spyrochaete didn't say anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if he also played World of Warcraft and just burned out on it.
Maybe I have attention problems, but it's exceedingly rare for me to play any PC game for 20 hours before I am bored to tears. Playing WoW month after month never worked for me. So playing Age of Conan 1 month here and 2 months there might.
I wouldn't lie. I would only list a Spring website or personal proficiency after I had actually built one or developed it, respectively.
But hoping that all HR screening processes are reasonable is rough. I've got three kids, if one job goes south for any reason I want to find a local replacement very fast.
If people think their religion is true, then breaking stuff is a moral obligation. You have to convince them they are incorrect.
So even if you aren't intent on getting them to reject religion, you still have to convince them the particular tenet of their belief focused on breaking things is wrong. The best way to do that is polite persuasion, not blanket statements like "science and religion are incompatible".
This code is so horrible I would rewrite it to be clearer.
Which is great until you need to read someone else's existing code and figure out what it does. Try explaining to the boss why you spent a week rewriting code that already passed QA because you couldn't understand operator precedence.
Besides, some of the Sun Java certification is silly stuff like that but a lot is standard APIs, appropriate classes (e.g. given a specific scenario, which java Collection is most appropriate?), serialization, etc...
I was already an experienced Java developer when I took the certification. Having to memorize all of those features made me much faster at writing new code and reading legacy code. The certification alone wouldn't be enough to make a good developer, but I really do believe my productivity benefitted from it.
I work at a company that uses Struts and Hibernate. Many of the places hiring senior Java devs near me want the candidate to be proficient in Spring. In my personal experience, simply writing a technology down on a resume without having any attached work experience does not carry any weight.
So what would you suggest? Writing an application with Spring and referencing the URL on the resume? Simply listing that I am proficient with it despite the lack of work experience? Or a Spring certification?
I took the SCJP cert after I had three years of Java work experience because I thought studying for it might fill in some gaps in my knowledge of Java. Turns out I was right.
I had been implementing hashcode incorrectly in some of my classes, and only dumb luck prevented me from unplanned duplicate entries in my HashMap and HashSet objects.
I had occasionally been using Lists when I should have used Sorted Sets.
I got comfortable with the syntax for static inner classes and anonymous inner classes.
I now understand the syntax ?, ? extends, and ? super for Java Generics and I also understand why they implemented generics the way they did. (I don't like the implementation, but at least now I understand it.)
I have the class hierarchy and inter-relationships of the most commonly used java.io and java.util classes and their constructors memorized, which makes for less time flipping through my Java API book when I'm writing new classes.
Now, anyone sufficiently motivated can learn all of that on their own. Which is fine. But why not get the piece of paper that confirms you have a strong grasp of most of the common language API?
All in all, I consider $30 for a study guide and $200 for the test money well spent. Now I'll agree with anyone that says a certification is no substitute for good experience and especially no substitute for a strong foundation in software engineering concepts. But a good certification is not a waste of time.
No matter how absurd you think religion is, you can't convince religious people to be reasonable by insulting them.
I didn't switch from fanatical Christian to atheist due to the people that insulted me. It was the ones who politely and patiently poked holes in my reasoning until I realized my beliefs were incorrect.
McCain: not the first white man to run for President or win a major party primary. Not his first Presidential run. Not involved in a long, tough primary. Not setting fundraising records. A skilled but not renowned orator.
Obama: first black man to win a major party primary. Obama's first Presidential run. Part of a long, tough primary. Set many fundraising records. Considered one of the best orators in the race from the beginning - though probably not the best (I thought Huckabee was a brilliant speaker, myself).
Obama won the media attention and the campaign the same way that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan won, by hammering on a message of optimism and outlining plans for the future. McCain had a far harder task - he had to reverse positions on all of those issues that made him an honorable, admirable maverick in order to win the nomination, and then downplay those reversals to win the general election.
