Just a thought - spend more time at the command line and less time in the GUI. I think Hiro Protaganist pointed that one out about half way through Snow Crash as a way to get the most out of your laptop when you are not connected to the juice.
My favorite line from that book : "I'm sure they'll listen to Reason..."
If I was completely wrong, but was on key enough to bring you to set the record straight and bring to us the facts - was my post completely worthless?
That said, mild cases of Autism (when caught early and properly medicated) not crippling, in fact I know a young boy that has been diagnosed with mild autism (and is being treated and medicated) that is going to dominate every scientific / tech based competition he ever enters. Done just right, to a point, it is actually an advantage in our world - how many 8 year old children do you know that can grasp the concepts to both the bubble sort and the insertion sort after having it described to him verbally one time? Then go program a perfunctory example in visual basic... I was pretty proud just to know him after watching that.
Dude, you just described me to a lesser degree, minus the pizza manager job. In fact you pretty much described a bunch of my social acquaintances also (all long time software developers / systems engineers.) Take your description down a notch and you most certainly described most of my social circle (and me.)
Unless it was a joke, sarcastic or irony (in which case I wouldn't have gotten it anyways.)
I googlefight'ed Ausperger and Ausberger... and Ausberger won. I wasn't entirely sure, and didn't try Asperger (which destroyed Ausberger in the googlefight I just tried... so I'm pretty sure you are right.)
Better me luck next time. But that said - I have wondered for a long time if the tech field attracted people like us, or if the tech field turned regular people into people like us. Probably a little bit of both.
Ausbergers syndrome - learn it, know it, ask yourself if it applies here. It is similar in nature to Autism (think of RainMan but really watered down, almost to the point of it being questionable as to whether or not he is / is not affected.)
Do the youthes you are talking about have amazing technical skills, wonderful (photographic) memories, the ability to empathize with the computer... while being totally socially inept?
Actually I did sit down and read encyclopedias cover to cover like a book. All of them. While the other kids were out on the playground. But I'm not normal. And that was a long time ago.
Actually I'm sure it has more to do with board games sucking when compared to video games.
BattleTech is a pretty good example of a game that has both board game and computer game versions. I have played both extensively (ok, so I played the board version in the late 80's) and I'm here to tell you there is no comparison. Hex paper and dice and lead figures were cool no doubt, but it took too damn long (an hour per minute of combat, roughly, if more than 4 people were playing. Well actually half hour of playing, 20 minutes of arguing, and 10 minutes looking shit up in books.) Filling in little damage circles with a pencil - bah! MechWarrior 3 on the PC in a LAN environment, combat happens in real time and battles take about 4 minutes in 3d sound and video.
No comparison.
How well do you think the 'board game' version of Everquest would do? Heh - exactly.
If there is a funny ending to this story, I would have to say it would be that someone actually made just that - you thought I was kidding... (don't forget to take out the spaces) http://www.gamespy.com/articles/october02 /eqboardg ame/
Well the way I read it he didn't 'blow $300k of his own money.' The $300k was in "time, money, and resources". Thus I have a strong feeling that of that $9,000 per month, every month for 33 in a row he is claiming to have spent to total the $300k, a pretty good chunk of it was his self-assigned pay rate of $150 an hour (my guess, no basis in fact) for his own time 'webmastering'.
Did he actually write checks for $9,000 per month is true expenses? Electricity, new hardware, bandwidth charges from his upstream provider? I'm guessing no fscking way.
And according to the first article, yes he did plonk down a bill, a piece of paper saying something to the effect of 'you owe me $300,000'. They told him to get bent, then arrested him.
That said, I think this entire thing is stupid. No farm-team sheriff office needs a web site that has 3.5 million 'hits' a month from 60 countries. And for damn sure no farm-team sheriff office web site is worth $300,000 over three years, traffic or no traffic. Someone is about to earn a few whacks from the clue stick.
At 3.5M 'hits' per month he should have put a few banner ads at the bottom (porn site banners, brought to you by the Police Department!) Even at the 'cop out' payment of one cent per view, that's $35k per month.
Heck, what are current banner ads paying per impression now?
I have a hard time with his web site costing him $9k per month in real expenditures ( bandwidth, etc. ) sustained for 33 months straight.
