The perks themselves may not be that important to many employees. What matters is that the existence of the perks sends a message: that the company values its employees and is willing to put some amount of effort into retaining them. As the original article pointed out, if a company isn't willing to spend a few bucks on free food and drinks that the employees value, how long will it be until the work environment deteriorates in other ways?
Things are different if you work for a nonprofit and/or government agency where there is less discretionary income. You know what you're getting into. But a for-profit company has the choice. If they cut out minor perks like free soda, they're saying that they are willing to piss off their employees to add a few bucks to the bottom line. Either that, or they really are on the verge of bankruptcy – and in both cases it's a good idea to be looking for the exits.
I used to work for a well-known company that had no perks except a very modest employee discount and was laser-focused on controlling costs. I used to joke that they probably had a profit target for the vending machines. Guess what? I didn't give a shit because business was great, therefore stock was going up and that provided me with a nice 50% income boost every year.
How would you have felt if you didn't have the stock options? Many employees hired later on may not have.
But in practice, a company that refuses to provide perks to developers is likely to pay them less, not more. Theoretically it could happen differently, but that's not the way to bet.
But taking it seriously... The new Xbox GPU is said to be similar to the Radeon 7790. And according to Anandtech, that card can indeed handle Crysis in full HD at more modest settings at playable frame rates (though not a full 60 fps).
That said... who cares? Crysis is basically a benchmark masquerading as a game. It's amazing how much publicity Crytek got by hiring programmers who don't know how to optimize.
This article confirms that both the CPU and GPU are based on AMD designs. Which means it will be an "8-core" CPU the same way the Bulldozer is 8-core: technically true if you only care about integer instructions, but it's more accurate to say there are four modules than eight cores.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the Xbox One SoC is basically a customized, jumbo-sized version of AMD's Trinity APU.
I'm curious how this thing will 'tune' in TV? Do they have deals with ATT UVerse, Cox/Charter/You Name it Cable channels, Dish/Direct TV Satellite companies to hook into their systems?
US cable companies are required to support the CableCard standard, so including that would cover all of them. They might still need to make individual deals with Uverse and the satellite providers, assuming they care about them. (I haven't looked up the stats, but I get the impression that mini-dish satellite TV isn't as popular as it once was. Probably because people have to pay the cable company for Internet access anyway, and figure it's easier to just use them for TV as well.)
Looks like the Xbox One is a home-entertainment center for which gaming is mostly an afterthought.
That's not necessarily a bad thing (hardcore gamers aren't nearly as important of a demographic as they think), but a lack of focus could be a real problem. We already have general-purpose machines that are versatile enough to do what we want them to. Microsoft needs to make the case why this is better than a laptop or a tablet or a smartphone – especially as it is certain to be loaded down with DRM.
Don't be silly. Any competent machinist can already build a gun that is far more functional than this piece of plastic crap. This has been true for decades, and the government still hasn't made any attempt to outlaw or even register machine tools.
I don't get the obsession with using 3D printing for guns. Other than the fact that it sounds cool and futuristic, it seems inferior to CNC-machining in just about every way. It's not even cheaper; you could buy a pretty decent hobbyist CNC machine for less than the $1725 that this 3D printer cost. And it's unlikely that cost gap will change significantly, since 3D printers need many of the same components (precise linear guidance rails and stepper motors) that CNC machines do.
The truth is that this is just a crappy plastic zip gun. I generally like to give tinkerers and hackers the benefit of the doubt, but it's hard to see what legitimate purpose it could serve. Certainly not self-defense. Even if you're envisioning some future scenario where you fight against tyranny, how is this going to be better than a zip gun made of common metal parts? Do you think the government is going to ban plumbing pipe? The only thing these plastic guns can do that a regular firearm can't is to get past metal detectors. They are weapons only suitable for criminals, assassins, and terrorists. I don't think that is what the people designing them have in mind, but if they are actually used for anything in the real world, that's what it will be.
I think the best commentary on this is a speech by Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park: "I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could [...] Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
Many of the most popular 3D printers are open-source designs, including the firmware. This makes DRM embedding essentially impossible since the whole concept is based on security by obscurity.
