Great... and if you're color blind, you can't work in this language? Ever?
(Me, I'm blue-yellow colorblind, yellow looks blazingly bright, blue is mostly invisible to m) /F
Ya know, I actually DID walk to classes, barefoot, in the snow. Yes, I was weird. (I growed up as a hillbilly. My mamma never could learn me to wear shoes much.) Now there were was only a very minor hill on the way, but the dorm was not 100 meters from the classroom building.
True, we only learned FORTRAN, using punch cards... then again I was a physics major, not a CS weenie. Those guys were too damned weird... imagine a physicist thinking another group was too weird to associate with.
We did have paper tape available on our KSR33s but it wasn't used all that much. We even had like 3 'glass teletypes' out of about 150 total terminals.
However that is not universally true (though I think it was more true a while back).
In the Denver area hospitals are frequently understaffed, but the hospitals refuse to hire many of the available nurses.
In particular the problem is that a significant percentage of new nurses can't get hired because there are policy (and regulatory? dunno) reasons that you can't have too high a percentage of staff being new graduates, due to their lack of experience. So new nursing school grads have a tough time getting hired around here.
My wife (a nurse) is involved in the training and orientation of new hires at her hospital, so she's relatively up on the issues. Also related is that there are some hospitals which are hurting financially due to the current general economic issues - a lot of that depends on the mix of patients and how they pay (insurance, if any, Medicare etc.)
There is also age discrimination for nurses in the opposite direction - my wife has been refused jobs because she's 'too old' or 'overqualified' etc. Not as bad as in the software world but it does exist.
Aside from a few universally hated people like Hitler, we have a tendency to focus on the good in people when they die....
Actually one of the biggest eye-opening shocks of my life was in the 70's when I was an American student in Germany living with a German family. They were quite adamant that Hitler had done Germany a lot of good throughout much of of his tenure as their leader.
Remember these were people who had lived through the economic nightmare there after WW-I, then the 30's and 40's. They said Hitler had brought them out of the economic mess, put food on their table, made jobs available etc. etc. And all that is true for the most part.
We tend to focus on the seriously bad things he did... like I said it was a massive shock to me at that time, having been taught only a subset of the entire set of historical events.
Do NOT view this as me agreeing with their viewpoint, merely pointing out that it existed, and in some sad forms still exists.
Not wrong in my neck of the woods. I'll admit that it was a period of transition, so perhaps drugstore chain X kept them around longer, while drugstore chain Y disposed of them sooner. There could well have been regional components as well, local economics, etc.
I didn't attempt to correlate when they disappeared from where with any other factors etc.
1977 was a different time, when information technology usually didn't even involve transistors, yet, and vacuum tube testers (for your TV) were still found at the local drug store.
Tube testers were pretty darned hard to find almost anywhere in 1977 (you could find them in old-used-electronics stores). I do recall testing tubes in drugstores in the early 70's.
Solid state, and even (*gasp*) integrated circuits were in widespread use. Why, by gosh by golly, we even had *8080*'s then.
I was a senior in college in physics+EE; I and a handful of my fellow students managed to coerce one of the EE profs to take a few hours and teach us about tubes (they had been removed from the curriculum). For the most part the interest was for us audio-nerds... tubes had that nice desirable sweet sound... (but I digress)
Sounds great, but... Cologne? You may want to reconsider that one. How much? If the cologne bottle will last you a period of years with daily application, maybe OK. If it only lasts weeks, or days, that's at least as bad as never showering.
Then there are people with varying degrees of sensitivity or allergy to scents. Some are obvious about their displeasure, others will just think you're a dick.
Nah, I'm as healthy as an ox. I feel just grea...&*)( ^ wgha'ts thayt opain in my armm ow...
60 hours is no big deal, when you love what you're doing. I have had a few times when it was real torture to try and appear to be busy for 40 hours though.
Mistakes, as in hitting 'Submit' before you're finished...
The other point worth making is code quality. My code tends to have less than 10% the average error rate (big company, we track such things). Again, it's all that experience.
Yes, thinking matters big time. Other elderly colleagues of mine can generally code circles around the young whippersnappers, as we've been there, made the mistakes, and know not to make most of them. (Sadly we do repeat them sometimes). Too bad so many young'uns already know everything and don't want to learn from others, and prefer to learn by making the same mistakes others have made a zillion times before.
Long term average is about 60 hours per week. I've gone to about 106-107 for some periods, 3 months in one instance, but I was a bit toasted by the end of it.
