If this is going to attract MY money, I'd like the group (EFF?) to select a (probably small) number of test cases to contest, rather than have a free-for-all system where everybody signs up to be defended against Sony et al.
Why? I've got no problem with the RIAA (and its equivalents worldwide) suing people for: - massive copyright infringement involving zillions of songs and zillions of copies - selling illegal copies of infringing content
On the other hand, I've got a big problem if/when the *AA goes after: - 13 year old kids, and by proxy, their parents (who generally have little to no idea that things such as Limewire even exist) - people who download a couple of songs for their own personal use i.e. not loads of stuff, and not to distribute further - people who download copies of songs they've already purchased on CD, but which they can't copy to e.g. their iPod because of copy protection restrictions on the CD - people who download a TV show which has already been shown on non-subscription services - people who "pirate" content that is so old that common sense says it should've been out of copyright years ago (e.g. old "I Love Lucy" episodes). The concept that copyright can effectively be extended forever just defies common sense, particularly when you see Hollywood waiting for vintage content to become public domain, then releasing "their" take on it and claiming copyright protection on intellectual content that someone else invented 50+ years ago - suing people for e.g. $100k per downloaded song, on some bogus principle that they COULD have given it to the 20,000 others. In that case, the onus should be on the suing party to come up with the list of 20,000 others, with verifiable documentation to support it
I'm curious to see what this document contains: whether it's an ITIL-like view of the world (e.g. a data centre runs on change management, capacity management, problem management,...), a hardware based view (e.g. a data centre needs a raised floor to duct cables, air conditioning, secure access, racks,...) or something else.
Just not curious enough to pay the price to find out
As a consultant, whenever I change/upgrade/rebuild laptops (probably once a year on average), I make a point of trying to use OOo. The most recent time was in March, with a 2.0 beta, but I had to swap back to MSO shortly afterwards.
Although OOo is now really close, and certainly on a par with respect to the UI, feature set and robustness, it still struggles with auto paragraph numbering on documents with a hierarchical structure. In MSO, I'd have a document with paragraphs numbered (e.g.) 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1, 1.3,...; after importing to OOo, they'd be numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,...
This bug/feature has been logged in OOo for quite a while, and (as of the last time I checked ~ 1 month ago) hadn't been addressed. I'm surprised; this feature is absolutely vital for consulting-type people who write reports in the field, and I suspect lots of us would really like to switch to OOo for a variety of reasons.
Personally, that was the *only* issue that kept me from sticking with OOo, but the need to collaborate with others who are using MSO meant that it was a showstopper.
So this "problem" means I'll be faced with the choice of the newest Britney or Good Charlotte single at $1.49, versus classic Stones, Zappa, etc. at (maybe) 79c.
Yep, I can see this being a BIG problem. Score one (more) for the baby boomers
...I'd say the following items really impress potential ops centre customers: - a dedicated viewing area; somewhere that visitors can sit/stand/watch that's glassed off from the day to day work area. If possible, with separate entrances so customers don't experience the joy of conversing with some out-of-it operator who's had to work a double shift in the outside smoking area - the requisite lots of screens showing pictures of systems/apps in green/yellow/red. No customer who visits an ops centre actually understands this stuff, but they'll notice if it isn't around - a BIG display showing a very simple view of the number of Sev 1 or Sev 2 problems. Visitors DO understand this - security cameras showing a very clean and tidy machine room, and maybe shots of attached car parks and external doors. This reinforces the impression that, if they go with you, their machines and data will be "safe" - if they're going to see real live people, make sure they're seeing a calm controlled work environment AT ALL TIMES. When disasters occur, you need to be able to drag the relevant people off to some out-of-view meeting room when you rip their heads off so potential new customers don't get to watch the bloodshed - no PostIt notes! Whether it's true or not, many people associate these with being disorganized, and you can't afford to appear disorganized. Use some alternative to store scribbled down bits of info
I've been using FreeMind for a couple of years to take notes, and it's brilliant. You need to subscribe to the Mind Maps approach to note taking first, but having done that ~10 years ago, I haven't found a commercial product to touch FreeMind.
More and more, I use it in preference to Powerpoint for presentations. Being able to drill down on points while retaining the context of other points onscreen, is a really powerful way to keep audiences interested, and also lets you change tack mid-presentation if you've misjudged the prior knowledge of your audience.
Free, rock solid, export to XML, link to other documents and Web sites, simple interface that stays out of the way. What more could you want?
> Ruby doesn't really bring any significant > advantages over python. Neither does > Ruby-on-rails. It's just the new-kid-on-the-block > enthusiasm that Ruby is enjoying ATM.
As someone who coded in Ruby, Perl and Python today(!), I'm inclined to agree to some extent.
Where both Ruby and Python are failing to replace Perl is with something comparable to CPAN.
