I would speak to whoever your direct supervisor is and ask to learn about how the company manages project of this size. Maybe point you towards any documentation in the SDLC. Clearly you don't understand what the program manager is doing. If they are traditional PMI type program manager, than they exist because what you are doing is called a program, not a project, wherein there are multiple projects that make up the program.
A program manager with multiple projects running concurrently is going to be trying to determine how many project managers there needs to be. Given that traditional programs have multiple deadlines, might have multiple development teams, qa teams, deployment teams, and a wide range of stakeholders, you may be underestimating what is necessary for the project management side of things. A program manager who underestimates what they need is failing. A project manager who underestimates what they need is failing. As a developer, you give estimates and the project managers try to understand how to use those estimates to determine resource needs. As a project manager, you have to include not just development work, but project management itself. Project managers who are programmers tend to try to close gaps by programming rather than project managing. The program manager doesn't have any recourse there. They can't dive into detail level. Its actually important that they don't. A project manager should be helping identify tasks, so that they can prioritize work based on dependencies. They need to be able to continually communicate resource gaps. A program manager should be taking oversight over multiple projects.
So basically if this project is simple enough that a single person can manage the teams necessary, with all communication being handled in a timely way, change control, qa, and deployment teams all easy to manage, then sure, smallest team necessary is best.
But if the issue here is that you just don't like the culture of enterprise development software development life cycle, then you are in the wrong company based on what you describe.
Having spent a lot of time running a small fast software company and a freelance programmer, and 5 years watching a small company get absorbed into a large company, I know a lot about how this works. Personally I am a better project manager than most people I know, but I hate it and since i am also a better design/architect/programmer, my bosses agree to try not to make me project manage. That being said, because the very large corporation I work for is extremely resource tight, and believed in flattening their management, we have very few project managers and we have suffered a lot. If your company has drank the ITIL/PMI coolaid and are willing to actually allocate the right qualified team members to fill those roles, than you are very lucky. Mostly I have seen companies whose leadership is trying to enforce those things, and doesn't invest in the necessary resources to make it work (so that too few lead chefs mean everyone has to do work they aren't good at)
Before you assume that your MBA type program manager sucks, consider that good project/program manager is a skill independent of the goal. A good project manager can figure out how to get you to the moon without knowing anything about aerodynamics. If you can learn a bit of that, then at worst you may be better at communicating to project managers and the people who hire them, and you may even be better at hiring project managers in the future.
If you treat it as a case where the guy is not valuable because his knowledge isn't based on software development skills, well I have news for you. None of the expert programmers I know can project manage worth a damn. Guys with 30 years of experience don't know how to think about projects in a way that is constructive. They may be problem solvers in their domain, but project management is its own puzzle. If you don't respect it, then don't expect to work well in the modern offshore heavy, PMI/ITIL driven enterprise world.
So yeah, if all you are making is broth, then too many cooks is bad.
I assume you want to do something a little bigger than broth in your life.
The article uses a technique to basically cause discomfort for a person trying to speak, by creating an audio feedback directed at them. They point out that it is similar to the annoying experience of hearing yourself during a skype (or conference call) which can disrupt your chain of thought.
The goal is to silence someone who is speaking to establish presence rather than contribute ideas.
In my experience what this does is disrupt the ability to keep track of what you are saying, but for someone who is speaking to hear their own voice (as we say idiomatically) this is entirely counter-productive. Furthermore a person who is a good speaker learns to concentrate through this. Anyone who has ever spoken in a hall where there is large enough space to create an audio delay, has heard their voice come back to them. Basically you learn to filter it out.
I am not saying it isn't annoying. I am saying that anyone who has a prepared statement can easily bypass it and anyone who is just ranting without concern for making sense, can do so. It is only someone who is actually trying to think about what they are saying, that will have some hardship.
This is pretty much the technically equivalent of someone echoing you (which siblings do).
A while back it was considered one of Microsoft's evil ways, that they sold an OS and the leading apps on it. It was considered an unfair advantage because they had access to api's and the OS writing team, with a greater level of access than other companies.
In the same way, people get frustrated that Apple has prevented other developers to publish certain apps that are similar to Apple ones. This has changed over time but at least for a while it was a key argument.
Now, Google is going to start competing against the app marketplace in a larger way.
Beyond just an admission that there is a lack of quality apps for Android, or that the economy of apps on Android is not yet mature enough to draw the larger scale development that has begun to focus on Apple (especially with games but also with productivity tools), this is now an 800 lb Gorilla. Can you write your killer app before Google does it and gives it away?
How long before Google starts buying small developers who develop cool multiplatform apps and then squelch their development on Apple?
If Apple wants to create an Application store on their own OS, why is that a problem?
Steam has an Application Store on both the Mac and Windows.
If someone wants to create a service exactly like Apple's they can, with additional features as they see fit. Apple isn't preventing that.
The fact that software developers will have an incentive to use Apple's method of distribution is based on THEM GETTING AN ADVANTAGE. If you have a better method to help developers make a living on Apple, then go ahead!
It isn't like the phone. The phone is locked down. The phone is closed.
The OS they give away the development software for free, there are even open source repositories that you can use to get X11/Unix software.
