I work for a boss who is also a friend. We agreed on what I would do and how much I would get paid (cash, benefits, etc., including a laptop and mobile phone, software, etc.) My work is contract software development for clients, and occasionally other things like interim management of IT departments.
I've worked as an independent contractor, member of an IT department for finance and chemical companies, and as an employee of Australia's biggest privately owned computer company.
I despair for you if you think that any arrangement where you employ others for your own profit is inherently evil. You need professional help. Nothing in this world of any size gets done unless people get organised and motivated, and to paraphrase Samuel Johnson (yes, he's dead too) few sensible people work without money in mind.
Another quote for the more rabid communist Linux tree-huggers to consider came from Sam also: "None but a blockhead ever wrote except for money". I'm not saying all or even most open source developers should be tarred with this brush, but I find rabid zealotry of all forms most repellent.
I'm nearly 45. I've been doing development on a variety of platforms, including win16/32, OS/2, HP/UX and Linux for the last five years. Before that I was an IT manager, and I can tell you that programming is a much safer employment proposition than management. I know I could go out tomorrow and have a well-paying development or project management contract within a week. The high profile companies in SV and on NasDaq may have been started by twentysomethings, but there are plenty of companies out there who have been around a lot longer; there is a shortage of IT staff in Australia at present and most are desperate for competent people of any age. Of course, if you started as a COBOL programmer 25 years ago (I did) and havent been prepared to learn modern software and development techniques, you probably deserve to go down with the dinosaurs (and Karl Marx) once the Y2K panic subsides. Of course in Oz, the government are introducing a GST hot on the heels of Y2K which means those developers will then have a whole swag of new legacy updates to take care of.
What am I doing now? Developing a complex web/database application in Perl, XML, Javescript and HTML. The only constant is change.
To sum up, there are no major revelations in Katz' piece, and the stuff he is talking about has been going on for decades if not centuries.
Rehashes of the bleeding obvious tinged with sixties-style idealistic longing for things that will never happen do not suddenly become insightful journalism because you add the buzzwords "technology" and "internet".
Why insult it by comparing it to Java, which in overblown hype ranks right up there with the coverage of JFKj's death?
BTW Katz, the gratuitous references to MS in your stories to hook the Linux weenies is wearing a bit thin. I still remember the time you tried to compare George Lucas to Bill Gates in your (possibly deserved) trashing of Phantom Menace. Give it a rest.
No the point is that SMS is installed and authorized by the System adminstrators who have all legal rights to do so whereas the BO2K is not an administration tool and is installed without authorization.
That's not logical. B02k could be installed by a legit sysadmin, an unlicensed SMS (shock! horror!) by an unauthorised hacker.
MS may be hypocrites on this issue, but it doesn't logically follow from that that the cDC people are angels. They portray themselves as on a computer security mission from God, to me they appear as self-publicising smartasses with programming talent which could be put to better use.
Look at VNC. That's my idea of a open source remote admin tool. And it doesn't just run on Win32.
I live in the Sydney and was getting a third line put into my house (one voice, one personal modem, one work voice/modem). It took 12 months... I eventually found out that at first the line capacity from the pole to the end of the street was full; they fixed this, but in the meantime capacity between the end of the street and the exchange filled up. They went through a big exercise in our neighbourhood installing underground cables... I doubt this was solely related to my line request, but I spoke to the Telstra techos while they were in my street and they knew of my request. Maybe this was related to the fact that I was being a complete PITA to their customer service people at the time.
I asked about compensation, but was told that this was only related to people who had no preexisting phone service. Hmmmm. It didn't REALLY affect me, so I kept the pressure on more for the fun of abusing Big Brother rather than a real requirement.
It sounds pretty worthless anyway - a lot of damage was done to property in Sydney's eastern suburbs in April this year by a vicious hailstorm, and this included phone service disruption. Telstra got out of their "service guarantee" by claiming it didn't apply during periods of bad weather. Plus they don't compensate you proactively, you have to apply and be aware of your rights to make such a claim.
