Whoops - my bad. I didn't mean that they shouldn't have access to tech until they 'earn' it, I just meant that making tech available to them wasn't going to make a difference.
Easy analogy : giving one of us nerds a 3 megabit connection to the Internet and a list of web sites full of porn isn't going to get anybody laid. The only way to get laid is to go outside, meet a woman and do all of the actual courting related work that leads to sex.
There are some things you can't fix by throwing tech at it, and I am saying that the evolution of civilization in Africa is one of them.
I've been to Austin, it is massive. Takes an hour to get where you want to go, driving full speed on the freeway. And yes the city is a hotbed of open WiFi.
If Hanlon had a corollary, however, it would be : 'Never attribute to good heart or generosity that which is easily explained by ignorance.' Just because a city has a Fry's (electronics wholesaler, sells wifi dirt cheap) and ten thousand unsecured wireless access points, don't think for a second that ten thousand people all decided to to donate bandwidth out of the goodness of their hearts. More likely scenario : get home / to the office, plug it in, watch the blinkenlighten, It Works!, drink beer, surf Internet.
Then again, Texans (and Austin'ites) are pretty good at heart people, some of them may know they are open and leave it so people can use it.
I am getting real tired of hearing about 'bringing technology to the underpriv's of the world' - guess what : Nigeria's problems are not going to be solved via the Internet.
Countries do not evolve, grow, or progress because an extra 2% of them get dial up access to the Internet. Countries evolve, grow, and progress because every single person in the country gets involved and does some work. Look at the conditions of America circa 1650 or 1800. Those poor fuckers worked 16 hours a day to build farms, homes, roads, schools, infrastructure and the best technology they had access to was the sailboat, the wheel, and the beast of burden. If they wanted a second copy of a text file they had to write it out by hand using a bird's feather dipped in a little glass of ink, scratching it on a piece of paper. If they planned on eating they got out in the field with wooden tools and dug up the ground and planted seeds, chased off birds and rodents from their crops, and watered them by pumping water out of the ground with a hand pump. They spun wool and cotton into threads, wove those threads into cloth, cut the cloth into patterns and using a sewing needle and thread made clothes, and they washed their clothes in the river. They mixed mud and rock to make bricks, fired them in an oven, and build their homes one brick at a time. They took straw and bundled it together and if the floor in their homes got dirty, they swept it outside. They took pride in who they were, they worked their asses off, and they became who America became. Without the Internet.
Yea it's hard. Anything worth while is hard. You can't give a country 'civilization'. They have to EARN it.
BTW pangian - I wasn't reacting harshly at you directly, your post simply gave me a good anchor point.
If that 5.6% is spread evenly across the board, that's not such a bad number. If that 5.6% aggregate means 34% in the tech sector and 4.3% in all the other sectors combined - that means that tech workers are seeing the most evil work drought in history (double the rate seen in the 'Great Depression' of about a century ago) and the rest of the country (ie, WalMart employees and car mechanics) are running about par for the course.
I agree - but for two things: I could probably run a P3 at 3.0GHz, but not for very long and not very stable (and the P3 probably wouldn't survive the trip.) If a P4 hyperthreading CPU was faster in the 1.0GHz - 1.2GHz range, and if I could run it using only passive cooling (big heat sink) - that's fast enough for most business work (not games) and quiet to boot.
I remember watching the rollout hoopla surrounding the DEC Alpha at 133MHz (with the ultra fast 166MHz coming 'real soon now') at a trade show when a DEC rep said that the Alpha architecture was designed with scalability in mind, that the day would come when a computer with a 600MHz 64-bit CPU would be available... not just in secret government labs, but in your own home (for the low low price of about $6,000.)
600MHz I thought... no way one single person could use all that power. Ahhh to be young and naive again.
I ask a question, and I got three responses : a no, a yes, and a maybe. Slashdot is easily as accurate as the weatherman and stock market predictors:)
I tend to go with your theory though - that a P4 running 1.3GHz is going to be slower than a P3 running 1.3GHz. The long pipelines help keep the CPU busy when we ramp up the speeds, though, and the reason a 3.2GHz P4 is faster than any P3 is because no P3 can run anywhere near 3.2GHz.
I wonder if it would be worth underclocking a hyperthreaded P4 to 1.2GHz to compare it with a 1.2GHz P3. If it was just as fast (or faster) and could run with passive cooling, that would be a slick platform, a good start for a silent machine that ran 'fast enough'.
Is this for real? I haven't done any testing in a few years but the last time I jacked with it the P3 core was quite a bit more efficient than the P4 core at the same speed. If I take one of the current generation 533MHz fsb P4 CPUs and underclock it to 1GHz, put it up against a regular P3 at 1GHz - you are suggesting that the P4 would be faster? How about one of the HT enabled 800MHz fsb P4s underclocked to 1GHz vs a P3 1GHz?
