Yeah and having fund with no functional prototype of any sort is a wet dream in those days.
I don't know his ideas but I'm quite sure that he would waste his time (and his precious contacts) if he has nothing to show.
If you have no functional prototype, only vague concept on a paper...99% you will find no investor and for the remaining 1% do not expect to keep 50% of your company. The one who is clearly taking the risk here is the VC not the entrepreneur.
For a first round, try to get money from friends and relatives to fund an initial prototype. Or more realistically...Paid it from your own pocket. Once it works, (in a way it can impress a non-techical minded person), then you are ready for the second step.
Even better, how about we stop encouraging/helping wild-eyed "entrepreneurs" who have these great ideas that are "probably patentable" but who are wholly incapable of actually inventing said devices.
Steve Jobs shouldn't have "great ideas" about software because he can't program?
It is also the only place where you can get flamed down/tortured to death before being dismembered and cut into little pieces because your summary wasn't really funny:-).
(well after the 3rd paragraph it is getting interesting IMHO).
(Mono is nice and all but it's no substitute for MS C# from what I hear)
If you plan to make desktop App yes (AFAIK, I didn't taste their windows forms for months). If you don't, this is almost the same IMHO. I'm currently working on a mono C# Linux daemon and it does support Unix like Signals and all.
The downfalls? I had my share of unexpected segmentation faults with Mono framework 1.X . Now it seems to work flawlessly with 2.X (fingers crossed). Second: you have no access to the closed sources libraries developed by third parties. They have shareware protections, it rarely works.
But I'm still quite pleased by my choice, I simply love the clean c# syntax and those clever get set stuffs:-).
Yeah, and what if the owner of the company declares you one, and it happens in more than one company, and you regularly live outside the traditional chain of command of the company, answerable only to the owners?
It happens especially in little company. I remember a client of mine. They had an "in house" programmer. It was probably the shittiest codes I have ever seen. No logic, redundant functions, etc. I remember a meeting with him, he played the arrogant know it all in front of me. He finally noticed that I was a programmer just like him. The tone changed.
He thought he was irreplaceable but the management has changed and the reason of my presence was to well outsource his work or to make him less "irreplaceable" due to the difficulties to get things right without crawling in front of him.
There are a lot of people like him, as soon as they know "a little" more than their fellow co-workers, they feel like genius...Until they meet another professional who didn't past the last ten years sleeping on its knowledge without ever documenting himself about the last techniques/tools.
As a developer I used to have a very poor understanding of basic things like indexing columns and optimizing SQL queries.
A significant fraction of the workload were wrongly put on the application shoulder.Or worst multiple queries were launched instead of just one. Man how wrong I was...
I remember a case where a query used to take "minutes", with the proper optimizations it became a mere second or so.
Now I've got some sorts basic rules I try to respect.
If you have to parse query results in your code, this is almost always because of a poorly written SQL query or a bad Database design.
If you need multiple queries to retrieve a list/value...Go back to the design board.
No. But "install" would have been simpler. We geek loves acronyms too much. we are Always busy trying to safe few letters for no apparent reasons IMHO.
The real issue is that there are now two different kind of web professionals: web designers and web developers.
As a web developer if you can't write from scratch CSS2 based layout without dreamweaver and the like then you should buy yourself a CSS2 manual quickly.
Sure there are still some clever people out there who can still do both. But their number are shrinking fast. And in a near future things like canvas and HTML5 will truly force you to choose your camp: coding or design.
Personally I use Gimp to edit layout I receive from web designers.
I use OpenSuSE as well, my favorite waste of icons is the five different terminal icons you've got in the menu (application/system/terminal) in KDE.
Obviously in you plan to open terminal, you've got some notions of things like sudo and all.
Almost as dumb as the start/shut down options in vista IMHO.
I do and on a daily basis. When you go back to Joomla! and the like, you suddenly feel like it is quite simple:-). I can't imagine the reaction of this guy in front of it:-)
Some of the problems of Typo3 is its legacy. Typo3 has been created in the nineties if I remind well at a time where Object oriented PHP programming wasn't possible.