Competition must be good. However, I've done programming contracts for two of Telstra's competitors, and neither seem at all efficient or well organised, so I ain't holding my breath.
Blacks and other minorities were making good money at these jobs, and who did they vote for but Bill Clinton, a leading advocate and implemtor of free trade policies.
America espouses "free trade" only when it suits. Recent protectionism for US lamb producers means it will be more difficult for you Yanks to get quality lamb from countries like Australia.
I agree that taking care of your own future is the only way. However, the notion that Internet access or lack thereof will fundamentally change the world is an illusion that only the Katz's of this world and others trapped in the '60s would choose to beat up. None of the various "technological revolutions" of this century (or any other) have done much to bridge the gap between haves and have nots, and there's no reason the net should be any different.
The poor and the third world will have internet access, like they have TV, phones, motorcycles and cars, just as soon as some clever (probably Yank) bastards find a way to make money out of it.
A) Why would someone want to work for a company that has bad management, 'hire & fire' policy and no compiler guy working on the Delphi compiler? (The last Delphi Compiler Engineer left a few weeks ago).
You worked there for more than a year, you tell us. If you went in for the sort of unsubstantiated whiteanting you display here, small wonder they gave you the bullet, and deservedly so. Take your word for it? NO CHANCE.
B) The Delphi IDE has no architecture at all! It is one big mess and it will be difficult to port to any other system. Good luck!
I guess I can agree that the IDE has suffered from creeping featurism along with most of its competitors. Still, it works well enough.
I guess there would be some merit in starting the IDE afresh for Linux with a reduced set of features - after all, the main benefits of Delphi are the component and object pascal features.
I challenge you to put your money where your mouth is and join up with either the Lazarus/VDK project, or the Megido project, both of whom are attempting to produce Open Source ports of Delphi for Linux using the Free Pascal compiler and GTK+. Prove that the problems you had were caused by Borland and not by you.
(I'd go for Lazarus myself - the Megido guys can't even keep up with offers of help on their mailing lists).
If you had a comprehensive remote control application that ran unobtrusively and efficiently on any win32 system, was released absolutely free and open source, and came with a comprehensive SDK for developing your own modules, plugins and clients for whatever platform you choose to use for administration, and it was released by somebody more "respectable" than us louts at the Cult of the Dead Cow, would you call it a threat?
Would you agree Virtual Network Computing (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc) goes at least some way towards meeting that goal? Without including the stealth features and self promotional posturing as our self-appointed security watchdogs?
You guys in CDC are obviously good programmers. If you're serious about protecting security, I hope you expand to probing other OS's too and not just concentrate on the Gates-bashing which too many here have an obsession about.
Perhaps this is a trivial complaint, but Windows 98 came out in 1998. So how could its shipments possibly go up 39 percent from 1997 to 1998?
Well, if you regard Win98 as a bugfix release for Win95 with a few extra utilities thrown in (and there's not a lot more to it than that), thus making all the numbers relate to versions of Win95, I guess this becomes totally trivial rather than almost totally trivial.
Who cares?
Numbers mean sweet FA to the average user anyway. Individuals and companies choose the OS's that best fit their needs, present and forecast, at a particular time. More often than not, they'll be unable to get by with a single OS and need to use a mix. Buying (or obtaining for free) decisions on OS's based on market share or penetration would be a foolish strategy. Fitness for purpose (which to some extent includes value for money) is the overriding concern for anyone with a clue.
@gamehacker.com? Playing quake made you feel real tough, huh?
This is a stupid law. If you make stupidity a capital offense, remember 50% of the poulation is below average intelligence by definition.
The tone of your post inclines me to categorise you below the line.
Violent overthrow of government might work some time in the future, but the past indicates the odds are against. Too many babies get thrown out with the bathwater.
You want to be a terrorist? Playing games ain't gonna get you there.
Well, we actually have plenty of expertise here already, and indeed have a number of recruitment companies doing good business providing contract expertise to North America. So please don't worry about your decision affecting us too much.
