Yeah, that's what virtually everyone has told me, but at the time, I had no idea that layoffs were coming or that the company was about to be sold. But seriously, I can't complain. Ruby is now paying the bills instead of Java, and it's paying the bills twice as quickly with half the effort. What's not to like?
I was gently encouraged to voluntarily quit my job awhile back. They knew I wanted to quit and they had layoffs coming up, so I guess they thought they'd just asked me quietly if perhaps I wouldn't be happier being self-employed. (Which I am.) Was really quite entertaining. But I gotta say, I thought they were really careless. Facilities managment shut off my security card a week early, which was kinda cute, but everyone kept letting me into the building in the morning anyways, and eventually my manager had them turn it back on. They didn't shut off my various accounts until about a week after I'd left, so Adium kept signing me into Sametime. This confused the heck out of some of the people there who kept asking me various software support questions, and then following them up with, "Wait, didn't you leave the company last week?" And I had full access to pretty much everything I normally had access to for the week or so between tendering my resignation and my last day (which was a lot), and my VPN access didn't go away for almost two weeks after I'd actually left. Of course, I'm a good guy and wasn't even remotely tempted to do anything evil -- I rather enjoyed working there -- but it seems to me that with clients and such, this kind of issue could be a serious legal liability no matter how much you trust the employee.
Oooh, sounds like a nice setup. The place we've got in Rochester seems to do OK, mainly because they set up shop right next door to RIT, which is renowned for its Counter-Strike obsession. They also have scheduled biweekly LAN parties, and they try to bring people in during the day for classes of one sort or another. Honestly though, I think I'd be much more likely to hang out in the Portland setup you described. Too many coffee places get pissy if you "over-use" their wifi, even if, you know, you're actually buying coffee.
The feed reader I use does, as does the feed parser that I wrote. It's common practice actually. This whitepaper merely identified all the stupid programmers.
Eh, comments are just the most likely vector of attack. The real problem is with any feed parser that naively trusts the HTML. Parsers should be as secure as browsers, and for the most part, they aren't, because most of them are written by someone who not only hasn't read the specs but also was only planning to write the thing in 3 hours. (Heh, I've been working on my parser for over a year now.) That said, the risk of this becoming a real problem is rediculously low. Beyond that, this has been a known issue for ages. Several years ago, Mark Pilgrim used his feed and an insecurity in IE to force his readers to look at lots of platypuses, mainly to prove the point that it could be done. However, both my parser and Mark's, which are used in a fairly significant number of different programs, completely strip out all elements that aren't guaranteed to be safe. Plus, most of the feed readers that were actually mentioned as being vulnerable to certain attacks have been reasonably quick to correct issues that are raised. The whole thing really just isn't worth sweating about, but it's certainly nice to have awareness of the issue raised among people who didn't know it was a problem.
That may be so, but you're not the market segment we're talking about. If I mention that I'm going to go over and talk to Sam Ruby at a Rails conference, typically, the nearest 5 people will turn and go, "Seriously, Sam Ruby is here?" Sam Ruby or Tim Bray or Mark Pilgrim are not going to radically change Apple's market share. That is a fact. But you may see a lot more of the hardcore hacker crowd switching off of OS X and onto Ubuntu. Does that matter to Apple? Who knows. Doubtful. The point isn't so much that Apple has become a lousy choice, but rather that for some people, Ubuntu has become a better one.
Eh, that's not -entirely- true. OS X does have a few things going for it beyond the aesthetics, most of which are directly related to the design of Cocoa. Ever notice that, with a few exceptions, almost all text areas in OS X can be spell-checked? I am so going to miss that feature when I make the switch to Linux.
Of course, that said, you pay for that kind of convenience by having to write code in Objective-C. IMHO, Objective-C requires an amazing amount of kool-aid to be palatable. YMMV.
As I'm quite sure I'm better acquainted with Mark's motivations, I feel it's fairly safe for me to say that you've distorted his main issue.
