I've heard this opinion expressed a lot, but I'm a bit skeptical because I've never seen it work in practice. If it works so well to have leaders who are just there to serve the machine, where are these great companies that have good engineers and subservient "leaders"?
If you look at all the big successful tech companies, they all seem to have strong leadership with a clear vision. For example Amazon, Facebook and especially Apple are all built around what are almost cults of personality. Even Google's leadership is taking stronger control over the direction of the company (take for example the recent push into social media with their Google+ mandate).
Big groups need leaders. In a small company it matters less, because if the CEO or whatever is not leading, one of the engineers will. But once a company gets large, if the leaders aren't taking control then people from below will try to fill the power vacuum. You end up with a lot of political infighting as senior engineers try to build their empires, rather than work together towards a common goal.
As a Software Engineer, I care plenty about "why" things are the way they are. For example, I care a lot about why unindexed database joins are O(n^2), because I need to know how to avoid writing slow code. Engineers who don't understand why their software will perform/scale adequately and meet SLAs aren't very good engineers.
I think a more accurate way to describe it is: science is more about "new" and engineering is more about "useful". Scientists don't bother researching things that are already known and engineers don't bother implementing things that they don't think anyone will want to use.
That's not really been my experience. If you think that Software Engineering is concerned with RoR and WordPress, then no offense or anything but you probably have a narrow understanding of the (computing) world and lack breadth in your studies and experience.
Computer Science, like science in general, attempts to expand human understanding of a field of study. So Computer Scientists spend a lot of time exploring new things. For this reason, they rarely talk about Turing Machines. Some do, but most don't - they've been studied to death already and there's relatively little left to discover about them. How often do you see new papers about LISP or Turing Machines? Most Computer Scientists I know research things like Machine Learning and Computer Vision.
The term Software Engineer gets thrown around a lot, and the meaning depends a lot on who is using the term. At my company, Software Engineers are concerned with things like performance/scalability and reliability. For example, have we got redundant systems in place in case a data center goes down? And will the algorithms we use handle peak expected loads?
The key difference is that CS is about finding out about things that people don't already know. SE is about building thats that are immediately useful to people. The equivalent to mechanics is called "IT".
And that's why MediaWiki is so great. It's not just a Word clone with a strict subset of Word's features; the two applications have feature sets that overlap but neither can do everything that the other can. What's important is that MediaWiki is significantly better than Word at collaborative document editing.
In many teams at many companies, including the last two that I've worked at, internal wikis have replaced Word as the standard way of sharing documents. It's just so much easier than creating a Word doc, putting it up on some network share and then hoping that no one moves (or worse, copies!) the document. Everyone, regardless of whether they're using Windows, Mac OS X, Linux or their smartphone, can access it, because it's all based on open standards. People still use Word, but it's no longer as absolutely vital as it once was.
MediaWiki needs to play to its strengths. The question isn't so much "what do other word processors do wrong?", but rather "what do other wikis do wrong?" My answer to that would be the simplistic page locking system that can't do a simple three-way merge. Ideally, a Google-Docs-style real-time collaborative editing feature would be in place.
Come on guys, the ignorance being displayed here is embarassing. Apple has not patented the general concept of turning a page. They've just claimed the rights to their specific page turn animation, that's all.
A lot of people here clearly don't understand what a "design patent" is, and how it differs from a utility patent and copyright. Here's an example of what they all mean:
Copyright: would apply to the code that implements the animation. Design patent: would apply to the animation itself. Utility patents: would apply to the general idea of turning of a page in an ebook.
This is the claim from the design patent:
The ornamental design for a display screen or portion thereof with animated-graphical user interface, as shown and described.
Note that it only covers the animation as shown and described. If you use a different animation, you're not infringing.
So calm down everyone. The patent system may be broken, but this is not an example of it.
But this is an extremely narrow patent, which covers the exact shape of an iPad. In order to infringe, you would need to have the exact height and width and roundness of the corners. Not exactly a singular patent on rounded rectangles in general.
