The labor market is just like any other freemarket. I provide a service and the employer pays for it. And we both agree on the terms regarding hours and wage.
No, the labor market is not free. State and federal governments impose many limits on what employers can do. That's the basis of this lawsuit. The employer did not break a contract. The employer broke labor law, which sets rules for overtime.
It's up to the court to decide if the suit has merit or not. If I'm not mistaken most states are right to work so if you are summarily fired then you won't have much.
Depends how wild a story the ex-employee is willing to tell. Sexual and racial harrassment, fired for objecting to illegal practices, etc. And the story might even be true. If the case is tried by jury, the sympathies will be with the ex-employee. The more legal issues the ex-employee can raise, the better his chance of prevailing on one of them. There is a lot of randomness in these cases. One rogue ex-employee can simply wipe out a small business.
If you start a business, don't rely on those laminated breakroom sheets to guide you through the thicket of labor law. They wouldn't have helped in this case, since the issue is whether a certain group of employees is "exempt". We all know that CEOs are exempt and janitors aren't, but we don't all know which analysts, marketers and programmers should be considered exempt. Even lawyers can be wrong.
As for your squeamishness about overtime, I feel more confident having proven people on my team who can pull out all the stops when it's needed. It's rarely needed.
Here's a question: why are you advocating that not only should someone get shafted on unpaid overtime...
I am not advocating that someone should get "shafted". But government interference in employer-employee relations is a two-edged sword. Personally I have no desire to sue my past or future employers over things like this. If I feel I am being treated unfairly, I'll explain my position. If they don't fix the issue, I'll leave. Those who do pursue these issues hurt the economy and the job market for all of us.
..., but then have job insecurity to boot?
Job security by government fiat is not a good idea. It has a chilling effect on the employment market. Imagine if cell phone carriers had "job security". You sign up for Verizon, and then you can never "fire" them unless they do something horrible. This would cause:
Angry customers feeling trapped and sharing horror stories.
Poor service by carriers who feel "fireproof"
Reluctance to sign up for cell service by those who don't have it. You want to research very carefully before making that lifetime commitment.
If you have never hired an employee with your own money (I have), it may be hard to understand the employer's perspective. However it is crucial that you understand. Employers are not just magical money faucets. They are people and organizations trying to accomplish specific goals with limited resources. Hiring an employee is a big and scary decision.
Every time employers in the US get in legal trouble due to having employees, the pressure to outsource or offshore increases. We have an absolute infestation of laws, lawyers and lawsuits in the US, convincing everyone that he's been wronged.
The risk of hiring employees in the US is already high, and cases like this are driving it higher. When the risk and overhead per employee goes up there is less hiring, and more conservatism in hiring, which means the applicant with anything odd on his resume gets summarily rejected.
I often see slashdotters complaining that companies won't take a chance on them; the company demands skill X and the applicant thinks he could learn X in no time. Well suppose they hire you and you don't learn X? How hard is it to fire you? In the US, a fired employee has many ways to sue.
If we continue down this road, we'll end up like France, where it's almost impossible to fire someone. Students there recently protested against a proposed law that would let employers fire them within the first N months. Needless to say, they have high unemployment.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Stronger employee protections mean higher unemployment.
As for crazy overtime, everyone should do it for a few months at least, to find out what it's like and find his own limits. After that, you learn to probe for this when interviewing for a job. My last several jobs have all been about 40-45 hours per week, plus rare crunches.
Interesting points. I too enjoyed the older RH releases and used AfterStep. But running a modern distro does not mean you have to run Gnome or KDE. I currently use fluxbox, which is about as minimal and fast as you can reasonably get.
I don't see how free software can manage transition as well as commercial software. Thinking through the transition issues is a boring process. In a commercial software shop, the developers are interested in the new version. Others, like support and marketing, may be aware of the needs of existing customers. In free software, the developers run the show.
