Stop posting on slashdot and go to that party. Yes, go get drunk right now. Make friends, live it up, and realize that even graduating with honors isn't going to make that much of a difference to the business world to make it worthwhile. All you have to do is pass, so have fun. Or learn to have fun, if you have too.
Bollocks. We [finance company owned by a bank] got screwed by RedHat when they ended our support before our contract was up. I won't install them again, nor do I need to rely on some wishful proprietary company to do for me what I can on my own.
Everything is going to Debian here and it's easier to support. Debian's file locations are fine, and yes, I do need to install things on occasion. It took me half a day to locate, compile and install all the dependencies for mondo rescue for an old RedHat 7.1 server, between calls. I consider that a reasonable time for such a box. Had it been Debian, five minutes.
Not to mention, the best feature: RedHat's upgrades have historically been hit or miss. Sometimes they corrupt everything, sometimes it's just fine. That's not a good sign for your next production server upgrade, even discounting counting the downtime to boot off the CD. `dist-upgrade` is far better, and far more rare, which is another plus in my book. Besides, has RedHat given up it's penchant for beta compilers yet? It just makes them more hard to support, not Debian.
If some vendor refuses to support Debian, I can either simply not tell them (how are they going to find out?) or find another vendor. They work for me, and they either accept that or I do without. And it's not like this is some skunk works operation. This is business and Debian fits our needs. Vendors understand that or they lose out.
Don't believe me? Oracle's expensive and only supports a few distros. I think they're still stuck on RedHat. But they can do whatever they want, as we now run everything on PostgreSql.
Oh, and I don't know what the heck the grandparent post was doing, but with a quick google and a couple tweeks, I had gotten Oracle 8i running on Debian pretty easily.
I think keeping code with one programmer would be a mistake. In my case, I've written a massive amount of code and I pioneer most of the new features, since it's my project. But I'm fortunate to have staff that'll take over when I've finished with a component, otherwise I'd never be able to get anything new done. The sheer weight of supporting all that old code would prevent me from working--or sleeping. It's not even bug reports, which I generally do handle, but new features, or, "We want to sort that column...."
My situation may be a little different, since programmers here are mostly still learning the language, but I doubt it's too different considering the case of the Really Good programmer vs. the masses. He'll write a massive amount of code (though clean will still need support) and he shouldn't be supporting an unequal percentage of the project.
Actually, I'd make the argument that a great programmer shouldn't support anything, their time is much better spent on new features and designs. Great programmers are not usually good at supporting things, anyhow. They lose interest in the drudgery of it all and eventually stop returning emails. That amounts to the abuse of extraordinary skill.
If your other programmers can't understand good code, they either a) don't know the language well enough, or b) just haven't spent enough time reading it. While even a great programmer writes a certain way, as you realize, it just takes time for people to acclimate. It can be a slow process initially, but that's one reason you have the great programmer in the first place, it'll take much less time than otherwise. It takes a good technical manager to insist there are no unnecessary rewrites of the great programmer's code (sacrilege!), but instead only small changes.
Failing that, you may have to reconsider whether you have a great programmer or if he's merely prolific.
"That sort of thing is NOT easier and cheaper, and in fact, finding and fixing such problems requires a degree of knowledge that is NOT found on most tech support desks."
You're right, of course. But with Mozilla at least you know what's going on internally. Had it been a problem with IE, the vast majority of helpdesk IT will swap out the entire computer...
Actually, the Java solution to this problem looks a lot different. Given the need to execute unknown code, usually an interface is used and the objects are made to implement it. Then the object will always have method foo and you can pass your data that way.
Granted, that's a lot more work. There's not a lot of Java code that is shorter than it's Python equivalent....
We need to make the database as related as possible - if you can make a lookup table for a Yes/No field, then by all means you should do it!
Hey, those come in handy. I inherited an schema (okay, it was horrible except they were consistent in their ineptitude) that had tables for every 'lookup' in the app.
The nice thing is, I generate all the HTML widgets off ResultSet objects with automatic security, just for fun. It's not such a bad idea.:-)
Heh. I'm using freevo on a 300Mhz Blue and White Mac. Of course, I'm using a hardware VGA to Composite converter... But hey, my setup uses 0% CPU for watching TV.
