This past weekend I was at a barbeque sitting talking to three guys all about my age (early 40's). After a few minutes I found out that one was a cop, recently retired who was collecting a healthy pension and was trying to decide if he wanted to get another job or just do some traveling and enjoy himself. The other was a postal worker who was upset because the union has told everyone to work slower because postal mail is down over 20% and there isn't enough work for everyone but according to union rules nobody can ever be laid off. The third was a city fireman who has retired and was outfitting his boat for a year-long trip from New York down to the Caribbean with his entire family.
After a few moments of this it struck me that I was paying for all of this.I was the only one of the three that was generating money from outside the government system and paying into it. All three of them were getting paid from the government, were not working as hard as me or not at all, and their taxes are an accounting trick because the money was going from the government to them and back to the government.
I am a CS major with 25 years experience. I make six figures and my job is in no jeopardy. I have no idea what an FSMO is. I don't do PC support, and neither do any of my friends who graduated with me. Computer Science wasn't about PC support.
> In short... As a developer, you need to either grow or dwindle. Some do not have the skills/desire to move forward. For those, the decline in wages and stagnation of performance is clearly going to be a problem over the long haul.
I passed the test. I shall diminish and go into the West.
> They are your future internal talent, however, so it is critical that you make sure you spend the time to help them grow their careers even if it is not eventually with my company.
Truly spoken like someone who is blind to what our industry, and our country, has been doing for the past 20 years. There is no next generation of programmers. The entry level has been outsourced. The technology to do software design will one day be like the technology to send a man to the Moon. If we want to do it we will have to build an industry from scratch.
> 'To find out, simply ROUND UP THE EXPERTS to hash out the linkages, translate them into algorithms, and upload enough historical data to populate the model. Then turn the knobs to see what happens when you nudge the city in one direction.'
The real wisdom is that most people, upon reaching a fork in the road, sit down and watch TV, eat some Bon-Bons, and forget where they had meant to go until it gets dark and goes to sleep only to repeat the same the next day.
Take either path. He says they look equally fair. Just pick one and GO. Your destiny lies on the path, not at the fork.
To use an above poster's example: Linus Torvalds sat down and wrote Linux instead of reading about what other people were doing.
Ok, gotta go, I have a hundred tabs open to different Slashdot articles I want to read...
> We're a ~100 person.NET shop and we do about 10 million a year with small businesses. It's worked great for us!
For various definitions of "great".
Let's say your largest single expense is salaries. We'll use 50% of gross, or $5 million/yr. Probably the owners take home much more then the rest of the team, we'll use $500K between 2 or 3 owners. You have $4,500,000 left. Divide that by your 100 people and you are all making an average of $45,000/yr.
Hopefully you are in Idaho, not New York or San Francisco because $45,000/yr is not "great" in either of those cities.
I see everyone is in agreement with this. It's a shame. When I was a teenager I was friends with one of my teachers. He took me under his wing, brought me to cool places that I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. He became friends with my family. Never an inappropriate touch or word.
But everyone knows now that all men are child molesters, especially teachers.
rsync only syncs in one direction. A two way rsync doesn't handle every case properly, such as deleted files (should it be deleted on the other side, or is it a new file that should be copy back?)
For proper two way sync you need something like Unison. Unison + ssh + cron is a perfect two way sync. The only thing Dropbox has over Unison + ssh + cron is dropbox monitors file changes in real time and so picks up changes right away and efficiently. Anything that runs every 5 minutes and scans through files is less efficient.
Imagine two people from different towns, John and Barry. John invents cookies and starts making cookies. Barry has a bakery and decided John's invention will add to his profit, so Barry starts making cookies too. Since Barry has a bakery with better equipment and staff, Barry soon puts John out of business.
Later that week Zeke is sitting in Barry's bakery eating a cookie and has a revolutionary idea for a new invention. Just then John passes by dressed in rags begging for food and Zeke decides it's not worth the trouble pursuing his idea.
I hate software patents and patent trolls in general, but your analogy is too simple and not everything about patents is bad.
> the guys who will be making and maintaining "telex" nodes will not sell them to any Government or ISP that censors the internet.
That won't work unless they also make it against their Usage Policy for totalitarian governments to use a third-party to purchase a "telex" node. Then it will be safe.
Slashdot Mirror
This past weekend I was at a barbeque sitting talking to three guys all about my age (early 40's). After a few minutes I found out that one was a cop, recently retired who was collecting a healthy pension and was trying to decide if he wanted to get another job or just do some traveling and enjoy himself. The other was a postal worker who was upset because the union has told everyone to work slower because postal mail is down over 20% and there isn't enough work for everyone but according to union rules nobody can ever be laid off. The third was a city fireman who has retired and was outfitting his boat for a year-long trip from New York down to the Caribbean with his entire family.
After a few moments of this it struck me that I was paying for all of this.I was the only one of the three that was generating money from outside the government system and paying into it. All three of them were getting paid from the government, were not working as hard as me or not at all, and their taxes are an accounting trick because the money was going from the government to them and back to the government.
