We need fewer programmers, not more. Maybe professional certification would help somewhat.
No no no no no. We need more programmers and we need them to be better. Professional certification almost universally enshrines a culture of having to memorize useless facts and kiss the right asses in the right way in order to be allowed to do work. Meanwhile it makes the entry bar so high that people that might be better at the job look elsewhere because they can't afford to spend years getting to a level where their professional body allows them to earn a crust. All you'd see is coders paid like trade apprenticies or even medical interns. I've seen some REALLY bad programmers who are professionally certified in one tool or other (mostly Java). You have to trust a certifying body NOT to create this kind of atmosphere which is the kind in which it will thrive most.
Aparently not, at least for you, since it taught you that you should always do everything the hard way (which is bone headed). Just because a tool is misused/overused it doesn't mean that tool is shite.
The very worst thing we've done ever since the tech boom is for the most part dumped the GUI tools in preference for hand coding. You use to be able to knock a screen together in a day. Now it takes a week. However it still takes the same amount of time to code any kind of business/application logic. So for a COMPETENT coder instead of it taking a day for the GUI and a week for the application code, it now takes a week for each. Way to go backwards.
If the worst thing that happens to you is some jail time because you refused to reveal your keys, consider yourself ahead of the game.
Lovely ideal but the practical considerations of having your life fall apart - job, marriage, family, friends all gone - say hi to your new cellmate who's hobbies include anal penetration of yourself aren't so nice.
I've posted about my caffeine free lifestyle on here before but I'm too drunk (it was 97F today) to look it up while I'm mobile....blah blah blah...
Drop the caffeine habit, you'll love yourself for it both health and money wise.
If you're worried about your health, why on earth would you be getting drunk. Switching from caffeined softdrink to water might be healthy but switching to beer not so much!
Dude, I still code for VMS but on Dec Alpha not VAX. There are plans to move to Linux but it's a mission critical custom app taht I work on and it won't be retired for some time.
You come across as a young coder with not much commercial experience. Forgive the insult if I'm wrong. When you mature as a programmer, you'll understand that it's not about what your favourite tools are. Your favourite tools will be the ones that let you get the job done and build what your users/clients want. It really sounds like you haven't done your research when it comes to PC debugging tools. There's a wide gamut of them around so it may be worth spending some time on it if you're allowed to add to your own dev environment where you work. There's also a lot to be said about the tried and true mechanism of adding print statements and dumping the stack manually from code. Even with a debugger, depending on your problem, print statements may be easier to use than an interactive debugger because you can ponder the trace for hours without worrying about the state of your debugging session (timeouts etc).
Not researching your market as you've described is just grossly incompetent. Presumably, there was a programmer, team leader or manager somewhere down the chain that realized how useless this was and either didn't communicate it to their boss or didn't draw enough attention to it that it was communicated up the line. That's a communication issue, and while cultural diversity allowed you to side step that one problem (or rather having someone of the same culture as the end user), I'm willing to bet the company had bigger problems. Making an assumption that poor sales = good uptake + piracy without gathering any evidence is a clear indication that the company was in a bad way managementwise.
Artists in general and musicians in particular don't get well known because they're able to plan sensibly for the future. They make it in the highly glamorized industry because they're rebellious and spontaneous and live the wild kind of life a teenager wishes they could or at least fantasizes about (you know the whole drugs and hookers, not to mention touring the world and being adored by millions). Sadly many people who are creative are also a tad mentally unstable. The industry doesn't promote common sense and if it did teens would move on to something else.
Asking these artists to create sensible investment plans and be grateful for their one song (by the way one song will generally get you into debt not make you rich) isn't very differen to asking drug addicts and hookers to go to church and quit doing what they do.
What you think evil and stupid are mutually exclusive?
They tried to screw this guy over. He had a legit claim. If they'd managed to win (only really possible on a technicality from what I can see, but I'm no lawyer) this guy would have been out of pocket for some hefty legal bills fighting them. His life quality would have gone down (to say the least). Hence evil. Fighting a case you can't win is also quite stupid.
I bought a Dell computer with Vista Ultimate this week. It was an Inspiron 9400. I was nervous about buying it because I didn't want Vista (but paid for Ultimate in case I ever needed it - $100 oem upgrade from home).
The first thing I did was finish setup and backup what I had. Then I loaded GParted, blew away the silly restore partition, shrank and moved the Vista partition and added XP for dual boot. It took a little bit of fiddling with Vista restore options and a boot util but to my relief I managed to get everything working and all devices recognized.
