Did tech innovation suffer over the last 10 years because Microsoft wasn't broken up? 'Not really,' said Vinton Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, 'It has to do with the fact that open source has become such a strong force in the software world.'"
I find that actually ambiguous... Is Vinton Cerf saying that tech innovation suffered because of open source instead of because Microsoft wasn't broken up? I'm sure that's not what he meant....
I can maybe see Senior Developers being able to veto process changes... but features/functionality? Maybe my workplace is different, but usually when someone from management asks for a list of features, they expect it to be complete. It usually happens at the expense of the timeline, but they want all the features no matter how long it takes.
Sure, I can see Senior Developers having some veto into the features and funcionality. Most senior ones have gotten there because of their experience working with computers and users, and can have some valuable insight into that. I've been in situations where managers have asked for things and I've known that they won't fly. Or might be too costly to build, or might be incompatible with something else in the system, or might be redundant.
A senior developer should also be able to explain it with more than "nope, won't do that...".
e.g. a manager at a company that made medical software once told me that since every patient has a sex, we had to make it a mandatory field for users when making a new patient, that it would increase the accuracy of the data. But having worked with customers I knew that it wasn't uncommon for patients to come in and buy some medical accessory (like eye glass cases) and knowing the patient's sex wasn't needed for that kind of transaction. Or that data entry people talking to customers on the phone wanted to get the minimal information to schedule the appointment and sex wasn't needed to get that task done, but making it mandatory would mean they'd have to have callers repeat information, or write it on paper to enter it in a different order...
same one who agrees with the "my code is its own documentation" principle and doesn't put a single comment in there
I sure wish more people agreed with that and didn't write so many comments in code... Last week, in fact, I introduced a bug in some code because I foolishly read the comments for someone else's code... Too bad the comments weren't updated when the code was changed earlier this year...
I run into this frequently on this 10 year old code... It's pretty heavily documented and a fairly significant portion of the documentation is simply wrong. It may have been right at one time, but the code's been changed so much over the years the two no longer match.
I was in Pune, India about ten years ago when one police precinct in the city got assigned a new chief inspector. It was the Deccan area, where there's a huge number of colleges and universities.
The newspaper had an interview with the new chief inspector (it was a big deal because she was the first woman in the position) and one of the questions they asked her was what factors complicated policing that precinct. Her answer was "there's a lot of educated people who know their rights."
Farenheit is one of the easiest ones... It's a very human measurement. The range from uncomfortably cold to uncomfortably hot, just slightly over body temperature, is simply divided into 100 degrees... It works great and gives a good numeric range for what we physically feel. No need to waste a bunch of valuable numbers on temperatures between "uncomfortably hot" and water boiling, we won't really use those for much anyway...
I also understand that in US schools they're taught metric measurements as well as imperial measurements (however I'm sure the focus is vastly in favour of imperial units)
In my school in Oregon in the 80's almost all classes that used measurements used metrics. But since everything outside class was Imperial, it just made the classes that much harder, and feel more useless, less applicable to anything outside class.
Make sure you take paracetamol regularly. Two tabs (2x500mg) four times per day.
Isn't that pushing the safe limit, 4000mg per day "regularly"?
When my migraines get bad I do that for a while, but of course it does nothing for the migraines... It only really works to accelerate the tail end of a migraine... For the last month or so I've just been taking one pill of 250mg paracetamol, 250mg aspirin and 65mg caffeine every morning and that's mostly working. If yesterday was an indication, it's probably the caffeine doing most of it, since I skipped the pill but had a bottle of Manhattan Special espresso soda...
The best thing I found for a migraine was back in college, a dose of lysergic acid diethylamide. The upside was the migraines were gone quickly, the downside was, so was productivity for the next 12 hours...
Is it just me, or is this just completely incoherent? What the hell is he talking about?
It's not just you... I don't understand what he's talking about, either... "Strike it out and make the connection between sentences"? I have no idea what that means...
Or maybe he means not writing "refer to paragraph 7, sentence 3 of document X" but do something else? But that's style, not a technical limitation, we can do things like that now, copy/paste, link, embed, etc...
