[Phoenix-pm] job opening

[Scott Walters]

Hey billn. Always good to see your text. I take it as a compliment that
you consider my banter worthy of a reply.

One thing I like about forums out of the main drag is I can be a little bit
less correct and a little more melodramatic when arguing a point - sort of like
how politicians pander exclusively to people with no knowledge of any topic.
(Obviously I give Phoenix.PM more credit than that but I'm not trying to get 
elected either.)

However, melodrama aside, I do have a point. None of the things you listed
save labor on a scale beyond a room full of researchers. Many of them
offer up new products to market, even enjoyable products, but none of them
further elevate humananity out of drudgery further than what was accomplished by 
1980.

But that's moot. My real complaint was something I'd rather hint at than say:
my jobs were banal. Of the dozens of "ecomm" websites I slaved away to
create under deadline, only one is still online. The other companies folded.
This is a blow to a pride that's already been injured by having to write ecomm 
websites in the first place. Obviously, if I'd been working on the human genome
project, I'd have no case to complain. And it isn't venting if my problems
are my fault rather than the world's, so I have to misrepresent the case.  
However, it all has a happy end: I work on things I consider interesting anyway,
and I consider a diet rich in ramen a small price to pay for the privilege.
It's nice to be able to boo the demons of the 8-5 job with my fellow
Perl Mongers. Re: Darwin, it's true I probably won't have any kids smelling
bad and not having money, so you're right. I can't argue with that.

-scott

On  0, Bill Nash <billn at billn.net> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Scott Walters wrote:
> 
> > Every worthwhile programming task was completed in the 1970's. The switched
> > phone network was finished, airlines has their reservation systems running,
> > Eliza was chatting up humans, humans were navigated to the moon and back...
> > since then we've just been doing the same things on different scales for
> 
> I don't see how packet switching voice, as a revolution over line
> switching, falls into this category. Neither do self-healing networks,
> unless you count cellular, and I don't. Lossless 12:1 audio compression in
> software clearly wasn't in the This Era project plan, either.
> Incidentally, Frontier turned down it's last operational 'party line'
> system in the late 90s. I'd hardly call the domestic line switched system
> complete until that point.
> 
> I'm pretty sure automated exploration of the human genome, much less the
> concept of practical computational genetic algorithms, was barely a
> twinkle in some doctor's pants, in the 70s. Glucose powered chips in the
> blood stream to monitor vitals? Get outta here. The control systems for
> such a feat were surely the product of a social event whose theme is best
> summarized by Pat Boone's cover of "Smoke on the Water". Or not.
> 
> I think NASA is going to disagree with you a lot, too. Otherwise, they
> wouldn't be shopping for off-the-shelf products to plug into their Mars
> landers, since they'd already have it all. For that matter, I'm pretty
> sure the concept of a radio tuner with a 150khz to 3+ghz tuning range,
> almost completely realized in a single DSP chip, was on the radar either.
> Being able to park one anywhere on the planet you can get power, and being
> able to tune it from anywhere else on the planet, as a basic civilian, was
> probably just as sneaky a concept. Yes, I own one of these.
> 
> > Seriously, I'm so badly traumitized by past employment I don't think
> > I could work in the tech sector again. It's my lot to sit at home and
> > eat ramen and write CPAN modules, sometimes pausing to guess where
> > rent might come from.
> 
> If it didn't kill you, and it didn't make you stronger, Darwin still won.
> 
> - billn
>