The author states that code improvements should be driven by "the developers with the deepest architectural understanding of the code, the closest interaction with the code, and the most responsibility for the code". However, this is a programmer biased perspective and not at all how a business operates.
A business is focused on making money. For the founders, the owners, the stakeholders with the most financial resources invested, that is what it comes down to. That is why if they find an employee that can generate more of it form them they are more likely to listen and give "the greatest decision-making power" to. Normally this ends up being the sales person, marketer, etc. They become the CEO. Those that are good at making things work become the COO.
While things are going well and the company is successful people will not question this model. Customers will request features, companies will implement them. When resources are short they will hire more people, layers of management gets added, everyone feels like their job is/can go somewhere.
The problem occurs when those in charge become lazy or egotistic. The lazy manager will stop gathering user input, or fail to understand why developers gawk at the 100th feature request that are not followed-up on for the month. The impact on morale is the real cancer that kills ideas and companies.
The egotistic manager will achieve similar results, but for different motivations. The incessant push for their ideas, the attempt at pressuring coders to succeed for them, etc. is too shallow and most egotistic managers are not good enough leaders/manipulators to actually motivate people even if it were for purely selfish purposes.
For a coder the best skill is not communication skills, although it is important, but business skills. If you can make money, you can do whatever you want. If you are good enough you can leave all the petty office politics behind and start your own enterprise.
Following another manager, however great, will never lead to security for the pure developer. This is because in the scheme of things you are just carrying out the vision of someone who helps the company achieve financial success. Just as soldiers are trained not to think too much, that is what managers want out of their coders as well when they have an agenda.
The times where I have seen managers ask developers for ideas and comments are when managers are out of ideas. In which case they do so less out of a willingness to communicate and more out of desperation. That is why many CEOs describe their job as cultivating a culture because in a "my way or the highway" environment there is no way people will bother suggesting alternatives.
If a coder wants security they need to first prove their worthiness to decision makers that they can be one of them, then lead and succeed for the organization; basically become a manager themselves. All of this requires a lot of investment in time and effort away from the text editor/IDE and a lot more time in front of people.
This is why there will always be a divide between managers and coders, the roles simply require different skill sets and to be good at either is not easy. The best of either class are good at reaching out, which still requires both parties to be willing to participate for the exchange to occur.
Really the whole saying yes thing is about being agreeable, and most of the time that is what the boss wants. I find that most questions placed upon "engineers" by managers are inconsequential and is simply helping out the manager with his/her mental-exercise-of-the-moment (to put it politely), so by simply saying yes or a qualified yes, you allow your manager to keep mentally turning the wheels and not interrupt their fantasy.
Going along in the above manner will make one more far less dislikeable and prevent you from being labelled a mr-can't-do, so that when you are asked a question that really affects the business - as in if it goes wrong you could be out of a job - you can answer honestly and have your answer be taken into serious consideration. But even in those circumstances you only have a 50% shot of being heard, that is why I recommend to people who do not care for their job to find a hobby, because not caring about what you do with your life is no way to live.
I believe the point of school is to train good employees. This just demonstrates how much under the thumb of the employer you will be once you get out. Students, like workers just need to deal with it. Of course this is more comparable to a law instead of workplace rules (as it is not possible for a student to change schools as easily as one changes jobs).
Nevertheless, like in life, the students sometimes just need to learn to play ball. When you have nothing you simply have to work for a living and you need to depend on the support of others, which is nearly always conditional.
At the same time a prior/. articles point out that there are services where papers/problems are solved for a fee; assuming these contracts are flexible students can start to demand absolutely non-plagiarized works. As the employer of the assignment contractors, the students have replicated their own school-to-student relationship, therefore the school system is working in preparing these kids for life. The kids that choose to hire a contractor simply choose a different role they play in this simulated life.
I believe the best thing high school can teach and should be more honest about is that since you are just starting, you are nothing, you can't do anything, and you need to either take it or become an useless outcast (kinda like boot camp).
I agree about the user becomming programmed to hit "allow" by default. However my way around it was to ask the user what programs they normally use (Skype, MSN, etc.), run the programs and allow those ports my self then simply tell the user to DECLINE EVERYTHING!
Most users that need you to help them set up a firewall really would not be using many different types of apps anyway. Also it is much quicker to set a declined app to allow than to clean out a spyware infested PC.
