In my opinion management generally has insufficient technical grasp to make informed judgements on the quality of developers or the software they produce. Managers understand when a developer has said a task is done. Most managers have no clue how to determine whether that work was done well.
This is based on 30+ years experience as a software developer and manager. I stay current. Sadly, I find it rare that management also stays technically current. So, I no longer expect managerial decisions to be informed -- or fair.
Not always true. I've found (30+ years IT experience) that for fun projects I can sustain lots of extra hours (60+ weeks) for a long time - months. However, I have also learned that most employers don't reward such efforts. So I don't do that any more.
I am lucky (and old) enough to have attended a lecture by Grace Hopper. She had an uncommon skill at presenting computing technology that was accessible to both technical and nontechnical folks. Fascinating, dynamic, a chain smoker, and perhaps all of 5 feet tall. I still have one of her nanoseconds - a wire cut to the length that an electrical signal can travel in a nanosecond.
He wrote an interesting article about tetrahedral kites for lifting, published in National Geographic magazine in 1908 if I remember correctly. As a topical coincidence: some kites had pyramidal structure.
Symbolics' operating system was written almost entirely in LISP. (Small bits were in assembler.) Very reliable and robust: in contrast to most other server or workstation operating systems of the time, Symbolics computers rarely crashed.
Symbolics hardware was innovative as well. It had a tagged architecture in which a data value included data type information. This meant the hardware could enforce the type system at run time with no additional execution overhead.
Here's a link to some Symbolics info: http://home.brightware.com/~rwk/symbolics/
(and it includes a picture of Zippy, the official Symbolics mascot!)
You can't, according to their web site. You must remove the folding cover to expose the edge connector for the springboard module. Hence the name for the Visor model, methinks.
I hope you are right about Gore winning California. I want to vote Nader, also, but
personally, I'm pretty convinced that Bush will carry California. I live in a conservative county, Ventura, so this may color my projection...
I guess we'll find out tomorrow, won't we?
There has GOT to be a better way to grow a viable third party. Anybody have any ideas?
I've been using keyboards intensively since '71 (which I think makes me a lot older than the average slashdot reader). I started juggling as a hobby in '75. Knock wood, but no wrist pain thus far. As an advantage, juggling is fun!
Phillips helped develop CD technology. Their internal projections on disk lifetime, as I remember, was approximately 10 years for a consumer CD (i.e., a Modern Jazz Quartet audio CD), no more than 10 years for the green CD-Rs, and "over 50 years" for a glass master. All assume the media is stored under controlled conditions (temperature, humidity, atmosphere, and radiation). These are projections based on testing, so be sceptical. The message: don't count on archival storage -- over a hundred years, say, like a book printed on acid-neutralized paper and stored in a good library -- from CD technology.
I can't comment on mouse-optional WMs. However, I think I can contribute motivation: my (Windowns NT Server) mouse driver can report the physical distance the mouse covers. My mouse covers, on average, _about_1.5_MILES_a_day_ while programming, confined within a 4x6" mouse pad. Scary, eh?
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In my opinion management generally has insufficient technical grasp to make informed judgements on the quality of developers or the software they produce. Managers understand when a developer has said a task is done. Most managers have no clue how to determine whether that work was done well.
This is based on 30+ years experience as a software developer and manager. I stay current. Sadly, I find it rare that management also stays technically current. So, I no longer expect managerial decisions to be informed -- or fair.
Not always true. I've found (30+ years IT experience) that for fun projects I can sustain lots of extra hours (60+ weeks) for a long time - months. However, I have also learned that most employers don't reward such efforts. So I don't do that any more.
Too bad: I really like fun projects.
SLASHDOTTED!
And a mighty ugly insect, too!
I am lucky (and old) enough to have attended a lecture by Grace Hopper. She had an uncommon skill at presenting computing technology that was accessible to both technical and nontechnical folks. Fascinating, dynamic, a chain smoker, and perhaps all of 5 feet tall. I still have one of her nanoseconds - a wire cut to the length that an electrical signal can travel in a nanosecond.
He wrote an interesting article about tetrahedral kites for lifting, published in National Geographic magazine in 1908 if I remember correctly. As a topical coincidence: some kites had pyramidal structure.
This was moderated to only 4????? I think his explanation, research, and links deserve better.
Symbolics hardware was innovative as well. It had a tagged architecture in which a data value included data type information. This meant the hardware could enforce the type system at run time with no additional execution overhead.
Here's a link to some Symbolics info: http://home.brightware.com/~rwk/symbolics/ (and it includes a picture of Zippy, the official Symbolics mascot!)
You can't, according to their web site. You must remove the folding cover to expose the edge connector for the springboard module. Hence the name for the Visor model, methinks.
I hope you are right about Gore winning California. I want to vote Nader, also, but personally, I'm pretty convinced that Bush will carry California. I live in a conservative county, Ventura, so this may color my projection... I guess we'll find out tomorrow, won't we? There has GOT to be a better way to grow a viable third party. Anybody have any ideas?
I've been using keyboards intensively since '71 (which I think makes me a lot older than the average slashdot reader). I started juggling as a hobby in '75. Knock wood, but no wrist pain thus far. As an advantage, juggling is fun!
Phillips helped develop CD technology. Their internal projections on disk lifetime, as I remember, was approximately 10 years for a consumer CD (i.e., a Modern Jazz Quartet audio CD), no more than 10 years for the green CD-Rs, and "over 50 years" for a glass master. All assume the media is stored under controlled conditions (temperature, humidity, atmosphere, and radiation). These are projections based on testing, so be sceptical. The message: don't count on archival storage -- over a hundred years, say, like a book printed on acid-neutralized paper and stored in a good library -- from CD technology.
I can't comment on mouse-optional WMs. However, I think I can contribute motivation: my (Windowns NT Server) mouse driver can report the physical distance the mouse covers. My mouse covers, on average, _about_1.5_MILES_a_day_ while programming, confined within a 4x6" mouse pad. Scary, eh?