You truly get what you pay for. During college I worked on PCs to make some extra $ - hated working on Dells or Gateways... rather annoying boxen.
Into corporate america I go, and I get what I considered a small fortune allocated to buy myself a development laptop. Anything I wanted, as long as it was a Dell:) This was just shy of 3 years ago. I bought a smashing d800 - carried it all over the world, in a backpack, throwning it into and out of the car 5 days a week.
The video card smoked on it at 2 yrs - had a tech at my desk at the office 36 hours later putting a new one in.
Nearing the end of warranty, I called support. Again, you get what you pay for, and what had been purchased was the 3 year gold warranty with full accidental damage coverage. After I went through the littany of things that were worn out (not broken, just USED) with the tech on the phone (I was on hold for 30 seconds - the Gold queues are short), he said it was cheaper for Dell to just replace the machine. How nice - a new d820 was shipped a few days later that is faster/bigger in all respects to the previous machine. Fully covered under warranty. How much was this warranty? $300.
I recently bought another Dell - M90 - top of the line mobile workstation, with the warranty that I had on the previous machine. You can't get close to it's specs from any manufacture out there without giving them $2k more than I paid - and the machine is fabulous - with no pre-loaded crapware - they don't do so much of that on an engineering machine.
Long story short - you get what you pay for. Pay $300 for a machine you get a $300 machine. get the cheapest/standard warranty you get 2 hour hold times - what do you expect? As a previous poster mentioned, I don't have the time to build a machine, and build your own laptop is hard... for the money I have a great machine and a stellar warranty that I've seen in action.
I used to hate Dell - now not so much:)
write more code of your own write more code read more code read LOTS of other people's code (DL a smallish OSS project at first, then larger ones).
rinse, lather, repeat.
If you're concerned that you're not learning "cool new things" on the job, learn them off the job. Your destiny is your own, as hokey as that sounds...
how bout they teach debugging programs? Looking at the CS grads I graduated with and a lot of the new grads I interview, they don't need a robot, they need to learn how to write software...
A new dev that can't follow a stack trace isn't a dev at all... if they had a cool robot, that does us no good at all.
what's a "huge percentage"? when you consider the $hit that the marketdroids put on their machines, and the massive number of them that MS must have, this is a good testbed. The number of actual software devs in the MS org must be surprisingly low...
Just piping in - I bought a Honda Civic Hybrid before they were "cool"... it rocks. Best money ever spend. Runs perfect, 60mpg+ in the city, and powerful enough to pass/merge etc. Cannot say enough good things about it.
Wife and I were talking about getting a new car... we're ONLY looking at hybrids. With 600+ miles from a tank of gas, $3 a gallon doesn't hurt me nearly as bad as the poor fellows I see driving 1/2 ton pickup trucks as commuter vehicles.
I suppose its all where you want to spend your pennies.
I used to commute a little over 100 miles a day, and NPR was the only station that really worked and made the time feel like less of a waste.
When the first fund drive came up, i ponied up my $20 - not much, but a lot to a college student. It was a good feeling to support something I used every day.
If you haven't tried NPR, at least give it a shot - you may be surprised.
First - love RMS and the stuff he's done. That said - when you're marketing an idea or set of ideas, you're marketing. Looking like a guy who just did a 20 year stretch isn't getting us anywhere.
We talk about usability, blah blah blah... who does my grandma trust - the shiny M$ guy telling her IE is great, or manson's cousin telling her it takes her freedom. Sheesh - even I got a haircut and shaved my gizzly adams. I suppose you can change the system from inside our out, just my 2c.
RE: his quote ~"you write java but it won't run on all platforms, it won't run on free platforms." Please, can we get him to stop doing that? I daily develop large java apps-developed on Win, contiuous integrationed on Linux, and deployed on a different flavor/kernel, unix, and Win - on amd and intel. Please, RMS, for the good of the cause either clarify what you're talking about, or stop spouting that FUD.
Don't shout about 40k per proc - that's for the enterprise licenses... and ONLY on large boxen.
The "free" edition is that - free with a machine size/data volume limit. The "Standard Edition One" is prolly the most compelling - $5k per proc LIST. Can only run on Dual proc boxen and can't cluster. Has ALL the features of enterprise besides that.
There is another edition in between that allows bigger boxen and clustering but misses out on some of the uber fancy stuff in enterprise (which, while cool - isn't stuff you use day-to-day).
The standard Edition One came out ~2yrs ago - they're trying to work in the shops/price range where SQLServer usually lives. And seriously, you can push a lot of data through a big dually with enough ram. Not going to support 50 million users - but both SQLServer and Oracle will do an awful lot on a properly configured Dual proc server.
That said - the previous poster was right - if you're paying retail you're nuts, and couldn't negotiate your way out of a paper sack.
I use MySQL, SQLServer, and Oracle on a fairly regular basis in different places, and for vanilla stuff A RDMS is a commodity service.
Until you're using your ERP to generate 4+MB sql statements (a supported feature in the latest DB2 version), or are doing some really ornery stuff, the DB is just a place to dump data. They all let you do backups etc, provide reasonable management tools etc. (Oracle does have some REALLY cool features from a DBA's standpoint that are missing in MySQL et al.)
Dev styles are different in different shops - if you're an "All CRUD/LOGIC in stored procs" shop then the lang in the DB (TSQL vrs PL/SQL) might be important to your devs... but if you are working on relative DB independence or working on portable COTS software, a DB is just another service.
