As soon as the management starts to then so will I. Or did you think unrealistic deadlines and bad overall designs come from the grunts?
A big part of the problem comes from the notion that some programmers should be treated as grunts.
Although it's a popular analogy, software development is not much like manufacturing. Compilation, linking, assembling the distribution: that's manufacturing. What we all do is all part of manufacturing's design phase. And that requires smarts.
In manufacturing, you can get somebody unskilled to stamp out parts all day. But for design, you need professionals who think about and influence the big picture. Top-down, taylorist software shops imagine that some genius can learn every important fact and think every important thought that a much larger group of people will have for the next couple of years. It's impossible and ridiculous.
Instead, you need everybody who is writing code to be thinking about the big picture. You need them to care about issues like security and quality. And you need an organization tuned for mentoring them, hearing their concerns, and adapting to the new information they find. And that's not an organization driven mainly by power relationships between elites and grunts.
Yes, he probably knows more then the PR SpokesBot but his own PR SpokesBot indoctrination combined with not having touched a compiler in 15 years create a unique form of PR SpokesBot that is dangerous and deadly.. Smart enough to fool the geeks but trained enough to not impact the stock price.
It's possible, I suppose. But having men a few of the Google managers and execs and having studied the company fairly closely, I think that Google is much less so than most companies. Remember that the two guys calling the shots are two Stanford CS grad students with a deep allergy for the usual corporate bullshit.
I think that Google will be creating entirely new forms of bullshit, as they have other weaknesses. But it's a mistake to see them through the lens of your average Fortune 500 company.
This is close, and the particular technologies don't matter a ton. But don't play around. Set out to make something simple that people will use. Maybe it's a to-do list just for you. Maybe it's a scheduling tool so your and your Quake buddies know who's up for a game when. Just make something ultra-minimal that works and gets use.
The essence of the profession is making things for people to use. Start with that focus and never let it go. The technologies are seven kinds of cool, but are secondary, not ends in themselves. If you want to do great work, you'll also need to understand people, how they use things, and how to build to last. As long as you focus on shipping software, even if only to yourself and a few pals, you'll have a million opportunities to dig in deep to interesting topics.
Were I setting up a novice today, I'd get them going with Ruby On Rails. It's easy to get started, will keep you from certain bad habits, and has many interesting avenues for exploration. But the important thing is to ship early and often, trying new tools regularly.
Sure can it's Dodge v.s. Ford a 1916 Supreme Court decision:
Thanks. That's very interesting. I can see the logic in this; taking people's money and then changing the deal unilaterally is a no-no. But I still disagree with the notion that a company can't get a decent return on investment and still have morals. It's zero-sum thinking applied to a positive-sum game.
I agree, though, about corporate personhood. It fucking dumbfounds me that people can with a straight face argue that corporations have a right to free speech. Citizens do and should; corporations absolutely should not, any more than my copy of Microsoft Word does.
Libertarians are really properly called propertyarians and when push comes to shove value material things over liberty.
Heh. That is a fantastic line. The fundamentalist Randites are the ones that amuse me the most. Speaking of which, if you haven't read "Sewer, Gas, and Electric", you'll almost certainly enjoy it.
I don't buy that crap about interesting problems, what exactly is interesting around rehashing web apps that never get out of beta, or working out how to make even more money from clickfraud?
I presume you're saying this just to be a dick, but in case you're serious but socially retarded, let me give you a real answer.
Doing search right is a fascinating problem. Or rather, a whole mess of fascinating problems. Although Google is still a big leap forward from earlier engines, it's still pretty primitive. It knows something about words, but very little about meaning yet. They have a lot of data indexed, but it's a small fraction of what's out there now, nevermind what people are creating. They are at the cutting edge of large scale server applications. They're one of the few places that really respects sysadmins and invests massively in infrastructure. And of course, you've got some very clever spammers continually chasing them, always keeping them from standing still.