Typo3 developers used a pseudo object oriented framework heavily based on hash tables. Which is truly ugly but well it works. If you've got a real Object oriented background, you feel sick in front of it. The real problem is that they kept this approach until today and when you read their developers mailing list, most have no desire to change it.
Another problem is really ridiculous but well the real problem is its repetition : naming convention. All "core api" classes have funny names. Imagine simple System.Console would become in typo3 Sys.csl a writeln would become wtln
Why? Don't ask. Maybe they want to look smart, I don't know.
If they can make an abreviation (let's say saving just one letter), they will! It could as stupid as objc witch is object or more important stuff like pi wich is plugin, and all. While reading their code, you can't understand it, you need google and dozens of different sources simply to understand what this variable or object stands for. They might save one nanosecond while typing it but newbies lose hours (and most leave the environement entirely).
Another problem is their fragmented documentations. Their documentation are heavily based on their abbreviations. Extremely important stuff like TCA...Means err nothing until you found another documentation describing this abbreviation. It is really frustrating.
They are also keen at "creating" new name for things you know for years...And it becomes even more frustrating to a point that you can understand the inner logic behind it.
Typoscript has been "designed" by a non developer IMHO. I feel like he thought that he could play with syntax as much as he wish. And you end up with a "configuration language" using = or <
with a total different meaning than in any other computer languages.
So the learning curve is extremely important (and they seem proud of that fact...Again don't ask). A large part of your technical experiences will be useless in front of typo3. These are the cons, I found a lot of "pros" that counterbalance them. Its extreme flexibility is the first. The second is that there are a lot of companies requiring it (in Europe at least) and very few developers ready to spend hours in this messy environment:-). I make now a good part of my revenues out of it.
Well they could simply force any browser on the market to respect standards. A bit like the Euro safety standard: Euro NCAP for cars.
If the new browser do not respect the current standard like HTML 5 in 2009, it can't be bundled with an operating system.
Prolem solved. IMHO.
As a web developer I couldn't care less about browser brand. It can be named Safari, Internet Explorer,Opera or Firefox. Open source or not. I don't care. What matters is the compatibility with standards. Then people could choose their browser for their performance, UI, whatever.
They screwed up by making a piss poor choice and they deserve to go down with the ship they hitched their trailers to
Most companies I've work for have no clues about the meaning of W3C standard. The only thing they know is:
it works under IE and Firefox (and Safari)! Cool! So let's talk about the essential: the layout. So if it is FLASH or plain HTML they don't care usually...Except when you talk about search engines optimizations, there you get their attention....If they are public services they might consider WAI (for visually impaired surfers)
Their questions are comparable to:
A dark blue wouldn't be more classy? Do you prefer Arial or Verdana? Maybe we should move the column two pixels to the right, what do you think?
And if you say:
Not possible, the IE opacity filter will mess with two overlapping PNG here.
their answer is:
eh?
Welcome to the real communication department world:-)
France and Germany can afford to do this precisely because the US spends so much on the military and subsidizes & assists Frances' and Germany's defense.
No. they can afford it because they pay high taxes. If you had to pay similar taxes in the US (21% VAT, 40% on income, etc.), there would be a civil war.
And, how much time, money, and headache have you spent in the past year, trying to prevent or cure viral infections on your Microsoft machine?
No a single second for mmmmh 4 years (?). The trick:
I do not install warez
I do not install freebies such as "Free screensaver!"
I do not surf (anymore;-) ) on freeboobs.com
I do not surf on www.warezzz.org
I do not open suspicious pamela_anderson_loves_you.zip
I've got a firewall
I use firefox
I use thunderbird
I only install software from legitimate sources.
I only install software from well known and legitimate sources.
I only keep applications that I use.
No antivirus, nothing. That's all. I have no kids, my gf has her own PC. I do understand that most windows users aren't wise but it is really possible to use Windows without an AV.
laughable 20 minutes talking full of technical non-sense
"Big tubes with teleportation technologies digitalizing DVDs from one side and materializing them on the other side. They use water and its well known memory to generate under intense pressure torrents of data!"
