Well, any time you're storing data in a central place, you have a greater consequence of failure. That's a downside of "cloud computing", or any web application that stores data in a database too.
Nope. That's the downside of any type of supposedly distributed system (including cloud/web apps) that stores data (or run systems) as single point of failures.
A cloud should be redundant, up to the database - a true cloud would even have redundant data centers (think google/ebay/yahoo infrastructures).
Moreover, and independently of whether it is a cloud or not, it should have a clear disaster recovery process. I've worked in systems were production runs in hardware in a data center in one state, and an identical/near identical hardware (usually running as UAT) in another data center in another state. Exercises were conducted routinely to demonstrate the ability to migrate a *failed* production environment to the 2nd environment, or even to rebuild it from scratch from tape backup (with tests on backup procedures done on a regular basis as well.)
This would include migrating app servers, http servers, database clusters, verifying firewalls let things go in and out as necessary (and no more than that), changing DNS entries to point to the new environments, etc, etc.
The only problem with a cloud environment is that the customer might not have visibility to see these things - ergo, the need to have the ability to back up your stuff off the cloud service. Obviously that was not what happened here.
This was a major foobar for all parties involved - you don't put your life on a cloud (or whatever) if you don't have a way to pull it back out with ease for the purpose of making backups.
Why on Earth would you trust your valuable data (and if it wasn't valuable to you, why keep it in the first place?) to someone else, someone who doesn't answer to the same people you do? I have always thought that "the cloud" is an epic fail waiting to happen. As a concept, it makes no sense. It's a scheme worthy of Professor Harold Hill himself.
You want your data safe? You want it backed up properly? Don't want to lose it? Then put it on your own hardware and take care of it yourself. Don't leave it to someone else to save your bacon when something goes wrong. Because, in the end, they don't care about you. You're just a monthly fee to them, and the agreement/contract/whatever you signed with them absolves them of all responsibility.
You have never worked in a large scale enterprise that stores terabytes (or even petabytes), moving 100's of gigabytes (or even terabytes) every single day, have you?
Every large organization (and many midsize ones) maintain most of their computing muscle and data on externally managed data centers (or proprietary data centers managed by 3rd party staff.) You can't just do it on your own, and if you can, it is awfully expensive.
This doesn't count the inevitable politics and rivalries that arise when you take a DIY approach. You end up with data teams, network teams, IT ops teams, all of them competing for resources (and sometimes prestige). Unloading most of that wild west crap out to a 3rd party that is only interested in sticking to SLAs to the letter frees a lot of time and $$$ to take care of actual business/business-related technology needs.
Disasters like these are actually extremely rare, and it seems to me it was more about the execution of the idea than on the idea itself (which has been done for years, decades without major problems.)
If you have local infrastructure, and you run into an issue, there's at least something you can do. For example, if your internet connection fails, it might be possible to hack something together to get email working again, for example using an UMTS Router.
Or if your Exchange server fails, you'll be able to get SOME backup restored, even if you can only take weekly backups because management said tapes are expensive.
If Google has a total system crash and loses 98% of it's data, but would be able to restore the remaining 2% at very high expenses, do you think they'd do it? Probably not.
Disclaimer: I use Google Apps Premier for my private domain.
Google (or any cloud provider) doesn't care about your organization the same way you care about it.
They do care, however, about SLAs. And that's all you need. I wouldn't care much if a 3rd party doesn't care about my business the same way I do. I care that he cares about SLAs between they and us.
Why must it be all-or-nothing? why should we be either mindless drones working 9 to 5, never learning anything other than what's required for our particular job at hand, or mindless nerds living in a basement with no life outside computers?
Or perhaps its just that both sides of this particular debate have a strong liking for red herrings.
One of the common red herrings that you see in/. is that a programmer that works 9-5 is inevitably a mindless drone, specially if he/she doesn't code at home for a hobby on a regular basis.
So you ONLY program for work now. You NEVER program a small project on your own time, for yourself. Then I would say you have lost the passion.
Passion for live =/= passion for a job.
To be good at a job, you have to have passion for the career. But career =/= job. Also, passion by itself when applied to something, that is not necessarily a healthy thing to have. Barring working at a crappy, stagnant job (which is another problem altogether), the job itself, specially a programming job, will present enough challenges to make you passionate, each one an opportunity to learn, improve and remain technologically relevant.
Sure, we can all brag about other stuff we have to do in our lives, if you think that makes you special you are a moron.
Everyone that is bragging here thinks he/she is special, including those who think they still have the l33t hax0r passion and not-so-surreptitiously brag about it. Including you.
Or what? Bragging to still have passion for programming at home is the only type of me-feel-special bragging you can do that doesn't make you a moron? How do you logically support that?
But somehow I still find time to program, even now.
You are bragging. You think that makes you special. If we are to follow that line of logic of yours to its inevitable conclusion, won't we be forced to conclude that you are a moron, too?
Thing is, staying relevant on a fast-evolving industry like programming pretty much *requires* you to love doing it enough that you take it as a hobby by itself, otherwise eventually either you stop trying to stay relevant, or the stress of it becomes too much to bear.
Or to put it some other way: I've yet to meet a programmer over 35 who doesn't code on his free time and whose knowledge isn't hopelessly outdated for most decent jobs.
