I've hired dozens of developers over the years. I can teach a developer a language, or a development philosophy, or a set of APIs. There are only two things I cannot teach, and therefore should look for in new hires:
1) Communication skills
2) Work Ethic
If a person has these two skills, I can teach them anything else they need to be a quality developer. People will tell you to over-communicate. It's good advice.
I don't think we have the same idea here. We don't keep our government "in check". Instead, we populate the government with people representative to some degree of the population at large.
That's exactly the problem in the US. We're a nation divided. If you look at the last 3 elections, we're divided nearly 50/50 on our political views. Half of Americans seem to want social justice, equality, privacy, and caring for the poor, and the other half want religion in schools, small government, privatization of all government roles, and a huge military. The two sides are so far apart that no compromise is possible.
A friend explained it like this. Two people go out to dinner. One says, "I feel like eating Italian tonight." The other says, "I want to eat Anthrax and broken glass." Now, compromise so both are happy.
There's always some Apple fanboys (jo_ham, where you at?), who insist the machines are higher quality etc etc, but this is mainly nonsense.
They use almost the exact same components for PC's, and are ridiculous overpriced.
Not to mention the barriers to self-repair, amping up the cost over the lifetime of the machine.
The only value they have is in the aesthetics, or if you need OS X for some reason. Generally not worth the cost except to people who like to burn money.
The same people who buy a $100 burger in a restaurant that costs $12 to make, cause it costs $100.
I've got a degree in computer engineering. I have designed and built CPUs and motherboards. I don't repair my own computers. It's not worth my time.
Aesthetics are important. Anyone who hasn't realized this is living in the past. There's a reason that Apple is the most valuable company in the world. The real genius in Apple's products isn't the performance and never has been; it's the fusion of design, style, and functionality.
Need OS X for some reason? How about because it's the best OS on the market for nearly everyone? Linux is a great dev OS, but my mother could never use it. Windows is an adequate OS, and had gotten better with Windows 7, but it's still far, far more obtuse than OS X, and it's less powerful for a power user with a UNIX background too.
A Mac is not a $100 burger. It's the $10 burger that's clearly better than the cheaper Big Mac. Both will fill you up, but there's no question in my mind which one I want to eat. You get what you pay for.
Finally, Microsoft Word for your phone. They will blow Android out of the water.
The ONLY way anyone is blowing Android out of the water is if they provide a better product and give it away for free. Android isn't where it is because it's superior; it's there because manufacturers can use it for free.
http://www.pixelmator.com/
An amazing piece of software, and only $15! Seriously, if you have a Mac and you don't get this you are doing yourself a disservice.
I have a Chromecast, as well as a Roku and an Apple TV. The Chromecast's video quality is terrible by comparison, pausing and stuttering, buffering and rendering video quality from the 1990s. Hopefully one of these updates will make it actually do what it's designed for. Right now it's a $35 device that serves no purpose.
Any compression at all, any modification at all, is unacceptable in a copier. How do you not get that?
That is an absurd position. There's no issue with lossless compression, and it's beneficial to the customer, because it allows you to scan and copy much larger documents without memory issues. The reason that this is a problem is that it's lossy compression algorithm that clearly is flawed.
It all depends on your thread scenario. Most of the smaller side-projects I work on are of no interest to any entity able to intercept the data transfers, so I don't mind storing stuff in, say, Evernote or Dropbox where it is more convenient to do so.
The stuff that the survival of my small company depends on, running my own servers is worth the effort. For my holiday pictures, iCloud is perfectly acceptable.
I don't have any data under my personal control that I care if the government intercepts. My email is boring as hell. The most interesting thing in my email is when Blizzard locks my Battle.net account because I tried to log in from work and they think my IP changed. My Dropbox is full of junk I want to transfer between computers and nightly binaries that I want to share with our Ukrainian QA team. Really exciting stuff. Hack away, people, hack away. I care not. The pieces of data that I wouldn't want stolen (SSN, bank accounts) aren't in my personal control anyway.
As to the quote about operating systems mad in China... what OS is that exactly? Neither Apple nor Microsoft develop their OS's in China. If any OS has Chinese developers, it's Linux. Red herring.
