In fact, there's a steady stream of jobs in Pittsburgh [pghtech.org]
Unfortunately, the pool of available talent apparently exceeds the number of jobs by a very large amount in Pittsburgh. We recently were hiring for three technical positions. We received several dozen resumes; only two (IIRC) were from people who were still employed. That's quite a bit different from three years ago.
Many of the resumes we got were from people laid off from the telecom industry. I'd say about a third of the candidates came from Marconi and/or Tollgrade.
Hmm... no offense, but you must be working in some amazingly bad companies.
In my entire career (four companies, over more than a decade) I've only been told once that programmers were not to talk to customers, and that was a time-preservation issue, not a "don't let the customer know what's going on" issue.
Modem Wars is often overlooked when people talk about multiplayer RTS games. So many people think that multiplayer RTS was invented by Warcraft or C and C...
I was lucky enough to have worked with Dani on the re-release of Modem Wars, which was named Warsport. Unfortunately, it's now second-generation abandonware. The company that made Warsport is out of business, and the game network for which Warsport was made is also gone (subsumed into GameSpy, which has no interest in supporting Warsport).
If you liked Modem Wars, here are a couple of screenshots from Warsport:
You obviously don't work at a company that either makes the division that produced the code also provide support, or cross-charges customer support to that division.
I do.
I feel bad for you, your employer, and your employer's stockholders.
I'll grant you some of the hardware on that laptop. The top-of-the-line Gateway matches the specs that count to me, though, for $600 less.
It only drops Gb Ethernet (don't need it), 802.11g (all the APs I ever see are 802.11b anyway, and I work for a manufacturer!), the slot-loading DVD burner (whoop!), and the light sensor.
Your assertion that you have to pony up three grand to Microsoft to program for Windows is just wrong. You can use the same Free GNU toolchain for Windows that you do for OSX, and you can pick up a brand-new copy of Visual Studio.NET for under $1000, not $3000. If you don't need the absolute-latest version (and you don't--I use version 6.0 at work), pick up a copy of version 6.0 for about $250.
As far as having to reboot my laptop, I haven't honestly had to reboot it in about three months. I just suspend and resume. It's not instantaneous, I'll grant you, but I doubt that yours is, either--there are some speed-of-light issues involved. Mine suspends and resumes in about three seconds, which is faster than it takes me to get it properly opened and sit down to work.
Don't get me wrong, and don't assume from my signature that I'm a Windows-only person. (Don't tell anyone, but Windev actually runs on a Linux box...;-))
I cut my teeth on Apples (II+, IIe, then Mac Plus); now I'm more of a Linux person, simply due to the economic realities (search for Mac programming jobs vs. Unix programming jobs and you'll understand).
MacOs was a decent platform, and from everything I've heard, OS/X is a great one. But you obviously know very little about the Windows world.
The top-level comment of this thread said: "might be worth a purchase, but still not completely sold...It still doesn't help when one member of a team doesn't listen to anyone and ends up rewriting their code 5-6 times."
I thought you were still commenting on the suitability of SCRUM. My bad.
Maybe because the term "Agile Development" was around for years before Microsoft started using the slogan "Software for the Agile Business". Same goes for "eXtreme Programming" versus "Windows XP".
So if tomorrow, Microsoft releases "SnigglyOS", are you going to change your/. id?;-)
Am I the only one that thought deserts were made of sand?
I sure hope so, or else the state of geography education has gone downhill fast. All desert means is that the average rainfall per year is a given, arbitrary level or less. The sagebrush country of the eastern part of the state of Washington in the U.S. is desert, as is most (all?) of Antarctica.
All 4 screencaps on their front page show grass.
Well, let's see what geography and history we can dig out from our junior high days. If I recall correctly, a large river runs through Egypt. You may have heard of it; it's called the Nile. Also, given that people have been digging up three-thousand-year-old human corpses from big stone tetrahedrons, apparently built by humans, we can deduce that a civilization has existed there for a while, and you can be pretty sure they didn't eat sand and scorpions.
