So while I am not a big fan of the total XP package, this one is actually right on the money. If the customer can't do the acceptance test, who can?
To a large extent, as a developer, I can, and do. Sure, the customer's approval is itself the final acceptance test, but the customer is not going to appreciate missing and mis-features because they weren't explicitly spelled out. AFAIC, it's the developer's responsibility to figure out what the customer actually wants, by active questioning and other methods, because only the developer knows enough about software development to fully appreciate the engineering issues, and pragmatically, a doofus customer is going to be a doofus customer whether you play passive-aggressive head games with him or not.
All of this buck-passing misses the point in two ways. First of all, it's everyone's responsibility to serve the needs of the organization to the best of their ability -- be it a company, a university, a government agency, or an open source project. Sure, there will be people who won't, both in management and in development, but the impact of slackers isn't ameliorated by retaliating with more slacking. And secondly, from a purely self-interested cover-your-ass point of view, when a project fails, the hammer will fall on you before it falls on your idiot manager, if ever.
Anyone who thinks this is going to change is probably also wondering why they no longer get recess and nap time. Dealing with incompetent and clueless coworkers, poor organization, and unreasonable expectations is just part of life. You can either deal with it constructively as best you can -- which might or might not mean seeking another job -- or you can turn it into an adversarial and ultimately self-destructive situation.
All three of the Impress Watch articles say it will cost around 40,000 yen - approximately $400 USD. And this is just for the reader, subscribing to the e-book service costs $5-10/month. They do, however, have the option of just purchasing single books for 350 yen, about $3.25.
The press release implies that you can download web pages and the like with it. I'm totally disinterested in paying for the content, mainly because my tastes are fairly specialized and most of the books I'm likely to read are not at all likely to appear as ebooks. On the other hand, there are an awful lot of free ebooks in ASCII, HTML, and PDF, including those in the Project Gutenberg collection, that I would gladly read if I could do it with a nice portable device instead of my PC monitor.
That being said, $3.25 for an electronic version of a book is a surprisingly fair price, considering how much the arguably more useful print versions cost. I'd be willing to pay that for a book I was seriously interested in reading.
With the caveat that I've spent a lot more time with real firearms than FPS games, my impression is that no, the skill doesn't transfer. Guns in games are much easier to use than real-world guns. The main differences that I can see are:
It's easier to aim in a game than real life. I suspect this is an intentional feature to make the game more fun to play.
Guns in most games never jam or misfire.
Guns in games require no cleaning, repair, or other maintenance.
Automatic weapons in games never seem to overheat.
Guns in games reload themselves automatically.
All the ammo you find lying around in heaps and mounds(!) is in excellent condition and is never booby-trapped.
Bullets in games don't ricochet, and shooting at brittle objects nearby (concrete walls, for example) never seems to spray you with high-velocity debris, nor does shot bounce around dangerously in enclosed spaces with hard surfaces.
The player character in most FPS games must have some sort of prosthetic ears, because not even a grenade detonation at close range ever seems to cause either temporary or permanent hearing loss.
Guns in games have no appreciable recoil.
...and so on. As for developing teamwork, you may have a point, but that probably applies to any team sport. Evidently, the Army seems to think that multiplayer FPS games might be good tactical training, and perhaps it is, but the Army makes soldiers get lots and lots practice with real guns.
Any word yet on the hardware requirements? While I certainly don't expect it to run on a 1 MHz 6502 like the original, it would be nice if it doesn't cost $49.95 plus $1k in system upgrades.
Let me play for as long as I want, or at least give me the option to do so.
Right. I want to keep prowling the Caribbean in my eight-gun sloop even after iron-clad steam-powered destroyers show up. Aaarrrrgh, matey! It's the dread Cap'n Anachronism!
It's really not much of an endorsement, considering how closely married the companies are. Pixar certainly doesn't have to worry about being shaken down for expensive licenses and somehow I doubt they're paying retail price for the G5s.
