No one uses everything we teach them in school, but the only way to find out if you're good at something and enjoy doing it is to give it a try. Not everyone who takes a programming class or two will end up being a programmer, but the approaches we take in programming can be applied usefully to a lot of other problems. Of course, we still seem to have absolutely no idea how to teach people things and it seems like pure luck whether anyone actually learns anything useful in school, so maybe we should try to address that problem first.

Yeah! 200 years from now, all the music of today will be considered classical and be played on future-NPR with the same pretentious tones they play Mozart in today. "That was Dr. Dre's 'All My Bitches' in D-Minor. After the break we'll be playing 'Smell Yo Dick' and 'What What, In The Butt?'"

I've only run across two or three who were atrocious, and I mean to the point where I though they were probably running a scam and collecting a fat paycheck until it seemed likely that they would get caught. I mean, these people knew literally nothing about programming and had to have completely misrepresented themselves to obtain a position.

I've met a lot of "meh" ones, who can kind of get the job done but obviously don't care about or enjoy programming. It was just a high paying career that they could get into.

I've met very few people who do it because they really enjoy doing it and are constantly being driven to learn. They usually get bored at a company within two or three years and move on.

I've met a lot of bad interviewers too, who obviously have no idea how to conduct an interview or what they're looking for in a candidate. They tend to jump on the latest interviewing gimmick bandwagon, whatever that happens to be, without really understanding why that gimmick is supposed to get results that are better than random. Most of the interviews I've seen could have just as easily flipped a coin and had an equal chance of getting a good developer.

You don't really need to be a network guy. An IP(v4) address is just a 32 bit number. Each octet is just 8 bits. The subnet mask is a binary mask that lets you separate your local network portion of the IP address from the public network (Admittedly I've only ever worked with trivial examples.) The /24 indicates how many of the leftmost bits are set to 1. So a /24 would work out to a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.

Funnily enough, most C standard library address resolvers can handle IP addresses as actual 32 bit numbers without the octects, which is an occasionally fun party trick.

Didn't realize my to-do list should include "outlive fucking Facebook." Of course, I'm getting on in years, so maybe I should start actively trying to orchestrate the company's demise. In the event of my success, the slashdot headline should read "Remembering Facebook."

I saw an Asian woman at a local gas station buying about $50 worth of lotto tickets and felt bad about being a racist and thinking how ironic that seemed.

TIPS bonds are indexed on inflation. I do believe that the current inflation rate is under 3.5% these days, though. You can in theory get higher interest rates out of other investment types (real estate, stocks etc) but can also lose money on those.

Hmm. My suggestion is spend whatever you do on your lotto tickets every week and track how much you spent and your winnings. Put exactly the same amount of money in a savings account in a bank. At the end of two years, compare the two values and see which one did better for you.

Even so, to get even money on your buy-in, the jackpot would have to be pretty close to a billion dollars. They advertise the jackpot amount, but the sum basically gets cut in half if you elect to take it all at once in a lump sum. Then taxes will basically cut it in half again. And there's always the chance that someone else will also hit the jackpot and you'll have to split it with them. On these big ones, a single winner is pretty rare. Of course that doesn't make all that much difference if the final sum is still enough to retire permanently. For a lot of lotto jackpot winners, it really isn't.

Jon Oliver has a good bit about it.

They're great for knowing who has publisher dicks in their mouths. So when I know for certain a game is going to be bad and see, oh let's say, completely hypothetically, IGN give it a 9.5/10, I know IGN is sucking cock and is probably going to get a kickback. "God damn fucking IGN get that publisher cock out of your mouth! We all already know better than to buy a $60 game on your say-so already!" is what I would want to say to them when I see them sucking cock like that! Of course this is a completely hypothetical example, and I'm sure that the quality of IGN's integrity, like the quality of their articles, will never actually come into question!

Ugh it took me about a year to lose the Java accent when I started doing a lot of C++ stuff about a year ago. Getters and setters seem to indicate that you're planning to do a lot of run-time introspection in your class, and I'm leaning toward run time introspection being bad in most cases. Every time I've seen it used outside of framework code, it's always by some professional programmer who just learned about runtime introspection and is looking for a nail for that hammer. He's also afraid to commit to any functionality in any single object, because then his objects won't be generic enough to dynamically change their behavior to do anything at run time. And I don't mean "anything" in a general sense of things his objects might actually have been programmed to do. I mean "anything" like literally any object could change its behavior to do literally anything at run time. His code is nearly impossible to maintain and is thoroughly obnoxious. I'm actually talking about one specific guy, and I think he knows who he is. If you're reading this, I have a frowny face just for you. >:-(

Ahem.

Anyway, yeah, things shouldn't need to do things with object internals as much as Java programmers seem to think that things will need to do things with their object internals. I'm leaning toward not writing accessors until I actually need them and then asking myself if I need to access specific information elsewhere, does the data actually belong in that class. In java's defense, if you asked most professional programmers about interfaces and design by contract, you'll probably get a pretty blank stare. At least any of the ones I've interviewed in the past...

I've never typed $0 to download Elementary OS*. I do believe I am going to continue that trend.

* be...cause I've never downloaded Elementary OS.

This is true. I usually give that guy 1 isk, and he does usually double it.

Mmm. Delicious.

No no no, you got it all wrong! It was not intended that they get caught! The whole injecting their own ads into the stream, that's a feature!