One factor that is often overlooked is that there is in some sense a productivity boom in IT, same as in other sectors, that has allowed fewer workers to get more done. A lot of the things programmers would have done from scratch in the old days are now encoded into APIs or web-enabled, or have complete products already in place.
When I first started programming, databases, window systems, consumer operating systems, the internet, web-enabled everything, etc did not exist. If you wanted to process information of any sort, depending on the platform, you may have had to code from the BIOS or program loader all the way up to curses windows. But at this point, a lot of the programming effort that would have been spent building a custom database, a custom TTY window system, a custom printing system, blah blah blah is now either integrated into the OS or available as a comprehensive product.
This sort of factoring of functionality by making a product out of it and making it accessible to other companies at a reasonable price is (a) something that managers can understand and (b) a logical consequence of the engineers credo to "not reinvent the wheel".
The downside is that business have less reason to have senior programmers "on retainer", if you will, doing traditional sorts of programming: custom-making some well-designed functionality fit into a proprietary system. At this point they just want some.net middleware to serve web pages from their database. Well, the database and the web server are already done, so all that's left is coding up some middleware type stuff and guess what, that can be done in India by people who maybe could or couldn't build a web server or database by themselves but can certainly use the APIs and get those web pages working.
Your 12+ years of experience should have prepared you to deal with short sighted/manipulative/ladder-climbing/egotistical managers a little bit better. You took it personally as an insult to your experiences and professionalism, but he's just playing with you because you're just a chess piece to him and he wants to put you in a square, not listen to what you have to say.
If you want to move to management, which is an obvious place for a 12 year programmer to go, especially in a company that values them the same as 2 year programmers, then he would probably be delighted to mentor you and get you started with a "team leader" position.
If you just want to get back at him, then you're playing his game and you're going to lose. Start looking for another job, but don't be surprised if you eventually have to deal with the same attitude from someone else at your new place.
One of the most difficult problems is that since linksys boxes are so cheap these days, it's not unusual for a misguided employee to just bring his old one from home and plug it into the corporate network. Hey the super-secure ultra-locked down DMZ'd VPN one you provided didn't even show up in the pop-up menu so obviously it was his right to just get something working.
Some really high-end wifi equipment will scan the airwaves for unauthorized signals, plus scan the wired network for IP addresses that are act like access points and then notify you or even attempt to shut them down.
Kids are exposed to television, radio, video games, high-pressure sports, junk food, back seat DVD players, and plain old bullies at school. If you want kids to learn, there needs to be some time each day spent in a calm, relaxed environment where they can read a book at their own pace, sit and think, daydream, play act, just the normal stuff kids do.
Adults are under so much pressure and stress that they seem to be preparing their kids early for a life of pressure and stress as well. Everyone I know who has kids makes sure the kids are occupied and entertained every waking moment. When I was a kid, the most refreshing and insightful moments often occurred when I was just sitting in a chair, staring into space, sometimes thinking, sometimes not. That's when you make a mental connection, that's when you "get it". Taking away the free time and relaxation is what makes science and math difficult for kids. It probably makes other subjects difficult too, but you can get by in a lot of subjects by just memorizing. We can do better.
(a) Intel actively lied about the presence of the FDIV bug and dug their own PR grave.
(b) firmware on Pentiums isn't field upgradeable and therefore has a higher standard to live up to.
(c) long division is not new and is easy to test and should have been tested by a fourth grader at least.
(d) I really don't think intel spent 1/2 billion dollars of real hard cash replacing chips that depreciated to $10 in a matter of months and only cost $5 to manufacture. the fix was trivial and certainly didn't deserve a big amortization share of Intel's galactic R&D budget either.
What they should have done differently? Admit the bug as soon as reports came in, offer to replace the chip free for anyone with scientific computing needs, distribute a math DLL that intercepts the FDIV call in software and replaces the results with correct ones. And offer at-cost replacements to anyone not happy with the DLL.
The employment picture for software engineers is pretty bad right now, and there is no reason to think it will get better anytime soon. There is rampant age-discrimination and checklist-based hiring, both of which will work against you.
And you find APIs daunting?
You aren't running toward programming, you're running away from management. I don't blame you for that (I would do the same thing) but unless you are really talented and motivated you should work on hobby-level coding to start with. At two or three hours a day with no management interference, even a beginner can get a lot done quickly. Have fun, but please don't make the career decision yet.
I have a suspicion that McBride is taking antidepressants. When I have observed other people taking them, often they become immature and paranoid, in a way that seeps into every action and every conversation. It's truly frightening when people in positions of power start behaving that way.
