I wonder if it's related to perception of control. I have a co-worker that makes constant mouth and breathy noises that are annoying in person, but if I were listening to a recording of it, I'm sure I'd get tingles from it.
I used to teach at ITT as well, and it was a joke. We had to follow the pre-made lesson plans, because every instructor was supposed to be able to assume each student who had taken a particular course had learned the exact same material. As you mentioned, the material was riddled with mistakes. Also, the students were woefully unprepared, even the ones who were in their 2nd year. If you gave a test with a matching section, but had a larger answer pool than there were questions, they'd freak out. They also couldn't handle short answer or multiple choice questions where more than one answer could be true (i.e. "select all that apply" types of questions). I'd have one or two students who learned quickly, but the majority were just there because they thought programming was a quick way to get rich and had no business behind a keyboard.
I got aTI-99/4A for my birthday when I was 8. I didn't know how to type yet, so my mom helped by typing in the examples from the Beginner's BASIC programming guide. Then I would edit them and figure out how to do stuff on my own. Eventually I was writing my own simple programs and trying to figure out how to make databases saved to cassette tapes.
A few years later, my dad bought an IBM PS/2 80 that came with a BASIC interpreter. A couple of years after that, I was in junior high school and had to take a programming class (taught in BASIC). I had been programming for several years at that point and was already well beyond what the class covered. This was still the 80s and the school didn't have a specialized computer teacher. Since computers had keyboards, they recruited the typing teacher for the class. Being a computer class, at some point Borland sent her a Pascal compiler. She knew I was way more into computers than anyone, so she gave it to me. I installed it at home and taught myself Pascal by writing programs in BASIC, then re-implementing it in Pascal.
When I got to college, I learned the "computer science" aspects (e.g. data structures and algorithms) of programming in C, then C++, and also learned things like COBOL, x86 assembly, and OpenGL. Along the way, I've also taught myself other languages as needed, like HTML, perl, php, SQL, etc.
I think the idea of making programming a requirement is pretty stupid. I have taught many programming classes myself and have observed the same thing as every other programming instructor I've ever met: there are a few people who pick it up instantly and advance far beyond the rest of the class in a very short time, a large number of people who are capable of doing it at a basic level, and a few people who just cannot get it at all. We should definitely have computer usage classes, especially for standard business applications, but what is far more important is how to think critically about information. We don't need any more anti-vaxxers or climate-change deniers.
You might be interested in the work of David Chalmers. His website has a lot of terrific resources about philosophy of mind, consciousness, cognitive science, etc. from a wide variety of philosophers with every perspective and theory you could imagine. Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory is quite technical, but fascinating. The basic idea is that conscious perception is an intrinsic property of patterns, not just an emergent property.
There is an online comic called Sinfest that occasionally has "cartoon-to-calligraphy" transformations that are interesting.
If you go to the archive and search for "calligraphy", you can pull up all the relevant strips. They will make more sense if you're a regular reader. Also, I probably wouldn't suggest using these for kids, but if you were creative, you could probably come up with similar types of drawings on your own.
You definitely want to patch up any problems before setting sail. If you're at sea with a bunch of lonely sailors, "Look, hole!" is the LAST thing you'd want to shout.
Victim: Where am I? RB: You're stuck under a building with a Rescue Buddy! Victim: I mean, what am I doing here? RB: I'm sorry. Would you please rephrase the question? Victim: How did I get stuck under a building? RB: The building fell over; you got stuck!
(how DO you get off the Heart Of Gold in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?)
Give Marvin the tool he requests so he can override the shipboard computer. Of course, to do that, you have to explore all the areas of the game, gather EVERY tool (if you miss one, Marvin will ask for that one!), get all the pieces of fluff, plant them in the flowerpot (created when you throw the switch to the Infinite Improbability Drive), walk into the sauna, teleport into your brain, remove your common sense so you can simultaneously hold Tea and No-Tea, which impresses Marvin enough to allow you into his room. (Don't forget to drink the Tea before walking in, or Marvin's depression will kill you.)
Just for the record, one reason I first asked out my wife is she could, after several years, still play the entire game from start to finish from memory. How can you not go for a girl who's such a geek?:)
I wonder if there is a way to encrypt two pieces of data to the same location, but using different passphrases. I tried googling, but I wasn't sure what terms to search for. So far, all my results have been about re-encrypting the encrypted data, not adding new encrypted data over the existing data.
