Perhaps, but their earliest Linux boxes, from about four years ago, ran Red Hat. Ran it well, I might add; one was my desktop machine when I worked there (although it performed some server-like functions because of the work I did), and it was bedrock-stable. The only times it ever crashed were when I did something stupid when mucking about with the kernel.
Oh, and as far as Linux-vs.-HP-UX: Two entirely different animals, with entirely different market spaces. Only the PA-RISC workstations have any overlap, and their primary market is CAD, running specialized applications that may or may not ever get ported to Linux.
Re:Family Tree Tech support: Wood for the fire....
on
Family Tech Support
·
· Score: 1
If you're in the U.S., claim the $.38/mile or whatever for the mileage. Plus, bill the driving time over and above what it would have been if you weren't hauling anything.
As for people leaving things in your truck over the weekend, take it all out, leave it at your house, fill the truck with your own stuff, and when they ask where theirs is, tell them you're keeping your stuff in your truck because you'll just need it again next weekend...
If that doesn't work, tell them your insurance policy doesn't cover business use, and that you're not willing to get your policy cancelled for them.
Re:If you're a Google H4X0R...
on
Google Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Nowithstanding the real-world need for students to know how to use Excel, etc., the real problem lies with the "indirect" part of the agreement.
We all know how hard it is to get name-brand x86 machines without some version of Windows installed, and if you don't want it, how hard it is to get a refund for it.
Sure, you can buy Macs, or you can buy branded x86 machines with Linux (etc.) from a number of vendors, but your choices are limited and except for Microtel, they tend to be pretty high-end. If you had to outfit 7000 students plus the proportional amount of faculty and staff with low-cost MS-free machines, you'd probably be buying a lot of beige boxes. (Either that or you've just found another way to enslave the grad students.)
Also, what about machines the students bring? Is it realy practical to think that the college's IT department can completely disavow support for all those Windows machines on the dorm networks?
Most of the time now when someone phones with a technical question I ask them if they can send me an email about it. After hearing this several times they usually get the message and stop calling at all in favour of sending emails.
For all the reasons people have talked about here (especially audit trails), I much prefer email versus the phone. Also try spelling weird things over the phone. "That's S-M-S-I_underscore--" "Eff en eff--" "No, S as in Sam, M as in Mary..."
But the above backfired on me at one job. People kept calling with things better handled via email, and I kept asking them to send email so they did:
Most of the dicussion here has centered around the obvious comparison to TiVo, even though most TiVo owners are not Joe Sixpack. But lots of Joe Sixpacks have gone down to Wal-Mart and bought their $50 DVD players.
Now, ask Joe Sixpack what he thinks of DVDs that won't let him fast forward over the previews, FBI warning, etc. That's exactly what he'll think of Mystro disabling the FF button during their "chosen just for you" Pabst commercials.
And I really don't want to be there when he finds out that some network stuffshirt has decided that he can't timeshift Wrestling Bitchslap Mayhem so he can watch it after the bar closes, because it's supposed to be a lead-in for Springer's Uncensored Hot-Tub Babes...
Nothing new there. For centuries, America as the "land of opportunity" meant that immigrants perceived (usually correctly) that they'd have a better chance of raising themselves out of poverty here than they did in their home countries. Only the list of home countries has changed from decade to decade.
Phenomena like the Indian software industry have fueled the rise of the middle class in those countries, and that's a Good Thing, but it still doesn't make me any more eager to lose my job to an anonymous programmer in Bangalore.
Xerox is an interesting example, because it's been verbed just like Google. It's been absorbed into the lexicon so well that the verb forms are even acceptable in tournament Scrabble, excuse me, "SCRABBLE(r) brand crossword game". (I found it odd, too, that they'd accept a trademark-derived word when they defend their own trademark so vigorously.)
This has only failed me once in the last ten years. YMMV.