I am just asking as this flies counter to everything as I understood it. Not like I'm going to underclock a P4... if I want quiet and cool and slow I have a laptop for that.
Inside Connections beats Prior Experience. Dig out your list of professional contacts and reconnect. As an intern position is fairly far down the food chain, someone already on the inside may have significant influence on the hire process. Actually I would guess that it -is- having significant influence on the hire process, but not in your favor. If one of the other candidates knows someone on the inside and you don't... Darwin says 'You lose.'
I didn't say 'most fine art photographers'. I said 'you'. And point I was trying to get across was that regardless of your relative skill, the quality of the one picture you display is going to go up dramatically if you take several pictures of the same subject and pick the best one to display.
I grant that landscape pictures are going to vary a lot less over the course of a few minutes, and that a lot of things (exposure, color, etc.) can be enhanced or 'made the best' in the lab if you are developing and printing your own pix from film - but Joe User is only going to take so many sunset pix and he is going to do it with whatever camera he happens to own. Joe user doesn't have large format view cameras, and he doesn't spend an hour prepping to take one shot.
I will tweak the statement just a touch, just to reinforce my point. Let me fill my CompactFlash with pictures from my crappy Kodak DC210+ on the kind of stuff that Joe User takes pictures of on a regular basis, and I will put the best one up against a single picture taken with the best camera that a common Best Buy/Circuit City customer actually went out and spent his own money on for personal use.
You are correct, as a second generation of photographer evolves from my first generation of newbie clickers.
You will know not to push the button because the picture will suck. You will make good decisions because of wisdom. Wisdom comes from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions. Bad decisions are 9 of the 10 pictures you take before you have the wisdom not to push the button.
We are talking about two different classes of picture clickers. Spend a few months taking a hundred pictures a week, understand why the good ones look good (and the sucky ones suck) and soon enough we graduate to the skilled guy you describe. Until then, my way will give better results, mostly on accident.
I think that 1 of 10 is a pretty good number. Most people aren't getting published, they are just taking pictures for themselves and friends.
Look through Joe Random's 64M compactflash card that has 500 pictures on it and I bet you could find 50 pretty good ones. The trick is to take those 50 out of context (ie, delete all the other crappy ones and merely 'good' ones) and all of a sudden it looks like he took 50 really good pix. He did, actually, but you need to learn to only go public with the good ones and not show all the ones that aren't as good as those 50.
Hence the rule.
And the biggest reason I can't take pictures as good as the photographers for Penthouse / Playboy has nothing to do with technical merits or ability and everything to do with that pesky restraining order.
Lets take my crappy Kodak DC210+ and your Nikon D70 to the beach on a particularly active day (full of model quality bikini babes.) You get to push the button one time, I get to fill my 64M card with as many pictures as it will hold. I'd put my best picture from that trip up against the one shot you take, and be willing to bet money on the outcome.
Luckily life doesn't have those restrictions - throw a nice fat 512M card in your D70, click off frames until the battery dies and at the end of the day you are going to have a lot of pictures. Cull the herd, delete the crappy ones, delete the ones that are merely 'good' and you end up with the best 12 or so pictures you took. Statistically speaking even a newbie is going to accidently take a good picture every once in a while - understand and apply those odds and you will end up with an album of great pictures.
Only taking one picture per setting is a throwback to regular cameras and rolls of film that held 12 or 24 pictures (or if you were rich, a mega 36 pictures.) If 24 pictures was going to document a full day at Disneyland you needed to be frugal, take one shot of this and one shot of that. With current hardware you can literally take a picture every 15 seconds for eight solid hours (one megapixel jpegs at 256kB per, 512M card.) Throw in one of those 4G compactflash microdrives and you can mash the button once every two seconds for eight solid hours (battery needs to be considered here.)
I do agree with the 'hold the camera steady' part though. Figure that one out and the quality of your pictures goes up in a hurry.
Want to have a picture portfolio that is almost as good as most professionals : there is only one rule.
Glonoinha's #1 Rule of Photography. Throw away (delete) 9 out of every 10 pictures.
Want one good picture? Take 10 pictures and pick the best one. Professionals take several hundred pictures in several settings just to get half a dozen really great shots worth publishing in a magazine. Most of the time excellent photos aren't about being good, they are about getting lucky.
Let me pick the best picture out of 20 I take on my crappy 1 megapixel Kodak and I will put it up against any camera (even the really awesome expensive ones) if you only take one picture with that camera.
You are probably correct, from your point of view. A self taught coder, even a guy with a BS/CS or BA/MIS degree in his first year in a code writing position is likely to write a good tight sort routine or a nice tight SQL statement that is 12.7% faster than the bubble sort or select statement an older guy / guy with a few years of experience / guy with better 'credentials' might use - same way some AMD/ATI fanboy is going to put together a computer that uses liquid cooling to keep his overclocked record setting system running circles (18.9% faster!) around the off the shelf Dell system an older guy might be using.
