But why are they having problems with the platform? If he says the platform is java, perl or php, then he's got some requirements that are so high that switching platforms won't help at all. If he's using Ruby, he can either switch or wait it out, because there's a good chance that it's going to be more popular in the future. I could rattle of ten more, but there's no point, because that guarantees that 90% of the time I took on the post was wasted.
And if this technology and the techniques associated with it were as simple as a shoe, then they would have had the internet for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the field is much more complex, too complex to answer in a post to slashdot, too complex to even attempt it.
No, he's saying that he thinks he's been fishing wrong, but he doesn't know whether he has or not, and he can't give any details about where or how he's fishing, but he wants to know what he's doing wrong. Without knowing whether he's fly fishing, net fishing, deep sea fishing or trolling in a lake, how are we supposed to tell him what he wants to know?
If he gave a specific platform, he would hear enough advice and argument about that platform in particular that he can start to learn about it in general. He would see the interaction between old and new technologies, scripting vs compiled, proprietary vs open, etc. Hell, his use of the word "platform" could even mean anything from language to DB to OS to webserver to all of them put together. Maybe all the arguments about language are pointless since he's having trouble finding a developer that can use Sun's webserver well.
The techniques associated with fishing can be taught in an afternoon, the techniques associated with development and technologies take years to learn. Without narrowing down the field, you can't expect to get usable knowledge.
Asking for a generic answer to this question is like asking for a generic answer for when to settle a lawsuit: stop when the costs of moving forward are greater than the cost of switching. Done. End of story. Without further details on his hiring problems or his platform, any other discussion is pointless.
So, the only generic answer that can be given is this: find someone with the necessary skills to evaluate the costs and benefits of switching and staying, and pay them to give you the information to decide which one is better. We can do a shallow analysis of the different factors that go into the decision, but the submitter shouldn't expect or hope for a glimmer of insight, because platform decisions rely on a thousand little variables.
The answer's easy: ditch the platform when the costs of maintaining it become greater than the cost of switching. That answer's so easy, in fact, that it's pointless to ask slashdot about it, bring it up in conversation, or even think about it for more than 2 minutes.
If you want something that actually requires an answer, you need to give more details. What's making him think of switching platforms? What's costing so much in maintenance or in finding people that it's just not worth it? Are these difficulties in his head, or is he actually having problems?
My guess is that he's talking about ruby on rails, because it's got a lot of hype and it's short on people with the necessary skill set. My answer in that instance would be, don't go with a young platform in the first place. Don't buy into hype until it's so mature that it doesn't have any hype, just a good solid list of pros and cons.
But maybe he's using.NET, in which case the necessary skillset is having your head up your ass;) But seriously, if he's having problems finding people of the right skillset on.NET, he needs to increase pay or switch to a platform where the pay's not as high as it is.
Perhaps he's using LAMP on either perl or php. If it's perl, he should shift to php as soon as possible, because perl code becomes very hard to maintain the longer it goes and developers are fewer and higher paid. He might have a problem with php because the developers lack the professional focus, in which case he should tighten his hiring practices.
Those are just some of the possible scenarios, and each of them requires a different response. The variables going into platform decisions are so complex that asking for an analysis without giving details requires a response that would be well over a hundred pages. He deserves credit for coming to the proper forum for his question (instead of asking a legal question, like "when is it legal for me to take my children without my ex-wife knowing?"), but that doesn't change the fact that any discussion which arises will be based on things that almost certainly don't answer his question.
I'm sorry, but that's just a dumb analogy. Email isn't overnight or even fast, it's nigh instantaneous. How about "overnight shipping for free" or something else that doesn't involve breaking it down into bits?
That's no problem, they don't have to pay a cent when I download their movies using bittorrent. If they actually lost money when I downloaded a movie, I can honestly say that I would keep azureus going all day, every day, downloading every movie I could get my hands on. Twice. I hate those money grubbing, lying, cheating scumbags so much.
Just a nitpick, but the summary says $9.63 million, when it is in fact billion
Also, the box office figures don't correlate directly to lost profits, because the DVD industry is so big now, and I think that's where they're losing most of their money. Getting a copy that was taken by a video camera sucks compared to a movie; however, once a DVD comes out, you can download the same quality for free.
(Score:1, Offtopic) At least they have a sense of humor...
