Maybe it's a side effect on how TIOBE measures "popularity" by looking at frequency in search engines - surely, that correlates with popularity, but also (IMHO) with complexity, which may have brought our friendly neighbourhood (Assembly) into the spotlight:-D
Another one on the Leave camp. One thing is when someone inadvertently starts to do it (and you may be in a position to give them constructive feedback). Another is when they keep on doing it, and no one on the powers that be realizes. Happened at an otherwise great workplace - at least two other very competent people left, and made it clear on their exit interviews that the person's toxic behaviour (which I just learned to have a term for) was the cause. Since then, the person has been promoted for their "loyalty", no matter how obvious it gets that they get zero things accomplished and cause talent to bleed, so no regrets.
^ That. Pebble does all the things people *actually* do with other super-powered battery-hog smartwatches (notifications, canned replies, a couple apps), but you get what you paid for (in money and charging worries). It doesn't duplicate smartphone functions - instead, it uses the smartphone's GPS, internet access and powerful CPU to do the heavy-lifting - the best apps are often "terminal-style" accessors for the powerful devices we have at our pockets but can't usually reach when wearing gloves, riding a bike or only having a split-second.
Unfortunately not an option anymore, unless Fitbit decides to launch a compatible device - after all, they *also* favor battery time and focus over feature-load. Who knows?
It all goes down to what pleases you (it's *free* time, after all). I, for example, enjoy off-work programming a little bit, but I am very happy to *have programmed* off-work, that is, I love the results, the fact that I have lots of cool babies of my own (or in which I had a role), and I'm willing to spend the extra mile for that. Sue me, your mileage may vary anyway.
How does that relate to who I should hire, or who would hire me? Well, I guess the thing sorts itself out: each team will end up being built around the same types of programmers (off-time coders x non off-time coders, for example). In the medium term, the team "personality" is born, and hiring goes from that point, in my humble experience.
But I can't help noticing the author of the article is quite opinionated, and a few of his opinions cross the boundary between "funny" and "gross". "This Is America, Take Your Unicode Somewhere Else" is a title that shows how well he plays along with anyone that thinks or looks different, so take that in account when reading his blog.
From both the technical and marketplace perspectives, it is clear that Palm had no choice other than pull the plug (although they've mostly put themselves onto that situation). And, as others have said, development of the OS had already stopped years ago. But it doesn't stop one from having a slightly sad feeling of closing a chapter in a digital lifestyle age.
Palm OS is, for me, the icon of the computer-in-your-pocket times. The amazing fact of having a Palm III is that it had roughly the same firepower that the high-end computers of my late childhood (heck, almost the same CPU of an Amiga) - and it was available for me anywhere, anytime.
It is hard to underestimate that, and I feel sad to see it go - even not being an user anymore (yeah, I'll mark this day on my iPhone's calendar.:-P )
As another Brazilian, I have mixed feelings with the deployment of OLPC laptops here.
But one thing is for sure: the *research* done by OLPC is something very benefitial for everyone. Just like when men went to the moon: maybe we didn't really need to land on the big piece of cheese;-), but it allowed the research of several, useful technologies.
Some of it happens at OLPC: see the "never-sleeping" WiFi chips, designed for mesh networks, as an example, or the dual-resolution LCD. Even if the $100 laptop never arrives, those technologies will hit the market somehow.
Yes, of cource IBM will be happy to provide you with training, programmers, analysts, whatever - after all, this can be one of their secondary interests on this "mainframe revival": the perenial support costs.
(one should't turn down mainframes or IBM's offers based on that, it's not supposed to be a troll - but it *is* a fact that the happiest entity in mainframe culture is always the mainframe seller, because they seem to have *huge* profits doing business related to keep the mainframe up and running - who knows if they don't make more money on that than by selling or renting the mainframe itself?)
Especially applications that use "sun.*" or "com.sun.*" packages in open defiance of Sun themselves saying not to do that.
That's a really dumb thing to do if you care about cross-release compatibility. There's no guarantee whatsoever that classes that are present in one release will be present in the next.
Yes, it *sure* is. However, corporate "developers" do it all the time: they hit Ctrl+Space (or anything like that) on their IDEs, and hope that the Package God brings a nice class, and use it, never bothering to read the docs (those that sometimes are available just by hovering over the class name) or wondering about where they came from.
Considering that most of these guys are more than satisfied with simple answers like "hey, it worked before this @#%@# JVM upgrade" when problems arise, I don't believe Sun is very motivated to change anything under com.sun.*, unless it is absolutely necessary (never cared to check it out because I don't touch the fruit of the forbidden tree anyway:-) ).
Of course this kind of bad-customer/forgiving-supplier dynamics only perpetuates such problems, but it just so happens, not only with Sun (see Ray Chen's blog's frequent posts about the hurdles that Windows has to jump to keep up with popular apps that abuse of undocumented features, so MS won't be trolled for those apps not running on newer Windows releases).
In the (rare) occasions in which Firefox crashed on my Mac, Session Saver was a great helping hand (I don't use its automatic restore for every startup, just for browser crashes).