Now if he wants to include the unpaid wages of a developer (himself) in that I can probably envision it (not necessarily agree, but I can see where the numbers come from) - but you got to use a LOT of bandwidth to burn through $9k a month.
There is exactly one job where women line up all day every day, one every three minutes or so, give you their undivided attention, describe their home life, eating and spending habits, then hand you a piece of paper with their real name, home address, phone number, and picture id to verify that they are over 18. Grocery cashier.
I spent 5 years (my last year in HS, and all through college) working at the big grocery store in my little college town and although the pay wasn't great I scored one quality contact a week, and got laid more than I will ever admit.
The only way to increase your odds over that is to be a bartender, but good luck getting that job (esp when you are 18.)
WTF modded this down? Microsoft even RECOMMENDs a clean install once a year to clear out all the crap that tends to accumulate.
Throw in three spyware packages, a virus or two, some cross linked files, some lost clusters, overload the registry with crap, install 63 of the little trial games that comes with your PC Gamer magazine, 71 little java applets in their.jar files, go two years without defragmenting the hard drive or the MFT (which can't be done without aftermarket tools), a partridge and a pear tree and yes.. a reinstall every year is a good thing.
Not to mention that doing a reinstall requires that you back all your important data up (to CD-R hopefully) and insure that you have all the install materials and disks needed for a reinstall.
The summer before my last year in high school I had a cheap beater of a pickup truck (a 1970 Ford F-150 with a motor and transmission out of a Mustang (V8-302, 3 speed manual tranny) - it was ugly, beat up, and cheap. Also had lots of room in the back for gear. Estimated cost : $500
Bought a used lawn mower, cleaned it up and sharpened the blade with a file. Estimated cost : 100 total.
Got an electric weed-eater for about $40 new w/ a 100' heavy duty extension cord.
Other crap : eye protection, ear protection, maybe a second mower and trimmer because there are two of you.
Total cost, roughly your entire $1000 budget.
Get started by printing out 1 page flyers to put on people's doors in neighborhoods (nice neighborhoods.) Each place you do will take you about 2 hours max with two people, and will pay $40, and needs to be done every two weeks. You can do like 4 each day tops, and if you do a GOOD job you will have awesome repeat business. Totally a cash business, so no taxes.
It takes some time to build up a client base, but once you two do a good job you will have more business than you can imagine. $800 free and clear every week on a full schedule, possibly more. That's $400 a week per person free and clear, $1600 a month.
It is hot, sweaty, dirty, demeaning work - which is why you will have so many people eager to have you do it for them. If you aren't too proud to sweat you will make more doing this than doing 'computer work' - esp. now.
Maybe you will find something that you can do with your $1000 start up fund, something that will net you $5,000 apiece in three months without access to a car... something that involves pushing buttons and moving a mouse around... if you do let us know because a bunch of us would love to do the same.
D'oh, my bad. Had a good example using objects in my head that didn't translate too well to a simple code example, changed it to int's midstream. Your point is still very valid, rather than check to see if it is zero and do something, it sets the value to zero and doesn't do the one thing that should have happened if the value was zero. What the code looks like it was intended to do and what it actually does are two different things, and in a recent test of my configuration of VisualStudio 6.0 the compiler doesn't complain.
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How is a compiler going to determine programmer's intent?
if (iIntVar = 0) { do.Something; } and if (iIntVar == 0) { do.Something; }
are both valid and both do different things (one initializes the variable to zero and if that succeeds it does something, the other checks if it is zero and if so does something.) I have done both, and spooging it is a fat finger away. Particularly when I am tired and undercaffeinated.
No, any good compiler released in the last 20 years doesn't have the ability to catch logical errors.
At first if (42 == yourVariable) looks ass-backwards I agree, but once you get used to it you will find it kills LOTS of logical errors.
-What is it that you can do on a w2k platform, that you can't don in OSX, Linux or w2k on Virtual PC?
29 frames per second in Star Wars Galaxies. I run Linux (a few different flavors) in VMware virtual machines on my W2K / XP boxes so I am comfortable doing the virtual machine thing.. in fact I prefer doing it that way. VMware just doesn't support directly accessing the video card in run on the bare metal (necessary for a decent frame rate.)
Well that and the software I help develop is developed in.NET and runs on Wintel boxes - although I can do that in a VM.
