but this time I really have to ask: Are you on smack?
It sounds more like he's on acid. The solution to information overload comes - yes! - via a website (how's that for circular logic) and Greek mythology! Of course! It's so obvious now!
Placing your decisions in the hands of others remains a foolish strategy, be those others humans, programs, or dogs (i'm on acid too!)
I looked out my window a minute ago, and if those Luddites are circling in their covered wagons, they're very well concealed.
BTW, Katz, there was a lot written on designing programs for users rather than programmers before "Information Architecture for the WWW" came along, though the concepts may be novel to the website script kiddies you associate with. It's something we professional developers have to deal with on a daily basis to keep our customers happy. Try "Code Complete" or even the "MS Windows interface guidelines" if you want to learn more on this topic.
If information overload is a concern, perhaps Slashdot could consider limiting Katz' epistles to one per day. There were two yesterday, and IMHO that's at least one too many.
It's obviously not going to have a GPL licence. I want open software development software to write open software.
And other people want development tools to get the job done the way which suits them best.
Freedom is about choice. Demanding that everything be GPL'ed, or implying that those who don't are morons (hello ESR), takes the choice, and thus the freedom, away.
I use a computer to get work done (I program Unix and Windows professionally). I don't run a "freedom platform". This politicisation of OS's I find ludicrous.
I'm not "euphoric", but I think this is a good thing. Delphi for Linux might not be Open Source, but if it helps me build effective apps for my customers faster i'm going to use it. I'd use GCC for everything if it were faster to use than Delphi, but it's not. Call me morally bankrupt for my pragmatic approach if you will - I DON'T CARE.
There are at least two "freedom platform" attempts to produce a "freeware Delphi for Linux" of which I am aware, Megido and Lazarus. Neither are going anywhere. There's the Free Pascal Compiler, sure, and this is pretty good as far as it goes, but it ain't Delphi. I guess you and your comrades in the collective could get on board if you want to demonstrate the strength of your convictions.
I DO plan to use the newly ported product. Delphi is a great tool, despite (or because of?) the fact it isn't open source. Actually, much of it is.
Your "freedom" stance may get you kudos at the commune or local LUG, but many of us in the real world don't give a rat's.
Oracle make a pretty good RDBMS, but bringing them into an organisation requires spending even more than you would with all Microsoft software. Their product prices are outrageous, their support model even more expensive than Microsoft. If you REALLY want to throw money away, contract their consulting services...
And they make what are IMHO the worst application development tools on the planet (Designer/2000 in particular, whose code generator regularly pumps out code that Developer/2000 can't compile).
Releasing a Linux version of your product doesn't make you a friend of free software.
I DO like their RDBMS - I just wish that the small company I work for could justify the expense.
If Linux and friends can defeat Microsoft, do you really think Sun is going to be a problem?
Linux defeating MS hasn't happened yet, and it's not likely to either. IMHO, this attitude of "war" and "Microsoft as the enemy" is part of what makes Scott McNealy so annoying, and what turns so many away from Linux because they see rightly or wrongly that the user base is full of rabid Microsoft haters.
Both McNealy and Larry Ellison would gladly take over from Bill Gates as monopolist in a nanosecond if they got the chance. And IBM were no better in their heyday - in many ways, they were worse.
Ultimately, I can't see Sun's strategies succeeding because they are focusing on dethroning Microsoft rather than the market and what users want (and that ain't Java!). A lesson there for the more one-eyed of you Linux treehuggers.
A sensible company will not monitor employee activity to micromanage employees or to ensure they meet some PHB-imposed standard of conduct or morality.
However, a sensible company will take steps to ensure the conduct of its employees will not expose it to prosecution or damage its reputation, or allow any intellectual property or information which gives it a competitive advantage to be stolen.
In Australia at least, any company monitoring its employees' activity is required to inform its employees that this is the case. A sensible company can and will publish, stick to, and enforce a code of conduct for the use of company property and resources.
I agree that measuring performance by things other than quality and quantity of output is galling, but some of the things employees can and do get up to which have nothing to do with productivity can and IMHO should get them summarily dismissed.
One company I worked for had an employee who, against company policy and the law, was making threats against finance company customers to get her performance stats up. Only the info from telephone monitoring allowed this employee to be caught.
In similar situations, disputes often arise with customers denying that they were told such and such by an employee, or claim that the employee threatened them or used offensive language, situations that monitoring can resolve.
The downloading or possesion of kiddie porn is an offence in most places, and the company could be conceivably held liable for such, as it could with an employee who sent unwanted and unwelcome porn, threats, love letters, etc. to a fellow employee - harassment.
The ideal company would only crack these logs after a complaint from an employee or customer, but such things do happen and any company which does not take steps to safeguard itself from them is inviting trouble. Abuses of the mechanism are possible, sure (vote with your feet), but having the company wound up and its employees retrenched because it inadequately monitored the actions of a few does nobody any good either.
