You are right, but how boring would the world be if no one ever pushed boundaries?
I'm a rock climber, kayaker and pilot. I like to push boundaries, but I try to do it with a realistic assessment of my skills and with planning for an out if things should go wrong. Personally, I find that life is much more enjoyable and fulfilling when you challenge yourself.
I was with you until you got here: "I was fine with the United States getting Saddam but the war stopped there...They should have handed the governance and rebuilding efforts at that point over to a conglomeration of willing Islamic coutries."
In the '80s, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan; I don't recall why. That was during the hey-days of the Cold War, so naturally the U.S. starting supporting the Mujahideen who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Finally, the Soviets decided they had sunk enough money and manpower into a lost cause and pulled out of Afghanistan. When the Soviets withdrew, so did we, abandoning our former allies. In the vacuum that was left, the Mujahideen were now at war with the other political factions for control of a country that no longer had any kind of stable government. Needless to say, a lot of people died in the ensuing chaos, and the former Mujahideen blamed us for a lot of that...and they were right, to some extent. Our battle was over -- the Soviets had withdrawn -- but theirs wasn't, and from the bitterness and hatred that resulted from our abrupt withdrawal, the seeds of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were born.
Twenty years later, Bush gets the bright idea to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, not remembering the lessons of Afghanistan. Unlike you, I have reservations about deposing Saddam. Yes, he was a (tm)Bad Dude, and yes, the world is a better place without him, but the reasons for the invasion were trumped up, and that bothers a great deal.
Furthermore, I'm not so sure that a conglomeration of willing Islamic countries with the U.S. providing funding and material support would have made much difference in the occupation of Iraq. In either case, it's still a foreign army occupying the country, and that rarely sits well with the natie population. Furthermore, the problems shaking Iraq right now are largely due to the fact that Muslim != Muslim for all instances. The Sunni and the Shiite Muslims don't like each other. Think Ireland during the '80s and '90s -- the Protestants and Catholics did not play well together. Which flavor of Islam is practiced in Indonesia, Jordan or Egypt? How do you unite the different sects in Iraq? These are real problems, and I don't think they are going to be solved by our current Presidency. The mid-east has been a volatile part of the world for many, many thousand years; the odds of it being calmed any time soon aren't good.
Hmmmm....the Internet portion of CALEA, I believe, only applies to providers of broadband Internet. If the House gets its way, does this mean that only ISPs providing 2MB or better Internet connections need to comply with CALEA?
I could be completely off the mark here (someone correct me if I am, please) but back in the day "broadband" became equivalent with "high speed" because high-speed Internet connectivity was, in fact, delivered using broadband technology. Broadband, as others have already pointed out, refers to networking technology where multiple frequency bands are multiplexed together across a broader spectrum than traditional channels. Dial-up modems used the same channels as voice calls, therefore your copper phone line could either carry a data call to your ISP or a voice call to another person. Along came DSL where a separate frequency band used by the DSL modem and DSLAM was added to your copper line. Cable, I believe, is kinda-sorta like DSL as well, in that multiple frequencies are delivered across a single coax cable, providing multiple cable TV channels as well as Internet connections.
Once people started buying these broadband connections, the term became synonymous with "high speed" even though technically, it would be possible to have slow "broadband"connections. In fact, one of the ISP's where I live delivers a much cheaper "broadband" connection at 128K.
I've had the great pleasure of modifying and/or debugging the sweet, elegant code created by Front Page and Dreamweaver that my wife insists upon using on her web pages </sarcasm>. While I had been interested in using automated tools at one time, the first time I had to wade through all of the extra crap these two programs dump into even a simple page (XML included into a static web page? <FONT> tags surrounding a line of HTML that only contains an <IMG> tag? No formatting for readability? WTF?!?!?), I swore off WYSIWIG HTML editors forever. Now, I do all of my coding by hand in Vim.
In addition, I'm a big fan of HTML::Mason for creating interactive web pages, and I've yet to find a WYSIWIG editor that can generate Mason and Perl code:)
Hmmm..."most of the industry" seems to exclude every car I've ever owned: a 1983 Ford EXP (total crap, but I digress), a 1986 Toyota Celica SL, a 1992 Eagle Talon and a 1997 Eagle Talon TSi. Both the EXP and the Celica broke a timing belt while I owned them, but since neither car had an interference fit between the valves and the pistons, it was simply a matter of replacing the belt, and I was back on my way again. The Talons...well, that's another story. I make sure the belts get replaced on schedule, despite the fact that replacing the belt on them is a real PITA:/ All of which is more or less beside the point: when the performance/efficiency/reliability gain is worth it, adding a more complex system can be a good idea.
