There are quite a few interesting posts in this thread, so I just picked yours to respond to. For background, I've been programming for more than 20 years, professionally for almost 15. I started with BASIC, expanded to Borland Pascal, graduated to assembly language, then went on to C, Perl, PHP and am currently immersed in web application development as the department manager.
In the past five years I have been the hiring manager for both in-house product development and out-sourced professional services. I have experimented with a range of programmers including brilliant high-school drop-outs, green college graduates, and hardened industry veterans. Ultimately I have found that a given position needs a developer who is specifically well-suited to it. If I'm looking for new, cool, whiz-bang, the brilliant hacks are great to throw at the job. If I'm looking for carefully considered back-end architecture, there is no substitute for a hardened veteran. In the middle are the production coders who follow orders but don't yet have the problem solving skills or experience necessary to always produce elegant work - and often that's OK: lower pay, keep them busy, deal with problems as they arise, each gains experiential points as they continue.
Two elements that are vital across the board are passion for software development and a penchant for problem solving. I have fired a handful who lacked either or both. As a team leader, my focus is on having the right person on task, not the cheapest one. I don't know if that's a rarity in the management world, but from some of the earlier comments, it's clear that there is a disconnect between what HR thinks and what engineering needs and that gap should be narrowed. Do companies really want 25 developers producing garbage at rock bottom prices, or 8 super-stars at 3x the price - quality over quantity...
PS: The original question is ridiculous to begin with; You're never too old to learn, but understand that learning the language syntax in a week is very difference from having a deep understanding of the problems unique to the environment it is applied to - that takes years, and you just have to DO IT.
This was the first thing that came to mind for me as well, however the next thought was: are the CAM programs actually have any reason to optimize the path? Once an area is machined out, there's nothing to prevent the tool from crossing that same area repeatedly without any cost to the machine unless they are truly designed to minimize running time... (?) I have never worked with CAM software, so just curious...
"Free Speech is something to be valued and not used anonymously."
Frankly, I'm surprised at the number of people taking this attitude lately. It goes along hand in hand with the thinking, "if you don't want anyone to know about it, you probably shouldn't be doing it." I, for one, think people should be less judgmental of situational considerations they are not privy to and just accept that situations do exist which break from over-simplified reasoning.
For example, it is essential to enable expression of dissent anonymously; if what you have to say is certain to anger some folks, then there is a real risk to life and limb. Suggesting that it should not have been said if it was going to bring the speaker harm is a false argument. It would be impossible to bring about change in the face of tyranny if nobody speaks for fear of their lives. There are many places in the world that suffer from this plight, please don't encourage the U.S. to become one of them.
Well there you have it - Americans have invented nothing of interest. Except freedom; they hate us for our freedom. You can take our innovations, but you can't take our FREEDOM! Oh wait that was Scottish...ish.
Puh-lease. Asia and Europe have all kinds of goodies broadly available to the consumer markets that Americans only daydream about. I think that copyright, patent, NIMBY, and the generally sue-happy you-can't-do-that American disposition have a lot to do with why some companies don't even bother pursuing business here. We were innovative when we came up with things like the light bulb, telephone, transistor, velcro, nuclear warhead, etc. but it's been a long time since anything interesting has developed at all.
This should go without saying, but there is a general movement towards dropping the requirement for users to type the (worthless|redundant) "www."whateveryouwant.com into the browser. For one thing it reduces confusion: if your website is www.yoursite.com then your email address should be AnonymousCoward@www.yoursite.com - but it's not: you have to drop the www. in order to deliver correctly. Making the default behavior work based on DNS and/or protocol (port address) whenever possible is widely appreciated. It removes the "www." from google.com, etc.
P.S. - This has been a contentious issue since at least 1997 which was when I tuned in, and it is generally accepted that the "assholes" are the ones on the "www." side:)
For more than one reason, I feel like unless it's the original hardware, it's just not the same experience. Like a replica kit car, or anniversary edition knock-offs of the original action figures.
I keep three boxes in deep storage:
#1) ~70-80 different ISA, VLB, and PCI adapter boards for VGA, IDE, audio, and general I/O
#2) ~10 different motherboards ranging from 286 20Mhz to Pentium 2 600Mhz, and CPU's and RAM to match
#3) ~5 AT power supplies, switches, LED's, leads/cables, and ~10 different floppy/CDROM/ZIP drives
All that plus a single AT chassis to reconfigure my goodies into when the urge arises and I'm set.
One of the biggest motivators for me as a developer actually is the accessibility of the ISA bus for experimentation and learning. You can play around with things on this bus and work at reasonable speeds without necessarily needing an oscilloscope or having to work around all the PCI bus drama.
