No, the original poster was right. E.g. the country code of Germany is 49, so if you'd like to call to Germany you'd call +0049 and not +049 like you suggested...
I agree, Lotus Notes is the worst "e-mail client" that I've seen. Last time I've checked it wasn't even able to do normal e-mail quotation (you know, with > indention). Thank God I don't have to use it any more.
Lotus Notes is good as a groupware, but never ever let your employees use it as an e-mail client !
What I don't unterstand is why germans always say "you know Hitler was from Austria". Yeah. So what? If you think about it it doesn't matter and doesn't make Germany better or Austria worse.
Yes, you're right. The reason why I mentioned it was because a great many right-wings and Neo-Nazis don't know history. When you talk to them they tell you "Hitler was great" but when you ask "Do you know where he's from and what he did before he went into politics ?" they just don't know. And this applies to almost every part of the Nazi era history, they only see what they want to see. It's all stuff we learn at school, you'd think that those people payed attention at least in those lessons...
As an outsider (my grandparents emigrated from Germany in 1935), I always wonder why it is that that Germans nowadays not only hate the above-mentioned, but also practically everything German? By which I mean ethnically, culturally, liguistically and historically, amongst others. I don't have a problem with getting rid of the bad, but why should the good go with it?
This is not the case, we still love our culture but about three decades of our history are more or less taboo. But there's still more than two thousand years of history left;-) You might get this impression because open national pride like seen in other countries is often considered to be a bad thing. Many people fear to get associated with Nazis when they'd say I'm proud to be German. Having the German flag in your front yard like many americans do with their flag is really something that is almost imaginable here.
But this doesn't mean we're not proud of our country and our culture. We are, since we do make the best cars in the world, for example;-)=) We just don't say that as often and explicit like other countries do.
In Germany one is hard-pressed to find a radio station that plays anything else than the American mass-produced pop crap. Germans nowadays use a lot of English words and grammatical constructs, as if the German language is incapable of expressing these things. Germans in general seem to be racist in a very "politically correct" sort of way. And while on the subject of racism, it seems almost like a fashion statement to have a life/love partner with a dark skin (other merits like personality seem to be distant secondary considerations).
This is not the case either, IMHO. There was indeed a call to play more German songs in radio a few months ago in Germany, but I saw a very enlightening report about this: in this report they listed all German artists that were played by a major radio station on one day. And then I realized that there really are enough German (and German-singing) artists. (BTW, AFAIK there is a law in France to play a certain amount of french songs on radio... could some French confirm this ?)
But of course you hear more english-language songs in radio than german-language. That's because a lot of people really do buy into the american media coporation produced shit, but also because a great many German artists often perform in English. This is quite natural, they like to target a wider audience than just Germany to make more money;-)
And about the grammatical stuff: you can express way more things in German (especially in rhymes) than in English, the German grammar is very complex and this can be used to play around a lot. The German language is not called die Sprache der Dichter und Denker (the language of poets and thinkers) for nothing.
I recommend reading some stuff from Mark Twain about the German language (e.g. The awful German language). This extremely bright man studied German for more than thirty years and he even managed to enlight me on a few grammatical oddities in the German language:-) His stuff is not only very interesting but also with written with a good deal of humor, nice read:-)
These are just some (admittedly subjective) observations made while travelling Europe. Any Germans willing to discuss this with me in private?
I know quite a few Germans myself, and they don't agree with your German friends at all.
So don't think your German friends represent a clear majority opinion, in Germany.
I know quite a few Germans as well... which is because I'm German;-) I can tell you the vast majority of Germans nowadays really do hate Nazis and racism.
Yes, there are still some idiots that didn't learn a thing, but luckily those are mostly dumb people that don't even know that Hitler was an Austrian and are generally very uninformed about history. And yes, in East Germany some right-winged parties have managed to get a noticable amount of votes. But that doesn't make those people the majority.
It seems you didn't notice the anti-Nazi demonstrations that every demonstration of right-winged parties (NPD, DSU) face. And you didn't notice what happened a few weeks ago when some right-winged politicians from the NPD boycotted a minute's silence for the holocaust victims and later on said stupid things the we Germans were the real victims in the war instead of the Jews. These caused an outrage in Germany and re-started a discussion to forbid the NPD for being anticonstitutional.
There are laws in Germany which make it risky to express your true feelings in public, and so many people would not admit that the Germans still feel quite some pride when they think about the days of the Third Reich.
As for those laws : you can't legislate the true sentiments of a people.
