How long has it been since the last apocalypse? Basically is the odometer rolling around its 27 millionth year? If so can we see something coming? Dust cloud?
In the early days it looked like.net might evolve to take on Java in that it was solving all those little coding nuggets that you have to otherwise grind out such as getting files from web servers. But then it turned into marketing for all their other products and the surface area of the whole.net thing grew out of control. But horribly enough I was still having to turn to ActiveX era programming to accomplish anything really cool.
Then I discovered QT and a whole new world was opened to me. After a year I realized that the only Microsoft product I was still using was Windows and that was seriously getting in my way. That was years ago and MS has not offered me a single geeky reason to go back.
PHP is better than any.net crap.
Apache is better than IIS
Linux is better than MS Server
MySQL is better than SQL Server
C++ QT is better than.Net
Eclipse is better than Visual Studio for multiple languages
Git is better than VSS
Mac OS X is better than Windows for programming
Anything is better than IE
So I have been able to nearly completely leave MS behind yet am able to release my desktop software with little effort for both Mac and Windows because of QT. I don't see an easy way for MS to get me back.
But there is a hard way. They could toss the present windows foundation and make Windows 9 based upon BSD. Make Visual Studio compile to a zillion platforms like Mac and Linux all the while opening it up to other languages like PHP. All the while beating away their marketing department who would want to do forced tie-ins to existing products. Then from this new foundation they could let their developers loose to make everything way better. Then, depending on pricing, they might get me back; maybe.
The first thing that did it for me was when they started polluting computers with bloatware.
Being the family computer nerd I would just wipe out any new Dell coming into the family with a fresh copy of the OS.
The second thing that did it for me was the quality reduction of support. 10 years ago Dell would go that extra mile and they were my standard recommendation for a PC. But then they went Indian with their support and calling in would start with a market survey and eventually end with a big negatory.
The first two were enough for me but the third was a bizarre drop in quality. Their machines were burning out and other oddities.
They might try and defend themselves saying that they needed to cut support costs and that without the additional revenue of the Norton AV subscriptions that they couldn't compete. But the reality is that their initial reputation was that buying a Dell was a safe bet. But as a nerd I have a reputation to manage and recommending Dells became a bad idea. Now I recommend a local computer shop that rocks.
If you forced me to use Opera to use your system I would demand that they find a new developer. Or as a customer I would find a new system.
This is a classic example of a developer trying to tailor the user to the system instead of the system to the user.
Stop your whining and just make it work in one or more of the common browsers. I have been forced to bend crap environments to my will and I suspect that most developers around slashdot have bent bad systems until they cried; but made them work in the end.
My Lexmark printer driver is around 3 bytes long. I dumped HP when their driver crossed the 200MB level and installed a bunch of background processes.
I didn't buy a computer to run HP software I bought it for many things a very small thing being to occasionally print. But HP seems to want to pretty well turn my desktop into an HP dedicated print server.
I have only "Office Spaced" one electronic device in my life and it was my HP all-in-one. It was very satisfying to smash the crap out of it. All that thing was built for was to get me to buy ink. Every time I turned it on to scan the thing would go through this 2 minute cleaning cycle and use up some more ink. I would literally go through more than half an ink cartridge without printing a thing. A printer that uses ink when I am only scanning is just stupid. Then when it ran out of ink the whole menu system basically wouldn't let me get past the no-ink-complaining so that I could do hardly anything else with the printer. It wasn't an all-in-one is was a single purpose ink selling machine.
So no surprise that HP is figuring out a way to screw their customers even harder. "Yes I bought your printer so that you could make money selling advertising." Or maybe people buy printers to print stuff; their own stuff.
As a developer I am frightened every time I expose some code to the world. Who's patent have I infringed? If I make it so that a user's status is visible to others I can be assured that somebody has patented this. I would not be shocked if people have patents on things like logins and logouts, or a patent on centering things on a screen.
Now that the patent office basically has given away a patent that seems to cover facebook to perfection what technically stops Amazon from shutting Facebook down? People might say, "Hey facebook is big and will pile on the lawyers." but when Microsoft was even recently staring down the barrel of an injunction on further Office sales what the heck chance does someone small have?
Some patent trolls are looking to take a bite from the big pies but does everyone remember Blackboard Learning Systems? They used patents to kill competitors who "stole" their technology. In that case their patent was taken out and shot but not until they had killed a Canadian company with something like a 2.7 million dollar judgment. It was only after a huge internet quest was started for prior art that a single foul patent was curtailed. 1 down, 1 zillion to go.
