Want to know the most important skill that helped me move from skilled computer hack (as in 'hack job', not hacker) to professional software engineer (and a happy one at that)?
Looking without seeing. I don't see the actual contents anymore - salaries, names, numbers, cause of death, how the fire started, child abusers, IRS cheaters, executive emails discussing layoffs - none of it. I see the code. I see the machines. I see whether the application talks to the database via ODBC or not. I see that the printer is printing, and the queues are moving. But I don't even glom the contents of the data - haven't for years.
Some stuff, I'm much happier (and safer) not knowing. I highly recommend it.
Speaking of state of the art in PC communications, I was tasked with something like the GF poster describes - so I rolled out a custom deployment of FrontDoor with a custom node list and automated the entire thing, including pre-packaging, package validation, multiple attempts in the event of failure, unpacking and post-processing. We had two runs per night, giving a DOS based inventory system the ability to update the other store inventory lists overnight every night.
The thought of having someone do this manually every night, even at Intern wages - crazy.
Or maybe Google could outsource their anti-spam efforts to these guys. I'm guessing giving these guys a million dollars and saying 'make spam stop globally' might just work.
With the exception of the 30" monitors and monster server farm stashed in a sound isolated room, wtf does any of that have to do with contributing towards excellent software development?
Want to know my dream office? The computer hardware you described. An R&D lab off the corporate grid where I can do whatever I want to do, no restrictions as long as I keep it legal. Ask me what I like to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Have high quality versions of what I describe show up at my desk at 8am, noon, and 5pm. Don't interrupt me to let me know it's there - I will figure it out. Keep it quiet, not over-brightly lit, and fairly interruption free. Get me close enough to the windows that I can see outside, and let me close the blinds if I want. Give me a safe place to park my car, with parking spaces wide enough I don't have to worry about door dings. If I can see my car from my window so I know it's ok - even better. Shield and insulate me from the bullshit office politics. And if you're feeling generous, arrange to get me laid on a regular basis.
All the time I spend not worrying about food, my car, or the mind-bendingly time consuming task of getting laid, and whether my job is in jeopardy to the whim of some manager's slash and burn short sighted quarterly profit strategy - is time I can spend totally focused on cranking out some of the most excellent software your company has ever proudly presented to its customers.
Well if it's (obviously wrong), why is it still listed on Wikipedia as... Because Wikipedia is filled with information typed by the same hands that type posts in Slashdot - ie. dumb motherfuckers like you and me.
Actually here's best part - by 2019 we will be using first edition discarded (broken) yottabyte sized hard drives to hold open doors, and by 2022 we will be using retired yottabyte sized hard drives as paperweights.
Honestly, if a WinCE handheld (meaning pretty much anything running whatever the latest Mobile version of Windows) had a decent sized screen with a resolution of 1024x768 or more, and even the tiniest of actual QWERTY keyboard (like the one on the Rumor cell phone) - it would completely own the world.
I use a hx4700 right now and the only two issues stopping it from replacing my laptop for 90% of what I do are - 640x480 screens quit being useful about 12 years ago, and the on-screen touch keyboard at that resolution is a two-fold joke (the keys are way too small to hit with the stylus for any kind of typing whatsoever, and the on-screen kb still takes half the screen, meaning you can't see what you are typing.)
The applications are pretty much there. When I'm on the road I need wifi enabled IE or Firefox to surf the web / do web enabled work. I need to view pictures, maybe edit a.doc or.xls. I need my calendar and the ability to queue up emails for my work mailbox (sync'ed with Outlook when I am anywhere near my work network.) That's about it - anything else is gravy. If my hx4700 had a little bit larger screen (again - big enough to do something useful via TermServ, which it already has installed but is worthless at 640x480) and a keyboard I could use while seeing my screen - I'd be golden.
I was hoping the new Eee (with the 8.9" screen) was going to do this for me, but the resolution is still a touch shy (1024x600, when 600 tall is still a little short). I'd eagerly have given up the built-in camera for a little more screen resolution (make or break purchase criteria, actually.)
Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy. Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?
I stole it from somewhere else - the more the merrier.
