Yes it would. But without figures, it's all speculation as to how much/if they give the artists/labels the winnings from a case. If you don't have specific information about it, then my natural disposition is neutral since I have no evidence either for or against.
I apologize, what I said could be wrong. The test may not be more suited to C++ than Java. Truthfully, a short test like that could favor either language or neither. It's too small of a test to be a significant benchmark of a language. If you could test the performance capabilities of an entire language with half a dozen lines of code, no one would ever create an entirely new language until they found a way to execute 4 lines of code faster.
The test given doesn't bring into a single feature that's unique to any language. It tests the execution speed of a loop and the increment/decrement of primitive types which is likely to be equally fast/slow in any language as it just comes down to the processor speed. To test Java as a language, a good start would be testing the creation of objects, allocating and deallocating arbitrary amounts of memory, and calling random methods on randomly sized objects.
Objects and memory management is where Java shines. Many tests that compare Java's speed to C++ speed tend to focus on areas where C++ shines and Java performs poorly, like resizing containers.
One reason Java really shines with objects is that Java doesn't run into the performance overhead incurred by copy constructors. There are a lot of situations in which Java will perform more slowly than C++. There are also situations where Java performs better. The end result is that Java's performance and C++'s performance can't be compared based on a single test. Many people craft a single test and based on the results of one test they brazely declare that Java is always slower. If, one day, it was 100 degrees in NYC, and 90 degrees in Las Vegas, one wouldn't say it's always hotter in NYC. By the same token, you can't compare language performances with a single test. The only real way to compare the performance of two languages is to actually spec a real-world program and have two teams go about building it in different languages.
I guess you're right, we'll never see a commercial game programmed in java. Unless you count:
Chrome
Law and Order II
Kingdom of Wars
Alien Flux
Star Wars Galaxies
Pernica
Command & Conquer Attack Copter
Roboforge
Runescape
Wurm Online
You Don't Know Jack
Vampire: the Masquerade Redemption
Source http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/jg/ch00/ch00.pdf
Although not all of those are completely coded in Java (some of them use Java and C++ both), many of them are.
There's literally tens of thousands of sources on the internet about java's execution speed and the myth of it all. Do some friggen research, what do I actually care if you believe it or not?
People wildly claim that Java is X amount slower than C++. I'm pointing out that it's not true. I guess the most mind boggling thing to me is that everyone is so skeptical about it, like if Java's execution speed approached the speed of C++ armageddon would happen.
Years ago, no one believed that the speed of C could ever approach the speed of assembly, but it has. It's come within about the same 10% margin that Java has come to C++.
I could see all the skepticism if someone was saying that Java was better. Fact is, it's no better or worse, it's just another language. Another language that happens to not be as slow as the majority think it is.
I'm far from a Java zealot. I'm a programmer, language is an insignificant issue. The fact is, I've done most of my programming in C++. I avoided Java for precisely the reason that I thought it was much slower, and as it turned out a lot of my assumptions were wrong. It's even fast enough for 3d games, like Megacorps Online http://www.megacorpsonline.com/game/
I know how to use plenty of languages, I learn new ones all the time. I wasn't just guessing the execution speed of Java, I was speaking from experience. As for the test code you use to show Java is slower, that's a huge mistake. You've composed a test which is ideal for C++ to execute. That's like proving a jeep is faster than a porche by doing time trials in offroad terrain. Given a more abstract problem than "Go through these loops a billion times", the solution in Java wouldn't even resemble the equivilant solution in C++. You can't approach the same problem identically in both languages, if you do, you're not writing Java code, you're writing C++ code in Java.
There's a lot of utility code that would be necessary in a C++ program that's not necessary to perform the equivilant task in Java. Each language isn't just different syntax, you need an entirely different way of thinking. Trying to port a solution line for line into a different language is senseless.
It's a common myth that Java is slow. Modernly, Java applications are (on average) only 10% slower than an equivilant C++ application. With appropriate optimization, that margin is even smaller. Even then, when it comes to 3D rendering, the application is usually running at the speed of the hardware, with the Java code not really even coming into play. In a 3D environment you could say the performance margin can be less than 1% difference.