For example, this morning I was trying to parse a bunch of data out of HTML tables in Ruby, and tearing my hair out with frustration; I switched to Perl, grabbed HTML::ParseTable from CPAN and had a working solution within 10 minutes. It worked exactly as I'd hoped, and I didn't have to know anything particularly clever to use it.
Looking at the code for HTML::ParseTable, it's not especially complex; a few hundred lines of reasonably clear Perl, plus some very good documentation and examples. However, the effort that's gone into it to get it to its current state - as I saw today, it's able to accurately parse HTML that was apparently handcrafted by a moron with a grudge - is its real value. Presumably it's been beaten into shape by many people over an extended period, and it's largely bug free at this point.
Given the inclination, I could build a HTML::ParseTable equivalent in either Ruby or Python, but why would I bother? The Perl one works now, and it's very rare to find an employer that will use Python and/or Ruby but not Perl.
If/when Parrot allows Ruby and Python to leverage CPAN, that's the point where I think Perl will finally be replaced as the most popular scripting language. Until then, as much as I dislike supporting Perl code, forget it.
How about this: consider an institutional currency trading system, such as those used by banks to hedge their currency positions.
You need a set of rules about when traders can go ahead and execute a particular trade. For example, if the bank already has a huge stash of Japanese yen, they might not want to buy any more (regardless of the price); they'll have a particular risk profile that each trade must fall into.
Now, the people who write the code to check how much the bank holds in Japanese yen at a particular point in time, will almost certainly NOT be the people who create and maintain the risk profiles that the bank needs to trade under when it buys or sells yen. The first set of guys will probably be full-time "normal" programmers who reference stuff out of one or more databases; the second set of guys will be trading management type people. While there's obviously a level of synergy required between the two, they're unlikely to (want to) sit and work together on a regular basis.
So far, it's not that unusual a problem.
Where it gets interesting is that both areas tend to be very dynamic: the definition of a good risk profile tends to vary over time, and the way of calculating current positions in Japanese yen may also change over time (as the bank starts/stops trading in different exchanges, as the bank opens/closes trading rooms in different parts of the world and different timezones, and so on).
Where rule-based apps shine in this scenario is that the two requirements can (and should) be largely separated. Provided the data coming from the data guys can be kept valid (which can be a huge challenge in itself), there's no reason for the risk management guys to be aware of where that data comes from or to question its integrity; they should be adjusting risk profiles via a rules-based mechanism rather than a programming mechanism that requires them to understand anything more than the actual values of the data.
Their rules may include things like "if we're going to buy more yen, we have to sell Brazilian real because we believe there's a relation between the two"; sure, you could employ a regular OO-type coder to do this stuff, but it's much quicker/safer for the guys making such rules to implement them in a rules engine. In this scenario, when a trader puts in a request to buy more yen, it will have to be matched with the amount of Brazilian real that has been sold to see if the appropriate ratios exist to allow the yen trade to go through.
Frequently, things get much more complicated than that, and maybe you'll have to deal with half a dozen other factors as well; this is a simplistic example that could probably be done with a few Excel macros and stored procs, but hopefully you can see how the complexity could scale to the point that a rules-based approach becomes significantly better than "traditional" alternatives as the problem becomes less and less trivial.
of 2 kids that are approaching the end of their high school years, I'm trying to push them into understanding that it's education that's important, not where it comes from.
Formal (e.g. college/university) and informal (e.g. on the job, reading books) training are both fine; the real problem is if you decide to settle comfortably into a job as e.g. supermarket checkout chick and stop trying to learn any more because "you don't have to". Once you've made that jump, you're pretty well hosed: - once you've stopped being educated, it's extremely tough to start again (all sorts of conflicting demands on your time and money start to appear) - once you're earning, words of horror such as "rent/board", "sharing household costs", etc. start to appear. No more free ride, my babies!
They've already got some peers who've made the jump into the workforce as (in their frame of reference) highly-paid shop assistants - "highly paid" translates to "can buy things without either begging from relatives or waiting for birthdays" or "can get car tyres with tread remaining".
All I've asked is that, before they decide to the same step themselves, talk to a few people who've been doing that sort of work for a few years to find out what it's really like.
> Ontario's been a rotten b*stard for the last week > - 30 Celsius + humidity every day.
Here in Australia, we call that "nearly warm enough to hang the washing on the line". 35C is "does anyone know where my shorts are?". 40C is borderline worthy of comment
In case anyone was wondering, beer consumption is independent of temperature.
> If you are making a large scale site or a > corporate inter/intranet site you really have two > choices ASP.NET and J2EE.
Agree with the parent, disagree with the GP.
Any large corporation has many layers of Web presence. There's their customer-focused Internet site, and I agree it'd be brave (not necessarily foolhardy) to use Rails for that.
However, there's also a LOT of intranet stuff going on, under the covers so to speak. Every person in that corporation needs access to internal information, and a lot of it is held in databases. That's where Rails can shine.
