Anyway, am I the only person who worries that bitching about outsourcing is just setting ourselves up for a bigger fall in the future? It looks just like the cliche of bitching about machinery replacing manufacturing jobs, where the jobs stay a few years and then the whole factory shuts down and moves to Malaysia, leaving the old factory town 100% screwed instead of just a few workers. Or, worse, the whole industry gets screwed as foreign companies compete using both machinery and very cheap labor, as happened to the US auto industry.
The students are getting treats a lot more than you think -- all the students pressing "B" are getting the thought-treat "I'm screwing this dude's research up...uh huhuhuhuh..."
You joke, but I do recall a few years back when it was discovered that prehistoric man did brain surgery using stone tools. They found the tools and skulls with healed repairs. A quick googling returns http://www.brain-surgery.com/history.html -- maybe somebody can cite better sites.
Didn't you know? "A combination of de-duplication and calculating and storing only the changes between similar byte streams" IS a breakthrough. No previous compression algorithm ever did that sort of thing before...
The good thing about OSS is that Theo doesn't have to give any permission for a fork to happen.
Yes, but the good thing about OpenSSH is that Theo and gang are the coders who maintain it.
FreeBSD seems the be the mainstream, easiest to install BSD. NetBSD is the most portable. Open is the most secure. Why not merge all three?
Huh? That's like saying why not merge Ubuntu, Fedora, and SuSE...
What is it about the level of security of Open prevents it from being mainstream and easy to install?
It's so secure because every single line of code is extensively audited. To do so, it's necessary to keep the code base small and not have to make it compatible with every person and computer under the sun.
What is it about NetBSD that makes it so easy to port to toasters?
It's the developers who spend their time making code more portable (rather than making it more secure), and the donated toasters.
I would love to get into the BSDs but they seem far less "friendly" than the Linux community.
AFAIK, FreeBSD is pretty friendly, as well as DesktopBSD.
Well, if you want something that's a little more threatening (even in context), how about these quotes:
"Microsoft is recruiting two 'feet on the street' personnel whose role will be to provide proactive assistance during customer visits, and help you get the value proposition for pre-installed software and related services. Give us a call and let's get those feet walking," Alexander wrote. [...] "There will be a concern if we see an increase in businesses selling PCs without Windows and piracy goes into the sky," said Alexander
that's how people perceive the words 'pirate' and 'piracy'. [...]They think of the guy with the pegleg and the buried treasure.
Actually, I think of a guy with a pegleg and a beard which are both fake and exposed by Scooby Doo and his human pals. He generally will then say "...and I would've gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids!".
There was an episode of The Man Show with a fake commercial for a porn-removal-on-death service...but a half-assed effort doesn't produce any google results that look like it. Oh well.
Parent, GP, and GGP: Sorry, the car already exists, and it IS software controlled, and the software DOES operate when you're on the highway. The GM full size pickups (and possibly the full size SUVs) are available with Quadrasteer, which is software controlled electric-actuated rear wheel steering. Depending on the context, it will turn the rear wheels parallel or perpendicular to the front wheels. If I had that on my GMC, I'd hack it so I could manually control it...Well, maybe my next truck.
Like the GP, I never have to parallel park. I live in a rural area with a yard large enough to park 100 cars. I parallel park my 26 foot travel trailer in my yard (there's this nice nook in the woods just past the end of my driveway and even with the side of it, exactly the shape and size of the trailer; I back up until the trailer bumper hits the big rock sticking out of the ground) more often than I parallel park my pickup anywhere.
Oh yeah, and I'm lucky enough to work in a similar area, although the commute is some 45 minutes on country two-lane highways. Lots of dicey passing, no parallel parking. As somebody who lives in a busy area, I imagine you have lots of extra lanes anywhere that you'd try to pass somebody, and don't get a lot of practice passing in the oncoming-traffic-lane.
The only time I have to parallel park the big honkin' truck is when I venture into the city, usually to deal with government-related bullschitt like getting a copy of my birth certificate or some such.
That said, I'm still pretty good at it, although I was better at it when I took my driving test (which, as it turned out, didn't include any parallel parking at all) as I had practiced a lot at the time.
