I have an HD6950 which has relatively good horsepower, I guess. I had been using the proprietary driver simply because that's what my distro set up and I've been too lazy to change it. I don't really play games all that often, but I have one or two kicking around. As you mentioned this, I decided to try out the open source driver.
On the plus side, the performance of 2D and video is actually quite a lot better than the proprietary driver. Everything is quick and smooth and no tearing. I had to fiddle with the proprietary driver to get it to look good and it never worked as well as the open source driver does. Some old games work really well. I fired up World of Padman and at full resolution I've got more FPS than I need. I also happened to have World of Goo kicking around. As long as I set the resolution of the game to my normal desktop resolution everything worked great. If it's set to 800x600, the screen gets crushed into an 800x600 block in the center of the monitor, though.
On the down side, I ran Torcs and get pretty significantly reduced frame rate. I didn't have time to fiddle with it, but I think I can probably set up something playable, but with the proprietary driver, I've got FPS to burn. I also tried Ember and it was a total disaster with screen artifacts and serious problems. Dmesg was telling me that the driver was encountering an error. Ember's kind of flaky anyway, but I never ran into these kinds of problems with the proprietary driver.
I wanted to try something under wine, but not being a gamer, I don't really have anything appropriate.
For me, I'm definitely going to stick with the open source driver. For one I get the advantages of free software. But it's also considerably better for every day use. If I were using this machine for games, the open source driver would not be acceptable, I think. It's definitely getting there, but it's not there yet.
I hate to say this, but Obama's election really cemented my view of how deluded the average person is wrt to politics. It's not just American's either. I live in Japan and when Obama was elected it was treated almost as if it was the second coming. He even won a Nobel Peace Prize ostensibly based on what he was *expected* to accomplish. It's crazy.
Before the election somebody asked him what his stance was on the continued bombing of Pakistan. He replied that he was in favour of it. If I'm to understand the situation correctly (and since I don't pay attention, it's quite possible I've got it wrong), it seems that the US gives Pakistan arms in exchange for the permission to drop bombs on Pakistan. This allows the US to assasinate terrorist leaders. (Again, if I've got this wrong, please reply with better info...)
Whether or not you think this is right or wrong, it's blantantly clear that there was never, ever going to be a major shift of foreign policy. This is pretty much business as usual for the US (whether or not you agree with it -- though I will say that the US has a history of this strategy biting them in the ass).
The interesting question for me is whether Obama himself believed that he would significantly change things. He seems like charismatic and relatively effective leader. If he can't make changes, what does that say about the ability of the democratic system to change government policy? If he never believed that he would change things significantly, what does that say about the level of propoganda in US politics?
To be fair, I don't mean to concentrate only on US politics. I could level these suspisions at pretty much any democratically elected government today.
Yeah, it's crazy, but it's just the way it is. My Canadian banks are the same way. No credit card unless I'm resident there. I can lie to them and say I'm living at a friend's place, but it's not worth the hassle. Online banks have the same restrictions as far as I know. If they are not operating in the country that I'm living in, they can't do anything for me. The ones that *do* operate in Japan have the same restrictions. The governments/banks have it all locked up. There is some good reason for it, though. It makes it difficult to launder money from country to country.
I used to do online shopping using Pay Pal, but they've shut me out since my bank is located in Canada and I always access it from Japan. I've been trying to get through to them, but they have been less than helpful. Something like Bitcoin could be very helpful, but I seriously doubt that Bitcoin is it. Putting aside potential scam issues for the moment, I'm not convinced that the transactional costs will be appreciably lower than what the banks are offering. As money volume goes up, the advantage to cheat becomes greater. Thus you need to offer higher transaction fees to build the blocks.
What would be nice is a system that poofed Xcoins into existence *all* the time to cover transaction fees, dependent on the volume going through. This would also ensure that the system was inflationary. The problem is that you can't do that with a computer. Eventually you overflow.
Not to beat a dead horse, but every time I look at Bitcoin (whether it is a scam or not) and try to think how an *honest* person building the same system would build it, I run into serious problems like the above. It's quite an interesting problem, and whether it is a scam or not, Bitcoin contains some interesting ideas.
Functional programming leads to a completely different set of coding idioms. These can be very convenient in many applications. Since it is not the kind of programming that most people are used to, it can be awkward at first. There are a lot of things that are much more elegant and obvious when done this way, but you have to get over the barrier of thinking procedurally first. I would say that it isn't simply that hard core CS types like the aesthetics of functional programming. I think it's more that, being hard core CS types, they are exposed to functional programming and once the get immersed find it easier to express what they want to say.
Of course there is nothing really stopping you from writing functional code in any language. It's just that notationally, functional languages make it much easier. In the same way, you could write object oriented code in any language, but the verbosity would negate it's usefulness.
Personally, I don't think a programmer's education is complete without achieving some level of fluency in functional programming. Personally, I sadly lack any competence at all and I really should spend more time practicing.
And bitcoin was (presumably) written by a Japanese guy. As it happens I live in Japan. You're arguing that this kind of service is not needed because you, as an American, do not need it.
To be honest, the only reason I replied was because I've seen other posts by you and (apart from Bitcoin) I've found you to be an intelligent and reasoning person. This is the second time I've responded to you on this subject only to have you pawn me off with an argument that equates to "Well, I really don't care about you because your opinion differs from mine". It's probably a huge waste of my time trying to get you to see this, but you never know.
I'm happy to be corrected if I've made an error, but I'm not quite understanding your point. I had no interest in the example just to keep it simple.
The idea is that if I make enough money to be able to afford paying back 0.1Y in year 1 values, since the currency is deflating my ability to pay back (numerically) diminishes. I keep making the same amount of value, but the numerical amount of money I receive diminishes.
Essentially, I have to pay the interest rate *and* the deflation rate in order to pay off the loan. It's not impossible, but is makes borrowing considerably less attractive.
You seem to be looking at one small part of Chomsky's work and assuming that is the entirety of it. There is hardly a paper published in the field of language acquisition (i.e., Humans learning human languages) that does not somehow refer back to Chomsky's work. I mean the work other than formal grammar theory.
Seriously, the guy was all over the place. Personally, I think it's a stretch to say that he reinvented linguistics. There were a lot of people involved. But there is really no denying that linguistics and language acquisition theory was completely completely restructured and he was a key part of it.
The banks in my country won't issue me any kind of credit card (secured or not) until I become a landed immigrant. The banks in my country of origin won't issue me any kind of credit card (secured or not) unless I am resident in the country.
I'm very happy that you are easily able to do online monetary transactions. Not everybody is you. That is why some people would really welcome a way to do electronic transactions without the intervention of a bank. Sure not everybody needs it, but some do.
I've never understood this argument, so perhaps you can explain it to me. Let's say I want worms for fishing. I have a buddy with a farm that is just crawling with worms. He really likes gumdrops. Everytime I ask him for worms, he says I can have them in exchange for gumdrops. This goes on for quite some time and I start to trust that I can get worms from the guy if I give him gum drops. So I stock some gum drops all the time, just in case I suddenly want to go fishing. Maybe you don't want to say that gum drops are a currency, but surely in this scenario gum drops have value (they are worth X worms).
In the same vein, if I want to buy drugs from the Silk Road or whatever, they want Bitcoins. It doesn't matter how many gold dubbloons I have in my house; I can't email them to the guys who are going to ship me drugs. The gold is worthless in this siuation and the Bitcoins have real value (X bitcoins are worth Y drugs).
In both scenarios, the value is risky. My buddy may suddenly stop liking gumdrops. The Silk Road may get taken down by the FBI. Then my stock of gum drops and Bitcoins is worthless. But they still have value until that point.
The argument that it doesn't have value unless you can pay your taxes wih it baffles me. I don't see how it is connected at all. I can't pay my taxes in saffron, but saffron is incredibly valuable to some people.
