Yep. High level languages such as python are great for letting you focus on the domain-specific task you want to accomplish without spending years learning all the little poorly-documented compiler-specific idiosyncrasies of compilers and preprocessors and template languages. Once you're through the prototyping phase and have your interface definitions and unit tests set up, you can then toss things one module at a time over to one of those software weenies to turn into hand-optimized production code. And they'll probably be happier since they don't have to tax their communications skills talking to project managers while trying to figure out what's going on from a nebulous requirements definition document.
Yes, I did my master's thesis using simpy / scipy, integrated with lp_solve for the number crunching , all of which was a breeze to learn and use. It was amazing banging out a new recursive algorithm crawling a new object structure and just having it work the first time without spending several precious cycles bugfixing syntax errors and chasing down obscure stack overflows.
I used the psyco JIT compiler (unfortunately 32-bit only) to get ~100x boost in runtime performance (all from a single import statement, woo), which was fast enough for me... these days I think you can get similar boosts from running on PyPy. Of course, if you're doing more serious number crunching, python makes it easy to rewrite your performance-critical modules in C/C++.
I also ended up making a LiveCD and/or VM of my thesis, which was a good way of wrapping up the software environment and dependencies, which could quickly grow outdated in a few short years.
Programming is a tool, not a trade. It sounds like the submitter wants to learn a trade, that may or may not be business-related.
If you have a job that pays for education, by all means, go back to school and take courses that interest you. And see if you can surreptitiously grow that into a trade that you can be awesome at because of your mad programming skills. There are tons of fields (business, accounting, engineering, wedding planning, art history, etc.) and all of them could greatly be enhanced by someone with your skillset. So find something you love, and use your existing tools to become awesome at it. "Find something you love, then find some fool to pay you to do it".
On the other hand, if you simply want to go the MBA route for the monies... well, first you may want to decide if you want to become a project manager or a people manager, and then pursue studies in "systems engineering" vs. "organizational development" accordingly.
It was always a bluff and everyone knew it. The benefactors behind the GOP would not allow them to allow the dollar to default. I can only imagine the kinds of phone calls they had been receiving from concerned benefactors, though.
But pretty sure we'll be doing this again in a few months. It's the only button the GOP has right now, so they're going to have to use it. Kind of like the MAD doctrine... nukes are absolutely useless unless you can convince every one that you are absolutely insane enough to use them, hence all of the brinksmanship during the cold war.
Fortunately the other side was cool-headed enough to see this for what it was and call their bluff without too many concessions. It'll be interesting to see how half-heartedly they try to pull this exercise next time... especially since it did definitely weaken the dollar internationally (albeit no where near as much as a default would have). The GOP might still construe this as a win, since their objective is to make Obama look bad at any cost... and now they can point to 2-3 weeks of furlough and a dip in the dollar and economy as signs of "his policies not working" *snicker*.
I wouldn't call it the "Premium" market, but I'm pretty sure Valve/Steam has a much different market than the console titles.
The Steam Machine seems like yet another settop box that would allow you to remote into your gaming computer from your entertainment center. All of the PC people probably already have their gaming PCs plugged directly into the biggest monitor they have, so I don't think this will help that market segment much. But I can see it making inroads on the console community... though probably not much more than the OnLive "remote cloud-hosted gaming" service.
First I made them carry around a toy phone with them for a month before they could not lose it. Currently both the 8 and the 11 year old break their phones (dropping them or getting them wet or mishandling them) once every few months. Fortunately at this point we haven't lost any SIM cards yet, since those are a bit more meddlesome to replace. Some of our friends had given their kids old smartphones. Those are all broken now too.
We have one of the family plans with T-mobile, so it was an extra $5/mo. per line on our bill, but they had some promotion where it was free for the first year or so.
If you really want to do Skype or Google Messenger or something, get an old laptop or tablet with a docking station that can live somewhere in the house and be always on. Built-in front-facing camera, so it's dead simple, set up the accounts and let it auto-answer so you can just pop in and say hi, if they're comfortable with that. Set this up in a little VTC telepresence area. Don't let them move it around or do anything else with it... if it's not able to stay on and fully powered and signed in, you won't be able to call it and it'll be useless for its intended purpose. Get them a separate device for "playing games" or "educational software".
If you go with a tablet, splurge for the docking station. I've never had a micro-usb cable stay connected and charged worth a shit, particularly when handled by children, but even in the gentle hands of responsible adults.
Yep. I've worked with a few people I would consider "Rockstar" programmers in the "non-asshole" sense. They were fun to be around, considerate, polite, knew their shit inside and out, and tutored / mentored me and others to become more effective at the parts of the project we worked on.