In my current job, while a debate was going on about how to build a small intranet site (serving ~30 people, but used by them 90% of the day), I put together the solution using Rails. Almost literally (missed it by about 30 minutes!), when someone asked for my input, I was able to say "Well I think it should look something like this..." and demonstrate a full working solution. I did say "Yep, the UI is absolute basis HTML, and I'm aware that the corporate standard is J2EE, and you're fully welcome to take this functionality and port it to J2EE if you want to, and if you can find the budget to do so" - guess what happened...
They went with the Rails solution, and (more importantly) I got exactly the feature set I wanted in the solution. My workmates jumped on and started using it straight away, so there's been no time since then for me to add all the esoteric/useless features that were requested by the "less-informed" users. Funny about how that worked out...;->
Many many intranet sites in large corps fall into the same category; there's a relatively small group of users need highly-specific and/or flexible functionality where a J2EE or.NET solution is neither timely or cost-effective. The choice is to try to come up with a business case to use J2EE or.NET, or to look elsewhere. There's so much of this work around, it's almost scary to contemplate.
I've worked in many large corps over many years, and only a tiny percentage of the Web dev work is on the huge sites that need mass scalability/auditability/etc. Rails may or many not evolve to serve the needs of those huge sites, but it's absolutely golden for the myriad smaller sites.
I'm in the early stages of experimenting with Mono's XSP as a drop-in replacement for ASP.NET. Looks quite promising at this stage, but I've got a lot more testing to do before I'll be turning off banks of Windows/ASP.NET servers and replacing them with Linux/XSP.
Still, nice to know there's an alternative if for some reason XSP doesn't work out.
if I had such a patent in my pocket, I'd licence it out on terms that said I could renegotiate any licence if and when my "client" decided to sue me for anything whatsoever.
In other words, you can licence it from me for $4 per unit sold. Complain about the patent; if you lose, it becomes $8 per unit. Complain about anything else, and it becomes $12 per unit. Still want to complain, or am I now your newest bestest buddy...?
Almost seems like common sense, which IP law in general is lacking across the board.
My guess is that your boss wants to send HTML email for the presentation benefits - it can look COOL!
I filter out HTML email, so if I was one of your customers, I wouldn't ever see it. However, if you sent me a PDF file, with a covering message in plain email text, then I'd be much more likely to read the PDF. Furthermore, unlike HTML, PDF layout can be specified in such a way that it will appear ~identical on all systems.
> How hard is it to negotiate a 5 week vacation at > an employer even if 3 weeks are unpaid?
I've never been to Canada, so I can only speak as someone who's done contract work for many years.
My normal year has 11 weeks off - I'm a single dad and I choose to take my kids for every school holiday.
I've had no trouble negotiating this as a contractor - most long-term contracts have busy and quiet periods, and I commit to doing overtime or whatever to try to keep projects going. I make it very clear that, not only am I not at work, I'm also uncontactable while I'm away; again, no problems negotiating this, because it's all done up front.
As a permanent, I don't think anyone I've worked for would put up with this. Employers of permanent staff have obligations such as training, career planning, etc. that would make it highly unlikely they'd be able to cope with giving someone 11 weeks off; employers of contractors, however, don't have these obligations.
Bottom line: if you want extra time off, do it as a contractor.
I was prepared to put aside my DRM objections and give this a try, but not at $1.80 a song. I'd probably consider paying up to $1.20 a song, but at $1.80 I'd get that "ripped off" feeling.
At that price, it's actually *cheaper* to buy many/most new CDs in a regular shop, and then you're not having to deal with DRM rubbish.
> SOX deals with accountability within US > corporations. It doesn't speak to the operations > of companies outside the US.
Not true - it also speaks to the operations of non-US companies who have dealings with US companies. Worldwide, that includes pretty much all companies beyond a certain size.
Loads of companies here in Australia are heading down the SOX path.
> I challenge you to list any format > incompatibilities you may think *school* kids may > come across when converting from MS Office to OOo.
First off, I love OOo, use it daily, and think *all* schools should switch to it in preference to paying for another round of MS Office upgrades.
However, there is a reasonably big incompatibility that bites me regularly, and will almost certainly bite school users as well.
If I have a bunch of numbered paragraphs in a MS Office document as follows: 1. 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.3.1 1.3.2 2.... (i.e. three levels of "indentation"), and I load that same document into OOo, I get my paragraphs numbered as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. (i.e. everything gets "flattened out" into a single level).
This has been the case with OOo for at least a couple of years, and was still there as of the first OOo 2.0 beta a short time ago.
With school assignments frequently being numbered in the same fashion, it'd be painful to have to import old MS Office documents and fix up the paragraph numbering.
It's not insurmountable, but it's certainly a format incompatibility and it's pretty painful.
> Sounds to me like you met a couple of guys who > insisted that you actually do your job properly > and had an epiphany. Try learning from it.
