I suppose it's pertinent again and all, but seriously, I already know this guys, why are we pretending like this is new?
On some level, I'm not sure why i care if it's repeat news. I mean really, repeat it all you want i guess, my life still goes on, but i dunno, journalistic integrity and all that, i feel like we should at least mention that this is a complete copy of an older story.... -Taylor
You ask if jobs are available, and of course they are, its just that every job (theoretically) goes to the most qualified person. Experience is key to that, but you don't even have to find a job to get it. I spend all kinds of time poking around on google or hackaday finding neat things to learn about. I'm a mechanical engineer but i taught myself C# recently (hey, it works) and i can write some pretty useful apps for work now. I taught myself CNC programming because i didn't want to wait to take it as a grad student (and i never ended up graduating). I spent many hours in high school learning how to use basic stamps and build an omni-directional hexapod before i even got to college. My high school was a podunk mountain school with wood shop being the most technical class, but i went out on my own and learned what i need to know.
You should do the same, whatever field it is you want to learn, go practice it as much as possible. Be able to wow interviewers with your knowledge of things that you could only have by trying it, not by hearing about it in a classroom. Of course getting a job will teach you that stuff but a lot of things can be learned at home too, before you have a job. As someone else said, even starbucks is good because it shows willingness to commit, but if you do end up there, you can still get experience at home. Hell, freshman year in college i didn't drink, so most of my friday and saturday nights were spent programming. I eventually got a good social life (yay booze!) but i learned a lot that year.
My junior year i heard about a local place that needed a mechanical engineer, and even though i hadn't graduated, all of my personal experience is what got me the job. I ended up finishing my senior year but i still needed a lot more credits, and i was so burnt out i said screw it, started full time at that job, and now have excellent pay, flexible hours, and a sweet job in general.
Now i have even more experience from what i've done at this job, but i wasn't just sitting around before that, and you should make sure you don't either. -Taylor
My girlfriend's laptop got infected before i knew this was a common virus (i just found that out) so i was searching all over. Most virus scanners and malware programs missed it (trendmicro online scanner, norton online scanner, Ad-Aware) but MalwareBytes found it all and killed it! I was so happy when it worked! -Taylor
So far all the chinese cars that have been engineered in china have been terrible.
They said the same thing when the Japanese started making cars... I have no doubt that Chinese companies could engineer cars to meet US/European safety regulations, but at the moment they mainly sell to their domestic less-regulated market, so they save money by having lower engineering standards. If there's money to be made by building to higher standards and exporting to the rest of the world, then they will do it.
Oh of course. I would never say that a people COULDN'T do it, just that so far they've very much not been making good cars, so new ones should always be looked at with a critical eye. I was mostly correcting the guy who called people arrogant for assuming they'll be crap, when actually it's a pretty reasonable assumption. -Taylor
That high quality American car is packed to the gunnels with Chinese made parts, including engines.
About the only thing that is truely american is the arrogance.
Arrogance? You obviously don't know much about chinese cars. It doesn't matter where the parts are made, but american cars aren't ENGINEERED in china. So far all the chinese cars that have been engineered in china have been terrible. I remember one example that looked like any other common car in the US or elsewhere, but it did so poorly in crash testing it couldn't even manage ONE STAR. It was a deathtrap.
Don't call people arrogant without checking your own ignorance. I'm not saying the car can't be good, but given what has come out of china so far, people have a right to be skeptical. -Taylor
Yes, look at all those sheeple, using stupid buzzwords that everyone else uses so they can feel superior. Good thing you're not just following the crowd, going on slashdot and calling windows users "sheeple"... Oh, wait... -Taylor
They really want to ween people off XP.. Will piracy of XP become more rampant because of the "upgrade" cost to downgrade to XP?
