I would like to thank my friend Dennis, who in addition to being a MAC crank is also a LISP zealot who motivated me to read at least part of an introductory LISP manual a few years ago.
Because of him I can understand this posters joke, and I am not even on any kind of drugs.
Dennis, thanks again for all of the free, high enthusiasm lectures on LISP.
If I could wave a magic wand I would the primary concern of the I.T. industry to be about doing things right which would result in a plethora of LISP programming jobs... most of which would be on MAC OSX platforms.
Since this is slashdot at this point I am supposed to say something like "oh ya, I'm rubber your glue" pointing out that my anecdotal account is better then your anecdotal account.
I don't doubt that your account of the job market in Utah is true. I know as a programmer I have avoided taking jobs with companies in regions without a diversity of tech employers. Perhaps other people have done this too resulting in an abnormally low I.T. worker to employer ration in Utah.
Who knows?
My opinion is based on working in the Washington D.C. area, having met a lot of good people out of work for very long periods of time, and reading very gloomy job market forecasts in a variety of places.
Take it for what it is worth and be thankful for the situation you have where you are at.
I don't doubt what you are saying, but there are loads of I.T. people out of work, and not all of them are the dot.com-get-rich-quick people who go into it at the drop of a dime in the 90s.
There must be plenty of unemployed quality people out there eager for a job. I just don't understand how it can be rough for the recruiters to find them.
I came across that with a grad student at my univ. I told him that I couldn't read his code because it wasn't indented. He said, "I was going to back and do that later." WTF? I thought that was going to be the Quote of The Day, but it turned out he wasn't done yet. I started indenting every line as I walked through a function. Seeing this, he inquired, "How are you moving those lines over?" My answer? "Tab."
I don't mean to sound like "slashdot hole" but why were you using the tab key to indent that person's code?
Most editors ( emacs too, when I checked a few years ago ) have code beautifiers that will indent an entire file or block of code in one shot.
The comments from the TAs about near useless comments was interesting.
Getting people to do any comments is a conversation in itself.
However, the TAs brought up a good point. It is not enough to put ANY comments in a file, you need to put GOOD comments in, but who teaches people what good commenting is?
What works for me is - putting a small paragraph at the top of file
explaining, in general, what the file is for
( sort of like labeling a jar with the preserves
you just put into it )
- putting a 1-2 line description above each
non-trivial function
- putting a sentence fragment above each
significant or non intuitive ( coding around a
quirk ) block of code
I get compliments on how easy it is to understand and maintain my code( often resulting in me getting to asked to write more code - versus the folks who intentionally obscure things in the pursuit of job security ). I can also go back to code I wrote years ago and understand what it is going on.
I put comments in as I write the code, mostly, so it doesn't feel like a burden.
If anyone has any other good idea, please do tell, someone somewhere is likely to give it a try.
I am on the side of most of the opinions you quote as examples.
However, I do agree with you.
I don't think it is fair to classify all of the "cranks" ( the word implied ) as young... many are not.
I have met a number of I.T. people who fit your descriptions in real life at various jobs. They are full grown, often middle aged men with homes and families.
I always had the impression that the equivalent of metrosexuals in the I.T. world used Opera, real men used a text based browser, if a browser at all, and the rest of us normal adjusted folk used mozilla:)
Soon, Linux development will no longer use this program,...
"Doesn't he mean GNU/Linux development?"
In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, the better term would be:
"GLX"
GNU operating system + the Linux kernel + the X windows libraries for GUI desktops.
Of course, all of that is assuming that Linus Torvalds put other parts of the GLX system beyond his linux kernal
into the source control devices he used, which brought up this issue.
If he did not, the RMS is correct in his use of the term "linux" as that is the kernal of the GLX operating system and that is what Linux Torvalds was working on.
I can't see corporate America with billions, if not trillions of dollars at their disposal allowing Congress to cut off millions of consumers from their advertisements.
Another poster posted a message about how to slim down for those people interested.
It sounded complicated. It involved paying money and it involved downloading PDF files.
In the spirit of free(dom) software I decided to post some notes on the subject I gathered from a National Geographic article:
Notes I have taken from:
National Geographic. August 2004. Pages 46 - 61. "Why are Americans so fat" by Cathy Newman.
1 in 3 Americans is obese, twice as many 3 decades ago
15 percent of children are overweight or obese, a three fold jump from 1980
Being overweight is associated with 400,000 American deaths per year.
