Well, What would you use for report generation over multiple 20 to 35 million record files? With multiple summary levels that all roll up automatically without a lot of extra coding.
I agree with you fishbowl. And you need to put your prejudices away.
I have have coached a half dozen people like you those refer to.
But I'm the guy who is at salary cap and getting a promotion every 12 months until the next step up would be managing a third of the department.
You mistook realism for bitterness. I'm not bitter. I'm very happy.
The executives are idiots when it comes to computers, they want a dollar for a dime, they want a 24 million dollar computer delivered next week without warning, they want a 5 man year system delivered bug free in 1 year with 2 programmers.
And it is because they have no way to tell if we are telling them the truth or lying to them like Scotty.
The only thing I've found that works is to fail gracefully and in small ways often. They understand small failures means you are working at capacity.
While others work 72 hour weeks to "make it happen", I get praise and bumped upstairs to manage. And my team is saying i'm one of the best team leads they've ever had. Because I protect them, I shoot straight with them, and I give them recognition for good work.
I know enough to know this is an area where they won't listen.
They have unrealistic desires. They want it fast, cheap, and bug free-- and I know you get two of the three.
They enthusiastically start new things, then fail to put enough in the budget to "do it right" because "doing it right" would have been too expensive and gotten the project canceled before it started.
They are willing to spend millions on redo's, patchwork, and fixups but are very stingy about spending a fraction of that before hand.
They constantly (every 5-6 years) reimagine that a bunch of college graduates or inexperienced foreign programmers managed by a consulting firm are going to allow them to get a bug free $5 million system. Any consulting firm that tells them the truth is not given work. Any successful consulting firm knows you have to lie- but then most consultants become corrupted by the necessity to lie and go overboard (grossly over promising and under delivering).
You *must* like to executives- but for your and their own good, keep it to reasonable lying.
But here on Slashdot, I can say it like it is. And...
It sounds like you may be a smaller privately held company.
I'm at a publicly held, tens of billions organization. Our programmers now take 6 weeks to change 1 line of code. Our programmers are no longer allowed to proactively make ANY change not pre-approved. We have 300-500 programmers and contractors. Changing anything is like changing the spark plugs on a running engine.
SOX totally slaughters us. And then executive illusions that programmers are generic for the last couple years are having a large negative impact due to resource constraints. There is *one* invoicing expert as much as they hate it.
Programmers are not generic as much as executive management would like them to be.
If your application is sufficiently complex, being in the same language buys you very little.
And there are huge costs to using an inappropriate language to solve a problem.
If it were just me, I'd go with Java all the way because at least it is fairly reusable on unknown future hardware.
And that being said, it would completely suck to try to work on certain classes of problems and platforms only in Java.
At my current company we have C, Oracle, MS-SQL, DB2, Java, JBoss, Eclipse, WSAD, RPG-ILE, Crytal Reports, SAP pieces, Various DTS packages, Cobol, Javascript, VB6.0, Various "MS Application" languages, and.Net. (And various XML/Markup stuff). And several packages.. which are basically programming languages when it comes to interfacing them. Plus some old powerbuilder stuff and maybe some foxpro plus spreadsheets and three kinds of workflow. Oh and several flavors of MQ...
I get the value of fewer languages and a standard platform.
I would hate to do workflow in C. I would hate to do reports in.Net without Crystal Reports and.Net can't handle the things that RPG-ILE and Cobol eat for breakfast.
Even just the 30 or so programmers that work in RPG-ILE can't be swapped because each package (~750k lines per package) contains specific business rules. Changing a programmer with the same language and platform results in lower quality work, doubled or quadrupled time lines, and more errors in production.
Executives Hate this and want everyone to be generic even if it takes 10 times as long (and before I entered management and stopped being a programmer, my productivity was down to about 1/10th of what it was in 2000).
Good points, On #4, the problem microsoft faces is that their competitor is free, they cant' buy it, and in at least one case is cutting one of their cash cows up into filets.
OpenOffice will only get better, it will continue to be free, and there is no way Microsoft can kill it. I bounced off OO several times but as of 2.4 it stuck. It's now my preferred word processor.
Word still has some killer business features... but only 3% of the people at my office use them. Most people don't need sharepoint type features.
Lots of apps still have very loose bounds checking. This allows things like that JPG vector virus attack. The jpg interpreter had a hole which a malicious jpg could lie about it's data size and overload, then pass execution to.