I have no idea where you've got that from, but it's just plain wrong. There are laws that forbid to lie about Nazi crimes, e.g. it's forbidden to say "The Nazis never killed any Jews", but it's not forbidden to say the truth or what you feel.
And yes, we are proud of some things we managed to do during WWII, namely building V2 rockets and developing jet planes as well as parachutes and other technological advances. But we know all too well that many thousands of innocent people lost their lifes to develop these things, and nobody is proud about that.
In conclusion, I really think you either know very twisted Germans and mistake them for being the majority or should listen more carefully what they say.
Unfortunately, the majority of the Indian people are not the least bit concerned, resulting in very low coverage for this important development.
Well, that's not different here in Europe (at least in Germany, where I'm from). There has been no media coverage about software patents discussions/issues at all. Not even about the foul things the Netherlands are currently doing in the European Council to force software patents on the EU although the European Parliament and the national parliaments voted against them. Only "specialized" media like news sites that only report about IT news covered this.
I guess this is because most journalists don't have a clue how important this issue is and what this would mean to our economy.
I've got a PC with Radeon at work, and in the last two years I've tried three times to get the ATi drivers to work with hardware 3D... I've never managed to get it run.
In contrast, I've never had any problems with nVidia's drivers... not on my TNT2, not on my GeForce 1 and not on the GeForce WhatEver that a friend of mine has. nVidia does a very good job with their drivers, IMHO. I'm not that happy thay they're closed source at least but they Just Work (tm).
This is why I won't ever buy a ATi card. They treat Linux users as third class citizens, unfortunately...
Well, the second biggest TLD in numbers of registered domains is the.de domain for some time now (I don't know for how long... one year, two years ?). And both.uk and.nl aren't small fish either.
I have watched the changes the Turkish government is making to enter the EU. You can't imagine how much pride they're swallowing to have their history and honor stepped on by Belgian chocolatiers, French pastry-chefs, German schnitzel-makers, English fish-and-chips vendors... There is NO WAY that any of you would tolerate such treatment in your own countries. Further -- the rank-and-file Turk doesn't want EU membership.
Granted, I've never been to Turkey. I know it's a beautiful country and has an interesting history. But I think you're not understanding an important point here: Turkey wants to be in the EU. Most european countries do not want that, since the human rights are so much behind european standards that it'll take at least another decade to resolve these issues. I don't know whether the average Turk wants to be in the EU, but their government really wants to !
This is not a bad thing per se, because of this wish a lot of progress has been made in turkish laws, e.g. they dropped the death penalty months ago (AFAIK) but the press is still not free and you're still not free to say what you want. Interestingly this is why turkish religious extremists go into european countries like Germany (where I'm from): here they are allowed to say and do a lot more than in Turkey, which is a very troublesome thing which is discussed hotly here in Germany.*
And then there are the Kurds: say nice things about them in Turkey and it seems like you're in deep trouble like that editor about whom the story is. The problem is they don't have their own country. They are spread over parts of Turkey, Iran and Iraq (IIRC) but like to have their own country. Granted, the terroristic operations done by the PKK are a very bad thing, but punishing people who just say "Most of them are nice people" is even worse, IMHO.
But most Turks are nice people as well (if they're past puberty;-), so I wish them good luck in having these issues resolved, but as it stands right now there is still a lot to critique in Turkey.
* Small example: Ataturk, the father of the modern Turkey, introduced the separation of religion and state. This is why turkish teachers are not allowed to wear a kerchief (correct word ?) at school. But the few turkish teachers here in Germany regularaly fight in curt to be allowed just that: wear a kerchierf when teaching. Some courts allow that, others not. And then there are criminal religous extremist like "the kalif of cologne" who was finally deported to Turkey a few weeks ago after years of legal fights...
This is something that I noticed very early in my life (while I was still at school) and avoided ever since. A friend of my father, who is a journalist at a major german computer magazine for about fifteen years or so, once told me that (almost) every job has one or more typical diseases.
He said that the typical programmer diseases are too much stress, pains from sitting around all day in a wrong stance (? sorry, I'm not a native english speaker) and gaining fat from too few sports;-)
I've been able to avoid the first and the last but suffer from sitting in a wrong position;-) Granted, it's sometimes very hard to avoid the stress, especially when the project is in the ending phase and the release date is nearing. But apart from that there is few need for stress. I've seen on my coworkers that very often people impose stress on themselves or let their bosses impose stress on them. And most of the time this stress is unnecessary and can be avoided.
