It is hard to say wether the boss is an idiot (...) Management is easier said than done.
I would wish every geek to hold a management position at least once in his life (...) it would improve their view of the world and help them to cope with managers in the future.
I agree with the part that management is easier said than done. But so is coding, so is engineering... That doesn't change the fact that it was a terrible way to manage the situation.
Different people have different skills. Having all developers being managers for a day wouldn't help at all. Just as I'm expected to be a good developer, the manager is expected be a good manager. This is the type of decision taken by someone that has no idea what the real problem is. And not understanding the problems of your department is a sign of bad management...
Now, if this would classify most managers in the world as idiots, this is another discussion. Most developers in the world have absolutely no idea how code should be written, still, they are the majority.
I am pretty sure, that the official reason is not the real reason. My best guess is that other employees have complained about the privilege of the programmers (listening music while working).
I agree that this definitely happens in the office, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a terrible management decision. I could argue that the sales guy has the privilege of going out every day while I need to be at the office coding. To make things even, he must be denied the "privilege" to go out to clients, because it is technically possible to sell things by phone or using the internet.
I mean, you are right, these things happen. But the manager that handles this situation like this is an idiot. I had one like this before, and the department had a party when he was fired...
Working without music is fine, as long as there isn't any noise to avert your concentration.
That may work for you, but not for me. I MUST listen to something when I'm doing something serious. And by that I mean that project I really enjoy working on, that code I want finish. Otherwise I can't concentrate. For regular boring work, I don't mind silence... but I tend to forget about the rest of the world easier when I don't hear the sound of phones, keyboards, people talking...And silence won't help. I tend to keep remembering guitar solos during the day that if I don't listen to then I guarantee I won't be able to focus enough to do something really good.
Different people focus in different ways. This manager is just crazy to think he will see any good outcome from this. The only thing that will happen is he will get a lot of unsatisfied employees and less work done.
Also, most host providers use the host header to provide access to many the website using a single IP. Unless you access the site by the DNS name or use some programming library to send the packets with the correct header to the host, you cannot access them using the IP address.
Well, I'm sure your dad listened to a lot of other bands in his time. Maybe not as much as you do, but he surely did listen to more things.
What happens is that some music gets stuck in your mind, and as you grow old, the rest of the world changes and you can't find new music that you like anymore, so you stick with the ones you already like.
I bet in 40 years or so, you will be like this too, listening to the same old MP3 you have for 30+ years while your son and grandson make fun of how you listen only to that old crap and how the new format is much better because you can change the instruments while you listen, or change the singer... and you will wonder why the hell they care about that.
Frankly I dunno why people are still so enamored of pirating music when there is so much GOOD stuff out there that's 100% free, legal, and sanctioned by the artists that you could listen to new music every moment of your life without spending a dime.
Well, that is quite of an stupid argument if you think about. The reason is very simple: because people want to hear that specific person singing that specific song. I could open youtube and get 50 covers of pink floyd, but listening to Davig Gilmour and his feeling is much better.
I agree that there are good stuff out there for free, but that doesn't exclude the good paid stuff that is already out there too. Having the milk available doesn't stop people from wanting cookies.
I like the approach of the Gov't Mule (www.mule.net). They are a really great band, one of the best I have ever heard. And they allow people to record and publish their live performances for free (usually available at bt.etree.org).
So, they have the studio albums they sell, and don't allow people to distribute it. And people usually don't, because the live versions are available for free. And still, they have a huge fan base, enough to do about 20 shows every month. This probably works very well for them. Not everyone can do it, but it surely works as an alternative model for a lot of bands.
This is a problem that won't go away easily. This image is perpetuated every day by stupid people that for some reason hate open source.
The funny fact is that the same people that say that Linux or any other open source software is created by lonely nerds, at the same time see nothing wrong with wikipedia, tvtropes, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.
So, the bottom line is: if a software is is created by individuals, it is a huge pile of crap done by lonely nerds that have nothing better to do in life.
Anything else is actually a great experience that shows how powerful individual contributions are, and how they can change the world.
C# is Microsoft's "bastardized version" of Java (though mostly better IMO), and VB.Net is C# with VB syntax.
