It's not that open source is too complex. The problem is that most IT and SW dev people are as dumb as rocks. And even smart IT people and SW devs are too chickenshit and/or lazy to take any initiative to self-teach themselves anything that's not right in front of them. It's all a part of the "Software Engineering Industry Going Down the Drain" zeitgeist.
With the trend towards VM's and virtualization, that "hypothetical" computer comes ever closer.
Yay. With continued displays of attitudes like that, I'm going to leave the industry.
It is getting increasingly difficult to hire S/W engineers that understand that there is an operating system and also hardware beneath the software they write. I need people NOW that can grok device drivers, understand and use Unix facilities, fiddle with DBs, write decent code in C, C++, Java, and shell, and can also whip together a decent WS interface. Someone who does all of those.
WhyTF has the S/W industry become so compartmentalized? I can hire a device driver person, but he won't know anything about web services. I can hire a DB person, but she won't know a damn thing about poking values into registers. I can hire a web-services person, but he will have never worked on a Unix platform before. WTF? Really, WTF?
In short, I can't hire someone who can take ownership of an entire system. It's always, "Well, that's a hardware thing, go ask Foo", "Oh, it looks like the database, need to talk to Bar", "The Web interface is borked, we'll need to bring Baz in", "Hm, it doesn't do this when we run it on Windows" (this one always pisses me off, because they can never explain why, and that's because they know nothing about Unix). How come I can't hire someone who could understand a whole vertical stack (and maintain it, and provide analysis and fixes when something breaks)?
I do this kind of thing now. If I can do it, it can't be that hard. But everybody thinks they have to specialize. THIS IS WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE INDUSTRY.
Microsoft Portable Media Player 3.1 Microsoft Portable Media Player 95 Microsoft Portable Media Player 98 Microsoft Portable Media Player NT Microsoft Portable Media Player CE Microsoft Portable Media Player 2000 Microsoft Portable Media Player 2003 Microsoft Portable Media Player XP Microsoft Portable Media Player Vista
Ask the police how private your fingerprints are. Does your boss put retina scanners on all company laptops?
Now, there's a disturbing trend.
I'm leary of using bio-markers as keys. I don't want to give crooks reasons to cut off my fingers for their fingerprints or remove my eyes for their retinas.
In a nutshell, programmers and computer scientists are uncomfortable with the fact that there's actual HARDWARE in the system, and this somehow taints their pure, beautiful software designs. That is to say, they unconsciously can't stand that software has to run on hardware. So, they've invented "virtual machines" to abstract away the icky hardware with all of its yucky "engineering hacks". Of course this is justified with the old, battered strawman of "portability". But really it's all about not having to worry about registers, MMUs, memory addresses (physical and virtual), I/O ports, etc.
But if you forget that ultimately, software is nothing more than machine code being interpreted by a CPU, then you've lost a huge part of what computers are all about.
Joel Spolsky says it best (OK, it's dated, but substitute Java for Pascal, and it still applies):
I've discovered that understanding pointers in C is not a skill, it's an aptitude. In Freshman year CompSci, there are always about 200 kids at the beginning of the semester, all of whom wrote complex adventure games in BASIC for their Atari 800s when they were 4 years old. They are having a good ol'; time learning Pascal in college, until one day their professor introduces pointers, and suddenly, they don't get it. They just don't understand anything any more. 90% of the class goes off and becomes PoliSci majors, then they tell their friends that there weren't enough good looking members of the appropriate sex in their CompSci classes, that's why they switched. For some reason most people seem to be born without the part of the brain that understands pointers. This is an aptitude thing, not a skill thing - it requires a complex form of doubly-indirected thinking that some people just can't do.
The conspiracy is that the software industry has moved in a direction to accommodate people who don't understand pointers. To acknowledge pointers would be to admit that there's machine-addressable memory in the system, which would be to admit that there's hardware in the system.
... 95% of developers see relational databases simply as a means for a persistent data store, but that's not what it was designed to do.
This developer doesn't. I prefer flat files, especially for storing large amounts of raw binary data.
But nearly every time I have a review for a design that uses flat files for persistent storage, the DB wonks have conniption fits and insist that I use a DB.
I think it's the DB enthusiasts that have the problem.
