Why must you make it into a "we the indians have such a broad and deep view of the world and you stupid americans are so shallow". It's very defensive and attacking the messenger is always the best way to prove you are right . You like it, go and live in india, but most people from india that I know were more than happy to leave.
I still find it wrong that US jobs are being sent overseas, it hurts the economy in the long run, but I wouldn't know that in my limited view...
You: All other indian PhDs are working for large US companies in US and making 200k+ a year, and have a huge house and with 5 cars, yet you are taking a sweatshop job and agree to minimal pay? What was that PhD in again?
You really don't know how indian companies work do you... how about having black lists for people who switch jobs or people who take US jobs (to make sure they don't get work when they return), their equivalent of affirmitive actions (which can get violent when discussed in certain company), officials and police expect to be bribed, government only caring about laws that benefit its citizens and companies, not allowing foreigners to work in their country, etc... it's pretty ugly there...
Executives ofte cut positions to make sure that the company meets the quarterly goals which will allows them to receive the obscene bonus. The issue here is that cutting jobs to get their bonus is not possible as IT people are needed to make sure the company does its job. The current fad is to replace current US workers with foreign workers that can be payed a lot less. However, there are many hidden costs with that (mostly job done incorrectly and not to spec). I have been involved in many outsourced projects (as a subject matter expert) and it took me twice as much effort to get them to understand what is required and how to do it efficiently... and in almost every case the code was subpar and buggy and followup cleanup projects had to be scheduled with in-house staff which costs them more overall, but the projects are rated individually and the outsourced version 1.0 was extremely cheap to produce (example of one of the more recent projects is 4.5 million) as opposed to inhouse estimate (same project was 6 million); what was not counter was that the followup to cleanup the mess cost them 3 million and here the outsourced project wound up costing 7.5 million and took 50% longer, but since the executives usedtheir funny math and spin it looked like they actually saved money for the company instead of losing it and I am sure they got their insane bonuses while I had to work weekend to help explain what the specs mean to some underqulified foreign workers (the qualified/smart foreign workers were smart enough to get hired by US companies and move here on H1B, the not so smart are what we pay when we outsource).
If I had to train my own replacement I would definitely do the worst possible job just meeting minimum reqiurements (just what most executives have done in their decisions).
There are way too many "Web 2.0 sucks and I hate it, but I don't know what it is and I don't care" posts... Ignore it all you want, it isn't going anywhere and it will only make you more replaceable. People dismissed the web in the early 90s, it didn't go anywhere it only made all those novell certified engineers obsolete...
It wasn't even a good movie, couldn't they at least wait for X-Men 3.
This does bring up an interesting point, RIAA and MPAA are so busy suing average folk in the US that they don't really make any serious efforts against the huge pirates in China. Chinese pirates will continue to go about ripping off movies and software because the Chinese government would rather side with its people than some evil foreign capitalist organization.
Unicode is a sore on the face of programming. UTF-8 may not be superoptimal but it definitely makes life a lot easier when dealing with L11N and I15N. This is more than just "Speak English Or Die" mentality, it's more of efficiency and in many cases ASCII is more than adequate for the program, yet it has to cater to double size characters that eat up memory with pretty little zeros everywhere.
I too have played and loved AD&D during the 80s and early 90s. It was a great way to hang out with freinds, run some encounters, drink beer, watch some porn, kill a few more things, eat, drink some more beer, watch some more porn, drink some more beer, argue over rolls, threaten DM for fixing combat and encounters, getting pissed off for rolling on treasures and getting yet another useless potion, and so on.
Those were great times that will be with me throughout my life, something my kids may never experience (but I am sure they will have their version of it).
Now I was really excited when I got into D&DO beta, I was hoping I would get into some groups, encounter monsters and puzzles and such. Got some free weekend time, installed it, got a 2 6-packs of beer (Dinkelaker just like in the old days), some chips and started playing.
Beer 1: Update started... 40 minutes to go...
Beer 2, 3, 4: Watched episode of ST:TNG, "A fistful of datas", 45 minutes...
Beer 5: Finally I am in, create an elf fighter and enter the world.
