ASUS and their peers copied the idea about 10 years after the first netbook and started a new boom of cheap latop-like mobile computers.
Netbooks were started by ASUS and their peers as an 'appliance' laptop- They were Linux based and only cost a few hundred bucks. Microsoft didn't try to get into it until it was posing as a threat to Windows!
Let me fix that for you:
Netbooks were started by PSION as an 'appliance' laptop- They were EPOC based and only cost a few hundred bucks AND had 40 hrs of battery uptime. Microsoft did get into it with the last Edition WindowsCE, because PSION thought it would be a great Idea to get in bed with MS. PSION standing in the mobile market folded shortly thereafter, just as Nokia is folding now.
A shame actually, the original Netbook [wikipedia.org] was a very good machine with some features we can only dream about even today, 13 years later (like a really awesome keyboard despite the really small size)
EPOC went on to become the awesome Symbian Mobile OS which Nokia dropped after getting in bed with MS.... What a coincidence.
To be honest I'd take a ancient DOS 4.0 System written in QBasic over Google Docs any time.
First of all: Moving to Google Drive for critical docs is a stupid idea. We (me and my freelancer crew) have team stuff on Google Docs, but those are for the very most part non-critical things. The rest are docs in Git Versioning with a central virtual server to push and pull. If Google Docs shuts us down, we won't miss a step. And if our vhost ISP folds, it takes me (or anybody else on the core team) to completely set up a new one and clone to that in less than an hour. That's how it should be.
I suggest you talk to Bob about doing a redo of the system *together*, preferably on x86 Linux, some kind of distriubted versioning (Bazaar has an x-plattform idiot-safe GUI as part of the core project) and maybe with a web-frontend. There are tons of easy setup/maintain FOSS systems that offer solutions for stuff like this. Help him sort the docs and show him some neat new stuff in the FOSS world and see to it that you *both* decide which system to slowly migrate to.
Coming on board as a kid and pissing into the captains soup is a bad idea, even if you know for sure that you know much better soup. Make it clear to Bob that you are here to help, and I'm sure he'll gladly listen to your suggestions, once you've delivered on your promises.
Todays portable lightweight low-power CPUs are yesterdays Workstation CPUs with 4 times the power. Apple has been trading off processing power for energy efficiency, design and small enclosures for quite some time now. It's one of the main reasons for their success. F.E.: I'm typing this on a 5 year old x86 mac mini, for which I have yet to find a competing non-apple product that matches it.
Yer Olde Desktop Setups are quickly going the way of the dodo. Fanless thin clients are as powerfull as a full-blown decked-out workstation in 2004, internal storage on HDDs is just plain silly once you've used an SSD device and you get highpower 4+1 multicore cpus in 199$ tablets with a batterytime of 8+ hours these days. It sure wont be long before apple pushed out iMacs as thin as a slim screen, with 8+ cores for processing power. It could very well be that their ARM variant is the way to go for them.
However, Intel isn't exactly lagging behind in the low-energy CPU game either, and you can allready get viable Atom desktops. It might very well be that come the time Intel is up for the task of lowering their energy requirements for their CPUs and Apple stays with Intel.
There is interesting things to come, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple would lead the innovation here once again.
Facebook doesn't care as much for the company as it does for the guy. Facebook usually buys for talent (the smaller joints anyway), which is the smart thing to do in the top tier web business.
Personally, I'd sell and join FB. They've still got bizar amounts of cash in the bank after their maximum-gain IPO and are into all kinds of crazy stuff like building PHP JIT Compilers and shit. Sort of like Google a few years ago. Sounds like tons of fun to me. And he can still leave and start a new company if he gets bored in a few years. He'll have gained tons of connections and experience. It's win-win all around.
4 times in 12 years? Underachiver? You, my friend, have a serious problem. A self-esteem problem. Being promoted at an avarage of every 3 years is what the large majority dream of. If that (and your low self-esteem, which appears to derive itself from amounts of promotion/year) is what's troubling you, these books, all of which have had life-changing impact on mine, are the type you should be reading and looking for:
Seneca "Letters from a Stoic" - its roughly 2000 years old iirc and thus public domain (downloads all over the web)..... The best things in life are free. Seneca was a bizarly rich and very powerfull man in Rome back in the day and is one of the more popular members of the 'Stoic' school of philosophy. Stoicisim is basically the western variant of zen buddism, without the weird stuff. Cult of Less, Lean living, focussing on the spiritual and mental, etc.... It's all there and all started here. A must read for any educated citizen. And, btw., at the same time more comforting than any of the religios scripts can ever be imho. Whenever you're in a jam, take out seneca, read a few pages and you feel like someones breathed new life into you. If you think philosophy is for nutcases, you haven't been looking further back enough. The last 300 years have mostly been shit, but this guy is for real. No intelectual masturbating and no bullshit from this guy. Promise.
Marie 'Shakti' Gawain "Creative Visualisation" Your standard 101 new age positive thinking book. A classic. Cheap, short, to the point. Where Joseph J. Murphy, Norman Vincent Peale, Rhonda Byrne and all the rest go on babbling for endless pages (and sometimes many books) Shakti Gawain cuts straight to the chase. A must for every bookshelf. Read this one and you'll know all there is to know about positive thinking and you'll get a neat stomachable dose of uplifting new age along with it. As with seneca I always go back to Gawain when in trouble and looking for advice on how to condition myself for the next trials. This little book has been with me for 25 years and it never grows old.
Tim Ferriss - "The four hour workweek" This guy deserves some credit, if only for tipping me of on stoicism and seneca. The four hour workweek is basically a modern lifestyle design guide, a kind of 'Stoicism implementation plan'. I ran into this one a few years ago (when it was in the lists) and had quite a few usefull inspirations from it. His blog can be worth a read aswell, he also does (i)regular web chatshows with Kevin Rose of digg.com fame. Very funny and entertaining. Currently the latest article on his blog is on another stoic of ancient Rome, Cato.
