Next on Ask Slashdot: "In the enterprise, what is the easiest way to get spoon-fed solutions without driving away the old, crotchety guys who know the answers?"
If Perl, Python, and Ruby are unable to match Java's performance, I'll take their portability, ease of development, lack of overhead and succinctness over Java any day.
I'd hate to have been an engineer working on this thing. Putting all your heart and soul into the R&D trying to make something novel, interesting and cutting-edge, and all you get in response is hate.
I know what you mean -- senior management makes me miserable too.
In fact, the irresponsible MacBook Air and iPad had more than one hook-up. O tempora, O mores! MacBook Air didn't bring the latex, that skank iPad wasn't on the pill, and TWO more underweight babies were born into the cycle of poverty, suffering, and black turtlenecks:
Desktop Linux but I am also intimately familiar with how far the user experience falls short. For an ordinary user it is (as I said) a pain to use compared to Windows XP or 7
Now this is Slashdot (where opinion reigns) on the Internet (where only the spooks really care what you say), but *how* are Ubuntu and Red Hat *more* of a usability pain than M-Windows? And are you saying that there is *no* pain using M-Windows, or that if there is, it is "less" somehow?
I suspect that you are observing people's ability to transfer M-Windows behaviours to other OSs. You may well observe this, of course, but then you aren't measuring the usability of "desktop Linux", you are measuring transferability. Your point of departure is prejudice.
Parental doting aside, your teenaged daughter is probably not a genius nor especially bright. She is using Linux. This is no Skinnerian experiment on your part -- the child is using it because it is usable for her.
There are M-Windows users who say they "can't use OS X because they can't find anything". Is OS X therefore worse in usability? You know it is not. Unless you only care about transferability.
I'm sure we all know at least 10 M-Windows users who can't solve any of their OS problems (configuration, infections, DLL Hell, 32bit-64bit Hell). I'm an experienced computer user and I had to do research to learn the solution to a configuration problem in M-Windows Vista. A problem that "should not have existed". It was at least as much of a pain as anything I've had to do recently with Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Red Hat, or OS X.
Is Vista as much of a "failure" in usability as Ubuntu, Mint, Red Hat, and OS X? I'm interested to know what you will say.
If you only measure transferability, you aren't measuring UI/UX quality objectively.
OS X - built-in Preview app Linux - Evince, several others M-Windows - Foxit, Sumatra
The alternatives are so much better than Adobe Acrobat Reader that I think we can now say that the alternatives are the market and Acrobat Reader is the poor alternative.
I would have said we had ordinary people on one side, and paranoid privacy geeks on the other side.
That Nader... what a Paranoid Safety Geek. This notion of families not dying in flaming wreckage or not being flung out of windows is a fairly modern invention.
Now, it's not such a bad thing. I personally like not being flung out the window or dying in a flaming wreck of incompetent engineering. Others may have a different opinion. I'm open-minded.
You don't appear to see who is attacking whom, nor what's at stake. Eric Schmidt himself publically admitted what profiteers are doing. And what the spooks can do isn't a figment of paranoid imagination. Your "small-town" analogy is weak but I'll let you think about it.
Your rights as a citizen and the US Consitution are also fairly recent inventions that you personally may like.
There is a battle for the future of the Web, and it is not about search engines, but about the social Web
There is a battle for the future of people's *privacy*. On one side, ordinary people. On the other side, spooks and profiteers who tell us that "privacy doesn't matter".
"Cyber" is the vague sort of word that Government Management uses in an attempt to sound technologically astute. As soon as you hear a phrase such as "cyber war", you know you are dealing with a management automaton paddling beyond its depth.
It's interesting to note that this term is a back-formation made from "cybernetics": "From Greek kubernts, governor, from kubernn, to govern."
Makes it sound as though this is another war that being invented by the government to spend the people's money to take the people's freedom away.
The parent is NOT a troll. As others have noted, BS says this himself.
I find one of the most unfortunate things about C++ is that for years a large number of self-important people considered C++ to be the only language that *good programmers* know.