Re:Endings: Stephenson and Gibson
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 1
Zodiac and Cryptonomicon have something approaching more normal narrative structure and endings which work reasonably well.
To me, the ending in Snow Crash was almost irrelevant to the sheer tidal wave of strange new ideas (the nam-shub of Enki, the supersonic rat-dogs, the Mataverse itself), weird but excellent characters (Raven, Ng etc.), the cultural references and in-jokes, and the sheer craziness, pace and voice of the writing itself - the pizza-delivery stuff at the beginning, the confrontation with Raven at the rock concert, and chapter 36 ("Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, givent the right circumstances, he could be the baddest motherf***er in the world..."). One of my favorite reads of all time.
Diamond Age is more measured and constructed with more care and thought than the adrenalin pace of SC, but its density of ideas is still to me the main fascination.
I loved Neuromancer, but found the other two in that series, MLO and Count Zero were just more of the same. I really liked "Burning Chrome" especially the title story and "the Winter Market".
But for my tastes, even though they're different, SC left Neuromancer in the dust as THE Cyberpunk novel.
I agree. The consensus seems to be that the best and brightest work as contractors, but in reality the best and brightest are people like Bill Joy, James Gosling, Sun employees, Linus Thorvalds the Transmeta employee, Mandrake the VA employee, jwz the former Netscape employee. Not to mention various people at Xerox PARC, and even... shudder... Microsoft.
I worked for a chemical company 7 years, a finance company 8 years, a contractor to a software company one year, and spent the last 5 working for IT consulting companies as an employee who works like contractors do, i.e. short to medium term assignments for other companies. I prefer the last arrangement.
The trouble with running projects staffed mainly with contractors is the level of management and coordination effort required. I worked on a 15 month project (which originally started as being a 3 week project) with between 30 and 60 contractors involved at one stage, and it was a communications and management nightmare. No one knew their station, responsibility and authority were ill defined (though everything got done due to the willingness of the majority to fill the gaps left through maladministration and make sure everything got done). There were good ideas and insights which went unheeded due to the poor coordination. goalposts were moved constantly and lots of time was spent hotly arguing about matters which later turned out to be inconsequential. Management by consensus is an ideal which doesn't work.
Only use contractors if you can define exactly what you want them to accomplish. Or if you can't hire employees...:)
user interface (windowing, user programmable buttons), connection to a database, and it MUST include a math package of great accuracy.
No. Each of these aspects (GUI, DB... hi precision math?) are IMHO candidates for second phase learning. Start with the command line as interface, learn about basic disk file and filesystem operations, and learn about integers and single and double precision floating point numbers to get a basic inderstanding of computer architecture. Why on earth is hi precision math a requirement?
None of these come close in popularity to the most widely used database and programming language - it's the Microsoft Excell spreadsheet.
This may be true (personally I suspect there's MUCH more COBOL code around) but wide usage is no indicator of learning efficacy. Excel macros are now written in VBA which is a mishmash of quasi-OO and VB quirks which IMHO are extraordinarily ill-suited to the beginner. I've had to do occasional work on such VBA "code" written by non-programmers and it's godawful. MS Access falls into this category also.
Yes, its true. When I need to track a mailing list, do I start a 3 year coding project with php talking to mysql with a py front end? Not on your life, I start banging data into a spreadsheet.
Yes but the discussion is about learning to program and developing good programming understanding and habits. Banging data into a spreadsheet has nothing to do with that.
I have programmed for 22 years (yes Unix included) and I have found few programmers who do not take pride in the quality of their work. Generally speaking, problems are due to bad project management or unrealistic scheduling by non-programmers.
IT has few ethical problems compared to a field such as... you listening, Katz?... journalism. Lies, beat-ups, restatement of the bleeding obvious, fatuousness, callous manipulation of people... one of the more self-important journalists on Australian 60 minutes was detained in East Timor recently for more or less inciting a riot with guns and machetes outside a polling booth in one of the most sensitive and explosive political environments of modern times. Unfortunately he survived unscathed.
You wanna get all high and mighty about ethics, Katz? Look a bit closer to home and give us techos a break.
Yes it does, it's just a LOT more difficult than it should be for an alleged "network programming language".
If you want to do something while waiting on a socket, you start another thread.
Not if the server you're trying to connect to exposes a non blocking socket as it's only interface. The thread approach is for blocking sockets.
If you are trying to do otherwise you have a paradigm/language mismatch.
So if I want to use a missing piece of Java (the language which Sun say will replace everything else) it's MY fault? If there's a language/paradigm mismatch, its between "Java" and "programming in the real world".
Traditional Unix style socket-centric programming is impossible in Java. Thats not necessarily a bad thing, and you can get the functionality in other (more OO) ways.
It's NOT impossible!!! I've done it!!!
