Your homebrew system building and web development is great seat-of-the-pants training for what works. I can tell when a system's been designed by engineers who've gotten their hands dirty, as opposed to straight book-learnin' types who never soldered a wire in their lives. The difference is not subtle.
I quit engineering at 19, hung out with rock bands for a few years, then went back to EE school at almost 25. Had to take a few mre courses because some previous ones were deprecated as prerequisites, but the new ones were _way_ more interesting anyway. I figured my touring days were over when I graduated at 28 -- was I wrong! My first engineering gig was Application Engineering for a Montreal company, which sent me all over the US and Europe in grand style instead of the dive hotels where I'd stayed as a roadie.
My then-girlfriend's mom was seeing an engineering prof, and when I was still looking for work, he claimed that because of my advanced age I would never score an engineering job and always be a bum. Later on, whenever xGF went to visit her mom, I made sure to tell her to give the bum's greetings from San Jose, or Hamburg, or New York, or Paris.
All this is to tell you, GO FOR IT! It's never too late.
Well, it's Bechtel on the case, so it's not surprising the project is falling apart. They seem to spend more effort on fighting regulators and oversight than in providing actual solid engineering. Here's an article which details some of their failures; why anyone still hires them is a tribute to their lobbyists and the power of greed.
$FEDGOV sells itself to the Corporocracy every chance it gets, and as a result techies get hosed whenever something interesting comes up. DMCA, broadcast flag, Net non-neutrality: all of those issue from laws passed by Our Elected Reprehensibles kneeling and nursing at the dicks with the deepest pockets.
According to TFA, the new HDMI seems to use xvYCC, which appears to be closely related to the scYCC discussed with faint praise by Ward in the aforementioned article. It's a limited dynamic range colourspace subject to weird saturation artifacts, but it's blessed by the IEC so it's a by-God standard even if it's crap.
Meanwhile ATI and nVidia already support the much superior EXR, but since Sony (*spit*) has already built the inferior standard into the PS3 then the rest of the world must fall into line.
Y'know, I can remember when the name "Sony" didn't stand for "fucked up junk".
Re:It's not as bad as Dilbert.
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The hiring manager clearly said to come right on in, but HR threw this at me and said I couldn't talk with him until this was done. They could've asked for the same info afterwards with no skin off their nose, but they insisted on this with a roomful of waiting interviewers. As I said, HR nixing a hire on something as silly as this is a clear cut case of misplaced priorities: they were obviously turf-marking over engineering.
As to the high maintenance bit, for the job I did end up taking I not only coded my ass off but near the end took on a few tricky hardware problems, even though they weren't anywhere near my job description, because my work was done and I wanted to move the project over the goal line. Doesn't sound too prima-donna to me, pal.
Re:It's not as bad as Dilbert.
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's not only big outfits: I worked at a startup where the VP of Engineering sprouted pointy hair three months after hiring me. On the other hand, some large outfits manage to combat idiocy fairly well, so it's really about the particular employer.
In job interviews I tell the questioner they're being interviewed just as much as I am - the ones who get offended are likely to be idiots about other things, whereas the folks who understand it's about matching styles have a good chance of understanding my approach to the job.
You can smell someplace will be a losing proposition. Here's an example. I was called into one office to speak with the hiring manager, but when HR heard about it, they came over with a six page form to fill out before I could talk with the guy. Didn't make a damned bit of difference whether all the data was already on my resume, paperwork had to be filled out, and at the bottom it even said "See resume not acceptable response". I scratched that in anyway since I had other things to do, the interview went swimmingly well, the engineering manager was ready to make me an offer, but after that nothing. Nada. Not hello, not goodbye, merry christmas, fuck you, nothing. I can only suspect HR scotched the followup, and if HR can override an engineering hire I wouldn't care to work there anyway because the priorities are FUBAR. Turns out my gut check was right: they went tits-up eighteen months later because of inept management.