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You truly get what you pay for. During college I worked on PCs to make some extra $ - hated working on Dells or Gateways... rather annoying boxen. Into corporate america I go, and I get what I considered a small fortune allocated to buy myself a development laptop. Anything I wanted, as long as it was a Dell :) This was just shy of 3 years ago. I bought a smashing d800 - carried it all over the world, in a backpack, throwning it into and out of the car 5 days a week.
The video card smoked on it at 2 yrs - had a tech at my desk at the office 36 hours later putting a new one in.
Nearing the end of warranty, I called support. Again, you get what you pay for, and what had been purchased was the 3 year gold warranty with full accidental damage coverage. After I went through the littany of things that were worn out (not broken, just USED) with the tech on the phone (I was on hold for 30 seconds - the Gold queues are short), he said it was cheaper for Dell to just replace the machine. How nice - a new d820 was shipped a few days later that is faster/bigger in all respects to the previous machine. Fully covered under warranty. How much was this warranty? $300.
I recently bought another Dell - M90 - top of the line mobile workstation, with the warranty that I had on the previous machine. You can't get close to it's specs from any manufacture out there without giving them $2k more than I paid - and the machine is fabulous - with no pre-loaded crapware - they don't do so much of that on an engineering machine.
Long story short - you get what you pay for. Pay $300 for a machine you get a $300 machine. get the cheapest/standard warranty you get 2 hour hold times - what do you expect? As a previous poster mentioned, I don't have the time to build a machine, and build your own laptop is hard... for the money I have a great machine and a stellar warranty that I've seen in action.
I used to hate Dell - now not so much :)
"I have little confidence in a product which is not written in lean-mean native C++ based code." Silly.
If you want to be a coder...
write more code of your own
write more code
read more code
read LOTS of other people's code (DL a smallish OSS project at first, then larger ones).
rinse, lather, repeat.
If you're concerned that you're not learning "cool new things" on the job, learn them off the job. Your destiny is your own, as hokey as that sounds...
love your work.
how bout they teach debugging programs? Looking at the CS grads I graduated with and a lot of the new grads I interview, they don't need a robot, they need to learn how to write software...
A new dev that can't follow a stack trace isn't a dev at all... if they had a cool robot, that does us no good at all.
Long story short - it is in the police report
"if you move, I'll shoot you in the face".
This from a fine boy in blue in the state of Colorado in 1995.
Guess he was a gamer back then....
what's a "huge percentage"? when you consider the $hit that the marketdroids put on their machines, and the massive number of them that MS must have, this is a good testbed. The number of actual software devs in the MS org must be surprisingly low...
Just piping in - I bought a Honda Civic Hybrid before they were "cool"... it rocks. Best money ever spend. Runs perfect, 60mpg+ in the city, and powerful enough to pass/merge etc. Cannot say enough good things about it. Wife and I were talking about getting a new car... we're ONLY looking at hybrids. With 600+ miles from a tank of gas, $3 a gallon doesn't hurt me nearly as bad as the poor fellows I see driving 1/2 ton pickup trucks as commuter vehicles. I suppose its all where you want to spend your pennies.
I used to commute a little over 100 miles a day, and NPR was the only station that really worked and made the time feel like less of a waste.
When the first fund drive came up, i ponied up my $20 - not much, but a lot to a college student. It was a good feeling to support something I used every day.
If you haven't tried NPR, at least give it a shot - you may be surprised.
If you use it, help em out.
First - love RMS and the stuff he's done. That said - when you're marketing an idea or set of ideas, you're marketing. Looking like a guy who just did a 20 year stretch isn't getting us anywhere.
We talk about usability, blah blah blah... who does my grandma trust - the shiny M$ guy telling her IE is great, or manson's cousin telling her it takes her freedom. Sheesh - even I got a haircut and shaved my gizzly adams. I suppose you can change the system from inside our out, just my 2c.
RE: his quote ~"you write java but it won't run on all platforms, it won't run on free platforms."
Please, can we get him to stop doing that? I daily develop large java apps-developed on Win, contiuous integrationed on Linux, and deployed on a different flavor/kernel, unix, and Win - on amd and intel. Please, RMS, for the good of the cause either clarify what you're talking about, or stop spouting that FUD.
Don't shout about 40k per proc - that's for the enterprise licenses... and ONLY on large boxen.
The "free" edition is that - free with a machine size/data volume limit.
The "Standard Edition One" is prolly the most compelling - $5k per proc LIST. Can only run on Dual proc boxen and can't cluster. Has ALL the features of enterprise besides that.
There is another edition in between that allows bigger boxen and clustering but misses out on some of the uber fancy stuff in enterprise (which, while cool - isn't stuff you use day-to-day).
The standard Edition One came out ~2yrs ago - they're trying to work in the shops/price range where SQLServer usually lives. And seriously, you can push a lot of data through a big dually with enough ram. Not going to support 50 million users - but both SQLServer and Oracle will do an awful lot on a properly configured Dual proc server.
That said - the previous poster was right - if you're paying retail you're nuts, and couldn't negotiate your way out of a paper sack.
I use MySQL, SQLServer, and Oracle on a fairly regular basis in different places, and for vanilla stuff A RDMS is a commodity service.
Until you're using your ERP to generate 4+MB sql statements (a supported feature in the latest DB2 version), or are doing some really ornery stuff, the DB is just a place to dump data. They all let you do backups etc, provide reasonable management tools etc. (Oracle does have some REALLY cool features from a DBA's standpoint that are missing in MySQL et al.)
Dev styles are different in different shops - if you're an "All CRUD/LOGIC in stored procs" shop then the lang in the DB (TSQL vrs PL/SQL) might be important to your devs... but if you are working on relative DB independence or working on portable COTS software, a DB is just another service.
No I don't work for Oracle.