Wow.. you're going to make me vote Republican. I'd really rather not. But my company has sold software to Chinese companies and had worked outsourced TO us from India.
Bush's statements reflect a degree of refreshing degree of reality from the group that doesn't count itself as part of the reality based community. We are in world of global competition for work. But the increased wealth in the rest of the world gives us more places to sell goods.
A key hope for the US auto industry (that can barely compete in the US) is that it will be able to compete in the fast growing Chinese market. Speaking of the auto industry, while the big three continue to suck, there are at least decent jobs being offered by Japanese companies who are able to run efecient shops here. Thank goodness for outsourcing.
On the manufacturing note, you might observe that we're losing jobs there. No shit. We've be steadily losing jobs in manufacturing since the 40s. Output has increased dramatically over the same time. Globalization is just the latest thing we can shake our fists at over this. The truth is that we have shifted towards manufacturing in a more effecient way and manufacturings goods that take less people to produce. Industries that can't take advantage of automation aren't going to sit still and take a loss while everyone around them improves productivity. They'll either work harder at automation or replace their workforce with a cheaper one. That sucks, but it's kinda the way capitalism works.
In IT? Yeah, I'm a bit worried, but having seen Indian work product, I'm pretty comfortable with my career choice. Bush should have said something simplier, "Quit crying. Get out there and Compete."
Ok, glad to see I'm not woefully underpaid. I've got a couple years experience and not anywhere near that 70K mark. I'm healthily above the high 30s though. The odd thing is that I left the rust belt for colorado and kept the same job/pay. In theory, cost of living is higher here, but I work from home, so my time spent driving dropped by an hour or two a day and gas / car wear and tear dropped like a rock too. So I guess it pans out.
Frankly, I think that in your first five years of work, it is much, much, much more important to get with a company that provides solid mentoring to young developers than with a company that pays well. I don't care if you're a MIT or Stanford grad. You have very little experience writting code and having people who teach you to do it better is very important.
I used to play some planetside and it was a very interesting experience. I had some of my best MMORPG and FPS experiences there. The problem was that they were seperated by long stretches of dull play and one side easily routing the other. I'm glad I played it, but have no regrets quitting.
By best two experiences were:
1) There was a sprawling conflict on a continent. I got in with an infiltration team that was harrassing an enemy base that was serving as a support and staging area. We snuck in, capped the base (involving a long firefight) and then went off and hid. The inevitible counter attack came hard, but we were just down in the basement telling ghost stories. Our opponents left to do whatever nefarious deeds they had to do, so went back upstairs and recapped. Cycling through this five times was a blast.
2) This was a massive firefight at a base we were defending. There had to be 200 players involved. Enemy vehicles were all over, but anytime they tried to penetrate the base, they got blown up good. I spent a good while shooting out our front gate using the wreckage of an enemy tank as cover. We eventually lost, but size and pace of that battle was spectacular.
Well... maybe if I get more table space. Frankly, I'd like it if the profs had emailed me lecture notes and added material, or just posted it on the class web page. Why my comptuer needs to be in the room is another question. Perhaps some interesting participation apps can be worked in, but I think the clickers I've seen do the trick nicely.
For me, the key was having a paper notebook to write in. For some reason the act of writing something down greatly helps me remember it. Typing doesn't have as strong as an effect. Actually reviewing my notes later? Ha! My handwriting is terrible and I'm not a good note taker. But having that space on the desk / table for notebook, paper and pen to write down the key points of what was said was critical to my success.
That's part of the question, but the kids also tried to build bombs. Fortunately, those didn't work as planned. On of the kids, forgive me that I don't remember which, was pretty clearly a sociopath. Pyscologists that reviewed writting and other information seemed pretty convinced that this kids was destined to be a mass murderer. The other kid, was pretty much dominated by him. One of the researchers commented that we may have been lucky he struck when he did. An older adult sociopath, might have been more effecient and competent at killing people.
Coming back to point. The statement of "Maybe not." is flat out wrong. There was going to be murder and the video games had nothing to do with it.
As for compilers efficiency... disassemble a program and you will immediately see the difference between human made code and compiler code. Compilers still do a lot of stupid things. Those 8% performance gain you mentioned is if you compare a shitty assembly programmer with an good C++ programmer. In reality, the difference is a lot higher than 8%.
8%? 15%? Who cares? Unless you're writing an extremely intensive section of code that is quite small, fiddling at this level is waste of time. Most performance problems are caused not by inefficient asm code, but by really dumb algorithms, dumb IO (often network or database) and the like.
