Re:Qt the de facto standard for cross platform ?
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Qt for Mac
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I am a full time Java developer and I am afraid I must disagree. Java is a greater server side language, but it is usless on the client side.
The java gui toolkits all suck. Swing is big, bloated and full of memory leaks. Awt has a smaller footprint but applications appierance changes from platform to platform. Until java solves this problem it will not be usefull as a cross-platform client for more then trivial applications.
This is a very good thing. Years ago when commercial airplane flights first started, seats were generally very expensive and it was considered a rich mans mode of transportation. Eventually though the price came down and now just about everyone can take a plane almost anywhere. I hope this leads to a similar situation with space flights.
If I remember correctly, Amazon used their concept of dynamic pricing to gouge returning customers. This model seems to be set up to give the best price to customers based on inventory, availability, etc.
I have not actually read the book, but I will attempt to get around to it as soon as I can.
Computer interfaces really haven't changed in at least the last ten years. They have gotten prettier, maybe faster, but there has been no fundamental change in all that time. In fact, as far as I can see they have only changed twice in computing history (Let me know if I am wrong, lord knows I am not omniscient). The changed from simple printouts/registers to character based interfaces then from character based interfaces to our present GUI interfaces.
I can't see this lack of change as a good thing. In an industry where rapid change is standard it surprises me that interfaces have remained stagnant. So if this book can foster some original thinking and perhaps some newer more efficient designs for interfaces, we should probably take it seriously, not matter how controversial the content.
My lord you really are a fool. My grammar is not great but my spelling is flawless. Yes I am a consultant and a very good one at that. I think you have just illustrated my point about degrees being useless, thank you.
I have always believed that the government needs the most advanced weapons it can get. Violence (ie. war) will never go away, so we should be as efficient at it as possible. (Just one second - doning flame retardent clothing). If this can allow the government to wipe out an opposing army and no one else, great lets do it. The problem comes into play when you cannot ensure that only your target will be affected, therefore, there is a very real possiblity of harming your own forces. This is not a good thing.
As soon as the scientest have incontrovertable proof that they can target an arbitrary inidividual or group of individuals, I say do it. We will save alot of american (british, austrailian take your pick of the allies) lives by employing this technology.
Alot of the technophobes are going to have a problem with this, as well as those who tend to believe in the inherent goodness of man. but when the start bringing up the inherent goodness ploy I always point out, as a really good, well reasoned response Hienlens book Starship Troopers (The book, not that pitiful excuse for a movie).
You idiot, read about XP before you talk. XP wont even work if you only have one person. Although I will grant it works best for a new project - b it 500 or 5000000 lines of code. idiot
I just love it when people blurt out erroneous information about a subject/product/project that they have never seen or used.
The main concern people have here is that in XP you don't design. That is a false statement. In XP iterations are encouraged and design, for an iteration, takes place at the beginning of that iteration. Its true in XP you don't design a large application at the beginning of the application, that ends up begin a waste of time. Any one who has ever worked as a programmer realizes that user requirements change on an almost daily basis. This iterative design process allows for change. In fact, one of XPs mottos is "Embrace Change".
The best argument for the use of XP is that it works, better then any other methodology I have ever used. The iterative design process, user stories, unit testing, constant code commitment, pair programming. These concepts brought together in the form of XP produce a balanced environment that tends to produce what the customer wants in the time frame he wants it. In short, it helps us do our job as developers well.
With XP you get well-designed, extensible, modular code. You are also encouraged to reuse it whenever possible.
Is XP a panacea? No, not by a long shot. On of the principle complaints I get when I introduce some of the concepts and procedures to a client is the statement "Oh our coders don't like procedures, they will never do that". This comes back to the fact that if you can't get your coders to follow any procedure, than it is likely that no procedure will work for you.
Although I am a full time coder and like XP, most coders do not. XP, by design, reduces the likely hood of cowboy coders (in the American sense) by design. If XP is implemented correctly it wont be long before almost everyone has a similar level of knowledge, this level is usually equal to the highest pre-XP level.
Let me say right off that I never obtained a degree. Do to some familial issues I had to go strait to work out of High School. Eventually, with the help of some kind employers, I managed to leverage my way into the IT industry as a programmer. My lack of a formal education has pushed my to study new technologies almost constantly. Do to perceived notions I have to be able to answer most programming questions right off the top of my head. All this to compete with those individuals freshly out of college, who generally can't code their way through a simple factorial algorithm.
