Actually the second monitor at my work desk is personally bought, not work provided. Ditto for the keyboard and mouse - I really like that specific set and it's not commercially available anymore.
At maybe $200 total in gear, I honestly don't care who pays for it - even if I pay for it - just don't hassle me about having it on my desk. I'm here to get shit done.
Multiple monitors usually mean video cards that are outrageously priced for the performance they deliver.
Are you serious? I'm reading slashdot on the third monitor on my desk and it's plugged into a PCI NVidia 5200 card - cost you about $15 brand new if you looked for one. The other two monitors are plugged into an older NVidia 7600GS that would still cost you less than a good bottle of scotch.
Three monitors set up on your desk, using decent hardware (not state of the art gamer gear) will still run you less than $500. Go with used monitors and middle of the road video cards (for simple graphics, like we use at work) and you could very likely do it for less than $300.
When my boss takes me out to dinner we spend more than that.
When I showed up on site I had a single 19" LCD. I mentioned to my client that I am easily 10% faster at what I do with a second monitor. A second used 19" was sitting on my desk the next morning - and true to my word I continue to be more than 10% more efficient than on a single monitor.
Ask my client whether it's a 'Need' or simply a 'Want' - they will explain that in their business world, they 'Need' me to have that second monitor.
Maybe I'm dense and missing something - are you seriously advocating for limiting the desktop real estate of software developers, or are you just trolling? 'Cause if you're trolling clue me in so I can take back all of the bad things I've thought about you.
Three 20" 1600x1200 monitors at home. A 1920x1080 15" laptop flanked by 22" 1680x1050 display on either side at work (so effectively 3 monitors wide at work.) Most of the time all three are being used to full capacity at work (at home not so much.)
Given that I like your resume (anybody that coded in Pascal is ok in my book) - work with me on this one. I honestly couldn't consider recommending a guy that would argue in public against giving a developer a second monitor, at a cost of maybe $150. If one of my developers is even one minute more productive per day, the break even point is less than three months - and I know I'm way more than 60 seconds more productive per day with my setup.
But smart coders will actually think about what the spec is trying to accomplish and realize that it's incomplete. It's the difference between blindly implementing feature requests and actually understanding what people are trying to do and solving the real problem.
And really, really good software engineers know that the approach to doing this is the written PCR - if the spec's as written don't fully meet the business requirements (or so the developer feels), it's his duty as a professional software engineer to inform the business that the original (agreed upon) spec's are incomplete via a Project Change Request, get them to sign off on the impact to the project (cost, scope, timeline, testing and QA, documentation, release date, etc..) Once the business (the people paying for the project) sign off in agreement, that developer is free to write the technical specs on the new functionality and have it reviewed in context by the business and other development members, then implement it.
It's the difference between a cowboy hacker going off on his own writing code he feels like writing and coming in weeks late and over budget, and a software engineer hitting his new date within his new budget (because part of the PCR was an agreed upon change in timeline and budget.) I've been both - cowboy hacker is fun, but professional software engineer keeps you in the good graces of the guys cutting checks.
Get on Steam and buy STALKER : Shadows of Chernobyl (the original). It is a few years old now and I can't imaging it costing you more than a few dollars. Play it from start to finish if you want a fairly real feel for what it is like to explore the zone. Seriously - trust me on this one.
When shut down, the backup and tertiary water sources are sufficient to keep the reactors safe.* -- Small print : * Not valid in case of massive tsunami or Godzilla attack.
Unless you are using multiple monitors, so the 'side' of the monitor you are on doesn't have a hard edge. Keep dragging - goes right onto the next monitor.
A million bucks worth of kit, smuggled out in a "small bag?!"
I'm guessing they are using 'cop math'.
My bet : they calculated that the small kit can be reproduced and / or reverse engineered, and the resulting copies will result in an overall loss to the original company over the sales life of the product, equaling one million dollars in losses.
In the end, the basic economics of it has dictated that it is cheaper to hot fix than to make it right the first time around.
What the OP failed to provide is the nature of the bugs his users are experiencing, the impact to the users and to the business, and the costs associated with the manifestation of those bugs.
If we're talking about user interface glitches where a button is not aligned with the others, the color of the button when pressed is wrong - then it is probably way cheaper to hot fix than to insure 100% quality the first pass. If we're talking about workflow and data errors in a financial application with regulatory implications, or bugs that bring the system down for an hour and the company loses five figures in revenue for each hour of downtime, that's a different story.
Testing doesn't necessarily save money. Saves pride and credibility more often than not, but as others are saying it isn't necessarily the most fiscally prudent choice. Neither is a wholesale re-write of 10 year old code (even though that's our first inclination when we inherit code.)