On this machine booting into Vista its slow and bloated, looks like a damned Mac clone (if I want a fucking Mac I'll buy one), is constantly prompting me to do crap (I switched off UAC this morning - it really has to be experienced to believe how bad it is!), keeps connecting out on the net (I'm in the process of removing the crapware they preload) and of course many things have now moved from where they were in previous versions of Windows. In contrast XP is a gem to use. Fast. No nags. No spurious network usage. Everything where I've had it for the last few years and where I'm use to it.
Vista is a dog. You can try to dress it up with SP1 but I still wouldn't tongue pash the mutt! I hope it ends up this decade's ME and we move on but with all the DRM crap we're seeing and customer hostile updates unfortunately I think we might be stuck with this mutt.
The point is that over the 20-30 year life of the loan, interest rates fall and rise around roughly the same level ANd the more equity you build over time, the less they affect you. Rents just keep on going up and up.
Simply not true. We've had interest rates as high as 18% in the last 30 years. They're currently holding around 6-7%. People have borrowed so much that if they tripled back to 18% most of us would lose our homes.
Unless you are sailing really close to the wind, interest rate fluctuations shouldn't matter too much.
So if my minimum loan repayment goes up from 25% of my wage to 80% of my wage it "shouldn't matter too much"?
If you are struggling with interest rates going up, then you wouldn't be any better off when they are falling either because you would be more likely to be facing redundancy or at least a slower rate of pay increases.
It really depends how much they go up and how much wages increase. If inflation is high but wages aren't keeping up (which is what I'm seeing now) then interest rates go up to try to curve the inflation, I end up doubly screwed.
The best approach if you find yourself heading into trouble is to talk to your bank early. Most will be understanding and you can often renegotiate the term of your loan, or even a payment holiday if you find yourself temporarily short of income
If I find myself struggling because the interest rates have gone up, most people will be in the same boat and property prices will fall sharply. I'd make a loss selling even IF I could find a buyer.
I really think you've been taking a lot in from your economics class without actually opening your eyes to see how it applies in the real world.
I'm not struggling today but could be one day soon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPAA Big six: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution (The Walt Disney Company), Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures (Viacom -- which bought DreamWorks in February 2006), 20th Century Fox (News Corporation), Universal Studios (NBC Universal), and Warner Bros. (Time Warner)
Sony, Warner Brothers, and Universal are common to the list. Many are the same damned companies being represented. You really think your argument holds any moral weight???
They article says they offered complete downloads of movies and "fast and easy video downloading all in one great site."
I'd call advertising flashing in your face that hey lookie lets make downloading fast and easy for you incentive to commit a crime someone might not otherwise commit.
Specialist cost a few hundred. CPAP machine cost over $1000. Sleep apnea mask $300 each (I've gone through 2). I think my private cover did cover part of the money I had to spend on the sleep study so that was only $100 or so out of my own pocket. The rest of the expenses all mine to pay and not covered.
My sleep apnea is so bad I was about to lose my job because I couldn't stay awake at my desk or at meetings. Driving had become too dangerous. This was not an optional extra for me - in fact despite having it for 4-5 years I still hate going to bed attached to that damned machine. However 3 nights without my machine and I'm a sleep deprived zombie with constant migraines.
If you are in Australia and also in a "life threatening" medical situation you are taken the BEST CARE POSSIBLE, even if this means putting the patient in a fucking helicopter to get to a surgeon who can (say) unblock the vien in the patients temple.
You're only talking about emergency care.
I'm an Australian citizen by birth, earn a decent wage, pay medicare and have top cover with a private health fund. Unfortunately an injury 17 years ago has led to my ankle becoming badly arthritic early. I'm told I'm going to have to have the ankle fused. I've seen two specialists - total time of 3 visits is less than an hour. So far for 3 visits, and and MRI it has cost me around a thousand dollars and I got I think around $200 of that back from the MRI (medicare, 1 allowed per year), and another $150 or so the doctor's visits. I will say that I did get a CT scan and I see a GP that bulk bills so all those visits were free. Still just to get the problem diagnosed and get a second opinion it's cost me over $700 after medicare rebates. The second opinion conflicted with the first so I'm glad I did it. Without the second opinion it would have been $550-$600. Again just for a diagnosis.
The first specialist said we should try an arthroscopy and palmed me off to his secretary to arrange the surgery which would cost me approximately $4000 according to the quote I was given. Private cover would only pay for the hospital stay if I stayed overnight and even then I'd have to pay a $500 excess. From the moment I was palmed off to the secretary when I asked a medical question she'd try to answer it without talking to the doctor. Since I didn't think that was appropriate I don't think I'll be going with this specialist. I have since cancelled the surgery due to the second opinion.
