I'm just a cube drone in a big 200 people cube farm now, but about 18 years ago I worked there too, after I graduated in 1988, and at that point we were mainly one to an office as I remember. I had a big office upstairs with the purple chaise longue where I could take a nap in the afternoon. Chris and our state of the art Dell 286 worked on hardware and board layout along the corridor, and Martin(?) was in an adjacent office. Dave and Mark had offices in the other direction towards the tennis courts. James and Neville were downstairs, with the secretaries being posted along the entrance hall. My wife and I still refer to my 'home office' as 'The Batcave'. Good times, good times.
Back on-topic, I've worked in open plan areas and a true open plan area populated with only your project team is a pretty good setup. Sadly the company I currently work for just resized the group of 4 cubes into group of six cubes (two long areas with 100 people each side), but with judicious positioning, it's possible to manipulate your nest into something workable. On the whole I work from home or in the giant empty 'overflow room', or off-site at a clients whenever I can swing it. Of course, 'managers' have windowed and doored offices around the edges, from which they can swoop down and annoy you whenever you approach getting into 'flow'. In fact I mainly do 'admin' during working hours, and all my real programming gets done at the kitchen table on weekends, or when working from home.
One day we'll look back on cubicles as a really 'bad idea'.
I work with both Oracle 9.2 and SQL Server 2000 on a daily basis, and the company I works for doesn't write much code that gets out of the compatibility zone that these two DBs. Of course, the solid reasoning behind this is that consulting companies produce software and we do not want to have the expense of supporting two very different code bases, and we cannot afford to say no to clients who want to run either Oracle or SQL Server.
Companies like this will eventually start supporting the open source databases, but probably only as customers demand. Currently this isn't much demand as our clients are pretty much tied into one of the big two/three, but it will surely come as big companies realize that if Google depends on MySQL, then maybe they could too.
On a good screen, Firefox 2.0 looks and behaves much better than IE 7.0 I'm running Vista Beta and IE 7.0 is ok, but kinda clunky feeling. FF 2.0 has lots of really nice touches like redesigned icons, spell checking and the interface in general is very clean and polished. Other items like reduced memory usage are really icing on the cake.
I live in Houston and I remember a piece about a black lady who's kids had died because they couldn't get medical care in time. She lived in what was basically a hut on the south-side of Houston, and I can remember in the report being able to make out roaches crawling around on the walls. They had power but not much else.
Despite being nominally first world, even the US still has pockets of the third-world hidden away. Arguing that third world countries need to be brought up to a uniform standard of living before projects like this should be started is as stupid as arguing that the US doesn't need projects like this because we all live in clean, modern housing and have great jobs.
There were a bunch of 'better mousetrap' products around the time that Lotus 1-2-3 was doing it's stuff. Among them was Tk_Solver!, but Microsoft came along with Excel which was great for adding up columns of numbers and making pretty pictures. Eventually they added pivot tables, but they never forgot the core market of people who just wanted to do real simple stuff. It's still pretty cool that Excel and Visual Basic runs on my Mac.
Heh, I did some summer work on an Amiga 1000 in the UK, including writing a near-real time Fourier Analysis of audio data from a Sophos (?) audio digitizer in 68000 assembler (sweet), and also integrating the Digiview source code (which we got under a NDA) into the same program. It was cool, and a very real advance, since the Amiga could do image capture and false color without having a big separate hardware frame buffer. The thing that real killed the A1000 was the crappy flickery hi-res display. Compared to a PC with a Hercules card and a decent green or amber monitor, is looked like ass, and no self-respecting business person would touch it, no matter how many huge pre-rendered bouncing globes you could show them... hmmm, that sounds kinda shady;-)
You obviously have a stupidly high perception of the quality of commercial software. Sure, in some cases it might be better than some young open source project, but the big name open source projects may well have many more eyes on the code. Maybe if you show such a strong preference, you would prefer to be stuck with the frankly shady NETBUI instead of TCP/IP. You would be SOL when Micrsoft pulled the plug on it.
What about Exchange server? Stuck into a complete upgrade and redeployment every 6 months? instead of sticking with the pretty solid SendMail etc.
As another poster mentioned, you need to select a solution on it's merits. One of the merits of Open Source is access to the source code and the freedom to stick with a particular release if it's business critical. With closed source, you are screwed if MS push a critical update and the older software is 'broken'.
Novell should not be allowed to act as a Trojan Horse to destroy the GPL.
"There is nothing we won't do or say to convince people that our way is the way to go." Bill Gates (paraphrased from memory)
Yeah, it sounds really thin and jarring and annoyingly fussy. The current Mac bootup sound is just unbelievably better. You can go here to hear all the different Mac chimes over the years. Most are pretty good, including the original Mac.