1. Get a glass of water. 2. Take a deep breath and let it out, but don't push it out. Don't worry if you hiccup during that breath. 3. Without taking another breath, start taking *tiny* sips of the water; try to take at least one per second. Swallow each one. Keep your epiglottis closed as much as you can, in case you hiccup in the middle of doing this. 4. After 10-15 sips, the muscles in your mouth and throat will start to get tired, making it more difficult to do this. Keep going. 5. After a few more sips you won't care about the tired muscles, because you'll really REALLY want to breathe. Force yourself to take a couple more sips, then stop drinking and take that breath.
You should have no more hiccups after this. If you keep hiccuping wait a few minutes and try again. If it doesn't work on the second try, you're screwed. Also, this will not work if the hiccups are from being drunk and it may not work if they're a side-effect of medication.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention that my wife and I save 10%-15% of our gross for retirement; the kid's college fund comes after that (we currently participate in a state run tax-deferred college savings program for that).
I paid 90% of my own way through college, and it had its good and bad points. The good point was that by the time I was done, I really knew I had done it for *me*, not my parents, employers, etc.
OTOH, I had a lot of Fs and Ws when I couldn't take courses and work 80 hours a week at the same time, and I graduated college 18 years after I graduated high school. The only time I was ever in school and not working was when I took a 3-month leave of absence in 1997 to finish my last 13 credits all at once. (That was a really great way to complete what had been a very long journey!)
Whether we send our kid to school and pay for everything, or make him pay for some things (like we pay tuition and room and board and he buys his own books), or instead of putting him through college we put him out the front door on his ass, that's up to him as he grows up.
Even if you do have the savings, sometimes it's a matter of priorities. Right now, one of our main long-term financial plans is for our son to be able to go to the college of his choice without having to worry about money. We can achieve that without much difficulty and without having to sell our blood and mortgage the dog. Cut my income by 50%-75% and we're back to filling out those pesky financial aid forms and hoping that National Merit Scholarships still exist in 2017.
There are a lot of Really Neat Things I'd like to do with my life, and if I'm lucky, maybe I'll be able to do one of them without forcing my family to live on a subsistence income. For the foreseeable future, though, I'm not quitting my day job.
I take those claims of CMM-5-ness with a large grain of salt. Not because I think they're lying (since it'd be easy enough to verify with the SEI), but because it may represent only a small fraction of the total business.
Maybe they've got a few groups that have hit CMM-5, but if I outsource my shopping-cart app to them, will it get built in a CMM-5 shop? Do I even want it to (since CMM-5 entails very expensive process overhead)?
So what's the alternative? I'd be happy to get CMM-2 plus code reviews, but for all I know their staff consists of the few rocket scientists they put on the CMM-5 gigs, and the rest of us get code monkeys who haven't even made it through "Teach yourself the Windows Login Prompt in 21 Days" yet.
Which means it's probably getting obvious why I'd never buy one of these things. The ones I've seen in airports have huge problems with whatever you call the plasma or LCD equivalent of CRT phosphor burn.
I'd be seriously pissed if I dropped $5000+ on a screen just to have a bunch of overlaid network logos burned into the lower-right corner after six months.
Headline of one of our actual change requests: "Login confirmation screen have bad grammar". This was not a joke; the originator is Chinese.
You're right, user-facing text has to be written in clear English. But the code and its comments, and even internal documentation can be written using the most execrable pidgin English and it'll still work. It can even be meaningfully code reviewed if all the developers speak the same pidgin.
In particular, India, unlike Russia and China, has a long history of widespread English usage. It may be heavily accented (and have a lot of regional accents), and it may have adopted a lot of its own rules (who needs articles or punctuation?), but it's good enough that some companies are even outsourcing their U.S. tech support to India.
The preceding paragraph is obviously a broad generalization; some Indians speak gramatically correct and nearly accent-free English. Some are incomprehensible. Most are somewhere in between. The same could be said for Americans.
The engineering staff at the company I work for is about 2/3 Indian, and 1/3 of the Indians work in our U.S. site, the rest in India. Our products are designed for the U.S. market, so we're an existence proof that large amounts of U.S.-destined software can be written overseas.