It's a waste of money to advertise to the public. It's not like the public gets to vote, as evidenced by the 2000 election.
And a 30 fold increase over four years? That's not so astounding. Virtually everything which has an initial state and a larger end state, grows 30 fold over some arbitrary period of time. I mean it would be one thing if you could say it would grow 30 fold indefinitely.
The number of MP3s I bought grew 30 fold over the last year. Once I took a sip of orange mountain dew, I liked it, so my spending on it grew 30 fold (I bought a whole can). My spending on duck grew 30 fold over the last 2 weeks. (2 weeks ago I spent $10 on duck at a chinese restaurant, just last night I spent $300 on duck for a dinner). Compared to last year, the number of box office films I've watched quadrupled!
It's amazing how long we can go on with phenomenal sounding statistics.
I pay for bandwidth therefore I should be able to choose what uses the bandwidth I pay for. The model of ad delivery on the internet is different than a magazine. Before you buy the magazine you can, theoretically, determine how much space is taken up by advertisements and decide if it's a fair trade for your money. With internet ads, you pay first, and you find out how much bandwidth is taken up by an ad after you get it.
Time is limited, advertising isn't a fair trade for my time. I lose minutes of my life, what do I get out of it?
I use the adblock extension for Firefox. Before that, I used Ad-Shield for Internet Explorer.
How is that a big difference? How is the difference significant to the discussion? That's like saying mobster Tony doesn't break legs for the Don, he breaks legs for the Captain (who works for the Don), how's that difference matter?
I dislike the fact that the justice system has become such a joke that media coverage frequently refers to legal decisions as if they're game maneuvers. Litigation should not be a game where you make moves and counter-moves, it should be a very straightforward process that distinguishes right and wrong.
I think the restrictions placed on corporations should be such that there is no cost-benefit analysis and the system can't be played like a game. If it's found that a company stole technology, participated in unfair business practices, ignored regulations, etc. the punishment should be simple, the company is immediately dissolved. But right now we fine them an insignificant amount and let them proceed with business as usual. The same companies are free to continue to break laws, the same laws that a normal person would go to prison for life, with hardly any consequences.
IBM vs. SCO, Sun vs. Microsoft... there's no winners. They're sociopathic entities whose only interest is themselves, at the expense of the public.
Can you link specifically to the article which has those results? I did a google site search and only a single page on the whole site even had the word "fox" in it. Using their built-in search returned no results for "fox".
It seems to me that the RIAA is only the enemy because they are the face of the body which has made it inconvenient to steal music. I think the majority of people who are hopping on the "I Hate The RIAA!" bandwagon are forgetting some crucial information. The RIAA is a trade organization. They represent MEMBERS of that organization. They are suing on behalf of their members, not on behalf of themselves. They're not the top of the chain, they are in the middle of the chain. The artists who join, support, and ask the RIAA to represent them are the ones at the top.
If someone gets sued by the RIAA it's not because the RIAA wants to sue them, it's because the artist they represent wants them to. Because Britney Spears, Metallica, or whoever else has, in essence, asked them to do it. Maybe the artists don't directly demand it in most cases, but they did indirectly demand it at the point they signed with a record company which was a member of the RIAA.
Money speaks louder than words. No matter how many people say they don't like the RIAA, there are still billions of dollars being given to the artists which essentially confirms the artists belief that they joined the right label. That in turn confirms the label's belief that joining the RIAA was the right decision. Everyone out there who is buying music from RIAA members is telling the RIAA that they're doing a great job.
The RIAA has been around for over 50 years, and the public has happily given them money hand-over-fist. It's only now that people got a taste of convenient, on-demand, free music that people have a problem with them. 20 years ago, no one was crying foul. Everyone knew that bootleg tapes were illegal, and most people copied tapes for their friends, but if you got into the business of moving massive numbers of bootleg tapes, no one was going to blink twice when you got pinched. But now that people are using the same concept in digital space, it has somehow become the moral highground.
People can quibble all they want about the exact definition of theft. The simple fact is, we all know that when we download an mp3, it's theft. We just cross our fingers and hope that the RIAA is looking at someone else when we do it.
