Well, just to be prepared, do I have to take some aptitude test? I.e., do I have to show them logs of hot steamy cybersex, to show that I've got the mad skills? Or is that tested on the spot?;)
Or I know that in the army you have to get trained and certified to be allowed to do pretty much anything. D'you figure it's the same for the FBI? Do they offer a course and an exam in impersonating horny 14 year old girls online?
They need a warrant to wiretap a phone line. And I think the same applies here: unless you plan to get someone to actually say they consent, better get a warrant first.
And, honestly, while I hate paedos as much as anyone else... I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation that the police gets a warrant before taping my phone or recording my chat sessions. If there's reasonable suspicion, ok, let them record away. But it ought to take a judge or DA to review that and decide if there's indeed reasonable suspicion to proceed.
All I'm saying is that, no disrespect intended to the fine police officers, it should not turn into "I'm a cop, therefore by default I'm entitled to stalk anyone and record anyone's conversations." There's a reason why they have to get warrants for everything else. I'm sure that the vast majority of them are honest, hard-working cops, but in the end they're human too... it's not hard to imagine a few crackpots wiretaping their ex, or poking through their neighbours' houses out of pure curiosity, or even helping someone spy on the competition, if they could do that by default without any warrant.
Well, we've always known that. On the other hand, what makes me wonder about that very phrase you've quoted is: some people are actually paid to hang out in chatrooms and have "cybersex".
(And I don't mean just this story. I also remember a much older one one where a female police officer, as part of her duties, coaxed her internet lover into crossing state border to come have sex with her underage daughters. Or so he thought. He just got arrested since that's a felony.)
Well, damn. It sure beats the heck out of a lot of other jobs:)
Instead of having to put up with stupid requirements, lazy co-workers, and (my least favourite) meetings, I'll take having to clock 8 hours a day in a chat room. Hey, I can even pretend to be a horny 14 year old girl, if that's what it takes to get that job. You can start calling me Shirley1990:)
Disclaimer: I'm not particularly religious, but I did make a point to read the bible. (And the Koran, and several others.)
It seems to me like first of all, it clearly speaks of a mark, not of an implant deep inside your body. Second, what it speaks of there, is about accepting the rule of the antichrist and the social/economic structure that comes with it, not about merely getting a medical implant.
As far as I know, so far noone's asking you to accept some particular government to get a simple medical implant. Noone asked that you change religions to get any other surgery, you know. And noone has been so far asked to get a peg-leg to be allowed to conduct business, so, you know, I doubt they'll be required to get an implant against paralysis either.
I.e., relax. When someone starts asking you to sell your soul or give up some rights to get such an implant, _then_ you can start worrying. But until then, relax.
That said, as the old saying goes, "Jesus is OK, but his fanboys piss me off". Ever considered that going crackpot and seeing antichrist conspiracies everywhere might actually do more harm than good towards "saving souls"?
Even skipping over the "would I want to be associated to a group of conspiracy crackpots" question, it still just begs the question: "would I give a damn about being 'saved' by a god who's against getting a simple medical implant?"
Sorry, but I have to question how would such a deity count as 'good'. Requiring people to basically just forego medical help and stay paralyzed, just to prove their faith? Doesn't sound like a benevolent deity to me. In fact, it sounds closer to "lawful evil" than anything else.
I don't know about china, but I have some first hand experience with Eastern Europe. It's a different culture, all right.
To put it mildly, the main "cultural difference" is that there it's ok to be an annoying f*ck to those around you. If it doesn't involve cell phones, it involves talking way too loudly, having an extremely loud party in a densely packed block of flats, etc. And if someone doesn't like it, fsck them, it's not your problem. Extreme individualism was pretty much _the_ way to survive communism, and the poverty that came with it.
Now to get back to your point, methinks the same must apply to China, then.
Sorry, no matter how much I want to find it an excuse, there is _no_ bloody way to say that it ought to be socially acceptable to talk loudly on the phone in a movie theatre. I went there to see and _listen_ to the bloody movie, not to hear a dozen retards talking on their phone. I don't care if it's face-to-face or on the phone. Just shut the fsck up. I've paid to listen to the actors, not to you.
It's not overreacting, it's not shunning "an obnoxious show of money", it's merely asking that you show at least some minimal respect to your fellow humans. All I'm asking is that you let me watch the bloody movie, that's all.
So again: what's different in the West is that people have learned to give each other at least some minimal respect. Whole systems of social customs have existed for the sole reason of allowing people to live without getting on each other's nerves every two minutes.
I'll tell you another point of view as to why cell phones are more annoying than face-to-face conversations. Because they're an _extra_ annoyance.
I find face-to-face conversations disruptive too, but... I can't expect people not to talk to each other, when they're travelling together. (I can, however, expect that they keep the volume down.) It always happened, it always will. Even back when people travelled in horse pulled carts, they talked to each other.
Cell phones, however, just bring an extra annoyance that just wouldn't be there without them. All those people having loud 30 minute long phone conversations on the bus, would have shut the fsck up if they didn't have cell phones. If it wasn't for cell phones, I'd only have the noise from those talking face to face, but as it is now I _also_ have the extra noise from those retards with cell phones.
Or when I'm at work. I already have enough disruption from people who obviously love to chat to each other more than they like to work. Either that, or some of them are actually paid to just walk around and talk to everyone about what they did for easter. Now throw the phones into the mix too. And by Odin, behold: the lout who just spent 2 hours straight talking about his vacation in the middle of the office, now spends an extra hour talking on the cell phone about it. Hello? I'm trying to bloody concentrate on writing a program, you know.
Briefly: It's not a new problem, it's just a new factor that multiplies an existing one. And it's not that I want to listen in, it's that I don't want you disturbing my peace in the first place, thank-you-very-much.
It's also that cell phones bring this problem in new places where the old one didn't exist. E.g., it was customary for most people to shut up or whisper in a movie theater. The others have paid to see the fscking movie, not to listen to your conversation. However, people calling don't know you're in a movie theater.
The same goes for team meetings, presentations, etc. People who wouldn't have been rude enough to start having their own side conversation in the middle of the presentation... now have cell phones ringing instead.
Well, how about setting it to only vibrate? I don't think you'll confuse that with some other person's phone.
And, no offense, but it makes me want to award some "Mr/Ms Individualistic Git" to everyone who can say "I aggree, it is annoying, but... [insert half-arsed excuse for continuing to be annoying]". Here's a crazy idea: if you do realize you're annoying the living heck out of the people around you... how about trying to stop being annoying? Yeah, I know, crazy concept.
Well, the only point I see (somewhat) is that more GUI means more code, which inherently means more bugs. People make mistakes. E.g., strapping the most primitive command line to a compression function, a la pkzip, is a lot less code than having a whole GUI around it, a la WinZip.
It should also be noted that security and GUIs also have other problems. Since I'm not an OS programmer, I'll give examples from stuff I did work on, and where I've seen these vulnerabilities happening every day:
1. A lot of companies hire basically clueless monkeys to write their code, especially for Web-based GUIs. GUIs have their own pitfalls, and that goes double if that all has to go over HTTP. Without someone at least remotely security-minded on the team, everyone is doing the same mistakes over and over again.
To use a well known example: there is nothing inherently insecure about Perl (buffer overflows and such), but, in the early days of the Web, Perl and CGI were synonimous for a vulnerable site. Why? Because although Perl and CGI by themselves were good and stable, the monkeys coding those sites were doing fundamentally dangerous things with them. Like passing parameters received off a web-site, without any checking, to command line programs.
Now replace "to command line programs" with "to SQL without quoting the apostrophes" and you have a mistake (and a vulnerability) that every newbie somehow just has to make. Or replace it with "to HTTP text without parsing or quoting", and you have a way to let the user embed JavaScript/VBScript/ActiveX/whatever in the pages other users see. Etc. And we're only starting to see the tip of the iceberg of security problems waiting to happen.
2. Reinventing the square wheel. E.g., instead of having the OS manage login and authorization for you, every single Web GUI inherently has to have its own passwords and permissions mechanisms. Which too often are implemented all wrong. E.g., every newbie just has to write code where you can escalate your privileges or see confidential data by just editing the URL. (See the old Hotmail vulnerability.)
And, to be honest, it's not just the newbies. I've seen expensive enterprise systems written by extremely expensive consultants from a _big_ corporation, which had all the vulnerabilities above. And then some. I guess some people just never learn.