Bitcoin has value to some people. This is obvious because people are paying money for them. Actually quite a lot of money is exchanged for Bitcoin every day. They don't hold much value for me since I don't want the things you can buy with them, but that doesn't make them valueless. I tend to agree that Bitcoins will not become popular enough to be as widely accepted as other forms of currency, but that doesn't make them valueless.
Finally, while I touched on it briefly before, the reason why you don't want to use silver or gold is because you can't do electronic transfers of silver or gold with very low fees and without the intervention of banks.
Inflation is a feature not a bug. In fact, you have listed the main benefits yourself without realizing it.
Imagine a world where your currency didn't devalue. Let's take an extreme example, where your currency actually increased in value. Sounds great, doesn't it? Put money under your mattress and in 10 years time it's worth a lot more than when you got it. Except, how would that work? Let's say that the world produces an amount of goods and services which we'll call X. Let's say we have a perfect economy where people receive money equivalent to the goods and services they produce -- also X. So in year 1 we sell all our goods and services and have X dollars.
The next year we don't produce any more money since we don't want it to devalue. Everyone is expecting the currency to go up in value so they save 10% of what they earned (0.1X) and spend 90% (0.9X). Since there is less money for the same amount of goods, this means that the currency goes up in value. Hurray! Everyone again saves 10%. Now there is 0.19X saved and 0.81X in circulation. Let's do this for 10 years. At that point we have about 0.65X in savings and about 0.35X in ciculation. And the currency is worth nearly 3 times it's original. Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Let's spend our savings!
But the entire output of the economy is 0.35X and we have 0.65X in savings to spend. If we spend it, it causes the value of the currency to crash dramatically. The problem is that the currency value was being kept artificially high by limiting its availability. As soon as we want to spend it, we're in big trouble.
The point of a currency from an economic point of view is to ease trade. If you can not get access to the resources you need, you can't produce. We want to distribute as much money as we can to people who can use it to produce something. Saving (some call it "hording" to distinguish it from investing) causes massive problems when you reintroduce the money into the economy. So you want to encourage people to either spend or invest money rather than putting it under a mattress.
Another major issue is borrowing. If you have a job to do but do not have the resources you need, you won't produce value. If you have money, you can buy the resources. What do you do if you don't have money? Ideally we want to be able to borrow the money. Remember we want as many people as possible to have money if they are able to use it productively. What happens if we have a currency without inflation?
Let's say I borrowed Y on year one. In the first year I can afford to pay back 0.1Y. But in the second year there is less currency around (people are saving) so I can only pay back 0.09Y. The next, I can only pay 0.081Y, etc etc. By year 10 I can only pay back 0.035Y. I'm paying back the same amount of value each year, but since the currency is deflating, I get to a point where I may never be able to pay back the loan fully.
To avoid this problem, people will avoid borrowing money. This means that they will not be productive and society suffers.
Deflationary currencies are extremely bad. Currencies with moderate inflation are exactly what we want. Our current fiscal problems do not come from the inflationary nature of the currency. They come because of bad loans. Money was lent to people who were not going to be productive with the money (for example they simply invested it in an overstocked property market that was at the height of it's price). Our problems really *are* due to unscrupulous and stupid commercial banks. It is highly regretteble that we were forced to bail out most of them. It is even more regrettable that the average voter can not understand the issue well enough to ensure that the government doesn't allow it to happen again.
Ha ha! Your post is awesome for the first three paragraphs and then you totally lose me;-)
But I just wanted to interject one small thing. Getting paid up front is a really good idea, but it goes a little bit beyond this. It's more like LEAN production. Traditional software producers operate in a push fashion. In other words, they build something and then they go around trying to convince customers to buy it. Even if they get money upfront (from an investor for instance), they operate in push mode. Some PGM sits in his cubicle and imagines what people are likely going to buy. This is problematic in more ways than just when the money comes in.
Ideally you want to be operating in a pull fashion. You want customers pulling the product from you. They have a need. They have money. You supply the solution and receive the money. The problem with software from a LEAN production point of view is that the turn-around time from customer-pull to when you can actually deliver can be large. Usually customers have a problem that they want solved now, not 6-18 months from now.
Going from push to pull has the potential for seriously reducing wasted effort on a team, but you have to deal with the turn-around time problem. There are some models that deal with that implicitly (custom development, support, etc), but it's a problem for a lot of other models.
Here's a tip: When ESR talks about "open source" software, he's talking about the same thing as when RMS talks about "Free Software,"
He's essentially talking about the same thing, but there are one or two subtle differences (unless he's changed his mind recently). When RMS talks about "Free Software", he's looking at it from a customer protection point of view (I'll try to avoid the M word since it inflames the situation). If the customer receives the software but is unable to exercise the 4 freedoms, it's potentially bad. ESR has historically discussed open source from a more pragmatic point of view. Open source leads to more efficient development, and engaging users in the process leads to lots of good opportunities.
Where the two have historically fallen out is on issues where the customer is not completely protected, but where development is still proceeding openly. I hesitate to present an example, because I don't want to put words in other people's mouths. However, if you look at some of the non-reciprocal OSI approved licenses, perhaps you can get an idea. RMS would say it isn't free software since a company could take a contributor's code and make a non-free project, but the reverse is not true.
This is actually the first time I've seen ESR post about the dangers of non-open source software, so I wonder if it's indicating a shift in his stance.
This is a serious problem with free software game developers. I've given some thought to it and here are a few ideas:
1) Serial content. While I would do it very differently, take a look at Mine Craft for an example. It is not open source, but he was charging $5 a pop for an unfinished game. The initial stages were compelling and there was an obvious desire for the game to be improved. Write a small kernel of a game and do various kickstarter like initiatives to add more and more.
2) Sell merchandise. Essentially the same business model as online comics or CC music. Charge for mugs, T-shirts, whatever. Probably you will have to trademark some things.
3) Sponsored development. This is similar to Serial content, but your money comes from advertisers, not users. Have regular development sprints (weekly would be great, but maybe you could make do with monthly too). Each version (or capability add-on, or extended story, or whatever) is named after the advertiser.
4) In game advertising. Actual items/enemies/whatever are named after or resemble some advertiser's logo/product. If it's a 3D game, have actual advertising billboards in the back ground. For many games there will be unobtrusive ways to do this.
5) Special paid versions. Offer special versions on actual physical media with merchandise. Offer various vanity options -- name in the credits, character name, etc. Note this has to be a physical thing. With free software anyone can change the names of the characters;-)
The challenges to these types of funding are numerous. First you need to be consistent. Nobody will pay for serialized content unless they are absolutely sure that the next one is coming. Ideally, you should find a way to do micro-payments, but failing that offer subscriptions (i.e., $15 for a year). You should probably offer paid subscribers special benefits like a fast download option, ability to vote on new features, etc, etc. You also need to spend money on sales and marketing in order to get advertising, etc.
It's a good point, but commit logs are quite dense to the average user. I've been thinking about this wrt to my own project (not that it's popular in any way;-) ). Communicating what you are planning to do, what you are actually doing, and what has been accomplished is really important when you start accepting money. Keeping the user engaged is incredibly important. But it's easy to overwhelm them with detail.
I wish I could mod up the AC's reply to this. Instead I'll chip in as well. The key really is the avoidance of business models that prevent the user from helping themselves or their neighbours with a problem. It's not that the original author shouldn't be compensated for their work/risk, but that denying the customers the 4 freedoms is a poor way to ensure payment.