* raises hand * here is one (check my profile link and see my CV.) I wonder how many over 35 programmers do you know and what kind of companies have your worked with to make that kind of assessment.
You seem to be equating being up-to-date as a programmer with the ability to code with whatever comes hot off the technology oven - don't. There is a lot more to being a technologically relevant programmer than knowing the latest technology stacks.
I stopped coding for fun/hobby about 10 years ago. I just turned 40, and most of my after-work-hour existence is devoted to husband/dad roles, cutting grass, working out and watching Law & Order.
The only time I actually got close to have less than relevant skills was when I was doing a sysadmin/weblogic admin gig working the graveyard shift with constant support 24/7 for a couple of year. Not much time (or mental energy) to learn anything new.
Other than that, all I've ever needed was read some chapters off a book, a couple of hours a week to stay up to date; 2-3 books a year; coding at home here and there so long as it is relevant to tasks I'm being paid to do. That's all I've ever needed.
Currently I subscribe to several podcasts : software engineering radio (for general topics), the Java Posse (for Java/Scala/JVM) and Herding Code (C#/.NET) - I put episodes that I *deem* relevant to me at this moment and listen to them while I drive or during my lunch break. That, more than tinkering with code is what helps me remain up to date.
There used to be a time that I would spend 20 hours of my time setting up networks at home and programming with this and that new language thingie just for the hell of it. That was 10-11 years ago. The time where I would take programming as a hobby are long gone. My job is strictly a 9-5, and I love programming tremendously. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing programming for a living.
Not to be arrogant, but I'm way past the point of merely coding. I'm able to take a holistic approach, from rolling-up-the-sleeves coding to application architecture all the way up to architecture at the systems level, crossing horizontally over IT infrastructure and operations, be it systems programming or e-commerce or what not.
Not that I claim to know everything I will ever need to know, but I know what learning patterns I must use to remain up to date in the fastest, most efficient way possible.
In fact, learning a new programming language is not a challenge. Learning infrastructure, architecture and entire solution stacks, that's the challenge, and you don't get that by coding at home as a hobby.
Love for the programming profession does not necessarily imply devoting personal time to programming as a hobby on a regular basis (unless you are volunteering to a FOSS project.)
To me, seeing someone treating programming as a hobby, in particular if it involves a significant amount of hours per week on a regular basis, that's a possible sign of dis-functionality or not getting sufficient intellectual stimulus in your career.
Also, if you rely on putting an inordinate amount of hours per week just to be able to remain up to date, then I'd have to question your learning strategies. I would have to question your ability at being efficient.
A hobby is something you do for the love of it, independently of efficiency. Learning for the purpose of remaining relevant is a complete different animal - it has a purpose, a deadline and it requires you to be efficient when doing it.
War might be a foregone conclusion, which Obama will pursue if he deems it necessary. This is one of the reasons why I think this prize was premature.
I think Obama is being awarded this simply because he kept the neo-cons out of power and the world is happy for that. Remember, if we took a world poll it would be surprising to have McCain come up over 10%.
That's pure conjecture and ideological speculation. Not an ounce of objective reasoning is found it that claim of yours. I know it might sound good to your ears to say that is the reason (and more so to think it is a valid one). But think, if you can, if it is really a valid argument.
It is not. Blabbing and raging against neo-cons (as much as they deserved to be disparaged) does not constitute a valid argument. Anti-right wing ideological demagoguery does not constitute progressive thinking.
I like Obama, and I think he is best that could have happened to our presidency. But giving him the Nobel prize, like that, when he still has to accomplish a great deal, and when there is still a real chance of war (hell, we are still at war in Afghanistan, and we might not be able to pull out as fast as we want out of Iraq), it is all too awfully premature.
The price should have been given to him years later, and only if he had been able to complete tangible progress in terms of peace.
But as it is, now, it was an stupid move that diminish the value of the Nobel prize for peace, and it helps Obama in the least. In fact, it hurts him. It makes a mockery of the prize and of him, a man of principle, and his efforts.
What kind of a world do you live in where professors reject money?
One where they want to do stem cell research to cure diseases, but a lot of medievalist retards want to stop them because an imaginary man wih a beard says it's bad.
What does that have to do with the claim professors will be free to reject federal funds?
....Jack Thompson has already threatened Slashdot with a US$100 million lawsuit, saying that if the "news for nerd" site does not filter and removing any angry postings made by its' members.....
The problem with my school's CS program is that they continued to require writing proper syntax code throughout all 4 years, rather than simply learning how to step through a process in pseudo-code. So instead of reinforcing proper visualisation of a program's execution, we got penalized for not remembering the exact name of a C++ library function.
If you got penalized for not remembering the exact keyword or function for a specific language, then I would have to agree that it is macho bullshit what you were subjected to.
Tracing an algorithm in pseudo-java/basic/assembly is what I was referring to. There are of courses, restrictions to be one on the pseudo-code. For example, you could be instructed in that the pseudo-code language doesn't support recursion, but that you can push and pop stuff on the stack.
But being penalized for not remembering the nitty gritty syntax, that's just academic dick-wagging from the instructor's part. A very common, very unfair and very unpedagogical practice, which is very different from what I was referring to.
I would suspect that any professor who does this does not have much industrial experience. You don't usually get that kind of treatment or evaluation in the real industry, under real constrains, and under real pressure, at least not from a company or a project worth working for, that is.
