I did spot your caveat regarding testing. Test all you fucking like, it's still going to cost several million for my company to switch away from IE, and the IT director/the board/the shareholders are never going to agree to that level of expenditure for minimal perceived benefit.
Meanwhile, the IT Director points out that there are currently 47 web based applications deployed in the organisation that were written to run in the corporate default browser, IE 5.5, and since most/all of them use Javascript or DHTML, they'd all need rewriting and retesting for Mozilla.
Faced with the millions of dollars that would costthe IT Director suggests you find another job.
>> Make it readable and non-technical. It's going to be screened by HR people, they're typically really bad with technical details.
Those HR people have been told they need to find a "Java/J2EE developer with good UML and OOA/OOD skills, capable of implementing XML over HTTP protocols"
If you don't have all/most of those keywords (ok, buzzwords) in your CV, HR will throw it out.
>> Nobody gives a crap about your hobbies
Several companies (typically the better ones to work for) want people who are different, sociable, will stand out,can think for themselves. And even if they're not, make yourself stand out from the crowd.
Consider "Hobbies: reading, cinema, dinner with friends" against "Hobbies: Field Archery (37th in National Championships), Cooking (Tex-Mex a speciality), RPGs with friends".
Yeah, but my job applications are crafted works of art, reviewed so many times the screens wearing thin, checked by other people and then reviewed again.
My Slashdot postings are typed as quickly as possible to avoid missing too much work.
~Cederic ps: of course, after all that effort my CV is totally fucked up by the job agency I had to apply through, so the hiring company doesn't see the results of my diligence and style. But hey, everyone applying for that job has the same problem
That's bullshit. There's nothing illegal about me personally buying an item from Hong Kong, asking the retailer to post it to me, and paying any necessary import duty.
I find I solve a lot of bugs in the shower. Or while out buying lunch. Or anywhere that my brain is not engaged in the current task, but where that current task is something other than the bug I'm trying to fix.
It's almost letting your subconscious thought processes work on the problem instead of trying to tackle it directly.
The upshot is that I feel no shame in saying "I'm not going to fix that bug today. I'll fix it tomorrow" when I'm stumped on something. Or a tricky design problem, etc - works for most problem solving situations.
Strangely enough, Java is fast enough for the uses I put it to.
So C/C++ can do some things quicker than Java. Shrug. I don't care. The things I want to do in Java, Java can do fast enough. C/C++ can't do all that much (if any) faster.
If you want to measure performance, let's consider time from "hey, we need some software" to "ok, data processing complete". That's the sort of speed that matters - maybe the benchmark should have checked for that..
>> You may just be hacking application programs for a living, but you still depend on all those libraries
Hacking applications? I fear not. Applying good software engineering practices to the creation of business software.
I may have "limited experience" but I'm experienced enough to know that writing graphics, image, audio and video codecs and libraries is something that one person does, then distributes to many. Unlike the software I create, which one person does, then one company uses for many years. That's an entirely different paradigm to creating a graphics library; don't act so surprised that a different language is in use.
"Pure Java" may be a lie; however I've used pure Java database drivers to connect to Oracle, I've used pure Java development tools and libraries that run on multiple platforms without recompilation, I've delivered systems that run equally well on Windows and Unix.
Most of what I want to do with Java can already be done with it; the rest tends to be specific business logic that I'd have to write myself anyway. Since Java meets my needs, and supplies many advantages other than execution speed, it is the language of choice for the business I work for.
I still haven't needed to write an FFT. Forgive me for being one of the millions of software engineers that falls into that category.
Yeah, but I've been writing software commercially for almost a decade, and I've never yet needed a "true multidimensional array" and I've certainly never needed to write an FFT.
If I were needing such things, maybe I'd use Matlab or C or FORTRAN.
Until then, I'll pick a language that suits my needs (and, quite importantly, those of my employer) and not get my knickers in a twist about non-my-real-world scenarios that the language may or may not handle.
However, there are definitely times when some languages are more appropriate than others.
Being mostly a one-language person (used to be guru level on others, but skills have lapsed) I restrict my development to the areas that language is strong in. And let people fluent in the other languages do the other work.
For the things most people use Java for, speed isn't that important compared to the reasons they're using it.
For people who need speed, maybe Java isn't the right choice. So pick something else and get on with it.
For the example environment shown, i.e. writing software to run on windows, I'd pick Delphi anyway - all the speed advantages of C, many of the programming language niceties of Java, all of the front-end simplicity of VB. Delphi rocks for Windows development. Shame it wasn't also benchmarked..