As an undergrad there were a few classes that I skipped the entire semester, only showing up to take (and ace) the exams. Showed up for the final exam and the prof didn't even recognize me, I had to prove I was in his class. Made the highest grade in his class, blew the curve for the rest of the kids.
When you hit college as a young adult, you aren't there because you have to be there (the gvmt isn't making you attend.) You are paying to addend classes to further your education, because you want to be there. If a kid wants to actually show up and not pay attention in class, that is his money going down the tubes and guess what - that's a lesson in and of itself. If a kid actually wants to learn and succeed, he will apply himself in class (or just cram for the exams the night before and walk in overcaffeinated and ace the exam anyways, as I recall.)
When the language is designed to have code run primarily in a linear fashion and doesn't (generally) nest the code into more than one layer deep, then a conditional GOTO is just the ticket for flow control. It's not 'harmful' any more than a hammer is 'harmful' - give either to a ten year old boy and he's going to make a mess, but used in proper context neither is particularly bad.
The funny thing is - all the GOTO bashing by the same people that salivate at the opportunity to throw random exceptions in their code, have them bubble up the call stack and get caught three calls up the stack. Guess what folks : that's the most gnarly and evil reincarnation of the GOTO most of us seasoned professionals have ever seen.
As for why BASIC is such a good beginners language - it has nothing to do with any of the above. It's about instant gratification - when newbies don't know the first thing about what makes a computer tick, being able to copy-type a few lines of text from a book and run it, then start tweaking it and seeing what the changes do - THAT is what hooks the new developer and gets his mind working. All this talk about OOP and high level languages - just scares them off. Get the fundamentals (the way, way low level fundamentals like what a variable is, that it holds a value, that the values can be changed and displayed on the screen, that you can do math on the variables) out of the way first - like showing a kid how to hold a hammer, that you only use it to hit nails on the head to drive them into wood, how the nails hold pieces of wood together - and BASIC is perfect for demonstrating those concepts without all the infrastructure surrounding bigger languages.
(And I can't believe I just defended the use of GOTO. Damn.)
Holy crap, you're right. SSDD disks (single sided, double density) were 360K on a side, and that's what we were using at a buck a piece.
The other trick was to drill out the notch on a 3.5" double density disk so the drive thought it was a high density, upping the space from 720K to 1.44M (highly recommended that you test the disk first with scratch data, as they didn't all work at the high density settings.)
I used to do this also (had a dedicated hole puncher made for the purpose - it was blue, as I recall.) I hypothesized that the problems (rare, but not unheard of) weren't from the media not being good enough, but because running the disk backwards gave all the grit and crap that got caught in the white soft layers of the cover a chance to come loose and get back onto the media, and occasionally onto the drive head.
But yea, given that a new ST 251-1 (40 meg hard drive) was $300~$400 at the time, being able to store 2.4 megabytes of data on a single $1 floppy disk seemed worth the risk.
Rockets at least can be built in somebody's garage
Actually I built two on the kitchen table this Thanksgiving after dinner. Took me about an hour, with a glass of good scotch in one hand during most of the construction. Cost me about $50 all inclusive (two rocket kit w/ launch pad, a dozen motors, and a glass of Glenrothes), and the larger of the two cleared the 1000' mark (~300 meters) on the second flight.
Here is the exact kit I used. They have two stage rockets that will clear 2000' for less than $50.
When we stand on the shoulders of giants, even rocket science isn't rocket science anymore.
I picked up Buckyballs thinking I would give them to a five year old (not mine) for Christmas - but ended up popping them open to 'become educated on how they work in case he asks me.' Yea, they're pretty thought provoking even for an adult.
Evidently a string of magnetic balls exhibits a strong magnetic field until they are looped into an endless single ball chain, at which point all of the magnetism seems to be contained within the chain itself and almost none of it is left to interact with the outside world.
Pulling on a single ball will cause the others to string together in a chain of single balls, and the magnetic attraction will be stronger to the adjacent balls in the chain than to other balls.
It's a pretty fun toy, but that whole 'eat the shiny balls = death' thing means he might get Legos instead.
Know what I remember being in short supply as a kid? Wheels.
We had access to all kinds of lumber, power tools, hammers and nails, and we all built go-carts from the ground up - they weren't marvels of engineering or anything like that, but they would have been pretty sweet go-carts (more like soap-box derby gravity powered cars) IF WE HAD WHEELS. Turns out no matter how well you design your vehicles using scrap materials from around the house, there really isn't a good substitute for a wheel with rubber on the outside and bearings on the inside to keep things spinning.
