What I hate are emails with no subject line or with one-word useless subjects like "hello". That helps, really. *groan*
We'd see a lot fewer grammar and spelling errors on/. if there were an edit function in the software for your own posts. I usually find at least one typo in everything I post but in order to get it in before someone else does you have to post it and not preview it.
yeah, that's basically what I was trying to say but it didn't quite come out right.
Religious motives add an interesting level of drama to stories, because usually they involve a mortal acting in the name of an immortal, and so it's not just human scheming.
I may be a more militant atheist than you and I love movies based on christian mythology.
I think it's because I had all that shit shoved down my throat by the schools (public schools at that, the south sucks) and the people around me and the characters are characters that I know about.
Or maybe because the people that make these movies tend to be people that believe in the mythology so they take the making of them more seriously and put more thought into the stories so they don't blaspheme and damn themselves.
Unfortunately I don't have the time to address all of your message, but I wanted to comment on this:
I know its cliche but it seems like you can never go wrong with striving to hit the ideal - you'll likely miss but you'll strike a lot closer to the target than you would have if you didn't try. Attempting to change the world is futile; attempting to change yourself is always worth the effort.
It seems to me that changing yourself is wasted energy if the nature of the world in which you live negates it.
I don't disagree with the sentiment of your argument at all. I disagree with the practicality of it. The world would be a better place if everyone lived by the same set of ideals, but they simply don't.
Your comment about marketers and their belief in what they do just proves that there are at least two sides to every story and everyone claims that the one that makes them look the best is the truth.
If you choose not to reply any further, thank you for a decent discussion that did not explode miserably into a flaming pile of crap.:)
What you're talking about is the ideal way things should be. I totally agree. Things should be that way.
I'm talking about the way things -are-. Take your example at the bottom, about getting stiffed for $3000. In reality, what the hell are you going to do if a $big_corp screws you like that? Sue them for it? Good luck making anything after the lawyers are done. They'll probably find some way to assign that account to a paper company that has no assets, anyway, and leave you with nobody at all to sue.
In point of fact, I don't complain when I'm deceived by my employer, because everyone knows that corporations are liars and cheats and if you trust what one of them says, you might as well carve "STUPID" into your forehead with a chainsaw (unless you're legitimately mentally handicapped) The only way to win when it's individual vs. corp is to get yours before they screw you - because they WILL try.
You seem to have made the assumption that I'll lie and cheat and steal with impunity to get what I want. That's not true. I believe wholeheartedly in keeping my word and in behaving honorably. But I also operate by the "fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice, shame on me" rule. If someone lies to me, they've shown that their word means nothing - therefore they aren't worthy of the same consideration from me. Every word that a corporation says publically is a lie at one level or another.
I've realized now that I'm not going to change the world by behaving in the ideal way. I'm just going to do what I have to to have the life I want. If I can behave ethically while I'm at it, so much the better.
If you honestly believe that ethics and business do not belong with each other than it must be safe to assume that: [list of evil shit deleted]
There is a difference between harassment of ordinary citizens by government-sponsored corporate entities and an ordinary citizen using the system to their advantage. In fact, they're pretty much polar opposites.
What you are really trying to express, it seems, is a selfish perspective built on whatever you can get away with. If that is the case, if your word, your contracts, your responsibilities and your commitments that you have willingly entered into mean nothing to you, then you are as bad as the machine you are raging against. Its dishonorable and sad.
If I'm contracted to provide a service, then I provide it to the best of my ability, because that's what I've been hired to do - but you can be damn sure I'm going to take every tax deduction I legally can when that time comes around, too.
The business world has consequences in the real world but the same rules do not apply. If they do, then why is Kenneth Lay a free man? You can't be serious if you're trying to tell me that honor has a place in a world where he gets away with what he and the rest of the Enron management did.
The things that mean something to me have no price. Business is just what I do in order to have the things that mean something to me. I've seen far too many people lose out or lose everything because they put an emotional investment in what they do for money. It's a sucker bet.
The question is not whether you would choose a 25 year veteran over a new grad, but whether you'd choose a self taught 20 something snot with 2 years experience over a college educated 20 something snot. Or whether you'd choose a self taught 25 year veteran over a college educated 25 year veteran(assuming any such actually exist).
For both of them it comes down to experience. With the veterans, the college education is more or less irrelevant. I'd take the 20 year old with experience over the one with a degree, IF the experience is applicable to the problems I needed him/her to solve. If neither of them have any experience, the degree-holder will at least have a better grounding in a broader range of problems.
