Actually V&V, or non-auditing SQA is a reasonable path to becoming a programmer, since, if done right, the meat of V&V work *is* programming.
That said, game programmers are, as you say, underpaid, and I'd only assume it is worse for game testers.
My advice would be to stay well clear of the game industry altogether.
But to think of it another way, being a game programmer is a reasonable path to becoming a well-paid, professional programmer. It just won't happen while you're actually writing games. Game programming, like embedded software development is one of the more challenging, hard core types of software development. Apparently though it is so fun though that employers can get away with underpaying you for it. So do that for a while, but plan to move to another programming specialty that pays once you get your chops.
I would concur with that... the keyboard+display is the data entry interface. It must be large enough to type on, and the display must be large enough to see 85 columns of text. Anything without a decent keyboard is not a general purpose computer. That's ok for a phone, calculator, music player, but not a computer.
I think these ultra-portable PCs are off on a wrong track, and they will disappear from the marketplace. Here's what I want:
a) Doesn't radiate signficant heat b) Lasts at least a day on the battery c) Built in apps... word processor, spreadsheet d) Act as an ebook reader e) GUI organized around keyboard access rather than mouse f) Laptop style keyboard g) Flash memory instead of hard disk h) Battery backed RAM, but off of a battery that is independent of the charge cycle of the main battery. That, or the hibernate code needs to be rock solid and fast. Open the lid, and the system is usable, not 15 seconds later. i) I don't care if it has a color screen, really. B/W or grayscale would be fine. Even some of the e-ink style displays would be ok for office apps. j) Obviously, USB, flash drive ports, ethernet would be nice. k) Doesn't need a pointing device. Just needs a good keyboard. Trackpads and pointers suck, and mice don't work when you're balancing a laptop on your lap on the train or a cramped space. l) Integrated applications. No Load/Save file paradigm.
The closest thing on the horizon is OLPC. But I'm not convinced they're going to get the battery life, and they're target market means that they are making a smaller keyboard and targeting users who may not be able to read yet. That said, the GUI shows lots of good ideas.
I guess I should have specified "QWERTY keyboard" in my dream laptop description.
While I'm making amendments,
"Doesn't fry the boys" is important to.
-- John.
Turn on and off instantly, no boot time Be ultraportable Run for 20 hours on a charge Run on off-the-shelf batteries Be easy to use Keep working if I drop it No hard drive, fast, rechargeable-battery backed all-RAM filesystem
Oh wait, that's my TRS-80 Model 100 that was designed 24 years ago.
Too bad the laptop industry hasn't quite caught up with this "obsolete" machine.
You missed dual-licensing, probably the most successful business model (MySQLAB, Trolltech,...)
Writing books, other forms of support than just tech support (training)...
One idea is to just sell copies of the software. Offer indemnification of some sort (ala Novell or Montavista)... this goes a long way with lawsuit fearing corporate customers. I guess in this business model you're actually an insurance company.
I'll grant that 0) is ok, you taught me something. But really, it's a narrow point. There are only two cases (single string parameter or single table constructor argument) where you can leave out the parens, unlike Perl where the cases where you must use parens are the exception. So you get in the habit of always putting them. For a) I maintain my statement; the Lua abstraction is an associative array (commonly called a "hash" by Perl programmers). Efficient use of positive integer indexes is a nice optimization though. I believe I've seen cases where the ; causes problems so I leave it out. As to the stack interface: I understand (and am using) the API, I just find it amateurish. You don't seriously think that lua_insert (L, -2) is as clear as swap (L) do you? It makes for hard to understand, write-only code for dealing with parameters. Also, sometimes you can use pseudo stack indices sometimes you need real ones. I'm not talking there about "getting by," of course you can get by. The problem is that it doesn't make for readable, maintainable code.