You are right, I don't know why people are still talking about this. C# was copied from java, as it was from delphi and c++. This is even officially documented in pages, video interviews, books... Just as java was copied from c++, that came from C...
It is impressive that people still don't realize that any thing that are created today will borrow only the good features from things created yesterday, discarding the bad ones. C++ was no different, Java was no different, C# was no different, and if Sun/Oracle decides to create a new java from scratch today, they will surely copy a lot features from.NET and C#.
Right now Java has the following features that are absent in C#:
1) High performance VM
2) Code that does what it says without hidden conversions, text substitutions, and macros.
3) Other languages that are actually useful like Scala and Clojure.
You are obviously talking a lot of shit there. I can't give numbers about issue #1, but from experience they are at least equivalent for general use. And its not like if anyone couldn't just open 2 apps in their desktop and compare. Java may be faster here, slower there and vice versa. But you certainly won't find any huge differences in the runtime that makes one seem useless next to the other.
Now, about issues #2 and #3, you are probably smoking something.
What kind of hidden conversions or text substitutions you are talking about? As any language, there are *features* that change the behavior in some way. There are no hidden conversions, there are documented implicit and explicit casts, there is marshalling for interoperability with other platforms that are completely configurable. Any language has this kind of thing to some degree, even java. Also, NET itself have no notion of macros, because macros are a compiler feature, not a runtime one. C# for instance doesn't know what is a macro, it simply has some basic pre-compiler, but nothing like C. It seems you don't understand or don't care about learning how the language works, even though all the reference, compilers and SDK is freely available online. The fact that you can't understand a feature that any VB programmer understands really tells me you shouldn't be spreading shit about it.
As for saying that java has the advantage of having more useful languages than.NET, you must be out of your mind. Simply going from the standard languages that.NET supports out of the box (C#, VB.NET, C++, F#) you have 4x more languages than Java, and they are certainly useful. If you count the other languages that people have created or ported to the CLI, you can even count Java.
You are just a java fanboy that will defend any feature that java implements, and bash any other that java doesn't have, until the day it is implemented. You are no different from the fanboys that love LINQ or extension methods.
The fact is, Java has a lot of benefits over.NET, like *supported* multi-platform runtime from the official vendor, more libraries due to more time in the market, a more open community, etc. You could simply have used them in your argument instead of saying a lot of nonsense shit about stuff you don't want to understand.
Only illegal copies cost $5. You could say also that they cost nothing if I download them from pirate bay. And if you're from Brazil too, you know legal copies of PS2 games here cost a lot more than that. Zeebo is going after a different market, offering legal copies costing $12.
But IMHO, I don't think the poor kids here are looking for the type of games this console is going to have (like Quake, Sonic, etc). I see this working for parents buying this for young kids, but in general, once kids grow up to the age of 12-14, they will ask for newer consoles, newer games.
The problem is that there is no isolated place in the world today. Wanting the latest is not a luxury that only 1st world countries have anymore. Information travels very fast nowadays, and products appear here almost at the same time they appear in USA or Europe. Poor kids on the street here in Brazil may not have anything to eat, but they surely know that a PS3 exists, they see a Wii or Xbox360 demos on stores as they pass by.
So, the fact is that that poor kids/parents will surely prefer to buy a not so old PS2 in the black market free of taxes for $150 or less than buying a legal version of Zeebo with 15 year old games for about the same price.
So, yes, I see this console working for a specific market, but I don't see it as any revolution like being the most popular console ever.
having just moved to an early version of Ubuntu 9.10 on my main testing-stuff laptop; it's frustrating
The first alpha of 9.10 was released a couple days ago with new kernel, new gcc, lots of new libraries... you should not be surprised things don't work well yet.
Jaunty seems pretty stable to me. Minor issues with my intel video card, but works fine for all my daily work.
So, what is the difference between this and silverlight? Both are a copy of flash that won't get any wide usage anytime soon and none of them run on linux...
You cleverly omitted an (I think) important sentence.
Drizzle will have a micro-kernel architecture with code being removed from the Drizzle core and moved through interfaces into modules.