You are correct. There was plenty of coverage - demonstrations in Sydney got on prime time TV news, and there was approximately four pages of articles, opinion and editorial in the Australian newspaper the week it went through the senate. It also mentioned the fact that Alston, the comms minister, was due to visit the US shortly thereafter, where he was expected to be hammered about it.
The recent enshrining of the legislation was a mere formality, the battle was already over, and thus is arguably less newsworthy, though no less asinine.
You Australians who claim there was no coverage in the mainstream press must have been hiding under a rock. If you claim to be concerned about such issues, you could at least take the trouble to check the facts.
I have to agree with this. All the middleware proponents should look at Phil Greenspun's book (the photo.net link) before spending large amounts of their employers' money on such solutions.
I don't agree with everything PG says, but I think he's dead right when he says that no amount of expensive middleware can replace proper application design methodologies.
As for machine redundancy and distributed RDBMS transactions, chances are if you can't work out how to do this using a solid RDBMS and well though out transactions, your application server vendor's programmers can't either.
It amazes me that Java Servlets and Beans are seen as the ants pants for web applications by so many. You have an immature and resource hungry implementation the subject of which is being fought over in court on several fronts and the focus of a concerted fragmentation effort. As a language for networked and distributed applications it sucks in several areas.
I had for one ecommerce project to implement a non-blocking socket interface to a proprietary piece of hardware and vendor-supplied software - this CAN be done in Java but only with a pathetic kludge using socket timeouts. My other option was to use COM to interface with an Active X wrapper which can only be done in Java using Visual J++ (ECCCH) or expensive middleware like Linar.
Instead I wrote Delphi and Perl clients. Both are rock solid.
Rocket science middleware is no substitute for careful design and prgramming.
The web provides software and protocols to provide somewhat standardised presentation and connectivity to applications. This statement needs to be heavily qualified to take into account incompatibilities between browsers and web servers, and a host of other non-standard extensions like ActiveX, Java, etc.
For some types of applications, the web simplifies design and programming. For many (most?) others, things are of similar or greater complexity.
The web does not make complex procedures and applications simple. If you're trying to design a high speed RDBMS-based application with a a large number of data entry forms and complex processing(or applets, or whatever) and make it easy to use, you are going to need a rigorous design, well designed and normalised database (except where denormalisation is required for speed), and be able to coordinate and manage several programmers or teams of programmers to meet that design. It's possible also that your design requires a flexibility of UI which is too much for current browsers and HTML. This is getting better, but it still has a long way to go.
Downloaded any CVS trees lately? Do that then tell me apps are getting smaller and simpler with the advent of the web.
The stereotypical white-male-bashing-feminist-liberal-type portrayal is so one-dimensional, it only makes the inclusion of her character feel reactionary and childish on Stephenson's part. The same can be said for the emasculated colleagues she is surrounded with...It seems like a cheap shot.
These people DO exist, I've met them. I don't have any problems with feminism or liberalism, only with those who use them as a substitute for empathy and personality.
Post-modernism might be popular with a few Unix weenies after Larry Wall's popularisation thereof, but it's not going to move the wheels of industry or stop the war in Kosovo.
It's a novel, for Chrissake. PC is IMHO the enemy of good literature. Neal S is telling a story, not shoring up the last bastions of male chauvinist hegemony. Jeez, I'm starting to talk like Charlene...
Yes, I've done nightshifts in datacentres. One had a very nice female security guard... the repercussions would have been mindboggling had I attempted this. I'd probably still be in jail or the nuthouse.
Telecom NZ is owned by American shareholders, they're the only ones stupid enough to try something like this.
And dare I say it, they don't care a fig how much the NZ internet user pays as long as the share price and dividends are up.
Actually, this is not about Net restriction... I think TNZ are happy to let as many people as possible access as many sites as they can. More tax $$$ and TNZ profits.
This HAS to be blatant unfair competition. Can't they be prosecuted?