We even considered swiping shopping carts to salvage the wheels, but we were too young to have pulled it off.
Feed their dreams and encourage them to be little vehicle engineers, then go get them some wheels.
I was thinking along the lines of 'The Anarchist Cookbook' for a friend's five year old for Christmas. He already has a pooh-bear which was my first choice, but dangerous books come in a close second.
Funny. Actually last week was a friend's son's 5th birthday, and I showed up to the party with the Estes rocket complete with launchpad and a dozen motors. Nothing like building a few model rockets (from a box of chemicals and cardboard tubes) with a five year old and then taking them to the park to launch them 900' into the sky to pique a child's interest in science.
Just a thought - how about pricing tickets the same way Google priced their IPO? Dutch auction. Basically you have a large number of (tickets, stock - whatever) and you put them up for public auction. For each set of identical items, say there are 50 seats that are roughly the same 'value' - the top 50 bidders get the tickets at whatever price the 50th bid was - so you can bid astronomically high to insure you get a seat, but the seat prices are actually priced so everybody pays the same (the lowest still winning bid.) As silly as it sounds, I think ebay would be the ideal solution for concert tickets - but not one at a time, entire blocks at a time where the entire world has weeks to bid on them, and the auction doesn't close until a day or two before the concert insuring anybody that would have bought from a scalper was able to simply pay the current bid price on a ticket.
The proceeds go to the band in the form of higher ticket prices, all the tickets still sell out and the venue still packs to capacity.
The biggest concern I have with this whole story, though - might not even be the dollar amount involved. This is one of the first times I've heard about the RIAA going after someone that was downloading songs, instead of going after the people that were sharing (making available) the songs.
In this it's not even about lost profits multiplied by some magic math (made available to 10 people who made available to 10 people each etc.. = 100,000 shares of the song.) If they tagged her for just downloading the song (not making it available to 10^4 potential customers) - then we're talking about ONE copy. A million dollar fine for ONE copy? Now that takes scary / evil to the next level.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the second monitor at my work desk is personally bought, not work provided.
Ditto for the keyboard and mouse - I really like that specific set and it's not commercially available anymore.
At maybe $200 total in gear, I honestly don't care who pays for it - even if I pay for it - just don't hassle me about having it on my desk. I'm here to get shit done.
[ ] Smart.
[ ] Gets shit done.
Pick two.
Get a PCI nvidia 5200 used for about $5 on Craigslist. For non-gaming, esp since it will be your third monitor, it will work splendidly.
Multiple monitors usually mean video cards that are outrageously priced for the performance they deliver.
Are you serious? I'm reading slashdot on the third monitor on my desk and it's plugged into a PCI NVidia 5200 card - cost you about $15 brand new if you looked for one. The other two monitors are plugged into an older NVidia 7600GS that would still cost you less than a good bottle of scotch.
Three monitors set up on your desk, using decent hardware (not state of the art gamer gear) will still run you less than $500.
Go with used monitors and middle of the road video cards (for simple graphics, like we use at work) and you could very likely do it for less than $300.
When my boss takes me out to dinner we spend more than that.
I bill out at a buck fifty five an hour.
When I showed up on site I had a single 19" LCD. I mentioned to my client that I am easily 10% faster at what I do with a second monitor. A second used 19" was sitting on my desk the next morning - and true to my word I continue to be more than 10% more efficient than on a single monitor.
Ask my client whether it's a 'Need' or simply a 'Want' - they will explain that in their business world, they 'Need' me to have that second monitor.
Maybe I'm dense and missing something - are you seriously advocating for limiting the desktop real estate of software developers, or are you just trolling?
'Cause if you're trolling clue me in so I can take back all of the bad things I've thought about you.
Three 20" 1600x1200 monitors at home.
A 1920x1080 15" laptop flanked by 22" 1680x1050 display on either side at work (so effectively 3 monitors wide at work.)
Most of the time all three are being used to full capacity at work (at home not so much.)
Given that I like your resume (anybody that coded in Pascal is ok in my book) - work with me on this one. I honestly couldn't consider recommending a guy that would argue in public against giving a developer a second monitor, at a cost of maybe $150. If one of my developers is even one minute more productive per day, the break even point is less than three months - and I know I'm way more than 60 seconds more productive per day with my setup.
But smart coders will actually think about what the spec is trying to accomplish and realize that it's incomplete. It's the difference between blindly implementing feature requests and actually understanding what people are trying to do and solving the real problem.