Is the notion of a "join" obsolete? No, but it is typically impractical in a high volume system. You would probably use denormalization as a strategy.
once again, correct, but having to denormalize to a snowflake or a star isn't always the best solution. you're taking the best parts of the relational database model, and throwing them out - normalization, referential integrity, just to squeeze more out of something that may not be the best tool for the job.
I'm currently developping a DB which is supposed to handle around 80 requests per sec and I use intensively joint (MySQL) to joint 3 tables (around 40.000 entries each). I would be quite interested to read the side effects you both are talking about.
I have seen several MS R&D projects. There were real gems and polished enough to be commercially released.
The real problem IMHO isn't Ms R&D but rather their marketing department.
You can't ask too much from people who sincerily think that marketing Vista through a dozen of different versions (basic, pro, business, ??) was a clever idea.
We're at a significantly lower latitude than France, and we've had at least 5 days of single digit F temps just this winter alone, and that is typical.
Buildings, farms and livestock (especially in southern france) aren't designed for such temperature and certainly not for long period under such a temperature.
Frankly as an European I do not see the point of developing a "national" operating system. Linux is "Free", there are already several European Linux distributions. If it means anything nowadays anyway. Developing your own OS sounds so 90's to me.
Don't really know. I still quite surprised by the supposed popularity of Perl. I was forced few years ago to switch to PHP to meet clients requirements.
It truly challenges my own personal experience (+10 years). I feel like they live in some kind of parallel universe. But well I'm just a web developer.
Anyway associating C and C# is err quite surprising. I know C#, I would hardly call myself a C coder.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah and having fund with no functional prototype of any sort is a wet dream in those days.
I don't know his ideas but I'm quite sure that he would waste his time (and his precious contacts) if he has nothing to show.
If you have no functional prototype, only vague concept on a paper...99% you will find no investor and for the remaining 1% do not expect to keep 50% of your company. The one who is clearly taking the risk here is the VC not the entrepreneur.
For a first round, try to get money from friends and relatives to fund an initial prototype. Or more realistically...Paid it from your own pocket. Once it works, (in a way it can impress a non-techical minded person), then you are ready for the second step.
Even better, how about we stop encouraging/helping wild-eyed "entrepreneurs" who have these great ideas that are "probably patentable" but who are wholly incapable of actually inventing said devices.
Steve Jobs shouldn't have "great ideas" about software because he can't program?
It is also the only place where you can get flamed down/tortured to death before being dismembered and cut into little pieces because your summary wasn't really funny :-).
(well after the 3rd paragraph it is getting interesting IMHO).
(Mono is nice and all but it's no substitute for MS C# from what I hear)
If you plan to make desktop App yes (AFAIK, I didn't taste their windows forms for months). If you don't, this is almost the same IMHO. I'm currently working on a mono C# Linux daemon and it does support Unix like Signals and all.
The downfalls? I had my share of unexpected segmentation faults with Mono framework 1.X . Now it seems to work flawlessly with 2.X (fingers crossed). Second: you have no access to the closed sources libraries developed by third parties. They have shareware protections, it rarely works.
But I'm still quite pleased by my choice, I simply love the clean c# syntax and those clever get set stuffs :-).
Yeah, and what if the owner of the company declares you one, and it happens in more than one company, and you regularly live outside the traditional chain of command of the company, answerable only to the owners?
It happens especially in little company. I remember a client of mine. They had an "in house" programmer. It was probably the shittiest codes I have ever seen. No logic, redundant functions, etc. I remember a meeting with him, he played the arrogant know it all in front of me. He finally noticed that I was a programmer just like him. The tone changed.
He thought he was irreplaceable but the management has changed and the reason of my presence was to well outsource his work or to make him less "irreplaceable" due to the difficulties to get things right without crawling in front of him.
There are a lot of people like him, as soon as they know "a little" more than their fellow co-workers, they feel like genius...Until they meet another professional who didn't past the last ten years sleeping on its knowledge without ever documenting himself about the last techniques/tools.
