I used to believe this. I said, "Heck, there's two amps and they both have 0.01% distortion or less at reasonable volume levels, so who could ever tell the difference?" Well, when I upgraded my home stereo from a relatively cheap mass-market amp to a $2500 or so higher-end (but actually lower-power) amp I was astounded. It sounded ilke there was another octave of bass - all of a sudden, bass guitar sounded like the real thing. Kick drums had *kick*. And not just the bass end got better: the net result was nicely balanced, really clean, enjoyable sound (sorry I don't know any fancier audiophile jargon to describe this;-)). I don't know the technical reason for this. Maybe it's the nasty reactive load a speaker presents to the amp that makes amps that theoretically are the same sound different. But I'm a believer now. (No, neither of the amps I'm talking about are tubed. There are good tube amps *and* good transistor amps on the market now).
Yeah, but I also remember using a hideously overloaded one for development (about the same era). Took 24 hours or so to build from scratch, and 20 minutes to link the compiler I was building on it. I'm not very nostalgic for slow hardware.
Well, ok, there's inaccuracies in the movie. But I wouldn't lean too heavily on Christopher Hitchens to sort it all out for you. I don't think he has any coherent political philosophy. He's still a leftie (I guess) but he's spent a huge amount of time and energy lately arguing against other lefties that the Bush wars were really ok.
You can make an argument that the Afghan invasion had some rationale behind it. But Iraq is a different story. We didn't need to go there. We either had bad intel or we had leaders who didn't care what the intel was, as long as they got to take out Saddam. The results are gruesome, and I'm not just talking about the war. The consequences are that we've hardly got any friends left in the world. And we've got millions of Muslims with new reasons to hate us. Hitchens backing this war just tells me how confused he is.
Not nearly as common as it used to be. Formerly if you were mentally ill enough (or appeared to be) you'd be committed to a state hospital. These places often provided substandard care and some people were locked up who shouldn't be.
Now most of those facilities are closed or drastically scaled back. The plan was that their former inmates would be better off integrated into the community (as much as could be done) and that they'd get followup care and medication, just outside the institution. This seemed feasible since more effective medications have become available. But there's very little funding for this. A few overwored social workers are trying to make this system work, but it doesn't very well. A lot of very ill people are out on the street, off their meds, shunned by society.
Even if you have health insurance and can theoretically get good treatment, many HMOs and the like have severe limits on the amount and duration of mental health care they will cover. This can be a lifelong lillness, but don't count on your HMO funding lifelong care.
California has relatively high income taxes and a high sales tax. It has relatively low property tax rates (because of Prop. 13), although your overall property tax bill may be high if you live in an area with astronomical housing prices, like San Francisco. Overall there are worse states for taxes (New York is one). (Of course the CA governor is choosing to borrow rather than tax his way out of our recent economic difficulties, so you may get soaked eventually).
Not only is it hard to implement, if you have a look at Sun's JIT source code, which is available, it's almost impossible to understand. They didn't open source the design docs, just the code, and it is inscrutable. So maybe open sourcing Java would help less than you might think.
> A fair taxation scheme is needed...but, not a > income redistribution scheme.
Income distribution is becoming more skewed over time. Pay for CEOs and other top execs has gotten increasingly disconnected from any measure of how well they or the companies they head perform, and also has risen to ludicrous heights compared to what the average worker is making. There is truly no limit to human greed, and most of the people who are getting (and increasingly, keeping) vast amounts of wealth are not going to step off the gravy train voluntarily.
Some people may still think this is just fine, it is the capitalist system at work. Others may think there's a problem, but there's a non-governmental solution. But personally I think some degree of income redistribution by government is just fine (and I'm in an income bracket where I'd almost certainly be on the giving end rather than the receiving end of this).
Re:This is about Server support, not desktop/lapto
on
Dell's New Linux Blog
·
· Score: 1
They apparently don't support it on servers very well, either.
I was browsing their site the other day to see if you could buy a server pre-configured with Red Hat Advanced Server. Turns out your choices are:
"Linux 9 Professional, Factory Installed [add $169 or $5/month1]" or "Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1, Non-factory installation [add $799 or $22/month1]"
What does "Non-factory installation" mean? And what's "Linux 9 Professional"? If it's Red Hat 9, Red Hat doesn't support it any more.
