"problem-solving and analytical skills will be key requirements for next generation developers"
Are they kidding me? Since when was this requirement "new"?
The problem that will confront your typical corporate development environment will be the same problems that have *always* confronted large bureaucratically heavy development environments. The list starts with the fact that the shear size of such environments makes it near impossible for them to be agile. That is why most great new stuff comes from small start-ups. The business model of large corporations is risk adverse and would rather wait to see what is trendy and then just buy it (and thus destroy it.)
The Mozilla Org / Firefox has failed miserably at this whole world record attempt. Firstly, they start at a cockeyed time instead of 00:01 UTC so half of the world has far less than a day to download. Then, they are incapable of having the servers perform even for the first minute and if you do get a response the website is still showing version 2 as the latest!
So, in an effort to spread the love, I tell my non-technical friends to go download firefox 3. First they get no reponse from the site so their reaction is, "hmmm, firefox is shit... I can't get it." The lucky ones get a response and are served up version 2 which doesn't count for the record and is inferior to version 3.
What a disaster.
I don't suppose I have to tell anybody on this thread that this is just a case of a man in a trench coat offering candies to children while his 1972 buick idles in the background with rope and chloroform sitting ready in the back seat.
If things would have gone differently back in 2000 I personally think you would have seen Microsoft broken in at least two as a result of their monopolistic practices. Unfortunately, Bush won the election and there was no way that a Republican president presiding over a collapsing economy wanted to deal the economy another blow by breaking up one of the shining jewels of American Capitalistic Greed (TM). Would we have been judging Gates differently now if that would have occured? Why is it that we applaude Gates for giving away his money when his money is ill gotten? And I don't just mean ill gotten amongst the slashdot crowd - the company he presides over has been found guilty in the U.S. and by the E.U. Maybe we should be outraged that he is allowed to have money to give away?
Well, there are about 30 million Canadians that would have to strongly disagree. Oh, but I forgot, the world does not exist outside of the United States.
All sarcasm aside, Hockey Night in Canada, the regular Saturday night hockey program carried by CBC is so popular that the ad revenues from that program alone basically carry the entire network. Don Cherry and Ron Mclean, the shows hosts, their salaries rival that of the top news anchor on the network - and may have even surpassed it.
In Canada the Fox glowing animated puck was ridiculed pretty heavily and is still used as a reference to the lower sport intellect of large majority of Americans.
Telus has actually been selling porn for quite some time on their TelusTV service (TV over IP) and there has not been any outcry that I know of. The same goes for Canada's largest carrier, Bell. They offer a number of porn channels on their ExpressView satellite service, although they have yet to roll out any service on their cellular network.
Actually, here is the conversion as of today's rate:
$4.00 Canadian = $USD 3.38
The Canadian dollar, as you can see, is actually quite strong, or more realistically put, the American dollar is actually quite weak from its historical values.
The thing is, you never know what is the catalyst to a revolution. What does access to cheap text messaging have to do with social justice? Well, a popular uprising of youth in the Philippines armed with cell phones, overthrew a government.
Can someone please allay my privacy fears with having my calendar info, personal and business email, financial data on a Google spreadsheet all hosted on a U.S. based server? The fact that so much of my personal data would be hosted on a server makes me nervous enough not to use it but being hosted on a U.S. based server makes me all the more nervous considering the lack of respect for personal privacy by U.S. authorities.
The big deal here is that campaigns on MoveOn *ARE* grassroots campaigns. They are by real people and organizations *NOT* for-profit businesses! It corrupts democracy.
Google will have to put some serious work into their site for it to catch up to Sourceforge. Their site is *VERY* spartan and lacking in features. They use the default, out-of-the-box subversion webdav so when viewing the source there is no syntax colouring and the bug tracker has no features what so ever.
But knowing google and their vast resources it probably won't be long, if the service looks like it will garner interest, until new features start showing up by the dozen all with nifty AJAX interfaces.
