Perhaps Silverlight will make some noticeable in-roads with a certain development crowd, but let's not pretend that good developers make good designers. And ninety-nine times out of one hundred, swf just begs to be designed beautifully. You're going to have to rely on designers to make it pretty -- and that's what the pointy haired boss will care about as well -- which means Flash will not go quietly into the night.
I think you're right, but that being said, this is something that isn't news to Microsoft either. One of the things they're clearly trying to get at with this generation and XAML is the idea that a designer and a developer can work on the same page, each with different tools that suit their perspective/needs (i.e., Visual Studio vs. Expression Blend), without getting in each others way.
Whether or not they've actually succeeded, I couldn't say.
This seems more than a little optimistic/naive to me.
If you were still writing the simple small business app to the same requirements as ten years ago, sure, Open Source is making fantastic inroads there.
The problem is, those aren't really the market Microsoft is aiming at developer-wise today. For example, when a customer wants an app that runs in Word and integrates seamlessly with it, there isn't really going to be a competitive Open Source way to do that anytime soon -- and an awful lot of customers for an awful lot of business applications, once they understand this is an option they're not going to want it any other way.
On the database side, consider moves like SQL Server Express. It's free (as in beer), is as much of a database as a lot of small businesses need, and it's probably a lot cheaper to find someone who can do basic tuning and admin with it than it is to find somebody equally skilled with Postgre.
Microsoft definitely doesn't do everything better than everyone else, but it's seriously premature to count them out.
Three developers (including me) were then tasked to fix the issue with the site, and within a couple days we had a well-tested site that worked with any modern standards based browser.
I think this neatly sums up the whole issue: the parent poster got something that worked cross-browser, at the cost of a few days labor by three developers.
Can that much developer time be spared on every project? I'd say on a lot of mine it couldn't -- people outside the dev team had made the decision that come hell or high water, the project was launching on X date. Really, generalize this statement to "Is there always time to do the job right? Given the demands of most employers, no."
Truth be told, generally, the fancier a web site gets (in terms of functionality), the harder it is to get cross-browser development right. Also, the more stringent the customer's requirements, the harder it is to get cross-browser development right. I recall one client who had a massively thick corporate branding standards document which had to be obeyed meticulously in all development for them. Who really cares that the company logo is no less than X pixels from everything else and positioned according to a bunch of other guidelines? No one sane, but they sure did. The web wasn't originally meant to do that kind of precision layout, but corporate America demands it, and it's not always easy cross-browser.
But let's assume you really can always do it right in ten developer-days of work. Are those extra days worth the gain of the non-IE chunk of the market? In most cases I'd say yes, but depending on the target audience, not necessarily so. A majority (not all) of my web project clients over the years have demanded that the project look the way they wanted in IE, and they couldn't be persuaded that any other browser was even important. Their funeral, but he who pays, says.
(And, of course, sometimes the web developer is just lazy or doesn't know better.)
Basically, this is over in a completely different space. Apples and oranges. Although, technically WPF is part of.NET 3.0.
If C#/.NET is Microsoft's answer to Java, this is their answer to stuff like Flash.
I mean, sure, you could use Flash to essentially build web forms or basic UI. We've all seen that done, and in that sense you could say WPF/Silverlight/etc. overlaps with the kind of UI you could build with C# web controls or Java Swing or whatever, but it's not what Flash is really for. This is MS trying to compete with Adobe in areas where people should actually be using Flash on purpose.
(Oh, and since you ask, Visual Studio is the IDE that one would typically use to create.NET framework applications. Related but not really one becoming the other.)
I'm familiar. They do simplify state maintenance to a point and are appropriate for a lot of different things you could do with a web app, but I think you're kidding yourself if you don't think there isn't extra thought/work involved there and some extra performance concerns that you wouldn't need to have with an equivalent desktop app.
You're never going to get the performance on the web (for most things) that you can running locally. Equally, while tools and frameworks for faking it have gotten a lot better, maintaining state is a pain in the ass on the web and generally is not on the desktop.
