Sometimes innovations are made that make innovation itself easier. A good example is the Internet which makes sharing information a lot easier than in the past.
Hopefully there will always be enough of those to keep innovation flowing at a good rate. Although sometimes I wonder if enough people are working on this type of problem. These are the problems of making problems easier to solve.
There are cheap (or even free) phones available so cost can't be the issue.
Are they too complicated for you? You know, you don't have to use those new-fangled features.
Personally I find the PDA-like features extremely handy as I never liked having to carry a PDA and phone anyway. I mostly just use the scheduling/reminder stuff though.
As for the "other" stuff like cameras, my guess is that there are more phones without cameras than with them.
You have to keep in mind the differences between a country like Japan and America.
America is huge. The distance between points of interest is massive compared to most anywhere else we see high-speed rail transit. Consider that the entire country of Japan is smaller than California. A good rail system would make sense if all the population was crammed into one state because there would be lots of places of interest spaced closed together and the entire rail system is relatively short.
As much as I hate flying, air travel is the most efficient way to move around in America because of all the empty space you must traverse to get somewhere interesting. Putting in a high-speed rail system to cover a whole bunch of empty space is simply a waste of resources.
SWT provides a decent native widget toolkit. That is what Eclipse uses. However, any GUI done in Java always has a funky clunky feel (even when using SWT). Just play around with Eclipse and you'll see. Although surely some Java zealots will come to flame me, they are looking through rose colored glasses because the fact remains that Java GUI apps just don't feel as snappy as the alternatives.
Also, the "Write once, run anywhere" thing never panned out. Both because you need to install that huge JRE (no matter your platform) and because all you need are cross-platform libraries and any language is just as portable as Java (often even more portable). The usefulness of only compiling once for all platforms is miniscule.
Doesn't a corporation (or LLC) provide protection against this kind of stuff?
In other words, if anyone gets sued it would be the corporate entity not an individual. The corporation takes any legal heat. I thought that was the whole point of having a corporation.
Opera have priced themselves out of business. $40 for a $20 product just ain't gonna sell.
Opera isn't that great anyway. It disappears off the screen (crashes) for no reason. It has a cluttered UI. Coupled with the pricing/adware it doesn't work out.
I partly blame Trolltech for their insane Qt pricing . $3800 for a $1000 product ain't gonna cut it.
You just know that right now there are some aliens up there watching and laughing their asses off. They probably record everything we do and broadcast their own reality series back to their planet(s). "Tonight on funniest earth out-takes..."
Come on you Vulcan bastards, come down here and help us pathic morons!
Seriously though, I think current world events (including the decline of Russia's military and America's focus on homeland dipshiatery) has lead to lack of interest/funding/training in space-related activies. The result is inevitable.
Because in the real world rich people want to seriously risk their lives... why??
This would be much more dangerous than flying into space or something. If you honestly look at things humans are really fragile. All it would take it pissing off the right people, they create a setup to entrap you and sorry no miracle escape for you.
It would be so easy for someone to take you out, "super" equipment or not (the Forbes equipment list is lame anyway). For instance, there are many sniper rounds that will go straight through any body armor you can create. Not to mention poison gases and all sorts of stuff.
There is a reason why law enforcement and the military is made up of many people dispite access to the best equipment available. One person can't do jack shit against many enemies.
Re:Kind of Esoteric, But...
on
Smart-Card Hacking?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Along with PKCS#11 and Javacard, you should be looking at all the ISO 7816 specifications for technical information.
However, do any stores actually use the smartcard portion of the card? All I have seen is using the mag-strip on the back and nothing more (which is usually just your account number, expiration, and name on the card). So there is no "secret" information that is even being used on the card.
Once you get into it you will realize that smartcards are not some magical device designed to invade privacy or something. Really, a smartcard is best for carrying protected private keys to be used with PKI (like a certificate). A smartcard provides benefits over traditional "soft" tokens by protecting your data in hardware.
