becomes system architects, changes profession, moves to a different consultant company which targets different customers or gets employed by the customers as specialists on something.
Personally I'm hitting 40 soon and the experience I have accumulated allows me to span from hardware & the soldering iron via low-level C to Java and Web design within the same project. Peronally I'm not much into the Microsoft environment, but I have had things to do anyway. Even though some things are more boring than others it's often easy to identify the tasks that can be fixed with a neat tool that I have hacked together and focus on the important details. It will take some time and effort to create that tool, but it is much more useful in the end to have that tool than to have to repeat the manual labor of converting MSSQL to OracleSQL for example.
So one way of working as a more experienced programmer is actually to know what to do and apply it. If the solution is ready at deadline nobody really asks if you were working 120 hour weeks or 12 hour weeks. One answer may be that the old and experienced knows when it's important to be visible and when not. (most of the time it's not necessary to be visible.)
Interesting article - but not very detailed
on
DIY LCD Backlight Repair
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Some more details would be useful - but it is at least interesting to know that there is a possibility to repair for a cheap sum.
Today the price of white LED:s are also starting to be acceptable so one may wonder if some white LED:s (powerful ones) may be of use. One version is the Luxeon Emitter that is fairly bright and can be found in LED torches.
Or a ramp of cheaper white LED:s may also do the trick.
Depending on where you live and your reasons for ending your employment. A reasonably smart employer should honor your wishes and let you wrap up your work in a neat way since that will help the employer in the end.
2001 is the best one. Even better if you consider when it was made and what you could compare it with! Not that the other ones are bad either.
When you consider that this film was made in 1968 it wasn't until 1977 when Star Wars appeared that you could get something to actually compare with in quality. And even though that film is almost forty years old it is still a film that you can watch. The only thing that it actually missed was the political situation in the world of today, but wh coul tell that at a time when the Soviet Union was at it's height and al-Qaeda wasn't known. The worst terrorists at the time was PLO and Lebanon was a holiday paradise.
Personally I don't give much for the Alien films, but it's a matter of taste.
is not solving any problems - it just creates more problems. Skype may have some bad sides like it's not open and nobody really knows if there are security issues with it, but so far there have been a lot more security issues with Microsoft's messenger. - And Skype has anyway been quick to respond to the security issues that actually has occured.
So was this researched and paid by M$???
If Skype is banned - then there will just pop up a lot of other alternatives. And one good thing with Skype is that it actually helps in the informal but important communication in companies.
By the same logic used against Skype - about any software should be banned.
Depending on the current state of flex and bison in use the statement will result in one of the following flavors: "Access violation - core dumped", "Ambigous statement please reenter" or "What is thy bidding my master?"
The SSN or whatever number used in your country just a key to connect to a database where further identification features can be stored. Relying on the SSN only is as stupid as anything. Let the database contain further biometric identification features that can be used to verify the identity of a person. Today there are algorithms that allows for verification of biometrics without allowing for reverse-engineering of the biometric data.
Of course some people may complain about "big brother" and things like that, but what should be considered is that this actually is a further step to avoid identity theft. It may also be a cost issue, but what is the price of an identity theft? (ok, if I'm using another person's ID when registering a proof of purchase that may at worst cause some irritation if the victim gets some funny commercials dropping into his mailbox, but if I'm signing for a loan at a bank it's a different issue.)
See the SSN as a convenience key for looking up more details - not a proof of identity!
---
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.
Robert A. Heinlein
There are areas in Africa where the basic needs aren't covered. (housing, drinking water etc) but there are also areas that actually aren't that poor. Africa is a big continent! The point is that free software is an alternative even in Africa.
If anything - this shows the level of stupidity at Microsoft.
As at least some people around the world has noted there are a multitude of electrical standards, plugs sockets voltages and so on floating around.
Now I have actually figured out that in the country where there are a multitude of responsibility write-offs (read USA) the electrical plugs are still "unsafe at any handling" (compare with Unsafe at any speed)
I have since figured out that the Underwriters Laboratories isn't doing a good enough job when they are checking the safety of our household utilities. A most notably thing is the electrical plug for 220V 30/50A applinces where you actually can grab around the plug and come in contact with both the live pins at the same time when inserting/removing the plug. This can be prevented by a design that protects the user from coming into contact with the pins while inserting the plug. This picture shows the outlet in a well that actually serves two purposes - protecting the userd during insert/removal and also catching any mechanical sideway stresses that can break the pins inside the connector.
I have also noted that NEMA is not doing a very good job either since the amount of different electrical plug pinnings that are present is more confusing than helping. Too many pin configurations for the same electrical rating is not very good.
