'standard' NDA

[Clifford Heath]

On 3/10/19 8:55 am, John Larkin wrote:

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 17:22:50 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:
software engineering and electrical engineering have diverged very far
over time to the point that outside a basic circuits class some students
take.

They should teach EE students the fundamentals, as always. Physics,
electromagnetics, circuit theory, EDA (engineering unit concepts),
signals+systems, control theory. Without that background, anything
more "advanced" is useless.

I have no idea what software engineering is. I should buy a textbook.
I did buy a sociology textbook; it was hilarious.

Can anybody recommend a good (or at least popular) undergrad intro
textbook in software engineering?

Most software is not "engineered" in any real sense (and for that matter
most "engineering" is not engineered either). Most "software engineers"
cannot adequately even define what they mean by "engineering".

My definition: engineering is solving problems by applying known
(measured) properties of available resources in a way that provides a
guarantee that certain outcomes will always be met, despite any natural
variation in the properties of those resources. So when a structural
engineer specifies a certain steel beam to support some load, they take
into account the specified load, the way the beam will be supported, and
the known properties of steel and of the type of beam specified.

The meaning of "properties of resources" in software is the properties
of storage devices, operating systems, databases, data structures and
the algorithms that implement operations on them. These properties are
almost only ever specified in the "happy path", and seldom if ever is
the worst-case behaviour specified. Instead, subsystems and libraries
are designed to avoid catastrophic worst cases (polynomial or
exponential runtimes, for example) - O(N*logN) is the worst that's
allowed without prior warning.

In any case software writers seldom know or consider these properties,
they just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. The same way the
structural engineer doesn't actually calculate the steel beam, they just
look it up in a table.

A former colleague trained first as a mech eng because he loved solving
the mathematical problems. During his first year working, he realised
that never in his career would he get to actually *use* the mathematical
analyses that he loved, so he went back to school and qualified in CS.
That's the kind of guy you want writing software for you (but they're rare)!

So CS courses do actually teach the required analysis, and in my
experience software writers do have some awareness of it, but only
enough to avoid using pathological algorithms. For the most part the
difficult algorithms are implemented in infrastructure code, and very
few people are competent to write that. (though many others try, and
they succeed only because spectacular computing power hides the
fundamental weakness of their code).

And then there's *systems* engineering, which is what happens when more
than one organisation works together to produce some system that's
larger than any of them could do by themselves. This brings in a raft of
human factors like clear communication, change management, etc. This too
can be engineered to some extent, but the vast majority of software
people never really find themselves in such a situation - and the Agile
movement is all about avoiding it. The one exceptional case is embedded
software, where you have a hardware team and a software team, and
neither can do what the other can. Our immaturity at systems engineering
explains the parlous state of embedded software.

I asked the dean of a big CS depertment what sort of programming they
teach nowadays. She handed me my head. "We don't teach programming!"

Oh. Sorry.

I *think* I understand that response. Modern CS is about *derivation*,
not about construction of step-by-step algorithms that perform some
derivation. By "derivation" I mean that for every current-state and
event there is an algebraic expression that derives next-state. This is
the basic idea behind functional programming. Every derivation is a
"function" that takes one parameter (current state) and by applying the
function, produces the next state. The compiler is responsible for
finding an algorithm to efficiently compute each function.

"Programming" then becomes the job of the compiler. The coder must find
a way to express their computation algebraically, and the compiler does
the rest. Haskell is perhaps the best examplar of this.

Clifford Heath.

 

[Dave Platt]

In article <gk3ape1kba2heg35f825r77ch91kckam0t@4ax.com>,
John Larkin <xx@yy.com> wrote:

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 14:02:07 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

PID controllers are apparently a hot area of interest and there are
software guys who will pay just to talk with someone who seems like
they've successfully implemented one.

Nobody teaches control theory in college any more? I guess the
software guys don't learn things like that. I'm not sure what they do
learn.

I don't think PID and similar control theory is taught to software
types (like me)... and in fact I don't think it was, when I was back
in college decades ago. My guess is that it's been seen as being a
"hardware engineering" discipline, as that's where it started. A lot
of process control implementation has moved from pure-hardware to
microprocessor-firmware, but the knowledge of the control algorithms
didn't make the jump between disciplines as easily.

I've had to learn it by independent reading, studying, and hobby
projects. It's been useful knowledge... I've encountered quite a few
"software" situations where a simple PID implementation was the right
choice, and the software developers hadn't ever even heard of the
concept.

