That will actually be a problem in 2017 in code I wrote.
I needed to implement 3-digit inventory taking IDs in 2007, whit about 20-30 inventories taken each year. So I have a one-digit year in those IDs, and in 2017 I will have to either delete the old ones or find a new approach.
But since a few weeks all our barcode scanners also can handle letter barcodes, so I can probably push the real problem into 2043, when I'm retired.;-P
Thinking of CSS as "not enough" is like having a Café using 5 spoons of salt for every coffee, and when the customers are fleeing in troves thinking that the cause is perhaps they are using "not enough" salt.
Maybe some manager of the Geek Squad did use the "Do what I say or I replace you with a small shell script" on to many employees, so now he bad to actually find a way to charge customers $40 to have a script run.
The sad part is, that a lot of farmers that could have feed their communities are pushed out of business by cheap subsidized food produced by the same western countries that then also have to send food aid once local farming has collapsed completely.
Everybody looses, except the big industrial food companies.
Some commercial systems used to run infrastructures of the scale often come with the source code. Users are not allowed to distribute it, but patching/optimizing/etc is perfectly fine.
We run two of such systems. We don't have all the necessary tools and manpower to actually change anything big, but the one first really BIG great thing about them is that whenever you have an unexplainable problem that even the support is not able to track down is that you can just LOOK at the code (and maybe add some small additional debugging output) and try to figure out what causes the problem yourself.
Also, the most problematic things are not usually "outages", since they can be resolved reasonably quick. The thing that takes forever, or is a lot of times never solved with completely closed source, is the sporadic errors. We have a closes source system that just creates wrong invoices 2-3 times a months for years now. The vendor is unable to track down the problem, and also doesn't want to give out any source code. (I managed to sneak a peek at a few procedures, though, and I know why. It's a horrible mess of spaghetti - code and workarounds.)
It can probably also do it in a lot of additional ways, like throwing it out of the window and then wait to see if the north / south / west / east window is mentioned as broken in the police report.
Incidentally, this person in question would blame almost anything except the real problem which was himself
And sadly, one such rotten apple can spoil the whole bunch.
After having encountered some of them myself (from coders, over management to customers) I now definitely like working with less-proficient people that can admit that they have shortcomings or have made errors than with geniuses in their field that are not able to to that.
Like the old saying:
It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know for sure that just ain’t so.
So, when the coder messes up it's the coders fault.
But when management messes up it's still the coders fault, just because he didn't quit fast enough?
On a related note: Most of the jobs *I* have quit so far (4 of 5) I have quit because the priority of people in the company was to pin the fault on someone, not to actually fix the problems.
The company I have worked now for 10 years has a very nice upper management level that manages to keep the people that try to fix problems, and manages to get rid of most of the people that play the blame-game.
The first step also doesn't involve any coders. The first step is the Customer deciding that he wants something, and who to hire to do it.;-p
Someone in a workshop recently compared software development to day with architecture from about 1000 years ago, when they started to build the big cathedrals. Back then they weren't able to calculate beforehand exactly which material in which strength they needed for the thing to keep standing, so it was more of a trial and error process than it is today.
Software is a little like this today. Even if I write a *perfect* program that has zero bugs, there might be an API change to another component that is used, or an OS update changes some specifics that I relied on, etc.... a few month from now that introduces a bug.
For example, we had an 3-day outage of or mobile data entry terminals that was pinned down to an incompatibility between a specific firmware of Cisco routers and a specific version of Citric combined with a specific network infrastructure. Those are the bugs that will always crop up now and then and are pretty much impossible to avoid. There you can only see the problem once your "Cathedral" has fallen into ruins. Fortunately you can re-build software with the necessary changes quicker than re-building a big stone building.
Of course, I estimate 90% of the bigger IT problems are there because of mis-communication between Customer Management Developer. And since my job consist of being both developer AND customer for different products / projects I would split the root of the problem equally across all of them.
As I said, that case was impossible to solve with "more manpower". There were specific software changes and test that had to be done "in synch" with electrical and mechanical changes to production lines, so a colleague and I did alternating 12-hour shifts during that.
