For me, the whole thing started when I was a young, bright eyed boy with delusions of being a programmer one day. I was always fascinated by computers, and was supported in my growing interest by my parents, who bought me my first commodore 64 for chirstmas. From that day I was hooked, and I tried BASIC and all the rest (played games too, but who dosen't), and it seemed that the sky was the limit. I tried my hand at graphics programming, with some amount of success.
The problems started however when I went and bought a PC. Everything got harder real quick. Of course I just thought that this was because this was a more "sophisticated" machine than the old commodore, with it's intuitive user interface ("put disk in drive") and easy to learn syntax (10 print 'hello' 20 goto 10). So obviously this monstrous machine with it's peripheral printer and fancy mouse would be more of a challenge. I figured that, down the line, some underlying logic would make itself apparent, and I would again be able to surf the creative waves of programmer heaven.
However, no logic made itself apparent. Sure, there were bits of logic, scattered hither and yon like wounded soldiers on a battlefield, weeping for their mother. But like those soldiers, these fragments of logic were lost and directionless and had no real reason for being there apart from the Demon Lord of Backward Compatibility and his minions the Deadlines of Fate and Versions of Mayhem. At times it seemed like I was having an ongoing conversation with the computer:
Computer : "You can't access memory over 1mb" Me : "Why?" Computer : "I don't know"
Computer : "You can't do that." Me : "Why?" Computer : "No reason. Just 'cause."
It started to occur to me on an intuitive level that there oughtta be a better way for things to work. I mean, the reasons for the way things work didn't seem like any kinda good reason, they sounded more like someone had just made them up because they had a deadline to catch and didn't want to put the work in to make the product the way it should be. But this didn't make sense, because what kind of person wouldn't put the work in? Who would go and create an operating system if they didn't love their work the way I did? Who would get into computer programming just for the money? What kind of money was in it anyway? Look at me, I was actively losing money trying to program, having saved up all my money to buy this beast in the first place.
So I started to believe that the fault must be mine. That there were in fact very good reasons for all the contradictory logic, I just wasn't intelligent enough to understand what they were. I was stupid.
And then came the crunch. I worked like a son of a bitch, got myself into college, taught myself some languages, and got the computer to grind out sprites that were easily as fast if not faster than contemporary platform games. Horay for me, I spend a whole summer in a bathrode poring over assembly language printouts. God knows why my girlfriend stayed with me.
And then they released Windows 95.
Bastards.
But I had it working. It worked, look at it, it's so beautiful.
But we don't want that old DOS crap any more, we have these things called 3D accellerators that we want to plug in to.
Well, ok, if you say so. Bye bye assembly language.
Let's see what this new fangled internet connection I have in college has to say about how to program in windows 95...
jesus...... and then I have to do what?......em...
Where do I get one of them?.. I have to BUY it? How much?.
But I don't have that much money I'm a student. Em, mister dean, can I have a copy of... no? Ok.
.
So at the tender age of 19 I came to understand that if I wanted to surf the creative program waves or whatever the hell, I would not only need access to funding beyond what I was capable of, but also have to climb up the learning curve ladder that had taken so much of
OH MY GOD. This post is pure spam - read the last sentence "I'll start up this new company if you pay me $30 a month". I can only think that having it up on slashdot will encourage people to give him cash, too. Be careful people.
The complexity cost of a system will be as high as the competence level of your development staff. Open Source is complex in that is favours good, solid programming over lazy inept programming (though the perpetual global review and analysis that goes on in any healthy OS project).
However, much of the complexity is taken away after a certain threshold of competence is acheived.
In my experience, when working on a problem in a windows system (development or support) there is always confusion around what has cause the problem - is it video drivers, is it this dll, is it something else entirely. Cost of complexity and the vast unknown that is the Windows system is huge.
On the flipside, a linux discussion around a given problem contains less confusion about what caused it, and more suggestions on how to fix it.
At Last! I have created a potion of greatest chill, which in it's tiniest amounts will make a slavering religious loony a relaxed and generally agreeable stoner. I have but to place this in the world's water for the world to be nicely chilled... now all I need is to make sure the bottle top's on......oh never mind...
The question of client value is one that has been ignored up until very recently, with areas like interaction design, and Agile methodologies incorporating client needs and goals into the day to day programming work. It comes down to this - only do what work has obvious value to the customer . The only question for these standardizers is : what value does this peice of work have? I would purport that standarizing on a language across multiple disparate teams for it's own sake has no value. So whats the reason these people have for wasting company time and money?