This article is a good illustration of the failures of the current university system. Employers rely on the degree this institutions grant as indicator of knowledge, when anymore they are simply indicators of the fact that someone spent four years in a university. I think this is why certifications are currently so popular among employers.
Unions have their place in many industries, especially those industries that lend themselves to worker exploitation or in times of massive economic downturn. I do not believe the IT industry fits into this category even in a bad economy.
First let me speak to what I consider one of the major drawbacks of standard unions and that is the seniority system. This has absolutely no place in IT at all. Much more so then almost any other industry IT lives off of talent. This is not to say that experience does not have its place, it is just recognition of the fact that two individuals of similar experience but differing levels of talent will perform very differently, with the advantage going to the individual of greater talent.
Those who have this talent, drive whatever you would like to call it should be rewarded, greater pay, quicker promotion, more responsibility etc. This thought is anathema to almost every union that I have ever read or heard about. That a person be rewarded for ability instead of longevity is against the basic union credo.
To speak to a second point, one of the union's main goals is to ensure a fair and even distribution of wages and to negotiate contracts. For reasons expressed in the last paragraph this has little or no place in it. If I do a better job then another person with more experience I should be rewarded to a greater extent then that person. Also to a large extent IT people negotiate their own contracts, for better or worse. I know I would never allow another entity to negotiate my contract; I would never be comfortable that I had gotten the best deal. If came into a shop that was under a mass contract I would leave immediately, mass contracts generally leave no room for rewards directed at individual accomplishments
One of the other major functions of unions is to protect the worker from the employer. In IT all the worker generally has to do is leave, usually (based on the tech he is familiar with) he will get an overall better deal anyway. Employers, for the most part, realize this and try to at least make their IT employees happy to a small extent.
Now I don't think it is a bad thing for a group of IT workers, devoted to their craft, to get together and share ideas for improvements. Even if this group becomes a legal organization and puts some pressure on companies to improve their policies in reference to quality of code, etc. These areas, however, are not the usual domain of unions. This may be a simple semantic issue. Perhaps the group described at the beginning of this paragraph could be called a guild or similar name and that might solve the problem.
In all of this, unions in the traditional sense of the word have no place in the IT industry.
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Hindu is the religion, Hindi is the language.
I am a full time Java developer and I am afraid I must disagree. Java is a greater server side language, but it is usless on the client side.
The java gui toolkits all suck. Swing is big, bloated and full of memory leaks. Awt has a smaller footprint but applications appierance changes from platform to platform. Until java solves this problem it will not be usefull as a cross-platform client for more then trivial applications.
This is a very good thing. Years ago when commercial airplane flights first started, seats were generally very expensive and it was considered a rich mans mode of transportation. Eventually though the price came down and now just about everyone can take a plane almost anywhere. I hope this leads to a similar situation with space flights.
If I remember correctly, Amazon used their concept of dynamic pricing to gouge returning customers. This model seems to be set up to give the best price to customers based on inventory, availability, etc.
Who knows it may be a good thing.Computer interfaces really haven't changed in at least the last ten years. They have gotten prettier, maybe faster, but there has been no fundamental change in all that time. In fact, as far as I can see they have only changed twice in computing history (Let me know if I am wrong, lord knows I am not omniscient). The changed from simple printouts/registers to character based interfaces then from character based interfaces to our present GUI interfaces.
I can't see this lack of change as a good thing. In an industry where rapid change is standard it surprises me that interfaces have remained stagnant. So if this book can foster some original thinking and perhaps some newer more efficient designs for interfaces, we should probably take it seriously, not matter how controversial the content.
As always just my 2cMy lord you really are a fool. My grammar is not great but my spelling is flawless. Yes I am a consultant and a very good one at that. I think you have just illustrated my point about degrees being useless, thank you.
I have always believed that the government needs the most advanced weapons it can get. Violence (ie. war) will never go away, so we should be as efficient at it as possible. (Just one second - doning flame retardent clothing). If this can allow the government to wipe out an opposing army and no one else, great lets do it. The problem comes into play when you cannot ensure that only your target will be affected, therefore, there is a very real possiblity of harming your own forces. This is not a good thing.
As soon as the scientest have incontrovertable proof that they can target an arbitrary inidividual or group of individuals, I say do it. We will save alot of american (british, austrailian take your pick of the allies) lives by employing this technology.
