I care about the consequences of sexism towards men, FWIW. I had a female supervisor who used to say sexist things and expect me to agree with them when a) I didn't and b) there were 8 guys in the room that I had to work with. It was very uncomfortable.
I used to use Eclipse when I was primarily doing Java development with a little bit of PHP support but now that I've changed jobs and almost exclusively work in PHP I use NetBeans. PHP support seems to be a lot better integrated and debugging was easy to get working. The only real issue I have with NetBeans is that it doesn't support as many languages - I occasionally need to work in Perl and it's pretty weak for that.
I'm concerned that with Oracle purchasing Sun and having their own IDE that Oracle will kill off support for NetBeans. Their announcement that the next JavaOne won't include presentations about other languages that use the JVM looks to be a portent.
I was also surprised that so many of these tools are Windows-only since PHP is usually the P in LAMP.
I am a woman. I am also a programmer, and I love football. I don't have a problem with the idea that for the most part men and women are interested in different things and want to pursue different types of careers. I do believe however that if a person has the desire and aptitude for a particular career that they should be able to pursue it even if it is not a traditional one.
Anecdotally, I was discouraged from pursuing computer science when I was younger. I wasn't allowed to play football either.;) So I feel pretty strongly about providing opportunities for those who want them. Both ways though - if a man wants to be a nurse then he should be treated equally in his nursing program.
That is a good question though, and one I haven't thought about before - why aren't there more female plumbers? It would be a pretty good career path in that it pays fairly well and there's steady work.
I was thinking something similar; the hardest part of moving between projects is picking up the domain knowledge rather than the technology. Standardizing languages/tools/IDEs/etc does very little to address this.
If it were my company I would be interested in finding out the real problem that the PHBs are trying to solve. Are there too many different toolsets in use or do they think that by standardizing they will make everyone into neat little interchangeable cogs?
I worked for a company owned by a bank. The bank had its own developers and their PHBs wanted to standardize on languages (C# in this case) so that our teams would be completely interchangeable. They had this pipe dream that if one of our team members was out for a couple of weeks that they could send up one of theirs to as a drop-in replacement, and vice versa. The problem with that is that our company was doing something completely different and a replacement wouldn't be able to learn the business processes quickly enough in such a short time to do anything useful. The PHBs acknowledged that this was an issue but refused to abandon the idea that someday, somehow, our teams would be completely interchangeable.
Actually, a TV is just a display for console gaming. I can't remember the last time I actually sat down and watched a complete show. Too many advertisements and I'd rather play Mass Effect.
But I learned sooo much from those mistakes that it is ingrained in me to enjoy failing because the path to the solution rewards so much more than the solution itself.
Thank you for your comment; it's one of the most insightful things I've ever read on Slashdot. I still struggle with a fear of failure and getting a different perspective is extremely helpful.
I'm currently on my 7th console (waiting for my 4th or 8th to be shipped back to me, depending on if they fix or replace it) so I can certainly understand thoughts of moving to a PS3. I really like epic RPGs and the 360 has more of them than the PS3 does right now. If Mass Effect 2 comes out for PS3 I'd be very tempted though.
It's pretty expensive but if you play a lot of Rock Band it makes the experience much better. I found that my accuracy improved and my leg didn't get as tired playing. Alternatively you can apparently make a replacement pedal using any drum pedal from an electronic drum set and an adapter but I didn't already have an electronic drum set and couldn't find a pedal for one that was any cheaper than this.
I also stopped playing PC games because of intrusive copy protection. I used to buy a couple of games a month but now I've switched to console gaming. I know there's still DRM but it's never stopped me from playing a game that I bought.
I can see the hardware lockin, but software lockin? Are you referring to the OS? Both Linux and Windows will run on a Mac (well technically Windows will only run on an Intel Mac and some Linux distros are dropping support for PPC). Part of the reason I felt comfortable trying a Mac is that if I didn't like the OS I could install Linux on the machine and still use it.
As for applications I'm not sure how lockin would work there either. If you were running commercial apps on Windows you'd have to repurchase the Mac versions, but I don't think there are that many apps that are OS X only.
So the price of admission is buying the hardware but after that I can't see where lockin applies. It seems like you have more choices with a Mac because you have the option of running OS X.
I saw a Sony representative speak at JavaOne this year. Blu-Ray supports Java so they had sponsored a day of Blu-Ray. He said that one of the things Blu-Ray movies can do is download updates to trailers. So if you buy Spider-Man 3 on Blu-Ray and later on Spider-Man 4 is released Spider-Man 3 can be updated with the new trailers. Presumably this would work for ads as well.