Heck, I may make it my own sig:)
Re:You've been working for 12 years, right?
on
Disillusioned With IT?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think what he was saying was - since you have two children, a mortgage payment (with 90% of the original house value still outstanding), and maybe a car payment or two... odds are if your boss comes to you and asks you to work overtime this weekend when you already have a slope-side condo booked (nonrefundable), and he leans on you real hard - odds are you are NOT going to tell him "Sorry but I'm busy this weekend; I'll be on the ski slopes if you need me." Not going to happen.
No kids, no house payment, no car payment, $250k in the bank = you do what you want, and if you need to find another job, you find another job.
PS - Most of my money I spent on loose women, liquor, cars, and computers. The rest I just wasted.
No joke. If anybody reading down this far wants a reality check of how the real world works (yes, even your office) - stay late one night after 5pm working in your cube. Continue to work on your computer for a few more hours. It only takes one night working the late shift to get the rude awakening with respect to just how tight 'security' is in your office.
No joke. That Colin Powell fellow, his poor son (Michael Powell, was Chairman of the FCC) and especially that poor Obama guy - not only black, but with a Muslim name - what chance do those guys have in life. Michael Jordan and Shaq. Tiger Woods. Oprah - not only black, but a woman too! There is no way black people can succeed in this world, with all the cards stacked against him.
WTF am I talking about? Maybe any person, no matter their origin, color, race, sex, or religion can succeed in this world simply by setting high goals, living in a world of self discipline and motivation, education and the pursuit of excellence. Given what everybody is saying about Generation Y, a kid growing up today just has to set their bar a little bit higher and BAM! they are head and shoulders above their peers, and then they grow more and more successful.
Black teens - want to be an overwhelming success in life, long term? Here's your recipe : 1. Stay in school. Do your homework. Study. Four hours every night. Even Saturday and Sunday. Four full hours. Graduate with good grades, maybe with honors. 2. Join the military right out of high school, do a four year stint. Get the GI Bill. Get discipline, respect, motivation. 3. Take that money, discipline, motivation and self respect down to a state university. Get a degree in something you can use to get a job in once you graduate. 4. Graduate college at age 26. With honors. 5. Get a real job right out of college. Spend less than you make. Invest 10% in long term growth (ie. 401(k), etc.) Do not buy bling or rims for your car. 6. Don't get pregnant / get any strange women pregnant in the process. Unless you marry her, and plan on staying married to her for 20+ years. 7. Don't break any laws. Not even the drug laws. Stay relatively sober, except when the occasion warrants otherwise. 8. Learn about credit. Get / keep a good credit rating. Don't do things that will damage your credit rating. 9. Do good at work, applying your education, discipline, respect, and motivation. Get recognized for excellent work. Get promoted.
Do this and the cycle is broken. You are a success. Maybe not Chairman of the FCC or President of the United States, but still... easily as successful as anybody reading this post on Slashdot. Try not to beat the living shit out of your kids when they are teenagers and they try to break your momentum, or try to fall back into the original cycle.
Here's the deal : the law says that an insider can submit massive buy or sell orders if he does not know anything (ie, no insider knowledge of events that will affect the stock price.)
Insider has tons of company stock. He structures a massive recurring sell order, sell as much as possible, to hit every month - does this a long time ago (or now, setting it up for years to come.) He doesn't know what the future holds for his company, so it's perfectly legit. Every month he calls in and cancels his sell order. This is also perfectly legit. Stock goes up, slowly over years. He still has it because he keeps calling in to cancel the sell orders he arranged years ago. A few years from now something really bad starts brewing for his company - he gets insider knowledge that the stock price is going to die in a few days (ie. Bear Stearns this week) He conveniently forgets to cancel this month's sell order. The pre-arranged sell order goes through, he sells his entire holdings at the current high price. The next day the 'bad thing' happens and the stock price tanks - he's all set, sold all of his before it happened. The entire thing is legal because the law only restricts buy or sell orders based on insider knowledge - it doesn't prevent him from not canceling orders that were placed years before. Profit! Sucks ass, but it is a perfectly legal loophole in the law.
And I agree - time to close the loophole. The visibility brought to the issue via wikileaks... may just start the ball rolling on doing exactly that.
