Most people have never tried implementing an application that handles such a heavy load in any system. I worked for an ISP that implemented a system, not as big, but in the hundreds of thousands of transactions a day. We started with Windows servers and switched to Linux -- not because of faults in Windows, but because of cost. I always chuckled when I saw those TCO ads by Microsoft. If you are a computer professional who has been trained in both systems, setup and install time usually goes to Linux. Now I know many windows guys are saying that it only takes seconds to restore their systems. I don't know any professional Windows shop that doesn't rely upon some type of system ghosting, because windows takes so long to install from scratch. Sure ghosting has an edge, but from CD our Linux server install took 15 minutes. I've seen shops stick to a platform after the hardware is out of date, because they are so scared of the time to re-setup their systems. Why doesn't Windows XP get upgraded. Microsoft serves its target market well, which is companies from 5 to 500 employees. Their products are overly complex for home users and the licensing fees so large for large companies that companies like Sun have found it cheaper to write their own office applications and to give them away for free.
If you like software development, why do you want to be in IT? IT is essentially a service job. Sure, some larger companies strangely try to develop custom applications in their IT departments, but, most have a separate department called Engineering or R&D where software is developed. Software Engineers rarely take support calls. Tasks are project based and not crisis based. The only rub is that some companies have IT departments that have individuals who think they know something about computers. At one company, I worked on a committee rewriting company computer usage policy, I specifically added that the engineering departments lab was off-limits to IT and exempt from IT computer use rules. Due to the "police" enforcement mentality of some IT groups, and often their lack of understanding of software development, engineering groups look on IT background with some disdain. So, you will find it nearly impossible to move from IT to better software development jobs in the same company. Find friends who have made the switch and apply to them at other companies.
Code reviews are only as good as the reviewer. I've worked for companies that do the team over-head approach -- mostly a waste of time. Pair programming -- valuable for some programmers, frankly I don't mind having someone look over my shoulder, but it's boring as can be to watch someone else program, especially when I'm faster.
Reviewing code of a failing project can be very valuable, recently I was asked to look at another team's project at the company where I work. I took on a few assignments to complete parts of the project, I learned that they had spent a year of development time and money to write a database access layer. I reported to my boss that they had wasted the companies money, I rewrote my portion using the Microsoft supplied DataSet and showed a simple operation taking 4 seconds in place of 90 seconds. Fortunately my boss took the corrective action and let the team go. The entire review took about four months.
I know that is not what you are thinking of when you talk about code reviews, but, just looking for bugs in code is not enough. You have to have a competent senior programmer who knows how to evaluate code. Two bad programmers are not any better than one bad programmer.
Throw out the silly coding standards that say tab stops must be 4 spaces, and ask a good programmer to look at the code to see if he is willing to take ownership. If you don't know if you have a good programmer, ask a programmer to add a couple of automated unit tests to the code you want reviewed. That will result in a better code review than any meeting or pairing.
Programmer, Software Engineer, Computer Scientist, Software Architect. The title depends upon your level of insecurity. Same with Computer Science compared with Software Engineering. Was Michael Faraday not an inventor of electronics because he didn't use calculus? The truth is that there are good, bad and ugly practitionares of computer engineering science. The ugliest of all think they are good.
In the seventies they had an idea called the Peter principle which is that in an organization, everyone rises to their level of incompetence. Sony is obviously lead by such a person. I worked for an ISP for hotels that wanted to add first run movies to their options. We spoke to the media companies, and I was surprised that their view was that their content was what everyone wanted. The hotels told us the purchase rates for the Internet were almost ten times the purchase rate for movies. Sony couldn't be more misinformed on tastes and wants of their customers. How many more hours do you spend on the internet than watching movies? If you have to pay for the movies at a theater? I would estimate that my ratio is easily higher than 10 times for internet to movies on TV and if I go to the theater, well I sometimes go more than a year without getting my feet stuck to the floor.
Many people commenting here have missed the point. The point is not that there are not movies on iTunes or other venues. The point is that there are many people who would pay a premium for first release movies to their houses. I will have to say that often I would be willing to pay $100 or more for a just released movie. I spend that much going to the theater and to be perfectly honest my home theater beats out all of the theaters around my house for quality and comfort. The motion picture producers should realized there is a market especially if the movie is targeted for a more intelligent crowd than the 14 year old boys that most PG-13 films aim to attract.
"Newspapers used to publish the best responses to their stories..." Best in who's eyes. I much prefer the current forums to the editor controlled forums. I would like the forums to be more unmoderated. The pretense that we have to be protected from the f-word is silly. I rarely swear in public. Yes I have a college education and I have no trouble coming up with descriptive and illustrative language to get my point across, but when I want to describe my health insurance to the widest possible audience, the best word is four letters long.