Chris Guillebeau "The Art of Non-Conformity" Guillebeau is sort of the less boastfull Tim Ferriss. If Ferris is to much haming and dick-waving for your taste, do at least try this guy. The book has similarities with FHWW, but also its own approach to the subject matter. Also very inspiring and well worth the money and time.
Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson "Rework" Result oriented working in the brave new digital age. If there is a book that will lift your spirits and change your habits and workstyle for the better right away, in your current line of work, then it is this one. A must read for you and your co-workers once your done with it. The HR Chief of a large software corporation I once worked for came in one day carrying a stack of copies of "Rework" and just put them into the companies library. Didn't even bother registrating them with codes and tags first. Very smart move.
Anything from Alan Watts The western zen buddhist. He changed me from a kid scared of life and death into a human being by introducing me to non-confessional, free zen buddhism. His explainations and lectures are top notch, very comforting and carry lots of weight. I can't tell if you'll still be as inspired once you've read Seneca, but I ran
I've found that for web development today, weekly or twice a week is around about the sweet spot for non-trivial web-development. Of course you need a modern pipeline. Good devtools, a framework, test first and a lead architect and scrum master who knows what he's doing. But the days of paper driven management in software development are totally over, except maybe for spaceships, military hardware, nuclear power plants and perhaps medical gear.
If you're doing web-dev management with a manually maintained papertrail, you're doing it wrong. It's that simple. And as an experienced scrum-master I'd say push-to-production once per week is minimum.
Then don't use GPL'd Software. Really, it's that simple. Here, let me show you, it goes like this: Don't like the licence of the software you're using? Don't use it. See? Very easy. Isn't it nice that we have a choice? Thanks for stopping by.
It's not to late to learn new stuff and reorientate you profession or change your career.
In may I asked which degree I should go for for a late career boost (article seems to be archived without comments, which is a shame... maybe you'll have more luck searching for it). The choice was CS or Business Informatics. I was leaning towards business informatics.
There was a bit of negativity in the responses (to late, missed chance, give up, blah-di-blah) but the overwelming majority was very supportive and gave very good advice. I was scared shitless of math (and still am) but started my college run for a BI Bachelor this winter-semester 10 days ago. Also due to the support and advice given here on slashdot. (Thanks again, folks!)
I'm working at the side as a developer, am on the move 13 hrs a day with something of a 70hr week, but it feels great. I'm as focused and determined as I ever was in my life and I'm being pay so low for my senior devwork at my job that no one can push me around.... In a strange way, it's acutally quite liberating.
I don't know if I will score the solidly paying consultant job I'm now aiming for in 6-7 years (my experience will definitely give me an edge, that's for sure), but I definitely will feel better for myself once I've gotten that degree.
Going (back?) to college might not be an option for you - after all, I'm in Germany and tuition is basically zero, aside from 150€ in fees each semester, but it's never to late to change your life for the better.
Downsize/downshift, move you investments into certs for technologies or products that are currently hip or do you own private low-budget sabatical. Or even change your life entirely! I strongly recommend this guy, his four hour workweek is a fun read and at least good for some inspiration, even if you're not into that sort of literature.
Whatever needs to be done, don't be scared and make your move. I was scared too, but now that I've made my decision I feel very good and even score some envy from my buddies.
Why I don't use my MB Air quite as often anymore when I'm on the go
I got myself a 13" MB Air about a year ago. In terms of usage patterns it's the best thing I've owned since the Highscreen Pocket PC back in 1994. I can carry it wherever I go without any hassle as with a regular notebook. It weighs 1,3 kg, which is less than half of my 15" Dell. In a nutshell, it's the best computer for a developer who's on the move a lot.
Then I got myself a 7" HTC Flyer Android Tablet in February this year. Not because I needed it, but because I knew it's was the best non-apple tablet around I had considered getting into serious android development at the time.
It turned out that while the iPad letterbox format doesn't appeal to much to me as a portable device, the 7" 16by9 format is just the right thing for a tablet. On the go I am currentyl using the Flyer more than the MB Air. You can't develop that good on it (I haven't tried yet, but I presume) but for surfing, reading, watching movies and listenning to music the form factor are just right. It's a tad sluggish but I'd guess that Android 4 and the new super-cheap multi-core devices such as the Nexus 7 eliminate that problem.
Conclusion: To me it looks as if Ultrabooks very quickly are falling into that compareatively narrow gap of portable developer and expert machines and that small form-factor tablets will rule the portable computing device market from here on out. Add keyboards, solid word processing and useable printing to Andorid, and maybe ASUS Transformer like devices will take yet another bit of the market.
The article is most likely a fake. Tracking someones home simply by having an IP adress with no help from the ISP and various legal procedures? Yeah, sure. *Not* going to the police over physical world death-threats? Yeah, sure.
I bet money that this is a fabricated news story by a loony pseudo journalist. Or that Leo Traynor simply doesn't exist. There are accounts on the interweb that indicate this.
Seriously, this sounds way out there. But then again, heavyer than air flight did sound so too, just a few years before the wright brothers finally found a solution to all the problems Lilienthal and others had been battling with. As did portable mass market Cray 2 supercomputers you can hold in your hand and make phonecalls with.... And are mostly used to make fart noises and play Angrybirds.
Another question would be: For these guys to be right, which three things would be the most important to get developed within the next 10 years to make mass space travel and exploration viable?
From the top of my head, I get this:
- Massive cheap manotechnology or some sort comes to mind, for building a space elevator or some kind of super-cheap super-fuel, or both. Also supercheap super sturdy space ship hulls and stuff.
- Some serious biotech, maybe mixed with nanotech, to provide for pratically endless food, recycling of waste of all kinds and huge, i.e. magical advancements in medicine.
- What else? Don't know... any ideas what we still need?... Oh, yes, a completly new energy source. Something like Mr. Fusion in "Back to the Future". Nothing short of that will get us into space in a way Branson envisions it.
I'd says the following is given: Nobody is flying to mars using conventional recycling techniques like chemical air refreshment and nobodys ever doing large scale space travel with todays conventional launching techniques. If there will be mass space travel, some sort of space elevator or sänger flying machines will have to be involved. That's what I would guess anyway.