And the project never was "late", it was perfectly on time all the time. So we never had any "get it finished quick" pressure, since almost every step of the procedure took place exactly as planned.
In my opinion, there is not really a need for the manager to stay, unless he has to physically scare away people trying to harass the developers. Just ask them if they need anything further before you leave, and tell them they can call any time they need anything.
At least that's the way it is with my manager. The poor guy hast to stay later than me on enough occasions, no need for him to hover around me when I need to work late.
Depends. There are a lot of jobs where you have to work overtime one week to get a job done, and then directly after that you have weeks with not much work.
I used to even have a job where I basically had a 80-hour week followed by 0-hour week pairs for a few months during a big project. And on most of those jobs it was pretty impossible to split the work over more people. Plus, if a job needs to be done in one week you can't bring in a new guy which would need at least 2-3 month to get up to speed with the project.
It's true however, when you are in a company where you are expected to work overtime ALL the time, then I would definitely also quit after 8 hours each day to force them to hire additional people.
It is however very nice that we now can use the space that was take up by the standard size pc for additional storage space in the information points on the sales floor where we deploy them. They are also much easier to move around when we re-decorate since they are fixed to the back of the monitor.
Why not? DRM set up in a way that would not have prevented people to see the movie, and actually GET what they have payed for instead of screwing both the customer AND the business parter is "not applicable"? You know, like actually MANAGE digital rights, not only REVOKE them.
Ah, I see. There is now a requirement in the entertainment industry that they HAVE to piss people off.
Especially in a B2B setting there is a non-destructive DRM option.
License audit. We use a lot of software at work, and one prerequisite we have put into every contract with the software vendor is that there is no DRM that does prevent the software from working. The software can check for licenses, it can alert the distributor that we use more than we have bought, they can log licensing problems into logs, but if the software stops working because of licensing problems we have put a clause in the contract that we deduct a percentage from the annual maintenance fee.
So the "entertainment industry" seems not to only think all their *customers* are crooks, they also think all their *business partners* are crooks. Well. It looks like they project their own business practices onto others.
When a movie theatre shows a movie, it is advertised in big freaking letters on the building, and when they want to make some money they also advertise it. The distributor would just have to check if they pay for all showings. It's not like they would be able to rip them of in the long run by showing the movies "secretly"
Yep. I use what I like, everybody else can use what everybody else likes.
My base home system is Gentoo, the current "install" is from around 2002, and has migrated over 4 or five different systems by now without having done a single complete re-install. Whenever I get a new system I just copy over the entire portage tree and sync/re-emerge everything after I have booted from the install disc and adjustments in the make/portage configuration. Sure, it might take a few hours or even days of chugging away in the background, but after that I have a system that is pretty much identical in setup to the original system, just with up to date software versions.
That's basically the one main point why I like it, that the distro itself is versionless. No "Oh, new Distro version out, should I try it?, should I not?", I just have a look every few month which ebuilds have been updated, and update the ones where I like to try the new version. Security and System updates regularly, things like OpenOffice or stuff I don't use much not so regularly.
And in the last couple of years the build - in documentation of what what problems you might have to be aware of in certain package versions is quite good. I personally would never swap this slow "growing" with the "version jumps" of other distros or Windows any more. It might take a little longer to initially set up, but once it is set up you can pretty much have it running forever with regular updates without having to think about re-installs.
OTOH when I needed some "I need a quick OS on this boxes here to keep some people browsing for a few weeks" I obviously installed (X)Ubuntu.
Slashdot Mirror
All this technological overkill these days.
I just ate all my important documents.
Ha!!!
*Runs of to the patent office to patent the potato-powered cellphone*
If you run out of potatoes in an emergency you could probably also run it using the bloody flesh of your own wounds.
Maybe "theft". Definitely not "robbery".
Theft is when I take your wallet out of your pocket.
Robbery is when I scream at you, shake my fists and threaten to punch you in the face and take your wallet.
Somehow I can't imagine Armin Maiwald threatening the radio people in any way. ;-P
Plus, the airline pilot terrorist doesn't have to bring anything on board that can be found by scanners to crash into Westminster.