Since in a small shop most people have to handle multiple roles, its sometimes hard to evaluate what your real work load is as far as any given set of tasks. The effort to effectively track each task is another task, and most people aren't really willing to give up 10-20% of their employees time to administrative tasks involving time tracking, so the end result is a sort of vague count "I spent about 5 hours programming, and about 2 hours production support and 1 hour administrative"
However, any computer programmer who is exhausted by heads down coding should probably find something better to do. When I was in my twenties I often would code for 10-12 hours a day for stretches lasting as long as a month. I think I once did 20 hour days for 4 weeks with really no break on weekends. Not that it was healthy, but as far as just pounding out code, testing it, packaging it for UAT and then moving on, I was pretty non-stop. Now that I am 40 I prefer not to do that however I had a project in which I lost my coder to another project and suddenly had to fill in for 8 weeks that wasn't on my schedule. I did a few all nighters, and certainly was averaging 14 hours per day for about 2 weeks, mostly coding.
Obviously that doesn't just mean writing a line of code a minute. It does involve testing things, finding answers to problems, designing algorithms, refactoring, but if you think programming is purely a function of typing out commands then I suspect you are writing trivial code.
In any case, I don't want to judge, and I don't think people are being fair talking about you being lazy. It is VERY difficult to really code productively when you have to break every hour. I find that I like to set myself up for 4 hour slots for programming, so that I can really warm up, get into the right head and have time to really complete a few significant things.
Still I think about programming when I am showering, or eating, or walking. Thinking is a big part of my job. Its really a challenge to just program at work and then stop thinking about it afterwards.
The real question always has to be, are you delivering what you promise to deliver on time. If you are having trouble getting things done on time then you have to worry about how you are organizing yourself. If you are feeling like you just can't program more than a certain number of hours a week without your head hurting then get a better monitor.
Funny. You call someone totalitarian because they choose to do something different than all the other phone makers. I would think requiring everyone to support Java would be totalitarian.
Maybe you don't really use the word properly. Maybe what you mean is, independent and competitive. Is that bad too?
For years Sun did nothing to get Java to work well on the Mac. Do you wonder that Apple doesn't really feel like relying on either them or Adobe to provide a user experience for their phones or tablets?
I am not sure how they came up with their criticsm of the Color classic being an indictment of the idea of the built in monitor.
"It could be argued that this system forced Apple to rethink building screens into systems. Sue it looks very good but it increases the overall cost of the system and limits users to a particular view. Built-in screens made sense at the start of the computing age but they have thankfully gone the way of the dinosaurs"
So I am wondering if anyone knows if the Australian Apple market is so different that the IMac and Macbook lines are marginal. In the US, the built in monitor is the standard on most models Apple sell. It is true that other computer companies don't do this on the desktop, but other than the mini there is no consumer desktop that Apple makes without being a single unit.
And the statement about the PowerPC is entirely 20/20 hindsight. The Intel Chips at the time were dogs. And apple is still producting development model and OS that differs entirely from the Windows one. As far as developer interest, I would say that once Mac OS X, and giving away the development tools began that jump start, and its still quite a bit different from any other environment.
Hard to imagine that the IPod Hi-Fi rates in any top 10 list. It seems so unimportant, but I guess Thomson saw one. That makes it special it seems considering he doesn't seem familiar with much about Apple's line from personal experience.
This is a point I really am trying to make too... The best code you do, the stuff that required you to actually use your brain hard, is going to be hard for YOU to maintain let alone others. You comment based on your own Eureka moments, you document your understanding, and hopefully it lets a person recognize that you were both solving the problem in a reasonable manner, and that your implementation and solution are in sync.
Beyond that, adding a few lines of code for clarity can also make it easier to debug, to extend and to implement in a different language.
Thank you for writing almost exactly what I wanted to say. I went through a weird emotional response. I almost want to call the writer a young whippersnapper...
It is pretty funny to say you aren't going to buy into dogma when nothing you are talking about is dogma. Even best practices are often stated in contexts. I won't reiterate the excellent rebuttals to the blog both on the blog and here.
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The more brilliant and exciting the code you write the more likely it is not a trivial and obvious solution. If all you do is code obvious solutions to common problems in standard idioms then you may be able to argue that your comments do not matter.
If you are writing something that was difficult for you to write (and the best programmers are lazy enough to try to avoid always rewriting trivial solutions) then you also are writing something that is difficult for not only other coders, but for YOU. That is to say that solving a complex problem in an ingenious and elegant way does not automatically mean that you will understand it later. Even a few months later you are going to wish you had explained some of the why and some of the what.
In the end most programmers comment only when they feel it is necessary. It isn't really enjoyable, it does take effort. Mostly we do it because we must. Depending on the language and context, you may be writing very formal documentation as part of your project, and some of that may be in the code itself. Other times, you write code that you think is a one off, and then somehow it ends up being a large project and suddenly you need to go back and comment to make it possible to hand it off.
I do feel as if the fellow who wrote this blog was not an experienced coder, and had never worked with other programmers...
Agreed 100%. I have had headhunters revise my resume from a format perspective so that it could fit within a format that the companies were looking for (often they want very little formatting) and when they did so they sent me back the revised copy.
The only other thing I have seen them do is remove my direct contact information from resume, to prevent the company from going around them. I respect that.
The article talks about how it is not intended as a complete solution. They do not go into, or intend to, describe their redundancy features, their performance issues, or anything else.
