Programming is hard. In fact, so hard that merely three or four years at university won't make you more than decent at it. The best programmers are the ones who love doing it, who got their C64 at 10 and then spent years learning about computers in their spare time. Understandably that is the kind of programmers your company wants. Programmers who have learnt so much by themselves that it would amount to 10+ years in university for someone new in the field. Programmers that are really good, that are better than average. Does your company pay them a fair salary in comparision to their education and skill? Or does it pay average salaries for very much above average skilled personell? If it is the latter, then it's no wonder that you have trouble recruiting people.
So, to sum up, companies that are to cheap to pay decent salaries or to offer training programs for their mediocre programmers have nothing but themselves to blame.
ClearCase isn't nearly as bad as you or anyone else makes it out to be. A SuperStar programmer would rather see CC as an interesting opportunity to work with a VCS that takes a totally different approach than all other systems out there. Sure I prefer git too, doesn't everyone? But I'd rather work with nice friendly coworkers and CC than with git and arrogant morons who thinks VCS is the most important part of the job.
Are you suggesting there is no correlation at all between how intelligent people are and how well they do in life financially? Or that there's no correlation between stupid buying habits and whether or not you end up poor? That's completely absurd, of course there must be. Or do you think it all boils down to luck? There are millions of correlations between X and how wealthy you are. Everything from gender (men earn more than women), to looks (beautiful is better than ugly), to length (taller is more successfull), to race (white of course), to parents social status, to geographic location, to physical health and so on. It would be completely absurd to suggest that intelligence is the only, or the most dominant, indicator of economic success.
1. The impulsiveness of purchases is highest in low income categories. The middle class actually counts pennies much more and the rich have someone counting for them. Let's see some source for that, can we? If you want to continue spreading the myth that poor=stupid, then at least paste a link. The only thing that differs is what people buy impulsively. Rich people impulse buys cars, middle class people fancy clothes and poor people tickets to the movies.
I don't think it's too difficult for determined espionage to get moles at Secret. Barring naturalized citizens from clearances would make it orders of magnitude more difficult but it's unlikely to be worth that cost. There is no reason to believe that naturalized citizens (aka immigrants) would be more likely to espionage than natives. In fact very few of the agents spying for the Soviet Union were Communists or Socialists, although the belief was a convenient myth for the establishment.
If past cases in Denmark are in indication Tele2 is just the first ISP to block access, all other ISPs in Denmark will soon follow. In short, if you live in Denmark, there really will be no alternatives. If just one tenth of every Danish Tele2 customer that reads this phoned up their customer service and asked them why all out of a sudden, they can't access The Piratebay, they would soon have to reverse their decision. Angry customers on phone is expensive. Or better yet, tell them that you will switch to another ISP that doesn't block torrent sites.
The essence of your argument is that taxes are bad because then the private sector gets less money to spend. That's not true. The only differences between private and public sector investments is that, if it is public, then the profit goes back to the public. The private sector loses opportunities with higher taxes, but the public sector gains just as many back.
If I'd ever seen a legitimate case of an officer oppressing someone, I'd pay more attention to your and the article writers' fears. But I haven't. And I've seen the stuff they actually did do to protect people. Then take a look at this.
Hillary Clinton, who most people will agree is very smart, has problems because people just can't connect on a personal level with her. And because of this, people feel that she's being disingenuous with them. Do you have a source for that? Hillary Clinton is a woman, and it is pretty clear from news, pundits and lame Hillary jokes that a lot of people would rather not see a female as the most important person in the world. Journalists, thinkers and the rest of the whole American intelligentia are used to the president being a man, the possibility that it might be a woman instead has them scared shitless. They (mostly men) naturally have a huge problem "connecting with her on a personal level." They don't want to change, they don't want the world to change. A female president is just way to much for them right now, try again in 50 years. The US has never been and probably never will be a frontrunner country for equal rights. Try asking your female aquiantances if they have a problem connecting to Hillary Clinton. You might be suprised.