If you were a programmer, and you spent $25,000 of your own money and 6 months to develop an application, you try to sell it and you hear "Great program, I already have that." from 100,000 people, but you've only sold two copies at $20 each, are you going to think "At least they didn't steal it from me"? Of course not, because they DID steal it from you. 100,000 people have the fruits of your labor, and you've got $40 to show for it.
I know it doesn't seem like the same issue when you can tell yourself that the person you took the music from already has plenty of money, because we all know stealing is alright so long as your victim has more than you. Or you can tell yourself you weren't going to buy it anyway. Whatever you need to sleep.
He's not being clear because there's nothing to be clear about. A group of people that can't even make a plain-text page comply with web standards, and they're working on rolling out the next-generation web browser? A browser which, apparently, is going to revolutionize the way all mankind views digital information. It's so wonderful it's like the first light bulb wrapped in sliced bread.
Flock : Firefox
Bitboyz : nVidia
The Greatest Vitamin On Earth : Centrum Silver
This article is a Reed Richards for newsworthy. Software Engineer career advice by someone who's only out of college a year?
If you won't work anywhere that doesn't give an office, it'll be a rough ride with plenty of missed opportunity. I've never worked for a company that gives everyone their own office. The closest I've come to having my own office was a shared office with 3 of us, but that company only had 4 employees and 2 rooms, one office was the boss's, the other was ours. Everywhere else I've worked, it's always cubicles. In most companies I've worked at, no one below the 2nd tier of managers got their own office. Getting an office is a comfort and convenience issue, we make do with what we have. My girlfriend works for one of the most prominent local software companies, there's 2 offices, one for the boss, one for the manager. The other 20 employees have cubicles.
The article is okay, but everyone and their dog has advice on bad job warning signs. 20 years from now, your insight is going to be a lot more focused, and these reasons to think the company is doomed won't be as astute an observation as you think. The same things you list as warning signs to get out are also the same things I've seen in numerous successful companies, and they weren't signs of impending doom, they were signs of business-as-usual.
I was a depraved sociopath long before video games made it cool. I once killed a man for a dollar. Okay, well it wasn't a dollar it was a quarter. And it wasn't a man it was a coke machine. And I didn't kill it but I did kick it very hard. Ignore the details, same story either way.
There's so many fallacies in Linus's assertion. He even mixes no less than four fallacies in the same sentence.
"I have _never_ seen a spec that was both big enough to be useful _and_ accurate."
First, he sets himself up for perfect justification by clarifying that he has never seen such a spec. Therefore if you argued that you've seen such a spec, he can still argue that he hasn't seen one. In the same sentence, he also puts forth the idea of a spec being both big enough to be useful and accurate. So if you showed him an accurate spec, he'd just claim it wasn't big enough to be useful.
There's also some ad hoc fallacy mixed in his argument. For example, by saying it's the single worst way to write software, if you showed him a worse method of writing software, he'd just claim "that's not really writing software", to maintain his argument.
And his entire assertion is coated in the fallacy of familiarity. He asserts that because, from his relative point of view, he has never judged a spec to be worthwhile, there must not exist any worthwhile specs.
Of course the fact that his entire argument is supported by fallacies doesn't make his conclusion wrong. But, as others have pointed out, there are plenty of examples of successful specifications which patently disprove him.
I shudder to think that Linus never wrote any specifications for Linux. Did he just open up a compiler and start typing? I can't even imagine he'd lower himself to use a compiler that was developed around (and hence tainted by) those damn language specs. How did he develop drivers to interact with the hardware without any specifications? Did he just guess at what they needed, shifting bits around one at a time until the network card responded?
Without a spec, what would a software engineer do at a company? He gets hired, sits down at a desk and and the boss says "We're writing tax management software." and the engineer asks "Any spec I can look at to get started? What component are we working on right now?" and the boss says "We don't use specs here, that's the single worst way to write software. I'm sure you'll figure out what to do."
Without specifications, the web wouldn't exist. You couldn't have web developers because you couldn't tell them where to look to learn how to build a web site. You just tell them to type and sooner or later something will happen. What if you didn't even specify what file extension to give a page? They'd just have to keep saving files guessing at extensions until they haphazardly got something to work.