Yep. The only thing that makes Windows "servers" half-way bearable is to put one server for each single service you need in a virtual machine.
So basically the whole thing IS already sandboxed.
That will actually be a problem in 2017 in code I wrote.
I needed to implement 3-digit inventory taking IDs in 2007, whit about 20-30 inventories taken each year. So I have a one-digit year in those IDs, and in 2017 I will have to either delete the old ones or find a new approach.
But since a few weeks all our barcode scanners also can handle letter barcodes, so I can probably push the real problem into 2043, when I'm retired. ;-P
Thinking of CSS as "not enough" is like having a Café using 5 spoons of salt for every coffee, and when the customers are fleeing in troves thinking that the cause is perhaps they are using "not enough" salt.
Maybe some manager of the Geek Squad did use the "Do what I say or I replace you with a small shell script" on to many employees, so now he bad to actually find a way to charge customers $40 to have a script run.
Numerous reports on TV and a lot of newspaper articles. Two are a few that a quick Google search turned up:
Third World Farmers Hit By Unfair Rules
The Seed Gestapo And Third World Farmers
Also, We Feed The World is kind of a starting point.
The sad part is, that a lot of farmers that could have feed their communities are pushed out of business by cheap subsidized food produced by the same western countries that then also have to send food aid once local farming has collapsed completely.
Everybody looses, except the big industrial food companies.
Some commercial systems used to run infrastructures of the scale often come with the source code. Users are not allowed to distribute it, but patching/optimizing/etc is perfectly fine.
We run two of such systems. We don't have all the necessary tools and manpower to actually change anything big, but the one first really BIG great thing about them is that whenever you have an unexplainable problem that even the support is not able to track down is that you can just LOOK at the code (and maybe add some small additional debugging output) and try to figure out what causes the problem yourself.
Also, the most problematic things are not usually "outages", since they can be resolved reasonably quick. The thing that takes forever, or is a lot of times never solved with completely closed source, is the sporadic errors. We have a closes source system that just creates wrong invoices 2-3 times a months for years now. The vendor is unable to track down the problem, and also doesn't want to give out any source code. (I managed to sneak a peek at a few procedures, though, and I know why. It's a horrible mess of spaghetti - code and workarounds.)
Wasn't it " In my Hesitating Opinion"?
Unless of course the messages deals with the "International Medical Health Organisation"
OK, so it can do it in three ways.
It can probably also do it in a lot of additional ways, like throwing it out of the window and then wait to see if the north / south / west / east window is mentioned as broken in the police report.
OK, with that I can agree completely.
Incidentally, this person in question would blame almost anything except the real problem which was himself
And sadly, one such rotten apple can spoil the whole bunch.
After having encountered some of them myself (from coders, over management to customers) I now definitely like working with less-proficient people that can admit that they have shortcomings or have made errors than with geniuses in their field that are not able to to that.
Like the old saying:
It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know for sure that just ain’t so.
So, when the coder messes up it's the coders fault.
But when management messes up it's still the coders fault, just because he didn't quit fast enough?
On a related note: Most of the jobs *I* have quit so far (4 of 5) I have quit because the priority of people in the company was to pin the fault on someone, not to actually fix the problems.
The company I have worked now for 10 years has a very nice upper management level that manages to keep the people that try to fix problems, and manages to get rid of most of the people that play the blame-game.
The first step also doesn't involve any coders. The first step is the Customer deciding that he wants something, and who to hire to do it. ;-p
Someone in a workshop recently compared software development to day with architecture from about 1000 years ago, when they started to build the big cathedrals. Back then they weren't able to calculate beforehand exactly which material in which strength they needed for the thing to keep standing, so it was more of a trial and error process than it is today.
Software is a little like this today. Even if I write a *perfect* program that has zero bugs, there might be an API change to another component that is used, or an OS update changes some specifics that I relied on, etc.... a few month from now that introduces a bug.
For example, we had an 3-day outage of or mobile data entry terminals that was pinned down to an incompatibility between a specific firmware of Cisco routers and a specific version of Citric combined with a specific network infrastructure. Those are the bugs that will always crop up now and then and are pretty much impossible to avoid. There you can only see the problem once your "Cathedral" has fallen into ruins. Fortunately you can re-build software with the necessary changes quicker than re-building a big stone building.
