"Do you not see that those statements kinda contradict each other?"
I guess in my mind they don't contradict. My main complaint about the message given by the instructors is that it tends to trivialize the extent of learning a new language. It isn't just syntax and program flow, but standard libraries, other libraries, nuances of the OS, compiler, and other tools, holes in documentation, varying vendor support, etc. There is no way to just jump from one language to another, IMO, and maintain the same level of competence. For example, I would be lost on an IBM mainframe without at least a few months or more of experience learning the ins and outs of the OS, what services it provides for the programming environment, etc. Perhaps the hardest thing is learning how to debug effectively. Most college-level programmers debug exclusively with printf() or equivalent--not particularly useful in many situations.
It took me years to glean all the little tidbits about UNIX that allow me to write efficient shell scripts that use everything from filesystem FIFOs and pipes to sed and awk regular expression hacks to debugging with the OS' utilities and so forth. These things can all also be done in Java, but it takes a little more than a few days to really put it all together.
"Just concentrate on C or C++ for *NIX (or something similarly consistent) and you'll eventually be a guru, able to do anything you wish with it."
See, here's a problem. Most CS instructors will cram down students' throats that if they concentrate on principles they can pick up any language/platform as if it's nothing at all. It's a lie, but that's what they say. This is where this "Ask Slashdot" is coming from--an idealized mindset leading to severe programming attention deficit disorder.
When I was a programmer full time, I tried to ignore the covers of magazines, knowing that it's just hyped up B.S. However, my co-workers would be drooling over whatever Java database framework was released that week (everyone and their uncle was writing Java frameworks!!!) and end up with some twisted mess of undocumented APIs and un-debuggable problems. It was awful. Couple that with high turnover and whole projects would just get flushed and re-done from scratch (again, done badly...perhaps they found a real money tree and didn't tell us?).
Oh, and trash the UML! Simultaneously with writing terrible software, everyone was on some sort of UML pilgramage to Software Engineer Paradise somewhere. Barf!
I would have been in programmer heaven to just do it all in C and/bin/sh, if only to have a platform that someone on this earth documented and understood without v0.00001 APIs and pretty UML pictures that meant absolutely nothing without minutes of explaining.
Has Linux gotten as simple as OpenBSD for firewalls, lately? Last time I looked (couple years back or so), I saw OpenBSD's two or three clear-as-day manual pages and compared that to a myriad of man pages, info pages, and HOWTOs on Linux and just went the (percieved) easy route at the time.
I think Motif is now open source, but wasn't CDE developed by some huge consortium of big companies back when open source wasn't cool? There might be too much legal wrangling in there between rival companies. It's probably better to bet on GNOME in the longer term. I use Sun's GNOME on Solaris Express (aka fetal Solaris 11) fairly frequently, and it is definitly improving with each update and is pretty well integrated. There are some issues with lesser-used utilities, such as some panel applets, but the rest has been pretty solid.
"Credit unions suck as much ass as most banks do."
Well, YMMV. My credit union has some really awesome money market and CD rates, for example, and all my accounts get some amount of interest (enough to balance inflation to some extent). The only downside I've seen so far is that they don't do accounts for businesses, they do accounts only for their members/owners. Businesses have to open their checking accounts at a regular bank.
"we pull in high six figures (in pounds stirling) between the two of us month after month"
"you have to be prepared to work seven days a week, be on call at 4am, and work 18 hour days (minimum), and put up with shit from clients who don't have a clue."
Well, if you live life like an obstetrician, you should expect to get paid like one.
Actually, with my fresh install of Win 98SE plus Office 97 plus Firefox plus GIMP, I don't get the BSOD very often at all. It's all a matter of not installing any software beyond what I actually need, and perhaps I'm lucky that the software I use doesn't cause many BSODs. For basic idiot-friendly desktop, there's Win 98, for everything else, there's Solaris/Linux/BSD.
I run GNOME 2 and Firefox acceptably well on a 300MHz CPU. The main thing is maxing out the RAM on older computers while it is widely available, and old PCs can be useful for a very long time. Now, really old PCs like a 486 or 386 are also not worth running Windows on, either. A couple years ago, I pulled out my old 486 PC to see what it was like, and I couldn't understand why I thought it was fast back when I used it every day. PCs really started shining when they got above 200MHz. A 300 to 500 MHz PC will be useful until it physically breaks down, even for years to come.
