sure love to fly their UFOs and give drunken farmers anal probes and mutilate their cattle and make crop circles.
Are we sure that they are smarter than us or just more technologically advanced than us but not smarter? Then again, maybe it is just their teenage UFO drivers playing pranks on us?;)
There used to be clever hacks in the old Yahoo Profiles to modify your profile to do things like play MIDI files and change the background and run Javascripts via a series of exploits in the way the Yahoo data forms worked.
Yahoo wants to get rid of the exploits by wiping clean every profile after it fixes the exploits. Some of the exploits stole passwords and other data and some even installed malware.
I don't mind having a blank profile, I am not really notable anyway. I am a pirate ninja and just love to blend into the background so nobody can notice me as I turn invisible.:)
Apple switched from ADB to USB to Firewire, but what if you really liked that ADB mouse and keyboard and wanted to use it on a modern Mac or PC?
This happened to the Amiga, the Amiga 1000 had a phone jack keyboard adapter and then the Amiga 2000 had a DIN adapter like the PC-AT. So when my Amiga 1000 keyboard broke I couldn't find a replacement and bought an Amiga 500 instead.
The pinouts for these devices should be all over the Internet, and if someone is business savvy enough they will make adapters for legacy peripherals to be used on modern systems and vice versa.
Imagine that you had a dongle for a 9 pin serial port but your new desktop or laptop has a USB port instead of a 9 pin serial adapter, how can you use your software you bought on your new system? How about that parallel port Dot Matrix impact printer you need to print carbon copy white, yellow, and pink order forms on, but the new PCs and Macs don't have parallel ports?
That serial to USB adapter only gets 9600 baud and it makes communicating with legacy modems and PLC devices very very slow and painful on new systems. Which opens up the market for retrocomputing to use old technology for legacy software that never got upgraded to run on modern systems.
Well whatever works. I am glad to hear that you were able to find a different way to do it. Each person is different and might do a different way of solving a problem.
By the way I never mention any company by name. I post as Orion Blastar as a parody of myself with a sense of humor.
Please don't take everything I say as serious. Jokes are protected from various laws and I was speaking hypothetically as something I thought happened and I might have been wrong about it, but I did a joke anyway. It did it to make others see that sometimes management doesn't understand what employees are doing. It was a parable parody.
as I cannot read your resume. I also don't have your references.
Sometimes to get a good IT job you need experience in that area, it is an IT Catch-22.
For example I worked on help desks and computer repair shops before I became a programmer. What helped me was getting a job in the college computer lab and since I was taking classes in programming, they had me do some programming projects for them.
Maybe what you need to do is some Guru work and some short term IT contracts. You also could join an open source programming project and start out documenting code and work your way to a programmer. But being a free lancer will get your foot in the door of a company quicker than an OSS project.
If you have help desk skills you can easily turn it into computer repair and training skills. Do consulting with friends and family for a small fee and put on your resume a DBA (Doing Business As) a company name that you will found later. Make sure you get some good references from those jobs.
Don't lie on your resume, they will spot that and disqualify you if they think you lied. Be truthful but show them that you are willing to learn new skills and can undergo training, and maybe you need to get a certificate or associates degree from a community college to complement your other degree to specialize in some field. For example if you want to work for lawyers get a legal assistant degree, if you want to enter data get a data entry degree, if you want to develop web sites get a web development certificate. Community college does not cost as much as a four year or higher college and it will help you specialize in some area.
What you really need is a career coach or some HR services company or recruiter to go over your options. Asking Slashdot might not work as you are asking people who might be competing with you for those IT jobs and they might give you a wrong answer or have problems finding work and give you what worked for them but it doesn't fit your resume.
When I had my Amiga 1000 we had software that could do an Amiga, Macintosh, and MS-DOS format on the same floppy disk. You took like 100K to 200K parts of the disk and made a mini-format for each standard.
There used to be software that made mini-standards and it was affordable for game companies to use the same floppy disk with two or more versions of their game on two different partitions of a floppy disk.
For example one was a MFM format for the PC and the other was a GCR format for the C64.
That was old school hacking, before "War Games" and people trying to crack computers and security and writing viruses. It is more of a computer hobbyist style of tweaking a computer that we computer geeks liked to use back in those days when being a "hacker" meant you wrote useful code that nobody else could to do impossible things like one floppy disk that supports two different formats at the same time. Back in the old days when programmers used machine code and assembly language and BASIC interpreters with peek and poke statements. Long before the GUI revolution and long before script-kiddies called themselves the new hackers, and are really crackers and not hackers at all.
Yeah I guess I could have, but it is all in the past. I forgive them for doing that to me, but they did it out of ignorance because they didn't understand what I was doing for them or how valuable it made me.
