Not trolling or anything, but to me, this just seems to prove (again) how well Apple has been doing things these past couple years. Would companies be trying to mimic their every move if Apple was on the wrong track?
I don't really like the fact that the software is a total rip-off of Apples UI design, and that it may (potentially?) reduce iPod sales (although probably to a minimal degree, if at all), but it does seem to very much re-inforce that consumers are generally extremely pleased with Apple's products, and the carefully thought out design that goes along with them.
Mikro$haft might get a Klew eventually, but probably not, and in the meantime, I'll rejoice in my Mac OS X bliss, and never look back. (Converted Mac user since July 2002)
I sure hope that they (M$) have less time to spend on their features. Because as far as I'm concerned, when I saw Windows XP, and saw some of the "features" that they added (gosh-awful nasty blue theme, big bloated icons, clueless stupid puppy dog to help you search in files, a hundred billion built-in useless wizards, retarded file views, and completely meaningless 'helpful task list things' on the left side of folders, to name a small few), I was awe-struck...and not in the good way either. It was that kind of awe like "what were you smoking, and where did you find the clueless idiots who designed this piece of software"?
In my opinion, it's time for the tortoise to whoop some ass.
I really just can't get over how obviously shameless Microsoft is in their business practices. This is a blatant and obvious attempt to mislead searchers, and potential users of XFree86, and what _REALLY_ pisses me off, is that stuff like this never seems to make it into the news. Why isn't this stuff taken to the masses via TV / News networks to show the rest of the world (eg: not just/. reader) how completely screwed up the business practices at Microsoft really are?
Personally, I think that any hosting company that has some sense, and has been following slashdot, groklaw, or _any_ other SCO related news in the last several months should realize exactly how much SCO has pissed off the open source community (among other governments and corporate giants).
If any hosting company that I had dealings with decided to support SCO in their extortionism and ridiculous claims, I would immediately find another hosting company.
This article is kinda cool. I've tried for ages to get my wife to play video games with me:)
She got really bored after about 45 seconds of Starcraft, I don't think Warcraft 3 will fly. She totally won't do the first person shooter thing. I get in trouble when playing Unreal Tournament.;)
Maybe I'll have to get a console (xbox, gamecube, whatever) to attempt enticing her. Anyone have any ideas for games that I might try to get my wife hooked on gaming?:)
For what it's worth, I've had (and kept) my resume up on Monster for just over the past 2 years. I go and update it every now and again to reflect new skills, or new projects worked on, and over the past two years, I have had numerous people contact me regarding my resume there. Now, the kicker is that EVERY person who has contacted me has been a recruiter/headhunter, I would say that I was offered interviews perhaps 8 times over the past two years. All of these offers (except for one) came at a time while I was happily employed, so I turned them all down. The one time I went for an interview (only with the recruiter), the interview went fine, but the company he was hiring for ultimately chose someone else [I think I wanted too much money;) ].
Anyways, all that said, what I really think is that the best way to get a job is through who you know. I can say this by experience.
1) My first job came to me straight out of BCIT (canadian technical college) because me and one other guy organized the career fair for our class and we got to know all of the HR people.
2) My second job came to me through a guy I met while working at my first job, who eventually went to start his own company.
3) My third job came to me through a programmer I know at the church that I go to (friend of a friend).
4) My fourth job came to me through another friend of a friend who I met once at a birthday dinner.
These are the four main full-time jobs I've had as a Java Developer. I've had numerous consulting engagements as well, and all of these were the direct result of someone who knew me, or someone I knew who knew someone else. Go ahead and laugh at my grammar and convoluted statements, but I'm telling you, go meet a bunch of programmers, project managers, IT people, go to seminars, dinners, meetings, user groups, whatever. Talk to everyone. It really pays off.
I've been doing all my home type java development, as well as all my consulting on a G4 powerbook running at 667MHz w/512MB RAM.
I can honestly say that it works fine, but IntelliJ Idea takes its sweet time (especially sychronizing files) and I do get a little impatient sometimes with how long it takes to compile stuff (using ANT or Maven).
I can't run any thorough tests right now, I'm at work and don't have my 'book with me (sigh)... I believe to compile around 700 Java files with ant takes about 30-45 seconds or so... If you want more conclusive information, I can get some for you... email = daniel at humandoing dot net.
I love google... It is my home page in my browser. I use it 100 times a day. But sometimes the results don't cut it, or seem to be in a different direction than what I am looking for.
Does anyone have recommendations to some good alternative engines? I used to use altavista, askjeeves, hotbot... but I don't remember the last time I got really useful results from them (maybe cuz I haven't used them for a couple years). What about those apps that you can download that search numerous engines?