I've worked on C++ systems that were over 250,000 lines of code. No way I am turning someone loose on a system that size who doesn't know the language backwards, forwards, and sideways. Yeah, you can pick up the basics in a couple weeks of cramming. But if you're to have to read and understand something huge and complex in the language and then modify/improve it in ways that don't also break it, then you need a high degree of skill and experience, to the point where you don't even need the language referece manual. (This comment of course also applies to systems in languages other than C++.. big Java systems, for example).
Minor problem: a lot of teaching jobs pay almost nothing. Tenured professors, they do ok (you need a Ph.D. and a flair for writing grant proposals). Tech "experts" with enough credibility to charge multi hundreds or thousands for a course, not bad work if you can get it. But without an advanced degree or big reputation, you'd probably at best be able to work at a community college or trade school, for little pay and no job security.
Not a bad idea, but maybe it is worth springing for something like Norton Anti-Virus. It scans incoming and outgoing mail and can auto-remove virus/worm attachments (yes, it works with Mozilla). It can also be configured to auto-update itself, which is pretty essential IMO.
Right. That is really the essence of it. Most will screw the employer just as bad as the employee. They just want to get a warm body placed so they can go on to the next suck^H^H^H^Hclient. They don't care if you're happy in the job, if you're a good fit for the company, if the company has a future... expect a lot of pressure to just sign up for something, so they get their pay.
It's far, far better to have your own network of contacts when you're job hunting, than to rely on some slime-trailing headhunter. Collect business cards, go to trade shows & conferences, keep in touch. It's not really hard.
This was great advice in 1999. Not anymore. When times got tough, guess who we let go first? All those expensive high hourly rate contractors. They were the first to go because they're expensive, and because there's no hassle about letting them go, since they were temporary from the get-go. Have we hired any in the last 2-3 years? Not that I know of.
Amazon has track samples for many CDs available online and also has user reviews. The reviews aren't 100% reliable of course, but Amazon filters them before posting, so they tend not to be total drivel. I've found them helpful.
Plus, they are also a broker for third-party CD sales, including used CDs. I do wonder about some of the third parties using their site who claim to offer new CDs at discount prices--were these promos, or they fell off a truck, or what? It is similar to some offline CD stores who seem to be able to get "gray market" goods. But I've bought a few this way and not gotten burned, so far.
Huh? There is a Sun reference implemention of J2EE, but if you read the license you will realize it's not free software: you don't get rights to modify it or redistribute it. You can get the source code, but there is a separate, complex license for that. Also, it is explicitly not licensed for commercial use. You can't run a business off it. Finally, it is also not intended to be fast or stable: it is built for correctness, not performance (although they don't even do the correctness part very well: there are bugs).
Well, you could live on $100K, or less, in Silicon Valley. People do. I did for a while, the main compromise being that I lived in a seedy downtown part of San Jose (which is still not that bad, compared to a lot of cities).
OTOH, it is very, very easy to spend a 5-figure income here. Especially if you buy a house. You not only have mortgage payments (at least most do), but you get to pay property taxes based on absurdly inflated real estate prices.
There are a few areas where costs are going down, like online CRM where you basically rent software you can access over the Web, and that can cost a lot less than installing a complex, expensive system on your own boxes.
But in general, software development costs do not go down 50% every 18 months. It would be great if they did, but there's no exponential growth in software productivity. Software development is still a painful, slow undertaking, especially if you are talking about large projects like an ERP system. Companies who make this stuff charge big $$ partly because it costs them big $$ to make and support their wares. Maybe they charge too much, and maybe sometimes their stuff is crappy, but it isn't going away soon, and it also isn't going to cost a lot less anytime soon, IMO.
Open source doesn't help here, because no large company trusts open source software to run stuff like their accounting system.
As pointed out, it is under license terms you might not like.
Also, many of the interesting bits, such as the optimizing compiler, are almost impossible to understand from the source code. They do not release design docs, tutorials, HOWTOs, or whatever, for people working on the source. There are source comments, but it is not at all easy to pick up an overall idea of how it works from reading those.
You should be flamed for generalizing, because the whole problem of ageism comes from generalizing about older workers.
I'm in my 40s. I remember programming on OS/360 with punch cards, in assembler. But that doesn't mean I'm stuck there.
In the mid 90's I taught myself Microsoft C++, MFC, OLE, etc., when it was real hot stuff.