Re:Of Course IE will fail, ACID test is biased...
on
Acid3 Test Released
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· Score: 2, Funny
no browser can make it to 100 even if somebody had everything working With an attitude like that I don't expect any browser to ever make it;)
Re:Of Course IE will fail, ACID test is biased...
on
Acid3 Test Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Not quite. When none of the browsers are getting 100/100 and the only browser to get over a 60 is a safari beta, I think it's safe to say that it's a test designed so that every browser will fail. That's the point: they're giving solid targets to browser developers and giving a concise score to everyone else so that they know where the browsers stand in the next generation of web tech.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that complaining about it being designed so that IE would fail is like saying that American Gladiators was designed so that my 8 year old brother would fail. Sure, it has that effect in the end, but the fact that he's under-equipped for such a competition isn't American Gladiators' fault.
If I bought a book, I could lend that book to my friends as much as I wanted to. I could take the pages, rip them out of the binding and scrapbook them. If I did it in such a way that the book's pages were merely decoration, I could even reproduce that scrapbook for non-profit use. I could scan that book into a computer and read it to my heart's content.
If for some reason the book had a lock on it, then I could break that lock to read it. If the company uses a special kind of binding that's supposed to allow me to read the book, but not take the pages out of it, I could circumvent that binding all I want. I could sell the book to somebody else for whatever price I wanted to. If a page of the book started fading or was scratched, I could photocopy the page so I'd have a backup.
Just because it's in a digital format doesn't nullify my rights to my copy of the work.
First off, you need to tone the bias against capitalism and corporations down just a little bit. It makes it so that people who don't agree with that aspect of your comment (actually a rant) will have a knee jerk reaction against the actual logic of your comment, which was pretty decent.
As for that logic, you make the assumption that the only thing power sellers have to gain by moving to another site is a warm, fuzzy feeling from doing what they feel is right. That's just not the case. All they need to do is either find or start an auction site that doesn't do the dumb things that ebay's been doing (like making them accept credit cards through paypal or not at all) and get a significant (~25%) portion of the actions and buyers to come to that site. This isn't as hard as you imply, since they don't have to list all their auctions, just a decent number of them.
This has a definitive business advantage. First, if this other site takes off, you can knock ebay off its pedestal and get a better auction site. Second, even if it doesn't take off it sends a warning that they're not going to put up with ebay's bullshit forever. Market dominance on the internet's not a permanent thing as facebook has shown. MySpace dominated more than google, and in a matter of a year and a half facebook has taken significant market share and branded itself as the "cool" social site. Google remains dominant because they continue to innovate and keep their appearance pretty clean. Dating sites are battling back and forth continually. Ebay would be foolish to not recognize that they could have a serious competitor if the sellers banded together and the new site had a marketing blitz.
The name appears to indicate some level of suckiness. On the contrary, it indicates that the awesomeness of this kernel has grown so much that it's reached critical mass and now become a singularity.
With all due respect, it's not censorship, it's a freezing of assets to help an embargo. From dictionary.com, a censor is:
A person authorized to examine books, films, or other material and to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable Censorship being what a censor does. Notice they didn't do anything to his actual site; they seized the domain that he was using which is purchased and maintained in the US. It's a reasonable assertion to say that a domain name is property (maybe rented property) that can be seized by a government official.
Anyone doing business with Cuba knows about the embargo; it's possible he didn't realize that his registrar was an american company and that his domain could be seized, but that's not going to keep the law from going into effect.
Until the criminals learn that they can get away with anything once all the watchers have gone to bed. Wheel of Fortune's ratings, however, will skyrocket as people start to watch so they know when it ends.
I seem to remember D&D being an impediment to making friends I don't know what the situation was like when you were going to college, but I've found that my activities never really limited my pool of friends. I was drawn to my activities because of my personality, which I happened to like. It meant that I had a limited pool of friends, but the friends I did get were good friends that I related to. I don't think my participation or lack thereof in D&D would have changed anything.
However, I also have a very thick skin and am pretty oblivious to things, so take what I said with a grain of salt. I also think that I happened to have a high school and college that were significantly better (with regards to the social atmosphere) than most peoples'.
I was like that once. However, as I thought about it, I realized that there was probably a reason that everyone I knew played those games, so I took the plunge and I've never looked back. If you've got a few hours to spare every week and you can find a good group, it's well worth the effort.