[sarcasm]A world without specifications sounds like a real gem of a place to develop software in.[/sarcasm]
Using FireFox for about 2 years now, never, ever visited a site that opens a popup. I think it's probably related to having both FireFox popup blocker enabled and have the adblock extension installed.
It's a scary thing. I'm sure the things I like would be considered deviant to some people. I mean I'm against child porn like most people, but aside from that, I'm uncomfortable passing judgements on other people's preferences. If it's consensual adult activity, it's really none of my business what they're doing.
Bunch of hypocrits. The same people issuing, signing, and executing orders and mandates are going to be into the same thing they're declaring must be destroyed. Some senator is sitting there struggling with being a conservative but also liking posterior sex, so he lashes out at all the people he feels are responsible for causing his conflicted feelings.
Ditty and Diddy have extremely similar phonetics. In colloquial usage, people will pronounce them identically. Dume and Tune aren't close at all. Even in informal usage, people still clearly enunciate the first letter of a word. If you meant "Dune" and "Tune", they're still very different pronunciations, Ts and Ds only sound similar when the emphasis is not on them. In Diddy and Ditty, the emphasis is on the first syllable, so the second half of the word sounds the same unless a person makes an effort to clearly enunciate the two.
Another problem with the distinction between Ditty and Diddy, is the fact that it's conceivable the two words could even be used in the same context. When asked what a person is listening two, a person could reasonably respond "Diddy" or "Ditty", and you may not know which one they're referring to.
If artists really cared about fans, freedom, etc. they wouldn't ink deals with the devil in the first place. Signing on with a big label isn't the only way to succeed in this world. I don't think they posted instructions like this against the label's wishes. Anything that happens within a label is the result of a marketing pow-wow. Some guy in a suit told them to post the instructions to further their rebel image and make them seem even more cool so they'll sell more albums.
Fallacious logic. If new people are never allowed to use things which they are new to, then no one is ever allowed to use anything that they're not currently using. You could never have a new Linux user, which means Linux could do nothing but die out as the population of Linux users eventually succumbs to mortality.
By your own logic, you should never go anywhere you don't currently go. Don't switch grocery stores, don't switch clubs... don't even switch TV channels because you'll just be a newbie to it, a realm in which you don't belong.
Maybe you should start your own business, and from the day you open hang a sign on the door that reads: "If you're not an existing customer, go away."
There's so many applications for additional flash memory it's insane. I think many people who are sarcastic about the use of a flash memory stick don't have the perspective to know what it's like to carry around a dozen floppy disks, and still not be able to bring your truly useful applications with you because they're just too big to fit on a floppy.
My programming projects are growing in size, and the number of tools I like to carry with me ready to install on any computer is increasing. I can see needing 16gb, 32gb, or more of storage.
There's a limitless number of tasks that any person can use to make their life/job easier. I think if just about anyone sat down and thought about what they could carry with them that would make their life easier, they could think up 16gb worth of information to store.
I think one market that will open or expand is the portable-data market. I mean obviously right now we have laptops, CDs, and other portable media that allow us to transport data, but I think the flash drive makes the task even more convenient and fills a technology gap that laptops can't comfortable fit into.
I'm not a big fan of programming competitions. They score people on bad programming practice. The skills that make you the best competitor are frequently the same habits that make you the guy everyone venomously whispers about in the cafeteria.
They reward you for coding fast, hacking out make-shift solutions (i.e. Code that could never pass QA), and the given problems are too narrow to be representative of a real programming problem. You can ignore things like portability issues, standards compliance, elegance, orthogonality, modularity and maintainability.
Real programming skills, the things that really set the master programmers apart, play absolutely no role. Namely: Source control and documentation.
Most types of "competitive science" won't work well. At least the type where you can't build your project ahead of time. You're going to get the same quality work out of "speed programming" that you'll get out of "speed chemistry". Wouldn't that be fun? Get a room full of chemists together with a bunch of components and tell them to mix real fast, no time for measuring!
That's my take on the whole Competitive Coding atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it would. But without figures, it's all speculation as to how much/if they give the artists/labels the winnings from a case. If you don't have specific information about it, then my natural disposition is neutral since I have no evidence either for or against.
