Very seldom do you see a commercial entity really bust their ass trying to make their code as clean and elegant as possible. There's just no money in it past a certain point. Why the hell should they care if you can make it.2% faster by rewriting the i/o subsytem interface here? Not crashing is it? Then who cares?
Turn it around to Open Soruce, and you end up with a whole hell of a lot of people just doing it for the hell of it. And yea, the initial products are probably sloppier than a lot of commercial code, and a lot of that code ends up on the metaphorical scrap heap. But the stuff that is good, the stuff that's really cool, suddenly you've got dozens of people going over the code. Everyone wants to be on the developer team. Everybody is reading through it, scratching their heads and offering little improvements. That's the thing about Open Source.
Heh. You're taking exactly the wrong tack. Computer literacy is not about which software you know. We deployed StarOffice at a company and they cried and cried and cried because it wasn't MS, nevermind that, when they had been using MS they had to share 5 computers with MS on it. (Gov't agency; get audited all the time.) These people were complete computer idiots. I mean their big problem with the Linux desktop was that they didn't like the fonts.
Turn this around; take an applicant who's just coming in for a job that requires a spreadsheet, a wordprocessor, and some sort of presentation software. What's going to impress you? Someone who just knows MS Office 2k, and gets hysterical when you give them Office 97 or Office XP. Or someone who has a good grounding in something a little different. "Have you ever used Word?" "No, but I've used Writer, Abiword, Islandwrite, and Emacs." Shows you've got flexibility, and that you've done something more than use yer grandmothers computer."
The best bit is when sites who've been quietly amassing yer personal info have to turn around and say, "Uhhhh, because we were dumb, all this information we gathered without your consent is now in the hands of someone who will do worse stuff with it than us."
The law passes. Bob, the filetrader, afraid to trade at home, sets up kazaa on his work machine. Bob happens to work at a hospital.
Hatch's copyright Nazi's see Bob's traffic, find Bob's IP. Bob's MAC address isn't making it past the router, so they latch onto the gateway's MAC address as the address of the illegally trading machine. They then attack the computer, presumably using some super-secret technology long under development by the RIAA. The attack is successful, they wipe out the gateway, scorch it down to bare metal.
In a hospital. That fits every defnition of cyber terrorism ever written.
How about this: I'm a big time file trader, and I have that thing that they call "computer knowledge". So I spend my time surfing the IP blocks given to ISP's, finding computers that are always on, and spoofing their IP addresses. When the attack comes down the line, WHAM, someone's grandma's home computer gets stomped.
Really, when it comes down to it, all that is pointless. Unless they are going to DOS you, they'll have to try and stick you with some sort of virus. All that will do is give Norton and McAfee a boost in business.
What happens when all the communication is one-sided? What happens when all the management spends it's time doing is trying to set the staff against each other, which might work, except that the staff DOES communicate, which just adds fuel to the whole situation becuase their attempts are so pathetically transparent.
There is so much intertia here, that nothing happens quickly, or even close. But pressure has likewise been building for a looooong time. I honestly don't see what else could be done. I don't know if the situation is unsalvageable, but it's certainly close.
It's just usually one sided. I'm working in a fricking sinking ship right now. Have been for a while. If I get a decent offer, I'm gone tomorrow.
The thing is, I am the kind of person who really commits to a job. It takes a lot to push me to the point where I'm sitting right now.
The amount of treacherous, underhanded, unpleasant, dishonest shit that's come down the pipe lately...I'll be happy to leave them in the lurch. Thank god I didn't sign a non-compete.
You've just described my life for the last 6 months.
We've got a skilled and effecient tech department, and a lax and inefficent sales department. They bring in pretty much nothing. They've been blaming it on the economy since forever, but when 10 of the last 11 decent sales were brought in by techs, that story ceases to hold water.
This is bad enough, but upper management listens to the sales idiots, and blame us for the lack of revenue! Like we can just magically make money if nothing is being sold.
My division is one of the worst hit. Sales underbids programming contracts massively, in order to make the sale, and leaves us holding the bucket, forced to try and make things happen with no resources. And when we fail to pull it off, its OUR fault.
The idiots bid a VB support contract for a legacy application, written in spagetti code by some lunatic, for a group of java, C, and PhP developers, and THEN refused to lay out for ANY development software. Normally I get annoyed with people who cry about having no development software, but VB? That crap depends on the tools. On top of that, we had a deadline so short it was stupid. It was a lose lose job.
