Netscape died because.. it sucked. AOL tried to turn the whole browser into a banner ad. Say whatever you want about IE, but it's still minimalistic compared to that piece of bloated code that NS became.
So the question of the day.. since Windows costs money and Linux is free, should MS sue Linus for anticompetitive practices? Or.. Red Hat? Will Napster now sue all the other free file sharing companies for anti-competitive practices?
Heck.. Sears charges $10 or whatever to fix a flat tire.. Discount Tire Center does it for free. Do they have a monopoly in the area on fixing tires? Yep. Do I care? Nope. Sears might.
Whenever I get a resume at work, one of the things I check is what the undergrad degree is in. Too many people have business, liberal arts, or other undergrad degrees, and suddenly plop on a CS masters to make themselves more marketable.
I've been burned too many times before by resumes such as these. I would rather take a person with a CS BS degree rather than a History BA and a CS Masters. They usually demand higher pay because of their masters, and do not perform as well as those who had a calling to CS from the get go.
This is just my experience. Your mileage may vary.
Your proven track record is only proven with your current employee. When it comes time to look for a new job, you will need to explain why you don't have a degree all over. Given two equally attractive resumes, one with a degree the other without, the one with the degree will win.
I finished my degree after 7 years of being out of school. I had a year of school left. It was not because of my current position that I did it, it was because I hated having to explain during job interviews why I don'thave a degree. I have a resume a mile long and good references. But the missing degree bugged me. And I did it while working full time and taking 18 hrs in school.
If you work for a large company you will find that without a degree, you will eventually hit a glass ceiling where HR will start complaining about any promotions or raises that do not correspond with what they consider to be the minimum qualifications for the position.
The formula they use is simple.. something like 1 degree = 5 or 8 years paid experience. That means that if you have 5 to 8 years experience, you should be paid as much as someone who just graduated from college. Most of us would not accept that, would we?
You are just paying for the next five years. Then your fancy CAT5 or fiber or whatever will be useless.
I would even predict that 10 years from now we would already have seen the emergence of a city-wide wireless internet in most areas. Your wireless connections will hook up directly into the backbone.
From personal experience, every time I advocated more GUI based interfaces to various functions, I always got back "why do this when you can just type xyz -a -b -c -d --e --f +g!!" or some other equally obscure command line that people need to memorize.
When I said on slashsdot that Linux needs a gui-based installer like Installshield, I was attacked by legions of proponents of the command line rpm mgr. When I said that Linux with all its CLI commands is too hard to use for novices, I was told that novices shouldn't know all this stuff, and I should set up everything for them and restrict their power.
Which is fine and dandy if everyone wants to hire their own personal administrator, but... some people don't have someone else to set up their computer for them. They need to be able to do everything.. easily. Until the legions of the CLI-rats understand this, Linux will never make it to the desktop.
Ease of portability. If you read the concept behind NT, they developed the HAL in order to move it easily to new hardware. This allow them to support Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC (while they did) with a very similar code base. Should there be another hardware platform that they wish to support, their major task will be to rewrite the HAL. And I don't just mean new processors. Try porting Windows ME to PPC architecture.
How about enterprise-level networking? 9x networking was very primitive. You try to use a 9x machine as a server, and let me know how well you will do.
How about Unicode support? At the file system level? May not be an issue for you, but dealing with japanese characters in filenames from inside english Win 9x is next to impossible, unless you read the disk raw.
How about multi-user support? Try terminal services on 9x. Even without terminal services, remember that apps can run under different security contexts even in 3.51. Think services, for example.
Also, WinNT applications (and drivers especially) are easier and cleaner to write. This does provide development savings. Not all revenue has to be from the marketplace.
Finally, it is very unlikely that a user-mode program will bring down an NT-based OS. That is why my development machine is Windows 2000. If it were 9x, I can easily corrupt the runtime.
Laugh as you want, I was using NT 3.51 when 95 came out, and I wished I had the new explorer, but I wouldn't switch over and give up all the stability.