Generally speaking a smartcard has one or more sets of keys and maybe certificates to go with those keys (just like PGP keys or a certificate you get from Verisign). Other than that the information is similar to what is on your credit card. Maybe your name, expiration date, etc. Some military cards have more information about the person. Almost always all the information is also printed on the card somewhere (just like how your credit card's mag-strip has the same information stamped on the front of the card).
First off I'm assuming this is for an externally visible business web-site and not some intranet thing or personal site (if it is then ignore this post).
Seriously it's better to pay someone to do this. I'm a developer too and I have even done serious web-site development in the past. It is tempting to do it yourself. However, it's so much easier and nicer just to pay someone else that actually spends a lot of time caring about what a site should look like, using modern design, and testing on all platforms.
Sites done by people like yourself generally are not very good. They're usually not real bad, but not as professional as they could be. It's not that you can't do a great job, it's just that it takes a lot of time to get it right and you have no experience. Your web-site may be the first thing people see concerning your business, it needs to look professional. Modern web-sites are a lot more complex than they used to be, especially when you get into CSS and similar which is the thing to do nowadays.
A couple thousand bucks is probably even cheaper than your time working on it anyway.
I agree with the wxWidgets thing. Honestly, I can't see how a toolkit can be that old and "mature" and still contain so many bugs. It's one of the buggiest toolkits I have ever used... this dispite the fact it is like 12 years old! After looking at the code you can tell why though. The foundation is poorly written, the programmer(s) did not know what they were doing and they never went back and fixed it (what have they been working on the last 12 years anyway?!).
As for Qt, we'll see. I think the only reason it survives is because of a couple corporate cash cows plus KDE. That will only last so long though. If KDE ever became extremely popular, creating commercial applications would be a huge drag because of the price for Qt. Most software companies don't want GPL code and the buy-in price is way higher than Windows or OS X. In fact, that is probably holding KDE back more than anything else.
OK Trolltech, how about lowering your prices instead of increasing them every few months?!
Most shops and individuals can't afford that stuff for commercial development. Every other development platform is hella cheaper than Qt (MSDN, Apple, etc.).
Trolltech needs to take a clue from some failed projects that made it too hard for the system to be adopted by the masses because they were listening to the marketing department.
There are two main reason I have seen for not upgrading:
1. There isn't very much difference between XP and 2000. 2000 is a fairly stable platform that runs pretty much all the same software as XP. "If it ain't broke"
2. The activation stuff sucks. Even as a legal owner I find it is a huge pain in the ass. This is especially true when you upgrade a server. It's not uncommon to upgrade servers either by changing/adding hardware or just replacing the whole machine which can cause you to have to reactivate Windows. Now, it's not that hard to reactivate but it's just a stupid little thing you have to do and the machine won't work until it's done. It feels risky to upgrade machines running XP because you're not sure if everything will go smoothly because of the activation crap.
I use 2000 on my main development machine because sometimes I do have to change the hardware for testing purposes and I got tired of having to continuously reactivate Windows.
I don't know what I'm going to do if they stop supporting 2000. More reason to spend more time in Linux or OS X I guess (although technically I simply must spend some time in Windows for development purposes).
I never said I was too brilliant for school. I was saying that school sucked.
I had many great unconventional ideas (I even created designs, wrote papers, etc.) that were shot down by teachers and other people I looked up to. When you're 10 years old that does something to you. Something not good.
Yeah but that doesn't work for high-school and below. Those were the worst years for me.
I dropped out(*) after 10th grade and started taking college courses. At the time I didn't know you could do that without a high-school diploma but nobody asked so... College was better than high-school but still didn't give me what I wanted. The courses were too basic. Especially the computer courses. I had already been programming for more than 8 years by that point (some commercial stuff even). Research? Pffft, all I saw was lame ivory tower crap. I finished my degree only because I knew it would help with the job search.
I then worked for "the man" for a number of years. After gaining a ton of experience working on cutting edge and complex government stuff and some small-business work I took that knowledge and started my own company a few years ago. I'm finally now doing what I want. I just wish I could have done this 15 years ago because this is all I really wanted back in elementary/middle/high school and college. I partly blame myself, but I also blame the education system for not showing me the way to reach my goals. I just didn't know any better at the time.
