My employer unfortunately uses Oracle's HR management systems also. Worst piece of enterprise software I've ever seen. I have physical pain any time I have to use it. Their big iron databases used to be the shit, but even those seem to be going the way of the dodo as much cheaper, easier to use options are available these days.
It just kills me that those in power with their jingoistic cries of "they hate our freedom" are the ones stripping us of our freedom. It kills me even more that we, as a nation, keep electing them. It's as if we are actively doing this to ourselves.
I don't think he was adequately restrained, that's the problem. He wasn't letting the cops put the cuffs on him. I think the one cop started hitting him so he would become dazed enough to stop resisting so they could get the cuffs on.
what other companies have learned? Outsourcing looks good on paper, but the quality of the product is comensurate with what you are paying them. We've removed our outsource team because the quality sucks and they take about 3 to 4 times the amount of time a local programmer does to accomplish the same task, and these aren't super complicated tasks, they're simple everyday webapp development type tasks. I replaced two india based developers with one in-house developer, and the in-house developer gets more work done in a day than the two of them were able to do in a week, and the in house developer's stuff works, I don't have to keep sending it back like I did with team india.
I can think of several other companies that have had the same experience.
Pro-star oems machines for Alienware, Sager, and apparently this company as well. You can get the exact same machine without the extra markup by buying direct from them at http://www.pro-star.com/. You won't get things like "machine tattoos" or cool colors, or rubber doohickies, glowing alien eyes or anything like that on your box though. They also have a thinner lighter centrino based machine that has a GeForce 7800gtx. I have the Pro-star 3724 which is a 15", WUXGA (1920x1200), GeForce 6600 machine and I love it. Just about every company I've seen that makes a machine of this caliber is a pro-star.
I tend to agree with you. I read the article and thought it was going to tell me how LDAP eases user management. Instead, I got to the end and it tells me "None of this stuff is really easy once you get past single server systems".... and in linux/unix "there are lots of choices"...
So, to me, lots of choices means, it's going to make things more complicated because now I have to go out and figure out what choice I want. The article is titled "how linux beats windows in ID management ease" but it never explains how it does that. Instead it says that in Linux, you have lots of choices. To me, that sounds harder.
OS X may be running on Intel, but it's not like we're going to be able to go get a copy of OS X and install it on the machine that WAS running linux is it? I thought Apple had stated that even though macs will be Intel based, OS X will still only run on Mac hardware.
That being the case, I don't see how this threatens linux. Am I missing something?
hehe congrats on the 15... I used to live in Wichita, and I REALLY miss the Warren. One of the best theaters in the country. Thankfully, we have http://www.alamodrafthouse.com/ down here but nothing as luxurious as the Warren.
Have you SEEN the code generated by those outsourcing companies? Worst I've ever seen. We tried it for one of our projects, we are killing the project and never doing it again.
My first exposure to computers and programming was on my brother's Commodore Vic20. From there I learned how I could write little programs using basic. I never got really good at basic, but I enjoyed writing stupid little quiz programs, which were really nothing more than programmable madlibs, but I was only 9 years old.:)
This kept me entertained for a little while, but it wasn't long before I got distracted by coleco, so my programming was put on hold for a little while.
At around the 5th grade I started learning turtle graphics on the apples at school. They also had us playing a lot of math games on the apple IIe's. One of the most beneficial things they had us learning was typing. I learned to type in the 5th grade because of those little typing programs. I loved hearing the keys click really fast like I was some professional, so as I was learning, anytime I wanted to do something on the computer, I would find all the keys for the word I wanted to type, position my fingers, and type them all at once really fast. This worked. By the time I was a freshmen in high school, and took my first typing class, I was typing 110 wpm, faster than the teacher.
I got aquainted with applications and DOS when we bought our first PC when I was in 8th grade, an IBM Ps/2 model 25. No hard drive, it came with Microsoft Works which had a really nice tutorial program that came with it. I went through the entire thing learning all the applications that Works had, and basically became an expert in it as I started using it for school. I took a computer apps class my first year of high school that was taught in works, so I became the resident expert when the teacher didn't know the answer to something.
I got fascinated with and built up my patience when my cousin and I spent an entire night trying to crack one of my Sierra games that I had lost the manual on, and thus the license key. We had no idea what we were doing, failed miserably, but we had a great time exploring all the files in the program and trying to figure out what they did. This I think is what sparked my interest in spending a lot of time to solve a problem.