From the Article:
A Backblaze Storage Pod is a Building Block
We have been extremely happy with the reliability and excellent performance of the pods, and a Backblaze Storage Pod is a fully contained storage server. But the intelligence of where to store data and how to encrypt it, deduplicate it, and index it is all at a higher level (outside the scope of this blog post). When you run a datacenter with thousands of hard drives, CPUs, motherboards, and power supplies, you are going to have hardware failuresâ"itâ(TM)s irrefutable. Backblaze Storage Pods are building blocks upon which a larger system can be organized that doesnâ(TM)t allow for a single point of failure. Each pod in itself is just a big chunk of raw storage for an inexpensive price; it is not a âoesolutionâ in itself.
If you did want to attack this concept, it would be based on the fact that I cannot think of a good general storage use for this besides serving static webpages.
The only access method is through https.
There is only 1gigabyte bandwidth per 67 terabytes. 67 Terabytes is duh, 67000Gigabytes... Thats 536000 gigabits. a 1gigabit/s interface needs 6 days to move all that data. Oh and it can only be accessed through https. So its somewhat questionable that you can actually move nearly that much data. I don't really know what the limitations of the harddrives or SATA are, but no matter how much speed any of that has, the network link and latency are going to be significant if you are really moving large scale data. I can only assume their applications don't require speed, or that by duplicating it over a large number of systems they are going to get some load balancing. So then one asks... HOw many of these pods equal a redundant system with reasonable performance? And what is the power usage involved?
There is Raid6 based on 15 drive sets with 2 parity drives spread across between 1 and 3 controllers but there is no hot swappable drive, fan, or controller.
Essentially a single drive failure requires you to take down the entire system. Now I assume there is a replicated system, so you can just take down any of these boxes with no planning.
-------------------- Honestly I am sure this suits their purpose. I can't imagine what purpose it would suit for me.
I think the recent news reports regarding bloggers being outed and then fired for the content of their entirely legal publishing has made the argument that anonymous use of the internet is defensible for freedom of speech. Perhaps because the journalists have a respect for sources that are not disclosed, and protecting those sources, there is a sympathy to this story that is starting to gain momentum. The end result is that the discussion that only criminals benefit from anonymity is weakened.
It is hard for me personally to believe that anyone expects anonymity on the internet, but I have assumed the FBI had recorded all of my posts since 1992.
Ditto. I am betting xpilot was sold as parts of distributions since it first started. If he had wanted to control the usage of the software to prevent others from selling it, he should not have used the GPL. As long as you are providing source code, you are in the right. The fact that it requires someone to pay 99 dollars to bring your source code into an executible object on the iPhone is no different than saying they have to buy a computer to do so. You are, in fact giving away the code, and also charging for a distributed binary. I am pretty sure that this is entirely conventional.
More importantly, you are contributing to the iPhone developer community by letting us see how you were able to port the code. This is helpful both in allowing enhanced versions, and as a learning tool.
If anyone thinks this validates putting up pictures of yourself doing stupid stuff and listing your favorite sexual positions because 'hey a bank in texas' is nervous that something you PUBLISHED to the Internet is an invasion of privacy, then you are probably also one of those people who thinks because one time someone stopped on the NJ turnpike to avoid hitting a kitty, that you can walk across it at will.
Anything you are actually publishing to a publicly visible page cannot EVER be misconstrued as your private business. Any lawyer who was actually awake can pretty easily convince a jury that you were actively promoting whatever behavior it was that they are looking at. The idea that a social site gets a special privelege over any other website is like saying 'hey I was on a reality show... People are supposed to act stupid on those!'
Your employer is likely to do a credit check for goodness sake. They can make you pee into a cup. Do you really think any large company is going to risk hiring someone into a position of responsibility when they are actively promoting themselves as a drunkard, sex-addict, racist, or any other of a thousand image crushing stereotypes?
If anyone actually breathed a sigh of relief, they should suck that air back down. We are not moving towards an error were there is more privacy. This is not a bellwether. The only thing that might happen is that you will be required to sign a form saying you waive your right to privacy if you are applying for a job. And you will.
If you leave your network entirely unsecured so that all the users using it are sending their data unencrypted, then are you really doing a kindness to your visiters? I mean you are essentially offering them a way to be unprotected from snooping and various other attacks. Maybe in a house with lots of distance between you and your neighbors you can expect that no one nearby is messing around, but in a city where you can easily pick up 20 AP's in an apartment building, its easy to ACCIDENTALLY be riding on an unsecure network.
I once used WEP to protect my network until I noticed that my bandwidth was starting to suck. I sniffed the traffic to see which of my machines was being problematic and discovered some neighbor eating my bandwidth.
On the other hand, I once booted up a laptop with an ubuntu installation disk, and it immediately got internet connection. It took a few minutes for me to notice, because I had WPA and it required me to download something to get internet, and then I realized I was already online. Someones open network picked me up.
I am not paranoid, and I like the idea of sharing, but I now use WPA and don't broadcast my SSID. I know its not enough for a serious hacker, but its enough for anyone who is just looking for an easy target.
And FYI I handled wireless network security for a lawfirm, and it required some very significant investment in hardware and software to protect our network while allowing for our guests.
What would be nice is for your average accesspoint to provide multiple vlans and allow you to rate limit free access, and create whatever other logs, while fully encrypting your internal network. Add some timed hotel features in the mix... Of course that stuff ends up costing a lot of money enterprise level even though its trivial technically.
