I spent five years working for one of the largest brokerage comanies in the US. I maintained and updated their nightly satellite data distrubtion system. After five years of pager duty and fire stomping I told them I wanted out. I wanted to get into their web development. I wanted some new skills. They said, "OK. We'll see what we can do." They were hiring newbie web developers for what I was making, pushing high-profile projects with contractors. I was quietly kept where I was, protecting and coddling the bread and butter. I told them I was quitting if I didn't get something new to do, so they said, "How about we let you redesign the system first, and then we'll let you work on other things." I spent a year leading a project got it to the integration testing phase. They offered me the title of the lead for that system. Hell, I was doing that for three years already! I jumped ship and went to contracting. That system never went production. The entire group fell from a dozen people to two who maintain it now. Everyone else left the group within a month.
Sometimes it pays to keep your talent happty and at least in the company. Losing one key player can have much bigger impact.
Your level of paranoia should be proportional to your level of hardware spending and site security. If the integrity of your work is jeopardized by stolen key and mouse clicks, how can you justify letting someone you don't know and trust close enough to do so? And if your work is so ultrasensitive, why are you trusting it to OEM products? Get the hardware and software to do it right.
Before long someone's going to realize that saying 'Hi' with hand wave is not secure. What the hell do we do then?
First, you have no position. You're obviously a college kid with an ego and too much free time. Secondly, unless you've software being marketted with some sort of open source license you've got no involvement with the Open Source movement. Just because you write some code at home and like the GPL doesn't make you anything. Thirdly, if you talk to Be with the same attitude as comes across in your post I doubt they'd think twice about you. THEY will consider YOU for a job at Be, not the other way around, and it's not likely that they'll dump a newby into the middle of their kernel.
Are you suggesting that open source OS's can't survive with competition? Poor little open source Linux saying, "Why can't you just leave me alone! Isn't it' hard enough for me to deal with Windoze and Solaris?" You've got to be kidding. I thought the Open Source movement was about individuals writing better software that thrives because it's better software.
Why not have both left and right halves of the keyboard with mouse functions? Two pointers, two selects, etc. It would lead to much more interaction with the display. Select text with left pointer, select with right, click and drag between locations. I think it would be a great improvement. And think what it would do to gaming!
Re:I'm a Union IT Professional
on
IT Unions?
·
· Score: 1
I will NEVER support any platform that makes it difficult to fire someone who is not doing what is best for the company I work for. If you cost too much for what you're doing, why is it bad for my company to replace you? You have a choice. Work for less or work somewhere else.
Many of us who are working 80-hours and wearing the pager are doing so because we have that much pride in our firm and in our product. Most of us know how to make that dedication pay off, with the 20% raises, bonuses that buy a new car every year. We're not going to hide behind the "My union won't let me do that" excuse.
If you think your interest is not served by serving the best interest of your company, I don't want to work with you. If you're working for a company that's taking advantage of you, it's your fault, first for letting it happen, and second for staying in that situation.
Benchmarking on Windows, where your programs run in a command window, is dependent on your program performance settings. I've started running a test in a command window, switched out to read an email, and switched back. It made a time difference of two orders of magnitude. You've got to be careful with Windows benchmarking.
What planet are you on, and what companies have you worked for? As a software consultant I've been at several large companies, each with several thousand users and PCs. When you walk in the door you get a cookie-cutter PC from the PC admin group, complete with licensed applications and OS. They generally use SMS to audit and distribute software. When you want to upgrade or add software you talk to the procurement department and they get you the latest.
It's not the companies' attitude toward software that generates the fines. It's generally the rogue developer or user who thinks they're too important to wait for the system to get them what they need.
Part of procedures, either office tasks or software design, should include the evaluation of necessary software. If you find yourself up against a deadline because you don't have the tools you need, you've skipped a step.
I think asking "What features do you want?" is short sighted. You should be asking, "What do you want to do with this language?"
If you're wanting to write server-side web apps your not going to focus on a GUI framework. If you're wanting to write a MOM, you're going to think data structures and serialization, as well as sockets. When you know what you're doing with it then you can say, "What features?"
Server side apps would be well-served by a VM with dynamic class loading. MOM would do well to have some well-constructed socket features and easy threading, plus some standard serialization support. GUI is going to need a good event managing system.
I think writing a language because you're looking for the next greatest thing since Java is wasteful, disruptive, and serving no relevant purpose.
And they wonder why there's an energy crunch. Let's all add another 500w of lighting to our entertainment rooms, and all the electronic gear to go with it!
