What management thinks "how come he made it work so quickly when the _product_ normally takes longer and has lots of bugs; cut allowed development time".
Seriously though if the prototype works then it's a product. Oh you mean it's got major bugs? Then it doesn't "work" (at least not properly). Or you mean it won't scale? Then can you ship it now and patch the parts that need to scale (management will probably want to wait until it actually breaks to commit resources)?
a great programmer can: 1) Evaluate the suitability of existing code for the task 2) Use the existing code appropriately 3) Write excellent readable, maintainable code when needed (and only when needed) to fill the gaps 4) Communicate well with the business to understand the problem and design a solution
5)... 6) Profit!
I wish I was a great programmer then I could cure world hunger, poverty and conflict and walk on water in my spare time....
Use-mention distinctions are not necessarily indicated by quotation marks.
In Warll's statement [GGP] "Google doesn't have 100% uptime" it was clear that Google is a placeholder for a real-referant and not a mention. But that real-referant is not *the company bearing the name "Google"* [GP] but a non-specific service of that same company.
But it seemed more pedantic to claim contrary to the Anon. Cow. [GP] that it was a mention, by which [of course] I do not mean it but Google.
Google is a company. Saying "Google doesn't have 100% uptime" makes as much sense as saying "Microsoft takes 40 minutes to install". What specifically are you trying to say?
If you're going to be pedantic... Google is not a company. Google is the name of a company.
Yes I'm sure someone can one up my pedantry, something about visual representations of sound tokens representing names, or somesuch...
Cars don't get anywhere close to 99.9%, since just a flat tire can take you out for a while, nevermind a broken transmition.
Example, I ordered a new shock absorber and was sent the wrong part... silly me removed the old one (broken) before checking the new one. Downtime 1 week = 2% (send back parts, order new ones from a company that knew what part they should have sent me!).
I'd guess adding up time for refuelling would give you less than 99.9% uptime.
I wonder if that show got a trademark on 'TWIKI' and if so, what would happen to the TWIKI.NET trademark?
That's not how trademarks work. They're not blanket restrictions against others use of the name (though people with huge amounts of money appear to be able to use them that way). Trademarks indicate the origin of a class of goods. Unless Twiki was registered to indicate the originator of software products then it's fair game - moreover sometimes multiple users can use a RTM in the same class provided their is no confusion. YMMV. Moreover trademarks are territorial.
NextWiki is a perfect follow on name (though the chat logs suggest it's taken) as it's probably not distinctive enough to be registered but includes the characters of Twiki. Perhaps LowFatWiki or PhatWiki or GotWiki or something would work too?
They could house the project in another jurisdiction and still call it TWiki if they want. It's not registered in Europe (just checked, http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tm/t-find/t-find-text ) but DentWiki and VetWiki are, so calling it $(String).tWiki is clearly not a problem.
If you switch to Deki, be prepared to fight with formatting a lot, including editing HTML directly to figure out why making one word bold makes the entire paragraph bold.
Sounds like MS Word last time I used it (quite a few years ago admittedly).
You're right, my bad, was addressing the question from POV of larger businesses wanting mindless drones. Yup, small business usually means huge investment (not just financial) in each employee. However, were you to be starting fresh under an adjusted tax regime you'd be looking at the take home pay after tax to decide the wage levels, no? In which case you'd adjust the wages down wouldn't you?
I've only used the new MS Office twice, fixing it on other peoples computers (!), the first time I was like WTF.. but it only took about 15 minutes to find where things were and fix the issues (I think one was changing default save format from docx to doc for interoperability; can't remember the other, was a few months ago now).
At first I thought, wow craptacular. But trying to asses the UI out of the historical context it does seem quite good. I was wondering if OOo was going to go the same way with 3.0, guess we'll have to wait for the community patch??
Were I to try to lower my employees' pay on the basis of their receipt of a tax break, wouldn't I be transferring their break to me? I would expect every one of them to quit should I pull such a stunt. With all due respect, you have your head up your ass.
But as is oft stated here "businesses are for profit". _Most_ businesses with shareholders wouldn't be bothered about screwing employees as long as profit isn't affected. That means for low-skilled low-paid that a tax break could easily mean a pay cut.. what're they going to do, quit? Thousands of other people want a job.
Like, how can you give a tax cut to 95% of Americans when nowhere near 95% of Americans actually pay net taxes?
Generally taxes are a percentage with a threshold underpin. I can give you a reduction of 2% in your tax burden whether you're above the threshold or not it only actually makes a difference to the amount you pay in one of those situations though. Percentages hey, who'd'a thunk. Moreover a reduction can be achieved by increasing the threshold to benefit the poorer tax payers.
Why is that a good thing? You're obviously not poor.
