...Seen it done in C++ too. Made me cry. The only good part of the whole thing was that it was code I was picking up from a guy who had "sadly left the team", as it were.
Whaddya mean "!"? COBOL still holds half the worlds' business systems together, and downturn or no downturn the lights still have to come on. Demand for COBOL is going to remain static (but reasonably low) for some time to come, and supply will only go down.
You want to work on 30 year old code in COBOL? Exactly.
What do you mean "how do we know it isn't a plant"? Of course it's a plant.
Yeah, once some digging has gone on. But, hey,/. editors are rarely able to check spelling and/or links. Why exactly should we expect them to actually confirm the accuracy of what they're posting?
I've been using OOo on Linux for about a year now. Yeah, it's competent, I guess. But it's not good, and it's office compatibility is not all it's cracked up to be.
Look, for instance at their own screenshots. Here the fonts are completely different, causing line breaks to take place in the wrong place, page breaks to do the same, orphaned half paragraphs and assorted shit that I'll have to go through and fix before I can print the bloody thing. Don't ask what happens when I forward the document to a colleague who uses word.
Sure, it's 99% there, but that's not enough. It's another demonstration of the "saving money by pushing my car around town" effect.
think some guy who failed highschool, has an iq of 40.. you don't want his opinion on something? Don't want to know what he thinks? You should, because he votes.
Corking. Racism, WTC and the US government pissing with the affairs of the world are all emotional issues. I'm glad you've identified it as such and come at it/me both barrels.
There's so much in the post I should reply to, but also have a jerking off appointment to keep, so I'll attempt to keep it short and to the point. A bit.
I don't think you had any friends or family in the WTC, did you?
No. A friend was starting work in NY a couple of days after, and she was there spending a week or so sightseeing. So we had an interesting day assuming that every form of communication going into or out of New York was at full capacity and that's why we'd not heard from her.
And I realized that I wasn't laughing anymore, I was horrified. So fuck you.
Fair enough, it was horrifying. Several thousand ordinary people lost their lives. The only thing you actually have is your life, lose that and that's the whole banana, for all eternity. The knock on effects are equally, if not more horrifying. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people lost a mother, a brother, a best friend. These people are going to be absolutely gutted for years to come. So, yeah, fuck me.
But loads of people have read this as a kind of "I think you deserved it". Ahh, no. I'm just saying that it's increasingly obvious why it's your country that's getting it in the neck. You know it too:
start paying attention to what the CIA is doing in South America...for instance, or...
if you want to point a finger in that case, try pointing it at the US government for backing them against Russia
Yeah, that too. All in all I think numerous people are getting bored of losing their children to weapons that say "made in USA" on the side. Sure, American citizens aren't firing them, but we all know where the money came from. Why, exactly, does the US government insist on pissing around with everyone else's affairs?
BTW, I guess I'm a racist, an asshole, and a spoiled rich kid because I don't agree with you, right?
No, you've got well considered opinions based on the world as you see it. Nothing wrong with that.
I know that I'm going to burn some karma for not being so nice about it
Screw karma. Not like you can eat it.
America discovers it has educated a generation of complete fuckwits And I would hazard a guess that you're their poster boy.
One of my favourite things about slashdot, people assuming I'm American.
It's such a pity that someone of your _almost_ intelligence had to blow a perfectly rational statement with a nonsensical emotional statement.
I find it hard to separate the two, apologies. That being said, this was fundamentally an emotional response. It would help if I ate lunch before posting to slashdot too. After all, ten years from now someone could be mining slashdot posts to decide who the infidels are.
For you to make a statement (even remotely akin) to the fact that we "deserved" to be targeted, or that "innocent civilians" are a logical target is absurd and nothing less than stupid.
Hmmmm, I suppose it could be read like that, but it certainly wasn't the intention. Look at it this way: you live in a cave, you basically control twenty thousand religious fanatics, you want to beat on someone. The USA is the most obvious target by a factor of ten. Once you start to look more closely at the USA's actions as a nation, then it doesn't take too much work to get a proper deep seated resentment going.