Let's hope that the Supreme Court pulls the rug out from under all these patent trolls. I suspect that most viable companies with many software patents will breath a sigh of relief knowing that some team of lawyers in Texas won't be able to tax them ever again.
Patents are supposed to be Non-Obvious to someone working in the field. Usually the great successes are not so much technological but a combination of balance and marketing. In a way patents often only provide protection to the failed ideas. I usually hear of patent lawsuits originating from patents that were created by companies that ended up face down in the dirt. Some law firm or competitor buy the patent for a song and starts ruining everyone else's day. I doubt that there is any part of Twitter that 100,000 slashdotters couldn't build 10 different ways and in many cases better than the twitter people. But what I suspect that most of us would have said, pre twitter, is that a 140 character blogging site is stupid. Might still say it but I wouldn't mind having a piece of that. But I wouldn't want to see them sued because someone has a patent on limiting a text field to a set number of characters, say 140.
After reading about this law suit we need a new blacklist category for people to opt into. Dirtbag companies who sue too much. e360 can then top the list.
Who wants to do business with a company that sues like this? Personally I would be happy to opt into a blacklist containing the likes of MPAA, RIAA, e360, patent trolls, and other companies who abuse the legal system.
Regardless of the lawsuit I would want my email service to block e360 emails.
Replace guns in the 2nd amendment with information control. As the control of information is power. So a new amendment firmly placing information control into the hands of the people.
The 2nd Amendment was cooked up with the idea that people could resist a government out of control. This might have been vaguely reasonable when you could typically only fire one badly aimed shot per minute. But with the command & control structures and things like drones and tanks it would either be impossible or shockingly horrific for people in a modern democracy to mount an armed resistance to a bad government.
We now have a new and better weapon which is the easy distribution of masses of information. Thus I would suggest changing the 2nd amendment from the right to be a hillbilly with a gun to the right to any information the government has combined with with a restriction on the government's right to store information on us. Basically I would want all information that is not involved in an active and ongoing serious criminal investigation to be released and the government to not use any personal information not covered by the above.
This would take some tweeking so that criminal records are kept but not allow the police to store travel data or license plates that drive by.
The whole idea would be that the government would lose a huge amount of power over us and we would gain a huge amount of power over it.
As an iPhone developer who would love to make the jump to include android I am very scared about the large mishmash of versions and hardware. Talk about a testing nightmare. Simulator testing is great but as we all know nothing beats the real thing. I don't feel like buying enough handsets to cover my desk.
I wouldn't be able to keep all the chargers straight anyway.
The trolls don't need to license squat thus they won't be bothered by this. It is somewhat rare for the larger companies to beat tiny people up with their massive patent portfolios and that is why it makes the news. Even the "evil" microsoft has a massive patent portfolio and it is infrequent when they beat people up. The FAT patent nonsense is sort of odd for them. I suspect their marketing department is more responsible for the lawsuits than their legal department.
But patent trolls are just evil lawyers who don't need to cross license patents seeing that the only patent they might genuinely try to use would be a patent on ruining lives through the courts.
Except for real killer inventions most large companies patent the crap out of what they do for defensive purposes more than anything else.
If they stopped granting software patents then it would free up a huge number of people. They obviously don't know software very well as they keep granting patents that would be the rough equivalent of granting a patent on farting as a solution to reducing inter bowel gas pressure. The same with business processes. Stop it.
I will leave one caveat. If you come up with something that truly makes programmers sit back and say wow then maybe an exception could be granted. Let's say a whole new AI based operating system that can be written in 200 lines of code.
Flash will probably be flash's replacement. As a programmer I used curse every time I opened the flash app to program in that lousy IDE. Now I curse far less with Flex. But much of the cool stuff seems to be missing or hard to get in Flex. Thus the way forward is simple. Improve Flex and I, as a programmer, will be content. And for all the HTML5 screamers out there; keep in mind that I still have to check to see if my stuff works in IE6. I hate IE6 and my stuff works like crap in it but I am not about to toss a chunk of my users/revenue into the toilet. So it will be a very long time before I can even consider using any HTML5 coolness. And by then it will be HTML6. The bit that works best in IE6... flash.
