The US middle class is shrinking. Thanks Bush. By the way, the next time you nominate a Supreme Court justice and praise his character for putting himself through college by working summers in a steel mill, don't forget to mention that:
a.)today most of those steel mill jobs are gone
and
b.)today, those jobs that still exist aren't paying enough to cover the rising cost of education.
After all, some things that weren't obvious on the first viewing are clearly harmful to children on closer inspection and slight modification of usual use.
Fucking censorship morons. I just love the fact that in this county it's ok to show graphic images of people being killed, but not people being fucked. This is pathetic.
Laptops replacing textbooks? Won't make a difference. The traditional educational system is severly broken. But don't take my word for it. Take a look at what the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year who quit education says about what's wrong.
Intel figured it was big enough to set the trend by making a radical change. It was wrong and paid the price when the market didn't follow. IBM thought it was big enough to set the trend by making a radical change with Micro Channel Architecture (replacement for the ISA Bus). It went nowhere and helped kill IBM's dominance of the X86 PC world it created. The fact that Intel didn't bet the farm and loose everything is either good planning or dumb luck on thier part.
A: "First, I'd question the business case for moving mount Fuji."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I recognize that this question should demonstrate your creative problem solving, but it seems to me that 9 times out of 10, a lot of technical "problems" out there are created by extremely stupid business requirements wich all too often come from extremely stupid business people. It's amazing sometimes how speaking to them in thier own insipid psudo-language (especially in front of thier peers) can slap them into reality. Granted, they won't stay in reality long, but the fresh air and change of scenery can do them some good with repeated visits:)
"Amateurs On-line","A**Holes On-Line", I'm sure there are far more and far worse. Most experienced Net users associate them with being a low-quality and/or "training whells" type of internet experience. You know, the service you're loathe to admit you used before you know what the Internet was? A name change would go a long way to removing that image.
I've had to look at Ruby On Rails due to decisions made by some of my agile team members. There's a number of important things to be aware of if you or someone on your team is seriously thinking about using RoR to replace Java web apps. Be forewarned, while these are my own extremely biased opinions, they are in no way uninformed:
1.) Give up a decent IDE. The development tools are crap. Good luck trying to fire up a Ruby IDE, and set a breakpoint in WEBrick or Apache mod_ruby. You can't. Even if you hack around with the breakpoint command and include the debugger in the code you want to debug, the debugger is buggy and makes old skool commandline tools look sharp.
3.) How do you like your OO style? If it's from the Jacobson camp, you're in for a treat! Objects are just dumb repeats of database tables 1st and foremost. Oh sure, you can add methods to do that OO thing if you must, but that's not the true essance. If you believe true object nature comes from behavior and not data, (ala Yordon & Coad) you won't be comfortable here.
4.) You're agile? You "get" test driven development? Give it up. RoR says you use a script. This hurts even more if you take issue with number 3 above. RoR rewards you for being database driven. Just define your scheme and all of your objects and a few controllers will get generated for you along with stub unit tests that pass by default. Just accept the required two line *Helper classes as well(yeah. TDD would have pushed me to create those).
5.) More on testing: hope you like having to rely on populating test data into your database. We kept hearing you can mock your persistance, but even some of the experts we talked to couldn't show us how (folks who are paid to work on a RoR product). Sure, folks said dependancy injection via Needle, but we couldn't find jack out about it.
6.)Speaking of database driven, that is a greenfield project you have with no legacy concerns and absolutely no complex O/R mapping requirements, you're starting RoR on right? No?!?! That's ok. just shoehorn RoR with updateable views or change your schema so that ID's are done the way ActiveRecords likes. That's no problem for your existing aps, is it?
7.)That had better be an OpenSource database you're using. It's not unheard of to "enjoy" a broken release for packages like ActiveRecord when the developers don't have access to Oracle or SQL Server. This happened to us and RoR was broken for about a week between releases in the 0.9 to 0.10 range. Yeah. That was a "release". Not CVS, not alpha or beta. Release. On the upside, we did patch ourselves, so "go OpenSource".