From those two facts, you can deduce that while a good part of Egypt may be desert, the part that's been heavily inhabited for the last few millenia must be capable of sustaining some sort of vegetation... and a lot of it. <grin>
But to your point, yes, just like in real Egypt, there is a heck of a lot of sandy desert in the game world. Problem is, just like in the real world, there's no reason anyone would want to build homes, towns, or anything worthy of a screenshot there.
But you could, possibly, make the argument that the title is misleading. I think if you take up the issue with the developers, you'll learn that "A Tale in a Group of Loosely-Affiliated Oases Located Throughout a Region Otherwise Consisting of Sandy Desert" was rejected, because it wouldn't fit on the splash screen.
It's still a hit even if you only count sales of the original game and not expansions, which, according to the latest copy of Computer Games, is still among the top ten selling games month-to-month.
One fair way is to pay per work performed. You estimate some reasonable time needed, you give the assignment, and whenever they finish is up to them. If the lazy guy has to come on weekends, it's his problem.
That works great for uniform tasks like (as another poster mentioned) rotating tires. It's near impossible when the task is either open-ended or difficult to measure.
As an example, my wife used to work as a physical therapist. PT offices are paid by insurance companies in the way you mentioned--they're paid per patient visit.
That means that a treatment that consists of instructing a patient for five minutes on how to do an exercise, then watching them do it for fifteen minutes, pays as much as a manual traction that requires three people's active work for the same twenty minutes. The effect is that if a treatment pays 'x', for some modalities, one assistant can treat six patients at once and the office earns 6x per employee. For another modality, the office earns x/3 per employee.
That causes some less-scrupulous offices to choose modalities that can pay more rather than those which are most medically appropriate.
You could make the scale more fine-grained, but you'd increase the paperwork by an order of magnitude, and you'd still have ways a bad office could get around it.
My point is that pay per work can be gamed just as easily as pay per hour or flat rate.
BOOL GetTextExtentPoint(HDC hdc, LPCTSTR lpString, int cbString, LPSIZE lpSize);
"The GetTextExtentPoint function computes the width and height of the specified string of text. "
BOOL GetTextExtentPoint32(HDC hdc, LPCTSTR lpString, int cbString, LPSIZE lpSize);
"The GetTextExtentPoint32 function computes the width and height of the specified string of text."
BOOL GetTextExtentPointI(HDC hdc, LPWORD pgiIn, int cgi, LPSIZE lpSize);
"The GetTextExtentPointI function computes the width and height of the specified array of glyph indices."
BOOL GetTextExtentExPoint(HDC hdc, LPCTSTR lpszStr, int cchString, int nMaxExtent, LPINT lpnFit, LPINT alpDx, LPSIZE lpSize);
"The GetTextExtentExPoint function retrieves the number of characters in a specified string that will fit within a specified space and fills an array with the text extent for each of those characters."
BOOL GetTextExtentExPointI(HDC hdc, LPWORD pgiIn, int cgi, int nMaxExtent, LPINT lpnFit, LPINT alpDx, LPSIZE lpSize);
"The GetTextExtentExPointI function retrieves the number of characters in a specified string that will fit within a specified space and fills an array with the text extent for each of those characters."
The shuttle fleet is another 17 years older than it was when challenger exploded. There are three orbiters left out of a fleet of five. It is one thing to redesign a spacecraft that has twenty years of design life left in it, quite another to make radical changes to a craft that is 20 years old.
The orbiters are now getting old.
Actually, IIRC Columbia was less than halfway through its expected life cycle of ~100 flights, and they _have_ been making design changes to the shuttles as they go.
There are plenty of reasonable criticisms of the shuttle vehicles, but "they're too old" isn't one.
I was a teenager, skipping school in 1986 when I saw the Challenger explosion live on television. Like you, I cried then.
When I heard about it this morning while making my kids' breakfast, I felt a hollow ache, but it wasn't until I read your post of 'High Flight' that the tears really came.