Like the AC, I tend to prefer business models that charge for time. Even when I was working for large proprietary software companies, my interaction with the people paying me was essentially free software. I even gave my employers the copyright for everything I wrote. They could do whatever they wished. This kind of work-for-hire, payment-up-front is one way to write free software. Often the customer doesn't care about the software so much as they care about the solution to their problem. If free software is used/developed, the development cost goes down. This is how Cygnus software worked with the GCC tool chain. By the time they were bought by Red Hat for $600 million, they were making $130 million a year in contracts (that's from memory -- if you want to you can check with the SEC filings at the time of the purchase).
Other business models are possible. Mozilla works essentially for advertising. Google has historically been paying them something like $100 million a year for the search bar (which is, in turn, funded by advertising). The nice thing about Mozilla is that they can spend virtually all their money on development since the extensive sales force you need in traditional software companies is completely unneeded. Apache works from payments from their member companies. Other projects are funded by corporations who keep a few developers on staff for that project -- essentially reducing the price they would have to pay by sharing it across many companies.
To me, this last strategy is likely the most compelling. Most software companies run with less than 10% of their operating costs being R&D (including R&D management and sometimes support). The rest is sales, marketing, and other infrastructure. When you take profit into consideration, companies like MS are using much more than 90% of the money they receive for sales in MS Office on resources not related to the development of MS Office. Open source software *should* be able to take advantage of reduced distribution and sales costs to seriously undercut the competition while still producing more software. I haven't seen many serious attempts to do so yet (Cygnus notwithstanding), though.
Well, clearly, that's because majority of the users don't care.
And I agree with you: for the nearly thirty years that the GNU project has been running, free software advocates have failed to convince end users to care.
Clearly some people care, otherwise this thread wouldn't have hundreds of messages of people flaming back and forth.
But it's still an interesting point, if a little over the top. I work as a teacher in Japan right now and we just had our school festival. My students wanted to have a stereo set up with music playing. The school doesn't have money to pay the fees for playing mainstream music in a public place. Instead I downloaded a whole bunch of Creative Commons music and played that instead. Everyone was happy and the students enjoyed the music.
The interesting part was that the license was CC-By-NC, so I had to give credit to the artists. The license is a little unclear about public performance, so I decided to make a poster explaining why we couldn't just play mainstream music, what CC licenses were and where you could download CC music. I also listed all the artists that contributed the music that we were playing.
The principal saw the poster and made the comment, "Oh it doesn't really matter. Everybody downloads music anyway. I don't see the point of this CC music".
He really didn't care if the music was CC or not. He really didn't care if we were breaking the law or not. The fact that this was the only legal way we could afford to do what we did was lost on him. This is also true of the average person wrt to software. Of the people I know who have Photoshop on their computer, not one of them has paid for it. They don't care.
Does that mean it's not important?
The way people deal with software these days is very organic. Most people pirate the software. If it's convenient (especially if they can download it), they may pay for it. But if they have to go to the store, it's a good bet that they will download it. If they have a problem with the software, they ask their techy friends to solve it. I don't know about you, but I can't fix any problems in Photoshop or Word or the like. I *have* fixed problems in the Gimp and Open Office when friends asked me. My friends were very happy.
Do average people care about free software? No, I don't think they do. Is it important. Yes, I think it is.
I'm not going to try to defend people who are jumping to conclusions about your motives, but I will try to explain my impression of why someone would get upset with your posting. The topic of this article is the potential dangers of using non-open sourced software. You didn't address the actual issue at all. Instead you posted an anecdote of how you get video artifacts in Linux, implying that Linux is unusable for the average person.
I actually spent some time googling around, with the limited information you described to see if I could find *anything* even remotely similar happening to anyone else. I found no mention of it. Whatever problem you are having is obviously very rare. I can easily point to similar rare problems with Windows or OSX. In fact, I have a laptop whose networking stopped working after I did a Windows Update. Probably I could fix it if I cared, but since 99.999% of the time I run Linux on it, I really don't care if something in Windows doesn't work.
Linux, BSD, Android and other open source platforms work acceptably well for millions of people. I'm sorry that you are having problems with your video card under Linux, but it doesn't really make a convincing argument that opens source software is unsuitable. Neither does my networking problem under Windows say anything at all about non-open source software.
What is frustrating about posts like yours is that it buries a potentially interesting conversation about the benefits and trade offs open source development with anecdotal complaints. For every one of your complaints about Linux not working for you, I can come up with an equally compelling (i.e., not compelling at all) complaint about Windows or OSX. Some people believe that the entire purpose of these anecdotal complaints is to bury intelligent discussion about open source development. This is why people are calling you an astroturfer. Even if I take your word that you are not, the effect of your posts is the same.
If you would like to have people respond in a more positive way, it would be great if you would address the points raised in TFA. I don't care if you agree or disagree. In fact, I like seeing intelligent responses that differ from my point of view. It is too bad that your original post was modded up so highly simply because people agreed with your complaint. It really should have been modded -1 Off topic IMHO. Feel free to disagree with me, but at least try to reference the TFA while doing so.
.Net is not my programming platform of choice, but I've actually implemented a SIP softphone for Windows Mobile in.Net (We're talking something like 7 years ago). I had no performance problems at all. I was careful with memory (memory pools, etc), but in terms of writing embedded code, I did nothing out of the ordinary. At the time.Net was not well supported on Windows Mobile (and maybe never got supported, for all I know -- after the project I've never used it again). I had problems with Visual Studio and Windows Mobile itself (a crappier embedded OS, I have never seen before...), but.Net was never a problem for me. I even made a mono port for Linux so that I could work using that platform (my preferred development platform).
People are too religious when it comes to development platforms. Unless you've worked extensively with it, it's actually pretty difficult to tell how good or bad it's going to be. Your experience running Hello, World in a desktop environment is really not related to working on an embedded device. Java suffers from the same misconceptions. Everything depends on the run time code.
If someone were to pay me, I would happily work with.Net again. I've worked with far more difficult systems.
My observations of old people are they either give up intentionally, the brain freezes up, and they're hopeless, or they keep using the brain and they're more focused than a 20-something.
My observation of me (at 44) is that no matter what I do, my brain is not as agile as it was when I was younger. The main problem is memory. You can train memory to a certain degree, but for me, anyway, it seems to be slowly fading away. When I was in my twenties, I could easily keep the structure of several hundred thousand lines of code in my head. I can not do that any more and I have to rely on notes.
The next biggest problem is stamina. If I'm coding all day long I get sleepy. I can get a good 8-10 hours but after that I need a nap. I remember one time as a teenager hacking for an entire weekend without sleep. That is utterly impossible for me now.
Having said that, the older me is many times more valuable than the younger me. When I was younger, I could easily pick out things that "sucked". I would ineffectually rant and rave about how crappy everything was. I would have grandiose plans for making everything great. But half of those plans were naively wrong and the other half were ignored by people annoyed by my arrogance. My biggest skill right now is in helping a team head towards success while empowering others and keeping morale high.
On the technical side, not only do I have much better design sense, I have patience. I am methodical now because I have to be. I am aware of what I am doing and why I am doing it. I've replaced my hotshot asshole programming style with humble coding.
I've actually been out of the industry for about 5 years (teaching) and I'm looking to get back to it. I don't think that I will ever be the "alpha coder" on a top team any more -- that's a role for the young. I don't care if I'm scoring the goals or setting them up -- I'm interested only in success, not personal glory. I honestly believe that every team needs a couple of gray headed guys like me to balance the primadonas.
I think many people are overlooking one important thing from the OP's post. They sell programming tools. The level of knowledge necessary to sell the tool depends a lot on what the tool is. If it's a text editor, then you need very little knowledge of programming. Even a refactoring browser would be fairly easy. But what if the company were selling static analysis tools for C and C++? Maybe along with profiling tools?
If this were the case I can imagine a lot of awkward conversations as the sales person describes features without the faintest idea why they are useful (or, indeed, what they are used for). There comes a point where someone has to have some experience with the thing to be able to sell it. In sales they say that you must sell the sizzle and not the steak. But if you have never even heard the sizzle before, it's a hard sell.
