The "next great advancement" in databases will be when I can setup 2 or more linux servers
I'm sorry, you must have misread the article (MTFA). I think you mean, "The 'next great advancement' in databases will be when I can setup 2 or more Microsoft servers."
My point is, the reason they killed the project clearly has nothing to do with the email and it is terrible for you, knowing this, to blame the poor guy who complained about the build. For christsake, he is just doing his job. If anything, whoever granted access for the customers to be on the build-mailing list should be fired as that is a clear breach of practice
I dunno. I work with someone that has the interests of the customer foremost above everything. It's like he has a crusade to bend over backwards to show the customer that we care. Even to the point of pointing out where faults are in the software instead of simply saying, "we have an issue, and we're working on it." And my current task for getting the requirements for the next build to the real customers is way behind because this fine fellow keeps thinking of things that he thinks that the customer needs. Unfortunately, we're in a small company, and the owner feels that this guy's word is golden (and he's fireproof), plus he keeps promising customers anything that pops into his head, so we never ship on schedule anymore. In fact, we ship when he figures out that not getting the software to the customer is a worse thing than not putting in more features.
No, i'm not talking about IT people with some ABC certificate or can program in X language, but engineers that have been trained to solve problems formally.
Um, sorry, I have to disagree with you. Regardless of the rhetoric, they want code monkeys that will work for peanuts and do sleep-deprivation tricks. IBM Austin's recent reqs was for college grads, not any industry veterans that know how to create software due to something called, oh I'm searching for the word... experience. Those with your, "solid quantitative skills" are out of luck if they're past their twenties.
Go ahead, vote Republican. Enjoy the new Depression.
but then, I've never seen one of these rumored documents, so I can't say for sure.
My experience has been, working for a former Fortune 500 company (it may still be, but it stopped acting like one about 8 years ago), that there were no good design documents from anyone else that we could use as a template. Either someone had a document from a book somewhere that had the kitchen sink in it, or else it was such an atrocious and/or insufficient mess, that it was useless.
I think that what was really going on what that everyone was waiting around for someone else to come up with a good design document that could be used as a prototype. In the meantime we used the old standby, tribal knowledge, as a communication medium and design store. Thank goodness nobody ever got run over by a truck....no, actually, that wouldn't have been all that bad....
Lessie here... if it's something vital, like entertainment, music in this case, then the U.S. Govenrnment passes laws to make them open their kimono.
But if it is something unimportant, like, say, the underpinnings of a computer, the operating system, for example, then it's okay for the company to keep things closed up nice and tight.
I guess we know which 500# gorilla owns the most Congresscritters!
And what happened? The people working on the flight deck, a bunch of un-educated 19 year old enlisted guys, ran TOWARDS the inferno, and put the fire out before it lit off the jet fuel.
Um, they were a lot better trained than you think. You go through damage control and firefighting training in boot, plus you constantly (at least I did) go through retraining as your duties change. I'm sure that they knew the penalty for letting that blaze spread farther than it did. Not saying that what they did wasn't unexceptional. But they weren't that uneducated.
(from non-ECC memory, which may have suffered parity errors)
Three guys meet up in a bar in Dallas. They start comparing life stories, and it turns out one is from San Francisco, one from Denver, and the other from Austin. They order up various drinks.
At one point the guy from S.F. takes a bottle of wine, pours himself a glass, takes a swig, then tosses the bottle up in the air, pulls out a gun (concealed carry law), and shoots the bottle, spraying Napa Valley's best and broken glass everywhere.
"What'd you do that for?" yells the guy from Colorado.
"Well, where I come from in California, we got plenty of wine!" roars the S.F. guy.
A little more time passes. Then the guy from Denver grabs a can of Coors, takes a swig, then throws the can in the air, pulls out a gun, and shoots the can, putting a neat hole in it and spraying Colorado's finest everywhere.
"What'd you do that for?" yells the guy from S.F.
"Well, where I come from in Denver, we gots plenty of Coors!" roars the Denver guy.
A little more time passes. Then the guy from Austin strokes his crystal, grabs a bottle of wine and a can of Coors, throws both of them up in the air, pulls out his gun, shoots the guy from Denver and the guy from S.F., and neatly catches the bottle in one hand and the can in the other.
"What'd you do that fer??!?" yells the bartender.
"Well," the Austinite says, "in Austin we got plenty of folks from Colorado and California, but bottles and cans, those you can recycle!"
2700 square foot houses can be had for $175,000 or less.
...upon which you'll be paying $6,000/yr. on property taxes. Have we mentioned the 8.25% sales tax (depends on where you live)? And a good chunk of your property tax goes to another school district because of the Robin Hood laws.
And ever live in an ETJ? Representation without taxation. I.e., they tell you how to run your life without being in the city limits.
OTOH, I've been in shorts for the past month, modulo two or three days.