I think they meant discomfort in one's job situation, i.e., always being a little afraid of being behind the times. That's not the same thing as being uncomfortable with one's overall lifestyle.
25 years ago, we "whiz kids" were a novelty. We could outprogram anyone with a degree except for those few who went to schools that had that newfangled "computer science" major. And we'd do it for the same money our friends made at McDonald's. Programming was fun then, and it's still fun now (even though I do SCM and haven't done a whole lot of mainstream development in the last 10 years).
I started out pre-med with software as my self-taught fallback. Today, if I didn't do the pre-med thing again, I'd probably go into some other engineering discipline, like building bridges that don't fall down, and stick to the truly fun hobbyist aspects of computing.
I'd have all the same reasons for not going CS today as I did back then, as well as the fear that by the time I got out of school all the programming jobs would be paid in rupees, rubles or yuan.
Of all the store-bought toys my three-year-old has, all but two were made in China. I truly fear that we're not far from the same thing for non-military software. Just as plastics manufacturing has become commoditized, so will coding, and it will go the way of all commodities--straight to the lowest-cost producers.
I work at a startup too, which has consumed approximately 90/168ths of all my weeks for the last eleven months.
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day they would have to have pried from my cold, dead fingers.
My wife and son and I actually had a very nice Christmas. The kid made out like a bandit this year, which gave us all plenty to do for most of the day. Then a few friends who, like us, had their plans cancelled because of the snowstorm, brought the food they had made for their get-togethers over to our house, added it to ours, and we all had a pretty decent feast.
Go to Walt Disney World. The parking attendants and some vendors use them. They demo it in one of the Epcot exhibits, but I couldn't talk the guy into letting me try it out.:(
He did have some interesting stories about training the staff. Apparently the things are dead easy to ride, but it takes awhile to learn the tricks that minimize power usage. A skilled rider can go three to five times as long on a charge as an unskilled rider.
IMO, this is a Good Thing. The TiVo Community Forum asks that things that will a) cost TiVo significant revenue or b) Open TiVo up to legal exposure not be discussed there. In return, they provide de facto support for all other kinds of hacking. Good luck finding that for any other piece of consumer electronics.
OTOH, as the above links show, information about the Other Stuff (like saving shows to CD) is easily available.
Better double check the internal temperature rating of the safe, though. Even if it doesn't get too hot for the media itself, it might melt the Ziploc bag.
But how many people have access to someone with your level of ClearCase experience?
Anyone who reads Slashdot.:) Seriously, join CCIUG. There are a lot of people there (some of whom have forgotten more about ClearCase than I'll ever know) who are happy to answer questions.
At work we have a whole SCM team, and as I said I spent far less time on SCM matters when we were just using CVS (in a team of ten or so).
On a team of ten, unless you're maintaining a large base of old legacy code, ClearCase is probably overkill. Were it not for our four sites in three countries, I think ClearCase would be overkill for my product. The rule of thumb I use is that if you don't need to be at CMM level 3 or higher, you probably don't need ClearCase.
Where ClearCase really shines is in very large projects with a long history. On my last project, we had some source files which had history going back fifteen years with over 10,000 versions. ClearCase doesn't break a sweat handling that.
I'm also unsure how useful the audit trals and richer meta-data such really are, since again I think few people can take advantage of them.
If your project is run right, there's only one person who would ever need to: the release manager. The high-end features of ClearCase aren't there for the benefit of individual developers, they're there for the project as a whole. They give you fast turnaround on official builds, they let you juggle a dozen releases of your product at once, they let you reproduce a build five years after it was shipped to customers, etc.
the way CVS has you work with files is the Correct Way - you change files, occasionally updating them from source to keep in sync.