That's a funny response. You're like the pirate of penzance that has never seen a woman except his old maid. So, you would limit this programmer to a language that doesn't work on the iPhone? I use.Net and I like C#, but half the systems I program don't have any Microsoft code and couldn't run.Net. The more languages you know well the more opportunities you have, although most programmers can't master even one language. So, this is really a question of what do you desire and do you have the talent to back up your desires?
I was too harsh in my criticism if thin clients. I've seen some excellent educational software delivered as thin clients. I've even worked on some. And at this point you could really teach using most business applications with thin clients. But, I still wouldn't want an entire school's technology limited to what runs in a web browser. Possibly it is because my own kids spend too much time on the web and on the little screens on their phones, I would like them to get deeper into some applications at school.
This is the wrong way to ask the question. The type of computers to buy should be decided by the application, which is mostly decided by software. Thin clients? Stupid idea, unless you are teaching using Facebook and surfing porn. Here's an idea, plan a curriculum and the needs will become apparent. For instance, buy some sturdy computers with attached keyboards for a few typing labs. Buy some great work stations with big monitors for teaching Photoshop of Gimp in Art (if Photoshop won't give the program for free use Gimp. Don't use government money to sell proprietary programs.) Buy general purpose machines for a library lab for poorer students to do homework. Get some Linux boxes for a programming lab and teach computer programming. Buy some microcontrollers like the Basic Stamp for an electronics class. Some laptops on carts for classes that don't necessarily need computers every day, but like math have a segment on programming to approximate integration. If you just buy one type of computer, you really don't teach computer usage very well.
Nothing is worse than working with someone who is ill-suited for their chosen profession. Sadly as demonstrated the American Idol show, too many people get into activities for which they have no talent. I think that the dot com bubble attracted too many poorly talented people in to the computer science field. The same is happening in India. There are talented programmers every where, but finding them is difficult. We have had jobs go unfilled in Utah and India. Not for lack of qualified candidates (i.e. they have a degree and experience), but for lack of talented candidates.
Universities aren't the solution. Unfortunately they are run by the same mix of qualified but often untalented individuals found anywhere. That is why you remember the few great professors the rest of your life, and suffer the others.
The tax system in the United States is one of the best in the world. The system in India is considered the most complex. Actually, the salaried income taxes are a simple three tiered scale in the US. They can be read off of a simple table so that individuals don't even have to do any math.
The opportunities for economic advancement is greater here than in many other countries. So the over 50 pages of tax forms that I submit, are really 50 pages of calculating my earnings in my various businesses and investments.
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Most people have never tried implementing an application that handles such a heavy load in any system. I worked for an ISP that implemented a system, not as big, but in the hundreds of thousands of transactions a day. We started with Windows servers and switched to Linux -- not because of faults in Windows, but because of cost. I always chuckled when I saw those TCO ads by Microsoft. If you are a computer professional who has been trained in both systems, setup and install time usually goes to Linux. Now I know many windows guys are saying that it only takes seconds to restore their systems. I don't know any professional Windows shop that doesn't rely upon some type of system ghosting, because windows takes so long to install from scratch. Sure ghosting has an edge, but from CD our Linux server install took 15 minutes. I've seen shops stick to a platform after the hardware is out of date, because they are so scared of the time to re-setup their systems. Why doesn't Windows XP get upgraded. Microsoft serves its target market well, which is companies from 5 to 500 employees. Their products are overly complex for home users and the licensing fees so large for large companies that companies like Sun have found it cheaper to write their own office applications and to give them away for free.
If you like software development, why do you want to be in IT? IT is essentially a service job. Sure, some larger companies strangely try to develop custom applications in their IT departments, but, most have a separate department called Engineering or R&D where software is developed. Software Engineers rarely take support calls. Tasks are project based and not crisis based. The only rub is that some companies have IT departments that have individuals who think they know something about computers. At one company, I worked on a committee rewriting company computer usage policy, I specifically added that the engineering departments lab was off-limits to IT and exempt from IT computer use rules. Due to the "police" enforcement mentality of some IT groups, and often their lack of understanding of software development, engineering groups look on IT background with some disdain. So, you will find it nearly impossible to move from IT to better software development jobs in the same company. Find friends who have made the switch and apply to them at other companies.
Code reviews are only as good as the reviewer. I've worked for companies that do the team over-head approach -- mostly a waste of time. Pair programming -- valuable for some programmers, frankly I don't mind having someone look over my shoulder, but it's boring as can be to watch someone else program, especially when I'm faster. Reviewing code of a failing project can be very valuable, recently I was asked to look at another team's project at the company where I work. I took on a few assignments to complete parts of the project, I learned that they had spent a year of development time and money to write a database access layer. I reported to my boss that they had wasted the companies money, I rewrote my portion using the Microsoft supplied DataSet and showed a simple operation taking 4 seconds in place of 90 seconds. Fortunately my boss took the corrective action and let the team go. The entire review took about four months. I know that is not what you are thinking of when you talk about code reviews, but, just looking for bugs in code is not enough. You have to have a competent senior programmer who knows how to evaluate code. Two bad programmers are not any better than one bad programmer. Throw out the silly coding standards that say tab stops must be 4 spaces, and ask a good programmer to look at the code to see if he is willing to take ownership. If you don't know if you have a good programmer, ask a programmer to add a couple of automated unit tests to the code you want reviewed. That will result in a better code review than any meeting or pairing.
