Something tells me I can do better than simply a dog or a cat.
[This sounds like a sickly competitive statement.]
Dogs and cats have millenia of domestication backing them up. If you want a trainable animal, this seems like a no brainer. My dog knows all sorts of things.
- "Let's take a nap" and Belle runs up stairs. - "MOVE!" and Belle avoids being kicked and gets out of my way. - "Treat!" and she pays more attention to me. - "Truck", "Clancy", "go", and she gets excited to go in the truck to Mom and Dad's to play with Clancy. - "Get in the truck" and she jumps into the back of the truck. - all of the standards, "sit", "down", "paw", "rollover", "stay" - "other paw" and she'll shake with the other paw... = "Outside?" and she'll go to the door if she wants out, otherwise she'll just stair at you. - When let in from outside, Belle used to check out the living room for visitors, not she checks out the high chair for dropped food.
Dogs are only fun when well trained. Training is a physical activity. There is no negotiating with a dog. The dog has to know that it is at the bottom of the pack (below children) and may at times need reminders.
Mixed breed dogs are more robust and smarter. I'd look for a young dog at the pound.
Dogs are also a 20 year commitment, but can be well worth it.
I have a 486/100 linux router (802.11b to ethernet) in the garage. The machine only has a harddrive for booting, then it gets shutdown, an ethernet card, a pcmcia Orinoco 802.11b card, and a video card (it complains and refuses to boot if it doesn't have a video card). The fan in the machine has been going out since January when the RPM of the fan was around 10. Two days ago when the mercury reached over 100 in Indiana (that is with our miserable humidity) the power supply finally shutdown. I removed the fan, blew out the dust and it worked all day yesterday in similar heat.
"All you have to do is put a large screw driver across the cap to test if it is safe to handle."
He never even mentions unpluging the darn thing. See, I'm used to not unplugging many of the toys I play with before I work on them (trains, computers, cars). Following the instructions here could kill me. (Of course, after 18 years of "experience", I am learning to unplug and turn off at the breaker, especially when I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
I agree, teaching someone how things work is great. Implying that working on a microwave is safe with as few instructions as were presented is irresponsible.
I live in the midwest, when common last words are "Hey y'all, watch this." I don't know that we need any more encouragement here.
You see, when I referred to 12 year olds, it was a generalization. Though you may be the smartest 12 year old that ever lived, there are some that wont be nearly as remarkable. Not everyone is above average. Not everyone understands what might be dangerous.
If you open up your microwave with only the knowlege that the previous poster submitted, there are still a multitude of ways to kill yourself. It is irresponsible to ignore that. The standard 12 year old, obviously not someone of your great accomplishment, has less experience in the real world to measure the posting and decide for him/herself that the poster may missed a few of the dangers still lurking in the disassembly of a microwave oven.
I'm sorry to hear about your home life. I hope you develop a support network of friends.
You're trying to do what? Not allow users to one resource on the net, but allow them to others. It wont work. If I can buy a book from Amazon, I can connect SSL to most anywhere and proxy anything I want over that (I am proxying VNC/SSH/HTTP/SSL right now through an extremely restrictive firewall so I can read my personal/business email.).
Would it be easier to replace the workers who are abusing their net privleges with better workers or software than to try to constrain them into a position where they can only do work? (Maybe I'm not the one who should be promoting this...see above activity.)
How does one test against every possible configuration of every possible computer that could conceivably run one's OS?
You design around it. 3rd party drivers are a constraint for MS. Drivers do not have to run in ring-0. Microsoft chose for drivers to run in ring-0 and we pay for it with crashes.
And, in the many years of the open source movement, I have not seen many open source projects that are highly profitable.
On their own. I MAKE MONEY FROM OPEN SOURCE. I AM NOT ALONE. There are thousands of us developers that build systems on open source platform for corporations that are making money.
Look at IGS (IBM Global Services). Imagine how little it would effect anything if IBM opensourced MQSeries. No one can use it without IGS due to the complexity, so IBM would still be making money even if they opensourced MQSeris (and hopefully fix a few bugs too!).