"Portability" was sort of trendy at the time, because there was such a zoo of incompatible PC architectures. (The shakeout and dominance of the IBM PC architecture happened with surprising speed). Pascal and C vied for language of choiceCoding for portability had worked wonderfully well for Multiplan, Microsoft's spreadsheet. In a world of dozens of incompatible personal computer architectures, Microsoft could deliver Multiplan quickly on everything. (I remember a friend using it on his Commodore 64).
The most popular home computers of the early 1980s – Commodore 64, Atari 800, and Apple II – all used some variant of a 6502 CPU. Therefore, it was possible to get "portable" code between these architectures while still coding in assembly, as long as you kept your display and I/O code well isolated in separate subroutines. Those were the only sections that would need to be rewritten. You would not get IBM PC compatibility this way, but at the time, the PC cost significantly more than the 6502-based computers, and didn't really offer that many advantages for the average user. It was used more in businesses than in homes, and the two types of software markets were more separate from each other than they are now.
The Commodore 64's CPU ran at a mere 1 MHz, so it was hard to get decent speed on any kind of application or game unless you coded in assembly.
Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!
on
Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I've heard a similar slogan with "Windows" instead of "DOS", as well as variations with "WordPerfect" instead of "Lotus". The fact that the quote has so many variations, and that no one can seem to pin down who said it and when, makes me suspicious that the whole thing is an urban legend.
Did Microsoft engage in anti-competitive behavior? Absolutely. Did this typically involve trying to deliberately break user-space software? No. In fact, as Raymond Chen has repeatedly noted in his blog, a lot of effort went into making compatibility hacks so badly written software would still work on Windows.
The fact is that neither Lotus nor WordPerfect ever successfully managed the transition from DOS text-mode to Windows GUI. This is due to a lot of factors, including bad management; W. Pete Peterson's book Almost Perfect is unintentionally revealing of this, since it indicates how the WordPerfect company under Peterson treated its employees like crap. They thought that GUIs were a passing fad and that they could stick with text-mode forever. Sure, the fact that the Office development team could ask other people in the same company for support may have helped on the margins, but other companies were writing good Windows software at the same time. Lotus and WordPerfect just plain didn't bother trying.
Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?
on
Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'd like to see an abandonware law, too. For software, anyone applying for a copyright should have to put the source code in escrow, and it would be automatically released a certain period of time (say, 1 year) after the company stops selling it.
Lotus Notes may well be the worst piece of software ever to exist (even if you include blatant malware in the competition). It is technically considered a "groupware" platform, but in practice it's almost exclusively used as an email/calendaring client, and it absolutely sucks at that, lacking the most basic features every other email program takes for granted.
Will they be open-sourcing it?
on
Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If IBM no longer wants to support Lotus 1-2-3 (understandably so), then open-sourcing the code might be a nice goodwill gesture. This way, whatever archaic organizations still rely on this stuff can always go hire someone else to maintain it. IBM has traditionally been fairly supportive of open source, and this would be a good opportunity to contribute to it without losing anything of substantial financial value.
It's a patent for a specific formula of wood filler, which may well have been novel and non-obvious in 1865 (I don't know enough about the history of woodworking to be certain).
BTW, the "Japan" reference is probably talking about the product that is sometimes called "Japan Drier" now. Presumably this made the wood filler cure more quickly.
I was happy when Firefox 19 added its own PDF reader like Chrome did long ago. Now Firefox is the default PDF reader on my machine -- I uninstalled Adobe Reader.
I'd be happy if Firefox's PDF reader actually worked. On 90% of the PDFs I open, I get a message saying some parts of the document may not display properly. Sometimes it actually displays right, sometimes it doesn't, but it's always dog-slow compared even to Adobe Reader (hardly a speed demon). Writing a PDF reader in JavaScript was a terrible idea; they should have used one of the many existing reader engines written in a real programming language.
Monsanto developed the genetically modified seeds, they can restrict their use however they want. Nothing prevents a competitor from developing a strain resistant to a different herbicide. Nothing prevents a farmer from just using normal soybean seeds.