If the Rails fanboys want to mod me down, have at it. I stand by my overall opinion. Keep in mind, I have no issue with Ruby itself. In fact, it stands to give Java a real run for it's money. RoR on the other hand, is immature and over-hyped at best, and a rat's nest of garbage at worst.
I'm getting real sick of companies complaining about lack of qualified candidates as they outsource jobs and refuse to pay living wages. You know what happens when you do that? All of a sudden, the qualified candidates go away or can no longer afford (literally) to keep current the qualifications that are oh so needed. It's going to be fun to see what happes to the first of the big Fortune 100 who go out of business due to misapplication of outsourcing that then have no way to recover. Of course if it's in my area of specialty, I'd be glad to consult for them at the low, low price of $400/hr while the ship sinks:)
I'll take unit tests over comments any day. Unit tests are an executable explanation of what the code should do. Comments get out of date and ignored. A well written unit test says exactly what sort of service the method is providing and what the implications of that method call are assumed to be. The important thing to notice here is that it doesn't tell HOW the code is doing it. This, of course is GREAT! If the code is hard to read, get unit test coverage, understand it, "comment" it with tests, and refactor the hell out of it.
The ideal design document is the one you didn't have to write because you were too busy delivering well tested, working software to your customer. This is a lot better than the 300 page design document (which the customer in truth doesn't give a damn about) that you deliver only to have the requirements change 20 times, which are still incomplete, which lead to your project cancelation. I look at it this way: typical software development lifecycle assumes not only that you can know everything up front, but that you make the right decisions with the information. Dispite more than 30 years now (see The Mythical Man Month, F.P. Brooks) of repeated demonstrations that this doesn't work, projects are still too often structured around this flawed concept. A lot of Agile approaches discard this ritual or at least put a reasonable devaluation on it.
They can come up with another way to make money. The market conditions have obviously changed for broadband. Sounds more like they just want big government to get in the way and protect the monopoly they think they're entitled to.
Mindshare and image bloodbath for BitKeeper
on
Linus Drops BitKeeper
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Until Linus started using it for Linux, I'll bet most developers had never heard of BitKeeper. CVS, Perforce, VSS, and ClearCase for the past 4 years mostly seems to be what people would be using. Now all anybody knows is that these idiots dropped Linux support and burned a a great source of publicity (e.g. "our product is so good, one of the biggest OpenSource poster-child projects uses it despite it being closed and commercial!").
Now they'll be known for screwing over Linus Torvalds. I wonder how well they'll fare in future technology evaluations? I can hear the discussions now: "Gee boss, BitKeeper is nice and all but if they screwed over the guy who writes Linux , how do you think they'll treat us after they have our money?"
I don't know about elsewhere, but at least in Seattle, it's not worth bothering with. With two crappy companies owning most of the stations, 60% of the air time is commercials, egotistical morons run at the mouth durring drive time (in the 2nd worst traffic in the US), and when they are playing music, they plug the same "crossover" and "wide apeal" singles on every station they can get mileage out of.
a company with a solid business plan to rescue themselves will more often than not be given a break and allowed to remain listed while they work things out.
Yeah, but this is SCO we're talking about. They're attempting to pull the Enron of intellectual property law and everyone knows it. That's why they're tanking.
Seriously. Shouldn't this be about recognition? I don't find Tux any more or less "professional" and it doesn't seem to hurt or harm Linux any more or less. This sounds like a real waste of $500. The BSD Daemon has established recognition. If anything, why not come up with an aditional mascot/logo along w/ the classic?
For a company that most Slashdotters would say is on the decline, Microsoft sure has weird financial results!
Yeah. People were laughing at Alan Greenspan for a number of few years before that bubble burst too. I guess some of us silly Slashdotters just don't "get" the new Microsoft economy. It's ok though, you just go ahead now and keep putting your money there. After all, what could be wrong with Microsoft's accounting practices?
Perhaps if AOL hadn't infected usenet...
on
AOL Kills Usenet Access
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...with thousands of mouth-breathing morons lacking any sense of netiquette, usenet wouldn't need "protection" from frivolous copyright lawsuits.