(This is why I never wanted to be a games programmer although I'd really like to write games: that industry was too much stress ten years ago and it seems that it got worse)
I think that if the work is imposing too much stress on you, you really should think about looking for another employer. I know very well that this sounds so much easier than it is, and that some people don't have the opportunity to change employer easily. But there are times when one has to ask oneself: what's more important ? My health or my great payment ? Wouldn't a job that's not as well payed but is more fun/healthier be a better deal ?
"If you use project management software (and it is a good idea to use it if you have it) I use the following metrics for % completed:"
0 - Not started (obvious)
10 - At least one person available to work on the project
20 - Have some sort of requirements
50 - All software has been written
75 - Software has been tested and shipped
90 - Customer is using the product, isn't moaning as much anymore
100 - Customers have stopped phoning you with annoying questions
Yes, I agree with this list. In software development the customer will always find bugs that didn't show at your testings, and he will almost always have some additional feature/change requests. So when you've shipped to the customer the first time you've still got a long way to go. That way won't produce as much code as before but it will take longer to produce it. By this I mean it's quite fast to write an application but after a certain size it can take up to a few days just to locate and fix a single bug (if the system is very complicated).
By the way, as a hint to (future) managers: if you notice a developer is hunting a bug for hours and doesn't find it, talk to him and let him explain how this bug manifests and discuss with him what could cause this. Or if you don't know enough about programming, get that developer to explain and discuss with another developer. Quite often the first developer then gets to see the missing piece (or the other does, which is as good):-)
I had just this situation yesterday: I was hunting a bug for about three hours. Then my boss came along and saw my frustration. I explained this bug and discussed for about three or four minutes with him and then suddenly I got enlightenment and fixed that bug within a minute:-)
Seriously, the only thing I could imagine where you'd need root access is restarting the webserver if it's serving from port 80 directly. As others have pointed out, you could have the sysop do portforwarding from port 80 to 8080 and then be able to run Apache on port 8080 as normal user. Or you could have him give you sudo access to the Apache rc script.
Other than that I fail to see where any root access would be needed. You'll write and edit HTML and script files and you'll do some database stuff. There's absolutely no need to be root here.
I think a sysop who doesn't give you root right away is a good sysop. UNIX gives you all the tools and concepts to let you do your work without ever being root. But you have to get used to it. In the beginning you'll have to bug the sysop a lot but within a short timespan you'll finally get to a point where you won't need him anymore as you'll then be able to do your work... without being root:-)
Should be quite easy with SubVersion to do the versioning:
First, create a new repository (or just create a new directory in an exisiting repository, that'd be easier).
Then unpack the first tar.gz into that directory, "svn add" everything and commit.
Next step is to unpack the next tar.gz into the same directory, do an "svn status" and "svn add" all files that have a question mark as status. Commit. Repeat.
This can even be scripted quite easily.
This procedure does have one problem, though: you won't catch when a file got deleted. You could do a script that compares the (sorted ?) file listings of the tar.gz that lists all files that were present in 1.tar.gz but are missing in 2.tar.gz and thus have to be deleted.
SubVersion is propably the better choice here anyways simply because if you're talking about firmware then I assume there are some binary files. And SVN handles binary files way more efficient than CVS. Plus SVN versions the repository as a whole, not just single files. So with the method described above each revision in the SubVersion repository would map to the exact content of tar.gz that you've used to create that revision.
I'm 15, self-taught, and I know what a singly linked list is. Since I assume I suck at C++/Programming in general, would it be fair to assume that most programmers wouldn't know everything that I know and more?
Well, I earn a living coding in the "semi"-embedded area and I tell you: most people that are allowed to code should never be let near a keyboard. Small example (this was found in the code of a GUI for an industrial robot !):
This short piece of code has such a high density of stupidity that I had to write it down... mind you, the guy who wrote this shit has a university degree in CS ! I got more examples of his code... and the sad thing is he's just the most obvious idiot. The other half a dozen people I have to work with in various other projects aren't that much better as well.
You really learn to appreciate coders and hackers when having to work with such people. My experience is this: people who studied CS and got some degree are good at designing applications, but suck at implementing them. Self-taught programmers/coders/hackers mostly suck at designing but shine at implementing.