I'd respect them even more if they stopped acting like rock stars and kept their professional difficulties to themselves, like mature professionals do.
I do hope that "professionalism", if that word applies to Open Source and Free Software, and discipline will come to grace the Linux community at some time. Show a little class and deal with your problems in private.
Good comments. Personally, I find the sort of elitism being promoted by some here rather distasteful. I would prefer not to be associated with a bunch of egotistical prima donnas.
Every decent professional wants work which is challenging and interesting, even lawyers and accountants. Nobody in a technical or methodological field wants to be managed by someone who can't or won't make the effort to understand what they do.
I agree good management is essential. But good management is not management by abdication. Letting the geeks get on with their work and staying out of their way is fine, ONCE MANAGEMENT HAS SET THE GOALS AND LIMITATIONS OF THE PROJECT (hopefully in consultation with the techies, but said consultation should happen with the janitor, soldiers in the field, or whomever). Letting geeks work on what they want is too close to letting the lunatics run the asylum.
I worked for a large Australian computing consultancy for several years. The bosses gave you assignments and let you get on with it. But they would provide backup and solve non-technical issues for you. The best account managers used to do some outrageous things and nearly drove me up the wall sometimes, but they kept the business coming in and kept projects coming. I respected them for that.
My current boss is a career manager, but also appointed himself network administrator, which he does quite well in his own time, and took the time to learn Dos, Basic, and Assembler programming back in the early 80's. He's more current with and has a better grasp of the wide range of computing trends than many of his specialist techie subordinates.
I also agree with your assessment of IonStorm. Romero sounds like he's in desperate need of a sharp manager - in his case the geek who manages himself has a fool for an employee.
There's no such thing as separate culture anymore, if ever.
Speak for yourself.
Or have you forgotten the fact that your upright govt banned Phantasmagoria when in fact they never played the game to see what it's about(this was admitted). Had they played the game they would have seen the option to turn of the violent cut-scenes.
I'm not an apologist for the Australian Government. I think this legislation is asinine. I haven't played the game you talk about. In any case, censorship of game content is not the same as Internet content regulation, except where game downloads are concerned. Frankly, that (P-Goria) particular infringement of civil liberties is somewhat low on my list of things to get upset about.
Where are YOU from, Mr Coward? U.S.? Australia? If the former, don't presume to assume you have the right to lecture me.
Oh hell yeah. Even the newsreaders go nude on Australia day. It's a tradition, like wombat-riding and playing the didgeridoo on Bondi Beach.
(Duh, That was a joke...)
I've never come across this show you're talking about. I have cable as well as free-to-air. Most nudity on Aussie TV comes from Hollywood.
Please make sure you are spouting fact rather than half-assed hearsay before posting in future.
The Australian Broadcasting Authority does govern TV as well. I think they are actually reasonably fair and open-minded; However, TV is easier to administer by restricting the timeslots shows are aired. This is of course impossible on the Internet, which makes the whole thing unworkable. If Aussie content is restricted to G-rated stuff, we might as well forget it. The whole thing is ridiculously unworkable, and only highlights the supreme ineptitude of our politicians. Don't blame me, I voted Labor.
It IS interesting that Alston, the communications minister behind this bill, complained to the ABA regarding what he perceived as journalistic bias against the government by government-sponsored TV during the last Australian Federal election. His complaint was proven to be groundless when the statitics were published. So the pollies can try to coopt the system, but the system doesn't always play along.
The Australian net censorship legislation had nothing to do with Littleton. Please stop assuming that everyone else in the world dances to the tunes played in the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
Marx is deader than Elvis. So is communism.
I work for a boss who is also a friend. We agreed on what I would do and how much I would get paid (cash, benefits, etc., including a laptop and mobile phone, software, etc.) My work is contract software development for clients, and occasionally other things like interim management of IT departments.
I've worked as an independent contractor, member of an IT department for finance and chemical companies, and as an employee of Australia's biggest privately owned computer company.