The issue that I would like to point out is that even if there is an international standard that standard isn't followed and adopted as superseding the national standards.
Re:Okay, here's a standard I'd like to see:
on
World Standards Day 2005
·
· Score: 2, Informative
And my favurite is all those road signs that almost always are written in english with no picture in the US. Most of the time they are OK, but sometimes it's just what the heck do they mean...
Maybe using pictures on the warning signs is too simple? My favourite is this warning for a quay. The most notably that I have seen is the "Right lane must turn right" and similar small signs often almost too late. I would really like the use of graphical lane information signs like the following: lane information before crossing and lane ending information. Everyone ever using Macintosh has probably encountered this sign indicating "worth to see". (Yes, Apple adopted that sign from a swedish road sign.)
When it comes to driving on the left side - it's not as bad as it sounds, but roundabouts (rotaries that they sometimes are called) are the worst since you expect traffic from the wrong direction.
is that if you start with easy to read code you have actually done some optimization already. The best way to create code that is easy to read is to actually minimize down all the unnecessary parts. (don't make unnecessary copies of data)
With less code the compiler will have an easier job to optimize your task than a complex expression. A breaking down of the code into manageable parts is also important.
One issue that hasn't been discussed yet is that code optimization today is depending on the hardware used. If you can execute all your code and data in the cache of the CPU it will be a lot more efficient than if the data has to be accessed from external memory.
When it comes to optimization there is also another thing to consider - even if the compiler is able to place unnecessary code outside a loop you shouldn't rely on it. If you do that by hand before then the compiler doesn't have to make considerations about such code - or at least at a much lower level. Depending on the compiler there may actually be a limit on how large blocks it is able to consider during optimization.
Use of switch statements in C instead of if/else/if/else/if/else-statements may actually also be both a readability and a compiler advantage since (if the case-labels are correctly managed) the switch statement can be translated to a jump table while the if statements are harder for the compiler to translate.
There are also many more optimizations that are very processor specific. Old processors like the Z80, 6502 etc. wasn't very complicated while modern processors are much more complex with different cache levels and prefetching. The prefetching of code is actually something that can be very tricky to do compiler optimization for when doing simple loops. There are actually some documents available both from Intel and AMD that describes how to work with prefetching and SIMD etc in which cases the code to use would be less efficient than a simple loop on any processor that doesn't support such features.
But as stated in other replies - figure out where to actually try to improve the code before doing optimizations. There are tools out there that can be very useful - Like Quantify (former Rational, now IBM) that can create a graphical tree over how functions are called and the amount of time consumed.
Require them to deliver a large bunch of memory packages (with a 10 year guarantee) for free to anybody that can claim that they have been suffering from the price.
and I will shoot myself in the foot. It will still hurt the economy less than this conflict.
Even if the current situation may not be ideal from a political point of view everyone must admit that it actually works (at least most of the time). If anything - this just is another of those issues driven by the central EU heads to which we all europeans are required to donate some of our income. (but this case is a complete waste of money)
If anything - this will actually be a larger threat to world economy than anything that Al-Qaeda can cook up. The WTC crashes was just an excuse to trigger the downward economic slope that was ripe to happen anyway. The economy swings in intervals of 10 to 13 years so no big surprise there.
It looks like none of the EU heads understands what impact this will have on small and medium-size businesses today. Large companies are handling their own networks so they will actually suffer less (albeit they will take some dents).
OK, it seems like we get the politicans that we deserve - Invent an enemy and go to war (economic or whatever) no matter the cost. Maybe the cold war wasn't that bad anyway. Then we all knew who the enemy was and didn't indulge ourselves into unnecessary internal conflicts.
Or maybe somebody is willing to hand me a BFG (quake warning) and a ticket to Brussels.
The memory allocation management routines are normally running when the JVM thinks it's best, but as a programmer it is usually possible to predict the best time when to actually take care of the housekeeping. Even if the memory management cleanup takes the same time in both cases Java has a tendency to issue them in the middle of everything. So if I as a programmer does the garbage collection at the end of a displayed page and Java does it uncontrollable in the middle of the page the latter case is more annoying to the user.
The difference between InnoDB and MyISAM is not that InnoDB is better, they are both good, but have different strategies. MyISAm isn't a fully transactional solution, which may be bad, but the advantage is that MyISAM is very fast, which is the key issue in some cases.
MySQL is also supporting several other databases as backend, all with different advantages and disadvantages.
A good spec is one that states the goal of a certain issue and creates boundaries. However it doesn't tell you exactly the path to the goal but can give hints.
