I think the premise of this question is that there is one thing that a person must learn to be marketable in today's environment.
As a marketing wonk can tell you, (no, I'm not one) you're never looking for "one thing". You don't kill flies with shotguns. You should always be looking 2-3 years out and training for what you believe the job market will look like then. If you're not learning something in today's IT business, you're losing ground. Things change, and even more so than the actual skills you have, companies are looking for people who try to keep changing with the times. That's my two cents, anyway.
Gartner just released a study of the top five reasons offshore deals go bust. I hope IBM was paying attention. It sounds like a lot of companies jump into these deals because of the labor differential and then find out later it wasn't such a good deal after all. There are a lot more factors to consider than just free trade, losing American jobs, and profit. Long-term viability has got to be high on the list of things to consider, right? (My blog on this)
I found this really cool site about Social Security Numbers and who you have to give them to. I can't vouch for the site or anything (and this is not a plug), but there is a lot of good information about how the system was set up and how it's changed into this monster unique identifier (which it really isn't -- the SSN system contains dupes) today.
But "Somewhere after November" I think should read "Sometime after November"
"Somewhere after November" sounds like a cool name for a movie (probably something with a beach and Barbara Striesand in it) but not so much an actual date.
I wonder if this will lead to the "Server ID" standard that is being proposed to stop spam? It's one thing when we have a couple companies fighting for a standard like the NextGen DVD format, but when there's a standards war on the net about how to send email?!? It could get ugly -- but I doubt anybody would let it go that far.
So we've not only outsourced our call centers, now we've outsourced our criminals too?
Well there can only be one answer: India needs to outsource it's police system to catch their criminals. Some country further down the economic chain. Perhaps there are some Zulu warriors who could use some means of "persuasion" to get a confession.
At some point, of course, outsourcing has its limits. Cheaper is not always better, nor is cost always the major factor in development and support.
"...This starts to address awkward web browsing..."
I RTFA, and I did not find anything specifically that told me what kind of neato features are going to address web browsing. Apple -- great company, great interfaces. OSS -- great idea, great systems. But what _in real terms_ are they going to do? Make the screen bigger or the text smaller, right?
Perhaps this whole idea of cramming so much into the phone is off-track. Maybe we should be buying separate "monitors" for all of our personal electronic gear. Preferably something that looks like sunglasses, or that invention that shoots low-power lasers in the eye to image things in 3-D. Then all our gadgets just use Bluetooth to plug into that. Sure would make some of these things cheaper, and would give us a lot more hardware options. After all, we have separate monitors for computers, why not personal display systems?
I think this is a neat idea, especially if Google opens up all of the data to outside developers (which it has in the past)
Imagine new MMOGs where the cities are real! Or virtual tours of New York, say, before you actually decide to go visit. There are a lot of great possibilities.
I guess you could even plug data like this into a Sim-City-type game, where the virtual city is modeled just like the real one. Sort of gives the term "city planning" a whole new meaning.
This month Scientific American ran an editorial about the new space goals. Their basic thrust was to cut the shuttle and space station, leave the science alone, and then you'd still have enough for the moon mission.
I've got mixed feelings about that viewpoint. I can't help but think the real problem is an aging, risk-adverse bureaucracy and fragmented goals. It's easy to argue all day about what is important or not. Personally, I'd like to see cost-to-orbit decreased by new technology. To me that should be the major national goal. Then the rest of these questions (which are really about money) would not be so pressing. But perhaps that is fixing the long-term problem instead of bickering over budgets today. And heck, that's no fun!
They ran this story on our local TV news last night. If I understood the reporter, it sounded like vendors were "customizing" the price based on all kinds of things, inlcuding whether or not you came to the site directly or had done a price search (aka Froogle) beforehand.
There's always a point/counterpoint to these things: virus vs. antivirus, spyware vs. antispyware, etc.
So it sounds like this is a ripe area for the next generation of home software -- setting up cookies and such on your machine in order to get the lowest price when online shopping (you heard it here first, folks)
This change will obviously be the heart of longhorn. All the other features they've thrown out by now (grin)
Is it just me, or does this sound like a PR unit leaking little bits of stuff over the months to the press in an effort to keep Longhorn in the news? I imagine we'll be hearing more little "gems" like this as the year proceeds.