Most people hate porting c/c++ between platforms, because it can (and often does) take an immense amount of effort. Not to mention the number of Windows programmers who'd panic without MFC or STL.
Most Java programmers on the other hand, writing server-side code (the main use for Java), develop on Windows and deploy on Unix. With zero code changes.
Sure, Java has portability issues. But don't even pretend most C++ code is more portable.
Incidentally, if you avoid platform, compiler and processor specific features, I suspect C++ is even more mind-bogglingly slow than Java.
~Cederic ps: plus compiled Java is portable, not just the source code, of course
the point of university is to get drunk, get laid, have a great time, and somehow con them into giving you a degree at the end of it.
worked for me.. ~Cederic ps: i got a very good degree in Financial Analysis from the #5 business school in the _world_ and still held down a job and spent an average of 40 hours a week (throughout the year) for three years 'playing' on the uni computers. Which is where I learned to program. Which is why I'm now in IT. So skipping lectures and treating the uni course as an excuse for being there can and did work..
From the Brazilian perspective, you _are_ just fingerprinting Brazilians. After all, the people they might consider their economic peers (the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Japan) don't get their citizens fingerprinted.
Brazil's hardly a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism either.. (actually, now I write that, it occurs to me that I have no idea at all. Maybe it is? I kinda assume they're all Catholic there)
If the UK gets added to the list of countries whose citizens are fingerprinted, I will stop coming to the US.
Brazil rock, I can't see why you could possibly have a problem with them applying the same security restrictions you're so enthusiastic for in Atlanta.
As for catching a dozen people in a couple of months.. the fingerprinting has only been happening for a couple of days, as far as I know..
Why? Surely the assignment is to produce a piece of work (essay, code, whatever) to answer a question or resolve an issue.
If I happen to be able to answer multiple questions with a single piece of work, then that's a valid response to each one. The fact that I wrote it once and only changed it a little for each individual answer should be irrelevant - I still did the work, I noticed the applicability of it to multiple questions, and the course shouldn't be so repetitive that this is possible in the first place.
If I got "in serious trouble" for re-using my own writings, I'd be challenging that very strongly, at the highest levels. Heck, imagine if someone asked Jon Johansson to write a piece of code to decrypt DVDs - is he going to be starting from scratch? I fear not..
Actually, there was a vote in the Commons on whether we should go to war. The people that voted were the MPs, elected to represent the people of the UK.
So it wasn't a dictatorial decision, it was a democratic decision.
Admittedly, it was somewhat flawed, due to the party system in place, but hey, it's better than most countries can manage.
~Cederic ps: for the record, i think blair is a cunt and lied to the country about the reasons for war
>> Now if only the British people could get over their attitude of "anyone who doesn't own a car is a loser", they we might just get somewhere with the rest of the country.
Hmm. Most people I know (and I live and work in Britain, and am British) don't have that attitude at all.
What is common is a desire to be able to move freely and conveniently, and at the moment that tends to be best achieved with a car.
As an example: I live 54 miles from where I work. I could: - catch a bus to work. But it'd be 3 hours each way - catch a bus to the train station, then a train to the nearest station to where I work, then bus it from there. But that'd be 4 hours each way - drive. 50 minutes on a good day, less than two hours on a bad day
Realistically, what option do I have?
Now, in practice, I'm staying with a friend just 17 miles from where I work. Again though, I'm driving - and again, because it saves me over an hour _each way_ compared to using public transport.
I'm also trying to sell my home so that I can purchase one within 3 miles of work. But that takes time..
So no, the attitude isn't "if you don't have a car you're a loser", the attitude is "give me suitable alternatives".
Slashdot Mirror
I did spot your caveat regarding testing. Test all you fucking like, it's still going to cost several million for my company to switch away from IE, and the IT director/the board/the shareholders are never going to agree to that level of expenditure for minimal perceived benefit.
Incidentally, there are two Es in my name.
~Cederic
forgive my old age, but that's a new one on me
Meanwhile, the IT Director points out that there are currently 47 web based applications deployed in the organisation that were written to run in the corporate default browser, IE 5.5, and since most/all of them use Javascript or DHTML, they'd all need rewriting and retesting for Mozilla.
Faced with the millions of dollars that would costthe IT Director suggests you find another job.
~Cederic
>> Make it readable and non-technical. It's going to be screened by HR people, they're typically really bad with technical details.
,can think for themselves. And even if they're not, make yourself stand out from the crowd.
