I'd tend to agree, especially when you are first starting out, and it is a competitive environment, if you went to the number 1 database school in the country (for example), you will get a job at such and such CRM software co, while others will not.
Another example: IBM, and others (SGI, read The New New Thing by Jim Clarke) hire quite a few IIT grads. I think MSFT got into trouble for hiring the entire graduating class(es) one year, in fact.
Finally I know an entirely capable programmer who had solid experience, very hard worker, who was out of work for a year - probably would've gotten work sooner had he a college degree of any sort.
-.NET apps are s-l-o-w starting up: NO advantage over Javax except the spiffy, Windows-native GUI layer;
But with SWT Java has the Windows-native GUI look also. Also check out Eclipse. In fact, Borland is using Eclipse for TogetherJ perhaps they will use it for Delphi too...
In fact, the 40 hour week, now called Sustainable Pace, is one of the core principles behind XP/Agile. If you get a chance to see Robert Martin speak it's worth it.
Can't find a reference with Googling, but a friend of mine writing payment software, that runs on all the app servers, was stunned to see that oracle is basically Tomcat, for a higher price. Fancy that. So hope you aren't comparing Oracle to itself.
Actually WebSphere is darned impressive as far as scalability goes. It even runs on the mainframe, one place supports 2million hits/day. Not bad.
I bought a US Robotics 56K modem years back from Best Buy. I asked the salesperson whether it was a software or a hardware modem, and he was like, "oh yeah, it's hardware alright". Only after some frustrating hours trying to get it to work on my Linux machine did I realize that I needed to get a "Data/Fax" modem.
So now I got to CompUSA instead, and direct others to that store. I don't mind salespeople on a commission, as long as they know what they are talking about.
TOra's license is GPL, straight, no chaser.Not quite. If you read the threads on SourceForge, it is an additional clause Henrik and Quest have added, expressing their interpretation of the GPL, that is causing the difficulties, not the Trolltech license.
The GPL specifically prohibits linking with non-Free 3rd party libraries, like the commercial versions of Qt.
Right. So Henrik simply bought a copy of Qt to compile the binaries. According to Henrik, for the distribution, the GPL allows you to exclude libraries, which he did for the Oracle libraries, but chose not to for the Qt libraries. And he has added wording to this effect to the boilerplate to clarify this.
It seems, from reading the threads, that Quest is not keen on the idea of a Windows version of TOra. And from what other posters on this/. list have commented about Quest, I can see why.
* Specifically you are not permitted to link this program with the * Qt/UNIX, Qt/Windows or Qt Non Commercial products of TrollTech. * And you are not permitted to distribute binaries compiled against * these libraries without written consent from Quest Software, Inc.
Really? I'd think the opposite. Most games *are* written in C++ for one thing, although Java seems to be making some inroads in the mobile phone games market. Also, there was a recent TopCoder contest, i.e. a similar programming contest, in which the programmer who won used C.
Re:eeeeevil? Yes. And NOT Funny.
on
Inside Wal-Mart IT
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Most Americans choose Wal-mart.
If you live in Podunk, USA, you probably don't have a choice. This is because Wal-Mart will artificially lower their prices to force out any competitors, once they've wiped everybody out, they raise 'em again. There's an excellent program on PBS recently, see it if you get a chance.
Pay a higher price at your local store on main street, and suport their higher cost structure (buying american manufactured goods, higher wages and benefits for employees, lost productivity due to unionized labor force, etc.)
True, workers in Safeway make $18/hr vs $8/hr for WM. But it's not just that. The PBS show gave some interesting insight into how Wal-Mart works. They get communities to give them huge tax incentives by showing how much sales revenue and jobs they will "generate". What the small towns don't realize is Wal-Mart doesn't "magically" create any more revenue, it just cannibalizes the other stores, so that in fact, total revenue goes down, especially if Wal-Mart headquarters decides they don't need the store anymore, after 10 years or so and closes it. Further, the bulk of the money goes elsewhere, out of the community, back to Bentonville.
Now back to the original point about insurance and pay. It actually turns out worse for the towns, that still have to provide care for their now non-insured population of workers. So they are basically subsidizing Wal-Mart in this way, not just in the tax benefits.
Wal-mart is simply supplying what the american consumer wants. this is not evil, this is meeting demand.