My experience of the 5744 Vista is that it's reasonable, but seems to be more unstable than XP. In particular, running any kind of games on my NVidia 6600GT will have it blue screen after a while. The FSX demo in particular really struggles unless you crank the desktop resolution down before starting it.
There are a bunch of rough edges such as bytes/sec deleted not being updated when emptying the recycle bin. Err, just like XP then.
It'll be interesting to see whether there are reports of widespread instability when Vista ships, and how fast MS scramble to get a service pack out.
If your WEP key is say 2389aabb6, then put in 0x2389aabb6, and better still paste it in from a text document so you know it's right. My G4 PB has been 100% on my home wireless network, and friends, hotels and everywhere else I take it.
Saving up for a Core 2 Duo PowerBook, damn I mean MacBook Pro.
1. Read lots of good and bad code, and understand how it fits into a system. Occasionally, you see code from great programmers that is stupidly overengineered with abstract types representing every tiny little object, and the code is very hard to follow. Good code should be clear and concise.
2. Write code for maintenance programmers. For big systems, you almost certainly won't be maintaining the code. Some other guy (or gal) will. Write the code for them to understand. Keep it simple, commented and clear.
3. Code often goes through design iterations. Write the simplest code that can work efficiently. Use an appropriate data structure. Minimize temporary object creation etc.
4. Learn a functional language. This gives a new viewpoint that can be useful, though it's a slow way to learn memoization, which may be the most useful thing ever.
5. Don't be afraid to refactor. Most of the good code in the world didn't look that great when it was first written.
I commute between Houston and Detroit every week. Watching video on my iPod, specifically the MIT SICP course lectures, makes complete sense. Hey, I'm learning (sorta) functional programming, well Scheme anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm sorry, you can only move to a diagonal cubicle."
(c) Scott Adams
I'm just a cube drone in a big 200 people cube farm now, but about 18 years ago I worked there too, after I graduated in 1988, and at that point we were mainly one to an office as I remember. I had a big office upstairs with the purple chaise longue where I could take a nap in the afternoon. Chris and our state of the art Dell 286 worked on hardware and board layout along the corridor, and Martin(?) was in an adjacent office. Dave and Mark had offices in the other direction towards the tennis courts. James and Neville were downstairs, with the secretaries being posted along the entrance hall. My wife and I still refer to my 'home office' as 'The Batcave'. Good times, good times.
Back on-topic, I've worked in open plan areas and a true open plan area populated with only your project team is a pretty good setup. Sadly the company I currently work for just resized the group of 4 cubes into group of six cubes (two long areas with 100 people each side), but with judicious positioning, it's possible to manipulate your nest into something workable. On the whole I work from home or in the giant empty 'overflow room', or off-site at a clients whenever I can swing it. Of course, 'managers' have windowed and doored offices around the edges, from which they can swoop down and annoy you whenever you approach getting into 'flow'. In fact I mainly do 'admin' during working hours, and all my real programming gets done at the kitchen table on weekends, or when working from home.
One day we'll look back on cubicles as a really 'bad idea'.
I work with both Oracle 9.2 and SQL Server 2000 on a daily basis, and the company I works for doesn't write much code that gets out of the compatibility zone that these two DBs. Of course, the solid reasoning behind this is that consulting companies produce software and we do not want to have the expense of supporting two very different code bases, and we cannot afford to say no to clients who want to run either Oracle or SQL Server.
Companies like this will eventually start supporting the open source databases, but probably only as customers demand. Currently this isn't much demand as our clients are pretty much tied into one of the big two/three, but it will surely come as big companies realize that if Google depends on MySQL, then maybe they could too.
Please, please, this time. Please let Web 3.0 include a spelling-checker.
On a good screen, Firefox 2.0 looks and behaves much better than IE 7.0 I'm running Vista Beta and IE 7.0 is ok, but kinda clunky feeling. FF 2.0 has lots of really nice touches like redesigned icons, spell checking and the interface in general is very clean and polished. Other items like reduced memory usage are really icing on the cake.
never underestimate the power of gadgets:
;-) no one *really* believes a neon can do 148 mph
original star tac.
peugeot 205Gti
12" Al PB G4
neon SRT-4
errr, forget that last one
I live in Houston and I remember a piece about a black lady who's kids had died because they couldn't get medical care in time. She lived in what was basically a hut on the south-side of Houston, and I can remember in the report being able to make out roaches crawling around on the walls. They had power but not much else.
Despite being nominally first world, even the US still has pockets of the third-world hidden away. Arguing that third world countries need to be brought up to a uniform standard of living before projects like this should be started is as stupid as arguing that the US doesn't need projects like this because we all live in clean, modern housing and have great jobs.