Personally I think this is about as interesting as those plasma balls and fiber-optic lamps.
"In college" and "old Unix-running VAX" immediately remove this environment from any reasonable discussion. Management of resources in colleges is generally terrible, and upgrades are generally done when some huge technology endowment has been dropped in the dean's lap.
You're not looking for mathematics, you are looking for a solution to a problem. They arent' the same. Mathematics is a set of laws and relations that are applicable to numbers, not numbers themselves. Pi and e are mathematical truths, not answers.
The idea of "open" has NO applicability to mathematics.
C++ is a tool that takes some knowledge and experience to get right. First, you MUST know your compiler and how to make it work properly. One little compiler flag can make a huge difference. Secondly, if you're looking for speed, know your design and just how many constructors you're using. If you're constantly dynamically creating something that's several levels down the class hierarchy, expect some time to create those things. If you don't need all that construction or can't live with the costs, change your design. Thirdly, as someone else suggested, know your algorithms. That means know the mathematical complexity of what you're doing, and watch your call stack depth, and the value parameters in each item in the stack.
I promise you that the guy who picked up a Perl of Java book and was a whiz kid in a couple weeks won't find as much mastery in the same time with C++. He might have something that works, but I bet it won't work as well as it could.
"Practical work" is not a universal teacher, which axioms and definitions can be. Anyone with the properly translated axioms and definitions can make use of them.
Interpretation is always invovled in "real-world" examples. Real-world examples have undefined but assumed conditions, unstated constants, statistically eliminated edge-cases.
At some point you must be able to state a truth in an unequivocable fashion. Anything left implies that there is room for argument.
There is no doubt that ALL of mathematical knowledge is free to everyone. Truth of the mathematical nature cannot be hidden. It can be difficult for most to achieve its understanding, but there is no denying it to anyone who cares to make the effort to find it.
When you discard all that is not true, what you are left with can be nothing but truth.
In most of the higher math courses I've been in (Minor in numerical mathematics) there is a minimum level of understanding, which has generally included the ability to diagram the problem appropriately. What's missing is not the diagrams themselves, but the students' ability to put together what they acutally know into a proper understanding of the problem. They generally know all the pieces, but have not the inclination or the imagination to put it all together into understanding. This is what a really good teacher can bring out of his students.
You "serious" PC guys who've never worked in a shared environment on real hardware are insecure by nature. That whole "PC stops responding" notion is a falacy you've been lead to believe is normal. The HP-UX boxen we've had up for 150+ days without reboot are hooked to a Tandem high avialablitiy system, backed by redundant mainframes, all connected by redundant data paths. They go down when we tell them to. Get yourself to a "serious" environment and you can give up your hard drive click security blanket.
Much of the useless email is not pesonal correspondence as much as it is a bulletin announcement. In one group I worked in we set up a news server for this type of thing. We'd subscribe to topics we needed or wanted to monitor. It eliminated hundreds of copies of email each week.
The office email systems need to provide an easy, alternate interface to allow people to set up such bulletin boards/news groups within their organization, perhaps even setting up personal or arbitrary group posting areas. It would eliminate mass mailing and message bloat that comes with forwarding.
As long as you are not pulling cash out of your pocket for every episode of Survivor or whatever you like to watch you owe the publishers and producers the courtesy of tolerating their advertising.
You also owe the manufacturer of the cheap (relatively) mass-market products you buy for the success that mass-media advertising has brought them. Without mass-marketing those Doritos you munch and the Pepsi you slurp while watching mass-media would cost a ton more, if they'd be available at all. For regional or local markets to produce such items in smaller quantity would make them far more expensive.
First, Linux isn't even a close runner up in Unix workstations. HP has been a market leader in workstations for decades, and Sun I'm sure is the next second.
Second, open source serves well in Unix originated system services like bind, sendmail, etc. because those items are simple, well-defined, previously implemented items that no one is making money from as a core product. There's no risk to using an OS version of those. You don't base your business on those.
Try to con the CIO of a Fortune [1-9]0{1,3} company into putting his payroll, sales figures, customer data, whatever, on a product for which there isn't someone you can call 24x7x365, and for whom no one's share holders have bet their retirement. Has MySQL or PostgreSQL been charged with providing the monthly statements for 1.2 million customers who've executed roughly 50-200 trades each month? Have either been used to store the trade blotter for 1.2 billion shares traded on the NYSE? Oracle has stood up to those environments. It has grown into that environment over decades. Oracle and the other big boys have history.