I spent a few years in college working for a television station, most of my job boiled down to watching our station on 5 different monitors as a quality control (high-def, black and white, regular color, a radial spectrograph, and a high-def black and white) - but after you trained yourself what to look for it bwas basically watching TV 8 hours a day in an otherwise featureless room with nobody else there, no outside stimuli. For two years, getting paid for it.
I still don't watch regular television anymore - can't bear to watch what amounts to crap for free. I do watch some Discovery Channel and the History Channel, that's time well spent - but regular TV... ouch.
Yaaa - actually that's one of the freakiest things about having my laptop on the same desk with a few desktops in my office. Every once a while we lose power (thunderstorms generally) and my entire office goes quiet and dark... but the laptop just stares at me with his happy screen still on, little fan and drive still spinning - as if to say 'hey man - wtf just happened?' Surreal
Damn that thing is nice. 'Cept I don't do anything remotely served by the OS/X (or whatever) platform.
At the risk of being burned at the stake as a heretic I would say that if Apple make hardware that I could install Windows 2000 Pro / Win XP Pro on I would be all over it. The case of the G4 is simply amazing with the handles on top and smooth edges, their displays are top notch (although I like my Logitech keyboard and mouse) - everything about the exterior of their hardware is simply amazing. Too bad I can't use it.
I know, crazy talk - but with IBM (et.al) looking at adopting Linux as the desktop there are going to be a few open spaces in the partner list for Microsoft - who better than Apple? It would be like USA and USSR cooperating to the effect of a new world order and maybe a space station or something. Stranger things have happened, and it would be one way for Apple to gain market share.
That's one hour in marketing 'hours', which are sort of the antithesis of Microsoft minutes (copying 1.4 gigabytes in 17,381 files, 2 minutes remaining.)
I wonder what that is in real life Earth time... 45 minutes on a charge before the warning light starts to go all blinky blinky on you.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a thought - spend more time at the command line and less time in the GUI. I think Hiro Protaganist pointed that one out about half way through Snow Crash as a way to get the most out of your laptop when you are not connected to the juice.
My favorite line from that book : "I'm sure they'll listen to Reason..."
Whoops,
That said, you are right in that he may never be able to run a household by himself, but he is going to be a bad ass programmer one of these days.
If I was completely wrong, but was on key enough to bring you to set the record straight and bring to us the facts - was my post completely worthless?
... I was pretty proud just to know him after watching that.
That said, mild cases of Autism (when caught early and properly medicated) not crippling, in fact I know a young boy that has been diagnosed with mild autism (and is being treated and medicated) that is going to dominate every scientific / tech based competition he ever enters. Done just right, to a point, it is actually an advantage in our world - how many 8 year old children do you know that can grasp the concepts to both the bubble sort and the insertion sort after having it described to him verbally one time? Then go program a perfunctory example in visual basic
Dude, you just described me to a lesser degree, minus the pizza manager job. In fact you pretty much described a bunch of my social acquaintances also (all long time software developers / systems engineers.) Take your description down a notch and you most certainly described most of my social circle (and me.)
Unless it was a joke, sarcastic or irony (in which case I wouldn't have gotten it anyways.)
Ouch - thank's chief.
... and Ausberger won. I wasn't entirely sure, and didn't try Asperger (which destroyed Ausberger in the googlefight I just tried ... so I'm pretty sure you are right.)
I googlefight'ed Ausperger and Ausberger
Better me luck next time. But that said - I have wondered for a long time if the tech field attracted people like us, or if the tech field turned regular people into people like us.
Probably a little bit of both.
Ausbergers syndrome - learn it, know it, ask yourself if it applies here. It is similar in nature to Autism (think of RainMan but really watered down, almost to the point of it being questionable as to whether or not he is / is not affected.)
... while being totally socially inept?
Do the youthes you are talking about have amazing technical skills, wonderful (photographic) memories, the ability to empathize with the computer
Anyways, it is worth understanding.
Actually I did sit down and read encyclopedias cover to cover like a book. All of them. While the other kids were out on the playground. But I'm not normal. And that was a long time ago.
Actually I'm sure it has more to do with board games sucking when compared to video games.