A bad spec is a spec that goes too much into detail but doesn't set the outer boundaries. (Well THIS software needs a terabyte of RAM to work, since nobody told us that we only have 32 meg to work with!)
Far too many projects have been started with bad specs. If a spec can't be summarized to an A4 page (or Letter for those who don't do ISO standards) it is time to sit down and think again. Of course it's impossible to get everything down on a single page, but you can create the basic boundaries. If the final spec is on more paper than you can comfortably put under your arm and have handy at all times - well, who do you think will read it?
There are actually two cases, software that requires the user to pay a fee for the right to use it and software that is free.
Free software may come without any guarantees, but should be distributed with source.
Pay software should also mean responsibilities for the company/person behind the software. This will increase the quality requirements that applies before the software is on the market.
And yet another issue is that if a company drops support for a software, then that company shall also lose the copyright to that software and have it placed into public domain.
Sorry for any incoherent typing - I'm a little tired...
Mozilla is creating a product that is add-on to the operating system, and that with reasonable means can act with limited operating system rights. This means that it is possible to sandbox Mozilla better than it is possible to sandbox IE that is closely integrated with the OS.
Another item is also the time it takes from a vulnerability to be publicized to the fix (or workaround). A moderate problem that isn't fixed for 6 months is more likely to be exploited than a hig-security problem fixed within days.
The real problem here is that even though both products generally are good products with some flaws (there will always be bugs, some more prominent than others) there may be need to address some of the security risks present today from a basic point of view. This may even mean sandboxing within sandboxes to control interaction between browser frames/iframes/embedding. like the effect of the following example (for Mozilla).
(Nothing ill-meant about slashdot here, just an example).
My point is that this could as well have been your bank that was framed this way, and if there was a way for the bank to indicate the framing permissions and that browsers were able to catch this a lot would have been gained in security.
(OK, I haven't considered every issue arised by this, but I hope that you see my point.)
Do we REALLY need the LSB too? I have only seen ONE application around that actually refers to it, and I can't see what benefits that is actually causing anyway.
It may be that Ulrich Drepper is a pain in the ass, but that is actually beside the point here. If anything - he actually have a point. Following the Posix standard should be sufficient. More often problems arises not due to the lack of following a certain standard but by having bad quality-checking inside your organization. It really doesn't matter how well you are complying to a standard if you haven't actually tested it on the platform you are targeting.
If I'm required to create anything portable I'll try to build it that way from the beginning. There may be some issues to cope with, but more often they are minor.
Well... languages does a lot of cross-inheritance, especially when they are new and fresh. And C# (C-hash as I like to say to the annoyance of everyone) is a relatively fresh language on the market.
The most annoying thing with that language is that it is very similar to Java, but is using different classes. Understandable since it is M$ behind it and they got slapped by Sun for incompatible Java.
Anyway, what I still don't understand is why M$ still are marketing VB as a programming language. It is just remotely related to Basic, and still suffers from the bad things with Basic which leads to hard-to-read code and lack of structure. OK, there are a lot of programmers out there that have learnt VB in and out, but I still would like to see better languages as the major language for a lot of operations. Why not promote programming macros and scripts in a more structured language with stronger typing instead?
and that is about the severity of the security issues.
Anyway, maybe it's time to switch to Opera or Lynx now. Or maybe tkWWW... Does anybody know of any other browser out there that may be usable on a variety of OS:es???
This is evidently a way to just mess things up. The name GMail isn't at a very high artistic level and seems to be just a simple label. I think that it is necessary to require fair uniqueness on a trademark so that you trademark names has to have a quality to them.
Save us from stupid conflicts and focus on more important things like development and quality.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I'm hitting 40 soon and the experience I have accumulated allows me to span from hardware & the soldering iron via low-level C to Java and Web design within the same project. Peronally I'm not much into the Microsoft environment, but I have had things to do anyway. Even though some things are more boring than others it's often easy to identify the tasks that can be fixed with a neat tool that I have hacked together and focus on the important details. It will take some time and effort to create that tool, but it is much more useful in the end to have that tool than to have to repeat the manual labor of converting MSSQL to OracleSQL for example.
So one way of working as a more experienced programmer is actually to know what to do and apply it. If the solution is ready at deadline nobody really asks if you were working 120 hour weeks or 12 hour weeks. One answer may be that the old and experienced knows when it's important to be visible and when not. (most of the time it's not necessary to be visible.)
Or a ramp of cheaper white LED:s may also do the trick.
Depending on where you live and your reasons for ending your employment. A reasonably smart employer should honor your wishes and let you wrap up your work in a neat way since that will help the employer in the end.
