I have several hand saws and several power saws. Just because I can saw everything with the hacksaw but the circular saw is only good for wood does not mean I should just use the hacksaw.
Yup, I agree. The best jobs I've had are where I was sat with the users doing what they asked me to do. I was much more productive and they got what they wanted. I also worked a lot harder, because I would be juggling many more demands, and it also meant that the users got to argue priorities amongst themselves.
Every time someone came over and said "can you just..." I could refer them to the person whose thaks I was currently on, they could sort it out between themselves.
I was struck by the question is this an "analogue of a blog" or a "blog created in an analogue manner"? The former I suppose I am ok with but if the latter, I would like to point out that analogue is NOT somehow the "opposite" of digital.
15 years ago I left construction for IT, and I can tell you that IT is one hell of a lot less stressful than construction. I now work for a major engineering company (in IT) and the guys supporting the production machinery have a load more hassle than the rest of us.
So I would say don't get out of IT into Engineering environments to avoid stress, but the job satisfaction of building "real" things is higher.
I really don't get all this time travel stuff, and I would love someone to explain to me why physicists even consider it possible. It seems to me that time is just the rate of propagation of change. A photon cannot move from a source to a detector instantly, the change introduced to the system by emitting a photon can only be detected after the change has propagated to the detector.
An often quoted example of why time is a dimension is that to meet someone you need there coordinates (x,y,z) and a time, ergo time is a dimension. However another way of thinking about it is to say meet me on the 20th floor of 2nd and 5th after a certain amount of change has occurred in the universe. Our most obvious method of monitoring universal change is the movement of the earth around the sun.
On this basis there is no way you can travel back in time, because anything you do creates change, even when it undoes a previous action - erasing a pencil mark does not cause time travel back to a point before the pencil mark was made)
Is there a FORTRAN port or a COBOL port? Java is a perfectly good language but it seems that there are a group of Slashdotters that automatically dismiss anything written in Java. Generally their views seem to be based on false rumour put about when Java first got off the ground.
For the record I have been coding for the last 30 years in just about every major language (with the notable exception of COBOL) on every platform from Mainframes to embedded. I still use C/C++ when I have to but default to Java when ever possible. This is not because I am some dumb newbie, or because of what I was taught at collage; it is because I chose Java over a decade ago as the best balance of versatility and productivity for general purpose programming. I also regularly use PHP and sometimes still do FORTAN when the job requires, and I make a point of seeing what new languages have to offer (Ruby, Python, etc.) but there is no need for a C++ port because the Java one will do you fine.
On a simlar note I have often wondered about something like this for camping. If you are on a campsite and the idiots next you decide to have an all night party, from inside your tent you given them a squirt of HERF, nothing too big, just enough to make them feel a bit less like having an all-nighter
It's all about the people, a good developer (and a good architect) can use anything from a duct tape approach to a full-on methodology based life-cycle depending on the scale, complexity and critcality of the job in hand. You cannot use the same approach for building a sky scraper that you might use for building a garden shed.
Several issues cloud this mix:
Non technical management really struggle to tell genuinely good developers from braggards and people who must be good because they are weird
Architects and analysts want fashionable things on their CVs as much as developers do, so they push towards the newest buzz because their next job may depend on it
At the bottom of every successful development are a few people who just get on and write the code, it's where it actually happens. Ever see a hole in the road where one guy is down the hole with a shovel, and 4 others are stood around the top? I'm the guy down the hole, have been down coding holes for 20 years and pretty much every project I have started coding, I have finished and delivered, some where big methodology driven things, some where me against the world with a couple of weeks to deliver. But get keen interested and pragmatic people on the shovel and the job gets done
Re:Not Really a Robot
on
Robotic Mold
·
· Score: 1
It's that time of year - University Clearing, all the minor universities in the UK are trying to get their names in the media so that potential students who didn't get into a major university may pick them instead of a gap year.
Why not encode any media files with open source software and keep the source - I mean all the source, libraries, the lot (even the source for the compiler...) - there will be compiliers for mainstream languages around for a long time to come. Store all of this on a whole heap of storeage media (it's all pretty cheap so use everything you can get from mag tape, disks, etc to on-line storeage)... what could possibly go wrong???
While I agree that the RNLI used to be mainly about boats, the RNLI do operate a lot of life guard services on beaches around the country. These often used to be run by local councils but I guess that budget cuts have left it to the RNLI.