Again, provided that "you" == "developer". The "extract the cleartext code into your directory" model is the classic, but to claim that it is the One True Way is a religious issue. Personally, wearing my developer hat, I much prefer to be able to describe the code I want to see, rather than specify lists of versions. I also like being able to root my source tree at the same place no matter what I'm doing.
When you are ready, you check it all in and there are hardly any merge issues because you've already done most of the merge ahead of time, and you've also tested it beforehand.
How is this different from ClearCase, unless you're checking your code directly into the mainline branch rather than on your own development branch?
Both methods mean if there are merge issues, you'll discover them in the VOB and not on a developers local machine first.
What's wrong with that? If your changes have to be reconciled with someone else's, what difference does it make when it happens? One of ClearCase's advantages is that most of the time, it can do the merges automatically for you. If you use UCM or an equivalent home-grown facility, you're encouraged to check the merges, and if there's a problem, you can back out with no trouble. It works like this: You check in your code on your development branch. Then, you set a view into the mainline, check out your files there, then merge the changes from your development branch into your mainline view. This will pick up and resolve anything else that's happened to your files while you were doing your development work. If the merge doesn't go smoothly, you can massage it by hand (like a traditinoal merge) before checking it into the mainline, or you can undo the checkouts on the mainline view, and go back and fix things up in your development view. When you're satisfied that the code looks right in your mainline view, and you've built and tested it to your satisfaction, check it in and you're done.
It is precisely because branching in ClearCase is such a simple procedure that a method like this is viable and not trickery. It also reduces the need for reserved checkouts, and is independent of whether you use snapshot or dynamic views.
I do not think there is a good way to make that sort of behavior a real default that people cannot help but use, though I would love to be told of a way to do so.
The way to make that the default behavior is to use UCM (although I'd only use this on ClearCase 5.0; UCM wasn't really ready for prime time in 4.2). UCM imposes a process you might not agree with 100% but for most things it's Good Enough, and it saved me months of scripting around base ClearCase.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps, but their earliest Linux boxes, from about four years ago, ran Red Hat. Ran it well, I might add; one was my desktop machine when I worked there (although it performed some server-like functions because of the work I did), and it was bedrock-stable. The only times it ever crashed were when I did something stupid when mucking about with the kernel.
Oh, and as far as Linux-vs.-HP-UX: Two entirely different animals, with entirely different market spaces. Only the PA-RISC workstations have any overlap, and their primary market is CAD, running specialized applications that may or may not ever get ported to Linux.
If you're in the U.S., claim the $.38/mile or whatever for the mileage. Plus, bill the driving time over and above what it would have been if you weren't hauling anything.
As for people leaving things in your truck over the weekend, take it all out, leave it at your house, fill the truck with your own stuff, and when they ask where theirs is, tell them you're keeping your stuff in your truck because you'll just need it again next weekend...
If that doesn't work, tell them your insurance policy doesn't cover business use, and that you're not willing to get your policy cancelled for them.
I like this one better.
True, but even if they're exaggerating, and spam is only 30% of all email, or even 20%, that's still what's commonly referred to as a "shitload".
Nowithstanding the real-world need for students to know how to use Excel, etc., the real problem lies with the "indirect" part of the agreement.
We all know how hard it is to get name-brand x86 machines without some version of Windows installed, and if you don't want it, how hard it is to get a refund for it.
Sure, you can buy Macs, or you can buy branded x86 machines with Linux (etc.) from a number of vendors, but your choices are limited and except for Microtel, they tend to be pretty high-end. If you had to outfit 7000 students plus the proportional amount of faculty and staff with low-cost MS-free machines, you'd probably be buying a lot of beige boxes. (Either that or you've just found another way to enslave the grad students.)
Also, what about machines the students bring? Is it realy practical to think that the college's IT department can completely disavow support for all those Windows machines on the dorm networks?
For all the reasons people have talked about here (especially audit trails), I much prefer email versus the phone. Also try spelling weird things over the phone. "That's S-M-S-I_underscore--" "Eff en eff--" "No, S as in Sam, M as in Mary..."
