually has a giant comment at the top describing the purpose of a class/library, a reference implementation, and version information. Before any significant chunk, I write out what I'm doing, and why - in case I ever have to read it again in the future. in the end, my code is probably half comments. This is good programming practice in general, and so few people do it that it makes me want to cry. Anybody, and I mean anybody, can pick up some of my code and figure out what's going on.
*That* is why I think python's enforcement of whitespace is a pointless anachronism. Good programming is good programming. Remember when Java said making everything an object meant everyone had to use objects properly? No, it meant old functional programmers would make a huge class, call it "UtilitiyClass" and use it like a library. You simply can not make good programming practice magically appear via language rules.
So yeah. I'll continue to roll my eyes when people mention python. No single attribute transforms an otherwise commonplace language into greathood. It's just another tool to me, with a weird limitation I could care less about, since it never applied to me anyway. Yeah, my code style would work in python; it also works in ada, c/c++, java, perl, php, and every other language I've used.
Python's cross-platform compatibility and somewhat extensive library are another point entirely. Why not push those elements instead? They actually mean something to good programmers who wouldn't give two figs about python's Awsome Whitespace Rule(tm).
Go ahead and click on any of the links on that page which describe bugs fixed in a release of the many branches. In almost every one, there's a critical bug that causes replication to fail, turn itself off, crash mysql, or otherwise act in an unpredictable manner. We've wanted to use it for two years now, but every release has some terrible flaw that makes this impossible.
Heck, they've only recently fixed a bug in the 4.0 branch that's been there since at least 4.0.12 which caused mysql to silently segfault and restart itself. Not to mention the bug before that, which segfaulted, restarted mysql, and randomly corrupted open tables. 4.0 is just now getting to the point where I'd recommend it to other people. I won't touch 5.0 with a mile-long pole until it hits 5.0.20.
Actually I wonder why anyone advocates number 1, unless the core developers are just absolute tools. The feeling I get is that the core developers of Gnome are generally respected. So why does it seem like anyone defending them would rather risk another X.Org reaction, than maybe listen a little?
This happens to a lot of open source projects I see. They languish for a while in response to user complaints, and someone forks it. The fork becomes more popular than the original branch, and the original developers get left out in the cold for their troubles. Why do we encourage this? What is with the STFU AND FORK IT attitude, anyway?
While there is definitely a "trollish" feel to all of this, I'm not so sure it's that simple. The thing is, if there really is a dearth of missing functionality, users will eventually get fed up with it, and fork the source. We all saw this happen with xF86 vs. xOrg.
If you ignore the ranting, it comes down to this: do the developers really want to encourage forking which may wrench the entire project out of their control, so far as relevance is concerned? Really, she's giving them a chance to cut this off before it reaches that point. While the level of loyalty seen here for the core developers is encouraging, reacting to the tone of her message ignores the issue.
Just because someone is being an ass, doesn't mean they're wrong.
Actually, I've wondered about that myself. If kids reproduce a violent scene from a movie and someone gets injured, the clamor to end violence in movies is frightening. But if the same kids play a scene out from the bible and someone gets hurt, strangely everyone is silent.
Bastard! I got my 4M+ for $135 a year ago. Then again, it came with 34MB of memory in it, and only had 21,000 pages on it.
When I got it about a year ago, they were all about that price. Are they that low now? Either way, you're right: these things are cheap. Sure, they're steel and weigh about 35lbs, but they're probably the most reliable printer HP ever made.
For bonus points, if your toner ever gets low, remove your cart, turn it upside-down and shake it. Reinsert and you'll get about another 100 pages. Friend from college taught me that one.
One major problem with Family Video: none of them are tied to the others. You'd think that seeing 2 or 3 of them in a city, one "Family Video" card would work in all of them. A friend of mine from Peoria tried using her card here in Moline twice to no avail; they insisted she needed a new card. I've had my original blockbuster card for the past 9 years, and it has worked in every city, every state, I've ever rented from.
That said, Family Video is damn cheap in comparison, with longer rental times by default. It's a good place to go if you don't travel often, or don't mind having a stack of "Family Video" cards.
Nope. It's called a robots.txt file, honored by good web-crawlers (such as Google's) for decades. Works for everyone - even Google.
Microsft wanted a special meta tag to opt out, made only for their service. The reason this was evil, was because every business could take the concept; suddenly you'd have to opt out of each individual site-modifying product ever created. It was also supposed to be built into IE, meaning it would have been enabled by default on 90% of the world's browsers.
