This post has been eye-opening for me, as an unemployed Indian-American programmer, because I've always seen the entire Linux/Free Software/late 90's geek culture as a new kind of social phenomenon unencumbered by the baggage of the past, including racism and nationalistic xenophobia.
I think (I hope!) you're getting this impression because you're looking at it the wrong way. I am, as usual, reading at +3, and so far I've seen one off-colour joke and no racism at all. People who regularly contribute to Slashdot and thus have the karma to post at automatic +2 are not racists and are not posting hate-speach - and I honestly believe that they are more representative of the actual contributing Open Source community than all the Anonymous Cowards and trolls.
After all these years. I'm fourty-seven now, and I still earn all my living from cutting code. I expect to be still cutting code (and still earning my living from it) in twenty years time; I might just still be going in thirty years time.
The answer to getting laid off is to employ yourself.
I'd also like to point out that some webdesigners actually develop websites as a job for real living customers. Who pay them. For making websites look like what they want. Pretty websites. And sometimes those pretty websites require absolutely (does that work as an adverb?) sized tables.
<rant>It is really incredibly amazing how bloody stupidsoi disantWeb designers are. Look if you want to design for bloody paper, design for bloody paper. The Web is not a fixed size medium. I'm currently using two browsing devices - one with a resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels, and one with a resolution of 320 x 200 pixels. If you cannot design a page which will flexibly reflow for both these devices, you cannot design for the Web, period. You are a dinosaur. Stick to paper, it's all you're good for.</rant>
if you ever use a fixed size table, if you ever use a table to position content, you are doing it wrong. If you expect your page to look the same on everybody's browser, then you expect the impossible. Flexible design is easy - much easier than inflexible, broken design - and always looks good, whereas inflexible looks good only on browsers set up identically to their author's.
I noticed the comments of Barry Klawans, and want to talk about it because I have heard this argument before and think it is poorly thought out and unpersuasive.
In my opinion, it is your response which is poorly thought out and unpersuasive.
In his comments, Klawans makes reference to old Jazz 78 rpm records that he has transfered to CD, AND which he says record companies will not reissue because they are not profitable.... History is full of examples of obscure books, art, and music that have been preserved while more popular (profitable) works fell by the wayside.
This is true, but this if course is precisely what 'Digital Rights Management' makes impossible. If the jazz recordings had originally been released on Digital Rights Management media, set to be played only a specific number of times or for a specific period (tachnologies which the DMCA and equivalents in other countries explicitly protect), the performances would now be permanently unavailable.
History? You mean the half-dozen Linux releases of big titles that came out one to twelve months after the Windows releases?
Most Linux-using gamers have access to at least one Windows machine, or dual-boot. There is a social preasure to aquire the games at release to play them with your friends. Nobody except a die-hard supporter with cash to burn will buy the same product twice.
Hey, you have to have a lot of cash to burn to be able to afford an extra near-state-of-the-art machine just to play games. As to dual boot you cannot be serious. Oh, I'd like to play a game now, I'll just wait ten minutes while Windows sorts itself out and sets itself up?
This is a copy of something I've just posted on the NWN site:
Quote: Posted 12/14/02 06:37:02 (GMT) by Kwalish
It looks like our fearless BioDevs have their work cut out for them when it comes to Bink. I mean, they have to either convince Rad Game Tools to port Bink to Linux, which is a possibilty, however that might take too long (if such a qualifier exists at this point in the game ). One option, if it is possible from a legal standpoint, would be to recode all of the video using MPEG and release it with the client download and when it installs that, replace all of the video content then. However this could be a problem in the future for the expansion packs, as the video would have to be recoded in those as well. Another option is to see if a bink-to-whatever conversion program exists for Linux (I highly doubt this) and convert the videos during the install.
[ Edited By Kwalish: Saturday, 14 December 06:44AM (GMT) ]
OK, guys, maybe this is somewhere we can do something practical to help.
I am a good general purpose geek, and I expect a lot of the rest of us here are. I've never actually written a CODEC, and while i've reverese engineered file formats before I've never tackled a compressed video stream. However, it can't be impossible.
How many people would be up for setting up a sourceforge project for either an open source BINK player or an open source BINK2mpeg converter (actually both would use most of the same components). This way we could make an actual positive contribution to getting games onto Linux. We probably would not be finished quick enough to make a real difference for NWN - three months is damn tight for such a project - but it might help BioWare and other companies with future cross-platform games.