It's just more difficult than a better designed set of Socket objects should make it. You're trying to defend Java's poor design in this area IMHO, for no good reason.
This is normal behaviour (well, as normal as it gets).
IE is telling you that the site is protected by SSL, using a certificate which not "I have chosen not to trust", but "I have not explicitly chosen to trust". Since the certificate used by the site was generated by C.Scott himself, it is unlikely that it will have been included in the default list of sites set up by Microsoft (Mostly big players like Verisign and Thawte) which come with IE5.
If you choose, you can trust any certificate generated by the C. Scott Ananian certification authority (anyone can be a CA, but can you trust them?), but you have to do this manually - otherwise the ceirtification thing would give no protection.
The certificate is used by Secure Sockets Layer to enable your traffic to/from C. Scott's site to be encrypted.
IE gives you another message about the Cert common name not matching the domain name. This is a warning; the domain name is checked by certification to avoid certain man in the middle attacks on SSL. This appears to be because the certificate used is a CA certificate rather than a more usual server certificate.
I recommend the O'Reilly book "Web Security and Commerce" if you wish to find out more about this.
Apache for Win32 cannot be considered as a production standard web server. The developers make no bones about this on their web page. If you want to use Apache for busy web servers, you run it on Unix.
Apache for Win32 DOES make an excellent replacement for MS Personal Web Server, for use in development. PWS and the associated MTS used to hang up with my laptop's management software and/or virus scanning software; Apache just runs fine on its own without side effects.
While there are few real open source programs out there for Win32, any longtime Delphi or VB programmers will tell you there are plenty of open source components written in such languages.
Some have lamented the lack of free development tools for Windows. To say there are none is too broad a statement. You have Perl/Tk, Perl::GUI, and Java (not open source, but free).
So I'm a corporate IT manager. I've had the misfortune to hire an NT bigot and a Unix weenie as sysadmins for their prospective domains. Both refuse to work on each other's systems, and both demand control of DNS.
They've swallowed the FUD about DDNS in this article, ignored the fact that's it's substantially a technical non-issue, and now I have both of them in my office shouting at each other, both demanding control.
What do I do?
Yep. Sack 'em both, and get two (or one?) admins who are prepared to work on both systems and do what it takes to get the job done. The company will be a better place without weenies, OS bigots, or prima donnas.
I too have done some work with certificates (no book contracts yet:-) )
In Australia, there has been much noise by government but little action regarding PKI's. Australia Post had a CA scheme going but decided to can it about 3 months back. Your only options now for an Australian CA (other than becoming one yourself, which has its own sociopolitical issues though the technology is there) are a couple of the big accounting/consulting firms, neither of whom seemed to have a clue about what they were trying to do last time I looked.
If you don't go with Verisign or Thawte, or a few other CA's, who appear as default trusted CA's in MS and Netscape products, you run the risk of scaring techno-illiterates away with those "untrusted authority" dialogs.
For a server cert, the Verisign signup procedure is not simple, quick or cheap. Particularly for a small company trying to, ahem, "leverage the level playing field of the Internet."
The US export laws cause problems for anyone trying to write automated secure email programs. for example, RSA's S/MIME toolkits are only available to US and Canadian citizens. And S/MIME is what MS mail software would have you use by default for mail encryption. (Yes I know you can get PGP plugins, I use them myself, but does Joe Average Clueless User?)
I have written programs to send encrypted email. But I used PGP, which does not use certificates. Finding something for S/MIME using certs was just too hard.
Oh, yeah. I can't see Dell delivering my next computer electronically any time soon.
I agree with most of what you say. Sun don't need MS to screw Java up, they're doing OK at that on their own. The ISO fiasco and split with IBM on the OS two cases in point.
I disagree with MassacrE's statements about OO. OO's good for a small to medium multideveloper project. The paradigm starts to run out of gas when you're talking about really big and complex systems, e.g. a telco billing system: they tend to collapse under the weight of the management and documentation overhead that strict OO projects require.
If I was to stick my neck out and say that OO is nothing more than the enforcement by software of what should be good development practices, but with a reduction in the flexibility which is sometimes necessary, I'd probably get flamed - so I won't.
I became disillusioned with Java when the two projects I wanted to use it for landed me in a few of the Java object heirarchy's holes - one required using nonblocking socket I/O, which in Java requires a horrid kludge using socket timeouts which has to be seen to be believed, the other landed me square in the middle of the DMZ between COM and CORBA and would have required me to use visual J++ (which is godawful), buy the overpriced Linar software, or start fiddling with low level COM for which I could have used C or Delphi anyway.
And this for Java, a language which is supposedly BUILT for network applications!
I wrote my Windows versions in Delphi, my Unix versions in Perl. Both work, even if they're not Java.
The Wired article was a load of rubbish. Someone must have had a deadline and no ideas. The LA times article was worth reading for its humour.