It makes it more worthwhile to earn more than the threshold and encourages employment. All people whether they currently pay or not can work harder and will get more of their "pie" should they breach the threshold.
Incidentally, we're about to have a 2nd child and will get a small amount of "child-tax credit" (as it's called in the UK) this means that we then have to pay more "domestic rates" (based on the value of your property/rent, reduced for low income occupiers) as our income has gone up by the amount of the tax credit and pushed us over a threshold. Whilst a change in the percentage above the threshold wouldn't affect us immediately it will when our baby comes along. Tax regimes are sometimes idiotic.
The bookkeeping says that the employer pays half of the tax, but that is a technicality. If the employee paid it all then supply and demand would raise wages by the amount the employer pays.
Of course businesses pay other taxes too. For example any profits are taxed with corporation tax in the UK.
Also if suddenly the tax regime was changed, so that employees were solely responsible for income tax, two things would happen IMHO. The percentage tax amount would be increased to allow for more non-payment and greater admin needed to recoup the same amount of tax. Second, wages would rise by a slightly smaller amount than the tax percentage in any sectors that rely on low-skilled workers.
Won't a caching server be far better though for a single user. Presumably for a small user-base most of the users are looking at different sites and there is very little crossover. For a single user they _may_ view the same pages every day or at least 90% of the same pages. Whilst those pages - eg Wikipedia, Slashdot, blogs - will change in their fresh textual and multimedia content most will only change a little in their graphical content.
This page shows a 260K download (49 requests) for an empty cache and 55K download (2 requests) for a primed cache (using YSlow for Firebug).
Youtube may still be a drain but not downloading the page "chrome" every time has to be a saving.
As an aside: What effect does increasing browser.cache.disk.capacity have in FF?
When rendering a big scene here, Safari will do it in a fraction of the time using 60mb of RAM, whereas Firefox 3.1beta's memory usage spirals out of control and into swap space.
Wow, 60 milli-bits of RAM, that's more than amazing!
When copyright was created it was to protect artistic work, music, writing, stories, images etc. It was designed to protect artistic endeavor.
The idea that you can copyright a fact, rather than its representation is just dumb.
In many jurisdictions databases, information independent of a specific presentation, are protected (to some extent) by copyright law - in Europe (and hence the UK where I am) a directive was made to add an additional "database right" (see eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right ) to ensure that pure information was fully protected.
That aside, some are arguing that you can't copyright a running order (schedule) - I'm sure DJs, radio stations and editors of "Top 100..." clips shows would disagree.
But the reason the web is largely non-standards compliant is little to do with innovation. How many non-standards compliant sites are that way because they include HTML5 or CSS3 code that hasn't been ratified as standard yet? Or because they're doing some funky DOM manipulation or whatever? No the sites are broken because people can't be arsed to fix them on the whole.
Innovation, as you say is messy, organic and almost by definition doesn't adhere to standards frameworks.. but I'd be prepared to bet that less than 1% of websites could really be classed as innovative.
Take Adobe's Kuler site for example, it's innovative but only in regard to the flash site embedded in the website - the website is just a simple frame to hold the flash site, does it validate? No. Why not? I'd have thought a company like Adobe would be embarrassed by such laxness.
Compare with colourlovers.com, which I think was the forerunner in this area, which implements it's site with XHTML. Does it validate, no, but it's doing a million more things with it's code.
One of these sites can claim the excuse that it's innovative, the other not. But neither seems a million miles away (most errors seem to be URL entity issues).
better analogy: in the early days of the railroad, there were many different track gauges. this made life hell for railroad car engineers who had to retrofit all of their designs. eventually, one gauge won out and standardization took place
What I'm saying is that it would be better if all the railroads had fit a standard gauge. Every passenger doesn't need to make their own railroad car - they can ride on one made for them, or if they want they can just build the car on a pre-made railroad truck (just the platform).
I think he means serious in that IE has (by my reckoning on the effect it's had on sites I've dev-ed on) added about 35% to website costs for anyone that has paid to have a website designed in the last 8 years. Wasting countless hours of time and costing businesses vast amounts of money.
Sure it's not as serious as the AIDS epidemic. But most people accept there are degrees of seriousness.
The flip-side is it's probably improved revenue for web designers in a bizarre sort of way.
Slashdot Mirror
What you say: "I have a working prototype."
What management hears: blah blah WORKING blah.
What management thinks "how come he made it work so quickly when the _product_ normally takes longer and has lots of bugs; cut allowed development time".
Seriously though if the prototype works then it's a product. Oh you mean it's got major bugs? Then it doesn't "work" (at least not properly). Or you mean it won't scale? Then can you ship it now and patch the parts that need to scale (management will probably want to wait until it actually breaks to commit resources)?
a great programmer can:
1) Evaluate the suitability of existing code for the task
2) Use the existing code appropriately
3) Write excellent readable, maintainable code when needed (and only when needed) to fill the gaps
4) Communicate well with the business to understand the problem and design a solution
5)...
