On Mon, 28 Sep 2015, Linda Walsh wrote:
Maybe it's there are so few in the field -- that of the ones that have stayed in the field for any length of time tend to do so because they really liked the field? Vs. w/ males, because there are so many in the field, the good ones don't stand out as "memorable-enough" from the crowd?
Could be. But I was more alluding to a sense of "I agree" or "I like". My experience in software (and I haven't been dealing with like-minded people for a long time) is just this... bitter feeling of everyone being of a different opinion and always having to fight to get your point (any point) across. I just don't agree with many of the things of FOSS. Maybe this is getting off-topic or off-list btw. The fact is that I see a lot of "rational" opposition to my ideas, or at least a rational mindset, you see it also if you play computer games, you come across men (always men, mostly) who treat what they do (or what you do) in the game as a rational enterprise of yield or profit maximisation. They don't care whether what they do is FUN, as long as it yields the best results in the shortest time. You see it for example with the game of Diablo 3 where people habitually sacrifice their "feeling good" while doing something just to get to some "feeling good" as a result of rewards gained. In the game of world of warcraft this translates to most males not talking in "group dungeons" and being extremely testy and quick to leave because any hindrance while doing the "challenge" means time wasted so they just leave and enter a new one. They get upset, angry, when their time is not being spent on getting loot or experience, but rather on doing something that might or could or would have been easier in a "better group". The fact that you can never meet friends that way (except perhaps the people you might keep running into because they follow the same strategy) doesn't matter to them. I met most people I met there in "time off" areas where I just go up to someone and talk. In that particular game also, but that is perhaps an entirely different subject, the game mechanics have changed to favour such behaviour. Prior to the dungeon "finder" change in the 2nd expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) it was much easier to have pleasant, long-running dungeon groups and runs where there was a lot of joking around and ease of mind. So to get back to linux or software engineering: I tend to get away or diversge from a mindset that says that results should be the indicator of choice. I mean that creation comes from inspiration and insight and the choice you make you make because you WANT to make them. And not because of the "results" they promise. In a sense that I am "at cause" in my creations and not "at the effect" of them. I do not let material conditions dictate how I want my system to be, in an important way. I see you doing the same. You make choices because you love them, not because it has to be done in a certain way (according to some other people or some established truth or dogma) and you look beyond meagre improvements or gains towards the bigger picture where you have to "not jump to conclusions so easily" so you can discern the more important aspects at play. In this way you can design systems that have much better yields in the long run because you can look past the short term gains that other people feel "compel" them to make certain lesser choices. The whole thing about life is that short-term conditions NEVER compel you to do anything because there is always a bigger picture. And if you can rest easy and confident you will be able to see that. In that sense material conditions never dictate your choice; on the other hand, your choice may in the end start dictating material conditions very well. And I often feel like some "lone voice in the desert". And I look around and pick up a rock, and I like it.
I don't know about other woman, but unlike a bunch of people who entered the field in the late 1990's and early 2000's because of the "dot com" bubble and high salaries, I really am an engineer & scientist -- w/an engineering degree in Computer Science. My alma mater had 2 Computer Science degree tracks: one in the Liberal Arts school that had more emphasis in math, and the other from the Engineering school with more emphasis on systems and OS design.
I'm not really comparing myself or you to those kind of people. They don't really matter to me. I was self-taught at the age of perhaps 8 or 9. I wrote you an email, remember? I believe I did... expressing some of these same sentiments.
Though, more often than not, I don't think I'm that good as much as I'm able to make mistakes and correct them more quickly than most. More often than not, I try not to get hung up on things that don't work, and instead try to focus on fixing them...
Yeah yeah. Trust me, the way you go about or relate what you do, quietly and quickly indicates that you are pretty much in a strong flow, not letting things get in your way, and it seems you have your systems very much the way you want, and you seem to be moving faster than most.
Do you mean you run them from your harddrive after setting up path?
If you are on a 64-bit machine, 32-bit programs don't run 'natively, but use a special 32-bit adaptation layer (or subsystem) layer that resides in the C:\windows\syswow64 (Sys-Windows-on-Windows64). If you are boot into the "recovery console", used for system rescue, programs that depend on other add-on layers/subsystems like the GUI, POSIX, and SysWoW64 can't run as those extra subsystems aren't loaded.
I meant like if that recovery console is just the shift-F10 thing, and if or whether you use that to use your cygwin, which obviously needs some PATH to be set up to use it? Or perhaps I don't understand cygwin and you merely need to run some (shell) binary.
The gnuwin32 tools don't use or try to provide a 'Posix-compatible' layer, whereas Cygwin does try to provide such a layer. I've taken some of the linux source rpms and build the binary-rpms using 'rpm[/build]' on Cygwin -- because many of the same linux-like utils are there (bash and most the command-line utils, vim/gvim -- even some of the linux desktops have been ported.
That's quite astonishing. I don't also see much the use. But I take it you use those programs in Cygwin as well.
True...but even just '2-way communication' is hard in bash -- i.e. you can't easily setup a pipe to 'sort' and read the output from the same process. I think 'co-processes' are supposed to allow that, but I never got them to work reliably.
Not saying it should be bash. Redirection in bash beyond the simple is extremely difficult and counter-intuitive anyway. I mean you can do stuff there that you need a computer to analyse. Even a simple (redirect err to out and save out in 3, and then once you have used the result, point 3 to 1 again) is something I cannot remember how to do, I have to copy it from my existing sources. I also couldn't manage even after 2 or more hours of study how to simply save some output in a "virtual file" (not a named pipe) within my bash script and use it in another part of the same script. It is very hard in Bash to return variables, because most of what you do happens in a sub-shell. So you either do not use any $( ... ) calls, or you store results in global variables. I haven't found anything else yet.