Now me, I don't live in a cave and (actually) don't have a resentment against the US. I travelled in the US after graduation and discovered that your 'brand' abroad doesn't match up with reality. That the sheer weight of numbers and the width of the bell curve mean that for every burger munching tub'o'lard (cliche overload, but you know what I mean) there is an equal and opposite hugely pleasant human being. Some are still my friends.
And as such, you've invalidated your arguement and demonstrated that you and your posts deserve no respect in the intellectual realm what-so-ever.
Uh, yeah, OK. Intellectual realm and emotional are entirely different things. I don't get it that straight, sorry.
I haven't looked at the other replies, so I don't know if this has been said already. Still, here goes:
Interesting post, if astonishingly racist.
Essentially, if all of the H1B visas were revoked, you could have jobs for all of the unemployed tech workers.
Oh, so it's the 90's. America discovers it has educated a generation of complete fuckwits. Unfortunately the tech bubble is in full swing and even scraping the bottom of the barrel, the tech economy is unable to find enough people to babysit IIS servers and something has to be done. So, H1B gets introduced and America gets access to the fruits of functioning education systems - like India's. Happyness all around since we are now flooded with curry eating geeks know how to do their jobs and are willing to come to work without being given a BMW first.
Remember the calls to get H1B's extended? The calls to get more of them issued in the first place?
Of course, the bubble bursts and geeks are being laid off in their tens of thousands. Oh no! The highly efficient and cheap curry eaters keep their jobs while the ivory league boys, who know the world owes them at least $100k/year, get hoofed out with their stock options shoved up their arses.
Your suggestion? Deport the curry eaters. Brown faced little bastards are taking jobs away from good ol' American boys.
You smug fuckers. I find it increasingly obvious why it is that Mr Bin Laden and Friends choose to pick on you. You can't just invite these people in, make them your friends, make them your colleagues, and throw them back to somewhere that doesn't have fresh running water as soon as it suits you.
Now, this is of course a grossly broad brush to apply to an entire country, and may not actually apply in your case (it's not clear from your post whether you believe in this shit or not). I also appreciate that there are copious exceptions at either end of the bell curve. I've heard some not pretty clueless H1B stories knocking around too.
It's overclocked. It would be modded if it gained an aluminium case with a window, some blue lights, something to measure fan RPM and "whohoo, l33t" dremelled into the side.
As a software developer, the last thing I want is some entity telling me what my default format should be.
I used to agree with you, wholeheartedly. After all, it's a shitload easier to cook up your own spec and code to that. Or, more likely, just code. Many Linux apps only get away with this attitude because their files are primarily plaintext, and therefore a complete absence of formality is generally OK.
But I've spent the last nine months going into battle, daily, with a video compression standard that's the hugest bastard in the whole world to work with. It's patent encumbered, it's not trendy, it doesn't have a pretty GUI, it won't enamour me to the OSS community and the whole experience has nearly killed me. So why bother?
Metcalfe's law: The utility (usefulness, approximately) of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes on a network. When I've finished building my stuff based on this bastard standard, it'll be compatible with the umpteen million other devices that also use it. That's one whole shitload of value proposition, right there.
Non standard format => Use to communicate with the other eight people who use the product. Standard format => Use to communicate with the other two million people who use the standard.
See? Step 1, use standards. Step 2, ? Step 3, Profit! Dave
Y'know, before posting I thought I'd check to see if anyone else had put what I was going to put. Tadaa, problem solved.
After years of work, hundreds of thousands of lawyer man-hours, what do we have to show for it? "Expose your API's unless they are to do with security, and don't be bad again". Honestly, this should have been a bitch slapping of biblical proportions. Not only should the company have been broken up, but a tier 1 deity should have rained down the wrath of the ancients in order to make it happen.
Another anti-trust suit? I don't think anyone's going to be going down *that* road in a hurry.
I've been writing some integer only video compression code, and these results don't really bear out what I've been seeing with GCC 3.1 and Intel C++ 6. I'm getting a consistent 15-20% more framerate under Intel, using an Athlon. An Athlon, god alone knows what we'd be looking at if I was daft enough to buy a P4. Admittedly there are some vectorizable loops in there (that are going to be replaced by primitives at some point), but even without those the performance improvement from C6 was consistent and noticeable.
