What astounds me is how bad google, MS, etc. are at lobbying. It seems like google and MS should be winning and not losing (as my current perception leads me to believe).
True dat! This very thought has been disturbing me for a while now. Exactly how messed up does the government have to be if the bald, pigheaded ignorance of a guy like Senator Ted Stevens seems do be winning out over the piles and piles of money of the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft combined?
I am only half joking here. A lot of people like to assume that any politician can be bought. But if they can't -- at least, not on the surface -- then maybe that's even scarier. What could possibly be motivating Stevens if it's not the money?
I believe that the 'passion' which the author refers to cannot be captured in a cover letter, interview, or golf outing, but in one's day-to-day commitment to the work. If that passion is the one which his managers look for then I am certain that your 'Bob' would find himself well rewarded.
Sure, you believe... it's easy to believe.
Where's the benchmark for "passion"? How do I prove I have it? How does a manager evaluate me for it? If Dave was hired because of his passion, and Bob was hired because of his passion, which one gets to head up the project? Which one has more passion and which could work on his passion a little bit?
For that matter, is it even possible to "work on" your passion? If you were hired with just a little less passion than Dave, is there some kind of program or training course the company can offer you that will increase your passion levels? Or are you just doomed to not succeed because, hell, it's about hiring the most passionate people you can find?
This is what I mean by touchy-feely management. Yes, in today's more compassionate America, nobody wants to look like a bully. God forbid we should be competitive, or aggressive, or challenge ourselves and our coworkers to do better work even if we're working on something that we're maybe not all that passionate about. But come on -- do you really want to work for a company whose mantra is "Admire us for our soul?" I feel oily just thinking about it.
I'd much rather work for Jack Welch than the people who wrote this list of tips. Jack's world may not be the most forgiving one, but at least he doesn't mince words with this kind of New Age garbage. At least he shoots straight.
After 19 years doing software for MacOS, I can certainly say if you made an attempt to stick to the documented routines, Apple bent over backwards to make sure stuff worked when they changed stuff in the OS. If you played idiotic games, you got what you deserved. And when Apple switched from 68K to PPC, almost all software just worked. Same with the move to OSX - I've got software I bought around 1992 that actually works on MacOSX today.
I call bullshit.
How many times did Apple break printer support in the first few releases of Mac OS X? Three? We're talking printer support here... PRINTERS!! Pretty basic functionality for most people who want to buy a computer, don't you think? Why is a company like Brother, selling laser printers for $300, going to keep hiring developers to rewrite printer drivers for an OS with a bare fraction of the market share that Windows has?
And Apple might have gotten most 68K software to run fine on PPC, but for some reason they sure seemed to have a problem keeping major apps running between Mac OS 8.1, 8.5, 9, etc. I can't tell you how many times I, as a Mac sysadmin, was forced to upgrade all kinds of applications software to be able to do the same things on the new generation of Macs, which came pre-installed with the latest OS and wouldn't run the version that ran my apps.
You say it's because all those developers played "idiotic games" -- hey, fine, maybe you're right. But the OP's point was that Microsoft doesn't say that -- even if it's true, Microsoft still makes the effort to try to keep those apps running -- and that's one of the reasons why Microsoft is successful. I'd say he's absolutely right.
"Hire passionate people." Well, if that isn't touchy-feely management at its best.
Welch's rule was to grade your players and go with the A's. Some of us might call that a meritocracy. To the B or C graded employee, of course, it looks like an unbalanced, unfair gold-key system driven by self interest on the part of senior managers.
What's the alternative? "Hire passionate people."
Am I the only one who imagines the following conversation: "Look, Bob, I know you're working hard. Your code is better than everyone else's on the team, and that's great! You did a good job getting everybody working together on that one project, too, and you were right about cutting out those side jobs -- if we were still eating those expenditures this project would have crashed and burned months ago. But Dave's the right guy to get this promotion, even though we only brought him in from that middle-manager position at Nabisco three weeks ago, and I'll tell you why. Frankly Bob, you just don't have Dave's passion."
Ad's on pavement aren't bad either, are they taking away from some beauty of paved ground?