1) I haven't had the same experience as you. There are many Windows based support forums in which I have seen NO answer to questions, let alone I'm better than you. Of course if you are using a closed source product you naturally would find the answers by going to the closed source product's moderated forums, where answers are vetted and the responders are customer service oriented. Still go to most hobby sites and you will find that the word n00b is not platform specific. Heck, Windows is the #1 game OS, and gamer sites are filled with 15 year olds talking trash. So lets put aside that first paragraph as too general. Furthermore, Zed is ranting about developer-> developer communication not user support. I don't know Zed, but I didn't see him bitching about users asking for help with his software, just with employeers, and the community of developers working on creating and implementing ruby for rails.
2) Are you really arguing that closed source community is better because they live in terror that they will need help and have to rely on the inexpert knowledge of their fellow users? That is a blessing?
3) 99% of users who are offering help to other users do not ever look at source code. They read the documentation. Most large scale open source projects have extensive documentation. Even more interestingly, as documentation is something that users can do without really having deep knowledge of code, and open source actually encourages users to contribute documentation, there is at least some possibility that a user can influence what they get. The fact that ANY user can see the source code is hardly elite. The fact that programmers may be involved in user support is certainly not elite. The fact that programmers are publicly publishing their code, documenting it, and discussing it openly, showing their dirty laundry (from a coding perspective) encourages a level of discourse that is so significantly better than the communication in closed source development projects. Since this subject is about a developer talking about other developers, it is worth considering that your argument about source code literacy as elite goes out the window, since the Ruby for Rails community he is talking about are all developers, all programmers.
I hate to say this, but I think your insight is misguided. It has to do with some really strange assumptions. Even your concept that closed sourced users are cut off from support is really incorrect. I have had great support from closed source companies. Most of the money closed source software makes is providing support to the users. It is true that Windows OS and maybe Office support is so often so cheap (since it is bundled) that Microsoft simply cannot afford the cost of supporting the users effectively, but I tend to also find Microsoft documentation (especially their documentation for developers) to be quite good.
Anyway you may be right that in some forums there is a lack of courtesy, but it hardly has to do with access to source code.
I agree that Firefox's overnight memory usage makes it necessary for me to shut the browser in the morning if I forget to do so at night. Weekends are even worse.
On the other hand, while I am not going to run benchmarks, I have found javascript/dhtml behaves slightly faster on firefox in the development work I do. That may be because I code on firefox and test on IE6/7 (firebug makes it just too easy to develop on Firefox for me to switch over). Obviously in the end I have to make sure that IE behaves well with my code, so I do tend to find ways to get the performance to be equivalent, however I really do find that both the type of html and the size of pages makes a big difference.
Sometimes its fun to write an entire column based on an incredibly unlikely and impractical idea. If we are going to make up crap based on conversations with our wives, I propose Apple buys a real Time Machine, goes back in time to 3000 years ago and begins a superior civilization in the North Americas, so that we have populated the Galaxy by tomorrow. And one more thing... Super Intelligent Llamas.
Any other fricken fantasy stories we need to get promoted as actual 'News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters'?
I suspect the difference in performance will be that the ASUS laptop will be a computer, and the Medison machine will be a sad memory of 150 dollars you once had.
. and.. are not files. They are navigation. Even DOS doesn't consider them the same way as directories despite showing them, since if you were to delete recursively in a directory it would NOT use the..
By making them LOOK like they are sub directories (when in fact one symbolizes the 'cwd' and one the parent, they break the paradigm that anything in a folder/directory listing is IN that folder/directory.
And SINCE either you know that . means 'here' and.. means 'up' then you also would know that without showing them listed. Or you don't know, and in that case they are a bunch of dots.
So a friend of mine (really) who was forced to use a Windows 2.0 based Video Editing program (back in 90?) probably with targa boards and all that jazz, wanted to clear out some files from a directory. While he was looking he saw the . and.. files, and considering them as garbage (they are listed as directories in DOS even to this day) he managed to use DEL/S.. or it's equivalent to delete a filesystem.
So I would say, listing special symbols as actual files in a dir command, is and was a stupid feature.
---- Also, I love when I have to shutdown my Windows Machine by using the 'Start' button. And ATM's that tell me to press Enter to Exit.
As an example of why my head would explode. From the FAQ:
Will we be able to meet some of the characters from The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit?
While adventuring in LOTRO, you will encounter many of your favorite characters from the books. At times they will be directly part of your story! What's the Prancing Pony without Barliman Butterbur? The Old Forest without Old Man Willow? Thorin's Halls without...Thorin?
I mean even assuming that they are aware of Thorin being dead for 80 years, Thorin considered Ered Luin to be a dump. It wasn't a marvel of the world as the website suggests. It was in fact the site of two ruined dwarf kingdoms and never was a great dwarf hall again. Certainly not a great crossroad of commerce, it is near the insular hobbits who probably don't even know it exists, and the elves of the Havens, who have little commerce with dwarves in general in this day and age.
Anyway thats just the teeniest gripe. Can you imagine me having to tolerate "Jetli the dwarf at your service! I'm a Ninja!"
Trust me. I didn't go see the movies because my wife forbade me, since we both knew that I would start screaming.
I am sure lots of folks will have fun frolicing around in what is no doubt a beautiful depiction of middle earth. I just don't see how they can do anything to make it a place where people actually try to be part of a the world, rather than grinding, farming, and otherwise conducting themselves as they do in all MMORPG's
Slashdot Mirror
I would speak to whoever your direct supervisor is and ask to learn about how the company manages project of this size. Maybe point you towards any documentation in the SDLC. Clearly you don't understand what the program manager is doing. If they are traditional PMI type program manager, than they exist because what you are doing is called a program, not a project, wherein there are multiple projects that make up the program.
