C'mon. Seriously. Great programmers know they are. They don't need to be on a wiki page. Besides fame doesnt equate to great. Putting together a list, if you don't mind the hypocrisy of the following list, is just pandering to 1) narcicists 2) sophists 3) egotists 4) braggarts 5) snake oil salesmen 6) shameless self promoters 7) groupies
Or does fame mean infamy, in which case I can see why a few of those names are on the list.
Turf all funding to the arts, atheletics, and social sciences. Anthropologist, archaeologists, sprinters, and sculptors have no beneficial impact on our society.
I don't know about that. Many of us who still play want revamped content and dynamic content, not more expansions... however some of the expansions do have unique challenges. It would be nice to unify some of them, like LDON, LOY, and anything has a new and useless currency.
"When design is great, and product is relevant, market success is a given."
Whoa. Is that why Windows took over the world? I'm sure there are thousands of great, relevant products that did not see the light of day because the creators/distributors of those products did not have good market access; whether it be financial where-with-all to promote a product, entrenched competition, monopolies or what-not.
"Build it and they will come" usually fails. 9/10 companies fail. I'm sure this applies to products, that je ne sais quoi about a great product that you really need but just don't want it enough.
Saying Rio made the market and iPod took it because of the design obviates the incredible marketting campaign Apple had that still sticks in people's memory (siloutted dancing headphone
At the end of the day, these roles are defined by the business and only marginally the same from company to company. Security is usually part of a broader IT strategy (so no specific corporate officer, but an IT lead.)
In any event, IT is almost always a service to business, and so top level organizational problems trickle down (as sometimes infrastructure politics bubble up.)
Re:Someone like Steve is essential
on
Apple After Jobs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why do some Apple enthusiasts always discount Anyone But Steve's value to the company? (And Steve was not the CEO at the start.)
From Wikipedia; Apple CEOs 1977-1981: Michael "Scotty" Scott 1981-1983: A. C. "Mike" Markkula 1983-1993: John Sculley 1993-1996: Michael Spindler 1996-1997: Gil Amelio 1997-Present: Steve Jobs (Interim CEO 1997-2000)
You can discount Sculley ( QuickTime started under his reign ), and Spindler ( OpenDoc, Pippin, Copland, and bridge technologies that were great ideas poorly delivered ) but these guys did have vision (not saying one person is responsible for anything; that in itself is flawed.)
Several enterprise content management systems (like LiveLink, that I hate) support almost transparent email integration. You could forward your mail to an "email folder", and let whatever records management module (and retention policy etc) take place.
I saw someone mention forward mail to wiki, that you can also do with LiveLink discussion boards (not an endorsement for LiveLInk).
Point is, moving it into an ECM brings it to whatever corporate records management has re policy and such.
Agree; 9/10 of the developers I know have no problem solving skills. Got so frustrated in one code review recently I yelled at the guy "Didn't you take the same courses I did?" We graduated compsci together. He was using floats for UIDs, arrays/iterative searches for keyed lookups, and violating encapsulation at every turn. Algorithms, data structures, complexity, and OOP 101 were foreign concepts.
You can lead an ass to water, but you can't make him drink.
You are SO right. I work for a company that our CIO attempts to implement all the stuff he reads from Gartner. And its all wrong. I tried to talk with him about it, but his response was along these lines...
"IT isn't our core competency. We must outsource or cosource it, much like the rest of our business. We cannot implement process improvement, because we aren't good at IT."
And he had over 1000 IT staff working for him. Man, if that many people make you believe that you're clueless...
Course that point in the article is contentious. Adding garbage collection after the fact can yield a host of problems. And inevitably most applications in C++ that use dynamic memory allocation will need some sort of GC. Purists would argue you hide this in your constructor/destructor, or object manager classes... but it all adds up to complexity, and complexity is bad, because it means defects.
Languages that support GC, or have optional support, still allow programmers to write bad programs. I review so much bad Java code that bleeds objects - show me that the developer was never educated (in school or by fire) about the how and why GC works or doesn't.
To add this to C++0x (or any language) late in the game is silly, even if optional. Languages like Java, more specifically the VM behind them, have over 10 years of solid development and evolution. Most Java developers do not know that they can complete tune and/or replace GC strategies in the VM. I wouldn't call this wierdness, if that is what you refer to. It, in my opinion, has everything to do with knowing about how things work under the hood. Optimization in general seems to be a forgetten art.
