Can you get involved in a degree program somewhere?
That's usually the most certain path. (You might
also learn a few interesting and valuable things
while you're there, too -- it's not a complete
waste of time.)
Consider the
situation from your potential employers perspective:
how do they know whether you're any good? There are
lots of people out there who think they are great
programmers, but can't actually program their way
out of a wet paper bag.
Networking/nepotism is the best way to overcome this.
If you know someone who will stand up for you and say
"even though this guy is a complete unknown, he's
got a lot of potential and I think we should hire
him."
If you can't get personal recommendations, institutional
credentials are next best. The fact that you can get
decent grades in some relevant classes at an accredited
school is at least
some evidence that you're not a complete poser.
No time for that? Try getting involved in an open source
project. If you have the necessary asbestos underwear,
you can make a reputation for yourself by contributing
good stuff. This is hit or miss, however -- you might
be the greatest programmer of all time, but if you're
working on a project that nobody knows about, it's not
as useful.
Internships -- around here, at least, internships are
highly competitive and if you're not a student in a
strong program, you might as well not even apply unless
you already have a foot in the door.
Well, I've written an awful lot of Java (maybe a lot of awful Java...)
but I don't count implementing an interface or extending a class
as writing "from scratch". Maybe I should.
What I'm counting is: packages I write that contain a class that
implements "main" and isn't a degenerate test rig -- something someone
might actually run someday.
I'm not going to try to defend this metric -- feel free to pick
another one. The distinction between starting something new and
extending/patching an existing system might look different in
different environments, but it's still fairly intuitive.
I haven't written a program longer than about 2,000 lines from
scratch in more than ten years. Nobody I know has, either.
It's all about adding another feature, or removing another bug,
from giant ecosystems of software that grow like moss over the
hardware.
Makes me nostalgic for the days when I used to start with an
idea and create the design from there. But even then, it was
almost always the case that everything I built was built on
top of, or in the context of, another software system. (well,
there was this one time when I wrote my own assembler so I could
write my own boot ROM for a machine you've never heard of... but
that's not exactly normal)
OK, so I pressed the submit button without previewing.
The original point was this: if the CIA wants a relationship with Google,
then they're going to have one, whether or not Google wants it. Google
is hiring people by the busload, people who are young, smart, independent,
perhaps idealistic, and like cool toys. How hard would it be to find a few
that could be co-opted?
This was a long time ago. Right after it forked from hack.
Many of the things that people have mentioned in this thread make no sense to me,
because the game has change/evolved hugely. At this time,
once you killed the dragon, and found the amulet, you were basically
done -- unless you left behind a nasty creature that was waiting for
you on a higher level, or left a dead cockatrice on the floor somewhere.
Or you zapped yourself with a wand of death.
Another silly way to die: killing a ghost and then picking up a dead
cockatrice that they were carrying. D'oh!
I won the game; killed everything, found everything, grabbed the amulet.
As I ascended the dungeon on my way out, I picked up all the jewels I could
find, leaving heavy things like weapons and armor behind. I'd heard that
you could turn lowly gems into diamonds with a wand of transformation (or
polymorph, or whatever they are called). On level three, I dropped all my
gems into a pile and zapped them with the wand.
But I mis-typed.
The wand of death ricocheted around the room, striking all four walls before
finding me again.
How fickle is that? After all we've done for it, too.
We've made a good start at
cleaning up the mess left behind by the dinosaurs -- all those fossil fuels!
And we've exposed ourselves to toxic flourocarbons in order to get rid
of the even more corrosive and dangerous layer of ozone obscuring the sun.
And to think that after all that, the earth is just going
to forget about us. Well, not if we dump her, first!
It's not a switch to solar power. The vast majority
of their power will still come from the same place as everyone
else's...
As a general rule of thumb, in a place with weather like San Jose,
the amount of power you can get from covering a building won't even
be enough to power the air conditioning unit during the afternoon.
Not to mention all those dozens of computers Google is rumored to
have, and free food that won't just cook itself.
This might be an earnest attempt to do something good, but it has
devolved into a shameless publicity stunt. Google isn't the first
company to use solar power for their office buildings, but they're
the first to get onto the front page for it.
