When you accept a salaried job in I.T., you generally do so under the assumption that you'll be working 40 hour weeks, on average. If more is asked of you, fine, but you expect your boss will be fair about it and give you comp. time, a few extra perks, or at least a bigger raise the next year in return.
There are other professions out there such as doctors or lawyers, where it's generally understood that these "rules" don't apply. It's the nature of the career. (You're not reporting daily to a workspace in someone's company, to sit in one spot all the time and work on whatever you're ordered to do.) As an attorney or a doctor, you're directly involved in decisions that can drastically change the course of a client's life. It's vastly different from I.T. - where mistakes or "slacking off" probably just means a deadline for a project doesn't get met, a server crashes more than it should, or some code is more buggy than average.
Last I checked, doctors and lawyers were earning considerably more than most I.T. workers, too. Ask yourself if you'd still put in those same number of billable hours if your take-home pay maxed out at, say, $35,000 or $40,000 a year.
Yeah, your "geek union" is a pretty unrealistic concept, unfortunately. First of all, the very idea that it would hold together on an international basis is absurd. There are simply too many countries with a large difference in cost of living/quality of life from what's found in the U.S. or Canada. Some programmer in Romania is going to be quite well off if he accepts a $10 or $12 an hour coding job from a United States owned company. He's not going to play along with a "geek union" demanding he refuse to work until they pay him much more than that. He'd rather take your job away and proudly be "non union".
Lately, I've seen some pretty poor results from labor oursourced to India and the like, though. I think in the long run, companies doing these things to cut costs are going to find they shot themselves in the foot. Customer satisfaction is going down the toilet....
It may not happen immediately (and I feel it will get still worse before it gets better), but eventually, good quality people from the U.S. will be in demand again for tech. jobs. All this outsourcing is a trend they'll try for a while and then realize was a long-term failure.
Well, I've considered Don Henley rather hypocritical ever since I heard his attacks on MP3 file sharing. On one hand, he protests all the raw deals the record companies give artists, but then he sides with them by decrying file sharing by his own fans?
I suppose he sees the two issues as unrelated - but that's a viewpoint one can only have while wearing blinders, IMHO. The fact is, people have been making copies of music ever since they were first able to record it. Anyone downloading an artist's work via the Internet is above all else, showing their loyalty to that musician's work. (Why would you bother downloading music you didn't like?) As a former musician myself, I would have been proud to see any of my music logging thousands of "pirate" downloads. It means I'm getting exposure, which is the most valuable thing of all for an artist. Instead of counting theoretical lost pennies for every "illegal download" one can track down, it's much more useful to accept file sharing as part of the culture.
Yes! You hit the nail on the head!
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Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 1
I think you've hit upon the primary reason for the age discrimination in hiring software developers, whether you realized it or not!
I used to program myself, back when 64K was "a lot of RAM".... I wrote and marketed my own computer bulletin board package, among other things.
I got involved with other things for a while though, and when I decided to re-vist programming, it felt like I was starting over from scratch - only the learning curve was steeper than when I first started out.
I took a course in C programming, and tried to grasp the new "object oriented" stuff -- but ultimately, my heart just wasn't in it, and I elected to concentrate on PC hardware and support instead.
While working in support, along-side software developers, I've notice a pattern. The older developers bring some good experience and techniques to the table (which the younger developers are usually eager to grasp onto and make use of in their own coding), but they don't usually have the flexibility and speed to pick up new things like the younger programmers do.
Depending on the type of project, I'd personally prefer either the older, experienced developers, OR the younger, eager developers. I don't think it's so much a case of discrimination, but merely trying to match the strengths and talents to the task at hand.
If your needs involve a lot of updating of old code, working on a project that requires lots of structure and planning, or you only develop using a "tried and true" programming language (such as C++), the older developers will probably have more experience than the younger folks.
On the flip-side, if you crank out projects on tight deadlines and tend to "jump around" with the languages used for individual tasks, it seems like the younger guys (and gals) are quicker to wrap their heads around the changing needs and crank out some solutions quickly. Older developers tend to fight and ask more questions, such as "Do you really HAVE to write this thing using VB? I'd really prefer to do it in Java." (They might be right too - but that's not always the point. Sometimes, companies just have rather senseless reasons for what they want, and as a dept. manager, it's simply your job to get coders who can produce the results requested, quickly.)
Yes, but who is drawing up the requirements in the first place? It seems to me it's usually one of the department heads I was referring to.
So like I was saying, the problem may not have much at all to do with some sort of mandate "from the top" that all military personnel use a Microsoft product (or any other vendor's product). In some (many?) cases, it just may be departmental politics at work.
And yes, people can (and do) manipulate requirements to effectively try to force the use of a favorite product - but that's not always successful. How many relevant features can you really come up with that are all only met by your "pet product" and not by any other vendor's alternatives?
I think the problem of old, outdated requirements being used long after they need review and revision is a bigger problem.
Personally, I think StarOffice/OpenOffice need to become clearly *superior* to Microsoft Office before they'll gain much market-share.
As long as they simply tout themselves as "very compatible" with Office, they'll just be a minority alternative to Office.
The problem is, the documents people create (especially in a corporate environment!) are typically much more valuable than the price of the Office suite itself. The fact that OpenOffice is free is almost a non-issue. The up-front cost of licensing MS Office might seem outrageously high, but you have to remember most companies are paying out a LOT more than that in salaries/hourly wages for all their employees' time typing documents up in the software afterwards.
If there's even a hint of a possibility that important documents could get "mangled" or not open right if a business switches Office suites, they'll usually decide against the switch.