They suffered for firing me, and could not replace me with someone who could do the job. I am writing these hints and directions and habits to help other programmers be like I once was.
I am getting my marbles back and will become a great programmer again. Maybe they will see I didn't sue them and hire me back as a contractor?:)
I didn't quit because I have a wife and son that need to have a house, if I quit I'd lose my house as I had a lot of medical bills and owed a lot of money to credit card companies to buy the medicine my insurance wouldn't pay for and the books I needed to do my job that my employers would not buy for me.
I had a small business but it only did tech support, as I had a "no compete" contract with them and so I didn't write programs but fixed computers instead to make sure it was a different line of work. But the local tech support businesses ran me out of business, caused my business partner to have a heart attack and I got really sick myself and closed the small business. Then I got fired for being sick on the job, and I was under a lot of stress for reasons I posted above. But I forgive them because they didn't know what they were doing or how valuable I was to them.
I've moved on, and I dug myself into a deep hole I now only recently am starting to get out of.
I've been in hell for like 7 or 8 years or a decade and I just got back to Earth. Now I am back and better than ever.:)
I have had good luck with legacy code, here is what I do:
#1 Figure out what the code does and document it with comments and write a document on it.
#2 Identify variables and objects and what they are used for and any naming convention the code may use.
#3 You need to stick to the original style of writing or rewrite parts of it into your style if it can give a performance boost or make it more stable.
#4 Try to find programming errors and things that do not make sense and rewrite them so that they make sense. Do error trapping and check for nulls and letters entered into number variables and all other sorts of things most legacy programmers overlook.
#5 Work to make the code stable and not crash and run faster before you start adding new features to it. Users don't want to wait 15 minutes to do a report and then have the program crash after their wait.
#6 Work with the help desk to identify the most serious problems that users complain about the legacy code. Make it a "wish list" and then fix each complaint as you have time to do.
#7 Get direction from your managers, tell them what you are trying to do and any problems you have. You need to work as a team with other developers, the help desk, managers, and users to work out the issues with legacy code. Explain to them when you need more time and cannot make the schedule they gave. Make a deal with them to release a stable version but lacking features that might take more time than they thought to do. Tell the users you had to no add in those features to meet a deadline or ask them if they want to wait until you figure out how to add in those features.
#8 Play Sherlock Holmes and read books or Internet web sites on the language and technology used with the legacy code. Search knowledge bases and blogs and forums for answers to solutions, sometimes someone else figured out what you are trying to solve. If not ask on a forum or blog or web site and see who answers. Many of my answers got that way from the Internet on legacy code, but management didn't understand why I spent so much time on the Internet. It was because they wouldn't buy me the books I needed and I had no documentation or anything to work with except for pure code with no comments and all with serious problems. Sometimes I had to spend 5 hours a day researching on the Internet and 3 or 4 hours coding, but in doing so I saved months of work, but management didn't understand that each web site I went to was work related and I looked at the design of sample code even HTML code to get ideas on how to solve the legacy code problems. Sometimes you have to call up a help desk of a vendor to get answers as well, but they docked me for long distance calls to Canada where Crystal Reports and Segate/Business Objects had their headquarters. Fixing Crystal Report errors would make me spend 5 hours a day on the Internet just to figure out what caused double lines in a report and why only certain users got it and not others.
#9 When in doubt ask for help. Sometimes another pair of eyes can spot errors and mistakes that you cannot see. Diversity is a good thing with team members. Form a dream team of programmers of different backgrounds for best results.
#10 When in danger, when in doubt, don't run in circles and scream and shout. Take a walk, get something to drink and relax. Take a mental health break instead of getting angry at other people for not helping you or not doing their jobs properly, they might be suffering from stress like you are and you don't know it. Be positive, not negative.
#1 Always do research, analysis, and design before you start coding. If not, do it later so you know how to fix and debug your program.
#2 You do quality work.
#3 You give the users what they want and the managers what they want. Customer satisfaction is the key. Everyone effected by the program needs to be happy and that is hard to do sometimes.
#4 You learn from your mistakes and failures and you try to invent new ways to do things.
#5 You keep trying even if you fail, you read books you look at articles and forums on the Internet, you search knowledge bases and online documentation.
#6 If you cannot meet a schedule, you tell the customers that you will add in features later and you are running out of time and need more time but will try to get a quick release now with fewer features and try to get it stable first, and then add more features later.
#7 You make a gold release where you fix most of the bugs and don't add in extra features until you can get the program stable first. You can add in features later, but the user really wants a program that does not crash too often and needs to save his/her work if there is a crash, so you write crashproof error trapping that saves the session so it can be restored after a crash.
#8 Invent new ways of doing things.
