[...]that's exactly how the relational model is defined. Each attribute is a value of a particular type (any type). In this example, the type is "XML document".[...] isn't an INT column just a BLOB with integer operators?
When you put it that, way, yes, it makes more sense.
I was just enthused by the idea of a database engine that uses XQuery [b]instead[/b] of SQL, not just for a particular type of field. You can infer the implications.
One of them is that the result sets would be variable trees, which could either be placed in PHP arrays, or implemented as objects, with navigational member functions.
I think there's something to be said about the relative merits of storing data hierarchically as opposed to 2d tables. Just thinking about what a JOIN would mean in a tree space, for multiple trees, is very interesting.
...they implemented "XML databases" by treating XML as BLOB's and adding XML parsing and updating capabilities to SQL. Hybrid indeed. I'd be rather tempted to call it a bastardization of both contepts (relational and XML).
The thought springs to mind that PHP, as it happens, would be uniquely suited to working with the hypotethical XML databases, due to it's rather particular concept of arrays. As many of us undoubtely know, a PHP array can be used to contain a tree of arbitrary shape and size, and with nodes of arbitrary types. A native, 1-on-1 match to an XML tree.
A couple of years ago I tried looking for a native XML database. The solutions were either very pricey, or very slow, or both. Nothing to keep up to RDBMS. The whole "XMLDBMS" hype died over eventually, as you may recall. OR hasn't it? Are such hybrid solutions all that's left of the concept? It was a great idea.
Governments are a sophisticated protection racket. You trade them some freedoms, in return they offer you some protection against our more cruel and brutish impulses and in theory allow us to live more pleasant lives. But with the Internet, there's currently nothing that we need protecting from and if we allow it to be regulated, we will have just given something away for nothing -- and it's not something we're ever likely to get back.
That's not entirely true. There is crime on the Internet. If you get scammed by someone over the Internet (and it doesn't necessarily have to be someone from an obscure ex-soviet country or from China, it can happen anywhere), won't you expect the police to do something about it? Sure, perhaps your bank will reimburse you, but should they go unknown and unpunished, and keep ripping people off? Tracking down and catching Internet criminals takes time and international cooperation.
There's good and there's bad in policing the Internet. I guess the only solution is to let "them" do it, but jump up in arms at their throat the second it looks like human rights are trampled. I know it's probably just fantasy, but if the White House lawn would fill up with thousands of angry citizens every time they don't like something, perhaps the.gov would be a little more cautios about these things.
There's no such thing as "uncopyrighted content". There's stuff released into the public domain, but definitely not among the videos and images flung around from inbox to inbox. Those are just things that nobody cares enough to enforce copyright on.
One example: HIV. If HIV had transmitted through air, humanity would have killed over around the 70s. It started spreading sometime in the 50s or 60s, and nobody knew about it until people started dying. Even if they would've found out later about it, there was nothing anyone could do. In 10 years time (the usual period for AIDS to install) the whole planet could've been infected many times over. I won't even mention the repeated reinfection effect. So there you have it, all quiet for 10 years, then bam, everybody goes down.
Re:It's more like a plan to..
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
we did not have a understanding of how virus's and epidemics worked.
Yeah, so now we know. That will be a BIG relief on your deathbed.
We did not have anti viral drugs.
We still don't. There's no "generic" anti-viral drug, it has to be one targeted specifically at the virus in question.
We did not have the capability or the capacity to mass produce specific vaccines
We still don't. Well, we do, it's just that corporate money hunger and bureocracy cripple it too much to be useful in case of epidemic.
We did not have the mass communication methods to allow coordination of response
Communication = services. Services run on people. When people start going down, so will a lot of other things.
It's extra-ugly in this case, since you're practically begging for an XSS security hole. Yeah, I know, it's Google we're talking about here, the ones with the motto "Do no evil". Right, that makes me trust them completely (rolls eyes).