What you are describing right now is a very narrow scope of vision. It is perfectly ok, and even expected from a one year guy - don't get me wrong as I'm not bagging on you. But you are seeing instant gratification, lines of code per hour, faster embedded loops and search routines, and frames per second. What you are not seeing, if I had to guess, is long term maintainability, group cohesion, the ability to integrate different routines together or reuse the existing development effort going forward, the overall architecture of the bigger system, scalability, usability in a business environment, reduced downtime when problems do occur.
In the same way that the overclocking crew can make a single uberMachine run 12.6% faster than a machine off the shelf, a tightly focused coder can write small blocks of code that are quite a bit faster than something written by an old school coder. From a business perspective, however, neither is particularly attractive when considering a large scale rollout of a massive business initiative. You simply can't have users running computers that sound like jet engines to keep their overclocked CPUs cool, and you can't have coders winging it to shave CPU cycles at the expense of long term stability, usability, and interoperability. Sure, you can read your in-line assembly and make it work - but can the guy over in maintenance keep it working without screwing it up or needing to rewrite it from scratch because he doesn't understand what it does?
When (if) you stop to think through all of these things you will take longer to write your individual lines of code than the next generation of hot coders. For every five days on a project, a full day needs to be dedicated to understanding what the customer (internal or external) needs and envisioning how you will design it. A full day needs to be spent doing documentation (documenting the code, user dox, developer design and intent, interaction conventions, installation, maintenance routines, etc.) and delivering the product. A day designing the system architecure, and two days actually doing the work come between the envision and delivery. In theory you could sit down and do the actual 'work' in two days, but someone has to be responsible for the other stuff - not doing the other stuff is why projects fail.
A day will come that you decide that hand building your own machine and getting an extra 7 fps isn't worth the hassle and you will just order a Dell. There will also come a day that you spend time documenting how you understand the customer's expectations and go over that document with the customer before you start designing how the system will work, and you will do that design before you start to write the code. And there will come a day that you write an official separate document describing the code you just wrote. Look forward to that day, consider it your next Graduation Day, and celebrate that day. Because the day after that is the day the youngsters start hassling you because they code faster than you do/grin.
Just a thought, WPA and SSL connections and even VPN connections protect the following : the conversation stream between your keyboard and the server you are connected to...
If your laptop is running XP Home and you have any shares on your laptop, anything in those shares is fair game to anybody else on the network. Who cares if they can't read the datastream of your Internet surfing in real time when they can sift through all the files you shared to make it easier to move stuff around between computers at home.
Ditto public shares on a more secure OS, and anonymous FTP connections if you have FTP up and running. You are fairly aware of these things, but you would be AMAZED at some of the stuff one might find surfing the network neighborhood in your friendly Starbucks.
And pay access or free access, there is nothing the Wifi providers can do about it.
This is exactly the opening I was looking for - it exactly describes what happened to me last week. I was going to stay in a hotel for a three day weekend, looked around and found a nice one (Hilton for those wondering.) In the online and paper marketing it proclaimed proudly 'high speed Internet access available' right after proudly proclaiming 'beautiful rooms' and 'air conditioning.' I show up, pay my roughly $350 for three nights and those fuckers had the audacity to preempt my online surfing with a money grab : that will be $50 please ($15 a day, plus taxes and fees * 3 days = $50.)
Needless to say it did nothing but royally piss me off, and insure that I will have a negative association with Hilton long after I forget why I am upset with them. I understand the profit motive, so why aren't they charging $5 a head to use the pool? I would bet that the monthly overhead associated with keeping the pool is a LOT higher than the monthly overhead associated with keeping their hard-line running. Easy answer : because customers expect a pool and will easily go elsewhere if they tried to charge $5 a head to use it.
Dear Slashdot: "I am the funeral director for a large funeral home and every weekend an entire extended family (generally minus one) comes in and over the course of a three hour ceremony just sits around looking sad, crying, and generally killing the mood around here. I am interested in ways to brighten the mood around here, it's almost like somebody fscking died or something. Anyways, last week I began my (tongue in cheek) 'Reign of Terror'. To start, this week is 'Gummi Bear Week', where I walk around handing out Gummi Bears to all the guests (maybe that will cheer them up.) Next week I may start a 'Goose the Widow' theme. What I need are suggestions. What can I possibly do that is funeral safe, humorous, and not something which will get me fired prematurely? During the black plague, when dying was all the rage, what did the funeral home directors do to abuse their power, and keep the survivors (and the corpse!) entertained during those especially stressful periods?"
Guess what : when bad shit happens people need to feel bad about it and get it out of their system. A funeral isn't time for fun and games, it is a time to be morose and sad, get your affairs in order, and move on towards starting their new life without one important aspect (the dead guy.) Getting RIF'ed is no different. You really want to help these people, forget being the Good Humor Man - be the Job Placement Assistant. Honestly most people could give a damn about being RIF'ed the second they have a new job and don't have to worry about losing their house, car, savings, etc... so if you really want to help : help them find a new job.
