I think it's more Joe myEmployee Public that matters to the companies. The companies want to use computer systems the general public knows how to use, so they can hire someone, plop them down at a desk, and expect them to be productive.
> "Ok, now open the control panel." > "What control panel?" > "Click Start, then click control panel." > "Start? What Start?"
Exasperated tech support guy takes a deep breath to stop from screaming. "Ok, use the mouse, point to the lower left of the screen..." "What mouse?" "Arrrgghhh!!!!"
Level two support: "Do you have ssh?" "Of course" "Ok, what the ip address and the root password?" "Nice try." "Well, I can't help you if you don't give me the root password." "You said it." "I said what?" "You can't help me."
Level three uber-tech-support from hell: "Ah, yes, I can see what the problem is." "You can?" "Of course. Lemme fix it" "But how can you get in? You don't even have an account on the server?" "Correction, it's you that doesn't have an account... anymore. BWAHAHAHA."
Sorry. I'll go back to coding crappy corporate proprietary code...
make sure that the page design makes it easy for the search engine to index (and make sure that the crawler can find every page) and make sure that the page copy is well-written and descriptive
What you are describing is a site written with the reader in mind. Those are the sites that need not worry about getting google rankings, because google will rank them well.
You see, most sites that care about SOE do so because they are a business entity, and want to drive eyeballs, ahem, customers, to their web sites so that they will buy products and make the company founders rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Of course, most of those sites add absolutely no value to the customer.
So, SOE is something that the marketing firms latch on because site/business owners think (rightly so because their site is crap) they need to spend money on to attract customers.
These people of course do not realize that google does not want that to happen so that they keep tweaking the search engine to drop the crap sites.
Call to the mods would be justified, except for the fact that he is right.
It may be slightly offtopic, I agree, but the discussion was (and I rtfa) about windows vista slippage. Now, Microsoft makes software to make money. And they are making Windows Vista to make money (ask any MSFT investor). The problem with slippage, bad management, code complexity, and a culture of not telling the truth directly affects the ability to sell the software, which directly affects invertor returns. Now, the longer Microsoft waits to ship, the more time competitors have to create more compelling software, and this means that the Microsoft software is less valuable in the marketplace. It's about time-to-market. The longer you wait, the more and better choices your consumers are going to have.
In the GP's case, that has happened a long time ago. But it is starting to happen more and more for regular users. And that is why MS wants to ship Vista ASAP.
The PRC has $900 billion in foreign cash reserves (just topped Japan recently to the #1 spot in the world).
How hard would it be to spend 5 billion of that on an "alternate" chip manufacturing plant.
You're right about it being insanely complex and insanely expensive. But the Chinese gov't is not above that. See the Three Gorge Dam project that displaced 1.2 million people and cost from $25B to $100B depending on who you ask.
Now, you're a Chinese Army general. How much of your budget and manpower are you willing to part with in exchange for advance information of US troop movement, weaponry deployment, weapon systems capabilities, transcripts of emails between high ranking US government officials, especially when it's _your_job_ to take Taiwan back in this lifetime?
Now, you start to see that no expense is too great and no job too complex for the rich and educated chinese elite/gov't.
Oh, and forget about sneaking the chips into the mainstream. Put the backdoor on every single chip manufactured, subsidise the factory to make sure it has the lowest price-point, and ship worldwide with a grin on your face and a "Glad to be doing business with you" on your lips.
I am going to agree. Java is just too far behind. It's the new COBOL.
American programmers are moving away from it (those that know how to see the future at the bottom of the coffee mug) because they realize that doing java in a corporate job is being at the end of the chain in a 60+ man project with all the remotely creative decisions done by people before the programmers, and they are just implementers of badly-written 500 pages spec that absolutely lack any spark of brilliance, all the while fearing outsourcing by Cognizant and IBM Global Services (yes, India, China, and various sundry other countries) and fighting against newly-minted foreign-born H-1 Visa-holding programmers who think that $63,000/yr would just be quite satifactory and who are itching to take on any project and demonstrate to foggy-eyed managers how many more lines of code they can produce than said American Programmers.
Enter Ruby, Python, and the very esoteric language known as C, and many other beasts (see Factor): tools all for the Great American Hacker to weave magical dream machines that web-service, self-introspect, metacode themselves, and baffle any attempt at explanation but are Rather Tiny, Dastardly Clever and Entirely Fast Enough; coded in 4 days rather than 3 months (as promised) + another 9 months (because management can't see Sunk Costs when it stares them in the face)of which said programmer grandly pronounce, chest a-puffing: "I was instrumental in the design, implementation, and maintenance of the Garguantuan multi-million dollar soul-crushing Monstruosity", would rather effacably mumble "I dabble in computers" and return to watching the "you got an f" veedub commercial on youtube as soon as fleet-footed managers have returned to their dens of power with doors and minds that close.