It is simple as this. If OpenBSD is running out of money then it is the fault of the person responsible for fund raising. OpenSSH is every bit as useful as Apache, GIMP, or any number of other OSS projects that seem to be doing much better as far as fund raising.
Well said.
As of now I just happen to feel that OpenSSH is more important to more people than OpenBSD. It almost seems like Theo is trying to say save OpenBSD or OpenSSH will go away.
That is exactly what is going on; and for good reason -- OpenSSH is, in fact, a component of OpenBSD. It is planned, conceived, and developed specifically for that purpose and by the exact same developers as OpenBSD, AFAIK.
It would seem that OpenSSH could find enough support so that it's development would continue if it was free of OpenBSD. It costs a lot more to develop OpenBSD than OpenSSH and for most users offers little to no return since OpenBSDs user-base is a tiny fraction of OpenSSHs.
This would require OpenSSH to fork, or the developers (including Theo) to suddenly decide that they don't like working on OpenBSD but do enjoy working on OpenSSH. So, like I said, it would require OpenSSH to fork...;)
OpenBSD is a decent idea and is worth keeping around...it's just that the rest of us only care for that one piece of it.
If you can come up with a tool or toolset to allow you to set up conversion templates from any format to any format, and sell it cheap, you could make a fortune. [...] It isn't glamorous or anything, but it is something that companies pay for, and would make a good project to enhance your skills.
Now THAT sounds like a good suggestion. It sounds like something difficult, but not so terribly intimidating that new coders can't do it. While your whole post seems to be about making money, I'd be willing to try something like this as an open source project. In that format, it may look better on the resume -- and prospective employers can easily and quickly look at your actual code.
If you felt like you needed to, you could make money on it by offering to write open source plugins for it, for companies that have some oddball format that you haven't written yet.
if you did what Peoplesoft (Oracle, now) does, and you did it better, and cheaper, you would have people beating down your door. Once again, this isn't glamorous or sexy software, but companies pay for it through the nose.
Egads, man! I don't propose to speak for Austin, but that sounds like one hell of a tall order for a programmer whose biggest project to date was probably a bicycle gear calculator with a GUI for a 5th-credit C++ course.
You do seem to have a good idea of what's missing out there...got any more suggestions? Maybe you can hit something else that would be useful for somebody like myself or Austin.
I have pretty much the same issue as Austin (the asker) -- it's very hard to get motivated to write something that already exists and doesn't suck; and it's hard to dig in to a big, scary open source project. I think I remember a similar Ask Slashdot recently, to which I probably posted a message similar to this one; and shortly before that, I spent a couple days drilling down in old Ask Slashdots for this information, too.
The problem with contributing to an open source project is that they tend of have any or all of the following pieces of intimidation:
-humongous size (OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc); this is usually coupled with:
-hard to determine what's an easy piece to work on -- you look in the bug tracker and see a lot of stuff that looks really hard because it's usually:
-too deep or advanced -- whether it's a bug from a big project, or it's a small project that's not already done, the work to do is generally something involving scary system calls that mess with your flash BIOS, or maybe involving some obscure algorithm for changing the sound shaping of vbr mp3s, or whatever else
It's hard to find something that looks workable to a newbie coder that's a stepping stone between school textbook one-hour-work examples and major scary stuff. I've taken courses in C++, Java, Javascript, I Don't Remember What Other Languages, QuickBasic (all in that order), and am currently taking Visual Basic.Net. At this point, I'm pretty agnostic about my languages; I'm comfortable writing the same types of programs in any of the above languages, or even in a new language that I haven't been taught...but I can't figure out where to start to go further.
One idea is to work on stuff that will help you at work (if you have a job).
I decided today that I'm going to write a program to take a.csv, sort the data, and print it in my desired format (QuickBooks Pro is surprisingly limited in it's ability to sort data and print it to a third party's specifications); and I also decided I'd write a program (for my VB.Net class project, as well as for work) that can validate vendors' statements against the invoices they've issued to us. These are, at least, tasks that aren't done by existing programs quite the way I need them done, and are too much work to string together macros in existing software when compared to writing a program and getting some practice as a fringe benefit.