I don't know, how much? If you have a figure, cite your source.
I apologize, what I said could be wrong. The test may not be more suited to C++ than Java. Truthfully, a short test like that could favor either language or neither. It's too small of a test to be a significant benchmark of a language. If you could test the performance capabilities of an entire language with half a dozen lines of code, no one would ever create an entirely new language until they found a way to execute 4 lines of code faster.
The test given doesn't bring into a single feature that's unique to any language. It tests the execution speed of a loop and the increment/decrement of primitive types which is likely to be equally fast/slow in any language as it just comes down to the processor speed. To test Java as a language, a good start would be testing the creation of objects, allocating and deallocating arbitrary amounts of memory, and calling random methods on randomly sized objects.
Objects and memory management is where Java shines. Many tests that compare Java's speed to C++ speed tend to focus on areas where C++ shines and Java performs poorly, like resizing containers.
One reason Java really shines with objects is that Java doesn't run into the performance overhead incurred by copy constructors. There are a lot of situations in which Java will perform more slowly than C++. There are also situations where Java performs better. The end result is that Java's performance and C++'s performance can't be compared based on a single test. Many people craft a single test and based on the results of one test they brazely declare that Java is always slower. If, one day, it was 100 degrees in NYC, and 90 degrees in Las Vegas, one wouldn't say it's always hotter in NYC. By the same token, you can't compare language performances with a single test. The only real way to compare the performance of two languages is to actually spec a real-world program and have two teams go about building it in different languages.
I guess you're right, we'll never see a commercial game programmed in java. Unless you count:f
Chrome
Law and Order II
Kingdom of Wars
Alien Flux
Star Wars Galaxies
Pernica
Command & Conquer Attack Copter
Roboforge
Runescape
Wurm Online
You Don't Know Jack
Vampire: the Masquerade Redemption
Source http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/jg/ch00/ch00.pd
Although not all of those are completely coded in Java (some of them use Java and C++ both), many of them are.
Sources http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Computer/javaCbenchmar k.html
There's literally tens of thousands of sources on the internet about java's execution speed and the myth of it all. Do some friggen research, what do I actually care if you believe it or not?
People wildly claim that Java is X amount slower than C++. I'm pointing out that it's not true. I guess the most mind boggling thing to me is that everyone is so skeptical about it, like if Java's execution speed approached the speed of C++ armageddon would happen.
Years ago, no one believed that the speed of C could ever approach the speed of assembly, but it has. It's come within about the same 10% margin that Java has come to C++.
I could see all the skepticism if someone was saying that Java was better. Fact is, it's no better or worse, it's just another language. Another language that happens to not be as slow as the majority think it is.
I'm far from a Java zealot. I'm a programmer, language is an insignificant issue. The fact is, I've done most of my programming in C++. I avoided Java for precisely the reason that I thought it was much slower, and as it turned out a lot of my assumptions were wrong. It's even fast enough for 3d games, like Megacorps Online http://www.megacorpsonline.com/game/
I know how to use plenty of languages, I learn new ones all the time. I wasn't just guessing the execution speed of Java, I was speaking from experience. As for the test code you use to show Java is slower, that's a huge mistake. You've composed a test which is ideal for C++ to execute. That's like proving a jeep is faster than a porche by doing time trials in offroad terrain. Given a more abstract problem than "Go through these loops a billion times", the solution in Java wouldn't even resemble the equivilant solution in C++. You can't approach the same problem identically in both languages, if you do, you're not writing Java code, you're writing C++ code in Java.
There's a lot of utility code that would be necessary in a C++ program that's not necessary to perform the equivilant task in Java. Each language isn't just different syntax, you need an entirely different way of thinking. Trying to port a solution line for line into a different language is senseless.
It's a common myth that Java is slow. Modernly, Java applications are (on average) only 10% slower than an equivilant C++ application. With appropriate optimization, that margin is even smaller. Even then, when it comes to 3D rendering, the application is usually running at the speed of the hardware, with the Java code not really even coming into play. In a 3D environment you could say the performance margin can be less than 1% difference.