It's an ugly situation. We've all got resumes out, but it's not a great time to be looking, especially here. We've almost walked out a couple of times, but that whole, "No job" thing is worrisome.
I'm tired of this "The comments are the same" shit. Unless the comments are things like, "Here's where I put that stupid fucking thing my boss made me write because he's a fucking moron, and I'm quitting tomorrow, before he finds out it was me who pissed in his coffee cup" there are only so many different comments that end up in code, usually stripped down stuff. "This method does object verification." "This method takes a string and has no output." Blah blah blah.
I know. That's kind of what I'm saying. These things slip by the normal consumer protection laws. It's not TRUE, but it's not false either. It would be nice to hold the software giants to TRUE statements.
Can you imagine microsoft being forced to say, "Windows is cheap, but not as cheap as linux, and windows is stable, but not as stable as BSD."
I imagine, at one time, the ability to write in cursive was indicitive of certain rigorous habits of thought that were desirable in an employee. i.e. Someone who is good at cursive, clearly has spent time on it, therefore her spent time on his school work, even the "less important" parts, like cursive.
They could just think it's nicer, though, which would be pretty silly, to tos on great applicant, for one mediocre one. I mean, I've never met a good programmer with good handwriting.
If you WANT to use redhat, then sure, 7.3 rocks. Sure as hell better than 8. 9's okay, but still not super. But really, so much of it depends on how you're using it. The kernel remains the same (meaning that you'll still have to recompile it to take advantage of this or that thing) so all you'll have to worry about is what apps you're going to be using on that box. There are usually only a few.
I mean, if I need a development box, and I want to save time by loading redhat, I've got to go in and dump all the java it comes with anyway, because the java that comes with redhat sucks for anything past a simple jsp or servlet. GCC is usually bleeding edge, and I tend to back off from that a bit, because it screws stuff up.
In short, if yer gonna use it for anythign fancy, yer gonna have to config it anyway, soooooo, why not just simplify things for yourself? Not like you need most of the stuff that comes with Redhat...I mean, do you want KDE and Gnome on your gateway firewall? Apache? Fricking Canna? (Which is mostly useless but redhat LOVES it). You can trim that stuff down to nothing, and have a great distro that does just what you like.
I think I speak for all of us, when I say, with all heartfelt feeling, "Who the hell cares?"
Oh no! Little Johnny can't write cursive!
Will cursive help you get a job? No. Will cursive improve your life? Unlikely. Will cursive help you find a mate? Possible, but unlikely. Will anyone except an anal english teacher care that you can't write cursive? No.
Honestly, the ability to type rapidly, with few mistakes, is far more valuable today than it ever has been before. Gone are the days when your executive assistant was the only one who needed to know how to type. Now EVERYONE has to know. So the sooner they start learning, the better.
Most of you are like me, terrible at cursive. I actually have (comparatively) good handwriting for a computer geek, legacy of my flirtation with the liberal arts. Does it help me? No. Do I ever use it? No. So, I say again, who cares?
I may type with only 5 or 6 fingers at a time, but I type FAST. The hammering of the keys on my old-fashioned finger-buster keyboard blends into a hyper-staccato clicking symphony! I am a product of the modern age! A self-taught keyboard prodigy!
Throwing out plans is one thing, but promising your software does one thing, when, in reality, it does nothing of the kind is false advertising at the very least.
Microsoft, in particular, gets away with murder dealing with this kind of stuff. They market their software as secure, cheap, and reliable, and it's hard to figure out what the hell they're talking about 90% of the time.
And with companies like AOL, who profit off the ignorance of their subscribers with claims like "You can sort your email!" or "Now you can search with Google!" when all these things are available anywhere.
I'd like to see some accountability put behind these claims.
More worms for Windows because Windows is on all the desktops? So what. Ooooooo, I can snag some old ladies original pentium. Wow, I'll crack the world with that.
OR: I can hack a Mosix or a Beowulf cluster. I could hack a nice blade server, or some corporate infrastructure. I could hack GOOGLE!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
All the good stuff runs Linux or Unix. IT ALWAYS HAS. So why are there FAR more exploits for Windows? Because it's on a lot of crappy machines? OR because it's an easier target? Seems pretty obvious.
Yea, the big corporations move on, but what is left behind? A bunch of money, and a bunch of skilled workers. This isn't a sneaker factory we're talking about here; this is a skill that is still very much in demand.
All those years learning Hindustani, so I could understand the tech support guy, down the drain. Who the hell speaks Czech? At least Hindustani is the third most commonly spoken language in the world.