For example, let's say I have two files, SUPERSECRET and PSEUDOSECRET. The first one is the one I want to protect, and the second is just a dummy file that I might reasonably want to protect, but is actually a diversion. Perhaps SUPERSECRET is something a government might want to oppress me for, and PSEUDOSECRET is my tax information that I wouldn't want casual snoopers to find.
Is there a way to encrypt SUPERSECRET and PSEUDOSECRET to the same physical disk space (not separate space like TrueCrypt hidden volumes), but use different passwords? That way if some "adversary" (as the TrueCrypt docs refer to it) comes after me for the key, I give them PSEUDOKEY, which will only show them my tax info, while SUPERSECRET stays safe.
It would be interesting to be able to layer as much data as desired over the space. It would be the encryption equivalent of storing information in a holographic crystal and pulling out what I want by aiming the laser at the proper angle.
I specifically purchased a laptop with Intel wireless and graphics because of the drivers. WPA2 encryption works, but only if you put all the magic voodoo programs in place. I am perfectly able to do so, but I should not have to. This is a higher level software issue, not a driver issue. There is no good program that will automagically manage the wireless connections, use encryption, and seamlessly switch between wired and wifi. The closest program is probably wicd.
Anyway, the topic post simply asked about areas I would like to devote a number of developers. What I want is a bunch of broadcom/atheros/ralink/nvidia/ati/amd/intel/hp/ca non/samsung/etc. programmers writing open-source drivers.
The original topic post says kernel AND applications. Linux (the kernel) will never be adopted wide-scale unless "linux" (i.e., distros based on the linux kernel) manage to get rid of the annoying problems that hinder adoption.
There are a lot of people who try linux and dump it because some little feature (say, sound) either doesn't work, or even better, breaks during an upgrade for no reason. Until "linux" in the broader sense gets all this stuff fixed, regular users won't stick with it.
1) Wifi networking
Too many wifi cards (especially the Broadcom chipsets) are painfully difficult to get working correctly. WPA2 encryption support is flaky. Wired and wifi should switch gracefully.
2) Better sound support
There are too many conflicting ways of producing sound, some of which dislike working together. Midi support should be built-in. Currently, it's a pain to install. Hopefully KDE's Phonon subsystem will help here.
3) Better a/v
Too many movies have unsynced audio and video. Also, many codecs are unsupported. Yes, I know they're proprietary, but I don't really care. Ubuntu is making codec installation easier, but frequently the codecs only work with some particular backend. (For instance, even with mp3 support installed for gxine, Amarok (a KDE app) still needs to install it's own. The desktop environment should provide a generic way for apps play audio, and if a KDE app is running under a Gnome environment, it should be able to "just work".) Don't forget the wonderful closed-source graphics card drivers!
4) Easier windowing subsystem
No one should have to edit xorg.conf to get anything working. Fortunately, the next release of X windows is supposed to finally do away with this by adding dynamic configuration with xrandr. Also, it will be nice when CompizFusion is more robust. Lots of people really like the eye-candy, and I find some of the features useful.
5) Applications
It should be easier to keep applications up-to-date. I love Ubuntu, but it drives me nuts seeing bug fixes or major enhancements to applications that I can't easily obtain because either the OS updates don't include application upgrades, or the OS repositories are simply not adequately maintained. I don't want to have to litter my package manager with repositories, or manually install packages just to keep my apps updated.
6) Laptop support
Suspend and resume don't always work very well. Some laptops don't come back, and frequently networking is messed up.
The main reason I've heard for advocating the use of ++n instead of n++ is related to C++ objects. If you use n++ and n is an object instead of a built-in type, the object has to be cloned so you can get a reference to its original state. In this case, ++n is faster, since the object does not have to be cloned first.
The reason for *always* using ++n was simply to be in the habit of typing it that way so you didn't accidentally incur the extra cost of the copy constructor.
I can identify a number of influences on my musical tastes:
1) Growing up, my mom listened to oldies. Even though I'm 32, I like the Monkees, Herman's Hermits, Jim Croce, Mamas and the Papas, and a lot of other music from the 50s and 60s. She also would listen to country, and I still like a number of old country songs.
2) I didn't start listening to other music until I was probably in the 8th grade (about 13 years old). I started with Guns N Roses and Def Leppard's Hysteria. I like hard rock, but never really got into metal. Although some of the music I listen to is (or was) quite popular, not all of it is. I tend to only like one or two songs by any particular artist, much less a whole album.