Help them find the sites that will walk them through creating a good resume. Help them understand which job sites are good and which are simply fake fronts for temp agencies. Help them recognise which job listings are bogus and which are real. Help them understand that real jobs are landed via networking and work with them to create, develop, and evolve their personal network and networking skills.
What most people (your peer group) want is to be a contributing member of society in a job that lets them be self sufficient and provide for their family. You want to flex your leet computer guy powers, help them get back on track to that effect. Tell them to bring a bag of Gummi Bears to their next job and think about you each time they eat one.
That's what people want. Not yellow smiley face cupcakes at a funeral. Being self sufficient.
Or when the client points to that site say 'I wrote that site too. Those guys paid me FOUR TIMES what you are paying me for your site. You want a site as good as that one? I can leverage the work I did for them and do it for you for only THREE times what I quoted you for the one you are currently on schedule to get.'
If he reaches for the checkbook, copy that other site, change the email and phone numbers, and buy me a Dell 18" flat panel LCD.
Remember that the distance to the nearest point of concern is an estimated 150 meters, also known as "almost two football fields."
I agree with points 1, 2, and 3 - regardless of the circumstances. Just good operating protocol. As for being concerned about them, bingo there. I would be willing to bet that the 220v lines in the wall powering the air conditioning gives off more EMI (as measured in the server room) than the high power lines 150m away.
-Wow, so I'm not the only one that talks to strippers
Whoops, forgot to answer the question. I dated a stripper for about 6 weeks, met her in real life and started dating her before she told me. So I talked to her quite a bit and gleaned quite a bit of insight into their world. Once the other girls at the club found out I was on the inside (hehe, so to speak) I was 'safe' and they opened up to me also - they like to poke fun at each other so while mine was up on stage and couldn't do anything about it the others would climb all over me in a playful 'make your gf jealous' way. It was a lot of fun, I will admit that. Talking with the dancers is cool, sort of how surfing slashdot at work is cool - it isn't making anybody any money so the minute a money making opportunity comes up the 'fun chat' is over (but it is a cool diversion between money making opportunities.)
Broke up after about 6 weeks, she was on the pipe (crack) and I wasn't - last I heard she ended up in jail. Too bad, she fscked like a wild animal, probably the best I ever had. Made more money than I did too, a lot more.
Enjoy your time in the clubs - but see it for what it is - like a trip to a really high class (expensive) exotic zoo with a great drink selection, with a booming sound system and all the music you like. Oh, and most high end clubs have amazing food, I highly recommend the best steak in the house - those places take pride in their meat (no pun intended.)
Actually almost without fail, strippers respond to everyone in the same way - and you got it right : *stripper sees through it and plays along*
Ever been to the zoo?
If you go to the zoo thinking 'Man this is going to be great. Going to see lions and tigers and bears and monkeys, they are so cool. Maybe if I get lucky one of the cute ones will pay a little attention to me for a minute and do a neat trick. They sure are great to look at - I could spend days thinking about all the animals I saw there' then the time and money is well spent.
If you go to the zoo thinking 'Man this is great, always wanted to ride a zebra and I'm pretty sure a zebra will be there today! Score! I think I am going to find myself a nice giraffe and bring it home with me, let her live with me because giraffes are great and I think I deserve one' then you have sadly deluded yourself and set yourself up for disappointment. Regardless of how much you spend on the zebra munchies and giraffe goodies you don't get to actually ride the zebra and you don't get to take the giraffe home with you.
Same deal with strip clubs. It's visual entertainment, see some freaky visual entertainment that you can only see in that controlled environment. That's it. Enjoy.
That said, if you want a LOT of attention at a strip club, forget table dances, forget 'ladies drinks' - sit in the back with a big empty table and call and have a large pizza or two delivered. Every single dancer that isn't on stage will be in your lap in about 90 seconds, like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Remember they work an eight hour shift eating nothing but bar snack food, so after about 5 or 6 hours of dancing they are hungry - and they will remember you. They probably still won't let you ride them like a zebra or take them home like a giraffe - but they will remember you.
Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!!
Ray, when a stripper invites you to her house, you say YES!
No offense, but you snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on that one. I wouldn't want to own one, but strippers are generally a ride you will never forget.
Stay late one night. After they are all gone walk from desktop to desktop. Look for post-it notes on the side of the monitor and under the keyboard, and in their drawers. The results will scare you, if your users are anything like mine, and I bet after that you start letting them pick less cryptic passwords.
Also, if you know their password there goes any semblance of Non-Repudiation. And if you can 'remind them' either you have a very short list of users and can remember them, or you have a written list somewhere - nifty, but a bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops - my bad. I didn't mean that they shouldn't have access to tech until they 'earn' it, I just meant that making tech available to them wasn't going to make a difference.