I came back to programming when I was 15 and taught myself Pascal. I wanted to learn how to program on the PC, and I wanted to learn something other than basic. My cousin had been taking a course in Pascal in college, so I thought that was the future.
Around this same time (realizing I didn't have a social life) my computer interest was noted by some marketing list (I had several computer mag subscriptiosn) and I got to pilot the Prodigy online service. This eventually led me to find BBSes, and not having a social life, BBSes were the thing for me. I got really into BBSing, started running my own, and eventually started learning to write mods for my own BBS. Eventually I finally bought my own computer, a 486sx25.
From there, I took AP computer science, which was taught in pascal, so I naturally aced it. Then went to computer science in college, which is where I was introduced to Linux and C. Got my first IT job while still in high school as a PC support specialist (shortly after I bought my first PC for myself, I started learning to build them, hence the specialist job), then once I got to college became an assistant unix admin at a local ISP.
I eventually got back to programming after I got tired of being a firefighter as a sysadmin, and got my first programming job doing Delphi, which is basically object oriented Pascal. A year later, offered a job to learn Java. Several years later, still doing java.:)
While not for a game company, I've seen this happen on other projects I'ved worked on. IMHO, it's not worth it.
I am not a spectacular games programmer. Just a lowly java programmer. I've worked for companies that run burnout plans. I've also worked for companies that don't. At least in my field (j2ee app development) what I've seen is that companies are starting to learn the value of keeping their devlopers happy. It keeps them around, and they write better code, and they are more efficient.
I don't think big game companies will ever learn this, and here is why. Their talent is usually young top notch programming talent. These guys are the rock stars of the IT industry. They have the desire, energy, and willingness to put up with this. The execs in game companies know that every young programmers dream is to write successful video games, and so their attitudes towards their developers are very master/slave oriented, because they know they are giving their people their dream shot.
My advice is, if you want a life outside of work, get out of game development, and get into enterprise software development under a company that knows what makes employees do well. The work is not as exciting as games, but life is so much better.
To give an example of what I'm talking about, in 2004, I'm making over 100k. The team rarely works more then 40 hours a week, except for the occasional extra 5 or so hours around release time, or an emergency bug fix and we might be called to VPN from home to fix a critical bug. Other than that, the team has never missed a deadline.
Our development methodology consists of components from both RUP and XP, especially the "sustainable pace" concept from XP. It works.
Actually, the first place I recall seeing this was in Microsoft Visual Studio back around 1996-1997(?). So is prior art anything before the patent? or anything before the patenter first started using it?
I took the exam in 1993. The exam was pascal based. I think it was a 1-2 hour written only exam. The exam covered a lot of the basic data structures and algorithims (linked lists, bubble sorts, etc). I personally didn't think it was anything too spectacular.
No you weren't dreaming. That silo was in my home state of Kansas and they bought it for some ungodly cheap sum (like 40-80k or something). The government was selling them off.
They also flooded some of them and you can book dive trips to go scuba diving in them.
I think both models can co-exist in various ways. Almost every project I've worked on has consisted of a mix of open source and proprietary software packages.
I've noticed a lot of times that companies don't care if a package is open source or proprietary, they simply just want to do what it takes to get the application done in as little time possible. If that means buying XYZ package to solve some immediate need they are more than willing to do it. Case in point, in a previous job I had a need for generating PDF reports, charts, and barcodes. I was having a hard time finding an open source tool to meet my needs, but I found a proprietary one that worked really well, company had no problem paying for it. Incidentally, there are now several open source packages that will do this.:)
The other thing is that being an applications developer does not always mean writing shrinkwrapped software that you want to put on the shelf at CompUSA or Best Buy. Personally, I think it would be extremely difficult to make that model work anymore, unless you are writing games (which in and of itself, is extremeley difficult to be successful with). There is a HUGE number of application development jobs, and I would say, most app developer jobs are this way, where you are writing apps to serve the needs of the business that employs you, and that business is not an IT related business, as is my current position.
Actually I used to do that. When I first got started in IT my first "real" job was Linux Systems Administrator. My current title, for what it's worth, is "Sr. Software Engineer." I decided I enjoyed writing code more than configuring and maintaining servers.
Most of the work I do now is coding in Java. Most of the open source software I use are development tools and libraries (Eclipse, Struts, Ant, Tomcat, Xerces, etc).