The spec changed. The implementations did not. Given IE's continued browser market share dominance and lack of support on still prevalent platforms, this can't be done without breaking compatibility. *shrug*
I like IE-bashing as much as the next guy, but the above is false. This is not a problem with IE, it's a restriction of the HTTPS protocol which encrypts the request headers preventing name-based virtual hosts from being an option.
"I'm pretty sure this means you can have more than one webserver/hostname entry, all with the same IP, and use host header names (IIS) or Name-based Virtual Host Support (Apache/others) to determine which site and certificate to connect the user to."
... and you would be incorrect. Name-based Virtual Hosting cannot be done with HTTPS. The reason is that the name of what is being requested is also encrypted in the SSL data. The only way for a web server such as Apache to know what virtual host to use is to look at the name. In order to get the name it would have to SSL decrypt the request. In order to SSL decrypt the request it needs to know what SSL key to use. In order to know what key to use, it would need to look it up in the name-based virtual host record. In order to do that, it needs to know the name... oops.
I thought you were BSing, but I finally found it when I scrolled down far enough. That's laughable/pitiful:
"Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity"
I decided to scrap my long-winded lecture on this topic in favor of leaving only my concluding statement: I see zero connection between the success of natural selection's random genetic mutation based on massive trial and error and an individual's (in)ability to win a chance hand of poker.
"Unless you're writing disc drivers where you need to understand stepper motors (...)"
FYI most device drivers are pretty straightforward and simply require the developer to follow published interface specifications. ATA/ATAPI specifications, for example, have you perform fun operations like seek(long block) and read(long block_start, long block_count), etc. (paraphrasing) where you the application developer don't require any specialized knowledge of the "stepper motors", spindle speed, etc. - you issue the commands, and out comes a response - that's the whole point of having intelligent circuitry and firmware on the disk device. I spent some time in an ATA/ATAPI driver BIOS development prison camp in the late 90's, so have a little experience with that.
In addition to the other comments, you *assume* that 200km can be covered by car in less than 1.5 hours between those two cities - not to mention that the commuters possess cars. I recently flew from California to the midwest and drove back. The flight took 6 hours, including a layover in Minneapolis. I drove back - that took 3 days, driving 14 hours/day. Your implied conclusion that the rail line is impractical relies on over-simplification of the particular situation. I'm all for the development of high speed rail technology, being one who lives in a place that doesn't have any - there are a lot of people here in this "boat" with me...
"Now we have these things called drivers and libraries that do all the basic work for us"
And where do drivers come from, faeries? Unless you want a generation of aging programmers who understand the workings of the machine to die off completely and become reliant on drivers originating from unknown mystical places, the younger generation of programmers MUST learn these things.
I do not think it is a coincidence that computers get faster every year, but my experiences as an end-user are not one bit improved since Windows 3.11. Things still break constantly. Mysterious transient problems. Multi-vendor finger-pointing because NONE of them truly understand the complete working system or want to be responsible for it. etc. etc. I still spend about 30% of my time just *waiting* for my PC to do God-knows-what between certain actions.
It's horrendous, and the problem, in my opinion, is that we have become reliant on "high level" app guys like yourself who just "trust" that whatever is beneath their app is going to do what it needs to magically and that it will all come to pass. And then the apps get heavier, and heavier, and round and round we go in perpetual mediocrity. I've been stuck in this feedback loop since 1989, and I'm telling you it makes me want to just swing a hammer for a living instead sometimes...
Agreed - it's idealism turned unrealism if you think you can take diametrically opposing views and plop them in front of a translation system to breed collaboration, open dialog, compassion, and understanding. I opened a political debate forum years ago with a similar hope: that opposing sides would find common ground through irrefutable factual analysis. While there are a handful of open-minded individuals out there who enjoy this concept, the majority are highly slanted, bull-headed, and offensive and want only to start a fight. I've maintained since then that the people most in need of revolutionary thinking are the ones who are completely unreachable thus making it a wasted effort. Good luck, but don't hold your breath.
Adding to that, the notion that a coax cable is "two wires" just sounds like a mistake to me. There is one signal conductor in the center wrapped by a ground which could be braided wire or foil depending on the type of cable. Trusting the ground for use as a precision signal conductor just seems counter-intuitive, and probably won't have the same conductance properties as the copper wire within...
Again, don't be lazy: just pull cat5 and do the stinking job right. If you want to spend some money, you could even spring for some ethernet-over-power adapters at 50 bucks a node and save yourself some hassle that way too...
