Technical skills *alone* is not valuable, correct. But if you find ways to ensure whoever coming to your website will generate new users and stay (virality factor) and also grab publicity at the right moment, and you understand what "right moment" means instead of naively going to TechCrunch while your website's fundamental design is not all that viral and not all that usable (e.g. the Color app that got $41M in investments) - then, only then, will you have some chance of success.
In short, it's all about execution, and most people think it's simple.
While you're saying all these things are bullshit, quite a few people made billions and thousands if not tens of thousands made millions. Businesses (e.g. Nokia, Borders) that can't follow are seeing a hit in real revenues, people are fired, and whole companies are going belly up.
You may think all these are bullshit, but to the investors, entrepreneurs and all related newly minted rich; or the newly fired people from older companies - the effects are very real.
Maybe if you see your personal wealth as an optimization problem, and thus if you're doing consumer software - things like traction, user experience, virality as optimization problems - you'll begin to appreciate the complexities inherent in building successful products (which can look deceptively simple, but the reasoning behind something simple can be very complicated) and by extension, companies that actually work well instead of "work" like a Dilbert comic strip.
I can understand the left-leaning and socialists among Slashdotters will hate what I just said. But at the end of the day, whatever technological and scientific advance you or I made have to serve human interests. You can't say "I like to do [math|quantum mechanics|machine learning|art|product design|rockets|science fiction|...] because it's fun" without "I".
Now if the politicians that decided to go to war were first required to slit the throats a typical 5 person enemy family - just maybe there would be fewer conflicts.
Why do you think the average politician wouldn't find killing innocent people awesome?
It doesn't work like that. Assuming both sides are highly competent, securing something is a fundamentally harder problem than breaking in. To break in, you only need to figure out one vulnerability. To secure something, you need to make sure every component - as big as a data center and as small as every single instruction sent to the CPUs - in your system, is invulnerable. Hiring hackers would only help if the engineering team is highly incompetent to start with (like, they aren't even aware of basic things like why strcpy() to a fixed buffer can be a very bad idea).
Half Life 2 doesn't have a emotionally deep backstory anyway - you get dropped into a situation and you kill monsters. Your character doesn't even get to say a word about all the crazy things happening around him. A "Please, somebody help" in Half Life 2 doesn't give the same kind of feeling as in the real world - all it does is telling you that something dangerous is approaching, ready your crowbar.
I used to work for a major open source project at home for 2 years... it felt awesome for the first 6 months, but after that I felt terrible being at home alone all day long, every day. I have a few other friends who experienced something like that, working at home for large tech companies for various reasons - it's awesome for the first few months, but you'll feel really bad after a while.
It doesn't even take 20 engineers over 3 years to make such a mistake. It only takes one - even you can and will do it. Just imagine yourself doing simple addition with numbers in the range [0, 10] every day - and you do 1000 such stupid math questions on a good day and 10000 during crunch time. And you keep doing that for 3 years. There has to be one day, you do one of these additions wrong - not because you're bad at maths - but because you're a human. I understand perfectly that you'll use an ORM or at least SQL bind, or whatever method you prefer to prevent SQL injections... but just as it's possible to leak memory in Java or any GC language, you're bound to find an uncommon or plain stupid way to make a mistake after a while.
The thing is, if you have 100 engineers working on your code, and they write or modify 200 lines of code every day - it's very hard to guarantee there's not a single line of vulnerable SQL code written over 3 years. It only takes one mistake to get your server compromised.
You're not getting what I'm saying. Whether something is in a bunch of draft standards or not.. is of academic interest to some people only. If you're actually coding something, you don't care - you can try to stick to the "standard" way but it will always breaks at some point. If you don't believe me, just look at a bug tracker in any popular FOSS web project - jQuery, extJS, jQ Mobile, CKEditor, etc. etc. If you want a specific example, read jQuery Mobile's fastclick branch, read the code and the commit log and see what the clusterfuck it is to simply handle "tap" events in mobile, "standard compliant" browsers.
And with the malleable nature of HTML5 right now... a bunch of usable features that breaks all the time in practice and has to be tested on different browsers on a case-by-case basis, is all what it means to a software developer. I guess what you're focusing on is the academic kind of correctness - whether W3C published it or not. Having W3C and WHATWG publish it has its uses... but at the end of the day, unless you're someone working at W3C, it doesn't really matter for you.
No. In common usage means when you actually go and code web-related projects like jQuery Mobile and CKEditor. When you're actually coding anything non-trivial for a few browsers, you'll find that the standards don't really work perfectly and that 100% rating on ACID3 is meaningless. There're always minute differences between browser implementations even though they all tell you they support X.
IE9's support for newer features is poor - that's a fact. In none of my previous posts have I even mentioned Microsoft. I mean.. what the heck is happening?