Being overweight increase the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, colon cancer, breast cancer, and endometrial cancer.
The Center For Disease Control reports that adult women are eating 335 more calories per day then they did in 1971. Adult men are eating an extra 168 calories a day.
1 pound of fat is about 3500 calories. An excess of 250 calories a day will put on 26 pounds a year.
Being overweight or obese is a matter of taking in more calories then are used.
Most overweight and obese people are out of caloric balance, but only by a tiny amount of calories per day. A 250 calorie deficit per day will subtract 26 pounds a year.
A calorie is a calorie is a calorie.
The effects of bariatric surgery can be thwarted by people snacking lightly, but continuously throughout the day.
The United States, Russia, Thailand, South Africa, Egypt, Turkey, Germany and the UK have the highest obesity rates.
France ( yes France ), Italy, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Pakistan, India, China, Colombia, Brazil and a handful of African countries have the lowest obesity rates.
Many people confuse being obese with being morbidly obese ( i.e. Al Roker, Michael Moore, Ariel Sharon etc).
FWIW, you do not have to be as overweight as you think to be considered obese. Having a BMI of at least 30 qualifies as obesity.
One word of caution. The BMI is criticized for not differentiating between weight from lean tissue and weight from fat.
However, you shouldn't let the criticism make you ignore the BMI scale. Oceania doesn't have a muscle building epidemic, it has an obesity epidemic.
It is still a good tool for giving people a perspective on various body weights:
It seems like every few weeks an article like this comes out and everyone is supposed to respond with panic? Why?
The American I.T. industry is off shoring every I.T. job it possibly can so why do these articles make it sound like a problem if fewer college students take up Computer Science as a major?
Are college professors and administrators worried about lack of funds for their department?
Are American I.T. companies worried about filling the lower quality I.T. jobs left in the country? The ones that aren't worth or that can't be outsourced?
Is this why these articles make references to getting more women into the field? So if corporate America can't save a few shekels by outsourcing a job they can save some money by giving it to a woman who they think they can pay less and push around more?
I think saving every email is more about having a a receipt than having a personal database...at least as far as businesses are concerned.
"I contacted you about XYZ on September 13th 1999 and here is an email ( my receipt ) from you acknowledging that you were made aware of this issue"
Along the same lines of having a receipt is sending an email to a known slow responder while visibly CCing others on the email.
"Dave...I am asking you, in FRONT OF EVERYONE about this issue, so you had better respond in a timely way."
However, this is just what people used to do with intra-office memos, except now they don't kill a tree ( just burn some oil for the electricity ) to distribute the message.
What I find interesting is that in the day of hard copy intra-office memos people were always careful about what they wrote in those things, but people will not hesitate to engage in a pissing contest in an email exchange at the office.... where everyone has a receipt.
I wonder how journalists will take this
on
Paul Graham on PR
·
· Score: 1
This was a good article and very critical of reporters.
I wonder how journalists will take it.
I have found the profession as a whole to be completely unwilling to accept any criticism of any sort from students all the way up to nationally known anchor people.
I have talked with people in other professions about their professions and they will usually mention( or admit ) to some shortcomings in the field.
The journalists I have talked to have gotten instantly indignant referring to their profession as some sort knighthood.
Apart from Paul Grahms excellent article this looks like a particularly unjustified attitude considering how journalists as a whole have let themselves become little more then mouth pieces for the government and corporate America over the last few years.
You really need to stop thinking that the technical implementation is the magic that makes it all work and that you possess the keys to the kingdom by having more than passing knowledge of the technology. There's just a lot more to running a business than that.
Yep, "build it and they will come" is not necessarily the case.
A myriad of empty empty web boards, low traffic email lists, empty chat rooms, and forgotten IRC channels are proof of that.
Up until now, I didn't volunteer because I wasn't sure I'd have the time -- now that I get to volunteer AND PAY $20 FOR THE PRIVILEGE, I'll get right on it!
Exactly!
Next month maybe they'll finally add the "pay $5 and get kicked in the nuts" service we've all been clamoring for!
That would almost be greater evidence of their lack of business sense than charging to be an admin. You can get a lot more then $5 for kicking someone in the nuts, especially if you are a good looking gal decked out in something shiny and black.
--
what ever happened to good ol' goin to clubs, getting drunk, findin a girl, who is as drunk as u, having a good night, and never seein that girl again, mutually?
What do you mean "what ever happened to..." ?
This is Slasdot, we are the nerds the news is for.
