Developers with more relevant skills should be paid more, regardless of age.
In principle, it should be easy for a senior developer to pick up "hot emerging technologies" within a few weeks to the same degree as the recent college grad learned during his four years in college. If the senior developer can't do that, there are three possibilities: (1) the company doesn't give him enough time/resources to let him keep up with the field and is burning him out, (2) he is too opinionated or stuck in his ways to bother, or (3) he just isn't very good in general.
The company should figure out which of the three possibilities it is. If it's (1), they should fix it and then pay him more. If it's (2) or (3), it's OK to pay him less, although they might want to just fire him.
Another issue is that when questions of "what the client wanted" come in, you are also veering into territory where your developers become booth babes rather than technical staff; someone who looks like a 20-something hotshot with the right buzzwords on his resume and promises the world may appeal more to the client than a bearded old guy who tells the client that what they want can't be done in time and on budget and that they should be using something more tried-and-true. Which of the two guys is more valuable to your business depends on what happens when the project fails... for some projects, you get paid anyway, for others, you eat the cost.
Of course, in the end, it's a free market kind of thing: do you think the experienced senior developer is going to walk if you treat him like that. If that's a problem for your business, you should probably raise his salary, in particular since it's not all that much money compared to all your other costs.
But companies that use such programs spend more on such things as learning to use them
That's sometimes the case; in the long run, training and learning costs are almost always lower than for equivalent Microsoft software however. Microsoft keeps changing its interfaces so that marketing and sales can squeeze out a new version, and that gets really expensive in the long run. Many companies have been refusing to upgrade Windows and Office because of that, only to be forced to do so eventually.
and making them work with other software"
Sure, making FOSS work with Microsoft software is a real pain. However, that pain can be nearly eliminated by eliminating Microsoft software.
Re:Apple's soft keyboards are awful
on
Auto Incorrect
·
· Score: 1
Unlike iPhone, Android lets you replace the soft keyboard and there are many choices; some of those are much less prone to errors like the iPhone.
Also, of course, people who text a lot just get an Android phone with a physical keyboard, which is still by far the most reliable way of entering text on a mobile device.
X11 the protocol was very good 20 years ago, but by now shows its age. A new X12 could use some cleanups such as removing
Yes, a lot of these things are obsolete, but they are needed for backwards compatibility and they are not hard to implement. There is no need to remove them.
And that's just graphics, don't get me started about multi-screne handler, internationalization, window management or inter-process communications.
These things are getting addressed one by one. If you have something to contribute, contribute, otherwise STFU.
And, the point you missed, is that the refactoring *will* *not* *happen* for political and social reasons. Even before patches, the first step would be to unify all that stuff under one tree, and the pushback against that is demented.
Why go through all that trouble? The reason the ATI drivers suck is because the hardware interfaces are proprietary; causing a big upheaval in the organization of various open source projects doesn't change that. nVidia drivers work fine, which shows that it can be done without too much trouble. And all your complaints are just unrelated hot air.
Nothing obscure there. And if you think they're independant you either haven't looked at the problem and the hardware or your blood level is too high in your coffee stream.
Actually, what I think is that you are a blow-hard know-nothing.
Apple's soft keyboards are awful
on
Auto Incorrect
·
· Score: 1
Most of these examples are from Apple devices. Apple's on-screen keyboards are among the worst on any platform. Not only is the autocorrection extremely poor, users can't replace the keyboard, and the way you choose between autocorrection and original is just wrong.
nVidia cards work fine on Linux and may even perform better than on Windows. That's half the serious 3D graphics card manufacturers right there.
I don't know why ATI can't get its act together. Maybe as GPUs are used for more general purpose computation, they have to provide more low-level access, and FOSS developers can fix what ATI doesn't seem to be capable of.
The use of "hardware acceleration" in browsers is silly; browsers do standard 2D graphics through standard 2D graphics APIs. If that isn't already hardware accelerated as much as it can be by the regular graphics APIs, then the regular graphics APIs need to get fixed.
Of course, the 2D graphics APIs on Windows and OS X are slow, which is why people are doing this. But then they need to get fixed. I'm not convinced that on X11, this is going to make a difference.
For 3D graphics, you need OpenGL, of course. But for that, FF should also just use it when need it and leave it up to the user to decide whether it's fast enough and stable enough.
And fixing that is probably not going to ever happen until X/Mesa is dead under its own weight.
X is a protocol, and a pretty good one at that. There is no reason for it to "die", since nobody has come up with anything better yet. Both the Windows and the OS X graphics architectures are inferior.
