with your criticism. This guy is sharing his observations with us. The fact of the matter is that this guy is squeezed. He has no budget for ramping up or internships or anything like that. His business is cut to the bone so he must hire a team of proven sluggers to get things done now. It's not his fault, it's a symptom of what's happening in the economy.
This guy has managers that has managers and somewhere high up, someone has decided that training unproven talent is not cost-effective. It is kind of a tragedy of the commons problem. Engineering talent is a resource that every IT company must share, just taking from the talent pool is most cost-effective for each individual company, but means that the pool will dry up. Training talent is not a smart strategy because, as the GP said, no company should expect the trainee to remain in the company.
The corporations themselves choose that way. They erased the concept of loyalty between empolyee and employer. Loyalty is for suckers when everyone at any time can be fired for what ever reason. If the corporations want to maximize their profit, then the employees will do likewise, jumping ship at the first opportunity. It is a situation that is optimal for each individually, but sucks at the whole.
The thing that always amazes me about Windows is not how half-assed it is, but how half-assed it is given the amount of resources that Microsoft has to throw at the problem. You'd think that they'd have the money to fund tons of cool pieces of software to go with a Windows installation. I mean Windows Paint is a pathetic application that does almost nothing, MS Paint is a horrible example as that is one of the nicest tools Windows has. It is lean and cold starts up in less than a second. It is easy, you don't have to fiddle with layers just to draw a rectangle or some text. Notepad is the same, perfect if you want to paste some random junk och just check out a small text file. There is nothing quite like those tools on Linux, it seems like all utility programs just must have a Python scripting interface, modular toolbars, splash screens... Application startup suffers. But all image programs apparently just have to be the next Photoshop killer and all editors just have to have more features than Emacs.
With all the taxes that I pay, I could hire another employee. But these well-meaning legislators have effectively fired him before I could ever hire him. That argument is quite stupid. Either you have a use for a new employee, which means that you earn more money from his or her work than it costs you in salary. If you do, then the taxes on your business is irrelevant. Or you don't have a use for a new employee, which means that $value_of_work less than $salary, which means no hire. Tax has nothing to do with that decision. It's a great way to raise sympathy for your cause though (more money). However, no business owner would rather hire someone than pocket the money if the latter is more profitable.
One method doesn't exclude the other and very few people have the money to write six figure checks. Real change happens after the first brick of stone is thrown, and when that happens, it is important to know that at least you tried changing it the right way.
Actually, I think it is rather impressive that 7.10 (which has eye candy on by default) has slightly less power consumption than 7.04 (no eye candy by default). Eye candy has nothing to do with it. When the computer is idle there is no eye candy and all processes should be sleeping. But some processes like daemons needs to wake up intermittently to check for various conditions. For example, the battery monitor needs to regularly update its display of how much battery power is left. It is these wake ups that consume power when idling (except for the ambient power draining from the hardware).
So if the idle power consumption increases it means that the wake ups happen more frequently or are longer, which is bad because generally, daemons with no work to do should do as little as possible before going to sleep again and they should wake up as seldom as possible. Someone coded a daemon badly and that is why 7.10 consumes more power than 6.06.1
Not true at all, Thomas Bodström had a similar proposition, but definitely not on the same scale as what the current government (and all coalition parties) are trying to push through. You are the one being gravely informed, it was Socialdemokraterna and the liberal parties that voted in favor of Bodströms previous proposals. Miljöpartiet and Vänsterpartiet voted against.
As a Swedish citizen, you should stop being so stuck up and realize that your government too wants to snoop your email. Which is, I presume, a government you can influence through voting. Reinfeldt sure loves to kiss Bush's ass. Vote right (left that is) next time.
Doesn't this mean they can pretty much charge anyone for having any kind of information relating to Bus/train/airplane times? Software Vulnerabilities? Google Earth? The Location of the White House? I think you got the point completely.
2. OOo did NOT inherit its bloat from MS Office. Part of it comes from the many tools used to make sure the software was Cross Platform. MS Office has a lot of bloat with NO Cross Platform features. What is their excuse?