If you know what you're going to do, and you are fairly certain about it -- as in you found someone in the Real World(tm) who does what you want to do, and you've taken a plant trip to see the environment, etc., etc. -- then go for the gusto to a university where you can, among other things, get more exposure to your intended major, even though you won't take serious major courses until your sophomore year.
Otherwise, if you don't know exactly what you want to do, perhaps go to the community college to get the general stuff out of the way.
If you don't have the stomach for that, or you really want to not do school again, join the military. Not the Army or the Marines where you're going to be cannon fodder in whatever country we happen to disagree with or want to liberate at the time. Something like the Navy or Air Force where you'll actually learn a trade and see the world and do things that you would never do in civilian life. And save money and get in on whatever the G.I. Bill incarnation is at the time, so that when you are ready, you won't be sponging off mom and dad.
The military will also give you discipline if you don't have it. Nothing like your liberty being taken away if you aren't doing well in the military technical school to motivate you.
Have them sit around while you tell them you want something that does, um, something, but you're not going to tell them what it is. Have them work on it for three months. Then tell the kids it's not what you wanted at all. You wanted it in mauve. They don't know what mauve is? Tough noogies.
Then tell them that if they were real software engineers, they'd be able to figure out what you want through osmosis. Berate them, and give them only a token bonus at the year-end review (no raise).
Then bring in a contractor that the boss likes. The contractor stays late after everybody but the boss goes home. Then the boss tells the contractor what he wants done differently. Then when everybody comes back the next day, all the code's been changed by the contractor, and there's no documentation except for the smug contractor that tells you that the boss came in late and wanted things changed.
Then the next thing you know, the contractor is the kids' project manager. Oh, did I forget to mention that he doesn't speak English very well? And that a month later he goes back home to India. Along with the project knowledge that the boss has been giving him. Berate the kids again since they haven't been keeping up with the code changes.
Make sure somewhere in here that you choose one of the kids that doesn't know very much to be in charge of the design, and if one of the other kids has a better idea, ignore it. Better yet, say that their design isn't like the original design, so they can't do it.
Then refuse to release the product because it's not good enough yet. Make the kids put in every change suggested by potential customers' brothers' hairdressers' uncles. Make the kids stay late at night to get this done because it's their fault that it's late. Berate the kids some more. If any of the complain or cry, fire them. Hold their stock options over their heads, and threaten to take them away if they say anything bad about the company. Reduce everybody's pay because they haven't put a product out yet.
I have a friend who works for HP (okay, two, but I haven't had lunch with the guy for years). I had told her that my HP 5550 Inkjet printer cannot print the bottom 5/8" of the paper, which made it not able to print my tax form for 2003 (so I printed it Postscript, and ran it off of a non-HP laser printer). It also makes me raise the bottom margin so that my kid's reports have page numbers at the bottom when he uses MS Word. Anyway, she was told that any time she hears of anyone having trouble with a HP product, even though it's nowhere near her area, she was supposed to follow through to help the problem. Geez, that's awful nice of a commodity company to task its employees to sell on their private time. Too bad I've already spent time with HP chat assistants and the on the phone with other HP droids that ended up telling me that it was my software that was the problem, and not their commotidy hardware.
I don't have the heart to tell her that I'm picking up a Brother laser printer in the next week or so. Oh wait, maybe I do.
So. Mark can't go and work on a Google OS.
But I doubt that is what Google wants to do anyway.
Um, how about a Google Linux distro? 'Cept that now you don't have a filesystem to worry about. Just do a Google search and it'll find the file you're looking for. But you'll also get targeted ads based upon keywords in your files. And then once you've completed installing the distro on your machine, you'll be able to send out invites to your friends to try GoogleLinux while it's still in beta.
I think that it's positively un-American that they're switching to Linux and taking jobs away from the hard-working deserving American citiziens that work at Microsoft, and subsequently at American anti-virus companies like Symantec. I've heard that there's French and Russian types that have spies in America that have worked on Linux, and it's only because Linux is free that companies are switching. Well, it's NOT FREE!!! Every copy of Linux that gets installed means one laid-off American worker from American companies that support our president and our just wars overseas. This has got to stop! If just every red-blooded American citizen would go out and buy a copy of Microsoft Windows at the suggested retail price, our lives would be so much better off for those of us that have invested our American dollars in MSFT.
I think that if we bought products from the company of every CEO that has slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, we'd have more prosperity, fewer terrorists, better return on our investment dollars, and higher executive bonuses that would trickle down to all layers of our economy, especially at American-staffed Mercedes and Lexus auto dealerships. So stay away from that Linux corruption. It's bad, very BAD!!!
I'm starting to get a little weary of these, "The Death of..." articles. It'll happen when it happens. Or is it that the authors are hoping that the thing whose turn it is to be dying will die of this quasi-self-fulfilling prophesy?