Executing someone else's JavaScript on your website means begging for trouble. JavaScript can install handlers to watch everything the visitor is doing, can read, create and modify cookies, can nose through that window's or tab's visited page history. Let's not talk about truly evil stuff such as inspecting content on the pages, overlaying links and buttons or injecting content.
I'm sorry, no matter how much of a white in shining armor Google is, not sane webmaster should willfully inject foreign JavaScript on his website.
PS: and before anybody replies that you can download the urchin script and see what it does, let me ask if you're willing to monitor it constantly.
Seriously, don't give Microsoft ideas. Like the "stateless" bit. How would you like for Vista to have a nice little HTTP extension built-in the fabulous IE7 browser AND all the Live stuff, which would precisely identify the machine, the Windows and Office installations, and, why not, the persons using them?
The State Management Mechanism (aka "cookies") was designed the way it was for a reason: privacy. And they stood the test of time all too well.
Once Microsoft bundles that sweet little bit of spyware in Vista, you can expect them to, naturally, sell a nifty new version of IIS which makes use of it. And then all hell will break loose. Which major website owner or online advertising broken can really resist the temptation of finally having precise Web statistics?
As fellow posters have flocked to reply, using AdBlock with a decent set of filters will effectively block ads all over the place. Flashblock really does its job too. Tested in 1.5 and 1.0.7 and whatnot. Rock solid, no ads, no Flash.
And in the border case where the webmasters employ javascript to drive you nuts, NoScript is the bomb. JavaScript is so evil it's scary, both due to privacy and advertisment. I definitely want a per-site blocker. It's trivial for a website to snoop on the browsing history of the current window or tab, for instance.
And no, blacklisting doesn't work. It's just a catch-up game and it's stupid from a security point of view. Nevermind that all antivirus and anti-malware makers employ it. Whitelisting is the way to go, and NoScript does it right. I don't want to keep up with unknown threats, I want to only allow what I know is good.
But the GP does have a point. At the core of any search engine is, of course, a search box. That's why, I suspect, for many of us Google starts at the search box in Firefox, or as a bookmarklet on the bookmarks bar (works in any browser).
Heck, on Linux you can go one step further and bind a key combo to pop-up a text box, then have a shell script use the text to launch Google in Firefox, or Beagle on your documents, or IM someone.
I'd say the "live" desktop is already here. Of course, integration is still a nice thing, but frankly if I can get quality results from the same unified text box, I can live without a unified interface for the results.
Why on Earth would an IM application, which is essentially a "client" application, maintain open ports, listening, service-style?
And if there really is some essential functionality that depends on such open ports, wouldn't one hope they were implemented FTP-style ie. open them randomly and tell the other party what they are via outgoing connection?
And if the above is true, how can a remote host cause a crash? It shouldn't be allowed to connect to my IM client just like that. There shouldn't be anything to connect to in the first place! The IM app should only connect to the IM central server and to accepted hosts in my buddy list.
The thing I see that would work is the bot prompting me to accept him in my buddy list and _then_ screwing my IM client. But that's quite different from all this "open port" business that people talk about, and can only be fixed by fixing the IM clients.
Actually, I've been expecting a movement that will offer countries in similar situation to China a network of free proxies all over the world, always available, always changing addresses.
Not that it will help much. It's a catch-up effort, as a previous poster noted. In truth, repressive measures are probably more effective than blocking. It comes out much better for the government if instead of blocking the culprit they identify him, arrest him and throw him in jail for 20 years, assuring that everyone hears about it. Then who's the next wiseass who wants to risk it?
Microsoft is good at playing catch up. It is one of the very few things it is very, very good at.
But not by innovating. Their comeback tactics have always been marketing and economics.
First there was personal computer OS and applications. Make MS-DOS, Windows and Office a good enough OS and spread it using an ubiquitous platform on the rise. Make people, the ordinary but many people, afford them. There goes UNIX or OS/2 as Microsoft takes over the desktop. There was more money in the collective pocket of the little people than in what you could get from corporations, and they got it.