The universities are really just trying to teach kids about the real world, where BOFHs listen to upper management and users use whatever BOFHs jam down their throats.
In OS X there is a feature called Zoom in the univsersal access pane. You simply hit option-command-8 and then opt-cmd-= or opt-cmd-- to zoom in-and-out of any part of the screen. I often use this for non-liquid sites that I expect to read for a while.
OS based zooming means that all images are scaled properly as well. Although the text is not as sharp as it can be at times the improved readability more than offsets the slight loss in text sharpness.
Not sure if policy has changed since you've got your mac, but on my new iSight iMac it came with Appleworks, which would be more than sufficient for everyday word processing.
AJAX only breaks the web (data-access wise) because most of the time it is being used for interactive pages, and providing pure data is an afterthought (e.g. how often does one read their e-mail with headers and all).
When you simply need to pull data, AJAX, and more specifically the "X" in it, means that most of the data presented is available in XML form. You'll find that most AJAX scripts still require server side handlers/interfaces written in PHP/ASP/etc. which return "text/xml". It would be very easy for developers to include an XML link or allow it to be saved directly from the page. While I can't speak for all developers, for the intranet application I am building, most users do not need or want raw data, they would like it nicely formatted and understandable; otherwise it'd save me lots of time and just have people all use phpMyAdmin.
On your point about having page content easily readable, I feel that it is true, however it depends on the nature of the content. AJAX is currently used for user-specific tasks: your e-mail, your to-do list, your etc. Those types of pages do not need to be indexed, and most of the time users do not need to access them by viewing page source. With things such as e-mail, calendars, etc. the content will constantly change. Your bookmark should only point you to the page of a calendar or a particular date, the page data can still be dynamic.
While some may attempt to fit different views for applications (e.g. month/week/day view of a calendar) into a single page, from experience I can tell you it is far easier to do the opposite, as AJAX pages are still heavily reliant on CSS and (X)HTML for the presentation layer, and those do not easily adapt to the large package/dll structure well.
To me the strength of AJAX is not that it will replace existing web standards, but it will help make doing things online much easier. Best AJAX implementations I have seen do not focus on AJAX for page rendering, etc. But use it as a non-abrasive way to allow users to perform small actions (send some data, refresh small section of site, etc.), just look at Blinklist or Backpack to see what I mean.
As other posters have noted Sun has failed miserably to get Java adopted, the web browser is a tool everyone has and wants, thus it is the easiest way to ensure your application can be used by the highest number of people. For me, as a developer, that single point will always make AJAX applications a serious contender for programs that use a remote data source.
It depends on what you buy. For some of their new sections, which are really affiliates, you need to lookup the retailer profile to see how much shipping is, and if they ship to you at all (I'm in Aus). However, like the parent said I do find that Amazon has the best prices (often beats local e-tailers shipping included).
The problem I find with other stores is that I find it very hard to trust a site that appears as if they don't have the money to hire a web designer. Amazon is always quick with delivery and reliable (in my experience), so even if it is more expensive that assurance is worth the extra dollars.
The problem with this racket is that it offers no more protection than not paying them. If this was a physical case, and you pay protection money to your local crime syndicate, should some other criminals try to get protection money from you the guys you are already paying off will protect you, so that he can protect his income (and territory).
When online there is nothing stop you getting DDoS'd by a different group every month. The group you are already paying off have no means of stopping the others, otherwise the government (to whom we pay for protection in the form of taxes) would be cracking down with that method already.
Re:Wow, they requested this?
on
Spam Bits
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The way I do it, which does not involve setting up my own email server, is to register a personal domain name with a provider that supports email aliasing/forwarding so that I can still use my isp email account with the benefit of whitelisting good guys and blocking the bad ones by looking at the to: header.
The only downside of course is that it takes a bit of time (10 ~ 20mins) before a new fowarding account is created and I am only limited to 99 aliases with my current domain name provider.
Can't wait till this hits stores, after burning out on MMORPGs it should be good to play a "good" RPG with friends again. Also nice to see them supporting the modding community a whole lot more than other RPGs have, with tool set demos [Planet NWN] out before the actual game!
My mobile phone currently weighs about 150g and is 2cm thick, it is already a burden by today's standards. How many people will actually carry this around with their everyday phone?
