[OT] Internet Censorship

[Bob Sneidar]

All good advice, except I'd like to add a couple often overlooked points. There is a difference between "knowing" and "knowing how to find out". I have IT guys working for me who are constantly asking me questions about how to do things. A simple Google query produces the results they were looking for, at which point they walk out of my office with a sheepish look on their faces. 

There is also a difference between "knowing" and "knowing how to apply" knowledge. I had an IT guy who had 3 Microsoft certifications. I had to let him go because he could never let go of what he *thought* he knew, and look at the problem intuitively. He was always bogged down in obscure log entries which had nothing to do with the problem at hand. He never to my knowledge solved a single problem by himself. 

I daresay, I have no real education in what I do, and yet I am good at it (I think you might disagree), because I started with an ability to look at a problem and dissect it, and also an ability to understand complex systems, which I put to great use in the Navy working on Radars. A lot of those skills I honed there crossed over into what I do now. 

I'd like to provide you with a couple of examples of highly paid programmers putting out crap: Windows ME. Then there is Outlook, which if not connected to an Exchange server will crash to desktop if it receives an email with a confirmation request (the default behavior and yes I know it can be turned off). Honorable mention is ADMT which I could never get to work as advertised, even after following all the advice about registry changes, command line statements to alter the way it is set up to use out of the box etc. It's just crap software produced by a HUGE software corporation after the fact, because when they first wrote AD no one ever thought about what do do when one company merged with another and all the thousands of credentials and profiles needed to be moved to the new companies servers. 

"Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding."

Bob


On Aug 15, 2011, at 10:08 AM, Pete wrote:

> You can take the word hobbyist as you please, it wasn't meant as a demeaning
> term.  And yes, there is crappy stuff produced by people who are "real"
> programmers (whatever that means). And yes, both groups of people probably
> never had a course in UI design or DB design - that's the whole point.
> Writing the program is the final stage of a the process and without the
> understanding of the things you mentioned, the result will likely not be
> good, whether it's written by someone who is paid good money to be a
> programmer or by someone who does it for fun.
> Pete
> Molly's Revenge <http://www.mollysrevenge.com>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 8:06 PM, Judy Perry <jperryl at ecs.fullerton.edu>wrote:
> 
>> Perhaps you'd care to offer an example or three of "hobbyist" (notice that
>> it is ALWAYS used in a demeaning manner) software done in LC that looks or
>> behaves any crappier than stuff produced by "real" programmers in *any*
>> language who've obviously never had a course in UI or UX design?
>> 
>> Judy
>> "the lowly dumb hobbyist"
>> 
>> On Sat, 13 Aug 2011, Pete wrote:
>> <snip>
>> 
>> Just like recording software, using a programming language without the
>>> required knowledge produces pretty lousy results.
>>> 
>> 
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