-1) I believe it's 'Lua' not LUA 0) You need the parentheses on function calls. a) Only data structure is hash tables b) Hash tables with positive integer indexes emulate arrays (order is maintained) c) Positive integer indexed hash tables are one-based. Gawd. This makes for some serious unpleasantness if you want to embed Lua in your C application, since many real world things are 0 based and probably all the patterns you know for writing proper loops in C are zero based. They wanted to make things simple, but they got this one dead wrong. Someone should make a zero-based fork. d) No continue statement for loops e) No semicolon separator f) Iterators g) Cool cooperative multitasking support h) Closures i) An extremely quirky stack based interface to C. Some api's pop their arguments some don't. They should do it the Forth way (words consume their arguments) or not automatically pop anything. Pick one, not both. And please, some simple stack operators (swap, drop, dup, roll, etc.) j) Perlish do-it-yourself objects k) Not-quite-regex string processing support. Come on, at least make it a subset of proper RE's, don't put a new syntax. l) Implicit dereferencing
Yes, because as everyone knows, businesses being able to more effectively communicate and accurately target the right customers is the worst thing that can happen.
I'm not sure why no one is understanding Mossberg's piece but here goes:
He is saying that the model of buying a white box PC or making one from commodity components might be replaced by an end-to-end solution like a Mac running OSX integrated with Ipod and other hardware. He's not saying desktop computers will go away, but maybe the generic PC built from OEM parts will.
The user experience is better when the software vendor only needs to target a non-moving target for hardware. Also, it gives an opportunity to focus on an integrated UI, and look-and-feel. People really do want their computers to "just work" and be easy to use/
However, I think consumers are being price sensitive when it comes to buying computers. Maybe people would accept an end-to-end solution, but not everyone is going to be willing to pay a price premium for an Apple, or whoever comes along next offering an end-to-end experience. The Ipod got lucky because it's price doesn't hit the > $1000 pain threshold desktop PCs can get to.
Even easier, if you've got the stones for it: be a man.
Think of employment as an economist does: it is a kind of marketplace in which you sell your labor. Any time you don't sell is your leisure time. Every day you go to work you are deciding to sell some of your labor to a particular employer.
On an ongoing basis you work, and on that basis you employer incurs a liability TO YOU. When they write out the check, they pay off that acrued liability. In fact, you are extending them credit terms of two weeks, basically. Oh, and they also usually incur a vacation liability to you. That is the extent of who owes who.
Employment is almost always at will. So beyond the acrued payroll and vacation time and possibly contractual obligations, nobody owes anybody anything really. You are free to go. They are free to let you go.
Your employer understands that there is a marketplace in which you can sell your services. Your resume on a web site is completely natural when you understand the economics of the situation. They may "not be happy" but who cares? If an employer would actually fire you for being in the job market there's a serious problem anyway. Are they afraid you're underpaid? Are they afraid you're unhappy? Frankly, any time would be a great time for them to fix that. The fact is that if a better offer comes along the rational choice is to go elsewhere, and they should know that.
Bottom line is, don't be a wuss. There are always other jobs.
In fact, I think everyone would be better off as contractors. Then the reality of the situation would be understood more clearly by both sides.
For there to be a valid contract there must an offer, acceptance and consideration. In some cases, such as regarding real property, under the Statute of Frauds there must be a writing. But for a fictitious contract, you just need a promise and detrimental reliance. It's called "promissory estoppel."
For example, say you offer to donate 5 Million to your favorite university. On the basis of this promise, they start construction on a new building. You change your mind for whatever reason, the University says you have to pay. But there has been no consideration, you say. But there was a promise. The university relied on that promise to their detriment. The court will make you pay to prevent what would otherwise quite obviously be an injustice.
So how, say, the Mozilla Foundation were to choose to rely on this promise would be the obvious question. But I don't think it's a very tough one to answer.
My cryonightmare is that they will wake me up in 500 years and I will find that all of the bugs in the software I maintain (still in use, mind you) are still frozen in time exactly as I left them. And of course, since I touched the code last and no one understands these archaic languages C and VB6 (or these ancient english comments) rather than getting to enjoy the benefits of our advanced civilization where no one works I will spend the rest of my life fixing bugs since they spent all that money to wake me up to fix them...
What I got from Niven was that transplant tech gets MUCH better, and Congress passes a law allowing harvesting of organs from the human corpsicles. People go along because they see those that freeze themselves waiting for a better future as freeloaders, and heck it's more important for me to live forever than somebody else, especially a corpsicle. Then of course comes harvesting organs from prisoners and changing the law to increase the prison population until finally artificial organ farms catch up and solve the problem.