3) When I was a little older, I had an exchange student from France who stayed for a month during one summer. He had some tapes from a singer, Francis Cabrel, which I enjoyed a lot. After he returned home, he sent me the tapes. I eventually bought all of Cabrel's CDs. Also, in high school French class we had an audio program called "Champs Elysees". My teacher let me dub all the songs onto a tape. Due to the modern wonders of the Internet, I have managed to download them all so I can hear them again. (My original tape got eat in the cassette player years ago.) I listen to a lot of music in French that, if it were in English, I probably wouldn't.
4) I tend to be very verbally oriented. I like music mainly for the lyrics. Songs with long instrumentals or over ornamented musical structures (like jazz) don't appeal to me very much. (Although hearing Liane Foly's smoky voice in "Au Fur et a Mesure" is quite sensuous.) Still, lyrics are vital to me liking a song. It doesn't matter if they're smart, funny, silly, bizarre, or whatever. If I can't connect with the lyrics, forget it.
5) I have an odd sense of humor. I tend to find surreal or silly things very funny, so I'm also drawn to that kind of music as well. They Might Be Giants, Weird Al, Jonathan Coulton, Da Vinci's Notebook / Paul and Storm, MC Hawking, and so on...
6) I didn't listen to a lot of music in the 80s that my wife, who is a little older than me, did. She has TONS of mp3s and has introduced me to an entire "new" style of music over 20 years after it was popular.
Funnily enough, if I'm talking to someone I don't know, I'm probably not going to mention music unless they seem odd enough to enjoy a song about the Mandelbrot Set or something similarly strange. I don't use music to find out about people as much as confirm what I already suspect. It's probably because I don't listen to a lot of music, I'm not really familiar with anything outside the stuff I already like, and I'm not typically willing to invest the time in finding anything new; I wait for new stuff to come to me.
I have better ways than talking about music to get a feel for someone's personality.
They got a patent on dynamic routing tables? Applications have been saving databases of IP addresses for ages. Technically, any two devices that create an IP connection do this, since they save each other's IP addresses in a data structure that describes the connection parameters.
An apt metaphor, to be sure. There's a reason anarchists refer to modern employment as "wage slavery".;)
It's one thing to trade your time and expertise for things (such as money). Humans have done this since before the beginning of recorded history. It's something else entirely to trade away control of your life (which results in us having "bosses" instead of "customers"). From now on, everyone will be my "customer".
If you read this, send me an email. I have a question for you.
Check my reply to Kjella... I'm not going to have any on-going client contact after business is finished. If I feel like taking two weeks (or two months) off, I can just not schedule anything for that period of time and go.
I understand where you're coming from as far as clients go, which is why I'm getting out of IT altogether. I won't have any clients, at least not clients that can keep bugging me after our business is done. (If they want to conduct more business, great, but each transaction will be isolated and require no further responsibility from me.)
So in short, you just want to do what you want to do and get paid for it.
Exactly!:)
Good luck with that.
Usually that phrase is accompanied by an air of cynicism, but think about it this way: every day thousands and thousands of people make a living working for themselves. I'm not concerned about being as wealthy as Bill Gates or Warren Buffett; I just don't want to spend all my time making someone else rich while I suffer for it.
Here are just a few benefits of working for myself:
1) The time I spend working will benefit ME first, not my boss, CEO, shareholders, or anyone else.
2) I can take my business income and spend it as I see fit without having to "go through the channels" and "get everyone's buy-in".
3) The harder I work, the more financially successful I will be. Working at a company, the harder you work, the harder they expect you to work in the future and the more crap they dump on you. Plus you still get paid the same.
4) If you work for yourself, you are the master of your schedule. I cannot tell you how degrading it feels to have to ask for time off. When I need time off, I'm just going to take it. Period.
I'm sure there are more reasons, but I think those are sufficient by themselves.
But as for me, I've had it with IT. After ten years doing helpdesk, software testing and/or programming, I've had my fill. I'm saving my pennies to be able to afford to go back to work on a doctorate and become a cranky old professor out in the middle of nowhere.
Funny... that sounds just like me. I started 10 years ago and I'm similarly completely sick of IT as a career. What kind of doctorate work are you thinking of going into?
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if it's related to perception of control. I have a co-worker that makes constant mouth and breathy noises that are annoying in person, but if I were listening to a recording of it, I'm sure I'd get tingles from it.
Nobody cares where you went to U, unless it was Phoenix, ITT, or Devry.