The "juvenile" names of programs also reflect the fact that developers run the show with no intervening marketing department. Inside commercial software shops, products and subsystems are given names much like free software. But these names are usually kept hidden, or only leak out to fans.
Is your problem occurring in interviews? If so, you need to take an honest, analytical look at the weak point. What kinds of questions are you failing to answer? Without a college degree, you need to demonstrate especially strong mastery of the common algorithms and data structures.
Also, monitor and improve your attitude. As we age, we tend to see more similarities to past events, as you noted. These similarities are not always valid, and usually should not be shared. Try to keep your conversation free of any ancient languages, platforms, etc.
I'm thinking about your "SHK" answer, and I'm convinced it's suboptimal. It registers somehow as an attempt to obfuscate the lack of college education. Somehow, your answer must address the concern. If you can take a couple of evening CS classes through a University extension program, or even work your way through some of MIT's Open Courseware units, you have a more encouraging answer.
I hope these suggestions will help and not annoy you. The problems you raise are on my mind as well.
In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law...
Before the president can sign a bill, it has to get passed by both houses of congress. It's one of the least stealthy processes on the planet.
And once a bill has been passed by Congress, the president normally signs it. To refuse to sign it is the exceptional event. So why does this writeup make it sound like Bush magically created this law himself?
I think Lua's main selling point is ease of embedding. When you write a large C++ application, you frequently end up wanting some embedded scripting language. Some interpreters, like Perl, are tricky to embed. Lua is very friendly to embedding. You can call user-defined Lua functions from C and call C functions from Lua.
The interpreter is small, and the language is sandboxable - for instance, you could have untrusted Lua running in your webserver and it would have no access to I/O or filesystem.
If you spill coffee on yourself, it's your fault. Americans in 1890 would have laughed at the idea of suing the restaurant. Shit happens. If the coffee didn't come from a mega-corporation, you know there wouldn't be any lawsuit. And calling people names is not very persuasive.
Of course any real terrorist will make sure that he (or she) acts as normal as possible.
This is the classic geek mistake when examining security - to assume it's a logic puzzle or chessboard. In the real world, if you can place an obstacle in your adversary's path, you gain an advantage. Of course he will probably go around it, but it gives him an additional burden and an additional chance to make a mistake.
There are probably thousands of variations on an airplane terrorist attack, each adapted to the visible security measures. The simpler variations have less complexity to break, but are easily stopped by the first security measures. A rational attacker would tend to choose the simplest workable plan. As the defender adds obstacles, the attacker has to add risky complexity to his plan.
I imagine that a geek would see a soldier digging a foxhole and tell him it's pointless - the enemy will just shoot him when he pokes his head up.
I think the idiots who designed this simply forgot about the possibility that people would take the tags off.
Yes, it's often like that. The specialists who spend months or years designing a system never think of issues that slashdotters think of in 30 seconds. Or so I hear on slashdot.
I think it's almost a sixth sense, kind of like slashdotters' ability to find prior art for any patent in 30 seconds.
I agree with most of your points. A stable, rugged, commoditized, low-power notebook platform would be awesome. But could we ever enjoy cheap prices on this platform if it wasn't supported by the quantities of the mass market?
As for Libya, I think people in the third world are quite cynical, and in fact better equipped to size up this project than most slashdotters. They are used to seeing government fads come and go. When you live under a Quadaffi, the green computers are just one of his eccentricities.
I was describing the OLPC to two Indian co-workers (A neutral presentation, with no sarcasm, I swear) - and they were incredulous. They explained that in poor parts of India, the OLPCs would be immediately sold to some trader.
I notice that Thailand is one of the seven countries which which OLPC has held initial discussions. In Thailand, Islamic militants have been killing two people per day on average, frequently targeting teachers. They object to secular education. When teachers fled, the government has tried sending in soldiers to teach.
