Moderators can vote on comments, but can the commentators vote on the original articles? This seems like a serious shortcoming in/.. Surely this must have been suggested in the past.
The above article was annoying enough that it made we wish we had such a moderation system.
I'm sorry, but I don't think this article was very thoughtful or enlightening. I think it misses the whole point of apple's existence.
Apple lost the mass market race long before they rehired jobs. For the unwashed masses who just want it cheap, there's nothing apple can do. The world doesn't need another clone maker. Apple couldn't possibly compete in that space. Why should they anyhow? It's a shitty business where very few companies (Dell) manage to actually profit.
Nature abhors a vacumm. Markets abhor a monopoly. Without any regulatory intervention at all, markets naturally need choise-- at least more than one choice. It's human nature. Some people just wanna be different. Nota Bene; DIFFERENT NOT NECESSARILY BETTER. At least 5% of the population would like to think of themselves as iconoclasts and will make decisions based on that inclination.
Steve understands the above phenomenon; apparently the author does not. Note the slogan: think different. Not think better, not think cool, just different. All apple has to do is to produce a technically competent system (which the current systems are) and the 5% of the people who wanna be different will flock.
IMHO Steve is a brilliant market strategist. After his initial screw ups to MS, he has since made the correct choices. People said allow clones, people said port OS to Intel. Steve made all the right choices since. IF you wanna be different, you have to closely manage to difference so it is noticeable enough. Otherwise you start to look like the other guys (undifferent).
As a long time NeXTStep, OpenStep, Webobjects (yes, WebObjects also uses ObjC) programmer I'd like to point out a few things about ObjC and the NeXTish frameworks, without religious bias.
ObjC was a very nice language when it first came out. For a hybrid language (object semantic hacked on top of ansi C), it is much more powerful and clean than c++, which is why I made the switch. However, it is absolutely erroneous to say that there are things you can do in ObjC that cannot be done in c++. You just have to jump through hoops of fire in c++ to achieve the dynamism of ObjC. On the other hand, it WAS a hybrid language: fundamentally still C. So it was no Smalltalk. Programmers are still fundamentally responsible for memory management (there's a refcounting scheme for helping) and this requires a high skill level. In large programs, tracking memory leaks could take time. Also, ObjC was not nearly as clean as Smalltalk in other respects. Some of the object semantics in ObjC were hacked on through the use of cpp macros. You could not stay entirely in the object world-- the facade of OO was not complete. In dealing with the low level of the runtime you would have to handle c structs.
The state of the art moves on. But ObjC doesn't, for the most part. ObjC has some features that Java is lacking: method forwarding, posing, categories, etc. Still, there are no circumstances under which I would now choose ObjC over Java. Why? Advantages of Java over ObjC:
- Automatic memory management.
- No direct memory access. Because of this, I can feel comfortable working with junior programmers. Not the case under ObjC.
- Only Objects and a few sensible primitives. No other data types.
- Unicode based.
- Strongly typed (yep, it's an advantage, good ObjC programmers type as much as possible anyhow)
- Exception handling first class citizen of language (it's hacked on in ObjC)
- Fully integrated threading model (much more difficult on ObjC)
- multi-platform. I know java isn't perfect in this respect, but ObjC and the Foundation framework was much, much worse. Basic things like threading could work differently on Solaris vs. windows under OpenStep Foundation.
- multi-vendor.
- A tremendous number of third party tools.
- A tremendous amount of third party information.
I can go on and on. I really don't see the point of Apple pursuing Cocoa, except as far as they are locked into it for legacy reasons.
Dude, check out the latest DoCoMo phones. THey do it all. They have built in keyboard, built-in PDA, run Java, built-in tiny digital camera. They send email, they browse the web (well at least i-mode sites), they can attach pictures to your email.
Oh yeah, as an added bonus the mobile phone service actually works!! (unlike in the U.S.).
Unfortunately they're only available in Tokyo (looks like a decent place to live). I don't think people in the U.S. realize just how far behind our mobile communications infrastructure has fallen.
