I've had the unfortunate opportunity to work with people who got hired simply because they said that they could do the work. They couldn't. They also didn't learn quickly.
Last time I was involved in hiring someone, the question I asked was "You need to get access to a linux server, but nobody knows the root password. How do you reset it?".
He didn't know, and I gave him a web browser and told him to google it. He found the solution, tried it out, and we hired him.
A lot of the posts so far have suggested that it's totally unrealistic, and you should leave ASAP. From my experience, I'd say that it is quite unrealistic. Not only is that quite the underestimation, but the skillset is quite different. I work with several programmers that can crank out code, but only have the foggiest notion about system administration, never mind the people skills necessary to deal with people's problems kindly.
But, chances are that you might not just want to quit, because you posted this question here, rather than just leaving. Or maybe you posted so you felt better about that decision. However, if you do want to keep your job (at least for a little while) try explaining to your Boss that they're different skillsets, 'good at programming' isn't necessarily 'good at computers' (sysadmin, computer support, etc), and you think his estimation is too low. Then cut a deal that if after a month, if your time spent per week is more than 3%, he'll hire a professional Admin, so you can concentrate on your main job responsibilities.
Just be sure to keep track of everything that you do, which will help make a stronger case.
That's how I got out of being the sysadmin at my job - it turned out that my Boss actually wanted me to to my main job well, and just didn't understand that the other duties were a major drain on my time. Chances are that your Boss isn't looking to sabotage his own investment, just unrealistic.
Although, you might want to start prepping your resume if he continues to be unrealistic. Hopefully he's hoping that your business will succeed, rather than looking for scapegoats.
This isn't the technology that they're using in the movie.. however, if you're looking for a true 3D display, I saw an awesome one at siggraph 2004's vendor show.
I can't find the name of it right now, but the basic technology was a back-projection, with a bunch of vertical planes that could be turned translucent. They simply projected images continuously, turning on the appropriate depth plane, so that each depth plane displayed the correct image. I believe they got around 15-20 fps, and it was the first true voxel display I've seen. That way, because the display is actually 3d, you'd get as much 3d as you get with the real world.
Seriously, sometimes reading slashdot hurts my head. I wish "Didn't RTFA" was a moderation option. While I think that there are a lot of intelligent readers of Slashdot, I think the average poster is an idiot. And half of them are below average.
I'd have to agree with the AC response to your post - the C code does less than the C++ code does.
Also, the real strength of C++ isn't in toy programs like the one listed. Heck, it wouldn't be much work to do that in assembly, even. But I notice you're not advocating coding everything in assembly.
The real strength of C++ and the STL is code reuse. I've hand-coded linked lists, and doubly linked lists. I've hand-coded variable sized arrays. But my implementations are neither as feature complete nor as optimized as the STL implementations I've used. Also, mine were a lot buggier, at least at the start. I've never actually seen a bug in an STL implementation (well, okay, MSVC6's was quite crappy).
Plus, with templates, you can actually improve performance of reused code over C's function pointers, becaues you can inline the functor at compile time. Don't believe me? Compare qsort's performance to algorithm's sort. Also, google for template metaprogramming. It's some interesting reading.
Finally, take a look at what boost and a few other libraries are doing. If you want, compare the speed and feature completeness to similar C libraries, if you can find any. Don't forget to take error checking into account.
For me personally, the biggest argument for the STL is that I'm optimizing for programmer time, which also often allows me to optimize my code as well. For example, the other day I needed to make a cache which was a map from a pair of strings to a Datum type, each of which could have an arbitrary number of children. Using the STL, the coding took about 10 minutes, had no bugs, and left me plenty of time to profile my code and optimize the inner loop.
C++ is almost always going to take longer to compile because it's a more complex language. However, if your code runs slowly, you're not using it correctly. At a minimum, you could just compile the C code with C++. Often, I mix C and C++ libraries when I find that the inner loop of my program needs more speed, while keeping the nice code reuse in the other parts.
I have a CPU meter on my personal machine... I wish OSes came with these things...
Every OS I've used in the last 5 years or so has come with one. On linux, my distro came with gkrellm, among others. OS X has performance monitor (under utilities) - I usually run it as a dock icon. XP has task manager, which when minimized to the tray works just fine, or you can maximize it for a history. Heck, even 95 had some program you could choose to install.. I think it was sysinfo or something, which would let you view and graph various OS stats, like CPU usage, memory usage, page faults, etc.