You are about 20 years late - see Max Headroom for a world ruled by corporations.
When you consider that this film was made in 1968 it wasn't until 1977 when Star Wars appeared that you could get something to actually compare with in quality. And even though that film is almost forty years old it is still a film that you can watch. The only thing that it actually missed was the political situation in the world of today, but wh coul tell that at a time when the Soviet Union was at it's height and al-Qaeda wasn't known. The worst terrorists at the time was PLO and Lebanon was a holiday paradise.
Personally I don't give much for the Alien films, but it's a matter of taste.
So was this researched and paid by M$???
If Skype is banned - then there will just pop up a lot of other alternatives. And one good thing with Skype is that it actually helps in the informal but important communication in companies.
By the same logic used against Skype - about any software should be banned.
Depending on the current state of flex and bison in use the statement will result in one of the following flavors: "Access violation - core dumped", "Ambigous statement please reenter" or "What is thy bidding my master?"
Of course some people may complain about "big brother" and things like that, but what should be considered is that this actually is a further step to avoid identity theft. It may also be a cost issue, but what is the price of an identity theft? (ok, if I'm using another person's ID when registering a proof of purchase that may at worst cause some irritation if the victim gets some funny commercials dropping into his mailbox, but if I'm signing for a loan at a bank it's a different issue.)
See the SSN as a convenience key for looking up more details - not a proof of identity!
---
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.
Robert A. Heinlein
If anything - this shows the level of stupidity at Microsoft.
Now I have actually figured out that in the country where there are a multitude of responsibility write-offs (read USA) the electrical plugs are still "unsafe at any handling" (compare with Unsafe at any speed) I have since figured out that the Underwriters Laboratories isn't doing a good enough job when they are checking the safety of our household utilities. A most notably thing is the electrical plug for 220V 30/50A applinces where you actually can grab around the plug and come in contact with both the live pins at the same time when inserting/removing the plug. This can be prevented by a design that protects the user from coming into contact with the pins while inserting the plug. This picture shows the outlet in a well that actually serves two purposes - protecting the userd during insert/removal and also catching any mechanical sideway stresses that can break the pins inside the connector.
I have also noted that NEMA is not doing a very good job either since the amount of different electrical plug pinnings that are present is more confusing than helping. Too many pin configurations for the same electrical rating is not very good.
The issue that I would like to point out is that even if there is an international standard that standard isn't followed and adopted as superseding the national standards.
Maybe using pictures on the warning signs is too simple? My favourite is this warning for a quay. The most notably that I have seen is the "Right lane must turn right" and similar small signs often almost too late. I would really like the use of graphical lane information signs like the following: lane information before crossing and lane ending information. Everyone ever using Macintosh has probably encountered this sign indicating "worth to see". (Yes, Apple adopted that sign from a swedish road sign.)
When it comes to driving on the left side - it's not as bad as it sounds, but roundabouts (rotaries that they sometimes are called) are the worst since you expect traffic from the wrong direction.
Actually - nobody is the wrong statement. Sweden and Japan uses the ISO format.
Swedish banks has been using a code-gadget much like a calculator for years now!
With less code the compiler will have an easier job to optimize your task than a complex expression. A breaking down of the code into manageable parts is also important.
One issue that hasn't been discussed yet is that code optimization today is depending on the hardware used. If you can execute all your code and data in the cache of the CPU it will be a lot more efficient than if the data has to be accessed from external memory.
When it comes to optimization there is also another thing to consider - even if the compiler is able to place unnecessary code outside a loop you shouldn't rely on it. If you do that by hand before then the compiler doesn't have to make considerations about such code - or at least at a much lower level. Depending on the compiler there may actually be a limit on how large blocks it is able to consider during optimization.
Use of switch statements in C instead of if/else/if/else/if/else-statements may actually also be both a readability and a compiler advantage since (if the case-labels are correctly managed) the switch statement can be translated to a jump table while the if statements are harder for the compiler to translate.
There are also many more optimizations that are very processor specific. Old processors like the Z80, 6502 etc. wasn't very complicated while modern processors are much more complex with different cache levels and prefetching. The prefetching of code is actually something that can be very tricky to do compiler optimization for when doing simple loops. There are actually some documents available both from Intel and AMD that describes how to work with prefetching and SIMD etc in which cases the code to use would be less efficient than a simple loop on any processor that doesn't support such features.
But as stated in other replies - figure out where to actually try to improve the code before doing optimizations. There are tools out there that can be very useful - Like Quantify (former Rational, now IBM) that can create a graphical tree over how functions are called and the amount of time consumed.
