... impresses nobody. Neither here nor on your so-called-consulting site.
Signed by: a software developer who worked with you, who knows you, and who is sure by personal experience that YOU SUCK both at development and at keeping your girlfriend faithful.
Here is an idea: I was once asked to do the same thing for 1st-year high-schoolers, in France, i.e. kids of about 12 or 13 years old. I then worked on the central calculator of a not-to-be-named airplane, written in some Object-Oriented language. Boring to death, no ?
Until I got the idea: I had a friend create a simple graphical demo of the plane in full flight, with a few clickable parts ( cockpit open/close, gear down/up etc. ), running in one of two halves of a split screen. In the other half I had the ( heavily modified ) source code of the cockpit-opener etc. etc. scrolling along. The kid would get a warning while e.g. attempting to put the landing gear in "down" position at a non-landing speed etc. etc.
They loved it.
The only problem I had was this: they went on and on asking about games. Most kids thought that software engineering is about coding games. When I told them the contrary, all but one boy and one girl remained interested, the girl asking some fairly intelligent questions for her level, like "If you modify this line of code, does it still run ? How do you know ?" etc. etc.
... that is: when I was still working. I am a monk now, so the discourse is completely different, although the mechanism is still the same: "Ehm, brother X, can you have a look at my laptop ? It's SOOOOOOOOOO slow... " etc. etc.
I found out, when still working, that it was easy to obtain about anything you desire in exchange for fixing people's PC's: nice meals, beer, sex, legal advice -- you name it. Simply need to be socially clever, which I had to learn: like for many geeks, that was not my strongest aspect.
Monk to novice: "Throw all your incapacities before God" Novice to monk: "What about my incapacity to do so, father ?"
... who wrote that article. I have seen it more often: some guy needs to boost his credit with his superiors, and - wihtout knowing anything about tech - he writes an article with a few bold phrases, then gets it published.
There is one thing, though, that caught my attention as an engineer: must be really interesting to design & develop a proto for a "suspicion engine".
There are still some REAL shops around. Visit these. There, you can
1) order a book and, while doing so, chat up that awfully attractive French philosophy student who is doing her "stage" in YOUR city
2) handle & turn pages in REAL books
3) open a book that looks interesting and actually SMELL that great perfume of fresh print ink and new paper -- not to speak about the subtle pleasure of being the first to crinkle the back / binding of a virgin book
All these, you cannot do at Amazon, for Amazon is NOT a real shop.
I was not only thinking of purely hardware issues when I wrote this. I was also thinking of the mental attitude, one that we are soon going to lose btw, needed to "scavenge for digital junk just in their bedrooms (or even pockets)" as you express it so coloredly.
Zuse had this attitude. One that you still need in order to, say, make a grape of ipods control an improvised oxygen plant.
But, true enough: in such a scenario chips will be everywhere.
Imagine. In a not-too-far-away future, some human beings are going to land on, say, Mars. And they will want to stay for a certain time.
Imagine. There is dissension in the group, and instead of returning to Mother Earth, at least part of the group wants to stay "for ever". One day, their computer is going to break down, e.g. by wear caused by cosmic radiation.
Even if they survive, even if the human colony on that far-away planet is large, even if they have nanotech with them, it will still be far beyond their means to build a chip-producing plant. If they want to solve numerical problems, they'll have to build, one day, a computer with parts from the space craft they came with.
Granted, it sounds improbable. But still - this is what knowing your computing science archeology is good for.
I was member of the team that developed a network management tool. It took 20+ coders, architects etc. more than 2 years of intense creative efforts to roll it out. Finally our small - 70-something people - French company was bought up by an American giant because of the huge potential of the product.
I observed, during these years of creative geek frenzy, that those who got children invested themselves less into the team's effort. The quantity AND sometimes the quality of their performances receded almost imperciptibly, as these people shifted their priorities to their ( newly-founded ) families.
So my advice would be: once you get children, make sure you are not in a coding team anymore, but are capitalizing on your former experience, e.g. as a consultant. If you want to keep coding or building great architectures, this is going to eat up your energy - you're simply not ready for redirecting that energy into a family.
"Making choices is about rejecting what we don't want" ( André Gide, French author )
Programming means, in whatever sense you turn it: handling ( an implementation of ) logic. And logic is math. Logic is also a domain of philosophy. So start with teaching basic math - set & group theory + logic - and Aristotle's philosophy to your mum. If she survives that, she can survive assembly, Logo, VB, Java. IF she can't, she won't.
