Yes I'm aware of that for system commands, but I manage a fairly complex application on a set of servers. The application has a rich command line syntax but no knowledge of executing on a remote machine.
Windows admins, welcome to the real world. You might want to brush up on your reference manuals.
Ok that was snarky, but geeze, as a Unix admin from a time before Winders, I've been waiting for this for a looooong time.
And as the admin of a loose collection of Linux and Windows now, I'm soooo looking forward to dumping Remote Desktop. Oooh, not having to wait for my desktop to load before running one command. It makes me feel all warm and tingly.
Finally, something to look forward to in Windows 8.
> I have also seen companies with a turnover history due to replacing experienced workers with cheaper labor and this kind of culture will frighten engineers into a protective mode, and they won't comment their code for fear of getting replaced.
I'm living that dream right now; we've replaced a couple hundred experienced, in some cases brilliant IT people with convenience store shelf replenishers with only a few weeks training. So it does happen. And yes, it has been an unmitigated disaster.
The problem is, the people who make the decision are not the people equipped to understand the ramifications of uncommented code. Even when it's pointed out to them that they're going to lose a gigantic amount of crucial tribal knowledge, they'll go ahead, with dollar signs dancing in their eyes, and pull the ripcord anyway. And then what comes out of the bag is a bunch of camping gear instead of a parachute. (Sorry, I just flashed back to an old Road Runner cartoon.)
The point is, not documenting your code is not a good strategy for job retention, for the reason you state (when this behavior is spotted they're more likely to be replaced with someone who's better at documentation) and also for the reason that upper management isn't even aware that code has comments, or that it's not a "procedure", it's the culmination of a lot of knowledge and experience, which isn't easily replaced by a written set of instructions. I would also add that a crew who is secretive, doesn't work well together, and takes forever to fix stuff due to having to reverse-engineer their code, is more likely to be outsourced than people who are doing their jobs properly. I hasten to add, crap happens even to good teams (it did here) but it makes it easier to argue against the decision if you're defending a stellar team.
I always document my code. It saves time later. Six months down the road I'm not asking myself "why the hell did I do that?" It's for my own protection. I've had programmers tell me that they don't document their code because it's obvious what the code does, and sometimes that's true. But I think at least some of the resistance later to add features or fix bugs has to do with not wanting to struggle to remember what the code does. And -- this is just me, but -- you probably don't want to have a reputation for being uncooperative and not a team player in a down economy.
In a very early job, a guy with more credentials than I wrote a program we all used in a language I didn't know. There was a longstanding bug which he refused to fix [1], and he kept the source in a protected directory. So one night we broke into his account, I scooped the completely undocumented code, figured out the problem (had to change *one* (1) character!) and distributed the new binary. It took him awhile to figure out what happened. Boy was he pissed.
[1] Whether this was a dominance game or he really did not want to try to figure out the code he had written months earlier was a point lost in history.
Not to be too geeky, but I'd imagine the Enterprise routinely releasing several satellites when it moved into orbit to provide a communications and sensor infrastructure. But you're right, the communicators were intended to be used in the wild, so they would have to have the capability to communicate unit-to-unit also.
That's true. Two conflicting ideas occur to me. (a) it may be only important that the apps you need are suitable for touchscreen, and (b) that may be why it's important to pick a touch-only OS. Pick a KVM OS that has "some touch features", and as a practical matter, you'll always be going back to the mouse and keyboard to get any work done.
> Facebook: Sign up now, or you will die in a friendless, dark basement.
I thought it was: Sign up now, *and* eventually die in a friendless, dark basement, with 31,226 friends on your account, none of whom have ever shared a meal with you.
As free solutions get better and better, and the business model of pay solutions start to fail, we get to a point, I think, where the only alternative is to start writing viruses. It's definitely in their area of expertise.
> The difference, as he explains it, is that differentiation means manufacturers have a choice, they're going to compete on their view of innovation, and try to convince consumers that their innovation is better than somebody elses whereas fragmentation is quite the opposite.
I remember the days of Unix fragmentation, and the explanation above sounds like the exact definition of fragmentation.
I can't realistically take credit. What made me think of it was Lakin's excellent Tricorder app for Android (previously PalmOS) [1] which actually did useful things; only hampered by the device's lack of sensors.
[1] Shut down by CBS for copyright infringement or somesuch. As I understand the story, Roddenberry explicitly granted permission to use the concept, later rescinded by the network.
I heard the Skiffy or whatever the sci-fi channel is being called these days was planning to do Kardashians in Space. It's the next step, really -- reality science fiction shows. At first I was opposed, and then, I thought, sure, let's shoot them into the sun and watch as they burst into flames. I'd pay to see that.
