I would define productivity as the ability to get your work done quickly with the least effort. For any given individual, this will be whatever system they are already familiar with. If that's Windows, Mac, or Linux for you, then that's what it is.
In absolute terms, I think the best productivity would be whatever OS or environment where the tools are forgotten about and your attention is solely focused on the task you are trying to accomplish. I think this might also be tempered by how long it takes to become an expert on the system (and how much effort is required to maintain that status).
Probably command line Unix type environments used by experts who really know the system are the have the highest level of productivity (most useful results for the least efforts). However, it takes a long time and lots of effort to become extremely proficient on the Unix command line.
Plus, comparing them like that is only valuable if you have no experience with computers or else want to maximize your efficiency in the long term at the cost of learning a new system.
realizing that you have limited space to work with...would it have occurred to you to put the cardholder's language preference in there?
The iso codes for language only require two letters be used to represent a language. So, you're talking about 2 bytes. I understand about limited space, but 2 bytes isn't very much.
There are several sites where you become pen pals or whatever with prisoners. I would think they wouldn't have to add this text since you do know the person is a felon by the nature of appearing on the site.
Actually, I'm a System Architect which means I'm the guy who is kind of the "voice" of our software engineering group. I also have some input and stakeholding in every product that we do. I promote interoperability between our individual products and also drive special projects to create reusable components that go into multiple products.
I don't mind "Why can't we..." at all. What you have to do is listen to what they are saying and try to understand why they are saying it. Most of the time the business goal seems valid (at least with my current managers) and the technical solution they are describing is a little bit oversimplified. If its a bad business goal, sometimes you can argue with them on that level and never get into technical details. However, I try to argue by asking questions because if something they are saying makes no sense to me, its because I don't understand their idea. And my goal is to understand their idea - not to make them angry. Once you understand their idea fully, you can usually suggest changes or maybe it turns out to be a good idea afterall.
What I do is say, "Absolutely we can do that. There are a few technical details of what you said that would need to change, but we can absolutely do something along the lines of what you are saying to meet the business goals you have in mind."
Then, I explain to them using everyday language the high level differences between what they are suggesting and what I think will actually work. I explain the basic reason why I'm suggesting these changes to their idea. One important thing is that I keep talking about it as "implementing your idea" and "meeting the business goal you called out".
The rub usually comes when the schedule and budget are discussed. However, if someone is saying "Why can't you just build the database in Access instead of Oracle for our server product?" or something really silly like that, it is usually not hard to explain why (because there really is in fact a valid reason). The important thing is to couch your reasoning in terms of business goals and financial costs to the company (e.g. increased support calls because Access can not handle the load generated by being used as a back end for a server of this kind.) and not try to put the person down. Putting people down or treating them in a condescending way because of lack of technical knowledge will not generally help you get your way. It also doesn't help you win any friends. Instead, treat them with respect and understand that they probably have some expertise in other areas that are important to the business - expertise you probably don't have. Take the time to patiently explain why and chalk up the extra time and effort this takes to the overhead you take on of working with other people.
I like my telephone to sound like a damn telephone. My Treo is either set to ring using a standard telephone ring, or else I have it set for silent operation. I always try (and usually remember) to set it for silent when I am in meetings because ringing telephones are disruptive.
You are flat out wrong. Jef's ideas were fundamental to what the Mac became.
I attended Mac Hack 2001 where Jef, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Caroline Rose, Woz, and others talked about this at length. Many of Jefs ideas were central to the Mac and its utlimate design.
Second, Jef was important enough at Apple that he was approached by senior management (I believe it was Michael Scott) to create a video game system and was able to convince them to do the Mac project instead. He also ran their publications group. He started a tradition of execellence in that group that continues today.
Third, many of the ideas that ultimately made it into the Mac came from Jef. For example, Jef was the person who thought of the idea of rounded rectangles being an important graphics primitive in the Mac.
Fourth, Jef was important enough at Apple to have been granted enough stock to make him a millionaire when the Apple IPO occurred. In fact, Jef quickly liquidated his stock because he felt like the day to day shift in the stock price was distracting him from his work. Jobs saw this as a "lack of commitment" to Apple which is part of why they did not get along well. Also, both Jef and Steve were trying to boss the same project. However, many of the "Steve" ideas really came from Jef.
You are really short changing Jef. He deserves more credit than what you are saying. Second, it was Steve Jobs who wanted to change the name to Bicycle. And at that time it was just a code name - not a product name. Marketing has virtual no power over R&D code names - nor would they care about code names.
Yeah, right. You have to do that for about 2-3 years. While the child is an infant, you can very easily "do crafts" for half the day while the baby sleeps and after age 5, the child is in school most of the day.
My stay at home wife does a great job of cleaning and cooking, but don't tell me she has a harder time than I do working. Our joke is: "Those bon-bons won't eat themselves."