MS is pretty much acting as a monopoly. This is a last ditch effort to see how many followers they still have. I wish i could assure that after this stunt they'll have a lot less, but the consumer only knows of Windows and will be oblivious as Vista will be $150 cheaper than XP
Yes, they are acting JUST like a monopoly. How dare they control the windows market exclusively!. Why they've cornered the market! -Taylor
Santa Cruz is 25-30 minutes from Silicon Valley, I'm really surprised there was seemingly only one competent data recovery firm nearby. Chances are there was more, but the D.A. just didn't find them. Still, i'm surprised that it took two years to find one. -Taylor
What I was told at phlebotomy school (class) was that the finger stick needles we use can only be 2.4mm in length by law. Everybody complains about them, whether that's because a lot of nerves end in the fingertips or they're just weak, unsure. Anything that penetrates the skin will hurt a little bit, it's just a matter of how much it will hurt because of your threshold for pain. Someone into the whole bondage thing won't care, but a child will definitely be alarmed, as well as the parent.
The fingers are, in fact, just full of nerves. I am into the whole bondage thing, and i can take a knife to the back till i bleed, but it still hurts when i prick my finger. -Taylor
I've found that programming BASIC Stamps is one of the simplest things you can do, yet totally reinforces those basic concepts you mentioned. Plus, it lets kids get hands on, maybe making a motor turn or turning on an LED. But yeah, the first kind of programming i did was modifying some BASIC Stamp code from a robot i got at Lynxmotion.com -Taylor
"Great start, not quite there yet (12/10/08 - 16:41 - by Robert B.)
The manufacturer\'s data sheet states 15 minutes output at 270 lumens on high (67 lumen-hrs), or 60 minutes at 90 lumens on low (90 lumen-hrs).
From this, I\'d estimate that on low the device draws approximately 1 watt from the ultracap, with each LED each operating at 0.3 watt at around 100 lumens per watt, with roughly 90% DC-DC converter efficiency.
This is 1 watt-hour from the ultracap.
On high, this device would draw about 4 watts from the ultracap, with a little over 1 watt reaching each LED, given a slightly lower LED efficiency at the higher brightness and a significantly lower converter efficiency, possibly a bit over 75%.
Compare this with two AA NiMH cells (at 3 watt-hours each) that together store 6 watt-hours.
Ultracaps are a breakthrough technology, but the energy storage density is still pretty low, as we see here. It will be a few years before ultracaps become the most satisfactory overall choice for flashlights."
Yeah, I got the idea from seeing that some company sells ultracaps that are the same form factor as D-Cell batteries, so it would be perfect for a maglite mod... If the capacity were there. And if I spend $180 on a flashlight it had better be BRIGHT. If those are only 1 Watt LEDs, you can buy similarly-equipped regular flashlights for $50. I'd rather just buy an LED Mag-Lite and two of those off-the-shelf rechargable battery packs for Mag Lites. I can swap out a charged pack faster than the ultracapacitor light can charge. -Taylor
I had this idea years ago! I calculated out that i could do it, and it wouldn't be too expensive, but it would only last about 15 minutes per charge. I assume they have done better? -Taylor
Interestingly, I wonder if you would have included the ethnicity of the manager if she'd been white.
That being said, I'm glad your wife called the health inspector.
Interestingly, i wonder if you would have said anything if the poster HAD mentioned she was white. Or if you would have noticed. Or if this person had been a man. Or a marmot. -Taylor
That's a little more difficult. Wired capacity you can increase just by pulling more wires. The carrying capacity of the airwaves is fixed by God, and a lot of it is already being used.
The carrying capacity of the airwaves is fixed by God, and a lot of it is already being used.
Seriously? You think we're reaching some physical maximum capacity of wireless transfer? Seriously? That is as silly as suggesting that 340k is more RAM than anyone will ever need, or whatever that original statement was. How many times have we said we are at the physical limit of something, only to come up with something better? I think there are physicists with PHDs 20 years ago that would have told you that current hard drive data densities were physically impossible, because of magnetic interference, etc. We are just cracking the surface on quantum interactions of things. Hell, we don't even know for sure how many dimensions there are in the universe. There will be many, MANY more advancements in physics in the future and i bet we will have gigabit wireless transfer in common hand held devices in the next 50 years, if not 10 or 20 years. Or think about tech a MILLION years from now? There is no physical maximum that we are even close to reaching. Data will be transferred in orders of magnitude never even conceived by man. -Taylor
I cited my 5 Mbit failure as an example of how feeble U.S. Internet access is. I was arguing with a guy who claimed that 100 Mbit was widely available. Getting 10 Mbit would be nice, but even if it were widely available, it still would leave the U.S. lagging.