Yeah, I too love Farm. But it sucks when the d runs around the back of the map and takes your team from behind. That's the nice thing about FLS, a bunch of e stuck in little boxes to shoot at. A lot of really good players camp on Farm's d and assault is usually mostly ~12 honor guys.
Still, I almost always play assault because it's more difficult. With a little training the newbies can do alright if they follow orders. Of course, then they'll think you're cheating because you just one a match against a much more highly rated d.:-)
It's easier to get honor there for a number of reasons: - if you're a good shot, you can take out enemies from assault positions without risking exposing yourself. It's difficult and takes a lot of practice, but if somebody leaves their head out for me, I'll take them in one shot at long distances. - one player can win the match by using stealth to get close enough and either a) taking out e or b) running to the door. Or, lob a smoke and run into the confusion before they can nade where you came from. - or, play defense and use your powerful gun against their wimpy m16s and get massive scores. A good d player on FLS should be able to get 1,000 points in one round (not match), even if assualt manages to get to the door most of the time.
It shouldn't take long to get good enough honor to go into any map. FLS is fun, too.
Someday I'm going to have to explain to my children how Microsoft ran the Xbox at a loss for years and won the whole gaming market away from it's competitors, and why Linux and the Mac never saw a game written for it again.
Someday we'll have to explain why our generation allowed Microsoft to move into PDA devices because it's Outlook syncronization was so darned convienient. Oh, and because it could play games and music.
Someday we'll have to explain why music once came on hard plastic disks and why we can't get music on anything but a windows machine because it played so nicely on our Windows PDA.
If that's not "tying" into other monopolies of theirs, we've truly got trouble brewing.
[root@sunrise root]# w
19:35:49 up 373 days, 5:08, 1 user, load average: 0.23, 0.23, 0.18 USER TTY LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT root pts/1 19:35 0.00s 0.04s 0.02s w
Well, now you can't say that.:-)
This is an Oracle server, normally quite busy during the day (it's now the weekend). But I agree with you -- we'll be moving this server and most of the other ones into a new facility, hopefully by the end of the year.
The highest I've seen was an AIX box that was taken out by a faulty UPS. That was over two years of uptime. Some of us nearly cried.:-)
I was in the same position when I asked for a title change to more accurately reflect what I actually did for them. As a result, I have the absurdly long title: "Sr. Network Administrator / Java Programmer" but I'm being paid more in the range I'd call "respectable."
There's something about changing your title that forces a click in the average PHB / HR mind -- you become a different category to them. Not to mention, since you've been performing the job for them, they don't really have the opportunity to say you're not qualified.
Also, go to salary.com or ilk and checkout what job responsibilities match what you're currently doing and what pay ranges are considered average. Print them out, one for each title you perform, and bring them to your next review. (If you don't have regular reviews, demand one.)
If they're good people and if they value the work you're doing, you'll find yourself with a much more appropriate title for the resume and a pay range that'll match your skill set.
Because spam has been getting through the filters at my company.
And because I have hundreds of messages queued on my mail server waiting to be delivered to what should be non-existent domains because verisign also broke smtp.
"Now I wish we could just get the ASP programmers to use SPROCs instead of hard coding their SQL into the ASP pages! Hey, who needs more than one concurrent connection anyway."
Wow. There are times I feel so sorry for Windows programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop posting on slashdot and go to that party. Yes, go get drunk right now. Make friends, live it up, and realize that even graduating with honors isn't going to make that much of a difference to the business world to make it worthwhile. All you have to do is pass, so have fun. Or learn to have fun, if you have too.
:-)
*sigh* I miss college days.
Bollocks. We [finance company owned by a bank] got screwed by RedHat when they ended our support before our contract was up. I won't install them again, nor do I need to rely on some wishful proprietary company to do for me what I can on my own.
Everything is going to Debian here and it's easier to support. Debian's file locations are fine, and yes, I do need to install things on occasion. It took me half a day to locate, compile and install all the dependencies for mondo rescue for an old RedHat 7.1 server, between calls. I consider that a reasonable time for such a box. Had it been Debian, five minutes.