Has advertising become effectively invisible to you?
Invisible and ineffective may not be the same thing.
Those advertisements costs massive amounts of money amd are paid for by people who will scotch the land to save half a cent when they are already sit on a pile of cash.
Those people are not idiots.
IMHO if those advertisements did not have an effect those people would not be paying for them..
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to thank my friend Dennis, who in addition to being a MAC crank is also a LISP zealot who motivated me to read at least part of an introductory LISP manual a few years ago.
Because of him I can understand this posters joke, and I am not even on any kind of drugs.
Dennis, thanks again for all of the free, high enthusiasm lectures on LISP.
If I could wave a magic wand I would the primary concern of the I.T. industry to be about doing things right which would result in a plethora of LISP programming jobs
Hi JBellis;
Since this is slashdot at this point I am supposed to say something like "oh ya, I'm rubber your glue" pointing out that my anecdotal account is better then your anecdotal account.
I don't doubt that your account of the job market in Utah is true. I know as a programmer I have avoided taking jobs with companies in regions without a diversity of tech employers. Perhaps other people have done this too resulting in an abnormally low I.T. worker to employer ration in Utah.
Who knows?
My opinion is based on working in the Washington D.C. area, having met a lot of good people out of work for very long periods of time, and reading very gloomy job market forecasts in a variety of places.
Take it for what it is worth and be thankful for the situation you have where you are at.
Is there a positive message between the lines?
Bill Gates is trying to bring cheap workers into the US when he has a huge investment in off shoring.
Could this mean that there are some I.T. jobs that are not practical to off shore?
I don't doubt what you are saying, but there are loads of I.T. people out of work, and not all of them are the dot.com-get-rich-quick people who go into it at the drop of a dime in the 90s.
There must be plenty of unemployed quality people out there eager for a job. I just don't understand how it can be rough for the recruiters to find them.
What is this about?
If he wants cheap labor, M$ already has outsourcing set up in India.
If he wants cheap labor here there are plenty of out of work I.T. people who would probably be willing to work for less just to have a job.
Can anyone guess what is behind all of this?
Most editors ( emacs too, when I checked a few years ago ) have code beautifiers that will indent an entire file or block of code in one shot.
The comments from the TAs about near useless comments was interesting.
Getting people to do any comments is a conversation in itself.
However, the TAs brought up a good point. It is not enough to put ANY comments in a file, you need to put GOOD comments in, but who teaches people what good commenting is?
What works for me is
- putting a small paragraph at the top of file
explaining, in general, what the file is for
( sort of like labeling a jar with the preserves
you just put into it )
- putting a 1-2 line description above each
non-trivial function
- putting a sentence fragment above each
significant or non intuitive ( coding around a
quirk ) block of code
I get compliments on how easy it is to understand and maintain my code( often resulting in me getting to asked to write more code - versus the folks who intentionally obscure things in the pursuit of job security ). I can also go back to code I wrote years ago and understand what it is going on.
I put comments in as I write the code, mostly, so it doesn't feel like a burden.
If anyone has any other good idea, please do tell, someone somewhere is likely to give it a try.
I am on the side of most of the opinions you quote as examples.
However, I do agree with you.
I don't think it is fair to classify all of the "cranks" ( the word implied ) as young... many are not.
I have met a number of I.T. people who fit your descriptions in real life at various jobs. They are full grown, often middle aged men with homes and families.
Scary isn't it?
I always had the impression that the equivalent of metrosexuals in the I.T. world used Opera, real men used a text based browser, if a browser at all, and the rest of us normal adjusted folk used mozilla :)
"GLX"
G NU operating system + the L inux kernel + the X windows libraries for GUI desktops.
Of course, all of that is assuming that Linus Torvalds put other parts of the GLX system beyond his linux kernal into the source control devices he used, which brought up this issue.
If he did not, the RMS is correct in his use of the term "linux" as that is the kernal of the GLX operating system and that is what Linux Torvalds was working on.
Yes, but do they still look like trash cans?
I guess that can be an advantage...camaflouge
They can sneak up on you, and then pounce on you when you try to stuff your drink up down their heads.
I can't see corporate America with billions, if not trillions of dollars at their disposal allowing Congress to cut off millions of consumers from their advertisements.
Another poster posted a message about how to slim down for those people interested.
It sounded complicated. It involved paying money and it involved downloading PDF files.