Then there came the Internet and the Web. Make Explorer a good enough browser and give it away for free. Bundle it with your OS so people never care there's an alternative. There goes Netscape.
Then here comes their 3rd big challenge, and I don't know what it is. If I did I'd be famous, or sought after by big money. It has to do with mobility, and distributed computing, and online services, perhaps. But it's here and Google is here and this time Microsoft doesn't seem to find that one thing to take over. It seems to be something that cannot be taken over.
This requires a fundamental change of strategy and I don't think Microsoft can do that. For once, they can't just throw their weight and money at the problem, and there's no catch or moment they can exploit, because they missed the train.
They are not alone. Let's not forget that the Google way of doing things has been a shocker for most of the IT world. I've always wondered why, since there are so many corporations out there with so much freaking money, they seem to produce so little. What the hell are they doing with all the dough and resources? Sure, we're getting new and better stuff, but sometimes it just shines through the cracks that it's not nearly what it should be.
Yet Google throws it's weight at furious innovation. It brings out new stuff weekly, for God's sake. It hires all the greatest minds, and they are eager to go with Google, because it's what they always truly wanted, furious innovation for the sake of it.
It's not like Microsoft isn't trying. They push out all these things as fast as they can think of them: IE7 with decent capabilities, XAML and XForms and Avalon,.Net and C#, MSN Search. But they're all things that catch up to something that was already top dog. Best case scenario, it breaks even.
I don't know why they can't shake it. Maybe they really have grown too beaurocratic for their own sake and can't react fast enough. I'm sure that Gates and the top dogs see all this pretty clear. And there's still nothing groundshaking but empty promises, and time passes and more innovation floods IT from other sources.
They still have Windows and Office and Explorer, for now, but how long is it going to last? The day the PC starts going and something new comes up, they're all gone.
"How the fuck am I supposed to support 500 different pieces of software?"
Insightful? What are you people on? What does MS specifically have to do with making sure that the client who needs support uses (tada, drum shot) supported software?
Obviously, sane people who offer technical support (and want to remain sane) will make sure first thing that the clients will be using only stuff they (the support) know about! What exactly that thing is (MS products or a KDE suite) is irrelevant, as long as both the client and the support person know what it is.
So there's no inherent advantage to using MS products, unless you're already locked in because your support contractor only supports MS products.
If it's in a stored procedure (or, better yet, stored function) when your business rules changes, instead of changing 2438 queries, you change it only in the database.
You can achieve the same with application code carefully written to allow for reuse.
I don't know about you people, but I like to be able to version, backtrack changes to my code and generally allow editing in a controlled manner. There's no CVS for databases, unfortunately.
One could also say they're using Java so that those awful pirates can steal movies and music over BitTorrent, then C++ so that those damn kids can chat each other stupid over IM, while only on third place do we see honest, hard-working software engineers doing database maintenance.
True, but it also explains why PHP will likely be more populair than Java for web apps. The resulting apps will also likely be of lower quality, but Windows is the most used OS as well...
There's nothing in PHP that will inherently force the appearance of bad code. It's the programmers producing bad code, not the engine or the platform.
And how about we touch on one of the most important differences between Java and PHP, and why PHP is so easy to use? Stuff like:
* It's interpreted, so no waiting for compilation or working with binary only form. To prevent the trolling, I'll also add that no, it doesn't make it slower, and the code can be protected if needed when deploying or selling it.
* It's loose typed. It lets programmers concentrate on the functionality they want to implement, instead of worrying about declaring stuff, or variables having locked types.
However, the real strength of these systems is not in themselves; they are built on a superb platform base which provides Threading, IO, Networking, Graphics, Db access, i18n,and all the things a programmer might ever require. PHP doesnt have anything remotely similar, as far as i can see.
OK, this is a troll if I ever saw one and may I be damned for feeding one but here it goes:
Go look at PEAR and the PHP manual index and then tell people PHP doesn't have a platform offering all those.