There are other cases, like the hostile HR guy who smelled of liquor at 11 am, the place which desperately solicited resumes then couldn't be arsed to answer email when I followed up a week later, or the guy who wasn't at his desk because there was no way he would say yes so he passive-aggressivated his way out of the problem. Each one of these was a huge warning sign, and in retrospect I'm way better off for avoiding these gigs. See, in civilian life, you can somewhat choose your CO, so reading the organisation before you get involved is a useful way to minimise potential asshattery.
Happens when you piss off your employees so the smart ones get jobs elsewhere and you're left with the dregs who can't. Could someone tell HP manglement "Dilbert" is supposed to be a humour strip, not a documentary?
Every goddamn article in Tom's is stretched out over way too many pages, no exceptions. Until they change that policy, they're dead to me. I have better things to do with my time than banging on the Next link like an ADHD 6 year old in front of a whack-a-mole game.
On the other hand, I've worked with Aerospatiale software engineers, and I wouldn't trust them to organise a piss-up in a brewery. Comp.risks is rife with their fuckups, so I expect Great Things from this proposal.
Do what? The Euro started out at roughly parity with the US dollar, dropped to $0.83 around 2000, then started climbing seriously in 2003. The oilocracies are making some noise about selling crude in Euros, as a matter of fact. It's already happening in effect: measured in constant Euros the price of a barrel hasn't changed all that much over the past three years.
Uh-huh. The Supremes don't care about the 4th when they say piss-testing for any job is acceptable. I blew off a job at USRobotics after passing the urine fetishists requirement because it offended me so goddamn much. What am I gonna do, go completely out of my mind on that wacky tobaccy and start pummeling people with keyboards?
The 4th is also so much toilet paper when cops acting under the War On Some Drugs can seize anything they want without a court decision. When it takes 20 grand of lawyer time to get back 10 thousand worth of stuff and the outcome is not even guaranteed, you're effectively screwed. Did I mention the people who lost their house because their grandson, unbeknownst to them, was dealing dope from his bedroom?
If you're counting on the 4th amendment as anything but pretty words on paper you're deluding yourself. This Court doesn't care about unreasonable.
Are you sure about that? A lot of people I know had heard about the rootkit, and they're avoiding any and all Sony products as a result. Recent crappy quality for their consumer gear hasn't helped. Remember, the kinda fanatics^Wfolks who'd pay $600 for a console would also tend to be plugged into the technology rumour mill on rootkits & such.
You obviously don't live in California. Chez Panisse and the French Laundry don't have much of a dress code apart from "reasonable".
Wrenching the subject back to the topic at hand, if Kutaragi is telling people $600 is "too cheap", he's in for a nasty surprise come shopping season. Sony's already 5 million seats behind the curve compared with X360, their reputation sucks after the rootkit fiasco, and the PS3 is a pain in the ass to program by all accounts - that'll slow down game development, notwithstanding the guys from Japan treating the American division like stupid gaijin every time they jet over from Tokyo. I don't usually root for Microsoft, but Sony needs to be taken down a notch.
And the damn console isn't even a good value as a Blu-ray player: $600 for crippled HD resolution? No thanks.
Crystal Geyser, available either in plain or fruit flavour (no calories). You can get a flat of 28 bottles at Costco for six and a half bucks. Can't beat that with a stick.
Every place I worked which imposed 100 hour/week crunch modes more than once was a guaranteed lose, because it meant management was so incompetent they couldn't come up with a plan of work more sophisticated than "more hours! more hours!". It was only a matter of time before they drove their employees into the ground, followed shortly by corporate implosion after mass defections took the necessary brainpower to greener fields.
Game companies sound like lousy places to work on that basis, but that's to be expected when the field is imbued with a perception of glamour and all the other spermatozoa are drilling into the egg. Better to be off in the boonies working on stuff few people even know exists.