I'm not going to argue with any of that except to say this: neither my company, nor any other I've ever worked for, would be willing to turn away big business on "grounds of principle" that they are IT-paralyzed by an inadequate continuity plan. So long as vendors on some level are willing to cater to their customers' deficiencies, their clout will help them stay the course, and all your idealistic ranting will be rendered ineffectual.
Yes, some day it will bite them in the ass, and some day it will cost them more to clean up the damage reactively than it would have cost to competently manage things proactively. But because upper management in the corporate world is often short-sighted with respect to controlling the costs of doing business especially when they see an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" aspect to their working environment, what I described is a reality that just will not go away. Putting the soap box aside, neither I, nor my company, as just one of thousands of vendors working with this customer will ever be able to say something to the customer that alters their momentum. Sometimes if you're hungry for business, you have to do whatever it takes.
One of my customers has 25,000 employees on campuses distributed across 30 countries on 5 continents. They have twenty spoken languages and a massive networked business management web-based software solution that cost millions to customize and deploy, upon which multi-billion dollar business (not to mention all those employees and their families) depends for stability every day of every week. The notion that IE6 breaks (on some asinine Web 2.0, AJAXy, worthless social networking widget which is not useful in ANY business context) is reason enough to justify even consider putting forth the effort and expense to update is woefully out of touch with reality.
... "maybe they figure that if they aren't 1.0 they aren't responsible for bugs or something"...
My guess would be that it's more of a corporate culture thing that leads Google to label their apps as "beta" for so long; their exemption from "responsibility" is specifically covered in their Terms of Service as so:
14.6 GOOGLE FURTHER EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.
The most common solution I've seen for this is a manned gate to the side of the conveyor. Handicapped are manually admitted through the side gate while the rest of the schmucks stick to the transport. The speed-up mechanism was a misplaced half-joke... the only point is that a number of people responding to this article have posted viable options that need not necessarily cost a fortune and could be reasonably implemented - so why wouldn't we? I can only imagine federally subsidizing such installations would offset the costs of running full terminal evacuations and re-screening, angering countless passengers, and costing airlines for the downtime...
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There are quite a few interesting posts in this thread, so I just picked yours to respond to. For background, I've been programming for more than 20 years, professionally for almost 15. I started with BASIC, expanded to Borland Pascal, graduated to assembly language, then went on to C, Perl, PHP and am currently immersed in web application development as the department manager.
In the past five years I have been the hiring manager for both in-house product development and out-sourced professional services. I have experimented with a range of programmers including brilliant high-school drop-outs, green college graduates, and hardened industry veterans. Ultimately I have found that a given position needs a developer who is specifically well-suited to it. If I'm looking for new, cool, whiz-bang, the brilliant hacks are great to throw at the job. If I'm looking for carefully considered back-end architecture, there is no substitute for a hardened veteran. In the middle are the production coders who follow orders but don't yet have the problem solving skills or experience necessary to always produce elegant work - and often that's OK: lower pay, keep them busy, deal with problems as they arise, each gains experiential points as they continue.
Two elements that are vital across the board are passion for software development and a penchant for problem solving. I have fired a handful who lacked either or both. As a team leader, my focus is on having the right person on task, not the cheapest one. I don't know if that's a rarity in the management world, but from some of the earlier comments, it's clear that there is a disconnect between what HR thinks and what engineering needs and that gap should be narrowed. Do companies really want 25 developers producing garbage at rock bottom prices, or 8 super-stars at 3x the price - quality over quantity...
PS: The original question is ridiculous to begin with; You're never too old to learn, but understand that learning the language syntax in a week is very difference from having a deep understanding of the problems unique to the environment it is applied to - that takes years, and you just have to DO IT.
This was the first thing that came to mind for me as well, however the next thought was: are the CAM programs actually have any reason to optimize the path? Once an area is machined out, there's nothing to prevent the tool from crossing that same area repeatedly without any cost to the machine unless they are truly designed to minimize running time... (?) I have never worked with CAM software, so just curious...
"Free Speech is something to be valued and not used anonymously."
Frankly, I'm surprised at the number of people taking this attitude lately. It goes along hand in hand with the thinking, "if you don't want anyone to know about it, you probably shouldn't be doing it." I, for one, think people should be less judgmental of situational considerations they are not privy to and just accept that situations do exist which break from over-simplified reasoning.
For example, it is essential to enable expression of dissent anonymously; if what you have to say is certain to anger some folks, then there is a real risk to life and limb. Suggesting that it should not have been said if it was going to bring the speaker harm is a false argument. It would be impossible to bring about change in the face of tyranny if nobody speaks for fear of their lives. There are many places in the world that suffer from this plight, please don't encourage the U.S. to become one of them.
