First, find a company that lets you do what you want. In particular, find one that doesn't push you into management (unless that's what you really want). Many companies will push you in that direction, but unless you're really good at it, it's a dead end.
Second, don't get stuck on the same project forever. Being the old fogey who knows everything about that important legacy system isn't a good place to be when the old system is finally retired. It isn't enough to "keep up with new technology". Knowing it and doing at are different things and are judged differently.
Third, don't expect that your superior wisdom is enough. Be wise, but be productive, and help other people be productive.
Not to defend Amazon, you have misstated the situation. They books he bought are still on his Kindle and still readable. He can't buy any new ones, and his subscriptions are canceled -- meaning he doesn't pay for them, and he doesn't receive them. The stuff he *bought* is all still there.
Yes, the grass is always greener. The pony express was good enough, but then they invented the telegraph, then they insisted we needed telephones, and then email, and now the web and IM. Think how great the pony express would be if we had just concentrated on perfecting it instead of getting all distracted by new-fangled innovations?
I've been programming since 1974 -- I started with a PDP 7 and an Altair 8800 and I'm currently writing code (C++, Java, Python) for Google. And I have a 4-digit slashdot ID, so get off my lawn!:-)
I guess I'm a pedantic fool, because it's obvious to me that C++ is a mess, and it's not the fault of programmers. It's not that it's impossible to write good C++. But compared to more modern languages it takes a lot more expertise, discipline, and especially time, so it's a lot more expensive than it should be. And, of course, there's always the temptation to cut the expense a little and then you have crappy code.
The problem is that C++ was initially a bit of a hack (remember cfront?) and then it was taken over by vast committees that used it as a vehicle to rationalize all their pet features. To see what can be done with a fresh start, take a look at the programming language D.
I had probably dozens of small, cheap sliderules when I was a kid. They were available for a few dollars in any drugstore. In the very early 70's, I bought a nice Post Versalog, which I expected to use for decades. I used it through high school and couple years of college, then I sold one of my guitars and bought an HP-35. I remember taking a mandatory "Engineering Computation" course my first year in college. The course had a fearsome reputation, but turned out to be pretty easy if you were already quick with a slide rule.
I still have the Versalog---it's outlasted the HP-35. Doesn't get a lot of use anymore, though.:-)
Mosquitoes are not restricted to the tropics, as any Minnesotan or Alaskan can tell you. Malaria is not a tropical disease; it's a disease of poverty. It was once endemic in Siberia , Britain, and parts of N. America.
Actually, since about 1980, it has been the right who has been trying to change things, for better or worse (quite often worse). The left has basically been playing defense: trying to keep alive as many as possible of the big entitlement programs handed down from Roosevelt and Johnson. There have been very few new initiatives from the left. The only big one that comes to mind is Clinton's health plan, which went nowhere.
Sorry, you're wrong. The climate doesn't emerge from primitive equations. What emerges from primitive equations is nothing like our climate. After adjusting numerous fudge factors to "calibrate" the simulations, they do sort of act sort of like real climate. Or to put in another way, after adjusting numerous fudge factors to make the simulations act like our climate they (amazingly) act sort of like our climate. Unfortunately, that tells us almost nothing about what our climate would be like with different inputs.
This is just silly. What physics? The well understood effects of high and low clouds, changes in solar radiation, cosmic rays, heat flux into and out of the ocean, I assume? Oh, wait, we don't have a clue about any of that...
No, power corrupts, too. First, a lot of people develop a taste for power. Second, a lot of people convince themselves to make unhealthy compromises to get reelected, because their opponent would be even worse.
A word to the wise: if you read realclimate.org, you owe it to yourself to also read climateaudit.org. The discussions at realclimate.org don't include some of the more prominent critics of their work because realclimate.org silently deletes their postings. A lot of what the folks at climate.org publish doesn't hold up very well to close scrutiny. They tend to hide their data and methods from researchers who want to reproduce their results, which is never a good sign. Many of their statistical methods are highly questionable. And their results are a good deal less robust than they make them out to be.
I know this is off-topic, but my nomination for the greasiest weasle word of all time is "arguably". What the hell does
...it was arguably the best Star Wars tale...
actually mean? Does it mean that the author argues that it was the best Star Wars tale? No; the author is apparently not decisive enough to actually commit himself to such a strong position. Does it mean that someone has argued that it was the best? Well, no; the author is not willing to go quite that far, either. Maybe no one has actually argued that. The author commits himself only to the proposition that someone, somewhere could make such an argument. If they chose to.