When was the last time you used windows? What you have wrote just isn't true. The memory footprint for apps such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint are much lower than comparable Linux apps like OpenOffice, AbiWord and KWrite. Almost all Linux desktop programs takes longer to cold start than their windows (XP or 2000, I've no experience of Vista) equivalents thanks to the huge amount of dynamic libraries Linux uses. EOG is slower than the image viewer in Windows, GEdit is much slower than notepad.exe, write.exe and so on. Internet Explorer and even Firefox starts faster on Windows than Linux.
While the summary, in typical Slashdot style, is heavily slanted, the article offers some interesting advice. Microsoft apparently has some serious problems trying to convince people to upgrade to Vista. Not because Vista is particularily bad (it isn't), but because XP is good enough already. So what would you do? You either use "evil" techniques like stopping distributing the old OS, shutting down upgrade servers or making your new software exclusive to the new OS. Or you use "good" techniques like publishing articles about how bad your previous OS was. Pick your choice. Also realize that all arguments presented in the article for switching from XP to Vista could equally well be applied to switching from XP to Linux.
If you read Slashdot a few months ago, you would find glowing reviews of the iPhone and its amazing and innovative visual voicemail features. Nowhere during the keynote did Steve Jobs say "it's just like email with wav files attached, very obvious." You can't have it both ways.
The problem is of couse we no longer produce our own necessities, therefore we are indentured servants to one another. That may sound "luddite'ish" but it is the truth. If you don't own your own productive property and are dependent on someone else for basic necessities, then you are in a struggle for power with the person that provides you those necessities. It also sounds an awful lot like the exact definition of "class struggle."
available emulators don't adequately emulate phone limitations, and not all manufacturers publish all of the relevant implementation specifications, so testing requires actually having a wide array of phones, which can be pretty expensive. Seek and you shall find. At least both Sony Ericsson and Nokia have public discussion boards where you can get in touch with handset developers, bug reporting and free test suites. You can also, if you represent a reputable ISV, borrow phones to test with and (if you sign a bunch of NDA:s) even get unreleased phones to experiment with.
but J2ME phones all run the same code and the same APIs. Issues between phones almost always come down to working around JVM implementation bugs
This is just plain wrong. Once you start looking at graphics, audio, keyboard input, bluetooth, gps, network, photo or video capture or anything beyond very basic apps, you reach the murky world of JSRs, which are bits of java that may or may not be included in a particular j2me installation. If they are included, many of them have lots left up to the implementation to decide, for example MMAPI leaves it up to the implementation whether to support MIDI sound, whether to support playing audio directly from code rather than from a file, whether to support recording, what file formats to support etc. You can't even reliably play audio files across platforms, let alone do interesting things like get at the camera, get video frames etc. No it is not wrong. Not all phones has camera snapshotting or audio recording capability which is why you need API:s that leaves it up to the manufacturer what to support. The only other alternative is that each manufacturer writes their own API for whatever features their phones support. All manufacturers had such API:s but are now trying to phase them out because it is easier to stick to standards than to invent your own. Which is exactly what Google is doing, which is exactly why they will fail to attract developers.
It is the same thing with other widely deployed specifications, POSIX, the C library, etc.
Nokia phones for example, most will let you grab a single frame from the camera, some won't, but you can't grab multiple video frames without a 1/4 second delay per frame, whereas motorola phones, many will not let you at the camera at all, Alright, that sucks. But what is your alternative? Try writing a PC program to record frames from a USB camera, easier than MMAPI?
This is what excites me the most about Android: OpenGL ES compatible Graphics API. Oh please. Handsets have been shipping with Mobile 3D Graphics for years (a 3d scene graph FYI). It is standardized as JSR-184 and is pretty much ubiquitous on even midrange phones. Earlier than that, you had the Mascot Capsule which is still the fastest J2ME 3D API for low end devices. Now there is also the OpenGL ES bindings (JSR-239) which will be included in many phones being released this Christmas and spring.