That's what you would think. But now you see it's just another tax loophole essentially, just as the mall sprawl was partially because real estate tax benefits, i.e. I invest my millions in a mall, and get a great ROI, regardless of whether the mall does well or not (see excellent New Yorker article about the history of Malls in the U.S.). Blame it on the accountants.
Unless it's your code, don't be so sure. For the original Win95/98 issue, it was an "OS" bug. Also, depends on what you call the "OS". As MSFT has argued in court, the "OS" encompasses lots of things. That's the problem with a company run by a bunch of lawyers instead of technical folks.
2) Regardless of where the fault is (hint: it's not in Windows), it is not unreasonable for a machine to need servicing.
That's why the software houses try to call 'em "Service" packs, sounds much more marketable than "patches". But don't think the airplane analogy works, what we have here is more like a "recall".
a periodic shutdown/restart in complicated systems can be a valid operational practice.
Not in the on-line 24x7 world, and especially not at a major airport.
If the system called for a 48th day restart, thats what it requires, and deviation from that has consequences.
Bad design is bad design. As others have pointed out it's ridiculous LAX is running on such a weak system. It does give you a bit of respect for those who wrote, for example, the air traffic controller systems, that manage all this magic every day. It also shows you just how difficult it is to replace something like that.
It's your own country's fault for making such a big deal when that prime minister was murdered, Olaf Palme, when that was a daily incident in days of yore. People have long forgotten, probably, how Charles the 12th, I believe it was, marched his way through the steppes of Russia with his Swedish steel, and cut the Russians to pieces, before getting bogged down in the mud and having to escape through the Black Sea. And before that the dreaded Vikings (especially that fellow with the axe who was the king of Iceland). So stop the fuss, and we'll go back to dreaming about Swedish babes in bikinis playing volleyball.
Nothing is quite as funny as seeing someone buy organic food for 3x-4x the price. Too many people have become big babies these days and are afraid of even living.
You've got it part-way right, too bad organic produce has a soccer-buys-it image. If you want to be a real he-man macho-dude, skip the grocery store altogether, with it's sanitized, ultra-pasteurized, FDA-approved, daintily packaged boxes of crap, and do yourself a favor and head outside to your local farmer's market. No packages, it's been dug out fresh from the earth, probably sitting out in the air. Better yet, head to Mexico with it's open-air markets (mercados). Now that's living. Purified (wussified) American's would probably hold their nose, or even grab their delicate tummies. Yep, American's don't have a clue what real living is. It's not hitting the mall in your SUV, it's not sitting watching footbal on your plasma telly, it's not pushing your overflowing shopping cart around wal-mart like a druggy addicted to _stuff_... it's not... well that's another story.
I believe you can get such cheese although it's difficult.
There was a great article recently in the New Yorker (search on 'Cheese Nun') about the efforts of a nun (with a Phd in Microbiology) to make authentic, unpasteurized French cheeses. Some interesting stuff about the fact that she tried making cheese in a highly sanitized environment, and actually had a big problem with E. Coli bacteria! Usual excellent writing from New Yorker.
Figures. Originally I read his article about the greatness of Lisp a while back, seems interesting, but now that he's yammering about Python being the "new, new thing" I've realized the gent is a bit of a kook.
First of all, some of the best programmers I know work magic in _whatever_ language they program in. One guy, who used to write operating system code for a phone company (in Forth I believe), wrote a simple messaging server using SQL Server stored procedures (when the management said we couldn't buy a real messaging system like MQSeries). Now that's what I call a cool hack.
Paul Graham's statement reminds me of a friend's kid brother saying why he didn't want to eat his spinach. But Mom, real surfers don't eat vegetables. By the same token, real programmers don't program anything but Python either!
However, it was big enough that Yahoo! had trouble reimplementing it in more conventional languages (and in the end, actually wrote a simple lisp interpreter to handle part of it).
Ahh. The small print. And why did they need to "reimplement" it? I'm assuming they didn't use Lisp, nor Python. Funny that wasn't mentioned. Just curious.
And I was new to patterns and was likely not communicating my questions as clearly as one could.
Then maybe that's why you're confusing simple programming, i.e. skipping patterns (whether in Python, Java, C++) or whatever, vs. programming using patterns to build reliable, robust, maintainable, modifiable, extendable applications.