Unfortunately there was no question and answer session for this talk. The Sony executive indicated that it was a big selling point for the studios, but I would have like to asked why I would want this "feature" as a consumer.
Yeah, I read that page and thought it was retarded. It wouldn't even be worth dissecting in a first year critical thinking class when they cover strawmen. Even if the entire class was retarded too.
And check out this little gem on his Vista page:
Windows Vista has modest minimum system requirements that everyone with a system from within the last 5 years should have no problem meeting.
But, they used to buy MORE than they do now. And the form in which you usually buy it (say, on a CD) remains available. What's changed is that people are no longer willing to pay what the artists ask for their recordings because they've found an easy way to rip it off, instead.
Hasn't the number of CDs produced each year gone down? Wouldn't that have something to do with sales being lower? I also read an interesting article once (posted on Slashdot, I think) that hypothesized that cell phones were the biggest reason music sales were down. That seems far more plausible to me than piracy.
If people would rather pirate music than buy it, then explain to me why iTunes and AllOfMP3 are successful. Perhaps they provide a product and service people are willing to pay for? I believe that if the RIAA set up an AllOfMP3-type site, with their whole catalog available at a reasonable cost with no DRM and a variety of formats to choose from, they could print money.
Personally I choose not to pirate music - I get all of my stuff through Magnatune or the occasional CD (preferably used). However, because the RIAA would rather sue their customers instead of changing their business model, leaving massive amounts of money on the table that is theirs for the taking if they would just offer a service to these same customers, I really don't care about other people's copyright infringement. Same goes for the MPAA.
But using open source tools and technologies to develop the software. I think "closed source" is a little disingenuous in this context because the source is not meant to be distributed.
A very small minority of programming jobs are in companies that produce software. The largest number of jobs are in corporations developing in house applications. The one I work for uses a fair amount of free software. We have quite a bit of Microsoft too, unfortunately.
Personally I would rather earn a modest living working with and supporting open source software than work for a company producing closed source. But that's just me, and there's nothing wrong with taking the best job you can get, open source or closed.
I don't think the (entire) problem with the SCO case is that the lawyers don't know what they're doing, it's that they don't have anything to work with. Their lawyers are trying every creative stall tactic they can think of, and then trying more, just to get out of having to finally break down and admit that they have absolutely nothing - no evidence, no lines of infringing code, no case.
With 235 possible infringing patents Microsoft has a lot more to work with. I believe that most of the patents will be found invalid and the rest will be worked around, but the process will take time and money.
I wonder if litigation is really in their best interest though. Part of the reason IBM is defending themselves so vigorously against SCO is to defend against the implication that they were behaving unethically; donating someone else's copyrighted code in bad faith to Linux. IBM makes a good deal of money supplying products and consulting services based around Linux. Wouldn't IBM's business be threatened by implications of intellectual property problems? Does Microsoft really want to go up against IBM over patents? Whatever you may think of SCO's legal team, IBM's is frighteningly competent.
If ease of install is high on your priority list then I wouldn't recommend Gentoo. Something like Mandriva or Ubuntu would be much better - with those you just stick in the disk, click Next a couple of times, wait about 20 minutes, and you're done.
I liked Mandrake. It recognized more hardware than any other distro I'd used, and it was so easy to deal with that it was a nice gentle introduction to Linux. But after using it a while I wanted to try something else where I could learn a little bit more about how things worked under the hood. Gentoo was the first distro I tried and I liked it so much I stayed with it.
It's been argued that Gentoo is sort of a ricer version of Linux from Scratch. I can understand that point. I didn't use it thinking I was doing the same thing as rolling my own distro. I learn by applying things, by finding patterns and extending them to understand how other things work. Gentoo was perfect for me, because it handheld me through installing it and I got enough exposure to the inner workings to get a foundation of how the whole thing worked. So that later on when I was having some weird problem I could remember back to some file that I had copied and pasted from the installation instructions and realize that it was related to the issue I was having, where to find it, and why what I had done initially wasn't working anymore.
I don't think that Gentoo is going to be the right distro for everyone and it certainly isn't Linux from Scratch. It's a fairly safe first start in that direction if you'd like to go there though.
I would also recommend Gentoo. I used Mandrake for 2 years when I first started with Linux. It was a nice distro and everything just worked, but I didn't think I was really learning anything since I didn't have to mess with it. I tried Gentoo out and felt that I learned more in the first week trying to get it installed than I had in my previous 2 years of Mandrake. Another even more hardcore route to go would be installing Linux from Scratch.