We could moderate topics. Yet another random Anti-MS flame. What does have a person in charge of internal IT infrastructure have to do with security holes in IIS and Outlook?
I wonder if the whole topic would be marked offtopic. It's too silly to qualify as Troll.
2. It is linked to your SID. Therefore no other user can read your files unless they have access to your account.
3. When you encrypt a file, the file is saved in plain text, then encrypted. Therefore, there is a chance that the data is unencrypted on disk somewhere.
I've noticed strange behaviour with this file system so I don't use it often. Most of the behaviour had to do with copying files to and from an encrypted directory. I would get frequent failures (such as "file is in use"). Also, since for some reason my temp directory ended up encrypted, some installshield based programs failed to install.
I am specifically talking about Win 2000 here. I have not yet used it on XP.
Requirements, Requirements, Requirements
on
Coder or Architect?
·
· Score: 1
Most of your time will be spent collecting requirements and reconciliating them. You have to polish up on your meeting skills and your organization skills. Learn to take notes effectively, and learn to ask the right questions. One good example is a book called "Database Design for Mere Mortals". I forget who writes it, but it discusses interviewing skills.
The other major slice of time will be spent writing pursuasive documentation. An architect needs to sell his design. You need to learn to write with the audience in mind, and given how your question was phrased, you have more to learn. You really did sound like a braggadocious snot nosed kid.
Finally, brush up on your presentation skills.
You already have (or should have) the technical skills, just keep those current. It is not important so much how some thing works, but what it can do for you.
And really, team lead is inconsistent with architecture. In many cases, an architect will work with the team, but not in a lead position. An architect doesn't necessarily need to be loaded with scheduling and human resource concerns. In some cases however, the roles are interchangable, depending on your environment.
So the question would then follow: if Christy Brinkley (or insert your favorite supermodel here) walked into your interview and answered all your questions, could you get over her looks and actually believe she would make a great developer?
In other words, don't we mistakenly also assume that someone can look "too good" to be a developer in some cases?
Of course, most male managers would still hire her, but then again it would have nothing to do with her programming skills.
We do judge people by how they dress. It implies a certain level of self worth and pride. If you don't care about what you look like, what would make me think you will care about what I want from you?
I've had to deal with at least one person like this. Funny enough, he got married two months later, and his wife turned him into a clean cut, normal smelling person. So maybe the moral is, find the geek a woman!
Linux still has a long way to go. You can't expect people to use an OS where much of the software is distributed in source code form. People (regular people, not geeks) don't like to compile. Many don't even know what compile means.
Also, the lack of a nice installer/uninstaller is crippling linux. Installshield (which I hate by the way because of certain technical reasons) and related tools do have a place in the hierarchy of things.
I don't know what the popular opinion is, but I see this as a major drawback. RPM is not the solution, it's just a kludge... For GUI based apps (KDE, etc), Linux needs a graphical installer (and uninstaller!) similar to InstallShield, wise, etc.
I think linux is great as a server or single utility OS.. But as a desktop for the average home user, noooooo... I shudder having to tell my mom "download this thing in your/tmp, gzip and untar it, run./configure, run make all, run make install"
And I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that the next day she doesn't say "I don't like it, how do I uninstall it?"
What, are we going back to the old 1980s Compaq portables? That is ugly and nerdy. My laptop is half an inch thick, so I can carry it around by itself.
Besides, I use my laptop at home a lot (almost exclusively, since I got my wireless setup). Why would I want that ugly thing on my coffee table??
The problem really is that it opens you up, then it broadcasts it to all your neighbors. Kinda like breaking your door down and putting a "Help Yourself" sign in front of the door.
Microsoft did something similar with almost any windows version this side of 95. It had app signatures in the registry for known apps that didn't work correctly with 9x. For example, trying to install Photoshop 3.x on Win9x it would pop up and tell me that this app would probably not work correctly.