Mark is very concerned with digital archival. He's worried that databases of photos or videos or music or whatever will no longer be usable 20 years from now. He's worried that the proprietary database formats will become corrupted and that he'll lose that information. And he's worried that the formats that the files are saved in aren't open enough and thus can't be migrated to a more useful modern format twenty or fifty years down the road. Apple doesn't provide him with enough assurance of future-proof-ness.
Beyond that, as a programmer, when you create a program that is designed to run on a single platform, especially one that's proprietary, that's kind of like building your life's work on a quicksand foundation.
All of the other reasons Mark listed were very probably just supporting points he used to convince himself that giving up 20 years of history was the right choice.
Also... Mark -does- back stuff up. IIRC, once an hour. He uses rsync and Strongspace and backs up the most important directories on his system. I personally do the exact same thing (though Mark had no influence on this, I just happen to use TextDrive as my webhost and they run Strongspace so it made sense to use them for backups). But yeah, Mark does backup -- probably more often than just about everyone else. But I have a funny feeling that Mark didn't set his backup script to backup anything in the/Library or ~/Library directories, which is probably why it didn't really do any good. But even if he had done a full system backup, databases like Apple's are a real pain to restore when you have the files intact but not the metadata, because the files and metadata typically are out-of-sync after the restore unless you use the app infrequently. I don't know how well Apple's apps deal with that situation, but I'd be willing to bet it's not a fun recovery from backups by any means.
Not really. Mark Pilgrim, Sam Ruby, and Tim Bray all have very strong influences on an extremely important segment of the market. Cory Doctorow has a very strong influence on a slightly different segment of the market. In the former group's case, we're really talking about the fact that the architects of some major systems are switching to Ubuntu. This will ultimately have virtually zero effect on Apple's market share, and honestly, I don't think anyone believes it will. However, it does mean that Apple may start losing PowerBook market share at certain conferences. Instead of 90% PowerBooks at the next RailsConf, we may only see 80% instead.
At least in my case, I know that ever since Sam and Mark started talking up Ubuntu, I've been wanting to find an excuse to set up an Ubuntu box. I doubt I'll leave Apple for my primary machine, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to explore Ubuntu. But who knows? I might really like it.
Well, we have a Documentum installation at work, and since it doesn't do file-deltas on versions and since most users don't understand the differences between "checkout" and "export" and "checkin" and "import", we frequently get 200MB flash files that have over 100 versions on them with no differences at all. That uses up a lot of disk space really, really fast.
That kind of statement is probably wide-open for being twisted by the telecoms. Remember, they're styling net neutrality laws as burdensome and unnecessary regulation that will stifle innovation.
Warning, I know virtually nothing about Pyrex, but...
It seems to me that C is usually still the better choice because it's fairly easy to use the same C code in Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, etc, whereas it looks like Pyrex is squarely targetted at fast extensions for Python? If I discover that my feed parsing code is slow, and I decide to rewrite it in C, I figure everybody should be able to benefit from my rewrite rather than just a single language community.
Oh and lets not forget that many (most?) DSLR cameras don't actually have live preview screens, yet Dvorak makes it sound like they all do. It's certainly not possible to operate my Canon EOS 300D with the thing held at arm's length.
We're just going to have to get used to it, it seems. The Democrats are far too chicken for a revolution. The Republicans might ballsy enough to do it, but uh, they're the ones who are making a revolution sound like a good idea. The Socialists are too busy calling for action to actually do anything. To no one's surprise, the Anarchists would be totally down for it, but arson does not a revolution make. You could always try whipping the Libertarians up into a frenzy, but there's only four of them, and you'd have to drive to New Hampshire to find them.
On a more serious note, revolution is only a real option if you can convince the military itself to overthrow the government. As long as the government wields the strength of the military, a revolution in the United States is simply implausible. That is a fact. More to the point, do you really want to encourage a military coup?
A corrupt democracy may suck, but there are far worse alternatives. Revolution is one of them.
Given that the only thing I'm going to use that 100mb of space for is media of some kind, I have no problem with being irreverant towards it. Steam often makes GBs disappear in a matter of 60 minutes.