I'm sorry, I don't see Bransons or Musks Vision come true anytime soon, not in my lifetime I expect.... But please, go ahead and do prove me wrong.
Anyone can programm if he has a healthy brain. And given enough time and programming problems anyone will discover his or her own version of functional programming, object orientation and all the other basic programming paradigms others have discovered too. For instance, most of us have discovered their version of OOP some time in their programming career all on their own.
Wether you'll have the mindset to work yourself into existing established insanities such as the C group of languages or Java or into huge libraries and complex existing systems and software kits and run into design patterns is a different story. As is if you are willing to slog through the existing insane historically grown chaos of our system stacks we have to handle today. That is what you'll have to do to get *paid* to program.
Those things aside, programming is more or less the same as disciplined thinking, and every healthy grown-up should be capable of that.
The truth is: For everyone who says you have to have a certain mind to programm, I can find a programming language that is turing complete, introduces innovative concepts that this person doesn't know to well and will be a huge pain for said person to programm in. Take an elitist ruby fanboy and he'll probably start crying and doubting himself (and the entire world:-) ) if you show him Lisp - for instance.
So one shouldn't be to distracted by enthusiasts who claim programming is an arcane art for a selected few. Programming as a pastime is actually quite easy and fun. As are most things. It's the hard dirty work that professionaly get paid to do. That goes for every learned profession basically.
As a rule of thumb, you should incorporate as soon as it saves you more money than it costs. That is, counting your additional personal time spent maintaing the corp. as expense, of course.
I presume the rules are simular to Germany where you have to file anual reports and stuff. Maintaining proper bookkeeping for a corp. costs money and/or time. Here in Germany it's freelance (roughly 500€/year of your time and/or money) vs. small business (Gewerbe, roughly 500€ to 800€ per year of your time and money, not counting extra taxes) vs. Ltd. (roughly about 1000€ to 1500€ per year, depending on some details). Founding a GmbH (german Ltd.) costs another 3000€ to begin with and takes a few months, but that's just your typical German burocracy and lawyer-lobby bullshit. If your LLC or something simular is anywhere near the costs in the UK, there's nothing to be worried about in that camp for you.
Generally, if tax savings and the usual legal bookkeeping tricks you can do with the corp are a measurable benefit and make up the cost of maintaining it for sure, then it's time to incorporate. If your business is growing you'll have to do it anyway - might as well start with the learning experience right away. If it's stable in size, then you'll save a few bucks and have a learning experience.
Find out how much bookeeping costs for a corp - it does cost more, because it's more work (Duh.). Do also look at the laws in place where you live and only make the switch when you're sure you have a graps of things even if the bookkeeper screws it up for you. It's your ass on the line if they pin you down for fraud or something simular just because you missed a due-date for a report or something, so do some research of your local laws before incorporating.
Other than that, if you can move around income and revenue and save taxes and shit and there's a safe bet that you'll end up cheaper in the end, go for corp.
That sounds like a 'No Go' to me. Seriously, the pro and cons are so close together that one would need more data than what you've provided in the post, but to be honest, a 10% increase in salary isn't worth the risk if you really like your current job.
If the new one is a 10 mile comute vs. a current 100 mile comute, then the case may be different, but from the data you've provided I'd say it's a "No Go".
Think over the details and the possible risks and make your decision. And factor in the possibility that you might be the kind of person who spends the next 20 years wondering if he did the wrong thing. Then it's actually better to do the switch, even if it *is* wrong - just to get it clear.
I did a wrong carreer decision a year ago that moved me into a dead end yet again. On the upside I do now know for absolutely sure that that was, is and always will be the wrong way for me to go under such conditions. Knowing that can mean a lot when moving on with your life.
I'm currently totally broke (and I mean *really* broke!), will have to take on a crappy paying PHP/HMTL5 sidejob any day now and could be making 55000$ whilst learing Java instead right now if I hadn't turned down a job last year. But I still have enough to eat, good sex and space and time to go back to university. There's an upside to every turn in your life.
Bottom line: Don't stress out over such things to much, no matter which move you make and no matter how it turns out in the future.
Apple did improve on the iPhone 4S. I like the shape better and find it quite amazing how they upped the precision in manufacturing again by orders of magnitude.... Awesome detail improvement whilst maintaining that neat design. Once again this electronic fashion statement is going to sell like hot cakes.
Then again, I personally choose the Google leash over the apple lock-in any time and still am enjoying my HTC Desire HD. Great phone, tons of features, very rugged, especially with its neat Otterbox protective case. I'm probably going to use that for the next few years. Its also way cheaper *and* I can replace the battery.... So to me there's really no need to by a piece of electronic junk every odd year right now.
Zuckerberg isn't dumb. This judgement on the whole HTML 5 craze goes to show. Techwise HTML5/CSS3/Ajax is a huge step backwards compared to other approaches, like, for instance, Flash. Flash is proprietary and invites doing all kinds of non-sense (sic), but it *is* a far better x-platform VM.
Going HTML5 is not to be triffled with and will bog down your systems performance way further than other VM solutions such as Java or Flash/AS. Any web developer worth his salt could have told Zuckerberg that.
The "problem" (lets just call it that for now) here is that geeks, i.e. opinion leaders, are willing to make huge technological concessions if the technology is more open than the alternatives. Some devs would rather chop their right arm off than develop against (semi)prorietary systems like iOS or countless versions of Android. Hence we've got native looking apps, that are web UIs in disguise, slowpoking about at speeds we know from Windows 95 Applikations back in the day. I presume Zuckerberg got himself talked into this by his devleads, who are, just like any respectable geek, probably way more concerned with system openess and anti-lock-in development wise than with business critical performance and end-user experience issues. That's my guess anyway.
You can say and think what you want about Zuckerberg and Facebook - I dislike the whole direction thinks have taken with this FB thing just as much as the next geek - but his conclusion is spot on. He's a developer himself and it's to his credit that he recongnises where his company bet on the wrong technology. You have to give him credit for that.
