Also, if you have a premier developer membership, you get a certain amount of hardware discounts. If you know someone who is a developer and hasn't used all of these, you could talk them out of one.
(The premier membership itself costs about $2500.)
A law firm where the admin's job is to keep the systems up so that people can do their work is a very different place than a software company.
At a software company, the admin should be serving sales and the execs - and staying the hell out of dev's way. The best way to do that is to make IT report to the CTO.
Yeah, right. I was hired by my company to write application software for the Macintosh. Therefore, I have a Macintosh on my desk. I called the IT department one day because my Windows machine would not log into the network. (Turns out to have been a problem on their end.)
Instead of fixing the problem, they give me a long lecture on Macintoshes not being "allowed" in the company. Apparently these IT morons had "standardized" on Windows and had just finished prying Macintoshes out of people's unwilling hands.
I listened patiently, politely asked them to fix my windows machine, and then went on with life. However, I have no respect for these idiots. You can play that kind of stuff with some sales guy - not with dev. If I need a dev tool, I should be able to get the damn thing and install it myself.
No, IT doesn't report to dev (at this company), but this is a reason why they should - in any engineering org.
The kind of things you are talking about, I as a developer, would have no problem with. It sounds like you are a knowledgable person doing your job and I would enjoy working with you.
However, I am currently developing a networking product. Our company has decided to move engineers to a different building. Our IT department has helpfully said that we cannot do any of our development work *in the new building*. So, now the company has to retain "labs" in the old building where we can go on those "rare occasions" where we need to run our code. QA is in just as bad of a situation. They somehow think that because we are doing "development work" we will flood the network with malformed packets and create DoS attacks. The old building is a place where the company is now going to have to continue to rent space, and I will have to get in my car and drive there.
The thing that admins need to understand is that at a software company, you should not prevent developers from writing software. That's really the second most important part of the business (sales being the most important part, in my opinion.)
This is exactly the reason why IT should report to dev. What this moron doesn't seem to get is that at a software company we (dev) are doing the real work - you are there to hand us the tools (and frankly you aren't even competent to do that). You have no business jumping in front of the hammer every time I try to hit a nail.
The fact is, no developer ever needs "help" from these morons unless they have explicitly locked us out of something. Go keep the website up, hold the hands of sales, and get out of my damn way. If you were any good, you'd be writing code, not fixing printers.
Re:Darl gets his ass kicked.
on
SCOrched Earth
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· Score: 1
Fighting without a profit motive is unconstitutional. Darl told me you can go to jail for that.
Re:SCO's noncompliance started this!
on
SCOrched Earth
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· Score: 2
it's obvious that Darl McBride has a reality-distortion field [catb.org] that makes Steve Jobs' look like a weak soap bubble.
The difference is that Steve Jobs actually makes people believe what he says. No one believes Darl. At this point if he says the sky is blue, I'm going to have to double check him on that.
Are you familiar with the improvements that went into the handwriting system on Newton OS 2.1? Have you used a Newton 2x00 or an eMate?
There were some improvemnts for recognition of foreign (accented) characters. Newton OS 2.0 had *very good* handwriting recognition. Most people are only familiar with the engine in 1.x which was not the same at all.
I am very familiar with all of the various versions of the Newton. (I own an OMP, MP100, 110, 120, 2000, and an eMate - I have used the 130 and 2100 extensively). I also have a Wacom tablet and MacOS X and I have tried Inkwell. The handwriting recognition on Jaguar is not noticably better than on Newton 2.1 (which was very good).
Inkwell is the Newton's handwriting recognition engine ported to OS X.
For certain uses, tablets are great. I loved the Newton - it was a great computing solution for people who have to stand up. (Like walking around doing inventory control, or doing data entry while inspecting a highway, doctors, etc.)
If Apple could also market it so that it competes with something like the Wacom Cintiq tablets, but also could have a keyboard plugged in and be like a full blown Mac, I could see it filling a niche.