I knew a guy who did an internship at IBM - I think he helped do internal IT for their boxes. Anyhow, while he was there, he was showing someone a neat trick he did with the init system on the linux boxes, so that it'd start up an interactive shell on a different terminal as soon as possible. The advantage being that if some process held up the boot, you could fix it (ie kill -9). I think dhcp was a big culprit on the distro they were using.
Anyhow, his boss recommended that he get a patent on the change.
So, I'm not too surprised to see them on the list.
I imagine that they've got a few devious people they keep in a room just to come up with ways to abuse their proposed system.
If I had that job, I'd make a little lending library system. That is, an audiophile may like to own thousands of songs, but they only have two ears.
Just make a piece of software that lets users make playlists of music from the current pool. The software would then schedule ownership transfers of the pool to enable every user to listen to their playlist. You could get fancier, such as buying more of a popular song when the reserves get low, or slightly shuffling playlists to ensure no breaks.
Now I just use my own domain, so if a company (like gmail) does something like Apple did, I can still use the email addresses I wanted.
One of my favorite features about gmail is that you can set the reply-to address to be whatever you want. I've currently got mine set to gmail@mydomain.com, which forwards to gmail. However, if gmail ever dies, I'll just have it forward elsewhere.
The only problem I have with gmail is that I've kept all my email since about 1996, transferring it from email client to email client. I'd love to have it all on google, but I want some way of forwarding it transparently - for example, if the email was from bob in 2002, I want it to spoof the headers so it's still from bob in 2002. Any ideas? All my mail is currently in Thunderbird.
When I'm in the 'zone' I can't talk with somebody else, I can't verbalize why I'm writing a code fragment the way I am writing it without getting yanked out of it.
In my experience, if I'm paired with someone good, and either one of us is in the zone, neither of us speaks. It's just a matter of being polite - when I'm not at the wheel I have time to read the code, and try not to talk unless the other programmer is moving on with something obviously unfinished or flawed. It's like a constant code review, but it's a lot more interesting to read the code as it's written.
The funniest thing that I ever did with a spreadsheet was a fourier transform (and an inverse ft). I had all the data down one side, a big block of sines, a big block of cosines, and a few lines that put stuff together and some graphs. The main problem I ran into was the limits on the size of the spreadsheet - 65k rows and 256 columns, iirc. I didn't want to mess with different sheets.
While my parents were on vacation in London, they overheard another guy at the hotel desk trying to check in. He was pretty upset that they weren't taking his American Dollars.
Before he stomped off, he asked "Is it going to be like this everywhere I go around here?!?"
One can only hope he gave up vacationing anywhere more exotic than Niagara Falls.
There have been a lot of comments in the discussion to the effect that the parents are responsible for the actions of their child. I don't think that this is the case - if it were, then parents would go to jail when their children broke laws. Parents certainly have a moral responsibility, and a responsibility to society at large, to teach their children good ethics. But that responsibility is not legally binding. Imagine if it were - parents would simply lock up their problem children, rather than risking their own imprisonment.
While things may be different in civil cases than criminal cases, I still think that if children are protected from the full force of the law because of their naivete and inexperience, parents should only be held accountable according to a reasonable measure of their control over their children. Children need to be taught to make right decisions - and part of that process is making mistakes. If we remove the opportunity to make mistakes without suffering the full consequences while still young, then they will make even worse mistakes when older.
Personally, I just don't listen to music. But it certainly seems to me that the RIAA isn't making any friends.
Look mom, I even got the funky capitalization right!
I know a guy who had a good experience using PDFLaTeX
with pretty much the same method you are using. I think he did some of his figures as eps and others as png. PDFLaTeX allowed for the hyperlinks that the LaTeX -> ps -> pdf method won't get you. I found a pretty good summary here. Might be good if you're already familiar with LaTeX.
I just created a Word document, blah.doc and put some text into it. I made sure I had a couple of undo points. I closed it and opened it back up, I couldn't undo SHIT. So where the hell am I being granted this mysterious "convenience?"
The convenience is in large files - I think the idea was that you store a diff on the end of the document, rather than rewriting the entire document to disk. You can disable this by unchecking the "Allow fast saves" option.
Just in case you were actually interested in having your question answered.
This is a bit unrelated, but also interesting. It appears that Adobe used Qt on their album product, Adobe Photoshop Album. I imagine that moving a behemoth like Photoshop to a different widget set would be a massive undertaking, so I'm not holding my breath..