The second more senior says the ankle is past an arthroscopy and I'll need a midfoot fusion. Nasty procedure. 3 months off my feet in agony apparently. 10-15% failure rate and the price of failure is going through it all again. (Even the first had said I'd need the fusion eventually, so I'm borked). I haven't got a quote from him but judging by his fees I'm guessint it'll be closer to $10000 than $4000 since he's a more well known doctor who's worked on athletes. He told me to come back towards the end of the year and schedule the surgery.
We may have excellent emergency health care in this country, but good luck to you if you have an illness that doesn't require emergency treatment and aren't covered by worker's comp.
Rubbish. I've worked at places with an Open Office format. Basically they open the office to any monkey who turns up for a job interview and a handful of people have to make up for their incompetence.
I've often commented as the credits came up on 1/3rd of the screen, too small to see, in fast forward that TV was quickly heading this way and that soon you'd have very short shows and much longer periods filled with commercials. Pretty soon all channels will have as much to offer as the shopping network (ie. nothing) and the execs wonder why ratings go down.
Nice troll but you can get Vista or Ubuntu on the same hardware. Providing the drivers are available for download it's not hard. I just bought an Inspiron 9400 with Vista Ultimate. It arrived Monday. I've got it dual booting XP with all hardware recognised as of this morning. There was a little messing with boot loaders and recovery discs and I did have to download the drivers, but since the machine was no longer offered with XP and I had a spare legit license I risked having trouble installing (after googling the problems others had) when they ran their $1000 off end of financial year thing. So far so good.
...if I'm spending thousands on a new laptop, I'll still take the OS if it's optional. I can pick up Ubuntu for nothing later on. Vista would cost me hundreds.
This isn't a push in the right direction, it's a slap in the face!
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We need fewer programmers, not more. Maybe professional certification would help somewhat.
No no no no no. We need more programmers and we need them to be better. Professional certification almost universally enshrines a culture of having to memorize useless facts and kiss the right asses in the right way in order to be allowed to do work. Meanwhile it makes the entry bar so high that people that might be better at the job look elsewhere because they can't afford to spend years getting to a level where their professional body allows them to earn a crust. All you'd see is coders paid like trade apprenticies or even medical interns. I've seen some REALLY bad programmers who are professionally certified in one tool or other (mostly Java). You have to trust a certifying body NOT to create this kind of atmosphere which is the kind in which it will thrive most.
Do the lessons of VB6 teach us nothing?
Aparently not, at least for you, since it taught you that you should always do everything the hard way (which is bone headed). Just because a tool is misused/overused it doesn't mean that tool is shite.
The very worst thing we've done ever since the tech boom is for the most part dumped the GUI tools in preference for hand coding. You use to be able to knock a screen together in a day. Now it takes a week. However it still takes the same amount of time to code any kind of business/application logic. So for a COMPETENT coder instead of it taking a day for the GUI and a week for the application code, it now takes a week for each. Way to go backwards.
If the worst thing that happens to you is some jail time because you refused to reveal your keys, consider yourself ahead of the game.
Lovely ideal but the practical considerations of having your life fall apart - job, marriage, family, friends all gone - say hi to your new cellmate who's hobbies include anal penetration of yourself aren't so nice.
I've posted about my caffeine free lifestyle on here before but I'm too drunk (it was 97F today) to look it up while I'm mobile. ...blah blah blah...
Drop the caffeine habit, you'll love yourself for it both health and money wise.
If you're worried about your health, why on earth would you be getting drunk. Switching from caffeined softdrink to water might be healthy but switching to beer not so much!
Dude, I still code for VMS but on Dec Alpha not VAX. There are plans to move to Linux but it's a mission critical custom app taht I work on and it won't be retired for some time.
You come across as a young coder with not much commercial experience. Forgive the insult if I'm wrong. When you mature as a programmer, you'll understand that it's not about what your favourite tools are. Your favourite tools will be the ones that let you get the job done and build what your users/clients want. It really sounds like you haven't done your research when it comes to PC debugging tools. There's a wide gamut of them around so it may be worth spending some time on it if you're allowed to add to your own dev environment where you work. There's also a lot to be said about the tried and true mechanism of adding print statements and dumping the stack manually from code. Even with a debugger, depending on your problem, print statements may be easier to use than an interactive debugger because you can ponder the trace for hours without worrying about the state of your debugging session (timeouts etc).
