J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) is a mix of two very different frameworks:
EJBs (Enterprise Java Beans) and related technologies (such as JMS for asynchronous messaging) are backend technologies, aimed at things such as centralized business rules implementation, enterprise application integration, distributed functionality, multi-application interconnection, redundancy, integration with legacy servers and, more in general, big multiple-server/multiple-clients architectures. This stuff has nothing to do with AJAX and never will. It's used for reliable and flexible server-side provision of business functions (for example "Debit single account, credit multiple accounts") and is aimed at being easilly extended to provide extra business functions and cover extra resources (as in, more databases)
JSPs (Java Server Pages - basically web page templates, equivalent to PHP pages) and Servlets (basically the Java equivalent of CGI-scripts) are the web-based user interface support components of J2EE. This stuff is most often used in conjuntion with EJBs, for example, providing a user-interface for the user accessible business functions - this usually happens in an intranet
JSPs and Servlets, with or without EJBs, can be (and are) used for web-based user interfaces on the Internet, although on their own they suffer scalability problems for concurrent access by many users and for speed of prototyping and developement of new features.
They are, however, pretty orthogonal to AJAX since they are server-side technologies. Both an Javascript controlled asynchronous HTTP request comming from a browser and a user triggered browser HTTP request look exactly the same to both JSPs and Servlets - they're just another HTTP request (HTTP/1.1 GET/bla)
Saying that J2EE should be more like AJAX is like saying that PHP should be more like AJAX or that CGI-scripts should be more like AJAX - complete nonsense!!!
Having better architectural support in J2EE for AJAX (for example, for being able to access a server-side business function in Javascript from the browser just as easilly as you can do it from the JSP layer) would be a good thing. However the groundwork need to support this on the server (J2EE) side is already done (it's called Web Services), and thus the biggest part of the work still needed to seamless provide the Javascript/AJAX code running on the browser with access to such remotely hosted business functions is..... on the browser - which means either some enormous complex Javascript libraries or standardized extensions to at least the two maintream browsers.
Just as a reminder, AJAX is the kludge it is because there's so very little standardized functionality in the browser to allow dynamic, localized refreshing on a page of information which is externally hosted.
To wrap things up: server-side support is there already in J2EE that provides, via HTTP, seamless access to business functions hosted in a J2EE server. Whether the requester is a piece of AJAXified-Javascript running on a browser or a batch C application makes no different. As usual, most of the necessary stuff missing, is missing from the browser.
To the writter of the article: Server-side technologies are mature already, AJAX is far from it. Stop demanding that servers are adjusted to serve a single client implementation methodology. If you really want an architecturally sound solution, get up from your fat ass and start coding a Web Services client in Javascript.
Regardless, I'm also among the absolute best programmers you will ever find. Seriously. It's 8pm, I've been here since 9am, and I'm not going to leave tonight until this particular bug is squashed.
Actually what this tells me is that you lack enough experience (read wisdom) to know that overworking was probably what put the bug there in the first place.
Been there (about 7 years ago), just as overworked, briliant and self-assured of my own imcomparable greatness as a programmer.
Guess what - working smart beats working hard everytime: the problem being, you have to have been exposed to all kinds of problems and all kinds of situations (aka experience) before you come to the point where you figure out that the vast majority of software development problems/solutions are just variants of a very small basic problems/solution space (and some people never do figure this out).
Oh, and btw - a lot more time in software development is lost due to inconsistent/incomplete requirements/analysis/design (which cascade into loads of programming hours/days being redone/thrown-away) than to programming faults: this is the reason why nowadays i'm squashing inconsistent requirements, straightening up insufficient analysis and cleaning-up bad designs long before i ever get to the stage of cleaning-up whatever bugs that end up in the code (which are way fewer that 7 years ago).
Eh? The Earth has the same amount of fresh water it's always had and always will. It's a ">closed system and any water you see/drink/urinate now has been around pretty much doing it's thing since forever.
Not exactly. More preciselly "The Earth has the same amount of [word removed] water it's always had and always will".
The water cycle is indeed a closed cycle, so no water is gained and no water is lost.
However the closed water cycle does not in any way guarantee the availability of non-poluted, low salt-content, drinkable water (which is what the GGP meant with "fresh water").
