consistent, so that you could actually
memorize commands and their options
Those were the days.
Actually Unix APIs predate VMS. The Unix/Posix API is actually quite stable and relatively simple. The "man" pages provide plenty of documentation. And the documentation has always been computer searchable.
VMS had/has some nice features (i.e. asynch I/O and unified calling conventions), but some parts of the VMS API were quite complex (e.g. random file access - RMS, or the quota's system).
Finally Unix shell is much more flexible and useful than DCL ever was. For instance, DCL did not have pipes or simple I/O redirection.
I know. I'm 49 and I spent more than 10 years developing software on VMS...
Wow! They had APIs to do that? Or did you write some assembly to access the stack?
This was on RSX11-M. As I recall, all networking calls were just system QIOs. We invoked these from Pascal by dropping into MACRO-11 (actually the compiler I used generated assembler code, which then was assembled and linked).
Re:Third-party's TCP/IP stack implementation?
on
DECnet Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 1
Maybe to license a third-party's TCP/IP stack implementation?
And I would say that this is the reason why the US is such an amazing place for blooming startups. It's a fundamental difference in attitude.
Well, startups can offer incentives to employees (i.e. stock options), which encourage people to work harder, Because, as Paul Graham said, in a successful startup you can work hard for 5 years an then be set for life.
Too bad, that actual wins do not occur that often.
My problem is with the fact that if something comes up (say, a deadline during a long weekend), their unwillingness to work. Or the attitude that says, "I've done this for eight hours, I'm not going to work more even if you are willing to pay overtime."
I understand what you are saying. I've worked in many companies where the deadlines need to be met.
However, in most cases, in my experience (except for a startup), the deadlines were artifically imposed by people who did not fully understand what they were asking for and refused to accept realistic estimates.
Maybe this is not the failure of the workers, but failure of management, in not being able to realisticly plan the work or to hire enough people to finish things on time.
Given three (good) programmers from across these regions, if I were to hire two, I'd hire those that were willing to work harder (yes, and that includes not taking days off when things are on a tightline and working at odd hours).
But spending time in the office is not equivalent to being productive. In fact, when you are tired you tend to make more mistakes.
So, I'm not sure what you mean by "willing to work harder".
In general good programmers are lazy (they figure out how to save work by using computers), so measuring their performance by amount of time spent in the office will not be particularly useful. About as useful as measuring their performance based on lines of code.
In fact, a good programmer given an interesting problem never really stops working, but he/she does not have to be in the office sitting in his cubicle.
I honestly believe that IBM - and all of the firms so happily laying off their employees in order to find cheaper labour - are acting in an immoral manner.
IBM is not an entity that can be moral or not. The company's main responsibility is to make money for the shareholders (i.e. the owners).
As long as IBM employees do not break laws, all that matters is the bottom line...
The attitude in Europe that I've noticed in general is the fact that no matter what, they should somehow be given their holidays and they would take their days off, come what may - that's a hard thing to sustain in a corporate, capitalistic setting.
I worked for a European company during the 90s and I spent a lot of time working in Paris and London. I haven't noticed anything like this. The company was a startup, and a typical day for everyone was from 08h00 until around 19h00. Nobody was slacking or demanding 5 weeks vacation.
When you find others who are willing to do the same thing cheaper, and willing to be flexible, you would quite obviously go with them. That is the problem.
You have to be careful what you mean by "the same thing". If it is sitting in the office for more hours, then sure.
However, productivity of a programmer (or any "idea" worker) cannot be measured by the number of hours spent in the office.
For example, whose more productive: programmer A, spends a week from morning to night writing 10,000 lines of code; whereas programmer B slacks on Monday, on Tuesdays realizes that the problem can be solved much nicer using code generation; on Wednesday he completes the generator in Python and is done with the 10,000 lines of code right then and there. Maybe "worked" for solid 8 hours.
I think GM would be a great case study here. The workers managed to wrest lots of concessions from the company, but in doing so set it up for a huge fall when cheaper, higher quality cars showed up in North America. You and I can pass laws so we don't have to compete with Indian and Chinese labor,
One of the problems GM has (besides not building cars that people want to buy) is the cost of healthcare for its employees and retirees.