I would think that slashdotters would be largely against evoting simply because we have all seen how computers are routinely mauled by bad people. The stakes are way too high if bad people are the only ones who would hack themselves a win does this not almost make it certain that bad people will win. The only computerized voting I would accept would be one where the vote is taken by computer but then it prints a bit of paper that becomes the final say. This way you avoid hanging chads yet you give the voter the ability to audit what they put in the box. With any other evoting system the computer could ignore the voter and change the tally as it is told and the voter would a have no idea that they were just disenfranchised. With the stakes this high having people count some bits of paper is a very good investment.
I always found the original Basic, with its gotos and line numbers, to resemble assembler. When I was around 10 I found it very easy to make the jump from Basic to assembler. I would really hate to make the jump from Java to assembler if I were now starting out. Not that I would advise programming in assembler but it is a very good thing for all programmers to know . As basic and assembler both grew up they both even added labels. So in a way learning to get anything done in Basic was actually quite hard core.
First problem is that this is a few paid programmers vs the world. Good luck with that.
Secondly good luck keeping those servers running 24/7 for the next decade. Right now as I write this my daughter is playing Dead or Alive on my original XBOX. She would be pretty ticked if they were to have turned off the servers. Thus they have left code where they can plug in an update that will eliminate their server requirements some time in the future and allow local saving. Saving a game state is really easy. For the most part it is a big serialization. Thus hackers might just intercept the activation of the game state and just dump the data with the load function reversing the same procedure.
Lastly they are going to find that running all these DRM servers is eating into their bottom line big time as these servers are going to receive some wicked hack attempts. Then lastly they are going to really tick off their customers when they lose game data to the hackers(or HD failure) or the hackers put everyone back to square one and rename their characters to Gay McGayster.
Experience really helps make great programmers get even better but I have also found that mediocre programmers merely become set in their ways. I know some network admins still torturing their Novell networks into doing stuff that quite simply nobody does anymore. They were crappy admins 20 years ago and now they are crappy admins with some serious seniority. The same with programmers. I have met old crappy programmers still trying to milk the lotus notes cow dry. And the worst is when you get really experienced hard core crappy programmers who think it is a good idea to architect systems where you start by reworking the Linux kernel (using some assembler) to accomplish things that you literally could do in python and not push python too hard. (Didn't make up the last line).
This sounds like a marketing person annoyed that nearly everyone who is forced to fill out their stupid forms to get some needed content is telling Microsoft that they are 98 year old Afghan woman with an income over $100,000.
I love power-tripping types like this: Lifeguards who seem to think that they are there to do anything but pull drunks out of the water. Police who think that they are there to do anything but pull drunks off their girlfriends. TSA people who think they are there to do anything but smell my feet. Politicians who think that elected office doesn't mean that they are really just failed real-estate people. Hall monitors who think they are popular. Waiters who think they have earned a tip by interrupting my conversation to see if everything is all right. Oh and failed programmers who think that by dragging their "Team" into meetings is the road to a great product. But I digress. Would an internet driver's license make the internet a better place? And more importantly who would collect the money for the licensing? That sounds like a monopoly that they could milk for decades longer than their slowly dying OS / Text editor business.
What I want is a GUI showcase. A website with GUIs from movies, industrial machines, web pages, etc. I have never seen a good one. Yet I have seen some very cool interfaces over the years. Sometimes you see movies where the police criminal database or whatnot could only have been built with a team of highly paid graphic artists. If anyone knows about this please reply with a link.
When I first started programming I used a VIC 20 with 3.5K. At first I dreamed about getting the tape device. So all my basic programming vanished when turned the machine was turned off. Then with the tape drive the best way that I figured out to squeeze the maximum out of this was to first create an assembler to machine code converter which stored the machine code to tape as you created it. Then you loaded the program back from tape and poof you had the absolute most you could squeeze out of 3.5K. After that I cobbled together 8086s and put every version of DOS that came along as well as radical new upgrades like a mouse and a hard drive. I squeezed Windows version 1 onto a machine that it wasn't meant for and so on. I see my intelligent Nephews and Neices (all around 20) who would be hard pressed to install windows if there was any hurdle like having to manually install a network driver. Some geeks to be are jumping into the depths of Linux and are probably getting some awesome experience but I have met many a comp sci grad who would be hard pressed to properly set up a pretty basic LAMP server and then do the slightest of unusual configurations (say memcached). Yet these same Comp Sci grads might have built a basic compiler or OS at some point during their education. I think that my particular timing was pretty good in that I have had the time to digest the zillion little wonderful innovations (color codes in my IDE) without having them overwhelm me like someone who might have started in the 60's. But I agree with the premise of this article. Facebook is not important to many of my generation and I can't remember the last time I sent a text message. The kids of today are probably doing with their cell phones what I did with computers 30 years ago; that is to squeeze every erg of functionality they can out of them. Texts are cheaper than calls thus better. Also innovations like keyboards on reasonably priced phones are better than typing texts on a number pad. Also the incentives are different; My social life does not depend on my text plan or abilities.