Kid I hate to tell you this, but once upon a time entire businesses were run from the command line. Look up DOS 3.3, 3.31, 4.01, 5.0, and 6.22 - most of those were used quite extensively and to very good effect long before Windows existed in any form that was even remotely usable, and many a career was launched writing scripts for the command prompt (they're called batch files, and the environment is pretty powerful.)
GUIs are ok for people that don't know what they are doing, but can figure it out. They are also good for doing more than one thing at the same time - and they are fairly pretty. The truly hardcore guys that know precisely what they are doing drop to the command line - and that's when the serious magic happens.
I can just see the little seven year old explaining to her parents...
It's not about trust. It's about accountability. See, I trust you guys, but lets face it - sometimes things happen and we all want to be able to have every person be accountable for their actions. So I'm just going to lock this bad boy down with a digital key long enough to choke a horse.
I can see securing a machine that has personal data on it (and personal can be nothing more than the musings and poems of a seven year old girl, has nothing to do with 'financial') - but honestly if I had a LiveCD version of Linux on a machine with no hard drive and no external media (removing the ability / incentive to download illegal stuff via that connection, having the feds trace it back to my IP) I would have no problem leaving it unlocked so any random person could connect to the Internet via it. If it gets borked, simply reboot it. That's not really all that different than simply leaving your wifi base unencrypted so random people can use it (like how coffee shops and other downtown shared environments work) other than letting them use your keyboard and monitor.
Light a man a fire and he is warm for that day. Light a man afire and he is warm for the rest of his life.
Regarding the kid's security concerns, I have two thoughts.
At seven years old, if she is computer aware enough to recognize the need for strong digital security of her own personal machine, she is probably smart enough to be able to respect that digital security well enough to maintain its viability (ie, remember where to find her password, even if she doesn't actually remember what it is - or in the event of hardware locks, remember how to use it and not to lose it.) If you want to stick with the 'free' route, I suggest that she be taught the following : she has plenty of objects in her room that have words on them - books, art on the walls, little trickets, ribbons, toys, the computer itself, whatever seven year old kids have in their rooms. Tell her to pick one and then pick one of the words on that physical item (books are ideal because you generally have a bunch of them stacked up next to each other, they are inconspicuous when laying out in the open, and you can stare right at them on the bookshelf while pondering to yourself silently and nobody even notices) - so if she has a bunch of children's books on her computer shelf, one of which being 'Cryptographic Analysis Techniques and Theories for Seven Year Old Girls' (aka 'One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blowfish') then she could pick the first word on the spine (Cryptographic) and not have to tell anybody. Or look at her keyboard, does it say Compaq101 ? Well there you go, hard password to break and easy to remember.
Parents got lots of money? Get the kid one of those RFID (or whatever) proximity keys that tells the USB locking unit to unlock machine only when she is close enough to use it. Attach it to her belt-buckle or something, don't tell the brothers about it. Buy a few spare keys, and keep one for the parents.
And yea, if I had a seven year old kid I would totally have an admin account on the box. I'd let her know - she has unrestricted access to do whatever she wants, right up until the point she does something 'bad' and then I'm locking it down. Define 'bad' well enough and give her enough rope to either jump rope or hang herself - her choice. And follow through. And no, I don't have kids, so that last part is probably stupid advice to follow.
Wing Commander? I had friends complaining about hardware requirements as far back as Choplifter and JumpMan.
What do you mean I need to buy a 1541 single sided floppy drive for my C=64 - I just bought this tape drive six months ago, paid $100 for it and at the time it was the fastest secondary storage known to man - I could type LOAD "*",1,1 and by the time I was done eating lunch my game was ready to run, and now you tell me I have to buy a new piece of hardware just to play a game?
Slashdot Mirror
Want to know the most important skill that helped me move from skilled computer hack (as in 'hack job', not hacker) to professional software engineer (and a happy one at that)?
Looking without seeing. I don't see the actual contents anymore - salaries, names, numbers, cause of death, how the fire started, child abusers, IRS cheaters, executive emails discussing layoffs - none of it. I see the code. I see the machines. I see whether the application talks to the database via ODBC or not. I see that the printer is printing, and the queues are moving. But I don't even glom the contents of the data - haven't for years.
