A true programmer in my opinion is somebody who LIKES to learn and solve problems.
This is clearly the most insightful thing anyone has said in this entire discussion.
In fact, the only time it changes is when you solve problems all day everyday for 40+ hours per week for a few years. Then you start to use your downtime for different pursuits.
That said, the last time I was between jobs was 4 years ago and I spent 3 months off. For the first month I did nothing work related but by the second two I was suffering withdrawal symptoms and started a few side projects to keep my mind going.
Programmers only improve with practice and writing simply, logical code is damn good practice.
It's far more important that I know the performance quirks of my language of choice -- for instance, string interpolation is faster than any sort of string concatenator, which is faster than straight-up string concatenation ('foo' + 'bar').
Remember that no language is used forever. Whilst it is important that you know your specialist language inside out it also pays to have an excellent knowledge of the generic principles of coding so that when your specialist language becomes obsolete you are not left behind.
Personally I want to choose when I retire, not have my retirement date forced on me. Programming is already a very ageist career when you have a wide variety of transferable skills, the last thing you want to do is also have an overly specialised skill set that is losing relevance.
Bear in mind as well that most contract with artists were sign when 50 years was the law so the contract will state they get royalties for 50 years. The extra 20 years royalties is going straight to the label in most cases and the artist won't see a penny.
All opting out means legally is that the particular spammer who you opted out from is not allowed to send you any more email. They are however allowed to sell your email address on as a known active account to every other spammer they have a relationship with.
Yes, opting out is the quickest way to get your email address circulated to as wider list of spammers as possible and flagged as a confirmed and current email address.
At my university the problem was that students would take the book out at the start of the year, then renew it continually until someone else put in a request. At that point they would simply stop renewing it then pay the fine when they returned it at the end of the year. This was usually cheaper than buying the book in question.
Most universities do not have enough money to but one copy of each text book for every student on a particular course in a single year. Certainly not when it comes to text books for courses like law when the text books themselves are updated at least every other year.
My university also had a book shop on campus that had a special relationship with the Uni. This meant your course texts were always in stock at a cheaper rate but the library always lacked a decent copy for at least a year after a book was updated.
In the end, it's attitudes like yours that allow totalitarian and anti-democratic regimes to flourish.
Why do you say that? All I was doing was pointing out the correct legal status of the matter. This does mean I agree with the plainly ridiculous laws in question.
So if some American guy decides to go to that country and smuggle out as many children from that group as possible in order to save their lives, you would condemn him for breaking the law? You would say he deserves to be executed or imprisoned for life for what he did?
Of course not. I would suggest that for him to back there afterwards on holiday would be pretty stupid and the US state department could do nothing about said country imprisoning him.
I am not arguing for this plainly ridiculous Thai law. I was just pointing out that the original poster who talked about going to Thailand to cause a load of bad PR for the Thai government when he was arrested was being naive if he thought the US state department would rescue him.
Remember: No matter how ridiculous another countries laws are, you are still bound by them if you visit.
No, as I said in my post you clearly did not read properly I said it as highly unlikely. I said you would be pretty stupid to go to Thailand yourself after doing something that may be against their law.
Learn to read, you will find it helps you in later life.
You do realise you are subject to other countries laws right? And other countries can pass whatever laws they choose.
It is quite possible the law Thailand has against insulting their monarch applies to people in other countries. Thailand could then apply to extradite you to their country to face trial. In this case extradition would be unlikely but if you are stupid enough to rock up in their country of you own accord there is nothing the US State department can do apart from provide you a lawyer.
A good example is Spain. According to Spanish law if you kill a Spanish citizen then that is a crime under their law even if you committed the offence in a country where murder was legal. This also applies to torture. Their are currently investigating whether to prosecute certain members of the US military who were involved in Guantanamo Bay. If successful this would make it awkward for the people involved to travel to anywhere in Europe since they may then be extradited to Spain to face trial.