Well there you have it - Americans have invented nothing of interest. Except freedom; they hate us for our freedom. You can take our innovations, but you can't take our FREEDOM! Oh wait that was Scottish...ish.
Puh-lease. Asia and Europe have all kinds of goodies broadly available to the consumer markets that Americans only daydream about. I think that copyright, patent, NIMBY, and the generally sue-happy you-can't-do-that American disposition have a lot to do with why some companies don't even bother pursuing business here. We were innovative when we came up with things like the light bulb, telephone, transistor, velcro, nuclear warhead, etc. but it's been a long time since anything interesting has developed at all.
This should go without saying, but there is a general movement towards dropping the requirement for users to type the (worthless|redundant) "www."whateveryouwant.com into the browser. For one thing it reduces confusion: if your website is www.yoursite.com then your email address should be AnonymousCoward@www.yoursite.com - but it's not: you have to drop the www. in order to deliver correctly. Making the default behavior work based on DNS and/or protocol (port address) whenever possible is widely appreciated. It removes the "www." from google.com, etc.
:)
P.S. - This has been a contentious issue since at least 1997 which was when I tuned in, and it is generally accepted that the "assholes" are the ones on the "www." side
For more than one reason, I feel like unless it's the original hardware, it's just not the same experience. Like a replica kit car, or anniversary edition knock-offs of the original action figures.
I keep three boxes in deep storage:
#1) ~70-80 different ISA, VLB, and PCI adapter boards for VGA, IDE, audio, and general I/O
#2) ~10 different motherboards ranging from 286 20Mhz to Pentium 2 600Mhz, and CPU's and RAM to match
#3) ~5 AT power supplies, switches, LED's, leads/cables, and ~10 different floppy/CDROM/ZIP drives
All that plus a single AT chassis to reconfigure my goodies into when the urge arises and I'm set.
One of the biggest motivators for me as a developer actually is the accessibility of the ISA bus for experimentation and learning. You can play around with things on this bus and work at reasonable speeds without necessarily needing an oscilloscope or having to work around all the PCI bus drama.
The spec changed. The implementations did not. Given IE's continued browser market share dominance and lack of support on still prevalent platforms, this can't be done without breaking compatibility. *shrug*
I like IE-bashing as much as the next guy, but the above is false. This is not a problem with IE, it's a restriction of the HTTPS protocol which encrypts the request headers preventing name-based virtual hosts from being an option.
"I'm pretty sure this means you can have more than one webserver/hostname entry, all with the same IP, and use host header names (IIS) or Name-based Virtual Host Support (Apache/others) to determine which site and certificate to connect the user to."
... and you would be incorrect. Name-based Virtual Hosting cannot be done with HTTPS. The reason is that the name of what is being requested is also encrypted in the SSL data. The only way for a web server such as Apache to know what virtual host to use is to look at the name. In order to get the name it would have to SSL decrypt the request. In order to SSL decrypt the request it needs to know what SSL key to use. In order to know what key to use, it would need to look it up in the name-based virtual host record. In order to do that, it needs to know the name... oops.
BEHOLD. The Great Conjunction is at hand!
I thought you were BSing, but I finally found it when I scrolled down far enough. That's laughable/pitiful:
" Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity"
I decided to scrap my long-winded lecture on this topic in favor of leaving only my concluding statement: I see zero connection between the success of natural selection's random genetic mutation based on massive trial and error and an individual's (in)ability to win a chance hand of poker.
I know this is tangential to your point, but...
"Unless you're writing disc drivers where you need to understand stepper motors (...)"
FYI most device drivers are pretty straightforward and simply require the developer to follow published interface specifications. ATA/ATAPI specifications, for example, have you perform fun operations like seek(long block) and read(long block_start, long block_count), etc. (paraphrasing) where you the application developer don't require any specialized knowledge of the "stepper motors", spindle speed, etc. - you issue the commands, and out comes a response - that's the whole point of having intelligent circuitry and firmware on the disk device. I spent some time in an ATA/ATAPI driver BIOS development prison camp in the late 90's, so have a little experience with that.
In addition to the other comments, you *assume* that 200km can be covered by car in less than 1.5 hours between those two cities - not to mention that the commuters possess cars. I recently flew from California to the midwest and drove back. The flight took 6 hours, including a layover in Minneapolis. I drove back - that took 3 days, driving 14 hours/day. Your implied conclusion that the rail line is impractical relies on over-simplification of the particular situation. I'm all for the development of high speed rail technology, being one who lives in a place that doesn't have any - there are a lot of people here in this "boat" with me...