I've worked long hours as sysadmin, operations supervisor, and programmer. Yes, I spent long hours in the office including regular all nighters. Doing so, I got to meet two shifts worth of female co-workers. I had several short dalliances and one relationship of nearly two years with attractive, sexy women. I also had a relationship with a girl working in technical sales support for a supplier which was delightful. I'm been married to a girl I met at work for nearly ten years.
I managed to pursue other hobbies as well, which gave me more to talk about than computers and work. Consideration for others and a sense of humour go a long way where relationships are concerned.
If you can't meet any MOTOS, change your job or change your priorities. Or accept things the way they are. If you work that hard in this industry and you're any good, you can have a large say in your choice of employer and conditions of work.
If your boss tells you that getting married will affect your career prospects while he's bonking two on the side and you take that at all seriously, you're the loser, not him.
Lots of companies are ruthless. "Playing nice" may make the world a better place overall, but that's not what business is about. Business is about money.
Being able to make money any which way you can is not something that counts against Microsoft. It's something we should look up to. If the same tactics were to be used against Microsoft, the company doing so would be called "creative" or at most, "aggressive".
Agreed. Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison aren't exactly the moral equivalents of Joan of Arc and Mother Theresa. There's plenty of ego and rapacity out there without Bill Gates. Think either of them would turn down MS's market share? In hell with those snowballs.
Ruthlessness? You don't grab that opportunity or stop the other guy from getting it, your business will suffer. So will your shareholders, employees, their families and kids.
The Bill Gates/Citizen Kane thing doesn't do it for me. I would expect him to be pretty happy right now... wife, kid, big house, the most successful software company in the world, interesting life, a few enemies (including those incredibly scary Linux hackers and ESR with his guns) but still lots of admirers.
Crap software? Since when was quality a primary determinant of what people buy? Turn on your most successful TV channel, read a tabloid newspaper or the national enquirer. Crap sells. People eat it up. As H L Mencken said, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Sickened by the "injustice"? Your problem. The rest of us just deal with it.
I'm normally an inveterate Katz basher (boycott theaters that won't let underage kids watch South Park? sheesh! Get a life!) but I thought this review was OK.
Remember, Hitler was a nice guy if you sat down to tea with him too.
Anyone offended by my use of hitler, feel free to substitute JDRockefeller, ACarnegie, TAEdison (before you flame for this one, research edisons position with regard to licensing motion picture technology) or any of the usual political figures.
The classic observation about usenet discussions is that they start to veer into the idiot zone when someone brings up Nazi Germany. Congrats.
None of those other guys murdered 6,000,000 Jews last time I consulted the history books. Neither did Bill Gates. I'm not getting upset, I just think your analogy and its self-justification are ridiculous.
By probabilities alone,... And therefore, even if the stock market is totally unbiased, the rich is sure to win and the poor is sure to loose.
This is utter bollocks. Even a small investor who invests for the long term, spreads risk, and does not speculate is guaranteed a better return over decades than leaving money in the bank or whatever.
There is a long distance between the ability to possess goods and the ability to make good (beneficial) use of your goods.
No shit, Sherlock. However you have to have resources first to make good use of them. you of course may not be able to use them effectively, but speak for yourself, please.
Even if this made money, it will teach me that money do not have to be earned, just steal them. This is not a good guide for my life since I do not plan to spend it collecting coins.
Why is it theft? If I were you, I wouldn't collect coins either, but I'd try to look at things from a more rational viewpoint. money's not evil, only its misuse. If you deserved the letter, you deserve to share in RHS's success.
The really good deals (moneymakers known in advance) are currently being reserved for the old hands who want to CONTROL the market.
Gee, you really have some AMAZING insight (*sarcasm*).
Well I say SUE 'EM NOW! SUE 'EM HARD! SUE 'EM TWICE!
Yeah, great idea. That way all the lawyers can get their snouts in the trough as well, and gum up the works for another decade. You live in the USA, land of guns and litigation, by any chance?
Any more earth stattering insights and bright ideas, Sherlock?
If you want to support RHS, buy their products and recommend them to others rather than fiddle-ass around with stocks. Good luck to all RH investors, anyway.
The sentiment around here is that if they aren't burnt-out by age 35-40 then they probably aren't any good.
Hmmm, I asked around here and the sentiment is that if young pups can't last as successful programmers into their 40's and beyond they probably should pick a career that won't stress them so much, like sweeping floors or flipping burgers.
You want to go out in a blaze of glory while you're young? fine, just don't expect anyone to look at you twice after you go nova.
Slashdot Mirror
but this time I really have to ask: Are you on smack?
It sounds more like he's on acid. The solution to information overload comes - yes! - via a website (how's that for circular logic) and Greek mythology! Of course! It's so obvious now!
Placing your decisions in the hands of others remains a foolish strategy, be those others humans, programs, or dogs (i'm on acid too!)