This is not, incidentally, a knock against either OS X or the G5, both of which are fine products. I'm just noting that this is a bit like MSN using Windows XP on x86 hardware. Big deal.
Unfortunately, this ignores the practical fact that the side with the most expensive legal team has a substantial advantage in a trial. So suppose you're an individual or small company, and some Giant Fnarking Corporation has cost you $100k, but you can't assemble absolutely incontrovertible evidence. Are you going to:
A) Field an expensive lawyer of your own and hope that the jury is convinced by your evidence and isn't swayed by the defendant's dream team, or...
B) Suck it up and go home, knowing that if you lose, there's no way you'll ever be able to pay the other side's six- or seven-digit legal fees?
Most small players are going to choose "B", which is in fact what most of them do today already. You want to make that worse?
Punitive damages limits
This is also stupid. The point of punitive damages is to disincentivize bad behavior even when its effects are not costly in terms of money. Suppose Giant Fnarking Corporation makes a defective product that kills your kid. How much are you out? Just your insurance co-pay on the ambulance ride and a couple thousand dollars for the funeral. If, on the other hand, you can sock it to them for a few million dollars, they'll certainly care about that even if they don't give a hoot about human lives.
If it bothers you that the plaintiff in this hypothetical case is the recipient of the punitive damages, consider either developing some compassion, and/or lobbying for punitive damages to be awarded to the state as a form of revenue.
his is a school of music, but billing Napster as academic resource seems a little questionable.
In all fairness, all that "free" music from the original Napster was costing universities millions of dollars in wasted bandwidth and imposed an enormous risk of legal exposure. Making deals with Roxio might well free up a lot of academic IT resources that had been hijacked by file trading.
And before some armchair sysadmin objects that "new" Napster will consume as much or more bandwidth than "old" Napster, it ain't so. New Napster is not P2P and is, therefore, comparatively easy to throttle.
Mistaking "pique" for "peak", as is common on Slashdot, borders on excusable simply because "pique" is not a very common word anymore. Failing to distinguish between "of" and "have" ought to be a source of profound shame.
Actually, the question -- or the worry -- is more around how to prevent somebody from forking Java and kill the "Write Once, Run Everywhere" idiom.
This hasn't been a problem with C, so why should it be so with Java? Sure, everyone and his brother has implemented non-standard extensions to C in their compilers --- but almost no one uses them. If you care about portability, you'll stick to the standard, and if you don't care about portability, odds are you don't care very much about Java.
If you're really into "write once, run everywhere," then an open source Java ought to be a major goal. Java doesn't run on my box, for example, because it doesn't come with my distro, and my past experiences with configuring it have been so unpleasant that I don't bother anymore. If I really could just run Java programs -- exactly as I can currently compile C programs without worrying about installing the compiler toolchain manually -- I'd probably use some Java programs.
(And yes, I know non-trivial C programs require modification to run on new platforms, but that's because C programs interface directly with the operating system without the buffer of a VM -- and the VM certainly isn't "write once, run anywere," now is it?)
Would someone from Samba and Apache please get on this bandwagon? Thanks.
Apache isn't GPL'ed; it's under the Apache License. Neither are Perl and PHP and a whole host of important open source projects.
That being said, Samba definitely is, and so are MySQL, gcc, emacs, binutils, and a number of other things that would hurt SCO badly if they were no longer available.
This should say something about the value of the GPL. Most non-GPL licensors are along for the ride with SCO and can't do anything about it. This sort of situation is precisely what the GPL is designed to defend against, and only licensors using the GPL or very similar licenses are in a position to take real action against SCO.
Mind you, I'm not part of the "everything must be GPL'ed" camp. But the more important a project becomes the more important it is to consider releasing it under the GPL.
Has the evolution of technology in the workplace (computer, internet, email, etc...), which is suppose to make your job easier, made it any less stressful?
My job consist of writing web applications. I can't say technology has made the job any less stressful, since that same technology is what makes it possible at all.
My job-related stress mostly comes from management and coworkers, with poor documentation running a close second, followed by what an incredible pain in the ass it is to get a printer working under Linux.