Beer 6: Done with tutorials and took the boat, seems like a reasonable game. So far, trying to get a group but no luck. Lots of people in the inn standing around many AFK. Video card feeling a bit of strain, but nothing serious. Talked to the few NPCs in the inn and got my initial quest and finish it quickly.
Beer 7: Get a followup quest. Opening doors all is well, found some mushrooms. Ooh enemy I see, I shoot some arrows only get 1 shot before the enemy gets too close so I switch to short sword and the fight begins, it requires active fighting and blocking and dodging. Well I am at half health and enemy is dead... health bar not moving, maybe I should stand for a bit and gain health back.
Beer 8: Health is not back after 10 minutes.. maybe there is no HP regen. Another fight later I am at 20% health, use up a potion to heal some back. Continue exploring and enter a room with ladder down and ladder up with few more enemies. One on top is stuck and unable to come down so after killing one near me I navigate the ladder slowly and eventually get up there and kill it. Health at maybe 5%.
Beer 9: I run back to the rest shrine (almost didn't find it), rest to 100%. Climb down the stairs and get attacked by another enemy. Using blocks and swinging in-between attacks I kill it and lose 30% health. Next room has yet another enemy and after killing it barely I am at 20% health. I find some room, finish objective and have to kill some crazy guy as the whole place is falling apart. I run into him on the way back, get one-hit and killed...
Beer 10: Roll a bard and get frustrated during tutorial. I hate not having any HP/MP regen. I can't tell the DM, "lets have a shot and make beleive we just rested"... Roll a cleric (so I can heal myself). Well healing self is great but now I run out of mana.
Beer 11: Exit AD&DO. Start City Of Heroes, use my tanker, run into a group of 8 enemies and defeat them all. Energy and Health returns in 10 seconds and I am ready for more... wow what a difference, no real downtime.
Beer 12: Uninstall AD&DO... watch some ST:V on DVR... get a sad feeling that the good old AD&D days are really gone forever.
Who's bright idea was it to put all these downtimes and annoyances into D&DO? AD&D was a social dice game and it does not translate well into the MMORPG world.
My advice, save your money, D&DO sucks, buy more beer with that money:)
I am not sure why you think the time spent waiting on health/mana is acceptable and to make things worse you can only use the rest stone once per instance. This game is a snoozefest. I played during beta and honestly after 10 minutes of boredom, I quickly switched to CoH and WoW which more so fast compared to AD&DO that it looks like it is standing still.
I'll give RoR another shot without using the WebBrick, I usually use Apache, so it should fit just fine.
The problem I had with rubyforge was that I got code that did xslt, but it was buggy and failed to transform some basic templates that I worked fine with xalan and ms-xslt engines. So I spent a few hours tracking it does to realize that it was a bug in the library I downloaded which soured me to it as I was able to do the same task with python in 5 lines of code. I do not remember what the libarry was called but this was a year ago, and while I am sure there is a lot of bug free code there, when doing script development I need things to work fast and not have to worry about bugs in the library. When I get library bugs with python is when I stop relying on it so much.
The libraries available to Ruby and not as extensive as Python, I didn't mean language specifics, sorry if I was unclear.
I am a hardcore C++ developer with a lot of Java, so for me Ruby and Python are used for the same position: scripting. Python libraries are very extensive and complete for almost everything I want in a scripting language (even more so than java). Ruby is still a relatively new langugae and the libraries are just not powerful enough (yet...). Withpython I can post to newgroups, send email, do XSLT, generate XML files all with a few lines of code; with ruby I have to do a lot of the work still. I have no doubt Ruby will get there but for now it's still not mature enough.
Like I said, Ruby has excellent constructs for OO development (for a script language); so I have been thinking of a way to embed Ruby into my C++ code to externalize some scripting tasks (Lua is another contender but the documentation to Lua is a bit too obscure and I don't have the time to learn it, Ruby is better documented and easier to get started with).
I can see how Ruby on Rails is meant for portability (I did you the web brick but in release mode), but I personally need performance to handle the load of 100 hits per seconds (not a lot but when I used RoR for the small DB view part it was noticeably slow so I went back to the JSP page, I'll rewrite it in C++ which should solve the performance issue).