Fresh install of Windows 98SE plus Office 97 plus Firefox plus maybe one or two other apps like GIMP does work pretty well. My main problem is that my printer is so old that it is getting flaky and especially needs a new set of rollers (Windows seems to freak out when the printer loses track of the paper, for some reason).
IMO, Windows 98SE is the pinnacle of Microsoft operating systems, because it is pretty simple, doesn't get in the way too much, and is quick to boot when it needs rebooting. It is true that newer versions of Windows have many improvements, but there is way too much baggage they put in there, too. In my personal cost/benefit equation, there just isn't much reason to use Microsoft products beyond Windows 98 and Office 97.
The cutting edge without all the baggage can be found in Solaris 10, Linux distros, and the BSDs. I can install one of these and not feel that there is going to be too many services phoning home, some new and more bizarre DRM, etc., yet they provide the best-of-breed for various things (scaling, networking, security, etc.).
Most of us in the "1st" world are grossly overpaid as it is, for what your lives really require. Take away the 3000 sq ft home, an SUV in the garage, the 40" LCD TV, PS2, etc, etc and you don't really need the $80K/year job.
As far as I can tell, it isn't $80K/year jobs, it's credit. There are all sorts of funky mortgages out there, for example. Balloon payments that can be re-mortgaged when they are due, interest-only mortgages that don't reduce principle, mortgages whose payments start low as a "hook" but go up after a few years, someone even mentioned that there are 50-year mortgages, etc. I was also baffled at seeing six and seven year car loans. It used to be that people would try to pay off their cars early and ride the no-payment gravy train for a while. There's also "no payments until past next year" financing for smaller items (furniture, electronics). The CC company keeps increasing my limit, even when I've never had a large balance, ever. There's also car title loan shops and check advance shops popping up everywhere--they must do a good business.
Children need to learn about cash flow and how loans make banks money. This should be required learning in junior high/high school--before the first credit cards are issued. People are literally pissing away whole years of work for "interest" on small things like cars, beds, and big screen TVs. It's pretty sad.
Re:That this question is even being asked
on
On Point On Slacking
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"American workplaces are continuing to push for higher productivity from fewer workers"
Absolutely. I've seen this at several workplaces (two professional and one factory setting), and the result is burnt out workers and confused managers wondering why everyone is burnt out! The management is seriously so dense that they can't understand why higher quotas are not a motivational tool. I've also seen an instance where management used the wrong formula to calculate labor needs, and laid off people based on that formula. When people complain, the response is, basically, "deal with it."
I know the overall quality of living is higher now than it was 100 years ago (economic growth, mainly), but the overall feeling I get is that we are moving back towards the 19th century in terms of how employees are valued.
Part of the percieved laziness and fatness of Americans is weight gain due to stress. Many people I know are stressed to the limit and wondering why they are unhappy, in spite of being "well educated" and having supposedly "rewarding professional careers".
"a company spending a few hundred mil. building a super-computer might just consider doing the same"
Well, if they hire the typical contractor to do the work, $10 million goes towards the computer, $90 million goes towards a coffee service, and $300 million goes towards per diem.
The result is that the infant is no longer able to project hologram movies. The head still spins, though, so most people won't notice at a distance. The trouble often begins in school, when kids compare their projectors during recess. This leaves the child with a mutation in a very awkward social situation, and, without extensive parental and teacher support, the child can develop low self esteem over time. It is also well documented that children with this mutation almost never work at a movie theatre for their first job while in high school.
Actually, removing the irritant is a cure, as far as the affected people are concerned. The problem is only a problem from my frame of reference, for example, where things like $1 shampoo from Wal-Mart don't bother me. Millenia ago, people weren't washing themselves with such a variety of things as we do today, so it could be that the problem is actually subjecting ourselves to things we haven't adapted to, yet. Humans are quite diverse, and what is true for me isn't necessarily true for anyone else.