And that's just search. If you're a geek that wants to do big projects, they're one of the few places that lets the geeks drive projects. They give you a day a week and all the computing power you can justify to do pretty much anything you find interesting. And if it ends up being cool, you can end up making it your primary project and get it worldwide exposure.
And to get their stock price back up again, they might cut some of the outrageously excessive benefits, therefore cutting out the other reason people work for Google.
And what would those be? The famous cafeteria is the most often cited, and it certainly is nice. But do a little math. I'd bet their average engineering salary is circa $100k; with trimmings that means they pay something like $60 per hour per engineer. Going out to lunch in suburbia is going to take them an hour. Even if you spend $15 a head to feed them lunch (which I doubt), you're way ahead if you just save them the travel time. Because the kind of people they hire will spend it working or talking about work or just thinking about it. And that doesn't even account for improved morale, team building, or cross-team fertilization.
He's a high level exec, and as any high level exec in a company that size his primary role is setting strategy and tracking projects at the line item level and fronting his department to partners, the outside world and the rest of the executive layer. Is it a demanding job? Yes. Is it a highly technical job? No. Is he trained to respond in a way that meets the company's PR needs? Yes.
Since you claim to be an engineering manager, I would think you would see those activities as "doing things". I agree that he is surely skilled in presenting things in a good light. But my point is that Cringely didn't talk to somebody who is just a vacuous mouthpiece like the hapless Scott McClellan. He's talking to the person in charge of the topic.
So yes I think in many ways the criticism of Google is a good thing, it's just too bad we had our irrational blinders on about OTHER Google blunders before the big Chinese sell out.
I completely agree with that.
people are questioning whether Google's "do no evil" ethos is true, which obviously it isn't being a a company funded by stock investment it's ONLY priority (and one enforced by law) is returning profit to it's investors.
Could you cite me the relevant section of the law on that?
Even if that were true, I'm not sure it matters much. In a practical sense, courts give corporate managers wide latitude to do what they think best as long as they aren't obviously stealing. Any first-year MBA student could give give you a plausible argument: Google's do-no-evil strategy is vital to maximizing profit because consumer trust is vital to search, selling ads, getting people to click on ads, and their ever-more-endoscopic products like GMail and Desktop Search.
So the real question is who the stockholders choose to run the company. And who are the biggest stockholders? Larry and Sergei, the VCs, and a bunch of Google's early employees. Who naturally agree with the do-no-evil approach or they would have bailed long ago.
Google did the blatantly evil thing of censoring Chinese search results.
I think it was a mistake, but I honestly believe they thought it went with the do-no-evil thing. Their options were to go to China censored or not at all. The first way guarantees that they will never make a difference. By going and playing by the rules, it gives them a chance at influence both obvious and subtle, a chance to make things better. Were I a geek at Google, I would delight in making the filtering just tight enough to pass government inspection, while being leaky for anybody with half a brain.
Not to mention Google's spokesperson's descent into corporate bollick-speak (forgive me but that's really the only way to put it).
Actually, he's not the spokesperson; he's the VP of Engineering. One thing I admire about Google is they give the media access to people who are actually doing things, rather than channelling it all through a PR-filled spokesbot.
It would affect their day-to-day business when half their employees walk out because their options are now worthless.
Probably a little. But I know a number of people who have gone to work for Google, and they aren't there for the money. They're there to work on really interesting problems with really smart people in a great environment.
I'm curious who you (Silicon Valley centrically) defined as the 4 internet Giants?
Amazon, EBay, Google, and Yahoo. You can get that list from The Economist.
Yeah, we only have tiny companies here. AOL, PSInet, MCI, Verisign, Network Solutions, UltraDNS, RSA Security,
I was speaking of internet-based companies, rather than ISPs. If you are planning on starting up your own telecommunications company, you sound like you're in a great place. Let me know how you and a couple of college buddies do this summer laying that fiber.
Stands for Venture Capital or Venture Capitalists. Though similar in practice to the Southeast Asian guerillas of the same name, these are native mostly to California.
