I'm with you, more or less. I've used them all. I remember being very productive with pwm about a decade ago. I use Mac OS X at home, but at work, Linux, and I've settled into a nice configuration of fvwm, mostly emulating Xmonad by way of keybindings, with a little xmobar at the top of the screen. It took a small amount of scripting to get the current window title up there and the current "workspace" but now everything is put together and seems to be working well and I'm very seldom tempted to run back to KDE or GNOME.
First, take heart. We've all been where you are now (or will be there soon enough). You're not alone.
You've probably noticed that people who are in relationships have an easier time... getting into relationships. It's much like this with work. It's a lot easier to get another job if you have one. It's also harder to get a job if you hate the work you're doing. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. You probably interview better than you think you do. If you can do FizzBuzz on a whiteboard, you're already in the top 10%. Cut yourself some slack.
Secondly, I think you're on the right track. You're not here because you think you should quit programming and become a farmer. I've been where you are. It's called burnout. Consider taking a real vacation, like two weeks or more, and get away from programming. See if you can get assigned to a different project at work, or at least trade some responsibility with someone else on your project. Burn out will eventually go away, but you will need to make some changes. Better to nip it in the bud now rather than wait for the day when you stare at the screen and really just can't program at all.
Thirdly, go learn something new. Not necessarily new as in bleeding edge; I've been having a great time with Smalltalk and J lately, neither of which is really new in the internet blogosphere sense. I crave a new language every now and then. You may be able to find one that appeals to your sense of what's lacking about what you're doing now. Give yourself small things to do. It's much easier to climb a sequence of hills that grow as you go than a giant mountain up front. I have never found starting a huge project to be much stress relief. Just screw around. Solve puzzles--maybe do the Lisp 99 or Project Euler. Or go download Love2D and learn Lua to program some simple games. Stop by the B&N and look through the computer section. Get yourself a book if you see one that looks interesting. Real World Haskell is a trip; Land of Lisp is supposed to be good too.
If you really can't stand it and none of this stuff helps, it may be time for a job or career change. Nobody expects you to retire from the job you have now (unless you're pushing 70). For the most part if you want a change of scenery in this profession, you change jobs. You'll be surprised how well you interview. Even just supporting the weight of a giant program for several years without being fired looks pretty good on a resume these days. Don't give up hope.
One final note. Your job is probably a lot more secure than you think it is. Management at most places sort of expects that programmers aren't all that productive. I wouldn't be surprised if you could just ignore your work for a few days or a week and do something completely different without it being noticed. It sounds unethical, and it probably is technically speaking, but letting you take a few brain vacation days is much cheaper to the organization than firing you and hiring and training a replacement.
I don't think we see it as a fatherland. I'm not sure we ascribe a gender to it. We do have a female icon ("Columbia") but I don't think we refer to it as a motherland either.
I think the real, deeper fallacy is the idea that we can find a way to prevent accidents from ever happening again, if we can just figure out which thing to do differently.
"Intensive purposes" are not a thing. You mean "intents and purposes." And "who cares?" is the correct form of the question: "who" is nominative, "whom" is accusative. Who cares? I care. You annoyed whom? You annoyed me.
Absent some kind of hash-tag search (you may recall, this is why this exists on Twitter) it adds nothing to the conversation except "I'm the kind of guy who thinks Slashdot is basically the same thing as Twitter."
I'm with you. Of course, there are tradeoffs I wish hadn't been made, but overall, as far as possible futures to live in from 10 years ago, this one is pretty far from the worst. And it happens to be the one we're stuck with. So let's enjoy it.
"there is nothing that isn't becoming a lot less affordable"... except apparently excellent, inexpensive, computer-replacing tablets. Which is exactly tripleevenfall's point. It's three times easier to save up $200 for a Kindle Fire than a $600 laptop.
The problem is the opportunity cost. You know which hard drives have sensitive data on them, but your some punk doesn't. Moreover, even your hard drives with sensitive data on them probably have lots of other stuff on them too, such as an operating system. If you're worried about database data, how likely is it you have Oracle and Oracle's data in the same place? An Oracle data partition without the corresponding configuration isn't particularly useful. But how many punks do you know who go out to the dump and root around for hard drives, take them all home, plug them in and go surfing for useful data? It would be a huge amount of work.
Even supposing this punk finds your product source code on there, what's he going to do with it? Just fire up gcc and stick it in the app store? Running a business is hard work. I know a writer who constantly worries about his computer being hacked into, yet can't find a publisher himself for his own work. I try to point out that getting published is hard work, why would somebody go to all that effort to live so poorly when they could just get a job?