The problem with this argument is that pests evolve to adjust to the chemicals in use. It is, in large part, Monsanto's fault that insects are resistant to older pesticides; they created the disease and now they're trying to sell the cure.
According to Wikipedia, "Clinical psychology is an integration of science, theory and clinical knowledge for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychologically-based distress or dysfunction and to promote subjective well-being and personal development. Central to its practice are psychological assessment and psychotherapy."
In other words, clinical psychologists focus on the "soft" stuff – talk therapy, Rorschach test, Myers-Briggs and all that crap. So it's not surprising that they would consider the efforts of real scientists to be an intrusion on their turf. We don't use talk therapy to treat depression any more; SSRIs are far more effective (not to mention much cheaper). The only type of talk therapy that has been shown to have any positive effects is cognitive behavioral therapy. All the rest is just crap, and most insurance companies won't pay for it any more because it's basically unproven pseudoscience.
What's the business case for this? Unless the existing languages are discontinued (VB6), out of common use, or completely unmaintainable, I'm just not seeing it. And even then, it's going to cost more money and time than you think.
A great engineer pushes technology forward and leads, a good engineer stays current and keeps his company in good technical standing, and bad engineers make excuses and rest on their laurels.
Good engineers get stuff done. If that can be done using older languages and older technology, nothing wrong with that. Not everything has to be written in the shiny new flavor of the day. The truth is that unless you work for Google, "pushing technology forward" probably isn't a goal in and of itself. It's only valuable if it actually assists the business in achieving its other goals.
In case anyone wants to use this incident to bash nuclear power, it's worth noting that Hanford was not a civilian nuclear power plant. It was a U.S. Government owned and operated site that produced plutonium for nuclear warheads. The military wasn't required to follow any kind of environmental or safety standards for most of the site's lifetime, and they didn't.
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The perks themselves may not be that important to many employees. What matters is that the existence of the perks sends a message: that the company values its employees and is willing to put some amount of effort into retaining them. As the original article pointed out, if a company isn't willing to spend a few bucks on free food and drinks that the employees value, how long will it be until the work environment deteriorates in other ways?
Things are different if you work for a nonprofit and/or government agency where there is less discretionary income. You know what you're getting into. But a for-profit company has the choice. If they cut out minor perks like free soda, they're saying that they are willing to piss off their employees to add a few bucks to the bottom line. Either that, or they really are on the verge of bankruptcy – and in both cases it's a good idea to be looking for the exits.
I used to work for a well-known company that had no perks except a very modest employee discount and was laser-focused on controlling costs. I used to joke that they probably had a profit target for the vending machines. Guess what? I didn't give a shit because business was great, therefore stock was going up and that provided me with a nice 50% income boost every year.
How would you have felt if you didn't have the stock options? Many employees hired later on may not have.
I'd rather have a larger paycheck.
But in practice, a company that refuses to provide perks to developers is likely to pay them less, not more. Theoretically it could happen differently, but that's not the way to bet.
But can it play Crysis?
Yes, rhetorical question, I know.
But taking it seriously... The new Xbox GPU is said to be similar to the Radeon 7790. And according to Anandtech, that card can indeed handle Crysis in full HD at more modest settings at playable frame rates (though not a full 60 fps).
That said... who cares? Crysis is basically a benchmark masquerading as a game. It's amazing how much publicity Crytek got by hiring programmers who don't know how to optimize.
This article confirms that both the CPU and GPU are based on AMD designs. Which means it will be an "8-core" CPU the same way the Bulldozer is 8-core: technically true if you only care about integer instructions, but it's more accurate to say there are four modules than eight cores.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the Xbox One SoC is basically a customized, jumbo-sized version of AMD's Trinity APU.
I'm curious how this thing will 'tune' in TV? Do they have deals with ATT UVerse, Cox/Charter/You Name it Cable channels, Dish/Direct TV Satellite companies to hook into their systems?