That's cool. I work in an interesting problem domain with a great group of people, under a genuinely nice CEO. If Java's what I have to put up with to stay here, I can live with it.
But the thing is, I can't get paid to use Haskell or Lisp at my job or at any other publicly listed software development job within a hundred miles of my house.
I've been trying to come up with a business model that lets me write my own software in a functional language and keep my kids in school and my mortgage paid. But I haven't found anything yet. So for the moment, I'm stuck with Java to pay the bills.
I realize Design Patterns are hype to overcome language limits. But since I'm not a wealthy retiree with the freedom to spend my time writing only code that interests me, the patterns are the best I can do to reduce some portion of the frustrations of Java development.
I don't know your particular situation. For us, we have all sorts of bizarre object relationships. But if we did enough hunting through the Hibernate documentation, we found some way to support them. It wasn't always optimal or as object-oriented as we would like on the Java side, but it worked and performance was acceptable.
Seconded. Learning Hibernate was really difficult for me. But now that I am comfortable with it, I can make it manage all sorts of intuitive and not-so-intuitive tables and table relationships.
Your position on Spring is interesting. I work with Java web stuff, and I was wondering which technology to pick up in my spare time to better prepare me for a future job.
From what you write, it sounds like Spring may be worth knowing because it's commonly used but definitely not worth adding to a new project in most cases.
As far as Hibernate... the learning curve on Hibernate is a bitch. But if you hunt around enough, you can configure it to work with almost any kind of weird table relationship. What would you use instead? Raw JDBC?
I think the point is important to clarify for people who legitimately don't know the difference. Not everyone who starts reading Slashdot and thedailywtf already understands good software engineering practices.
I've even worked with senior developers who think "cut and paste" is code reuse. Clearly they were not spending enough time on sites like this one.
Only if you know they're worn out questions. Most of the people here on Slashdot in this discussion aren't going to write to the OpenBSD mailing list, "I installed OpenBSD and now I can't play World of Warcraft! Help me!"
If someone writes the same question about one particular piece of software the eighty-fourth time, chances are good that they're not familiar with mailing list etiquette and how to research their problem. Flaming them makes you look like an ass and they won't even understand why they were rude. Politely referring them to a helpful resource - even if it's just a generic web FAQ on researching help before writing to the mailing list - would be far better, and take just as much time.
I use TrueCrypt to hide my financial data and pornography at home, and the performance is perfectly fine.
But we also run PostgreSQL database off of TrueCrypt encrypted disks at work, because we have laptops and workstations with patient data. PostgreSQL running on unencrypted drives is noticeably faster.
If this researcher really is running complex calculations, the difference could be crucial.
At our company, CVS is adequate to our revision control needs in every way save speed.
Any replacement we check needs to meet or exceed CVS feature-for-feature. As far as I know, SVN, HG, Git, Mercurial and for that matter DARCS all do that. But in order to be worth the switch, they also need to be significantly quicker.
I prefer Linux to Windows. But for many companies, the cost of installing Linux (in time, not licenses) and retraining the staff exceeds the cost of the Microsoft licenses.
Windows is a headache, but it's not enough of a headache at many places for them to migrate. I want that to change, but my personal preference and yours doesn't change the reality.
http://www.iihs.org/ratings/ratingsbyseries.aspx?id=328
Good rating in the front offset crash test by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety (IIHS), which has harsher crash tests than the US government. Poor in the IIHS side midsize SUV crash test when tested without side curtain airbags (but every small car gets a Poor rating in that test when side curtain airbags are absent).
http://www.iihs.org/ratings/default.aspx
Considering the fact that the Focus got an update for model year 2008 and that between the Focus' 2000 introduction and now Ford has introduced 9 vehicles with the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety "Best Safety Pick" rating (15 if you count platform sharing and rebadges), it's possible the new Focus fares even better.
Do you have any facts to justify your assertion that's a deathtrap, other than the fact that smaller vehicles are inherently less safe due to the laws of Physics?