...are the scum of the earth. I can't stand that! Take separate notes! Respect the text for future users! And they always write stupid crap in'em, too.
That is stupid. A book is someone's private property, and his owner can do whatever he wants with it. There is no obligation to respect any future user since the owner, when obtaining a new or used copy of a textbook, never got into a contractual agreement to preserve it for someone else. Writing on a book has been a long standing and useful tradition.
What your self-centered mind dismiss, in a juvenile manner, what someone writes as stupid crap in'em, that actually made sense to someone else at some point. Not that you are impervious to writing something that might appear stupid to someone else, even you at some time in the future. Grow up dude.
Besides, they should've given'em to some real college students, like engineering majors.
Obligatory self-back-patting I see. At some point you'll transition from being a student into a professional, a real engineer. Don't feel you are all that just because you are an engineering major. Only when you graduate, with good grades, and when you demonstrate you can do the work, then you are entitled to feel good about it.
That is, instead of being dismissive of others, earn it.
I'd love to stop carrying a pile 8 inches thick of textbooks around the campus every freakin' day. I mean, that can't be good for your back.
Only if you don't know how to carry a backpack, or if you are extremely weak.
Jokes aside, I use a kindle to carry some textbooks and manuals I use at work. It does makes it very convenient, specially when I have to travel to do work. But the key difference is that I use these textbooks and manuals as reference material.
That is, I don't have them in the kindle for me to learn, but to quickly look for something that I know it's there, to verify if what I believe I know is applicable to the problem at hand. But not to learn.
Learning =/= using as reference. The ergonomics of the kindle are not there yet. Trust me on this one, you can't use one as a replacement for an actual, physical textbook, in the context of actually having to learn from it while trying to cross-reference whatever your instructor is dictating in the classroom.
Well done, you've fallen for macho bull-shit. A common problem. Seems to work with women as much as men.
I disagree. Having to work and trace, by hand, the execution of a moderately large program and its state at every step is a very powerful tool. I had to do that a lot (combined with actual programming of course) during my first two years in CS. Best training I could get. Obviously as you progress into your junior year and the complexity of the problems grow, this is not a viable training method (here I would agree it would be macho bullshit to evaluate students with that method.)
But for freshmen/sophomore level CS students, certainly this is a good way to go. Get them to demonstrate how they can walk through an algorithm over a data structure by pen and pencil (as opposed to have them write cute little programs with colors and widgets that still print out the wrong result.)
It teaches you two things right of the bat - it teaches you how to debug (which is not the same as knowing how to use a debugger.) Also, it teaches you to see a program conceptually as a state machine, its state as a function of its prior state and the current step, and the next step as a state transition.
It teaches you a practical skill early on, one that you might not get at all until getting a few years of work experience.
I wonder if the Tornado authors set forth to re-implemented <a href="http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/">Twisted Python</a> just for kicks or out of not knowning about its existence.
Twisted supports epoll kqueue, win32 iocp, select, etc.
And what makes you think they didn't know? Are you privy of information that objectively and clearly indicates the authors DID NOT have any valid technical or business reason AT ALL to implement Tornado as opposed to adopt Twisted?
To be honest, I don't know of any evidence, for or against. I have no clue of their reasons (intelligent and/or stupid). As a result I don't assume either. A more constructive and useful question would have been I wonder what were the technical or business reasons (if any) that lead Facebook to implement Tornado? Did they find a technical problem with Twisted? Did they have a strategic reason not to use it? Did they already have a lot of functionally-related Python code built in-house, making the creation of Tornado a reasonable step? I would like to know so that I can clearly understand this on its own merits.
I dunno, it's the pragmatic engineer in me talking here.
He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was.
Perhaps there would have been more supercomputers? Or the internet would have arrived sooner and networking would be more advanced? None of us know what would have happened. Assuming it would have been worse is just speculation.
I doubt that the market for super computers would have increased given that the number of problems that actually require them has always been small, and that the price of manufacturing has always been high.
OTH, micro computers have allowed, via clustering, to venture into financial number crunching (cruise lines come to mind) to a degree that very likely would have never due to the cost (or at best have done so at a much greater cost than what is now possible.)
Considering the lethargic and pretty much clueless reaction of the big iron makers of the day (IBM, Unisys, Burroughs) as the minicomputer/microcomputer market was taking shape, I extremely doubt we would have had the internet as we have it today. BTW, I'm not referring to "internet" as the hardware and software technologies that make the internet possible, but the internet as a facilitator of communication and business as we have it today.
We would still have computing focused on big iron number crunching. People-focused technology like multimedia, gaming and personal finance packages like Quicken would not exist. Don't get me wrong, technical innovation would still exist, but it would be geared toward big-iron and centralized data/business processing
The arrival of the microcomputer brought computing at the masses' fingertips (no, I'm not into socialist rhetoric.) This eventually created a market niche, a space of business and technology opportunities that was bound to grow. From there it grow into people's inter networking and from there into e-commerce and easier (at least in theory) B2B.
Things like multimedia would most likely never be known outside academic/research circles, with the mouse and the GUI still being under development in some dark corner at Xerox Palo Alto.
Obviously, all of this is pure conjecture. The scenario you describe is probabilistically possible. Taking into consideration the nature of business during the pre-microcomputer, I do not see it as being a highly probable one.
If you want to be a nuclear engineer join the Navy. If you want to be a brain surgeon go to college.