People who don't think java7 is ready are smoking crack. It's been production ready for a long time.. Works on Linux, works on OSX, works on Windows. I have used it on 20M transaction/day apps and had it run for months with no issues..
Java gets a bad name because of the browser plugin. Let's EOL that for all versions of java. I like java on the server. I like it for writing Android apps. I do NOT like it in the browser, and neither does anyone else with any interest in security.
Every problem that a slashdot reader has is a first world problem.
Unless you're dying from or transmitting a disease, starving to death, cannot find clean water, have too many children because you don't about contraception, or are growing up uneducated, your problems are most likely all first world problems.
I have it on my to-do list to record it. The live footage in full quality will air on Discovery Channel on Sun. January 27th on a show called "Monster Squid: The Giant is Real". I suspect until then it will be hard to find good quality footage.
I don't buy it for a minute. My kids have tons of Lego sets. Yes, they build the thing on the box, but then later, they tear it apart and build a million other things too.
Clearly, as usual, nobody did their research. I quote the Blizzard Community Manager:
We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
And fail, like 95% of those projects do. Entrepreneuring is the game of either the young or the rich; the young don't have enough commitments to make the risk really hurt, and the rich have enough assets to absorb the shock. If you're middle-aged, with a mortgage, and high ongoing costs in regard to the maintenance of your family, the risk just isn't worth it.
So what if you fail? You get up and try again. There is tons of VC and angel funding out there for people with a good work ethic and some new ideas. Honestly, the idea is the hard part. Once you get past that it's not really hard at all to make a living at it.
I'm at a startup now after 10+ years at large mega-corporations. It's fun to be back at a company where people actually like to come to work.
Slashdot Mirror
I've hired dozens of developers over the years. I can teach a developer a language, or a development philosophy, or a set of APIs. There are only two things I cannot teach, and therefore should look for in new hires: 1) Communication skills 2) Work Ethic If a person has these two skills, I can teach them anything else they need to be a quality developer. People will tell you to over-communicate. It's good advice.
I don't think we have the same idea here. We don't keep our government "in check". Instead, we populate the government with people representative to some degree of the population at large.
That's exactly the problem in the US. We're a nation divided. If you look at the last 3 elections, we're divided nearly 50/50 on our political views. Half of Americans seem to want social justice, equality, privacy, and caring for the poor, and the other half want religion in schools, small government, privatization of all government roles, and a huge military. The two sides are so far apart that no compromise is possible.
A friend explained it like this. Two people go out to dinner. One says, "I feel like eating Italian tonight." The other says, "I want to eat Anthrax and broken glass." Now, compromise so both are happy.
Let's let that dominate the discussion.
There's always some Apple fanboys (jo_ham, where you at?), who insist the machines are higher quality etc etc, but this is mainly nonsense.
They use almost the exact same components for PC's, and are ridiculous overpriced.
Not to mention the barriers to self-repair, amping up the cost over the lifetime of the machine.
The only value they have is in the aesthetics, or if you need OS X for some reason. Generally not worth the cost except to people who like to burn money.
The same people who buy a $100 burger in a restaurant that costs $12 to make, cause it costs $100.
Finally, Microsoft Word for your phone. They will blow Android out of the water.
The ONLY way anyone is blowing Android out of the water is if they provide a better product and give it away for free. Android isn't where it is because it's superior; it's there because manufacturers can use it for free.
http://www.pixelmator.com/ An amazing piece of software, and only $15! Seriously, if you have a Mac and you don't get this you are doing yourself a disservice.
All police are asshats. You pretty much have to be a sociopath to take such a horrible job.
I have a Chromecast, as well as a Roku and an Apple TV. The Chromecast's video quality is terrible by comparison, pausing and stuttering, buffering and rendering video quality from the 1990s. Hopefully one of these updates will make it actually do what it's designed for. Right now it's a $35 device that serves no purpose.
PGP/GPG with an 16k key? Yeah, crack that NSA. Until quantum computers come out, PGP/GPG are solid choices. Just keep making the key bigger.