The laptop battery version looks promising though, but hasn't a step-charging laptop battery been posted on/. before too.
As any EQ player (seller actually, many players are against it, but that's a whole other topic) will tell you they are selling their TIME. It takes many hundred hours to get a character to the point where someone will pay $K+ for it. Taking that argument if you were to pay someone to "develop" your EQ character(s) you would probably pay the same thing. As an EQ account buyer it is more than just a user name and password you are buying, you are paying so that you don't need to waste your time to play the sort of game (high-level, what not) you want.
I am sure the argument applies to other forms of valuable information. You are not just paying for a piece of information, but the time it takes to develop/asscertain that information too.
Being a Fitaly user for about six months, I can now tap more than 50 wpm. However that wpm rate only applies when I am typing a lot of text and do not have my Stowaway with me.
From looking at the pictures provided, there are a few reasons temping me to learn a new key layout and switch to ATOMIK. First of all, IBM has managed to fit the number pad into their basic keypad. Whereas on Fitaly you would need to press the little '123' button to get a number pad. This may not seem like a big deal, however I do find a lot of the time I dont even use the '123' button, but just write the numbers in Graffiti (I use Fitaly virtual keyboard so the Graffiti area is still available).
Secondly, rarely used keys such as 'w, x, y, z' are placed together on the bottom right of the keypad, which is easy to remember and find. Fitaly on the other hand, because they map their keys based on frequency of individual keys (rather than pair of keys) used, the letters 'w, x, y, z' are found scattered around the outer border of the keypad. The placement of these keys on Fitaly slow me down greatly, and it seems ATOMIK may have found a better solution.
Now I know I may sound like I am strongly in favor of IBMs ATOMIK, but its only because I have used Fitaly for so long and know all the advantages/disadvanges of it. I do believe it is possible for ATOMIK to take over Fitaly as the replacement keypad of choice on handheld devices, but I wront really know until I give it a try. Nonetheless, the design looks very promising.
Slashdot Mirror
The author states that code improvements should be driven by "the developers with the deepest architectural understanding of the code, the closest interaction with the code, and the most responsibility for the code". However, this is a programmer biased perspective and not at all how a business operates.
A business is focused on making money. For the founders, the owners, the stakeholders with the most financial resources invested, that is what it comes down to. That is why if they find an employee that can generate more of it form them they are more likely to listen and give "the greatest decision-making power" to. Normally this ends up being the sales person, marketer, etc. They become the CEO. Those that are good at making things work become the COO.
While things are going well and the company is successful people will not question this model. Customers will request features, companies will implement them. When resources are short they will hire more people, layers of management gets added, everyone feels like their job is/can go somewhere.
The problem occurs when those in charge become lazy or egotistic. The lazy manager will stop gathering user input, or fail to understand why developers gawk at the 100th feature request that are not followed-up on for the month. The impact on morale is the real cancer that kills ideas and companies.
The egotistic manager will achieve similar results, but for different motivations. The incessant push for their ideas, the attempt at pressuring coders to succeed for them, etc. is too shallow and most egotistic managers are not good enough leaders/manipulators to actually motivate people even if it were for purely selfish purposes.
For a coder the best skill is not communication skills, although it is important, but business skills. If you can make money, you can do whatever you want. If you are good enough you can leave all the petty office politics behind and start your own enterprise.
Following another manager, however great, will never lead to security for the pure developer. This is because in the scheme of things you are just carrying out the vision of someone who helps the company achieve financial success. Just as soldiers are trained not to think too much, that is what managers want out of their coders as well when they have an agenda.
The times where I have seen managers ask developers for ideas and comments are when managers are out of ideas. In which case they do so less out of a willingness to communicate and more out of desperation. That is why many CEOs describe their job as cultivating a culture because in a "my way or the highway" environment there is no way people will bother suggesting alternatives.
If a coder wants security they need to first prove their worthiness to decision makers that they can be one of them, then lead and succeed for the organization; basically become a manager themselves. All of this requires a lot of investment in time and effort away from the text editor/IDE and a lot more time in front of people.
This is why there will always be a divide between managers and coders, the roles simply require different skill sets and to be good at either is not easy. The best of either class are good at reaching out, which still requires both parties to be willing to participate for the exchange to occur.