These days, the first interview question I throw at new candidates is "Tell me a story about a time you had a technical difference of opinion with another person or group, and describe what you did to resolve your conflict and move forward". It's a behavioral interview tactic I picked up from a former big employer, and it tends to be fun to note how much they squirm while recounting past bad blood. Now, no one has really ever totally bombed this question, but making them talk through some of their uncomfortable scenarios provides some good insight into how much experience people have when they inevitably have to deal with conflict resolution... and the mere fact that we ask it kinda prompts them with the expectations we have of our employees for cooperating with others in our environment.
I used to use netscape mail, then left after they lost all my data (fortunately, I set up forwarding to another account)
Then I used yahoo mail, then left after they got overrun with spam and allowed crackers to send emails to my (and my wife's) address books. Also it was a pain to download my mail spool via fetchyahoo.pl .
Now we've been using multiple gmail accounts (one for emailing actual people, and semi-anonymous ones for website registration / bots / mailing lists, that have notification turned off). They also forward mail to my home mail spool, so I'm mostly ready to migrate to the next best thing when necessary.
It's nice that yahoo tries to give the extra little push to help their users find something better, though. I appreciate that!
Though I still prefer to use IRC instead of most social media sites.
Heh, reminds me of another saying I try to live by... "You don't get rich by living richly".
I take that to mean you don't flaunt your wealth (people who do are most likely spending other people's money). And also the way you mean it, in that you expect some kind of return for the investment of your generosity. At some point, money was considered power, and people who were smart enough to successfully amass some amount of money and power were generally good at redistributing to maximize positive impact on their business and community.
At some point, money and power seems to have diverged somewhat (though there is some kind of exchange rate between them). So the people who try to maximize money focus on just that to the detriment of everyone else, and the ones who try to amass power... well... don't really have control over enough money to really do anything beyond help their friends with the money and CYA.
Anyway, I'm starting to sound like I have to tend to my lawn.
That's fine and all, but I really don't care about the OS name. There's multiple articles out there and people going crazy _just for the name_. I want to know what's new in the OS for developers, not what their next marketing strategy is.
Also, the Android OS version apparently doesn't really matter anymore... they moved all of the critical API stuff to "Google Play Services" which auto-updates every week or so, and pretty much supports everything back to Android 2.2
This. If there's one thing I learned from my AP Chemistry teacher, it was to pay attention and learn from the textbook. Classroom instruction was for review and socializing the concepts, but if I didn't have an inkling of what was going on in advance of the lecture for labs, I would be totally lost.
Teachers are there to help keep pace and entertain the occasional question... but you can't and shouldn't expect them to spoon feed everything to you and your kin. Yes, perhaps sometimes you might get lucky and find a very motivational teacher that can present the material to you in a series of epiphanies, but that's not the sort of thing you can rely on these days.
... but here's an exercise that will translate into the real world... Separate them into two groups, the "M" group, and the "E" group.
The Ms ties the Es group's hands up behind their backs. Then the Ms set themselves on fire, and have to coerce the Es to put the fire out with their hands tied up. If the Ms survive, they get more Es and go again. If the don't, they're replaced with a new M, preferably one from outside who has no idea what just happened.
But yeah, what do you do when something that someone else is doing is demonstrably hurting other people?
OTOH, we also have a culture of not punishing people before their crime is demonstrably committed. So for the sake of transparency, I'd think the best we could be doing right now is just outlining the repercussions on polluters that will go into effect after everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
Yeah, I cringed a bit when my google search for "London Fog" came up with an io9 article (is that a gawker site... ech). Anyway, here's a better one on previous occurences in the 1800s:
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. High level languages such as python are great for letting you focus on the domain-specific task you want to accomplish without spending years learning all the little poorly-documented compiler-specific idiosyncrasies of compilers and preprocessors and template languages. Once you're through the prototyping phase and have your interface definitions and unit tests set up, you can then toss things one module at a time over to one of those software weenies to turn into hand-optimized production code. And they'll probably be happier since they don't have to tax their communications skills talking to project managers while trying to figure out what's going on from a nebulous requirements definition document.
Yes, I did my master's thesis using simpy / scipy, integrated with lp_solve for the number crunching , all of which was a breeze to learn and use. It was amazing banging out a new recursive algorithm crawling a new object structure and just having it work the first time without spending several precious cycles bugfixing syntax errors and chasing down obscure stack overflows.
I used the psyco JIT compiler (unfortunately 32-bit only) to get ~100x boost in runtime performance (all from a single import statement, woo), which was fast enough for me... these days I think you can get similar boosts from running on PyPy. Of course, if you're doing more serious number crunching, python makes it easy to rewrite your performance-critical modules in C/C++.