I despair for you if you think that any arrangement where you employ others for your own profit is inherently evil. You need professional help. Nothing in this world of any size gets done unless people get organised and motivated, and to paraphrase Samuel Johnson (yes, he's dead too) few sensible people work without money in mind.
Another quote for the more rabid communist Linux tree-huggers to consider came from Sam also: "None but a blockhead ever wrote except for money". I'm not saying all or even most open source developers should be tarred with this brush, but I find rabid zealotry of all forms most repellent.
I'm nearly 45. I've been doing development on a variety of platforms, including win16/32, OS/2, HP/UX and Linux for the last five years. Before that I was an IT manager, and I can tell you that programming is a much safer employment proposition than management. I know I could go out tomorrow and have a well-paying development or project management contract within a week. The high profile companies in SV and on NasDaq may have been started by twentysomethings, but there are plenty of companies out there who have been around a lot longer; there is a shortage of IT staff in Australia at present and most are desperate for competent people of any age. Of course, if you started as a COBOL programmer 25 years ago (I did) and havent been prepared to learn modern software and development techniques, you probably deserve to go down with the dinosaurs (and Karl Marx) once the Y2K panic subsides. Of course in Oz, the government are introducing a GST hot on the heels of Y2K which means those developers will then have a whole swag of new legacy updates to take care of.
What am I doing now? Developing a complex web/database application in Perl, XML, Javescript and HTML. The only constant is change.
Good post.
To sum up, there are no major revelations in Katz' piece, and the stuff he is talking about has been going on for decades if not centuries.
Rehashes of the bleeding obvious tinged with sixties-style idealistic longing for things that will never happen do not suddenly become insightful journalism because you add the buzzwords "technology" and "internet".
Greek's a good language.
Why insult it by comparing it to Java, which in overblown hype ranks right up there with the coverage of JFKj's death?
BTW Katz, the gratuitous references to MS in your stories to hook the Linux weenies is wearing a bit thin. I still remember the time you tried to compare George Lucas to Bill Gates in your (possibly deserved) trashing of Phantom Menace. Give it a rest.
No the point is that SMS is installed and authorized by the System adminstrators who have all legal rights to do so whereas the BO2K is not an administration tool and is installed without authorization.
That's not logical. B02k could be installed by a legit sysadmin, an unlicensed SMS (shock! horror!) by an unauthorised hacker.
MS may be hypocrites on this issue, but it doesn't logically follow from that that the cDC people are angels. They portray themselves as on a computer security mission from God, to me they appear as self-publicising smartasses with programming talent which could be put to better use.
Look at VNC. That's my idea of a open source remote admin tool. And it doesn't just run on Win32.
You were lucky.
... I eventually found out that at first the line capacity from the pole to the end of the street was full; they fixed this, but in the meantime capacity between the end of the street and the exchange filled up. They went through a big exercise in our neighbourhood installing underground cables ... I doubt this was solely related to my line request, but I spoke to the Telstra techos while they were in my street and they knew of my request. Maybe this was related to the fact that I was being a complete PITA to their customer service people at the time.
I live in the Sydney and was getting a third line put into my house (one voice, one personal modem, one work voice/modem). It took 12 months
I asked about compensation, but was told that this was only related to people who had no preexisting phone service. Hmmmm. It didn't REALLY affect me, so I kept the pressure on more for the fun of abusing Big Brother rather than a real requirement.
It sounds pretty worthless anyway - a lot of damage was done to property in Sydney's eastern suburbs in April this year by a vicious hailstorm, and this included phone service disruption. Telstra got out of their "service guarantee" by claiming it didn't apply during periods of bad weather. Plus they don't compensate you proactively, you have to apply and be aware of your rights to make such a claim.
Competition must be good. However, I've done programming contracts for two of Telstra's competitors, and neither seem at all efficient or well organised, so I ain't holding my breath.
Blacks and other minorities were making good money at these jobs, and who did they vote for but Bill Clinton, a leading advocate and implemtor of free trade policies.
