Not sure if you are joking, but if not...then you need a new job. Or you may just need to put your foot down. I have been in IT for years as a web developer for a few diff companies, and have never worked like that. Get your stuff done at work, make it clear you are willing to work a little extra where needed (which should be rare) but if there is bad planning, well, tough. IT shops need to be brought back to reality, namely, that poor planning cannot be overcome by stressing out your workers. And I've done pretty well, and thus far my family hasn't starved. The people who are often overworked are overworked because they let it happen. I have known way too many "heroes" who are all willing to work as long as needed for no good reason at all. Trouble is, today's hero is tomorrow's burnout.
Or become a consultant. You may work the hours, but they are no longer a free gift from you to the company. You bill every hour you work.
I have yet to see "semantic web" fully explained, but Wikipedia is giving some good insight [wikipedia.org] into it, especially into its nebulousness. It is supposed to make web (or in this case, desktop) documents machine-readable.
Talk about nebulous, look at the mission statment for the OSCA. What does that even MEAN?! It's ironic that an organization devoted to making information more easily consumable cannot even get a decent statement of purpose together.
And look, you have to pay to be a member. So the standards that nobody will even adhere to will be decided by corporations who are willing to pay for seats on the committee. I mean, isn't that basically what's wrong with the whole ODF/OOXML thing, as well as the W3C?
While I am on my soapbox, am I the only one severely annoyed by slashdot's web2.0-wannabe UI? It makes posting a real pain. Clicking the reply button results in an endless wait. The disease is spreading. First the firehose, then the idle page, then the comments on articles, and now the user profile pages. Will someone please stop the madness?
I don't really even know where to begin in telling you how wrong you are. Have you even used RAD and Eclipse? (note the logical operator I used in that sentence) Eclipse is a steaming pile of crap to be sure, but RAD manages to make said steaming pile of crap even more putrid. It's like they took a dump on the proverbial pile of crap and garnished it with the rotting carcass of a dead skunk. And while you can get the aforementioned steaming pile of crap for free (which is still too much to pay for it) you have to pay through the nose to get the two-layer poopcake with the dead animal on top.
The proof is in the pudding when large dev team in an even larger IBM shop has a major initiative to eliminate RAD, which has already been paid for at something like $5K a pop, in favor of Eclipse. RAD actually prevents developer productivity. At least Eclipse is marginally better than using Notepad or vi to write Java code, even if you do spend half your time waiting for it to do stuff.
Jeez people, just use PHP or Ruby already. But that's another rant.
Support from IBM. Costly, but effective, for many large corporations
Effective? Hah.
I just left a company which was a big IBM shop. I had never worked in an IBM shop before. That was eye opening. We spent more time fighting the software that we did working. It was the most frustrating experience I have ever had to deal with in the workplace. I think on all future job interviews, I'll ask straighaway if the place is an IBM shop and if they say yes I'll thank them for their time.
IBM doesn't provide support, unless by support you mean allowing their you to hire their overpriced consultants. IBM takes what should be open source products and strips them of useful features, loads them with cruft, and then sells them for exorbitant prices (looking at you, Rational Application Developer).
There's a reason the definition for fear and loathing references IBM. As a former co-worker once put it: "Nobody was ever fired for choosing IBM."
I'd argue that an IBM issued linux desktop is just as bad as Windows. Leave it to IBM to find *some* way to lock you in. You'd expect that from proprietary software. But using F/OSS to accomplish vendor lock-in? That's a complete abomination.
The place I used to work used Corda with Coldfusion. It worked really well and gave really good support. You define chart layouts with an XML-based language (there was an IDE for this task.) You then feed it serialized data. The charts look nice, have drilldown capability, and the company provided us with excellent support. The few times we had to call them they were responsive and fixed any bugs we found. I'd recommend them.
Yeah, you probably mean callbacks. And when you talk about callbacks, you often use closures. And anything that helps you grok javascript closures is A Good Thing.
Did you mean to reply to my post? It doesn't seem related.
That said, I agree with you. Event binding is awesome and libs like jQuery make it easy. It's the last step in making sure that CSS, HTML, and Javascript are all loosely coupled and therefore potentially independent.