There were a bunch of 'better mousetrap' products around the time that Lotus 1-2-3 was doing it's stuff. Among them was Tk_Solver!, but Microsoft came along with Excel which was great for adding up columns of numbers and making pretty pictures. Eventually they added pivot tables, but they never forgot the core market of people who just wanted to do real simple stuff. It's still pretty cool that Excel and Visual Basic runs on my Mac.
What is this infernal light I see before me?
Will no-one rid me of this flashing clock?
Heh, I did some summer work on an Amiga 1000 in the UK, including writing a near-real time Fourier Analysis of audio data from a Sophos (?) audio digitizer in 68000 assembler (sweet), and also integrating the Digiview source code (which we got under a NDA) into the same program. ;-)
It was cool, and a very real advance, since the Amiga could do image capture and false color without having a big separate hardware frame buffer.
The thing that real killed the A1000 was the crappy flickery hi-res display. Compared to a PC with a Hercules card and a decent green or amber monitor, is looked like ass, and no self-respecting business person would touch it, no matter how many huge pre-rendered bouncing globes you could show them... hmmm, that sounds kinda shady
My previous FAA medical cost $75. Health consultation, eye and ear poking. Paperwork.
Obviously not something my insurance pays.
You obviously have a stupidly high perception of the quality of commercial software. Sure, in some cases it might be better than some young open source project, but the big name open source projects may well have many more eyes on the code. Maybe if you show such a strong preference, you would prefer to be stuck with the frankly shady NETBUI instead of TCP/IP. You would be SOL when Micrsoft pulled the plug on it.
What about Exchange server? Stuck into a complete upgrade and redeployment every 6 months? instead of sticking with the pretty solid SendMail etc.
As another poster mentioned, you need to select a solution on it's merits. One of the merits of Open Source is access to the source code and the freedom to stick with a particular release if it's business critical. With closed source, you are screwed if MS push a critical update and the older software is 'broken'.
Novell should not be allowed to act as a Trojan Horse to destroy the GPL.
"There is nothing we won't do or say to convince people that our way is the way to go." Bill Gates (paraphrased from memory)
Rubbish! It's Death or Mau Mau !!!
Yeah, it sounds really thin and jarring and annoyingly fussy. The current Mac bootup sound is just unbelievably better. You can go here to hear all the different Mac chimes over the years. Most are pretty good, including the original Mac.
I for one, welcome our boxy, porn storing overlords.
Dude, if you're that good, you should be writing efficient, effective systems and generally be in high demand by decent paying clients.
There's stacks of work out there. What went wrong dude?
My G4 does about 4 hours+. Best laptop ever.
My experience of the 5744 Vista is that it's reasonable, but seems to be more unstable than XP. In particular, running any kind of games on my NVidia 6600GT will have it blue screen after a while. The FSX demo in particular really struggles unless you crank the desktop resolution down before starting it.
There are a bunch of rough edges such as bytes/sec deleted not being updated when emptying the recycle bin. Err, just like XP then.
It'll be interesting to see whether there are reports of widespread instability when Vista ships, and how fast MS scramble to get a service pack out.
If your WEP key is say 2389aabb6, then put in 0x2389aabb6, and better still paste it in from a text document so you know it's right. My G4 PB has been 100% on my home wireless network, and friends, hotels and everywhere else I take it.
Saving up for a Core 2 Duo PowerBook, damn I mean MacBook Pro.
What next? Microsoft releases hax0r4d Vista to Pirate Bay?
;-)
It looks to me like Comedy Central subscribe to the axiom 'any usage is good usage'.
The skill isn't in multi-threading, it's in knowing where to single-thread... ;-)
Well, here's my advice:
1. Read lots of good and bad code, and understand how it fits into a system. Occasionally, you see code from great programmers that is stupidly overengineered with abstract types representing every tiny little object, and the code is very hard to follow.
Good code should be clear and concise.
2. Write code for maintenance programmers. For big systems, you almost certainly won't be maintaining the code. Some other guy (or gal) will. Write the code for them to understand. Keep it simple, commented and clear.
3. Code often goes through design iterations. Write the simplest code that can work efficiently. Use an appropriate data structure. Minimize temporary object creation etc.
4. Learn a functional language. This gives a new viewpoint that can be useful, though it's a slow way to learn memoization, which may be the most useful thing ever.
5. Don't be afraid to refactor. Most of the good code in the world didn't look that great when it was first written.
Good luck!!
I commute between Houston and Detroit every week. Watching video on my iPod, specifically the MIT SICP course lectures, makes complete sense. Hey, I'm learning (sorta) functional programming, well Scheme anyway.
I'd imagine there's so much Windows code in there that this is just a non-starter.
IBM have a pretty good history of contributing to FOSS.
Norton, Macafee, Symantec and the like need to build a better rootkit.
;-)
Maybe they should give Sony a call.