Fixing this stuff is done either while editing your C++ or at a whiteboard. This is where you're going to see the 50% performance improvements. It's not nearly as nerd sexy as hacking ASM, but it's going to make a bigger difference than ensuring that you've got your row major or column major array traversing straight or that your asm code is tight.
Sure, in extremely performance critical apps, where all the other issues are already resolved, tweaking the asm might be needed. But frankly, that's a small percentage of the apps in the world. Most really great programmes can get by never hacking in asm because they are making the 50% performance improvements in different kinds of apps.
Accusing someone of being invloved in the murder of his friend isn't very funny. Had he added a note to the entry saying, "Some say he was instrumental in the creation of Spider Man" that might have been inconsequential and funny. John seemed geniunely upset about this situation and I wouldn't blame him.
No kidding. I'm a member of PETA and Oregon trial is nothing more than an animal murder simulator. It's only redeeming value is that the animal murderers are likely to see much of their family die off as kharmatic punishment.
Exactly. I can't believe this was taken as seriously as it was. Whenever someone headlines something with "modest proposal" it's generally satire - especially when it is morally outrageous and absurd. For those who aren't sure, google "modest proposal" and read the piece by swift.
I think we can look to film for our answers here. The mainstream titles and blockbusters will come from EA sized companies just as the blockbuster movies tend to come from the big studios. However, there will continue to be a thriving indie community that produces high quality work on a budget.
Interesting. I wonder how much code to OSS projects is done this way. On most projects I've seen, 80-90% of the work is done by a few maintainers who have some (usually financial) interest in the project and most or all of the remaining work is done by users of that software who were pissed off about some piece of functionality.
Well yes, Nintendo didn't develop the games. But the games were out on their system. Making it so the Game Cube and the xbox were in competition for the same kind of gamer.
Cradle rocks. I'm not convinced by the pinpoint passes in Madden. Seems tricky. But in soccer games, I can never get the proper angle on a through pass and if this controller can get me close, excellent. Same for running one way and shooting another in either soccer or hockey games. Mostly, I think that being able to jerk the controller around in order to do jukes in any of those games would be fun.
Actually, in football, I'd be thrilled with a tilt sensitive passing. Tilt right and QB throws a little to the right, same for left, up and down. Throwing low for safety would nice as would being able to throw to the safer side of a reciever who is checking back on a hook right. Oooh. Juicy.
History of Econ class sounds interesting. Your in college at least partly to expand your horizons. Definately stay in that.
Otherwise, yeah, what you learn in school isn't the most relevent to finding jobs. That's why it is most important that you get an internship or failing that contribute to an open source project.
Classes just don't give you the opportunity to work on projects of an acceptable scale to be real experience.
Theory of Computation can actually be a fairly useful course. Much more so that I thought it would be while I was taking it. There are some useful abstrations in there.
I did take an OO class in Java that was useful to me, and I wish I'd taken the database course that was offered. Other than that, the courses I took just gave me a decent vocabulary for the real learning I would do as an intern and junior programmer.
The author of the article complains that there aren't courses about XML. Wah. XML just isn't that hard. It's self descriptive after all. The trick is learning about how it's used. Since it is used in different ways all over the place, any digging you do in a college class is likely to teach you about a way you never use it.
Still, the best college course I took for preparation was our senior project. We took a team of five students and worked on an industry supplied small app for the course of the year. Great experience and it was a solid talking point for me in my early interviews.
Cute. The high pressure situations I was talking about were first person shooter games where you have a number of people firing at you and you have to move quickly and fire precisely to do well.
My mom at least sees an advantage to video games. Both my brother and I have been driving her when something unfortunate happened in the road in front of us. We reacted calmly and properly to what was really a high pressure situtaiton likely to involve us in a wreck.
She credits video games for giving us practice at doing things precisely and with quick reactions when under pressure. I would credit playing sports as much as gaming to be sure, but she might have a point.
So if you turn it over and it says 'Language' as the reason for a bad rating, you can imagine that there is profanity. 'Brief Language' means there is a little bit of profanity. That might earn the flick a PG-13 rating.
I suspect you know that. The label sounds clear to me. Oh, and I think it's the MPAA who comes up with the ratings and categories for movies.
Actually, when I went to South Park in the theater they IDed us when we purchased the tickets and again at the door to the theater. It was stunning and challenging to do with nachos and popcorn.
I'd never before and never since seen that kind of security for an R rated flick.
Exactly. This is a much easier way to gain karma than to actually open source any of your own code. Simply call on your competitors to do so. You gain a karma point and they lose one when they tell you to fuck off.
Wow, that's a lame statement. I've bumped into plenty of Java developers running on Windows and Linux who want their IDE to do everything. For the love of God, look at the goddamn plugins for Eclipse.