If you read books on software engineering and design, python and/or ruby are inevitably mentioned. That is because they encourage and allow for elegent design. Therefore, using the above definition of LAMP you might as well say that Java and Weblogic are finished as well.
I am becoming less and less enthused about keeping my personal mail and most especially my personal financial information on a google server in the U.S. where the government feels that they have every right to rummage through my things.
A professional construction worker is going to have a wholly different drill in his tool shed than your average home owner.
I suspect if they made Linux easy enough for grandma to use then it would lose something on the other side of the use-case spectrum. I use Linux because I am a software professional and it gives me ultimate control and the tools I need to do my job. I don't want a drill that only goes one speed.
The reason that it is so hard to "listen to your customers" is that far, far too often, customers don't know what they want - they just know that what they currently have is no good. I believe the comment below this advocating finding customer pains will lead to more success than trying to get any sort of reasonable story of what a customer wants.
I don't believe any customer went to Apple and said, "I want a digital music player that uses a really groovey touch sensitive circle as the user interface." There is a real lack of "designers" in the software industry that are akin to physical product designers. Yes, you have to listen to customer's desires but if you ask developers to code to some spec that was solely created from customer "requirements" you will end up with shit software. You need a designer interjected into that process that has vision and can recognize where customers are feeling pain.
It is very important in society to have people like RMS. He balances out the people on the other extreme of the issue who think that everything including water and air should be under private ownership for the express purpose of making a profit. If it wasn't for him there would be precious little in the software industry that is in the public domain.
Most of us have chosen that the healthy balance between socialist and capitalist in the context of software lies somewhere in the middle. But without the debate that he sparks, that balance would slowly drift in a direction where all code would be patented by Big Software and if you wished to code you would have to become a cubicle dwelling peon at Big Software's "campus" in the exburbs.
You make a very good point that the President has greatly expanded the role of the central government during his tenure. Isn't one of the historical platform policies of the Republican party to reduce the size of government, or is that just when the Democrats are in power?
Despite your salient point on the size of government you are repeating one of the biggest fallacies so often repeated in the "war on terror." Please be reminded that all of the 9/11 hijackers were legally in the United States. They did not "sneak" in across the border from Canada or anywhere else.
Efforts to defend such a large land mass from very determined, well financed, angry extremists will always be out-paced by their determination at getting in. The largest failure following 9/11 was the United States' ability to look critically at its foreign policy. Why are Al-Queda recruiters so effective at finding more young Muslim men willing to die for their cause? And invading Iraq only further fanned the flame of hate towards the United States for those that were susceptable to anti-American sentiment.
I am puzzled by your thinking that animal rights advocates are anti-science. On the contrary, much of what motivates them is based on science. It is the right wing religious nutters who believe that animals were put on this earth solely for our benefit. Then along came Darwin with his crazy theory of evolution, which, in an indirect manner, suggested that we are all (lesser primates such as President Bush included) here for our own reasons and that there is no ultimate being that controls the others.
Science throughout this century has further disproved notions put forth by religious dogma that animals have no feeling (and as such could be slaughtered in any heinous manner without the tiniest feelings of remorse.) In fact science has proven that animals have feelings, complex emotions, and many other traits that were previously reserved for humans. As such, shouldn't we be treating animals more like humans (unless of course you believe humans should be shut in cages and tortured under the guise of science?)
Compassion and science are two different things. However, a compassionate scientist would use science and technology to good use and use computer models and rigourous research to prove whether a chemical is dangerous rather than taking the most expedient route of squirting it in some unsuspecting rat's eye. Which of course only tells us whether it is dangerous to a rat's eye and very little about what it would do to a human's.
A sure fire road to humdrum mediocrity is to listen to the "have fun now" advise. Lock yourself in your shitty little apartment while you are not bleeding into the sand for "the man" and flush out every idea you have ever had to make it big. Be unbelievably driven and ignore sex and booze. The mistake most make is to chase women (or men as it may be) and drink and piss away your brain cells and what little money you make on your first sorry jobs. Then you end up falling in love, having kids and being stuck paying a mortgage. Now you are trapped. All those great ideas you had are now exponentially more difficult to pursue because you have to buy diapers. Become successful first then have fun... and you will have the money to REALLY have fun.
