You know how it is in a text based way of exchanging messages such as/. right? Everybody is real brave and confrontational on the keyboard but in reality that belligerent STFU probably came out of his mouth as "Yes sir. I'm sorry sir."
I think the point is something along the lines of that notable Abraham Lincoln quote about being able to please everybody. Whenever you institute any change, there is always going to be a group of people who are going to find something to complain about. So don't take it too personally. Just get on with the change. Try to mitigate the pain. And pretty much ignore the whiners. In this economy, they are more than welcome to seek employment elsewhere.
I'd like to see/.'s predictions on that, especially with regards to VMWare. In my own ad hoc findings, it is true that Microsoft shops are leaning towards HyperV but isn't that to be expected? I find non Microsoft shops to be leaning towards VMWare. What are you finding?
I disagree. First of all, the semantic web is just about allowing content creators to associate context with their content to facilitate a context sensitive search. The semantic web has lackluster adoption because google does a great job at context sensitive search without the context providing meta-data markup.
A more limited version of semantic web has achieved some notable traction. Microformats are another way of associating context with content that is more agreeable with content providers.
I agree. The article implies that you always generate the HTML from the server side. An MVC compliant web browser app could easily be hand written HTML (view) and javascript (controller) making AJAX calls to server side scripts (model).
It seems pretty straight forward to me but that may be because I administer an open source project with this architecture.
Well, this might steer you away from jQuery but it looks like Microsoft will be using jQuery under the covers for its future ASP.NET AJAX technology offerings.
The problem with rentacoder.com, guru,com, and getacoder.com is that they are all about brokering the deal and getting a percentage of the take. They couldn't care less about quality or satisfaction. The coder is asked to make a fixed bid on what usually amounts to less than a paragraph of information. It promotes incompetence for both the sellers and the buyers too. In terms of quality, it's a race to the bottom.
May I introduce an emerging alternative to these kinds of sites? I am building an online community where entrepreneurs and engineers get together to produce custom software by hosting the venue for this community in a free collaborative software development project life cycle management solution called Code Roller.
Code Roller uses deliverables that just work when it comes to specifying and developing software; user stories, use cases, design documents, test plans, and defect reports.
Code Roller uses a practical, time honored work flow that is Agile friendly.
You don't just lob a paragraph describing the software you want and expect the coder to be able to read your mind. The people who want the software need to be just as involved as the coders.
Code Roller neither brokers, tracks, nor collects any money on the deal. How coders collect pay (or not) is entirely up to them.
All Code Roller is about is building community and promoting sound SDLC practices.
Excuse what could possibly be a dumb question here but is it like if you install Azure on your hardware, then you have to keep up to date with their latest and greatest or is it more like if you run apps on their cloud, then you have to keep up with their latest and greatest?
If the former, then that will significantly raise your TCO for using Azure. It's very hard for little guys to keep up with Microsoft's technology churn. If the later, then that is a given with any cloud offering including Google's and Amazon's.
I claim that virtual worlds is an approach to telepresence on a budget. Someone must think that telepresense is important because it is estimated to generate about 4 billion USD in annual revenues.
Your other arguments are supercilious at best and show a lack of understanding, at least in the world of distributed software development. I would also guess that you've never used Second Life before.
Most developer machines need to be high performance due to the resource heavy nature of having to run a web server, a database server, and an Integrated Development Environment all on the same machine.
In my own experience with off shore development houses, their network and machines are just as good as ours.
The Second Life HUD client has about a 21MB download.
Teleporting to the meeting site in Second Life is as easy as clicking on a link in a web page.
I never intended to imply that virtual worlds would replace IM. Your scenario of spontaneous communication with office mates was not what I had in mind. IM is actually very good in that situation because you already have a lot of face time with office mates. In that situation, brief text is all that is needed.
Consider this situation. You have coders in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Hyderabad. You've noticed that their defect counts have started to escalate out of proportion to your local team in the USA. It's time to schedule a meeting to find out what the problem is. You could use a phone but accents get in the way and telephone use is still pretty expensive. You could use IM but you've noticed that, in the past, people don't really participate. Remember, you are twelve time zones away from them so either you are going to be tired or they are going to be tired whenever you communicate in real time. That's a situation where virtual worlds might make a difference. The virtual reality aspect of sitting in a room with other avatars arouses your social instincts and you tend to get more involved with the conversation than the dry text only user experience of most IM clients.
