In the UK at least (and in the US?), there's a critical judgement you have to make if you're well qualified, namely "Is there sufficient commerce here to require specialized skills?".
The fact is that in most of the UK, there just isn't. I'm the only person in my company with a University degree, and I get the impression that most people in my company (and most people in this country) wouldn't actually know what a further degree is, let alone recognise it's value.
The situation is much the same across the country, especially in IT. As a consequence, I am one of the "waiting to bolt" types that's underpaid and underutilised - 5 years experience, (not in tech tho) business degree and MS CS. GBP15k/year and definitely no stock options. I appreciate having a job in the tech field but feel that the financial and mental outlay never really justified the payoff. Not until I go abroad that is...
is the official reason the Harry Potter phenomenon is labelled A Good Thing.
The other reason is that it also encourages adults to read. I've got few objections to literature being pirated on the internet, and although they wouldn't admit it in public, I'd imagine the books authors don't object much either. If you really love a book, you'll want a hard copy. It makes a change from all the "How To Drive a Woman Wild in 30 Seconds.pdf" crap circulating on Kazaa anyway.
Would you object to your kids downloading Shakespeare's sonnets from th'Internet? Then what's wrong with downloading modern literature from a personal development point of view?
Dysfunctional nerds are not. A good litmus test is to ask yourself "Could I live with a clone of myself?", if the answer is anything other then "absolutely" then sorry, but you're a dysfunctional nerd too. Other people won't like working/living with you if you fall in this bracket - because you actually can't tolerate yourself either.
And if you call this post flamebait, it's because... ummm, you're in denial.
Isn't the term "Career Programmer" an oxymoron?
on
The Career Programmer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Like "computer science" or "Microsoft Works".
I've been convinced for some time that the best programs are not written by career "programmers" but by people looking for innovative ways of solving problems. If you understand the problem *inside out* - and you would if you work with the problem every day - then programming a solution is a series of fairly well defined steps.
Of course, this approach won't necessarily scale up to big problems, because such non-professional programmers will have to read round the topic to optimize make their solution solve the problem efficiently - but a common-all garden problem solver can learn this skill.
My job title is "e-Commerce Analyst" but I spend a lot of my time writing programs to solve problems. My boss decided that this was preferable to the "career programmer" who might not always know the particulars of the problem but knows a great way to show a tree-view of a relational database with editable nodes...
Haha. If you really want to know, it was a Japanese methodology called Lyee - feel free to read the English documentation. If you spend a few days with it you might just "get" it. It took me about a month to really understand it though. It's heavy stuff.
Great paradigm, shame about the acompanying toolsets.
If someone has been aware of it, my seeming lack of qualification has sometimes been a hurdle too. I think quite a few physicists and philosophers have difficulty getting their heads around the topic of time properly as well. I'm not a big fan of quite a few aspects of academia, but I'd like to think that whats happened with the work is a good example of perseverance and a few other things eventually winning through.
Sorry for the long quote but it highlights something I've been gnashing my teeth over for a while - academia is rarely about real research these days, only chasing research funding - my entire CS Masters was about a program design paradigm with highly esoteric underpinnings and very little mathematical substance - on the other hand it was well funded!
Hence it doesn't surprise me that the research for this important and highly academic topic was done by a non-academic, and he got little or no help from the academic community.
Okay, I was going to mod you down, but I thought I'd respond instead. The only value in any theory is in its ability to model reality.
Very good then, lets see you model your theory in reality. Where are you going to get a million monkeys? Don't know. Million typewriters? Not my problem either.
As a randomly generated string becomes very large, the probability (in actual likelihood) that the works of Shakespeare will be included becomes very close to one.
*cough* BS! *cough*. So how exactly will your be measuring whether "the works of Shakespeare" are included in this finite string? Let me guess, common letters of the alphabet?
Sorry, if I had mod points you'd be a troll already and I'd request you resit your Casual Science for the Less Attentive 101 class.
Probability is a deceptive thing, because although a million monkeys with typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare, it's just a theoretical probability which is different to an actual likelyhood.
This is the nature of "np-hard" problems (as I believe they're called) - you can't beat the odds.
Cool! I was using Evolution at a time when there were so many better clients around with superior multi character support - eg. Sylpheed rocks in this arena.
Overall, I find Linux multibyte input support (kinput, Canna et al.) to be a bit lacklustre. But the sound of GTK2 Pango combo in Evo 1.4 sounds worth having another try - thanks.
When evolution supports multibyte characters - that's when it will surpass outlook. Seriously - I use Japanese and English email and as soon as I tried migrating to Evolution all my email just &#"%"#%\'"&#%\%"'&%!>('$
From Frauenhofer patent enforcement available here:
To make, sell and/or distribute products using the standard and thus our patents, you need to obtain a license under these patents from us.
In the past, we have licensed several companies under different models for different products, e.g.: - Software encoder licenses against a per unit royalty starting at $ 25,00 and decreasing for high volumes; and - Pay-audio licenses against a royalty of $ 0,01 per song or 1 % of the selling price.
And now after interviewing MP3 standard's inventor, there's this revelation that he doesn't like P2P?
