Thailand is imperfect; the United States is imperfect. As my father said many years ago, you pays your money and takes your choice. I decided twenty years ago that I would rather die in Thailand than live in America. I'm still here.
Disclaimer: I am a geek geezer. Been programming from 1968 through 2013.
I try to keep up with the knowledge requirements. But what is valuable about older programmers is judgement, AKA wisdom. The kid fresh out of college knows how to record the number in a database. But he does not know WHETHER to record the number in the database. Do you store it or recompute it? Does the unit of measure change? Do you store a change history? Is the number valuable enough to the company to pay for data entry? You can fit the numbers onto a small screen, but will anyone want to read them?
I recently had a manager ask for a report, and I pointed out to him that his request would show him fifteen thousand numbers. Fifteen thousand numbers are effectively useless. So together we figured out what he really wanted.
Colleges, and reference manuals, can teach you how to code. Only experience can teach you whether to code, and when to code, and what to code, and what not to code.
I have a low-security password that I use for Slashdot and most web sites. I have a very high-security password that I use with my bank (it depends on a number that has not been written down anywhere for fifty years). The idea of needing a unique password for every web site is rediculous. What do I care if yahoo.com is hacked and somebody logs in to Slashdot as me? Impersonation is not a serious problem.
(Result: I can not guarantee that I wrote this message. So what.)
I've been in Thailand (& Laos) for twenty years. Now most of my work is done through the Internet, even for local companies. Living costs are low. A Company puts money into my bank, the ATM card takes it out. Work at home means long hours with lots of breaks. Rural Thailand is wonderful. I jumped ship from California in 1990 and have never regretted it. But I live a Thai lifestyle, not an American lifestyle. More information at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/72291163/index.html . Cold water baths, no air conditioning, travel by bicycle or motorcycle or bus.
No (English) computer books to speak of; all technical information through the Internet. I still read the news, but don't much care what that idiot government in Washington does. Eighteen years ago I decided I'd rather die in Thailand than live in the United States. I have had seven children; my children have had five mothers. Every time I say this some lady in the crowd raises her hand and shouts "NUMBER SIX! NUMBER SIX". Two kids are in America; the other five were all born in The Land Of Smiles.
Sometimes I have a little bit of money, so I can eat. Sometimes I have a lot of money; some Thai lady comes along, and goes away, and I have a little bit of money left, so I can eat. No problem, no worry, no stress.
One technique is to spread it around. Use DuckDuckGo or Yandex for search. Use independent e-mail services. If you must do social networking, use low-volume third-layer sites. Remember that Google is now one database; your gmail and youtube use are correlated. Whenever possible use companies based outside the US. Google (USA) will tell the FBI; Yandex (Russia) will not. Sure, any fact about you is in some database. But don't let all those facts get into a single database.
A year ago I signed up for an online course in software testing. It went OK until I was supposed to post unit test code for an existing function. The function function (target code) was well specified, the unit test (my code) was under-specified, the user interface (web site GUI) was totally unspecified. I copied my code and pasted it into the textarea and clicked on "submit". What did I get back? "Wrong". What was wrong? No way to tell. No error message, just "Wrong". After a dozen variations over at least three days, I gave up and dropped out of the course.
I have degrees from U.C.Berkeley and Stanford. It is amazing how important the Teaching Assistants are in a live course. Where is the submit bin? What do I erase, and what to I keep? Why am I not seeing an error message? TA's are a vital point of human contact. Professors' lectures can be recorded; TAs' answers must be responsive.
Patent, and Copyright, is basically a government-issued monopoly on making copies.
I'm going to do like Monsanto. I'll write a computer virus, copyright it, spread it, and sue the ass off of anyone who gets infected.
A patent on a life form makes no sense. Life forms, by their very nature, make copies of themselves. How can Monsanto claim an exclusive right to make Widget Seeds when the Widget seeds themselves are dedicated to making widget seeds?
What will happen when Monsanto makes a human gene that cures epilepsy? Will the law prohibit cured epileptics from having children?
Perhaps ONLY 'terminator' seeds should be patentable.
gweihir, your line (signature?) "I usually do not reply to Anonymous Cowards." is insulting me. I did not post anonymously. I assure you that "AndyCanfield" (with the obvious space in the middle) is the name my mother gave me and that I use everywere. If that's your signature I suggest you make it optional.
He points out that new technologies, such as low frequency radar, will eventually overcome the stealth technology of any existing flyer. How much can such a system cost? A few dishes, and a new computer - far less than a new airframe.