Why is it that so many people in a computer technology forum are so resistant to the kind of endless change that computer technology brings? I find it ironic that this poster claims "If you create a product that uses a new technology, and doesn't need that technology, it's introducing needless complexity" but then uses instant messaging as an example of a successful new technology adoption. There is nothing in most IM offerings that you can't do with a conference call on a POTS phone.
The article associated with the OP really focuses on the e-commerce aspects of virtual worlds. Why is everyone here so resistant to this? Back in the mid 90's, if you went around telling these same people that one day most people would shop with their web browser, then you would most probably get this same resistance.
I believe that there is also some compelling B2B drivers for virtual worlds too. This poster claims that "you don't need a 3D world for" instant messaging. I don't agree. The geographically distributed work environment is quickly becoming the norm for knowledge workers. The challenge is how to keep up the high degree of quality communication needed for productivity. Text alone doesn't cut it. The TCO for tele-conferencing is still fairly expensive. Virtual worlds can be a low cost alternative that has more immersion than text based IM.
Also, with an already established project, you don't want to lose your change history. Is there a way to migrate from svn to git without losing the change history?
I am curious about integrating with git. I know that there is plenty of support to integrate with Subversion. What does git provide in terms of integration? I am not talking about IDE integration, I am talking about continuous integration. Does Cruise Control work with git?
Huh? I was logged in to gmail all day yesterday and am logged in today. I am receiving and sending plenty of email from that account. What's the problem?
I am interpreting the O.P.'s information request as a request for endorsements for a product suitable for building an online community for a call center and not a request for an already active online community for a call center. I am also assuming that the call center is for an ISV. Here are a few recommendations that are my favorites.
My favorite open source product for this sort of thing is GForge. It's got lots of call center friendly features and is also a hit with the coders.
The full featured yet non-open source version of GForge is SFEE.
Please don't mod me down, post nasty replies, or take away my karma points but may I feebly and humbly suggest my own product Code Roller? It's not open source yet but it is free (as in beer). Code Roller is not currently a perfect fit for call centers but has lots of great features that are conducive to managing the full life cycle for software development.
They do have a message about software development that you can read without purchasing any of their product. I have endorsed their book, Getting Real, and you can read my endorsement here without purchasing any of my product.
Seriously, where is the line between information and advertising? IMHO, if the link takes you to a page where there is no possible way to part with your cash without going someplace else, then it is information. Have you been so betrayed by capitalism that you can't tolerate any exchange of money at all? How can you afford to eat?
I know what you mean. I struggled with this social networking share everything attitude that has become so prevalent in the prosumer generation. That is, until I read this NY Times article on it. Then it made sense.
if you're a power user, though, XP -> Vista is still easier than XP -> Ubuntu
I don't agree. XP has menus. Ubuntu has menus. Vista, IE, and MS-Office have moved away from menus. Most computer users understand and rely on menus a lot.
The more relevant comparison would be between Ubuntu and Vista. Anecdotally, a friend of mine just got a tablet PC running Vista that she is about to either return or try to talk the OEM into installing XP on it. This is an English teacher with no love for geekiness what so ever. She is going to have to go through the pain and agony of all of this because her wireless doesn't work on Vista. This is a known and well documented issue that neither Microsoft nor HP has gone to the trouble to fix.
That's clever. When the beta release of my product gets out of beta, I think that I will brand it as gamma. Thanks for the playfully humorous suggestion.
For me, alpha means "Pretty buggy, don't expect a smooth ride" and beta means "still some rough patches but you should be able to get the job done." It's crazy to market a product as beta for years. They should just take a page from FOSS and market the product as pre version 1 for years.
I see it a little bit differently. With regards to the issue of business types and technologists operating in two distinct, alienated silos of organization, there are two types of companies. One type of company sells the technology in question. An example of this is an ISV. The other type of company uses the technology to facilitate the operation of whatever it sells.
In the first type, I.T. is a profit center. In the second type, I.T. is a cost center. It is the second type of company that breeds this separation of business and technology. The first type of company cannot afford to breed that separation.
The OP stated "My ultimate goal is to have a complete, secure LAMP server available to the public running CentOS." so how is learning virtualization going to take him towards his goal?