Why hasn't anyway made a Gil "The Arm" Hamilton movie yet...
First, why are you assuming he can't hire home grown consultants?
Second, you can usually get the same consultants back for maintenance work. And if you can't because they are busy, there are other consultants, often with the same firm.
Hiring lots of permanent employees is not the only way to go.
From the description it would seem what they have actually built is a "bad commodity music that people with more money than sense really like"-detector.
A patent on those algorithms would be worth something. The fact is that most people have bad taste. And most of the people spend most of the money.
I'd start with companies that are already offering internships through your university. Find professors and graduate students that already have a working relationship with private sector folks and get introduced through them.
Just cold calling or sending in letters or email is about as effective as you've found it to be.
Also you should try looking through published artcles in trade journals and find out which companies are sponsoring research in your field by association with existing published research.
The fact is that you'll certainly have to sign an NDA and likely they will have to scrub the data anyway. One way or another it's going to cost the donors $$$ that you aren't going to reimburse. Your project will have to fit in with their research goals or they'll be returning a favor from someone else.
The difference is not between a $600 and a $60 router. Market for a higher end Cisco and a DIY GNU/Linux/Linksys are completely disjoint.
If this was a marketing decision, rather than a cost reduction I'd say the differences is between a $60 router and a $90 router where the $30 is some software-only feature like router-to-router VPN. That $30 goes straight to contribution margin since it doesn't increase COGS at all. Of course the channel is going to take a chunk of that, but you get the picture. Elective software features are 100% gravy.
The problem for Linksys obviously is that with open software running on the unit, the user doesn't need to spend any extra for the additional software-only features.
Of course, if there is demand for DIY routers, then someone is going to fill that gap. If the market is lucrative and Linksys (Cisco) is smart (they are) they will position products for both markets. But I'd warrant that their strategies for both markets would be totally different.
Maybe Cisco's marketing team is that dumb, who knows, but does anyone really believe that Cisco's target market is wavering on the edge between a high end Cisco router and an unwarranted, unsupported, WRT54G running custom open source software?
If that market really existed they could just as well run an old PC with two network cards in it. It would be more flexible and probably faster.
The one license option that CC has that I don't see much of on the software side is "no commercial use."
Personally I detest such licenses because almost anything can be commercial. If I make a shareware disk and charge a copying fee, well that's probably commercial even if I'm only covering costs according to my own bookkeeping. What if I just use the program in my business but I don't sell the program. If you want to share, share... if someone figures out how to make some money selling or using the program even though you couldn't, what harm is done? The GPL does a much better job since basically anyone can use GPLed software for whatever reason, the sticking point comes if you were to try to proprietize it by distributing an extended version w/out source. So no one can really "steal" your work.
But I find that many creators like the idea of "no commercial use" intuitively. They are fine with sharing their work, but they worry someone might try to make a profit off of it. and so they want to rule that out. If you have a "commercial" purpose, then you need to negotiate a license.
ISTR the MAME/MESS emulator has a ncu clause in its license.
You are right in that Microsoft and Apple do not in general make changes for specific customers. But I was thinking a little past that.
a) There aren't a lot of Microsofts and Apples. And that pool is only going to continue to shrink given users standardizing on a platform and/or open source software commoditizing their products.
b) More importantly almost no one is Microsoft or Apple. And the fact is from the programmer's point of view the model is still "you want a change, pay me."
Slashdot Mirror
The best one I saw was something like
Babies
Looking for Babies?
Find exactly what you want today
www.ebay.com
Actually V&V, or non-auditing SQA is a reasonable path to becoming a programmer, since, if done right, the meat of V&V work *is* programming.
That said, game programmers are, as you say, underpaid, and I'd only assume it is worse for game testers.
My advice would be to stay well clear of the game industry altogether.
But to think of it another way, being a game programmer is a reasonable path to becoming a well-paid, professional programmer. It just won't happen while you're actually writing games. Game programming, like embedded software development is one of the more challenging, hard core types of software development. Apparently though it is so fun though that employers can get away with underpaying you for it. So do that for a while, but plan to move to another programming specialty that pays once you get your chops.