This is true. But really we need mobile broadband to get faster too. At 10Mbps I am well on my way to filling up my 3TB of HDD space on my desktop as it is. I really want a 10 or 20Mbps mobile connection so i can stream files from home. -Taylor
The power of the Internet to retain acts, deeds, and knowledge for so long is disturbing to me. There are Usenet posts I made 10 years ago that will never go away.
No, i really don't find it scary. Probably just because i have grown up with it, but i know i have forum posts that have been around almost as many years and i don't really care. I think people are adjusting to the idea that this stuff can be permanent, and just changing their behavior accordingly. -Taylor
No, AT&T U-verse is not available in my area. (Ironically, I work for the company that makes the computers that U-verse uses.) And even if it were, that hardly compares with the gigabit speeds available in some countries.
You just said you were hoping to get 5Mbps earlier... 10Mbps, if you didn't know, is at least better than that. But yes gigabit would be nice. -Taylor
Dude, I live in Silicon Valley. I tried to get 5 Mbs, but it wasn't supported, even though I live close to a major business district.
I'm assuming you looked at AT&T U-Verse? I get a rock solid 10Mbps connection. It's actually a 25Mb connection but 15 of it is reserved for cable (sadly, but that's how it works).
I also live in Silicon Valley, in Cupertino. I know U-Verse isn't available everywhere around here though. -Taylor
I see that you have one month of experience in a single sourced proprietary language. You seem to have successfully stumbled through your first program which you have already released to customers, and now you feel confident enough to recommend this language to others. WOW. All I can say is that your program must have been so simple that it took little more than a few lines of code added to the hello world program to make you a success. Your story is just in line with what I hate about Microsoft's approach to programming. It is so Zen, programming without the need to know about programming. If you reduce the problem until it is pathetically simple, then it is not surprising you can write a pathetically simple program to solve it. But here is my question... Did you check any return codes (or enable exceptions)? Did you consider any of the possible things that could go wrong with your program and check for them all? What if the customer's machine is resource challenged? Did you code up the first design that came to mind? If writing code this way is so easy, where is your job security? The next person that comes along with a month to spare can replace you. After what I have said you may think I am an asshole. Maybe I am. You said c# showed no signs of being limited in anything you intended to do... As far as I can tell, c# is good at accessing.net components. The problem is (and this is true of most Microsoft programing) that in the end when you want to actually do something interesting, like accessing hardware, things will become extremely difficult and you will hate everything about managed code. Trusted computing is the bane of existence to real programmers. The day you have two years of experience in.NET you will become overqualified and may never be allowed to work again. I think I have said enough.
Yes, i DO in fact think you are an asshole, as i made it very clear i am inexperienced, on purpose, so as not to lead anyone astray. You seem to think that i don't realize how inexperienced i am but i think i made that very clear. If someone sees that i have one moth programming experience, yet somehow decides to base all their decisions on my recommendation, that would be their fault, not mine, i simply wanted to share my experience.
And my program is, in fact, quite simple, as it is supposed to be a very simple utility. I have no doubt there will be bugs, but I did include some simple error handling, like when the serial port opens, if it fails, it tells the user rather than flipping out. There isn't much else i am doing that would fail, but it's fine, my program does one simple task but it does it very well and it will be incredibly useful to our customers. It is not a "pathetically simple" program, however.
And job security? No shit, if i were hired as a programmer and i started one month ago, i would have very little job security, but why do you even think that is a reasonable explanation? Who would hire someone like that? I'm a mechanical engineer at a company that has only 8 employees. I do all of our mechanical design and CNC machine programming, and my job is extremely secure as i have brought a very good set of talents to our company. I'm only writing software because it turns out i can, and the only other software we have is terrible and old and not very useful.