I also ended up making a LiveCD and/or VM of my thesis, which was a good way of wrapping up the software environment and dependencies, which could quickly grow outdated in a few short years.
Yep, sounds right.
Programming is a tool, not a trade. It sounds like the submitter wants to learn a trade, that may or may not be business-related.
If you have a job that pays for education, by all means, go back to school and take courses that interest you. And see if you can surreptitiously grow that into a trade that you can be awesome at because of your mad programming skills. There are tons of fields (business, accounting, engineering, wedding planning, art history, etc.) and all of them could greatly be enhanced by someone with your skillset. So find something you love, and use your existing tools to become awesome at it. "Find something you love, then find some fool to pay you to do it".
On the other hand, if you simply want to go the MBA route for the monies... well, first you may want to decide if you want to become a project manager or a people manager, and then pursue studies in "systems engineering" vs. "organizational development" accordingly.
It was always a bluff and everyone knew it. The benefactors behind the GOP would not allow them to allow the dollar to default. I can only imagine the kinds of phone calls they had been receiving from concerned benefactors, though.
But pretty sure we'll be doing this again in a few months. It's the only button the GOP has right now, so they're going to have to use it. Kind of like the MAD doctrine... nukes are absolutely useless unless you can convince every one that you are absolutely insane enough to use them, hence all of the brinksmanship during the cold war.
Fortunately the other side was cool-headed enough to see this for what it was and call their bluff without too many concessions. It'll be interesting to see how half-heartedly they try to pull this exercise next time... especially since it did definitely weaken the dollar internationally (albeit no where near as much as a default would have). The GOP might still construe this as a win, since their objective is to make Obama look bad at any cost... and now they can point to 2-3 weeks of furlough and a dip in the dollar and economy as signs of "his policies not working" *snicker*.
The price of realism: $750,000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2001_CENTRIFUGE_SET.jpg
Apollo 13 shot parts of their scenes on the KC-135 "Vomit comet" to put the actors in actual microgravity for ~90 seconds at a time.
In engineering circles I always heard it as the 10/90 rule... the last 10% of the work will take 90% of the time.
Either way, doesn't bode well with their current progress report of 70%.
Nerds who like the occasional attention from the cool hipster kids who'll stumble over and ask, "dude, what time is it?"
Well, guess this is as good an opportunity as any to whip this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_xHueP7bQ0
(Console Wars the Musical)
I wouldn't call it the "Premium" market, but I'm pretty sure Valve/Steam has a much different market than the console titles.
The Steam Machine seems like yet another settop box that would allow you to remote into your gaming computer from your entertainment center. All of the PC people probably already have their gaming PCs plugged directly into the biggest monitor they have, so I don't think this will help that market segment much. But I can see it making inroads on the console community... though probably not much more than the OnLive "remote cloud-hosted gaming" service.
Oh, that's just a contradiction, not an argument
Well... my 8 year olds got cheap BLU GSM phones to carry around with them. Amazon has them for about $25, just above the free shipping threshold. Buy a pile, because kids will frequently break/lose them at any age.
http://www.amazon.com/BLU-T190i-Quad-Band-Battery-Bluetooth/dp/B00AA6WVBA/
First I made them carry around a toy phone with them for a month before they could not lose it. Currently both the 8 and the 11 year old break their phones (dropping them or getting them wet or mishandling them) once every few months. Fortunately at this point we haven't lost any SIM cards yet, since those are a bit more meddlesome to replace. Some of our friends had given their kids old smartphones. Those are all broken now too.
We have one of the family plans with T-mobile, so it was an extra $5/mo. per line on our bill, but they had some promotion where it was free for the first year or so.
If you really want to do Skype or Google Messenger or something, get an old laptop or tablet with a docking station that can live somewhere in the house and be always on. Built-in front-facing camera, so it's dead simple, set up the accounts and let it auto-answer so you can just pop in and say hi, if they're comfortable with that. Set this up in a little VTC telepresence area. Don't let them move it around or do anything else with it... if it's not able to stay on and fully powered and signed in, you won't be able to call it and it'll be useless for its intended purpose. Get them a separate device for "playing games" or "educational software".
If you go with a tablet, splurge for the docking station. I've never had a micro-usb cable stay connected and charged worth a shit, particularly when handled by children, but even in the gentle hands of responsible adults.
Wait, who was the "they" that already had a lot to do while strapped in their seats?
I can see the the tweets streaming in from pilots now.... "OK, landing gear is coming out..."