Jeez! Just delete the damn word. If you still like the sentence, great. If you don't, then say what you really mean.
Actually, the referenced article is misleading information from the left.
The actual net present value of the SS loss is several times greater than $3.3T, and we need to do something about it soon. Limiting the analysis to 75 years is traditional, but highly deceptive. It is the reason we have to keep "fixing" SS every few years, but the fix never lasts long. Suppose we "fix" SS today so that it is solvent for the next 75 years, until 2080. In 2010, when we look at it again, we will be in worse trouble than ever. Why? Five good years in the original analysis (2005-2010) will be behind us. And five very bad years (2080-2085) will be tacked on the end. The computed debt will be much larger than today.
If we want to avoid a Ponzi crash, we need to start looking at the actuarial problem over an indefinite future.
I don't know if global warming exists, and, if it does I don't know what the effects will be. However, I'm a bit cynical, for the following reasons.
1. A lot of scientific theories have been very popular and well accepted for quite a while before they are disproven. Epicycles. The aether. Phlogiston. Eugenics. Cold fusion. The coming ice age in the 70's. So wide acceptance by itself doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling.
2. Having been a university professor for a while, I understand the intense conflict of interest that researchers experience. On the one hand, climatologists would like to tell the truth. On the other hand, they know beyond the shadow of a doubt that if they held a conference tomorrow and all agreed that global warming wasn't happening, their lives and the lives of their families would all change for the worse. They would lose funding and graduate students, their salaries would drop, they'd have more trouble publishing papers, they'd have to teach more undergraduate classes, some would not get tenure, etc. So there is a huge incentive to interpret ambiguous data in such a way as to keep the global warming in the news.
3. The data is very noisy and ambiguous. Climatologists are trying to pull a trend out of data that has a lot of natural variation, that has a lot of measurment error, and that is very incomplete. Also, since global warming is now the "standard" view, journal reviewers will examine papers that do not tend to support global warming a lot more carefully than papers that do support global warming. If your paper weakly supports global warming, it is much more likely to be published than a paper that weakly undermines global warming. ("Extraordinary results require extranordinary evidence.")
4. The theory keeps changing. It is not longer just warming. It's almost any change in climate at all. More hurricanes than average? Fewer hurricanes than average? The Sahara is growing? The Sahara is shrinking? The US midwest is getting drier? Getting wetter? The theory of global warming has gotten so flexible that all these scenarios are apparently consistent with it. If a theory predicts anything then it has no predictive power at all.
So, fundamentally, you'll see maybe between 100 to 200 developers working on Linux at any given point in time. There might be a larger group that's helping test that, but the real work is within a small group and there's nothing really different there than many other software projects, commercial and open.
At Microsoft, the real work doesn't include testing.
Why? Because if you violate type rules in C/C++, arbitrary nasty behavior can occur. For example, your program may complete "successfully" with no hint that anything went wrong, but with an entirely wrong answer. If you violate type rules in Java, you get (at worst) a well-defined runtime error.
And as of the latest Java, there are strongly typed collections:
Map<String,Integer> map =
new HashMap<String, Integer>(); map.put("Foo", 3); int x = map.get("Foo");
The idea that plutonium is "one of the most poisonous substances on earth" is complete nonsense. In fact, plutonium barely qualifies as a toxin at all. Yes, it can cause cancer, which may eventually kill you. But lots of substances will kill you far more quickly at far smaller dosages. Some that are quite likely present in your neighborhood include digitoxin (foxgloves), convallaria (lily-of-the-valley), and aflatoxin (food molds). And substances such as Indian cobra venom, ricin, botulism, or anthrax are so much more toxic than plutonium that there is really no comparison.
The only real points you disagree with Chomsky on are those of economic rights.
That's like saying "the only thing you disagree with the NRA on is gun control." Without economic rights, we would effectively have no rights at all. If the government can take away your property and your means of earning a livelihood, what point is there any real point in having a right to privacy?
The whole point of the timestamp business is to compensate for message latency. My opponent might live in South Africa, Brazil, or Siberia, at the far end of a slow connection. Even if my opponent responds instantly to every move, absent timestamping, he or she will get charged a second or two (or more) on every move. If we're trying to play 40 moves or so in 3 minutes, that is significant.