You say that accessing hardware is difficult, but it's not, it's quite simple. My program interfaces with the serial port to connect with our product, and that can be accomplished in about 3 lines of setup, and then just one line to read or write to it, or a few more if you include error handling. Are you sure you know anything about C#? It's actually a pretty capable language - at least compared to what you seem to think of it. Maybe you should try LOOKING at it?
And anyway, you seem to have assumed a bunch of things that make no sense, and ignored the facts i did put out there only so that you could make some poor and misguided attempt at tearing me down. So yes, i do think you are an asshole, at least you got one thing right. -Taylor
Try it. You'll be soon warning people away from it, too. C# programming is one thing (it's just a language), but the mono/.NET libraries will have you banging your head against the desk before long.
I might have a skewed perspective. When I started working with mono, the big selling point was that we could use all the tools and processes on Windows (our development environment is standardized for the whole company's development department and has years of process development work in it), then deploy applications on our Linux servers (we were even using SuSE). Not so fast. Some of the data access libraries work different (tests that pass on.NET fail on mono). Most of those nifty widgets and reporting tools you're using in Visual Studio won't work at all, because they rely on GDI or other native Windows services/APIs.
We eventually abandoned mono (and.NET for that matter, other than existing production applications), and we are now mainly using Java (it is the COBOL of the 21st century, after all). Deployments on our JBoss servers work exactly the same, whether they are on Windows, or Linux, and so far we have not encountered a single bug that we had to work around because the vendor's response was "Yes, that's a known issue and will be fixed in the next commercial release." (!!)
Fair enough, i could see how all that would be true. Doesn't make a lot of sense to use a software package that isn't even officially supported by the developer of the language, if it's critical stuff. -Taylor
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose it's pertinent again and all, but seriously, I already know this guys, why are we pretending like this is new?
On some level, I'm not sure why i care if it's repeat news. I mean really, repeat it all you want i guess, my life still goes on, but i dunno, journalistic integrity and all that, i feel like we should at least mention that this is a complete copy of an older story....
-Taylor
You ask if jobs are available, and of course they are, its just that every job (theoretically) goes to the most qualified person. Experience is key to that, but you don't even have to find a job to get it. I spend all kinds of time poking around on google or hackaday finding neat things to learn about. I'm a mechanical engineer but i taught myself C# recently (hey, it works) and i can write some pretty useful apps for work now. I taught myself CNC programming because i didn't want to wait to take it as a grad student (and i never ended up graduating). I spent many hours in high school learning how to use basic stamps and build an omni-directional hexapod before i even got to college. My high school was a podunk mountain school with wood shop being the most technical class, but i went out on my own and learned what i need to know.
You should do the same, whatever field it is you want to learn, go practice it as much as possible. Be able to wow interviewers with your knowledge of things that you could only have by trying it, not by hearing about it in a classroom. Of course getting a job will teach you that stuff but a lot of things can be learned at home too, before you have a job. As someone else said, even starbucks is good because it shows willingness to commit, but if you do end up there, you can still get experience at home. Hell, freshman year in college i didn't drink, so most of my friday and saturday nights were spent programming. I eventually got a good social life (yay booze!) but i learned a lot that year.
My junior year i heard about a local place that needed a mechanical engineer, and even though i hadn't graduated, all of my personal experience is what got me the job. I ended up finishing my senior year but i still needed a lot more credits, and i was so burnt out i said screw it, started full time at that job, and now have excellent pay, flexible hours, and a sweet job in general.
Now i have even more experience from what i've done at this job, but i wasn't just sitting around before that, and you should make sure you don't either.
-Taylor
My girlfriend's laptop got infected before i knew this was a common virus (i just found that out) so i was searching all over. Most virus scanners and malware programs missed it (trendmicro online scanner, norton online scanner, Ad-Aware) but MalwareBytes found it all and killed it! I was so happy when it worked!
-Taylor
Mmmmmmm... Braaaaiiiiinnnsss......