"I've found that my desire to have a fundamental understanding of javascript, which kept me away from most of the popular libraries for quite a while, is one of the main reasons I love jQuery,"
Interesting point. Care to share one or two ways that jQuery helped you understand javascript better?
I'll be the first to admit I am still missing prototype and maybe that's why I haven't fully embraced jQuery yet. I do like its terseness and the small size, so I really *want* to like it.
"I personally like jQuery (and jQueryUI) because it's more terse and elegant."
I have used prototype pretty extensively for years now. I recently made the switch to jQuery and have been doing quite a bit with it. jQuery UI is awesome. I have never been a fan of combining prototype with scriptaculous because that *really* bloats your pages. And you really cannot minify prototype, at least as far as I know. jQuery UI is extremely intuitive to use and is lightweight thanks to the awesome build-your-own-download site they have.
That said, I prefer prototype for straight ahead AJAX stuff, mainly for one reason: jQuery requires you to use the jQuery object. The prototype $() just returns a nice fully qualified object reference with which you can do all sorts of stuff. jQuery lets you do the same things, but requires you to learn all kinds of jQuery stuff. jQuery thus moves you one more layer away from using straight ahead javascript, which in turn makes your skills more about jQuery than the underlying language. That is A Bad Thing.
Re:A simple request
on
jQuery in Action
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Keep the content separate from the interface." Great! I like pork chops! What does that have to do with the subject at hand?
Javascript is neither content nor interface. Javascript, HTML, and CSS are more like a MVC-type setup.
Javascript is great, and while I do agree with some of your rules, they really have more to do with *what* you use javascript for, not whether you should use it. Honestly, I worry about people who are *still* scared of javascript and AJAX. These are usually people who do not understand said technologies.
I have a $20 Dell Optiplex I got from Pacific Geek. It's old, and has a P3 and 256M of RAM. It's a LAMP box, running on Xubuntu. Works just great!
You don't need something beefy for a dev server. A LAMP box on a well chosen Linux distro doesn't need much.
The nice thing about an old box for a dev server is that you work hard to make sure the application runs fast. You don't have resources to make a crappy app. When it gets to prod, that's a great thing.
Agreed. And I make a living writing AJAX-type apps. I think the technology is just fabulous, when used for the right things. Office apps? Not the right use of the technology. I look at Google Office apps as more of a proof-of-concept, anyhow. No way would I even consider using them for any serious work.
"Must be a winblows developer or clueless." False dichotomy. Neither.
And Struts? What, are you delusional? Wait a year or two. It'll be an unmaintainable pile of spaghetti. I have watched developers who have used struts for *years* muddle through the forwards and redirects and tiles-defs and other layers of over-engineered cruft. Struts elevates abstraction distraction to an art form.
The problem with the java technology stack (or more accurately, the Java *culture*) is that the standard response to unmaintainable bloat is to add yet more unmaintainable bloat to, you know, "manage the layers". Performance is all too often that thing behind whatever is on the back burner.
Java is the new COBOL.
Re:Three tips to optimize your site...
on
Website Optimization
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Oh, and don't use Java.
A website written in Java that runs quickly? hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
In all seriousness, hasn't the blunder already happened when they shipped the CD without the full key? What else can they do at this point? Anyone have any better ideas?
I don't know if you're being sarcastic. But I recently started a new job in a place that is a huge java shop (coming from LAMP/ASP background). I am utterly amazed at the towers of abstraction layers that seem somewhere between a Rube Goldberg contraption and something out of a Dr Seuss book. Something seems wrong with requiring layers to help you manage layers. Hey, do you have too many layers to manage? Well, just use this tool (maven, hudson, cruise control, WICA) to help you manage the complexity.
"Steve's Law - If a layer of abstraction is the right answer, you have probably asked the wrong question" I have been saying basically the same thing since I started working at this place.
That said, OO seems to have some good tenets such as design patterns. So why is it that OO geeks seem to love piling layers upon layers?
To a point you're right. Mario jumping a turtle, while one could call that violence, isn't going to be harmful. Be honest, some modern games carry very realistic and graphic depictions of extreme violence. If you're telling me that doesn't affect you, you're either ignorant or a liar.