Sligthly more practical migth be blowing the thing up, which would result in a large number of smaller impacts instead of a single big one.
Is this really desirable? I know that if I had to choose between being shot with a rifle or being shot with a shotgun, I'd pick the rifle. Why? The amount of force imparted by each impact drops off rapidly in proportion to the distance from the impact. The single rifle round might clobber one kidney, but the shotgun blast will take out both kidneys, the liver, stomach, intestines, and the south end of the lungs.
Maybe it's different with planets, but I'd want to run some good simulations before assuming a bunch of small impacts is any better than one big impact.
It's small enough to hide and launch from anywhere, has enough range to be launched from outside a ground based barrier, but is launched close enough to a target to reach it (or near enough for a chemical or bio-weapon) before large air defense systems become useful.
Um, before you start building defenses against expensive electronic toys, you might want to consider that all of the criteria you mentioned above are satisfied by mortars, and that mortars are not terrifically difficult to obtain and any ex-infantryman -- a class which numbers in the tens of millions in the US -- can operate one. A mortar round can, additionally, contain a larger payload than Mr. Dragan's nifty little toy.
I suspect that this little aircraft is more of a threat to backyard sunbathers than national security. After all, who wants to watch Laura Bush sunbathing naked in the White House backyard?
...so I could spend millions of dollars of someone else's money on ideas that are fucktastically stupid.
I don't know about you, but me and everyone else I know lose pens all the time. The only way this could be dumber would be if they made a computer that required you to keep three perfectly matched pairs of socks together in the dryer. Why not make a computer out of clothes hangers. At least that way, you'll end up with more computing power than you started with.
Especially considering that the wxWidgets team had to know the groundswell of support they would have if Microsoft DID force the issue.
Y'know, I'm a professional developer myself, so I understand the occasional episode of swollen ego that goes with it, but let's step outside and and take a breath of reality, shall we?
All of the world's developers, much less the tiny fraction of them that use wxWindows, couldn't create a freaking groundswell if they were pureed and pumped underground by industrial hydraulic pumps. Daytime soap operas have larger followings by several orders of magnitude than any development tool.
The logic here is that:
It costs a lot of money to wage a court battle over trademarks.
The more money you have, the more expensive you can make it for the other side.
Microsoft has more money than God.
Developers aren't end users, and hardly anyone could care less what wxWhatever is called, as long as it works.
Ergo, call it wxWidgets and get on with life. Yes, it's stupid, but in this particular case, fighting it would be even more stupid.
Another thing to keep in mind, though, is that you MUST make sure you follow up the recruiters. They will NOT follow up you if you don't show interest.
This is God's own truth, folks. There are three important rules to remember about recruiters:
1. Call your recruiter every day. Recruiters deal with a lot of people, and because their business depends of supplying highly motivated employees to the companies they work for, they want to see motivation. Making you call them is one easy (if admittedly stupid) way of doing that. And if your recruiter mentions or even hints at a specific possibility during your first call, call him/her back the same day to see if anything came of it.
2. Keep track of the positions you're applying for. It makes recruiters look bad if they turn in your resume to a client after another recruiter already has, and they will drop you, often without bothering to tell you.
3. Ask specific questions about the companies the recruiter deals with. I got a job with Intel in late 2000 via one recruiting company, got laid off in the first big wave, and then spent two weeks listening to my recruiter tell me he was trying to get me another position -- only to discover later that this small headhunting firm did 95% of its business with Intel, and Intel had a hiring freeze going on! If I had bothered to learn a little more about the recruiter, I could have pumped more energy into other prospects.
Switching off of Windows sounds great to me, as I really dislike using it, but your reasoning sounds a bit flawed. If it's because the software's buggy and prone to exploitation, great. But if it's just because some code got leaked.. and OSS software generally has all the code available all the time.. then your reasoning sounds a little flawed.
The vital difference, at least in theory, is that FLOSS developers are operating under the assumption that any would-be attacker can see the source, so they have to make damn sure it's secure. Microsoft developers, on the other hand, have been relying for years on security through obscurity, and have therefore been less careful.
