If someone isn't willing to hire someone with their own brain, who puts the needs of the corp ahead of their manager's petty concerns, then fuck them, right up the ass.
You can fuck them wherever you like, but I want to make a living. And I learned a long time ago that I don't work for the company, I work for my manager. When my manager asks me to do something that I think costs the company money, I'll voice my concern, but then I'll do it. He hired me, he can fire me, he does my reviews and decides my raises, so he's the one I have to please. The company's given him all that power, pays him a boatload of money, and to me, that's the company expressing its confidence that his petty concerns are the company's, if you ask me.
There was a time when MS told developers that the only guaranteed writable dir was the windows dir, since your app could be running on a network installation of windows (where everything was on a network drive, but a tiny secondary windows dir would be created on the local machine so that settings (i.e. INI files) could still be per user).
But that was > 10 years ago, before they created the Windows registry and told developers to switch to using that. I'd hate to think how many components are not even looked at let alone updated with each "new version" of Office.
And how many people have really ever been power users of email clients?
Maybe more than you think. Back in the day I used mush, Mail User's Shell, and it literally was a full-blown shell environment, similar to csh, for email. Teh web was practically nothing at the time (I barely heard of Mosaic), so I lived on mush, trn, vi, and procmail.
Is this some Java-centric approach to software, where if there's not already a library for it, it's simply declared not worth doing? Seriously, I hope you're having a good time working on all those software projects that are so similar to what you've done many times before that there's this simple recipe for estimating. I seem to get things that I've never done before, and don't know how to do yet, or even how long it will take me to learn how to do, when I'm asked for estimates.
My manager and I do a simplified variation of that. I give a time estimate, and then a Risk value of either low, medium, or high, where the risk indicates my level of confidence that I can even do it. He then uses that as a gauge of the potential variability of the time estimate.
He had mentioned to me early in starting to work for him that he believes he's found that there are fudge factors for each of his developers, and he's learned what they are. He said so-and-so always estimates by 50%, so I double it, this person always specifies 3 times too much, so I always third his estimates, etc. This is like saying you've identified the scientific principles of astrology! It's bad enough he believes that you can estimate software, but the idea that people as well can be simplified down to predictable, widget-like terms gave me the creeps. And I didn't want him thinking of this developer that way.
MS doesn't have a marketshare with IE, because there is no market -- it's free. So their lack of incentive to keep up with alternative web browsers, whether open source or closed source or other, remains. IE7 is only a priority because they've been getting beat up on security, and an unconfigured IE6 leaves Windows open to attack. And that's an attack on their revenue stream. If there weren't tons of security problems via IE6, there would never have been an IE7, and Mozilla or anyone else could get 90% "marketshare" and MS wouldn't have cared less, as long as it didn't affect Windows' sales.
Yeah and the amount of mobo RAM needed is dependent on how many programs you want to run and how piggy they are, but that didn't stop MS from at least giving a guideline. They don't specify, so technical news sites use technical terms like "plenty". Super.
No. These days you need pretty high-powered graphics cards for games, but when you're not playing, what else is there for the GPU to do? It might as well loaf through drawing a few 3D transparent windows, in between tapping its fingers.
The 1Ghz CPU and 1GB RAM and DirectX 9 graphics is understandable, but what exactly does "plenty" of video RAM mean? For the full-blown Aero "experience" do I need 512 or 256 or 1024 or what?
C++ makes it difficult to use complex data structures...
It does? I've always managed, somehow. If you're referring to things like structures of pointers to structures, smart pointer techniques have been around for ages that manage cleanup. Maybe not as trivial as a scripting language, but not difficult.
Python also has the advantage of making object oriented programming simple, whereas the convoluted structure of C++ struct-based objects discourages programmers from taking advantage of them.
Nice talking out your ass there. Ya, C++ programmers everywhere refuse to use struct-based objects (i.e. C++'s classes) and OOP because they're so discouraging.
Check to see if your university has an extension program. I didn't know these things existed when I went to school, but I make heavy use of them now. These are where you sign up for an individual class here and there -- no commitments or programs to enroll in, no transcripts to submit, etc. Around here it's typically 1 night a week for 3-4 hours, for 6-8 weeks, around $600 a class, company pays.
Many uni's have distance learning programs, but there are so many free tutorials on the web, I like to be taught by a live person I can throw questions at, to get that kind of money's worth.
If you had tried developing on NS back in the day of the 4.x versions, when it lost to IE, and were attempting anything non-trivial with JavaScript and DHTML, you'd know painfully well why it died -- it was the crashiest, render bug filled POS platform ever.
1) Monkey-boy said in TFA "...Microsoft has returned $87bn to shareholders through buybacks and dividends since 2001,...", so you should've already seen the money.