Oh yeah, one more point that the original author brought up. That girls will go for the guys who sell their software for money as opposed to those who do it for fun. So in other words, if you want to find a gold-digging tramp who is only interested in you for your money, then make sure you write proprietary software.
First some background: I'm 28 years old, and dropped out of college my senior year because jobs were flying at me right and left.
Any software I write on my own is for my own personal enjoyment and education, is GPL'd, and I would be tickled pink if other people found it useful enough to them to use it.
As for the car, the house, the family? Because of my love for writing software, and willingness to keep honing my craft even during non-working hours, I am able to enjoy a 6 figure salary complete with loving wife, 2000 sq. foot home, and I own two brand new Lexus. Even in a down economy I am able to do this. Oh yeah, I also work for a non-profit org.
What keeps me employed and employable? My knowledge and experience with open source software. There is only one piece of software I use at work that is not open source, and that is Oracle, which is not even in my core skillset. My knowledge of Linux, a large set of apache products, and several other open source packages, are more valuable to me careerwise than knowledge of Oracle.
What do I consider the holy grail of my career? I asked James Duncan Davidson (Ant, Tomcat fame) at a local JUG meeting one time how authoring open source software has helped his career? He said that being able to put on his resume that he wrote Ant has given him the ability to just walk into any shop he wants and get a job. That is currently what I would like to accomplish. It may not ever happen, but that doesn't matter either. What does matter, is that I am enjoying life as it is, tinkering with free software even though it may never make me rich.
I don't expect to become a millionaire from writing software. That kind of wealth will come from investing and smart business decisions. But, I hate business, and I love writing software, so I really don't care if I never become a millionaire, as long as I can still write software, I will be happy with my six figure income.
As perhaps a stronger counterpoint, Bill Gates didn't become the richest man in the world from software. He became the richest man in the world by being a brilliant business man.
Slashdot Mirror
Without the struggle to get out, the butterfly can't develop strong wings to fly.
My employer unfortunately uses Oracle's HR management systems also. Worst piece of enterprise software I've ever seen. I have physical pain any time I have to use it. Their big iron databases used to be the shit, but even those seem to be going the way of the dodo as much cheaper, easier to use options are available these days.
It just kills me that those in power with their jingoistic cries of "they hate our freedom" are the ones stripping us of our freedom. It kills me even more that we, as a nation, keep electing them. It's as if we are actively doing this to ourselves.
You can remove your phone number from settings / phone / my number. Then when the code tries to read your phone'ss number it gets nil.
... and Michael Shermer.
Great read on how to quickly do complex arithmetic in your head.
http://www.apple.com/getamac/
I don't think he was adequately restrained, that's the problem. He wasn't letting the cops put the cuffs on him. I think the one cop started hitting him so he would become dazed enough to stop resisting so they could get the cuffs on.
what other companies have learned? Outsourcing looks good on paper, but the quality of the product is comensurate with what you are paying them. We've removed our outsource team because the quality sucks and they take about 3 to 4 times the amount of time a local programmer does to accomplish the same task, and these aren't super complicated tasks, they're simple everyday webapp development type tasks. I replaced two india based developers with one in-house developer, and the in-house developer gets more work done in a day than the two of them were able to do in a week, and the in house developer's stuff works, I don't have to keep sending it back like I did with team india.
I can think of several other companies that have had the same experience.
Pro-star oems machines for Alienware, Sager, and apparently this company as well. You can get the exact same machine without the extra markup by buying direct from them at http://www.pro-star.com/. You won't get things like "machine tattoos" or cool colors, or rubber doohickies, glowing alien eyes or anything like that on your box though. They also have a thinner lighter centrino based machine that has a GeForce 7800gtx. I have the Pro-star 3724 which is a 15", WUXGA (1920x1200), GeForce 6600 machine and I love it. Just about every company I've seen that makes a machine of this caliber is a pro-star.
I start my new job here on Monday. You can help keep me employed by buying one of these:
http://www.tippingpoint.com/
I tend to agree with you. I read the article and thought it was going to tell me how LDAP eases user management. Instead, I got to the end and it tells me "None of this stuff is really easy once you get past single server systems" .... and in linux/unix "there are lots of choices" ...
So, to me, lots of choices means, it's going to make things more complicated because now I have to go out and figure out what choice I want. The article is titled "how linux beats windows in ID management ease" but it never explains how it does that. Instead it says that in Linux, you have lots of choices. To me, that sounds harder.