Absolutely not - I'm from an engineering background myself, so I appreciate having people around me with a similar mindset.
I don't expect people to "pull a number out of their ass" when I ask for an estimate. However, I expect them to be able to formulate a list of requirements they have which, when addressed, will let them give me an accurate estimate. Although I'm technically capable of doing so, I've got nowhere near enough time to analyse every piece of documentation (including revisions) that comes my way - I have to delegate that task to trusted lieutenants, and to do that I need to have faith that the approach they take will give me a correct answer. To refer to your message, I expect them to test the earth before they build a bridge; if they can't test it themselves, then they need to get someone who can. Until they get the definitive answer, the answer I expect from them is "I don't know, but I'm working on it now". If they can tell me the cause of the delay, I'll manage the uncertainty upwards in the organisation.
Way too many people think of a number, multiply by 2 or 3 to cover things they don't know and are too lazy to find out, then go with that - sorry, doesn't cut it. When you do that, you're hanging people out to dry. I've seen many multi-million dollar projects die because someone didn't do their due diligence and what they thought was a small problem was actually a big problem.
Bottom line: if you're one of those people who actually does the investigation required to come up with accurate estimates, I'd probably employ you. To some people, you might appear to be high-maintenance because you take time to come up with the right answer; to me, you're low maintenance because I don't have to continually check that you know what you're doing.
> Computing is a creative technical discipline that > has little to do with engineering and even less to > do with science. It is an art, a craft and > sometimes a trade.
Although I suspect most coders would agree with you, IMHO it's the fact that people approach coding as "art" rather than "engineering" that screws up schedules and gets business offside.
I've been lucky enough to work with 2 coders who come from a strong engineering background. They approach coding as an engineering task; they design code specifically so that it doesn't fail and does EXACTLY what it's supposed to do under all circumstances.
In terms of documentation, these guys are high maintenance; they question every piece of unclear text in requirements documentation because that's what's required when you're e.g. building a bridge. They don't guess or extrapolate; they execute. Best of all, their results are highly predictable; if they say a task is going to take 3 weeks, then it'll take 3 weeks plus or minus 10%.
Show me an "artistic" coder who can work in that fashion, and it'll be a revelation to me. I don't believe they exist. 90% of the coders I've employed or work with can't estimate within 100% on a regular basis, which is completely intolerable for a project manager.
When times were tough a year or so ago, I sought out these guys time and time again to work for me, and recommended them for other roles when I couldn't employ them myself. Everyone they work for wants them back, simply because they do what they say they're going to do, and do it within the time they originally stated. That makes them HIGHLY employable, even in a downturn.
My advice is to stick with what you've got now. That advice would also apply if you were using C# and wondering about switching to Java.
Honestly, the two languages are close enough in terms of capability that it really boils down to the cost and effort involved in switching.
Cost to remain with Java: $0
Cost to switch to C#: (by the time you've recoded all your "trivial" common routines you've created to work within your particular environment, built.NET equivalents to your scriptable Ant software build scripts, retrained people and maybe pissed off a few in the process, etc.) a lot more than $0
Speak to people who've worked a lot with both languages. Get them to rank both languages out of 10 in terms that are relevant to you. Average the scores across a bunch of people. If C# averages >1.5 more than Java, then consider switching
> Phoney human drama that is cheap to produce. No > screenwriters or plotlines needed. Just find > various "personalities" that will grate on each > other, stick them together, and film it.
Actually, one of the things that made the Australian version of "Survivor" (the one with Australians in it, not the US version that was filmed in Australia) so bad was that the people on the show all got on well together. There were no nasty people, no "alpha males", no real plotting or scheming, no significant personality conflicts, no shafting of rivals, no real subplots,...
The end result was something like an idealised Scout camp; not enthralling TV, by any stretch.
Another aspect is that, more than any other form, TV advertising seems to target *only* e.g. 12-15 year olds. I'm sure that's been the case for some time, but the advertising seems to have become more skewed away from other age groups over the past few years. Or maybe I've just gotten older;->
It always amazes me that this age group is targetted above any others. At my age (early 40s), I've actually got money in the bank to spend (unlike many teenagers). My income is higher than 99.9% of teenagers, and more and more of it is becoming available for discretionary spending; my kids are close to starting work which will free up considerably more of *my* money for stuff I may want to buy. Unlike many teenagers, I'm not constrained by peer pressure when it comes to buying stuff; I'm more likely to be swayed by other peoples' experiences than anything else.
Why, why, WHY doesn't advertising target people my age? I don't particularly want to be targetted, but it just seems such a waste of time and effort to spend SO much effort selling things to teenagers when people in their 40s and 50s have so much more money to spend.
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If this is going to attract MY money, I'd like the group (EFF?) to select a (probably small) number of test cases to contest, rather than have a free-for-all system where everybody signs up to be defended against Sony et al.