I wish that had been the case. They had nothing that was even close. I think it all boiled down to two issues: not wanting another product to support. And they didn't like how the staff had presented the purchase of our product as basically a done deal without any input from them. So they circled the wagons and kept us out as a precedent. What IT people like this don't realize is that a boiling point will be reached and they will find themselves going head on with a "consulting" company that has come to "rationalize" IT. Once that path is taken by senior management there is no going back as the IT people would have to admit that many if not all their selfish policies had been wrong.
Once when presenting a web based product to the senior management the IT people at a huge company tried to block the IP address of the server in the middle of the presentation. Without missing a beat I switched over to a copy of the product that was hosted on the laptop itself. The IT guy typed furiously and then interrupted and asked what port/ IP address I was using. I told him that I had switched from TCP to UDP as something was blocking the TCP packets. He typed even more furiously trying to figure out why blocking a single IP wouldn't also block UDP. I am not sure he ever figured out what went wrong. For weeks after the presentation the IT group threw up roadblock after roadblock. We weren't compatible with their PKI, etc (we didn't use anything that would work with PKI). Even though the top people(CEO, CFO, President, and the VP of Marketing) really wanted what we were offering they simply admitted that a battle with their IT department wasn't something they could handle at this time.
This was not the first IT department that tried to crap all over our product for "Technical" reasons. Even if our product were to have sucked crap that was never the reason given. It was always "bandwidth" or something not relating at all to any possible problem that our product had.
I think it all boils down to IT departments being driven by fear. If all goes well the IT department risks downsizing. If anything goes wrong the IT department gets the blame. Then to top it all off the typical IT head might be around 50 years old in the average large organization and they fear the new guy who just was hired who could single handedly bring the entire department out of the depths of Novell and into the 21st century.
I would recommend that any large company regularly get an outside organization to audit their IT departments and make sure that the technologies and practices are up to a reasonable standard. Best to learn now that your backups suck instead of when the good data still exists. I would be willing to venture that most organizations have a head of IT who should be replaced by one of his far younger underlings.
The best coders I have seen wrote amazingly little code. I am not talking about crazy pointer arithmetic but just way less code than lesser programmers. Often the best programmers also deployed the available resources way better. When all is said and done the best programmers leave code that everyone worships as pure genius that everyone else builds on with ease. A great example was someone who did some great code where they took the bull buy the horns and moved the project into proper multithreading and some crazy memory usage. The server went from using maybe 10Megs per process to a collective 8Gigs spread across many threads. Sounds complex but every programmer took one look at the code and went wow. 20 servers out of 23 previously heavily loaded servers were shut down as unneeded. Even with 50% client growth every year our next server purchase will probably be in a decade. That super programmer moved on and we just kept building on his code for a long time. Programming and debugging went from a chore to a joy. Anyone could tell which code was new code because it was ugly and complex compared to the simple elegance of the original code. Without a doubt that programmer could replace the 50 pretty good programmers we have on staff now. Plus his code eliminated 3 full time system admins and has resulted in zero downtime in two years, thus avoiding millions in losses over the last and next few years. So what should his pay have been? 5 Million a year?
On a different topic, in my travels I have seen sys admins who ran well oiled machines that were amazing. At the same time I have seen sys admins who weren't properly backing up critical data. Critical as in the company would go bust in the event of a HD failure. In these same companies they had HR, CFO's, and Sales people who were paid multiples of the Admin. These "senior" managem who's screwups would be hard pressed to completely wreck the company usually saw the various computer people as a bit of a joke.
Slashdot Mirror
How long has it been since the last apocalypse? Basically is the odometer rolling around its 27 millionth year? If so can we see something coming? Dust cloud?