Simple three point plan for eliminating e-mail viruses:
1. Microsoft should immediately patch exchange and outlook so that no attachments that include executable files can be transmitted. You get word files, pdfs, plain text, jpegs and similar "passive" file formats. any scripting gets filtered out of html or spreadsheets. An archive (tar, zip, etc) doesn't get transmitted if it contains bad stuff or is not readable. And you can't override this by just clicking "yes" or "okay" upon receipt of a message.
2. viruses propagate similar to spam. ms exchange or other MTAs should make note of 50000+ very similar messages being tossed about and immediately blacklist compromised machines, then go into mail accounts and yank out virus messages that haven't been downloaded yet. Messages with attachments should be subject to a short extra wait time (5 min) to slow propagation and give the system time to react.
3. email attachments, even non-executable ones, should be opened in a restricted environment, e.g. chroot jail, java sandbox, or a refreshable vmware image. if the virus goes nuts, just delete the environment and kill its processes. don't allow outbound connections from the sandbox. In the long run, web pages and downloaded files should be treated similarly.
Yes, virus writers will find workarounds and attack new security holes. But microsoft has an obligation to fix existing security holes and at least make the virus writers look for new ones.
Yes, some people will be annoyed that their excel macros get lost. But it is time to start setting up a social environment where email is about sending a message that you type in yourself to communicate, not just a file sharing system for forwarding zip files.
This is just a preview of the upcoming 128-bit processor war! 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 bytes of addressable memory...powerpoint is really going to kick butt!
It wasn't that long ago that most vehicles had NO active help from the car for the actual act of driving. No anti-lock brakes, no stability control, no airbags, no heads-up-display, no backup sensors, no third brake lights, nothing. Now that we have this symphony of helpful features (a) is it really helping reduce accidents, injuries, and deaths on the road and (b) will more active driving aids help more.
I pose answers to my own questions.
In the first case, accident rates slowly declined in the 70's and early eighties, but have held steady since then. Most of the active safety features were only widely available starting in the mid-nineties and have had no measurable effect on accident rates or safety since then. In fact, other safety related measures were introduced in the US during that time, e.g. the 55mph speed limit, a reduction in the DUI blood alcohol threshold, and mandatory seatbelt laws. These seemed to have little effect also.
What's going on here? A fluffy magazine article explained it to me. People have a certain comfort level when it comes to perceived risk and danger. While individuals are somewhat poor at making mathematical judgements of accident risks and the personal danger to themselves, in the aggregate, people somewhat accurately adjust their driving behavior to be more aggressive and risky to "compensate" for the uncompfortably low level of risk when new safety features are implemented.
The second question is whether additional driving assistance from a new technology like 360 degree radar would actually improve safety. The answer is we'll never know because this feature will be introduced for profit reasons and its effect on safety will never be measured independently from other variables, especially the human risk evaluation variable.
I actually wanted Bill Gates to waste billions of dollars on this. Ever since Iridium died it was obvious that satellites are a bad idea, but his continued pursuit of a financially reckless satellite network would have been proof that Bill G. was a dangerous egomaniac. Alas, he has more brains than that.
What about the fact that medical lasers are set to a specific wavelength because of the properties of its interaction with skin tissue vs. diseased tissue? sunlight is "broadband" if you will. If they put a filter in there to restrict it to a narrow range of wavelengths they'll lose out on power.
When the xbox was first brought to the public's attention, one of the strengths mentioned was that since it was at heart an intel cpu and nvdia gpu (which are common in PCs), a great quantity of games would quickly be ported from the PC to the xbox. This has not happened, and the lack of game titles available has become a very severe criticism of the xbox. What is preventing PC games from being ported?
Hmm, now if I can get pills that remove my need for food, air, water, and sex, I will legally qualify as a robot. Bender doesn't seem to need food, air, or water at least.
Tivo explicitly promises not to use anything more specific than a zip code to
identify your viewing details (see point 1.3 of their privacy policy [tivo.com]);
and that's nothing like as specific as you seem to think - unless everyone in
Beverley Hills 90210 lives in the same house. Even UK postcodes aren't that
precise: it's simply not true to say that "if i give my postcode to some
companies they can tell exactly which house iam living in," unless your
house is the size of a football pitch.
The 9 digit zip codes in common use in the US do indeed uniquely identify many, perhaps even most, houses in the US. My house, and all of my neighbors, have unique 9-digit zip codes. The tivo privacy policy doesn't restrict itself to 5-digit zip codes. Several of the arguments in this thread are based a naive assumption.