It's not an IDE it's a platform. That didn't have the courtesy to ship with a reasonable JSP editor out of the box.
Regardless, you're largely right:). I wouldn't say that Windows developers tend to half ass everything. The put much more effort into the UI than most Unix guys. Their products tend to be more friendly and approachable to people.
As you mentioned, each Unix module tends to do its own thing. It's more approachable to other programs.
Now I'm sounding like Joel.
But I have noticed the unusual rigor and dependence on care and process among the mainframe folks. I suspect that may stem from how very bad it is to crash your mainframe - particularly back in the day when it might have been easier to do.
My summary.
Windows Programmers: Optimize for users. Unix Programmers: Optimize for other programmers. Mainfrom Programmers: Optimize for not getting fired. (ass well covered)
The non-.Net version of CC was covered by Pragmatic Build Automation, a nice short read.
I think the CruiseControl products are popular to target for authors since they are more config file focused than the more graphical tools. Text is easier to write about than saying, "then you would go to screen X and set these values..."
The patent system, when working properly, is not so bad.
Problem #1 Should be addressed by the existing requirement that the invention not be obvious to a knowledgeable person in that field.
Problem #2 Goes to the heart of the patent system. It is designed to create monopolies that cause higher prices. Getting a temporary monopoly is supposed to be the reward for putting in the R&D to make the invention in the first place.
Let's assume that in your example the Ford invention was truly difficult. Without the incentive of a temporary monopoly they might never invent the magic tires. Not only would the people buying generics die, but so would those who could afford Ford's tires. In practice, most safety inventions in cars are licensed out. I think Volvo makes a chunk of change this way. In your example, everyone can buy good tires at $55 dollars but Ford would get see a couple bucks from every tire made this way.
Frankly, I think patents for software aren't completely stupid, but given the pace at which software moves, a 2-5 year expiration would be more appropriate than the current couple decade set-up.
The basic idea is that we know people (and companies) are usually more greedy than they are nice. To encourage inventions that will make everyone's lives better / safer we try to harness that greed by making inventions valuable as opposed to easily copied and nearly worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
The real issue is that the laptop belongs to the company. He can't just not give it back. That's what we might call 'theft'.
Wow.. you're going to make me vote Republican. I'd really rather not. But my company has sold software to Chinese companies and had worked outsourced TO us from India.
Bush's statements reflect a degree of refreshing degree of reality from the group that doesn't count itself as part of the reality based community. We are in world of global competition for work. But the increased wealth in the rest of the world gives us more places to sell goods.
A key hope for the US auto industry (that can barely compete in the US) is that it will be able to compete in the fast growing Chinese market. Speaking of the auto industry, while the big three continue to suck, there are at least decent jobs being offered by Japanese companies who are able to run efecient shops here. Thank goodness for outsourcing.
On the manufacturing note, you might observe that we're losing jobs there. No shit. We've be steadily losing jobs in manufacturing since the 40s. Output has increased dramatically over the same time. Globalization is just the latest thing we can shake our fists at over this. The truth is that we have shifted towards manufacturing in a more effecient way and manufacturings goods that take less people to produce. Industries that can't take advantage of automation aren't going to sit still and take a loss while everyone around them improves productivity. They'll either work harder at automation or replace their workforce with a cheaper one. That sucks, but it's kinda the way capitalism works.
In IT? Yeah, I'm a bit worried, but having seen Indian work product, I'm pretty comfortable with my career choice. Bush should have said something simplier, "Quit crying. Get out there and Compete."
Ok, glad to see I'm not woefully underpaid. I've got a couple years experience and not anywhere near that 70K mark. I'm healthily above the high 30s though. The odd thing is that I left the rust belt for colorado and kept the same job/pay. In theory, cost of living is higher here, but I work from home, so my time spent driving dropped by an hour or two a day and gas / car wear and tear dropped like a rock too. So I guess it pans out.
Frankly, I think that in your first five years of work, it is much, much, much more important to get with a company that provides solid mentoring to young developers than with a company that pays well. I don't care if you're a MIT or Stanford grad. You have very little experience writting code and having people who teach you to do it better is very important.
I used to play some planetside and it was a very interesting experience. I had some of my best MMORPG and FPS experiences there. The problem was that they were seperated by long stretches of dull play and one side easily routing the other. I'm glad I played it, but have no regrets quitting.
By best two experiences were:
1) There was a sprawling conflict on a continent. I got in with an infiltration team that was harrassing an enemy base that was serving as a support and staging area. We snuck in, capped the base (involving a long firefight) and then went off and hid. The inevitible counter attack came hard, but we were just down in the basement telling ghost stories. Our opponents left to do whatever nefarious deeds they had to do, so went back upstairs and recapped. Cycling through this five times was a blast.