I'm not sure how a teacher-beheading terrorist would react to a classroom full of lime-green notebooks. Maybe they could be programmed with a hotkey that displays "Allah Akhbar", thus avoiding the headsman's axe.
I have no idea where you get the OLPC is "designing down to kids." Maybe it is for children who grow up with iPods, XBoxen, broadband Internet access and plasma TVs.
That's not it. Your Sesame Street quote is close, though. I never liked that show - I could sense its condescension even when I was in the age bracket. Want the best tool for word processing, spreadsheets, etc? It's a Windows laptop. Want the best tool for learning to program? It's a C64 or Apple IIe or any leading micro of the era. (I bring in this ancient stuff to point out that it's not about horsepower - it's about design intent and focus.) In both cases, the creators were striving to be the best against tough competition.
This OLPC is not really trying to be the best - it's trying to get acceptance where there's no competition. It's designing down to kids because it needs its own "Sugar" UI - you think between Windows, MacOSX and Linux we don't already have fierce competition for good UIs? Do you think "Sugar" will take away some marketshare from Windows Vista or KDE?
I've learned to detect and loathe the foul scent of condescending "educational" foo, whether it's books, software of whatever.
First, these numbers stink. Yes, I searched, and found them in news stories. But there's no point in arguing that. When Dell "makes" a computer, they just plug together components that took much greater time to produce. So the assembly time at Dell is irrelevant.
What matters is overall cost. The math which Negroponte uses to dismiss recycled computers is clearly self-serving and fabricated. (I'm not saying recycled is the way to go.) Which points to my larger suspicion that this entire project is just an exercise in ego gratification. By the way, the OLPC will also require "handling".
In any event, I can't really fault your decision to sign up for one. Irrelevant thought it may be to the needs of the third world, the OLPC might be a better direction for first-worlders than the current fragile, low-battery-life machines.
I generally agree, but negotiations did work with the Russian soviets. For example, we negotiated SALT treaties. If the agreement is structured so both parties have a continuing incentive to keep following it, and both parties are rational actors (big assumption) it is viable. I think your real complaint is that we shouldn't give NK rewards for being evil.
I hate to rain on the love parade, but this OLPC/CHM1 thing sets off many alarm bells. Condescension sucks: Why does the OLPC need a special user interface ("Sugar")? Designing down to kids is a recipe for crap, as well as a refuge for the incompetent. Remember Logo? Well the guy behind Logo, Seymour Papert, is part of this project.
Dogfood gap:Torvalds uses Linux. Gates uses Windows. Jobs uses MacOS. Is Negroponte going to use the OLPC? Of course he'll play with one, but for real work - no way. From the FAQ:
Why not a desktop computer, or even better a recycled desktop machine?... Kids in the developing world need the newest technology, especially really rugged hardware and innovative software.
Why? Why do they need "the newest technology"? And if they do, shouldn't we admit that the newest technology is a Windows PC, not some oddball "educational computer"? The 400MHz CPU and 128M RAM are not in line with the newest technology. Again, from the FAQ:
Finally, regarding recycled machines: if we estimate 100 million available used desktops, and each one requires only one hour of human attention to refurbish, reload, and handle, that is forty-five thousand work years. Thus, while we definitely encourage the recycling of used computers, it is not the solution for One Laptop per Child.
So you're going to manufacture and handle the OLPC in less than one hour? Or maybe 100 million is the wrong number to start with. The question should be, which is more expensive, making an OLPC or refurbishing a normal computer.
You haven't told us much about your startup. Are you tiny and poor? Do you have any employees?
If you're tiny and poor, eating ramen and paying no salaries for now, then you don't need professional support for anything. You're better off saving that money and learning the skills needed to do it yourself.
If you have at least one programmer on salary, the cost of tools, licenses, etc. is tiny compared to payroll. Are you seriously making a decision that affects your chance of success based on a few percent of your annual budget?
Now behold: QT is $3300 per seat.