Silly! Because, the way it currently is, you have to go through the effort of running around trying to find a 5-9 digit number/word thing thats different for every country, instead of one, simple, easy-to-remember, 10 character alpha-numeric string!
I mean which is easier:
The American 5+4 11111-2222 system
Heh. There's always that one girl. All CS majors will know the one I mean. Yea, that one. Of course you have to compete with the 99.5% of the class who ALSO wants to get with her. (99.5% includes all the CS guys who don't have girlfriends, but not the.5% of the class made up of females.)
I am a data FIEND. I LOVE data, I love varied data, good data, bad data, random data, and wierd data. I like playing with it, and running stats on it and basically just wallowing in it.
So frankly, pretty much any data collection gets my approval, as long as anonymity is preserved. Really, the specific data is the least useful. Who cares what one guy does? There is no reason to collect that data except for the express purpose of violating someones privacy. Now tell me what every guy between 20 and 30 is doing, and I'll be frickin ecstatic.
Remember what the word "Deregulation" means. It means no government controls. Ask anyone from California if they think deregulating their power industry was a good idea.
Government is bulky and bloated, but there really isn't any incentive for screwing people on public service costs. Private enterprise is technically leaner and more efficient, but they have a whole slew of new costs (Marketing, of course, top of the list), and they have no reason not to screw the consumers. That's what capitalism is all about.
Now, theoretically, competition will even all this stuff out and get you the best service for the lowest price, but I've never seen it happen here in the real world.
All this being said, it's the worst of all worlds to have a business that's half regulated and half free. You get all the negatives and none of the positives.
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Very seldom do you see a commercial entity really bust their ass trying to make their code as clean and elegant as possible. There's just no money in it past a certain point. Why the hell should they care if you can make it .2% faster by rewriting the i/o subsytem interface here? Not crashing is it? Then who cares?
Turn it around to Open Soruce, and you end up with a whole hell of a lot of people just doing it for the hell of it. And yea, the initial products are probably sloppier than a lot of commercial code, and a lot of that code ends up on the metaphorical scrap heap. But the stuff that is good, the stuff that's really cool, suddenly you've got dozens of people going over the code. Everyone wants to be on the developer team. Everybody is reading through it, scratching their heads and offering little improvements. That's the thing about Open Source.
Heh. You're taking exactly the wrong tack. Computer literacy is not about which software you know. We deployed StarOffice at a company and they cried and cried and cried because it wasn't MS, nevermind that, when they had been using MS they had to share 5 computers with MS on it. (Gov't agency; get audited all the time.) These people were complete computer idiots. I mean their big problem with the Linux desktop was that they didn't like the fonts.
Turn this around; take an applicant who's just coming in for a job that requires a spreadsheet, a wordprocessor, and some sort of presentation software. What's going to impress you? Someone who just knows MS Office 2k, and gets hysterical when you give them Office 97 or Office XP. Or someone who has a good grounding in something a little different. "Have you ever used Word?" "No, but I've used Writer, Abiword, Islandwrite, and Emacs." Shows you've got flexibility, and that you've done something more than use yer grandmothers computer."
Just my opinion.
The best bit is when sites who've been quietly amassing yer personal info have to turn around and say, "Uhhhh, because we were dumb, all this information we gathered without your consent is now in the hands of someone who will do worse stuff with it than us."
Heh, think about the following scenario:
The law passes. Bob, the filetrader, afraid to trade at home, sets up kazaa on his work machine. Bob happens to work at a hospital.
Hatch's copyright Nazi's see Bob's traffic, find Bob's IP. Bob's MAC address isn't making it past the router, so they latch onto the gateway's MAC address as the address of the illegally trading machine. They then attack the computer, presumably using some super-secret technology long under development by the RIAA. The attack is successful, they wipe out the gateway, scorch it down to bare metal.
In a hospital. That fits every defnition of cyber terrorism ever written.
How about this: I'm a big time file trader, and I have that thing that they call "computer knowledge". So I spend my time surfing the IP blocks given to ISP's, finding computers that are always on, and spoofing their IP addresses. When the attack comes down the line, WHAM, someone's grandma's home computer gets stomped.
Really, when it comes down to it, all that is pointless. Unless they are going to DOS you, they'll have to try and stick you with some sort of virus. All that will do is give Norton and McAfee a boost in business.
Just my opinion.
I don't know, the word "ILLEGAL" pops into my mind.
With that word comes the thought, "If someone stole something of mine, and I nuked their computer, I would be called a cyber-terrorist."