Alot of the technophobes are going to have a problem with this, as well as those who tend to believe in the inherent goodness of man. but when the start bringing up the inherent goodness ploy I always point out, as a really good, well reasoned response Hienlens book Starship Troopers (The book, not that pitiful excuse for a movie).
You idiot, read about XP before you talk. XP wont even work if you only have one person. Although I will grant it works best for a new project - b it 500 or 5000000 lines of code. idiot
I just love it when people blurt out erroneous information about a subject/product/project that they have never seen or used.
The main concern people have here is that in XP you don't design. That is a false statement. In XP iterations are encouraged and design, for an iteration, takes place at the beginning of that iteration. Its true in XP you don't design a large application at the beginning of the application, that ends up begin a waste of time. Any one who has ever worked as a programmer realizes that user requirements change on an almost daily basis. This iterative design process allows for change. In fact, one of XPs mottos is "Embrace Change".
The best argument for the use of XP is that it works, better then any other methodology I have ever used. The iterative design process, user stories, unit testing, constant code commitment, pair programming. These concepts brought together in the form of XP produce a balanced environment that tends to produce what the customer wants in the time frame he wants it. In short, it helps us do our job as developers well.
With XP you get well-designed, extensible, modular code. You are also encouraged to reuse it whenever possible.
Is XP a panacea? No, not by a long shot. On of the principle complaints I get when I introduce some of the concepts and procedures to a client is the statement "Oh our coders don't like procedures, they will never do that". This comes back to the fact that if you can't get your coders to follow any procedure, than it is likely that no procedure will work for you.
Although I am a full time coder and like XP, most coders do not. XP, by design, reduces the likely hood of cowboy coders (in the American sense) by design. If XP is implemented correctly it wont be long before almost everyone has a similar level of knowledge, this level is usually equal to the highest pre-XP level.
Let me say right off that I never obtained a degree. Do to some familial issues I had to go strait to work out of High School. Eventually, with the help of some kind employers, I managed to leverage my way into the IT industry as a programmer. My lack of a formal education has pushed my to study new technologies almost constantly. Do to perceived notions I have to be able to answer most programming questions right off the top of my head. All this to compete with those individuals freshly out of college, who generally can't code their way through a simple factorial algorithm.
This article is a good illustration of the failures of the current university system. Employers rely on the degree this institutions grant as indicator of knowledge, when anymore they are simply indicators of the fact that someone spent four years in a university. I think this is why certifications are currently so popular among employers.
Just my 2cUnions have their place in many industries, especially those industries that lend themselves to worker exploitation or in times of massive economic downturn. I do not believe the IT industry fits into this category even in a bad economy.
First let me speak to what I consider one of the major drawbacks of standard unions and that is the seniority system. This has absolutely no place in IT at all. Much more so then almost any other industry IT lives off of talent. This is not to say that experience does not have its place, it is just recognition of the fact that two individuals of similar experience but differing levels of talent will perform very differently, with the advantage going to the individual of greater talent.
Those who have this talent, drive whatever you would like to call it should be rewarded, greater pay, quicker promotion, more responsibility etc. This thought is anathema to almost every union that I have ever read or heard about. That a person be rewarded for ability instead of longevity is against the basic union credo.
To speak to a second point, one of the union's main goals is to ensure a fair and even distribution of wages and to negotiate contracts. For reasons expressed in the last paragraph this has little or no place in it. If I do a better job then another person with more experience I should be rewarded to a greater extent then that person. Also to a large extent IT people negotiate their own contracts, for better or worse. I know I would never allow another entity to negotiate my contract; I would never be comfortable that I had gotten the best deal. If came into a shop that was under a mass contract I would leave immediately, mass contracts generally leave no room for rewards directed at individual accomplishments
One of the other major functions of unions is to protect the worker from the employer. In IT all the worker generally has to do is leave, usually (based on the tech he is familiar with) he will get an overall better deal anyway. Employers, for the most part, realize this and try to at least make their IT employees happy to a small extent.
Now I don't think it is a bad thing for a group of IT workers, devoted to their craft, to get together and share ideas for improvements. Even if this group becomes a legal organization and puts some pressure on companies to improve their policies in reference to quality of code, etc. These areas, however, are not the usual domain of unions. This may be a simple semantic issue. Perhaps the group described at the beginning of this paragraph could be called a guild or similar name and that might solve the problem.
In all of this, unions in the traditional sense of the word have no place in the IT industry.