China or Japan do not have this problem. In all those countries health care is provided by the goverment, so it is not an expense for the company.
Minimum wage. When you can give people a living wage in the United States for $2.50/hr, you'll be able to compete with India. At the rate the dollar is sliding under Bush, that should be about 5 years from now.
What about health insurance? Doesn't India have nationalized healthcare?
Yeah... quantum was a buzzword in 1905. But now it's actual science and proven. Quantum mechanics and QFT are two of the most successful theories to date.
Agree that quantum theory is one of the more solids theories we have. However, building a quantum computer is more a matter of engineering, than just pure science.
For example, Newtown figured out all the theory we needed to go to the Moon, but it took engineers few hundred years to actually accomplish this.
Let's say that according to fair use clauses of Copyright law, I can quote 10% of a song for non-commercial purposes. What if there was a P2P client that would only allow people to upload 10% of the file from you.
Since you never share more than 10% of a song, you could use "fair use" defense (you can even provide critisism - "this song is good/sucks").
The same P2P client would grab 10% of a song from 10 different people, each of who shares different part of the file...
If I had some advice it would be to suck it up and go work for a company at a high wage for 4 years. Save every penny and then get to work on your own project when you're 25. It increases the odds of success to be both experienced, wealthy and over 25.
If only Bill Gates had listen to your advice, when he dropped out of college to sell BASIC on paper tape.
I pointed out that variations in a species are quite common and demonstrable.
Right, but given enough time and physical isolation will result in the variation creating new species.
Even with dogs, a doberman would never mate with a pekingese - so as far as the species definition goes they are different species.
You have to realize the vastness of time over which these changes take place.
You should read Richard Dawkins' "The Ancestor Tale" for discussion of the various lineages of humans and other species that exit today, and explanation of how we know these things.
Frankly, I've become bored with the whole argument; it always follows the same trajectories, and I've yet to see a fundamentalist convinced that the words in their holy book of choice are in error.
I know what you mean.
However, I've been trying to come up with a argument that goes like this: "If you believe that evolution is wrong, why aren't you afraid to go on elevators? Because if the science that is used to demonstrate evolution is wrong, then elevators could not possibly work".
This is not entirely convincing argument. I'd like to get it to be more explicit. Like there was a comedian who said "I don't believe in psychics, because you have to make an appointment".
It's actually kind of ironic to have these kinds of argument on the Internet, considering what kind of science was needed to devlop computers and the net...
The holes in the theory of evolution are manifold and many and yet it is treated as a LAW in the popular press, scientific community, and this forum.
Sigh!
Please take some science courses and learn what a scientific theory is.
We have many theories: Theory of Electricity and Magnetism, Theory of Gravity, Heliocentric Theory, and so on. Everything in science is a theory. Every scientific theory has holes and places where scientists disagree. That does not make them false.
If you are looking for absolute truths, please go study Mathematics.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Unix APIs predate VMS. The Unix/Posix API is actually quite stable and relatively simple. The "man" pages provide plenty of documentation. And the documentation has always been computer searchable.
VMS had/has some nice features (i.e. asynch I/O and unified calling conventions), but some parts of the VMS API were quite complex (e.g. random file access - RMS, or the quota's system).
Finally Unix shell is much more flexible and useful than DCL ever was. For instance, DCL did not have pipes or simple I/O redirection.
I know. I'm 49 and I spent more than 10 years developing software on VMS...
This was on RSX11-M. As I recall, all networking calls were just system QIOs. We invoked these from Pascal by dropping into MACRO-11 (actually the compiler I used generated assembler code, which then was assembled and linked).
For VMS. Since VMS did not come with TCP/IP...
Well, startups can offer incentives to employees (i.e. stock options), which encourage people to work harder, Because, as Paul Graham said, in a successful startup you can work hard for 5 years an then be set for life.
Too bad, that actual wins do not occur that often.
I understand what you are saying. I've worked in many companies where the deadlines need to be met.
However, in most cases, in my experience (except for a startup), the deadlines were artifically imposed by people who did not fully understand what they were asking for and refused to accept realistic estimates.
