I am not coding for the money ($42K last year) or the prestige (at a state government agency), and I am severely burned out. But not because programming is a dead end job.
Hell, I love to hack...when I get home. My job has become more a place where they issue paychecks rather than the place where I code. Why?
Because of everything else unrelated to coding that I have to fend off: meetings, fickle graphic designers, shrinkwrap software that doesn't work and I end up "supporting," a boss that buys servers by the bushel because we have to use or lose our budget.
In short, I already am a manager.
Besides, at age 29, I cannot see myself with a family (I want one) if I'm spending 8-12 hours in front of a computer by day and a couple more by night to hone my skills. I don't instant message, own or carry a cell phone or pager, or pick up a phone without screening it via answering machine, and I still don't have a life to speak of. I've forgotten what a tit feels like!
Actually, I take that back. I'm growing my own.
I love programming. But it is a solitary discipline in its purest form. Unfortunately, there's too many people throwing their hats into the design process. And then you start coding from specs, and the specs change.
So lately, I'm neither programmer or social butterfly. I could code righteously, but only if there's nothing to code. It's a Catch-22. Yossarian lives!
A lot of vendors we deal with have significantly raised pricing for their support services, and a few others have quit supporting their software altogether. Struggling to stay in the black, a lot of companies are no longer developing and supporting software for the small shops and home office folks and are instead steering their efforts towards the big corporate money.
To which I say fine. Alternatives for most of the stuff we use here, messaging systems, web based stuff, etc. can be found in open source projects or written in house. This is just another golden opportunity for open source software. Maybe my boss will hear my pleas now.
Actually, the Clinton administration put a trade laywer, Sandy Berger, in charge of national security by naming him national security advisor. So, there's a precedent.
When folks first starting using the Net, especially your average computer neophyte, he didn't know his ass from a drop-down box.
Now people not only know the basics of how to surf, they have gravitated toward familiar sites. Sure, there's the occasional search, but most folks have a staple of "go-to" URLs.
Even you geeks. How many of you have bookmarks categorized by topics? News. Sports. Weather. Technical references. Pr0n.
Most University's are adding Windows workstations, but not the servers. You know what students are doing on those Win2k lab PCs?
85%: Microsoft Word (Sure beats tex for the average student)
15%: Telnet to the *nix server to code.
5%: Using in VB for their IS course in GUI design.
University students giving 105%?! Are the seas boiling over?
I work extensively with streaming media, specifically with RealNetwork's line of software. Each of us in my office hates the clients, RealPlayer and especially RealOne. We are considering alternatives despite the fact that our system (we encode & archive in real time an entire legislative body's general assembly including committee meetings and chambers) is designed around Real software.
RealNetwork's playbook is simple: how can we leverage our users with the software we produce. Real software is designed to guide users toward their services more than they are designed to satisfy users' A/V Jones.
I think the viability and interest in streaming media is yet to be realized though. Bandwidth, greed, and poorly written software are problems. I think Ogg Vorbis is a step in the right direction on the audio side. If the same progress can be made on the video side, and we can open up streaming media for good natured developers (read: open source authors), then I think streaming media could be a lot of fun.
Blizzard is not as bad as most game development houses, but I was sorely disappointed by Diablo II. I was hoping for more than the basic hack-n-slash that was Diablo. No dice. Diablo II was more a burden to finish than a pleasure discover.
I'm passing on Warcraft III for the same reason. Warcraft II was okay, but Warcraft III would have to be a quantum leap for me part with my $.
Remove the Carp and Exporter modules from the standard Perl distro? Is a cold front moving into Hades?
Sounds to me like the company he works for is getting taken to the woodshed by its legal department and/or legal counsel. If company's said management knew better, they would realize that pursuing this is futile. Like Compuserve GIF futile. Frauhofer MP3 futile.
To say nothing about the untold benefits his company has reaped from open source development. If a single TCP/IP packet has flowed into or out of his company's LAN, if Perl is utilized, or if some other technological goody with roots in open source development is used there, then those fargin' iceholes need to step off.
This is just another example of how far behind the technological curve (especially regarding open source software) our legal system and legislative bodies are.