Some stuff, I'm much happier (and safer) not knowing. I highly recommend it.
Speaking of state of the art in PC communications, I was tasked with something like the GF poster describes - so I rolled out a custom deployment of FrontDoor with a custom node list and automated the entire thing, including pre-packaging, package validation, multiple attempts in the event of failure, unpacking and post-processing. We had two runs per night, giving a DOS based inventory system the ability to update the other store inventory lists overnight every night.
The thought of having someone do this manually every night, even at Intern wages - crazy.
Ray! If someone asks if you're a God ... you ... say ... YES!
The way I read the summary - they asked him to eat from the same bowl he shat in.
Hell - they could ask you or I the same thing, and we'd say no.
Actually when they caught him, he held up one hand and said 'How'
Ouch. Holy crap.
I don't know which is worse - that you were able to recite that from memory, or that I recognized it.
I was going to come in here and give the obvious answer to the question (that answer being 'bubblesort') but I think you may have me beat.
Or maybe Google could outsource their anti-spam efforts to these guys.
I'm guessing giving these guys a million dollars and saying 'make spam stop globally' might just work.
It's worth a try.
With the exception of the 30" monitors and monster server farm stashed in a sound isolated room, wtf does any of that have to do with contributing towards excellent software development?
Want to know my dream office?
The computer hardware you described.
An R&D lab off the corporate grid where I can do whatever I want to do, no restrictions as long as I keep it legal.
Ask me what I like to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Have high quality versions of what I describe show up at my desk at 8am, noon, and 5pm. Don't interrupt me to let me know it's there - I will figure it out.
Keep it quiet, not over-brightly lit, and fairly interruption free.
Get me close enough to the windows that I can see outside, and let me close the blinds if I want.
Give me a safe place to park my car, with parking spaces wide enough I don't have to worry about door dings. If I can see my car from my window so I know it's ok - even better.
Shield and insulate me from the bullshit office politics.
And if you're feeling generous, arrange to get me laid on a regular basis.
All the time I spend not worrying about food, my car, or the mind-bendingly time consuming task of getting laid, and whether my job is in jeopardy to the whim of some manager's slash and burn short sighted quarterly profit strategy - is time I can spend totally focused on cranking out some of the most excellent software your company has ever proudly presented to its customers.
Well if it's (obviously wrong), why is it still listed on Wikipedia as ...
Because Wikipedia is filled with information typed by the same hands that type posts in Slashdot - ie. dumb motherfuckers like you and me.
Have I been summoned?
Actually here's best part - by 2019 we will be using first edition discarded (broken) yottabyte sized hard drives to hold open doors, and by 2022 we will be using retired yottabyte sized hard drives as paperweights.
Honestly, if a WinCE handheld (meaning pretty much anything running whatever the latest Mobile version of Windows) had a decent sized screen with a resolution of 1024x768 or more, and even the tiniest of actual QWERTY keyboard (like the one on the Rumor cell phone) - it would completely own the world.
.doc or .xls. I need my calendar and the ability to queue up emails for my work mailbox (sync'ed with Outlook when I am anywhere near my work network.) That's about it - anything else is gravy. If my hx4700 had a little bit larger screen (again - big enough to do something useful via TermServ, which it already has installed but is worthless at 640x480) and a keyboard I could use while seeing my screen - I'd be golden.
I use a hx4700 right now and the only two issues stopping it from replacing my laptop for 90% of what I do are - 640x480 screens quit being useful about 12 years ago, and the on-screen touch keyboard at that resolution is a two-fold joke (the keys are way too small to hit with the stylus for any kind of typing whatsoever, and the on-screen kb still takes half the screen, meaning you can't see what you are typing.)
The applications are pretty much there. When I'm on the road I need wifi enabled IE or Firefox to surf the web / do web enabled work. I need to view pictures, maybe edit a
I was hoping the new Eee (with the 8.9" screen) was going to do this for me, but the resolution is still a touch shy (1024x600, when 600 tall is still a little short). I'd eagerly have given up the built-in camera for a little more screen resolution (make or break purchase criteria, actually.)
