I'll join in the Old Fart Chorus (kind of a geek barbershop quartet?) by saying I kept one stack of cards for each language I coded in in college, Cobol, Fortran, PL/1 and Assembler. I never copied the JCL cards, but I remember that we had to run our non-Assembly code at "Class X" which gave us a decent 4 or 5 hour turnaround, but Assembler had to run at "Class Z" which realistically meant at least 24 hours. The joys of ABEND debugging, keypunch machines (you knew you were coding when you heard the bits being chewed out of the cards) and coding sheets (I still have a pad of COBOL and a pad of general purpose sheets).
Geeze, the Geek equivalent of "When I was a boy I walked to school in the snow uphill both ways"...
So, all we have to do is drill holes all over Mars and drop huge Mentos candies down the shafts, and voila! Instant atmosphere and oceans! Plus, if we time the drops right, we might be able to nudge Mars into an orbit closer to the Sun!
Which means a person should not be allowed to buy unlimited numbers of billboards (blog postings) supporting or opposing any candidate, either.
Easy solution: don't count the votes
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
Since exit polls are supposedly more accurate than the actual count, do away with actually counting the votes. That will save a lot of time and effort, and still give people the feeling that they're participating, and worst case the votes could be used to clarify any exit polling issues.
Just like how we don't need a real "count every nose" census, just count a lot then correct via statistics.
I guess the Reader's Digest was right all those years: It Pays To Increase Your Word Power!
(I used to read those and quiz myself with those columns all the time when I was in junior high and high school. I still throw some people when I use a word that not many people other than William F. Buckley use...)
I've only ever had languages in high school and college, but I started with Latin, went to German, then took the first two Russian courses offered at my university, and really only got good enough to simple tourist things. After about 20 years of no language study, I started learning Japanese here at the local university, thankfully taught by native Japanese speakers. Strange phenomenon, I would find myself accidently saying what I wanted to say, but in German or Russian instead of Japanese. Apparently I learned enough to think (crudely) in the other languages, enough to trigger some long-dormant paths when I tried to use the new language. The biggest problem I've had in all the languages was vocabulary. Just learning enough words to say what I want to say is difficult for me, for some reason.
Since there's a history of Alzheimers' in my family, I'm also interested in doing what I can to keep my brain healthy, if it's possible to build up that "cognitive reserve" so I'm not so much of a burden in later years.
Financial software == programs run by financial institutions: banks, brokerage houses, etc. I worked on software that handled mortgage-backed securities, keeping track of mortgages traded between investment companies and banks. The cost of restarting was all the time spent by high-paid managers, traders, and business analysts to figure out where the failures happened, when, and what impact they had on that day's transactions. The programs I dealt with when I first got the contract were incredibly haphazard in memory allocation and use, and had little error checking of any kind. I was on a team that was supposed to "harden" the software and make it more efficient, without really changing much of the code. I told them that was contradictory, they said do it anyway, so I nodded, cleaned up what I could, snuck in bounds checking and function return code checking when no one was looking, and turned in my hours. After 4 years of this, my programs no longer crashed or gave bad results, but the rest of the system was still fragile. Design and testing were considered extraneous cost items that couldn't be justified in the budget, so the customers (banks, etc) were the de facto unit testers. There was no end-to-end testing, no test procedures, no test data, no consistent bug reporting or tracking. In short, everything I've come to expect in modern software development houses.
One of my professors(years ago) and a few of my friends work at JPL. They do engineered software and it is ungodly expensive. Millions just to produce the docs/specs. The question we have to ask ourselves is if the cost is worth it. For NASA/JPL it clearly is. For a serious web app it isn't. Agile practices give you reasonably robust code at a fraction of the cost of "engineered" code. And you get to market sooner.
Unfortunately, financial software should definitely be designed to be robust, yet from the systems I've worked on, most of it is hacked together legacy code that often started out as spreadsheets. When you have a multi-trillion dollar economy, doesn't it make sense that the code supporting it be as fail-safe as possible? I could never convince my bosses that the time and money for error-checking code and more logical design were worth it. Fortunately the big multi-billion dollar-losing bugs had been hacked around, but there were often million-dollar losses or mistakes that "re-starting and running the data again" would fix. Makes me want to take all my money and hide it under the matress...
