My current job - I have to monitor all posts on slashdot to make sure the guy we hired to internationalize our PL/SQL isn't posting on slashdot while he's supposed to be working.
Unless you're accused of "Terrorism" (as the poster was). That's the tricky point - even here in the U.S., if they use the "magic word", the Patriot Act trumps the constitution. I'm not being facetious - that was the whole (only) point of the Patriot Act. "The bill of rights makes it hard to fight terrorism, so repeal it for people we say are terrorists. We promise we won't abuse it."
(x) It is defenseless against encryption/sourcehiding
This is something they really seem to be losing sight of. Encrypted file-sharing networks like Freenet & MUTE depend on lots of users in order to run reasonably well (and they don't have many today, which is why they run slower than hell). However, these draconian laws push more people to start investigating encrypted file-sharing networks - maybe enough that someday the damned things will actually work.
That's right, you dumb shits - today, at least, you have some means of tracking down who's trading files illegally (including the ones who are trading illegal stuff like kiddie porn). Your brilliant efforts to enforce a moronic set of laws are actually working to create a network of millions of people who can up/download pretty much anything with impunity. In other words, in a catch-22 Sen. Hatch is too stupid to comprehend, tougher laws will make the current laws unenforcable.
Oh, yeah, BTW - live in the U.S.? Thinking about voting for Bush in November? Sen. Hatch is on Bush's short list for the supreme court. Yep.
That's what I've been doing wrong... I've been taking jobs in physics laboratories and university faculty positions to sharpen my math skills - I need to apply at McDonald's!
According to the article, the DRM chip creates a "partition that Windows won't be able to access". If that's true, I want a PC where everything is controlled by the DRM chip. Then I could trust my computer.
Actually, I'd be curious to hear a photoshop whiz compare photoshop with the Gimp... I've been playing around with the Gimp for quite a while and it appears to me that you can use it to do pretty much anything you could possibly want with photo manipulation. Seems awfully tedious, no matter what tool you use, though...
1. The FBI is only "asking" the FCC which, anyway, lacks jurisdiction to tell IRC programmers how to program.
Today, anyway. The FCC is going completely insange these days... what's really scary is that the actions of the FCC aren't subject to a judge and jury - their judgment is final. No appeal.
Holy shit, man - $25,000/yr is about what my wife and I pay the fucking nanny who watches our son while we're away at work. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of $12/hr. I may not starve, but wife would have to sell the house, the cars, and the furniture to keep herself and my son from starving if that's what I was bringing home.
A mechanic would think your pretty stupid to go on an across country trip with a 1/4 tank of gas, knowing the gas was at 1/4 tank, telling you it was at 1/4 tank, and wondering why the car does not go
You know, I remember one time I had a car with, I was certain, an electrical short somewhere in the wiring. The car had electrical window controls, and I could use the buttons to roll up and down the driver's side window, but not the passenger's side window. It worked fine when I used the button on the driver's side, but the passenger's window up/down button was broken.
Well, I had to take the car in for some kind of maintenance, and it occured to me to mention this problem to the mechanic while I happened to be standing there talking to him. He did what any of us tech types would have done when a really dumbass user presented us with a really dumbass problem - he reached in to the passenger's side, flipped the "window lock" button to "off" and rolled down the passenger's side window for me.
My reaction was to LMAO and say "You're going to be telling people about the idiot who came into your garage with a 'broken window button' for weeks, aren't you?" He just smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
I think far too many computer users could stand to develop a sense of humor about their computer illiteracy.
>Your function is back office - that means you support the front office, or revenue generating functions.
...
the finance types that create price points, the marketing types that create demand, the accounting types that ensure your check clears
Ummm... pardon me, but I beleive that finance and accounting are the definition of the back office. What business school did you attend? I want to make sure not to send my son there.
What were your experiences? I'm suffering from sort of a mix of morbid curiosity and quest for knowledge - everything I know about prison I've seen on TV and movies, and when I consider what a bang-up job TV and movies did of representing high school, the workplace, suburbia, etc... I'm sort of curious what they got right.
It's the greed-motivated executives who fuck over their loyal employees and ship all the call-center jobs overseas that I have a problem with
Which the sig-owner knows damned well. He's probably one of the people "in the club" who benefits from offshoring (for now) who know that if you complain about offshoring, it's easy to "shut you down" by saying "Racist!".
"Management perspective" is that programming skills are somewhat like shoelace tying skills. This perspective created the certification mill schools and doesn't show any real sign of slowing down or changing.