People are missing the fact that attitudes towards government are fundamentally different between the U.S. and Europe (much of the rest o the world for that matter). Bottom line: Other advanced countries in the world believe in public infrastructure (which includes government)-- Americans don't. That means for us in the U.S.:
- we will never have a working passenger rail system (don't talk to me about amtrak)
- Park benches will be designed for maximum discomfort, in order to deter people from sitting on them.
- our streets will always be littered by trash, since no one believes in the public commons.
- our schools will be worthy of the third world (and in some cases they will have to stretch even to achieve that)
- Government will strive to do as little as possible. That means no well functioning web sites. If the U.S. builds a site similar to the one mentioned, it will be designed for failure from the get go. That's because it will be contracted to several different private companies, who will all strive to politically one-up their competitors and all strive to rape the government. Since the government doesn't attract able administrators lack of any intelligent oversight will ensure this happens.
Health costs have experienced an average annual 20% inflation over the last 2 years. How come foreign doctors are not allowed to practice in the U.S.? Obviously there is a shortage of doctors, given the insane prices of health care.
Could you imagine importing 100,000 Indian doctors? Of course not. It's inconceivable. But why?
The reason is simple. Doctors are, and always have been, much smarter than engineers. They achieved GUILD STATUS over 100 years ago and are capable of protecting themselves from the evil machinations of the lawyers that run our government. Engineers are too stupid to organize guilds to concentrate their political will. Heck, auto workers are smarter than engineers in this respect. You get what you deserve, for a lack of political spine. How many engineers called or wrote their congressmen to protests this sell-out? When the current tech mania subsides, which will be in the next two years, there will be a horrendous glut of technical workers. At that point, 35-50 year old engineers with good degrees from good schools will only be able to find shit corporate back office IT jobs for $50K. Cops where I live make more than $50k. Until engineers acquire a whiff of political savvy, the profession will always be a ghetto.
uhmmm, have you heard of something called laws? That's what makes the U.S. work. The lack thereof is why India, China and Russia are third-world countries. Sure, having rules is tough-- but trying living without them.
You know what? I work hard too. I've worked much harder than many people I know who are much much richer than me. I think they should give me a break and gimme some of their money. It's only nice...
Definitely go to Japan. I'm sure you will find the work rules there much more flexible than the U.S. . Also, the Japanese have historically treated foreigners much better than Americans.
Folks,
Why favor high tech companies over other industries? Why should high tech barons be allowed to increase their margins by hiring cheaper labor, when other industries, say manufacturing or clerical work, cannot?
Also, what are the limits to immigration? U.S. immigration is currently at historic highs. But the public infrastructure to support all these people, especially in places like NYC, is breaking down under the load. What is a rational level of immigration?
Dude, I read the article thoroughly. Why did they expect their stay to become permanent? Who told them it would be? Where in their contract did it say so? America is based on the rule of law, which is almost always contract based.
Where does their contract say they can stay indefinitely? In fact, does it not say specifically that they must leave after 6 years?
Folks,
I'm doing some server side work and have encountered a heinous behavior on the part of IE. Basically, when IE requests an office document from the server, some special magic happens in IE related to firing up the inline content handler associated with office content-types. When the http response containing the document comes directly from the server that the original http server was directed at, all works fine. But when the original server redirects IE to another server that will dish up the actual document binary, IE sends TWO nearly identical requests to that second server. Just from watching the browser, it appears that the first request is to detect the content-type and load the content handler, and the second request is to actually feed the content handler (word/excel/etc application). Note that this only happens with MS Office content-types, and only happens if a redirect is involved. If the content-type is a non-MS binary (e.g. gif,jpg) or if there is no redirect involved, IE will issue only 1 request.
Does anyone know what is going on here? Can anyone point me at some resources (website?) that explains what IE is doing and maybe how I can defeat it? The double request confounding some of our schemes and is also very wasteful of bandwidth.
Thanks for any pointers.