The interesting question that I haven't seen addressed is, how do they intend to do this driver blocking? Is it a driver checksum, driver name, what? If so, you can simply recompile it with a little change, or rename it.
sorry if this has been addressed in the article, it's unreachable right now.
Wrong again. It does block traffic, depending on your configuration. Please read your "manual" again.
Personally, I had to hand configure it to let ICQ through. And since I run my web server on a non-standard port, it blocked all connections to that port until I configured it as an exception.
Just because you don't understand it, doesn't give you license to put it down. Do you even own it? Even from the blackice home page:
BlackICE is a revolutionary new way to detect, monitor, and block intrusions. BlackICE Defender analyzes, in real-time, ALL the communications from the Internet to your computer. Using an intelligent firewall combined with an advanced intrusion detection engine, BlackICE can stop attacks while leaving normal Internet communications unaffected.
and...
You can manually customize BlackICE Defender to block or accept any IP address or TCP/UDP port.
What you are saying is that there is no damage that can be done if you are not root?
How about forking a backdoor trojan such as subseven? What if the payload contained an attack that would give you root? Or mailing out something sensitive? Heck, you don't need special permissions to ICMP flood an internet host under the command of a malicious user.
Again, I resubmit that it's the user, not the OS. and because of posts like this, Linux would be a nice target, if only more than 10 people were using it on the desktop. It's all this 'my shit is better than thou's' attitude.
That 'Google is our favorite search engine' is a tribute to Google's marketing team. This even happened before the newsgroups and before the cached pages. I wonder how much money they shoved down the throats of web sites like slashdot in order to get them heavily promoted with nerds.
Altavista's raging.com also gives add-free searches, althought they lost something when they were merged with the look and feel of altavista.com. I use google for what used to be called deja.com services. Google is not my favorite search engine, I don't have one. I could care less if it stayed or dissapeared, there are plenty out there that do the same thing. Altavista may not have cached pages, but does google have translation?
This whole article is a big "kiss google's butt" add. Slashdot should be obligated to note on their postings if an article is a payed advertisement. Makes me sick.
Yeah. When the hell are the full immersion games showing up? We've been promised for years. I want the gogles and the surround video effect! I'm sick of staring at a monitor, I want to lay back in a lazy boy, slap on the goggles, and have some (clean, non x-rated) fun. I refuse to update my PC until those show up.:) And I don't mean those silly Elsa $50 goggles that depend on the frequency rate of your monitor and give you a fake 3d effect.
The game industry has been in a funk ever since the release of Doom (the last major accomplishment in my opinion). When is the next revolution coming?
I would like to run my own test. In particular I'd like to benchmark Linux vs. 2k vs. FreeBSD (assuming the later can support my gigabit nic, haven't tried it yet).
What I'm looking for is benchmarking file server performance. I've written a test tool before and on windows I used TransmitFile() and completion ports, and I don't have an equivalent method on Linux.
I would like to find a tool that can serve files *optimally* under every OS supported. Portability is not a concern. Any suggestions?
At the risk of upsetting the slashdot community, i believe we are focusing on the wrong thing. It's not the IDE, it is a) THE LANGUAGE, and b) THE LIBRARIES.
You want something that will compile more or less unmodified on different platforms. The IDE is inconsequential. It would be nice if it looked and feel the same, but who cares. Could always use a makefile.
So, I haven't seen kylix. Is the VCL library portable between Linux and Windows, or do you have to make a ton of changes? How about the BDE layer (I assume that if you use ADO you are screwed).
If either MFC or VCL have been ported to use with GCC, there is your answer. Your cross platform development tool is GCC. If you use kdevelop it even feels a little like Visual C++'s IDE.
Slashdot Mirror
Netscape died because.. it sucked. AOL tried to turn the whole browser into a banner ad. Say whatever you want about IE, but it's still minimalistic compared to that piece of bloated code that NS became.