Firstly, I think the author is WAY off with the comment that open source software is feature driven. I believe the contrary is true. Open source software is design driven because of one of her other points - it is made for other developers. You will not gain much in terms of bragging rights if your underlying architecture is sloppy, especially when everyone gets to look under the hood.
And so what if is is made for other developers. I like the UNIX philosophy and the command line and so what if she doesn't! Open source software is kind of the kit car of the software world. If you are into cars you love to tinker but if you just want to go to the store you don't want to know where the manifold is. Its all about CHOICE.
To respond to the watch analogy, the problem with the software industry today is that the software costing the most money, enterprise software, is typically of the lowest quality. Imagine if the watch industry worked the same way - you pay $5000 on a watch and when you compare it to a watch worth $12 in WalMart you find that the cheap-o version is comprised of better technology.
I don't think the original "And yet..." post was trying to belittle people who don't understand the Internet. I believe his point was to say that many people may have responded to the survey saying that they have Internet when in fact they don't because they really don't understand what the Internet *is* Maybe someone thinks that if they get CNN on TV then that is considered the Internet or the mere fact that they have a telephone means that they are on the Internet... who knows... never underestimate the ignorance of the masses.
Our body was designed quite smartly to conserve heat when the temperature drops. Circulation decreases to those parts of the body that are not necessarily important for immediate survival (a.k.a your fingers, toes, tip of your nose, and other protruding misc!) This ensures the maximum amount of heat for places that really need it - your core (a.k.a heart and lungs.) If you are pumping heat from your upper arm to your fingers you may actually be working against your body's own natural defenses.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's do a comparison, then, shall we?
NASDAQ Composite Index:
Mar 24, 2000 -> $4,963
Today -> $2,350
I would suggest the poster give their head a real hard shake and think of another title.
"problem-solving and analytical skills will be key requirements for next generation developers" Are they kidding me? Since when was this requirement "new"? The problem that will confront your typical corporate development environment will be the same problems that have *always* confronted large bureaucratically heavy development environments. The list starts with the fact that the shear size of such environments makes it near impossible for them to be agile. That is why most great new stuff comes from small start-ups. The business model of large corporations is risk adverse and would rather wait to see what is trendy and then just buy it (and thus destroy it.)
The Mozilla Org / Firefox has failed miserably at this whole world record attempt. Firstly, they start at a cockeyed time instead of 00:01 UTC so half of the world has far less than a day to download. Then, they are incapable of having the servers perform even for the first minute and if you do get a response the website is still showing version 2 as the latest! So, in an effort to spread the love, I tell my non-technical friends to go download firefox 3. First they get no reponse from the site so their reaction is, "hmmm, firefox is shit ... I can't get it." The lucky ones get a response and are served up version 2 which doesn't count for the record and is inferior to version 3.
What a disaster.
I don't suppose I have to tell anybody on this thread that this is just a case of a man in a trench coat offering candies to children while his 1972 buick idles in the background with rope and chloroform sitting ready in the back seat.
If things would have gone differently back in 2000 I personally think you would have seen Microsoft broken in at least two as a result of their monopolistic practices. Unfortunately, Bush won the election and there was no way that a Republican president presiding over a collapsing economy wanted to deal the economy another blow by breaking up one of the shining jewels of American Capitalistic Greed (TM). Would we have been judging Gates differently now if that would have occured? Why is it that we applaude Gates for giving away his money when his money is ill gotten? And I don't just mean ill gotten amongst the slashdot crowd - the company he presides over has been found guilty in the U.S. and by the E.U. Maybe we should be outraged that he is allowed to have money to give away?