I agree with the idea that you need to pair a traditional sales person with a personable programmer. The programmer need not be top drawer. They simply have to go to the potential client, demonstrate the product, answer questions, be able to refer difficult questions back to the core team, etc, etc. The sales guy is just the closer. They don't need to know anything about the product at all, practically.
I have been a programmer for 20 years and a high school teacher for 5 years. Teaching requires way more talent and knowledge than programming. Teaching is *not* standing up in front of a bunch of kids and reading out of the textbook (much as your previous teachers may have made it seem so). Technical ability in the subject matter is such a small part of the job that it doesn't even register with me. Teaching is finding a way help your students succeed in their dreams. This despite your students often being determined not to succeed. Or despite your students being confused about what they want. Or despite your students being convinced that things that kill them are a good idea. Or despite your students being so mentally abused by their families that they are just barely able to function at all. Or despite your students having mental disabilities (diagnosed/treated or not). Trust me, the problems are endless. And debugging is messy to say the least.
The problem is that people settle for teachers that are neither talented nor knowledgable. Let me put it another way. Imagine your favorite sports team hiring anybody who has a knowledge of the rules of the game and a year or two of coaching school at a university. How well would the team function? What is the difference between that and a *really* good coach? That's the difference (or more) that your children are missing out on.
It is definitely possible that she is working for the wrong employer. There are good jobs and bad jobs in every field.
I posted something similar above, but I wanted to try to make this point somewhere that the OP may have a chance of seeing it. From the little that is written in the summary, I would guess that the problem is likely to persist even with a different employer.
I teach English in high school in Japan. I'm not a regular teacher. I'm designated an assistant and I have no way of becoming a regular teacher in the near future because of the way licensing is done in Japan. Essentially your have to have better Japanese than the average adult, and while I am fluent, I'm not there yet. Even though I am officially an assistant, I pretty much teach classes the way the other teachers do and have a lot of freedom. But in terms of "support", I'm lucky if I don't get people actively working against me. I'm an outsourced foreign worker, working for half the pay that the local workers get. You can do the math. Nobody wants me there other than the bean counters.
The key phrases I get from the summary are "more challenging than expected" and "deal with a bunch of criminals as students".
Teaching is very hard. I also worked 20 years as a programmer and was very good at it. Programming is hard. Teaching is *very* hard. To make matters worse, the vast majority of teachers are completely ignorant of their craft. As I pointed out in another post, they never, ever read scientific literature on memory, learning, acquisition of knowledge or the like. They are working with concepts that were thrown out more than half a century ago. The materials they have to work with are by and large terrible. I've literally had to write all my own textbooks (and the bloody school board, who owns the copyright, won't give me a license...)
But the worst part is that virtually every teacher is unaware of their problems. They complain endlessly about other teachers, the staff, the students, but they very rarely point the finger at themselves. I'm not trying to be unkind with this. Teaching is *very* hard. I have met teachers that have a few things working well. I have yet to meet even one that has mastered the craft. I've been doing this 5 years now and I've just got my feet wet. To get good at this... Well, it's going to take a lot more time.
No matter how much "support" you get from the administration; no matter what kind of angels you have as students; in the end you are up there alone with your students. It is your relationship with each individual student that is key. They must trust you. Trust is something that can never be asked for. It is only given when someone genuinely wants to do so. You need to give them reasons why they should believe in you (part of that is knowing exactly what will be effective for each and every student in the class). You need to give them reasons why they should rely on you (part of that is never, ever betraying them). You need to show that you can do it (part of that is not relying on "support").
The bullshit *around* teaching is terrible. The politics are insane. But none of it matters in the classroom. Forget the bullshit and concentrate on how you're going to become a better teacher. Don't expect it to happen quickly. It is a shame that some students will suffer from your mistakes, but they are better off with a teacher who is aware of their mistakes and putting everything they have into improving.
I teach English in a Japanese high school. In my opinion, the teaching aspect of the job is orders of magnitude more difficult than the English aspect of the job.
The problem is not mastery of the subject. It's just not required. The problem is that most teachers do not know anything about how the mind works. I have met scores of ESL/EFL teachers. I can count the number who had ever heard anything about language acquisition theory on one hand. With respect to memory, I have *never* met a teacher who has ever read anything about the forgetting curve, the spacing effect, interleaving, or *anything* about memory discovered in the last 40 years. Applying these concepts to the classroom? Forget about it. It's not even on the radar. And that's not to mention the huge challenge of dealing with the psychology of motivating random groups of (especially young) people.
I will say that in my opinion, it *is* enough to know how to teach and to have a passion for teaching. But I've met a rare few people who fit the bill. Standing up in front of the students and cajoling them through the textbook is *not* "knowing how to teach".
To bring my rant somewhat on topic (although I doubt that the OP will ever read this deeply), I will lay odds that his wife's problems only *appear* to be with her colleagues/superiors. Teaching is hard beyond most people's definition of the word "hard". This bright eyed, bushy tailed, young person thinks that they can teach. But the truth is almost certainly that they suck nearly as badly as all the people around them that they are complaining about.
The key to moving past this point is to ignore the incompetence of others so as to be able to fully concentrate on your own failings. This problem is so difficult that if you allow yourself to get distracted by the circus going on around you that you will never move forward.
The median yearly income in the world is $850 (grabbed from a random google search, but it's probably close). A single year's salary as a senior mainframe programmer is 100 times that. Why is there such a disparity? Where is the justice in the world?
The reality of the situation is that your employer made a profit on your work. I don't actually know about mainframe work, but for software companies, it is normal to operate with less than 10% operating costs as R&D. Then there's overhead and taxes. So for every $1 a programmer makes, the company is pulling in something like $15. They *could* hire some random people off the street and pay them half of what you earn, but they wouldn't be earning the $15 any more. It would be closer to $0.
Football makes ridiculous amounts of money. Football players earn large salaries because the people paying the salaries think they can make a lot more money with those players than they are paying. By and large they are right.
I don't exactly know where this idea that football players or actors "deserve" their riches because their careers are short came from. They get paid a small fraction of what they bring in. Just like you. This whole idea that *anyone* deserves any specific salary is kind of wacky. Does God have some checklist that says, "This person is clever and was lucky enough to be educated, thus I will grant them wealth!" ? You make what somewhat less than the guy hiring you gets for your work. It's not fair. Just like everything else.
My god. How many times have I seen that same sentence over and over and over again. Compilers are extremely complex and take a lot of man-hours to be able to use. Those with the skill to do it generally want to get paid. Then, I think it was spreadsheets. Ummm... After that it was an OS kernel. And then I think WYSIWYG word processor.... Web sever, web browser, 3D modelling software, etc, etc, etc.
It's not just games. Software is complex. It takes a lot of man-hours to do. Currently, we have culture where some people write free software. Quite a few of those people get paid to do it now too. It's great! For a long time software has been ahead of the game in terms of "free culture" (by which I mean the products of creative effort that are freely distributable, not necessarily free of charge). Slowly other areas have been catching up.
Games have historically been difficult to create in a free software project because while there were plenty of programmers around, artists and musicians have been lacking. Game designers have actually been plentiful, but they have been stuck in the modding scene (and often doing incredibly creative work) rather than in new development. This is slowly changing.
The one place where free software game development really needs to improve is in realistic business models. I don't actually know of any full games (rather than engines) built on a free software model that are profitable. With business software, you can charge for support, but with games you can't. I would like to see someone try to do it, possibly using merchandizing, serialization and sponsored development (i.e., Chapter 2 brought to you be Coca Cola). It would take good marketing skills, which is lacking the most in free software development. Mozilla makes $100 million a year and they don't do support. I don't think it's a stretch to think that a decent game could do as well.