I have sat for interviews that were in sum nothing but quizzes about the arcane features and misfeatures of C++. The interviewers thought that they were showing me that I didn't deserve to work with "geniuses".
What they were really showing me is that I didn't want to work with arrogant primates who had lost their way in the Software Engineering Forest.
The harshest reality is that the jobs are leaving.
The jobs of the CEO and his/her pals will be staying, of course.
A university degree won't make you less expendable to a corpocracy that wants the cheapest workers. Unless you are willing to cost the same to the employer at 35 as you did at 25 (and use your benefits as little), your days are numbered.
Code Poet, Rockstar Programmer, Unit-Test Guru, Meme Zealot, Jedi Knight of the Latest Methodology, or (what is likeliest) red-tunicked member of the Roddenberry Landing Crew or Storm Trooper cannon-fodder, the real masters of this game are the Bean Counters.
The corpocracy has docile subjects. It has seen that it can lay people off without having to report it (IBM -- for years), take huge local tax breaks (which your family and community paid for) and then ship jobs overseas, and claim to be "a good citizen" while loudly claiming there are "insufficient numbers of skilled workers".
Of course, you can take the Blue Pill and go back to your pasting your face into pictures of Gates and Zuckerberg. (o:
As someone who makes hiring decisions and interviews prospects, I'm going to call bullshit.
(Deleted stuff)
Are large numbers of stupid people graduating who don't deserve their degrees? Yes. Has higher education, to some degree, become commoditized and devalued?
Yes, but it does not follow that no learning occurs at universities.
By your own admission, it does follow that you have a challenging job because you have to look for people like yourself among devalued degrees and undeserving candidates. Your personal experience at university is the minority case.
Anyway, you work in HR, so if you're not ineffectual or full of buzz-word rubbish, have a cookie.
I have both taught in university and worked in a university administration. I've been offered bribes by students to pass them. I've seen the laziness and cheating that is "group work". I've seen senior university students require remedial high-school assistance. I've watched the 10% of students who are talented wondering what sort of a Kafkaesque sham their world is.
In administration, I have seen the overpaying management positions filled by self-anointing PhDs who weren't any good at teaching either. I've seen these All-Star products of their own system try to apply their theories to the real world and it's a good thing that they are not measured by performance and progress. I've seen what university management does when the economy is imploding and courageous budgetary decisions must be made: save their salaries and stipends, and raise the tuitions and student fees.
The input of our educational system is mostly garbage and the system itself is rotten. If you find a gem in the cloaca, I am quite sure it's not a product of the educational system's intestines. (o:
It's time for the Internet to transform Education.
Knuth doesn't stand out amongst his peers in his field as much as those examples you've mentioned. Peers such as Siffredi, North, Holmes (etc) are all more important.
What R&D hobbies do Slashdotters have that provide them with opportunities to make interesting discoveries and potentially chart new territory in the home?
Chatroulette and Remote Web Cam Control are really big right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Next on Ask Slashdot: "In the enterprise, what is the easiest way to get spoon-fed solutions without driving away the old, crotchety guys who know the answers?"
If Perl, Python, and Ruby are unable to match Java's performance, I'll take their portability, ease of development, lack of overhead and succinctness over Java any day.
IANAL, but ISTYOMLOS** so I have picked up a few things.
Ellison will have his legal team print all the JVM source code and ship it to every Android integrator by Sikorsky helicopter.
On top of each pile, there will be a note: "Show us your violations."
**I Squandered Ten Years Of My Life On Slashdot
I'd hate to have been an engineer working on this thing. Putting all your heart and soul into the R&D trying to make something novel, interesting and cutting-edge, and all you get in response is hate.
I know what you mean -- senior management makes me miserable too.
