Oracle just fired many of the best and brightest programmers at Sun, because they were the most highly paid. So, if long-term is important to you, I suggest jumping ship. As one example, they fired the accessibility guru, Willie Walker. As a result, SunOS will no longer be accessible as it use to be, causing it trouble in winning government contracts. I say good riddance... SunOS was cool, but with Oracle in charge, it's time to move on to greener pastures.
I think Android is a lot closer to Windows than Linux in this regard. Windows has to run on different screens, with different processors and peripherals made by all sorts of different people, and it really needs to "just work" most of the time, since average users are generally driving things. It's the same with Android. This is really just Mac vs Windows all over again, with iPhone being the Mac, and Android being Windows. Like Macs, the iPhone will be more stable and "just work" more often, and like Windows, Android will find itself in lower cost hardware, and probably a lot more handsets in the end.
BTW, I keep reading rants about all the different handsets Android has to work with, and I've had two myself (G1 and Nexus One). Pretty much, the popular apps just work, so I don't know what the hubbub is all about. The poster's rant about the various cell phone vendors not upgrading their version of Android is valid. Does it surprise anyone that most cell-phone manufacturers continue to be huge dorks? If you buy directly from either Apple or Google, I think you'll find that you are able to run the latest OS. If you buy from the guys who invented 2-year contracts to sucker you for more money and vendor-locking of cell phones... well, then you'll get what you deserve.
Because half of us are dyslexic. We're also so ADHD that we could never study a spelling test. Sorry about the spelling! I married a brilliant woman who also is incapable of spelling. Now, we have two kids who can't spell...
There are people on this list who are passionate that we need to keep spelling in English in it's current messed up state. I disagree. I think we should switch to spelling words how they sound. That would help a lot, and I don't care that eight and ate would be spelled the same. I understand words from context perfectly well in speech. I don't need them to be spelled differently to figure out what's what. Until we fix spelling, the problem has more to do with English than me.
Yes, the point is to have multiple clients. However, I suspect you haven't tried it yet. I always say, if you want to work for an ass-hole, work for yourself! If you think your current boss is a dick, wait until you have to suck up to morons who screw their own projects up so badly that they have to hire contractors to fix things. Good contractors rarely "fire" a client. Instead, they raise their rates to the point that it's worth dealing with them.
Being a contractor is kind of like the Matrix. No one can be told about how much it sucks sometimes to be a contractor... you have to see it for yourself. Of course, if you're the right kind of guy, it might work out well for you.
The danger is that the company may be told to retroactively withhold taxes from your paycheck, making them liable for a portion of your tax bill. If the IRS feels you are actually an employee, based on how many hours you work and how many other clients you have, they can get into trouble.
I didn't mean to say that the 1986 law was all for the good. I just wanted people to know there are two sides to this story.
Agreed. I also once had a job where I wanted the ability to also work for others. There was little reasons for my company not to allow me to be a contractor, but they were worried about the IRS, and by default, they say no now days, when they use to say yes. There should be a better middle ground.
Not to mention the tax benefit of having your company pay with pre-tax dollars. Then there's the security issue. Contractors are always worried about losing their income, and are more likely to skimp on health care to build up savings.
I remember when this law was passed. At the time, many large companies were switching to having huge numbers of contractors instead of regular employees. Uniformly, these companies denied any benefits, like health insurance. Job security was also lower. I personally did a lot of contract work at the time. After the law passed, the big companies were forced to hire most of those contractors, with benefits. I think this improved things generally all around. For some reason, full employment creates a bond of loyalty from the employee, and sometimes from the company, which is never there as a contractor. More programmers got health care. It was a good thing.
As a contractor, I was not personally effected, because I was an actual contractor, with multiple clients, self-employment taxes, and all. All you need to not be effected by the law is to be an actual contractor.
I agree. Novell turned evil when it sided with Microsoft against all linux distros other than SUSE. Novell must die, and SUSE supports need to understand they are playing with the Devil.
I believe that Canonical is probably the most popular Linux distro that still has as it's primary goal helping make the world a better place. RedHat and Suse both make it difficult to fork their distros, by requiring that you remove their trademarks everywhere, and in general, they are unfriendly to forks. Ubuntu on the other hand, has been much friendlier in this regard, and there are several useful forks that make life better for their target users.
