It's the one and only page from the liberal playbook - if you disagree with something or somebody, call it racist. It's like Mr. Miyagi's crane technique - "if do right, no can defense." It's been working for them so well for the last fifty years, why would they try anything else?
I recently got an e-mail from a recruiter who was offering $80K for a position that required a master's degree and 5+ years of experience. In New York City.
After I graduated college and started working, I began to notice a pattern in the jobs I got: I'd start out doing work and producing stuff, and the people around me would start to notice that I was good at doing work and producing stuff, and that I seemed to know a lot of stuff (I love to study arcane details like how TCP/IP or SSL work, so I can often troubleshoot unusual problems), so they would start asking for my help. I would help more and more with other things, and spend less and less time doing work and producing stuff. So I'd start to get criticism for not doing work and producing stuff ("on time and under budget, you programmer peon, and if you don't like it there's a hundred guys in India who will do your job for half what I pay you!"), so I'd yo-yo back to turning away requests for help so that I could focus on doing work and producing stuff, only to get criticism for not being a good team player. (Funny how "team work makes the dream work" but we're evaluated only on our own individual accomplishments)
Since being a good team player is the polar opposite of adhering to arbitrary deadlines, I've experimented both ways over the past 25 years and I've come to the conclusion that being ready and willing to drop everything and helping out whoever needs or asks for your help is what makes you "valuable", not slavishly adhering to meaningless deadlines, regardless of how you think the world ought to work.
I don't know what the hell slashdot did with that comment, but the middle half is missing. I can't delete it, either, so just disregard it. I was agreeing with OP.
practical solutions to the types of problems that most people are going to be facing
Agree - I'm halfway through volume 2 now, attempting to work every single exercise with a rating OpenID bridge or migrating all the Maven build scripts to Gradle or whatever the buzzword of the day is. I still recommend the books: I think reading Knuth makes you a better programmer in the sense that learning to play the piano or chess or a foreign language makes you a better programmer by "unlocking" parts of your brain that don't get exercised that often, but I don't see any practical solutions to modern problems in there.
More meetings, more stand ups, shorter sprints, a "collaborative" open office so the boss can stare at everybody all day long, code-quality measurement targets and time-reporting in quarter-hour increments. THAT will get their systems working again.
So, this is basically like when they awarded a Nobel prize first to Al Gore and then to Obama (in his first year in office) just to make sure to remind everybody how much they hated George Bush (and Republicans in general)?
Imo @ least, it doesn't matter WHERE YOU GO TO COLLEGE
Unfortunately, yours isn't the only opinion that matters - there's a LOT of elitist college snobbery out there, especially among companies that can afford to be picky. Not that you'll be unable to find a job, but there are a lot of doors that will still be closed to you - so it does matter, although going to the university of bubba doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be living in a refrigerator box.
I can't say I'm surprised - all in all, this will be good for those of us who were lucky enough to "come up" in an open world, but bad for the next generation that will have to fight and claw to learn how things actually work (if they ever manage to at all). It seems to me like we've been playing a sort of "musical chairs" game for the past 30 years or so and those of us who are sitting down right now are the "winners".
Nobody else offers unlimited plans, though. And, honestly, 200 GB is... quite a bit. I don't know how somebody could go through that in a month. When AT&T forcibly converted me, kicking and screaming, from my unlimited plan to a metered plan, I went for 10 GB a month, thinking for sure that I'd blow right through it and end up paying ridiculous overage fees. After a few months, I scaled it back to 5 GB a month because I was never even close to hitting my limit, even though I'm on my phone all the time.
You laugh, but is he married? Believe me, if he made 10 million last year, she's going to spend 10 million this year, whether he brings in all 10 of those million or not.
Today's younglings likely enjoy using WebGL to make 4K 3D webpages
I don't know. I'd like to hope that this would be the case, but I watch my 13-year-old son so quickly lose interest with complex computing platforms because it just takes so long to get to where you produce anything that looks like anything you're used to. When I was his age, I could realistically put my C64 into graphics mode and code up something that sort of approximated what professional games looked like at the time. Nowadays, the best he can realistically hope for is approximating what games looked like back in 1987 when I was his age. I think he can see the utility and value in learning this as a trade, but I don't think it will ever be something that he looks forward to purely for the sake of it like we used to.
I believe he completely reworked that in the new versions
He plans to, but hasn't yet. The current edition of the first three volumes (the third) still presents all of the examples in MIX. Volumes 4+ are written using a more modern MMIX.
Must respectfully completely disagree. I'm halfway through volume 2 now, trying to work (or, at least, attempt) all of the exercises, and I can't imagine that I would have gotten anything from this series if I'd just treated it as a reference work. If I were to go look up an algorithm, I'd find that its description relied on (and back-referenced) some mathematical concepts that were covered in earlier chapters, and that the example code is written in MIX which itself was covered in a long section around the middle of volume 1. So you'll end up reading most of the book anyway. Further, there are important insights into the details of the algorithm that are covered in the exercises which you'll only really internalize if you work through the details yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this racist?
It's the one and only page from the liberal playbook - if you disagree with something or somebody, call it racist. It's like Mr. Miyagi's crane technique - "if do right, no can defense." It's been working for them so well for the last fifty years, why would they try anything else?
to compete with us
Uh, they are competing with us. That's kind of the point.
I recently got an e-mail from a recruiter who was offering $80K for a position that required a master's degree and 5+ years of experience. In New York City.
Don't worry, they'll raise the cap again.
