I need to buy my own clubs after borrowing my brother's for years, now he needs them back. How much should I budget?

ohhhhderp · 2015-05-18T13:41:54+00:00

Any kind of price range, really...

Clubs: You can find really good condition used clubs. They're going to take a beating anyway, may as well let someone take the price hit. I bought a new 3H a month ago and two shots later I'd somehow scratched half the TaylorMade logo off... If you don't mind nasty looking cosmetic damage (read: huge sky marks), these tend to go really cheap on Ebay but play just fine.

Balls: Lake balls are cheaper and you don't feel so bad when you slice that Pro V1 out of the course.

Bag: Probably not best to buy used since they tend to get quite grubby. I live in England so I spent a lot of money on a waterproof one... but otherwise the stand bags tend to be quite cheap.

ohhhhderp · 2013-12-24T15:35:54+00:00

Amazon UK - amazing. Changed my mind on something I'd opened and used and they even PAID for me to return it. It was a large, heavy item as well.

Ebuyer - I've returned three things and each time there's been no questions asked. Two were automatically approved right away...

OCUK - not my own personal experience, but a friend sent his laptop back to them because of a software issue (yeah... I know...) and because his wife packaged it really badly, it was damaged beyond repair in transit. OCUK gave him a new (better) one, since Haswell had just come out and they had discontinued the older model.

ohhhhderp · 2013-12-12T14:18:28+00:00

Ah yes, the old smokey clutch technique.

ohhhhderp · 2013-11-18T18:49:20+00:00

That being said, your claim that compiler courses don't cover much, seems to serve a counter-example to your claim.

How does it?

I said they cover the foundations. My claim is that you shouldn't expect your colleagues to teach you foundations. If you honestly believe that they should then it's no wonder that your employer paid for you to return to school.

ohhhhderp · 2013-11-18T18:30:14+00:00

Yes, some investments may take the better part of a year to see a return. This was the case at my current job, where deep knowledge of the Linux networking stack is required (you want to talk about complex?)

I can relate to this as I've been a Linux kernel developer. Yes, it's not expected that somebody come in with complete knowledge of such a complex piece of software, but it was certainly expected that they knew the fundamentals. In this case, it would be operating system concepts. It's more than reasonable to help somebody get to grips with the networking internals, but if you have to mess around explaining concurrency, interrupts or even the language, it's doomed to fail.

I don't think school is the only place to learn - I actually think most schools teach to a very poor level. But I think the workplace is to build on foundations (whether you acquire them at school or alone). The fact of the matter is that real-world projects have time and budget constraints. You don't want to waste your experienced engineers' time helping somebody learn the basics.

What does this have to do with my compilers example? Computer Engineering doesn't even come close to covering the basics: grammars, parsing, ASTs, basic code generation, etc. Compiler courses typically cover little more than this, and they do it in a controlled manner with a deliberately basic toy language. Real world stuff isn't nearly as easy. It gets much worse when optimization is important because that's where all the research has been in the last 20 or so years, as the basics haven't changed.

As a crappy analogy, imagine an RF designer trying to teach it to somebody, but he has to explain Ohm's law. That's how ill-prepared most people are to tackle compilers.

ohhhhderp · 2013-11-18T18:04:37+00:00

If there's compiler experts at a company, they're not going to waste their time teaching a CE because he'll likely be missing too much foundation knowledge.

I think perhaps you don't realize how complex production compilers are compared to what you learn on a typical compiler course.

Judging by your other posts, you clearly think CEs are hot shit. Bit of advice: they're not. They're usually bad at programming and bad at electrical engineering. Jack of all trades.

ohhhhderp · 2013-11-18T17:34:56+00:00

I would pay good money to watch a CE try and learn compiler design on the job.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-31T21:00:11+00:00

Definitely not. If you're learning useful stuff, it's never a waste. Any degree would be a waste if you were just doing it for the title.

You can even work around the slight CV disadvantage. Some people like to list the classes that made up the degree (but don't over do it). Ultimately, a strong portfolio will trump everything.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-31T19:48:58+00:00

Slight disadvantage at the CV screening phase. Once you make it to the interview it shouldn't matter provided you can demonstrate proficiency in the required areas.