Easy analogy : giving one of us nerds a 3 megabit connection to the Internet and a list of web sites full of porn isn't going to get anybody laid. The only way to get laid is to go outside, meet a woman and do all of the actual courting related work that leads to sex.
There are some things you can't fix by throwing tech at it, and I am saying that the evolution of civilization in Africa is one of them.
I've been to Austin, it is massive. Takes an hour to get where you want to go, driving full speed on the freeway. And yes the city is a hotbed of open WiFi.
If Hanlon had a corollary, however, it would be : 'Never attribute to good heart or generosity that which is easily explained by ignorance.' Just because a city has a Fry's (electronics wholesaler, sells wifi dirt cheap) and ten thousand unsecured wireless access points, don't think for a second that ten thousand people all decided to to donate bandwidth out of the goodness of their hearts. More likely scenario : get home / to the office, plug it in, watch the blinkenlighten, It Works!, drink beer, surf Internet.
Then again, Texans (and Austin'ites) are pretty good at heart people, some of them may know they are open and leave it so people can use it.
I am getting real tired of hearing about 'bringing technology to the underpriv's of the world' - guess what : Nigeria's problems are not going to be solved via the Internet.
Countries do not evolve, grow, or progress because an extra 2% of them get dial up access to the Internet. Countries evolve, grow, and progress because every single person in the country gets involved and does some work. Look at the conditions of America circa 1650 or 1800. Those poor fuckers worked 16 hours a day to build farms, homes, roads, schools, infrastructure and the best technology they had access to was the sailboat, the wheel, and the beast of burden. If they wanted a second copy of a text file they had to write it out by hand using a bird's feather dipped in a little glass of ink, scratching it on a piece of paper. If they planned on eating they got out in the field with wooden tools and dug up the ground and planted seeds, chased off birds and rodents from their crops, and watered them by pumping water out of the ground with a hand pump. They spun wool and cotton into threads, wove those threads into cloth, cut the cloth into patterns and using a sewing needle and thread made clothes, and they washed their clothes in the river. They mixed mud and rock to make bricks, fired them in an oven, and build their homes one brick at a time. They took straw and bundled it together and if the floor in their homes got dirty, they swept it outside. They took pride in who they were, they worked their asses off, and they became who America became. Without the Internet.
Yea it's hard. Anything worth while is hard. You can't give a country 'civilization'. They have to EARN it.
BTW pangian - I wasn't reacting harshly at you directly, your post simply gave me a good anchor point.
-They probably meant that the # of jobs lost was 20 times higher (which doesn't mean that the percentage will come out 20x).
This was the statement that made reading the entire thread worth the time and effort. Thanks much.
If that 5.6% is spread evenly across the board, that's not such a bad number. If that 5.6% aggregate means 34% in the tech sector and 4.3% in all the other sectors combined - that means that tech workers are seeing the most evil work drought in history (double the rate seen in the 'Great Depression' of about a century ago) and the rest of the country (ie, WalMart employees and car mechanics) are running about par for the course.
I agree - but for two things :
... not just in secret government labs, but in your own home (for the low low price of about $6,000.)
... no way one single person could use all that power. Ahhh to be young and naive again.
I could probably run a P3 at 3.0GHz, but not for very long and not very stable (and the P3 probably wouldn't survive the trip.)
If a P4 hyperthreading CPU was faster in the 1.0GHz - 1.2GHz range, and if I could run it using only passive cooling (big heat sink) - that's fast enough for most business work (not games) and quiet to boot.
I remember watching the rollout hoopla surrounding the DEC Alpha at 133MHz (with the ultra fast 166MHz coming 'real soon now') at a trade show when a DEC rep said that the Alpha architecture was designed with scalability in mind, that the day would come when a computer with a 600MHz 64-bit CPU would be available
600MHz I thought
I ask a question, and I got three responses : a no, a yes, and a maybe. Slashdot is easily as accurate as the weatherman and stock market predictors :)
I tend to go with your theory though - that a P4 running 1.3GHz is going to be slower than a P3 running 1.3GHz. The long pipelines help keep the CPU busy when we ramp up the speeds, though, and the reason a 3.2GHz P4 is faster than any P3 is because no P3 can run anywhere near 3.2GHz.
I wonder if it would be worth underclocking a hyperthreaded P4 to 1.2GHz to compare it with a 1.2GHz P3. If it was just as fast (or faster) and could run with passive cooling, that would be a slick platform, a good start for a silent machine that ran 'fast enough'.
Is this for real? I haven't done any testing in a few years but the last time I jacked with it the P3 core was quite a bit more efficient than the P4 core at the same speed. If I take one of the current generation 533MHz fsb P4 CPUs and underclock it to 1GHz, put it up against a regular P3 at 1GHz - you are suggesting that the P4 would be faster? How about one of the HT enabled 800MHz fsb P4s underclocked to 1GHz vs a P3 1GHz?
... if I want quiet and cool and slow I have a laptop for that.