In the early days it looked like .net might evolve to take on Java in that it was solving all those little coding nuggets that you have to otherwise grind out such as getting files from web servers. But then it turned into marketing for all their other products and the surface area of the whole .net thing grew out of control. But horribly enough I was still having to turn to ActiveX era programming to accomplish anything really cool.
.net crap. .Net
Then I discovered QT and a whole new world was opened to me. After a year I realized that the only Microsoft product I was still using was Windows and that was seriously getting in my way. That was years ago and MS has not offered me a single geeky reason to go back.
PHP is better than any
Apache is better than IIS
Linux is better than MS Server
MySQL is better than SQL Server
C++ QT is better than
Eclipse is better than Visual Studio for multiple languages
Git is better than VSS
Mac OS X is better than Windows for programming
Anything is better than IE
So I have been able to nearly completely leave MS behind yet am able to release my desktop software with little effort for both Mac and Windows because of QT. I don't see an easy way for MS to get me back.
But there is a hard way. They could toss the present windows foundation and make Windows 9 based upon BSD. Make Visual Studio compile to a zillion platforms like Mac and Linux all the while opening it up to other languages like PHP. All the while beating away their marketing department who would want to do forced tie-ins to existing products. Then from this new foundation they could let their developers loose to make everything way better. Then, depending on pricing, they might get me back; maybe.
The first thing that did it for me was when they started polluting computers with bloatware.
Being the family computer nerd I would just wipe out any new Dell coming into the family with a fresh copy of the OS.
The second thing that did it for me was the quality reduction of support. 10 years ago Dell would go that extra mile and they were my standard recommendation for a PC. But then they went Indian with their support and calling in would start with a market survey and eventually end with a big negatory.
The first two were enough for me but the third was a bizarre drop in quality. Their machines were burning out and other oddities.
They might try and defend themselves saying that they needed to cut support costs and that without the additional revenue of the Norton AV subscriptions that they couldn't compete. But the reality is that their initial reputation was that buying a Dell was a safe bet. But as a nerd I have a reputation to manage and recommending Dells became a bad idea. Now I recommend a local computer shop that rocks.
If you forced me to use Opera to use your system I would demand that they find a new developer. Or as a customer I would find a new system.
This is a classic example of a developer trying to tailor the user to the system instead of the system to the user.
Stop your whining and just make it work in one or more of the common browsers. I have been forced to bend crap environments to my will and I suspect that most developers around slashdot have bent bad systems until they cried; but made them work in the end.
My Lexmark printer driver is around 3 bytes long. I dumped HP when their driver crossed the 200MB level and installed a bunch of background processes.
I didn't buy a computer to run HP software I bought it for many things a very small thing being to occasionally print. But HP seems to want to pretty well turn my desktop into an HP dedicated print server.
I have only "Office Spaced" one electronic device in my life and it was my HP all-in-one. It was very satisfying to smash the crap out of it. All that thing was built for was to get me to buy ink. Every time I turned it on to scan the thing would go through this 2 minute cleaning cycle and use up some more ink. I would literally go through more than half an ink cartridge without printing a thing. A printer that uses ink when I am only scanning is just stupid. Then when it ran out of ink the whole menu system basically wouldn't let me get past the no-ink-complaining so that I could do hardly anything else with the printer. It wasn't an all-in-one is was a single purpose ink selling machine.
So no surprise that HP is figuring out a way to screw their customers even harder. "Yes I bought your printer so that you could make money selling advertising." Or maybe people buy printers to print stuff; their own stuff.
As a developer I am frightened every time I expose some code to the world. Who's patent have I infringed? If I make it so that a user's status is visible to others I can be assured that somebody has patented this. I would not be shocked if people have patents on things like logins and logouts, or a patent on centering things on a screen.
Now that the patent office basically has given away a patent that seems to cover facebook to perfection what technically stops Amazon from shutting Facebook down? People might say, "Hey facebook is big and will pile on the lawyers." but when Microsoft was even recently staring down the barrel of an injunction on further Office sales what the heck chance does someone small have?
Some patent trolls are looking to take a bite from the big pies but does everyone remember Blackboard Learning Systems? They used patents to kill competitors who "stole" their technology. In that case their patent was taken out and shot but not until they had killed a Canadian company with something like a 2.7 million dollar judgment. It was only after a huge internet quest was started for prior art that a single foul patent was curtailed. 1 down, 1 zillion to go.