Of course there are exceptions: my boss, whom I consider to be one of the brightest heads I've ever met, has studied CS in Germany and America and is excellent at both designing and implementing (though he sucks at documenting and has an ugly coding style;-)
Ok... Z80 was Zilog's extension of Intel's 8080. (which was in turn an extension of the 8008, an 8-bit version of the 4004, the first single-chip microprocessor) x86 was based on the 8080/8085, which Intel already had all the internal designs for, as opposed to the z80. You don't need to make it sound like Intel was just stealing other people's ideas.
I didn't want it sound like that, I just didn't knew any better;-) Thnx for explaining...
Reading everyone's comments about PowerPC sucking makes me realize that most of these people have never had the pleasure of taking a masters level Organization and Architecture class.. because if people truely understood the power of a RISC processor and its simplicity and superior design.. they'd dump CISC in a minute. The fact remains.. intel could never shake the 8086 CISC precedent.. and it will forever remain backwards compatibe to 1980's technology... seeing a horribly inefficient CISC pipeline makes me want to cry. Branch Hazard! Bubble! Data Hazard! Flush or glorious 16 stage Pipeline! errrrrrr... Hazard! Hazard! Hazard!!
I totally agree ! The whole x86 processor architecture looks like Frankensteins Monster: butt ugly, as more and more features/instructions were added but still lacking nice and powerful features other architectures sponsor for years now...
The best thing Intel and AMD could do is throw the whole x86 architecture into the trashbin, sit down and develop a whole new processor.
If Microsoft made this move, how would Intel react?
They would panic, of course ! The whole x86 architecture is ugly as hell, and the IBM PC architecture even more so, so low level programmers would propably open a bottle or two and party if we could ditch our x86's for PPC's:-)
The 8086/8088 (to which even the Pentium 4 tries to be backwards compatible with to some degree) was a hack at Intel to get a 16 bit processor to market fast and was meant to have a very short lifespan. Intel was developing a way better processor then (can't remember its number, could anyone fill it in ?). So they took the Z80 processor and extended it. You see the relation even today in the register namings.
I wasn't aware how much the x86 really sucks until I began programming the Motorolla M68000 in the Sega MegaDrive/Genesis as a hobby a few weeks ago. That processor is about as old as the 8086/8088 but has so many cool and useful features that the x86's doesn't have even today (like the eight address registers and the postincrement/predecrement features which make it trivial to set up eight stacks at once, just to name two features).
And then IBM came along. They wanted to get a "cheap" computer to market fast, and used Intels 8086/8088. And like the processor, the whole IBM PC was meant to have a short lifespan.
Unfortunately the PC became a success, and so its lifespan had to be expanded artificially and backward compability had to be put in. This is true for the Intel processors as well as the whole PC architecture. As time passed by more and more things were added without really fixing the underlying problems.
I think computers could be cheaper and more powerful if we'd had a better mainstream processor and computer architecture, one that was meant to live long and thus was better designed. But this is just a dream, I'm afraid...
PayPal's questionable policy has also hurted the artist of the excellent adult comic "Sexy Loser". PayPal has shut down his account although he doesn't sell any adult oriented material, he only asked for donations on his site.
PayPal currently is the MicroSoft of micropayment, it seems... which is very sad. Why they piss of their customers like this is beyond me. I can't understand how they could NOT like to make more money ?! Excluding adult material is surely a big financial loss, isn't it ?
Well, it's quite simple: programs go into bin directories, programs only intended for the superuser into sbin and libraries into lib.
Then you have the different levels:/,/usr and/usr/local.
Things in the top-level (/{bin,lib,sbin}) are the most elemental tools/libraries needed to start the system and rescue a broken system (/usr might not yet be mounted).
The/usr level is for programs/tools for normal runtime. Most tools are found in this level. And/usr/local is for "third-party" programs that you've installed yourself, mostly when compiled from source.
The bin and lib directories can also be found in other directories as well: the most notable is/usr/X11R6 which is such a vital and big software package that it is allowed to break the rule that additional packages should live in/opt. And if you have a look at your/opt/kde3 directory you'll find a bin and lib as well.
There is another directory that can be found in many directories that have a bin and lib directory: the share directory, which holds data files for programs. You can find it e.g. in/usr,/usr/local,/usr/X11R6 and/opt/kde3.
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Um, the + is synonymous with 00 in international dialing. 0049 == +49, 001 == +1
Oh yes, you're right... my fault.
No, the original poster was right. E.g. the country code of Germany is 49, so if you'd like to call to Germany you'd call +0049 and not +049 like you suggested...
I agree, Lotus Notes is the worst "e-mail client" that I've seen. Last time I've checked it wasn't even able to do normal e-mail quotation (you know, with > indention). Thank God I don't have to use it any more.