Really the whole saying yes thing is about being agreeable, and most of the time that is what the boss wants. I find that most questions placed upon "engineers" by managers are inconsequential and is simply helping out the manager with his/her mental-exercise-of-the-moment (to put it politely), so by simply saying yes or a qualified yes, you allow your manager to keep mentally turning the wheels and not interrupt their fantasy.
Going along in the above manner will make one more far less dislikeable and prevent you from being labelled a mr-can't-do, so that when you are asked a question that really affects the business - as in if it goes wrong you could be out of a job - you can answer honestly and have your answer be taken into serious consideration. But even in those circumstances you only have a 50% shot of being heard, that is why I recommend to people who do not care for their job to find a hobby, because not caring about what you do with your life is no way to live.
I believe the point of school is to train good employees. This just demonstrates how much under the thumb of the employer you will be once you get out. Students, like workers just need to deal with it. Of course this is more comparable to a law instead of workplace rules (as it is not possible for a student to change schools as easily as one changes jobs).
/. articles point out that there are services where papers/problems are solved for a fee; assuming these contracts are flexible students can start to demand absolutely non-plagiarized works. As the employer of the assignment contractors, the students have replicated their own school-to-student relationship, therefore the school system is working in preparing these kids for life. The kids that choose to hire a contractor simply choose a different role they play in this simulated life.
Nevertheless, like in life, the students sometimes just need to learn to play ball. When you have nothing you simply have to work for a living and you need to depend on the support of others, which is nearly always conditional.
At the same time a prior
I believe the best thing high school can teach and should be more honest about is that since you are just starting, you are nothing, you can't do anything, and you need to either take it or become an useless outcast (kinda like boot camp).
I agree about the user becomming programmed to hit "allow" by default. However my way around it was to ask the user what programs they normally use (Skype, MSN, etc.), run the programs and allow those ports my self then simply tell the user to DECLINE EVERYTHING!
Most users that need you to help them set up a firewall really would not be using many different types of apps anyway. Also it is much quicker to set a declined app to allow than to clean out a spyware infested PC.
The universities are really just trying to teach kids about the real world, where BOFHs listen to upper management and users use whatever BOFHs jam down their throats.
In OS X there is a feature called Zoom in the univsersal access pane. You simply hit option-command-8 and then opt-cmd-= or opt-cmd-- to zoom in-and-out of any part of the screen. I often use this for non-liquid sites that I expect to read for a while.
OS based zooming means that all images are scaled properly as well. Although the text is not as sharp as it can be at times the improved readability more than offsets the slight loss in text sharpness.
Not sure if policy has changed since you've got your mac, but on my new iSight iMac it came with Appleworks, which would be more than sufficient for everyday word processing.
AJAX only breaks the web (data-access wise) because most of the time it is being used for interactive pages, and providing pure data is an afterthought (e.g. how often does one read their e-mail with headers and all).
When you simply need to pull data, AJAX, and more specifically the "X" in it, means that most of the data presented is available in XML form. You'll find that most AJAX scripts still require server side handlers/interfaces written in PHP/ASP/etc. which return "text/xml". It would be very easy for developers to include an XML link or allow it to be saved directly from the page. While I can't speak for all developers, for the intranet application I am building, most users do not need or want raw data, they would like it nicely formatted and understandable; otherwise it'd save me lots of time and just have people all use phpMyAdmin.
On your point about having page content easily readable, I feel that it is true, however it depends on the nature of the content. AJAX is currently used for user-specific tasks: your e-mail, your to-do list, your etc. Those types of pages do not need to be indexed, and most of the time users do not need to access them by viewing page source. With things such as e-mail, calendars, etc. the content will constantly change. Your bookmark should only point you to the page of a calendar or a particular date, the page data can still be dynamic.
While some may attempt to fit different views for applications (e.g. month/week/day view of a calendar) into a single page, from experience I can tell you it is far easier to do the opposite, as AJAX pages are still heavily reliant on CSS and (X)HTML for the presentation layer, and those do not easily adapt to the large package/dll structure well.
To me the strength of AJAX is not that it will replace existing web standards, but it will help make doing things online much easier. Best AJAX implementations I have seen do not focus on AJAX for page rendering, etc. But use it as a non-abrasive way to allow users to perform small actions (send some data, refresh small section of site, etc.), just look at Blinklist or Backpack to see what I mean.