It's like when Java came out and some people said we'd never write C again. There are things Java is good for and has taken over, just as there are things web apps are good for and has taken over, but there is still a place for desktop apps just as there is still a place for C.
The kind of bold, sweeping statements made by this article aren't much more than flamebait in a pretty dress.
I've got a few friends who each have worked a couple different jobs in the game industry.
The short version is, yes, it is that bad.
The long version is, I wonder sometimes. On one hand, they're very often there late at night and on weekends. On the other hand, a lot of these guys roll into the office at 11 in the morning, surf the web for half an hour and go to lunch. Team goofing off seems more accepted in the game industry than any other programming or art job, too -- if you want to take an hour to play pool or Warcraft, even if these have nothing to do with the game you're working on, more power to you. Does this all still add up to more than 40 hours of real work a week? Probably, but it probably doesn't add up to 80, either.
The only thing I feel sure of is that, with few if any exceptions, you can't really work 9-5 in this industry. This is not a job for people who want to have kids and actually see them.
I think OpenOffice can do the plugin thing better than MS can. Just look how multi platform plugins work for Firefox. The OO team can make cross platform plugins that work pretty seamlessly if they tried. MS will be locked into doing it on Windows only.
Multi-platform plugins don't get you anywhere in this context, because people who run recent versions of Office are pretty much running Windows already.
I could be wrong of course but I don't see how MS can do plugins better than the OO people, especially consider OO uses open API's and formats. I would find OO the much more appealing option if I were a developer.
There's a couple different things to mention here:
1) In its heyday, (and I don't have numbers handy for this, so I may be wrong) there were more people programming in VBA than any programming language in the world. I have to use the word programming loosely here, because most of these people wouldn't identify themselves as programmers -- more, people just trying to use Excel or whatever to get some task done, automating or simplifying part of their job with little programs and VBA macros. There hasn't been a reasonable successor or update of VBA in probably near 10 years, and that kind of "hey, everyone's a programmer" mentality is something MS is trying to push again with Office '07.
Thankfully, security is way better on what they're exposing these days. I think a lot of us still have Word macro nightmares. But that being said, the sheer accessability of this kind of 'coding light' I think will get a lot of people hacking on Office 2007 stuff that would never dream of firing up a C/Java/etc. compiler even if they were using Open Office.
The APIs being exposed now in Office are both simple and powerful, relative to anything of the kind I can remember seeing for any mainstream app. Let's say you want to author a plug-in for Outlook for the salespeople at your manufacturing company; when they get an e-mail from one of their customers, it will bring up a panel that shows sales history information for that customer (from a pre-existing database that that sort of company almost always has) in a pretty little graph, along with information on who that customer's primary salesperson is, contact information, etc. Someone with a decent idea of what they're doing could reasonably author that in an hour or two. I just can't imagine that kind of rapid development for a similar plug-in for OO, especially if you wanted it to look half as nice.
2) On the other hand, if you're coming from the perspective of being a professional developer and wanting to author some kind of more generally useful plug-in to try to sell it, Office is the clear winner just because its installed user base is so massive.
3) Typically, Open Source software is more feature-rich, more powerful, and more secure than its closed-source counterparts -- but also less visually appealing, less well documented, and generally harder to use. This tends to be true in terms of how easy it is to add on to the software in these areas, too. When you've got a tool primarily aimed at developers like Subversion, giving up a lot of usability for a lot of stability/power is a pretty good trade; when you've got something aimed at Joe Business User, not so much.
There are lots of people out there that hate Windows and know about the alternatives, but still use it. Office is probably the most common reason why. I've worked with consultants from IBM who wouldn't touch.NET with a fifty foot pole, but nonetheless were using Office on their work machines and Outlook for their e-mail instead of Lotus notes (which IBM makes) or a free alternative. I can't imagine any stronger statement about the pervasiveness of Office than that.