One really good use is when you are coding something and there is someone else in the code base (or others in the codebase), you can IM them and coordinate efforts. For example, you want to ask Sam if he's made modifications to foo.cpp. Or, you want to ask him about some code in foo.cpp. You can copy it into the IM real fast. and talk together about the code snippet. Another example, is you can often send files through IM which is real useful.
One thing the article talks about is that the traditional way of building an audience for a new show (lead ins and lead outs) doesn't work with Tivo users. A lead in or lead out is when you place the new show either before or after an existing popular show to hook in people who tune in early to the show or who don't quickly turn the TV off or change the channel when the show is over.
OK, so how about coding the ads for shows (like when they advertise a special or a new show) with some kind of meta data so that you can press a button on the Tivo remote to have it auto-record the show. I think that would work just as well.
How many times do I see an ad for a show and think that I'd like to watch it, but I'm too lazy to stop everthing, go into the Tivo's menus, and set the show to record. That happens some for me. There are a lot of "marginal" shows that I'm not super enthused about setting up to record, but would record if I could push a button.
I'd vote to acquit. It is obvious by the kind of things he said that he was not serious about it. He was obviously just frustrated.
If a company is going to send out billions of offensive emails to people, they should expect a few nasty responses in return.
Since when did the first amendment not protect idle threats made to foreign spam companies?
Change to try to improve things isn't bad. What you should do is have a clear idea what you are trying to accomplish by making the change, make sure you convey your thinking behind the change to your leutenants. Make sure they know that the reasoning behind the change isn't some big secret. (In a lot of orgs, the leutenants don't understand why the change is being made, so when people ask them they say it is a secret or explain it in such a way that it makes no sense to anyone.)
OK. So, now everyone in the org knows that the change happened and what the purpose of the change was. Next, make sure people are comfortable enough to freely discuss whether the change is working. Is it worth the effort?
If it isn't, admit that it didn't work and either make another (again, well reasoned) change, or go back to the old way for a while. Let everyone know that your doing that because the idea didn't pan out.
If you do it this way, people won't be afraid of the changes and they won't think you are stupid. They will think that you are open to ideas and want to improve things. Don't be surprised if they suggest good ideas and discuss how to improve things. If those ideas sound good, implement them the same way except you should also let everyone know whose idea it was.
I did this with my team of developers and it worked great. We discovered a lot of things that worked well for our group and some things that didn't work very well. Remember that not all groups are going to be the same and that situations change over time. Just because something worked with your last team does not mean it will work with your present team. Also, just because something worked terrifically in the past does not mean that it is working now.
Keep apprised as to what is going on and continuously adapt policies and processes to serve you and your team. If it ever gets to be the other way around, you need to re-think the policies. If you find that following a company policy is a waste of time, you need to either change the policy or else discover that you are following it as an actual beneficial (and worthwhile) service to another group. Don't ever let your people think they are wasting their time following a stupid policy just because it is the policy. If the explanation isn't convincing to you, it won't be convincing to your team.
under Ray Kasser, it was a disaster. Then the Tramiel brothers really ran it into the ground.
Re:Is this my first ever troll?
on
iPod-Jacked
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· Score: 1
Not all iPod owners are Mac users.
Not all Mac users are iPod owners.
Not all iPod owners would do this.
At the moment, I'm listening to Black Flag on my iPod. I don't think any random stranger is likely to want to listen to Black Flag and I don't need more people thinking I'm psycho.
When I lived in Missouri I once had a problem with being slammed by various telephone companies (mostly from Texas.)
Slamming is where they change your long distance service from your preferred service to a different one (usually one that charges a very high rate) without your permission.
I didn't know what to do about it and Southwestern Bell's answer was that I should just pay my bill and shut up. So, I called John Ashcroft's office because he was one of my US Senators. Someone at his office made a call to SW Bell on my behalf and voila my problem was solved.
In this case, he has captured people who were actually out comitting crimes against people. These crimes had victims and real consequences. I, for one, applaud this news.
Tomorrow I can go back to fuming about the patriot act. Today, I say "Thank you very much Attorney General Ashcroft for getting some criminals off the internet!"
I worked with a guy briefly in 2000 that got paid $75/hour, 60 hours a week, for a whole month (before jumping ship to greener pastures in Silicon Valley) to write some horribly broken and incomplete perl CGI code.