As other posters have noted Sun has failed miserably to get Java adopted, the web browser is a tool everyone has and wants, thus it is the easiest way to ensure your application can be used by the highest number of people. For me, as a developer, that single point will always make AJAX applications a serious contender for programs that use a remote data source.
This is the best post I've read in WEEKS! There is hope for /. afterall :)
Is it just me, or does the mini-map of the race track look like a dinosaur (barney) that needs too pee (the crossed legs at the bottom) ?
Thats pretty wise, perhaps he should write "The art of monopoly", guaranteed best seller.
It depends on what you buy. For some of their new sections, which are really affiliates, you need to lookup the retailer profile to see how much shipping is, and if they ship to you at all (I'm in Aus). However, like the parent said I do find that Amazon has the best prices (often beats local e-tailers shipping included).
The problem I find with other stores is that I find it very hard to trust a site that appears as if they don't have the money to hire a web designer. Amazon is always quick with delivery and reliable (in my experience), so even if it is more expensive that assurance is worth the extra dollars.
The problem with this racket is that it offers no more protection than not paying them. If this was a physical case, and you pay protection money to your local crime syndicate, should some other criminals try to get protection money from you the guys you are already paying off will protect you, so that he can protect his income (and territory). When online there is nothing stop you getting DDoS'd by a different group every month. The group you are already paying off have no means of stopping the others, otherwise the government (to whom we pay for protection in the form of taxes) would be cracking down with that method already.
The way I do it, which does not involve setting up my own email server, is to register a personal domain name with a provider that supports email aliasing/forwarding so that I can still use my isp email account with the benefit of whitelisting good guys and blocking the bad ones by looking at the to: header. The only downside of course is that it takes a bit of time (10 ~ 20mins) before a new fowarding account is created and I am only limited to 99 aliases with my current domain name provider.
Can't wait till this hits stores, after burning out on MMORPGs it should be good to play a "good" RPG with friends again. Also nice to see them supporting the modding community a whole lot more than other RPGs have, with tool set demos [Planet NWN] out before the actual game!
My mobile phone currently weighs about 150g and is 2cm thick, it is already a burden by today's standards. How many people will actually carry this around with their everyday phone?
The laptop battery version looks promising though, but hasn't a step-charging laptop battery been posted on /. before too.
How many /. reader's use their name spelt backwards as passwords ;)
As any EQ player (seller actually, many players are against it, but that's a whole other topic) will tell you they are selling their TIME. It takes many hundred hours to get a character to the point where someone will pay $K+ for it. Taking that argument if you were to pay someone to "develop" your EQ character(s) you would probably pay the same thing. As an EQ account buyer it is more than just a user name and password you are buying, you are paying so that you don't need to waste your time to play the sort of game (high-level, what not) you want. I am sure the argument applies to other forms of valuable information. You are not just paying for a piece of information, but the time it takes to develop/asscertain that information too.
Multi-sourced don't always work. With high demand albums I've seen fake tracks that has 50 or 60 hosts.
Being a Fitaly user for about six months, I can now tap more than 50 wpm. However that wpm rate only applies when I am typing a lot of text and do not have my Stowaway with me.
From looking at the pictures provided, there are a few reasons temping me to learn a new key layout and switch to ATOMIK. First of all, IBM has managed to fit the number pad into their basic keypad. Whereas on Fitaly you would need to press the little '123' button to get a number pad. This may not seem like a big deal, however I do find a lot of the time I dont even use the '123' button, but just write the numbers in Graffiti (I use Fitaly virtual keyboard so the Graffiti area is still available).
Secondly, rarely used keys such as 'w, x, y, z' are placed together on the bottom right of the keypad, which is easy to remember and find. Fitaly on the other hand, because they map their keys based on frequency of individual keys (rather than pair of keys) used, the letters 'w, x, y, z' are found scattered around the outer border of the keypad. The placement of these keys on Fitaly slow me down greatly, and it seems ATOMIK may have found a better solution.
Now I know I may sound like I am strongly in favor of IBMs ATOMIK, but its only because I have used Fitaly for so long and know all the advantages/disadvanges of it. I do believe it is possible for ATOMIK to take over Fitaly as the replacement keypad of choice on handheld devices, but I wront really know until I give it a try. Nonetheless, the design looks very promising.
[FAT]Ranger