For performance reasons, they set up a buffer of fixed size and trust that other applications will feed them that amount of information. Many virii and malware figure out a way to overload that buffer and then have execution start in the excess data. It is possible to bounds check everything but it comes at a definite performance hit. You set up a buffer for 1024 and when data is sent to you, instead of flash loading it- it is specifically loaded to fill the buffer and any excess throws an exception or is discarded.
The other severely open issue is administrative rights. The same thing applies- how convenient do you want your system to be vs how safe. If programmers write code correctly, you don't have issues with lack of god level authority.
Sometimes, you just have to do something to induce people to do the crappy jobs.
I just wish they would write a secure OS and get it over with. It's clear that cutting corners for performance reasons isn't working. Time to bounds check everything.
Most heavy users will stop being heavy users if they have to pay. Most are only heavy users because it's free.
Example.. p2p movie. 4gb-- $4. Oh wait... I can buy a physical DVD for $5.
As for the rest- I admit that I didn't read your post well enough. I was rushed at work and responded to what I thought it said. I agree with a lot of it. Sorry!
Slashdot Mirror
Well,
What would you use for report generation over multiple 20 to 35 million record files?
With multiple summary levels that all roll up automatically without a lot of extra coding.
I agree with you fishbowl. And you need to put your prejudices away.
I have have coached a half dozen people like you those refer to.
But I'm the guy who is at salary cap and getting a promotion every 12 months until the next step up would be managing a third of the department.
You mistook realism for bitterness. I'm not bitter. I'm very happy.
The executives are idiots when it comes to computers, they want a dollar for a dime, they want a 24 million dollar computer delivered next week without warning, they want a 5 man year system delivered bug free in 1 year with 2 programmers.
And it is because they have no way to tell if we are telling them the truth or lying to them like Scotty.
The only thing I've found that works is to fail gracefully and in small ways often. They understand small failures means you are working at capacity.
While others work 72 hour weeks to "make it happen", I get praise and bumped upstairs to manage. And my team is saying i'm one of the best team leads they've ever had. Because I protect them, I shoot straight with them, and I give them recognition for good work.
Go cell phone for a year. It reaches a point where they will give you great offers just to have you in their network.
$16.95 gets me unlimited incoming calls, 25 outgoing calls (.10 per call over that) and no deals on long distance.
Even better,
I know enough to know this is an area where they won't listen.
They have unrealistic desires. They want it fast, cheap, and bug free-- and I know you get two of the three.
They enthusiastically start new things, then fail to put enough in the budget to "do it right" because "doing it right" would have been too expensive and gotten the project canceled before it started.
They are willing to spend millions on redo's, patchwork, and fixups but are very stingy about spending a fraction of that before hand.
They constantly (every 5-6 years) reimagine that a bunch of college graduates or inexperienced foreign programmers managed by a consulting firm are going to allow them to get a bug free $5 million system. Any consulting firm that tells them the truth is not given work. Any successful consulting firm knows you have to lie- but then most consultants become corrupted by the necessity to lie and go overboard (grossly over promising and under delivering).
You *must* like to executives- but for your and their own good, keep it to reasonable lying.
But here on Slashdot, I can say it like it is. And...
It's dumb.
It sounds like you may be a smaller privately held company.
I'm at a publicly held, tens of billions organization. Our programmers now take 6 weeks to change 1 line of code. Our programmers are no longer allowed to proactively make ANY change not pre-approved. We have 300-500 programmers and contractors. Changing anything is like changing the spark plugs on a running engine.
SOX totally slaughters us. And then executive illusions that programmers are generic for the last couple years are having a large negative impact due to resource constraints. There is *one* invoicing expert as much as they hate it.
Programmers are not generic as much as executive management would like them to be.
If your application is sufficiently complex, being in the same language buys you very little.
And there are huge costs to using an inappropriate language to solve a problem.
If it were just me, I'd go with Java all the way because at least it is fairly reusable on unknown future hardware.
And that being said, it would completely suck to try to work on certain classes of problems and platforms only in Java.
At my current company we have .Net. (And various XML/Markup stuff). And several packages.. which are basically programming languages when it comes to interfacing them. Plus some old powerbuilder stuff and maybe some foxpro plus spreadsheets and three kinds of workflow. Oh and several flavors of MQ...
