I finally got to visit an Apple store and I had such high expectations after the spate of such stories like the one in NYT. Quite frankly I was underwhelmed and disappointed. The stories always write about stores in Manhattan and San Francisco, but this was a top ten U.S. city and quite frankly it was a rather plain store. No grand architectural details, nothing special over any of the other mall stores.
The difference was in layout and help. No boxes, if you wanted to buy anything it was in the back. Lots of products on display and no staff hovering over you. So it was easy to try things out and the minute you had a question help was instantly available and knowledgeable.
In contrast to CompUSA,Gateway and now Circuit City. All three fired the well paid help, piled the boxes high and locked things behind glass cases. Then paid bonuses to execs when sales tanked that cost more than what was saved by the store conversions.
It seems rather a simple formula to succeed in retail, too bad far few companies try it. Works for me cause I bought an iPod. After I see what future products are coming out after Jobs address in mid-January I am buying a Mac laptop.
As usual the newspapers have it all wrong. But look to see electronics retailers putting in glass stairways in future stores and genius bars staffed with minimum wage teenagers;
My advice would be to read The Pragmatic Programmer book by Hunt and Thomas. It provides the best blue print I have seen to solving the problem for you.
You may not be able to implement all the changes at once but you will find that you've got more authority than you realize.
You may not even agree with all of it, implement what makes sense and your code will improve. I've found with my friends that the longer you've been coding the more sense that the book makes.
Paul Graham just used the word dead to be provocative. The overwhelming majority of startups no longer have to worry about Microsoft invading their space.
Startups founders also no longer list an exit strategy as being bought by Microsoft. Google and Yahoo perhaps, but not Microsoft and that's a big change from five years ago. As a matter of fact if you ask founders in their twenties if they envision someday being purchased by Microsoft you are more likely to be met with derisive laughter.
What attracted me most to the hobby of ham radio was that it was an elite fraternity. It wasn't that difficult, but it required you to make some effort to join. Contrast that to the mess of CB radio where anyone with the price of a radio can belong.
The hobby may indeed gain in popularity but the great influx of new operators will change it and not for the better. The move to dumb down the hobby will not end with the elimination of the morse code requirement. How much longer will it be before the anti-morse contingent cheerleaders are lobbying to make the written tests easier or eliminate them all together?
In a few years the bands will be full of nothing but lids, kids and space cadets. That makes me quite sad.
I have observed that there are two kinds of programmers. Regular programmers to whom it's just a job. You will never catch them contributing to open source or attending a user group meeting.
Then there are the passionate programmers, people who would code whether they are paid for it or not. I decided a few years ago that I only wanted to work with and hang out with the passionate kind. You may be different but if you make the basic decision of which camp you are in your choice will be easy.
I am not saying that there aren't passionate.net'ers, but that big corporate job doesn't sound like that's where they would go if they were passionate.
It's not wrong to go for the money, this is after all America. Just be certain why you made the choice.
I can't let this common misconception stand. Most farmers are more advanced in their use of computers than the average person. A very popular online forum for farmers published their browser stats recently and something like 95% were on either IE6 or a current version of Firefox or Opera.
Man Holmes
Loving complexity for complexity's sake
on
Ruby Off the Rails
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You just have to love java programmers making the easy more difficult. What I have learned in managing developers is that you have to constantly fight their desire to make things more complicated without a valid reason for doing so.
He's correct that certain tasks are easier in Ruby than in java, not to mention that the code is more readable. But he is missing in my opinion the most important part of Rails and that the ORM. Use scaffolding or don't use it. But if you bypass Active Record you're just making more work for yourself.
That's not how enterprise software gets built. If it was a mission critical app for the school, then you don't let students build it.
If the school employee was more comfortable using ColdFusion then it was still far more cost effective to purchase it for him.
Plus when you need an app to scale suddenly PHP isn't free as in beer anymore.
Let me ask you a question: what's the greater cost the price of an app server or the salaries of the developers?
Getting a free server if development time is cut by two thirds is false economy.
Macromedia sure didn't emphasize it but ColdFusion was RAD before RAD was cool.
I couldn't disagree with you more. What's wrong with belonging to an elite hobby? Destroy its uniqueness and you end up destroying what made it so special.
How about changing the rules for MENSA? Instead of the top 2% how about letting in the top 20%? The MENSA membership would grow and that's surely a good thing right?
There's sheer poetry in code and now few people will come to know it. Once that happens the new majority of lids, kids and space cadets occupying the phone portion of the band will demand the bandwidth occupied by cw as well.
If you read the article you would have learned that hams aren't the only ones affected by the interference generated by BPL.
So if the fire department using 20th century radios is unable to communicate and your house burns down is that OK with you?
