I suggest however, that increases in our relative standard of living and the fact that our purchasing power has remained reasonably constant over the past three decades would suggest that we're not actually all secretly bankrupt, or, if we are, then the whole world is secretly bankrupt with us.
Currency inflation isn't directly related to economic growth; they can run together, but it's not required. Currency inflates when the money supply outstrips the supply of goods, so consumers bid up the prices of goods. Obviiously things like the multiplier effect, which is how the banks "create" money (you give them money, and they give the same money to someone else, but you still have access to it so there is effectively twice as much money, etc) can increase the money supply, and thus cause inflation.
But it can also work in reverse, when the money supply shrinks and causes currency deflation...And this is absolutely possible, like when the gp poster and his ilk pull all their money out of banks to hide it under their beds. The reason nations don't usually seek this is because when the value of your currency increases, it pretty much ends your foreign trade because no one can afford to buy your goods. If an american made car cost 20,000 dollars, and a dollar was worth.25 euros, the demand for american cars would increase overseas. Conversely, if the dollar was worth 25 euros, then no one in their right mind would buy an american car...Once you add the tariffs, the price would make it unthinkable.
Also, if the supply of goods increase, the amount of money needed to buy them will decrease (assuming constant demand, which is probably a bad assumption, but what the hell), leading to deflation.
The problem with "Wealth as a Herd of Goats" is when no one wants to eat goat. The "other" multiplier, which is a driver of cash velocity, is when you're building up your goat herd, you're buying goat chow, and goat supply, and then you're paying a butcher, and you're paying people to market your goat, and the supermarket is paying people to put it on shelves and take money from goat consumers, etc.
That is where wealth comes from. Not from a thing; that thing is worthless without demand. I once heard an environmentalist say, "What do you think the last barrel of oil will cost?" and I thought the answer was obvious: "Nothing." It's not like the demand for oil will remain constant as the supply dwindles and the price skyrockets; chances are we'll never see the last barrel, because we'll have long since passed the point where it makes economic sense to use oil at all.
Likewise with most resources; in the long run resource prices rise and fall, because the demand doesn't remain constant. If the price goes too high, alternatives become economical, and the demand drops off. If we had a massive outbreak of bird flu and mad cow, then your goats would see a market surge because of the scarcity of other meats.
Generally, the economy works better when money circulates...When it has "velocity", which is another one of those words like "multiplier" which I'm going to assume you understand. By dumping surplus money into commodities rather than banks, you're effectively hiding your money under your bed, and dampening the flow of money through the economy. People did this for a long time until a smart guy named Adam Smith pointed out that hoarding gold didn't make anyone especially wealthy; it was trade that built wealth, and that meant the movement of money and goods.
So that's why banks exist, and why we allow things like the multiplier effect to run our economy. The granddaddy of all multipliers (the Fed) has been active for the past few weeks, trying to pump some money into the economy. Bush is hedging his bets, and backing Keynes at the same time with a stimulus package. Historically, these actions have added velocity to currency, and fast currency tends to stimulate the economy.
The reason for the FDIC, and SEC, and Social Security and Welfare, and every other similar system is to basically keep the money in people's pockets. This is important for the reasons above; cash circulating through the economy creates jobs and stimulates the economy. A bunch of people losing all their money (for example, when a bank fails) means you have a bunch of people who suddenly can't buy groceries. Grocery stores start laying people off, because they have to cut costs, which means MORE people can't afford groceries, and so forth. People like you pull their money in and convert it to commodities, instead of putting it into banks, which means banks can't make loans to support people who are trying to start businesses or buy houses, which, again, slows the economy and costs people their jobs.
Basically your thoughts on this stuff fly in the face of all mainstream economic thought for the last several hundred years. I'm assuming you're a Ron Paul guy, because echoing his "economic" beliefs, and Gosh, we'd sure like to move back to the gold standard. I'd almost like to see him get elected, just out of academic interest in the economic chaos that would ensue.
