The original article poster seems to be imagining where he might like to see tech companies spring up (Arizona, Austin) as opposed to where the tech companies already are.
From my own experience: I lived in Phoenix for a little while. I spent about 6 months looking for C++ work, and as I recall, I got exactly one uninteresting phone call in all that time.
Finally, I moved back here to Mass., and landed a great programming job within 3 weeks. I don't believe it was just a fluke, either. I've lived in MA for most of my life, and there really are many, many technology companies here. There's hardly a region in the state that doesn't have 2-3 towns packed full of tech-heavy office parks.
And you might be surprised (or not) at how many companies have regional presence in MA. ATI, 3COM, and Compaq come to mind. Not to mention the enormous EMC presence. And those are outside the metro Boston area! Then there's Cambridge, Waltham, Burlington, Andover, etc. There's no exaggerating the glut of tech companies in Mass., although I am slightly surprised that we beat California.
The downsides, of course, are heavy traffic burdening grossly inadequate roads and freeways everywhere, and obscene real estate prices. But if you value being able to find work semi-reliably, it's not so bad all in all.
Right. It's also basic human nature. You know how there are some people who have great personalities, who speak like it is really them talking, who, while they are almost certainly not 100% original, still give that impression? Then, there are people who seem to have half a personality, who parrot excessively, who, when you're having a conversation with them, they keep picking up words you use and throwing them back at you, and you notice because it's mildly odd. Or maybe you overhear them repeating an idea that you know you formulated, but they're repeating it to somebody else and taking the credit.
It seems to me that this article is merely pointing out that a lot of people are like the latter. I'm also not surprised to find lots of these types of people among bloggers, since so many are overt attention ho's, and attention ho's are often notorious "borrowers" of other people's personalities.
(Mind, I'm not saying this of all bloggers, as I have found plenty of interesting, well-written, informative, and entertaining blogs. You know the kind I'm talking about.)
All the research you need can be found on Infinium'svery ownweb sites. Read every press release, look at the site (design by 2advanced. Infinium can't even take credit for the cool flash, which is the only thing of "substance" in sight), read the comedy that is Tim's resume page, look at how they word everything, and read between the lines.
I'm not going to post my play-by-play analysis, but suffice it to say, I agree with you about one thing. Anybody who's interested should indeed do their own research. (and have a few good laughs and amazed slaps of the forehead while they're at it)
Thank you, thank you, for putting into words and lending the credibility of an insider to some things I've been wanting to post myself.
In the IL thread last night, I invited people to have a laugh by simply reading anything and everything on IL's own websites. Any observant person should be able to read between the lines there.
IL has had one product - an image, and an image created for them by 3rd parties at that! Their target market is investors, to whom they want to sell this image. At this point, I don't care how many "industry veterans" they become capable of hiring, or whether they do eventually bring a console to market. I don't doubt that their shady strategy could work, and call me spiteful, but to me that possibily is more offensive than simply peddling the exaggerated nothing in the first place.
Tell me about it. As it is, I'm confined to keeping anything amusing in the comments, and all I have to worry about is the day my company gets as big as Microsoft and our code gets leaked to the net for the world to mock.
Er... on second thought, I probably don't have anything to worry about there.
I had a similar experience. This is how my programming career really got kicked off in the first place.
In early '99 I'd just been laid off from a short-lived tech-support gig that I'd landed through a friend. I posted my info to every job website I could find.
Three weeks later, a headhunter called me and said he'd seen my resume on CareerMosaic. I got an interview a couple days later, and a job a few days after that. I was hired on the pretense of doing tech-support, but I let everybody know that I was a programmer. A month after I started, I was on the development team, and two years later I was lead programmer for the "next generation" of their flagship software.
Every job I've had since then has had something to do with that company, or former employees thereof. I've no idea what I'd be doing now if that headhunter hadn't seen my posting on a job website.
Of course, that went down in good ol' 1999. I still actively wonder what I'd do now if I suddenly found myself looking for a job, and short of a lead.
On the flip side, I tried moving to Phoenix a couple of years ago. Not knowing anybody there, I hit the job boards for 8 months, without any response beyond maybe one call from a headhunter that went nowhere. I couldn't find a job. Finally had to move back home to Mass., where I quickly landed a job with some ex-employees of the company I mentioned above.
So there are the factors of era, and location. The job board route got me started, but that was during high-flying times. Everything since then has been due to networking, and somehow, I'd rather not find myself relying on job boards now. I'm very interested in what other kinds of techniques or circumstances have worked for other folks.
About the only program I ever ran on it was GW-BASIC, and later QuickBasic. I wrote my first shareware games on that Tandy. I did sometimes use the sweet music program in DeskMate to create 3-voice songs. Oh yeah, and every Sierra game it could run!
I remember sending away for the upgrade that brought the RAM up to 640k, so I could run the really cutting-edge games, like TMNT. I seem to remember that extra 384k costing kind of a lot... y'know, for 384k.
I'm no physics expert, but if you could truly stop light (as it seems this experiment has still not really done), does that imply that the photons would age while they are stationary?