I think it's possible that functional programming is not harder than procedural programming.
The problem is that we are taught procedural programming and shown procedural programming in all of our CS courses, and we become accustomed to thinking of our languages and the work we have to design in procedural language ways.
So when we're introduced to functional programming, we have years of very different thinking we have to fight through before we can wrap our head around functional stuff.
So those Haskell type headaches and puzzling ideas might be simplicity itself for a software developer who started with Haskell.
I could be wrong about this. I had six years as an (admittedly at best mediocre) C, C++ and Java developer under my belt before I tried to grasp Haskell. It seems really, really weird and difficult to me. But is my problem Haskell, or is my problem weird/bad/poor thinking because I automatically view everything through a C/C++/Java lense?
What's your superior alternative? I thought SQL query strings, possibly externalized with properties files or XML, was pretty common. Your query strings contain ? for parameter substitution or even better named parameters.
The only alternative I know of is building an API that transforms object-oriented queries into SQL. That's fine for simple queries, but when you need a complicated query things get ugly quickly.
All you really need is a good engineering team with disciplined code review. If you don't have that, you have other problems.
I meant "Petty cash" as a joke. Obviously $7.5 trillion is an unbelievable amount of money.
I was actually trying to point out the same thing you are: Solar is a workable solution for sustainable domestic energy production, but it's emphatically not realistic as a complete solution in the short term.
However, the Nevada Solar One plant uses this technology. It covers 400 acres of land, cost $266 million to build, and generates 134 million kwh of power per year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Solar_One
So we only need 28,477 additional solar plants like the Nevada Solar One to get all of our energy, 24 hours a day ( due to the solar heat storage ), from solar power. That's 17,800 square miles of solar plants and a production cost - before economies of scale kick in - of just $7.5 trillion.
Petty cash.
More seriously, building more plants like this as we can as part of a broader strategy to support domestic energy production - and domestic jobs - seems like a great idea to me.
Slashdot Mirror
spyrochaete didn't say anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if he also played World of Warcraft and just burned out on it.
Maybe I have attention problems, but it's exceedingly rare for me to play any PC game for 20 hours before I am bored to tears. Playing WoW month after month never worked for me. So playing Age of Conan 1 month here and 2 months there might.
I wouldn't lie. I would only list a Spring website or personal proficiency after I had actually built one or developed it, respectively.
But hoping that all HR screening processes are reasonable is rough. I've got three kids, if one job goes south for any reason I want to find a local replacement very fast.
If people think their religion is true, then breaking stuff is a moral obligation. You have to convince them they are incorrect.
So even if you aren't intent on getting them to reject religion, you still have to convince them the particular tenet of their belief focused on breaking things is wrong. The best way to do that is polite persuasion, not blanket statements like "science and religion are incompatible".
This code is so horrible I would rewrite it to be clearer.
Which is great until you need to read someone else's existing code and figure out what it does. Try explaining to the boss why you spent a week rewriting code that already passed QA because you couldn't understand operator precedence.
Besides, some of the Sun Java certification is silly stuff like that but a lot is standard APIs, appropriate classes (e.g. given a specific scenario, which java Collection is most appropriate?), serialization, etc...
I was already an experienced Java developer when I took the certification. Having to memorize all of those features made me much faster at writing new code and reading legacy code. The certification alone wouldn't be enough to make a good developer, but I really do believe my productivity benefitted from it.
I work at a company that uses Struts and Hibernate. Many of the places hiring senior Java devs near me want the candidate to be proficient in Spring. In my personal experience, simply writing a technology down on a resume without having any attached work experience does not carry any weight.
So what would you suggest? Writing an application with Spring and referencing the URL on the resume? Simply listing that I am proficient with it despite the lack of work experience? Or a Spring certification?
Now, anyone sufficiently motivated can learn all of that on their own. Which is fine. But why not get the piece of paper that confirms you have a strong grasp of most of the common language API?