So, buck up fellow creaking-jointed, progressive-bifocal-wearing, relaxed-fit-docker's-wearing folks, it's never too late to start again!
I dunno, I'm in the same age bracket as you, and even after 25 years in the field, I absolutely love programming -- the amount of fascinating stuff there is to do with the same core skillset is just amazing, given how computers play an increasingly large part in a vast number of fields. I'm an old school hacker I guess: I view the field as much or more as a craft (in the fine woodworking sense) than as an engineering field, and get a lot of satisfaction from an elegant solution to a problem.
My problems with the software field are many, the biggest one being the overall lack of discipline in development, and the lack of concern about this lack of discipline among people in charge of software development. I've worked on probably 15 to 18 completely different projects over the 22 years I've been a professional, from satellite data analysis to artificial intelligence, to data conversion, telecom equipment provisioning, and mortgage-backed securities systems. On only four projects have there been anything resembling requirements specifications, and only two where simple error checking was even considered during the design, rather than an add-on once the customer complained of a crash. I learned early on to avoid the "elegant" solutions that were as fragile as Faberge eggs and learned to make "crude" designs that kept working when the world failed to cooperate with design assumptions. Unfortunately, the industry apparently prefers crude, fragile, easily-shipped solutions that can be hacked into shape over time and lots of unpaid overtime. Even "discoveries" lately seem to be mere rehashes of ideas and systems I worked on decades ago. Having created my own graphics object toolkit in X Window 10r4, I can't really get excited over something like Qt or KDE or gtk+ or Swing or... Nor, after having coded a big chunk of an AI system in Smalltalk in '87, can I get excited about some language rediscovering the Model-View-Controller paradigm. I definitely can't get excited about any programming challenge that requires me to spend 50-80 hours per week that I spent when I first started, especially not on salary, and most especially not when the reason is because of management's refusal to pay for some modicum of discipline in designing the system.
Basically, for me, "seen it, done it, done too much of it" is the main reason I'm burned out of the profession. I get into the same "flow" state when I'm painting that I once got into while designing and coding and debugging. I like the outcome better, too.
Like Harland Sanders' story, Ando's is inspiring for those of us who are "past their prime" in this youth-oriented culture. I'm looking around for some kind of post-computer geek career that doesn't involve management (especially not managing software development), but to pay the bills I have to keep doing what I've grown to hate. It doesn't help to be thought of as too old (read: too expensive) to have "kept up" with the "l33t" technology. Ando and others prove that age doesn't have to affect peoples' careers or lifestyles except for those that are very physical in nature. At 48 myself I've picked up my brushes and started painting again after 20 years (see my website), and thinking of at least supplementing my income by selling prints. If the "long tail" theory of marketing is correct, somebody out there will buy a couple. I have a 40-something friend who bought a farm, and though she's not making anything from it now, she has the potential to do so and get out of the programming field altogether.
So, buck up fellow creaking-jointed, progressive-bifocal-wearing, relaxed-fit-docker's-wearing folks, it's never too late to start again!
The gold prospectors in California didn't get rich, Hilton and the guys who sold the prospectors shovels and picks got rich. Robots can explore, but you need exploitation, too, and that takes people. That's also how you get money to keep exploring further out, money that's not dependent on the whims of the electorate or the biases of elected demagogues.
Something's got be funny about someone who names a 69 ft phallic object after the fruit of the most celebrated instance of bestiality in antiquity... That might be just a wee bit of a stretch for the funny.
I got email just today about a revolutionary new product that could help that...
To get the path easier, go to Finder, select View->Customize Toolbar. From the window, drag the "Path" icon to your toolbar. This gives you the same path info as the Command Click on the folder icon.
And what, precisely, are these random sweeps supposed to prove?
They prove to the womyn-based community that the patriarchical University takes sexual assault "seriously."
