Word up. I use "Software Smithy" as many projects are trying to bang two moving projects together as it is about any kind of design or engineering. And, yeah, I got the CS thing going, but as the OP points out, the academic is nothing like the actual.
Hey Pac Man is only 13 years old according to TFA! That's great that means i'm only in my 30s again!...oh wait a tick this is Slashdot where editors never edit...:-(
Or more likely that Slashdotters don't read TFA. The 13 is a reference to the number of games researched, not their age. Pac-Man is noted as a game from 1980. Neither the introduction article (first link) or the research paper itself (led to by second link) suggest Pac-Man is only 13 years old.
I agree also on the WYSIWYG editing, but was commenting in context of OP. In general I do my editing in text editor and view results in a browser. Usually as many browsers as I can access (evil IE, FF, Chrome, and Safari usually suffice). Unless layout is of no concern (and that rarely happens) the browsers seem to have some quirk that messes up somethg.
And that can lead to some pretty bad programming habits. There are exceptions, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're one of them.
You might not need to know the details of an internal combustion engine to make a hobby around driving a car, but you do need to understand the complexities of lift and drag and such to fly an airplane. Software's at least as technical as flight, even in many pretty simple games.
If one knows nothing of data structures, control statements, and even error handling, then one is likely to write inefficient, unresponsive, and even faulty software.
Certainly it isn't as much fun learning the technical details right away, but writing software is a technical undertaking. If one is going to skip the technical bits, then one's going to end up doing it wrong. It might become easy with practice, but it's pretty heady, technical stuff, and some people won't get it and will be driven away from it.
That said, these kids don't need to start out understanding heuristic pointer manipulation in C/C++ or inline assembly. However, they should properly learn some basics like for() and if() and how to create and handle structures or classes, like what it means to pass those as parameters. Even a simple game of rock-paper-scissors requires conditionals and input handling. If you want to make a "simple" Pacman or Asteroids or Tetris clone will require knowing where many things are on the playing field, many of which are moving, most of which will interact with each other and game controls. That's a lot of "make it up as you go" that has opportunity to learn some good data handling and coding practices along the way.
Given that Blender is in the list, the easy assumption is OP has some idea of writing a 3D game, and that's going to require some rather technical understanding, whether just for the modeling, or if including kinetic skeletal animation. Even if a library does the hard bits, some understanding of matrix-based multi-dimensional math will be required; how's that for needing some basics for ya? Blender makes that kind of easy with its game engine requiring scripting in Python.
Calculator shows that $27.63 is $57,4740 for 52 40-hour weeks (a "typical" 2080-hour year). It should be the case that a typical "two week" vacation is covered in that, but if you use 50 40-hour weeks, it comes out to a rounder number, $55,260. If one was just unaware of how weeks work in a year (and even 52 40-hour weeks doesn't round right), using 4 40-hour weeks in each of the 12 months is $53,049.6.
I'm an IT worker who doesn't get overtime. I work hourly, and am paid for every hour I work, but it's the same rate no matter how many in a day or week or pay period.
Done right, outsourcing can save money overall. Done wrong, it's a headache for everyone, and an arguable pouring of money into a bunch of wasted spin.
Ultimately, for any project, it comes down to planning and management as well as execution. You can hire a room full of $100/hour US programmers who also will not get anything done if they aren't given any direction. Similarly, if the skills of the team don't match the work to be done, it's wasteful for a whole different reason.
Just because a developer in India (or Manila or Singapore or in Russia or whatever) is getting paid a fraction (third, quarter, fifth, tenth, or less) of what a similar developer in the US or Europe might make doesn't mean it's a low-cut rate in that country, nor does it mean that it hires less capable talent. Even in the US there's a spread of relative wages because relative cost of living changes.
Others have pointed out that the example $14/hour is a lot in some places. In those places, you're potentially getting the topper talent. It's up to the reader, manager, or whatever to judge whether the talent is comparable; whether comparing Saint Paul to San Jose, or Milwaukee to Mumbai. And that judgement should probably weigh in some of the time zone, cultural, and other geographic-based differences, as well as the experience of the individuals and groups involved. No matter where one looks, one should hire the right skills for the task.