Are they backed up in their claims by metrics, prior experience of a successful changeover, or published works backing them up? OR are they, as I would assume, going with a bad idea through lack of imagination? Trollish as it may sound, lack of imagination in people who have big ideas is a bigger problem than people realise.
Those who come to the idea first, and quickly, are those who are most unwilling to change (src: http://www.poppendieck.com/ Lean development techniques). It is exactly these types of personality which graduate towards management positions, pushing bad ideas until they are proven irrevocably wrong.
Who are they anyway? Are they programmers themselves? (in which case I'd be inclined to dismiss their opinion on the basis they are naturally biased to one language anyway) or are they managers? (in which case I'd be inclined to dismiss their opinion on the basis they don't know what they're talking about)
Warning: a small spec of dust on the lens may, under the right conditions, refract the light into a four-way square structure, forever burning the microsoft logo into your eye.
You can't draw that conclusion from the fact that Apple users feel no pain when they first use the machine. Windows causes pain, OS dosen't. If journalists (the ultimate end user with the power to change trends) don't complain about it, it's a good product in my opinion. Get them in front of a windows desktop and see how long it is before MS is brought to it's knees by bad press.
They must pass four tests, each more devious than the last. The first, an unsolveable puzzle in the dungeon of Redmond. The second, a riddle given by the black granite face of the Ogre of Northrend. The third, a random encounter with a 13th level creature from the DnD monster manual, and lastly, the task of stealing fire from Bill Gate's Obsidian Tower.
I thought we'd grown out of being patronizing towards Africa. "Oh, look, the little black people couldn't possibly get their heads round computers, or voting, so we shouldn't give them either because they won't use it responsibly."
We as in "humanity". The article itself reads like a nazi handbook. I'm not saying there aren't big leaps to be made to help people who have had parts of their heart arbitrarily frozen by probes, I'm just sayin in the cosmic view of things there are no free lunches.
"Kudos for Microsoft"? From an anonymous reader? Who just happened to mention all those figures in the same sentence? Does this anonymous reader work for Microsoft? Am I paranoid?
Slashdot Mirror
For me, the whole thing started when I was a young, bright eyed boy with delusions of being a programmer one day. I was always fascinated by computers, and was supported in my growing interest by my parents, who bought me my first commodore 64 for chirstmas. From that day I was hooked, and I tried BASIC and all the rest (played games too, but who dosen't), and it seemed that the sky was the limit. I tried my hand at graphics programming, with some amount of success.
... and then I have to do what?... ...em...
.. I have to BUY it? How much?.
The problems started however when I went and bought a PC. Everything got harder real quick. Of course I just thought that this was because this was a more "sophisticated" machine than the old commodore, with it's intuitive user interface ("put disk in drive") and easy to learn syntax (10 print 'hello' 20 goto 10). So obviously this monstrous machine with it's peripheral printer and fancy mouse would be more of a challenge. I figured that, down the line, some underlying logic would make itself apparent, and I would again be able to surf the creative waves of programmer heaven.
However, no logic made itself apparent. Sure, there were bits of logic, scattered hither and yon like wounded soldiers on a battlefield, weeping for their mother. But like those soldiers, these fragments of logic were lost and directionless and had no real reason for being there apart from the Demon Lord of Backward Compatibility and his minions the Deadlines of Fate and Versions of Mayhem. At times it seemed like I was having an ongoing conversation with the computer:
Computer : "You can't access memory over 1mb"
Me : "Why?"
Computer : "I don't know"
Computer : "You can't do that."
Me : "Why?"
Computer : "No reason. Just 'cause."
It started to occur to me on an intuitive level that there oughtta be a better way for things to work. I mean, the reasons for the way things work didn't seem like any kinda good reason, they sounded more like someone had just made them up because they had a deadline to catch and didn't want to put the work in to make the product the way it should be. But this didn't make sense, because what kind of person wouldn't put the work in? Who would go and create an operating system if they didn't love their work the way I did? Who would get into computer programming just for the money? What kind of money was in it anyway? Look at me, I was actively losing money trying to program, having saved up all my money to buy this beast in the first place.
So I started to believe that the fault must be mine. That there were in fact very good reasons for all the contradictory logic, I just wasn't intelligent enough to understand what they were. I was stupid.