"Data Structures and Their Algorithms" by Lewis and Denenberg.
Not an encyclopedia, like CLR(S) or Knuth, but rather a tutorial of many useful
data structures and algorithms. Doesn't have the breadth of the "encyclopedic"
books but what it covers, it covers very well.
The drawback of this book, from your perspective, is that it isn't C-specific.
It's usually transparent how to translate the code into C (or anything similar)
but you can't just paste it into your code.
Maybe we should send a couple of guys over to their house
to send a message they can share via their "communicate networks",
for the greater good of the internet.
Of course there's always the theory that the administration
thought that a terrorist attack would be a great way to rally
the American populace and take their minds off much larger
problems at home...
More likely, it will be something to the effect of:
This is an automated message.
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The problem is that whenever someone compares Google to IT (the gigantic evil brain thing),
they get modded down as flamebait by the Google-bois. So I won't. Google is nothing
like a giant brain than manages all the information on the planet and governs access
to that information, enforcing conformity and uniformity of perception. Not in any way.
And of course the evil part is just plain backwards.
(I think it was wonderfully prescient to name the villian after "information technology".
Or maybe just lucky.)
Why this is unfortunate
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Because he's DEAD.
It's unfortunate that a good person had to DIE to help
make the self-evident and well-known points you mention.
My experience has been that if you start at first
principles, it's entirely possible to teach people
OO in a semester. Other folks do it over a year.
But if you wait too long to introduce these ideas
then the students will be fixed in their habits.
People tend to program in the first language they
really learned or
the rest of their careers (there's a guy down the
hall writing Fortran programs in Java and, another
guy writing JCL programs in C++...).
To use your metaphor -- after teaching kids to run
for a semester, they're not going to be interested
in jumping over the hurdles. They know it's faster
to run around them. Getting them to explore the
third dimension is not easy.
Google is taking a bunch of things they already
make available for free download, wrapping a bow around
them, and calling it something new? Doesn't seem like
anything new to me...
Let me know when they release a version (of anything) that isn't
ad-supported and does provide user support.
That'll be something really new
(and a departure from anything Google has done in the
past). That'll be news.
A few toys won't be enough. An F-14 without modern ordnance, radar, and support is little more than a target.
(Not to mention that the F-14A, which IIRC is what the Iranians have, shares little with the current F-14D in
terms of power, weaponry, and avionics... it's no match for anything modern.)
Does Iran have something equal to a modern AWACS? (the USA didn't sell them any -- they were about to, but
canceled the sale after the revolution) Do they have the equivalent of the AMRAAM or a Phoenix? How are they fixed for tankers? (they had one squadron; not sure how many survived the Iran-Iraq war) If not, and
they start an air war with Israel, they'll
be lucky to get a radar contact (much less a visual) on the planes that shoot them down.
Modern air warfare is about information and system integration. Israel understands this.
In an air war, my money's on Israel.
There are several pedagogically-suitable languages... but if you want the one that
best reflects the methodologies in current use in the "real world", Python is probably
the best bet. Java with the proper wrapper is also good.
Languages like Scheme, Forth, SML are interesting and cool but the ways of thinking
they teach are, for better or for worse, not part of the mainstream. Better to teach
good OO methodology and design.
Anyone care to bet whether the reason why this was announced the day before the deadline
was to goad the UN and make sure they'll impose sanctions?
Iran has money to burn, and UN sanctions don't seem to be particularly effective
ways to convince to
governments;
it's the proletariat who suffer. In the meanwhile, Iran's government gets to play
the "it's us against the (non-Muslim) world!" card again. Jihad, anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
Consider the situation from your potential employers perspective: how do they know whether you're any good? There are lots of people out there who think they are great programmers, but can't actually program their way out of a wet paper bag.
Networking/nepotism is the best way to overcome this. If you know someone who will stand up for you and say "even though this guy is a complete unknown, he's got a lot of potential and I think we should hire him."
If you can't get personal recommendations, institutional credentials are next best. The fact that you can get decent grades in some relevant classes at an accredited school is at least some evidence that you're not a complete poser.
No time for that? Try getting involved in an open source project. If you have the necessary asbestos underwear, you can make a reputation for yourself by contributing good stuff. This is hit or miss, however -- you might be the greatest programmer of all time, but if you're working on a project that nobody knows about, it's not as useful.