I worked with one outsourcing group that had an interesting approach. Rather than stick people to a task for which they may or may not have the appropriate skill, a team is assigned and when a task comes up, someone capable would be selected from the crowd of waiting talent. The billing was only for the people working, not for the people waiting, so it was a bit of a win-win. If your plan and workflow are such that a bevy of developers can just pick a task to finish, instead of arbitrarily assigning tasks because tasks need doing and developers are waiting, then it doesn't matter where the developers are sitting. I've worked successfully with "in" and "out" sourced groups in this fashion; a developer will look at the tasks that need doing and pick something they can do well. (Yes, of course, some of the "low hanging fruit" constantly picked the "easy" tasks, or just didn't do well, but that had a benefit of removing the "easy" tasks from the list so the "better" devs could focus on the "harder" tasks.)
I work on Windows XP, Windows 7, Mac, Solaris, CENTOS, Ubuntu (older and newer), and more. They're all a little different, but really when you get into your tools (in this case Eclipse), it's more about the shifts in keyboard than anything GUI. The fonts and icons and toolbars and window frames and so on all change a little between the platforms.
Other than the not-yet-made-or-released UI/theme editor for Unity, making it so tweaking the themes is hard, there's not much worse in Unity than in the other UIs. There are forum posts to help find the CSS and other files to change (Google for "unity orange css" and you'll find them) what you really can't stand (color/size-wise, anyway).
Beyond that, it's taskbar or dock, menu in window or desktop, and eye-candy things like snapping windows to an edge.
Download and unpack a fresh Eclipse Indigo release. After starting, go to the help menu, pick the Market place. Search for Subversive (by Polarion), ignore the "cannot find" warning, and install that. Restart Eclipse. It will prompt you for an SVN connector--choose one of the SVN Kit connectors as it's a pure-Java and doesn't rely on external SVN to be installed. After installing, restart Eclipse again. Open the perspective SVN Repository Exploring or Team Sharing (and then SVN Repositories view). Add your sever. Check-out your project. Start working.
As I sit here working on a Java web app written almost 10 years ago, updated continuously since, but still with threads of old libraries and methodologies within, I think the half-life is a little bit of a weak comparison to make.
TFA is all about staying on top of your unnamed vendor's magic moving technology. It isn't about technology skills in general. Heck, it isn't mentioning anything specific either. Well, there is that one line about staying up with PL/SQL.
It'd be more difficult to tell the difference if the responses lagged a little bit, you know, like it took some time for someone to read your text, formulate and type a response.
And I agree wholeheartedly with that. I had a semantic issue with "aren't earning," which they are.
A dollar is a dollar, I think, and it shouldn't make a difference where or how you earned it: tip, wage, bonus, dividend or other capital gain. If we're going to stick with an income-tax based government, we should make the tax system easy to undertand and treat every dollar the same, insofar as taxes are concerned, and no matter who earns them.
Smarter people than me (in economics and finance) have better details. Sadly, I think they get mired in politics, and too often with people dumber than me (in economics and finance).
People aren't earning nor working for multi-million dollar annual incomes, they are enjoying the benefits of others work by collecting dividens and stock profits.
While one might argue that those receiving dividends and stock profits aren't working for it, it is earning, but is often taxed as "gains" instead. It is still income, though.
Word. I use the IP blocks from http://ipdeny.com/ to configure ip-filter to stop systems in the top ten malicious countries (http://www.countryipblocks.net/malicious-internet-traffic/malicious-internet-activity-the-top-10-countries/) from getting SSH and SMTP access to my servers. This dropped the amount of relay-attempted e-mail to practically nothing (by three orders of magnitude, from 10Ks of attempts to 10s of attempts), and unknown user attempts to less than a quarter of what they had been.
Yeah, I might miss a little bit of legit e-mail, but if they really need me, we can work out a specific allowance or they can use an otherwise accepted (and content-filtered) server.
I have another 5 years left in the field and I'm aware of it....
If you're any good, you probably have another ten at least. Age-out in dev doesn't really start until 45, and isn't enforced with too much vigor until 55. After that, it'll totally depend on how many months ago your HR people finished college...
I wonder what will happen if all a whole generation of IT people are out of work because they are "too expensive".
I was in IT before the 2000 bubble burst. They handed out truckloads of money. The bubble burst and no one could afford to pay anyone those crazy rates any more. As a result, a lot of people were suddenly out of work, and a lot of work ground to a halt. Eventually work returned, but at a much reduced (some say "corrected") rate. A lot of people changed industries or otherwise never made it back.
It'll probably be similar. As all of the experienced people become "too expensive" they'll be cut in large numbers, resulting in a lot of work that can't be done, because you really can't cut all of that experience. The returning group will be smaller, and less expensive.
Take advantage of the money times, and save a lot more than you think you'll need. Prepare to reduce your lifestyle to fit a future budget when the cuts come. Repeat as necessary.