It is interesting (scary?) to see how much a business can be affected by the algorithms and voodoo of an entity such as google. What I find about myself as well, is that if I am looking for a store or business that provides a certain good or service, I always go to google (or mytelus, gag...) to search for it. I don't think I even go to any sort of specialty shops or businesses anymore unless I have found that they have a web site that doesn't repulse me. Anyone else find themselves falling into these sorts of habits?
Although there seem to be specifications upon implementations upon specifications for eternity (pick something: j2ee, ejb, servlet, etc.), one of the great things is that _most_ of the time, you only need to dig as deep as you want. I've done Java development for over four years now, and only last month did I need to start digging into the EJB and J2EE specs for the first time.
The other great thing is that if you don't like one implementation, pick a different one! With.NET, you don't have that option. It's either M$, or M$.
I also don't know what the documentation is like for.NET development, but if it is anything like the documentation for Visual Basic (Lord save us all), then as far as I'm concerned, it isn't even worth my time. Documentation for java (javadoc) is amazing, not to mention the 5 bazillion open source APIs that you can find to help you with your project, hudreds of which have fantastic documentation.
At least for the development that I've wanted to do, I haven't found anything that I couldn't do in Java that would need me to switch to another lanaguage for something. Java, for me anyways, is the ultimate development platform.
I probably live in the dark ages, seeing as I don't remember reading anything about Cisco buying linksys, but still... Maybe they did it to stop linksys from making even more crappy products? Not trying to troll, but they have given me nothing but grief. The DHCP server in the Router I bought from them died, the Wireless USB adaper I bought for my wife is constantly flaking out, and the WAP11 I bought for wireless access doesn't seem to understand multicasting.
I'm still stuck with the two wireless products, but finally threw together a FreeBSD firwall that I use for my router now (200MHz pentium machine that cost me $40cdn, less than half the price of a linksys router dealy).
Check out ipcop, or smoothwall if you want alternative firewall/router solutions.
How many/. type folx are actually paying for linux distributions these days? I'm not seeking flamebait, but just curious. With distro's like Mandrake, Suse, and Redhat all starting to charge some cash for their production releases, are more people starting to look to alternatives such as Gentoo and Debian? Are others starting to scrap the idea of Linux and move to OSX?
What gets you stoked about Linux? The price tag? Quality? Security? or the fact that it isn't M$.
I'd be willing to pay for a distro like SuSE (or whatever) if I knew that the quality was uber-superb. But even my latest go-round with RedHat 9 has left me fairly unimpressed... Maybe I just love OS X too much?
I am really quite shocked to learn that RBC would drop $50 million into SCO? That is absursd (no more absurd than any other bank/investor that has been doing it I suppose), but it just seems so clear to me that SCO is basically...well... screwed. Any article you read from Groklaw, or other sources leave SCO's case looking like swiss cheese and smelling like blue.
Maybe before investing in any new mutual funds, I'll ask the financial advisor if Slashdot is one of the sites they do some research on before they decide to drop 50 million in a peon piss stupid company (SCO) that has just pissed off a giant (IBM) or six (SuSe, Redhat, pick some others, la de da)...;)
I've been following this "outsourcing to India" thing for a while. I have come to several conclusions. The bigger picture here is NOT the fact that developers in North America are losing development contracts, this is just the continuation of a ball that is already rolling.... [read on for more drivel!]
Conclusion 1) US companies (among others, I'm canadian, it is no exception up here) are going to have to start doing a better job of giving customers and clients value for their budget. Call me a chump, I wanna make a ton of cash just as much as the next guy, but billing someone $100-$200 US/Hour and milking them for all they're worth is not (in my opinion) a good way to do business.
Conclusion 2) Lots of Indian guys are really smart. I hope this doesn't come as a surprise, but so are a lot of people from a lot of other ethnicities. I myself am white trash, but I know a lot of stupid canadian people too, as well as a ton of programmers in Canada who really otta be flipping burgers.
Conclusion 3) Corporations (in general) don't care about their employees, economics, or anything else, but rather, their bottom dollar. They don't care who they have to screw out of money, so long as it ends up in their own account.
Software development just seems to be the latest trend in an already downward spiral. It is the continuation of that which has already started as some slave child has made my Nike runners, and all the people that I try to talk to about why my phone bill is not being directly put onto my Visa bill have been fired in replacement of a computerizes lady who really can't tell me jack-all.
Perhaps unrelated, perhaps not. This is going to get worse, not beter, while capitalists run the world. What's going to be next? Perhaps more importantly, what can we do to change it?