For example, I'm working with Tony Sales on a Vinux ISO, linux for blind and visually impaired, built on top of Ubuntu Lucid. Having a good and accessible base Linux to start with helps make Vinux better, and through our testing and code fixes, we can feed back improvements to Ubuntu. I certainly hope that Ubuntu continues it's openness in this regard.
My own straw-poll doesn't agree with you. I'm 46 years old, and doing fairly well. Of my geek friends who live at the country club, not one is considering buying an iPad. They all own iPhones (I'm a rebel - I've got a Nexus One), they all have ipods (me, too), and every one is dissapointed in the iPad. General consensus is they were hoping for a MacBook in a slate format, but what they got was an oversized iPod Touch. You never heard such whining!
I have to admit, I'd be a little embarrassed being seen with an iPad, unlike how cool I think it would be to strut around with a MacBook Air. Steve Jobs may be a genius at marketing, but his blind-spot is understanding that users want powerful general-purpose devices, not just players for Apple programs. Apple's initial refusal to allow 3rd party iPhone apps is evidence of this. Of course, we could all start writing cool iPad apps, so long as they are single-threaded, non-threatening to Steve, and don't mind developing them on a real computer, as the iPad is incapable of hosting such development.
This is why Google dominated. Their adds are targetted, based on keyword matching your search, and they're just plain text. Why can't the rest of the internet do that?
Even slashdot.org has a nice little comment permantely in the upper right corner: "As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising." I get a real kick out of that.
The funny thing, is I like slashdot adds. It's that freaking girl in a bikini who really wants to meet me that requires the block. If I could somehow allow really well targeted adds, and block the spam, I'd enable it.
There are plenty of reasons a 3X speed improvement could be had. For example, optimizing memory layout for cache performace could do it. If one system had a heap that randomly scatters objects through memory, and the other packs like-fields of objects together in dense arrays, inner loop cache performace can be improved greatly. I saw a factor of 17X in one case. It's amazing to me how few programmers today bother getting down to this all-important performance bottleneck.
Several things come to mind. First, my Nexus One, like the iPhone, burns about 85% of it's power on the display. If it weren't for the display, it could play music and keep the receiver active, and probably do a few more things and have the battery last for days. So, we're really only talking about the last 15%. Second, many applications run in compiled C, like webkit, the network stack, the map application, speech synthesis, 3D rendering, etc. These apps are going to probably be the similar on both phones in terms of efficiency. So, in Java, a lot of what we're really talking about is the code that pops up pretty windows. It's hard for me to imagine that takes much power.
I expect big advances in the future. Low power displays will be huge. After that, maybe we should revisit the JVM.
Now that might be a few instructions, but nowhere near 60. Far more importantly, my objects are allocated out of contigous memory blocks, meaning that cache misses are far more likely to load objects into cache that will be accessed in inner loops. Many geeks still think in terms of machine cycles, rather than L2 cache misses. That's sooo last decade.
I think it's a Braille abbreviation for accessibility. The blind typically only read Braille at about 60 words per minute, or about a quarter of what most people can read. To be more productive, the blind prefer very long words to be abbreviated. Modern Braille computer displays even do this shortening automatically.
It turns out that Linux hackers like to abbriviate, too, and a11y seems to show up all over the place in accessibility code. Or, maybe they're just trying to be cool.
You can't just throw somebody into developing accessibility software
Very true! When I first started playing with Ubuntu accessibility, the blind were all upset about PulseAudio, but the Ubuntu screen reader worked perfectly for me. I didn't understand what they were upset about, and so I didn't put any time into tracking down the problems. Instead, I began training my ear to listen at very high speed. Now that I can hear properly, it's plain as day that a 1/2 second delay in speech was making Ubuntu as painful as a root canal. I've joined with other guys to track down the problems, and now Ubuntu is much better. Imagine debugging a sound problem you can't even hear? What if you worked on the speech synthesis tool I used to generate that sound file I linked to, and I came and said it sounds distorted today, compared to yesterday's release?