Let's hope that the Supreme Court pulls the rug out from under all these patent trolls. I suspect that most viable companies with many software patents will breath a sigh of relief knowing that some team of lawyers in Texas won't be able to tax them ever again. Patents are supposed to be Non-Obvious to someone working in the field. Usually the great successes are not so much technological but a combination of balance and marketing. In a way patents often only provide protection to the failed ideas. I usually hear of patent lawsuits originating from patents that were created by companies that ended up face down in the dirt. Some law firm or competitor buy the patent for a song and starts ruining everyone else's day. I doubt that there is any part of Twitter that 100,000 slashdotters couldn't build 10 different ways and in many cases better than the twitter people. But what I suspect that most of us would have said, pre twitter, is that a 140 character blogging site is stupid. Might still say it but I wouldn't mind having a piece of that. But I wouldn't want to see them sued because someone has a patent on limiting a text field to a set number of characters, say 140.
After reading about this law suit we need a new blacklist category for people to opt into. Dirtbag companies who sue too much. e360 can then top the list. Who wants to do business with a company that sues like this? Personally I would be happy to opt into a blacklist containing the likes of MPAA, RIAA, e360, patent trolls, and other companies who abuse the legal system. Regardless of the lawsuit I would want my email service to block e360 emails.
When I was a kid I ran around shooting my friends with a toy gun. thus I own the FPS concept. I order all FPS games removed from all stores.
Replace guns in the 2nd amendment with information control. As the control of information is power. So a new amendment firmly placing information control into the hands of the people.
The 2nd Amendment was cooked up with the idea that people could resist a government out of control. This might have been vaguely reasonable when you could typically only fire one badly aimed shot per minute. But with the command & control structures and things like drones and tanks it would either be impossible or shockingly horrific for people in a modern democracy to mount an armed resistance to a bad government.
We now have a new and better weapon which is the easy distribution of masses of information. Thus I would suggest changing the 2nd amendment from the right to be a hillbilly with a gun to the right to any information the government has combined with with a restriction on the government's right to store information on us. Basically I would want all information that is not involved in an active and ongoing serious criminal investigation to be released and the government to not use any personal information not covered by the above.
This would take some tweeking so that criminal records are kept but not allow the police to store travel data or license plates that drive by.
The whole idea would be that the government would lose a huge amount of power over us and we would gain a huge amount of power over it.
As an iPhone developer who would love to make the jump to include android I am very scared about the large mishmash of versions and hardware. Talk about a testing nightmare. Simulator testing is great but as we all know nothing beats the real thing. I don't feel like buying enough handsets to cover my desk.
I wouldn't be able to keep all the chargers straight anyway.
The trolls don't need to license squat thus they won't be bothered by this. It is somewhat rare for the larger companies to beat tiny people up with their massive patent portfolios and that is why it makes the news. Even the "evil" microsoft has a massive patent portfolio and it is infrequent when they beat people up. The FAT patent nonsense is sort of odd for them. I suspect their marketing department is more responsible for the lawsuits than their legal department.
But patent trolls are just evil lawyers who don't need to cross license patents seeing that the only patent they might genuinely try to use would be a patent on ruining lives through the courts.
Except for real killer inventions most large companies patent the crap out of what they do for defensive purposes more than anything else.
If they stopped granting software patents then it would free up a huge number of people. They obviously don't know software very well as they keep granting patents that would be the rough equivalent of granting a patent on farting as a solution to reducing inter bowel gas pressure. The same with business processes. Stop it. I will leave one caveat. If you come up with something that truly makes programmers sit back and say wow then maybe an exception could be granted. Let's say a whole new AI based operating system that can be written in 200 lines of code.
It is fairly difficult to do evil in the bright light of day; Can be done but it is much harder. What is far worse though is when people self censor.
Flash will probably be flash's replacement. As a programmer I used curse every time I opened the flash app to program in that lousy IDE. Now I curse far less with Flex. But much of the cool stuff seems to be missing or hard to get in Flex. Thus the way forward is simple. Improve Flex and I, as a programmer, will be content. And for all the HTML5 screamers out there; keep in mind that I still have to check to see if my stuff works in IE6. I hate IE6 and my stuff works like crap in it but I am not about to toss a chunk of my users/revenue into the toilet. So it will be a very long time before I can even consider using any HTML5 coolness. And by then it will be HTML6. The bit that works best in IE6... flash.