But the above backfired on me at one job. People kept calling with things better handled via email, and I kept asking them to send email so they did:
To: ebh
From: luser
Subject: (no subject)
pls call
And don't get me started on pls.
Most of the dicussion here has centered around the obvious comparison to TiVo, even though most TiVo owners are not Joe Sixpack. But lots of Joe Sixpacks have gone down to Wal-Mart and bought their $50 DVD players.
Now, ask Joe Sixpack what he thinks of DVDs that won't let him fast forward over the previews, FBI warning, etc. That's exactly what he'll think of Mystro disabling the FF button during their "chosen just for you" Pabst commercials.
And I really don't want to be there when he finds out that some network stuffshirt has decided that he can't timeshift Wrestling Bitchslap Mayhem so he can watch it after the bar closes, because it's supposed to be a lead-in for Springer's Uncensored Hot-Tub Babes...
Or was Adobe just stupid when they let the perfectly functional Unix Photoshop and (beta) Linux FM ports die?
Nothing new there. For centuries, America as the "land of opportunity" meant that immigrants perceived (usually correctly) that they'd have a better chance of raising themselves out of poverty here than they did in their home countries. Only the list of home countries has changed from decade to decade.
Phenomena like the Indian software industry have fueled the rise of the middle class in those countries, and that's a Good Thing, but it still doesn't make me any more eager to lose my job to an anonymous programmer in Bangalore.
I thought Stallman refused to support man pages because at the time there was no free version of nroff, troff, the man macros, font files, etc.
Xerox is an interesting example, because it's been verbed just like Google. It's been absorbed into the lexicon so well that the verb forms are even acceptable in tournament Scrabble, excuse me, "SCRABBLE(r) brand crossword game". (I found it odd, too, that they'd accept a trademark-derived word when they defend their own trademark so vigorously.)
This has only failed me once in the last ten years. YMMV.
1. Get a glass of water.
2. Take a deep breath and let it out, but don't push it out. Don't worry if you hiccup during that breath.
3. Without taking another breath, start taking *tiny* sips of the water; try to take at least one per second. Swallow each one. Keep your epiglottis closed as much as you can, in case you hiccup in the middle of doing this.
4. After 10-15 sips, the muscles in your mouth and throat will start to get tired, making it more difficult to do this. Keep going.
5. After a few more sips you won't care about the tired muscles, because you'll really REALLY want to breathe. Force yourself to take a couple more sips, then stop drinking and take that breath.
You should have no more hiccups after this. If you keep hiccuping wait a few minutes and try again. If it doesn't work on the second try, you're screwed. Also, this will not work if the hiccups are from being drunk and it may not work if they're a side-effect of medication.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention that my wife and I save 10%-15% of our gross for retirement; the kid's college fund comes after that (we currently participate in a state run tax-deferred college savings program for that).
I paid 90% of my own way through college, and it had its good and bad points. The good point was that by the time I was done, I really knew I had done it for *me*, not my parents, employers, etc.
OTOH, I had a lot of Fs and Ws when I couldn't take courses and work 80 hours a week at the same time, and I graduated college 18 years after I graduated high school. The only time I was ever in school and not working was when I took a 3-month leave of absence in 1997 to finish my last 13 credits all at once. (That was a really great way to complete what had been a very long journey!)
Whether we send our kid to school and pay for everything, or make him pay for some things (like we pay tuition and room and board and he buys his own books), or instead of putting him through college we put him out the front door on his ass, that's up to him as he grows up.
Even if you do have the savings, sometimes it's a matter of priorities. Right now, one of our main long-term financial plans is for our son to be able to go to the college of his choice without having to worry about money. We can achieve that without much difficulty and without having to sell our blood and mortgage the dog. Cut my income by 50%-75% and we're back to filling out those pesky financial aid forms and hoping that National Merit Scholarships still exist in 2017.