My advice? Do internships. You will learn way more stuff than being a professor's slave-monkey.
(*) I finished my high-school at home while I went to college. I ended up graduating high-school just after I graduated college.;)
Oh, so that's why when I'm running GNOME if I just want to fire up a simple text editor (Kate) it brings a crapload of other stuff into memory and takes forever to start (plus leaves stuff hanging around in memory afterwards). For just that little app.
Whatever... When building a system you should have goals. One of those goals should be performance related.
For example, if I had written Ruby one of my goals would be to have it run faster than the other systems I was basing it on. In this case that would mean at a minimum making it the same or faster than Perl. So as I was building the system I would constantly test performance to make sure it was meeting or beating the performance goals throughout the whole process. This requires no design work, just common sense.
Now they're going back and having to redo the entire thing. As a programmer I know how that goes. It's insanely difficult to stay motivated while redoing the same work as you did before (or even that someone else did before). Good designs are iterative in nature rather than massive re-writes. Ruby v2 has about as much chance of success as Perl 6... (ie. extremely unlikely)
Has the performance of Ruby gotten much better since the early days?
I started using Ruby a long time ago, back when no one knew about it. I liked it because it was like a better Perl (better OO support but with Perl syntax). However, I quickly tired of its lackluster performance. I mean it was a lot slower than even Perl or Python. I eventually moved on hoping to return when Rudy had matured and performance was kicking. Last time I checked the performance was the same as always. So much for the "tune for performance later" crap. When will programmers learn that doesn't actually work? You need a good design that includes tuning for performance early on.
Now I know Ruby on Rails has been shown to be faster than J2EE and similar but that's just a small part of what Ruby can do. Everywhere else it doesn't seem to perform as good. Sorta like Java. Good for server-side web stuff (mostly due to the nice API's really) but suck-ass at everything else.
I think the more general problem is: 10 year old use computers, and everybody is really really desperate to get them to get them to use high-tech wizardry, when really what all that does is make kids multimediocre.
This really depends on how it is done. The computer can provide benefits if used properly. The problem is most people don't know how to effectively use a computer as a teaching tool. Almost all computer work I see kids doing is of the form "sit down and use this software package to learn stuff" or "search the intarweb for information on this subject." That's just lame and not really using a computer to its full potential.
There should also be more stuff for students who want to learn to programming. I know I wish I had something like that when I was in school. Back in the early 80's the elementary and middle school "computer" classes I had consisted of learning to type and looking up library books. This was quite lame considering I had already been programming computers for several years by the time I hit middle school. Near the end of high school I finally had the chance to take a programming class. LOL, what a joke. At that point I was already doing things like assembly language, C, and LISP. They were teaching BASIC. Well, trying to anyway because the teacher was learning while teaching the class and didn't know jack crap.
You're probably not focusing long enough. It's like those 3D pictures, it took me a minute to figure out the mental state required to make them disappear. Once I got that I can now make them disappear quickly and for as long as I like. Pretty cool.
I wonder if this damanges anything though. After doing it for a couple minutes, when I stopped it was like someone had taken my picture with a flash or something. Even as I type this the visual residue is still there.
In principal I agree but I good software developers don't follow those rules. Lets look at how cars are made.
Architects are like automotive engineers. They create design of the car and then the workers put the thing together. This leads to several problems. One is that the engineers are so disconnected from the end product that you run into problems like needing to remove the entire engine to change a spark plug. Another problem which is related to the first, is that there are lots and lots of little gaps between the design and the actual finished product. It's simply too complex for the engineers to think of every little detail in the design. This leads to problems similar to the first.
Good software developers are like custom car builders. Some times they work off an existing design and some times they create things from scratch. They typically do both the design work and the work of putting the thing together. They are pragmatic. They solve the problem and then move on. What you get from this is not always perfect but lots better than the over-engineered ivory tower crap. It looks cool and serves its purpose. ie. it gets stuff done, dammit. Due to this working environment the custom car builders become both master designers and master builders. They are artists.
haha, I have thought about developing a fake foreign accent for that reason. I found it to be too much work though.