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I have an HD6950 which has relatively good horsepower, I guess. I had been using the proprietary driver simply because that's what my distro set up and I've been too lazy to change it. I don't really play games all that often, but I have one or two kicking around. As you mentioned this, I decided to try out the open source driver.
On the plus side, the performance of 2D and video is actually quite a lot better than the proprietary driver. Everything is quick and smooth and no tearing. I had to fiddle with the proprietary driver to get it to look good and it never worked as well as the open source driver does. Some old games work really well. I fired up World of Padman and at full resolution I've got more FPS than I need. I also happened to have World of Goo kicking around. As long as I set the resolution of the game to my normal desktop resolution everything worked great. If it's set to 800x600, the screen gets crushed into an 800x600 block in the center of the monitor, though.
On the down side, I ran Torcs and get pretty significantly reduced frame rate. I didn't have time to fiddle with it, but I think I can probably set up something playable, but with the proprietary driver, I've got FPS to burn. I also tried Ember and it was a total disaster with screen artifacts and serious problems. Dmesg was telling me that the driver was encountering an error. Ember's kind of flaky anyway, but I never ran into these kinds of problems with the proprietary driver.
I wanted to try something under wine, but not being a gamer, I don't really have anything appropriate.
For me, I'm definitely going to stick with the open source driver. For one I get the advantages of free software. But it's also considerably better for every day use. If I were using this machine for games, the open source driver would not be acceptable, I think. It's definitely getting there, but it's not there yet.
I hate to say this, but Obama's election really cemented my view of how deluded the average person is wrt to politics. It's not just American's either. I live in Japan and when Obama was elected it was treated almost as if it was the second coming. He even won a Nobel Peace Prize ostensibly based on what he was *expected* to accomplish. It's crazy.
Before the election somebody asked him what his stance was on the continued bombing of Pakistan. He replied that he was in favour of it. If I'm to understand the situation correctly (and since I don't pay attention, it's quite possible I've got it wrong), it seems that the US gives Pakistan arms in exchange for the permission to drop bombs on Pakistan. This allows the US to assasinate terrorist leaders. (Again, if I've got this wrong, please reply with better info...)
Whether or not you think this is right or wrong, it's blantantly clear that there was never, ever going to be a major shift of foreign policy. This is pretty much business as usual for the US (whether or not you agree with it -- though I will say that the US has a history of this strategy biting them in the ass).
The interesting question for me is whether Obama himself believed that he would significantly change things. He seems like charismatic and relatively effective leader. If he can't make changes, what does that say about the ability of the democratic system to change government policy? If he never believed that he would change things significantly, what does that say about the level of propoganda in US politics?
To be fair, I don't mean to concentrate only on US politics. I could level these suspisions at pretty much any democratically elected government today.
Yeah, it's crazy, but it's just the way it is. My Canadian banks are the same way. No credit card unless I'm resident there. I can lie to them and say I'm living at a friend's place, but it's not worth the hassle. Online banks have the same restrictions as far as I know. If they are not operating in the country that I'm living in, they can't do anything for me. The ones that *do* operate in Japan have the same restrictions. The governments/banks have it all locked up. There is some good reason for it, though. It makes it difficult to launder money from country to country.
I used to do online shopping using Pay Pal, but they've shut me out since my bank is located in Canada and I always access it from Japan. I've been trying to get through to them, but they have been less than helpful. Something like Bitcoin could be very helpful, but I seriously doubt that Bitcoin is it. Putting aside potential scam issues for the moment, I'm not convinced that the transactional costs will be appreciably lower than what the banks are offering. As money volume goes up, the advantage to cheat becomes greater. Thus you need to offer higher transaction fees to build the blocks.
What would be nice is a system that poofed Xcoins into existence *all* the time to cover transaction fees, dependent on the volume going through. This would also ensure that the system was inflationary. The problem is that you can't do that with a computer. Eventually you overflow.
Not to beat a dead horse, but every time I look at Bitcoin (whether it is a scam or not) and try to think how an *honest* person building the same system would build it, I run into serious problems like the above. It's quite an interesting problem, and whether it is a scam or not, Bitcoin contains some interesting ideas.
Or am I missing something profound?
Probably.
Functional programming leads to a completely different set of coding idioms. These can be very convenient in many applications. Since it is not the kind of programming that most people are used to, it can be awkward at first. There are a lot of things that are much more elegant and obvious when done this way, but you have to get over the barrier of thinking procedurally first. I would say that it isn't simply that hard core CS types like the aesthetics of functional programming. I think it's more that, being hard core CS types, they are exposed to functional programming and once the get immersed find it easier to express what they want to say.
Of course there is nothing really stopping you from writing functional code in any language. It's just that notationally, functional languages make it much easier. In the same way, you could write object oriented code in any language, but the verbosity would negate it's usefulness.
Personally, I don't think a programmer's education is complete without achieving some level of fluency in functional programming. Personally, I sadly lack any competence at all and I really should spend more time practicing.
And bitcoin was (presumably) written by a Japanese guy. As it happens I live in Japan. You're arguing that this kind of service is not needed because you, as an American, do not need it.
To be honest, the only reason I replied was because I've seen other posts by you and (apart from Bitcoin) I've found you to be an intelligent and reasoning person. This is the second time I've responded to you on this subject only to have you pawn me off with an argument that equates to "Well, I really don't care about you because your opinion differs from mine". It's probably a huge waste of my time trying to get you to see this, but you never know.
I'm happy to be corrected if I've made an error, but I'm not quite understanding your point. I had no interest in the example just to keep it simple.
The idea is that if I make enough money to be able to afford paying back 0.1Y in year 1 values, since the currency is deflating my ability to pay back (numerically) diminishes. I keep making the same amount of value, but the numerical amount of money I receive diminishes.
Essentially, I have to pay the interest rate *and* the deflation rate in order to pay off the loan. It's not impossible, but is makes borrowing considerably less attractive.
You seem to be looking at one small part of Chomsky's work and assuming that is the entirety of it. There is hardly a paper published in the field of language acquisition (i.e., Humans learning human languages) that does not somehow refer back to Chomsky's work. I mean the work other than formal grammar theory.
Seriously, the guy was all over the place. Personally, I think it's a stretch to say that he reinvented linguistics. There were a lot of people involved. But there is really no denying that linguistics and language acquisition theory was completely completely restructured and he was a key part of it.
The banks in my country won't issue me any kind of credit card (secured or not) until I become a landed immigrant. The banks in my country of origin won't issue me any kind of credit card (secured or not) unless I am resident in the country.
I'm very happy that you are easily able to do online monetary transactions. Not everybody is you. That is why some people would really welcome a way to do electronic transactions without the intervention of a bank. Sure not everybody needs it, but some do.
I've never understood this argument, so perhaps you can explain it to me. Let's say I want worms for fishing. I have a buddy with a farm that is just crawling with worms. He really likes gumdrops. Everytime I ask him for worms, he says I can have them in exchange for gumdrops. This goes on for quite some time and I start to trust that I can get worms from the guy if I give him gum drops. So I stock some gum drops all the time, just in case I suddenly want to go fishing. Maybe you don't want to say that gum drops are a currency, but surely in this scenario gum drops have value (they are worth X worms).
In the same vein, if I want to buy drugs from the Silk Road or whatever, they want Bitcoins. It doesn't matter how many gold dubbloons I have in my house; I can't email them to the guys who are going to ship me drugs. The gold is worthless in this siuation and the Bitcoins have real value (X bitcoins are worth Y drugs).
In both scenarios, the value is risky. My buddy may suddenly stop liking gumdrops. The Silk Road may get taken down by the FBI. Then my stock of gum drops and Bitcoins is worthless. But they still have value until that point.
The argument that it doesn't have value unless you can pay your taxes wih it baffles me. I don't see how it is connected at all. I can't pay my taxes in saffron, but saffron is incredibly valuable to some people.