So the question of the day.. since Windows costs money and Linux is free, should MS sue Linus for anticompetitive practices? Or.. Red Hat? Will Napster now sue all the other free file sharing companies for anti-competitive practices?
Heck.. Sears charges $10 or whatever to fix a flat tire.. Discount Tire Center does it for free. Do they have a monopoly in the area on fixing tires? Yep. Do I care? Nope. Sears might.
Noooo...
Whenever I get a resume at work, one of the things I check is what the undergrad degree is in. Too many people have business, liberal arts, or other undergrad degrees, and suddenly plop on a CS masters to make themselves more marketable.
I've been burned too many times before by resumes such as these. I would rather take a person with a CS BS degree rather than a History BA and a CS Masters. They usually demand higher pay because of their masters, and do not perform as well as those who had a calling to CS from the get go.
This is just my experience. Your mileage may vary.
Your proven track record is only proven with your current employee. When it comes time to look for a new job, you will need to explain why you don't have a degree all over. Given two equally attractive resumes, one with a degree the other without, the one with the degree will win.
I finished my degree after 7 years of being out of school. I had a year of school left. It was not because of my current position that I did it, it was because I hated having to explain during job interviews why I don'thave a degree. I have a resume a mile long and good references. But the missing degree bugged me. And I did it while working full time and taking 18 hrs in school.
If you work for a large company you will find that without a degree, you will eventually hit a glass ceiling where HR will start complaining about any promotions or raises that do not correspond with what they consider to be the minimum qualifications for the position.
The formula they use is simple.. something like 1 degree = 5 or 8 years paid experience. That means that if you have 5 to 8 years experience, you should be paid as much as someone who just graduated from college. Most of us would not accept that, would we?
.. wireless will have caught up with wired speed.
You are just paying for the next five years. Then your fancy CAT5 or fiber or whatever will be useless.
I would even predict that 10 years from now we would already have seen the emergence of a city-wide wireless internet in most areas. Your wireless connections will hook up directly into the backbone.
From personal experience, every time I advocated more GUI based interfaces to various functions, I always got back "why do this when you can just type xyz -a -b -c -d --e --f +g!!" or some other equally obscure command line that people need to memorize.
When I said on slashsdot that Linux needs a gui-based installer like Installshield, I was attacked by legions of proponents of the command line rpm mgr. When I said that Linux with all its CLI commands is too hard to use for novices, I was told that novices shouldn't know all this stuff, and I should set up everything for them and restrict their power.
Which is fine and dandy if everyone wants to hire their own personal administrator, but... some people don't have someone else to set up their computer for them. They need to be able to do everything.. easily. Until the legions of the CLI-rats understand this, Linux will never make it to the desktop.
One the charmap.exe issue, would you say it was a user mode bug, or a kernel mode bug? In other words, where did the problem happen?
I am not familiar with that particular error, but I would suspect that something screwed up in kernel mode, even though it was called from user mode.
And.. even the mighty linux can be crashed by a misbehaving driver.
Ease of portability. If you read the concept behind NT, they developed the HAL in order to move it easily to new hardware. This allow them to support Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC (while they did) with a very similar code base. Should there be another hardware platform that they wish to support, their major task will be to rewrite the HAL. And I don't just mean new processors. Try porting Windows ME to PPC architecture.
How about enterprise-level networking? 9x networking was very primitive. You try to use a 9x machine as a server, and let me know how well you will do.
How about Unicode support? At the file system level? May not be an issue for you, but dealing with japanese characters in filenames from inside english Win 9x is next to impossible, unless you read the disk raw.
How about multi-user support? Try terminal services on 9x. Even without terminal services, remember that apps can run under different security contexts even in 3.51. Think services, for example.
Also, WinNT applications (and drivers especially) are easier and cleaner to write. This does provide development savings. Not all revenue has to be from the marketplace.
Finally, it is very unlikely that a user-mode program will bring down an NT-based OS. That is why my development machine is Windows 2000. If it were 9x, I can easily corrupt the runtime.