The biggest problem I see with meeting geeky people is that we hate socializing.
I'm thin not overweight so pasta and bread I need just maintain a decent weight. I have tried many different styles of eating over the years (eg. bodybuilder diet, etc.) and finally just chalked it up as genetics. That is until I see this mention of thinking about exercising.
It has also recently been proven (again, by nerd scientists who sit at their computers all day) that just THINKING about exercising is almost as effective at increasing strength as actually exercising.
What? Where is this study? I'm curious because I workout regularly (for the last 10 years) and although I'm in good shape, I never really developed an athletes body. Now, some part of that is surely genetics, but I'm wondering if lack of focus has an effect. I really only think about exercising when I'm actually doing it. As a programmer I am completely focused on that for 99% of the time I am awake. I wonder if the mere fact that I don't (or can't) think about being "big musclely dude" detracts from my potential in that area.
Meh, anyway... Let me tell you guys, you don't want the supermodel girlfriend. I have been down that road many times. Attractive (in the pop-culture sense) women may make good playthings for a while but make horrible long term relationships and even worse wives. I actually prefer to have long term relationships because then I don't want to waste energy thinking about that crap. So I guess... find a geek girlfriend and make austistic babies.
Save one for me though as I'm still trying to find a geek girlfriend.
I used to work at a similar sized company. Around 30 people, mostly programmers. Network admin was a full time job for two, sometimes three people.
Don't kid yourself, it's too much for one person if you have other tasks. Also, once you become an admin it's really hard to go back to programmer (both because you get lazy and also because you just won't have time).
I have always held steady in that area. I would probably be a really good admin but I refuse to do it. My statement is simply "I'm a programmer, not an admin." I can only imagine you have at some point given your boss reasons to believe you are a good admin type? Don't do that.
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Sometimes innovations are made that make innovation itself easier. A good example is the Internet which makes sharing information a lot easier than in the past.
Hopefully there will always be enough of those to keep innovation flowing at a good rate. Although sometimes I wonder if enough people are working on this type of problem. These are the problems of making problems easier to solve.
What exactly is the point in asking this?
There are cheap (or even free) phones available so cost can't be the issue.
Are they too complicated for you? You know, you don't have to use those new-fangled features.
Personally I find the PDA-like features extremely handy as I never liked having to carry a PDA and phone anyway. I mostly just use the scheduling/reminder stuff though.
As for the "other" stuff like cameras, my guess is that there are more phones without cameras than with them.
You have to keep in mind the differences between a country like Japan and America.
America is huge. The distance between points of interest is massive compared to most anywhere else we see high-speed rail transit. Consider that the entire country of Japan is smaller than California. A good rail system would make sense if all the population was crammed into one state because there would be lots of places of interest spaced closed together and the entire rail system is relatively short.
As much as I hate flying, air travel is the most efficient way to move around in America because of all the empty space you must traverse to get somewhere interesting. Putting in a high-speed rail system to cover a whole bunch of empty space is simply a waste of resources.
SWT provides a decent native widget toolkit. That is what Eclipse uses. However, any GUI done in Java always has a funky clunky feel (even when using SWT). Just play around with Eclipse and you'll see. Although surely some Java zealots will come to flame me, they are looking through rose colored glasses because the fact remains that Java GUI apps just don't feel as snappy as the alternatives.
Also, the "Write once, run anywhere" thing never panned out. Both because you need to install that huge JRE (no matter your platform) and because all you need are cross-platform libraries and any language is just as portable as Java (often even more portable). The usefulness of only compiling once for all platforms is miniscule.
All the FX chips are Socket 939. The only chips that are socket 940 are Opterons. The Athlon-FX chips are basically Socket 939 Opterons.
Socket 939 is for the single CPU systems (including multiple cores).
Socket 940 is for multiple CPU systems (ie. Opteron).
Doesn't a corporation (or LLC) provide protection against this kind of stuff?