This is obviously not going to be true in every case. BIND's developers, for example, are evidently entirely unaware that the source code is being distributed freely, or else they're relying on security-through-ugly-kludginess. Contrariwise, I'm sure that there are plenty of developers at Microsoft who care very much about security, but their managers see that sales are good despite the bugginess of the code, so they allocate their developers' time to new features instead of bugfixes.
The fact that Microsoft or any software company thinks it's a disaster to have the source leaked is, however, a cardinal sign of poor engineering. They should be pissed, perhaps, but not terrified.
No, we're not using it. But thanks for the tip -- I'll be checking it out. Something on the order of 30% of our read queries could probably benefit from this.
Funny, this seems to be one of those double standards. People like ESR and Linus are praised and recognized as the fathers of OSS, heros among their kind, but as soon as they say something offensive you disown them.
Speaking only for myself -- though I suspect I'm not alone in this -- I've never been an ESR fan. I became involved in Free Software because I wanted to help people. ESR and the bulk of the Open Source crowd are involved in software on the basis of some dubious theories about alternative market models and software engineering. ESR, being the blinkered ideologue that he is, conveniently chooses to ignore the fact that more than a few very successful, high-quality free software packages are built in environments much more like a cathedral than a bazaar, and also chooses to ignore the fact the few businesses managing to turn a profit on the support and add-on model are both exceptional and only very modestly successful.
If your main concern is helping people by giving away quality software, none of this matters. If you're still clinging to the ESR version of the New Economy, it's an unmitigated disaster. That he still trumpets Mozilla as a success story with a straight face demonstrates just how out of touch he is. Mozilla, or, more accurately, it's stripped-down spinoffs are success stories from the standpoint of good free software. As far as the brave new Open Source market goes, they are the Hindenburg of failed late 20th century business theories.
This isn't to say there aren't a fair number of small companies and individuals making money off of Open Source. Hell, I'm one of them, and my day job involves working for another. But my day job -- which is a consumer, rather than producer of free software -- is where the real market role of free software lies: reducing operating expenses for real businesses. Open or Free software almost certainly will overtake most commercial software within our lifetimes, but it will not be creating value in the software market, it will be destroying it.
This is bad news if you're investing in commercial software companies, but if you are a business that uses software, or buying products from such a business -- which is just about everybody -- it is good news indeed in the form of lowered expenses and consumer prices. It's good news for schools, charities, and the poor, too.
ESR, contrary to some opinions expressed here, is actually a very good programmer and has worked on quite a number of important projects other than those which are solely his own -- bogofilter and fetchmail. I wish he would spend more time doing what he excels at -- namely, coding -- and less time doing things which he is truly awful at -- namely, acting as an unelected representative of a truly naive and reality-proof ideology.
Are there any sort of government oversights as to how these can be sold and to whom? I would hate for some wack-job with money to get a hold of one of these, get some armament via the black market, and use it to do something regrettable.
Like what? There are plenty of civilian aircraft you can buy for a lot cheaper than an F-18 that can carry substantially larger payloads, and you'd have more money left over for explosives. The only advantage to the jet fighter is that it goes real fast, but the downside is that an F-18 attracts suspicion and a garden-variety small cargo plane does not. The F-18 is a lot harder to fly, too.
Now, if you want to engage professional military pilots in air combat, this is the plane to do it with, but there are also much cheaper methods of suicide available.
How much will it cost for the add-ons necessary to run PHP on a high traffic server? You know, the cache that should be included in the base product but isn't because it would hurt Zends market.
There are several free third-party caches that work just fine. The PHP folks even provide links to them.
That being said, I work for a company that has a high-traffic site -- about 3 million page-views per day, and we run it without a cache. It takes eight load-balanced web servers to do this, and the main bottleneck is response time from the MySQL server. (This is not a slam against MySQL -- it's chugging along at about 10,000 queries per second.) We could get by with less hardware if more non-sensitive data was shoved into cookies instead of the database and more trivial UI stuff was migrated to client-side Javascript.