Lotus Notes is good as a groupware, but never ever let your employees use it as an e-mail client !
What I don't unterstand is why germans always say "you know Hitler was from Austria". Yeah. So what? If you think about it it doesn't matter and doesn't make Germany better or Austria worse.
Yes, you're right. The reason why I mentioned it was because a great many right-wings and Neo-Nazis don't know history. When you talk to them they tell you "Hitler was great" but when you ask "Do you know where he's from and what he did before he went into politics ?" they just don't know. And this applies to almost every part of the Nazi era history, they only see what they want to see. It's all stuff we learn at school, you'd think that those people payed attention at least in those lessons...
As an outsider (my grandparents emigrated from Germany in 1935), I always wonder why it is that that Germans nowadays not only hate the above-mentioned, but also practically everything German? By which I mean ethnically, culturally, liguistically and historically, amongst others. I don't have a problem with getting rid of the bad, but why should the good go with it?
This is not the case, we still love our culture but about three decades of our history are more or less taboo. But there's still more than two thousand years of history left ;-) You might get this impression because open national pride like seen in other countries is often considered to be a bad thing. Many people fear to get associated with Nazis when they'd say I'm proud to be German. Having the German flag in your front yard like many americans do with their flag is really something that is almost imaginable here.
But this doesn't mean we're not proud of our country and our culture. We are, since we do make the best cars in the world, for example ;-)=) We just don't say that as often and explicit like other countries do.
In Germany one is hard-pressed to find a radio station that plays anything else than the American mass-produced pop crap. Germans nowadays use a lot of English words and grammatical constructs, as if the German language is incapable of expressing these things. Germans in general seem to be racist in a very "politically correct" sort of way. And while on the subject of racism, it seems almost like a fashion statement to have a life/love partner with a dark skin (other merits like personality seem to be distant secondary considerations).
This is not the case either, IMHO. There was indeed a call to play more German songs in radio a few months ago in Germany, but I saw a very enlightening report about this: in this report they listed all German artists that were played by a major radio station on one day. And then I realized that there really are enough German (and German-singing) artists. (BTW, AFAIK there is a law in France to play a certain amount of french songs on radio... could some French confirm this ?)
But of course you hear more english-language songs in radio than german-language. That's because a lot of people really do buy into the american media coporation produced shit, but also because a great many German artists often perform in English. This is quite natural, they like to target a wider audience than just Germany to make more money ;-)
And about the grammatical stuff: you can express way more things in German (especially in rhymes) than in English, the German grammar is very complex and this can be used to play around a lot. The German language is not called die Sprache der Dichter und Denker (the language of poets and thinkers) for nothing.
I recommend reading some stuff from Mark Twain about the German language (e.g. The awful German language). This extremely bright man studied German for more than thirty years and he even managed to enlight me on a few grammatical oddities in the German language :-) His stuff is not only very interesting but also with written with a good deal of humor, nice read :-)
These are just some (admittedly subjective) observations made while travelling Europe. Any Germans willing to discuss this with me in private?
Nah, I'd rather discuss publicly ;-)
all you need to stop people from stealing your images is a no-right-click javascript. sheesh.
Except that all browser allow to turn JavaScript off. And then there's still wget, lynx, w3m, ... and "View Source".
I know quite a few Germans myself, and they don't agree with your German friends at all.
So don't think your German friends represent a clear majority opinion, in Germany.
I know quite a few Germans as well... which is because I'm German ;-) I can tell you the vast majority of Germans nowadays really do hate Nazis and racism.
Yes, there are still some idiots that didn't learn a thing, but luckily those are mostly dumb people that don't even know that Hitler was an Austrian and are generally very uninformed about history. And yes, in East Germany some right-winged parties have managed to get a noticable amount of votes. But that doesn't make those people the majority.
It seems you didn't notice the anti-Nazi demonstrations that every demonstration of right-winged parties (NPD, DSU) face. And you didn't notice what happened a few weeks ago when some right-winged politicians from the NPD boycotted a minute's silence for the holocaust victims and later on said stupid things the we Germans were the real victims in the war instead of the Jews. These caused an outrage in Germany and re-started a discussion to forbid the NPD for being anticonstitutional.
There are laws in Germany which make it risky to express your true feelings in public, and so many people would not admit that the Germans still feel quite some pride when they think about the days of the Third Reich.
As for those laws : you can't legislate the true sentiments of a people.