I feel 100% confident and even comfortable with writing these. That's not going to be a big help at all! It will get me some practice with stuff I already know, but it scarcely even qualifies as a "baby step". I don't want to take baby steps; I also don't want to bite off more than I can chew.
So, the question can be asked in a different way: Where can an educated but inexperienced coder find varying sizes and complexities of stuff that actually needs to get done?
Your suggestions:
-A web content management system is actually a decent idea. I've never seen one that doesn't suck that I can figure out how to use given the amount of patience I have available, although I haven't tried hard to find one either.
-Writing a small game is actually a usable idea -- dig out a dusty board game from the closet that you can't find a decent computer version of, and write it. Also, it could be fun to write a somewhat modernized version of an old but obscure computer game (BBS door games, for example, or old RPGs such as my favorite, "Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed")
-A text editor is quite educational, but the motivation would be hard to find. There's just so damn many great open source text editors that I'd never get started writing one.
-Open source projects -- well, I addressed those above.
Maybe some project admins can email folks like me and Austin to say "We've got some work that needs to be done; if you do it, then the rest of us can work on the harder parts" or whatever.
For that matter, maybe I should try to start a forum somewhere, where project admins can post that sort of thing to be taken up by newbie coders...unless such a forum already exists. Any ideas?
Everytime I tried porting a simple message encrypting program that I did in BASIC on a children portable computer (those with a B&W screen of 20x2) when I was 13-14.
Was it a VTech PreComputer [1|2|x]000? I wonder how many geeks had one and were encouraged by it, and how many parents said "That doesn't look like a fun toy, we'll get him a Nintendo" whose children _could_ have been geeks?
I wonder what ever happened to mine...I'm going to assume that I got tired of mine after we got the Applie ][gs, and proceeded to give it an autopsy (probably before it was actually dead).
And . is hardly worthless, as anyone who has had to type./exec_file knows
In this context, '.' really is entirely worthless. How can you use '.' on a dvd player whose only available controls are up, down, left, right, and enter?
This shit has to stop, I mean netflix are just being totally petty about the whole damn thing. I mean, what *other* way is there to organise online DVD rental? Are they going to enforce patents on their *whole* business model.
Netflix's patent seems to be a valid patent on a non-obvious business model. The "*other* way", which is entirely more obvious, is to rent online the same way as people have always rented in stores: Choose an item, pay a fixed charge for it's rental, and return it by a specified date or pay a late fee.
The idea to have a flat monthly rate with the customer always having X amount of titles out and a pre-specified queue to be sent whenever the customer should decide to send it back was novel. I don't think there's prior art; I think Netflix originated it. I could be wrong.
If I'm not wrong, then this is an example of when patents on business methods encouraged development of a new idea. That's the whole purpose of patents. However, this would definitely be an example of a patent that shouldn't last very long...10 years at most. That's long enough to make a tidy profit on their new idea before others can use it. 20 years is way too long.
Now, I may be wrong, but I do not recall a flamefest back then about how that anticapitalist hippie Stallman would just spend the money on pizza and T-shirts. Why is it, then, that when the Mozilla group seeks to fund OpenSSH, the standard seems to be different?
The rest of your post makes a lot of sense. If you're correct that donation checks are written to Theo personally, then that's rather icky and would discourage me if I was inclined to donate.
However, posting
Now, you don't have to ask around much to find out how that money is handled. Hell, some of it seems to literally go under his mattress.
without backing it up is kinda trollish. I'd be interested in seeing the information whose existence is implied by that statement.
The parent should NOT be modded Troll. Informative or Insightful would be more appropriate. Don't mod it unless you've ever had any direct interaction with Theo. His attitude is awful, his ego is huge and offensive, but I can't argue with results...
He assumes the perfect world, with newbies reading and understanding all documentation and code, with 100% of all users contributing, with everybody sharing exactly his value system, etc, and is (at best) intolerant, offensive, and rude regarding any deviation from that scheme.
You've failed in the area of reading comprehension. I'm not the least bit bothered by robots; I'm quite bothered by the central government having an electronic presence by my side at all times, or even merely in my living room.
I, for one, would wholeheartedly welcome robots to do all kinds of stuff for me...as long as it only reports to *me*.