And that's why I said, "in common usage". Nobody cares what the committees say in practice. If all commonly used browsers support WebGL to some degree, then it's a "standard", and people will use "HTML5" as the buzzword. Fact is, a lot of things that are included now in HTML5 (e.g. web workers) were not part of what the committees published some time before, and HTML5 is still a work-in-progress. So the standard right now is still a very malleable thing.
HTML5 is still a draft standard and in common usage it usually refers to a bunch of stuff like an in-browser video codec, WebGL, DOM data storage, canvas, geo location data support, etc. - almost all of which are not uniformly supported across all "HTML5" browsers - and that's especially true for IE9.
Agreed... if you looked at the people inside the Fukushima plant, which was swept by the tsunami; verses people outside the Fukushima plant who're also swept by the tsunami - those inside of the nuclear plant are actually MUCH MORE likely to make it out alive. And that's a 40-year-old plant not designed to handle earthquakes and tsunamis at the same time. That's actually quite amazingly robust.
That was the a century ago when people hadn't discovered how to step up and step down DC voltages. There're still problems with transmitting high voltage AC across long distances - many long distance runs are actually HVDC now.
Ok, let's say you're doing some kind of charity project like the OLPC, and you seriously need money to move your project forward, and you're just a MIT professor who'd been minding his research, and published a few books, for over 40 years.
And Qadaffi, a leader of some African country which just happens to be in your target market, donates money to you so you can move your project forward. You've never been a diplomat so you don't really know what Qadaffi has been up to, but it's good money and probably some goodwill with a non-small African country. All you know is you can use that money to help a bunch of poor kids in Africa.
Now, who wouldn't accept that money?! Seriously, get a grip. An MIT professor isn't some kind of all-knowing god.
Now that you have criminals going to the Internet and disclosing what they're doing... so you can round them up before they commit crimes. And you wanna stop that? Seriously?
A trillion positrons is still a very microscopic amount of particles and mass when macro phenomenons (i.e. blow things up) are concerned. You probably wouldn't feel anything if all that was dumped onto your tongue.
Slashdot Mirror
Technical skills *alone* is not valuable, correct. But if you find ways to ensure whoever coming to your website will generate new users and stay (virality factor) and also grab publicity at the right moment, and you understand what "right moment" means instead of naively going to TechCrunch while your website's fundamental design is not all that viral and not all that usable (e.g. the Color app that got $41M in investments) - then, only then, will you have some chance of success.
In short, it's all about execution, and most people think it's simple.
While you're saying all these things are bullshit, quite a few people made billions and thousands if not tens of thousands made millions. Businesses (e.g. Nokia, Borders) that can't follow are seeing a hit in real revenues, people are fired, and whole companies are going belly up.
You may think all these are bullshit, but to the investors, entrepreneurs and all related newly minted rich; or the newly fired people from older companies - the effects are very real.
Maybe if you see your personal wealth as an optimization problem, and thus if you're doing consumer software - things like traction, user experience, virality as optimization problems - you'll begin to appreciate the complexities inherent in building successful products (which can look deceptively simple, but the reasoning behind something simple can be very complicated) and by extension, companies that actually work well instead of "work" like a Dilbert comic strip.
I can understand the left-leaning and socialists among Slashdotters will hate what I just said. But at the end of the day, whatever technological and scientific advance you or I made have to serve human interests. You can't say "I like to do [math|quantum mechanics|machine learning|art|product design|rockets|science fiction|...] because it's fun" without "I".
But you need to take the Shadowdancer prestige class to Hide in Plain Sight.
They should go Dr. Evil and demand one million dollars *checks back with Number 2*, sorry, one hundred billion dollars.
Now if the politicians that decided to go to war were first required to slit the throats a typical 5 person enemy family - just maybe there would be fewer conflicts.
Why do you think the average politician wouldn't find killing innocent people awesome?
It doesn't work like that. Assuming both sides are highly competent, securing something is a fundamentally harder problem than breaking in. To break in, you only need to figure out one vulnerability. To secure something, you need to make sure every component - as big as a data center and as small as every single instruction sent to the CPUs - in your system, is invulnerable. Hiring hackers would only help if the engineering team is highly incompetent to start with (like, they aren't even aware of basic things like why strcpy() to a fixed buffer can be a very bad idea).
Half Life 2 doesn't have a emotionally deep backstory anyway - you get dropped into a situation and you kill monsters. Your character doesn't even get to say a word about all the crazy things happening around him. A "Please, somebody help" in Half Life 2 doesn't give the same kind of feeling as in the real world - all it does is telling you that something dangerous is approaching, ready your crowbar.
n/t
Because we're not powerful enough to control and manipulate the laws of physics, and mathematics, yet?
If you think about it.. most people's image of God is quite a bit less powerful than what's needed to fit their definitions.