 

[Joseph Gwinn]

On Oct 2, 2019, John Larkin wrote
(in article<gk3ape1kba2heg35f825r77ch91kckam0t@4ax.com&gt:

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 14:02:07 -0400, bitrex<user@example.net> wrote:

On 10/2/19 1:59 PM, bitrex wrote:
[snip]
PID controllers are apparently a hot area of interest and there are
software guys who will pay just to talk with someone who seems like
they've successfully implemented one.

Nobody teaches control theory in college any more? I guess the
software guys don't learn things like that. I'm not sure what they do
learn.

War story: I´m an EE who went into realtime programming. When I went to add
a degree in Computer Science (this is circa 1980 - the field had just been
invented, and there were things I wanted to learn), there was a
Servomechanisms course offered, but was not listed as an allowed
distribution-requirement course for CS.

So I went to the Dean, and asked him to authorize this course, pointing out
that Servomechanisms was not exactly Basketweaving. He laughed, and signed.
It was a very good, and useful, course.

More seriously, no Computer Science graduate not also having an EE or Physics
background (including Linear Systems) would have survived that
Servomechanisms course.

Joe Gwinn

 

[Rick C]

On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 5:40:53 PM UTC-4, George Herold wrote:

On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 1:50:00 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 1 Oct 2019 17:55:09 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
gherold@teachspin.com> wrote:

John (Larkin), You offered to send me a 'standard' NDA. I wanted to take you up on that. Maybe on dropbox? Or my email (now) is ggherold@gmail..com

Thanks
George H.

Here is our starting-point NDA.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/b924j4e9jbbven2/NDA%20Draft%20-2%20.docx?dl=0

Thanks John, Ughh that's a lot of legal-ease.
I think statement 3 is the only one I need,
stuff in the public domain can not be confidential.
Since most of my circuits come from AoE, spec sheets, app notes
or circuit's shown on SED, it's all public.

It never hurts to put things in a contract, unless they hurt to be put in. But it's a given that something in the public domain is not confidential. You can talk about the "thing" just not that it relates to the NDA project, company, etc. That's even true for government classified material. You can't confirm that anything is true, but you can certainly say so-and-so reported this even if it is exactly the info you are not allowed to divulge.

I'm working on a response, it includes a summary of my long and
rather sordid history with my ex-boss. Maybe sharing it is not
a good idea? But I'd like my colleagues and co-workers to know
I'm not a complete a-hole.

History is seldom of interest to anyone. There has to be a 10,000 feet way of explaining you aren't an a-hole.

--

Rick C.

+- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 1:59:10 PM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:

On 10/2/19 1:49 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 1 Oct 2019 17:55:09 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
gherold@teachspin.com> wrote:

John (Larkin), You offered to send me a 'standard' NDA. I wanted to take you up on that. Maybe on dropbox? Or my email (now) is ggherold@gmail..com

Thanks
George H.

Here is our starting-point NDA.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/b924j4e9jbbven2/NDA%20Draft%20-2%20.docx?dl=0

This has been mangled by multiple lawyers, and other companies usually
sign this, sometimes with minor revs. It's pretty much the standard
Silicon Valley NDA.

We have had some legal doings with a giant company who signed this
basic form when they needed stuff badly. They later discovered that we
take it seriously.

One trick companies will do is to sign the NDA, let you do a lot of
work for them, show them how it's done, and then do a big prior-art
search to justify stealing the designs. I could name names. About all
you can do then is walk away and concentrate on working with people
who have ethics.

It happens and unless the job is heading towards mid five figures
there's not much to do but write it off. I rarely have any work that
pays that much so far.

Clue: if their engineers look eager to do it themselves, they probably
will.


In the 21st century there are online avenues both for contract
work/employment and for just contracting to do tutoring/general
education. If someone seems super-eager to do it themselves then there
is no reason not to just acknowledge that and re-direct to the proper
department, they often accept.

You can charge hourly for just talking, which while perhaps not quite as
well-paid or as emotionally satisfying as designing something, is pretty
easy money. Sometimes they decide they'd rather you do something once
they fully realize it's beyond them so it turns out into being an
elongated pitch session, but you get paid for it.