Not that I think there's very much room for improvement on MS Office at all at this point
Having played with Office 2007 a little bit, I feel like they were mostly trying to get two things done:
1) Improve the UI. I can't think of anything I ever wanted Office 2003 to do that it wouldn't do -- but figuring out how the hell to make it happen, that was the rub.
2) Open up the APIs better from a developer perspective and make it easy to write other programs that interact with Office easily, such as plug-ins for Office at both the document and application levels.
You can write some pretty amazing (and easy to use / pretty) things to tie into Office now fairly quickly. It's going to be like a million monkeys with VBA macros all over again, except with way better UI and security. Some of them are bound to turn up something really good out of the sea of crap that emerges.
This second point is something I don't see OpenOffice being capable of competing with -- sure, you could try to streamline the OO APIs and make it easier to hack on, but you still wouldn't be writing a plug-in for the world's most popular spreadsheet (or whatever) program and there wouldn't be as wide of developer appeal. Then again, I don't think OO was ever trying to go for that market -- they're more for the "Look, I just want something that can read.doc files that works" crowd.
Not that I'm an SAP fan either, but based on my experiences trying to get good answers out of Oracle's support materials in the past, I'm baffled as to why anyone would even want a copy of it.
Don't get me wrong, there are projects where I'd still use Oracle even so, but if I need Oracle support documents I'm probably going to Google and ignoring any of the responses that go to oracle.com. Generally, some random yahoo on the internet has done a better job of explaining Oracle's products/bugs/problems.
Well, are you implying that they train to be psychics or prognosticators? Because a lot of the time users don't know what they really want either, at least until well into the process.
There will always be clients that can't be helped, but it's a hallmark of a great consultant (not as general of a term as could be accurate here -- I'd say programmer, but a lot of programmers don't have client/user/whatever-facing roles) to be able to, more often than not, give the client software that does what they really need, even when the client doesn't themselves know at the start what that is.
There is some guesswork here, but in general it's not Psychic Friends Network style voodoo. A lot of it really is in how you approach the users, what questions you ask, and how you discover all the tricky little details they take for granted.
Let me start by saying that I agree wholeheartedly with 90% of what you're written here.
However!
but I just don't see how it is possible to achieve great writing in a medium where the chief goal is leading towards allowing the player as much freedom as possible to create his own narrative.
I'm not convinced this is necesarily the case. I grant you, there are some great sandboxy games out there that allow the player a ton of freedom... but looking back at some of the games that I really enjoyed playing or thought had great stories, a lot of them were pretty linear. I don't think we'll stop seeing game creators explore either end of that spectrum anytime soon.
Not to nitpick too much, but people put a price on life all the time. Now, if you want to say that we shouldn't put a price on life, that's possibly another story.
I think you do raise some interesting points and I agree with a lot of what you have to say, but ultimately I have to feel like it's a little overly optimistic/naive. I don't, for example, really see people who currently shelter violent terrorists shunning them if their crimes were to be known, because said people probably don't share your/our view of what constitutes innocent victims. How great it would be if the solution to all problems was just to tell people the truth, but I don't think that's the world we live in.
Obligatory Simpsons:
Salesman: Surely you can't put a price on your family's lives? Homer: I wouldn't have thought so either, but here we are.
Er, get a new job? A company that cares about certification, especially in a technology that you're not even using, doesn't sound like a good one to work for.
It depends. If they do a lot of work that touches on what the other developers at the company (who, apparently, do use a lot of J2EE) do, it might well make sense to get those developers more familiar with the basic architecture and terms that the others are using.
Potentially, it could bring more opportunities for the teams to collaborate, or for developers to switch teams if they want to. These aren't necessarily bad things.
I'm not sure certification will be good for your career. When I see it on a resume, my first thought isn't "Wow, here's an expert!"; it's "Why did this person need to get certification?"
Honestly, both of those first thoughts are wrong.
A better answer is to accept certification for what it is, and not try to make more or less of it than that. It's a reasonably good assurance that the person has been exposed to the basics of what the cert is supposed to cover and has some knowledge of the tools or technologies involved.