Why? I've got no problem with the RIAA (and its equivalents worldwide) suing people for:
- massive copyright infringement involving zillions of songs and zillions of copies
- selling illegal copies of infringing content
On the other hand, I've got a big problem if/when the *AA goes after:
- 13 year old kids, and by proxy, their parents (who generally have little to no idea that things such as Limewire even exist)
- people who download a couple of songs for their own personal use i.e. not loads of stuff, and not to distribute further
- people who download copies of songs they've already purchased on CD, but which they can't copy to e.g. their iPod because of copy protection restrictions on the CD
- people who download a TV show which has already been shown on non-subscription services
- people who "pirate" content that is so old that common sense says it should've been out of copyright years ago (e.g. old "I Love Lucy" episodes). The concept that copyright can effectively be extended forever just defies common sense, particularly when you see Hollywood waiting for vintage content to become public domain, then releasing "their" take on it and claiming copyright protection on intellectual content that someone else invented 50+ years ago
- suing people for e.g. $100k per downloaded song, on some bogus principle that they COULD have given it to the 20,000 others. In that case, the onus should be on the suing party to come up with the list of 20,000 others, with verifiable documentation to support it
Absolutely.
Whenever I've had access to a whiteboard, I've been much more productive. At home, I use mine constantly.
No idea why individual whiteboards aren't more common in workplaces...
I'm curious to see what this document contains: whether it's an ITIL-like view of the world (e.g. a data centre runs on change management, capacity management, problem management, ...), a hardware based view (e.g. a data centre needs a raised floor to duct cables, air conditioning, secure access, racks, ...) or something else.
Just not curious enough to pay the price to find out
As a consultant, whenever I change/upgrade/rebuild laptops (probably once a year on average), I make a point of trying to use OOo. The most recent time was in March, with a 2.0 beta, but I had to swap back to MSO shortly afterwards.
...; after importing to OOo, they'd be numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...
Although OOo is now really close, and certainly on a par with respect to the UI, feature set and robustness, it still struggles with auto paragraph numbering on documents with a hierarchical structure. In MSO, I'd have a document with paragraphs numbered (e.g.) 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1, 1.3,
This bug/feature has been logged in OOo for quite a while, and (as of the last time I checked ~ 1 month ago) hadn't been addressed. I'm surprised; this feature is absolutely vital for consulting-type people who write reports in the field, and I suspect lots of us would really like to switch to OOo for a variety of reasons.
Personally, that was the *only* issue that kept me from sticking with OOo, but the need to collaborate with others who are using MSO meant that it was a showstopper.
So this "problem" means I'll be faced with the choice of the newest Britney or Good Charlotte single at $1.49, versus classic Stones, Zappa, etc. at (maybe) 79c.
Yep, I can see this being a BIG problem. Score one (more) for the baby boomers
...I'd say the following items really impress potential ops centre customers:
- a dedicated viewing area; somewhere that visitors can sit/stand/watch that's glassed off from the day to day work area. If possible, with separate entrances so customers don't experience the joy of conversing with some out-of-it operator who's had to work a double shift in the outside smoking area
- the requisite lots of screens showing pictures of systems/apps in green/yellow/red. No customer who visits an ops centre actually understands this stuff, but they'll notice if it isn't around
- a BIG display showing a very simple view of the number of Sev 1 or Sev 2 problems. Visitors DO understand this
- security cameras showing a very clean and tidy machine room, and maybe shots of attached car parks and external doors. This reinforces the impression that, if they go with you, their machines and data will be "safe"
- if they're going to see real live people, make sure they're seeing a calm controlled work environment AT ALL TIMES. When disasters occur, you need to be able to drag the relevant people off to some out-of-view meeting room when you rip their heads off so potential new customers don't get to watch the bloodshed
- no PostIt notes! Whether it's true or not, many people associate these with being disorganized, and you can't afford to appear disorganized. Use some alternative to store scribbled down bits of info
A bit more - it's 100% Java, so runs in Windows, Linux, Mac etc.
I believe you can also embed it in Web pages, which is probably useful to somebody but not yet to me.
I've been using FreeMind for a couple of years to take notes, and it's brilliant. You need to subscribe to the Mind Maps approach to note taking first, but having done that ~10 years ago, I haven't found a commercial product to touch FreeMind.
More and more, I use it in preference to Powerpoint for presentations. Being able to drill down on points while retaining the context of other points onscreen, is a really powerful way to keep audiences interested, and also lets you change tack mid-presentation if you've misjudged the prior knowledge of your audience.
Free, rock solid, export to XML, link to other documents and Web sites, simple interface that stays out of the way. What more could you want?
> Ruby doesn't really bring any significant
> advantages over python. Neither does
> Ruby-on-rails. It's just the new-kid-on-the-block
> enthusiasm that Ruby is enjoying ATM.
As someone who coded in Ruby, Perl and Python today(!), I'm inclined to agree to some extent.