The two biggest things I've had to overcome as a self-taught programmer are a) bad coding habits like undercommenting or not commenting code and using cryptic variable names and b) the narrow scope of what I learned on my own. When programming was just a hobby for me, I didn't sit around the house writing database driven enterprise applications, I wrote what I enjoyed writing. It is very rare that I can take the work I'm doing now and directly compare it to things I wrote for fun while I was learning.
In a CS program a student HAS to learn how to solve a wide variety of problems and that necessarily makes them more flexible as a professional, up to the point where real-world experience negates this advantage.
Oh yeah, like I said, I don't believe in any of the theories myself. Occam's Razor blows most conspiracy theories out of the water. Iraq has always seemed more like a Bush vs. Hussein personal vendetta to me. That, and the oil, but it's not like this is the 1600s and the USA can go into a country, blow away the government, and claim it as territory. At least, not overtly.
I was making the point that, just because the conclusion is bullshit, that doesn't mean the supporting information is. Anyone who remembers the O.J. Simpson trial should remember that.
Wow. You have absolutely no moral qualms whatsoever about lying, huh? Perhaps that bad credit rating is deserved...I mean if you advocate lying, how is a business/partner/whomever supposed to know you will keep your end of a contract (i.e. what the credit report is supposed to reflect).
In today's world, ethics and business cannot mix if you want to be more than just someone's corporate bitch.
I don't believe any of the 9/11 conspiracies myself, but it would be technologically very easy for the government to get four modern commercial airliners, paint them in airline colors, rig them for remote piloting or with a GPS autopilot from a military aircraft, and use them as cruise missiles.
Also, the FBI has many years of experience in suppressing evidence. They are more than capable of making sure that the world only sees what the US government wants them to.
Goodbye any chance of pulling yourself out of poverty!
Don't you see that that's the point?
When everyone's poor, they are desperate and thus easy to manipulate through dangling the carrot of jobs and money.
It's also easier to distract uneducated people with bread and circuses like reality TV and sports events. If everyone is poor nobody can afford to educate themselves. The educated will all come from upper classes and use their education to further the class divide.
It amazes me how people fail to recognize this. I'm guessing they fail to see it because Lee Atwater and the other GOP POS's of the later 80s made a dirty word out of it - "class warfare" - and then stigmatized anyone who even mentioned the thought of class in America.
That's unfortunate that you got that impression - are you sure he actually has a CS degree, and that he wasn't just lying (or equivalently, it isn't from a "school" like University of Phoenix?)
I know where he claims to have a degree from. I'm not going to be specific because he reads/. and may be reading this. He should know more than he does. I guess it's possible he's lying, but that's a big risk and he's not the kind of guy that would take risks like that. If you lie about a degree in this town you get blacklisted.
Anyway, U of Phoenix has its place. It provides the piece of paper for people that have all the real-world experience, but who can't crack HR departments because of the lack of a degree.
That may be partly intentional. Real-world experience is not a replacement for formal education (the theory behind software design is only *one* of many fields covered in a CS degree - it's called Computer Science, not Software Development, for a reason!). Vice versa, formal education is not a replacement for real-world experience. Those who think that one is a means to the other are sadly mistaken.
That was essentially my point. CS is a pure academic discipline, not an applied science. It's not the responsibility of a CS department to teach people how to get along in real-world IT environments, but that doesn't matter - they have to anyway.
Sorry to discard other parts of CS than software development. Most CS majors are software guys, though. Hardware guys tend towards the EE side of things.
well, MIT isn't just any school and learning from the best is worth quite a bit of real-world experience. If we were talking about some degree factory school then it'd be a different story.
I used 25 years of exp. because the most fastidious programmers I know are veterans of the mainframe world where every line of code had to count.
"flowcharts" have given way to UML. This is both good and bad (who the hell can get anything out of a collaboration diagram?) but mostly good. I don't like activity diagrams vs. old-school flowcharts, but they do the job and at least things are standardized somewhat now.
As a software developer that doesn't have a degree I think I slightly disagree with you.
I'm totally self-taught. I've had to do a LOT of catching up on my own to learn the underlying theories behind good software design. If I had stuck with CS in school and stayed in school I'd have learned more about CS theory and would have more of a foundation to build upon.
Having gone through a good CS program that covers actual computer science and not just how to code is a big advantage. The hard part of software is designing it and fitting it all together and a good CS program teaches you that.