We've also all got sample BINK files to analyse, and a google search for 'bink file format' found me a useful text from someone (Mike Melanson) who has already started to analyse the format.
OK, I've already said this on the NWN discussion boards, but I'll say it here as well. There is a trust issue here. I (and I suspect a lot of other people) went out and bought NWN as soon as it was released to support a games company which supported Linux. I've had the game now for many months and I still can't play it on my own machine.
At this stage I don't greatly care whether the movies work or not, and I don't care how bad the sound is. I want the game which I paid for working on my machine. I don't care if it's called a beta. But I want it now. Yes, I'd like it if there was a patch release available by March which had as good sound as the Windows version, but I think waiting the Linux client till March is a long time to ask loyal supporters to wait.
It has to be remembered that this isn't the first time they've put it off...
I remember in the run-up to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. The Atlanta Olympic Committee (AOC) was going after people aggressively. You just about couldn't even say "Olympics" without a license. There was some old family-run Greek restaurant, called The Olympic Diner (or somesuch) and they had been around for years. Of course, they hadn't _trademarked_ their name and the AOC made them change it.
When I was at University in Lancaster, England, there was a pub called the Red Cross. Then, one day, lawyers from the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote to them and said ' you can't call your pub that', it's our name'. So the owners did a little research and wrote back saying 'we've been trading under this name since 1155AD, when did you start using it? Oddly enough, that was teh end of the matter.
In the beginning there was 'B', then came from it 'C'. Followed by C++, which is technically 'D'(stemming from the ++ operator).
How quickly history is forgotten.
Once upon a time (but by no means 'in the beginning'), on a continent so far away that the people spoke a language known as 'English', the sages of the City of Cambridge held colloquy with the sages of the City of London, and agreed upon a great programme and quest to create the ultimate programming language, which they named 'CPL', for 'Combined Programming Language'. And having named it, they argued and disputed for many bitter months about the nature of this language, and nothing was made which worked.
Then arose Richards of Cambridge, crying 'a plague on both your houses. I shall go off on my own and write a language which works, and I shall call it Basic Combined Programming Language, or BCPL for short. And this language shall run on a Virtual Machine, so that programmes[1] written in it shall be portable to all manner of hardware architectures.'
But this language went forth even to the land of the Merkins, for whom long words are unduly difficult, and so they had to make the name shorter. And because they (those primitive heathen) were not subtle enough to understand the value of portability, they also stripped out the virtual machine and made the compiler compile down to the bare metal.
And that was B, oh best beloved, but as you can see it wasn't the beginning.
In the BSD world, we believe in making available trap-less software
which anyone can use for any purpose. Even if they wanted to put our
operating system into baby mulching machines or cruise missiles.
H'mmm...
In my first startup, when I was much younger and greener, we had a clause in the license of the software we were selling (which was some quite cute AI stuff) saying that it couldn't be used in the manufacture, testing, etc of weapons or munitions. More to the point, we actually refused to sell it to the military, although they were willing customers and our liquidity was going pear shaped. I'm still kind of proud, in an obscure way, about that. I don't want stuff I do to be used to kill people, and I think the world would be a better place if more people took the same attitude.
But I doubt whether this sort of thing has much effect in practice. If the bad guys want to use your code, I can't see that a license is going to stop them - they're bad guys, after all.
If someone has actually read the Silmarillion, feel free to correct me.
I've actually read the Silmarillion, and, indeed, I prefer it to the Lord of the Rings. However, it has to be said that I've also read the Old Testament, the Heimskringla and assorted other similar things. You can't approach the Silmarillion as if it were a novel. It isn't. It's a complete synthetic mythos, one of very few that exist, and probably the best.
Note: I am a software engineer and have done enough Windows and Linux cross platform GUI and non GUI coding to not be considered a Linux idiot.
Caution: Well thought-out and knowledgeable opinions ahead. If these disturb you , read no further.
I will not be switching from Windows to Linux as my main platform any time soon because:
You know, I found your post extremely interesting because I'm just the same... except exactly the opposite way around. I've used UN*X for the past fifteen years as my desktop operating system, and tof the last eight of those the UN*X in question has been Linux. I've seen Windows and the problems people have had with it and have had absolutely no motivation to switch. As a software engineer and as a businessman, all the tools I need work well on UN*X and the Windows equivalents don't have any compelling benefits to offset against the learning curve involved.