And then came the crunch. I worked like a son of a bitch, got myself into college, taught myself some languages, and got the computer to grind out sprites that were easily as fast if not faster than contemporary platform games. Horay for me, I spend a whole summer in a bathrode poring over assembly language printouts. God knows why my girlfriend stayed with me.
And then they released Windows 95.
Bastards.
But I had it working. It worked, look at it, it's so beautiful.
But we don't want that old DOS crap any more, we have these things called 3D accellerators that we want to plug in to.
Well, ok, if you say so. Bye bye assembly language.
Let's see what this new fangled internet connection I have in college has to say about how to program in windows 95...
jesus...
Where do I get one of them?
But I don't have that much money I'm a student. Em, mister dean, can I have a copy of... no? Ok.
.
So at the tender age of 19 I came to understand that if I wanted to surf the creative program waves or whatever the hell, I would not only need access to funding beyond what I was capable of, but also have to climb up the learning curve ladder that had taken so much of
OH MY GOD. This post is pure spam - read the last sentence "I'll start up this new company if you pay me $30 a month". I can only think that having it up on slashdot will encourage people to give him cash, too. Be careful people.
The complexity cost of a system will be as high as the competence level of your development staff. Open Source is complex in that is favours good, solid programming over lazy inept programming (though the perpetual global review and analysis that goes on in any healthy OS project).
However, much of the complexity is taken away after a certain threshold of competence is acheived.
In my experience, when working on a problem in a windows system (development or support) there is always confusion around what has cause the problem - is it video drivers, is it this dll, is it something else entirely. Cost of complexity and the vast unknown that is the Windows system is huge.
On the flipside, a linux discussion around a given problem contains less confusion about what caused it, and more suggestions on how to fix it.
At Last! I have created a potion of greatest chill, which in it's tiniest amounts will make a slavering religious loony a relaxed and generally agreeable stoner. I have but to place this in the world's water for the world to be nicely chilled... now all I need is to make sure the bottle top's on... ...oh never mind...
The question of client value is one that has been ignored up until very recently, with areas like interaction design, and Agile methodologies incorporating client needs and goals into the day to day programming work. It comes down to this - only do what work has obvious value to the customer . The only question for these standardizers is : what value does this peice of work have? I would purport that standarizing on a language across multiple disparate teams for it's own sake has no value. So whats the reason these people have for wasting company time and money? Are they backed up in their claims by metrics, prior experience of a successful changeover, or published works backing them up? OR are they, as I would assume, going with a bad idea through lack of imagination? Trollish as it may sound, lack of imagination in people who have big ideas is a bigger problem than people realise. Those who come to the idea first, and quickly, are those who are most unwilling to change (src: http://www.poppendieck.com/ Lean development techniques). It is exactly these types of personality which graduate towards management positions, pushing bad ideas until they are proven irrevocably wrong. Who are they anyway? Are they programmers themselves? (in which case I'd be inclined to dismiss their opinion on the basis they are naturally biased to one language anyway) or are they managers? (in which case I'd be inclined to dismiss their opinion on the basis they don't know what they're talking about)
Warning: a small spec of dust on the lens may, under the right conditions, refract the light into a four-way square structure, forever burning the microsoft logo into your eye.
You can't draw that conclusion from the fact that Apple users feel no pain when they first use the machine. Windows causes pain, OS dosen't. If journalists (the ultimate end user with the power to change trends) don't complain about it, it's a good product in my opinion. Get them in front of a windows desktop and see how long it is before MS is brought to it's knees by bad press.
They must pass four tests, each more devious than the last. The first, an unsolveable puzzle in the dungeon of Redmond. The second, a riddle given by the black granite face of the Ogre of Northrend. The third, a random encounter with a 13th level creature from the DnD monster manual, and lastly, the task of stealing fire from Bill Gate's Obsidian Tower.
I thought we'd grown out of being patronizing towards Africa. "Oh, look, the little black people couldn't possibly get their heads round computers, or voting, so we shouldn't give them either because they won't use it responsibly."
We as in "humanity". The article itself reads like a nazi handbook. I'm not saying there aren't big leaps to be made to help people who have had parts of their heart arbitrarily frozen by probes, I'm just sayin in the cosmic view of things there are no free lunches.
You know, on a purely Karmic level, we're gonna have to pay up bigtime eventually...
"Kudos for Microsoft"? From an anonymous reader? Who just happened to mention all those figures in the same sentence? Does this anonymous reader work for Microsoft? Am I paranoid?