I would think that slashdotters would be largely against evoting simply because we have all seen how computers are routinely mauled by bad people. The stakes are way too high if bad people are the only ones who would hack themselves a win does this not almost make it certain that bad people will win. The only computerized voting I would accept would be one where the vote is taken by computer but then it prints a bit of paper that becomes the final say. This way you avoid hanging chads yet you give the voter the ability to audit what they put in the box. With any other evoting system the computer could ignore the voter and change the tally as it is told and the voter would a have no idea that they were just disenfranchised. With the stakes this high having people count some bits of paper is a very good investment.
I always found the original Basic, with its gotos and line numbers, to resemble assembler. When I was around 10 I found it very easy to make the jump from Basic to assembler. I would really hate to make the jump from Java to assembler if I were now starting out. Not that I would advise programming in assembler but it is a very good thing for all programmers to know . As basic and assembler both grew up they both even added labels. So in a way learning to get anything done in Basic was actually quite hard core.
First problem is that this is a few paid programmers vs the world. Good luck with that. Secondly good luck keeping those servers running 24/7 for the next decade. Right now as I write this my daughter is playing Dead or Alive on my original XBOX. She would be pretty ticked if they were to have turned off the servers. Thus they have left code where they can plug in an update that will eliminate their server requirements some time in the future and allow local saving. Saving a game state is really easy. For the most part it is a big serialization. Thus hackers might just intercept the activation of the game state and just dump the data with the load function reversing the same procedure. Lastly they are going to find that running all these DRM servers is eating into their bottom line big time as these servers are going to receive some wicked hack attempts. Then lastly they are going to really tick off their customers when they lose game data to the hackers(or HD failure) or the hackers put everyone back to square one and rename their characters to Gay McGayster.
Experience really helps make great programmers get even better but I have also found that mediocre programmers merely become set in their ways. I know some network admins still torturing their Novell networks into doing stuff that quite simply nobody does anymore. They were crappy admins 20 years ago and now they are crappy admins with some serious seniority. The same with programmers. I have met old crappy programmers still trying to milk the lotus notes cow dry. And the worst is when you get really experienced hard core crappy programmers who think it is a good idea to architect systems where you start by reworking the Linux kernel (using some assembler) to accomplish things that you literally could do in python and not push python too hard. (Didn't make up the last line).
This sounds like a marketing person annoyed that nearly everyone who is forced to fill out their stupid forms to get some needed content is telling Microsoft that they are 98 year old Afghan woman with an income over $100,000. I love power-tripping types like this: Lifeguards who seem to think that they are there to do anything but pull drunks out of the water. Police who think that they are there to do anything but pull drunks off their girlfriends. TSA people who think they are there to do anything but smell my feet. Politicians who think that elected office doesn't mean that they are really just failed real-estate people. Hall monitors who think they are popular. Waiters who think they have earned a tip by interrupting my conversation to see if everything is all right. Oh and failed programmers who think that by dragging their "Team" into meetings is the road to a great product. But I digress. Would an internet driver's license make the internet a better place? And more importantly who would collect the money for the licensing? That sounds like a monopoly that they could milk for decades longer than their slowly dying OS / Text editor business.
Where can one get a list of IP addresses for countries like China and India so that server admins like myself can block these countries entirely?
What I want is a GUI showcase. A website with GUIs from movies, industrial machines, web pages, etc. I have never seen a good one. Yet I have seen some very cool interfaces over the years. Sometimes you see movies where the police criminal database or whatnot could only have been built with a team of highly paid graphic artists. If anyone knows about this please reply with a link.
