If you can build a script system to cvs export -D now a snapshot to do automated build testing and feature testing you and your developers will sleep better at night. Even better if you can do multiple platforms and show the results on an updated web page.
There's also DamageControl. I checked it out, but got scared off by the need to install and use Ruby. I work with too many languages as it is, and am teaching myself Python, I don't need another especially just for one tool.
If you can't catch the sneering, anti-family tone in your posts, perhaps you should show them to your folks.
You may have read what I posted, but you haven't comprehended what I posted.
There're only a few ways I know to say that I'm not anti-family. I've run out, and you haven't picked up on any of them, so I guess we have an impasse.
I am not anti-family or anti-children. I may decide to have a family someday. My point is that if I make that choice, I will do so in such a way that I (and my family) don't need special treatment at work or anywhere else, and I will do so in such a way that me or my wife (or both of us) raise our own children. Call it personal preference, call it sanctimonious, call it whatever, I just call it planning.
I'm anti-inequality. That's all. In my experience, people with children get special treatment in the workplace while people without children do not. This special treatment is the result of a conscious decision (aside from rape or "accidents"), and in many cases, is also the result of gender.
I believe giving some people special treatment because of a decision they made is not fair. I'm not talking about treating a PhD "better" than someone with a 4-yr degree, either.
If you believe that you should be given special treatment because you have children, that's fine. I disagree, whether you negotiated something in advance with your employer or not. Are your co-workers without children allowed to take time off or work a special schedule when they aren't sick themselves? Either we're all equal or we're not. In your world, we're not. In my world, or at least the world I would like to see and do my best to make, we are.
I'm not the one who a) is overly sensitive, and b) got personal. In both cases, that was you.
Except for those who, like yourself, have issues with people who raise families.
Nope, I don't have any issue with people who raise families, which is pretty evident in my posts.
I do have issue with people who make a choice to raise families and expect everyone else to accomodate their choice unequally. You want special time off because you have kids? No problem, provided I get the same time off when I don't have kids. Equality. Fairness. That's all I'm asking for.
Why should I be treated differently just because you decided to have children?
My parents couldn't raise two kids on my dad's income alone.
Then maybe they shouldn't have had any kids, hmmm? That's not being sanctimonious, just planning.
Get ready for the immigrant wave! Zero population growth means imported labor. That idea doesn't bother me, but now YOU'VE got to deal with a new set of cultural standards. And how are your foreign language skills? Are you going to be able to get a job if your native language is no longer the lingua franca?
Wait a minute...you're saying immigrant labor is good? I'd rather not have immigrant labor, thank you very much. I'd rather have "regular" labor...you know, the kind where people are legally employed, get benefits, don't have to live in shacks, and make a living wage. What's wrong with that?
Yeah, those fucking breeders.
Well, let's speculate about that. Why do people have children? The historical reasons like needing a larger family to work fields are no longer valid. One reason might be to carry on the family name, but we don't have a clan system in the West any more, so is carrying on the family name really that much of a priority?
You want to call me sanctimonious, I call, as you say, "bullshit". You're telling me that you had children because of some noble ideal that you needed to replenish the population to prevent "the immigrant wave"? Yeah, right. You had children either because you weren't smart enough to handle birth control, or you needed someone to love you.
If you choose to have a family, great. Seriously, that's great. More power to you. But don't expect everyone else to fall all over themselves honoring your commitment and praising your contributions to society. You had children for your own selfish reasons, plain and simple. YOU wanted a family. YOU wanted to be able to teach someone YOUR preferences, YOUR beliefs, YOUR culture. YOU had the need for someone to love YOU.
For you to assume your children are going to be "good" people is just sheer arrogance. You have no control over what will happen or what they will do, only hope. For all you know, one of your kids is going to kill someone while driving drunk, or maybe one of your kids is going to have a kid that turns out to be a serial killer, or maybe one of your kids is going to cheat on their spouse, or any number of things that aren't all warm, fuzzy, and perfect.
If acknowledging what is true is sanctimonious, so be it. I'm not saying I'm better than you, I'm not attacking you. I'm only claiming that you DON'T KNOW what will happen, there's no way you can know what will happen, and for you to assert that your kids (and their kids) will always be perfect little members of society is just arrogance.
Give me one specific reason why you had children that DOESN'T have to do with emotions. Did you need extra help in the fields? Believing that you should have children so that you can raise them "right" to help make "the world a better place" at some point in the future is just arrogance. Who says you know what's right? Who says your version of how the world should be is how it should be?
Bullshit on item one, and things are changing for item two.
I'm no lawyer (are you?), so I can't confirm your assertion one way or the other...I only know what I was told. I would assume that my company's lawyers gave a reasonable opinion to our managers when asked about possible options.
Are you suggesting that employers will force the single-parent father to leave his small children to stay at home by themselves?
Nope, I'm saying that in my experience, the men don't ask, for whatever reason.
I don't know what world you grew up in but BOTH of my parents worked and I spent a great deal of time in daycare. I was also latchkey for a number of years.
Ah, the fresh smell of/. sarcasm. Incidentally, both of MY parents worked as well, though my Mom (reasonably) waited until my sister and I were both in grade school to return to work, and chose a career (teaching) where her schedule matched those of her children so that she was home when we were. Is that a reasonable world to you?
I hold two degrees, have a great job with great pay, and I work in my children's schools and the surrounding community as a volunteer.
Looks like society got the benefit of that arrangement, right?
How would I know? Do degrees automatically equal productivity? I've worked with PhDs who couldn't produce their way out of paper bags, and until recently I didn't have a degree and regularly did the work of several people with aplomb. So, I don't think degrees automatically equal productivity.
For all I know your "great job with great pay" is running spam campaigns from Chinese-hosted servers. For all I know your "volunteer work" is as a KKK member fighting for white rights.
Even if you are "all that", I wasn't claiming to have an observation that was true for everyone, everywhere. I just described my own personal experiences and the difficulty my team and my employer are having due to women employees needing excessive time off for children.
Here's a good one for you: Dad and Mom are transient workers and can't afford daycare. The children grow up in the fields, working right next to their parents. They never attend a class in their life because they never show up in the system due to their mobility. Their parents, however, are EXTREMELY productive.
Here's a good one for you: Dad and Mom don't have kids in the first place. (gasp! shocker!) Here's another: how about no transient workers at all? Another: how about living within your means so your lifestyle doesn't require two incomes that in turn requires that you ask (and pay for) strangers to raise your kids and doesn't require your employer to give you special treatment?
I chose to let my employers know that I am on-call to stay at home if my children are sick and cannot attend school. When they hired me it was not an issue because they knew up front what my requirements were.
My point exactly...your employer DID discuss, prior to your employment, your family/child situation. As stated in other posts, that's not acceptable. Even if you bring it up unasked, the employer isn't supposed to consider it.
The companies that hired me are still in business, so I guess they survived my *low* productivity.