I'm not a fan of what Apple is doing in terms of litigation, but to be fair, they don't have a patent on rounded corners.
Their claim to rounded rectangles is part of a set of design patents, which includes the home button, edge-to-edge glass, the bezel, and other design features. The problem is not so much that Samsung* copied the rounded rectangles from the iPhone, but they've copied it in addition to a whole set of other design features. Lots of other phones and computing devices have rounded rectangles, so this is not in and of itself protected. But prior to Samsung's Galaxy S, I don't think there were any phones that infringed on all of Apple's claimed patents.
As an analogy, imagine if someone started a computer and smartphone company called "Apples". Apple then comes and complains that they've used the letters 'a', 'p', 'p', 'l' and 'e' in the same sequence as Apple has. Then a horde of angry Slashdotters comes and cries "Apple thinks they can trademark the letter 'a'!?!?!? The system is broken!!!!"
Yes, you can make a valid argument that Apple is abusing the system. But a half-truth like Apple has patented rounded rectangles distracts from that message, and weakens the argument.
* The rounded rectangles thing came up in the Samsung trial, not the HTC one. The HTC case is more about things like multitouch gestures like "pinch to zoom".
Women need to like the job of the guy they’re with. If they don’t like the job, they don’t like the guy. Men know this. Which is why we make up the phony, bogus names for the jobs that we have. “Well, right now, I’m the regional management supervisor. I’m in development, research, consulting...”
Men on the other hand – if they are physically attracted to a woman – are not that concerned with her job. Are we? Men don’t really care. Men’ll just go, “Really? Slaughterhouse? Is that where you work? That sounds interesting. So whaddaya got a big cleaver there? You’re just lopping their heads off? That sounds great! Listen, why don’t you shower up, and we’ll get some burgers and catch a movie.”
The movement against excessive options started with an article by Havoc Pennington that describes why Linux desktops had such bad user interfaces back in the 90s and early 2000s:
You have to read it with the proper historical context in mind. Some examples he gives of the state of the desktop at the time are:
* Emacs having a broken-by-default cut and paste feature, and you had to go into the preferences dialog to make it standards-compliaint * Gnome 1.x used to have 5 different clock applets, and during usability testing people would asking why are there 5 clocks to choose? More of a problem was that they assumed that there was a good reason for having 5 clocks, and would then spend a lot of time thinking about which of the 5 clocks was right for them.
It wasn't so much an idea that "options are bad" but rather that "options have a cost", and so excessive options are bad and that the default option should be something reasonable. There should never be an option to "unbreak" something like clipboard standards.
You could argue that Gnome 3.x takes it too far (I disagree, but that's just my opinion), but there are good reasons to remove the fallback mode. The fact is, no one uses it. The people who the fallback mode is targetted towards have already (very vocally!) moved to KDE/XFCE. So why bother developing something for users who aren't going to use it anyway?
Yes, exactly! Elon Musk seems like a really great guy and all, but he does have a tendency to move on to new things before finishing up with the previous thing. The same can't be said of Steve Jobs.
PayPal was great but they really need to expand more outside of eBay. And also gain the trust of their users. You know you're doing it wrong when people say that you're less trustworthy than the banks!
Telsa and SpaceX are awesome companies, but both have serious hurdles ahead. His achievements to date don't warrant quite the amount of fawning as what was displayed in TFS. As the Wolf would say, "let's not start sucking each other's dicks quite yet"!
If he was ousted, it's probably due more to the others thinking he's an asshole. The Maps debacle provides a convenient excuse, but I doubt it's the real reason behind this. This is just another political backstabbing, that's all.
The best article that I've ever read on coding style is Style is Substance by Ken Arnold.
I won't repeat what he has to say here, because he explains it better than I could. But I wish that more programming languages would follow what he is advocating, because we waste way too much time arguing about braces and tabs.
Same thing with Aussie cars. It amazes me that the Australian engineered and manufactured Chevy Camaro SS (with a V8 engine) in the United States is cheaper than a Holden Commodore SV6 in Australia. For those who don't know, it's the same car underneath.