Mostly these - in this order, which represents more or less the priority order of these items in my life, before I became a monk.
Not bad for some Java applets, registry cleaning, Linux tuning - not to speak about HD formatting or finding back "erased" documents.
It seems an inevitable paradigm in the world of software creation: someone has an idea, and works it out. The first implementation is recognized by some humans as fulfilling a need, so the someone works on and on upon his idea, until he realizes that he could found a company selling the software. The company meets success, sometimes even huge success. And then it turns out that, not in the first and basic idea but in the bare fact that the founder of the company is ( are ) a human being(s), is hidden the very seed of tyranny upon users. Such has been the story of Microsoft, and the announcement of Google GMail seems to confirm that Google will follow a similar "Rise and Fall" paradigm. Whoever reads this article on the internet has personal experience with this paradigm, at the user side.
Searching on the internet, i.e. searching the internet itself, is a daily necessity for millions of us. Google, in its initial times, met this need, and at the time of writing of these words Google has, in this field, the same kind of status that Microsoft once had in the field of operating systems for consumer pc's: hardly anybody would think to use another product. Thus, indexing and searching the internet is, basically, the prerogative of one corporation; millions of people trust it blindly. As pointed out above, no corporation should be trusted blindly.
As history taught us, monopolies are dangerous.
Are you people REALLY going to trust a company that you don't know from within, a company that already publicly announced to have plans for indexing YOUR emails ? Geez people - think !!
Hmmm... Remember one of the hijacked planes on 9/11? A guy onboard managed to make a call home to tell what was going on. He managed to hold on to whomever he was calling for a significant amount of time - somewhere in the range between 5 and 25 minutes. So it definitely plain WORKS in planes - at least above the continental US of A.
I think it is definitely NOT a Doppler effect issue. I have been traveling a lot on French High-Speed Trains ( TGV ) and using my cell phone on it. TGVs run as fast as 330 km/h i.e. about 183 mph, and cell phones work fine BUT you frequently lose contact, as 1) there are so many tunnels 2) you move from cell to cell so quickly.
...which is, by my humble transatlantic opinion, way too often the case. I am Dutch, and biking is the national activity here. Cycling here is something like breathing, even up to the point that many women have balloon-shaped calves (**yuck**). So I'd rather do something REALLY different after my job - like taking a bath in the surf of the North Sea, getting crushed under a few tons of foam; or playing a game of chess in a storm on the beach, the so-called storm-chess, which is, btw, a Dutch invention.
Entirely right. I started as an autodidact BEFORE the dotcom boom, and I had a hard time too. I quickly learned to focus upon one or two areas, mostly server-end intelligence: data transport in the lower layers of applications - and dove into Java as soon as it came out. By the time the dotcom boom came along, I was ready for it. I only knew two or three languages really well, and had been sweating for it. The reward: in this French company where I was supposed to be working as an outsourcement developer, I was kicked up the ladder, and ended as CTO.
And that is a danger. Google is blindly trusted by too many people. How many - especially less-educated people - do not go to Google immediately after connecting, take its results for granted, and collect their information from links that Google came up with ?
I see an alternative to google - I might want to dedicate an entire thread to that: not a "centralized" google that we cannot control, and that after some time acquires these irritating commercial charactertraits, but a distributed one: a piece of it running on every internet-connected PC.
Absolutely: DO stay on the grid. For 2 obvious reasons:
1) what if, you never know, your installation breaks down beyond repair ?
2) it's profitable
I am in a monastery in the Netherlands. We are going to generate our own electric power, with windmills ( we are very close to the North Sea shore, have 200+ days of wind per year ). Not only for the monastery-house itself, but also for the candle factory with which we earn our money: heating paraffine eats kilowatts.
But even under these favorable circumstances we would be mad to go off the grid.
Slashdot Mirror
... impresses nobody. Neither here nor on your so-called-consulting site.
:-D
Signed by: a software developer who worked with you, who knows you, and who is sure by personal experience that YOU SUCK both at development and at keeping your girlfriend faithful.
( develish laugh in the background )
Sorry. The "all but..." can be confusing for non-native English speakers, I would have done better not to use that paradigm.
What I meant was, of course: all became uninterested, EXCEPT one boy and one girl. And yes, it was her asking the questions.