In other words, if anyone gets sued it would be the corporate entity not an individual. The corporation takes any legal heat. I thought that was the whole point of having a corporation.
Opera have priced themselves out of business. $40 for a $20 product just ain't gonna sell.
Opera isn't that great anyway. It disappears off the screen (crashes) for no reason. It has a cluttered UI. Coupled with the pricing/adware it doesn't work out.
I partly blame Trolltech for their insane Qt pricing . $3800 for a $1000 product ain't gonna cut it.
You just know that right now there are some aliens up there watching and laughing their asses off. They probably record everything we do and broadcast their own reality series back to their planet(s). "Tonight on funniest earth out-takes..."
Come on you Vulcan bastards, come down here and help us pathic morons!
Seriously though, I think current world events (including the decline of Russia's military and America's focus on homeland dipshiatery) has lead to lack of interest/funding/training in space-related activies. The result is inevitable.
Because in the real world rich people want to seriously risk their lives... why??
This would be much more dangerous than flying into space or something. If you honestly look at things humans are really fragile. All it would take it pissing off the right people, they create a setup to entrap you and sorry no miracle escape for you.
It would be so easy for someone to take you out, "super" equipment or not (the Forbes equipment list is lame anyway). For instance, there are many sniper rounds that will go straight through any body armor you can create. Not to mention poison gases and all sorts of stuff.
There is a reason why law enforcement and the military is made up of many people dispite access to the best equipment available. One person can't do jack shit against many enemies.
Along with PKCS#11 and Javacard, you should be looking at all the ISO 7816 specifications for technical information.
However, do any stores actually use the smartcard portion of the card? All I have seen is using the mag-strip on the back and nothing more (which is usually just your account number, expiration, and name on the card). So there is no "secret" information that is even being used on the card.
Once you get into it you will realize that smartcards are not some magical device designed to invade privacy or something. Really, a smartcard is best for carrying protected private keys to be used with PKI (like a certificate). A smartcard provides benefits over traditional "soft" tokens by protecting your data in hardware.
Generally speaking a smartcard has one or more sets of keys and maybe certificates to go with those keys (just like PGP keys or a certificate you get from Verisign). Other than that the information is similar to what is on your credit card. Maybe your name, expiration date, etc. Some military cards have more information about the person. Almost always all the information is also printed on the card somewhere (just like how your credit card's mag-strip has the same information stamped on the front of the card).
First off I'm assuming this is for an externally visible business web-site and not some intranet thing or personal site (if it is then ignore this post).
Seriously it's better to pay someone to do this. I'm a developer too and I have even done serious web-site development in the past. It is tempting to do it yourself. However, it's so much easier and nicer just to pay someone else that actually spends a lot of time caring about what a site should look like, using modern design, and testing on all platforms.
Sites done by people like yourself generally are not very good. They're usually not real bad, but not as professional as they could be. It's not that you can't do a great job, it's just that it takes a lot of time to get it right and you have no experience. Your web-site may be the first thing people see concerning your business, it needs to look professional. Modern web-sites are a lot more complex than they used to be, especially when you get into CSS and similar which is the thing to do nowadays.
A couple thousand bucks is probably even cheaper than your time working on it anyway.
I agree with the wxWidgets thing. Honestly, I can't see how a toolkit can be that old and "mature" and still contain so many bugs. It's one of the buggiest toolkits I have ever used... this dispite the fact it is like 12 years old! After looking at the code you can tell why though. The foundation is poorly written, the programmer(s) did not know what they were doing and they never went back and fixed it (what have they been working on the last 12 years anyway?!).
As for Qt, we'll see. I think the only reason it survives is because of a couple corporate cash cows plus KDE. That will only last so long though. If KDE ever became extremely popular, creating commercial applications would be a huge drag because of the price for Qt. Most software companies don't want GPL code and the buy-in price is way higher than Windows or OS X. In fact, that is probably holding KDE back more than anything else.
OK Trolltech, how about lowering your prices instead of increasing them every few months?!
Most shops and individuals can't afford that stuff for commercial development. Every other development platform is hella cheaper than Qt (MSDN, Apple, etc.).
