Fun with departmental vs team budgets. For 2 years my team had no hardware/software budget (or, more accurately, we did but we didn't have any way of accessing it), but we have a site license for Oracle so could run it at no cost to the team.
Once we did get a budget, it wasn't until Oracle keeled over that we went "Wait, we have a budget, why are we running unsupported OSes?"
SUSE is not free. However, when your Oracle server has decided to keel over on the development server, and you've spent a couple of hours now trying to find out why, you really begin to wonder if it wouldn't have been cheaper to pay for the version with support and be able to call someone (OpenSUSE isn't an officially supported Oracle platform, so we couldn't even call them) and have them fix it.
C64... so a comparable locked down platform would be the Sega Master System, right?
I mean... yes, you can't develop for every platform for free. You can still tinker (and frankly from a tinkering point of view, surely having to jailbreak the platform first just makes it more interesting:) ).
The fancier players tend to try post-processing the input to make it look "better", in order to validate their price. This made a decent amount of sense with DVD players, where motion compensation, de-interlacing and other things could really make a difference.
In reality, for Blu-Ray, buy a slimline PS3 and call it done, unless you want a player with a specific feature (DVR, Blu-Ray recording, etc.)
Yeah, I saw that video earlier. That phone looks easily rugged enough to withstand anything that might happen to it in a day to day environment except actually dropping into heavy machinery. Repeated hard impacts to the weakest surface from a single point managed to damage the screen - good grief, most phones I've gone near would have snapped like a twig on the first impact!
I would love to see password authentication replaced with using PGP-style signing. Never actually send the private key to the remote system, but instead when you signup you say "This is me" by giving them your public key and they then know the person with the matching private key is you.
Of course, somehow the private key would need to be kept somewhere viruses can't extract it outright, which means a USB dongle or similar that does the signing on request, which is more stuff...
I get plenty of "You've got stuff waiting. Please log in and read it" or "We've changed our terms and conditions (so you now owe us your first born), please log in to accept them" or similar...
A lot of e-mail clients (Thunderbird, OS X's Mail.App, and I believe Outlook) come with support for encryption and signing of e-mails using X.509 certificates and RSA keys. It's a chain of trust (so you have to get a certificate from a certificate authority of some kind) rather than a web, but until recently Thawte was doing free e-mail certificates. The real problem is... no-one seems to care. Why aren't e-mails from my bank signed cryptographically? Do they even know it's a possibility...
Okay, so lets talk some of the code I have to deal with on a day to day basis...
int getGradeSourceHumanPosition(int sourceID)
What does that do? What's a source ID? What does human position mean? That's a method in an API, as listed. We argue over this a lot, but I maintain that it's essentially impossible for the initial developer to understand what someone coming to the API later on will find confusing, and at the very least exposed methods need to be documented...
Exactly. A code-monkey can talk about just writing raw lines of code, but any serious software developer will spend far more time designing the architecture of the code, than actually typing it in...
> Website support: 10,000 users, supporting general usage of just 1 website. 4 techs, regular business hours only.
Envious. 7,000 users; 1 full time person and 2 half-time. Oh, and we're also expected to the develop the underlying application, not just make keep it up and running......actually, we're primarily meant to be developing it, and support isn't expected to be a major part of our job...
If they were going to bring PC gaming to consoles I could see an argument for hardware maintenance, but with the exception of the infamous XBox 360's RROD consoles tend to be built like a brick and go out of date long before they break.
Is to rent console time over the Internet, to people with enough money to have a PC that will run this stuff, and a fast Internet connection......or an iPhone, a platform known for its cost-effective pricing model......but don't want to buy their own console, because it would clearly be too expensive?
Of course, people don't want to all play computer games at the same time, so I can see they'll be balancing load throughout the day... erm... or not (and certainly, they're not going to be running connections internationally with latency that's anything less than abominable for this).
If you developed something for months, released a version labelled as "beta" for testing only, and found a/. review of it, do you really think you'd feel this was a good forum to provide feedback?
Not to mention; it should be on a bug tracking system, so they can discuss it directly, flag requests for action or explain why they can't be done. This is likely to be lost and forgotten within a couple of weeks.
"assuming a conservative ratio of 10 for the efficiency of C++ versus PHP code"
ARRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Why? On what evidence? I mean, I hate PHP as much as the next guy, but last time I wrote a web application platform in C++, I got to the end, analysed the result and went "Great, I've made the fast bit even faster. Now, about that database engine..."
I think people are overestimating how hard it is to be seen as influential. Windows 7 pre-order, is a good example. Do you think they did massively cut-price Windows 7 for people who ordered early because people wouldn't buy it once it was released, or because they needed sales figured ahead of time? Maybe, but I personally think they were trying to ensure early-adopters (who are likely to be the techies other people look to for advice) can get Windows 7 easily.