Perhaps they would still be travelling at c, with significant motion diverted to the time dimension? Any real physicists out there who can elaborate on why I'm talking out my ass?
That's exactly right. People/groups in leadership positions have this peculiar tendency to lobby eveybody else to vest more power in them. This is always accompanied by noble-sounding promises that they alone can make everybody else safe, secure, and better off.
But whether it's a politician, an agency, a corporation, or an unabashed dictator, it always turns out to be all about the payoff for the leader, whether they are in it for power, money, or both.
When some ass says "I must have increased authority, because your (or the fictional "our") security is at stake" - that's your cue to run whoever it is out of town.
Ah - a subject close to my heart. I've been programming games of varying quality and complexity for 13 years. The closest any of them came to 'success' was the modest following garnered by a top-down RPG called Aspetra back in '96; but it has never really been about getting big or making $ for me. I simply LOVE designing game engines, from graphics to AI to physics to everything else.
Although I have had a pretty easy time of landing interesting, fun software jobs, I have had absolutely NO luck attracting the slightest bit of interest from game companies, ever. So I continue to enjoy my 9-5, M-F, working on everything from compilers, to integration, to various business apps; but if I want to develop a game, doing so in my 'garage' is, so far, the only way to go!
It's much more than a cynical forum for betting on catastrophes. As I understand it, the idea is to create a network of people who are thinking and making predictions about world events, with an incentive for correct predictions. It's like building a distributed human computer.
Unfortunately, markets generate a lot of noise, and they obscure information. Usually, any good information generated by a market can only be recognized as such in retrospect.
I, too, treasure irreverance. That is, I've always thought that people like Howard Stern, and the South Park creators, for example, are actually fulfilling a very important function.
Which leads me to my answer to the first question - should people say anything, just because they can? Absolutely. The only way to keep a pathway open is to use it. If nobody was challenging the boundaries, I believe the boundaries would tend to shrink, in practice, socially, regardless of what is written in the constitution.
There's a compact, simple development language called OZEXE at http://www.ozexe.com. I think it fulfils most of the points in the article. At any rate, the language is easy, but flexible. There's a mini-API interface for I/O and other windows functions. It has a lot of support for automation. There's a built in UI editor. You can write all kinds of non-graphics-oriented programs really quickly.
The coolest thing about it is: it hides your source code right in the.exe file, so you don't have to maintain separate source files, and you can actually load the.exe file right into the editor!
Plus, it's a small download, and it's basically free for non-commercial use.
Slashdot Mirror
The original article poster seems to be imagining where he might like to see tech companies spring up (Arizona, Austin) as opposed to where the tech companies already are.
From my own experience: I lived in Phoenix for a little while. I spent about 6 months looking for C++ work, and as I recall, I got exactly one uninteresting phone call in all that time.
Finally, I moved back here to Mass., and landed a great programming job within 3 weeks. I don't believe it was just a fluke, either. I've lived in MA for most of my life, and there really are many, many technology companies here. There's hardly a region in the state that doesn't have 2-3 towns packed full of tech-heavy office parks.
And you might be surprised (or not) at how many companies have regional presence in MA. ATI, 3COM, and Compaq come to mind. Not to mention the enormous EMC presence. And those are outside the metro Boston area! Then there's Cambridge, Waltham, Burlington, Andover, etc. There's no exaggerating the glut of tech companies in Mass., although I am slightly surprised that we beat California.
The downsides, of course, are heavy traffic burdening grossly inadequate roads and freeways everywhere, and obscene real estate prices. But if you value being able to find work semi-reliably, it's not so bad all in all.
Right. It's also basic human nature. You know how there are some people who have great personalities, who speak like it is really them talking, who, while they are almost certainly not 100% original, still give that impression? Then, there are people who seem to have half a personality, who parrot excessively, who, when you're having a conversation with them, they keep picking up words you use and throwing them back at you, and you notice because it's mildly odd. Or maybe you overhear them repeating an idea that you know you formulated, but they're repeating it to somebody else and taking the credit.
It seems to me that this article is merely pointing out that a lot of people are like the latter. I'm also not surprised to find lots of these types of people among bloggers, since so many are overt attention ho's, and attention ho's are often notorious "borrowers" of other people's personalities.
(Mind, I'm not saying this of all bloggers, as I have found plenty of interesting, well-written, informative, and entertaining blogs. You know the kind I'm talking about.)
I'm not going to post my play-by-play analysis, but suffice it to say, I agree with you about one thing. Anybody who's interested should indeed do their own research. (and have a few good laughs and amazed slaps of the forehead while they're at it)
Thank you, thank you, for putting into words and lending the credibility of an insider to some things I've been wanting to post myself.
In the IL thread last night, I invited people to have a laugh by simply reading anything and everything on IL's own websites. Any observant person should be able to read between the lines there.
IL has had one product - an image, and an image created for them by 3rd parties at that! Their target market is investors, to whom they want to sell this image. At this point, I don't care how many "industry veterans" they become capable of hiring, or whether they do eventually bring a console to market. I don't doubt that their shady strategy could work, and call me spiteful, but to me that possibily is more offensive than simply peddling the exaggerated nothing in the first place.