If there's no compelling reason to switch, they'll keep using what they've been using too. Why incur additional training costs for people to learn something new, if there's no obvious productivity benefit?
That said, I'm convinced MS Excel has some unacknowleged bugs in it that can cause document corruption. I've read many a story of people who worked for hours on an Excel spreadsheet, saved it - and came back the next day to find the document completely gone. (One of the "switcher" stories recently posted to Apple's site documents this, for example.) I also ran into this at least a handful of times when doing computer support for companies. People would blame our server, or say their computer just "ate my file".... We'd either have to pull a day old backup off a tape or just say "Sorry.... you'll have to type it over." It seemed like systems with less RAM in them were more likely to exhibit this behavior - but it was impossible to duplicate, and didn't happen with any real pattern. I do think it tended to only happen on a larger, more complex spreadsheet though. (At least, if it happened on small "quickie" spreadsheets, the victims never complained about it.)
A truly more stable spreadsheet app with all the power and charting abilities of Excel could compel people to switch.
One of my friends was employed by the military (mechanical engineer), and often got involved in computer issues as a side-effect of his rank and position.
From the stories he told me, it sounds to me like the U.S. military often resists change on a department by department basis. I don't doubt that politicians at the top play a big role in keeping closed source commerical products in the military -- but in many cases, it seems like the only hurdles are technical ones. (EG. A specification demands that any software or OS solution used meet a number of criteria. If a Linux installation can meet them, then fine - it can *technically* be substituted as the server platform for that department.) Where it falls apart is when a colonel decides he really likes Microsoft products (maybe simply because that's all he ever used), and he dictates that *his* staff will never use anything but Windows.
On the particular military installation my friend worked at, they had a similar situation years ago, where one group kept using Novell - despite the rest of the base running Windows. Everyone tried to put pressure on the other group to ditch the old Novell server - but for years, they insisted on sticking with it. (Everyone else ended up having to mess around with loading Novell modules and IPX stacks they didn't want to use, or else not be able to access that one department's data.) Since the Novell system technically met the (old) requirements drafted up, there wasn't any way to mandate a change.
It's not that any of the other patents we saw described our idea with a "slight modification". It's more of a problem of their patents describing inventions which are for a much less specific purpose than ours - yet could be construed to encompass our idea. If we could find someone describing a device to do exactly what we wanted to do, we'd just scrap the whole project. The thing is, some of the other patents just seem to be close enough to allow a fight in court over it. We don't have the money or time to deal with that, so we're wanting to use alternate methods of accomplishing individual tasks within the invention to what's described in any of these broader patents - just to make it less similar and reduce the risk of lawsuit.
My wife came up with an idea a while back for a product, and we're still trying to get a prototype built. When we went to do an online patent search, we discovered at least 8 or 9 potentially troublesome patents already in place for similar devices to ours. Upon closer inspection though, they all appeared to be filed by people who never sold a product based on any of them. In most of the cases, it looked like they were written up by other people like us, trying to piece something together from parts lying around the house. (One guy described how his unit functioned using such things as an aquarium water pump and a tire inner-tube, for example.)
I can understand why the people wanted to patent their ideas, but as others pointed out - it seems like these unimplemented patents should automatically expire after a period of time. (Perhaps 2 years is enough of a time-frame to say "Show evidence of progress, or the patent gets removed."?)
As it stands now, all of these existing patents place artifical limits on the ways we can opt to accomplish specific goals inside our final product. I'd prefer not to disclose exactly what we're trying to do, but just for example - if we want to heat and distill some water in our product, we might have to use a peltier device instead of a heating coil. Even if the heating coil is the superior solutuon, it might put our device into questionable patent territory, since another (fairly broadly worded) patent already describes a device not too different than ours, using a heating coil for this function.
Re:160 Kbps MP3 NOT very good!
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AAC Put To The Test
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yep!! I encoded my entire CD collection at 192 bits, and I don't waste my time listening to anything less, if I can help it. I find it maddening that most people still encode at 128 bits and think it sounds "good enough". It only sounds ok on cheap speakers, or perhaps even moderate priced speakers + some audio processing enabled to "enhance" the sound.
Whenever I listen to 128-bit MP3s through my set of studio monitors, they sound "thin". Even in my car (I have a Rio MP3 car player), with Diamond Audio seperates and a Rockford Fosgate amp, 128-bit MP3s are noticeably poorer quality than ones encoded at higher bitrates.
I would have encoded above 192 bits, even, except I was trying to strike a good balance between optimal sound quality and conserving a little bit of drive space. (After all, if disk space is no object, then it makes no sense to use a compressed audio format to begin with!) I found that 192 bits was about as low as I could encode and still feel like I wasn't losing any significant amount of audio quality. (At worst, you might be able to hear very small details, such as a brush against a cymbal in an otherwise quiet passage, that would have sounded more "life-like" at 256 bit+ encoding than at 192. You'd almost have to listen to them side by side to even tell though.)
Personally, I think the best thing that could happen is for the artists to all get screwed over on their advances, when they find out people just aren't buying enough stuff on major label CDs and tapes to cover their loans.
That's what it seems like it will take to get musicians and artists to "read the fine print" on these outrageous recording contracts, and just say "NO!" to them.
As it stands, they're all still willing to take the gamble that it will pay off for them. (EG. "I know *my* music is so good, it's gotta go platinum. I won't be one of the failures.")
While it's largely true that "clock speed alone doesn't mean that much anymore", Apple's biggest defecit has been in system bus speed. Their best G4 tower still uses a 266Mhz bus, if I recall correctly.
By comparison, current P4 boards have as high as an 800Mhz bus.