Slashdot Mirror
They took our jobs! http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The y+Took+Our+Jobs!&defid=640597
Anyway, am I the only person who worries that bitching about outsourcing is just setting ourselves up for a bigger fall in the future? It looks just like the cliche of bitching about machinery replacing manufacturing jobs, where the jobs stay a few years and then the whole factory shuts down and moves to Malaysia, leaving the old factory town 100% screwed instead of just a few workers. Or, worse, the whole industry gets screwed as foreign companies compete using both machinery and very cheap labor, as happened to the US auto industry.
Wanna make an extra $25k? Hire me to do your job for $75k, keep skimming the other $25k, and get yourself another job for $100k.
The students are getting treats a lot more than you think -- all the students pressing "B" are getting the thought-treat "I'm screwing this dude's research up...uh huhuhuhuh..."
You missed a few. Everybody post one.
I'll do Seven Of Nine.
Take THAT out of context!
You joke, but I do recall a few years back when it was discovered that prehistoric man did brain surgery using stone tools. They found the tools and skulls with healed repairs. A quick googling returns http://www.brain-surgery.com/history.html -- maybe somebody can cite better sites.
One of the things I enjoy about my GPS is that it sometimes takes me on rocky, dangerous, fall-off-a-cliff dirt roads that I'd otherwise never find!
Didn't you know? "A combination of de-duplication and calculating and storing only the changes between similar byte streams" IS a breakthrough. No previous compression algorithm ever did that sort of thing before...
There was an episode of The Man Show with a fake commercial for a porn-removal-on-death service...but a half-assed effort doesn't produce any google results that look like it. Oh well.
Parent, GP, and GGP: Sorry, the car already exists, and it IS software controlled, and the software DOES operate when you're on the highway. The GM full size pickups (and possibly the full size SUVs) are available with Quadrasteer, which is software controlled electric-actuated rear wheel steering. Depending on the context, it will turn the rear wheels parallel or perpendicular to the front wheels. If I had that on my GMC, I'd hack it so I could manually control it...Well, maybe my next truck.
Like the GP, I never have to parallel park. I live in a rural area with a yard large enough to park 100 cars. I parallel park my 26 foot travel trailer in my yard (there's this nice nook in the woods just past the end of my driveway and even with the side of it, exactly the shape and size of the trailer; I back up until the trailer bumper hits the big rock sticking out of the ground) more often than I parallel park my pickup anywhere.
Oh yeah, and I'm lucky enough to work in a similar area, although the commute is some 45 minutes on country two-lane highways. Lots of dicey passing, no parallel parking. As somebody who lives in a busy area, I imagine you have lots of extra lanes anywhere that you'd try to pass somebody, and don't get a lot of practice passing in the oncoming-traffic-lane.
The only time I have to parallel park the big honkin' truck is when I venture into the city, usually to deal with government-related bullschitt like getting a copy of my birth certificate or some such.
That said, I'm still pretty good at it, although I was better at it when I took my driving test (which, as it turned out, didn't include any parallel parking at all) as I had practiced a lot at the time.
OpenBSD is a decent idea and is worth keeping around...it's just that the rest of us only care for that one piece of it.
If you felt like you needed to, you could make money on it by offering to write open source plugins for it, for companies that have some oddball format that you haven't written yet.Egads, man! I don't propose to speak for Austin, but that sounds like one hell of a tall order for a programmer whose biggest project to date was probably a bicycle gear calculator with a GUI for a 5th-credit C++ course.
You do seem to have a good idea of what's missing out there...got any more suggestions? Maybe you can hit something else that would be useful for somebody like myself or Austin.
I have pretty much the same issue as Austin (the asker) -- it's very hard to get motivated to write something that already exists and doesn't suck; and it's hard to dig in to a big, scary open source project. I think I remember a similar Ask Slashdot recently, to which I probably posted a message similar to this one; and shortly before that, I spent a couple days drilling down in old Ask Slashdots for this information, too.
.csv, sort the data, and print it in my desired format (QuickBooks Pro is surprisingly limited in it's ability to sort data and print it to a third party's specifications); and I also decided I'd write a program (for my VB.Net class project, as well as for work) that can validate vendors' statements against the invoices they've issued to us. These are, at least, tasks that aren't done by existing programs quite the way I need them done, and are too much work to string together macros in existing software when compared to writing a program and getting some practice as a fringe benefit.
