You know, when I first saw this, I thought it said "Games Better Than Boobs," and man that was just wrong.
But seriously, I have found myself thinking this very thing over time. I have learned more about history and geography from gaming than I ever did (way back when) in school. For example, SimCity can teach about zoning ordinances: it's not completely accurate, but you start to understand some of the intricacies of zoning and it actually proved helpful when buying a house.
I have one excellent concrete example of this process, too - and I wasn't even aware of it until years later. When I was just a wee little hacker, probably 10 or 11 at the time, I had an Apple ][ and a game called Rocky's Boots that I played an awful lot of. I just thought it was fun, in kind of an odd way. Imagine my surprise when I took my first digital design course in college. "Hey, I know what that funny half-moon shaped thing is!" So, I can say I totally aced all DD courses thanks to computer games.
> There are perfectly reasonable ways to use Google ads, for instance. Describe your product honestly, market your product honestly on the target page the ad leads to, and provide a good and well supported product.
> If you can't be bothered to do that, then you deserve to have your ad budget eat you for dinner, IMHO.
The problem isn't misleading ads - it's the fact that your competitors could burn up your ad budget very quickly by simply writing a script that "clicks" your ad link over and over again. If you set your ad budget low, your ad falls off and then theirs gets seen. If you set your budget high, then they just end up costing you money.
> 1) so what? If they can't ship the worker here they can ship the job to India.
> 2) So what? were you planning on working in a job that requires a clearance? How many of those are there? How many of those exclude foreign nationals?
In response to (2) a) and b), lots and almost all. And they pay great. If you want to get a better idea, check out the Washington Post's
job page.
Good search terms:
clearance
TS/SI
Top Secret
and so on. No offshoring here!
Of course, if you live in MD, DC, or northern VA, be prepared to pay for California-like housing costs. But no earthquakes!
First off, I'd love to moderate some of the other replies "Informative" because they are, but then I couldn't post.
I, too, am a Computer Engineer, and have been working for 11 years now in jobs focused on developing systems for the government (or should I say U.S. government, so as not to be an insensitive clod.) And it's never gotten old. A few times, I've even thought about why this is. But most of the successful computer people I've known tend to be in this camp -- they do it at work, and do something similar at home. Not necessarily programming, but some kind of tinkering/hacking (cars, woodworking, etc) because they really enjoy the challenge and get addicted to being "in the zone" mentally.
My trick regarding work was to make sure I always pursued jobs on the "leading edge" of technology. Not necessarily the crazy pie-in-the-sky stuff, but the stuff that's still being developed for real-world use. For example, I started pursuing object-oriented design methodologies in the early nineties, hitting Java relatively early and J2EE very early in its lifecycle.
I'm not pusing Java here - what I'm pointing out is that working in areas that are still ill-defined or growing forces you to build skills in design, pattern development, and general hackery. Plus you get a lot of experience in debugging, testing, and interacting with other early adopters, which can build a wonderful network when (and if) the technology you're dealing with blossoms. If it doesn't, the experience will help you choose a better candidate in the next go-round.
And I can't stress enough that you need to pick the work that you want to do (balanced against your life, of course) Look around, talk to a bunch of companies, and make sure that you'll end up doing something that won't get boring, tedious, or what have you. If you can, get yourself into a good market where there's more jobs than people (in my area, it's government work requiring clearances) because then you tend to have many many choices about what you want to pursue.
At this point, I think I'm rambling, which probably has something to do with the cold medications I'm on currently. But anyway, if you enjoy computers, you shouldn't find the work tedious. If you don't find the work challenging you, try to find another job that's better. Always stretch your skills, and you'll never be bored.
I do want to amend my previous comment for one thing, however -- the Outlook web client is an excellent piece of work. That alone may be its killer feature if you have a lot of mobile employees. Most of my companies haven't needed it though.
The big functions needed for most businesses are e-mail and shared calendars. I've really never seen the great majority of other features used, and I've worked in organizations ranging from 100 to 200,000 people.
So, let's say the 80% solution is just those two capabilities. For a 100-person organization:
Thunderbird + Sunbird + a WebDAV folder for
shared calendars = $0.00
(no hardware costs counted)
And TCO is negligible for the Mozilla stack; the Exchange server requires serious maintenance. In a mid-sized organization it seems to require about 10% of a full-time admin's time to dink with.
Your mileage may vary, of course, but the numbers work out quite well for me and mine.
> Remember, kids:
> Vein: Blood vessel that returns blood to the heart.