In the last 2-3 years or so, I'd say that bus speed on the motherboard is much more of a bottleneck than the CPU. Cranking a CPU's processor speed up gives diminishing returns if the rest of the support chips and RAM can only move the data around at a fraction of the speed the CPU crunches the data at.
This problem gets compounded when everything else in the machine gets faster and faster (such as video cards, hard drives, etc.). All those devices push data out to the motherboard, and there's only so much "bandwidth" to go around for cards and integrated controller-based devices. When that gets flooded out, performance suffers.
This is painfully obvious when people buy G3 and G4 upgrade cards for older generation Macs (such as Beige G3's), upgrade to a Radeon video card, and then try enabling "Quartz Extreme" graphics acceleration under OS X. The 100Mhz bus speed of a Beige G3 gets saturated with the video acceleration on - and performs worse than with it off.
No, of course it isn't about "helping the people of India". It's obviously about improving profit margins. As upsetting and/or frustrating as it may be to Americans finding themselves unemployed because of it - I think it's still only a temporary "fad".
At some point, people in these 3rd. world countries will realize that their talents are very valuable to the U.S. (and other countries outsourcing to them). They'll start to become more greedy than they are today, and won't continue working for these miniscule salaries.
Right now, citizens of countries like Romania generally earn so little, these outsourcing deals seem very attractive to them by comparison. Fine, but not everyone in Romania possesses the skills to do these jobs. (Help desk or software development demand some skills that I'd think relatively few of their citizens would be equipped to do.) Those that have the skills will start learning to leverage those skills to earn more and more. You can only shuffle your labor pool around from country to country for so long before you run out of "takers" willing to work for peanuts.
Yep - I agree. Right now, there's so much "big label" music still missing from Apple's store, I think they've got *plenty* of additions to make on existing fronts - before even starting to delve into the unknown labels.
EG. The other night, I did a search on a few artists that came to mind, and they had NOTHING available from any of these:
Weird Al Yankovic Lords of Acid Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction
Then I searched for Roger Waters, and they only had 2 complete albums of his, only 2 songs from "The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking", and absolutely nothing from his latest album.
Yeah, I find this interesting as well. (Especially since I just bought a new dual 1.42Ghz tower!) I was under the impression that the chips inside wouldn't be labeled as 1.25Ghz....
In any case though, it's a pretty elaborate heat-sink upgrade. There's actually a heat-pipe engineered into it. It's not simply "more metal on top". So even if they are effectively just "overclocked 1.25Ghz chips", Apple put a lot of R&D into finding an improved way to channel off the extra heat.
If you look at most of the G4 CPU upgrades for pre-G3 Macs (Sonnet, PowerLogix, etc.) - they do their share of overclocking too. The G4-550Mhz upgrade they sell for the Beige and Blue & White G3 machines, for example, runs at 533Mhz in the B&W model. It runs at 550 only on Beige systems. (Apparently as a result of the bus speed multipliers having different possible settings, due to different bus speeds of the 2 systems.)
I'm not even sure I see why this project is a "very good idea"? I think the technology has some promise. (A system that coordinates such things as you blowing towards the screen and having items on the screen react to your breath is pretty cool, for example.) I just don't see this "new age, neo-hippie meditative journey" software as being the "killer app" that convinces us to buy into the USB control devices making it happen.
Perhaps society is already as "designed around relaxation" as it can be, without being too detrimental to other aspects of our lives? People have always had the option to live a generally peaceful, tranquil and relaxing lifestyle - but most of us opt for a higher stress level and faster pace, because we receive more monetary rewards for it, and perhaps achieve a greater sense of accomplishment to boot.
I dislike stress as much as anyone, but I put myself under quite a bit of it regularly, because it's worth it to me. If I didn't, I would never have achieved such things as becoming a home-owner (because I'd be working "little thought necessary" jobs with low pay, and just scraping by on renting some hole-in-the-wall apartment), or owning a decent car.
I'm not at all sold on the idea that our lives are improved through meditation. Most of us might see benefits to health and overall wellness if we got a little more sleep - but I think that's good enough.
So wait a minute, are you saying Microsoft Windows is the only environment that does (or should) offer "ease of use"?
If that's your belief, I think you're crazy.
Re:Question about their threat to sue Linus Torval
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SCO vs Linux.. Continued
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think this coincides with the other comment made by SCO's CEO that they'd go after the infringements all the way to the individual users, if necessary. (By the same token, if they can prove Linus Torvalds somehow stole SCO kernel source and rolled parts of it into the Linux kernel, they'd sue him personally for that act.)
The whole thing sounds ridiculous to me, but as so often happens with software, sometimes there aren't a whole lot of different ways to accomplish a task. A piece of hardware only interfaces with its software drivers through specific commands, sent a specific way, for example. I don't doubt SCO could match up small code segments (or even "big blocks of code", depending on their definition of "big") with what's in Linux.... but it might just be because nobody would really write those routines any other way.
Yep - that's immediately what I thought, too. It's just the same technology as the Mobil SpeedPass, in a different physical format.
That said, SpeedPass seems to work well, technically speaking. My big complaint about it is it seems a little redundant. "Just wave your speedpass" isn't really any easier than "Just stick your credit card in the slot on the pump".
It's all going to get charged to a card anyway.
SpeedPass would have been more sensible if it functioned as a unique credit card account, instead of requiring you link it to an existing account.
I get the feeling there will always be a certain crowd that sticks up for games like Shadowbane no matter what happens - because they haven't really played anything else like it before, and they're impressed with the basic concept enough to overlook a lot of technical problems.