I've been lucky, most of the time I work with the customer directly, they have far more work than I can ever get done so things are simply prioritized and I do what's next on the list. I don't have to worry about a Manager demanding a different estimate from me than what I would say to the next person in the chain.
Ah, but usually it's not that simple, someone has to bridge the gap between engineers or techies, and management or marketing. After reading all these comments here, I'm starting to suspect those are the persons worth their weight in gold. The famous missing link of the IT world!:)
In other words, the manager is telling you on one hand that it's not ok for you to shaft your customers (him), but it's ok for him to shaft his customers (the end user)
Screw 'em. Do your job the way you want to do it. Never feel guilty about making money for doing the least amount of work. Don't worry about doing work for other people on your bosses time. Within the context of your contract, sell the work you do to as many people as you can.
The problem I see with this line of thinking is that it ruins you, from a moral and psychological point of view, in the long term. As an engineer and a human being, if you don't have the pride in the things you create then what do you have? You're probably going to say "money". It will work as an excuse for some people, but I suspect that it won't for all. Some people are (as am I) driven by a need to create good, lasting stuff. It gives you peace. Such a point of view goes against everything they believe in.
You have to be born in America to be the President.
By glancing at the records so far, it strikes me you also have to be white, male and elderly.
What, that's not in the Constitution? Must be a de-facto standard or something.
Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
Everyone who works with unix should learn how to use vi though, for the simple reason that it's on pretty much every unix box out there, and is the editor you're pretty much guarenteed to be able to have available if $random_person asks you to quick jump on their $unix_box to [do something].
The most that "fact" will extort out of me is learning the append and save commands, so I can do some editing if indeed the box only has vi on it.
But it is true that no matter what, you should actually learn the very basics of several of the most often encountered editors. Remember the first time you entered one of these editors (any of them!) and you couldn't get out of it and had to kill the session?
At least some editors (like joe) give you by default a tip about reaching the builtin help system...
Slashdot Mirror
[...]that's exactly how the relational model is defined. Each attribute is a value of a particular type (any type). In this example, the type is "XML document".[...] isn't an INT column just a BLOB with integer operators?
When you put it that, way, yes, it makes more sense.
I was just enthused by the idea of a database engine that uses XQuery [b]instead[/b] of SQL, not just for a particular type of field. You can infer the implications.
One of them is that the result sets would be variable trees, which could either be placed in PHP arrays, or implemented as objects, with navigational member functions.
I think there's something to be said about the relative merits of storing data hierarchically as opposed to 2d tables. Just thinking about what a JOIN would mean in a tree space, for multiple trees, is very interesting.
...they implemented "XML databases" by treating XML as BLOB's and adding XML parsing and updating capabilities to SQL. Hybrid indeed. I'd be rather tempted to call it a bastardization of both contepts (relational and XML).
The thought springs to mind that PHP, as it happens, would be uniquely suited to working with the hypotethical XML databases, due to it's rather particular concept of arrays. As many of us undoubtely know, a PHP array can be used to contain a tree of arbitrary shape and size, and with nodes of arbitrary types. A native, 1-on-1 match to an XML tree.
A couple of years ago I tried looking for a native XML database. The solutions were either very pricey, or very slow, or both. Nothing to keep up to RDBMS. The whole "XMLDBMS" hype died over eventually, as you may recall. OR hasn't it? Are such hybrid solutions all that's left of the concept? It was a great idea.
Governments are a sophisticated protection racket. You trade them some freedoms, in return they offer you some protection against our more cruel and brutish impulses and in theory allow us to live more pleasant lives. But with the Internet, there's currently nothing that we need protecting from and if we allow it to be regulated, we will have just given something away for nothing -- and it's not something we're ever likely to get back.
That's not entirely true. There is crime on the Internet. If you get scammed by someone over the Internet (and it doesn't necessarily have to be someone from an obscure ex-soviet country or from China, it can happen anywhere), won't you expect the police to do something about it? Sure, perhaps your bank will reimburse you, but should they go unknown and unpunished, and keep ripping people off? Tracking down and catching Internet criminals takes time and international cooperation.