#9 License technology and code if you cannot invent new things. Open source projects might have what you need, but you need to pay off the open source programmers for their work first, and then get a fork of their code and use it in your project as they agree to release it from the open source license to your license. That includes open source libraries if the license requires commercial code to buy a license to use in non-open source code. If not license commercial code and libraries instead.
#10 If all else fails, design a standard that the program or operating system should go by and hope someone else or another company or group can code to that standard. Then license their work and pay them off.
#11 If you are not using legacy software you can license them to retro computing companies who can use your old version for retro computing hobbyists in exchange for 10% of the profits from sales of the retro program or operating system. It is called OEMing the retro software like Serenity making OS/2 into eComStation or the AROS project turning AmigaOS 3.1 into a new open source OS. You can make money that way as well, always another group or company that will continue on legacy software and retro computing.
Acutally Slashdot covered the AmigaOS and GUI in 1999 as not being dead yet.
Apple didn't kill it, just stole the AmigaOS GUI for Mac OSX which was based on Next OpenStep which stole from AmigaDOS 1.0 Workbench 1.0 to create a GUI on top of BSD Unix so Steve Jobs and Next could copy the Macintosh by stealing the best parts of the Amiga GUI and claiming them as their own.
#1 None of that applies to me, I don't want to build stuff for OSX, I don't use OSX, OSX is too bloated for my tastes and too expensive. XCode isn't the right development tool for me, it is way too crappy to be of any use I'd much rather use Python, Java, or even Free Pascal than the Code Warrior recycled as XCode and based on Objective-C crudware.
#2 There is no killer app for OSX that I like, they are all bloatware and crappy. Even Deluxe Paint II on an Amiga 500 works better than Photoshop for the Mac, and Photoshop stole a lot from Deluxe Paint as DP was out before PS.
#3 I can run AROS on a cheapie $100 Pentium 4 laptop, and it runs three times as fast as a $2000 Macbook Pro with OSX 10.5.X on it and has a better GUI, and low memory and hard drive requirements while OSX is bloatware that needs a Dual-Core processor, 1Gig of RAM, and the biggest hard drive I can afford.
There is no point for my Amiga to run OSX, as AmigaDOS, Workbench, AmigaOS, AROS programs run much faster and with less memory than their OSX counterparts. Most of the open source OSX software exists for AROS now.
If you ever used AmigaOS, you'll know that Steve Jobs stole from it to make the Next and OpenStep interfaces and later the OSX and Aqua interfaces, but Steve Jobs was only a petty thief and didn't steal 100% of the AmigaOS/AROS GUI so the OSX GUI is only half-baked.
"The prevailing wage must be at, or above the federal or state or local minimum wage, whichever is higher. The federal minimum wage is $6.55/hr effective July 24, 2008."
Computer Programmers can be hired at $6.55/hr or the state wage if it is higher under the H1B Visa program. As long as it is minimum wage or higher it is 100% legal to under pay computer programmers.
I know many Thai H1B Visa workers who program C++, C#, Java, Visual BASIC for minimum wage and work a second job at a restaurant in my area. The chef or waiter job, pays them more than their programming job based on tips they get.
My wife is half Thai and I know a lot of Thai people and I've been to Thailand a few times and talked with them.
Yeah I was a federal IT contractor. But I doubt I can get security clearance again after I developed schizoaffective disorder.
But at least I have no criminal record or drug use or anything else, so maybe via the ADA I can reapply for Federal IT work. I worked under the Clinton Administration from 1996-1997 to downsize army bases.
Yet those jobs are really really hard to get. I scored near perfect on their tests and still couldn't get a federal job and the best I got was a federal contractor job but not a federal employee job. You almost have to know someone in politics or that works for the federal government just to get hired. I know almost nobody and those I do know have forgotten about me by now.
#1 For every start you put in an end, for every open bracket you put in a closed bracket, etc.
#2 For every object you use or open, you close it and free up the memory.
#3 Comments are your friends, use lots of them.
#4 Stick to the naming convention your company uses, like global variables begin with a "g" and integers begin with an "i" so a global counter variable is named as "gi_count" and a local counter is "i_count" or whatever your company says to use.
#5 Before you start to program, do research, analysis, and design, do psuedocode and flowcharts if you can they will help you out later, only then do you write code when all of that is done first.
#6 Work as a team, get a coworker to look over your code for mistakes and you do the same for him/her sometimes you cannot see mistakes in your own code, get help.
#7 Security should be built into coding, always check variables for buffer overflows and set and enforce limits in length of variables.
#8 Assume that users will type in characters in number only fields, and enter drive names that do not exist and error trap for that. Check any formula that uses division to see if the bottom is a zero and check for negative numbers before you do a square root and trap for those as well.
#9 Learn to think like a user, they won't know what you know. Think like someone who doesn't know how to program and then use your programs and see what happens. Then you can spot things a programmer would often miss or not see.