"It's a wonderful decision to have," said industry lawyer Carey Ramos. "In the various lawsuits going on, there will now be citations that the Supreme Court has endorsed copyright as the engine of free expression and means of promoting creativity."...
Ramos mocked the idea that people would even notice the court decision. "Millions of people are not going to say, 'Let's have a day of protest where we stay home and download music.' It ain't going to happen. If three people do it, I'll be shocked," he said.
Hmm... google for "Carey Ramos" gives this web site.
Mr. Ramos' email address from this publically-available source is cramos@paulweiss.com.
Would the Slashdot-reading public care to challenge Mr. Ramos's perception of the world?
Because the GPL doesn't directly address patents by the first party (only patent restrictions placed upon licensees), I fear that a good lawyer could argue that license to use, modify and distribute a copyrighted document (the source code) doesn't take away from the patent rights of the first party.
rms has indicated that an FSF lawyer has opined that the GPL in its current form forces an implicit licensing of the patent, but there is no language in the GPL that makes this explicit. (Don't quote me the preamble; that's non-normative).
That's why some folks have proposed adding this language to the GPL.
You seem to be confused about the difference between releasing code under the GPL and granting license to patented inventions.
I can patent a software invention, write some code that shows how to implement the patented invention, and distribute that for free. That doesn't mean that I have given up my rights to the patent; quite the contrary, that's the whole point of the patent system.
The argument for the patent system is that it lets inventors make the workings of an invention known, in order that others may use it under license. Without the patent system, inventors have to keep their inventions as trade secrets, meaning that they can't license the invention easily without giving up their rights to the invention.
Now, that's the theory. I don't think that anyone would disagree that the patent system is used, abused, and generally twisted 180 degrees from the way it's supposed to work. But you assertion that giving away code that implements patents equates to free licensing of the patent is just incorrect.
Naturally, I'm no lawyer, so if any lawyers or proto-lawyers out there know better, please correct me...
The salon regulation, to me at first, seemed like the usual overkill large government regulation. However, it too is a matter of safety to the clients, as the chemicals and equipment (tanning beds especially) can also do harm if used incorrectly.
You read way too much into that piece of paper. At least in my state, having that certificate on your wall means only two things:
1. At some point, perhaps thirty years ago, you passed a test. 2. You've continued to pay your US$30 to the state every two years to be able to continue to put that piece of paper on the wall.
This is a chicken-and-egg problem, at least in the Bay area. Real estate prices were high, but not stupid-high, before the tech boom. When tech people became scarce due to the tech explosion there, companies started paying silly money to qualified people from out of the area in order to entice them to move. This caused a mass influx of people with good amounts of disposable income and lots of competition for scarce housing. Low supply, high demand: prices go up. It's Economics 101.
Now real estate prices generally (but not always) fall much more slowly in a recession than they rise in a superheated market. So now we have a situation where housing prices remain high, but the jobs are far less plentiful and you still have a large number of people chasing them. Higher supply (of labor), low demand: prices go down.
You remark that companies should move to where real estate isn't subject to bidding wars. They are--it's just not a place in the U.S.
Also, you could say the same things about those who complain about high real estate prices compared to their salaries: go somewhere with a decent tech economy and a non-inflated real estate market.
Yes, there are cities in the U.S. that fit this description.
One day, the disciple said unto the master: "Master, there are so many free software licenses with so many different requirements that nobody can possibly remember them all. I shall design my own set of unified free software licenses to replace all the others, and thereby set us all free!"
The master immediately slapped the disciple.
"Master, why did you strike me?"
The master said nothing, and the disciple went away.
The next day, the disciple returned to the master, but before he could say anything, the master immediately slapped the disciple.
"Master, why did you strike me again?"
"I did not strike you again. Yesterday, I struck you with my left hand. Today I strike you with my right hand. Tomorrow I shall kick you."