A program manager with multiple projects running concurrently is going to be trying to determine how many project managers there needs to be. Given that traditional programs have multiple deadlines, might have multiple development teams, qa teams, deployment teams, and a wide range of stakeholders, you may be underestimating what is necessary for the project management side of things. A program manager who underestimates what they need is failing. A project manager who underestimates what they need is failing. As a developer, you give estimates and the project managers try to understand how to use those estimates to determine resource needs. As a project manager, you have to include not just development work, but project management itself. Project managers who are programmers tend to try to close gaps by programming rather than project managing. The program manager doesn't have any recourse there. They can't dive into detail level. Its actually important that they don't. A project manager should be helping identify tasks, so that they can prioritize work based on dependencies. They need to be able to continually communicate resource gaps. A program manager should be taking oversight over multiple projects.
So basically if this project is simple enough that a single person can manage the teams necessary, with all communication being handled in a timely way, change control, qa, and deployment teams all easy to manage, then sure, smallest team necessary is best.
But if the issue here is that you just don't like the culture of enterprise development software development life cycle, then you are in the wrong company based on what you describe.
Having spent a lot of time running a small fast software company and a freelance programmer, and 5 years watching a small company get absorbed into a large company, I know a lot about how this works. Personally I am a better project manager than most people I know, but I hate it and since i am also a better design/architect/programmer, my bosses agree to try not to make me project manage. That being said, because the very large corporation I work for is extremely resource tight, and believed in flattening their management, we have very few project managers and we have suffered a lot. If your company has drank the ITIL/PMI coolaid and are willing to actually allocate the right qualified team members to fill those roles, than you are very lucky. Mostly I have seen companies whose leadership is trying to enforce those things, and doesn't invest in the necessary resources to make it work (so that too few lead chefs mean everyone has to do work they aren't good at)
Before you assume that your MBA type program manager sucks, consider that good project/program manager is a skill independent of the goal. A good project manager can figure out how to get you to the moon without knowing anything about aerodynamics. If you can learn a bit of that, then at worst you may be better at communicating to project managers and the people who hire them, and you may even be better at hiring project managers in the future.
If you treat it as a case where the guy is not valuable because his knowledge isn't based on software development skills, well I have news for you. None of the expert programmers I know can project manage worth a damn. Guys with 30 years of experience don't know how to think about projects in a way that is constructive. They may be problem solvers in their domain, but project management is its own puzzle. If you don't respect it, then don't expect to work well in the modern offshore heavy, PMI/ITIL driven enterprise world.
So yeah, if all you are making is broth, then too many cooks is bad.
I assume you want to do something a little bigger than broth in your life.
D
The article uses a technique to basically cause discomfort for a person trying to speak, by creating an audio feedback directed at them. They point out that it is similar to the annoying experience of hearing yourself during a skype (or conference call) which can disrupt your chain of thought.
The goal is to silence someone who is speaking to establish presence rather than contribute ideas.
In my experience what this does is disrupt the ability to keep track of what you are saying, but for someone who is speaking to hear their own voice (as we say idiomatically) this is entirely counter-productive. Furthermore a person who is a good speaker learns to concentrate through this. Anyone who has ever spoken in a hall where there is large enough space to create an audio delay, has heard their voice come back to them. Basically you learn to filter it out.
I am not saying it isn't annoying. I am saying that anyone who has a prepared statement can easily bypass it and anyone who is just ranting without concern for making sense, can do so. It is only someone who is actually trying to think about what they are saying, that will have some hardship.
This is pretty much the technically equivalent of someone echoing you (which siblings do).
I hope they got lots of money to develop this.
A while back it was considered one of Microsoft's evil ways, that they sold an OS and the leading apps on it. It was considered an unfair advantage because they had access to api's and the OS writing team, with a greater level of access than other companies.
In the same way, people get frustrated that Apple has prevented other developers to publish certain apps that are similar to Apple ones. This has changed over time but at least for a while it was a key argument.
Now, Google is going to start competing against the app marketplace in a larger way.
Beyond just an admission that there is a lack of quality apps for Android, or that the economy of apps on Android is not yet mature enough to draw the larger scale development that has begun to focus on Apple (especially with games but also with productivity tools), this is now an 800 lb Gorilla. Can you write your killer app before Google does it and gives it away?
How long before Google starts buying small developers who develop cool multiplatform apps and then squelch their development on Apple?
If Apple wants to create an Application store on their own OS, why is that a problem?
Steam has an Application Store on both the Mac and Windows.
If someone wants to create a service exactly like Apple's they can, with additional features as they see fit. Apple isn't preventing that.
The fact that software developers will have an incentive to use Apple's method of distribution is based on THEM GETTING AN ADVANTAGE. If you have a better method to help developers make a living on Apple, then go ahead!
It isn't like the phone. The phone is locked down. The phone is closed.
The OS they give away the development software for free, there are even open source repositories that you can use to get X11/Unix software.
Whine Whine whine.
