the first company I worked for out of school a couple years ago was *gasp* a web shop. After struggling through about 6 months with major project management problems (none of the owners, who functioned as project managers, knew anything about project management), major development problems (floating specs, zero QA) the company brought in a consultant *groan* to help us iron out our problems.
i actually really liked the consultant... probably because he ended up telling the owners what I'd been telling them for months (the obvious problems mentioned above). everyone was pretty pumped up for a change.
three days later we were all called to a meeting where it was explained to us that "now that all our past problems have been solved...". i was baffled... we hadn't actually implemented anything the consultant had proposed, we merely talked about it. i stood up and said "I don't understand. What have we done to fix the stuff we've been talking about?" to which I got stares and bewilderment. Everyone was thinking the same thing (several folks told me afterwards), but I was the only one with the balls to actually say it.
I was fired within a week for my "attitude problem".
my point is -- real change is hard; 90% of folks would rather just talk about hard stuff than actually do it to improve their situation. don't settle for any Mickey Mouse shit. good luck!:)
this is an interesting problem, and since I've got GIMP installed and know a bit of Lisp (similiar to the Scheme that "Script-Fu" uses) I'm going to try and see what I can do using gimp's built-in functions. i'll set up a page at www.parseerror.com/split/ with my progress. i wouldn't gamble on when i'll have something worth using, but hey, you never know. i'll post back to this thread if i make any major break-throughs.
true enough, i tried it in my win2k dos prompt with perl 5.6.1 and it gave me the same thing. must be the way dos handles the input... it thinks i'm trying to access \$_ instead of $_... i'll see what i can do
... but just because open source can do something doesn't mean it should do it.
Re:Too late. The cat is out of the bag.
on
"Squishy" DRM?
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· Score: 1
You're looking at the small picture. Would you rather be like Nelly and make recyclable music which will die in a year and live in luxury? Or would you rather live in poverty, make beautiful music and become a legend, having billions of people after your death play and enjoy the music you created? There lies the question.
where are you writing this from? a street corner or your office/home?
From my own experience I would say that having a certain degree just gets you in the door, but what's considered after that is the skill level and your ability to learn new things.
i agree with you in part, but remember - getting in the door, especially today and perhaps for the next few years, is the hardest part. besides, this person isn't asking "should i start a whole new degree?" -- they're 3 classes away from a second major. sure, getting the second major might not make you a better ______, but slacking off and taking "gym 101" instead isn't going to either, and you don't have that sexy extra line on your resume.
as someone who's working full-time and going to school part-time on getting his first degree, i would say you should make the most of school while you're there. from your intro it seems as though you're interested in both CS and math... if it's only a "little" more work to get the second major, i can't see how that can hurt you. if you need to take 9 classes per year and you only need 5 to complete 2 degrees, that still leaves you 4 classes to waste however you like.
down the road you may decide you'd rather teach math or take on a job heavily involved in math... if you get your degree now it will open up that opportunity right away (going back to school is a pain in the ass). and, as someone who's seen alot of people interviewed (we work in a small office, interviews are done in the open), i can tell you that a double-major can only add to your appeal to prospective employers. good luck with whatever you decide to do.
i must say that parrot is neat -- i've checked out latest current version, 0.0.2 iirc and written some little parrot assembly files.
i've always wanted to learn plain old assembly, but i could never rationalize it... assembler is more of a pain than C and it isn't portable. parrot, however, being a software-based assembler *is* portable and fast.
i guess i'm kind of rambling, but my point is: the parrot project is a very cool one -- especially if you're a an admitted programming language junkie like me. if you haven't taken a look at parrot, check out www.parrotcode.org
remember the GUID that was switch "on" by default in the P3 chips? the public response was so bad, Intel turned the default to "off" and no one heard any more about them.
as long as you let Intel know what you think, i think everything will turn out ok. remember: their #1 concern is making money, so if enough people are made aware of the crap they're trying to pull, things should turn out ok.
and if not, I forsee high-end Athlon XPs and/or P4's in my future until i see a decent alternative.
one question i do have is: what impact will Palladium have on non-windows users?