The fresh water problem that the GPP refers to is mostly due to 4 reasons:
A lot of the water has become poluted with industrial/human/domestic-animal waste and is thus unsuitable for human consumption
The distribution of human beings does not match the distribution of fresh water. In other words, there's plenty of fresh, clean water - just not where the people that need it are
Some sources of fresh water have been drying up. Either due to increased temperatures or due to water overuse in agriculture, surface and underground water deposits have become (or are close to becoming) depleted in many places
Water consumption due to population growth (and accompanying growth in agriculture and cattle numbers) has exceeded the capacity of the local water sources - this is a problem, for example, in some areas of Somalia and Ethiopia
Sure, water is still evaporating and falling down from the sky as before - it's just that it's either missing the places where people need it the most or it's not enough (anymore) or it's getting poluted before it reaches those people.
But there you have it. Apparently the Chairwoman at HP is willing to go to great, and illegal lengths, to run the company. Will the shareholders say "hey, wait, maybe having someone at the top who's willing to commit felonies isn't such a great idea"? Only time will tell..
This reminds me of a couple of years ago when the football (soccer if you're an american) club i'm a fan of elected as president a shaddy lawyer character which years before had scammed some persons out of their moeny but somehow managed to sleeaze his way out of ending up in jail (mostly due to his connections).
At the time i thought: "Hey, this guy is a bit of a mobster, but at least he's our mobster".
I believe he's still in jail for defrauding that same football club.
If you have shares in HP, i suggest you keep this story in mind...
Allow me to add a little something that poped-up to my mind today:
This kind of behaviour is tipical of a certain kind of people who hide behind a crowd and lead it to act in ways which solo individuals never would.
- If the crowd is on the streets they're "a mob" and the aboved mentioned people are called "rabble rousers" or "inciters to violence" - If the crowd sits down in buildings they're "a corporation" and the above mentioned people are called "directors"
I strongly suspect that personality-wise the same kind of people are behind inciting a mob to linch someone and deciding not to recall a defective product because it's cheaper to pay the familiy of the victims - the only difference is that some have an MBA and some don't.
It's a strong sign of the decadence of a society when the ones with the MBAs usually get away with a pat on the wrist (and a multi-million dollars golden umbrela).
- If passing through unshielde cables, internal ship comunications, commands and sensor data can be read from a distance using a proper (directional) antena, a good low noise amp, an analog to digital converter (ADC), a notebook and some software.
This might not be an issue if the patrol boat is facing a couple of guys with AK-47s in a rubber boat, but it can be an issue if facing another nation's navy or a drug baron (both of which having the means and the smarts to take advantage of such a vulnerability).
Tempest attacks are only a "tin-foil crowd" thing when we're talking about non-descript individuals shielding their computer screens against "being read from a distance" even if such individuals are highly unlikely to be under surveilance by an organization with the right means and know-how.
It's way more likelly that the right persons (or should i say the wrong persons) are interested in intercepting internal communications of ships used in war or for security purposes (even if they are hardly aircraft carriers) than in reading the porn and unix commands of a non-descript geek with a little too much paranoia.
Or putting things another way, the higher the value of a target, the more likelly it is that complicated, expensive and/or specialized techniques are used against it.
What is best for the economy as a whole (in terms of jobs and the efficiency of producing wealth):
One hit record worth $5M and 100 flops worth $10k each?
100 records worth $100K each?
A DRM enabled world would most likelly cement the position of the current players which mostly go for the first option (since they relly heavilly on marketing and advertising a single album is cheaper than advertising 100)
Another example coming from a pure economic perspective:
Which markets are most efficient (i.e. produce the most value per-invested-dollar):
Those with high barriers to entry (in which the market is typically dominated by a few big players)?
Those with low barriers to entry (in which the market is a constantly changing constelation of players of all sizes)?
Consider that DRM can be used as a barrier to entry (if all music is required to be DRM enabled).
Note that lower barriers to entry mean increased competition which usually means product that compete in price and quality which pressures companies into increasing their efficiency/innovation in order to keep their edge in price/quality.
Also note that in a market with lower barriers to entry, the lame/weak companies are more quickly weaned-out and the resources they were consuming are redirected to the more efficient companies.
If i remember it correctly from my days of playing with POVRay (free raytracing app), the time it took to raytrace an image depended on things like the presence (or not) of semi-transparent, semi-reflective surfaces and on the number of light sources.
If this is still the case, then going from the current rendering techniques in games to raytracing would result in images with more realistic reflections and lighting but, due to performance tradeoffs, few reflective surfaces and light sources.