Since in a small shop most people have to handle multiple roles, its sometimes hard to evaluate what your real work load is as far as any given set of tasks. The effort to effectively track each task is another task, and most people aren't really willing to give up 10-20% of their employees time to administrative tasks involving time tracking, so the end result is a sort of vague count "I spent about 5 hours programming, and about 2 hours production support and 1 hour administrative"
However, any computer programmer who is exhausted by heads down coding should probably find something better to do. When I was in my twenties I often would code for 10-12 hours a day for stretches lasting as long as a month. I think I once did 20 hour days for 4 weeks with really no break on weekends. Not that it was healthy, but as far as just pounding out code, testing it, packaging it for UAT and then moving on, I was pretty non-stop. Now that I am 40 I prefer not to do that however I had a project in which I lost my coder to another project and suddenly had to fill in for 8 weeks that wasn't on my schedule. I did a few all nighters, and certainly was averaging 14 hours per day for about 2 weeks, mostly coding.
Obviously that doesn't just mean writing a line of code a minute. It does involve testing things, finding answers to problems, designing algorithms, refactoring, but if you think programming is purely a function of typing out commands then I suspect you are writing trivial code.
In any case, I don't want to judge, and I don't think people are being fair talking about you being lazy. It is VERY difficult to really code productively when you have to break every hour. I find that I like to set myself up for 4 hour slots for programming, so that I can really warm up, get into the right head and have time to really complete a few significant things.
Still I think about programming when I am showering, or eating, or walking. Thinking is a big part of my job. Its really a challenge to just program at work and then stop thinking about it afterwards.
The real question always has to be, are you delivering what you promise to deliver on time. If you are having trouble getting things done on time then you have to worry about how you are organizing yourself. If you are feeling like you just can't program more than a certain number of hours a week without your head hurting then get a better monitor.
Funny. You call someone totalitarian because they choose to do something different than all the other phone makers. I would think requiring everyone to support Java would be totalitarian.
Maybe you don't really use the word properly. Maybe what you mean is, independent and competitive. Is that bad too?
For years Sun did nothing to get Java to work well on the Mac. Do you wonder that Apple doesn't really feel like relying on either them or Adobe to provide a user experience for their phones or tablets?
Whose numbers are these?
What is the percentage of?
Is it US? International?
This may be data, but is it information given the lack of context?
I am not sure how they came up with their criticsm of the Color classic being an indictment of the idea of the built in monitor.
"It could be argued that this system forced Apple to rethink building screens into systems. Sue it looks very good but it increases the overall cost of the system and limits users to a particular view. Built-in screens made sense at the start of the computing age but they have thankfully gone the way of the dinosaurs"
So I am wondering if anyone knows if the Australian Apple market is so different that the IMac and Macbook lines are marginal. In the US, the built in monitor is the standard on most models Apple sell. It is true that other computer companies don't do this on the desktop, but other than the mini there is no consumer desktop that Apple makes without being a single unit.
And the statement about the PowerPC is entirely 20/20 hindsight. The Intel Chips at the time were dogs. And apple is still producting development model and OS that differs entirely from the Windows one. As far as developer interest, I would say that once Mac OS X, and giving away the development tools began that jump start, and its still quite a bit different from any other environment.
Hard to imagine that the IPod Hi-Fi rates in any top 10 list. It seems so unimportant, but I guess Thomson saw one. That makes it special it seems considering he doesn't seem familiar with much about Apple's line from personal experience.
This is a point I really am trying to make too... The best code you do, the stuff that required you to actually use your brain hard, is going to be hard for YOU to maintain let alone others. You comment based on your own Eureka moments, you document your understanding, and hopefully it lets a person recognize that you were both solving the problem in a reasonable manner, and that your implementation and solution are in sync.
Beyond that, adding a few lines of code for clarity can also make it easier to debug, to extend and to implement in a different language.
Thank you for writing almost exactly what I wanted to say. I went through a weird emotional response. I almost want to call the writer a young whippersnapper...
It is pretty funny to say you aren't going to buy into dogma when nothing you are talking about is dogma. Even best practices are often stated in contexts. I won't reiterate the excellent rebuttals to the blog both on the blog and here.
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The more brilliant and exciting the code you write the more likely it is not a trivial and obvious solution. If all you do is code obvious solutions to common problems in standard idioms then you may be able to argue that your comments do not matter.
If you are writing something that was difficult for you to write (and the best programmers are lazy enough to try to avoid always rewriting trivial solutions) then you also are writing something that is difficult for not only other coders, but for YOU. That is to say that solving a complex problem in an ingenious and elegant way does not automatically mean that you will understand it later. Even a few months later you are going to wish you had explained some of the why and some of the what.
In the end most programmers comment only when they feel it is necessary. It isn't really enjoyable, it does take effort. Mostly we do it because we must. Depending on the language and context, you may be writing very formal documentation as part of your project, and some of that may be in the code itself. Other times, you write code that you think is a one off, and then somehow it ends up being a large project and suddenly you need to go back and comment to make it possible to hand it off.
I do feel as if the fellow who wrote this blog was not an experienced coder, and had never worked with other programmers...
Agreed 100%. I have had headhunters revise my resume from a format perspective so that it could fit within a format that the companies were looking for (often they want very little formatting) and when they did so they sent me back the revised copy.
The only other thing I have seen them do is remove my direct contact information from resume, to prevent the company from going around them. I respect that.
The article talks about how it is not intended as a complete solution. They do not go into, or intend to, describe their redundancy features, their performance issues, or anything else.