i think that probably works out about right. of course, 50% of/. geeks will say "well i could through a big old RAID together in my basement for $50,000" -- but in the real world you'll need people who know what they're doing to design it, you'll need to purchase all the disparate equipment from different vendors, assemble, test, repeat. you'll need a place the put the thing, whether it be colo or onsite. after all that you'll need people to maintain it.
i don't know nearly enough to put such a thing together, but i do know enough to know that every real-world project probably costs 50x what a geek-fantasy basement equivalent would cost.
the point of blogging...?
on
Essential Blogging
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· Score: 2, Insightful
isn't the point of blogging (assuming you're into it, which i am not) to express yourself and discover how to get people interested in your opinions (basically talk about sex and talk shit about people, afaik). essentially it's the path, not the destination.
would you buy a book "how to keep a journal"? this seems like it could be summarized in a one page list of "hints and tips"
Seriously though- pornography is not healthy. It tends to make think nasty thoughts and do nasty things- it is not good for the mind. I know it gets joked about a lot here, but that's the truth.
hey, i just got 4GB of pr0n last weekend (wget++), and i haven't done anything nasty all morning.
aw shit, i just posted on/. -- i guess you're right, it does make you do bad things:(
this just announced: Microsoft will make it's new version of the Windows operating system, Windows.NET, even more bloated, so as to appease hardware makers.
afaict the major improvements to apache 2.x are better performance and simpler development. this is great, but, imho, not the kind of thing one gets in line for.
has anyone here personally had any trouble with apache 1.3.x's performance? perhaps large-scale sites may have, but apache runs just fine for everything i've ever worked on.
as for keeping developers sane, great. eventually everyone will move to 2.x, but it'll probably be years before it's as popular as 1.3.x is now.
the problem is that apache 1.3.x is "good enough" for most people. to be honest, i haven't even looked at 2.x
this is no suprise to most people, but instead of just saying "yeah, M$ stinks!", try thinking about why they're not engineered for security.
secure systems are hard to build and cst alot of money. they are also generally less easy to use (usually because lots of convenient, insecure shortcuts are not available)
as for Microsoft, the "worst thing" they could ever do was build a rock-solid operating system with everything you ever needed that ran lightning fast. why? because they only make money when they sell you something (their new licensing plan aside for the moment).
the real purpose of Microsoft's products are to take up more room, run more slowly and add more and more features with each version. that way, you need to buy a new computer and a new copy of the operating system just to run them. by adding features they can assure that everyone will eventually need to upgrade, just to view your company's new Word XP documents, even if they'd be just fine as ASCII text
in the end, of course, it's all about money and keeping their investors happy and thus keeping their customers just happy enough not to dump them completely
i could not find anything that ns7 had that mozilla 1 doesn't (except for bundled "AOL Free & Unlimited" and RealAudio icons everywhere after install). in fact, there's no straight-forward way to disable popup ads (I've noticed netscape.com has several), whereas in mozilla you can. the whole download -> install -> try -> uninstall cycle took about 20 minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
i actually really liked the consultant... probably because he ended up telling the owners what I'd been telling them for months (the obvious problems mentioned above). everyone was pretty pumped up for a change.
three days later we were all called to a meeting where it was explained to us that "now that all our past problems have been solved...". i was baffled... we hadn't actually implemented anything the consultant had proposed, we merely talked about it. i stood up and said "I don't understand. What have we done to fix the stuff we've been talking about?" to which I got stares and bewilderment. Everyone was thinking the same thing (several folks told me afterwards), but I was the only one with the balls to actually say it.
I was fired within a week for my "attitude problem".
my point is -- real change is hard; 90% of folks would rather just talk about hard stuff than actually do it to improve their situation. don't settle for any Mickey Mouse shit. good luck! :)
this is an interesting problem, and since I've got GIMP installed and know a bit of Lisp (similiar to the Scheme that "Script-Fu" uses) I'm going to try and see what I can do using gimp's built-in functions. i'll set up a page at www.parseerror.com/split/ with my progress. i wouldn't gamble on when i'll have something worth using, but hey, you never know. i'll post back to this thread if i make any major break-throughs.
note: the Italian team was unable to find signs of interstellar beer, which signifies that there is indeed no intelligent life out there.