Then when that got old, I got into Java. I'm on several Java standards groups where I am very close to the cutting edge of technology.
Older != stops learning new skills.
Re:Who's got the time?
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Absolutely. When I was teaching at a university, I used to tell my students, "You will never have more free time than you presently have. Make the most of it". They thought I was crazy - they had full schedules of courses and felt busy enough. But they mostly didn't yet have a full time job, a family, a house to maintain, and all the other things that suck free time (there is goodness in these things, of course, but that's their downside).
Modern top-level computer chess programs don't really use a "fairly unsophisticated brute force mathematical approach". They have significant amounts of chess knowledge encoded in them. Also the search process itself is sometimes highly speculative. Other posters have mentioned null move pruning, which is a risky but effective way to reduce the size of the search tree. There are other techniques of this sort. It is not trivial to build a chess program that's simultaneously fast, knowledgable, and efficient. And the top humans are still good enough that you need a really good program to beat them, at tournament time controls.
Still the point is valid that a chess program is a very different beast than a human. The best programs do not mimic what humans do: they optimize playing the game in a very different way.
Sun runs both JavaSoft (a R&D and standards organization, basically) and a software business based on Java technology (they are calling this Sun ONE now). JavaSoft doesn't make them any money, and the Sun ONE stuff isn't getting much traction in the market. So from a pure business point of view, their "Java business" is not very attractive.
However, right now IBM has to comply with Java standards set by Sun and other vendors in a bunch of technical committees they (IBM) don't control. They would probably like to be in the driver's seat on this instead of Sun.
Ok, if you make $200K, you indeed have security and comfort a lot of people don't have, and you should be grateful for that. But if you've got a high-stress job, a pointy-haired boss, and a bad commute, maybe you're calculating that it's not worth it. Plus, if (like me) you're in Silicon Valley, you could easily have the same or better lifestyle on half your current salary, if you were willing to relocate. This is the most expensive place to live in the country, bar none.
Many companies do have too many systems, and an overall architecture that is "designed" bottom up (by departments making independent decisions) rather than top down. But don't underestimate the costs of ripping out something that works and is running a crucial part of your business. Sometimes it is better to set up an integration bridge that will get one system's data into the other systems that need it, while keeping the ends of the bridge intact.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to believe this. I said, "Heck, there's two amps and they both have 0.01% distortion or less at reasonable volume levels, so who could ever tell the difference?" Well, when I upgraded my home stereo from a relatively cheap mass-market amp to a $2500 or so higher-end (but actually lower-power) amp I was astounded. It sounded ilke there was another octave of bass - all of a sudden, bass guitar sounded like the real thing. Kick drums had *kick*. And not just the bass end got better: the net result was nicely balanced, really clean, enjoyable sound (sorry I don't know any fancier audiophile jargon to describe this ;-)). I don't know the technical reason for this. Maybe it's the nasty reactive load a speaker presents to the amp that makes amps that theoretically are the same sound different. But I'm a believer now. (No, neither of the amps I'm talking about are tubed. There are good tube amps *and* good transistor amps on the market now).
Yeah, but I also remember using a hideously overloaded one for development (about the same era). Took 24 hours or so to build from scratch, and 20 minutes to link the compiler I was building on it. I'm not very nostalgic for slow hardware.
--Jon
Well, ok, there's inaccuracies in the movie. But I wouldn't lean too heavily on Christopher Hitchens to sort it all out for you. I don't think he has any coherent political philosophy. He's still a leftie (I guess) but he's spent a huge amount of time and energy lately arguing against other lefties that the Bush wars were really ok.
You can make an argument that the Afghan invasion had some rationale behind it. But Iraq is a different story. We didn't need to go there. We either had bad intel or we had leaders who didn't care what the intel was, as long as they got to take out Saddam. The results are gruesome, and I'm not just talking about the war. The consequences are that we've hardly got any friends left in the world. And we've got millions of Muslims with new reasons to hate us. Hitchens backing this war just tells me how confused he is.
Not nearly as common as it used to be. Formerly if you were mentally ill enough (or appeared to be) you'd be committed to a state hospital. These places often provided substandard care and some people were locked up who shouldn't be.
Now most of those facilities are closed or drastically scaled back. The plan was that their former inmates would be better off integrated into the community (as much as could be done) and that they'd get followup care and medication, just outside the institution. This seemed feasible since more effective medications have become available. But there's very little funding for this. A few overwored social workers are trying to make this system work, but it doesn't very well. A lot of very ill people are out on the street, off their meds, shunned by society.