... (don't forget to take out the spaces)2 /eqboardg ame/
BattleTech is a pretty good example of a game that has both board game and computer game versions. I have played both extensively (ok, so I played the board version in the late 80's) and I'm here to tell you there is no comparison. Hex paper and dice and lead figures were cool no doubt, but it took too damn long (an hour per minute of combat, roughly, if more than 4 people were playing. Well actually half hour of playing, 20 minutes of arguing, and 10 minutes looking shit up in books.) Filling in little damage circles with a pencil - bah! MechWarrior 3 on the PC in a LAN environment, combat happens in real time and battles take about 4 minutes in 3d sound and video.
No comparison.
How well do you think the 'board game' version of Everquest would do? Heh - exactly.
If there is a funny ending to this story, I would have to say it would be that someone actually made just that - you thought I was kidding
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/october0
Damn, and I thought that tub-girl and goatse were hard on the eyes.
Shit man, my eyes are watering bad, I think I may need to cry.
I can't wait to see this guy's 'page counter' after he has been in jail a year.
Ass poundings this month : 3,000.
Ok, is that individual strokes, views, completed sessions, or unique visitors?
Well the way I read it he didn't 'blow $300k of his own money.' The $300k was in "time, money, and resources". Thus I have a strong feeling that of that $9,000 per month, every month for 33 in a row he is claiming to have spent to total the $300k, a pretty good chunk of it was his self-assigned pay rate of $150 an hour (my guess, no basis in fact) for his own time 'webmastering'.
Did he actually write checks for $9,000 per month is true expenses? Electricity, new hardware, bandwidth charges from his upstream provider? I'm guessing no fscking way.
And according to the first article, yes he did plonk down a bill, a piece of paper saying something to the effect of 'you owe me $300,000'. They told him to get bent, then arrested him.
That said, I think this entire thing is stupid. No farm-team sheriff office needs a web site that has 3.5 million 'hits' a month from 60 countries. And for damn sure no farm-team sheriff office web site is worth $300,000 over three years, traffic or no traffic. Someone is about to earn a few whacks from the clue stick.
At 3.5M 'hits' per month he should have put a few banner ads at the bottom (porn site banners, brought to you by the Police Department!) Even at the 'cop out' payment of one cent per view, that's $35k per month.
Heck, what are current banner ads paying per impression now?
I have a hard time with his web site costing him $9k per month in real expenditures ( bandwidth, etc. ) sustained for 33 months straight.
Now if he wants to include the unpaid wages of a developer (himself) in that I can probably envision it (not necessarily agree, but I can see where the numbers come from) - but you got to use a LOT of bandwidth to burn through $9k a month.
There is exactly one job where women line up all day every day, one every three minutes or so, give you their undivided attention, describe their home life, eating and spending habits, then hand you a piece of paper with their real name, home address, phone number, and picture id to verify that they are over 18. Grocery cashier.
I spent 5 years (my last year in HS, and all through college) working at the big grocery store in my little college town and although the pay wasn't great I scored one quality contact a week, and got laid more than I will ever admit.
The only way to increase your odds over that is to be a bartender, but good luck getting that job (esp when you are 18.)
WTF modded this down? Microsoft even RECOMMENDs a clean install once a year to clear out all the crap that tends to accumulate.
.jar files, go two years without defragmenting the hard drive or the MFT (which can't be done without aftermarket tools), a partridge and a pear tree and yes .. a reinstall every year is a good thing.
Throw in three spyware packages, a virus or two, some cross linked files, some lost clusters, overload the registry with crap, install 63 of the little trial games that comes with your PC Gamer magazine, 71 little java applets in their
Not to mention that doing a reinstall requires that you back all your important data up (to CD-R hopefully) and insure that you have all the install materials and disks needed for a reinstall.
Isn't the Oregon state income tax like 9% of your gross income? That's just freaky - scary more like it.
The summer before my last year in high school I had a cheap beater of a pickup truck (a 1970 Ford F-150 with a motor and transmission out of a Mustang (V8-302, 3 speed manual tranny) - it was ugly, beat up, and cheap. Also had lots of room in the back for gear. Estimated cost : $500
... something that involves pushing buttons and moving a mouse around ... if you do let us know because a bunch of us would love to do the same.
Bought a used lawn mower, cleaned it up and sharpened the blade with a file. Estimated cost : 100 total.
Got an electric weed-eater for about $40 new w/ a 100' heavy duty extension cord.