I kinda lucked out in that regard. I got a contract developing a custom board for a company who didn't want to bother with something that would make so little money. The guy who was head of this product line made the case for farming it out and they sprung for the various testing required to sell it in their product line. Sales are *very* sporadic, but pays well when they order more than a few hundred, very well. Technically they own the rights, but unless it becomes part of a $100 million a year product line they aren't going to worry about taking it back from me. So I mark it up big time and they mark it up even further. It bought me my Tesla and much more.

I think I'd like to have a few products to help even out the flow, but I'm not sure it wouldn't still be very sporadic and possibly worse with everything demanding my attention at once sometimes.

Essentially this is a rather niche product. A nice place to be. Ask JL.

I'd like to tutor math for high school or maybe college. Math concepts were always hard for me to figure out because the teachers didn't speak the right language for me to get it. I like to think I understand what the concepts are that the kids don't get and can be better at teaching it. A friend talked me into pursuing being a sub once. Not only does it not pay beans, they require a lot of background checking and it is all about when they need you with last minute calls, literally. Still, it might be interesting. If I settle down somewhere maybe I'll look into that.

--

Rick C.

-- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
-- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[John Larkin]

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 16:17:52 -0700 (PDT), Steve Wilson
<9fe142ac@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 1:50:00 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

Here is our starting-point NDA.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/b924j4e9jbbven2/NDA%20Draft%20-2%20.docx?dl=0

This has been mangled by multiple lawyers, and other companies usually
sign this, sometimes with minor revs. It's pretty much the standard
Silicon Valley NDA.

Thanks John.

For those who cannot read DOC files, here is a free DOC to HTML converter:

https://document.online-convert.com/convert-to-html

I can put it up as a PDF if anybody wants.

I figured it would be easier to rip as a .DOCX.

 

[Rick C]

On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 4:58:04 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 14:02:07 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 10/2/19 1:59 PM, bitrex wrote:
On 10/2/19 1:49 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 1 Oct 2019 17:55:09 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
gherold@teachspin.com> wrote:

John (Larkin), You offered to send me a 'standard' NDA.  I wanted to
take you up on that.  Maybe on dropbox?  Or my email (now) is
ggherold@gmail.com

Thanks
George H.

Here is our starting-point NDA.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/b924j4e9jbbven2/NDA%20Draft%20-2%20.docx?dl=0

This has been mangled by multiple lawyers, and other companies usually
sign this, sometimes with minor revs. It's pretty much the standard
Silicon Valley NDA.

We have had some legal doings with a giant company who signed this
basic form when they needed stuff badly. They later discovered that we
take it seriously.

One trick companies will do is to sign the NDA, let you do a lot of
work for them, show them how it's done, and then do a big prior-art
search to justify stealing the designs. I could name names. About all
you can do then is walk away and concentrate on working with people
who have ethics.

It happens and unless the job is heading towards mid five figures
there's not much to do but write it off. I rarely have any work that
pays that much so far.

Clue: if their engineers look eager to do it themselves, they probably
will.


In the 21st century there are online avenues both for contract
work/employment and for just contracting to do tutoring/general
education. If someone seems super-eager to do it themselves then there
is no reason not to just acknowledge that and re-direct to the proper
department, they often accept.

You can charge hourly for just talking, which while perhaps not quite as
well-paid or as emotionally satisfying as designing something, is pretty
easy money. Sometimes they decide they'd rather you do something once
they fully realize it's beyond them so it turns out into being an
elongated pitch session, but you get paid for it.

PID controllers are apparently a hot area of interest and there are
software guys who will pay just to talk with someone who seems like
they've successfully implemented one.

Nobody teaches control theory in college any more? I guess the
software guys don't learn things like that. I'm not sure what they do
learn.

I just had to explain to a guy at a biggish aircraft outfit how
synchros and resolvers and LVDTs work. He had no idea.

Control theory isn't synchros and LVDTs. Those are just gadgets, the theory is math. Hopefully the math can be applied to the gadgets, but that's not control theory.

I took digital design classes and they could not care the least bit about teaching any of the practical aspects of designing with logic. I was in my first job and no one seemed to know diddly about transmission line theory. They had a 25 MHz wire wrapped TTL backplane gadget that they had trouble getting to work reliably. They treated it like 25 MHz was a magic upper limit. At my next job they were building stuff running at 25 MHz, two rack cabinets of it with massive wire wrap backplanes. They got it to work mostly, but had to tune the clock lines because their timing was so tight one board would need to be slightly advanced while another board in the same slot would need to be slightly retarded relative to the rest of the chassis. It made field service a bitch. Not many in the company actually knew what was going on with all this because everything was a closely guarded secret. But they didn't have problems with reflections and such. They used twisted pair for the clock lines. In fact, cutting length out of the clock lines was how they "tuned" the machine to make them work.