The school I went to would let anyone with the ability and the interest attend. The Alumni had very deep pockets and would help anyone with sufficient interest.
[I think we agree, but you said "I do disagree...", so I'm obligated to defend.]
Rose didn't offer any language courses. Languages were expected to be learned on the side.
OK. Rose taught two languages, PASCAL to freshman in CS100 and a subset of Ada in datastructures. The rest of the classes were taught in a language that you were expected to pickup. AI was taught in a variety of lagages, lisp, scheme, SML-NJ. Programming Language Concepts was taught in lisp and scheme. Compilers was write a compiler in its own language. Many classes like numerical analysis only required that the language you used run on the prof's machine. Graphics had to link with a home grown graphics primatives library.
As close as they got to language instruction was System Programming in C, but that really taught POSIX, not C. Knowlege of C was a prereq.
I've only met two groups in the business community that in general think logically, engineers and lawyers, though only the engineers base their ideas on reality.
If we kill all the lawyers, we'll end up with more marktroids and PHBs.
Which is it? Us breeding these buggers or nature? We created those breeds, just like the new naked breed. Naked chickens aren't any more unatural than any of our other breeds.
Again, where do these wild boiler chickens come from? [HINT: The same place wild dairy cows and wild chihuahuas come from.]
First, maybe we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about software development of complete systems that may be done in a corporate setting, not one off scripts, or web pages, or a java script routine, or an ASP page.
Class is bullshit.. and most people gone through it will vouch to it. Bad classes are bullshit, but I'm not recommending them:-)
Either way, I think its attitudes like the one you presented here that keep the industry deprived, not lack of school. Would you go to a doctor that is learning on the job? Do you get your hair cut at a beauty school? Does your lawyer have a degree? Did your tax preparer learn on the job?
Name any other industry where you can learn it in a book.
I would suggest that you haven't learned it. How many compilers have you written? What designs did you use? Why? You need to know these things to be a good developer. Again, not because you need to implement a compiler, but you need to understand your tools.
try grabbing a large open source package Open source code works great, but evolutionary development results in poorly designed code. I suggest understanding class libraries from the likes of Sun and MS and learning as many languages and environments as possible, you know, kind of like you would learn in class.
Just an opinion of a contract developer/designer/mentor with 8 years professional experience,
90% (or some other arbitrary figure) of developers could not write mission-critical code to save themselves EXACTLY! Why are we continuing the myth that you can become a super programmer without extensive training? You can't. You need experience with the patterns of software development (notice the lower case 'p'atterns).
Just because it does not meet your standards, doesn't meen it's not development. Right. Handing out asprin isn't medicine. Your future coworker here wants to transfer to a programming department. That isn't a one off group. How many of your coworkers should have gone to school, but didn't. We as an industry are producing crap, and it's because of attitudes like this skipping school thing. You have to learn the basics before you can produce complex software.
You can get this from a book. Did you get it from a book? I didn't say you couldn't get it from a book, but I don't know anyone who learns from a book without testing. projects, and peer review like they can from a class.
I've been stitching up cuts on my livestock and giving my children cough medicine and asprin. At work they only think of me as a software designer. How can I break into the medical field?
Going to school is out of the question.
Writing one off utilities is not developing software.
You need to understand how languages work (what is a virtual function in c++), how OSs work, what a thread is, what a btree is and why it is so useful, how a garbage collector works, how your filesystem works, how commen compressions schemes work, how long to expect a user to wait with no feed back or some feed back but no progress indication, how to fill a polygon, etc. You don't need to know all of this because you might have to write it, it is already written, but you need to understand these concepts to expand on them and apply them when appropriate. I have used concepts learned in all the previously mentioned ideas in production software.
I suggest that you find a way to learn the stuff in a structured environment. I agree that a degree is only a sheet of paper, but the learning that takes place in those classes is extremely hard to reproduce working on a helpdesk.