Even if you have health insurance and can theoretically get good treatment, many HMOs and the like have severe limits on the amount and duration of mental health care they will cover. This can be a lifelong lillness, but don't count on your HMO funding lifelong care.
California has relatively high income taxes and a high sales tax. It has relatively low property tax rates (because of Prop. 13), although your overall property tax bill may be high if you live in an area with astronomical housing prices, like San Francisco. Overall there are worse states for taxes (New York is one). (Of course the CA governor is choosing to borrow rather than tax his way out of our recent economic difficulties, so you may get soaked eventually).
Not only is it hard to implement, if you have a look at Sun's JIT source code, which is available, it's almost impossible to understand. They didn't open source the design docs, just the code, and it is inscrutable. So maybe open sourcing Java would help less than you might think.
> A fair taxation scheme is needed...but, not a
> income redistribution scheme.
Income distribution is becoming more skewed over time. Pay for CEOs and other top execs has gotten increasingly disconnected from any measure of how well they or the companies they head perform, and also has risen to ludicrous heights compared to what the average worker is making. There is truly no limit to human greed, and most of the people who are getting (and increasingly, keeping) vast amounts of wealth are not going to step off the gravy train voluntarily.
Some people may still think this is just fine, it is the capitalist system at work. Others may think there's a problem, but there's a non-governmental solution. But personally I think some degree of income redistribution by government is just fine (and I'm in an income bracket where I'd almost certainly be on the giving end rather than the receiving end of this).
They apparently don't support it on servers very well, either.
I was browsing their site the other day to see if you could buy a server pre-configured with Red Hat Advanced Server. Turns out your choices are:
"Linux 9 Professional, Factory Installed [add $169 or $5/month1]"
or
"Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1, Non-factory installation [add $799 or $22/month1]"
What does "Non-factory installation" mean? And what's "Linux 9 Professional"? If it's Red Hat 9, Red Hat doesn't support it any more.
I've worked on C++ systems that were over 250,000 lines of code. No way I am turning someone loose on a system that size who doesn't know the language backwards, forwards, and sideways. Yeah, you can pick up the basics in a couple weeks of cramming. But if you're to have to read and understand something huge and complex in the language and then modify/improve it in ways that don't also break it, then you need a high degree of skill and experience, to the point where you don't even need the language referece manual. (This comment of course also applies to systems in languages other than C++ .. big Java systems, for example).
Minor problem: a lot of teaching jobs pay almost nothing. Tenured professors, they do ok (you need a Ph.D. and a flair for writing grant proposals). Tech "experts" with enough credibility to charge multi hundreds or thousands for a course, not bad work if you can get it. But without an advanced degree or big reputation, you'd probably at best be able to work at a community college or trade school, for little pay and no job security.
Not a bad idea, but maybe it is worth springing for something like Norton Anti-Virus. It scans incoming and outgoing mail and can auto-remove virus/worm attachments (yes, it works with Mozilla). It can also be configured to auto-update itself, which is pretty essential IMO.
Right. That is really the essence of it. Most will screw the employer just as bad as the employee. They just want to get a warm body placed so they can go on to the next suck^H^H^H^Hclient. They don't care if you're happy in the job, if you're a good fit for the company, if the company has a future ... expect a lot of pressure to just sign up for something, so they get their pay.
It's far, far better to have your own network of contacts when you're job hunting, than to rely on some slime-trailing headhunter. Collect business cards, go to trade shows & conferences, keep in touch. It's not really hard.
This was great advice in 1999. Not anymore. When times got tough, guess who we let go first? All those expensive high hourly rate contractors. They were the first to go because they're expensive, and because there's no hassle about letting them go, since they were temporary from the get-go. Have we hired any in the last 2-3 years? Not that I know of.
Amazon has track samples for many CDs available online and also has user reviews. The reviews aren't 100% reliable of course, but Amazon filters them before posting, so they tend not to be total drivel. I've found them helpful.
Plus, they are also a broker for third-party CD sales, including used CDs. I do wonder about some of the third parties using their site who claim to offer new CDs at discount prices--were these promos, or they fell off a truck, or what? It is similar to some offline CD stores who seem to be able to get "gray market" goods. But I've bought a few this way and not gotten burned, so far.