Maybe I misread this, but it sounds the features everyone is up in arms about aren't really being removed, but are being modularized. The core application should run faster and other features will load via modules.
WTF??? What kind of slashdotter with a sane mind reads and understands TFA before starts bashing something??
a database project aimed at powering websites with massive concurrency as well as trimming superfluous functionality from MySQL... Akers has already selected particular functionality for removal: modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, access control lists and some data types."
I have been developing for the web during the past years and that's why MySQL has been off my list for serious development for some time in favor of Postgresql. It took about a decade to implement basic features like views and foreign keys that even Access 2.0 had in 93. Even sqlite has views for god sake!
Today, even for the most simple projects I cannot think about not using views, stored procedures, and triggers. Not because there is no way to do the job, but because they are important for organization, security, data integrity, etc.
It is like they have no idea that web sites are getting more complicated, and more and more data is involved everyday. I can't think of someone creating a big website with massive concurrency using this. Sounds more like an alternative to Sqlite for very simple tasks.
Adobe's interests in supporting Linux may vary, at least they don't have an automatic and obvious interest in fighting against it either. MS does. Agreed. But that don't change the fact that Silverlight is a very good alternative from a technical standpoint.
I mean, if you had the exact same product coming from Sun and running on Java, everybody here would love to have this alternative.
But I'm not surprised that on slashdot, suddenly the silverlight vs. flash fight became a microsoft vs. linux fight. =)
I believe the technical concept behind silverlight is better than flash.
I mean, it uses XML instead of binary format for source, meaning it's easy to generate files on the fly. And like it or not,.NET has a far better library and tools than ActionScript, even on linux.
Of course there are problems for linux about using.NET as platform, and WMV as codecs. But mono has been putting a great effort into this, there are other codecs available. Also, xine can play wmv files without problems. If they are able to bring silverlight to Linux and other systems in an usable state, I see no problem in using them to develop my applications.
Also, Adobe/Macromedia were never saints. They took ages to release flash players for linux, and I still use a package called "flashplugin-nonfree" on my box, that uses wrappers and lots of 32bit libraries to run on my Ubuntu x64, because Adobe refuses to compile it for 64bit, and the player cannot even be put on the repositories because of licenses and other factors.
There are no open source heroes here. It just heppens that you believe Adobe is better than Microsoft, but they are just the same, and will do anything at all costs to crush the opponent. If Adobe's solution is to start releasing good players for all platforms, they will do because they need to stay in market, not because they love linux. And if Microsoft makes a deal with Novell to release a good silverlight player for linux to compete with flash, I see no difference in that.
One important thing to consider, is that if using a ramdisk for important stuff, what happens when the power dies?
Although that is a problem, you don't need to move all your disk to RAM. You can move the system partition, and let your documents on regular disks. My home computer with Ubuntu and lots of additional stuff must be about 5 or 6Gb (without home folder). So, 8Gb of RAM would allow me to run the whole system at an amazing speed while leaving the other stuff that don't care about performance safe on the disk.
Of course I'm not considering the regular RAM requirements, but then work with 12 or 16Gb of RAM, you should be good to go.
I call that the opposite of progress... unfortunately many governments can't see beyond "now." "Oh hey... we can just charge a ridiculous amount of money on imports and make money!!! we win!"...... (I understand the tarrifs to help local businesses... but honestly... there aren't any camera manufacturers in any of those countries).
I live in Brazil, and I must say I don't like paying the amount of taxes we have here. Unfortunately, this issue you mentioned is called protectionism. If Brazil (or any other developing country) starts importing at very low taxes, imported products would be much cheaper than the ones produced here, because we have lots of taxes to employ, to buy, to sell, etc, that my company needs to pay, and yours don't.
In the big picture, if that happens, a lot of companies will be closing the doors because people will start buying imported goods as it is much cheaper. That means unemployment, and that means people won't have money to buy the imported goods. It is a circle.
Then you would say that if Brazil (and others) had less taxes, this woudn't happen... well, that is another complex topic we are not discussing here.
The fact is that you can't simply reduce import taxes because there is no company currently producing that specific product. You must give the chance for people start doing that.