Then I had a vision of people scattered all over Iran, with radios and binoculars. As far as I know the so-called "stealth" planes are still visible in the visual spectrum. "What's that? It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a hundred million dollar U.S. Navy Stealth Bomber! Phone home Ahmed!"
Slashdot.org barely works on my Android 2.2 phone. "Today" and "Yesterday" and sometimes "More" just hang. The tv.slashdot.org site I can browse but never see or hear anything. You seem to detect the mobile phone, but the HTML and/or JavaScript is beyond the capabilities of my phone (the only thing I own that has sound).
I'm a programmer. I've worked from home for a decade. It's usually a 10 hour bus ride to the company office. Even when I've had a designated desk at the company, somebody else would take it over because it was unused.
I've worked from home for longer than I've had this family. Or the one before that.
If possible set up your home workstation in a spare bedroom; otherwise family traffic through the room will upset your work frequently.
You'll be surprised how easy it is to do two hours of work at midnight. Go for it; I have ideas in my sleep that I can implement immediately.
Kids come first. The day I booted my daughter out of my home office was the day she died.
I raise my head above the notebook screen and wonder where the family went. They get used to it; I don't.
I'm not a phone or IM person. E-mail is my professional lifeline. Know thyself.
No problem with the wife; she knows that this is where the money comes from.
I've always been on-call 24/7 so home/work separation is no problem.
My clients treat me like an outside vendor. Yes, I get paid for results, not for time. But if I put in half the time, I'll get half the results, and get paid half as much, and that's bad for my family.
If possible have a cheap desktop computer at home to store backups. The kids can play games on it, but you need a a place to store a daily backup of your notebook. Uploading a 1GB backup through the internet is something you only do once.
It's easy for the boss to forget that you exist, but in the long run people who don't exist don't get paid. Stay visible. Stay in contact with various people at work, not just the boss.
I am ***SO*** glad that I live in a country (Thailand) where you can ride in the back of a pickup truck. "Those who sell their liberty for safety will find that they have neither."
I completely disagree. The most valuable resource I have is real estate in my brain. Yes, I know "Ctrl+F". and often use it. But I don't know, I don't want to know, Ctrl+D, Ctrl+R, Ctrl+H, etc. Put them on a menu, in English.
The purpose of a user interface is ***NOT*** to minimize keystrokes, nor to minimze mouse clicks. It is to minimize the junk you need to know to use the program. A lady who hasn't found Edit / Find on the menu is just plain dumb. But a lady who uses Edit / Find instead of Ctrl+F is using her brain for what she gets paid to use it for - keeping her boss happy.
Thirty years ago I argued that we were mistaken in writing our programs for "expert users". Even then people had so many different programs to use every day that nobody had time to become an "expert" in any one of them. That is even more true today. I have Ctrl+F on my PC, but not on my phone, so why should I memorize it?
People who love Ctrl+F probably love VI, the second worst editor ever invented (The worst is emacs, which is VI with unpredictable macros; sit down at a friend's computer and run emacs and you have no idea what Ctrl+F does on HIS machine.)
I have never gotten BitTorrent to work. Today I am behind an ISP's router that I can't reconfigure. So I can't share. My attempts at downloading fail because everyone in the swarm got what they wanted and disconnected. BitTorrent has no way to recover from that.
I use Firefox, but for serious downloading I use wget. Just copy the link from Firefox to the command line, and leave it alone overnight. Wonderful. It continues, it retries, it will keep plugging away no matter what. Recently downloaded the Sintel movie using wget.
i'm sorry, but vigilantism sucks, and is not a solution to anything. the only valid solution is to kick your government in the ass to fix the failures in your society that make the idea of vigilantism seem remotely appealing at all
--
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it
Anybody else notice the ethical inconsistancy between his pronouncement and his signature?
The only valid solution is to obey this law and perhaps change it, and your moral duty to ignore that other law.
25 years ago I asked my co-worker about my work habits. He said "You goof off for eight hours a day, then you work for 20 minutes and earn your salary."
20 years ago I was training a new system administrator. I explained to her that some days you only needed to work four hours, but when the network is down you don't go home at night until it is back up.
Programmers do not work by the clock, nor by the lines of code. If you are happy with what I produce, it doesn't matter if it is 10,000 lines that took me 90 hours in one week, or 5 lines that took me one hour. If it works, and is readable, and is maintainable, it is worth what you paid me.
And, ironically, the best programmers produce the smallest, lightest, most readable code. Vast quantities of work and code are often a sign that the coder doesn't understand the problem.