Is Rutan going to advance the cause of civilian orbital spaceflight or not? I was under the impression that he was. I thought he was onboard for the Bigalow orbital prize. Perhaps this is due to my confusion over the myriad prizes and programs out there today.
If he is, then I don't understand how helping DoD furthers that cause. If he isn't, then by all means go for the bucks. No troll intended.
How does this relate to the America's Space Prize?
on
White Knight Testing X-37
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Has Rutan given up on orbital flight and instead selling out to the defense department? Or did he ever commit to taking this to the next step?
I don't understand how taking the entire rest of year to do drop tests for the Air Force is going to advance anything. Make a few bucks, sure. But make progress towards civilian orbital flight? If there's some strategy there I don't understand it.
who just celebrated his 40th birthday, I for one welcome our new geriatric intellectual overlords.
Seriously -- doesn't this make sense? 100 years ago you went around and dug in some rocks and junk piles and you were discovering stuff. Put a magnifying glass on a drop of pond water and it's a whole new world. Nowadays the _baseline_ for inventions has grown much more than before.
For instance, my invention deals with measuring how well intellectual processes are being performed at an organization. To get to where I'm at, you have to first invent IP, then process control, then computer technology, etc -- and for me to come up with it I had to understand enough of that previous work to mutate it into something useful for people.
What concerns me is that with more and more specialization, there seems to be a dearth of "cross pollenization" among sciences. Sure, there are specific programs, but it's almost impossible to find people with a truly broad and moderately deep general knowledge of sciences. My opinion only -- we've got a lot of brillant people but lack enough people who think outside the box and put the pieces together.
Seems to me there is a link between F/OSS and popularity of the problem space, especially among programmers. I've never seen it discussed before, so I thought I'd bring it up.
To create a solution for somebody for nothing, I would guess you would need a bunch of qualified people to write and test the code. Since these people are not getting paid, then it would have to be something that these people are interested in solving.
Since these people by definition are programmers, they're going to be interested in stuff that programmers are interested in. So the evolution of F/OSS will continue along the lines of stuff programmers like -- encryption, database, file sharing, photo editing tools, etc.
It's going to be awful hard to get groundswell support for some new system to categorize ear wax, for instance. You can make the argument that so much of software is just the guts and not the business logic, but that's the whole point of software abstraction to begin with, so it's a non-starter.
So to me the question is: who's going to care enough about mundane, boring, business-rules based code to keep it up to date? Certainly not me -- not for free. And therein lies the limits of F/OSS.
As a writer, programmer, and creative person, I've always been for strict copyright enforcement.
But I'm changing my mind. Why?
Art is about the medium, message, and reception. It used to be the medium was radio or a record, the message is the content, and the reception was just somebody absorbing the content.
That worldview is no longer valid. Therefore, laws and mores built upon it need to be re-examined.
The medium can be anything now -- disc, WiFi, BlueTooth, etc. The reception -- and here's the key point -- is not the human ear anymore. It's the hard drive. When I TiVo an old Star Trek episode, my computer's hard drive is the first to get it, not me. I use the computer as a extension to my brain and memory process. It's nothing at all like a book, or record.
This sucks for content producers, because the rules are going to change. Maybe not today, maybe not even this decade, but the world is changing. The people who made buggy whips were probably outraged that the horseless carriage came along.
I think the situation sucks. The reason it sucks is that people who have been playing by the rules are getting screwed by file-sharing. But there are no culprits here, save for the evolution of the human existance. Demonizing people and paying a lot of lawyers is just smoking so much rope. How many times was the new Star Wars movie downloaded in the last week? 100 thousand? More?
Use Occam's Razor -- has the world suddenly grew infected with souless criminals intent on stealing from the mouths of the creative industry? Or has time simply moved on?
We all know the VGA, SVGA resolutions. My question is: who comes up with these screen resolution combinations? How far up can you go in pixels on one screen?