All in all, I consider $30 for a study guide and $200 for the test money well spent. Now I'll agree with anyone that says a certification is no substitute for good experience and especially no substitute for a strong foundation in software engineering concepts. But a good certification is not a waste of time.
No matter how absurd you think religion is, you can't convince religious people to be reasonable by insulting them.
I didn't switch from fanatical Christian to atheist due to the people that insulted me. It was the ones who politely and patiently poked holes in my reasoning until I realized my beliefs were incorrect.
McCain: not the first white man to run for President or win a major party primary. Not his first Presidential run. Not involved in a long, tough primary. Not setting fundraising records. A skilled but not renowned orator.
Obama: first black man to win a major party primary. Obama's first Presidential run. Part of a long, tough primary. Set many fundraising records. Considered one of the best orators in the race from the beginning - though probably not the best (I thought Huckabee was a brilliant speaker, myself).
Obama won the media attention and the campaign the same way that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan won, by hammering on a message of optimism and outlining plans for the future. McCain had a far harder task - he had to reverse positions on all of those issues that made him an honorable, admirable maverick in order to win the nomination, and then downplay those reversals to win the general election.
That's cool. I work in an interesting problem domain with a great group of people, under a genuinely nice CEO. If Java's what I have to put up with to stay here, I can live with it.
Good point.
But the thing is, I can't get paid to use Haskell or Lisp at my job or at any other publicly listed software development job within a hundred miles of my house.
I've been trying to come up with a business model that lets me write my own software in a functional language and keep my kids in school and my mortgage paid. But I haven't found anything yet. So for the moment, I'm stuck with Java to pay the bills.
I realize Design Patterns are hype to overcome language limits. But since I'm not a wealthy retiree with the freedom to spend my time writing only code that interests me, the patterns are the best I can do to reduce some portion of the frustrations of Java development.
I don't know your particular situation. For us, we have all sorts of bizarre object relationships. But if we did enough hunting through the Hibernate documentation, we found some way to support them. It wasn't always optimal or as object-oriented as we would like on the Java side, but it worked and performance was acceptable.
What walls? Could you give examples or a link?
Seconded. Learning Hibernate was really difficult for me. But now that I am comfortable with it, I can make it manage all sorts of intuitive and not-so-intuitive tables and table relationships.
Your position on Spring is interesting. I work with Java web stuff, and I was wondering which technology to pick up in my spare time to better prepare me for a future job.
From what you write, it sounds like Spring may be worth knowing because it's commonly used but definitely not worth adding to a new project in most cases.
As far as Hibernate... the learning curve on Hibernate is a bitch. But if you hunt around enough, you can configure it to work with almost any kind of weird table relationship. What would you use instead? Raw JDBC?
I think the point is important to clarify for people who legitimately don't know the difference. Not everyone who starts reading Slashdot and thedailywtf already understands good software engineering practices.
I've even worked with senior developers who think "cut and paste" is code reuse. Clearly they were not spending enough time on sites like this one.
Only if you know they're worn out questions. Most of the people here on Slashdot in this discussion aren't going to write to the OpenBSD mailing list, "I installed OpenBSD and now I can't play World of Warcraft! Help me!"
If someone writes the same question about one particular piece of software the eighty-fourth time, chances are good that they're not familiar with mailing list etiquette and how to research their problem. Flaming them makes you look like an ass and they won't even understand why they were rude. Politely referring them to a helpful resource - even if it's just a generic web FAQ on researching help before writing to the mailing list - would be far better, and take just as much time.
I use TrueCrypt to hide my financial data and pornography at home, and the performance is perfectly fine.
But we also run PostgreSQL database off of TrueCrypt encrypted disks at work, because we have laptops and workstations with patient data. PostgreSQL running on unencrypted drives is noticeably faster.
If this researcher really is running complex calculations, the difference could be crucial.