Are you saying that you wrote the app to QT before checking the price? Seems to be implied by this "rewrote":
We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700).
(3300-700) * 5 = $13k. You completely ported your app to save $13k? This certainly tilts the balance towards "tiny and poor" and away from buying pricy "support". But how do you justify the choice of C#? Surely your 'behold' moment with QT taught you some caution?
There are many factors in choosing a GUI toolkit. Price per development seat is a fairly minor one. The first question is, on what platforms must the GUI run? You haven't told us. You mentioned embedded Linux - is the GUI going to be part of the embedded product? Or running on PC's talking to the embedded product? If it's the former, do you realize that C#/Linux is a fairly risky path? Who will support you there? And how will you later hop to VxWorks, if needed? If it's the latter, have you asked an experienced Windows programmer about the tradeoffs between.NET and Win32 for client GUIs?
I think a startup needs experienced team members to succeed. There is not much time for learning new skills, and not much money for buying support. When you talk about randomly hopping from embedded Linux to VxWorks to WinCE, I do not get the sense of a seasoned embedded developer. Each of these OS's brings its own set of tradeoffs, its own nightmarish traps, and its own steep learning curve. I'm far from an embedded expert, but I've looked over the shoulders of experts enough to make that observation.
I think you need to work as a professional programmer for about 10 more years before you're ready for a startup.
I was the same, but finally gave in and learned C++. It is a great language. You don't have to use every crazy feature or go insanely OO. It's unfortunate that the C++ discussion is dominated by people who love the weirdest, least useful parts of the language.
Example: most books on C++ use cout << foo instead of printf. I tried it, hated it, went back to the printf family with a sense of guilt ("it's not typesafe"). Reading code from C++ programmers I respect, I found they use printf too. Iostreams is just trendy crap that unfortunately became part of C++.
I recommend Eckel's Thiking in C++ - written for the skeptical C programmer.
Now it's 2006, an election year, and all of a sudden this story rises from the dead like some zombie and trumpeted like it's fresh news.
I think the Post is concerned about the recent TV interview in which Bill Clinton became irate when asked about his failure to catch Bin Laden. The Post wants to remind us that the Bush administration may have also dropped the ball.
Java doesn't have function pointers? How do you write code that maps strings to functions? For example, a config file parser that calls a handler for each keyword it encounters? This seems to me an invaluable idiom. For example, in Apache's http_core.c: static const command_rec core_cmds[] = {... { "NameVirtualHost", ap_set_name_virtual_host, NULL, RSRC_CONF, TAKE1,
"A numeric IP address:port, or the name of a host" },
VCs are not in business to finance expansion of retail stores. They invest in high-risk, high-return ventures. Any investor or creditor brings problems to the business. If you can fund your expansion out of operating profits, you remain in the driver's seat and you can probably repeat your recipe for success.
Get another pair of hands on the wheel, and the vehicle may be headed off a cliff.
I guess it's a case of "different strokes for different folks". I've used VS (a fair bit) and Eclipse (briefly). While they have some nice productivity-boosters, I found them immensely slow and distracting. Wrestling with the GUI causes me to lose my train of thought.
Now I use Vim, and find it easier and faster.
As for word processors, I avoid them when possible. My company is pretty englightened (by my standards, not yours), and any documents I write are in HTML or Wiki markup. Using, you guessed it, Vim.
I guess I'm one of those complainers. I think typing 'vi' on a unix box should give you something that acts like vi. It's very unpleasant to find that vi acts strangely while trying to get a new box working. It's like having a tool break. Specifically, auto-indent means that if I paste lines into a file, they end up staircased.
The points is not whether it's a good feature. The point is that vi has a specific meaning, just like ls or cat. And it's a critical tool in configuring or rescuing a system. So messing with it was a very poor decision by distro maintainers.
I'm equally disgruntled with Gentoo's decision to only provide nano, and no vi by default.