IMO, part of many of these anecdotes about some people being sick while living a modern lifestyle are due to them having environments that are so clean or controlled, their immune systems get bored and decide to find other things for entertainment. No germs to attack? That's okay, there's this new soap our host bought last week!
"People will buy the PS3. In fact, a lot of people will buy the PS3. The price is high yes, but not so high that it's pricing people out of it."
After so many parents have bought iPods, cell phones, brand name clothing, auto insurance, digital cable, etc. for their kids, do they really have $800 left for another gaming machine? Or is this going to be another big tick up in the consumer debt levels that are already too high?
If I had $800 to spend on something, and I just had to spend it, a more general purpose PC or Mac Mini would seem much wiser. It seems the new generation of gaming consoles are more high fashion than anything, IMO.
Unless you went up to them and started gnawing on a mysterious stain on the scrubs, the odds of you getting anything off of them is practically nil. You'd be much more likely to contract a nasty flesh eating infection from getting a cut while gardening, stepping on a nail, etc. Even then, it simply isn't common for people to drop dead from gardening. Our immune system takes care of most of these things, and, beyond that, it's all just a game of dice.
If they really cared, though, they'd have hired the worlds leading toroid (donut) expert: Homer Simpson. The fact that they haven't offered top dollar to aquire this level of talent shows they are just milking the contract money for themselves.
Now, when I perfect my interstellar tractor beam and shrink ray, each of us will have a small galaxy powering our homes from an attractive and compact household unit. Why try to make fusion for ourselves, when there is the motherlode only a few light years away?
(Please note that the sentient being rights debate concerning civilizations residing in those galaxies is merely a formality. My tractor beam should be operating...in about five years.)
Another thing to consider is that taking a professional and personal interest in something requires becoming a "domain expert" in that something, which requires experience and/or training and/or super-human dedication. Unless a company is willing to support this effort, a person can find themselves investing way too much personal energy for no guaranteed or even likely gain, especially if that energy leads down a very specialized path. If that specialization leads to a dead end, it results in burnout and the wasteland of being highly trained yet feeling useless (also known as depression).
I think students in high school and college are fed a lot of idealistic B.S. about being some super-cool scientist or whatever, when the reality is that only a person who is deeply in love with a particular field can pull off whatever super-cool thing is being pitched by teachers and parents. That love is what drives that person to make the sacrifices necessary to pull off what they do (and hope the spouse is so dedicated they don't mind that half the couple is missing 100 hours a week).
Is there a way for software running on that CPU to test the CPU for math errors and provide trustworthy results? Seems like a conflict of interest, where the CPU might bribe the software with a little extra cache to give misleading results.
I think the main difference, lately, is scale. Some of the data "misplacements" at the companies listed above resulted in millions of records of data going to mysterious places. That represents a very large percentage of our population. It is nearly guaranteed that every one of us knows someone whose data was not contained, whether they know about it or not. Sort of like nearly everyone carries Toxoplasmosis, but doesn't know it.
It bothers me that if I have an insurance policy with company A, who outsources customer service to company B, who outsources data services with company C, and, if company B or C have "shrinkage", would I ever learn about it?
I don't understand the energy drink fad going around, lately. For starters, they are very expensive. Also, do people really understand all the ingredients? Some of them have stimulants beyond caffeine, which is something people need to educate themselves about before drinking a lot of them.
I know nothing about the drink you linked to. It's just observing people buying $1+ drinks for some percieved benefit is confusing me. If I was going to spend more than $1 for a canned or bottled beverage, I'd go straight for some really good and tasty beer.
I thought White Tea was the least processed. IIRC, white tea is basically dried raw tea leaves (or thereabouts). It's also not more expensive in bulk than green or black tea, but its flavor does take a little getting used to (I like it quite a lot, now).
My best teacher by far was my freshmen English professor. One thing he did was meet with us one-at-a-time for every paper we wrote. He'd make us read our papers aloud, and he'd point out ways to re-order paragraphs, remove unneeded words, etc. He had taught for something like 50 years, and he knew every mistake we would make and how to explain why it was a mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
"Do you not see that those statements kinda contradict each other?"