As far as opening Oracle source, I'd bet the only customers for whom the licensing of the product is the major income for Oracle are those with one or two servers with tiny little databases. Support, ugrades, and consulting is where the money is. Open source that.
If you think you're good enough to ignore ideas like this and patterns, then I'd say you're judging yourself against your own yard stick in some two-bit shop that's still using Turbo C++ or VB. If you can't work within various paradigms you are NOT a top-level developer. The inability to work in other paradigms is a sign of YOUR rigidity and lack of flexibility.
If you worked for me I'd tell you to take your briliance packing.
All this moaning about privacy and security is getting old. People should use the same instincts about net use as they do in other activities. Would you trust some guy who walked up and said, "I'll deliver your messages. I've got a big fast truck and I'm your man!" That's what Hotmail and Excite and Yahoo mail and other services are. They're something you didn't ask for, but found to be convenient when they offered themselves. Sad fact is, they probably didn't tell you everything. If you're worried about their motives or their scruples, DON"T USE THEM! Use some service you know you can trust.
Just because they are big companies with large exposure you can't assume that they have a mandate to be ethical or even nice.
The April Scientific American has an article explaining how a new class of mid-sized black hole is being studied. One theory is that these IXOs (Intermdiate-luminosity X-ray Objects) are the result of the dying of the first generation of stars, which may have been giants because of the simpler structure of the universe.
Concentrating on what made you great is good, but being too centrally focused is not a good thing either. Look at all the dot-coms who put all their focus on a single product and went belly-up when technology shifted. (Remember push technology? Where is Stream Search now?) These large companies can use smaller, short-term side-projects to take some of the heat off when their core business is getting hammered. When they can participate in the hot market they make the gravy profits. When they're no longer paying great dividends, why not sell it before it's a money loser?
As a software consultant I've worked for several fortune 500/1000 companies and most had both MS SQL Server and Oracle or DB2 or who knows what. In EVERY instance it was NEVER the MS SQL Server handling the lifeblood transactions. The MS product was always handling table lookup and transitory information that was precursory to the real business transactions. This is how I gauge the real status of a database product. What do you trust it to do. Who cares how fast it is if you'd never put your business in its hands.
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I spent five years working for one of the largest brokerage comanies in the US. I maintained and updated their nightly satellite data distrubtion system. After five years of pager duty and fire stomping I told them I wanted out. I wanted to get into their web development. I wanted some new skills. They said, "OK. We'll see what we can do." They were hiring newbie web developers for what I was making, pushing high-profile projects with contractors. I was quietly kept where I was, protecting and coddling the bread and butter. I told them I was quitting if I didn't get something new to do, so they said, "How about we let you redesign the system first, and then we'll let you work on other things." I spent a year leading a project got it to the integration testing phase. They offered me the title of the lead for that system. Hell, I was doing that for three years already! I jumped ship and went to contracting. That system never went production. The entire group fell from a dozen people to two who maintain it now. Everyone else left the group within a month.
Sometimes it pays to keep your talent happty and at least in the company. Losing one key player can have much bigger impact.
Your level of paranoia should be proportional to your level of hardware spending and site security. If the integrity of your work is jeopardized by stolen key and mouse clicks, how can you justify letting someone you don't know and trust close enough to do so? And if your work is so ultrasensitive, why are you trusting it to OEM products? Get the hardware and software to do it right.
Before long someone's going to realize that saying 'Hi' with hand wave is not secure. What the hell do we do then?
First, you have no position. You're obviously a college kid with an ego and too much free time. Secondly, unless you've software being marketted with some sort of open source license you've got no involvement with the Open Source movement. Just because you write some code at home and like the GPL doesn't make you anything. Thirdly, if you talk to Be with the same attitude as comes across in your post I doubt they'd think twice about you. THEY will consider YOU for a job at Be, not the other way around, and it's not likely that they'll dump a newby into the middle of their kernel.
Other than that, your question is legitimate.
Are you suggesting that open source OS's can't survive with competition? Poor little open source Linux saying, "Why can't you just leave me alone! Isn't it' hard enough for me to deal with Windoze and Solaris?" You've got to be kidding. I thought the Open Source movement was about individuals writing better software that thrives because it's better software.
Why not have both left and right halves of the keyboard with mouse functions? Two pointers, two selects, etc. It would lead to much more interaction with the display. Select text with left pointer, select with right, click and drag between locations. I think it would be a great improvement. And think what it would do to gaming!