Incidentally, while I'm not a mechanic, I do perform a lot of the maintenance on my cars, so I'm not exactly completely devoid of clue. Explain to me again why your post might be hard for me to get?
It's happened to me. I was in a job interview and the interviewer made a passing reference to a piece of information he could only have known about by visiting my web page (music I had posted on-line). He then added "Not that we Googled you or anything."
While I was a little surprised to find out that they had Googled me, I wasn't upset by it -- in fact, I thought it was kind of funny, and in hindsight, I figured it was probably a good idea. And like someone else posted above, it works both ways. You can Google them (both the company, and your future potential boss/coworkers) to make sure the new environment will be a good fit for you, too.
Riiiiiiight. Do you really think that timing belts and chains never fail?
I'm a firm believer in KISS, but when the potential gain from keeping it simple is worth less than the potential gain from introducing a complex system (ECU, for example) that improves efficiency, then it's time to get a little more complex.
Otherwise, we'd all be doing accounting on an abacus and reading this article on papyrus or clay tablets.
I got my start as a sys admin at an ISP that had a group of very intelligent, very experienced admins who had essentially built the ISP from the ground up before it was bought by the company that hired me. The new company was growing and offering business-class services that the old company had never considered, so they hired a wave of noobs like me. After working closely with the old salts and getting the sink-or-swim school of OJT for about a year, management had the brainstorm to divide us up into two (later four) groups: the experienced admins would go into the Network Engineering group in one building and all the noobs like me would go into the Operations group in another building. Unfortunately, this had the unintended and undesirable effect of all but ending the knowledge transfer from the experienced hands and the noobs.
While I believe that having no one immediately at hand to turn to is a great way of building self-reliance and honing your own troubleshooting and problem solving skills, there are a lot of tips, tricks and best practices that seasoned admins know that can make all the difference between being a decent and an outstanding sys admin. The noobs have to learn somewhere, and they have to learn from someone. A really good admin loves what he (she) does, and usually loves to pass that knowledge on to others -- and that's good for the experienced admin, the noob and the company.
Actually, I forgot one option that I've seriously considered from time to time: you already have skills and experience in computer science. How about getting your masters or even a Ph.D. and teaching comp sci at a university? You work nine months a year, and then during the other three months, relax, vacation, or find a job doing something completely unrelated that you love (in my case, flight instructing or kayak guiding).
I've considered the same thing on more than one occasion. Here's my thoughts, for whatever they are worth.
First, think long and hard about leaving IT. The older you get, the better your retirement will be if you stay where you are. Can you tough it out a little longer where you are for an earlier retirement? What does your retirement plan look like right now?
Second, do you really want to leave IT, or do you just want to leave your current employer? I recently found myself getting bored in the position I held, but found a new job with a very fun, very laid back company for more money than I had been making in the old job. In the new job, I get to work on everything from customer Internet connections to core routers, so I'm constantly learning new things. While I had considered a shift out of IT/Telecommunications with the old employer, the new job has renewed my interest in my chosen field.
Finally, okay, so you really, truly, honestly want out of IT entirely, and you can't last long enough where you are at to retire. What are your hobbies? What do you enjoy? I have a couple of hobbies that I would consider pursuing if I were to leave IT. I have been a flight instructor since 1999, so that's one job I would consider. While the pay is nowhere near as good as what I get right now, the job itself is a lot of fun. I also enjoy sea and whitewater kayaking, so I've toyed with the idea of becoming a kayak guide from time to time. Finally, I'm hoping to start on a project to build a cedar strip canoe in the near future. Having never done anything like this before, it currently seems like building custom wooden canoes, kayaks and small sailboats would be a fun way to make a living. We'll see if it still seems like an attractive job option when I finish;) If you have a passion that could possibly earn some income, then that's where I would start looking for a career change. But be warned -- just as IT stopped being fun and became work once you "made it" these other hobbies could, as well.
I'm sorry, but if you rely on this 'creative flow' to program, your programs probably aren't that great.
Nonsense.
I agree with your argument that good programs "are the result of thought, design and effort," but I strongly disagree that disrupting creative flow is not detrimental to well-designed programs.