Aside from distro forums and Google I've found a couple of books to be especially helpful.
Slashdot Mirror
I care about the consequences of sexism towards men, FWIW. I had a female supervisor who used to say sexist things and expect me to agree with them when a) I didn't and b) there were 8 guys in the room that I had to work with. It was very uncomfortable.
I used to use Eclipse when I was primarily doing Java development with a little bit of PHP support but now that I've changed jobs and almost exclusively work in PHP I use NetBeans. PHP support seems to be a lot better integrated and debugging was easy to get working. The only real issue I have with NetBeans is that it doesn't support as many languages - I occasionally need to work in Perl and it's pretty weak for that.
I'm concerned that with Oracle purchasing Sun and having their own IDE that Oracle will kill off support for NetBeans. Their announcement that the next JavaOne won't include presentations about other languages that use the JVM looks to be a portent.
I was also surprised that so many of these tools are Windows-only since PHP is usually the P in LAMP.
Truth is an absolute defense against libel.
Mine scratched my discs even though I never moved the console.
I am a woman. I am also a programmer, and I love football. I don't have a problem with the idea that for the most part men and women are interested in different things and want to pursue different types of careers. I do believe however that if a person has the desire and aptitude for a particular career that they should be able to pursue it even if it is not a traditional one.
;) So I feel pretty strongly about providing opportunities for those who want them. Both ways though - if a man wants to be a nurse then he should be treated equally in his nursing program.
Anecdotally, I was discouraged from pursuing computer science when I was younger. I wasn't allowed to play football either.
That is a good question though, and one I haven't thought about before - why aren't there more female plumbers? It would be a pretty good career path in that it pays fairly well and there's steady work.
I use Vista and I hate it. Although I will grant that it became more tolerable after the first service pack.
I was thinking something similar; the hardest part of moving between projects is picking up the domain knowledge rather than the technology. Standardizing languages/tools/IDEs/etc does very little to address this.
If it were my company I would be interested in finding out the real problem that the PHBs are trying to solve. Are there too many different toolsets in use or do they think that by standardizing they will make everyone into neat little interchangeable cogs?
I worked for a company owned by a bank. The bank had its own developers and their PHBs wanted to standardize on languages (C# in this case) so that our teams would be completely interchangeable. They had this pipe dream that if one of our team members was out for a couple of weeks that they could send up one of theirs to as a drop-in replacement, and vice versa. The problem with that is that our company was doing something completely different and a replacement wouldn't be able to learn the business processes quickly enough in such a short time to do anything useful. The PHBs acknowledged that this was an issue but refused to abandon the idea that someday, somehow, our teams would be completely interchangeable.
Actually, a TV is just a display for console gaming. I can't remember the last time I actually sat down and watched a complete show. Too many advertisements and I'd rather play Mass Effect.
Thank you for your comment; it's one of the most insightful things I've ever read on Slashdot. I still struggle with a fear of failure and getting a different perspective is extremely helpful.
I'm currently on my 7th console (waiting for my 4th or 8th to be shipped back to me, depending on if they fix or replace it) so I can certainly understand thoughts of moving to a PS3. I really like epic RPGs and the 360 has more of them than the PS3 does right now. If Mass Effect 2 comes out for PS3 I'd be very tempted though.
I had similar problems and bought a third party replacement pedal:
Rock Pedal
It's pretty expensive but if you play a lot of Rock Band it makes the experience much better. I found that my accuracy improved and my leg didn't get as tired playing. Alternatively you can apparently make a replacement pedal using any drum pedal from an electronic drum set and an adapter but I didn't already have an electronic drum set and couldn't find a pedal for one that was any cheaper than this.
http://www.bernardbelanger.com/computing/NaDa/
I was going to ask how you knew this and then decided that I didn't want to know.
I also stopped playing PC games because of intrusive copy protection. I used to buy a couple of games a month but now I've switched to console gaming. I know there's still DRM but it's never stopped me from playing a game that I bought.
I can see the hardware lockin, but software lockin? Are you referring to the OS? Both Linux and Windows will run on a Mac (well technically Windows will only run on an Intel Mac and some Linux distros are dropping support for PPC). Part of the reason I felt comfortable trying a Mac is that if I didn't like the OS I could install Linux on the machine and still use it.
As for applications I'm not sure how lockin would work there either. If you were running commercial apps on Windows you'd have to repurchase the Mac versions, but I don't think there are that many apps that are OS X only.