Those HR people have been told they need to find a "Java/J2EE developer with good UML and OOA/OOD skills, capable of implementing XML over HTTP protocols"
If you don't have all/most of those keywords (ok, buzzwords) in your CV, HR will throw it out.
>> Nobody gives a crap about your hobbies
Several companies (typically the better ones to work for) want people who are different, sociable, will stand out
Consider "Hobbies: reading, cinema, dinner with friends" against "Hobbies: Field Archery (37th in National Championships), Cooking (Tex-Mex a speciality), RPGs with friends".
Which are you going to employ?
~Cederic
Yeah, but my job applications are crafted works of art, reviewed so many times the screens wearing thin, checked by other people and then reviewed again.
My Slashdot postings are typed as quickly as possible to avoid missing too much work.
~Cederic
ps: of course, after all that effort my CV is totally fucked up by the job agency I had to apply through, so the hiring company doesn't see the results of my diligence and style. But hey, everyone applying for that job has the same problem
Or better yet, do what I did and fax your MP.
If you're in the UK, visit www.faxyourmp.com - one of the few truly great sites on the internet.
~Cederic
cd-wow send each item direct from HK, with the appropriate customs notice, description of contents, value, etc.
Nothing shady or underhand.
They also provide an excellent service.
~Stuart
That's bullshit. There's nothing illegal about me personally buying an item from Hong Kong, asking the retailer to post it to me, and paying any necessary import duty.
~Cederic
I find I solve a lot of bugs in the shower. Or while out buying lunch. Or anywhere that my brain is not engaged in the current task, but where that current task is something other than the bug I'm trying to fix.
It's almost letting your subconscious thought processes work on the problem instead of trying to tackle it directly.
The upshot is that I feel no shame in saying "I'm not going to fix that bug today. I'll fix it tomorrow" when I'm stumped on something. Or a tricky design problem, etc - works for most problem solving situations.
Of course, this is all anecdotal..
~Cederic
Actually, I feel very superior to anybody that has to use CAPS LOCKS instead of using their baby finger to hold down the 'shift' key.
Not heard it called "Manual Shifting" before though..
~Cederic
ps: learned to drive (and owned) a manual gearbox car, now driving an automatic for medical reasons (buggered knees)
Hmm. No.
Microsoft is my-crow-soft
MikeRoweSoft is mike-row-soft
the difference is the imperceptible pause - for MS it's between i and c, for mike rowe it's between k and r
~ced
Strangely enough, Java is fast enough for the uses I put it to.
So C/C++ can do some things quicker than Java. Shrug. I don't care. The things I want to do in Java, Java can do fast enough. C/C++ can't do all that much (if any) faster.
If you want to measure performance, let's consider time from "hey, we need some software" to "ok, data processing complete". That's the sort of speed that matters - maybe the benchmark should have checked for that..
~cederic
>> You may just be hacking application programs for a living, but you still depend on all those libraries
Hacking applications? I fear not. Applying good software engineering practices to the creation of business software.
I may have "limited experience" but I'm experienced enough to know that writing graphics, image, audio and video codecs and libraries is something that one person does, then distributes to many. Unlike the software I create, which one person does, then one company uses for many years. That's an entirely different paradigm to creating a graphics library; don't act so surprised that a different language is in use.
"Pure Java" may be a lie; however I've used pure Java database drivers to connect to Oracle, I've used pure Java development tools and libraries that run on multiple platforms without recompilation, I've delivered systems that run equally well on Windows and Unix.
Most of what I want to do with Java can already be done with it; the rest tends to be specific business logic that I'd have to write myself anyway. Since Java meets my needs, and supplies many advantages other than execution speed, it is the language of choice for the business I work for.
I still haven't needed to write an FFT. Forgive me for being one of the millions of software engineers that falls into that category.
~Cederic
Yeah, but I've been writing software commercially for almost a decade, and I've never yet needed a "true multidimensional array" and I've certainly never needed to write an FFT.
If I were needing such things, maybe I'd use Matlab or C or FORTRAN.
Until then, I'll pick a language that suits my needs (and, quite importantly, those of my employer) and not get my knickers in a twist about non-my-real-world scenarios that the language may or may not handle.
~Cederic
Performance and scale are two different beasts.
However, there are definitely times when some languages are more appropriate than others.
Being mostly a one-language person (used to be guru level on others, but skills have lapsed) I restrict my development to the areas that language is strong in. And let people fluent in the other languages do the other work.
For the things most people use Java for, speed isn't that important compared to the reasons they're using it.
For people who need speed, maybe Java isn't the right choice. So pick something else and get on with it.
