In your outraged diatribe, you fail to answer the original question to which I was responding to which is "Why should the safety net be labor free?"
Was my post hyperbolic? Yes it was. Do I agree with the principle of what you're saying, i.e. how a government handles the reality of people going hungry is a true test of it's character. Of course I do. However, none of that addresses the issue. "Why should the safety net be labor free?"
If you're going to start giving people money for doing nothing, they will keep on doing nothing. You get a benefits subculture, akin to what you have in some areas of the UK where multiple generations of a family are dependent on the government aid and none have seen work in years. If your motivation for running a social programme is how much money you'll save on prison expenses, you're doing it wrong. This was the point of the post I was replying to, which I merely extrapolated to the logical conclusion.
The safety net should be there as a temporary measure, to help people get back to work and to prevent them from starving while doing so. The key is to prevent it from being seen as a lifestyle choice, lest you get into the mess the UK is in. If it means that you need to work for the safety net, tough titties?
From free market point of view I do not understand this at all. If a company X can get overqualified person for the announced salary, isn't that good for the company?
No, it isn't good for a company to hire overqualified people. Can you guess why?
If you're overqualified for a job, there's a high chance that you will get bored with it. As you're over qualified, you're able to get a better job somewhere else and you're most likely to do so the moment one appears. For a non-trivial job, it takes months for an employee to become proficient. I've seen 6 months as the number being bandied about. Regardless of the actual number, that means that an employee leaving is going to be very disruptive for the company as they will have to hire a replacement and then suffer the lack of productivity for X months while the new employee gets up to speed.
This surprised me when I moved from interviewee to interviewer. Being overqualified doesn't mean that employers will be falling over themselves to employ you.
If that's going to be your argument, why not argue that it's cheaper to put a bullet through them than it is to pay them to keep out of trouble, which is in turn cheaper than locking them away in prison? After all, what you're saying is that they're effectively holding you to ransom.
And if you can't see the stupidity of giving something away that a client paid you thousands for then there's no help for you.
You could offer a discount to your customers if they allow you to open source the code. This benefits everyone. Your customers get a nice discount, and you get to open source your code and potentially help speed up your development time on subsequent projects. To get around the drop in income, you could raise your baseline rate and encourage your customers to take the discount.
Alternatively, you could just focus on refactoring and open sourcing the code in your own free time.
Q: Why don't you just run git/svn/hg on your local machine?
A: I am running hg on my local machine currently for version control. While this is much better than no version control at all, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of collaborating with the other dev and managing deployment.
While DVCS tools allow you to push and pull directly from each other's repositories and that's a useful feature, there's nothing stopping you from having a central repository. The way my team works is each developer has N number of personal repositories, and we have a central repository (which we call the canonical repo). The canonical repo is what's used to build the product. For each product release, all developers must push their changes to the canonical repo, handle any merges that are required. Once all desired changes have been pushed to the canonical repository, we then tag the canonical repo with the build number. The product then gets built with changes up to said tag.
This works very well for us.
Q: Why not run your own server?
A: The other dev and I have talked about this, but there are a few problems. First and foremost, it takes time to setup and maintain such a server and the cost of many online services like Github are pretty modest. The other problem is that we're not really in control of the servers and equipment. That's handled by a separate IT group, so we would have to get them involved to make this happen. Then there's the fact that the IT guys at our work mostly deal with Windows servers while we're mostly *nix fans. Neither one of us has setup a Windows box as a VC server before, so I'm really not sure how well-supported that is.
If you don't want to set up your own server, you have two options: a) use a cloud service like BitBucket or b) put the canonical repo on a file share and push/pull from that. I'd personally go with BitBucket (you get 5 collaborators for free). We currently use BitBucket for hosting the canonical repo, as well as bug tracking and wiki.
From reading the thread, the artifacts do not appear when JPEG quality is set to 10 (i.e. maximum) or if a non-lossy algorithm is used (like TIFF or PNG). If this was meant to be a watermark, the programmer who wrote the algorithm should be fired.
Putting profit over all else isn't necessarily evil.
The problem is that those pursuing profits tend to operate a greedy algorithm. They're constantly chasing after short term goals (local optima) at the expense of long term benefits (global optima). You see this at every level of government & corporations where they chase quarterly targets without ever considering that something that might be hugely beneficial in the future may cause pain in the short term.
It's a sad state of affairs when we've spent decades formulating non-greedy algorithms in machine learning when the real world is full of people who operate in a greedy manner. If you ever needed evidence that humanity is doomed come the robot revolution...