Like many high profile OSS ranters, he's ignoring the fact that if most workers try to challenge their company's existing model (the sharecropping model) they are likely to be firebranded in their jobs or worse. Fine if you work for yourself or whatever, not fine if you have bills to pay and a status quo to keep.
We'd all love to get paid to do interesting stuff on exciting platforms (I'm an RHCE, but in my current job we don't even have a Linux box in the building). Unfortunately, boring stuff on Windows keeps the rest of us (and our numbers are dwindling) in jobs.
I might be modded a troll, but then some mods have more time and more idealism, others are pragmatic.
So you have a way of authenticating that a song is legitimately bought? An audit trail for each track? Wonderful. It's not going to be taken apart and cracked within a week is it? No-one's going to take our model and release a free implementation with much wider popular appeal are they? Are you sure? Great! We'll buy your company and give you generous stock options then.
Please excuse me now, my pet unicorn needs feeding...
I like the idea of economic bandwidth too. One of the biggest problems with the IT industry in the UK and facing tecchie grads right now is coming to terms with the fact that the economy just doesn't have the economic bandwidth to gainfully employ them.
There is still a staggering number of incompetents employed in IT in the UK that the last recession didn't purge. They are the people who will buy trinkets. Hehe.
This is another example of giantkiller technologies like XML , P2P and Linux. The battle lines are still being drawn, but the core message is the same - businesses have to adapt to the new model, because it's not going away. Notice how PS2 modders have been pre-empted with PS2 Linux? That was no accident. That was just smart thinking from Sony (albeit rare). Wait until XBox sales start flagging, and watch the reins come off the modding community. I'm sure even Microsoft's CEO is capable of some smart thinking.
But at a time when intelligence agencies are under fire for being not very intelligent, when our leaders are sometimes in too big a hurry to cast blame and take credit, we are building huge information gathering systems that we can't completely control...
In other words, when granny farts, smack the dog. What's new? Most of Cringley's article is ripped straight out of the original information source. A bit like my post.
This archetypal spammer image will equate roughly with people's image of a hacker. And those weirdy beardy folks called RMS and ESR call themselves hackers. And so this Linux must be... so that's what young Timmy is doing. Quick Al, call the police!
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK at least (and in the US?), there's a critical judgement you have to make if you're well qualified, namely "Is there sufficient commerce here to require specialized skills?" .
...
The fact is that in most of the UK, there just isn't. I'm the only person in my company with a University degree, and I get the impression that most people in my company (and most people in this country) wouldn't actually know what a further degree is, let alone recognise it's value.
The situation is much the same across the country, especially in IT. As a consequence, I am one of the "waiting to bolt" types that's underpaid and underutilised - 5 years experience, (not in tech tho) business degree and MS CS. GBP15k/year and definitely no stock options.
I appreciate having a job in the tech field but feel that the financial and mental outlay never really justified the payoff. Not until I go abroad that is
The cultural momentum is there even if the availability of resources isn't apparent.
is the official reason the Harry Potter phenomenon is labelled A Good Thing.
The other reason is that it also encourages adults to read. I've got few objections to literature being pirated on the internet, and although they wouldn't admit it in public, I'd imagine the books authors don't object much either. If you really love a book, you'll want a hard copy.
It makes a change from all the "How To Drive a Woman Wild in 30 Seconds.pdf" crap circulating on Kazaa anyway.
Would you object to your kids downloading Shakespeare's sonnets from th'Internet?
Then what's wrong with downloading modern literature from a personal development point of view?
Dysfunctional nerds are not. A good litmus test is to ask yourself "Could I live with a clone of myself?", if the answer is anything other then "absolutely" then sorry, but you're a dysfunctional nerd too. Other people won't like working/living with you if you fall in this bracket - because you actually can't tolerate yourself either.
... ummm, you're in denial.
And if you call this post flamebait, it's because
Like "computer science" or "Microsoft Works".
...
I've been convinced for some time that the best programs are not written by career "programmers" but by people looking for innovative ways of solving problems. If you understand the problem *inside out* - and you would if you work with the problem every day - then programming a solution is a series of fairly well defined steps.
Of course, this approach won't necessarily scale up to big problems, because such non-professional programmers will have to read round the topic to optimize make their solution solve the problem efficiently - but a common-all garden problem solver can learn this skill.
My job title is "e-Commerce Analyst" but I spend a lot of my time writing programs to solve problems. My boss decided that this was preferable to the "career programmer" who might not always know the particulars of the problem but knows a great way to show a tree-view of a relational database with editable nodes
Haha. If you really want to know, it was a Japanese methodology called Lyee - feel free to read the English documentation. If you spend a few days with it you might just "get" it. It took me about a month to really understand it though. It's heavy stuff.
Great paradigm, shame about the acompanying toolsets.
If you read the post, I referred to the project in the past tense.
And err, no you can't have your money back.
The subtle but important difference is, I'm not paid to post on slashdot. ;-(
If someone has been aware of it, my seeming lack of qualification has sometimes been a hurdle too. I think quite a few physicists and philosophers have difficulty getting their heads around the topic of time properly as well. I'm not a big fan of quite a few aspects of academia, but I'd like to think that whats happened with the work is a good example of perseverance and a few other things eventually winning through.