I am just asking as this flies counter to everything as I understood it. Not like I'm going to underclock a P4
Two scales to remember in the computer world :
On skills : High Tech, Low Tech, and Aztec.
On honesty : Lies, Damn Lies, and Benchmarks.
Inside Connections beats Prior Experience. ... Darwin says 'You lose.'
Dig out your list of professional contacts and reconnect. As an intern position is fairly far down the food chain, someone already on the inside may have significant influence on the hire process. Actually I would guess that it -is- having significant influence on the hire process, but not in your favor. If one of the other candidates knows someone on the inside and you don't
I didn't say 'most fine art photographers'. I said 'you'. And point I was trying to get across was that regardless of your relative skill, the quality of the one picture you display is going to go up dramatically if you take several pictures of the same subject and pick the best one to display.
I grant that landscape pictures are going to vary a lot less over the course of a few minutes, and that a lot of things (exposure, color, etc.) can be enhanced or 'made the best' in the lab if you are developing and printing your own pix from film - but Joe User is only going to take so many sunset pix and he is going to do it with whatever camera he happens to own. Joe user doesn't have large format view cameras, and he doesn't spend an hour prepping to take one shot.
I will tweak the statement just a touch, just to reinforce my point. Let me fill my CompactFlash with pictures from my crappy Kodak DC210+ on the kind of stuff that Joe User takes pictures of on a regular basis, and I will put the best one up against a single picture taken with the best camera that a common Best Buy/Circuit City customer actually went out and spent his own money on for personal use.
You are correct, as a second generation of photographer evolves from my first generation of newbie clickers.
You will know not to push the button because the picture will suck. You will make good decisions because of wisdom.
Wisdom comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad decisions.
Bad decisions are 9 of the 10 pictures you take before you have the wisdom not to push the button.
We are talking about two different classes of picture clickers. Spend a few months taking a hundred pictures a week, understand why the good ones look good (and the sucky ones suck) and soon enough we graduate to the skilled guy you describe. Until then, my way will give better results, mostly on accident.
I think that 1 of 10 is a pretty good number. Most people aren't getting published, they are just taking pictures for themselves and friends.
Look through Joe Random's 64M compactflash card that has 500 pictures on it and I bet you could find 50 pretty good ones. The trick is to take those 50 out of context (ie, delete all the other crappy ones and merely 'good' ones) and all of a sudden it looks like he took 50 really good pix. He did, actually, but you need to learn to only go public with the good ones and not show all the ones that aren't as good as those 50.
Hence the rule.
And the biggest reason I can't take pictures as good as the photographers for Penthouse / Playboy has nothing to do with technical merits or ability and everything to do with that pesky restraining order.
Lets take my crappy Kodak DC210+ and your Nikon D70 to the beach on a particularly active day (full of model quality bikini babes.) You get to push the button one time, I get to fill my 64M card with as many pictures as it will hold. I'd put my best picture from that trip up against the one shot you take, and be willing to bet money on the outcome.
Luckily life doesn't have those restrictions - throw a nice fat 512M card in your D70, click off frames until the battery dies and at the end of the day you are going to have a lot of pictures. Cull the herd, delete the crappy ones, delete the ones that are merely 'good' and you end up with the best 12 or so pictures you took. Statistically speaking even a newbie is going to accidently take a good picture every once in a while - understand and apply those odds and you will end up with an album of great pictures.
Only taking one picture per setting is a throwback to regular cameras and rolls of film that held 12 or 24 pictures (or if you were rich, a mega 36 pictures.) If 24 pictures was going to document a full day at Disneyland you needed to be frugal, take one shot of this and one shot of that. With current hardware you can literally take a picture every 15 seconds for eight solid hours (one megapixel jpegs at 256kB per, 512M card.) Throw in one of those 4G compactflash microdrives and you can mash the button once every two seconds for eight solid hours (battery needs to be considered here.)
I do agree with the 'hold the camera steady' part though. Figure that one out and the quality of your pictures goes up in a hurry.
Want to have a picture portfolio that is almost as good as most professionals : there is only one rule.
Glonoinha's #1 Rule of Photography.
Throw away (delete) 9 out of every 10 pictures.
Want one good picture? Take 10 pictures and pick the best one. Professionals take several hundred pictures in several settings just to get half a dozen really great shots worth publishing in a magazine. Most of the time excellent photos aren't about being good, they are about getting lucky.
Let me pick the best picture out of 20 I take on my crappy 1 megapixel Kodak and I will put it up against any camera (even the really awesome expensive ones) if you only take one picture with that camera.
You are probably correct, from your point of view. A self taught coder, even a guy with a BS/CS or BA/MIS degree in his first year in a code writing position is likely to write a good tight sort routine or a nice tight SQL statement that is 12.7% faster than the bubble sort or select statement an older guy / guy with a few years of experience / guy with better 'credentials' might use - same way some AMD/ATI fanboy is going to put together a computer that uses liquid cooling to keep his overclocked record setting system running circles (18.9% faster!) around the off the shelf Dell system an older guy might be using.