Real people don't call them "bobbies". They're coppers, plod, filth, pigs, old Bill and on those rare occasions you actually need their help, it does not really matter since they do not turn up.
I will be sticking with Windows Mobile for the foreseeable future since there phones have an application built in that allows exactly this tethering. As a long term Linux user I am a little disappointed but as I have mentioned on slashdot before this is a killer application for me that I cannot live without.
I also use my laptop as a linux based router so I pass an entire networks internet traffic through my Windows mobile phone when I have no other net connection available. I have free data on my phone so this does not cost me a penny providing I do not do it often enough to overrun my phone companies fair usage policy.
I do find it hard to believe that neither Apple or Google are willing to stand up to the telephone companies and provide functionality that their main competitor HTC already builds in to their phones using Windows Mobile.
Recent research actually shows that mental faculties begin to decline as early in life as the 20's. Kids don't seem sharper, they ARE sharper. That isn't to say that there isn't more to being a good employee or that older individuals don't have their own advantages but there is a basis for IT discrimination based on age.
Unfortunately a lot of young, sharp IT geeks are also a pain in the arse with no social skills and a superiority complex as large as planet. Older IT workers generally have a far more mature attitude.
The simple fact is that IT skills can be trained to almost anyone, but certain things you only gain with the benefit of a few more years on this planet.
This is a brilliant idea. It enables the same file to played ubiquitiously in a lower format version but those players that support the lossless version get the full benefit. With the advent of 100Gb MP3 players having a few redundant megabytes in each file is pretty irrelevant when it enables you to easily throw files on and off your device. I have 3 computers and regularly use my MP3 player to transfer music between them.
A few years sgo this would have made no sense whatsoever but now that storage is cheap it makes perfect sense.
My problem was not getting my laptop to connect to the net while in windows, it was how get the laptop to behave as a router between small lan and the internet. I am currently posting this from a desktop machine on that LAN while I wait for my Xbox360 to update in the other room. All my internet traffic is being routed through that phone. This is what I could only get working under Linux on the laptop. I also trust IPTables more in its abilities to bahave as a gateway than I do windows firewall.
As soon as I bought the phone I switched onto a much cheaper data and phone package as it was a sim only deal. This halfed my mothly bill and came with free unlimited data. This lets me net and think nothing of downloading a few hundred megabytes over the weekend. Some weekends I probably come closer to a gigabyte.
I am posting this from my laptop tethered to a HTC Tytn ii. It is getting a bit old now since I bought when it first came out. I am on an unlimited data contract with a fair usage policy but I have never hit my cap yet.
I have been getting a new phone for a month or so and have strongly considered an iphone now it has 3G support. The only issue is I do not use mobile broadband often enough to get a separate dongle for my laptop. About once a month I go away and have to rely on it though so it is very important to me.
If I could hook and iphone up to my PC via a USB cable and use it as a modem like I am currently doing with my HTC the debate would end, I would buy one instead of the HTC Touch HD I am considering.
Hopefully Apple will realise people like me exist and recognise this as a draw to the iphone. They entered the mobile market with the promise of not being in the Telco's pocket so they should be enabling this functionality without someone trying to hack it. Even if they just let me enable it and did not brick my phone for doing so I would be content.
I am currently posting this under Linux so that when I get where I am going I plug my laptop into the network, enable IP routing and route all the traffic through my windows mobile device. Since I only do this for one weekend in four I get away with it from a fair usage point of view. I could not get this working when I boot my laptop into Windows XP but that only happens once in a blue moon anyway.
I also bought my current phone for cash as I did not want to be tied to a particular network. If Apple let me use an iphone how I want I will probably buy one of those for cash too and list my HTC on ebay. If they force me to get an additional dongle and mobile broadband account to get this working I will probably stick with Windows Mobile or go for Android in a few months.