I think it's great that vim continues to grow as an editor, and I'll happily explore those features in my spare time, but don't force them on me.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the labor market is not free. State and federal governments impose many limits on what employers can do. That's the basis of this lawsuit. The employer did not break a contract. The employer broke labor law, which sets rules for overtime.
Depends how wild a story the ex-employee is willing to tell. Sexual and racial harrassment, fired for objecting to illegal practices, etc. And the story might even be true. If the case is tried by jury, the sympathies will be with the ex-employee. The more legal issues the ex-employee can raise, the better his chance of prevailing on one of them. There is a lot of randomness in these cases. One rogue ex-employee can simply wipe out a small business.
If you start a business, don't rely on those laminated breakroom sheets to guide you through the thicket of labor law. They wouldn't have helped in this case, since the issue is whether a certain group of employees is "exempt". We all know that CEOs are exempt and janitors aren't, but we don't all know which analysts, marketers and programmers should be considered exempt. Even lawyers can be wrong.
As for your squeamishness about overtime, I feel more confident having proven people on my team who can pull out all the stops when it's needed. It's rarely needed.
I am not advocating that someone should get "shafted". But government interference in employer-employee relations is a two-edged sword. Personally I have no desire to sue my past or future employers over things like this. If I feel I am being treated unfairly, I'll explain my position. If they don't fix the issue, I'll leave. Those who do pursue these issues hurt the economy and the job market for all of us.
Job security by government fiat is not a good idea. It has a chilling effect on the employment market. Imagine if cell phone carriers had "job security". You sign up for Verizon, and then you can never "fire" them unless they do something horrible. This would cause:
If you have never hired an employee with your own money (I have), it may be hard to understand the employer's perspective. However it is crucial that you understand. Employers are not just magical money faucets. They are people and organizations trying to accomplish specific goals with limited resources. Hiring an employee is a big and scary decision.
Every time employers in the US get in legal trouble due to having employees, the pressure to outsource or offshore increases. We have an absolute infestation of laws, lawyers and lawsuits in the US, convincing everyone that he's been wronged.
The risk of hiring employees in the US is already high, and cases like this are driving it higher. When the risk and overhead per employee goes up there is less hiring, and more conservatism in hiring, which means the applicant with anything odd on his resume gets summarily rejected.
I often see slashdotters complaining that companies won't take a chance on them; the company demands skill X and the applicant thinks he could learn X in no time. Well suppose they hire you and you don't learn X? How hard is it to fire you? In the US, a fired employee has many ways to sue.
If we continue down this road, we'll end up like France, where it's almost impossible to fire someone. Students there recently protested against a proposed law that would let employers fire them within the first N months. Needless to say, they have high unemployment.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Stronger employee protections mean higher unemployment.
As for crazy overtime, everyone should do it for a few months at least, to find out what it's like and find his own limits. After that, you learn to probe for this when interviewing for a job. My last several jobs have all been about 40-45 hours per week, plus rare crunches.
Interesting points. I too enjoyed the older RH releases and used AfterStep. But running a modern distro does not mean you have to run Gnome or KDE. I currently use fluxbox, which is about as minimal and fast as you can reasonably get.
I don't see how free software can manage transition as well as commercial software. Thinking through the transition issues is a boring process. In a commercial software shop, the developers are interested in the new version. Others, like support and marketing, may be aware of the needs of existing customers. In free software, the developers run the show.
The "juvenile" names of programs also reflect the fact that developers run the show with no intervening marketing department. Inside commercial software shops, products and subsystems are given names much like free software. But these names are usually kept hidden, or only leak out to fans.
Is your problem occurring in interviews? If so, you need to take an honest, analytical look at the weak point. What kinds of questions are you failing to answer? Without a college degree, you need to demonstrate especially strong mastery of the common algorithms and data structures.
Also, monitor and improve your attitude. As we age, we tend to see more similarities to past events, as you noted. These similarities are not always valid, and usually should not be shared. Try to keep your conversation free of any ancient languages, platforms, etc.