2) This was a massive firefight at a base we were defending. There had to be 200 players involved. Enemy vehicles were all over, but anytime they tried to penetrate the base, they got blown up good. I spent a good while shooting out our front gate using the wreckage of an enemy tank as cover. We eventually lost, but size and pace of that battle was spectacular.
Well... maybe if I get more table space. Frankly, I'd like it if the profs had emailed me lecture notes and added material, or just posted it on the class web page. Why my comptuer needs to be in the room is another question. Perhaps some interesting participation apps can be worked in, but I think the clickers I've seen do the trick nicely.
For me, the key was having a paper notebook to write in. For some reason the act of writing something down greatly helps me remember it. Typing doesn't have as strong as an effect. Actually reviewing my notes later? Ha! My handwriting is terrible and I'm not a good note taker. But having that space on the desk / table for notebook, paper and pen to write down the key points of what was said was critical to my success.
That's part of the question, but the kids also tried to build bombs. Fortunately, those didn't work as planned. On of the kids, forgive me that I don't remember which, was pretty clearly a sociopath. Pyscologists that reviewed writting and other information seemed pretty convinced that this kids was destined to be a mass murderer. The other kid, was pretty much dominated by him. One of the researchers commented that we may have been lucky he struck when he did. An older adult sociopath, might have been more effecient and competent at killing people.
Coming back to point. The statement of "Maybe not." is flat out wrong. There was going to be murder and the video games had nothing to do with it.
As for compilers efficiency... disassemble a program and you will immediately see the difference between human made code and compiler code. Compilers still do a lot of stupid things. Those 8% performance gain you mentioned is if you compare a shitty assembly programmer with an good C++ programmer. In reality, the difference is a lot higher than 8%.
8%? 15%? Who cares? Unless you're writing an extremely intensive section of code that is quite small, fiddling at this level is waste of time. Most performance problems are caused not by inefficient asm code, but by really dumb algorithms, dumb IO (often network or database) and the like.
Fixing this stuff is done either while editing your C++ or at a whiteboard. This is where you're going to see the 50% performance improvements. It's not nearly as nerd sexy as hacking ASM, but it's going to make a bigger difference than ensuring that you've got your row major or column major array traversing straight or that your asm code is tight.
Sure, in extremely performance critical apps, where all the other issues are already resolved, tweaking the asm might be needed. But frankly, that's a small percentage of the apps in the world. Most really great programmes can get by never hacking in asm because they are making the 50% performance improvements in different kinds of apps.
Accusing someone of being invloved in the murder of his friend isn't very funny. Had he added a note to the entry saying, "Some say he was instrumental in the creation of Spider Man" that might have been inconsequential and funny. John seemed geniunely upset about this situation and I wouldn't blame him.
No kidding. I'm a member of PETA and Oregon trial is nothing more than an animal murder simulator. It's only redeeming value is that the animal murderers are likely to see much of their family die off as kharmatic punishment.
(tongue placed firmly in cheek)
Exactly. I can't believe this was taken as seriously as it was. Whenever someone headlines something with "modest proposal" it's generally satire - especially when it is morally outrageous and absurd. For those who aren't sure, google "modest proposal" and read the piece by swift.
I think we can look to film for our answers here. The mainstream titles and blockbusters will come from EA sized companies just as the blockbuster movies tend to come from the big studios. However, there will continue to be a thriving indie community that produces high quality work on a budget.
Interesting. I wonder how much code to OSS projects is done this way. On most projects I've seen, 80-90% of the work is done by a few maintainers who have some (usually financial) interest in the project and most or all of the remaining work is done by users of that software who were pissed off about some piece of functionality.
Isn't this what Microsoft has been fearing? Isn't this exactly why they went out to kill Netscape?
Between Sun's passionate hatred of Microsoft and Google's competence, it's got to be a bad day over a Redmond.
Well yes, Nintendo didn't develop the games. But the games were out on their system. Making it so the Game Cube and the xbox were in competition for the same kind of gamer.
Cradle rocks. I'm not convinced by the pinpoint passes in Madden. Seems tricky. But in soccer games, I can never get the proper angle on a through pass and if this controller can get me close, excellent. Same for running one way and shooting another in either soccer or hockey games. Mostly, I think that being able to jerk the controller around in order to do jukes in any of those games would be fun.
Actually, in football, I'd be thrilled with a tilt sensitive passing. Tilt right and QB throws a little to the right, same for left, up and down. Throwing low for safety would nice as would being able to throw to the safer side of a reciever who is checking back on a hook right. Oooh. Juicy.