It's not just the imoact on birds, one thing that never seems to get discussed is what si the environmental impact of removing so much energy from the atmospheric system. Most people seem to think that wind is "free" energy, but in fact large scale wind generation will surely alter the local climate, and potentially affect things like wind pollentated plants
The effcts may be small but over say 50 years they could have a noticable impact on the environment - remember nuclear was once going to be the solution to all our energy needs, now it's wind.
Thing is they should have had the political balls to pay them selves a salary comensurate with their (percieved) status rather than hiding it in expenses - it was bound to catch them out sooner or later. However sucessive governments have failed to up the salaries, and to compensate they have made the expenses system increasingly lax.
That way if we thought they paid themselves too much we could vote them out at the next election, personally I don't mind them getting similar average salaries to that of professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc) and I think it is important that we encourage people with real careers to move into the politcail system.
Like I said, they should have had the guts to win the argument over salaries rather than trying to hide it
A fourth possibility is they pay for it out of the cost to the people who need better connections outside of the major cities.
If you follow that line of thinking then may be people who live in outside major cities should pay more road tax or may be cancer patients should pay more for expensive drugs. We generally have fair minded policies in the UK and recognise that what you loose on supporting others you gain by what they contribute to you. If dairy farmers have to pay more for braodband (and they have to use things like the Cattle Movement Service on line) then they will put that on the price of milk, or go out of business. How about next time you vist Scotland the broadband in the hotel costs 10x as much as in a city?
What's a stake here is really the ability to distribute internet TV. We will all be better off if TV moves to internet rather than broadcast which requires high energy radio transmission and all the attendant cost. But you can't move to internet only TV unless everyone is on broad band. It would be a lot better to stop the digital TV roll-out and use that money to fund braodband.
Put a wiki on there and just add stuff that you need to know (that's what I've done). By stuff you need to know I DON'T mean passwords/pins/etc I mean links and info that were hard to find, code snippets that you often cut and paste, things that you intend to look up etc. At least I can find those hard to find examples and it may help others as well (I do get a few hits this way)
I agree, my first though when I read this was "what a ponce". We would all like more time, more flexibility and more peace and quiet, but transfer this guy's approach to say a Paramedic. There you are lying at the side of the road bleeding to death and the paramedic can't decide whay to do with out a whole heap of rituals.
Planning, to a point, is obviously a good thing, but if you are a professional coder, cutting code is something you have done so often that you know the patterns, like the paramedic, you should be able to quickly assess the situation and apply the right techniques in the right way.
It's bound to happen, set up a department to check web content and they will find your own content apparently copied. Tracing that back through to some original poster and then identifying that poster as legitimate or not is going to be difficult.
Anyone who has worked in a medium to large organisation will know how hard it is to find out what someone in the same building is doing, let alone some affiliate.
My thoughts exactly, other studies have also linked asthma to overly clean environments and obviously the more time inside, the less time outside gettting dirty.
I also belive that obesity causes diabetes and smoking around children increases the risk of asthma, so if there is a correlation between obesity and TV watching and smoking and TV watching then the others probably follow. Lets be honest, smoking and obesity are very likely to reduce the inclination to get out and exercise, so the alternative is to stay in and watch TV - hence the correlation.
Good point but the reason they ended up in this situation is that no one has invented a net that catches small ones and lets the big ones go. We eat all sizes of marine creatures from shrimp and white bait to whales and if they get smaller we will jst use smaller and smaller nets.
There seems to be no limit on our urge to exploit to extinction all life on the planet that we cannot farm. So nice try fish but we're gonna get ya
On the other hand we keep hearing about child abuse, crimes and all manner of other issues that could have been avoided if only agency A could share data with Agency B.
It could be an oppressive conspiracy, or it could be a sensible measure to protect the vulnerable from horrific abuse. The key surely is "By Order" one benefit of having a lot of elected politicians is so that they can keep an eye on each other and we will be expecting them to scrutinize the orders made and the purposes for which they can be used.
I accept that this government, in particular, seems to have failed to act in a reasonable way with the legislation it enacts, but that doesn't mean that we should simply stop trying to make life better. What we need is better over-sight and a better way of stopping the government abusing the powers it grants itself.
You are quite right that the commercial firms would whinge, but does goverment funding of Arts and theater undermine Broadway, TV Companies, Record Companies - no.
