It was probably because 2010 sucked. I really wanted to like it, and I bought the DVD so that I could rewatch it and learn to like it, but it's so lame. The whole cold war angle was a bad move as well, though I understand why it was taken.
I agree that there are a ton of Visual Studio whores out there, but it all depends on how you learn the tool. The guys who initially tried to "sell" me on VS.NET did so claiming that everything was so "easy." I didn't use it because the things that would have truly made it easy (like populating datasets and binding them to web controls) still required some manual code when even Dreamweaver (which has a HORRIBLE.NET implementation) had managed to do this without. So I said to hell with it and I bought a great book called ASP.NET for Developers that showed you how all of.NET plumbing works and how to set everything up manually using a plain text editor.
After a year or so I started using Visual Studio to organize and compile my assemblies but I still didn't use it to write code. I finally moved over because of the IIS debugging features, but I hand code everything and dont screw with that drag and drop crap. As such it is light years ahead of what I was doing before and I really like it but I would hate it if my introduction to ASP.NET was though VS.NET.
I do understand the criticism though. I have tried some of the RAD features and they are lame. As best as I can tell, they are totally worthless with an object-oriented middle tier and it generates woefully inefficient CSS. But still, as a glorified text editor, it does ok.
Not even so much that as the fact that there are few code examples that can accomodate for every conceivable situation.
In many cases you'd have to turn out a ton of examples that would be much less efficient - in terms of the time / ease to produce and the time / ease to consume - than writing an abstraction of what the method in question requires and does.
Had I not actually gone through this process a number of times I would probably agree. But my experience has shown otherwise. The biggest problem isn't actually converting the design, the problem is troubleshooting the bugs (mainly in IE - peekaboo, guillotine anyone?) and finding workarounds. And as somebody that has been doing tableless designs for the past 4 years, no, CSS driven layouts are not easier. If anything they are harder because they don't require the insane levels of nesting and floating and THEN troubleshooting to get working. Tables just work.
Don't get me wrong, table-based designs suck and I have completely abandoned them, but as far as the ease of just throwing up a layout goes, I feel like it is infinitely easier to do a simple 3 column header / footer design with tables than it is with CSS.
If you've ever done serious web design then you know that going from a 5 year old plus table-based layout to a completely CSS-driven one is more like a Godzilla step.
More importantly, it makes things like what you are requesting relative bably steps.
the organization is usually shit, and half the time the apps look like they're banged together with no consideration for usability or appearance.
This statement could have been lifted directly from the Mozillazine.org archives in the period before the release of mozilla-browser (the very first iteration of what we know as Firefox). It was this discussion that spurned the development of Firefox / Firebird / Phoenix in the first place.
I recently applied for a Web Developer job that explicitly listed several certs as preferences and I have none. I did bring lots of documentation (ERDs, URLs, UML) with me though and beat out a number of other people who had certs and tertiary degrees (which I don't have either).
I would imagine that this may be a little different than, say, a networking job, but there are definitely other ways to prove how compenent you are.
On the flip side, I was on a hiring committee for a Technology Coordinator position that required coding skills and you can really just talk to a candidate and determine what they know. It takes mere seconds for them to play themselves.
Notice that those top guys aren't terribly good programmers either (Gates, Dell, Ellison, Jobs). You have a point, but let's make sure that we're comparing apples to apples.
The vast minority of IT guys that I know outside of the Engineering disciplines have related degrees. For years I worked under a dude with an undergrad in Petroleum Engineering and a grad degree in Accounting.
The thing about a degree is not that it ensures that you know anything (it doesn't), or are any good at what you do know. What it does is makes a statement about you committing to a reasonably demanding goal and finishing it. Grad degrees generally say a bit more about your analytical and written skills and your application of a certain subset of knowledge. Certifications kind of act as a sealant to fill in any gaps in knowledge you might have.
While these things are not the end-all-be-all of candidate qualifications, I think that it is childish to discount people who have go to the lengths to attain them. I know too many people with "experience" that are experienced in doing shit the wrong way and in a haphazard fashion.
This is where the real work of HR and recruitment comes in.
You're right, I am the exception. I have the charisma and skillset to get pretty much any job that I am interested in. That's why I only applied for one job and I got it. This is not the case for most people, as most people are average and don't routinely blow away their peers in interviews.
You are the exception, pretty much any career center will tell you that an average hunt for a professional job will take 4-6 months - assuming that you're unemployed (it can take longer if you aren't due to a lack of urgency). This is why most financial planners tell you to store away six months of living expenses.
