Being effective is not a requirement - and if you are too effective then you may lose your job.
The patent office situation with antique systems - if it's so old that you only can type it in then that system must be incompatible with any modern system so bad that nobody can expect the old system to survive much longer due to lack of spare parts - unless it's a completely mechanical system using punch cards in which case you just need to find a decent blacksmith.
The most important thing is WHY an accident occurs, not the blame for who is responsible.
If you can figure out WHY you can take preventive action.
As for traffic deaths - in 2008 the US had about 143 deaths per million while Sweden had 33 per million citizens. And you may say that the countries are different, but in reality they aren't that much different to say that you can't compare figures.
I would say that there is a continuous stream of updates and patches all the time. Mostly anti-virus, but then we have Adobe reader/flash, Windows (and other M$ items) and whatever other software that you have installed. Many softwares have their own method of updates and patches, and it's seldom compatible with the other software update packages in the system.
So every time you boot/login there are a lot of processes started that are competing for resources trying to make an upgrade and whatever which makes the startup time horrible.
So then there are at least three spellings that are right.
And consider "Wo", which is Wolfram in some countries and Tungsten in other is really funny for a swede since Tungsten comes from the comment "Tung Sten" in the notes of the discoverer, which means "Heavy Rock".
Don't worry until you have had a radiation team doing measurements in your apartment and found out that the levels are near what's considered unhealthy.
But be prepared to find out that your apartment is considered unfit for living.
And it still doesn't remove the fact that Win7 really uses more memory than XP.
But it's hard for me to see what the memory is used for in the system monitor, it only says that it's used, not what it's for and if it can be freed for my application. This is an issue that can cause some irritation when you are developing software and wants to monitor system usage to determine recommended amount of memory in the computer that's used.
Another way around it could be to actually offer the game itself for free, but it's restricted until you connect to an online service where you can upgrade and interact with other players.
But that only works for some games and consoles.
It's a balancing act to get everything right since if you get it wrong you will insult your customers and loose the business.
And the funny thing - the online restaurant guide does exist now, at least in Sweden.
So he must have been too early.
Some of the ventures that are taken on are actually not wrong as an idea - just wrong in time. You must get the timing right to make it work.
But then - the timing window is of different width depending on what you do. Some do only have an opportunity window of a week, while other has a window of several years.
Just because RAM is available doesn't mean that the OS should hog it. You may want to use that RAM for something different. It may be legal to use "excess" RAM for buffers, but then those buffers must be freed fast whenever necessary.
If you use large amounts of RAM for buffers you will either freeing the least used buffers and use them for the application, and then you will get memory fragmentation. This can be bad for some applications. The other scenario is that you will just kill a block of buffers and that may happen to be buffers that are heavily trafficked and has to be re-loaded somewhere else - and you have a performance penalty.
And caching a lot means more caching overhead. Not everything makes sense to cache. What about the case when you run a database, caching the database file through the OS first and then have the database engine to cache the same thing again? A complete waste of performance and resources.
So having the OS caching - it works fine for many applications, but not for every application. Some applications are also tuning themselves by looking at available memory and determining how to best allocate resources. It is of course possible to figure out how much the OS can free for application use, but it's also hard to calculate an usage budget. And if it goes wrong you will end up swapping to disk.
But reality is that variable screen size IS a problem, since it determines how many items that can be placed on a page, like when using an input form.
But then - the telecom operators are also responsible for the app store fragmentation since they are the ones requiring the mobile phone vendors to provide branded phones - which usually means lobotomized phones.
Essentially we are back to the old problems of the ST412 interface where we had to figure out the best interleave for the drives as well when we were formatting them. Most drives then did have a fairly conservative interleave, but a reformat of them could improve the throughput considerably. A reformat could be done so that the whole track could be read in 2 rotations instead of 3, and what that does to performance is fairly easy to understand. C800:5 was a commonly used BIOS address where the low level format routine did reside.
But from what I understand this problem is an offset problem when the head steps from track to track, and that's also an issue to be considered. And today it's not common knowledge/practice to low level format hard drives.
And why stick at 4k sectors? Depending on the system you may want to use a different sector size. If you run Oracle on some systems the block size is 8k, and in that case you may want to have 8k disk blocks too since it would be good for performance.
Anyway - sooner or later we will have flash drives instead, and then this isn't a problem.
But when you buy a new computer - like for Christmas - you will pay the Microsoft tax and get a thin version of office. And that with minimal administration cost for Microsoft.
There are a lot of competent people in India. However the culture is more hierarchical so that means that they aren't used to take a personal initiative when necessary.