It is cool that Google is making a gPhone, but really, they aren't breaking any new ground here. Google's attempt to create a totally new embedded Java ecosystem also seems a little misguided. There is already the MIDP and CLDC platforms which are open, standardized and implemented on a huge number of devices. gPhone apparently has neither which will make porting apps to it a huge pain in the ass for developers. There is a reason why other handset manufacturers tries to stick with the established standards instead of doing everything their own way.
What matters is how much energy per mass you can store. So if you can store four times as much energy using compressed air compared to batteries, then even if the efficiency is only 30% it is still a good deal. However, that seems quite unlikely to me.
As for your article, it doesn't cite a single source, and seems not to be anything other than a plot summary from the movie, so looks like it will probably be deleted. If you really want to save it, all you need to do is to put in some references to sources besides the movie itself, and call attention to that in the AfD discussion. And that is exactly why he, me and everyone else who hard their articles deleted have stopped contributing. The original author isn't obliged to do anything. Instead, those that nominate for deletion should do their part and add the required references. But I guess, like others have said, they can't, so they will try to destroy the sand castles instead of building them.
Saying "if you really want to save it, all you need to do is to put in some references" is extremely disrespectful and shows a total lack of understanding of the amount of work involved in writing high quality articles. The author did it for free. Now you can either be a douche bag and write "nn. delete" or put in the time needed to add those references. Kids that smash sand castles indeed.
I agree that there are definitely some people who want to delete to readily, but then again there are people who are pushing trivia on Wikipedia, which is not good. It can run both ways. I don't think it run both ways at all. If you are one of those that wants to delete, then the easiest way to do it is to nominate articles for deletion (AfD) and vote "Delete" a lot. Any monkey can do that and it doesn't require much energy. If instead you want to push trivia, then you write articles containing trivial information. That requires research, spell-checking, writing skills and is quite some effort. So, someone adding articles has to spend 100 times or more effort than the ones doing the deletion. Which is why people writing "non-notable" articles doesn't tend to stick around - nobody enjoys seeing maybe days of work being destroyed by some random jackasses who have no idea about the subject. The investment the "deletionist" has to do is much much smaller than for the "inclusionist."
The article author is either stupid beyond belief or deliberately trying to cause spite and malice. Neither GNOME the project, nor The GNOME Foundation is in any way or form backing OOXML! Miguel de Icaza is, but most other foundation members are staunchly against it. Not that it matters, there is a big fucking difference between individuals opinions and the stance of an organization. If the author has some beef with de Icaza, then he should say so, but don't try to paint the GNOME Foundation with the same brush. Fucking moron troll.
The difference is conceptual. When people start "blogging" many slashdotters also missed it: "Just upload your html using ftp!" Just compare how simple it is to put together an HTML page with a form and how (relatively) difficult it is to do the same thing using even Visual Basic. My prediction is that this is the beginning to something really big.
Slashdot Mirror
Because I have seen it. 16 year olds who write complete 3d engines in assembly on their free time just for fun are extremely skilled programmers.
Programming is hard. In fact, so hard that merely three or four years at university won't make you more than decent at it. The best programmers are the ones who love doing it, who got their C64 at 10 and then spent years learning about computers in their spare time. Understandably that is the kind of programmers your company wants. Programmers who have learnt so much by themselves that it would amount to 10+ years in university for someone new in the field. Programmers that are really good, that are better than average. Does your company pay them a fair salary in comparision to their education and skill? Or does it pay average salaries for very much above average skilled personell? If it is the latter, then it's no wonder that you have trouble recruiting people. So, to sum up, companies that are to cheap to pay decent salaries or to offer training programs for their mediocre programmers have nothing but themselves to blame.
ClearCase isn't nearly as bad as you or anyone else makes it out to be. A SuperStar programmer would rather see CC as an interesting opportunity to work with a VCS that takes a totally different approach than all other systems out there. Sure I prefer git too, doesn't everyone? But I'd rather work with nice friendly coworkers and CC than with git and arrogant morons who thinks VCS is the most important part of the job.