No, you don't get it - they will be planting listening devices in our blood vessels using alien teleportation technology. That way THEY can monitor everything you do!
The only remedy is to use a dialysis machine to cleanse the impurities from your blood and then wear a tinfoil body suit to block the teleporters. Remember, put the shiny side OUT or it won't work.
Same here. TA is still on my computer, and still played periodically by my friends and I. How come nobody since has done true 3D terrain, ballistics modeling, a freakin' physics engine for the units, etc?
If you want to have even more fun, download the UberHack for it. It makes multiplayer far, far more interesting than it already was.
Wal-Mart's unique position makes them a monopsony rather than a monopoly. Basically, a monopsony exists when there is one buyer in the market. Since Wal-Mart is so colossaly huge, they can effectively set the price points for their suppliers. This is good for the consumers, but bad for the suppliers and their employees.
Anti-trust legislation won't work in this case because they're not harming consumers (at least, not directly).
Well, there's XMLEncoder and XMLDecoder in Java, which handle simple cases really easily. Now to be fair I don't know the first thing about C# XML serialization. Also I've found XMLBeans (an open-source XML parser) to be way way better than JAX* for dealing with just about everything XML related.
And I agree - I think the attributes/metadata will be a big deal for handling XML in future Java endeavors.
Oh, and just curious about JBuilder- do you find that it is a better tool for systems analysis than Visual Studio? I'd like to know what the standard is. How do JavaBeans compare to Active X for software development?
Drop me a line at nathan dot carpenter at raba dot com and we can discuss offline.
It seems like the only way software developers can make "off-the-shelf" software for mobile phones is by sticking with Java, which would be a great scenario for computers.
That's something that's always puzzled me - I've been to several conferences where various tool vendors are showing off applications that could very easily be written in Java - but they're written in either VB or some extremely Windows-oriented GUI builder so they're no-go on Mac, Unix, Linux, etc.
Seems to me that it's a free way to really expand your potential pool of buyers. But that's just me.
Old school? Counterstrike?
And the first "LAN Party" I remember was a single-elimination 16 person M.U.L.E. tournament using 4 C-64s. We couldn't network them, because back in those days the dinosaurs kept chewing through the 300 baud modem lines, but the spirit was the same.
You kids and your fancy "Inter-Net" and "Protocols". Why, back in my day we spent nearly two days getting Doom to run on a null modem cable we made ourselves. And the packets had to travel uphill both ways.
How about Borland JBuilder? That's a big, powerful IDE, and I'd consider it a successful commercial product.
Also, from the games side, Puzzle Pirates is a Java game, and good chunks of Chrome are Java.
Oh yeah, plus about a billion cellphone applications.
This is funny, for sure, but there's a grain of truth there. Longhorn's FS search capabilities are pretty amazing from the demos (including some hands-on time) that I've seen.
Microsoft had a booth at last year's Borland Developer's Conference, and had basically built a prototype of their file system search running on top of XP. The way it works is actually pretty well described in this interview:
http://www.searchengineguide.com/beal/2004/0204_ab 1.html.
Not rocket science, necessarily, but it was very impressive to see it working. Hopefully the KDE developers will take notes.
This is true, except again in the government arena's special case. I can be fairly sure that the Department of Homeland Security is NOT outsourcing jobs to Pakistan.
Bottom line is, if your college offers a co-op program to any three-letter agency, and you want to be set for life as a programmer, take a job there during college. Once you have your tickets, you're totally set.
I can speak from direct experience here - after 10 years (including the co-op time) my compensation has nearly sextupled, and I've always gotten to work on neat projects. No need to take the management track, either!
As to doing commercial-side work, I bet it is difficult to get experience. Too many people are going into "programming" because it's currently perceived as the hot path for $$. I've done more interviews with out-of-college folks with absolutely zero knowledge than I can count. All people should be looking for from a fresh graduate is object-oriented design skills, the capability to read UML, and enough working knowledge of OO languages to answer basic questions about polymorphism, inheritance, etc. The rest is OJT, and frankly, it's way better return on investment to train up a promising student into a senior developer than to try to poach one from a competitor. That's why my salary is so high now:)
Slashdot Mirror
You know, when I first saw this, I thought it said "Games Better Than Boobs," and man that was just wrong.
But seriously, I have found myself thinking this very thing over time. I have learned more about history and geography from gaming than I ever did (way back when) in school. For example, SimCity can teach about zoning ordinances: it's not completely accurate, but you start to understand some of the intricacies of zoning and it actually proved helpful when buying a house.