Bitcoin has value to some people. This is obvious because people are paying money for them. Actually quite a lot of money is exchanged for Bitcoin every day. They don't hold much value for me since I don't want the things you can buy with them, but that doesn't make them valueless. I tend to agree that Bitcoins will not become popular enough to be as widely accepted as other forms of currency, but that doesn't make them valueless.
Finally, while I touched on it briefly before, the reason why you don't want to use silver or gold is because you can't do electronic transfers of silver or gold with very low fees and without the intervention of banks.
Inflation is a feature not a bug. In fact, you have listed the main benefits yourself without realizing it.
Imagine a world where your currency didn't devalue. Let's take an extreme example, where your currency actually increased in value. Sounds great, doesn't it? Put money under your mattress and in 10 years time it's worth a lot more than when you got it. Except, how would that work? Let's say that the world produces an amount of goods and services which we'll call X. Let's say we have a perfect economy where people receive money equivalent to the goods and services they produce -- also X. So in year 1 we sell all our goods and services and have X dollars.
The next year we don't produce any more money since we don't want it to devalue. Everyone is expecting the currency to go up in value so they save 10% of what they earned (0.1X) and spend 90% (0.9X). Since there is less money for the same amount of goods, this means that the currency goes up in value. Hurray! Everyone again saves 10%. Now there is 0.19X saved and 0.81X in circulation. Let's do this for 10 years. At that point we have about 0.65X in savings and about 0.35X in ciculation. And the currency is worth nearly 3 times it's original. Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Let's spend our savings!
But the entire output of the economy is 0.35X and we have 0.65X in savings to spend. If we spend it, it causes the value of the currency to crash dramatically. The problem is that the currency value was being kept artificially high by limiting its availability. As soon as we want to spend it, we're in big trouble.
The point of a currency from an economic point of view is to ease trade. If you can not get access to the resources you need, you can't produce. We want to distribute as much money as we can to people who can use it to produce something. Saving (some call it "hording" to distinguish it from investing) causes massive problems when you reintroduce the money into the economy. So you want to encourage people to either spend or invest money rather than putting it under a mattress.
Another major issue is borrowing. If you have a job to do but do not have the resources you need, you won't produce value. If you have money, you can buy the resources. What do you do if you don't have money? Ideally we want to be able to borrow the money. Remember we want as many people as possible to have money if they are able to use it productively. What happens if we have a currency without inflation?
Let's say I borrowed Y on year one. In the first year I can afford to pay back 0.1Y. But in the second year there is less currency around (people are saving) so I can only pay back 0.09Y. The next, I can only pay 0.081Y, etc etc. By year 10 I can only pay back 0.035Y. I'm paying back the same amount of value each year, but since the currency is deflating, I get to a point where I may never be able to pay back the loan fully.
To avoid this problem, people will avoid borrowing money. This means that they will not be productive and society suffers.
Deflationary currencies are extremely bad. Currencies with moderate inflation are exactly what we want. Our current fiscal problems do not come from the inflationary nature of the currency. They come because of bad loans. Money was lent to people who were not going to be productive with the money (for example they simply invested it in an overstocked property market that was at the height of it's price). Our problems really *are* due to unscrupulous and stupid commercial banks. It is highly regretteble that we were forced to bail out most of them. It is even more regrettable that the average voter can not understand the issue well enough to ensure that the government doesn't allow it to happen again.
Ha ha! Your post is awesome for the first three paragraphs and then you totally lose me ;-)
But I just wanted to interject one small thing. Getting paid up front is a really good idea, but it goes a little bit beyond this. It's more like LEAN production. Traditional software producers operate in a push fashion. In other words, they build something and then they go around trying to convince customers to buy it. Even if they get money upfront (from an investor for instance), they operate in push mode. Some PGM sits in his cubicle and imagines what people are likely going to buy. This is problematic in more ways than just when the money comes in.
Ideally you want to be operating in a pull fashion. You want customers pulling the product from you. They have a need. They have money. You supply the solution and receive the money. The problem with software from a LEAN production point of view is that the turn-around time from customer-pull to when you can actually deliver can be large. Usually customers have a problem that they want solved now, not 6-18 months from now.
Going from push to pull has the potential for seriously reducing wasted effort on a team, but you have to deal with the turn-around time problem. There are some models that deal with that implicitly (custom development, support, etc), but it's a problem for a lot of other models.
Here's a tip: When ESR talks about "open source" software, he's talking about the same thing as when RMS talks about "Free Software,"
He's essentially talking about the same thing, but there are one or two subtle differences (unless he's changed his mind recently). When RMS talks about "Free Software", he's looking at it from a customer protection point of view (I'll try to avoid the M word since it inflames the situation). If the customer receives the software but is unable to exercise the 4 freedoms, it's potentially bad. ESR has historically discussed open source from a more pragmatic point of view. Open source leads to more efficient development, and engaging users in the process leads to lots of good opportunities.
Where the two have historically fallen out is on issues where the customer is not completely protected, but where development is still proceeding openly. I hesitate to present an example, because I don't want to put words in other people's mouths. However, if you look at some of the non-reciprocal OSI approved licenses, perhaps you can get an idea. RMS would say it isn't free software since a company could take a contributor's code and make a non-free project, but the reverse is not true.
This is actually the first time I've seen ESR post about the dangers of non-open source software, so I wonder if it's indicating a shift in his stance.
This is a serious problem with free software game developers. I've given some thought to it and here are a few ideas:
1) Serial content. While I would do it very differently, take a look at Mine Craft for an example. It is not open source, but he was charging $5 a pop for an unfinished game. The initial stages were compelling and there was an obvious desire for the game to be improved. Write a small kernel of a game and do various kickstarter like initiatives to add more and more.
2) Sell merchandise. Essentially the same business model as online comics or CC music. Charge for mugs, T-shirts, whatever. Probably you will have to trademark some things.
3) Sponsored development. This is similar to Serial content, but your money comes from advertisers, not users. Have regular development sprints (weekly would be great, but maybe you could make do with monthly too). Each version (or capability add-on, or extended story, or whatever) is named after the advertiser.
4) In game advertising. Actual items/enemies/whatever are named after or resemble some advertiser's logo/product. If it's a 3D game, have actual advertising billboards in the back ground. For many games there will be unobtrusive ways to do this.
5) Special paid versions. Offer special versions on actual physical media with merchandise. Offer various vanity options -- name in the credits, character name, etc. Note this has to be a physical thing. With free software anyone can change the names of the characters ;-)
The challenges to these types of funding are numerous. First you need to be consistent. Nobody will pay for serialized content unless they are absolutely sure that the next one is coming. Ideally, you should find a way to do micro-payments, but failing that offer subscriptions (i.e., $15 for a year). You should probably offer paid subscribers special benefits like a fast download option, ability to vote on new features, etc, etc. You also need to spend money on sales and marketing in order to get advertising, etc.
It's a good point, but commit logs are quite dense to the average user. I've been thinking about this wrt to my own project (not that it's popular in any way ;-) ). Communicating what you are planning to do, what you are actually doing, and what has been accomplished is really important when you start accepting money. Keeping the user engaged is incredibly important. But it's easy to overwhelm them with detail.
I wish I could mod up the AC's reply to this. Instead I'll chip in as well. The key really is the avoidance of business models that prevent the user from helping themselves or their neighbours with a problem. It's not that the original author shouldn't be compensated for their work/risk, but that denying the customers the 4 freedoms is a poor way to ensure payment.