Other crap : eye protection, ear protection, maybe a second mower and trimmer because there are two of you.
Total cost, roughly your entire $1000 budget.
Get started by printing out 1 page flyers to put on people's doors in neighborhoods (nice neighborhoods.) Each place you do will take you about 2 hours max with two people, and will pay $40, and needs to be done every two weeks. You can do like 4 each day tops, and if you do a GOOD job you will have awesome repeat business. Totally a cash business, so no taxes.
It takes some time to build up a client base, but once you two do a good job you will have more business than you can imagine. $800 free and clear every week on a full schedule, possibly more. That's $400 a week per person free and clear, $1600 a month.
It is hot, sweaty, dirty, demeaning work - which is why you will have so many people eager to have you do it for them. If you aren't too proud to sweat you will make more doing this than doing 'computer work' - esp. now.
Maybe you will find something that you can do with your $1000 start up fund, something that will net you $5,000 apiece in three months without access to a car
D'oh, my bad.
Had a good example using objects in my head that didn't translate too well to a simple code example, changed it to int's midstream.
Your point is still very valid, rather than check to see if it is zero and do something, it sets the value to zero and doesn't do the one thing that should have happened if the value was zero. What the code looks like it was intended to do and what it actually does are two different things, and in a recent test of my configuration of VisualStudio 6.0 the compiler doesn't complain.
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How is a compiler going to determine programmer's intent?
if (iIntVar = 0) { do.Something; }
and
if (iIntVar == 0) { do.Something; }
are both valid and both do different things (one initializes the variable to zero and if that succeeds it does something, the other checks if it is zero and if so does something.) I have done both, and spooging it is a fat finger away. Particularly when I am tired and undercaffeinated.
No, any good compiler released in the last 20 years doesn't have the ability to catch logical errors.
At first if (42 == yourVariable) looks ass-backwards I agree, but once you get used to it you will find it kills LOTS of logical errors.
-What is it that you can do on a w2k platform, that you can't don in OSX, Linux or w2k on Virtual PC?
.. in fact I prefer doing it that way. VMware just doesn't support directly accessing the video card in run on the bare metal (necessary for a decent frame rate.)
.NET and runs on Wintel boxes - although I can do that in a VM.
29 frames per second in Star Wars Galaxies.
I run Linux (a few different flavors) in VMware virtual machines on my W2K / XP boxes so I am comfortable doing the virtual machine thing
Well that and the software I help develop is developed in
I spent a few years in college working for a television station, most of my job boiled down to watching our station on 5 different monitors as a quality control (high-def, black and white, regular color, a radial spectrograph, and a high-def black and white) - but after you trained yourself what to look for it bwas basically watching TV 8 hours a day in an otherwise featureless room with nobody else there, no outside stimuli. For two years, getting paid for it.
... ouch.
I still don't watch regular television anymore - can't bear to watch what amounts to crap for free. I do watch some Discovery Channel and the History Channel, that's time well spent - but regular TV
Yaaa - actually that's one of the freakiest things about having my laptop on the same desk with a few desktops in my office. Every once a while we lose power (thunderstorms generally) and my entire office goes quiet and dark ... but the laptop just stares at me with his happy screen still on, little fan and drive still spinning - as if to say 'hey man - wtf just happened?'
Surreal
Damn that thing is nice. 'Cept I don't do anything remotely served by the OS/X (or whatever) platform.
At the risk of being burned at the stake as a heretic I would say that if Apple make hardware that I could install Windows 2000 Pro / Win XP Pro on I would be all over it. The case of the G4 is simply amazing with the handles on top and smooth edges, their displays are top notch (although I like my Logitech keyboard and mouse) - everything about the exterior of their hardware is simply amazing. Too bad I can't use it.
I know, crazy talk - but with IBM (et.al) looking at adopting Linux as the desktop there are going to be a few open spaces in the partner list for Microsoft - who better than Apple? It would be like USA and USSR cooperating to the effect of a new world order and maybe a space station or something. Stranger things have happened, and it would be one way for Apple to gain market share.
That's one hour in marketing 'hours', which are sort of the antithesis of Microsoft minutes (copying 1.4 gigabytes in 17,381 files, 2 minutes remaining.)
... 45 minutes on a charge before the warning light starts to go all blinky blinky on you.
I wonder what that is in real life Earth time