In addition to blocking unwanted open ports to the world, have just about all of China's IPs in my ipfilter, denying them access to anything but HTTP (they might want to read my blogs...right?). Also the other countries called out by http://www.countryipblocks.net/malicious-internet-traffic/malicious-internet-activity-the-top-10-countries/ are likewise blocked. Yeah, that's about 10K IP blocks in the filter, but it seems to run just fine, and I end up with only sporadic and apparently random (or maybe successful) failures in my auth files.
Not that I want anyone to see this as any kind of challenge...I'm sure someone is spending more time to access and zombie my machines than I'm spending to try to cut them off!
I once ran into a problem trying to repair a mid-70's American car, on which some bolts were metric and others were standard. Inconveniently, 12mm socket fits nicely on 1/2-inch bolt head, but the threads, while close, aren't quite close enough, and would fail to hold. Over time it became more evident where the differences were, and it was manageable to find and use the correct bolt, but before figuring that out there were many re-repairs.
And speaking of "parent," let's not forget the damage that happens to them through "undesirable care," such as is often applied at the hands of children and other less-responsible people.
A stack of disks strewn about will certainly fare much worse for wear than disks more carefully tended.
Either way, you're paying a lot for something that there's no point to watching more than once.
Quality of the individual something notwithstanding, watching it more than once is a personal choice. If you're not the type to do that, even just on occasion, then owning probably isn't for you. If you're the type to re-watch, then owning makes sense.
It is the case that sometimes some people are in a place where bandwidth or storage doesn't allow watching an otherwise delivered video, and the disks then come in handy. Consider uses of video learning or motivation (such as for exercise), or even mundane repetitive review (say, kids and their stuff, which hopefully overlaps with learning and motiviation); it's hard to beat "popping it in" and having it turn on.
Slashdot Mirror
Word up. I use "Software Smithy" as many projects are trying to bang two moving projects together as it is about any kind of design or engineering. And, yeah, I got the CS thing going, but as the OP points out, the academic is nothing like the actual.
Something anyone with a CS degree should do by instinct anyway, in my opinion.
I'll cut slack for the "opinion" bit, but having a degree doesn't mean anything becomes instinct.
Hey Pac Man is only 13 years old according to TFA! That's great that means i'm only in my 30s again!...oh wait a tick this is Slashdot where editors never edit... :-(
Or more likely that Slashdotters don't read TFA. The 13 is a reference to the number of games researched, not their age. Pac-Man is noted as a game from 1980. Neither the introduction article (first link) or the research paper itself (led to by second link) suggest Pac-Man is only 13 years old.
What does this really mean? You're old again.
I agree also on the WYSIWYG editing, but was commenting in context of OP. In general I do my editing in text editor and view results in a browser. Usually as many browsers as I can access (evil IE, FF, Chrome, and Safari usually suffice). Unless layout is of no concern (and that rarely happens) the browsers seem to have some quirk that messes up somethg.
Agreed, but I think it fails as a WYSIWYG HTML editor...and, probably for the purposes of the post, it equals vi...
Post before yours (in my stream anyway) was for VIM. I think that counts.
And that can lead to some pretty bad programming habits. There are exceptions, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're one of them.
You might not need to know the details of an internal combustion engine to make a hobby around driving a car, but you do need to understand the complexities of lift and drag and such to fly an airplane. Software's at least as technical as flight, even in many pretty simple games.
If one knows nothing of data structures, control statements, and even error handling, then one is likely to write inefficient, unresponsive, and even faulty software.
Certainly it isn't as much fun learning the technical details right away, but writing software is a technical undertaking. If one is going to skip the technical bits, then one's going to end up doing it wrong. It might become easy with practice, but it's pretty heady, technical stuff, and some people won't get it and will be driven away from it.
That said, these kids don't need to start out understanding heuristic pointer manipulation in C/C++ or inline assembly. However, they should properly learn some basics like for() and if() and how to create and handle structures or classes, like what it means to pass those as parameters. Even a simple game of rock-paper-scissors requires conditionals and input handling. If you want to make a "simple" Pacman or Asteroids or Tetris clone will require knowing where many things are on the playing field, many of which are moving, most of which will interact with each other and game controls. That's a lot of "make it up as you go" that has opportunity to learn some good data handling and coding practices along the way.
Given that Blender is in the list, the easy assumption is OP has some idea of writing a 3D game, and that's going to require some rather technical understanding, whether just for the modeling, or if including kinetic skeletal animation. Even if a library does the hard bits, some understanding of matrix-based multi-dimensional math will be required; how's that for needing some basics for ya? Blender makes that kind of easy with its game engine requiring scripting in Python.