My pickup truck is a 1970 Chevy C10... -- The Earth's biosphere can't be traded in next year like that SUV you're eyeing, dude.
Nice. The dude who's wagging his finger at potential SUV buyers drives a big old truck that gets terrible gas mileage (1970-era 5.7L V8, plus 3-speed tranny) and pollutes like a mofo (predates catalytic converters, and due to the age most likely exempt from mandated smog checks).
However: 1) Electricity and water are consumed in using it. The provider then has to make more, whereas with software this is not the case. With software as a service there isn't even costs of packaging, stamping CD's, buying shelf space at CompUSA, etc. IANAEconomist, but this takes a product that has a very high initial cost but then a very small cost per unit sold, and moves it into the realm of even tinier costs per unit sold. Utility companies have relatively high costs per unit sold.
2) Electricity and water generation equipment, that is, the means to buy something once and never have to purchase anything again to then consume all the electricity and water I want, is generally not feasible financially. Software is. We all stopped renting a telephone from Ma Bell when we could buy them.
Let's face it, if companies didn't think it would be overall more profitable, they wouldn't do it. Kind of like extended warranties. That alone makes me think I might not be getting such a great deal if we are switched to this delivery and pricing model.
I don't currently, but I definitely would if that's what we had in the U.S. Thank goodness we don't. (FYI) I do like it on a small scale, such as a state referendum or ballot initiative process, where with enough popular support, and with the courts as a check, something can get done that may be being blocked by one or a few powerful members of a legislative body.
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If someone isn't willing to hire someone with their own brain, who puts the needs of the corp ahead of their manager's petty concerns, then fuck them, right up the ass.
You can fuck them wherever you like, but I want to make a living. And I learned a long time ago that I don't work for the company, I work for my manager. When my manager asks me to do something that I think costs the company money, I'll voice my concern, but then I'll do it. He hired me, he can fire me, he does my reviews and decides my raises, so he's the one I have to please. The company's given him all that power, pays him a boatload of money, and to me, that's the company expressing its confidence that his petty concerns are the company's, if you ask me.
Yup. It's best to use either MakeMeAdmin or DropMyRights, which add or remove privileges to the account you're already using.
I personally find it easier, esp. as a developer, to take the latter approach -- log in as admin, but run net apps neutered.
There was a time when MS told developers that the only guaranteed writable dir was the windows dir, since your app could be running on a network installation of windows (where everything was on a network drive, but a tiny secondary windows dir would be created on the local machine so that settings (i.e. INI files) could still be per user).
But that was > 10 years ago, before they created the Windows registry and told developers to switch to using that. I'd hate to think how many components are not even looked at let alone updated with each "new version" of Office.
And how many people have really ever been power users of email clients?
Maybe more than you think. Back in the day I used mush, Mail User's Shell, and it literally was a full-blown shell environment, similar to csh, for email. Teh web was practically nothing at the time (I barely heard of Mosaic), so I lived on mush, trn, vi, and procmail.
Speaking from experience (including having never caught anything myself):
Setting a shortcut once to run IE as a regular user is not "a huge pain in the ass".
And Outlook can be set to always open emails as plain text -- no web bugs, no scripts.
So E-Z Step #1 can be omitted. The other three still remain, as they are the really important ones.
It's only fair, if managers get to use Magic Eightballs, that we should get to use D&D dice.
Is this some Java-centric approach to software, where if there's not already a library for it, it's simply declared not worth doing? Seriously, I hope you're having a good time working on all those software projects that are so similar to what you've done many times before that there's this simple recipe for estimating. I seem to get things that I've never done before, and don't know how to do yet, or even how long it will take me to learn how to do, when I'm asked for estimates.
My manager and I do a simplified variation of that. I give a time estimate, and then a Risk value of either low, medium, or high, where the risk indicates my level of confidence that I can even do it. He then uses that as a gauge of the potential variability of the time estimate.
He had mentioned to me early in starting to work for him that he believes he's found that there are fudge factors for each of his developers, and he's learned what they are. He said so-and-so always estimates by 50%, so I double it, this person always specifies 3 times too much, so I always third his estimates, etc. This is like saying you've identified the scientific principles of astrology! It's bad enough he believes that you can estimate software, but the idea that people as well can be simplified down to predictable, widget-like terms gave me the creeps. And I didn't want him thinking of this developer that way.
Of what? He's only 39, at the mid-point of (U.S.) life expectancy.
Maybe you mean this. In that case, he's died many times. Usually from rockets, but the chainsaw or even plain fists is sometimes fun.