However, so many CS degrees are just coding certificates, more or less. the guy opposite the wall from me is an idiot. He cuts and pastes all of his code, not even paying attention to what it's doing, has singlehandedly brought down many production systems and broken almost every build he's been involved with, and is just generally an unpleasant person aside from that. He also has a bachelors degree in CS.
The academic CS culture seems to devalue things like communications and, well, anything that's not geeky, so you get a lot of recent CS grads that still have the social skills of a retarded goat, even if they could rewrite the Quake engine from scratch in 48 hours. That's useless in the real world. A good programmer has to be able to communicate as well as code and design software. There's a backlash growing against offshoring because of this (if the backlash hasn't made it to where you are, I'm sorry)
Furthermore, pure CS programs teach you nothing about business or how to survive in the corporate environment. If you don't understand the business of your employer, you're not going to be very good at solving its problems. The corporate environment has to be experienced to learn to navigate it.
If I had a resume from a recent MIT graduate and a 25-year self-taught veteran, it would come down to what the task is, if I were hiring. I'd take the MIT guy for buzzword compliant work and the vet for mission-critical stuff that has to be near-100% reliable. I've found that veteran programmers make an effort to cover the bases more thoroughly.
Well, in my case, I grew up on a farm and my dad got unlimited free manual labor out of me from the time I was old enough to do it. I'm not your typical/. reader white-collar kid that sat around their house for 18 years and then went to college on their dime.
They also never allowed me to be lazy about figuring things out myself, so I have the same policy with them. They pushed me to figure things out on my own, and taught me that that is a better way of doing things than running for help the first time you run into something you don't know. It's their value, too, so it'd be hypocritical of them to call me at every error message.
If they try to fix it themselves, and are still stumped, then I'm more than glad to help. I just don't put up with anyone refusing to try to help themselves.
And no, when they're old and physically incapable of doing what they used to do for themselves, I'm not going to make them try anyway. They're just not helpless yet.
Slashdot Mirror
What I hate are emails with no subject line or with one-word useless subjects like "hello". That helps, really. *groan*
We'd see a lot fewer grammar and spelling errors on
that looks great. but what part of the Hasbro conglomerate is responsible for it? I can't find it just by browsing the site?
I tested high enoguh to get into Mensa, and that's not saying much for them as a group.
--
Vote Libertarian! [lp.org]
I guess not.
I thought Death Row was Suge Knight's company.
yeah, that's basically what I was trying to say but it didn't quite come out right.
Religious motives add an interesting level of drama to stories, because usually they involve a mortal acting in the name of an immortal, and so it's not just human scheming.
I may be a more militant atheist than you and I love movies based on christian mythology.
I think it's because I had all that shit shoved down my throat by the schools (public schools at that, the south sucks) and the people around me and the characters are characters that I know about.
Or maybe because the people that make these movies tend to be people that believe in the mythology so they take the making of them more seriously and put more thought into the stories so they don't blaspheme and damn themselves.
so what did you run to eliminate your sense of humor?
Unless you count "relaxing" for six hours a day to be an accomplishment.
You'll understand when you get older, son.
hey, as long as we don't have to listen to Blood Sweat and Tears, I'm cool with it
You overestimate our importance. The vast majority of game buyers don't read Slashdot and probably couldn't even spell the URL.
A Slashdot boycott of EA would last until their next release, then everyone would just lap it up like always.
Unfortunately I don't have the time to address all of your message, but I wanted to comment on this:
:)
I know its cliche but it seems like you can never go wrong with striving to hit the ideal - you'll likely miss but you'll strike a lot closer to the target than you would have if you didn't try. Attempting to change the world is futile; attempting to change yourself is always worth the effort.
It seems to me that changing yourself is wasted energy if the nature of the world in which you live negates it.
I don't disagree with the sentiment of your argument at all. I disagree with the practicality of it. The world would be a better place if everyone lived by the same set of ideals, but they simply don't.
Your comment about marketers and their belief in what they do just proves that there are at least two sides to every story and everyone claims that the one that makes them look the best is the truth.
If you choose not to reply any further, thank you for a decent discussion that did not explode miserably into a flaming pile of crap.
Likewise.
What you're talking about is the ideal way things should be. I totally agree. Things should be that way.
I'm talking about the way things -are-. Take your example at the bottom, about getting stiffed for $3000. In reality, what the hell are you going to do if a $big_corp screws you like that? Sue them for it? Good luck making anything after the lawyers are done. They'll probably find some way to assign that account to a paper company that has no assets, anyway, and leave you with nobody at all to sue.