Close but no Tiparillo. One-pole smoother to me sounds like a first order filter, which has a feedforward component on top of the leaky integrator feedback part.
ATI's drivers were shit 15 years ago when I declined a job with them; nice to see nothing changes. Part of the problem is both ATI and nVidia were founded by hardware guys, who see software support as a cost center instead of an integral part of making the stuff work - it's like throwing bare silicon at users and telling them to spot-weld the chips right onto the circuit board because packages cost money.
The age of a few college kids making a state-of-the-art game in their spare time is probably over.
Perhaps, but there are other things people can do on game machines which are just as interesting.http://llamasoft.co.uk/neon.php
That was two guys coding like demons on a labour of love. I suspect there will be more of that sort of thing, not Yet Another Football/MMPORG/FPS style games, which will be created by people outside the mainstream. Microsoft understands this, amazingly enough, hence XNA.
To quote from "Ed Wood", McCullagh is not fit to suck my shit. The bastard essentially faked the Al Gore story, then the stupid sonovabitch boasted about it. Nice attempt at slithering back to respectability, Declan, hope you enjoyed the taste of Rove's cock after the entire country got butt-fucked.
After Rumsfeld fucking up Iraq, Chertoff screwing up FEMA, the entire Administration blowing up the budget, FCC administrators selling us down the river to Jeezemoids and junk faxers, and various PR mouthpieces stifling scientists, picking someone who knows the matter at hand would be a freaking first for this bunch.
You can goddamn betcha the BSA has had an influence. My startup will be a Microsoft-free zone - I can't afford to have my business disrupted by a bunch of extortionate asshats because someone might have slipped up with an Office CDROM, and why go through the hassle of switching when I can do it properly right from the git-go?
So long, Redmond. You coulda had a bunch of seats, but I'm too busy to watch my back for the BSA, and frankly the security holes aren't helping much either. Seeya.
Slashdot Mirror
Your homebrew system building and web development is great seat-of-the-pants training for what works. I can tell when a system's been designed by engineers who've gotten their hands dirty, as opposed to straight book-learnin' types who never soldered a wire in their lives. The difference is not subtle.
I quit engineering at 19, hung out with rock bands for a few years, then went back to EE school at almost 25. Had to take a few mre courses because some previous ones were deprecated as prerequisites, but the new ones were _way_ more interesting anyway. I figured my touring days were over when I graduated at 28 -- was I wrong! My first engineering gig was Application Engineering for a Montreal company, which sent me all over the US and Europe in grand style instead of the dive hotels where I'd stayed as a roadie.
My then-girlfriend's mom was seeing an engineering prof, and when I was still looking for work, he claimed that because of my advanced age I would never score an engineering job and always be a bum. Later on, whenever xGF went to visit her mom, I made sure to tell her to give the bum's greetings from San Jose, or Hamburg, or New York, or Paris.
All this is to tell you, GO FOR IT! It's never too late.
Well, it's Bechtel on the case, so it's not surprising the project is falling apart. They seem to spend more effort on fighting regulators and oversight than in providing actual solid engineering. Here's an article which details some of their failures; why anyone still hires them is a tribute to their lobbyists and the power of greed.
4 /probes_may_test_bechtels_clout/
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/07/2
Do what? The "fixes" were actually on site tests of repair kits to make sure they'd work in space.
Wish in one hand and shit in the other - see which fills up faster.
$FEDGOV sells itself to the Corporocracy every chance it gets, and as a result techies get hosed whenever something interesting comes up. DMCA, broadcast flag, Net non-neutrality: all of those issue from laws passed by Our Elected Reprehensibles kneeling and nursing at the dicks with the deepest pockets.
According to TFA, the new HDMI seems to use xvYCC, which appears to be closely related to the scYCC discussed with faint praise by Ward in the aforementioned article. It's a limited dynamic range colourspace subject to weird saturation artifacts, but it's blessed by the IEC so it's a by-God standard even if it's crap.