But since India is a country with a fairly large population you will see a lot of mediocre persons from India showing up at your doorstep too.
Another issue that has to be considered is the offshoring of jobs. Companies in the US having the owner and a few employees which is primarily the secretary and legal department and then all the developers in India or something. That means that there no new experience with the technology at all - everyone with the core competence is in India (or whatever the current favorite offshore site is).
And then you have lead times since the turnaround between management and developers is longer. That means that the competition that has both the management and developers offshore will steadily gain on you.
It somewhat depends on the language used - some languages are easier to penetrate than others. And some languages does more in 10 lines than other languages do in 100.
But anyway - to learn the code you may have to find a starting point (there is usually at least one logical point to start) and then make a flowchart in PowerPoint or something for the general structure. It's no point trying to get into the finer details, just a general sense of flow. You will get things wrong in the beginning, but don't worry. And you may end up finding a lot of dead code too.
When you have a satisfactory overview of the code it's time to really swim and drink the code. Many programmers have a tendency to accept that "it works" and stop there. By throwing the code into the compiler at maximum warning level and then try to fix all warnings you will be even more involved. And if you aren't satisfied you can take on the code with code analysis tools like Splint (for C) or FindBugs (for Java).
And don't forget that the commands "find" and "grep" in *NIX are your friends. Other environments usually have other tools, and IDE:s have their own, so you don't have to install Cygwin or something to get a grip on things.
And if you think that you don't understand the code well enough - try to port it to another operating system or other language.
Of course - this takes a lot of time and consumption of your favorite hacking beverage.
And yes - I'm involved as a single developer in a system with about 400k lines of code written in Java, and it was ported from an older system written in C, C++, Basic, Java, DCL...
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Being effective is not a requirement - and if you are too effective then you may lose your job.
The patent office situation with antique systems - if it's so old that you only can type it in then that system must be incompatible with any modern system so bad that nobody can expect the old system to survive much longer due to lack of spare parts - unless it's a completely mechanical system using punch cards in which case you just need to find a decent blacksmith.
The most important thing is WHY an accident occurs, not the blame for who is responsible.
If you can figure out WHY you can take preventive action.
As for traffic deaths - in 2008 the US had about 143 deaths per million while Sweden had 33 per million citizens. And you may say that the countries are different, but in reality they aren't that much different to say that you can't compare figures.
Just wait - soon it will be a legal requirement to log a lot of parameters in a format that can be read.
I would say that there is a continuous stream of updates and patches all the time. Mostly anti-virus, but then we have Adobe reader/flash, Windows (and other M$ items) and whatever other software that you have installed. Many softwares have their own method of updates and patches, and it's seldom compatible with the other software update packages in the system.
So every time you boot/login there are a lot of processes started that are competing for resources trying to make an upgrade and whatever which makes the startup time horrible.
So then there are at least three spellings that are right.
And consider "Wo", which is Wolfram in some countries and Tungsten in other is really funny for a swede since Tungsten comes from the comment "Tung Sten" in the notes of the discoverer, which means "Heavy Rock".
Don't worry until you have had a radiation team doing measurements in your apartment and found out that the levels are near what's considered unhealthy.
But be prepared to find out that your apartment is considered unfit for living.
In addition to this - it's suspected that the "floor mat" issue actually isn't really the floor mat at all but something else.
It's always easy to blame a simple cheap object for a stupid failure.
It's true for modern cars. Good luck to find a modern car without at least one microprocessor today.
And it still doesn't remove the fact that Win7 really uses more memory than XP.
But it's hard for me to see what the memory is used for in the system monitor, it only says that it's used, not what it's for and if it can be freed for my application. This is an issue that can cause some irritation when you are developing software and wants to monitor system usage to determine recommended amount of memory in the computer that's used.
It's all about the business model.
Another way around it could be to actually offer the game itself for free, but it's restricted until you connect to an online service where you can upgrade and interact with other players.
But that only works for some games and consoles.
It's a balancing act to get everything right since if you get it wrong you will insult your customers and loose the business.
And the funny thing - the online restaurant guide does exist now, at least in Sweden.
So he must have been too early.
Some of the ventures that are taken on are actually not wrong as an idea - just wrong in time. You must get the timing right to make it work.
But then - the timing window is of different width depending on what you do. Some do only have an opportunity window of a week, while other has a window of several years.
Nokias are probably tested in the sauna.
Since they also specify non-condensing humidity they are likely to be able to dismiss any claims anyway.
Their idea is that the content in the cable is going to be encrypted.
But a decoding of that content is needed in the TV, so there will be hacks sooner or later that decodes the signal.