"Still in business" doesn't equal "maximum". I guess we could get into a business discussion if you wanted, but it is pretty common for a business to 1) continue for years due to momentum even after being damaged, and 2) ignore or not notice poor performance or productivity because of other things going on. My intent is not to attack you, my intent is to point out that your conclusion is flawed: the company or companies you worked for in the past still being in business does not prove you were as productive as you could have been, nor does it prove that your family issues weren't detrimental to your team and/or employer.
Oddly enough, when the men hit the 45-65 age range and are taking two mornings a week off to go to the cardiologist and prostate doctors' offices, and 6 weeks off every five years or so to recover from their current bypass operation, while the women keep plugging along, they tend to think it does not fall into the same category of offense.
Sick time wasn't my point. The women on my team (and in my company) typically exceed their allotted sick time and vacation time for their own medical needs and those of their children.
The men, even if they're willing, aren't given the same flexibility as the women. Legally or culturally. So how would Dad get time off from HIS job if Mom can't get the time off from hers? In the end, productivity suffers somewhere, right? And in the long run, we ALL suffer, because dual-income households mean day care, so in the long run we end up with a society of adults raised by strangers instead of their parents.
I have no issue with Dad staying at home and Mom working. If I was married with children, I would want to have one parent at home, either parent. I'm practical, so I would say the parent earning the most should work, and the other would stay at home. If Mom made more than Dad, so be it.
I do have issue with someone demanding that they be allowed to have it all at someone else's expense. How is that fair? A woman can demand career and family even if it costs someone else (person or corporation), but a man can't? That's not equal.
I realize that life throws curveballs, like divorce, death, whatever. You have to do what you have to do. My point is that in many situations, you have an opportunity to think about your options beforehand, and failure to do that responsibly shouldn't be a hardship on anyone or anything else.
I think part of the problem is that for all the equality in the workplace, there just isn't any, from either direction.
For example, my team is 75% female. I am male. I do not have a problem working with women, and in fact, until my current position, every supervisor I ever had was female. That's regardless of industry...I've worked in hospitality, IT, and finance/insurance.
The female members of my team consistently require special treatment for scheduling due to their children. When I say "consistently" I mean one or more of them require a day off or out of the office, or a late start or early stop every week. Every single week. Its usually because their children are sick or they can't find a baby sitter, or day care isn't open, or whatever. These scheduling events (I won't say "problems") have seriously harmed my team's productivity, and set us back several months by conservative estimates.
Our HR person has instructed us (team leaders) that we can, in no way whatsoever, force any of our female employees to choose between their job or their children without making the company liable to a lawsuit. In other words, all any of the women on my team have to say is "My kid..." and they get to work whatever schedule they want, and usually less than a typical 40 hours.
Yes, they can work from home, but from the logs, they rarely do. If you call them on it, they say "Well, I was going to, but my kid was sick..." and you have to let them slide.
On the flip side, the male members of the team must be here every day without fail unless calling in sick or using a vacation day. 8-5, no work from home, nothing. Occasionally we get to leave early for a doctor/dentist appointment. Other than that, we are here every day, and we work all day. We are not allowed the same flexibility as the women.
Women demand equality, they demand that they be allowed to have both children and a career, yet when it comes time to actually DO both, they end up choosing one or the other a good portion of the time. You can't say anything against them, you can't write them up for missing too much work and not being productive, you can't write them up for contributing less than others on the team even though they make the same or more in salary (the women on my team do).
Maybe the solution is to allow men the same flexibility as women, even if they don't have kids. I'm single without children...if I was allowed the same scheduling flexibility as the women on my team with children, maybe I wouldn't care as much. At this point, however, there definitely isn't equality, and demanding any would just get me branded a sexist.
So, to me, it is a valid concern for an employer to consider whether you have or are planning to have children. It might not be valid legally, but I have epxerienced firsthand that it DOES have ramifications and DOES effect productivity. Given that it does effect the workplace and productivity, why shouldn't it be a valid concern for an employer?
My point is that you can't have it all. Sometimes you have to compromise. If children are a priority, then maybe the compromise is less career advancement. If career advancement is a priority, then maybe the compromise is not having children.
And this means absolutely zero if you really think about it.
Having a certificate just means you were able to convince a CA like Verisign that you are who you claim you are, which may or may not be true.
All that's required is that the information you type into the web form matches the info on file for the credit card you're using.
Unless Verisign is going to send a person out to physically check your ID while watching you physically place the order for the certificate, they're just taking your word for it.
So, having someone's basic identity information gets you a certificate claiming you are them. Yeah, that's secure.
And actually, if you go through the process on the Verisign site (for example...I'm not picking on Verisign specifically), all they want is valid credit card information, it doesn't even need to match the Name, Company Name, and other info used on the certificate itself. Yeah, that's secure.
"Taking work home" is a voluntary action. Not deductible.
Being told by your employer to work from home, or being told by your employer that you must be prepared to work from home as a condition of your employment (such as being on call 24/7 with the ability to log in) is not voluntary. Deductible.
As I said in my post(s), I'm not speaking out of my ass. I use a reputable and very experienced financial planner, who also prepares my taxes. Every planner in the office is an IRS Enrolled Agent.
My medicine is the good medicine. I have no worries.
I doubt it. You're a liar, an idiot, or a cracker.
You'd be wrong, and I'm no idiot. My ex-wife would probably disagree, though.
Our clients would most certainly prefer to be offline if the alternative was being vulnerable. After going through three different finance and IT audits last year alone (from 3 different accounting firms hired by 3 different clients and including one employee termination) our policy is simple: if we're vulnerable, and we know it, we are required to take immediate action proportionate to the degree of the vulnerability. Its in our contracts. A kernel exploit requiring a typical user account? Not that big of a deal to us, because there's only one user account on the production servers. An exploit in OpenSSH or Apache? Much more serious.
I don't have a thousand servers. More than 10, less than a hundred. They're all mirrors of each other...once the patch is tested on one, it rolls to the others. Elapsed time: less than a day.
This is linux. You don't like it, fix it yourself.
Duh. You're a tool. My point was that any sort of moratorium on notification just so some PR dweeb somewhere can put the right spin on things is not what I want. I want to know what's going on, I need to be able to report to my boss our liability, and I need to tell him my plan for fixing it ASAP, even if that plan means waiting a day or two for Red Hat or Novell to get a patch out. I can't do that unless I have information, and I can't get that information if everyone is keeping secrets. If one person has reported an exploit, to ANYONE, it means that there is SOMEONE ELSE out there that knows about the exploit but isn't so generous as to tell someone they know.
Anyone who believes that they're the only ones to have found a particular exploit is an arrogant ass. They may actually be the only ones, but it is safe to say that if one person can find something, so can another (or many others) most of whom probably won't be so noble.
As I stated in my other post: I want to know ASAP. If that means "0-day" to you, then oh well. To me, it means getting information pronto so that I can make an informed decision and take action ASAP, not sitting there waiting for a press release.