Moreover, if this punk really wants your credit cards, why would he bother rooting around in your trash when he could just sniff your wifi and wait for you to make a purchase somewhere stupid, or send you a phishing email? For that matter, I doubt it's very hard to go to IRC somewhere and say "I need a thousand credit cards"; credit cards are not stolen individually these days when they can instead be stolen and sold in bulk.
I certainly see a need for proper, secure hard drive erasure for government or military secrets, but in industry, I certainly agree with the OP: the sheer quantity of boring data out there is itself a wonderful deterrent, and a simple one-pass write of zeros is enough to raise the opportunity cost of finding valuable data well beyond the threshold of "some punk" rooting through your trash.
Normally this situation is pretty cut and dry. Unfortunately, the problem here is that H.264 is substantially better technology than WebM, it's not clear that WebM is not trampling on MPEG-LA patents, Google is not indemnifying WebM users against it, and Ogg Theora is noticeably worse than WebM.
I am obviously in favor of eliminating software patents, and thereby eliminating the problem of patent trolls like MPEG-LA. I am also obviously in favor of open standards. But this is not like most software where we can just round up some of the gang and knock out a new better thing in a few weeks. There are not a lot of people who can design a modern, performant, high-quality video codec, open source or no (notably, both Google and Xiph have managed to do a shitty job). To do so within our legal constraints really might be asking too much.
Since it looks like we don't get to live in the world we want to live in, we have to ask ourselves which of the worlds we can have we would like. I don't relish the idea of having inferior technology foisted on me any more than the idea of closed standards. But it's looking like we're going to have to pick one, and I don't think when it comes down to it I'd rather have the inferior technology.
Emulate a low-level machine in your high level language, and use that emulated low-level language to implement another high level language. That's going to be a real performer.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you, more or less. I've used them all. I remember being very productive with pwm about a decade ago. I use Mac OS X at home, but at work, Linux, and I've settled into a nice configuration of fvwm, mostly emulating Xmonad by way of keybindings, with a little xmobar at the top of the screen. It took a small amount of scripting to get the current window title up there and the current "workspace" but now everything is put together and seems to be working well and I'm very seldom tempted to run back to KDE or GNOME.
You might want to look at Pharo. With the new CogVM performance is really quite good these days.
I realize you're just trying to make a point, but this makes no sense whatsoever. How would this work, exactly?
You've certainly got their rhetoric down.
iSSH on the iPad can do X forwarding and VNC.
I strongly recommend you read Ted Dziuba's article "Monitoring Theory". A little preventative medicine will do wonders.
Niles, are you back with Maris?
In Albuquerque, it got shut down a few weeks ago because the bums were crashing the party and there was a stabbing.
First, take heart. We've all been where you are now (or will be there soon enough). You're not alone.
You've probably noticed that people who are in relationships have an easier time ... getting into relationships. It's much like this with work. It's a lot easier to get another job if you have one. It's also harder to get a job if you hate the work you're doing. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. You probably interview better than you think you do. If you can do FizzBuzz on a whiteboard, you're already in the top 10%. Cut yourself some slack.
Secondly, I think you're on the right track. You're not here because you think you should quit programming and become a farmer. I've been where you are. It's called burnout. Consider taking a real vacation, like two weeks or more, and get away from programming. See if you can get assigned to a different project at work, or at least trade some responsibility with someone else on your project. Burn out will eventually go away, but you will need to make some changes. Better to nip it in the bud now rather than wait for the day when you stare at the screen and really just can't program at all.
Thirdly, go learn something new. Not necessarily new as in bleeding edge; I've been having a great time with Smalltalk and J lately, neither of which is really new in the internet blogosphere sense. I crave a new language every now and then. You may be able to find one that appeals to your sense of what's lacking about what you're doing now. Give yourself small things to do. It's much easier to climb a sequence of hills that grow as you go than a giant mountain up front. I have never found starting a huge project to be much stress relief. Just screw around. Solve puzzles--maybe do the Lisp 99 or Project Euler. Or go download Love2D and learn Lua to program some simple games. Stop by the B&N and look through the computer section. Get yourself a book if you see one that looks interesting. Real World Haskell is a trip; Land of Lisp is supposed to be good too.
If you really can't stand it and none of this stuff helps, it may be time for a job or career change. Nobody expects you to retire from the job you have now (unless you're pushing 70). For the most part if you want a change of scenery in this profession, you change jobs. You'll be surprised how well you interview. Even just supporting the weight of a giant program for several years without being fired looks pretty good on a resume these days. Don't give up hope.