Yep. I've worked with a few people I would consider "Rockstar" programmers in the "non-asshole" sense. They were fun to be around, considerate, polite, knew their shit inside and out, and tutored / mentored me and others to become more effective at the parts of the project we worked on.
These days, the first interview question I throw at new candidates is "Tell me a story about a time you had a technical difference of opinion with another person or group, and describe what you did to resolve your conflict and move forward". It's a behavioral interview tactic I picked up from a former big employer, and it tends to be fun to note how much they squirm while recounting past bad blood. Now, no one has really ever totally bombed this question, but making them talk through some of their uncomfortable scenarios provides some good insight into how much experience people have when they inevitably have to deal with conflict resolution... and the mere fact that we ask it kinda prompts them with the expectations we have of our employees for cooperating with others in our environment.
My head is still reeling from why we're marketing smartphones by the megapixel anyway.
Change is good.
I used to use netscape mail, then left after they lost all my data (fortunately, I set up forwarding to another account)
Then I used yahoo mail, then left after they got overrun with spam and allowed crackers to send emails to my (and my wife's) address books. Also it was a pain to download my mail spool via fetchyahoo.pl .
Now we've been using multiple gmail accounts (one for emailing actual people, and semi-anonymous ones for website registration / bots / mailing lists, that have notification turned off). They also forward mail to my home mail spool, so I'm mostly ready to migrate to the next best thing when necessary.
It's nice that yahoo tries to give the extra little push to help their users find something better, though. I appreciate that!
Though I still prefer to use IRC instead of most social media sites.
If only there was an image to go with that....
Someone with Gimp skills doctor up http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/windows-good-and-shit.jpg
You don't get rich spending money FOOLISHLY.
Heh, reminds me of another saying I try to live by... "You don't get rich by living richly".
I take that to mean you don't flaunt your wealth (people who do are most likely spending other people's money). And also the way you mean it, in that you expect some kind of return for the investment of your generosity. At some point, money was considered power, and people who were smart enough to successfully amass some amount of money and power were generally good at redistributing to maximize positive impact on their business and community.
At some point, money and power seems to have diverged somewhat (though there is some kind of exchange rate between them). So the people who try to maximize money focus on just that to the detriment of everyone else, and the ones who try to amass power... well... don't really have control over enough money to really do anything beyond help their friends with the money and CYA.
Anyway, I'm starting to sound like I have to tend to my lawn.
Obligatory Simpsons quote:
Don't do the crime, if you can't do the ...
http://i.imgur.com/GKGCtZD.jpg
KEY LIME!
That's fine and all, but I really don't care about the OS name. There's multiple articles out there and people going crazy _just for the name_. I want to know what's new in the OS for developers, not what their next marketing strategy is.
Also, the Android OS version apparently doesn't really matter anymore... they moved all of the critical API stuff to "Google Play Services" which auto-updates every week or so, and pretty much supports everything back to Android 2.2
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/balky-carriers-and-slow-oems-step-aside-google-is-defragging-android/
This. If there's one thing I learned from my AP Chemistry teacher, it was to pay attention and learn from the textbook. Classroom instruction was for review and socializing the concepts, but if I didn't have an inkling of what was going on in advance of the lecture for labs, I would be totally lost.
Teachers are there to help keep pace and entertain the occasional question... but you can't and shouldn't expect them to spoon feed everything to you and your kin. Yes, perhaps sometimes you might get lucky and find a very motivational teacher that can present the material to you in a series of epiphanies, but that's not the sort of thing you can rely on these days.
Give each of them a VM , and unleash some worms and viruses on your little cloud
http://xkcd.com/350/
... but here's an exercise that will translate into the real world... Separate them into two groups, the "M" group, and the "E" group.
The Ms ties the Es group's hands up behind their backs. Then the Ms set themselves on fire, and have to coerce the Es to put the fire out with their hands tied up. If the Ms survive, they get more Es and go again. If the don't, they're replaced with a new M, preferably one from outside who has no idea what just happened.
Heh heh... people are pissing in the pool! I think I will too.
In fact, I might even take a dump!
Heh, I read that as code for "education".
But yeah, what do you do when something that someone else is doing is demonstrably hurting other people?
OTOH, we also have a culture of not punishing people before their crime is demonstrably committed. So for the sake of transparency, I'd think the best we could be doing right now is just outlining the repercussions on polluters that will go into effect after everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
Yeah, I cringed a bit when my google search for "London Fog" came up with an io9 article (is that a gawker site... ech). Anyway, here's a better one on previous occurences in the 1800s:
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/offbeat-news/environmentalism-in-1880/888
Or just read up on "London Fog" leading to the "Clean Air Act of 1956" on wikipedia, whatever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog