I live in Japan. Everybody who knows me knows that my favorite food is daifuku (sticky mochi rice with a sweet been filling). I practically yell it from the rooftops. Why? It really helps to fit in. Someone will say something like, "Let's go to the onsen (public bath)" and somebody who doesn't know me will ask, "Is he OK with the onsen". Finally another of my friends will say, "He's Japanese! He eats daifuku." Everybody will laugh and off we go to the onsen.
Because this country is so homogenous, looking different and sounding different (I still talk like a child with my lousy Japanese) makes everyone worry about you. But magically if you like the cultural food everyone is willing to overlook your differences. The US and Japan are similar in this way. While the US has people with a lot of different backgrounds, a lot is made of the great American "melting pot". There is a strong American culture and people tend to be a bit suspicious of you if they think you might not fit in. I'm sure making a big deal of liking American food helps immigrants a lot, just like it does me in Japan.
It's a funny thing. I agree with you that the mainstream media portrays a mostly consistent message. I also agree with you that the two main parties "mostly share the same political ideology, and work very hard to demonstrate their differences on a limited number of areas". But I kind of get lost after that.
I'm not an American, so my perspective may be skewed, but I see American media as not being neutral per se. I see them as following the same political ideology that both of the main parties do. From the perspective of portraying party agenda, I suppose that is neutral. But I tend to notice a definite American ideological bias in the reporting. No reporting can be truly neutral, but especially for foreign affairs issues, the media portrays issues without an attempt to explain opposing points of view. This isn't neutral from my perspective.
What is even more interesting is when discussing the few issues in which the two parties diverge, the media tends to present a polarised view without actually taking sides. Well, in fairness to the OP, I often feel that the Democrat side of the issue is often portrayed in a somewhat softer light. But like you say, it's not anything like reporting in some other countries. Both sides are portrayed to some extent. However, they are portrayed in such a way as if they are polar opposites. It's like there are only two solutions to everything: the Democrat way and the Republican way. It not only makes it appear that the two sides are much farther apart than I think they are, but that there can't possibly be any other solution than those two.
When I discuss politics with my American friends I always have to preface the discussion with a definition of right and left. Their view of left is still way over into the right for me. If I say that I don't agree with one point of view, I get a huge amount of grief about how the other party has ruined whatever it is we're talking about. But if I say that I don't agree with something both parties agree on people often stare at me like I must be completely insane.
Coming back to the point, I often find that Americans are already getting this filtered media where they are only presented with issues that the two parties disagree on. They enjoy this view because it is simple, fits their preconceived notions of the world, but still gives them something to argue about. If I am very cynical I might even say that it gives them the illusion of choice at election time.
Of course, I am also biased and I am presented with news conforming to my views and confirming my biases. What made me interested about your post was that we both viewed the starting conditions similarly and yet came to dramatically different conclusions, probably based on those biases. Very interesting, indeed.
In a much too long comment above, I advocate for a "coach" role in development. This is someone on the team who is responsible for the performance of the team, but who is not part of the management. It is pretty much identical to a sports coach. They spend their day watching what the programmers are doing, pointing out problems, offering advice, etc, etc. Of course, this has to be someone with a very deep understanding of programming. Player/coaches also work well, but in my experience manager/coaches do not work. This is mainly due to the issues you point out where the skills necessary for management are orthogonal to the skills needed for programming. A good manager is also way too busy clearing the path for their programmers and making sure that they can concentrate 100% on programming.
Here's how I look at it (although I've also left development;-) ). The author of TFA (and it seems you as well) is a victim of badly run software development. It is all too common, unfortunately.
The *only* thing that pays the bills in a software company (assuming it isn't a consultant) is functioning software. An hour in a meeting is an hour where you aren't creating functioning software. Therefore meetings should be minimised. On the teams I organised I insisted that meetings were *only* attended by management, unless direct developer feedback was required. Managers were required to summarise meetings in emails and to answer questions on an ad-hoc basis.
The only meetings developers attended were a 15 minute stand up meeting in the morning, where management was forbidden from attending and the bi-weekly planning meeting. The stand up was merely a meeting to coordinate who expected to be touching what code that day, or to request help from other members of the team. The planning meeting was a traditional "planning game" meeting from XP (estimation, or a request to split stories up into smaller pieces).
Status was automatically generated in the form of a graph at the end of each day. Either a story was complete or it wasn't. Developers checked off the story when it was completed (we also had QA on some of my teams who would check off when the acceptance tests that they wrote were passed). We usually used a wiki for this, but an issue tracking system would work fine. Managers were generally forbidden from asking "When will X be done" questions, because it was blatantly obvious in the charts.
Legacy code sucks, but every system has legacy code. All developers were encouraged to put untested code under automated tests if they were working with it. Any code that was under test and was not optimal for what the developer wanted was encouraged to be refactored. Developers were highly discouraged from modifying code that wasn't related to the story that they were currently working on (this enforces the scope of refactoring). Putting legacy code under test and refactoring it is a challenging skill and any programmer who doesn't want to do it isn't welcome on my team.
There was never a difference between bugs and new development. All work was prioritised the same way. A bug is simply a lack of functionality that was expected to work previously. This expectation should not affect its priority. Very often I have new work that has a higher business priority than fulfilling my expectation that something else already worked. All work is prioritised, developed, tested and tracked the same way.
On training, developers are not good resources for giving training on how to use the system. This is mainly because they don't know how the system works, only how it is developed. QA and/or Documentation are *much* better resources for giving training. If QA and/or Documentation don't know how the system works, then you have massive, massive problems that you need to address immediately.
I once worked in a job where preparing for meetings, attending meetings and following up for meetings took 24 hours a week. That was a crappy job and a fucked up development team. On my teams, apart from the stand up meeting (which the developers always insisted on, I never cared), developers were expected to spend up to 1 hour a week in formal meetings. I expected them to spend *all* of the rest of their time directly on producing code or helping others produce code. Everything else was handled by management (because, that's *why they are there* -- to make sure that BS is not stopping the developers from producing code).
Code reviews, whether formal or informal are directly related to development. It doesn't matter if you are doing pair programming, desk reviews or formal inspections. The end result is the development of a consensus on how problems should be approached. You are also developing a set of idiomatic expressions that will help everyone mesh properly wh
All this hand-wringing over Honeycomb is fucking annoying at this point. Get over it.
Gladly. As you note, when the source comes out, everything will be (mostly) hunky dory. But I don't have the source code yet. Without source code I can't study or modify the system.
I have to wonder, in your opinion, what is the point of having source code in the first place? Why on earth would I be happy that it will come at some point in the future, but not care in the least that it isn't here now? If I need the source code to do my work, then I am waiting. I can't get my work done because I am waiting. Until when? Who knows? If I don't need the source code, why would I care if it was open sourced in the first place?
Open source is useful *because you have the source code*. I can't quite comprehend the confusion as to why someone would be unhappy to have an "open source" system where you aren't allowed to see the source code until the planets are aligned...
I'm a guy that doesn't like traditional training. That is, I can't stand power point presentations with guys from the local training center. I'd rather poke my eyeballs out than sit through those classes. But that doesn't mean I don't need training.
If I'm working on an important project, I'm going to be conservative. I'm going to use what I know works. I'm going to keep it simple and keep the risk low. But that means that I might overlook some fancy new technique or technology that would make the project even more successful. I might be reinventing the wheel because I just don't know the details of a class library. Or I might be missing opportunities for writing better code because I just don't know any better.
So, I need time to research. I need time to read. And most importantly, I need time to experiment -- WITH my colleagues. We need projects that we can try new techniques on. We need to evaluate new technologies and languages and class libraries so that we know if we want to use them in the future. I really shouldn't be doing that "on the job" because I'll likely make a dog's breakfast of the job.
Personally, I don't really favour the "one day a week" of personal training. It's too hard to stay focused. Instead, give me 6 weeks a year (in a row), with a couple of colleagues to simply try new things. Then I will come back to the team and share my experience.
Do that too much and in a down market you will price yourself out of a job. I've seen it happen many times. You get these guys who play the system trying to get that extra couple of percent raise every year and before you know it they are making 30% more than anyone else. But then the company gets hit hard some way and they find some excuse to lay off the expensive talent. Then these expensive guys go around trying to find another job, but can't land a thing because their last job was considerably higher than what anyone else pays. The management don't believe that the person will settle for a lower salary and don't even make an offer.
I always priced myself below the market. In the end I admittedly got paid less than the guys scrambling for higher salaries (even taking into account the time they were unemployable looking for a job). But I *like* working. I am absolutely sure that my management always considered me a bargain and I would be the last one they would want to lay off for any reason. That has value too.
I'm not saying that what you are doing is wrong. Everybody has their motivating factors. For some it is money. But if money is not so important to you, it's best to keep your eyes on other things. When someone asked me what I wanted for salary, my answer was always, "Money doesn't motivate me. Pay me a reasonable wage and that will be fine. But I want to work for a company that feels comfortable with the idea that the quality of my life at work is more important than the amount of money I take home at the end of the day."
As someone who used to hire people, I think you're best off pretty much saying what you just said. "I'm not really satisfied with what I've done so far. I still have a lot to learn and I've made good progress, but I think the best is yet to come." A good interviewer will follow up with a question like, "Please talk about a time when you noticed a problem with your coding and found a better way to do it".
Sometimes a group is looking to hire a "star programmer" right out of university. If you are feeling at all unsure about your abilities, you probably aren't going to handle the alpha-dog mentality that such a group will likely have. When I was right out of university, I was a "hotshot asshole programmer". I worked on a "hotshot asshole team". We were brutal with each other, but we had egos the size of Mount Everest. It was fine and in some respects you can learn quickly that way. Later I managed to shed the ego (mostly) and learn from other people.
I don't get that from you. You're going to work well on a team that wants to develop you. It's a much harder fit, but potentially you can grow faster. You're ability to accept your current position is your strength. But it will only manifest itself as a strength on the right team. Remember that *you* are filtering too. Find the right employer for you.
If you're looking for people with factual knowledge in a certain area, technical interviews will work well. For example, groups doing work with MFC often need an expert with MFC because there are ways to do things that work and ways to do things that don't work. Simply asking a few questions will determine if the person knows those things or not.
But if you are looking for general programming ability, it's much harder to ask specific questions. Whether or not an employer should expect it, having a portfolio is a really good idea. It doesn't need to be that much code. It's just a demonstration of what you would do. In my old portfolio I had a link to a software project and then a document containing excerpts of the code that I wrote. I then wrote up explanations for things like why I named my functions the way I did, some key design issues that reflected my programming personality, etc, etc. The whole document was about 4-5 pages. Let's face it, hiring managers aren't going to wade through 10,000 lines of code. They want an annotated overview.
For me the interesting thing was that my code examples were not what attracted the most interest. I had also included examples of how I liked to handle issue tracking and planning. I showed the type of documentation that I liked to write and the kinds of charts and graphs I made to show my progress. Management types eat that stuff up. It also showed that I knew what a good work flow was and that I was an organized programmer (as opposed to a cowboy coder).
I've noticed a lot of people here saying that they don't have time to write up a portfolio. Although different than what TFA suggests, even a portfolio of toy problems will at least give people an idea of who you are if you annotate it well. At the very least it can drive a discussion. I always used to put my portfolio on my web page and write a link at the top of my resume. I would also bring it on a CD ROM to the interview.
I'm out of the software business now (I prefer to write free software in my free time rather than proprietary software in my paid time), but if I were to go back, the first thing I would do is make up a portfolio again. Especially since I've been out for 5 years, I doubt I could get a job without it...
So the rule is, if your boss is a moron... you should be worried.
No, you haven't quite grasped it. If you start to realise that your boss is a moron, that means you are stupider than him. First you should feel really lucky that you have a job at all. Second, you should entrench yourself so that you can never be fired. Try teaming up with other stupid people. The really cool part is that if your boss got promoted and is stupid, then ability isn't a requirement for the job. You can get promoted as well. The easiest way to do this is to volunteer for virtually impossible projects (the competent people will avoid them, so don't worry) and then lie about your progress. Because your manage is stupid and is trying to get promoted too, he will happily pass on the lies to upper management.
Seriously, it's only those poor competent schmucks who accidently get hired by a moronic boss that have to worry. Stupid people can rejoice!
I don't think it will necessarily bring the industry to its knees (patent trolls notwithstanding). What it does is require that you have a certain amount of capital before you can write software. In other words, only big companies will be able to write software. I believe this is the intent of the current software patent system. The interesting thing is that patent trolls, as much as we might hate them, throw a wrench into this scenario. If large compaies use software patents in some MAD plot to keep upstarts out, what happens when the trolls extort actual money from them?
One place they had some business was in migrating businesses from Netware to Linux. I once talked to a salesman about their Linux business trying to understand how they were going to make money. His answer was that they would offer user hand-holding support, but no custom development contracts. They were intent on offering free tools to make it attractive to move away from Netware and Novell intended to basically charge for the service doing that. But they seemed to have no plan what so ever about how to make money once their customers were on Linux. It seemed to me that it was merely a question of time before they packed it in.
wildly inaccurate? Seems to me TEPCO and the japanese government have been the biggest offenders as later reality proves their lies:
How about backing up your claims. You have 2 posts in this thread, both saying the same thing, both modded up highly and both without any references
"don't need an exclusion zone, just stay indoors and you'll be fine"
According to Wikipedia: "A nuclear emergency was declared by the Government at 19:03 on 11 March. Initially a 2 km, then 10 km[336] evacuation zone was ordered. Later Prime Minister Naoto Kan issued instructions that people within a 20 km (12 mile) zone around the plant must leave, and urged that those living between 20 km and 30 km from the site to stay indoors." Are you saying those measures were inadequate?
"no fuel has melted "the rods in the spent fuel pool aren't uncovered"
According to Wikipedia: In a press release at 07:00 JST 12 March, TEPCO stated, "Measurement of radioactive material (iodine, etc.) by monitoring car indicates increasing value compared to normal level. One of the monitoring posts is also indicating higher than normal level."[75] Dose rates recorded on the main gate rose from 69 n Gy/h (for gamma radiation, equivalent to 0.000069 m Sv/h) at 04:00 JST, 12 March, to 866 nGy/h 40 minutes later, before hitting a peak of 0.3855 mSv/h at 10:30 JST.[75][76][77][78] At 13:30 JST, workers detected radioactive caesium-137 and iodine-131 near reactor 1,[3] which indicated some of the core's fuel had been damaged.[79] Cooling water levels had fallen so much that parts of the nuclear fuel rods were exposed and partial melting might have occurred.[80][81] Radiation levels at the site boundary exceeded the regulatory limits.
"containment hasn't been breached"
According to Wikipedia: On 25 March, officials announced the reactor vessel might be breached and leaking radioactive material.
Look, I'm not even trying hard and I can tell that you're just spouting nonsense. It pisses me off that you get modded up without anyone even going through the pretense of checking up on your BS.
In some place other than Japan, what you are saying is feasible. But in Japan I really, really doubt that private/public makes any difference what-so-ever in how things are run. It's not like they are cutting costs in order to deal with a hostile market. I'm paying something like 30 cents a KWH for electricity. That will definitely be going up I guess (which is a good thing in my books). Pretty much every big organisation in Japan runs the same way as far as I can tell. On the one hand, they aren't going to be stingy just to reduce the price. But on the other hand there are huge swathes of bureaucracy and plenty of places for a ball to be dropped. It has both advantages and disadvantages.
No offense, but that is not how fiat money works. The gold that everyone is so keen to mark as the "value" behind currency isn't much more valuable than the cotton used to make US dollars. That's a bit extreme, but the price of gold is so out of whack with it's actual value from a use perspective that you may as well call the use contribution zero. Gold's apparent value is just as illusory as the value behind the dollar.
Money in and of itself is not valuable. But without money you get into situations where person A has resource X, person B has resource Y and person C has resource Z. They don't have any common way of trading and so they just sit on their resources and no work gets done. But if they have a common way to trade, the resources flow and something that takes all of X,Y, and Z can be created. *This* is value.
The idea behind fiat money is that you create money out of thin air. The money is a promise to exchange value at a later date. Trade is enabled and the value is created. Without the initial money, people sit on their asses and do nothing. But with the promise of a pay check, they get up every morning at 7 am and create value all day. That value fulfils the promise of the fiat money. Having some shiny, yellow metal sitting in an important looking building doesn't actually do much to help the purpose of money. The key to understanding is to realise that money itself has no value, so "backing it up" with something valuable serves no purpose. The money exists as a promise in order to liberate resources (things or labour) that create the value.
I'm not saying that there aren't problems with our economic system, or that we don't need controls on our monetary supply, etc, etc. But unless I'm very much mistaken, going back to a gold backed currency won't do anything useful other than make gold more valuable (which may be why many people calling for a return to the gold standard are also heavily invested in gold...)
Not that many people lie on their deathbed wishing they had worked more over their lifetime.
I find it unfortunate that this line is so popular. It's as if people see working merely as a means to provide funds for what they *really* want to do. Would it not be better to hope that someone on their deathbed would look back on the activity that took up a third of their life and feel happy that they invested that time? To me, anything less than that is a tragedy.
There really is no shortage of "work" to be done. Or, let me rephrase that, we have already gone *well* beyond the point where meaningful work took up a large percentage of our collective time. I mean that growing and distributing food, making clothes and building houses occupies a ridiculously small amount of our workforce. The rest of the work is geared towards improving our lifestyles. That people playing sports or music can be among the wealthiest in the world shows how far away our economy has shifted from being needs based.
The thing about a job is that it forces you to think about other people. You can't just fart around as you please. What you do has to benefit others in some way (otherwise you won't get paid). This is a tremendously good thing. But it is important not to leave yourself out of the equation. If you are working only to make money to support your after-work lifestyle, you are already an indentured slave (especially true if you are working to pay off your debt, but somehow the debt never seems to get smaller)
If the purpose of work is to do something with your life that benefits others, then I hope people can enjoy it to the point where they miss it when it is gone. For myself, many people ask me what I will do when I retire. I alternatively tell them "I am not going to retire." (I am not going to stop helping others), and "I have already retired." (I'm not working, I'm just having fun)
I think we can safely assume that Blackberry is about as secure as a wet paper bag in countries where the device has become "commercially successful" and the government is less than interested in maintaining privacy.
I originally started to think, why not just say, "The secure channel may not be secure in countries that disallow full security". And then I thought, "Which ones are those"? Because presumably most of the countries that disallow a secure channel also don't want to advertise the fact. They would *like* people to use the "secure" channel so that they have a handy mechanism to track them (as opposed to having those people set up an actually secure channel).
So, the really interesting question becomes, if they allow country X to snoop on the "secure channel", what about *my* country? How do I know that it isn't compromised?
So it's not just in countries where the government is less than interested in maintaining privacy. It's useless in *every* country because can't tell which ones have been compromised. I suspect this is the real reason he doesn't want to answer the question. Because the next question would be, "Does the US/UK government have access?" and "How do we know if it does or doesn't"
Yes. Focus follow mouse. The whole "one window" thing stems from people who refuse to use focus follows mouse as far as I can tell.
What's ridiculous about the situation is the blind religious insistence that my *application* should implement a window manager. And a *tiling* window manager at that!
One of the things that this whole issue has pointed out to me is that window managers are broken. I like focus follows mouse, but obviously it isn't for everyone. So we need a window manager that allows you to group your windows by application and tile them how you like inside a single window. We could even add hints to X that allows the application to specify how it thinks the windows in the app should be tiled. But putting it in the application is the *wrong* place to do it. If we do that then every app will have a different way to implement the tiling.
But I like focus follows mouse so I've never gotten around to implementing a better window manager. I probably should do it just to stop people from sticking things all in one big bloody window...
Kind of off topic, but Japan has it's own vegan cuisine called shoujin ryouri. It is generally associated with buddhist temples, but it doesn't have to be. Shoujin ryouri is really, really delicious and surprisingly healthy. Whenever I punch in a typical shoujin ryouri menu into a nutrient calculator I'm amazed how close it comes to what most people say you should be eating (i.e., WHO, etc). Unfortunately there aren't a lot of non-Japanese resources on the topic.
But I seriously doubt very many people in Japan will adopt such a diet. People will openly laugh at you for suggesting that you eat shoujin ryouri more than once or twice a year ("What, are you going to become a monk? Ha ha ha ha!"). On the other hand, most people don't eat a lot of meat or chicken to begin with and quite a lot of the staple fish that they eat is deep sea fish anyway. Possibly the biggest animal product that could be affected locally is eggs. I don't know what the local fish specialties are in the area, but I suspect the fisheries will be shut down. This will be a fairly large financial hardship on a lot of people, but probably won't affect the way people eat all that much.
The really sad thing is, people are ignorantly scared of nuclear power but should really be scared of anti-nuclear idiots.
Or they should really be scared of the alternative power generation schemes. Personally, I have no problem with anti-nuclear people. There *is* a risk. And there *is* waste. And it *is* a problem. Fine. Getting rid of nuclear power doesn't solve the problem, it only changes the symptoms (and as you point out, can make it worse). It is important to note that the idiocy is *not* in thinking that nuclear power has problem. It is in thinking that anything else we have is better.
I have found that when I explain things in this way, most (though not all) of the anti-nuclear people I know view the situation differently. They don't become any less anti-nuclear, but they stop being counter-productive (which is all I want anyway). If they want to reduce nuclear power generation (and everything worse) there is a simple and effective technique -- reduce energy consumption. The beauty of it is that we can make large improvements in this area without additional need for technology. Only our culture needs to change. While doing this, we can also put pressure on politicians and businesses to divert more money into research for things like large scale energy storage and transportation so that we can reduce the need for unrenewable energy sources.
The thing is, these people *really* want to be helpful. If you concentrate so much on how idiotic they are, you lose a valuable resource. Instead please consider trying to aim that human energy into productive directions.
Not to be negative, especially since I just started writing an Android app, but even Java seems to be half baked. I really hope that once I get used to the quirks my productivity will improve, but nothing seems to work the way I expect it too. I'm not trying to troll here, it's just that there seems to be one way that works well and about 100 other ways that may or may not work. I spend a lot of my time guessing what the one magic working way is (especially since it often isn't my first choice). I had actually thought briefly about using JRuby before I started this app and I am really, really glad I didn't. I'd be tearing my hair out by the fistful now, I'm sure. Again, not that there is anything wrong with using another language, but unless you are really familiar with the way Android is supposed to work I can imagine it being very, very difficult to determine what are quirks with Android and what are problems with the language.
The corollary to this is that when writing your app, don't assume that I'm using one desktop environment or another. A good example of this would be configuring sound notification for a messaging system from the desktop environment rather than the app itself. In the worst case I have to run a whole bunch of daemons in the background that have very little to do with the application, expanding its footprint dramatically (and since these daemons don't stop running when I'm finished using the program, the expanded footprint lasts indefinitely).
There are quite a few applications I can't use from both KDE and Gnome because they are unusable without the whole environment (which I specifically don't want to have going on my tiny little machine).
But I agree with you 100%. There are lots and lots of useful APIs that run on a Linux box. Pick what you like and if your app is worth the footprint it brings along, I will install it.
They make no judgement on the veracity, or even the coherence, of the sentence - they simply present it as something that people have been typing in to the search box.
That is arguably true. The question is whether or not they make it clear. I understand it. You understand it. But does the average person understand it? And if the average person is expected not to understand it, perhaps it is not a good idea to generate it. I don't know the details of this case, but I can definitely understand the need for an explanation somewhere. I don't see one anywhere.
Having said that, the number one completion for "Google is" is "evil". Number three is "gay". What is one to believe?
But they released a binary. I can buy a Motorola Xoom and I can't get the source code. Thus it isn't open source.
Of course we all believe it will become open source in the future. That's not the point. They have released it and refuse to give their customers the source code. Their customers can't inspect it for problems, learn from it, modify it, fix bugs, adapt it for their purpose or redistribute it. Even though they have bought a device containing the binary. Kudos that they intend to open source it in the future, but it is not open sourced now, by anyone's definition.
The important thing to take away from this is that people who will not pay are not your customers. You have people who will pay a price. Those people are your potential customers. If the price increases, the number of people who pay drop. Will these people start to pirate? Possibly. If you stop them from pirating, will they suddenly pay the increased price? The assertion is that they will not in most cases. Thus it is inefficient to spend resources trying to stop people from pirating. The resources spent will not increase the sales as much as lowering the price.
In your case, the price is as low as it can go. But there is still piracy. But like you say, those people likely won't pay no matter what the price. Thus concentrating on them is a waste of your time.
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I live in Japan. Everybody who knows me knows that my favorite food is daifuku (sticky mochi rice with a sweet been filling). I practically yell it from the rooftops. Why? It really helps to fit in. Someone will say something like, "Let's go to the onsen (public bath)" and somebody who doesn't know me will ask, "Is he OK with the onsen". Finally another of my friends will say, "He's Japanese! He eats daifuku." Everybody will laugh and off we go to the onsen.
Because this country is so homogenous, looking different and sounding different (I still talk like a child with my lousy Japanese) makes everyone worry about you. But magically if you like the cultural food everyone is willing to overlook your differences. The US and Japan are similar in this way. While the US has people with a lot of different backgrounds, a lot is made of the great American "melting pot". There is a strong American culture and people tend to be a bit suspicious of you if they think you might not fit in. I'm sure making a big deal of liking American food helps immigrants a lot, just like it does me in Japan.
It's a funny thing. I agree with you that the mainstream media portrays a mostly consistent message. I also agree with you that the two main parties "mostly share the same political ideology, and work very hard to demonstrate their differences on a limited number of areas". But I kind of get lost after that.
I'm not an American, so my perspective may be skewed, but I see American media as not being neutral per se. I see them as following the same political ideology that both of the main parties do. From the perspective of portraying party agenda, I suppose that is neutral. But I tend to notice a definite American ideological bias in the reporting. No reporting can be truly neutral, but especially for foreign affairs issues, the media portrays issues without an attempt to explain opposing points of view. This isn't neutral from my perspective.
What is even more interesting is when discussing the few issues in which the two parties diverge, the media tends to present a polarised view without actually taking sides. Well, in fairness to the OP, I often feel that the Democrat side of the issue is often portrayed in a somewhat softer light. But like you say, it's not anything like reporting in some other countries. Both sides are portrayed to some extent. However, they are portrayed in such a way as if they are polar opposites. It's like there are only two solutions to everything: the Democrat way and the Republican way. It not only makes it appear that the two sides are much farther apart than I think they are, but that there can't possibly be any other solution than those two.
When I discuss politics with my American friends I always have to preface the discussion with a definition of right and left. Their view of left is still way over into the right for me. If I say that I don't agree with one point of view, I get a huge amount of grief about how the other party has ruined whatever it is we're talking about. But if I say that I don't agree with something both parties agree on people often stare at me like I must be completely insane.
Coming back to the point, I often find that Americans are already getting this filtered media where they are only presented with issues that the two parties disagree on. They enjoy this view because it is simple, fits their preconceived notions of the world, but still gives them something to argue about. If I am very cynical I might even say that it gives them the illusion of choice at election time.
Of course, I am also biased and I am presented with news conforming to my views and confirming my biases. What made me interested about your post was that we both viewed the starting conditions similarly and yet came to dramatically different conclusions, probably based on those biases. Very interesting, indeed.
In a much too long comment above, I advocate for a "coach" role in development. This is someone on the team who is responsible for the performance of the team, but who is not part of the management. It is pretty much identical to a sports coach. They spend their day watching what the programmers are doing, pointing out problems, offering advice, etc, etc. Of course, this has to be someone with a very deep understanding of programming. Player/coaches also work well, but in my experience manager/coaches do not work. This is mainly due to the issues you point out where the skills necessary for management are orthogonal to the skills needed for programming. A good manager is also way too busy clearing the path for their programmers and making sure that they can concentrate 100% on programming.
Here's how I look at it (although I've also left development ;-) ). The author of TFA (and it seems you as well) is a victim of badly run software development. It is all too common, unfortunately.
The *only* thing that pays the bills in a software company (assuming it isn't a consultant) is functioning software. An hour in a meeting is an hour where you aren't creating functioning software. Therefore meetings should be minimised. On the teams I organised I insisted that meetings were *only* attended by management, unless direct developer feedback was required. Managers were required to summarise meetings in emails and to answer questions on an ad-hoc basis.
The only meetings developers attended were a 15 minute stand up meeting in the morning, where management was forbidden from attending and the bi-weekly planning meeting. The stand up was merely a meeting to coordinate who expected to be touching what code that day, or to request help from other members of the team. The planning meeting was a traditional "planning game" meeting from XP (estimation, or a request to split stories up into smaller pieces).
Status was automatically generated in the form of a graph at the end of each day. Either a story was complete or it wasn't. Developers checked off the story when it was completed (we also had QA on some of my teams who would check off when the acceptance tests that they wrote were passed). We usually used a wiki for this, but an issue tracking system would work fine. Managers were generally forbidden from asking "When will X be done" questions, because it was blatantly obvious in the charts.
Legacy code sucks, but every system has legacy code. All developers were encouraged to put untested code under automated tests if they were working with it. Any code that was under test and was not optimal for what the developer wanted was encouraged to be refactored. Developers were highly discouraged from modifying code that wasn't related to the story that they were currently working on (this enforces the scope of refactoring). Putting legacy code under test and refactoring it is a challenging skill and any programmer who doesn't want to do it isn't welcome on my team.
There was never a difference between bugs and new development. All work was prioritised the same way. A bug is simply a lack of functionality that was expected to work previously. This expectation should not affect its priority. Very often I have new work that has a higher business priority than fulfilling my expectation that something else already worked. All work is prioritised, developed, tested and tracked the same way.
On training, developers are not good resources for giving training on how to use the system. This is mainly because they don't know how the system works, only how it is developed. QA and/or Documentation are *much* better resources for giving training. If QA and/or Documentation don't know how the system works, then you have massive, massive problems that you need to address immediately.
I once worked in a job where preparing for meetings, attending meetings and following up for meetings took 24 hours a week. That was a crappy job and a fucked up development team. On my teams, apart from the stand up meeting (which the developers always insisted on, I never cared), developers were expected to spend up to 1 hour a week in formal meetings. I expected them to spend *all* of the rest of their time directly on producing code or helping others produce code. Everything else was handled by management (because, that's *why they are there* -- to make sure that BS is not stopping the developers from producing code).
Code reviews, whether formal or informal are directly related to development. It doesn't matter if you are doing pair programming, desk reviews or formal inspections. The end result is the development of a consensus on how problems should be approached. You are also developing a set of idiomatic expressions that will help everyone mesh properly wh
All this hand-wringing over Honeycomb is fucking annoying at this point. Get over it.
Gladly. As you note, when the source comes out, everything will be (mostly) hunky dory. But I don't
have the source code yet. Without source code I can't study or modify the system.
I have to wonder, in your opinion, what is the point of having source code in the first place?
Why on earth would I be happy that it will come at some point in the future, but not
care in the least that it isn't here now? If I need the source code to do my work, then
I am waiting. I can't get my work done because I am waiting. Until when? Who knows?
If I don't need the source code, why would I care if it was open sourced in the first
place?
Open source is useful *because you have the source code*. I can't quite comprehend
the confusion as to why someone would be unhappy to have an "open source" system
where you aren't allowed to see the source code until the planets are aligned...
I'm a guy that doesn't like traditional training. That is, I can't stand power point presentations with guys from the local training center. I'd rather poke my eyeballs out than sit through those classes. But that doesn't mean I don't need training.
If I'm working on an important project, I'm going to be conservative. I'm going to use what I know works. I'm going to keep it simple and keep the risk low. But that means that I might overlook some fancy new technique or technology that would make the project even more successful. I might be reinventing the wheel because I just don't know the details of a class library. Or I might be missing opportunities for writing better code because I just don't know any better.
So, I need time to research. I need time to read. And most importantly, I need time to experiment -- WITH my colleagues. We need projects that we can try new techniques on. We need to evaluate new technologies and languages and class libraries so that we know if we want to use them in the future. I really shouldn't be doing that "on the job" because I'll likely make a dog's breakfast of the job.
Personally, I don't really favour the "one day a week" of personal training. It's too hard to stay focused. Instead, give me 6 weeks a year (in a row), with a couple of colleagues to simply try new things. Then I will come back to the team and share my experience.
Do that too much and in a down market you will price yourself out of a job. I've seen it happen many times. You get these guys who play the system trying to get that extra couple of percent raise every year and before you know it they are making 30% more than anyone else. But then the company gets hit hard some way and they find some excuse to lay off the expensive talent. Then these expensive guys go around trying to find another job, but can't land a thing because their last job was considerably higher than what anyone else pays. The management don't believe that the person will settle for a lower salary and don't even make an offer.
I always priced myself below the market. In the end I admittedly got paid less than the guys scrambling for higher salaries (even taking into account the time they were unemployable looking for a job). But I *like* working. I am absolutely sure that my management always considered me a bargain and I would be the last one they would want to lay off for any reason. That has value too.
I'm not saying that what you are doing is wrong. Everybody has their motivating factors. For some it is money. But if money is not so important to you, it's best to keep your eyes on other things. When someone asked me what I wanted for salary, my answer was always, "Money doesn't motivate me. Pay me a reasonable wage and that will be fine. But I want to work for a company that feels comfortable with the idea that the quality of my life at work is more important than the amount of money I take home at the end of the day."
As someone who used to hire people, I think you're best off pretty much saying what you just said. "I'm not really satisfied with what I've done so far. I still have a lot to learn and I've made good progress, but I think the best is yet to come." A good interviewer will follow up with a question like, "Please talk about a time when you noticed a problem with your coding and found a better way to do it".
Sometimes a group is looking to hire a "star programmer" right out of university. If you are feeling at all unsure about your abilities, you probably aren't going to handle the alpha-dog mentality that such a group will likely have. When I was right out of university, I was a "hotshot asshole programmer". I worked on a "hotshot asshole team". We were brutal with each other, but we had egos the size of Mount Everest. It was fine and in some respects you can learn quickly that way. Later I managed to shed the ego (mostly) and learn from other people.
I don't get that from you. You're going to work well on a team that wants to develop you. It's a much harder fit, but potentially you can grow faster. You're ability to accept your current position is your strength. But it will only manifest itself as a strength on the right team. Remember that *you* are filtering too. Find the right employer for you.
If you're looking for people with factual knowledge in a certain area, technical interviews will work well. For example, groups doing work with MFC often need an expert with MFC because there are ways to do things that work and ways to do things that don't work. Simply asking a few questions will determine if the person knows those things or not.
But if you are looking for general programming ability, it's much harder to ask specific questions. Whether or not an employer should expect it, having a portfolio is a really good idea. It doesn't need to be that much code. It's just a demonstration of what you would do. In my old portfolio I had a link to a software project and then a document containing excerpts of the code that I wrote. I then wrote up explanations for things like why I named my functions the way I did, some key design issues that reflected my programming personality, etc, etc. The whole document was about 4-5 pages. Let's face it, hiring managers aren't going to wade through 10,000 lines of code. They want an annotated overview.
For me the interesting thing was that my code examples were not what attracted the most interest. I had also included examples of how I liked to handle issue tracking and planning. I showed the type of documentation that I liked to write and the kinds of charts and graphs I made to show my progress. Management types eat that stuff up. It also showed that I knew what a good work flow was and that I was an organized programmer (as opposed to a cowboy coder).
I've noticed a lot of people here saying that they don't have time to write up a portfolio. Although different than what TFA suggests, even a portfolio of toy problems will at least give people an idea of who you are if you annotate it well. At the very least it can drive a discussion. I always used to put my portfolio on my web page and write a link at the top of my resume. I would also bring it on a CD ROM to the interview.
I'm out of the software business now (I prefer to write free software in my free time rather than proprietary software in my paid time), but if I were to go back, the first thing I would do is make up a portfolio again. Especially since I've been out for 5 years, I doubt I could get a job without it...
So the rule is, if your boss is a moron ... you should be worried.
No, you haven't quite grasped it. If you start to realise that your boss is a moron, that means you are stupider than him. First you should feel really lucky that you have a job at all. Second, you should entrench yourself so that you can never be fired. Try teaming up with other stupid people. The really cool part is that if your boss got promoted and is stupid, then ability isn't a requirement for the job. You can get promoted as well. The easiest way to do this is to volunteer for virtually impossible projects (the competent people will avoid them, so don't worry) and then lie about your progress. Because your manage is stupid and is trying to get promoted too, he will happily pass on the lies to upper management.
Seriously, it's only those poor competent schmucks who accidently get hired by a moronic boss that have to worry. Stupid people can rejoice!
I don't think it will necessarily bring the industry to its knees (patent trolls notwithstanding). What it does is require that you have a certain amount of capital before you can write software. In other words, only big companies will be able to write software. I believe this is the intent of the current software patent system. The interesting thing is that patent trolls, as much as we might hate them, throw a wrench into this scenario. If large compaies use software patents in some MAD plot to keep upstarts out, what happens when the trolls extort actual money from them?
One place they had some business was in migrating businesses from Netware to Linux. I once talked to a salesman about their Linux business trying to understand how they were going to make money. His answer was that they would offer user hand-holding support, but no custom development contracts. They were intent on offering free tools to make it attractive to move away from Netware and Novell intended to basically charge for the service doing that. But they seemed to have no plan what so ever about how to make money once their customers were on Linux. It seemed to me that it was merely a question of time before they packed it in.
wildly inaccurate? Seems to me TEPCO and the japanese government have been the biggest offenders as later reality proves their lies:
How about backing up your claims. You have 2 posts in this thread, both saying the same thing, both modded up highly and both without any references
"don't need an exclusion zone, just stay indoors and you'll be fine"
According to Wikipedia: "A nuclear emergency was declared by the Government at 19:03 on 11 March. Initially a 2 km, then 10 km[336] evacuation zone was ordered. Later Prime Minister Naoto Kan issued instructions that people within a 20 km (12 mile) zone around the plant must leave, and urged that those living between 20 km and 30 km from the site to stay indoors." Are you saying those measures were inadequate?
"no fuel has melted
"the rods in the spent fuel pool aren't uncovered"
According to Wikipedia: In a press release at 07:00 JST 12 March, TEPCO stated, "Measurement of radioactive material (iodine, etc.) by monitoring car indicates increasing value compared to normal level. One of the monitoring posts is also indicating higher than normal level."[75] Dose rates recorded on the main gate rose from 69 n Gy/h (for gamma radiation, equivalent to 0.000069 m Sv/h) at 04:00 JST, 12 March, to 866 nGy/h 40 minutes later, before hitting a peak of 0.3855 mSv/h at 10:30 JST.[75][76][77][78] At 13:30 JST, workers detected radioactive caesium-137 and iodine-131 near reactor 1,[3] which indicated some of the core's fuel had been damaged.[79] Cooling water levels had fallen so much that parts of the nuclear fuel rods were exposed and partial melting might have occurred.[80][81] Radiation levels at the site boundary exceeded the regulatory limits.
"containment hasn't been breached"
According to Wikipedia: On 25 March, officials announced the reactor vessel might be breached and leaking radioactive material.
Look, I'm not even trying hard and I can tell that you're just spouting nonsense. It pisses me off that you get modded up without anyone even going through the pretense of checking up on your BS.
In some place other than Japan, what you are saying is feasible. But in Japan I really, really doubt that private/public makes any difference what-so-ever in how things are run. It's not like they are cutting costs in order to deal with a hostile market. I'm paying something like 30 cents a KWH for electricity. That will definitely be going up I guess (which is a good thing in my books). Pretty much every big organisation in Japan runs the same way as far as I can tell. On the one hand, they aren't going to be stingy just to reduce the price. But on the other hand there are huge swathes of bureaucracy and plenty of places for a ball to be dropped. It has both advantages and disadvantages.
No offense, but that is not how fiat money works. The gold that everyone is so keen to mark as the "value" behind currency isn't much more valuable than the cotton used to make US dollars. That's a bit extreme, but the price of gold is so out of whack with it's actual value from a use perspective that you may as well call the use contribution zero. Gold's apparent value is just as illusory as the value behind the dollar.
Money in and of itself is not valuable. But without money you get into situations where person A has resource X, person B has resource Y and person C has resource Z. They don't have any common way of trading and so they just sit on their resources and no work gets done. But if they have a common way to trade, the resources flow and something that takes all of X,Y, and Z can be created. *This* is value.
The idea behind fiat money is that you create money out of thin air. The money is a promise to exchange value at a later date. Trade is enabled and the value is created. Without the initial money, people sit on their asses and do nothing. But with the promise of a pay check, they get up every morning at 7 am and create value all day. That value fulfils the promise of the fiat money. Having some shiny, yellow metal sitting in an important looking building doesn't actually do much to help the purpose of money. The key to understanding is to realise that money itself has no value, so "backing it up" with something valuable serves no purpose. The money exists as a promise in order to liberate resources (things or labour) that create the value.
I'm not saying that there aren't problems with our economic system, or that we don't need controls on our monetary supply, etc, etc. But unless I'm very much mistaken, going back to a gold backed currency won't do anything useful other than make gold more valuable (which may be why many people calling for a return to the gold standard are also heavily invested in gold...)
Not that many people lie on their deathbed wishing they had worked more over their lifetime.
I find it unfortunate that this line is so popular. It's as if people see working merely as a means to provide funds for what they *really* want to do. Would it not be better to hope that someone on their deathbed would look back on the activity that took up a third of their life and feel happy that they invested that time? To me, anything less than that is a tragedy.
There really is no shortage of "work" to be done. Or, let me rephrase that, we have already gone *well* beyond the point where meaningful work took up a large percentage of our collective time. I mean that growing and distributing food, making clothes and building houses occupies a ridiculously small amount of our workforce. The rest of the work is geared towards improving our lifestyles. That people playing sports or music can be among the wealthiest in the world shows how far away our economy has shifted from being needs based.
The thing about a job is that it forces you to think about other people. You can't just fart around as you please. What you do has to benefit others in some way (otherwise you won't get paid). This is a tremendously good thing. But it is important not to leave yourself out of the equation. If you are working only to make money to support your after-work lifestyle, you are already an indentured slave (especially true if you are working to pay off your debt, but somehow the debt never seems to get smaller)
If the purpose of work is to do something with your life that benefits others, then I hope people can enjoy it to the point where they miss it when it is gone. For myself, many people ask me what I will do when I retire. I alternatively tell them "I am not going to retire." (I am not going to stop helping others), and "I have already retired." (I'm not working, I'm just having fun)
I think we can safely assume that Blackberry is about as secure as a wet paper bag in countries where the device has become "commercially successful" and the government is less than interested in maintaining privacy.
I originally started to think, why not just say, "The secure channel may not be secure in countries that disallow full security". And then I thought, "Which ones are those"? Because presumably most of the countries that disallow a secure channel also don't want to advertise the fact. They would *like* people to use the "secure" channel so that they have a handy mechanism to track them (as opposed to having those people set up an actually secure channel).