From the Article:
A Backblaze Storage Pod is a Building Block
We have been extremely happy with the reliability and excellent performance of the pods, and a Backblaze Storage Pod is a fully contained storage server. But the intelligence of where to store data and how to encrypt it, deduplicate it, and index it is all at a higher level (outside the scope of this blog post). When you run a datacenter with thousands of hard drives, CPUs, motherboards, and power supplies, you are going to have hardware failuresâ"itâ(TM)s irrefutable. Backblaze Storage Pods are building blocks upon which a larger system can be organized that doesnâ(TM)t allow for a single point of failure. Each pod in itself is just a big chunk of raw storage for an inexpensive price; it is not a âoesolutionâ in itself.
If you did want to attack this concept, it would be based on the fact that I cannot think of a good general storage use for this besides serving static webpages.
The only access method is through https.
There is only 1gigabyte bandwidth per 67 terabytes. 67 Terabytes is duh, 67000Gigabytes... Thats 536000 gigabits. a 1gigabit/s interface needs 6 days to move all that data. Oh and it can only be accessed through https. So its somewhat questionable that you can actually move nearly that much data. I don't really know what the limitations of the harddrives or SATA are, but no matter how much speed any of that has, the network link and latency are going to be significant if you are really moving large scale data. I can only assume their applications don't require speed, or that by duplicating it over a large number of systems they are going to get some load balancing. So then one asks... HOw many of these pods equal a redundant system with reasonable performance? And what is the power usage involved?
There is Raid6 based on 15 drive sets with 2 parity drives spread across between 1 and 3 controllers but there is no hot swappable drive, fan, or controller.
Essentially a single drive failure requires you to take down the entire system. Now I assume there is a replicated system, so you can just take down any of these boxes with no planning.
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Honestly I am sure this suits their purpose. I can't imagine what purpose it would suit for me.
I think the recent news reports regarding bloggers being outed and then fired for the content of their entirely legal publishing has made the argument that anonymous use of the internet is defensible for freedom of speech. Perhaps because the journalists have a respect for sources that are not disclosed, and protecting those sources, there is a sympathy to this story that is starting to gain momentum. The end result is that the discussion that only criminals benefit from anonymity is weakened.
It is hard for me personally to believe that anyone expects anonymity on the internet, but I have assumed the FBI had recorded all of my posts since 1992.
Ditto. I am betting xpilot was sold as parts of distributions since it first started. If he had wanted to control the usage of the software to prevent others from selling it, he should not have used the GPL. As long as you are providing source code, you are in the right. The fact that it requires someone to pay 99 dollars to bring your source code into an executible object on the iPhone is no different than saying they have to buy a computer to do so. You are, in fact giving away the code, and also charging for a distributed binary. I am pretty sure that this is entirely conventional.
More importantly, you are contributing to the iPhone developer community by letting us see how you were able to port the code. This is helpful both in allowing enhanced versions, and as a learning tool.
Thank you,
If anyone thinks this validates putting up pictures of yourself doing stupid stuff and listing your favorite sexual positions because 'hey a bank in texas' is nervous that something you PUBLISHED to the Internet is an invasion of privacy, then you are probably also one of those people who thinks because one time someone stopped on the NJ turnpike to avoid hitting a kitty, that you can walk across it at will.
Anything you are actually publishing to a publicly visible page cannot EVER be misconstrued as your private business. Any lawyer who was actually awake can pretty easily convince a jury that you were actively promoting whatever behavior it was that they are looking at. The idea that a social site gets a special privelege over any other website is like saying 'hey I was on a reality show... People are supposed to act stupid on those!'
Your employer is likely to do a credit check for goodness sake. They can make you pee into a cup. Do you really think any large company is going to risk hiring someone into a position of responsibility when they are actively promoting themselves as a drunkard, sex-addict, racist, or any other of a thousand image crushing stereotypes?
If anyone actually breathed a sigh of relief, they should suck that air back down. We are not moving towards an error were there is more privacy. This is not a bellwether. The only thing that might happen is that you will be required to sign a form saying you waive your right to privacy if you are applying for a job. And you will.
If you leave your network entirely unsecured so that all the users using it are sending their data unencrypted, then are you really doing a kindness to your visiters? I mean you are essentially offering them a way to be unprotected from snooping and various other attacks. Maybe in a house with lots of distance between you and your neighbors you can expect that no one nearby is messing around, but in a city where you can easily pick up 20 AP's in an apartment building, its easy to ACCIDENTALLY be riding on an unsecure network.
I once used WEP to protect my network until I noticed that my bandwidth was starting to suck. I sniffed the traffic to see which of my machines was being problematic and discovered some neighbor eating my bandwidth.
On the other hand, I once booted up a laptop with an ubuntu installation disk, and it immediately got internet connection. It took a few minutes for me to notice, because I had WPA and it required me to download something to get internet, and then I realized I was already online. Someones open network picked me up.
I am not paranoid, and I like the idea of sharing, but I now use WPA and don't broadcast my SSID. I know its not enough for a serious hacker, but its enough for anyone who is just looking for an easy target.
And FYI I handled wireless network security for a lawfirm, and it required some very significant investment in hardware and software to protect our network while allowing for our guests.
What would be nice is for your average accesspoint to provide multiple vlans and allow you to rate limit free access, and create whatever other logs, while fully encrypting your internal network. Add some timed hotel features in the mix... Of course that stuff ends up costing a lot of money enterprise level even though its trivial technically.