D&D isn't actually my system of choice, but roleplaying games in general were about the only time that my friends and I could get together. It was a way for us to force ourselves to hang out, and I've made several friends that I expect to keep in touch with for many years to come. I've always made up worlds that I play in, so for me D&D was a way to externalize those worlds and allow other people to affect them with me. It also appeals to many nerds' tendency to break down and quantify the world around them.
As a side note, my sister-in-law that's currently in college was struggling with depression and a lack of friends until she started doing RPGs. Now she's got as many friends as she could wish for:D
Slashdot Mirror
But why are they having problems with the platform? If he says the platform is java, perl or php, then he's got some requirements that are so high that switching platforms won't help at all. If he's using Ruby, he can either switch or wait it out, because there's a good chance that it's going to be more popular in the future. I could rattle of ten more, but there's no point, because that guarantees that 90% of the time I took on the post was wasted.
And if this technology and the techniques associated with it were as simple as a shoe, then they would have had the internet for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the field is much more complex, too complex to answer in a post to slashdot, too complex to even attempt it.
No, he's saying that he thinks he's been fishing wrong, but he doesn't know whether he has or not, and he can't give any details about where or how he's fishing, but he wants to know what he's doing wrong. Without knowing whether he's fly fishing, net fishing, deep sea fishing or trolling in a lake, how are we supposed to tell him what he wants to know?
If he gave a specific platform, he would hear enough advice and argument about that platform in particular that he can start to learn about it in general. He would see the interaction between old and new technologies, scripting vs compiled, proprietary vs open, etc. Hell, his use of the word "platform" could even mean anything from language to DB to OS to webserver to all of them put together. Maybe all the arguments about language are pointless since he's having trouble finding a developer that can use Sun's webserver well.
The techniques associated with fishing can be taught in an afternoon, the techniques associated with development and technologies take years to learn. Without narrowing down the field, you can't expect to get usable knowledge.
Asking for a generic answer to this question is like asking for a generic answer for when to settle a lawsuit: stop when the costs of moving forward are greater than the cost of switching. Done. End of story. Without further details on his hiring problems or his platform, any other discussion is pointless.
So, the only generic answer that can be given is this: find someone with the necessary skills to evaluate the costs and benefits of switching and staying, and pay them to give you the information to decide which one is better. We can do a shallow analysis of the different factors that go into the decision, but the submitter shouldn't expect or hope for a glimmer of insight, because platform decisions rely on a thousand little variables.
The answer's easy: ditch the platform when the costs of maintaining it become greater than the cost of switching. That answer's so easy, in fact, that it's pointless to ask slashdot about it, bring it up in conversation, or even think about it for more than 2 minutes.
.NET, in which case the necessary skillset is having your head up your ass ;) But seriously, if he's having problems finding people of the right skillset on .NET, he needs to increase pay or switch to a platform where the pay's not as high as it is.
If you want something that actually requires an answer, you need to give more details. What's making him think of switching platforms? What's costing so much in maintenance or in finding people that it's just not worth it? Are these difficulties in his head, or is he actually having problems?
My guess is that he's talking about ruby on rails, because it's got a lot of hype and it's short on people with the necessary skill set. My answer in that instance would be, don't go with a young platform in the first place. Don't buy into hype until it's so mature that it doesn't have any hype, just a good solid list of pros and cons.
But maybe he's using
Perhaps he's using LAMP on either perl or php. If it's perl, he should shift to php as soon as possible, because perl code becomes very hard to maintain the longer it goes and developers are fewer and higher paid. He might have a problem with php because the developers lack the professional focus, in which case he should tighten his hiring practices.
Those are just some of the possible scenarios, and each of them requires a different response. The variables going into platform decisions are so complex that asking for an analysis without giving details requires a response that would be well over a hundred pages. He deserves credit for coming to the proper forum for his question (instead of asking a legal question, like "when is it legal for me to take my children without my ex-wife knowing?"), but that doesn't change the fact that any discussion which arises will be based on things that almost certainly don't answer his question.
Troglodyte infestations will probably be their biggest problem. Luckily, this is Germany we're talking; they're the birthplace of the plucky hero.
I'm sorry, but that's just a dumb analogy. Email isn't overnight or even fast, it's nigh instantaneous. How about "overnight shipping for free" or something else that doesn't involve breaking it down into bits?