History of Econ class sounds interesting. Your in college at least partly to expand your horizons. Definately stay in that.
Otherwise, yeah, what you learn in school isn't the most relevent to finding jobs. That's why it is most important that you get an internship or failing that contribute to an open source project.
Classes just don't give you the opportunity to work on projects of an acceptable scale to be real experience.
Theory of Computation can actually be a fairly useful course. Much more so that I thought it would be while I was taking it. There are some useful abstrations in there.
I did take an OO class in Java that was useful to me, and I wish I'd taken the database course that was offered. Other than that, the courses I took just gave me a decent vocabulary for the real learning I would do as an intern and junior programmer.
The author of the article complains that there aren't courses about XML. Wah. XML just isn't that hard. It's self descriptive after all. The trick is learning about how it's used. Since it is used in different ways all over the place, any digging you do in a college class is likely to teach you about a way you never use it.
Still, the best college course I took for preparation was our senior project. We took a team of five students and worked on an industry supplied small app for the course of the year. Great experience and it was a solid talking point for me in my early interviews.
Cute. The high pressure situations I was talking about were first person shooter games where you have a number of people firing at you and you have to move quickly and fire precisely to do well.
My mom at least sees an advantage to video games. Both my brother and I have been driving her when something unfortunate happened in the road in front of us. We reacted calmly and properly to what was really a high pressure situtaiton likely to involve us in a wreck.
She credits video games for giving us practice at doing things precisely and with quick reactions when under pressure. I would credit playing sports as much as gaming to be sure, but she might have a point.
So if you turn it over and it says 'Language' as the reason for a bad rating, you can imagine that there is profanity. 'Brief Language' means there is a little bit of profanity. That might earn the flick a PG-13 rating.
I suspect you know that. The label sounds clear to me. Oh, and I think it's the MPAA who comes up with the ratings and categories for movies.
Actually, when I went to South Park in the theater they IDed us when we purchased the tickets and again at the door to the theater. It was stunning and challenging to do with nachos and popcorn.
I'd never before and never since seen that kind of security for an R rated flick.
Exactly. This is a much easier way to gain karma than to actually open source any of your own code. Simply call on your competitors to do so. You gain a karma point and they lose one when they tell you to fuck off.
Clearly the Wang ... force
Wow, that's a lame statement. I've bumped into plenty of Java developers running on Windows and Linux who want their IDE to do everything. For the love of God, look at the goddamn plugins for Eclipse.
:). I wouldn't say that Windows developers tend to half ass everything. The put much more effort into the UI than most Unix guys. Their products tend to be more friendly and approachable to people.
It's not an IDE it's a platform. That didn't have the courtesy to ship with a reasonable JSP editor out of the box.
Regardless, you're largely right
As you mentioned, each Unix module tends to do its own thing. It's more approachable to other programs.
Now I'm sounding like Joel.
But I have noticed the unusual rigor and dependence on care and process among the mainframe folks. I suspect that may stem from how very bad it is to crash your mainframe - particularly back in the day when it might have been easier to do.
My summary.
Windows Programmers: Optimize for users.
Unix Programmers: Optimize for other programmers.
Mainfrom Programmers: Optimize for not getting fired. (ass well covered)
The non-.Net version of CC was covered by Pragmatic Build Automation, a nice short read.
I think the CruiseControl products are popular to target for authors since they are more config file focused than the more graphical tools. Text is easier to write about than saying, "then you would go to screen X and set these values..."
The patent system, when working properly, is not so bad.
Problem #1 Should be addressed by the existing requirement that the invention not be obvious to a knowledgeable person in that field.
Problem #2 Goes to the heart of the patent system. It is designed to create monopolies that cause higher prices. Getting a temporary monopoly is supposed to be the reward for putting in the R&D to make the invention in the first place.
Let's assume that in your example the Ford invention was truly difficult. Without the incentive of a temporary monopoly they might never invent the magic tires. Not only would the people buying generics die, but so would those who could afford Ford's tires. In practice, most safety inventions in cars are licensed out. I think Volvo makes a chunk of change this way. In your example, everyone can buy good tires at $55 dollars but Ford would get see a couple bucks from every tire made this way.
Frankly, I think patents for software aren't completely stupid, but given the pace at which software moves, a 2-5 year expiration would be more appropriate than the current couple decade set-up.
The basic idea is that we know people (and companies) are usually more greedy than they are nice. To encourage inventions that will make everyone's lives better / safer we try to harness that greed by making inventions valuable as opposed to easily copied and nearly worthless.