The compilation benchmarks are not comparable as the compilers are different, not only in version number but in architecture! OS X ships with llvm-gcc, which is a different compiler from GCC. Think of it a LLVM pretending to be GCC (accepting GCC options, etc) for backward compatibility. This would explain the huge discrepancies between the results of the compilation benchmarks
Disk performance is another thorny issue. The Postmark benchmark shows Ubuntu 12.04 being 3x faster than OS X 10.8 (246 tps vs 80 tps), yet the postgresql database benchmark shows OS X to be 3x faster than Ubuntu. No explanation is even attempted. Why? Readers would like to know! How can OS X be faster at a database benchmark when a raw disk benchmark shows it to be a lot slower than Ubuntu?! Perhaps there's something screwy with the configuration of Postgres on Ubuntu? Does this mean that OS X is *THE* choice for hosting busy databases? My suspicion is that this is due to fsync (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/runtime-config-wal.html). If fsync is enabled, the database waits for the transaction log to be flushed to disk every time a transaction is committed. It's basically down to defaults, and who knows what the default values are for Postgresql on OS X vs Ubuntu?
The graphs raise far too many questions that are not addressed. Many of them should have raised warning flags, like the one about disk performance vs actual database performance. As such, the results are thoroughly suspect and no reasonable conclusions can be drawn. Pity, because they clearly have the kit just not the knowhow.
You're correct that a PhD doesn't guarantee anything. My personal experience of working in the software industry in the UK, after getting a PhD in computer science has been mixed. On one hand, employees still have the stupid mind set of looking for X years commercial experience. It didn't matter that I had spent 4 years writing lots of C++ code for complicated machine learning algorithms, and like most on/. had been programming from a very early age before going to university. It still counted as 0 years commercial experience at a lot of places. I gave up trying to figure that one out. A PhD isn't going to automatically give you a high paying job.
On the other hand, having a PhD can open doors. I've found out that clued up start-up founders are desperately keen on hiring PhDs. This isn't strictly down to the area of your research (though it helps obviously). A PhD says that you've spent years working on problems where the solution isn't well defined (buzz word here is "wicked problem"), you're self motivated (no need for management hand holding), you can work with plans that change, you're not fazed by failure and most importantly you persevere and finish the damn job. Big companies tend to be pretty "Meh" about these traits, but start ups know that these traits are absolutely vital to getting off the ground.
TL;DR version: The PhD may not help you in your career in well established organizations, but it may give you a better shot at working at start ups where the skills you picked up over the course of your PhD are better valued.
... is a dangerous thing! I can just see bosses putting more pressure on coders to "get the job done now!" and then failing to understand why code takes so long to be delivered.
When I was with them 2+ years ago, not only did they shape BitTorrent downloads they also shaped HTTP and streaming video downloads. I require bit torrent when downloading WoW client updates (don't use it for anything else as I don't have the time. See WoW...). I noticed things speeded up when I disabled the Blizzard Downloader's P2P functionality. I've also noticed them throttling Steam downloads from about 5 - 9 pm, and they throttle video services that compete with their BT Vision package.
So true. I remember trying to get to grips with MOO 3, failing hard and thinking there must be something wrong with me because games are supposed to be fun.
That hasn't stopped GTK+ from working on all three platforms.
Define working:)
GTK+ apps look out of place on Windows, even more so on Mac. In addition to that, Qt just integrates a lot better into the native tool chain (e.g. Visual Studio, Xcode). Prior to being bought out by Nokia, Trolltech were charging $1500 per developer, per platform for Qt. And Trolltech were profitable! It is *that* good a toolkit. It's benefited immensely from being backed commercially and it shows.
Will this continue after Nokia bails? Will the pace of development slow, to the extent that it no longer integrates as well with new tool chains and platforms? That is an unknown and I really hate unknowns...
Having used both, VCL has nothing on Qt. It also doesn't hurt that Qt is free and cross platform while VCL costs a fortune and has only recently gained OS X support. However now that Nokia appears intent on offloading Qt, I'd worry about Qt's long term future.
I can't comment on the others, but Canonical is most certainly NOT making money. They're burning far more money than what's coming in and given Shuttleworth's attitude (i.e. So what?) it doesn't look like they'll be profitable any time soon.
While profits might be anathema to some in the open source world, a business needs to break even if it's going to have long term survivability.
Yes. Personally, I prefer to just log in as the sudo user and then do "sudo su" to become root.
The default configuration of SSH is to only allow you to log in with your private key so you're still going to muck around with to allow password logins or get the root user a public/private key pair.
Do what I do. Reserve a micro instance on a 3 year plan.
1 time fee: $100
Monthly fee: $3.66 * 36
Total: $231.76
Averaged over 36 months: $6.44
That's slightly more expensive than some shared hosts, but the upshot is that you full access to a VM that's under your control to install whatever you please. I've got a blog, VPN and photo gallery and once you factor in bandwidth and Amazon S3 storage costs it's still under $7 a month.
Slashdot Mirror
In your outraged diatribe, you fail to answer the original question to which I was responding to which is "Why should the safety net be labor free?"