I'm referring to combination thinking/designing/coding, not counting breaks etc. (We were required to track our hours, what a pain). I'm also mostly autonomous and don't have to go to too many meetings.
For you young weenies, I'm 54. Most of you kids can't keep up. (I did once meet a young kid who could wear me out time-wise).
It helps that I've changed industries and roles several times, keeps things fresh.
Hmmm, I wonder wonder why I sometimes get burned out?
My mother was one of the people rescued by the CG in the 1937 floods referenced in the CG article. You can be sure that *I* am glad that she was... I sure wouldn't be here if she hadn't been rescued.
Remember what is crystal clear to you may not be to the guy coming in to clean your mess up in a few years. ( or even yourself as you have learned more and advanced your skills, and have to go back, often with a 'wtf was i doing'.. )
I worked on the same system for 15 years. More than once I saw some code and said "what idiot wrote this!?"... only to realize it was me, 5 years ago. Yes, that did indeed lead to me becoming a) much less prone to "clever tricks" and b) much much better at explaining what (WHY) I was doing whatever it was.
I must respectfully disagree. I happen to be an airgun nut, and have airguns in my collection that run in the $500 range - and there are plenty that cost a lot more. I don't have a a Red Ryder because I collect shooters, not collectors items, but there are plenty of folks who would and do purchase such items as the 'original' and modern replicas.
The whole point of the article is to tell what he did with linux when he first installed it.
OK, you want real life events. What I did was to try to port Mallinckrodt CTN software (Central Test Node - DICOM software) - see http://erl.wustl.edu/research/dicom/ctn.html if you're into that sort of thing.
Around 1994, early Slackware IIRC. I got enough pieces of it to work for my immediate needs, which was to start testing DICOM software my company was writing. In those days it was only running on Solaris, maybe Irix, HP-UX... don't recall, it was a while ago.
I haven't had a chance to test drive this, but I'd like to have a house in the mountains with an elevated room overlooking the woods with huge screened windows that open wide. I would open the windows wide ('cept for the winter) and get a slight sweet breeze and hear the sounds of birds chirping.
Funny you should mention... this is exactly where I live (and I work from home), about 35 miles SW of Denver.
Slight kink in the plans... I live at 9500 ft elevation, and it's only warm enough to have the windows open for a couple months of the year. At night they usually have to be closed, even in summer. There is an adequate selection of birds - hummingbirds, Stellars Jays, miscellaneous robin and sparrow-like species, etc. But the squirrels make more noise than the birds. (They're little black ones about 1/2 the size of a regular squirrel - Abert's squirrel I think they are).
One of the unexpected oddities up here - it's so deadly quiet that noises you'd never notice in a city are very audible. A dog barking a mile away, Harleys on the 4-lane road 6 miles away, the bear plodding across the deck - all very audible. Whether that works for you or not depends on you. I don't care for those kind of sounds, but they're infrequent enough to not be much of a problem.
I've been known to take the laptop out on the deck a time or 10. Have to stay in the shade though because the sun's so bright. The biggest hazard is a hummingbird zipping by - scares the crap out of you for a second, at first it sounds like a condor-size bee coming after you.
Then there's the 42 inches of snow we got this weekend...
I use 4 - left->right - a 17" on the Mac Mini, a 22" wide + 1280 'regular' on the winders dev box, then another laptop to the right of that at 1400x1050, all connected up using synergy2 so I don't need to use the KVM switch much.
Fortunately I have a wide U-shaped work area and all this fits in sanely (if barely).
My employer only springs for 1280x1024, so I supply everything but the laptops myself. (Yes, I work from home, and love it- except for missing all the free meals and goodies in the office(s).)
OTOH I get to do dev on Windows, Linux, and Irix.
Part of your data is not quite correct. I'm 52 and started using computers at 14. Granted, it was at a university where they had programming classes for high school students. They had an IBM 1620 that we were free to use almost any time of day... /F
A situation like that happened in my place of employ. A long-standing PITA person - smart, but impossible to work with - was asked by a brand new manager 2 levels above him to provide some documentation and a summary of what he does.
He refused, said "ask my boss". The 2 level up guy said "your boss works for me". The guy still refused.
Next week, the guy was fired. Had been there 18 years. Funny, no one really misses him... /F
While there may be some price plans that allow for free incoming calls or free incoming text messages, the majority of US price plans charge airtime for incoming calls and charge the same for incoming text messages as outgoing - currently 20 cents per message.