I frequently write proof-of-concept code while in a state of 'creative flow' -- after taking a period of time to settle in to the job at hand and get the creative juices (so to speak) flowing, a solution or algorithm may occur to me that I had never considered before. I then begin writing code to test my algorithm, and work my way through problems that may not be immediately obvious. This is the point at which disrupting your mental state to look up some arcane syntax causes the most damage. Then, after creating the test code, I begin working on the real design, and at this point, I follow coding best-practices.
There are several valid approaches to software engineering. Each has its own particular strengths and its own particular weaknesses. This one seems to work well for me; YMMV.
Yeah, I'm sure she is the only person who ever got drunk while attending that college. I attended two colleges on the way to my degree, and I never saw anyone -- especially anyone under age 21 -- drink or get drunk.
This statement speaks volumes about the ethics -- or lack thereof -- of Verizon's upper management. Regardless of the legal validity of their claim, someone who decides that it is okay to share my confidential information because of free speech does not deserve my business. I refuse to pay even a penny of my hard-earned money to Verizon.
I've played with Rosegarden a little, and I like it, but I can't say I've thoroughly tested it. One of the things I really like about Rosegarden is that it's just a sequencer--not a sequencer, soft-synth, digital audio recorder, eye-candy-gee-whiz-I-can-take-over-the-world-with- this-software application like a lot of the commercial products. I'm using pretty light-weight hardware (700MHz Celeron on my Linux box, OS-X 400MHz G4 on my Mac), so I don't want a lot of fluff or extra features--I just want to sequence an Electribe-A and a Roland JV-880 from one machine and record on another.
The other Linux audio application I use is Audacity, for recording. Again, it may not be as full-featured as the commercial software, but even on a lightweight box, it works reasonably well--in fact, I prefer using Linux/Audacity to the MR-8 digital recorder I bought a while back.
Slashdot Mirror
You are right, but how boring would the world be if no one ever pushed boundaries?
I'm a rock climber, kayaker and pilot. I like to push boundaries, but I try to do it with a realistic assessment of my skills and with planning for an out if things should go wrong. Personally, I find that life is much more enjoyable and fulfilling when you challenge yourself.
I was with you until you got here: "I was fine with the United States getting Saddam but the war stopped there...They should have handed the governance and rebuilding efforts at that point over to a conglomeration of willing Islamic coutries."
In the '80s, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan; I don't recall why. That was during the hey-days of the Cold War, so naturally the U.S. starting supporting the Mujahideen who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Finally, the Soviets decided they had sunk enough money and manpower into a lost cause and pulled out of Afghanistan. When the Soviets withdrew, so did we, abandoning our former allies. In the vacuum that was left, the Mujahideen were now at war with the other political factions for control of a country that no longer had any kind of stable government. Needless to say, a lot of people died in the ensuing chaos, and the former Mujahideen blamed us for a lot of that...and they were right, to some extent. Our battle was over -- the Soviets had withdrawn -- but theirs wasn't, and from the bitterness and hatred that resulted from our abrupt withdrawal, the seeds of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were born.
Twenty years later, Bush gets the bright idea to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, not remembering the lessons of Afghanistan. Unlike you, I have reservations about deposing Saddam. Yes, he was a (tm)Bad Dude, and yes, the world is a better place without him, but the reasons for the invasion were trumped up, and that bothers a great deal.
Furthermore, I'm not so sure that a conglomeration of willing Islamic countries with the U.S. providing funding and material support would have made much difference in the occupation of Iraq. In either case, it's still a foreign army occupying the country, and that rarely sits well with the natie population. Furthermore, the problems shaking Iraq right now are largely due to the fact that Muslim != Muslim for all instances. The Sunni and the Shiite Muslims don't like each other. Think Ireland during the '80s and '90s -- the Protestants and Catholics did not play well together. Which flavor of Islam is practiced in Indonesia, Jordan or Egypt? How do you unite the different sects in Iraq? These are real problems, and I don't think they are going to be solved by our current Presidency. The mid-east has been a volatile part of the world for many, many thousand years; the odds of it being calmed any time soon aren't good.
Thanks for the clarification :)
Hmmmm....the Internet portion of CALEA, I believe, only applies to providers of broadband Internet. If the House gets its way, does this mean that only ISPs providing 2MB or better Internet connections need to comply with CALEA?
