I'd be very much surprised if programmer's perks haven't been a long-standing source of friction.
They are a permanent, ongoing and vociferous source of friction wherever programmers are in visible range. That's why i felt so sure that i could run this diagnosis:-).
Sometimes frustration is included in all choices the menu offers. This is why the term "lesser of two evils" was invented. The boss may even hate his own decision but perhaps he just ran out of alternatives. There is still the chance that he was just plain stupid, but from the amount of information available, i would not place any money on that bet.
It is hard to say wether the boss is an idiot. The original posts doesn't give all the constraints he is working under. Judging a decision from 10 lines of text is something i try to avoid. Management is easier said than done. I would wish every geek to hold a management position at least once in his life. This is not because i like to see people suffer (or better: not only because), but it would improve their view of the world and help them to cope with managers in the future. Sincerely yours, Martin
I am pretty sure, that the official reason is not the real reason. My best guess is that other employees have complained about the privilege of the programmers (listening music while working). Since your boss knows that giving this reason would create dissent, he has choosen the quality issue as official reason. That is the reason why discussing the pretended reason will not make him change his mind. I have seen this happening a hundred times... humans are so petty.
CU, Martin
Hmmm..... Neither headline nor summary fits the news. Nothing in the quoted article mentions windows. The article itself is focussing on a small aspect of what is being discussed. Some parts of the discussion would be very negative for Windows users. E.g. it is being discussed to disconnect users from the Internet who don't fix their PCs when attacks originate from them. I don't agree with a lot of things discussed, but they didn't do anything to deserve a/. summary like this.
for a detailed advice, there are too many parameters missing. So i have to stay on the general track:
1. Your wording seems to indicate you don't have a choice. The question would have been asked a different way if you had one. 2. My personal opinion: Every technical guy should try management at least once. Even if you hate the job, you may learn a lot of things that may help you in your relationship with future bosses. 3. Management is an ungrateful job: You can do everything for you subordinates, they will not thank it. If you stay in management, your job satisfaction must have a different source. 4. If you find not be suited to the job: Pull the plug yourself. Don't wait for anyone else to do it. The damage from the later one outweighs the salary from a weeks or months.
Have fun, Martin
P.S. My path was: Programmer -> Consultant -> Director -> CEO -> Sales. While i loved every technical aspects of the first two jobs, nothing beats sales. Being a sales guy with a heavy technical background is like being armed with an M16 on a medieval battlefield.
- People have spent Battlefunds to get weapons permanently which are now obsolete. - Based on Valor Points, prices have increased by a factor of 10-20. - Changes were not announced, so nobody had a chance to spend there now worthless Valor Points. - They have promised not to this. They even mocked games that did this before them.
I have spent more money on Battlefunds than for a full price game, but i never felt forced. Now i feel forced and my natural reaction is "quit". I feel cheated and not because they want money. I have enough of it to afford Battlefunds. But i dislike changing a deal after i has been made.
The only reason for prosecuting the Google Execs is: It gives more kudos (not within the/. community and only if they win) and press coverage for the prosecutors. So they take the gamble, since most judges are so incompetent about everything concerning the internet.
Since it has been disclosed that good reviews are being bought (you are allowed to conduct a test early if you guarantee at least a score of X), you cannot rely on reviews in any way. Currently the publisher try to sell any game as much as possible on the first three days before the "real" reviews hit.
What is the definition of intercontinental? The flight was supposed to be 20 miles. That is not much... There are places were continents are so close together, so you can jump:-) the distance. If he goes Tokio to LA with his suite, i'll be impressed.
The problem seems to be right out of the textbook for "Practical Analysis" (not sure if this is the correct translation for the german "Praktische Analysis"). This was a nandatory course for every computer science degree during my university time (20 years ago). Don't know if this is still the case. It was an eye opener to see how correct formulas and a perfectly working computer could yield absurd results. Several times i was asked for help by people claiming their Excel was broken due to such mistakes.
Movie or game directors are not biased against truth. Usually it is just not entertaining enough or too complex for a popcorn munching viewer to understand.