However, Windows has been getting better. Nowadays Windows (2k and XP) seem to have adequate stability and are at last the sort of operating system which is robust enough for commercial use. But there still isn't any compelling reason to switch.
What it boils down to is familiarity with applications. All those people wh are saying 'I can't switch because I use application X and it doesn't run on operating system Y' are essentially in the same position I'm in- we're using a toolkit that works for us and there's no compelling reason to change it. Those people who, in this discussion, are saying 'I'm using functionality X and it doesn't exist on platform Y' are, in 90% of the cases, just wrong. Those people who are saying 'operating system X is easier to set up than operating system Y' are these days definitely just plain wrong (I know, I've installed them all).
For me, whether I'm writing code, doing my accounts, designing bits for my boat, sorting and manipulating my photographs, keeping up with the news and so on, the tools on Linux are just there and are completely familiar; on Windows I wouldn't know where to start.
Except for a few very highly specialised jobs, the tools have been there on UN*X for longer than Windows has existed, and just as on Windows, they've been getting better all the time. If you can't find what you need, it's because you're not looking. Not that there is any moral imperative on you to look - if what you've got is good enough, why change?
As you say, the best tool for the job wins and in 99% of the cases we're discussing the best tool for the job is the one you're familiar with. For me, it's interesting to see that Windows is at last becoming as good as UN*X, but until it's considerably better I have no incentive to switch.
But to go back to the beginning of this discussion, for Linux to become the operating system of choice for the majority doesn't require any changes to the operating system, the user interface, the installers or anything else. It simply has to become the operating system used in schools and colleges. People will stick to what they're used to, and if they're used to Linux, Linux is what it will be.
I've been writing exclusively in Java for seven years now. I've tried ant a couple of times and found it so balky and counterintuitive that I didn't bother persuing it. Yes, my Makefiles only work on Linux, but then I only build things on Linux. If anyone else wants to build my stuff on other platforms that is their problem. They can run them just fine on other platforms - that's the joy of Java.
What problems does ant solve for me that make doesn't do much easier?
How can I migrate my (considerable) investment in makefiles to ant and why should I bother?
These are the questions I need someone (or some book) to answer. Will this book answer them?
Right. Having read this article I did a quick bit of background research. According to this article, the people who are helping the Namibian SchoolNet project are a UK based charity called CODA. They're mainly funded by the UK government, but I'm sure they wouldn't say no to donations in cash. As well as their work in Namibia CODA is active in Central America.
CODA work with another UK charity, Computer Aid, who refubished the machines sent to Namibia. They're looking for donations of money but they're also looking for donations of old computers, and for volunteers to help refurbish computers (in London, England).
whatever happened to good old ASCII or ISO text files? nothing says cross-platform than an ISO format
I'm currently trying to write a parser for ISO8211. Currently it makes me very cross and won't run on any platform. Just because a format has been endorsed by ISO doesn't mean it's either any good or easy to use.
[Yes, I know there already are two open source ISO8211 parsers out there. Unfortunately they're in C++ and Python respectively and I need one in Java].
American civil procedure provides for jurisdiction over foreign companies that do business in America. The theory is that if you come to America and avail yourself of our markets, resources, society, labor, and laws, you are bound to obey our laws. This does not mean that you can be sued in New York if you offer goods for sale in China and some American happens to buy them while on vacation in Beijing. It does mean, though, that if you knowingly advertise in America, ship goods to America, or provide services to American clients, you can be sued in America for violating American law.
I see. So American courts can decide what companies based in France can do on the Internet, but French courts can't decide what American companies can do on the Internet?
that there's currently a user contributed story entitled 'Robert Novak ate my baby!'. No, I didn't put it there. But I can't help wondering if he will now have to sue himself, seeing his own site is carrying
defamatory remarks about him.
To admit that right and wrong are a matter of preference is to destroy any useful definition of right and wrong.
That's true, but either you admit it or else you have to find some objective basis for right and wrong. Which means either you accept both the existance of some extra-human basis for them and you have to produce an authoritative statement of tehm. Which is fine if you believe in an old-testament God.