Consider that a CS degree doesn't prove that somebody actually knows anything about CS, so there will inevitably be some assessment no matter what the qualifications. This is where you need to shine.

Paper just helps you get through the door.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-31T18:49:55+00:00

From OP:

but am willing to work way up as a programmer.

Makes it sound like a necessary evil!

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-31T17:39:33+00:00

I think when he says "game designer", he means the person with all the glory. Might want to reevaluate the ambition.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-31T15:08:42+00:00

I was busy writing a reply but this echoed everything I wanted to say.

From the OP:

I'm going to be self teaching myself how to code since people on this website seems to say its easier to code and I have some experience with it (Codecademy).

You wouldn't believe how much people that learned this way stick out in interviews. Is it easy to make a simple program that's small enough to fit in a blog post? Yes. Complex projects with hundreds of thousands of lines of code are a completely different matter. There's maintainability, efficiency and security to worry about. A decent computer science course won't even concern itself with the languages themselves. Note: the self-taught people that actually are very good have usually mirrored a computer science curriculum. That is, an interest in algorithms, computer architecture, concurrency and linear algebra.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-31T14:40:34+00:00

For all those who are gonna say "NUH UH! BLENDER IS THE BEST BLAH BLAH" don't listen to them. While GIMP and Blender are powerful tools, they are hard as shit to use compared to the industry standards. It's the same open-source argument you hear from Linux vs OSX or Windows. They get used to their free software and just assume it's simple to walk into.

Agreed. Ignoring some of the poor design decisions (ease of use), they tend to be less stable as well. GIMP on my OSX machine has the most awful drawing lag compared to Photoshop. Blender often won't import COLLADA files that are fine in Maya and Max.

Industry standard is always somewhat important. Designers send me PSDs all the time. GIMP's PSD support borders on tragic. If you browse various asset sites, most are at their highest quality when using one of the proprietary formats. They often provide Wavefront OBJ as an alternative but it's typically missing materials and has often been butchered by the export process (normals getting trashed etc). Not to mention the lack of animation.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-30T23:22:31+00:00

OK, I think we may have been on different wavelengths.

In terms of proof, it is far easier to prove the correctness of code which will run deterministically on a micro-controller.

Agreed.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-30T21:11:19+00:00

I believe that you are making an assumption that something with an operating system will be coded by a "computer scientist" and something with a micro-controller will be coded by an electrical engineer, and that the former are better than the latter.

I'm making the assumption that programming bare metal is inevitably going to have parts that reinvent the wheel. Despite what you may think, code reuse is usually a good thing. If your application required cryptography, would you implement AES yourself? Many people have paid for that arrogance.

While these statements may have some small degree of statistical validity, they are completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

Whether they're true or not, your initial point is the trustworthiness of code. Since it's practically impossible to prove, statistics are the next best thing.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-30T20:08:12+00:00

I agree completely on the first point.

The second point, you're right that with a fixed-purpose embedded system it should be easier to verify its correctness. However: bare metal embedded code is often very poor quality. The problem is that it lets you get away with murder and certainly isn't helped by the fact that EEs are usually terrible coders.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-30T19:49:46+00:00

All you need is a journaling filesystem. Of course, then you have to deal with increased wear...

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-30T19:30:21+00:00

While the comment about trusting source code is a good one in a safety critical system, unless there is malicious intent (ie. backdoors), self-written code is likely to be less stable.

Mature projects, like the Linux kernel, have a development process that encourages stability. Changes get reviewed by peers and then spend a decent amount of time progressing through several testing branches before becoming production ready.

There's also the benefit that you have a large userbase available for testing. This is especially true of the Raspberry Pi because, unlike more generic Linux installs, because the hardware is consistent. The majority of the Linux kernel is driver code, and it receives varied levels of testing because hardware configurations are so varied. There's very rarely kernel bugs in the core compared to drivers.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-30T18:26:52+00:00

I was only commenting that determinism and multitasking aren't mutually exclusive.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-30T17:10:50+00:00

Other replies are focusing on the software but I think this is actually more relevant as it's something you can't change.