Was my post hyperbolic? Yes it was. Do I agree with the principle of what you're saying, i.e. how a government handles the reality of people going hungry is a true test of it's character. Of course I do. However, none of that addresses the issue. "Why should the safety net be labor free?"
If you're going to start giving people money for doing nothing, they will keep on doing nothing. You get a benefits subculture, akin to what you have in some areas of the UK where multiple generations of a family are dependent on the government aid and none have seen work in years. If your motivation for running a social programme is how much money you'll save on prison expenses, you're doing it wrong. This was the point of the post I was replying to, which I merely extrapolated to the logical conclusion.
The safety net should be there as a temporary measure, to help people get back to work and to prevent them from starving while doing so. The key is to prevent it from being seen as a lifestyle choice, lest you get into the mess the UK is in. If it means that you need to work for the safety net, tough titties?
From free market point of view I do not understand this at all. If a company X can get overqualified person for the announced salary, isn't that good for the company?
No, it isn't good for a company to hire overqualified people. Can you guess why?
If you're overqualified for a job, there's a high chance that you will get bored with it. As you're over qualified, you're able to get a better job somewhere else and you're most likely to do so the moment one appears. For a non-trivial job, it takes months for an employee to become proficient. I've seen 6 months as the number being bandied about. Regardless of the actual number, that means that an employee leaving is going to be very disruptive for the company as they will have to hire a replacement and then suffer the lack of productivity for X months while the new employee gets up to speed.
This surprised me when I moved from interviewee to interviewer. Being overqualified doesn't mean that employers will be falling over themselves to employ you.
If that's going to be your argument, why not argue that it's cheaper to put a bullet through them than it is to pay them to keep out of trouble, which is in turn cheaper than locking them away in prison? After all, what you're saying is that they're effectively holding you to ransom.
"Gimme money or I'll start causing trouble."
This is the only game I'm playing at the moment. It rocks, but it's sadly Windows only.
There's the Qt framework. It's C++, open source and a lot more popular than realBASIC.
You get 6 - 7 hours battery life on the 15" retina Macbook Pro. Power consumption of these screens is fine.
See Empire on Ice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHw0-6SqecI&feature=youtube_gdata_player
And if you can't see the stupidity of giving something away that a client paid you thousands for then there's no help for you.
You could offer a discount to your customers if they allow you to open source the code. This benefits everyone. Your customers get a nice discount, and you get to open source your code and potentially help speed up your development time on subsequent projects. To get around the drop in income, you could raise your baseline rate and encourage your customers to take the discount.
Alternatively, you could just focus on refactoring and open sourcing the code in your own free time.
Keep up the good work, dude.
What mistakes are you referring to? What was so broken in Python 2 that required a completely incompatible Python 3 as a fix?
Q: Why don't you just run git/svn/hg on your local machine? A: I am running hg on my local machine currently for version control. While this is much better than no version control at all, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of collaborating with the other dev and managing deployment.
While DVCS tools allow you to push and pull directly from each other's repositories and that's a useful feature, there's nothing stopping you from having a central repository. The way my team works is each developer has N number of personal repositories, and we have a central repository (which we call the canonical repo). The canonical repo is what's used to build the product. For each product release, all developers must push their changes to the canonical repo, handle any merges that are required. Once all desired changes have been pushed to the canonical repository, we then tag the canonical repo with the build number. The product then gets built with changes up to said tag.
This works very well for us.
Q: Why not run your own server? A: The other dev and I have talked about this, but there are a few problems. First and foremost, it takes time to setup and maintain such a server and the cost of many online services like Github are pretty modest. The other problem is that we're not really in control of the servers and equipment. That's handled by a separate IT group, so we would have to get them involved to make this happen. Then there's the fact that the IT guys at our work mostly deal with Windows servers while we're mostly *nix fans. Neither one of us has setup a Windows box as a VC server before, so I'm really not sure how well-supported that is.
If you don't want to set up your own server, you have two options: a) use a cloud service like BitBucket or b) put the canonical repo on a file share and push/pull from that. I'd personally go with BitBucket (you get 5 collaborators for free). We currently use BitBucket for hosting the canonical repo, as well as bug tracking and wiki.
N.B. All of the above are free.
From reading the thread, the artifacts do not appear when JPEG quality is set to 10 (i.e. maximum) or if a non-lossy algorithm is used (like TIFF or PNG). If this was meant to be a watermark, the programmer who wrote the algorithm should be fired.
These are most likely JPEG compression artefacts.
The problem is that those pursuing profits tend to operate a greedy algorithm. They're constantly chasing after short term goals (local optima) at the expense of long term benefits (global optima). You see this at every level of government & corporations where they chase quarterly targets without ever considering that something that might be hugely beneficial in the future may cause pain in the short term.
