I'm one of those who can't find a job right now. Graduated top 5% of my class, been programming for 16 years, but I'm stuck at home doing nothing.
The problem? I have no industry experience, and nobody seems willing to hire programmers with no experience right now. Presumably because there are so many recently-laid-off programmers who do have experience out there. I used to see dozens of Junior Programmer jobs advertised, now I see one or two a month and they usually need specialized skills. Meanwhile there's lots of Senior positions available.
I don't see things getting better for a few years yet at least. Until companies have reason to be optimistic and less skittish and start taking chances on people, there will be a whole bunch of us who are stuck.
Now I'm a full believer in a free market economy and in global trade, so I won't lash out at companies for shifting to a cheaper solution. But that doesn't mean I won't say that it really sucks!!!
Most of the the advice I see here disturbs me. It's mostly cliches and generic medical or psychological advice which will probably do more harm than good. Here's a different take:
Don't worry about it!
All it means it that you are a deadline-oriented person. That is, you need deadlines imposed on you to get you going. There is nothing wrong with this. It's not a pretty or glamorous way to live, but it still means you can get things done.
See, you seem to be trying to adjust yourself to fit a predetermined set of working habits, i.e. that of the stereotypical "model student". But if you think you need to become one of these workaholic types to do well in your studies and try to force yourself to become one, you will have great difficulties. So instead, adjust your working habits to fit yourself.
I am also very deadline-oriented, and if I may toot my own horn, I just graduated First Class Honours. So I like to think I'm qualified to give some tips for deadline-oriented individuals:
First, accept it. You won't get anywhere otherwise.
Next, focus on learning how long it takes you to do things. It sounds like you're underestimating the work time you need. This is a common problem. Gauging time is a very hard thing to do and it will take some time, but once you learn to do it you will realize that your deadlines are coming up sooner than you think and you can deal with it better. This will help curb those late nights.
You've already taken the step of eliminating most distractions, social and otherwise. This is vital. Of course, don't eliminate them completely - you do need some time to yourself and some time to socialize. Just do them in moderation, and make sure they take a back seat to your studies.
Don't do any socialization on campus as it will only tempt you further later. Also, it means that if you are really finding it hard to work you can make special trips to campus to study. I always found I got so much more done on campus than I did at home.
Accept the fact that things will go wrong sometimes and that you'll have to put in a late night and/or cancel your plans from time to time. But if it happens too often, start rethinking your deadlines.
Don't miss lectures! You'll save yourself reading and studying time later, and in all likelihood this is the type of work you'll put off the most. Also, don't sacrifice one class for another. For example, don't skip a lecture in one class to finish an assignment in another. This just backs up your workload and gives you an excuse to procrastinate even more.
Lastly, don't look for a medical or psychological explanation until you've tried everything else. IANAD, but neither are the vast majority of these other people telling you have these problems. There is a vast difference between a short attention span and clinical ADD. Many people have the former, but very few the latter - it's just too prominent these days so everybody thinks they have it. Oh, and while I'm sure it would be a help to be physically fit, it's not a requirement.
In short, don't try to be perfect. Accept your limitations and deal with them. I'm sure you'd like to try to improve upon some of your bad habits, but University just isn't the place to attempt that. There's way too much else going on!
Hahaha, reminds me of those big ogres (or whatever) on Fraggle Rock.
Miner 2049er was a damn fun game though! Played it for hours on my old 8-bit Atari when I was a kid. Though the sequel, Bounty Bob Strikes Back, was even better.
I remember when I got my first modem (a 1200bps) that 9600bps and 14400bps were considered "high speed". The USRobotics modems were even branded as "HST" with the HS meaning "high speed".
Then 19200 and later 28800 came out and suddenly 14400 modems were accessible to the masses and they weren't considered to be high speed anymore. However some 14400 modems still were labelled "high speed", presumably to attract people to make the switch from the lowly speed of 2400.
Then it happened all over again when 56K came out.
The one thing that was different is that I can't recall hearing of anybody getting sued over it. Probably because most modem buyers back then were more of the nerdy types and weren't fooled by cheap marketing gimmicks like sticking the words "high speed" on the box!
As for broadband, it's probably best left as a relative term. In many countries, 128K may be the best that one can get, unless one wishes to spend thousands of dollars.
Doom has state of the art graphics when it was built. The background scene in doom1 e1m1 for example almost made me cream my pants. It was a real jpg texture in the background! How cool.
You must have a special XXX-rated version with porn in the background!