While I can certainly appreciate what you're saying, I disagree. The wikipedia link is nice, but I tend to distrust child psychology. Child psychology is a large part of the reason many children are as bad as they are. Child psychology is an experiment. So is parenting. But I think parents are in a better position to "experiment" on their children because parents know the child's temprament and can tailor discipline accordingly. Do you have children? If so, then you surely understand that each child is different and requires different treatment.
And the Punishment and Reward method is describing something a little different than what I described. The reason I feel it's good to express love for children after administering discipline is that they then understand the misbehavior has been handled. It's sort of a "take your lumps and move on" thing. It isn't an apology for the discipline. If it were, I agree, that's inconsistency.
I agree, these studies are crap. I don't think you need a study here. Doesn't common sense tell you that repeated exposure to something produces a tolerance? Likewise, graphically violent entertainment desensitizes you to violence through exposure. If a person is desensitized to violence, that means it becomes less shocking. If it's less shocking, that means it's not deviant behavior; it's normal behavior. If violence is normal behavior, what's so wrong with hitting, shooting, running over with your car, etc someone when they upset you? Now, that line of logic is not the same thing as saying that if you play violent games, you *will* go kill people. It's saying that if impressionable children are desensitized to violence, they will be more inclined to act violently. I honestly don't see what makes that such a stretch of the imagination for some people.
In fact, and I am not sure about you, I think many of the people here defending violent games only because they enjoy them as a form of entertainment (just like many people attack violent games because they do NOT enjoy them). Well that's just fine, but that doesn't make it ok to rationalize that they have no effect. Be honest with yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure if you are joking, but if not...then you need a new job. Or you may just need to put your foot down. I have been in IT for years as a web developer for a few diff companies, and have never worked like that. Get your stuff done at work, make it clear you are willing to work a little extra where needed (which should be rare) but if there is bad planning, well, tough. IT shops need to be brought back to reality, namely, that poor planning cannot be overcome by stressing out your workers. And I've done pretty well, and thus far my family hasn't starved. The people who are often overworked are overworked because they let it happen. I have known way too many "heroes" who are all willing to work as long as needed for no good reason at all. Trouble is, today's hero is tomorrow's burnout.
Or become a consultant. You may work the hours, but they are no longer a free gift from you to the company. You bill every hour you work.
Just curious, what reason did your teacher offer for covering such heavy material as The Core?
Excuse me, I need to go heat up my Hot Pockets.
Talk about nebulous, look at the mission statment for the OSCA. What does that even MEAN?! It's ironic that an organization devoted to making information more easily consumable cannot even get a decent statement of purpose together.
And look, you have to pay to be a member. So the standards that nobody will even adhere to will be decided by corporations who are willing to pay for seats on the committee. I mean, isn't that basically what's wrong with the whole ODF/OOXML thing, as well as the W3C?
While I am on my soapbox, am I the only one severely annoyed by slashdot's web2.0-wannabe UI? It makes posting a real pain. Clicking the reply button results in an endless wait. The disease is spreading. First the firehose, then the idle page, then the comments on articles, and now the user profile pages. Will someone please stop the madness?
No, I think he meant Java. Who in their right mind would want to code a site in Java unless forced to by some PHB at Conglom-O Corporation?
Fortunately not. Just RAD and Websphere. It was bad enough, trust me.
Yup. Web2.0 is fine. What's not fine is poorly implemented wannabe AJAXy pages. This page sucks, and the new user profile pages suck.
If you're gonna try to be all web2.0 (man I hate that term) then do it, don't bring a knife to a gunfight with this crapola.
"Its pretty unfair to criticize them for a that."
I don't really even know where to begin in telling you how wrong you are. Have you even used RAD and Eclipse? (note the logical operator I used in that sentence) Eclipse is a steaming pile of crap to be sure, but RAD manages to make said steaming pile of crap even more putrid. It's like they took a dump on the proverbial pile of crap and garnished it with the rotting carcass of a dead skunk. And while you can get the aforementioned steaming pile of crap for free (which is still too much to pay for it) you have to pay through the nose to get the two-layer poopcake with the dead animal on top.