I had occasion recently to travel with the president of the company I work for to attend some meetings (bleah). After the meetings, over a beer, he asked me what I thought of him taking the entire company (~100 employees) to a mandatory 30-hour work week.
My twofold response was:
1. Sign me up. 2. You won't notice a drop in overall output (ie, perceived productivity would go up).
He agreed with me on point #2.
It remains to be seen if he will go through with his nefarious plan. I sure hope he does.
From TFQA:... there's an enormous difference between working for a software company [that ships software as a product] and a company where software is just a step towards some other goal...
Holy cow, that's saying a lot. I used to work for the later, then I worked for the former, then I worked for the later again, and now I work for the former again.
Believe me, it's MUCH more fun to work on software that isn't going to be sold to customers. Why anyone would actually want to work on software-as-a-product is beyond me.
As someone who just had to deal with a machine becoming inoperable because the process table filled up with thousands of zombies because 3rd party software wasn't reaping its children.....
Please, for the love of all that's holy and Unixy, teach yourselves what a SIGCHLD is and how to use wait(2).
I have a box running XP Pro, and to Microsoft's credit, it runs pretty good. I have no complaints. I have other boxes running other OSes, and I usually don't futz around with upgrading unless I have a compelling reason to. I have the XP Automatics Updates turned on, so I suppose it's up to date. While the XP box isn't my main desktop machine, it seems to be solid when I do use it.
So will there be any compelling reason to upgrade to Vista? Why bother?
There's no concept of 'checking for existing entries on import' - importing the same folder will just give you each track twice...
Yes, that does suck. The best it can do is "Edit -> Show Duplicate Songs". After that your on your own to remove duplicate tracks. Seems like it wouldn't be that hard to have the SW do that for you.
Seamless integration with iTunes? If no, then NO SALE.
Why? Because I'm already using iTunes on Windows, and I'll be making the switch to OSX within 12 months.
I'm not necessarily in love with iTunes, but I'll be goddamned if I'm going to waste my time futzing around with a new music organization software suite.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this thing have seamless integration with iTunes -- e.g. can I use iTunes to load (non DRM) music on the player?
If not, then NO SALE.
I'm not particularly in love with iTunes, but I'll be damned if I'm going to futz around moving all my music to some other player.
It's not that open source is too complex. The problem is that most IT and SW dev people are as dumb as rocks. And even smart IT people and SW devs are too chickenshit and/or lazy to take any initiative to self-teach themselves anything that's not right in front of them. It's all a part of the "Software Engineering Industry Going Down the Drain" zeitgeist.
http://shatneriskirk.ytmnd.com/
Unfortunately, I agree with you completely. And this is the problem with the industry.
Probably so. But you missed my point. Your being a specialist means that you're useless to me.
Yay. With continued displays of attitudes like that, I'm going to leave the industry.
It is getting increasingly difficult to hire S/W engineers that understand that there is an operating system and also hardware beneath the software they write. I need people NOW that can grok device drivers, understand and use Unix facilities, fiddle with DBs, write decent code in C, C++, Java, and shell, and can also whip together a decent WS interface. Someone who does all of those.
WhyTF has the S/W industry become so compartmentalized? I can hire a device driver person, but he won't know anything about web services. I can hire a DB person, but she won't know a damn thing about poking values into registers. I can hire a web-services person, but he will have never worked on a Unix platform before. WTF? Really, WTF?
In short, I can't hire someone who can take ownership of an entire system. It's always, "Well, that's a hardware thing, go ask Foo", "Oh, it looks like the database, need to talk to Bar", "The Web interface is borked, we'll need to bring Baz in", "Hm, it doesn't do this when we run it on Windows" (this one always pisses me off, because they can never explain why, and that's because they know nothing about Unix). How come I can't hire someone who could understand a whole vertical stack (and maintain it, and provide analysis and fixes when something breaks)?
I do this kind of thing now. If I can do it, it can't be that hard. But everybody thinks they have to specialize. THIS IS WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE INDUSTRY.
Instead of aP2, I read a2p, which is the awk to perl translator. Everybody knows a2p is bad for you. First I've heard of aP2.