US cable companies are required to support the CableCard standard, so including that would cover all of them. They might still need to make individual deals with Uverse and the satellite providers, assuming they care about them. (I haven't looked up the stats, but I get the impression that mini-dish satellite TV isn't as popular as it once was. Probably because people have to pay the cable company for Internet access anyway, and figure it's easier to just use them for TV as well.)
Looks like the Xbox One is a home-entertainment center for which gaming is mostly an afterthought.
That's not necessarily a bad thing (hardcore gamers aren't nearly as important of a demographic as they think), but a lack of focus could be a real problem. We already have general-purpose machines that are versatile enough to do what we want them to. Microsoft needs to make the case why this is better than a laptop or a tablet or a smartphone – especially as it is certain to be loaded down with DRM.
Trust me, Netscape didn't need any help to crash. It could do that just fine on its own.
Don't be silly. Any competent machinist can already build a gun that is far more functional than this piece of plastic crap. This has been true for decades, and the government still hasn't made any attempt to outlaw or even register machine tools.
I don't get the obsession with using 3D printing for guns. Other than the fact that it sounds cool and futuristic, it seems inferior to CNC-machining in just about every way. It's not even cheaper; you could buy a pretty decent hobbyist CNC machine for less than the $1725 that this 3D printer cost. And it's unlikely that cost gap will change significantly, since 3D printers need many of the same components (precise linear guidance rails and stepper motors) that CNC machines do.
The truth is that this is just a crappy plastic zip gun. I generally like to give tinkerers and hackers the benefit of the doubt, but it's hard to see what legitimate purpose it could serve. Certainly not self-defense. Even if you're envisioning some future scenario where you fight against tyranny, how is this going to be better than a zip gun made of common metal parts? Do you think the government is going to ban plumbing pipe? The only thing these plastic guns can do that a regular firearm can't is to get past metal detectors. They are weapons only suitable for criminals, assassins, and terrorists. I don't think that is what the people designing them have in mind, but if they are actually used for anything in the real world, that's what it will be.
I think the best commentary on this is a speech by Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park: "I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could [...] Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
Is this a joke? Africa and the former Soviet republics are already awash in cheap AK-47s, and have been for years.
Many of the most popular 3D printers are open-source designs, including the firmware. This makes DRM embedding essentially impossible since the whole concept is based on security by obscurity.
"Portability" was sort of trendy at the time, because there was such a zoo of incompatible PC architectures. (The shakeout and dominance of the IBM PC architecture happened with surprising speed). Pascal and C vied for language of choiceCoding for portability had worked wonderfully well for Multiplan, Microsoft's spreadsheet. In a world of dozens of incompatible personal computer architectures, Microsoft could deliver Multiplan quickly on everything. (I remember a friend using it on his Commodore 64).
The most popular home computers of the early 1980s – Commodore 64, Atari 800, and Apple II – all used some variant of a 6502 CPU. Therefore, it was possible to get "portable" code between these architectures while still coding in assembly, as long as you kept your display and I/O code well isolated in separate subroutines. Those were the only sections that would need to be rewritten. You would not get IBM PC compatibility this way, but at the time, the PC cost significantly more than the 6502-based computers, and didn't really offer that many advantages for the average user. It was used more in businesses than in homes, and the two types of software markets were more separate from each other than they are now.
The Commodore 64's CPU ran at a mere 1 MHz, so it was hard to get decent speed on any kind of application or game unless you coded in assembly.
I've heard a similar slogan with "Windows" instead of "DOS", as well as variations with "WordPerfect" instead of "Lotus". The fact that the quote has so many variations, and that no one can seem to pin down who said it and when, makes me suspicious that the whole thing is an urban legend.
Did Microsoft engage in anti-competitive behavior? Absolutely. Did this typically involve trying to deliberately break user-space software? No. In fact, as Raymond Chen has repeatedly noted in his blog, a lot of effort went into making compatibility hacks so badly written software would still work on Windows.