I will NEVER support any platform that makes it difficult to fire someone who is not doing what is best for the company I work for. If you cost too much for what you're doing, why is it bad for my company to replace you? You have a choice. Work for less or work somewhere else.
Many of us who are working 80-hours and wearing the pager are doing so because we have that much pride in our firm and in our product. Most of us know how to make that dedication pay off, with the 20% raises, bonuses that buy a new car every year. We're not going to hide behind the "My union won't let me do that" excuse.
If you think your interest is not served by serving the best interest of your company, I don't want to work with you. If you're working for a company that's taking advantage of you, it's your fault, first for letting it happen, and second for staying in that situation.
Benchmarking on Windows, where your programs run in a command window, is dependent on your program performance settings. I've started running a test in a command window, switched out to read an email, and switched back. It made a time difference of two orders of magnitude. You've got to be careful with Windows benchmarking.
What planet are you on, and what companies have you worked for? As a software consultant I've been at several large companies, each with several thousand users and PCs. When you walk in the door you get a cookie-cutter PC from the PC admin group, complete with licensed applications and OS. They generally use SMS to audit and distribute software. When you want to upgrade or add software you talk to the procurement department and they get you the latest.
It's not the companies' attitude toward software that generates the fines. It's generally the rogue developer or user who thinks they're too important to wait for the system to get them what they need.
Part of procedures, either office tasks or software design, should include the evaluation of necessary software. If you find yourself up against a deadline because you don't have the tools you need, you've skipped a step.
I think asking "What features do you want?" is short sighted. You should be asking, "What do you want to do with this language?"
If you're wanting to write server-side web apps your not going to focus on a GUI framework. If you're wanting to write a MOM, you're going to think data structures and serialization, as well as sockets. When you know what you're doing with it then you can say, "What features?"
Server side apps would be well-served by a VM with dynamic class loading. MOM would do well to have some well-constructed socket features and easy threading, plus some standard serialization support. GUI is going to need a good event managing system.
I think writing a language because you're looking for the next greatest thing since Java is wasteful, disruptive, and serving no relevant purpose.
And they wonder why there's an energy crunch. Let's all add another 500w of lighting to our entertainment rooms, and all the electronic gear to go with it!
Personally I think this is about as interesting as those plasma balls and fiber-optic lamps.
"In college" and "old Unix-running VAX" immediately remove this environment from any reasonable discussion. Management of resources in colleges is generally terrible, and upgrades are generally done when some huge technology endowment has been dropped in the dean's lap.
You're not looking for mathematics, you are looking for a solution to a problem. They arent' the same. Mathematics is a set of laws and relations that are applicable to numbers, not numbers themselves. Pi and e are mathematical truths, not answers.
The idea of "open" has NO applicability to mathematics.
C++ is a tool that takes some knowledge and experience to get right. First, you MUST know your compiler and how to make it work properly. One little compiler flag can make a huge difference. Secondly, if you're looking for speed, know your design and just how many constructors you're using. If you're constantly dynamically creating something that's several levels down the class hierarchy, expect some time to create those things. If you don't need all that construction or can't live with the costs, change your design. Thirdly, as someone else suggested, know your algorithms. That means know the mathematical complexity of what you're doing, and watch your call stack depth, and the value parameters in each item in the stack.
I promise you that the guy who picked up a Perl of Java book and was a whiz kid in a couple weeks won't find as much mastery in the same time with C++. He might have something that works, but I bet it won't work as well as it could.
"Practical work" is not a universal teacher, which axioms and definitions can be. Anyone with the properly translated axioms and definitions can make use of them.
Interpretation is always invovled in "real-world" examples. Real-world examples have undefined but assumed conditions, unstated constants, statistically eliminated edge-cases.
At some point you must be able to state a truth in an unequivocable fashion. Anything left implies that there is room for argument.
There is no doubt that ALL of mathematical knowledge is free to everyone. Truth of the mathematical nature cannot be hidden. It can be difficult for most to achieve its understanding, but there is no denying it to anyone who cares to make the effort to find it.
When you discard all that is not true, what you are left with can be nothing but truth.
In most of the higher math courses I've been in (Minor in numerical mathematics) there is a minimum level of understanding, which has generally included the ability to diagram the problem appropriately. What's missing is not the diagrams themselves, but the students' ability to put together what they acutally know into a proper understanding of the problem. They generally know all the pieces, but have not the inclination or the imagination to put it all together into understanding. This is what a really good teacher can bring out of his students.