And really, really good software engineers know that the approach to doing this is the written PCR - if the spec's as written don't fully meet the business requirements (or so the developer feels), it's his duty as a professional software engineer to inform the business that the original (agreed upon) spec's are incomplete via a Project Change Request, get them to sign off on the impact to the project (cost, scope, timeline, testing and QA, documentation, release date, etc..) Once the business (the people paying for the project) sign off in agreement, that developer is free to write the technical specs on the new functionality and have it reviewed in context by the business and other development members, then implement it.
It's the difference between a cowboy hacker going off on his own writing code he feels like writing and coming in weeks late and over budget, and a software engineer hitting his new date within his new budget (because part of the PCR was an agreed upon change in timeline and budget.) I've been both - cowboy hacker is fun, but professional software engineer keeps you in the good graces of the guys cutting checks.
Get on Steam and buy STALKER : Shadows of Chernobyl (the original). It is a few years old now and I can't imaging it costing you more than a few dollars.
Play it from start to finish if you want a fairly real feel for what it is like to explore the zone. Seriously - trust me on this one.
When shut down, the backup and tertiary water sources are sufficient to keep the reactors safe.*
--
Small print :
* Not valid in case of massive tsunami or Godzilla attack.
What works for me :
Will you work on my computer?
I only work on computers for women I'm dating. How's this weekend sound?
(Needless to say, I don't fix a lot of computers.)
Unless you are using multiple monitors, so the 'side' of the monitor you are on doesn't have a hard edge. Keep dragging - goes right onto the next monitor.
A million bucks worth of kit, smuggled out in a "small bag?!"
I'm guessing they are using 'cop math'.
My bet : they calculated that the small kit can be reproduced and / or reverse engineered, and the resulting copies will result in an overall loss to the original company over the sales life of the product, equaling one million dollars in losses.
In the end, the basic economics of it has dictated that it is cheaper to hot fix than to make it right the first time around.
What the OP failed to provide is the nature of the bugs his users are experiencing, the impact to the users and to the business, and the costs associated with the manifestation of those bugs.
If we're talking about user interface glitches where a button is not aligned with the others, the color of the button when pressed is wrong - then it is probably way cheaper to hot fix than to insure 100% quality the first pass.
If we're talking about workflow and data errors in a financial application with regulatory implications, or bugs that bring the system down for an hour and the company loses five figures in revenue for each hour of downtime, that's a different story.
Testing doesn't necessarily save money. Saves pride and credibility more often than not, but as others are saying it isn't necessarily the most fiscally prudent choice. Neither is a wholesale re-write of 10 year old code (even though that's our first inclination when we inherit code.)
Honestly - who cares?
As an undergrad there were a few classes that I skipped the entire semester, only showing up to take (and ace) the exams. Showed up for the final exam and the prof didn't even recognize me, I had to prove I was in his class. Made the highest grade in his class, blew the curve for the rest of the kids.
When you hit college as a young adult, you aren't there because you have to be there (the gvmt isn't making you attend.) You are paying to addend classes to further your education, because you want to be there. If a kid wants to actually show up and not pay attention in class, that is his money going down the tubes and guess what - that's a lesson in and of itself. If a kid actually wants to learn and succeed, he will apply himself in class (or just cram for the exams the night before and walk in overcaffeinated and ace the exam anyways, as I recall.)
When the language is designed to have code run primarily in a linear fashion and doesn't (generally) nest the code into more than one layer deep, then a conditional GOTO is just the ticket for flow control. It's not 'harmful' any more than a hammer is 'harmful' - give either to a ten year old boy and he's going to make a mess, but used in proper context neither is particularly bad.
The funny thing is - all the GOTO bashing by the same people that salivate at the opportunity to throw random exceptions in their code, have them bubble up the call stack and get caught three calls up the stack. Guess what folks : that's the most gnarly and evil reincarnation of the GOTO most of us seasoned professionals have ever seen.
As for why BASIC is such a good beginners language - it has nothing to do with any of the above. It's about instant gratification - when newbies don't know the first thing about what makes a computer tick, being able to copy-type a few lines of text from a book and run it, then start tweaking it and seeing what the changes do - THAT is what hooks the new developer and gets his mind working. All this talk about OOP and high level languages - just scares them off. Get the fundamentals (the way, way low level fundamentals like what a variable is, that it holds a value, that the values can be changed and displayed on the screen, that you can do math on the variables) out of the way first - like showing a kid how to hold a hammer, that you only use it to hit nails on the head to drive them into wood, how the nails hold pieces of wood together - and BASIC is perfect for demonstrating those concepts without all the infrastructure surrounding bigger languages.
(And I can't believe I just defended the use of GOTO. Damn.)