What's the difference between Computer Science and Computer Engineering? I graduated 10 years ago and I'm a bit out of the loop on these things... back then you had EE and CS and that was about it for computers. I've also seen something called "Software Engineering" as opposed to CS, too, and I'm not sure what that is. I'm thinking about going back for some master's work (with a BS in CS), and I'm trying to figure out what my options are.
I think there's a bit of a difference between "being in it for the money"/expecting a big paycheck after college and wondering if you're going to starve to death. The typical slashdot "I was outsourced to India" story doesn't start "I used to make $100K/yr and now I only make $40K", but "I used to make $100K/yr and now I fight with birds for crumbs of bread on the street".
Two things concern me about this (other than the obvious fact that no American can live in the US for $8000/year and we have nowhere else to go).
Number one, these people are, on the average, smarter than we are. Period. We all like to think, yeah, I could go get a PHD in nuclear physics, it's just a matter of the money and the time. Most of us can't. Especially not somewhere like IIT (which has higher standards than MIT, which accepted about 2000 of 20,000 applicants last year). Ever looked at the GRE? The average Indian who comes here to study scores about 760 on the quantitative (Math) section of the GRE. Ever tried it? How'd you do? Even break 700 (90%)?
Second, we joke about getting jobs at Wal-mart if things don't work out in programming. We may not be qualified. My senior year of college, I took a job in a gas station (cash register) to make my truck payment. After four months, it didn't work out.
It wasn't the meniality of the job, or the boredom - I've been far more bored by, say, HR presentations or sales pitches than I was in the gas station (although you do begin to see why people start smoking marijuana to get through the day).
It wasn't the customers. I never in four months of working there had to deal with a ridiculously surly customer. When they were a pain, well, I can be polite to anybody for two minutes.
It was my coworkers. They hated me. I hated them. They would start conversations about characters on MTV's "The real world" and I'd admit I didn't watch much TV. They'd curl their lip and think, "snob". And, of course, I'd scratch my head and think "moron". I tried to hide it, but shit - these people were the bottom of the barrel. What can I say? They can sense how you feel about them, and trust me - listen to them talk for a few days and you'll feel that way too.
And... what makes you think Wal-mart is going to hire you? They'll want to know your employment history - and when the hiring manager finds out you used to make $70,000, he's going to be a bit concerned that you'll jump ship at the first opportunity. And he'll be right.
You know, I always just sort of assumed this went without saying... I finished a four-year degree before I even so much as considered looking for a programming job. As the mid-90's wore into the late-90's, I was starting to wonder if I had just been wasting my time, being surrounded by Journalism majors, Philosophy majors, Basket-weaving majors, most with two-year degrees (and some with nothing past high school), who were doing the same job I was doing, and getting paid pretty much the same.
There was one significant problem, though, and I think this contributed to the.com bust in a lot of ways. I may not be any smarter than, say, your average journalism major, or even your average high-school graduate (who may well go on to get a PhD in nuclear engineering or some such). In other words, I may well be of average intelligence (I don't think so, but it's possible). However, if so, then I'm somebody of average intelligence who spent four years literally living and breathing the concepts and philosophies that underpin good software design, as well as physics, calculus, and a bit of electrical engineering. When you say, for example "circularly linked list" or "merge sort" or "virtual polymorphism", I know what you're talking about. No explanation necessary. I even know my transistors from my diodes and could probably remember Ohm's law if I thought about it hard enough. That doesn't mean I'm smarter than anybody else (although I think I am), it just means I've spent (at least) four years learning the theories behind what I do.
Nothing was as frustrating to me in the late 90's as trying to explain to an "internet gold rusher" who had gone out and gotten his Microsoft cert in January and a.com job in February why it's not a good idea to put all the code in the main routine and why you really do need to version your source code and not just e-mail the changes you made to your neighbor. It takes a person of average intelligence at least four years of study to become proficient at this trade. Period. If you could learn it in a month, there probably wouldn't be a full-blown four-year college track on it, now, would there? Did these people really think that they were that much smarter than the rest of the world? I'm arrogant as hell, and even I don't think I could take a two-week training course and then step into a job that other people had college degrees in.
So, anyway, soap box aside, a CS degree creates a common language for programmers and yes, with more CS-degree holders than programming jobs, the degree holders are likely going to end up getting the programming jobs, and all in all, the quality of software out there is going to go up as a result.
(Oh yeah, since the post was about network guys, I beleive this applies to network guys, too.)
And just an hour ago, I got a call that my programming job has already been offatmosphered to Martian programmers willing to work for trinkets and shiny beads...
Slashdot Mirror
My current job - I have to monitor all posts on slashdot to make sure the guy we hired to internationalize our PL/SQL isn't posting on slashdot while he's supposed to be working.