I have one excellent concrete example of this process, too - and I wasn't even aware of it until years later. When I was just a wee little hacker, probably 10 or 11 at the time, I had an Apple ][ and a game called Rocky's Boots that I played an awful lot of. I just thought it was fun, in kind of an odd way. Imagine my surprise when I took my first digital design course in college. "Hey, I know what that funny half-moon shaped thing is!" So, I can say I totally aced all DD courses thanks to computer games.
> There are perfectly reasonable ways to use Google ads, for instance. Describe your product honestly, market your product honestly on the target page the ad leads to, and provide a good and well supported product.
> If you can't be bothered to do that, then you deserve to have your ad budget eat you for dinner, IMHO.
The problem isn't misleading ads - it's the fact that your competitors could burn up your ad budget very quickly by simply writing a script that "clicks" your ad link over and over again. If you set your ad budget low, your ad falls off and then theirs gets seen. If you set your budget high, then they just end up costing you money.
> 2) So what? were you planning on working in a job that requires a clearance? How many of those are there? How many of those exclude foreign nationals?
In response to (2) a) and b), lots and almost all. And they pay great. If you want to get a better idea, check out the Washington Post's job page.
Good search terms:
- clearance
- TS/SI
- Top Secret
and so on. No offshoring here!Of course, if you live in MD, DC, or northern VA, be prepared to pay for California-like housing costs. But no earthquakes!
First off, I'd love to moderate some of the other replies "Informative" because they are, but then I couldn't post.
I, too, am a Computer Engineer, and have been working for 11 years now in jobs focused on developing systems for the government (or should I say U.S. government, so as not to be an insensitive clod.) And it's never gotten old. A few times, I've even thought about why this is. But most of the successful computer people I've known tend to be in this camp -- they do it at work, and do something similar at home. Not necessarily programming, but some kind of tinkering/hacking (cars, woodworking, etc) because they really enjoy the challenge and get addicted to being "in the zone" mentally.
My trick regarding work was to make sure I always pursued jobs on the "leading edge" of technology. Not necessarily the crazy pie-in-the-sky stuff, but the stuff that's still being developed for real-world use. For example, I started pursuing object-oriented design methodologies in the early nineties, hitting Java relatively early and J2EE very early in its lifecycle.
I'm not pusing Java here - what I'm pointing out is that working in areas that are still ill-defined or growing forces you to build skills in design, pattern development, and general hackery. Plus you get a lot of experience in debugging, testing, and interacting with other early adopters, which can build a wonderful network when (and if) the technology you're dealing with blossoms. If it doesn't, the experience will help you choose a better candidate in the next go-round.
And I can't stress enough that you need to pick the work that you want to do (balanced against your life, of course) Look around, talk to a bunch of companies, and make sure that you'll end up doing something that won't get boring, tedious, or what have you. If you can, get yourself into a good market where there's more jobs than people (in my area, it's government work requiring clearances) because then you tend to have many many choices about what you want to pursue.
At this point, I think I'm rambling, which probably has something to do with the cold medications I'm on currently. But anyway, if you enjoy computers, you shouldn't find the work tedious. If you don't find the work challenging you, try to find another job that's better. Always stretch your skills, and you'll never be bored.
It usually takes two apps - one of them just always happens to be explorer.exe...
I do want to amend my previous comment for one thing, however -- the Outlook web client is an excellent piece of work. That alone may be its killer feature if you have a lot of mobile employees. Most of my companies haven't needed it though.
The big functions needed for most businesses are e-mail and shared calendars. I've really never seen the great majority of other features used, and I've worked in organizations ranging from 100 to 200,000 people.
So, let's say the 80% solution is just those two capabilities. For a 100-person organization:
Exchange Server + User CAL = $10700 (see pricing)
Thunderbird + Sunbird + a WebDAV folder for shared calendars = $0.00
(no hardware costs counted)
And TCO is negligible for the Mozilla stack; the Exchange server requires serious maintenance. In a mid-sized organization it seems to require about 10% of a full-time admin's time to dink with.
Your mileage may vary, of course, but the numbers work out quite well for me and mine.
> Remember, kids:
> Vein: Blood vessel that returns blood to the heart.
No, you don't get it - they will be planting listening devices in our blood vessels using alien teleportation technology. That way THEY can monitor everything you do!
The only remedy is to use a dialysis machine to cleanse the impurities from your blood and then wear a tinfoil body suit to block the teleporters. Remember, put the shiny side OUT or it won't work.
Same here. TA is still on my computer, and still played periodically by my friends and I. How come nobody since has done true 3D terrain, ballistics modeling, a freakin' physics engine for the units, etc?