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Holy crap, you're right. SSDD disks (single sided, double density) were 360K on a side, and that's what we were using at a buck a piece.
The other trick was to drill out the notch on a 3.5" double density disk so the drive thought it was a high density, upping the space from 720K to 1.44M (highly recommended that you test the disk first with scratch data, as they didn't all work at the high density settings.)
I used to do this also (had a dedicated hole puncher made for the purpose - it was blue, as I recall.) I hypothesized that the problems (rare, but not unheard of) weren't from the media not being good enough, but because running the disk backwards gave all the grit and crap that got caught in the white soft layers of the cover a chance to come loose and get back onto the media, and occasionally onto the drive head.
But yea, given that a new ST 251-1 (40 meg hard drive) was $300~$400 at the time, being able to store 2.4 megabytes of data on a single $1 floppy disk seemed worth the risk.
Rockets at least can be built in somebody's garage
Actually I built two on the kitchen table this Thanksgiving after dinner. Took me about an hour, with a glass of good scotch in one hand during most of the construction.
Cost me about $50 all inclusive (two rocket kit w/ launch pad, a dozen motors, and a glass of Glenrothes), and the larger of the two cleared the 1000' mark (~300 meters) on the second flight.
Here is the exact kit I used. They have two stage rockets that will clear 2000' for less than $50.
When we stand on the shoulders of giants, even rocket science isn't rocket science anymore.
I picked up Buckyballs thinking I would give them to a five year old (not mine) for Christmas - but ended up popping them open to 'become educated on how they work in case he asks me.' Yea, they're pretty thought provoking even for an adult.
Evidently a string of magnetic balls exhibits a strong magnetic field until they are looped into an endless single ball chain, at which point all of the magnetism seems to be contained within the chain itself and almost none of it is left to interact with the outside world.
Pulling on a single ball will cause the others to string together in a chain of single balls, and the magnetic attraction will be stronger to the adjacent balls in the chain than to other balls.
It's a pretty fun toy, but that whole 'eat the shiny balls = death' thing means he might get Legos instead.
Know what I remember being in short supply as a kid?
Wheels.
We had access to all kinds of lumber, power tools, hammers and nails, and we all built go-carts from the ground up - they weren't marvels of engineering or anything like that, but they would have been pretty sweet go-carts (more like soap-box derby gravity powered cars) IF WE HAD WHEELS. Turns out no matter how well you design your vehicles using scrap materials from around the house, there really isn't a good substitute for a wheel with rubber on the outside and bearings on the inside to keep things spinning.
We even considered swiping shopping carts to salvage the wheels, but we were too young to have pulled it off.
Feed their dreams and encourage them to be little vehicle engineers, then go get them some wheels.
I was thinking along the lines of 'The Anarchist Cookbook' for a friend's five year old for Christmas.
He already has a pooh-bear which was my first choice, but dangerous books come in a close second.
Funny. Actually last week was a friend's son's 5th birthday, and I showed up to the party with the Estes rocket complete with launchpad and a dozen motors.
Nothing like building a few model rockets (from a box of chemicals and cardboard tubes) with a five year old and then taking them to the park to launch them 900' into the sky to pique a child's interest in science.
Just a thought - how about pricing tickets the same way Google priced their IPO?
Dutch auction. Basically you have a large number of (tickets, stock - whatever) and you put them up for public auction. For each set of identical items, say there are 50 seats that are roughly the same 'value' - the top 50 bidders get the tickets at whatever price the 50th bid was - so you can bid astronomically high to insure you get a seat, but the seat prices are actually priced so everybody pays the same (the lowest still winning bid.) As silly as it sounds, I think ebay would be the ideal solution for concert tickets - but not one at a time, entire blocks at a time where the entire world has weeks to bid on them, and the auction doesn't close until a day or two before the concert insuring anybody that would have bought from a scalper was able to simply pay the current bid price on a ticket.
The proceeds go to the band in the form of higher ticket prices, all the tickets still sell out and the venue still packs to capacity.
Dude calm down. This will fix it :
debug < G=C800:5
(Protip : Google random shit you find in a message thread before typing it on your computer.)
Probably not.
The biggest concern I have with this whole story, though - might not even be the dollar amount involved. This is one of the first times I've heard about the RIAA going after someone that was downloading songs, instead of going after the people that were sharing (making available) the songs.
In this it's not even about lost profits multiplied by some magic math (made available to 10 people who made available to 10 people each etc.. = 100,000 shares of the song.) If they tagged her for just downloading the song (not making it available to 10^4 potential customers) - then we're talking about ONE copy. A million dollar fine for ONE copy? Now that takes scary / evil to the next level.