Despite the tone, I couldn't agree more. You're not building widgets, and jobs lost to the sick corporate malevolence that is offshore outsourcing don't come with a 6 week retraining courses available. So now it's you who's hurting, eh? Turning to/. folks for advice? Look elsewhere, pal. Oh, and you might want to update your McManagement skills soon too.
Mandating something like this is counterproductive. People either have the drive to do things on thier own via personal projects or they don't. If having employees who have the drive to learn more and improve themselves via projects is important (and I believe it is), you need to make the cultural changes to enable it. Many people are likely to be doing things on thier own time as it is. You should start there and then begin accomodating "work time" to do it once you see people have the personal commitment not to abuse the freedom. Here's a few suggestions to encourage personal projects to start with:
1.) Provide a personal project server w/ CVS access from both inside and outside the company. Personally speaking, traffic sucks where I am. If I can crank on something out durring rush hour, then pick it up over the weekend or at night as well as tinker at luchtime w/o copying files around it would be a godsend.
2.) Sponsor weekly project lunch where the company pays for pizza around noon and people are encouraged to discuss, demo, or work on personal projects. Show, tell, talk, encourage.
3.)Work the project concept into the job itself. When doing performance reviews, ask what people have done in the way of personal projects and/or professional development since the last time. Let it become a cultural expectation and include the concept that "we encourage and support personal projects around here" part interview process.
If you do put these things in place, don't forget to include some Slack as well every now and then. Good developers write software in part because they love to, but even they need some downtime. Replace that show & tell pizza lunch w/ tickets to an afternoon geekfest type movie or something sometime.
Slashdot Mirror
The US middle class is shrinking. Thanks Bush. By the way, the next time you nominate a Supreme Court justice and praise his character for putting himself through college by working summers in a steel mill, don't forget to mention that:
a.)today most of those steel mill jobs are gone
and
b.)today, those jobs that still exist aren't paying enough to cover the rising cost of education.
After all, some things that weren't obvious on the first viewing are clearly harmful to children on closer inspection and slight modification of usual use. Fucking censorship morons. I just love the fact that in this county it's ok to show graphic images of people being killed, but not people being fucked. This is pathetic.
favorite ZZ Top songs!
Bored. And burning Karma:)
Laptops replacing textbooks? Won't make a difference. The traditional educational system is severly broken. But don't take my word for it. Take a look at what the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year who quit education says about what's wrong.
Intel figured it was big enough to set the trend by making a radical change. It was wrong and paid the price when the market didn't follow. IBM thought it was big enough to set the trend by making a radical change with Micro Channel Architecture (replacement for the ISA Bus). It went nowhere and helped kill IBM's dominance of the X86 PC world it created. The fact that Intel didn't bet the farm and loose everything is either good planning or dumb luck on thier part.
The rain volume is a bit of a myth, but the constant grey isn't.
Q: "How would you move mount Fuji"?
A: "First, I'd question the business case for moving mount Fuji."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I recognize that this question should demonstrate your creative problem solving, but it seems to me that 9 times out of 10, a lot of technical "problems" out there are created by extremely stupid business requirements wich all too often come from extremely stupid business people. It's amazing sometimes how speaking to them in thier own insipid psudo-language (especially in front of thier peers) can slap them into reality. Granted, they won't stay in reality long, but the fresh air and change of scenery can do them some good with repeated visits:)
"Amateurs On-line","A**Holes On-Line", I'm sure there are far more and far worse. Most experienced Net users associate them with being a low-quality and/or "training whells" type of internet experience. You know, the service you're loathe to admit you used before you know what the Internet was? A name change would go a long way to removing that image.
I've had to look at Ruby On Rails due to decisions made by some of my agile team members. There's a number of important things to be aware of if you or someone on your team is seriously thinking about using RoR to replace Java web apps. Be forewarned, while these are my own extremely biased opinions, they are in no way uninformed:
? l=RailsHibernate).