And it is rarely used. "Nom de Dieu" is more popular nowadays.
Yes totally agree.
As a developer I used to have a very poor understanding of basic things like indexing columns and optimizing SQL queries.
A significant fraction of the workload were wrongly put on the application shoulder.Or worst multiple queries were launched instead of just one. Man how wrong I was...
I remember a case where a query used to take "minutes", with the proper optimizations it became a mere second or so.
Now I've got some sorts basic rules I try to respect.
Now, In all honesty, was that hard to comprehend?
No. But "install" would have been simpler. We geek loves acronyms too much. we are Always busy trying to safe few letters for no apparent reasons IMHO.
The real issue is that there are now two different kind of web professionals: web designers and web developers.
As a web developer if you can't write from scratch CSS2 based layout without dreamweaver and the like then you should buy yourself a CSS2 manual quickly.
Sure there are still some clever people out there who can still do both. But their number are shrinking fast. And in a near future things like canvas and HTML5 will truly force you to choose your camp: coding or design.
Personally I use Gimp to edit layout I receive from web designers.
I use OpenSuSE as well, my favorite waste of icons is the five different terminal icons you've got in the menu (application/system/terminal) in KDE. Obviously in you plan to open terminal, you've got some notions of things like sudo and all. Almost as dumb as the start/shut down options in vista IMHO.
I do and on a daily basis. When you go back to Joomla! and the like, you suddenly feel like it is quite simple :-). I can't imagine the reaction of this guy in front of it :-)
Some of the problems of Typo3 is its legacy. Typo3 has been created in the nineties if I remind well at a time where Object oriented PHP programming wasn't possible.
Typo3 developers used a pseudo object oriented framework heavily based on hash tables. Which is truly ugly but well it works. If you've got a real Object oriented background, you feel sick in front of it. The real problem is that they kept this approach until today and when you read their developers mailing list, most have no desire to change it.
Another problem is really ridiculous but well the real problem is its repetition : naming convention. All "core api" classes have funny names. Imagine simple System.Console would become in typo3 Sys.csl a writeln would become wtln
Why? Don't ask. Maybe they want to look smart, I don't know.
If they can make an abreviation (let's say saving just one letter), they will! It could as stupid as objc witch is object or more important stuff like pi wich is plugin, and all. While reading their code, you can't understand it, you need google and dozens of different sources simply to understand what this variable or object stands for. They might save one nanosecond while typing it but newbies lose hours (and most leave the environement entirely).
Another problem is their fragmented documentations. Their documentation are heavily based on their abbreviations. Extremely important stuff like TCA...Means err nothing until you found another documentation describing this abbreviation. It is really frustrating.
They are also keen at "creating" new name for things you know for years...And it becomes even more frustrating to a point that you can understand the inner logic behind it.
Typoscript has been "designed" by a non developer IMHO. I feel like he thought that he could play with syntax as much as he wish. And you end up with a "configuration language" using = or < with a total different meaning than in any other computer languages.
So the learning curve is extremely important (and they seem proud of that fact...Again don't ask). A large part of your technical experiences will be useless in front of typo3. These are the cons, I found a lot of "pros" that counterbalance them. Its extreme flexibility is the first. The second is that there are a lot of companies requiring it (in Europe at least) and very few developers ready to spend hours in this messy environment :-). I make now a good part of my revenues out of it.
I watched a British BBC car show (Top gear) a couple of weeks ago. Their main complain was the weight of the car (extremly heavy) but more importantly the time you need to recharge it (16 hours! Tesla said you "just" need 3.5 hours) http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/12/16/tesla-clarifies-some-of-top-gears-mischaracterizations/
thx for the info. HTML 5 is under work for...6 years (IMHO it all started in 2003?) and all they can provide is a "draft".
Then we bitch companies like Microsoft because they don't respect standards but if they did all you would have is HTML 4.01 and CSS 1.
How could you possibly respect standards when there is none or only obsolete ones are available?