If you want to have even more fun, download the UberHack for it. It makes multiplayer far, far more interesting than it already was.
UberHack info
I was too dumb for that - I could only play with this version.
I was *really* good though.
To secure your Macintosh, please download the NSA_KEY file and place it in your system directory.
(For those who missed this way back when, here's a good summary: http://cryptome.org/nsakey-ms-dc.htm
Wal-Mart's unique position makes them a monopsony rather than a monopoly. Basically, a monopsony exists when there is one buyer in the market. Since Wal-Mart is so colossaly huge, they can effectively set the price points for their suppliers. This is good for the consumers, but bad for the suppliers and their employees.
Anti-trust legislation won't work in this case because they're not harming consumers (at least, not directly).
Some good statistics and links can be found here.
> like C#'s XML serialization / de-serialization
Well, there's XMLEncoder and XMLDecoder in Java, which handle simple cases really easily. Now to be fair I don't know the first thing about C# XML serialization. Also I've found XMLBeans (an open-source XML parser) to be way way better than JAX* for dealing with just about everything XML related.
And I agree - I think the attributes/metadata will be a big deal for handling XML in future Java endeavors.
Oh, and just curious about JBuilder- do you find that it is a better tool for systems analysis than Visual Studio? I'd like to know what the standard is. How do JavaBeans compare to Active X for software development? Drop me a line at nathan dot carpenter at raba dot com and we can discuss offline.
Did you mean ".jar"?
.jar at that. Saves me the bullet.
I didn't before, but I do now!
And a self-executing
It seems like the only way software developers can make "off-the-shelf" software for mobile phones is by sticking with Java, which would be a great scenario for computers.
That's something that's always puzzled me - I've been to several conferences where various tool vendors are showing off applications that could very easily be written in Java - but they're written in either VB or some extremely Windows-oriented GUI builder so they're no-go on Mac, Unix, Linux, etc.
Seems to me that it's a free way to really expand your potential pool of buyers. But that's just me.
Old school? Counterstrike? And the first "LAN Party" I remember was a single-elimination 16 person M.U.L.E. tournament using 4 C-64s. We couldn't network them, because back in those days the dinosaurs kept chewing through the 300 baud modem lines, but the spirit was the same.
You kids and your fancy "Inter-Net" and "Protocols". Why, back in my day we spent nearly two days getting Doom to run on a null modem cable we made ourselves. And the packets had to travel uphill both ways.
How about Borland JBuilder? That's a big, powerful IDE, and I'd consider it a successful commercial product. Also, from the games side, Puzzle Pirates is a Java game, and good chunks of Chrome are Java. Oh yeah, plus about a billion cellphone applications.
> Although I agree 256MB is a bit stingy, what possible use could a home user have for more than 2GB or RAM?
I think you meant to say "640K^H^H^H^H256MB ought to be enough for anyone"
...just like in Soviet Russia.
This is funny, for sure, but there's a grain of truth there. Longhorn's FS search capabilities are pretty amazing from the demos (including some hands-on time) that I've seen.
b 1.html.
Microsoft had a booth at last year's Borland Developer's Conference, and had basically built a prototype of their file system search running on top of XP. The way it works is actually pretty well described in this interview: http://www.searchengineguide.com/beal/2004/0204_a
Not rocket science, necessarily, but it was very impressive to see it working. Hopefully the KDE developers will take notes.
It's actually $100 per employee per year. A small, but important difference.
This is true, except again in the government arena's special case. I can be fairly sure that the Department of Homeland Security is NOT outsourcing jobs to Pakistan.
:)
Bottom line is, if your college offers a co-op program to any three-letter agency, and you want to be set for life as a programmer, take a job there during college. Once you have your tickets, you're totally set.
I can speak from direct experience here - after 10 years (including the co-op time) my compensation has nearly sextupled, and I've always gotten to work on neat projects. No need to take the management track, either!
As to doing commercial-side work, I bet it is difficult to get experience. Too many people are going into "programming" because it's currently perceived as the hot path for $$. I've done more interviews with out-of-college folks with absolutely zero knowledge than I can count. All people should be looking for from a fresh graduate is object-oriented design skills, the capability to read UML, and enough working knowledge of OO languages to answer basic questions about polymorphism, inheritance, etc. The rest is OJT, and frankly, it's way better return on investment to train up a promising student into a senior developer than to try to poach one from a competitor. That's why my salary is so high now
> Does the Windows key really piss you off *that much*?
You're not from around here, are you?