Unless you're accused of "Terrorism" (as the poster was). That's the tricky point - even here in the U.S., if they use the "magic word", the Patriot Act trumps the constitution. I'm not being facetious - that was the whole (only) point of the Patriot Act. "The bill of rights makes it hard to fight terrorism, so repeal it for people we say are terrorists. We promise we won't abuse it."
(x) It is defenseless against encryption/sourcehiding
This is something they really seem to be losing sight of. Encrypted file-sharing networks like Freenet & MUTE depend on lots of users in order to run reasonably well (and they don't have many today, which is why they run slower than hell). However, these draconian laws push more people to start investigating encrypted file-sharing networks - maybe enough that someday the damned things will actually work.
That's right, you dumb shits - today, at least, you have some means of tracking down who's trading files illegally (including the ones who are trading illegal stuff like kiddie porn). Your brilliant efforts to enforce a moronic set of laws are actually working to create a network of millions of people who can up/download pretty much anything with impunity. In other words, in a catch-22 Sen. Hatch is too stupid to comprehend, tougher laws will make the current laws unenforcable.
Oh, yeah, BTW - live in the U.S.? Thinking about voting for Bush in November? Sen. Hatch is on Bush's short list for the supreme court. Yep.
That's what I've been doing wrong... I've been taking jobs in physics laboratories and university faculty positions to sharpen my math skills - I need to apply at McDonald's!
Because we'd rather die free than live caged.
According to the article, the DRM chip creates a "partition that Windows won't be able to access". If that's true, I want a PC where everything is controlled by the DRM chip. Then I could trust my computer.
Actually, I'd be curious to hear a photoshop whiz compare photoshop with the Gimp... I've been playing around with the Gimp for quite a while and it appears to me that you can use it to do pretty much anything you could possibly want with photo manipulation. Seems awfully tedious, no matter what tool you use, though...
1. The FBI is only "asking" the FCC which, anyway, lacks jurisdiction to tell IRC programmers how to program.
Today, anyway. The FCC is going completely insange these days... what's really scary is that the actions of the FCC aren't subject to a judge and jury - their judgment is final. No appeal.
Holy shit, man - $25,000/yr is about what my wife and I pay the fucking nanny who watches our son while we're away at work. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of $12/hr. I may not starve, but wife would have to sell the house, the cars, and the furniture to keep herself and my son from starving if that's what I was bringing home.
A mechanic would think your pretty stupid to go on an across country trip with a 1/4 tank of gas, knowing the gas was at 1/4 tank, telling you it was at 1/4 tank, and wondering why the car does not go
You know, I remember one time I had a car with, I was certain, an electrical short somewhere in the wiring. The car had electrical window controls, and I could use the buttons to roll up and down the driver's side window, but not the passenger's side window. It worked fine when I used the button on the driver's side, but the passenger's window up/down button was broken.
Well, I had to take the car in for some kind of maintenance, and it occured to me to mention this problem to the mechanic while I happened to be standing there talking to him. He did what any of us tech types would have done when a really dumbass user presented us with a really dumbass problem - he reached in to the passenger's side, flipped the "window lock" button to "off" and rolled down the passenger's side window for me.
My reaction was to LMAO and say "You're going to be telling people about the idiot who came into your garage with a 'broken window button' for weeks, aren't you?" He just smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
I think far too many computer users could stand to develop a sense of humor about their computer illiteracy.
>Your function is back office - that means you support the front office, or revenue generating functions.
...
the finance types that create price points, the marketing types that create demand, the accounting types that ensure your check clears
Ummm... pardon me, but I beleive that finance and accounting are the definition of the back office. What business school did you attend? I want to make sure not to send my son there.
What were your experiences? I'm suffering from sort of a mix of morbid curiosity and quest for knowledge - everything I know about prison I've seen on TV and movies, and when I consider what a bang-up job TV and movies did of representing high school, the workplace, suburbia, etc... I'm sort of curious what they got right.
Child support?
Which the sig-owner knows damned well. He's probably one of the people "in the club" who benefits from offshoring (for now) who know that if you complain about offshoring, it's easy to "shut you down" by saying "Racist!".
"Management perspective" is that programming skills are somewhat like shoelace tying skills. This perspective created the certification mill schools and doesn't show any real sign of slowing down or changing.
It makes me feel like I'm listening to Captain Kirk.
Yep. I think I've worked with every one of them at one time or another, too.