Where both Ruby and Python are failing to replace Perl is with something comparable to CPAN.
For example, this morning I was trying to parse a bunch of data out of HTML tables in Ruby, and tearing my hair out with frustration; I switched to Perl, grabbed HTML::ParseTable from CPAN and had a working solution within 10 minutes. It worked exactly as I'd hoped, and I didn't have to know anything particularly clever to use it.
Looking at the code for HTML::ParseTable, it's not especially complex; a few hundred lines of reasonably clear Perl, plus some very good documentation and examples. However, the effort that's gone into it to get it to its current state - as I saw today, it's able to accurately parse HTML that was apparently handcrafted by a moron with a grudge - is its real value. Presumably it's been beaten into shape by many people over an extended period, and it's largely bug free at this point.
Given the inclination, I could build a HTML::ParseTable equivalent in either Ruby or Python, but why would I bother? The Perl one works now, and it's very rare to find an employer that will use Python and/or Ruby but not Perl.
If/when Parrot allows Ruby and Python to leverage CPAN, that's the point where I think Perl will finally be replaced as the most popular scripting language. Until then, as much as I dislike supporting Perl code, forget it.
How about this: consider an institutional currency trading system, such as those used by banks to hedge their currency positions.
You need a set of rules about when traders can go ahead and execute a particular trade. For example, if the bank already has a huge stash of Japanese yen, they might not want to buy any more (regardless of the price); they'll have a particular risk profile that each trade must fall into.
Now, the people who write the code to check how much the bank holds in Japanese yen at a particular point in time, will almost certainly NOT be the people who create and maintain the risk profiles that the bank needs to trade under when it buys or sells yen. The first set of guys will probably be full-time "normal" programmers who reference stuff out of one or more databases; the second set of guys will be trading management type people. While there's obviously a level of synergy required between the two, they're unlikely to (want to) sit and work together on a regular basis.
So far, it's not that unusual a problem.
Where it gets interesting is that both areas tend to be very dynamic: the definition of a good risk profile tends to vary over time, and the way of calculating current positions in Japanese yen may also change over time (as the bank starts/stops trading in different exchanges, as the bank opens/closes trading rooms in different parts of the world and different timezones, and so on).
Where rule-based apps shine in this scenario is that the two requirements can (and should) be largely separated. Provided the data coming from the data guys can be kept valid (which can be a huge challenge in itself), there's no reason for the risk management guys to be aware of where that data comes from or to question its integrity; they should be adjusting risk profiles via a rules-based mechanism rather than a programming mechanism that requires them to understand anything more than the actual values of the data.
Their rules may include things like "if we're going to buy more yen, we have to sell Brazilian real because we believe there's a relation between the two"; sure, you could employ a regular OO-type coder to do this stuff, but it's much quicker/safer for the guys making such rules to implement them in a rules engine. In this scenario, when a trader puts in a request to buy more yen, it will have to be matched with the amount of Brazilian real that has been sold to see if the appropriate ratios exist to allow the yen trade to go through.
Frequently, things get much more complicated than that, and maybe you'll have to deal with half a dozen other factors as well; this is a simplistic example that could probably be done with a few Excel macros and stored procs, but hopefully you can see how the complexity could scale to the point that a rules-based approach becomes significantly better than "traditional" alternatives as the problem becomes less and less trivial.
of 2 kids that are approaching the end of their high school years, I'm trying to push them into understanding that it's education that's important, not where it comes from.
Formal (e.g. college/university) and informal (e.g. on the job, reading books) training are both fine; the real problem is if you decide to settle comfortably into a job as e.g. supermarket checkout chick and stop trying to learn any more because "you don't have to". Once you've made that jump, you're pretty well hosed:
- once you've stopped being educated, it's extremely tough to start again (all sorts of conflicting demands on your time and money start to appear)
- once you're earning, words of horror such as "rent/board", "sharing household costs", etc. start to appear. No more free ride, my babies!
They've already got some peers who've made the jump into the workforce as (in their frame of reference) highly-paid shop assistants - "highly paid" translates to "can buy things without either begging from relatives or waiting for birthdays" or "can get car tyres with tread remaining".
All I've asked is that, before they decide to the same step themselves, talk to a few people who've been doing that sort of work for a few years to find out what it's really like.
> Ontario's been a rotten b*stard for the last week
> - 30 Celsius + humidity every day.
Here in Australia, we call that "nearly warm enough to hang the washing on the line". 35C is "does anyone know where my shorts are?". 40C is borderline worthy of comment
In case anyone was wondering, beer consumption is independent of temperature.
> If you are making a large scale site or a
;->
.NET solution is neither timely or cost-effective. The choice is to try to come up with a business case to use J2EE or .NET, or to look elsewhere. There's so much of this work around, it's almost scary to contemplate.
> corporate inter/intranet site you really have two
> choices ASP.NET and J2EE.