Not researching your market as you've described is just grossly incompetent. Presumably, there was a programmer, team leader or manager somewhere down the chain that realized how useless this was and either didn't communicate it to their boss or didn't draw enough attention to it that it was communicated up the line. That's a communication issue, and while cultural diversity allowed you to side step that one problem (or rather having someone of the same culture as the end user), I'm willing to bet the company had bigger problems. Making an assumption that poor sales = good uptake + piracy without gathering any evidence is a clear indication that the company was in a bad way managementwise.
Artists in general and musicians in particular don't get well known because they're able to plan sensibly for the future. They make it in the highly glamorized industry because they're rebellious and spontaneous and live the wild kind of life a teenager wishes they could or at least fantasizes about (you know the whole drugs and hookers, not to mention touring the world and being adored by millions). Sadly many people who are creative are also a tad mentally unstable. The industry doesn't promote common sense and if it did teens would move on to something else.
Asking these artists to create sensible investment plans and be grateful for their one song (by the way one song will generally get you into debt not make you rich) isn't very differen to asking drug addicts and hookers to go to church and quit doing what they do.
Isn't that against "Do no stupid"?
What you think evil and stupid are mutually exclusive?
They tried to screw this guy over. He had a legit claim. If they'd managed to win (only really possible on a technicality from what I can see, but I'm no lawyer) this guy would have been out of pocket for some hefty legal bills fighting them. His life quality would have gone down (to say the least). Hence evil. Fighting a case you can't win is also quite stupid.
I bought a Dell computer with Vista Ultimate this week. It was an Inspiron 9400. I was nervous about buying it because I didn't want Vista (but paid for Ultimate in case I ever needed it - $100 oem upgrade from home).
The first thing I did was finish setup and backup what I had. Then I loaded GParted, blew away the silly restore partition, shrank and moved the Vista partition and added XP for dual boot. It took a little bit of fiddling with Vista restore options and a boot util but to my relief I managed to get everything working and all devices recognized.
On this machine booting into Vista its slow and bloated, looks like a damned Mac clone (if I want a fucking Mac I'll buy one), is constantly prompting me to do crap (I switched off UAC this morning - it really has to be experienced to believe how bad it is!), keeps connecting out on the net (I'm in the process of removing the crapware they preload) and of course many things have now moved from where they were in previous versions of Windows. In contrast XP is a gem to use. Fast. No nags. No spurious network usage. Everything where I've had it for the last few years and where I'm use to it.
Vista is a dog. You can try to dress it up with SP1 but I still wouldn't tongue pash the mutt! I hope it ends up this decade's ME and we move on but with all the DRM crap we're seeing and customer hostile updates unfortunately I think we might be stuck with this mutt.
The point is that over the 20-30 year life of the loan, interest rates fall and rise around roughly the same level ANd the more equity you build over time, the less they affect you. Rents just keep on going up and up.
Simply not true. We've had interest rates as high as 18% in the last 30 years. They're currently holding around 6-7%. People have borrowed so much that if they tripled back to 18% most of us would lose our homes.
Unless you are sailing really close to the wind, interest rate fluctuations shouldn't matter too much.
So if my minimum loan repayment goes up from 25% of my wage to 80% of my wage it "shouldn't matter too much"?
If you are struggling with interest rates going up, then you wouldn't be any better off when they are falling either because you would be more likely to be facing redundancy or at least a slower rate of pay increases.
It really depends how much they go up and how much wages increase. If inflation is high but wages aren't keeping up (which is what I'm seeing now) then interest rates go up to try to curve the inflation, I end up doubly screwed.
The best approach if you find yourself heading into trouble is to talk to your bank early. Most will be understanding and you can often renegotiate the term of your loan, or even a payment holiday if you find yourself temporarily short of income
If I find myself struggling because the interest rates have gone up, most people will be in the same boat and property prices will fall sharply. I'd make a loss selling even IF I could find a buyer.
I really think you've been taking a lot in from your economics class without actually opening your eyes to see how it applies in the real world.
I'm not struggling today but could be one day soon.
I still have my very first CD player. Oversized unit that was an addon component for a stereo I bought in the 80s. Last I checked it still works too.
And how exactly did Google not stick to their slogan?
By fighting this guy who is a much smaller player when they knew perfectly well he had a solid case.
Or are you just happy to sniff me?
"Be like water"
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee
Yeah goes to show how much you can trust any large corporation to stick to their corporate slogan.
Here's a word to the MPAA. Take a look at the mess RIAA has made of its affairs.
l abels
You're just justifying your desire to watch your DVDs and go to the movies.