PHP's main problem, in terms of implementation, is that it's a bit of a memory hog. There's a huge amount of metadata that goes along with PHP variables, and a PHP array of n elements consumes several times as much memory as the equivalent Perl array. If this has been addressed in PHP 5.0, it will be a big damn deal.
Slashdot Mirror
So while I am not a big fan of the total XP package, this one is actually right on the money. If the customer can't do the acceptance test, who can?
To a large extent, as a developer, I can, and do. Sure, the customer's approval is itself the final acceptance test, but the customer is not going to appreciate missing and mis-features because they weren't explicitly spelled out. AFAIC, it's the developer's responsibility to figure out what the customer actually wants, by active questioning and other methods, because only the developer knows enough about software development to fully appreciate the engineering issues, and pragmatically, a doofus customer is going to be a doofus customer whether you play passive-aggressive head games with him or not.
All of this buck-passing misses the point in two ways. First of all, it's everyone's responsibility to serve the needs of the organization to the best of their ability -- be it a company, a university, a government agency, or an open source project. Sure, there will be people who won't, both in management and in development, but the impact of slackers isn't ameliorated by retaliating with more slacking. And secondly, from a purely self-interested cover-your-ass point of view, when a project fails, the hammer will fall on you before it falls on your idiot manager, if ever.
Anyone who thinks this is going to change is probably also wondering why they no longer get recess and nap time. Dealing with incompetent and clueless coworkers, poor organization, and unreasonable expectations is just part of life. You can either deal with it constructively as best you can -- which might or might not mean seeking another job -- or you can turn it into an adversarial and ultimately self-destructive situation.
All three of the Impress Watch articles say it will cost around 40,000 yen - approximately $400 USD. And this is just for the reader, subscribing to the e-book service costs $5-10/month. They do, however, have the option of just purchasing single books for 350 yen, about $3.25.
The press release implies that you can download web pages and the like with it. I'm totally disinterested in paying for the content, mainly because my tastes are fairly specialized and most of the books I'm likely to read are not at all likely to appear as ebooks. On the other hand, there are an awful lot of free ebooks in ASCII, HTML, and PDF, including those in the Project Gutenberg collection, that I would gladly read if I could do it with a nice portable device instead of my PC monitor.
That being said, $3.25 for an electronic version of a book is a surprisingly fair price, considering how much the arguably more useful print versions cost. I'd be willing to pay that for a book I was seriously interested in reading.
Government computers are insecure and Native Americans get the shaft from the federal government.
Wow. In what way is this news?
Any word yet on the hardware requirements? While I certainly don't expect it to run on a 1 MHz 6502 like the original, it would be nice if it doesn't cost $49.95 plus $1k in system upgrades.
Let me play for as long as I want, or at least give me the option to do so.
Right. I want to keep prowling the Caribbean in my eight-gun sloop even after iron-clad steam-powered destroyers show up. Aaarrrrgh, matey! It's the dread Cap'n Anachronism!
It's really not much of an endorsement, considering how closely married the companies are. Pixar certainly doesn't have to worry about being shaken down for expensive licenses and somehow I doubt they're paying retail price for the G5s.
This is not, incidentally, a knock against either OS X or the G5, both of which are fine products. I'm just noting that this is a bit like MSN using Windows XP on x86 hardware. Big deal.
Loser pays
Unfortunately, this ignores the practical fact that the side with the most expensive legal team has a substantial advantage in a trial. So suppose you're an individual or small company, and some Giant Fnarking Corporation has cost you $100k, but you can't assemble absolutely incontrovertible evidence. Are you going to:
A) Field an expensive lawyer of your own and hope that the jury is convinced by your evidence and isn't swayed by the defendant's dream team, or...
B) Suck it up and go home, knowing that if you lose, there's no way you'll ever be able to pay the other side's six- or seven-digit legal fees?