I have no idea where you've got that from, but it's just plain wrong. There are laws that forbid to lie about Nazi crimes, e.g. it's forbidden to say "The Nazis never killed any Jews", but it's not forbidden to say the truth or what you feel.
And yes, we are proud of some things we managed to do during WWII, namely building V2 rockets and developing jet planes as well as parachutes and other technological advances. But we know all too well that many thousands of innocent people lost their lifes to develop these things, and nobody is proud about that.
In conclusion, I really think you either know very twisted Germans and mistake them for being the majority or should listen more carefully what they say.
Unfortunately, the majority of the Indian people are not the least bit concerned, resulting in very low coverage for this important development.
Well, that's not different here in Europe (at least in Germany, where I'm from). There has been no media coverage about software patents discussions/issues at all. Not even about the foul things the Netherlands are currently doing in the European Council to force software patents on the EU although the European Parliament and the national parliaments voted against them. Only "specialized" media like news sites that only report about IT news covered this.
I guess this is because most journalists don't have a clue how important this issue is and what this would mean to our economy.
I've got a PC with Radeon at work, and in the last two years I've tried three times to get the ATi drivers to work with hardware 3D... I've never managed to get it run.
In contrast, I've never had any problems with nVidia's drivers... not on my TNT2, not on my GeForce 1 and not on the GeForce WhatEver that a friend of mine has. nVidia does a very good job with their drivers, IMHO. I'm not that happy thay they're closed source at least but they Just Work (tm).
This is why I won't ever buy a ATi card. They treat Linux users as third class citizens, unfortunately...
The DENIC (the registry...
Uhm... *blush*... the link should obviously point to www.denic.de and not to www.denice.de :-)
Well, the second biggest TLD in numbers of registered domains is the .de domain for some time now (I don't know for how long... one year, two years ?). And both .uk and .nl aren't small fish either.
The DENIC (the registry for the german .de TLD) has an interesting
graph showing the number of domains in the ten biggest TLDs (in english).
I have watched the changes the Turkish government is making to enter the EU. You can't imagine how much pride they're swallowing to have their history and honor stepped on by Belgian chocolatiers, French pastry-chefs, German schnitzel-makers, English fish-and-chips vendors... There is NO WAY that any of you would tolerate such treatment in your own countries. Further -- the rank-and-file Turk doesn't want EU membership.
Granted, I've never been to Turkey. I know it's a beautiful country and has an interesting history. But I think you're not understanding an important point here: Turkey wants to be in the EU. Most european countries do not want that, since the human rights are so much behind european standards that it'll take at least another decade to resolve these issues. I don't know whether the average Turk wants to be in the EU, but their government really wants to !
This is not a bad thing per se, because of this wish a lot of progress has been made in turkish laws, e.g. they dropped the death penalty months ago (AFAIK) but the press is still not free and you're still not free to say what you want. Interestingly this is why turkish religious extremists go into european countries like Germany (where I'm from): here they are allowed to say and do a lot more than in Turkey, which is a very troublesome thing which is discussed hotly here in Germany.*
And then there are the Kurds: say nice things about them in Turkey and it seems like you're in deep trouble like that editor about whom the story is. The problem is they don't have their own country. They are spread over parts of Turkey, Iran and Iraq (IIRC) but like to have their own country. Granted, the terroristic operations done by the PKK are a very bad thing, but punishing people who just say "Most of them are nice people" is even worse, IMHO.
But most Turks are nice people as well (if they're past puberty ;-), so I wish them good luck in having these issues resolved, but as it stands right now there is still a lot to critique in Turkey.
* Small example: Ataturk, the father of the modern Turkey, introduced the separation of religion and state. This is why turkish teachers are not allowed to wear a kerchief (correct word ?) at school. But the few turkish teachers here in Germany regularaly fight in curt to be allowed just that: wear a kerchierf when teaching. Some courts allow that, others not. And then there are criminal religous extremist like "the kalif of cologne" who was finally deported to Turkey a few weeks ago after years of legal fights...
This is something that I noticed very early in my life (while I was still at school) and avoided ever since. A friend of my father, who is a journalist at a major german computer magazine for about fifteen years or so, once told me that (almost) every job has one or more typical diseases.
;-)
;-) Granted, it's sometimes very hard to avoid the stress, especially when the project is in the ending phase and the release date is nearing. But apart from that there is few need for stress. I've seen on my coworkers that very often people impose stress on themselves or let their bosses impose stress on them. And most of the time this stress is unnecessary and can be avoided.