Slashdot Mirror
I've had the unfortunate opportunity to work with people who got hired simply because they said that they could do the work. They couldn't. They also didn't learn quickly. Last time I was involved in hiring someone, the question I asked was "You need to get access to a linux server, but nobody knows the root password. How do you reset it?". He didn't know, and I gave him a web browser and told him to google it. He found the solution, tried it out, and we hired him.
A lot of the posts so far have suggested that it's totally unrealistic, and you should leave ASAP. From my experience, I'd say that it is quite unrealistic. Not only is that quite the underestimation, but the skillset is quite different. I work with several programmers that can crank out code, but only have the foggiest notion about system administration, never mind the people skills necessary to deal with people's problems kindly.
But, chances are that you might not just want to quit, because you posted this question here, rather than just leaving. Or maybe you posted so you felt better about that decision. However, if you do want to keep your job (at least for a little while) try explaining to your Boss that they're different skillsets, 'good at programming' isn't necessarily 'good at computers' (sysadmin, computer support, etc), and you think his estimation is too low. Then cut a deal that if after a month, if your time spent per week is more than 3%, he'll hire a professional Admin, so you can concentrate on your main job responsibilities. Just be sure to keep track of everything that you do, which will help make a stronger case.
That's how I got out of being the sysadmin at my job - it turned out that my Boss actually wanted me to to my main job well, and just didn't understand that the other duties were a major drain on my time. Chances are that your Boss isn't looking to sabotage his own investment, just unrealistic.
Although, you might want to start prepping your resume if he continues to be unrealistic. Hopefully he's hoping that your business will succeed, rather than looking for scapegoats.
This isn't the technology that they're using in the movie.. however, if you're looking for a true 3D display, I saw an awesome one at siggraph 2004's vendor show. I can't find the name of it right now, but the basic technology was a back-projection, with a bunch of vertical planes that could be turned translucent. They simply projected images continuously, turning on the appropriate depth plane, so that each depth plane displayed the correct image. I believe they got around 15-20 fps, and it was the first true voxel display I've seen. That way, because the display is actually 3d, you'd get as much 3d as you get with the real world.
Seriously, sometimes reading slashdot hurts my head. I wish "Didn't RTFA" was a moderation option. While I think that there are a lot of intelligent readers of Slashdot, I think the average poster is an idiot. And half of them are below average.
Thanks for posting something intelligent.
I had a French roommate once. I used to tease him that English is now the Lingua Francaw of the world. Always got a rise. :)
Yeah, after I got back my SAT and ACT results, I got a lot of cracks about how I'd make various simple mistakes.
;P
I just told them that if it was multiple choice, I woulda got it.
I'd have to agree with the AC response to your post - the C code does less than the C++ code does.
Also, the real strength of C++ isn't in toy programs like the one listed. Heck, it wouldn't be much work to do that in assembly, even. But I notice you're not advocating coding everything in assembly.
The real strength of C++ and the STL is code reuse. I've hand-coded linked lists, and doubly linked lists. I've hand-coded variable sized arrays. But my implementations are neither as feature complete nor as optimized as the STL implementations I've used. Also, mine were a lot buggier, at least at the start. I've never actually seen a bug in an STL implementation (well, okay, MSVC6's was quite crappy).
Plus, with templates, you can actually improve performance of reused code over C's function pointers, becaues you can inline the functor at compile time. Don't believe me? Compare qsort's performance to algorithm's sort. Also, google for template metaprogramming. It's some interesting reading.
Finally, take a look at what boost and a few other libraries are doing. If you want, compare the speed and feature completeness to similar C libraries, if you can find any. Don't forget to take error checking into account.
For me personally, the biggest argument for the STL is that I'm optimizing for programmer time, which also often allows me to optimize my code as well. For example, the other day I needed to make a cache which was a map from a pair of strings to a Datum type, each of which could have an arbitrary number of children. Using the STL, the coding took about 10 minutes, had no bugs, and left me plenty of time to profile my code and optimize the inner loop.
C++ is almost always going to take longer to compile because it's a more complex language. However, if your code runs slowly, you're not using it correctly. At a minimum, you could just compile the C code with C++. Often, I mix C and C++ libraries when I find that the inner loop of my program needs more speed, while keeping the nice code reuse in the other parts.
Every OS I've used in the last 5 years or so has come with one. On linux, my distro came with gkrellm, among others. OS X has performance monitor (under utilities) - I usually run it as a dock icon. XP has task manager, which when minimized to the tray works just fine, or you can maximize it for a history. Heck, even 95 had some program you could choose to install.. I think it was sysinfo or something, which would let you view and graph various OS stats, like CPU usage, memory usage, page faults, etc.