-- John.
Actually no, NOT a PDA, although it's definitely a melding of PDA and laptop.
PDA screens are too small and they don't have a keyboard.
But the OS, battery life, fanless operation is along the lines of what I am talking about.
I would concur with that... the keyboard+display is the data entry interface. It must be large enough to type on, and the display must be large enough to see 85 columns of text. Anything without a decent keyboard is not a general purpose computer. That's ok for a phone, calculator, music player, but not a computer.
I think these ultra-portable PCs are off on a wrong track, and they will disappear from the marketplace. Here's what I want:
a) Doesn't radiate signficant heat
b) Lasts at least a day on the battery
c) Built in apps... word processor, spreadsheet
d) Act as an ebook reader
e) GUI organized around keyboard access rather than mouse
f) Laptop style keyboard
g) Flash memory instead of hard disk
h) Battery backed RAM, but off of a battery that is independent of the charge cycle of the main battery. That, or the hibernate code needs to be rock solid and fast. Open the lid, and the system is usable, not 15 seconds later.
i) I don't care if it has a color screen, really. B/W or grayscale would be fine. Even some of the e-ink style displays would be ok for office apps.
j) Obviously, USB, flash drive ports, ethernet would be nice.
k) Doesn't need a pointing device. Just needs a good keyboard. Trackpads and pointers suck, and mice don't work when you're balancing a laptop on your lap on the train or a cramped space.
l) Integrated applications. No Load/Save file paradigm.
The closest thing on the horizon is OLPC. But I'm not convinced they're going to get the battery life, and they're target market means that they are making a smaller keyboard and targeting users who may not be able to read yet. That said, the GUI shows lots of good ideas.
I guess I should have specified "QWERTY keyboard" in my dream laptop description. While I'm making amendments, "Doesn't fry the boys" is important to. -- John.
My dream machine would...
Turn on and off instantly, no boot time
Be ultraportable
Run for 20 hours on a charge
Run on off-the-shelf batteries
Be easy to use
Keep working if I drop it
No hard drive, fast, rechargeable-battery backed all-RAM filesystem
Oh wait, that's my TRS-80 Model 100 that was designed 24 years ago.
Too bad the laptop industry hasn't quite caught up with this "obsolete" machine.
-- John.
You missed dual-licensing, probably the most successful business model (MySQLAB, Trolltech, ...)
Writing books, other forms of support than just tech support (training)...
One idea is to just sell copies of the software. Offer indemnification of some sort (ala Novell or Montavista)... this goes a long way with lawsuit fearing corporate customers. I guess in this business model you're actually an insurance company.
-- John.
I'll grant that 0) is ok, you taught me something. But really, it's a narrow point. There are only two cases (single string parameter or single table constructor argument) where you can leave out the parens, unlike Perl where the cases where you must use parens are the exception. So you get in the habit of always putting them.
For a) I maintain my statement; the Lua abstraction is an associative array (commonly called a "hash" by Perl programmers). Efficient use of positive integer indexes is a nice optimization though.
I believe I've seen cases where the ; causes problems so I leave it out.
As to the stack interface: I understand (and am using) the API, I just find it amateurish. You don't seriously think that lua_insert (L, -2) is as clear as swap (L) do you? It makes for hard to understand, write-only code for dealing with parameters. Also, sometimes you can use pseudo stack indices sometimes you need real ones. I'm not talking there about "getting by," of course you can get by. The problem is that it doesn't make for readable, maintainable code.
No it's
print ("Hello, world.")
Reader's Digest guide to Lua:
-1) I believe it's 'Lua' not LUA
0) You need the parentheses on function calls.
a) Only data structure is hash tables
b) Hash tables with positive integer indexes emulate arrays (order is maintained)
c) Positive integer indexed hash tables are one-based. Gawd. This makes for some serious unpleasantness if you want to embed Lua in your C application, since many real world things are 0 based and probably all the patterns you know for writing proper loops in C are zero based. They wanted to make things simple, but they got this one dead wrong. Someone should make a zero-based fork.
d) No continue statement for loops
e) No semicolon separator
f) Iterators
g) Cool cooperative multitasking support
h) Closures
i) An extremely quirky stack based interface to C. Some api's pop their arguments some don't. They should do it the Forth way (words consume their arguments) or not automatically pop anything. Pick one, not both. And please, some simple stack operators (swap, drop, dup, roll, etc.)
j) Perlish do-it-yourself objects
k) Not-quite-regex string processing support. Come on, at least make it a subset of proper RE's, don't put a new syntax.
l) Implicit dereferencing
I'm probably missing something...