There's good and there's bad in policing the Internet. I guess the only solution is to let "them" do it, but jump up in arms at their throat the second it looks like human rights are trampled. I know it's probably just fantasy, but if the White House lawn would fill up with thousands of angry citizens every time they don't like something, perhaps the
There's no such thing as "uncopyrighted content". There's stuff released into the public domain, but definitely not among the videos and images flung around from inbox to inbox. Those are just things that nobody cares enough to enforce copyright on.
One example: HIV. If HIV had transmitted through air, humanity would have killed over around the 70s. It started spreading sometime in the 50s or 60s, and nobody knew about it until people started dying. Even if they would've found out later about it, there was nothing anyone could do. In 10 years time (the usual period for AIDS to install) the whole planet could've been infected many times over. I won't even mention the repeated reinfection effect. So there you have it, all quiet for 10 years, then bam, everybody goes down.
we did not have a understanding of how virus's and epidemics worked.
Yeah, so now we know. That will be a BIG relief on your deathbed.
We did not have anti viral drugs.
We still don't. There's no "generic" anti-viral drug, it has to be one targeted specifically at the virus in question.
We did not have the capability or the capacity to mass produce specific vaccines
We still don't. Well, we do, it's just that corporate money hunger and bureocracy cripple it too much to be useful in case of epidemic.
We did not have the mass communication methods to allow coordination of response
Communication = services. Services run on people. When people start going down, so will a lot of other things.
It's extra-ugly in this case, since you're practically begging for an XSS security hole. Yeah, I know, it's Google we're talking about here, the ones with the motto "Do no evil". Right, that makes me trust them completely (rolls eyes).
Executing someone else's JavaScript on your website means begging for trouble. JavaScript can install handlers to watch everything the visitor is doing, can read, create and modify cookies, can nose through that window's or tab's visited page history. Let's not talk about truly evil stuff such as inspecting content on the pages, overlaying links and buttons or injecting content.
I'm sorry, no matter how much of a white in shining armor Google is, not sane webmaster should willfully inject foreign JavaScript on his website.
PS: and before anybody replies that you can download the urchin script and see what it does, let me ask if you're willing to monitor it constantly.
Seriously, don't give Microsoft ideas. Like the "stateless" bit. How would you like for Vista to have a nice little HTTP extension built-in the fabulous IE7 browser AND all the Live stuff, which would precisely identify the machine, the Windows and Office installations, and, why not, the persons using them?
The State Management Mechanism (aka "cookies") was designed the way it was for a reason: privacy. And they stood the test of time all too well.
Once Microsoft bundles that sweet little bit of spyware in Vista, you can expect them to, naturally, sell a nifty new version of IIS which makes use of it. And then all hell will break loose. Which major website owner or online advertising broken can really resist the temptation of finally having precise Web statistics?
As fellow posters have flocked to reply, using AdBlock with a decent set of filters will effectively block ads all over the place. Flashblock really does its job too. Tested in 1.5 and 1.0.7 and whatnot. Rock solid, no ads, no Flash.
And in the border case where the webmasters employ javascript to drive you nuts, NoScript is the bomb. JavaScript is so evil it's scary, both due to privacy and advertisment. I definitely want a per-site blocker. It's trivial for a website to snoop on the browsing history of the current window or tab, for instance.
And no, blacklisting doesn't work. It's just a catch-up game and it's stupid from a security point of view. Nevermind that all antivirus and anti-malware makers employ it. Whitelisting is the way to go, and NoScript does it right. I don't want to keep up with unknown threats, I want to only allow what I know is good.
But the GP does have a point. At the core of any search engine is, of course, a search box. That's why, I suspect, for many of us Google starts at the search box in Firefox, or as a bookmarklet on the bookmarks bar (works in any browser).
Heck, on Linux you can go one step further and bind a key combo to pop-up a text box, then have a shell script use the text to launch Google in Firefox, or Beagle on your documents, or IM someone.