Calculator shows that $27.63 is $57,4740 for 52 40-hour weeks (a "typical" 2080-hour year). It should be the case that a typical "two week" vacation is covered in that, but if you use 50 40-hour weeks, it comes out to a rounder number, $55,260. If one was just unaware of how weeks work in a year (and even 52 40-hour weeks doesn't round right), using 4 40-hour weeks in each of the 12 months is $53,049.6.
I'm an IT worker who doesn't get overtime. I work hourly, and am paid for every hour I work, but it's the same rate no matter how many in a day or week or pay period.
I think you forgot to wrap your text in <sarcasm/> tags. Otherwise, your recollection of history is a little off.
Done right, outsourcing can save money overall. Done wrong, it's a headache for everyone, and an arguable pouring of money into a bunch of wasted spin.
Ultimately, for any project, it comes down to planning and management as well as execution. You can hire a room full of $100/hour US programmers who also will not get anything done if they aren't given any direction. Similarly, if the skills of the team don't match the work to be done, it's wasteful for a whole different reason.
Just because a developer in India (or Manila or Singapore or in Russia or whatever) is getting paid a fraction (third, quarter, fifth, tenth, or less) of what a similar developer in the US or Europe might make doesn't mean it's a low-cut rate in that country, nor does it mean that it hires less capable talent. Even in the US there's a spread of relative wages because relative cost of living changes.
Others have pointed out that the example $14/hour is a lot in some places. In those places, you're potentially getting the topper talent. It's up to the reader, manager, or whatever to judge whether the talent is comparable; whether comparing Saint Paul to San Jose, or Milwaukee to Mumbai. And that judgement should probably weigh in some of the time zone, cultural, and other geographic-based differences, as well as the experience of the individuals and groups involved. No matter where one looks, one should hire the right skills for the task.
I worked with one outsourcing group that had an interesting approach. Rather than stick people to a task for which they may or may not have the appropriate skill, a team is assigned and when a task comes up, someone capable would be selected from the crowd of waiting talent. The billing was only for the people working, not for the people waiting, so it was a bit of a win-win. If your plan and workflow are such that a bevy of developers can just pick a task to finish, instead of arbitrarily assigning tasks because tasks need doing and developers are waiting, then it doesn't matter where the developers are sitting. I've worked successfully with "in" and "out" sourced groups in this fashion; a developer will look at the tasks that need doing and pick something they can do well. (Yes, of course, some of the "low hanging fruit" constantly picked the "easy" tasks, or just didn't do well, but that had a benefit of removing the "easy" tasks from the list so the "better" devs could focus on the "harder" tasks.)
I work on Windows XP, Windows 7, Mac, Solaris, CENTOS, Ubuntu (older and newer), and more. They're all a little different, but really when you get into your tools (in this case Eclipse), it's more about the shifts in keyboard than anything GUI. The fonts and icons and toolbars and window frames and so on all change a little between the platforms.
Other than the not-yet-made-or-released UI/theme editor for Unity, making it so tweaking the themes is hard, there's not much worse in Unity than in the other UIs. There are forum posts to help find the CSS and other files to change (Google for "unity orange css" and you'll find them) what you really can't stand (color/size-wise, anyway).
Beyond that, it's taskbar or dock, menu in window or desktop, and eye-candy things like snapping windows to an edge.
Download and unpack a fresh Eclipse Indigo release. After starting, go to the help menu, pick the Market place. Search for Subversive (by Polarion), ignore the "cannot find" warning, and install that. Restart Eclipse. It will prompt you for an SVN connector--choose one of the SVN Kit connectors as it's a pure-Java and doesn't rely on external SVN to be installed. After installing, restart Eclipse again. Open the perspective SVN Repository Exploring or Team Sharing (and then SVN Repositories view). Add your sever. Check-out your project. Start working.
As I sit here working on a Java web app written almost 10 years ago, updated continuously since, but still with threads of old libraries and methodologies within, I think the half-life is a little bit of a weak comparison to make.
TFA is all about staying on top of your unnamed vendor's magic moving technology. It isn't about technology skills in general. Heck, it isn't mentioning anything specific either. Well, there is that one line about staying up with PL/SQL.
It'd be more difficult to tell the difference if the responses lagged a little bit, you know, like it took some time for someone to read your text, formulate and type a response.
