... if the developers have to develop for a multi user and limited rights user OS they will actually build software that obeys those constraints...
The problem here is that you're talking about the difference between needing to respect constraints and being able to work outside of those constraints to set them in the first place.
If you take the simple Windows example of building a local service, you can see the complications for the non-admin developer. First off, how do you install the service that you've just built? The service can run in a local context, but it needs to be installed using an admin context. Now if I can't install the service, how do I test it? Can I attach a debugger, do I have those permissions?
Note that this isn't an issue of getting the service onto the user's computer, the sys admin can manage that process. This is a matter of being able to pretend to be an admin to get stuff working on my own computer before I push it out to users. Now it is possible to manage permissions in such a way that I can actually test what I'm doing without needing full admin permissions. But in most domains the simplest way to do this is to simply provide admin permissions (to the machine, not the domain) and let the devs support themselves.
The other major option is to set up some VMs for doing this, but then you have the problem of needing to create network test users so that the dev can manage the machine but still access resources on the network as if they were local. So it's a similar problem in a different place.
We run hundreds of Linux servers on EC2 and much of the original software was written in.NET. Most of our commodity servers have therefore been ported to Mono. Several of our core servers are running Windows. So we end up using Mono when we need scale (to save on licenses) and.NET on Windows for ease of implementation (like Services) on those servers that won't need to scale heavily.
At the end of the day our team uses both VS and MonoDevelop and I don't really think that either of them are going away:)
Back-end services that require the performance are implemente in C++.
And most of these 30k servers may be "running" PHP, but goodness their code is not all PHP. Facebook leverages a large amount of open source software and it's definitely not all PHP. MySQL isn't PHP, MemcacheD isn't PHP, Cassandra & Hive are written in Java, Thrift and Scribe are built in C++.
This guy's whole premise is completely under-researched, to tell people at Facebook that they're missing a 10:1 performance opportunity b/c of PHP is pretty ridiculous.
And that's the problem right there. The primary purpose of the IDE is to leverage computer power to improve developer productivity. If you're not using an IDE with re-factoring tools and test suites and code generation and maybe some handy UIs... then you don't need that much RAM.
Of course, it could also be argued that you're wasting a lot of money. RAM is cheap, your time isn't supposed to be.
Based on the original post, I think something went wrong during the talk with the boss: "I asked my current employer and was shot down". The question here isn't "can I?", but "what can I do to?". Unless you walked into that room with ways to make it happen, then you were dooming yourself. Go read 4-Hour Work Week for some inspiration / ideas.
Whenever someone in an organization proposes to add a new check, they should have to explain not just the benefit but the cost. No matter how bad a job they did of analyzing it, this meta-check would at least remind everyone there had to be a cost, and send them looking for it.
So bureaucracy has a cost in that it places lots of checks on things, and the solution to that is adding more checks?
Sounds like solid bureaucracy to me!
Building a check on your production line is very expensive. It automatically slows down the line. It comes with the overhead of modifying the production line, re-instructing the people on the line, etc. Building a check on the "verification process" is far less expensive. Management is already just overhead, increasing their overhead to protect productivity is way cheaper than the alternative.
As evidenced by the mass numbers of replies, yes you can succeed without a degree. However, unless you plan on a lead or "self-made" then your growth cycle is likely to be longer.
The knowledge associated with the various degrees is useful to the job you will be doing. For example, if you program but have never understood the "Big O" of various algorithms, then you will inevitably encounter a problem where you'll need to learn the concept. So yes you can be successful, but you will (at some point) end up learning much of the material included in a degree or your growth will be stopped.
A good IDE is a productivity tool. It leverages computer power to make your job faster, via things like "Intellisense", drag & drop code, easy refactoring tools, visual tools, etc. It's unfortunate that these IDEs don't come with a "Power Slider" to let you control things like what get cached and what doesn't.
However, in your case, XP really sucks on one gig of RAM. I've seen VS 2005 take an entire gig just for large project. Remember, the IDE isn't trying to be a pig here, it's trying to cache all kinds of things in memory to make your job easier and faster. But your laptop is definitely a few years behind the curve. You're basically asking why your Power Drill isn't working very well with your AAA batteries.
As a guy who spends 20+ hours / week on Facebook (it's my job (no I'm not kidding))... Facebook and MySpace are very different.
My friends and family are mostly regular Facebook users (yes that includes 50-year old aunts and uncles). Facebook has a 35-40% penetration in Canada, they didn't get there without having a few people over 35:)
So why not take the time to add it to the already established languages?