A whole product line:
Microsoft Portable Media Player 3.1
Microsoft Portable Media Player 95
Microsoft Portable Media Player 98
Microsoft Portable Media Player NT
Microsoft Portable Media Player CE
Microsoft Portable Media Player 2000
Microsoft Portable Media Player 2003
Microsoft Portable Media Player XP
Microsoft Portable Media Player Vista
There's no such thing as a 12-cylinder motorcycle engine.
Ask the police how private your fingerprints are. Does your boss put retina scanners on all company laptops?
Now, there's a disturbing trend.
I'm leary of using bio-markers as keys. I don't want to give crooks reasons to cut off my fingers for their fingerprints or remove my eyes for their retinas.
In a nutshell, programmers and computer scientists are uncomfortable with the fact that there's actual HARDWARE in the system, and this somehow taints their pure, beautiful software designs. That is to say, they unconsciously can't stand that software has to run on hardware. So, they've invented "virtual machines" to abstract away the icky hardware with all of its yucky "engineering hacks". Of course this is justified with the old, battered strawman of "portability". But really it's all about not having to worry about registers, MMUs, memory addresses (physical and virtual), I/O ports, etc.
But if you forget that ultimately, software is nothing more than machine code being interpreted by a CPU, then you've lost a huge part of what computers are all about.
Joel Spolsky says it best (OK, it's dated, but substitute Java for Pascal, and it still applies):
The conspiracy is that the software industry has moved in a direction to accommodate people who don't understand pointers. To acknowledge pointers would be to admit that there's machine-addressable memory in the system, which would be to admit that there's hardware in the system.
And we can't have that, can we?
... 95% of developers see relational databases simply as a means for a persistent data store, but that's not what it was designed to do.
This developer doesn't. I prefer flat files, especially for storing large amounts of raw binary data.
But nearly every time I have a review for a design that uses flat files for persistent storage, the DB wonks have conniption fits and insist that I use a DB.
I think it's the DB enthusiasts that have the problem.
You're an idiot. My father died of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), and he absolutely was NOT a second rate homo sapiens.
I had occasion recently to travel with the president of the company I work for to attend some meetings (bleah). After the meetings, over a beer, he asked me what I thought of him taking the entire company (~100 employees) to a mandatory 30-hour work week.
My twofold response was:
1. Sign me up.
2. You won't notice a drop in overall output (ie, perceived productivity would go up).
He agreed with me on point #2.
It remains to be seen if he will go through with his nefarious plan. I sure hope he does.
The International Standards Organization ISO declares Microsoft Windows too slow.
... but turning 31? For whatever reason, that caused me to have a meltdown.
But that water has long since been under the bridge.
... the web's not gonna surf itself, you know.
Holy cow, that's saying a lot. I used to work for the later, then I worked for the former, then I worked for the later again, and now I work for the former again.
Believe me, it's MUCH more fun to work on software that isn't going to be sold to customers. Why anyone would actually want to work on software-as-a-product is beyond me.
Please, for the love of all that's holy and Unixy, teach yourselves what a SIGCHLD is and how to use wait(2).
In this day and age of Xen, VMware, Microsoft Virtual PC, CoLinux, etc., how can anyone get excited about a dual-boot system?
I mean, if I want both operating sytems, I want them both running at the same time. Otherwise, why bother?
I have a box running XP Pro, and to Microsoft's credit, it runs pretty good. I have no complaints. I have other boxes running other OSes, and I usually don't futz around with upgrading unless I have a compelling reason to. I have the XP Automatics Updates turned on, so I suppose it's up to date. While the XP box isn't my main desktop machine, it seems to be solid when I do use it.
So will there be any compelling reason to upgrade to Vista? Why bother?
There's no concept of 'checking for existing entries on import' - importing the same folder will just give you each track twice...
Yes, that does suck. The best it can do is "Edit -> Show Duplicate Songs". After that your on your own to remove duplicate tracks. Seems like it wouldn't be that hard to have the SW do that for you.
Seamless integration with iTunes?
If no, then NO SALE.
Why? Because I'm already using iTunes on Windows, and I'll be making the switch to OSX within 12 months.
I'm not necessarily in love with iTunes, but I'll be goddamned if I'm going to waste my time futzing around with a new music organization software suite.
You forgot Windows Vista Me!
Rats, you're right.
I also forgot:
Windows Vista Vista