I think that's a completely inappropriate and insensitive comparison. One group acted in a completely vicious and amoral fashion: causing great suffering, imprisoning people for years, and acting with a callous disregard for human life. Whereas the other group was just a bunch of communists rebels.
There are serveral areas that have vibrant Tech communities besides Silicon valley, there's a whole class of nerds that want nothing to do with the fruitcake culture of the west coast.
I'm not denying that there are other good places to do tech, but that's not enough for startups. It's no coincidence that of the four internet giants, three of them are in the Bay Area (with the fourth in Seattle). Best of luck to Austin or wherever you favor in coming up with the next three, but if you're looking to do an internet startup, doing it in the Bay Area will be easier.
If at all possible, go visit. Then ask them to physically show you all the things they promised.
One place I looked at promised backup power. Then when I asked to see it, they explained that they only had the fittings and a contract for a backup generator that would be delivered in a couple of hours. Given that they are in San Francisco, that's a stupid plan, my-nurse-only-lets-me-use-a-spoon stupid; in an earthquake, their provider wouldn't have enough generators and probably wouldn't be able to deliver them anyhow.
The personal computer software culture in the United States is much like that of automakers in the United States circa the sixties, who insisted that the low quality of U. S. autos was the result of the best and wisest judgement... and that public toleration of low quality, as reflected in good sales and profits, validated their judgement.
Fantastic insight.
I recently did a 36 developer-month project with a total of two bugs in production. We used Extreme Programming, and it was the best development experience anybody, including the CEO, ever had. And Extreme Programming is based in part on the Toyota Production System and other Japanese-derived techniques.
Thus if you want to review a beta (as opposed to doing bug reporting for Microsoft) then you should use a more standardized system. i.e. A Desktop.
I would turn that around. If you want to release a beta of an upgrade to your current product, it should run where the current product does.
The "no! no! you're not doing it right, you fool!" school of tech support has never appealed to me much. It is my belief as developer that I should make products that are a good fit for the audience. This is especially true when I'm making things for a general consumer audience: however much I *wish* everybody knew lots about computers, the reality is that they don't and won't. If I sell them something, it had better just work.
Discussion is only permitted if you agree with the PC stance. Any deviation from the PC stance and you will be villified.
I am endlessly amused at the extent to which the anti-PC stance has become to be its own kind of political correctness within a different community. Too much ideological conformism is bad, true. But the solution to that is not a demand for a different kind of ideological conformism.
Further, you imply that the validity of a critique depends not on what it says but on who says it. That's ad-hominem.
You're using "ad hominem" incorrectly here, but let that pass; I know what you mean: that true things are true no matter who says them, and therefore we should attach no weight to the source of a comment.
This is true in the abstract, but not so useful in the real world. It's one of a set of arguments that assume infinite capacity. Assumptions like that can be useful; economics did a lot of good work assuming a completely rational actor, which requires an utterly perfect perception and processing aparatus and infinite mental capacity.
In practice, there are six billion people saying stupid shit all the time. Further, the world is a more complicated place than any human can understand. Coming up with provably true answers to any question (the job of science) is an expensive and arduous enterprise, and it will be centuries before the boys in white coats, who have done well with simple things like atoms and molecules, reach a reasonably settled understanding of things like brains and societies.
So to function in the real world we come up with rules of thumb to filter the crap. When a Democrat criticizes the Republican party, it is not unreasonable to translate it into "I want their power." (And vice versa, natch.) But when a Republican criticizes the Republican party, that's more interesting, even if the gripes are identical in content.
Partly because of those common heuristics, in-group critiques are more valuable in another way; they are more likely to promote change. So it's not only the probable (though not actual) validity of a critique that depends on who says it; so does the critique's utility.
Anyway, I thought Americans were so big on freedom of speech.
But *all* of us have freedom of speech, and freedom of association as well. We are obliged neither to listen to nor to repeat speech we diagree with.
