For whoever.. it is a exceptional sign of weakness and lack of style to mod down opinions that are not yours. How sad. You just proved my point. Go back to MSN now.
Hmm you must be the "soft skill nazi" from Dilbert, if there was such as character. The secret is, the guy with the "soft skills" is the mediocre coder whos so called soft skills usually imply back stabbing skills - don't confuse them. It's the mediocricy of middle management which demands these so called "soft skills" you so like, in an attempt to level the playing field, nay, to turn it into their favour. They produce nothing, but their own carreers. Your definition of soft skill is not mine, I usually find much more work ethics in those lone coders you seem to hate because they don't play the game the overhead people specialize in. Funnily, programmers have the same operation of concentration as writers do. Putting the art part apart and comparing on the product as a craft of concentration, I wonder who'd write the better books, a Tolkien who could concentrate on writing, or one who was a part time writer, and a part time specialist in middle management politics self-labelled, suspiciously, "soft skills". As soon as you manage to proof the second is the better one, get back to me. Otherwise you're just doing more politics. Hard as rock they are, aimed at putting down the craftsmen, belittling them, and putting forward your own "skills" as superior.
Re:Don't Knock "Soft Skills"
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: -1, Redundant
I think you carefully managed to mention about everything that is wrong with this kind of corporate culture. "If you can't beat them, join them". In other words: Power to the Powerpoint people. It is exactly this preference for Powerpoint skills, or soft skills, over C skills or hard skills that is a killer for true craftmanship, and may I say so, innovation. A labour force of Powerpointers does not create or produce in my opinion. Yes it can present great ideas but that is not related to the powerpoint skill itself but other skills. If I'm even more cynical, in some years the corporate western world will have specialized in management, politcal BS, "innovation" and Powerpoint, while countries like India will have the craftsmen who "just do it" and because of that have the real good ideas. Then some years later India will have more and more money, while we produce less and less because we forgot how to trully make stuff. Maybe some years later they will outsource to us, eh?
They are equally "evil", except that Google claims in their company motto they are not, which adds to the evilness. It is like MS having as a compay motto: "Open source - Lovin' it".
>The China censorship issue was a very difficult decision
I imagine how hard it must be for a bunch of billionaires and mere millionaires to make such a difficult moral decision, ooooh;) Either deal or not deal with a government who throws people in jail for years, and posibly worse, for "state unfriendly" activities using services like Google offers. Either sell your soul to become even more filthy rich, and not sell, and still never be able to spend all your money. So difficult.
He's inherently wrong at a conceptual, meta level. Very, very wrong. Also, this is a cyclic thing, so this is midly entertaining.
Real men do it with punch cards. Real men do it in assembler, nay, binary. C is bad. Real men do it in C, C++ is bad. Real men use C++, PHP is bad. Need I go on?
No it's good. Higher level programming languages are good. The only reason not to use a higher level programming language, is performance. My first operating system written in C (well sortof, I think it was called B) was the AmigaOS, before that you'd have been ridiculed. And for years, most stuff on the Amiga was written in assembler, because only lamers would have to be stupid enough not to be able to do it in assembler and use the slow C.
But the point is, once performance allows for it, higher level programs, when the same skills are applied, lead to programs with less bugs, which took less time to develop and are easier to maintain. C pointers anyone? In the end, the pointers are not important, WHAT you build is important. So higher level programming languages will always win. Just as more and more software moved from assembler to C, more will move from C to PHP/Python, and beyond.
>But this is just the beginning. In the next few years, we will see the development of schemes where you pay for advertising only when you make a direct sale off the back of it. The scheme will track you from the moment you click, to the moment you get the confirmation e-mail.
Yes, it's fairly well known among nerds that Google is trying the same learning curve that pron sites succesfully left behind them years ago. Same thing is happening all over again, to the point of probability that no more bets are taken. So they are and will be hit hard by the click bots. Very hard. For some advertisers the end result will be a transition from click to sales related revenue. This is why Google is working on its own payment solution before the click model finally falls under the heavy attack of the clickbot farms. Advertisers will want to use the new model, and they will have to use Google's payment solution in order so no one can work the numbers. Of course this leads to a whole area of new fraud. For pure branding or sites generating telephone sales, this obviously won't work, and they can't use the service, but there's a whole grey area.