Not sure how that matters...I mean, sure an engineer could build a bomb, but a good actor could sneak it into position to do the most damage. A good psychologist could work out what the "best" target would be in terms of the impact on the will of the opposition. A good orator wouldn't even need a bomb; they'd just start a jihad, and let other people build the bombs. If you have any skill at all, there is a place to put it to work.
It's very typical of an engineering mindset to think of their skillset as the only useful skillset, but that is seldom actually the case.
Yea, it's just not that hard to get. I remember all the hoopla in the press about it, pre-Iraq, and I was just baffled. If he'd been getting enriched uranium, that would be a possible justification, but yellowcake? Even relatively cheap gas centrifuges are hard to make, and harder to hide.
Dude...Did you read the gp post? We're not talking about feeding it to kids, we're talking about whether or not its a good justification to go to war...It's not.
No, I wouldn't want to snack on it, but that's true of a lot of things.
I'll admit it's pedantic, but I just don't see a fission bomb that uses fusion to increase its yield as a fusion bomb. I'm not saying that fusion doesn't occur because it obviously does, but the H bomb is more of a clever way to get higher yields out of lower quantities of fissionables than it is a pure fusion bomb.
It's not a huge deal with me, though it obviously is with everyone else here, but H-bomb fusion isn't at all practical for a power source at this time. It's something we can take advantage of after we kick off a fission reaction, but it's not something we can harvest in a meaningful way, or duplicate without intending the reaction to run away.
Not quite the same thing, since it's all powered by a fission reaction...An H-Bomb would be all H and no bomb without a nice chunk of Uranium...Just as well for us, because if the military could churn out nuclear bombs that required no uranium, and produced little fallout, we'd see a hell of a lot more being used.
In this case, I'd be surprised if we saw a fusion bomb before a fusion power plant...To get fusion requires such a large input of power...Even when(if) they get it to a point where it's possible to get more power out of it than it requires to maintain the reaction, it will happen in a lab long before it happens in a mobile device.
OT but no one in their right mind would think that getting yellowcake or any other unprocessed uranium is much threat...The big hurdle with bombs and power plants is refining the stuff, which is much much much more difficult than refining a normal metal. But yea, most laymen think you just shovel yellowcake into a reactor and it spits out power, or whack it with a shovel and get a couple of megatons of boom.
I actually stepped on a hot one once...Not electric hot, but melt your shoes hot...I thought I'd stepped in gum for a minute, until I saw the melted tread on my shoe. On another occasion I was walking down town and an electrical transformer blew out, and flipped half a dozen manhole covers out of their sockets...I wasn't right there, but I was close enough to hear it, and see the covers bouncing around. They didn't go very high, but it was still pretty alarming.
You just get used to it. I think Dennis Leary said it best:
Hey! I just moved here four years ago, and I'm not leaving, because this is the most exciting place in the world to live. Oh yeah! Yeah! There are so many ways to die in New York City, come on! Race riots, drive by shootings, subway crashes, construction cranes collapsing on the sidewalks, manhole covers blowing up, asbestos shooting into the sky.
We had a subway crash here a couple of years ago. Five people died. The next day they found the driver was drunk and hooked on crack. Folks, this makes Disneyland look like a fucking bike ride, doesn't it? "Your driver today is Edward. He's drunk and hooked on crack. The man sitting next to you has a loaded nine-millimeter. Good luck, folks!" "Honey, get the camera! This is gonna be fucking great!"
Yeah, I love living in New York, man, and people who live in New York, we wear that fact like a badge right on our sleeve because we know that fact impresses everybody! "I was in Vietnam." "So what? I live in New York!" "Really?"
It's New York...Your average New Yorker, on plugging in a Geiger counter that immediately redlined and then exploded would say, "Eh, I figyaed as much." They know it's hazardous to live there, they take a weird sort of pride in it. I moved from New York to Georgia in 2002, and people were way more freaked out about 9/11 in Georgia than they were in New York...The city still had that "burnt tire" smell, but otherwise things were back to normal.
Not to say there weren't some deep fricking scars, but you can't live there and be that high strung about environmental safety issues; the first day you come home, take off your white shirt and your white undershirt, and notice that, while they were the same color when you put them on, one of them is now a sort of stinky grey...You have to accept it and move on, or you will lose your fricking mind.