Is there a place in my preferences where I can turn off viewing "Death of..." articles?
I don't think the man pages are all THAT bad, they're WAY better then the ones that come with Solaris. Then there are the Info pages too, which are often useful, but still pale in comparison to a book. But IMHO they do make a good reference.
Ah, but when do you look at the info page, which may or may not be there? I'm not a big fan of doing a man foo and then an info foo for everything that I want to look up. 'Course there's a note at the bottom of some man pages that say to look at the more extensive info pages.
We should have been screaming a long time ago, back in the early 90ties... but back then M$ didn't look like a serious threat.
Hahahahahaha! It was just as big of a threat back then, unless you count 1990 and 1991. But Apple wanted to make oodles of money, and Windows was all that was left. And it was pretty harmless back then.
I still pine for the days when only the hobbyists, universities, and corporate wonks had computers. Now they let anyone buy one. And everyone wonders why Ma & Pa Kettle can't figure out why it don't work right four minutes after they connect it to the Internet.
Deathmarches, poor project management and PHBs are no more the norm now than they were 30 years ago.
It's expected. You're a programmer, put in the hours, then! Oh, you won't? Well, we'll replace you with someone who is more passionate about software development than you are. Someone who will put in 60-hour weeks...for starters, that is.
Slashdot Mirror
Getting rid of Windows.
DT
I'm sorry, you must have misread the article (MTFA). I think you mean, "The 'next great advancement' in databases will be when I can setup 2 or more Microsoft servers."
DT
I dunno. I work with someone that has the interests of the customer foremost above everything. It's like he has a crusade to bend over backwards to show the customer that we care. Even to the point of pointing out where faults are in the software instead of simply saying, "we have an issue, and we're working on it." And my current task for getting the requirements for the next build to the real customers is way behind because this fine fellow keeps thinking of things that he thinks that the customer needs. Unfortunately, we're in a small company, and the owner feels that this guy's word is golden (and he's fireproof), plus he keeps promising customers anything that pops into his head, so we never ship on schedule anymore. In fact, we ship when he figures out that not getting the software to the customer is a worse thing than not putting in more features.
DT
Um, sorry, I have to disagree with you. Regardless of the rhetoric, they want code monkeys that will work for peanuts and do sleep-deprivation tricks. IBM Austin's recent reqs was for college grads, not any industry veterans that know how to create software due to something called, oh I'm searching for the word... experience. Those with your, "solid quantitative skills" are out of luck if they're past their twenties.
Go ahead, vote Republican. Enjoy the new Depression.
DT
Several commenters of/in the blog mentioned tabs, including a link to someone at MSDN blogs that doesn't like them.
DT
My experience has been, working for a former Fortune 500 company (it may still be, but it stopped acting like one about 8 years ago), that there were no good design documents from anyone else that we could use as a template. Either someone had a document from a book somewhere that had the kitchen sink in it, or else it was such an atrocious and/or insufficient mess, that it was useless.
I think that what was really going on what that everyone was waiting around for someone else to come up with a good design document that could be used as a prototype. In the meantime we used the old standby, tribal knowledge, as a communication medium and design store. Thank goodness nobody ever got run over by a truck. ...no, actually, that wouldn't have been all that bad....
DT
Okay, here ya go:
1. What are you smoking? I want some.
2. What country do you think you're talking about?
A: The United States of Corporate Slaves and Their Masters
3. No, seriously, what are you smoking?
4. Get back to work, you!
DT
But if it is something unimportant, like, say, the underpinnings of a computer, the operating system, for example, then it's okay for the company to keep things closed up nice and tight.
I guess we know which 500# gorilla owns the most Congresscritters!
DT
Could also be Child Protective Services, or whatever y'all have down there. And just think of the taxes.
DT
"Who's the educator here?"
"Why did you ever go into computers? I can't stand them."
"I don't expect you to know that."
Oh, and we're fungible.
DT
Um, they were a lot better trained than you think. You go through damage control and firefighting training in boot, plus you constantly (at least I did) go through retraining as your duties change. I'm sure that they knew the penalty for letting that blaze spread farther than it did. Not saying that what they did wasn't unexceptional. But they weren't that uneducated.
DT
Three guys meet up in a bar in Dallas. They start comparing life stories, and it turns out one is from San Francisco, one from Denver, and the other from Austin. They order up various drinks.
At one point the guy from S.F. takes a bottle of wine, pours himself a glass, takes a swig, then tosses the bottle up in the air, pulls out a gun (concealed carry law), and shoots the bottle, spraying Napa Valley's best and broken glass everywhere.
"What'd you do that for?" yells the guy from Colorado.
"Well, where I come from in California, we got plenty of wine!" roars the S.F. guy.