America espouses "free trade" only when it suits. Recent protectionism for US lamb producers means it will be more difficult for you Yanks to get quality lamb from countries like Australia.
I agree that taking care of your own future is the only way. However, the notion that Internet access or lack thereof will fundamentally change the world is an illusion that only the Katz's of this world and others trapped in the '60s would choose to beat up. None of the various "technological revolutions" of this century (or any other) have done much to bridge the gap between haves and have nots, and there's no reason the net should be any different.
The poor and the third world will have internet access, like they have TV, phones, motorcycles and cars, just as soon as some clever (probably Yank) bastards find a way to make money out of it.
A) Why would someone want to work for a company that has bad management, 'hire & fire' policy and no compiler guy working on the Delphi compiler? (The last Delphi Compiler Engineer left a few weeks ago).
You worked there for more than a year, you tell us. If you went in for the sort of unsubstantiated whiteanting you display here, small wonder they gave you the bullet, and deservedly so. Take your word for it? NO CHANCE.
B) The Delphi IDE has no architecture at all! It is one big mess and it will be difficult to port to any other system. Good luck!
I guess I can agree that the IDE has suffered from creeping featurism along with most of its competitors. Still, it works well enough.
I guess there would be some merit in starting the IDE afresh for Linux with a reduced set of features - after all, the main benefits of Delphi are the component and object pascal features.
I challenge you to put your money where your mouth is and join up with either the Lazarus/VDK project, or the Megido project, both of whom are attempting to produce Open Source ports of Delphi for Linux using the Free Pascal compiler and GTK+. Prove that the problems you had were caused by Borland and not by you.
(I'd go for Lazarus myself - the Megido guys can't even keep up with offers of help on their mailing lists).
If you had a comprehensive remote control application that ran unobtrusively and efficiently on any win32 system, was released absolutely free and open source, and came with a comprehensive SDK for developing your own modules, plugins and clients for whatever platform you choose to use for administration, and it was released by somebody more "respectable" than us louts at the Cult of the Dead Cow, would you call it a threat?
Would you agree Virtual Network Computing (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc) goes at least some way towards meeting that goal? Without including the stealth features and self promotional posturing as our self-appointed security watchdogs?
You guys in CDC are obviously good programmers. If you're serious about protecting security, I hope you expand to probing other OS's too and not just concentrate on the Gates-bashing which too many here have an obsession about.
Perhaps this is a trivial complaint, but Windows 98 came out in 1998. So how could its shipments possibly go up 39 percent from 1997 to 1998?
Well, if you regard Win98 as a bugfix release for Win95 with a few extra utilities thrown in (and there's not a lot more to it than that), thus making all the numbers relate to versions of Win95, I guess this becomes totally trivial rather than almost totally trivial.
Who cares?
Numbers mean sweet FA to the average user anyway. Individuals and companies choose the OS's that best fit their needs, present and forecast, at a particular time. More often than not, they'll be unable to get by with a single OS and need to use a mix. Buying (or obtaining for free) decisions on OS's based on market share or penetration would be a foolish strategy. Fitness for purpose (which to some extent includes value for money) is the overriding concern for anyone with a clue.
Uh, yeah, there is occasional nudity on OZ TV. We have a rating system and warnings about content prior to showing.
...
We get most of our content from the US, so draw your own conclusions.
Hypocrisy in politics? That's never happened before, and not in any other country
I find it rather tedious having our politicians labelled as stupider than the rest by people from a country that elected both Reagan and Clinton.
@gamehacker.com? Playing quake made you feel real tough, huh?
This is a stupid law. If you make stupidity a capital offense, remember 50% of the poulation is below average intelligence by definition.
The tone of your post inclines me to categorise you below the line.
Violent overthrow of government might work some time in the future, but the past indicates the odds are against. Too many babies get thrown out with the bathwater.
You want to be a terrorist? Playing games ain't gonna get you there.
Well, we actually have plenty of expertise here already, and indeed have a number of recruitment companies doing good business providing contract expertise to North America. So please don't worry about your decision affecting us too much.