I worked as a PDA app developer for a medical software company. We had the same product on Windows and Newton. They hired a guy who was supposed to "amazing" (because he had a Masters in CS). He spent the four months that he worked there on a small module of the Windows code used to record a patient's vital signs (temperature, etc.)
I had two conversations with him about what he was working on. This was because he was supposed to implement code that worked the same as my Newton code. I had a conversation with him when he first started about how to convert Celcius to Farenheit. Right before he left, I had another conversation with him about converting Celcius to Farenheit.
When he left, his team lead and I looked at everything he had done. He spent four months on the temperature panel of the vitals module.
On the Newton, I spent a week and a half implementing the entire vitals module.
He was from India - here on an H1B. He left to go to work for Microsoft as some kind of regional developer tech support guy. I ran into him again a year later at Microsoft. He was there for some training and I was there because I was working there as a developer.
He was a nice guy and all, but I could see that of the developers they had on the Windows project, they had maybe three who were really doing any work and the other five were just getting in their way. They should have just given raises to the guys who were doing the work and gotten rid of the others.
In those days (1996-1999) we had a huge amount of churn on employees. It was really hard for them to keep anybody. A lot of the people they would hire were just not making significant contributions to the work of the company.
What you are saying is that if Gates makes a stupid decision, Microsoft follows him off the cliff.
If Linus tries to lead people off a cliff, people will recognize it and not go. Linus leads by figuring out where the group is headed and running in front of them.
Sounds like the Linux model is less likely to make bad decisions.
Unfortunately (for us), Gates is a very smart guy and rarely makes stupid decisions. Now, if we could get the Microsoft board to put someone like Ray Kasser, Darl McBride, or John Sculley in charge of Microsoft for a few years...
Slashdot Mirror
V) Darl McBride's most meritless lawsuits
VI) Stupidest ???->Profit! jokes
VII) Most obnoxious slashdot sigs
Also, if you have a premier developer membership, you get a certain amount of hardware discounts. If you know someone who is a developer and hasn't used all of these, you could talk them out of one.
(The premier membership itself costs about $2500.)
A law firm where the admin's job is to keep the systems up so that people can do their work is a very different place than a software company.
At a software company, the admin should be serving sales and the execs - and staying the hell out of dev's way. The best way to do that is to make IT report to the CTO.
Yeah, right. I was hired by my company to write application software for the Macintosh. Therefore, I have a Macintosh on my desk. I called the IT department one day because my Windows machine would not log into the network. (Turns out to have been a problem on their end.)
Instead of fixing the problem, they give me a long lecture on Macintoshes not being "allowed" in the company. Apparently these IT morons had "standardized" on Windows and had just finished prying Macintoshes out of people's unwilling hands.
I listened patiently, politely asked them to fix my windows machine, and then went on with life. However, I have no respect for these idiots. You can play that kind of stuff with some sales guy - not with dev. If I need a dev tool, I should be able to get the damn thing and install it myself.
No, IT doesn't report to dev (at this company), but this is a reason why they should - in any engineering org.
The kind of things you are talking about, I as a developer, would have no problem with. It sounds like you are a knowledgable person doing your job and I would enjoy working with you.
However, I am currently developing a networking product. Our company has decided to move engineers to a different building. Our IT department has helpfully said that we cannot do any of our development work *in the new building*. So, now the company has to retain "labs" in the old building where we can go on those "rare occasions" where we need to run our code. QA is in just as bad of a situation. They somehow think that because we are doing "development work" we will flood the network with malformed packets and create DoS attacks. The old building is a place where the company is now going to have to continue to rent space, and I will have to get in my car and drive there.
The thing that admins need to understand is that at a software company, you should not prevent developers from writing software. That's really the second most important part of the business (sales being the most important part, in my opinion.)
This is exactly the reason why IT should report to dev. What this moron doesn't seem to get is that at a software company we (dev) are doing the real work - you are there to hand us the tools (and frankly you aren't even competent to do that). You have no business jumping in front of the hammer every time I try to hit a nail.