Let's take MVC (Model-View-Controller). I could write on large simple script in PHP, Python, Perl what have you, quick and simple, gets the job done, I saved some time etc etc. But as you build on it, that solution quickly falls apart, hence the MVC and other time-tested patterns.
I just read about a new CRM based on PHP and MySQL. They emphasize "Fast fast fast" on their website. They don't have any documentation on their architecture, but I'm betting it's 'fast' because they hit the db directly from their web scripts.
Here's an interesting discussions on patterns.
Paul Graham seems to be arguing that there is a silver bullet. I remember this guy, he used to say Lisp was the silver bullet. Now I guess he's saying Python is.
True, Engineering courses at school help you learn how to solve problems better, but those were only 5 really helpful courses and then there is the rest of liberal arts easy A stuff:-).
and theirin in part of the problem with a college compsci degree. Great for learning basic coding syntax, various interesting subjects that provide good background but you might not use much (AI), but barely cover the bread and butter stuff you will need in the real world: stuff like how to gather requirements, how to design/model an application, how to test. Learning Pascal/C/C++/Java (or whatever lang. they are teaching) is the easy part, and the coding examples they give - you will *never* get something matching those specs in the real world. Read Gosling's excellent discussion about exception handling: main point that you don't bother with that anything other than the one-true-path scenario in college.
But in a way I prefer theory over practical as there are those who criticize my school (UWisc) as too theoretical. I'd rather get a good foundation in math, computer architecture, OS, compilers, networks, than learn the latest fad (.NET/ASP/C#). This is a field that as you say you have to keep up with. So as a whole, various schools do a good job, certainly there are various improvements, but it's up to you really to apply it.
I believe Patterson wrote the original version of CP/M on an emulator, simply because it was too expensive or difficult to run on native hardware. And it worked. I may be off on the details, it's all in Robert X. Cringley's excellent book about how Silicon Valley Geeks are billionaires but still can't get a date. Greate book.
I recall the community school I took calculus at while in high school had a Dec PDP-7 (or 11? but I'm guessing, 32K?). Anyway, it was about the size of a refrigerator, and one of my friends spent most of the semester trying to boot that sucker, as you say with _tape_! And flipping the switches and the whole bit. Although he claimed various successes, This guy eventually got a Masters at Stanford and works at MSFT, graphics/sound (DirectX I believe) so he was no slouch.
Hmm. That sounds roughly similar to IBM's HACMP, High Availability something or other. Basically if there is a hardware failure it has to shift processing to the other box (RS-6000 I think, on the system I'm familiar with, no expense was spared). I just recall this as I had to work on a shutdown process for my component. But as I recall it was very fast, the idea was that processing (from a mainframe) was uninterrupted.
They're also handy in the instance that you may have multiple front-ends written in multiple languages accessing the same database in many cases. Making a change to the way data is returned is far easier to do in one stored procedure than in X number of front-ends.
Sounds like you need some middleware. There are database servers, and there are integration servers, for example WebMethods. They might be overkill in your situation, or might be a big improvement.
Yeah, but then you are stuck with a certain database. So I would say your better bet would be something like J2EE if one of your design goals is to be cross-platform or even cross-app servers.
But even there, there are sure to be differences. Main thing is to make sure you keep it simple. I'm currently using a product called omniORB for Corba development, and the designers went out of their way to stick to plain and simple C++, no fancy stuff, so they would have no trouble porting it.
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Another example: IBM, and others (SGI, read The New New Thing by Jim Clarke) hire quite a few IIT grads. I think MSFT got into trouble for hiring the entire graduating class(es) one year, in fact.
Finally I know an entirely capable programmer who had solid experience, very hard worker, who was out of work for a year - probably would've gotten work sooner had he a college degree of any sort.
But with SWT Java has the Windows-native GUI look also. Also check out Eclipse. In fact, Borland is using Eclipse for TogetherJ perhaps they will use it for Delphi too...
Actually WebSphere is darned impressive as far as scalability goes. It even runs on the mainframe, one place supports 2million hits/day. Not bad.
So now I got to CompUSA instead, and direct others to that store. I don't mind salespeople on a commission, as long as they know what they are talking about.
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/description.html
The GPL specifically prohibits linking with non-Free 3rd party libraries, like the commercial versions of Qt.