For the example environment shown, i.e. writing software to run on windows, I'd pick Delphi anyway - all the speed advantages of C, many of the programming language niceties of Java, all of the front-end simplicity of VB. Delphi rocks for Windows development. Shame it wasn't also benchmarked..
~Cederic
Which makes you a very unusual person.
Most people hate porting c/c++ between platforms, because it can (and often does) take an immense amount of effort. Not to mention the number of Windows programmers who'd panic without MFC or STL.
Most Java programmers on the other hand, writing server-side code (the main use for Java), develop on Windows and deploy on Unix. With zero code changes.
Sure, Java has portability issues. But don't even pretend most C++ code is more portable.
Incidentally, if you avoid platform, compiler and processor specific features, I suspect C++ is even more mind-bogglingly slow than Java.
~Cederic
ps: plus compiled Java is portable, not just the source code, of course
Oh, hell no.
the point of university is to get drunk, get laid, have a great time, and somehow con them into giving you a degree at the end of it.
worked for me..
~Cederic
ps: i got a very good degree in Financial Analysis from the #5 business school in the _world_ and still held down a job and spent an average of 40 hours a week (throughout the year) for three years 'playing' on the uni computers. Which is where I learned to program. Which is why I'm now in IT. So skipping lectures and treating the uni course as an excuse for being there can and did work..
Ah, thanks for the clarification on Atlanta.
From the Brazilian perspective, you _are_ just fingerprinting Brazilians. After all, the people they might consider their economic peers (the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Japan) don't get their citizens fingerprinted.
Brazil's hardly a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism either.. (actually, now I write that, it occurs to me that I have no idea at all. Maybe it is? I kinda assume they're all Catholic there)
If the UK gets added to the list of countries whose citizens are fingerprinted, I will stop coming to the US.
Brazil rock, I can't see why you could possibly have a problem with them applying the same security restrictions you're so enthusiastic for in Atlanta.
As for catching a dozen people in a couple of months.. the fingerprinting has only been happening for a couple of days, as far as I know..
~Ced
Except the UK..
Passports and driving licences are Blunkett's planned ways for introducing the new biometric ID cards.
So if you don't want a biometric passport, better renew in the next couple of years..
Why? Surely the assignment is to produce a piece of work (essay, code, whatever) to answer a question or resolve an issue.
If I happen to be able to answer multiple questions with a single piece of work, then that's a valid response to each one. The fact that I wrote it once and only changed it a little for each individual answer should be irrelevant - I still did the work, I noticed the applicability of it to multiple questions, and the course shouldn't be so repetitive that this is possible in the first place.
If I got "in serious trouble" for re-using my own writings, I'd be challenging that very strongly, at the highest levels. Heck, imagine if someone asked Jon Johansson to write a piece of code to decrypt DVDs - is he going to be starting from scratch? I fear not..
~Cederic
My car has a vanity mirror on the driver's side.
Then again, if I want to look at myself while driving I'll lean across and use the rear-view mirror.
~Cederic drove 54 miles in 41 minutes today to get to work. Distressingly it took him 45 minutes to get home again.
Actually, there was a vote in the Commons on whether we should go to war. The people that voted were the MPs, elected to represent the people of the UK.
So it wasn't a dictatorial decision, it was a democratic decision.
Admittedly, it was somewhat flawed, due to the party system in place, but hey, it's better than most countries can manage.
~Cederic
ps: for the record, i think blair is a cunt and lied to the country about the reasons for war
I think Dog Soldiers worked better, from a 'shit, whats that noise' scariness perspective.
But 28 days is probably the better film..
>> Now if only the British people could get over their attitude of "anyone who doesn't own a car is a loser", they we might just get somewhere with the rest of the country.
Hmm. Most people I know (and I live and work in Britain, and am British) don't have that attitude at all.
What is common is a desire to be able to move freely and conveniently, and at the moment that tends to be best achieved with a car.
As an example: I live 54 miles from where I work. I could:
- catch a bus to work. But it'd be 3 hours each way
- catch a bus to the train station, then a train to the nearest station to where I work, then bus it from there. But that'd be 4 hours each way
- drive. 50 minutes on a good day, less than two hours on a bad day
Realistically, what option do I have?
Now, in practice, I'm staying with a friend just 17 miles from where I work. Again though, I'm driving - and again, because it saves me over an hour _each way_ compared to using public transport.
I'm also trying to sell my home so that I can purchase one within 3 miles of work. But that takes time..
So no, the attitude isn't "if you don't have a car you're a loser", the attitude is "give me suitable alternatives".
~Cederic