It seems to me the graphics chip guys are pushing the MBs on the cards instead of the resolution they put out. I wonder why?
Had a couple bosses (especially, for some reason, small development and start-up companies) that lost it.
The easy answer is: do the right thing. You did the right thing by giving notice, you did the right thing by hanging in there. Go in to work each day and be the best you can. Help hand off the codebase. Give the best training you can to the others.
The more you do the right thing and your boss acts like an idiot, the better you are doing. Do the right thing and let the rest slide.
In both of my cases, the old boss felt sorry for acting the way he did. (But this took several months) People get upset when they don't know what to do. Sometimes they act very poorly. My advice is to be a bigger person than that.
"...It is amazing how polarized our society is. Half the folks will agree with this and half will disagree..."
Oh I completely disagree with that. It's more like 52.7% of the people will agree with that. You couldn't be more wrong. We're a very agreeable society. Of course we are. Right?
Please tell me you didn't quote that entire thing from memory!
You Herbert!
(For those not in the know, the above lyrics were from a Star Trek episode involving hippies hijacking spacecraft to look for Eden. They sang songs with Spock -- yes, Spock sings. Although it doesn't sound anything at all like Kirk singing) A "Herbert" was a nickname for a obstructionist official.
Gee- weren't we all talking on slashdot the other day about how tough it is to get licenses for private spacecraft launches?
I am running a web site that gives out process assessments (long story). But after the assessments are set up, we churn out emails to each of the recipients saying "Hey! Your boss wants to to take this test. Click here to take it."
Needless to say, hotmail takes these emails and puts them in the junk mail folder. Lord knows what the other services are doing.
Now this isn't unsolicited email -- people are supposed to get this as part of their job. Are we supposed to give up on email if it involves sending to more than a couple people at a time. I even re-wrote the page to send out emails one-at-a-time: no luck. Still ends up in the spam box.
Seems to me like there's going to be a lot of businesses that have a real need for contacting people (besides sales) that are getting blocked. Anybody have a solution to this mess?
I believe the point was that there are transactional qualities associated with complex object heirarchies that are not adequately captured by current language and programming paradigms.
Certainly, language constructs and techniques handle the simple cases. The issue is both scalability and sharing. "Really knowing your stuff" may or may not be adequate. For instance, OOP does a great job of separating common pieces of data and functionality, but various pieces of data and functionality can be executed in an ad-hoc manner by outside callers, creating various race or lock conditions that are not evident to either programmer. This is not due to poor programming, rather the need to look at depolyed functionality in a new way.
I hope that help explain it. I could write the 3-thousand-word version of this if you like. But only if I get paid for it! (grin)
Dr. Dobbs last month had an item regarding threading in real-world environments. The authur said that while multi-threaded applications run a lot faster than single-threaded applications, that always isn't so. In addition, there are some significant issues in running in a multi-tasking, multi-threaded environment, not solved with the use of mutexes and semaphores.
Multi-threading and mult-cores are definitely the way the industry needs to go, but the current development methodologies and application architectures (as well as computing theory) may need to catch up a bit.
Basic communications 101 says the purpose of any document is to communicate. And you, the poor schmoe left with maintenance, is exactly the guy the design doc is supposed to be talking to.
Now a lot of times businesses create documents just to "check off the boxes" in which case they want some big, heavy monstrosity to deliver. If that's what you're getting, good luck.
People (especially programmers) tend to think of design docs as some kind of ultimate bible in the sky that's going to answer all questions and be a completely accurate guide to what's in the code. That's fine in theory, but in the real world the best design doc you're going to find is one that tells you what the design team was thinking when they started down the path of building this program. What's the patterns that were used? What constraints kept them from doing things differently? It's just a technical memo from them to you that's supposed to help you get oriented and work more efficiently.
Sometimes those memos aren't done so well. My advice is to get what general information you can from them, and then talk to the coders who worked on the project.
That's my two cents.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the premise of this question is that there is one thing that a person must learn to be marketable in today's environment.