Re:Still Not Real Clear on Design Patterns...
on
J2EE Design Patterns
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That seems to be the general take on the matter.
For example, the Gang of Four book (Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software) has a ton of patterns that it discusses, and the language that it happense to use to illustrate the solutions to these "problems" is in SmallTalk... Not a lot of people were using Java in 1995, and I was still in grade 10 programming Pascal;). It has 3 broad categories of patterns that it defines as Creational, Structure, and Behavioral...
For example, one of the Behavioral patterns defined in the Book is "Iterator". This is defined as "...a way to access the elements of an aggregate object sequentially without exposing its underlying representation". This is an extremely simple example, but it is clear that this is a common problem, with common solutions, implemented in dozens of programming languages (eg: java.util.Iterator).
...Science Fiction shows ever put on television (imho). At first, I didn't think I could get use to the "space cowboy" feel, but this show was absolutely fantastic. It was a much more realistic look at what a potential "space wandering" humanity could become (when comparing to something like Star Trek). The cast and acting was great, the episodes, plots, and storyline, all very intriguing. It still completely shocks me that Fox took it off the air. Several friends of mine and myself still wallow in frustration as to why it ever got taken off the air.
I highly recommend picking the series up on DVD, available at Amazon Dec.9.
Worth Learning?
on
Bitter EJB
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
How many people have had really good experiences with EJB's? In over 3 years of doing Java development I have yet to hear anyone say anything good about developing with them.
The vast majority of people who I have talked to seem to indicate that they have never come across any project under development where using EJB wouldn't be complete overkill, and that much simpler, easier to maintain, and cheaper solutions seem to be the path chosen.
These aren't all small projects either, I would venture to say all of the people I have spoken with (or projects I have been working on) have been in the $50,000 - $2,000,000 range, and none of the senior developers or architects on these projects have ever dreamed of going anywhere near EJB.
My boss gave me his old dual 75MHz sparc station 20 with 128 megs ram in it. That's the oldest thing I have kicking around. He used it to power the oracle database behind lilith fair, back in the day.
Right now, it's running my website for me. I can't believe how heavy that sucker is!
Slashdot Mirror
I have heard lots of good things from co-workers and sysadmins...
http://www.1and1.com
Not trolling or anything, but to me, this just seems to prove (again) how well Apple has been doing things these past couple years. Would companies be trying to mimic their every move if Apple was on the wrong track?
I don't really like the fact that the software is a total rip-off of Apples UI design, and that it may (potentially?) reduce iPod sales (although probably to a minimal degree, if at all), but it does seem to very much re-inforce that consumers are generally extremely pleased with Apple's products, and the carefully thought out design that goes along with them.
Mikro$haft might get a Klew eventually, but probably not, and in the meantime, I'll rejoice in my Mac OS X bliss, and never look back. (Converted Mac user since July 2002)
I sure hope that they (M$) have less time to spend on their features. Because as far as I'm concerned, when I saw Windows XP, and saw some of the "features" that they added (gosh-awful nasty blue theme, big bloated icons, clueless stupid puppy dog to help you search in files, a hundred billion built-in useless wizards, retarded file views, and completely meaningless 'helpful task list things' on the left side of folders, to name a small few), I was awe-struck...and not in the good way either. It was that kind of awe like "what were you smoking, and where did you find the clueless idiots who designed this piece of software"?
In my opinion, it's time for the tortoise to whoop some ass.
Yah, after thinking about it more, this is a good point. Still a bit frustrating, nonetheless... Thanks for keeping it in perspective.
I really just can't get over how obviously shameless Microsoft is in their business practices. This is a blatant and obvious attempt to mislead searchers, and potential users of XFree86, and what _REALLY_ pisses me off, is that stuff like this never seems to make it into the news. Why isn't this stuff taken to the masses via TV / News networks to show the rest of the world (eg: not just /. reader) how completely screwed up the business practices at Microsoft really are?
Personally, I think that any hosting company that has some sense, and has been following slashdot, groklaw, or _any_ other SCO related news in the last several months should realize exactly how much SCO has pissed off the open source community (among other governments and corporate giants).
If any hosting company that I had dealings with decided to support SCO in their extortionism and ridiculous claims, I would immediately find another hosting company.
This article is kinda cool. I've tried for ages to get my wife to play video games with me :)
;)
:)
She got really bored after about 45 seconds of Starcraft, I don't think Warcraft 3 will fly. She totally won't do the first person shooter thing. I get in trouble when playing Unreal Tournament.