C, Oracle, MS-SQL, DB2, Java, JBoss, Eclipse, WSAD, RPG-ILE, Crytal Reports, SAP pieces, Various DTS packages, Cobol, Javascript, VB6.0, Various "MS Application" languages, and
I get the value of fewer languages and a standard platform.
I would hate to do workflow in C. I would hate to do reports in .Net without Crystal Reports and .Net can't handle the things that RPG-ILE and Cobol eat for breakfast.
Even just the 30 or so programmers that work in RPG-ILE can't be swapped because each package (~750k lines per package) contains specific business rules. Changing a programmer with the same language and platform results in lower quality work, doubled or quadrupled time lines, and more errors in production.
Executives Hate this and want everyone to be generic even if it takes 10 times as long (and before I entered management and stopped being a programmer, my productivity was down to about 1/10th of what it was in 2000).
Yes but the mobile repeater towers can't and they go out between 5 and 24 hours into a power outage.
Land lines are great-- for about $16.95 which is what I pay for one.
Otherwise, I use cell service which is still melting down in price because minutes are just a commodity.
27 years experience and I've heard this idea before. It is dumb.
2-3 languages- sure. One for gear-head, one for report/data mining at least.
5 languages at the same company is a problem- but 1 language is a problem too.
Good points,
On #4, the problem microsoft faces is that their competitor is free, they cant' buy it, and in at least one case is cutting one of their cash cows up into filets.
OpenOffice will only get better, it will continue to be free, and there is no way Microsoft can kill it. I bounced off OO several times but as of 2.4 it stuck. It's now my preferred word processor.
Word still has some killer business features... but only 3% of the people at my office use them. Most people don't need sharepoint type features.
In cars like this there can be a substantial difference in mileage between a 130 lb driver and a 235 lb driver.
I'm responding to the designer's bold statement that his program could be written well enough to play without loss.
Given a long enough game, there will be a plausible hand which seems like a winner which is beaten by another hand and results in a huge loss.
You are now pretty much immune to that version of the flu (you got well so your immune system knows and can beat it).
So your laptop is only dangerous to others.
UV light is probably your best best. A day in direct sunlight would probably do it without hurting the laptop.
This was on discovery channel a couple years back. basically very slow growth from cold winters == denser wood.
Lots of apps still have very loose bounds checking. This allows things like that JPG vector virus attack. The jpg interpreter had a hole which a malicious jpg could lie about it's data size and overload, then pass execution to.
For performance reasons, they set up a buffer of fixed size and trust that other applications will feed them that amount of information. Many virii and malware figure out a way to overload that buffer and then have execution start in the excess data. It is possible to bounds check everything but it comes at a definite performance hit. You set up a buffer for 1024 and when data is sent to you, instead of flash loading it- it is specifically loaded to fill the buffer and any excess throws an exception or is discarded.
The other severely open issue is administrative rights. The same thing applies- how convenient do you want your system to be vs how safe. If programmers write code correctly, you don't have issues with lack of god level authority.
People paint for free.
People do not tend to clean toilets for free.
Sometimes, you just have to do something to induce people to do the crappy jobs.
I just wish they would write a secure OS and get it over with. It's clear that cutting corners for performance reasons isn't working. Time to bounds check everything.
Or zero...
Or a multiple
Or a negative multiple.
Or it was an idiom like "paasaùga Bai na hnaa".
"Having 2 cores is enough for most consumers"
And we only need 640k ram.
Don't give up! Stay the cores!
Cool is 24 hours a day music videos with 90% mainstream and 10% "learn new stuff"/Bizarre/off the wall".
MTV was indeed cool. Through about 1988. Then it lost it and became crap.
Not quite.
If I allow a site but don't want flash from the site then I get a bunch of "play" arrows instead of animations.
I was also able to install the portable OpenOffice 2.4!
Not saying McCain is old, but I heard he told some meddling reporters to "Get off my lawn!"
George Carlin died around McCain's age.
OTH, George had known major health issues while McCain does not.
Most heavy users will stop being heavy users if they have to pay.
Most are only heavy users because it's free.
Example.. p2p movie. 4gb-- $4. Oh wait... I can buy a physical DVD for $5.
As for the rest- I admit that I didn't read your post well enough. I was rushed at work and responded to what I thought it said. I agree with a lot of it. Sorry!