After that... I'd try starting the download over. I think there's a "Delete local game content" option somewhere, and if that doesn't work, you could probably try just manually deleting the.gcf files. I'm pretty sure Steam is able to deal with that. Probably should make a quick backup though to be safe.
Been saying thisfor awhile now. But it's a good thing, not a bad thing. As Clay Shirky wisely said, "The advantages of anonymity grow linearly with the population; the disadvantages grow with the square of the population."
It's not hard to fill a drive with high-res textures, game data, and various media files, and it doesn't matter what OS you use, those things are always big unless they're procedurally generated.
I had an issue with disk space while downloading. Steam was installed to my E: drive, with 700+MB free, but my D: drive had a piddly 100MB left. There were some old registry settings left over from my original Steam install on the D: drive and the installer never overwrote them, so it was trying to put CS:S and HL2:E1 onto the D: drive instead and then running out of space. The download would just hang with no error.
So very, very true. I probably applied to 100+ places for a job after I got out of college. I ended up working for $11/hr at an auto-parts database company that wanted to pretend that it was a factory. I basically built/rebuilt all of their systems, and the software I wrote was a major factor in acquiring UPS as a customer. When I had gotten to the point where I had finished most of the work on the application and I was basically moving into just bug fixes, they hired another guy... somehow... for even less than I was making, they had me train him, and then told me that they couldn't afford to keep my on the payroll anymore, but, "Would you please come in every other Friday just to make sure things stayed on track?"
And then one day a friend of mine asked me if I knew of any competant Java developers that the company he worked for might be able to hire. My response was something to the effect of, "Uh... me?" One resume, and one interview later, I was hired.
Personally though, in retrospect, I think I probably should have tried to pick up income via self-employment rather than wasting any time scouring Monster/Dice/CareerBuilder, but I have a feeling that that option is a lot easier for programmers than in other professions.
Slashdot Mirror
...that Windows has become so bloated in the previous 20 years that it still just barely crawls on our pocket supercomputers.
Yeah, that's what virtually everyone has told me, but at the time, I had no idea that layoffs were coming or that the company was about to be sold. But seriously, I can't complain. Ruby is now paying the bills instead of Java, and it's paying the bills twice as quickly with half the effort. What's not to like?
I was gently encouraged to voluntarily quit my job awhile back. They knew I wanted to quit and they had layoffs coming up, so I guess they thought they'd just asked me quietly if perhaps I wouldn't be happier being self-employed. (Which I am.) Was really quite entertaining. But I gotta say, I thought they were really careless. Facilities managment shut off my security card a week early, which was kinda cute, but everyone kept letting me into the building in the morning anyways, and eventually my manager had them turn it back on. They didn't shut off my various accounts until about a week after I'd left, so Adium kept signing me into Sametime. This confused the heck out of some of the people there who kept asking me various software support questions, and then following them up with, "Wait, didn't you leave the company last week?" And I had full access to pretty much everything I normally had access to for the week or so between tendering my resignation and my last day (which was a lot), and my VPN access didn't go away for almost two weeks after I'd actually left. Of course, I'm a good guy and wasn't even remotely tempted to do anything evil -- I rather enjoyed working there -- but it seems to me that with clients and such, this kind of issue could be a serious legal liability no matter how much you trust the employee.
Oooh, sounds like a nice setup. The place we've got in Rochester seems to do OK, mainly because they set up shop right next door to RIT, which is renowned for its Counter-Strike obsession. They also have scheduled biweekly LAN parties, and they try to bring people in during the day for classes of one sort or another. Honestly though, I think I'd be much more likely to hang out in the Portland setup you described. Too many coffee places get pissy if you "over-use" their wifi, even if, you know, you're actually buying coffee.
The feed reader I use does, as does the feed parser that I wrote. It's common practice actually. This whitepaper merely identified all the stupid programmers.