I'm thinking about your "SHK" answer, and I'm convinced it's suboptimal. It registers somehow as an attempt to obfuscate the lack of college education. Somehow, your answer must address the concern. If you can take a couple of evening CS classes through a University extension program, or even work your way through some of MIT's Open Courseware units, you have a more encouraging answer.
I hope these suggestions will help and not annoy you. The problems you raise are on my mind as well.
The table's rumbling
The click wheel's turning
No I was not pushing that time
It spells M-S-Z-U-N-E
The table's rumbling
The click wheel's turning
No I was not pushing that time
F-U-C-K O double F
(Ouija Board)
Before the president can sign a bill, it has to get passed by both houses of congress. It's one of the least stealthy processes on the planet.
And once a bill has been passed by Congress, the president normally signs it. To refuse to sign it is the exceptional event. So why does this writeup make it sound like Bush magically created this law himself?
I think Lua's main selling point is ease of embedding. When you write a large C++ application, you frequently end up wanting some embedded scripting language.
Some interpreters, like Perl, are tricky to embed. Lua is very friendly to embedding. You can call user-defined Lua functions from C and call C functions from Lua.
The interpreter is small, and the language is sandboxable - for instance, you could have untrusted Lua running in your webserver and it would have no access to I/O or filesystem.
If you spill coffee on yourself, it's your fault. Americans in 1890 would have laughed at the idea of suing the restaurant. Shit happens. If the coffee didn't come from a mega-corporation, you know there wouldn't be any lawsuit. And calling people names is not very persuasive.
There are probably thousands of variations on an airplane terrorist attack, each adapted to the visible security measures. The simpler variations have less complexity to break, but are easily stopped by the first security measures. A rational attacker would tend to choose the simplest workable plan. As the defender adds obstacles, the attacker has to add risky complexity to his plan.
I imagine that a geek would see a soldier digging a foxhole and tell him it's pointless - the enemy will just shoot him when he pokes his head up.
Yes, it's often like that. The specialists who spend months or years designing a system never think of issues that slashdotters think of in 30 seconds. Or so I hear on slashdot.
I think it's almost a sixth sense, kind of like slashdotters' ability to find prior art for any patent in 30 seconds.
I agree with most of your points. A stable, rugged, commoditized, low-power notebook platform would be awesome. But could we ever enjoy cheap prices on this platform if it wasn't supported by the quantities of the mass market?
As for Libya, I think people in the third world are quite cynical, and in fact better equipped to size up this project than most slashdotters. They are used to seeing government fads come and go. When you live under a Quadaffi, the green computers are just one of his eccentricities.
I was describing the OLPC to two Indian co-workers (A neutral presentation, with no sarcasm, I swear) - and they were incredulous. They explained that in poor parts of India, the OLPCs would be immediately sold to some trader.
I notice that Thailand is one of the seven countries which which OLPC has held initial discussions. In Thailand, Islamic militants have been killing two people per day on average, frequently targeting teachers. They object to secular education. When teachers fled, the government has tried sending in soldiers to teach.
I'm not sure how a teacher-beheading terrorist would react to a classroom full of lime-green notebooks. Maybe they could be programmed with a hotkey that displays "Allah Akhbar", thus avoiding the headsman's axe.
That's not it. Your Sesame Street quote is close, though. I never liked that show - I could sense its condescension even when I was in the age bracket. Want the best tool for word processing, spreadsheets, etc? It's a Windows laptop. Want the best tool for learning to program? It's a C64 or Apple IIe or any leading micro of the era. (I bring in this ancient stuff to point out that it's not about horsepower - it's about design intent and focus.) In both cases, the creators were striving to be the best against tough competition.