You can also typically buy bundles of text messages, with say Verizon charging $5.00/month for 250 text messages (and other options as well)
It means "soon" but in a nonspecific way. As in "we're working on it, honest". Or "Johnny, take out the trash!...OK, mom, Real Soon Now". Could also be used sarcastically.
A little like Duke Nukem Forever, but not nearly so much so.
To my knowledge, initially coined and/or made popular by Jerry Pournelle back in the days of Byte magazine. He'd use the term in reference to someone saying they were working on fixing or releasing something.
Slashdot Mirror
Great... and if you're color blind, you can't work in this language? Ever?
/F
(Me, I'm blue-yellow colorblind, yellow looks blazingly bright, blue is mostly invisible to m)
True, we only learned FORTRAN, using punch cards... then again I was a physics major, not a CS weenie. Those guys were too damned weird... imagine a physicist thinking another group was too weird to associate with.
We did have paper tape available on our KSR33s but it wasn't used all that much. We even had like 3 'glass teletypes' out of about 150 total terminals.
I don't even have a lawn any more.
In the Denver area hospitals are frequently understaffed, but the hospitals refuse to hire many of the available nurses.
In particular the problem is that a significant percentage of new nurses can't get hired because there are policy (and regulatory? dunno) reasons that you can't have too high a percentage of staff being new graduates, due to their lack of experience. So new nursing school grads have a tough time getting hired around here.
My wife (a nurse) is involved in the training and orientation of new hires at her hospital, so she's relatively up on the issues. Also related is that there are some hospitals which are hurting financially due to the current general economic issues - a lot of that depends on the mix of patients and how they pay (insurance, if any, Medicare etc.)
There is also age discrimination for nurses in the opposite direction - my wife has been refused jobs because she's 'too old' or 'overqualified' etc. Not as bad as in the software world but it does exist.
Aside from a few universally hated people like Hitler, we have a tendency to focus on the good in people when they die. ...
Actually one of the biggest eye-opening shocks of my life was in the 70's when I was an American student in Germany living with a German family. They were quite adamant that Hitler had done Germany a lot of good throughout much of of his tenure as their leader.
Remember these were people who had lived through the economic nightmare there after WW-I, then the 30's and 40's. They said Hitler had brought them out of the economic mess, put food on their table, made jobs available etc. etc. And all that is true for the most part.
We tend to focus on the seriously bad things he did... like I said it was a massive shock to me at that time, having been taught only a subset of the entire set of historical events.
Do NOT view this as me agreeing with their viewpoint, merely pointing out that it existed, and in some sad forms still exists.
I didn't attempt to correlate when they disappeared from where with any other factors etc.
1977 was a different time, when information technology usually didn't even involve transistors, yet, and vacuum tube testers (for your TV) were still found at the local drug store.
Tube testers were pretty darned hard to find almost anywhere in 1977 (you could find them in old-used-electronics stores). I do recall testing tubes in drugstores in the early 70's.
Solid state, and even (*gasp*) integrated circuits were in widespread use. Why, by gosh by golly, we even had *8080*'s then.
I was a senior in college in physics+EE; I and a handful of my fellow students managed to coerce one of the EE profs to take a few hours and teach us about tubes (they had been removed from the curriculum). For the most part the interest was for us audio-nerds... tubes had that nice desirable sweet sound... (but I digress)
Sounds great, but...
Cologne? You may want to reconsider that one. How much? If the cologne bottle will last you a period of years with daily application, maybe OK. If it only lasts weeks, or days, that's at least as bad as never showering.
Then there are people with varying degrees of sensitivity or allergy to scents. Some are obvious about their displeasure, others will just think you're a dick.
Nah, I'm as healthy as an ox. I feel just grea...&*)( ^ wgha'ts thayt opain in my armm ow...
60 hours is no big deal, when you love what you're doing. I have had a few times when it was real torture to try and appear to be busy for 40 hours though.
The other point worth making is code quality. My code tends to have less than 10% the average error rate (big company, we track such things). Again, it's all that experience.
Enough yapping, back to slaving (and loving it).
I'm referring to combination thinking/designing/coding, not counting breaks etc. (We were required to track our hours, what a pain). I'm also mostly autonomous and don't have to go to too many meetings.
For you young weenies, I'm 54. Most of you kids can't keep up. (I did once meet a young kid who could wear me out time-wise).
It helps that I've changed industries and roles several times, keeps things fresh.
Hmmm, I wonder wonder why I sometimes get burned out?
My mother was one of the people rescued by the CG in the 1937 floods referenced in the CG article. You can be sure that *I* am glad that she was... I sure wouldn't be here if she hadn't been rescued.