So don't misunderstand me, I am not saying Ruby sucks, quite teh contrary, I actually like it a lot and use it when I have a simple script task, but my 1 day with RoR was not too pleasant, which doesn't mean I am going to stop using Ruby.
RoR is pushing this whole codegen thing too much (I personally think codegen is the work of mediocre developers who have ego issues, but that's just me). I used RoR for about a day and wrote a little app then realized that maintenance is a pain and that I would have to manually change all the code anyways to make it behave as I want and that codegen created something I did not want. Then I weighed it against writing sevlets and JSP pages and RoR didn't look so appealing. Ruby is a nice scripting language but I didn't like the architecture of rails. Just not for me. Performance was quite bad too, about 6 times slower than JSP for fetching some data from a database, manipulating it (which is the bulk of the work) and displaying it (given JSP gens compiled into Java and takes advantage of JIT). Ruby is a nice language though, but it's not as useful as python. So I struggle to find a place where I can use it, maybe it can be nice as a simple embedded script language (similar to Lua).
If asked what I would use to develop a server side app, I would have to look at volume and complexity then go in the order: C/C++ > servlets > JSP/PHP > RoR (from highest volumen/complexity to lowest). For high volume/complexity C/C++ is still the best efficient way to go but not for all, requires more work from the developers and not for average/weak developers. Servlets are a good next step if performance is not extremely important. JSP/PHP is a good way to run a site that doesn't have complex computation or one that is static content based (news, blog, forum, and such). RoR I would use for maybe some prototyping or to build a quick and dirty app to provide a simple view of the database (but even then I would probably lean to PHP). YMMV.
Out of my 3 major credit cards I use AMEX about 90% of the time and 100% online. They are best at handling fraud charges or merchants that do not deliver and as you mentioned it costs more for a merchant to process AMEX and more difficult to get it set up. If a merchant goes through that little trouble then it is a merchant that cares a little about the customer. I have noticed that lots of run-by-night places only use Visa/MC because Visa/MC have turned the blind eye on 3rd party clearing houses that provide checkout services to retailers.
Amex also has least hidden charges, I have been enrolled into some dining plan by my Visa card when I just hung up on a telemarketer pushing the package and Mastercard signed me up for a "protection" racket (I mean plan) when I told a telemarketer to stop bothering me. Ultimately I called both Visa and MC provider and asked them to reduce my cradit limit to 1k each so that even if they do screw up it won't be for anything too major. I wish I could just cancel them both but there are places that don't take Amex (mostly small retailers).
And don't get me started on American Airlines Visa I used to have... I gathered 130,000 miles on it and I can't find any viable tickets, every flight I try to get is either 3 connections or last row that doesn't recline next to the toilets. When I pay cash suddenly I get direct flights with seating in the middle to front and even window seats.
At least Amex miles let me use it to buy concert tickets from Ticketmaster... a tangible reward without hassles:)
It also depends how much you were willing to pay for a good C++ developer. If you are planning on paying 100K in NYC area then you will have a very hard time; that's the going rate. In Silicon Valley it's about 110k and given the cost of living out here, that number is a bit low if you want to even attempt owning a small 2-br fixer-upper house.
Slashdot Mirror
Why must you make it into a "we the indians have such a broad and deep view of the world and you stupid americans are so shallow". It's very defensive and attacking the messenger is always the best way to prove you are right . You like it, go and live in india, but most people from india that I know were more than happy to leave.
I still find it wrong that US jobs are being sent overseas, it hurts the economy in the long run, but I wouldn't know that in my limited view...
You: All other indian PhDs are working for large US companies in US and making 200k+ a year, and have a huge house and with 5 cars, yet you are taking a sweatshop job and agree to minimal pay? What was that PhD in again?
You really don't know how indian companies work do you... how about having black lists for people who switch jobs or people who take US jobs (to make sure they don't get work when they return), their equivalent of affirmitive actions (which can get violent when discussed in certain company), officials and police expect to be bribed, government only caring about laws that benefit its citizens and companies, not allowing foreigners to work in their country, etc... it's pretty ugly there...