It's not the sign of an expert programmer (something I'd say is very hard to discern from a resume or even an interview period) and it's not the sign of a bozo with no useful experience or skills, either. I've worked with my fair share of people who were, generally, smart programmers but who also spent weeks reinventing the wheel because they had no idea that the language/framework/tool they were using had a feature which dramatically simplified the problem. The kind of knowledge you accrue getting a cert doesn't make you a great programmer, but it does cut down on that kind of lost time a great deal. Better to know what the established answer is and, if necessary, be able to reject it for the purposes of the problem you're trying to solve from an educated viewpoint, than to reject it by default by not knowing at all. Sure, a programmer could rigorously study all the available features and libraries of a new language they're starting to use and gain this knowledge without attempting to learn it from a cert, but my experience is that people generally don't.
Without knowing the specifics of this law, I would say that "Low Income" probably means something different in San Francisco than you'd expect.
It's been a few years since I lived there, but... at the time, there were laws in place that apartment complexes meeting certain size criteria or what have you were required to offer some percentage of their units at reduced rates to "low income" residents. At one apartment complex I looked at living at at the time, "low income" was any family with a household income less than $62k.
We got rights back after the Revolutionary war, the civil war, WWI, WWII, we'll get whatever is lost after this war as well.
That would imply that the "War on Terror" is meant to have an end. I suggest to you that this is optimistic.
There notably isn't anything about the KKK in the article you link. But, for the moment, assuming this is true... that's an even stronger argument for limits on presidential power and preservation of civil rights -- because it's not about if you trust this president, it's about if you trust everyone who might ever be president.
The fact of the matter is, as long as a user isn't computer illiterate to the point that they can't operate a mouse, any modern user-oriented desktop operating system will work fine for them - Windows XP, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.
Clearly, you've never done tech support.:)
(Possibly including for ignorant enough family members who would be better off if they couldn't operate a mouse -- so far, everything but OS X beat the stuffing out of my father-in-law.)
Anyone who's ever built an install for an Windows environment, be it with the (weak) tool in Visual Studio or InstallShield or whatever has most likely seen an option screen where you can choose to check which OSes the install is for (and will be allowed to be used on.)
A software developer could've just as easily built software that locked out Win2k five or more years ago if they wanted to.
If Sun's goal is assumed to be freedom, sure, that's true. Probably their goal is the best interest of the company and to some degree its customers. A lot of times free software will serve that, but I don't think it necessarily best serves it in all cases.
I think there's great things to be found, even for businesses in free software -- I just wish people saw it as more an option and less a religion.
It will mean something when Solaris us placed under it.
Why does this have to be the case? Why does it have to be black and white, all or nothing? Why can't open source be the right answer for some of Sun's projects and not the right answer for others? This seems perfectly sensible to me.
If you're a half decent programmer you'd be able to code just as well with a text editor as with an IDE. That fact that you imply you can't says more about you than the linux dev enviroment.
No, no it doesn't. It does say something about the kinds of projects you've worked on. Nothing bad, per se, just limited or specialized in some respects.
When I work in C (usually on projects with no graphical UI to speak of) I pretty much always use a text editor and in a linux environment. No problems there. I'm sure there are better IDEs for that even, really, but it's what I'm used to and it works fine for what I do.
But when I'm doing a web project or something with a reasonably modern GUI? No way. A good IDE for the appropriate language/environment saves so much time and suffering there. Sure, I could get that stuff done with a text editor if I had to, but I've also put nails in with a shoe because I didn't have a hammer handy. Possible, but given the alternative, what sane person would?
How much time have you spent working with SQL Server?
I haven't ever had a problem of this type with it. You can specify what you need to. It's just less frustrating to work with as a developer for a number of reasons.
(I also wrestle with Word's auto-formatting. This isn't anything like that.)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps Silverlight will make some noticeable in-roads with a certain development crowd, but let's not pretend that good developers make good designers. And ninety-nine times out of one hundred, swf just begs to be designed beautifully. You're going to have to rely on designers to make it pretty -- and that's what the pointy haired boss will care about as well -- which means Flash will not go quietly into the night.