You "serious" PC guys who've never worked in a shared environment on real hardware are insecure by nature. That whole "PC stops responding" notion is a falacy you've been lead to believe is normal. The HP-UX boxen we've had up for 150+ days without reboot are hooked to a Tandem high avialablitiy system, backed by redundant mainframes, all connected by redundant data paths. They go down when we tell them to. Get yourself to a "serious" environment and you can give up your hard drive click security blanket.
Much of the useless email is not pesonal correspondence as much as it is a bulletin announcement. In one group I worked in we set up a news server for this type of thing. We'd subscribe to topics we needed or wanted to monitor. It eliminated hundreds of copies of email each week.
The office email systems need to provide an easy, alternate interface to allow people to set up such bulletin boards/news groups within their organization, perhaps even setting up personal or arbitrary group posting areas. It would eliminate mass mailing and message bloat that comes with forwarding.
As long as you are not pulling cash out of your pocket for every episode of Survivor or whatever you like to watch you owe the publishers and producers the courtesy of tolerating their advertising.
You also owe the manufacturer of the cheap (relatively) mass-market products you buy for the success that mass-media advertising has brought them. Without mass-marketing those Doritos you munch and the Pepsi you slurp while watching mass-media would cost a ton more, if they'd be available at all. For regional or local markets to produce such items in smaller quantity would make them far more expensive.
First, Linux isn't even a close runner up in Unix workstations. HP has been a market leader in workstations for decades, and Sun I'm sure is the next second.
Second, open source serves well in Unix originated system services like bind, sendmail, etc. because those items are simple, well-defined, previously implemented items that no one is making money from as a core product. There's no risk to using an OS version of those. You don't base your business on those.
Try to con the CIO of a Fortune [1-9]0{1,3} company into putting his payroll, sales figures, customer data, whatever, on a product for which there isn't someone you can call 24x7x365, and for whom no one's share holders have bet their retirement. Has MySQL or PostgreSQL been charged with providing the monthly statements for 1.2 million customers who've executed roughly 50-200 trades each month? Have either been used to store the trade blotter for 1.2 billion shares traded on the NYSE? Oracle has stood up to those environments. It has grown into that environment over decades. Oracle and the other big boys have history.
As far as opening Oracle source, I'd bet the only customers for whom the licensing of the product is the major income for Oracle are those with one or two servers with tiny little databases. Support, ugrades, and consulting is where the money is. Open source that.
If you think you're good enough to ignore ideas like this and patterns, then I'd say you're judging yourself against your own yard stick in some two-bit shop that's still using Turbo C++ or VB. If you can't work within various paradigms you are NOT a top-level developer. The inability to work in other paradigms is a sign of YOUR rigidity and lack of flexibility.
If you worked for me I'd tell you to take your briliance packing.
All this moaning about privacy and security is getting old. People should use the same instincts about net use as they do in other activities. Would you trust some guy who walked up and said, "I'll deliver your messages. I've got a big fast truck and I'm your man!" That's what Hotmail and Excite and Yahoo mail and other services are. They're something you didn't ask for, but found to be convenient when they offered themselves. Sad fact is, they probably didn't tell you everything. If you're worried about their motives or their scruples, DON"T USE THEM! Use some service you know you can trust.
Just because they are big companies with large exposure you can't assume that they have a mandate to be ethical or even nice.
The April Scientific American has an article explaining how a new class of mid-sized black hole is being studied. One theory is that these IXOs (Intermdiate-luminosity X-ray Objects) are the result of the dying of the first generation of stars, which may have been giants because of the simpler structure of the universe.
Concentrating on what made you great is good, but being too centrally focused is not a good thing either. Look at all the dot-coms who put all their focus on a single product and went belly-up when technology shifted. (Remember push technology? Where is Stream Search now?) These large companies can use smaller, short-term side-projects to take some of the heat off when their core business is getting hammered. When they can participate in the hot market they make the gravy profits. When they're no longer paying great dividends, why not sell it before it's a money loser?
As a software consultant I've worked for several fortune 500/1000 companies and most had both MS SQL Server and Oracle or DB2 or who knows what. In EVERY instance it was NEVER the MS SQL Server handling the lifeblood transactions. The MS product was always handling table lookup and transitory information that was precursory to the real business transactions. This is how I gauge the real status of a database product. What do you trust it to do. Who cares how fast it is if you'd never put your business in its hands.