This guy needs to learn how to install, setup, configure, and tune CentOS, Apache, MySql, and whichever P (perl, php, python, etc) that he is developing. So, let's give him links to books or online materials about those things, OK?
Are you passionate about this idea? Are you willing to commit to it? How are you willing to manifest that commitment? You say that you are unqualified to write the code but what are you willing and qualified to do?
At a minimum, a software project needs more than just coders. It also needs evangelists. People who are passionate about the software and are willing to get the message out to the software's intended audience. You can build a better mousetrap but the world won't beat a path to your door unless you are willing to market it.
A non-trivial project could also stand to have analysts, designers, a usability engineer, an information architect, a software architect, subject matter experts, a product manager, a project manager. Also, a copy writer wouldn't hurt. An online application should also have community managers. Depending on the size of the effort, these roles may be filled by different people or by fewer people wearing different hats as they perform these different functions. How many of these hats are you willing to wear?
I have grown tired working for the man and have just recently started my own software development house. We are looking to partner with visionaries and startup entrepreneurs to bring the next generation of great applications to the web. If you really feel like you've got something important and are willing to put in some sweat in order to bring your baby to life, then contact me and let's discuss this further.
I worked in a small company that used a software development project life cycle management application called SourceForge Enterprise Edition. You can download and use what they call the SFDE version of it if you have 50 users or less. This is a VmWare appliance where CentOS is the guest OS. We had no trouble with it whatsoever. We looked at what it would cost to upgrade to RHEL and, frankly, that was just out of the company's reach financially.
I have been writing business application software for over 20 years. SFEE is most probably the best life cycle application that I have run across but, ultimately, I was still unsatisfied with it. You have trackers and artifacts that you have to customize in order to get change requests and defects. It's kind of a round peg in a square hole deal. Trackers are too generic, too agnostic. I agree with 37signals that software should be opinionated. That is why I am "scratching an itch" by developing a real collaborative software development project life cycle management application.
I am calling this application Code Roller. This app has a lot of features.
Users can collaborate on requirements, use-cases, test plans, designs, and diagrams.
Documents can be attached to any of these kinds of items. Documents are managed with multiple taxonomies.
All of these things can go through a software development friendly workflow process of review and approval/rejection.
Time is managed through tasks and events.
The user can also work his bug list.
A dashboard style interface shows you at a glance what projects that you are working on and what teams that you are a member of.
For more information, please check out my white papers. I would absolutely be honored if members of the/. community would become beta testers.
I don't live in Europe but I have hired foreign nationals in the past. I never really developed insight into their hierarchy of Universities so I would just ask another foreign national if that had heard of it. The OP mentioned four years work experience so, to me, that would be more relevant. Actually, I have fairly specific criteria that I use when evaluating a candidate.
Slashdot Mirror
well said
You know how it is in a text based way of exchanging messages such as /. right? Everybody is real brave and confrontational on the keyboard but in reality that belligerent STFU probably came out of his mouth as "Yes sir. I'm sorry sir."
I think the point is something along the lines of that notable Abraham Lincoln quote about being able to please everybody. Whenever you institute any change, there is always going to be a group of people who are going to find something to complain about. So don't take it too personally. Just get on with the change. Try to mitigate the pain. And pretty much ignore the whiners. In this economy, they are more than welcome to seek employment elsewhere.
I use a Linksys network and their WAP54G can be configured as a repeater. That costs about $80.
I'd like to see /.'s predictions on that, especially with regards to VMWare. In my own ad hoc findings, it is true that Microsoft shops are leaning towards HyperV but isn't that to be expected? I find non Microsoft shops to be leaning towards VMWare. What are you finding?
I disagree. First of all, the semantic web is just about allowing content creators to associate context with their content to facilitate a context sensitive search. The semantic web has lackluster adoption because google does a great job at context sensitive search without the context providing meta-data markup.
A more limited version of semantic web has achieved some notable traction. Microformats are another way of associating context with content that is more agreeable with content providers.
A more compelling technology offering than Nepomuk for advancing semantic web would be Reuters' OpenCalais project. That's the one you should be watching. Another interesting trend to watch is how semantic web is affecting the more popular collective intelligence movement.