Meanwhile ATI and nVidia already support the much superior EXR, but since Sony (*spit*) has already built the inferior standard into the PS3 then the rest of the world must fall into line.
Y'know, I can remember when the name "Sony" didn't stand for "fucked up junk".
The hiring manager clearly said to come right on in, but HR threw this at me and said I couldn't talk with him until this was done. They could've asked for the same info afterwards with no skin off their nose, but they insisted on this with a roomful of waiting interviewers. As I said, HR nixing a hire on something as silly as this is a clear cut case of misplaced priorities: they were obviously turf-marking over engineering.
As to the high maintenance bit, for the job I did end up taking I not only coded my ass off but near the end took on a few tricky hardware problems, even though they weren't anywhere near my job description, because my work was done and I wanted to move the project over the goal line. Doesn't sound too prima-donna to me, pal.
It's not only big outfits: I worked at a startup where the VP of Engineering sprouted pointy hair three months after hiring me. On the other hand, some large outfits manage to combat idiocy fairly well, so it's really about the particular employer.
In job interviews I tell the questioner they're being interviewed just as much as I am - the ones who get offended are likely to be idiots about other things, whereas the folks who understand it's about matching styles have a good chance of understanding my approach to the job.
You can smell someplace will be a losing proposition. Here's an example. I was called into one office to speak with the hiring manager, but when HR heard about it, they came over with a six page form to fill out before I could talk with the guy. Didn't make a damned bit of difference whether all the data was already on my resume, paperwork had to be filled out, and at the bottom it even said "See resume not acceptable response". I scratched that in anyway since I had other things to do, the interview went swimmingly well, the engineering manager was ready to make me an offer, but after that nothing. Nada. Not hello, not goodbye, merry christmas, fuck you, nothing. I can only suspect HR scotched the followup, and if HR can override an engineering hire I wouldn't care to work there anyway because the priorities are FUBAR. Turns out my gut check was right: they went tits-up eighteen months later because of inept management.
There are other cases, like the hostile HR guy who smelled of liquor at 11 am, the place which desperately solicited resumes then couldn't be arsed to answer email when I followed up a week later, or the guy who wasn't at his desk because there was no way he would say yes so he passive-aggressivated his way out of the problem. Each one of these was a huge warning sign, and in retrospect I'm way better off for avoiding these gigs. See, in civilian life, you can somewhat choose your CO, so reading the organisation before you get involved is a useful way to minimise potential asshattery.
Happens when you piss off your employees so the smart ones get jobs elsewhere and you're left with the dregs who can't. Could someone tell HP manglement "Dilbert" is supposed to be a humour strip, not a documentary?
Every goddamn article in Tom's is stretched out over way too many pages, no exceptions. Until they change that policy, they're dead to me. I have better things to do with my time than banging on the Next link like an ADHD 6 year old in front of a whack-a-mole game.
Nope. That was a Swiss air controller who gave instructions counter to the in-cockpit collision avoidance system.
8 632002 t m
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=455&id=73
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2082331.s
On the other hand, I've worked with Aerospatiale software engineers, and I wouldn't trust them to organise a piss-up in a brewery. Comp.risks is rife with their fuckups, so I expect Great Things from this proposal.
Do what? The Euro started out at roughly parity with the US dollar, dropped to $0.83 around 2000, then started climbing seriously in 2003. The oilocracies are making some noise about selling crude in Euros, as a matter of fact. It's already happening in effect: measured in constant Euros the price of a barrel hasn't changed all that much over the past three years.
Uh-huh. The Supremes don't care about the 4th when they say piss-testing for any job is acceptable. I blew off a job at USRobotics after passing the urine fetishists requirement because it offended me so goddamn much. What am I gonna do, go completely out of my mind on that wacky tobaccy and start pummeling people with keyboards?