This. For all of the above. 'Face-to-Face' doesn't have to mean travel.
I disagree... I think travel helps a lot. I worked in India for ten years at two different companies, one based in the U.S. and one based in Europe.
The U.S. one didn't like travel. The European one did and it made a huge difference.
My Indian team members spent a few months getting up to speed and working in Europe before going back to work full time in India and the value of it was that once we returned to India everyone knew everyone. People on the other continent weren't just voices on a phone or faces on a computer screen, they were real people we'd sat side-by-side with, had pub lunches with, coffee breaks with and so forth.
It made communication easier when we were remote because no one was "just some guy who's gonna say 'no'".
So the great firewall of China is OK with you? Three Strike regulations? And all kind of other stuff that makes your Internet in full or in part go away?
No, it's not that I like those... It's that I was responding to someone who suggested that the freedom of speech can't exist without the internet. But where I am I have the freedom to stand on a street corner and say what I want, or print what I want and mail it all over, tack leaflets to telephone poles, etc. The freedom to do that isn't tied to the internet.
In countries without that freedom, they can't criticize their gov't either online or standing on a street corner. The internet might help them with a bit of anonyminity to get away with forbidden speech longer, but that's not the same as the freedom to speak.
Some, like freedom of speech, are there to protect our other rights.
The question is, in the modern day and age, can you truly have freedom of speech without Internet access?
Sure. The freedom of speech is that we can say what we want without fear of reprisals, not that the platform for saying it will be provided. So, even without internet access we can say what we want.
Not to argue that the internet isn't a powerful platform for communicating.
"Can I get a monitor with a display resolution larger than 1400x900?" "No." "But...but...I can't even see a page of schematics at a time, and the code I'm maintaining is a hundred thousand lines split in to dozens of files!" "The budget is tight, can't do it."
You're asking for the wrong reasons... With a bigger monitor you can show the new brand image more clearly, you can use the extra space to display the image of the new mission statement... You'll always be on track that way, you'll know the schematic you can't see clearly on the screen is driving customer satisfaction and global leadership and all that...
Until it can print it can't be considered a true development environment... because debugging usually requires a view larger than a few lines of code
I'm not quite sure I see what printing has to do with it being a true development environment or not... I haven't printed code in years, except when doing some BPM diagram programming and needed to make notes about what wasn't viewable on the screen at one time...
Granted, maybe it's not an ideal debugging environment, but it sure sounds like a development environment to me if you can use it to create programs... Perfect? Powerful? Maybe not...
Well except for the volumes and volumes of data that show species changing over time from the fossil record. Religion just has 'a book that says so' for its evidence. So not exactly 'equal' footing.
Yeah, but for people who really and truly believe in that one book "that says so", the footing isn't anywhere close to equal...
Actually, this doesn't sound so bad. I know I'm not attractive, and probably many of the coworkers wouldn't be, either... But every morning when I'm struggling to get my clothes on, I keep thinking, "I wish I worked in a clothing optional office..."
Over the years I've become more sensitive to things, and clothes have become more uncomfortable, with the stitches itching, seams rubbing my skin, collars scratching my chin and so forth... I hate getting dressed...
I've worked with plenty of men and women doing coding and the women are a match for the men in terms of skill and knowledge. There's always been more men in terms of numbers, offering a wider range of competence of and incompetence than the women...
But where it's great working with women is they're generally more open to discussing solutions to problems, resulting in overall better results, and less stuck up on a "my way or fuck off" attitude...
Slashdot Mirror
I think modern technology trumps anything as barbaric as what you're describing!
Did tech innovation suffer over the last 10 years because Microsoft wasn't broken up? 'Not really,' said Vinton Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, 'It has to do with the fact that open source has become such a strong force in the software world.'"
I find that actually ambiguous... Is Vinton Cerf saying that tech innovation suffered because of open source instead of because Microsoft wasn't broken up? I'm sure that's not what he meant....
I didn't bother to proofread.
Planning to write a book for Packt?
I can maybe see Senior Developers being able to veto process changes... but features/functionality? Maybe my workplace is different, but usually when someone from management asks for a list of features, they expect it to be complete. It usually happens at the expense of the timeline, but they want all the features no matter how long it takes.