Remember what is crystal clear to you may not be to the guy coming in to clean your mess up in a few years. ( or even yourself as you have learned more and advanced your skills, and have to go back, often with a 'wtf was i doing'.. )
I worked on the same system for 15 years. More than once I saw some code and said "what idiot wrote this!?" ... only to realize it was me, 5 years ago. Yes, that did indeed lead to me becoming a) much less prone to "clever tricks" and b) much much better at explaining what (WHY) I was doing whatever it was.
You kids these days.
Too bad that lawsuits and prosecutions are about winning and losing, not about finding out the truth.
The whole point of the article is to tell what he did with linux when he first installed it.
OK, you want real life events. What I did was to try to port Mallinckrodt CTN software (Central Test Node - DICOM software) - see http://erl.wustl.edu/research/dicom/ctn.html if you're into that sort of thing.
Around 1994, early Slackware IIRC. I got enough pieces of it to work for my immediate needs, which was to start testing DICOM software my company was writing. In those days it was only running on Solaris, maybe Irix, HP-UX... don't recall, it was a while ago.
I haven't had a chance to test drive this, but I'd like to have a house in the mountains with an elevated room overlooking the woods with huge screened windows that open wide. I would open the windows wide ('cept for the winter) and get a slight sweet breeze and hear the sounds of birds chirping.
Funny you should mention... this is exactly where I live (and I work from home), about 35 miles SW of Denver.
Slight kink in the plans... I live at 9500 ft elevation, and it's only warm enough to have the windows open for a couple months of the year. At night they usually have to be closed, even in summer.
There is an adequate selection of birds - hummingbirds, Stellars Jays, miscellaneous robin and sparrow-like species, etc. But the squirrels make more noise than the birds. (They're little black ones about 1/2 the size of a regular squirrel - Abert's squirrel I think they are).
One of the unexpected oddities up here - it's so deadly quiet that noises you'd never notice in a city are very audible. A dog barking a mile away, Harleys on the 4-lane road 6 miles away, the bear plodding across the deck - all very audible. Whether that works for you or not depends on you. I don't care for those kind of sounds, but they're infrequent enough to not be much of a problem.
I've been known to take the laptop out on the deck a time or 10. Have to stay in the shade though because the sun's so bright. The biggest hazard is a hummingbird zipping by - scares the crap out of you for a second, at first it sounds like a condor-size bee coming after you.
Then there's the 42 inches of snow we got this weekend...
I use 4 - left->right - a 17" on the Mac Mini, a 22" wide + 1280 'regular' on the winders dev box, then another laptop to the right of that at 1400x1050, all connected up using synergy2 so I don't need to use the KVM switch much.
Fortunately I have a wide U-shaped work area and all this fits in sanely (if barely).
My employer only springs for 1280x1024, so I supply everything but the laptops myself. (Yes, I work from home, and love it- except for missing all the free meals and goodies in the office(s).)
OTOH I get to do dev on Windows, Linux, and Irix.
Part of your data is not quite correct.
/F
I'm 52 and started using computers at 14. Granted, it was at a university where they had programming classes for high school students. They had an IBM 1620 that we were free to use almost any time of day...
A situation like that happened in my place of employ. A long-standing PITA person - smart, but impossible to work with - was asked by a brand new manager 2 levels above him to provide some documentation and a summary of what he does.
/F
He refused, said "ask my boss". The 2 level up guy said "your boss works for me". The guy still refused.
Next week, the guy was fired. Had been there 18 years. Funny, no one really misses him...
I have a simple policy, for myself and for people who work for me.
/F
If it isn't fully documented, it isn't done. There are no excuses, period.
There's also the Trilogy system.
No, receiving calls/texts is free.
While there may be some price plans that allow for free incoming calls or free incoming text messages, the majority of US price plans charge airtime for incoming calls and charge the same for incoming text messages as outgoing - currently 20 cents per message.
You can also typically buy bundles of text messages, with say Verizon charging $5.00/month for 250 text messages (and other options as well)
What does that mean?
It means "soon" but in a nonspecific way. As in "we're working on it, honest". Or "Johnny, take out the trash! ...OK, mom, Real Soon Now".
Could also be used sarcastically.
A little like Duke Nukem Forever, but not nearly so much so.
To my knowledge, initially coined and/or made popular by Jerry Pournelle back in the days of Byte magazine. He'd use the term in reference to someone saying they were working on fixing or releasing something.