As a marketing wonk can tell you, (no, I'm not one) you're never looking for "one thing". You don't kill flies with shotguns. You should always be looking 2-3 years out and training for what you believe the job market will look like then. If you're not learning something in today's IT business, you're losing ground. Things change, and even more so than the actual skills you have, companies are looking for people who try to keep changing with the times. That's my two cents, anyway.
Chickens that swim! Film at eleven
Gartner just released a study of the top five reasons offshore deals go bust. I hope IBM was paying attention. It sounds like a lot of companies jump into these deals because of the labor differential and then find out later it wasn't such a good deal after all. There are a lot more factors to consider than just free trade, losing American jobs, and profit. Long-term viability has got to be high on the list of things to consider, right? (My blog on this)
I found this really cool site about Social Security Numbers and who you have to give them to. I can't vouch for the site or anything (and this is not a plug), but there is a lot of good information about how the system was set up and how it's changed into this monster unique identifier (which it really isn't -- the SSN system contains dupes) today.
For further in-depth reading check it out:
http://www.epic.org/privacy/ssn/
But "Somewhere after November" I think should read "Sometime after November"
"Somewhere after November" sounds like a cool name for a movie (probably something with a beach and Barbara Striesand in it) but not so much an actual date.
I wonder if this will lead to the "Server ID" standard that is being proposed to stop spam? It's one thing when we have a couple companies fighting for a standard like the NextGen DVD format, but when there's a standards war on the net about how to send email?!? It could get ugly -- but I doubt anybody would let it go that far.
So we've not only outsourced our call centers, now we've outsourced our criminals too?
Well there can only be one answer: India needs to outsource it's police system to catch their criminals. Some country further down the economic chain. Perhaps there are some Zulu warriors who could use some means of "persuasion" to get a confession.
At some point, of course, outsourcing has its limits. Cheaper is not always better, nor is cost always the major factor in development and support.
"...This starts to address awkward web browsing..."
I RTFA, and I did not find anything specifically that told me what kind of neato features are going to address web browsing. Apple -- great company, great interfaces. OSS -- great idea, great systems. But what _in real terms_ are they going to do? Make the screen bigger or the text smaller, right?
Perhaps this whole idea of cramming so much into the phone is off-track. Maybe we should be buying separate "monitors" for all of our personal electronic gear. Preferably something that looks like sunglasses, or that invention that shoots low-power lasers in the eye to image things in 3-D. Then all our gadgets just use Bluetooth to plug into that. Sure would make some of these things cheaper, and would give us a lot more hardware options. After all, we have separate monitors for computers, why not personal display systems?
I think this is a neat idea, especially if Google opens up all of the data to outside developers (which it has in the past)
Imagine new MMOGs where the cities are real! Or virtual tours of New York, say, before you actually decide to go visit. There are a lot of great possibilities.
I guess you could even plug data like this into a Sim-City-type game, where the virtual city is modeled just like the real one. Sort of gives the term "city planning" a whole new meaning.
This month Scientific American ran an editorial about the new space goals. Their basic thrust was to cut the shuttle and space station, leave the science alone, and then you'd still have enough for the moon mission.
I've got mixed feelings about that viewpoint. I can't help but think the real problem is an aging, risk-adverse bureaucracy and fragmented goals. It's easy to argue all day about what is important or not. Personally, I'd like to see cost-to-orbit decreased by new technology. To me that should be the major national goal. Then the rest of these questions (which are really about money) would not be so pressing. But perhaps that is fixing the long-term problem instead of bickering over budgets today. And heck, that's no fun!
Sounds like an extra feature, eh?
"Price Customization! Just for you!"
They ran this story on our local TV news last night. If I understood the reporter, it sounded like vendors were "customizing" the price based on all kinds of things, inlcuding whether or not you came to the site directly or had done a price search (aka Froogle) beforehand.
There's always a point/counterpoint to these things: virus vs. antivirus, spyware vs. antispyware, etc.
So it sounds like this is a ripe area for the next generation of home software -- setting up cookies and such on your machine in order to get the lowest price when online shopping (you heard it here first, folks)
Maybe they should just name it "your computer"
After all, it IS your computer, right?