Bullshit. If a company is laying you off to save money on cheaper foreign workers, you have no obligation to see to the good of the company in the future. The company-employee trust has been broken, and not by you.
I'm not as much worried about the individual company, nor about the CEO's bonus, as about society as a whole. Even taking the most conservative estimates on how much is spent on computing each year, and applying the results of such statistics as "68% of Java developpers don't know Java" or "3 out of 4 programmers can't really program"... it's scary. It means _hundreds_ _of_ _billions_ each year are drained just into feeding parasites.
It's money which could be better spent elsewhere. It could mean opening new factories and creating work for a lot more people. And this time for people who actually want to do honest work, not for cheats and liars.
Even if I'm to get in the mindset of "screw the corporations and their CEOs! They have too much money! Make 'em pay!" there are way better ways than this. Change some employment laws. Raise the minimum wage. Stuff which benefits everyone, not just the biggest liars and cheats.
Bullshit. It's about money.
Indeed. And I think being about the money is actually a good thing. Most companies weren't seeing a profit out of those hordes of incompetents taking years to deliver a half-arsed system. If that grandious enterprise system makes 5 secretaries redundant, but requires 4 full time programmers and admins, it's actually making a loss. And that loss might just cause a lot more jobs lost down the line.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that there aren't people in the US who do a good job.
Oh, I'm sure there are plenty of _very_ competent people in the US. But here's the rub: not half as many as are currently getting ridiculously high salaries as programmers.
The plan to let go of the manufacturing industry and make everyone a programmer or other high-tech expert was fundamentally flawed. It's as stupid as saying "screw the rest of the economy, this whole country is going to produce and export movies." Most people just can't either act, direct or write a good script. You only have a tiny fraction of the population who can do that well. Same with programming.
I know several people who are productive and competent, but are no longer competitive because they can't work for $3/hr.
Those can always find another (better) job. I did. Within a month I was hired again.
The last statistic I've seen, said that less than 10% of the jobs were moved so far. Roll it around in your head. If you're not in the 10% most incompetent segment, you'll still find a job. It might involve moving (_not_ to India), or having "only" a 5 figure salary for a change, or other mildly unpleasant stuff, but you'll survive.
I do agree that there should be some sort of penalty applied to people who lie on their resume. I also think that there should be some sort of penalty applied to salesman who sell a product/service that the company doesn't provide and to the management that allows it to happen.
Amen to that. That's another thing I really wish to see.
I do think that equal punishment should apply to the person who lied on their resume and the person who hired them. If the person they hired is incompetent then it follows that the hiring manager is also incompetent, do you not agree? After all, it is the manager's job to hire competent people.
No arguments there. I was just getting that thought myself after I posted the previous message.
Just thought I'd add: if that was supposed to be an insult, well, it tends to work less well against someone who just got a pay raise in January. So, speaking of whining, sometimes hard work and quality pay off more than whining about your job going to India, eh?:D
Actually, I never asked about his salary, since, honestly it's not my problem how much he earns. My problem is more that such parasites are employed at all.
But I'd be surprised if his was that much higher. You see, this is the kind of Wally which doesn't even try to be likeable to the boss or anything. When I've said that he openly refuses to do anything, I really meant it. Very literally. His _only_ claim to staying employed is very literally that he still has to finish that module, and look how many people want changes from him (i.e., want it changed into something that actually works), etc.
Now I've met smart Wallies. Wallies that came from a business school, and knew how to talk the language of management. They were damn good at marketting themselves. Couldn't code worth crap, but the bosses loved them. One of them averaged two pay raises a year.
That's the smart version Wally. This one, on the other hand, is the "I can't be arsed to do that" kind of a hardliner.
As for whining, shoot... I have better things to do than complain about co-workers. I figure that _if_ the boss hasn't yet figured out that Wally is an incompetent parasite, well, there's probably nothing I can do about it either.
So let me get this straight: basically the reason you should be kept is _not_ competence, it's _not_ productivity... it's just that hopefully noone will show the new guy where the files are and what that mess of piss-poor quality undocumented code does.
You know what? That's exactly the reason why more people like you should be fired, and sent back to whatever burger-flipper jobs they had before the dot com scam.
And you know what? That's precisely the reason the whole "send the jobs overseas" plan is happening in the first place. Because the domestic market is flooded with cheats, frauds and leeches who don't plan to do a good job, but just see it as "hey, cool, I can get a buttload of money for nothing." And who, in many cases, won't hesitate to actively sabotage the project. (E.g., deliberately making it hard to maintain, as "job security.")
All those con artists cost the economy a buttload of money. Money which ultimately comes from everyone else.
Here's an idea for you: how about being unreplaceable for being competent, productive and competitive? That's what a job in programming used to mean. And those are _not_ the jobs who get sent overseas.
Yes, I know, it sounds absurd. It also sounds like real work.
I'm going to say something nasty. You know what I really want now? To see the fraud laws applied to resumes too. Same as selling a non-existing product based on faked specs is fraud, I see no reason why selling non-existing competence based on a faked resume is any better.
I want to see all those fraudsters not just fired, but fined for more than they ever made in that job. And if possible sent to state prison. But at the very least, I want to see the hiring company entitled to sue the pants out of you if you sold yourself as some Java or C++ expert while barely being able to copy and paste a "Hello World" tutorial.
Probably not going to happen, but I can dream anyway.
How about the economy doesn't crumble? How about it actually starts doing a lot better, once they stop paying a mint to all the incompetents and con artists hired during the dot com fraud?
I'll say it again: heck, forget even about offshoring or foreign workers. Most companies would actually see _increased_ productivity from just firing half the "programmers". No, not replacing them. Fire the incompetent frauds, and let them go back to flipping burgers or whatever their little brain can actually handle. The decreased overhead will actually let the ones who actually work, be more productive.
When you see statistics like "68% of those hired as Java developpers don't even know Java" or I've even seen one saying basically "3 out of 4 programmers can't actually program"... gotta wonder: why the fsck does someone pay them?
During the dot com fraud days, any drooling cretin could take a bogus 2 week Java or C++ course, often without even having to show up or take any exam. Just give us the money and we'll give you a bogus diploma. And retarded PHBs hired these idiots anyway.
The only problem is that 90% of them not only didn't know anything useful to start with, they weren't planning to learn either. Most didn't have the brain to, anyway.
Keeping them employed is actually causing a _loss_ to the company. You're paying an oversized salary to a cretin who can't produce anything useful. Or produces something which is as "secure" as posting your company's internal data on a billboard on the highway. And even that needs years of debugging to even work at all. Somewhat work.
You're also paying rent for more office space, more electricity used, more administrative overhead for the oversized teams full of drooling incompetents, etc.
And I say it's about damn time that someone sent these leeches and frauds back to flipping burgers, or whatever they're qualified for. Bring back the days when competence actually mattered.
I know this was supposed to be funny, but you'd be surprised how many fucktards actually do that. They think they ought to stay perpetually employed, not just in spite of doing a piss-poor job and being a liability to the company, but _because_ doing a piss-poor job and being a liability.
You know what my advice to their employer would be? Fire them.
It may look like "but only he knows that mess of ugly undocumented code! He's unreplaceable!" Wrong. He's just doing a crap job, often deliberately. He's often not even doing much of a job any more, once he feels unreplaceable.
E.g., I know an instance of Wally (of Dilbert fame) here who, for the last two years straight, has only kept himself busy with one small module that still isn't ready. But, hey, it's completely undocumented and he's also invented a 7'th point to your list:
7) he copied 100 random java files off the net into his source directory to make it look bigger and harder to navigate. (E.g., WTF are Swing (GUI) tutorial classes doing in an EJB (non-GUI server-side) module?)
He also openly refuses to do any other job, other than maintain that module.
The saddest part? You could do a close enough approximation of what his module is doing, by using standard libraries, in 3 lines of code.
But even if that wasn't the case: It will cost you less to hire someone to untangle and comment that code, than to perpetually keep a _parasite_ around.
It might take a month or two (which you would have paid to the parasite anyway), but at the end of it you'll have a program that's not only maintainable, but often actually works better. E.g., it might stop having those spurious thread race bugs that the parasite kept in as job security.
So fire them. The company and the industry as a whole will be better off with one less parasite in it.
What actually happens isn't that you train someone incompetent to be competent. It's that you start with someone very competent in the first place, and show them what the files are, what the project does, and so on.