This is actually a fairly simple issue. The lawyers and MBAs are waging war on the techies. Our society does not value technical work in the least, despite all the recent geek chic and all the lip service paid to technical work. That is why lawmakers have reduced it to the level of migrant fruit picking. There can be no labor shortages in America, because our economy is brutally efficient. If demand outstrips supply, price will rise, which will attract more supply. Obviously all engineering positions can be filled by Americans if corporations are willing to pay enough. But engineering salaries have risen to a STAGERRING AVERAGE $60,000/yr, so the government, all lawyers, will keep them uppity engineers in their place by replacing exensive american engineers with cheap foreign ones. And surprise surprise... smart young American college students see that the profession has been ghettoized and avoid it like the plague. The cycle begins anew.
The interesting aspect of our predicament is that engineers are such sheep to allow this to happen in the first place. Other professions, notably law and medicine, have achieved "guild status". For instance, health care costs are once again spiraling out of control (roughly 20%/yr right now). And yet the notion of importing 200,000 indian M.D.s (for $50,000/yr each) would seem laughable. Why? The answer is simple-- the AMA. Doctors pay into the AMA, and the AMA protects its members from the lawyers, who would otherwise replace the doctors with migrant fruit pickers, under pressure from the CEOs of health management conglomerates. Engineers have never been smart enough to handle the societal aspects of their profession.
This is not simply a financial issue. Many purists in slashdot-land will ignore my rant, preferring instead to concentrate on their craft. But the organizational issues surrounding the engineering career tend to destabilize the profession in our country. You notice that there are very few practicing software engineers in America over 40. Yet in my experience, the profession could dramatically benefit from more attention to experience and learned process, especially in the area of quality. American software, while supposedly innovative, is very low quality compared with other commercial engineering products (japanese cars, swiss watches, airplanes). I think that once the current mania surrounding "internet time" fades, much software engineering that currently takes place in America will instead move to countries that produce higher quality engineering products because engineering is accorded a guild status and people see it as a lifelong career, rather than a stepping stone to management like in America.
Anyone interested in further exploring this subject might want to look at: http://www.programmersguild.org
At, reputedly, 40Million lines of code, do you really think a clone of Win2K is feasible? It took MS 5+ years to crank out Win2K. Cloning it should be even harder (since you have to be conformant, whereas MS could do whatever and simply be canonical). By the time you are done, the Win2K approach will have been fully discredited anyhow, and MS will have moved to the next generation of software architecture as the computing environment changes radically.
There will be two camps of OSX users. Some GUI only mac faithful, and some more sophisticated users like developers, service deployers and "power users". The latter camp will benefit from shell based, unix command line tools, without any further UI work. These tools should port for almost no work. Then there can be a lot of convergence work between the OSX community and the Unix community, where experienced cocoa developers can build Cocoa front ends to unix originated tools/libraries. The combined results will not flow back to Unix, but live exclusively in the OSX world. In fact, this situation already exists with OpenStep/YellowBox. One (of many) example is CVL, a Cocoa front end to cvs (http://www.sente.ch/software/cvl/).
JSP allows you to put code into the templates-- it does not mandate it. Developers who know what they're doing would never put programming elements in their JSP templates. It's quite easy to program JSPs such that the templates have only declarative tags in them. I think TEA offers no benefit at all.
Wow, yet another totally incompatible servlet based templating system! What most people don't realize is that this technology is fundamentally 3 years old. Looking in the source code I find this: Author: Reece Wilton. If I then go to developer.com's who's who directory I find: Starwave Corporation Java developer (servlets, applets, beans, threads, etc). That's right, this is the same lame Starwave technology that they were pushing 3 years ago. Only now, instead of it being 100% proprietary, it's 90% proprietary, being somewhat Servlet conformant now. The analysis of the problem with servlets (Jason Hunter) is a very superficial reading into the problem. If it's simply a matter of needing a templating mechanism, then JSPs solve this in a standard way. But the bigger problem is that none of these technologies provide for a clear MVC architecture. For a solution that is years ahead of the GO crap in its thinking, look at the STRUTS project in the Jakarta initiative (Apache org). There are many other App servers that have solved both the templating problem and the MVC/flow control problems in a sensible way (Apple's WebObjects, ATG Dynamo). Did GO pay you guys to put up this link? Why did you bother?