I recently switched jobs and I got the one job that I applied for, they would have hired me on the spot but I had to close out some things with my previous employer. It took them about 3 months to call me in for the interview and I stayed at my old job for a month. I was lucky though, I know a lot of people who have been looking for a while.
A case can be made for almost every browser to have been technially superior for years.
Opera is cool, but it didn't get a respectable CSS engine until version 7. The interface is still way non-standard and a roadblock to a lot of people that I know adopting it. And from a technical standpoint, XUL is at least as revolutionary as anything that Opera has come up with.
Granted, Opera did a lot of things before Mozilla, Konq, or IE (particularly tabs and gestures), and is very fast, but speed to market only gives you bragging rights when everybody else takes your idea and does it better leaving you with memories (or fantasies in Opera's case) of market share.
Re:I liked Internet Explorer 7 the first time...
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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· Score: 1
It's only odd until you realize how hugely complex web browsers are. The W3C doesn't have the resources of Mozilla.org (particularly the legacy code) or Opera / Microsoft ($$$$) to maintain such development.
It may be intuitive because you are used to it, but not neccesarily because it is better. There are strong arguments for interactive parts of a web-centric application being on the right side of the screen and leaving the left side for content.
I am totally certain that the blink tag was a Netscape "innovation." Marquee was just Microsoft wanting catch up with Netscape in functionality as well as annoyance.
perhaps a) understanding your market or b) improving your product are equally as important.
Surely AMD has been at least as good as Intel on this for the past few years. Unfortunately that only gets you so far against an entrenched enemy like Intel.
I guess one good thing is that it does leave it up to the states to place restrictions on these developments. Hopefully they will. I think that the families do get a pretty fair market value for their homes, but of course the fair market value does nothing to compensate for the family history that can be tied up in a home.
Slashdot Mirror
That list is missing The Blair Witch Project which cost 35K to make and grossed over 140 million (248 worldwide).
How's that for ROI?
It was probably because 2010 sucked. I really wanted to like it, and I bought the DVD so that I could rewatch it and learn to like it, but it's so lame. The whole cold war angle was a bad move as well, though I understand why it was taken.
I agree that there are a ton of Visual Studio whores out there, but it all depends on how you learn the tool. The guys who initially tried to "sell" me on VS.NET did so claiming that everything was so "easy." I didn't use it because the things that would have truly made it easy (like populating datasets and binding them to web controls) still required some manual code when even Dreamweaver (which has a HORRIBLE .NET implementation) had managed to do this without. So I said to hell with it and I bought a great book called ASP.NET for Developers that showed you how all of .NET plumbing works and how to set everything up manually using a plain text editor.
After a year or so I started using Visual Studio to organize and compile my assemblies but I still didn't use it to write code. I finally moved over because of the IIS debugging features, but I hand code everything and dont screw with that drag and drop crap. As such it is light years ahead of what I was doing before and I really like it but I would hate it if my introduction to ASP.NET was though VS.NET.
I do understand the criticism though. I have tried some of the RAD features and they are lame. As best as I can tell, they are totally worthless with an object-oriented middle tier and it generates woefully inefficient CSS. But still, as a glorified text editor, it does ok.
I will burn a post just to say that Gattaca is one of my absolute favorite movies of all time.
Not even so much that as the fact that there are few code examples that can accomodate for every conceivable situation.
In many cases you'd have to turn out a ton of examples that would be much less efficient - in terms of the time / ease to produce and the time / ease to consume - than writing an abstraction of what the method in question requires and does.
Had I not actually gone through this process a number of times I would probably agree. But my experience has shown otherwise. The biggest problem isn't actually converting the design, the problem is troubleshooting the bugs (mainly in IE - peekaboo, guillotine anyone?) and finding workarounds. And as somebody that has been doing tableless designs for the past 4 years, no, CSS driven layouts are not easier. If anything they are harder because they don't require the insane levels of nesting and floating and THEN troubleshooting to get working. Tables just work.
Don't get me wrong, table-based designs suck and I have completely abandoned them, but as far as the ease of just throwing up a layout goes, I feel like it is infinitely easier to do a simple 3 column header / footer design with tables than it is with CSS.
But hey... YMMV.
If you've ever done serious web design then you know that going from a 5 year old plus table-based layout to a completely CSS-driven one is more like a Godzilla step.