6) Profit!
I wish I was a great programmer then I could cure world hunger, poverty and conflict and walk on water in my spare time ....
Err, yes, -ish.
Use-mention distinctions are not necessarily indicated by quotation marks.
In Warll's statement [GGP] "Google doesn't have 100% uptime" it was clear that Google is a placeholder for a real-referant and not a mention. But that real-referant is not *the company bearing the name "Google"* [GP] but a non-specific service of that same company.
But it seemed more pedantic to claim contrary to the Anon. Cow. [GP] that it was a mention, by which [of course] I do not mean it but Google.
Clear?
Google is a company. Saying "Google doesn't have 100% uptime" makes as much sense as saying "Microsoft takes 40 minutes to install". What specifically are you trying to say?
If you're going to be pedantic ... Google is not a company. Google is the name of a company.
Yes I'm sure someone can one up my pedantry, something about visual representations of sound tokens representing names, or somesuch ...
Cars don't get anywhere close to 99.9%, since just a flat tire can take you out for a while, nevermind a broken transmition.
Example, I ordered a new shock absorber and was sent the wrong part ... silly me removed the old one (broken) before checking the new one. Downtime 1 week = 2% (send back parts, order new ones from a company that knew what part they should have sent me!).
I'd guess adding up time for refuelling would give you less than 99.9% uptime.
Why is push better in practical terms than, say, a 1-minute pull?
How many "donuts" [sic] can you eat in a minute ...?
I wonder if that show got a trademark on 'TWIKI' and if so, what would happen to the TWIKI.NET trademark?
That's not how trademarks work. They're not blanket restrictions against others use of the name (though people with huge amounts of money appear to be able to use them that way). Trademarks indicate the origin of a class of goods. Unless Twiki was registered to indicate the originator of software products then it's fair game - moreover sometimes multiple users can use a RTM in the same class provided their is no confusion. YMMV. Moreover trademarks are territorial.
NextWiki is a perfect follow on name (though the chat logs suggest it's taken) as it's probably not distinctive enough to be registered but includes the characters of Twiki. Perhaps LowFatWiki or PhatWiki or GotWiki or something would work too?
They could house the project in another jurisdiction and still call it TWiki if they want. It's not registered in Europe (just checked, http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tm/t-find/t-find-text ) but DentWiki and VetWiki are, so calling it $(String).tWiki is clearly not a problem.
Perhaps Twiki.fk (fork / Falkland Islands)?
IANAIPL
If you switch to Deki, be prepared to fight with formatting a lot, including editing HTML directly to figure out why making one word bold makes the entire paragraph bold.
Sounds like MS Word last time I used it (quite a few years ago admittedly).
You're right, my bad, was addressing the question from POV of larger businesses wanting mindless drones. Yup, small business usually means huge investment (not just financial) in each employee. However, were you to be starting fresh under an adjusted tax regime you'd be looking at the take home pay after tax to decide the wage levels, no? In which case you'd adjust the wages down wouldn't you?
I've only used the new MS Office twice, fixing it on other peoples computers (!), the first time I was like WTF .. but it only took about 15 minutes to find where things were and fix the issues (I think one was changing default save format from docx to doc for interoperability; can't remember the other, was a few months ago now).
At first I thought, wow craptacular. But trying to asses the UI out of the historical context it does seem quite good. I was wondering if OOo was going to go the same way with 3.0, guess we'll have to wait for the community patch??
Were I to try to lower my employees' pay on the basis of their receipt of a tax break, wouldn't I be transferring their break to me? I would expect every one of them to quit should I pull such a stunt. With all due respect, you have your head up your ass.
But as is oft stated here "businesses are for profit". _Most_ businesses with shareholders wouldn't be bothered about screwing employees as long as profit isn't affected. That means for low-skilled low-paid that a tax break could easily mean a pay cut .. what're they going to do, quit? Thousands of other people want a job.
My toilet is overflowing, they're onto me...
Other than in a flood, does this ever happen - waste pipes are pretty wide, what the heck do you flush to block them, a dog?
As for the flood thing, could a very simple flap valve relieve (ahem) that problem?
Like, how can you give a tax cut to 95% of Americans when nowhere near 95% of Americans actually pay net taxes?
Generally taxes are a percentage with a threshold underpin. I can give you a reduction of 2% in your tax burden whether you're above the threshold or not it only actually makes a difference to the amount you pay in one of those situations though. Percentages hey, who'd'a thunk. Moreover a reduction can be achieved by increasing the threshold to benefit the poorer tax payers.
Why is that a good thing? You're obviously not poor.