Trolltech needs to take a clue from some failed projects that made it too hard for the system to be adopted by the masses because they were listening to the marketing department.
There are two main reason I have seen for not upgrading:
1. There isn't very much difference between XP and 2000. 2000 is a fairly stable platform that runs pretty much all the same software as XP. "If it ain't broke"
2. The activation stuff sucks. Even as a legal owner I find it is a huge pain in the ass. This is especially true when you upgrade a server. It's not uncommon to upgrade servers either by changing/adding hardware or just replacing the whole machine which can cause you to have to reactivate Windows. Now, it's not that hard to reactivate but it's just a stupid little thing you have to do and the machine won't work until it's done. It feels risky to upgrade machines running XP because you're not sure if everything will go smoothly because of the activation crap.
I use 2000 on my main development machine because sometimes I do have to change the hardware for testing purposes and I got tired of having to continuously reactivate Windows.
I don't know what I'm going to do if they stop supporting 2000. More reason to spend more time in Linux or OS X I guess (although technically I simply must spend some time in Windows for development purposes).
I never said I was too brilliant for school. I was saying that school sucked.
I had many great unconventional ideas (I even created designs, wrote papers, etc.) that were shot down by teachers and other people I looked up to. When you're 10 years old that does something to you. Something not good.
Yeah but that doesn't work for high-school and below. Those were the worst years for me.
;)
I dropped out(*) after 10th grade and started taking college courses. At the time I didn't know you could do that without a high-school diploma but nobody asked so... College was better than high-school but still didn't give me what I wanted. The courses were too basic. Especially the computer courses. I had already been programming for more than 8 years by that point (some commercial stuff even). Research? Pffft, all I saw was lame ivory tower crap. I finished my degree only because I knew it would help with the job search.
I then worked for "the man" for a number of years. After gaining a ton of experience working on cutting edge and complex government stuff and some small-business work I took that knowledge and started my own company a few years ago. I'm finally now doing what I want. I just wish I could have done this 15 years ago because this is all I really wanted back in elementary/middle/high school and college. I partly blame myself, but I also blame the education system for not showing me the way to reach my goals. I just didn't know any better at the time.
My advice? Do internships. You will learn way more stuff than being a professor's slave-monkey.
(*) I finished my high-school at home while I went to college. I ended up graduating high-school just after I graduated college.
Oh, so that's why when I'm running GNOME if I just want to fire up a simple text editor (Kate) it brings a crapload of other stuff into memory and takes forever to start (plus leaves stuff hanging around in memory afterwards). For just that little app.
Yeah, great design.
Whatever... When building a system you should have goals. One of those goals should be performance related.
For example, if I had written Ruby one of my goals would be to have it run faster than the other systems I was basing it on. In this case that would mean at a minimum making it the same or faster than Perl. So as I was building the system I would constantly test performance to make sure it was meeting or beating the performance goals throughout the whole process. This requires no design work, just common sense.
Now they're going back and having to redo the entire thing. As a programmer I know how that goes. It's insanely difficult to stay motivated while redoing the same work as you did before (or even that someone else did before). Good designs are iterative in nature rather than massive re-writes. Ruby v2 has about as much chance of success as Perl 6... (ie. extremely unlikely)
Most programmers are idiots.
Has the performance of Ruby gotten much better since the early days?
I started using Ruby a long time ago, back when no one knew about it. I liked it because it was like a better Perl (better OO support but with Perl syntax). However, I quickly tired of its lackluster performance. I mean it was a lot slower than even Perl or Python. I eventually moved on hoping to return when Rudy had matured and performance was kicking. Last time I checked the performance was the same as always. So much for the "tune for performance later" crap. When will programmers learn that doesn't actually work? You need a good design that includes tuning for performance early on.
Now I know Ruby on Rails has been shown to be faster than J2EE and similar but that's just a small part of what Ruby can do. Everywhere else it doesn't seem to perform as good. Sorta like Java. Good for server-side web stuff (mostly due to the nice API's really) but suck-ass at everything else.