Agree with the parent, disagree with the GP.
Any large corporation has many layers of Web presence. There's their customer-focused Internet site, and I agree it'd be brave (not necessarily foolhardy) to use Rails for that.
However, there's also a LOT of intranet stuff going on, under the covers so to speak. Every person in that corporation needs access to internal information, and a lot of it is held in databases. That's where Rails can shine.
In my current job, while a debate was going on about how to build a small intranet site (serving ~30 people, but used by them 90% of the day), I put together the solution using Rails. Almost literally (missed it by about 30 minutes!), when someone asked for my input, I was able to say "Well I think it should look something like this..." and demonstrate a full working solution. I did say "Yep, the UI is absolute basis HTML, and I'm aware that the corporate standard is J2EE, and you're fully welcome to take this functionality and port it to J2EE if you want to, and if you can find the budget to do so" - guess what happened...
They went with the Rails solution, and (more importantly) I got exactly the feature set I wanted in the solution. My workmates jumped on and started using it straight away, so there's been no time since then for me to add all the esoteric/useless features that were requested by the "less-informed" users. Funny about how that worked out...
Many many intranet sites in large corps fall into the same category; there's a relatively small group of users need highly-specific and/or flexible functionality where a J2EE or
I've worked in many large corps over many years, and only a tiny percentage of the Web dev work is on the huge sites that need mass scalability/auditability/etc. Rails may or many not evolve to serve the needs of those huge sites, but it's absolutely golden for the myriad smaller sites.
I'm in the early stages of experimenting with Mono's XSP as a drop-in replacement for ASP.NET. Looks quite promising at this stage, but I've got a lot more testing to do before I'll be turning off banks of Windows/ASP.NET servers and replacing them with Linux/XSP.
Still, nice to know there's an alternative if for some reason XSP doesn't work out.
if I had such a patent in my pocket, I'd licence it out on terms that said I could renegotiate any licence if and when my "client" decided to sue me for anything whatsoever.
In other words, you can licence it from me for $4 per unit sold. Complain about the patent; if you lose, it becomes $8 per unit. Complain about anything else, and it becomes $12 per unit. Still want to complain, or am I now your newest bestest buddy...?
Almost seems like common sense, which IP law in general is lacking across the board.
My guess is that your boss wants to send HTML email for the presentation benefits - it can look COOL!
I filter out HTML email, so if I was one of your customers, I wouldn't ever see it. However, if you sent me a PDF file, with a covering message in plain email text, then I'd be much more likely to read the PDF. Furthermore, unlike HTML, PDF layout can be specified in such a way that it will appear ~identical on all systems.
> How hard is it to negotiate a 5 week vacation at
> an employer even if 3 weeks are unpaid?
I've never been to Canada, so I can only speak as someone who's done contract work for many years.
My normal year has 11 weeks off - I'm a single dad and I choose to take my kids for every school holiday.
I've had no trouble negotiating this as a contractor - most long-term contracts have busy and quiet periods, and I commit to doing overtime or whatever to try to keep projects going. I make it very clear that, not only am I not at work, I'm also uncontactable while I'm away; again, no problems negotiating this, because it's all done up front.
As a permanent, I don't think anyone I've worked for would put up with this. Employers of permanent staff have obligations such as training, career planning, etc. that would make it highly unlikely they'd be able to cope with giving someone 11 weeks off; employers of contractors, however, don't have these obligations.
Bottom line: if you want extra time off, do it as a contractor.
I was prepared to put aside my DRM objections and give this a try, but not at $1.80 a song. I'd probably consider paying up to $1.20 a song, but at $1.80 I'd get that "ripped off" feeling.
At that price, it's actually *cheaper* to buy many/most new CDs in a regular shop, and then you're not having to deal with DRM rubbish.
> SOX deals with accountability within US
> corporations. It doesn't speak to the operations
> of companies outside the US.
Not true - it also speaks to the operations of non-US companies who have dealings with US companies. Worldwide, that includes pretty much all companies beyond a certain size.
Loads of companies here in Australia are heading down the SOX path.
> I challenge you to list any format
...
> incompatibilities you may think *school* kids may
> come across when converting from MS Office to OOo.
First off, I love OOo, use it daily, and think *all* schools should switch to it in preference to paying for another round of MS Office upgrades.
However, there is a reasonably big incompatibility that bites me regularly, and will almost certainly bite school users as well.
If I have a bunch of numbered paragraphs in a MS Office document as follows:
1.
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.3.1
1.3.2
2.
(i.e. three levels of "indentation"), and I load that same document into OOo, I get my paragraphs numbered as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
(i.e. everything gets "flattened out" into a single level).
This has been the case with OOo for at least a couple of years, and was still there as of the first OOo 2.0 beta a short time ago.
With school assignments frequently being numbered in the same fashion, it'd be painful to have to import old MS Office documents and fix up the paragraph numbering.