Tell me about it. As it is, I'm confined to keeping anything amusing in the comments, and all I have to worry about is the day my company gets as big as Microsoft and our code gets leaked to the net for the world to mock.
Er... on second thought, I probably don't have anything to worry about there.
I had a similar experience. This is how my programming career really got kicked off in the first place.
In early '99 I'd just been laid off from a short-lived tech-support gig that I'd landed through a friend. I posted my info to every job website I could find.
Three weeks later, a headhunter called me and said he'd seen my resume on CareerMosaic. I got an interview a couple days later, and a job a few days after that. I was hired on the pretense of doing tech-support, but I let everybody know that I was a programmer. A month after I started, I was on the development team, and two years later I was lead programmer for the "next generation" of their flagship software.
Every job I've had since then has had something to do with that company, or former employees thereof. I've no idea what I'd be doing now if that headhunter hadn't seen my posting on a job website.
Of course, that went down in good ol' 1999. I still actively wonder what I'd do now if I suddenly found myself looking for a job, and short of a lead.
On the flip side, I tried moving to Phoenix a couple of years ago. Not knowing anybody there, I hit the job boards for 8 months, without any response beyond maybe one call from a headhunter that went nowhere. I couldn't find a job. Finally had to move back home to Mass., where I quickly landed a job with some ex-employees of the company I mentioned above.
So there are the factors of era, and location. The job board route got me started, but that was during high-flying times. Everything since then has been due to networking, and somehow, I'd rather not find myself relying on job boards now. I'm very interested in what other kinds of techniques or circumstances have worked for other folks.
*whistles innocently*
Mmmmhmmmm. Tandy 1000 HX: 7.16 mHz 8088, 256k RAM, 720k floppy, 16-color weirdo-CGA, 4 whole sound channels! (Though 1 channel was noise-only.)
About the only program I ever ran on it was GW-BASIC, and later QuickBasic. I wrote my first shareware games on that Tandy. I did sometimes use the sweet music program in DeskMate to create 3-voice songs. Oh yeah, and every Sierra game it could run!
I remember sending away for the upgrade that brought the RAM up to 640k, so I could run the really cutting-edge games, like TMNT. I seem to remember that extra 384k costing kind of a lot... y'know, for 384k.
I'm no physics expert, but if you could truly stop light (as it seems this experiment has still not really done), does that imply that the photons would age while they are stationary? Perhaps they would still be travelling at c, with significant motion diverted to the time dimension? Any real physicists out there who can elaborate on why I'm talking out my ass?
I love it that Bill Joy fantasizes about a device that would enhance his myopia.
Can you imagine a world in which congress always sided with the majority they are supposed to represent? *sigh* So nice.
That's exactly right. People/groups in leadership positions have this peculiar tendency to lobby eveybody else to vest more power in them. This is always accompanied by noble-sounding promises that they alone can make everybody else safe, secure, and better off.
But whether it's a politician, an agency, a corporation, or an unabashed dictator, it always turns out to be all about the payoff for the leader, whether they are in it for power, money, or both.
When some ass says "I must have increased authority, because your (or the fictional "our") security is at stake" - that's your cue to run whoever it is out of town.
Ah - a subject close to my heart. I've been programming games of varying quality and complexity for 13 years. The closest any of them came to 'success' was the modest following garnered by a top-down RPG called Aspetra back in '96; but it has never really been about getting big or making $ for me. I simply LOVE designing game engines, from graphics to AI to physics to everything else. Although I have had a pretty easy time of landing interesting, fun software jobs, I have had absolutely NO luck attracting the slightest bit of interest from game companies, ever. So I continue to enjoy my 9-5, M-F, working on everything from compilers, to integration, to various business apps; but if I want to develop a game, doing so in my 'garage' is, so far, the only way to go!
It's much more than a cynical forum for betting on catastrophes. As I understand it, the idea is to create a network of people who are thinking and making predictions about world events, with an incentive for correct predictions. It's like building a distributed human computer. Unfortunately, markets generate a lot of noise, and they obscure information. Usually, any good information generated by a market can only be recognized as such in retrospect.
I, too, treasure irreverance. That is, I've always thought that people like Howard Stern, and the South Park creators, for example, are actually fulfilling a very important function. Which leads me to my answer to the first question - should people say anything, just because they can? Absolutely. The only way to keep a pathway open is to use it. If nobody was challenging the boundaries, I believe the boundaries would tend to shrink, in practice, socially, regardless of what is written in the constitution.
There's a compact, simple development language called OZEXE at http://www.ozexe.com. I think it fulfils most of the points in the article. At any rate, the language is easy, but flexible. There's a mini-API interface for I/O and other windows functions. It has a lot of support for automation. There's a built in UI editor. You can write all kinds of non-graphics-oriented programs really quickly. The coolest thing about it is: it hides your source code right in the .exe file, so you don't have to maintain separate source files, and you can actually load the .exe file right into the editor!
Plus, it's a small download, and it's basically free for non-commercial use.