There are a lot of Really Neat Things I'd like to do with my life, and if I'm lucky, maybe I'll be able to do one of them without forcing my family to live on a subsistence income. For the foreseeable future, though, I'm not quitting my day job.
I take those claims of CMM-5-ness with a large grain of salt. Not because I think they're lying (since it'd be easy enough to verify with the SEI), but because it may represent only a small fraction of the total business.
Maybe they've got a few groups that have hit CMM-5, but if I outsource my shopping-cart app to them, will it get built in a CMM-5 shop? Do I even want it to (since CMM-5 entails very expensive process overhead)?
So what's the alternative? I'd be happy to get CMM-2 plus code reviews, but for all I know their staff consists of the few rocket scientists they put on the CMM-5 gigs, and the rest of us get code monkeys who haven't even made it through "Teach yourself the Windows Login Prompt in 21 Days" yet.
Which means it's probably getting obvious why I'd never buy one of these things. The ones I've seen in airports have huge problems with whatever you call the plasma or LCD equivalent of CRT phosphor burn.
I'd be seriously pissed if I dropped $5000+ on a screen just to have a bunch of overlaid network logos burned into the lower-right corner after six months.
I think I'll wait for DLP to mature a bit.
For that matter, how many of those people think the Internet is either a Microsoft or AOL product?
Headline of one of our actual change requests: "Login confirmation screen have bad grammar". This was not a joke; the originator is Chinese.
You're right, user-facing text has to be written in clear English. But the code and its comments, and even internal documentation can be written using the most execrable pidgin English and it'll still work. It can even be meaningfully code reviewed if all the developers speak the same pidgin.
In particular, India, unlike Russia and China, has a long history of widespread English usage. It may be heavily accented (and have a lot of regional accents), and it may have adopted a lot of its own rules (who needs articles or punctuation?), but it's good enough that some companies are even outsourcing their U.S. tech support to India.
The preceding paragraph is obviously a broad generalization; some Indians speak gramatically correct and nearly accent-free English. Some are incomprehensible. Most are somewhere in between. The same could be said for Americans.
The engineering staff at the company I work for is about 2/3 Indian, and 1/3 of the Indians work in our U.S. site, the rest in India. Our products are designed for the U.S. market, so we're an existence proof that large amounts of U.S.-destined software can be written overseas.
I think they meant discomfort in one's job situation, i.e., always being a little afraid of being behind the times. That's not the same thing as being uncomfortable with one's overall lifestyle.
Would I do it again?
25 years ago, we "whiz kids" were a novelty. We could outprogram anyone with a degree except for those few who went to schools that had that newfangled "computer science" major. And we'd do it for the same money our friends made at McDonald's. Programming was fun then, and it's still fun now (even though I do SCM and haven't done a whole lot of mainstream development in the last 10 years).
I started out pre-med with software as my self-taught fallback. Today, if I didn't do the pre-med thing again, I'd probably go into some other engineering discipline, like building bridges that don't fall down, and stick to the truly fun hobbyist aspects of computing.
I'd have all the same reasons for not going CS today as I did back then, as well as the fear that by the time I got out of school all the programming jobs would be paid in rupees, rubles or yuan.
Of all the store-bought toys my three-year-old has, all but two were made in China. I truly fear that we're not far from the same thing for non-military software. Just as plastics manufacturing has become commoditized, so will coding, and it will go the way of all commodities--straight to the lowest-cost producers.
I work at a startup too, which has consumed approximately 90/168ths of all my weeks for the last eleven months.
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day they would have to have pried from my cold, dead fingers.
My wife and son and I actually had a very nice Christmas. The kid made out like a bandit this year, which gave us all plenty to do for most of the day. Then a few friends who, like us, had their plans cancelled because of the snowstorm, brought the food they had made for their get-togethers over to our house, added it to ours, and we all had a pretty decent feast.