OS X may be running on Intel, but it's not like we're going to be able to go get a copy of OS X and install it on the machine that WAS running linux is it? I thought Apple had stated that even though macs will be Intel based, OS X will still only run on Mac hardware.
That being the case, I don't see how this threatens linux. Am I missing something?
hehe congrats on the 15... I used to live in Wichita, and I REALLY miss the Warren. One of the best theaters in the country. Thankfully, we have http://www.alamodrafthouse.com/ down here but nothing as luxurious as the Warren.
Have you SEEN the code generated by those outsourcing companies? Worst I've ever seen. We tried it for one of our projects, we are killing the project and never doing it again.
My first exposure to computers and programming was on my brother's Commodore Vic20. From there I learned how I could write little programs using basic. I never got really good at basic, but I enjoyed writing stupid little quiz programs, which were really nothing more than programmable madlibs, but I was only 9 years old. :)
:)
This kept me entertained for a little while, but it wasn't long before I got distracted by coleco, so my programming was put on hold for a little while.
At around the 5th grade I started learning turtle graphics on the apples at school. They also had us playing a lot of math games on the apple IIe's. One of the most beneficial things they had us learning was typing. I learned to type in the 5th grade because of those little typing programs. I loved hearing the keys click really fast like I was some professional, so as I was learning, anytime I wanted to do something on the computer, I would find all the keys for the word I wanted to type, position my fingers, and type them all at once really fast. This worked. By the time I was a freshmen in high school, and took my first typing class, I was typing 110 wpm, faster than the teacher.
I got aquainted with applications and DOS when we bought our first PC when I was in 8th grade, an IBM Ps/2 model 25. No hard drive, it came with Microsoft Works which had a really nice tutorial program that came with it. I went through the entire thing learning all the applications that Works had, and basically became an expert in it as I started using it for school. I took a computer apps class my first year of high school that was taught in works, so I became the resident expert when the teacher didn't know the answer to something.
I got fascinated with and built up my patience when my cousin and I spent an entire night trying to crack one of my Sierra games that I had lost the manual on, and thus the license key. We had no idea what we were doing, failed miserably, but we had a great time exploring all the files in the program and trying to figure out what they did. This I think is what sparked my interest in spending a lot of time to solve a problem.
I came back to programming when I was 15 and taught myself Pascal. I wanted to learn how to program on the PC, and I wanted to learn something other than basic. My cousin had been taking a course in Pascal in college, so I thought that was the future.
Around this same time (realizing I didn't have a social life) my computer interest was noted by some marketing list (I had several computer mag subscriptiosn) and I got to pilot the Prodigy online service. This eventually led me to find BBSes, and not having a social life, BBSes were the thing for me. I got really into BBSing, started running my own, and eventually started learning to write mods for my own BBS. Eventually I finally bought my own computer, a 486sx25.
From there, I took AP computer science, which was taught in pascal, so I naturally aced it. Then went to computer science in college, which is where I was introduced to Linux and C. Got my first IT job while still in high school as a PC support specialist (shortly after I bought my first PC for myself, I started learning to build them, hence the specialist job), then once I got to college became an assistant unix admin at a local ISP.
I eventually got back to programming after I got tired of being a firefighter as a sysadmin, and got my first programming job doing Delphi, which is basically object oriented Pascal. A year later, offered a job to learn Java. Several years later, still doing java.
The end.
While not for a game company, I've seen this happen on other projects I'ved worked on. IMHO, it's not worth it.
I am not a spectacular games programmer. Just a lowly java programmer. I've worked for companies that run burnout plans. I've also worked for companies that don't. At least in my field (j2ee app development) what I've seen is that companies are starting to learn the value of keeping their devlopers happy. It keeps them around, and they write better code, and they are more efficient.
I don't think big game companies will ever learn this, and here is why. Their talent is usually young top notch programming talent. These guys are the rock stars of the IT industry. They have the desire, energy, and willingness to put up with this. The execs in game companies know that every young programmers dream is to write successful video games, and so their attitudes towards their developers are very master/slave oriented, because they know they are giving their people their dream shot.
My advice is, if you want a life outside of work, get out of game development, and get into enterprise software development under a company that knows what makes employees do well. The work is not as exciting as games, but life is so much better.