So government penalizing certain business behaviour will not lead to fewer ocurrances of said behaviour?
The essence of your argument is that taxes are bad because then the private sector gets less money to spend. That's not true. The only differences between private and public sector investments is that, if it is public, then the profit goes back to the public. The private sector loses opportunities with higher taxes, but the public sector gains just as many back.
There are lots of organisations that accept donations and will give you a diploma or something in return. Greenpeace for exampe, http://www.greenpeace.org/international/supportus
When was the last time you used windows? What you have wrote just isn't true. The memory footprint for apps such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint are much lower than comparable Linux apps like OpenOffice, AbiWord and KWrite. Almost all Linux desktop programs takes longer to cold start than their windows (XP or 2000, I've no experience of Vista) equivalents thanks to the huge amount of dynamic libraries Linux uses. EOG is slower than the image viewer in Windows, GEdit is much slower than notepad.exe, write.exe and so on. Internet Explorer and even Firefox starts faster on Windows than Linux.
While the summary, in typical Slashdot style, is heavily slanted, the article offers some interesting advice. Microsoft apparently has some serious problems trying to convince people to upgrade to Vista. Not because Vista is particularily bad (it isn't), but because XP is good enough already. So what would you do? You either use "evil" techniques like stopping distributing the old OS, shutting down upgrade servers or making your new software exclusive to the new OS. Or you use "good" techniques like publishing articles about how bad your previous OS was. Pick your choice. Also realize that all arguments presented in the article for switching from XP to Vista could equally well be applied to switching from XP to Linux.
If you read Slashdot a few months ago, you would find glowing reviews of the iPhone and its amazing and innovative visual voicemail features. Nowhere during the keynote did Steve Jobs say "it's just like email with wav files attached, very obvious." You can't have it both ways.
It is the same thing with other widely deployed specifications, POSIX, the C library, etc. Nokia phones for example, most will let you grab a single frame from the camera, some won't, but you can't grab multiple video frames without a 1/4 second delay per frame, whereas motorola phones, many will not let you at the camera at all, Alright, that sucks. But what is your alternative? Try writing a PC program to record frames from a USB camera, easier than MMAPI?
It is cool that Google is making a gPhone, but really, they aren't breaking any new ground here. Google's attempt to create a totally new embedded Java ecosystem also seems a little misguided. There is already the MIDP and CLDC platforms which are open, standardized and implemented on a huge number of devices. gPhone apparently has neither which will make porting apps to it a huge pain in the ass for developers. There is a reason why other handset manufacturers tries to stick with the established standards instead of doing everything their own way.
The sex of the embryo is decided by the sperm.
What matters is how much energy per mass you can store. So if you can store four times as much energy using compressed air compared to batteries, then even if the efficiency is only 30% it is still a good deal. However, that seems quite unlikely to me.
Saying "if you really want to save it, all you need to do is to put in some references" is extremely disrespectful and shows a total lack of understanding of the amount of work involved in writing high quality articles. The author did it for free. Now you can either be a douche bag and write "nn. delete" or put in the time needed to add those references. Kids that smash sand castles indeed.
The article author is either stupid beyond belief or deliberately trying to cause spite and malice. Neither GNOME the project, nor The GNOME Foundation is in any way or form backing OOXML! Miguel de Icaza is, but most other foundation members are staunchly against it. Not that it matters, there is a big fucking difference between individuals opinions and the stance of an organization. If the author has some beef with de Icaza, then he should say so, but don't try to paint the GNOME Foundation with the same brush. Fucking moron troll.
The difference is conceptual. When people start "blogging" many slashdotters also missed it: "Just upload your html using ftp!" Just compare how simple it is to put together an HTML page with a form and how (relatively) difficult it is to do the same thing using even Visual Basic. My prediction is that this is the beginning to something really big.