Interesting theory. It would have more weight if Kerry actually disagreed with Bush on any Middle-East policy. He disagrees with Bush's tone, but supported and continues to support everything Bush actually did. If we take him at his word, he would have done basically the same things, but after more talking to France and Germany. Since I see absolutely no reason to believe that talking would have changed anything, it appears to me that he would have done the same things, but somewhat later.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm 61, writing code, and having fun. My advice:
First, find a company that lets you do what you want. In particular, find one that doesn't push you into management (unless that's what you really want). Many companies will push you in that direction, but unless you're really good at it, it's a dead end.
Second, don't get stuck on the same project forever. Being the old fogey who knows everything about that important legacy system isn't a good place to be when the old system is finally retired. It isn't enough to "keep up with new technology". Knowing it and doing at are different things and are judged differently.
Third, don't expect that your superior wisdom is enough. Be wise, but be productive, and help other people be productive.
Not to defend Amazon, you have misstated the situation. They books he bought are still on his Kindle and still readable. He can't buy any new ones, and his subscriptions are canceled -- meaning he doesn't pay for them, and he doesn't receive them. The stuff he *bought* is all still there.
Yes, the grass is always greener. The pony express was good enough, but then they invented the telegraph, then they insisted we needed telephones, and then email, and now the web and IM. Think how great the pony express would be if we had just concentrated on perfecting it instead of getting all distracted by new-fangled innovations?
I've been programming since 1974 -- I started with a PDP 7 and an Altair 8800 and I'm currently writing code (C++, Java, Python) for Google. And I have a 4-digit slashdot ID, so get off my lawn! :-)
I guess I'm a pedantic fool, because it's obvious to me that C++ is a mess, and it's not the fault of programmers. It's not that it's impossible to write good C++. But compared to more modern languages it takes a lot more expertise, discipline, and especially time, so it's a lot more expensive than it should be. And, of course, there's always the temptation to cut the expense a little and then you have crappy code.
The problem is that C++ was initially a bit of a hack (remember cfront?) and then it was taken over by vast committees that used it as a vehicle to rationalize all their pet features. To see what can be done with a fresh start, take a look at the programming language D.
I had probably dozens of small, cheap sliderules when I was a kid. They were available for a few dollars in any drugstore. In the very early 70's, I bought a nice Post Versalog, which I expected to use for decades. I used it through high school and couple years of college, then I sold one of my guitars and bought an HP-35. I remember taking a mandatory "Engineering Computation" course my first year in college. The course had a fearsome reputation, but turned out to be pretty easy if you were already quick with a slide rule.
:-)
I still have the Versalog---it's outlasted the HP-35. Doesn't get a lot of use anymore, though.
Mosquitoes are not restricted to the tropics, as any Minnesotan or Alaskan can tell you. Malaria is not a tropical disease; it's a disease of poverty. It was once endemic in Siberia , Britain, and parts of N. America.
So, you would be happy with my codec, which replaces hip-hop with Bach played on original instruments? That sounds best to me...
Actually, since about 1980, it has been the right who has been trying to change things, for better or worse (quite often worse). The left has basically been playing defense: trying to keep alive as many as possible of the big entitlement programs handed down from Roosevelt and Johnson. There have been very few new initiatives from the left. The only big one that comes to mind is Clinton's health plan, which went nowhere.
-mike
Not true. Deleted messages are kept for 30 days and then permanently removed. http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answe r=7401&topic=1533
Sorry, you're wrong. The climate doesn't emerge from primitive equations. What emerges from primitive equations is nothing like our climate. After adjusting numerous fudge factors to "calibrate" the simulations, they do sort of act sort of like real climate. Or to put in another way, after adjusting numerous fudge factors to make the simulations act like our climate they (amazingly) act sort of like our climate. Unfortunately, that tells us almost nothing about what our climate would be like with different inputs.
Google for "overfitting".
-mike
This is just silly. What physics? The well understood effects of high and low clouds, changes in solar radiation, cosmic rays, heat flux into and out of the ocean, I assume? Oh, wait, we don't have a clue about any of that...
Google, and we do sorta depend on the internet.
No, power corrupts, too. First, a lot of people develop a taste for power. Second, a lot of people convince themselves to make unhealthy compromises to get reelected, because their opponent would be even worse.
A word to the wise: if you read realclimate.org, you owe it to yourself to also read climateaudit.org. The discussions at realclimate.org don't include some of the more prominent critics of their work because realclimate.org silently deletes their postings. A lot of what the folks at climate.org publish doesn't hold up very well to close scrutiny. They tend to hide their data and methods from researchers who want to reproduce their results, which is never a good sign. Many of their statistical methods are highly questionable. And their results are a good deal less robust than they make them out to be.
actually mean? Does it mean that the author argues that it was the best Star Wars tale? No; the author is apparently not decisive enough to actually commit himself to such a strong position. Does it mean that someone has argued that it was the best? Well, no; the author is not willing to go quite that far, either. Maybe no one has actually argued that. The author commits himself only to the proposition that someone, somewhere could make such an argument. If they chose to.