#10 The help desk is your friend, but get the correct error message and things the user did before the error happened to locate in your code where the problem is, if not, you'll have to play as Sherlock Holmes and figure out the mystery.
like Google, Yahoo, IBM, etc, because those Transmeta chips run fast and use as little electricity as possible. It is really needed to create green technology to use less energy and thus stop the coal pollution caused by the Intel, AMD, IBM etc cpus that use too much power and cause the coal burning power plants to burn more coal and thus waste our valuable resources.
Fossil fuels we need to conserve because they are finite and we need to do it as soon as possible to not only get prices down on fossil fuels but also ensure our future by reusing our use.
It does not matter if you believe in global warming, peak oil, or just want to stop using so much foreign oil and foreign fossil fuels and want to stop giving away $700B each year to foreign nations that hate the USA and use our fossil fuel money to fund terrorism and dictatorships that will one day do more wars and 9/11's on us using the money we pay them for fossil fuels today against us in the future. Both liberals and conservatives should be united on this issue and as a bonus it will help fix our economy as well. I'm a libertarian and I want to see everyone agree on this and help bring about greener tech for whatever their personal reasons may be. We need to work as a team on this and stop our infighting as we head into a recession and soon a depression and then when that happens money will be tight and we'll wish we didn't use too many fossil fuels as we'll really need them in the next few decades or so when they are scare or high in price due to shortages.
Thanks for your support, but I have already been married and breeding for a while now. My offspring will be the ones saving your offspring from the economic collapse that will happen soon, because you are too busy smoking joints than saving money to pay your bills than take responsibility for your life. All you do is post as Anonymous Coward trying to troll me, but in real life you are the one who is the loser and drain on society and the economy.
Well they used to say the same thing about Linux before it got to the 1.0 kernel. We'll just have to wait and see.
I guess you are going with the ReactOS is basically the Freedows 98 project and nothing but vaporware, but in reality it is based on the WINE code base and will be turned into a decent OS once the WINE and Linux developers decide to help out the ReactOS project and developers and help them get back on track.
but that iDeneb project is way cheaper as it does not require a dongle.
Others have found a way to hack their BIOS to use the Apple OEM ID and do their own EFI to run Mac OSX to fool OSX to think it is running on a real Apple Macintosh. The nice thing about EEPROMS is that you can flash update them easily, and anyone who knows machine language can hack their own BIOS file into one that can easily pass for an Apple Macintosh BIOS.
As for people like me, we don't even need a dongle to make our Intel PC turn into an Amiga that is even cooler than an Apple Macintosh running OSX, and has a much lower memory footprint so it runs faster than OSX, and has an interface and look and feel like OSX or Vista, but is 100% free, 100% open source, and 100% legal.
For those who want to pirate OSX, get real, get AROS instead and support AROS developers to develop more AROS drivers and software. Why settle for a monopoly from Microsoft or Apple, when you can be free and use a non-monopoly OS that will run on almost any PC, Mac, Amiga, MIPS, PowerPC, etc system on the market?
You want an alternative to Windows? Wait until ReactOS is done. It will run Windows applications. If you want an alternative to Windows that does not run Windows programs get HaikuOS when it is ready as it is a free and open source BeOS operating system. Once OSFree is finished it will be a free OS/2 open source OS, but I heard they will make it run under Linux to run OS/2 applications. Support your favorite free open source operating system instead of pirating OSX. Who cares enough about bloatware to pirate OSX or Vista, they are both bloated and buggy! If you want a free OS, get a free open source OS as I listed above when they are finished and out of beta testing. If you can't wait join in their beta program and give them feedback on how to fix it, or join the developers to help them get done faster.
Boycott Vista and OSX, and get Linux instead and install a Macintosh skin on Linux instead of pirating OSX.
I'm mad as all hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore! That does tend to make one a bit wild eyed and suicidal/schizophrenic at times.:)
Pay no attention to the Kurobots who lick Jimbo Wales arse over at Kuro5hin and post as Anonymous Coward to try and troll me on Slashdot as a result of their leftist nazism as they wear the brownshirts of their political party and put down any non-white or non-liberal person or viewpoint as part of their hate group groupmind doublespeak. They think they are better than the rest of us as they march in lockstep with each other wearing leftist jackboots. I'm not impressed, if they want to waste their lives, up to them, I'm not going to waste my life for those leftards.
Slashdot Mirror
sure love to fly their UFOs and give drunken farmers anal probes and mutilate their cattle and make crop circles.
Are we sure that they are smarter than us or just more technologically advanced than us but not smarter? Then again, maybe it is just their teenage UFO drivers playing pranks on us? ;)
There used to be clever hacks in the old Yahoo Profiles to modify your profile to do things like play MIDI files and change the background and run Javascripts via a series of exploits in the way the Yahoo data forms worked.