However, just because you believe in your God doesn't mean I do. I may not believe in any god at all, in which case I will see the commandments of your God as just your preference; or I will believe in my God and we'lkl have to fight a holy war to decide which set of commandments take precedence. You can't have democratic agreement when both sides believe the matter of disagreement is a matter of faith.
The alternative, if you don't believe in God and you still want to hang on to the idea of objective right and wrong, is Utilitarianism. Even then, you have to decide who gets to do the calculations.
Objective right and wrong are like free breakfast and lunch: Objectively, there ain't no such thing.
It gets 43% of its electricity from hydroelectric dams, 22% from geothermal, and another 4% from other renewable sources.
The city really focuses on finding plausible, cost-effective power sources, but for some reason it doesn't get any of its power from the wind. Perhaps the Santa Clarans know something the Danish don't?
Yup.
They know they've got mountains, with rivers descending gradients thus making suitable sites for hydro schemes. Denmark has no mountains.
They know they're sitting on a tectonic fault line, where geothermal energy can be tapped. Denmark has no tectonic faults.
I can't help getting irritated with the ignorant American assumption that what works for them in their particular location will work for everyone everwhere. It won't. In Iceland, where they have plenty of geothermal energy, they power domestic heating, aluminium smelters and spa baths directly from geothermal sources. Works for them. Here in Scotland (and also in Norway) we have a lot of rain and a lot of mountains, so we have a lot of hydro-electric power. Works for us. There are places in the world that have lots of sunlight, and can realistically expect to generate some proportion of their energy needs from solar power.
The Danes don't have any of these advantages, so they have to do the best they can with what they've got. Which happens to be wind. The Danes aren't stupid. They aren't perverse, or ignorant, or backward. They live on a flat sandbar with few mineral resources in a cool sea, and they're doing it well.
Yup. Isn't it strange how the Americans were the first people in the world to invent everything, usually several years after we were using it here in Scotland?
OK, let's face it this particular manager is an idiot, and will never get his product out of the door, but...
When you're working on a knotty programming problem, in my experience long uninterrupted hours do help. I find that it takes some considerable time at the start of a session to think myself into the problem, and that consequently the first two or three hours of a programming session aren't as productive. Consequently left to myself with a difficult problem I will choose to work sixteen or seventeen hours at a session.
So yes, in my opinion, long sessions improve code quality.
When I was younger and had no life I would work sixteen hours a day five days a week, every week, even though I didn't get any extra recognition for it. Nowadays I go sailing or messing about with friends three of four days a week, and rarely do sixteen hours on the trot.
The point is you burn out.
You can do a few months - or at a pinch a few years - of working very long hours every day, and then you burn out and are fit for nothing for months. If you earn enough in the time when you are doing the hard graft to take the next couple of years off recovering (and you actually save that money up and don't spend it on silly toys) then that is fine. But typically the employers who demand these ridiculous schedules are startups with no money, and just at the point when you are burned out and need to take time off your employer goes bust and doesn't pay you the salary and bonuses they've promised you.
So, some rules for those who are asked to work very long hours:
Do not take equity in lieu of salary unless you are allowed to see all the financial accounts of the company at any time.
If you're working a sixteen hour day, that's effectively two days work in one, and sooner or later your body is going to need time to recover. So make sure thar either you get a four day weekend, or you are being paid at least twice the salary you could reasonably expect given your skill-set - and you are saving half of it.
If your salary isn't paid, stop work. Immediately. If your salary is paid in arears (most people), then if they miss salaries at the end of a month stop work immediately and don't start again until they've agreed to pay weekly.
Get any agreement about end-of-project bonusses in writing, and have a lawyer check it.
Start ups do fail, and fairly often it isn't anyone's fault that the startup fails. But too often I've seen situations where the principals have seen trouble coming and organised a soft landing for themselves. Meantime they miss salaries for the employees and promise that everything will be alright soon... until you get to work one morning and find the door lock or the kit being reposessed. What hurts most is that in very small businesses you feel you are a team and you feel that the people you are working for are friends. If the principals bail out and screw the workers not only are you jobless and broke but also feel betrayed. Do not allow yourself to be caught out that way.
I hate to say this, but look at what happened to the people who worked for Loki.
They're in Dublin (Eire, or Southern Ireland) The "trouble" is in Northern Ireland.