Re:The story with Apple's NeXT acquisition
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Apple to Buy TiVo?
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Jean Louis Gasse had been the head of Apple France. However, his last post at Apple was VP of Engineering, not Sales.
Bullshit. Some basic checks on performance are always appropriate as part of your debugging. For example, on MacOS X, I recommend you at least do two things in your app:
1. Run top and look at the amount of CPU usage your app has during different parts of its operation. It should not, for example, run at 99% CPU usage while idle. 2. Run QuartzDebug to make sure you aren't doing gratuituous amounts of extra drawing. Examples: redrawing more often than necessary, redrawing more area than necessary.
And yes, for the average application, I still care about these things.
If certain operations seem to be slow, run an optimization tool and see what "low hanging fruit" you can address.
I've worked on several professional applications and while some of them are "weird", some level of optimization has always been important.
Better yet, they should come to my house and remove the old milk when it expires. They should show up a few seconds before it expires and remove it from the refrigerator, or my hand, just as the expiration happens. That's a valuable service and I would expect people to pay extra for it.
Slashdot is so great. Its the only place I can think of where I can honestly get annoyed by repeated quibbling about the technical differences between extortion and blackmail.
Not only that, but the PowerBook 100 didn't even sell well when it was first released. For one thing, it was initially overpriced and was very underpowered compared to the PowerBook 140 and 170 which were released at the same time.
Then, Apple cut the price to dump them and people were buying them to soup them up. Still, the PowerBook 100 had only a 6800 and used a lead acid battery whereas the other two machines had the 68030 and used NiCads.
I totally agree. If business is not regulated at all, they will sink to the level of the online viagra sellers real quick. It's a race to bottom without some regs to buoy it.
I totally disagree. Having to listen to a woman complain is awful. And they all complain. Plus, they are bossy and want to take your money.
My friend is smart. He hires a maid to clean his house and a prostitute to service his other needs. He gets a good deal on each and doesn't mix the two.
Slashdot Mirror
I would define productivity as the ability to get your work done quickly with the least effort. For any given individual, this will be whatever system they are already familiar with. If that's Windows, Mac, or Linux for you, then that's what it is.
In absolute terms, I think the best productivity would be whatever OS or environment where the tools are forgotten about and your attention is solely focused on the task you are trying to accomplish. I think this might also be tempered by how long it takes to become an expert on the system (and how much effort is required to maintain that status).
Probably command line Unix type environments used by experts who really know the system are the have the highest level of productivity (most useful results for the least efforts). However, it takes a long time and lots of effort to become extremely proficient on the Unix command line.
Plus, comparing them like that is only valuable if you have no experience with computers or else want to maximize your efficiency in the long term at the cost of learning a new system.
realizing that you have limited space to work with ...would it have occurred to you to put the cardholder's language preference in there?
The iso codes for language only require two letters be used to represent a language. So, you're talking about 2 bytes. I understand about limited space, but 2 bytes isn't very much.
There are several sites where you become pen pals or whatever with prisoners. I would think they wouldn't have to add this text since you do know the person is a felon by the nature of appearing on the site.
Actually, I'm a System Architect which means I'm the guy who is kind of the "voice" of our software engineering group. I also have some input and stakeholding in every product that we do. I promote interoperability between our individual products and also drive special projects to create reusable components that go into multiple products.
I don't mind "Why can't we..." at all. What you have to do is listen to what they are saying and try to understand why they are saying it. Most of the time the business goal seems valid (at least with my current managers) and the technical solution they are describing is a little bit oversimplified. If its a bad business goal, sometimes you can argue with them on that level and never get into technical details. However, I try to argue by asking questions because if something they are saying makes no sense to me, its because I don't understand their idea. And my goal is to understand their idea - not to make them angry. Once you understand their idea fully, you can usually suggest changes or maybe it turns out to be a good idea afterall.
What I do is say, "Absolutely we can do that. There are a few technical details of what you said that would need to change, but we can absolutely do something along the lines of what you are saying to meet the business goals you have in mind."
Then, I explain to them using everyday language the high level differences between what they are suggesting and what I think will actually work. I explain the basic reason why I'm suggesting these changes to their idea. One important thing is that I keep talking about it as "implementing your idea" and "meeting the business goal you called out".
The rub usually comes when the schedule and budget are discussed. However, if someone is saying "Why can't you just build the database in Access instead of Oracle for our server product?" or something really silly like that, it is usually not hard to explain why (because there really is in fact a valid reason). The important thing is to couch your reasoning in terms of business goals and financial costs to the company (e.g. increased support calls because Access can not handle the load generated by being used as a back end for a server of this kind.) and not try to put the person down. Putting people down or treating them in a condescending way because of lack of technical knowledge will not generally help you get your way. It also doesn't help you win any friends. Instead, treat them with respect and understand that they probably have some expertise in other areas that are important to the business - expertise you probably don't have. Take the time to patiently explain why and chalk up the extra time and effort this takes to the overhead you take on of working with other people.