Most of the FOSS produced would be quite abstract and esoteric - just like the FOSS we have now, - server software, specialised client software, packet sniffers, testing tools, languages.
To all those people who "saw this coming" and new it was inevitable, did you bet everything you had on it? There was money to be made from the downturn and a lucky few did make money.
Any one that did not bet their house on it is just being wise after the event. FACT, everyone knows that that level of growth is unsustainable - EVERYONE - the trick was in knowing whta would be the trigger for the collapse and when it would occur.
Actually the 1689 English Bill Of Rights grants Freedom for Protestants to bear arms for their own defence, as suitable to their class and as allowed by law.
So they can't ban knives beacuse it's in the Bill of Rights... oh wait
Slashdot Mirror
I have several hand saws and several power saws. Just because I can saw everything with the hacksaw but the circular saw is only good for wood does not mean I should just use the hacksaw.
Yup, I agree. The best jobs I've had are where I was sat with the users doing what they asked me to do. I was much more productive and they got what they wanted. I also worked a lot harder, because I would be juggling many more demands, and it also meant that the users got to argue priorities amongst themselves.
Every time someone came over and said "can you just ..." I could refer them to the person whose thaks I was currently on, they could sort it out between themselves.
I was struck by the question is this an "analogue of a blog" or a "blog created in an analogue manner"? The former I suppose I am ok with but if the latter, I would like to point out that analogue is NOT somehow the "opposite" of digital.
15 years ago I left construction for IT, and I can tell you that IT is one hell of a lot less stressful than construction. I now work for a major engineering company (in IT) and the guys supporting the production machinery have a load more hassle than the rest of us.
So I would say don't get out of IT into Engineering environments to avoid stress, but the job satisfaction of building "real" things is higher.
I really don't get all this time travel stuff, and I would love someone to explain to me why physicists even consider it possible. It seems to me that time is just the rate of propagation of change. A photon cannot move from a source to a detector instantly, the change introduced to the system by emitting a photon can only be detected after the change has propagated to the detector.
An often quoted example of why time is a dimension is that to meet someone you need there coordinates (x,y,z) and a time, ergo time is a dimension. However another way of thinking about it is to say meet me on the 20th floor of 2nd and 5th after a certain amount of change has occurred in the universe. Our most obvious method of monitoring universal change is the movement of the earth around the sun.
On this basis there is no way you can travel back in time, because anything you do creates change, even when it undoes a previous action - erasing a pencil mark does not cause time travel back to a point before the pencil mark was made)
Is there a FORTRAN port or a COBOL port? Java is a perfectly good language but it seems that there are a group of Slashdotters that automatically dismiss anything written in Java. Generally their views seem to be based on false rumour put about when Java first got off the ground.
For the record I have been coding for the last 30 years in just about every major language (with the notable exception of COBOL) on every platform from Mainframes to embedded. I still use C/C++ when I have to but default to Java when ever possible. This is not because I am some dumb newbie, or because of what I was taught at collage; it is because I chose Java over a decade ago as the best balance of versatility and productivity for general purpose programming. I also regularly use PHP and sometimes still do FORTAN when the job requires, and I make a point of seeing what new languages have to offer (Ruby, Python, etc.) but there is no need for a C++ port because the Java one will do you fine.
On a simlar note I have often wondered about something like this for camping. If you are on a campsite and the idiots next you decide to have an all night party, from inside your tent you given them a squirt of HERF, nothing too big, just enough to make them feel a bit less like having an all-nighter
Several issues cloud this mix:
At the bottom of every successful development are a few people who just get on and write the code, it's where it actually happens. Ever see a hole in the road where one guy is down the hole with a shovel, and 4 others are stood around the top? I'm the guy down the hole, have been down coding holes for 20 years and pretty much every project I have started coding, I have finished and delivered, some where big methodology driven things, some where me against the world with a couple of weeks to deliver. But get keen interested and pragmatic people on the shovel and the job gets done
It's that time of year - University Clearing, all the minor universities in the UK are trying to get their names in the media so that potential students who didn't get into a major university may pick them instead of a gap year.
Why not encode any media files with open source software and keep the source - I mean all the source, libraries, the lot (even the source for the compiler...) - there will be compiliers for mainstream languages around for a long time to come. Store all of this on a whole heap of storeage media (it's all pretty cheap so use everything you can get from mag tape, disks, etc to on-line storeage) ... what could possibly go wrong???