I think you're right, but that being said, this is something that isn't news to Microsoft either. One of the things they're clearly trying to get at with this generation and XAML is the idea that a designer and a developer can work on the same page, each with different tools that suit their perspective/needs (i.e., Visual Studio vs. Expression Blend), without getting in each others way.
Whether or not they've actually succeeded, I couldn't say.
This seems more than a little optimistic/naive to me.
If you were still writing the simple small business app to the same requirements as ten years ago, sure, Open Source is making fantastic inroads there.
The problem is, those aren't really the market Microsoft is aiming at developer-wise today. For example, when a customer wants an app that runs in Word and integrates seamlessly with it, there isn't really going to be a competitive Open Source way to do that anytime soon -- and an awful lot of customers for an awful lot of business applications, once they understand this is an option they're not going to want it any other way.
On the database side, consider moves like SQL Server Express. It's free (as in beer), is as much of a database as a lot of small businesses need, and it's probably a lot cheaper to find someone who can do basic tuning and admin with it than it is to find somebody equally skilled with Postgre.
Microsoft definitely doesn't do everything better than everyone else, but it's seriously premature to count them out.
Three developers (including me) were then tasked to fix the issue with the site, and within a couple days we had a well-tested site that worked with any modern standards based browser.
I think this neatly sums up the whole issue: the parent poster got something that worked cross-browser, at the cost of a few days labor by three developers.
Can that much developer time be spared on every project? I'd say on a lot of mine it couldn't -- people outside the dev team had made the decision that come hell or high water, the project was launching on X date. Really, generalize this statement to "Is there always time to do the job right? Given the demands of most employers, no."
Truth be told, generally, the fancier a web site gets (in terms of functionality), the harder it is to get cross-browser development right. Also, the more stringent the customer's requirements, the harder it is to get cross-browser development right. I recall one client who had a massively thick corporate branding standards document which had to be obeyed meticulously in all development for them. Who really cares that the company logo is no less than X pixels from everything else and positioned according to a bunch of other guidelines? No one sane, but they sure did. The web wasn't originally meant to do that kind of precision layout, but corporate America demands it, and it's not always easy cross-browser.
But let's assume you really can always do it right in ten developer-days of work. Are those extra days worth the gain of the non-IE chunk of the market? In most cases I'd say yes, but depending on the target audience, not necessarily so. A majority (not all) of my web project clients over the years have demanded that the project look the way they wanted in IE, and they couldn't be persuaded that any other browser was even important. Their funeral, but he who pays, says.
(And, of course, sometimes the web developer is just lazy or doesn't know better.)
Basically, this is over in a completely different space. Apples and oranges. Although, technically WPF is part of .NET 3.0.
.NET framework applications. Related but not really one becoming the other.)
If C#/.NET is Microsoft's answer to Java, this is their answer to stuff like Flash.
I mean, sure, you could use Flash to essentially build web forms or basic UI. We've all seen that done, and in that sense you could say WPF/Silverlight/etc. overlaps with the kind of UI you could build with C# web controls or Java Swing or whatever, but it's not what Flash is really for. This is MS trying to compete with Adobe in areas where people should actually be using Flash on purpose.
(Oh, and since you ask, Visual Studio is the IDE that one would typically use to create
I'm familiar. They do simplify state maintenance to a point and are appropriate for a lot of different things you could do with a web app, but I think you're kidding yourself if you don't think there isn't extra thought/work involved there and some extra performance concerns that you wouldn't need to have with an equivalent desktop app.
You're never going to get the performance on the web (for most things) that you can running locally. Equally, while tools and frameworks for faking it have gotten a lot better, maintaining state is a pain in the ass on the web and generally is not on the desktop.
It's like when Java came out and some people said we'd never write C again. There are things Java is good for and has taken over, just as there are things web apps are good for and has taken over, but there is still a place for desktop apps just as there is still a place for C.
The kind of bold, sweeping statements made by this article aren't much more than flamebait in a pretty dress.