Our constitution grants us great power, and power must be matched by responsibility. It is incumbent on all of us to exercise good judgement, including good editorial judgement. Google did that, and good for them.
Oh, don't. I went for one job interview where they asked me to write code - on paper. With a pen. I still regret not just walking out on the spot. I will next time.
It's not like I ask them to prove the four-color theorem. I ask them to do "Hello, World" in as many languages as they can, hopefully as many as they list on their resume.
The main goal here is to separate the poseurs from the real coders. It also lets me see how people perform under pressure. With people who pass the initial technical screening, I also do a two-hour, test-driven pair programming session, so they get plenty of screen time. In my experience there's a strong correlation between people who can write basic code on paper and people who write real code well on the screen.
I think you're right that open-source developers should practice this.
However, I think grumbly people (like the writer of this article) should offer to step up and solve the problem rather than bitching that other people aren't doing enough free work for them. I'm sure most projects would love to hear from a volunteer release wrangler or energetic beta tester. And even if a user doesn't have those skills, they can certainly volunteer to write friendly responses to newbie users.
Seeing the problem is generally easy. Finding a solution isn't that much harder. But on open-source projects, most of my respect goes to people who step up and solve the problem rather than talking about it.
Re:The diplomatic response
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In fact, awesome, the FFMpeg people come right out and say that if you're not using CVS to basically screw off and leave them alone.
And I confess to some sympathy for that. One of the things that stops me from releasing more of my code is that producing a nice, friendly, well-packaged distribution is a lot of work.
And honestly, that work can be pretty unrewarding. I help maintain a web-based service used by hundreds of people daily. We pay a few thousand bucks a year to keep it going, and put in a fair bit of time. We get maybe two thank you notes a month, but if it's ever down or buggy, we get a couple of complaints an hour, some of them frothingly rude.
Now, whenever I use or download something I like, I take ten minutes to write a little note to the people who make it. I encourage everybody to do that; it makes a big difference.
We recently spent about $1000 on a InFocus DLP projector and love it. The picture is large enough (100" diagonal where we placed it) that we can have a dozen friends over to watch a movie. When we turn it off, it goes away, rather than continuing to dominate the room.
I'd have to go with a non-IDE approach initially and introduce an IDE later on so as to avoid teaching dependence on something which shouldn't be required.
I would agree with this. I think you can't be a professional programmer without knowing what goes on under the hood. On the other hand, you can't be a professional programmer in a language like Java without mastering one of the better IDEs.
Modern IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA, by making it easy to follow the relationships and jump around the code, permit a more modular, granular style of development than you get using a text editor and opening up one file at a time. And these days I won't even hire somebody who doesn't know and use the automated refactoring tools if their language supports them.
Of course, I also won't hire somebody who can't write reasonably correct code on paper. So yes, do both!
I first saw this as a WoW-based animation and was very impressed. Then I discovered that they lifted the audio from Avenue Q, a Broadway musical. You can see original The Internet is for Porn on the Avenue Q site.
The problem is, as always, government regulation at every level. [...] The best way to create a competitive market is genuine deregulation p [...]
Sorry, but I can't see this as other than starry-eyed idealism. I agree that some government regulation is a problem here. In particular, the government-granted monopolies to telcos and cable companies have given them a massive financial advantage that will persist even in the face of deregulation.
But saying that regulation is always the problem ignores much of the history of the modern marketplace. Trademark law, anti-trust law, protection against fraud, mandatory deposit insurance, laws against ponzi schemes, and many other regulations create a carefully balanced environment where you maximize the market's ability to create value and mediate exchange of goods and services.
I worked for several years in the belly of the marketplace beast, spending time on the floors of several major exchanges. I promise you that careful rule-making (and the matching fear of wrath from on high) was a vital component in what at first glance appears to be capitalism at its most unfettered.
Slashdot Mirror
As soon as the management starts to then so will I. Or did you think unrealistic deadlines and bad overall designs come from the grunts?