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, there's a steady stream of jobs in Pittsburgh [pghtech.org]
Unfortunately, the pool of available talent apparently exceeds the number of jobs by a very large amount in Pittsburgh. We recently were hiring for three technical positions. We received several dozen resumes; only two (IIRC) were from people who were still employed. That's quite a bit different from three years ago.
Many of the resumes we got were from people laid off from the telecom industry. I'd say about a third of the candidates came from Marconi and/or Tollgrade.
Hmm... no offense, but you must be working in some amazingly bad companies.
In my entire career (four companies, over more than a decade) I've only been told once that programmers were not to talk to customers, and that was a time-preservation issue, not a "don't let the customer know what's going on" issue.
There's a reason for that... the guy who drew the art for the mule had an AT-AT model on his desk when he did it!
(This is from Dani herself, circa 1997).
Modem Wars is often overlooked when people talk about multiplayer RTS games. So many people think that multiplayer RTS was invented by Warcraft or C and C...
I was lucky enough to have worked with Dani on the re-release of Modem Wars, which was named Warsport. Unfortunately, it's now second-generation abandonware. The company that made Warsport is out of business, and the game network for which Warsport was made is also gone (subsumed into GameSpy, which has no interest in supporting Warsport).
If you liked Modem Wars, here are a couple of screenshots from Warsport:
Formation Setup
Missile Mode
Repair Mode
End Game
You obviously don't work at a company that either makes the division that produced the code also provide support, or cross-charges customer support to that division.
I do.
I feel bad for you, your employer, and your employer's stockholders.
there aren't cow farmers... farming is plants, ranching is animals... This is a cow rancher!
I'm assuming you're from the U.S., and from the western half at that.
In the Eastern US, someone who grows cows for milk or for slaughter is usually called a "farmer". A "rancher" is primarily a mid-west or western term.
I'll grant you some of the hardware on that laptop. The top-of-the-line Gateway matches the specs that count to me, though, for $600 less.
;-))
It only drops Gb Ethernet (don't need it), 802.11g (all the APs I ever see are 802.11b anyway, and I work for a manufacturer!), the slot-loading DVD burner (whoop!), and the light sensor.
Your assertion that you have to pony up three grand to Microsoft to program for Windows is just wrong. You can use the same Free GNU toolchain for Windows that you do for OSX, and you can pick up a brand-new copy of Visual Studio.NET for under $1000, not $3000. If you don't need the absolute-latest version (and you don't--I use version 6.0 at work), pick up a copy of version 6.0 for about $250.
As far as having to reboot my laptop, I haven't honestly had to reboot it in about three months. I just suspend and resume. It's not instantaneous, I'll grant you, but I doubt that yours is, either--there are some speed-of-light issues involved. Mine suspends and resumes in about three seconds, which is faster than it takes me to get it properly opened and sit down to work.
Don't get me wrong, and don't assume from my signature that I'm a Windows-only person. (Don't tell anyone, but Windev actually runs on a Linux box...
I cut my teeth on Apples (II+, IIe, then Mac Plus); now I'm more of a Linux person, simply due to the economic realities (search for Mac programming jobs vs. Unix programming jobs and you'll understand).
MacOs was a decent platform, and from everything I've heard, OS/X is a great one. But you obviously know very little about the Windows world.
The top-level comment of this thread said: "might be worth a purchase, but still not completely sold...It still doesn't help when one member of a team doesn't listen to anyone and ends up rewriting their code 5-6 times."
I thought you were still commenting on the suitability of SCRUM. My bad.
Maybe because the term "Agile Development" was around for years before Microsoft started using the slogan "Software for the Agile Business". Same goes for "eXtreme Programming" versus "Windows XP".
/. id? ;-)
So if tomorrow, Microsoft releases "SnigglyOS", are you going to change your
What part of "In that case, no development methodology will work" didn't you understand?
It's as if you're comparing two models of automobile, and insisting that the second CAN'T be better than the first, because it doesn't run underwater.
Am I the only one that thought deserts were made of sand?