The fact is, no developer ever needs "help" from these morons unless they have explicitly locked us out of something. Go keep the website up, hold the hands of sales, and get out of my damn way. If you were any good, you'd be writing code, not fixing printers.
Fighting without a profit motive is unconstitutional. Darl told me you can go to jail for that.
it's obvious that Darl McBride has a reality-distortion field [catb.org] that makes Steve Jobs' look like a weak soap bubble.
The difference is that Steve Jobs actually makes people believe what he says. No one believes Darl. At this point if he says the sky is blue, I'm going to have to double check him on that.
Are you familiar with the improvements that went into the handwriting system on Newton OS 2.1? Have you used a Newton 2x00 or an eMate? There were some improvemnts for recognition of foreign (accented) characters. Newton OS 2.0 had *very good* handwriting recognition. Most people are only familiar with the engine in 1.x which was not the same at all. I am very familiar with all of the various versions of the Newton. (I own an OMP, MP100, 110, 120, 2000, and an eMate - I have used the 130 and 2100 extensively). I also have a Wacom tablet and MacOS X and I have tried Inkwell. The handwriting recognition on Jaguar is not noticably better than on Newton 2.1 (which was very good).
...unless some people riot over the verdict.
Didn't the cops who were found not guilty of beating Rodney King end up going to jail anyway after the riots? Why? Because they had a re-trial.
OK, then why were the cops who were found not guilty of beating Rodney King retried and sent to prison after the LA riots?
Inkwell is the Newton's handwriting recognition engine ported to OS X.
For certain uses, tablets are great. I loved the Newton - it was a great computing solution for people who have to stand up. (Like walking around doing inventory control, or doing data entry while inspecting a highway, doctors, etc.)
If Apple could also market it so that it competes with something like the Wacom Cintiq tablets, but also could have a keyboard plugged in and be like a full blown Mac, I could see it filling a niche.
No you don't. Quit lying - you feel great.
One really good use is when you are coding something and there is someone else in the code base (or others in the codebase), you can IM them and coordinate efforts. For example, you want to ask Sam if he's made modifications to foo.cpp. Or, you want to ask him about some code in foo.cpp. You can copy it into the IM real fast. and talk together about the code snippet. Another example, is you can often send files through IM which is real useful.
One thing the article talks about is that the traditional way of building an audience for a new show (lead ins and lead outs) doesn't work with Tivo users. A lead in or lead out is when you place the new show either before or after an existing popular show to hook in people who tune in early to the show or who don't quickly turn the TV off or change the channel when the show is over.
OK, so how about coding the ads for shows (like when they advertise a special or a new show) with some kind of meta data so that you can press a button on the Tivo remote to have it auto-record the show. I think that would work just as well.
How many times do I see an ad for a show and think that I'd like to watch it, but I'm too lazy to stop everthing, go into the Tivo's menus, and set the show to record. That happens some for me. There are a lot of "marginal" shows that I'm not super enthused about setting up to record, but would record if I could push a button.
You're the one who insulted my girlfirend, you insensitive clod!
I'd vote to acquit. It is obvious by the kind of things he said that he was not serious about it. He was obviously just frustrated. If a company is going to send out billions of offensive emails to people, they should expect a few nasty responses in return. Since when did the first amendment not protect idle threats made to foreign spam companies?
Jef Raskin
Change to try to improve things isn't bad. What you should do is have a clear idea what you are trying to accomplish by making the change, make sure you convey your thinking behind the change to your leutenants. Make sure they know that the reasoning behind the change isn't some big secret. (In a lot of orgs, the leutenants don't understand why the change is being made, so when people ask them they say it is a secret or explain it in such a way that it makes no sense to anyone.)
OK. So, now everyone in the org knows that the change happened and what the purpose of the change was. Next, make sure people are comfortable enough to freely discuss whether the change is working. Is it worth the effort?
If it isn't, admit that it didn't work and either make another (again, well reasoned) change, or go back to the old way for a while. Let everyone know that your doing that because the idea didn't pan out.