Not to mention, the best feature: RedHat's upgrades have historically been hit or miss. Sometimes they corrupt everything, sometimes it's just fine. That's not a good sign for your next production server upgrade, even discounting counting the downtime to boot off the CD. `dist-upgrade` is far better, and far more rare, which is another plus in my book. Besides, has RedHat given up it's penchant for beta compilers yet? It just makes them more hard to support, not Debian.
If some vendor refuses to support Debian, I can either simply not tell them (how are they going to find out?) or find another vendor. They work for me, and they either accept that or I do without. And it's not like this is some skunk works operation. This is business and Debian fits our needs. Vendors understand that or they lose out.
Don't believe me? Oracle's expensive and only supports a few distros. I think they're still stuck on RedHat. But they can do whatever they want, as we now run everything on PostgreSql.
Oh, and I don't know what the heck the grandparent post was doing, but with a quick google and a couple tweeks, I had gotten Oracle 8i running on Debian pretty easily.
I think keeping code with one programmer would be a mistake. In my case, I've written a massive amount of code and I pioneer most of the new features, since it's my project. But I'm fortunate to have staff that'll take over when I've finished with a component, otherwise I'd never be able to get anything new done. The sheer weight of supporting all that old code would prevent me from working--or sleeping. It's not even bug reports, which I generally do handle, but new features, or, "We want to sort that column...."
My situation may be a little different, since programmers here are mostly still learning the language, but I doubt it's too different considering the case of the Really Good programmer vs. the masses. He'll write a massive amount of code (though clean will still need support) and he shouldn't be supporting an unequal percentage of the project.
Actually, I'd make the argument that a great programmer shouldn't support anything, their time is much better spent on new features and designs. Great programmers are not usually good at supporting things, anyhow. They lose interest in the drudgery of it all and eventually stop returning emails. That amounts to the abuse of extraordinary skill.
If your other programmers can't understand good code, they either a) don't know the language well enough, or b) just haven't spent enough time reading it. While even a great programmer writes a certain way, as you realize, it just takes time for people to acclimate. It can be a slow process initially, but that's one reason you have the great programmer in the first place, it'll take much less time than otherwise. It takes a good technical manager to insist there are no unnecessary rewrites of the great programmer's code (sacrilege!), but instead only small changes.
Failing that, you may have to reconsider whether you have a great programmer or if he's merely prolific.
Yeah, but Drew Carey makes up for it.
"That sort of thing is NOT easier and cheaper, and in fact, finding and fixing such problems requires a degree of knowledge that is NOT found on most tech support desks."
You're right, of course. But with Mozilla at least you know what's going on internally. Had it been a problem with IE, the vast majority of helpdesk IT will swap out the entire computer...
Easier, maybe, but not cheaper.
You could just execute it in BeanShell...
:-)
(Of course, there'd be no testing and no security so you wouldn't want to do this anyhow.
I'd just embed python.
:-)
Just kidding.
Actually, the Java solution to this problem looks a lot different. Given the need to execute unknown code, usually an interface is used and the objects are made to implement it. Then the object will always have method foo and you can pass your data that way.
Granted, that's a lot more work. There's not a lot of Java code that is shorter than it's Python equivalent....
I believe the author meant to refer to primitive types....
:-)
The object *reference* is passed by value, but it's still only a reference.
Later, he says:
"Java copies and passes the reference by value, not the object."
But, you're right -- I could have read the article more closely. I would have linked one of the other hits.
Before you say somebody is wrong, it's always a good idea to ask google first. :-)
0 5/ 03-qa-0526-pass.html
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/javaqa/2000-
We need to make the database as related as possible - if you can make a lookup table for a Yes/No field, then by all means you should do it!
:-)
Hey, those come in handy. I inherited an schema (okay, it was horrible except they were consistent in their ineptitude) that had tables for every 'lookup' in the app.
The nice thing is, I generate all the HTML widgets off ResultSet objects with automatic security, just for fun. It's not such a bad idea.