Well, there are about 30 million Canadians that would have to strongly disagree. Oh, but I forgot, the world does not exist outside of the United States. All sarcasm aside, Hockey Night in Canada, the regular Saturday night hockey program carried by CBC is so popular that the ad revenues from that program alone basically carry the entire network. Don Cherry and Ron Mclean, the shows hosts, their salaries rival that of the top news anchor on the network - and may have even surpassed it.
In Canada the Fox glowing animated puck was ridiculed pretty heavily and is still used as a reference to the lower sport intellect of large majority of Americans.
Telus has actually been selling porn for quite some time on their TelusTV service (TV over IP) and there has not been any outcry that I know of. The same goes for Canada's largest carrier, Bell. They offer a number of porn channels on their ExpressView satellite service, although they have yet to roll out any service on their cellular network.
Actually, here is the conversion as of today's rate:
$4.00 Canadian = $USD 3.38
The Canadian dollar, as you can see, is actually quite strong, or more realistically put, the American dollar is actually quite weak from its historical values.
The thing is, you never know what is the catalyst to a revolution. What does access to cheap text messaging have to do with social justice? Well, a popular uprising of youth in the Philippines armed with cell phones, overthrew a government.
Can someone please allay my privacy fears with having my calendar info, personal and business email, financial data on a Google spreadsheet all hosted on a U.S. based server? The fact that so much of my personal data would be hosted on a server makes me nervous enough not to use it but being hosted on a U.S. based server makes me all the more nervous considering the lack of respect for personal privacy by U.S. authorities.
The big deal here is that campaigns on MoveOn *ARE* grassroots campaigns. They are by real people and organizations *NOT* for-profit businesses! It corrupts democracy.
Google will have to put some serious work into their site for it to catch up to Sourceforge. Their site is *VERY* spartan and lacking in features. They use the default, out-of-the-box subversion webdav so when viewing the source there is no syntax colouring and the bug tracker has no features what so ever. But knowing google and their vast resources it probably won't be long, if the service looks like it will garner interest, until new features start showing up by the dozen all with nifty AJAX interfaces.
My LAMP is:
If you read books on software engineering and design, python and/or ruby are inevitably mentioned. That is because they encourage and allow for elegent design. Therefore, using the above definition of LAMP you might as well say that Java and Weblogic are finished as well.
I am becoming less and less enthused about keeping my personal mail and most especially my personal financial information on a google server in the U.S. where the government feels that they have every right to rummage through my things.
A professional construction worker is going to have a wholly different drill in his tool shed than your average home owner.
I suspect if they made Linux easy enough for grandma to use then it would lose something on the other side of the use-case spectrum. I use Linux because I am a software professional and it gives me ultimate control and the tools I need to do my job. I don't want a drill that only goes one speed.
The reason that it is so hard to "listen to your customers" is that far, far too often, customers don't know what they want - they just know that what they currently have is no good. I believe the comment below this advocating finding customer pains will lead to more success than trying to get any sort of reasonable story of what a customer wants.
I don't believe any customer went to Apple and said, "I want a digital music player that uses a really groovey touch sensitive circle as the user interface." There is a real lack of "designers" in the software industry that are akin to physical product designers. Yes, you have to listen to customer's desires but if you ask developers to code to some spec that was solely created from customer "requirements" you will end up with shit software. You need a designer interjected into that process that has vision and can recognize where customers are feeling pain.
It is very important in society to have people like RMS. He balances out the people on the other extreme of the issue who think that everything including water and air should be under private ownership for the express purpose of making a profit. If it wasn't for him there would be precious little in the software industry that is in the public domain.
Most of us have chosen that the healthy balance between socialist and capitalist in the context of software lies somewhere in the middle. But without the debate that he sparks, that balance would slowly drift in a direction where all code would be patented by Big Software and if you wished to code you would have to become a cubicle dwelling peon at Big Software's "campus" in the exburbs.
You make a very good point that the President has greatly expanded the role of the central government during his tenure. Isn't one of the historical platform policies of the Republican party to reduce the size of government, or is that just when the Democrats are in power?