>But Microsoft themselves said they were going to use Cocoa, Wowa! Where did you read that? I've been following this issue pretty closely and haven't been able to find a single reliable reference indicating that *any* major software will get rewritten in Cocoa. Please cite source. thanks
Re:Get off the production line!
on
Too Old To Code?
·
· Score: 1
Coulnd't the same be said about doctors? >10 years from now, the programmer's still there doing roughly the same thing. Yet doctor's manage to protect their working/earning environment as they age. Why is that?
H1-B Visas-- Programmers are just a labor cost.
on
Too Old To Code?
·
· Score: 2
Of course there is age discrimination in engineering-- especially in software engineering. This is a well documented fact.You can find an in-depth study here . Why would a company hire a very expensive, very experienced engineer when they can source the project to a consultancy (Andersen et. al.) which will simply human wave the problem with indentured H1-B visa employees? Even if the project management is really bad, the programmers totally demoralized, and the project majorly screwed up, they can usually produce something that pretends to work. For internet software, that's all you need. According to the Programmer's Guild (PG), U.S. industry has already reached its quota of H1-B visas (a program that allows non-resident/non-greencard foreign nationals to work in the U.S. for 6 years). This, despite having last year doubled the size of the program to 115,000 visas annually.Because IT salaries are totally out of control now, having risen to a whopping $54,000, U.S. industry has put the full court press on congress to dramatically increase the quota or eliminate it altogether.Congress, responding appropriately to the huge campaign contributions from big biz, will most likely pass such an increase, according to the IEEE One particularly interesting point about the leading bill winding its way through the senate is the name: "American Competitiveness in the 21st Century act". I guess that congress does not think the current crop of American born programmers are very competitive.
I'd like to know what people here think. Will a million new "guest workers" in the next 5 years help the quality of U.S. software engineering, thus expanding the pie for everyone? Or will 1 million new indentured servants allow IT management to continue many of their screwed up practices because they know that engineering can't complain.
I've used WO extensively over the last 3 years (as well as other servelet/jsp servers) and I think you got this backwards. The primary reason to use WO is the incredible *short* develpment cycles compared with other app servers. This is a result of WOs tight integration of a sensible dynamic html generation architecture (something jsp lacks) and a very mature (5+ years) Object Relational mapping layer (EOF). Ive seen fairly complex projects completed in several months (contrasted with much longer spans for jsp/ejb). But WO is a pretty complex product (the OR Mapping layer alone is fairly complex)with a steep learning curve. I agree that in the hands of inexperienced developers, a WO project would take forever. WO is built on top of former Next Computer technologies and most competent WO engineers were using these Next technologies before the Web came along.
I think the point of that exercise is to promote a sense of well defined accountability and confidence, up and down the management chain. Sure, in theory, the project manager should be ultimately accountable. But all too often she can, post facto, dodge responsibility for failure by (accurately) claiming that other project stakeholders failed to provide their inputs to the project correctly. In Mr. Keller's case, he would not sign the certificate if he felt that failure was a possibility, for any reason. This also gives the decision makers a well defined "emergency brake" that perhaps could have averted a *Challenger* like disaster, where some line managers said STOP, while some higher-ups said GO!
OS X (aka NextStep) multitasks very well. I'm currently running OS X server on an older G4. The responsiveness of apps (and app switching) under a heavy load is quite zippy. I contrast that with my other box, a more expensive (honkin SCSI 3)NT 4 system, which at times has major brain farts trying to smoothly schedule under heavy loads. That's not to mention all of the weird things that can happen to display refresh on NT 4 under heavy load. OS X's display system is rock solid and lightning fast.
I don't think so. The emphasis seems to be on "home entertainment" integration. Also, " Related Items: Customer must purchase microprocessor (CPU), CPU fan, memory (PC66 or 100 SDRAM), hard drive (regular 3.5" IDE, ATA33 or 66, only one allowed), speakers, and operating system separately " I'm sure this will drive the cost up close to $1K.
it appears appears from the website that Netbox is a "concept appliance", meaning that they have not yet committed to production. Are these things really for sale somewhere?