Yahoo wants to get rid of the exploits by wiping clean every profile after it fixes the exploits. Some of the exploits stole passwords and other data and some even installed malware.
I don't mind having a blank profile, I am not really notable anyway. I am a pirate ninja and just love to blend into the background so nobody can notice me as I turn invisible. :)
so old peripherals can work on the new Macs/PCs.
Apple switched from ADB to USB to Firewire, but what if you really liked that ADB mouse and keyboard and wanted to use it on a modern Mac or PC?
This happened to the Amiga, the Amiga 1000 had a phone jack keyboard adapter and then the Amiga 2000 had a DIN adapter like the PC-AT. So when my Amiga 1000 keyboard broke I couldn't find a replacement and bought an Amiga 500 instead.
The pinouts for these devices should be all over the Internet, and if someone is business savvy enough they will make adapters for legacy peripherals to be used on modern systems and vice versa.
Imagine that you had a dongle for a 9 pin serial port but your new desktop or laptop has a USB port instead of a 9 pin serial adapter, how can you use your software you bought on your new system? How about that parallel port Dot Matrix impact printer you need to print carbon copy white, yellow, and pink order forms on, but the new PCs and Macs don't have parallel ports?
That serial to USB adapter only gets 9600 baud and it makes communicating with legacy modems and PLC devices very very slow and painful on new systems. Which opens up the market for retrocomputing to use old technology for legacy software that never got upgraded to run on modern systems.
Well whatever works. I am glad to hear that you were able to find a different way to do it. Each person is different and might do a different way of solving a problem.
By the way I never mention any company by name. I post as Orion Blastar as a parody of myself with a sense of humor.
Please don't take everything I say as serious. Jokes are protected from various laws and I was speaking hypothetically as something I thought happened and I might have been wrong about it, but I did a joke anyway. It did it to make others see that sometimes management doesn't understand what employees are doing. It was a parable parody.
as I cannot read your resume. I also don't have your references.
Sometimes to get a good IT job you need experience in that area, it is an IT Catch-22.
For example I worked on help desks and computer repair shops before I became a programmer. What helped me was getting a job in the college computer lab and since I was taking classes in programming, they had me do some programming projects for them.
Maybe what you need to do is some Guru work and some short term IT contracts. You also could join an open source programming project and start out documenting code and work your way to a programmer. But being a free lancer will get your foot in the door of a company quicker than an OSS project.
If you have help desk skills you can easily turn it into computer repair and training skills. Do consulting with friends and family for a small fee and put on your resume a DBA (Doing Business As) a company name that you will found later. Make sure you get some good references from those jobs.
Don't lie on your resume, they will spot that and disqualify you if they think you lied. Be truthful but show them that you are willing to learn new skills and can undergo training, and maybe you need to get a certificate or associates degree from a community college to complement your other degree to specialize in some field. For example if you want to work for lawyers get a legal assistant degree, if you want to enter data get a data entry degree, if you want to develop web sites get a web development certificate. Community college does not cost as much as a four year or higher college and it will help you specialize in some area.
What you really need is a career coach or some HR services company or recruiter to go over your options. Asking Slashdot might not work as you are asking people who might be competing with you for those IT jobs and they might give you a wrong answer or have problems finding work and give you what worked for them but it doesn't fit your resume.
Yeah a bit of time travel was involved, but nevermind. :) It was a joke.
When I had my Amiga 1000 we had software that could do an Amiga, Macintosh, and MS-DOS format on the same floppy disk. You took like 100K to 200K parts of the disk and made a mini-format for each standard.
There used to be software that made mini-standards and it was affordable for game companies to use the same floppy disk with two or more versions of their game on two different partitions of a floppy disk.
For example one was a MFM format for the PC and the other was a GCR format for the C64.
That was old school hacking, before "War Games" and people trying to crack computers and security and writing viruses. It is more of a computer hobbyist style of tweaking a computer that we computer geeks liked to use back in those days when being a "hacker" meant you wrote useful code that nobody else could to do impossible things like one floppy disk that supports two different formats at the same time. Back in the old days when programmers used machine code and assembly language and BASIC interpreters with peek and poke statements. Long before the GUI revolution and long before script-kiddies called themselves the new hackers, and are really crackers and not hackers at all.
Yeah I guess I could have, but it is all in the past. I forgive them for doing that to me, but they did it out of ignorance because they didn't understand what I was doing for them or how valuable it made me.
They suffered for firing me, and could not replace me with someone who could do the job. I am writing these hints and directions and habits to help other programmers be like I once was.