In fact, the irresponsible MacBook Air and iPad had more than one hook-up. O tempora, O mores! MacBook Air didn't bring the latex, that skank iPad wasn't on the pill, and TWO more underweight babies were born into the cycle of poverty, suffering, and black turtlenecks:
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/10/2010-10-20279back2mac.jpg
In other news: Google To Expand Outsourcing
Desktop Linux but I am also intimately familiar with how far the user experience falls short. For an ordinary user it is (as I said) a pain to use compared to Windows XP or 7
Now this is Slashdot (where opinion reigns) on the Internet (where only the spooks really care what you say), but *how* are Ubuntu and Red Hat *more* of a usability pain than M-Windows? And are you saying that there is *no* pain using M-Windows, or that if there is, it is "less" somehow?
I suspect that you are observing people's ability to transfer M-Windows behaviours to other OSs. You may well observe this, of course, but then you aren't measuring the usability of "desktop Linux", you are measuring transferability. Your point of departure is prejudice.
Parental doting aside, your teenaged daughter is probably not a genius nor especially bright. She is using Linux. This is no Skinnerian experiment on your part -- the child is using it because it is usable for her.
There are M-Windows users who say they "can't use OS X because they can't find anything". Is OS X therefore worse in usability? You know it is not. Unless you only care about transferability.
I'm sure we all know at least 10 M-Windows users who can't solve any of their OS problems (configuration, infections, DLL Hell, 32bit-64bit Hell). I'm an experienced computer user and I had to do research to learn the solution to a configuration problem in M-Windows Vista. A problem that "should not have existed". It was at least as much of a pain as anything I've had to do recently with Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Red Hat, or OS X.
Is Vista as much of a "failure" in usability as Ubuntu, Mint, Red Hat, and OS X? I'm interested to know what you will say.
If you only measure transferability, you aren't measuring UI/UX quality objectively.
Seeing Oracle and Java all in the same sentence gives me a nervous tick
Well, seeing Oracle and "Eleonore, Crimepack and SEO Sploit Pack" in the same paragraph makes me nervous.
When Ellison's raiders see a money-making opportunity, they go for it.
OS X - built-in Preview app
Linux - Evince, several others
M-Windows - Foxit, Sumatra
The alternatives are so much better than Adobe Acrobat Reader that I think we can now say that the alternatives are the market and Acrobat Reader is the poor alternative.
I would have said we had ordinary people on one side, and paranoid privacy geeks on the other side.
That Nader... what a Paranoid Safety Geek. This notion of families not dying in flaming wreckage or not being flung out of windows is a fairly modern invention.
Now, it's not such a bad thing. I personally like not being flung out the window or dying in a flaming wreck of incompetent engineering. Others may have a different opinion. I'm open-minded.
You don't appear to see who is attacking whom, nor what's at stake. Eric Schmidt himself publically admitted what profiteers are doing. And what the spooks can do isn't a figment of paranoid imagination. Your "small-town" analogy is weak but I'll let you think about it.
Your rights as a citizen and the US Consitution are also fairly recent inventions that you personally may like.
There is a battle for the future of the Web, and it is not about search engines, but about the social Web
There is a battle for the future of people's *privacy*. On one side, ordinary people. On the other side, spooks and profiteers who tell us that "privacy doesn't matter".
"Cyber" is the vague sort of word that Government Management uses in an attempt to sound technologically astute. As soon as you hear a phrase such as "cyber war", you know you are dealing with a management automaton paddling beyond its depth.
It's interesting to note that this term is a back-formation made from "cybernetics":
"From Greek kubernts, governor, from kubernn, to govern."
Makes it sound as though this is another war that being invented by the government to spend the people's money to take the people's freedom away.
TFS: "There's some surprising revelations in here, too, as his portable computer runs Windows"
Very well, I am a long-time supporter of FOSS too, but I'll feed your troll: How is BS's use of M-Windows a surprise?
Is it because M-Windows has bad C++ development tools?
Is it because M-Windows is not the dominate OS?
Is it because C++ should only be used in FOSS?
Is it because BS should share your opinions or be damned?
The parent is NOT a troll. As others have noted, BS says this himself.
I find one of the most unfortunate things about C++ is that for years a large number of self-important people considered C++ to be the only language that *good programmers* know.