Right. So Henrik simply bought a copy of Qt to compile the binaries. According to Henrik, for the distribution, the GPL allows you to exclude libraries, which he did for the Oracle libraries, but chose not to for the Qt libraries. And he has added wording to this effect to the boilerplate to clarify this.
It seems, from reading the threads, that Quest is not keen on the idea of a Windows version of TOra. And from what other posters on this /. list have commented about Quest, I can see why.
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?I agree, both Turbo Pascal and Turbo C were fantastic. One person mentioned open source, why not use the Eclipse IDE, and supply a Borland plugin?
Really? I'd think the opposite. Most games *are* written in C++ for one thing, although Java seems to be making some inroads in the mobile phone games market. Also, there was a recent TopCoder contest, i.e. a similar programming contest, in which the programmer who won used C.
If you live in Podunk, USA, you probably don't have a choice. This is because Wal-Mart will artificially lower their prices to force out any competitors, once they've wiped everybody out, they raise 'em again. There's an excellent program on PBS recently, see it if you get a chance.
Pay a higher price at your local store on main street, and suport their higher cost structure (buying american manufactured goods, higher wages and benefits for employees, lost productivity due to unionized labor force, etc.)
True, workers in Safeway make $18/hr vs $8/hr for WM. But it's not just that. The PBS show gave some interesting insight into how Wal-Mart works. They get communities to give them huge tax incentives by showing how much sales revenue and jobs they will "generate". What the small towns don't realize is Wal-Mart doesn't "magically" create any more revenue, it just cannibalizes the other stores, so that in fact, total revenue goes down, especially if Wal-Mart headquarters decides they don't need the store anymore, after 10 years or so and closes it. Further, the bulk of the money goes elsewhere, out of the community, back to Bentonville.
Now back to the original point about insurance and pay. It actually turns out worse for the towns, that still have to provide care for their now non-insured population of workers. So they are basically subsidizing Wal-Mart in this way, not just in the tax benefits.
Wal-mart is simply supplying what the american consumer wants. this is not evil, this is meeting demand.
That's what you would think. But now you see it's just another tax loophole essentially, just as the mall sprawl was partially because real estate tax benefits, i.e. I invest my millions in a mall, and get a great ROI, regardless of whether the mall does well or not (see excellent New Yorker article about the history of Malls in the U.S.). Blame it on the accountants.
Unless it's your code, don't be so sure. For the original Win95/98 issue, it was an "OS" bug. Also, depends on what you call the "OS". As MSFT has argued in court, the "OS" encompasses lots of things. That's the problem with a company run by a bunch of lawyers instead of technical folks. 2) Regardless of where the fault is (hint: it's not in Windows), it is not unreasonable for a machine to need servicing.
That's why the software houses try to call 'em "Service" packs, sounds much more marketable than "patches". But don't think the airplane analogy works, what we have here is more like a "recall". a periodic shutdown/restart in complicated systems can be a valid operational practice.
Not in the on-line 24x7 world, and especially not at a major airport. If the system called for a 48th day restart, thats what it requires, and deviation from that has consequences.
Bad design is bad design. As others have pointed out it's ridiculous LAX is running on such a weak system. It does give you a bit of respect for those who wrote, for example, the air traffic controller systems, that manage all this magic every day. It also shows you just how difficult it is to replace something like that.
It's your own country's fault for making such a big deal when that prime minister was murdered, Olaf Palme, when that was a daily incident in days of yore. People have long forgotten, probably, how Charles the 12th, I believe it was, marched his way through the steppes of Russia with his Swedish steel, and cut the Russians to pieces, before getting bogged down in the mud and having to escape through the Black Sea. And before that the dreaded Vikings (especially that fellow with the axe who was the king of Iceland). So stop the fuss, and we'll go back to dreaming about Swedish babes in bikinis playing volleyball.
You've got it part-way right, too bad organic produce has a soccer-buys-it image. If you want to be a real he-man macho-dude, skip the grocery store altogether, with it's sanitized, ultra-pasteurized, FDA-approved, daintily packaged boxes of crap, and do yourself a favor and head outside to your local farmer's market. No packages, it's been dug out fresh from the earth, probably sitting out in the air. Better yet, head to Mexico with it's open-air markets (mercados). Now that's living. Purified (wussified) American's would probably hold their nose, or even grab their delicate tummies. Yep, American's don't have a clue what real living is. It's not hitting the mall in your SUV, it's not sitting watching footbal on your plasma telly, it's not pushing your overflowing shopping cart around wal-mart like a druggy addicted to _stuff_ ... it's not ... well that's another story.