Wow, a new sensible reply to a comment I had long since forgotten:)
Just thought I would mention the servers in question are in a datacentre with 3 levels of UPS redundancy. Including one of ours in the cage with them. This is necessary since they host government data and we got audited when we were shortlisted for the contract. This included them sending out some experts to inspect the datacentre. They even went so far as to get the datacentre staff to pull up a few floor tiles so they could inspect the underfloor cable routing to our cage.
Not sure what you mean by stable software, are you referring to Ext4? The point of my post was to say I would NEVER use it until they changed this "feature". Even if they do change it I am not likely to migrate any servers to Ext4 in the next 2 or 3 years. I am not likely to deploy new servers using it for a similar length of time.
I generally follow the "If it is not broken, do not fix it rule" very strictly.
Last year I managed 99.9999% uptime, so I think I am ok. The contract in question stipulates 99.999% uptime but that is too easy. Please not these uptime figures are for the entire web application. I think the database servers actually hit the big 100% since I cannot remember any issues since some time in 2007. I could look in our monitoring data but I am on a train at the moment and can not be bothered connecting to our office VPN over a sketchy mobile broadband connection.
I love their comment that they never would have guess they could write an app to big for google.
Did they really never guess that writing an application that allowed you to perform one of the primary functions for a mobile phone that is usually chargeable would cause problems if it was free. The mobile networks would have started moaning at google immediately and since Google are currently trying to get them to sign up to android they were going to have to cave in.
Slashdot Mirror
Any chance of an explanation as to why?
Without explaining yourself your reasoning your post is pretty empty.
A true programmer in my opinion is somebody who LIKES to learn and solve problems.
This is clearly the most insightful thing anyone has said in this entire discussion.
In fact, the only time it changes is when you solve problems all day everyday for 40+ hours per week for a few years. Then you start to use your downtime for different pursuits.
That said, the last time I was between jobs was 4 years ago and I spent 3 months off. For the first month I did nothing work related but by the second two I was suffering withdrawal symptoms and started a few side projects to keep my mind going.
Why?
To make you a better developer.
Programmers only improve with practice and writing simply, logical code is damn good practice.
It's far more important that I know the performance quirks of my language of choice -- for instance, string interpolation is faster than any sort of string concatenator, which is faster than straight-up string concatenation ('foo' + 'bar').
Remember that no language is used forever. Whilst it is important that you know your specialist language inside out it also pays to have an excellent knowledge of the generic principles of coding so that when your specialist language becomes obsolete you are not left behind.
Personally I want to choose when I retire, not have my retirement date forced on me. Programming is already a very ageist career when you have a wide variety of transferable skills, the last thing you want to do is also have an overly specialised skill set that is losing relevance.
Bear in mind as well that most contract with artists were sign when 50 years was the law so the contract will state they get royalties for 50 years. The extra 20 years royalties is going straight to the label in most cases and the artist won't see a penny.
All opting out means legally is that the particular spammer who you opted out from is not allowed to send you any more email. They are however allowed to sell your email address on as a known active account to every other spammer they have a relationship with.
Yes, opting out is the quickest way to get your email address circulated to as wider list of spammers as possible and flagged as a confirmed and current email address.
At my university the problem was that students would take the book out at the start of the year, then renew it continually until someone else put in a request. At that point they would simply stop renewing it then pay the fine when they returned it at the end of the year. This was usually cheaper than buying the book in question.
Most universities do not have enough money to but one copy of each text book for every student on a particular course in a single year. Certainly not when it comes to text books for courses like law when the text books themselves are updated at least every other year.
My university also had a book shop on campus that had a special relationship with the Uni. This meant your course texts were always in stock at a cheaper rate but the library always lacked a decent copy for at least a year after a book was updated.
I dunno...with a name like Aneesh Chopra, I gotta think he'll help promote more H-1B visas..
So because he is of Indian descent he must have a particular point of view? There is a name for that sort of prejudgement: Racism.