1.) Give up a decent IDE. The development tools are crap. Good luck trying to fire up a Ruby IDE, and set a breakpoint in WEBrick or Apache mod_ruby. You can't. Even if you hack around with the breakpoint command and include the debugger in the code you want to debug, the debugger is buggy and makes old skool commandline tools look sharp.
2.) Bet the farm that RoR only deals with you 80% problem, and your requirements won't break how it needs the ActiveRecord pattern. ActiveRecord looses it's luster once things get complex (see http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss
3.) How do you like your OO style? If it's from the Jacobson camp, you're in for a treat! Objects are just dumb repeats of database tables 1st and foremost. Oh sure, you can add methods to do that OO thing if you must, but that's not the true essance. If you believe true object nature comes from behavior and not data, (ala Yordon & Coad) you won't be comfortable here.
4.) You're agile? You "get" test driven development? Give it up. RoR says you use a script. This hurts even more if you take issue with number 3 above. RoR rewards you for being database driven. Just define your scheme and all of your objects and a few controllers will get generated for you along with stub unit tests that pass by default. Just accept the required two line *Helper classes as well(yeah. TDD would have pushed me to create those).
5.) More on testing: hope you like having to rely on populating test data into your database. We kept hearing you can mock your persistance, but even some of the experts we talked to couldn't show us how (folks who are paid to work on a RoR product). Sure, folks said dependancy injection via Needle, but we couldn't find jack out about it.
6.)Speaking of database driven, that is a greenfield project you have with no legacy concerns and absolutely no complex O/R mapping requirements, you're starting RoR on right? No?!?! That's ok. just shoehorn RoR with updateable views or change your schema so that ID's are done the way ActiveRecords likes. That's no problem for your existing aps, is it?
7.)That had better be an OpenSource database you're using. It's not unheard of to "enjoy" a broken release for packages like ActiveRecord when the developers don't have access to Oracle or SQL Server. This happened to us and RoR was broken for about a week between releases in the 0.9 to 0.10 range. Yeah. That was a "release". Not CVS, not alpha or beta. Release. On the upside, we did patch ourselves, so "go OpenSource".
If the Rails fanboys want to mod me down, have at it. I stand by my overall opinion. Keep in mind, I have no issue with Ruby itself. In fact, it stands to give Java a real run for it's money. RoR on the other hand, is immature and over-hyped at best, and a rat's nest of garbage at worst.
I'm getting real sick of companies complaining about lack of qualified candidates as they outsource jobs and refuse to pay living wages. You know what happens when you do that? All of a sudden, the qualified candidates go away or can no longer afford (literally) to keep current the qualifications that are oh so needed. It's going to be fun to see what happes to the first of the big Fortune 100 who go out of business due to misapplication of outsourcing that then have no way to recover. Of course if it's in my area of specialty, I'd be glad to consult for them at the low, low price of $400/hr while the ship sinks:)
I'll take unit tests over comments any day. Unit tests are an executable explanation of what the code should do. Comments get out of date and ignored. A well written unit test says exactly what sort of service the method is providing and what the implications of that method call are assumed to be. The important thing to notice here is that it doesn't tell HOW the code is doing it. This, of course is GREAT! If the code is hard to read, get unit test coverage, understand it, "comment" it with tests, and refactor the hell out of it.
The ideal design document is the one you didn't have to write because you were too busy delivering well tested, working software to your customer. This is a lot better than the 300 page design document (which the customer in truth doesn't give a damn about) that you deliver only to have the requirements change 20 times, which are still incomplete, which lead to your project cancelation. I look at it this way: typical software development lifecycle assumes not only that you can know everything up front, but that you make the right decisions with the information. Dispite more than 30 years now (see The Mythical Man Month, F.P. Brooks) of repeated demonstrations that this doesn't work, projects are still too often structured around this flawed concept. A lot of Agile approaches discard this ritual or at least put a reasonable devaluation on it.
Take a look at Agile Manifesto for more info.