Like the AC, I tend to prefer business models that charge for time. Even when I was working for large proprietary software companies, my interaction with the people paying me was essentially free software. I even gave my employers the copyright for everything I wrote. They could do whatever they wished. This kind of work-for-hire, payment-up-front is one way to write free software. Often the customer doesn't care about the software so much as they care about the solution to their problem. If free software is used/developed, the development cost goes down. This is how Cygnus software worked with the GCC tool chain. By the time they were bought by Red Hat for $600 million, they were making $130 million a year in contracts (that's from memory -- if you want to you can check with the SEC filings at the time of the purchase).
Other business models are possible. Mozilla works essentially for advertising. Google has historically been paying them something like $100 million a year for the search bar (which is, in turn, funded by advertising). The nice thing about Mozilla is that they can spend virtually all their money on development since the extensive sales force you need in traditional software companies is completely unneeded. Apache works from payments from their member companies. Other projects are funded by corporations who keep a few developers on staff for that project -- essentially reducing the price they would have to pay by sharing it across many companies.
To me, this last strategy is likely the most compelling. Most software companies run with less than 10% of their operating costs being R&D (including R&D management and sometimes support). The rest is sales, marketing, and other infrastructure. When you take profit into consideration, companies like MS are using much more than 90% of the money they receive for sales in MS Office on resources not related to the development of MS Office. Open source software *should* be able to take advantage of reduced distribution and sales costs to seriously undercut the competition while still producing more software. I haven't seen many serious attempts to do so yet (Cygnus notwithstanding), though.
Well, clearly, that's because majority of the users don't care.
And I agree with you: for the nearly thirty years that the GNU project has been running, free software advocates have failed to convince end users to care.
Clearly some people care, otherwise this thread wouldn't have hundreds of messages of people flaming back and forth.
But it's still an interesting point, if a little over the top. I work as a teacher in Japan right now and we just had our school festival. My students wanted to have a stereo set up with music playing. The school doesn't have money to pay the fees for playing mainstream music in a public place. Instead I downloaded a whole bunch of Creative Commons music and played that instead. Everyone was happy and the students enjoyed the music.
The interesting part was that the license was CC-By-NC, so I had to give credit to the artists. The license is a little unclear about public performance, so I decided to make a poster explaining why we couldn't just play mainstream music, what CC licenses were and where you could download CC music. I also listed all the artists that contributed the music that we were playing.
The principal saw the poster and made the comment, "Oh it doesn't really matter. Everybody downloads music anyway. I don't see the point of this CC music".
He really didn't care if the music was CC or not. He really didn't care if we were breaking the law or not. The fact that this was the only legal way we could afford to do what we did was lost on him. This is also true of the average person wrt to software. Of the people I know who have Photoshop on their computer, not one of them has paid for it. They don't care.
Does that mean it's not important?
The way people deal with software these days is very organic. Most people pirate the software. If it's convenient (especially if they can download it), they may pay for it. But if they have to go to the store, it's a good bet that they will download it. If they have a problem with the software, they ask their techy friends to solve it. I don't know about you, but I can't fix any problems in Photoshop or Word or the like. I *have* fixed problems in the Gimp and Open Office when friends asked me. My friends were very happy.
Do average people care about free software? No, I don't think they do. Is it important. Yes, I think it is.
I'm not going to try to defend people who are jumping to conclusions about your motives, but I will try to explain my impression of why someone would get upset with your posting. The topic of this article is the potential dangers of using non-open sourced software. You didn't address the actual issue at all. Instead you posted an anecdote of how you get video artifacts in Linux, implying that Linux is unusable for the average person.
I actually spent some time googling around, with the limited information you described to see if I could find *anything* even remotely similar happening to anyone else. I found no mention of it. Whatever problem you are having is obviously very rare. I can easily point to similar rare problems with Windows or OSX. In fact, I have a laptop whose networking stopped working after I did a Windows Update. Probably I could fix it if I cared, but since 99.999% of the time I run Linux on it, I really don't care if something in Windows doesn't work.
Linux, BSD, Android and other open source platforms work acceptably well for millions of people. I'm sorry that you are having problems with your video card under Linux, but it doesn't really make a convincing argument that opens source software is unsuitable. Neither does my networking problem under Windows say anything at all about non-open source software.
What is frustrating about posts like yours is that it buries a potentially interesting conversation about the benefits and trade offs open source development with anecdotal complaints. For every one of your complaints about Linux not working for you, I can come up with an equally compelling (i.e., not compelling at all) complaint about Windows or OSX. Some people believe that the entire purpose of these anecdotal complaints is to bury intelligent discussion about open source development. This is why people are calling you an astroturfer. Even if I take your word that you are not, the effect of your posts is the same.
If you would like to have people respond in a more positive way, it would be great if you would address the points raised in TFA. I don't care if you agree or disagree. In fact, I like seeing intelligent responses that differ from my point of view. It is too bad that your original post was modded up so highly simply because people agreed with your complaint. It really should have been modded -1 Off topic IMHO. Feel free to disagree with me, but at least try to reference the TFA while doing so.
.Net is not my programming platform of choice, but I've actually implemented a SIP softphone for Windows Mobile in .Net (We're talking something like 7 years ago). I had no performance problems at all. I was careful with memory (memory pools, etc), but in terms of writing embedded code, I did nothing out of the ordinary. At the time .Net was not well supported on Windows Mobile (and maybe never got supported, for all I know -- after the project I've never used it again). I had problems with Visual Studio and Windows Mobile itself (a crappier embedded OS, I have never seen before...), but .Net was never a problem for me. I even made a mono port for Linux so that I could work using that platform (my preferred development platform).
People are too religious when it comes to development platforms. Unless you've worked extensively with it, it's actually pretty difficult to tell how good or bad it's going to be. Your experience running Hello, World in a desktop environment is really not related to working on an embedded device. Java suffers from the same misconceptions. Everything depends on the run time code.
If someone were to pay me, I would happily work with .Net again. I've worked with far more difficult systems.
My observations of old people are they either give up intentionally, the brain freezes up, and they're hopeless, or they keep using the brain and they're more focused than a 20-something.
My observation of me (at 44) is that no matter what I do, my brain is not as agile as it was when I was younger. The main problem is memory. You can train memory to a certain degree, but for me, anyway, it seems to be slowly fading away. When I was in my twenties, I could easily keep the structure of several hundred thousand lines of code in my head. I can not do that any more and I have to rely on notes.
The next biggest problem is stamina. If I'm coding all day long I get sleepy. I can get a good 8-10 hours but after that I need a nap. I remember one time as a teenager hacking for an entire weekend without sleep. That is utterly impossible for me now.
Having said that, the older me is many times more valuable than the younger me. When I was younger, I could easily pick out things that "sucked". I would ineffectually rant and rave about how crappy everything was. I would have grandiose plans for making everything great. But half of those plans were naively wrong and the other half were ignored by people annoyed by my arrogance. My biggest skill right now is in helping a team head towards success while empowering others and keeping morale high.
On the technical side, not only do I have much better design sense, I have patience. I am methodical now because I have to be. I am aware of what I am doing and why I am doing it. I've replaced my hotshot asshole programming style with humble coding.
I've actually been out of the industry for about 5 years (teaching) and I'm looking to get back to it. I don't think that I will ever be the "alpha coder" on a top team any more -- that's a role for the young. I don't care if I'm scoring the goals or setting them up -- I'm interested only in success, not personal glory. I honestly believe that every team needs a couple of gray headed guys like me to balance the primadonas.
I think many people are overlooking one important thing from the OP's post. They sell programming tools. The level of knowledge necessary to sell the tool depends a lot on what the tool is. If it's a text editor, then you need very little knowledge of programming. Even a refactoring browser would be fairly easy. But what if the company were selling static analysis tools for C and C++? Maybe along with profiling tools?
If this were the case I can imagine a lot of awkward conversations as the sales person describes features without the faintest idea why they are useful (or, indeed, what they are used for). There comes a point where someone has to have some experience with the thing to be able to sell it. In sales they say that you must sell the sizzle and not the steak. But if you have never even heard the sizzle before, it's a hard sell.