From TFA, the rationale is because they're worried that a bunch of shoddy devices will throw tons of false positives, and cause havok amongst emergency responders who would have to run around town constantly trying to weed out false leads.
Frankly, it's crap. I seriously doubt as many people as they're representing are going to be buying these things; the vast majority will be installing them indoors, where they'll be lucky to detect ANYTHING, and the shoddy ones will tend to go off for crap that would set off your smoke alarm...I used to have a CO detector near my kitchen...It's somewhere in my backyard now, after the 10th time it went off when I dumped some liquor in a skillet to deglaze it.
People may buy this stuff, but the vast majority won't, and the ones that do are almost MORE likely to view an alarm as a false positive than the police themselves. New Yorkers are tough bastards. They'll piss and moan, but they're not super-hazard conscious...You can't be, and live in the City all the time, because you're far more likely to be killed by a manhole or a cracked out subway driver than any terrorist.
Yea, but the problem comes up when you have a programmer doing the programming and a graphic designer doing the web design. If your HTML is all embedded in the Perl, it's extremely difficult to update, whereas if there is some php in the HTML, you can still pop the file open in the WYSIWYG of your choice and play with the HTML.
Even trivial UI changes are a bear when all the HTML is embedded in code, be it perl, java,.net, whatever...Hell, you can embed the HTML with php if you want to! It's just not a good practice.
So it's a virtue to be programming in a half a dozen different languages? Or to force an accomplished programmer to switch to a different language for no good reason? Sure, he should be able to pick it up, but there is a learning curve, and lingering inefficiency issues that will last for a while.
I recently had a throwdown regarding this because one of my coworkers was working on a project, and I flat refused to help him in his chosen language. That language? VB6.
Now I used to program in that...thing...and when.Net came out, I purged it from my memory banks. I am not going back, not for anything. Does that make me weak, to refuse to dive back into an obsolete language in order to generate a new application?
It's one thing to be flexible and open to new ideas, and dedicated to improving your skillset, but it's entirely different to be running around programming in random different languages for no compelling reason. One of the negatives in TFA was that if you used perl to sub for a shell script, you'd take an efficiency hit...This after he said you should never use it at all where efficiency was an issue because it's interpreted! The reason to use perl instead of a shell script is because perl will work in any shell...If you need performance you shouldn't be using it anyway.
In short, using a different tool for every job is only useful if it's not more efficient in the long run to do the job with the tool at hand. If I need to tighten a bolt, I could go to the hardware store and get a socket set that will fit that bolt, or I could use the crescent wrench that's sitting 5 feet away. The sockets would do the job a hell of a lot faster...But it would take longer to get them than it would to just use the wrench.
Most unpleasant TO YOU. You may think you're the final arbiter of what everyone likes to do, but I'm fairly sure that this isn't the case.
If you take into consideration the relative qualifications for a position, you will find that jobs that are less pleasant, whether because they require more work, more hours, more stress, something disgusting, whatever, are better compensated than others requiring the same qualifications.
The only exceptions to this rule are those jobs that are taken with the understanding that working them is a requirement to moving up to a more desirable position.
Most pleasant to you. I admit I enjoy code a lot more than manual labor. But I'm not going to pretend like the industry isn't stressful. I get no exercise, I get to work weekends and nights sometimes. Contrast that with someone else who has a less stressful deskjob; who never has to work overtime, and never has to do anything especially difficult. Are they paid as well as you?
Any kind of white collar, intellectual job has a high barrier of entry built right in. You have to be smart, you have to be educated. I've known tenured university professors who had some of the cushiest jobs on the planet, and made 6 figure salaries for teaching one or two classes a semester. I think we all want that job; can't be fired, make good money, etc, etc. You think that job is easy to get?
Yea, manual labor is cheap; this is not a newsflash. The reason for it is anyone can do it. You need a bare minimum of qualifications. So we get large populations of migrant workers who are willing to do the work, and the price stays nice and low.