I didn't know some of the chronology as stated above, so I've learned something:) It seems I've underestimated Blade Runner, I didn't know it was a trend setter. Still, Neuromancer in my comment is just put forward as an example of the genre, it wasn't even Gibson's first novel on the topic, just the best known work of it. I never said Blade Runner was modelled after it, just that it captured the spirit of the genre. I wonder why it's the only movie that managed. Matrix was close, but is something else. Cheers,
This is the only true cyberpunk movie that captured the spirit set mainly by Gibson in e.g. Neuromancer and by others. Stuff like the Matrix is pale in comparison, a riduculous mix of cyberpunk and tech-singularity concepts, aimed at providing cool but even more ridiculous fighting scenes (no, the computer will NOT fight you by generating a character aimed at your perceptive brain). What's particulary interesting about Neuromancer was, apart from the fact it was a book on many levels such as romatic or 80ties gloom thinking, it was also a warning or investigation in what tech can do to humanity. But in the nineties, when the internet needed jargon words such as cyberspace or matrix, much stuff was modelled and named after Gibson cyberspace concepts, because of the "coolness" factor, in fact turning his warning into a self-fullfilling prophecy. Yuck. Back to Blade Runner, it was a brave attempt at capturing some of the spirit. It is sometimes shallow and clearly the same issues play as with other movies after books, e.g. the Da Vinci Code, and I think it was handled particularly well here on a whole. How cynical it is, that the choices they have made (voice-over etc.) now endlessly hount us in "final" and "director" cuts and other such marketing ploys aimed only at getting my money. Guys, it is JUST a movie, no ones live will get any better by watching the same story told a bit different, except the guys who are selling it.
Here in the Netherlands, your prepaid amount is valid for either a year after the last call, or infinite, depending on the provider you pick. They all used to be infiite, but the providers hate it of course. I'm not a phone person, even less on the road, and when I phone I use skype, demoting my mobile to just a "receiver" for skypeless people. My last device is still on the EUR 20,- prepaid card I bought over a year ago.
This problem has been recognized for a while, but mainly from the point of view people who are challenged by technology to begin with, not your savvy person you just want the thing to phone. However, it's interesting to note these simple phones are not only required so you don't accidently delete your voice mail message, but much more importantly, to save lives. For many people, a mobile phone is an emergency device. The result is, if you shop, you can find a simple phone. And just imagine how cool you look as a nerd with a phone designed for your granny..uhm..well.
This is a Dutch phone with just three buttons aimed at the ederly and disabled people: http://www.mybell.nl/
I like wikepedia, but I don't like wikis. Your "knowledge base" is your web site or documentation section. If you add a wiki, I have two places to search for information, do I have to look in the docs, or in the chaotic wiki, where you won't be able to find it anyay? Wikis seem an excuse for laziness, just throw the information somewhere instead of making a structured, well designed web site or documentation section.
>But the Linux kernel accounts for the lion share of the symbiotic relationship between those other projects and the allocation of those precious resources which they all require.
I run FreeBSD and a MIT licensed open source project. Linux is sort of irrelevant for me. It's another clone of an age-old operating system, run by a millionaire. It strikes me that most big mouths in OS (yes Linus might not be a leader but he does have a big mouth) are either filthy rich or at least on a payroll to make or market open source software, unlike the vast majority of volunteers. I applaud them for it, but I feel they are too far detached from reality to be called leaders or icons.
>We've been working on C++ AJAX toolkit called Wt. [sourceforge.net] Similar to GWT, it completely hides the complexity resulting from Javascript ui logic, DHTML, XML, etc associated with creating AJAX applications.
Pah! Java to hide higher level complexity, C++ to hide HTML/Javascript, you guys are all pussies.
I announce the Assembler AJAX Toolkit called PushPopAjax. It completely hides those nasty complex HTML/Javascript details, you simply program your pages using our assembler toolkit. Now you know what that first A from AJAX really ment!
>Crawling too many of those low-content pages would be a bad idea.
Indexing would be. Crawling, it depends. It indeed looks like Yahoo is using a shotgun. But there's a flaw in your argumentation (besides arguing for worse spiders), which is if the search engine was capable of identifying the link farm in the first place, it would not be crawled at all. So both failed. So the Yahoo's and Google's must equip themselves against those links farms. That strategy has two parts: what to crawl, and what to index. I wonder if you decide to crawl "deep first" to avoid link farms, if that also has negative indexing results on legite sites. Bu that would be speculation.
Monitoring the search engines crawling my site, Yahoo Slurp is clearly the most aggressive now. This is backed up here: http://drunkmenworkhere.org/219
Their results are getting better all the time. In a time where Google is having troubles staying up to date and MSN search is still lacking, it seems the others must be afraid. The newest public sign of results can be seen on http://www.alltheweb.com/ with the Yahoo powered Live search.