If I was a cracker, I wouldn't be spending 10 hours a day in a frigging cube with Lieberts and dehumidifiers blasting away making ends meet, I'd be off stealing credit card numbers and living the high life.
So, your bullshit, condescending tone aside, and your arrogant, incorrect assumptions aside, I give you +1 because you said "cracker" and not "hacker". At least you know the jargon.
The article is discussing the kernel. How can Red Hat ever test every possible configuration anyway? They have no way of knowing whether you're running Oracle in a mission-critical environment or running it on your desktop to play MP3s.
In your example it would be up to Oracle to certify and support the kernel released by Red Hat, not up to Red Hat to make sure their patch plays nice in every possible way with every possible application.
As soon as more than one person knows them, secrets don't exist.
If there is one person out there who knows about a vulnerability and/or exploit, there is more than one, and that means your systems are at risk instantly, embargo or not.
I'd rather know right away my systems are at risk...worst case, I walk over and yank the ethernet cable until the issue can be resolved. Waiting even 5 days means I'm vulnerable for those 5 days, which is unacceptable. I want the vulnerability fixed immediately. My company's clients would much rather know we took drastic measures to keep their data safe instead of sitting there with our asses hanging out waiting for some corporate vendor to put the best spin on things and generate a press release.
90 days? You've got to be kidding...that means my systems and networks are sitting ducks for 90 days. Unacceptable.
And yes, I do administer a significant number of Linux systems (and Solaris) so I know what I am talking about.
I think you have a lot of misconceptions about music.
First, I think you'd be hard pressed to find any musician who didn't do something that another did. There are so many examples to cite...probably the most overused (in the rock genre, anyway) would be Led Zeppelin ripping off just about every blues artist there ever was prior to 1968 or so. Would you say that Led Zeppelin is untalented? Would you say Jimmy Page in his heyday was a lousy guitarist?
Second, you seem to believe that only certain things can be used to create music, like actual, established, traditional instruments. Soundgarden's "Spoon Man" features a guy playing the spoons...is that new? Original? It can't be, because spoons aren't musical instruments, they're eating utensils, yet most people you could ask would say that song was "new" and "original" when it came out. So obviously its OK to take something unconventional and make sounds with it, right? What's the difference between one guy using spoons and another guy writing some code to make his computer spit out sounds instead of playing the guitar?
Third, you seem to equate someone being first or famous as being "original". In this thread, Chuck D's track would be considered "original" but I guarantee you that track probably has samples, loops, effects, and other techniques in it that came from other tracks. Hell, Public Enemy was one of the original groups to use samples in mainstream radio. Is Chuck D's music still "original" then? How can it be if he's using samples?
Fourth, you seem to have a bias against rap and hip-hop, judging by your "singing and not just speaking or shouting" comment. In "Pink Moon" Nick Drake doesn't sing (or what you would probably call singing)...yet I bet anyone you asked would say that song was an "original song" and its not even hip-hop or rap.
Fifth, what constitutes performing live? Is Kraftwerk a group with original songs? Their concerts sell out, and I'm talking arena size shows, not small clubs. They perform live. Yet they use samples and loops. Are they untalented? Unoriginal? Groups like U2 use pre-recorded backing tracks to fill out the live sound and make their live shows sound more like the albums...is U2 unoriginal? Untalented?
Seriously, think about what you're saying. You're saying that unless somebody knows how to play a traditional instrument (whatever "traditional" means) a certain way, their creative output is unoriginal. You can't even define "knows how to play" or "traditional"...is a didgeridoo a traditional instrument? How about a bouzouki? What level constitutes "knowing" how to play an instrument? I can teach a 13-yr old the bar chord progression used in the vast majority of rock songs in the past 40 years...if that kid writes 5 songs using that same chord progression, is that kid's music not new? Unoriginal? Should I punish that kid for not inventing something completely new? Chastise her for not understanding that she isn't good enough to make "real music"?
It's a shame that you feel only people who meet certain criteria should be allowed to create. Having an open mind is critical to growth...nobody is saying you have to like the things you see and hear, but criticizing them based on some subjective measure of "talent" or "originality" just isn't reasonable.
IMHO, you should refrain from judging someone's talent or originality until you can, in fact, do "better" than they can, whatever "better" means.
The Creative Commons licenses generally offer exceptions to copyrights. From the CC FAQ: Is Creative Commons against copyright? Not at all. Our licenses help you retain your copyright while allowing certain exceptions to it, upon certain conditions.
The Creative Commons license doesn't say anything about prohibiting commercial use of content. In fact, depending on which Creative Commons license you choose, commercial use is explicitly allowed.
You might want to check out the Creative Commons site, which explains the different licenses very clearly.
In short, an artist can retain copyright and control of a song, but allow others to freely use parts of the song (or all of the song) as long as they comply with certain restrictions. Sometimes, those restrictions include not using the song for commercial gain without the copyright holder's consent.
If the license covering the uploaded remixes is something like the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license, then the uploaded remix can be used commercially provided the person using it gives attribution to the author and allows distribution using the same license.
You might want to check the Creative Commons site...there's lots of info there. In short, depending on the license covering the uploaded remix, there's nothing at all preventing Chuck D from including the remix in a commercial distribution.
In many cases, I would guess the vast majority of cases, "new" music isn't actually new. Seriously, think about it. Unless you've heard EVERYTHING that's been produced, you can't determine whether something is new or not.
You might think its new, but there's a good chance someone, somewhere, in their basement, garage, club, whatever, wrote a very similar song using a very similar chord progression, beat, and very similar lyrics.
If I write a "new" song using the same chord progression as "Wild Thing" (and "Louie Louie" and about a million other rock songs), is my song "new"? Why? How is that different from taking what someone else has done and doing it differently?
If I play a C chord on my guitar, why is that original? Nobody else in the world has ever played a C chord before?
My point is that "new" means "different", not "nobody ever thought this up, ever!".
Now, as you seem not to be ethically bothered with proprietary software, then this is a moot point to discuss.
As I said, this is where your argument and Stallman's breaks down. You have to make a living wage, which means you have to have the skills that employers are looking for. The skills in demand at this point in time, in my area, are.Net (and to a lesser degree VB) and Java. It is just that simple. My family doesn't give a rat's ass about ethics if I'm not feeding them or housing them because I refuse to code using anything but what Stallman says I should use.
The "lone genius coder" style of doing things is all well and good, but in practice, corporate America just doesn't work that way. Do I wish it was different? Sure, but it isn't.
You have to get management buy in, then you have to have long term support. How do I save my ass if I convince my boss to go with Python, and a year into the project we lose two people and can't find any others with comparable Python experience? Saying "But boss, Richard Stallman and somebody on/. using the nick hummassa insist that we shouldn't be using anything but perl, Python, or Ruby so the fact that our project is behind schedule and won't meet our launch deadline is OK, and if the board doesn't like it, tough!" will just get me fired. Get it?
I pointed out that I support free software, in many ways. I don't need to defend my support, either. My point is simple: whether you support free software or not, in many, many cases the pie-in-the-sky theoretical way it "should" be isn't the way it actually is.
