Oh please, compared to professionals, computer guys are generally far short. We compare well to trades, which is depressing - the supply and demand is manipulated by the people who pay us, so no wonder our salaries are stagnant. Really, it's not whining - it's as hard or harder to build a product as sell it, so how about some better pay and recognition? I don't see sales guys treated like a liability or outsourced to lowcostistan.
Well paid professionals? Sure, if that means $150k and up. I get middle class pay - better than a plumber but not that much better. Sure, we make 80k after a few years and 120k in expensive cities when you have something to offer, but when houses cost $400k for something decent, it doesn't feel like well paid. I'd like to be paid better than my father, who got his decent house near DC while being essentially unpromotable in a city government job, but I don't see it, not unless I go off to be a quant and pull down 200k to start. Really, a bit of perspective would be nice - be a VP of something and get a large paycheck (and work like a slave), sell $5m/year and pocket large commission checks, build software that saves your company $500k YoY and get a pat on the head. It really seems unbalanced.
Until you nerds start building some awesome robots, the majority of the human race is going to be stuck doing menial tasks instead of creative work, if for no other reason than it has to be done by someone.
Hey, don't give me static on that - we can build fancy robots all day, they just cost more than a $12/hr grunt.
$2000 can get you an essentially top of the line machine these days (at least, it did for me); if I were going to spend $700 on the case, I'd want to scale up the other parts appropriately (getting into you-have-to-be-kidding-me territory)
I specced a machine at $1500 that has 16G ram and a $200 geforce card - at the $2000 price point, I suppose I'd have a faster proc and the $500 card, but if I went to $7k, it'd probably be a DB server + 3 webservers in a remote rack. seriously, how do you spend $7k on a box without it being for some sort of medium to large website? I think I could get the hardware to run half of fark for $7k.
Backups: run your backups one final time, then install windows on a new hard drive (because they cost $50) and restore the data. Why complicate things?
I want an autonomous robot which hunts down lying politicians and ass-rapes them. For reference, that includes their conspirators at Fox News and NBC and the like.
Rapage is really complicated - how about we just give it a rifle?
This isn't security, it's about not advertising a target - your house is just as secure if you tell people about it's vaunted impenetrability, but if you go do that, you'll have more people trying to break in
Well, in all fairness, Design patterns aren't supposed to be new things, just a way of making a common vocabulary so you can talk about design more easily.
In particular claiming you should NEVER use C++ or threads is purely silly. Yes you can abuse C++ and threads.
He never claimed that. He said that using c++ and threads would've added complications that would make them not ship. Remember, this is mid-90s, so pthreads and C++ with STL were far from mature, and C++ compilers were still frequently buggy.
Threads certainly can be a reliability curse but there are most definitely places where they are the RIGHT tool to use and if you don't the consequences can be bad in their own right. For example when you end up with a program that is sluggish because its letting some task that should be running in a background thread hogging the foreground and UI.
And the alternative is using different threading libraries across 8 platforms and dealing with the bugs from each.
He's also learning that the SF alcohol board is petty, prone to revenge, and has a bias against homosexuals (read up on it at jwz.org), which was pretty shocking given my expectations about SF.
After broadening my horizons, it would seem that half or more of the design patterns are simply language features in functional languages - seriously, visitor?
If somebody shipped a browser as crash-prone as Netscape was today, it wouldn't matter if it was three years ahead of the competition. People would play with it for a bit, and then use something stable.
And back when NS came out, there wasn't 'something stable', so I don't see your point.
I dunno, qwerty isn't particularly bad - it tends to alternate hands and allows for some fairly fast typing: my mother made money doing typing on the side and she did 180wpm with no errors at the time. I do about 45 with no training to speak of.
Who cares if it does? Any server management tool from MS will likely require different concepts from any other, and be a bigger hurdle moving from one to another compared to moving from an equivalent competitor product. Don't you get it? Knowing AD doesn't give you the ability to run exchange or sql server. Knowing Oracle gives you quite a bit of knowledge on running sql server.
gee plague, that was an example of how skills in one package don't transfer to another package. You know, to rebut your claim that switching to a different vendor was a higher barrier than adding a completely new piece of software to the mix?
And Nominum has not had a single known vulnerability in its software.
"Only the 30 or so devs in our company can look at our code and they're busy doing other things anyway, therefore our code is superior!" Or something like that.
I'm talking about their claim that a huge NUMBER of open implementations are bad, while saying that users of all should go right over to them.
It's just BS - make an unsupported claim, then offer an unrelated solution (that benefits your company). Act properly sincere and some people will look at the sincerity and assume the whole thing is reasonable. Then you take their money.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please, compared to professionals, computer guys are generally far short. We compare well to trades, which is depressing - the supply and demand is manipulated by the people who pay us, so no wonder our salaries are stagnant. Really, it's not whining - it's as hard or harder to build a product as sell it, so how about some better pay and recognition? I don't see sales guys treated like a liability or outsourced to lowcostistan.
Actually, risking downmod even more, it's more like, "Has the Glory Gone out of Being A Candystriper?"