Good point. Problem is, I am not chained to the TV (maybe that'll come later) nor is it a law yet that TVs not have an off switch (see Max Headroom) and advertisements suck. So other than prerecorded content, why have the TV on at all?
> Exactly. A screen should just be a screen. High resolution, low latency, great colour gamut, high frame-rate - sure, knock yourself out. Anything else will probably detract from the purchase.
The problem is, as a TV manufacturer, once you've done that, you've lost a repeat customer.
There is some truth to that. My last non-HD, tube-type TV (Sony XBR) lasted over 15 years. My first HDTV (a Sony Grand Wega -- google "wega lawsuit" for more info) lasted barely over a year. After a lot of fireworks, Sony finally replaced it (partially at our cost) with a Bravia, and now I hear that Bravias are catching fire. Clearly TVs are not considered the long term appliance they used to be.
But that doesn't make you throw out your old TV and buy a new one, which is what they want. Manufacturers want to see the churn they saw when they introduced "HD Ready" flat panel TVs that weren't really HD ready, and then sorta-funky HDTVs which would only do 1080i, and then full HDTVs that do full 1080p. 4K isn't ready yet, so the only solution they have is some intermediate step. People have not been swapping out their year-old HDTVs for 3D in large enough numbers, so they're trying this.
It's just something to tide them over until 4K content gets implemented and they can deprecate HDTV and force us to buy TVs again.
(I'm with you -- this sounds like the act of incorporating a non-repairable media player into your multi-thousand-dollar television. I have a reasonably large HDTV that I'm going to keep until it breaks and can't be fixed. It's connected to a several-year-old media center that's about to be swapped out.)
I want to see the sensor pack on a thumb-drive-sized micro-USB device that can plug into any smartphone... um, sorry, *many* smartphones... Then tell CBS to stop screwing with Kenneth Lakin and turn him loose on it.
Ooooh oooh oooh, make the sensor pack a Bluetooth device that looks vaguely like a chrome cigarette lighter!
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Yes I'm aware of that for system commands, but I manage a fairly complex application on a set of servers. The application has a rich command line syntax but no knowledge of executing on a remote machine.
> Shill or not, he has a point. Security within Windows and Internet Exploder have improved over the years.
How could it not? Alternate answer: Test by: Windows still exists as a product.
> Windows 7 is a very good OS, actually so good that Microsoft really needs to step up their game in windows 8 so that W7 won't become the new XP.
Why would that be a bad thing?
Windows admins, welcome to the real world. You might want to brush up on your reference manuals.
Ok that was snarky, but geeze, as a Unix admin from a time before Winders, I've been waiting for this for a looooong time.
And as the admin of a loose collection of Linux and Windows now, I'm soooo looking forward to dumping Remote Desktop. Oooh, not having to wait for my desktop to load before running one command. It makes me feel all warm and tingly.
Finally, something to look forward to in Windows 8.
> I have also seen companies with a turnover history due to replacing experienced workers with cheaper labor and this kind of culture will frighten engineers into a protective mode, and they won't comment their code for fear of getting replaced.
I'm living that dream right now; we've replaced a couple hundred experienced, in some cases brilliant IT people with convenience store shelf replenishers with only a few weeks training. So it does happen. And yes, it has been an unmitigated disaster.
The problem is, the people who make the decision are not the people equipped to understand the ramifications of uncommented code. Even when it's pointed out to them that they're going to lose a gigantic amount of crucial tribal knowledge, they'll go ahead, with dollar signs dancing in their eyes, and pull the ripcord anyway. And then what comes out of the bag is a bunch of camping gear instead of a parachute. (Sorry, I just flashed back to an old Road Runner cartoon.)
The point is, not documenting your code is not a good strategy for job retention, for the reason you state (when this behavior is spotted they're more likely to be replaced with someone who's better at documentation) and also for the reason that upper management isn't even aware that code has comments, or that it's not a "procedure", it's the culmination of a lot of knowledge and experience, which isn't easily replaced by a written set of instructions. I would also add that a crew who is secretive, doesn't work well together, and takes forever to fix stuff due to having to reverse-engineer their code, is more likely to be outsourced than people who are doing their jobs properly. I hasten to add, crap happens even to good teams (it did here) but it makes it easier to argue against the decision if you're defending a stellar team.
I always document my code. It saves time later. Six months down the road I'm not asking myself "why the hell did I do that?" It's for my own protection. I've had programmers tell me that they don't document their code because it's obvious what the code does, and sometimes that's true. But I think at least some of the resistance later to add features or fix bugs has to do with not wanting to struggle to remember what the code does. And -- this is just me, but -- you probably don't want to have a reputation for being uncooperative and not a team player in a down economy.