Sure, I can see Senior Developers having some veto into the features and funcionality. Most senior ones have gotten there because of their experience working with computers and users, and can have some valuable insight into that. I've been in situations where managers have asked for things and I've known that they won't fly. Or might be too costly to build, or might be incompatible with something else in the system, or might be redundant.
A senior developer should also be able to explain it with more than "nope, won't do that...".
e.g. a manager at a company that made medical software once told me that since every patient has a sex, we had to make it a mandatory field for users when making a new patient, that it would increase the accuracy of the data. But having worked with customers I knew that it wasn't uncommon for patients to come in and buy some medical accessory (like eye glass cases) and knowing the patient's sex wasn't needed for that kind of transaction. Or that data entry people talking to customers on the phone wanted to get the minimal information to schedule the appointment and sex wasn't needed to get that task done, but making it mandatory would mean they'd have to have callers repeat information, or write it on paper to enter it in a different order...
same one who agrees with the "my code is its own documentation" principle and doesn't put a single comment in there
I sure wish more people agreed with that and didn't write so many comments in code... Last week, in fact, I introduced a bug in some code because I foolishly read the comments for someone else's code... Too bad the comments weren't updated when the code was changed earlier this year...
I run into this frequently on this 10 year old code... It's pretty heavily documented and a fairly significant portion of the documentation is simply wrong. It may have been right at one time, but the code's been changed so much over the years the two no longer match.
pesky "due process of law" thing
I was in Pune, India about ten years ago when one police precinct in the city got assigned a new chief inspector. It was the Deccan area, where there's a huge number of colleges and universities.
The newspaper had an interview with the new chief inspector (it was a big deal because she was the first woman in the position) and one of the questions they asked her was what factors complicated policing that precinct. Her answer was "there's a lot of educated people who know their rights."
their phones might be tracking their locations
Might? Might be tracking their locations? Sounds like they don't even know if it is or not...
Farenheit is one of the easiest ones... It's a very human measurement. The range from uncomfortably cold to uncomfortably hot, just slightly over body temperature, is simply divided into 100 degrees... It works great and gives a good numeric range for what we physically feel. No need to waste a bunch of valuable numbers on temperatures between "uncomfortably hot" and water boiling, we won't really use those for much anyway...
I also understand that in US schools they're taught metric measurements as well as imperial measurements (however I'm sure the focus is vastly in favour of imperial units)
In my school in Oregon in the 80's almost all classes that used measurements used metrics. But since everything outside class was Imperial, it just made the classes that much harder, and feel more useless, less applicable to anything outside class.
Make sure you take paracetamol regularly. Two tabs (2x500mg) four times per day.
Isn't that pushing the safe limit, 4000mg per day "regularly"?
When my migraines get bad I do that for a while, but of course it does nothing for the migraines... It only really works to accelerate the tail end of a migraine... For the last month or so I've just been taking one pill of 250mg paracetamol, 250mg aspirin and 65mg caffeine every morning and that's mostly working. If yesterday was an indication, it's probably the caffeine doing most of it, since I skipped the pill but had a bottle of Manhattan Special espresso soda...
The best thing I found for a migraine was back in college, a dose of lysergic acid diethylamide. The upside was the migraines were gone quickly, the downside was, so was productivity for the next 12 hours...
Do those students in the Armenian equivalent of the ROTC get to substitute Global Thermonuclear War for a nice class of chess instead?
Is it just me, or is this just completely incoherent? What the hell is he talking about?
It's not just you... I don't understand what he's talking about, either... "Strike it out and make the connection between sentences"? I have no idea what that means...
Or maybe he means not writing "refer to paragraph 7, sentence 3 of document X" but do something else? But that's style, not a technical limitation, we can do things like that now, copy/paste, link, embed, etc...
Beats me what he's talking about...
This. For all of the above. 'Face-to-Face' doesn't have to mean travel.
I disagree... I think travel helps a lot. I worked in India for ten years at two different companies, one based in the U.S. and one based in Europe.
The U.S. one didn't like travel. The European one did and it made a huge difference.