It's a sad state of affairs when we've spent decades formulating non-greedy algorithms in machine learning when the real world is full of people who operate in a greedy manner. If you ever needed evidence that humanity is doomed come the robot revolution ...
They're merely version numbers, after all.
Because nobody gives two cents about Azure. Amazon dominate the cloud market and hence any new service will be compared against it.
The compilation benchmarks are not comparable as the compilers are different, not only in version number but in architecture! OS X ships with llvm-gcc, which is a different compiler from GCC. Think of it a LLVM pretending to be GCC (accepting GCC options, etc) for backward compatibility. This would explain the huge discrepancies between the results of the compilation benchmarks
Disk performance is another thorny issue. The Postmark benchmark shows Ubuntu 12.04 being 3x faster than OS X 10.8 (246 tps vs 80 tps), yet the postgresql database benchmark shows OS X to be 3x faster than Ubuntu. No explanation is even attempted. Why? Readers would like to know! How can OS X be faster at a database benchmark when a raw disk benchmark shows it to be a lot slower than Ubuntu?! Perhaps there's something screwy with the configuration of Postgres on Ubuntu? Does this mean that OS X is *THE* choice for hosting busy databases? My suspicion is that this is due to fsync (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/runtime-config-wal.html). If fsync is enabled, the database waits for the transaction log to be flushed to disk every time a transaction is committed. It's basically down to defaults, and who knows what the default values are for Postgresql on OS X vs Ubuntu?
The graphs raise far too many questions that are not addressed. Many of them should have raised warning flags, like the one about disk performance vs actual database performance. As such, the results are thoroughly suspect and no reasonable conclusions can be drawn. Pity, because they clearly have the kit just not the knowhow.
A PhD doesn't really guarantee you anything.
You're correct that a PhD doesn't guarantee anything. My personal experience of working in the software industry in the UK, after getting a PhD in computer science has been mixed. On one hand, employees still have the stupid mind set of looking for X years commercial experience. It didn't matter that I had spent 4 years writing lots of C++ code for complicated machine learning algorithms, and like most on /. had been programming from a very early age before going to university. It still counted as 0 years commercial experience at a lot of places. I gave up trying to figure that one out. A PhD isn't going to automatically give you a high paying job.
On the other hand, having a PhD can open doors. I've found out that clued up start-up founders are desperately keen on hiring PhDs. This isn't strictly down to the area of your research (though it helps obviously). A PhD says that you've spent years working on problems where the solution isn't well defined (buzz word here is "wicked problem"), you're self motivated (no need for management hand holding), you can work with plans that change, you're not fazed by failure and most importantly you persevere and finish the damn job. Big companies tend to be pretty "Meh" about these traits, but start ups know that these traits are absolutely vital to getting off the ground.
TL;DR version: The PhD may not help you in your career in well established organizations, but it may give you a better shot at working at start ups where the skills you picked up over the course of your PhD are better valued.
... is a dangerous thing! I can just see bosses putting more pressure on coders to "get the job done now!" and then failing to understand why code takes so long to be delivered.
Avoid them like the plague.
So true. I remember trying to get to grips with MOO 3, failing hard and thinking there must be something wrong with me because games are supposed to be fun.
That hasn't stopped GTK+ from working on all three platforms.
Define working :)
GTK+ apps look out of place on Windows, even more so on Mac. In addition to that, Qt just integrates a lot better into the native tool chain (e.g. Visual Studio, Xcode). Prior to being bought out by Nokia, Trolltech were charging $1500 per developer, per platform for Qt. And Trolltech were profitable! It is *that* good a toolkit. It's benefited immensely from being backed commercially and it shows.
Will this continue after Nokia bails? Will the pace of development slow, to the extent that it no longer integrates as well with new tool chains and platforms? That is an unknown and I really hate unknowns ...
Having used both, VCL has nothing on Qt. It also doesn't hurt that Qt is free and cross platform while VCL costs a fortune and has only recently gained OS X support. However now that Nokia appears intent on offloading Qt, I'd worry about Qt's long term future.
I can't comment on the others, but Canonical is most certainly NOT making money. They're burning far more money than what's coming in and given Shuttleworth's attitude (i.e. So what?) it doesn't look like they'll be profitable any time soon.
While profits might be anathema to some in the open source world, a business needs to break even if it's going to have long term survivability.
The default configuration of SSH is to only allow you to log in with your private key so you're still going to muck around with to allow password logins or get the root user a public/private key pair.
Do what I do. Reserve a micro instance on a 3 year plan. 1 time fee: $100 Monthly fee: $3.66 * 36 Total: $231.76 Averaged over 36 months: $6.44 That's slightly more expensive than some shared hosts, but the upshot is that you full access to a VM that's under your control to install whatever you please. I've got a blog, VPN and photo gallery and once you factor in bandwidth and Amazon S3 storage costs it's still under $7 a month.