Because you might think of new, better ways of doing old things. Just being educated by other viewpoints can improve your approach to problems and give you a more comprehensive outlook on your craft. If your entire universe is your job right now, then that's all you'll be able to do.
I used ASP.NET full time for a few years, and then did a couple of projects in Ruby on Rails, then Django. When I came back to ASP.NET there were a couple of things I did differently, and quite successfully, that were more similar to approaches I used in Python, even though it was still ASP.NET.
If you're note even willing to entertain the idea of learning new things just for the sake of improving yourself and learning, then you're even more of a dinosaur than any of us might have guessed.
"Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility." - Pablo Picasso
"LISP is worth learning for a different reason -- the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself..." Eric Raymond
If you're a 10 year veteran web dev, and didn't care enough about your craft to step outside of ASP.NET and at least explore Ruby or Python web dev, then you are arguably not a decent web dev. You'll disagree, and that's cool, but you are in fact a dinosaur.
UO was pretty close to much of this, although that's ancient history, and today mainly only good for people who love to yearn about the good old days. But Tale in the Desert, more recently, has much of what you describe today.
Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)
AT&T. Locked iPhones. Can't do anything not officially blessed with your iPhone unless you unlock it. Can't register your iPhone with anyone other than AT&T. iTunes is loaded with DRM, and QuickTime is pretty annoying... I do love Apple, but seriously, they constantly flirt with annoying their customers far more than most companies.
VB was an excellent starting point for young programmers
There, I fixed it for you.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 1
Try the middle mouse button. Instead of Ctrl-N to open a new (blank) window, middle mouse click on a link. That'll open that link in the new window. This helps with the common case of wanting to open a new window on the same page.
the keys are never, ever going to be used - good old double dipping by Microsoft:/
I've got no doubt I'm bending the rules and in a grey area, however now all my computers / friends / family computers I work on are completely 100% legitimate with genuine copies of Windows
You're the one that's "double dipping", not Microsoft. And it's not a "grey" area; it's clear piracy. If you're gonna pirate, at least own up to it on Slashdot. It's not like we really care. But don't kid yourself.
If your sysadmins were worth a damn it wouldn't matter if you needed to push updates to 5 computers or 50,000.
You're basically right. The problem is-- and you would know this if you had ever actually done it instead of just talking smack about it-- it'll fail on some portion of the deployments, say 0.5% or 2%. Or maybe the install will go fine, but you have problems on updates. Silly things, like one user installs it, then another user runs the update, and some people have admin privileges on the machine and some don't.
The problem is that you're only basically right about it being easy. And it's that tiny fraction of the time when it doesn't work out right that will suck up all your support time.
That's all fascinating and useful information. But honestly, that's technically beyond half the slashdot readers, much less people that run coffee shops. Certainly there's a lot of slashdot readers who can do this stuff in their sleep, and of course they will be the ones to respond to this message and tell me what a retard I am, and how simply everyone is a network specialist except for me. I am fairly technical, but networks aren't my specialty. If I wanted to do even half the things you listed above, it'd take me at least a day or two of long hours of fiddling studying and researching.
What you're suggesting is good solid information. But really your statements support the idea that requires labor and expertise (that is, expense) to provide this service and have it not suck.
More than likely I will die. But substantially later than someone 200 years ago would. Life expectancy has been going up and up. Life expectancy topped out at about 40 in the early 20th century in Britain, and about 30 in the Middle Ages in Britain. Actually, I'd say that I've got a much better shot of living to be 100 or 120 than anyone did 200 years ago. So it's technically not accurate to say that I will die just as surely as someone from then.
Sure! All I ask is that he not be any younger than me, because that wouldn't be fair. I'm 39. Oh wait, he'd be long dead. Too bad! The prime of their youth, these primitive humans, would last, what, 10 years?
I already am a god compared to someone living 200 years ago. I'm not afraid of infection. My children and wife survived the childbirth process easily. Name a topic, any topic in the world, and I can talk intelligently about it (all of us here are pretty much augmented beings, backed by the internet). I've seen the Earth from on top of the clouds. I've seen the sun come up over the Bay in Annapolis in the morning, and watched it go down over the bay in San Francisco in the evening of the same day.
Few people of the past would have thought such things were possible.
Sure, there's some faith, but there's a lot of carefully considered fact involved in the belief as well.
It's dead. The effort for reward ratio isn't there, just like EJB. Some things are great ideas, like sequence diagrams, but generally it's just a big pain in the ass way to annoy your coworkers and mystify your bosses.
You can switch power-cycle your computer and have the same program running as used to run before.
The especially great thing about this is that when our Rails apps barf, the only recourse is to reboot rails. Now the clusterfuckery can be persisted!