Sarcasm aside, the University should have the right to restrict access to their facilities to only students and faculty, especially after hours. The only way to do this is to check for student or faculty ID.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll join in the Old Fart Chorus (kind of a geek barbershop quartet?) by saying I kept one stack of cards for each language I coded in in college, Cobol, Fortran, PL/1 and Assembler. I never copied the JCL cards, but I remember that we had to run our non-Assembly code at "Class X" which gave us a decent 4 or 5 hour turnaround, but Assembler had to run at "Class Z" which realistically meant at least 24 hours. The joys of ABEND debugging, keypunch machines (you knew you were coding when you heard the bits being chewed out of the cards) and coding sheets (I still have a pad of COBOL and a pad of general purpose sheets).
Geeze, the Geek equivalent of "When I was a boy I walked to school in the snow uphill both ways"...
Ah, but that's exactly what they want you to think...
Then we'd have to rename Mars as "Belchium" or something...
So, all we have to do is drill holes all over Mars and drop huge Mentos candies down the shafts, and voila! Instant atmosphere and oceans! Plus, if we time the drops right, we might be able to nudge Mars into an orbit closer to the Sun!
Which means a person should not be allowed to buy unlimited numbers of billboards (blog postings) supporting or opposing any candidate, either.
Since exit polls are supposedly more accurate than the actual count, do away with actually counting the votes. That will save a lot of time and effort, and still give people the feeling that they're participating, and worst case the votes could be used to clarify any exit polling issues.
Just like how we don't need a real "count every nose" census, just count a lot then correct via statistics.
I guess the Reader's Digest was right all those years: It Pays To Increase Your Word Power!
(I used to read those and quiz myself with those columns all the time when I was in junior high and high school. I still throw some people when I use a word that not many people other than William F. Buckley use...)
Start slow:
Cattus Petasatus
Virent Ova! Virent Perna!!
Quomodo Invidiosulus Nomine Grinchus Christi Natalem Abrogaverit
and work your way up:
Winnie Ille Pu
Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis
Then there's always:
Latin for Dummies
I've only ever had languages in high school and college, but I started with Latin, went to German, then took the first two Russian courses offered at my university, and really only got good enough to simple tourist things. After about 20 years of no language study, I started learning Japanese here at the local university, thankfully taught by native Japanese speakers. Strange phenomenon, I would find myself accidently saying what I wanted to say, but in German or Russian instead of Japanese. Apparently I learned enough to think (crudely) in the other languages, enough to trigger some long-dormant paths when I tried to use the new language. The biggest problem I've had in all the languages was vocabulary. Just learning enough words to say what I want to say is difficult for me, for some reason.
Since there's a history of Alzheimers' in my family, I'm also interested in doing what I can to keep my brain healthy, if it's possible to build up that "cognitive reserve" so I'm not so much of a burden in later years.
Financial software == programs run by financial institutions: banks, brokerage houses, etc. I worked on software that handled mortgage-backed securities, keeping track of mortgages traded between investment companies and banks. The cost of restarting was all the time spent by high-paid managers, traders, and business analysts to figure out where the failures happened, when, and what impact they had on that day's transactions. The programs I dealt with when I first got the contract were incredibly haphazard in memory allocation and use, and had little error checking of any kind. I was on a team that was supposed to "harden" the software and make it more efficient, without really changing much of the code. I told them that was contradictory, they said do it anyway, so I nodded, cleaned up what I could, snuck in bounds checking and function return code checking when no one was looking, and turned in my hours. After 4 years of this, my programs no longer crashed or gave bad results, but the rest of the system was still fragile. Design and testing were considered extraneous cost items that couldn't be justified in the budget, so the customers (banks, etc) were the de facto unit testers. There was no end-to-end testing, no test procedures, no test data, no consistent bug reporting or tracking. In short, everything I've come to expect in modern software development houses.
Unfortunately, financial software should definitely be designed to be robust, yet from the systems I've worked on, most of it is hacked together legacy code that often started out as spreadsheets. When you have a multi-trillion dollar economy, doesn't it make sense that the code supporting it be as fail-safe as possible? I could never convince my bosses that the time and money for error-checking code and more logical design were worth it. Fortunately the big multi-billion dollar-losing bugs had been hacked around, but there were often million-dollar losses or mistakes that "re-starting and running the data again" would fix. Makes me want to take all my money and hide it under the matress...