But, but, but... formal education is a thing of the past. You said so yourself.
I may have not picked the best title for my post but
See, one thing that formal education helps achieve is the ability to express yourself accordingly.
You may have not? "May have"/"may have not" imply a possibility of a choice not being completely right or wrong. Stick to clarity and state whether the choice of your title was right or wrong instead of "maybe have, could have, would have, but kinda like didn't quite do it."
A better, more reasonable reply, considering what you wrote after, would have had started with "I meant differently. The title of my post is wrong as it does not communicate clearly the point I was trying to make."
my point was that formal education is not necessary to make good money and own a house.
That is a different argument altogether. Your original argument was that "formal education is a thing of the past" without any other quantifier to explain that out. You presented an absolute, followed by your personal anecdotes as evidence of its validity. As a result, it was interpreted the way it was.
Whether that was your original and true to the heath opinion (which you are now revisiting after getting a reply) or whether indeed you made an honest mistake in expressing your view, I'll leave that to you.
A formal education doesn't guarantee the ability to express intention clearly and defend it in a logical manner, but it sure helps.
As far as the engineer who designs network protocols....Im willing to be he does not know much else.
And assuming that you bet correctly, this explains your original choice of title and/or the current point of view you are presenting... how?
Are you trying to make another distinct point that somehow is directly related to the discussion at hand? Or are you engaging in the logical fallacies known as "straw man" and "red herring"?
I did some work for AMCC and they guy you speak of sits in a cubicle all day doing nothing but designing circuits yet he lacks a basic understanding of how the rest of a PC / software works.
So? For what he does, for what he studies, specifically for communication technology, why would he need to know the rest of the PC/software technology?
... ignoring the fact that this is just annecdotal, and a straw man/red herring...
As a sysadmin, do you know link layer technology, electronic circuitry, power generation, ceramics? Do you understand the physical and manufacturing principles by which all those transistors get jammed into the CPU as well as the manufacturing details that brought that motherboard to life?
No, you don't. And no one short of an idiot would expect you to. It's called specialization. You specialize on something. Someone else specialize in something else.
Thoes guys are highly specialized and do not really get paid for it. (Unless they get a patent)
Speak for yourself. Besides, there is more to success than getting incredibly paid (revolutionary, I know!) Furthermore, it still has nothing to do with the topic at hand, nor with the point of view which you originally presented...
... which by your own admission was a mistake, well, kinda like because you cannot bring yourself to say anything beyond "I may have chosen the wrong title" as opposed to "I chose the wrong title".
I'll put it another way. What are the chances of me becoming a brain surgeon, a nuclear engineer, an economist, or the engineering dude who designs link layer collision detection algorithms (the very thing that make networks for you to administer) without formal education?
Does wanting it bad enough will suffice?
What if wanting it bad enough entails getting the formal education (that which is a thing of the past in your own words) that is needed to get that type of knowledge which is what some would ultimately want bad enough?
Or does success is merely limited to get a high paying job?
I never finished high school and actualy had a grade point average of 0.00 one semester.
Yet today I am a systems administrator for a well known company and do some consulting on the side.
I did serve as an IT in the Navy to get training and a few lines on my resume but I already knew a lot about computers and networking because It has always been my hobby since I was 13.
I am a people person I dress very well so that alone puts me in another category of IT.
Bottom line if you want success bad enough you can make it happen without traveling the cookie cutter path. I am currently enrolled in school but I only take classes which I have an interest in and will directly benefit my career. I could care less about obtaining a degree.
Good for you and congratulations. I really mean it. But your anecdotal case is not a representative of the general one. It is certainly not, and it does not logically follow that, and I quote, formal education is a thing of the past. You were an over achiever with a talent for analytical thinking, and as fortune would have it, you had access to a resource that you could enjoy and make a living of it : computers.
Bottom line if you want success bad enough you can make it happen without traveling the cookie cutter path.
Wishful thinking of you to think a path you did not travel to achieve success is, then by inevitable definition, a cookie cutter path. Wanting it bad enough is not sufficient. You have to have the intelligence to pursue it, and the opportunities for you to exploit at the precise junctions in your life that could exploit them to your favor.
It might as well be true for you, and you have achieve the things that, in your life define success. But, do you really believe that your own personal anecdote is evidence that a formal education is a thing of the past, in general?
I do appreciate your work - I myself tolled worked my hands to the bone since I was a kid, and then here in the US in McDonalds, Home Depots and what not. So I know what it is to travel from the bottom up. But your logic is flawed dude, deeply so.
2. You suck at noticing facetious and tongue-in-cheek remarks.
If by facetious you mean something devoid of any textual emotion that can convey a joking nature, however remote that might be, on a site full of pseudo-libertarian nerd rage, then yeah, I guess I sucked at noticing your facetious remarks.
3. If this is any attempt at logic at all, it's the Absurd Case.
No attempt at logic at all, just a reply of a nature appropriate to your retarded... oh, sorry, facetious statement.
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Well, any time you're storing data in a central place, you have a greater consequence of failure. That's a downside of "cloud computing", or any web application that stores data in a database too.
Nope. That's the downside of any type of supposedly distributed system (including cloud/web apps) that stores data (or run systems) as single point of failures.
A cloud should be redundant, up to the database - a true cloud would even have redundant data centers (think google/ebay/yahoo infrastructures).