I used to work for a major open source project at home for 2 years... it felt awesome for the first 6 months, but after that I felt terrible being at home alone all day long, every day. I have a few other friends who experienced something like that, working at home for large tech companies for various reasons - it's awesome for the first few months, but you'll feel really bad after a while.
It doesn't even take 20 engineers over 3 years to make such a mistake. It only takes one - even you can and will do it. Just imagine yourself doing simple addition with numbers in the range [0, 10] every day - and you do 1000 such stupid math questions on a good day and 10000 during crunch time. And you keep doing that for 3 years. There has to be one day, you do one of these additions wrong - not because you're bad at maths - but because you're a human. I understand perfectly that you'll use an ORM or at least SQL bind, or whatever method you prefer to prevent SQL injections... but just as it's possible to leak memory in Java or any GC language, you're bound to find an uncommon or plain stupid way to make a mistake after a while.
The thing is, if you have 100 engineers working on your code, and they write or modify 200 lines of code every day - it's very hard to guarantee there's not a single line of vulnerable SQL code written over 3 years. It only takes one mistake to get your server compromised.
Just in case you're not the guy who pays the bills of a company... H1Bs are fucking expensive, ok?
That has already happened, at least on the mobile front. Take a look at PhoneGap.
You can expect the APIs on this kind of thing to become standardized in a few years.
You're not getting what I'm saying. Whether something is in a bunch of draft standards or not.. is of academic interest to some people only. If you're actually coding something, you don't care - you can try to stick to the "standard" way but it will always breaks at some point. If you don't believe me, just look at a bug tracker in any popular FOSS web project - jQuery, extJS, jQ Mobile, CKEditor, etc. etc. If you want a specific example, read jQuery Mobile's fastclick branch, read the code and the commit log and see what the clusterfuck it is to simply handle "tap" events in mobile, "standard compliant" browsers.
And with the malleable nature of HTML5 right now... a bunch of usable features that breaks all the time in practice and has to be tested on different browsers on a case-by-case basis, is all what it means to a software developer. I guess what you're focusing on is the academic kind of correctness - whether W3C published it or not. Having W3C and WHATWG publish it has its uses... but at the end of the day, unless you're someone working at W3C, it doesn't really matter for you.
No. In common usage means when you actually go and code web-related projects like jQuery Mobile and CKEditor. When you're actually coding anything non-trivial for a few browsers, you'll find that the standards don't really work perfectly and that 100% rating on ACID3 is meaningless. There're always minute differences between browser implementations even though they all tell you they support X.
IE9's support for newer features is poor - that's a fact. In none of my previous posts have I even mentioned Microsoft. I mean.. what the heck is happening?
And that's why I said, "in common usage". Nobody cares what the committees say in practice. If all commonly used browsers support WebGL to some degree, then it's a "standard", and people will use "HTML5" as the buzzword. Fact is, a lot of things that are included now in HTML5 (e.g. web workers) were not part of what the committees published some time before, and HTML5 is still a work-in-progress. So the standard right now is still a very malleable thing.
HTML5 is still a draft standard and in common usage it usually refers to a bunch of stuff like an in-browser video codec, WebGL, DOM data storage, canvas, geo location data support, etc. - almost all of which are not uniformly supported across all "HTML5" browsers - and that's especially true for IE9.
Agreed... if you looked at the people inside the Fukushima plant, which was swept by the tsunami; verses people outside the Fukushima plant who're also swept by the tsunami - those inside of the nuclear plant are actually MUCH MORE likely to make it out alive. And that's a 40-year-old plant not designed to handle earthquakes and tsunamis at the same time. That's actually quite amazingly robust.
That was the a century ago when people hadn't discovered how to step up and step down DC voltages. There're still problems with transmitting high voltage AC across long distances - many long distance runs are actually HVDC now.
Ok, let's say you're doing some kind of charity project like the OLPC, and you seriously need money to move your project forward, and you're just a MIT professor who'd been minding his research, and published a few books, for over 40 years.
And Qadaffi, a leader of some African country which just happens to be in your target market, donates money to you so you can move your project forward. You've never been a diplomat so you don't really know what Qadaffi has been up to, but it's good money and probably some goodwill with a non-small African country. All you know is you can use that money to help a bunch of poor kids in Africa.
Now, who wouldn't accept that money?! Seriously, get a grip. An MIT professor isn't some kind of all-knowing god.
Now that you have criminals going to the Internet and disclosing what they're doing... so you can round them up before they commit crimes. And you wanna stop that? Seriously?
A trillion positrons is still a very microscopic amount of particles and mass when macro phenomenons (i.e. blow things up) are concerned. You probably wouldn't feel anything if all that was dumped onto your tongue.
Why do you want yet another currency backed by banksters?