Put these two ideas together, and you come up with the logical argument:
Hatch wants to legalize computer nuking.
Computer nuking is cyber-terrorism
THEREFORE
Hatch wants to legalize terrorism.
I mean really, what else can you expect from a Republican?
*DUCKS*
Been there done that.
What happens when all the communication is one-sided? What happens when all the management spends it's time doing is trying to set the staff against each other, which might work, except that the staff DOES communicate, which just adds fuel to the whole situation becuase their attempts are so pathetically transparent.
There is so much intertia here, that nothing happens quickly, or even close. But pressure has likewise been building for a looooong time. I honestly don't see what else could be done. I don't know if the situation is unsalvageable, but it's certainly close.
Heh. They'll never replace me with someone cheaper. =P
Heh. My immediate boss, the head of the whole tech division, would be the first to walk.
Hard to get branded a troublemaker when your primary job reference walks out the door right in front of you.
It's just usually one sided.
I'm working in a fricking sinking ship right now. Have been for a while. If I get a decent offer, I'm gone tomorrow.
The thing is, I am the kind of person who really commits to a job. It takes a lot to push me to the point where I'm sitting right now.
The amount of treacherous, underhanded, unpleasant, dishonest shit that's come down the pipe lately...I'll be happy to leave them in the lurch. Thank god I didn't sign a non-compete.
You've just described my life for the last 6 months.
We've got a skilled and effecient tech department, and a lax and inefficent sales department. They bring in pretty much nothing. They've been blaming it on the economy since forever, but when 10 of the last 11 decent sales were brought in by techs, that story ceases to hold water.
This is bad enough, but upper management listens to the sales idiots, and blame us for the lack of revenue! Like we can just magically make money if nothing is being sold.
My division is one of the worst hit. Sales underbids programming contracts massively, in order to make the sale, and leaves us holding the bucket, forced to try and make things happen with no resources. And when we fail to pull it off, its OUR fault.
The idiots bid a VB support contract for a legacy application, written in spagetti code by some lunatic, for a group of java, C, and PhP developers, and THEN refused to lay out for ANY development software. Normally I get annoyed with people who cry about having no development software, but VB? That crap depends on the tools. On top of that, we had a deadline so short it was stupid. It was a lose lose job.
It's an ugly situation. We've all got resumes out, but it's not a great time to be looking, especially here. We've almost walked out a couple of times, but that whole, "No job" thing is worrisome.
Sigh. Well, that was depressing.
I'm tired of this "The comments are the same" shit. Unless the comments are things like, "Here's where I put that stupid fucking thing my boss made me write because he's a fucking moron, and I'm quitting tomorrow, before he finds out it was me who pissed in his coffee cup" there are only so many different comments that end up in code, usually stripped down stuff. "This method does object verification." "This method takes a string and has no output." Blah blah blah.
I know. That's kind of what I'm saying. These things slip by the normal consumer protection laws. It's not TRUE, but it's not false either. It would be nice to hold the software giants to TRUE statements.
Can you imagine microsoft being forced to say, "Windows is cheap, but not as cheap as linux, and windows is stable, but not as stable as BSD."
Mmmmmm. Warm fuzzies just thinking about it.
I imagine, at one time, the ability to write in cursive was indicitive of certain rigorous habits of thought that were desirable in an employee. i.e. Someone who is good at cursive, clearly has spent time on it, therefore her spent time on his school work, even the "less important" parts, like cursive.
They could just think it's nicer, though, which would be pretty silly, to tos on great applicant, for one mediocre one. I mean, I've never met a good programmer with good handwriting.
It's linux man, knock together yer own distro.
If you WANT to use redhat, then sure, 7.3 rocks. Sure as hell better than 8. 9's okay, but still not super. But really, so much of it depends on how you're using it. The kernel remains the same (meaning that you'll still have to recompile it to take advantage of this or that thing) so all you'll have to worry about is what apps you're going to be using on that box. There are usually only a few.
I mean, if I need a development box, and I want to save time by loading redhat, I've got to go in and dump all the java it comes with anyway, because the java that comes with redhat sucks for anything past a simple jsp or servlet. GCC is usually bleeding edge, and I tend to back off from that a bit, because it screws stuff up.
In short, if yer gonna use it for anythign fancy, yer gonna have to config it anyway, soooooo, why not just simplify things for yourself? Not like you need most of the stuff that comes with Redhat...I mean, do you want KDE and Gnome on your gateway firewall? Apache? Fricking Canna? (Which is mostly useless but redhat LOVES it). You can trim that stuff down to nothing, and have a great distro that does just what you like.