For heaven's sake read the article. They're in Doolin, not Dublin. Dublin is a big modern bustling city. Doolin is about as small, peaceful and laid back a place as you can get.
Oh, yes, and the 'trouble' is in Northern Ireland, a long way away.
but who's going to pay for laying of fiber all over europe? if they can possibly get by with the existing wiring, why not try?
Actually, Hydro Electric (and also ScottishPower, our other power company) have already run big fibre bundles down all their major transmission lines. So they will presumably use fibre to quite near the consumer, and only run the 'last mile' or so over the power lines.
Slashdot Mirror
I think (I hope!) you're getting this impression because you're looking at it the wrong way. I am, as usual, reading at +3, and so far I've seen one off-colour joke and no racism at all. People who regularly contribute to Slashdot and thus have the karma to post at automatic +2 are not racists and are not posting hate-speach - and I honestly believe that they are more representative of the actual contributing Open Source community than all the Anonymous Cowards and trolls.
The answer to getting laid off is to employ yourself.
Windows XP 19.97% (1877)
KDE 25.60% (2406)
Gnome 15.73% (1479)
BeOS 8.10% (761)
MacOS X 21.68% (2038)
Other, please, post a comment 8.93% (839)
Yup, that's right, most people prefer KDE to XP.
Good, that saves a lot of work then.
<rant>It is really incredibly amazing how bloody stupid soi disant Web designers are. Look if you want to design for bloody paper, design for bloody paper. The Web is not a fixed size medium. I'm currently using two browsing devices - one with a resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels, and one with a resolution of 320 x 200 pixels. If you cannot design a page which will flexibly reflow for both these devices, you cannot design for the Web, period. You are a dinosaur. Stick to paper, it's all you're good for.</rant>
if you ever use a fixed size table, if you ever use a table to position content, you are doing it wrong. If you expect your page to look the same on everybody's browser, then you expect the impossible. Flexible design is easy - much easier than inflexible, broken design - and always looks good, whereas inflexible looks good only on browsers set up identically to their author's.
In my opinion, it is your response which is poorly thought out and unpersuasive.
This is true, but this if course is precisely what 'Digital Rights Management' makes impossible. If the jazz recordings had originally been released on Digital Rights Management media, set to be played only a specific number of times or for a specific period (tachnologies which the DMCA and equivalents in other countries explicitly protect), the performances would now be permanently unavailable.
Hey, you have to have a lot of cash to burn to be able to afford an extra near-state-of-the-art machine just to play games. As to dual boot you cannot be serious. Oh, I'd like to play a game now, I'll just wait ten minutes while Windows sorts itself out and sets itself up?
Sorry, no.
OK, guys, maybe this is somewhere we can do something practical to help.
I am a good general purpose geek, and I expect a lot of the rest of us here are. I've never actually written a CODEC, and while i've reverese engineered file formats before I've never tackled a compressed video stream. However, it can't be impossible.
How many people would be up for setting up a sourceforge project for either an open source BINK player or an open source BINK2mpeg converter (actually both would use most of the same components). This way we could make an actual positive contribution to getting games onto Linux. We probably would not be finished quick enough to make a real difference for NWN - three months is damn tight for such a project - but it might help BioWare and other companies with future cross-platform games.
We've also all got sample BINK files to analyse, and a google search for 'bink file format' found me a useful text from someone (Mike Melanson) who has already started to analyse the format.
So, come on, who's in?
At this stage I don't greatly care whether the movies work or not, and I don't care how bad the sound is. I want the game which I paid for working on my machine. I don't care if it's called a beta. But I want it now. Yes, I'd like it if there was a patch release available by March which had as good sound as the Windows version, but I think waiting the Linux client till March is a long time to ask loyal supporters to wait.
It has to be remembered that this isn't the first time they've put it off...
When I was at University in Lancaster, England, there was a pub called the Red Cross. Then, one day, lawyers from the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote to them and said ' you can't call your pub that', it's our name'. So the owners did a little research and wrote back saying 'we've been trading under this name since 1155AD, when did you start using it? Oddly enough, that was teh end of the matter.
How quickly history is forgotten.
Once upon a time (but by no means 'in the beginning'), on a continent so far away that the people spoke a language known as 'English', the sages of the City of Cambridge held colloquy with the sages of the City of London, and agreed upon a great programme and quest to create the ultimate programming language, which they named 'CPL', for 'Combined Programming Language'. And having named it, they argued and disputed for many bitter months about the nature of this language, and nothing was made which worked.