The X server software and Mesa should get updated. But it actually works pretty well. Most of the things you list are fairly specific add-ons, and having those access the hardware separately seems like a good thing; why would I want to have all that extra crap in a single project?
People need to do some refactoring, cleanup, and documentation. But, hey, what else is new. But there is nothing really wrong with having those different pieces of functionality factored into seperate projects.
There are effectively two manufacturers of accelerated 3D graphics cards these days: nVidia and ATI. So, Linux works well with at least half the major 3D graphics card manufacturers.
I also wonder how accurate the claims of the FF developers are. Frankly, their Linux effort has never been all that good to begin with. And I haven't had any problems with Compiz or games on ATI and Linux (at least not any more than on ATI+Windows, which is also buggy).
Well, and that is ATI's fault. ATI fails to supply a working open source driver.
nVidia also fails to supply a working open source driver, but at least they provide a working binary driver.
Incidentally, ATI's Windows driver on my Windows 7 machine crashes with regularity as well, so maybe the problem is just bad ATI hardware.
It's a bit unfair to say OpenGL is bad just because the open source guys can't implement it correctly in the Linux drivers.
It isn't the responsibility of "the open source guys" to reverse engineer hardware to create drivers for it. They do that because manufacturers are pig-headed, but if there is no good, working ATI driver for Linux, that's ATI's fault and ATI's fault alone.
What you are highlighting with regard to the UI changes is one of the symptoms of fragmentation that many commentators are criticizing Android over, with some justification.
Even customized devices run standard Android apps. You can even run home screen apps and keyboards, like those that have more standard behavior than the customization. The problem with those customizations is that they delay releases and degrade the out-of-box experience; they do not "fragment" the platform.
"Android fragmentation" is a meme created by Apple's marketing department and repeated by Apple fanboys. It has no basis in reality.
To be honest, I've only tried two Android phones just to see what they were like and, yes, the delay was there, too.
There is no delay at all on an HTC Desire. Its home screen scrolling is as zippy and responsive as the latest iPhone/iPod.
I realize this is going to make everyone yell "Fanboi!", but I carry around an iPod Touch (3rd Gen)
The iPod Touch has massive delays when opening home screen folders and when organizing apps. Organizing apps, the entire UI often freezes for several seconds when switching modes; that's a major usability issue.
I think--although they didn't say it clearly--they meant more than just pushing buttons; things like scrolling widgets, which let you use widgets as mini apps or windows.
People have been using the wrong horoscopes! That means that many of the predictions that horoscopes have made and that world leaders have based their policies on have been WRONG! It's no wonder that our world has been in so much trouble!
I have yet to see anybody who didn't screw up badly while messing with the Android UI. Furthermore, those "enhancements" mean support, update, and documentation headaches.
The specific changes on that device looked questionable, and their claims that you can't interact with widgets are out of date. In effect, they have duplicated work on the main branch of Android and come up with an incompatible solution.
No wonder that they are shipping late; they should have shipped a minimal adaptation of Android earlier and taken any spare time fixing bugs in their drivers and hardware.
I won't buy a heavily customized Android device, and I recommend against it. Android gives manufacturers the freedom to do this, but as customers, we don't have to buy the stuff.
Kids, in order to build hot mobile apps, get yourself a piece of locked down hardware from a control freak company. Then, reinvent 50 year old technology to circumvent the restrictions that company put on it. Then, write software in a weird variant of the C language, software that you can install on your own device in development mode but that won't ever make it in the real world because the control freak company won't let you install it.
The USA have 90% of theri forces spread all over the world... and NOTHING at home to defend themselves
Yes... and that means it's close to anybody who might attack the US and that the US doesn't even have to fight on its own soil. Seriously, why do you think US troops are in Germany and Japan? For the beer?
I simply fail to understand why the rest of the world united should not be able to fight a war against USA.
On purely military grounds: nukes.
On economic grounds: because it would be economic suicide. The world economy needs the US and US consumers.
It is more or less the same like in the US. You have to convince a judge to give a search warrant.
You're from Germany. While Germany does have search warrants for some online searches, they are required in fewer circumstances than in the US. In the WikiLeaks/Twitter case, a warrant would likely not be required and targets would not be informed.
In fact, the German government has been trying to give police and prosecutors direct electronic access to these records.
Some of the retention laws have declared unconstitutional, but that's because some details of the German laws went too far. Germany is still required to implement the EU directive, and the government is going to do that.
The situation elsewhere in Europe is similar or worse for the most part.
Nobody goes out and establishes a political philosophy that says "we want evil men to dominate the world and commit mass murder". Instead, totalitarianism and oppression are the unintended consequence of other political ideas that may not seem so dangerous at first glance.