Or reading. Or perhaps there would finally be time to get that eye exam and buy glasses.
Article says eighty-five not ninety-five.
Perhaps it changed, but in my timeline, that's the reality to which I'm sticking.
And I agree wholeheartedly with that. I had a semantic issue with "aren't earning," which they are.
A dollar is a dollar, I think, and it shouldn't make a difference where or how you earned it: tip, wage, bonus, dividend or other capital gain. If we're going to stick with an income-tax based government, we should make the tax system easy to undertand and treat every dollar the same, insofar as taxes are concerned, and no matter who earns them.
Smarter people than me (in economics and finance) have better details. Sadly, I think they get mired in politics, and too often with people dumber than me (in economics and finance).
People aren't earning nor working for multi-million dollar annual incomes, they are enjoying the benefits of others work by collecting dividens and stock profits.
While one might argue that those receiving dividends and stock profits aren't working for it, it is earning, but is often taxed as "gains" instead. It is still income, though.
Word. I use the IP blocks from http://ipdeny.com/ to configure ip-filter to stop systems in the top ten malicious countries (http://www.countryipblocks.net/malicious-internet-traffic/malicious-internet-activity-the-top-10-countries/) from getting SSH and SMTP access to my servers. This dropped the amount of relay-attempted e-mail to practically nothing (by three orders of magnitude, from 10Ks of attempts to 10s of attempts), and unknown user attempts to less than a quarter of what they had been.
Yeah, I might miss a little bit of legit e-mail, but if they really need me, we can work out a specific allowance or they can use an otherwise accepted (and content-filtered) server.
I think (s)he's is suggesting (s)he isn't old enough to have any...
I have another 5 years left in the field and I'm aware of it....
If you're any good, you probably have another ten at least. Age-out in dev doesn't really start until 45, and isn't enforced with too much vigor until 55. After that, it'll totally depend on how many months ago your HR people finished college...
I wonder what will happen if all a whole generation of IT people are out of work because they are "too expensive".
I was in IT before the 2000 bubble burst. They handed out truckloads of money. The bubble burst and no one could afford to pay anyone those crazy rates any more. As a result, a lot of people were suddenly out of work, and a lot of work ground to a halt. Eventually work returned, but at a much reduced (some say "corrected") rate. A lot of people changed industries or otherwise never made it back.
It'll probably be similar. As all of the experienced people become "too expensive" they'll be cut in large numbers, resulting in a lot of work that can't be done, because you really can't cut all of that experience. The returning group will be smaller, and less expensive.
Take advantage of the money times, and save a lot more than you think you'll need. Prepare to reduce your lifestyle to fit a future budget when the cuts come. Repeat as necessary.
In addition to blocking unwanted open ports to the world, have just about all of China's IPs in my ipfilter, denying them access to anything but HTTP (they might want to read my blogs...right?). Also the other countries called out by http://www.countryipblocks.net/malicious-internet-traffic/malicious-internet-activity-the-top-10-countries/ are likewise blocked. Yeah, that's about 10K IP blocks in the filter, but it seems to run just fine, and I end up with only sporadic and apparently random (or maybe successful) failures in my auth files.
Not that I want anyone to see this as any kind of challenge...I'm sure someone is spending more time to access and zombie my machines than I'm spending to try to cut them off!
I once ran into a problem trying to repair a mid-70's American car, on which some bolts were metric and others were standard. Inconveniently, 12mm socket fits nicely on 1/2-inch bolt head, but the threads, while close, aren't quite close enough, and would fail to hold. Over time it became more evident where the differences were, and it was manageable to find and use the correct bolt, but before figuring that out there were many re-repairs.
Wikipedia (the source to end all sources) agrees that 1982 was the first released music CD, by Billy Joel, no less.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc
And speaking of "parent," let's not forget the damage that happens to them through "undesirable care," such as is often applied at the hands of children and other less-responsible people.
A stack of disks strewn about will certainly fare much worse for wear than disks more carefully tended.
Either way, you're paying a lot for something that there's no point to watching more than once.
Quality of the individual something notwithstanding, watching it more than once is a personal choice. If you're not the type to do that, even just on occasion, then owning probably isn't for you. If you're the type to re-watch, then owning makes sense.
It is the case that sometimes some people are in a place where bandwidth or storage doesn't allow watching an otherwise delivered video, and the disks then come in handy. Consider uses of video learning or motivation (such as for exercise), or even mundane repetitive review (say, kids and their stuff, which hopefully overlaps with learning and motiviation); it's hard to beat "popping it in" and having it turn on.