Sort of, if you were designing a car, and hired a new automobile engineer, someone would have to give him an overview of what's happening in that project, and what will he have to do in the new job.
Go back to playing CS and pretending your a "Sysadmin" because you run your pirate copy of Windows 2003.
Just had to add a few more words about this.
You see, my dear lemming, it may be hard for you to comprehend it, but not everyone is a cheapskate.
I don't have Windows 2003, I most of the time run on my legit bought copy of Windows 2000. I'm writing this on a SuSE 9.0 box. I actually bought the boxed distro.
What half the "either FOSS or pirated Windows" fucktards don't seem to undestand is that good software doesn't happen for free. Someone has to pay for it. So freeloading bums like you actually have their software paid for by people like me.
It's a nice myth that F/OSS just happens out of someone's generosity, in their free time. That a few thousands of volunteers all around the world will just spontaneously start working together and make the next enterprise strength OS or server software for fun. Too bad it's just that: a myth.
Where most of the OSS comes from is people who are paid to write it. By IBM, RedHat, SuSE, etc. E.g., even this thread's topic mention's RedHat's new GUI team in Boston. Guess what? RedHat will pay them.
And the response to Eric's rant did nail a real problem dead on: good usable GUIs are hard work, not just a quick coat of paint at the end. They require a lot of hard work, and it typically means some hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars out of someone's pocket.
Either way: good software costs money to make. And I have nothing against "voting with my wallet" that such software continues to be made. Regardless of whether it's for Linux, Windows or god knows what else.
And why not? If that software saves me a few hours, it's worth every penny. Because my time is worth more than that. If that paid-for copy of Windows saved me from weeks of recompiling and reconfiguring just to get something done (e.g., to just be able to run a goddamn game in WineX), as seems to still be the Linux way... well, it practically paid for itself, no?
Never said that Windows doesn't have a command line. And for even more advanced needs there's always 4NT or cygwin.
In fact, it wasn't even as much about the "CLI vs GUI" as such, as about "complete programs vs pipe your own together". What a regular user wants is just getting a job done. Heck, it's what _I_ want.
E.g., I just want to post this message. I use a complete program for that: a browser. I'm guessing even the "CLI rules" geeks are using one. (Yes, even if it's lynx.)
I don't think anyone is doing the True Unix Way (TM) of piping small CLI utilities to: retrieve the page source with wget, run it through some html-to-text CLI utility, view it with cat and less, edit the response with vi, run a small script to generate the HTTP POST request, and then upload the end result. It's possible, but noone does it. They use a complete program instead.
That's all I'm saying. For common, everyday tasks like this, or like killing a hanging program, there should be a complete and easy to use program. Even if it's in text mode, or even if it's a CLI program.
Having to write your own program or script (yes, even a one liner with "for" and pipes) should be reserved for exotic stuff, not for stuff which millions of people do several times a day.
Grep can do regular expressions by the way, something your "Find" dialog can't.
There are plenty of file find dialogs which _can_.
The process list isn't just for you so you can send SIGKILL. There are other things you can do to a process (For example, renice them)
And again: why would I want to do that to 50 individual threads, as opposed to the whole program?
When you see a list of 100 individual threads, do you instinctively know the relationships between them? Do you know which thread is depending on which? Do you even understand what will happen when you change only that one thread's priority? Do you know if the original programmer even thought of what happens when some thread suddenly drops to idle priority and the system is under heavy load?
E.g., if it's the log writer thread. Will the logging buffer balloon until it fills all memory, because the the thread servicing it never executes? Or will it reach a limit and overflow? Or what?
Well, no. So you're telling me no less than that messing with the innards of a program you don't even understand, at runtime, is some good thing.
Well, I didn't want to mention that before, but this is another thing that bothers me about the whole Unix Way (TM) idiocy. That it encourages doing a half-arsed dangerous job, and, hey, if it ended up in some disaster like "rm -rf / home/user1/gifs/*" (notice the space), it's just normal and a learning experience. That if that clever one line script which renames "*.c" files to "*.bak" files, also renamed ".config" to ".bakonfig", hey, no problem. It happens. It's just part of the Unix everyday life.
It's this kind of irresponsible approach to computing that I'd rather not encourage even more. Especially not on production machines.
but you're totally clueless and I suspect any discussion of a topic more advanced than "Why the Windows Find dialog r0x0rs!!!111" would be over your head. Go back to playing CS and pretending your a "Sysadmin" because you run your pirate copy of Windows 2003.
And this, my friend, is why it's pointless to even think of "Linux" and "usability" in the same sentence. Because there'll always be a retard jumping in to foam at the mouth and scream "CLI r00lz!!!" at any mention of making stuff better or easier for the end user.
It has been said that when the only tool you've used is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I'll go further and say that if the only tool you've ever used is a hammer, and that's your only skill, then suddenly it starts to look like every tool should be a hammer and everyone should have to use one. You start thinking "Bah, those drooling lusers who use screwdrivers or saws. Someone ought to give them a clue! Teach them to use a HAMMER, like us real men!"
Well, sorry to rain on your parrade, but: if your most useful skill is that you can use a piss-poor tool (in this case the Unix CLI), then you're a has-been. Your prized skill is quickly going the way of such fine skills as hunting with a bow, or jousting. Maybe interesting as a hobby, but otherwise irrelevant. In the meantime the world has discovered better tools.
And no ammount of whining and moaning is going to bring back the "good old days" when you passed for a guru by just knowing how to find a file. And no ammount of whining and moaning will bring back the days when writing a piss-poor 100 line incomplete program with counted as being a l33t programmer. Now we expect more.
Froth at the mouth all you want, the world is still moving forward. Addapt, or go the way of the wooly mammoth or the dinosaurs. Your choice.
Cooling is IMHO an even bigger problem. With heat dissipation increasing exponentially in the last years, the problem is getting even bigger than "how do I get it off the chip?"
E.g.,
1. Do I want that heat pumped into my room? How about into an office room with 4 computers? At what point will we need not just a duct to the outside of the computer case, but one to the outside of the building? At 500W? 1000W?
2. How about additional costs arising from that? E.g., will small software companies now need industrial air conditioning systems to cope with the heat from 20 workstations and some 5 servers?
3. Does Joe Average want that on his electricity bill? All that heat doesn't come from nowhere. It goes into the computer as electricity. If it gets to the point of 1000W for the CPU alone, I do believe that you'll start noticing a difference on your bill.
Unfortunately, the problem is precisely this mentality that it's actually good to have a piss-poor collection of bits and pieces, and have to assemble them yourself into something useful. Instead of just having one thing that does the actual job at hand.
No matter how trivial a task you're trying to achieve, nah, we won't give you a complete program. We'll give you a bucket of whatever bits someone could be arsed to write, and it's your problem to figure out how to combine them.
Which is as idiotic as saying that instead of selling cars to people, we should just give them a truckload of random metal bits and pipes and a toolbox, and let them figure out how to make a car out of them. And if it doesn't fit, hey, feel free to change them with that supplied hammer. It's stupid because people just want to drive a car, not to spend years learning how to make one.
And to get back to your example, have a look for yourself and try to realize the idiocy of it all. They're menial everyday tasks, not something new and clever. There's nothing about them that warrants having to write your own program or script (even if it's a one liner.) I would understand having to write my own program for something so new and exotic that noone ever needed something like that before. But for such trivial tasks? Gimme a break.
So let's look at those examples again, and what a civilized OS offers for that:
- find all documents and display their contents: the Windows search box, or (my favourite) the search box in Total Commander. They also give you a civilized list of files that you can view at your leisure, with the apropriate viewer for that file type. (As opposed to the Unix brain damaged thinking that dumping 100 files to the console with "cat" actually counts as a viewer. What if the files are 100,000 lines long? What if they're binary files?)
- find all documents with a certain string inside of them: see above. That's what any good file find dialog box does.
- process hanging and has 50 children: well, see, only Unix is retarded enough to need that. In Windows the Task Manager already shows me whole programs, not 10,000 individual threads, and killing a program automatically also terminates its spawned threads.
And honestly: Why do I even need a list of threads, instead of a list of programs running? Did anyone actually think "ooh, if I could kill _only_ the third thread of a program, it would continue to run happily ever after"?
If I even wanted to kill, say, only the sound thread of a program... how would I know which of those processes is the one? And would the program even continue to run? Well, no. What everyone does is precisely kill everything together.