-Taylor
(err... I mean Taaaaaaaayyyyyyloooorrrrr)
They said the same thing when the Japanese started making cars... I have no doubt that Chinese companies could engineer cars to meet US/European safety regulations, but at the moment they mainly sell to their domestic less-regulated market, so they save money by having lower engineering standards. If there's money to be made by building to higher standards and exporting to the rest of the world, then they will do it.
Oh of course. I would never say that a people COULDN'T do it, just that so far they've very much not been making good cars, so new ones should always be looked at with a critical eye. I was mostly correcting the guy who called people arrogant for assuming they'll be crap, when actually it's a pretty reasonable assumption.
-Taylor
Haha, thanks for the backup. I think you're right, "deathtrap" is letting them off easy...
-Taylor
That high quality American car is packed to the gunnels with Chinese made parts, including engines.
About the only thing that is truely american is the arrogance.
Arrogance? You obviously don't know much about chinese cars. It doesn't matter where the parts are made, but american cars aren't ENGINEERED in china. So far all the chinese cars that have been engineered in china have been terrible. I remember one example that looked like any other common car in the US or elsewhere, but it did so poorly in crash testing it couldn't even manage ONE STAR. It was a deathtrap.
Don't call people arrogant without checking your own ignorance. I'm not saying the car can't be good, but given what has come out of china so far, people have a right to be skeptical.
-Taylor
blah blah blah blah blah "sheeple" blah blah blah blah
Yes, look at all those sheeple, using stupid buzzwords that everyone else uses so they can feel superior. Good thing you're not just following the crowd, going on slashdot and calling windows users "sheeple"... Oh, wait...
-Taylor
They really want to ween people off XP.. Will piracy of XP become more rampant because of the "upgrade" cost to downgrade to XP?
MS is pretty much acting as a monopoly. This is a last ditch effort to see how many followers they still have. I wish i could assure that after this stunt they'll have a lot less, but the consumer only knows of Windows and will be oblivious as Vista will be $150 cheaper than XP
Yes, they are acting JUST like a monopoly. How dare they control the windows market exclusively!. Why they've cornered the market!
-Taylor
Santa Cruz is 25-30 minutes from Silicon Valley, I'm really surprised there was seemingly only one competent data recovery firm nearby. Chances are there was more, but the D.A. just didn't find them. Still, i'm surprised that it took two years to find one.
-Taylor
What I was told at phlebotomy school (class) was that the finger stick needles we use can only be 2.4mm in length by law. Everybody complains about them, whether that's because a lot of nerves end in the fingertips or they're just weak, unsure. Anything that penetrates the skin will hurt a little bit, it's just a matter of how much it will hurt because of your threshold for pain. Someone into the whole bondage thing won't care, but a child will definitely be alarmed, as well as the parent.
The fingers are, in fact, just full of nerves. I am into the whole bondage thing, and i can take a knife to the back till i bleed, but it still hurts when i prick my finger.
-Taylor
Just get a handful of these eternity lights.
They have some kind of magnetic and capacitor thing that requires no battery.
Clearly you haven't used those before.
-Taylor
I've found that programming BASIC Stamps is one of the simplest things you can do, yet totally reinforces those basic concepts you mentioned. Plus, it lets kids get hands on, maybe making a motor turn or turning on an LED. But yeah, the first kind of programming i did was modifying some BASIC Stamp code from a robot i got at Lynxmotion.com
-Taylor
Looks like you are about right...
From a comment of TFA -
"Great start, not quite there yet (12/10/08 - 16:41 - by Robert B.)
The manufacturer\'s data sheet states 15 minutes output at 270 lumens
on high (67 lumen-hrs), or 60 minutes at 90 lumens on low (90
lumen-hrs).
From this, I\'d estimate that on low the device draws
approximately 1 watt from the ultracap, with each LED each operating
at 0.3 watt at around 100 lumens per watt, with roughly 90% DC-DC
converter efficiency.
This is 1 watt-hour from the ultracap.
On high, this device would draw about 4 watts from the ultracap,
with a little over 1 watt reaching each LED, given a slightly lower
LED efficiency at the higher brightness and a significantly lower
converter efficiency, possibly a bit over 75%.