More relevant is how the performance of C7 is markedly worse on the P3 platform than C6. Very disappointing, makes me wonder what they've done.
'kay, so it was a bit late and I was trolling. Java performance has traditionally sucked. Java performance is currently one hell of a lot better than when I first tried it. None the less, this has raised Java's performance to the point where it's acceptable for 99% of tasks, but for the last 1% you're going to have to use C/C++.
Actually, they're trying to get a domain extension of sorts, much like the pre-existing.org.nz,.net.nz and.co.nz.
No shit, I think you might find that the words "a second level domain" gave the game away. I mean, it'd be fine to be a newbie, but don't slate the editors for giving a terrible summary.
As it is, it seems to be a cool novelty, but these geeks failed to express any sort of goal for this project.
Well, dah. We get a second level domain of.geek.nz. Hello? That _is_ the goal, what's there to no know?
Y'know, just as I'm starting to understand why developers, corporations, every man under the sun thinks Java is a good thing... they go and do this.
How're you supposed to get people to maintain 1.5 code then? D'you know how many C++ coders don't understand templates? Even to use them it's a scarily small number.
There's very little you can do with a template that you can't do with a well designed virtual base class (whatever they're called in Java). And what you can do boils down to performance, which sucks under Java anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
...Seen it done in C++ too. Made me cry. The only good part of the whole thing was that it was code I was picking up from a guy who had "sadly left the team", as it were.
Dave
COBOL
601 (Monster) !
547 (dice) !
Whaddya mean "!"? COBOL still holds half the worlds' business systems together, and downturn or no downturn the lights still have to come on. Demand for COBOL is going to remain static (but reasonably low) for some time to come, and supply will only go down.
You want to work on 30 year old code in COBOL? Exactly.
Dave
My apologies. This is the most obvious astroturfing in the history of man.
Oh, look. I got to go to Dean Kamen's house, just like all the other segway owners.
Fuckers. America's turning into the corporations' bitch.
Dave
What do you mean "how do we know it isn't a plant"? Of course it's a plant.
/. editors are rarely able to check spelling and/or links. Why exactly should we expect them to actually confirm the accuracy of what they're posting?
Yeah, once some digging has gone on. But, hey,
Rhetorical question, of course.
Dave
I've been using OOo on Linux for about a year now. Yeah, it's competent, I guess. But it's not good, and it's office compatibility is not all it's cracked up to be.
Look, for instance at their own screenshots. Here the fonts are completely different, causing line breaks to take place in the wrong place, page breaks to do the same, orphaned half paragraphs and assorted shit that I'll have to go through and fix before I can print the bloody thing. Don't ask what happens when I forward the document to a colleague who uses word.
Sure, it's 99% there, but that's not enough. It's another demonstration of the "saving money by pushing my car around town" effect.
Dave
think some guy who failed highschool, has an iq of 40.. you don't want his opinion on something? Don't want to know what he thinks? You should, because he votes.
And buys things.
Dave
What you want is wxWindows.
Dave
Great Britain? Headed down the crapper, dude. Have a look at what they did with Singapore.
Dave
Corking. Racism, WTC and the US government pissing with the affairs of the world are all emotional issues. I'm glad you've identified it as such and come at it/me both barrels.
...for instance, or...
There's so much in the post I should reply to, but also have a jerking off appointment to keep, so I'll attempt to keep it short and to the point. A bit.
I don't think you had any friends or family in the WTC, did you?
No. A friend was starting work in NY a couple of days after, and she was there spending a week or so sightseeing. So we had an interesting day assuming that every form of communication going into or out of New York was at full capacity and that's why we'd not heard from her.
And I realized that I wasn't laughing anymore, I was horrified. So fuck you.
Fair enough, it was horrifying. Several thousand ordinary people lost their lives. The only thing you actually have is your life, lose that and that's the whole banana, for all eternity. The knock on effects are equally, if not more horrifying. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people lost a mother, a brother, a best friend. These people are going to be absolutely gutted for years to come. So, yeah, fuck me.