Executives ofte cut positions to make sure that the company meets the quarterly goals which will allows them to receive the obscene bonus. The issue here is that cutting jobs to get their bonus is not possible as IT people are needed to make sure the company does its job. The current fad is to replace current US workers with foreign workers that can be payed a lot less. However, there are many hidden costs with that (mostly job done incorrectly and not to spec). I have been involved in many outsourced projects (as a subject matter expert) and it took me twice as much effort to get them to understand what is required and how to do it efficiently... and in almost every case the code was subpar and buggy and followup cleanup projects had to be scheduled with in-house staff which costs them more overall, but the projects are rated individually and the outsourced version 1.0 was extremely cheap to produce (example of one of the more recent projects is 4.5 million) as opposed to inhouse estimate (same project was 6 million); what was not counter was that the followup to cleanup the mess cost them 3 million and here the outsourced project wound up costing 7.5 million and took 50% longer, but since the executives usedtheir funny math and spin it looked like they actually saved money for the company instead of losing it and I am sure they got their insane bonuses while I had to work weekend to help explain what the specs mean to some underqulified foreign workers (the qualified/smart foreign workers were smart enough to get hired by US companies and move here on H1B, the not so smart are what we pay when we outsource).
If I had to train my own replacement I would definitely do the worst possible job just meeting minimum reqiurements (just what most executives have done in their decisions).
First step of not being ignored is not being anonymous...
There are way too many "Web 2.0 sucks and I hate it, but I don't know what it is and I don't care" posts... Ignore it all you want, it isn't going anywhere and it will only make you more replaceable. People dismissed the web in the early 90s, it didn't go anywhere it only made all those novell certified engineers obsolete...
So when is Honda releasing the Fembot that is controlled by brain waves... I have a lot of pronographic brain waves to "test" out!
It wasn't even a good movie, couldn't they at least wait for X-Men 3.
This does bring up an interesting point, RIAA and MPAA are so busy suing average folk in the US that they don't really make any serious efforts against the huge pirates in China. Chinese pirates will continue to go about ripping off movies and software because the Chinese government would rather side with its people than some evil foreign capitalist organization.
For you I have a different script:
while have_time():
read_link_in_article();
A lot more efficient, no?
Metallica's greed caused them to lose a lot of fans, many have been there from day 1... I am one of the fans they lost forever.
Agreed, what a waste of time. http://www.python.org/ would have been a lot more useful, albeit already known by most.
To summorize:
if you want to waste time:
click on link in article
else:
skip to next slashdot article and make believe this one does not exist
Obviously you are not a developer so your opinion is incorrect and uninformed; hence the anonymity.
Wow their CTO is a lot more in touch with development than our CTO... :(
Unicode is a sore on the face of programming. UTF-8 may not be superoptimal but it definitely makes life a lot easier when dealing with L11N and I15N. This is more than just "Speak English Or Die" mentality, it's more of efficiency and in many cases ASCII is more than adequate for the program, yet it has to cater to double size characters that eat up memory with pretty little zeros everywhere.
I still remeber the odd way Yehat spoke and the whole Conclear Shame quest and ... darn I need to istall that game again.
I too have played and loved AD&D during the 80s and early 90s. It was a great way to hang out with freinds, run some encounters, drink beer, watch some porn, kill a few more things, eat, drink some more beer, watch some more porn, drink some more beer, argue over rolls, threaten DM for fixing combat and encounters, getting pissed off for rolling on treasures and getting yet another useless potion, and so on.
:)
Those were great times that will be with me throughout my life, something my kids may never experience (but I am sure they will have their version of it).
Now I was really excited when I got into D&DO beta, I was hoping I would get into some groups, encounter monsters and puzzles and such. Got some free weekend time, installed it, got a 2 6-packs of beer (Dinkelaker just like in the old days), some chips and started playing.
Beer 1:
Update started... 40 minutes to go...
Beer 2, 3, 4: Watched episode of ST:TNG, "A fistful of datas", 45 minutes...
Beer 5:
Finally I am in, create an elf fighter and enter the world.
Beer 6:
Done with tutorials and took the boat, seems like a reasonable game. So far, trying to get a group but no luck. Lots of people in the inn standing around many AFK. Video card feeling a bit of strain, but nothing serious. Talked to the few NPCs in the inn and got my initial quest and finish it quickly.