The same thing has happened in the movies. Often historical events were only used as distorted background. And movies are as games made for entertainment purposes. So what counts is entertainment value not historical accuracy.
Nevertheless, this would suggest that there will always be a niche market willing to pay absurd prices for their books printed in German.
Correct: A niche... that's what i ment with funeral eulogy. Currently the german book market is nothing but a niche; it has to collapse to become a niche market. Unluckily they are doing their best to achieve this.
since i am german and an ebook user for several years (iRexx Iliad),
i would like to comment on that:
It is very hard to purchase german ebooks. Only a small percantage
of all books is actually offered as an ebook. If they are published at
all, the ebook version comes months or even years later.
The german book market is heavily regulated and
publishers/authors are mostly happy with the status quo.
The ebook is seen as "a disturbance of the force" and
therefor not appreciated. Publishers already try to get
lawmakers to extend the regulation to ebooks as well.
Germanys "Intelligenzija" (from which a lot of authors are
recruited) is notorical hostile towards technology.
The primary clients for ebooks are geeks and technology friendly
young adults. Those can read books in english. Since those are even
a lot of cheaper, germanys ebook shoppers buy beyond the border (e.g. i have
200 ebooks from Baen.
The trend of germans reading "english" literature is already
demonstrated by Amazon Germany having an own category "English
books". Patrick Rothfuss fulminant debut with "Name of the wind"
costs 25 Euro as a german book or 7 Euro as an english one (both
including S&H).
The early adopters of technology typically read a large share
of Science Fiction & Fantasy... not a strength of german authors
(few exceptions). SF&F is still frowned at, not considered to be
"real literature" here. This also drives readers into exile.
Like the music industry the publishers are currently comitting
sucide due to the fear of death. By trying to preserve the status
quo, they are scaring away a big part of their future customers.
Ebooks are only a symptom here.
I have purchased and read about 1.000+ books during the last 25 years. Due
to a still progressing carreer, my budget is rising. But i am less
and less inclined to spend it on the local market.
The only way to bring glory into your daily job is to do it yourself. No work environment does bring the glory. If it should, it would attract such people, that any glory would be estinguished.... OOooops, that's what happend to the IT.
having evaluated and supported a lot of DNS software in the last years, i have to concede some truth to those statement (for other reasons than mentioned), especially concerning the still heavily used BIND. E.g. BIND 9 is a software, i would not encorurage to use in certain environments (>100K zones for authorative, more than 5K queries per second for caching nameservers). The code of BIND isn't something, i want to debug (been there, done that). The weirdest thing (last checked with BIND 9.6.0): With about 100K zones, config and zone files on a RAM disk, it still needed about 40 minutes for startup. Importing the same configuration into another nameserver took only about 90 seconds.
With the Nominum products, i appreciated performance (10-20 times better than BIND, about 7 times better than PowerDNS [better meaning: number of requests serviced per CPU minute]), the complete re-configurability at runtime and the PERL/Java/C-API. Implementing a solid provisioning was always easy.
Each software has its advantages and disadvantages. If only technical aspects matter, i would currently prefer the Nominum products to all OSS products i have tested. Other criterias may lead to different decision.
CU, Martin
P.S. My statement concerns the use of DNS in a provider environment. If you setup a DNS service for your enterprise, OSS will probably your software of choice. I have only one strong recommendation even there: Separate the caching nameserver from your authorative nameserver. Even if you use BIND and only one machine: Implement those services in separate instances and
on separate IP adresses. It will give you a lot more choices, if you want to replace the software later or if you need to scale up a service.
P.P.S. This is my personal opinion and may not be untainted by selfinterest. I consider myself OSS-friendly, but it isn't a religious belief. While i'm really grateful for the existence of BIND (and was even more a decade ago), the decision to start BIND 10 came at least 2 years late.
When given similar performance but a slightly higher price, i would prefer the SSD. I can't take the flash to the next PC as i can do with the SSD. Hard disks have a highe life expectancy than mainboards (i usually find some good use for old HDs, i never did for old mainboards). Unless the SSD will cost 2-3 times as much as the flash on the mainboard, i believe SSDs will still be used. But maybe this will lead to lower SSD prices.