I once had a router where the signal started to go bad over time. I called up the company and the tech support guy told me that most routers "wear out" after around 2 years, and that I'd need to replace it. He struggled to give a logical answer when I asked him how a device with no moving parts could wear out so quickly.
If you're right, and if this is the standard advice being given to everyone, we're in for a huge arms race.
I don't buy this idea that Microsoft would be so reckless as to risk their biggest product like that. The only other version of Windows that has been such a failure is Vista, and when Microsoft released that, they scrambled to push Windows 7 out the door ASAP to stop the backlash. It was an accident, and they're not dumb enough to try to make a corporate strategy out of repeating this accident.
You could argue that Windows Me was their other throwaway version, but when that happened, they had the NT line ready to take over. This time around, they have no such backup strategy ready to go. If Windiows 8 doesn't work out, their only option is a major reversal in strategy and a scramble to release Windows 9 Classic.
It's a bit like New Coke. They're not that dumb, and they're not that smart.
I have a friend who works for a large bank. He's in charge of developing a new internal application, and the execs insisted that it be an HTML5 app so that it would be compatible with their shiny new iPads. This is quite different from even 5 years ago, where there were lots of native Windows-only corporate applications within the bank and everyone thought this was completely acceptable. You may disagree with their reasoning for moving away from Windows, but regardless, most internal corporate applications are now developed for the web, which is an open platform.
The Windows monopoly existed because even though Mac and Linux could do 80% of what people needed, there was a long tail of Windows-only applications that companies could not move away from. Many of these were custom apps that were written in VB or used some Windows-only technology. Given this, I'd say that he's right. Internal corporate applications these days are almost always web-based, so they're much less locked in to Windows, and so Windows is becoming irrelevant.
Also, you may think that making spreadsheets counts as "real computing", but realize that spreadsheets are only used for small, quick and dirty jobs. Real computing is done by distributed database-driven applications, which these days almost always has a web frontend.
That only makes sense if you assume that Google engineers live paycheck to paycheck.
What's more likely is that they save a certain percentage of their $128k, and spend it in a lower cost area once they've left their job in Mountain View.
The word "troll", as used by the media and politicians, seems to have a slightly different meaning from the way it has traditionally been used. It's kind of like how the word "hacker" changed from "someone who hacks code" to "someone who breaks into computer systems".
To me, a troll is a person who tries to start trivial arguments on message boards. The goal is to say something that is obviously silly to most, but still be subtle enough that some people "bite". An example would be talking about "blinker fluid" on a car forum - car guys obviously know that you don't need to add any fluid to your indicator lights, but n00bs often get sucked it.
But then there's the type of "troll" that makes the news. Examples are the losers who post hateful or disgusting images on Facebook memorial pages for the recently deceased. Or the guy who took a topless pic of Amanda Todd and tracked her down every time she tried to change schools to get away from it. It's not really "trolling"; it's stalking/bullying/harassment.
It's a shame that the media is conflating trolling and harassment. Trolling is and should be legal, and harassment should and does carry jail time. It doesn't matter whether it's online or in real life.
That's a bit unfair. She didn't put any information onto Facebook; her queer choir group president accidentally outed her by adding her to a group.
This could be either the president's fault, for carelessly exposing private information, or Facebook's fault, for not providing an easy enough way to control what interactions are public/private. Or maybe her dad's fault for being such a bigot. But anyway, whoever's fault it is, it's certainly not her fault.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard this opinion expressed a lot, but I'm a bit skeptical because I've never seen it work in practice. If it works so well to have leaders who are just there to serve the machine, where are these great companies that have good engineers and subservient "leaders"?
If you look at all the big successful tech companies, they all seem to have strong leadership with a clear vision. For example Amazon, Facebook and especially Apple are all built around what are almost cults of personality. Even Google's leadership is taking stronger control over the direction of the company (take for example the recent push into social media with their Google+ mandate).