Most small players are going to choose "B", which is in fact what most of them do today already. You want to make that worse?
Punitive damages limits
This is also stupid. The point of punitive damages is to disincentivize bad behavior even when its effects are not costly in terms of money. Suppose Giant Fnarking Corporation makes a defective product that kills your kid. How much are you out? Just your insurance co-pay on the ambulance ride and a couple thousand dollars for the funeral. If, on the other hand, you can sock it to them for a few million dollars, they'll certainly care about that even if they don't give a hoot about human lives.
If it bothers you that the plaintiff in this hypothetical case is the recipient of the punitive damages, consider either developing some compassion, and/or lobbying for punitive damages to be awarded to the state as a form of revenue.
his is a school of music, but billing Napster as academic resource seems a little questionable.
In all fairness, all that "free" music from the original Napster was costing universities millions of dollars in wasted bandwidth and imposed an enormous risk of legal exposure. Making deals with Roxio might well free up a lot of academic IT resources that had been hijacked by file trading.
And before some armchair sysadmin objects that "new" Napster will consume as much or more bandwidth than "old" Napster, it ain't so. New Napster is not P2P and is, therefore, comparatively easy to throttle.
My God, man, have you ever tried to move STL code between compilers???
No, I haven't, but the STL isn't part of C, it's part of C++, and cross-platform standards compliance is definitely not there yet with C++.
Comics of done the multiverse thing to death
Mistaking "pique" for "peak", as is common on Slashdot, borders on excusable simply because "pique" is not a very common word anymore. Failing to distinguish between "of" and "have" ought to be a source of profound shame.
Actually, the question -- or the worry -- is more around how to prevent somebody from forking Java and kill the "Write Once, Run Everywhere" idiom.
This hasn't been a problem with C, so why should it be so with Java? Sure, everyone and his brother has implemented non-standard extensions to C in their compilers --- but almost no one uses them. If you care about portability, you'll stick to the standard, and if you don't care about portability, odds are you don't care very much about Java.
If you're really into "write once, run everywhere," then an open source Java ought to be a major goal. Java doesn't run on my box, for example, because it doesn't come with my distro, and my past experiences with configuring it have been so unpleasant that I don't bother anymore. If I really could just run Java programs -- exactly as I can currently compile C programs without worrying about installing the compiler toolchain manually -- I'd probably use some Java programs.
(And yes, I know non-trivial C programs require modification to run on new platforms, but that's because C programs interface directly with the operating system without the buffer of a VM -- and the VM certainly isn't "write once, run anywere," now is it?)
Would someone from Samba and Apache please get on this bandwagon? Thanks.
Apache isn't GPL'ed; it's under the Apache License. Neither are Perl and PHP and a whole host of important open source projects.
That being said, Samba definitely is, and so are MySQL, gcc, emacs, binutils, and a number of other things that would hurt SCO badly if they were no longer available.
This should say something about the value of the GPL. Most non-GPL licensors are along for the ride with SCO and can't do anything about it. This sort of situation is precisely what the GPL is designed to defend against, and only licensors using the GPL or very similar licenses are in a position to take real action against SCO.
Mind you, I'm not part of the "everything must be GPL'ed" camp. But the more important a project becomes the more important it is to consider releasing it under the GPL.
Has the evolution of technology in the workplace (computer, internet, email, etc...), which is suppose to make your job easier, made it any less stressful?
My job consist of writing web applications. I can't say technology has made the job any less stressful, since that same technology is what makes it possible at all.
My job-related stress mostly comes from management and coworkers, with poor documentation running a close second, followed by what an incredible pain in the ass it is to get a printer working under Linux.
Sligthly more practical migth be blowing the thing up, which would result in a large number of smaller impacts instead of a single big one.
Is this really desirable? I know that if I had to choose between being shot with a rifle or being shot with a shotgun, I'd pick the rifle. Why? The amount of force imparted by each impact drops off rapidly in proportion to the distance from the impact. The single rifle round might clobber one kidney, but the shotgun blast will take out both kidneys, the liver, stomach, intestines, and the south end of the lungs.