Because you like to code you find it enjoyable. Fine. I'm happy you've got a niche. But it's difficult and demanding work, which is why we're well paid. But there are a lot of people out there who want to be well paid too, and they're willing to do work that they do not enjoy for a nice salary. And if it takes two of them to do your job, that's only good for you if you don't cost more than two of them.
The fact that you enjoy certain types of work and not others has no bearing on whether or not most people find them enjoyable. In my experience, most people would rather take their eyes out with a fork than do the kind of work you do for a living.
Actually, yes. High pay is almost always high because of some factors that make the job less enjoyable. If anyone could do the job, it would be low paying. If you're looking for a high paying job where you don't have to work long hours or have crazy stress, or have a ton of education, or have to pay two decades of dues, or publish, publish, publish...I don't know what to tell you. They just don't exist. If you want more time with your family, more vacation, less stress, you're going to make less money. Family has a high opportunity cost;)
There are plenty of computer jobs out there. You may not be working for IBM, making 80,000 dollars a year. When I got sick of the crap, I moved to an area where the cost of living is fantastically lower(5 bedroom, 4 baths for under 1000.00 a month), and took a job that pays less in dollars than the one I had straight out of college. I have a nice house, enough money where I can save and still not to have to worry about bills every month, and I usually don't have to work overtime. I can take a 2 hour lunch and go play with my kid.
I'm not going to be a CIO before I'm 40, but that's not what I'm in it for. Figure out what your priorities are, and find a job that lets you meet them.
The only thing a union is likely to do in this situation is force the work overseas.
If IBM can't find workers for what they're offering, they'll have to raise their salaries. If they can, then the work isn't worth as much as people thought it was.
The only thing I've ever see a union do well is force out people who don't belong to that union.
Is someone making them work there? They're salaried workers, working in a reasonably high-paying field. Yea, there is stress, yea there are long hours...What's your point?
If they don't like the pay, they should do something else for a living.
I went from 1-35 in about 2 days of play time. I went from 35-45 in about 18 hours. I think my previous best-to-60 was about 8 days...If I finish leveling my current character to 60, I think I'll be able to pull it off in 5 or 6.
When you complete a yellow or orange quest at level 35 and get 4.5k experience, you'll understand the level of difference. Where you used to hit all the zones in your level range, and then ground a level or two to get to the next set of zones...Yea, forget about that. You can skip all the annoying quests in every zone and grind less at the same time.
It's definitely a big difference. I was pretty burned out on WoW, but the sense of blazing fast progression is seductive, and there is none of that "almost to the next set of zones" doldrums.
What, so it's only a bad thing when the gaming industry does it, and not when every other lobby in the universe does it?
Screw it. They tried to do it the right way, using reason, and compromise, and common sense, and it didn't work. So now, screw it, they're going to play the game, and it turns out that gaming is a fricking huge industry, and they can blow a ton of money on legislation that is favorable to them.
So now all the "Think of the Children" politicos are going to have to decide whether they want to keep pretending that they actually care, or whether they want money. Pretty much a no brainer.
I was thinking of exactly the same experience. Windows, fubar, fix from boot floppy, everything. Forever after in my mind "bad firmware" will equal that never-to-be-sufficiently-dammned motherboard.
The phrase "brick" is so overused as to be meaningless these days. It wasn't "bricked"; the firmware update got fubared on the hacked phones the last time it was updated, rendering the device non-functional. This one overwrites whatever chunk of firmware code that was causing the issue, and poof, it fixes the problem.
Same as if you screwed up a BIOS update on your motherboard. Do it again, correctly and you'll be fine.
Yea, I saw the profile Wired did of him a while back; there was some video there.
Looking at him, it's definitely different and you feel like there could be something to accusations that it's an advantage, but there are a lot of factors. I'm perfectly willing to believe the tests; but I was willing to suspend judgment before they were done. I used to run as well, so I was leery of irrationalness.
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Well, can't argue with a zealot, so I won't try.