Ruby on Rails is delightful to develop in. But deploying it across something that gets hammered a lot is a nightmare. Say what you will, but scaling up Python or PHP is way easier.
Quote of the day (actually I see this dozens of times per day): "Twitter returned a "temporarily overloaded" error. This is a problem with the server that provides tweets to Twitterific...
You're a DBA. You're supposed to figure out how to give your customers access to the data they want, not to keep them away from it. You have forgotten what your calling is. You should be ashamed of yourself. Stop asking yourself how to restrict access and lock your customer out, and start asking how to give them what they want.
I have a wife and kids, also. Plus child support. The thing is, I used to make 130k a year doing Oracle ERP implementations and customizations. I needed to cut my salary in half so I could work as a developer for a video game company. Attack me and my lifestyle if you like, it doesn't bother me. But I'm chasing my dream, and more successfully than I thought was likely a decade ago. Based on the venom in your post, I'd be willing to bet that you are not, and likely never will. You don't have the balls. Or perhaps you don't have the dreams. Makes no difference to me. But the future isn't built by sheep like you.
Get your finances under control. Reduce your need for money. The difference between how much you make and how much you must spend reflects the size of choices available in your life. Reduce your dependence on needing a lot of money each month, and the number of choices available to you increases dramatically, and your freedom increases dramatically.
In my case, I used to own two cars, now I own none. I moved to another state that is 1/2 the price for housing. I quit eating out, started buying things like pinto beans and rice, and cook all my own meals. After restructuring my life, I have far more money and options available to me.
Once your finances are in order, and you learn to do without things like starbucks every day and whatnot, you may find you have the freedom you need to pursue your dreams. It may take years to get to that point, but you must try to take control. Otherwise you forfeit control of your life to the will of others.
1. Chase your passions. Work in a field that you can be passionate about. The best way for you to be happy and successful is to chase your passion. Crazy examples: maybe you want to create new content in Second Life. Maybe you'd be happier teaching troubled teens how to use woodworking tools. Maybe your dream is to be a park ranger. Figure it out.
2. Don't worry about money. Restructure your life so that you can chase your passion. Figure out a way to live with half of your current salary if you have to. Live somewhere that you don't need a car. Hike with your groceries. Use public transportation. Work from home.
3. If you don't know what you're passionate about, hurry up and find out now, before you're dead. You only have one life. Don't waste it as a slave, doing what you don't want to be doing.
Consider this very seriously. Nobody is forcing you to do what you've been doing. Don't be a sheep, take control of your life, because if you don't there's plenty of other people who will.
Perhaps the fact that you're able to write a 5 paragraph treatise on how it's such a snap to do supports the OP's point, thant password changing is a bitch. Maybe you're too close to the forest to see the trees.
As soon as I read your comment, I thought I knew the answer even before hearing the voice. I then listened to the video, and sure enough, it was the voice I thought it would be.
I used to spend a fortune on books on CD, at $50 usd per book it became an expensive habit as I drove back and forth to work.
Then I started pirating books off a torrent site, then burning my own mp3's using speech synthesis software. I scoured the internets to find the best damn speech synthesis in the world, and I found the voice they used in that movie. I wrote software to take the text and semi intelligently split it into chapters, and make guesses about dividing the chapters down into 15 minute or so chunks for easy mp3 navigation. It has some features that let me preview what's going to get recorded so I can make sure it's naming the mp3 filesnames with the right chapter numbers. I've been steadily improving the software for a couple years. For text to speech, it just uses the Microsoft Speech API and I purchased that voice (Heather I think her name was) and it works amazingly.
The software isn't free, but it's so much better than anything else I've ever heard. It paid for itself after burning a few books to mp3. The voice is actually really expensive, I paid something like $150 2 years ago. However, at that time you could get a one month free trial, which is enough time to do a lot of playing and book recording.
Acapela offers several voices, but by far hers is the best. When you listen to her for hours, you'll hear traces of what I think is a castilian spanish accent. Acapela is based in Europe, and they do voices in many languages.
Anyway, their stuff is way better than anything else I've ever heard for general purpose synthesis. If there's anything better, I need to hear about it immediately, especially if it's open source.
Or OS X itself, which is basically UNIX with a simplified window manager which is easier to use than most traditional X windows managers (and that for most people does make up for the loss of flexibility).
Cmon, give apple some credit for innovation here. You make it sound as if OSX is pretty similar to, say, a Sun workstation circa 1989. The differences and advances in OSX over plain old Unix are legion.