Compare this with
two AA NiMH cells (at 3 watt-hours each) that together store 6
watt-hours.
Ultracaps are a breakthrough technology, but the
energy storage density is still pretty low, as we see here. It will be
a few years before ultracaps become the most satisfactory overall
choice for flashlights."
Yeah, I got the idea from seeing that some company sells ultracaps that are the same form factor as D-Cell batteries, so it would be perfect for a maglite mod... If the capacity were there. And if I spend $180 on a flashlight it had better be BRIGHT. If those are only 1 Watt LEDs, you can buy similarly-equipped regular flashlights for $50. I'd rather just buy an LED Mag-Lite and two of those off-the-shelf rechargable battery packs for Mag Lites. I can swap out a charged pack faster than the ultracapacitor light can charge.
-Taylor
I had this idea years ago! I calculated out that i could do it, and it wouldn't be too expensive, but it would only last about 15 minutes per charge. I assume they have done better?
-Taylor
Interestingly, I wonder if you would have included the ethnicity of the manager if she'd been white.
That being said, I'm glad your wife called the health inspector.
Interestingly, i wonder if you would have said anything if the poster HAD mentioned she was white. Or if you would have noticed. Or if this person had been a man. Or a marmot.
-Taylor
That's a little more difficult. Wired capacity you can increase just by pulling more wires. The carrying capacity of the airwaves is fixed by God, and a lot of it is already being used.
*COUGH* http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/09/0018241 *COUGH*
The carrying capacity of the airwaves is fixed by God, and a lot of it is already being used.
Seriously? You think we're reaching some physical maximum capacity of wireless transfer? Seriously? That is as silly as suggesting that 340k is more RAM than anyone will ever need, or whatever that original statement was. How many times have we said we are at the physical limit of something, only to come up with something better? I think there are physicists with PHDs 20 years ago that would have told you that current hard drive data densities were physically impossible, because of magnetic interference, etc. We are just cracking the surface on quantum interactions of things. Hell, we don't even know for sure how many dimensions there are in the universe. There will be many, MANY more advancements in physics in the future and i bet we will have gigabit wireless transfer in common hand held devices in the next 50 years, if not 10 or 20 years. Or think about tech a MILLION years from now? There is no physical maximum that we are even close to reaching. Data will be transferred in orders of magnitude never even conceived by man.
-Taylor
I cited my 5 Mbit failure as an example of how feeble U.S. Internet access is. I was arguing with a guy who claimed that 100 Mbit was widely available. Getting 10 Mbit would be nice, but even if it were widely available, it still would leave the U.S. lagging.
This is true. But really we need mobile broadband to get faster too. At 10Mbps I am well on my way to filling up my 3TB of HDD space on my desktop as it is. I really want a 10 or 20Mbps mobile connection so i can stream files from home.
-Taylor
The power of the Internet to retain acts, deeds, and knowledge for so long is disturbing to me. There are Usenet posts I made 10 years ago that will never go away.
No, i really don't find it scary. Probably just because i have grown up with it, but i know i have forum posts that have been around almost as many years and i don't really care. I think people are adjusting to the idea that this stuff can be permanent, and just changing their behavior accordingly.
-Taylor
Oooh, 10 Mbs. Be still my beating heart.
No, AT&T U-verse is not available in my area. (Ironically, I work for the company that makes the computers that U-verse uses.) And even if it were, that hardly compares with the gigabit speeds available in some countries.
You just said you were hoping to get 5Mbps earlier... 10Mbps, if you didn't know, is at least better than that. But yes gigabit would be nice.
-Taylor
I feel like there is a porn joke in here somewhere...
-Taylor
Dude, I live in Silicon Valley. I tried to get 5 Mbs, but it wasn't supported, even though I live close to a major business district.
I'm assuming you looked at AT&T U-Verse? I get a rock solid 10Mbps connection. It's actually a 25Mb connection but 15 of it is reserved for cable (sadly, but that's how it works).
I also live in Silicon Valley, in Cupertino. I know U-Verse isn't available everywhere around here though.