But instead of having an usable system which offers that from the start, nah, let's stick to the Unix Way (TM) of doing a half-arsed job and expecting the user to fill in the blanks and turn it into something actually useful.
But either way, there you go. There _are_ complete, finished and usable tools that offer just that. And they have a good intuitive GUI, where Joe Average can simply _see_ the available options, click on a few boxes, and get a result. Instead of having to remember 100 programs and their options and figure out ways to pipe them together.
Actually, I'm a programmer, and I wouldn't touch vi with a 10 ft lance. I use an IDE. Currently, that means Eclipse.
Why? A more complex issue of UI, functionality, and the relationship among them. Let me explain.
I will postulate: programming isn't about typing, and it isn't even about syntax. Programming is about the mental effort to design an algorithm and an architecture. Every time you use a loop here and an if there, and every time you decide to split this into two smaller functions, while that is split into separate classes, etc, you don't do typist work. You really do design work. Every line you type, every class you define, every library of commonly used functions you put together, that's at heart design work.
Corolary: The more menial tasks I can delegate to an IDE, the more time I have to dedicate to the real problem at hand. The less time I have to waste my time figuring out complex command combinations to achieve a trivial result (e.g., deleting a line, since it's right in your example), the more time I have left for the actual programming.
And the more the IDE can support that mental process, the more efficient I can be.
Whereas 20 years ago you'd type in a plain editor, with a manual nearby in case you need to look up the parameters to a function, now a good IDE can do that for me automatically. It can look up function names and parameters at the hit of a button. Or take me directly to that function, even if it's in another file. It finds typos and syntax errors while I type, so I don't have to run make to find them.
Yes, you could do all that with grep and switching consoles, and god knows what else. But that's exactly the problem. While you waste your (and your employer's) time with such menial tasks, I'm using mine for the actual programming.
And there's a lesson in there not only about programming: it's generally about UI. The job of a good UI is to help the user do what the user wants, not to make the user do what the UI wants. A good UI saves you time, and allows you to use that time for more important tasks. A bad UI wastes your time on learning retarded tricks, which you wouldn't need to start with, if the UI wasn't piss-poor.
That's the real problem with the whole "Unix way" mentality. The whole pride of being able to string together pipes and scripts even for the most menial tasks. Like to just get the equivalent of the DOS "copy *.c *.bak" or "pkunzip backup.zip *.c".
I'm sure a dozen of you are just itching to post their cool one-line scripts that use sed and loops to achieve that. Please don't.
Instead take some time to think about it all. You're not learning cool skills, you're not getting a clue, and you're not more efficient as a result. You're just wasting your time with a piss-poor UI. An UI which instead of doing what you want, forces you to learn to do what _it_ wants. That's just wasted time. Me, I'll be doing something more useful instead.
And until more people come to that realization, well, the issue of UI on Linux will be a long and thorny one.
The G5 never was faster. The only benchmarks that put it in front were done by crippling the P4's it was compared to. E.g., by using GCC on them, instead of Intel's or Microsoft's compilers, which is what actual commercial programs are compiled with.
I mean, what next? Disabling the cache on a P4 to make the crap G5 look faster? At this rate, hell, I wouldn't even be surprised to see just that happening about next year or so.
The whole thing was a big bullshit game by Apple. The G5 never was faster than an ordinary PC box, and it cost twice as much. Not even a dual Xenon box. It lost even to el-cheapo P4 or K7 boxes. It's that simple.
You know it's a dog when you then see fanboy magazines comparing a dual G5 to a _single_ _cpu_ P4. And even then not getting a clear win.
You know it's an _overpriced_ dog when you see them also loading the compared PC with the most expensive professional OpenGL card in a CPU speed test, while the Mac is equipped with a far cheaper graphics card. Presumably to hide the fact that at equal hardware the PC would have been half the price. And wouldn't you know it, the PC still ends up cheaper.
Now before someone jumps in with that, standard disclaimer: I know that raw CPU speed isn't everything, blah, blah, blah. I'm bringing that in only because that's what Apple's bullshit ads claimed.
And it's precisely that kind of lies, hype and bullshit that makes me sick. By comparison, it makes Microsoft seem like saints. It's about time someone brought not just the BBB, but the FTC to have this look at this con operation.
Well, I see one problem with that theory: people _are_ voting with their wallets for non-standard games. At least if those games are also quality stuff, and not some buggy unusable piece of crap.
Let's think of some games which sold spectacularly well, or are played the most.
- The Sims. It's _the_ best selling game of all time, even taken by itself. If you add the seven full-price add-ons for it (and yes, some of us bought all seven:), it dwarfs any other game by ludicrious margins. In spite of being a 2D isometric game in an age of 3D bump-mapped pixel-shaded games.
- Counterstrike. The most played online game. It's based on Half Life, which is how old? Right. The graphics were horrible, the hostage AI was piss-poor, but people were buying Half Life like crazy just to play Counter-Strike. Why? A new mode of play.
But let's go even farther back in time:
- Diablo. Strictly speaking not totally new, but it still was original enough for a PC game. It also was a quality title: rock stable, good game balance, a good interface, easy learning curve, and basically a self-adjusting difficulty curve to fit most gamers. It sold like hot cakes.
- Dune II. A 2D 320x200 game, completely unimpressive as graphics go. Yet not only it sold great, it spawned a new genre. For a while everyone who wasn't making a FPS, was making a RTS instead.
- Wolfenstein 3D. You may notice that Id never needed a publisher ever since. Again, it was so popular that it spawned a whole new genre.
- Sim City. It practically invented the city building genre.
- Civilization. Probably the game which actually did _more_ than spawn a new genre. You'd be surprised how many games are essentially derived from Civilization. From obvious stuff like "Two Thrones" to practically any space colonization/empire building game out there, there's one solid market segment playing Civilization derivatives.
So, you see, my take is that people _did_ vote with their wallets for more original games, and did so again and again. Invariably truly new games sell _far_ better that titles whose only quality is "hey, look, we have even nicer textures. Look, we have 1324 screenshots too."
You think that would send a message to publishers already. But no, instead they'll keep making retarded clones instead. (And by "retarded" I mean: by people who haven't even understood what made the original sell well. So they'll make something that looks like a clone, but misses all the fun parts.)
No matter how many such truly original games appear and rake in a big pile of cash, the publisher still won't think "hey, let's try more original stuff." They'll just think "ooh, The Sims sold well. Let's include that in our next game."
(Except see above what I've said about retarded clones. So far they invariably missed every single part that made The Sims fun. Even though Will Wright even spelled it out in dozens of interviews.)
I know you were just joking, but here's my answer anyway.
Why did I go into CS instead of becoming a doctor, broker or spy? Because I love computers and programming dearly.
I sorta grew up with them. I wrote my first program at 13 in BASIC. I don't mean "hello world." I mean an arcade game. (In as much as possible on that machin.) The other kids at school actually liked playing my game.
At 14 I was already learning machine code. Not assembly, like some of you wussies;) A ZX-80 with 1K RAM didn't have the space to run an assembler. I had to convert it to hex by hand. No, honestly.
By 16 I already had added Pascal to my repertoire and was learning Prolog. I also had the luxury of being able to use an assembler, what with that "huge" 48K memory on a ZX-Spectrum.
Finishing homework and being allowed on the parents' computer was the highlight of my day. It was better than getting a new toy. It was being allowed to _make_ a new toy.
Why did I love it? For the mental challenge.
Programming isn't about typing, and isn't about learning the syntax from some "java for retards in 21 days book." It's about solving a huge puzzle. The biggest puzzle ever, in fact. It's like making an incredible mouse trap from 200,000 levers, bowling balls, desk fans, toy boats, and whatever else that language gives you. It's fun. (You can guess that my favourite kinds of games are also puzzles, business sims, adventure games, and the like. Stuff which is about exercising the grey cells, not about running around with a rifle, like a retard.)
So, yes, on _my_ own scale, sitting and programming banking software is, in fact, actually fun. Sure, I could have been a doctor or whatnot, maybe even made more money in the process. But, guess what? I like my current job more. Same as some people like being a florist or whatever, I actually _like_ being a programmer. With or without hawaiian shirts. (Never wore one yet.) Go figure.
If you don't, that's ok too. The world needs people doing other jobs too. Go find yourself another job, and leave CS to those of us who actually understand and enjoy it.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh.