That's exactly what happened with this speech synthesizer. When you ask it to generate 22KHz sample-rate audio, it actually gives you 11KHz, which no one would notice unless they tried to play it at very high speed. I've reported the bug, but the developers have long since moved to a different company. I'm stuck with sucky 11KHz sound for life.
I have specific reasons for prefering Ubuntu. In particular, I use it at work. Even more specifically, I'm losing my central vision, and have decided to take some control over accessibility in the distro I use. I'm working with other guys on a derivation of Ubuntu for the blind and visually impaired - Vinux. So far as I can tell, there are two really good linux distros for accessibility: Vinux, and Adriane Knoppix. I'm working with the founder of Vinux, Tony Sales, to build the Vinux/Ubuntu Lucid release. I prefer a full-fledged Linux distro, as an experienced Linux user. Klaus, the author of Knoppix, has a blind wife, named Adriane. Klaus wrote Adrian Knoppix for beginning blind users, and it's a great distro for that purpose, just not what I personally need.
There are a host of other reasons, too. Fedora is great, but doesn't ship proprietary hardware drivers. That's a much bigger problem for the blind, since they really can't debug a system that wont speak to them. It's also less stable than Ubuntu - that's not saying much, but it's true! For example, Fedora was the first distro to force PulseAudio on us, which was a disastor for the blind for about two years. For these various reasons, Ubuntu seems to have attracted the largest blind community, so I think it makes sense for Willie to go there. Frankly, if he'd been there instead of at Sun all these years, Linux accessibility would be far better than it is today.
Let me tell you, you're right that the blind do take control and solve the problem themselves. If you lost your sight and hearing, and you were a big Linux hacker, what would you do? Buy a Braille display, slap some low-level code to drive it into the kernel to read the console, and you're off coding! That project is called "speakup", and it's great for blind-deaf programmers, and not bad at all for the blind who can hear. What if you're a really good emacs hacker who loses your vision? What do you do? Rewrite the entire desktop environment based on talking emacs? That project is called emacspeak, and many consider it the most productive environment for blind programmers with good hearing.
What if you want access to all those great Gnome applications like FireFox and OpenOffice? Now, you're at the mercy of the big Linux distros, because it involves 100 binary packages that the distro ships to all take part. That's where you need a guy like Willie Walker, who has the clout at all the major distros to set the direction for the entire linux accessibility community. That's the guy Oracle fired. That's the code which may fall apart, and the blind will not be able to fix it, not unless they find a new Willie Walker.
A lot of the fear in blind-linux land isn't because Oracle fired two people, but because they fired Willie Walker. So far as I can tell from all the accessibility code I've read, Willie roughly plays the same role for open-source accessibility that Linus Torvalds plays for Linux. It's as if someone bought the company Linus works for, and said, "This guy is overpaid. Let's save some money."
I'm slowly losing my own vision, but while I can still use inaccessible software, I'm hacking like crazy in my free time to improve the things in Linux land. So, I've read a lot of code, and Willie's name is all over the place. The most important centerpiece of Linux accessibility is the Orca screen reader for the Gnome desktop. Who do you think was in charge of both Orca and Gnome accessibility? Willie, and for damned good reasons.
For guys like me who write code on Linux boxes for a living, Willie's departure from Sun is scary as hell.
It turns out that one of the people Oracle fired is effectively the Linus Torvald of Linux accessibility. He architected it, and wrote a ton of it. It's like firing Linux, and complaining that after all, it's only one guy.
As for OpenOffice accessibility, kiss it goodbye on Linux. Without Willie or a team of several guys to replace him, it will slowly degrade in to unusablity.
I'm 100% with you on the other guys hiring Willie. My preference would be Canonical (Ubuntu), but RedHat would be a decent fit, and I could even live with Novell. Maybe they could start working off the evil taint.
I suppose we could complain about Oracle selling inaccessible RedHat clone licenses, which are not accessible because the RedHat code they copied doesn't properly support Sun's accessiblity code (Orca, in particular).
Anyone know a good lawyer who might want to do a bit of pro-bono work for the blind?