Now, I don't know about you, but a google toolbar is something I download myself. This toolbar also doesn't autolink a site until the user clicks a button. This means the user *knows* the links are not sponsored by the site they're visiting, but are external - created by the Google toolbar. This is similar to running a site through a translator, or a dialect filter - it's a user-initiated action for their own entertainment.
Notice the difference of approaches. In one case, 90% of the web suddenly thinks your site advocates maalox. In the other, odd terms are highlighted if the user wants to know what the hell you mean by "wikipedia."
Running a business is different, though. You really do have to track pretty much everything you buy, so you can weed through all of your receipts and sum up business deduction and totals for quarterly filings. In which case, you really should have an accountant anyway.
Ah well. I personally think we could do it the same way it goes in the EU. You buy something from France? Pay the french their sales tax. With the amount of interstate commerce we have, it would even out, and be a lot easier to manage than keeping a record and summing it up at the end of the year; just pay when you buy.
I love how it's easier to do inter-country taxing in EU, than it is to do inter-state taxing here. How exactly does something like that happen, anyway? Aren't we supposed to be *united* states?
So you're saying you look up address information for each company you buy from online, including all subsidiary offices, and actually manage to track, for an entire year, all such purchases for the sake of tax filing?
Ok, now that we've determined you're an accountant, how about an option for the rest of us?
The reason to restrict build net cafe 200m away from school is that too many kids go to net cafes after school and spend too much time on computer games or internet surfing.
Right, because no child will walk more than 200 meters from school, and no child lives within walking distance of an internet cafe. Also no children have the internet at home, nor do they have any friends with the internet. Just because children are fairly bad at time management is no reason to shut down businesses.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no doubt my company will do the same thing. I've often wondered about this, and I do understand their position, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. To this day, I discourage anyone I know from entering this field, all for reasons like this.
Does a carpenter need 5+ years of experience using Craftsman drill presses? No, they just need a few years of experience in carpentry and facets thereof. Why does someone need 5+ years as an Oracle DBA, if they already have the same amount of experience with multiple databases that just didn't happen to be Oracle? Database theory doesn't really change from implementation to implementation, yet the requirements are firm.
I haven't really found an easy way to deal with things like this, since they currently hold all the cards.
Ah well.
If it were as simple as lowering standards, I might agree with you. Something interesting has been happening in this sector recently however. Not a single person I know, not even the guy getting a double Ph.D. in CS and Engineering, with an IQ over 160 and a photographic memory, quallifies for 90% of the jobs I've seen posted. I'm not talking overquallified, he doesn't fulfill their minimum requirements.
What's that? Not possible, you say? I'm gainfully employed, and have been for the past six years. But I've been keeping an eye on the job market, mostly as an exercise in curiousity. So far, everything I've seen is "Must have 5+ years in skill X, 5+ years in skill Y working specifically in the Z industry using tools Q, R, and S." I think this is actually done specifically so they can claim there's a shortage of quallified tech-workers.
Either that, or a department just had someone quit, and they're attempting to replace her with another person with her exact skillset, right down to any certifications and experience she may have gained while working there. Take the skills of the person who left, roll it back to when she started, use that as the requirements, and they'd be no worse off. The last person worked out fine with that level of knowledge, right? But they want a drop-in replacement. They're likely to be looking for a long time using that reasoning.
It's a pretty smart move considering the average salary in the US for coders is over $90k.
What sir, are you smoking... and may I have some? Unless you live in Cali, where everything is ridiculously expensive and requires an equally insane income, salaries of 90k, even for someone like an experienced Oracle DBA, is wishful thinking.
Seriously... 90k?
Your situation is very similar to mine. I also grew up poor, and just happened to have an old TRS-80 I fiddled with for years. I figured that CS being a field with pretty good money was a lucky break from my past. I never considered CS hard, and I also majored in Math and Physics while I was in college. I'm a DBA now and make respectable income, but that's only because I graduated in '99, and missed the crash barely, by a single year.
These days, I couldn't in good conscience recommend anyone take a major in CS if they want to make a living wage. There's just no point to it unless you have 5+ years of experience in *everything* judging by all the job ads I see in the paper.
Oh noez! Your imaginary invisible man, written about in a storybook condemns gays! Whatever will them poor gay people do!?!!??!?!??!!!111one!!1
To be honest, this doesn't really surprise me. I work for a company that provides newspaper-centric ISP services, and we've fought with AP for years over feeds, images, you name it. We host many of their partners, and we reduce the overal bandwidth between us and AP by doing a single aggregate feed which is only enabled for genuine AP-carriers. Yet time after time, we've had to argue with AP over the article posting rights of their own customers.