And of course I'd never come to appreciate it in Java if I weren't a C++ programmer for 8 years prior where a lot of my time was wasted hunting down memory issues and/or reinventing GC as the application's problem (yay object reference counters, object managers, and other strategies that aren't directly related to problem domain.)
The article points out that project management didn't do grass roots valuation or [pause] management. I would bet that the PM for this project has a PMP cert. As a former tech lead/architect for a death march type project, I can honestly say sometimes people in roles such as mine do have the expertise to advise management of risk, complexity, and time/cost. The biggest obstacle is the mind-set and experience of the PM and their bosses. For example, the last project, I mentioned certain things were high risk and/or would take significant time due to complexity and "unknown dangers." The question put to me was "Can we solve this by throwing more people at the problem without changing the time-line [that was picked out of the air]?" My response was, "Its the mythical man month." The blank stare I had in response forced me to explain the concept of overhead logistics, ramp up time, and cost/time trade-off features and risk. [The unfortunate side effect of me educating the PM about her job made me a threat and obstacle to be removed.]
You can have a kick azz senior team and still fail.
Wbere are these good head hunters? I keeping finding head hunters that have no clue about the tech industry. Once upon a time I had a resume that had 20+ pages of detailed experience. Then a few pimps told me I needed to concentrate it all down to 2-3 pages. Finally it came back to "Why don't you list all your experience on your resume?"
SOM/DSOM was an implementation of the CORBA spec, and yes they had meta-classes, but the meta-class (though cool) isn't much different than a java Class and was often used for object caching / singletons.
SOM implements a subset of the CORBA specification. Other technologies implement CORBA. Some already are open source (MICO). So... consider porting to another ORB.
And for the person who mentioned Apple... Apple implemented a subset of SOM specifically for OpenDoc. Though highly cool at the time, it was too castrated to be useful and has been surpased by other technologies for robustness (like J2SE/J2EE). Don't forget cool stuff like Spring... Lots has changed in 10 years.
A lot of core PC gamers I know didn't have consoles... but bought XBoxes. A lot of non gamers I knew - bought XBoxes because (oddly) it was less of a toy than Nintendo or Playstation (it was Microsoft.) And one of the Killer Apps (and I don't believe XBox would be a success without it) was Halo.
So keep laughing, anonymous coward, because if you were to poll every XBox owner to find out what if any console they had before - I think you'd be pretty surprised.
As opposed to FPS tourneys; look at the big on-line gambling companies (offshored, of course) that laugh at the silly patent. 1997 - designed a secure back end for an on-line casino infrastructure. Tons of prior art (much of which isn't patented.) (Should have taken the job and/or got stock... stoopid... stoopid... stoopid...)
Trying to explain to people what you do, when prefaced by "its complicated", I've resorted to saying "I make big computer programs."
In or around 1996 APEGGA issued me a demand letter to remove the word "software engineering" from my corporate web site as it was not an accredited field (even though I had numerous articles and citings of SEI and ISO quality processes I adhered to - exception was taken with the promotion of "applied software engineering.")
My response was pretty much "sue me, dick heads" and I never heard back from them, however, working in Alberta and OG I continually meet lead rings that frown upon computer science or software engineering as an "engineering" discipline. Working with real engineers has only illustrated to me that lead rings should not be doing OOD/OOA, computer science, or anything that resembles programming (other than an HP calculator.)
assume I'm an arrogant self important ass when I tell them I'm a software engineer/software developer/systems architect/systems analyst/computer programmer/software designer?
Slashdot Mirror
C'mon. Seriously. Great programmers know they are. They don't need to be on a wiki page. Besides fame doesnt equate to great. Putting together a list, if you don't mind the hypocrisy of the following list, is just pandering to
1) narcicists
2) sophists
3) egotists
4) braggarts
5) snake oil salesmen
6) shameless self promoters
7) groupies
Or does fame mean infamy, in which case I can see why a few of those names are on the list.
"Fame does not make one great." (In Yoda voice.)
And to further that line of thinking...
Turf all funding to the arts, atheletics, and social sciences. Anthropologist, archaeologists, sprinters, and sculptors have no beneficial impact on our society.