(My wife certainly falls into this category. She loves Shadowbane, despite fits of screaming every few hours when something goes wrong.) Personally, I'm done with the game after only one night of trying it out - because of all the login server issues, lag problems (and I'm on a fast DSL circuit with a 1.8Ghz P4 and a dual processor 1.42Ghz Powermac G4 tower), and client bugs.
Maybe I'm jaded, but I feel like it's technically feasible to do much better - and I refuse to give my money to a half-baked project like Shadowbane. When our free trial runs out, my wife is the one who has to come up with her own money if she wants to continue the membership.
The "glue" that holds people to these games is usually the interaction with other real, live people - and you can do that for free in a chat room on IRC or in an instant messenger client. Everything else requires a well thought-out and well executed game environment (both on the client and the server end), and Ubi falls flat on their face doing both.
You really don't get it, do you? The point is, people pay $40 for a copy of Shadowbane, on the assumption that it might be lots of fun to play. Nowhere on the box (or even inside the box!) does it actually state what the monthly charge is to use the game.
Since you already blew the $40 on it though, you go ahead and sign up (since they do at least promise a 30 day free trial period), and then you find out it's about $11 a month. (Price depends a bit on if you're willing to buy several months in advance, or just go month to month.)
Considering the game is designed to "unlock" features as months go by, there's a built-in temptation to keep a membership past the trial period and "give it some time".
The game is utterly useless if you don't keep an active membership, because it has no "single player mode".
Therefore, people do their best to put up with it, at least until it gets totally intolerable - because it sucks to waste $40 and not even get anything useful out of it, when you can throw another $22 or so at it and end up with 3 months of playability.
Yeah, on one hand, it is pretty funny. The hackers were creative, at least. They could have just done a boring old denial of service attack, or stole customer records....
On the other hand, I think it is rather serious from another standpoint. I recently bought a copy of Shadowbane to give it a try - and on my first connection attempt, was refused. (Apparently, it was due to server overload.) Not a good first impression, but I gave it a try an hour or so later and was able to connect up and create my character.
Then, I was promptly greeted by system "news" apologizing for a number of system errors a few nights earlier, mentioning garbled character stats, etc. After I played a short time, I found numerous bugs in the client. On one of my systems, the on-board sound isn't properly supported and I get this echo'd, slurred effect for all the sounds in the game.
I ran out of time to mess around with the game, and turned it over to my wife, who likes RPG type games better than I do anyway. She got hooked on Shadowbane and has been playing it a lot while she watches our kid during the day. So far, she's been kicked off servers numerous times, has a persistent bug they won't address or fix where an item removed from inventory stays on the screen, floating in space, and can't be cleared off the screen - and now, this hack attempt!
The hassles of character stats getting reset once again just drives more customers away.... That's the real damage the hackers did. They're contributing to the possible demise of Shadowbane itself - due to lack of paying subscribers.
Funny you mention that Carmack quote, because that's precisely what stuck in my mind as a very insightful and intelligent comment when I read it, too.
I think adding more "plot" to games is crucial for certain types, and a hinderance/annoyance in others. (Some folks may disagree, but I really find it annoying as hell when I go to play some mindless shooter game and have to first skip through 5 minutes of full-screen animation with a narrator telling me the reason why I'm about to do battle. It just doesn't matter! If I wanted to be told a story, I'd play a different type of game.)
On the other hand, some of my favorite games have been the ones that had a constantly developing story, with twists and turns that came about due to my choices and actions during the game. (Wing Commander: Privateer was one such title that comes to mind.)
I think if we reach a point, technologically, where games look as good as movies - and "improved graphics" alone won't sell a title, that can be both good and bad. I don't want my computer games to become "passive entertainment" like movies, for starters. That would be the "easy way out" for developers. (Some D&D type games almost seem this way now. You click once to fight some monster, and then you just sort of sit back and watch the characters battle it out, with results determined merely by stats and a random number generator. Boring!)
Yeah, you're correct there. Apple's wireless is a relative no-brainer to set up (at least compared to many wireless PC config. utilities).
Still, that's improving on the PC side as well. I recently set up some Belkin 802.11g wireless stuff for a client, and it allowed actual passwords too. (Even showed what they converted to in hex, in a seperate "info" window below as you keyed it in.) It also featured auto-detect. The Belkin hub had an integrated web-based interface, so using the included Windows setup software was optional (and I saw no point to using it at all, since the web interface was functionally equivalent).
One thing I really did like on Apple's software is the way it automatically checks for firmware updates, and lets you update an Airport base with a single click if newer firmware is available. (By contrast, I needed a firmware update for the Belkin setup mentioned above, and it never informed me an update was available. I just happened to check their web site out of habit, and found it there. If I hadn't done it, I wouldn't have gotten one of the 802.11b client cards to connect properly!)
The trend with new cellphones has been attempting to make them appeal to younger and younger kids. Turning the phones into "must have" toys for the kids means a sharp increase in an otherwise mostly saturated subscriber base.
Text messaging, for example, has been re-marketed from its original status as a business feature; "When you get out of your meeting, Joe, please call Carol at ext. 490. Urgent!" to a play-toy feature for teens.
Cameras built into cellphones? Another similar ploy. While you *might* find a few people creatively using theirs for business purposes, they generally don't have enough resolution to serve useful business purposes. (If I was in real-estate, for example, and needed lots of photos of interiors/exteriors of homes - I'd just use a digital camera so the results were better.) What they're really hoping is for the teens to pass photos back and forth of people doing stupid stuff at parties, the latest boyfriend/girlfriend pics, etc.