USA has protectionism too, but as almost everything there is produced by USA companies, americans will never see the effect of this as much as we do.
Slashdot Mirror
It is hard to say wether the boss is an idiot (...) Management is easier said than done. I would wish every geek to hold a management position at least once in his life (...) it would improve their view of the world and help them to cope with managers in the future.
I agree with the part that management is easier said than done. But so is coding, so is engineering... That doesn't change the fact that it was a terrible way to manage the situation.
Different people have different skills. Having all developers being managers for a day wouldn't help at all. Just as I'm expected to be a good developer, the manager is expected be a good manager. This is the type of decision taken by someone that has no idea what the real problem is. And not understanding the problems of your department is a sign of bad management...
Now, if this would classify most managers in the world as idiots, this is another discussion. Most developers in the world have absolutely no idea how code should be written, still, they are the majority.
I am pretty sure, that the official reason is not the real reason. My best guess is that other employees have complained about the privilege of the programmers (listening music while working).
I agree that this definitely happens in the office, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a terrible management decision. I could argue that the sales guy has the privilege of going out every day while I need to be at the office coding. To make things even, he must be denied the "privilege" to go out to clients, because it is technically possible to sell things by phone or using the internet.
I mean, you are right, these things happen. But the manager that handles this situation like this is an idiot. I had one like this before, and the department had a party when he was fired...
Working without music is fine, as long as there isn't any noise to avert your concentration.
That may work for you, but not for me. I MUST listen to something when I'm doing something serious. And by that I mean that project I really enjoy working on, that code I want finish. Otherwise I can't concentrate. For regular boring work, I don't mind silence... but I tend to forget about the rest of the world easier when I don't hear the sound of phones, keyboards, people talking...And silence won't help. I tend to keep remembering guitar solos during the day that if I don't listen to then I guarantee I won't be able to focus enough to do something really good.
Different people focus in different ways. This manager is just crazy to think he will see any good outcome from this. The only thing that will happen is he will get a lot of unsatisfied employees and less work done.
... do they see the higgs bosons now?
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/401/
Also, most host providers use the host header to provide access to many the website using a single IP. Unless you access the site by the DNS name or use some programming library to send the packets with the correct header to the host, you cannot access them using the IP address.
Well, I'm sure your dad listened to a lot of other bands in his time. Maybe not as much as you do, but he surely did listen to more things.
What happens is that some music gets stuck in your mind, and as you grow old, the rest of the world changes and you can't find new music that you like anymore, so you stick with the ones you already like.
I bet in 40 years or so, you will be like this too, listening to the same old MP3 you have for 30+ years while your son and grandson make fun of how you listen only to that old crap and how the new format is much better because you can change the instruments while you listen, or change the singer... and you will wonder why the hell they care about that.
Frankly I dunno why people are still so enamored of pirating music when there is so much GOOD stuff out there that's 100% free, legal, and sanctioned by the artists that you could listen to new music every moment of your life without spending a dime.
Well, that is quite of an stupid argument if you think about. The reason is very simple: because people want to hear that specific person singing that specific song. I could open youtube and get 50 covers of pink floyd, but listening to Davig Gilmour and his feeling is much better.
I agree that there are good stuff out there for free, but that doesn't exclude the good paid stuff that is already out there too. Having the milk available doesn't stop people from wanting cookies.
I like the approach of the Gov't Mule (www.mule.net). They are a really great band, one of the best I have ever heard. And they allow people to record and publish their live performances for free (usually available at bt.etree.org).
So, they have the studio albums they sell, and don't allow people to distribute it. And people usually don't, because the live versions are available for free. And still, they have a huge fan base, enough to do about 20 shows every month. This probably works very well for them. Not everyone can do it, but it surely works as an alternative model for a lot of bands.
This is a problem that won't go away easily. This image is perpetuated every day by stupid people that for some reason hate open source.
The funny fact is that the same people that say that Linux or any other open source software is created by lonely nerds, at the same time see nothing wrong with wikipedia, tvtropes, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.
So, the bottom line is: if a software is is created by individuals, it is a huge pile of crap done by lonely nerds that have nothing better to do in life. Anything else is actually a great experience that shows how powerful individual contributions are, and how they can change the world.