Sorry, that should have read:
This does NOT mean I agree with the plainly ridiculous laws in question.
In the end, it's attitudes like yours that allow totalitarian and anti-democratic regimes to flourish.
Why do you say that? All I was doing was pointing out the correct legal status of the matter. This does mean I agree with the plainly ridiculous laws in question.
So if some American guy decides to go to that country and smuggle out as many children from that group as possible in order to save their lives, you would condemn him for breaking the law? You would say he deserves to be executed or imprisoned for life for what he did?
Of course not. I would suggest that for him to back there afterwards on holiday would be pretty stupid and the US state department could do nothing about said country imprisoning him.
I am not arguing for this plainly ridiculous Thai law. I was just pointing out that the original poster who talked about going to Thailand to cause a load of bad PR for the Thai government when he was arrested was being naive if he thought the US state department would rescue him.
Remember: No matter how ridiculous another countries laws are, you are still bound by them if you visit.
No, as I said in my post you clearly did not read properly I said it as highly unlikely. I said you would be pretty stupid to go to Thailand yourself after doing something that may be against their law.
Learn to read, you will find it helps you in later life.
You do realise you are subject to other countries laws right? And other countries can pass whatever laws they choose.
It is quite possible the law Thailand has against insulting their monarch applies to people in other countries. Thailand could then apply to extradite you to their country to face trial. In this case extradition would be unlikely but if you are stupid enough to rock up in their country of you own accord there is nothing the US State department can do apart from provide you a lawyer.
A good example is Spain. According to Spanish law if you kill a Spanish citizen then that is a crime under their law even if you committed the offence in a country where murder was legal. This also applies to torture. Their are currently investigating whether to prosecute certain members of the US military who were involved in Guantanamo Bay. If successful this would make it awkward for the people involved to travel to anywhere in Europe since they may then be extradited to Spain to face trial.
Does the anonymous reader work for AT&T, Microsoft or any other of the companies currently trying to run a smear campaign against Google?
Unfortunately your right about the GUI.
I generally use VLC when I need to throw a DVD player on a machine. On my own machines though I use Windows Media player as I prefer the interface.
Mind you, most of the time I use Linux so I use Xine :)
Real people don't call them "bobbies". They're coppers, plod, filth, pigs, old Bill and on those rare occasions you actually need their help, it does not really matter since they do not turn up.
(There we go, fixed that typo for you)
I will be sticking with Windows Mobile for the foreseeable future since there phones have an application built in that allows exactly this tethering. As a long term Linux user I am a little disappointed but as I have mentioned on slashdot before this is a killer application for me that I cannot live without.
I also use my laptop as a linux based router so I pass an entire networks internet traffic through my Windows mobile phone when I have no other net connection available. I have free data on my phone so this does not cost me a penny providing I do not do it often enough to overrun my phone companies fair usage policy.
I do find it hard to believe that neither Apple or Google are willing to stand up to the telephone companies and provide functionality that their main competitor HTC already builds in to their phones using Windows Mobile.
Maybe Microsoft are not so bad after all :)
Recent research actually shows that mental faculties begin to decline as early in life as the 20's. Kids don't seem sharper, they ARE sharper. That isn't to say that there isn't more to being a good employee or that older individuals don't have their own advantages but there is a basis for IT discrimination based on age.
Unfortunately a lot of young, sharp IT geeks are also a pain in the arse with no social skills and a superiority complex as large as planet. Older IT workers generally have a far more mature attitude.
The simple fact is that IT skills can be trained to almost anyone, but certain things you only gain with the benefit of a few more years on this planet.
This is a brilliant idea. It enables the same file to played ubiquitiously in a lower format version but those players that support the lossless version get the full benefit. With the advent of 100Gb MP3 players having a few redundant megabytes in each file is pretty irrelevant when it enables you to easily throw files on and off your device. I have 3 computers and regularly use my MP3 player to transfer music between them.