Slashdot Mirror
Moderators can vote on comments, but can the commentators vote on the original articles? This seems like a serious shortcoming in /.. Surely this must have been suggested in the past.
The above article was annoying enough that it made we wish we had such a moderation system.
I'm sorry, but I don't think this article was very thoughtful or enlightening. I think it misses the whole point of apple's existence.
Apple lost the mass market race long before they rehired jobs. For the unwashed masses who just want it cheap, there's nothing apple can do. The world doesn't need another clone maker. Apple couldn't possibly compete in that space. Why should they anyhow? It's a shitty business where very few companies (Dell) manage to actually profit.
Nature abhors a vacumm. Markets abhor a monopoly. Without any regulatory intervention at all, markets naturally need choise-- at least more than one choice. It's human nature. Some people just wanna be different. Nota Bene; DIFFERENT NOT NECESSARILY BETTER. At least 5% of the population would like to think of themselves as iconoclasts and will make decisions based on that inclination.
Steve understands the above phenomenon; apparently the author does not. Note the slogan: think different. Not think better, not think cool, just different. All apple has to do is to produce a technically competent system (which the current systems are) and the 5% of the people who wanna be different will flock.
IMHO Steve is a brilliant market strategist. After his initial screw ups to MS, he has since made the correct choices. People said allow clones, people said port OS to Intel. Steve made all the right choices since. IF you wanna be different, you have to closely manage to difference so it is noticeable enough. Otherwise you start to look like the other guys (undifferent).
As a long time NeXTStep, OpenStep, Webobjects (yes, WebObjects also uses ObjC) programmer I'd like to point out a few things about ObjC and the NeXTish frameworks, without religious bias.
ObjC was a very nice language when it first came out. For a hybrid language (object semantic hacked on top of ansi C), it is much more powerful and clean than c++, which is why I made the switch. However, it is absolutely erroneous to say that there are things you can do in ObjC that cannot be done in c++. You just have to jump through hoops of fire in c++ to achieve the dynamism of ObjC. On the other hand, it WAS a hybrid language: fundamentally still C. So it was no Smalltalk. Programmers are still fundamentally responsible for memory management (there's a refcounting scheme for helping) and this requires a high skill level. In large programs, tracking memory leaks could take time. Also, ObjC was not nearly as clean as Smalltalk in other respects. Some of the object semantics in ObjC were hacked on through the use of cpp macros. You could not stay entirely in the object world-- the facade of OO was not complete. In dealing with the low level of the runtime you would have to handle c structs.
The state of the art moves on. But ObjC doesn't, for the most part. ObjC has some features that Java is lacking: method forwarding, posing, categories, etc. Still, there are no circumstances under which I would now choose ObjC over Java. Why? Advantages of Java over ObjC:
- Automatic memory management.
- No direct memory access. Because of this, I can feel comfortable working with junior programmers. Not the case under ObjC.
- Only Objects and a few sensible primitives. No other data types.
- Unicode based.
- Strongly typed (yep, it's an advantage, good ObjC programmers type as much as possible anyhow)
- Exception handling first class citizen of language (it's hacked on in ObjC)
- Fully integrated threading model (much more difficult on ObjC)
- multi-platform. I know java isn't perfect in this respect, but ObjC and the Foundation framework was much, much worse. Basic things like threading could work differently on Solaris vs. windows under OpenStep Foundation.
- multi-vendor.
- A tremendous number of third party tools.
- A tremendous amount of third party information.
I can go on and on. I really don't see the point of Apple pursuing Cocoa, except as far as they are locked into it for legacy reasons.
This is the second one in a few months. Fess up, are you guys getting paid by Zapatistas?
Wasn't this subject beat to death in the last post? Didn't the slashdotters overwhelming conclude that it's a wildly overpriced pc with video out?
Dude, check out the latest DoCoMo phones. THey do it all. They have built in keyboard, built-in PDA, run Java, built-in tiny digital camera. They send email, they browse the web (well at least i-mode sites), they can attach pictures to your email.
Oh yeah, as an added bonus the mobile phone service actually works!! (unlike in the U.S.).