Besides, at the moment what games need the most is beter AIs and procedurally generated content, not yet another layer of eyecandy that requires gamers to upgrade their hardware (again).
I get the impression there are two factors at work in causing games to be more difficult:
Some games, as the article points, are being designed with a view of helping the sale of strategy guides. This would explain the impossible puzzles (as pointed by some other posters).
Gamers have become more sophisticated. The more puzzles solved and the more clues found, the beter we become at solving puzzles and finding clues. Hence, to present the same level of challenge to today's "been there, done it already" gamers, the newer games have to have different and/or harder puzzles.
I live in Holland and around here bikes are all over the place and it's very common for bycicles to be stollen.
Thus everybody locks their bikes when leaving them outside (for example at the train station). Still, locked bikes also get stollen.
If you leave your bike out around here, the easiest way to NOT have your bikes stollen is..... 2 locks.
Simply put, a bike with 2 locks is not worth the trouble for a thief if right next to it there's a bike with 1 lock (keep in mind the this is happening in an open parking area for bikes filled with more than 100 bikes)
Same principle really, make it less attractive for thiefs to steal your stuff and they'll mostly leave you alone and go for easier targets.
PS: This same principle applies to mugging - people that look and act like victims are more likelly to actually become victims of mugging than those that look confident and unafraid.
I suspect it all depends on what kind of position is someone being interviewed for:
- A programmer should remain familiar with the basic principles of creating code that runs efficiently. A more senior programmer is expected to be efficient at creating such code and to make easier to maintain code.
- A software designer is expected to be aware of the importance of compartimentalization of information and division of responsabilities across the design, and of the tradeoffs between flexibility, maintenability and performance when making a design. A more senior designer should be well versed in communicating the design and the rationale behind it to the developers, and of keeping a record of the accepted and rejected designed decisions and the reasons behind it (such a record can be used latter when changes in requirements might mean that the rationale for choosing a certain design feature instead of another one is now not valid anymore).
- A technical architect is expected to understand the issues of scalability, inter-application connectivity, fallback solutions. He should be capable of defining standards which promote efficiente development, maintenability, robustness and/or lower number of errors, all supported by a well document, internaly consistent rationale. He should be an expert at communicating these solutions to the developers and designers. He should be aware of the development process and ensure that the right tools are chosen/provided for the right job.
[Note: there's a lot more than just this]
Now, if you're interviewing for a technical architect position, which is more important:
Somebody that knows how to reverse a circular linked list out of the top of their heads and can do it in 5 minutes on a whiteboard
Somebody that can hammer down an Interface Requirements Specification for connecting two sub-systems being developed by different contractors
In my experience there's a limited amount of seniority (in knowledge and wisdom) that you can achieve as a programmer before you find out you've turned into a software designer (in all but name) - if you're still selling yourself as a programmer by then (say, because you like programming and can't stand the boring parts of software design like making long documents and doing presentations), expect to have to go through "just out of school" questions in an interview when applying for a programmer position, even if you're insanelly experienced for a programmer.
Uhhh...are people buying the game and having fun? If so, then I think it's safe to say that the number of clicks is just fine.
If it's too many clicks for you personally, then maybe you should go play a different game. I know it's hard to believe, but you as an individual are not the intended market for every developer out there.
What? And give up on one's [insert divinity or pantheon here]'s given right to bitch about something in a game?
Which kinda makes one think how one can be both a femininist and anti-(legal)-abortion.
I come from a country where not that long ago abortion was illegal and i know of many situations in which low-means/low-education women had illegal abortions (and risked their lifes in the process) because they didn't want to bring a child to the world to live in poverty and/or be fatherless.
It takes a real woman to risk her life for the sake of not bringing a child to live a life of poverty.
It's all nice and prim for reasonably wealthy, well educated women (many of which past their fertile years) to do their best to deny other women the right to a legal safe abortion, all the while calling themselfs feminists - they are not the ones that have to, after a backbreaking 12 hour day of hard work cleaning somebody else's toilet's, go back to their tinfoil and wood shack and their dirty, snot-nosed 12 kids that have been left on their own the whole day to roam the streets (did i mention that some of those kids are girls which will grow up to be poor and uneducated single mothers, just like their mothers were?).
Having seen real poverty up close, it's hard for me not to despise those who loudly proclaim their high-morals all the while trying to knowingly get laws to be such that the cycle of poverty is reinforced.