All of these books are about changing the status quo against some big group of people having a stranglehold on society and progress; they just differ in the details of their justifications.
Rand is about "individualism", but effectively that means individualism for only a few superior men; it's not that different from postulating a "master race".
Bollocks. Europe is not a nation state, European Law is a collection of treaties at best
Well, I'm sorry, I guess as a Brit, English is not your native language and I may have to be a little clearer:-)
An expression like "in Europe" can mean "somewhere in Europe" or "everywhere in Europe". Here it means the former; more to the point: "In many nations in Europe, police would be able to..."
However, there's less variation across Europe than you think; the two main legal systems are the British system and the Napoleonic system (from one of those former European evil empires).
As for "beating up on America", thats going to get an MP here nowhere,
You're living in the UK with its notions of a "special relationship" with the US that even creeps out US diplomats (see Wikileaks).
Sorry, buddy, but your MPs are not representative of Europe. In many European nations, anti-American sentiments work quite well for politicians.
We could simply talk China and Japan into stop sending you toys.
Are you kidding? Germany, China, and Japan are the countries screaming the loudest when the US is trying to balance its trade, because their unemployment would explode and their economies would look pretty bleak.
In this arrangement, the US gets the goods it wants, but people selling the goods just get promises to get a share of future US wealth. If the outlook for the US is as bleak as you think, the US can't keep those promises and those promises are worth little. What's Europe going to do when the US devalues the dollar substantially, as it will sooner or later?
Since you've long since outsourced most of your own industrial capacities, the curtain would fall very quickly.
It's no wonder that if you start with wrong assumptions, you end up with wrong conclusions.
Even if you were right, it wouldn't be a bad thing: Germany and Japan managed to build strong industrial bases after the devastation of WWII. Having your industrial base wiped out and then rebuilding it is usually not a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Developers with more relevant skills should be paid more, regardless of age.
In principle, it should be easy for a senior developer to pick up "hot emerging technologies" within a few weeks to the same degree as the recent college grad learned during his four years in college. If the senior developer can't do that, there are three possibilities: (1) the company doesn't give him enough time/resources to let him keep up with the field and is burning him out, (2) he is too opinionated or stuck in his ways to bother, or (3) he just isn't very good in general.
The company should figure out which of the three possibilities it is. If it's (1), they should fix it and then pay him more. If it's (2) or (3), it's OK to pay him less, although they might want to just fire him.
Another issue is that when questions of "what the client wanted" come in, you are also veering into territory where your developers become booth babes rather than technical staff; someone who looks like a 20-something hotshot with the right buzzwords on his resume and promises the world may appeal more to the client than a bearded old guy who tells the client that what they want can't be done in time and on budget and that they should be using something more tried-and-true. Which of the two guys is more valuable to your business depends on what happens when the project fails... for some projects, you get paid anyway, for others, you eat the cost.
Of course, in the end, it's a free market kind of thing: do you think the experienced senior developer is going to walk if you treat him like that. If that's a problem for your business, you should probably raise his salary, in particular since it's not all that much money compared to all your other costs.
But companies that use such programs spend more on such things as learning to use them
That's sometimes the case; in the long run, training and learning costs are almost always lower than for equivalent Microsoft software however. Microsoft keeps changing its interfaces so that marketing and sales can squeeze out a new version, and that gets really expensive in the long run. Many companies have been refusing to upgrade Windows and Office because of that, only to be forced to do so eventually.
and making them work with other software"
Sure, making FOSS work with Microsoft software is a real pain. However, that pain can be nearly eliminated by eliminating Microsoft software.
Unlike iPhone, Android lets you replace the soft keyboard and there are many choices; some of those are much less prone to errors like the iPhone.
Also, of course, people who text a lot just get an Android phone with a physical keyboard, which is still by far the most reliable way of entering text on a mobile device.
X11 the protocol was very good 20 years ago, but by now shows its age. A new X12 could use some cleanups such as removing
Yes, a lot of these things are obsolete, but they are needed for backwards compatibility and they are not hard to implement. There is no need to remove them.
And that's just graphics, don't get me started about multi-screne handler, internationalization, window management or inter-process communications.
These things are getting addressed one by one. If you have something to contribute, contribute, otherwise STFU.
And, the point you missed, is that the refactoring *will* *not* *happen* for political and social reasons. Even before patches, the first step would be to unify all that stuff under one tree, and the pushback against that is demented.