I guess in my mind they don't contradict. My main complaint about the message given by the instructors is that it tends to trivialize the extent of learning a new language. It isn't just syntax and program flow, but standard libraries, other libraries, nuances of the OS, compiler, and other tools, holes in documentation, varying vendor support, etc. There is no way to just jump from one language to another, IMO, and maintain the same level of competence. For example, I would be lost on an IBM mainframe without at least a few months or more of experience learning the ins and outs of the OS, what services it provides for the programming environment, etc. Perhaps the hardest thing is learning how to debug effectively. Most college-level programmers debug exclusively with printf() or equivalent--not particularly useful in many situations.
It took me years to glean all the little tidbits about UNIX that allow me to write efficient shell scripts that use everything from filesystem FIFOs and pipes to sed and awk regular expression hacks to debugging with the OS' utilities and so forth. These things can all also be done in Java, but it takes a little more than a few days to really put it all together.
"Just concentrate on C or C++ for *NIX (or something similarly consistent) and you'll eventually be a guru, able to do anything you wish with it."
/bin/sh, if only to have a platform that someone on this earth documented and understood without v0.00001 APIs and pretty UML pictures that meant absolutely nothing without minutes of explaining.
See, here's a problem. Most CS instructors will cram down students' throats that if they concentrate on principles they can pick up any language/platform as if it's nothing at all. It's a lie, but that's what they say. This is where this "Ask Slashdot" is coming from--an idealized mindset leading to severe programming attention deficit disorder.
When I was a programmer full time, I tried to ignore the covers of magazines, knowing that it's just hyped up B.S. However, my co-workers would be drooling over whatever Java database framework was released that week (everyone and their uncle was writing Java frameworks!!!) and end up with some twisted mess of undocumented APIs and un-debuggable problems. It was awful. Couple that with high turnover and whole projects would just get flushed and re-done from scratch (again, done badly...perhaps they found a real money tree and didn't tell us?).
Oh, and trash the UML! Simultaneously with writing terrible software, everyone was on some sort of UML pilgramage to Software Engineer Paradise somewhere. Barf!
I would have been in programmer heaven to just do it all in C and
"It has got to be easy to use, web enabled, capable of storing documents and pictures and offer user level security."
Is it hard to set up an office webserver with some sort of content management that everyone can use?
Linux is great for firewalls...
Has Linux gotten as simple as OpenBSD for firewalls, lately? Last time I looked (couple years back or so), I saw OpenBSD's two or three clear-as-day manual pages and compared that to a myriad of man pages, info pages, and HOWTOs on Linux and just went the (percieved) easy route at the time.
I think Motif is now open source, but wasn't CDE developed by some huge consortium of big companies back when open source wasn't cool? There might be too much legal wrangling in there between rival companies. It's probably better to bet on GNOME in the longer term. I use Sun's GNOME on Solaris Express (aka fetal Solaris 11) fairly frequently, and it is definitly improving with each update and is pretty well integrated. There are some issues with lesser-used utilities, such as some panel applets, but the rest has been pretty solid.
"Credit unions suck as much ass as most banks do."
Well, YMMV. My credit union has some really awesome money market and CD rates, for example, and all my accounts get some amount of interest (enough to balance inflation to some extent). The only downside I've seen so far is that they don't do accounts for businesses, they do accounts only for their members/owners. Businesses have to open their checking accounts at a regular bank.
"we pull in high six figures (in pounds stirling) between the two of us month after month"
"you have to be prepared to work seven days a week, be on call at 4am, and work 18 hour days (minimum), and put up with shit from clients who don't have a clue."
Well, if you live life like an obstetrician, you should expect to get paid like one.
Actually, with my fresh install of Win 98SE plus Office 97 plus Firefox plus GIMP, I don't get the BSOD very often at all. It's all a matter of not installing any software beyond what I actually need, and perhaps I'm lucky that the software I use doesn't cause many BSODs. For basic idiot-friendly desktop, there's Win 98, for everything else, there's Solaris/Linux/BSD.