Actually, you did tell me to have people read PDFs and FAQs. I quote (from #11292714):
small developer pool? I don't think so. lots of documentation around.
That says "if you don't have any developers, have the developers you do have read some documentation and start coding."
IDEs aren't even an issue in my mind, as I said, we already use Eclipse. Got it?
First, the books and magazines are not useful outside my chosen field. If I purchase a book like "Diving into Python" because my work has started using Python and I need to learn it, that book is only useful to me at work. What, I'm going to use Python to go grocery shopping?
Likewise, if I subscribe to "Cold Fusion Journal" where is that magazine generally useful outside of my work? Do I use it to improve my workouts at the gym? No.
My financial planner (who also prepares my taxes) is an IRS Enrolled Agent. In other words, if I get audited, I never see someone from the IRS, and never talk to them. My planner does it for me.
You didn't read my original post, or if you did, you didn't comprehend what I was saying. If my employer REQUIRES THAT I BE ABLE TO WORK FROM HOME (ie be on call, be able to log in at 4 am, etc) then my computer is for their benefit. Thus, deductible if they do not provide such equipment to me or reimburse me for its expense.
This is not the same as trying to get something deducted under the home office scenario that everyone tries. If I incur expenses because my employer requires them for my job, I can deduct them. Likewise, I can deduct any expenses I incur that are educational in nature if the education improves my work skills.
My list was fairly specific. I don't deduct software costs if the software is for my own pleasure or my own benefit, for example. I don't deduct something like a digital camera, or a scanner, because my work doesn't require me to have them.
I don't see anything unreasonable (and apparently neither does the IRS) with deducting the expenses I incur to keep myself marketable and employed. After all, the more marketable I am, the more salary I make, and the more taxes I pay.
There's absolutely nothing unethical about tax avoidance, only tax evasion.
The rules are there for everybody to use...I'm being absolutely ethical by 1) hiring someone (an Enrolled Agent with the IRS, BTW) to prepare my taxes and minimize my tax as much as possible, and 2) complete #1 while avoiding an audit using rules that are public information.
You don't need to have a business. If you use the computer in any way for work, you can deduct it.
That includes being on-call and having to log in from home, authoring a book, computer training, computer certifications, and so on.
You can also deduct web hosting fees (you test code there to make sure you've learned what you've been studying), ISP fees (you have to have an internet account to log in to work with the computer you're deducting) and more.
Disclaimer: I'm not an attorney or tax preparer, I just have a damn good financial planner and tax preparer. I've been deducting everything related to my computer for years. I've also been deducting my vacations because wherever I go, I drop off a couple resumes and get some business cards and call it "job hunting".
Magazine subscriptions and book costs related to computers (or your work period if your work isn't I.T.) can also be deducted.
Skilled developers with 3-5 years of Python experience readily available in our Metro area. By 3-5 years experience I mean 3-5 years of serious application development, enterprise level, with Python. Not somebody who has read a couple books or a couple PDFs.
That's where your argument breaks down (as does Stallman's): its all well and good to champion doing everything only with free software, but the practical situation is quite different. The 100% as-defined-by-RMS free software means C, perl, or Python.
An multi-platform application used by an enterprise (hundreds of employees) in production, coded in C, would be a monster. Likewise perl, and probably Python, assuming we could even find the people with the experience. Regaring the C and perl comments I just made, I say this from experience.
I think you aren't being rational if you think you can take on development projects of large scope and get them done in the time constraints by telling half a dozen people to go read some PDFs and FAQs and then start coding.
Keep in mind, I'm platform agnostic. I don't really care what tools my team uses as long as the project comes in on time and under budget and doesn't fall on its face the first time people use it for real. I just don't think Python is that platform at this time, for all of the reasons I've stated.
I'll ask our HR guy to do a search on Monster, see how many hits we get for 3-5 years of Python experience in the Detroit metro area. My guess is, the number will be quite small, but maybe I will be surprised.
I don't understand your comments about IDEs. We already use Eclipse (as well as GNU/Linux for development, QA, and staging, using Apache and Tomcat)...which IDE you use is irrelevant to the specs I laid out in my previous post. Choice of IDE does nothing to help your app when it goes to production.
And that happens how, again? The U.S. has no military capability to invade any country of any substance.
What, the U.S. is going to invade China? Get real...even if every man, woman, and child in the U.S. that could walk and hold a club invaded China, they'd be outnumbered something like 10 to 1.
The scenario: an application that must be readily distributable and runnable on Solaris, GNU/Linux, Windows, OS X, and (hopefully) *BSD. The definition of "readily" is:
- build once (meaning compile once) - no installation of third-party software. In other words, the application's distribution package must have everything it needs to run - it must install correctly on all of the listed operating systems simply by running a wizard and taking the default options
Business issues to consider: conservative estimates specify approx. 8 "man" years to develop. All versions of application must communicate easily with other versions of the same application regardless of platform, and must also communicate easily with third-party applications and services, a la web services (SOAP, XML, etc)
Timeframe: no more than 24 calendar months elapsed time to 1.0, including all QA and testing.
Now, let's consider the options.
C: requires multiple builds, difficult to find suitably accomplished developers to meet timeframe requirements, major issues with memory management and other difficulties.
C++: all of the above from C, developer pool is smaller for UNIX-ish platforms, larger for Windows
VB: Windows only, developer pool is large
Perl: requires third-party installation on Windows (ActivePerl), developer pool is sizable. Difficult to code enterprise-wide application (we tried it). Server-based installations require something like mod_perl and Apache.
Python: developer pool very small
Ruby: developer pool very small
Java: no third-party installations, easily distributable, one build, enterprise apps easily created, developer pool is large
Seriously, for many, many purposes in the business world (where people make money to spend elsewhere) Java is the only answer. I'm not saying that because of bias, I'm saying that because I spend several months of every year writing specifications and design documents for such business applications.
I've been hacking around with Python for a couple of weeks lately. Very cool stuff, but I wouldn't even attempt trying to justify choosing it to any of my clients or my bosses for any number of reasons.
If you want to just start writing some application so that you can release it under the GPL and get it onto SourceForge and Freshmeat and look cool, then yeah, there are many different options for language and environment.
However, in a practical, real-world situation with deadlines, management buy-in, long term maintenance and support, etc. the options these days are basically two: bite the bullet and go Microsoft only with.NET and the various languages they offer (VB, C++, C#) or avoid Microsoft and choose Java.
I welcome a reasonable case proving I'm wrong. Claiming I'm wrong just because you happen to be good friends with half a dozen people who are Perl/Python/Ruby or C/C++ gods doesn't prove your case, though, because I'm talking about being able to find the people needed through a normal hiring process. That means geographic location, skills, quantity, etc.
Disclaimer: my team is currently developing an application that could not have been developed with anything but Java unless we were willing to support Microsoft platforms only, and that wasn't an option.
Slashdot Mirror
We use CruiseControl for this. Works great.