By "already established", it sounds like you mean "C++". It should be obvious from my description the degree of difficulty that was required to make LINQ work. MS had to develop Anonymous Delegates, Anonymous Types and Extension Methods before they could actually make LINQ work. How many of these technologies exist in C++?
So you added it to the language constructs and now we have a specialized set of keywords created JUST for this type of thing. It's complication at it's worst.
Given that they've based LINQ on an SQL syntax and that the code compiles to.NET 2.0, this doesn't really sound like complication to me. It doesn't break existing code it just gives you an easier way to express many set-based operations.
I know it's frustrating being a C++ developer in.NET world, but that's likely not going to change any time soon. C++ is not the "productivity-oriented" language and LINQ is a productivity-oriented tool.
I'd add some more commentary here, but it's hard to know your stance or what you're complaining about. It mostly sounds like you're just angry.
OK, short answer,.NET already has the basic components of Templates, they're known as Generics in.NET. This whole LINQ thing actually lets you write queries (that resemble SQL) right into the code. Initially, you're writing these queries against plain old objects. So you can basically write a select against your collection of customers.
Now the queries are "Language-Integrated". So they're intellisensed and they compile, which are both big productivity wins. You also get Anonymous Types, which are almost like inline ad-hoc structs. So not only can you query into your collection of customers, but you can also return a list of objects containing only the Name and Age of the customer.
On top of this, people have written all manner of "LINQ-to-X" extensions beyond just querying collections of objects. For example, LINQ-To-XML, lets you write "SQL-like" queries into an XML data store. LINQ-to-SQL, provides a method for translating those "Language-Integrated" queries into SQL for running against SQL server.
SQL is effectively a "functional" language that works very well for manipulating sets of data. Lambda expressions and LINQ pull some of that functionality into the C# language in a seamless fashion. Suddenly, we've added this very powerful Functional syntax to our Imperative language.
And there's way more going on here than I can discuss in a/. post
Deep-down, it's quite likely that this whole thing could be done in C++, but it would be a tremendous amount of work..NET provides this excellent productivity gain as part of framework.
Then again, I'm biased - I believe email should just be pure text. Perhaps that's a sign that I'm now old...
No just a sign that you're communicating inefficiently. Font sizing, font highlighting, font types and nested bullets are used because they are effective tools for communication.
Pure text e-mail is like using a monotone voice. It simply doesn't encapsulate the richness of human communication. If I'm stuck with pure text e-mail I end up doing stuff like *this* anyways.
In fact, you used the bold-facing in your own post to highlight every e-mail. Why you desire pure text e-mail but are more than happy to highlight your forum post kind of baffles me, not really a great sell.
I'm not sure why unions act like every person should be guaranteed a job.
Easy answer. Unions get paid a percentage of salary of active employees. In return they attempt to protect the jobs of those employees. They're going to act like every person should be guaranteed a job because that's what they get paid to do. And more people = more money for them.
You've created a project that a big client wants to use. But they're not paying for it... and they have the code. So if they have problems they can either fix them or they can pay you to fix them.
That's how this stuff works. You build a good free tool and then people pay you money to make it a great free tool that they can use. At some point along the road your time has to be worth something.
When you start sweating enough to post an ask Slashdot, then your time is now worth something. Ask for money or ask for help.
OK, this is pretty weak and a very far cry from having to constantly mix in win32.
To implement this in.Net you just handle the Mouseclick event for the control, check if it's in the header area, handle code as appropriate. Honestly, I'd just extend the existing control and add this feature such that it handles & suppresses the general MouseClick, changes the header color and fires a new HeaderClicked event. Add the arrow by overriding the Paint method.
Calling Win32 API use "common" in.NET is quite misleading. If anything, it's quite rare.
A company that has shown time and again that their primary concern is their shareholders, not their customers.
As a publicly-held company this is pretty much a legal requirement. Companies are allowed to ignore their customers, even for extended periods of time; they're not allowed to ignore their shareholders for any significant measure of time.
Now, generally, shareholders want happy customers or they don't achieve growth. No growth means loss of revenue, so to say that shareholder's interests are opposed to customer interests is a very short-term view of a company that has a few decades behind it.
So if you're going to complain, you should have at least brought your own solution to the problem. Sun is publicly-held (and therefore, so is MySQL), Oracle is publicly held, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, most chipmakers, etc. From software to hardware many of the components are built by publicly held companies.
Based on the logic espoused in the above quote, basically nobody is eligible to host your precious data.
Is it better for a few dozen big and a few hundred small software vendors to make the money and grow bigger, or is it better for the money to be spread out among tens of thousands of businesses in thousands of communities?