That's not true, and here is the proof. Anyone with a Windows computer can easiliy verify the results. MS Office is orders of magnitues faster than OO.o. A warm start of any MS Office tool (Powerpoint, Word, Exel) starts and loads the document in less than 1 second on my P4 3.2 GHz 1GB RAM computer. The reason why is obvious. Better platform integration, preloading libraries and yes, binary formats which is, and always will be, more efficient than XML.
If you step back and squint, J2ME is handled exactly the opposite way that Java is handled. There are no standardized implementations you can deploy on, not even on PDAs, which would bring a lot of ideas and talent in from the developer community. This diametrically opposite effect explains why Java, which is so important in the enterprise, is a toy platform in the mobile world. You either develop for a specific device, or you develop trivial games that don't cause a lot of grief when they don't work cross platform.
Oh really? If J2ME is a toy platform, what is the real platform then? J2ME is deployed on billions of devices and it would be insane for any ISV to ignore that. Yes, the platform is balkanized and you have to perform a lot of painful compatibility testing to ensure that your software works on a wide range of devices. Exactly the same problem you would have had if you wanted to deploy commerical apps targetting GNU/Linux. And yes, write once run anywhere is a myth. But what is your alternative? The Windows Mobile market is only about a few millions so that is right out.
And which of Investigators, Sims 2, VRally-3D, Extreme Air Snowboarding 3D, Tomb Raider, Virtua Tennis and 3D Golf xPro is a trivial game? Which of them is developed for a specific device?
Done. I work for a phone company in Springfield, MA. They've been using Windows on their desktop for quite a while now, mostly due to both my predecessors being totally incompetent and windows being the status-quo.
It took very little convincing on my part to get the management to see the benefits of Ubuntu on the normal users desktops and we'll be doing a nearly-full rollout (some manager computers will remain windows) in a couple months.
Good luck to you! I have tried the same thing, but failed. It turned out that the social hurdles are much, much harder to overcome than the technical ones. Setting up Linux servers and desktop is trivial, but forcing a technology hating manager to adapt just a tiny little bit is like moving mountains. It would be very interesting to hear if your planned rollout suceeds and how you did it.
All those lists of top universities are very subjective. You cant comparatively measure quality of education or of students because all faculties use different metrics and change them all the time. They are more a lists of what the most prestigious universities are and Harvard is the world leader, no question about that. It could be that credentials and prestige is much more important to Chinese and Indians than to Americans. You can acquire a "world class" education at any university in the world if you put your mind to it.
is the one Metacity uses. The patch to remove that one is also only a few lines, but I have yet to see a non-technical person manage to do that. The great advantages of free software aren't technical, they are social. People working together for a common good because it is fun is a more efficient economic system than the one in which you do it to get a paycheck. Imagine what would happen if the rest of the world where also structured like free software communities?
Sucks to live in a backwater country. The rest of us are happy to download stupid Hollywood movies from Pirate Bay at 100 MBit/s using the municipal fiber network for 15$/month.:)
You are missing the point. We have draconian regulations like max 100 ml of liquid on airplanes, agencies wiretapping phones and internet lines, cameras everywhere and wars in Iraq and Afganistan all in the name of preventing terrorism. It stands to reason that building a nuclear powerplant which actually would be a delicious target for a potential terroist or hostile nation would get more scrutiny. If you are going to be paranoid about terrorists, do it in a rational and future-thinking way rather than just harassing citizens. I'm not a nuclear technician so I have no idea how you damage a nuclear plant, neither am I a pilot so I have no idea how to crash a plane into a big tower. That doesn't stop smarter people than me from knowing how to do these kinds of things.
One reason against nuclear power is that it is centralized. That is, it is farily easy to bomb a nuclear plant to take out electricity for a lot of people. Wind or solar power which is much more decentralized doesn't have the same problem because you have to strike hundreds of targets for the electricity to go down.
And what about the terrorists? How hard is it to imagine a few devoted terrorists infiltrating a plant to deliberately cause a melt-down?