I don't know about that. Many of us who still play want revamped content and dynamic content, not more expansions... however some of the expansions do have unique challenges. It would be nice to unify some of them, like LDON, LOY, and anything has a new and useless currency.
Sklinker of TM
"When design is great, and product is relevant, market success is a given."
Whoa. Is that why Windows took over the world? I'm sure there are thousands of great, relevant products that did not see the light of day because the creators/distributors of those products did not have good market access; whether it be financial where-with-all to promote a product, entrenched competition, monopolies or what-not.
"Build it and they will come" usually fails. 9/10 companies fail. I'm sure this applies to products, that je ne sais quoi about a great product that you really need but just don't want it enough.
Saying Rio made the market and iPod took it because of the design obviates the incredible marketting campaign Apple had that still sticks in people's memory (siloutted dancing headphone
CSO = Chief Security Officer
CIO = Chief Information Officer
CTO = Chief Technology Officer
At the end of the day, these roles are defined by the business and only marginally the same from company to company. Security is usually part of a broader IT strategy (so no specific corporate officer, but an IT lead.)
In any event, IT is almost always a service to business, and so top level organizational problems trickle down (as sometimes infrastructure politics bubble up.)
Here is a fun rant, from the armchair cio.
Why do some Apple enthusiasts always discount Anyone But Steve's value to the company? (And Steve was not the CEO at the start.)
From Wikipedia;
Apple CEOs
1977-1981: Michael "Scotty" Scott
1981-1983: A. C. "Mike" Markkula
1983-1993: John Sculley
1993-1996: Michael Spindler
1996-1997: Gil Amelio
1997-Present: Steve Jobs (Interim CEO 1997-2000)
You can discount Sculley ( QuickTime started under his reign ), and Spindler ( OpenDoc, Pippin, Copland, and bridge technologies that were great ideas poorly delivered ) but these guys did have vision (not saying one person is responsible for anything; that in itself is flawed.)
Several enterprise content management systems (like LiveLink, that I hate) support almost transparent email integration. You could forward your mail to an "email folder", and let whatever records management module (and retention policy etc) take place.
I saw someone mention forward mail to wiki, that you can also do with LiveLink discussion boards (not an endorsement for LiveLInk).
Point is, moving it into an ECM brings it to whatever corporate records management has re policy and such.
Agree; 9/10 of the developers I know have no problem solving skills. Got so frustrated in one code review recently I yelled at the guy "Didn't you take the same courses I did?" We graduated compsci together. He was using floats for UIDs, arrays/iterative searches for keyed lookups, and violating encapsulation at every turn. Algorithms, data structures, complexity, and OOP 101 were foreign concepts.
You can lead an ass to water, but you can't make him drink.
You are SO right. I work for a company that our CIO attempts to implement all the stuff he reads from Gartner. And its all wrong. I tried to talk with him about it, but his response was along these lines...
"IT isn't our core competency. We must outsource or cosource it, much like the rest of our business. We cannot implement process improvement, because we aren't good at IT."
And he had over 1000 IT staff working for him. Man, if that many people make you believe that you're clueless...
Play Sim Earth as a kid?
The solar system has a lot of water. Lots of commets plowed early planets/planetoids/moons. That's another source of water.
Now let me get back to crashing this commet into my planet...
An alternative revenue model does not obviate theft as a crime.
Saying the solution to piracy is making games free is like saying the solution to murder is making it legal.
I know, there is that alternative revenue model, so its not really free, but its like giving drugs to junkies and charging for the needle.
You forgot CIO or VP IT.
Course that point in the article is contentious. Adding garbage collection after the fact can yield a host of problems. And inevitably most applications in C++ that use dynamic memory allocation will need some sort of GC. Purists would argue you hide this in your constructor/destructor, or object manager classes... but it all adds up to complexity, and complexity is bad, because it means defects.
Languages that support GC, or have optional support, still allow programmers to write bad programs. I review so much bad Java code that bleeds objects - show me that the developer was never educated (in school or by fire) about the how and why GC works or doesn't.
To add this to C++0x (or any language) late in the game is silly, even if optional. Languages like Java, more specifically the VM behind them, have over 10 years of solid development and evolution. Most Java developers do not know that they can complete tune and/or replace GC strategies in the VM. I wouldn't call this wierdness, if that is what you refer to. It, in my opinion, has everything to do with knowing about how things work under the hood. Optimization in general seems to be a forgetten art.