Just my opinion.
I think I speak for all of us, when I say, with all heartfelt feeling, "Who the hell cares?"
Oh no! Little Johnny can't write cursive!
Will cursive help you get a job? No.
Will cursive improve your life? Unlikely.
Will cursive help you find a mate? Possible, but unlikely.
Will anyone except an anal english teacher care that you can't write cursive? No.
Honestly, the ability to type rapidly, with few mistakes, is far more valuable today than it ever has been before. Gone are the days when your executive assistant was the only one who needed to know how to type. Now EVERYONE has to know. So the sooner they start learning, the better.
Most of you are like me, terrible at cursive. I actually have (comparatively) good handwriting for a computer geek, legacy of my flirtation with the liberal arts. Does it help me? No. Do I ever use it? No. So, I say again, who cares?
I may type with only 5 or 6 fingers at a time, but I type FAST. The hammering of the keys on my old-fashioned finger-buster keyboard blends into a hyper-staccato clicking symphony! I am a product of the modern age! A self-taught keyboard prodigy!
And nobody cares that I can't write cursive.
Throwing out plans is one thing, but promising your software does one thing, when, in reality, it does nothing of the kind is false advertising at the very least.
Microsoft, in particular, gets away with murder dealing with this kind of stuff. They market their software as secure, cheap, and reliable, and it's hard to figure out what the hell they're talking about 90% of the time.
And with companies like AOL, who profit off the ignorance of their subscribers with claims like "You can sort your email!" or "Now you can search with Google!" when all these things are available anywhere.
I'd like to see some accountability put behind these claims.
Just my opinion.
More worms for Windows because Windows is on all the desktops? So what. Ooooooo, I can snag some old ladies original pentium. Wow, I'll crack the world with that.
OR: I can hack a Mosix or a Beowulf cluster. I could hack a nice blade server, or some corporate infrastructure. I could hack GOOGLE!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
All the good stuff runs Linux or Unix. IT ALWAYS HAS. So why are there FAR more exploits for Windows? Because it's on a lot of crappy machines? OR because it's an easier target? Seems pretty obvious.
Just my opinion.
Yea, the big corporations move on, but what is left behind? A bunch of money, and a bunch of skilled workers. This isn't a sneaker factory we're talking about here; this is a skill that is still very much in demand.
All those years learning Hindustani, so I could understand the tech support guy, down the drain. Who the hell speaks Czech? At least Hindustani is the third most commonly spoken language in the world.
Hmmmmmmmmm.
I misspelled weird. Wow. Ask me if I give a shit. You auditioning for a job as a spellchecker?
Silly! Because, the way it currently is, you have to go through the effort of running around trying to find a 5-9 digit number/word thing thats different for every country, instead of one, simple, easy-to-remember, 10 character alpha-numeric string!
I mean which is easier:
The American 5+4 11111-2222 system
Or
The new improved D3F6J QW3RZ system?
Seems obvious to me!
I've got like 10 because I'm ripping them for email.
BTW: I think hotCOWmail.com is much better than plain old hotmail.
Heh. There's always that one girl. All CS majors will know the one I mean. Yea, that one. Of course you have to compete with the 99.5% of the class who ALSO wants to get with her. (99.5% includes all the CS guys who don't have girlfriends, but not the .5% of the class made up of females.)
I am a data FIEND. I LOVE data, I love varied data, good data, bad data, random data, and wierd data. I like playing with it, and running stats on it and basically just wallowing in it.
So frankly, pretty much any data collection gets my approval, as long as anonymity is preserved. Really, the specific data is the least useful. Who cares what one guy does? There is no reason to collect that data except for the express purpose of violating someones privacy. Now tell me what every guy between 20 and 30 is doing, and I'll be frickin ecstatic.
Just my opinion.
Remember what the word "Deregulation" means. It means no government controls. Ask anyone from California if they think deregulating their power industry was a good idea.
Government is bulky and bloated, but there really isn't any incentive for screwing people on public service costs. Private enterprise is technically leaner and more efficient, but they have a whole slew of new costs (Marketing, of course, top of the list), and they have no reason not to screw the consumers. That's what capitalism is all about.
Now, theoretically, competition will even all this stuff out and get you the best service for the lowest price, but I've never seen it happen here in the real world.
All this being said, it's the worst of all worlds to have a business that's half regulated and half free. You get all the negatives and none of the positives.
Just my opinion.