An R/C car remote control feature? Just another example. No, most adults will find it amusing maybe once or twice, and then never use it again (if they ever mess with that feature at all). But the pre-teens will dig it.
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When you accept a salaried job in I.T., you generally do so under the assumption that you'll be working 40 hour weeks, on average. If more is asked of you, fine, but you expect your boss will be fair about it and give you comp. time, a few extra perks, or at least a bigger raise the next year in return.
There are other professions out there such as doctors or lawyers, where it's generally understood that these "rules" don't apply. It's the nature of the career. (You're not reporting daily to a workspace in someone's company, to sit in one spot all the time and work on whatever you're ordered to do.) As an attorney or a doctor, you're directly involved in decisions that can drastically change the course of a client's life. It's vastly different from I.T. - where mistakes or "slacking off" probably just means a deadline for a project doesn't get met, a server crashes more than it should, or some code is more buggy than average.
Last I checked, doctors and lawyers were earning considerably more than most I.T. workers, too. Ask yourself if you'd still put in those same number of billable hours if your take-home pay maxed out at, say, $35,000 or $40,000 a year.
Yeah, your "geek union" is a pretty unrealistic concept, unfortunately. First of all, the very idea that it would hold together on an international basis is absurd. There are simply too many countries with a large difference in cost of living/quality of life from what's found in the U.S. or Canada. Some programmer in Romania is going to be quite well off if he accepts a $10 or $12 an hour coding job from a United States owned company. He's not going to play along with a "geek union" demanding he refuse to work until they pay him much more than that. He'd rather take your job away and proudly be "non union".
Lately, I've seen some pretty poor results from labor oursourced to India and the like, though. I think in the long run, companies doing these things to cut costs are going to find they shot themselves in the foot. Customer satisfaction is going down the toilet....
It may not happen immediately (and I feel it will get still worse before it gets better), but eventually, good quality people from the U.S. will be in demand again for tech. jobs. All this outsourcing is a trend they'll try for a while and then realize was a long-term failure.
Well, I've considered Don Henley rather hypocritical ever since I heard his attacks on MP3 file sharing. On one hand, he protests all the raw deals the record companies give artists, but then he sides with them by decrying file sharing by his own fans?
I suppose he sees the two issues as unrelated - but that's a viewpoint one can only have while wearing blinders, IMHO. The fact is, people have been making copies of music ever since they were first able to record it. Anyone downloading an artist's work via the Internet is above all else, showing their loyalty to that musician's work. (Why would you bother downloading music you didn't like?) As a former musician myself, I would have been proud to see any of my music logging thousands of "pirate" downloads. It means I'm getting exposure, which is the most valuable thing of all for an artist. Instead of counting theoretical lost pennies for every "illegal download" one can track down, it's much more useful to accept file sharing as part of the culture.
I think you've hit upon the primary reason for the age discrimination in hiring software developers, whether you realized it or not!
I used to program myself, back when 64K was "a lot of RAM".... I wrote and marketed my own computer bulletin board package, among other things.
I got involved with other things for a while though, and when I decided to re-vist programming, it felt like I was starting over from scratch - only the learning curve was steeper than when I first started out.
I took a course in C programming, and tried to grasp the new "object oriented" stuff -- but ultimately, my heart just wasn't in it, and I elected to concentrate on PC hardware and support instead.
While working in support, along-side software developers, I've notice a pattern. The older developers bring some good experience and techniques to the table (which the younger developers are usually eager to grasp onto and make use of in their own coding), but they don't usually have the flexibility and speed to pick up new things like the younger programmers do.
Depending on the type of project, I'd personally prefer either the older, experienced developers, OR the younger, eager developers. I don't think it's so much a case of discrimination, but merely trying to match the strengths and talents to the task at hand.
If your needs involve a lot of updating of old code, working on a project that requires lots of structure and planning, or you only develop using a "tried and true" programming language (such as C++), the older developers will probably have more experience than the younger folks.
On the flip-side, if you crank out projects on tight deadlines and tend to "jump around" with the languages used for individual tasks, it seems like the younger guys (and gals) are quicker to wrap their heads around the changing needs and crank out some solutions quickly. Older developers tend to fight and ask more questions, such as "Do you really HAVE to write this thing using VB? I'd really prefer to do it in Java." (They might be right too - but that's not always the point. Sometimes, companies just have rather senseless reasons for what they want, and as a dept. manager, it's simply your job to get coders who can produce the results requested, quickly.)
Yes, but who is drawing up the requirements in the first place? It seems to me it's usually one of the department heads I was referring to.
So like I was saying, the problem may not have much at all to do with some sort of mandate "from the top" that all military personnel use a Microsoft product (or any other vendor's product). In some (many?) cases, it just may be departmental politics at work.
And yes, people can (and do) manipulate requirements to effectively try to force the use of a favorite product - but that's not always successful. How many relevant features can you really come up with that are all only met by your "pet product" and not by any other vendor's alternatives?
I think the problem of old, outdated requirements being used long after they need review and revision is a bigger problem.
Personally, I think StarOffice/OpenOffice need to become clearly *superior* to Microsoft Office before they'll gain much market-share.
As long as they simply tout themselves as "very compatible" with Office, they'll just be a minority alternative to Office.
The problem is, the documents people create (especially in a corporate environment!) are typically much more valuable than the price of the Office suite itself. The fact that OpenOffice is free is almost a non-issue. The up-front cost of licensing MS Office might seem outrageously high, but you have to remember most companies are paying out a LOT more than that in salaries/hourly wages for all their employees' time typing documents up in the software afterwards.
If there's even a hint of a possibility that important documents could get "mangled" or not open right if a business switches Office suites, they'll usually decide against the switch.