As a person who uses software, I'm with the former option. If I buy a product, I want 3 maybe 4 options at most. And if stuff is reasonably "vertical", I'd like them to be offered by the same company or be highly interoperable.
Why would I possibly want 15 completely different Quicken clones?
I mean, compare (A) "15 companies with 3 developers each" to (B) "3 companies with 15 developers each". Who's going to get more done? Collectively? I mean if all 15 apps are doing the same things then you have 15 teams all spending time on the same goal.
All 15 teams will have to build a custom reporting solution and most of them will be eerily similar b/c they're all trying to accomplish the same goal. There seems to be this notion that duplicating work is a good thing.
Give me 3 teams of 15 any day. As a consumer I don't want to waste my money on picking the 14th horse in the race. Give me 3 competitors and a handful of blazing guns (kind of like we have now). As an investor, I don't want to put my money on a 15-horse race, it's just dangerous and pointless.
Spreading money across too many business and communities actually dilutes the value of those communities. Facebook would be useless if it didn't host my friends and family. If there were 9 open-source Facebook clones fighting for the Canadian market-share, then they'd all be useless. Nobody would use them b/c nobody would want to sign up for 6 different accounts to connect with all of their friends.
It's cool to think that there's some perfect mass-distributed model, but there isn't. The universe doesn't work that way, it naturally evolves leaders and followers. Markets size will shrink and grow over time. It's great to think that we have some better way of pruning than nature, but we don't have a really great history to back that thought.
I RTFA article and it's nice to hear one side reported; but I feel there's a whole other side to this that's not understood. Most "millenials" that I've met have very little concept of business and business finances.
The average worker expects to sit around and do as they are told and basically "be taken care of". The average worker never sits down with their boss and says "I'm making X and I want to be worth X+10%, what do I need to do?". There's an expectation that simply showing up will get you there. Most workers I've met simply let the company decide their next step. I've even met tons of smart and skilled developers who simply don't know the math behind their salary. They can't ask for a pay raise or different benefits or some other employer concession, they don't even know how much they're worth. They don't know what income they generated last year or the typical overhead cost on their time.
Meanwhile, from the other side, most companies I've known are simply terrible at managing workers and projects and growing their #1 assets. They set up win/lose pay structures that heavily reward management instead of the workers. They ask for more work hours instead of more project deliverables. They expect employees to train outside of work instead of accounting for the cost of "in-the-week" training time. They ignore the concept of "apprenticeships" and the time required and just add juniors to the team as a single unit of time (instead of the.2 units of time they actually generate). They fail to build progression plans (including scheduled pay increases for young workers) and then wonder why they get caught with their pants down when the best young workers leave for more money and the bad ones hang around.
It's a two-way street and there are ample examples of failure on both sides. There are tons of "sweatshop" workplaces and tons of workplace Princesses. So it's really hard to yell at anyone in particular.
Given your mention of RRSP, I'll assume that you were working in Canada.
Canada has strict laws with regards to employee dismissal, so unless you were under a probabtionary period, you should have received at least two weeks of "lay-off" pay. Moreover, given that you were working for a multi-million dollar company, there would have been some very explicit hiring/firing procedures as well as required HR paperwork. In fact, in cases like this, basically any multi-million dollar company in the last 15 years would've had a "sit-down" session between you and the manager in question. There would have been a formal write-up process and your manager's manager would've been present to ensure that your manager wasn't just "being an ass" and letting you go.
I'll take a leap of faith and assume that none of this happened. Given that you've made no mention of a wrongful dismissal suit. I'll also guess that you did not file one of those either. Even though you likely had ample material with which to fight back.
Personally, I'm not really impressed. You've let yourself down and you've let your co-workers down. Now they may live in fear of suffering the same fate as you did. You can spit acid all that you want, but if you're not even going to use the basic tools available to you then you're really not going to get any sympathy from me (or likely anyone on these boards).
From the header: when one company adopted a new technology, its competitors did the same
His conclusions would be correct if this is actually what happened. But it isn't. Competitors don't magically "catch up" to each other. Can you walk into your favorite shoe store and get shoes delivered to your door the next day if they don't have the right size in stock? I know that I've tried, but to no avail. Of course, one company pulled this off like 5+ years ago, they just don't have any stores where I live. But their competitors are clearly not offering the service yet.
Anyone working in POS/Retail industry has seen the giant gaping chasm of technology differences between similar-sized vendors. You don't have to go too far before you meet one company with interactive Open-To-Buy and 6-month planning tools, whilst others are just fighting to run last year's sales reports.