Well they're not computer hardware, but I've been brutal on VCR remote controls over the years and they all still work perfectly. Throwing them onto the bed and missing, fumbling them and dropping them hard onto my (concrete) floor, spilling on them, etc. They all still work perfectly. They easily outlast the VCRs themselves.
Computer hardware makers should take notice, especially when producing portable stuff. I'm already getting a bit of button flakiness from my Palm handheld. It's barely a year old, and I've never even done anything noteworthy to endanger it.
Coincidentally enough, I found a Mozilla Easter Egg just last night. It's not an about URL, but something else.
I was on the phone and was just randomly clicking and dragging to pass the time. That's the only hint I'm going to give. I don't know how well-known it is, but in case it's not I don't want to spoil it. Besides, if it is well-known then you can easily find out what it is somewhere else anyhow.
It's the first time I've ever found an Easter Egg myself (in anything) before so I was kind of thrilled! I was totally not expecting it.
all of these Palm and PocketPC devices have compatibility issues with 3rd party software.
Compatibility issues? WTF? I've written Palm software that runs flawlessly on Palm OS 2.0 right up through 5.0, on a wide variety of devices. (I tell users up front that it doesn't work on 1.x, which was a design choice.)
If there are compatibility issues with Palm software it's because the authors of that software are ignoring Palm's own compatibility guidelines. It's a shame, yes, but don't blame Palm because third party developers can't read documentation that's freely available.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Chris Sawyer, developer of Rollercoaster Tycoon, only one of the best-selling games of the last few years. (He also wrote Transport Tycoon, of course.)
He's still basically an independent developer. It's mostly just him and his graphics guy. He has an agency handling the business end of things, and of course Infogrames does the publishing, but as far as the actual game development and programming is concerned it's still a largely independent effort.
I'm not sure, but it could also explain why RCT had such a low price when it was released.
The CBC actually ran a TV report about this on the national news tonight! It included numerous mentions of TCP/IP and a quick "dummy's overview" of what it was, plus some reflections on what the modern Internet has meant for society.
The online article is here along with a link to a radio report. Hopefully they'll put the TV version on there too.
It was obviously a slow news day, but it was still nice to see such a geeky topic hit mainstream media.
I'm just learning how to be an academic and I've already done this a couple of times. Deadlines were pressing and I was trying to focus on the information I needed for my papers. I read the relevant parts quickly a couple of times, but certainly not thoroughly. Unless I later thought that I truly didn't understand something I didn't bother to look more closely.
Plus even if you read and really do understand the main part of a paper you might make a simple mistake like missing a key assumption in the introduction (which I don't imagine too many people pay much attention to) and then end up stating a result without that assumption, and then anybody who uses your paper is getting bad information. It probably doesn't happen often, but even just a few times could cause huge problems.
It's probably excusable when a novice like myself doesn't look too closely. After all, we're still learning. Plus I know it's a bad habit and I'm trying not to continue it. However, if this is happening with more experienced academics, it is quite scary!
Wow, this is totally awesome! I was just thinking about SC2 a few days ago, too!
I don't play too many RPGs, but I was drawn to SC2 after I tried it at a friend's place. It had everything. Great races, good story, and incredible music. There are still tunes from that game that I can't get out of my head. I hum them regularly.
SC2 was really something special, and I'm thrilled to see it's coming back.
I still spend a lot of time in DOS on my WinME machine. My primary text editor is still DOS-based! When I do computer work for people they always boggle about how I go into a DOS prompt and start typing in commands instead of pushing a mouse around.
I grew up on DOS systems. In high school it was all we had: WordPerfect 5.1, Borland C++ 2.0, etc. You had to know DOS to get any work done!
DOS had its faults of course but it had many strong points:
1) The command line syntax was clean and easy to learn.
2) The set of commands was small enough to hold in your head. On Unix I often forget the commands for stuff because there are so many of them, and there are a bunch I still haven't learned.
3) Graphics in DOS programs were easy; almost trivial by today's standards.
4) You can play with whatever part of the system you want and not have to jump through hoops. In fact, the hardware course at my U is still using DOS because it's so easy to do hardware programming for.
5) Quick! No multitasking => No overhead.
Dead or not, I'll probably still be using DOS for many years to come.
...in about two years. While I was reading the article, Windows Update pops up to tell me that a "critical update" was available. For a second I foolishly thought it might be for the very problem I was reading about, but the fix is dated November 2000 and has nothing to do with security.
(I use Windows because I have to, but at least I don't use IE.)