Require them to deliver a large bunch of memory packages (with a 10 year guarantee) for free to anybody that can claim that they have been suffering from the price.
Even if the current situation may not be ideal from a political point of view everyone must admit that it actually works (at least most of the time). If anything - this just is another of those issues driven by the central EU heads to which we all europeans are required to donate some of our income. (but this case is a complete waste of money)
If anything - this will actually be a larger threat to world economy than anything that Al-Qaeda can cook up. The WTC crashes was just an excuse to trigger the downward economic slope that was ripe to happen anyway. The economy swings in intervals of 10 to 13 years so no big surprise there.
It looks like none of the EU heads understands what impact this will have on small and medium-size businesses today. Large companies are handling their own networks so they will actually suffer less (albeit they will take some dents).
OK, it seems like we get the politicans that we deserve - Invent an enemy and go to war (economic or whatever) no matter the cost. Maybe the cold war wasn't that bad anyway. Then we all knew who the enemy was and didn't indulge ourselves into unnecessary internal conflicts.
Or maybe somebody is willing to hand me a BFG (quake warning) and a ticket to Brussels.
The memory allocation management routines are normally running when the JVM thinks it's best, but as a programmer it is usually possible to predict the best time when to actually take care of the housekeeping. Even if the memory management cleanup takes the same time in both cases Java has a tendency to issue them in the middle of everything. So if I as a programmer does the garbage collection at the end of a displayed page and Java does it uncontrollable in the middle of the page the latter case is more annoying to the user.
MySQL is also supporting several other databases as backend, all with different advantages and disadvantages.
A good spec is one that states the goal of a certain issue and creates boundaries. However it doesn't tell you exactly the path to the goal but can give hints.
A bad spec is a spec that goes too much into detail but doesn't set the outer boundaries. (Well THIS software needs a terabyte of RAM to work, since nobody told us that we only have 32 meg to work with!)
Far too many projects have been started with bad specs. If a spec can't be summarized to an A4 page (or Letter for those who don't do ISO standards) it is time to sit down and think again. Of course it's impossible to get everything down on a single page, but you can create the basic boundaries. If the final spec is on more paper than you can comfortably put under your arm and have handy at all times - well, who do you think will read it?
There are actually two cases, software that requires the user to pay a fee for the right to use it and software that is free.
Free software may come without any guarantees, but should be distributed with source.
Pay software should also mean responsibilities for the company/person behind the software. This will increase the quality requirements that applies before the software is on the market.
And yet another issue is that if a company drops support for a software, then that company shall also lose the copyright to that software and have it placed into public domain.
Sorry for any incoherent typing - I'm a little tired...
Another item is also the time it takes from a vulnerability to be publicized to the fix (or workaround). A moderate problem that isn't fixed for 6 months is more likely to be exploited than a hig-security problem fixed within days.
The real problem here is that even though both products generally are good products with some flaws (there will always be bugs, some more prominent than others) there may be need to address some of the security risks present today from a basic point of view. This may even mean sandboxing within sandboxes to control interaction between browser frames/iframes/embedding. like the effect of the following example (for Mozilla).
(Nothing ill-meant about slashdot here, just an example).
My point is that this could as well have been your bank that was framed this way, and if there was a way for the bank to indicate the framing permissions and that browsers were able to catch this a lot would have been gained in security. (OK, I haven't considered every issue arised by this, but I hope that you see my point.)
It may be that Ulrich Drepper is a pain in the ass, but that is actually beside the point here. If anything - he actually have a point. Following the Posix standard should be sufficient. More often problems arises not due to the lack of following a certain standard but by having bad quality-checking inside your organization. It really doesn't matter how well you are complying to a standard if you haven't actually tested it on the platform you are targeting.
If I'm required to create anything portable I'll try to build it that way from the beginning. There may be some issues to cope with, but more often they are minor.
The most annoying thing with that language is that it is very similar to Java, but is using different classes. Understandable since it is M$ behind it and they got slapped by Sun for incompatible Java.
Anyway, what I still don't understand is why M$ still are marketing VB as a programming language. It is just remotely related to Basic, and still suffers from the bad things with Basic which leads to hard-to-read code and lack of structure. OK, there are a lot of programmers out there that have learnt VB in and out, but I still would like to see better languages as the major language for a lot of operations. Why not promote programming macros and scripts in a more structured language with stronger typing instead?
And still, don't forget Ada.
Anyway, maybe it's time to switch to Opera or Lynx now. Or maybe tkWWW... Does anybody know of any other browser out there that may be usable on a variety of OS:es???
Save us from stupid conflicts and focus on more important things like development and quality.