If there's no compelling reason to switch, they'll keep using what they've been using too. Why incur additional training costs for people to learn something new, if there's no obvious productivity benefit?
That said, I'm convinced MS Excel has some unacknowleged bugs in it that can cause document corruption. I've read many a story of people who worked for hours on an Excel spreadsheet, saved it - and came back the next day to find the document completely gone. (One of the "switcher" stories recently posted to Apple's site documents this, for example.) I also ran into this at least a handful of times when doing computer support for companies. People would blame our server, or say their computer just "ate my file".... We'd either have to pull a day old backup off a tape or just say "Sorry.... you'll have to type it over." It seemed like systems with less RAM in them were more likely to exhibit this behavior - but it was impossible to duplicate, and didn't happen with any real pattern. I do think it tended to only happen on a larger, more complex spreadsheet though. (At least, if it happened on small "quickie" spreadsheets, the victims never complained about it.)
A truly more stable spreadsheet app with all the power and charting abilities of Excel could compel people to switch.
One of my friends was employed by the military (mechanical engineer), and often got involved in computer issues as a side-effect of his rank and position.
From the stories he told me, it sounds to me like the U.S. military often resists change on a department by department basis. I don't doubt that politicians at the top play a big role in keeping closed source commerical products in the military -- but in many cases, it seems like the only hurdles are technical ones. (EG. A specification demands that any software or OS solution used meet a number of criteria. If a Linux installation can meet them, then fine - it can *technically* be substituted as the server platform for that department.) Where it falls apart is when a colonel decides he really likes Microsoft products (maybe simply because that's all he ever used), and he dictates that *his* staff will never use anything but Windows.
On the particular military installation my friend worked at, they had a similar situation years ago, where one group kept using Novell - despite the rest of the base running Windows. Everyone tried to put pressure on the other group to ditch the old Novell server - but for years, they insisted on sticking with it. (Everyone else ended up having to mess around with loading Novell modules and IPX stacks they didn't want to use, or else not be able to access that one department's data.) Since the Novell system technically met the (old) requirements drafted up, there wasn't any way to mandate a change.
It's not that any of the other patents we saw described our idea with a "slight modification". It's more of a problem of their patents describing inventions which are for a much less specific purpose than ours - yet could be construed to encompass our idea. If we could find someone describing a device to do exactly what we wanted to do, we'd just scrap the whole project. The thing is, some of the other patents just seem to be close enough to allow a fight in court over it. We don't have the money or time to deal with that, so we're wanting to use alternate methods of accomplishing individual tasks within the invention to what's described in any of these broader patents - just to make it less similar and reduce the risk of lawsuit.
My wife came up with an idea a while back for a product, and we're still trying to get a prototype built. When we went to do an online patent search, we discovered at least 8 or 9 potentially troublesome patents already in place for similar devices to ours. Upon closer inspection though, they all appeared to be filed by people who never sold a product based on any of them. In most of the cases, it looked like they were written up by other people like us, trying to piece something together from parts lying around the house. (One guy described how his unit functioned using such things as an aquarium water pump and a tire inner-tube, for example.)
I can understand why the people wanted to patent their ideas, but as others pointed out - it seems like these unimplemented patents should automatically expire after a period of time. (Perhaps 2 years is enough of a time-frame to say "Show evidence of progress, or the patent gets removed."?)
As it stands now, all of these existing patents place artifical limits on the ways we can opt to accomplish specific goals inside our final product. I'd prefer not to disclose exactly what we're trying to do, but just for example - if we want to heat and distill some water in our product, we might have to use a peltier device instead of a heating coil. Even if the heating coil is the superior solutuon, it might put our device into questionable patent territory, since another (fairly broadly worded) patent already describes a device not too different than ours, using a heating coil for this function.
Yep!! I encoded my entire CD collection at 192 bits, and I don't waste my time listening to anything less, if I can help it. I find it maddening that most people still encode at 128 bits and think it sounds "good enough". It only sounds ok on cheap speakers, or perhaps even moderate priced speakers + some audio processing enabled to "enhance" the sound.
Whenever I listen to 128-bit MP3s through my set of studio monitors, they sound "thin". Even in my car (I have a Rio MP3 car player), with Diamond Audio seperates and a Rockford Fosgate amp, 128-bit MP3s are noticeably poorer quality than ones encoded at higher bitrates.
I would have encoded above 192 bits, even, except I was trying to strike a good balance between optimal sound quality and conserving a little bit of drive space. (After all, if disk space is no object, then it makes no sense to use a compressed audio format to begin with!) I found that 192 bits was about as low as I could encode and still feel like I wasn't losing any significant amount of audio quality. (At worst, you might be able to hear very small details, such as a brush against a cymbal in an otherwise quiet passage, that would have sounded more "life-like" at 256 bit+ encoding than at 192. You'd almost have to listen to them side by side to even tell though.)
Personally, I think the best thing that could happen is for the artists to all get screwed over on their advances, when they find out people just aren't buying enough stuff on major label CDs and tapes to cover their loans.
That's what it seems like it will take to get musicians and artists to "read the fine print" on these outrageous recording contracts, and just say "NO!" to them.
As it stands, they're all still willing to take the gamble that it will pay off for them. (EG. "I know *my* music is so good, it's gotta go platinum. I won't be one of the failures.")
While it's largely true that "clock speed alone doesn't mean that much anymore", Apple's biggest defecit has been in system bus speed. Their best G4 tower still uses a 266Mhz bus, if I recall correctly.
By comparison, current P4 boards have as high as an 800Mhz bus.