You could go to podunk U, and still get hired.
I've seen hiring managers reject resumes when they saw the applicant's degree was granted from DeVry.
I used to teach at ITT as well, and it was a joke. We had to follow the pre-made lesson plans, because every instructor was supposed to be able to assume each student who had taken a particular course had learned the exact same material. As you mentioned, the material was riddled with mistakes. Also, the students were woefully unprepared, even the ones who were in their 2nd year. If you gave a test with a matching section, but had a larger answer pool than there were questions, they'd freak out. They also couldn't handle short answer or multiple choice questions where more than one answer could be true (i.e. "select all that apply" types of questions). I'd have one or two students who learned quickly, but the majority were just there because they thought programming was a quick way to get rich and had no business behind a keyboard.
Good riddance.
I got aTI-99/4A for my birthday when I was 8. I didn't know how to type yet, so my mom helped by typing in the examples from the Beginner's BASIC programming guide. Then I would edit them and figure out how to do stuff on my own. Eventually I was writing my own simple programs and trying to figure out how to make databases saved to cassette tapes.
A few years later, my dad bought an IBM PS/2 80 that came with a BASIC interpreter. A couple of years after that, I was in junior high school and had to take a programming class (taught in BASIC). I had been programming for several years at that point and was already well beyond what the class covered. This was still the 80s and the school didn't have a specialized computer teacher. Since computers had keyboards, they recruited the typing teacher for the class. Being a computer class, at some point Borland sent her a Pascal compiler. She knew I was way more into computers than anyone, so she gave it to me. I installed it at home and taught myself Pascal by writing programs in BASIC, then re-implementing it in Pascal.
When I got to college, I learned the "computer science" aspects (e.g. data structures and algorithms) of programming in C, then C++, and also learned things like COBOL, x86 assembly, and OpenGL. Along the way, I've also taught myself other languages as needed, like HTML, perl, php, SQL, etc.
I think the idea of making programming a requirement is pretty stupid. I have taught many programming classes myself and have observed the same thing as every other programming instructor I've ever met: there are a few people who pick it up instantly and advance far beyond the rest of the class in a very short time, a large number of people who are capable of doing it at a basic level, and a few people who just cannot get it at all. We should definitely have computer usage classes, especially for standard business applications, but what is far more important is how to think critically about information. We don't need any more anti-vaxxers or climate-change deniers.
You might be interested in the work of David Chalmers. His website has a lot of terrific resources about philosophy of mind, consciousness, cognitive science, etc. from a wide variety of philosophers with every perspective and theory you could imagine. Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory is quite technical, but fascinating. The basic idea is that conscious perception is an intrinsic property of patterns, not just an emergent property.
There is an online comic called Sinfest that occasionally has "cartoon-to-calligraphy" transformations that are interesting.
If you go to the archive and search for "calligraphy", you can pull up all the relevant strips. They will make more sense if you're a regular reader. Also, I probably wouldn't suggest using these for kids, but if you were creative, you could probably come up with similar types of drawings on your own.
Reminds me of this comic...
CSI
You definitely want to patch up any problems before setting sail. If you're at sea with a bunch of lonely sailors, "Look, hole!" is the LAST thing you'd want to shout.
Victim: Where am I?
RB: You're stuck under a building with a Rescue Buddy!
Victim: I mean, what am I doing here?
RB: I'm sorry. Would you please rephrase the question?
Victim: How did I get stuck under a building?
RB: The building fell over; you got stuck!
(how DO you get off the Heart Of Gold in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?)
:)
Give Marvin the tool he requests so he can override the shipboard computer. Of course, to do that, you have to explore all the areas of the game, gather EVERY tool (if you miss one, Marvin will ask for that one!), get all the pieces of fluff, plant them in the flowerpot (created when you throw the switch to the Infinite Improbability Drive), walk into the sauna, teleport into your brain, remove your common sense so you can simultaneously hold Tea and No-Tea, which impresses Marvin enough to allow you into his room. (Don't forget to drink the Tea before walking in, or Marvin's depression will kill you.)
Just for the record, one reason I first asked out my wife is she could, after several years, still play the entire game from start to finish from memory. How can you not go for a girl who's such a geek?
I wonder if there is a way to encrypt two pieces of data to the same location, but using different passphrases. I tried googling, but I wasn't sure what terms to search for. So far, all my results have been about re-encrypting the encrypted data, not adding new encrypted data over the existing data.
