I found a recent Slashdot article very informative about what coders look for in a manager. This survey in that article contains a slide that shows what I believe to be a very good detail of what coders want.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 1
"It will be almost impossible for oppressed people's to violently object to tyranny in such a scenario."
Agreed, however peacefully, a large enough mass of people can object dramatically to that type of system by hurting what it needs most, Money!
If enough consumers opressed by that kind of system, refused to spend, had work slowdowns, and instituted a number of boycotts, it would hurt it. It wouldn't kill it overnight but it would be a strong weapon against it.
I don't think *nix's need office but the ability to create and open native M$ Word, and Excel documents in *nix would greatly help (at least me) completely abandon having to use _any_ M$ products.
I find that to be completely true that one really _really_ good programmer can be better than as many mediocre programmers as you want to throw at a problem. However in a big project I think having those mediocre programmers can help put the icing on the cake. Documentation, debugging, etc. that you really don't want your best mind wasting his time on. They can help iron out the details. Problem with that is the masses can come up with some pretty bad ideas and poor decision making but that is why you don't run a software project as a democracy. I forget who said it but they said "Software projects should be run like surgical teams". You don't have the owner of the hospital leaning over the chief surgeons shoulder saying "No clamp there, that looks better". In this style he uses the extra assistants to aid him in his job but the art that is his craft is shaped by him and the big decisions are made by him.
I don't believe they are ignoring any incoming bugs but if you look at the number of bug reports they skyrocket when they make major changes. That is of course to be expected. I just see projects like Debian taking longer to release and when they do it is uber frozen to only fix security concerns and it kicks ass. I think if Mozilla did this more people would jump in to help the project. I for one can't keep up with it enought to help it. Debian on the other hand I can. I hope there is a method to there madness because I do think it an awesome piece of software just a 'jellified one'.
Take for example i386 machine instruction set. It is a disaster but a frozen one. RISC is much better but because i386 is frozen it lives. Mozilla will be the RISC of browsers forever if it won't freeze. Or at least make a 'stable' 1.0 release we all work on bug squashing in while they work towards 2.0. Maybe that is already their plan I hope so.
Are they ever going to freeze Mozilla and just fix bugs?
Re:It appears to actually be fixes
on
Kernel 2.4.17 Out
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· Score: 1
This is good news for Debian which is probably not to far from releasing Woody (3.0) onto the world. Last time I checked they were teetering on not putting 2.4 in there as default (I know easily apt-get'd but it would be nice as default).
So if they stabilize it out good the Debian guys might go with that (I hope).
On another note mostly bug fixes is a beutiful thing... ANYONE AT MOZILLA LISTENING????
We have a new manager of the department that is pushing the documentation aspect real hard. We have a nice tidy drive share with volumes of documentation. I have been laying the groundwork for a massive new web system we will be creating and I find myself spending more time changing and organizing the framework document and DFD's than writing code.
I think it is very dificult to balance getting things done and writing the documentation. It seems to me a number of the programmers are a bit burnt out on a project they were excited about by the time they do the Milestone graph, the DFD's, etc.
My point is there has to be a balance and I see programmers who are hard enough to motivate to begin with just spin their wheels in the documentation and keeping it all up to date if it is to extensive can kill them.
Anyone else have a success story of balancing making developers document well with writing kick ass code please share how you did it.
The big problem with this is the new stock of future IT professionals in schools is watered down. They are a mass of people who came running during the.dotboom to get the $$. I am sure the same number of people are going into it because they love it as there was before. Problem is the number of newbies who want to do it as a job and make a decent check aren't _into_ it and outnumber the 1337. They don't know how to go onto IRC and ask for help. They don't know what a newsgroup is. They don't know what FAQ stands for and why they have to read that. Etc. etc.
Damien writes many great modules and great articles for the community. I don't know anything about the other guy but this is a great charity to give to so we can free up uber 3l337 Perl hackers from their day jobs to make Perl even better.