Unfortunately they're only available in Tokyo (looks like a decent place to live). I don't think people in the U.S. realize just how far behind our mobile communications infrastructure has fallen.
People are missing the fact that attitudes towards government are fundamentally different between the U.S. and Europe (much of the rest o the world for that matter). Bottom line: Other advanced countries in the world believe in public infrastructure (which includes government)-- Americans don't. That means for us in the U.S.:
- we will never have a working passenger rail system (don't talk to me about amtrak)
- Park benches will be designed for maximum discomfort, in order to deter people from sitting on them.
- our streets will always be littered by trash, since no one believes in the public commons.
- our schools will be worthy of the third world (and in some cases they will have to stretch even to achieve that)
- Government will strive to do as little as possible. That means no well functioning web sites. If the U.S. builds a site similar to the one mentioned, it will be designed for failure from the get go. That's because it will be contracted to several different private companies, who will all strive to politically one-up their competitors and all strive to rape the government. Since the government doesn't attract able administrators lack of any intelligent oversight will ensure this happens.
Health costs have experienced an average annual 20% inflation over the last 2 years. How come foreign doctors are not allowed to practice in the U.S.? Obviously there is a shortage of doctors, given the insane prices of health care. Could you imagine importing 100,000 Indian doctors? Of course not. It's inconceivable. But why? The reason is simple. Doctors are, and always have been, much smarter than engineers. They achieved GUILD STATUS over 100 years ago and are capable of protecting themselves from the evil machinations of the lawyers that run our government. Engineers are too stupid to organize guilds to concentrate their political will. Heck, auto workers are smarter than engineers in this respect. You get what you deserve, for a lack of political spine. How many engineers called or wrote their congressmen to protests this sell-out? When the current tech mania subsides, which will be in the next two years, there will be a horrendous glut of technical workers. At that point, 35-50 year old engineers with good degrees from good schools will only be able to find shit corporate back office IT jobs for $50K. Cops where I live make more than $50k. Until engineers acquire a whiff of political savvy, the profession will always be a ghetto.
uhmmm, have you heard of something called laws? That's what makes the U.S. work. The lack thereof is why India, China and Russia are third-world countries. Sure, having rules is tough-- but trying living without them. You know what? I work hard too. I've worked much harder than many people I know who are much much richer than me. I think they should give me a break and gimme some of their money. It's only nice...
Definitely go to Japan. I'm sure you will find the work rules there much more flexible than the U.S. . Also, the Japanese have historically treated foreigners much better than Americans.
Good luck.
Folks, Why favor high tech companies over other industries? Why should high tech barons be allowed to increase their margins by hiring cheaper labor, when other industries, say manufacturing or clerical work, cannot? Also, what are the limits to immigration? U.S. immigration is currently at historic highs. But the public infrastructure to support all these people, especially in places like NYC, is breaking down under the load. What is a rational level of immigration?
Dude, I read the article thoroughly. Why did they expect their stay to become permanent? Who told them it would be? Where in their contract did it say so? America is based on the rule of law, which is almost always contract based.
Where does their contract say they can stay indefinitely? In fact, does it not say specifically that they must leave after 6 years?
Folks, I'm doing some server side work and have encountered a heinous behavior on the part of IE. Basically, when IE requests an office document from the server, some special magic happens in IE related to firing up the inline content handler associated with office content-types. When the http response containing the document comes directly from the server that the original http server was directed at, all works fine. But when the original server redirects IE to another server that will dish up the actual document binary, IE sends TWO nearly identical requests to that second server. Just from watching the browser, it appears that the first request is to detect the content-type and load the content handler, and the second request is to actually feed the content handler (word/excel/etc application). Note that this only happens with MS Office content-types, and only happens if a redirect is involved. If the content-type is a non-MS binary (e.g. gif,jpg) or if there is no redirect involved, IE will issue only 1 request. Does anyone know what is going on here? Can anyone point me at some resources (website?) that explains what IE is doing and maybe how I can defeat it? The double request confounding some of our schemes and is also very wasteful of bandwidth. Thanks for any pointers.