There was a great article recently in the New Yorker (search on 'Cheese Nun') about the efforts of a nun (with a Phd in Microbiology) to make authentic, unpasteurized French cheeses. Some interesting stuff about the fact that she tried making cheese in a highly sanitized environment, and actually had a big problem with E. Coli bacteria! Usual excellent writing from New Yorker.
First of all, some of the best programmers I know work magic in _whatever_ language they program in. One guy, who used to write operating system code for a phone company (in Forth I believe), wrote a simple messaging server using SQL Server stored procedures (when the management said we couldn't buy a real messaging system like MQSeries). Now that's what I call a cool hack.
Paul Graham's statement reminds me of a friend's kid brother saying why he didn't want to eat his spinach. But Mom, real surfers don't eat vegetables. By the same token, real programmers don't program anything but Python either!
Ahh. The small print. And why did they need to "reimplement" it? I'm assuming they didn't use Lisp, nor Python. Funny that wasn't mentioned. Just curious.
Then maybe that's why you're confusing simple programming, i.e. skipping patterns (whether in Python, Java, C++) or whatever, vs. programming using patterns to build reliable, robust, maintainable, modifiable, extendable applications.
Let's take MVC (Model-View-Controller). I could write on large simple script in PHP, Python, Perl what have you, quick and simple, gets the job done, I saved some time etc etc. But as you build on it, that solution quickly falls apart, hence the MVC and other time-tested patterns.
I just read about a new CRM based on PHP and MySQL. They emphasize "Fast fast fast" on their website. They don't have any documentation on their architecture, but I'm betting it's 'fast' because they hit the db directly from their web scripts.
Here's an interesting discussions on patterns. Paul Graham seems to be arguing that there is a silver bullet. I remember this guy, he used to say Lisp was the silver bullet. Now I guess he's saying Python is.
and theirin in part of the problem with a college compsci degree. Great for learning basic coding syntax, various interesting subjects that provide good background but you might not use much (AI), but barely cover the bread and butter stuff you will need in the real world: stuff like how to gather requirements, how to design/model an application, how to test. Learning Pascal/C/C++/Java (or whatever lang. they are teaching) is the easy part, and the coding examples they give - you will *never* get something matching those specs in the real world. Read Gosling's excellent discussion about exception handling: main point that you don't bother with that anything other than the one-true-path scenario in college.
But in a way I prefer theory over practical as there are those who criticize my school (UWisc) as too theoretical. I'd rather get a good foundation in math, computer architecture, OS, compilers, networks, than learn the latest fad (.NET/ASP/C#). This is a field that as you say you have to keep up with. So as a whole, various schools do a good job, certainly there are various improvements, but it's up to you really to apply it.
I believe Patterson wrote the original version of CP/M on an emulator, simply because it was too expensive or difficult to run on native hardware. And it worked. I may be off on the details, it's all in Robert X. Cringley's excellent book about how Silicon Valley Geeks are billionaires but still can't get a date. Greate book.
I recall the community school I took calculus at while in high school had a Dec PDP-7 (or 11? but I'm guessing, 32K?). Anyway, it was about the size of a refrigerator, and one of my friends spent most of the semester trying to boot that sucker, as you say with _tape_! And flipping the switches and the whole bit. Although he claimed various successes, This guy eventually got a Masters at Stanford and works at MSFT, graphics/sound (DirectX I believe) so he was no slouch.
Hmm. That sounds roughly similar to IBM's HACMP, High Availability something or other. Basically if there is a hardware failure it has to shift processing to the other box (RS-6000 I think, on the system I'm familiar with, no expense was spared). I just recall this as I had to work on a shutdown process for my component. But as I recall it was very fast, the idea was that processing (from a mainframe) was uninterrupted.
Yep lots of talk of portability, be interesting to see how many people *really* use it.
Sounds like you need some middleware. There are database servers, and there are integration servers, for example WebMethods. They might be overkill in your situation, or might be a big improvement.
But even there, there are sure to be differences. Main thing is to make sure you keep it simple. I'm currently using a product called omniORB for Corba development, and the designers went out of their way to stick to plain and simple C++, no fancy stuff, so they would have no trouble porting it.