Big groups need leaders. In a small company it matters less, because if the CEO or whatever is not leading, one of the engineers will. But once a company gets large, if the leaders aren't taking control then people from below will try to fill the power vacuum. You end up with a lot of political infighting as senior engineers try to build their empires, rather than work together towards a common goal.
As a Software Engineer, I care plenty about "why" things are the way they are. For example, I care a lot about why unindexed database joins are O(n^2), because I need to know how to avoid writing slow code. Engineers who don't understand why their software will perform/scale adequately and meet SLAs aren't very good engineers.
I think a more accurate way to describe it is: science is more about "new" and engineering is more about "useful". Scientists don't bother researching things that are already known and engineers don't bother implementing things that they don't think anyone will want to use.
False. Mathematics does not care about grounding or motivation in reality.
Ever heard of "applied mathematics", like for example statistics or operations research?
That's not really been my experience. If you think that Software Engineering is concerned with RoR and WordPress, then no offense or anything but you probably have a narrow understanding of the (computing) world and lack breadth in your studies and experience.
Computer Science, like science in general, attempts to expand human understanding of a field of study. So Computer Scientists spend a lot of time exploring new things. For this reason, they rarely talk about Turing Machines. Some do, but most don't - they've been studied to death already and there's relatively little left to discover about them. How often do you see new papers about LISP or Turing Machines? Most Computer Scientists I know research things like Machine Learning and Computer Vision.
The term Software Engineer gets thrown around a lot, and the meaning depends a lot on who is using the term. At my company, Software Engineers are concerned with things like performance/scalability and reliability. For example, have we got redundant systems in place in case a data center goes down? And will the algorithms we use handle peak expected loads?
The key difference is that CS is about finding out about things that people don't already know. SE is about building thats that are immediately useful to people. The equivalent to mechanics is called "IT".
And that's why MediaWiki is so great. It's not just a Word clone with a strict subset of Word's features; the two applications have feature sets that overlap but neither can do everything that the other can. What's important is that MediaWiki is significantly better than Word at collaborative document editing.
In many teams at many companies, including the last two that I've worked at, internal wikis have replaced Word as the standard way of sharing documents. It's just so much easier than creating a Word doc, putting it up on some network share and then hoping that no one moves (or worse, copies!) the document. Everyone, regardless of whether they're using Windows, Mac OS X, Linux or their smartphone, can access it, because it's all based on open standards. People still use Word, but it's no longer as absolutely vital as it once was.
MediaWiki needs to play to its strengths. The question isn't so much "what do other word processors do wrong?", but rather "what do other wikis do wrong?" My answer to that would be the simplistic page locking system that can't do a simple three-way merge. Ideally, a Google-Docs-style real-time collaborative editing feature would be in place.
Come on guys, the ignorance being displayed here is embarassing. Apple has not patented the general concept of turning a page. They've just claimed the rights to their specific page turn animation, that's all.
A lot of people here clearly don't understand what a "design patent" is, and how it differs from a utility patent and copyright. Here's an example of what they all mean:
Copyright: would apply to the code that implements the animation.
Design patent: would apply to the animation itself.
Utility patents: would apply to the general idea of turning of a page in an ebook.
This is the claim from the design patent:
The ornamental design for a display screen or portion thereof with animated-graphical user interface, as shown and described.
Note that it only covers the animation as shown and described. If you use a different animation, you're not infringing.
So calm down everyone. The patent system may be broken, but this is not an example of it.
Can you point it out? Because I can't find it. The closest thing I can find is this:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/11/apple-awarded-design-patent-for-actual-rounded-rectangle/?comments=1#comments-bar
But this is an extremely narrow patent, which covers the exact shape of an iPad. In order to infringe, you would need to have the exact height and width and roundness of the corners. Not exactly a singular patent on rounded rectangles in general.
I'm not a fan of what Apple is doing in terms of litigation, but to be fair, they don't have a patent on rounded corners.