A few years sgo this would have made no sense whatsoever but now that storage is cheap it makes perfect sense.
My problem was not getting my laptop to connect to the net while in windows, it was how get the laptop to behave as a router between small lan and the internet. I am currently posting this from a desktop machine on that LAN while I wait for my Xbox360 to update in the other room. All my internet traffic is being routed through that phone. This is what I could only get working under Linux on the laptop. I also trust IPTables more in its abilities to bahave as a gateway than I do windows firewall.
As soon as I bought the phone I switched onto a much cheaper data and phone package as it was a sim only deal. This halfed my mothly bill and came with free unlimited data. This lets me net and think nothing of downloading a few hundred megabytes over the weekend. Some weekends I probably come closer to a gigabyte.
I am posting this from my laptop tethered to a HTC Tytn ii. It is getting a bit old now since I bought when it first came out. I am on an unlimited data contract with a fair usage policy but I have never hit my cap yet.
I have been getting a new phone for a month or so and have strongly considered an iphone now it has 3G support. The only issue is I do not use mobile broadband often enough to get a separate dongle for my laptop. About once a month I go away and have to rely on it though so it is very important to me.
If I could hook and iphone up to my PC via a USB cable and use it as a modem like I am currently doing with my HTC the debate would end, I would buy one instead of the HTC Touch HD I am considering.
Hopefully Apple will realise people like me exist and recognise this as a draw to the iphone. They entered the mobile market with the promise of not being in the Telco's pocket so they should be enabling this functionality without someone trying to hack it. Even if they just let me enable it and did not brick my phone for doing so I would be content.
I am currently posting this under Linux so that when I get where I am going I plug my laptop into the network, enable IP routing and route all the traffic through my windows mobile device. Since I only do this for one weekend in four I get away with it from a fair usage point of view. I could not get this working when I boot my laptop into Windows XP but that only happens once in a blue moon anyway.
I also bought my current phone for cash as I did not want to be tied to a particular network. If Apple let me use an iphone how I want I will probably buy one of those for cash too and list my HTC on ebay. If they force me to get an additional dongle and mobile broadband account to get this working I will probably stick with Windows Mobile or go for Android in a few months.
Wow, a new sensible reply to a comment I had long since forgotten :)
Just thought I would mention the servers in question are in a datacentre with 3 levels of UPS redundancy. Including one of ours in the cage with them. This is necessary since they host government data and we got audited when we were shortlisted for the contract. This included them sending out some experts to inspect the datacentre. They even went so far as to get the datacentre staff to pull up a few floor tiles so they could inspect the underfloor cable routing to our cage.
Not sure what you mean by stable software, are you referring to Ext4? The point of my post was to say I would NEVER use it until they changed this "feature". Even if they do change it I am not likely to migrate any servers to Ext4 in the next 2 or 3 years. I am not likely to deploy new servers using it for a similar length of time.
I generally follow the "If it is not broken, do not fix it rule" very strictly.
Last year I managed 99.9999% uptime, so I think I am ok. The contract in question stipulates 99.999% uptime but that is too easy. Please not these uptime figures are for the entire web application. I think the database servers actually hit the big 100% since I cannot remember any issues since some time in 2007. I could look in our monitoring data but I am on a train at the moment and can not be bothered connecting to our office VPN over a sketchy mobile broadband connection.
I changed companies the next year.
Do you think your new one is any better?
Remember the insurance company motto: Whatever they say, we don't pay!
Thats assuming your model plane could fly in the rarefied atmosphere.
First rate opponents usually have nukes, so we don't fight them.
I love their comment that they never would have guess they could write an app to big for google.
Did they really never guess that writing an application that allowed you to perform one of the primary functions for a mobile phone that is usually chargeable would cause problems if it was free. The mobile networks would have started moaning at google immediately and since Google are currently trying to get them to sign up to android they were going to have to cave in.