I like my telephone to sound like a damn telephone. My Treo is either set to ring using a standard telephone ring, or else I have it set for silent operation. I always try (and usually remember) to set it for silent when I am in meetings because ringing telephones are disruptive.
You are flat out wrong. Jef's ideas were fundamental to what the Mac became.
I attended Mac Hack 2001 where Jef, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Caroline Rose, Woz, and others talked about this at length. Many of Jefs ideas were central to the Mac and its utlimate design.
You are flat wrong.
First, Jef was not fired from Apple. Jef quit.
Second, Jef was important enough at Apple that he was approached by senior management (I believe it was Michael Scott) to create a video game system and was able to convince them to do the Mac project instead. He also ran their publications group. He started a tradition of execellence in that group that continues today.
Third, many of the ideas that ultimately made it into the Mac came from Jef. For example, Jef was the person who thought of the idea of rounded rectangles being an important graphics primitive in the Mac.
Fourth, Jef was important enough at Apple to have been granted enough stock to make him a millionaire when the Apple IPO occurred. In fact, Jef quickly liquidated his stock because he felt like the day to day shift in the stock price was distracting him from his work. Jobs saw this as a "lack of commitment" to Apple which is part of why they did not get along well. Also, both Jef and Steve were trying to boss the same project. However, many of the "Steve" ideas really came from Jef.
You are really short changing Jef. He deserves more credit than what you are saying. Second, it was Steve Jobs who wanted to change the name to Bicycle. And at that time it was just a code name - not a product name. Marketing has virtual no power over R&D code names - nor would they care about code names.
Yeah, right. You have to do that for about 2-3 years. While the child is an infant, you can very easily "do crafts" for half the day while the baby sleeps and after age 5, the child is in school most of the day.
My stay at home wife does a great job of cleaning and cooking, but don't tell me she has a harder time than I do working. Our joke is: "Those bon-bons won't eat themselves."
Jean Louis Gasse had been the head of Apple France. However, his last post at Apple was VP of Engineering, not Sales.
Bullshit. Some basic checks on performance are always appropriate as part of your debugging. For example, on MacOS X, I recommend you at least do two things in your app:
1. Run top and look at the amount of CPU usage your app has during different parts of its operation. It should not, for example, run at 99% CPU usage while idle.
2. Run QuartzDebug to make sure you aren't doing gratuituous amounts of extra drawing. Examples: redrawing more often than necessary, redrawing more area than necessary.
And yes, for the average application, I still care about these things.
If certain operations seem to be slow, run an optimization tool and see what "low hanging fruit" you can address.
I've worked on several professional applications and while some of them are "weird", some level of optimization has always been important.
Premature optimization is the root of some evil.
Frankly, I'd code it as:
if (NULL == ptr) {
}
And then use the profiler later to see what needs to be optimized.
All your post proves is that the price they have been charging for the past few years on iPods is "the right price."
If Apple had charged a million dollars for each iPod, their marketshare would almost certainly be lower.
Actually, Next was doing OK with Web Objects when Apple came calling.
Better yet, they should come to my house and remove the old milk when it expires. They should show up a few seconds before it expires and remove it from the refrigerator, or my hand, just as the expiration happens. That's a valuable service and I would expect people to pay extra for it.
Sorry. I meant 68000 but mistyped (left off a zero.)
Slashdot is so great. Its the only place I can think of where I can honestly get annoyed by repeated quibbling about the technical differences between extortion and blackmail.
Me too. Because of its small size, I always carry a Fisher Space Pen in my pocket. That way I'm never stuck without a pen.
Not only that, but the PowerBook 100 didn't even sell well when it was first released. For one thing, it was initially overpriced and was very underpowered compared to the PowerBook 140 and 170 which were released at the same time.
Then, Apple cut the price to dump them and people were buying them to soup them up. Still, the PowerBook 100 had only a 6800 and used a lead acid battery whereas the other two machines had the 68030 and used NiCads.
I totally agree. If business is not regulated at all, they will sink to the level of the online viagra sellers real quick. It's a race to bottom without some regs to buoy it.
I totally disagree. Having to listen to a woman complain is awful. And they all complain. Plus, they are bossy and want to take your money.
My friend is smart. He hires a maid to clean his house and a prostitute to service his other needs. He gets a good deal on each and doesn't mix the two.
That's exactly how I'm posting this right now. Why should I pay for broadband, when my neighbor can pay for it for me?
I agree that it is not such a bad deal, so why not advertise the truth of the deal instead of the oversimplistic "no late fees"?
I'm not saying they have to go into tremendous details, but they could at least mention "If you keep it an extra week - it's yours!"
Again, I have no problem with the deal, just the deceptive way it is advertised.
You can get the same kind of deal if you arrange your own financing ahead of time, too. (Although you pay interest on the loan of course.)