If you do it this way, people won't be afraid of the changes and they won't think you are stupid. They will think that you are open to ideas and want to improve things. Don't be surprised if they suggest good ideas and discuss how to improve things. If those ideas sound good, implement them the same way except you should also let everyone know whose idea it was.
I did this with my team of developers and it worked great. We discovered a lot of things that worked well for our group and some things that didn't work very well. Remember that not all groups are going to be the same and that situations change over time. Just because something worked with your last team does not mean it will work with your present team. Also, just because something worked terrifically in the past does not mean that it is working now.
Keep apprised as to what is going on and continuously adapt policies and processes to serve you and your team. If it ever gets to be the other way around, you need to re-think the policies. If you find that following a company policy is a waste of time, you need to either change the policy or else discover that you are following it as an actual beneficial (and worthwhile) service to another group. Don't ever let your people think they are wasting their time following a stupid policy just because it is the policy. If the explanation isn't convincing to you, it won't be convincing to your team.
under Ray Kasser, it was a disaster. Then the Tramiel brothers really ran it into the ground.
Not all iPod owners are Mac users. Not all Mac users are iPod owners. Not all iPod owners would do this. At the moment, I'm listening to Black Flag on my iPod. I don't think any random stranger is likely to want to listen to Black Flag and I don't need more people thinking I'm psycho.
When I lived in Missouri I once had a problem with being slammed by various telephone companies (mostly from Texas.)
Slamming is where they change your long distance service from your preferred service to a different one (usually one that charges a very high rate) without your permission.
I didn't know what to do about it and Southwestern Bell's answer was that I should just pay my bill and shut up. So, I called John Ashcroft's office because he was one of my US Senators. Someone at his office made a call to SW Bell on my behalf and voila my problem was solved.
In this case, he has captured people who were actually out comitting crimes against people. These crimes had victims and real consequences. I, for one, applaud this news.
Tomorrow I can go back to fuming about the patriot act. Today, I say "Thank you very much Attorney General Ashcroft for getting some criminals off the internet!"
I'm going to pop a vein! Afirca is not a country, it's a continent .
If the USA can call itself "America", then I think South Africa ought to be able to call itself "Africa".
I worked with a guy briefly in 2000 that got paid $75/hour, 60 hours a week, for a whole month (before jumping ship to greener pastures in Silicon Valley) to write some horribly broken and incomplete perl CGI code.
I worked as a PDA app developer for a medical software company. We had the same product on Windows and Newton. They hired a guy who was supposed to "amazing" (because he had a Masters in CS). He spent the four months that he worked there on a small module of the Windows code used to record a patient's vital signs (temperature, etc.)
I had two conversations with him about what he was working on. This was because he was supposed to implement code that worked the same as my Newton code. I had a conversation with him when he first started about how to convert Celcius to Farenheit. Right before he left, I had another conversation with him about converting Celcius to Farenheit.
When he left, his team lead and I looked at everything he had done. He spent four months on the temperature panel of the vitals module.
On the Newton, I spent a week and a half implementing the entire vitals module.
He was from India - here on an H1B. He left to go to work for Microsoft as some kind of regional developer tech support guy. I ran into him again a year later at Microsoft. He was there for some training and I was there because I was working there as a developer.
He was a nice guy and all, but I could see that of the developers they had on the Windows project, they had maybe three who were really doing any work and the other five were just getting in their way. They should have just given raises to the guys who were doing the work and gotten rid of the others. In those days (1996-1999) we had a huge amount of churn on employees. It was really hard for them to keep anybody. A lot of the people they would hire were just not making significant contributions to the work of the company.
Advantage: Linux.
What you are saying is that if Gates makes a stupid decision, Microsoft follows him off the cliff.
If Linus tries to lead people off a cliff, people will recognize it and not go. Linus leads by figuring out where the group is headed and running in front of them.
Sounds like the Linux model is less likely to make bad decisions.
Unfortunately (for us), Gates is a very smart guy and rarely makes stupid decisions. Now, if we could get the Microsoft board to put someone like Ray Kasser, Darl McBride, or John Sculley in charge of Microsoft for a few years...