I'd say the "live" desktop is already here. Of course, integration is still a nice thing, but frankly if I can get quality results from the same unified text box, I can live without a unified interface for the results.
Why on Earth would an IM application, which is essentially a "client" application, maintain open ports, listening, service-style?
And if there really is some essential functionality that depends on such open ports, wouldn't one hope they were implemented FTP-style ie. open them randomly and tell the other party what they are via outgoing connection?
And if the above is true, how can a remote host cause a crash? It shouldn't be allowed to connect to my IM client just like that. There shouldn't be anything to connect to in the first place! The IM app should only connect to the IM central server and to accepted hosts in my buddy list.
The thing I see that would work is the bot prompting me to accept him in my buddy list and _then_ screwing my IM client. But that's quite different from all this "open port" business that people talk about, and can only be fixed by fixing the IM clients.
Actually, I've been expecting a movement that will offer countries in similar situation to China a network of free proxies all over the world, always available, always changing addresses.
Not that it will help much. It's a catch-up effort, as a previous poster noted. In truth, repressive measures are probably more effective than blocking. It comes out much better for the government if instead of blocking the culprit they identify him, arrest him and throw him in jail for 20 years, assuring that everyone hears about it. Then who's the next wiseass who wants to risk it?
Microsoft is good at playing catch up. It is one of the very few things it is very, very good at.
.Net and C#, MSN Search. But they're all things that catch up to something that was already top dog. Best case scenario, it breaks even.
But not by innovating. Their comeback tactics have always been marketing and economics.
First there was personal computer OS and applications. Make MS-DOS, Windows and Office a good enough OS and spread it using an ubiquitous platform on the rise. Make people, the ordinary but many people, afford them. There goes UNIX or OS/2 as Microsoft takes over the desktop. There was more money in the collective pocket of the little people than in what you could get from corporations, and they got it.
Then there came the Internet and the Web. Make Explorer a good enough browser and give it away for free. Bundle it with your OS so people never care there's an alternative. There goes Netscape.
Then here comes their 3rd big challenge, and I don't know what it is. If I did I'd be famous, or sought after by big money. It has to do with mobility, and distributed computing, and online services, perhaps. But it's here and Google is here and this time Microsoft doesn't seem to find that one thing to take over. It seems to be something that cannot be taken over.
This requires a fundamental change of strategy and I don't think Microsoft can do that. For once, they can't just throw their weight and money at the problem, and there's no catch or moment they can exploit, because they missed the train.
They are not alone. Let's not forget that the Google way of doing things has been a shocker for most of the IT world. I've always wondered why, since there are so many corporations out there with so much freaking money, they seem to produce so little. What the hell are they doing with all the dough and resources? Sure, we're getting new and better stuff, but sometimes it just shines through the cracks that it's not nearly what it should be.
Yet Google throws it's weight at furious innovation. It brings out new stuff weekly, for God's sake. It hires all the greatest minds, and they are eager to go with Google, because it's what they always truly wanted, furious innovation for the sake of it.
It's not like Microsoft isn't trying. They push out all these things as fast as they can think of them: IE7 with decent capabilities, XAML and XForms and Avalon,
I don't know why they can't shake it. Maybe they really have grown too beaurocratic for their own sake and can't react fast enough. I'm sure that Gates and the top dogs see all this pretty clear. And there's still nothing groundshaking but empty promises, and time passes and more innovation floods IT from other sources.
They still have Windows and Office and Explorer, for now, but how long is it going to last? The day the PC starts going and something new comes up, they're all gone.
"How the fuck am I supposed to support 500 different pieces of software?"
Insightful? What are you people on? What does MS specifically have to do with making sure that the client who needs support uses (tada, drum shot) supported software?
Obviously, sane people who offer technical support (and want to remain sane) will make sure first thing that the clients will be using only stuff they (the support) know about! What exactly that thing is (MS products or a KDE suite) is irrelevant, as long as both the client and the support person know what it is.
So there's no inherent advantage to using MS products, unless you're already locked in because your support contractor only supports MS products.