"We could possibly see drivers going 95 up to 100 miles per hour." Hate to break it to Sandra, but that's the usual speed in many parts of Texas.
100mph ~ 160km/h, correct?... You american sissies, that's not fast. 220km/h - that's fast. Sometimes.
Jokes aside: If only the americans were so prissy about guns as they are about speeding and germans would be as prissy about speeding as they are about guns, the western world would be a much, much safer place. The western world really needs US speed limits in Germany and German gun laws in the US. Seriously, that would really solve a lot of our everyday problems, both in the US and in Germany. And unnatural deaths would plummet.
I've been saying no to Apple phones and tablets for quite some time now. Proprietary ports and all that comes with them being one of the reasons why. I'm glad we still agree that they do not want me as a customer.
Meanwhile, to anyone who whishes to enjoy their tablet with an USB port, may I suggest the recent additions to the overall tabletspace, Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10" and 7" (both very nice) or the new Google Nexus 7, also very nice, very cheap, very fast and... Tadaa!... also with a micro USB port. I personally am still enjoying my HTC Flyer very much and can asure you that the 7" form factor is a very neat one indeed. More than one would expect before using it every day.
Your problem isn't unduping files in your archives, your problem is getting an overview of your data archives. If you'd have it, you wouldn't have dupes in the first place.
This is a larger personal project, but you should take it on, since it will be a good lesson in data organisation. I've been there and done that.
You should get a rough overview of what you're looking at and where to expect large sets of dupes. Do this by manually parsing your archives in broad strokes. If you want to automate dupe-removal, do so by de-duping smaller chunks of your archive. You will need extra CPU and storage - maybe borrow a box or two from friends and set up a batch of scripts you can run from Linux live CDs with external HDDs attached.
Most likely you will have to do some scripting or programming, and you will have to devise a strategy not only of dupe removal, but of merging the remaining skeletons of dirtrees. That's actually the tough part. Removing dupes takes raw processing power and can be done in a few weeks and brute force and a solid storage bandwidth.
Organising the remaining stuff is where the real fun begins.... You should start thinking about what you are willing to invest and how your backup, versioning and archiving strategy should look in the end, data/backup/archive retrival included. The latter might even determine how you go about doing your dirtree diffs - maybe you want to use a database for that for later use.
Anyway you put it, just setting up a box in the corner and having a piece of software churn away for a few days, weeks or months won't solve your problem in the end. If you plan well, it will get you started, but that's the most you can expect.
As I say: Been there, done that. I still have unfinished business in my backup/archiving strategy and setup, but the setup now is 2 1TB external USB3 drives and manual arsync sessions every 10 weeks or so to copy from HDD-1 to HDD-2 to have dual backups/archives. It's quite simple now, but it was a long hard way to clean up the mess of the last 10 years. And I actually was quite conservative about keeping my boxed tidy. I'm still missing external storage in my setup, aka Cloud-Storage, the 2012 buzzword for that, but it will be much easyer for me to extend to that, now that I've cleaned up my shit halfway.
Good luck, get started now, work in iterations, and don't be silly and expect this project to be over in less than half a year.
I bet it's not about the encounters but all about the lesser sexual stress/frustration. I'd argue it's the same with humans, to a certain degree. Mostly men, but women too. Unsafe sex endangers your health, but a solid amount of safe sex is likely to be good for health. That would be my theory at least.
The negative influence that sexual frustration has on ones health is vastly underestimated, I've come to believe. Especially since I've experienced what positive effects a healthy sex life can have.
I don't drink alcohol and don't make a religion of it. I have plenty of friends who enjoy a beer or two or a bottle of whine, but none of them think im boring because I don't drink alcohol.
I also meet quite a few people - mostly men - who think what you think and have thought that since their late teens. Most of them have a beerbelly, a slow brain and can't losen up around women. Sad sight. I on the other hand get my age mistaken for early to mid 30ies (kind of a big deal when you're 42), enjoy good health and a brain that still is able to handle new stuff like high math, new languages and usefull programming performance.
I never understood the binge-drinking crowd in particular. I was the wimpy nerd, and the others were the tough guys smoking, getting drunk as a weekend pasttime and behaving like idiots or assholes or both at the same time and scoring the one or other early initial peer admiration. Now they all look as described above.
Aw, well, I'll just go on enjoying myself, my highscores with not-so-naive-anymore women and some neat dancing and social skills and the company that comes with them, all of which would actually easyly be spoiled by to much alcohol, but not at all but completely avoiding it.
But go ahead and keep calling somebody who doesn't drink alcohol 'boring' if you fancy.
There's quite a bit of truth to the article allthough I'd say that true rockstar programmers do use the right tool for the job. If a programmer builds a custom Java CMS where Joomla would do, he isn't a rockstar. He's an idiot.
Then again, the best programmer in the world is worth nothing without the environment or the right people around him. That includes higher ups that keep people off his back, maintainers that can handle the pipeline and clear objectives to work against.
If a rockstar doesn't have those, he'll be faster than others in producing workable stuff, but if he gets hit by a bus it will be just as much worth as the other unfinished stuff.
Many programmers I know hat are considered rockstars are quite mediocre. They only were at the right place at the righ time and didn't have any scruples in building a complex key product only they could understand, without docs, concept comments or usecases, as a means of job security.
My last teamlead was a nice guy and a demigod in Perl, but absolutely incapable of any sort of productive or result oriented teamwork-organisation or inter-team communication. In itself not very rockstarish, allthough people did think of him that way when he saved the day on some billing system or something every once in a while.
Bottom line: Rockstar is always relative. Very relative.
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ASUS and their peers copied the idea about 10 years after the first netbook and started a new boom of cheap latop-like mobile computers.
Netbooks were started by ASUS and their peers as an 'appliance' laptop- They were Linux based and only cost a few hundred bucks. Microsoft didn't try to get into it until it was posing as a threat to Windows!