At our company, CVS is adequate to our revision control needs in every way save speed.
Any replacement we check needs to meet or exceed CVS feature-for-feature. As far as I know, SVN, HG, Git, Mercurial and for that matter DARCS all do that. But in order to be worth the switch, they also need to be significantly quicker.
I prefer Linux to Windows. But for many companies, the cost of installing Linux (in time, not licenses) and retraining the staff exceeds the cost of the Microsoft licenses.
Windows is a headache, but it's not enough of a headache at many places for them to migrate. I want that to change, but my personal preference and yours doesn't change the reality.
http://www.safercar.gov/portal/site/safercar/menuitem.94b0130be143aeb342252f0835a67789/?vgnextoid=68adf2905bf54110VgnVCM1000002fd17898RCRD
4/4/5/4 stars in US government crash tests.
http://www.iihs.org/ratings/ratingsbyseries.aspx?id=328
Good rating in the front offset crash test by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety (IIHS), which has harsher crash tests than the US government. Poor in the IIHS side midsize SUV crash test when tested without side curtain airbags (but every small car gets a Poor rating in that test when side curtain airbags are absent).
http://www.iihs.org/research/hldi/composite_cls.aspx?cls=2&sort=name&sz=2
Slightly better than average medical losses and liability coverage for small cars in the US from model year 2004-2006.
http://www.iihs.org/ratings/default.aspx
Considering the fact that the Focus got an update for model year 2008 and that between the Focus' 2000 introduction and now Ford has introduced 9 vehicles with the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety "Best Safety Pick" rating (15 if you count platform sharing and rebadges), it's possible the new Focus fares even better.
Do you have any facts to justify your assertion that's a deathtrap, other than the fact that smaller vehicles are inherently less safe due to the laws of Physics?
Speaking as an experienced Java developer and a Python novice, I agree completely.
I think it's possible that functional programming is not harder than procedural programming.
The problem is that we are taught procedural programming and shown procedural programming in all of our CS courses, and we become accustomed to thinking of our languages and the work we have to design in procedural language ways.
So when we're introduced to functional programming, we have years of very different thinking we have to fight through before we can wrap our head around functional stuff.
So those Haskell type headaches and puzzling ideas might be simplicity itself for a software developer who started with Haskell.
I could be wrong about this. I had six years as an (admittedly at best mediocre) C, C++ and Java developer under my belt before I tried to grasp Haskell. It seems really, really weird and difficult to me. But is my problem Haskell, or is my problem weird/bad/poor thinking because I automatically view everything through a C/C++/Java lense?
What's your superior alternative? I thought SQL query strings, possibly externalized with properties files or XML, was pretty common. Your query strings contain ? for parameter substitution or even better named parameters.
The only alternative I know of is building an API that transforms object-oriented queries into SQL. That's fine for simple queries, but when you need a complicated query things get ugly quickly.
All you really need is a good engineering team with disciplined code review. If you don't have that, you have other problems.
I meant "Petty cash" as a joke. Obviously $7.5 trillion is an unbelievable amount of money.
I was actually trying to point out the same thing you are: Solar is a workable solution for sustainable domestic energy production, but it's emphatically not realistic as a complete solution in the short term.
I guess my skill at sarcasm is lacking.
Absolutely.
However, the Nevada Solar One plant uses this technology. It covers 400 acres of land, cost $266 million to build, and generates 134 million kwh of power per year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Solar_One
The CIA world fact book ( https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/us.html ) says the US used 3.816 trillion kwh.
So we only need 28,477 additional solar plants like the Nevada Solar One to get all of our energy, 24 hours a day ( due to the solar heat storage ), from solar power. That's 17,800 square miles of solar plants and a production cost - before economies of scale kick in - of just $7.5 trillion.
Petty cash.
More seriously, building more plants like this as we can as part of a broader strategy to support domestic energy production - and domestic jobs - seems like a great idea to me.