I think the more general problem is: 10 year old use computers, and everybody is really really desperate to get them to get them to use high-tech wizardry, when really what all that does is make kids multimediocre.
This really depends on how it is done. The computer can provide benefits if used properly. The problem is most people don't know how to effectively use a computer as a teaching tool. Almost all computer work I see kids doing is of the form "sit down and use this software package to learn stuff" or "search the intarweb for information on this subject." That's just lame and not really using a computer to its full potential.
There should also be more stuff for students who want to learn to programming. I know I wish I had something like that when I was in school. Back in the early 80's the elementary and middle school "computer" classes I had consisted of learning to type and looking up library books. This was quite lame considering I had already been programming computers for several years by the time I hit middle school. Near the end of high school I finally had the chance to take a programming class. LOL, what a joke. At that point I was already doing things like assembly language, C, and LISP. They were teaching BASIC. Well, trying to anyway because the teacher was learning while teaching the class and didn't know jack crap.
"Education" is a oxymoron.
You're probably not focusing long enough. It's like those 3D pictures, it took me a minute to figure out the mental state required to make them disappear. Once I got that I can now make them disappear quickly and for as long as I like. Pretty cool.
I wonder if this damanges anything though. After doing it for a couple minutes, when I stopped it was like someone had taken my picture with a flash or something. Even as I type this the visual residue is still there.
In principal I agree but I good software developers don't follow those rules. Lets look at how cars are made.
Architects are like automotive engineers. They create design of the car and then the workers put the thing together. This leads to several problems. One is that the engineers are so disconnected from the end product that you run into problems like needing to remove the entire engine to change a spark plug. Another problem which is related to the first, is that there are lots and lots of little gaps between the design and the actual finished product. It's simply too complex for the engineers to think of every little detail in the design. This leads to problems similar to the first.
Good software developers are like custom car builders. Some times they work off an existing design and some times they create things from scratch. They typically do both the design work and the work of putting the thing together. They are pragmatic. They solve the problem and then move on. What you get from this is not always perfect but lots better than the over-engineered ivory tower crap. It looks cool and serves its purpose. ie. it gets stuff done, dammit. Due to this working environment the custom car builders become both master designers and master builders. They are artists.
haha, I have thought about developing a fake foreign accent for that reason. I found it to be too much work though.
The biggest problem I see with meeting geeky people is that we hate socializing.
I'm thin not overweight so pasta and bread I need just maintain a decent weight. I have tried many different styles of eating over the years (eg. bodybuilder diet, etc.) and finally just chalked it up as genetics. That is until I see this mention of thinking about exercising.
It has also recently been proven (again, by nerd scientists who sit at their computers all day) that just THINKING about exercising is almost as effective at increasing strength as actually exercising.
... find a geek girlfriend and make austistic babies.
What? Where is this study? I'm curious because I workout regularly (for the last 10 years) and although I'm in good shape, I never really developed an athletes body. Now, some part of that is surely genetics, but I'm wondering if lack of focus has an effect. I really only think about exercising when I'm actually doing it. As a programmer I am completely focused on that for 99% of the time I am awake. I wonder if the mere fact that I don't (or can't) think about being "big musclely dude" detracts from my potential in that area.
Meh, anyway... Let me tell you guys, you don't want the supermodel girlfriend. I have been down that road many times. Attractive (in the pop-culture sense) women may make good playthings for a while but make horrible long term relationships and even worse wives. I actually prefer to have long term relationships because then I don't want to waste energy thinking about that crap. So I guess
Save one for me though as I'm still trying to find a geek girlfriend.
I used to work at a similar sized company. Around 30 people, mostly programmers. Network admin was a full time job for two, sometimes three people.
Don't kid yourself, it's too much for one person if you have other tasks. Also, once you become an admin it's really hard to go back to programmer (both because you get lazy and also because you just won't have time).
I have always held steady in that area. I would probably be a really good admin but I refuse to do it. My statement is simply "I'm a programmer, not an admin." I can only imagine you have at some point given your boss reasons to believe you are a good admin type? Don't do that.