Any compression at all, any modification at all, is unacceptable in a copier. How do you not get that?
That is an absurd position. There's no issue with lossless compression, and it's beneficial to the customer, because it allows you to scan and copy much larger documents without memory issues. The reason that this is a problem is that it's lossy compression algorithm that clearly is flawed.
Disclaimer: I am an IT Security professional.
It all depends on your thread scenario. Most of the smaller side-projects I work on are of no interest to any entity able to intercept the data transfers, so I don't mind storing stuff in, say, Evernote or Dropbox where it is more convenient to do so.
The stuff that the survival of my small company depends on, running my own servers is worth the effort. For my holiday pictures, iCloud is perfectly acceptable.
I don't have any data under my personal control that I care if the government intercepts. My email is boring as hell. The most interesting thing in my email is when Blizzard locks my Battle.net account because I tried to log in from work and they think my IP changed. My Dropbox is full of junk I want to transfer between computers and nightly binaries that I want to share with our Ukrainian QA team. Really exciting stuff. Hack away, people, hack away. I care not. The pieces of data that I wouldn't want stolen (SSN, bank accounts) aren't in my personal control anyway.
As to the quote about operating systems mad in China... what OS is that exactly? Neither Apple nor Microsoft develop their OS's in China. If any OS has Chinese developers, it's Linux. Red herring.
People who don't think java7 is ready are smoking crack. It's been production ready for a long time.. Works on Linux, works on OSX, works on Windows. I have used it on 20M transaction/day apps and had it run for months with no issues.. Java gets a bad name because of the browser plugin. Let's EOL that for all versions of java. I like java on the server. I like it for writing Android apps. I do NOT like it in the browser, and neither does anyone else with any interest in security.
Every problem that a slashdot reader has is a first world problem. Unless you're dying from or transmitting a disease, starving to death, cannot find clean water, have too many children because you don't about contraception, or are growing up uneducated, your problems are most likely all first world problems.
seppuku
How can this comment not get modded up? I actually laughed.
I have it on my to-do list to record it. The live footage in full quality will air on Discovery Channel on Sun. January 27th on a show called "Monster Squid: The Giant is Real". I suspect until then it will be hard to find good quality footage.
So, your workplace have no phone? I always had a phone on my desk.
Welcome to 1992. The last three companies I worked for (AT&T, Nokia, and a startup) did not have desk phones. They're dinosaurs.
I don't buy it for a minute. My kids have tons of Lego sets. Yes, they build the thing on the box, but then later, they tear it apart and build a million other things too.
Printing currency is a fundamental human right! Next thing you know, they be telling you and me that we can't print currency anymore either.
I know my rights. We print our our Schrute bucks whenever we need them!
Well I have a patent on zero, void, null, and None. I expect a royalty of 1 per use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma-Shave#Roadside_billboards
Re:If you can't beat 'em, sue 'em!
Looks like Apple has a new business model.
Actually Apple's business model is "beat 'em, then sue 'em anyway". As a shareholder of Apple, I approve.
If you think Apple is losing in the smartphone or the tablet market, you're not looking very closely.
The app is already gone off the App store, at least in the US.
Clearly, as usual, nobody did their research. I quote the Blizzard Community Manager:
We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings. Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
And fail, like 95% of those projects do. Entrepreneuring is the game of either the young or the rich; the young don't have enough commitments to make the risk really hurt, and the rich have enough assets to absorb the shock. If you're middle-aged, with a mortgage, and high ongoing costs in regard to the maintenance of your family, the risk just isn't worth it.
So what if you fail? You get up and try again. There is tons of VC and angel funding out there for people with a good work ethic and some new ideas. Honestly, the idea is the hard part. Once you get past that it's not really hard at all to make a living at it.
I'm at a startup now after 10+ years at large mega-corporations. It's fun to be back at a company where people actually like to come to work.
BTW, If we get rid of publishers, we lose the editor. Get ready for 1,000 page epics about cats.
http://www.amazon.com/WARRIORS-BOOKS-Complete-List-Updated/lm/R3OL3CAN7KYOVI
Just saying. Been there, done that.
Null Pointer Exceptions?