I got into computers when Construction Set games were in their prime. Between my friends and myself we had almost all of them. (It's interesting to note that most of them were made by Electronic Arts, now one of the biggest gaming companies.)
The thing that all of them had in common was that they were SIMPLE! Look at Pinball Construction Set: Drag the pieces from the right side of the board to the left, and you're done! Anybody off the street could get a decent table up and running in 10 minutes.
Nowadays you practically need a degree to figure out what the hell you're supposed to be doing.
Editing a Quake level (hardly a construction set, but nevertheless) requires considerable artistic talent. I'm not able to think too well in 3D so I have a fantastically difficult time working with a Quake editor.
Visual Pinball (mentioned earlier) is great but you need to know how to program in VB to make the table work. Then you need to have nice graphics to overlay so the table doesn't look like a sterile piece of crap, because plainness just doesn't cut it nowadays.
My current favourity "software toy" is a Trainz, a Model Railroad "constructor". It's a great program that's as open-ended as any of the old constructors. Building a layout is not too hard but takes considerable time. Creating new locomotives requires great proficiency in 3D editing with a tool like gmax. And scripting a scenario (new with the latest service pack) requires programming proficiency in an OO language.
This is the price we pay for stunning graphics, real-life sound, and 3D immersive gameplay. Is it worth it? Well, that's a decision we each have to make for ourselves.
I'm all for a form of base-10 time, but the one proposed in the article seems too complicated.
Why not just take a year (a "real" year, not the rounded 365 days), chop it into 10 million, and make one of those the base units? Each one would be just over 3 seconds long. Then if people really need to define an hour, a day, a month, etc. they can still do it using some convenient round number, for example, 25000 units in a day (or even 30000 for longer days!:-))
This keeps the base unit reasonably close to a second and allows for a kind of "backward compatibility" while doing away with the different bases and complex leap calculations. Saying "I'll see you in 100 TU." (Time Units) is no less reasonable than "I'll see you in five minutes".
I vastly prefer the metric system for measurements but for time it just would be too radical of a step. A simpler system with a base unit close to a second would be a lot easier for people to adjust to, I think.
This obviously isn't perfect but I think it would at least be a good step in the right direction.
Unless you live in a really remote location, go to a local computer shop and either buy the parts from them or have them put together a system for you.
I've found the prices of the local "mom and pop" computer stores generally kick the shit out of the big chain stores and online stores, and there's no shipping to worry about. Plus you can actually go talk to somebody to get advice or if something goes wrong.
If you do this, buying the parts and building the system yourself is still probably your best bet, but sometimes shops have good deals on prebuilt systems that might (depending on what you need it for) be good enough.
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I'm one of those who can't find a job right now. Graduated top 5% of my class, been programming for 16 years, but I'm stuck at home doing nothing.
The problem? I have no industry experience, and nobody seems willing to hire programmers with no experience right now. Presumably because there are so many recently-laid-off programmers who do have experience out there. I used to see dozens of Junior Programmer jobs advertised, now I see one or two a month and they usually need specialized skills. Meanwhile there's lots of Senior positions available.
I don't see things getting better for a few years yet at least. Until companies have reason to be optimistic and less skittish and start taking chances on people, there will be a whole bunch of us who are stuck.
Now I'm a full believer in a free market economy and in global trade, so I won't lash out at companies for shifting to a cheaper solution. But that doesn't mean I won't say that it really sucks!!!
I run a coupla Linux boxes at work and a couple at home, and I swear I don't even take a dump unless I am certain I have backups.
Perhaps you should consider fixing your toilet.
What is your catch phrase?
You'll need a damn good one in order to compete with Mr. Schewarzenegger!
Don't worry about it!
All it means it that you are a deadline-oriented person. That is, you need deadlines imposed on you to get you going. There is nothing wrong with this. It's not a pretty or glamorous way to live, but it still means you can get things done.
See, you seem to be trying to adjust yourself to fit a predetermined set of working habits, i.e. that of the stereotypical "model student". But if you think you need to become one of these workaholic types to do well in your studies and try to force yourself to become one, you will have great difficulties. So instead, adjust your working habits to fit yourself.
I am also very deadline-oriented, and if I may toot my own horn, I just graduated First Class Honours. So I like to think I'm qualified to give some tips for deadline-oriented individuals:
In short, don't try to be perfect. Accept your limitations and deal with them. I'm sure you'd like to try to improve upon some of your bad habits, but University just isn't the place to attempt that. There's way too much else going on!