In the spirit of free(dom) software I decided to post some notes on the subject I gathered from a National Geographic article:
Notes I have taken from:
National Geographic. August 2004. Pages 46 - 61.
"Why are Americans so fat" by Cathy Newman.
1 in 3 Americans is obese, twice as many 3 decades ago
15 percent of children are overweight or obese, a three fold jump from 1980
Being overweight is associated with 400,000 American deaths per year.
Being overweight increase the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes,
colon cancer, breast cancer, and endometrial cancer.
The Center For Disease Control reports that adult women are eating 335 more
calories per day then they did in 1971.
Adult men are eating an extra 168 calories a day.
1 pound of fat is about 3500 calories. An excess of 250 calories a day will
put on 26 pounds a year.
Being overweight or obese is a matter of taking in more calories then are used.
Most overweight and obese people are out of caloric balance,
but only by a tiny amount of calories per day. A 250 calorie deficit per day
will subtract 26 pounds a year.
A calorie is a calorie is a calorie.
The effects of bariatric surgery can be thwarted by people snacking lightly,
but continuously throughout the day.
The United States, Russia, Thailand, South Africa, Egypt, Turkey, Germany
and the UK have the highest obesity rates.
France ( yes France ), Italy, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Pakistan, India, China,
Colombia, Brazil and a handful of African countries have the lowest
obesity rates.
Many people confuse being obese with being morbidly obese ( i.e. Al Roker, Michael Moore, Ariel Sharon etc).
FWIW, you do not have to be as overweight as you think to be considered obese. Having a BMI of at least 30 qualifies as obesity.
One word of caution. The BMI is criticized for not differentiating between weight from lean tissue and weight from fat.
However, you shouldn't let the criticism make you ignore the BMI scale. Oceania doesn't have a muscle building epidemic, it has an obesity epidemic. It is still a good tool for giving people a perspective on various body weights:
BMI Scale http://www.consumer.gov/weightloss/bmi.htm
It seems like every few weeks an article like this comes out and everyone is supposed to respond with panic? Why?
The American I.T. industry is off shoring every I.T. job it possibly can so why do these articles make it sound like a problem if fewer college students take up Computer Science as a major?
Are college professors and administrators worried about lack of funds for their department?
Are American I.T. companies worried about filling the lower quality I.T. jobs left in the country? The ones that aren't worth or that can't be outsourced?
Is this why these articles make references to getting more women into the field? So if corporate America can't save a few shekels by outsourcing a job they can save some money by giving it to a woman who they think they can pay less and push around more?
What do the rest of you think?
I think saving every email is more about having a a receipt than having a personal database...at least as far as businesses are concerned.
"I contacted you about XYZ on September 13th 1999 and here is an email ( my receipt ) from you acknowledging that you were made aware of this issue"
Along the same lines of having a receipt is sending an email to a known slow responder while visibly CCing others on the email.
"Dave...I am asking you, in FRONT OF EVERYONE about this issue, so you had better respond in a timely way."
However, this is just what people used to do with intra-office memos, except now they don't kill a tree ( just burn some oil for the electricity ) to distribute the message.
What I find interesting is that in the day of hard copy intra-office memos people were always careful about what they wrote in those things, but people will not hesitate to engage in a pissing contest in an email exchange at the office.... where everyone has a receipt.
This was a good article and very critical of reporters.
I wonder how journalists will take it.
I have found the profession as a whole to be completely unwilling to accept any criticism of any sort from students all the way up to nationally known anchor people.
I have talked with people in other professions about their professions and they will usually mention( or admit ) to some shortcomings in the field.
The journalists I have talked to have gotten instantly indignant referring to their profession as some sort knighthood.
Apart from Paul Grahms excellent article this looks like a particularly unjustified attitude considering how journalists as a whole have let themselves become little more then mouth pieces for the government and corporate America over the last few years.
I wonder what happens to pot smokers who also use the internet and watch tv.
Wow. The Doctors are changing almost as fast as the post Breshnev Soviet leaders did.
A myriad of empty empty web boards, low traffic email lists, empty chat rooms, and forgotten IRC channels are proof of that.
Didn't MS establish discounted windows distributions for Asia as well?
I guess Americans who buy windows will be subsidizing other countries MS fixes
Invisible and ineffective may not be the same thing.
Those advertisements costs massive amounts of money amd are paid for by people who will scotch the land to save half a cent when they are already sit on a pile of cash.
Those people are not idiots.
IMHO if those advertisements did not have an effect those people would not be paying for them..