This change will obviously be the heart of longhorn. All the other features they've thrown out by now (grin)
Is it just me, or does this sound like a PR unit leaking little bits of stuff over the months to the press in an effort to keep Longhorn in the news? I imagine we'll be hearing more little "gems" like this as the year proceeds.
Not trolling at all.
Perhaps my post was poorly worded.
Is Rutan going to advance the cause of civilian orbital spaceflight or not? I was under the impression that he was. I thought he was onboard for the Bigalow orbital prize. Perhaps this is due to my confusion over the myriad prizes and programs out there today.
If he is, then I don't understand how helping DoD furthers that cause. If he isn't, then by all means go for the bucks. No troll intended.
Has Rutan given up on orbital flight and instead selling out to the defense department? Or did he ever commit to taking this to the next step?
I don't understand how taking the entire rest of year to do drop tests for the Air Force is going to advance anything. Make a few bucks, sure. But make progress towards civilian orbital flight? If there's some strategy there I don't understand it.
who just celebrated his 40th birthday, I for one welcome our new geriatric intellectual overlords.
Seriously -- doesn't this make sense? 100 years ago you went around and dug in some rocks and junk piles and you were discovering stuff. Put a magnifying glass on a drop of pond water and it's a whole new world. Nowadays the _baseline_ for inventions has grown much more than before.
For instance, my invention deals with measuring how well intellectual processes are being performed at an organization. To get to where I'm at, you have to first invent IP, then process control, then computer technology, etc -- and for me to come up with it I had to understand enough of that previous work to mutate it into something useful for people.
What concerns me is that with more and more specialization, there seems to be a dearth of "cross pollenization" among sciences. Sure, there are specific programs, but it's almost impossible to find people with a truly broad and moderately deep general knowledge of sciences. My opinion only -- we've got a lot of brillant people but lack enough people who think outside the box and put the pieces together.
Seems to me there is a link between F/OSS and popularity of the problem space, especially among programmers. I've never seen it discussed before, so I thought I'd bring it up.
To create a solution for somebody for nothing, I would guess you would need a bunch of qualified people to write and test the code. Since these people are not getting paid, then it would have to be something that these people are interested in solving.
Since these people by definition are programmers, they're going to be interested in stuff that programmers are interested in. So the evolution of F/OSS will continue along the lines of stuff programmers like -- encryption, database, file sharing, photo editing tools, etc.
It's going to be awful hard to get groundswell support for some new system to categorize ear wax, for instance. You can make the argument that so much of software is just the guts and not the business logic, but that's the whole point of software abstraction to begin with, so it's a non-starter.
So to me the question is: who's going to care enough about mundane, boring, business-rules based code to keep it up to date? Certainly not me -- not for free. And therein lies the limits of F/OSS.
As a writer, programmer, and creative person, I've always been for strict copyright enforcement.
But I'm changing my mind. Why?
Art is about the medium, message, and reception. It used to be the medium was radio or a record, the message is the content, and the reception was just somebody absorbing the content.
That worldview is no longer valid. Therefore, laws and mores built upon it need to be re-examined.
The medium can be anything now -- disc, WiFi, BlueTooth, etc. The reception -- and here's the key point -- is not the human ear anymore. It's the hard drive. When I TiVo an old Star Trek episode, my computer's hard drive is the first to get it, not me. I use the computer as a extension to my brain and memory process. It's nothing at all like a book, or record.
This sucks for content producers, because the rules are going to change. Maybe not today, maybe not even this decade, but the world is changing. The people who made buggy whips were probably outraged that the horseless carriage came along.
I think the situation sucks. The reason it sucks is that people who have been playing by the rules are getting screwed by file-sharing. But there are no culprits here, save for the evolution of the human existance. Demonizing people and paying a lot of lawyers is just smoking so much rope. How many times was the new Star Wars movie downloaded in the last week? 100 thousand? More?
Use Occam's Razor -- has the world suddenly grew infected with souless criminals intent on stealing from the mouths of the creative industry? Or has time simply moved on?
Let's see, increasing prices in a dying industry. That makes a lot of sense, right?