I am getting my marbles back and will become a great programmer again. Maybe they will see I didn't sue them and hire me back as a contractor? :)
I didn't quit because I have a wife and son that need to have a house, if I quit I'd lose my house as I had a lot of medical bills and owed a lot of money to credit card companies to buy the medicine my insurance wouldn't pay for and the books I needed to do my job that my employers would not buy for me.
I had a small business but it only did tech support, as I had a "no compete" contract with them and so I didn't write programs but fixed computers instead to make sure it was a different line of work. But the local tech support businesses ran me out of business, caused my business partner to have a heart attack and I got really sick myself and closed the small business. Then I got fired for being sick on the job, and I was under a lot of stress for reasons I posted above. But I forgive them because they didn't know what they were doing or how valuable I was to them.
I've moved on, and I dug myself into a deep hole I now only recently am starting to get out of.
I've been in hell for like 7 or 8 years or a decade and I just got back to Earth. Now I am back and better than ever. :)
I have had good luck with legacy code, here is what I do:
#1 Figure out what the code does and document it with comments and write a document on it.
#2 Identify variables and objects and what they are used for and any naming convention the code may use.
#3 You need to stick to the original style of writing or rewrite parts of it into your style if it can give a performance boost or make it more stable.
#4 Try to find programming errors and things that do not make sense and rewrite them so that they make sense. Do error trapping and check for nulls and letters entered into number variables and all other sorts of things most legacy programmers overlook.
#5 Work to make the code stable and not crash and run faster before you start adding new features to it. Users don't want to wait 15 minutes to do a report and then have the program crash after their wait.
#6 Work with the help desk to identify the most serious problems that users complain about the legacy code. Make it a "wish list" and then fix each complaint as you have time to do.
#7 Get direction from your managers, tell them what you are trying to do and any problems you have. You need to work as a team with other developers, the help desk, managers, and users to work out the issues with legacy code. Explain to them when you need more time and cannot make the schedule they gave. Make a deal with them to release a stable version but lacking features that might take more time than they thought to do. Tell the users you had to no add in those features to meet a deadline or ask them if they want to wait until you figure out how to add in those features.
#8 Play Sherlock Holmes and read books or Internet web sites on the language and technology used with the legacy code. Search knowledge bases and blogs and forums for answers to solutions, sometimes someone else figured out what you are trying to solve. If not ask on a forum or blog or web site and see who answers. Many of my answers got that way from the Internet on legacy code, but management didn't understand why I spent so much time on the Internet. It was because they wouldn't buy me the books I needed and I had no documentation or anything to work with except for pure code with no comments and all with serious problems. Sometimes I had to spend 5 hours a day researching on the Internet and 3 or 4 hours coding, but in doing so I saved months of work, but management didn't understand that each web site I went to was work related and I looked at the design of sample code even HTML code to get ideas on how to solve the legacy code problems. Sometimes you have to call up a help desk of a vendor to get answers as well, but they docked me for long distance calls to Canada where Crystal Reports and Segate/Business Objects had their headquarters. Fixing Crystal Report errors would make me spend 5 hours a day on the Internet just to figure out what caused double lines in a report and why only certain users got it and not others.
#9 When in doubt ask for help. Sometimes another pair of eyes can spot errors and mistakes that you cannot see. Diversity is a good thing with team members. Form a dream team of programmers of different backgrounds for best results.
#10 When in danger, when in doubt, don't run in circles and scream and shout. Take a walk, get something to drink and relax. Take a mental health break instead of getting angry at other people for not helping you or not doing their jobs properly, they might be suffering from stress like you are and you don't know it. Be positive, not negative.
#1 Always do research, analysis, and design before you start coding. If not, do it later so you know how to fix and debug your program.
#2 You do quality work.
#3 You give the users what they want and the managers what they want. Customer satisfaction is the key. Everyone effected by the program needs to be happy and that is hard to do sometimes.
#4 You learn from your mistakes and failures and you try to invent new ways to do things.
#5 You keep trying even if you fail, you read books you look at articles and forums on the Internet, you search knowledge bases and online documentation.
#6 If you cannot meet a schedule, you tell the customers that you will add in features later and you are running out of time and need more time but will try to get a quick release now with fewer features and try to get it stable first, and then add more features later.
#7 You make a gold release where you fix most of the bugs and don't add in extra features until you can get the program stable first. You can add in features later, but the user really wants a program that does not crash too often and needs to save his/her work if there is a crash, so you write crashproof error trapping that saves the session so it can be restored after a crash.
#8 Invent new ways of doing things.
#9 License technology and code if you cannot invent new things. Open source projects might have what you need, but you need to pay off the open source programmers for their work first, and then get a fork of their code and use it in your project as they agree to release it from the open source license to your license. That includes open source libraries if the license requires commercial code to buy a license to use in non-open source code. If not license commercial code and libraries instead.