I looked out my window a minute ago, and if those Luddites are circling in their covered wagons, they're very well concealed.
BTW, Katz, there was a lot written on designing programs for users rather than programmers before "Information Architecture for the WWW" came along, though the concepts may be novel to the website script kiddies you associate with. It's something we professional developers have to deal with on a daily basis to keep our customers happy. Try "Code Complete" or even the "MS Windows interface guidelines" if you want to learn more on this topic.
If information overload is a concern, perhaps Slashdot could consider limiting Katz' epistles to one per day. There were two yesterday, and IMHO that's at least one too many.
It's obviously not going to have a GPL licence. I want open software development software to write open software.
And other people want development tools to get the job done the way which suits them best.
Freedom is about choice. Demanding that everything be GPL'ed, or implying that those who don't are morons (hello ESR), takes the choice, and thus the freedom, away.
I use a computer to get work done (I program Unix and Windows professionally). I don't run a "freedom platform". This politicisation of OS's I find ludicrous.
I'm not "euphoric", but I think this is a good thing. Delphi for Linux might not be Open Source, but if it helps me build effective apps for my customers faster i'm going to use it. I'd use GCC for everything if it were faster to use than Delphi, but it's not. Call me morally bankrupt for my pragmatic approach if you will - I DON'T CARE.
There are at least two "freedom platform" attempts to produce a "freeware Delphi for Linux" of which I am aware, Megido and Lazarus. Neither are going anywhere. There's the Free Pascal Compiler, sure, and this is pretty good as far as it goes, but it ain't Delphi. I guess you and your comrades in the collective could get on board if you want to demonstrate the strength of your convictions.
I DO plan to use the newly ported product. Delphi is a great tool, despite (or because of?) the fact it isn't open source. Actually, much of it is.
Your "freedom" stance may get you kudos at the commune or local LUG, but many of us in the real world don't give a rat's.
Oracle make a pretty good RDBMS, but bringing them into an organisation requires spending even more than you would with all Microsoft software. Their product prices are outrageous, their support model even more expensive than Microsoft. If you REALLY want to throw money away, contract their consulting services ...
And they make what are IMHO the worst application development tools on the planet (Designer/2000 in particular, whose code generator regularly pumps out code that Developer/2000 can't compile).
Releasing a Linux version of your product doesn't make you a friend of free software.
I DO like their RDBMS - I just wish that the small company I work for could justify the expense.
Well, I DID stop reading it and went straight to the comments. It WAS too long.
If Linux and friends can defeat Microsoft, do you really think Sun is going to be a problem?
Linux defeating MS hasn't happened yet, and it's not likely to either. IMHO, this attitude of "war" and "Microsoft as the enemy" is part of what makes Scott McNealy so annoying, and what turns so many away from Linux because they see rightly or wrongly that the user base is full of rabid Microsoft haters.
Both McNealy and Larry Ellison would gladly take over from Bill Gates as monopolist in a nanosecond if they got the chance. And IBM were no better in their heyday - in many ways, they were worse.
Ultimately, I can't see Sun's strategies succeeding because they are focusing on dethroning Microsoft rather than the market and what users want (and that ain't Java!). A lesson there for the more one-eyed of you Linux treehuggers.
A sensible company will not monitor employee activity to micromanage employees or to ensure they meet some PHB-imposed standard of conduct or morality.
However, a sensible company will take steps to ensure the conduct of its employees will not expose it to prosecution or damage its reputation, or allow any intellectual property or information which gives it a competitive advantage to be stolen.
In Australia at least, any company monitoring its employees' activity is required to inform its employees that this is the case. A sensible company can and will publish, stick to, and enforce a code of conduct for the use of company property and resources.
I agree that measuring performance by things other than quality and quantity of output is galling, but some of the things employees can and do get up to which have nothing to do with productivity can and IMHO should get them summarily dismissed.
One company I worked for had an employee who, against company policy and the law, was making threats against finance company customers to get her performance stats up. Only the info from telephone monitoring allowed this employee to be caught.
In similar situations, disputes often arise with customers denying that they were told such and such by an employee, or claim that the employee threatened them or used offensive language, situations that monitoring can resolve.
The downloading or possesion of kiddie porn is an offence in most places, and the company could be conceivably held liable for such, as it could with an employee who sent unwanted and unwelcome porn, threats, love letters, etc. to a fellow employee - harassment.
The ideal company would only crack these logs after a complaint from an employee or customer, but such things do happen and any company which does not take steps to safeguard itself from them is inviting trouble. Abuses of the mechanism are possible, sure (vote with your feet), but having the company wound up and its employees retrenched because it inadequately monitored the actions of a few does nobody any good either.
Zodiac and Cryptonomicon have something approaching more normal narrative structure and endings which work reasonably well.
..."). One of my favorite reads of all time.