I'm not applauding them nor affiliated with them, all I'm saying is that it is clear that inside Yahoo they want to aggressively compete and are up for it. At least that is a good thing, for starters it puts the pressure on Google. Likewise in such a situation it's clear they don't want/need MS. So this has all been an irrelevant exercise, the outcome was clear before the game started, so this is probably all aimed at internal MS politics or something. Some manager just proved a point. Probably about internal re-allocation of money. So, in the end, you might have a point, as the game might be aimed at getting more budget for MSN search. But now I'm just guessing.
OMG as a Windows freak I'd settle for the "monolithic" kernel, why settle for anything sounding smaller?
This all sounds very interesting, when is Linux for Windows coming out and will I be able to patch it using Visual Basic? I'd like to add some cool skins and then submit it to the project.
>My Windows XP box only goes down rarely for updates and it does it at night when I am not there. Last time, I had over 100 days of uptime (this is a desktop machine).
Two things:
a) Company IT Security rule nr. 2: Don't leave your Windows desktop on at night, it becomes the next weakest link and the whole company is open because of a piece of spyware IE picked up.
b)Company IT Security rule nr. 1: Install your security patches. 100 days of uptime means you did NOT install the required Windows security updates, a weird policy.
I'm surprise you're still up and running. You have been waving a flag on top of your roof saying "crackers and script kiddies, come inside, free beer!". That is, if your company hasn't turned into an IRC or spamnest at night without your knowledge...
I'm not sure if it's good business sence in the long term. Just as dual licensed OS projects don't attract many contributors, something similar is at play for me choosing an OS vendor, if any. But that was not the argument. Steve Balmer, for instance, has an almost perfect business sense in terms of personal wealth. For many though, he will always remain Monkey Boy.
Theo said regarding donations:
>I don't understand why the Unix/Linux vendors (and Cisco) who ship our product are avoiding us. Maybe they are afraid to give to the first project, because then other projects will come asking too.
These vendors are a bunch of losers. In their quest for the accumulation of scarcity tokens, they take a gift, make money with it, then avoid the gift giver, don't share tokens, and thus basically give up being civilized beings. That's a big price to pay for a small donation. Losers.
What this communicates to me is: Don't support *NIX vendors. Penny wise, pound stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
For whoever.. it is a exceptional sign of weakness and lack of style to mod down opinions that are not yours. How sad. You just proved my point. Go back to MSN now.
Hmm you must be the "soft skill nazi" from Dilbert, if there was such as character. The secret is, the guy with the "soft skills" is the mediocre coder whos so called soft skills usually imply back stabbing skills - don't confuse them. It's the mediocricy of middle management which demands these so called "soft skills" you so like, in an attempt to level the playing field, nay, to turn it into their favour. They produce nothing, but their own carreers. Your definition of soft skill is not mine, I usually find much more work ethics in those lone coders you seem to hate because they don't play the game the overhead people specialize in. Funnily, programmers have the same operation of concentration as writers do. Putting the art part apart and comparing on the product as a craft of concentration, I wonder who'd write the better books, a Tolkien who could concentrate on writing, or one who was a part time writer, and a part time specialist in middle management politics self-labelled, suspiciously, "soft skills". As soon as you manage to proof the second is the better one, get back to me. Otherwise you're just doing more politics. Hard as rock they are, aimed at putting down the craftsmen, belittling them, and putting forward your own "skills" as superior.
I think you carefully managed to mention about everything that is wrong with this kind of corporate culture. "If you can't beat them, join them". In other words: Power to the Powerpoint people. It is exactly this preference for Powerpoint skills, or soft skills, over C skills or hard skills that is a killer for true craftmanship, and may I say so, innovation. A labour force of Powerpointers does not create or produce in my opinion. Yes it can present great ideas but that is not related to the powerpoint skill itself but other skills. If I'm even more cynical, in some years the corporate western world will have specialized in management, politcal BS, "innovation" and Powerpoint, while countries like India will have the craftsmen who "just do it" and because of that have the real good ideas. Then some years later India will have more and more money, while we produce less and less because we forgot how to trully make stuff. Maybe some years later they will outsource to us, eh?
They are equally "evil", except that Google claims in their company motto they are not, which adds to the evilness. It is like MS having as a compay motto: "Open source - Lovin' it".