But loads of people have read this as a kind of "I think you deserved it". Ahh, no. I'm just saying that it's increasingly obvious why it's your country that's getting it in the neck. You know it too:
start paying attention to what the CIA is doing in South America
if you want to point a finger in that case, try pointing it at the US government for backing them against Russia
Yeah, that too. All in all I think numerous people are getting bored of losing their children to weapons that say "made in USA" on the side. Sure, American citizens aren't firing them, but we all know where the money came from. Why, exactly, does the US government insist on pissing around with everyone else's affairs?
BTW, I guess I'm a racist, an asshole, and a spoiled rich kid because I don't agree with you, right?
No, you've got well considered opinions based on the world as you see it. Nothing wrong with that.
I know that I'm going to burn some karma for not being so nice about it
Screw karma. Not like you can eat it.
America discovers it has educated a generation of complete fuckwits
And I would hazard a guess that you're their poster boy.
One of my favourite things about slashdot, people assuming I'm American.
Dave
It's such a pity that someone of your _almost_ intelligence had to blow a perfectly rational statement with a nonsensical emotional statement.
I find it hard to separate the two, apologies. That being said, this was fundamentally an emotional response. It would help if I ate lunch before posting to slashdot too. After all, ten years from now someone could be mining slashdot posts to decide who the infidels are.
For you to make a statement (even remotely akin) to the fact that we "deserved" to be targeted, or that "innocent civilians" are a logical target is absurd and nothing less than stupid.
Hmmmm, I suppose it could be read like that, but it certainly wasn't the intention. Look at it this way: you live in a cave, you basically control twenty thousand religious fanatics, you want to beat on someone. The USA is the most obvious target by a factor of ten. Once you start to look more closely at the USA's actions as a nation, then it doesn't take too much work to get a proper deep seated resentment going.
Now me, I don't live in a cave and (actually) don't have a resentment against the US. I travelled in the US after graduation and discovered that your 'brand' abroad doesn't match up with reality. That the sheer weight of numbers and the width of the bell curve mean that for every burger munching tub'o'lard (cliche overload, but you know what I mean) there is an equal and opposite hugely pleasant human being. Some are still my friends.
And as such, you've invalidated your arguement and demonstrated that you and your posts deserve no respect in the intellectual realm what-so-ever.
Uh, yeah, OK. Intellectual realm and emotional are entirely different things. I don't get it that straight, sorry.
Dave
I haven't looked at the other replies, so I don't know if this has been said already. Still, here goes:
Interesting post, if astonishingly racist.
Essentially, if all of the H1B visas were revoked, you could have jobs for all of the unemployed tech workers.
Oh, so it's the 90's. America discovers it has educated a generation of complete fuckwits. Unfortunately the tech bubble is in full swing and even scraping the bottom of the barrel, the tech economy is unable to find enough people to babysit IIS servers and something has to be done. So, H1B gets introduced and America gets access to the fruits of functioning education systems - like India's. Happyness all around since we are now flooded with curry eating geeks know how to do their jobs and are willing to come to work without being given a BMW first.
Remember the calls to get H1B's extended? The calls to get more of them issued in the first place?
Of course, the bubble bursts and geeks are being laid off in their tens of thousands. Oh no! The highly efficient and cheap curry eaters keep their jobs while the ivory league boys, who know the world owes them at least $100k/year, get hoofed out with their stock options shoved up their arses.
Your suggestion? Deport the curry eaters. Brown faced little bastards are taking jobs away from good ol' American boys.
You smug fuckers. I find it increasingly obvious why it is that Mr Bin Laden and Friends choose to pick on you. You can't just invite these people in, make them your friends, make them your colleagues, and throw them back to somewhere that doesn't have fresh running water as soon as it suits you.
Now, this is of course a grossly broad brush to apply to an entire country, and may not actually apply in your case (it's not clear from your post whether you believe in this shit or not). I also appreciate that there are copious exceptions at either end of the bell curve. I've heard some not pretty clueless H1B stories knocking around too.
None the less, the basic thesis is racist.
Bite me.
Dave
Heh! It does seem a little steep, eh?
Dave
doesn't this open up a slippery slope? Where does it stop?
A good question. I suspect it stops when you don't have enough money to buy the lawyers to make it happen.