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Oracle just fired many of the best and brightest programmers at Sun, because they were the most highly paid. So, if long-term is important to you, I suggest jumping ship. As one example, they fired the accessibility guru, Willie Walker. As a result, SunOS will no longer be accessible as it use to be, causing it trouble in winning government contracts. I say good riddance... SunOS was cool, but with Oracle in charge, it's time to move on to greener pastures.
I think Android is a lot closer to Windows than Linux in this regard. Windows has to run on different screens, with different processors and peripherals made by all sorts of different people, and it really needs to "just work" most of the time, since average users are generally driving things. It's the same with Android. This is really just Mac vs Windows all over again, with iPhone being the Mac, and Android being Windows. Like Macs, the iPhone will be more stable and "just work" more often, and like Windows, Android will find itself in lower cost hardware, and probably a lot more handsets in the end.
BTW, I keep reading rants about all the different handsets Android has to work with, and I've had two myself (G1 and Nexus One). Pretty much, the popular apps just work, so I don't know what the hubbub is all about. The poster's rant about the various cell phone vendors not upgrading their version of Android is valid. Does it surprise anyone that most cell-phone manufacturers continue to be huge dorks? If you buy directly from either Apple or Google, I think you'll find that you are able to run the latest OS. If you buy from the guys who invented 2-year contracts to sucker you for more money and vendor-locking of cell phones... well, then you'll get what you deserve.
Because half of us are dyslexic. We're also so ADHD that we could never study a spelling test. Sorry about the spelling! I married a brilliant woman who also is incapable of spelling. Now, we have two kids who can't spell...
There are people on this list who are passionate that we need to keep spelling in English in it's current messed up state. I disagree. I think we should switch to spelling words how they sound. That would help a lot, and I don't care that eight and ate would be spelled the same. I understand words from context perfectly well in speech. I don't need them to be spelled differently to figure out what's what. Until we fix spelling, the problem has more to do with English than me.
Yes, the point is to have multiple clients. However, I suspect you haven't tried it yet. I always say, if you want to work for an ass-hole, work for yourself! If you think your current boss is a dick, wait until you have to suck up to morons who screw their own projects up so badly that they have to hire contractors to fix things. Good contractors rarely "fire" a client. Instead, they raise their rates to the point that it's worth dealing with them.
Being a contractor is kind of like the Matrix. No one can be told about how much it sucks sometimes to be a contractor... you have to see it for yourself. Of course, if you're the right kind of guy, it might work out well for you.
The danger is that the company may be told to retroactively withhold taxes from your paycheck, making them liable for a portion of your tax bill. If the IRS feels you are actually an employee, based on how many hours you work and how many other clients you have, they can get into trouble.
I didn't mean to say that the 1986 law was all for the good. I just wanted people to know there are two sides to this story.
Agreed. I also once had a job where I wanted the ability to also work for others. There was little reasons for my company not to allow me to be a contractor, but they were worried about the IRS, and by default, they say no now days, when they use to say yes. There should be a better middle ground.
Not to mention the tax benefit of having your company pay with pre-tax dollars. Then there's the security issue. Contractors are always worried about losing their income, and are more likely to skimp on health care to build up savings.
I remember when this law was passed. At the time, many large companies were switching to having huge numbers of contractors instead of regular employees. Uniformly, these companies denied any benefits, like health insurance. Job security was also lower. I personally did a lot of contract work at the time. After the law passed, the big companies were forced to hire most of those contractors, with benefits. I think this improved things generally all around. For some reason, full employment creates a bond of loyalty from the employee, and sometimes from the company, which is never there as a contractor. More programmers got health care. It was a good thing.
As a contractor, I was not personally effected, because I was an actual contractor, with multiple clients, self-employment taxes, and all. All you need to not be effected by the law is to be an actual contractor.
I agree. Novell turned evil when it sided with Microsoft against all linux distros other than SUSE. Novell must die, and SUSE supports need to understand they are playing with the Devil.
I believe that Canonical is probably the most popular Linux distro that still has as it's primary goal helping make the world a better place. RedHat and Suse both make it difficult to fork their distros, by requiring that you remove their trademarks everywhere, and in general, they are unfriendly to forks. Ubuntu on the other hand, has been much friendlier in this regard, and there are several useful forks that make life better for their target users.