At 18.2%, individuals are still the largest single group contributing to Linux. The next is RedHat at 12.3%.
By your analysis, the largest single group contributing to Linux is actually the "people working for a company" group, with 81.8%.
C# is Microsoft's "bastardized version" of Java (though mostly better IMO), and VB.Net is C# with VB syntax.
You are right, I don't know why people are still talking about this. C# was copied from java, as it was from delphi and c++. This is even officially documented in pages, video interviews, books... Just as java was copied from c++, that came from C...
.NET and C#.
It is impressive that people still don't realize that any thing that are created today will borrow only the good features from things created yesterday, discarding the bad ones. C++ was no different, Java was no different, C# was no different, and if Sun/Oracle decides to create a new java from scratch today, they will surely copy a lot features from
Right now Java has the following features that are absent in C#:
1) High performance VM
2) Code that does what it says without hidden conversions, text substitutions, and macros.
3) Other languages that are actually useful like Scala and Clojure.
You are obviously talking a lot of shit there. I can't give numbers about issue #1, but from experience they are at least equivalent for general use. And its not like if anyone couldn't just open 2 apps in their desktop and compare. Java may be faster here, slower there and vice versa. But you certainly won't find any huge differences in the runtime that makes one seem useless next to the other.
.NET, you must be out of your mind. Simply going from the standard languages that .NET supports out of the box (C#, VB.NET, C++, F#) you have 4x more languages than Java, and they are certainly useful. If you count the other languages that people have created or ported to the CLI, you can even count Java.
.NET, like *supported* multi-platform runtime from the official vendor, more libraries due to more time in the market, a more open community, etc. You could simply have used them in your argument instead of saying a lot of nonsense shit about stuff you don't want to understand.
Now, about issues #2 and #3, you are probably smoking something.
What kind of hidden conversions or text substitutions you are talking about? As any language, there are *features* that change the behavior in some way. There are no hidden conversions, there are documented implicit and explicit casts, there is marshalling for interoperability with other platforms that are completely configurable. Any language has this kind of thing to some degree, even java. Also, NET itself have no notion of macros, because macros are a compiler feature, not a runtime one. C# for instance doesn't know what is a macro, it simply has some basic pre-compiler, but nothing like C. It seems you don't understand or don't care about learning how the language works, even though all the reference, compilers and SDK is freely available online. The fact that you can't understand a feature that any VB programmer understands really tells me you shouldn't be spreading shit about it.
As for saying that java has the advantage of having more useful languages than
You are just a java fanboy that will defend any feature that java implements, and bash any other that java doesn't have, until the day it is implemented. You are no different from the fanboys that love LINQ or extension methods.
The fact is, Java has a lot of benefits over
Only illegal copies cost $5. You could say also that they cost nothing if I download them from pirate bay. And if you're from Brazil too, you know legal copies of PS2 games here cost a lot more than that. Zeebo is going after a different market, offering legal copies costing $12.
But IMHO, I don't think the poor kids here are looking for the type of games this console is going to have (like Quake, Sonic, etc). I see this working for parents buying this for young kids, but in general, once kids grow up to the age of 12-14, they will ask for newer consoles, newer games.
The problem is that there is no isolated place in the world today. Wanting the latest is not a luxury that only 1st world countries have anymore. Information travels very fast nowadays, and products appear here almost at the same time they appear in USA or Europe. Poor kids on the street here in Brazil may not have anything to eat, but they surely know that a PS3 exists, they see a Wii or Xbox360 demos on stores as they pass by.
So, the fact is that that poor kids/parents will surely prefer to buy a not so old PS2 in the black market free of taxes for $150 or less than buying a legal version of Zeebo with 15 year old games for about the same price.
So, yes, I see this console working for a specific market, but I don't see it as any revolution like being the most popular console ever.
The first alpha of 9.10 was released a couple days ago with new kernel, new gcc, lots of new libraries... you should not be surprised things don't work well yet. Jaunty seems pretty stable to me. Minor issues with my intel video card, but works fine for all my daily work.