This is yet another kink they're throwing into the mix, as now we have to know which of the AP partners have actually paid for online publishing rights. This will likely irritate our programmers, and probably reduce the amount of our customers re-publishing AP data, but that's about it.
Personally, I don't understand the point of publishing AP online if you're a local paper, anyway. Often this data isn't differentiated from the paper's own articles, and ends up getting archived as such. Many papers these days require registration or pay-access to their archives, which are now diluted with articles that have been replicated thousands of times over by newspapers all over the country.
I don't know... I just never watched it because there is no UPN affiliate in this area. I suppose putting the show on a network that... oh, people actually watch, might have helped the situation.
And thanks to the "moral mandate" of our current administration, this will never happen.
Next.
Please people, don't feed the trolls... The line between American Made (tm) products and foreign products is very thin these days. My Mitsubishi for example, was manufactured in Springfield, Illinois. An "American" X-box was likely made in Mexico. Unless you painstakingly track every product you ever buy, it's almost impossible to buy American, aside from labor and services.
Think about that for a second.
You're right. Libraries never have more than one function in them, and functions are never more than 100 lines.
What was I thinking?
The semantic meaning of {} is "consider anything in here, part of a single element." One would even argue that it makes more sense, since you can say that anything within the curly braces, belongs with the if statement. With only indentation, what happens when you have two if statements that are many pages long? You scroll until you find something not as indented as the rest, prefixed with "if, while, for, etc." But where does your block end?
When I end a {}, I always append a statement about what I'm ending:How would you do that in a language with no explicit block delimiter? I find languages like Ada the ideal, since they force you to say what block element you are terminating. Does that mean they're inherently better, somehow? Sure, it's more "clutter", but it conveys meaning. You sound like the kind of person that may describe commenting as clutter - in which case, stay away from me, foul beast.
Now, call me when python enforces 40% commenting, standard variable, function, and class naming schemes complete with javadoc-style interface declaration headers, and named blocks, and I might care. Otherwise it's Just Another Language(tm).
Don't forget "emulate". My editor, and in fact any editor I will use, is set to display all indentation as two spaces, and convert any tabs to two spaces. If I press tab, I also get two virtual spaces that don't really exist until I actually type something on that line. It means all code looks the same to me, no matter how many tabs vs. spaces it may contain. Other people though...
Really, there is no point. A good editor will hide inconsistent spacing, so why bother?
No, actually... it doesn't. I've seen python code that uses *only* the indentation rule - there was no other extra whitespace or comments anywhere. Not between functions, not between class declarations, not between loops, nowhere. Not only was this code unreadable, but it proved to me that you can't make someone a good programmer by enforcing semantic rules in the language. While we're at it, why not build a language that enforces javadoc-style comments at a rate of 40% or more to code? How about one that enforces a standard naming scheme on variables?
Personally, my code usually has a giant comment at the top describing the purpose of a class/library, a reference implementation, and version information. Before any significant chunk, I write out what I'm doing, and why - in case I ever have to read it again in the future. in the end, my code is probably half comments. This is good programming practice in general, and so few people do it that it makes me want to cry. Anybody, and I mean anybody, can pick up some of my code and figure out what's going on.
*That* is why I think python's enforcement of whitespace is a pointless anachronism. Good programming is good programming. Remember when Java said making everything an object meant everyone had to use objects properly? No, it meant old functional programmers would make a huge class, call it "UtilitiyClass" and use it like a library. You simply can not make good programming practice magically appear via language rules.
So yeah. I'll continue to roll my eyes when people mention python. No single attribute transforms an otherwise commonplace language into greathood. It's just another tool to me, with a weird limitation I could care less about, since it never applied to me anyway. Yeah, my code style would work in python; it also works in ada, c/c++, java, perl, php, and every other language I've used.
Python's cross-platform compatibility and somewhat extensive library are another point entirely. Why not push those elements instead? They actually mean something to good programmers who wouldn't give two figs about python's Awsome Whitespace Rule(tm).
What? Wife? Now who's telling April Fools jokes?
True, true. You got me there. ^_^
Go ahead and click on any of the links on that page which describe bugs fixed in a release of the many branches. In almost every one, there's a critical bug that causes replication to fail, turn itself off, crash mysql, or otherwise act in an unpredictable manner. We've wanted to use it for two years now, but every release has some terrible flaw that makes this impossible.