CruiseControl Home
There's also DamageControl. I checked it out, but got scared off by the need to install and use Ruby. I work with too many languages as it is, and am teaching myself Python, I don't need another especially just for one tool.
You may have read what I posted, but you haven't comprehended what I posted.
There're only a few ways I know to say that I'm not anti-family. I've run out, and you haven't picked up on any of them, so I guess we have an impasse.
I am not anti-family or anti-children. I may decide to have a family someday. My point is that if I make that choice, I will do so in such a way that I (and my family) don't need special treatment at work or anywhere else, and I will do so in such a way that me or my wife (or both of us) raise our own children. Call it personal preference, call it sanctimonious, call it whatever, I just call it planning.
I'm anti-inequality. That's all. In my experience, people with children get special treatment in the workplace while people without children do not. This special treatment is the result of a conscious decision (aside from rape or "accidents"), and in many cases, is also the result of gender.
I believe giving some people special treatment because of a decision they made is not fair. I'm not talking about treating a PhD "better" than someone with a 4-yr degree, either.
If you believe that you should be given special treatment because you have children, that's fine. I disagree, whether you negotiated something in advance with your employer or not. Are your co-workers without children allowed to take time off or work a special schedule when they aren't sick themselves? Either we're all equal or we're not. In your world, we're not. In my world, or at least the world I would like to see and do my best to make, we are.
I'm not the one who a) is overly sensitive, and b) got personal. In both cases, that was you.
Except for those who, like yourself, have issues with people who raise families.
Nope, I don't have any issue with people who raise families, which is pretty evident in my posts.
I do have issue with people who make a choice to raise families and expect everyone else to accomodate their choice unequally. You want special time off because you have kids? No problem, provided I get the same time off when I don't have kids. Equality. Fairness. That's all I'm asking for.
Why should I be treated differently just because you decided to have children?
My parents couldn't raise two kids on my dad's income alone.
Then maybe they shouldn't have had any kids, hmmm? That's not being sanctimonious, just planning.
Get ready for the immigrant wave! Zero population growth means imported labor. That idea doesn't bother me, but now YOU'VE got to deal with a new set of cultural standards. And how are your foreign language skills? Are you going to be able to get a job if your native language is no longer the lingua franca?
Wait a minute...you're saying immigrant labor is good? I'd rather not have immigrant labor, thank you very much. I'd rather have "regular" labor...you know, the kind where people are legally employed, get benefits, don't have to live in shacks, and make a living wage. What's wrong with that?
Yeah, those fucking breeders.
Well, let's speculate about that. Why do people have children? The historical reasons like needing a larger family to work fields are no longer valid. One reason might be to carry on the family name, but we don't have a clan system in the West any more, so is carrying on the family name really that much of a priority?
You want to call me sanctimonious, I call, as you say, "bullshit". You're telling me that you had children because of some noble ideal that you needed to replenish the population to prevent "the immigrant wave"? Yeah, right. You had children either because you weren't smart enough to handle birth control, or you needed someone to love you.
If you choose to have a family, great. Seriously, that's great. More power to you. But don't expect everyone else to fall all over themselves honoring your commitment and praising your contributions to society. You had children for your own selfish reasons, plain and simple. YOU wanted a family. YOU wanted to be able to teach someone YOUR preferences, YOUR beliefs, YOUR culture. YOU had the need for someone to love YOU.
For you to assume your children are going to be "good" people is just sheer arrogance. You have no control over what will happen or what they will do, only hope. For all you know, one of your kids is going to kill someone while driving drunk, or maybe one of your kids is going to have a kid that turns out to be a serial killer, or maybe one of your kids is going to cheat on their spouse, or any number of things that aren't all warm, fuzzy, and perfect.
If acknowledging what is true is sanctimonious, so be it. I'm not saying I'm better than you, I'm not attacking you. I'm only claiming that you DON'T KNOW what will happen, there's no way you can know what will happen, and for you to assert that your kids (and their kids) will always be perfect little members of society is just arrogance.
Give me one specific reason why you had children that DOESN'T have to do with emotions. Did you need extra help in the fields? Believing that you should have children so that you can raise them "right" to help make "the world a better place" at some point in the future is just arrogance. Who says you know what's right? Who says your version of how the world should be is how it should be?
You call me sanctimonious?? Ha. I call bullshit.
Bullshit on item one, and things are changing for item two.
I'm no lawyer (are you?), so I can't confirm your assertion one way or the other...I only know what I was told. I would assume that my company's lawyers gave a reasonable opinion to our managers when asked about possible options.
Are you suggesting that employers will force the single-parent father to leave his small children to stay at home by themselves?
Nope, I'm saying that in my experience, the men don't ask, for whatever reason.
I don't know what world you grew up in but BOTH of my parents worked and I spent a great deal of time in daycare. I was also latchkey for a number of years.
Ah, the fresh smell of /. sarcasm. Incidentally, both of MY parents worked as well, though my Mom (reasonably) waited until my sister and I were both in grade school to return to work, and chose a career (teaching) where her schedule matched those of her children so that she was home when we were. Is that a reasonable world to you?
I hold two degrees, have a great job with great pay, and I work in my children's schools and the surrounding community as a volunteer.
Looks like society got the benefit of that arrangement, right?
How would I know? Do degrees automatically equal productivity? I've worked with PhDs who couldn't produce their way out of paper bags, and until recently I didn't have a degree and regularly did the work of several people with aplomb. So, I don't think degrees automatically equal productivity.
For all I know your "great job with great pay" is running spam campaigns from Chinese-hosted servers. For all I know your "volunteer work" is as a KKK member fighting for white rights.
Even if you are "all that", I wasn't claiming to have an observation that was true for everyone, everywhere. I just described my own personal experiences and the difficulty my team and my employer are having due to women employees needing excessive time off for children.
Here's a good one for you: Dad and Mom are transient workers and can't afford daycare. The children grow up in the fields, working right next to their parents. They never attend a class in their life because they never show up in the system due to their mobility. Their parents, however, are EXTREMELY productive.
Here's a good one for you: Dad and Mom don't have kids in the first place. (gasp! shocker!) Here's another: how about no transient workers at all? Another: how about living within your means so your lifestyle doesn't require two incomes that in turn requires that you ask (and pay for) strangers to raise your kids and doesn't require your employer to give you special treatment?
I chose to let my employers know that I am on-call to stay at home if my children are sick and cannot attend school. When they hired me it was not an issue because they knew up front what my requirements were.
My point exactly...your employer DID discuss, prior to your employment, your family/child situation. As stated in other posts, that's not acceptable. Even if you bring it up unasked, the employer isn't supposed to consider it.
The companies that hired me are still in business, so I guess they survived my *low* productivity.
"Still in business" doesn't equal "maximum". I guess we could get into a business discussion if you wanted, but it is pretty common for a business to 1) continue for years due to momentum even after being damaged, and 2) ignore or not notice poor performance or productivity because of other things going on. My intent is not to attack you, my intent is to point out that your conclusion is flawed: the company or companies you worked for in the past still being in business does not prove you were as productive as you could have been, nor does it prove that your family issues weren't detrimental to your team and/or employer.