Internships -- around here, at least, internships are highly competitive and if you're not a student in a strong program, you might as well not even apply unless you already have a foot in the door.
What I'm counting is: packages I write that contain a class that implements "main" and isn't a degenerate test rig -- something someone might actually run someday.
I'm not going to try to defend this metric -- feel free to pick another one. The distinction between starting something new and extending/patching an existing system might look different in different environments, but it's still fairly intuitive.
Makes me nostalgic for the days when I used to start with an idea and create the design from there. But even then, it was almost always the case that everything I built was built on top of, or in the context of, another software system. (well, there was this one time when I wrote my own assembler so I could write my own boot ROM for a machine you've never heard of... but that's not exactly normal)
The original point was this: if the CIA wants a relationship with Google, then they're going to have one, whether or not Google wants it. Google is hiring people by the busload, people who are young, smart, independent, perhaps idealistic, and like cool toys. How hard would it be to find a few that could be co-opted?
Besides, nobody really leaves The Company.
Good luck. Nobody ever really leaves The Company.
Many of the things that people have mentioned in this thread make no sense to me, because the game has change/evolved hugely. At this time, once you killed the dragon, and found the amulet, you were basically done -- unless you left behind a nasty creature that was waiting for you on a higher level, or left a dead cockatrice on the floor somewhere. Or you zapped yourself with a wand of death.
Another silly way to die: killing a ghost and then picking up a dead cockatrice that they were carrying. D'oh!
As I ascended the dungeon on my way out, I picked up all the jewels I could find, leaving heavy things like weapons and armor behind. I'd heard that you could turn lowly gems into diamonds with a wand of transformation (or polymorph, or whatever they are called). On level three, I dropped all my gems into a pile and zapped them with the wand.
But I mis-typed.
The wand of death ricocheted around the room, striking all four walls before finding me again.
I never played it seriously again.
It's not easy to be really good at more than one thing. Especially when the two things are based on wildly different technologies...
Where do you live? North Korea?
Anyone who didn't notice the massive evaporation of apparent wealth a few years ago is frighteningly oblivious.
And to think that after all that, the earth is just going to forget about us. Well, not if we dump her, first!
As a general rule of thumb, in a place with weather like San Jose, the amount of power you can get from covering a building won't even be enough to power the air conditioning unit during the afternoon. Not to mention all those dozens of computers Google is rumored to have, and free food that won't just cook itself.
This might be an earnest attempt to do something good, but it has devolved into a shameless publicity stunt. Google isn't the first company to use solar power for their office buildings, but they're the first to get onto the front page for it.
Not an encyclopedia, like CLR(S) or Knuth, but rather a tutorial of many useful data structures and algorithms. Doesn't have the breadth of the "encyclopedic" books but what it covers, it covers very well.
The drawback of this book, from your perspective, is that it isn't C-specific. It's usually transparent how to translate the code into C (or anything similar) but you can't just paste it into your code.
Apologies for my weak knowledge of English.
Thugs are thugs.
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The message you sent (attached below) requires confirmation
before it can be delivered. To confirm that you sent the
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(I think it was wonderfully prescient to name the villian after "information technology". Or maybe just lucky.)
It's unfortunate that a good person had to DIE to help make the self-evident and well-known points you mention.
To use your metaphor -- after teaching kids to run for a semester, they're not going to be interested in jumping over the hurdles. They know it's faster to run around them. Getting them to explore the third dimension is not easy.
Let me know when they release a version (of anything) that isn't ad-supported and does provide user support. That'll be something really new (and a departure from anything Google has done in the past). That'll be news.
Modern air warfare is about information and system integration. Israel understands this. In an air war, my money's on Israel.
Languages like Scheme, Forth, SML are interesting and cool but the ways of thinking they teach are, for better or for worse, not part of the mainstream. Better to teach good OO methodology and design.
Iran has money to burn, and UN sanctions don't seem to be particularly effective ways to convince to governments; it's the proletariat who suffer. In the meanwhile, Iran's government gets to play the "it's us against the (non-Muslim) world!" card again. Jihad, anyone?