In a very early job, a guy with more credentials than I wrote a program we all used in a language I didn't know. There was a longstanding bug which he refused to fix [1], and he kept the source in a protected directory. So one night we broke into his account, I scooped the completely undocumented code, figured out the problem (had to change *one* (1) character!) and distributed the new binary. It took him awhile to figure out what happened. Boy was he pissed.
[1] Whether this was a dominance game or he really did not want to try to figure out the code he had written months earlier was a point lost in history.
Not to be too geeky, but I'd imagine the Enterprise routinely releasing several satellites when it moved into orbit to provide a communications and sensor infrastructure. But you're right, the communicators were intended to be used in the wild, so they would have to have the capability to communicate unit-to-unit also.
That's true. Two conflicting ideas occur to me. (a) it may be only important that the apps you need are suitable for touchscreen, and (b) that may be why it's important to pick a touch-only OS. Pick a KVM OS that has "some touch features", and as a practical matter, you'll always be going back to the mouse and keyboard to get any work done.
I'm a little disturbed that you know this...
> Facebook: Sign up now, or you will die in a friendless, dark basement.
I thought it was: Sign up now, *and* eventually die in a friendless, dark basement, with 31,226 friends on your account, none of whom have ever shared a meal with you.
As free solutions get better and better, and the business model of pay solutions start to fail, we get to a point, I think, where the only alternative is to start writing viruses. It's definitely in their area of expertise.
> The difference, as he explains it, is that differentiation means manufacturers have a choice, they're going to compete on their view of innovation, and try to convince consumers that their innovation is better than somebody elses whereas fragmentation is quite the opposite.
I remember the days of Unix fragmentation, and the explanation above sounds like the exact definition of fragmentation.
I can't realistically take credit. What made me think of it was Lakin's excellent Tricorder app for Android (previously PalmOS) [1] which actually did useful things; only hampered by the device's lack of sensors.
[1] Shut down by CBS for copyright infringement or somesuch. As I understand the story, Roddenberry explicitly granted permission to use the concept, later rescinded by the network.
I heard the Skiffy or whatever the sci-fi channel is being called these days was planning to do Kardashians in Space. It's the next step, really -- reality science fiction shows. At first I was opposed, and then, I thought, sure, let's shoot them into the sun and watch as they burst into flames. I'd pay to see that.
Good point. Problem is, I am not chained to the TV (maybe that'll come later) nor is it a law yet that TVs not have an off switch (see Max Headroom) and advertisements suck. So other than prerecorded content, why have the TV on at all?
> Exactly. A screen should just be a screen. High resolution, low latency, great colour gamut, high frame-rate - sure, knock yourself out. Anything else will probably detract from the purchase.
The problem is, as a TV manufacturer, once you've done that, you've lost a repeat customer.
> However, I don't see people spending $2K for a new TV every 12 to 18 months.
Wait until Apple releases one.
There is some truth to that. My last non-HD, tube-type TV (Sony XBR) lasted over 15 years. My first HDTV (a Sony Grand Wega -- google "wega lawsuit" for more info) lasted barely over a year. After a lot of fireworks, Sony finally replaced it (partially at our cost) with a Bravia, and now I hear that Bravias are catching fire. Clearly TVs are not considered the long term appliance they used to be.
But that doesn't make you throw out your old TV and buy a new one, which is what they want. Manufacturers want to see the churn they saw when they introduced "HD Ready" flat panel TVs that weren't really HD ready, and then sorta-funky HDTVs which would only do 1080i, and then full HDTVs that do full 1080p. 4K isn't ready yet, so the only solution they have is some intermediate step. People have not been swapping out their year-old HDTVs for 3D in large enough numbers, so they're trying this.
It's just something to tide them over until 4K content gets implemented and they can deprecate HDTV and force us to buy TVs again.
(I'm with you -- this sounds like the act of incorporating a non-repairable media player into your multi-thousand-dollar television. I have a reasonably large HDTV that I'm going to keep until it breaks and can't be fixed. It's connected to a several-year-old media center that's about to be swapped out.)
So... won't CBS sue the hell out of the winner?
I want to see the sensor pack on a thumb-drive-sized micro-USB device that can plug into any smartphone... um, sorry, *many* smartphones... Then tell CBS to stop screwing with Kenneth Lakin and turn him loose on it.
Ooooh oooh oooh, make the sensor pack a Bluetooth device that looks vaguely like a chrome cigarette lighter!