Heck, they've only recently fixed a bug in the 4.0 branch that's been there since at least 4.0.12 which caused mysql to silently segfault and restart itself. Not to mention the bug before that, which segfaulted, restarted mysql, and randomly corrupted open tables. 4.0 is just now getting to the point where I'd recommend it to other people. I won't touch 5.0 with a mile-long pole until it hits 5.0.20.
Actually I wonder why anyone advocates number 1, unless the core developers are just absolute tools. The feeling I get is that the core developers of Gnome are generally respected. So why does it seem like anyone defending them would rather risk another X.Org reaction, than maybe listen a little?
This happens to a lot of open source projects I see. They languish for a while in response to user complaints, and someone forks it. The fork becomes more popular than the original branch, and the original developers get left out in the cold for their troubles. Why do we encourage this? What is with the STFU AND FORK IT attitude, anyway?
While there is definitely a "trollish" feel to all of this, I'm not so sure it's that simple. The thing is, if there really is a dearth of missing functionality, users will eventually get fed up with it, and fork the source. We all saw this happen with xF86 vs. xOrg.
If you ignore the ranting, it comes down to this: do the developers really want to encourage forking which may wrench the entire project out of their control, so far as relevance is concerned? Really, she's giving them a chance to cut this off before it reaches that point. While the level of loyalty seen here for the core developers is encouraging, reacting to the tone of her message ignores the issue.
Just because someone is being an ass, doesn't mean they're wrong.
Actually, I've wondered about that myself. If kids reproduce a violent scene from a movie and someone gets injured, the clamor to end violence in movies is frightening. But if the same kids play a scene out from the bible and someone gets hurt, strangely everyone is silent.
Bastard! I got my 4M+ for $135 a year ago. Then again, it came with 34MB of memory in it, and only had 21,000 pages on it.
When I got it about a year ago, they were all about that price. Are they that low now? Either way, you're right: these things are cheap. Sure, they're steel and weigh about 35lbs, but they're probably the most reliable printer HP ever made.
For bonus points, if your toner ever gets low, remove your cart, turn it upside-down and shake it. Reinsert and you'll get about another 100 pages. Friend from college taught me that one.
One major problem with Family Video: none of them are tied to the others. You'd think that seeing 2 or 3 of them in a city, one "Family Video" card would work in all of them. A friend of mine from Peoria tried using her card here in Moline twice to no avail; they insisted she needed a new card. I've had my original blockbuster card for the past 9 years, and it has worked in every city, every state, I've ever rented from.
That said, Family Video is damn cheap in comparison, with longer rental times by default. It's a good place to go if you don't travel often, or don't mind having a stack of "Family Video" cards.
Nope. It's called a robots.txt file, honored by good web-crawlers (such as Google's) for decades. Works for everyone - even Google.
Microsft wanted a special meta tag to opt out, made only for their service. The reason this was evil, was because every business could take the concept; suddenly you'd have to opt out of each individual site-modifying product ever created. It was also supposed to be built into IE, meaning it would have been enabled by default on 90% of the world's browsers.
Now, I don't know about you, but a google toolbar is something I download myself. This toolbar also doesn't autolink a site until the user clicks a button. This means the user *knows* the links are not sponsored by the site they're visiting, but are external - created by the Google toolbar. This is similar to running a site through a translator, or a dialect filter - it's a user-initiated action for their own entertainment.
Notice the difference of approaches. In one case, 90% of the web suddenly thinks your site advocates maalox. In the other, odd terms are highlighted if the user wants to know what the hell you mean by "wikipedia."
Running a business is different, though. You really do have to track pretty much everything you buy, so you can weed through all of your receipts and sum up business deduction and totals for quarterly filings. In which case, you really should have an accountant anyway.
Ah well. I personally think we could do it the same way it goes in the EU. You buy something from France? Pay the french their sales tax. With the amount of interstate commerce we have, it would even out, and be a lot easier to manage than keeping a record and summing it up at the end of the year; just pay when you buy.
I love how it's easier to do inter-country taxing in EU, than it is to do inter-state taxing here. How exactly does something like that happen, anyway? Aren't we supposed to be *united* states?
So you're saying you look up address information for each company you buy from online, including all subsidiary offices, and actually manage to track, for an entire year, all such purchases for the sake of tax filing?
Ok, now that we've determined you're an accountant, how about an option for the rest of us?