The proof is in the pudding when large dev team in an even larger IBM shop has a major initiative to eliminate RAD, which has already been paid for at something like $5K a pop, in favor of Eclipse. RAD actually prevents developer productivity. At least Eclipse is marginally better than using Notepad or vi to write Java code, even if you do spend half your time waiting for it to do stuff.
Jeez people, just use PHP or Ruby already. But that's another rant.
Effective? Hah.
I just left a company which was a big IBM shop. I had never worked in an IBM shop before. That was eye opening. We spent more time fighting the software that we did working. It was the most frustrating experience I have ever had to deal with in the workplace. I think on all future job interviews, I'll ask straighaway if the place is an IBM shop and if they say yes I'll thank them for their time.
IBM doesn't provide support, unless by support you mean allowing their you to hire their overpriced consultants. IBM takes what should be open source products and strips them of useful features, loads them with cruft, and then sells them for exorbitant prices (looking at you, Rational Application Developer).
There's a reason the definition for fear and loathing references IBM. As a former co-worker once put it: "Nobody was ever fired for choosing IBM."
I'd argue that an IBM issued linux desktop is just as bad as Windows. Leave it to IBM to find *some* way to lock you in. You'd expect that from proprietary software. But using F/OSS to accomplish vendor lock-in? That's a complete abomination.
The squirrels are merely saving them. They know the apocalypse is coming. That, or they are planning an all out takeover of the earth. Are you ready?
Look! You've been warned! The hungry squirrel of the apocalypse rides!!!
I have used Corda for this very thing.
http://www.corda.com/?gclid=CMzq_aDFlJcCFQNbxwodfEbudg
The place I used to work used Corda with Coldfusion. It worked really well and gave really good support. You define chart layouts with an XML-based language (there was an IDE for this task.) You then feed it serialized data. The charts look nice, have drilldown capability, and the company provided us with excellent support. The few times we had to call them they were responsive and fixed any bugs we found. I'd recommend them.
Yeah...I have heard that before. I honestly haven't made the effort to understand why this is true. Hasn't caused a problem for me yet, though. YMMV.
Yeah, you probably mean callbacks. And when you talk about callbacks, you often use closures. And anything that helps you grok javascript closures is A Good Thing.
Did you mean to reply to my post? It doesn't seem related.
That said, I agree with you. Event binding is awesome and libs like jQuery make it easy. It's the last step in making sure that CSS, HTML, and Javascript are all loosely coupled and therefore potentially independent.
"I've found that my desire to have a fundamental understanding of javascript, which kept me away from most of the popular libraries for quite a while, is one of the main reasons I love jQuery,"
Interesting point. Care to share one or two ways that jQuery helped you understand javascript better?
I'll be the first to admit I am still missing prototype and maybe that's why I haven't fully embraced jQuery yet. I do like its terseness and the small size, so I really *want* to like it.
"I personally like jQuery (and jQueryUI) because it's more terse and elegant."
I have used prototype pretty extensively for years now. I recently made the switch to jQuery and have been doing quite a bit with it. jQuery UI is awesome. I have never been a fan of combining prototype with scriptaculous because that *really* bloats your pages. And you really cannot minify prototype, at least as far as I know. jQuery UI is extremely intuitive to use and is lightweight thanks to the awesome build-your-own-download site they have.
That said, I prefer prototype for straight ahead AJAX stuff, mainly for one reason: jQuery requires you to use the jQuery object. The prototype $() just returns a nice fully qualified object reference with which you can do all sorts of stuff. jQuery lets you do the same things, but requires you to learn all kinds of jQuery stuff. jQuery thus moves you one more layer away from using straight ahead javascript, which in turn makes your skills more about jQuery than the underlying language. That is A Bad Thing.
"Keep the content separate from the interface."
Great! I like pork chops! What does that have to do with the subject at hand?
Javascript is neither content nor interface. Javascript, HTML, and CSS are more like a MVC-type setup.