For example, let's say I have two files, SUPERSECRET and PSEUDOSECRET. The first one is the one I want to protect, and the second is just a dummy file that I might reasonably want to protect, but is actually a diversion. Perhaps SUPERSECRET is something a government might want to oppress me for, and PSEUDOSECRET is my tax information that I wouldn't want casual snoopers to find.
Is there a way to encrypt SUPERSECRET and PSEUDOSECRET to the same physical disk space (not separate space like TrueCrypt hidden volumes), but use different passwords? That way if some "adversary" (as the TrueCrypt docs refer to it) comes after me for the key, I give them PSEUDOKEY, which will only show them my tax info, while SUPERSECRET stays safe.
It would be interesting to be able to layer as much data as desired over the space. It would be the encryption equivalent of storing information in a holographic crystal and pulling out what I want by aiming the laser at the proper angle.
It would probably be a lot like this:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29620
I specifically purchased a laptop with Intel wireless and graphics because of the drivers. WPA2 encryption works, but only if you put all the magic voodoo programs in place. I am perfectly able to do so, but I should not have to. This is a higher level software issue, not a driver issue. There is no good program that will automagically manage the wireless connections, use encryption, and seamlessly switch between wired and wifi. The closest program is probably wicd.
a non/samsung/etc. programmers writing open-source drivers.
Anyway, the topic post simply asked about areas I would like to devote a number of developers. What I want is a bunch of broadcom/atheros/ralink/nvidia/ati/amd/intel/hp/c
The original topic post says kernel AND applications. Linux (the kernel) will never be adopted wide-scale unless "linux" (i.e., distros based on the linux kernel) manage to get rid of the annoying problems that hinder adoption.
There are a lot of people who try linux and dump it because some little feature (say, sound) either doesn't work, or even better, breaks during an upgrade for no reason. Until "linux" in the broader sense gets all this stuff fixed, regular users won't stick with it.
1) Wifi networking
Too many wifi cards (especially the Broadcom chipsets) are painfully difficult to get working correctly. WPA2 encryption support is flaky. Wired and wifi should switch gracefully.
2) Better sound support
There are too many conflicting ways of producing sound, some of which dislike working together. Midi support should be built-in. Currently, it's a pain to install. Hopefully KDE's Phonon subsystem will help here.
3) Better a/v
Too many movies have unsynced audio and video. Also, many codecs are unsupported. Yes, I know they're proprietary, but I don't really care. Ubuntu is making codec installation easier, but frequently the codecs only work with some particular backend. (For instance, even with mp3 support installed for gxine, Amarok (a KDE app) still needs to install it's own. The desktop environment should provide a generic way for apps play audio, and if a KDE app is running under a Gnome environment, it should be able to "just work".) Don't forget the wonderful closed-source
graphics card drivers!
4) Easier windowing subsystem
No one should have to edit xorg.conf to get anything working. Fortunately, the next release of X windows is supposed to finally do away with this by adding dynamic configuration with xrandr. Also, it will be nice when CompizFusion is more robust. Lots of people really like the eye-candy, and I find some of the features useful.
5) Applications
It should be easier to keep applications up-to-date. I love Ubuntu, but it drives me nuts seeing bug fixes or major enhancements to applications that I can't easily obtain because either the OS updates don't include application upgrades, or the OS repositories are simply not adequately maintained. I don't want to have to
litter my package manager with repositories, or manually install packages just to keep my apps updated.
6) Laptop support
Suspend and resume don't always work very well. Some laptops don't come back, and frequently networking
is messed up.
The main reason I've heard for advocating the use of ++n instead of n++ is related to C++ objects. If you use n++ and n is an object instead of a built-in type, the object has to be cloned so you can get a reference to its original state. In this case, ++n is faster, since the object does not have to be cloned first.
The reason for *always* using ++n was simply to be in the habit of typing it that way so you didn't accidentally incur the extra cost of the copy constructor.
I can identify a number of influences on my musical tastes:
1) Growing up, my mom listened to oldies. Even though I'm 32, I like the Monkees, Herman's Hermits, Jim Croce, Mamas and the Papas, and a lot of other music from the 50s and 60s. She also would listen to country, and I still like a number of old country songs.
2) I didn't start listening to other music until I was probably in the 8th grade (about 13 years old). I started with Guns N Roses and Def Leppard's Hysteria. I like hard rock, but never really got into metal. Although some of the music I listen to is (or was) quite popular, not all of it is. I tend to only like one or two songs by any particular artist, much less a whole album.