My problems with the software field are many, the biggest one being the overall lack of discipline in development, and the lack of concern about this lack of discipline among people in charge of software development. I've worked on probably 15 to 18 completely different projects over the 22 years I've been a professional, from satellite data analysis to artificial intelligence, to data conversion, telecom equipment provisioning, and mortgage-backed securities systems. On only four projects have there been anything resembling requirements specifications, and only two where simple error checking was even considered during the design, rather than an add-on once the customer complained of a crash. I learned early on to avoid the "elegant" solutions that were as fragile as Faberge eggs and learned to make "crude" designs that kept working when the world failed to cooperate with design assumptions. Unfortunately, the industry apparently prefers crude, fragile, easily-shipped solutions that can be hacked into shape over time and lots of unpaid overtime. Even "discoveries" lately seem to be mere rehashes of ideas and systems I worked on decades ago. Having created my own graphics object toolkit in X Window 10r4, I can't really get excited over something like Qt or KDE or gtk+ or Swing or... Nor, after having coded a big chunk of an AI system in Smalltalk in '87, can I get excited about some language rediscovering the Model-View-Controller paradigm. I definitely can't get excited about any programming challenge that requires me to spend 50-80 hours per week that I spent when I first started, especially not on salary, and most especially not when the reason is because of management's refusal to pay for some modicum of discipline in designing the system.
Basically, for me, "seen it, done it, done too much of it" is the main reason I'm burned out of the profession. I get into the same "flow" state when I'm painting that I once got into while designing and coding and debugging. I like the outcome better, too.
And Saturday Night Live "commercial" back in '76 or so: "The new Triple Trak: Because you'll believe anything!"
... and others who think that Slashdot is life...
Like Harland Sanders' story, Ando's is inspiring for those of us who are "past their prime" in this youth-oriented culture. I'm looking around for some kind of post-computer geek career that doesn't involve management (especially not managing software development), but to pay the bills I have to keep doing what I've grown to hate. It doesn't help to be thought of as too old (read: too expensive) to have "kept up" with the "l33t" technology. Ando and others prove that age doesn't have to affect peoples' careers or lifestyles except for those that are very physical in nature. At 48 myself I've picked up my brushes and started painting again after 20 years (see my website), and thinking of at least supplementing my income by selling prints. If the "long tail" theory of marketing is correct, somebody out there will buy a couple. I have a 40-something friend who bought a farm, and though she's not making anything from it now, she has the potential to do so and get out of the programming field altogether.
So, buck up fellow creaking-jointed, progressive-bifocal-wearing, relaxed-fit-docker's-wearing folks, it's never too late to start again!
The gold prospectors in California didn't get rich, Hilton and the guys who sold the prospectors shovels and picks got rich. Robots can explore, but you need exploitation, too, and that takes people. That's also how you get money to keep exploring further out, money that's not dependent on the whims of the electorate or the biases of elected demagogues.
Something's got be funny about someone who names a 69 ft phallic object after the fruit of the most celebrated instance of bestiality in antiquity...
That might be just a wee bit of a stretch for the funny.
I got email just today about a revolutionary new product that could help that...
To get the path easier, go to Finder, select View->Customize Toolbar. From the window, drag the "Path" icon to your toolbar. This gives you the same path info as the Command Click on the folder icon.
And always, always keep your red Swingline stapler. Otherwise you'll have to burn the building down.
That was iLarious...
You keep using these words, I don't think they mean what you think they mean...
And all of us old farts call it "job security"...
And what, precisely, are these random sweeps supposed to prove?
They prove to the womyn-based community that the patriarchical University takes sexual assault "seriously."
Sarcasm aside, the University should have the right to restrict access to their facilities to only students and faculty, especially after hours. The only way to do this is to check for student or faculty ID.
Or an Andean villager or an Ethiopian highlander:2 24_040225_evolution.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/02/0
And a fourth, "you look like Linux" "no I'm not, shut up" BSD.