If it's in a stored procedure (or, better yet, stored function) when your business rules changes, instead of changing 2438 queries, you change it only in the database.
You can achieve the same with application code carefully written to allow for reuse.
I don't know about you people, but I like to be able to version, backtrack changes to my code and generally allow editing in a controlled manner. There's no CVS for databases, unfortunately.
One could also say they're using Java so that those awful pirates can steal movies and music over BitTorrent, then C++ so that those damn kids can chat each other stupid over IM, while only on third place do we see honest, hard-working software engineers doing database maintenance.
(Ducks.)
True, but it also explains why PHP will likely be more populair than Java for web apps. The resulting apps will also likely be of lower quality, but Windows is the most used OS as well...
There's nothing in PHP that will inherently force the appearance of bad code. It's the programmers producing bad code, not the engine or the platform.
And how about we touch on one of the most important differences between Java and PHP, and why PHP is so easy to use? Stuff like:
* It's interpreted, so no waiting for compilation or working with binary only form. To prevent the trolling, I'll also add that no, it doesn't make it slower, and the code can be protected if needed when deploying or selling it.
* It's loose typed. It lets programmers concentrate on the functionality they want to implement, instead of worrying about declaring stuff, or variables having locked types.
However, the real strength of these systems is not in themselves; they are built on a superb platform base which provides Threading, IO, Networking, Graphics, Db access, i18n,and all the things a programmer might ever require. PHP doesnt have anything remotely similar, as far as i can see.
OK, this is a troll if I ever saw one and may I be damned for feeding one but here it goes:
Go look at PEAR and the PHP manual index and then tell people PHP doesn't have a platform offering all those.
PHP rocks. Pure and Simple.
[...]
Opinions are like assholes: everyone's got one, and they all smell.
Peee-eeew.
[..]Java is becoming the new COBOL[..]
Oh you really made the case for Java here... "You don't like Java? How can you? It's the new COBOL! Everybody's loving it!"
Plus, don't wanna be the one who brushes the lion's teeth? How about being the one that wipes his ass?
I've been lucky, most of the time I work with the customer directly, they have far more work than I can ever get done so things are simply prioritized and I do what's next on the list. I don't have to worry about a Manager demanding a different estimate from me than what I would say to the next person in the chain.
:)
Ah, but usually it's not that simple, someone has to bridge the gap between engineers or techies, and management or marketing. After reading all these comments here, I'm starting to suspect those are the persons worth their weight in gold. The famous missing link of the IT world!
In other words, the manager is telling you on one hand that it's not ok for you to shaft your customers (him), but it's ok for him to shaft his customers (the end user)
Screw 'em. Do your job the way you want to do it. Never feel guilty about making money for doing the least amount of work. Don't worry about doing work for other people on your bosses time. Within the context of your contract, sell the work you do to as many people as you can.
The problem I see with this line of thinking is that it ruins you, from a moral and psychological point of view, in the long term. As an engineer and a human being, if you don't have the pride in the things you create then what do you have? You're probably going to say "money". It will work as an excuse for some people, but I suspect that it won't for all. Some people are (as am I) driven by a need to create good, lasting stuff. It gives you peace. Such a point of view goes against everything they believe in.
You have to be born in America to be the President.
By glancing at the records so far, it strikes me you also have to be white, male and elderly.
What, that's not in the Constitution? Must be a de-facto standard or something.
Everyone who works with unix should learn how to use vi though, for the simple reason that it's on pretty much every unix box out there, and is the editor you're pretty much guarenteed to be able to have available if $random_person asks you to quick jump on their $unix_box to [do something].
The most that "fact" will extort out of me is learning the append and save commands, so I can do some editing if indeed the box only has vi on it.
But it is true that no matter what, you should actually learn the very basics of several of the most often encountered editors. Remember the first time you entered one of these editors (any of them!) and you couldn't get out of it and had to kill the session?
At least some editors (like joe) give you by default a tip about reaching the builtin help system...