Then arose Richards of Cambridge, crying 'a plague on both your houses. I shall go off on my own and write a language which works, and I shall call it Basic Combined Programming Language, or BCPL for short. And this language shall run on a Virtual Machine, so that programmes[1] written in it shall be portable to all manner of hardware architectures.'
But this language went forth even to the land of the Merkins, for whom long words are unduly difficult, and so they had to make the name shorter. And because they (those primitive heathen) were not subtle enough to understand the value of portability, they also stripped out the virtual machine and made the compiler compile down to the bare metal.
And that was B, oh best beloved, but as you can see it wasn't the beginning.
[1]Richards also knew how to spell.
H'mmm...
In my first startup, when I was much younger and greener, we had a clause in the license of the software we were selling (which was some quite cute AI stuff) saying that it couldn't be used in the manufacture, testing, etc of weapons or munitions. More to the point, we actually refused to sell it to the military, although they were willing customers and our liquidity was going pear shaped. I'm still kind of proud, in an obscure way, about that. I don't want stuff I do to be used to kill people, and I think the world would be a better place if more people took the same attitude.
But I doubt whether this sort of thing has much effect in practice. If the bad guys want to use your code, I can't see that a license is going to stop them - they're bad guys, after all.
I've actually read the Silmarillion, and, indeed, I prefer it to the Lord of the Rings. However, it has to be said that I've also read the Old Testament, the Heimskringla and assorted other similar things. You can't approach the Silmarillion as if it were a novel. It isn't. It's a complete synthetic mythos, one of very few that exist, and probably the best.
You know, I found your post extremely interesting because I'm just the same... except exactly the opposite way around. I've used UN*X for the past fifteen years as my desktop operating system, and tof the last eight of those the UN*X in question has been Linux. I've seen Windows and the problems people have had with it and have had absolutely no motivation to switch. As a software engineer and as a businessman, all the tools I need work well on UN*X and the Windows equivalents don't have any compelling benefits to offset against the learning curve involved.
However, Windows has been getting better. Nowadays Windows (2k and XP) seem to have adequate stability and are at last the sort of operating system which is robust enough for commercial use. But there still isn't any compelling reason to switch.
What it boils down to is familiarity with applications. All those people wh are saying 'I can't switch because I use application X and it doesn't run on operating system Y' are essentially in the same position I'm in- we're using a toolkit that works for us and there's no compelling reason to change it. Those people who, in this discussion, are saying 'I'm using functionality X and it doesn't exist on platform Y' are, in 90% of the cases, just wrong. Those people who are saying 'operating system X is easier to set up than operating system Y' are these days definitely just plain wrong (I know, I've installed them all).
For me, whether I'm writing code, doing my accounts, designing bits for my boat, sorting and manipulating my photographs, keeping up with the news and so on, the tools on Linux are just there and are completely familiar; on Windows I wouldn't know where to start.
Except for a few very highly specialised jobs, the tools have been there on UN*X for longer than Windows has existed, and just as on Windows, they've been getting better all the time. If you can't find what you need, it's because you're not looking. Not that there is any moral imperative on you to look - if what you've got is good enough, why change?
As you say, the best tool for the job wins and in 99% of the cases we're discussing the best tool for the job is the one you're familiar with. For me, it's interesting to see that Windows is at last becoming as good as UN*X, but until it's considerably better I have no incentive to switch.
But to go back to the beginning of this discussion, for Linux to become the operating system of choice for the majority doesn't require any changes to the operating system, the user interface, the installers or anything else. It simply has to become the operating system used in schools and colleges. People will stick to what they're used to, and if they're used to Linux, Linux is what it will be.
These are the questions I need someone (or some book) to answer. Will this book answer them?
So what happens when you get a blue screen of death at 200kph on the autobahn?
CODA work with another UK charity, Computer Aid, who refubished the machines sent to Namibia. They're looking for donations of money but they're also looking for donations of old computers, and for volunteers to help refurbish computers (in London, England).
I'm currently trying to write a parser for ISO8211. Currently it makes me very cross and won't run on any platform. Just because a format has been endorsed by ISO doesn't mean it's either any good or easy to use.