PS: Doing charity work, no mater what your "Cristians for Helping the Poor" (or whatever other high-morals charity organization you belong to) pals tell you, does not in anyway excuse you from pressing for laws that pertty much guarantee that the children of those which are poor and uneducated people will be poor and uneducated themselfs.
As many kung-fu B-movies will tell you, one has first to learn how to fight oneself before one can fight others.
If you strip the whole kung-fu thing out of it, the lesson boils down to this: - To have the ability to fight the world (not necessarily with violence) you have first to defeat yourself. Those that remain locked behind their own fears, learned social behaviours or moods (or as i call it, "the brain police") are those less able to fight the world - they themselfs refrain from doing things because it's "not the right thing" or "it would look bad" or they are too afraid of facing the consequences (and many of those fears are social in nature since they derive from not wanting to be frowned upon by others).
This is not to say you should ditch your morals or sence of ethics - on the contrary: the difference between a fighter and a killer is their morals and sense of ethics.
What's important is to be keenly aware of one's own motivations for doing (or not doing) things.
In my own experience, finding the right balance between "do no evil" and "never stop improving" (the main parts of my personal moral axis) is not an easy task.
Creative and energetic people are not per-se the best for a company - no mater how creative and energetic you are when working 60-80 h/week breaking rocks using a small hammer, am uncreative, lazy guy with a jackhammer can do the same amount of work in 1/2 hour.
I'm not saying that creativity or energetic-ness (is this a real word?) are bad things, my point is that creative, energetic and disorganized people are not that productive - in my experience, having been such a person in the past (i'm now way much more organized and slightly less energetic), such people are all over the place, bring in new techniques without thinking about the implications (and thus usually have to work around it's limitations), rush ahead to implement things that turn out to be unnecessary (or even not what they were supposed to be) and in general spend way too much time redesigning, refactoring and/or rewritting code because they didn't do even the simplest analysis of the problem up-front - they end up working 60-80 h/week and still can barelly achieve the business objectives (as in, implementing functionality as seen by the users) of making a system/application.
That you actually believe that working 60-80 h/week is a good sign read very much like an alarming sign to me - i'd much rather have a slow plodder that gets things done (without empairing the ability of others to get things done) than an energetic, creative person that spreads chaos and delays things (though a creative and energetic person that gets things done and helps others get things done is probably the best kind of worker)
Years and years of posting in/. and this is the first time i got trolled - I feel all nice and fuzy inside now.
The vast majority of people in our society are, according to our society's definition, underachievers. (you can easilly figure out our society's definition for sucessfull from television, magazines, boosk, movies or simply by seing how people are treated according to how much money they have or how famous they are).
Furthermore, people are expected to accept that and don't make waves - after all, important people need people to open their doors, take their trash out and manage their investments.
All societies, independently of their political system, tend to end up in this kind of stratified structure where a minority has the best of it all and the majority is not quite that well off - this is the result of the fact that people are all different, those on top will try to remain on top and resources are limited, and it's pretty much the most stable configuration known for a society.
The only difference is on the details: - How easy it is to climb up or fall down in the ladder - How far are people allowed to fall - How far is the highest step from the lowest step - Where does the majority of people stand in comparisson with those on the highest step and those on the lowest one
Don't decieve yourself by thinking that a Democracy will, by virtue of giving everybody a vote (whose value is distorted in all but a proportional voting system), will somehow avoid that those on top remain on top or turn a society into a structure in which all have the best that can be had.
As with all human societies since the beginning of times, both the carrot and the stick are used to keep everybody marching along in synch: - Those that don't follow the rules are treated as outcasts or even imprisioned. - Everybody is baited with the promise that, if they work hard they can someday be the ones on top.
Guess what, human nature means that those on top now aren't exactly interested in being replaced.
Back to the OP, drugs that make people be content all the time are a great way of keeping those that take them where they are now (or as some might say, "in their right and proper places"), since they remove the motivation for trying to improve one's own life.
When it comes to news (even for nerds), problems, criticism and outrageous statements sell.
When was the last time you saw a news item like "Old lady crosses dangerous neighbourhood at night and gets home safe"? Mostly you get the "Innocent bystander shot in gang driveby shooting" type of article
Yet (and keeping with the example) you somehow deduced that everybody that crosses a dangerous neighbourhood ends up dead.
Many articles in/. tend to be stated as issues and/or criticisms while just about no article (at least not about hardware) is of the "thing X is the best Y ever" kind.