Heh. I'm using freevo on a 300Mhz Blue and White Mac. Of course, I'm using a hardware VGA to Composite converter... But hey, my setup uses 0% CPU for watching TV.
And, yet they build more stuff in the OS:
n =displaynews&NewsID=995
http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?fuseactio
"The more you can put in the core operating system the better." Yeah, they are that inept.
Yeah, I too love Farm. But it sucks when the d runs around the back of the map and takes your team from behind. That's the nice thing about FLS, a bunch of e stuck in little boxes to shoot at. A lot of really good players camp on Farm's d and assault is usually mostly ~12 honor guys.
:-)
Still, I almost always play assault because it's more difficult. With a little training the newbies can do alright if they follow orders. Of course, then they'll think you're cheating because you just one a match against a much more highly rated d.
Play FLS.
It's easier to get honor there for a number of reasons:
- if you're a good shot, you can take out enemies from assault positions without risking exposing yourself. It's difficult and takes a lot of practice, but if somebody leaves their head out for me, I'll take them in one shot at long distances.
- one player can win the match by using stealth to get close enough and either a) taking out e or b) running to the door. Or, lob a smoke and run into the confusion before they can nade where you came from.
- or, play defense and use your powerful gun against their wimpy m16s and get massive scores. A good d player on FLS should be able to get 1,000 points in one round (not match), even if assualt manages to get to the door most of the time.
It shouldn't take long to get good enough honor to go into any map. FLS is fun, too.
nah, it's softwa~1
Except that, for most people, XP is not familiar. Most people have never run that version of windows.
heh.
No, that means 75% of them needed a module of some sort and compiled it in on their own.
Public education worked for me! :-)
You've got to be kidding.
Someday I'm going to have to explain to my children how Microsoft ran the Xbox at a loss for years and won the whole gaming market away from it's competitors, and why Linux and the Mac never saw a game written for it again.
Someday we'll have to explain why our generation allowed Microsoft to move into PDA devices because it's Outlook syncronization was so darned convienient. Oh, and because it could play games and music.
Someday we'll have to explain why music once came on hard plastic disks and why we can't get music on anything but a windows machine because it played so nicely on our Windows PDA.
If that's not "tying" into other monopolies of theirs, we've truly got trouble brewing.
Listen to what Gore has to say about this, it's enlightening.
video from cpan
or check:
http://www.moveon.org/gore/webcast.html
[root@sunrise root]# w
:-)
:-)
19:35:49 up 373 days, 5:08, 1 user, load average: 0.23, 0.23, 0.18
USER TTY LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
root pts/1 19:35 0.00s 0.04s 0.02s w
Well, now you can't say that.
This is an Oracle server, normally quite busy during the day (it's now the weekend). But I agree with you -- we'll be moving this server and most of the other ones into a new facility, hopefully by the end of the year.
The highest I've seen was an AIX box that was taken out by a faulty UPS. That was over two years of uptime. Some of us nearly cried.
You're getting taken advantage of.
I was in the same position when I asked for a title change to more accurately reflect what I actually did for them. As a result, I have the absurdly long title: "Sr. Network Administrator / Java Programmer" but I'm being paid more in the range I'd call "respectable."
There's something about changing your title that forces a click in the average PHB / HR mind -- you become a different category to them. Not to mention, since you've been performing the job for them, they don't really have the opportunity to say you're not qualified.
Also, go to salary.com or ilk and checkout what job responsibilities match what you're currently doing and what pay ranges are considered average. Print them out, one for each title you perform, and bring them to your next review. (If you don't have regular reviews, demand one.)
If they're good people and if they value the work you're doing, you'll find yourself with a much more appropriate title for the resume and a pay range that'll match your skill set.
If not, you're better off -- find another job.
Because spam has been getting through the filters at my company.
And because I have hundreds of messages queued on my mail server waiting to be delivered to what should be non-existent domains because verisign also broke smtp.
I had good luck with mplayer on ppc linux.
"Now I wish we could just get the ASP programmers to use SPROCs instead of hard coding their SQL into the ASP pages! Hey, who needs more than one concurrent connection anyway."
Wow. There are times I feel so sorry for Windows programmers.