He said that the typical programmer diseases are too much stress, pains from sitting around all day in a wrong stance (? sorry, I'm not a native english speaker) and gaining fat from too few sports
I've been able to avoid the first and the last but suffer from sitting in a wrong position
(This is why I never wanted to be a games programmer although I'd really like to write games: that industry was too much stress ten years ago and it seems that it got worse)
I think that if the work is imposing too much stress on you, you really should think about looking for another employer. I know very well that this sounds so much easier than it is, and that some people don't have the opportunity to change employer easily. But there are times when one has to ask oneself: what's more important ? My health or my great payment ? Wouldn't a job that's not as well payed but is more fun/healthier be a better deal ?
Yes, I agree with this list. In software development the customer will always find bugs that didn't show at your testings, and he will almost always have some additional feature/change requests. So when you've shipped to the customer the first time you've still got a long way to go. That way won't produce as much code as before but it will take longer to produce it. By this I mean it's quite fast to write an application but after a certain size it can take up to a few days just to locate and fix a single bug (if the system is very complicated).
By the way, as a hint to (future) managers: if you notice a developer is hunting a bug for hours and doesn't find it, talk to him and let him explain how this bug manifests and discuss with him what could cause this. Or if you don't know enough about programming, get that developer to explain and discuss with another developer. Quite often the first developer then gets to see the missing piece (or the other does, which is as good) :-)
I had just this situation yesterday: I was hunting a bug for about three hours. Then my boss came along and saw my frustration. I explained this bug and discussed for about three or four minutes with him and then suddenly I got enlightenment and fixed that bug within a minute :-)
Seriously, the only thing I could imagine where you'd need root access is restarting the webserver if it's serving from port 80 directly. As others have pointed out, you could have the sysop do portforwarding from port 80 to 8080 and then be able to run Apache on port 8080 as normal user. Or you could have him give you sudo access to the Apache rc script.
:-)
Other than that I fail to see where any root access would be needed. You'll write and edit HTML and script files and you'll do some database stuff. There's absolutely no need to be root here.
I think a sysop who doesn't give you root right away is a good sysop. UNIX gives you all the tools and concepts to let you do your work without ever being root. But you have to get used to it. In the beginning you'll have to bug the sysop a lot but within a short timespan you'll finally get to a point where you won't need him anymore as you'll then be able to do your work... without being root
Should be quite easy with SubVersion to do the versioning:
First, create a new repository (or just create a new directory in an exisiting repository, that'd be easier).
Then unpack the first tar.gz into that directory, "svn add" everything and commit.
Next step is to unpack the next tar.gz into the same directory, do an "svn status" and "svn add" all files that have a question mark as status. Commit. Repeat.
This can even be scripted quite easily.
This procedure does have one problem, though: you won't catch when a file got deleted. You could do a script that compares the (sorted ?) file listings of the tar.gz that lists all files that were present in 1.tar.gz but are missing in 2.tar.gz and thus have to be deleted.
SubVersion is propably the better choice here anyways simply because if you're talking about firmware then I assume there are some binary files. And SVN handles binary files way more efficient than CVS. Plus SVN versions the repository as a whole, not just single files. So with the method described above each revision in the SubVersion repository would map to the exact content of tar.gz that you've used to create that revision.
I'm 15, self-taught, and I know what a singly linked list is. Since I assume I suck at C++/Programming in general, would it be fair to assume that most programmers wouldn't know everything that I know and more?
Well, I earn a living coding in the "semi"-embedded area and I tell you: most people that are allowed to code should never be let near a keyboard. Small example (this was found in the code of a GUI for an industrial robot !):
(damn, Slashdot ignores the indention... sorry)
This short piece of code has such a high density of stupidity that I had to write it down... mind you, the guy who wrote this shit has a university degree in CS ! I got more examples of his code... and the sad thing is he's just the most obvious idiot. The other half a dozen people I have to work with in various other projects aren't that much better as well.
You really learn to appreciate coders and hackers when having to work with such people. My experience is this: people who studied CS and got some degree are good at designing applications, but suck at implementing them. Self-taught programmers/coders/hackers mostly suck at designing but shine at implementing.
Of course there are exceptions: my boss, whom I consider to be one of the brightest heads I've ever met, has studied CS in Germany and America and is excellent at both designing and implementing (though he sucks at documenting and has an ugly coding style ;-)
And it's obvious to whom you belong... ;)
Need I point out that 1+1=10 in binary?