;)
Well, just to be prepared, do I have to take some aptitude test? I.e., do I have to show them logs of hot steamy cybersex, to show that I've got the mad skills? Or is that tested on the spot?
Or I know that in the army you have to get trained and certified to be allowed to do pretty much anything. D'you figure it's the same for the FBI? Do they offer a course and an exam in impersonating horny 14 year old girls online?
They need a warrant to wiretap a phone line. And I think the same applies here: unless you plan to get someone to actually say they consent, better get a warrant first.
And, honestly, while I hate paedos as much as anyone else... I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation that the police gets a warrant before taping my phone or recording my chat sessions. If there's reasonable suspicion, ok, let them record away. But it ought to take a judge or DA to review that and decide if there's indeed reasonable suspicion to proceed.
All I'm saying is that, no disrespect intended to the fine police officers, it should not turn into "I'm a cop, therefore by default I'm entitled to stalk anyone and record anyone's conversations." There's a reason why they have to get warrants for everything else. I'm sure that the vast majority of them are honest, hard-working cops, but in the end they're human too... it's not hard to imagine a few crackpots wiretaping their ex, or poking through their neighbours' houses out of pure curiosity, or even helping someone spy on the competition, if they could do that by default without any warrant.
Well, we've always known that. On the other hand, what makes me wonder about that very phrase you've quoted is: some people are actually paid to hang out in chatrooms and have "cybersex".
:)
:)
:)
(And I don't mean just this story. I also remember a much older one one where a female police officer, as part of her duties, coaxed her internet lover into crossing state border to come have sex with her underage daughters. Or so he thought. He just got arrested since that's a felony.)
Well, damn. It sure beats the heck out of a lot of other jobs
Instead of having to put up with stupid requirements, lazy co-workers, and (my least favourite) meetings, I'll take having to clock 8 hours a day in a chat room. Hey, I can even pretend to be a horny 14 year old girl, if that's what it takes to get that job. You can start calling me Shirley1990
Now where do I apply for a job like that?
Disclaimer: I'm not particularly religious, but I did make a point to read the bible. (And the Koran, and several others.)
It seems to me like first of all, it clearly speaks of a mark, not of an implant deep inside your body. Second, what it speaks of there, is about accepting the rule of the antichrist and the social/economic structure that comes with it, not about merely getting a medical implant.
As far as I know, so far noone's asking you to accept some particular government to get a simple medical implant. Noone asked that you change religions to get any other surgery, you know. And noone has been so far asked to get a peg-leg to be allowed to conduct business, so, you know, I doubt they'll be required to get an implant against paralysis either.
I.e., relax. When someone starts asking you to sell your soul or give up some rights to get such an implant, _then_ you can start worrying. But until then, relax.
That said, as the old saying goes, "Jesus is OK, but his fanboys piss me off". Ever considered that going crackpot and seeing antichrist conspiracies everywhere might actually do more harm than good towards "saving souls"?
Even skipping over the "would I want to be associated to a group of conspiracy crackpots" question, it still just begs the question: "would I give a damn about being 'saved' by a god who's against getting a simple medical implant?"
Sorry, but I have to question how would such a deity count as 'good'. Requiring people to basically just forego medical help and stay paralyzed, just to prove their faith? Doesn't sound like a benevolent deity to me. In fact, it sounds closer to "lawful evil" than anything else.
I don't know about china, but I have some first hand experience with Eastern Europe. It's a different culture, all right.
To put it mildly, the main "cultural difference" is that there it's ok to be an annoying f*ck to those around you. If it doesn't involve cell phones, it involves talking way too loudly, having an extremely loud party in a densely packed block of flats, etc. And if someone doesn't like it, fsck them, it's not your problem. Extreme individualism was pretty much _the_ way to survive communism, and the poverty that came with it.
Now to get back to your point, methinks the same must apply to China, then.
Sorry, no matter how much I want to find it an excuse, there is _no_ bloody way to say that it ought to be socially acceptable to talk loudly on the phone in a movie theatre. I went there to see and _listen_ to the bloody movie, not to hear a dozen retards talking on their phone. I don't care if it's face-to-face or on the phone. Just shut the fsck up. I've paid to listen to the actors, not to you.
It's not overreacting, it's not shunning "an obnoxious show of money", it's merely asking that you show at least some minimal respect to your fellow humans. All I'm asking is that you let me watch the bloody movie, that's all.
So again: what's different in the West is that people have learned to give each other at least some minimal respect. Whole systems of social customs have existed for the sole reason of allowing people to live without getting on each other's nerves every two minutes.
I'll tell you another point of view as to why cell phones are more annoying than face-to-face conversations. Because they're an _extra_ annoyance.
I find face-to-face conversations disruptive too, but... I can't expect people not to talk to each other, when they're travelling together. (I can, however, expect that they keep the volume down.) It always happened, it always will. Even back when people travelled in horse pulled carts, they talked to each other.
Cell phones, however, just bring an extra annoyance that just wouldn't be there without them. All those people having loud 30 minute long phone conversations on the bus, would have shut the fsck up if they didn't have cell phones. If it wasn't for cell phones, I'd only have the noise from those talking face to face, but as it is now I _also_ have the extra noise from those retards with cell phones.
Or when I'm at work. I already have enough disruption from people who obviously love to chat to each other more than they like to work. Either that, or some of them are actually paid to just walk around and talk to everyone about what they did for easter. Now throw the phones into the mix too. And by Odin, behold: the lout who just spent 2 hours straight talking about his vacation in the middle of the office, now spends an extra hour talking on the cell phone about it. Hello? I'm trying to bloody concentrate on writing a program, you know.
Briefly: It's not a new problem, it's just a new factor that multiplies an existing one. And it's not that I want to listen in, it's that I don't want you disturbing my peace in the first place, thank-you-very-much.
It's also that cell phones bring this problem in new places where the old one didn't exist. E.g., it was customary for most people to shut up or whisper in a movie theater. The others have paid to see the fscking movie, not to listen to your conversation. However, people calling don't know you're in a movie theater.
The same goes for team meetings, presentations, etc. People who wouldn't have been rude enough to start having their own side conversation in the middle of the presentation... now have cell phones ringing instead.
Well, how about setting it to only vibrate? I don't think you'll confuse that with some other person's phone.
And, no offense, but it makes me want to award some "Mr/Ms Individualistic Git" to everyone who can say "I aggree, it is annoying, but... [insert half-arsed excuse for continuing to be annoying]". Here's a crazy idea: if you do realize you're annoying the living heck out of the people around you... how about trying to stop being annoying? Yeah, I know, crazy concept.
Well, the only point I see (somewhat) is that more GUI means more code, which inherently means more bugs. People make mistakes. E.g., strapping the most primitive command line to a compression function, a la pkzip, is a lot less code than having a whole GUI around it, a la WinZip.
It should also be noted that security and GUIs also have other problems. Since I'm not an OS programmer, I'll give examples from stuff I did work on, and where I've seen these vulnerabilities happening every day:
1. A lot of companies hire basically clueless monkeys to write their code, especially for Web-based GUIs. GUIs have their own pitfalls, and that goes double if that all has to go over HTTP. Without someone at least remotely security-minded on the team, everyone is doing the same mistakes over and over again.
To use a well known example: there is nothing inherently insecure about Perl (buffer overflows and such), but, in the early days of the Web, Perl and CGI were synonimous for a vulnerable site. Why? Because although Perl and CGI by themselves were good and stable, the monkeys coding those sites were doing fundamentally dangerous things with them. Like passing parameters received off a web-site, without any checking, to command line programs.
Now replace "to command line programs" with "to SQL without quoting the apostrophes" and you have a mistake (and a vulnerability) that every newbie somehow just has to make. Or replace it with "to HTTP text without parsing or quoting", and you have a way to let the user embed JavaScript/VBScript/ActiveX/whatever in the pages other users see. Etc. And we're only starting to see the tip of the iceberg of security problems waiting to happen.
2. Reinventing the square wheel. E.g., instead of having the OS manage login and authorization for you, every single Web GUI inherently has to have its own passwords and permissions mechanisms. Which too often are implemented all wrong. E.g., every newbie just has to write code where you can escalate your privileges or see confidential data by just editing the URL. (See the old Hotmail vulnerability.)
And, to be honest, it's not just the newbies. I've seen expensive enterprise systems written by extremely expensive consultants from a _big_ corporation, which had all the vulnerabilities above. And then some. I guess some people just never learn.