It's a waste of money to advertise to the public. It's not like the public gets to vote, as evidenced by the 2000 election.
And a 30 fold increase over four years? That's not so astounding. Virtually everything which has an initial state and a larger end state, grows 30 fold over some arbitrary period of time. I mean it would be one thing if you could say it would grow 30 fold indefinitely.
The number of MP3s I bought grew 30 fold over the last year. Once I took a sip of orange mountain dew, I liked it, so my spending on it grew 30 fold (I bought a whole can). My spending on duck grew 30 fold over the last 2 weeks. (2 weeks ago I spent $10 on duck at a chinese restaurant, just last night I spent $300 on duck for a dinner). Compared to last year, the number of box office films I've watched quadrupled!
It's amazing how long we can go on with phenomenal sounding statistics.
I pay for bandwidth therefore I should be able to choose what uses the bandwidth I pay for. The model of ad delivery on the internet is different than a magazine. Before you buy the magazine you can, theoretically, determine how much space is taken up by advertisements and decide if it's a fair trade for your money. With internet ads, you pay first, and you find out how much bandwidth is taken up by an ad after you get it.
Time is limited, advertising isn't a fair trade for my time. I lose minutes of my life, what do I get out of it?
I use the adblock extension for Firefox. Before that, I used Ad-Shield for Internet Explorer.
How is that a big difference? How is the difference significant to the discussion? That's like saying mobster Tony doesn't break legs for the Don, he breaks legs for the Captain (who works for the Don), how's that difference matter?
I dislike the fact that the justice system has become such a joke that media coverage frequently refers to legal decisions as if they're game maneuvers. Litigation should not be a game where you make moves and counter-moves, it should be a very straightforward process that distinguishes right and wrong.
I think the restrictions placed on corporations should be such that there is no cost-benefit analysis and the system can't be played like a game. If it's found that a company stole technology, participated in unfair business practices, ignored regulations, etc. the punishment should be simple, the company is immediately dissolved. But right now we fine them an insignificant amount and let them proceed with business as usual. The same companies are free to continue to break laws, the same laws that a normal person would go to prison for life, with hardly any consequences.
IBM vs. SCO, Sun vs. Microsoft... there's no winners. They're sociopathic entities whose only interest is themselves, at the expense of the public.
Can you link specifically to the article which has those results? I did a google site search and only a single page on the whole site even had the word "fox" in it. Using their built-in search returned no results for "fox".
It seems to me that the RIAA is only the enemy because they are the face of the body which has made it inconvenient to steal music. I think the majority of people who are hopping on the "I Hate The RIAA!" bandwagon are forgetting some crucial information. The RIAA is a trade organization. They represent MEMBERS of that organization. They are suing on behalf of their members, not on behalf of themselves. They're not the top of the chain, they are in the middle of the chain. The artists who join, support, and ask the RIAA to represent them are the ones at the top.
If someone gets sued by the RIAA it's not because the RIAA wants to sue them, it's because the artist they represent wants them to. Because Britney Spears, Metallica, or whoever else has, in essence, asked them to do it. Maybe the artists don't directly demand it in most cases, but they did indirectly demand it at the point they signed with a record company which was a member of the RIAA.
Money speaks louder than words. No matter how many people say they don't like the RIAA, there are still billions of dollars being given to the artists which essentially confirms the artists belief that they joined the right label. That in turn confirms the label's belief that joining the RIAA was the right decision. Everyone out there who is buying music from RIAA members is telling the RIAA that they're doing a great job. The RIAA has been around for over 50 years, and the public has happily given them money hand-over-fist. It's only now that people got a taste of convenient, on-demand, free music that people have a problem with them. 20 years ago, no one was crying foul. Everyone knew that bootleg tapes were illegal, and most people copied tapes for their friends, but if you got into the business of moving massive numbers of bootleg tapes, no one was going to blink twice when you got pinched. But now that people are using the same concept in digital space, it has somehow become the moral highground.
People can quibble all they want about the exact definition of theft. The simple fact is, we all know that when we download an mp3, it's theft. We just cross our fingers and hope that the RIAA is looking at someone else when we do it.