You seem to believe that this is a pattern in the way "nerds" think and yet it's way much more likelly that this is just the usual pattern in the way news (for nerds or not) are presented.
Overtime is often caused by clueless managers that underestimated the man-hour cost of implementing something and still want it to be done within budget ('cause they look good and get big bonuses). Thus they pressure developers into working overtime without payment.
Overworking that actually goes on the budget is way much rarer - usually those "imovable" deadlines suddenly become much more flexible when a manager cannot squirm his/her way out of paying 150% or 200% for work beyond normal work hours.
In my experience, those kind of companies are the same that try and make their workers do as many extra (unpaid) work hours as possible. It's the same guys that will arrange for dry-cleaning services to come pickup their workers clothes at work - the point being to reduce the need to go home and to have people (working) in the office as long as possible.
Often company perks of this kind, for example company cars, are not only cheaper to provide than actually paying a industry competitive salary, but also have a secondary purpose to benefict the company (people with company cars are often detached to the offices of the customer, company outtings with the family can be used by management to get a feeling for the moral of the employes and will also, by getting a worker's family used to those outings and the people there, bind them tightelly with the company and make it harder for the worker to quit that job).
You mean using one's bare hands to squeeze the neck of the clueless manager that missplaned the whole project and then pressured everbody into working 80 hours/weeks for 3 months to get a big fat bonues is actually less stress than wearing army boots and giving that same person a good strong kick in the butt?
Slashdot Mirror
JSPs and Servlets, with or without EJBs, can be (and are) used for web-based user interfaces on the Internet, although on their own they suffer scalability problems for concurrent access by many users and for speed of prototyping and developement of new features.
They are, however, pretty orthogonal to AJAX since they are server-side technologies. Both an Javascript controlled asynchronous HTTP request comming from a browser and a user triggered browser HTTP request look exactly the same to both JSPs and Servlets - they're just another HTTP request (HTTP/1.1 GET
Saying that J2EE should be more like AJAX is like saying that PHP should be more like AJAX or that CGI-scripts should be more like AJAX - complete nonsense!!!
Having better architectural support in J2EE for AJAX (for example, for being able to access a server-side business function in Javascript from the browser just as easilly as you can do it from the JSP layer) would be a good thing. However the groundwork need to support this on the server (J2EE) side is already done (it's called Web Services), and thus the biggest part of the work still needed to seamless provide the Javascript/AJAX code running on the browser with access to such remotely hosted business functions is
Just as a reminder, AJAX is the kludge it is because there's so very little standardized functionality in the browser to allow dynamic, localized refreshing on a page of information which is externally hosted.
To wrap things up: server-side support is there already in J2EE that provides, via HTTP, seamless access to business functions hosted in a J2EE server. Whether the requester is a piece of AJAXified-Javascript running on a browser or a batch C application makes no different. As usual, most of the necessary stuff missing, is missing from the browser.
To the writter of the article: Server-side technologies are mature already, AJAX is far from it. Stop demanding that servers are adjusted to serve a single client implementation methodology. If you really want an architecturally sound solution, get up from your fat ass and start coding a Web Services client in Javascript.
Actually what this tells me is that you lack enough experience (read wisdom) to know that overworking was probably what put the bug there in the first place.
Been there (about 7 years ago), just as overworked, briliant and self-assured of my own imcomparable greatness as a programmer.
Guess what - working smart beats working hard everytime: the problem being, you have to have been exposed to all kinds of problems and all kinds of situations (aka experience) before you come to the point where you figure out that the vast majority of software development problems/solutions are just variants of a very small basic problems/solution space (and some people never do figure this out).
Oh, and btw - a lot more time in software development is lost due to inconsistent/incomplete requirements/analysis/design (which cascade into loads of programming hours/days being redone/thrown-away) than to programming faults: this is the reason why nowadays i'm squashing inconsistent requirements, straightening up insufficient analysis and cleaning-up bad designs long before i ever get to the stage of cleaning-up whatever bugs that end up in the code (which are way fewer that 7 years ago).
No, no, no - you're going at it all wrong.
All you have to do is balance the positive and negative energies in yourself so that you stop felling the need to understand the summary.
Not exactly. More preciselly "The Earth has the same amount of [word removed] water it's always had and always will".
The water cycle is indeed a closed cycle, so no water is gained and no water is lost.
However the closed water cycle does not in any way guarantee the availability of non-poluted, low salt-content, drinkable water (which is what the GGP meant with "fresh water").