I agree. The article implies that you always generate the HTML from the server side. An MVC compliant web browser app could easily be hand written HTML (view) and javascript (controller) making AJAX calls to server side scripts (model).
It seems pretty straight forward to me but that may be because I administer an open source project with this architecture.
Well, this might steer you away from jQuery but it looks like Microsoft will be using jQuery under the covers for its future ASP.NET AJAX technology offerings.
The problem with rentacoder.com, guru,com, and getacoder.com is that they are all about brokering the deal and getting a percentage of the take. They couldn't care less about quality or satisfaction. The coder is asked to make a fixed bid on what usually amounts to less than a paragraph of information. It promotes incompetence for both the sellers and the buyers too. In terms of quality, it's a race to the bottom.
May I introduce an emerging alternative to these kinds of sites? I am building an online community where entrepreneurs and engineers get together to produce custom software by hosting the venue for this community in a free collaborative software development project life cycle management solution called Code Roller.
Excuse what could possibly be a dumb question here but is it like if you install Azure on your hardware, then you have to keep up to date with their latest and greatest or is it more like if you run apps on their cloud, then you have to keep up with their latest and greatest?
If the former, then that will significantly raise your TCO for using Azure. It's very hard for little guys to keep up with Microsoft's technology churn. If the later, then that is a given with any cloud offering including Google's and Amazon's.
I claim that virtual worlds is an approach to telepresence on a budget. Someone must think that telepresense is important because it is estimated to generate about 4 billion USD in annual revenues.
Your other arguments are supercilious at best and show a lack of understanding, at least in the world of distributed software development. I would also guess that you've never used Second Life before.
I never intended to imply that virtual worlds would replace IM. Your scenario of spontaneous communication with office mates was not what I had in mind. IM is actually very good in that situation because you already have a lot of face time with office mates. In that situation, brief text is all that is needed.
Consider this situation. You have coders in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Hyderabad. You've noticed that their defect counts have started to escalate out of proportion to your local team in the USA. It's time to schedule a meeting to find out what the problem is. You could use a phone but accents get in the way and telephone use is still pretty expensive. You could use IM but you've noticed that, in the past, people don't really participate. Remember, you are twelve time zones away from them so either you are going to be tired or they are going to be tired whenever you communicate in real time. That's a situation where virtual worlds might make a difference. The virtual reality aspect of sitting in a room with other avatars arouses your social instincts and you tend to get more involved with the conversation than the dry text only user experience of most IM clients.
Why is it that so many people in a computer technology forum are so resistant to the kind of endless change that computer technology brings? I find it ironic that this poster claims "If you create a product that uses a new technology, and doesn't need that technology, it's introducing needless complexity" but then uses instant messaging as an example of a successful new technology adoption. There is nothing in most IM offerings that you can't do with a conference call on a POTS phone.
The article associated with the OP really focuses on the e-commerce aspects of virtual worlds. Why is everyone here so resistant to this? Back in the mid 90's, if you went around telling these same people that one day most people would shop with their web browser, then you would most probably get this same resistance.
I believe that there is also some compelling B2B drivers for virtual worlds too. This poster claims that "you don't need a 3D world for" instant messaging. I don't agree. The geographically distributed work environment is quickly becoming the norm for knowledge workers. The challenge is how to keep up the high degree of quality communication needed for productivity. Text alone doesn't cut it. The TCO for tele-conferencing is still fairly expensive. Virtual worlds can be a low cost alternative that has more immersion than text based IM.
Also, with an already established project, you don't want to lose your change history. Is there a way to migrate from svn to git without losing the change history?
I am curious about integrating with git. I know that there is plenty of support to integrate with Subversion. What does git provide in terms of integration? I am not talking about IDE integration, I am talking about continuous integration. Does Cruise Control work with git?
Huh? I was logged in to gmail all day yesterday and am logged in today. I am receiving and sending plenty of email from that account. What's the problem?
I am interpreting the O.P.'s information request as a request for endorsements for a product suitable for building an online community for a call center and not a request for an already active online community for a call center. I am also assuming that the call center is for an ISV. Here are a few recommendations that are my favorites.
They do have a message about software development that you can read without purchasing any of their product. I have endorsed their book, Getting Real, and you can read my endorsement here without purchasing any of my product.