Just a nitpick, but the summary says $9.63 million, when it is in fact billion
Also, the box office figures don't correlate directly to lost profits, because the DVD industry is so big now, and I think that's where they're losing most of their money. Getting a copy that was taken by a video camera sucks compared to a movie; however, once a DVD comes out, you can download the same quality for free.
Because then it would be false advertising? There's only one computer-related job I'd classify as sexy.
That's easy. If N=1 it's true; otherwise it's false. Mathematicians are so dumb.
Not quite. When none of the browsers are getting 100/100 and the only browser to get over a 60 is a safari beta, I think it's safe to say that it's a test designed so that every browser will fail. That's the point: they're giving solid targets to browser developers and giving a concise score to everyone else so that they know where the browsers stand in the next generation of web tech.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that complaining about it being designed so that IE would fail is like saying that American Gladiators was designed so that my 8 year old brother would fail. Sure, it has that effect in the end, but the fact that he's under-equipped for such a competition isn't American Gladiators' fault.
If I bought a book, I could lend that book to my friends as much as I wanted to. I could take the pages, rip them out of the binding and scrapbook them. If I did it in such a way that the book's pages were merely decoration, I could even reproduce that scrapbook for non-profit use. I could scan that book into a computer and read it to my heart's content.
If for some reason the book had a lock on it, then I could break that lock to read it. If the company uses a special kind of binding that's supposed to allow me to read the book, but not take the pages out of it, I could circumvent that binding all I want. I could sell the book to somebody else for whatever price I wanted to. If a page of the book started fading or was scratched, I could photocopy the page so I'd have a backup.
Just because it's in a digital format doesn't nullify my rights to my copy of the work.
First off, you need to tone the bias against capitalism and corporations down just a little bit. It makes it so that people who don't agree with that aspect of your comment (actually a rant) will have a knee jerk reaction against the actual logic of your comment, which was pretty decent.
As for that logic, you make the assumption that the only thing power sellers have to gain by moving to another site is a warm, fuzzy feeling from doing what they feel is right. That's just not the case. All they need to do is either find or start an auction site that doesn't do the dumb things that ebay's been doing (like making them accept credit cards through paypal or not at all) and get a significant (~25%) portion of the actions and buyers to come to that site. This isn't as hard as you imply, since they don't have to list all their auctions, just a decent number of them.
This has a definitive business advantage. First, if this other site takes off, you can knock ebay off its pedestal and get a better auction site. Second, even if it doesn't take off it sends a warning that they're not going to put up with ebay's bullshit forever. Market dominance on the internet's not a permanent thing as facebook has shown. MySpace dominated more than google, and in a matter of a year and a half facebook has taken significant market share and branded itself as the "cool" social site. Google remains dominant because they continue to innovate and keep their appearance pretty clean. Dating sites are battling back and forth continually. Ebay would be foolish to not recognize that they could have a serious competitor if the sellers banded together and the new site had a marketing blitz.
Have you tried buffing your charisma? Maybe upping your int?
Anyone doing business with Cuba knows about the embargo; it's possible he didn't realize that his registrar was an american company and that his domain could be seized, but that's not going to keep the law from going into effect.
In other words, "Only the evidence they want to be considered"?
Until the criminals learn that they can get away with anything once all the watchers have gone to bed. Wheel of Fortune's ratings, however, will skyrocket as people start to watch so they know when it ends.
However, I also have a very thick skin and am pretty oblivious to things, so take what I said with a grain of salt. I also think that I happened to have a high school and college that were significantly better (with regards to the social atmosphere) than most peoples'.
I was like that once. However, as I thought about it, I realized that there was probably a reason that everyone I knew played those games, so I took the plunge and I've never looked back. If you've got a few hours to spare every week and you can find a good group, it's well worth the effort.
Oh, um, yeah, me too. It was totally D&D that kept me from getting the girls. ;)
D&D isn't actually my system of choice, but roleplaying games in general were about the only time that my friends and I could get together. It was a way for us to force ourselves to hang out, and I've made several friends that I expect to keep in touch with for many years to come. I've always made up worlds that I play in, so for me D&D was a way to externalize those worlds and allow other people to affect them with me. It also appeals to many nerds' tendency to break down and quantify the world around them.
:D
As a side note, my sister-in-law that's currently in college was struggling with depression and a lack of friends until she started doing RPGs. Now she's got as many friends as she could wish for