Eh, comments are just the most likely vector of attack. The real problem is with any feed parser that naively trusts the HTML. Parsers should be as secure as browsers, and for the most part, they aren't, because most of them are written by someone who not only hasn't read the specs but also was only planning to write the thing in 3 hours. (Heh, I've been working on my parser for over a year now.) That said, the risk of this becoming a real problem is rediculously low. Beyond that, this has been a known issue for ages. Several years ago, Mark Pilgrim used his feed and an insecurity in IE to force his readers to look at lots of platypuses, mainly to prove the point that it could be done. However, both my parser and Mark's, which are used in a fairly significant number of different programs, completely strip out all elements that aren't guaranteed to be safe. Plus, most of the feed readers that were actually mentioned as being vulnerable to certain attacks have been reasonably quick to correct issues that are raised. The whole thing really just isn't worth sweating about, but it's certainly nice to have awareness of the issue raised among people who didn't know it was a problem.
That may be so, but you're not the market segment we're talking about. If I mention that I'm going to go over and talk to Sam Ruby at a Rails conference, typically, the nearest 5 people will turn and go, "Seriously, Sam Ruby is here?" Sam Ruby or Tim Bray or Mark Pilgrim are not going to radically change Apple's market share. That is a fact. But you may see a lot more of the hardcore hacker crowd switching off of OS X and onto Ubuntu. Does that matter to Apple? Who knows. Doubtful. The point isn't so much that Apple has become a lousy choice, but rather that for some people, Ubuntu has become a better one.
Eh, that's not -entirely- true. OS X does have a few things going for it beyond the aesthetics, most of which are directly related to the design of Cocoa. Ever notice that, with a few exceptions, almost all text areas in OS X can be spell-checked? I am so going to miss that feature when I make the switch to Linux.
Of course, that said, you pay for that kind of convenience by having to write code in Objective-C. IMHO, Objective-C requires an amazing amount of kool-aid to be palatable. YMMV.
It's not an assumption? They've said that they are?
As I'm quite sure I'm better acquainted with Mark's motivations, I feel it's fairly safe for me to say that you've distorted his main issue.
/Library or ~/Library directories, which is probably why it didn't really do any good. But even if he had done a full system backup, databases like Apple's are a real pain to restore when you have the files intact but not the metadata, because the files and metadata typically are out-of-sync after the restore unless you use the app infrequently. I don't know how well Apple's apps deal with that situation, but I'd be willing to bet it's not a fun recovery from backups by any means.
Mark is very concerned with digital archival. He's worried that databases of photos or videos or music or whatever will no longer be usable 20 years from now. He's worried that the proprietary database formats will become corrupted and that he'll lose that information. And he's worried that the formats that the files are saved in aren't open enough and thus can't be migrated to a more useful modern format twenty or fifty years down the road. Apple doesn't provide him with enough assurance of future-proof-ness.
Beyond that, as a programmer, when you create a program that is designed to run on a single platform, especially one that's proprietary, that's kind of like building your life's work on a quicksand foundation.
All of the other reasons Mark listed were very probably just supporting points he used to convince himself that giving up 20 years of history was the right choice.
Also... Mark -does- back stuff up. IIRC, once an hour. He uses rsync and Strongspace and backs up the most important directories on his system. I personally do the exact same thing (though Mark had no influence on this, I just happen to use TextDrive as my webhost and they run Strongspace so it made sense to use them for backups). But yeah, Mark does backup -- probably more often than just about everyone else. But I have a funny feeling that Mark didn't set his backup script to backup anything in the
Not really. Mark Pilgrim, Sam Ruby, and Tim Bray all have very strong influences on an extremely important segment of the market. Cory Doctorow has a very strong influence on a slightly different segment of the market. In the former group's case, we're really talking about the fact that the architects of some major systems are switching to Ubuntu. This will ultimately have virtually zero effect on Apple's market share, and honestly, I don't think anyone believes it will. However, it does mean that Apple may start losing PowerBook market share at certain conferences. Instead of 90% PowerBooks at the next RailsConf, we may only see 80% instead.
At least in my case, I know that ever since Sam and Mark started talking up Ubuntu, I've been wanting to find an excuse to set up an Ubuntu box. I doubt I'll leave Apple for my primary machine, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to explore Ubuntu. But who knows? I might really like it.