Plus, there's the assumption that competitors can cost-effectively reproduce the solution. Non-compete contracts, patenting and various other legal backing can make this reproduction costly, difficult of even impossible.
Government IT workers are average at best. That is the very nature of their existence there. They tend to use old technology and they are definitely under-trained. The best IT workers don't need government benefits and security so they work for more money. Of course, even the average workers (heck the 80% and under mark) often don't understand these security issues. I'm pretty sure that none of the people on this project have CISSP certifications or even week-long security courses to their name.
Government IT workers cannot be fired. Or at least they're very difficult to fire and replace.
The truth is, with a breach like this, heads should roll. The project manager should be fired b/c managing this stuff was their job (that's why they make the big bucks). However, it's most likely that nothing will happen. Unless a million people pick up on the Globe and Mail article and start yelling and screaming, then nothing will happen. The good who let this through will happily work away until he collects his government pension. Bunch of amateurs... make me retch just thinking about it.
but a general purpose computer is still a complicated high tech instrument and the current generation of tools is not sufficiently advanced to resolve that complexity for the average person
But there's a step beyond that here which is the natural relation between power and ease of use. At some level, you cannot separate the complexity of the process from the complexity of use. There's a limited amount of work that can be done to make a CAD program "user-friendly" before I simply start removing features or ignoring my target audience.
The real problem underneath all of this is the fact that a typical home PC setup is a ridiculously powerful tool with so many applications that no one knows how to use them all. If you don't have the time to you learn how some particular tool works on your computer, then you cannot reliably use that tool, it's as simple as that.
This is helping to drive the move towards "smart appliances" and other "smaller-purpose" tools, but then it's not really a general purpose computer is it? Look we all know where this whole thing is going: networks of small-purpose devices interconnected with each other and with the general multi-purpose tool(s). i.e.: the "typical" home entertainment system will soon be run through an XBOX360-like setup, we'll see home automation tools that you can run through your TV or through the Net, we'll see more unified calendars and contact lists and vid-phones (not just cell phones) which will then connect back to the server and record calls if you want them to, internet-enabled fridge, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah.
We know that we're going there, Jobs and Gates are both working on the tech (hello Windows Home Server? hello Microsoft Surface?). What's going to happen is that we're actually going to remove a certain number of general-purpose computers from the eco-system and replace them with more useful "small-purpose" devices. Of course, even then, there's only so much that I can do to make your MP3/Camera/Vid/Contact Book/Calendar/Web-enabled cell phone "easy to use":)
But I will pick at one thing, 3 & 4 are not issues with a unionized organization like VA. Given your example the 7 of the 8 leftover people would be "repurposed" to tackle another massive pile of outstanding work and the 8th one would either get promoted to manage the remaining 7 or they would be "trimmed" and someone else would be promoted to manage the 7.
My experience with government organizations is that they tend to carry a lot of overhead and they can't really get rid of people. Near-perfect job security and above average pay tends to suck in the "average" workers, with the "best" workers carrying the load of 3 people (and likely there b/c they want the pension and don't want to have to compete on the open market).
As to the layoffs, if you're in a centralization situation and there is an inkling of layoffs on the horizon, it may be best to become a consultant. They'll likely need your knowledge to perform the centralization so you might as well make the big bucks before you leave:) But that's just my $0.02
so businesses wait, and then buy a different product from Microsoft; it delays income, but isn't that bad
Ummm... I think that you're missing something here. MS really only cares that consumers are buying Vista. Businesses won't actually buy Vista, they're already paying annual site licenses for the software and CAL (client access licences) for each computer. Technically a CAL is just a licence to connect to Exchange for Outlook, but really if that's your stack (Windows, Exchange, etc), its all the same.
Either way, when a big biz "upgrades" to Vista, they won't be paying for it. They're already paying the "per user fee" (CAL) and they're paying the "site fee", so as long as their not using an unsupported OS (e.g.: NT4), then MS doesn't really care. They tried to force the Vista issue and then caved recently "due to customer demand", but it's not like their stock is hurting or anything.
MS has enough cash that they can afford to just "eat one". From a user experience perspective, Vista was mostly just a wash. But as a dev, under the hood, the changes MS has brought with the newest generation of technology will have a lasting impact in the coming years. If you've ever seen a video for WPF you'll see what I'm talking about. We don't see it today, but the UIs in 2009 will be vastly different. A quick run at.NET 3.5 and 4.0: LINQ, WCF, WPF, PFX, etc. will show that MS isn't just spinning its wheels.
Is it too late to MOD PARENT UP?
That's exactly what I've been saying for years.