More importantly, it makes things like what you are requesting relative bably steps.
the organization is usually shit, and half the time the apps look like they're banged together with no consideration for usability or appearance.
This statement could have been lifted directly from the Mozillazine.org archives in the period before the release of mozilla-browser (the very first iteration of what we know as Firefox). It was this discussion that spurned the development of Firefox / Firebird / Phoenix in the first place.
Bush? Nah this sounds more like a woman to me.
I recently applied for a Web Developer job that explicitly listed several certs as preferences and I have none. I did bring lots of documentation (ERDs, URLs, UML) with me though and beat out a number of other people who had certs and tertiary degrees (which I don't have either).
I would imagine that this may be a little different than, say, a networking job, but there are definitely other ways to prove how compenent you are.
On the flip side, I was on a hiring committee for a Technology Coordinator position that required coding skills and you can really just talk to a candidate and determine what they know. It takes mere seconds for them to play themselves.
Notice that those top guys aren't terribly good programmers either (Gates, Dell, Ellison, Jobs). You have a point, but let's make sure that we're comparing apples to apples.
The vast minority of IT guys that I know outside of the Engineering disciplines have related degrees. For years I worked under a dude with an undergrad in Petroleum Engineering and a grad degree in Accounting.
The thing about a degree is not that it ensures that you know anything (it doesn't), or are any good at what you do know. What it does is makes a statement about you committing to a reasonably demanding goal and finishing it. Grad degrees generally say a bit more about your analytical and written skills and your application of a certain subset of knowledge. Certifications kind of act as a sealant to fill in any gaps in knowledge you might have.
While these things are not the end-all-be-all of candidate qualifications, I think that it is childish to discount people who have go to the lengths to attain them. I know too many people with "experience" that are experienced in doing shit the wrong way and in a haphazard fashion.
This is where the real work of HR and recruitment comes in.
Get a job at a downtown university ;-)
You're right, I am the exception. I have the charisma and skillset to get pretty much any job that I am interested in. That's why I only applied for one job and I got it. This is not the case for most people, as most people are average and don't routinely blow away their peers in interviews.
You are the exception, pretty much any career center will tell you that an average hunt for a professional job will take 4-6 months - assuming that you're unemployed (it can take longer if you aren't due to a lack of urgency). This is why most financial planners tell you to store away six months of living expenses.
I recently switched jobs and I got the one job that I applied for, they would have hired me on the spot but I had to close out some things with my previous employer. It took them about 3 months to call me in for the interview and I stayed at my old job for a month. I was lucky though, I know a lot of people who have been looking for a while.
When all is said and done, all of the the Apple PR on the Mighty Mouse product page is a bit much.
... and apparently he found no surprises.
He did at least read part of the site...
A case can be made for almost every browser to have been technially superior for years.
Opera is cool, but it didn't get a respectable CSS engine until version 7. The interface is still way non-standard and a roadblock to a lot of people that I know adopting it. And from a technical standpoint, XUL is at least as revolutionary as anything that Opera has come up with.
Granted, Opera did a lot of things before Mozilla, Konq, or IE (particularly tabs and gestures), and is very fast, but speed to market only gives you bragging rights when everybody else takes your idea and does it better leaving you with memories (or fantasies in Opera's case) of market share.
It's only odd until you realize how hugely complex web browsers are. The W3C doesn't have the resources of Mozilla.org (particularly the legacy code) or Opera / Microsoft ($$$$) to maintain such development.
It may be intuitive because you are used to it, but not neccesarily because it is better. There are strong arguments for interactive parts of a web-centric application being on the right side of the screen and leaving the left side for content.
I am totally certain that the blink tag was a Netscape "innovation." Marquee was just Microsoft wanting catch up with Netscape in functionality as well as annoyance.
Since when did genocide get such a bad name?
I think that it was that little thing called The Holocaust.
WWJD?
perhaps a) understanding your market or b) improving your product are equally as important.
Surely AMD has been at least as good as Intel on this for the past few years. Unfortunately that only gets you so far against an entrenched enemy like Intel.
Good point about the future value of Real Estate.
I guess one good thing is that it does leave it up to the states to place restrictions on these developments. Hopefully they will. I think that the families do get a pretty fair market value for their homes, but of course the fair market value does nothing to compensate for the family history that can be tied up in a home.
It's not like the update will harm anything on your PC
*gasping for air*
Man, I needed that laugh. Thanks!