In point of fact, I don't complain when I'm deceived by my employer, because everyone knows that corporations are liars and cheats and if you trust what one of them says, you might as well carve "STUPID" into your forehead with a chainsaw (unless you're legitimately mentally handicapped) The only way to win when it's individual vs. corp is to get yours before they screw you - because they WILL try.
You seem to have made the assumption that I'll lie and cheat and steal with impunity to get what I want. That's not true. I believe wholeheartedly in keeping my word and in behaving honorably. But I also operate by the "fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice, shame on me" rule. If someone lies to me, they've shown that their word means nothing - therefore they aren't worthy of the same consideration from me. Every word that a corporation says publically is a lie at one level or another.
I've realized now that I'm not going to change the world by behaving in the ideal way. I'm just going to do what I have to to have the life I want. If I can behave ethically while I'm at it, so much the better.
If you honestly believe that ethics and business do not belong with each other than it must be safe to assume that:
[list of evil shit deleted]
There is a difference between harassment of ordinary citizens by government-sponsored corporate entities and an ordinary citizen using the system to their advantage. In fact, they're pretty much polar opposites.
What you are really trying to express, it seems, is a selfish perspective built on whatever you can get away with. If that is the case, if your word, your contracts, your responsibilities and your commitments that you have willingly entered into mean nothing to you, then you are as bad as the machine you are raging against. Its dishonorable and sad.
If I'm contracted to provide a service, then I provide it to the best of my ability, because that's what I've been hired to do - but you can be damn sure I'm going to take every tax deduction I legally can when that time comes around, too.
The business world has consequences in the real world but the same rules do not apply. If they do, then why is Kenneth Lay a free man? You can't be serious if you're trying to tell me that honor has a place in a world where he gets away with what he and the rest of the Enron management did.
The things that mean something to me have no price. Business is just what I do in order to have the things that mean something to me. I've seen far too many people lose out or lose everything because they put an emotional investment in what they do for money. It's a sucker bet.
The question is not whether you would choose a 25 year veteran over a new grad, but whether you'd choose a self taught 20 something snot with 2 years experience over a college educated 20 something snot. Or whether you'd choose a self taught 25 year veteran over a college educated 25 year veteran(assuming any such actually exist).
For both of them it comes down to experience. With the veterans, the college education is more or less irrelevant. I'd take the 20 year old with experience over the one with a degree, IF the experience is applicable to the problems I needed him/her to solve. If neither of them have any experience, the degree-holder will at least have a better grounding in a broader range of problems.
The two biggest things I've had to overcome as a self-taught programmer are a) bad coding habits like undercommenting or not commenting code and using cryptic variable names and b) the narrow scope of what I learned on my own. When programming was just a hobby for me, I didn't sit around the house writing database driven enterprise applications, I wrote what I enjoyed writing. It is very rare that I can take the work I'm doing now and directly compare it to things I wrote for fun while I was learning.
In a CS program a student HAS to learn how to solve a wide variety of problems and that necessarily makes them more flexible as a professional, up to the point where real-world experience negates this advantage.
Oh yeah, like I said, I don't believe in any of the theories myself. Occam's Razor blows most conspiracy theories out of the water. Iraq has always seemed more like a Bush vs. Hussein personal vendetta to me. That, and the oil, but it's not like this is the 1600s and the USA can go into a country, blow away the government, and claim it as territory. At least, not overtly.
I was making the point that, just because the conclusion is bullshit, that doesn't mean the supporting information is. Anyone who remembers the O.J. Simpson trial should remember that.
Wow. You have absolutely no moral qualms whatsoever about lying, huh? Perhaps that bad credit rating is deserved...I mean if you advocate lying, how is a business/partner/whomever supposed to know you will keep your end of a contract (i.e. what the credit report is supposed to reflect).
In today's world, ethics and business cannot mix if you want to be more than just someone's corporate bitch.
I don't believe any of the 9/11 conspiracies myself, but it would be technologically very easy for the government to get four modern commercial airliners, paint them in airline colors, rig them for remote piloting or with a GPS autopilot from a military aircraft, and use them as cruise missiles.
Also, the FBI has many years of experience in suppressing evidence. They are more than capable of making sure that the world only sees what the US government wants them to.
Goodbye any chance of pulling yourself out of poverty!
Don't you see that that's the point?
When everyone's poor, they are desperate and thus easy to manipulate through dangling the carrot of jobs and money.
It's also easier to distract uneducated people with bread and circuses like reality TV and sports events. If everyone is poor nobody can afford to educate themselves. The educated will all come from upper classes and use their education to further the class divide.