The slow technology progress of cable companies is just them writing their own obituary. The set top box isn't needed to watch video any more. The slower cable companies move, the more irrelevant they become and the more they encourage users to use their PC's for video entertainment.
If I want friendship, I turn to my friends, 99% of which are guys. I like women for getting laid, but, other than that....they pretty much are foreign beings.
You're a great candidate for becoming a homosexual.
this could be likely achieved with other conventional robotic conveyance mechanisms... I agree with parent about this being mostly a pack mule.
Keep in mind this is an early version. Future versions might be like a pack mules when needed, but a group of lightning fast completely silent wolves on demand.
Slashdot Mirror
Because you might think of new, better ways of doing old things. Just being educated by other viewpoints can improve your approach to problems and give you a more comprehensive outlook on your craft. If your entire universe is your job right now, then that's all you'll be able to do.
I used ASP.NET full time for a few years, and then did a couple of projects in Ruby on Rails, then Django. When I came back to ASP.NET there were a couple of things I did differently, and quite successfully, that were more similar to approaches I used in Python, even though it was still ASP.NET.
If you're note even willing to entertain the idea of learning new things just for the sake of improving yourself and learning, then you're even more of a dinosaur than any of us might have guessed.
"Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility." - Pablo Picasso "LISP is worth learning for a different reason -- the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself..." Eric Raymond
If you're a 10 year veteran web dev, and didn't care enough about your craft to step outside of ASP.NET and at least explore Ruby or Python web dev, then you are arguably not a decent web dev. You'll disagree, and that's cool, but you are in fact a dinosaur.
UO was pretty close to much of this, although that's ancient history, and today mainly only good for people who love to yearn about the good old days. But Tale in the Desert, more recently, has much of what you describe today.
Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)
AT&T. Locked iPhones. Can't do anything not officially blessed with your iPhone unless you unlock it. Can't register your iPhone with anyone other than AT&T. iTunes is loaded with DRM, and QuickTime is pretty annoying... I do love Apple, but seriously, they constantly flirt with annoying their customers far more than most companies.
VB was an excellent starting point for young programmers
There, I fixed it for you.
Try the middle mouse button. Instead of Ctrl-N to open a new (blank) window, middle mouse click on a link. That'll open that link in the new window. This helps with the common case of wanting to open a new window on the same page.
You're the one that's "double dipping", not Microsoft. And it's not a "grey" area; it's clear piracy. If you're gonna pirate, at least own up to it on Slashdot. It's not like we really care. But don't kid yourself.
Awesome! And true. Now, what if some of your users are on Macs and Windows?
You're basically right. The problem is-- and you would know this if you had ever actually done it instead of just talking smack about it-- it'll fail on some portion of the deployments, say 0.5% or 2%. Or maybe the install will go fine, but you have problems on updates. Silly things, like one user installs it, then another user runs the update, and some people have admin privileges on the machine and some don't.
The problem is that you're only basically right about it being easy. And it's that tiny fraction of the time when it doesn't work out right that will suck up all your support time.
That's all fascinating and useful information. But honestly, that's technically beyond half the slashdot readers, much less people that run coffee shops. Certainly there's a lot of slashdot readers who can do this stuff in their sleep, and of course they will be the ones to respond to this message and tell me what a retard I am, and how simply everyone is a network specialist except for me. I am fairly technical, but networks aren't my specialty. If I wanted to do even half the things you listed above, it'd take me at least a day or two of long hours of fiddling studying and researching.
What you're suggesting is good solid information. But really your statements support the idea that requires labor and expertise (that is, expense) to provide this service and have it not suck.
More than likely I will die. But substantially later than someone 200 years ago would. Life expectancy has been going up and up. Life expectancy topped out at about 40 in the early 20th century in Britain, and about 30 in the Middle Ages in Britain. Actually, I'd say that I've got a much better shot of living to be 100 or 120 than anyone did 200 years ago. So it's technically not accurate to say that I will die just as surely as someone from then.
Sure! All I ask is that he not be any younger than me, because that wouldn't be fair. I'm 39. Oh wait, he'd be long dead. Too bad! The prime of their youth, these primitive humans, would last, what, 10 years?
I already am a god compared to someone living 200 years ago. I'm not afraid of infection. My children and wife survived the childbirth process easily. Name a topic, any topic in the world, and I can talk intelligently about it (all of us here are pretty much augmented beings, backed by the internet). I've seen the Earth from on top of the clouds. I've seen the sun come up over the Bay in Annapolis in the morning, and watched it go down over the bay in San Francisco in the evening of the same day.
Few people of the past would have thought such things were possible.
Sure, there's some faith, but there's a lot of carefully considered fact involved in the belief as well.