Maybe I'll have to get a console (xbox, gamecube, whatever) to attempt enticing her. Anyone have any ideas for games that I might try to get my wife hooked on gaming?
For what it's worth, I've had (and kept) my resume up on Monster for just over the past 2 years. I go and update it every now and again to reflect new skills, or new projects worked on, and over the past two years, I have had numerous people contact me regarding my resume there. Now, the kicker is that EVERY person who has contacted me has been a recruiter/headhunter, I would say that I was offered interviews perhaps 8 times over the past two years. All of these offers (except for one) came at a time while I was happily employed, so I turned them all down. The one time I went for an interview (only with the recruiter), the interview went fine, but the company he was hiring for ultimately chose someone else [I think I wanted too much money ;) ].
Anyways, all that said, what I really think is that the best way to get a job is through who you know. I can say this by experience.
1) My first job came to me straight out of BCIT (canadian technical college) because me and one other guy organized the career fair for our class and we got to know all of the HR people.
2) My second job came to me through a guy I met while working at my first job, who eventually went to start his own company.
3) My third job came to me through a programmer I know at the church that I go to (friend of a friend).
4) My fourth job came to me through another friend of a friend who I met once at a birthday dinner.
These are the four main full-time jobs I've had as a Java Developer. I've had numerous consulting engagements as well, and all of these were the direct result of someone who knew me, or someone I knew who knew someone else. Go ahead and laugh at my grammar and convoluted statements, but I'm telling you, go meet a bunch of programmers, project managers, IT people, go to seminars, dinners, meetings, user groups, whatever. Talk to everyone. It really pays off.
I've been doing all my home type java development, as well as all my consulting on a G4 powerbook running at 667MHz w/512MB RAM.
I can honestly say that it works fine, but IntelliJ Idea takes its sweet time (especially sychronizing files) and I do get a little impatient sometimes with how long it takes to compile stuff (using ANT or Maven).
I can't run any thorough tests right now, I'm at work and don't have my 'book with me (sigh)... I believe to compile around 700 Java files with ant takes about 30-45 seconds or so... If you want more conclusive information, I can get some for you... email = daniel at humandoing dot net.
smartass! ;)
I love google... It is my home page in my browser. I use it 100 times a day. But sometimes the results don't cut it, or seem to be in a different direction than what I am looking for.
Does anyone have recommendations to some good alternative engines? I used to use altavista, askjeeves, hotbot... but I don't remember the last time I got really useful results from them (maybe cuz I haven't used them for a couple years). What about those apps that you can download that search numerous engines?
It is interesting (scary?) to see how much a business can be affected by the algorithms and voodoo of an entity such as google. What I find about myself as well, is that if I am looking for a store or business that provides a certain good or service, I always go to google (or mytelus, gag...) to search for it. I don't think I even go to any sort of specialty shops or businesses anymore unless I have found that they have a web site that doesn't repulse me. Anyone else find themselves falling into these sorts of habits?
Although there seem to be specifications upon implementations upon specifications for eternity (pick something: j2ee, ejb, servlet, etc.), one of the great things is that _most_ of the time, you only need to dig as deep as you want. I've done Java development for over four years now, and only last month did I need to start digging into the EJB and J2EE specs for the first time.
.NET, you don't have that option. It's either M$, or M$.
.NET development, but if it is anything like the documentation for Visual Basic (Lord save us all), then as far as I'm concerned, it isn't even worth my time. Documentation for java (javadoc) is amazing, not to mention the 5 bazillion open source APIs that you can find to help you with your project, hudreds of which have fantastic documentation.
:)
The other great thing is that if you don't like one implementation, pick a different one! With
I also don't know what the documentation is like for
At least for the development that I've wanted to do, I haven't found anything that I couldn't do in Java that would need me to switch to another lanaguage for something. Java, for me anyways, is the ultimate development platform.
I also think the wallchart thing is a cool idea
I probably live in the dark ages, seeing as I don't remember reading anything about Cisco buying linksys, but still... Maybe they did it to stop linksys from making even more crappy products? Not trying to troll, but they have given me nothing but grief. The DHCP server in the Router I bought from them died, the Wireless USB adaper I bought for my wife is constantly flaking out, and the WAP11 I bought for wireless access doesn't seem to understand multicasting.
I'm still stuck with the two wireless products, but finally threw together a FreeBSD firwall that I use for my router now (200MHz pentium machine that cost me $40cdn, less than half the price of a linksys router dealy).
Check out ipcop, or smoothwall if you want alternative firewall/router solutions.