If you were a programmer, and you spent $25,000 of your own money and 6 months to develop an application, you try to sell it and you hear "Great program, I already have that." from 100,000 people, but you've only sold two copies at $20 each, are you going to think "At least they didn't steal it from me"? Of course not, because they DID steal it from you. 100,000 people have the fruits of your labor, and you've got $40 to show for it.
I know it doesn't seem like the same issue when you can tell yourself that the person you took the music from already has plenty of money, because we all know stealing is alright so long as your victim has more than you. Or you can tell yourself you weren't going to buy it anyway. Whatever you need to sleep.
Exactly, this is at least the third time I've seen this post, whenever a piracy/riaa thing pops up.
He's not being clear because there's nothing to be clear about. A group of people that can't even make a plain-text page comply with web standards, and they're working on rolling out the next-generation web browser? A browser which, apparently, is going to revolutionize the way all mankind views digital information. It's so wonderful it's like the first light bulb wrapped in sliced bread.
Flock : Firefox
Bitboyz : nVidia
The Greatest Vitamin On Earth : Centrum Silver
There a pattern here?
This article is a Reed Richards for newsworthy. Software Engineer career advice by someone who's only out of college a year?
If you won't work anywhere that doesn't give an office, it'll be a rough ride with plenty of missed opportunity. I've never worked for a company that gives everyone their own office. The closest I've come to having my own office was a shared office with 3 of us, but that company only had 4 employees and 2 rooms, one office was the boss's, the other was ours. Everywhere else I've worked, it's always cubicles. In most companies I've worked at, no one below the 2nd tier of managers got their own office. Getting an office is a comfort and convenience issue, we make do with what we have. My girlfriend works for one of the most prominent local software companies, there's 2 offices, one for the boss, one for the manager. The other 20 employees have cubicles.
The article is okay, but everyone and their dog has advice on bad job warning signs. 20 years from now, your insight is going to be a lot more focused, and these reasons to think the company is doomed won't be as astute an observation as you think. The same things you list as warning signs to get out are also the same things I've seen in numerous successful companies, and they weren't signs of impending doom, they were signs of business-as-usual.
I was a depraved sociopath long before video games made it cool. I once killed a man for a dollar. Okay, well it wasn't a dollar it was a quarter. And it wasn't a man it was a coke machine. And I didn't kill it but I did kick it very hard. Ignore the details, same story either way.
There's so many fallacies in Linus's assertion. He even mixes no less than four fallacies in the same sentence.
"I have _never_ seen a spec that was both big enough to be useful _and_ accurate."
First, he sets himself up for perfect justification by clarifying that he has never seen such a spec. Therefore if you argued that you've seen such a spec, he can still argue that he hasn't seen one. In the same sentence, he also puts forth the idea of a spec being both big enough to be useful and accurate. So if you showed him an accurate spec, he'd just claim it wasn't big enough to be useful.
There's also some ad hoc fallacy mixed in his argument. For example, by saying it's the single worst way to write software, if you showed him a worse method of writing software, he'd just claim "that's not really writing software", to maintain his argument.
And his entire assertion is coated in the fallacy of familiarity. He asserts that because, from his relative point of view, he has never judged a spec to be worthwhile, there must not exist any worthwhile specs.
Of course the fact that his entire argument is supported by fallacies doesn't make his conclusion wrong. But, as others have pointed out, there are plenty of examples of successful specifications which patently disprove him.
I shudder to think that Linus never wrote any specifications for Linux. Did he just open up a compiler and start typing? I can't even imagine he'd lower himself to use a compiler that was developed around (and hence tainted by) those damn language specs. How did he develop drivers to interact with the hardware without any specifications? Did he just guess at what they needed, shifting bits around one at a time until the network card responded?
Without a spec, what would a software engineer do at a company? He gets hired, sits down at a desk and and the boss says "We're writing tax management software." and the engineer asks "Any spec I can look at to get started? What component are we working on right now?" and the boss says "We don't use specs here, that's the single worst way to write software. I'm sure you'll figure out what to do."
Without specifications, the web wouldn't exist. You couldn't have web developers because you couldn't tell them where to look to learn how to build a web site. You just tell them to type and sooner or later something will happen. What if you didn't even specify what file extension to give a page? They'd just have to keep saving files guessing at extensions until they haphazardly got something to work.