-- John.
Yes, because as everyone knows, businesses being able to more effectively communicate and accurately target the right customers is the worst thing that can happen.
Really, marketing is not a dirty word...
-- John.
I'm not sure why no one is understanding Mossberg's piece but here goes:
He is saying that the model of buying a white box PC or making one from commodity components might be replaced by an end-to-end solution like a Mac running OSX integrated with Ipod and other hardware. He's not saying desktop computers will go away, but maybe the generic PC built from OEM parts will.
The user experience is better when the software vendor only needs to target a non-moving target for hardware. Also, it gives an opportunity to focus on an integrated UI, and look-and-feel. People really do want their computers to "just work" and be easy to use/
However, I think consumers are being price sensitive when it comes to buying computers. Maybe people would accept an end-to-end solution, but not everyone is going to be willing to pay a price premium for an Apple, or whoever comes along next offering an end-to-end experience. The Ipod got lucky because it's price doesn't hit the > $1000 pain threshold desktop PCs can get to.
-- John.
Even easier, if you've got the stones for it: be a man.
Think of employment as an economist does: it is a kind of marketplace in which you sell your labor. Any time you don't sell is your leisure time. Every day you go to work you are deciding to sell some of your labor to a particular employer.
On an ongoing basis you work, and on that basis you employer incurs a liability TO YOU. When they write out the check, they pay off that acrued liability. In fact, you are extending them credit terms of two weeks, basically. Oh, and they also usually incur a vacation liability to you. That is the extent of who owes who.
Employment is almost always at will. So beyond the acrued payroll and vacation time and possibly contractual obligations, nobody owes anybody anything really. You are free to go. They are free to let you go.
Your employer understands that there is a marketplace in which you can sell your services. Your resume on a web site is completely natural when you understand the economics of the situation. They may "not be happy" but who cares? If an employer would actually fire you for being in the job market there's a serious problem anyway. Are they afraid you're underpaid? Are they afraid you're unhappy? Frankly, any time would be a great time for them to fix that. The fact is that if a better offer comes along the rational choice is to go elsewhere, and they should know that.
Bottom line is, don't be a wuss. There are always other jobs.
In fact, I think everyone would be better off as contractors. Then the reality of the situation would be understood more clearly by both sides.
-- John.
For there to be a valid contract there must an offer, acceptance and consideration. In some cases, such as regarding real property, under the Statute of Frauds there must be a writing. But for a fictitious contract, you just need a promise and detrimental reliance. It's called "promissory estoppel."
For example, say you offer to donate 5 Million to your favorite university. On the basis of this promise, they start construction on a new building. You change your mind for whatever reason, the University says you have to pay. But there has been no consideration, you say. But there was a promise. The university relied on that promise to their detriment. The court will make you pay to prevent what would otherwise quite obviously be an injustice.
So how, say, the Mozilla Foundation were to choose to rely on this promise would be the obvious question. But I don't think it's a very tough one to answer.
-- John.
Speculation but...
To get a PIC you likely have to sign a contract...
And I would expect that agreement would prevent you from signing just anybody's code.
So probably your risk would be getting sued for breach of contract.
-- John.
TNG novels are not canon. The question is, are the new DS-9 novels canon?
My cryonightmare is that they will wake me up in 500 years and I will find that all of the bugs in the software I maintain (still in use, mind you) are still frozen in time exactly as I left them. And of course, since I touched the code last and no one understands these archaic languages C and VB6 (or these ancient english comments) rather than getting to enjoy the benefits of our advanced civilization where no one works I will spend the rest of my life fixing bugs since they spent all that money to wake me up to fix them...