Maybe this is not the failure of the workers, but failure of management, in not being able to realisticly plan the work or to hire enough people to finish things on time.
Absolutely!
But spending time in the office is not equivalent to being productive. In fact, when you are tired you tend to make more mistakes.
So, I'm not sure what you mean by "willing to work harder".
In general good programmers are lazy (they figure out how to save work by using computers), so measuring their performance by amount of time spent in the office will not be particularly useful. About as useful as measuring their performance based on lines of code.
In fact, a good programmer given an interesting problem never really stops working, but he/she does not have to be in the office sitting in his cubicle.
IBM is not an entity that can be moral or not. The company's main responsibility is to make money for the shareholders (i.e. the owners).
As long as IBM employees do not break laws, all that matters is the bottom line...
I worked for a European company during the 90s and I spent a lot of time working in Paris and London. I haven't noticed anything like this. The company was a startup, and a typical day for everyone was from 08h00 until around 19h00. Nobody was slacking or demanding 5 weeks vacation.
When you find others who are willing to do the same thing cheaper, and willing to be flexible, you would quite obviously go with them. That is the problem.
You have to be careful what you mean by "the same thing". If it is sitting in the office for more hours, then sure.
However, productivity of a programmer (or any "idea" worker) cannot be measured by the number of hours spent in the office.
For example, whose more productive: programmer A, spends a week from morning to night writing 10,000 lines of code; whereas programmer B slacks on Monday, on Tuesdays realizes that the problem can be solved much nicer using code generation; on Wednesday he completes the generator in Python and is done with the 10,000 lines of code right then and there. Maybe "worked" for solid 8 hours.
Which one would you like to work in your startup?
One of the problems GM has (besides not building cars that people want to buy) is the cost of healthcare for its employees and retirees.
China or Japan do not have this problem. In all those countries health care is provided by the goverment, so it is not an expense for the company.
What about health insurance? Doesn't India have nationalized healthcare?
Agree that quantum theory is one of the more solids theories we have. However, building a quantum computer is more a matter of engineering, than just pure science.
For example, Newtown figured out all the theory we needed to go to the Moon, but it took engineers few hundred years to actually accomplish this.
Don't underestimate the engineering problems...
That's nice. But wanting to devote yourself to some craft, does not automatically qualify you for compensation.
If you want to make money, you have to do something that people are willing to buy.
Amen!
Just look at the numbers of people goverments killed throughout history...
Since you never share more than 10% of a song, you could use "fair use" defense (you can even provide critisism - "this song is good/sucks").
The same P2P client would grab 10% of a song from 10 different people, each of who shares different part of the file...
Pony Express was wireless :-)
Since I subscribe to the paper Sunday NYT I wonder if I can continue reading it, without paying more.
The bad thing about NYT is that it is not visible to Google, which will make it irrelevant in the long run.
If only Bill Gates had listen to your advice, when he dropped out of college to sell BASIC on paper tape.
I pointed out that variations in a species are quite common and demonstrable.
Right, but given enough time and physical isolation will result in the variation creating new species. Even with dogs, a doberman would never mate with a pekingese - so as far as the species definition goes they are different species.
You have to realize the vastness of time over which these changes take place.
You should read Richard Dawkins' "The Ancestor Tale" for discussion of the various lineages of humans and other species that exit today, and explanation of how we know these things.
I know what you mean.
However, I've been trying to come up with a argument that goes like this: "If you believe that evolution is wrong, why aren't you afraid to go on elevators? Because if the science that is used to demonstrate evolution is wrong, then elevators could not possibly work".
This is not entirely convincing argument. I'd like to get it to be more explicit. Like there was a comedian who said "I don't believe in psychics, because you have to make an appointment".
It's actually kind of ironic to have these kinds of argument on the Internet, considering what kind of science was needed to devlop computers and the net...
Wonderful post! Bravo!
Sigh! Please take some science courses and learn what a scientific theory is.
We have many theories: Theory of Electricity and Magnetism, Theory of Gravity, Heliocentric Theory, and so on. Everything in science is a theory. Every scientific theory has holes and places where scientists disagree. That does not make them false.
If you are looking for absolute truths, please go study Mathematics.