I've got a few friends who each have worked a couple different jobs in the game industry.
The short version is, yes, it is that bad.
The long version is, I wonder sometimes. On one hand, they're very often there late at night and on weekends. On the other hand, a lot of these guys roll into the office at 11 in the morning, surf the web for half an hour and go to lunch. Team goofing off seems more accepted in the game industry than any other programming or art job, too -- if you want to take an hour to play pool or Warcraft, even if these have nothing to do with the game you're working on, more power to you. Does this all still add up to more than 40 hours of real work a week? Probably, but it probably doesn't add up to 80, either.
The only thing I feel sure of is that, with few if any exceptions, you can't really work 9-5 in this industry. This is not a job for people who want to have kids and actually see them.
I think OpenOffice can do the plugin thing better than MS can. Just look how multi platform plugins work for Firefox. The OO team can make cross platform plugins that work pretty seamlessly if they tried. MS will be locked into doing it on Windows only.
.NET with a fifty foot pole, but nonetheless were using Office on their work machines and Outlook for their e-mail instead of Lotus notes (which IBM makes) or a free alternative. I can't imagine any stronger statement about the pervasiveness of Office than that.
Multi-platform plugins don't get you anywhere in this context, because people who run recent versions of Office are pretty much running Windows already. I could be wrong of course but I don't see how MS can do plugins better than the OO people, especially consider OO uses open API's and formats. I would find OO the much more appealing option if I were a developer.
There's a couple different things to mention here:
1) In its heyday, (and I don't have numbers handy for this, so I may be wrong) there were more people programming in VBA than any programming language in the world. I have to use the word programming loosely here, because most of these people wouldn't identify themselves as programmers -- more, people just trying to use Excel or whatever to get some task done, automating or simplifying part of their job with little programs and VBA macros. There hasn't been a reasonable successor or update of VBA in probably near 10 years, and that kind of "hey, everyone's a programmer" mentality is something MS is trying to push again with Office '07.
Thankfully, security is way better on what they're exposing these days. I think a lot of us still have Word macro nightmares. But that being said, the sheer accessability of this kind of 'coding light' I think will get a lot of people hacking on Office 2007 stuff that would never dream of firing up a C/Java/etc. compiler even if they were using Open Office.
The APIs being exposed now in Office are both simple and powerful, relative to anything of the kind I can remember seeing for any mainstream app. Let's say you want to author a plug-in for Outlook for the salespeople at your manufacturing company; when they get an e-mail from one of their customers, it will bring up a panel that shows sales history information for that customer (from a pre-existing database that that sort of company almost always has) in a pretty little graph, along with information on who that customer's primary salesperson is, contact information, etc. Someone with a decent idea of what they're doing could reasonably author that in an hour or two. I just can't imagine that kind of rapid development for a similar plug-in for OO, especially if you wanted it to look half as nice.
2) On the other hand, if you're coming from the perspective of being a professional developer and wanting to author some kind of more generally useful plug-in to try to sell it, Office is the clear winner just because its installed user base is so massive.
3) Typically, Open Source software is more feature-rich, more powerful, and more secure than its closed-source counterparts -- but also less visually appealing, less well documented, and generally harder to use. This tends to be true in terms of how easy it is to add on to the software in these areas, too. When you've got a tool primarily aimed at developers like Subversion, giving up a lot of usability for a lot of stability/power is a pretty good trade; when you've got something aimed at Joe Business User, not so much.
There are lots of people out there that hate Windows and know about the alternatives, but still use it. Office is probably the most common reason why. I've worked with consultants from IBM who wouldn't touch
Not that I think there's very much room for improvement on MS Office at all at this point
.doc files that works" crowd.
Having played with Office 2007 a little bit, I feel like they were mostly trying to get two things done:
1) Improve the UI. I can't think of anything I ever wanted Office 2003 to do that it wouldn't do -- but figuring out how the hell to make it happen, that was the rub.
2) Open up the APIs better from a developer perspective and make it easy to write other programs that interact with Office easily, such as plug-ins for Office at both the document and application levels.