For example, I'm working with Tony Sales on a Vinux ISO, linux for blind and visually impaired, built on top of Ubuntu Lucid. Having a good and accessible base Linux to start with helps make Vinux better, and through our testing and code fixes, we can feed back improvements to Ubuntu. I certainly hope that Ubuntu continues it's openness in this regard.
My own straw-poll doesn't agree with you. I'm 46 years old, and doing fairly well. Of my geek friends who live at the country club, not one is considering buying an iPad. They all own iPhones (I'm a rebel - I've got a Nexus One), they all have ipods (me, too), and every one is dissapointed in the iPad. General consensus is they were hoping for a MacBook in a slate format, but what they got was an oversized iPod Touch. You never heard such whining!
I have to admit, I'd be a little embarrassed being seen with an iPad, unlike how cool I think it would be to strut around with a MacBook Air. Steve Jobs may be a genius at marketing, but his blind-spot is understanding that users want powerful general-purpose devices, not just players for Apple programs. Apple's initial refusal to allow 3rd party iPhone apps is evidence of this. Of course, we could all start writing cool iPad apps, so long as they are single-threaded, non-threatening to Steve, and don't mind developing them on a real computer, as the iPad is incapable of hosting such development.
This is why Google dominated. Their adds are targetted, based on keyword matching your search, and they're just plain text. Why can't the rest of the internet do that?
Even slashdot.org has a nice little comment permantely in the upper right corner: "As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising." I get a real kick out of that.
The funny thing, is I like slashdot adds. It's that freaking girl in a bikini who really wants to meet me that requires the block. If I could somehow allow really well targeted adds, and block the spam, I'd enable it.
There are plenty of reasons a 3X speed improvement could be had. For example, optimizing memory layout for cache performace could do it. If one system had a heap that randomly scatters objects through memory, and the other packs like-fields of objects together in dense arrays, inner loop cache performace can be improved greatly. I saw a factor of 17X in one case. It's amazing to me how few programmers today bother getting down to this all-important performance bottleneck.
Several things come to mind. First, my Nexus One, like the iPhone, burns about 85% of it's power on the display. If it weren't for the display, it could play music and keep the receiver active, and probably do a few more things and have the battery last for days. So, we're really only talking about the last 15%. Second, many applications run in compiled C, like webkit, the network stack, the map application, speech synthesis, 3D rendering, etc. These apps are going to probably be the similar on both phones in terms of efficiency. So, in Java, a lot of what we're really talking about is the code that pops up pretty windows. It's hard for me to imagine that takes much power.
I expect big advances in the future. Low power displays will be huge. After that, maybe we should revisit the JVM.
I create objects in C with:
if(freePtr == NULL) {
allocateMoreObjects();
}
object = freePtr;
freePtr = freePtr->nextObject
Now that might be a few instructions, but nowhere near 60. Far more importantly, my objects are allocated out of contigous memory blocks, meaning that cache misses are far more likely to load objects into cache that will be accessed in inner loops. Many geeks still think in terms of machine cycles, rather than L2 cache misses. That's sooo last decade.
I think it's a Braille abbreviation for accessibility. The blind typically only read Braille at about 60 words per minute, or about a quarter of what most people can read. To be more productive, the blind prefer very long words to be abbreviated. Modern Braille computer displays even do this shortening automatically.
It turns out that Linux hackers like to abbriviate, too, and a11y seems to show up all over the place in accessibility code. Or, maybe they're just trying to be cool.
Very true! When I first started playing with Ubuntu accessibility, the blind were all upset about PulseAudio, but the Ubuntu screen reader worked perfectly for me. I didn't understand what they were upset about, and so I didn't put any time into tracking down the problems. Instead, I began training my ear to listen at very high speed. Now that I can hear properly, it's plain as day that a 1/2 second delay in speech was making Ubuntu as painful as a root canal. I've joined with other guys to track down the problems, and now Ubuntu is much better. Imagine debugging a sound problem you can't even hear? What if you worked on the speech synthesis tool I used to generate that sound file I linked to, and I came and said it sounds distorted today, compared to yesterday's release?