You are correct. There was plenty of coverage - demonstrations in Sydney got on prime time TV news, and there was approximately four pages of articles, opinion and editorial in the Australian newspaper the week it went through the senate. It also mentioned the fact that Alston, the comms minister, was due to visit the US shortly thereafter, where he was expected to be hammered about it.
The recent enshrining of the legislation was a mere formality, the battle was already over, and thus is arguably less newsworthy, though no less asinine.
You Australians who claim there was no coverage in the mainstream press must have been hiding under a rock. If you claim to be concerned about such issues, you could at least take the trouble to check the facts.
I have to agree with this. All the middleware proponents should look at Phil Greenspun's book (the photo.net link) before spending large amounts of their employers' money on such solutions.
I don't agree with everything PG says, but I think he's dead right when he says that no amount of expensive middleware can replace proper application design methodologies.
As for machine redundancy and distributed RDBMS transactions, chances are if you can't work out how to do this using a solid RDBMS and well though out transactions, your application server vendor's programmers can't either.
It amazes me that Java Servlets and Beans are seen as the ants pants for web applications by so many. You have an immature and resource hungry implementation the subject of which is being fought over in court on several fronts and the focus of a concerted fragmentation effort. As a language for networked and distributed applications it sucks in several areas.
I had for one ecommerce project to implement a non-blocking socket interface to a proprietary piece of hardware and vendor-supplied software - this CAN be done in Java but only with a pathetic kludge using socket timeouts. My other option was to use COM to interface with an Active X wrapper which can only be done in Java using Visual J++ (ECCCH) or expensive middleware like Linar.
Instead I wrote Delphi and Perl clients. Both are rock solid.
Rocket science middleware is no substitute for careful design and prgramming.
Errr.... No.
The web provides software and protocols to provide somewhat standardised presentation and connectivity to applications. This statement needs to be heavily qualified to take into account incompatibilities between browsers and web servers, and a host of other non-standard extensions like ActiveX, Java, etc.
For some types of applications, the web simplifies design and programming. For many (most?) others, things are of similar or greater complexity.
The web does not make complex procedures and applications simple. If you're trying to design a high speed RDBMS-based application with a a large number of data entry forms and complex processing(or applets, or whatever) and make it easy to use, you are going to need a rigorous design, well designed and normalised database (except where denormalisation is required for speed), and be able to coordinate and manage several programmers or teams of programmers to meet that design. It's possible also that your design requires a flexibility of UI which is too much for current browsers and HTML. This is getting better, but it still has a long way to go.
Downloaded any CVS trees lately? Do that then tell me apps are getting smaller and simpler with the advent of the web.
The stereotypical white-male-bashing-feminist-liberal-type portrayal is so one-dimensional, it only makes the inclusion of her character feel reactionary and childish on Stephenson's part. The same can be said for the emasculated colleagues she is surrounded with...It seems like a cheap shot.
...
These people DO exist, I've met them. I don't have any problems with feminism or liberalism, only with those who use them as a substitute for empathy and personality.
Post-modernism might be popular with a few Unix weenies after Larry Wall's popularisation thereof, but it's not going to move the wheels of industry or stop the war in Kosovo.
It's a novel, for Chrissake. PC is IMHO the enemy of good literature. Neal S is telling a story, not shoring up the last bastions of male chauvinist hegemony. Jeez, I'm starting to talk like Charlene
Amen to the Deliverator. Hooked TOTALLY. I loved that book, and Diamond Age. Working on the big C right now (about page 456).
You and Mr Slippery need to get out more.
... the repercussions would have been mindboggling had I attempted this. I'd probably still be in jail or the nuthouse.
Yes, I've done nightshifts in datacentres. One had a very nice female security guard
Telecom NZ is owned by American shareholders, they're the only ones stupid enough to try something like this.
... I think TNZ are happy to let as many people as possible access as many sites as they can. More tax $$$ and TNZ profits.