3) When I was a little older, I had an exchange student from France who stayed for a month during one summer. He had some tapes from a singer, Francis Cabrel, which I enjoyed a lot. After he returned home, he sent me the tapes. I eventually bought all of Cabrel's CDs. Also, in high school French class we had an audio program called "Champs Elysees". My teacher let me dub all the songs onto a tape. Due to the modern wonders of the Internet, I have managed to download them all so I can hear them again. (My original tape got eat in the cassette player years ago.) I listen to a lot of music in French that, if it were in English, I probably wouldn't.
4) I tend to be very verbally oriented. I like music mainly for the lyrics. Songs with long instrumentals or over ornamented musical structures (like jazz) don't appeal to me very much. (Although hearing Liane Foly's smoky voice in "Au Fur et a Mesure" is quite sensuous.) Still, lyrics are vital to me liking a song. It doesn't matter if they're smart, funny, silly, bizarre, or whatever. If I can't connect with the lyrics, forget it.
5) I have an odd sense of humor. I tend to find surreal or silly things very funny, so I'm also drawn to that kind of music as well. They Might Be Giants, Weird Al, Jonathan Coulton, Da Vinci's Notebook / Paul and Storm, MC Hawking, and so on...
6) I didn't listen to a lot of music in the 80s that my wife, who is a little older than me, did. She has TONS of mp3s and has introduced me to an entire "new" style of music over 20 years after it was popular.
Funnily enough, if I'm talking to someone I don't know, I'm probably not going to mention music unless they seem odd enough to enjoy a song about the Mandelbrot Set or something similarly strange. I don't use music to find out about people as much as confirm what I already suspect. It's probably because I don't listen to a lot of music, I'm not really familiar with anything outside the stuff I already like, and I'm not typically willing to invest the time in finding anything new; I wait for new stuff to come to me.
I have better ways than talking about music to get a feel for someone's personality.
They got a patent on dynamic routing tables? Applications have been saving databases of IP addresses for ages. Technically, any two devices that create an IP connection do this, since they save each other's IP addresses in a data structure that describes the connection parameters.
Un-freakin'-believable.
Hafta keep to the same initial letter... that should be:
"Gaping Goatse"
An apt metaphor, to be sure. There's a reason anarchists refer to modern employment as "wage slavery". ;)
It's one thing to trade your time and expertise for things (such as money). Humans have done this since before the beginning of recorded history. It's something else entirely to trade away control of your life (which results in us having "bosses" instead of "customers"). From now on, everyone will be my "customer".
If you read this, send me an email. I have a question for you.
Actually, yes! I'm currently on getting myself set up financially so I can devote my time to doctoral work, then become a professor.
Check my reply to Kjella... I'm not going to have any on-going client contact after business is finished. If I feel like taking two weeks (or two months) off, I can just not schedule anything for that period of time and go.
I understand where you're coming from as far as clients go, which is why I'm getting out of IT altogether. I won't have any clients, at least not clients that can keep bugging me after our business is done. (If they want to conduct more business, great, but each transaction will be isolated and require no further responsibility from me.)
So in short, you just want to do what you want to do and get paid for it.
:)
Exactly!
Good luck with that.
Usually that phrase is accompanied by an air of cynicism, but think about it this way: every day thousands and thousands of people make a living working for themselves. I'm not concerned about being as wealthy as Bill Gates or Warren Buffett; I just don't want to spend all my time making someone else rich while I suffer for it.
Here are just a few benefits of working for myself:
1) The time I spend working will benefit ME first, not my boss, CEO, shareholders, or anyone else.
2) I can take my business income and spend it as I see fit without having to "go through the channels" and "get everyone's buy-in".
3) The harder I work, the more financially successful I will be. Working at a company, the harder you work, the harder they expect you to work in the future and the more crap they dump on you. Plus you still get paid the same.
4) If you work for yourself, you are the master of your schedule. I cannot tell you how degrading it feels to have to ask for time off. When I need time off, I'm just going to take it. Period.
I'm sure there are more reasons, but I think those are sufficient by themselves.
But as for me, I've had it with IT. After ten years doing helpdesk, software testing and/or programming, I've had my fill. I'm saving my pennies to be able to afford to go back to work on a doctorate and become a cranky old professor out in the middle of nowhere.
Funny... that sounds just like me. I started 10 years ago and I'm similarly completely sick of IT as a career. What kind of doctorate work are you thinking of going into?