On the contrary, managers will stop handing out busy work to programmers when they realize that their time actually costs real money. No more, please sort these papers in chronological order tonight, we don't pay you anything anyway. So much great talent is wasted everyday because programmer time is way to cheap. Less hours means more productive hours means better software.
Here is a list of good things that the UN has done. Just because the UN hasn't won any wars doesn't mean that they have not accomplished a lot of good.
It's still very recognizable as C. GObject might not be ideal, but it works, and it's not required that you use it; you can write perfectly functional applications on top of Glib without touching GObject. Of course, GObject is more powerful than straight C and arguably more powerful than most other object oriented languages (though admittedly, violates many of the principals of OO languages, for example Encapsulation is entirely broken in GObject).
it's debatable if this is recognizable as C. To me it looks more like some form of bastardized Scheme and Java. Ofcourse you can write applications without Glib, you don't need any library to write anything. But if you want to integrate your software to GNOME you have to use GObject and your code will become just as messy as the one in the link. Truth is that compared to what OO languages offer, GObject is pure garbage. It requires you to follow some very braindead conventions and go through major pain to accomplish what a few lines would do in other languages.
Just the boilerplate to declare and implement an empty GObject is 6 defines, 2 structs and one public constructor function. Plus one more struct if you want to be able to encapsulate your data. Then you also have to implement one instance init function, one finalization function, one class init function, one property setter function (otherwise your GObjects wont be subclassable) and one constructor function. All that to write the equivalent of "class Foo { };"
Of course, the environment has changed quite a bit and most platforms have a more-than-acceptable C++ STL implementation, so if we ever wanted to drop every single piece of code we've written to date and rewrite everything from the ground up in C++... yeah, you can see why we're all against it.
That is not one of the reasons. Mixing C++ and C is easy. The reasons instead are 1. Ditching Glib and GObject would make lots of programmers who spent years working on it angry. 2. Adopting C++ would be like admitting they were wrong all the time and the KDE fanboys were right, can't have that. 3. Plain old "C has always worked for me, we don't need any of your newfangled toys!" Most of GNOME is still stuck in C89 btw, and even C99 code will be treated with extreme suspicion.
How can salary information be abused? It can't be. It doesn't allow you to loot someones bank account, fake their identity or any other kind of mischief. What it can be used to, though, is salary bargaining. It is much easier to demand a raise if you can prove, black on white, that you are underpaid. Employees know that, employers do too, which is why they want that kind of info to be a as closely guarded secret as possible. Do your colleagues know how much you earn? Does your boss like you discussing it?
In Sweden, how much someone earn is public information. Or actually what they pay in taxes is, but you can easily count backwards from that. Checking out such information before you negotiate your salary for a new job is a great idea which I learned the hard way. Should have done a credit check before I accepted a lower than average salary because the company didn't do very well, when in reality the boss took 3-4x as much as me. Everyone gets fooled like that all time time because all the cards are stacked in the employers favor. They have all the knowledge of what salaries there are and you have none, even unions can't do much anymore. But getting salary information is a great way to at least reduce the knowledge gap a little.
I expected to see a ton of 'that's not fair!' posts here, but maybe those people don't wake up this early.
Alright, but we're also missing a "I'm morally superior to you" post. And here it is:
I also make lots of money. Not as much as those guys, but still enough to make a decent living. I don't own a car and never will. Taking the bus or train when you want to go somewhere is simple, and costs less. Cars pollute and driving them, is according to most research, the primary cause of global warning. So if just a few more people would be as responsible as we, the mass transit users, our planet wouldn't be in this fucking mess that it is in right now. Believing that you actually need a private landing strip and your private jet tells me that you are an egoistic unresponsible sob with an overinflated ego. I'm more envious of Bill Gates then who through his foundation has managed to put his wealth to good use. All without needing a private jet afaik.
So as I think your statement is just a rubber-stamp ignorant cop out - if you need to learn it you probably can. Now what would be a good case is more a comparison of capabilities or ease of learning the syntax. I chose PHP not only for it's flexibility but also for the readable syntax it has.