I agree with the idea that you need to pair a traditional sales person with a personable programmer. The programmer need not be top drawer. They simply have to go to the potential client, demonstrate the product, answer questions, be able to refer difficult questions back to the core team, etc, etc. The sales guy is just the closer. They don't need to know anything about the product at all, practically.
I have been a programmer for 20 years and a high school teacher for 5 years. Teaching requires way more talent and knowledge than programming. Teaching is *not* standing up in front of a bunch of kids and reading out of the textbook (much as your previous teachers may have made it seem so). Technical ability in the subject matter is such a small part of the job that it doesn't even register with me. Teaching is finding a way help your students succeed in their dreams. This despite your students often being determined not to succeed. Or despite your students being confused about what they want. Or despite your students being convinced that things that kill them are a good idea. Or despite your students being so mentally abused by their families that they are just barely able to function at all. Or despite your students having mental disabilities (diagnosed/treated or not). Trust me, the problems are endless. And debugging is messy to say the least.
The problem is that people settle for teachers that are neither talented nor knowledgable. Let me put it another way. Imagine your favorite sports team hiring anybody who has a knowledge of the rules of the game and a year or two of coaching school at a university. How well would the team function? What is the difference between that and a *really* good coach? That's the difference (or more) that your children are missing out on.
It is definitely possible that she is working for the wrong employer. There are good jobs and bad jobs in every field.
I posted something similar above, but I wanted to try to make this point somewhere that the OP may have a chance of seeing it. From the little that is written in the summary, I would guess that the problem is likely to persist even with a different employer.
I teach English in high school in Japan. I'm not a regular teacher. I'm designated an assistant and I have no way of becoming a regular teacher in the near future because of the way licensing is done in Japan. Essentially your have to have better Japanese than the average adult, and while I am fluent, I'm not there yet. Even though I am officially an assistant, I pretty much teach classes the way the other teachers do and have a lot of freedom. But in terms of "support", I'm lucky if I don't get people actively working against me. I'm an outsourced foreign worker, working for half the pay that the local workers get. You can do the math. Nobody wants me there other than the bean counters.
The key phrases I get from the summary are "more challenging than expected" and "deal with a bunch of criminals as students".
Teaching is very hard. I also worked 20 years as a programmer and was very good at it. Programming is hard. Teaching is *very* hard. To make matters worse, the vast majority of teachers are completely ignorant of their craft. As I pointed out in another post, they never, ever read scientific literature on memory, learning, acquisition of knowledge or the like. They are working with concepts that were thrown out more than half a century ago. The materials they have to work with are by and large terrible. I've literally had to write all my own textbooks (and the bloody school board, who owns the copyright, won't give me a license...)
But the worst part is that virtually every teacher is unaware of their problems. They complain endlessly about other teachers, the staff, the students, but they very rarely point the finger at themselves. I'm not trying to be unkind with this. Teaching is *very* hard. I have met teachers that have a few things working well. I have yet to meet even one that has mastered the craft. I've been doing this 5 years now and I've just got my feet wet. To get good at this... Well, it's going to take a lot more time.
No matter how much "support" you get from the administration; no matter what kind of angels you have as students; in the end you are up there alone with your students. It is your relationship with each individual student that is key. They must trust you. Trust is something that can never be asked for. It is only given when someone genuinely wants to do so. You need to give them reasons why they should believe in you (part of that is knowing exactly what will be effective for each and every student in the class). You need to give them reasons why they should rely on you (part of that is never, ever betraying them). You need to show that you can do it (part of that is not relying on "support").
The bullshit *around* teaching is terrible. The politics are insane. But none of it matters in the classroom. Forget the bullshit and concentrate on how you're going to become a better teacher. Don't expect it to happen quickly. It is a shame that some students will suffer from your mistakes, but they are better off with a teacher who is aware of their mistakes and putting everything they have into improving.
I teach English in a Japanese high school. In my opinion, the teaching aspect of the job is orders of magnitude more difficult than the English aspect of the job.
The problem is not mastery of the subject. It's just not required. The problem is that most teachers do not know anything about how the mind works. I have met scores of ESL/EFL teachers. I can count the number who had ever heard anything about language acquisition theory on one hand. With respect to memory, I have *never* met a teacher who has ever read anything about the forgetting curve, the spacing effect, interleaving, or *anything* about memory discovered in the last 40 years. Applying these concepts to the classroom? Forget about it. It's not even on the radar. And that's not to mention the huge challenge of dealing with the psychology of motivating random groups of (especially young) people.
I will say that in my opinion, it *is* enough to know how to teach and to have a passion for teaching. But I've met a rare few people who fit the bill. Standing up in front of the students and cajoling them through the textbook is *not* "knowing how to teach".
To bring my rant somewhat on topic (although I doubt that the OP will ever read this deeply), I will lay odds that his wife's problems only *appear* to be with her colleagues/superiors. Teaching is hard beyond most people's definition of the word "hard". This bright eyed, bushy tailed, young person thinks that they can teach. But the truth is almost certainly that they suck nearly as badly as all the people around them that they are complaining about.
The key to moving past this point is to ignore the incompetence of others so as to be able to fully concentrate on your own failings. This problem is so difficult that if you allow yourself to get distracted by the circus going on around you that you will never move forward.
The median yearly income in the world is $850 (grabbed from a random google search, but it's probably close). A single year's salary as a senior mainframe programmer is 100 times that. Why is there such a disparity? Where is the justice in the world?
The reality of the situation is that your employer made a profit on your work. I don't actually know about mainframe work, but for software companies, it is normal to operate with less than 10% operating costs as R&D. Then there's overhead and taxes. So for every $1 a programmer makes, the company is pulling in something like $15. They *could* hire some random people off the street and pay them half of what you earn, but they wouldn't be earning the $15 any more. It would be closer to $0.
Football makes ridiculous amounts of money. Football players earn large salaries because the people paying the salaries think they can make a lot more money with those players than they are paying. By and large they are right.
I don't exactly know where this idea that football players or actors "deserve" their riches because their careers are short came from. They get paid a small fraction of what they bring in. Just like you. This whole idea that *anyone* deserves any specific salary is kind of wacky. Does God have some checklist that says, "This person is clever and was lucky enough to be educated, thus I will grant them wealth!" ? You make what somewhat less than the guy hiring you gets for your work. It's not fair. Just like everything else.
My god. How many times have I seen that same sentence over and over and over again. Compilers are extremely complex and take a lot of man-hours to be able to use. Those with the skill to do it generally want to get paid. Then, I think it was spreadsheets. Ummm... After that it was an OS kernel. And then I think WYSIWYG word processor.... Web sever, web browser, 3D modelling software, etc, etc, etc.
It's not just games. Software is complex. It takes a lot of man-hours to do. Currently, we have culture where some people write free software. Quite a few of those people get paid to do it now too. It's great! For a long time software has been ahead of the game in terms of "free culture" (by which I mean the products of creative effort that are freely distributable, not necessarily free of charge). Slowly other areas have been catching up.
Games have historically been difficult to create in a free software project because while there were plenty of programmers around, artists and musicians have been lacking. Game designers have actually been plentiful, but they have been stuck in the modding scene (and often doing incredibly creative work) rather than in new development. This is slowly changing.
The one place where free software game development really needs to improve is in realistic business models. I don't actually know of any full games (rather than engines) built on a free software model that are profitable. With business software, you can charge for support, but with games you can't. I would like to see someone try to do it, possibly using merchandizing, serialization and sponsored development (i.e., Chapter 2 brought to you be Coca Cola). It would take good marketing skills, which is lacking the most in free software development. Mozilla makes $100 million a year and they don't do support. I don't think it's a stretch to think that a decent game could do as well.