Slashdot Mirror
One factor that is often overlooked is that there is in some sense a productivity boom in IT, same as in other sectors, that has allowed fewer workers to get more done. A lot of the things programmers would have done from scratch in the old days are now encoded into APIs or web-enabled, or have complete products already in place.
.net middleware to serve web pages from their database. Well, the database and the web server are already done, so all that's left is coding up some middleware type stuff and guess what, that can be done in India by people who maybe could or couldn't build a web server or database by themselves but can certainly use the APIs and get those web pages working.
When I first started programming, databases, window systems, consumer operating systems, the internet, web-enabled everything, etc did not exist. If you wanted to process information of any sort, depending on the platform, you may have had to code from the BIOS or program loader all the way up to curses windows. But at this point, a lot of the programming effort that would have been spent building a custom database, a custom TTY window system, a custom printing system, blah blah blah is now either integrated into the OS or available as a comprehensive product.
This sort of factoring of functionality by making a product out of it and making it accessible to other companies at a reasonable price is (a) something that managers can understand and (b) a logical consequence of the engineers credo to "not reinvent the wheel".
The downside is that business have less reason to have senior programmers "on retainer", if you will, doing traditional sorts of programming: custom-making some well-designed functionality fit into a proprietary system. At this point they just want some
Your 12+ years of experience should have prepared you to deal with short sighted/manipulative/ladder-climbing/egotistical managers a little bit better. You took it personally as an insult to your experiences and professionalism, but he's just playing with you because you're just a chess piece to him and he wants to put you in a square, not listen to what you have to say.
If you want to move to management, which is an obvious place for a 12 year programmer to go, especially in a company that values them the same as 2 year programmers, then he would probably be delighted to mentor you and get you started with a "team leader" position.
If you just want to get back at him, then you're playing his game and you're going to lose. Start looking for another job, but don't be surprised if you eventually have to deal with the same attitude from someone else at your new place.
One of the most difficult problems is that since linksys boxes are so cheap these days, it's not unusual for a misguided employee to just bring his old one from home and plug it into the corporate network. Hey the super-secure ultra-locked down DMZ'd VPN one you provided didn't even show up in the pop-up menu so obviously it was his right to just get something working.
Some really high-end wifi equipment will scan the airwaves for unauthorized signals, plus scan the wired network for IP addresses that are act like access points and then notify you or even attempt to shut them down.
Kids are exposed to television, radio, video games, high-pressure sports, junk food, back seat DVD players, and plain old bullies at school. If you want kids to learn, there needs to be some time each day spent in a calm, relaxed environment where they can read a book at their own pace, sit and think, daydream, play act, just the normal stuff kids do.
Adults are under so much pressure and stress that they seem to be preparing their kids early for a life of pressure and stress as well. Everyone I know who has kids makes sure the kids are occupied and entertained every waking moment. When I was a kid, the most refreshing and insightful moments often occurred when I was just sitting in a chair, staring into space, sometimes thinking, sometimes not. That's when you make a mental connection, that's when you "get it". Taking away the free time and relaxation is what makes science and math difficult for kids. It probably makes other subjects difficult too, but you can get by in a lot of subjects by just memorizing. We can do better.
Coincidentally, next week is TV Turnoff Week.
(a) Intel actively lied about the presence of the FDIV bug and dug their own PR grave.
(b) firmware on Pentiums isn't field upgradeable and therefore has a higher standard to live up to.
(c) long division is not new and is easy to test and should have been tested by a fourth grader at least.
(d) I really don't think intel spent 1/2 billion dollars of real hard cash replacing chips that depreciated to $10 in a matter of months and only cost $5 to manufacture. the fix was trivial and certainly didn't deserve a big amortization share of Intel's galactic R&D budget either.
What they should have done differently?
Admit the bug as soon as reports came in, offer to replace the chip free for anyone with scientific computing needs, distribute a math DLL that intercepts the FDIV call in software and replaces the results with correct ones. And offer at-cost replacements to anyone not happy with the DLL.
The employment picture for software engineers is pretty bad right now, and there is no reason to think it will get better anytime soon. There is rampant age-discrimination and checklist-based hiring, both of which will work against you.
And you find APIs daunting?
You aren't running toward programming, you're running away from management. I don't blame you for that (I would do the same thing) but unless you are really talented and motivated you should work on hobby-level coding to start with. At two or three hours a day with no management interference, even a beginner can get a lot done quickly. Have fun, but please don't make the career decision yet.