Forget TV. Make a solar collector, generate steam, and make a 1-3KW power plant out of it, then show all your neighbors how to do it too.
"Now we have these things called drivers and libraries that do all the basic work for us"
And where do drivers come from, faeries? Unless you want a generation of aging programmers who understand the workings of the machine to die off completely and become reliant on drivers originating from unknown mystical places, the younger generation of programmers MUST learn these things.
I do not think it is a coincidence that computers get faster every year, but my experiences as an end-user are not one bit improved since Windows 3.11. Things still break constantly. Mysterious transient problems. Multi-vendor finger-pointing because NONE of them truly understand the complete working system or want to be responsible for it. etc. etc. I still spend about 30% of my time just *waiting* for my PC to do God-knows-what between certain actions.
It's horrendous, and the problem, in my opinion, is that we have become reliant on "high level" app guys like yourself who just "trust" that whatever is beneath their app is going to do what it needs to magically and that it will all come to pass. And then the apps get heavier, and heavier, and round and round we go in perpetual mediocrity. I've been stuck in this feedback loop since 1989, and I'm telling you it makes me want to just swing a hammer for a living instead sometimes...
"... the abortion pill is comparable to the cost of surgical abortion procedures at $300 to $500..."
Still think reaction "beats the hell out of" prevention?
The fact that RU-586 works with dual pipes more than makes up for the 95% effectiveness rate.
Agreed - it's idealism turned unrealism if you think you can take diametrically opposing views and plop them in front of a translation system to breed collaboration, open dialog, compassion, and understanding. I opened a political debate forum years ago with a similar hope: that opposing sides would find common ground through irrefutable factual analysis. While there are a handful of open-minded individuals out there who enjoy this concept, the majority are highly slanted, bull-headed, and offensive and want only to start a fight. I've maintained since then that the people most in need of revolutionary thinking are the ones who are completely unreachable thus making it a wasted effort. Good luck, but don't hold your breath.
"You'll likely want to simply pull new cable."
Adding to that, the notion that a coax cable is "two wires" just sounds like a mistake to me. There is one signal conductor in the center wrapped by a ground which could be braided wire or foil depending on the type of cable. Trusting the ground for use as a precision signal conductor just seems counter-intuitive, and probably won't have the same conductance properties as the copper wire within...
Again, don't be lazy: just pull cat5 and do the stinking job right. If you want to spend some money, you could even spring for some ethernet-over-power adapters at 50 bucks a node and save yourself some hassle that way too...
I'm not going to argue with any of that except to say this: neither my company, nor any other I've ever worked for, would be willing to turn away big business on "grounds of principle" that they are IT-paralyzed by an inadequate continuity plan. So long as vendors on some level are willing to cater to their customers' deficiencies, their clout will help them stay the course, and all your idealistic ranting will be rendered ineffectual.
Yes, some day it will bite them in the ass, and some day it will cost them more to clean up the damage reactively than it would have cost to competently manage things proactively. But because upper management in the corporate world is often short-sighted with respect to controlling the costs of doing business especially when they see an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" aspect to their working environment, what I described is a reality that just will not go away. Putting the soap box aside, neither I, nor my company, as just one of thousands of vendors working with this customer will ever be able to say something to the customer that alters their momentum. Sometimes if you're hungry for business, you have to do whatever it takes.
One of my customers has 25,000 employees on campuses distributed across 30 countries on 5 continents. They have twenty spoken languages and a massive networked business management web-based software solution that cost millions to customize and deploy, upon which multi-billion dollar business (not to mention all those employees and their families) depends for stability every day of every week. The notion that IE6 breaks (on some asinine Web 2.0, AJAXy, worthless social networking widget which is not useful in ANY business context) is reason enough to justify even consider putting forth the effort and expense to update is woefully out of touch with reality.
... "maybe they figure that if they aren't 1.0 they aren't responsible for bugs or something" ...
My guess would be that it's more of a corporate culture thing that leads Google to label their apps as "beta" for so long; their exemption from "responsibility" is specifically covered in their Terms of Service as so:
14.6 GOOGLE FURTHER EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.
The most common solution I've seen for this is a manned gate to the side of the conveyor. Handicapped are manually admitted through the side gate while the rest of the schmucks stick to the transport. The speed-up mechanism was a misplaced half-joke... the only point is that a number of people responding to this article have posted viable options that need not necessarily cost a fortune and could be reasonably implemented - so why wouldn't we? I can only imagine federally subsidizing such installations would offset the costs of running full terminal evacuations and re-screening, angering countless passengers, and costing airlines for the downtime...