BPL is flawed technology trying to be rammed down people's throats. Those nerdy hams were just the first to see the wolf in sheep's clothing thats all.
Here's something Jesse might have overlooked. How do you reinvigorate the PDF franchise and make it part of the future? By easily enabling dynamic pdf's.
Adobe acquired a way to do just that. With ColdFusion 7 they have an easy to use, java based, scripting language that already provides a fast and scalable way to generate dynamic PDF's.
The only thing ColdFusion lacked at Macromedia was an aggressive marketing budget. I'm betting CF-7's PDF creation capabilities will only get better.
I am currently working on a project for a software company that sells to the health insurance industry.
In developing this project I've had contact with a lot of the largest health insurance companies in our region.
What I have found most of them have in common is a mixture of J2EE and ColdFusion, almost exclusively. It appears that dotNet hasn't made the inroads with the health care industry that they have with other corporate clients.
No doubt Bush was probably wrong about WMD's in Iraq. But so were Bill Clinton and John Kerry who were both on record as late as early 2002 in saying Iraq had WMD's.
Sounds like Gilmor's venture had found their first subscriber!
Gilmor is a great tech writer and I too have read him in SiliconValley.com for years. But he has increasingly become more political and his blog has become full of left wing rants. To me that takes away from his tech writing.
This so-called believer in free speech has actually banned conservatives who debate him on his blog. He backed the National Guard story on Bush six months before Dan Rather. He joins Rather in still believing the story is true even though the documents were fake.
Maybe he can make a living writing exclusively for the Moveon.org crowd but I think he is in for a rude education in the principles of capitalism.
You are the only one making sense in this whole debate. If you look carefully you will see that only some outsourcing projects are successful.
But the suits are following a trend blindly. The danger is that by the time they find out that 80% of outsourcing doesn't work it will be too late. They will have destroyed the US industry.
Then of course jobs will be bid up, students will be attracted to the field and the cycle will begin again.
I am usually against government intervention but I do feel in this case the government should step in and limit the amount of programming that goes overseas.
For national security reasons if nothing else. Course neither of the candidates is addressing the problem.
Community college is a good solution if you're laid off from a manufacturing job. But not a good one if you're a fifty year old programmer with two degrees.
You know less than you think you do. Most people aren't aware of it but the genesis of most of FDR's programs was the Hoover administration.
Yes, that's right poor maligned Herbert Hoover has proposed these same programs several years earlier but the Democratic controlled Congress wouldn't pass them. Yet as soon as FDR was elected the names changed and they became law.
Did those programs end the great depression? No, though they alleviated the people's suffering. World War II ended the great depression.
Those who want to blame Bush for the current economic condition have got to ask themselves what Al Gore would have differently if he had inherited a recession from Clinton and then lost over a million jobs after 9-11. I am willing to bet if Gore had been in office we would have fared worse, far worse.
I've studied the history of the Green's in Germany as well as the rest of Europe.
Their views on a variety of issues are pretty darned predictable. To this conservative they are almost always goofy, but predictably goofy.
This time their objections are totally out of character. I don't know if Germany has the transparency of political donations that exists in the US.
I want to know if donations from Redmond can be the reason for the Green's sudden interest in possible patent violations. Didn't Steve Ballmer go ballistic when they lost in Munich?
The Green's are believers in the old axim, "the ends justify the means". I have no problem believing they could justify taking Microsoft's money and putting it to "good use" for their cause.
What I want to know is their any way this can be checked?
Slashdot Mirror
I finally got to visit an Apple store and I had such high expectations after the spate of such stories like the one in NYT. Quite frankly I was underwhelmed and disappointed. The stories always write about stores in Manhattan and San Francisco, but this was a top ten U.S. city and quite frankly it was a rather plain store. No grand architectural details, nothing special over any of the other mall stores.
;
The difference was in layout and help. No boxes, if you wanted to buy anything it was in the back. Lots of products on display and no staff hovering over you. So it was easy to try things out and the minute you had a question help was instantly available and knowledgeable.
In contrast to CompUSA,Gateway and now Circuit City. All three fired the well paid help, piled the boxes high and locked things behind glass cases. Then paid bonuses to execs when sales tanked that cost more than what was saved by the store conversions.
It seems rather a simple formula to succeed in retail, too bad far few companies try it. Works for me cause I bought an iPod. After I see what future products are coming out after Jobs address in mid-January I am buying a Mac laptop.
As usual the newspapers have it all wrong. But look to see electronics retailers putting in glass stairways in future stores and genius bars staffed with minimum wage teenagers
Man Holmes
My advice would be to read The Pragmatic Programmer book by Hunt and Thomas. It provides the best blue print I have seen to solving the problem for you.