I run GNOME 2 and Firefox acceptably well on a 300MHz CPU. The main thing is maxing out the RAM on older computers while it is widely available, and old PCs can be useful for a very long time. Now, really old PCs like a 486 or 386 are also not worth running Windows on, either. A couple years ago, I pulled out my old 486 PC to see what it was like, and I couldn't understand why I thought it was fast back when I used it every day. PCs really started shining when they got above 200MHz. A 300 to 500 MHz PC will be useful until it physically breaks down, even for years to come.
Fresh install of Windows 98SE plus Office 97 plus Firefox plus maybe one or two other apps like GIMP does work pretty well. My main problem is that my printer is so old that it is getting flaky and especially needs a new set of rollers (Windows seems to freak out when the printer loses track of the paper, for some reason).
IMO, Windows 98SE is the pinnacle of Microsoft operating systems, because it is pretty simple, doesn't get in the way too much, and is quick to boot when it needs rebooting. It is true that newer versions of Windows have many improvements, but there is way too much baggage they put in there, too. In my personal cost/benefit equation, there just isn't much reason to use Microsoft products beyond Windows 98 and Office 97.
The cutting edge without all the baggage can be found in Solaris 10, Linux distros, and the BSDs. I can install one of these and not feel that there is going to be too many services phoning home, some new and more bizarre DRM, etc., yet they provide the best-of-breed for various things (scaling, networking, security, etc.).
Most of us in the "1st" world are grossly overpaid as it is, for what your lives really require. Take away the 3000 sq ft home, an SUV in the garage, the 40" LCD TV, PS2, etc, etc and you don't really need the $80K/year job.
As far as I can tell, it isn't $80K/year jobs, it's credit. There are all sorts of funky mortgages out there, for example. Balloon payments that can be re-mortgaged when they are due, interest-only mortgages that don't reduce principle, mortgages whose payments start low as a "hook" but go up after a few years, someone even mentioned that there are 50-year mortgages, etc. I was also baffled at seeing six and seven year car loans. It used to be that people would try to pay off their cars early and ride the no-payment gravy train for a while. There's also "no payments until past next year" financing for smaller items (furniture, electronics). The CC company keeps increasing my limit, even when I've never had a large balance, ever. There's also car title loan shops and check advance shops popping up everywhere--they must do a good business.
Children need to learn about cash flow and how loans make banks money. This should be required learning in junior high/high school--before the first credit cards are issued. People are literally pissing away whole years of work for "interest" on small things like cars, beds, and big screen TVs. It's pretty sad.
"American workplaces are continuing to push for higher productivity from fewer workers"
Absolutely. I've seen this at several workplaces (two professional and one factory setting), and the result is burnt out workers and confused managers wondering why everyone is burnt out! The management is seriously so dense that they can't understand why higher quotas are not a motivational tool. I've also seen an instance where management used the wrong formula to calculate labor needs, and laid off people based on that formula. When people complain, the response is, basically, "deal with it."
I know the overall quality of living is higher now than it was 100 years ago (economic growth, mainly), but the overall feeling I get is that we are moving back towards the 19th century in terms of how employees are valued.
Part of the percieved laziness and fatness of Americans is weight gain due to stress. Many people I know are stressed to the limit and wondering why they are unhappy, in spite of being "well educated" and having supposedly "rewarding professional careers".
"a company spending a few hundred mil. building a super-computer might just consider doing the same"
Well, if they hire the typical contractor to do the work, $10 million goes towards the computer, $90 million goes towards a coffee service, and $300 million goes towards per diem.
The result is that the infant is no longer able to project hologram movies. The head still spins, though, so most people won't notice at a distance. The trouble often begins in school, when kids compare their projectors during recess. This leaves the child with a mutation in a very awkward social situation, and, without extensive parental and teacher support, the child can develop low self esteem over time. It is also well documented that children with this mutation almost never work at a movie theatre for their first job while in high school.
Actually, removing the irritant is a cure, as far as the affected people are concerned. The problem is only a problem from my frame of reference, for example, where things like $1 shampoo from Wal-Mart don't bother me. Millenia ago, people weren't washing themselves with such a variety of things as we do today, so it could be that the problem is actually subjecting ourselves to things we haven't adapted to, yet. Humans are quite diverse, and what is true for me isn't necessarily true for anyone else.