Slashdot Mirror
The usual thing:
a) Someone posted something stupid online
b) Someone else overreacted
Sounds like pattern? Read it before? Here on /.? Impossible :-)
CU, Martin
I'd be very much surprised if programmer's perks haven't been a long-standing source of friction.
They are a permanent, ongoing and vociferous source of friction wherever programmers are in visible range. That's why i felt so sure that i could run this diagnosis :-).
CU, Martin
Sometimes frustration is included in all choices the menu offers. This is why the term "lesser of two evils" was invented. The boss may even hate his own decision but perhaps he just ran out of alternatives. There is still the chance that he was just plain stupid, but from the amount of information available, i would not place any money on that bet.
It is hard to say wether the boss is an idiot. The original posts doesn't give all the constraints he is working under. Judging a decision from 10 lines of text is something i try to avoid. Management is easier said than done.
I would wish every geek to hold a management position at least once in his life. This is not because i like to see people suffer (or better: not only because), but it would improve their view of the world and help them to cope with managers in the future.
Sincerely yours, Martin
While this scores 100% on the equality scale, it would really screw productivity :-).
You're right, but this is Spaaaartaaa ... i mean the real world.
I am pretty sure, that the official reason is not the real reason. My best guess is that other employees have complained about the privilege of the programmers (listening music while working). Since your boss knows that giving this reason would create dissent, he has choosen the quality issue as official reason. That is the reason why discussing the pretended reason will not make him change his mind. I have seen this happening a hundred times... humans are so petty. CU, Martin
Nope, the disagreement is about protocols and procedures.... Furthermore i would prefer ISPs to make IP spoofing impossible first.
Hmmm..... Neither headline nor summary fits the news. Nothing in the quoted article mentions windows. The article itself is focussing on a small aspect of what is being discussed. Some parts of the discussion would be very negative for Windows users. E.g. it is being discussed to disconnect users from the Internet who don't fix their PCs when attacks originate from them. I don't agree with a lot of things discussed, but they didn't do anything to deserve a /. summary like this.
CU, Martin
Hi,
for a detailed advice, there are too many parameters missing. So i have to stay on the general track:
1. Your wording seems to indicate you don't have a choice. The question would have been asked a different way if you had one.
2. My personal opinion: Every technical guy should try management at least once. Even if you hate the job, you may learn a lot of things that may help you in your relationship with future bosses.
3. Management is an ungrateful job: You can do everything for you subordinates, they will not thank it. If you stay in management, your job satisfaction must have a different source.
4. If you find not be suited to the job: Pull the plug yourself. Don't wait for anyone else to do it. The damage from the later one outweighs the salary from a weeks or months.
Have fun, Martin
P.S. My path was: Programmer -> Consultant -> Director -> CEO -> Sales. While i loved every technical aspects of the first two jobs, nothing beats sales. Being a sales guy with a heavy technical background is like being armed with an M16 on a medieval battlefield.
The changes are unfair on several levels:
- People have spent Battlefunds to get weapons permanently which are now obsolete.
- Based on Valor Points, prices have increased by a factor of 10-20.
- Changes were not announced, so nobody had a chance to spend there now worthless Valor Points.
- They have promised not to this. They even mocked games that did this before them.
I have spent more money on Battlefunds than for a full price game, but i never felt forced. Now i feel forced and my natural reaction is "quit". I feel cheated and not because they want money. I have enough of it to afford Battlefunds. But i dislike changing a deal after i has been made.
CU, Martin
The only reason for prosecuting the Google Execs is: It gives more kudos (not within the /. community and only if they win) and press coverage for the prosecutors. So they take the gamble, since most judges are so incompetent about everything concerning the internet.
Since it has been disclosed that good reviews are being bought (you are allowed to conduct a test early if you guarantee at least a score of X), you cannot rely on reviews in any way. Currently the publisher try to sell any game as much as possible on the first three days before the "real" reviews hit.