Their claim to rounded rectangles is part of a set of design patents, which includes the home button, edge-to-edge glass, the bezel, and other design features. The problem is not so much that Samsung* copied the rounded rectangles from the iPhone, but they've copied it in addition to a whole set of other design features. Lots of other phones and computing devices have rounded rectangles, so this is not in and of itself protected. But prior to Samsung's Galaxy S, I don't think there were any phones that infringed on all of Apple's claimed patents.
As an analogy, imagine if someone started a computer and smartphone company called "Apples". Apple then comes and complains that they've used the letters 'a', 'p', 'p', 'l' and 'e' in the same sequence as Apple has. Then a horde of angry Slashdotters comes and cries "Apple thinks they can trademark the letter 'a'!?!?!? The system is broken!!!!"
Yes, you can make a valid argument that Apple is abusing the system. But a half-truth like Apple has patented rounded rectangles distracts from that message, and weakens the argument.
* The rounded rectangles thing came up in the Samsung trial, not the HTC one. The HTC case is more about things like multitouch gestures like "pinch to zoom".
Women need to like the job of the guy they’re with. If they don’t like the job, they don’t like the guy. Men know this. Which is why we make up the phony, bogus names for the jobs that we have. “Well, right now, I’m the regional management supervisor. I’m in development, research, consulting...”
Men on the other hand – if they are physically attracted to a woman – are not that concerned with her job. Are we? Men don’t really care. Men’ll just go, “Really? Slaughterhouse? Is that where you work? That sounds interesting. So whaddaya got a big cleaver there? You’re just lopping their heads off? That sounds great! Listen, why don’t you shower up, and we’ll get some burgers and catch a movie.”
The movement against excessive options started with an article by Havoc Pennington that describes why Linux desktops had such bad user interfaces back in the 90s and early 2000s:
http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html
You have to read it with the proper historical context in mind. Some examples he gives of the state of the desktop at the time are:
* Emacs having a broken-by-default cut and paste feature, and you had to go into the preferences dialog to make it standards-compliaint
* Gnome 1.x used to have 5 different clock applets, and during usability testing people would asking why are there 5 clocks to choose? More of a problem was that they assumed that there was a good reason for having 5 clocks, and would then spend a lot of time thinking about which of the 5 clocks was right for them.
It wasn't so much an idea that "options are bad" but rather that "options have a cost", and so excessive options are bad and that the default option should be something reasonable. There should never be an option to "unbreak" something like clipboard standards.
You could argue that Gnome 3.x takes it too far (I disagree, but that's just my opinion), but there are good reasons to remove the fallback mode. The fact is, no one uses it. The people who the fallback mode is targetted towards have already (very vocally!) moved to KDE/XFCE. So why bother developing something for users who aren't going to use it anyway?
This is about as non-sensical as the Australian "president" who is a Christian and supports what he says ;)
Also, AWS already has a lot of their services avaialble in Singapore: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/globalinfrastructure/regional-product-services/
I believe the correct euphemism is "Communism with Chinese Characteristics".
Yes, exactly! Elon Musk seems like a really great guy and all, but he does have a tendency to move on to new things before finishing up with the previous thing. The same can't be said of Steve Jobs.
PayPal was great but they really need to expand more outside of eBay. And also gain the trust of their users. You know you're doing it wrong when people say that you're less trustworthy than the banks!
Telsa and SpaceX are awesome companies, but both have serious hurdles ahead. His achievements to date don't warrant quite the amount of fawning as what was displayed in TFS. As the Wolf would say, "let's not start sucking each other's dicks quite yet"!
It's well known that Scott Forstall didn't get along with the others. He's been called a "mini-Steve (Jobs)" and described as "maddeningly political":
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorcerers-apprentice-at-apple-10122011.html
If he was ousted, it's probably due more to the others thinking he's an asshole. The Maps debacle provides a convenient excuse, but I doubt it's the real reason behind this. This is just another political backstabbing, that's all.
Well yeah, in that way the internet is the same as real life. If you do something in public, you shouldn't be surprised that people see it.
But it is still super creepy if some acquaintance of yours knows every detail about what you do in public.
The best article that I've ever read on coding style is Style is Substance by Ken Arnold.