Thus proving my point that whether someone has children, or plans to have children, is a reasonable concern for an employer.
Oddly enough, when the men hit the 45-65 age range and are taking two mornings a week off to go to the cardiologist and prostate doctors' offices, and 6 weeks off every five years or so to recover from their current bypass operation, while the women keep plugging along, they tend to think it does not fall into the same category of offense.
Sick time wasn't my point. The women on my team (and in my company) typically exceed their allotted sick time and vacation time for their own medical needs and those of their children.
The men, even if they're willing, aren't given the same flexibility as the women. Legally or culturally. So how would Dad get time off from HIS job if Mom can't get the time off from hers? In the end, productivity suffers somewhere, right? And in the long run, we ALL suffer, because dual-income households mean day care, so in the long run we end up with a society of adults raised by strangers instead of their parents.
I have no issue with Dad staying at home and Mom working. If I was married with children, I would want to have one parent at home, either parent. I'm practical, so I would say the parent earning the most should work, and the other would stay at home. If Mom made more than Dad, so be it.
I do have issue with someone demanding that they be allowed to have it all at someone else's expense. How is that fair? A woman can demand career and family even if it costs someone else (person or corporation), but a man can't? That's not equal.
I realize that life throws curveballs, like divorce, death, whatever. You have to do what you have to do. My point is that in many situations, you have an opportunity to think about your options beforehand, and failure to do that responsibly shouldn't be a hardship on anyone or anything else.
I think part of the problem is that for all the equality in the workplace, there just isn't any, from either direction.
For example, my team is 75% female. I am male. I do not have a problem working with women, and in fact, until my current position, every supervisor I ever had was female. That's regardless of industry...I've worked in hospitality, IT, and finance/insurance.
The female members of my team consistently require special treatment for scheduling due to their children. When I say "consistently" I mean one or more of them require a day off or out of the office, or a late start or early stop every week. Every single week. Its usually because their children are sick or they can't find a baby sitter, or day care isn't open, or whatever. These scheduling events (I won't say "problems") have seriously harmed my team's productivity, and set us back several months by conservative estimates.
Our HR person has instructed us (team leaders) that we can, in no way whatsoever, force any of our female employees to choose between their job or their children without making the company liable to a lawsuit. In other words, all any of the women on my team have to say is "My kid..." and they get to work whatever schedule they want, and usually less than a typical 40 hours.
Yes, they can work from home, but from the logs, they rarely do. If you call them on it, they say "Well, I was going to, but my kid was sick..." and you have to let them slide.
On the flip side, the male members of the team must be here every day without fail unless calling in sick or using a vacation day. 8-5, no work from home, nothing. Occasionally we get to leave early for a doctor/dentist appointment. Other than that, we are here every day, and we work all day. We are not allowed the same flexibility as the women.
Women demand equality, they demand that they be allowed to have both children and a career, yet when it comes time to actually DO both, they end up choosing one or the other a good portion of the time. You can't say anything against them, you can't write them up for missing too much work and not being productive, you can't write them up for contributing less than others on the team even though they make the same or more in salary (the women on my team do).
Maybe the solution is to allow men the same flexibility as women, even if they don't have kids. I'm single without children...if I was allowed the same scheduling flexibility as the women on my team with children, maybe I wouldn't care as much. At this point, however, there definitely isn't equality, and demanding any would just get me branded a sexist.
So, to me, it is a valid concern for an employer to consider whether you have or are planning to have children. It might not be valid legally, but I have epxerienced firsthand that it DOES have ramifications and DOES effect productivity. Given that it does effect the workplace and productivity, why shouldn't it be a valid concern for an employer?
My point is that you can't have it all. Sometimes you have to compromise. If children are a priority, then maybe the compromise is less career advancement. If career advancement is a priority, then maybe the compromise is not having children.
And this means absolutely zero if you really think about it.
Having a certificate just means you were able to convince a CA like Verisign that you are who you claim you are, which may or may not be true.
All that's required is that the information you type into the web form matches the info on file for the credit card you're using.
Unless Verisign is going to send a person out to physically check your ID while watching you physically place the order for the certificate, they're just taking your word for it.
So, having someone's basic identity information gets you a certificate claiming you are them. Yeah, that's secure.
And actually, if you go through the process on the Verisign site (for example...I'm not picking on Verisign specifically), all they want is valid credit card information, it doesn't even need to match the Name, Company Name, and other info used on the certificate itself. Yeah, that's secure.
"Taking work home" is a voluntary action. Not deductible.
Being told by your employer to work from home, or being told by your employer that you must be prepared to work from home as a condition of your employment (such as being on call 24/7 with the ability to log in) is not voluntary. Deductible.
As I said in my post(s), I'm not speaking out of my ass. I use a reputable and very experienced financial planner, who also prepares my taxes. Every planner in the office is an IRS Enrolled Agent.
My medicine is the good medicine. I have no worries.
I doubt it. You're a liar, an idiot, or a cracker.
You'd be wrong, and I'm no idiot. My ex-wife would probably disagree, though.
Our clients would most certainly prefer to be offline if the alternative was being vulnerable. After going through three different finance and IT audits last year alone (from 3 different accounting firms hired by 3 different clients and including one employee termination) our policy is simple: if we're vulnerable, and we know it, we are required to take immediate action proportionate to the degree of the vulnerability. Its in our contracts. A kernel exploit requiring a typical user account? Not that big of a deal to us, because there's only one user account on the production servers. An exploit in OpenSSH or Apache? Much more serious.
I don't have a thousand servers. More than 10, less than a hundred. They're all mirrors of each other...once the patch is tested on one, it rolls to the others. Elapsed time: less than a day.
This is linux. You don't like it, fix it yourself.
Duh. You're a tool. My point was that any sort of moratorium on notification just so some PR dweeb somewhere can put the right spin on things is not what I want. I want to know what's going on, I need to be able to report to my boss our liability, and I need to tell him my plan for fixing it ASAP, even if that plan means waiting a day or two for Red Hat or Novell to get a patch out. I can't do that unless I have information, and I can't get that information if everyone is keeping secrets. If one person has reported an exploit, to ANYONE, it means that there is SOMEONE ELSE out there that knows about the exploit but isn't so generous as to tell someone they know.
Anyone who believes that they're the only ones to have found a particular exploit is an arrogant ass. They may actually be the only ones, but it is safe to say that if one person can find something, so can another (or many others) most of whom probably won't be so noble.
As I stated in my other post: I want to know ASAP. If that means "0-day" to you, then oh well. To me, it means getting information pronto so that I can make an informed decision and take action ASAP, not sitting there waiting for a press release.
If I was a cracker, I wouldn't be spending 10 hours a day in a frigging cube with Lieberts and dehumidifiers blasting away making ends meet, I'd be off stealing credit card numbers and living the high life.