Let me fix that for you:
Netbooks were started by PSION as an 'appliance' laptop- They were EPOC based and only cost a few hundred bucks AND had 40 hrs of battery uptime. Microsoft did get into it with the last Edition WindowsCE, because PSION thought it would be a great Idea to get in bed with MS. PSION standing in the mobile market folded shortly thereafter, just as Nokia is folding now.
A shame actually, the original Netbook [wikipedia.org] was a very good machine with some features we can only dream about even today, 13 years later (like a really awesome keyboard despite the really small size)
EPOC went on to become the awesome Symbian Mobile OS which Nokia dropped after getting in bed with MS. ... What a coincidence.
To be honest I'd take a ancient DOS 4.0 System written in QBasic over Google Docs any time.
First of all: Moving to Google Drive for critical docs is a stupid idea. We (me and my freelancer crew) have team stuff on Google Docs, but those are for the very most part non-critical things. The rest are docs in Git Versioning with a central virtual server to push and pull. If Google Docs shuts us down, we won't miss a step. And if our vhost ISP folds, it takes me (or anybody else on the core team) to completely set up a new one and clone to that in less than an hour. That's how it should be.
I suggest you talk to Bob about doing a redo of the system *together*, preferably on x86 Linux, some kind of distriubted versioning (Bazaar has an x-plattform idiot-safe GUI as part of the core project) and maybe with a web-frontend. There are tons of easy setup/maintain FOSS systems that offer solutions for stuff like this. Help him sort the docs and show him some neat new stuff in the FOSS world and see to it that you *both* decide which system to slowly migrate to.
Coming on board as a kid and pissing into the captains soup is a bad idea, even if you know for sure that you know much better soup. Make it clear to Bob that you are here to help, and I'm sure he'll gladly listen to your suggestions, once you've delivered on your promises.
Todays portable lightweight low-power CPUs are yesterdays Workstation CPUs with 4 times the power. Apple has been trading off processing power for energy efficiency, design and small enclosures for quite some time now. It's one of the main reasons for their success. F.E.: I'm typing this on a 5 year old x86 mac mini, for which I have yet to find a competing non-apple product that matches it.
Yer Olde Desktop Setups are quickly going the way of the dodo. Fanless thin clients are as powerfull as a full-blown decked-out workstation in 2004, internal storage on HDDs is just plain silly once you've used an SSD device and you get highpower 4+1 multicore cpus in 199$ tablets with a batterytime of 8+ hours these days.
It sure wont be long before apple pushed out iMacs as thin as a slim screen, with 8+ cores for processing power. It could very well be that their ARM variant is the way to go for them.
However, Intel isn't exactly lagging behind in the low-energy CPU game either, and you can allready get viable Atom desktops. It might very well be that come the time Intel is up for the task of lowering their energy requirements for their CPUs and Apple stays with Intel.
There is interesting things to come, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple would lead the innovation here once again.
Facebook doesn't care as much for the company as it does for the guy.
Facebook usually buys for talent (the smaller joints anyway), which is the smart thing to do in the top tier web business.
Personally, I'd sell and join FB. They've still got bizar amounts of cash in the bank after their maximum-gain IPO and are into all kinds of crazy stuff like building PHP JIT Compilers and shit. Sort of like Google a few years ago. Sounds like tons of fun to me. And he can still leave and start a new company if he gets bored in a few years. He'll have gained tons of connections and experience. It's win-win all around.
My 2 cents.
That will be modified as soon as the capability and the superiour firepower to occupy and defend celestial bodies exists.
4 times in 12 years? Underachiver?
You, my friend, have a serious problem. A self-esteem problem. Being promoted at an avarage of every 3 years is what the large majority dream of. If that (and your low self-esteem, which appears to derive itself from amounts of promotion/year) is what's troubling you, these books, all of which have had life-changing impact on mine, are the type you should be reading and looking for:
Seneca "Letters from a Stoic" - its roughly 2000 years old iirc and thus public domain (downloads all over the web). .... The best things in life are free. ... It's all there and all started here. A must read for any educated citizen. And, btw., at the same time more comforting than any of the religios scripts can ever be imho. Whenever you're in a jam, take out seneca, read a few pages and you feel like someones breathed new life into you. If you think philosophy is for nutcases, you haven't been looking further back enough. The last 300 years have mostly been shit, but this guy is for real. No intelectual masturbating and no bullshit from this guy. Promise.
Seneca was a bizarly rich and very powerfull man in Rome back in the day and is one of the more popular members of the 'Stoic' school of philosophy. Stoicisim is basically the western variant of zen buddism, without the weird stuff. Cult of Less, Lean living, focussing on the spiritual and mental, etc.
Marie 'Shakti' Gawain "Creative Visualisation"
Your standard 101 new age positive thinking book. A classic. Cheap, short, to the point. Where Joseph J. Murphy, Norman Vincent Peale, Rhonda Byrne and all the rest go on babbling for endless pages (and sometimes many books) Shakti Gawain cuts straight to the chase. A must for every bookshelf. Read this one and you'll know all there is to know about positive thinking and you'll get a neat stomachable dose of uplifting new age along with it. As with seneca I always go back to Gawain when in trouble and looking for advice on how to condition myself for the next trials. This little book has been with me for 25 years and it never grows old.
Tim Ferriss - "The four hour workweek"
This guy deserves some credit, if only for tipping me of on stoicism and seneca. The four hour workweek is basically a modern lifestyle design guide, a kind of 'Stoicism implementation plan'. I ran into this one a few years ago (when it was in the lists) and had quite a few usefull inspirations from it. His blog can be worth a read aswell, he also does (i)regular web chatshows with Kevin Rose of digg.com fame. Very funny and entertaining. Currently the latest article on his blog is on another stoic of ancient Rome, Cato.
Chris Guillebeau "The Art of Non-Conformity"
Guillebeau is sort of the less boastfull Tim Ferriss. If Ferris is to much haming and dick-waving for your taste, do at least try this guy. The book has similarities with FHWW, but also its own approach to the subject matter. Also very inspiring and well worth the money and time.
Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson "Rework"
Result oriented working in the brave new digital age. If there is a book that will lift your spirits and change your habits and workstyle for the better right away, in your current line of work, then it is this one. A must read for you and your co-workers once your done with it. The HR Chief of a large software corporation I once worked for came in one day carrying a stack of copies of "Rework" and just put them into the companies library. Didn't even bother registrating them with codes and tags first. Very smart move.
Anything from Alan Watts
The western zen buddhist. He changed me from a kid scared of life and death into a human being by introducing me to non-confessional, free zen buddhism. His explainations and lectures are top notch, very comforting and carry lots of weight. I can't tell if you'll still be as inspired once you've read Seneca, but I ran
I've found that for web development today, weekly or twice a week is around about the sweet spot for non-trivial web-development.
Of course you need a modern pipeline. Good devtools, a framework, test first and a lead architect and scrum master who knows what he's doing. But the days of paper driven management in software development are totally over, except maybe for spaceships, military hardware, nuclear power plants and perhaps medical gear.
If you're doing web-dev management with a manually maintained papertrail, you're doing it wrong. It's that simple. And as an experienced scrum-master I'd say push-to-production once per week is minimum.
My 2 cents.
The GPL is a bad thing.
Then don't use GPL'd Software.
Really, it's that simple. Here, let me show you, it goes like this:
Don't like the licence of the software you're using? Don't use it.
See? Very easy.
Isn't it nice that we have a choice?
Thanks for stopping by.
It's not to late to learn new stuff and reorientate you profession or change your career.
In may I asked which degree I should go for for a late career boost (article seems to be archived without comments, which is a shame ... maybe you'll have more luck searching for it). The choice was CS or Business Informatics. I was leaning towards business informatics.
There was a bit of negativity in the responses (to late, missed chance, give up, blah-di-blah) but the overwelming majority was very supportive and gave very good advice. I was scared shitless of math (and still am) but started my college run for a BI Bachelor this winter-semester 10 days ago. Also due to the support and advice given here on slashdot. (Thanks again, folks!)
I'm working at the side as a developer, am on the move 13 hrs a day with something of a 70hr week, but it feels great. I'm as focused and determined as I ever was in my life and I'm being pay so low for my senior devwork at my job that no one can push me around. ... In a strange way, it's acutally quite liberating.
I don't know if I will score the solidly paying consultant job I'm now aiming for in 6-7 years (my experience will definitely give me an edge, that's for sure), but I definitely will feel better for myself once I've gotten that degree.
Going (back?) to college might not be an option for you - after all, I'm in Germany and tuition is basically zero, aside from 150€ in fees each semester, but it's never to late to change your life for the better.
Downsize/downshift, move you investments into certs for technologies or products that are currently hip or do you own private low-budget sabatical. Or even change your life entirely! I strongly recommend this guy, his four hour workweek is a fun read and at least good for some inspiration, even if you're not into that sort of literature.
Whatever needs to be done, don't be scared and make your move. I was scared too, but now that I've made my decision I feel very good and even score some envy from my buddies.
My 2 cents.
Obligatory:
John Gabriels Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory.
Why I don't use my MB Air quite as often anymore when I'm on the go
I got myself a 13" MB Air about a year ago. In terms of usage patterns it's the best thing I've owned since the Highscreen Pocket PC back in 1994. I can carry it wherever I go without any hassle as with a regular notebook. It weighs 1,3 kg, which is less than half of my 15" Dell. In a nutshell, it's the best computer for a developer who's on the move a lot.
Then I got myself a 7" HTC Flyer Android Tablet in February this year. Not because I needed it, but because I knew it's was the best non-apple tablet around I had considered getting into serious android development at the time.
It turned out that while the iPad letterbox format doesn't appeal to much to me as a portable device, the 7" 16by9 format is just the right thing for a tablet. On the go I am currentyl using the Flyer more than the MB Air. You can't develop that good on it (I haven't tried yet, but I presume) but for surfing, reading, watching movies and listenning to music the form factor are just right. It's a tad sluggish but I'd guess that Android 4 and the new super-cheap multi-core devices such as the Nexus 7 eliminate that problem.
Conclusion:
To me it looks as if Ultrabooks very quickly are falling into that compareatively narrow gap of portable developer and expert machines and that small form-factor tablets will rule the portable computing device market from here on out. Add keyboards, solid word processing and useable printing to Andorid, and maybe ASUS Transformer like devices will take yet another bit of the market.
My 2 cents.
The article is most likely a fake.
Tracking someones home simply by having an IP adress with no help from the ISP and various legal procedures? Yeah, sure.
*Not* going to the police over physical world death-threats? Yeah, sure.
I bet money that this is a fabricated news story by a loony pseudo journalist. Or that Leo Traynor simply doesn't exist. There are accounts on the interweb that indicate this.
What do these guys know that we don't?
Seriously, this sounds way out there. But then again, heavyer than air flight did sound so too, just a few years before the wright brothers finally found a solution to all the problems Lilienthal and others had been battling with. As did portable mass market Cray 2 supercomputers you can hold in your hand and make phonecalls with. ... And are mostly used to make fart noises and play Angrybirds.
Another question would be: For these guys to be right, which three things would be the most important to get developed within the next 10 years to make mass space travel and exploration viable?
From the top of my head, I get this:
- Massive cheap manotechnology or some sort comes to mind, for building a space elevator or some kind of super-cheap super-fuel, or both. Also supercheap super sturdy space ship hulls and stuff.
- Some serious biotech, maybe mixed with nanotech, to provide for pratically endless food, recycling of waste of all kinds and huge, i.e. magical advancements in medicine.
- What else? Don't know ... any ideas what we still need? ... Oh, yes, a completly new energy source. Something like Mr. Fusion in "Back to the Future". Nothing short of that will get us into space in a way Branson envisions it.
I'd says the following is given: Nobody is flying to mars using conventional recycling techniques like chemical air refreshment and nobodys ever doing large scale space travel with todays conventional launching techniques. If there will be mass space travel, some sort of space elevator or sänger flying machines will have to be involved. That's what I would guess anyway.