You can write some pretty amazing (and easy to use / pretty) things to tie into Office now fairly quickly. It's going to be like a million monkeys with VBA macros all over again, except with way better UI and security. Some of them are bound to turn up something really good out of the sea of crap that emerges.
This second point is something I don't see OpenOffice being capable of competing with -- sure, you could try to streamline the OO APIs and make it easier to hack on, but you still wouldn't be writing a plug-in for the world's most popular spreadsheet (or whatever) program and there wouldn't be as wide of developer appeal. Then again, I don't think OO was ever trying to go for that market -- they're more for the "Look, I just want something that can read
Not that I'm an SAP fan either, but based on my experiences trying to get good answers out of Oracle's support materials in the past, I'm baffled as to why anyone would even want a copy of it.
Don't get me wrong, there are projects where I'd still use Oracle even so, but if I need Oracle support documents I'm probably going to Google and ignoring any of the responses that go to oracle.com. Generally, some random yahoo on the internet has done a better job of explaining Oracle's products/bugs/problems.
Well, are you implying that they train to be psychics or prognosticators? Because a lot of the time users don't know what they really want either, at least until well into the process.
There will always be clients that can't be helped, but it's a hallmark of a great consultant (not as general of a term as could be accurate here -- I'd say programmer, but a lot of programmers don't have client/user/whatever-facing roles) to be able to, more often than not, give the client software that does what they really need, even when the client doesn't themselves know at the start what that is.
There is some guesswork here, but in general it's not Psychic Friends Network style voodoo. A lot of it really is in how you approach the users, what questions you ask, and how you discover all the tricky little details they take for granted.
Let me start by saying that I agree wholeheartedly with 90% of what you're written here.
However!
but I just don't see how it is possible to achieve great writing in a medium where the chief goal is leading towards allowing the player as much freedom as possible to create his own narrative.
I'm not convinced this is necesarily the case. I grant you, there are some great sandboxy games out there that allow the player a ton of freedom... but looking back at some of the games that I really enjoyed playing or thought had great stories, a lot of them were pretty linear. I don't think we'll stop seeing game creators explore either end of that spectrum anytime soon.
You can't put a price on life.
Not to nitpick too much, but people put a price on life all the time. Now, if you want to say that we shouldn't put a price on life, that's possibly another story.
I think you do raise some interesting points and I agree with a lot of what you have to say, but ultimately I have to feel like it's a little overly optimistic/naive. I don't, for example, really see people who currently shelter violent terrorists shunning them if their crimes were to be known, because said people probably don't share your/our view of what constitutes innocent victims. How great it would be if the solution to all problems was just to tell people the truth, but I don't think that's the world we live in.
Obligatory Simpsons: Salesman: Surely you can't put a price on your family's lives?
Homer: I wouldn't have thought so either, but here we are.
Er, get a new job? A company that cares about certification, especially in a technology that you're not even using, doesn't sound like a good one to work for.
It depends. If they do a lot of work that touches on what the other developers at the company (who, apparently, do use a lot of J2EE) do, it might well make sense to get those developers more familiar with the basic architecture and terms that the others are using.
Potentially, it could bring more opportunities for the teams to collaborate, or for developers to switch teams if they want to. These aren't necessarily bad things.
I'm not sure certification will be good for your career. When I see it on a resume, my first thought isn't "Wow, here's an expert!"; it's "Why did this person need to get certification?"
Honestly, both of those first thoughts are wrong.
A better answer is to accept certification for what it is, and not try to make more or less of it than that. It's a reasonably good assurance that the person has been exposed to the basics of what the cert is supposed to cover and has some knowledge of the tools or technologies involved.