It's not insurmountable, but it's certainly a format incompatibility and it's pretty painful.
> Sounds to me like you met a couple of guys who
> insisted that you actually do your job properly
> and had an epiphany. Try learning from it.
Absolutely not - I'm from an engineering background myself, so I appreciate having people around me with a similar mindset.
I don't expect people to "pull a number out of their ass" when I ask for an estimate. However, I expect them to be able to formulate a list of requirements they have which, when addressed, will let them give me an accurate estimate. Although I'm technically capable of doing so, I've got nowhere near enough time to analyse every piece of documentation (including revisions) that comes my way - I have to delegate that task to trusted lieutenants, and to do that I need to have faith that the approach they take will give me a correct answer. To refer to your message, I expect them to test the earth before they build a bridge; if they can't test it themselves, then they need to get someone who can. Until they get the definitive answer, the answer I expect from them is "I don't know, but I'm working on it now". If they can tell me the cause of the delay, I'll manage the uncertainty upwards in the organisation.
Way too many people think of a number, multiply by 2 or 3 to cover things they don't know and are too lazy to find out, then go with that - sorry, doesn't cut it. When you do that, you're hanging people out to dry. I've seen many multi-million dollar projects die because someone didn't do their due diligence and what they thought was a small problem was actually a big problem.
Bottom line: if you're one of those people who actually does the investigation required to come up with accurate estimates, I'd probably employ you. To some people, you might appear to be high-maintenance because you take time to come up with the right answer; to me, you're low maintenance because I don't have to continually check that you know what you're doing.
> Computing is a creative technical discipline that
> has little to do with engineering and even less to
> do with science. It is an art, a craft and
> sometimes a trade.
Although I suspect most coders would agree with you, IMHO it's the fact that people approach coding as "art" rather than "engineering" that screws up schedules and gets business offside.
I've been lucky enough to work with 2 coders who come from a strong engineering background. They approach coding as an engineering task; they design code specifically so that it doesn't fail and does EXACTLY what it's supposed to do under all circumstances.
In terms of documentation, these guys are high maintenance; they question every piece of unclear text in requirements documentation because that's what's required when you're e.g. building a bridge. They don't guess or extrapolate; they execute. Best of all, their results are highly predictable; if they say a task is going to take 3 weeks, then it'll take 3 weeks plus or minus 10%.
Show me an "artistic" coder who can work in that fashion, and it'll be a revelation to me. I don't believe they exist. 90% of the coders I've employed or work with can't estimate within 100% on a regular basis, which is completely intolerable for a project manager.
When times were tough a year or so ago, I sought out these guys time and time again to work for me, and recommended them for other roles when I couldn't employ them myself. Everyone they work for wants them back, simply because they do what they say they're going to do, and do it within the time they originally stated. That makes them HIGHLY employable, even in a downturn.
My advice is to stick with what you've got now. That advice would also apply if you were using C# and wondering about switching to Java.
.NET equivalents to your scriptable Ant software build scripts, retrained people and maybe pissed off a few in the process, etc.) a lot more than $0
Honestly, the two languages are close enough in terms of capability that it really boils down to the cost and effort involved in switching.
Cost to remain with Java: $0
Cost to switch to C#: (by the time you've recoded all your "trivial" common routines you've created to work within your particular environment, built
Speak to people who've worked a lot with both languages. Get them to rank both languages out of 10 in terms that are relevant to you. Average the scores across a bunch of people. If C# averages >1.5 more than Java, then consider switching
> Phoney human drama that is cheap to produce. No
...
> screenwriters or plotlines needed. Just find
> various "personalities" that will grate on each
> other, stick them together, and film it.
Actually, one of the things that made the Australian version of "Survivor" (the one with Australians in it, not the US version that was filmed in Australia) so bad was that the people on the show all got on well together. There were no nasty people, no "alpha males", no real plotting or scheming, no significant personality conflicts, no shafting of rivals, no real subplots,
The end result was something like an idealised Scout camp; not enthralling TV, by any stretch.
Another aspect is that, more than any other form, TV advertising seems to target *only* e.g. 12-15 year olds. I'm sure that's been the case for some time, but the advertising seems to have become more skewed away from other age groups over the past few years. Or maybe I've just gotten older ;->
It always amazes me that this age group is targetted above any others. At my age (early 40s), I've actually got money in the bank to spend (unlike many teenagers). My income is higher than 99.9% of teenagers, and more and more of it is becoming available for discretionary spending; my kids are close to starting work which will free up considerably more of *my* money for stuff I may want to buy. Unlike many teenagers, I'm not constrained by peer pressure when it comes to buying stuff; I'm more likely to be swayed by other peoples' experiences than anything else.
Why, why, WHY doesn't advertising target people my age? I don't particularly want to be targetted, but it just seems such a waste of time and effort to spend SO much effort selling things to teenagers when people in their 40s and 50s have so much more money to spend.