My Indian team members spent a few months getting up to speed and working in Europe before going back to work full time in India and the value of it was that once we returned to India everyone knew everyone. People on the other continent weren't just voices on a phone or faces on a computer screen, they were real people we'd sat side-by-side with, had pub lunches with, coffee breaks with and so forth.
It made communication easier when we were remote because no one was "just some guy who's gonna say 'no'".
So the great firewall of China is OK with you? Three Strike regulations? And all kind of other stuff that makes your Internet in full or in part go away?
No, it's not that I like those... It's that I was responding to someone who suggested that the freedom of speech can't exist without the internet. But where I am I have the freedom to stand on a street corner and say what I want, or print what I want and mail it all over, tack leaflets to telephone poles, etc. The freedom to do that isn't tied to the internet.
In countries without that freedom, they can't criticize their gov't either online or standing on a street corner. The internet might help them with a bit of anonyminity to get away with forbidden speech longer, but that's not the same as the freedom to speak.
Some, like freedom of speech, are there to protect our other rights.
The question is, in the modern day and age, can you truly have freedom of speech without Internet access?
Sure. The freedom of speech is that we can say what we want without fear of reprisals, not that the platform for saying it will be provided. So, even without internet access we can say what we want.
Not to argue that the internet isn't a powerful platform for communicating.
"Can I get a monitor with a display resolution larger than 1400x900?" "No." "But...but...I can't even see a page of schematics at a time, and the code I'm maintaining is a hundred thousand lines split in to dozens of files!" "The budget is tight, can't do it."
You're asking for the wrong reasons... With a bigger monitor you can show the new brand image more clearly, you can use the extra space to display the image of the new mission statement... You'll always be on track that way, you'll know the schematic you can't see clearly on the screen is driving customer satisfaction and global leadership and all that...
Until it can print it can't be considered a true development environment ... because debugging usually requires a view larger than a few lines of code
I'm not quite sure I see what printing has to do with it being a true development environment or not... I haven't printed code in years, except when doing some BPM diagram programming and needed to make notes about what wasn't viewable on the screen at one time...
Granted, maybe it's not an ideal debugging environment, but it sure sounds like a development environment to me if you can use it to create programs... Perfect? Powerful? Maybe not...
So, it appears to be not true programming, but just script manipulation?
But what is programming? It's just giving the computer instructions to perform later... Script manipulation certainly qualifies for that.
Well except for the volumes and volumes of data that show species changing over time from the fossil record. Religion just has 'a book that says so' for its evidence. So not exactly 'equal' footing.
Yeah, but for people who really and truly believe in that one book "that says so", the footing isn't anywhere close to equal...
What I have seen is a salient call for respect. No wonder our older population are so depressed and stressed out.
You should visit some retirement homes to see for yourself. It's sad. The bad thing is that we're all headed there. God help us.
Well, the now-old people should've had more respect for the younger people, back before they picked the nursing home...
Do you honestly expect a 16 year old to want to be involved in someone's 70th birthday?
Want? Not necessarily... Participate, yes, and even pretend to be cheerful.
Actually, this doesn't sound so bad. I know I'm not attractive, and probably many of the coworkers wouldn't be, either... But every morning when I'm struggling to get my clothes on, I keep thinking, "I wish I worked in a clothing optional office..."
Over the years I've become more sensitive to things, and clothes have become more uncomfortable, with the stitches itching, seams rubbing my skin, collars scratching my chin and so forth... I hate getting dressed...
Now if only they can find a woman who can code.
I've worked with plenty of men and women doing coding and the women are a match for the men in terms of skill and knowledge. There's always been more men in terms of numbers, offering a wider range of competence of and incompetence than the women...
But where it's great working with women is they're generally more open to discussing solutions to problems, resulting in overall better results, and less stuck up on a "my way or fuck off" attitude...
Surprisingly, it was enough to run databases, word processors and complex, professional software
I fail to see what the surprise is... So it ran software that was designed and written for it? Wow, surprise!
Yep, 18 year-olds generally haven't got a clue about anything much so they don't see the bad side of smoking.
Yeah, but how many 18 year olds understand that? They think they know it all and it's the older folks who don't have a clue...