Re:Relay-testing
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
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· Score: 2, Insightful
While you have a point about good netizens not repeatedly exploiting bugs in other people's software, I wonder at what point the responsibility should shift toward the developers of said buggy software.
Is it not reasonable for us to ask Lotus developers to "catch up" to the crowd and fix the problem therein? I know Lotus Domino is proprietary software and all, but that doesn't give them a free pass (pun intended).
The scoreboard that way I look at it:
Developers of unstable, buggy proprietary software backed by an ignorant legal system 1, netizens 0.
Who cares about the news anymore? Nowadays, news is no more factual than it is sellable. I mean, look at the cable news channels. Estrogen TV. All of it meant to tug on emotions.
We know all we're going to know about Jean-Bihne-Ramsey (sp?), the little girl murdered by her parents who now live in Georgia because the local police in Colorado botched some things. But rest assured, the news syndicate will continue to drag that fucking story back into the spotlight. Because (and I don't really know why) people tune into.
As television becomes more and more a digital medium, we, the people, should gain a little more control over what shows up on our screen. Imagine being able to watch a cable news channel without tickers, logos, and other screen-saturating graphics. Imagine watching a ball game without graphics for balls, strikes, outs, men on base, down, quarter, yards to go, and even score. Imagine watching game 7 of the World Series without having to know what other people thought about a manager's move in the seventh inning.
It could happen if there were some sort of customization between digital TV signals and your TV set. But it won't happen. That's because TV producers are all about "interactive TV" ever since the Internet starting siphoning away their viewership.
If anything, logos are just the beginning of this trend. Check out MSNBC, CNN, or Foxnews to see where we're headed.
My preference that a bill like this would never have been conceived much less introduced or passed was seriously skewed after the terrorist attacks. I value my privacy a great deal more than most people I know: I don't have a credit card, I opt out of every possible thing I'm aware of, I use PGP, text only e-mail (no image loads in my e-mail thank you), turn off cookies, and more. But I remain pragmatic.
Technology has advanced faster and further than law enforcement agencies have been able to keep up. And as a consequence, the Fourth Amendment that was written over two hundred years ago without a whiff of the differences between open societies and the terrorist cells that exploit them in the twenty-first century has to be challenged. The Constitution is a wonderful, principled set of guidelines for running a republic, but I postulate that the founding fathers by no means intended for it to become our ten commandments. We have to evolve folks. Evolution requires action.
I welcome your scrutiny of our legislative body, because it is well founded. But somebody has to do something to empower our law enforcement agencies to act. After reading the text of the Patriot
Act of 2001 [thomas.house.gov], I feel the Senate and related law enforcement agencies are moving in the right direction. Here's the gist for those that won't read the text: we're stepping up surveillance. We're doing this by hiring translators, improving the sharing of information among agencies, and empowering the executive branch (i.e. President) to freeze assets suspected to support terrorists.
Will terrorists stop trying because of this law? No. Will we be better prepared to intercept and respond to such threats? Yes. Hopefully those of you who spend most of your time in the Slashdot vacuum will understand this.
Compiler that shipped with Redhat 7.0?
on
GCC 3.0.2 Is Out
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
I just did a full upgrade on my home workstation from Redhat 7.0 to 7.2. One of the main reasons was because I couldn't build a kernel from source with the compiler that shipped with 7.0 (gcc 2.96). I learned a valuable lesson: never run a.0 version of Redhat. Hopefully, the next time I attempt to rebuild my kernel, I won't run into the same problem.
So very true. If Max Payne had some kind of multiplayer or random skirmish mode, it would be a top five all-time game. It's pretty close as is though. I'd rather gaming companies shorten their reach and focus on the damn game instead of producing byte wasting cut scenes and the like.
Defect tolerance is central to the science of nanotechnology and addresses the very concern you raised. Essentially, when you're working with stuff this small, you assume that some things are going to be defective. The real juicy idea is writing software for these kinds of systems that assumes a certain amount of defects and works around them. Try writing a garbage collector for that!