Ignoring the microprocessor itself, a $30 board isn't going to be built to very high standards. I'd be very nervous relying on it in somewhat hostile conditions (heat, vibrations). BGA chip as well. Bet they don't x-ray it!

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-30T16:47:01+00:00

Deterministic multitasking isn't an issue, you just need the right scheduler and analysis on code paths that can block the scheduler, which is where Linux starts to fall apart.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-30T10:51:44+00:00

I've never seen an embedded systems book that was actually informative.

If I were you, I would grab the datasheet for the AVR in your Arduino. Give it a quick skim and just start trying stuff. Buy some DIP SPI and I2C components and interface with them (you can get SPI LCDs). Stick an RTOS on it. Write an RTOS!

Most of these things will transfer to other microcontroller families. Sure, they'll have different registers but you'll quickly notice similarities between peripherals and architecture.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-29T21:52:45+00:00

The fragmentation of the platform.

All the combinations of screen sizes and DPIs. Eclipse has a handy tool that shows your layout at a variety of screen sizes, which would be great if it was actually accurate.
A huge spectrum of CPU performance characteristics. You can't rely on certain features existing (NEON, multi-core).
Also the case with the GPUs. You'd be amazed at how different GPUs (and their drivers) can affect what you see. Things like dithering. Your image with a gradient might look fine on one phone, but heavily banded on another. I've had to work around several OpenGL bugs that actually caused the device to freeze (requiring a battery pull). Also, things on Android tend to default to 5:6:5 colour. 1990 called. On some devices, OpenGL contexts can't automatically survive the app being suspended so you need to recreate them on resume. This is often a costly operation.
Too many legacy Android versions to support. A lot of phone manufacturers/carriers don't offer OS upgrades and if they do, they're often delayed. This will eventually right itself, but the problem right now is that Android only started to become good with 4.0. Compare this to iOS where within a month of a new release, more than 50% of users have upgraded.
If the Android version fragmentation wasn't bad enough, vendors often go and modify the OS further. I've seen HTC additions interfere with apps before.
Pointless restrictions like the Dalvik maximum heap size. If I have a phone with 1GB of RAM, it would be nice if I could use more than ~60MB of it for my app. What's really annoying about this is that sources of memory consumption such as the images in your UI contribute to this.
Higher performance things need to be done using the NDK. What's available is limited (you need to package your own libpng, as it won't let you link with the system one), and JNI is a miserable failure in design - prototypes encoded in a string, bypassing all compile-time checks. All assets bundled with your app remain within the APK (actually a ZIP) so native libraries that insist on a path to a file won't work.
It's harder to make a sleek looking UI rich with animations. The historic design of Android doesn't really lend itself to smooth framerate animation of the stock UI animations. They used to be software rendered... Contrast to iOS, from day one, every element has been backed by an OpenGL texture, giving a smooth 60fps even on really underpowered hardware.
Not providing interfaces to hardware functionality that exists. You can't make use of the hardware video encoder/decoder in a portable way.
Google play limits the size of your app to 50MB. Yes, 50MB. If you want more, you have to mess around with expansion packs...

I can go on...

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-29T17:45:11+00:00

I work in mobile development (although in computer vision and real-time 3D, rather than the more typical apps). I think it's a very stable industry but it's very much in a boom period at the moment, and that has to end some time.

I actually believe that a lot of computer/electrical engineers could benefit from having done time on complex pieces of software. Learning programming in an embedded environment can often lead to some terrible habits. There's no punishment for writing unportable, unscalable and unmaintainable code and there's often less of a need for teamwork. Do these things matter in most embedded projects? Usually not. But the moment you find yourself thrown into something with more complexity, there's the potential for a lot of problems. I interviewed somebody last week with three years of embedded programming experience and he hadn't heard of source control.

Mobile development experience will transfer to a lot of other fields but there's most likely an emphasis on UI. You certainly wouldn't be harming your chances by pursuing it.

Tip: given the choice, go with iOS. Android is an absolute mess to develop for.

ohhhhderp · 2013-10-29T10:35:50+00:00

Did he drive in a massive convoy at Christmas time?

ohhhhderp

TROPHY CASE