If you start out simple in perl -- and use it for 1-liners, it's not that hard. Perl started out being a combination of shell+awk+sort+sed+tr -- all the common unix utils but in 1 program. Perl-V added some basic Object-Oriented support which allowed it to be more useful as a general purpose programming language, but the language has mostly stagnated since V5.6 (it's now at 5.22).
It's not like I'm really complaining about not having perl skill, I also do not want it at this point because the things you do is not something I really need to do at this point or perhaps for a long time to come. I was just a bit awed by it. My apologies ;-). Like, when I was still young and more stupid I printed out both the Picking up Perl manual and Diving into Python and in the end I never read them because really I was not interested in that after all. And I think I threw both away. I had no practical needs for them. I usually or mostly or principally only learn when I have a practical need to do something right now this instant, or perhaps there is one most urgent thing to do and it requires a bit of study, but I never study without a practical need.
Even w/1 core, you can improve on efficiencies (though more worth your money to get more cores, usually) as file-I/O isn't usually handled by the main processor but by a disk-controller that can do DMA in background while the foreground compute process does the compute stuff (wave->flac or wave->mp3).
Yeah yeah. For the few times I do this stuff, you can bet learning how to write this sort of thing would be a very bad investment at this point ;-).
These days, the amount of stuff to learn is increasing exponentially with 'old knowledge' often getting outdated.
That's a shame and it is not even necessary. It is pointless to throw away old stuff that works, but a lot of people (also in Linux) seem to be doing that as a form of "have to improve" craze. Even if the improvement is not an improvement they are still going to do it. *Most of what happens these days in society is regression*. I will say it again more loudly. (whispers) "most of what happens these days in society in order to progress, is actually a regression". I will say that about 70-80% of improvements these days are actually a detriment. And there are very few that see clearly because they are led by false assumptions of the results of their actions actually being good or helpful or pleasant when they are not. And I just have this impression that it is mostly men doing this. Not wanting to betray my own sex, and I am not clear on that. And women probably follow suit just easily. Think of the iPads and stuff, you can't do anything truly worthwhile on that and they don't notice so much they are trapped in a spell of "embazzlement" (don't know) of how pretty everything is and what not. But it also signifies for them a bleakness and an escape into something at least moderately fun (or addicting) out of a life that doesn't promise them much. I don't want to abandon my fellow men but this rational goal-seeking without regard of actual experience of real people (or even themselves!) and a close-mindedness on short-term goals (are you really benefitting from it?) (are material rewards more important than e.g. meeting friends?) (is it that important that that thing will do X or Y when people may not even have asked for it?) (why are you improving something without listening to your users?) (who is really benefitting from this? who are you working for really?). It is a pervasive sense I have these days and in every instance the rational mindset is to blame. My mother once said she never knew a more rational person than me. I am a computer scientist/programmer, but I am also a way-finder. I sacrifice much at present just to enable some other people in my life to find the way themselves. Quite stupid I must say. I would rather have done it myself. What was I thinking?
From this stems my jealousy by the way: my own sacrifice in life.
Had I not done that, I would not have been jealous, because I would have gained what you have. So you can see already that the sacrifice is not really paying off. And the rational mindset is all about sacrifice. Usually it is about sacrificing your joy today for the benefits of tomorrow. And the irony is that not only do they create a destitute present, tomorrow is also turning into a desert landscape.
Most the stuff I've learned I've learned on my own trying to solve my own problems -- but alot of it I've learned by building and adding on features to other people's programs.
I never got as far yet to start diving into Linux or C-type programs. C, perl, they are rather nasty constructs. Just take the language of the RFCs they are not very readable and they use C-like 'grammar' and 'terms'. It is quite nasty. On the contrary, I am more than happy to dive into any PHP program, for instance. They might or might have changed in the future, but I am not there or no longer there.
-- if you have an 'itch' to scratch with some open-source program, you can often compile it and make little changes to see how things work. Later on, you make bigger changes...
Quite naturally.
Hardest is writing programs from scratch -- since you have to build a "virtual framework" first (that's the design part -- when you have the most freedom and most opportunity to go in a wrong direction).
I usually go right straigt away but it can also mean I want to experiment and learn things myself, so my knowledge or understanding is not good enough to do right away what I think is most elegant, and I get there in steps.
Even though I've had tons of experiences going the wrong way, I still increased my knowledge and learning in those areas....
Seeing how another has done something is like reading a design. And you can always learn from, or be informed by, the designs of other people, because they contain symbols that may be or get unlocked in your mind by seeing them.
Problem today, is most people want it done right the first time and take any 'side' ventures as a waste of time -- even though they usually aren't because of the additional stuff you learn.
Aye and it may mean you use an existing library but you don't know why exactly it is done that way, so now your program depends on external knowledge you cannot replicate. And your program works, but it doesn't feel right. A side venture may just be what you need to get to a higher level, to get some building blocks in place in your life.
Well, have to say writing my snapshot prog in shell, 1st, was a learning experience! ;-)
Ooh, I hope you didn't get paid to do it again and again. Learning experience might start feeling like a punishment then, that way. It is always nice to punish girls :p :p ^^ but all the same it would feel like transporting two heaps of dirt from one place to the other, or perhaps one heap and your mission is to move it, and then move it back again. Now wouldn't it ;-). :).
At least 1 person liked it.... most can't wade through my verbosity. ;-)
I told you in my mail ;-). And perhaps you've noticed by now that there is another person in the room :p. Love ya, bye. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org