Yea. That whole myth about landing planes IFR because the airports have transponders ... total fiction.
Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy. Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?
Oh, wait.
I stole it from somewhere else - the more the merrier.
:)
Heck, I may make it my own sig
I think what he was saying was - since you have two children, a mortgage payment (with 90% of the original house value still outstanding), and maybe a car payment or two ... odds are if your boss comes to you and asks you to work overtime this weekend when you already have a slope-side condo booked (nonrefundable), and he leans on you real hard - odds are you are NOT going to tell him "Sorry but I'm busy this weekend; I'll be on the ski slopes if you need me." Not going to happen.
No kids, no house payment, no car payment, $250k in the bank = you do what you want, and if you need to find another job, you find another job.
PS - Most of my money I spent on loose women, liquor, cars, and computers. The rest I just wasted.
No joke. If anybody reading down this far wants a reality check of how the real world works (yes, even your office) - stay late one night after 5pm working in your cube. Continue to work on your computer for a few more hours. It only takes one night working the late shift to get the rude awakening with respect to just how tight 'security' is in your office.
No joke. That Colin Powell fellow, his poor son (Michael Powell, was Chairman of the FCC) and especially that poor Obama guy - not only black, but with a Muslim name - what chance do those guys have in life. Michael Jordan and Shaq. Tiger Woods. Oprah - not only black, but a woman too! There is no way black people can succeed in this world, with all the cards stacked against him.
... easily as successful as anybody reading this post on Slashdot. Try not to beat the living shit out of your kids when they are teenagers and they try to break your momentum, or try to fall back into the original cycle.
WTF am I talking about? Maybe any person, no matter their origin, color, race, sex, or religion can succeed in this world simply by setting high goals, living in a world of self discipline and motivation, education and the pursuit of excellence. Given what everybody is saying about Generation Y, a kid growing up today just has to set their bar a little bit higher and BAM! they are head and shoulders above their peers, and then they grow more and more successful.
Black teens - want to be an overwhelming success in life, long term? Here's your recipe :
1. Stay in school. Do your homework. Study. Four hours every night. Even Saturday and Sunday. Four full hours. Graduate with good grades, maybe with honors.
2. Join the military right out of high school, do a four year stint. Get the GI Bill. Get discipline, respect, motivation.
3. Take that money, discipline, motivation and self respect down to a state university. Get a degree in something you can use to get a job in once you graduate.
4. Graduate college at age 26. With honors.
5. Get a real job right out of college. Spend less than you make. Invest 10% in long term growth (ie. 401(k), etc.) Do not buy bling or rims for your car.
6. Don't get pregnant / get any strange women pregnant in the process. Unless you marry her, and plan on staying married to her for 20+ years.
7. Don't break any laws. Not even the drug laws. Stay relatively sober, except when the occasion warrants otherwise.
8. Learn about credit. Get / keep a good credit rating. Don't do things that will damage your credit rating.
9. Do good at work, applying your education, discipline, respect, and motivation. Get recognized for excellent work. Get promoted.
Do this and the cycle is broken. You are a success. Maybe not Chairman of the FCC or President of the United States, but still
Now that you mention it, K-Mart was doing this back in the '70s, something about a Blue Light that really wakes up the shoppers.
Here's the deal : the law says that an insider can submit massive buy or sell orders if he does not know anything (ie, no insider knowledge of events that will affect the stock price.)
... may just start the ball rolling on doing exactly that.
Insider has tons of company stock.
He structures a massive recurring sell order, sell as much as possible, to hit every month - does this a long time ago (or now, setting it up for years to come.)
He doesn't know what the future holds for his company, so it's perfectly legit.
Every month he calls in and cancels his sell order. This is also perfectly legit.
Stock goes up, slowly over years. He still has it because he keeps calling in to cancel the sell orders he arranged years ago.
A few years from now something really bad starts brewing for his company - he gets insider knowledge that the stock price is going to die in a few days (ie. Bear Stearns this week)
He conveniently forgets to cancel this month's sell order. The pre-arranged sell order goes through, he sells his entire holdings at the current high price.