After I graduated college and started working, I began to notice a pattern in the jobs I got: I'd start out doing work and producing stuff, and the people around me would start to notice that I was good at doing work and producing stuff, and that I seemed to know a lot of stuff (I love to study arcane details like how TCP/IP or SSL work, so I can often troubleshoot unusual problems), so they would start asking for my help. I would help more and more with other things, and spend less and less time doing work and producing stuff. So I'd start to get criticism for not doing work and producing stuff ("on time and under budget, you programmer peon, and if you don't like it there's a hundred guys in India who will do your job for half what I pay you!"), so I'd yo-yo back to turning away requests for help so that I could focus on doing work and producing stuff, only to get criticism for not being a good team player. (Funny how "team work makes the dream work" but we're evaluated only on our own individual accomplishments)
Since being a good team player is the polar opposite of adhering to arbitrary deadlines, I've experimented both ways over the past 25 years and I've come to the conclusion that being ready and willing to drop everything and helping out whoever needs or asks for your help is what makes you "valuable", not slavishly adhering to meaningless deadlines, regardless of how you think the world ought to work.
Without reading through any of the comments, I predict that 90% of them will be "the only good developer is me, everybody else is an idiot".
My ego is too big for me to carry around a book that says "Java for Dummies"
I cross out "dummies" and write "geniuses" over the top of it. So far nobody's called me out on it.
I don't know what the hell slashdot did with that comment, but the middle half is missing. I can't delete it, either, so just disregard it. I was agreeing with OP.
practical solutions to the types of problems that most people are going to be facing
Agree - I'm halfway through volume 2 now, attempting to work every single exercise with a rating OpenID bridge or migrating all the Maven build scripts to Gradle or whatever the buzzword of the day is. I still recommend the books: I think reading Knuth makes you a better programmer in the sense that learning to play the piano or chess or a foreign language makes you a better programmer by "unlocking" parts of your brain that don't get exercised that often, but I don't see any practical solutions to modern problems in there.
You're observing the wrong person. Observe his wife if you want to know how much cash he'll burn through given the opportunity.
And treating your employees like slaves.
More meetings, more stand ups, shorter sprints, a "collaborative" open office so the boss can stare at everybody all day long, code-quality measurement targets and time-reporting in quarter-hour increments. THAT will get their systems working again.
So, this is basically like when they awarded a Nobel prize first to Al Gore and then to Obama (in his first year in office) just to make sure to remind everybody how much they hated George Bush (and Republicans in general)?
Imo @ least, it doesn't matter WHERE YOU GO TO COLLEGE
Unfortunately, yours isn't the only opinion that matters - there's a LOT of elitist college snobbery out there, especially among companies that can afford to be picky. Not that you'll be unable to find a job, but there are a lot of doors that will still be closed to you - so it does matter, although going to the university of bubba doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be living in a refrigerator box.
I can't say I'm surprised - all in all, this will be good for those of us who were lucky enough to "come up" in an open world, but bad for the next generation that will have to fight and claw to learn how things actually work (if they ever manage to at all). It seems to me like we've been playing a sort of "musical chairs" game for the past 30 years or so and those of us who are sitting down right now are the "winners".
There are currently over 10,000 federal statutes. Can you say, categorically, that you are not currently breaking any of them?
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu
I think you're confusing how things ought to be with how they actually are.
This is not a setting used by customers
Even Apple is telling us to just use Chrome.
Nobody else offers unlimited plans, though. And, honestly, 200 GB is... quite a bit. I don't know how somebody could go through that in a month. When AT&T forcibly converted me, kicking and screaming, from my unlimited plan to a metered plan, I went for 10 GB a month, thinking for sure that I'd blow right through it and end up paying ridiculous overage fees. After a few months, I scaled it back to 5 GB a month because I was never even close to hitting my limit, even though I'm on my phone all the time.
Only 8 millions! How will he possibly survive?
You laugh, but is he married? Believe me, if he made 10 million last year, she's going to spend 10 million this year, whether he brings in all 10 of those million or not.
Today's younglings likely enjoy using WebGL to make 4K 3D webpages
I don't know. I'd like to hope that this would be the case, but I watch my 13-year-old son so quickly lose interest with complex computing platforms because it just takes so long to get to where you produce anything that looks like anything you're used to. When I was his age, I could realistically put my C64 into graphics mode and code up something that sort of approximated what professional games looked like at the time. Nowadays, the best he can realistically hope for is approximating what games looked like back in 1987 when I was his age. I think he can see the utility and value in learning this as a trade, but I don't think it will ever be something that he looks forward to purely for the sake of it like we used to.
To a liberal, the word "racist" means "anybody who disagrees with me".
And we'll sidestep it by changing one single bit at the very end of the video or picture.
I believe he completely reworked that in the new versions
He plans to, but hasn't yet. The current edition of the first three volumes (the third) still presents all of the examples in MIX. Volumes 4+ are written using a more modern MMIX.
It's not like a novel you read front to back.
Must respectfully completely disagree. I'm halfway through volume 2 now, trying to work (or, at least, attempt) all of the exercises, and I can't imagine that I would have gotten anything from this series if I'd just treated it as a reference work. If I were to go look up an algorithm, I'd find that its description relied on (and back-referenced) some mathematical concepts that were covered in earlier chapters, and that the example code is written in MIX which itself was covered in a long section around the middle of volume 1. So you'll end up reading most of the book anyway. Further, there are important insights into the details of the algorithm that are covered in the exercises which you'll only really internalize if you work through the details yourself.