Bullshit. If a company is laying you off to save money on cheaper foreign workers, you have no obligation to see to the good of the company in the future. The company-employee trust has been broken, and not by you.
I'm not as much worried about the individual company, nor about the CEO's bonus, as about society as a whole. Even taking the most conservative estimates on how much is spent on computing each year, and applying the results of such statistics as "68% of Java developpers don't know Java" or "3 out of 4 programmers can't really program"... it's scary. It means _hundreds_ _of_ _billions_ each year are drained just into feeding parasites.
It's money which could be better spent elsewhere. It could mean opening new factories and creating work for a lot more people. And this time for people who actually want to do honest work, not for cheats and liars.
Even if I'm to get in the mindset of "screw the corporations and their CEOs! They have too much money! Make 'em pay!" there are way better ways than this. Change some employment laws. Raise the minimum wage. Stuff which benefits everyone, not just the biggest liars and cheats.
Bullshit. It's about money.
Indeed. And I think being about the money is actually a good thing. Most companies weren't seeing a profit out of those hordes of incompetents taking years to deliver a half-arsed system. If that grandious enterprise system makes 5 secretaries redundant, but requires 4 full time programmers and admins, it's actually making a loss. And that loss might just cause a lot more jobs lost down the line.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that there aren't people in the US who do a good job.
Oh, I'm sure there are plenty of _very_ competent people in the US. But here's the rub: not half as many as are currently getting ridiculously high salaries as programmers.
The plan to let go of the manufacturing industry and make everyone a programmer or other high-tech expert was fundamentally flawed. It's as stupid as saying "screw the rest of the economy, this whole country is going to produce and export movies." Most people just can't either act, direct or write a good script. You only have a tiny fraction of the population who can do that well. Same with programming.
I know several people who are productive and competent, but are no longer competitive because they can't work for $3/hr.
Those can always find another (better) job. I did. Within a month I was hired again.
The last statistic I've seen, said that less than 10% of the jobs were moved so far. Roll it around in your head. If you're not in the 10% most incompetent segment, you'll still find a job. It might involve moving (_not_ to India), or having "only" a 5 figure salary for a change, or other mildly unpleasant stuff, but you'll survive.
I do agree that there should be some sort of penalty applied to people who lie on their resume. I also think that there should be some sort of penalty applied to salesman who sell a product/service that the company doesn't provide and to the management that allows it to happen.
Amen to that. That's another thing I really wish to see.
I do think that equal punishment should apply to the person who lied on their resume and the person who hired them. If the person they hired is incompetent then it follows that the hiring manager is also incompetent, do you not agree? After all, it is the manager's job to hire competent people.
No arguments there. I was just getting that thought myself after I posted the previous message.
Just thought I'd add: if that was supposed to be an insult, well, it tends to work less well against someone who just got a pay raise in January. So, speaking of whining, sometimes hard work and quality pay off more than whining about your job going to India, eh? :D
Strangely enough, no.
Actually, I never asked about his salary, since, honestly it's not my problem how much he earns. My problem is more that such parasites are employed at all.
But I'd be surprised if his was that much higher. You see, this is the kind of Wally which doesn't even try to be likeable to the boss or anything. When I've said that he openly refuses to do anything, I really meant it. Very literally. His _only_ claim to staying employed is very literally that he still has to finish that module, and look how many people want changes from him (i.e., want it changed into something that actually works), etc.
Now I've met smart Wallies. Wallies that came from a business school, and knew how to talk the language of management. They were damn good at marketting themselves. Couldn't code worth crap, but the bosses loved them. One of them averaged two pay raises a year.
That's the smart version Wally. This one, on the other hand, is the "I can't be arsed to do that" kind of a hardliner.
As for whining, shoot... I have better things to do than complain about co-workers. I figure that _if_ the boss hasn't yet figured out that Wally is an incompetent parasite, well, there's probably nothing I can do about it either.
So let me get this straight: basically the reason you should be kept is _not_ competence, it's _not_ productivity... it's just that hopefully noone will show the new guy where the files are and what that mess of piss-poor quality undocumented code does.
You know what? That's exactly the reason why more people like you should be fired, and sent back to whatever burger-flipper jobs they had before the dot com scam.
And you know what? That's precisely the reason the whole "send the jobs overseas" plan is happening in the first place. Because the domestic market is flooded with cheats, frauds and leeches who don't plan to do a good job, but just see it as "hey, cool, I can get a buttload of money for nothing." And who, in many cases, won't hesitate to actively sabotage the project. (E.g., deliberately making it hard to maintain, as "job security.")
All those con artists cost the economy a buttload of money. Money which ultimately comes from everyone else.
Here's an idea for you: how about being unreplaceable for being competent, productive and competitive? That's what a job in programming used to mean. And those are _not_ the jobs who get sent overseas.
Yes, I know, it sounds absurd. It also sounds like real work.
I'm going to say something nasty. You know what I really want now? To see the fraud laws applied to resumes too. Same as selling a non-existing product based on faked specs is fraud, I see no reason why selling non-existing competence based on a faked resume is any better.
I want to see all those fraudsters not just fired, but fined for more than they ever made in that job. And if possible sent to state prison. But at the very least, I want to see the hiring company entitled to sue the pants out of you if you sold yourself as some Java or C++ expert while barely being able to copy and paste a "Hello World" tutorial.
Probably not going to happen, but I can dream anyway.
How about the economy doesn't crumble? How about it actually starts doing a lot better, once they stop paying a mint to all the incompetents and con artists hired during the dot com fraud?
I'll say it again: heck, forget even about offshoring or foreign workers. Most companies would actually see _increased_ productivity from just firing half the "programmers". No, not replacing them. Fire the incompetent frauds, and let them go back to flipping burgers or whatever their little brain can actually handle. The decreased overhead will actually let the ones who actually work, be more productive.
When you see statistics like "68% of those hired as Java developpers don't even know Java" or I've even seen one saying basically "3 out of 4 programmers can't actually program"... gotta wonder: why the fsck does someone pay them?
During the dot com fraud days, any drooling cretin could take a bogus 2 week Java or C++ course, often without even having to show up or take any exam. Just give us the money and we'll give you a bogus diploma. And retarded PHBs hired these idiots anyway.
The only problem is that 90% of them not only didn't know anything useful to start with, they weren't planning to learn either. Most didn't have the brain to, anyway.
Keeping them employed is actually causing a _loss_ to the company. You're paying an oversized salary to a cretin who can't produce anything useful. Or produces something which is as "secure" as posting your company's internal data on a billboard on the highway. And even that needs years of debugging to even work at all. Somewhat work.
You're also paying rent for more office space, more electricity used, more administrative overhead for the oversized teams full of drooling incompetents, etc.
And I say it's about damn time that someone sent these leeches and frauds back to flipping burgers, or whatever they're qualified for. Bring back the days when competence actually mattered.
I know this was supposed to be funny, but you'd be surprised how many fucktards actually do that. They think they ought to stay perpetually employed, not just in spite of doing a piss-poor job and being a liability to the company, but _because_ doing a piss-poor job and being a liability.
You know what my advice to their employer would be? Fire them.
It may look like "but only he knows that mess of ugly undocumented code! He's unreplaceable!" Wrong. He's just doing a crap job, often deliberately. He's often not even doing much of a job any more, once he feels unreplaceable.
E.g., I know an instance of Wally (of Dilbert fame) here who, for the last two years straight, has only kept himself busy with one small module that still isn't ready. But, hey, it's completely undocumented and he's also invented a 7'th point to your list:
7) he copied 100 random java files off the net into his source directory to make it look bigger and harder to navigate. (E.g., WTF are Swing (GUI) tutorial classes doing in an EJB (non-GUI server-side) module?)
He also openly refuses to do any other job, other than maintain that module.
The saddest part? You could do a close enough approximation of what his module is doing, by using standard libraries, in 3 lines of code.
But even if that wasn't the case: It will cost you less to hire someone to untangle and comment that code, than to perpetually keep a _parasite_ around.
It might take a month or two (which you would have paid to the parasite anyway), but at the end of it you'll have a program that's not only maintainable, but often actually works better. E.g., it might stop having those spurious thread race bugs that the parasite kept in as job security.
So fire them. The company and the industry as a whole will be better off with one less parasite in it.
What actually happens isn't that you train someone incompetent to be competent. It's that you start with someone very competent in the first place, and show them what the files are, what the project does, and so on.