My answer is: Yeah, absolutely. Ads are garish, insulting, occasionally degrading, and generally offensive. I'll take the quirky charms of a slab of dry concrete any day.
But then, I live in a major city and I don't own a car, ergo I spend a lot of time staring at paved ground. Your mileage may vary (no pun intended).
Also, as somebody else pointed out, you could argue that ads are fine for you and me as experienced adults, but do you really want your kids walking home from school every day over a mosaic of commercial messages? Not me.
the people who are hiking and rock climbing aren't big fans of soda
Tell it to the makers of Gatorade or Mountain Dew. If not Mountain Dew then how about Arrowhead bottled water? Or Soy Blossom Organic Tofu? Seriously, you think they wouldn't try it if it bought them enough market penetration for their messages?
As someone who works in publishing, this seems symptomatic of what is a very disturbing trend to me. Somebody has to pay for content. Popular wisdom is that the consumers of that content won't pay for it. There's only one other place to go for the money, it seems, and that's advertisers.
I don't know how to feel about it. I'm somebody who hates ads. I watch a lot of PBS, tend to rent shows on DVD rather than watch them when broadcast on commercial television, or if I do watch them, I skip the ads in my DVR. Likewise, I run AdBlock and an aggressive set of filters in Firefox. My goal is to see no advertisements at all. Ironically, however, those same ads are my livelihood. Am I cutting my own throat?
Even scarier is the fact that all the movie and TV studios are aware of this behavior and are taking steps to correct for it. Product placement, for example -- it's no coincidence that guy is drinking a Coke and not a Pepsi, or that there's a big RSA Security logo on that video monitor in that episode of "24."
So if we don't want to pay for our content, and we refuse to be receptive to traditional advertising messages, how long before that kind of influence gains a foothold in other kinds of media? I work in the trade press, so we're right on the cusp of that -- some people will never believe that a story in my magazine is meant to be impartial, no matter what it says. But does anyone really think the mainstream news media -- even something like the New York Times -- is completely impervious?
I really, really do not want to live in the kind of world where every flat surface is paved with an ad, every movie is a sales vehicle, every TV show is a survey, every newspaper article is corporate public relations. But is it avoidable, given the direction our society is going?
I'm glad to see they like Beagle (which I haven't read much about).
Had you read a little bit about it, you would know that it was written by Nat Friedman and the Ximian team, which is now a part of Novell. So it makes some sense that they would "like" Beagle.
This seems like a tactic by Infoworld where they wanted to say "We are going to portray net neutrality as an assault on the core principles of the internet" while somehow managing to blame someone else.
Hmmmm. It's a good conspiracy theory but I'm actually going to have to burst your bubble on that one.
The fault was mine. It was a lousy edit of the interview. I think all of us on staff subconsciously read it as "the telcos' stance on Net neutrality is portrayed..." but nobody noticed what it actually said. Win some, lose some.
If you read the other articles in the package, you'll notice that there's no such bias as you describe.
All partitions use the same OS image. The base OS is a full Solaris installation; if it goes down it takes everything thing down with it (it's not a stripped base OS as in VMWare or your Xen dom0). It's almost like running chroot environments with symlinks to the base software.
That's pretty much how Virtuozzo works too. It's another way to do things. (There are items about both in TFA, BTW.)
That's a fair comment. We're aware of IBM's pioneering virtualization work and I believe there's a nod to it in the article somewhere (something about "since the 1970s"). For this feature package, though, we were more looking at it in terms of current server buying trends. IBM still has a ton of mainframe customers... but new mainframe customers? Not many. So while it's true that x86 virtualization seems to be converging on a lot of ideas that IBM made popular on big iron years ago, the news is that it's becoming possible to do.
I like mainframes... we'll probably hit that topic again as we build out our virtualization coverage in the coming months.
Yeah, no kidding. The reason this book is called "hacks" anything is not because the author sat down and thought long and hard about it, but because O'Reilly has branded entire line of books with the word "hacks." I doubt the author even had a choice in the matter.
Re:You got that right
on
PHP Hacks
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
PHP has a lot of functions and although some people critisize this, it makes it much easier to accomplish many different tasks.