We had touch screens in the 1980's and gave up on them. Why? Use a touch screen for an hour and your arm falls off. The wonderful thing about the mouse is that you can rest your forearm on the table, you can rest your fingers on the mouse, and so take the weight off of your upper arm muscles. Why doesn't anyone today remember this? We gave up on touch screens twenty-five years ago. Jeesh.
I play a version of Freecell, with the same rules but a different goal. But you need to turn off autodrop, so you can't play it in Microsoft Freecell. Pysol works well.
The new goal is to get all the cards in four long streams, king down to whatever, with as few cards as possible in the output stacks. Your score is negative - the best you can do is nothing at all in the output stacks which gives you a score of zero. An Ace counts one, two counts two, three counts three, etc. If the output stack contains an ace and two of every suit that's a twelve; not bad. I can usually get below ten, which is better.
It requires you to generate long streams of cards and be creative in moving them around. You have to decide the tradeoffs - can you get the stream from here to there or do you have to put an ace in the output stacks, costing you a point? And remmember that if you put the ace and two of spades in the output stack you'll be short a black two when you want to stream up the last red ace, so you'll have to put the red ace on the output stack also and your score will be four, not three.
It's a challenge; requires a lot more look-ahead than most versions of Solitaire.
You mentioned "continuing efforts to implement mandatory ID cards". Remember that if you leave your country of citizenship, you must carry a passport. For example, if you move from the UK to the US, American citzens have no mandatory ID but you do - your British passport. Generally you must show it to any policeman who asks to see it for any reason, and he need not tell you his reason. I've lived with my (US) passport for nineteen years; mandatory ID has never bothered me.
Years ago I received an e-mail attachment named "SEXYLADY.JPG". Did Outlook Express hide extensions? I didn't know. But saving it to the hard disk and using the DOS window I could see it was really "SEXYLADY.JPG.EXE". That's when I started hating Microsoft's extension policy. I hope this means they will soon eliminate this security hole.
And yes, every dumb user I know opens files by double clicking. Many of them don't even know you can run Excel from the menu! Indeed, I've seen people save an HTML web page as "Pagename.xls" just so that when they double click on the name Excel will open it.
Wonderful! I can hardly wait until the DVD stores grab this idea! Here in Thailand, legal CD/DVD stores have a hundred titles, and pirate shops have thousands! You can never find what you want in the legal shops.
Slashdot Mirror
Thailand is imperfect; the United States is imperfect. As my father said many years ago, you pays your money and takes your choice. I decided twenty years ago that I would rather die in Thailand than live in America. I'm still here.
Any of you are welcome to come and take a look.
I try to keep up with the knowledge requirements. But what is valuable about older programmers is judgement, AKA wisdom. The kid fresh out of college knows how to record the number in a database. But he does not know WHETHER to record the number in the database. Do you store it or recompute it? Does the unit of measure change? Do you store a change history? Is the number valuable enough to the company to pay for data entry? You can fit the numbers onto a small screen, but will anyone want to read them?
I recently had a manager ask for a report, and I pointed out to him that his request would show him fifteen thousand numbers. Fifteen thousand numbers are effectively useless. So together we figured out what he really wanted.
Colleges, and reference manuals, can teach you how to code. Only experience can teach you whether to code, and when to code, and what to code, and what not to code.
(Result: I can not guarantee that I wrote this message. So what.)
I've been in Thailand (& Laos) for twenty years. Now most of my work is done through the Internet, even for local companies. Living costs are low. A Company puts money into my bank, the ATM card takes it out. Work at home means long hours with lots of breaks. Rural Thailand is wonderful. I jumped ship from California in 1990 and have never regretted it. But I live a Thai lifestyle, not an American lifestyle. More information at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/72291163/index.html . Cold water baths, no air conditioning, travel by bicycle or motorcycle or bus. No (English) computer books to speak of; all technical information through the Internet. I still read the news, but don't much care what that idiot government in Washington does. Eighteen years ago I decided I'd rather die in Thailand than live in the United States. I have had seven children; my children have had five mothers. Every time I say this some lady in the crowd raises her hand and shouts "NUMBER SIX! NUMBER SIX". Two kids are in America; the other five were all born in The Land Of Smiles. Sometimes I have a little bit of money, so I can eat. Sometimes I have a lot of money; some Thai lady comes along, and goes away, and I have a little bit of money left, so I can eat. No problem, no worry, no stress.
One technique is to spread it around. Use DuckDuckGo or Yandex for search. Use independent e-mail services. If you must do social networking, use low-volume third-layer sites. Remember that Google is now one database; your gmail and youtube use are correlated. Whenever possible use companies based outside the US. Google (USA) will tell the FBI; Yandex (Russia) will not. Sure, any fact about you is in some database. But don't let all those facts get into a single database.