it's taken /. a while as well; this book was published in January
perl -e"$_=q#: 13_2: 12/'{>: 8_4) (_4: 6/2'-2; 3;-2'\2: 5/7\_/\7: 12m m::#;s#:#\n#g;s#(\D)(\d+)#$1x$2#ge;print"
apparently, the dos shell doesn't replace "$variables" like bash does... just when you though cross-platform sigging was easy! :P
true enough, i tried it in my win2k dos prompt with perl 5.6.1 and it gave me the same thing. must be the way dos handles the input... it thinks i'm trying to access \$_ instead of $_... i'll see what i can do
... but just because open source can do something doesn't mean it should do it.
where are you writing this from? a street corner or your office/home?
i'm in. 2998 left.
i agree with you in part, but remember - getting in the door, especially today and perhaps for the next few years, is the hardest part. besides, this person isn't asking "should i start a whole new degree?" -- they're 3 classes away from a second major. sure, getting the second major might not make you a better ______, but slacking off and taking "gym 101" instead isn't going to either, and you don't have that sexy extra line on your resume.
down the road you may decide you'd rather teach math or take on a job heavily involved in math... if you get your degree now it will open up that opportunity right away (going back to school is a pain in the ass). and, as someone who's seen alot of people interviewed (we work in a small office, interviews are done in the open), i can tell you that a double-major can only add to your appeal to prospective employers. good luck with whatever you decide to do.
i've always wanted to learn plain old assembly, but i could never rationalize it... assembler is more of a pain than C and it isn't portable. parrot, however, being a software-based assembler *is* portable and fast.
i guess i'm kind of rambling, but my point is: the parrot project is a very cool one -- especially if you're a an admitted programming language junkie like me. if you haven't taken a look at parrot, check out www.parrotcode.org
> Pardon my ignorance, but what's a .pod file?
Plain old documentation.It's what all perldoc's files are stored as, iirc.
this may be the Information Age, but we're all cavemen at heart. *sniffs keyboard*
as long as you let Intel know what you think, i think everything will turn out ok. remember: their #1 concern is making money, so if enough people are made aware of the crap they're trying to pull, things should turn out ok.
and if not, I forsee high-end Athlon XPs and/or P4's in my future until i see a decent alternative.
one question i do have is: what impact will Palladium have on non-windows users?
i don't know nearly enough to put such a thing together, but i do know enough to know that every real-world project probably costs 50x what a geek-fantasy basement equivalent would cost.
would you buy a book "how to keep a journal"? this seems like it could be summarized in a one page list of "hints and tips"
aw shit, i just posted on /. -- i guess you're right, it does make you do bad things :(
this just announced: Microsoft will make it's new version of the Windows operating system, Windows .NET, even more bloated, so as to appease hardware makers.
has anyone here personally had any trouble with apache 1.3.x's performance? perhaps large-scale sites may have, but apache runs just fine for everything i've ever worked on.
as for keeping developers sane, great. eventually everyone will move to 2.x, but it'll probably be years before it's as popular as 1.3.x is now.
the problem is that apache 1.3.x is "good enough" for most people. to be honest, i haven't even looked at 2.x
secure systems are hard to build and cst alot of money. they are also generally less easy to use (usually because lots of convenient, insecure shortcuts are not available)
as for Microsoft, the "worst thing" they could ever do was build a rock-solid operating system with everything you ever needed that ran lightning fast. why? because they only make money when they sell you something (their new licensing plan aside for the moment).
the real purpose of Microsoft's products are to take up more room, run more slowly and add more and more features with each version. that way, you need to buy a new computer and a new copy of the operating system just to run them. by adding features they can assure that everyone will eventually need to upgrade, just to view your company's new Word XP documents, even if they'd be just fine as ASCII text
in the end, of course, it's all about money and keeping their investors happy and thus keeping their customers just happy enough not to dump them completely
Many FBI Agent Too Dumb to Be "Hackers"
this was posted not long ago. sheesh. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/01/013524 5&mode=flat&tid=159
I would run out and grab OS X.x asap if it was released for x86.
i could not find anything that ns7 had that mozilla 1 doesn't (except for bundled "AOL Free & Unlimited" and RealAudio icons everywhere after install). in fact, there's no straight-forward way to disable popup ads (I've noticed netscape.com has several), whereas in mozilla you can. the whole download -> install -> try -> uninstall cycle took about 20 minutes.