The next generation had serpentine clock traces on the boards so they could use on board jumpers to make all the boards match and be interchangeable like they should. I'm not sure where the variations came from, perhaps the on board clock buffers??? It was not too long after that chip makers started making PLL clock distribution chips... maybe 5 years or so. About the time bit slice became old technology because everything would fit on a single chip... like the 486. lol This would have been early 80s. I'm not sure I can correlate all the timing of events. I've always been fuzzy with history.

--

Rick C.

-+ Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 6:22:28 PM UTC-4, pcdh...@gmail.com wrote:

The expiration date on NDAs are not about when you can disclose the
information unless it specifically says that which is rare.  Usually they
are in force until specifically released by the company holding the
information.

Not in my experience--I sometimes get sent ones like that, and if they insist on it, I walk. (I've had to walk as many as three times in an ultimately-successful negotiation.)

I do a lot of NDAs, and it's onerous having to remember who owns what chunk of my brain.

Why? What is the reason for them releasing their technology after some period of time?

--

Rick C.

++ Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

bitrex <user@example.net> wrote in
news:QG8lF.25945$Qz2.21122@fx03.iad:

On 10/2/19 5:30 PM, bitrex wrote:
On 10/2/19 5:00 PM, John Larkin wrote:

It happens and unless the job is heading towards mid five
figures there's not much to do but write it off. I rarely
have any work that pays that much so far.
* Small claims courts usually are good to $5K; if you
anticipate problems like that, try breaking the project into
logical sub-sections and make those desperate contract
projects.     Also look into E&O insurance that THEY pay
for, proceeds to you when
they mess up.

Ya, doing a project for a new client who's sort of an unknown
without setting regular milestones is bad idea.

Posting bids somewhat higher than the ask doesn't hurt much
either. It encourages the non-serious to bail.

Econ courses present a classic sales-vs-price curve. In reality,
there is a long tail on the high end. If you double your price,
some people will still go for it. May as well.


making "affordable" products is sometimes a thankless job, put a
$5 monochrome LCD display in a product costing $250 and reviewers
may gripe about the display, put the same screen in a $2500
product and reviewers may say "wow! it even has a display!"

Or at the most mention the cheapness of the display but qualify
it with "at this price point buyers are true connoisseurs who
understand the limitations"

Hence why BMW still exists

And Maserati, and Cadillac, and...

And Apple.

The first iPhone was a friggin MP3 player stretched and given phone
parts.

The touch interface is what got the win. Now the world has changed
and they are all touch and hundreds of thousands of man-hours is
wasted by folks walking around production floors with a phone in
their face.

When I was a kid, my mom would not even think about calling my dad
on the phone at his work, unless it was a full blown emergency.

Now, the bosses are among the idiots walking around workplace
environments showing something on their phone to someone else,
essentially doubling the time wasted.

How quaint.

 

Steve Wilson <9fe142ac@gmail.com> wrote in
news:f395a16b-eb21-44ca-b20e-d6677477c567@googlegroups.com:

On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 1:50:00 PM UTC-4, John Larkin
wrote:

Here is our starting-point NDA.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/b924j4e9jbbven2/NDA%20Draft%20-2%20.docx
?dl=0

This has been mangled by multiple lawyers, and other companies
usually sign this, sometimes with minor revs. It's pretty much
the standard Silicon Valley NDA.

Thanks John.

For those who cannot read DOC files, here is a free DOC to HTML
converter:

https://document.online-convert.com/convert-to-html

When one 'opens' it in dropbox, it shows up. Then one can DL it.

Thing is, I am not sure that your converter works on DOCX files,
which is what this is. It is not a DOC file. It is a DOCX file.

It should though, being a modern website. Give up all rights to
the document though probably.

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 3/10/19 11:38 am, Joseph Gwinn wrote:

On Oct 2, 2019, John Larkin wrote
(in article<gk3ape1kba2heg35f825r77ch91kckam0t@4ax.com&gt:
On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 14:02:07 -0400, bitrex<user@example.net> wrote:
On 10/2/19 1:59 PM, bitrex wrote:
[snip]
PID controllers are apparently a hot area of interest and there are
software guys who will pay just to talk with someone who seems like
they've successfully implemented one.
Nobody teaches control theory in college any more? I guess the
software guys don't learn things like that. I'm not sure what they do
learn.