This is actually a fairly simple issue. The lawyers and MBAs are waging war on the techies. Our society does not value technical work in the least, despite all the recent geek chic and all the lip service paid to technical work. That is why lawmakers have reduced it to the level of migrant fruit picking. There can be no labor shortages in America, because our economy is brutally efficient. If demand outstrips supply, price will rise, which will attract more supply. Obviously all engineering positions can be filled by Americans if corporations are willing to pay enough. But engineering salaries have risen to a STAGERRING AVERAGE $60,000/yr, so the government, all lawyers, will keep them uppity engineers in their place by replacing exensive american engineers with cheap foreign ones. And surprise surprise... smart young American college students see that the profession has been ghettoized and avoid it like the plague. The cycle begins anew.
The interesting aspect of our predicament is that engineers are such sheep to allow this to happen in the first place. Other professions, notably law and medicine, have achieved "guild status". For instance, health care costs are once again spiraling out of control (roughly 20%/yr right now). And yet the notion of importing 200,000 indian M.D.s (for $50,000/yr each) would seem laughable. Why? The answer is simple-- the AMA. Doctors pay into the AMA, and the AMA protects its members from the lawyers, who would otherwise replace the doctors with migrant fruit pickers, under pressure from the CEOs of health management conglomerates. Engineers have never been smart enough to handle the societal aspects of their profession.
This is not simply a financial issue. Many purists in slashdot-land will ignore my rant, preferring instead to concentrate on their craft. But the organizational issues surrounding the engineering career tend to destabilize the profession in our country. You notice that there are very few practicing software engineers in America over 40. Yet in my experience, the profession could dramatically benefit from more attention to experience and learned process, especially in the area of quality. American software, while supposedly innovative, is very low quality compared with other commercial engineering products (japanese cars, swiss watches, airplanes). I think that once the current mania surrounding "internet time" fades, much software engineering that currently takes place in America will instead move to countries that produce higher quality engineering products because engineering is accorded a guild status and people see it as a lifelong career, rather than a stepping stone to management like in America. Anyone interested in further exploring this subject might want to look at: http://www.programmersguild.org
At, reputedly, 40Million lines of code, do you really think a clone of Win2K is feasible? It took MS 5+ years to crank out Win2K. Cloning it should be even harder (since you have to be conformant, whereas MS could do whatever and simply be canonical). By the time you are done, the Win2K approach will have been fully discredited anyhow, and MS will have moved to the next generation of software architecture as the computing environment changes radically.
There will be two camps of OSX users. Some GUI only mac faithful, and some more sophisticated users like developers, service deployers and "power users". The latter camp will benefit from shell based, unix command line tools, without any further UI work. These tools should port for almost no work. Then there can be a lot of convergence work between the OSX community and the Unix community, where experienced cocoa developers can build Cocoa front ends to unix originated tools/libraries. The combined results will not flow back to Unix, but live exclusively in the OSX world. In fact, this situation already exists with OpenStep/YellowBox. One (of many) example is CVL, a Cocoa front end to cvs (http://www.sente.ch/software/cvl/).
JSP allows you to put code into the templates-- it does not mandate it. Developers who know what they're doing would never put programming elements in their JSP templates. It's quite easy to program JSPs such that the templates have only declarative tags in them. I think TEA offers no benefit at all.
Wow, yet another totally incompatible servlet based templating system! What most people don't realize is that this technology is fundamentally 3 years old. Looking in the source code I find this: Author: Reece Wilton. If I then go to developer.com's who's who directory I find: Starwave Corporation Java developer (servlets, applets, beans, threads, etc). That's right, this is the same lame Starwave technology that they were pushing 3 years ago. Only now, instead of it being 100% proprietary, it's 90% proprietary, being somewhat Servlet conformant now. The analysis of the problem with servlets (Jason Hunter) is a very superficial reading into the problem. If it's simply a matter of needing a templating mechanism, then JSPs solve this in a standard way. But the bigger problem is that none of these technologies provide for a clear MVC architecture. For a solution that is years ahead of the GO crap in its thinking, look at the STRUTS project in the Jakarta initiative (Apache org). There are many other App servers that have solved both the templating problem and the MVC/flow control problems in a sensible way (Apple's WebObjects, ATG Dynamo). Did GO pay you guys to put up this link? Why did you bother?