Same reason I've got Office 2010 on my PC at the moment; free Office for a year (until Oct 2010) if you can cope with the fact it's meant to be beta (no significant issues so far, personally). They're trying to motivate me to tell others they need to upgrade for cool features such as ODF support......and I think it's working...
Good grief, what is your computer using for a CPU!? Most lf them max out at 85W last time I checked. You're not, perhaps, also running a graphics card at 100% at the same time, are you? There's a reason they need a separate power connection these days...
(Although I can accept it might simply be a whole pile of stuff added together when maxing the computer out means it hits 450W at the wall)
Stop reading those! The less people know I was there, the easier my life is going to be...
Seriously though; a lot of articles are calling this a money grab. It might be, but the core point from what they said at the office hours was to cut down on the sheer clutter in XStreetSL. Unfortunately, they haven't given us an alternative site for freebies (which was a point raised), and there's no ability to group items under a single listing (for example, if someone sells one hair style in 20 colours, they need 20 listings).
So... they've failed to get the why across to most people, and missed most of what we suggested in terms of how.
> Well, he also thinks that a country that loses many times more people to cancer than the USA-- and has people with life-threatening conditions on waiting lists for months-- has a great health system.
Well, it's better than your free healthcare!
Seriously though, the really fantastic thing about the UK system is that it provides a baseline that you can't fall past. However bad things are, it's always there. Want better? Get medical insurance. For example, I pay Bupa ( http://bupa.co.uk/ ) £35-ish/month, which covers any tests I need done, and any surgery. That's not after an employer contribution, that's £35/month all in.
Day traders keep things moving, so if you want to buy/sell a share, you can generally find a day trader to do it against. If you wait for another investor, you could be waiting a while.
If you don't like it, get investors to care more about the exact price they trade at, and squeeze the traders out of the market.
I was thinking something similar (I do currency/futures trading with my own money, but am by no means a professional); I know when I'm emotional, and I know I shouldn't trade when emotional, I don't need a machine to tell me it's a bad plan.
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Fun with departmental vs team budgets. For 2 years my team had no hardware/software budget (or, more accurately, we did but we didn't have any way of accessing it), but we have a site license for Oracle so could run it at no cost to the team.
Once we did get a budget, it wasn't until Oracle keeled over that we went "Wait, we have a budget, why are we running unsupported OSes?"
OpenSUSE is free: http://www.opensuse.org/en/ - we run it here.
SUSE is not free. However, when your Oracle server has decided to keel over on the development server, and you've spent a couple of hours now trying to find out why, you really begin to wonder if it wouldn't have been cheaper to pay for the version with support and be able to call someone (OpenSUSE isn't an officially supported Oracle platform, so we couldn't even call them) and have them fix it.
C64... so a comparable locked down platform would be the Sega Master System, right?
I mean... yes, you can't develop for every platform for free. You can still tinker (and frankly from a tinkering point of view, surely having to jailbreak the platform first just makes it more interesting :) ).
I was about to say, most of the places around here will deliver for free if you spend a decent amount on food...
The fancier players tend to try post-processing the input to make it look "better", in order to validate their price. This made a decent amount of sense with DVD players, where motion compensation, de-interlacing and other things could really make a difference.
In reality, for Blu-Ray, buy a slimline PS3 and call it done, unless you want a player with a specific feature (DVR, Blu-Ray recording, etc.)
Yeah, I saw that video earlier. That phone looks easily rugged enough to withstand anything that might happen to it in a day to day environment except actually dropping into heavy machinery. Repeated hard impacts to the weakest surface from a single point managed to damage the screen - good grief, most phones I've gone near would have snapped like a twig on the first impact!
I would love to see password authentication replaced with using PGP-style signing. Never actually send the private key to the remote system, but instead when you signup you say "This is me" by giving them your public key and they then know the person with the matching private key is you.
Of course, somehow the private key would need to be kept somewhere viruses can't extract it outright, which means a USB dongle or similar that does the signing on request, which is more stuff...
I get plenty of "You've got stuff waiting. Please log in and read it" or "We've changed our terms and conditions (so you now owe us your first born), please log in to accept them" or similar...
A lot of e-mail clients (Thunderbird, OS X's Mail.App, and I believe Outlook) come with support for encryption and signing of e-mails using X.509 certificates and RSA keys. It's a chain of trust (so you have to get a certificate from a certificate authority of some kind) rather than a web, but until recently Thawte was doing free e-mail certificates. The real problem is... no-one seems to care. Why aren't e-mails from my bank signed cryptographically? Do they even know it's a possibility...