In Ft Wayne, IN, we had to look for 3 months and interview 7 people before we could find a competent Java developer. He has the skills and the training, but not as much experience as we were initially looking for.
We only found him because he was downsized from another company where I work.
/** what are you talking about? **/ public class NAMESPACE1 {
static public class NAMESPACE2 {
static public class MyClass {
public String toString(){ return "hah!"; }
}
}
static public void main(String [] a) {
System.err.println(new NAMESPACE1.NAMESPACE2.MyClass().toString())
} }
I frequently code small standalone apps this way. Everything in a single wrapper class, just one big file.
I don't print money to pay taxes. I make money from corporations; every single dime of my income comes from corporations. Ultimately all my taxes are paid by corporations.
Public school attempts to bring the masses to a basic level. Brain surgeons don't graduate from public school high school into the OR. You benefit from public schools, because everyone else is educated. Everyone needs to be able to read a newspaper to participate in our society (not that everyone needs to read the paper, just have the ability).
[Neither my wife nor I were challenged through our public education, so we are considering alternatives for our children. We are concerned about the odd social skills that some of our aquaintences picked up in private schools (not DaveA).]
Don't think of the CD as a boot device, think of it as a boot rom. It should have the same stuff that the sun rom has (ie, not the kernel or any of the real OS).
It is just a more easily replaced boot rom.
(A floppy would work, but there may be reliability isses.)
Slashdot Mirror
Some of my smarter professors played way too much Tetris back in the day. I'd didn't and almost didn't pass.
Joe
Something tells me I can do better than simply a dog or a cat.
[This sounds like a sickly competitive statement.]
Dogs and cats have millenia of domestication backing them up. If you want a trainable animal, this seems like a no brainer. My dog knows all sorts of things.
- "Let's take a nap" and Belle runs up stairs.
- "MOVE!" and Belle avoids being kicked and gets out of my way.
- "Treat!" and she pays more attention to me.
- "Truck", "Clancy", "go", and she gets excited to go in the truck to Mom and Dad's to play with Clancy.
- "Get in the truck" and she jumps into the back of the truck.
- all of the standards, "sit", "down", "paw", "rollover", "stay"
- "other paw" and she'll shake with the other paw...
= "Outside?" and she'll go to the door if she wants out, otherwise she'll just stair at you.
- When let in from outside, Belle used to check out the living room for visitors, not she checks out the high chair for dropped food.
Dogs are only fun when well trained. Training is a physical activity. There is no negotiating with a dog. The dog has to know that it is at the bottom of the pack (below children) and may at times need reminders.
Mixed breed dogs are more robust and smarter. I'd look for a young dog at the pound.
Dogs are also a 20 year commitment, but can be well worth it.
Joe
I have a 486/100 linux router (802.11b to ethernet) in the garage. The machine only has a harddrive for booting, then it gets shutdown, an ethernet card, a pcmcia Orinoco 802.11b card, and a video card (it complains and refuses to boot if it doesn't have a video card). The fan in the machine has been going out since January when the RPM of the fan was around 10. Two days ago when the mercury reached over 100 in Indiana (that is with our miserable humidity) the power supply finally shutdown. I removed the fan, blew out the dust and it worked all day yesterday in similar heat.
"No harm done to you..."
"...it is easy to work on one"
"All you have to do is put a large screw driver across the cap to test if it is safe to handle."
He never even mentions unpluging the darn thing. See, I'm used to not unplugging many of the toys I play with before I work on them (trains, computers, cars). Following the instructions here could kill me. (Of course, after 18 years of "experience", I am learning to unplug and turn off at the breaker, especially when I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
I agree, teaching someone how things work is great. Implying that working on a microwave is safe with as few instructions as were presented is irresponsible.
I live in the midwest, when common last words are "Hey y'all, watch this." I don't know that we need any more encouragement here.
Joe
I'll need your address too.
You see, when I referred to 12 year olds, it was a generalization. Though you may be the smartest 12 year old that ever lived, there are some that wont be nearly as remarkable. Not everyone is above average. Not everyone understands what might be dangerous.
