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Comment Re:The real question... (Score 1) 742

I have worked support for a ISP before, If I had a dime for every time a conversation started with I'm a lawyer, technician, or etc.. so I know what I'm talking about. I would be a millionaire.

I wish more people understood this. There are plenty of ways during a support contact to show me you are an exception to the norm, but telling me you are the exception just makes you less exceptional.

AKA: Show me don't tell me.

Comment Re:Mars has no magnetosphere (Score 3, Insightful) 549

It doesn't matter how much money you spend here, by staying only here you are committing the species to a single point of failure. Fault tolerant design requires the elimination of single point failure architecture, particularly if the detection and correction of the failing element is difficult or impossible prior to failure.

We are pretty bad at detecting dangerously large rocks flying directly at our faces. Said dangerously large rocks have the potential to kill every one of us in one event. There is no safe mitigation, there is no localized preparation that can eliminate the risk. Parallelism is the only idea that provides the proper redundancy. Extra-solar would be better, but we can't reasonably achieve that yet. We also might not be capable of colonizing Mars yet, but we should all get behind the fact that we really need to.

Comment Re:List the STL? Seriously? (Score 2) 479

We engineer so we draw things out write out UML or some type of logic flow then get to coding.

I personally build little modules then add on higher functional work loads until I have a finished product...

Son, you are adorable! So cute with your UML diagrams, logic flows, little modules, thinking, and all that. In the real world of startups and Minimum Viable Products, we just code whatever comes in our minds before dinner and ship it.

I wish to live in a world where this is funny, because right now it's a little too on point.

Comment Re:Brought an iPhone 6 and think it's too big (Score 1) 277

I switched to a Note 2 from my old iPhone 3GS, because I wanted more screen real estate, and it was a huge adjustment. Took me about a month to get used to the size (mow the 3GS seems laughable). After almost two years I'm still not OK with Android, but it was worth the annoyance for the larger size. I'd give it a little time...particularly give it long enough to determine if you actually need your tablet any more. I certainly didn't.

Comment Re:Methodologies are like religion (Score 1) 101

Well, software development is about many stakeholders. You, as the developer, are one of those stakeholders. Yes, the customer has a set of requirements, but you have a set of requirements as well. You make technical decisions every day based on those requirements whether you have explicitly enumerated them or not.

My read on this is that it's a set of governing principles for making implementation decisions about how you write code. As such any one of these guiding principles can be set aside to accomplish specific requirements they might conflict with, but where they don't conflict they should guide decision making.

From that perspective I guess they are helpful, if kind of obvious, guidelines. They seem kind of asymmetric though..."use message passing" is a pretty specific choice, where "elastic" is vague to the point of uselessness. On the whole I guess this seems like someone who really likes message passing and is tired of trying to justify the extra overhead every single time it comes up.

Robotics

A Thousand Kilobots Self-Assemble Into Complex Shapes 56

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Harvard's Self-Organizing Systems Research Group—describe their thousand-robot swarm in a paper published today in Science (they actually built 1024 robots). In the past, researchers have only been able to program at most a couple hundred robots to work together. Now, these researchers have programmed the biggest robot swarm yet. Alone, the simple little robot can't do much, but working with 1,000 or more like-minded fellow bots, it becomes part of a swarm that can self-assemble into any two-dimensional shape. These are some of the first steps toward creating huge herds of tiny robots that form larger structures—including bigger robots."

Comment "Can Learn and Tolerate BS" Certificate (Score 2) 148

I got through about 2.5 years of college before I was too poor to continue. I lucked out, got a job doing exactly the type of programming I wanted to do (custom automation control systems) but making next to nothing doing it (about $15k/year). Eventually being poor got old and I took a job with a "real" company making $60k. Six months in they bumped me to $68k and took me on as a full time employee.

Eventually I went back and finished my degree (BS in Comp Sci). I lost my job at almost the same time I finished the degree (I wasn't willing to move then the company did). That's why I know that the degree gave me a 10-15% bump in pay.

I learned almost nothing in college about programming. To this day I am of the belief that it is a certificate attesting that when told to do something silly you have the fortitude to actually get it done. Oh, and maybe you have the ability to learn new things...maybe. In the end I'm glad I got it, but only because of what it means to other people. Directly to me it means almost nothing.

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I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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