No one ever plans on having more cavities.
-chuckle-
Well, we have a Documentum installation at work, and since it doesn't do file-deltas on versions and since most users don't understand the differences between "checkout" and "export" and "checkin" and "import", we frequently get 200MB flash files that have over 100 versions on them with no differences at all. That uses up a lot of disk space really, really fast.
Guess who we buy our disks from?
I will, in fact, be writing the C library, but not for awhile. Got other projects to finish first...
That kind of statement is probably wide-open for being twisted by the telecoms. Remember, they're styling net neutrality laws as burdensome and unnecessary regulation that will stifle innovation.
Warning, I know virtually nothing about Pyrex, but... It seems to me that C is usually still the better choice because it's fairly easy to use the same C code in Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, etc, whereas it looks like Pyrex is squarely targetted at fast extensions for Python? If I discover that my feed parsing code is slow, and I decide to rewrite it in C, I figure everybody should be able to benefit from my rewrite rather than just a single language community.
Oh and lets not forget that many (most?) DSLR cameras don't actually have live preview screens, yet Dvorak makes it sound like they all do. It's certainly not possible to operate my Canon EOS 300D with the thing held at arm's length.
We're just going to have to get used to it, it seems. The Democrats are far too chicken for a revolution. The Republicans might ballsy enough to do it, but uh, they're the ones who are making a revolution sound like a good idea. The Socialists are too busy calling for action to actually do anything. To no one's surprise, the Anarchists would be totally down for it, but arson does not a revolution make. You could always try whipping the Libertarians up into a frenzy, but there's only four of them, and you'd have to drive to New Hampshire to find them.
On a more serious note, revolution is only a real option if you can convince the military itself to overthrow the government. As long as the government wields the strength of the military, a revolution in the United States is simply implausible. That is a fact. More to the point, do you really want to encourage a military coup?
A corrupt democracy may suck, but there are far worse alternatives. Revolution is one of them.
Given that the only thing I'm going to use that 100mb of space for is media of some kind, I have no problem with being irreverant towards it. Steam often makes GBs disappear in a matter of 60 minutes.
After that... I'd try starting the download over. I think there's a "Delete local game content" option somewhere, and if that doesn't work, you could probably try just manually deleting the .gcf files. I'm pretty sure Steam is able to deal with that. Probably should make a quick backup though to be safe.
Been saying this for awhile now. But it's a good thing, not a bad thing. As Clay Shirky wisely said, "The advantages of anonymity grow linearly with the population; the disadvantages grow with the square of the population."
Want a cookie?
It's not hard to fill a drive with high-res textures, game data, and various media files, and it doesn't matter what OS you use, those things are always big unless they're procedurally generated.
Yeah, I did that too.
I had an issue with disk space while downloading. Steam was installed to my E: drive, with 700+MB free, but my D: drive had a piddly 100MB left. There were some old registry settings left over from my original Steam install on the D: drive and the installer never overwrote them, so it was trying to put CS:S and HL2:E1 onto the D: drive instead and then running out of space. The download would just hang with no error.
Check to see if your disk is full I guess?
So very, very true. I probably applied to 100+ places for a job after I got out of college. I ended up working for $11/hr at an auto-parts database company that wanted to pretend that it was a factory. I basically built/rebuilt all of their systems, and the software I wrote was a major factor in acquiring UPS as a customer. When I had gotten to the point where I had finished most of the work on the application and I was basically moving into just bug fixes, they hired another guy... somehow... for even less than I was making, they had me train him, and then told me that they couldn't afford to keep my on the payroll anymore, but, "Would you please come in every other Friday just to make sure things stayed on track?" And then one day a friend of mine asked me if I knew of any competant Java developers that the company he worked for might be able to hire. My response was something to the effect of, "Uh... me?" One resume, and one interview later, I was hired. Personally though, in retrospect, I think I probably should have tried to pick up income via self-employment rather than wasting any time scouring Monster/Dice/CareerBuilder, but I have a feeling that that option is a lot easier for programmers than in other professions.