In my experience, it's not so much a case of an embarrassment of riches but more like what the parent said -- it feels like a bunch of hacks. For example, standard library functions that seem similar in almost every respect, save that they work on different data types, take different parameters (or accept them in a different order). This can be very frustrating for experienced programmers who want to get up to speed quickly. Presumably it's less of a worry if you're just learning on PHP.
I don't hate PHP. I don't really like it, either, though. I'm one of those people who is quick with a snide comment about it whenever it's brought up, just because it has always feels so amateurish, poorly designed, and slapdash to me. That said, you can do some pretty decent stuff given a database abstraction layer and Smarty templates (for example). And the one big advantage it has over Ruby on Rails is that it's available on just about every cheapie $5/month Web host around, whereas RoR is barely supported.
With the notable exception, maybe, of that aforementioned VMware acquisition. So far the policy has been pretty laissez-faire... no attempt to integrate VMware technology with their storage offerings. What's it all about?
Being arrested, being charged, and being held guilty of a crime are three entirely different things. So far, I hear somebody got arrested.
As for the why, this article seems a little short on details. But one thing I've heard several times (though it's totally hearsay and it probably varies from state to state anyway) is that it is illegal to record both video and audio without prior consent. Most of the surveillance cameras you see in stores and the like only record video.
Similarly, it's illegal to record a telephone conversation without telling all parties on the line that it's being recorded. I think that's federal law.
In other words, yeah the cops probably had a right to arrest the guy. Did the cops it done as a form of harrassment? Yeah, probably. Well knock me over with a feather. Cops, harrassing people? Never!
So Phipps says the future of open source is in companies (and individuals) cooperating and each one preserving what is of value to it. He says it's not about altruism but about self-interest. Is this news? Do a Google search for "scratch your own itch" and you end up with a whole bunch of references to open source. Hardly original thinking on Phipps's part.
Is it a police organization? A government agency charged with protecting the virtue of copyright? What company in their right mind lets some schmuck come in and do an audit without a warrant?
The article is a little unclear and more than a little inflammatory. My read of it is that the publisher actually wanted the BSA to come in and do the audit. The £80,000 they ended up paying wasn't a fee or a fine paid to the BSA; it was the cost of buying all the software licenses they needed to get fully into compliance.
So were they suckers? I'd say so, yes -- the BSA are greedy sharks and there was probably another option besides paying for every font and every piece of software on their network (e.g. get rid of some of it). But the company does seem to have been asking for it.
Slashdot Mirror
True dat! This very thought has been disturbing me for a while now. Exactly how messed up does the government have to be if the bald, pigheaded ignorance of a guy like Senator Ted Stevens seems do be winning out over the piles and piles of money of the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft combined?
I am only half joking here. A lot of people like to assume that any politician can be bought. But if they can't -- at least, not on the surface -- then maybe that's even scarier. What could possibly be motivating Stevens if it's not the money?
See? Everybody's got a set of rules.
Sure, you believe ... it's easy to believe.
Where's the benchmark for "passion"? How do I prove I have it? How does a manager evaluate me for it? If Dave was hired because of his passion, and Bob was hired because of his passion, which one gets to head up the project? Which one has more passion and which could work on his passion a little bit?
For that matter, is it even possible to "work on" your passion? If you were hired with just a little less passion than Dave, is there some kind of program or training course the company can offer you that will increase your passion levels? Or are you just doomed to not succeed because, hell, it's about hiring the most passionate people you can find?
This is what I mean by touchy-feely management. Yes, in today's more compassionate America, nobody wants to look like a bully. God forbid we should be competitive, or aggressive, or challenge ourselves and our coworkers to do better work even if we're working on something that we're maybe not all that passionate about. But come on -- do you really want to work for a company whose mantra is "Admire us for our soul?" I feel oily just thinking about it.
I'd much rather work for Jack Welch than the people who wrote this list of tips. Jack's world may not be the most forgiving one, but at least he doesn't mince words with this kind of New Age garbage. At least he shoots straight.
I call bullshit.