A big part of the problem comes from the notion that some programmers should be treated as grunts.
Although it's a popular analogy, software development is not much like manufacturing. Compilation, linking, assembling the distribution: that's manufacturing. What we all do is all part of manufacturing's design phase. And that requires smarts.
In manufacturing, you can get somebody unskilled to stamp out parts all day. But for design, you need professionals who think about and influence the big picture. Top-down, taylorist software shops imagine that some genius can learn every important fact and think every important thought that a much larger group of people will have for the next couple of years. It's impossible and ridiculous.
Instead, you need everybody who is writing code to be thinking about the big picture. You need them to care about issues like security and quality. And you need an organization tuned for mentoring them, hearing their concerns, and adapting to the new information they find. And that's not an organization driven mainly by power relationships between elites and grunts.
Yes, he probably knows more then the PR SpokesBot but his own PR SpokesBot indoctrination combined with not having touched a compiler in 15 years create a unique form of PR SpokesBot that is dangerous and deadly.. Smart enough to fool the geeks but trained enough to not impact the stock price.
It's possible, I suppose. But having men a few of the Google managers and execs and having studied the company fairly closely, I think that Google is much less so than most companies. Remember that the two guys calling the shots are two Stanford CS grad students with a deep allergy for the usual corporate bullshit.
I think that Google will be creating entirely new forms of bullshit, as they have other weaknesses. But it's a mistake to see them through the lens of your average Fortune 500 company.
play around with MySQL and PHP
This is close, and the particular technologies don't matter a ton. But don't play around. Set out to make something simple that people will use. Maybe it's a to-do list just for you. Maybe it's a scheduling tool so your and your Quake buddies know who's up for a game when. Just make something ultra-minimal that works and gets use.
The essence of the profession is making things for people to use. Start with that focus and never let it go. The technologies are seven kinds of cool, but are secondary, not ends in themselves. If you want to do great work, you'll also need to understand people, how they use things, and how to build to last. As long as you focus on shipping software, even if only to yourself and a few pals, you'll have a million opportunities to dig in deep to interesting topics.
Were I setting up a novice today, I'd get them going with Ruby On Rails. It's easy to get started, will keep you from certain bad habits, and has many interesting avenues for exploration. But the important thing is to ship early and often, trying new tools regularly.
Sure can it's Dodge v.s. Ford a 1916 Supreme Court decision:
Thanks. That's very interesting. I can see the logic in this; taking people's money and then changing the deal unilaterally is a no-no. But I still disagree with the notion that a company can't get a decent return on investment and still have morals. It's zero-sum thinking applied to a positive-sum game.
I agree, though, about corporate personhood. It fucking dumbfounds me that people can with a straight face argue that corporations have a right to free speech. Citizens do and should; corporations absolutely should not, any more than my copy of Microsoft Word does.
Libertarians are really properly called propertyarians and when push comes to shove value material things over liberty.
Heh. That is a fantastic line. The fundamentalist Randites are the ones that amuse me the most. Speaking of which, if you haven't read "Sewer, Gas, and Electric", you'll almost certainly enjoy it.
I don't buy that crap about interesting problems, what exactly is interesting around rehashing web apps that never get out of beta, or working out how to make even more money from clickfraud?
I presume you're saying this just to be a dick, but in case you're serious but socially retarded, let me give you a real answer.
Doing search right is a fascinating problem. Or rather, a whole mess of fascinating problems. Although Google is still a big leap forward from earlier engines, it's still pretty primitive. It knows something about words, but very little about meaning yet. They have a lot of data indexed, but it's a small fraction of what's out there now, nevermind what people are creating. They are at the cutting edge of large scale server applications. They're one of the few places that really respects sysadmins and invests massively in infrastructure. And of course, you've got some very clever spammers continually chasing them, always keeping them from standing still.