I imagine how hard it must be for a bunch of billionaires and mere millionaires to make such a difficult moral decision, ooooh ;) Either deal or not deal with a government who throws people in jail for years, and posibly worse, for "state unfriendly" activities using services like Google offers. Either sell your soul to become even more filthy rich, and not sell, and still never be able to spend all your money. So difficult.
Real men do it with punch cards. Real men do it in assembler, nay, binary. C is bad. Real men do it in C, C++ is bad. Real men use C++, PHP is bad. Need I go on?
No it's good. Higher level programming languages are good. The only reason not to use a higher level programming language, is performance. My first operating system written in C (well sortof, I think it was called B) was the AmigaOS, before that you'd have been ridiculed. And for years, most stuff on the Amiga was written in assembler, because only lamers would have to be stupid enough not to be able to do it in assembler and use the slow C.
But the point is, once performance allows for it, higher level programs, when the same skills are applied, lead to programs with less bugs, which took less time to develop and are easier to maintain. C pointers anyone? In the end, the pointers are not important, WHAT you build is important. So higher level programming languages will always win. Just as more and more software moved from assembler to C, more will move from C to PHP/Python, and beyond.
Yes, it's fairly well known among nerds that Google is trying the same learning curve that pron sites succesfully left behind them years ago. Same thing is happening all over again, to the point of probability that no more bets are taken. So they are and will be hit hard by the click bots. Very hard. For some advertisers the end result will be a transition from click to sales related revenue. This is why Google is working on its own payment solution before the click model finally falls under the heavy attack of the clickbot farms. Advertisers will want to use the new model, and they will have to use Google's payment solution in order so no one can work the numbers. Of course this leads to a whole area of new fraud. For pure branding or sites generating telephone sales, this obviously won't work, and they can't use the service, but there's a whole grey area.
Dunno about the bandwidth for an average user though. The views would have to exceed an expression including nr_of_users and upload_cycle.
How about linking your phonecam to a webpage?
I didn't know some of the chronology as stated above, so I've learned something :) It seems I've underestimated Blade Runner, I didn't know it was a trend setter. Still, Neuromancer in my comment is just put forward as an example of the genre, it wasn't even Gibson's first novel on the topic, just the best known work of it. I never said Blade Runner was modelled after it, just that it captured the spirit of the genre. I wonder why it's the only movie that managed. Matrix was close, but is something else. Cheers,
This is the only true cyberpunk movie that captured the spirit set mainly by Gibson in e.g. Neuromancer and by others. Stuff like the Matrix is pale in comparison, a riduculous mix of cyberpunk and tech-singularity concepts, aimed at providing cool but even more ridiculous fighting scenes (no, the computer will NOT fight you by generating a character aimed at your perceptive brain). What's particulary interesting about Neuromancer was, apart from the fact it was a book on many levels such as romatic or 80ties gloom thinking, it was also a warning or investigation in what tech can do to humanity. But in the nineties, when the internet needed jargon words such as cyberspace or matrix, much stuff was modelled and named after Gibson cyberspace concepts, because of the "coolness" factor, in fact turning his warning into a self-fullfilling prophecy. Yuck. Back to Blade Runner, it was a brave attempt at capturing some of the spirit. It is sometimes shallow and clearly the same issues play as with other movies after books, e.g. the Da Vinci Code, and I think it was handled particularly well here on a whole. How cynical it is, that the choices they have made (voice-over etc.) now endlessly hount us in "final" and "director" cuts and other such marketing ploys aimed only at getting my money. Guys, it is JUST a movie, no ones live will get any better by watching the same story told a bit different, except the guys who are selling it.
Here in the Netherlands, your prepaid amount is valid for either a year after the last call, or infinite, depending on the provider you pick. They all used to be infiite, but the providers hate it of course. I'm not a phone person, even less on the road, and when I phone I use skype, demoting my mobile to just a "receiver" for skypeless people. My last device is still on the EUR 20,- prepaid card I bought over a year ago.
This problem has been recognized for a while, but mainly from the point of view people who are challenged by technology to begin with, not your savvy person you just want the thing to phone. However, it's interesting to note these simple phones are not only required so you don't accidently delete your voice mail message, but much more importantly, to save lives. For many people, a mobile phone is an emergency device. The result is, if you shop, you can find a simple phone. And just imagine how cool you look as a nerd with a phone designed for your granny..uhm..well.
h tm o biel.html
This is a Dutch phone with just three buttons aimed at the ederly and disabled people:
http://www.mybell.nl/
Other "senior" phones:
http://www.mijntoestel.nl/
http://www.revah.nl/Revah%20Telecom/ITT/Easy5afb.
http://www.utnws.utwente.nl/utnieuws/data/38/11/m
http://www.secufone.com/
Hints: Marketeze, First Post...