It makes it more worthwhile to earn more than the threshold and encourages employment. All people whether they currently pay or not can work harder and will get more of their "pie" should they breach the threshold.
Incidentally, we're about to have a 2nd child and will get a small amount of "child-tax credit" (as it's called in the UK) this means that we then have to pay more "domestic rates" (based on the value of your property/rent, reduced for low income occupiers) as our income has gone up by the amount of the tax credit and pushed us over a threshold. Whilst a change in the percentage above the threshold wouldn't affect us immediately it will when our baby comes along. Tax regimes are sometimes idiotic.
The bookkeeping says that the employer pays half of the tax, but that is a technicality. If the employee paid it all then supply and demand would raise wages by the amount the employer pays.
Of course businesses pay other taxes too. For example any profits are taxed with corporation tax in the UK.
Also if suddenly the tax regime was changed, so that employees were solely responsible for income tax, two things would happen IMHO. The percentage tax amount would be increased to allow for more non-payment and greater admin needed to recoup the same amount of tax. Second, wages would rise by a slightly smaller amount than the tax percentage in any sectors that rely on low-skilled workers.
Won't a caching server be far better though for a single user. Presumably for a small user-base most of the users are looking at different sites and there is very little crossover. For a single user they _may_ view the same pages every day or at least 90% of the same pages. Whilst those pages - eg Wikipedia, Slashdot, blogs - will change in their fresh textual and multimedia content most will only change a little in their graphical content.
This page shows a 260K download (49 requests) for an empty cache and 55K download (2 requests) for a primed cache (using YSlow for Firebug).
Youtube may still be a drain but not downloading the page "chrome" every time has to be a saving.
As an aside: What effect does increasing browser.cache.disk.capacity have in FF?
Worth a shot anyway - what have you got to lose?
Time, money, sanity, wife? Did I miss anything?
Hmm, I think you missed the ascerbic edge in the GP. He wasn't trying to suggest that sponges can't soak up water .... [rolls eyes]
24ft implies a 6ft square room, that doesn't sound huge to me, or did I miss something?
When rendering a big scene here, Safari will do it in a fraction of the time using 60mb of RAM, whereas Firefox 3.1beta's memory usage spirals out of control and into swap space.
Wow, 60 milli-bits of RAM, that's more than amazing!
OT: why do you have a monkey next to your name?
When copyright was created it was to protect artistic work, music, writing, stories, images etc. It was designed to protect artistic endeavor.
The idea that you can copyright a fact, rather than its representation is just dumb.
In many jurisdictions databases, information independent of a specific presentation, are protected (to some extent) by copyright law - in Europe (and hence the UK where I am) a directive was made to add an additional "database right" (see eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right ) to ensure that pure information was fully protected.
That aside, some are arguing that you can't copyright a running order (schedule) - I'm sure DJs, radio stations and editors of "Top 100 ..." clips shows would disagree.
But the reason the web is largely non-standards compliant is little to do with innovation. How many non-standards compliant sites are that way because they include HTML5 or CSS3 code that hasn't been ratified as standard yet? Or because they're doing some funky DOM manipulation or whatever? No the sites are broken because people can't be arsed to fix them on the whole.
Innovation, as you say is messy, organic and almost by definition doesn't adhere to standards frameworks .. but I'd be prepared to bet that less than 1% of websites could really be classed as innovative.
Take Adobe's Kuler site for example, it's innovative but only in regard to the flash site embedded in the website - the website is just a simple frame to hold the flash site, does it validate? No. Why not? I'd have thought a company like Adobe would be embarrassed by such laxness.
Compare with colourlovers.com, which I think was the forerunner in this area, which implements it's site with XHTML. Does it validate, no, but it's doing a million more things with it's code.
One of these sites can claim the excuse that it's innovative, the other not. But neither seems a million miles away (most errors seem to be URL entity issues).
better analogy: in the early days of the railroad, there were many different track gauges. this made life hell for railroad car engineers who had to retrofit all of their designs. eventually, one gauge won out and standardization took place
What I'm saying is that it would be better if all the railroads had fit a standard gauge. Every passenger doesn't need to make their own railroad car - they can ride on one made for them, or if they want they can just build the car on a pre-made railroad truck (just the platform).
OK, gotcha, thanks for explaining - still sounds like a feature request but I see the utility. Sometimes an extra click is one too many.
I think he means serious in that IE has (by my reckoning on the effect it's had on sites I've dev-ed on) added about 35% to website costs for anyone that has paid to have a website designed in the last 8 years. Wasting countless hours of time and costing businesses vast amounts of money.
Sure it's not as serious as the AIDS epidemic. But most people accept there are degrees of seriousness.
The flip-side is it's probably improved revenue for web designers in a bizarre sort of way.