Linux will not become the desktop OS b/c it's not pointed in that direction. Even stuff like ReactOS is just intended as an XP replacement, not some bold, new, better OS. Without a guiding central authority decisions are constantly being made that undermine Linux's ability to compete.
Slashdot Mirror
... if the developers have to develop for a multi user and limited rights user OS they will actually build software that obeys those constraints...
The problem here is that you're talking about the difference between needing to respect constraints and being able to work outside of those constraints to set them in the first place.
If you take the simple Windows example of building a local service, you can see the complications for the non-admin developer. First off, how do you install the service that you've just built? The service can run in a local context, but it needs to be installed using an admin context. Now if I can't install the service, how do I test it? Can I attach a debugger, do I have those permissions?
Note that this isn't an issue of getting the service onto the user's computer, the sys admin can manage that process. This is a matter of being able to pretend to be an admin to get stuff working on my own computer before I push it out to users. Now it is possible to manage permissions in such a way that I can actually test what I'm doing without needing full admin permissions. But in most domains the simplest way to do this is to simply provide admin permissions (to the machine, not the domain) and let the devs support themselves.
The other major option is to set up some VMs for doing this, but then you have the problem of needing to create network test users so that the dev can manage the machine but still access resources on the network as if they were local. So it's a similar problem in a different place.
Yes we have several installs at my office.
We run hundreds of Linux servers on EC2 and much of the original software was written in .NET. Most of our commodity servers have therefore been ported to Mono. Several of our core servers are running Windows. So we end up using Mono when we need scale (to save on licenses) and .NET on Windows for ease of implementation (like Services) on those servers that won't need to scale heavily.
At the end of the day our team uses both VS and MonoDevelop and I don't really think that either of them are going away :)
I'll add to this comment, FTA:
Back-end services that require the performance are implemente in C++.
And most of these 30k servers may be "running" PHP, but goodness their code is not all PHP. Facebook leverages a large amount of open source software and it's definitely not all PHP. MySQL isn't PHP, MemcacheD isn't PHP, Cassandra & Hive are written in Java, Thrift and Scribe are built in C++.
This guy's whole premise is completely under-researched, to tell people at Facebook that they're missing a 10:1 performance opportunity b/c of PHP is pretty ridiculous.
...I don't use a heavy-weight IDE...
And that's the problem right there. The primary purpose of the IDE is to leverage computer power to improve developer productivity. If you're not using an IDE with re-factoring tools and test suites and code generation and maybe some handy UIs... then you don't need that much RAM.
Of course, it could also be argued that you're wasting a lot of money. RAM is cheap, your time isn't supposed to be.
Based on the original post, I think something went wrong during the talk with the boss: "I asked my current employer and was shot down". The question here isn't "can I?", but "what can I do to?". Unless you walked into that room with ways to make it happen, then you were dooming yourself. Go read 4-Hour Work Week for some inspiration / ideas.
From the article:
So bureaucracy has a cost in that it places lots of checks on things, and the solution to that is adding more checks?
Sounds like solid bureaucracy to me!
Building a check on your production line is very expensive. It automatically slows down the line. It comes with the overhead of modifying the production line, re-instructing the people on the line, etc. Building a check on the "verification process" is far less expensive. Management is already just overhead, increasing their overhead to protect productivity is way cheaper than the alternative.
As evidenced by the mass numbers of replies, yes you can succeed without a degree. However, unless you plan on a lead or "self-made" then your growth cycle is likely to be longer.
The knowledge associated with the various degrees is useful to the job you will be doing. For example, if you program but have never understood the "Big O" of various algorithms, then you will inevitably encounter a problem where you'll need to learn the concept. So yes you can be successful, but you will (at some point) end up learning much of the material included in a degree or your growth will be stopped.
A good IDE is a productivity tool. It leverages computer power to make your job faster, via things like "Intellisense", drag & drop code, easy refactoring tools, visual tools, etc. It's unfortunate that these IDEs don't come with a "Power Slider" to let you control things like what get cached and what doesn't.
However, in your case, XP really sucks on one gig of RAM. I've seen VS 2005 take an entire gig just for large project. Remember, the IDE isn't trying to be a pig here, it's trying to cache all kinds of things in memory to make your job easier and faster. But your laptop is definitely a few years behind the curve. You're basically asking why your Power Drill isn't working very well with your AAA batteries.
As a guy who spends 20+ hours / week on Facebook (it's my job (no I'm not kidding))... Facebook and MySpace are very different.
My friends and family are mostly regular Facebook users (yes that includes 50-year old aunts and uncles). Facebook has a 35-40% penetration in Canada, they didn't get there without having a few people over 35 :)
So why not take the time to add it to the already established languages?