In the last 2-3 years or so, I'd say that bus speed on the motherboard is much more of a bottleneck than the CPU. Cranking a CPU's processor speed up gives diminishing returns if the rest of the support chips and RAM can only move the data around at a fraction of the speed the CPU crunches the data at.
This problem gets compounded when everything else in the machine gets faster and faster (such as video cards, hard drives, etc.). All those devices push data out to the motherboard, and there's only so much "bandwidth" to go around for cards and integrated controller-based devices. When that gets flooded out, performance suffers.
This is painfully obvious when people buy G3 and G4 upgrade cards for older generation Macs (such as Beige G3's), upgrade to a Radeon video card, and then try enabling "Quartz Extreme" graphics acceleration under OS X. The 100Mhz bus speed of a Beige G3 gets saturated with the video acceleration on - and performs worse than with it off.
No, of course it isn't about "helping the people of India". It's obviously about improving profit margins. As upsetting and/or frustrating as it may be to Americans finding themselves unemployed because of it - I think it's still only a temporary "fad".
At some point, people in these 3rd. world countries will realize that their talents are very valuable to the U.S. (and other countries outsourcing to them). They'll start to become more greedy than they are today, and won't continue working for these miniscule salaries.
Right now, citizens of countries like Romania generally earn so little, these outsourcing deals seem very attractive to them by comparison. Fine, but not everyone in Romania possesses the skills to do these jobs. (Help desk or software development demand some skills that I'd think relatively few of their citizens would be equipped to do.) Those that have the skills will start learning to leverage those skills to earn more and more. You can only shuffle your labor pool around from country to country for so long before you run out of "takers" willing to work for peanuts.
Yep - I agree. Right now, there's so much "big label" music still missing from Apple's store, I think they've got *plenty* of additions to make on existing fronts - before even starting to delve into the unknown labels.
EG. The other night, I did a search on a few artists that came to mind, and they had NOTHING available from any of these:
Weird Al Yankovic
Lords of Acid
Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction
Then I searched for Roger Waters, and they only had 2 complete albums of his, only 2 songs from "The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking", and absolutely nothing from his latest album.
Yeah, I find this interesting as well. (Especially since I just bought a new dual 1.42Ghz tower!) I was under the impression that the chips inside wouldn't be labeled as 1.25Ghz....
In any case though, it's a pretty elaborate heat-sink upgrade. There's actually a heat-pipe engineered into it. It's not simply "more metal on top". So even if they are effectively just "overclocked 1.25Ghz chips", Apple put a lot of R&D into finding an improved way to channel off the extra heat.
If you look at most of the G4 CPU upgrades for pre-G3 Macs (Sonnet, PowerLogix, etc.) - they do their share of overclocking too. The G4-550Mhz upgrade they sell for the Beige and Blue & White G3 machines, for example, runs at 533Mhz in the B&W model. It runs at 550 only on Beige systems. (Apparently as a result of the bus speed multipliers having different possible settings, due to different bus speeds of the 2 systems.)
I'm not even sure I see why this project is a "very good idea"? I think the technology has some promise. (A system that coordinates such things as you blowing towards the screen and having items on the screen react to your breath is pretty cool, for example.) I just don't see this "new age, neo-hippie meditative journey" software as being the "killer app" that convinces us to buy into the USB control devices making it happen.
Perhaps society is already as "designed around relaxation" as it can be, without being too detrimental to other aspects of our lives? People have always had the option to live a generally peaceful, tranquil and relaxing lifestyle - but most of us opt for a higher stress level and faster pace, because we receive more monetary rewards for it, and perhaps achieve a greater sense of accomplishment to boot.
I dislike stress as much as anyone, but I put myself under quite a bit of it regularly, because it's worth it to me. If I didn't, I would never have achieved such things as becoming a home-owner (because I'd be working "little thought necessary" jobs with low pay, and just scraping by on renting some hole-in-the-wall apartment), or owning a decent car.
I'm not at all sold on the idea that our lives are improved through meditation. Most of us might see benefits to health and overall wellness if we got a little more sleep - but I think that's good enough.
So wait a minute, are you saying Microsoft Windows is the only environment that does (or should) offer "ease of use"?
If that's your belief, I think you're crazy.
I think this coincides with the other comment made by SCO's CEO that they'd go after the infringements all the way to the individual users, if necessary. (By the same token, if they can prove Linus Torvalds somehow stole SCO kernel source and rolled parts of it into the Linux kernel, they'd sue him personally for that act.)
The whole thing sounds ridiculous to me, but as so often happens with software, sometimes there aren't a whole lot of different ways to accomplish a task. A piece of hardware only interfaces with its software drivers through specific commands, sent a specific way, for example. I don't doubt SCO could match up small code segments (or even "big blocks of code", depending on their definition of "big") with what's in Linux.... but it might just be because nobody would really write those routines any other way.
Yep - that's immediately what I thought, too. It's just the same technology as the Mobil SpeedPass, in a different physical format.
That said, SpeedPass seems to work well, technically speaking. My big complaint about it is it seems a little redundant. "Just wave your speedpass" isn't really any easier than "Just stick your credit card in the slot on the pump".
It's all going to get charged to a card anyway.
SpeedPass would have been more sensible if it functioned as a unique credit card account, instead of requiring you link it to an existing account.
I get the feeling there will always be a certain crowd that sticks up for games like Shadowbane no matter what happens - because they haven't really played anything else like it before, and they're impressed with the basic concept enough to overlook a lot of technical problems.