I'm surprised no one has asked this question yet (at least that I have found). Why go to Mars? And please don't tell me to examine the "face of Mars" near Cydonia.
Look I'm not against going to Mars. It's just that such endeavors require clear purposes. Next logical step to other stars and solar systems? Fine. Determine the viability for colonization of the red planet and potentially other solar systems? Fine.
Because it is there? Not good enough. I welcome your reasons for going to Mars...
On the other hand, zero-g environments make for easier transport of resources and materials. The toughest, most dangerous part of any mission to space is lift-off, i.e. rocketry. It literally takes rocket scientists, and those fellows don't grow on trees.
As for human physiology, one week in the scope of a long-term mission or colonization is pocket change. However, your observation regarding long term health, namely loss of bone density, loss of muscle mass, and cardiovascular irregularity is right on. We humans have evolved many years to become masters of the earthly domain. Indeed, other animal and plant species are already better suited physically for outer space.
Slashdot Mirror
The Ford team thinks the Chevy team is a bunch of wimps with no HORSEPOWER-POWER-POWER!!!
Yeah, but Ogg Vorbis's sushi in seaweed dish is unstoppable.
Hell, I love to hack...when I get home. My job has become more a place where they issue paychecks rather than the place where I code. Why?
Because of everything else unrelated to coding that I have to fend off: meetings, fickle graphic designers, shrinkwrap software that doesn't work and I end up "supporting," a boss that buys servers by the bushel because we have to use or lose our budget.
In short, I already am a manager.
Besides, at age 29, I cannot see myself with a family (I want one) if I'm spending 8-12 hours in front of a computer by day and a couple more by night to hone my skills. I don't instant message, own or carry a cell phone or pager, or pick up a phone without screening it via answering machine, and I still don't have a life to speak of. I've forgotten what a tit feels like!
Actually, I take that back. I'm growing my own.
I love programming. But it is a solitary discipline in its purest form. Unfortunately, there's too many people throwing their hats into the design process. And then you start coding from specs, and the specs change.
So lately, I'm neither programmer or social butterfly. I could code righteously, but only if there's nothing to code. It's a Catch-22. Yossarian lives!
To which I say fine. Alternatives for most of the stuff we use here, messaging systems, web based stuff, etc. can be found in open source projects or written in house. This is just another golden opportunity for open source software. Maybe my boss will hear my pleas now.
Actually, the Clinton administration put a trade laywer, Sandy Berger, in charge of national security by naming him national security advisor. So, there's a precedent.
I would revise the bill's wording to simply dissolve and disband X10. Adjourn the chamber and call it a session.
Use the above link to delete your Yahoo account. It's the Internet folks. There are alternatives. There are always alternatives.
Your account will remain in their database for 90 days, then poof gone, but the account is deactivated. For what that's worth. Peace of mind?
Now people not only know the basics of how to surf, they have gravitated toward familiar sites. Sure, there's the occasional search, but most folks have a staple of "go-to" URLs.
Even you geeks. How many of you have bookmarks categorized by topics? News. Sports. Weather. Technical references. Pr0n.
85%: Microsoft Word (Sure beats tex for the average student)
15%: Telnet to the *nix server to code.
5%: Using in VB for their IS course in GUI design.
University students giving 105%?! Are the seas boiling over?
RealNetwork's playbook is simple: how can we leverage our users with the software we produce. Real software is designed to guide users toward their services more than they are designed to satisfy users' A/V Jones.
I think the viability and interest in streaming media is yet to be realized though. Bandwidth, greed, and poorly written software are problems. I think Ogg Vorbis is a step in the right direction on the audio side. If the same progress can be made on the video side, and we can open up streaming media for good natured developers (read: open source authors), then I think streaming media could be a lot of fun.
I'm passing on Warcraft III for the same reason. Warcraft II was okay, but Warcraft III would have to be a quantum leap for me part with my $.
Anybody else feel the same?
Sounds to me like the company he works for is getting taken to the woodshed by its legal department and/or legal counsel. If company's said management knew better, they would realize that pursuing this is futile. Like Compuserve GIF futile. Frauhofer MP3 futile.