What I got from Niven was that transplant tech gets MUCH better, and Congress passes a law allowing harvesting of organs from the human corpsicles. People go along because they see those that freeze themselves waiting for a better future as freeloaders, and heck it's more important for me to live forever than somebody else, especially a corpsicle. Then of course comes harvesting organs from prisoners and changing the law to increase the prison population until finally artificial organ farms catch up and solve the problem.
Why hasn't anyway made a Gil "The Arm" Hamilton movie yet...
-- John.
People like you deserve what you get... PCs that are locked down tighter than a DVD player or X-Box.
What you'll get is a world where freedom means having the freedom to rent your computing time from the man as long as you don't break the EULA.
Sorry, that's not for me (or most engineers, for that matter).
-- John.
First, why are you assuming he can't hire home grown consultants?
Second, you can usually get the same consultants back for maintenance work. And if you can't because they are busy, there are other consultants, often with the same firm.
Hiring lots of permanent employees is not the only way to go.
-- John.
From the description it would seem what they have actually built is a "bad commodity music that people with more money than sense really like"-detector.
A patent on those algorithms would be worth something. The fact is that most people have bad taste. And most of the people spend most of the money.
-- John.
I'd start with companies that are already offering internships through your university. Find professors and graduate students that already have a working relationship with private sector folks and get introduced through them.
Just cold calling or sending in letters or email is about as effective as you've found it to be.
Also you should try looking through published artcles in trade journals and find out which companies are sponsoring research in your field by association with existing published research.
The fact is that you'll certainly have to sign an NDA and likely they will have to scrub the data anyway. One way or another it's going to cost the donors $$$ that you aren't going to reimburse. Your project will have to fit in with their research goals or they'll be returning a favor from someone else.
-- John.
The difference is not between a $600 and a $60 router. Market for a higher end Cisco and a DIY GNU/Linux/Linksys are completely disjoint.
If this was a marketing decision, rather than a cost reduction I'd say the differences is between a $60 router and a $90 router where the $30 is some software-only feature like router-to-router VPN. That $30 goes straight to contribution margin since it doesn't increase COGS at all. Of course the channel is going to take a chunk of that, but you get the picture. Elective software features are 100% gravy.
The problem for Linksys obviously is that with open software running on the unit, the user doesn't need to spend any extra for the additional software-only features.
Of course, if there is demand for DIY routers, then someone is going to fill that gap. If the market is lucrative and Linksys (Cisco) is smart (they are) they will position products for both markets. But I'd warrant that their strategies for both markets would be totally different.
-- John.
Maybe Cisco's marketing team is that dumb, who knows, but does anyone really believe that Cisco's target market is wavering on the edge between a high end Cisco router and an unwarranted, unsupported, WRT54G running custom open source software?
If that market really existed they could just as well run an old PC with two network cards in it. It would be more flexible and probably faster.
0 * ($600 - $70) = 0
-- John.
The one license option that CC has that I don't see much of on the software side is "no commercial use."
Personally I detest such licenses because almost anything can be commercial. If I make a shareware disk and charge a copying fee, well that's probably commercial even if I'm only covering costs according to my own bookkeeping. What if I just use the program in my business but I don't sell the program. If you want to share, share... if someone figures out how to make some money selling or using the program even though you couldn't, what harm is done? The GPL does a much better job since basically anyone can use GPLed software for whatever reason, the sticking point comes if you were to try to proprietize it by distributing an extended version w/out source. So no one can really "steal" your work.
But I find that many creators like the idea of "no commercial use" intuitively. They are fine with sharing their work, but they worry someone might try to make a profit off of it. and so they want to rule that out. If you have a "commercial" purpose, then you need to negotiate a license.
ISTR the MAME/MESS emulator has a ncu clause in its license.
-- John.
You are right in that Microsoft and Apple do not in general make changes for specific customers. But I was thinking a little past that.
a) There aren't a lot of Microsofts and Apples. And that pool is only going to continue to shrink given users standardizing on a platform and/or open source software commoditizing their products.
b) More importantly almost no one is Microsoft or Apple. And the fact is from the programmer's point of view the model is still "you want a change, pay me."
-- John.