The fresh water problem that the GPP refers to is mostly due to 4 reasons:
Sure, water is still evaporating and falling down from the sky as before - it's just that it's either missing the places where people need it the most or it's not enough (anymore) or it's getting poluted before it reaches those people.
This reminds me of a couple of years ago when the football (soccer if you're an american) club i'm a fan of elected as president a shaddy lawyer character which years before had scammed some persons out of their moeny but somehow managed to sleeaze his way out of ending up in jail (mostly due to his connections).
At the time i thought: "Hey, this guy is a bit of a mobster, but at least he's our mobster".
I believe he's still in jail for defrauding that same football club.
If you have shares in HP, i suggest you keep this story in mind
Allow me to add a little something that poped-up to my mind today:
This kind of behaviour is tipical of a certain kind of people who hide behind a crowd and lead it to act in ways which solo individuals never would.
- If the crowd is on the streets they're "a mob" and the aboved mentioned people are called "rabble rousers" or "inciters to violence"
- If the crowd sits down in buildings they're "a corporation" and the above mentioned people are called "directors"
I strongly suspect that personality-wise the same kind of people are behind inciting a mob to linch someone and deciding not to recall a defective product because it's cheaper to pay the familiy of the victims - the only difference is that some have an MBA and some don't.
It's a strong sign of the decadence of a society when the ones with the MBAs usually get away with a pat on the wrist (and a multi-million dollars golden umbrela).
Dunno about Windows, but in Linux if you want a really fast swap space you make a virtual disk in memory and set it up as your swap space.
To simplify things further:
- If passing through unshielde cables, internal ship comunications, commands and sensor data can be read from a distance using a proper (directional) antena, a good low noise amp, an analog to digital converter (ADC), a notebook and some software.
This might not be an issue if the patrol boat is facing a couple of guys with AK-47s in a rubber boat, but it can be an issue if facing another nation's navy or a drug baron (both of which having the means and the smarts to take advantage of such a vulnerability).
Tempest attacks are only a "tin-foil crowd" thing when we're talking about non-descript individuals shielding their computer screens against "being read from a distance" even if such individuals are highly unlikely to be under surveilance by an organization with the right means and know-how.
It's way more likelly that the right persons (or should i say the wrong persons) are interested in intercepting internal communications of ships used in war or for security purposes (even if they are hardly aircraft carriers) than in reading the porn and unix commands of a non-descript geek with a little too much paranoia.
Or putting things another way, the higher the value of a target, the more likelly it is that complicated, expensive and/or specialized techniques are used against it.
What is best for the economy as a whole (in terms of jobs and the efficiency of producing wealth):
A DRM enabled world would most likelly cement the position of the current players which mostly go for the first option (since they relly heavilly on marketing and advertising a single album is cheaper than advertising 100)
Another example coming from a pure economic perspective:
Which markets are most efficient (i.e. produce the most value per-invested-dollar):
Consider that DRM can be used as a barrier to entry (if all music is required to be DRM enabled).
Note that lower barriers to entry mean increased competition which usually means product that compete in price and quality which pressures companies into increasing their efficiency/innovation in order to keep their edge in price/quality.
Also note that in a market with lower barriers to entry, the lame/weak companies are more quickly weaned-out and the resources they were consuming are redirected to the more efficient companies.
If i remember it correctly from my days of playing with POVRay (free raytracing app), the time it took to raytrace an image depended on things like the presence (or not) of semi-transparent, semi-reflective surfaces and on the number of light sources.
If this is still the case, then going from the current rendering techniques in games to raytracing would result in images with more realistic reflections and lighting but, due to performance tradeoffs, few reflective surfaces and light sources.
Besides, at the moment what games need the most is beter AIs and procedurally generated content, not yet another layer of eyecandy that requires gamers to upgrade their hardware (again).
This will revolutionize the "I'm with stupid" t-shirt industry - now the arrow can always point in the right direction
I live in Holland and around here bikes are all over the place and it's very common for bycicles to be stollen.
..... 2 locks.
Thus everybody locks their bikes when leaving them outside (for example at the train station). Still, locked bikes also get stollen.
If you leave your bike out around here, the easiest way to NOT have your bikes stollen is
Simply put, a bike with 2 locks is not worth the trouble for a thief if right next to it there's a bike with 1 lock (keep in mind the this is happening in an open parking area for bikes filled with more than 100 bikes)
Same principle really, make it less attractive for thiefs to steal your stuff and they'll mostly leave you alone and go for easier targets.