And that's just search. If you're a geek that wants to do big projects, they're one of the few places that lets the geeks drive projects. They give you a day a week and all the computing power you can justify to do pretty much anything you find interesting. And if it ends up being cool, you can end up making it your primary project and get it worldwide exposure.
And to get their stock price back up again, they might cut some of the outrageously excessive benefits, therefore cutting out the other reason people work for Google.
And what would those be? The famous cafeteria is the most often cited, and it certainly is nice. But do a little math. I'd bet their average engineering salary is circa $100k; with trimmings that means they pay something like $60 per hour per engineer. Going out to lunch in suburbia is going to take them an hour. Even if you spend $15 a head to feed them lunch (which I doubt), you're way ahead if you just save them the travel time. Because the kind of people they hire will spend it working or talking about work or just thinking about it. And that doesn't even account for improved morale, team building, or cross-team fertilization.
He's a high level exec, and as any high level exec in a company that size his primary role is setting strategy and tracking projects at the line item level and fronting his department to partners, the outside world and the rest of the executive layer. Is it a demanding job? Yes. Is it a highly technical job? No. Is he trained to respond in a way that meets the company's PR needs? Yes.
Since you claim to be an engineering manager, I would think you would see those activities as "doing things". I agree that he is surely skilled in presenting things in a good light. But my point is that Cringely didn't talk to somebody who is just a vacuous mouthpiece like the hapless Scott McClellan. He's talking to the person in charge of the topic.
So yes I think in many ways the criticism of Google is a good thing, it's just too bad we had our irrational blinders on about OTHER Google blunders before the big Chinese sell out.
I completely agree with that.
people are questioning whether Google's "do no evil" ethos is true, which obviously it isn't being a
a company funded by stock investment it's ONLY priority (and one enforced by law) is returning profit to it's investors.
Could you cite me the relevant section of the law on that?
Even if that were true, I'm not sure it matters much. In a practical sense, courts give corporate managers wide latitude to do what they think best as long as they aren't obviously stealing. Any first-year MBA student could give give you a plausible argument: Google's do-no-evil strategy is vital to maximizing profit because consumer trust is vital to search, selling ads, getting people to click on ads, and their ever-more-endoscopic products like GMail and Desktop Search.
So the real question is who the stockholders choose to run the company. And who are the biggest stockholders? Larry and Sergei, the VCs, and a bunch of Google's early employees. Who naturally agree with the do-no-evil approach or they would have bailed long ago.
Google did the blatantly evil thing of censoring Chinese search results.
I think it was a mistake, but I honestly believe they thought it went with the do-no-evil thing. Their options were to go to China censored or not at all. The first way guarantees that they will never make a difference. By going and playing by the rules, it gives them a chance at influence both obvious and subtle, a chance to make things better. Were I a geek at Google, I would delight in making the filtering just tight enough to pass government inspection, while being leaky for anybody with half a brain.
Not to mention Google's spokesperson's descent into corporate bollick-speak (forgive me but that's really the only way to put it).
Actually, he's not the spokesperson; he's the VP of Engineering. One thing I admire about Google is they give the media access to people who are actually doing things, rather than channelling it all through a PR-filled spokesbot.
It would affect their day-to-day business when half their employees walk out because their options are now worthless.
Probably a little. But I know a number of people who have gone to work for Google, and they aren't there for the money. They're there to work on really interesting problems with really smart people in a great environment.
I'm curious who you (Silicon Valley centrically) defined as the 4 internet Giants?
Amazon, EBay, Google, and Yahoo. You can get that list from The Economist.
Yeah, we only have tiny companies here. AOL, PSInet, MCI, Verisign, Network Solutions, UltraDNS, RSA Security,
I was speaking of internet-based companies, rather than ISPs. If you are planning on starting up your own telecommunications company, you sound like you're in a great place. Let me know how you and a couple of college buddies do this summer laying that fiber.
Stands for Venture Capital or Venture Capitalists. Though similar in practice to the Southeast Asian guerillas of the same name, these are native mostly to California.