Okay, so lets talk some of the code I have to deal with on a day to day basis...
int getGradeSourceHumanPosition(int sourceID)
What does that do? What's a source ID? What does human position mean? That's a method in an API, as listed. We argue over this a lot, but I maintain that it's essentially impossible for the initial developer to understand what someone coming to the API later on will find confusing, and at the very least exposed methods need to be documented...
Exactly. A code-monkey can talk about just writing raw lines of code, but any serious software developer will spend far more time designing the architecture of the code, than actually typing it in...
> Website support: 10,000 users, supporting general usage of just 1 website. 4 techs, regular business hours only.
Envious. 7,000 users; 1 full time person and 2 half-time. Oh, and we're also expected to the develop the underlying application, not just make keep it up and running... ...actually, we're primarily meant to be developing it, and support isn't expected to be a major part of our job...
Space... erm... space...
No, fairly much stuck after space.
If they were going to bring PC gaming to consoles I could see an argument for hardware maintenance, but with the exception of the infamous XBox 360's RROD consoles tend to be built like a brick and go out of date long before they break.
Is to rent console time over the Internet, to people with enough money to have a PC that will run this stuff, and a fast Internet connection... ...or an iPhone, a platform known for its cost-effective pricing model... ...but don't want to buy their own console, because it would clearly be too expensive?
Of course, people don't want to all play computer games at the same time, so I can see they'll be balancing load throughout the day... erm... or not (and certainly, they're not going to be running connections internationally with latency that's anything less than abominable for this).
In summary: WTF?
Really?
If you developed something for months, released a version labelled as "beta" for testing only, and found a /. review of it, do you really think you'd feel this was a good forum to provide feedback?
Not to mention; it should be on a bug tracking system, so they can discuss it directly, flag requests for action or explain why they can't be done. This is likely to be lost and forgotten within a couple of weeks.
Feedback is something you write to developers, not something you write in an article on your advertising supported website...
"assuming a conservative ratio of 10 for the efficiency of C++ versus PHP code"
ARRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Why? On what evidence? I mean, I hate PHP as much as the next guy, but last time I wrote a web application platform in C++, I got to the end, analysed the result and went "Great, I've made the fast bit even faster. Now, about that database engine..."
I think people are overestimating how hard it is to be seen as influential. Windows 7 pre-order, is a good example. Do you think they did massively cut-price Windows 7 for people who ordered early because people wouldn't buy it once it was released, or because they needed sales figured ahead of time? Maybe, but I personally think they were trying to ensure early-adopters (who are likely to be the techies other people look to for advice) can get Windows 7 easily.
Same reason I've got Office 2010 on my PC at the moment; free Office for a year (until Oct 2010) if you can cope with the fact it's meant to be beta (no significant issues so far, personally). They're trying to motivate me to tell others they need to upgrade for cool features such as ODF support... ...and I think it's working...
Oi, 6-digit, get off my lawn :)
Good grief, what is your computer using for a CPU!? Most lf them max out at 85W last time I checked. You're not, perhaps, also running a graphics card at 100% at the same time, are you? There's a reason they need a separate power connection these days...
(Although I can accept it might simply be a whole pile of stuff added together when maxing the computer out means it hits 450W at the wall)
Stop reading those! The less people know I was there, the easier my life is going to be...
Seriously though; a lot of articles are calling this a money grab. It might be, but the core point from what they said at the office hours was to cut down on the sheer clutter in XStreetSL. Unfortunately, they haven't given us an alternative site for freebies (which was a point raised), and there's no ability to group items under a single listing (for example, if someone sells one hair style in 20 colours, they need 20 listings).
So... they've failed to get the why across to most people, and missed most of what we suggested in terms of how.
> Well, he also thinks that a country that loses many times more people to cancer than the USA-- and has people with life-threatening conditions on waiting lists for months-- has a great health system.
Well, it's better than your free healthcare!
Seriously though, the really fantastic thing about the UK system is that it provides a baseline that you can't fall past. However bad things are, it's always there. Want better? Get medical insurance. For example, I pay Bupa ( http://bupa.co.uk/ ) £35-ish/month, which covers any tests I need done, and any surgery. That's not after an employer contribution, that's £35/month all in.
> They just happen to be the sharks, while most people are the tuna.
Which makes the hyper-scalping (sub-second round trip) automated trading platforms some sort of T-1000, right? :)
Day traders keep things moving, so if you want to buy/sell a share, you can generally find a day trader to do it against. If you wait for another investor, you could be waiting a while.
If you don't like it, get investors to care more about the exact price they trade at, and squeeze the traders out of the market.
I was thinking something similar (I do currency/futures trading with my own money, but am by no means a professional); I know when I'm emotional, and I know I shouldn't trade when emotional, I don't need a machine to tell me it's a bad plan.