I suggest however, that increases in our relative standard of living and the fact that our purchasing power has remained reasonably constant over the past three decades would suggest that we're not actually all secretly bankrupt, or, if we are, then the whole world is secretly bankrupt with us.
Actually, no.
.25 euros, the demand for american cars would increase overseas. Conversely, if the dollar was worth 25 euros, then no one in their right mind would buy an american car...Once you add the tariffs, the price would make it unthinkable.
Currency inflation isn't directly related to economic growth; they can run together, but it's not required. Currency inflates when the money supply outstrips the supply of goods, so consumers bid up the prices of goods. Obviiously things like the multiplier effect, which is how the banks "create" money (you give them money, and they give the same money to someone else, but you still have access to it so there is effectively twice as much money, etc) can increase the money supply, and thus cause inflation.
But it can also work in reverse, when the money supply shrinks and causes currency deflation...And this is absolutely possible, like when the gp poster and his ilk pull all their money out of banks to hide it under their beds. The reason nations don't usually seek this is because when the value of your currency increases, it pretty much ends your foreign trade because no one can afford to buy your goods. If an american made car cost 20,000 dollars, and a dollar was worth
Also, if the supply of goods increase, the amount of money needed to buy them will decrease (assuming constant demand, which is probably a bad assumption, but what the hell), leading to deflation.
The problem with "Wealth as a Herd of Goats" is when no one wants to eat goat. The "other" multiplier, which is a driver of cash velocity, is when you're building up your goat herd, you're buying goat chow, and goat supply, and then you're paying a butcher, and you're paying people to market your goat, and the supermarket is paying people to put it on shelves and take money from goat consumers, etc.
That is where wealth comes from. Not from a thing; that thing is worthless without demand.
I once heard an environmentalist say, "What do you think the last barrel of oil will cost?" and I thought the answer was obvious: "Nothing." It's not like the demand for oil will remain constant as the supply dwindles and the price skyrockets; chances are we'll never see the last barrel, because we'll have long since passed the point where it makes economic sense to use oil at all.
Likewise with most resources; in the long run resource prices rise and fall, because the demand doesn't remain constant. If the price goes too high, alternatives become economical, and the demand drops off. If we had a massive outbreak of bird flu and mad cow, then your goats would see a market surge because of the scarcity of other meats.
Generally, the economy works better when money circulates...When it has "velocity", which is another one of those words like "multiplier" which I'm going to assume you understand. By dumping surplus money into commodities rather than banks, you're effectively hiding your money under your bed, and dampening the flow of money through the economy. People did this for a long time until a smart guy named Adam Smith pointed out that hoarding gold didn't make anyone especially wealthy; it was trade that built wealth, and that meant the movement of money and goods.
So that's why banks exist, and why we allow things like the multiplier effect to run our economy. The granddaddy of all multipliers (the Fed) has been active for the past few weeks, trying to pump some money into the economy. Bush is hedging his bets, and backing Keynes at the same time with a stimulus package. Historically, these actions have added velocity to currency, and fast currency tends to stimulate the economy.
The reason for the FDIC, and SEC, and Social Security and Welfare, and every other similar system is to basically keep the money in people's pockets. This is important for the reasons above; cash circulating through the economy creates jobs and stimulates the economy. A bunch of people losing all their money (for example, when a bank fails) means you have a bunch of people who suddenly can't buy groceries. Grocery stores start laying people off, because they have to cut costs, which means MORE people can't afford groceries, and so forth. People like you pull their money in and convert it to commodities, instead of putting it into banks, which means banks can't make loans to support people who are trying to start businesses or buy houses, which, again, slows the economy and costs people their jobs.
Basically your thoughts on this stuff fly in the face of all mainstream economic thought for the last several hundred years. I'm assuming you're a Ron Paul guy, because echoing his "economic" beliefs, and Gosh, we'd sure like to move back to the gold standard. I'd almost like to see him get elected, just out of academic interest in the economic chaos that would ensue.
Anyway.