To give an example of what I'm talking about, in 2004, I'm making over 100k. The team rarely works more then 40 hours a week, except for the occasional extra 5 or so hours around release time, or an emergency bug fix and we might be called to VPN from home to fix a critical bug. Other than that, the team has never missed a deadline.
Our development methodology consists of components from both RUP and XP, especially the "sustainable pace" concept from XP. It works.
You don't have to suffer.
Actually, the first place I recall seeing this was in Microsoft Visual Studio back around 1996-1997(?). So is prior art anything before the patent? or anything before the patenter first started using it?
I took the exam in 1993. The exam was pascal based. I think it was a 1-2 hour written only exam. The exam covered a lot of the basic data structures and algorithims (linked lists, bubble sorts, etc). I personally didn't think it was anything too spectacular.
No you weren't dreaming. That silo was in my home state of Kansas and they bought it for some ungodly cheap sum (like 40-80k or something). The government was selling them off.
They also flooded some of them and you can book dive trips to go scuba diving in them.
Do you think tiny charity organizations that can barely pay their people are the only non-profits?
I think both models can co-exist in various ways. Almost every project I've worked on has consisted of a mix of open source and proprietary software packages.
:)
I've noticed a lot of times that companies don't care if a package is open source or proprietary, they simply just want to do what it takes to get the application done in as little time possible. If that means buying XYZ package to solve some immediate need they are more than willing to do it. Case in point, in a previous job I had a need for generating PDF reports, charts, and barcodes. I was having a hard time finding an open source tool to meet my needs, but I found a proprietary one that worked really well, company had no problem paying for it. Incidentally, there are now several open source packages that will do this.
The other thing is that being an applications developer does not always mean writing shrinkwrapped software that you want to put on the shelf at CompUSA or Best Buy. Personally, I think it would be extremely difficult to make that model work anymore, unless you are writing games (which in and of itself, is extremeley difficult to be successful with). There is a HUGE number of application development jobs, and I would say, most app developer jobs are this way, where you are writing apps to serve the needs of the business that employs you, and that business is not an IT related business, as is my current position.
Actually I used to do that. When I first got started in IT my first "real" job was Linux Systems Administrator. My current title, for what it's worth, is "Sr. Software Engineer." I decided I enjoyed writing code more than configuring and maintaining servers.
Most of the work I do now is coding in Java. Most of the open source software I use are development tools and libraries (Eclipse, Struts, Ant, Tomcat, Xerces, etc).
Agreed, I never claimed to be a good business man. :) ... and I have a weakness for cars.
Oh yeah, one more point that the original author brought up. That girls will go for the guys who sell their software for money as opposed to those who do it for fun. So in other words, if you want to find a gold-digging tramp who is only interested in you for your money, then make sure you write proprietary software.
If I may use myself as a counterpoint:
First some background: I'm 28 years old, and dropped out of college my senior year because jobs were flying at me right and left.
Any software I write on my own is for my own personal enjoyment and education, is GPL'd, and I would be tickled pink if other people found it useful enough to them to use it.
As for the car, the house, the family? Because of my love for writing software, and willingness to keep honing my craft even during non-working hours, I am able to enjoy a 6 figure salary complete with loving wife, 2000 sq. foot home, and I own two brand new Lexus. Even in a down economy I am able to do this. Oh yeah, I also work for a non-profit org.
What keeps me employed and employable? My knowledge and experience with open source software. There is only one piece of software I use at work that is not open source, and that is Oracle, which is not even in my core skillset. My knowledge of Linux, a large set of apache products, and several other open source packages, are more valuable to me careerwise than knowledge of Oracle.
What do I consider the holy grail of my career? I asked James Duncan Davidson (Ant, Tomcat fame) at a local JUG meeting one time how authoring open source software has helped his career? He said that being able to put on his resume that he wrote Ant has given him the ability to just walk into any shop he wants and get a job. That is currently what I would like to accomplish. It may not ever happen, but that doesn't matter either. What does matter, is that I am enjoying life as it is, tinkering with free software even though it may never make me rich.
I don't expect to become a millionaire from writing software. That kind of wealth will come from investing and smart business decisions. But, I hate business, and I love writing software, so I really don't care if I never become a millionaire, as long as I can still write software, I will be happy with my six figure income.
As perhaps a stronger counterpoint, Bill Gates didn't become the richest man in the world from software. He became the richest man in the world by being a brilliant business man.