Moreover, and independently of whether it is a cloud or not, it should have a clear disaster recovery process. I've worked in systems were production runs in hardware in a data center in one state, and an identical/near identical hardware (usually running as UAT) in another data center in another state. Exercises were conducted routinely to demonstrate the ability to migrate a *failed* production environment to the 2nd environment, or even to rebuild it from scratch from tape backup (with tests on backup procedures done on a regular basis as well.)
This would include migrating app servers, http servers, database clusters, verifying firewalls let things go in and out as necessary (and no more than that), changing DNS entries to point to the new environments, etc, etc.
The only problem with a cloud environment is that the customer might not have visibility to see these things - ergo, the need to have the ability to back up your stuff off the cloud service. Obviously that was not what happened here.
This was a major foobar for all parties involved - you don't put your life on a cloud (or whatever) if you don't have a way to pull it back out with ease for the purpose of making backups.
Why on Earth would you trust your valuable data (and if it wasn't valuable to you, why keep it in the first place?) to someone else, someone who doesn't answer to the same people you do? I have always thought that "the cloud" is an epic fail waiting to happen. As a concept, it makes no sense. It's a scheme worthy of Professor Harold Hill himself.
You want your data safe? You want it backed up properly? Don't want to lose it? Then put it on your own hardware and take care of it yourself. Don't leave it to someone else to save your bacon when something goes wrong. Because, in the end, they don't care about you. You're just a monthly fee to them, and the agreement/contract/whatever you signed with them absolves them of all responsibility.
You have never worked in a large scale enterprise that stores terabytes (or even petabytes), moving 100's of gigabytes (or even terabytes) every single day, have you?
Every large organization (and many midsize ones) maintain most of their computing muscle and data on externally managed data centers (or proprietary data centers managed by 3rd party staff.) You can't just do it on your own, and if you can, it is awfully expensive.
This doesn't count the inevitable politics and rivalries that arise when you take a DIY approach. You end up with data teams, network teams, IT ops teams, all of them competing for resources (and sometimes prestige). Unloading most of that wild west crap out to a 3rd party that is only interested in sticking to SLAs to the letter frees a lot of time and $$$ to take care of actual business/business-related technology needs. Disasters like these are actually extremely rare, and it seems to me it was more about the execution of the idea than on the idea itself (which has been done for years, decades without major problems.)
Yep, but consider this:
Google doesn't care about your university.
You did. Or at least should've ;)
If you have local infrastructure, and you run into an issue, there's at least something you can do. For example, if your internet connection fails, it might be possible to hack something together to get email working again, for example using an UMTS Router.
Or if your Exchange server fails, you'll be able to get SOME backup restored, even if you can only take weekly backups because management said tapes are expensive.
If Google has a total system crash and loses 98% of it's data, but would be able to restore the remaining 2% at very high expenses, do you think they'd do it? Probably not.
Disclaimer: I use Google Apps Premier for my private domain.
Google (or any cloud provider) doesn't care about your organization the same way you care about it.
They do care, however, about SLAs. And that's all you need. I wouldn't care much if a 3rd party doesn't care about my business the same way I do. I care that he cares about SLAs between they and us.
Why must it be all-or-nothing? why should we be either mindless drones working 9 to 5, never learning anything other than what's required for our particular job at hand, or mindless nerds living in a basement with no life outside computers?
Or perhaps its just that both sides of this particular debate have a strong liking for red herrings.
One of the common red herrings that you see in /. is that a programmer that works 9-5 is inevitably a mindless drone, specially if he/she doesn't code at home for a hobby on a regular basis.
So you ONLY program for work now. You NEVER program a small project on your own time, for yourself. Then I would say you have lost the passion.
Passion for live =/= passion for a job. To be good at a job, you have to have passion for the career. But career =/= job. Also, passion by itself when applied to something, that is not necessarily a healthy thing to have. Barring working at a crappy, stagnant job (which is another problem altogether), the job itself, specially a programming job, will present enough challenges to make you passionate, each one an opportunity to learn, improve and remain technologically relevant.
Sure, we can all brag about other stuff we have to do in our lives, if you think that makes you special you are a moron.
Everyone that is bragging here thinks he/she is special, including those who think they still have the l33t hax0r passion and not-so-surreptitiously brag about it. Including you.
Or what? Bragging to still have passion for programming at home is the only type of me-feel-special bragging you can do that doesn't make you a moron? How do you logically support that?
But somehow I still find time to program, even now.
You are bragging. You think that makes you special. If we are to follow that line of logic of yours to its inevitable conclusion, won't we be forced to conclude that you are a moron, too?
Thing is, staying relevant on a fast-evolving industry like programming pretty much *requires* you to love doing it enough that you take it as a hobby by itself, otherwise eventually either you stop trying to stay relevant, or the stress of it becomes too much to bear.
Or to put it some other way: I've yet to meet a programmer over 35 who doesn't code on his free time and whose knowledge isn't hopelessly outdated for most decent jobs.
* raises hand * here is one (check my profile link and see my CV.) I wonder how many over 35 programmers do you know and what kind of companies have your worked with to make that kind of assessment.
You seem to be equating being up-to-date as a programmer with the ability to code with whatever comes hot off the technology oven - don't. There is a lot more to being a technologically relevant programmer than knowing the latest technology stacks.