-Taylor
I see that you have one month of experience in a single sourced proprietary language. You seem to have successfully stumbled through your first program which you have already released to customers, and now you feel confident enough to recommend this language to others. WOW. All I can say is that your program must have been so simple that it took little more than a few lines of code added to the hello world program to make you a success. Your story is just in line with what I hate about Microsoft's approach to programming. It is so Zen, programming without the need to know about programming. If you reduce the problem until it is pathetically simple, then it is not surprising you can write a pathetically simple program to solve it. But here is my question... Did you check any return codes (or enable exceptions)? Did you consider any of the possible things that could go wrong with your program and check for them all? What if the customer's machine is resource challenged? Did you code up the first design that came to mind? If writing code this way is so easy, where is your job security? The next person that comes along with a month to spare can replace you. After what I have said you may think I am an asshole. Maybe I am. You said c# showed no signs of being limited in anything you intended to do... As far as I can tell, c# is good at accessing .net components. The problem is (and this is true of most Microsoft programing) that in the end when you want to actually do something interesting, like accessing hardware, things will become extremely difficult and you will hate everything about managed code. Trusted computing is the bane of existence to real programmers. The day you have two years of experience in .NET you will become overqualified and may never be allowed to work again. I think I have said enough.
Yes, i DO in fact think you are an asshole, as i made it very clear i am inexperienced, on purpose, so as not to lead anyone astray. You seem to think that i don't realize how inexperienced i am but i think i made that very clear. If someone sees that i have one moth programming experience, yet somehow decides to base all their decisions on my recommendation, that would be their fault, not mine, i simply wanted to share my experience.
And my program is, in fact, quite simple, as it is supposed to be a very simple utility. I have no doubt there will be bugs, but I did include some simple error handling, like when the serial port opens, if it fails, it tells the user rather than flipping out. There isn't much else i am doing that would fail, but it's fine, my program does one simple task but it does it very well and it will be incredibly useful to our customers. It is not a "pathetically simple" program, however.
And job security? No shit, if i were hired as a programmer and i started one month ago, i would have very little job security, but why do you even think that is a reasonable explanation? Who would hire someone like that? I'm a mechanical engineer at a company that has only 8 employees. I do all of our mechanical design and CNC machine programming, and my job is extremely secure as i have brought a very good set of talents to our company. I'm only writing software because it turns out i can, and the only other software we have is terrible and old and not very useful.
You say that accessing hardware is difficult, but it's not, it's quite simple. My program interfaces with the serial port to connect with our product, and that can be accomplished in about 3 lines of setup, and then just one line to read or write to it, or a few more if you include error handling. Are you sure you know anything about C#? It's actually a pretty capable language - at least compared to what you seem to think of it. Maybe you should try LOOKING at it?
And anyway, you seem to have assumed a bunch of things that make no sense, and ignored the facts i did put out there only so that you could make some poor and misguided attempt at tearing me down. So yes, i do think you are an asshole, at least you got one thing right.
-Taylor
Try it. You'll be soon warning people away from it, too. C# programming is one thing (it's just a language), but the mono/.NET libraries will have you banging your head against the desk before long.
I might have a skewed perspective. When I started working with mono, the big selling point was that we could use all the tools and processes on Windows (our development environment is standardized for the whole company's development department and has years of process development work in it), then deploy applications on our Linux servers (we were even using SuSE). Not so fast. Some of the data access libraries work different (tests that pass on .NET fail on mono). Most of those nifty widgets and reporting tools you're using in Visual Studio won't work at all, because they rely on GDI or other native Windows services/APIs.
We eventually abandoned mono (and .NET for that matter, other than existing production applications), and we are now mainly using Java (it is the COBOL of the 21st century, after all). Deployments on our JBoss servers work exactly the same, whether they are on Windows, or Linux, and so far we have not encountered a single bug that we had to work around because the vendor's response was "Yes, that's a known issue and will be fixed in the next commercial release." (!!)
Fair enough, i could see how all that would be true. Doesn't make a lot of sense to use a software package that isn't even officially supported by the developer of the language, if it's critical stuff.
-Taylor