Need I point out that I was quoting a comment that contained "1+1=11", to which I replied that there are 10 kind of people... ? Oh man...
1 + 1 = 11
There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary arithmetics and those who dont :-)
Ok... Z80 was Zilog's extension of Intel's 8080. (which was in turn an extension of the 8008, an 8-bit version of the 4004, the first single-chip microprocessor) x86 was based on the 8080/8085, which Intel already had all the internal designs for, as opposed to the z80. You don't need to make it sound like Intel was just stealing other people's ideas.
I didn't want it sound like that, I just didn't knew any better ;-) Thnx for explaining...
Reading everyone's comments about PowerPC sucking makes me realize that most of these people have never had the pleasure of taking a masters level Organization and Architecture class.. because if people truely understood the power of a RISC processor and its simplicity and superior design.. they'd dump CISC in a minute. The fact remains.. intel could never shake the 8086 CISC precedent.. and it will forever remain backwards compatibe to 1980's technology... seeing a horribly inefficient CISC pipeline makes me want to cry. Branch Hazard! Bubble! Data Hazard! Flush or glorious 16 stage Pipeline! errrrrrr... Hazard! Hazard! Hazard!!
I totally agree ! The whole x86 processor architecture looks like Frankensteins Monster: butt ugly, as more and more features/instructions were added but still lacking nice and powerful features other architectures sponsor for years now...
The best thing Intel and AMD could do is throw the whole x86 architecture into the trashbin, sit down and develop a whole new processor.
If Microsoft made this move, how would Intel react?
They would panic, of course ! The whole x86 architecture is ugly as hell, and the IBM PC architecture even more so, so low level programmers would propably open a bottle or two and party if we could ditch our x86's for PPC's :-)
The 8086/8088 (to which even the Pentium 4 tries to be backwards compatible with to some degree) was a hack at Intel to get a 16 bit processor to market fast and was meant to have a very short lifespan. Intel was developing a way better processor then (can't remember its number, could anyone fill it in ?). So they took the Z80 processor and extended it. You see the relation even today in the register namings.
I wasn't aware how much the x86 really sucks until I began programming the Motorolla M68000 in the Sega MegaDrive/Genesis as a hobby a few weeks ago. That processor is about as old as the 8086/8088 but has so many cool and useful features that the x86's doesn't have even today (like the eight address registers and the postincrement/predecrement features which make it trivial to set up eight stacks at once, just to name two features).
And then IBM came along. They wanted to get a "cheap" computer to market fast, and used Intels 8086/8088. And like the processor, the whole IBM PC was meant to have a short lifespan.
Unfortunately the PC became a success, and so its lifespan had to be expanded artificially and backward compability had to be put in. This is true for the Intel processors as well as the whole PC architecture. As time passed by more and more things were added without really fixing the underlying problems.
I think computers could be cheaper and more powerful if we'd had a better mainstream processor and computer architecture, one that was meant to live long and thus was better designed. But this is just a dream, I'm afraid...
So now Slashdot has turned into a helpdesk ? There goes the neighbourhood... ;-)
PayPal's questionable policy has also hurted the artist of the excellent adult comic "Sexy Loser". PayPal has shut down his account although he doesn't sell any adult oriented material, he only asked for donations on his site.
PayPal currently is the MicroSoft of micropayment, it seems... which is very sad. Why they piss of their customers like this is beyond me. I can't understand how they could NOT like to make more money ?! Excluding adult material is surely a big financial loss, isn't it ?
Well, it's quite simple: programs go into bin directories, programs only intended for the superuser into sbin and libraries into lib.
Then you have the different levels: /, /usr and /usr/local.
Things in the top-level (/{bin,lib,sbin}) are the most elemental tools/libraries needed to start the system and rescue a broken system (/usr might not yet be mounted).
The /usr level is for programs/tools for normal runtime. Most tools are found in this level. And /usr/local is for "third-party" programs that you've installed yourself, mostly when compiled from source.
The bin and lib directories can also be found in other directories as well: the most notable is /usr/X11R6 which is such a vital and big software package that it is allowed to break the rule that additional packages should live in /opt. And if you have a look at your /opt/kde3 directory you'll find a bin and lib as well.
There is another directory that can be found in many directories that have a bin and lib directory: the share directory, which holds data files for programs. You can find it e.g. in /usr, /usr/local, /usr/X11R6 and /opt/kde3.
Whew... I hope it's of use for you :-)