The idea of a contractor is that you can hire someone for a very specific task and when they are finished, they go. If you're builing a house, works out great, if you're building software, not so much. The job often never really finishes, and contractors end up being hired for years on end. Good for the contractor, bad for the company; contractors are more expensive, and the differentiation between perm/cont can upset team dynamics.
The really strange thing is that in larger companies there's a budget overhead associated with regular employees (for an office, phone service, etc..), but the same overhead is often not factored into a contractors cost. If you're a department head, it can seem 'cheaper' to hire a contractor.
Don't get me wrong, contracting is good, and I contracted for a while, but they are a tool that is often used unwisely. -Ben
The second advantage to plists is that they're self-validating. When a program tries to load a plist, if the file doesn't validate against the PropertyList-1.0 DTD, nothing happens. An error is returned, and the program (in this case, launchd) moves on. No chance of a corrupt file producing unexpected results.
So it can validate syntax, just like cron does, brilliant.
There seems to be two distict camps in this topic. The detractors would probably be less detracting if launchd supported the status quo.
When robot wars came to the UK I was still working at university. The depeartment was going to enter, but when we got the rules they were very boring. We were working on vision systems for robots at the time so we could have entered something really cool; nevermind.
We used some similar SW on some labs I used to look after at university. It could log keystrokes, and also give the master operator control of the desktop remotely.
We just used to set it on scan to see if any of the kids were looking at porn, if they were, we'd pop up a message on their screen and freak them out!
It would also tell you how many WPM the admin staff were doing, so we'd place bets on who was doing the most. Stopped this when we started deliberatly messing with them to try and win!
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The idea of a contractor is that you can hire someone for a very specific task and when they are finished, they go. If you're builing a house, works out great, if you're building software, not so much. The job often never really finishes, and contractors end up being hired for years on end. Good for the contractor, bad for the company; contractors are more expensive, and the differentiation between perm/cont can upset team dynamics.
The really strange thing is that in larger companies there's a budget overhead associated with regular employees (for an office, phone service, etc..), but the same overhead is often not factored into a contractors cost. If you're a department head, it can seem 'cheaper' to hire a contractor.
Don't get me wrong, contracting is good, and I contracted for a while, but they are a tool that is often used unwisely.
-Ben
But launchd has obsoleted and replaced what used to be the status quo. Now it's the status quo.
I was refering to the status quo in the wider unix comunity and not specifically tiger.
The second advantage to plists is that they're self-validating. When a program tries to load a plist, if the file doesn't validate against the PropertyList-1.0 DTD, nothing happens. An error is returned, and the program (in this case, launchd) moves on. No chance of a corrupt file producing unexpected results.
So it can validate syntax, just like cron does, brilliant.
There seems to be two distict camps in this topic. The detractors would probably be less detracting if launchd supported the status quo.
When robot wars came to the UK I was still working at university. The depeartment was going to enter, but when we got the rules they were very boring. We were working on vision systems for robots at the time so we could have entered something really cool; nevermind.
We used some similar SW on some labs I used to look after at university. It could log keystrokes, and also give the master operator control of the desktop remotely.
We just used to set it on scan to see if any of the kids were looking at porn, if they were, we'd pop up a message on their screen and freak them out!
It would also tell you how many WPM the admin staff were doing, so we'd place bets on who was doing the most. Stopped this when we started deliberatly messing with them to try and win!