The 4th is also so much toilet paper when cops acting under the War On Some Drugs can seize anything they want without a court decision. When it takes 20 grand of lawyer time to get back 10 thousand worth of stuff and the outcome is not even guaranteed, you're effectively screwed. Did I mention the people who lost their house because their grandson, unbeknownst to them, was dealing dope from his bedroom?
If you're counting on the 4th amendment as anything but pretty words on paper you're deluding yourself. This Court doesn't care about unreasonable.
Are you sure about that? A lot of people I know had heard about the rootkit, and they're avoiding any and all Sony products as a result. Recent crappy quality for their consumer gear hasn't helped. Remember, the kinda fanatics^Wfolks who'd pay $600 for a console would also tend to be plugged into the technology rumour mill on rootkits & such.
You obviously don't live in California. Chez Panisse and the French Laundry don't have much of a dress code apart from "reasonable".
Wrenching the subject back to the topic at hand, if Kutaragi is telling people $600 is "too cheap", he's in for a nasty surprise come shopping season. Sony's already 5 million seats behind the curve compared with X360, their reputation sucks after the rootkit fiasco, and the PS3 is a pain in the ass to program by all accounts - that'll slow down game development, notwithstanding the guys from Japan treating the American division like stupid gaijin every time they jet over from Tokyo. I don't usually root for Microsoft, but Sony needs to be taken down a notch.
And the damn console isn't even a good value as a Blu-ray player: $600 for crippled HD resolution? No thanks.
Crystal Geyser, available either in plain or fruit flavour (no calories). You can get a flat of 28 bottles at Costco for six and a half bucks. Can't beat that with a stick.
Every place I worked which imposed 100 hour/week crunch modes more than once was a guaranteed lose, because it meant management was so incompetent they couldn't come up with a plan of work more sophisticated than "more hours! more hours!". It was only a matter of time before they drove their employees into the ground, followed shortly by corporate implosion after mass defections took the necessary brainpower to greener fields.
Game companies sound like lousy places to work on that basis, but that's to be expected when the field is imbued with a perception of glamour and all the other spermatozoa are drilling into the egg. Better to be off in the boonies working on stuff few people even know exists.
Close but no Tiparillo. One-pole smoother to me sounds like a first order filter, which has a feedforward component on top of the leaky integrator feedback part.
ATI's drivers were shit 15 years ago when I declined a job with them; nice to see nothing changes. Part of the problem is both ATI and nVidia were founded by hardware guys, who see software support as a cost center instead of an integral part of making the stuff work - it's like throwing bare silicon at users and telling them to spot-weld the chips right onto the circuit board because packages cost money.
That was two guys coding like demons on a labour of love. I suspect there will be more of that sort of thing, not Yet Another Football/MMPORG/FPS style games, which will be created by people outside the mainstream. Microsoft understands this, amazingly enough, hence XNA.
Bigfoot. Ew. News.admin.net-abuse.email is rife with stories about addresses "leaking" from BFI onto spam lists.
To quote from "Ed Wood", McCullagh is not fit to suck my shit. The bastard essentially faked the Al Gore story, then the stupid sonovabitch boasted about it. Nice attempt at slithering back to respectability, Declan, hope you enjoyed the taste of Rove's cock after the entire country got butt-fucked.
http://www.sethf.com/gore/
After Rumsfeld fucking up Iraq, Chertoff screwing up FEMA, the entire Administration blowing up the budget, FCC administrators selling us down the river to Jeezemoids and junk faxers, and various PR mouthpieces stifling scientists, picking someone who knows the matter at hand would be a freaking first for this bunch.
You can goddamn betcha the BSA has had an influence. My startup will be a Microsoft-free zone - I can't afford to have my business disrupted by a bunch of extortionate asshats because someone might have slipped up with an Office CDROM, and why go through the hassle of switching when I can do it properly right from the git-go?
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html
So long, Redmond. You coulda had a bunch of seats, but I'm too busy to watch my back for the BSA, and frankly the security holes aren't helping much either. Seeya.