If you open up your microwave with only the knowlege that the previous poster submitted, there are still a multitude of ways to kill yourself. It is irresponsible to ignore that. The standard 12 year old, obviously not someone of your great accomplishment, has less experience in the real world to measure the posting and decide for him/herself that the poster may missed a few of the dangers still lurking in the disassembly of a microwave oven.
I'm sorry to hear about your home life. I hope you develop a support network of friends.
Joe
After following your above instructions and a short trip to the hospital, my lawyer suggested that I get your address.
/. crowd. Describing working with a microwave to 12 year olds is irresponsible!
Don't overestimate the
Joe
You're trying to do what? Not allow users to one resource on the net, but allow them to others. It wont work. If I can buy a book from Amazon, I can connect SSL to most anywhere and proxy anything I want over that (I am proxying VNC/SSH/HTTP/SSL right now through an extremely restrictive firewall so I can read my personal/business email.).
Would it be easier to replace the workers who are abusing their net privleges with better workers or software than to try to constrain them into a position where they can only do work? (Maybe I'm not the one who should be promoting this...see above activity.)
Joe
How does one test against every possible configuration of every possible computer that could conceivably run one's OS?
You design around it. 3rd party drivers are a constraint for MS. Drivers do not have to run in ring-0. Microsoft chose for drivers to run in ring-0 and we pay for it with crashes.
Joe
And, in the many years of the open source movement, I have not seen many open source projects that are highly profitable.
On their own. I MAKE MONEY FROM OPEN SOURCE. I AM NOT ALONE. There are thousands of us developers that build systems on open source platform for corporations that are making money.
Look at IGS (IBM Global Services). Imagine how little it would effect anything if IBM opensourced MQSeries. No one can use it without IGS due to the complexity, so IBM would still be making money even if they opensourced MQSeris (and hopefully fix a few bugs too!).
The school I went to would let anyone with the ability and the interest attend. The Alumni had very deep pockets and would help anyone with sufficient interest.
Ask the school.
Joe
[I think we agree, but you said "I do disagree...", so I'm obligated to defend.]
Rose didn't offer any language courses. Languages were expected to be learned on the side.
OK. Rose taught two languages, PASCAL to freshman in CS100 and a subset of Ada in datastructures. The rest of the classes were taught in a language that you were expected to pickup. AI was taught in a variety of lagages, lisp, scheme, SML-NJ. Programming Language Concepts was taught in lisp and scheme. Compilers was write a compiler in its own language. Many classes like numerical analysis only required that the language you used run on the prof's machine. Graphics had to link with a home grown graphics primatives library.
As close as they got to language instruction was System Programming in C, but that really taught POSIX, not C. Knowlege of C was a prereq.
CS is not an applied study; CS is a science.
Joe
I've only met two groups in the business community that in general think logically, engineers and lawyers, though only the engineers base their ideas on reality.
If we kill all the lawyers, we'll end up with more marktroids and PHBs.
Joe
don't use those breeds...by nature's own design
Which is it? Us breeding these buggers or nature? We created those breeds, just like the new naked breed. Naked chickens aren't any more unatural than any of our other breeds.
Again, where do these wild boiler chickens come from? [HINT: The same place wild dairy cows and wild chihuahuas come from.]
Joe
Yah, right...Wild boiler chickens have feathers?!?! Wild boiler chickens don't exist.
Those feathers are not important where boiler chickens live (you know, in a barn!).
Joe
If they answer with a list, run away.
Don't go to a school that teaches languages, go to a school that teaches concepts. You can learn the languages from a book.
I am very happy with the education I received at Rose-Hulman, and recommend that you check it out.
Joe
And you thought property values were high in Hong Kong!
Joe
First, maybe we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about software development of complete systems that may be done in a corporate setting, not one off scripts, or web pages, or a java script routine, or an ASP page.
:-)
Class is bullshit.. and most people gone through it will vouch to it.