I could be completely off the mark here (someone correct me if I am, please) but back in the day "broadband" became equivalent with "high speed" because high-speed Internet connectivity was, in fact, delivered using broadband technology. Broadband, as others have already pointed out, refers to networking technology where multiple frequency bands are multiplexed together across a broader spectrum than traditional channels. Dial-up modems used the same channels as voice calls, therefore your copper phone line could either carry a data call to your ISP or a voice call to another person. Along came DSL where a separate frequency band used by the DSL modem and DSLAM was added to your copper line. Cable, I believe, is kinda-sorta like DSL as well, in that multiple frequencies are delivered across a single coax cable, providing multiple cable TV channels as well as Internet connections.
Once people started buying these broadband connections, the term became synonymous with "high speed" even though technically, it would be possible to have slow "broadband"connections. In fact, one of the ISP's where I live delivers a much cheaper "broadband" connection at 128K.
Not to mention that the Aurora Borealis is much more interesting, IMHO, than most of what the movie studios release, anyway.
The problem with that is it's kind of like alpha-testing your Enterprise-level software in a production system 8(
Yeah, but can you insert breakpoints or use other debugging tools when writing a legal brief or piece of legislation?
Aw, man...now I've got Windows envy. I wish my Linux PC could downdaload data! (sorry, I couldn't resist!)
mano-a-mano => man to man mono-a-mono => ??? (Although I get your drift)
Absolutely.
:)
I've had the great pleasure of modifying and/or debugging the sweet, elegant code created by Front Page and Dreamweaver that my wife insists upon using on her web pages </sarcasm>. While I had been interested in using automated tools at one time, the first time I had to wade through all of the extra crap these two programs dump into even a simple page (XML included into a static web page? <FONT> tags surrounding a line of HTML that only contains an <IMG> tag? No formatting for readability? WTF?!?!?), I swore off WYSIWIG HTML editors forever. Now, I do all of my coding by hand in Vim.
In addition, I'm a big fan of HTML::Mason for creating interactive web pages, and I've yet to find a WYSIWIG editor that can generate Mason and Perl code
Hmmm..."most of the industry" seems to exclude every car I've ever owned: a 1983 Ford EXP (total crap, but I digress), a 1986 Toyota Celica SL, a 1992 Eagle Talon and a 1997 Eagle Talon TSi. Both the EXP and the Celica broke a timing belt while I owned them, but since neither car had an interference fit between the valves and the pistons, it was simply a matter of replacing the belt, and I was back on my way again. The Talons...well, that's another story. I make sure the belts get replaced on schedule, despite the fact that replacing the belt on them is a real PITA :/ All of which is more or less beside the point: when the performance/efficiency/reliability gain is worth it, adding a more complex system can be a good idea.
Incidentally, while I'm not a mechanic, I do perform a lot of the maintenance on my cars, so I'm not exactly completely devoid of clue. Explain to me again why your post might be hard for me to get?
It's happened to me. I was in a job interview and the interviewer made a passing reference to a piece of information he could only have known about by visiting my web page (music I had posted on-line). He then added "Not that we Googled you or anything."
While I was a little surprised to find out that they had Googled me, I wasn't upset by it -- in fact, I thought it was kind of funny, and in hindsight, I figured it was probably a good idea. And like someone else posted above, it works both ways. You can Google them (both the company, and your future potential boss/coworkers) to make sure the new environment will be a good fit for you, too.
Riiiiiiight. Do you really think that timing belts and chains never fail?
I'm a firm believer in KISS, but when the potential gain from keeping it simple is worth less than the potential gain from introducing a complex system (ECU, for example) that improves efficiency, then it's time to get a little more complex.
Otherwise, we'd all be doing accounting on an abacus and reading this article on papyrus or clay tablets.
Exactly.
I got my start as a sys admin at an ISP that had a group of very intelligent, very experienced admins who had essentially built the ISP from the ground up before it was bought by the company that hired me. The new company was growing and offering business-class services that the old company had never considered, so they hired a wave of noobs like me. After working closely with the old salts and getting the sink-or-swim school of OJT for about a year, management had the brainstorm to divide us up into two (later four) groups: the experienced admins would go into the Network Engineering group in one building and all the noobs like me would go into the Operations group in another building. Unfortunately, this had the unintended and undesirable effect of all but ending the knowledge transfer from the experienced hands and the noobs.
While I believe that having no one immediately at hand to turn to is a great way of building self-reliance and honing your own troubleshooting and problem solving skills, there are a lot of tips, tricks and best practices that seasoned admins know that can make all the difference between being a decent and an outstanding sys admin. The noobs have to learn somewhere, and they have to learn from someone. A really good admin loves what he (she) does, and usually loves to pass that knowledge on to others -- and that's good for the experienced admin, the noob and the company.