Not sure how that matters...I mean, sure an engineer could build a bomb, but a good actor could sneak it into position to do the most damage. A good psychologist could work out what the "best" target would be in terms of the impact on the will of the opposition. A good orator wouldn't even need a bomb; they'd just start a jihad, and let other people build the bombs. If you have any skill at all, there is a place to put it to work.
It's very typical of an engineering mindset to think of their skillset as the only useful skillset, but that is seldom actually the case.
Meh, don't worry about it.
Yea, it's just not that hard to get. I remember all the hoopla in the press about it, pre-Iraq, and I was just baffled. If he'd been getting enriched uranium, that would be a possible justification, but yellowcake? Even relatively cheap gas centrifuges are hard to make, and harder to hide.
Dude...Did you read the gp post? We're not talking about feeding it to kids, we're talking about whether or not its a good justification to go to war...It's not.
No, I wouldn't want to snack on it, but that's true of a lot of things.
I'll admit it's pedantic, but I just don't see a fission bomb that uses fusion to increase its yield as a fusion bomb. I'm not saying that fusion doesn't occur because it obviously does, but the H bomb is more of a clever way to get higher yields out of lower quantities of fissionables than it is a pure fusion bomb.
It's not a huge deal with me, though it obviously is with everyone else here, but H-bomb fusion isn't at all practical for a power source at this time. It's something we can take advantage of after we kick off a fission reaction, but it's not something we can harvest in a meaningful way, or duplicate without intending the reaction to run away.
Not quite the same thing, since it's all powered by a fission reaction...An H-Bomb would be all H and no bomb without a nice chunk of Uranium...Just as well for us, because if the military could churn out nuclear bombs that required no uranium, and produced little fallout, we'd see a hell of a lot more being used.
In this case, I'd be surprised if we saw a fusion bomb before a fusion power plant...To get fusion requires such a large input of power...Even when(if) they get it to a point where it's possible to get more power out of it than it requires to maintain the reaction, it will happen in a lab long before it happens in a mobile device.
Nah, first we'll have the fusion bomb, then we'll have the fusion reactor.
Whenever we get a new energy source, we set something on fire with it, or blow something up.
OT but no one in their right mind would think that getting yellowcake or any other unprocessed uranium is much threat...The big hurdle with bombs and power plants is refining the stuff, which is much much much more difficult than refining a normal metal. But yea, most laymen think you just shovel yellowcake into a reactor and it spits out power, or whack it with a shovel and get a couple of megatons of boom.
I actually stepped on a hot one once...Not electric hot, but melt your shoes hot...I thought I'd stepped in gum for a minute, until I saw the melted tread on my shoe. On another occasion I was walking down town and an electrical transformer blew out, and flipped half a dozen manhole covers out of their sockets...I wasn't right there, but I was close enough to hear it, and see the covers bouncing around. They didn't go very high, but it was still pretty alarming.
You just get used to it. I think Dennis Leary said it best:
Hey! I just moved here four years ago, and I'm not leaving, because this is the most exciting place in the world to live. Oh yeah! Yeah! There are so many ways to die in New York City, come on! Race riots, drive by shootings, subway crashes, construction cranes collapsing on the sidewalks, manhole covers blowing up, asbestos shooting into the sky.
We had a subway crash here a couple of years ago. Five people died. The next day they found the driver was drunk and hooked on crack. Folks, this makes Disneyland look like a fucking bike ride, doesn't it? "Your driver today is Edward. He's drunk and hooked on crack. The man sitting next to you has a loaded nine-millimeter. Good luck, folks!" "Honey, get the camera! This is gonna be fucking great!"
Yeah, I love living in New York, man, and people who live in New York, we wear that fact like a badge right on our sleeve because we know that fact impresses everybody! "I was in Vietnam." "So what? I live in New York!" "Really?"
It's New York...Your average New Yorker, on plugging in a Geiger counter that immediately redlined and then exploded would say, "Eh, I figyaed as much." They know it's hazardous to live there, they take a weird sort of pride in it. I moved from New York to Georgia in 2002, and people were way more freaked out about 9/11 in Georgia than they were in New York...The city still had that "burnt tire" smell, but otherwise things were back to normal.