[Yes, I know there already are two open source ISO8211 parsers out there. Unfortunately they're in C++ and Python respectively and I need one in Java].
I see. So American courts can decide what companies based in France can do on the Internet, but French courts can't decide what American companies can do on the Internet?
Must be great to be emporers of all the world.
Life is tough when you're a litigious numpty.
That's true, but either you admit it or else you have to find some objective basis for right and wrong. Which means either you accept both the existance of some extra-human basis for them and you have to produce an authoritative statement of tehm. Which is fine if you believe in an old-testament God.
However, just because you believe in your God doesn't mean I do. I may not believe in any god at all, in which case I will see the commandments of your God as just your preference; or I will believe in my God and we'lkl have to fight a holy war to decide which set of commandments take precedence. You can't have democratic agreement when both sides believe the matter of disagreement is a matter of faith.
The alternative, if you don't believe in God and you still want to hang on to the idea of objective right and wrong, is Utilitarianism. Even then, you have to decide who gets to do the calculations.
Objective right and wrong are like free breakfast and lunch: Objectively, there ain't no such thing.
Yup.
They know they've got mountains, with rivers descending gradients thus making suitable sites for hydro schemes. Denmark has no mountains.
They know they're sitting on a tectonic fault line, where geothermal energy can be tapped. Denmark has no tectonic faults.
I can't help getting irritated with the ignorant American assumption that what works for them in their particular location will work for everyone everwhere. It won't. In Iceland, where they have plenty of geothermal energy, they power domestic heating, aluminium smelters and spa baths directly from geothermal sources. Works for them. Here in Scotland (and also in Norway) we have a lot of rain and a lot of mountains, so we have a lot of hydro-electric power. Works for us. There are places in the world that have lots of sunlight, and can realistically expect to generate some proportion of their energy needs from solar power.
The Danes don't have any of these advantages, so they have to do the best they can with what they've got. Which happens to be wind. The Danes aren't stupid. They aren't perverse, or ignorant, or backward. They live on a flat sandbar with few mineral resources in a cool sea, and they're doing it well.
Yup. Isn't it strange how the Americans were the first people in the world to invent everything, usually several years after we were using it here in Scotland?
OK, let's face it this particular manager is an idiot, and will never get his product out of the door, but...
When you're working on a knotty programming problem, in my experience long uninterrupted hours do help. I find that it takes some considerable time at the start of a session to think myself into the problem, and that consequently the first two or three hours of a programming session aren't as productive. Consequently left to myself with a difficult problem I will choose to work sixteen or seventeen hours at a session.
So yes, in my opinion, long sessions improve code quality.
When I was younger and had no life I would work sixteen hours a day five days a week, every week, even though I didn't get any extra recognition for it. Nowadays I go sailing or messing about with friends three of four days a week, and rarely do sixteen hours on the trot.
The point is you burn out.
You can do a few months - or at a pinch a few years - of working very long hours every day, and then you burn out and are fit for nothing for months. If you earn enough in the time when you are doing the hard graft to take the next couple of years off recovering (and you actually save that money up and don't spend it on silly toys) then that is fine. But typically the employers who demand these ridiculous schedules are startups with no money, and just at the point when you are burned out and need to take time off your employer goes bust and doesn't pay you the salary and bonuses they've promised you.
So, some rules for those who are asked to work very long hours:
Start ups do fail, and fairly often it isn't anyone's fault that the startup fails. But too often I've seen situations where the principals have seen trouble coming and organised a soft landing for themselves. Meantime they miss salaries for the employees and promise that everything will be alright soon... until you get to work one morning and find the door lock or the kit being reposessed. What hurts most is that in very small businesses you feel you are a team and you feel that the people you are working for are friends. If the principals bail out and screw the workers not only are you jobless and broke but also feel betrayed. Do not allow yourself to be caught out that way.
I hate to say this, but look at what happened to the people who worked for Loki.
For heaven's sake read the article. They're in Doolin, not Dublin. Dublin is a big modern bustling city. Doolin is about as small, peaceful and laid back a place as you can get.
Oh, yes, and the 'trouble' is in Northern Ireland, a long way away.
Actually, Hydro Electric (and also ScottishPower, our other power company) have already run big fibre bundles down all their major transmission lines. So they will presumably use fibre to quite near the consumer, and only run the 'last mile' or so over the power lines.