I stopped coding for fun/hobby about 10 years ago. I just turned 40, and most of my after-work-hour existence is devoted to husband/dad roles, cutting grass, working out and watching Law & Order.
The only time I actually got close to have less than relevant skills was when I was doing a sysadmin/weblogic admin gig working the graveyard shift with constant support 24/7 for a couple of year. Not much time (or mental energy) to learn anything new. Other than that, all I've ever needed was read some chapters off a book, a couple of hours a week to stay up to date; 2-3 books a year; coding at home here and there so long as it is relevant to tasks I'm being paid to do. That's all I've ever needed.
Currently I subscribe to several podcasts : software engineering radio (for general topics), the Java Posse (for Java/Scala/JVM) and Herding Code (C#/.NET) - I put episodes that I *deem* relevant to me at this moment and listen to them while I drive or during my lunch break. That, more than tinkering with code is what helps me remain up to date.
There used to be a time that I would spend 20 hours of my time setting up networks at home and programming with this and that new language thingie just for the hell of it. That was 10-11 years ago. The time where I would take programming as a hobby are long gone. My job is strictly a 9-5, and I love programming tremendously. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing programming for a living.
Not to be arrogant, but I'm way past the point of merely coding. I'm able to take a holistic approach, from rolling-up-the-sleeves coding to application architecture all the way up to architecture at the systems level, crossing horizontally over IT infrastructure and operations, be it systems programming or e-commerce or what not.
Not that I claim to know everything I will ever need to know, but I know what learning patterns I must use to remain up to date in the fastest, most efficient way possible.
In fact, learning a new programming language is not a challenge. Learning infrastructure, architecture and entire solution stacks, that's the challenge, and you don't get that by coding at home as a hobby.
Love for the programming profession does not necessarily imply devoting personal time to programming as a hobby on a regular basis (unless you are volunteering to a FOSS project.)
To me, seeing someone treating programming as a hobby, in particular if it involves a significant amount of hours per week on a regular basis, that's a possible sign of dis-functionality or not getting sufficient intellectual stimulus in your career. Also, if you rely on putting an inordinate amount of hours per week just to be able to remain up to date, then I'd have to question your learning strategies. I would have to question your ability at being efficient.
A hobby is something you do for the love of it, independently of efficiency. Learning for the purpose of remaining relevant is a complete different animal - it has a purpose, a deadline and it requires you to be efficient when doing it.
You hope he causes war killing millions?
War might be a foregone conclusion, which Obama will pursue if he deems it necessary. This is one of the reasons why I think this prize was premature.
I think Obama is being awarded this simply because he kept the neo-cons out of power and the world is happy for that. Remember, if we took a world poll it would be surprising to have McCain come up over 10%.
That's pure conjecture and ideological speculation. Not an ounce of objective reasoning is found it that claim of yours. I know it might sound good to your ears to say that is the reason (and more so to think it is a valid one). But think, if you can, if it is really a valid argument.
It is not. Blabbing and raging against neo-cons (as much as they deserved to be disparaged) does not constitute a valid argument. Anti-right wing ideological demagoguery does not constitute progressive thinking.
I like Obama, and I think he is best that could have happened to our presidency. But giving him the Nobel prize, like that, when he still has to accomplish a great deal, and when there is still a real chance of war (hell, we are still at war in Afghanistan, and we might not be able to pull out as fast as we want out of Iraq), it is all too awfully premature.
The price should have been given to him years later, and only if he had been able to complete tangible progress in terms of peace.
But as it is, now, it was an stupid move that diminish the value of the Nobel prize for peace, and it helps Obama in the least. In fact, it hurts him. It makes a mockery of the prize and of him, a man of principle, and his efforts.
He waged two wars killing millions.
Not that I disagree about Bush being a warmongering tard, but where the bloody fuck did you get those numbers?
Not the Brian Kernighan of "The C Programming Language" fame, then?
That's exactly what I was thinking. I'm like WTF with the title of this thread (??????????)
One where they want to do stem cell research to cure diseases, but a lot of medievalist retards want to stop them because an imaginary man wih a beard says it's bad.
What does that have to do with the claim professors will be free to reject federal funds?
....Jack Thompson has already threatened Slashdot with a US$100 million lawsuit, saying that if the "news for nerd" site does not filter and removing any angry postings made by its' members.....
Good luck with that.
The problem with my school's CS program is that they continued to require writing proper syntax code throughout all 4 years, rather than simply learning how to step through a process in pseudo-code. So instead of reinforcing proper visualisation of a program's execution, we got penalized for not remembering the exact name of a C++ library function.
If you got penalized for not remembering the exact keyword or function for a specific language, then I would have to agree that it is macho bullshit what you were subjected to.
Tracing an algorithm in pseudo-java/basic/assembly is what I was referring to. There are of courses, restrictions to be one on the pseudo-code. For example, you could be instructed in that the pseudo-code language doesn't support recursion, but that you can push and pop stuff on the stack.
But being penalized for not remembering the nitty gritty syntax, that's just academic dick-wagging from the instructor's part. A very common, very unfair and very unpedagogical practice, which is very different from what I was referring to.
I would suspect that any professor who does this does not have much industrial experience. You don't usually get that kind of treatment or evaluation in the real industry, under real constrains, and under real pressure, at least not from a company or a project worth working for, that is.