How many times did Apple break printer support in the first few releases of Mac OS X? Three? We're talking printer support here ... PRINTERS!! Pretty basic functionality for most people who want to buy a computer, don't you think? Why is a company like Brother, selling laser printers for $300, going to keep hiring developers to rewrite printer drivers for an OS with a bare fraction of the market share that Windows has?
And Apple might have gotten most 68K software to run fine on PPC, but for some reason they sure seemed to have a problem keeping major apps running between Mac OS 8.1, 8.5, 9, etc. I can't tell you how many times I, as a Mac sysadmin, was forced to upgrade all kinds of applications software to be able to do the same things on the new generation of Macs, which came pre-installed with the latest OS and wouldn't run the version that ran my apps.
You say it's because all those developers played "idiotic games" -- hey, fine, maybe you're right. But the OP's point was that Microsoft doesn't say that -- even if it's true, Microsoft still makes the effort to try to keep those apps running -- and that's one of the reasons why Microsoft is successful. I'd say he's absolutely right.
"Hire passionate people." Well, if that isn't touchy-feely management at its best.
Welch's rule was to grade your players and go with the A's. Some of us might call that a meritocracy. To the B or C graded employee, of course, it looks like an unbalanced, unfair gold-key system driven by self interest on the part of senior managers.
What's the alternative? "Hire passionate people."
Am I the only one who imagines the following conversation: "Look, Bob, I know you're working hard. Your code is better than everyone else's on the team, and that's great! You did a good job getting everybody working together on that one project, too, and you were right about cutting out those side jobs -- if we were still eating those expenditures this project would have crashed and burned months ago. But Dave's the right guy to get this promotion, even though we only brought him in from that middle-manager position at Nabisco three weeks ago, and I'll tell you why. Frankly Bob, you just don't have Dave's passion."
My answer is: Yeah, absolutely. Ads are garish, insulting, occasionally degrading, and generally offensive. I'll take the quirky charms of a slab of dry concrete any day.
But then, I live in a major city and I don't own a car, ergo I spend a lot of time staring at paved ground. Your mileage may vary (no pun intended).
Also, as somebody else pointed out, you could argue that ads are fine for you and me as experienced adults, but do you really want your kids walking home from school every day over a mosaic of commercial messages? Not me.
Tell it to the makers of Gatorade or Mountain Dew. If not Mountain Dew then how about Arrowhead bottled water? Or Soy Blossom Organic Tofu? Seriously, you think they wouldn't try it if it bought them enough market penetration for their messages?
As someone who works in publishing, this seems symptomatic of what is a very disturbing trend to me. Somebody has to pay for content. Popular wisdom is that the consumers of that content won't pay for it. There's only one other place to go for the money, it seems, and that's advertisers.
I don't know how to feel about it. I'm somebody who hates ads. I watch a lot of PBS, tend to rent shows on DVD rather than watch them when broadcast on commercial television, or if I do watch them, I skip the ads in my DVR. Likewise, I run AdBlock and an aggressive set of filters in Firefox. My goal is to see no advertisements at all. Ironically, however, those same ads are my livelihood. Am I cutting my own throat?
Even scarier is the fact that all the movie and TV studios are aware of this behavior and are taking steps to correct for it. Product placement, for example -- it's no coincidence that guy is drinking a Coke and not a Pepsi, or that there's a big RSA Security logo on that video monitor in that episode of "24."
So if we don't want to pay for our content, and we refuse to be receptive to traditional advertising messages, how long before that kind of influence gains a foothold in other kinds of media? I work in the trade press, so we're right on the cusp of that -- some people will never believe that a story in my magazine is meant to be impartial, no matter what it says. But does anyone really think the mainstream news media -- even something like the New York Times -- is completely impervious?
I really, really do not want to live in the kind of world where every flat surface is paved with an ad, every movie is a sales vehicle, every TV show is a survey, every newspaper article is corporate public relations. But is it avoidable, given the direction our society is going?
It uses a different codebase and it runs on a Mac? Just guessing.
<humorless>Yes, but the way in which they support long filenames on their default CD-ROM filesystems varies widely.</humorless>
Had you read a little bit about it, you would know that it was written by Nat Friedman and the Ximian team, which is now a part of Novell. So it makes some sense that they would "like" Beagle.