I think the biggest concern I have is getting M$ to open their API and Office up. I think doing this is near impossible, yet it is what needs to be done. For example they can open it up yet make it extremely hard to work with. How do you prove that in court? As a programmer I want to be able to write programs that can easily communicate with other systems and M$ makes it tough. Having other systems able to interoperate with that system on the lines all other OS's typically interoperate would help competitors have some market share. They also shouldn't be able to have binary office documents other offices can't read. How would you address those two issues?
e) find some way to stimulate some plate tectonics to recycle the minerals and crack the O off the Fe in the crust (this is a long term goal, though)
Easy, you just pull a big moon into orbit like we have and it will start churning and heating things up like we need. BTW, if we did that we probably wouldn't even have to do a-c.
As someone who has been buidling a ton of the same software on different systems (OpenVMS, Linux, and Solaris) lately I must say that we should make a new tool.
The new tool with simply be you have an xml file on each of these systems that have that systems libraries, compiler, architecture, etc. all in it kind of like how Perl's Makemaker builds a makefile but in a way that works better:-). On OpenVMS it sux.
I would love to see -
<oracle_8_header_files/>
as opposed to searching 25 disk arrays to find one stupid.h then find out exactly what I need to define as a system logical (on VMS) to make it find that. Then make sure I did that ok.
$INC{INST_LIBS} doesn't tell the lay person a damn thing. Put it in xml with good documentation how to fix it cuz it isn't going to work for everyone.
Or maybe I will do it. Anyone else out there have any use for something like this?
I love how I not only have to use IE, Mozilla, and Konquerer, but multiple versions of them (IE) to be able to do what I want on certain web sites.
Never used to be that way. I used to be able to hit submit buttons (on Yahoo) and have them work in my web browser of choice. I have problems mostly with IE 6 and Mozilla.
While I am whole heartedly against the idea of ID cards that hit a database with _ALL_ my information I wouldn't mind one for things only I wish to have public.
For instance say I am filling out paperwork at the DMV, College, or wherever. I want to be able to give them a number and have them fill out 90% of the paperwork for me from a central source. Then I would just fill in the sensitive information SS #, Name, Employer, etc.
If we could ever trust a system like this is debatable. You would have to pass serious legislation limiting it and doing so would be quite difficult considering the lobbying companies would do to get information added to it. But it is an idea.
I have found that many people who started programming post DOS, using Win95 seem to be the ones really afraid of the command line. I mean _really_ afraid of it. Many of the people I work with that fit into that category would answer your question just like your collegue did.
These people think they cannot function without visual this and visual that. It really hurts what they can learn because in turn they are afraid of many handy command line tools and programming languages that don't have the visual training wheels they are used to.
If they make a significant investment into determining what parts of their hardware and software are the best they could really have something here.
You could take the really good things about OpenVMS and the hardware it runs on, mash it with the HPUX stuff, and have a great system.
OpenVMS kicks ass in area's like processor affinity, system process queues, and stability in the software area. There new wildfire hardware is blazingly fast as well.
Take all that good hardware, the good software design and roll it all up into Linux. Nothing would stop them from doing that and then running it across the board.
Re:Hate to say, sounds like a dot-bomb strategy...
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 1
Just a bit to add to this...
Compaq ate DEC and with that Alpha chips and the OpenVMS OS. With Intel eating Alpha (which kills that) OpenVMS will eventually die. Sad to see this it's a rock solid OS.
With that dead, all that is left to run on those powerhouse servers is Tru64 Unix. They will probably opt to spend their time on improving Linux on that architecture instead which would be a really cool thing but that is very speculative.
HP could use a lot of these to make some killer Linux hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I found a recent Slashdot article very informative about what coders look for in a manager. This survey in that article contains a slide that shows what I believe to be a very good detail of what coders want.
Male (over 90% WHOA!)
Educated
Going to Mars
and online way too much
"It will be almost impossible for oppressed people's to violently object to tyranny in such a scenario."
Agreed, however peacefully, a large enough mass of people can object dramatically to that type of system by hurting what it needs most, Money!
If enough consumers opressed by that kind of system, refused to spend, had work slowdowns, and instituted a number of boycotts, it would hurt it. It wouldn't kill it overnight but it would be a strong weapon against it.
Will you idiots please stop saying "civil liberertarians". Have you ever met a "civil libertarian" in your life or seen one talking on TV. NO!.