#10 If all else fails, design a standard that the program or operating system should go by and hope someone else or another company or group can code to that standard. Then license their work and pay them off.
#11 If you are not using legacy software you can license them to retro computing companies who can use your old version for retro computing hobbyists in exchange for 10% of the profits from sales of the retro program or operating system. It is called OEMing the retro software like Serenity making OS/2 into eComStation or the AROS project turning AmigaOS 3.1 into a new open source OS. You can make money that way as well, always another group or company that will continue on legacy software and retro computing.
Acutally Slashdot covered the AmigaOS and GUI in 1999 as not being dead yet.
Apple didn't kill it, just stole the AmigaOS GUI for Mac OSX which was based on Next OpenStep which stole from AmigaDOS 1.0 Workbench 1.0 to create a GUI on top of BSD Unix so Steve Jobs and Next could copy the Macintosh by stealing the best parts of the Amiga GUI and claiming them as their own.
Yeah Linux + WINE will do that on Intel Macs and Intel PCs.
For PowerMac Mac OSX and Mac OS you can use Mac on Linux but there is no Intel Mac or Intel PC port yet. But for PPC Macs it works great.
Mac on Linux will run Mac programs under Linux.
Google is your friend!
Dude, even retards can hack Apple EFI emulation it is not really that hard.
#1 None of that applies to me, I don't want to build stuff for OSX, I don't use OSX, OSX is too bloated for my tastes and too expensive. XCode isn't the right development tool for me, it is way too crappy to be of any use I'd much rather use Python, Java, or even Free Pascal than the Code Warrior recycled as XCode and based on Objective-C crudware.
#2 There is no killer app for OSX that I like, they are all bloatware and crappy. Even Deluxe Paint II on an Amiga 500 works better than Photoshop for the Mac, and Photoshop stole a lot from Deluxe Paint as DP was out before PS.
#3 I can run AROS on a cheapie $100 Pentium 4 laptop, and it runs three times as fast as a $2000 Macbook Pro with OSX 10.5.X on it and has a better GUI, and low memory and hard drive requirements while OSX is bloatware that needs a Dual-Core processor, 1Gig of RAM, and the biggest hard drive I can afford.
There is no point for my Amiga to run OSX, as AmigaDOS, Workbench, AmigaOS, AROS programs run much faster and with less memory than their OSX counterparts. Most of the open source OSX software exists for AROS now.
If you ever used AmigaOS, you'll know that Steve Jobs stole from it to make the Next and OpenStep interfaces and later the OSX and Aqua interfaces, but Steve Jobs was only a petty thief and didn't steal 100% of the AmigaOS/AROS GUI so the OSX GUI is only half-baked.
Oh yeah? The feds say:
"The prevailing wage must be at, or above the federal or state or local minimum wage, whichever is higher. The federal minimum wage is $6.55/hr effective July 24, 2008."
Computer Programmers can be hired at $6.55/hr or the state wage if it is higher under the H1B Visa program. As long as it is minimum wage or higher it is 100% legal to under pay computer programmers.
I know many Thai H1B Visa workers who program C++, C#, Java, Visual BASIC for minimum wage and work a second job at a restaurant in my area. The chef or waiter job, pays them more than their programming job based on tips they get.
My wife is half Thai and I know a lot of Thai people and I've been to Thailand a few times and talked with them.
Yeah I was a federal IT contractor. But I doubt I can get security clearance again after I developed schizoaffective disorder.
But at least I have no criminal record or drug use or anything else, so maybe via the ADA I can reapply for Federal IT work. I worked under the Clinton Administration from 1996-1997 to downsize army bases.
Yet those jobs are really really hard to get. I scored near perfect on their tests and still couldn't get a federal job and the best I got was a federal contractor job but not a federal employee job. You almost have to know someone in politics or that works for the federal government just to get hired. I know almost nobody and those I do know have forgotten about me by now.
Thank you Captain Obvious, what would we programmers do without you? :)
They are my programming habits, not his, so I wrote what I knew not what he knows.
#1 For every start you put in an end, for every open bracket you put in a closed bracket, etc.
#2 For every object you use or open, you close it and free up the memory.
#3 Comments are your friends, use lots of them.
#4 Stick to the naming convention your company uses, like global variables begin with a "g" and integers begin with an "i" so a global counter variable is named as "gi_count" and a local counter is "i_count" or whatever your company says to use.
#5 Before you start to program, do research, analysis, and design, do psuedocode and flowcharts if you can they will help you out later, only then do you write code when all of that is done first.
#6 Work as a team, get a coworker to look over your code for mistakes and you do the same for him/her sometimes you cannot see mistakes in your own code, get help.
#7 Security should be built into coding, always check variables for buffer overflows and set and enforce limits in length of variables.