The next day the 'bad thing' happens and the stock price tanks - he's all set, sold all of his before it happened.
The entire thing is legal because the law only restricts buy or sell orders based on insider knowledge - it doesn't prevent him from not canceling orders that were placed years before.
Profit! Sucks ass, but it is a perfectly legal loophole in the law.
And I agree - time to close the loophole. The visibility brought to the issue via wikileaks
Kid I hate to tell you this, but once upon a time entire businesses were run from the command line. Look up DOS 3.3, 3.31, 4.01, 5.0, and 6.22 - most of those were used quite extensively and to very good effect long before Windows existed in any form that was even remotely usable, and many a career was launched writing scripts for the command prompt (they're called batch files, and the environment is pretty powerful.)
GUIs are ok for people that don't know what they are doing, but can figure it out. They are also good for doing more than one thing at the same time - and they are fairly pretty.
The truly hardcore guys that know precisely what they are doing drop to the command line - and that's when the serious magic happens.
I can just see the little seven year old explaining to her parents ...
It's not about trust. It's about accountability. See, I trust you guys, but lets face it - sometimes things happen and we all want to be able to have every person be accountable for their actions. So I'm just going to lock this bad boy down with a digital key long enough to choke a horse.
Why?
I can see securing a machine that has personal data on it (and personal can be nothing more than the musings and poems of a seven year old girl, has nothing to do with 'financial') - but honestly if I had a LiveCD version of Linux on a machine with no hard drive and no external media (removing the ability / incentive to download illegal stuff via that connection, having the feds trace it back to my IP) I would have no problem leaving it unlocked so any random person could connect to the Internet via it. If it gets borked, simply reboot it. That's not really all that different than simply leaving your wifi base unencrypted so random people can use it (like how coffee shops and other downtown shared environments work) other than letting them use your keyboard and monitor.
Actually the third part has to do with fire.
Light a man a fire and he is warm for that day.
Light a man afire and he is warm for the rest of his life.
Regarding the kid's security concerns, I have two thoughts.
At seven years old, if she is computer aware enough to recognize the need for strong digital security of her own personal machine, she is probably smart enough to be able to respect that digital security well enough to maintain its viability (ie, remember where to find her password, even if she doesn't actually remember what it is - or in the event of hardware locks, remember how to use it and not to lose it.) If you want to stick with the 'free' route, I suggest that she be taught the following : she has plenty of objects in her room that have words on them - books, art on the walls, little trickets, ribbons, toys, the computer itself, whatever seven year old kids have in their rooms. Tell her to pick one and then pick one of the words on that physical item (books are ideal because you generally have a bunch of them stacked up next to each other, they are inconspicuous when laying out in the open, and you can stare right at them on the bookshelf while pondering to yourself silently and nobody even notices) - so if she has a bunch of children's books on her computer shelf, one of which being 'Cryptographic Analysis Techniques and Theories for Seven Year Old Girls' (aka 'One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blowfish') then she could pick the first word on the spine (Cryptographic) and not have to tell anybody. Or look at her keyboard, does it say Compaq101 ? Well there you go, hard password to break and easy to remember.
Parents got lots of money? Get the kid one of those RFID (or whatever) proximity keys that tells the USB locking unit to unlock machine only when she is close enough to use it. Attach it to her belt-buckle or something, don't tell the brothers about it. Buy a few spare keys, and keep one for the parents.
And yea, if I had a seven year old kid I would totally have an admin account on the box. I'd let her know - she has unrestricted access to do whatever she wants, right up until the point she does something 'bad' and then I'm locking it down. Define 'bad' well enough and give her enough rope to either jump rope or hang herself - her choice. And follow through. And no, I don't have kids, so that last part is probably stupid advice to follow.
Wing Commander? I had friends complaining about hardware requirements as far back as Choplifter and JumpMan.
What do you mean I need to buy a 1541 single sided floppy drive for my C=64 - I just bought this tape drive six months ago, paid $100 for it and at the time it was the fastest secondary storage known to man - I could type LOAD "*",1,1 and by the time I was done eating lunch my game was ready to run, and now you tell me I have to buy a new piece of hardware just to play a game?