I'm sorry, I don't see Bransons or Musks Vision come true anytime soon, not in my lifetime I expect. ... But please, go ahead and do prove me wrong.
My 2 cents.
Anyone can programm if he has a healthy brain. And given enough time and programming problems anyone will discover his or her own version of functional programming, object orientation and all the other basic programming paradigms others have discovered too. For instance, most of us have discovered their version of OOP some time in their programming career all on their own.
Wether you'll have the mindset to work yourself into existing established insanities such as the C group of languages or Java or into huge libraries and complex existing systems and software kits and run into design patterns is a different story. As is if you are willing to slog through the existing insane historically grown chaos of our system stacks we have to handle today. That is what you'll have to do to get *paid* to program.
Those things aside, programming is more or less the same as disciplined thinking, and every healthy grown-up should be capable of that.
The truth is: For everyone who says you have to have a certain mind to programm, I can find a programming language that is turing complete, introduces innovative concepts that this person doesn't know to well and will be a huge pain for said person to programm in. Take an elitist ruby fanboy and he'll probably start crying and doubting himself (and the entire world :-) ) if you show him Lisp - for instance.
So one shouldn't be to distracted by enthusiasts who claim programming is an arcane art for a selected few.
Programming as a pastime is actually quite easy and fun. As are most things.
It's the hard dirty work that professionaly get paid to do. That goes for every learned profession basically.
My 2 cents.
As a rule of thumb, you should incorporate as soon as it saves you more money than it costs. That is, counting your additional personal time spent maintaing the corp. as expense, of course.
I presume the rules are simular to Germany where you have to file anual reports and stuff. Maintaining proper bookkeeping for a corp. costs money and/or time. Here in Germany it's freelance (roughly 500€/year of your time and/or money) vs. small business (Gewerbe, roughly 500€ to 800€ per year of your time and money, not counting extra taxes) vs. Ltd. (roughly about 1000€ to 1500€ per year, depending on some details). Founding a GmbH (german Ltd.) costs another 3000€ to begin with and takes a few months, but that's just your typical German burocracy and lawyer-lobby bullshit. If your LLC or something simular is anywhere near the costs in the UK, there's nothing to be worried about in that camp for you.
Generally, if tax savings and the usual legal bookkeeping tricks you can do with the corp are a measurable benefit and make up the cost of maintaining it for sure, then it's time to incorporate. If your business is growing you'll have to do it anyway - might as well start with the learning experience right away. If it's stable in size, then you'll save a few bucks and have a learning experience.
Find out how much bookeeping costs for a corp - it does cost more, because it's more work (Duh.).
Do also look at the laws in place where you live and only make the switch when you're sure you have a graps of things even if the bookkeeper screws it up for you. It's your ass on the line if they pin you down for fraud or something simular just because you missed a due-date for a report or something, so do some research of your local laws before incorporating.
Other than that, if you can move around income and revenue and save taxes and shit and there's a safe bet that you'll end up cheaper in the end, go for corp.
My 2 cents.
That sounds like a 'No Go' to me. Seriously, the pro and cons are so close together that one would need more data than what you've provided in the post, but to be honest, a 10% increase in salary isn't worth the risk if you really like your current job.
If the new one is a 10 mile comute vs. a current 100 mile comute, then the case may be different, but from the data you've provided I'd say it's a "No Go".
Think over the details and the possible risks and make your decision. And factor in the possibility that you might be the kind of person who spends the next 20 years wondering if he did the wrong thing. Then it's actually better to do the switch, even if it *is* wrong - just to get it clear.
I did a wrong carreer decision a year ago that moved me into a dead end yet again. On the upside I do now know for absolutely sure that that was, is and always will be the wrong way for me to go under such conditions. Knowing that can mean a lot when moving on with your life.
I'm currently totally broke (and I mean *really* broke!), will have to take on a crappy paying PHP/HMTL5 sidejob any day now and could be making 55000$ whilst learing Java instead right now if I hadn't turned down a job last year. But I still have enough to eat, good sex and space and time to go back to university. There's an upside to every turn in your life.
Bottom line:
Don't stress out over such things to much, no matter which move you make and no matter how it turns out in the future.
Good luck.
Apple did improve on the iPhone 4S. I like the shape better and find it quite amazing how they upped the precision in manufacturing again by orders of magnitude. ... Awesome detail improvement whilst maintaining that neat design. Once again this electronic fashion statement is going to sell like hot cakes.
Then again, I personally choose the Google leash over the apple lock-in any time and still am enjoying my HTC Desire HD. Great phone, tons of features, very rugged, especially with its neat Otterbox protective case. I'm probably going to use that for the next few years. Its also way cheaper *and* I can replace the battery. ... So to me there's really no need to by a piece of electronic junk every odd year right now.
My 2 cents.
Zuckerberg isn't dumb. This judgement on the whole HTML 5 craze goes to show. Techwise HTML5/CSS3/Ajax is a huge step backwards compared to other approaches, like, for instance, Flash. Flash is proprietary and invites doing all kinds of non-sense (sic), but it *is* a far better x-platform VM.
Going HTML5 is not to be triffled with and will bog down your systems performance way further than other VM solutions such as Java or Flash/AS. Any web developer worth his salt could have told Zuckerberg that.
The "problem" (lets just call it that for now) here is that geeks, i.e. opinion leaders, are willing to make huge technological concessions if the technology is more open than the alternatives. Some devs would rather chop their right arm off than develop against (semi)prorietary systems like iOS or countless versions of Android. Hence we've got native looking apps, that are web UIs in disguise, slowpoking about at speeds we know from Windows 95 Applikations back in the day. I presume Zuckerberg got himself talked into this by his devleads, who are, just like any respectable geek, probably way more concerned with system openess and anti-lock-in development wise than with business critical performance and end-user experience issues. That's my guess anyway.
You can say and think what you want about Zuckerberg and Facebook - I dislike the whole direction thinks have taken with this FB thing just as much as the next geek - but his conclusion is spot on. He's a developer himself and it's to his credit that he recongnises where his company bet on the wrong technology. You have to give him credit for that.