It's dead. The effort for reward ratio isn't there, just like EJB. Some things are great ideas, like sequence diagrams, but generally it's just a big pain in the ass way to annoy your coworkers and mystify your bosses.
The especially great thing about this is that when our Rails apps barf, the only recourse is to reboot rails. Now the clusterfuckery can be persisted!
Ruby on Rails is delightful to develop in. But deploying it across something that gets hammered a lot is a nightmare. Say what you will, but scaling up Python or PHP is way easier.
Quote of the day (actually I see this dozens of times per day): "Twitter returned a "temporarily overloaded" error. This is a problem with the server that provides tweets to Twitterific...
You're a DBA. You're supposed to figure out how to give your customers access to the data they want, not to keep them away from it. You have forgotten what your calling is. You should be ashamed of yourself. Stop asking yourself how to restrict access and lock your customer out, and start asking how to give them what they want.
I have a wife and kids, also. Plus child support. The thing is, I used to make 130k a year doing Oracle ERP implementations and customizations. I needed to cut my salary in half so I could work as a developer for a video game company. Attack me and my lifestyle if you like, it doesn't bother me. But I'm chasing my dream, and more successfully than I thought was likely a decade ago. Based on the venom in your post, I'd be willing to bet that you are not, and likely never will. You don't have the balls. Or perhaps you don't have the dreams. Makes no difference to me. But the future isn't built by sheep like you.
Get your finances under control. Reduce your need for money. The difference between how much you make and how much you must spend reflects the size of choices available in your life. Reduce your dependence on needing a lot of money each month, and the number of choices available to you increases dramatically, and your freedom increases dramatically.
In my case, I used to own two cars, now I own none. I moved to another state that is 1/2 the price for housing. I quit eating out, started buying things like pinto beans and rice, and cook all my own meals. After restructuring my life, I have far more money and options available to me.
Once your finances are in order, and you learn to do without things like starbucks every day and whatnot, you may find you have the freedom you need to pursue your dreams. It may take years to get to that point, but you must try to take control. Otherwise you forfeit control of your life to the will of others.
1. Chase your passions. Work in a field that you can be passionate about. The best way for you to be happy and successful is to chase your passion. Crazy examples: maybe you want to create new content in Second Life. Maybe you'd be happier teaching troubled teens how to use woodworking tools. Maybe your dream is to be a park ranger. Figure it out.
2. Don't worry about money. Restructure your life so that you can chase your passion. Figure out a way to live with half of your current salary if you have to. Live somewhere that you don't need a car. Hike with your groceries. Use public transportation. Work from home.
3. If you don't know what you're passionate about, hurry up and find out now, before you're dead. You only have one life. Don't waste it as a slave, doing what you don't want to be doing.
Consider this very seriously. Nobody is forcing you to do what you've been doing. Don't be a sheep, take control of your life, because if you don't there's plenty of other people who will.
Perhaps the fact that you're able to write a 5 paragraph treatise on how it's such a snap to do supports the OP's point, thant password changing is a bitch. Maybe you're too close to the forest to see the trees.
As soon as I read your comment, I thought I knew the answer even before hearing the voice. I then listened to the video, and sure enough, it was the voice I thought it would be.
I used to spend a fortune on books on CD, at $50 usd per book it became an expensive habit as I drove back and forth to work.
Then I started pirating books off a torrent site, then burning my own mp3's using speech synthesis software. I scoured the internets to find the best damn speech synthesis in the world, and I found the voice they used in that movie. I wrote software to take the text and semi intelligently split it into chapters, and make guesses about dividing the chapters down into 15 minute or so chunks for easy mp3 navigation. It has some features that let me preview what's going to get recorded so I can make sure it's naming the mp3 filesnames with the right chapter numbers. I've been steadily improving the software for a couple years. For text to speech, it just uses the Microsoft Speech API and I purchased that voice (Heather I think her name was) and it works amazingly.
The software isn't free, but it's so much better than anything else I've ever heard. It paid for itself after burning a few books to mp3. The voice is actually really expensive, I paid something like $150 2 years ago. However, at that time you could get a one month free trial, which is enough time to do a lot of playing and book recording.
Acapela offers several voices, but by far hers is the best. When you listen to her for hours, you'll hear traces of what I think is a castilian spanish accent. Acapela is based in Europe, and they do voices in many languages.
Anyway, their stuff is way better than anything else I've ever heard for general purpose synthesis. If there's anything better, I need to hear about it immediately, especially if it's open source.
The slow technology progress of cable companies is just them writing their own obituary. The set top box isn't needed to watch video any more. The slower cable companies move, the more irrelevant they become and the more they encourage users to use their PC's for video entertainment.