MS doesn't have a marketshare with IE, because there is no market -- it's free. So their lack of incentive to keep up with alternative web browsers, whether open source or closed source or other, remains. IE7 is only a priority because they've been getting beat up on security, and an unconfigured IE6 leaves Windows open to attack. And that's an attack on their revenue stream. If there weren't tons of security problems via IE6, there would never have been an IE7, and Mozilla or anyone else could get 90% "marketshare" and MS wouldn't have cared less, as long as it didn't affect Windows' sales.
When ideas are patentable, what doesn't deserve a patent?
When actions are punishable by the state with fines and/or jail time, what action doesn't deserve such punishment?
Yeah and the amount of mobo RAM needed is dependent on how many programs you want to run and how piggy they are, but that didn't stop MS from at least giving a guideline. They don't specify, so technical news sites use technical terms like "plenty". Super.
No. These days you need pretty high-powered graphics cards for games, but when you're not playing, what else is there for the GPU to do? It might as well loaf through drawing a few 3D transparent windows, in between tapping its fingers.
The 1Ghz CPU and 1GB RAM and DirectX 9 graphics is understandable, but what exactly does "plenty" of video RAM mean? For the full-blown Aero "experience" do I need 512 or 256 or 1024 or what?
Expressive power, or syntactic sugar? To me the former means all the things I can accomplish, not all the ways I can accomplish the same things.
I miss the days when everyone didn't always over-generalize about everything all the time.
C++ makes it difficult to use complex data structures...
It does? I've always managed, somehow. If you're referring to things like structures of pointers to structures, smart pointer techniques have been around for ages that manage cleanup. Maybe not as trivial as a scripting language, but not difficult.
Python also has the advantage of making object oriented programming simple, whereas the convoluted structure of C++ struct-based objects discourages programmers from taking advantage of them.
Nice talking out your ass there. Ya, C++ programmers everywhere refuse to use struct-based objects (i.e. C++'s classes) and OOP because they're so discouraging.
They could be experts in C++, and not be already familiar with the highly unusual case of manipulating insanely large text files efficiently. Like me.
but a few people might complain about losing San Francisco and New York
was really supposed to be
and few people would complain about losing San Francisco and New York
:)
Check to see if your university has an extension program. I didn't know these things existed when I went to school, but I make heavy use of them now. These are where you sign up for an individual class here and there -- no commitments or programs to enroll in, no transcripts to submit, etc. Around here it's typically 1 night a week for 3-4 hours, for 6-8 weeks, around $600 a class, company pays.
Many uni's have distance learning programs, but there are so many free tutorials on the web, I like to be taught by a live person I can throw questions at, to get that kind of money's worth.
If you had tried developing on NS back in the day of the 4.x versions, when it lost to IE, and were attempting anything non-trivial with JavaScript and DHTML, you'd know painfully well why it died -- it was the crashiest, render bug filled POS platform ever.
1) Monkey-boy said in TFA "...Microsoft has returned $87bn to shareholders through buybacks and dividends since 2001,...", so you should've already seen the money.
2) U.S. CS students should cheer up only in proportion to the amount of that R&D budget that's going to be spent here. MS has 6 research labs, and 3 of them are located overseas. And MS is now moving crypto research from their Redmond lab to their India one.
My pickup truck is a 1970 Chevy C10...
--
The Earth's biosphere can't be traded in next year like that SUV you're eyeing, dude.
Nice. The dude who's wagging his finger at potential SUV buyers drives a big old truck that gets terrible gas mileage (1970-era 5.7L V8, plus 3-speed tranny) and pollutes like a mofo (predates catalytic converters, and due to the age most likely exempt from mandated smog checks).
However:
1) Electricity and water are consumed in using it. The provider then has to make more, whereas with software this is not the case. With software as a service there isn't even costs of packaging, stamping CD's, buying shelf space at CompUSA, etc. IANAEconomist, but this takes a product that has a very high initial cost but then a very small cost per unit sold, and moves it into the realm of even tinier costs per unit sold. Utility companies have relatively high costs per unit sold.
2) Electricity and water generation equipment, that is, the means to buy something once and never have to purchase anything again to then consume all the electricity and water I want, is generally not feasible financially. Software is. We all stopped renting a telephone from Ma Bell when we could buy them.
Let's face it, if companies didn't think it would be overall more profitable, they wouldn't do it. Kind of like extended warranties. That alone makes me think I might not be getting such a great deal if we are switched to this delivery and pricing model.
I don't currently, but I definitely would if that's what we had in the U.S. Thank goodness we don't. (FYI) I do like it on a small scale, such as a state referendum or ballot initiative process, where with enough popular support, and with the courts as a check, something can get done that may be being blocked by one or a few powerful members of a legislative body.