By "already established", it sounds like you mean "C++". It should be obvious from my description the degree of difficulty that was required to make LINQ work. MS had to develop Anonymous Delegates, Anonymous Types and Extension Methods before they could actually make LINQ work. How many of these technologies exist in C++?
So you added it to the language constructs and now we have a specialized set of keywords created JUST for this type of thing. It's complication at it's worst.
Given that they've based LINQ on an SQL syntax and that the code compiles to .NET 2.0, this doesn't really sound like complication to me. It doesn't break existing code it just gives you an easier way to express many set-based operations.
I know it's frustrating being a C++ developer in .NET world, but that's likely not going to change any time soon. C++ is not the "productivity-oriented" language and LINQ is a productivity-oriented tool.
I'd add some more commentary here, but it's hard to know your stance or what you're complaining about. It mostly sounds like you're just angry.
OK, short answer, .NET already has the basic components of Templates, they're known as Generics in .NET. This whole LINQ thing actually lets you write queries (that resemble SQL) right into the code. Initially, you're writing these queries against plain old objects. So you can basically write a select against your collection of customers.
Now the queries are "Language-Integrated". So they're intellisensed and they compile, which are both big productivity wins. You also get Anonymous Types, which are almost like inline ad-hoc structs. So not only can you query into your collection of customers, but you can also return a list of objects containing only the Name and Age of the customer.
On top of this, people have written all manner of "LINQ-to-X" extensions beyond just querying collections of objects. For example, LINQ-To-XML, lets you write "SQL-like" queries into an XML data store. LINQ-to-SQL, provides a method for translating those "Language-Integrated" queries into SQL for running against SQL server.
SQL is effectively a "functional" language that works very well for manipulating sets of data. Lambda expressions and LINQ pull some of that functionality into the C# language in a seamless fashion. Suddenly, we've added this very powerful Functional syntax to our Imperative language.
And there's way more going on here than I can discuss in a /. post
Deep-down, it's quite likely that this whole thing could be done in C++, but it would be a tremendous amount of work. .NET provides this excellent productivity gain as part of framework.
Then again, I'm biased - I believe email should just be pure text. Perhaps that's a sign that I'm now old...
No just a sign that you're communicating inefficiently. Font sizing, font highlighting, font types and nested bullets are used because they are effective tools for communication.
Pure text e-mail is like using a monotone voice. It simply doesn't encapsulate the richness of human communication. If I'm stuck with pure text e-mail I end up doing stuff like *this* anyways.
In fact, you used the bold-facing in your own post to highlight every e-mail. Why you desire pure text e-mail but are more than happy to highlight your forum post kind of baffles me, not really a great sell.
I'm not sure why unions act like every person should be guaranteed a job.
Easy answer. Unions get paid a percentage of salary of active employees. In return they attempt to protect the jobs of those employees. They're going to act like every person should be guaranteed a job because that's what they get paid to do. And more people = more money for them.
Can we mod this one to 6?
You've created a project that a big client wants to use. But they're not paying for it... and they have the code. So if they have problems they can either fix them or they can pay you to fix them.
That's how this stuff works. You build a good free tool and then people pay you money to make it a great free tool that they can use. At some point along the road your time has to be worth something.
When you start sweating enough to post an ask Slashdot, then your time is now worth something. Ask for money or ask for help.
OK, this is pretty weak and a very far cry from having to constantly mix in win32.
To implement this in .Net you just handle the Mouseclick event for the control, check if it's in the header area, handle code as appropriate. Honestly, I'd just extend the existing control and add this feature such that it handles & suppresses the general MouseClick, changes the header color and fires a new HeaderClicked event. Add the arrow by overriding the Paint method.
Calling Win32 API use "common" in .NET is quite misleading. If anything, it's quite rare.
As a publicly-held company this is pretty much a legal requirement. Companies are allowed to ignore their customers, even for extended periods of time; they're not allowed to ignore their shareholders for any significant measure of time.
Now, generally, shareholders want happy customers or they don't achieve growth. No growth means loss of revenue, so to say that shareholder's interests are opposed to customer interests is a very short-term view of a company that has a few decades behind it.
So if you're going to complain, you should have at least brought your own solution to the problem. Sun is publicly-held (and therefore, so is MySQL), Oracle is publicly held, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, most chipmakers, etc. From software to hardware many of the components are built by publicly held companies.
Based on the logic espoused in the above quote, basically nobody is eligible to host your precious data.