One final note. Your job is probably a lot more secure than you think it is. Management at most places sort of expects that programmers aren't all that productive. I wouldn't be surprised if you could just ignore your work for a few days or a week and do something completely different without it being noticed. It sounds unethical, and it probably is technically speaking, but letting you take a few brain vacation days is much cheaper to the organization than firing you and hiring and training a replacement.
I think it's possible to dislike their PM without wanting them destroyed. I disliked Bush, but it didn't make me unamerican.
Moreover, this is two politicians talking. Why do we assume that they were being honest with each other?
Hmm.
I don't think we see it as a fatherland. I'm not sure we ascribe a gender to it. We do have a female icon ("Columbia") but I don't think we refer to it as a motherland either.
I think the real, deeper fallacy is the idea that we can find a way to prevent accidents from ever happening again, if we can just figure out which thing to do differently.
"Intensive purposes" are not a thing. You mean "intents and purposes." And "who cares?" is the correct form of the question: "who" is nominative, "whom" is accusative. Who cares? I care. You annoyed whom? You annoyed me.
Awesomesauce. A-shark jumping we shall go.
Absent some kind of hash-tag search (you may recall, this is why this exists on Twitter) it adds nothing to the conversation except "I'm the kind of guy who thinks Slashdot is basically the same thing as Twitter."
I'm with you. Of course, there are tradeoffs I wish hadn't been made, but overall, as far as possible futures to live in from 10 years ago, this one is pretty far from the worst. And it happens to be the one we're stuck with. So let's enjoy it.
Yo Broseph, this isn't Twitter.
You missed the part about the author being at Jane Street Capital?
"there is nothing that isn't becoming a lot less affordable"... except apparently excellent, inexpensive, computer-replacing tablets. Which is exactly tripleevenfall's point. It's three times easier to save up $200 for a Kindle Fire than a $600 laptop.
Have you really never had a bad day, in your whole life?
The problem is the opportunity cost. You know which hard drives have sensitive data on them, but your some punk doesn't. Moreover, even your hard drives with sensitive data on them probably have lots of other stuff on them too, such as an operating system. If you're worried about database data, how likely is it you have Oracle and Oracle's data in the same place? An Oracle data partition without the corresponding configuration isn't particularly useful. But how many punks do you know who go out to the dump and root around for hard drives, take them all home, plug them in and go surfing for useful data? It would be a huge amount of work.
Even supposing this punk finds your product source code on there, what's he going to do with it? Just fire up gcc and stick it in the app store? Running a business is hard work. I know a writer who constantly worries about his computer being hacked into, yet can't find a publisher himself for his own work. I try to point out that getting published is hard work, why would somebody go to all that effort to live so poorly when they could just get a job?
Moreover, if this punk really wants your credit cards, why would he bother rooting around in your trash when he could just sniff your wifi and wait for you to make a purchase somewhere stupid, or send you a phishing email? For that matter, I doubt it's very hard to go to IRC somewhere and say "I need a thousand credit cards"; credit cards are not stolen individually these days when they can instead be stolen and sold in bulk.
I certainly see a need for proper, secure hard drive erasure for government or military secrets, but in industry, I certainly agree with the OP: the sheer quantity of boring data out there is itself a wonderful deterrent, and a simple one-pass write of zeros is enough to raise the opportunity cost of finding valuable data well beyond the threshold of "some punk" rooting through your trash.
Either you can't be bothered to edit the configuration file, or you don't care about your data still being there tomorrow.
Normally this situation is pretty cut and dry. Unfortunately, the problem here is that H.264 is substantially better technology than WebM, it's not clear that WebM is not trampling on MPEG-LA patents, Google is not indemnifying WebM users against it, and Ogg Theora is noticeably worse than WebM.
I am obviously in favor of eliminating software patents, and thereby eliminating the problem of patent trolls like MPEG-LA. I am also obviously in favor of open standards. But this is not like most software where we can just round up some of the gang and knock out a new better thing in a few weeks. There are not a lot of people who can design a modern, performant, high-quality video codec, open source or no (notably, both Google and Xiph have managed to do a shitty job). To do so within our legal constraints really might be asking too much.
Since it looks like we don't get to live in the world we want to live in, we have to ask ourselves which of the worlds we can have we would like. I don't relish the idea of having inferior technology foisted on me any more than the idea of closed standards. But it's looking like we're going to have to pick one, and I don't think when it comes down to it I'd rather have the inferior technology.
Emulate a low-level machine in your high level language, and use that emulated low-level language to implement another high level language. That's going to be a real performer.