Forget.NET. Go with Python. It has features that.NET doesn't support yet. They do try (see IronPython), but the Python C implementation has been years in the making is the love child of some of the brightest out there. It's getting to be plenty fast for most tasks, and is so insanely easier to use than java that it's not even funny. Classes are namespaces. Think on that a bit. Then, go run amok in Ruby land, following Matz's fantasy. At last, embrace the Way of UNIX, as so eloquently expounded by none other than ESR.
Java is fighting a rear-guard action. The language is 10 years old. It should be so much better by now. Python is the same age as linux, both 15-16 years old. They are more mature, more robust, more accepted and accepting.
I personally know (irl) -- an 11 year old girl (daughter of ex-coworker) whose MySpace profile says she's 17 -- a 30 year old woman whose MySpace profile says she's 14.
The former to explore the world, the latter not to be explored by the world.
If you have a 80% market share and make a billion dollars in net profits for your investors, and the other company has a 20% market share and make 1.2 billion dollars in net profits for your investors, you are falling behind.
GM sold 9 million plus cars in 2005, and still managed to have a net loss of 9 billion dollars. Toyota sold 8.2 million cars in the same period, and posted 5.6 billion dollars in net profits.
You see, market share means nothing to investors. They like profits.
Heck, just trigger the bomb when you detect any RFID signal. Only people and stuff from western nations will have them. Do you think for a second that Iranian, Syrian, and Lebanese passports will have RFID tags?
Ah, unfortunately, I do with Oracle. 5TB worth, and the table listing takes forever to load (in thousands). We use PLSQL Developer, toad, ERWIN, Informatica, pl/sql...
I'll agree with you that Oracle is a bear.
It's a little like an aircraft carrier. All bow before it, but you need 6,000 crew and 30 support vessels to be fully operational. But then you can project power all over the world and piss off third world nations.
There are how many AC in active duty worldwide? 10, 15 top?
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a line from that Disney remake that's strangely apropos:
"The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all."
Uh, no.
It it translated as: "None is supposed to ignore the law."
Yes, I am French.
The only way to win is not to play.
Completely offtopic but there it goes:
It's Draft on the western side of the Atlantic because we're still trying to perfect the brews.
Well, I have a spin on that.
:)
With Vista's hardware requirements, there's gonna be plenty of old machines to convert to Ubuntu
I think it's more Joe myEmployee Public that matters to the companies. The companies want to use computer systems the general public knows how to use, so they can hire someone, plop them down at a desk, and expect them to be productive.
it's in the embrace stage.
Agreed, and most people who need to do these one-off jobs do them often enough that they have spare hardware to run them on.
> "Ok, now open the control panel."
> "What control panel?"
> "Click Start, then click control panel."
> "Start? What Start?"
Exasperated tech support guy takes a deep breath to stop from screaming.
"Ok, use the mouse, point to the lower left of the screen..."
"What mouse?"
"Arrrgghhh!!!!"
Level two support:
"Do you have ssh?"
"Of course"
"Ok, what the ip address and the root password?"
"Nice try."
"Well, I can't help you if you don't give me the root password."
"You said it."
"I said what?"
"You can't help me."
Level three uber-tech-support from hell:
"Ah, yes, I can see what the problem is."
"You can?"
"Of course. Lemme fix it"
"But how can you get in? You don't even have an account on the server?"
"Correction, it's you that doesn't have an account... anymore. BWAHAHAHA."
Sorry. I'll go back to coding crappy corporate proprietary code...
Too Funny...
I'm not disagreeing with you.
Unfortunately, management generally believes that a web site is not something that should require one (or more) well-paid fte athat know their stuff.
Most small non-software companies want to compete in Google but don't want to invest the time/money.
For them, SEO is the keyword of the day.
For those that "get it", SEO becomes irrelevent, since they are going to enjoy top google rankings regardless.
make sure that the page design makes it easy for the search engine to index (and make sure that the crawler can find every page) and make sure that the page copy is well-written and descriptive
What you are describing is a site written with the reader in mind. Those are the sites that need not worry about getting google rankings, because google will rank them well.
Ah, but that would not work.
You see, most sites that care about SOE do so because they are a business entity, and want to drive eyeballs, ahem, customers, to their web sites so that they will buy products and make the company founders rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Of course, most of those sites add absolutely no value to the customer.
So, SOE is something that the marketing firms latch on because site/business owners think (rightly so because their site is crap) they need to spend money on to attract customers.
These people of course do not realize that google does not want that to happen so that they keep tweaking the search engine to drop the crap sites.
This is the perfect "nerd revenge" if you ask me.
Except when it doesn't come out of your cost center.
Call to the mods would be justified, except for the fact that he is right.
It may be slightly offtopic, I agree, but the discussion was (and I rtfa) about windows vista slippage. Now, Microsoft makes software to make money. And they are making Windows Vista to make money (ask any MSFT investor). The problem with slippage, bad management, code complexity, and a culture of not telling the truth directly affects the ability to sell the software, which directly affects invertor returns. Now, the longer Microsoft waits to ship, the more time competitors have to create more compelling software, and this means that the Microsoft software is less valuable in the marketplace. It's about time-to-market. The longer you wait, the more and better choices your consumers are going to have.