>But Microsoft themselves said they were going to use Cocoa, Wowa! Where did you read that? I've been following this issue pretty closely and haven't been able to find a single reliable reference indicating that *any* major software will get rewritten in Cocoa. Please cite source. thanks
Coulnd't the same be said about doctors?
>10 years from now, the programmer's still there doing roughly the same thing. Yet doctor's manage to protect their working/earning environment as they age. Why is that?
Of course there is age discrimination in engineering-- especially in software engineering. This is a well documented fact.You can find an in-depth study here . Why would a company hire a very expensive, very experienced engineer when they can source the project to a consultancy (Andersen et. al.) which will simply human wave the problem with indentured H1-B visa employees? Even if the project management is really bad, the programmers totally demoralized, and the project majorly screwed up, they can usually produce something that pretends to work. For internet software, that's all you need.
According to the Programmer's Guild (PG), U.S. industry has already reached its quota of H1-B visas (a program that allows non-resident/non-greencard foreign nationals to work in the U.S. for 6 years). This, despite having last year doubled the size of the program to 115,000 visas annually.Because IT salaries are totally out of control now, having risen to a whopping $54,000, U.S. industry has put the full court press on congress to dramatically increase the quota or eliminate it altogether.Congress, responding appropriately to the huge campaign contributions from big biz, will most likely pass such an increase, according to the IEEE One particularly interesting point about the leading bill winding its way through the senate is the name: "American Competitiveness in the 21st Century act". I guess that congress does not think the current crop of American born programmers are very competitive.
I'd like to know what people here think. Will a million new "guest workers" in the next 5 years help the quality of U.S. software engineering, thus expanding the pie for everyone? Or will 1 million new indentured servants allow IT management to continue many of their screwed up practices because they know that engineering can't complain.
I've used WO extensively over the last 3 years (as well as other servelet/jsp servers) and I think you got this backwards. The primary reason to use WO is the incredible *short* develpment cycles compared with other app servers. This is a result of WOs tight integration of a sensible dynamic html generation architecture (something jsp lacks) and a very mature (5+ years) Object Relational mapping layer (EOF). Ive seen fairly complex projects completed in several months (contrasted with much longer spans for jsp/ejb). But WO is a pretty complex product (the OR Mapping layer alone is fairly complex)with a steep learning curve. I agree that in the hands of inexperienced developers, a WO project would take forever. WO is built on top of former Next Computer technologies and most competent WO engineers were using these Next technologies before the Web came along.
I think the point of that exercise is to promote a sense of well defined accountability and confidence, up and down the management chain. Sure, in theory, the project manager should be ultimately accountable. But all too often she can, post facto, dodge responsibility for failure by (accurately) claiming that other project stakeholders failed to provide their inputs to the project correctly. In Mr. Keller's case, he would not sign the certificate if he felt that failure was a possibility, for any reason. This also gives the decision makers a well defined "emergency brake" that perhaps could have averted a *Challenger* like disaster, where some line managers said STOP, while some higher-ups said GO!
OS X (aka NextStep) multitasks very well. I'm currently running OS X server on an older G4. The responsiveness of apps (and app switching) under a heavy load is quite zippy. I contrast that with my other box, a more expensive (honkin SCSI 3)NT 4 system, which at times has major brain farts trying to smoothly schedule under heavy loads. That's not to mention all of the weird things that can happen to display refresh on NT 4 under heavy load. OS X's display system is rock solid and lightning fast.
I don't think so. The emphasis seems to be on "home entertainment" integration. Also, " Related Items: Customer must purchase microprocessor (CPU), CPU fan, memory (PC66 or 100 SDRAM), hard drive (regular 3.5" IDE, ATA33 or 66, only one allowed), speakers, and operating system separately " I'm sure this will drive the cost up close to $1K.
it appears appears from the website that Netbox is a "concept appliance", meaning that they have not yet committed to production. Are these things really for sale somewhere?