I am a CS major with 25 years experience. I make six figures and my job is in no jeopardy. I have no idea what an FSMO is.
I don't do PC support, and neither do any of my friends who graduated with me. Computer Science wasn't about PC support.
> If mail delivery is cut back will the due date of my bills be extended?
Does it matter? You would still pay them on midnight the day it was due.
> In short... As a developer, you need to either grow or dwindle. Some do not have the skills/desire to move forward. For those, the decline in wages and stagnation of performance is clearly going to be a problem over the long haul.
I passed the test. I shall diminish and go into the West.
> They are your future internal talent, however, so it is critical that you make sure you spend the time to help them grow their careers even if it is not eventually with my company.
Truly spoken like someone who is blind to what our industry, and our country, has been doing for the past 20 years.
There is no next generation of programmers. The entry level has been outsourced. The technology to do software design will one day be like the technology to send a man to the Moon. If we want to do it we will have to build an industry from scratch.
They have this. It's called a Live-CD.
It just doesn't come with the PC.
I love my Apollo workstations. I still have two of them.
Specious argument. People aren't being sued for downloading old out-of-print movies.
> But how does the cost of an SSD compare, to 2 years of a worked being unproductive for an extra 7 minutes / day?
The SSD costs more than banning Facebook, which will recover an unproductive 3 hours / day.
> A normal war while can have some that there isn't a declared winner or looser. But there are also wars where there is a Winner and a Looser.
*my grammar-nazi sense is tingling*
So if the loser is Looser, does that mean that the Winner is always tighter?
Your English while can have some.
> 'To find out, simply ROUND UP THE EXPERTS to hash out the linkages, translate them into algorithms, and upload enough historical data to populate the model. Then turn the knobs to see what happens when you nudge the city in one direction.'
(emphasis mine)
Here's your problem!
> And the cost-benefit of the cut was negligible-believe it or not, App Inventor was a small team of just 5+ employees! The Math doesn't make sense.'"
One of those 5 employees parked in Sergey Brin's parking spot. The rest was inevitable.
The real wisdom is that most people, upon reaching a fork in the road, sit down and watch TV, eat some Bon-Bons, and forget where they had meant to go until it gets dark and goes to sleep only to repeat the same the next day.
Take either path. He says they look equally fair. Just pick one and GO. Your destiny lies on the path, not at the fork.
To use an above poster's example: Linus Torvalds sat down and wrote Linux instead of reading about what other people were doing.
Ok, gotta go, I have a hundred tabs open to different Slashdot articles I want to read...
Even M. Night Shayamalan has better mysteries than you.
Command of the English language is probably on their checklist as well. Thanks for sending your resume.
> We're a ~100 person .NET shop and we do about 10 million a year with small businesses. It's worked great for us!
For various definitions of "great".
Let's say your largest single expense is salaries. We'll use 50% of gross, or $5 million/yr. Probably the owners take home much more then the rest of the team, we'll use $500K between 2 or 3 owners. You have $4,500,000 left. Divide that by your 100 people and you are all making an average of $45,000/yr.
Hopefully you are in Idaho, not New York or San Francisco because $45,000/yr is not "great" in either of those cities.
I see everyone is in agreement with this.
It's a shame. When I was a teenager I was friends with one of my teachers. He took me under his wing, brought me to cool places that I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. He became friends with my family. Never an inappropriate touch or word.
But everyone knows now that all men are child molesters, especially teachers.
rsync only syncs in one direction. A two way rsync doesn't handle every case properly, such as deleted files (should it be deleted on the other side, or is it a new file that should be copy back?)
For proper two way sync you need something like Unison. Unison + ssh + cron is a perfect two way sync. The only thing Dropbox has over Unison + ssh + cron is dropbox monitors file changes in real time and so picks up changes right away and efficiently. Anything that runs every 5 minutes and scans through files is less efficient.
I'm buying the iPhone 5 sight-unseen.
I am even checking the option that allows Apple to surgically transform me into a HumaniCentiPad.
Imagine two people from different towns, John and Barry. John invents cookies and starts making cookies. Barry has a bakery and decided John's invention will add to his profit, so Barry starts making cookies too. Since Barry has a bakery with better equipment and staff, Barry soon puts John out of business.
Later that week Zeke is sitting in Barry's bakery eating a cookie and has a revolutionary idea for a new invention. Just then John passes by dressed in rags begging for food and Zeke decides it's not worth the trouble pursuing his idea.
I hate software patents and patent trolls in general, but your analogy is too simple and not everything about patents is bad.
> bullshitting two national governments in order to handle your private affairs for you.
There was no bullshitting. The governments are only too happy to do as they are told,
Yes.
That's why it's a famous poem.
Or he could have, I don't know, fed the desperately poor people in his country...
> the guys who will be making and maintaining "telex" nodes will not sell them to any Government or ISP that censors the internet.
That won't work unless they also make it against their Usage Policy for totalitarian governments to use a third-party to purchase a "telex" node. Then it will be safe.
Don't count on it: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinking-tech/googles-self-driving-car/5445