Seriously, where is the line between information and advertising? IMHO, if the link takes you to a page where there is no possible way to part with your cash without going someplace else, then it is information. Have you been so betrayed by capitalism that you can't tolerate any exchange of money at all? How can you afford to eat?
I know what you mean. I struggled with this social networking share everything attitude that has become so prevalent in the prosumer generation. That is, until I read this NY Times article on it. Then it made sense.
if you're a power user, though, XP -> Vista is still easier than XP -> Ubuntu
I don't agree. XP has menus. Ubuntu has menus. Vista, IE, and MS-Office have moved away from menus. Most computer users understand and rely on menus a lot.
The more relevant comparison would be between Ubuntu and Vista. Anecdotally, a friend of mine just got a tablet PC running Vista that she is about to either return or try to talk the OEM into installing XP on it. This is an English teacher with no love for geekiness what so ever. She is going to have to go through the pain and agony of all of this because her wireless doesn't work on Vista. This is a known and well documented issue that neither Microsoft nor HP has gone to the trouble to fix.
That's clever. When the beta release of my product gets out of beta, I think that I will brand it as gamma. Thanks for the playfully humorous suggestion.
For me, alpha means "Pretty buggy, don't expect a smooth ride" and beta means "still some rough patches but you should be able to get the job done." It's crazy to market a product as beta for years. They should just take a page from FOSS and market the product as pre version 1 for years.
I see it a little bit differently. With regards to the issue of business types and technologists operating in two distinct, alienated silos of organization, there are two types of companies. One type of company sells the technology in question. An example of this is an ISV. The other type of company uses the technology to facilitate the operation of whatever it sells.
In the first type, I.T. is a profit center. In the second type, I.T. is a cost center. It is the second type of company that breeds this separation of business and technology. The first type of company cannot afford to breed that separation.
The OP stated "My ultimate goal is to have a complete, secure LAMP server available to the public running CentOS." so how is learning virtualization going to take him towards his goal?
This guy needs to learn how to install, setup, configure, and tune CentOS, Apache, MySql, and whichever P (perl, php, python, etc) that he is developing. So, let's give him links to books or online materials about those things, OK?
Are you passionate about this idea? Are you willing to commit to it? How are you willing to manifest that commitment? You say that you are unqualified to write the code but what are you willing and qualified to do?
At a minimum, a software project needs more than just coders. It also needs evangelists. People who are passionate about the software and are willing to get the message out to the software's intended audience. You can build a better mousetrap but the world won't beat a path to your door unless you are willing to market it.
A non-trivial project could also stand to have analysts, designers, a usability engineer, an information architect, a software architect, subject matter experts, a product manager, a project manager. Also, a copy writer wouldn't hurt. An online application should also have community managers. Depending on the size of the effort, these roles may be filled by different people or by fewer people wearing different hats as they perform these different functions. How many of these hats are you willing to wear?
I have grown tired working for the man and have just recently started my own software development house. We are looking to partner with visionaries and startup entrepreneurs to bring the next generation of great applications to the web. If you really feel like you've got something important and are willing to put in some sweat in order to bring your baby to life, then contact me and let's discuss this further.
I worked in a small company that used a software development project life cycle management application called SourceForge Enterprise Edition. You can download and use what they call the SFDE version of it if you have 50 users or less. This is a VmWare appliance where CentOS is the guest OS. We had no trouble with it whatsoever. We looked at what it would cost to upgrade to RHEL and, frankly, that was just out of the company's reach financially.
I have been writing business application software for over 20 years. SFEE is most probably the best life cycle application that I have run across but, ultimately, I was still unsatisfied with it. You have trackers and artifacts that you have to customize in order to get change requests and defects. It's kind of a round peg in a square hole deal. Trackers are too generic, too agnostic. I agree with 37signals that software should be opinionated. That is why I am "scratching an itch" by developing a real collaborative software development project life cycle management application.
I am calling this application Code Roller. This app has a lot of features.
For more information, please check out my white papers. I would absolutely be honored if members of the /. community would become beta testers.
I don't live in Europe but I have hired foreign nationals in the past. I never really developed insight into their hierarchy of Universities so I would just ask another foreign national if that had heard of it. The OP mentioned four years work experience so, to me, that would be more relevant. Actually, I have fairly specific criteria that I use when evaluating a candidate.