No really, it is not. A good techie can easily write scalable Ruby on Rails apps and it is simple to write readable and maintainable PHP code. But trying to convince your collegues who neither likes you nor your new-fangled ideas is impossible. Yes, it is politics at its worst but it is also reality, technology is easy to change, people are not.
Deploying Rails can be very difficult and you can face a lot of issues that you would never face for PHP.
Would you like to elaborate a bit on that? I know a bit about PHP but I have no experience with Ruby on Rails and I'm kinda curious what these issues would be.
Your Ruby programmer who coded the site quits and/or your website hits a serious problem in the Ruby on Rails you have no idea to fix. Ruby programmers doesn't exactly grow on trees although those that exist are almost without exception extremely talented. A PHP programmer quitting is annoying, a Ruby programmer quitting is a major disaster.
Indeed! We have a wiki at our company with something like 10,000 employees. It is very popular and received hundreds of edits every day. IT doesn't manage it, it was some guy who decided that it would be nice to setup one. The wiki is now two years old but IT still threats it like a step child because it is new and foreign to them. I imagine it was the same thing with the corporate IM clients we are using. Most IT folks seem to have trouble realizing that they serve the same role to the company as the cleaning staff - they should be keeping stuff working and clean and then, please, get out of the way. Instead they grow into a nuisance where every change in the environment becomes a massive beaurocratic undertaking.
For example, many people want to use Firefox to browse the intranet (we're developers after all). But IT still gets away with "Sorry, Firefox is not supported here. If you have a legitimate business case for requesting a change please fill in this form to create a request ticket along with your department managers approval bla bla bla"
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This guy has managers that has managers and somewhere high up, someone has decided that training unproven talent is not cost-effective. It is kind of a tragedy of the commons problem. Engineering talent is a resource that every IT company must share, just taking from the talent pool is most cost-effective for each individual company, but means that the pool will dry up. Training talent is not a smart strategy because, as the GP said, no company should expect the trainee to remain in the company.
The corporations themselves choose that way. They erased the concept of loyalty between empolyee and employer. Loyalty is for suckers when everyone at any time can be fired for what ever reason. If the corporations want to maximize their profit, then the employees will do likewise, jumping ship at the first opportunity. It is a situation that is optimal for each individually, but sucks at the whole.
Not that it matters, but please. It is 10k (EURO). $14286
One method doesn't exclude the other and very few people have the money to write six figure checks. Real change happens after the first brick of stone is thrown, and when that happens, it is important to know that at least you tried changing it the right way.
So if the idle power consumption increases it means that the wake ups happen more frequently or are longer, which is bad because generally, daemons with no work to do should do as little as possible before going to sleep again and they should wake up as seldom as possible. Someone coded a daemon badly and that is why 7.10 consumes more power than 6.06.1
Not true at all, Thomas Bodström had a similar proposition, but definitely not on the same scale as what the current government (and all coalition parties) are trying to push through. You are the one being gravely informed, it was Socialdemokraterna and the liberal parties that voted in favor of Bodströms previous proposals. Miljöpartiet and Vänsterpartiet voted against.
As a Swedish citizen, you should stop being so stuck up and realize that your government too wants to snoop your email. Which is, I presume, a government you can influence through voting. Reinfeldt sure loves to kiss Bush's ass. Vote right (left that is) next time.
That's not true, and here is the proof. Anyone with a Windows computer can easiliy verify the results. MS Office is orders of magnitues faster than OO.o. A warm start of any MS Office tool (Powerpoint, Word, Exel) starts and loads the document in less than 1 second on my P4 3.2 GHz 1GB RAM computer. The reason why is obvious. Better platform integration, preloading libraries and yes, binary formats which is, and always will be, more efficient than XML.
Oh really? If J2ME is a toy platform, what is the real platform then? J2ME is deployed on billions of devices and it would be insane for any ISV to ignore that. Yes, the platform is balkanized and you have to perform a lot of painful compatibility testing to ensure that your software works on a wide range of devices. Exactly the same problem you would have had if you wanted to deploy commerical apps targetting GNU/Linux. And yes, write once run anywhere is a myth. But what is your alternative? The Windows Mobile market is only about a few millions so that is right out.