Despite your salient point on the size of government you are repeating one of the biggest fallacies so often repeated in the "war on terror." Please be reminded that all of the 9/11 hijackers were legally in the United States. They did not "sneak" in across the border from Canada or anywhere else.
Efforts to defend such a large land mass from very determined, well financed, angry extremists will always be out-paced by their determination at getting in. The largest failure following 9/11 was the United States' ability to look critically at its foreign policy. Why are Al-Queda recruiters so effective at finding more young Muslim men willing to die for their cause? And invading Iraq only further fanned the flame of hate towards the United States for those that were susceptable to anti-American sentiment.
I am puzzled by your thinking that animal rights advocates are anti-science. On the contrary, much of what motivates them is based on science. It is the right wing religious nutters who believe that animals were put on this earth solely for our benefit. Then along came Darwin with his crazy theory of evolution, which, in an indirect manner, suggested that we are all (lesser primates such as President Bush included) here for our own reasons and that there is no ultimate being that controls the others. Science throughout this century has further disproved notions put forth by religious dogma that animals have no feeling (and as such could be slaughtered in any heinous manner without the tiniest feelings of remorse.) In fact science has proven that animals have feelings, complex emotions, and many other traits that were previously reserved for humans. As such, shouldn't we be treating animals more like humans (unless of course you believe humans should be shut in cages and tortured under the guise of science?) Compassion and science are two different things. However, a compassionate scientist would use science and technology to good use and use computer models and rigourous research to prove whether a chemical is dangerous rather than taking the most expedient route of squirting it in some unsuspecting rat's eye. Which of course only tells us whether it is dangerous to a rat's eye and very little about what it would do to a human's.
A sure fire road to humdrum mediocrity is to listen to the "have fun now" advise. Lock yourself in your shitty little apartment while you are not bleeding into the sand for "the man" and flush out every idea you have ever had to make it big. Be unbelievably driven and ignore sex and booze. The mistake most make is to chase women (or men as it may be) and drink and piss away your brain cells and what little money you make on your first sorry jobs. Then you end up falling in love, having kids and being stuck paying a mortgage. Now you are trapped. All those great ideas you had are now exponentially more difficult to pursue because you have to buy diapers. Become successful first then have fun ... and you will have the money to REALLY have fun.
Firstly, I think the author is WAY off with the comment that open source software is feature driven. I believe the contrary is true. Open source software is design driven because of one of her other points - it is made for other developers. You will not gain much in terms of bragging rights if your underlying architecture is sloppy, especially when everyone gets to look under the hood. And so what if is is made for other developers. I like the UNIX philosophy and the command line and so what if she doesn't! Open source software is kind of the kit car of the software world. If you are into cars you love to tinker but if you just want to go to the store you don't want to know where the manifold is. Its all about CHOICE.
To respond to the watch analogy, the problem with the software industry today is that the software costing the most money, enterprise software, is typically of the lowest quality. Imagine if the watch industry worked the same way - you pay $5000 on a watch and when you compare it to a watch worth $12 in WalMart you find that the cheap-o version is comprised of better technology.
I don't think the original "And yet..." post was trying to belittle people who don't understand the Internet. I believe his point was to say that many people may have responded to the survey saying that they have Internet when in fact they don't because they really don't understand what the Internet *is* Maybe someone thinks that if they get CNN on TV then that is considered the Internet or the mere fact that they have a telephone means that they are on the Internet ... who knows ... never underestimate the ignorance of the masses.
Our body was designed quite smartly to conserve heat when the temperature drops. Circulation decreases to those parts of the body that are not necessarily important for immediate survival (a.k.a your fingers, toes, tip of your nose, and other protruding misc!) This ensures the maximum amount of heat for places that really need it - your core (a.k.a heart and lungs.) If you are pumping heat from your upper arm to your fingers you may actually be working against your body's own natural defenses.