Don't know whether it restores data such as server-session-id cookies (which would be needed to salvage this insurance app incident, for example), but having such an option available as a plugin is what made me stick to Firefox in both Windows and Mac OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it's a side effect on how TIOBE measures "popularity" by looking at frequency in search engines - surely, that correlates with popularity, but also (IMHO) with complexity, which may have brought our friendly neighbourhood (Assembly) into the spotlight :-D
Another one on the Leave camp. One thing is when someone inadvertently starts to do it (and you may be in a position to give them constructive feedback). Another is when they keep on doing it, and no one on the powers that be realizes. Happened at an otherwise great workplace - at least two other very competent people left, and made it clear on their exit interviews that the person's toxic behaviour (which I just learned to have a term for) was the cause. Since then, the person has been promoted for their "loyalty", no matter how obvious it gets that they get zero things accomplished and cause talent to bleed, so no regrets.
^ That. Pebble does all the things people *actually* do with other super-powered battery-hog smartwatches (notifications, canned replies, a couple apps), but you get what you paid for (in money and charging worries). It doesn't duplicate smartphone functions - instead, it uses the smartphone's GPS, internet access and powerful CPU to do the heavy-lifting - the best apps are often "terminal-style" accessors for the powerful devices we have at our pockets but can't usually reach when wearing gloves, riding a bike or only having a split-second.
Unfortunately not an option anymore, unless Fitbit decides to launch a compatible device - after all, they *also* favor battery time and focus over feature-load. Who knows?
They started the project over from scratch recently.
Apparently the old codebase was like polishing a turd.
You mean, ReactOS or the Slashdot Beta?
It all goes down to what pleases you (it's *free* time, after all). I, for example, enjoy off-work programming a little bit, but I am very happy to *have programmed* off-work, that is, I love the results, the fact that I have lots of cool babies of my own (or in which I had a role), and I'm willing to spend the extra mile for that. Sue me, your mileage may vary anyway.
How does that relate to who I should hire, or who would hire me? Well, I guess the thing sorts itself out: each team will end up being built around the same types of programmers (off-time coders x non off-time coders, for example). In the medium term, the team "personality" is born, and hiring goes from that point, in my humble experience.
But I can't help noticing the author of the article is quite opinionated, and a few of his opinions cross the boundary between "funny" and "gross". "This Is America, Take Your Unicode Somewhere Else" is a title that shows how well he plays along with anyone that thinks or looks different, so take that in account when reading his blog.
From both the technical and marketplace perspectives, it is clear that Palm had no choice other than pull the plug (although they've mostly put themselves onto that situation). And, as others have said, development of the OS had already stopped years ago. But it doesn't stop one from having a slightly sad feeling of closing a chapter in a digital lifestyle age.
Palm OS is, for me, the icon of the computer-in-your-pocket times. The amazing fact of having a Palm III is that it had roughly the same firepower that the high-end computers of my late childhood (heck, almost the same CPU of an Amiga) - and it was available for me anywhere, anytime.
It is hard to underestimate that, and I feel sad to see it go - even not being an user anymore (yeah, I'll mark this day on my iPhone's calendar. :-P )
As another Brazilian, I have mixed feelings with the deployment of OLPC laptops here. But one thing is for sure: the *research* done by OLPC is something very benefitial for everyone. Just like when men went to the moon: maybe we didn't really need to land on the big piece of cheese ;-), but it allowed the research of several, useful technologies.
Some of it happens at OLPC: see the "never-sleeping" WiFi chips, designed for mesh networks, as an example, or the dual-resolution LCD. Even if the $100 laptop never arrives, those technologies will hit the market somehow.
Yes, of cource IBM will be happy to provide you with training, programmers, analysts, whatever - after all, this can be one of their secondary interests on this "mainframe revival": the perenial support costs. (one should't turn down mainframes or IBM's offers based on that, it's not supposed to be a troll - but it *is* a fact that the happiest entity in mainframe culture is always the mainframe seller, because they seem to have *huge* profits doing business related to keep the mainframe up and running - who knows if they don't make more money on that than by selling or renting the mainframe itself?)
Considering that most of these guys are more than satisfied with simple answers like "hey, it worked before this @#%@# JVM upgrade" when problems arise, I don't believe Sun is very motivated to change anything under com.sun.*, unless it is absolutely necessary (never cared to check it out because I don't touch the fruit of the forbidden tree anyway
Of course this kind of bad-customer/forgiving-supplier dynamics only perpetuates such problems, but it just so happens, not only with Sun (see Ray Chen's blog's frequent posts about the hurdles that Windows has to jump to keep up with popular apps that abuse of undocumented features, so MS won't be trolled for those apps not running on newer Windows releases).
In the (rare) occasions in which Firefox crashed on my Mac, Session Saver was a great helping hand (I don't use its automatic restore for every startup, just for browser crashes).
Don't know whether it restores data such as server-session-id cookies (which would be needed to salvage this insurance app incident, for example), but having such an option available as a plugin is what made me stick to Firefox in both Windows and Mac OS X.
As seen on Mr. T Versus IT Consulting Companies