I like wikepedia, but I don't like wikis. Your "knowledge base" is your web site or documentation section. If you add a wiki, I have two places to search for information, do I have to look in the docs, or in the chaotic wiki, where you won't be able to find it anyay? Wikis seem an excuse for laziness, just throw the information somewhere instead of making a structured, well designed web site or documentation section.
I run FreeBSD and a MIT licensed open source project. Linux is sort of irrelevant for me. It's another clone of an age-old operating system, run by a millionaire. It strikes me that most big mouths in OS (yes Linus might not be a leader but he does have a big mouth) are either filthy rich or at least on a payroll to make or market open source software, unlike the vast majority of volunteers. I applaud them for it, but I feel they are too far detached from reality to be called leaders or icons.
Pah! Java to hide higher level complexity, C++ to hide HTML/Javascript, you guys are all pussies.
I announce the Assembler AJAX Toolkit called PushPopAjax. It completely hides those nasty complex HTML/Javascript details, you simply program your pages using our assembler toolkit. Now you know what that first A from AJAX really ment!
For the record, no, I just picked up the link and passed it on, as you did.
>Crawling too many of those low-content pages would be a bad idea. Indexing would be. Crawling, it depends. It indeed looks like Yahoo is using a shotgun. But there's a flaw in your argumentation (besides arguing for worse spiders), which is if the search engine was capable of identifying the link farm in the first place, it would not be crawled at all. So both failed. So the Yahoo's and Google's must equip themselves against those links farms. That strategy has two parts: what to crawl, and what to index. I wonder if you decide to crawl "deep first" to avoid link farms, if that also has negative indexing results on legite sites. Bu that would be speculation.
Their results are getting better all the time. In a time where Google is having troubles staying up to date and MSN search is still lacking, it seems the others must be afraid. The newest public sign of results can be seen on http://www.alltheweb.com/ with the Yahoo powered Live search.
I'm not applauding them nor affiliated with them, all I'm saying is that it is clear that inside Yahoo they want to aggressively compete and are up for it. At least that is a good thing, for starters it puts the pressure on Google. Likewise in such a situation it's clear they don't want/need MS. So this has all been an irrelevant exercise, the outcome was clear before the game started, so this is probably all aimed at internal MS politics or something. Some manager just proved a point. Probably about internal re-allocation of money. So, in the end, you might have a point, as the game might be aimed at getting more budget for MSN search. But now I'm just guessing.
OMG as a Windows freak I'd settle for the "monolithic" kernel, why settle for anything sounding smaller?
This all sounds very interesting, when is Linux for Windows coming out and will I be able to patch it using Visual Basic? I'd like to add some cool skins and then submit it to the project.
Two things:
a) Company IT Security rule nr. 2: Don't leave your Windows desktop on at night, it becomes the next weakest link and the whole company is open because of a piece of spyware IE picked up.
b)Company IT Security rule nr. 1: Install your security patches. 100 days of uptime means you did NOT install the required Windows security updates, a weird policy.
I'm surprise you're still up and running. You have been waving a flag on top of your roof saying "crackers and script kiddies, come inside, free beer!". That is, if your company hasn't turned into an IRC or spamnest at night without your knowledge...
True, on the other hand, it allows some really cool tricks...
AJAX site: http://www.dutchpipe.org/
Yahoo cache: http://216.109.125.130/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&fr=sf p&p=dutchpipe&u=www.dutchpipe.org/&w=dutchpipe&d=N -xgzEaqMtyR&icp=1&.intl=us
I'm not sure if it's good business sence in the long term. Just as dual licensed OS projects don't attract many contributors, something similar is at play for me choosing an OS vendor, if any. But that was not the argument. Steve Balmer, for instance, has an almost perfect business sense in terms of personal wealth. For many though, he will always remain Monkey Boy.
>I don't understand why the Unix/Linux vendors (and Cisco) who ship our product are avoiding us. Maybe they are afraid to give to the first project, because then other projects will come asking too.
These vendors are a bunch of losers. In their quest for the accumulation of scarcity tokens, they take a gift, make money with it, then avoid the gift giver, don't share tokens, and thus basically give up being civilized beings. That's a big price to pay for a small donation. Losers.
What this communicates to me is: Don't support *NIX vendors. Penny wise, pound stupid.