To me, the ending in Snow Crash was almost irrelevant to the sheer tidal wave of strange new ideas (the nam-shub of Enki, the supersonic rat-dogs, the Mataverse itself), weird but excellent characters (Raven, Ng etc.), the cultural references and in-jokes, and the sheer craziness, pace and voice of the writing itself - the pizza-delivery stuff at the beginning, the confrontation with Raven at the rock concert, and chapter 36 ("Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, givent the right circumstances, he could be the baddest motherf***er in the world
Diamond Age is more measured and constructed with more care and thought than the adrenalin pace of SC, but its density of ideas is still to me the main fascination.
I loved Neuromancer, but found the other two in that series, MLO and Count Zero were just more of the same. I really liked "Burning Chrome" especially the title story and "the Winter Market".
But for my tastes, even though they're different, SC left Neuromancer in the dust as THE Cyberpunk novel.
I agree. The consensus seems to be that the best and brightest work as contractors, but in reality the best and brightest are people like Bill Joy, James Gosling, Sun employees, Linus Thorvalds the Transmeta employee, Mandrake the VA employee, jwz the former Netscape employee. Not to mention various people at Xerox PARC, and even ... shudder ... Microsoft.
... :)
I worked for a chemical company 7 years, a finance company 8 years, a contractor to a software company one year, and spent the last 5 working for IT consulting companies as an employee who works like contractors do, i.e. short to medium term assignments for other companies. I prefer the last arrangement.
The trouble with running projects staffed mainly with contractors is the level of management and coordination effort required. I worked on a 15 month project (which originally started as being a 3 week project) with between 30 and 60 contractors involved at one stage, and it was a communications and management nightmare. No one knew their station, responsibility and authority were ill defined (though everything got done due to the willingness of the majority to fill the gaps left through maladministration and make sure everything got done). There were good ideas and insights which went unheeded due to the poor coordination. goalposts were moved constantly and lots of time was spent hotly arguing about matters which later turned out to be inconsequential. Management by consensus is an ideal which doesn't work.
Only use contractors if you can define exactly what you want them to accomplish. Or if you can't hire employees
I think Linus was quoted once as saying his goal was world domination.
Unfortunately, the more rabid zealots and tree huggers thought he was serious.
Linux is a viable option - I'd hate it to become the only option.
The language must have logic (do loops, ifelse),
...
... hi precision math?) are IMHO candidates for second phase learning. Start with the command line as interface, learn about basic disk file and filesystem operations, and learn about integers and single and double precision floating point numbers to get a basic inderstanding of computer architecture. Why on earth is hi precision math a requirement?
OK, this I can accept
user interface (windowing, user programmable buttons), connection to a database, and it MUST include a math package of great accuracy.
No. Each of these aspects (GUI, DB
None of these come close in popularity to the most widely used database and programming language - it's the Microsoft Excell spreadsheet.
This may be true (personally I suspect there's MUCH more COBOL code around) but wide usage is no indicator of learning efficacy. Excel macros are now written in VBA which is a mishmash of quasi-OO and VB quirks which IMHO are extraordinarily ill-suited to the beginner. I've had to do occasional work on such VBA "code" written by non-programmers and it's godawful. MS Access falls into this category also.
Yes, its true. When I need to track a mailing list, do I start a 3 year coding project with php talking to mysql with a py front end? Not on your life, I start banging data into a spreadsheet.
Yes but the discussion is about learning to program and developing good programming understanding and habits. Banging data into a spreadsheet has nothing to do with that.
I have programmed for 22 years (yes Unix included) and I have found few programmers who do not take pride in the quality of their work. Generally speaking, problems are due to bad project management or unrealistic scheduling by non-programmers.
... you listening, Katz? ... journalism. Lies, beat-ups, restatement of the bleeding obvious, fatuousness, callous manipulation of people ... one of the more self-important journalists on Australian 60 minutes was detained in East Timor recently for more or less inciting a riot with guns and machetes outside a polling booth in one of the most sensitive and explosive political environments of modern times. Unfortunately he survived unscathed.
IT has few ethical problems compared to a field such as
You wanna get all high and mighty about ethics, Katz? Look a bit closer to home and give us techos a break.
Java doesn't do non-blocking I/O.
Yes it does, it's just a LOT more difficult than it should be for an alleged "network programming language".
If you want to do something while waiting on a socket, you start another thread.
Not if the server you're trying to connect to exposes a non blocking socket as it's only interface. The thread approach is for blocking sockets.
If you are trying to do otherwise you have a paradigm/language mismatch.
So if I want to use a missing piece of Java (the language which Sun say will replace everything else) it's MY fault? If there's a language/paradigm mismatch, its between "Java" and "programming in the real world".
Traditional Unix style socket-centric programming is impossible in Java. Thats not necessarily a bad thing, and you can get the functionality in other (more OO) ways.
It's NOT impossible!!! I've done it!!!