It's not the sign of an expert programmer (something I'd say is very hard to discern from a resume or even an interview period) and it's not the sign of a bozo with no useful experience or skills, either. I've worked with my fair share of people who were, generally, smart programmers but who also spent weeks reinventing the wheel because they had no idea that the language/framework/tool they were using had a feature which dramatically simplified the problem. The kind of knowledge you accrue getting a cert doesn't make you a great programmer, but it does cut down on that kind of lost time a great deal. Better to know what the established answer is and, if necessary, be able to reject it for the purposes of the problem you're trying to solve from an educated viewpoint, than to reject it by default by not knowing at all. Sure, a programmer could rigorously study all the available features and libraries of a new language they're starting to use and gain this knowledge without attempting to learn it from a cert, but my experience is that people generally don't.
Without knowing the specifics of this law, I would say that "Low Income" probably means something different in San Francisco than you'd expect.
It's been a few years since I lived there, but... at the time, there were laws in place that apartment complexes meeting certain size criteria or what have you were required to offer some percentage of their units at reduced rates to "low income" residents. At one apartment complex I looked at living at at the time, "low income" was any family with a household income less than $62k.
We got rights back after the Revolutionary war, the civil war, WWI, WWII, we'll get whatever is lost after this war as well.
That would imply that the "War on Terror" is meant to have an end. I suggest to you that this is optimistic.
There notably isn't anything about the KKK in the article you link. But, for the moment, assuming this is true... that's an even stronger argument for limits on presidential power and preservation of civil rights -- because it's not about if you trust this president, it's about if you trust everyone who might ever be president.
The limitations of the strap could only be tested by morons who will treat a $40 controller like it was a $2 toy they got with their happy meal.
:)
It's the job of a good QA department to somehow manage to round up just such morons.
The fact of the matter is, as long as a user isn't computer illiterate to the point that they can't operate a mouse, any modern user-oriented desktop operating system will work fine for them - Windows XP, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.
:)
Clearly, you've never done tech support.
(Possibly including for ignorant enough family members who would be better off if they couldn't operate a mouse -- so far, everything but OS X beat the stuffing out of my father-in-law.)
I don't understand how this is even news.
Anyone who's ever built an install for an Windows environment, be it with the (weak) tool in Visual Studio or InstallShield or whatever has most likely seen an option screen where you can choose to check which OSes the install is for (and will be allowed to be used on.)
A software developer could've just as easily built software that locked out Win2k five or more years ago if they wanted to.
If Sun's goal is assumed to be freedom, sure, that's true. Probably their goal is the best interest of the company and to some degree its customers. A lot of times free software will serve that, but I don't think it necessarily best serves it in all cases.
I think there's great things to be found, even for businesses in free software -- I just wish people saw it as more an option and less a religion.
Same question, really. Why does GPLv3 have to be the correct license for everything?
It will mean something when Solaris us placed under it.
Why does this have to be the case? Why does it have to be black and white, all or nothing? Why can't open source be the right answer for some of Sun's projects and not the right answer for others? This seems perfectly sensible to me.
If you're a half decent programmer you'd be able to code just as well with a text editor as with an IDE. That fact that you imply you can't says more about you than the linux dev enviroment.
No, no it doesn't. It does say something about the kinds of projects you've worked on. Nothing bad, per se, just limited or specialized in some respects.
When I work in C (usually on projects with no graphical UI to speak of) I pretty much always use a text editor and in a linux environment. No problems there. I'm sure there are better IDEs for that even, really, but it's what I'm used to and it works fine for what I do.
But when I'm doing a web project or something with a reasonably modern GUI? No way. A good IDE for the appropriate language/environment saves so much time and suffering there. Sure, I could get that stuff done with a text editor if I had to, but I've also put nails in with a shoe because I didn't have a hammer handy. Possible, but given the alternative, what sane person would?
Cost is irrelevant. Quality is the only measure.
That's the ivory tower answer, and from a certain perspective it's true and from a certain perspective it's not.
The last Java shop I worked in wouldn't pay for any development tools. Good tools that were free (as in beer) or close to it were at a premium.
How much time have you spent working with SQL Server?
I haven't ever had a problem of this type with it. You can specify what you need to. It's just less frustrating to work with as a developer for a number of reasons.
(I also wrestle with Word's auto-formatting. This isn't anything like that.)