I think that's a completely inappropriate and insensitive comparison. One group acted in a completely vicious and amoral fashion: causing great suffering, imprisoning people for years, and acting with a callous disregard for human life. Whereas the other group was just a bunch of communists rebels.
There are serveral areas that have vibrant Tech communities besides Silicon valley, there's a whole class of nerds that want nothing to do with the fruitcake culture of the west coast.
I'm not denying that there are other good places to do tech, but that's not enough for startups. It's no coincidence that of the four internet giants, three of them are in the Bay Area (with the fourth in Seattle). Best of luck to Austin or wherever you favor in coming up with the next three, but if you're looking to do an internet startup, doing it in the Bay Area will be easier.
If at all possible, go visit. Then ask them to physically show you all the things they promised.
One place I looked at promised backup power. Then when I asked to see it, they explained that they only had the fittings and a contract for a backup generator that would be delivered in a couple of hours. Given that they are in San Francisco, that's a stupid plan, my-nurse-only-lets-me-use-a-spoon stupid; in an earthquake, their provider wouldn't have enough generators and probably wouldn't be able to deliver them anyhow.
I didn't bitch-slap them. But I should have.
The personal computer software culture in the United States is much like that of automakers in the United States circa the sixties, who insisted that the low quality of U. S. autos was the result of the best and wisest judgement... and that public toleration of low quality, as reflected in good sales and profits, validated their judgement.
Fantastic insight.
I recently did a 36 developer-month project with a total of two bugs in production. We used Extreme Programming, and it was the best development experience anybody, including the CEO, ever had. And Extreme Programming is based in part on the Toyota Production System and other Japanese-derived techniques.
Thus if you want to review a beta (as opposed to doing bug reporting for Microsoft) then you should use a more standardized system. i.e. A Desktop.
I would turn that around. If you want to release a beta of an upgrade to your current product, it should run where the current product does.
The "no! no! you're not doing it right, you fool!" school of tech support has never appealed to me much. It is my belief as developer that I should make products that are a good fit for the audience. This is especially true when I'm making things for a general consumer audience: however much I *wish* everybody knew lots about computers, the reality is that they don't and won't. If I sell them something, it had better just work.
Discussion is only permitted if you agree with the PC stance. Any deviation from the PC stance and you will be villified.
I am endlessly amused at the extent to which the anti-PC stance has become to be its own kind of political correctness within a different community. Too much ideological conformism is bad, true. But the solution to that is not a demand for a different kind of ideological conformism.
Further, you imply that the validity of a critique depends not on what it says but on who says it. That's ad-hominem.
You're using "ad hominem" incorrectly here, but let that pass; I know what you mean: that true things are true no matter who says them, and therefore we should attach no weight to the source of a comment.
This is true in the abstract, but not so useful in the real world. It's one of a set of arguments that assume infinite capacity. Assumptions like that can be useful; economics did a lot of good work assuming a completely rational actor, which requires an utterly perfect perception and processing aparatus and infinite mental capacity.
In practice, there are six billion people saying stupid shit all the time. Further, the world is a more complicated place than any human can understand. Coming up with provably true answers to any question (the job of science) is an expensive and arduous enterprise, and it will be centuries before the boys in white coats, who have done well with simple things like atoms and molecules, reach a reasonably settled understanding of things like brains and societies.
So to function in the real world we come up with rules of thumb to filter the crap. When a Democrat criticizes the Republican party, it is not unreasonable to translate it into "I want their power." (And vice versa, natch.) But when a Republican criticizes the Republican party, that's more interesting, even if the gripes are identical in content.
Partly because of those common heuristics, in-group critiques are more valuable in another way; they are more likely to promote change. So it's not only the probable (though not actual) validity of a critique that depends on who says it; so does the critique's utility.
Anyway, I thought Americans were so big on freedom of speech.