I have a suspicion that McBride is taking antidepressants. When I have observed other people taking them, often they become immature and paranoid, in a way that seeps into every action and every conversation. It's truly frightening when people in positions of power start behaving that way.
Simple three point plan for eliminating e-mail viruses:
1. Microsoft should immediately patch exchange and outlook so that no attachments that include executable files can be transmitted. You get word files, pdfs, plain text, jpegs and similar "passive" file formats. any scripting gets filtered out of html or spreadsheets. An archive (tar, zip, etc) doesn't get transmitted if it contains bad stuff or is not readable. And you can't override this by just clicking "yes" or "okay" upon receipt of a message.
2. viruses propagate similar to spam. ms exchange or other MTAs should make note of 50000+ very similar messages being tossed about and immediately blacklist compromised machines, then go into mail accounts and yank out virus messages that haven't been downloaded yet. Messages with attachments should be subject to a short extra wait time (5 min) to slow propagation and give the system time to react.
3. email attachments, even non-executable ones, should be opened in a restricted environment, e.g. chroot jail, java sandbox, or a refreshable vmware image. if the virus goes nuts, just delete the environment and kill its processes. don't allow outbound connections from the sandbox. In the long run, web pages and downloaded files should be treated similarly.
Yes, virus writers will find workarounds and attack new security holes. But microsoft has an obligation to fix existing security holes and at least make the virus writers look for new ones.
Yes, some people will be annoyed that their excel macros get lost. But it is time to start setting up a social environment where email is about sending a message that you type in yourself to communicate, not just a file sharing system for forwarding zip files.
This is just a preview of the upcoming 128-bit processor war!
340282366920938463463374607431768211456 bytes of addressable memory...powerpoint is really going to kick butt!
It wasn't that long ago that most vehicles had NO active help from the car for the actual act of driving. No anti-lock brakes, no stability control, no airbags, no heads-up-display, no backup sensors, no third brake lights, nothing. Now that we have this symphony of helpful features (a) is it really helping reduce accidents, injuries, and deaths on the road and (b) will more active driving aids help more.
I pose answers to my own questions.
In the first case, accident rates slowly declined in the 70's and early eighties, but have held steady since then. Most of the active safety features were only widely available starting in the mid-nineties and have had no measurable effect on accident rates or safety since then. In fact, other safety related measures were introduced in the US during that time, e.g. the 55mph speed limit, a reduction in the DUI blood alcohol threshold, and mandatory seatbelt laws. These seemed to have little effect also.
What's going on here? A fluffy magazine article explained it to me. People have a certain comfort level when it comes to perceived risk and danger. While individuals are somewhat poor at making mathematical judgements of accident risks and the personal danger to themselves, in the aggregate, people somewhat accurately adjust their driving behavior to be more aggressive and risky to "compensate" for the uncompfortably low level of risk when new safety features are implemented.
The second question is whether additional driving assistance from a new technology like 360 degree radar would actually improve safety. The answer is we'll never know because this feature will be introduced for profit reasons and its effect on safety will never be measured independently from other variables, especially the human risk evaluation variable.
Upon first glance, I read the headline as "Africa's Great Apes in Parallel."
Other people take talking frogs for granted?
Rev. Lovejoy was actually speaking to Marge when he said that.
I actually wanted Bill Gates to waste billions of dollars on this. Ever since Iridium died it was obvious that satellites are a bad idea, but his continued pursuit of a financially reckless satellite network would have been proof that Bill G. was a dangerous egomaniac. Alas, he has more brains than that.
always mount a scratch monkey
All I asked for was sharks with fricken laser beams on their heads.
What about the fact that medical lasers are set to a specific wavelength because of the properties of its interaction with skin tissue vs. diseased tissue? sunlight is "broadband" if you will. If they put a filter in there to restrict it to a narrow range of wavelengths they'll lose out on power.
I was expecting something a little less silly to come from the multibillion dollar merger of Compaq and HP.
When the xbox was first brought to the public's attention, one of the strengths mentioned was that since it was at heart an intel cpu and nvdia gpu (which are common in PCs), a great quantity of games would quickly be ported from the PC to the xbox. This has not happened, and the lack of game titles available has become a very severe criticism of the xbox.
What is preventing PC games from being ported?
It's kind of ironic--Adobe's tools are to be used by graphic design professionals, yet the tools themselves are poorly designed in some sense.
Hmm, now if I can get pills that remove my need for food, air, water, and sex, I
will legally qualify as a robot.
Bender doesn't seem to need food, air, or water at least.