1) I haven't had the same experience as you. There are many Windows based support forums in which I have seen NO answer to questions, let alone I'm better than you. Of course if you are using a closed source product you naturally would find the answers by going to the closed source product's moderated forums, where answers are vetted and the responders are customer service oriented. Still go to most hobby sites and you will find that the word n00b is not platform specific. Heck, Windows is the #1 game OS, and gamer sites are filled with 15 year olds talking trash. So lets put aside that first paragraph as too general. Furthermore, Zed is ranting about developer-> developer communication not user support. I don't know Zed, but I didn't see him bitching about users asking for help with his software, just with employeers, and the community of developers working on creating and implementing ruby for rails.
2) Are you really arguing that closed source community is better because they live in terror that they will need help and have to rely on the inexpert knowledge of their fellow users? That is a blessing?
3) 99% of users who are offering help to other users do not ever look at source code. They read the documentation. Most large scale open source projects have extensive documentation. Even more interestingly, as documentation is something that users can do without really having deep knowledge of code, and open source actually encourages users to contribute documentation, there is at least some possibility that a user can influence what they get. The fact that ANY user can see the source code is hardly elite. The fact that programmers may be involved in user support is certainly not elite. The fact that programmers are publicly publishing their code, documenting it, and discussing it openly, showing their dirty laundry (from a coding perspective) encourages a level of discourse that is so significantly better than the communication in closed source development projects. Since this subject is about a developer talking about other developers, it is worth considering that your argument about source code literacy as elite goes out the window, since the Ruby for Rails community he is talking about are all developers, all programmers.
I hate to say this, but I think your insight is misguided. It has to do with some really strange assumptions. Even your concept that closed sourced users are cut off from support is really incorrect. I have had great support from closed source companies. Most of the money closed source software makes is providing support to the users. It is true that Windows OS and maybe Office support is so often so cheap (since it is bundled) that Microsoft simply cannot afford the cost of supporting the users effectively, but I tend to also find Microsoft documentation (especially their documentation for developers) to be quite good.
Anyway you may be right that in some forums there is a lack of courtesy, but it hardly has to do with access to source code.
I agree that Firefox's overnight memory usage makes it necessary for me to shut the browser in the morning if I forget to do so at night. Weekends are even worse.
On the other hand, while I am not going to run benchmarks, I have found javascript/dhtml behaves slightly faster on firefox in the development work I do. That may be because I code on firefox and test on IE6/7 (firebug makes it just too easy to develop on Firefox for me to switch over). Obviously in the end I have to make sure that IE behaves well with my code, so I do tend to find ways to get the performance to be equivalent, however I really do find that both the type of html and the size of pages makes a big difference.
Super Llamas makes her hot.
And if you consider time machines 'tech stuff' I want to work where you work.
Sometimes its fun to write an entire column based on an incredibly unlikely and impractical idea. If we are going to make up crap based on conversations with our wives, I propose Apple buys a real Time Machine, goes back in time to 3000 years ago and begins a superior civilization in the North Americas, so that we have populated the Galaxy by tomorrow. And one more thing... Super Intelligent Llamas.
Any other fricken fantasy stories we need to get promoted as actual 'News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters'?
I suspect the difference in performance will be that the ASUS laptop will be a computer, and the Medison machine will be a sad memory of 150 dollars you once had.
I don't believe that is what I meant actually.
.. are not files. They are navigation. Even DOS doesn't consider them the same way as directories despite showing them, since if you were to delete recursively in a directory it would NOT use the ..
.. means 'up' then you also would know that without showing them listed. Or you don't know, and in that case they are a bunch of dots.
. and
By making them LOOK like they are sub directories (when in fact one symbolizes the 'cwd' and one the parent, they break the paradigm that anything in a folder/directory listing is IN that folder/directory.
And SINCE either you know that . means 'here' and
So a friend of mine (really) who was forced to use a Windows 2.0 based Video Editing program (back in 90?) probably with targa boards and all that jazz, wanted to clear out some files from a directory. .. files, and considering them as garbage (they are listed as directories in DOS even to this day) he managed to use DEL /S .. or it's equivalent to delete a filesystem.
While he was looking he saw the . and
So I would say, listing special symbols as actual files in a dir command, is and was a stupid feature.
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Also, I love when I have to shutdown my Windows Machine by using the 'Start' button.
And ATM's that tell me to press Enter to Exit.
As an example of why my head would explode. From the FAQ:
Will we be able to meet some of the characters from The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit?
While adventuring in LOTRO, you will encounter many of your favorite characters from the books. At times they will be directly part of your story! What's the Prancing Pony without Barliman Butterbur? The Old Forest without Old Man Willow? Thorin's Halls without...Thorin?
I mean even assuming that they are aware of Thorin being dead for 80 years, Thorin considered Ered Luin to be a dump. It wasn't a marvel of the world as the website suggests. It was in fact the site of two ruined dwarf kingdoms and never was a great dwarf hall again. Certainly not a great crossroad of commerce, it is near the insular hobbits who probably don't even know it exists, and the elves of the Havens, who have little commerce with dwarves in general in this day and age.
Anyway thats just the teeniest gripe. Can you imagine me having to tolerate "Jetli the dwarf at your service! I'm a Ninja!"
Trust me. I didn't go see the movies because my wife forbade me, since we both knew that I would start screaming.
I am sure lots of folks will have fun frolicing around in what is no doubt a beautiful depiction of middle earth. I just don't see how they can do anything to make it a place where people actually try to be part of a the world, rather than grinding, farming, and otherwise conducting themselves as they do in all MMORPG's