Go to Walt Disney World. The parking attendants and some vendors use them. They demo it in one of the Epcot exhibits, but I couldn't talk the guy into letting me try it out. :(
He did have some interesting stories about training the staff. Apparently the things are dead easy to ride, but it takes awhile to learn the tricks that minimize power usage. A skilled rider can go three to five times as long on a charge as an unskilled rider.
IMO, this is a Good Thing. The TiVo Community Forum asks that things that will a) cost TiVo significant revenue or b) Open TiVo up to legal exposure not be discussed there. In return, they provide de facto support for all other kinds of hacking. Good luck finding that for any other piece of consumer electronics.
OTOH, as the above links show, information about the Other Stuff (like saving shows to CD) is easily available.
Sounds like the best of both worlds to me.
Better double check the internal temperature rating of the safe, though. Even if it doesn't get too hot for the media itself, it might melt the Ziploc bag.
Anyone who reads Slashdot. :) Seriously, join CCIUG. There are a lot of people there (some of whom have forgotten more about ClearCase than I'll ever know) who are happy to answer questions.
At work we have a whole SCM team, and as I said I spent far less time on SCM matters when we were just using CVS (in a team of ten or so).
On a team of ten, unless you're maintaining a large base of old legacy code, ClearCase is probably overkill. Were it not for our four sites in three countries, I think ClearCase would be overkill for my product. The rule of thumb I use is that if you don't need to be at CMM level 3 or higher, you probably don't need ClearCase.
Where ClearCase really shines is in very large projects with a long history. On my last project, we had some source files which had history going back fifteen years with over 10,000 versions. ClearCase doesn't break a sweat handling that.
I'm also unsure how useful the audit trals and richer meta-data such really are, since again I think few people can take advantage of them.
If your project is run right, there's only one person who would ever need to: the release manager. The high-end features of ClearCase aren't there for the benefit of individual developers, they're there for the project as a whole. They give you fast turnaround on official builds, they let you juggle a dozen releases of your product at once, they let you reproduce a build five years after it was shipped to customers, etc.
the way CVS has you work with files is the Correct Way - you change files, occasionally updating them from source to keep in sync.
Again, provided that "you" == "developer". The "extract the cleartext code into your directory" model is the classic, but to claim that it is the One True Way is a religious issue. Personally, wearing my developer hat, I much prefer to be able to describe the code I want to see, rather than specify lists of versions. I also like being able to root my source tree at the same place no matter what I'm doing.
When you are ready, you check it all in and there are hardly any merge issues because you've already done most of the merge ahead of time, and you've also tested it beforehand.
How is this different from ClearCase, unless you're checking your code directly into the mainline branch rather than on your own development branch?
Both methods mean if there are merge issues, you'll discover them in the VOB and not on a developers local machine first.
What's wrong with that? If your changes have to be reconciled with someone else's, what difference does it make when it happens? One of ClearCase's advantages is that most of the time, it can do the merges automatically for you. If you use UCM or an equivalent home-grown facility, you're encouraged to check the merges, and if there's a problem, you can back out with no trouble. It works like this: You check in your code on your development branch. Then, you set a view into the mainline, check out your files there, then merge the changes from your development branch into your mainline view. This will pick up and resolve anything else that's happened to your files while you were doing your development work. If the merge doesn't go smoothly, you can massage it by hand (like a traditinoal merge) before checking it into the mainline, or you can undo the checkouts on the mainline view, and go back and fix things up in your development view. When you're satisfied that the code looks right in your mainline view, and you've built and tested it to your satisfaction, check it in and you're done.
It is precisely because branching in ClearCase is such a simple procedure that a method like this is viable and not trickery. It also reduces the need for reserved checkouts, and is independent of whether you use snapshot or dynamic views.
I do not think there is a good way to make that sort of behavior a real default that people cannot help but use, though I would love to be told of a way to do so.
The way to make that the default behavior is to use UCM (although I'd only use this on ClearCase 5.0; UCM wasn't really ready for prime time in 4.2). UCM imposes a process you might not agree with 100% but for most things it's Good Enough, and it saved me months of scripting around base ClearCase.