Not to say there weren't some deep fricking scars, but you can't live there and be that high strung about environmental safety issues; the first day you come home, take off your white shirt and your white undershirt, and notice that, while they were the same color when you put them on, one of them is now a sort of stinky grey...You have to accept it and move on, or you will lose your fricking mind.
From TFA, the rationale is because they're worried that a bunch of shoddy devices will throw tons of false positives, and cause havok amongst emergency responders who would have to run around town constantly trying to weed out false leads.
Frankly, it's crap. I seriously doubt as many people as they're representing are going to be buying these things; the vast majority will be installing them indoors, where they'll be lucky to detect ANYTHING, and the shoddy ones will tend to go off for crap that would set off your smoke alarm...I used to have a CO detector near my kitchen...It's somewhere in my backyard now, after the 10th time it went off when I dumped some liquor in a skillet to deglaze it.
People may buy this stuff, but the vast majority won't, and the ones that do are almost MORE likely to view an alarm as a false positive than the police themselves. New Yorkers are tough bastards. They'll piss and moan, but they're not super-hazard conscious...You can't be, and live in the City all the time, because you're far more likely to be killed by a manhole or a cracked out subway driver than any terrorist.
Yea, but the problem comes up when you have a programmer doing the programming and a graphic designer doing the web design. If your HTML is all embedded in the Perl, it's extremely difficult to update, whereas if there is some php in the HTML, you can still pop the file open in the WYSIWYG of your choice and play with the HTML.
.net, whatever...Hell, you can embed the HTML with php if you want to! It's just not a good practice.
Even trivial UI changes are a bear when all the HTML is embedded in code, be it perl, java,
So it's a virtue to be programming in a half a dozen different languages? Or to force an accomplished programmer to switch to a different language for no good reason? Sure, he should be able to pick it up, but there is a learning curve, and lingering inefficiency issues that will last for a while.
.Net came out, I purged it from my memory banks. I am not going back, not for anything. Does that make me weak, to refuse to dive back into an obsolete language in order to generate a new application?
I recently had a throwdown regarding this because one of my coworkers was working on a project, and I flat refused to help him in his chosen language. That language? VB6.
Now I used to program in that...thing...and when
It's one thing to be flexible and open to new ideas, and dedicated to improving your skillset, but it's entirely different to be running around programming in random different languages for no compelling reason. One of the negatives in TFA was that if you used perl to sub for a shell script, you'd take an efficiency hit...This after he said you should never use it at all where efficiency was an issue because it's interpreted! The reason to use perl instead of a shell script is because perl will work in any shell...If you need performance you shouldn't be using it anyway.
In short, using a different tool for every job is only useful if it's not more efficient in the long run to do the job with the tool at hand. If I need to tighten a bolt, I could go to the hardware store and get a socket set that will fit that bolt, or I could use the crescent wrench that's sitting 5 feet away. The sockets would do the job a hell of a lot faster...But it would take longer to get them than it would to just use the wrench.
Most unpleasant TO YOU. You may think you're the final arbiter of what everyone likes to do, but I'm fairly sure that this isn't the case.
If you take into consideration the relative qualifications for a position, you will find that jobs that are less pleasant, whether because they require more work, more hours, more stress, something disgusting, whatever, are better compensated than others requiring the same qualifications.
The only exceptions to this rule are those jobs that are taken with the understanding that working them is a requirement to moving up to a more desirable position.
Most pleasant to you. I admit I enjoy code a lot more than manual labor. But I'm not going to pretend like the industry isn't stressful. I get no exercise, I get to work weekends and nights sometimes. Contrast that with someone else who has a less stressful deskjob; who never has to work overtime, and never has to do anything especially difficult. Are they paid as well as you?
Any kind of white collar, intellectual job has a high barrier of entry built right in. You have to be smart, you have to be educated. I've known tenured university professors who had some of the cushiest jobs on the planet, and made 6 figure salaries for teaching one or two classes a semester. I think we all want that job; can't be fired, make good money, etc, etc. You think that job is easy to get?