The RIAA and MPAA are just associations. Ever looked at the member organizations?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RIAA_member_
Big four: EMI, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPAA
Big six: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution (The Walt Disney Company), Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures (Viacom -- which bought DreamWorks in February 2006), 20th Century Fox (News Corporation), Universal Studios (NBC Universal), and Warner Bros. (Time Warner)
Sony, Warner Brothers, and Universal are common to the list. Many are the same damned companies being represented. You really think your argument holds any moral weight???
They article says they offered complete downloads of movies and "fast and easy video downloading all in one great site."
I'd call advertising flashing in your face that hey lookie lets make downloading fast and easy for you incentive to commit a crime someone might not otherwise commit.
Oh and I almost forgot. I have sleep apnea too.
Specialist cost a few hundred. CPAP machine cost over $1000. Sleep apnea mask $300 each (I've gone through 2). I think my private cover did cover part of the money I had to spend on the sleep study so that was only $100 or so out of my own pocket. The rest of the expenses all mine to pay and not covered.
My sleep apnea is so bad I was about to lose my job because I couldn't stay awake at my desk or at meetings. Driving had become too dangerous. This was not an optional extra for me - in fact despite having it for 4-5 years I still hate going to bed attached to that damned machine. However 3 nights without my machine and I'm a sleep deprived zombie with constant migraines.
If you are in Australia and also in a "life threatening" medical situation you are taken the BEST CARE POSSIBLE, even if this means putting the patient in a fucking helicopter to get to a surgeon who can (say) unblock the vien in the patients temple.
You're only talking about emergency care.
I'm an Australian citizen by birth, earn a decent wage, pay medicare and have top cover with a private health fund. Unfortunately an injury 17 years ago has led to my ankle becoming badly arthritic early. I'm told I'm going to have to have the ankle fused. I've seen two specialists - total time of 3 visits is less than an hour. So far for 3 visits, and and MRI it has cost me around a thousand dollars and I got I think around $200 of that back from the MRI (medicare, 1 allowed per year), and another $150 or so the doctor's visits. I will say that I did get a CT scan and I see a GP that bulk bills so all those visits were free. Still just to get the problem diagnosed and get a second opinion it's cost me over $700 after medicare rebates. The second opinion conflicted with the first so I'm glad I did it. Without the second opinion it would have been $550-$600. Again just for a diagnosis.
The first specialist said we should try an arthroscopy and palmed me off to his secretary to arrange the surgery which would cost me approximately $4000 according to the quote I was given. Private cover would only pay for the hospital stay if I stayed overnight and even then I'd have to pay a $500 excess. From the moment I was palmed off to the secretary when I asked a medical question she'd try to answer it without talking to the doctor. Since I didn't think that was appropriate I don't think I'll be going with this specialist. I have since cancelled the surgery due to the second opinion.
The second more senior says the ankle is past an arthroscopy and I'll need a midfoot fusion. Nasty procedure. 3 months off my feet in agony apparently. 10-15% failure rate and the price of failure is going through it all again. (Even the first had said I'd need the fusion eventually, so I'm borked). I haven't got a quote from him but judging by his fees I'm guessint it'll be closer to $10000 than $4000 since he's a more well known doctor who's worked on athletes. He told me to come back towards the end of the year and schedule the surgery.
We may have excellent emergency health care in this country, but good luck to you if you have an illness that doesn't require emergency treatment and aren't covered by worker's comp.
There is no such thing as Open Office format.
Rubbish. I've worked at places with an Open Office format. Basically they open the office to any monkey who turns up for a job interview and a handful of people have to make up for their incompetence.
I've often commented as the credits came up on 1/3rd of the screen, too small to see, in fast forward that TV was quickly heading this way and that soon you'd have very short shows and much longer periods filled with commercials. Pretty soon all channels will have as much to offer as the shopping network (ie. nothing) and the execs wonder why ratings go down.
Somebody set us up the dildo!
Nice troll but you can get Vista or Ubuntu on the same hardware. Providing the drivers are available for download it's not hard. I just bought an Inspiron 9400 with Vista Ultimate. It arrived Monday. I've got it dual booting XP with all hardware recognised as of this morning. There was a little messing with boot loaders and recovery discs and I did have to download the drivers, but since the machine was no longer offered with XP and I had a spare legit license I risked having trouble installing (after googling the problems others had) when they ran their $1000 off end of financial year thing. So far so good.
...if I'm spending thousands on a new laptop, I'll still take the OS if it's optional. I can pick up Ubuntu for nothing later on. Vista would cost me hundreds.
This isn't a push in the right direction, it's a slap in the face!