PS: This same principle applies to mugging - people that look and act like victims are more likelly to actually become victims of mugging than those that look confident and unafraid.
- A programmer should remain familiar with the basic principles of creating code that runs efficiently. A more senior programmer is expected to be efficient at creating such code and to make easier to maintain code.
- A software designer is expected to be aware of the importance of compartimentalization of information and division of responsabilities across the design, and of the tradeoffs between flexibility, maintenability and performance when making a design. A more senior designer should be well versed in communicating the design and the rationale behind it to the developers, and of keeping a record of the accepted and rejected designed decisions and the reasons behind it (such a record can be used latter when changes in requirements might mean that the rationale for choosing a certain design feature instead of another one is now not valid anymore).
- A technical architect is expected to understand the issues of scalability, inter-application connectivity, fallback solutions. He should be capable of defining standards which promote efficiente development, maintenability, robustness and/or lower number of errors, all supported by a well document, internaly consistent rationale. He should be an expert at communicating these solutions to the developers and designers. He should be aware of the development process and ensure that the right tools are chosen/provided for the right job.
[Note: there's a lot more than just this]
Now, if you're interviewing for a technical architect position, which is more important:
In my experience there's a limited amount of seniority (in knowledge and wisdom) that you can achieve as a programmer before you find out you've turned into a software designer (in all but name) - if you're still selling yourself as a programmer by then (say, because you like programming and can't stand the boring parts of software design like making long documents and doing presentations), expect to have to go through "just out of school" questions in an interview when applying for a programmer position, even if you're insanelly experienced for a programmer.
Is that before or after the "Puke your guts out" end of level boss?
What? And give up on one's [insert divinity or pantheon here]'s given right to bitch about something in a game?
You must be new here
Which kinda makes one think how one can be both a femininist and anti-(legal)-abortion.
I come from a country where not that long ago abortion was illegal and i know of many situations in which low-means/low-education women had illegal abortions (and risked their lifes in the process) because they didn't want to bring a child to the world to live in poverty and/or be fatherless.
It takes a real woman to risk her life for the sake of not bringing a child to live a life of poverty.
It's all nice and prim for reasonably wealthy, well educated women (many of which past their fertile years) to do their best to deny other women the right to a legal safe abortion, all the while calling themselfs feminists - they are not the ones that have to, after a backbreaking 12 hour day of hard work cleaning somebody else's toilet's, go back to their tinfoil and wood shack and their dirty, snot-nosed 12 kids that have been left on their own the whole day to roam the streets (did i mention that some of those kids are girls which will grow up to be poor and uneducated single mothers, just like their mothers were?).
Having seen real poverty up close, it's hard for me not to despise those who loudly proclaim their high-morals all the while trying to knowingly get laws to be such that the cycle of poverty is reinforced.
PS: Doing charity work, no mater what your "Cristians for Helping the Poor" (or whatever other high-morals charity organization you belong to) pals tell you, does not in anyway excuse you from pressing for laws that pertty much guarantee that the children of those which are poor and uneducated people will be poor and uneducated themselfs.
As many kung-fu B-movies will tell you, one has first to learn how to fight oneself before one can fight others.
If you strip the whole kung-fu thing out of it, the lesson boils down to this:
- To have the ability to fight the world (not necessarily with violence) you have first to defeat yourself. Those that remain locked behind their own fears, learned social behaviours or moods (or as i call it, "the brain police") are those less able to fight the world - they themselfs refrain from doing things because it's "not the right thing" or "it would look bad" or they are too afraid of facing the consequences (and many of those fears are social in nature since they derive from not wanting to be frowned upon by others).
This is not to say you should ditch your morals or sence of ethics - on the contrary: the difference between a fighter and a killer is their morals and sense of ethics.
What's important is to be keenly aware of one's own motivations for doing (or not doing) things.
In my own experience, finding the right balance between "do no evil" and "never stop improving" (the main parts of my personal moral axis) is not an easy task.
Creative and energetic people are not per-se the best for a company - no mater how creative and energetic you are when working 60-80 h/week breaking rocks using a small hammer, am uncreative, lazy guy with a jackhammer can do the same amount of work in 1/2 hour.