Yea, manual labor is cheap; this is not a newsflash. The reason for it is anyone can do it. You need a bare minimum of qualifications. So we get large populations of migrant workers who are willing to do the work, and the price stays nice and low.
Because you like to code you find it enjoyable. Fine. I'm happy you've got a niche. But it's difficult and demanding work, which is why we're well paid. But there are a lot of people out there who want to be well paid too, and they're willing to do work that they do not enjoy for a nice salary. And if it takes two of them to do your job, that's only good for you if you don't cost more than two of them.
The fact that you enjoy certain types of work and not others has no bearing on whether or not most people find them enjoyable. In my experience, most people would rather take their eyes out with a fork than do the kind of work you do for a living.
Actually, yes. High pay is almost always high because of some factors that make the job less enjoyable. If anyone could do the job, it would be low paying. If you're looking for a high paying job where you don't have to work long hours or have crazy stress, or have a ton of education, or have to pay two decades of dues, or publish, publish, publish...I don't know what to tell you. They just don't exist. If you want more time with your family, more vacation, less stress, you're going to make less money. Family has a high opportunity cost ;)
There are plenty of computer jobs out there. You may not be working for IBM, making 80,000 dollars a year. When I got sick of the crap, I moved to an area where the cost of living is fantastically lower(5 bedroom, 4 baths for under 1000.00 a month), and took a job that pays less in dollars than the one I had straight out of college. I have a nice house, enough money where I can save and still not to have to worry about bills every month, and I usually don't have to work overtime. I can take a 2 hour lunch and go play with my kid.
I'm not going to be a CIO before I'm 40, but that's not what I'm in it for. Figure out what your priorities are, and find a job that lets you meet them.
The only thing a union is likely to do in this situation is force the work overseas.
If IBM can't find workers for what they're offering, they'll have to raise their salaries. If they can, then the work isn't worth as much as people thought it was.
The only thing I've ever see a union do well is force out people who don't belong to that union.
Is someone making them work there? They're salaried workers, working in a reasonably high-paying field. Yea, there is stress, yea there are long hours...What's your point?
If they don't like the pay, they should do something else for a living.
I went from 1-35 in about 2 days of play time. I went from 35-45 in about 18 hours. I think my previous best-to-60 was about 8 days...If I finish leveling my current character to 60, I think I'll be able to pull it off in 5 or 6.
When you complete a yellow or orange quest at level 35 and get 4.5k experience, you'll understand the level of difference. Where you used to hit all the zones in your level range, and then ground a level or two to get to the next set of zones...Yea, forget about that. You can skip all the annoying quests in every zone and grind less at the same time.
It's definitely a big difference. I was pretty burned out on WoW, but the sense of blazing fast progression is seductive, and there is none of that "almost to the next set of zones" doldrums.
What, so it's only a bad thing when the gaming industry does it, and not when every other lobby in the universe does it?
Screw it. They tried to do it the right way, using reason, and compromise, and common sense, and it didn't work. So now, screw it, they're going to play the game, and it turns out that gaming is a fricking huge industry, and they can blow a ton of money on legislation that is favorable to them.
So now all the "Think of the Children" politicos are going to have to decide whether they want to keep pretending that they actually care, or whether they want money. Pretty much a no brainer.
I was thinking of exactly the same experience. Windows, fubar, fix from boot floppy, everything. Forever after in my mind "bad firmware" will equal that never-to-be-sufficiently-dammned motherboard.
The phrase "brick" is so overused as to be meaningless these days. It wasn't "bricked"; the firmware update got fubared on the hacked phones the last time it was updated, rendering the device non-functional. This one overwrites whatever chunk of firmware code that was causing the issue, and poof, it fixes the problem.
Same as if you screwed up a BIOS update on your motherboard. Do it again, correctly and you'll be fine.
Yea, I saw the profile Wired did of him a while back; there was some video there.
Looking at him, it's definitely different and you feel like there could be something to accusations that it's an advantage, but there are a lot of factors. I'm perfectly willing to believe the tests; but I was willing to suspend judgment before they were done. I used to run as well, so I was leery of irrationalness.