Laugh as you want, I was using NT 3.51 when 95 came out, and I wished I had the new explorer, but I wouldn't switch over and give up all the stability.
We could moderate topics. Yet another random Anti-MS flame. What does have a person in charge of internal IT infrastructure have to do with security holes in IIS and Outlook?
I wonder if the whole topic would be marked offtopic. It's too silly to qualify as Troll.
Or you could name your namespaces A, B, C and you could have a:/usr/bin, b:/usr/bin, c:/usr/bin..
:)
Sounds vaguely similar to another OS, no?
1. It is a public key encryption method.
2. It is linked to your SID. Therefore no other user can read your files unless they have access to your account.
3. When you encrypt a file, the file is saved in plain text, then encrypted. Therefore, there is a chance that the data is unencrypted on disk somewhere.
I've noticed strange behaviour with this file system so I don't use it often. Most of the behaviour had to do with copying files to and from an encrypted directory. I would get frequent failures (such as "file is in use"). Also, since for some reason my temp directory ended up encrypted, some installshield based programs failed to install.
I am specifically talking about Win 2000 here. I have not yet used it on XP.
Most of your time will be spent collecting requirements and reconciliating them. You have to polish up on your meeting skills and your organization skills. Learn to take notes effectively, and learn to ask the right questions. One good example is a book called "Database Design for Mere Mortals". I forget who writes it, but it discusses interviewing skills.
The other major slice of time will be spent writing pursuasive documentation. An architect needs to sell his design. You need to learn to write with the audience in mind, and given how your question was phrased, you have more to learn. You really did sound like a braggadocious snot nosed kid.
Finally, brush up on your presentation skills.
You already have (or should have) the technical skills, just keep those current. It is not important so much how some thing works, but what it can do for you.
And really, team lead is inconsistent with architecture. In many cases, an architect will work with the team, but not in a lead position. An architect doesn't necessarily need to be loaded with scheduling and human resource concerns. In some cases however, the roles are interchangable, depending on your environment.
So the question would then follow: if Christy Brinkley (or insert your favorite supermodel here) walked into your interview and answered all your questions, could you get over her looks and actually believe she would make a great developer?
In other words, don't we mistakenly also assume that someone can look "too good" to be a developer in some cases?
Of course, most male managers would still hire her, but then again it would have nothing to do with her programming skills.
We do judge people by how they dress. It implies a certain level of self worth and pride. If you don't care about what you look like, what would make me think you will care about what I want from you?
I've had to deal with at least one person like this. Funny enough, he got married two months later, and his wife turned him into a clean cut, normal smelling person. So maybe the moral is, find the geek a woman!
I guess noone has used Terminal Services which do allow multiple people to be logged in at the same time.
With Win2K, it even comes in the CD.
It's an EEPROM.
Linux still has a long way to go. You can't expect people to use an OS where much of the software is distributed in source code form. People (regular people, not geeks) don't like to compile. Many don't even know what compile means.
/tmp, gzip and untar it, run ./configure, run make all, run make install"
Also, the lack of a nice installer/uninstaller is crippling linux. Installshield (which I hate by the way because of certain technical reasons) and related tools do have a place in the hierarchy of things.
I don't know what the popular opinion is, but I see this as a major drawback. RPM is not the solution, it's just a kludge... For GUI based apps (KDE, etc), Linux needs a graphical installer (and uninstaller!) similar to InstallShield, wise, etc.
I think linux is great as a server or single utility OS.. But as a desktop for the average home user, noooooo... I shudder having to tell my mom "download this thing in your
And I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that the next day she doesn't say "I don't like it, how do I uninstall it?"
Just my $0.02
What, are we going back to the old 1980s Compaq portables? That is ugly and nerdy. My laptop is half an inch thick, so I can carry it around by itself.
Besides, I use my laptop at home a lot (almost exclusively, since I got my wireless setup). Why would I want that ugly thing on my coffee table??