(My wife certainly falls into this category. She loves Shadowbane, despite fits of screaming every few hours when something goes wrong.) Personally, I'm done with the game after only one night of trying it out - because of all the login server issues, lag problems (and I'm on a fast DSL circuit with a 1.8Ghz P4 and a dual processor 1.42Ghz Powermac G4 tower), and client bugs.
Maybe I'm jaded, but I feel like it's technically feasible to do much better - and I refuse to give my money to a half-baked project like Shadowbane. When our free trial runs out, my wife is the one who has to come up with her own money if she wants to continue the membership.
The "glue" that holds people to these games is usually the interaction with other real, live people - and you can do that for free in a chat room on IRC or in an instant messenger client. Everything else requires a well thought-out and well executed game environment (both on the client and the server end), and Ubi falls flat on their face doing both.
You really don't get it, do you? The point is, people pay $40 for a copy of Shadowbane, on the assumption that it might be lots of fun to play. Nowhere on the box (or even inside the box!) does it actually state what the monthly charge is to use the game.
Since you already blew the $40 on it though, you go ahead and sign up (since they do at least promise a 30 day free trial period), and then you find out it's about $11 a month. (Price depends a bit on if you're willing to buy several months in advance, or just go month to month.)
Considering the game is designed to "unlock" features as months go by, there's a built-in temptation to keep a membership past the trial period and "give it some time".
The game is utterly useless if you don't keep an active membership, because it has no "single player mode".
Therefore, people do their best to put up with it, at least until it gets totally intolerable - because it sucks to waste $40 and not even get anything useful out of it, when you can throw another $22 or so at it and end up with 3 months of playability.
Yeah, on one hand, it is pretty funny. The hackers were creative, at least. They could have just done a boring old denial of service attack, or stole customer records....
On the other hand, I think it is rather serious from another standpoint. I recently bought a copy of Shadowbane to give it a try - and on my first connection attempt, was refused. (Apparently, it was due to server overload.) Not a good first impression, but I gave it a try an hour or so later and was able to connect up and create my character.
Then, I was promptly greeted by system "news" apologizing for a number of system errors a few nights earlier, mentioning garbled character stats, etc. After I played a short time, I found numerous bugs in the client. On one of my systems, the on-board sound isn't properly supported and I get this echo'd, slurred effect for all the sounds in the game.
I ran out of time to mess around with the game, and turned it over to my wife, who likes RPG type games better than I do anyway. She got hooked on Shadowbane and has been playing it a lot while she watches our kid during the day. So far, she's been kicked off servers numerous times, has a persistent bug they won't address or fix where an item removed from inventory stays on the screen, floating in space, and can't be cleared off the screen - and now, this hack attempt!
The hassles of character stats getting reset once again just drives more customers away.... That's the real damage the hackers did. They're contributing to the possible demise of Shadowbane itself - due to lack of paying subscribers.
Funny you mention that Carmack quote, because that's precisely what stuck in my mind as a very insightful and intelligent comment when I read it, too.
I think adding more "plot" to games is crucial for certain types, and a hinderance/annoyance in others. (Some folks may disagree, but I really find it annoying as hell when I go to play some mindless shooter game and have to first skip through 5 minutes of full-screen animation with a narrator telling me the reason why I'm about to do battle. It just doesn't matter! If I wanted to be told a story, I'd play a different type of game.)
On the other hand, some of my favorite games have been the ones that had a constantly developing story, with twists and turns that came about due to my choices and actions during the game. (Wing Commander: Privateer was one such title that comes to mind.)
I think if we reach a point, technologically, where games look as good as movies - and "improved graphics" alone won't sell a title, that can be both good and bad. I don't want my computer games to become "passive entertainment" like movies, for starters. That would be the "easy way out" for developers. (Some D&D type games almost seem this way now. You click once to fight some monster, and then you just sort of sit back and watch the characters battle it out, with results determined merely by stats and a random number generator. Boring!)
Yeah, you're correct there. Apple's wireless is a relative no-brainer to set up (at least compared to many wireless PC config. utilities).
Still, that's improving on the PC side as well. I recently set up some Belkin 802.11g wireless stuff for a client, and it allowed actual passwords too. (Even showed what they converted to in hex, in a seperate "info" window below as you keyed it in.) It also featured auto-detect.
The Belkin hub had an integrated web-based interface, so using the included Windows setup software was optional (and I saw no point to using it at all, since the web interface was functionally equivalent).
One thing I really did like on Apple's software is the way it automatically checks for firmware updates, and lets you update an Airport base with a single click if newer firmware is available. (By contrast, I needed a firmware update for the Belkin setup mentioned above, and it never informed me an update was available. I just happened to check their web site out of habit, and found it there. If I hadn't done it, I wouldn't have gotten one of the 802.11b client cards to connect properly!)
The trend with new cellphones has been attempting to make them appeal to younger and younger kids. Turning the phones into "must have" toys for the kids means a sharp increase in an otherwise mostly saturated subscriber base.
Text messaging, for example, has been re-marketed from its original status as a business feature; "When you get out of your meeting, Joe, please call Carol at ext. 490. Urgent!" to a play-toy feature for teens.
Cameras built into cellphones? Another similar ploy. While you *might* find a few people creatively using theirs for business purposes, they generally don't have enough resolution to serve useful business purposes. (If I was in real-estate, for example, and needed lots of photos of interiors/exteriors of homes - I'd just use a digital camera so the results were better.) What they're really hoping is for the teens to pass photos back and forth of people doing stupid stuff at parties, the latest boyfriend/girlfriend pics, etc.
An R/C car remote control feature? Just another example. No, most adults will find it amusing maybe once or twice, and then never use it again (if they ever mess with that feature at all). But the pre-teens will dig it.