To say nothing about the untold benefits his company has reaped from open source development. If a single TCP/IP packet has flowed into or out of his company's LAN, if Perl is utilized, or if some other technological goody with roots in open source development is used there, then those fargin' iceholes need to step off.
This is just another example of how far behind the technological curve (especially regarding open source software) our legal system and legislative bodies are.
While you have a point about good netizens not repeatedly exploiting bugs in other people's software, I wonder at what point the responsibility should shift toward the developers of said buggy software.
Is it not reasonable for us to ask Lotus developers to "catch up" to the crowd and fix the problem therein? I know Lotus Domino is proprietary software and all, but that doesn't give them a free pass (pun intended).
The scoreboard that way I look at it:
Developers of unstable, buggy proprietary software backed by an ignorant legal system 1, netizens 0.
And all we ever needed was 16MB of RAM.
We know all we're going to know about Jean-Bihne-Ramsey (sp?), the little girl murdered by her parents who now live in Georgia because the local police in Colorado botched some things. But rest assured, the news syndicate will continue to drag that fucking story back into the spotlight. Because (and I don't really know why) people tune into.
...be a real space marine! ;)
Fantasia -> Minnie Does Orlando
Shrek -> Scrog
Little Mermaid -> Deep Inside Little Mermaid
Just wondering...
It could happen if there were some sort of customization between digital TV signals and your TV set. But it won't happen. That's because TV producers are all about "interactive TV" ever since the Internet starting siphoning away their viewership.
If anything, logos are just the beginning of this trend. Check out MSNBC, CNN, or Foxnews to see where we're headed.
Technology has advanced faster and further than law enforcement agencies have been able to keep up. And as a consequence, the Fourth Amendment that was written over two hundred years ago without a whiff of the differences between open societies and the terrorist cells that exploit them in the twenty-first century has to be challenged. The Constitution is a wonderful, principled set of guidelines for running a republic, but I postulate that the founding fathers by no means intended for it to become our ten commandments. We have to evolve folks. Evolution requires action.
I welcome your scrutiny of our legislative body, because it is well founded. But somebody has to do something to empower our law enforcement agencies to act. After reading the text of the Patriot Act of 2001 [thomas.house.gov], I feel the Senate and related law enforcement agencies are moving in the right direction. Here's the gist for those that won't read the text: we're stepping up surveillance. We're doing this by hiring translators, improving the sharing of information among agencies, and empowering the executive branch (i.e. President) to freeze assets suspected to support terrorists.
Will terrorists stop trying because of this law? No. Will we be better prepared to intercept and respond to such threats? Yes. Hopefully those of you who spend most of your time in the Slashdot vacuum will understand this.
I just did a full upgrade on my home workstation from Redhat 7.0 to 7.2. One of the main reasons was because I couldn't build a kernel from source with the compiler that shipped with 7.0 (gcc 2.96). I learned a valuable lesson: never run a .0 version of Redhat. Hopefully, the next time I attempt to rebuild my kernel, I won't run into the same problem.
So very true. If Max Payne had some kind of multiplayer or random skirmish mode, it would be a top five all-time game. It's pretty close as is though. I'd rather gaming companies shorten their reach and focus on the damn game instead of producing byte wasting cut scenes and the like.
Defect tolerance is central to the science of nanotechnology and addresses the very concern you raised. Essentially, when you're working with stuff this small, you assume that some things are going to be defective. The real juicy idea is writing software for these kinds of systems that assumes a certain amount of defects and works around them. Try writing a garbage collector for that!
Look I'm not against going to Mars. It's just that such endeavors require clear purposes. Next logical step to other stars and solar systems? Fine. Determine the viability for colonization of the red planet and potentially other solar systems? Fine.
Because it is there? Not good enough. I welcome your reasons for going to Mars...
As for human physiology, one week in the scope of a long-term mission or colonization is pocket change. However, your observation regarding long term health, namely loss of bone density, loss of muscle mass, and cardiovascular irregularity is right on. We humans have evolved many years to become masters of the earthly domain. Indeed, other animal and plant species are already better suited physically for outer space.