They can come up with another way to make money. The market conditions have obviously changed for broadband. Sounds more like they just want big government to get in the way and protect the monopoly they think they're entitled to.
Until Linus started using it for Linux, I'll bet most developers had never heard of BitKeeper. CVS, Perforce, VSS, and ClearCase for the past 4 years mostly seems to be what people would be using. Now all anybody knows is that these idiots dropped Linux support and burned a a great source of publicity (e.g. "our product is so good, one of the biggest OpenSource poster-child projects uses it despite it being closed and commercial!").
Now they'll be known for screwing over Linus Torvalds. I wonder how well they'll fare in future technology evaluations? I can hear the discussions now: "Gee boss, BitKeeper is nice and all but if they screwed over the guy who writes Linux , how do you think they'll treat us after they have our money?"
TGIAF*
*Thank Gorf It's April Fools:)
I don't know about elsewhere, but at least in Seattle, it's not worth bothering with. With two crappy companies owning most of the stations, 60% of the air time is commercials, egotistical morons run at the mouth durring drive time (in the 2nd worst traffic in the US), and when they are playing music, they plug the same "crossover" and "wide apeal" singles on every station they can get mileage out of.
a company with a solid business plan to rescue themselves will more often than not be given a break and allowed to remain listed while they work things out.
Yeah, but this is SCO we're talking about. They're attempting to pull the Enron of intellectual property law and everyone knows it. That's why they're tanking.
Seriously. Shouldn't this be about recognition? I don't find Tux any more or less "professional" and it doesn't seem to hurt or harm Linux any more or less. This sounds like a real waste of $500. The BSD Daemon has established recognition. If anything, why not come up with an aditional mascot/logo along w/ the classic?
For a company that most Slashdotters would say is on the decline, Microsoft sure has weird financial results!
Yeah. People were laughing at Alan Greenspan for a number of few years before that bubble burst too. I guess some of us silly Slashdotters just don't "get" the new Microsoft economy. It's ok though, you just go ahead now and keep putting your money there. After all, what could be wrong with Microsoft's accounting practices?
...with thousands of mouth-breathing morons lacking any sense of netiquette, usenet wouldn't need "protection" from frivolous copyright lawsuits.
"Me too! Me too!"
Despite the tone, I couldn't agree more. You're not building widgets, and jobs lost to the sick corporate malevolence that is offshore outsourcing don't come with a 6 week retraining courses available. So now it's you who's hurting, eh? Turning to /. folks for advice? Look elsewhere, pal. Oh, and you might want to update your McManagement skills soon too.
Mandating something like this is counterproductive. People either have the drive to do things on thier own via personal projects or they don't. If having employees who have the drive to learn more and improve themselves via projects is important (and I believe it is), you need to make the cultural changes to enable it. Many people are likely to be doing things on thier own time as it is. You should start there and then begin accomodating "work time" to do it once you see people have the personal commitment not to abuse the freedom. Here's a few suggestions to encourage personal projects to start with:
1.) Provide a personal project server w/ CVS access from both inside and outside the company. Personally speaking, traffic sucks where I am. If I can crank on something out durring rush hour, then pick it up over the weekend or at night as well as tinker at luchtime w/o copying files around it would be a godsend.
2.) Sponsor weekly project lunch where the company pays for pizza around noon and people are encouraged to discuss, demo, or work on personal projects. Show, tell, talk, encourage.
3.)Work the project concept into the job itself. When doing performance reviews, ask what people have done in the way of personal projects and/or professional development since the last time. Let it become a cultural expectation and include the concept that "we encourage and support personal projects around here" part interview process.
If you do put these things in place, don't forget to include some Slack as well every now and then. Good developers write software in part because they love to, but even they need some downtime. Replace that show & tell pizza lunch w/ tickets to an afternoon geekfest type movie or something sometime.
They've obviously never even been on Slashdot if they think broadband access is linked to education and employment.
I'll be happy when someone codes a DWIM method (Do What I mean):)
Great use of our tax dollars. You'd think this country was run by a bunch of greedy corporations and thier front special interest groups. Oh wait...