Why go through all that trouble? The reason the ATI drivers suck is because the hardware interfaces are proprietary; causing a big upheaval in the organization of various open source projects doesn't change that. nVidia drivers work fine, which shows that it can be done without too much trouble. And all your complaints are just unrelated hot air.
Nothing obscure there. And if you think they're independant you either haven't looked at the problem and the hardware or your blood level is too high in your coffee stream.
Actually, what I think is that you are a blow-hard know-nothing.
Most of these examples are from Apple devices. Apple's on-screen keyboards are among the worst on any platform. Not only is the autocorrection extremely poor, users can't replace the keyboard, and the way you choose between autocorrection and original is just wrong.
It may depend on the number of apps you have installed; I have a lot of apps installed.
nVidia cards work fine on Linux and may even perform better than on Windows. That's half the serious 3D graphics card manufacturers right there.
I don't know why ATI can't get its act together. Maybe as GPUs are used for more general purpose computation, they have to provide more low-level access, and FOSS developers can fix what ATI doesn't seem to be capable of.
The use of "hardware acceleration" in browsers is silly; browsers do standard 2D graphics through standard 2D graphics APIs. If that isn't already hardware accelerated as much as it can be by the regular graphics APIs, then the regular graphics APIs need to get fixed.
Of course, the 2D graphics APIs on Windows and OS X are slow, which is why people are doing this. But then they need to get fixed. I'm not convinced that on X11, this is going to make a difference.
For 3D graphics, you need OpenGL, of course. But for that, FF should also just use it when need it and leave it up to the user to decide whether it's fast enough and stable enough.
And fixing that is probably not going to ever happen until X/Mesa is dead under its own weight.
X is a protocol, and a pretty good one at that. There is no reason for it to "die", since nobody has come up with anything better yet. Both the Windows and the OS X graphics architectures are inferior.
The X server software and Mesa should get updated. But it actually works pretty well. Most of the things you list are fairly specific add-ons, and having those access the hardware separately seems like a good thing; why would I want to have all that extra crap in a single project?
People need to do some refactoring, cleanup, and documentation. But, hey, what else is new. But there is nothing really wrong with having those different pieces of functionality factored into seperate projects.
There are effectively two manufacturers of accelerated 3D graphics cards these days: nVidia and ATI. So, Linux works well with at least half the major 3D graphics card manufacturers.
I also wonder how accurate the claims of the FF developers are. Frankly, their Linux effort has never been all that good to begin with. And I haven't had any problems with Compiz or games on ATI and Linux (at least not any more than on ATI+Windows, which is also buggy).
The open source ATI stuff is mostly junk.
Well, and that is ATI's fault. ATI fails to supply a working open source driver.
nVidia also fails to supply a working open source driver, but at least they provide a working binary driver.
Incidentally, ATI's Windows driver on my Windows 7 machine crashes with regularity as well, so maybe the problem is just bad ATI hardware.
It's a bit unfair to say OpenGL is bad just because the open source guys can't implement it correctly in the Linux drivers.
It isn't the responsibility of "the open source guys" to reverse engineer hardware to create drivers for it. They do that because manufacturers are pig-headed, but if there is no good, working ATI driver for Linux, that's ATI's fault and ATI's fault alone.
What you are highlighting with regard to the UI changes is one of the symptoms of fragmentation that many commentators are criticizing Android over, with some justification.
Even customized devices run standard Android apps. You can even run home screen apps and keyboards, like those that have more standard behavior than the customization. The problem with those customizations is that they delay releases and degrade the out-of-box experience; they do not "fragment" the platform.
"Android fragmentation" is a meme created by Apple's marketing department and repeated by Apple fanboys. It has no basis in reality.
To be honest, I've only tried two Android phones just to see what they were like and, yes, the delay was there, too.
There is no delay at all on an HTC Desire. Its home screen scrolling is as zippy and responsive as the latest iPhone/iPod.
I realize this is going to make everyone yell "Fanboi!", but I carry around an iPod Touch (3rd Gen)
The iPod Touch has massive delays when opening home screen folders and when organizing apps. Organizing apps, the entire UI often freezes for several seconds when switching modes; that's a major usability issue.
I think--although they didn't say it clearly--they meant more than just pushing buttons; things like scrolling widgets, which let you use widgets as mini apps or windows.
People have been using the wrong horoscopes! That means that many of the predictions that horoscopes have made and that world leaders have based their policies on have been WRONG! It's no wonder that our world has been in so much trouble!
I have yet to see anybody who didn't screw up badly while messing with the Android UI. Furthermore, those "enhancements" mean support, update, and documentation headaches.