Maybe it's different with planets, but I'd want to run some good simulations before assuming a bunch of small impacts is any better than one big impact.
It's small enough to hide and launch from anywhere, has enough range to be launched from outside a ground based barrier, but is launched close enough to a target to reach it (or near enough for a chemical or bio-weapon) before large air defense systems become useful.
Um, before you start building defenses against expensive electronic toys, you might want to consider that all of the criteria you mentioned above are satisfied by mortars, and that mortars are not terrifically difficult to obtain and any ex-infantryman -- a class which numbers in the tens of millions in the US -- can operate one. A mortar round can, additionally, contain a larger payload than Mr. Dragan's nifty little toy.
I suspect that this little aircraft is more of a threat to backyard sunbathers than national security. After all, who wants to watch Laura Bush sunbathing naked in the White House backyard?
...so I could spend millions of dollars of someone else's money on ideas that are fucktastically stupid.
I don't know about you, but me and everyone else I know lose pens all the time. The only way this could be dumber would be if they made a computer that required you to keep three perfectly matched pairs of socks together in the dryer. Why not make a computer out of clothes hangers. At least that way, you'll end up with more computing power than you started with.
Y'know, I'm a professional developer myself, so I understand the occasional episode of swollen ego that goes with it, but let's step outside and and take a breath of reality, shall we?
All of the world's developers, much less the tiny fraction of them that use wxWindows, couldn't create a freaking groundswell if they were pureed and pumped underground by industrial hydraulic pumps. Daytime soap operas have larger followings by several orders of magnitude than any development tool.
The logic here is that:
- It costs a lot of money to wage a court battle over trademarks.
- The more money you have, the more expensive you can make it for the other side.
- Microsoft has more money than God.
- Developers aren't end users, and hardly anyone could care less what wxWhatever is called, as long as it works.
Ergo, call it wxWidgets and get on with life. Yes, it's stupid, but in this particular case, fighting it would be even more stupid.Another thing to keep in mind, though, is that you MUST make sure you follow up the recruiters. They will NOT follow up you if you don't show interest.
This is God's own truth, folks. There are three important rules to remember about recruiters:
1. Call your recruiter every day. Recruiters deal with a lot of people, and because their business depends of supplying highly motivated employees to the companies they work for, they want to see motivation. Making you call them is one easy (if admittedly stupid) way of doing that. And if your recruiter mentions or even hints at a specific possibility during your first call, call him/her back the same day to see if anything came of it.
2. Keep track of the positions you're applying for. It makes recruiters look bad if they turn in your resume to a client after another recruiter already has, and they will drop you, often without bothering to tell you.
3. Ask specific questions about the companies the recruiter deals with. I got a job with Intel in late 2000 via one recruiting company, got laid off in the first big wave, and then spent two weeks listening to my recruiter tell me he was trying to get me another position -- only to discover later that this small headhunting firm did 95% of its business with Intel, and Intel had a hiring freeze going on! If I had bothered to learn a little more about the recruiter, I could have pumped more energy into other prospects.
What do you think of hardware manufacturers locking in games to certain platforms, whether a territorial decision or a universal one?
I think there's money to be made on eBay, boy-o.
Switching off of Windows sounds great to me, as I really dislike using it, but your reasoning sounds a bit flawed. If it's because the software's buggy and prone to exploitation, great. But if it's just because some code got leaked.. and OSS software generally has all the code available all the time.. then your reasoning sounds a little flawed.
The vital difference, at least in theory, is that FLOSS developers are operating under the assumption that any would-be attacker can see the source, so they have to make damn sure it's secure. Microsoft developers, on the other hand, have been relying for years on security through obscurity, and have therefore been less careful.
This is obviously not going to be true in every case. BIND's developers, for example, are evidently entirely unaware that the source code is being distributed freely, or else they're relying on security-through-ugly-kludginess. Contrariwise, I'm sure that there are plenty of developers at Microsoft who care very much about security, but their managers see that sales are good despite the bugginess of the code, so they allocate their developers' time to new features instead of bugfixes.