IMO, part of many of these anecdotes about some people being sick while living a modern lifestyle are due to them having environments that are so clean or controlled, their immune systems get bored and decide to find other things for entertainment. No germs to attack? That's okay, there's this new soap our host bought last week!
"People will buy the PS3. In fact, a lot of people will buy the PS3. The price is high yes, but not so high that it's pricing people out of it."
After so many parents have bought iPods, cell phones, brand name clothing, auto insurance, digital cable, etc. for their kids, do they really have $800 left for another gaming machine? Or is this going to be another big tick up in the consumer debt levels that are already too high?
If I had $800 to spend on something, and I just had to spend it, a more general purpose PC or Mac Mini would seem much wiser. It seems the new generation of gaming consoles are more high fashion than anything, IMO.
Unless you went up to them and started gnawing on a mysterious stain on the scrubs, the odds of you getting anything off of them is practically nil. You'd be much more likely to contract a nasty flesh eating infection from getting a cut while gardening, stepping on a nail, etc. Even then, it simply isn't common for people to drop dead from gardening. Our immune system takes care of most of these things, and, beyond that, it's all just a game of dice.
It's double past tense. It probably means they were running Solaris 8.
If they really cared, though, they'd have hired the worlds leading toroid (donut) expert: Homer Simpson. The fact that they haven't offered top dollar to aquire this level of talent shows they are just milking the contract money for themselves.
Now, when I perfect my interstellar tractor beam and shrink ray, each of us will have a small galaxy powering our homes from an attractive and compact household unit. Why try to make fusion for ourselves, when there is the motherlode only a few light years away?
(Please note that the sentient being rights debate concerning civilizations residing in those galaxies is merely a formality. My tractor beam should be operating...in about five years.)
Another thing to consider is that taking a professional and personal interest in something requires becoming a "domain expert" in that something, which requires experience and/or training and/or super-human dedication. Unless a company is willing to support this effort, a person can find themselves investing way too much personal energy for no guaranteed or even likely gain, especially if that energy leads down a very specialized path. If that specialization leads to a dead end, it results in burnout and the wasteland of being highly trained yet feeling useless (also known as depression).
I think students in high school and college are fed a lot of idealistic B.S. about being some super-cool scientist or whatever, when the reality is that only a person who is deeply in love with a particular field can pull off whatever super-cool thing is being pitched by teachers and parents. That love is what drives that person to make the sacrifices necessary to pull off what they do (and hope the spouse is so dedicated they don't mind that half the couple is missing 100 hours a week).
Is there a way for software running on that CPU to test the CPU for math errors and provide trustworthy results? Seems like a conflict of interest, where the CPU might bribe the software with a little extra cache to give misleading results.
I think the main difference, lately, is scale. Some of the data "misplacements" at the companies listed above resulted in millions of records of data going to mysterious places. That represents a very large percentage of our population. It is nearly guaranteed that every one of us knows someone whose data was not contained, whether they know about it or not. Sort of like nearly everyone carries Toxoplasmosis, but doesn't know it.
It bothers me that if I have an insurance policy with company A, who outsources customer service to company B, who outsources data services with company C, and, if company B or C have "shrinkage", would I ever learn about it?
I don't understand the energy drink fad going around, lately. For starters, they are very expensive. Also, do people really understand all the ingredients? Some of them have stimulants beyond caffeine, which is something people need to educate themselves about before drinking a lot of them.
I know nothing about the drink you linked to. It's just observing people buying $1+ drinks for some percieved benefit is confusing me. If I was going to spend more than $1 for a canned or bottled beverage, I'd go straight for some really good and tasty beer.
I thought White Tea was the least processed. IIRC, white tea is basically dried raw tea leaves (or thereabouts). It's also not more expensive in bulk than green or black tea, but its flavor does take a little getting used to (I like it quite a lot, now).
My best teacher by far was my freshmen English professor. One thing he did was meet with us one-at-a-time for every paper we wrote. He'd make us read our papers aloud, and he'd point out ways to re-order paragraphs, remove unneeded words, etc. He had taught for something like 50 years, and he knew every mistake we would make and how to explain why it was a mistake.