In the GP's case, that has happened a long time ago. But it is starting to happen more and more for regular users. And that is why MS wants to ship Vista ASAP.
The PRC has $900 billion in foreign cash reserves (just topped Japan recently to the #1 spot in the world).
How hard would it be to spend 5 billion of that on an "alternate" chip manufacturing plant.
You're right about it being insanely complex and insanely expensive. But the Chinese gov't is not above that. See the Three Gorge Dam project that displaced 1.2 million people and cost from $25B to $100B depending on who you ask.
Now, you're a Chinese Army general. How much of your budget and manpower are you willing to part with in exchange for advance information of US troop movement, weaponry deployment, weapon systems capabilities, transcripts of emails between high ranking US government officials, especially when it's _your_job_ to take Taiwan back in this lifetime?
Now, you start to see that no expense is too great and no job too complex for the rich and educated chinese elite/gov't.
Oh, and forget about sneaking the chips into the mainstream. Put the backdoor on every single chip manufactured, subsidise the factory to make sure it has the lowest price-point, and ship worldwide with a grin on your face and a "Glad to be doing business with you" on your lips.
Yeah, you're right. I wasn't comparing languages. I was thinking of the perception in corporations.
I am going to agree. Java is just too far behind. It's the new COBOL.
.NET. Go with Python. It has features that .NET doesn't support yet. They do try (see IronPython), but the Python C implementation has been years in the making is the love child of some of the brightest out there. It's getting to be plenty fast for most tasks, and is so insanely easier to use than java that it's not even funny. Classes are namespaces. Think on that a bit. Then, go run amok in Ruby land, following Matz's fantasy. At last, embrace the Way of UNIX, as so eloquently expounded by none other than ESR.
.Net have more robust libraries, constructs, and frameworks. I shall remind you all that the way of UNIX leads to simplicity and depth of understanding. See Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines. (for those who grok that, see Master Foo Discourses on the Unix-Nature).
American programmers are moving away from it (those that know how to see the future at the bottom of the coffee mug) because they realize that doing java in a corporate job is being at the end of the chain in a 60+ man project with all the remotely creative decisions done by people before the programmers, and they are just implementers of badly-written 500 pages spec that absolutely lack any spark of brilliance, all the while fearing outsourcing by Cognizant and IBM Global Services (yes, India, China, and various sundry other countries) and fighting against newly-minted foreign-born H-1 Visa-holding programmers who think that $63,000/yr would just be quite satifactory and who are itching to take on any project and demonstrate to foggy-eyed managers how many more lines of code they can produce than said American Programmers.
Enter Ruby, Python, and the very esoteric language known as C, and many other beasts (see Factor): tools all for the Great American Hacker to weave magical dream machines that web-service, self-introspect, metacode themselves, and baffle any attempt at explanation but are Rather Tiny, Dastardly Clever and Entirely Fast Enough; coded in 4 days rather than 3 months (as promised) + another 9 months (because management can't see Sunk Costs when it stares them in the face)of which said programmer grandly pronounce, chest a-puffing: "I was instrumental in the design, implementation, and maintenance of the Garguantuan multi-million dollar soul-crushing Monstruosity", would rather effacably mumble "I dabble in computers" and return to watching the "you got an f" veedub commercial on youtube as soon as fleet-footed managers have returned to their dens of power with doors and minds that close.
Forget
Java is fighting a rear-guard action. The language is 10 years old. It should be so much better by now. Python is the same age as linux, both 15-16 years old. They are more mature, more robust, more accepted and accepting.
Alas, many will claim that java and
I'm going to echo that.
I personally know (irl)
-- an 11 year old girl (daughter of ex-coworker) whose MySpace profile says she's 17
-- a 30 year old woman whose MySpace profile says she's 14.
The former to explore the world, the latter not to be explored by the world.
That's all I'll say about that.
So you're saying there have been requests that have been declined?
If you have a 80% market share and make a billion dollars in net profits for your investors, and the other company has a 20% market share and make 1.2 billion dollars in net profits for your investors, you are falling behind.
GM sold 9 million plus cars in 2005, and still managed to have a net loss of 9 billion dollars. Toyota sold 8.2 million cars in the same period, and posted 5.6 billion dollars in net profits.
You see, market share means nothing to investors. They like profits.
That's true, but again, I don't think the terrorists care.
Heck, just trigger the bomb when you detect any RFID signal. Only people and stuff from western nations will have them. Do you think for a second that Iranian, Syrian, and Lebanese passports will have RFID tags?
And babes. Let's not forget babes.
>>> you work a lot with databases don't you ?
Ah, unfortunately, I do with Oracle. 5TB worth, and the table listing takes forever to load (in thousands).
We use PLSQL Developer, toad, ERWIN, Informatica, pl/sql...
I'll agree with you that Oracle is a bear.
It's a little like an aircraft carrier. All bow before it, but you need 6,000 crew and 30 support vessels to be fully operational. But then you can project power all over the world and piss off third world nations.
There are how many AC in active duty worldwide? 10, 15 top?
I'm rambling. I'll stop now.