So, what is the difference between this and silverlight? Both are a copy of flash that won't get any wide usage anytime soon and none of them run on linux...
You cleverly omitted an (I think) important sentence.
Maybe I misread this, but it sounds the features everyone is up in arms about aren't really being removed, but are being modularized. The core application should run faster and other features will load via modules.
WTF??? What kind of slashdotter with a sane mind reads and understands TFA before starts bashing something??
Security!!! Get this guy outta here!
Why would anyone in their right mind set up a Web/SQL platform using MS products?
Because it is reliable, easy to develop, implement and support?
I have been developing for the web during the past years and that's why MySQL has been off my list for serious development for some time in favor of Postgresql. It took about a decade to implement basic features like views and foreign keys that even Access 2.0 had in 93. Even sqlite has views for god sake!
Today, even for the most simple projects I cannot think about not using views, stored procedures, and triggers. Not because there is no way to do the job, but because they are important for organization, security, data integrity, etc.
It is like they have no idea that web sites are getting more complicated, and more and more data is involved everyday. I can't think of someone creating a big website with massive concurrency using this. Sounds more like an alternative to Sqlite for very simple tasks.
I mean, if you had the exact same product coming from Sun and running on Java, everybody here would love to have this alternative.
But I'm not surprised that on slashdot, suddenly the silverlight vs. flash fight became a microsoft vs. linux fight. =)
I don't like Gnome too much. Let's wait for the KNewSense and XNewSense to be released.
I believe the technical concept behind silverlight is better than flash.
.NET has a far better library and tools than ActionScript, even on linux.
.NET as platform, and WMV as codecs. But mono has been putting a great effort into this, there are other codecs available. Also, xine can play wmv files without problems. If they are able to bring silverlight to Linux and other systems in an usable state, I see no problem in using them to develop my applications.
I mean, it uses XML instead of binary format for source, meaning it's easy to generate files on the fly. And like it or not,
There is a good post here about some differences: http://weblogs.asp.net/jezell/archive/2007/05/03/silverlight-vs-flash-the-developer-story.aspx
Of course there are problems for linux about using
Also, Adobe/Macromedia were never saints. They took ages to release flash players for linux, and I still use a package called "flashplugin-nonfree" on my box, that uses wrappers and lots of 32bit libraries to run on my Ubuntu x64, because Adobe refuses to compile it for 64bit, and the player cannot even be put on the repositories because of licenses and other factors.
There are no open source heroes here. It just heppens that you believe Adobe is better than Microsoft, but they are just the same, and will do anything at all costs to crush the opponent. If Adobe's solution is to start releasing good players for all platforms, they will do because they need to stay in market, not because they love linux. And if Microsoft makes a deal with Novell to release a good silverlight player for linux to compete with flash, I see no difference in that.
Actually, you could do it already. Microsoft is just making it easier.
Although that is a problem, you don't need to move all your disk to RAM. You can move the system partition, and let your documents on regular disks. My home computer with Ubuntu and lots of additional stuff must be about 5 or 6Gb (without home folder). So, 8Gb of RAM would allow me to run the whole system at an amazing speed while leaving the other stuff that don't care about performance safe on the disk.
Of course I'm not considering the regular RAM requirements, but then work with 12 or 16Gb of RAM, you should be good to go.
I live in Brazil, and I must say I don't like paying the amount of taxes we have here. Unfortunately, this issue you mentioned is called protectionism. If Brazil (or any other developing country) starts importing at very low taxes, imported products would be much cheaper than the ones produced here, because we have lots of taxes to employ, to buy, to sell, etc, that my company needs to pay, and yours don't.
In the big picture, if that happens, a lot of companies will be closing the doors because people will start buying imported goods as it is much cheaper. That means unemployment, and that means people won't have money to buy the imported goods. It is a circle.
Then you would say that if Brazil (and others) had less taxes, this woudn't happen... well, that is another complex topic we are not discussing here.
The fact is that you can't simply reduce import taxes because there is no company currently producing that specific product. You must give the chance for people start doing that.
USA has protectionism too, but as almost everything there is produced by USA companies, americans will never see the effect of this as much as we do.