And which of Investigators, Sims 2, VRally-3D, Extreme Air Snowboarding 3D, Tomb Raider, Virtua Tennis and 3D Golf xPro is a trivial game? Which of them is developed for a specific device?
Good luck to you! I have tried the same thing, but failed. It turned out that the social hurdles are much, much harder to overcome than the technical ones. Setting up Linux servers and desktop is trivial, but forcing a technology hating manager to adapt just a tiny little bit is like moving mountains. It would be very interesting to hear if your planned rollout suceeds and how you did it.
All those lists of top universities are very subjective. You cant comparatively measure quality of education or of students because all faculties use different metrics and change them all the time. They are more a lists of what the most prestigious universities are and Harvard is the world leader, no question about that. It could be that credentials and prestige is much more important to Chinese and Indians than to Americans. You can acquire a "world class" education at any university in the world if you put your mind to it.
is the one Metacity uses. The patch to remove that one is also only a few lines, but I have yet to see a non-technical person manage to do that. The great advantages of free software aren't technical, they are social. People working together for a common good because it is fun is a more efficient economic system than the one in which you do it to get a paycheck. Imagine what would happen if the rest of the world where also structured like free software communities?
Sucks to live in a backwater country. The rest of us are happy to download stupid Hollywood movies from Pirate Bay at 100 MBit/s using the municipal fiber network for 15$/month. :)
You are missing the point. We have draconian regulations like max 100 ml of liquid on airplanes, agencies wiretapping phones and internet lines, cameras everywhere and wars in Iraq and Afganistan all in the name of preventing terrorism. It stands to reason that building a nuclear powerplant which actually would be a delicious target for a potential terroist or hostile nation would get more scrutiny. If you are going to be paranoid about terrorists, do it in a rational and future-thinking way rather than just harassing citizens. I'm not a nuclear technician so I have no idea how you damage a nuclear plant, neither am I a pilot so I have no idea how to crash a plane into a big tower. That doesn't stop smarter people than me from knowing how to do these kinds of things.
One reason against nuclear power is that it is centralized. That is, it is farily easy to bomb a nuclear plant to take out electricity for a lot of people. Wind or solar power which is much more decentralized doesn't have the same problem because you have to strike hundreds of targets for the electricity to go down.
And what about the terrorists? How hard is it to imagine a few devoted terrorists infiltrating a plant to deliberately cause a melt-down?
On the contrary, managers will stop handing out busy work to programmers when they realize that their time actually costs real money. No more, please sort these papers in chronological order tonight, we don't pay you anything anyway. So much great talent is wasted everyday because programmer time is way to cheap. Less hours means more productive hours means better software.
Here is a list of good things that the UN has done. Just because the UN hasn't won any wars doesn't mean that they have not accomplished a lot of good.
It's still very recognizable as C. GObject might not be ideal, but it works, and it's not required that you use it; you can write perfectly functional applications on top of Glib without touching GObject. Of course, GObject is more powerful than straight C and arguably more powerful than most other object oriented languages (though admittedly, violates many of the principals of OO languages, for example Encapsulation is entirely broken in GObject).
it's debatable if this is recognizable as C. To me it looks more like some form of bastardized Scheme and Java. Ofcourse you can write applications without Glib, you don't need any library to write anything. But if you want to integrate your software to GNOME you have to use GObject and your code will become just as messy as the one in the link. Truth is that compared to what OO languages offer, GObject is pure garbage. It requires you to follow some very braindead conventions and go through major pain to accomplish what a few lines would do in other languages.
Just the boilerplate to declare and implement an empty GObject is 6 defines, 2 structs and one public constructor function. Plus one more struct if you want to be able to encapsulate your data. Then you also have to implement one instance init function, one finalization function, one class init function, one property setter function (otherwise your GObjects wont be subclassable) and one constructor function. All that to write the equivalent of "class Foo { };"
Of course, the environment has changed quite a bit and most platforms have a more-than-acceptable C++ STL implementation, so if we ever wanted to drop every single piece of code we've written to date and rewrite everything from the ground up in C++... yeah, you can see why we're all against it.