And just recently the hardware has been getting decent enough to run XP.
So when the hardware is decent enough to run Windows 7 we will need something else.
Just because RAM is available doesn't mean that the OS should hog it. You may want to use that RAM for something different. It may be legal to use "excess" RAM for buffers, but then those buffers must be freed fast whenever necessary.
If you use large amounts of RAM for buffers you will either freeing the least used buffers and use them for the application, and then you will get memory fragmentation. This can be bad for some applications. The other scenario is that you will just kill a block of buffers and that may happen to be buffers that are heavily trafficked and has to be re-loaded somewhere else - and you have a performance penalty.
And caching a lot means more caching overhead. Not everything makes sense to cache. What about the case when you run a database, caching the database file through the OS first and then have the database engine to cache the same thing again? A complete waste of performance and resources.
So having the OS caching - it works fine for many applications, but not for every application. Some applications are also tuning themselves by looking at available memory and determining how to best allocate resources. It is of course possible to figure out how much the OS can free for application use, but it's also hard to calculate an usage budget. And if it goes wrong you will end up swapping to disk.
There are differences in bugs.
Some bugs are just simple programming mistakes, but some bugs are major design mistakes that can be very hard to drill down to and resolve.
And the major design mistakes aren't always evident until you put a system under stress with multiple users.
But reality is that variable screen size IS a problem, since it determines how many items that can be placed on a page, like when using an input form.
But then - the telecom operators are also responsible for the app store fragmentation since they are the ones requiring the mobile phone vendors to provide branded phones - which usually means lobotomized phones.
Essentially we are back to the old problems of the ST412 interface where we had to figure out the best interleave for the drives as well when we were formatting them. Most drives then did have a fairly conservative interleave, but a reformat of them could improve the throughput considerably. A reformat could be done so that the whole track could be read in 2 rotations instead of 3, and what that does to performance is fairly easy to understand. C800:5 was a commonly used BIOS address where the low level format routine did reside.
But from what I understand this problem is an offset problem when the head steps from track to track, and that's also an issue to be considered. And today it's not common knowledge/practice to low level format hard drives.
And why stick at 4k sectors? Depending on the system you may want to use a different sector size. If you run Oracle on some systems the block size is 8k, and in that case you may want to have 8k disk blocks too since it would be good for performance.
Anyway - sooner or later we will have flash drives instead, and then this isn't a problem.
But when you buy a new computer - like for Christmas - you will pay the Microsoft tax and get a thin version of office. And that with minimal administration cost for Microsoft.
Why not?
There are a lot of competent people in India. However the culture is more hierarchical so that means that they aren't used to take a personal initiative when necessary.
But since India is a country with a fairly large population you will see a lot of mediocre persons from India showing up at your doorstep too.
Assuming that you only use the basic tools, but when you are a *NIX nerd you will soon get accustomed to a lot of the other tools too.
Another issue that has to be considered is the offshoring of jobs. Companies in the US having the owner and a few employees which is primarily the secretary and legal department and then all the developers in India or something. That means that there no new experience with the technology at all - everyone with the core competence is in India (or whatever the current favorite offshore site is).
And then you have lead times since the turnaround between management and developers is longer. That means that the competition that has both the management and developers offshore will steadily gain on you.
It somewhat depends on the language used - some languages are easier to penetrate than others. And some languages does more in 10 lines than other languages do in 100.
But anyway - to learn the code you may have to find a starting point (there is usually at least one logical point to start) and then make a flowchart in PowerPoint or something for the general structure. It's no point trying to get into the finer details, just a general sense of flow. You will get things wrong in the beginning, but don't worry. And you may end up finding a lot of dead code too.
When you have a satisfactory overview of the code it's time to really swim and drink the code. Many programmers have a tendency to accept that "it works" and stop there. By throwing the code into the compiler at maximum warning level and then try to fix all warnings you will be even more involved. And if you aren't satisfied you can take on the code with code analysis tools like Splint (for C) or FindBugs (for Java).
And don't forget that the commands "find" and "grep" in *NIX are your friends. Other environments usually have other tools, and IDE:s have their own, so you don't have to install Cygwin or something to get a grip on things.
And if you think that you don't understand the code well enough - try to port it to another operating system or other language.
Of course - this takes a lot of time and consumption of your favorite hacking beverage.
And yes - I'm involved as a single developer in a system with about 400k lines of code written in Java, and it was ported from an older system written in C, C++, Basic, Java, DCL...
Just compare I Want A New Drug and Ghostbusters and then look into the legal processes around that.