War story: I´m an EE who went into realtime programming. When I went to add
a degree in Computer Science (this is circa 1980 - the field had just been
invented,

If by "just" you mean in the previous two decades...

Mind you, it was apparent that the term "software engineering" was new
and the professors were scrabbling to find material to make up a course.
Most of what we were taught in SW Eng was introductory systems eng, in
fact. As far as I can tell they hadn't figured out what it meant to
engineer software yet, and this was at a top-50-globally CS dept.

and there were things I wanted to learn), there was a
Servomechanisms course offered, but was not listed as an allowed
distribution-requirement course for CS.

So I went to the Dean, and asked him to authorize this course, pointing out
that Servomechanisms was not exactly Basketweaving. He laughed, and signed.
It was a very good, and useful, course.

I finished my CS degree in 1979, when CS was still part of the Maths
dept, so I studied math and quantum physics through 2nd year. Funnily
enough I also arranged an exemption to earn credit from an EE unit in
digital sequential logic design. That involved getting the EE and CS
departments to talk for the first time - they've been merged for a
couple of decades now.

More seriously, no Computer Science graduate not also having an EE or Physics
background (including Linear Systems) would have survived that
Servomechanisms course.

I daresay I was one of the few with enough calculus to have done control
theory (though I wouldn't have done very well) but there were still
some. It might have been different in the USA, or just at your
university. I tried to persuade my (now 29yo) son to find a control
theory course as part of his double degrees in Math and CS, but it
wasn't available in either CS or Math (though CS is now in the Eng
faculty, CS folk don't do it). Control Theory was far too "applied" for
the snooty Math folk to care about.

Clifford Heath.

 

John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in
news:2oaapet924g197rm9a9a9br8l93fu8fhfl@4ax.com:

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 17:31:28 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net
wrote:

On 10/2/19 5:30 PM, bitrex wrote:
On 10/2/19 5:00 PM, John Larkin wrote:

It happens and unless the job is heading towards mid five
figures there's not much to do but write it off. I rarely
have any work that pays that much so far.
* Small claims courts usually are good to $5K; if you
anticipate problems like that, try breaking the project into
logical sub-sections and make those desperate contract
projects.     Also look into E&O insurance that THEY pay for,
proceeds to you when
they mess up.

Ya, doing a project for a new client who's sort of an unknown
without setting regular milestones is bad idea.

Posting bids somewhat higher than the ask doesn't hurt much
either. It encourages the non-serious to bail.

Econ courses present a classic sales-vs-price curve. In
reality, there is a long tail on the high end. If you double
your price, some people will still go for it. May as well.


making "affordable" products is sometimes a thankless job, put a
$5 monochrome LCD display in a product costing $250 and
reviewers may gripe about the display, put the same screen in a
$2500 product and reviewers may say "wow! it even has a
display!"

Or at the most mention the cheapness of the display but qualify
it with "at this price point buyers are true connoisseurs who
understand the limitations"

Hence why BMW still exists

And Maserati, and Cadillac, and...

You can buy a mechanical wristwatch for $60K. A $20 quartz watch
works better.

There are $400k watches out there. More even.

Precision micro-machining and engravature and the surface finishes
are not easy to accomplish, and do not come cheap.

There are high priced quartz watches out there to. The real snazzy
ones we call 'smart phones' and they do not even use quartz clocks
any more. They use gps.

Some restaurant near here discovered that the more they charged
for a bottle of wine, the more people ordered it. They peaked out
around $3K.

My younger sister made one of the things she 'invested in' the
purchase of cases of expensive wines. Which then sold for as much as
four times what she paid for them. She said it was easier to make
money on it than buying art in the form of paintings. She said the
turn around was a lot faster too.

America's hidden big investment: Invest in the stupidity of the
dopes who got rich enough to wildly spend all in the name of status.

 

bitrex <user@example.net> wrote in
news:_NalF.2982$rR2.1519@fx23.iad:

In essence your success in a CS program of that type was
predicated on you already being a good programmer before you came.

Still that way.

The dopes simply use 'modular' pre-coded bits now, and the
"programming acumen" is for those able to compose within those modular
realms well. Still, one has to know how to construct(good)error
handling routines.