It's just more difficult than a better designed set of Socket objects should make it. You're trying to defend Java's poor design in this area IMHO, for no good reason.
This is normal behaviour (well, as normal as it gets).
IE is telling you that the site is protected by SSL, using a certificate which not "I have chosen not to trust", but "I have not explicitly chosen to trust". Since the certificate used by the site was generated by C.Scott himself, it is unlikely that it will have been included in the default list of sites set up by Microsoft (Mostly big players like Verisign and Thawte) which come with IE5.
If you choose, you can trust any certificate generated by the C. Scott Ananian certification authority (anyone can be a CA, but can you trust them?), but you have to do this manually - otherwise the ceirtification thing would give no protection.
The certificate is used by Secure Sockets Layer to enable your traffic to/from C. Scott's site to be encrypted.
IE gives you another message about the Cert common name not matching the domain name. This is a warning; the domain name is checked by certification to avoid certain man in the middle attacks on SSL. This appears to be because the certificate used is a CA certificate rather than a more usual server certificate.
I recommend the O'Reilly book "Web Security and Commerce" if you wish to find out more about this.
Apache for Win32 cannot be considered as a production standard web server. The developers make no bones about this on their web page. If you want to use Apache for busy web servers, you run it on Unix.
Apache for Win32 DOES make an excellent replacement for MS Personal Web Server, for use in development. PWS and the associated MTS used to hang up with my laptop's management software and/or virus scanning software; Apache just runs fine on its own without side effects.
While there are few real open source programs out there for Win32, any longtime Delphi or VB programmers will tell you there are plenty of open source components written in such languages.
Some have lamented the lack of free development tools for Windows. To say there are none is too broad a statement. You have Perl/Tk, Perl::GUI, and Java (not open source, but free).
I do both Unix and Windows programming professionally.
Please don't put me in a "camp" because I do Windows development. I don't feel I live in a world of greed and cutthroat shareware/commercial software.
It looks to me like you belong in a "camp" of irrational OS bigotry. Take a few valiums and remove the raw meat from your diet.
So I'm a corporate IT manager. I've had the misfortune to hire an NT bigot and a Unix weenie as sysadmins for their prospective domains. Both refuse to work on each other's systems, and both demand control of DNS.
They've swallowed the FUD about DDNS in this article, ignored the fact that's it's substantially a technical non-issue, and now I have both of them in my office shouting at each other, both demanding control.
What do I do?
Yep. Sack 'em both, and get two (or one?) admins who are prepared to work on both systems and do what it takes to get the job done. The company will be a better place without weenies, OS bigots, or prima donnas.
I too have done some work with certificates (no book contracts yet :-) )
In Australia, there has been much noise by government but little action regarding PKI's. Australia Post had a CA scheme going but decided to can it about 3 months back. Your only options now for an Australian CA (other than becoming one yourself, which has its own sociopolitical issues though the technology is there) are a couple of the big accounting/consulting firms, neither of whom seemed to have a clue about what they were trying to do last time I looked.
If you don't go with Verisign or Thawte, or a few other CA's, who appear as default trusted CA's in MS and Netscape products, you run the risk of scaring techno-illiterates away with those "untrusted authority" dialogs.
For a server cert, the Verisign signup procedure is not simple, quick or cheap. Particularly for a small company trying to, ahem, "leverage the level playing field of the Internet."
The US export laws cause problems for anyone trying to write automated secure email programs. for example, RSA's S/MIME toolkits are only available to US and Canadian citizens. And S/MIME is what MS mail software would have you use by default for mail encryption. (Yes I know you can get PGP plugins, I use them myself, but does Joe Average Clueless User?)
I have written programs to send encrypted email. But I used PGP, which does not use certificates. Finding something for S/MIME using certs was just too hard.
Oh, yeah. I can't see Dell delivering my next computer electronically any time soon.
I agree with most of what you say. Sun don't need MS to screw Java up, they're doing OK at that on their own. The ISO fiasco and split with IBM on the OS two cases in point.
I disagree with MassacrE's statements about OO. OO's good for a small to medium multideveloper project. The paradigm starts to run out of gas when you're talking about really big and complex systems, e.g. a telco billing system: they tend to collapse under the weight of the management and documentation overhead that strict OO projects require.
If I was to stick my neck out and say that OO is nothing more than the enforcement by software of what should be good development practices, but with a reduction in the flexibility which is sometimes necessary, I'd probably get flamed - so I won't.
I became disillusioned with Java when the two projects I wanted to use it for landed me in a few of the Java object heirarchy's holes - one required using nonblocking socket I/O, which in Java requires a horrid kludge using socket timeouts which has to be seen to be believed, the other landed me square in the middle of the DMZ between COM and CORBA and would have required me to use visual J++ (which is godawful), buy the overpriced Linar software, or start fiddling with low level COM for which I could have used C or Delphi anyway.