The problem with contributing to an open source project is that they tend of have any or all of the following pieces of intimidation:
-humongous size (OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc); this is usually coupled with:
-hard to determine what's an easy piece to work on -- you look in the bug tracker and see a lot of stuff that looks really hard because it's usually:
-too deep or advanced -- whether it's a bug from a big project, or it's a small project that's not already done, the work to do is generally something involving scary system calls that mess with your flash BIOS, or maybe involving some obscure algorithm for changing the sound shaping of vbr mp3s, or whatever else
It's hard to find something that looks workable to a newbie coder that's a stepping stone between school textbook one-hour-work examples and major scary stuff. I've taken courses in C++, Java, Javascript, I Don't Remember What Other Languages, QuickBasic (all in that order), and am currently taking Visual Basic.Net. At this point, I'm pretty agnostic about my languages; I'm comfortable writing the same types of programs in any of the above languages, or even in a new language that I haven't been taught...but I can't figure out where to start to go further.
One idea is to work on stuff that will help you at work (if you have a job).
I decided today that I'm going to write a program to take a
I feel 100% confident and even comfortable with writing these. That's not going to be a big help at all! It will get me some practice with stuff I already know, but it scarcely even qualifies as a "baby step". I don't want to take baby steps; I also don't want to bite off more than I can chew.
So, the question can be asked in a different way: Where can an educated but inexperienced coder find varying sizes and complexities of stuff that actually needs to get done?
Your suggestions:
-A web content management system is actually a decent idea. I've never seen one that doesn't suck that I can figure out how to use given the amount of patience I have available, although I haven't tried hard to find one either.
-Writing a small game is actually a usable idea -- dig out a dusty board game from the closet that you can't find a decent computer version of, and write it. Also, it could be fun to write a somewhat modernized version of an old but obscure computer game (BBS door games, for example, or old RPGs such as my favorite, "Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed")
-A text editor is quite educational, but the motivation would be hard to find. There's just so damn many great open source text editors that I'd never get started writing one.
-Open source projects -- well, I addressed those above.
Maybe some project admins can email folks like me and Austin to say "We've got some work that needs to be done; if you do it, then the rest of us can work on the harder parts" or whatever.
For that matter, maybe I should try to start a forum somewhere, where project admins can post that sort of thing to be taken up by newbie coders...unless such a forum already exists. Any ideas?
I wonder what ever happened to mine...I'm going to assume that I got tired of mine after we got the Applie ][gs, and proceeded to give it an autopsy (probably before it was actually dead).
The idea to have a flat monthly rate with the customer always having X amount of titles out and a pre-specified queue to be sent whenever the customer should decide to send it back was novel. I don't think there's prior art; I think Netflix originated it. I could be wrong.
If I'm not wrong, then this is an example of when patents on business methods encouraged development of a new idea. That's the whole purpose of patents. However, this would definitely be an example of a patent that shouldn't last very long...10 years at most. That's long enough to make a tidy profit on their new idea before others can use it. 20 years is way too long.
Hmm...it wouldn't bother me one bit if Google tripled their price... n*0 == 0.
However, postingwithout backing it up is kinda trollish. I'd be interested in seeing the information whose existence is implied by that statement.
The parent should NOT be modded Troll. Informative or Insightful would be more appropriate. Don't mod it unless you've ever had any direct interaction with Theo. His attitude is awful, his ego is huge and offensive, but I can't argue with results...
He assumes the perfect world, with newbies reading and understanding all documentation and code, with 100% of all users contributing, with everybody sharing exactly his value system, etc, and is (at best) intolerant, offensive, and rude regarding any deviation from that scheme.
On a sufficiently cold day, would that be a "slush fund"?
You've failed in the area of reading comprehension. I'm not the least bit bothered by robots; I'm quite bothered by the central government having an electronic presence by my side at all times, or even merely in my living room.
I, for one, would wholeheartedly welcome robots to do all kinds of stuff for me...as long as it only reports to *me*.