We all know the VGA, SVGA resolutions. My question is: who comes up with these screen resolution combinations? How far up can you go in pixels on one screen?
It seems to me the graphics chip guys are pushing the MBs on the cards instead of the resolution they put out. I wonder why?
I've been there, done that.
Had a couple bosses (especially, for some reason, small development and start-up companies) that lost it.
The easy answer is: do the right thing. You did the right thing by giving notice, you did the right thing by hanging in there. Go in to work each day and be the best you can. Help hand off the codebase. Give the best training you can to the others.
The more you do the right thing and your boss acts like an idiot, the better you are doing. Do the right thing and let the rest slide.
In both of my cases, the old boss felt sorry for acting the way he did. (But this took several months) People get upset when they don't know what to do. Sometimes they act very poorly. My advice is to be a bigger person than that.
"...It is amazing how polarized our society is. Half the folks will agree with this and half will disagree..."
Oh I completely disagree with that. It's more like 52.7% of the people will agree with that. You couldn't be more wrong. We're a very agreeable society. Of course we are. Right?
Please tell me you didn't quote that entire thing from memory!
You Herbert!
(For those not in the know, the above lyrics were from a Star Trek episode involving hippies hijacking spacecraft to look for Eden. They sang songs with Spock -- yes, Spock sings. Although it doesn't sound anything at all like Kirk singing) A "Herbert" was a nickname for a obstructionist official.
Gee- weren't we all talking on slashdot the other day about how tough it is to get licenses for private spacecraft launches?
I am running a web site that gives out process assessments (long story). But after the assessments are set up, we churn out emails to each of the recipients saying "Hey! Your boss wants to to take this test. Click here to take it."
Needless to say, hotmail takes these emails and puts them in the junk mail folder. Lord knows what the other services are doing.
Now this isn't unsolicited email -- people are supposed to get this as part of their job. Are we supposed to give up on email if it involves sending to more than a couple people at a time. I even re-wrote the page to send out emails one-at-a-time: no luck. Still ends up in the spam box.
Seems to me like there's going to be a lot of businesses that have a real need for contacting people (besides sales) that are getting blocked. Anybody have a solution to this mess?
I believe the point was that there are transactional qualities associated with complex object heirarchies that are not adequately captured by current language and programming paradigms.
Certainly, language constructs and techniques handle the simple cases. The issue is both scalability and sharing. "Really knowing your stuff" may or may not be adequate. For instance, OOP does a great job of separating common pieces of data and functionality, but various pieces of data and functionality can be executed in an ad-hoc manner by outside callers, creating various race or lock conditions that are not evident to either programmer. This is not due to poor programming, rather the need to look at depolyed functionality in a new way.
I hope that help explain it. I could write the 3-thousand-word version of this if you like. But only if I get paid for it! (grin)
Dr. Dobbs last month had an item regarding threading in real-world environments. The authur said that while multi-threaded applications run a lot faster than single-threaded applications, that always isn't so. In addition, there are some significant issues in running in a multi-tasking, multi-threaded environment, not solved with the use of mutexes and semaphores.
Multi-threading and mult-cores are definitely the way the industry needs to go, but the current development methodologies and application architectures (as well as computing theory) may need to catch up a bit.
"Vulcan Bay Watch" You heard it here first.
Basic communications 101 says the purpose of any document is to communicate. And you, the poor schmoe left with maintenance, is exactly the guy the design doc is supposed to be talking to. Now a lot of times businesses create documents just to "check off the boxes" in which case they want some big, heavy monstrosity to deliver. If that's what you're getting, good luck. People (especially programmers) tend to think of design docs as some kind of ultimate bible in the sky that's going to answer all questions and be a completely accurate guide to what's in the code. That's fine in theory, but in the real world the best design doc you're going to find is one that tells you what the design team was thinking when they started down the path of building this program. What's the patterns that were used? What constraints kept them from doing things differently? It's just a technical memo from them to you that's supposed to help you get oriented and work more efficiently. Sometimes those memos aren't done so well. My advice is to get what general information you can from them, and then talk to the coders who worked on the project. That's my two cents.