Of course, I estimate 90% of the bigger IT problems are there because of mis-communication between Customer Management Developer. And since my job consist of being both developer AND customer for different products / projects I would split the root of the problem equally across all of them.
As I said, that case was impossible to solve with "more manpower". There were specific software changes and test that had to be done "in synch" with electrical and mechanical changes to production lines, so a colleague and I did alternating 12-hour shifts during that.
And the project never was "late", it was perfectly on time all the time. So we never had any "get it finished quick" pressure, since almost every step of the procedure took place exactly as planned.
Second that.
In my opinion, there is not really a need for the manager to stay, unless he has to physically scare away people trying to harass the developers. Just ask them if they need anything further before you leave, and tell them they can call any time they need anything.
At least that's the way it is with my manager. The poor guy hast to stay later than me on enough occasions, no need for him to hover around me when I need to work late.
Depends. There are a lot of jobs where you have to work overtime one week to get a job done, and then directly after that you have weeks with not much work.
I used to even have a job where I basically had a 80-hour week followed by 0-hour week pairs for a few months during a big project. And on most of those jobs it was pretty impossible to split the work over more people. Plus, if a job needs to be done in one week you can't bring in a new guy which would need at least 2-3 month to get up to speed with the project.
It's true however, when you are in a company where you are expected to work overtime ALL the time, then I would definitely also quit after 8 hours each day to force them to hire additional people.
That is true for traditional "office" settings.
It is however very nice that we now can use the space that was take up by the standard size pc for additional storage space in the information points on the sales floor where we deploy them. They are also much easier to move around when we re-decorate since they are fixed to the back of the monitor.
Sure, you can do it that way. But then don't complain afterwards and blame it on piracy when you lose customers.
Why not? DRM set up in a way that would not have prevented people to see the movie, and actually GET what they have payed for instead of screwing both the customer AND the business parter is "not applicable"? You know, like actually MANAGE digital rights, not only REVOKE them.
Ah, I see. There is now a requirement in the entertainment industry that they HAVE to piss people off.
Oh, another thing:
Especially in a B2B setting there is a non-destructive DRM option.
License audit. We use a lot of software at work, and one prerequisite we have put into every contract with the software vendor is that there is no DRM that does prevent the software from working. The software can check for licenses, it can alert the distributor that we use more than we have bought, they can log licensing problems into logs, but if the software stops working because of licensing problems we have put a clause in the contract that we deduct a percentage from the annual maintenance fee.
So the "entertainment industry" seems not to only think all their *customers* are crooks, they also think all their *business partners* are crooks. Well. It looks like they project their own business practices onto others.
When a movie theatre shows a movie, it is advertised in big freaking letters on the building, and when they want to make some money they also advertise it. The distributor would just have to check if they pay for all showings. It's not like they would be able to rip them of in the long run by showing the movies "secretly"
Yep. I use what I like, everybody else can use what everybody else likes.
My base home system is Gentoo, the current "install" is from around 2002, and has migrated over 4 or five different systems by now without having done a single complete re-install. Whenever I get a new system I just copy over the entire portage tree and sync/re-emerge everything after I have booted from the install disc and adjustments in the make/portage configuration. Sure, it might take a few hours or even days of chugging away in the background, but after that I have a system that is pretty much identical in setup to the original system, just with up to date software versions.
That's basically the one main point why I like it, that the distro itself is versionless. No "Oh, new Distro version out, should I try it?, should I not?", I just have a look every few month which ebuilds have been updated, and update the ones where I like to try the new version. Security and System updates regularly, things like OpenOffice or stuff I don't use much not so regularly.
And in the last couple of years the build - in documentation of what what problems you might have to be aware of in certain package versions is quite good. I personally would never swap this slow "growing" with the "version jumps" of other distros or Windows any more. It might take a little longer to initially set up, but once it is set up you can pretty much have it running forever with regular updates without having to think about re-installs.
OTOH when I needed some "I need a quick OS on this boxes here to keep some people browsing for a few weeks" I obviously installed (X)Ubuntu.