/grin.
What you are describing right now is a very narrow scope of vision. It is perfectly ok, and even expected from a one year guy - don't get me wrong as I'm not bagging on you. But you are seeing instant gratification, lines of code per hour, faster embedded loops and search routines, and frames per second. What you are not seeing, if I had to guess, is long term maintainability, group cohesion, the ability to integrate different routines together or reuse the existing development effort going forward, the overall architecture of the bigger system, scalability, usability in a business environment, reduced downtime when problems do occur.
In the same way that the overclocking crew can make a single uberMachine run 12.6% faster than a machine off the shelf, a tightly focused coder can write small blocks of code that are quite a bit faster than something written by an old school coder. From a business perspective, however, neither is particularly attractive when considering a large scale rollout of a massive business initiative. You simply can't have users running computers that sound like jet engines to keep their overclocked CPUs cool, and you can't have coders winging it to shave CPU cycles at the expense of long term stability, usability, and interoperability. Sure, you can read your in-line assembly and make it work - but can the guy over in maintenance keep it working without screwing it up or needing to rewrite it from scratch because he doesn't understand what it does?
When (if) you stop to think through all of these things you will take longer to write your individual lines of code than the next generation of hot coders. For every five days on a project, a full day needs to be dedicated to understanding what the customer (internal or external) needs and envisioning how you will design it. A full day needs to be spent doing documentation (documenting the code, user dox, developer design and intent, interaction conventions, installation, maintenance routines, etc.) and delivering the product. A day designing the system architecure, and two days actually doing the work come between the envision and delivery. In theory you could sit down and do the actual 'work' in two days, but someone has to be responsible for the other stuff - not doing the other stuff is why projects fail.
A day will come that you decide that hand building your own machine and getting an extra 7 fps isn't worth the hassle and you will just order a Dell. There will also come a day that you spend time documenting how you understand the customer's expectations and go over that document with the customer before you start designing how the system will work, and you will do that design before you start to write the code. And there will come a day that you write an official separate document describing the code you just wrote. Look forward to that day, consider it your next Graduation Day, and celebrate that day. Because the day after that is the day the youngsters start hassling you because they code faster than you do
Just a thought, WPA and SSL connections and even VPN connections protect the following : the conversation stream between your keyboard and the server you are connected to ...
If your laptop is running XP Home and you have any shares on your laptop, anything in those shares is fair game to anybody else on the network. Who cares if they can't read the datastream of your Internet surfing in real time when they can sift through all the files you shared to make it easier to move stuff around between computers at home.
Ditto public shares on a more secure OS, and anonymous FTP connections if you have FTP up and running. You are fairly aware of these things, but you would be AMAZED at some of the stuff one might find surfing the network neighborhood in your friendly Starbucks.
And pay access or free access, there is nothing the Wifi providers can do about it.
This is exactly the opening I was looking for - it exactly describes what happened to me last week. I was going to stay in a hotel for a three day weekend, looked around and found a nice one (Hilton for those wondering.) In the online and paper marketing it proclaimed proudly 'high speed Internet access available' right after proudly proclaiming 'beautiful rooms' and 'air conditioning.' I show up, pay my roughly $350 for three nights and those fuckers had the audacity to preempt my online surfing with a money grab : that will be $50 please ($15 a day, plus taxes and fees * 3 days = $50.)
Needless to say it did nothing but royally piss me off, and insure that I will have a negative association with Hilton long after I forget why I am upset with them. I understand the profit motive, so why aren't they charging $5 a head to use the pool? I would bet that the monthly overhead associated with keeping the pool is a LOT higher than the monthly overhead associated with keeping their hard-line running. Easy answer : because customers expect a pool and will easily go elsewhere if they tried to charge $5 a head to use it.
Dear Slashdot :
... so if you really want to help : help them find a new job.
"I am the funeral director for a large funeral home and every weekend an entire extended family (generally minus one) comes in and over the course of a three hour ceremony just sits around looking sad, crying, and generally killing the mood around here. I am interested in ways to brighten the mood around here, it's almost like somebody fscking died or something. Anyways, last week I began my (tongue in cheek) 'Reign of Terror'. To start, this week is 'Gummi Bear Week', where I walk around handing out Gummi Bears to all the guests (maybe that will cheer them up.) Next week I may start a 'Goose the Widow' theme. What I need are suggestions. What can I possibly do that is funeral safe, humorous, and not something which will get me fired prematurely? During the black plague, when dying was all the rage, what did the funeral home directors do to abuse their power, and keep the survivors (and the corpse!) entertained during those especially stressful periods?"