Hahaha, reminds me of those big ogres (or whatever) on Fraggle Rock.
Miner 2049er was a damn fun game though! Played it for hours on my old 8-bit Atari when I was a kid. Though the sequel, Bounty Bob Strikes Back, was even better.
Well we know it's definitely NOT his web server!
I remember when I got my first modem (a 1200bps) that 9600bps and 14400bps were considered "high speed". The USRobotics modems were even branded as "HST" with the HS meaning "high speed".
Then 19200 and later 28800 came out and suddenly 14400 modems were accessible to the masses and they weren't considered to be high speed anymore. However some 14400 modems still were labelled "high speed", presumably to attract people to make the switch from the lowly speed of 2400.
Then it happened all over again when 56K came out.
The one thing that was different is that I can't recall hearing of anybody getting sued over it. Probably because most modem buyers back then were more of the nerdy types and weren't fooled by cheap marketing gimmicks like sticking the words "high speed" on the box!
As for broadband, it's probably best left as a relative term. In many countries, 128K may be the best that one can get, unless one wishes to spend thousands of dollars.
Homer: Oh, so that's your little plan! Get us addicted then jack up the price! [pause] Well, you win.
Doom has state of the art graphics when it was built. The background scene in doom1 e1m1 for example almost made me cream my pants. It was a real jpg texture in the background! How cool.
You must have a special XXX-rated version with porn in the background!
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Well they're not computer hardware, but I've been brutal on VCR remote controls over the years and they all still work perfectly. Throwing them onto the bed and missing, fumbling them and dropping them hard onto my (concrete) floor, spilling on them, etc. They all still work perfectly. They easily outlast the VCRs themselves.
Computer hardware makers should take notice, especially when producing portable stuff. I'm already getting a bit of button flakiness from my Palm handheld. It's barely a year old, and I've never even done anything noteworthy to endanger it.
Coincidentally enough, I found a Mozilla Easter Egg just last night. It's not an about URL, but something else.
I was on the phone and was just randomly clicking and dragging to pass the time. That's the only hint I'm going to give. I don't know how well-known it is, but in case it's not I don't want to spoil it. Besides, if it is well-known then you can easily find out what it is somewhere else anyhow.
It's the first time I've ever found an Easter Egg myself (in anything) before so I was kind of thrilled! I was totally not expecting it.
BTW it's also in Netscape 7.01.
all of these Palm and PocketPC devices have compatibility issues with 3rd party software.
Compatibility issues? WTF? I've written Palm software that runs flawlessly on Palm OS 2.0 right up through 5.0, on a wide variety of devices. (I tell users up front that it doesn't work on 1.x, which was a design choice.)
If there are compatibility issues with Palm software it's because the authors of that software are ignoring Palm's own compatibility guidelines. It's a shame, yes, but don't blame Palm because third party developers can't read documentation that's freely available.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Chris Sawyer, developer of Rollercoaster Tycoon, only one of the best-selling games of the last few years. (He also wrote Transport Tycoon, of course.)
He's still basically an independent developer. It's mostly just him and his graphics guy. He has an agency handling the business end of things, and of course Infogrames does the publishing, but as far as the actual game development and programming is concerned it's still a largely independent effort.
I'm not sure, but it could also explain why RCT had such a low price when it was released.
The CBC actually ran a TV report about this on the national news tonight! It included numerous mentions of TCP/IP and a quick "dummy's overview" of what it was, plus some reflections on what the modern Internet has meant for society.
The online article is here along with a link to a radio report. Hopefully they'll put the TV version on there too.
It was obviously a slow news day, but it was still nice to see such a geeky topic hit mainstream media.
I'm just learning how to be an academic and I've already done this a couple of times. Deadlines were pressing and I was trying to focus on the information I needed for my papers. I read the relevant parts quickly a couple of times, but certainly not thoroughly. Unless I later thought that I truly didn't understand something I didn't bother to look more closely.
Plus even if you read and really do understand the main part of a paper you might make a simple mistake like missing a key assumption in the introduction (which I don't imagine too many people pay much attention to) and then end up stating a result without that assumption, and then anybody who uses your paper is getting bad information. It probably doesn't happen often, but even just a few times could cause huge problems.
It's probably excusable when a novice like myself doesn't look too closely. After all, we're still learning. Plus I know it's a bad habit and I'm trying not to continue it. However, if this is happening with more experienced academics, it is quite scary!
Wow, this is totally awesome! I was just thinking about SC2 a few days ago, too!