I have a notebook computer, and I use a monitor, a USB keyboard, and a wireless mouse. I can put these three things anywhere I want them.
A year ago I signed up for an online course in software testing. It went OK until I was supposed to post unit test code for an existing function. The function function (target code) was well specified, the unit test (my code) was under-specified, the user interface (web site GUI) was totally unspecified. I copied my code and pasted it into the textarea and clicked on "submit". What did I get back? "Wrong". What was wrong? No way to tell. No error message, just "Wrong". After a dozen variations over at least three days, I gave up and dropped out of the course. I have degrees from U.C.Berkeley and Stanford. It is amazing how important the Teaching Assistants are in a live course. Where is the submit bin? What do I erase, and what to I keep? Why am I not seeing an error message? TA's are a vital point of human contact. Professors' lectures can be recorded; TAs' answers must be responsive.
Patent, and Copyright, is basically a government-issued monopoly on making copies.
I'm going to do like Monsanto. I'll write a computer virus, copyright it, spread it, and sue the ass off of anyone who gets infected.
A patent on a life form makes no sense. Life forms, by their very nature, make copies of themselves. How can Monsanto claim an exclusive right to make Widget Seeds when the Widget seeds themselves are dedicated to making widget seeds?
What will happen when Monsanto makes a human gene that cures epilepsy? Will the law prohibit cured epileptics from having children?
Perhaps ONLY 'terminator' seeds should be patentable.
--
I usually do not reply to Idiots.
gweihir, your line (signature?) "I usually do not reply to Anonymous Cowards." is insulting me. I did not post anonymously. I assure you that "AndyCanfield" (with the obvious space in the middle) is the name my mother gave me and that I use everywere. If that's your signature I suggest you make it optional.
He points out that new technologies, such as low frequency radar, will eventually overcome the stealth technology of any existing flyer. How much can such a system cost? A few dishes, and a new computer - far less than a new airframe.
Then I had a vision of people scattered all over Iran, with radios and binoculars. As far as I know the so-called "stealth" planes are still visible in the visual spectrum. "What's that? It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a hundred million dollar U.S. Navy Stealth Bomber! Phone home Ahmed!"
Slashdot.org barely works on my Android 2.2 phone. "Today" and "Yesterday" and sometimes "More" just hang. The tv.slashdot.org site I can browse but never see or hear anything. You seem to detect the mobile phone, but the HTML and/or JavaScript is beyond the capabilities of my phone (the only thing I own that has sound).
Will you please clarify what "Today" means? It is now 8AM Sunday in my time zone (ICT), Saturday in the USA.
I'm a programmer. I've worked from home for a decade. It's usually a 10 hour bus ride to the company office. Even when I've had a designated desk at the company, somebody else would take it over because it was unused.
I've worked from home for longer than I've had this family. Or the one before that.
If possible set up your home workstation in a spare bedroom; otherwise family traffic through the room will upset your work frequently.
You'll be surprised how easy it is to do two hours of work at midnight. Go for it; I have ideas in my sleep that I can implement immediately.
Kids come first. The day I booted my daughter out of my home office was the day she died.
I raise my head above the notebook screen and wonder where the family went. They get used to it; I don't.
I'm not a phone or IM person. E-mail is my professional lifeline. Know thyself.
No problem with the wife; she knows that this is where the money comes from.
I've always been on-call 24/7 so home/work separation is no problem.
My clients treat me like an outside vendor. Yes, I get paid for results, not for time. But if I put in half the time, I'll get half the results, and get paid half as much, and that's bad for my family.
If possible have a cheap desktop computer at home to store backups. The kids can play games on it, but you need a a place to store a daily backup of your notebook. Uploading a 1GB backup through the internet is something you only do once.
It's easy for the boss to forget that you exist, but in the long run people who don't exist don't get paid. Stay visible. Stay in contact with various people at work, not just the boss.
Obama says 'We'll see how the Iranians respond.' Rolling on the floor laughing their fool heads off.
I am ***SO*** glad that I live in a country (Thailand) where you can ride in the back of a pickup truck. "Those who sell their liberty for safety will find that they have neither."
I completely disagree. The most valuable resource I have is real estate in my brain. Yes, I know "Ctrl+F". and often use it. But I don't know, I don't want to know, Ctrl+D, Ctrl+R, Ctrl+H, etc. Put them on a menu, in English.