Sorry for the long quote but it highlights something I've been gnashing my teeth over for a while - academia is rarely about real research these days, only chasing research funding - my entire CS Masters was about a program design paradigm with highly esoteric underpinnings and very little mathematical substance - on the other hand it was well funded!
Hence it doesn't surprise me that the research for this important and highly academic topic was done by a non-academic, and he got little or no help from the academic community.
Okay, I was going to mod you down, but I thought I'd respond instead. The only value in any theory is in its ability to model reality.
Very good then, lets see you model your theory in reality. Where are you going to get a million monkeys? Don't know. Million typewriters? Not my problem either.
As a randomly generated string becomes very large, the probability (in actual likelihood) that the works of Shakespeare will be included becomes very close to one.
*cough* BS! *cough*. So how exactly will your be measuring whether "the works of Shakespeare" are included in this finite string? Let me guess, common letters of the alphabet?
Sorry, if I had mod points you'd be a troll already and I'd request you resit your Casual Science for the Less Attentive 101 class.
do not a poem make.
Probability is a deceptive thing, because although a million monkeys with typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare, it's just a theoretical probability which is different to an actual likelyhood.
This is the nature of "np-hard" problems (as I believe they're called) - you can't beat the odds.
and that 10 percent of global desktops will be Linux in a few years.
In a few years. We know the revolution is just round the corner. But how many corners do we have to revolve around?
Cool! I was using Evolution at a time when there were so many better clients around with superior multi character support - eg. Sylpheed rocks in this arena.
Overall, I find Linux multibyte input support (kinput, Canna et al.) to be a bit lacklustre. But the sound of GTK2 Pango combo in Evo 1.4 sounds worth having another try - thanks.
When evolution supports multibyte characters - that's when it will surpass outlook. Seriously - I use Japanese and English email and as soon as I tried migrating to Evolution all my email just &#"%"#%\'"&#%\%"'&%!>('$
From Frauenhofer patent enforcement available here:
To make, sell and/or distribute products using the standard and thus our patents, you need to obtain a license under these patents from us.
In the past, we have licensed several companies under different models for different products, e.g.:
- Software encoder licenses against a per unit royalty starting at $ 25,00 and decreasing for high volumes; and
- Pay-audio licenses against a royalty of $ 0,01 per song or 1 % of the selling price.
And now after interviewing MP3 standard's inventor, there's this revelation that he doesn't like P2P?
Come on slash eds - this aint news!
I think it's Psalm 35: "Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cryeth!" so err, both of 'em.
And many minions will flock to its being, and would be cast therein.
Like many high profile OSS ranters, he's ignoring the fact that if most workers try to challenge their company's existing model (the sharecropping model) they are likely to be firebranded in their jobs or worse. Fine if you work for yourself or whatever, not fine if you have bills to pay and a status quo to keep.
We'd all love to get paid to do interesting stuff on exciting platforms (I'm an RHCE, but in my current job we don't even have a Linux box in the building). Unfortunately, boring stuff on Windows keeps the rest of us (and our numbers are dwindling) in jobs.
I might be modded a troll, but then some mods have more time and more idealism, others are pragmatic.
So you have a way of authenticating that a song is legitimately bought? An audit trail for each track? Wonderful. It's not going to be taken apart and cracked within a week is it? No-one's going to take our model and release a free implementation with much wider popular appeal are they? Are you sure? Great! We'll buy your company and give you generous stock options then.
...
Please excuse me now, my pet unicorn needs feeding
I like the idea of economic bandwidth too. One of the biggest problems with the IT industry in the UK and facing tecchie grads right now is coming to terms with the fact that the economy just doesn't have the economic bandwidth to gainfully employ them.
There is still a staggering number of incompetents employed in IT in the UK that the last recession didn't purge. They are the people who will buy trinkets. Hehe.
This is another example of giantkiller technologies like XML , P2P and Linux. The battle lines are still being drawn, but the core message is the same - businesses have to adapt to the new model, because it's not going away. Notice how PS2 modders have been pre-empted with PS2 Linux? That was no accident. That was just smart thinking from Sony (albeit rare). Wait until XBox sales start flagging, and watch the reins come off the modding community. I'm sure even Microsoft's CEO is capable of some smart thinking.
But at a time when intelligence agencies are under fire for being not very intelligent, when our leaders are sometimes in too big a hurry to cast blame and take credit, we are building huge information gathering systems that we can't completely control ...
In other words, when granny farts, smack the dog. What's new? Most of Cringley's article is ripped straight out of the original information source. A bit like my post.
This archetypal spammer image will equate roughly with people's image of a hacker. And those weirdy beardy folks called RMS and ESR call themselves hackers. And so this Linux must be ... so that's what young Timmy is doing. Quick Al, call the police!
That translates to "You (effeminate) are a uninformed."
You're using that dictionary too much and not looking at grammar enough - put a noun in there somewhere.
To this topic, I posted this.
translate something useful from a Japanese source. Or get back to your Kanji study.