Your just playing into mainstream medias ploy to discredit Libertarians and people who "oh no" actually think freedom is a good thing.
I don't think *nix's need office but the ability to create and open native M$ Word, and Excel documents in *nix would greatly help (at least me) completely abandon having to use _any_ M$ products.
I find that to be completely true that one really _really_ good programmer can be better than as many mediocre programmers as you want to throw at a problem. However in a big project I think having those mediocre programmers can help put the icing on the cake. Documentation, debugging, etc. that you really don't want your best mind wasting his time on. They can help iron out the details. Problem with that is the masses can come up with some pretty bad ideas and poor decision making but that is why you don't run a software project as a democracy. I forget who said it but they said "Software projects should be run like surgical teams". You don't have the owner of the hospital leaning over the chief surgeons shoulder saying "No clamp there, that looks better". In this style he uses the extra assistants to aid him in his job but the art that is his craft is shaped by him and the big decisions are made by him.
I don't believe they are ignoring any incoming bugs but if you look at the number of bug reports they skyrocket when they make major changes. That is of course to be expected. I just see projects like Debian taking longer to release and when they do it is uber frozen to only fix security concerns and it kicks ass. I think if Mozilla did this more people would jump in to help the project. I for one can't keep up with it enought to help it. Debian on the other hand I can. I hope there is a method to there madness because I do think it an awesome piece of software just a 'jellified one'.
Take for example i386 machine instruction set. It is a disaster but a frozen one. RISC is much better but because i386 is frozen it lives. Mozilla will be the RISC of browsers forever if it won't freeze. Or at least make a 'stable' 1.0 release we all work on bug squashing in while they work towards 2.0. Maybe that is already their plan I hope so.
Are they ever going to freeze Mozilla and just fix bugs?
This is good news for Debian which is probably not to far from releasing Woody (3.0) onto the world. Last time I checked they were teetering on not putting 2.4 in there as default (I know easily apt-get'd but it would be nice as default).
So if they stabilize it out good the Debian guys might go with that (I hope).
On another note mostly bug fixes is a beutiful thing... ANYONE AT MOZILLA LISTENING????
We have a new manager of the department that is pushing the documentation aspect real hard. We have a nice tidy drive share with volumes of documentation. I have been laying the groundwork for a massive new web system we will be creating and I find myself spending more time changing and organizing the framework document and DFD's than writing code.
I think it is very dificult to balance getting things done and writing the documentation. It seems to me a number of the programmers are a bit burnt out on a project they were excited about by the time they do the Milestone graph, the DFD's, etc.
My point is there has to be a balance and I see programmers who are hard enough to motivate to begin with just spin their wheels in the documentation and keeping it all up to date if it is to extensive can kill them.
Anyone else have a success story of balancing making developers document well with writing kick ass code please share how you did it.
The big problem with this is the new stock of future IT professionals in schools is watered down. They are a mass of people who came running during the .dotboom to get the $$. I am sure the same number of people are going into it because they love it as there was before. Problem is the number of newbies who want to do it as a job and make a decent check aren't _into_ it and outnumber the 1337. They don't know how to go onto IRC and ask for help. They don't know what a newsgroup is. They don't know what FAQ stands for and why they have to read that. Etc. etc.
Damien writes many great modules and great articles for the community. I don't know anything about the other guy but this is a great charity to give to so we can free up uber 3l337 Perl hackers from their day jobs to make Perl even better.
I think the biggest concern I have is getting M$ to open their API and Office up. I think doing this is near impossible, yet it is what needs to be done. For example they can open it up yet make it extremely hard to work with. How do you prove that in court? As a programmer I want to be able to write programs that can easily communicate with other systems and M$ makes it tough. Having other systems able to interoperate with that system on the lines all other OS's typically interoperate would help competitors have some market share. They also shouldn't be able to have binary office documents other offices can't read. How would you address those two issues?
e) find some way to stimulate some plate tectonics to recycle the minerals and crack the O off the Fe in the crust (this is a long term goal, though)
Easy, you just pull a big moon into orbit like we have and it will start churning and heating things up like we need. BTW, if we did that we probably wouldn't even have to do a-c.