Heh, now I've got an image of some 20 year old LPN candystriper saying "I'm a nurse".
Well paid professionals? Sure, if that means $150k and up. I get middle class pay - better than a plumber but not that much better. Sure, we make 80k after a few years and 120k in expensive cities when you have something to offer, but when houses cost $400k for something decent, it doesn't feel like well paid. I'd like to be paid better than my father, who got his decent house near DC while being essentially unpromotable in a city government job, but I don't see it, not unless I go off to be a quant and pull down 200k to start. Really, a bit of perspective would be nice - be a VP of something and get a large paycheck (and work like a slave), sell $5m/year and pocket large commission checks, build software that saves your company $500k YoY and get a pat on the head. It really seems unbalanced.
Time to start a company, I suppose.
Until you nerds start building some awesome robots, the majority of the human race is going to be stuck doing menial tasks instead of creative work, if for no other reason than it has to be done by someone.
Hey, don't give me static on that - we can build fancy robots all day, they just cost more than a $12/hr grunt.
Email doesn't affect the bottom line? :)
A watch? How quaint! Why would you need a watch when you have a cell phone?
I can glance at a watch in a meeting without looking like a jerk. Also, I like watches.
$2000 can get you an essentially top of the line machine these days (at least, it did for me); if I were going to spend $700 on the case, I'd want to scale up the other parts appropriately (getting into you-have-to-be-kidding-me territory)
I specced a machine at $1500 that has 16G ram and a $200 geforce card - at the $2000 price point, I suppose I'd have a faster proc and the $500 card, but if I went to $7k, it'd probably be a DB server + 3 webservers in a remote rack. seriously, how do you spend $7k on a box without it being for some sort of medium to large website? I think I could get the hardware to run half of fark for $7k.
The only place I've ever done credit for a computer was newegg, and that was because they had a 0% for a year deal.
Backups: run your backups one final time, then install windows on a new hard drive (because they cost $50) and restore the data. Why complicate things?
yo dawg, you like fish sticks?
I want an autonomous robot which hunts down lying politicians and ass-rapes them. For reference, that includes their conspirators at Fox News and NBC and the like.
Rapage is really complicated - how about we just give it a rifle?
the recursion is hurting my brain...
That's not recursion, it's meta! Yay metacontest, all hail the metacontest!
This isn't security, it's about not advertising a target - your house is just as secure if you tell people about it's vaunted impenetrability, but if you go do that, you'll have more people trying to break in
Well, in all fairness, Design patterns aren't supposed to be new things, just a way of making a common vocabulary so you can talk about design more easily.
In particular claiming you should NEVER use C++ or threads is purely silly. Yes you can abuse C++ and threads.
He never claimed that. He said that using c++ and threads would've added complications that would make them not ship. Remember, this is mid-90s, so pthreads and C++ with STL were far from mature, and C++ compilers were still frequently buggy.
Threads certainly can be a reliability curse but there are most definitely places where they are the RIGHT tool to use and if you don't the consequences can be bad in their own right. For example when you end up with a program that is sluggish because its letting some task that should be running in a background thread hogging the foreground and UI.
And the alternative is using different threading libraries across 8 platforms and dealing with the bugs from each.
He's also learning that the SF alcohol board is petty, prone to revenge, and has a bias against homosexuals (read up on it at jwz.org), which was pretty shocking given my expectations about SF.
After broadening my horizons, it would seem that half or more of the design patterns are simply language features in functional languages - seriously, visitor?
If somebody shipped a browser as crash-prone as Netscape was today, it wouldn't matter if it was three years ahead of the competition. People would play with it for a bit, and then use something stable.
And back when NS came out, there wasn't 'something stable', so I don't see your point.
How do you determine what "needs" unit testing?
By using good judgement.
I dunno, qwerty isn't particularly bad - it tends to alternate hands and allows for some fairly fast typing: my mother made money doing typing on the side and she did 180wpm with no errors at the time. I do about 45 with no training to speak of.
Who cares if it does? Any server management tool from MS will likely require different concepts from any other, and be a bigger hurdle moving from one to another compared to moving from an equivalent competitor product. Don't you get it? Knowing AD doesn't give you the ability to run exchange or sql server. Knowing Oracle gives you quite a bit of knowledge on running sql server.
gee plague, that was an example of how skills in one package don't transfer to another package. You know, to rebut your claim that switching to a different vendor was a higher barrier than adding a completely new piece of software to the mix?
And Nominum has not had a single known vulnerability in its software.
"Only the 30 or so devs in our company can look at our code and they're busy doing other things anyway, therefore our code is superior!" Or something like that.
I'm talking about their claim that a huge NUMBER of open implementations are bad, while saying that users of all should go right over to them.
It's just BS - make an unsupported claim, then offer an unrelated solution (that benefits your company). Act properly sincere and some people will look at the sincerity and assume the whole thing is reasonable. Then you take their money.
You may as well wonder why they don't all stand in wide lines, several deep, and fire muskets.
Because even a 30 year old unmaintained ak47 is accurate enough to hit a man at 100 meters. Muskets were inaccurate enough to warrant volley fire.