What is the definition of intercontinental? The flight was supposed to be 20 miles. That is not much... There are places were continents are so close together, so you can jump :-) the distance. If he goes Tokio to LA with his suite, i'll be impressed.
For me the news reads: ATI anounces a new, faster graphics card which is as unavailable as the previous one.
The problem seems to be right out of the textbook for "Practical Analysis" (not sure if this is the correct translation for the german "Praktische Analysis"). This was a nandatory course for every computer science degree during my university time (20 years ago). Don't know if this is still the case. It was an eye opener to see how correct formulas and a perfectly working computer could yield absurd results. Several times i was asked for help by people claiming their Excel was broken due to such mistakes.
CU, Martin
Movie or game directors are not biased against truth. Usually it is just not entertaining enough or too complex for a popcorn munching viewer to understand.
The same thing has happened in the movies. Often historical events were only used as distorted background. And movies are as games made for entertainment purposes. So what counts is entertainment value not historical accuracy.
CU, Martin
I think Darl McBride terminated SCO, only then SCO fired Darl McBride.
Nevertheless, this would suggest that there will always be a niche market willing to pay absurd prices for their books printed in German.
Correct: A niche... that's what i ment with funeral eulogy. Currently the german book market is nothing but a niche; it has to collapse to become a niche market. Unluckily they are doing their best to achieve this.
CU, Martin
Hi,
since i am german and an ebook user for several years (iRexx Iliad), i would like to comment on that:
Like the music industry the publishers are currently comitting sucide due to the fear of death. By trying to preserve the status quo, they are scaring away a big part of their future customers. Ebooks are only a symptom here.
I have purchased and read about 1.000+ books during the last 25 years. Due to a still progressing carreer, my budget is rising. But i am less and less inclined to spend it on the local market.
Sincerely yours, Martin
The only way to bring glory into your daily job is to do it yourself. No work environment does bring the glory. If it should, it would attract such people, that any glory would be estinguished.... OOooops, that's what happend to the IT.
CU, Martin
Hi,
having evaluated and supported a lot of DNS software in the last years, i have to concede some truth to those statement (for other reasons than mentioned), especially concerning the still heavily used BIND. E.g. BIND 9 is a software, i would not encorurage to use in certain environments (>100K zones for authorative, more than 5K queries per second for caching nameservers). The code of BIND isn't something, i want to debug (been there, done that). The weirdest thing (last checked with BIND 9.6.0): With about 100K zones, config and zone files on a RAM disk, it still needed about 40 minutes for startup. Importing the same configuration into another nameserver took only about 90 seconds.
With the Nominum products, i appreciated performance (10-20 times better than BIND, about 7 times better than PowerDNS [better meaning: number of requests serviced per CPU minute]), the complete re-configurability at runtime and the PERL/Java/C-API. Implementing a solid provisioning was always easy.
Each software has its advantages and disadvantages. If only technical aspects matter, i would currently prefer the Nominum products to all OSS products i have tested. Other criterias may lead to different decision.
CU, Martin
P.S. My statement concerns the use of DNS in a provider environment. If you setup a DNS service for your enterprise, OSS will probably your software of choice. I have only one strong recommendation even there: Separate the caching nameserver from your authorative nameserver. Even if you use BIND and only one machine: Implement those services in separate instances and on separate IP adresses. It will give you a lot more choices, if you want to replace the software later or if you need to scale up a service.
P.P.S. This is my personal opinion and may not be untainted by selfinterest. I consider myself OSS-friendly, but it isn't a religious belief. While i'm really grateful for the existence of BIND (and was even more a decade ago), the decision to start BIND 10 came at least 2 years late.
Hi,
The game Birth of the Federation has been an
excellent Star Trek game. Friends of mine still play it on a regular basis
even though it's a decade old.
CU, Martin
When given similar performance but a slightly higher price, i would prefer the SSD. I can't take the flash to the next PC as i can do with the SSD. Hard disks have a highe life expectancy than mainboards (i usually find some good use for old HDs, i never did for old mainboards). Unless the SSD will cost 2-3 times as much as the flash on the mainboard, i believe SSDs will still be used. But maybe this will lead to lower SSD prices.