Beer 7:
Get a followup quest. Opening doors all is well, found some mushrooms. Ooh enemy I see, I shoot some arrows only get 1 shot before the enemy gets too close so I switch to short sword and the fight begins, it requires active fighting and blocking and dodging. Well I am at half health and enemy is dead... health bar not moving, maybe I should stand for a bit and gain health back.
Beer 8:
Health is not back after 10 minutes.. maybe there is no HP regen. Another fight later I am at 20% health, use up a potion to heal some back. Continue exploring and enter a room with ladder down and ladder up with few more enemies. One on top is stuck and unable to come down so after killing one near me I navigate the ladder slowly and eventually get up there and kill it. Health at maybe 5%.
Beer 9:
I run back to the rest shrine (almost didn't find it), rest to 100%. Climb down the stairs and get attacked by another enemy. Using blocks and swinging in-between attacks I kill it and lose 30% health. Next room has yet another enemy and after killing it barely I am at 20% health. I find some room, finish objective and have to kill some crazy guy as the whole place is falling apart. I run into him on the way back, get one-hit and killed...
Beer 10:
Roll a bard and get frustrated during tutorial. I hate not having any HP/MP regen. I can't tell the DM, "lets have a shot and make beleive we just rested"...
Roll a cleric (so I can heal myself). Well healing self is great but now I run out of mana.
Beer 11:
Exit AD&DO. Start City Of Heroes, use my tanker, run into a group of 8 enemies and defeat them all. Energy and Health returns in 10 seconds and I am ready for more... wow what a difference, no real downtime.
Beer 12:
Uninstall AD&DO... watch some ST:V on DVR... get a sad feeling that the good old AD&D days are really gone forever.
Who's bright idea was it to put all these downtimes and annoyances into D&DO? AD&D was a social dice game and it does not translate well into the MMORPG world.
My advice, save your money, D&DO sucks, buy more beer with that money
I am not sure why you think the time spent waiting on health/mana is acceptable and to make things worse you can only use the rest stone once per instance. This game is a snoozefest. I played during beta and honestly after 10 minutes of boredom, I quickly switched to CoH and WoW which more so fast compared to AD&DO that it looks like it is standing still.
Lua is not really like C and I always feel they went out of their way to design it to be just different enought to be annoying to C++ developers.
// Lua: --
/* */ Lua: --[[ ]]
Line comment:
C++:
Block comment:
C++:
NULL value:
C++: NULL Lua: nil
Block:
C++: directive { } Lua: directive end
etc...
They could have used same tags as C++ and made life a bit easier and concept more understandable.
Python is a lot more powerful than Lua and the Python libraries are way more extensive. Just my opinion.
I would recommend Python for beginners hands down.
I'll give RoR another shot without using the WebBrick, I usually use Apache, so it should fit just fine.
The problem I had with rubyforge was that I got code that did xslt, but it was buggy and failed to transform some basic templates that I worked fine with xalan and ms-xslt engines. So I spent a few hours tracking it does to realize that it was a bug in the library I downloaded which soured me to it as I was able to do the same task with python in 5 lines of code. I do not remember what the libarry was called but this was a year ago, and while I am sure there is a lot of bug free code there, when doing script development I need things to work fast and not have to worry about bugs in the library. When I get library bugs with python is when I stop relying on it so much.
The libraries available to Ruby and not as extensive as Python, I didn't mean language specifics, sorry if I was unclear.
I am a hardcore C++ developer with a lot of Java, so for me Ruby and Python are used for the same position: scripting. Python libraries are very extensive and complete for almost everything I want in a scripting language (even more so than java). Ruby is still a relatively new langugae and the libraries are just not powerful enough (yet...). Withpython I can post to newgroups, send email, do XSLT, generate XML files all with a few lines of code; with ruby I have to do a lot of the work still. I have no doubt Ruby will get there but for now it's still not mature enough.