And this for Java, a language which is supposedly BUILT for network applications!
I wrote my Windows versions in Delphi, my Unix versions in Perl. Both work, even if they're not Java.
The Wired article was a load of rubbish. Someone must have had a deadline and no ideas. The LA times article was worth reading for its humour.
I've worked long hours as sysadmin, operations supervisor, and programmer. Yes, I spent long hours in the office including regular all nighters. Doing so, I got to meet two shifts worth of female co-workers. I had several short dalliances and one relationship of nearly two years with attractive, sexy women. I also had a relationship with a girl working in technical sales support for a supplier which was delightful. I'm been married to a girl I met at work for nearly ten years.
I managed to pursue other hobbies as well, which gave me more to talk about than computers and work. Consideration for others and a sense of humour go a long way where relationships are concerned.
If you can't meet any MOTOS, change your job or change your priorities. Or accept things the way they are. If you work that hard in this industry and you're any good, you can have a large say in your choice of employer and conditions of work.
If your boss tells you that getting married will affect your career prospects while he's bonking two on the side and you take that at all seriously, you're the loser, not him.
Lots of companies are ruthless. "Playing nice" may make the world a better place overall, but that's not what business is about. Business is about money.
... wife, kid, big house, the most successful software company in the world, interesting life, a few enemies (including those incredibly scary Linux hackers and ESR with his guns) but still lots of admirers.
Being able to make money any which way you can is not something that counts against Microsoft. It's something we should look up to. If the same tactics were to be used against Microsoft, the company doing so would be called "creative" or at most, "aggressive".
Agreed. Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison aren't exactly the moral equivalents of Joan of Arc and Mother Theresa. There's plenty of ego and rapacity out there without Bill Gates. Think either of them would turn down MS's market share? In hell with those snowballs.
Ruthlessness? You don't grab that opportunity or stop the other guy from getting it, your business will suffer. So will your shareholders, employees, their families and kids.
The Bill Gates/Citizen Kane thing doesn't do it for me. I would expect him to be pretty happy right now
Crap software? Since when was quality a primary determinant of what people buy? Turn on your most successful TV channel, read a tabloid newspaper or the national enquirer. Crap sells. People eat it up. As H L Mencken said, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Sickened by the "injustice"? Your problem. The rest of us just deal with it.
I'm normally an inveterate Katz basher (boycott theaters that won't let underage kids watch South Park? sheesh! Get a life!) but I thought this review was OK.
Remember, Hitler was a nice guy if you sat down to tea with him too.
Anyone offended by my use of hitler, feel free to substitute JDRockefeller, ACarnegie, TAEdison (before you flame for this one, research edisons position with regard to licensing motion picture technology) or any of the usual political figures.
The classic observation about usenet discussions is that they start to veer into the idiot zone when someone brings up Nazi Germany. Congrats.
None of those other guys murdered 6,000,000 Jews last time I consulted the history books. Neither did Bill Gates. I'm not getting upset, I just think your analogy and its self-justification are ridiculous.
By probabilities alone, ... And therefore, even if the stock market is totally unbiased, the rich is sure to win and the poor is sure to loose.
This is utter bollocks. Even a small investor who invests for the long term, spreads risk, and does not speculate is guaranteed a better return over decades than leaving money in the bank or whatever.
There is a long distance between the ability to possess goods and the ability to make good (beneficial) use of your goods.
No shit, Sherlock. However you have to have resources first to make good use of them. you of course may not be able to use them effectively, but speak for yourself, please.
Even if this made money, it will teach me that money do not have to be earned, just steal them. This is not a good guide for my life since I do not plan to spend it collecting coins.
Why is it theft? If I were you, I wouldn't collect coins either, but I'd try to look at things from a more rational viewpoint. money's not evil, only its misuse. If you deserved the letter, you deserve to share in RHS's success.
( Now explain all that to my wife...)
Good luck, you're going to need it.
The really good deals (moneymakers known in advance) are currently being reserved for the old hands who want to CONTROL the market.
Gee, you really have some AMAZING insight (*sarcasm*).
Well I say SUE 'EM NOW! SUE 'EM HARD! SUE 'EM TWICE!
Yeah, great idea. That way all the lawyers can get their snouts in the trough as well, and gum up the works for another decade. You live in the USA, land of guns and litigation, by any chance?
Any more earth stattering insights and bright ideas, Sherlock?
If you want to support RHS, buy their products and recommend them to others rather than fiddle-ass around with stocks. Good luck to all RH investors, anyway.
The sentiment around here is that if they aren't burnt-out by age 35-40 then they probably aren't any good.
Hmmm, I asked around here and the sentiment is that if young pups can't last as successful programmers into their 40's and beyond they probably should pick a career that won't stress them so much, like sweeping floors or flipping burgers.
You want to go out in a blaze of glory while you're young? fine, just don't expect anyone to look at you twice after you go nova.