...are the scum of the earth. I can't stand that! Take separate notes! Respect the text for future users! And they always write stupid crap in'em, too.
That is stupid. A book is someone's private property, and his owner can do whatever he wants with it. There is no obligation to respect any future user since the owner, when obtaining a new or used copy of a textbook, never got into a contractual agreement to preserve it for someone else. Writing on a book has been a long standing and useful tradition.
What your self-centered mind dismiss, in a juvenile manner, what someone writes as stupid crap in'em, that actually made sense to someone else at some point. Not that you are impervious to writing something that might appear stupid to someone else, even you at some time in the future. Grow up dude.
Besides, they should've given'em to some real college students, like engineering majors.
Obligatory self-back-patting I see. At some point you'll transition from being a student into a professional, a real engineer. Don't feel you are all that just because you are an engineering major. Only when you graduate, with good grades, and when you demonstrate you can do the work, then you are entitled to feel good about it.
That is, instead of being dismissive of others, earn it.
I'd love to stop carrying a pile 8 inches thick of textbooks around the campus every freakin' day. I mean, that can't be good for your back.
Only if you don't know how to carry a backpack, or if you are extremely weak.
Jokes aside, I use a kindle to carry some textbooks and manuals I use at work. It does makes it very convenient, specially when I have to travel to do work. But the key difference is that I use these textbooks and manuals as reference material.
That is, I don't have them in the kindle for me to learn, but to quickly look for something that I know it's there, to verify if what I believe I know is applicable to the problem at hand. But not to learn.
Learning =/= using as reference. The ergonomics of the kindle are not there yet. Trust me on this one, you can't use one as a replacement for an actual, physical textbook, in the context of actually having to learn from it while trying to cross-reference whatever your instructor is dictating in the classroom.
Well done, you've fallen for macho bull-shit. A common problem. Seems to work with women as much as men.
I disagree. Having to work and trace, by hand, the execution of a moderately large program and its state at every step is a very powerful tool. I had to do that a lot (combined with actual programming of course) during my first two years in CS. Best training I could get. Obviously as you progress into your junior year and the complexity of the problems grow, this is not a viable training method (here I would agree it would be macho bullshit to evaluate students with that method.)
But for freshmen/sophomore level CS students, certainly this is a good way to go. Get them to demonstrate how they can walk through an algorithm over a data structure by pen and pencil (as opposed to have them write cute little programs with colors and widgets that still print out the wrong result.)
It teaches you two things right of the bat - it teaches you how to debug (which is not the same as knowing how to use a debugger.) Also, it teaches you to see a program conceptually as a state machine, its state as a function of its prior state and the current step, and the next step as a state transition.
It teaches you a practical skill early on, one that you might not get at all until getting a few years of work experience.
I wonder if the Tornado authors set forth to re-implemented <a href="http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/">Twisted Python</a> just for kicks or out of not knowning about its existence. Twisted supports epoll kqueue, win32 iocp, select, etc.
And what makes you think they didn't know? Are you privy of information that objectively and clearly indicates the authors DID NOT have any valid technical or business reason AT ALL to implement Tornado as opposed to adopt Twisted?
To be honest, I don't know of any evidence, for or against. I have no clue of their reasons (intelligent and/or stupid). As a result I don't assume either. A more constructive and useful question would have been I wonder what were the technical or business reasons (if any) that lead Facebook to implement Tornado? Did they find a technical problem with Twisted? Did they have a strategic reason not to use it? Did they already have a lot of functionally-related Python code built in-house, making the creation of Tornado a reasonable step? I would like to know so that I can clearly understand this on its own merits.
I dunno, it's the pragmatic engineer in me talking here.
can it turn a nigger white? because even a pile of dog shit eventually turns white and stops stinking (it really does)
So bacteria helps you turn white and non-foul smelling??? Jolly good for ya! :)
That article was an example of techno-buzzword mental masturbation.
He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was.
Perhaps there would have been more supercomputers? Or the internet would have arrived sooner and networking would be more advanced? None of us know what would have happened. Assuming it would have been worse is just speculation.
I doubt that the market for super computers would have increased given that the number of problems that actually require them has always been small, and that the price of manufacturing has always been high.
OTH, micro computers have allowed, via clustering, to venture into financial number crunching (cruise lines come to mind) to a degree that very likely would have never due to the cost (or at best have done so at a much greater cost than what is now possible.)
Considering the lethargic and pretty much clueless reaction of the big iron makers of the day (IBM, Unisys, Burroughs) as the minicomputer/microcomputer market was taking shape, I extremely doubt we would have had the internet as we have it today. BTW, I'm not referring to "internet" as the hardware and software technologies that make the internet possible, but the internet as a facilitator of communication and business as we have it today.
We would still have computing focused on big iron number crunching. People-focused technology like multimedia, gaming and personal finance packages like Quicken would not exist. Don't get me wrong, technical innovation would still exist, but it would be geared toward big-iron and centralized data/business processing
The arrival of the microcomputer brought computing at the masses' fingertips (no, I'm not into socialist rhetoric.) This eventually created a market niche, a space of business and technology opportunities that was bound to grow. From there it grow into people's inter networking and from there into e-commerce and easier (at least in theory) B2B.
Things like multimedia would most likely never be known outside academic/research circles, with the mouse and the GUI still being under development in some dark corner at Xerox Palo Alto.