What's the difference between Computer Science and Computer Engineering? I graduated 10 years ago and I'm a bit out of the loop on these things... back then you had EE and CS and that was about it for computers. I've also seen something called "Software Engineering" as opposed to CS, too, and I'm not sure what that is. I'm thinking about going back for some master's work (with a BS in CS), and I'm trying to figure out what my options are.
Spoken like someone who's never written a line of code in his life.
I think there's a bit of a difference between "being in it for the money"/expecting a big paycheck after college and wondering if you're going to starve to death. The typical slashdot "I was outsourced to India" story doesn't start "I used to make $100K/yr and now I only make $40K", but "I used to make $100K/yr and now I fight with birds for crumbs of bread on the street".
Sorry - who's Brooks?
Two things concern me about this (other than the obvious fact that no American can live in the US for $8000/year and we have nowhere else to go).
Number one, these people are, on the average, smarter than we are. Period. We all like to think, yeah, I could go get a PHD in nuclear physics, it's just a matter of the money and the time. Most of us can't. Especially not somewhere like IIT (which has higher standards than MIT, which accepted about 2000 of 20,000 applicants last year). Ever looked at the GRE? The average Indian who comes here to study scores about 760 on the quantitative (Math) section of the GRE. Ever tried it? How'd you do? Even break 700 (90%)?
Second, we joke about getting jobs at Wal-mart if things don't work out in programming. We may not be qualified. My senior year of college, I took a job in a gas station (cash register) to make my truck payment. After four months, it didn't work out.
It wasn't the meniality of the job, or the boredom - I've been far more bored by, say, HR presentations or sales pitches than I was in the gas station (although you do begin to see why people start smoking marijuana to get through the day).
It wasn't the customers. I never in four months of working there had to deal with a ridiculously surly customer. When they were a pain, well, I can be polite to anybody for two minutes.
It was my coworkers. They hated me. I hated them. They would start conversations about characters on MTV's "The real world" and I'd admit I didn't watch much TV. They'd curl their lip and think, "snob". And, of course, I'd scratch my head and think "moron". I tried to hide it, but shit - these people were the bottom of the barrel. What can I say? They can sense how you feel about them, and trust me - listen to them talk for a few days and you'll feel that way too.
And... what makes you think Wal-mart is going to hire you? They'll want to know your employment history - and when the hiring manager finds out you used to make $70,000, he's going to be a bit concerned that you'll jump ship at the first opportunity. And he'll be right.
- This comment courtesy of the Calcutta Better Business Bureau.
You know, I always just sort of assumed this went without saying... I finished a four-year degree before I even so much as considered looking for a programming job. As the mid-90's wore into the late-90's, I was starting to wonder if I had just been wasting my time, being surrounded by Journalism majors, Philosophy majors, Basket-weaving majors, most with two-year degrees (and some with nothing past high school), who were doing the same job I was doing, and getting paid pretty much the same.
There was one significant problem, though, and I think this contributed to the .com bust in a lot of ways. I may not be any smarter than, say, your average journalism major, or even your average high-school graduate (who may well go on to get a PhD in nuclear engineering or some such). In other words, I may well be of average intelligence (I don't think so, but it's possible). However, if so, then I'm somebody of average intelligence who spent four years literally living and breathing the concepts and philosophies that underpin good software design, as well as physics, calculus, and a bit of electrical engineering. When you say, for example "circularly linked list" or "merge sort" or "virtual polymorphism", I know what you're talking about. No explanation necessary. I even know my transistors from my diodes and could probably remember Ohm's law if I thought about it hard enough. That doesn't mean I'm smarter than anybody else (although I think I am), it just means I've spent (at least) four years learning the theories behind what I do.
Nothing was as frustrating to me in the late 90's as trying to explain to an "internet gold rusher" who had gone out and gotten his Microsoft cert in January and a .com job in February why it's not a good idea to put all the code in the main routine and why you really do need to version your source code and not just e-mail the changes you made to your neighbor. It takes a person of average intelligence at least four years of study to become proficient at this trade. Period. If you could learn it in a month, there probably wouldn't be a full-blown four-year college track on it, now, would there? Did these people really think that they were that much smarter than the rest of the world? I'm arrogant as hell, and even I don't think I could take a two-week training course and then step into a job that other people had college degrees in.
So, anyway, soap box aside, a CS degree creates a common language for programmers and yes, with more CS-degree holders than programming jobs, the degree holders are likely going to end up getting the programming jobs, and all in all, the quality of software out there is going to go up as a result.
(Oh yeah, since the post was about network guys, I beleive this applies to network guys, too.)
And just an hour ago, I got a call that my programming job has already been offatmosphered to Martian programmers willing to work for trinkets and shiny beads...