And dare I say it, they don't care a fig how much the NZ internet user pays as long as the share price and dividends are up.
Actually, this is not about Net restriction
This HAS to be blatant unfair competition. Can't they be prosecuted?
Well said.
I use E, and I admire both these guys' work.
I'd respect them even more if they stopped acting like rock stars and kept their professional difficulties to themselves, like mature professionals do.
I do hope that "professionalism", if that word applies to Open Source and Free Software, and discipline will come to grace the Linux community at some time. Show a little class and deal with your problems in private.
"Stunt Programmer" - I love that expression.
Good comments. Personally, I find the sort of elitism being promoted by some here rather distasteful. I would prefer not to be associated with a bunch of egotistical prima donnas.
Every decent professional wants work which is challenging and interesting, even lawyers and accountants. Nobody in a technical or methodological field wants to be managed by someone who can't or won't make the effort to understand what they do.
I agree good management is essential. But good management is not management by abdication. Letting the geeks get on with their work and staying out of their way is fine, ONCE MANAGEMENT HAS SET THE GOALS AND LIMITATIONS OF THE PROJECT (hopefully in consultation with the techies, but said consultation should happen with the janitor, soldiers in the field, or whomever). Letting geeks work on what they want is too close to letting the lunatics run the asylum.
I worked for a large Australian computing consultancy for several years. The bosses gave you assignments and let you get on with it. But they would provide backup and solve non-technical issues for you. The best account managers used to do some outrageous things and nearly drove me up the wall sometimes, but they kept the business coming in and kept projects coming. I respected them for that.
My current boss is a career manager, but also appointed himself network administrator, which he does quite well in his own time, and took the time to learn Dos, Basic, and Assembler programming back in the early 80's. He's more current with and has a better grasp of the wide range of computing trends than many of his specialist techie subordinates.
I also agree with your assessment of IonStorm. Romero sounds like he's in desperate need of a sharp manager - in his case the geek who manages himself has a fool for an employee.
You 32-bit luddites and your prophecies of doom.
Go 64 bits. A LITTLE more time to think.
There's no such thing as separate culture anymore, if ever.
Speak for yourself.
Or have you forgotten the fact that your upright govt banned Phantasmagoria when in fact they never played the game to see what it's about(this was admitted). Had they played the game they would have seen the option to turn of the violent cut-scenes.
I'm not an apologist for the Australian Government. I think this legislation is asinine. I haven't played the game you talk about. In any case, censorship of game content is not the same as Internet content regulation, except where game downloads are concerned. Frankly, that (P-Goria) particular infringement of civil liberties is somewhat low on my list of things to get upset about.
Where are YOU from, Mr Coward? U.S.? Australia? If the former, don't presume to assume you have the right to lecture me.
Oh hell yeah. Even the newsreaders go nude on Australia day. It's a tradition, like wombat-riding and playing the didgeridoo on Bondi Beach.
(Duh, That was a joke...)
I've never come across this show you're talking about. I have cable as well as free-to-air. Most nudity on Aussie TV comes from Hollywood.
Please make sure you are spouting fact rather than half-assed hearsay before posting in future.
The Australian Broadcasting Authority does govern TV as well. I think they are actually reasonably fair and open-minded; However, TV is easier to administer by restricting the timeslots shows are aired. This is of course impossible on the Internet, which makes the whole thing unworkable. If Aussie content is restricted to G-rated stuff, we might as well forget it. The whole thing is ridiculously unworkable, and only highlights the supreme ineptitude of our politicians. Don't blame me, I voted Labor.
It IS interesting that Alston, the communications minister behind this bill, complained to the ABA regarding what he perceived as journalistic bias against the government by government-sponsored TV during the last Australian Federal election. His complaint was proven to be groundless when the statitics were published. So the pollies can try to coopt the system, but the system doesn't always play along.
The Australian net censorship legislation had nothing to do with Littleton. Please stop assuming that everyone else in the world dances to the tunes played in the United States.