Javascript is great, and while I do agree with some of your rules, they really have more to do with *what* you use javascript for, not whether you should use it. Honestly, I worry about people who are *still* scared of javascript and AJAX. These are usually people who do not understand said technologies.
I have a $20 Dell Optiplex I got from Pacific Geek. It's old, and has a P3 and 256M of RAM. It's a LAMP box, running on Xubuntu. Works just great!
You don't need something beefy for a dev server. A LAMP box on a well chosen Linux distro doesn't need much.
The nice thing about an old box for a dev server is that you work hard to make sure the application runs fast. You don't have resources to make a crappy app. When it gets to prod, that's a great thing.
Agreed. And I make a living writing AJAX-type apps. I think the technology is just fabulous, when used for the right things. Office apps? Not the right use of the technology. I look at Google Office apps as more of a proof-of-concept, anyhow. No way would I even consider using them for any serious work.
"Must be a winblows developer or clueless."
False dichotomy. Neither.
And Struts? What, are you delusional? Wait a year or two. It'll be an unmaintainable pile of spaghetti. I have watched developers who have used struts for *years* muddle through the forwards and redirects and tiles-defs and other layers of over-engineered cruft. Struts elevates abstraction distraction to an art form.
The problem with the java technology stack (or more accurately, the Java *culture*) is that the standard response to unmaintainable bloat is to add yet more unmaintainable bloat to, you know, "manage the layers". Performance is all too often that thing behind whatever is on the back burner.
Java is the new COBOL.
Oh, and don't use Java.
A website written in Java that runs quickly? hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
In all seriousness, hasn't the blunder already happened when they shipped the CD without the full key? What else can they do at this point? Anyone have any better ideas?
I don't know if you're being sarcastic. But I recently started a new job in a place that is a huge java shop (coming from LAMP/ASP background). I am utterly amazed at the towers of abstraction layers that seem somewhere between a Rube Goldberg contraption and something out of a Dr Seuss book. Something seems wrong with requiring layers to help you manage layers. Hey, do you have too many layers to manage? Well, just use this tool (maven, hudson, cruise control, WICA) to help you manage the complexity.
"Steve's Law - If a layer of abstraction is the right answer, you have probably asked the wrong question"
I have been saying basically the same thing since I started working at this place.
That said, OO seems to have some good tenets such as design patterns. So why is it that OO geeks seem to love piling layers upon layers?
To a point you're right. Mario jumping a turtle, while one could call that violence, isn't going to be harmful. Be honest, some modern games carry very realistic and graphic depictions of extreme violence. If you're telling me that doesn't affect you, you're either ignorant or a liar.
While I can certainly appreciate what you're saying, I disagree. The wikipedia link is nice, but I tend to distrust child psychology. Child psychology is a large part of the reason many children are as bad as they are. Child psychology is an experiment. So is parenting. But I think parents are in a better position to "experiment" on their children because parents know the child's temprament and can tailor discipline accordingly. Do you have children? If so, then you surely understand that each child is different and requires different treatment.
And the Punishment and Reward method is describing something a little different than what I described. The reason I feel it's good to express love for children after administering discipline is that they then understand the misbehavior has been handled. It's sort of a "take your lumps and move on" thing. It isn't an apology for the discipline. If it were, I agree, that's inconsistency.
I agree, these studies are crap. I don't think you need a study here. Doesn't common sense tell you that repeated exposure to something produces a tolerance? Likewise, graphically violent entertainment desensitizes you to violence through exposure. If a person is desensitized to violence, that means it becomes less shocking. If it's less shocking, that means it's not deviant behavior; it's normal behavior. If violence is normal behavior, what's so wrong with hitting, shooting, running over with your car, etc someone when they upset you? Now, that line of logic is not the same thing as saying that if you play violent games, you *will* go kill people. It's saying that if impressionable children are desensitized to violence, they will be more inclined to act violently. I honestly don't see what makes that such a stretch of the imagination for some people.
In fact, and I am not sure about you, I think many of the people here defending violent games only because they enjoy them as a form of entertainment (just like many people attack violent games because they do NOT enjoy them). Well that's just fine, but that doesn't make it ok to rationalize that they have no effect. Be honest with yourself.