A little more time passes. Then the guy from Denver grabs a can of Coors, takes a swig, then throws the can in the air, pulls out a gun, and shoots the can, putting a neat hole in it and spraying Colorado's finest everywhere.
"What'd you do that for?" yells the guy from S.F.
"Well, where I come from in Denver, we gots plenty of Coors!" roars the Denver guy.
A little more time passes. Then the guy from Austin strokes his crystal, grabs a bottle of wine and a can of Coors, throws both of them up in the air, pulls out his gun, shoots the guy from Denver and the guy from S.F., and neatly catches the bottle in one hand and the can in the other.
"What'd you do that fer??!?" yells the bartender.
"Well," the Austinite says, "in Austin we got plenty of folks from Colorado and California, but bottles and cans, those you can recycle!"
DT
And ever live in an ETJ? Representation without taxation. I.e., they tell you how to run your life without being in the city limits.
OTOH, I've been in shorts for the past month, modulo two or three days.
DT
Otherwise, if you don't know exactly what you want to do, perhaps go to the community college to get the general stuff out of the way.
If you don't have the stomach for that, or you really want to not do school again, join the military. Not the Army or the Marines where you're going to be cannon fodder in whatever country we happen to disagree with or want to liberate at the time. Something like the Navy or Air Force where you'll actually learn a trade and see the world and do things that you would never do in civilian life. And save money and get in on whatever the G.I. Bill incarnation is at the time, so that when you are ready, you won't be sponging off mom and dad.
The military will also give you discipline if you don't have it. Nothing like your liberty being taken away if you aren't doing well in the military technical school to motivate you.
Been there. Done that.
DT
Then tell them that if they were real software engineers, they'd be able to figure out what you want through osmosis. Berate them, and give them only a token bonus at the year-end review (no raise).
Then bring in a contractor that the boss likes. The contractor stays late after everybody but the boss goes home. Then the boss tells the contractor what he wants done differently. Then when everybody comes back the next day, all the code's been changed by the contractor, and there's no documentation except for the smug contractor that tells you that the boss came in late and wanted things changed.
Then the next thing you know, the contractor is the kids' project manager. Oh, did I forget to mention that he doesn't speak English very well? And that a month later he goes back home to India. Along with the project knowledge that the boss has been giving him. Berate the kids again since they haven't been keeping up with the code changes.
Make sure somewhere in here that you choose one of the kids that doesn't know very much to be in charge of the design, and if one of the other kids has a better idea, ignore it. Better yet, say that their design isn't like the original design, so they can't do it.
Then refuse to release the product because it's not good enough yet. Make the kids put in every change suggested by potential customers' brothers' hairdressers' uncles. Make the kids stay late at night to get this done because it's their fault that it's late. Berate the kids some more. If any of the complain or cry, fire them. Hold their stock options over their heads, and threaten to take them away if they say anything bad about the company. Reduce everybody's pay because they haven't put a product out yet.
Did I forget anything?
DT
Yah, so we can find out the best, and most sincere way, to say, "You want fries with that?".
DT
I don't have the heart to tell her that I'm picking up a Brother laser printer in the next week or so. Oh wait, maybe I do.
DT
Um, how about a Google Linux distro? 'Cept that now you don't have a filesystem to worry about. Just do a Google search and it'll find the file you're looking for. But you'll also get targeted ads based upon keywords in your files. And then once you've completed installing the distro on your machine, you'll be able to send out invites to your friends to try GoogleLinux while it's still in beta.
DT
Um, a doctor?
DT
I think that if we bought products from the company of every CEO that has slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, we'd have more prosperity, fewer terrorists, better return on our investment dollars, and higher executive bonuses that would trickle down to all layers of our economy, especially at American-staffed Mercedes and Lexus auto dealerships. So stay away from that Linux corruption. It's bad, very BAD!!!
DT
Is there a place in my preferences where I can turn off viewing "Death of ..." articles?
DT
As soon as the market opens on Monday, I'll buy a few hundred shares, and watch the tumble.
Get out while you can.
DT
Ah, but when do you look at the info page, which may or may not be there? I'm not a big fan of doing a man foo and then an info foo for everything that I want to look up. 'Course there's a note at the bottom of some man pages that say to look at the more extensive info pages.
DT
Hahahahahaha! It was just as big of a threat back then, unless you count 1990 and 1991. But Apple wanted to make oodles of money, and Windows was all that was left. And it was pretty harmless back then.
I still pine for the days when only the hobbyists, universities, and corporate wonks had computers. Now they let anyone buy one. And everyone wonders why Ma & Pa Kettle can't figure out why it don't work right four minutes after they connect it to the Internet.
DT
It's expected. You're a programmer, put in the hours, then! Oh, you won't? Well, we'll replace you with someone who is more passionate about software development than you are. Someone who will put in 60-hour weeks...for starters, that is.
Welcome to the post-dot-com era.
DT