There.
Here is an idea: I was once asked to do the same thing for 1st-year high-schoolers, in France, i.e. kids of about 12 or 13 years old. I then worked on the central calculator of a not-to-be-named airplane, written in some Object-Oriented language. Boring to death, no ?
Until I got the idea: I had a friend create a simple graphical demo of the plane in full flight, with a few clickable parts ( cockpit open/close, gear down/up etc. ), running in one of two halves of a split screen. In the other half I had the ( heavily modified ) source code of the cockpit-opener etc. etc. scrolling along. The kid would get a warning while e.g. attempting to put the landing gear in "down" position at a non-landing speed etc. etc.
They loved it.
The only problem I had was this: they went on and on asking about games. Most kids thought that software engineering is about coding games. When I told them the contrary, all but one boy and one girl remained interested, the girl asking some fairly intelligent questions for her level, like "If you modify this line of code, does it still run ? How do you know ?" etc. etc.
I went home with a good feeling, that day.
... that is: when I was still working. I am a monk now, so the discourse is completely different, although the mechanism is still the same: "Ehm, brother X, can you have a look at my laptop ? It's SOOOOOOOOOO slow... " etc. etc.
I found out, when still working, that it was easy to obtain about anything you desire in exchange for fixing people's PC's: nice meals, beer, sex, legal advice -- you name it. Simply need to be socially clever, which I had to learn: like for many geeks, that was not my strongest aspect.
Monk to novice: "Throw all your incapacities before God"
Novice to monk: "What about my incapacity to do so, father ?"
... who wrote that article. I have seen it more often: some guy needs to boost his credit with his superiors, and - wihtout knowing anything about tech - he writes an article with a few bold phrases, then gets it published.
There is one thing, though, that caught my attention as an engineer: must be really interesting to design & develop a proto for a "suspicion engine".
Hanc amavi & dilexi a ivventvte mea
Yep. Absolutely.
There are still some REAL shops around. Visit these. There, you can
1) order a book and, while doing so, chat up that awfully attractive French philosophy student who is doing her "stage" in YOUR city
2) handle & turn pages in REAL books
3) open a book that looks interesting and actually SMELL that great perfume of fresh print ink and new paper -- not to speak about the subtle pleasure of being the first to crinkle the back / binding of a virgin book
All these, you cannot do at Amazon, for Amazon is NOT a real shop.
Yup. No DEFAULT case. Frequent beginner's error. This would most likely go unnoticed, as
1) this code looks "serious", "well-done" ( the code seems to do its job, nothing more and nothing less, at first glance )
2) many coders, even advanced / experienced, do not always bother to write DEFAULT cases.
What a great idea ! ***grin***
is the one that does a DOS on /. every time it infects a new phone.
I was not only thinking of purely hardware issues when I wrote this. I was also thinking of the mental attitude, one that we are soon going to lose btw, needed to "scavenge for digital junk just in their bedrooms (or even pockets)" as you express it so coloredly. Zuse had this attitude. One that you still need in order to, say, make a grape of ipods control an improvised oxygen plant. But, true enough: in such a scenario chips will be everywhere.
Imagine. In a not-too-far-away future, some human beings are going to land on, say, Mars. And they will want to stay for a certain time.
Imagine. There is dissension in the group, and instead of returning to Mother Earth, at least part of the group wants to stay "for ever". One day, their computer is going to break down, e.g. by wear caused by cosmic radiation.
Even if they survive, even if the human colony on that far-away planet is large, even if they have nanotech with them, it will still be far beyond their means to build a chip-producing plant. If they want to solve numerical problems, they'll have to build, one day, a computer with parts from the space craft they came with.
Granted, it sounds improbable. But still - this is what knowing your computing science archeology is good for.
History is important
I was member of the team that developed a network management tool. It took 20+ coders, architects etc. more than 2 years of intense creative efforts to roll it out. Finally our small - 70-something people - French company was bought up by an American giant because of the huge potential of the product. I observed, during these years of creative geek frenzy, that those who got children invested themselves less into the team's effort. The quantity AND sometimes the quality of their performances receded almost imperciptibly, as these people shifted their priorities to their ( newly-founded ) families. So my advice would be: once you get children, make sure you are not in a coding team anymore, but are capitalizing on your former experience, e.g. as a consultant. If you want to keep coding or building great architectures, this is going to eat up your energy - you're simply not ready for redirecting that energy into a family. "Making choices is about rejecting what we don't want" ( André Gide, French author )
True, it teaches a lot. Good start. Just take care that mom doesn't buy a ticket, after having read it, in order to enter a Zen monastery.