Guess what : when bad shit happens people need to feel bad about it and get it out of their system. A funeral isn't time for fun and games, it is a time to be morose and sad, get your affairs in order, and move on towards starting their new life without one important aspect (the dead guy.) Getting RIF'ed is no different. You really want to help these people, forget being the Good Humor Man - be the Job Placement Assistant. Honestly most people could give a damn about being RIF'ed the second they have a new job and don't have to worry about losing their house, car, savings, etc
Help them find the sites that will walk them through creating a good resume.
Help them understand which job sites are good and which are simply fake fronts for temp agencies.
Help them recognise which job listings are bogus and which are real.
Help them understand that real jobs are landed via networking and work with them to create, develop, and evolve their personal network and networking skills.
What most people (your peer group) want is to be a contributing member of society in a job that lets them be self sufficient and provide for their family. You want to flex your leet computer guy powers, help them get back on track to that effect. Tell them to bring a bag of Gummi Bears to their next job and think about you each time they eat one.
That's what people want. Not yellow smiley face cupcakes at a funeral. Being self sufficient.
Or when the client points to that site say 'I wrote that site too. Those guys paid me FOUR TIMES what you are paying me for your site. You want a site as good as that one? I can leverage the work I did for them and do it for you for only THREE times what I quoted you for the one you are currently on schedule to get.'
If he reaches for the checkbook, copy that other site, change the email and phone numbers, and buy me a Dell 18" flat panel LCD.
Remember that the distance to the nearest point of concern is an estimated 150 meters, also known as "almost two football fields."
I agree with points 1, 2, and 3 - regardless of the circumstances. Just good operating protocol. As for being concerned about them, bingo there. I would be willing to bet that the 220v lines in the wall powering the air conditioning gives off more EMI (as measured in the server room) than the high power lines 150m away.
-Wow, so I'm not the only one that talks to strippers
Whoops, forgot to answer the question. I dated a stripper for about 6 weeks, met her in real life and started dating her before she told me. So I talked to her quite a bit and gleaned quite a bit of insight into their world. Once the other girls at the club found out I was on the inside (hehe, so to speak) I was 'safe' and they opened up to me also - they like to poke fun at each other so while mine was up on stage and couldn't do anything about it the others would climb all over me in a playful 'make your gf jealous' way. It was a lot of fun, I will admit that. Talking with the dancers is cool, sort of how surfing slashdot at work is cool - it isn't making anybody any money so the minute a money making opportunity comes up the 'fun chat' is over (but it is a cool diversion between money making opportunities.)
Broke up after about 6 weeks, she was on the pipe (crack) and I wasn't - last I heard she ended up in jail. Too bad, she fscked like a wild animal, probably the best I ever had. Made more money than I did too, a lot more.
Enjoy your time in the clubs - but see it for what it is - like a trip to a really high class (expensive) exotic zoo with a great drink selection, with a booming sound system and all the music you like. Oh, and most high end clubs have amazing food, I highly recommend the best steak in the house - those places take pride in their meat (no pun intended.)
Actually almost without fail, strippers respond to everyone in the same way - and you got it right : *stripper sees through it and plays along*
Ever been to the zoo?
If you go to the zoo thinking 'Man this is going to be great. Going to see lions and tigers and bears and monkeys, they are so cool. Maybe if I get lucky one of the cute ones will pay a little attention to me for a minute and do a neat trick. They sure are great to look at - I could spend days thinking about all the animals I saw there' then the time and money is well spent.
If you go to the zoo thinking 'Man this is great, always wanted to ride a zebra and I'm pretty sure a zebra will be there today! Score! I think I am going to find myself a nice giraffe and bring it home with me, let her live with me because giraffes are great and I think I deserve one' then you have sadly deluded yourself and set yourself up for disappointment. Regardless of how much you spend on the zebra munchies and giraffe goodies you don't get to actually ride the zebra and you don't get to take the giraffe home with you.
Same deal with strip clubs. It's visual entertainment, see some freaky visual entertainment that you can only see in that controlled environment. That's it. Enjoy.
That said, if you want a LOT of attention at a strip club, forget table dances, forget 'ladies drinks' - sit in the back with a big empty table and call and have a large pizza or two delivered. Every single dancer that isn't on stage will be in your lap in about 90 seconds, like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Remember they work an eight hour shift eating nothing but bar snack food, so after about 5 or 6 hours of dancing they are hungry - and they will remember you. They probably still won't let you ride them like a zebra or take them home like a giraffe - but they will remember you.
Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!!
Ray, when a stripper invites you to her house, you say YES!
No offense, but you snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on that one. I wouldn't want to own one, but strippers are generally a ride you will never forget.
Stay late one night. After they are all gone walk from desktop to desktop. Look for post-it notes on the side of the monitor and under the keyboard, and in their drawers. The results will scare you, if your users are anything like mine, and I bet after that you start letting them pick less cryptic passwords.
Also, if you know their password there goes any semblance of Non-Repudiation. And if you can 'remind them' either you have a very short list of users and can remember them, or you have a written list somewhere - nifty, but a bad idea.