Obviously, all of this is pure conjecture. The scenario you describe is probabilistically possible. Taking into consideration the nature of business during the pre-microcomputer, I do not see it as being a highly probable one.
If you want to be a nuclear engineer join the Navy. If you want to be a brain surgeon go to college.
But, but, but... formal education is a thing of the past. You said so yourself.
I may have not picked the best title for my post but
See, one thing that formal education helps achieve is the ability to express yourself accordingly.
You may have not? "May have"/"may have not" imply a possibility of a choice not being completely right or wrong. Stick to clarity and state whether the choice of your title was right or wrong instead of "maybe have, could have, would have, but kinda like didn't quite do it."
A better, more reasonable reply, considering what you wrote after, would have had started with "I meant differently. The title of my post is wrong as it does not communicate clearly the point I was trying to make."
my point was that formal education is not necessary to make good money and own a house.
That is a different argument altogether. Your original argument was that "formal education is a thing of the past" without any other quantifier to explain that out. You presented an absolute, followed by your personal anecdotes as evidence of its validity. As a result, it was interpreted the way it was. Whether that was your original and true to the heath opinion (which you are now revisiting after getting a reply) or whether indeed you made an honest mistake in expressing your view, I'll leave that to you.
A formal education doesn't guarantee the ability to express intention clearly and defend it in a logical manner, but it sure helps.
As far as the engineer who designs network protocols....Im willing to be he does not know much else.
And assuming that you bet correctly, this explains your original choice of title and/or the current point of view you are presenting... how?
Are you trying to make another distinct point that somehow is directly related to the discussion at hand? Or are you engaging in the logical fallacies known as "straw man" and "red herring"?
I did some work for AMCC and they guy you speak of sits in a cubicle all day doing nothing but designing circuits yet he lacks a basic understanding of how the rest of a PC / software works.
So? For what he does, for what he studies, specifically for communication technology, why would he need to know the rest of the PC/software technology?
As a sysadmin, do you know link layer technology, electronic circuitry, power generation, ceramics? Do you understand the physical and manufacturing principles by which all those transistors get jammed into the CPU as well as the manufacturing details that brought that motherboard to life?
No, you don't. And no one short of an idiot would expect you to. It's called specialization. You specialize on something. Someone else specialize in something else.
Thoes guys are highly specialized and do not really get paid for it. (Unless they get a patent)
Speak for yourself. Besides, there is more to success than getting incredibly paid (revolutionary, I know!) Furthermore, it still has nothing to do with the topic at hand, nor with the point of view which you originally presented...
stuff
I'll put it another way. What are the chances of me becoming a brain surgeon, a nuclear engineer, an economist, or the engineering dude who designs link layer collision detection algorithms (the very thing that make networks for you to administer) without formal education?
Does wanting it bad enough will suffice?
What if wanting it bad enough entails getting the formal education (that which is a thing of the past in your own words) that is needed to get that type of knowledge which is what some would ultimately want bad enough?
Or does success is merely limited to get a high paying job?
I never finished high school and actualy had a grade point average of 0.00 one semester. Yet today I am a systems administrator for a well known company and do some consulting on the side. I did serve as an IT in the Navy to get training and a few lines on my resume but I already knew a lot about computers and networking because It has always been my hobby since I was 13. I am a people person I dress very well so that alone puts me in another category of IT. Bottom line if you want success bad enough you can make it happen without traveling the cookie cutter path. I am currently enrolled in school but I only take classes which I have an interest in and will directly benefit my career. I could care less about obtaining a degree.
Good for you and congratulations. I really mean it. But your anecdotal case is not a representative of the general one. It is certainly not, and it does not logically follow that, and I quote, formal education is a thing of the past. You were an over achiever with a talent for analytical thinking, and as fortune would have it, you had access to a resource that you could enjoy and make a living of it : computers.
Bottom line if you want success bad enough you can make it happen without traveling the cookie cutter path.
Wishful thinking of you to think a path you did not travel to achieve success is, then by inevitable definition, a cookie cutter path. Wanting it bad enough is not sufficient. You have to have the intelligence to pursue it, and the opportunities for you to exploit at the precise junctions in your life that could exploit them to your favor.
It might as well be true for you, and you have achieve the things that, in your life define success. But, do you really believe that your own personal anecdote is evidence that a formal education is a thing of the past, in general?
I do appreciate your work - I myself tolled worked my hands to the bone since I was a kid, and then here in the US in McDonalds, Home Depots and what not. So I know what it is to travel from the bottom up. But your logic is flawed dude, deeply so.
allowing a child to follow his passions and learn at his own pace, year-round
Barring a learning disability, that's the worst thing you can do to a healthy, learning child.
* unplug *
Who told you that? This guy?
Either your kool aid is laced or you are smoking some really strong crap. Whatever it is, I want some of that good shit!
1. Not dude. Not even close.
What, Klingon? KillerBob != dude, man, amazing.
2. You suck at noticing facetious and tongue-in-cheek remarks.
If by facetious you mean something devoid of any textual emotion that can convey a joking nature, however remote that might be, on a site full of pseudo-libertarian nerd rage, then yeah, I guess I sucked at noticing your facetious remarks.
3. If this is any attempt at logic at all, it's the Absurd Case.
No attempt at logic at all, just a reply of a nature appropriate to your retarded... oh, sorry, facetious statement.