I have sat for interviews that were in sum nothing but quizzes about the arcane features and misfeatures of C++. The interviewers thought that they were showing me that I didn't deserve to work with "geniuses".
What they were really showing me is that I didn't want to work with arrogant primates who had lost their way in the Software Engineering Forest.
I am running Gnu-Linux on an NSLU2, a DNS-323, and a SheevaPlug. I have a free compiler on these devices.
On another computer, I just downloaded MingW and Lighttpd (source and binary) last night.
I remember when "free software" usually meant crippleware, and there was no way a poor kid eager to write code could get a compiler for free.
Thanks for your vision, RMS. You changed culture and you helped the future.
The harshest reality is that the jobs are leaving.
The jobs of the CEO and his/her pals will be staying, of course.
A university degree won't make you less expendable to a corpocracy that wants the cheapest workers. Unless you are willing to cost the same to the employer at 35 as you did at 25 (and use your benefits as little), your days are numbered.
Code Poet, Rockstar Programmer, Unit-Test Guru, Meme Zealot, Jedi Knight of the Latest Methodology, or (what is likeliest) red-tunicked member of the Roddenberry Landing Crew or Storm Trooper cannon-fodder, the real masters of this game are the Bean Counters.
The corpocracy has docile subjects. It has seen that it can lay people off without having to report it (IBM -- for years), take huge local tax breaks (which your family and community paid for) and then ship jobs overseas, and claim to be "a good citizen" while loudly claiming there are "insufficient numbers of skilled workers".
Of course, you can take the Blue Pill and go back to your pasting your face into pictures of Gates and Zuckerberg. (o:
I can hear the song now: "Hey, you, get off of my exalogic elastic compute cloud!"
Declaring FOSS "unAmerican" is how Monoposoft used to mask its own incompetence.
Works for Hollywood.
I've had a geothermal heatpump for almost 10 years. My parents for even longer.
If my skill in solving those word-problems from elementary-school math has not diminished, you are at least 11 years old.
As someone who makes hiring decisions and interviews prospects, I'm going to call bullshit.
(Deleted stuff)
Are large numbers of stupid people graduating who don't deserve their degrees? Yes. Has higher education, to some degree, become commoditized and devalued?
Yes, but it does not follow that no learning occurs at universities.
By your own admission, it does follow that you have a challenging job because you have to look for people like yourself among devalued degrees and undeserving candidates. Your personal experience at university is the minority case.
Anyway, you work in HR, so if you're not ineffectual or full of buzz-word rubbish, have a cookie.
I have both taught in university and worked in a university administration. I've been offered bribes by students to pass them. I've seen the laziness and cheating that is "group work". I've seen senior university students require remedial high-school assistance. I've watched the 10% of students who are talented wondering what sort of a Kafkaesque sham their world is.
In administration, I have seen the overpaying management positions filled by self-anointing PhDs who weren't any good at teaching either. I've seen these All-Star products of their own system try to apply their theories to the real world and it's a good thing that they are not measured by performance and progress. I've seen what university management does when the economy is imploding and courageous budgetary decisions must be made: save their salaries and stipends, and raise the tuitions and student fees.
The input of our educational system is mostly garbage and the system itself is rotten. If you find a gem in the cloaca, I am quite sure it's not a product of the educational system's intestines. (o:
It's time for the Internet to transform Education.
And you wonder why capitalism is going down the drain
Quick, buy drain stocks!
Knuth doesn't stand out amongst his peers in his field as much as those examples you've mentioned. Peers such as Siffredi, North, Holmes (etc) are all more important.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornographic_actor
(Disclaimer: I know who Knuth is but I'm just not bothered by those that don't when there's so much porn to watch.)
even hackers admit we're doing a better job making our products more secure than anyone else
Hmmm, Symantec, McAfee, Kaspersky and 34 others all appear to be working harder than Microsoft to make Microsoft products more secure.
What R&D hobbies do Slashdotters have that provide them with opportunities to make interesting discoveries and potentially chart new territory in the home?
Chatroulette and Remote Web Cam Control are really big right now.