So the price of admission is buying the hardware but after that I can't see where lockin applies. It seems like you have more choices with a Mac because you have the option of running OS X.
I saw a Sony representative speak at JavaOne this year. Blu-Ray supports Java so they had sponsored a day of Blu-Ray. He said that one of the things Blu-Ray movies can do is download updates to trailers. So if you buy Spider-Man 3 on Blu-Ray and later on Spider-Man 4 is released Spider-Man 3 can be updated with the new trailers. Presumably this would work for ads as well.
Unfortunately there was no question and answer session for this talk. The Sony executive indicated that it was a big selling point for the studios, but I would have like to asked why I would want this "feature" as a consumer.
And check out this little gem on his Vista page: Windows Vista has modest minimum system requirements that everyone with a system from within the last 5 years should have no problem meeting.
Hasn't the number of CDs produced each year gone down? Wouldn't that have something to do with sales being lower? I also read an interesting article once (posted on Slashdot, I think) that hypothesized that cell phones were the biggest reason music sales were down. That seems far more plausible to me than piracy.
If people would rather pirate music than buy it, then explain to me why iTunes and AllOfMP3 are successful. Perhaps they provide a product and service people are willing to pay for? I believe that if the RIAA set up an AllOfMP3-type site, with their whole catalog available at a reasonable cost with no DRM and a variety of formats to choose from, they could print money.
Personally I choose not to pirate music - I get all of my stuff through Magnatune or the occasional CD (preferably used). However, because the RIAA would rather sue their customers instead of changing their business model, leaving massive amounts of money on the table that is theirs for the taking if they would just offer a service to these same customers, I really don't care about other people's copyright infringement. Same goes for the MPAA.
But using open source tools and technologies to develop the software. I think "closed source" is a little disingenuous in this context because the source is not meant to be distributed.
A very small minority of programming jobs are in companies that produce software. The largest number of jobs are in corporations developing in house applications. The one I work for uses a fair amount of free software. We have quite a bit of Microsoft too, unfortunately.
Personally I would rather earn a modest living working with and supporting open source software than work for a company producing closed source. But that's just me, and there's nothing wrong with taking the best job you can get, open source or closed.
I don't think the (entire) problem with the SCO case is that the lawyers don't know what they're doing, it's that they don't have anything to work with. Their lawyers are trying every creative stall tactic they can think of, and then trying more, just to get out of having to finally break down and admit that they have absolutely nothing - no evidence, no lines of infringing code, no case.
With 235 possible infringing patents Microsoft has a lot more to work with. I believe that most of the patents will be found invalid and the rest will be worked around, but the process will take time and money.
I wonder if litigation is really in their best interest though. Part of the reason IBM is defending themselves so vigorously against SCO is to defend against the implication that they were behaving unethically; donating someone else's copyrighted code in bad faith to Linux. IBM makes a good deal of money supplying products and consulting services based around Linux. Wouldn't IBM's business be threatened by implications of intellectual property problems? Does Microsoft really want to go up against IBM over patents? Whatever you may think of SCO's legal team, IBM's is frighteningly competent.
Agreed - I have a Wii, 360, and PS2. If a game is cross platform I prefer to buy it for the Wii since the controls make it more fun.
If ease of install is high on your priority list then I wouldn't recommend Gentoo. Something like Mandriva or Ubuntu would be much better - with those you just stick in the disk, click Next a couple of times, wait about 20 minutes, and you're done.
I liked Mandrake. It recognized more hardware than any other distro I'd used, and it was so easy to deal with that it was a nice gentle introduction to Linux. But after using it a while I wanted to try something else where I could learn a little bit more about how things worked under the hood. Gentoo was the first distro I tried and I liked it so much I stayed with it.
It's been argued that Gentoo is sort of a ricer version of Linux from Scratch. I can understand that point. I didn't use it thinking I was doing the same thing as rolling my own distro. I learn by applying things, by finding patterns and extending them to understand how other things work. Gentoo was perfect for me, because it handheld me through installing it and I got enough exposure to the inner workings to get a foundation of how the whole thing worked. So that later on when I was having some weird problem I could remember back to some file that I had copied and pasted from the installation instructions and realize that it was related to the issue I was having, where to find it, and why what I had done initially wasn't working anymore.
I don't think that Gentoo is going to be the right distro for everyone and it certainly isn't Linux from Scratch. It's a fairly safe first start in that direction if you'd like to go there though.
Aside from distro forums and Google I've found a couple of books to be especially helpful.