Is it better for a few dozen big and a few hundred small software vendors to make the money and grow bigger, or is it better for the money to be spread out among tens of thousands of businesses in thousands of communities?
As a person who uses software, I'm with the former option. If I buy a product, I want 3 maybe 4 options at most. And if stuff is reasonably "vertical", I'd like them to be offered by the same company or be highly interoperable.
Why would I possibly want 15 completely different Quicken clones?
I mean, compare (A) "15 companies with 3 developers each" to (B) "3 companies with 15 developers each". Who's going to get more done? Collectively? I mean if all 15 apps are doing the same things then you have 15 teams all spending time on the same goal.
All 15 teams will have to build a custom reporting solution and most of them will be eerily similar b/c they're all trying to accomplish the same goal. There seems to be this notion that duplicating work is a good thing.
Give me 3 teams of 15 any day. As a consumer I don't want to waste my money on picking the 14th horse in the race. Give me 3 competitors and a handful of blazing guns (kind of like we have now). As an investor, I don't want to put my money on a 15-horse race, it's just dangerous and pointless.
Spreading money across too many business and communities actually dilutes the value of those communities. Facebook would be useless if it didn't host my friends and family. If there were 9 open-source Facebook clones fighting for the Canadian market-share, then they'd all be useless. Nobody would use them b/c nobody would want to sign up for 6 different accounts to connect with all of their friends.
It's cool to think that there's some perfect mass-distributed model, but there isn't. The universe doesn't work that way, it naturally evolves leaders and followers. Markets size will shrink and grow over time. It's great to think that we have some better way of pruning than nature, but we don't have a really great history to back that thought.
*Sigh*
I RTFA article and it's nice to hear one side reported; but I feel there's a whole other side to this that's not understood. Most "millenials" that I've met have very little concept of business and business finances.
The average worker expects to sit around and do as they are told and basically "be taken care of". The average worker never sits down with their boss and says "I'm making X and I want to be worth X+10%, what do I need to do?". There's an expectation that simply showing up will get you there. Most workers I've met simply let the company decide their next step. I've even met tons of smart and skilled developers who simply don't know the math behind their salary. They can't ask for a pay raise or different benefits or some other employer concession, they don't even know how much they're worth. They don't know what income they generated last year or the typical overhead cost on their time.
Meanwhile, from the other side, most companies I've known are simply terrible at managing workers and projects and growing their #1 assets. They set up win/lose pay structures that heavily reward management instead of the workers. They ask for more work hours instead of more project deliverables. They expect employees to train outside of work instead of accounting for the cost of "in-the-week" training time. They ignore the concept of "apprenticeships" and the time required and just add juniors to the team as a single unit of time (instead of the .2 units of time they actually generate). They fail to build progression plans (including scheduled pay increases for young workers) and then wonder why they get caught with their pants down when the best young workers leave for more money and the bad ones hang around.
It's a two-way street and there are ample examples of failure on both sides. There are tons of "sweatshop" workplaces and tons of workplace Princesses. So it's really hard to yell at anyone in particular.
Given your mention of RRSP, I'll assume that you were working in Canada.
Canada has strict laws with regards to employee dismissal, so unless you were under a probabtionary period, you should have received at least two weeks of "lay-off" pay. Moreover, given that you were working for a multi-million dollar company, there would have been some very explicit hiring/firing procedures as well as required HR paperwork. In fact, in cases like this, basically any multi-million dollar company in the last 15 years would've had a "sit-down" session between you and the manager in question. There would have been a formal write-up process and your manager's manager would've been present to ensure that your manager wasn't just "being an ass" and letting you go.
I'll take a leap of faith and assume that none of this happened. Given that you've made no mention of a wrongful dismissal suit. I'll also guess that you did not file one of those either. Even though you likely had ample material with which to fight back.
Personally, I'm not really impressed. You've let yourself down and you've let your co-workers down. Now they may live in fear of suffering the same fate as you did. You can spit acid all that you want, but if you're not even going to use the basic tools available to you then you're really not going to get any sympathy from me (or likely anyone on these boards).
From the header: when one company adopted a new technology, its competitors did the same
His conclusions would be correct if this is actually what happened. But it isn't. Competitors don't magically "catch up" to each other. Can you walk into your favorite shoe store and get shoes delivered to your door the next day if they don't have the right size in stock? I know that I've tried, but to no avail. Of course, one company pulled this off like 5+ years ago, they just don't have any stores where I live. But their competitors are clearly not offering the service yet.
Anyone working in POS/Retail industry has seen the giant gaping chasm of technology differences between similar-sized vendors. You don't have to go too far before you meet one company with interactive Open-To-Buy and 6-month planning tools, whilst others are just fighting to run last year's sales reports.