I won't repeat what he has to say here, because he explains it better than I could. But I wish that more programming languages would follow what he is advocating, because we waste way too much time arguing about braces and tabs.
Same thing with Aussie cars. It amazes me that the Australian engineered and manufactured Chevy Camaro SS (with a V8 engine) in the United States is cheaper than a Holden Commodore SV6 in Australia. For those who don't know, it's the same car underneath.
Interesting. The company I'm talking about is iiNet so maybe I'll look into this more :P
I once had a router where the signal started to go bad over time. I called up the company and the tech support guy told me that most routers "wear out" after around 2 years, and that I'd need to replace it. He struggled to give a logical answer when I asked him how a device with no moving parts could wear out so quickly.
If you're right, and if this is the standard advice being given to everyone, we're in for a huge arms race.
I don't buy this idea that Microsoft would be so reckless as to risk their biggest product like that. The only other version of Windows that has been such a failure is Vista, and when Microsoft released that, they scrambled to push Windows 7 out the door ASAP to stop the backlash. It was an accident, and they're not dumb enough to try to make a corporate strategy out of repeating this accident.
You could argue that Windows Me was their other throwaway version, but when that happened, they had the NT line ready to take over. This time around, they have no such backup strategy ready to go. If Windiows 8 doesn't work out, their only option is a major reversal in strategy and a scramble to release Windows 9 Classic.
It's a bit like New Coke. They're not that dumb, and they're not that smart.
I have a friend who works for a large bank. He's in charge of developing a new internal application, and the execs insisted that it be an HTML5 app so that it would be compatible with their shiny new iPads. This is quite different from even 5 years ago, where there were lots of native Windows-only corporate applications within the bank and everyone thought this was completely acceptable. You may disagree with their reasoning for moving away from Windows, but regardless, most internal corporate applications are now developed for the web, which is an open platform.
The Windows monopoly existed because even though Mac and Linux could do 80% of what people needed, there was a long tail of Windows-only applications that companies could not move away from. Many of these were custom apps that were written in VB or used some Windows-only technology. Given this, I'd say that he's right. Internal corporate applications these days are almost always web-based, so they're much less locked in to Windows, and so Windows is becoming irrelevant.
Also, you may think that making spreadsheets counts as "real computing", but realize that spreadsheets are only used for small, quick and dirty jobs. Real computing is done by distributed database-driven applications, which these days almost always has a web frontend.
That only makes sense if you assume that Google engineers live paycheck to paycheck.
What's more likely is that they save a certain percentage of their $128k, and spend it in a lower cost area once they've left their job in Mountain View.
The word "troll", as used by the media and politicians, seems to have a slightly different meaning from the way it has traditionally been used. It's kind of like how the word "hacker" changed from "someone who hacks code" to "someone who breaks into computer systems".
To me, a troll is a person who tries to start trivial arguments on message boards. The goal is to say something that is obviously silly to most, but still be subtle enough that some people "bite". An example would be talking about "blinker fluid" on a car forum - car guys obviously know that you don't need to add any fluid to your indicator lights, but n00bs often get sucked it.
But then there's the type of "troll" that makes the news. Examples are the losers who post hateful or disgusting images on Facebook memorial pages for the recently deceased. Or the guy who took a topless pic of Amanda Todd and tracked her down every time she tried to change schools to get away from it. It's not really "trolling"; it's stalking/bullying/harassment.
It's a shame that the media is conflating trolling and harassment. Trolling is and should be legal, and harassment should and does carry jail time. It doesn't matter whether it's online or in real life.
That's a bit unfair. She didn't put any information onto Facebook; her queer choir group president accidentally outed her by adding her to a group.
This could be either the president's fault, for carelessly exposing private information, or Facebook's fault, for not providing an easy enough way to control what interactions are public/private. Or maybe her dad's fault for being such a bigot. But anyway, whoever's fault it is, it's certainly not her fault.
Well, if he's allowed to have invisible friends then surely it's OK for him to have imaginary enemies as well? :P