Dave
Hmmmm, to me modded means modified with no actual increase in performance.
I think that even by slashdot's standards, we're both thinking into a hole.
Dave
It's overclocked. It would be modded if it gained an aluminium case with a window, some blue lights, something to measure fan RPM and "whohoo, l33t" dremelled into the side.
Dave
Sod that, get an iBook.
Dave
As a software developer, the last thing I want is some entity telling me what my default format should be.
I used to agree with you, wholeheartedly. After all, it's a shitload easier to cook up your own spec and code to that. Or, more likely, just code. Many Linux apps only get away with this attitude because their files are primarily plaintext, and therefore a complete absence of formality is generally OK.
But I've spent the last nine months going into battle, daily, with a video compression standard that's the hugest bastard in the whole world to work with. It's patent encumbered, it's not trendy, it doesn't have a pretty GUI, it won't enamour me to the OSS community and the whole experience has nearly killed me. So why bother?
Metcalfe's law: The utility (usefulness, approximately) of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes on a network. When I've finished building my stuff based on this bastard standard, it'll be compatible with the umpteen million other devices that also use it. That's one whole shitload of value proposition, right there.
Non standard format => Use to communicate with the other eight people who use the product.
Standard format => Use to communicate with the other two million people who use the standard.
See? Step 1, use standards. Step 2, ? Step 3, Profit!
Dave
Y'know, before posting I thought I'd check to see if anyone else had put what I was going to put. Tadaa, problem solved.
After years of work, hundreds of thousands of lawyer man-hours, what do we have to show for it? "Expose your API's unless they are to do with security, and don't be bad again". Honestly, this should have been a bitch slapping of biblical proportions. Not only should the company have been broken up, but a tier 1 deity should have rained down the wrath of the ancients in order to make it happen.
Another anti-trust suit? I don't think anyone's going to be going down *that* road in a hurry.
Dave
I've been writing some integer only video compression code, and these results don't really bear out what I've been seeing with GCC 3.1 and Intel C++ 6. I'm getting a consistent 15-20% more framerate under Intel, using an Athlon. An Athlon, god alone knows what we'd be looking at if I was daft enough to buy a P4. Admittedly there are some vectorizable loops in there (that are going to be replaced by primitives at some point), but even without those the performance improvement from C6 was consistent and noticeable.
More relevant is how the performance of C7 is markedly worse on the P3 platform than C6. Very disappointing, makes me wonder what they've done.
Dave
So that's where all our international bandwidth has gone, /. strikes again.
Dave
Flamebait? Is Slashdot truly disappearing up it's own arse or what? Are there no coders left in the whole world?
FFS
'kay, so it was a bit late and I was trolling. Java performance has traditionally sucked. Java performance is currently one hell of a lot better than when I first tried it. None the less, this has raised Java's performance to the point where it's acceptable for 99% of tasks, but for the last 1% you're going to have to use C/C++.
Or JNI over to C/C++ at least.
Dave
Actually, they're trying to get a domain extension of sorts, much like the pre-existing .org.nz, .net.nz and .co.nz.
.geek.nz. Hello? That _is_ the goal, what's there to no know?
No shit, I think you might find that the words "a second level domain" gave the game away. I mean, it'd be fine to be a newbie, but don't slate the editors for giving a terrible summary.
As it is, it seems to be a cool novelty, but these geeks failed to express any sort of goal for this project.
Well, dah. We get a second level domain of
Dave
Y'know, just as I'm starting to understand why developers, corporations, every man under the sun thinks Java is a good thing ... they go and do this.
How're you supposed to get people to maintain 1.5 code then? D'you know how many C++ coders don't understand templates? Even to use them it's a scarily small number.
There's very little you can do with a template that you can't do with a well designed virtual base class (whatever they're called in Java). And what you can do boils down to performance, which sucks under Java anyway.
Don't get it. Should've let it be.
Dave
+1 Informative? WTF?
... sure.
Under no circumstances try and make music with Linux. It's just not suited to the job. Macs, Windows machines
It's not like anyone tries to make Microsoft webservers is it? Oh, hang on.....
Dave