Bad classes are bullshit, but I'm not recommending them
Either way, I think its attitudes like the one you presented here that keep the industry deprived, not lack of school.
Would you go to a doctor that is learning on the job? Do you get your hair cut at a beauty school? Does your lawyer have a degree? Did your tax preparer learn on the job?
Name any other industry where you can learn it in a book.
I would suggest that you haven't learned it. How many compilers have you written? What designs did you use? Why? You need to know these things to be a good developer. Again, not because you need to implement a compiler, but you need to understand your tools.
try grabbing a large open source package
Open source code works great, but evolutionary development results in poorly designed code. I suggest understanding class libraries from the likes of Sun and MS and learning as many languages and environments as possible, you know, kind of like you would learn in class.
Just an opinion of a contract developer/designer/mentor with 8 years professional experience,
Joe
90% (or some other arbitrary figure) of developers could not write mission-critical code to save themselves
EXACTLY! Why are we continuing the myth that you can become a super programmer without extensive training? You can't. You need experience with the patterns of software development (notice the lower case 'p'atterns).
Just because it does not meet your standards, doesn't meen it's not development.
Right. Handing out asprin isn't medicine. Your future coworker here wants to transfer to a programming department. That isn't a one off group. How many of your coworkers should have gone to school, but didn't. We as an industry are producing crap, and it's because of attitudes like this skipping school thing. You have to learn the basics before you can produce complex software.
You can get this from a book.
Did you get it from a book? I didn't say you couldn't get it from a book, but I don't know anyone who learns from a book without testing. projects, and peer review like they can from a class.
Joe
I've been stitching up cuts on my livestock and giving my children cough medicine and asprin. At work they only think of me as a software designer. How can I break into the medical field?
Going to school is out of the question.
Writing one off utilities is not developing software.
You need to understand how languages work (what is a virtual function in c++), how OSs work, what a thread is, what a btree is and why it is so useful, how a garbage collector works, how your filesystem works, how commen compressions schemes work, how long to expect a user to wait with no feed back or some feed back but no progress indication, how to fill a polygon, etc. You don't need to know all of this because you might have to write it, it is already written, but you need to understand these concepts to expand on them and apply them when appropriate. I have used concepts learned in all the previously mentioned ideas in production software.
I suggest that you find a way to learn the stuff in a structured environment. I agree that a degree is only a sheet of paper, but the learning that takes place in those classes is extremely hard to reproduce working on a helpdesk.
Joe
In Ft Wayne, IN, we had to look for 3 months and interview 7 people before we could find a competent Java developer. He has the skills and the training, but not as much experience as we were initially looking for.
We only found him because he was downsized from another company where I work.
Joe
/** what are you talking about? **/
public class NAMESPACE1 {
static public class NAMESPACE2 {
static public class MyClass {
public String toString(){ return "hah!"; }
}
}
static public void main(String [] a) {
System.err.println(new NAMESPACE1.NAMESPACE2.MyClass().toString())
}
}
I frequently code small standalone apps this way. Everything in a single wrapper class, just one big file.
Joe
I don't print money to pay taxes. I make money from corporations; every single dime of my income comes from corporations. Ultimately all my taxes are paid by corporations.
WTFAYS?
Joe
Public school attempts to bring the masses to a basic level. Brain surgeons don't graduate from public school high school into the OR. You benefit from public schools, because everyone else is educated. Everyone needs to be able to read a newspaper to participate in our society (not that everyone needs to read the paper, just have the ability).
[Neither my wife nor I were challenged through our public education, so we are considering alternatives for our children. We are concerned about the odd social skills that some of our aquaintences picked up in private schools (not DaveA).]
Joe
Don't think of the CD as a boot device, think of it as a boot rom. It should have the same stuff that the sun rom has (ie, not the kernel or any of the real OS).
It is just a more easily replaced boot rom.
(A floppy would work, but there may be reliability isses.)
Joe
5"8' or less before or after the experiment?