Huh? There is a Sun reference implemention of J2EE, but if you read the license you will realize it's not free software: you don't get rights to modify it or redistribute it. You can get the source code, but there is a separate, complex license for that. Also, it is explicitly not licensed for commercial use. You can't run a business off it. Finally, it is also not intended to be fast or stable: it is built for correctness, not performance (although they don't even do the correctness part very well: there are bugs).
Well, you could live on $100K, or less, in Silicon Valley. People do. I did for a while, the main compromise being that I lived in a seedy downtown part of San Jose (which is still not that bad, compared to a lot of cities).
OTOH, it is very, very easy to spend a 5-figure income here. Especially if you buy a house. You not only have mortgage payments (at least most do), but you get to pay property taxes based on absurdly inflated real estate prices.
There are a few areas where costs are going down, like online CRM where you basically rent software you can access over the Web, and that can cost a lot less than installing a complex, expensive system on your own boxes.
But in general, software development costs do not go down 50% every 18 months. It would be great if they did, but there's no exponential growth in software productivity. Software development is still a painful, slow undertaking, especially if you are talking about large projects like an ERP system. Companies who make this stuff charge big $$ partly because it costs them big $$ to make and support their wares. Maybe they charge too much, and maybe sometimes their stuff is crappy, but it isn't going away soon, and it also isn't going to cost a lot less anytime soon, IMO.
Open source doesn't help here, because no large company trusts open source software to run stuff like their accounting system.
IntelliJ is an excellent Java IDE.
As pointed out, it is under license terms you might not like.
Also, many of the interesting bits, such as the optimizing compiler, are almost impossible to understand from the source code. They do not release design docs, tutorials, HOWTOs, or whatever, for people working on the source. There are source comments, but it is not at all easy to pick up an overall idea of how it works from reading those.
You should be flamed for generalizing, because the whole problem of ageism comes from generalizing about older workers.
I'm in my 40s. I remember programming on OS/360 with punch cards, in assembler. But that doesn't mean I'm stuck there.
In the mid 90's I taught myself Microsoft C++, MFC, OLE, etc., when it was real hot stuff.
Then when that got old, I got into Java. I'm on several Java standards groups where I am very close to the cutting edge of technology.
Older != stops learning new skills.
Absolutely. When I was teaching at a university, I used to tell my students, "You will never have more free time than you presently have. Make the most of it". They thought I was crazy - they had full schedules of courses and felt busy enough. But they mostly didn't yet have a full time job, a family, a house to maintain, and all the other things that suck free time (there is goodness in these things, of course, but that's their downside).
Modern top-level computer chess programs don't really use a "fairly unsophisticated brute force mathematical approach". They have significant amounts of chess knowledge encoded in them. Also the search process itself is sometimes highly speculative. Other posters have mentioned null move pruning, which is a risky but effective way to reduce the size of the search tree. There are other techniques of this sort. It is not trivial to build a chess program that's simultaneously fast, knowledgable, and efficient. And the top humans are still good enough that you need a really good program to beat them, at tournament time controls.
Still the point is valid that a chess program is a very different beast than a human. The best programs do not mimic what humans do: they optimize playing the game in a very different way.
Sun runs both JavaSoft (a R&D and standards organization, basically) and a software business based on Java technology (they are calling this Sun ONE now). JavaSoft doesn't make them any money, and the Sun ONE stuff isn't getting much traction in the market. So from a pure business point of view, their "Java business" is not very attractive.
However, right now IBM has to comply with Java standards set by Sun and other vendors in a bunch of technical committees they (IBM) don't control. They would probably like to be in the driver's seat on this instead of Sun.
Ok, if you make $200K, you indeed have security and comfort a lot of people don't have, and you should be grateful for that. But if you've got a high-stress job, a pointy-haired boss, and a bad commute, maybe you're calculating that it's not worth it. Plus, if (like me) you're in Silicon Valley, you could easily have the same or better lifestyle on half your current salary, if you were willing to relocate. This is the most expensive place to live in the country, bar none.
Many companies do have too many systems, and an overall architecture that is "designed" bottom up (by departments making independent decisions) rather than top down. But don't underestimate the costs of ripping out something that works and is running a crucial part of your business. Sometimes it is better to set up an integration bridge that will get one system's data into the other systems that need it, while keeping the ends of the bridge intact.