 

[Rick C]

On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 10:56:28 PM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

bitrex <user@example.net> wrote in
news:QG8lF.25945$Qz2.21122@fx03.iad:

On 10/2/19 5:30 PM, bitrex wrote:
On 10/2/19 5:00 PM, John Larkin wrote:

It happens and unless the job is heading towards mid five
figures there's not much to do but write it off. I rarely
have any work that pays that much so far.
* Small claims courts usually are good to $5K; if you
anticipate problems like that, try breaking the project into
logical sub-sections and make those desperate contract
projects.     Also look into E&O insurance that THEY pay
for, proceeds to you when
they mess up.

Ya, doing a project for a new client who's sort of an unknown
without setting regular milestones is bad idea.

Posting bids somewhat higher than the ask doesn't hurt much
either. It encourages the non-serious to bail.

Econ courses present a classic sales-vs-price curve. In reality,
there is a long tail on the high end. If you double your price,
some people will still go for it. May as well.


making "affordable" products is sometimes a thankless job, put a
$5 monochrome LCD display in a product costing $250 and reviewers
may gripe about the display, put the same screen in a $2500
product and reviewers may say "wow! it even has a display!"

Or at the most mention the cheapness of the display but qualify
it with "at this price point buyers are true connoisseurs who
understand the limitations"

Hence why BMW still exists

And Maserati, and Cadillac, and...


And Apple.

The first iPhone was a friggin MP3 player stretched and given phone
parts.

The touch interface is what got the win.

What got the win was that the iPhone was fully integrated with capabilities shared across the phone and the rest of the unit with PDA capabilities. The only combined phone and PDA at that point was the Palm crap which might as well have been a phone and a Palm Pilot duct taped together. There was literally ZERO communications between the two. Even I expected the durn thing to not just show me a phone number from the contact list, but to be able to hand it to the phone and DIAL which the Palm phone couldn't do!!!

Now the world has changed
and they are all touch and hundreds of thousands of man-hours is
wasted by folks walking around production floors with a phone in
their face.

When I was a kid, my mom would not even think about calling my dad
on the phone at his work, unless it was a full blown emergency.

Very different times. What was right then doesn't need to be right now.

Now, the bosses are among the idiots walking around workplace
environments showing something on their phone to someone else,
essentially doubling the time wasted.

Yeah, it's amazing how all these productivity features allow us to get any work done at all.

Are you 82 and waving a cane at the computer as someone else types on it for you?

--

Rick C.

--- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 11:46:30 PM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:3d9fff45-b48c-47cd-9ed0-c971ecfa7d81@googlegroups.com:


Very different times. What was right then doesn't need to be
right now.


Bullshit. There are articles all over the net about how much time
is wasted.

Someone making a crack like that has no clue, much less any
credence on the subject.

I agree 100%... bullshit.


> If I ran a lab, the phones would be in your locker.

There are many, many reasons why you don't run a lab. Your BS makes me think of the MaliciousCompliance videos.

Tell your stupid kids that their 'emergency' phone calls are to be
made to your desk phone number, not your cell.

Period.

We had secret level labs where one could not have ANY record
capable device. Even a pencil. Even a piece of paper.

Who has desk phones anymore. Hell, I don't even have a desk!

You are living in the 50s... if you call what you do living.

No pencil, no paper... no work?

Ok, I'm ready for it. Call me a "child". Oh, I'm so hurt... boo, hoo.

--

Rick C.

--+ Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
--+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:3d9fff45-b48c-47cd-9ed0-c971ecfa7d81@googlegroups.com:

Very different times. What was right then doesn't need to be
right now.

Bullshit. There are articles all over the net about how much time
is wasted.

Someone making a crack like that has no clue, much less any
credence on the subject.

If I ran a lab, the phones would be in your locker.

Tell your stupid kids that their 'emergency' phone calls are to be
made to your desk phone number, not your cell.

Period.

We had secret level labs where one could not have ANY record
capable device. Even a pencil. Even a piece of paper.

 

[bitrex]

On 10/2/19 11:23 PM, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:

bitrex <user@example.net> wrote in
news:_NalF.2982$rR2.1519@fx23.iad:

In essence your success in a CS program of that type was
predicated on you already being a good programmer before you came.


Still that way.