I don't play too many RPGs, but I was drawn to SC2 after I tried it at a friend's place. It had everything. Great races, good story, and incredible music. There are still tunes from that game that I can't get out of my head. I hum them regularly.
SC2 was really something special, and I'm thrilled to see it's coming back.
I still spend a lot of time in DOS on my WinME machine. My primary text editor is still DOS-based! When I do computer work for people they always boggle about how I go into a DOS prompt and start typing in commands instead of pushing a mouse around.
I grew up on DOS systems. In high school it was all we had: WordPerfect 5.1, Borland C++ 2.0, etc. You had to know DOS to get any work done!
DOS had its faults of course but it had many strong points:
1) The command line syntax was clean and easy to learn.
2) The set of commands was small enough to hold in your head. On Unix I often forget the commands for stuff because there are so many of them, and there are a bunch I still haven't learned.
3) Graphics in DOS programs were easy; almost trivial by today's standards.
4) You can play with whatever part of the system you want and not have to jump through hoops. In fact, the hardware course at my U is still using DOS because it's so easy to do hardware programming for.
5) Quick! No multitasking => No overhead.
Dead or not, I'll probably still be using DOS for many years to come.
Napster anagrams to "panters", so it must be fate!
("Pantser" works too...)
> it appears they've suffered mechanical difficulties and cancelled the test.
They obviously forgot what happens when you hit 88mph in a DeLorean!
...in about two years. While I was reading the article, Windows Update pops up to tell me that a "critical update" was available. For a second I foolishly thought it might be for the very problem I was reading about, but the fix is dated November 2000 and has nothing to do with security.
(I use Windows because I have to, but at least I don't use IE.)
My system (Windows ME) hangs every time I try to use Restart. I hope their avionics system is more stable, or those pilots are in trouble...
I got into computers when Construction Set games were in their prime. Between my friends and myself we had almost all of them. (It's interesting to note that most of them were made by Electronic Arts, now one of the biggest gaming companies.)
The thing that all of them had in common was that they were SIMPLE! Look at Pinball Construction Set: Drag the pieces from the right side of the board to the left, and you're done! Anybody off the street could get a decent table up and running in 10 minutes.
Nowadays you practically need a degree to figure out what the hell you're supposed to be doing.
Editing a Quake level (hardly a construction set, but nevertheless) requires considerable artistic talent. I'm not able to think too well in 3D so I have a fantastically difficult time working with a Quake editor.
Visual Pinball (mentioned earlier) is great but you need to know how to program in VB to make the table work. Then you need to have nice graphics to overlay so the table doesn't look like a sterile piece of crap, because plainness just doesn't cut it nowadays.
My current favourity "software toy" is a Trainz, a Model Railroad "constructor". It's a great program that's as open-ended as any of the old constructors. Building a layout is not too hard but takes considerable time. Creating new locomotives requires great proficiency in 3D editing with a tool like gmax. And scripting a scenario (new with the latest service pack) requires programming proficiency in an OO language.
This is the price we pay for stunning graphics, real-life sound, and 3D immersive gameplay. Is it worth it? Well, that's a decision we each have to make for ourselves.
Linux: It's not your mother's OS.
I'm all for a form of base-10 time, but the one proposed in the article seems too complicated.
:-))
Why not just take a year (a "real" year, not the rounded 365 days), chop it into 10 million, and make one of those the base units? Each one would be just over 3 seconds long. Then if people really need to define an hour, a day, a month, etc. they can still do it using some convenient round number, for example, 25000 units in a day (or even 30000 for longer days!
This keeps the base unit reasonably close to a second and allows for a kind of "backward compatibility" while doing away with the different bases and complex leap calculations. Saying "I'll see you in 100 TU." (Time Units) is no less reasonable than "I'll see you in five minutes".
I vastly prefer the metric system for measurements but for time it just would be too radical of a step. A simpler system with a base unit close to a second would be a lot easier for people to adjust to, I think.
This obviously isn't perfect but I think it would at least be a good step in the right direction.
Unless you live in a really remote location, go to a local computer shop and either buy the parts from them or have them put together a system for you.
I've found the prices of the local "mom and pop" computer stores generally kick the shit out of the big chain stores and online stores, and there's no shipping to worry about. Plus you can actually go talk to somebody to get advice or if something goes wrong.
If you do this, buying the parts and building the system yourself is still probably your best bet, but sometimes shops have good deals on prebuilt systems that might (depending on what you need it for) be good enough.