Plus, there's the assumption that competitors can cost-effectively reproduce the solution. Non-compete contracts, patenting and various other legal backing can make this reproduction costly, difficult of even impossible.
OK, this is a simple two-part problem.
The truth is, with a breach like this, heads should roll. The project manager should be fired b/c managing this stuff was their job (that's why they make the big bucks). However, it's most likely that nothing will happen. Unless a million people pick up on the Globe and Mail article and start yelling and screaming, then nothing will happen. The good who let this through will happily work away until he collects his government pension. Bunch of amateurs... make me retch just thinking about it.
but a general purpose computer is still a complicated high tech instrument and the current generation of tools is not sufficiently advanced to resolve that complexity for the average person
But there's a step beyond that here which is the natural relation between power and ease of use. At some level, you cannot separate the complexity of the process from the complexity of use. There's a limited amount of work that can be done to make a CAD program "user-friendly" before I simply start removing features or ignoring my target audience.
The real problem underneath all of this is the fact that a typical home PC setup is a ridiculously powerful tool with so many applications that no one knows how to use them all. If you don't have the time to you learn how some particular tool works on your computer, then you cannot reliably use that tool, it's as simple as that.
This is helping to drive the move towards "smart appliances" and other "smaller-purpose" tools, but then it's not really a general purpose computer is it? Look we all know where this whole thing is going: networks of small-purpose devices interconnected with each other and with the general multi-purpose tool(s). i.e.: the "typical" home entertainment system will soon be run through an XBOX360-like setup, we'll see home automation tools that you can run through your TV or through the Net, we'll see more unified calendars and contact lists and vid-phones (not just cell phones) which will then connect back to the server and record calls if you want them to, internet-enabled fridge, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah.
We know that we're going there, Jobs and Gates are both working on the tech (hello Windows Home Server? hello Microsoft Surface?). What's going to happen is that we're actually going to remove a certain number of general-purpose computers from the eco-system and replace them with more useful "small-purpose" devices. Of course, even then, there's only so much that I can do to make your MP3/Camera/Vid/Contact Book/Calendar/Web-enabled cell phone "easy to use" :)
Here, here, great post.
But I will pick at one thing, 3 & 4 are not issues with a unionized organization like VA. Given your example the 7 of the 8 leftover people would be "repurposed" to tackle another massive pile of outstanding work and the 8th one would either get promoted to manage the remaining 7 or they would be "trimmed" and someone else would be promoted to manage the 7.
My experience with government organizations is that they tend to carry a lot of overhead and they can't really get rid of people. Near-perfect job security and above average pay tends to suck in the "average" workers, with the "best" workers carrying the load of 3 people (and likely there b/c they want the pension and don't want to have to compete on the open market).
As to the layoffs, if you're in a centralization situation and there is an inkling of layoffs on the horizon, it may be best to become a consultant. They'll likely need your knowledge to perform the centralization so you might as well make the big bucks before you leave :) But that's just my $0.02
so businesses wait, and then buy a different product from Microsoft; it delays income, but isn't that bad Ummm... I think that you're missing something here. MS really only cares that consumers are buying Vista. Businesses won't actually buy Vista, they're already paying annual site licenses for the software and CAL (client access licences) for each computer. Technically a CAL is just a licence to connect to Exchange for Outlook, but really if that's your stack (Windows, Exchange, etc), its all the same. Either way, when a big biz "upgrades" to Vista, they won't be paying for it. They're already paying the "per user fee" (CAL) and they're paying the "site fee", so as long as their not using an unsupported OS (e.g.: NT4), then MS doesn't really care. They tried to force the Vista issue and then caved recently "due to customer demand", but it's not like their stock is hurting or anything. MS has enough cash that they can afford to just "eat one". From a user experience perspective, Vista was mostly just a wash. But as a dev, under the hood, the changes MS has brought with the newest generation of technology will have a lasting impact in the coming years. If you've ever seen a video for WPF you'll see what I'm talking about. We don't see it today, but the UIs in 2009 will be vastly different. A quick run at .NET 3.5 and 4.0: LINQ, WCF, WPF, PFX, etc. will show that MS isn't just spinning its wheels.
Is it too late to MOD PARENT UP? That's exactly what I've been saying for years. Linux will not become the desktop OS b/c it's not pointed in that direction. Even stuff like ReactOS is just intended as an XP replacement, not some bold, new, better OS. Without a guiding central authority decisions are constantly being made that undermine Linux's ability to compete.