When I first started programming I used a VIC 20 with 3.5K. At first I dreamed about getting the tape device. So all my basic programming vanished when turned the machine was turned off. Then with the tape drive the best way that I figured out to squeeze the maximum out of this was to first create an assembler to machine code converter which stored the machine code to tape as you created it. Then you loaded the program back from tape and poof you had the absolute most you could squeeze out of 3.5K. After that I cobbled together 8086s and put every version of DOS that came along as well as radical new upgrades like a mouse and a hard drive. I squeezed Windows version 1 onto a machine that it wasn't meant for and so on. I see my intelligent Nephews and Neices (all around 20) who would be hard pressed to install windows if there was any hurdle like having to manually install a network driver. Some geeks to be are jumping into the depths of Linux and are probably getting some awesome experience but I have met many a comp sci grad who would be hard pressed to properly set up a pretty basic LAMP server and then do the slightest of unusual configurations (say memcached). Yet these same Comp Sci grads might have built a basic compiler or OS at some point during their education. I think that my particular timing was pretty good in that I have had the time to digest the zillion little wonderful innovations (color codes in my IDE) without having them overwhelm me like someone who might have started in the 60's. But I agree with the premise of this article. Facebook is not important to many of my generation and I can't remember the last time I sent a text message. The kids of today are probably doing with their cell phones what I did with computers 30 years ago; that is to squeeze every erg of functionality they can out of them. Texts are cheaper than calls thus better. Also innovations like keyboards on reasonably priced phones are better than typing texts on a number pad. Also the incentives are different; My social life does not depend on my text plan or abilities.
I wish that had been the case. They had nothing that was even close. I think it all boiled down to two issues: not wanting another product to support. And they didn't like how the staff had presented the purchase of our product as basically a done deal without any input from them. So they circled the wagons and kept us out as a precedent. What IT people like this don't realize is that a boiling point will be reached and they will find themselves going head on with a "consulting" company that has come to "rationalize" IT. Once that path is taken by senior management there is no going back as the IT people would have to admit that many if not all their selfish policies had been wrong.
Once when presenting a web based product to the senior management the IT people at a huge company tried to block the IP address of the server in the middle of the presentation. Without missing a beat I switched over to a copy of the product that was hosted on the laptop itself. The IT guy typed furiously and then interrupted and asked what port/ IP address I was using. I told him that I had switched from TCP to UDP as something was blocking the TCP packets. He typed even more furiously trying to figure out why blocking a single IP wouldn't also block UDP. I am not sure he ever figured out what went wrong. For weeks after the presentation the IT group threw up roadblock after roadblock. We weren't compatible with their PKI, etc (we didn't use anything that would work with PKI). Even though the top people(CEO, CFO, President, and the VP of Marketing) really wanted what we were offering they simply admitted that a battle with their IT department wasn't something they could handle at this time. This was not the first IT department that tried to crap all over our product for "Technical" reasons. Even if our product were to have sucked crap that was never the reason given. It was always "bandwidth" or something not relating at all to any possible problem that our product had. I think it all boils down to IT departments being driven by fear. If all goes well the IT department risks downsizing. If anything goes wrong the IT department gets the blame. Then to top it all off the typical IT head might be around 50 years old in the average large organization and they fear the new guy who just was hired who could single handedly bring the entire department out of the depths of Novell and into the 21st century. I would recommend that any large company regularly get an outside organization to audit their IT departments and make sure that the technologies and practices are up to a reasonable standard. Best to learn now that your backups suck instead of when the good data still exists. I would be willing to venture that most organizations have a head of IT who should be replaced by one of his far younger underlings.
The best coders I have seen wrote amazingly little code. I am not talking about crazy pointer arithmetic but just way less code than lesser programmers. Often the best programmers also deployed the available resources way better. When all is said and done the best programmers leave code that everyone worships as pure genius that everyone else builds on with ease. A great example was someone who did some great code where they took the bull buy the horns and moved the project into proper multithreading and some crazy memory usage. The server went from using maybe 10Megs per process to a collective 8Gigs spread across many threads. Sounds complex but every programmer took one look at the code and went wow. 20 servers out of 23 previously heavily loaded servers were shut down as unneeded. Even with 50% client growth every year our next server purchase will probably be in a decade. That super programmer moved on and we just kept building on his code for a long time. Programming and debugging went from a chore to a joy. Anyone could tell which code was new code because it was ugly and complex compared to the simple elegance of the original code. Without a doubt that programmer could replace the 50 pretty good programmers we have on staff now. Plus his code eliminated 3 full time system admins and has resulted in zero downtime in two years, thus avoiding millions in losses over the last and next few years. So what should his pay have been? 5 Million a year? On a different topic, in my travels I have seen sys admins who ran well oiled machines that were amazing. At the same time I have seen sys admins who weren't properly backing up critical data. Critical as in the company would go bust in the event of a HD failure. In these same companies they had HR, CFO's, and Sales people who were paid multiples of the Admin. These "senior" managem who's screwups would be hard pressed to completely wreck the company usually saw the various computer people as a bit of a joke.