The dopes simply use 'modular' pre-coded bits now, and the
"programming acumen" is for those able to compose within those modular
realms well. Still, one has to know how to construct(good)error
handling routines.

I think it's a wonderful time to get into programming, far better than
when I first took a shot at it in the 1990s. At the time your language
choices were more or less C, C++, Lisp...Python may have existed but it
wasn't much to write home about.

C, C++ and Lisp are challenging languages for adult students, much less
17 and 18 year olds. And the adults who tend to be the most skilled in
those languages are often not particularly good at teaching them. There
are some kids who seem to be "naturals" in any field but most are not.

To do well in a CS program you have to be pretty good in your didactic
languages of choice and at 17 I was not a particularly good C
programmer. I was a shit C programmer back then actually. What the fuck
did I know about anything at 17, though?

It took until the Internet was more common that I came across what I
consider to be like, actual good how-to-program what-is-pointer? material.

 

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:3d9fff45-b48c-47cd-9ed0-c971ecfa7d81@googlegroups.com:

Yeah, it's amazing how all these productivity features allow us to
get any work done at all.

Walking an aisle with your face in a phone on your way to interrupt
yet another worker's time instead of being at your bench is decidedly
counterprodcutive.

Are you 82 and waving a cane at the computer as someone else types
on it for you?

No. I have used and programmed personal computers since the XT on.
I was working on a mainframe prior to that.

You must be wearing horse blinders, and it matters not what your
age is as you stand before men, blind.



>

 

[bitrex]

On 10/2/19 8:51 PM, Rick C wrote:

In the 21st century there are online avenues both for contract
work/employment and for just contracting to do tutoring/general
education. If someone seems super-eager to do it themselves then there
is no reason not to just acknowledge that and re-direct to the proper
department, they often accept.

You can charge hourly for just talking, which while perhaps not quite as
well-paid or as emotionally satisfying as designing something, is pretty
easy money. Sometimes they decide they'd rather you do something once
they fully realize it's beyond them so it turns out into being an
elongated pitch session, but you get paid for it.

I kinda lucked out in that regard. I got a contract developing a custom board for a company who didn't want to bother with something that would make so little money. The guy who was head of this product line made the case for farming it out and they sprung for the various testing required to sell it in their product line. Sales are *very* sporadic, but pays well when they order more than a few hundred, very well. Technically they own the rights, but unless it becomes part of a $100 million a year product line they aren't going to worry about taking it back from me. So I mark it up big time and they mark it up even further. It bought me my Tesla and much more.

I think I'd like to have a few products to help even out the flow, but I'm not sure it wouldn't still be very sporadic and possibly worse with everything demanding my attention at once sometimes.

Essentially this is a rather niche product. A nice place to be. Ask JL.

I'd like to tutor math for high school or maybe college. Math concepts were always hard for me to figure out because the teachers didn't speak the right language for me to get it. I like to think I understand what the concepts are that the kids don't get and can be better at teaching it. A friend talked me into pursuing being a sub once. Not only does it not pay beans, they require a lot of background checking and it is all about when they need you with last minute calls, literally. Still, it might be interesting. If I settle down somewhere maybe I'll look into that.

There is a ton of work available for STEM tutors at all levels. you
could probably make a decent living just tutoring ARM assembly all day
to college students, judging by some of the requests I see on contract
tutoring sites.

Prefer adult students if it's on a piecemeal basis. I....I dunno if you
have the patience to tutor high school and college students. My
girlfriend does it for the university as an adjunct and she's one of the
most even-tempered people I know but "the kids these days" are gonna
frustrate and get inside your head, and when you're associated with a
university or brick-and-mortar tutoring company (i.e. getting paid a
decent "regular" salary to do it) you can't just eject the real brats.

 

[Rick C]

On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 11:50:56 PM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:3d9fff45-b48c-47cd-9ed0-c971ecfa7d81@googlegroups.com:

Yeah, it's amazing how all these productivity features allow us to
get any work done at all.

Walking an aisle with your face in a phone on your way to interrupt
yet another worker's time instead of being at your bench is decidedly
counterprodcutive.

Are you 82 and waving a cane at the computer as someone else types
on it for you?

No. I have used and programmed personal computers since the XT on.
I was working on a mainframe prior to that.

You must be wearing horse blinders, and it matters not what your
age is as you stand before men, blind.

Yes, exactly, the cane it is... "You kids get off my lawn!"

--

Rick C.

-+- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209