Sort of, if you were designing a car, and hired a new automobile engineer, someone would have to give him an overview of what's happening in that project, and what will he have to do in the new job.
Go back to playing CS and pretending your a "Sysadmin" because you run your pirate copy of Windows 2003.
Just had to add a few more words about this.
You see, my dear lemming, it may be hard for you to comprehend it, but not everyone is a cheapskate.
I don't have Windows 2003, I most of the time run on my legit bought copy of Windows 2000. I'm writing this on a SuSE 9.0 box. I actually bought the boxed distro.
What half the "either FOSS or pirated Windows" fucktards don't seem to undestand is that good software doesn't happen for free. Someone has to pay for it. So freeloading bums like you actually have their software paid for by people like me.
It's a nice myth that F/OSS just happens out of someone's generosity, in their free time. That a few thousands of volunteers all around the world will just spontaneously start working together and make the next enterprise strength OS or server software for fun. Too bad it's just that: a myth.
Where most of the OSS comes from is people who are paid to write it. By IBM, RedHat, SuSE, etc. E.g., even this thread's topic mention's RedHat's new GUI team in Boston. Guess what? RedHat will pay them.
And the response to Eric's rant did nail a real problem dead on: good usable GUIs are hard work, not just a quick coat of paint at the end. They require a lot of hard work, and it typically means some hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars out of someone's pocket.
Either way: good software costs money to make. And I have nothing against "voting with my wallet" that such software continues to be made. Regardless of whether it's for Linux, Windows or god knows what else.
And why not? If that software saves me a few hours, it's worth every penny. Because my time is worth more than that. If that paid-for copy of Windows saved me from weeks of recompiling and reconfiguring just to get something done (e.g., to just be able to run a goddamn game in WineX), as seems to still be the Linux way... well, it practically paid for itself, no?
Never said that Windows doesn't have a command line. And for even more advanced needs there's always 4NT or cygwin.
In fact, it wasn't even as much about the "CLI vs GUI" as such, as about "complete programs vs pipe your own together". What a regular user wants is just getting a job done. Heck, it's what _I_ want.
E.g., I just want to post this message. I use a complete program for that: a browser. I'm guessing even the "CLI rules" geeks are using one. (Yes, even if it's lynx.)
I don't think anyone is doing the True Unix Way (TM) of piping small CLI utilities to: retrieve the page source with wget, run it through some html-to-text CLI utility, view it with cat and less, edit the response with vi, run a small script to generate the HTTP POST request, and then upload the end result. It's possible, but noone does it. They use a complete program instead.
That's all I'm saying. For common, everyday tasks like this, or like killing a hanging program, there should be a complete and easy to use program. Even if it's in text mode, or even if it's a CLI program.
Having to write your own program or script (yes, even a one liner with "for" and pipes) should be reserved for exotic stuff, not for stuff which millions of people do several times a day.
Grep can do regular expressions by the way, something your "Find" dialog can't.
There are plenty of file find dialogs which _can_.
The process list isn't just for you so you can send SIGKILL. There are other things you can do to a process (For example, renice them)
And again: why would I want to do that to 50 individual threads, as opposed to the whole program?
When you see a list of 100 individual threads, do you instinctively know the relationships between them? Do you know which thread is depending on which? Do you even understand what will happen when you change only that one thread's priority? Do you know if the original programmer even thought of what happens when some thread suddenly drops to idle priority and the system is under heavy load?
E.g., if it's the log writer thread. Will the logging buffer balloon until it fills all memory, because the the thread servicing it never executes? Or will it reach a limit and overflow? Or what?
Well, no. So you're telling me no less than that messing with the innards of a program you don't even understand, at runtime, is some good thing.
Well, I didn't want to mention that before, but this is another thing that bothers me about the whole Unix Way (TM) idiocy. That it encourages doing a half-arsed dangerous job, and, hey, if it ended up in some disaster like "rm -rf / home/user1/gifs/*" (notice the space), it's just normal and a learning experience. That if that clever one line script which renames "*.c" files to "*.bak" files, also renamed ".config" to ".bakonfig", hey, no problem. It happens. It's just part of the Unix everyday life.
It's this kind of irresponsible approach to computing that I'd rather not encourage even more. Especially not on production machines.
but you're totally clueless and I suspect any discussion of a topic more advanced than "Why the Windows Find dialog r0x0rs!!!111" would be over your head. Go back to playing CS and pretending your a "Sysadmin" because you run your pirate copy of Windows 2003.
And this, my friend, is why it's pointless to even think of "Linux" and "usability" in the same sentence. Because there'll always be a retard jumping in to foam at the mouth and scream "CLI r00lz!!!" at any mention of making stuff better or easier for the end user.
It has been said that when the only tool you've used is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I'll go further and say that if the only tool you've ever used is a hammer, and that's your only skill, then suddenly it starts to look like every tool should be a hammer and everyone should have to use one. You start thinking "Bah, those drooling lusers who use screwdrivers or saws. Someone ought to give them a clue! Teach them to use a HAMMER, like us real men!"
Well, sorry to rain on your parrade, but: if your most useful skill is that you can use a piss-poor tool (in this case the Unix CLI), then you're a has-been. Your prized skill is quickly going the way of such fine skills as hunting with a bow, or jousting. Maybe interesting as a hobby, but otherwise irrelevant. In the meantime the world has discovered better tools.
And no ammount of whining and moaning is going to bring back the "good old days" when you passed for a guru by just knowing how to find a file. And no ammount of whining and moaning will bring back the days when writing a piss-poor 100 line incomplete program with counted as being a l33t programmer. Now we expect more.
Froth at the mouth all you want, the world is still moving forward. Addapt, or go the way of the wooly mammoth or the dinosaurs. Your choice.
Cooling is IMHO an even bigger problem. With heat dissipation increasing exponentially in the last years, the problem is getting even bigger than "how do I get it off the chip?"
E.g.,
1. Do I want that heat pumped into my room? How about into an office room with 4 computers? At what point will we need not just a duct to the outside of the computer case, but one to the outside of the building? At 500W? 1000W?
2. How about additional costs arising from that? E.g., will small software companies now need industrial air conditioning systems to cope with the heat from 20 workstations and some 5 servers?
3. Does Joe Average want that on his electricity bill? All that heat doesn't come from nowhere. It goes into the computer as electricity. If it gets to the point of 1000W for the CPU alone, I do believe that you'll start noticing a difference on your bill.
Unfortunately, the problem is precisely this mentality that it's actually good to have a piss-poor collection of bits and pieces, and have to assemble them yourself into something useful. Instead of just having one thing that does the actual job at hand.
No matter how trivial a task you're trying to achieve, nah, we won't give you a complete program. We'll give you a bucket of whatever bits someone could be arsed to write, and it's your problem to figure out how to combine them.
Which is as idiotic as saying that instead of selling cars to people, we should just give them a truckload of random metal bits and pipes and a toolbox, and let them figure out how to make a car out of them. And if it doesn't fit, hey, feel free to change them with that supplied hammer. It's stupid because people just want to drive a car, not to spend years learning how to make one.
And to get back to your example, have a look for yourself and try to realize the idiocy of it all. They're menial everyday tasks, not something new and clever. There's nothing about them that warrants having to write your own program or script (even if it's a one liner.) I would understand having to write my own program for something so new and exotic that noone ever needed something like that before. But for such trivial tasks? Gimme a break.
So let's look at those examples again, and what a civilized OS offers for that:
- find all documents and display their contents: the Windows search box, or (my favourite) the search box in Total Commander. They also give you a civilized list of files that you can view at your leisure, with the apropriate viewer for that file type. (As opposed to the Unix brain damaged thinking that dumping 100 files to the console with "cat" actually counts as a viewer. What if the files are 100,000 lines long? What if they're binary files?)
- find all documents with a certain string inside of them: see above. That's what any good file find dialog box does.
- process hanging and has 50 children: well, see, only Unix is retarded enough to need that. In Windows the Task Manager already shows me whole programs, not 10,000 individual threads, and killing a program automatically also terminates its spawned threads.
And honestly: Why do I even need a list of threads, instead of a list of programs running? Did anyone actually think "ooh, if I could kill _only_ the third thread of a program, it would continue to run happily ever after"?
If I even wanted to kill, say, only the sound thread of a program... how would I know which of those processes is the one? And would the program even continue to run? Well, no. What everyone does is precisely kill everything together.