Well they could simply force any browser on the market to respect standards. A bit like the Euro safety standard: Euro NCAP for cars.
If the new browser do not respect the current standard like HTML 5 in 2009, it can't be bundled with an operating system.
Prolem solved. IMHO.
As a web developer I couldn't care less about browser brand. It can be named Safari, Internet Explorer,Opera or Firefox. Open source or not. I don't care. What matters is the compatibility with standards. Then people could choose their browser for their performance, UI, whatever.
They screwed up by making a piss poor choice and they deserve to go down with the ship they hitched their trailers to
Most companies I've work for have no clues about the meaning of W3C standard. The only thing they know is:
it works under IE and Firefox (and Safari)! Cool! So let's talk about the essential: the layout. So if it is FLASH or plain HTML they don't care usually...Except when you talk about search engines optimizations, there you get their attention....If they are public services they might consider WAI (for visually impaired surfers)
Their questions are comparable to: A dark blue wouldn't be more classy? Do you prefer Arial or Verdana? Maybe we should move the column two pixels to the right, what do you think?
And if you say:
Not possible, the IE opacity filter will mess with two overlapping PNG here.
their answer is: eh?
Welcome to the real communication department world :-)
France and Germany can afford to do this precisely because the US spends so much on the military and subsidizes & assists Frances' and Germany's defense.
No. they can afford it because they pay high taxes. If you had to pay similar taxes in the US (21% VAT, 40% on income, etc.), there would be a civil war.
And, how much time, money, and headache have you spent in the past year, trying to prevent or cure viral infections on your Microsoft machine?
No a single second for mmmmh 4 years (?). The trick:
No antivirus, nothing. That's all. I have no kids, my gf has her own PC. I do understand that most windows users aren't wise but it is really possible to use Windows without an AV.
laughable 20 minutes talking full of technical non-sense
"Big tubes with teleportation technologies digitalizing DVDs from one side and materializing them on the other side. They use water and its well known memory to generate under intense pressure torrents of data!"
Is the notion of a "join" obsolete? No, but it is typically impractical in a high volume system. You would probably use denormalization as a strategy.
once again, correct, but having to denormalize to a snowflake or a star isn't always the best solution. you're taking the best parts of the relational database model, and throwing them out - normalization, referential integrity, just to squeeze more out of something that may not be the best tool for the job.
I'm currently developping a DB which is supposed to handle around 80 requests per sec and I use intensively joint (MySQL) to joint 3 tables (around 40.000 entries each). I would be quite interested to read the side effects you both are talking about.
I know the sinking feeling I get every time I find a crontab entry pointing to a Perl script.
For the younger folks out there, the feeling is similar too: /script/all_your_code_belong_to_us.exe
mono
I have seen several MS R&D projects. There were real gems and polished enough to be commercially released.
The real problem IMHO isn't Ms R&D but rather their marketing department.
You can't ask too much from people who sincerily think that marketing Vista through a dozen of different versions (basic, pro, business, ??) was a clever idea.
We're at a significantly lower latitude than France, and we've had at least 5 days of single digit F temps just this winter alone, and that is typical.
France and other western european countries enjoy (imho) the gulf stream effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream
Buildings, farms and livestock (especially in southern france) aren't designed for such temperature and certainly not for long period under such a temperature.
Frankly as an European I do not see the point of developing a "national" operating system. Linux is "Free", there are already several European Linux distributions. If it means anything nowadays anyway. Developing your own OS sounds so 90's to me.
Don't really know. I still quite surprised by the supposed popularity of Perl. I was forced few years ago to switch to PHP to meet clients requirements.
It truly challenges my own personal experience (+10 years). I feel like they live in some kind of parallel universe. But well I'm just a web developer.
Anyway associating C and C# is err quite surprising. I know C#, I would hardly call myself a C coder.
yes and it lacks strong type, static, abstract Or quite useful things like enum.
You need to hack and to reinvent the wheel to achieve what is merely a line of code in any decent object oriented language.
JavaScript is a great language but I prefer to use it inside its eco-system: the web.