I knew a guy who did an internship at IBM - I think he helped do internal IT for their boxes. Anyhow, while he was there, he was showing someone a neat trick he did with the init system on the linux boxes, so that it'd start up an interactive shell on a different terminal as soon as possible. The advantage being that if some process held up the boot, you could fix it (ie kill -9). I think dhcp was a big culprit on the distro they were using.
Anyhow, his boss recommended that he get a patent on the change.
So, I'm not too surprised to see them on the list.
Are you saying that there's a single calling convention for assembly? Really?
...Only Old People are for Serious Security.
Hope you didn't want to use your geocities account for a few days.
I imagine that they've got a few devious people they keep in a room just to come up with ways to abuse their proposed system.
If I had that job, I'd make a little lending library system. That is, an audiophile may like to own thousands of songs, but they only have two ears.
Just make a piece of software that lets users make playlists of music from the current pool. The software would then schedule ownership transfers of the pool to enable every user to listen to their playlist. You could get fancier, such as buying more of a popular song when the reserves get low, or slightly shuffling playlists to ensure no breaks.
The minimal fee would make this pointless.
One of my favorite features about gmail is that you can set the reply-to address to be whatever you want. I've currently got mine set to gmail@mydomain.com, which forwards to gmail. However, if gmail ever dies, I'll just have it forward elsewhere.
The only problem I have with gmail is that I've kept all my email since about 1996, transferring it from email client to email client. I'd love to have it all on google, but I want some way of forwarding it transparently - for example, if the email was from bob in 2002, I want it to spoof the headers so it's still from bob in 2002. Any ideas? All my mail is currently in Thunderbird.
Hm.. ignalum is an anagram of Mauling. Coincidence?
;)
<br>
I was hoping for Linonghorn
In my experience, if I'm paired with someone good, and either one of us is in the zone, neither of us speaks. It's just a matter of being polite - when I'm not at the wheel I have time to read the code, and try not to talk unless the other programmer is moving on with something obviously unfinished or flawed. It's like a constant code review, but it's a lot more interesting to read the code as it's written.
The funniest thing that I ever did with a spreadsheet was a fourier transform (and an inverse ft). I had all the data down one side, a big block of sines, a big block of cosines, and a few lines that put stuff together and some graphs. The main problem I ran into was the limits on the size of the spreadsheet - 65k rows and 256 columns, iirc. I didn't want to mess with different sheets.
If you're interested it's available on my website. Be warned, it's 11 meg.
Before he stomped off, he asked "Is it going to be like this everywhere I go around here?!?"
One can only hope he gave up vacationing anywhere more exotic than Niagara Falls.
There have been a lot of comments in the discussion to the effect that the parents are responsible for the actions of their child. I don't think that this is the case - if it were, then parents would go to jail when their children broke laws. Parents certainly have a moral responsibility, and a responsibility to society at large, to teach their children good ethics. But that responsibility is not legally binding. Imagine if it were - parents would simply lock up their problem children, rather than risking their own imprisonment.
While things may be different in civil cases than criminal cases, I still think that if children are protected from the full force of the law because of their naivete and inexperience, parents should only be held accountable according to a reasonable measure of their control over their children. Children need to be taught to make right decisions - and part of that process is making mistakes. If we remove the opportunity to make mistakes without suffering the full consequences while still young, then they will make even worse mistakes when older.
Personally, I just don't listen to music. But it certainly seems to me that the RIAA isn't making any friends.
Ah, yes, the Cut-And-Paste method of coding. Pisses off a lot more people than Copy-And-Paste.
For those interested, the paper is available from ACM's digital library.
Look mom, I even got the funky capitalization right!
I know a guy who had a good experience using PDFLaTeX with pretty much the same method you are using. I think he did some of his figures as eps and others as png. PDFLaTeX allowed for the hyperlinks that the LaTeX -> ps -> pdf method won't get you. I found a pretty good summary here. Might be good if you're already familiar with LaTeX.
The convenience is in large files - I think the idea was that you store a diff on the end of the document, rather than rewriting the entire document to disk. You can disable this by unchecking the "Allow fast saves" option.
Just in case you were actually interested in having your question answered.
This is a bit unrelated, but also interesting. It appears that Adobe used Qt on their album product, Adobe Photoshop Album. I imagine that moving a behemoth like Photoshop to a different widget set would be a massive undertaking, so I'm not holding my breath..