Programmer, Software Engineer, Computer Scientist, Software Architect. The title depends upon your level of insecurity. Same with Computer Science compared with Software Engineering. Was Michael Faraday not an inventor of electronics because he didn't use calculus? The truth is that there are good, bad and ugly practitionares of computer engineering science. The ugliest of all think they are good.
In the seventies they had an idea called the Peter principle which is that in an organization, everyone rises to their level of incompetence. Sony is obviously lead by such a person. I worked for an ISP for hotels that wanted to add first run movies to their options. We spoke to the media companies, and I was surprised that their view was that their content was what everyone wanted. The hotels told us the purchase rates for the Internet were almost ten times the purchase rate for movies. Sony couldn't be more misinformed on tastes and wants of their customers. How many more hours do you spend on the internet than watching movies? If you have to pay for the movies at a theater? I would estimate that my ratio is easily higher than 10 times for internet to movies on TV and if I go to the theater, well I sometimes go more than a year without getting my feet stuck to the floor.
Many people commenting here have missed the point. The point is not that there are not movies on iTunes or other venues. The point is that there are many people who would pay a premium for first release movies to their houses. I will have to say that often I would be willing to pay $100 or more for a just released movie. I spend that much going to the theater and to be perfectly honest my home theater beats out all of the theaters around my house for quality and comfort. The motion picture producers should realized there is a market especially if the movie is targeted for a more intelligent crowd than the 14 year old boys that most PG-13 films aim to attract.
"Newspapers used to publish the best responses to their stories..." Best in who's eyes. I much prefer the current forums to the editor controlled forums. I would like the forums to be more unmoderated. The pretense that we have to be protected from the f-word is silly. I rarely swear in public. Yes I have a college education and I have no trouble coming up with descriptive and illustrative language to get my point across, but when I want to describe my health insurance to the widest possible audience, the best word is four letters long.
That's a funny response. You're like the pirate of penzance that has never seen a woman except his old maid. So, you would limit this programmer to a language that doesn't work on the iPhone? I use .Net and I like C#, but half the systems I program don't have any Microsoft code and couldn't run .Net. The more languages you know well the more opportunities you have, although most programmers can't master even one language. So, this is really a question of what do you desire and do you have the talent to back up your desires?
I was too harsh in my criticism if thin clients. I've seen some excellent educational software delivered as thin clients. I've even worked on some. And at this point you could really teach using most business applications with thin clients. But, I still wouldn't want an entire school's technology limited to what runs in a web browser. Possibly it is because my own kids spend too much time on the web and on the little screens on their phones, I would like them to get deeper into some applications at school.
This is the wrong way to ask the question. The type of computers to buy should be decided by the application, which is mostly decided by software. Thin clients? Stupid idea, unless you are teaching using Facebook and surfing porn. Here's an idea, plan a curriculum and the needs will become apparent. For instance, buy some sturdy computers with attached keyboards for a few typing labs. Buy some great work stations with big monitors for teaching Photoshop of Gimp in Art (if Photoshop won't give the program for free use Gimp. Don't use government money to sell proprietary programs.) Buy general purpose machines for a library lab for poorer students to do homework. Get some Linux boxes for a programming lab and teach computer programming. Buy some microcontrollers like the Basic Stamp for an electronics class. Some laptops on carts for classes that don't necessarily need computers every day, but like math have a segment on programming to approximate integration. If you just buy one type of computer, you really don't teach computer usage very well.
Nothing is worse than working with someone who is ill-suited for their chosen profession. Sadly as demonstrated the American Idol show, too many people get into activities for which they have no talent. I think that the dot com bubble attracted too many poorly talented people in to the computer science field. The same is happening in India. There are talented programmers every where, but finding them is difficult. We have had jobs go unfilled in Utah and India. Not for lack of qualified candidates (i.e. they have a degree and experience), but for lack of talented candidates. Universities aren't the solution. Unfortunately they are run by the same mix of qualified but often untalented individuals found anywhere. That is why you remember the few great professors the rest of your life, and suffer the others.
The tax system in the United States is one of the best in the world. The system in India is considered the most complex. Actually, the salaried income taxes are a simple three tiered scale in the US. They can be read off of a simple table so that individuals don't even have to do any math. The opportunities for economic advancement is greater here than in many other countries. So the over 50 pages of tax forms that I submit, are really 50 pages of calculating my earnings in my various businesses and investments.