My 2 cents.
Fah'n, fah'n, fah'n auf der Autobahn. Fah'n, fah'n, fah'n auf der Autobahn. Fah'n, fah'n, fah'n auf der Autobahn. ... etc.
"We could possibly see drivers going 95 up to 100 miles per hour."
Hate to break it to Sandra, but that's the usual speed in many parts of Texas.
100mph ~ 160km/h, correct? ... You american sissies, that's not fast.
220km/h - that's fast. Sometimes.
Jokes aside:
If only the americans were so prissy about guns as they are about speeding and germans would be as prissy about speeding as they are about guns, the western world would be a much, much safer place. The western world really needs US speed limits in Germany and German gun laws in the US. Seriously, that would really solve a lot of our everyday problems, both in the US and in Germany. And unnatural deaths would plummet.
My 2 cents.
I've been saying no to Apple phones and tablets for quite some time now. Proprietary ports and all that comes with them being one of the reasons why. I'm glad we still agree that they do not want me as a customer.
Meanwhile, to anyone who whishes to enjoy their tablet with an USB port, may I suggest the recent additions to the overall tabletspace, Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10" and 7" (both very nice) or the new Google Nexus 7, also very nice, very cheap, very fast and ... Tadaa! ... also with a micro USB port. I personally am still enjoying my HTC Flyer very much and can asure you that the 7" form factor is a very neat one indeed. More than one would expect before using it every day.
My 2 cents.
Your problem isn't unduping files in your archives, your problem is getting an overview of your data archives. If you'd have it, you wouldn't have dupes in the first place.
This is a larger personal project, but you should take it on, since it will be a good lesson in data organisation. I've been there and done that.
You should get a rough overview of what you're looking at and where to expect large sets of dupes. Do this by manually parsing your archives in broad strokes. If you want to automate dupe-removal, do so by de-duping smaller chunks of your archive. You will need extra CPU and storage - maybe borrow a box or two from friends and set up a batch of scripts you can run from Linux live CDs with external HDDs attached.
Most likely you will have to do some scripting or programming, and you will have to devise a strategy not only of dupe removal, but of merging the remaining skeletons of dirtrees. That's actually the tough part. Removing dupes takes raw processing power and can be done in a few weeks and brute force and a solid storage bandwidth.
Organising the remaining stuff is where the real fun begins. ... You should start thinking about what you are willing to invest and how your backup, versioning and archiving strategy should look in the end, data/backup/archive retrival included. The latter might even determine how you go about doing your dirtree diffs - maybe you want to use a database for that for later use.
Anyway you put it, just setting up a box in the corner and having a piece of software churn away for a few days, weeks or months won't solve your problem in the end. If you plan well, it will get you started, but that's the most you can expect.
As I say: Been there, done that.
I still have unfinished business in my backup/archiving strategy and setup, but the setup now is 2 1TB external USB3 drives and manual arsync sessions every 10 weeks or so to copy from HDD-1 to HDD-2 to have dual backups/archives. It's quite simple now, but it was a long hard way to clean up the mess of the last 10 years. And I actually was quite conservative about keeping my boxed tidy. I'm still missing external storage in my setup, aka Cloud-Storage, the 2012 buzzword for that, but it will be much easyer for me to extend to that, now that I've cleaned up my shit halfway.
Good luck, get started now, work in iterations, and don't be silly and expect this project to be over in less than half a year.
My 2 cents.
I bet it's not about the encounters but all about the lesser sexual stress/frustration. I'd argue it's the same with humans, to a certain degree. Mostly men, but women too. Unsafe sex endangers your health, but a solid amount of safe sex is likely to be good for health. That would be my theory at least.
The negative influence that sexual frustration has on ones health is vastly underestimated, I've come to believe. Especially since I've experienced what positive effects a healthy sex life can have.
My 2 cents.
You are "The Most Boring Man in the World".
I don't drink alcohol and don't make a religion of it. I have plenty of friends who enjoy a beer or two or a bottle of whine, but none of them think im boring because I don't drink alcohol.
I also meet quite a few people - mostly men - who think what you think and have thought that since their late teens. Most of them have a beerbelly, a slow brain and can't losen up around women. Sad sight. I on the other hand get my age mistaken for early to mid 30ies (kind of a big deal when you're 42), enjoy good health and a brain that still is able to handle new stuff like high math, new languages and usefull programming performance.
I never understood the binge-drinking crowd in particular. I was the wimpy nerd, and the others were the tough guys smoking, getting drunk as a weekend pasttime and behaving like idiots or assholes or both at the same time and scoring the one or other early initial peer admiration. Now they all look as described above.
Aw, well, I'll just go on enjoying myself, my highscores with not-so-naive-anymore women and some neat dancing and social skills and the company that comes with them, all of which would actually easyly be spoiled by to much alcohol, but not at all but completely avoiding it.
But go ahead and keep calling somebody who doesn't drink alcohol 'boring' if you fancy.
My 2 cents.
There's quite a bit of truth to the article allthough I'd say that true rockstar programmers do use the right tool for the job. If a programmer builds a custom Java CMS where Joomla would do, he isn't a rockstar. He's an idiot.
Then again, the best programmer in the world is worth nothing without the environment or the right people around him. That includes higher ups that keep people off his back, maintainers that can handle the pipeline and clear objectives to work against.
If a rockstar doesn't have those, he'll be faster than others in producing workable stuff, but if he gets hit by a bus it will be just as much worth as the other unfinished stuff.
Many programmers I know hat are considered rockstars are quite mediocre. They only were at the right place at the righ time and didn't have any scruples in building a complex key product only they could understand, without docs, concept comments or usecases, as a means of job security.
My last teamlead was a nice guy and a demigod in Perl, but absolutely incapable of any sort of productive or result oriented teamwork-organisation or inter-team communication. In itself not very rockstarish, allthough people did think of him that way when he saved the day on some billing system or something every once in a while.
Bottom line:
Rockstar is always relative. Very relative.