How many /. type folx are actually paying for linux distributions these days? I'm not seeking flamebait, but just curious. With distro's like Mandrake, Suse, and Redhat all starting to charge some cash for their production releases, are more people starting to look to alternatives such as Gentoo and Debian? Are others starting to scrap the idea of Linux and move to OSX?
What gets you stoked about Linux? The price tag? Quality? Security? or the fact that it isn't M$.
I'd be willing to pay for a distro like SuSE (or whatever) if I knew that the quality was uber-superb. But even my latest go-round with RedHat 9 has left me fairly unimpressed... Maybe I just love OS X too much?
:)
iTunes
I am really quite shocked to learn that RBC would drop $50 million into SCO? That is absursd (no more absurd than any other bank/investor that has been doing it I suppose), but it just seems so clear to me that SCO is basically...well... screwed. Any article you read from Groklaw, or other sources leave SCO's case looking like swiss cheese and smelling like blue.
;)
Maybe before investing in any new mutual funds, I'll ask the financial advisor if Slashdot is one of the sites they do some research on before they decide to drop 50 million in a peon piss stupid company (SCO) that has just pissed off a giant (IBM) or six (SuSe, Redhat, pick some others, la de da)...
I've been following this "outsourcing to India" thing for a while. I have come to several conclusions. The bigger picture here is NOT the fact that developers in North America are losing development contracts, this is just the continuation of a ball that is already rolling.... [read on for more drivel!]
Conclusion 1) US companies (among others, I'm canadian, it is no exception up here) are going to have to start doing a better job of giving customers and clients value for their budget. Call me a chump, I wanna make a ton of cash just as much as the next guy, but billing someone $100-$200 US/Hour and milking them for all they're worth is not (in my opinion) a good way to do business.
Conclusion 2) Lots of Indian guys are really smart. I hope this doesn't come as a surprise, but so are a lot of people from a lot of other ethnicities. I myself am white trash, but I know a lot of stupid canadian people too, as well as a ton of programmers in Canada who really otta be flipping burgers.
Conclusion 3) Corporations (in general) don't care about their employees, economics, or anything else, but rather, their bottom dollar. They don't care who they have to screw out of money, so long as it ends up in their own account.
Software development just seems to be the latest trend in an already downward spiral. It is the continuation of that which has already started as some slave child has made my Nike runners, and all the people that I try to talk to about why my phone bill is not being directly put onto my Visa bill have been fired in replacement of a computerizes lady who really can't tell me jack-all.
Perhaps unrelated, perhaps not. This is going to get worse, not beter, while capitalists run the world. What's going to be next? Perhaps more importantly, what can we do to change it?
That seems to be the general take on the matter.
;). It has 3 broad categories of patterns that it defines as Creational, Structure, and Behavioral...
For example, the Gang of Four book (Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software) has a ton of patterns that it discusses, and the language that it happense to use to illustrate the solutions to these "problems" is in SmallTalk... Not a lot of people were using Java in 1995, and I was still in grade 10 programming Pascal
For example, one of the Behavioral patterns defined in the Book is "Iterator". This is defined as "...a way to access the elements of an aggregate object sequentially without exposing its underlying representation". This is an extremely simple example, but it is clear that this is a common problem, with common solutions, implemented in dozens of programming languages (eg: java.util.Iterator).
Hope thats informative!
...Science Fiction shows ever put on television (imho). At first, I didn't think I could get use to the "space cowboy" feel, but this show was absolutely fantastic. It was a much more realistic look at what a potential "space wandering" humanity could become (when comparing to something like Star Trek). The cast and acting was great, the episodes, plots, and storyline, all very intriguing. It still completely shocks me that Fox took it off the air. Several friends of mine and myself still wallow in frustration as to why it ever got taken off the air.
I highly recommend picking the series up on DVD, available at Amazon Dec.9.
How many people have had really good experiences with EJB's? In over 3 years of doing Java development I have yet to hear anyone say anything good about developing with them.
The vast majority of people who I have talked to seem to indicate that they have never come across any project under development where using EJB wouldn't be complete overkill, and that much simpler, easier to maintain, and cheaper solutions seem to be the path chosen.
These aren't all small projects either, I would venture to say all of the people I have spoken with (or projects I have been working on) have been in the $50,000 - $2,000,000 range, and none of the senior developers or architects on these projects have ever dreamed of going anywhere near EJB.
Thoughts?
My boss gave me his old dual 75MHz sparc station 20 with 128 megs ram in it. That's the oldest thing I have kicking around. He used it to power the oracle database behind lilith fair, back in the day.
Right now, it's running my website for me. I can't believe how heavy that sucker is!
At companies I've worked for, they fire the people who _don't_ put stuff into the issue tracking system ;)
-d