I sure hope so, or else the state of geography education has gone downhill fast. All desert means is that the average rainfall per year is a given, arbitrary level or less. The sagebrush country of the eastern part of the state of Washington in the U.S. is desert, as is most (all?) of Antarctica.
All 4 screencaps on their front page show grass.
Well, let's see what geography and history we can dig out from our junior high days. If I recall correctly, a large river runs through Egypt. You may have heard of it; it's called the Nile. Also, given that people have been digging up three-thousand-year-old human corpses from big stone tetrahedrons, apparently built by humans, we can deduce that a civilization has existed there for a while, and you can be pretty sure they didn't eat sand and scorpions.
From those two facts, you can deduce that while a good part of Egypt may be desert, the part that's been heavily inhabited for the last few millenia must be capable of sustaining some sort of vegetation... and a lot of it. <grin>
But to your point, yes, just like in real Egypt, there is a heck of a lot of sandy desert in the game world. Problem is, just like in the real world, there's no reason anyone would want to build homes, towns, or anything worthy of a screenshot there.
But you could, possibly, make the argument that the title is misleading. I think if you take up the issue with the developers, you'll learn that "A Tale in a Group of Loosely-Affiliated Oases Located Throughout a Region Otherwise Consisting of Sandy Desert" was rejected, because it wouldn't fit on the splash screen.
It's still a hit even if you only count sales of the original game and not expansions, which, according to the latest copy of Computer Games, is still among the top ten selling games month-to-month.
One fair way is to pay per work performed. You estimate some reasonable time needed, you give the assignment, and whenever they finish is up to them. If the lazy guy has to come on weekends, it's his problem.
That works great for uniform tasks like (as another poster mentioned) rotating tires. It's near impossible when the task is either open-ended or difficult to measure.
As an example, my wife used to work as a physical therapist. PT offices are paid by insurance companies in the way you mentioned--they're paid per patient visit.
That means that a treatment that consists of instructing a patient for five minutes on how to do an exercise, then watching them do it for fifteen minutes, pays as much as a manual traction that requires three people's active work for the same twenty minutes. The effect is that if a treatment pays 'x', for some modalities, one assistant can treat six patients at once and the office earns 6x per employee. For another modality, the office earns x/3 per employee.
That causes some less-scrupulous offices to choose modalities that can pay more rather than those which are most medically appropriate.
You could make the scale more fine-grained, but you'd increase the paperwork by an order of magnitude, and you'd still have ways a bad office could get around it.
My point is that pay per work can be gamed just as easily as pay per hour or flat rate.
The shuttle fleet is another 17 years older than it was when challenger exploded. There are three orbiters left out of a fleet of five. It is one thing to redesign a spacecraft that has twenty years of design life left in it, quite another to make radical changes to a craft that is 20 years old.
The orbiters are now getting old.
Actually, IIRC Columbia was less than halfway through its expected life cycle of ~100 flights, and they _have_ been making design changes to the shuttles as they go.
There are plenty of reasonable criticisms of the shuttle vehicles, but "they're too old" isn't one.
I was a teenager, skipping school in 1986 when I saw the Challenger explosion live on television. Like you, I cried then.
When I heard about it this morning while making my kids' breakfast, I felt a hollow ache, but it wasn't until I read your post of 'High Flight' that the tears really came.
Thank you.
But you must see that businesses do not play UT 2003 or Quake 3 on their computers. A business is not an average user of computers.
You have a rather interesting definition of "average". Do you honestly think there are more gamers than business users?
Ok, I've got it. What we need are bar codes on business cards....
.
Uhh... don't we already? I mean, I do.
Oh, wait, maybe it's because I work here
<grin>
"It's a wonderful decision to have," said industry lawyer Carey Ramos. "In the various lawsuits going on, there will now be citations that the Supreme Court has endorsed copyright as the engine of free expression and means of promoting creativity." ...