The fact that Microsoft or any software company thinks it's a disaster to have the source leaked is, however, a cardinal sign of poor engineering. They should be pissed, perhaps, but not terrified.
No, we're not using it. But thanks for the tip -- I'll be checking it out. Something on the order of 30% of our read queries could probably benefit from this.
Funny, this seems to be one of those double standards. People like ESR and Linus are praised and recognized as the fathers of OSS, heros among their kind, but as soon as they say something offensive you disown them.
Speaking only for myself -- though I suspect I'm not alone in this -- I've never been an ESR fan. I became involved in Free Software because I wanted to help people. ESR and the bulk of the Open Source crowd are involved in software on the basis of some dubious theories about alternative market models and software engineering. ESR, being the blinkered ideologue that he is, conveniently chooses to ignore the fact that more than a few very successful, high-quality free software packages are built in environments much more like a cathedral than a bazaar, and also chooses to ignore the fact the few businesses managing to turn a profit on the support and add-on model are both exceptional and only very modestly successful.
If your main concern is helping people by giving away quality software, none of this matters. If you're still clinging to the ESR version of the New Economy, it's an unmitigated disaster. That he still trumpets Mozilla as a success story with a straight face demonstrates just how out of touch he is. Mozilla, or, more accurately, it's stripped-down spinoffs are success stories from the standpoint of good free software. As far as the brave new Open Source market goes, they are the Hindenburg of failed late 20th century business theories.
This isn't to say there aren't a fair number of small companies and individuals making money off of Open Source. Hell, I'm one of them, and my day job involves working for another. But my day job -- which is a consumer, rather than producer of free software -- is where the real market role of free software lies: reducing operating expenses for real businesses. Open or Free software almost certainly will overtake most commercial software within our lifetimes, but it will not be creating value in the software market, it will be destroying it.
This is bad news if you're investing in commercial software companies, but if you are a business that uses software, or buying products from such a business -- which is just about everybody -- it is good news indeed in the form of lowered expenses and consumer prices. It's good news for schools, charities, and the poor, too.
ESR, contrary to some opinions expressed here, is actually a very good programmer and has worked on quite a number of important projects other than those which are solely his own -- bogofilter and fetchmail. I wish he would spend more time doing what he excels at -- namely, coding -- and less time doing things which he is truly awful at -- namely, acting as an unelected representative of a truly naive and reality-proof ideology.
Are there any sort of government oversights as to how these can be sold and to whom? I would hate for some wack-job with money to get a hold of one of these, get some armament via the black market, and use it to do something regrettable.
Like what? There are plenty of civilian aircraft you can buy for a lot cheaper than an F-18 that can carry substantially larger payloads, and you'd have more money left over for explosives. The only advantage to the jet fighter is that it goes real fast, but the downside is that an F-18 attracts suspicion and a garden-variety small cargo plane does not. The F-18 is a lot harder to fly, too.
Now, if you want to engage professional military pilots in air combat, this is the plane to do it with, but there are also much cheaper methods of suicide available.
How much will it cost for the add-ons necessary to run PHP on a high traffic server? You know, the cache that should be included in the base product but isn't because it would hurt Zends market.
There are several free third-party caches that work just fine. The PHP folks even provide links to them.
That being said, I work for a company that has a high-traffic site -- about 3 million page-views per day, and we run it without a cache. It takes eight load-balanced web servers to do this, and the main bottleneck is response time from the MySQL server. (This is not a slam against MySQL -- it's chugging along at about 10,000 queries per second.) We could get by with less hardware if more non-sensitive data was shoved into cookies instead of the database and more trivial UI stuff was migrated to client-side Javascript.
PHP's main problem, in terms of implementation, is that it's a bit of a memory hog. There's a huge amount of metadata that goes along with PHP variables, and a PHP array of n elements consumes several times as much memory as the equivalent Perl array. If this has been addressed in PHP 5.0, it will be a big damn deal.