Hmmmm. It's a good conspiracy theory but I'm actually going to have to burst your bubble on that one.
The fault was mine. It was a lousy edit of the interview. I think all of us on staff subconsciously read it as "the telcos' stance on Net neutrality is portrayed..." but nobody noticed what it actually said. Win some, lose some.
If you read the other articles in the package, you'll notice that there's no such bias as you describe.
That's pretty much how Virtuozzo works too. It's another way to do things. (There are items about both in TFA, BTW.)
That's a fair comment. We're aware of IBM's pioneering virtualization work and I believe there's a nod to it in the article somewhere (something about "since the 1970s"). For this feature package, though, we were more looking at it in terms of current server buying trends. IBM still has a ton of mainframe customers... but new mainframe customers? Not many. So while it's true that x86 virtualization seems to be converging on a lot of ideas that IBM made popular on big iron years ago, the news is that it's becoming possible to do.
... we'll probably hit that topic again as we build out our virtualization coverage in the coming months.
I like mainframes
Whoever came up with that movie is fricken brilliant. That is all.
Yeah, no kidding. The reason this book is called "hacks" anything is not because the author sat down and thought long and hard about it, but because O'Reilly has branded entire line of books with the word "hacks." I doubt the author even had a choice in the matter.
In my experience, it's not so much a case of an embarrassment of riches but more like what the parent said -- it feels like a bunch of hacks. For example, standard library functions that seem similar in almost every respect, save that they work on different data types, take different parameters (or accept them in a different order). This can be very frustrating for experienced programmers who want to get up to speed quickly. Presumably it's less of a worry if you're just learning on PHP.
I don't hate PHP. I don't really like it, either, though. I'm one of those people who is quick with a snide comment about it whenever it's brought up, just because it has always feels so amateurish, poorly designed, and slapdash to me. That said, you can do some pretty decent stuff given a database abstraction layer and Smarty templates (for example). And the one big advantage it has over Ruby on Rails is that it's available on just about every cheapie $5/month Web host around, whereas RoR is barely supported.
You might think. But they aren't doing it. Their policy is hands off -- VMware stands pretty much on its own.
With the notable exception, maybe, of that aforementioned VMware acquisition. So far the policy has been pretty laissez-faire ... no attempt to integrate VMware technology with their storage offerings. What's it all about?
Not in my state. But as it turns out, that's probably true in yours. Only 12 states require all-party consent.
The video and audio thing comes from Title I of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (18 U.S.C. Section 2510).
But hey, I just posted it. I didn't mod me up! ;-)
Oh yeah, and the United States' capitalist-like laws have never done that.
Being arrested, being charged, and being held guilty of a crime are three entirely different things. So far, I hear somebody got arrested.
As for the why, this article seems a little short on details. But one thing I've heard several times (though it's totally hearsay and it probably varies from state to state anyway) is that it is illegal to record both video and audio without prior consent. Most of the surveillance cameras you see in stores and the like only record video.
Similarly, it's illegal to record a telephone conversation without telling all parties on the line that it's being recorded. I think that's federal law.
In other words, yeah the cops probably had a right to arrest the guy. Did the cops it done as a form of harrassment? Yeah, probably. Well knock me over with a feather. Cops, harrassing people? Never!
I've heard it said by people from as far as Maine.
So Phipps says the future of open source is in companies (and individuals) cooperating and each one preserving what is of value to it. He says it's not about altruism but about self-interest. Is this news? Do a Google search for "scratch your own itch" and you end up with a whole bunch of references to open source. Hardly original thinking on Phipps's part.
The article is a little unclear and more than a little inflammatory. My read of it is that the publisher actually wanted the BSA to come in and do the audit. The £80,000 they ended up paying wasn't a fee or a fine paid to the BSA; it was the cost of buying all the software licenses they needed to get fully into compliance.
So were they suckers? I'd say so, yes -- the BSA are greedy sharks and there was probably another option besides paying for every font and every piece of software on their network (e.g. get rid of some of it). But the company does seem to have been asking for it.