And of course I'd never come to appreciate it in Java if I weren't a C++ programmer for 8 years prior where a lot of my time was wasted hunting down memory issues and/or reinventing GC as the application's problem (yay object reference counters, object managers, and other strategies that aren't directly related to problem domain.)
Hey, FaceBook isn't mentioned in this song, so it can't be cool enough to survive :-)
(And as a FaceBook user ... as soon as something as slick comes along that actively ... I'll jump ship.)
manages the flood of craptastic add-ins
The article points out that project management didn't do grass roots valuation or [pause] management. I would bet that the PM for this project has a PMP cert. As a former tech lead/architect for a death march type project, I can honestly say sometimes people in roles such as mine do have the expertise to advise management of risk, complexity, and time/cost. The biggest obstacle is the mind-set and experience of the PM and their bosses. For example, the last project, I mentioned certain things were high risk and/or would take significant time due to complexity and "unknown dangers." The question put to me was "Can we solve this by throwing more people at the problem without changing the time-line [that was picked out of the air]?" My response was, "Its the mythical man month." The blank stare I had in response forced me to explain the concept of overhead logistics, ramp up time, and cost/time trade-off features and risk. [The unfortunate side effect of me educating the PM about her job made me a threat and obstacle to be removed.]
You can have a kick azz senior team and still fail.
Depended on the target. I received more responses from technical people to that then the "executive" summary passed through a pimp.
Wbere are these good head hunters? I keeping finding head hunters that have no clue about the tech industry. Once upon a time I had a resume that had 20+ pages of detailed experience. Then a few pimps told me I needed to concentrate it all down to 2-3 pages. Finally it came back to "Why don't you list all your experience on your resume?"
Road warriors stick to ArsTechnica.
SOM/DSOM was an implementation of the CORBA spec, and yes they had meta-classes, but the meta-class (though cool) isn't much different than a java Class and was often used for object caching / singletons.
SOM implements a subset of the CORBA specification. Other technologies implement CORBA. Some already are open source (MICO). So... consider porting to another ORB.
And for the person who mentioned Apple... Apple implemented a subset of SOM specifically for OpenDoc. Though highly cool at the time, it was too castrated to be useful and has been surpased by other technologies for robustness (like J2SE/J2EE). Don't forget cool stuff like Spring... Lots has changed in 10 years.
A lot of core PC gamers I know didn't have consoles... but bought XBoxes. A lot of non gamers I knew - bought XBoxes because (oddly) it was less of a toy than Nintendo or Playstation (it was Microsoft.) And one of the Killer Apps (and I don't believe XBox would be a success without it) was Halo.
So keep laughing, anonymous coward, because if you were to poll every XBox owner to find out what if any console they had before - I think you'd be pretty surprised.
There were MP3 players before the iPod too...
I mean, I hate them as much as the next guy, but Xbox and Bungie (Jason Jones) pretty much mainstreamed the console market.
(And now I'll go back to worshiping Sid Meyers.)
As opposed to FPS tourneys; look at the big on-line gambling companies (offshored, of course) that laugh at the silly patent. 1997 - designed a secure back end for an on-line casino infrastructure. Tons of prior art (much of which isn't patented.) (Should have taken the job and/or got stock... stoopid... stoopid... stoopid...)
Trying to explain to people what you do, when prefaced by "its complicated", I've resorted to saying "I make big computer programs."
In or around 1996 APEGGA issued me a demand letter to remove the word "software engineering" from my corporate web site as it was not an accredited field (even though I had numerous articles and citings of SEI and ISO quality processes I adhered to - exception was taken with the promotion of "applied software engineering.")
My response was pretty much "sue me, dick heads" and I never heard back from them, however, working in Alberta and OG I continually meet lead rings that frown upon computer science or software engineering as an "engineering" discipline. Working with real engineers has only illustrated to me that lead rings should not be doing OOD/OOA, computer science, or anything that resembles programming (other than an HP calculator.)
assume I'm an arrogant self important ass when I tell them I'm a software engineer/software developer/systems architect/systems analyst/computer programmer/software designer?
Must be my identity crisis.