That is not one of the reasons. Mixing C++ and C is easy. The reasons instead are 1. Ditching Glib and GObject would make lots of programmers who spent years working on it angry. 2. Adopting C++ would be like admitting they were wrong all the time and the KDE fanboys were right, can't have that. 3. Plain old "C has always worked for me, we don't need any of your newfangled toys!" Most of GNOME is still stuck in C89 btw, and even C99 code will be treated with extreme suspicion.
How can salary information be abused? It can't be. It doesn't allow you to loot someones bank account, fake their identity or any other kind of mischief. What it can be used to, though, is salary bargaining. It is much easier to demand a raise if you can prove, black on white, that you are underpaid. Employees know that, employers do too, which is why they want that kind of info to be a as closely guarded secret as possible. Do your colleagues know how much you earn? Does your boss like you discussing it?
In Sweden, how much someone earn is public information. Or actually what they pay in taxes is, but you can easily count backwards from that. Checking out such information before you negotiate your salary for a new job is a great idea which I learned the hard way. Should have done a credit check before I accepted a lower than average salary because the company didn't do very well, when in reality the boss took 3-4x as much as me. Everyone gets fooled like that all time time because all the cards are stacked in the employers favor. They have all the knowledge of what salaries there are and you have none, even unions can't do much anymore. But getting salary information is a great way to at least reduce the knowledge gap a little.
I expected to see a ton of 'that's not fair!' posts here, but maybe those people don't wake up this early.
Alright, but we're also missing a "I'm morally superior to you" post. And here it is:
I also make lots of money. Not as much as those guys, but still enough to make a decent living. I don't own a car and never will. Taking the bus or train when you want to go somewhere is simple, and costs less. Cars pollute and driving them, is according to most research, the primary cause of global warning. So if just a few more people would be as responsible as we, the mass transit users, our planet wouldn't be in this fucking mess that it is in right now. Believing that you actually need a private landing strip and your private jet tells me that you are an egoistic unresponsible sob with an overinflated ego. I'm more envious of Bill Gates then who through his foundation has managed to put his wealth to good use. All without needing a private jet afaik.
So as I think your statement is just a rubber-stamp ignorant cop out - if you need to learn it you probably can. Now what would be a good case is more a comparison of capabilities or ease of learning the syntax. I chose PHP not only for it's flexibility but also for the readable syntax it has.
No really, it is not. A good techie can easily write scalable Ruby on Rails apps and it is simple to write readable and maintainable PHP code. But trying to convince your collegues who neither likes you nor your new-fangled ideas is impossible. Yes, it is politics at its worst but it is also reality, technology is easy to change, people are not.
Deploying Rails can be very difficult and you can face a lot of issues that you would never face for PHP.
Would you like to elaborate a bit on that? I know a bit about PHP but I have no experience with Ruby on Rails and I'm kinda curious what these issues would be.
Your Ruby programmer who coded the site quits and/or your website hits a serious problem in the Ruby on Rails you have no idea to fix. Ruby programmers doesn't exactly grow on trees although those that exist are almost without exception extremely talented. A PHP programmer quitting is annoying, a Ruby programmer quitting is a major disaster.
Indeed! We have a wiki at our company with something like 10,000 employees. It is very popular and received hundreds of edits every day. IT doesn't manage it, it was some guy who decided that it would be nice to setup one. The wiki is now two years old but IT still threats it like a step child because it is new and foreign to them. I imagine it was the same thing with the corporate IM clients we are using. Most IT folks seem to have trouble realizing that they serve the same role to the company as the cleaning staff - they should be keeping stuff working and clean and then, please, get out of the way. Instead they grow into a nuisance where every change in the environment becomes a massive beaurocratic undertaking.
For example, many people want to use Firefox to browse the intranet (we're developers after all). But IT still gets away with "Sorry, Firefox is not supported here. If you have a legitimate business case for requesting a change please fill in this form to create a request ticket along with your department managers approval bla bla bla"