But *all* of us have freedom of speech, and freedom of association as well. We are obliged neither to listen to nor to repeat speech we diagree with.
Our constitution grants us great power, and power must be matched by responsibility. It is incumbent on all of us to exercise good judgement, including good editorial judgement. Google did that, and good for them.
Oh, don't. I went for one job interview where they asked me to write code - on paper. With a pen. I still regret not just walking out on the spot. I will next time.
It's not like I ask them to prove the four-color theorem. I ask them to do "Hello, World" in as many languages as they can, hopefully as many as they list on their resume.
The main goal here is to separate the poseurs from the real coders. It also lets me see how people perform under pressure. With people who pass the initial technical screening, I also do a two-hour, test-driven pair programming session, so they get plenty of screen time. In my experience there's a strong correlation between people who can write basic code on paper and people who write real code well on the screen.
Is it hard to write one of these?
I think you're right that open-source developers should practice this.
However, I think grumbly people (like the writer of this article) should offer to step up and solve the problem rather than bitching that other people aren't doing enough free work for them. I'm sure most projects would love to hear from a volunteer release wrangler or energetic beta tester. And even if a user doesn't have those skills, they can certainly volunteer to write friendly responses to newbie users.
Seeing the problem is generally easy. Finding a solution isn't that much harder. But on open-source projects, most of my respect goes to people who step up and solve the problem rather than talking about it.
In fact, awesome, the FFMpeg people come right out and say that if you're not using CVS to basically screw off and leave them alone.
And I confess to some sympathy for that. One of the things that stops me from releasing more of my code is that producing a nice, friendly, well-packaged distribution is a lot of work.
And honestly, that work can be pretty unrewarding. I help maintain a web-based service used by hundreds of people daily. We pay a few thousand bucks a year to keep it going, and put in a fair bit of time. We get maybe two thank you notes a month, but if it's ever down or buggy, we get a couple of complaints an hour, some of them frothingly rude.
Now, whenever I use or download something I like, I take ten minutes to write a little note to the people who make it. I encourage everybody to do that; it makes a big difference.
Have you considered getting a projector instead?
We recently spent about $1000 on a InFocus DLP projector and love it. The picture is large enough (100" diagonal where we placed it) that we can have a dozen friends over to watch a movie. When we turn it off, it goes away, rather than continuing to dominate the room.
I'd have to go with a non-IDE approach initially and introduce an IDE later on so as to avoid teaching dependence on something which shouldn't be required.
I would agree with this. I think you can't be a professional programmer without knowing what goes on under the hood. On the other hand, you can't be a professional programmer in a language like Java without mastering one of the better IDEs.
Modern IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA, by making it easy to follow the relationships and jump around the code, permit a more modular, granular style of development than you get using a text editor and opening up one file at a time. And these days I won't even hire somebody who doesn't know and use the automated refactoring tools if their language supports them.
Of course, I also won't hire somebody who can't write reasonably correct code on paper. So yes, do both!
I first saw this as a WoW-based animation and was very impressed. Then I discovered that they lifted the audio from Avenue Q, a Broadway musical. You can see original The Internet is for Porn on the Avenue Q site.
The problem is, as always, government regulation at every level. [...] The best way to create a competitive market is genuine deregulation p [...]
Sorry, but I can't see this as other than starry-eyed idealism. I agree that some government regulation is a problem here. In particular, the government-granted monopolies to telcos and cable companies have given them a massive financial advantage that will persist even in the face of deregulation.
But saying that regulation is always the problem ignores much of the history of the modern marketplace. Trademark law, anti-trust law, protection against fraud, mandatory deposit insurance, laws against ponzi schemes, and many other regulations create a carefully balanced environment where you maximize the market's ability to create value and mediate exchange of goods and services.
I worked for several years in the belly of the marketplace beast, spending time on the floors of several major exchanges. I promise you that careful rule-making (and the matching fear of wrath from on high) was a vital component in what at first glance appears to be capitalism at its most unfettered.