Actually, I forgot one option that I've seriously considered from time to time: you already have skills and experience in computer science. How about getting your masters or even a Ph.D. and teaching comp sci at a university? You work nine months a year, and then during the other three months, relax, vacation, or find a job doing something completely unrelated that you love (in my case, flight instructing or kayak guiding).
I've considered the same thing on more than one occasion. Here's my thoughts, for whatever they are worth.
;) If you have a passion that could possibly earn some income, then that's where I would start looking for a career change. But be warned -- just as IT stopped being fun and became work once you "made it" these other hobbies could, as well.
First, think long and hard about leaving IT. The older you get, the better your retirement will be if you stay where you are. Can you tough it out a little longer where you are for an earlier retirement? What does your retirement plan look like right now?
Second, do you really want to leave IT, or do you just want to leave your current employer? I recently found myself getting bored in the position I held, but found a new job with a very fun, very laid back company for more money than I had been making in the old job. In the new job, I get to work on everything from customer Internet connections to core routers, so I'm constantly learning new things. While I had considered a shift out of IT/Telecommunications with the old employer, the new job has renewed my interest in my chosen field.
Finally, okay, so you really, truly, honestly want out of IT entirely, and you can't last long enough where you are at to retire. What are your hobbies? What do you enjoy? I have a couple of hobbies that I would consider pursuing if I were to leave IT. I have been a flight instructor since 1999, so that's one job I would consider. While the pay is nowhere near as good as what I get right now, the job itself is a lot of fun. I also enjoy sea and whitewater kayaking, so I've toyed with the idea of becoming a kayak guide from time to time. Finally, I'm hoping to start on a project to build a cedar strip canoe in the near future. Having never done anything like this before, it currently seems like building custom wooden canoes, kayaks and small sailboats would be a fun way to make a living. We'll see if it still seems like an attractive job option when I finish
Nonsense.
I agree with your argument that good programs "are the result of thought, design and effort," but I strongly disagree that disrupting creative flow is not detrimental to well-designed programs.
I frequently write proof-of-concept code while in a state of 'creative flow' -- after taking a period of time to settle in to the job at hand and get the creative juices (so to speak) flowing, a solution or algorithm may occur to me that I had never considered before. I then begin writing code to test my algorithm, and work my way through problems that may not be immediately obvious. This is the point at which disrupting your mental state to look up some arcane syntax causes the most damage. Then, after creating the test code, I begin working on the real design, and at this point, I follow coding best-practices.
There are several valid approaches to software engineering. Each has its own particular strengths and its own particular weaknesses. This one seems to work well for me; YMMV.
Unlike all of the other laws passed in the last six years? Well, most anyway. There might be one law I haven't heard of that makes sense. Nah...
...404 (dec) or 0x194 as my own personal, copyrighted, DMCA'd number.
All of you using the number 404 on your web servers must cease and desist immediately!
Yeah, I'm sure she is the only person who ever got drunk while attending that college. I attended two colleges on the way to my degree, and I never saw anyone -- especially anyone under age 21 -- drink or get drunk.
Oh, wait.....
This statement speaks volumes about the ethics -- or lack thereof -- of Verizon's upper management. Regardless of the legal validity of their claim, someone who decides that it is okay to share my confidential information because of free speech does not deserve my business. I refuse to pay even a penny of my hard-earned money to Verizon.
Enlighten me.
Better watch out -- borders and national sovereignty apparently don't mean anything any more: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/07/01 44241
I've played with Rosegarden a little, and I like it, but I can't say I've thoroughly tested it. One of the things I really like about Rosegarden is that it's just a sequencer--not a sequencer, soft-synth, digital audio recorder, eye-candy-gee-whiz-I-can-take-over-the-world-with- this-software application like a lot of the commercial products. I'm using pretty light-weight hardware (700MHz Celeron on my Linux box, OS-X 400MHz G4 on my Mac), so I don't want a lot of fluff or extra features--I just want to sequence an Electribe-A and a Roland JV-880 from one machine and record on another.
The other Linux audio application I use is Audacity, for recording. Again, it may not be as full-featured as the commercial software, but even on a lightweight box, it works reasonably well--in fact, I prefer using Linux/Audacity to the MR-8 digital recorder I bought a while back.
YMMV.