I'm not saying that creativity or energetic-ness (is this a real word?) are bad things, my point is that creative, energetic and disorganized people are not that productive - in my experience, having been such a person in the past (i'm now way much more organized and slightly less energetic), such people are all over the place, bring in new techniques without thinking about the implications (and thus usually have to work around it's limitations), rush ahead to implement things that turn out to be unnecessary (or even not what they were supposed to be) and in general spend way too much time redesigning, refactoring and/or rewritting code because they didn't do even the simplest analysis of the problem up-front - they end up working 60-80 h/week and still can barelly achieve the business objectives (as in, implementing functionality as seen by the users) of making a system/application.
That you actually believe that working 60-80 h/week is a good sign read very much like an alarming sign to me - i'd much rather have a slow plodder that gets things done (without empairing the ability of others to get things done) than an energetic, creative person that spreads chaos and delays things (though a creative and energetic person that gets things done and helps others get things done is probably the best kind of worker)
Years and years of posting in /. and this is the first time i got trolled - I feel all nice and fuzy inside now.
The vast majority of people in our society are, according to our society's definition, underachievers. (you can easilly figure out our society's definition for sucessfull from television, magazines, boosk, movies or simply by seing how people are treated according to how much money they have or how famous they are).
Furthermore, people are expected to accept that and don't make waves - after all, important people need people to open their doors, take their trash out and manage their investments.
All societies, independently of their political system, tend to end up in this kind of stratified structure where a minority has the best of it all and the majority is not quite that well off - this is the result of the fact that people are all different, those on top will try to remain on top and resources are limited, and it's pretty much the most stable configuration known for a society.
The only difference is on the details:
- How easy it is to climb up or fall down in the ladder
- How far are people allowed to fall
- How far is the highest step from the lowest step
- Where does the majority of people stand in comparisson with those on the highest step and those on the lowest one
Don't decieve yourself by thinking that a Democracy will, by virtue of giving everybody a vote (whose value is distorted in all but a proportional voting system), will somehow avoid that those on top remain on top or turn a society into a structure in which all have the best that can be had.
As with all human societies since the beginning of times, both the carrot and the stick are used to keep everybody marching along in synch:
- Those that don't follow the rules are treated as outcasts or even imprisioned.
- Everybody is baited with the promise that, if they work hard they can someday be the ones on top.
Guess what, human nature means that those on top now aren't exactly interested in being replaced.
Back to the OP, drugs that make people be content all the time are a great way of keeping those that take them where they are now (or as some might say, "in their right and proper places"), since they remove the motivation for trying to improve one's own life.
Or beter yet, a well integrated nice little drone.
Bland little drones that accept their place in life, don't make waves and don't try to get ahead in life are the backbone of our society.
When it comes to news (even for nerds), problems, criticism and outrageous statements sell.
/. tend to be stated as issues and/or criticisms while just about no article (at least not about hardware)
When was the last time you saw a news item like "Old lady crosses dangerous neighbourhood at night and gets home safe"?
Mostly you get the "Innocent bystander shot in gang driveby shooting" type of article
Yet (and keeping with the example) you somehow deduced that everybody that crosses a dangerous neighbourhood ends up dead.
Many articles in
is of the "thing X is the best Y ever" kind.
You seem to believe that this is a pattern in the way "nerds" think and yet it's way much more likelly that this is just the usual pattern in the way news (for nerds or not) are presented.
Overtime is often caused by clueless managers that underestimated the man-hour cost of implementing something and still want it to be done within budget ('cause they look good and get big bonuses). Thus they pressure developers into working overtime without payment.
Overworking that actually goes on the budget is way much rarer - usually those "imovable" deadlines suddenly become much more flexible when a manager cannot squirm his/her way out of paying 150% or 200% for work beyond normal work hours.
In my experience, those kind of companies are the same that try and make their workers do as many extra (unpaid) work hours as possible. It's the same guys that will arrange for dry-cleaning services to come pickup their workers clothes at work - the point being to reduce the need to go home and to have people (working) in the office as long as possible.
Often company perks of this kind, for example company cars, are not only cheaper to provide than actually paying a industry competitive salary, but also have a secondary purpose to benefict the company (people with company cars are often detached to the offices of the customer, company outtings with the family can be used by management to get a feeling for the moral of the employes and will also, by getting a worker's family used to those outings and the people there, bind them tightelly with the company and make it harder for the worker to quit that job).
You mean using one's bare hands to squeeze the neck of the clueless manager that missplaned the whole project and then pressured everbody into working 80 hours/weeks for 3 months to get a big fat bonues is actually less stress than wearing army boots and giving that same person a good strong kick in the butt?
Amazing!