[sarcasm]A world without specifications sounds like a real gem of a place to develop software in.[/sarcasm]
Using FireFox for about 2 years now, never, ever visited a site that opens a popup. I think it's probably related to having both FireFox popup blocker enabled and have the adblock extension installed.
It's a scary thing. I'm sure the things I like would be considered deviant to some people. I mean I'm against child porn like most people, but aside from that, I'm uncomfortable passing judgements on other people's preferences. If it's consensual adult activity, it's really none of my business what they're doing.
Bunch of hypocrits. The same people issuing, signing, and executing orders and mandates are going to be into the same thing they're declaring must be destroyed. Some senator is sitting there struggling with being a conservative but also liking posterior sex, so he lashes out at all the people he feels are responsible for causing his conflicted feelings.
Ditty and Diddy have extremely similar phonetics. In colloquial usage, people will pronounce them identically. Dume and Tune aren't close at all. Even in informal usage, people still clearly enunciate the first letter of a word. If you meant "Dune" and "Tune", they're still very different pronunciations, Ts and Ds only sound similar when the emphasis is not on them. In Diddy and Ditty, the emphasis is on the first syllable, so the second half of the word sounds the same unless a person makes an effort to clearly enunciate the two.
Another problem with the distinction between Ditty and Diddy, is the fact that it's conceivable the two words could even be used in the same context. When asked what a person is listening two, a person could reasonably respond "Diddy" or "Ditty", and you may not know which one they're referring to.
If artists really cared about fans, freedom, etc. they wouldn't ink deals with the devil in the first place. Signing on with a big label isn't the only way to succeed in this world. I don't think they posted instructions like this against the label's wishes. Anything that happens within a label is the result of a marketing pow-wow. Some guy in a suit told them to post the instructions to further their rebel image and make them seem even more cool so they'll sell more albums.
Wealth, fame, and integrity; pick two.
Fallacious logic. If new people are never allowed to use things which they are new to, then no one is ever allowed to use anything that they're not currently using. You could never have a new Linux user, which means Linux could do nothing but die out as the population of Linux users eventually succumbs to mortality.
By your own logic, you should never go anywhere you don't currently go. Don't switch grocery stores, don't switch clubs... don't even switch TV channels because you'll just be a newbie to it, a realm in which you don't belong.
Maybe you should start your own business, and from the day you open hang a sign on the door that reads: "If you're not an existing customer, go away."
There's so many applications for additional flash memory it's insane. I think many people who are sarcastic about the use of a flash memory stick don't have the perspective to know what it's like to carry around a dozen floppy disks, and still not be able to bring your truly useful applications with you because they're just too big to fit on a floppy.
My programming projects are growing in size, and the number of tools I like to carry with me ready to install on any computer is increasing. I can see needing 16gb, 32gb, or more of storage.
There's a limitless number of tasks that any person can use to make their life/job easier. I think if just about anyone sat down and thought about what they could carry with them that would make their life easier, they could think up 16gb worth of information to store.
I think one market that will open or expand is the portable-data market. I mean obviously right now we have laptops, CDs, and other portable media that allow us to transport data, but I think the flash drive makes the task even more convenient and fills a technology gap that laptops can't comfortable fit into.
I'm not a big fan of programming competitions. They score people on bad programming practice. The skills that make you the best competitor are frequently the same habits that make you the guy everyone venomously whispers about in the cafeteria.
They reward you for coding fast, hacking out make-shift solutions (i.e. Code that could never pass QA), and the given problems are too narrow to be representative of a real programming problem. You can ignore things like portability issues, standards compliance, elegance, orthogonality, modularity and maintainability.
Real programming skills, the things that really set the master programmers apart, play absolutely no role. Namely: Source control and documentation. Most types of "competitive science" won't work well. At least the type where you can't build your project ahead of time. You're going to get the same quality work out of "speed programming" that you'll get out of "speed chemistry". Wouldn't that be fun? Get a room full of chemists together with a bunch of components and tell them to mix real fast, no time for measuring!
That's my take on the whole Competitive Coding atmosphere.