31 Dec
2001
31 Dec
'01
11:55 a.m.
OK, I may be odd_man_out in this, but I remember from the beatnic 60s
when a nice young black neighbor in an apartment building on Symphony
Road in Boston(populated mainly bymusicians and artists) was working on a
thesis at MIT about controlling atomic reactions by the depth of insertion of
rods in radioactive core elements. He moonlighted by working at the
Smithsonian which he loved. Most of the MIT students had very vigorous
qualifying tests unlike Harvard where if you had family connections you could
likely get in. I often wonder if his thesis had a role in 3 Mile Island which
would be horrifying to him as he was then.
So this nerd who is thinking about programming games without taking into
account the uses that Corporations like Martin would employ them for, "a
2nd year summer slave" confronts the "real" world and despite the usual
arrogance attitude of youth, who figure they know it all, is confronted by an
superior who does know what these programs do.
Other responses on your part so that he could decide whether or not he
wants to seriously engage himself in these goals might have been a more
benign response. Then if he decided to quit on moral grounds or not,
introduce him to Ethics 101.
No more Mr. Nice Guy.
Lawrence
On December 31, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote:
Reply to:
lgwalker(a)mts.net
The only place that I have EVER met any people
who claimed to be
"engineers" who might "have never heard of Amphenol" would be some
university folk who have never set foot into the real world.
Ahh, those "engineers" who don't know which end of a soldering iron
gets hot.
A fond memory from around 1991, while working for a small defense
contractor in NJ, talking with a 2nd-year "summer slave" on loan from
MIT (of all places!). I'd assigned him to write some data reduction
code in FORTRAN for a remote sensing project, and later wound up
having to do it myself:
Me: "This program needs a lot of work."
Weenie: "Hah! Where did *YOU* go to school? See here:"
[weenie scribbles some incomprehensible equation on the whiteboard]
Me: "I didn't. But I damn well know a REAL*4 on this VAX won't
deal with the IEEE-format floating point numbers from the
spectrometer without format conversion, for starters.
Weenie: "WHAT?! [horrified look] You actually want to RUN this program?"
Me: "Of course. Why the hell do you think I asked you to write it?"
Weenie: "Isn't this just an exercise?"
Me: "We are a defense contractor. We build machines to kill
people. Look at the size of my gut...we NEVER exercise
around here."
Weenie: "Does this mean I have to type this program in, like on a computer?"
Me: "No. You're fired."
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL "Less talk. More synthohol." --Lt. Worf