You may not be able to implement all the changes at once but you will find that you've got more authority than you realize.
You may not even agree with all of it, implement what makes sense and your code will improve. I've found with my friends that the longer you've been coding the more sense that the book makes.
Man Holmes
Paul Graham just used the word dead to be provocative. The overwhelming majority of startups no longer have to worry about Microsoft invading their space.
Startups founders also no longer list an exit strategy as being bought by Microsoft. Google and Yahoo perhaps, but not Microsoft and that's a big change from five years ago. As a matter of fact if you ask founders in their twenties if they envision someday being purchased by Microsoft you are more likely to be met with derisive laughter.
Man Holmes
What attracted me most to the hobby of ham radio was that it was an elite fraternity. It wasn't that difficult, but it required you to make some effort to join. Contrast that to the mess of CB radio where anyone with the price of a radio can belong.
The hobby may indeed gain in popularity but the great influx of new operators will change it and not for the better. The move to dumb down the hobby will not end with the elimination of the morse code requirement. How much longer will it be before the anti-morse contingent cheerleaders are lobbying to make the written tests easier or eliminate them all together?
In a few years the bands will be full of nothing but lids, kids and space cadets. That makes me quite sad.
Man Holmes
Licensed 40 years
I have observed that there are two kinds of programmers. Regular programmers to whom it's just a job. You will never catch them contributing to open source or attending a user group meeting.
.net'ers, but that big corporate job doesn't sound like that's where they would go if they were passionate.
Then there are the passionate programmers, people who would code whether they are paid for it or not. I decided a few years ago that I only wanted to work with and hang out with the passionate kind. You may be different but if you make the basic decision of which camp you are in your choice will be easy.
I am not saying that there aren't passionate
It's not wrong to go for the money, this is after all America. Just be certain why you made the choice.
Man Holmes
I can't let this common misconception stand. Most farmers are more advanced in their use of computers than the average person. A very popular online forum for farmers published their browser stats recently and something like 95% were on either IE6 or a current version of Firefox or Opera.
Man Holmes
You just have to love java programmers making the easy more difficult. What I have learned in managing developers is that you have to constantly fight their desire to make things more complicated without a valid reason for doing so.
He's correct that certain tasks are easier in Ruby than in java, not to mention that the code is more readable. But he is missing in my opinion the most important part of Rails and that the ORM. Use scaffolding or don't use it. But if you bypass Active Record you're just making more work for yourself.
Man Holmes
That's not how enterprise software gets built. If it was a mission critical app for the school, then you don't let students build it. If the school employee was more comfortable using ColdFusion then it was still far more cost effective to purchase it for him. Plus when you need an app to scale suddenly PHP isn't free as in beer anymore.
Let me ask you a question: what's the greater cost the price of an app server or the salaries of the developers? Getting a free server if development time is cut by two thirds is false economy. Macromedia sure didn't emphasize it but ColdFusion was RAD before RAD was cool.
I couldn't disagree with you more. What's wrong with belonging to an elite hobby? Destroy its uniqueness and you end up destroying what made it so special.
How about changing the rules for MENSA? Instead of the top 2% how about letting in the top 20%? The MENSA membership would grow and that's surely a good thing right?
There's sheer poetry in code and now few people will come to know it. Once that happens the new majority of lids, kids and space cadets occupying the phone portion of the band will demand the bandwidth occupied by cw as well.
This will totally destroy a once great hobby.
Man Holmes
It's actually the end of an era. I wouldn't expect non-hams to understand.
It was part of a common heritage that made the ham fraternity unique.
Now it will be no different than CB radio, sigh...
Man Holmes
If you look at all recorded history you find that peace only came about as a result of strength. You either intimidate your opponent or you kill him.
Suing for peace, sympathizing with your enemy and looking at what you might have done to upset him haven't worked.
British prime minster, Neville Chamberlin, tried to sue for peace with Hitler and failed. Winston Churchill who took his country to war succeeded.
Al Qaeda are monsters. You don't negotiate or sympathize with monsters.
Man Holmes
If you read the article you would have learned that hams aren't the only ones affected by the interference generated by BPL.
So if the fire department using 20th century radios is unable to communicate and your house burns down is that OK with you?
BPL is flawed technology trying to be rammed down people's throats. Those nerdy hams were just the first to see the wolf in sheep's clothing thats all.
Man Holmes
Here's something Jesse might have overlooked. How do you reinvigorate the PDF franchise and make it part of the future? By easily enabling dynamic pdf's.
Adobe acquired a way to do just that. With ColdFusion 7 they have an easy to use, java based, scripting language that already provides a fast and scalable way to generate dynamic PDF's.