The problem really is that it opens you up, then it broadcasts it to all your neighbors. Kinda like breaking your door down and putting a "Help Yourself" sign in front of the door.
The interesting question that I haven't seen addressed is, how do they intend to do this driver blocking? Is it a driver checksum, driver name, what? If so, you can simply recompile it with a little change, or rename it.
sorry if this has been addressed in the article, it's unreachable right now.
Personally, I had to hand configure it to let ICQ through. And since I run my web server on a non-standard port, it blocked all connections to that port until I configured it as an exception.
Just because you don't understand it, doesn't give you license to put it down. Do you even own it? Even from the blackice home page:
BlackICE is a revolutionary new way to detect, monitor, and block intrusions. BlackICE Defender analyzes, in real-time, ALL the communications from the Internet to your computer. Using an intelligent firewall combined with an advanced intrusion detection engine, BlackICE can stop attacks while leaving normal Internet communications unaffected.
and...
You can manually customize BlackICE Defender to block or accept any IP address or TCP/UDP port.
What you are saying is that there is no damage that can be done if you are not root?
How about forking a backdoor trojan such as subseven? What if the payload contained an attack that would give you root? Or mailing out something sensitive? Heck, you don't need special permissions to ICMP flood an internet host under the command of a malicious user.
Again, I resubmit that it's the user, not the OS. and because of posts like this, Linux would be a nice target, if only more than 10 people were using it on the desktop. It's all this 'my shit is better than thou's' attitude.
That 'Google is our favorite search engine' is a tribute to Google's marketing team. This even happened before the newsgroups and before the cached pages. I wonder how much money they shoved down the throats of web sites like slashdot in order to get them heavily promoted with nerds.
Altavista's raging.com also gives add-free searches, althought they lost something when they were merged with the look and feel of altavista.com. I use google for what used to be called deja.com services. Google is not my favorite search engine, I don't have one. I could care less if it stayed or dissapeared, there are plenty out there that do the same thing. Altavista may not have cached pages, but does google have translation?
This whole article is a big "kiss google's butt" add. Slashdot should be obligated to note on their postings if an article is a payed advertisement. Makes me sick.
Yeah. When the hell are the full immersion games showing up? We've been promised for years. I want the gogles and the surround video effect! I'm sick of staring at a monitor, I want to lay back in a lazy boy, slap on the goggles, and have some (clean, non x-rated) fun. I refuse to update my PC until those show up. :) And I don't mean those silly Elsa $50 goggles that depend on the frequency rate of your monitor and give you a fake 3d effect.
The game industry has been in a funk ever since the release of Doom (the last major accomplishment in my opinion). When is the next revolution coming?
I would like to run my own test. In particular I'd like to benchmark Linux vs. 2k vs. FreeBSD (assuming the later can support my gigabit nic, haven't tried it yet). What I'm looking for is benchmarking file server performance. I've written a test tool before and on windows I used TransmitFile() and completion ports, and I don't have an equivalent method on Linux. I would like to find a tool that can serve files *optimally* under every OS supported. Portability is not a concern. Any suggestions?
At the risk of upsetting the slashdot community, i believe we are focusing on the wrong thing. It's not the IDE, it is a) THE LANGUAGE, and b) THE LIBRARIES.
You want something that will compile more or less unmodified on different platforms. The IDE is inconsequential. It would be nice if it looked and feel the same, but who cares. Could always use a makefile.
So, I haven't seen kylix. Is the VCL library portable between Linux and Windows, or do you have to make a ton of changes? How about the BDE layer (I assume that if you use ADO you are screwed).
If either MFC or VCL have been ported to use with GCC, there is your answer. Your cross platform development tool is GCC. If you use kdevelop it even feels a little like Visual C++'s IDE.
But well, the Chinese hackers already declared war on the american infrastructure. Kinda makes sense, no?
If you drive by your ex wife's house every morning yelling "I'm going to kill you", and one day they find her dead, guess who's going to be on Cops?