That's exactly what happened with this speech synthesizer. When you ask it to generate 22KHz sample-rate audio, it actually gives you 11KHz, which no one would notice unless they tried to play it at very high speed. I've reported the bug, but the developers have long since moved to a different company. I'm stuck with sucky 11KHz sound for life.
I have specific reasons for prefering Ubuntu. In particular, I use it at work. Even more specifically, I'm losing my central vision, and have decided to take some control over accessibility in the distro I use. I'm working with other guys on a derivation of Ubuntu for the blind and visually impaired - Vinux. So far as I can tell, there are two really good linux distros for accessibility: Vinux, and Adriane Knoppix. I'm working with the founder of Vinux, Tony Sales, to build the Vinux/Ubuntu Lucid release. I prefer a full-fledged Linux distro, as an experienced Linux user. Klaus, the author of Knoppix, has a blind wife, named Adriane. Klaus wrote Adrian Knoppix for beginning blind users, and it's a great distro for that purpose, just not what I personally need.
There are a host of other reasons, too. Fedora is great, but doesn't ship proprietary hardware drivers. That's a much bigger problem for the blind, since they really can't debug a system that wont speak to them. It's also less stable than Ubuntu - that's not saying much, but it's true! For example, Fedora was the first distro to force PulseAudio on us, which was a disastor for the blind for about two years. For these various reasons, Ubuntu seems to have attracted the largest blind community, so I think it makes sense for Willie to go there. Frankly, if he'd been there instead of at Sun all these years, Linux accessibility would be far better than it is today.
Oh, come on! He's funny! Even to a guy losing his vision! Sorry to debase myself by talking about flambait mods...
Let me tell you, you're right that the blind do take control and solve the problem themselves. If you lost your sight and hearing, and you were a big Linux hacker, what would you do? Buy a Braille display, slap some low-level code to drive it into the kernel to read the console, and you're off coding! That project is called "speakup", and it's great for blind-deaf programmers, and not bad at all for the blind who can hear. What if you're a really good emacs hacker who loses your vision? What do you do? Rewrite the entire desktop environment based on talking emacs? That project is called emacspeak, and many consider it the most productive environment for blind programmers with good hearing.
What if you want access to all those great Gnome applications like FireFox and OpenOffice? Now, you're at the mercy of the big Linux distros, because it involves 100 binary packages that the distro ships to all take part. That's where you need a guy like Willie Walker, who has the clout at all the major distros to set the direction for the entire linux accessibility community. That's the guy Oracle fired. That's the code which may fall apart, and the blind will not be able to fix it, not unless they find a new Willie Walker.
A lot of the fear in blind-linux land isn't because Oracle fired two people, but because they fired Willie Walker. So far as I can tell from all the accessibility code I've read, Willie roughly plays the same role for open-source accessibility that Linus Torvalds plays for Linux. It's as if someone bought the company Linus works for, and said, "This guy is overpaid. Let's save some money."
I'm slowly losing my own vision, but while I can still use inaccessible software, I'm hacking like crazy in my free time to improve the things in Linux land. So, I've read a lot of code, and Willie's name is all over the place. The most important centerpiece of Linux accessibility is the Orca screen reader for the Gnome desktop. Who do you think was in charge of both Orca and Gnome accessibility? Willie, and for damned good reasons.
For guys like me who write code on Linux boxes for a living, Willie's departure from Sun is scary as hell.
It turns out that one of the people Oracle fired is effectively the Linus Torvald of Linux accessibility. He architected it, and wrote a ton of it. It's like firing Linux, and complaining that after all, it's only one guy.
As for OpenOffice accessibility, kiss it goodbye on Linux. Without Willie or a team of several guys to replace him, it will slowly degrade in to unusablity.
I'm 100% with you on the other guys hiring Willie. My preference would be Canonical (Ubuntu), but RedHat would be a decent fit, and I could even live with Novell. Maybe they could start working off the evil taint.
I suppose we could complain about Oracle selling inaccessible RedHat clone licenses, which are not accessible because the RedHat code they copied doesn't properly support Sun's accessiblity code (Orca, in particular).
Anyone know a good lawyer who might want to do a bit of pro-bono work for the blind?