The only thing ColdFusion lacked at Macromedia was an aggressive marketing budget. I'm betting CF-7's PDF creation capabilities will only get better.
Man Homes
Very well put. Detroit simply doesn't get the respect that it deserves. Or Michigan for that matter.
Man Holmes
If you're into Flash and/or ColdFusion programming there's another Michigan show in April.
It's called Powered by Detroit and it's this Friday and Saturday at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn.
Details at PoweredbyDetroit.org - see you there.
Man Holmes
Each business if different but getting one running for 90K is just about impossible. That won't even cover two people for six months.
Then you don't want success badly enough. How about not taking any salary for the first year or two?
I've done several startups and had guys who wanted their full corporate salary and a big chunk of equity.
Quite simply it doesn't work that way. If there's no risk, then there's no equity.
If you don't believe enough in your idea that you're willing to sacrifice everything then you will never start the company plain and simple.
Man Holmes
I am currently working on a project for a software company that sells to the health insurance industry.
In developing this project I've had contact with a lot of the largest health insurance companies in our region.
What I have found most of them have in common is a mixture of J2EE and ColdFusion, almost exclusively. It appears that dotNet hasn't made the inroads with the health care industry that they have with other corporate clients.
Holmes
No doubt Bush was probably wrong about WMD's in Iraq. But so were Bill Clinton and John Kerry who were both on record as late as early 2002 in saying Iraq had WMD's.
Sounds like Gilmor's venture had found their first subscriber!
Man Holmes
You offer no facts, yet the story is true because you say it is true?
CBS made a minor mistake? Even the New York Times has it on record as a huge mistake.
Dude, YOUR SIDE LOST - GET OVER IT.
Man Holmes
Gilmor is a great tech writer and I too have read him in SiliconValley.com for years. But he has increasingly become more political and his blog has become full of left wing rants. To me that takes away from his tech writing.
This so-called believer in free speech has actually banned conservatives who debate him on his blog. He backed the National Guard story on Bush six months before Dan Rather. He joins Rather in still believing the story is true even though the documents were fake.
Maybe he can make a living writing exclusively for the Moveon.org crowd but I think he is in for a rude education in the principles of capitalism.
Man Holmes
Will you settle for four out of five? If that's the case consider ColdFusion.
Before I am flamed, if you haven't used CF in the past twelve months whatever comment that you might make is probably no longer true.
Coldfusion no longer has a problem with scalability and proper use of Coldfusion components lets you build object oriented applications.
If your app server must be free then consider the free version of NewAtlanta's Blue Dragon server or the Swiss Railio which is in beta.
All of these are built on top of Java. Blue Dragon even has a dotNet version.
Why ColdFusion? Three words - Rapid Application Development.
Man Holmes
You are the only one making sense in this whole debate. If you look carefully you will see that only some outsourcing projects are successful.
But the suits are following a trend blindly. The danger is that by the time they find out that 80% of outsourcing doesn't work it will be too late. They will have destroyed the US industry.
Then of course jobs will be bid up, students will be attracted to the field and the cycle will begin again.
I am usually against government intervention but I do feel in this case the government should step in and limit the amount of programming that goes overseas.
For national security reasons if nothing else. Course neither of the candidates is addressing the problem.
Community college is a good solution if you're laid off from a manufacturing job. But not a good one if you're a fifty year old programmer with two degrees.
Man Holmes
You know less than you think you do. Most people aren't aware of it but the genesis of most of FDR's programs was the Hoover administration.
Yes, that's right poor maligned Herbert Hoover has proposed these same programs several years earlier but the Democratic controlled Congress wouldn't pass them. Yet as soon as FDR was elected the names changed and they became law.
Did those programs end the great depression? No, though they alleviated the people's suffering. World War II ended the great depression.
Those who want to blame Bush for the current economic condition have got to ask themselves what Al Gore would have differently if he had inherited a recession from Clinton and then lost over a million jobs after 9-11. I am willing to bet if Gore had been in office we would have fared worse, far worse.
Man Holmes
I've studied the history of the Green's in Germany as well as the rest of Europe.
Their views on a variety of issues are pretty darned predictable. To this conservative they are almost always goofy, but predictably goofy.
This time their objections are totally out of character. I don't know if Germany has the transparency of political donations that exists in the US.
I want to know if donations from Redmond can be the reason for the Green's sudden interest in possible patent violations. Didn't Steve Ballmer go ballistic when they lost in Munich?
The Green's are believers in the old axim, "the ends justify the means". I have no problem believing they could justify taking Microsoft's money and putting it to "good use" for their cause.
What I want to know is their any way this can be checked?
Man Holmes