The specific changes on that device looked questionable, and their claims that you can't interact with widgets are out of date. In effect, they have duplicated work on the main branch of Android and come up with an incompatible solution.
No wonder that they are shipping late; they should have shipped a minimal adaptation of Android earlier and taken any spare time fixing bugs in their drivers and hardware.
I won't buy a heavily customized Android device, and I recommend against it. Android gives manufacturers the freedom to do this, but as customers, we don't have to buy the stuff.
Kids, in order to build hot mobile apps, get yourself a piece of locked down hardware from a control freak company. Then, reinvent 50 year old technology to circumvent the restrictions that company put on it. Then, write software in a weird variant of the C language, software that you can install on your own device in development mode but that won't ever make it in the real world because the control freak company won't let you install it.
Wow, great education!
Apple's way is more discoverable because it isn't hiding,
Are you kidding? There are three big buttons on Android devices, always in the same place, consistently doing the same thing; they aren't "hiding".
iOS apps are totally inconsistent in how you invoke menus, navigate back, search, and even invoke settings.
both are valid UI design methodologies
Apple's design methodology is that Jobs hates buttons, it's as simple as that.
It is more easy to believe that the US Army preferred to support their own economy ;D
That, plus having more confidence in the construction, security, secrecy, and availability of a US-built device.
The USA have 90% of theri forces spread all over the world ... and NOTHING at home to defend themselves
Yes... and that means it's close to anybody who might attack the US and that the US doesn't even have to fight on its own soil. Seriously, why do you think US troops are in Germany and Japan? For the beer?
I simply fail to understand why the rest of the world united should not be able to fight a war against USA.
On purely military grounds: nukes.
On economic grounds: because it would be economic suicide. The world economy needs the US and US consumers.
It is more or less the same like in the US. You have to convince a judge to give a search warrant.
You're from Germany. While Germany does have search warrants for some online searches, they are required in fewer circumstances than in the US. In the WikiLeaks/Twitter case, a warrant would likely not be required and targets would not be informed.
In fact, the German government has been trying to give police and prosecutors direct electronic access to these records.
Some of the retention laws have declared unconstitutional, but that's because some details of the German laws went too far. Germany is still required to implement the EU directive, and the government is going to do that.
The situation elsewhere in Europe is similar or worse for the most part.
Look at paragraphs 112, 113, 160, 161 here: http://dejure.org/gesetze/TKG/113.html
I do not see how the extreme libertarianism of Ayn Rand fits in with the collectivism of Mein Kampf.
Rand's "extreme libertarianism" effectively only applies to a kind of "master race" of superior men, so it's not that different.
Nobody goes out and establishes a political philosophy that says "we want evil men to dominate the world and commit mass murder". Instead, totalitarianism and oppression are the unintended consequence of other political ideas that may not seem so dangerous at first glance.
All of these books are about changing the status quo against some big group of people having a stranglehold on society and progress; they just differ in the details of their justifications.
Rand is about "individualism", but effectively that means individualism for only a few superior men; it's not that different from postulating a "master race".
Bollocks. Europe is not a nation state, European Law is a collection of treaties at best
Well, I'm sorry, I guess as a Brit, English is not your native language and I may have to be a little clearer :-)
An expression like "in Europe" can mean "somewhere in Europe" or "everywhere in Europe". Here it means the former; more to the point: "In many nations in Europe, police would be able to..."
However, there's less variation across Europe than you think; the two main legal systems are the British system and the Napoleonic system (from one of those former European evil empires).
As for "beating up on America", thats going to get an MP here nowhere,
You're living in the UK with its notions of a "special relationship" with the US that even creeps out US diplomats (see Wikileaks).
Sorry, buddy, but your MPs are not representative of Europe. In many European nations, anti-American sentiments work quite well for politicians.
We could simply talk China and Japan into stop sending you toys.
Are you kidding? Germany, China, and Japan are the countries screaming the loudest when the US is trying to balance its trade, because their unemployment would explode and their economies would look pretty bleak.
In this arrangement, the US gets the goods it wants, but people selling the goods just get promises to get a share of future US wealth. If the outlook for the US is as bleak as you think, the US can't keep those promises and those promises are worth little. What's Europe going to do when the US devalues the dollar substantially, as it will sooner or later?
Since you've long since outsourced most of your own industrial capacities, the curtain would fall very quickly.
It's no wonder that if you start with wrong assumptions, you end up with wrong conclusions.
Even if you were right, it wouldn't be a bad thing: Germany and Japan managed to build strong industrial bases after the devastation of WWII. Having your industrial base wiped out and then rebuilding it is usually not a bad thing.