Ramos mocked the idea that people would even notice the court decision. "Millions of people are not going to say, 'Let's have a day of protest where we stay home and download music.' It ain't going to happen. If three people do it, I'll be shocked," he said.
Hmm... google for "Carey Ramos" gives this web site.
Mr. Ramos' email address from this publically-available source is cramos@paulweiss.com.
Would the Slashdot-reading public care to challenge Mr. Ramos's perception of the world?
You're using the wrong sense of hacker. Most security hackers won't have much use for the tricks in this book, either.
The hacker referenced in the book's title is this one.
Also there is no real-world application for hacking. Anyone who says that deserves to be butt-raped in jail.
Tell that to anyone who's ever worked on a tiger team (or opfor, in military terms).
Because the GPL doesn't directly address patents by the first party (only patent restrictions placed upon licensees), I fear that a good lawyer could argue that license to use, modify and distribute a copyrighted document (the source code) doesn't take away from the patent rights of the first party.
rms has indicated that an FSF lawyer has opined that the GPL in its current form forces an implicit licensing of the patent, but there is no language in the GPL that makes this explicit. (Don't quote me the preamble; that's non-normative).
That's why some folks have proposed adding this language to the GPL.
You seem to be confused about the difference between releasing code under the GPL and granting license to patented inventions.
I can patent a software invention, write some code that shows how to implement the patented invention, and distribute that for free. That doesn't mean that I have given up my rights to the patent; quite the contrary, that's the whole point of the patent system.
The argument for the patent system is that it lets inventors make the workings of an invention known, in order that others may use it under license. Without the patent system, inventors have to keep their inventions as trade secrets, meaning that they can't license the invention easily without giving up their rights to the invention.
Now, that's the theory. I don't think that anyone would disagree that the patent system is used, abused, and generally twisted 180 degrees from the way it's supposed to work. But you assertion that giving away code that implements patents equates to free licensing of the patent is just incorrect.
Naturally, I'm no lawyer, so if any lawyers or proto-lawyers out there know better, please correct me...
The salon regulation, to me at first, seemed like the usual overkill large government regulation. However, it too is a matter of safety to the clients, as the chemicals and equipment (tanning beds especially) can also do harm if used incorrectly.
You read way too much into that piece of paper. At least in my state, having that certificate on your wall means only two things:
1. At some point, perhaps thirty years ago, you passed a test.
2. You've continued to pay your US$30 to the state every two years to be able to continue to put that piece of paper on the wall.
This is a chicken-and-egg problem, at least in the Bay area. Real estate prices were high, but not stupid-high, before the tech boom. When tech people became scarce due to the tech explosion there, companies started paying silly money to qualified people from out of the area in order to entice them to move. This caused a mass influx of people with good amounts of disposable income and lots of competition for scarce housing. Low supply, high demand: prices go up. It's Economics 101.
Now real estate prices generally (but not always) fall much more slowly in a recession than they rise in a superheated market. So now we have a situation where housing prices remain high, but the jobs are far less plentiful and you still have a large number of people chasing them. Higher supply (of labor), low demand: prices go down.
You remark that companies should move to where real estate isn't subject to bidding wars. They are--it's just not a place in the U.S.
Also, you could say the same things about those who complain about high real estate prices compared to their salaries: go somewhere with a decent tech economy and a non-inflated real estate market.
Yes, there are cities in the U.S. that fit this description.
Amusing, but this would be a more proper koan:
One day, the disciple said unto the master: "Master, there are so many free software licenses with so many different requirements that nobody can possibly remember them all. I shall design my own set of unified free software licenses to replace all the others, and thereby set us all free!"
The master immediately slapped the disciple.
"Master, why did you strike me?"
The master said nothing, and the disciple went away.
The next day, the disciple returned to the master, but before he could say anything, the master immediately slapped the disciple.
"Master, why did you strike me again?"
"I did not strike you again. Yesterday, I struck you with my left hand. Today I strike you with my right hand. Tomorrow I shall kick you."
The disciple was suddenly enlightened.