#8 Assume that users will type in characters in number only fields, and enter drive names that do not exist and error trap for that. Check any formula that uses division to see if the bottom is a zero and check for negative numbers before you do a square root and trap for those as well.
#9 Learn to think like a user, they won't know what you know. Think like someone who doesn't know how to program and then use your programs and see what happens. Then you can spot things a programmer would often miss or not see.
#10 The help desk is your friend, but get the correct error message and things the user did before the error happened to locate in your code where the problem is, if not, you'll have to play as Sherlock Holmes and figure out the mystery.
like Google, Yahoo, IBM, etc, because those Transmeta chips run fast and use as little electricity as possible. It is really needed to create green technology to use less energy and thus stop the coal pollution caused by the Intel, AMD, IBM etc cpus that use too much power and cause the coal burning power plants to burn more coal and thus waste our valuable resources.
Fossil fuels we need to conserve because they are finite and we need to do it as soon as possible to not only get prices down on fossil fuels but also ensure our future by reusing our use.
It does not matter if you believe in global warming, peak oil, or just want to stop using so much foreign oil and foreign fossil fuels and want to stop giving away $700B each year to foreign nations that hate the USA and use our fossil fuel money to fund terrorism and dictatorships that will one day do more wars and 9/11's on us using the money we pay them for fossil fuels today against us in the future. Both liberals and conservatives should be united on this issue and as a bonus it will help fix our economy as well. I'm a libertarian and I want to see everyone agree on this and help bring about greener tech for whatever their personal reasons may be. We need to work as a team on this and stop our infighting as we head into a recession and soon a depression and then when that happens money will be tight and we'll wish we didn't use too many fossil fuels as we'll really need them in the next few decades or so when they are scare or high in price due to shortages.
Thanks for your support, but I have already been married and breeding for a while now. My offspring will be the ones saving your offspring from the economic collapse that will happen soon, because you are too busy smoking joints than saving money to pay your bills than take responsibility for your life. All you do is post as Anonymous Coward trying to troll me, but in real life you are the one who is the loser and drain on society and the economy.
Well they used to say the same thing about Linux before it got to the 1.0 kernel. We'll just have to wait and see.
I guess you are going with the ReactOS is basically the Freedows 98 project and nothing but vaporware, but in reality it is based on the WINE code base and will be turned into a decent OS once the WINE and Linux developers decide to help out the ReactOS project and developers and help them get back on track.
but that iDeneb project is way cheaper as it does not require a dongle.
Others have found a way to hack their BIOS to use the Apple OEM ID and do their own EFI to run Mac OSX to fool OSX to think it is running on a real Apple Macintosh. The nice thing about EEPROMS is that you can flash update them easily, and anyone who knows machine language can hack their own BIOS file into one that can easily pass for an Apple Macintosh BIOS.
As for people like me, we don't even need a dongle to make our Intel PC turn into an Amiga that is even cooler than an Apple Macintosh running OSX, and has a much lower memory footprint so it runs faster than OSX, and has an interface and look and feel like OSX or Vista, but is 100% free, 100% open source, and 100% legal.
For those who want to pirate OSX, get real, get AROS instead and support AROS developers to develop more AROS drivers and software. Why settle for a monopoly from Microsoft or Apple, when you can be free and use a non-monopoly OS that will run on almost any PC, Mac, Amiga, MIPS, PowerPC, etc system on the market?
You want an alternative to Windows? Wait until ReactOS is done. It will run Windows applications. If you want an alternative to Windows that does not run Windows programs get HaikuOS when it is ready as it is a free and open source BeOS operating system. Once OSFree is finished it will be a free OS/2 open source OS, but I heard they will make it run under Linux to run OS/2 applications. Support your favorite free open source operating system instead of pirating OSX. Who cares enough about bloatware to pirate OSX or Vista, they are both bloated and buggy! If you want a free OS, get a free open source OS as I listed above when they are finished and out of beta testing. If you can't wait join in their beta program and give them feedback on how to fix it, or join the developers to help them get done faster.
Boycott Vista and OSX, and get Linux instead and install a Macintosh skin on Linux instead of pirating OSX.
I am the modern day Howard Beale don'tcha know?
I'm mad as all hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore! That does tend to make one a bit wild eyed and suicidal/schizophrenic at times. :)
Pay no attention to the Kurobots who lick Jimbo Wales arse over at Kuro5hin and post as Anonymous Coward to try and troll me on Slashdot as a result of their leftist nazism as they wear the brownshirts of their political party and put down any non-white or non-liberal person or viewpoint as part of their hate group groupmind doublespeak. They think they are better than the rest of us as they march in lockstep with each other wearing leftist jackboots. I'm not impressed, if they want to waste their lives, up to them, I'm not going to waste my life for those leftards.