The fact is that neither Lotus nor WordPerfect ever successfully managed the transition from DOS text-mode to Windows GUI. This is due to a lot of factors, including bad management; W. Pete Peterson's book Almost Perfect is unintentionally revealing of this, since it indicates how the WordPerfect company under Peterson treated its employees like crap. They thought that GUIs were a passing fad and that they could stick with text-mode forever. Sure, the fact that the Office development team could ask other people in the same company for support may have helped on the margins, but other companies were writing good Windows software at the same time. Lotus and WordPerfect just plain didn't bother trying.
I'd like to see an abandonware law, too. For software, anyone applying for a copyright should have to put the source code in escrow, and it would be automatically released a certain period of time (say, 1 year) after the company stops selling it.
Lotus Notes may well be the worst piece of software ever to exist (even if you include blatant malware in the competition). It is technically considered a "groupware" platform, but in practice it's almost exclusively used as an email/calendaring client, and it absolutely sucks at that, lacking the most basic features every other email program takes for granted.
If IBM no longer wants to support Lotus 1-2-3 (understandably so), then open-sourcing the code might be a nice goodwill gesture. This way, whatever archaic organizations still rely on this stuff can always go hire someone else to maintain it. IBM has traditionally been fairly supportive of open source, and this would be a good opportunity to contribute to it without losing anything of substantial financial value.
It's a patent for a specific formula of wood filler, which may well have been novel and non-obvious in 1865 (I don't know enough about the history of woodworking to be certain).
BTW, the "Japan" reference is probably talking about the product that is sometimes called "Japan Drier" now. Presumably this made the wood filler cure more quickly.
I was happy when Firefox 19 added its own PDF reader like Chrome did long ago. Now Firefox is the default PDF reader on my machine -- I uninstalled Adobe Reader.
I'd be happy if Firefox's PDF reader actually worked. On 90% of the PDFs I open, I get a message saying some parts of the document may not display properly. Sometimes it actually displays right, sometimes it doesn't, but it's always dog-slow compared even to Adobe Reader (hardly a speed demon). Writing a PDF reader in JavaScript was a terrible idea; they should have used one of the many existing reader engines written in a real programming language.
Monsanto developed the genetically modified seeds, they can restrict their use however they want. Nothing prevents a competitor from developing a strain resistant to a different herbicide. Nothing prevents a farmer from just using normal soybean seeds.
The problem with this argument is that pests evolve to adjust to the chemicals in use. It is, in large part, Monsanto's fault that insects are resistant to older pesticides; they created the disease and now they're trying to sell the cure.
According to Wikipedia, "Clinical psychology is an integration of science, theory and clinical knowledge for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychologically-based distress or dysfunction and to promote subjective well-being and personal development. Central to its practice are psychological assessment and psychotherapy."
In other words, clinical psychologists focus on the "soft" stuff – talk therapy, Rorschach test, Myers-Briggs and all that crap. So it's not surprising that they would consider the efforts of real scientists to be an intrusion on their turf. We don't use talk therapy to treat depression any more; SSRIs are far more effective (not to mention much cheaper). The only type of talk therapy that has been shown to have any positive effects is cognitive behavioral therapy. All the rest is just crap, and most insurance companies won't pay for it any more because it's basically unproven pseudoscience.
What's the business case for this? Unless the existing languages are discontinued (VB6), out of common use, or completely unmaintainable, I'm just not seeing it. And even then, it's going to cost more money and time than you think.
A great engineer pushes technology forward and leads, a good engineer stays current and keeps his company in good technical standing, and bad engineers make excuses and rest on their laurels.
Good engineers get stuff done. If that can be done using older languages and older technology, nothing wrong with that. Not everything has to be written in the shiny new flavor of the day. The truth is that unless you work for Google, "pushing technology forward" probably isn't a goal in and of itself. It's only valuable if it actually assists the business in achieving its other goals.
How many paid services has Google shut down so far?
In case anyone wants to use this incident to bash nuclear power, it's worth noting that Hanford was not a civilian nuclear power plant. It was a U.S. Government owned and operated site that produced plutonium for nuclear warheads. The military wasn't required to follow any kind of environmental or safety standards for most of the site's lifetime, and they didn't.