if($YouDontBelieveInEvolution){ &mass_mob() }h an Linus){
if($YouThinkYourSmarterThanLinus{ &mass_mob() }
if($YouDontKnowWhatProgrammingLanguageThisIs{
&mass_mob();
}
if($YouThinkYouManageProgrammingProjectsBetterT
&mass_mob();
}
if($YouEverUsedScalarsAsLongAsTheOnesIAmUsing){
&mass_mob();
}
sub mass_mob() {
print "Please stop reading this and go away\n";
}
As someone who has been buidling a ton of the same software on different systems (OpenVMS, Linux, and Solaris) lately I must say that we should make a new tool.
:-). On OpenVMS it sux.
.h then find out exactly what I need to define as a system logical (on VMS) to make it find that. Then make sure I did that ok.
The new tool with simply be you have an xml file on each of these systems that have that systems libraries, compiler, architecture, etc. all in it kind of like how Perl's Makemaker builds a makefile but in a way that works better
I would love to see -
<oracle_8_header_files/>
as opposed to searching 25 disk arrays to find one stupid
$INC{INST_LIBS} doesn't tell the lay person a damn thing. Put it in xml with good documentation how to fix it cuz it isn't going to work for everyone.
Or maybe I will do it. Anyone else out there have any use for something like this?
I love how I not only have to use IE, Mozilla, and Konquerer, but multiple versions of them (IE) to be able to do what I want on certain web sites.
Never used to be that way. I used to be able to hit submit buttons (on Yahoo) and have them work in my web browser of choice. I have problems mostly with IE 6 and Mozilla.
Does JonKatz liking this movie mean it is good, and I should go see this movie, or it is bad and I shouldn't waste my money?
Good -
Hot Vulcan
Bad -
Bunch of morons make up the crew of the most technologically advanced spacecraft mankind has ever created.
(Found it tough to get over that one)
While I am whole heartedly against the idea of ID cards that hit a database with _ALL_ my information I wouldn't mind one for things only I wish to have public.
For instance say I am filling out paperwork at the DMV, College, or wherever. I want to be able to give them a number and have them fill out 90% of the paperwork for me from a central source. Then I would just fill in the sensitive information SS #, Name, Employer, etc.
If we could ever trust a system like this is debatable. You would have to pass serious legislation limiting it and doing so would be quite difficult considering the lobbying companies would do to get information added to it. But it is an idea.
If they want to pass some effective legislation they need to loosen up restrictions on the CIA.
Allow them to have assasination teams working covertly that any time they see people consorting with these groups, kill them.
If the heads of states of these countries consort with them, kill them too.
We have a lot of really good snipers all itching to do it, let them do it.
The /. staff stood up to this task so amazingly well.
Thank you for doing such a great job in getting information out to people when they needed it so badly.
Does anyone know of some kind of award or congressional recognition we could submit these guys for? I would sure sign a petition for that.
I have found that many people who started programming post DOS, using Win95 seem to be the ones really afraid of the command line. I mean _really_ afraid of it. Many of the people I work with that fit into that category would answer your question just like your collegue did.
These people think they cannot function without visual this and visual that. It really hurts what they can learn because in turn they are afraid of many handy command line tools and programming languages that don't have the visual training wheels they are used to.
If they make a significant investment into determining what parts of their hardware and software are the best they could really have something here.
You could take the really good things about OpenVMS and the hardware it runs on, mash it with the HPUX stuff, and have a great system.
OpenVMS kicks ass in area's like processor affinity, system process queues, and stability in the software area. There new wildfire hardware is blazingly fast as well.
Take all that good hardware, the good software design and roll it all up into Linux. Nothing would stop them from doing that and then running it across the board.
Just a bit to add to this...
Compaq ate DEC and with that Alpha chips and the OpenVMS OS. With Intel eating Alpha (which kills that) OpenVMS will eventually die. Sad to see this it's a rock solid OS.
With that dead, all that is left to run on those powerhouse servers is Tru64 Unix. They will probably opt to spend their time on improving Linux on that architecture instead which would be a really cool thing but that is very speculative.
HP could use a lot of these to make some killer Linux hardware.