While I agree that the RNLI used to be mainly about boats, the RNLI do operate a lot of life guard services on beaches around the country. These often used to be run by local councils but I guess that budget cuts have left it to the RNLI.
South American Joke:
Why has there never been a revolution in Washington DC?
Because there is no American Embassy there!
And yes I know there was an American revolution etc.. it IS a joke
The effcts may be small but over say 50 years they could have a noticable impact on the environment - remember nuclear was once going to be the solution to all our energy needs, now it's wind.
Thing is they should have had the political balls to pay them selves a salary comensurate with their (percieved) status rather than hiding it in expenses - it was bound to catch them out sooner or later. However sucessive governments have failed to up the salaries, and to compensate they have made the expenses system increasingly lax.
That way if we thought they paid themselves too much we could vote them out at the next election, personally I don't mind them getting similar average salaries to that of professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc) and I think it is important that we encourage people with real careers to move into the politcail system.
Like I said, they should have had the guts to win the argument over salaries rather than trying to hide it
A fourth possibility is they pay for it out of the cost to the people who need better connections outside of the major cities.
If you follow that line of thinking then may be people who live in outside major cities should pay more road tax or may be cancer patients should pay more for expensive drugs. We generally have fair minded policies in the UK and recognise that what you loose on supporting others you gain by what they contribute to you. If dairy farmers have to pay more for braodband (and they have to use things like the Cattle Movement Service on line) then they will put that on the price of milk, or go out of business. How about next time you vist Scotland the broadband in the hotel costs 10x as much as in a city?
What's a stake here is really the ability to distribute internet TV. We will all be better off if TV moves to internet rather than broadcast which requires high energy radio transmission and all the attendant cost. But you can't move to internet only TV unless everyone is on broad band. It would be a lot better to stop the digital TV roll-out and use that money to fund braodband.
Put a wiki on there and just add stuff that you need to know (that's what I've done). By stuff you need to know I DON'T mean passwords/pins/etc I mean links and info that were hard to find, code snippets that you often cut and paste, things that you intend to look up etc. At least I can find those hard to find examples and it may help others as well (I do get a few hits this way)
I agree, my first though when I read this was "what a ponce". We would all like more time, more flexibility and more peace and quiet, but transfer this guy's approach to say a Paramedic. There you are lying at the side of the road bleeding to death and the paramedic can't decide whay to do with out a whole heap of rituals. Planning, to a point, is obviously a good thing, but if you are a professional coder, cutting code is something you have done so often that you know the patterns, like the paramedic, you should be able to quickly assess the situation and apply the right techniques in the right way.
Anyone who has worked in a medium to large organisation will know how hard it is to find out what someone in the same building is doing, let alone some affiliate.
My thoughts exactly, other studies have also linked asthma to overly clean environments and obviously the more time inside, the less time outside gettting dirty. I also belive that obesity causes diabetes and smoking around children increases the risk of asthma, so if there is a correlation between obesity and TV watching and smoking and TV watching then the others probably follow. Lets be honest, smoking and obesity are very likely to reduce the inclination to get out and exercise, so the alternative is to stay in and watch TV - hence the correlation.
There seems to be no limit on our urge to exploit to extinction all life on the planet that we cannot farm. So nice try fish but we're gonna get ya
It could be an oppressive conspiracy, or it could be a sensible measure to protect the vulnerable from horrific abuse. The key surely is "By Order" one benefit of having a lot of elected politicians is so that they can keep an eye on each other and we will be expecting them to scrutinize the orders made and the purposes for which they can be used.
I accept that this government, in particular, seems to have failed to act in a reasonable way with the legislation it enacts, but that doesn't mean that we should simply stop trying to make life better. What we need is better over-sight and a better way of stopping the government abusing the powers it grants itself.
Most of the FOSS produced would be quite abstract and esoteric - just like the FOSS we have now, - server software, specialised client software, packet sniffers, testing tools, languages.
Any one that did not bet their house on it is just being wise after the event. FACT, everyone knows that that level of growth is unsustainable - EVERYONE - the trick was in knowing whta would be the trigger for the collapse and when it would occur.
So they can't ban knives beacuse it's in the Bill of Rights ... oh wait
Do you guys watch "The Big Bang Theory" by an chance?