The purpose of a user interface is ***NOT*** to minimize keystrokes, nor to minimze mouse clicks. It is to minimize the junk you need to know to use the program. A lady who hasn't found Edit / Find on the menu is just plain dumb. But a lady who uses Edit / Find instead of Ctrl+F is using her brain for what she gets paid to use it for - keeping her boss happy.
Thirty years ago I argued that we were mistaken in writing our programs for "expert users". Even then people had so many different programs to use every day that nobody had time to become an "expert" in any one of them. That is even more true today. I have Ctrl+F on my PC, but not on my phone, so why should I memorize it?
People who love Ctrl+F probably love VI, the second worst editor ever invented (The worst is emacs, which is VI with unpredictable macros; sit down at a friend's computer and run emacs and you have no idea what Ctrl+F does on HIS machine.)
Keep it simple, keep it obvious.
I have never gotten BitTorrent to work. Today I am behind an ISP's router that I can't reconfigure. So I can't share. My attempts at downloading fail because everyone in the swarm got what they wanted and disconnected. BitTorrent has no way to recover from that.
I use Firefox, but for serious downloading I use wget. Just copy the link from Firefox to the command line, and leave it alone overnight. Wonderful. It continues, it retries, it will keep plugging away no matter what. Recently downloaded the Sintel movie using wget.
i'm sorry, but vigilantism sucks, and is not a solution to anything. the only valid solution is to kick your government in the ass to fix the failures in your society that make the idea of vigilantism seem remotely appealing at all
--
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it
Anybody else notice the ethical inconsistancy between his pronouncement and his signature? The only valid solution is to obey this law and perhaps change it, and your moral duty to ignore that other law.
25 years ago I asked my co-worker about my work habits. He said "You goof off for eight hours a day, then you work for 20 minutes and earn your salary."
20 years ago I was training a new system administrator. I explained to her that some days you only needed to work four hours, but when the network is down you don't go home at night until it is back up.
Programmers do not work by the clock, nor by the lines of code. If you are happy with what I produce, it doesn't matter if it is 10,000 lines that took me 90 hours in one week, or 5 lines that took me one hour. If it works, and is readable, and is maintainable, it is worth what you paid me.
And, ironically, the best programmers produce the smallest, lightest, most readable code. Vast quantities of work and code are often a sign that the coder doesn't understand the problem.
We had touch screens in the 1980's and gave up on them. Why? Use a touch screen for an hour and your arm falls off. The wonderful thing about the mouse is that you can rest your forearm on the table, you can rest your fingers on the mouse, and so take the weight off of your upper arm muscles. Why doesn't anyone today remember this? We gave up on touch screens twenty-five years ago. Jeesh.
I play a version of Freecell, with the same rules but a different goal. But you need to turn off autodrop, so you can't play it in Microsoft Freecell. Pysol works well.
The new goal is to get all the cards in four long streams, king down to whatever, with as few cards as possible in the output stacks. Your score is negative - the best you can do is nothing at all in the output stacks which gives you a score of zero. An Ace counts one, two counts two, three counts three, etc. If the output stack contains an ace and two of every suit that's a twelve; not bad. I can usually get below ten, which is better.
It requires you to generate long streams of cards and be creative in moving them around. You have to decide the tradeoffs - can you get the stream from here to there or do you have to put an ace in the output stacks, costing you a point? And remmember that if you put the ace and two of spades in the output stack you'll be short a black two when you want to stream up the last red ace, so you'll have to put the red ace on the output stack also and your score will be four, not three.
It's a challenge; requires a lot more look-ahead than most versions of Solitaire.
You mentioned "continuing efforts to implement mandatory ID cards". Remember that if you leave your country of citizenship, you must carry a passport. For example, if you move from the UK to the US, American citzens have no mandatory ID but you do - your British passport. Generally you must show it to any policeman who asks to see it for any reason, and he need not tell you his reason. I've lived with my (US) passport for nineteen years; mandatory ID has never bothered me.
Years ago I received an e-mail attachment named "SEXYLADY.JPG". Did Outlook Express hide extensions? I didn't know. But saving it to the hard disk and using the DOS window I could see it was really "SEXYLADY.JPG.EXE". That's when I started hating Microsoft's extension policy. I hope this means they will soon eliminate this security hole.
And yes, every dumb user I know opens files by double clicking. Many of them don't even know you can run Excel from the menu! Indeed, I've seen people save an HTML web page as "Pagename.xls" just so that when they double click on the name Excel will open it.
Wonderful! I can hardly wait until the DVD stores grab this idea! Here in Thailand, legal CD/DVD stores have a hundred titles, and pirate shops have thousands! You can never find what you want in the legal shops.