Like I said, Ruby has excellent constructs for OO development (for a script language); so I have been thinking of a way to embed Ruby into my C++ code to externalize some scripting tasks (Lua is another contender but the documentation to Lua is a bit too obscure and I don't have the time to learn it, Ruby is better documented and easier to get started with).
I can see how Ruby on Rails is meant for portability (I did you the web brick but in release mode), but I personally need performance to handle the load of 100 hits per seconds (not a lot but when I used RoR for the small DB view part it was noticeably slow so I went back to the JSP page, I'll rewrite it in C++ which should solve the performance issue).
So don't misunderstand me, I am not saying Ruby sucks, quite teh contrary, I actually like it a lot and use it when I have a simple script task, but my 1 day with RoR was not too pleasant, which doesn't mean I am going to stop using Ruby.
code gen is NOT a compiler or assembler. compiler is a compiler and assembler is an assembler.
this is a code gen (written in pyhton):
import sys;
print "include ";
print "class "+sys.argv[1]+" {";
print "public:";
print " "+sys.argv[1]+"() { std::cout \"I do not trust developers to write good code.\"; }";
print "};";
print "int main() {";
print " "+sys.argv[1]+" myobj;";
print " return 0;"
print "}"
After codegen you then compile/assemble the code.
RoR is pushing this whole codegen thing too much (I personally think codegen is the work of mediocre developers who have ego issues, but that's just me). I used RoR for about a day and wrote a little app then realized that maintenance is a pain and that I would have to manually change all the code anyways to make it behave as I want and that codegen created something I did not want. Then I weighed it against writing sevlets and JSP pages and RoR didn't look so appealing. Ruby is a nice scripting language but I didn't like the architecture of rails. Just not for me. Performance was quite bad too, about 6 times slower than JSP for fetching some data from a database, manipulating it (which is the bulk of the work) and displaying it (given JSP gens compiled into Java and takes advantage of JIT). Ruby is a nice language though, but it's not as useful as python. So I struggle to find a place where I can use it, maybe it can be nice as a simple embedded script language (similar to Lua).
If asked what I would use to develop a server side app, I would have to look at volume and complexity then go in the order: C/C++ > servlets > JSP/PHP > RoR (from highest volumen/complexity to lowest). For high volume/complexity C/C++ is still the best efficient way to go but not for all, requires more work from the developers and not for average/weak developers. Servlets are a good next step if performance is not extremely important. JSP/PHP is a good way to run a site that doesn't have complex computation or one that is static content based (news, blog, forum, and such). RoR I would use for maybe some prototyping or to build a quick and dirty app to provide a simple view of the database (but even then I would probably lean to PHP). YMMV.
Out of my 3 major credit cards I use AMEX about 90% of the time and 100% online. They are best at handling fraud charges or merchants that do not deliver and as you mentioned it costs more for a merchant to process AMEX and more difficult to get it set up. If a merchant goes through that little trouble then it is a merchant that cares a little about the customer. I have noticed that lots of run-by-night places only use Visa/MC because Visa/MC have turned the blind eye on 3rd party clearing houses that provide checkout services to retailers.
:)
Amex also has least hidden charges, I have been enrolled into some dining plan by my Visa card when I just hung up on a telemarketer pushing the package and Mastercard signed me up for a "protection" racket (I mean plan) when I told a telemarketer to stop bothering me. Ultimately I called both Visa and MC provider and asked them to reduce my cradit limit to 1k each so that even if they do screw up it won't be for anything too major. I wish I could just cancel them both but there are places that don't take Amex (mostly small retailers).
And don't get me started on American Airlines Visa I used to have... I gathered 130,000 miles on it and I can't find any viable tickets, every flight I try to get is either 3 connections or last row that doesn't recline next to the toilets. When I pay cash suddenly I get direct flights with seating in the middle to front and even window seats.
At least Amex miles let me use it to buy concert tickets from Ticketmaster... a tangible reward without hassles
Google is the next Microsoft... give it a year or two or when any of their products are not beta...
It also depends how much you were willing to pay for a good C++ developer. If you are planning on paying 100K in NYC area then you will have a very hard time; that's the going rate. In Silicon Valley it's about 110k and given the cost of living out here, that number is a bit low if you want to even attempt owning a small 2-br fixer-upper house.