So, your bullshit, condescending tone aside, and your arrogant, incorrect assumptions aside, I give you +1 because you said "cracker" and not "hacker". At least you know the jargon.
The article is discussing the kernel. How can Red Hat ever test every possible configuration anyway? They have no way of knowing whether you're running Oracle in a mission-critical environment or running it on your desktop to play MP3s.
In your example it would be up to Oracle to certify and support the kernel released by Red Hat, not up to Red Hat to make sure their patch plays nice in every possible way with every possible application.
As soon as more than one person knows them, secrets don't exist.
If there is one person out there who knows about a vulnerability and/or exploit, there is more than one, and that means your systems are at risk instantly, embargo or not.
I'd rather know right away my systems are at risk...worst case, I walk over and yank the ethernet cable until the issue can be resolved. Waiting even 5 days means I'm vulnerable for those 5 days, which is unacceptable. I want the vulnerability fixed immediately. My company's clients would much rather know we took drastic measures to keep their data safe instead of sitting there with our asses hanging out waiting for some corporate vendor to put the best spin on things and generate a press release.
90 days? You've got to be kidding...that means my systems and networks are sitting ducks for 90 days. Unacceptable.
And yes, I do administer a significant number of Linux systems (and Solaris) so I know what I am talking about.
Check out rsnapshot, then. rsnapshot.org.
I think you have a lot of misconceptions about music.
First, I think you'd be hard pressed to find any musician who didn't do something that another did. There are so many examples to cite...probably the most overused (in the rock genre, anyway) would be Led Zeppelin ripping off just about every blues artist there ever was prior to 1968 or so. Would you say that Led Zeppelin is untalented? Would you say Jimmy Page in his heyday was a lousy guitarist?
Second, you seem to believe that only certain things can be used to create music, like actual, established, traditional instruments. Soundgarden's "Spoon Man" features a guy playing the spoons...is that new? Original? It can't be, because spoons aren't musical instruments, they're eating utensils, yet most people you could ask would say that song was "new" and "original" when it came out. So obviously its OK to take something unconventional and make sounds with it, right? What's the difference between one guy using spoons and another guy writing some code to make his computer spit out sounds instead of playing the guitar?
Third, you seem to equate someone being first or famous as being "original". In this thread, Chuck D's track would be considered "original" but I guarantee you that track probably has samples, loops, effects, and other techniques in it that came from other tracks. Hell, Public Enemy was one of the original groups to use samples in mainstream radio. Is Chuck D's music still "original" then? How can it be if he's using samples?
Fourth, you seem to have a bias against rap and hip-hop, judging by your "singing and not just speaking or shouting" comment. In "Pink Moon" Nick Drake doesn't sing (or what you would probably call singing)...yet I bet anyone you asked would say that song was an "original song" and its not even hip-hop or rap.
Fifth, what constitutes performing live? Is Kraftwerk a group with original songs? Their concerts sell out, and I'm talking arena size shows, not small clubs. They perform live. Yet they use samples and loops. Are they untalented? Unoriginal? Groups like U2 use pre-recorded backing tracks to fill out the live sound and make their live shows sound more like the albums...is U2 unoriginal? Untalented?
Seriously, think about what you're saying. You're saying that unless somebody knows how to play a traditional instrument (whatever "traditional" means) a certain way, their creative output is unoriginal. You can't even define "knows how to play" or "traditional"...is a didgeridoo a traditional instrument? How about a bouzouki? What level constitutes "knowing" how to play an instrument? I can teach a 13-yr old the bar chord progression used in the vast majority of rock songs in the past 40 years...if that kid writes 5 songs using that same chord progression, is that kid's music not new? Unoriginal? Should I punish that kid for not inventing something completely new? Chastise her for not understanding that she isn't good enough to make "real music"?
It's a shame that you feel only people who meet certain criteria should be allowed to create. Having an open mind is critical to growth...nobody is saying you have to like the things you see and hear, but criticizing them based on some subjective measure of "talent" or "originality" just isn't reasonable.
IMHO, you should refrain from judging someone's talent or originality until you can, in fact, do "better" than they can, whatever "better" means.
The Creative Commons licenses generally offer exceptions to copyrights. From the CC FAQ:
Is Creative Commons against copyright?
Not at all. Our licenses help you retain your copyright while allowing certain exceptions to it, upon certain conditions.
You're not getting it.
The Creative Commons license doesn't say anything about prohibiting commercial use of content. In fact, depending on which Creative Commons license you choose, commercial use is explicitly allowed.
You might want to check out the Creative Commons site, which explains the different licenses very clearly.
In short, an artist can retain copyright and control of a song, but allow others to freely use parts of the song (or all of the song) as long as they comply with certain restrictions. Sometimes, those restrictions include not using the song for commercial gain without the copyright holder's consent.
If the license covering the uploaded remixes is something like the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license, then the uploaded remix can be used commercially provided the person using it gives attribution to the author and allows distribution using the same license.
You might want to check the Creative Commons site...there's lots of info there. In short, depending on the license covering the uploaded remix, there's nothing at all preventing Chuck D from including the remix in a commercial distribution.
Good ol' /. l33t-ism!
Define "new" and "original", first of all.
In many cases, I would guess the vast majority of cases, "new" music isn't actually new. Seriously, think about it. Unless you've heard EVERYTHING that's been produced, you can't determine whether something is new or not.
You might think its new, but there's a good chance someone, somewhere, in their basement, garage, club, whatever, wrote a very similar song using a very similar chord progression, beat, and very similar lyrics.
If I write a "new" song using the same chord progression as "Wild Thing" (and "Louie Louie" and about a million other rock songs), is my song "new"? Why? How is that different from taking what someone else has done and doing it differently?
If I play a C chord on my guitar, why is that original? Nobody else in the world has ever played a C chord before?
My point is that "new" means "different", not "nobody ever thought this up, ever!".
As I said, this is where your argument and Stallman's breaks down. You have to make a living wage, which means you have to have the skills that employers are looking for. The skills in demand at this point in time, in my area, are .Net (and to a lesser degree VB) and Java. It is just that simple. My family doesn't give a rat's ass about ethics if I'm not feeding them or housing them because I refuse to code using anything but what Stallman says I should use.
The "lone genius coder" style of doing things is all well and good, but in practice, corporate America just doesn't work that way. Do I wish it was different? Sure, but it isn't.
You have to get management buy in, then you have to have long term support. How do I save my ass if I convince my boss to go with Python, and a year into the project we lose two people and can't find any others with comparable Python experience? Saying "But boss, Richard Stallman and somebody on /. using the nick hummassa insist that we shouldn't be using anything but perl, Python, or Ruby so the fact that our project is behind schedule and won't meet our launch deadline is OK, and if the board doesn't like it, tough!" will just get me fired. Get it?
I pointed out that I support free software, in many ways. I don't need to defend my support, either. My point is simple: whether you support free software or not, in many, many cases the pie-in-the-sky theoretical way it "should" be isn't the way it actually is.