Jeez! Just delete the damn word. If you still like the sentence, great. If you don't, then say what you really mean.
Actually, the referenced article is misleading information from the left.
The actual net present value of the SS loss is several times greater than $3.3T, and we need to do something about it soon. Limiting the analysis to 75 years is traditional, but highly deceptive. It is the reason we have to keep "fixing" SS every few years, but the fix never lasts long. Suppose we "fix" SS today so that it is solvent for the next 75 years, until 2080. In 2010, when we look at it again, we will be in worse trouble than ever. Why? Five good years in the original analysis (2005-2010) will be behind us. And five very bad years (2080-2085) will be tacked on the end. The computed debt will be much larger than today.
If we want to avoid a Ponzi crash, we need to start looking at the actuarial problem over an indefinite future.
I believe that you heard this. I do not believe that it actually happened.
I don't know if global warming exists, and, if it does I don't know what the effects will be. However, I'm a bit cynical, for the following reasons.
1. A lot of scientific theories have been very popular and well accepted for quite a while before they are disproven. Epicycles. The aether. Phlogiston. Eugenics. Cold fusion. The coming ice age in the 70's. So wide acceptance by itself doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling.
2. Having been a university professor for a while, I understand the intense conflict of interest that researchers experience. On the one hand, climatologists would like to tell the truth. On the other hand, they know beyond the shadow of a doubt that if they held a conference tomorrow and all agreed that global warming wasn't happening, their lives and the lives of their families would all change for the worse. They would lose funding and graduate students, their salaries would drop, they'd have more trouble publishing papers, they'd have to teach more undergraduate classes, some would not get tenure, etc. So there is a huge incentive to interpret ambiguous data in such a way as to keep the global warming in the news.
3. The data is very noisy and ambiguous. Climatologists are trying to pull a trend out of data that has a lot of natural variation, that has a lot of measurment error, and that is very incomplete. Also, since global warming is now the "standard" view, journal reviewers will examine papers that do not tend to support global warming a lot more carefully than papers that do support global warming. If your paper weakly supports global warming, it is much more likely to be published than a paper that weakly undermines global warming. ("Extraordinary results require extranordinary evidence.")
4. The theory keeps changing. It is not longer just warming. It's almost any change in climate at all. More hurricanes than average? Fewer hurricanes than average? The Sahara is growing? The Sahara is shrinking? The US midwest is getting drier? Getting wetter? The theory of global warming has gotten so flexible that all these scenarios are apparently consistent with it. If a theory predicts anything then it has no predictive power at all.
At Microsoft, the real work doesn't include testing.
Should have started with Resier4? Unix was designed in the early 70's. I'm guessing that Reiser was either not born or maybe in diapers.
And as of the latest Java, there are strongly typed collections:so I guess we can finally retire that argument.
The idea that plutonium is "one of the most poisonous substances on earth" is complete nonsense. In fact, plutonium barely qualifies as a toxin at all. Yes, it can cause cancer, which may eventually kill you. But lots of substances will kill you far more quickly at far smaller dosages. Some that are quite likely present in your neighborhood include digitoxin (foxgloves), convallaria (lily-of-the-valley), and aflatoxin (food molds). And substances such as Indian cobra venom, ricin, botulism, or anthrax are so much more toxic than plutonium that there is really no comparison.
That's like saying "the only thing you disagree with the NRA on is gun control." Without economic rights, we would effectively have no rights at all. If the government can take away your property and your means of earning a livelihood, what point is there any real point in having a right to privacy?
The whole point of the timestamp business is to compensate for message latency. My opponent might live in South Africa, Brazil, or Siberia, at the far end of a slow connection. Even if my opponent responds instantly to every move, absent timestamping, he or she will get charged a second or two (or more) on every move. If we're trying to play 40 moves or so in 3 minutes, that is significant.
Interesting theory. It would have more weight if Kerry actually disagreed with Bush on any Middle-East policy. He disagrees with Bush's tone, but supported and continues to support everything Bush actually did. If we take him at his word, he would have done basically the same things, but after more talking to France and Germany. Since I see absolutely no reason to believe that talking would have changed anything, it appears to me that he would have done the same things, but somewhat later.