It amazes me how people fail to recognize this. I'm guessing they fail to see it because Lee Atwater and the other GOP POS's of the later 80s made a dirty word out of it - "class warfare" - and then stigmatized anyone who even mentioned the thought of class in America.
That's unfortunate that you got that impression - are you sure he actually has a CS degree, and that he wasn't just lying (or equivalently, it isn't from a "school" like University of Phoenix?)
/. and may be reading this. He should know more than he does. I guess it's possible he's lying, but that's a big risk and he's not the kind of guy that would take risks like that. If you lie about a degree in this town you get blacklisted.
I know where he claims to have a degree from. I'm not going to be specific because he reads
Anyway, U of Phoenix has its place. It provides the piece of paper for people that have all the real-world experience, but who can't crack HR departments because of the lack of a degree.
That may be partly intentional. Real-world experience is not a replacement for formal education (the theory behind software design is only *one* of many fields covered in a CS degree - it's called Computer Science, not Software Development, for a reason!). Vice versa, formal education is not a replacement for real-world experience. Those who think that one is a means to the other are sadly mistaken.
That was essentially my point. CS is a pure academic discipline, not an applied science. It's not the responsibility of a CS department to teach people how to get along in real-world IT environments, but that doesn't matter - they have to anyway.
Sorry to discard other parts of CS than software development. Most CS majors are software guys, though. Hardware guys tend towards the EE side of things.
well, MIT isn't just any school and learning from the best is worth quite a bit of real-world experience. If we were talking about some degree factory school then it'd be a different story.
I used 25 years of exp. because the most fastidious programmers I know are veterans of the mainframe world where every line of code had to count.
this may be the first time in history anything related to Nigel was termed as Insightful.
Today's UserFriendly is a perfect illustration of why, for me, it's the community that drives me away from MMORPGs.
Excellent point. I play games as a break from people. I don't want more people in my games. Thankfully some publishers still realize that.
"flowcharts" have given way to UML. This is both good and bad (who the hell can get anything out of a collaboration diagram?) but mostly good. I don't like activity diagrams vs. old-school flowcharts, but they do the job and at least things are standardized somewhat now.
As a software developer that doesn't have a degree I think I slightly disagree with you.
I'm totally self-taught. I've had to do a LOT of catching up on my own to learn the underlying theories behind good software design. If I had stuck with CS in school and stayed in school I'd have learned more about CS theory and would have more of a foundation to build upon.
Having gone through a good CS program that covers actual computer science and not just how to code is a big advantage. The hard part of software is designing it and fitting it all together and a good CS program teaches you that.
However, so many CS degrees are just coding certificates, more or less. the guy opposite the wall from me is an idiot. He cuts and pastes all of his code, not even paying attention to what it's doing, has singlehandedly brought down many production systems and broken almost every build he's been involved with, and is just generally an unpleasant person aside from that. He also has a bachelors degree in CS.
The academic CS culture seems to devalue things like communications and, well, anything that's not geeky, so you get a lot of recent CS grads that still have the social skills of a retarded goat, even if they could rewrite the Quake engine from scratch in 48 hours. That's useless in the real world. A good programmer has to be able to communicate as well as code and design software. There's a backlash growing against offshoring because of this (if the backlash hasn't made it to where you are, I'm sorry)
Furthermore, pure CS programs teach you nothing about business or how to survive in the corporate environment. If you don't understand the business of your employer, you're not going to be very good at solving its problems. The corporate environment has to be experienced to learn to navigate it.
If I had a resume from a recent MIT graduate and a 25-year self-taught veteran, it would come down to what the task is, if I were hiring. I'd take the MIT guy for buzzword compliant work and the vet for mission-critical stuff that has to be near-100% reliable. I've found that veteran programmers make an effort to cover the bases more thoroughly.
Well, in my case, I grew up on a farm and my dad got unlimited free manual labor out of me from the time I was old enough to do it. I'm not your typical /. reader white-collar kid that sat around their house for 18 years and then went to college on their dime.
They also never allowed me to be lazy about figuring things out myself, so I have the same policy with them. They pushed me to figure things out on my own, and taught me that that is a better way of doing things than running for help the first time you run into something you don't know. It's their value, too, so it'd be hypocritical of them to call me at every error message.
If they try to fix it themselves, and are still stumped, then I'm more than glad to help. I just don't put up with anyone refusing to try to help themselves.
And no, when they're old and physically incapable of doing what they used to do for themselves, I'm not going to make them try anyway. They're just not helpless yet.