So, the really interesting question becomes, if they allow country X to snoop on the "secure channel", what about *my* country? How do I know that it isn't compromised?
So it's not just in countries where the government is less than interested in maintaining privacy. It's useless in *every* country because can't tell which ones have been compromised. I suspect this is the real reason he doesn't want to answer the question. Because the next question would be, "Does the US/UK government have access?" and "How do we know if it does or doesn't"
Yes. Focus follow mouse. The whole "one window" thing stems from people who refuse to use focus follows mouse as far as I can tell.
What's ridiculous about the situation is the blind religious insistence that my *application* should implement a window manager. And a *tiling* window manager at that!
One of the things that this whole issue has pointed out to me is that window managers are broken. I like focus follows mouse, but obviously it isn't for everyone. So we need a window manager that allows you to group your windows by application and tile them how you like inside a single window. We could even add hints to X that allows the application to specify how it thinks the windows in the app should be tiled. But putting it in the application is the *wrong* place to do it. If we do that then every app will have a different way to implement the tiling.
But I like focus follows mouse so I've never gotten around to implementing a better window manager. I probably should do it just to stop people from sticking things all in one big bloody window...
Kind of off topic, but Japan has it's own vegan cuisine called shoujin ryouri. It is generally associated with buddhist temples, but it doesn't have to be. Shoujin ryouri is really, really delicious and surprisingly healthy. Whenever I punch in a typical shoujin ryouri menu into a nutrient calculator I'm amazed how close it comes to what most people say you should be eating (i.e., WHO, etc). Unfortunately there aren't a lot of non-Japanese resources on the topic.
But I seriously doubt very many people in Japan will adopt such a diet. People will openly laugh at you for suggesting that you eat shoujin ryouri more than once or twice a year ("What, are you going to become a monk? Ha ha ha ha!"). On the other hand, most people don't eat a lot of meat or chicken to begin with and quite a lot of the staple fish that they eat is deep sea fish anyway. Possibly the biggest animal product that could be affected locally is eggs. I don't know what the local fish specialties are in the area, but I suspect the fisheries will be shut down. This will be a fairly large financial hardship on a lot of people, but probably won't affect the way people eat all that much.
The really sad thing is, people are ignorantly scared of nuclear power but should really be scared of anti-nuclear idiots.
Or they should really be scared of the alternative power generation schemes. Personally, I have no problem with anti-nuclear people. There *is* a risk. And there *is* waste. And it *is* a problem. Fine. Getting rid of nuclear power doesn't solve the problem, it only changes the symptoms (and as you point out, can make it worse). It is important to note that the idiocy is *not* in thinking that nuclear power has problem. It is in thinking that anything else we have is better.
I have found that when I explain things in this way, most (though not all) of the anti-nuclear people I know view the situation differently. They don't become any less anti-nuclear, but they stop being counter-productive (which is all I want anyway). If they want to reduce nuclear power generation (and everything worse) there is a simple and effective technique -- reduce energy consumption. The beauty of it is that we can make large improvements in this area without additional need for technology. Only our culture needs to change. While doing this, we can also put pressure on politicians and businesses to divert more money into research for things like large scale energy storage and transportation so that we can reduce the need for unrenewable energy sources.
The thing is, these people *really* want to be helpful. If you concentrate so much on how idiotic they are, you lose a valuable resource. Instead please consider trying to aim that human energy into productive directions.
Not to be negative, especially since I just started writing an Android app, but even Java seems to be half baked. I really hope that once I get used to the quirks my productivity will improve, but nothing seems to work the way I expect it too. I'm not trying to troll here, it's just that there seems to be one way that works well and about 100 other ways that may or may not work. I spend a lot of my time guessing what the one magic working way is (especially since it often isn't my first choice). I had actually thought briefly about using JRuby before I started this app and I am really, really glad I didn't. I'd be tearing my hair out by the fistful now, I'm sure. Again, not that there is anything wrong with using another language, but unless you are really familiar with the way Android is supposed to work I can imagine it being very, very difficult to determine what are quirks with Android and what are problems with the language.
The corollary to this is that when writing your app, don't assume that I'm using one desktop environment or another. A good example of this would be configuring sound notification for a messaging system from the desktop environment rather than the app itself. In the worst case I have to run a whole bunch of daemons in the background that have very little to do with the application, expanding its footprint dramatically (and since these daemons don't stop running when I'm finished using the program, the expanded footprint lasts indefinitely).
There are quite a few applications I can't use from both KDE and Gnome because they are unusable without the whole environment (which I specifically don't want to have going on my tiny little machine).
But I agree with you 100%. There are lots and lots of useful APIs that run on a Linux box. Pick what you like and if your app is worth the footprint it brings along, I will install it.
They make no judgement on the veracity, or even the coherence, of the sentence - they simply present it as something that people have been typing in to the search box.
That is arguably true. The question is whether or not they make it clear. I understand it. You understand it. But does the average person understand it? And if the average person is expected not to understand it, perhaps it is not a good idea to generate it. I don't know the details of this case, but I can definitely understand the need for an explanation somewhere. I don't see one anywhere.
Having said that, the number one completion for "Google is" is "evil". Number three is "gay". What is one to believe?
But they released a binary. I can buy a Motorola Xoom and I can't get the source code. Thus it isn't open source.
Of course we all believe it will become open source in the future. That's not the point. They have released it and refuse to give their customers the source code. Their customers can't inspect it for problems, learn from it, modify it, fix bugs, adapt it for their purpose or redistribute it. Even though they have bought a device containing the binary. Kudos that they intend to open source it in the future, but it is not open sourced now, by anyone's definition.
The important thing to take away from this is that people who will not pay are not your customers. You have people who will pay a price. Those people are your potential customers. If the price increases, the number of people who pay drop. Will these people start to pirate? Possibly. If you stop them from pirating, will they suddenly pay the increased price? The assertion is that they will not in most cases. Thus it is inefficient to spend resources trying to stop people from pirating. The resources spent will not increase the sales as much as lowering the price.
In your case, the price is as low as it can go. But there is still piracy. But like you say, those people likely won't pay no matter what the price. Thus concentrating on them is a waste of your time.