But instead of having an usable system which offers that from the start, nah, let's stick to the Unix Way (TM) of doing a half-arsed job and expecting the user to fill in the blanks and turn it into something actually useful.
But either way, there you go. There _are_ complete, finished and usable tools that offer just that. And they have a good intuitive GUI, where Joe Average can simply _see_ the available options, click on a few boxes, and get a result. Instead of having to remember 100 programs and their options and figure out ways to pipe them together.
Actually, I'm a programmer, and I wouldn't touch vi with a 10 ft lance. I use an IDE. Currently, that means Eclipse.
Why? A more complex issue of UI, functionality, and the relationship among them. Let me explain.
I will postulate: programming isn't about typing, and it isn't even about syntax. Programming is about the mental effort to design an algorithm and an architecture. Every time you use a loop here and an if there, and every time you decide to split this into two smaller functions, while that is split into separate classes, etc, you don't do typist work. You really do design work. Every line you type, every class you define, every library of commonly used functions you put together, that's at heart design work.
Corolary: The more menial tasks I can delegate to an IDE, the more time I have to dedicate to the real problem at hand. The less time I have to waste my time figuring out complex command combinations to achieve a trivial result (e.g., deleting a line, since it's right in your example), the more time I have left for the actual programming.
And the more the IDE can support that mental process, the more efficient I can be.
Whereas 20 years ago you'd type in a plain editor, with a manual nearby in case you need to look up the parameters to a function, now a good IDE can do that for me automatically. It can look up function names and parameters at the hit of a button. Or take me directly to that function, even if it's in another file. It finds typos and syntax errors while I type, so I don't have to run make to find them.
Yes, you could do all that with grep and switching consoles, and god knows what else. But that's exactly the problem. While you waste your (and your employer's) time with such menial tasks, I'm using mine for the actual programming.
And there's a lesson in there not only about programming: it's generally about UI. The job of a good UI is to help the user do what the user wants, not to make the user do what the UI wants. A good UI saves you time, and allows you to use that time for more important tasks. A bad UI wastes your time on learning retarded tricks, which you wouldn't need to start with, if the UI wasn't piss-poor.
That's the real problem with the whole "Unix way" mentality. The whole pride of being able to string together pipes and scripts even for the most menial tasks. Like to just get the equivalent of the DOS "copy *.c *.bak" or "pkunzip backup.zip *.c".
I'm sure a dozen of you are just itching to post their cool one-line scripts that use sed and loops to achieve that. Please don't.
Instead take some time to think about it all. You're not learning cool skills, you're not getting a clue, and you're not more efficient as a result. You're just wasting your time with a piss-poor UI. An UI which instead of doing what you want, forces you to learn to do what _it_ wants. That's just wasted time. Me, I'll be doing something more useful instead.
And until more people come to that realization, well, the issue of UI on Linux will be a long and thorny one.
That, my friend, is bullshit.
The G5 never was faster. The only benchmarks that put it in front were done by crippling the P4's it was compared to. E.g., by using GCC on them, instead of Intel's or Microsoft's compilers, which is what actual commercial programs are compiled with.
I mean, what next? Disabling the cache on a P4 to make the crap G5 look faster? At this rate, hell, I wouldn't even be surprised to see just that happening about next year or so.
The whole thing was a big bullshit game by Apple. The G5 never was faster than an ordinary PC box, and it cost twice as much. Not even a dual Xenon box. It lost even to el-cheapo P4 or K7 boxes. It's that simple.
You know it's a dog when you then see fanboy magazines comparing a dual G5 to a _single_ _cpu_ P4. And even then not getting a clear win.
You know it's an _overpriced_ dog when you see them also loading the compared PC with the most expensive professional OpenGL card in a CPU speed test, while the Mac is equipped with a far cheaper graphics card. Presumably to hide the fact that at equal hardware the PC would have been half the price. And wouldn't you know it, the PC still ends up cheaper.
Now before someone jumps in with that, standard disclaimer: I know that raw CPU speed isn't everything, blah, blah, blah. I'm bringing that in only because that's what Apple's bullshit ads claimed.
And it's precisely that kind of lies, hype and bullshit that makes me sick. By comparison, it makes Microsoft seem like saints. It's about time someone brought not just the BBB, but the FTC to have this look at this con operation.
Well, I see one problem with that theory: people _are_ voting with their wallets for non-standard games. At least if those games are also quality stuff, and not some buggy unusable piece of crap.
Let's think of some games which sold spectacularly well, or are played the most.
- The Sims. It's _the_ best selling game of all time, even taken by itself. If you add the seven full-price add-ons for it (and yes, some of us bought all seven:), it dwarfs any other game by ludicrious margins. In spite of being a 2D isometric game in an age of 3D bump-mapped pixel-shaded games.
- Counterstrike. The most played online game. It's based on Half Life, which is how old? Right. The graphics were horrible, the hostage AI was piss-poor, but people were buying Half Life like crazy just to play Counter-Strike. Why? A new mode of play.
But let's go even farther back in time:
- Diablo. Strictly speaking not totally new, but it still was original enough for a PC game. It also was a quality title: rock stable, good game balance, a good interface, easy learning curve, and basically a self-adjusting difficulty curve to fit most gamers. It sold like hot cakes.
- Dune II. A 2D 320x200 game, completely unimpressive as graphics go. Yet not only it sold great, it spawned a new genre. For a while everyone who wasn't making a FPS, was making a RTS instead.
- Wolfenstein 3D. You may notice that Id never needed a publisher ever since. Again, it was so popular that it spawned a whole new genre.
- Sim City. It practically invented the city building genre.
- Civilization. Probably the game which actually did _more_ than spawn a new genre. You'd be surprised how many games are essentially derived from Civilization. From obvious stuff like "Two Thrones" to practically any space colonization/empire building game out there, there's one solid market segment playing Civilization derivatives.
So, you see, my take is that people _did_ vote with their wallets for more original games, and did so again and again. Invariably truly new games sell _far_ better that titles whose only quality is "hey, look, we have even nicer textures. Look, we have 1324 screenshots too."
You think that would send a message to publishers already. But no, instead they'll keep making retarded clones instead. (And by "retarded" I mean: by people who haven't even understood what made the original sell well. So they'll make something that looks like a clone, but misses all the fun parts.)
No matter how many such truly original games appear and rake in a big pile of cash, the publisher still won't think "hey, let's try more original stuff." They'll just think "ooh, The Sims sold well. Let's include that in our next game."
(Except see above what I've said about retarded clones. So far they invariably missed every single part that made The Sims fun. Even though Will Wright even spelled it out in dozens of interviews.)
I know you were just joking, but here's my answer anyway.
;) A ZX-80 with 1K RAM didn't have the space to run an assembler. I had to convert it to hex by hand. No, honestly.
Why did I go into CS instead of becoming a doctor, broker or spy? Because I love computers and programming dearly.
I sorta grew up with them. I wrote my first program at 13 in BASIC. I don't mean "hello world." I mean an arcade game. (In as much as possible on that machin.) The other kids at school actually liked playing my game.
At 14 I was already learning machine code. Not assembly, like some of you wussies
By 16 I already had added Pascal to my repertoire and was learning Prolog. I also had the luxury of being able to use an assembler, what with that "huge" 48K memory on a ZX-Spectrum.
Finishing homework and being allowed on the parents' computer was the highlight of my day. It was better than getting a new toy. It was being allowed to _make_ a new toy.
Why did I love it? For the mental challenge.
Programming isn't about typing, and isn't about learning the syntax from some "java for retards in 21 days book." It's about solving a huge puzzle. The biggest puzzle ever, in fact. It's like making an incredible mouse trap from 200,000 levers, bowling balls, desk fans, toy boats, and whatever else that language gives you. It's fun. (You can guess that my favourite kinds of games are also puzzles, business sims, adventure games, and the like. Stuff which is about exercising the grey cells, not about running around with a rifle, like a retard.)
So, yes, on _my_ own scale, sitting and programming banking software is, in fact, actually fun. Sure, I could have been a doctor or whatnot, maybe even made more money in the process. But, guess what? I like my current job more. Same as some people like being a florist or whatever, I actually _like_ being a programmer. With or without hawaiian shirts. (Never wore one yet.) Go figure.
If you don't, that's ok too. The world needs people doing other jobs too. Go find yourself another job, and leave CS to those of us who actually understand and enjoy it.