Programming means, in whatever sense you turn it: handling ( an implementation of ) logic. And logic is math. Logic is also a domain of philosophy. So start with teaching basic math - set & group theory + logic - and Aristotle's philosophy to your mum. If she survives that, she can survive assembly, Logo, VB, Java. IF she can't, she won't.
Mostly these - in this order, which represents more or less the priority order of these items in my life, before I became a monk. Not bad for some Java applets, registry cleaning, Linux tuning - not to speak about HD formatting or finding back "erased" documents.
It seems an inevitable paradigm in the world of software creation: someone has an idea, and works it out. The first implementation is recognized by some humans as fulfilling a need, so the someone works on and on upon his idea, until he realizes that he could found a company selling the software. The company meets success, sometimes even huge success. And then it turns out that, not in the first and basic idea but in the bare fact that the founder of the company is ( are ) a human being(s), is hidden the very seed of tyranny upon users. Such has been the story of Microsoft, and the announcement of Google GMail seems to confirm that Google will follow a similar "Rise and Fall" paradigm. Whoever reads this article on the internet has personal experience with this paradigm, at the user side.
Searching on the internet, i.e. searching the internet itself, is a daily necessity for millions of us. Google, in its initial times, met this need, and at the time of writing of these words Google has, in this field, the same kind of status that Microsoft once had in the field of operating systems for consumer pc's: hardly anybody would think to use another product. Thus, indexing and searching the internet is, basically, the prerogative of one corporation; millions of people trust it blindly. As pointed out above, no corporation should be trusted blindly.
As history taught us, monopolies are dangerous.
Are you people REALLY going to trust a company that you don't know from within, a company that already publicly announced to have plans for indexing YOUR emails ? Geez people - think !!
Hmmm... Remember one of the hijacked planes on 9/11? A guy onboard managed to make a call home to tell what was going on. He managed to hold on to whomever he was calling for a significant amount of time - somewhere in the range between 5 and 25 minutes. So it definitely plain WORKS in planes - at least above the continental US of A.
I think it is definitely NOT a Doppler effect issue. I have been traveling a lot on French High-Speed Trains ( TGV ) and using my cell phone on it. TGVs run as fast as 330 km/h i.e. about 183 mph, and cell phones work fine BUT you frequently lose contact, as
1) there are so many tunnels
2) you move from cell to cell so quickly.
...which is, by my humble transatlantic opinion, way too often the case. I am Dutch, and biking is the national activity here. Cycling here is something like breathing, even up to the point that many women have balloon-shaped calves (**yuck**). So I'd rather do something REALLY different after my job - like taking a bath in the surf of the North Sea, getting crushed under a few tons of foam; or playing a game of chess in a storm on the beach, the so-called storm-chess, which is, btw, a Dutch invention.
Entirely right. I started as an autodidact BEFORE the dotcom boom, and I had a hard time too. I quickly learned to focus upon one or two areas, mostly server-end intelligence: data transport in the lower layers of applications - and dove into Java as soon as it came out. By the time the dotcom boom came along, I was ready for it. I only knew two or three languages really well, and had been sweating for it. The reward: in this French company where I was supposed to be working as an outsourcement developer, I was kicked up the ladder, and ended as CTO.
And that is a danger. Google is blindly trusted by too many people. How many - especially less-educated people - do not go to Google immediately after connecting, take its results for granted, and collect their information from links that Google came up with ?
I see an alternative to google - I might want to dedicate an entire thread to that: not a "centralized" google that we cannot control,
and that after some time acquires these irritating
commercial charactertraits, but a distributed one: a piece of it running on every internet-connected PC.
Power to the people !
Absolutely: DO stay on the grid. For 2 obvious reasons: 1) what if, you never know, your installation breaks down beyond repair ? 2) it's profitable I am in a monastery in the Netherlands. We are going to generate our own electric power, with windmills ( we are very close to the North Sea shore, have 200+ days of wind per year ). Not only for the monastery-house itself, but also for the candle factory with which we earn our money: heating paraffine eats kilowatts. But even under these favorable circumstances we would be mad to go off the grid.