Actually, you did tell me to have people read PDFs and FAQs. I quote (from #11292714):
small developer pool? I don't think so. lots of documentation around.
That says "if you don't have any developers, have the developers you do have read some documentation and start coding."
IDEs aren't even an issue in my mind, as I said, we already use Eclipse. Got it?
I run into people like you all the time.
First, the books and magazines are not useful outside my chosen field. If I purchase a book like "Diving into Python" because my work has started using Python and I need to learn it, that book is only useful to me at work. What, I'm going to use Python to go grocery shopping?
Likewise, if I subscribe to "Cold Fusion Journal" where is that magazine generally useful outside of my work? Do I use it to improve my workouts at the gym? No.
My financial planner (who also prepares my taxes) is an IRS Enrolled Agent. In other words, if I get audited, I never see someone from the IRS, and never talk to them. My planner does it for me.
You didn't read my original post, or if you did, you didn't comprehend what I was saying. If my employer REQUIRES THAT I BE ABLE TO WORK FROM HOME (ie be on call, be able to log in at 4 am, etc) then my computer is for their benefit. Thus, deductible if they do not provide such equipment to me or reimburse me for its expense.
This is not the same as trying to get something deducted under the home office scenario that everyone tries. If I incur expenses because my employer requires them for my job, I can deduct them. Likewise, I can deduct any expenses I incur that are educational in nature if the education improves my work skills.
My list was fairly specific. I don't deduct software costs if the software is for my own pleasure or my own benefit, for example. I don't deduct something like a digital camera, or a scanner, because my work doesn't require me to have them.
I don't see anything unreasonable (and apparently neither does the IRS) with deducting the expenses I incur to keep myself marketable and employed. After all, the more marketable I am, the more salary I make, and the more taxes I pay.
There's absolutely nothing unethical about tax avoidance, only tax evasion.
The rules are there for everybody to use...I'm being absolutely ethical by 1) hiring someone (an Enrolled Agent with the IRS, BTW) to prepare my taxes and minimize my tax as much as possible, and 2) complete #1 while avoiding an audit using rules that are public information.
You don't need to have a business. If you use the computer in any way for work, you can deduct it.
That includes being on-call and having to log in from home, authoring a book, computer training, computer certifications, and so on.
You can also deduct web hosting fees (you test code there to make sure you've learned what you've been studying), ISP fees (you have to have an internet account to log in to work with the computer you're deducting) and more.
Disclaimer: I'm not an attorney or tax preparer, I just have a damn good financial planner and tax preparer. I've been deducting everything related to my computer for years. I've also been deducting my vacations because wherever I go, I drop off a couple resumes and get some business cards and call it "job hunting".
Magazine subscriptions and book costs related to computers (or your work period if your work isn't
I.T.) can also be deducted.
Skilled developers with 3-5 years of Python experience readily available in our Metro area. By 3-5 years experience I mean 3-5 years of serious application development, enterprise level, with Python. Not somebody who has read a couple books or a couple PDFs.
That's where your argument breaks down (as does Stallman's): its all well and good to champion doing everything only with free software, but the practical situation is quite different. The 100% as-defined-by-RMS free software means C, perl, or Python.
An multi-platform application used by an enterprise (hundreds of employees) in production, coded in C, would be a monster. Likewise perl, and probably Python, assuming we could even find the people with the experience. Regaring the C and perl comments I just made, I say this from experience.
I think you aren't being rational if you think you can take on development projects of large scope and get them done in the time constraints by telling half a dozen people to go read some PDFs and FAQs and then start coding.
Keep in mind, I'm platform agnostic. I don't really care what tools my team uses as long as the project comes in on time and under budget and doesn't fall on its face the first time people use it for real. I just don't think Python is that platform at this time, for all of the reasons I've stated.
I'll ask our HR guy to do a search on Monster, see how many hits we get for 3-5 years of Python experience in the Detroit metro area. My guess is, the number will be quite small, but maybe I will be surprised.
I don't understand your comments about IDEs. We already use Eclipse (as well as GNU/Linux for development, QA, and staging, using Apache and Tomcat)...which IDE you use is irrelevant to the specs I laid out in my previous post. Choice of IDE does nothing to help your app when it goes to production.
And that happens how, again? The U.S. has no military capability to invade any country of any substance.
What, the U.S. is going to invade China? Get real...even if every man, woman, and child in the U.S. that could walk and hold a club invaded China, they'd be outnumbered something like 10 to 1.
There are options. Explore them.
.NET and the various languages they offer (VB, C++, C#) or avoid Microsoft and choose Java.
The scenario: an application that must be readily distributable and runnable on Solaris, GNU/Linux, Windows, OS X, and (hopefully) *BSD. The definition of "readily" is:
- build once (meaning compile once)
- no installation of third-party software. In other words, the application's distribution package must have everything it needs to run
- it must install correctly on all of the listed operating systems simply by running a wizard and taking the default options
Business issues to consider: conservative estimates specify approx. 8 "man" years to develop. All versions of application must communicate easily with other versions of the same application regardless of platform, and must also communicate easily with third-party applications and services, a la web services (SOAP, XML, etc)
Timeframe: no more than 24 calendar months elapsed time to 1.0, including all QA and testing.
Now, let's consider the options.
C: requires multiple builds, difficult to find suitably accomplished developers to meet timeframe requirements, major issues with memory management and other difficulties.
C++: all of the above from C, developer pool is smaller for UNIX-ish platforms, larger for Windows
VB: Windows only, developer pool is large
Perl: requires third-party installation on Windows (ActivePerl), developer pool is sizable. Difficult to code enterprise-wide application (we tried it). Server-based installations require something like mod_perl and Apache.
Python: developer pool very small
Ruby: developer pool very small
Java: no third-party installations, easily distributable, one build, enterprise apps easily created, developer pool is large
Seriously, for many, many purposes in the business world (where people make money to spend elsewhere) Java is the only answer. I'm not saying that because of bias, I'm saying that because I spend several months of every year writing specifications and design documents for such business applications.
I've been hacking around with Python for a couple of weeks lately. Very cool stuff, but I wouldn't even attempt trying to justify choosing it to any of my clients or my bosses for any number of reasons.
If you want to just start writing some application so that you can release it under the GPL and get it onto SourceForge and Freshmeat and look cool, then yeah, there are many different options for language and environment.
However, in a practical, real-world situation with deadlines, management buy-in, long term maintenance and support, etc. the options these days are basically two: bite the bullet and go Microsoft only with
I welcome a reasonable case proving I'm wrong. Claiming I'm wrong just because you happen to be good friends with half a dozen people who are Perl/Python/Ruby or C/C++ gods doesn't prove your case, though, because I'm talking about being able to find the people needed through a normal hiring process. That means geographic location, skills, quantity, etc.
Disclaimer: my team is currently developing an application that could not have been developed with anything but Java unless we were willing to support Microsoft platforms only, and that wasn't an option.