This OLPC is not really trying to be the best - it's trying to get acceptance where there's no competition. It's designing down to kids because it needs its own "Sugar" UI - you think between Windows, MacOSX and Linux we don't already have fierce competition for good UIs? Do you think "Sugar" will take away some marketshare from Windows Vista or KDE?
I've learned to detect and loathe the foul scent of condescending "educational" foo, whether it's books, software of whatever.
First, these numbers stink. Yes, I searched, and found them in news stories. But there's no point in arguing that. When Dell "makes" a computer, they just plug together components that took much greater time to produce. So the assembly time at Dell is irrelevant.
What matters is overall cost. The math which Negroponte uses to dismiss recycled computers is clearly self-serving and fabricated. (I'm not saying recycled is the way to go.) Which points to my larger suspicion that this entire project is just an exercise in ego gratification. By the way, the OLPC will also require "handling".
In any event, I can't really fault your decision to sign up for one. Irrelevant thought it may be to the needs of the third world, the OLPC might be a better direction for first-worlders than the current fragile, low-battery-life machines.
I generally agree, but negotiations did work with the Russian soviets. For example, we negotiated SALT treaties. If the agreement is structured so both parties have a continuing incentive to keep following it, and both parties are rational actors (big assumption) it is viable. I think your real complaint is that we shouldn't give NK rewards for being evil.
Condescension sucks: Why does the OLPC need a special user interface ("Sugar")? Designing down to kids is a recipe for crap, as well as a refuge for the incompetent. Remember Logo? Well the guy behind Logo, Seymour Papert, is part of this project.
Dogfood gap:Torvalds uses Linux. Gates uses Windows. Jobs uses MacOS. Is Negroponte going to use the OLPC? Of course he'll play with one, but for real work - no way.
From the FAQ:
Why? Why do they need "the newest technology"? And if they do, shouldn't we admit that the newest technology is a Windows PC, not some oddball "educational computer"? The 400MHz CPU and 128M RAM are not in line with the newest technology.
Again, from the FAQ: So you're going to manufacture and handle the OLPC in less than one hour? Or maybe 100 million is the wrong number to start with. The question should be, which is more expensive, making an OLPC or refurbishing a normal computer.
Looks like the tech version of "Live Aid".
If you're tiny and poor, eating ramen and paying no salaries for now, then you don't need professional support for anything. You're better off saving that money and learning the skills needed to do it yourself.
If you have at least one programmer on salary, the cost of tools, licenses, etc. is tiny compared to payroll. Are you seriously making a decision that affects your chance of success based on a few percent of your annual budget?
Are you saying that you wrote the app to QT before checking the price? Seems to be implied by this "rewrote":
(3300-700) * 5 = $13k. You completely ported your app to save $13k? This certainly tilts the balance towards "tiny and poor" and away from buying pricy "support". But how do you justify the choice of C#? Surely your 'behold' moment with QT taught you some caution?
There are many factors in choosing a GUI toolkit. Price per development seat is a fairly minor one. The first question is, on what platforms must the GUI run? You haven't told us. You mentioned embedded Linux - is the GUI going to be part of the embedded product? Or running on PC's talking to the embedded product?
If it's the former, do you realize that C#/Linux is a fairly risky path? Who will support you there? And how will you later hop to VxWorks, if needed?
If it's the latter, have you asked an experienced Windows programmer about the tradeoffs between
I think a startup needs experienced team members to succeed. There is not much time for learning new skills, and not much money for buying support. When you talk about randomly hopping from embedded Linux to VxWorks to WinCE, I do not get the sense of a seasoned embedded developer. Each of these OS's brings its own set of tradeoffs, its own nightmarish traps, and its own steep learning curve. I'm far from an embedded expert, but I've looked over the shoulders of experts enough to make that observation.
I think you need to work as a professional programmer for about 10 more years before you're ready for a startup.
I was the same, but finally gave in and learned C++. It is a great language. You don't have to use every crazy feature or go insanely OO. It's unfortunate that the C++ discussion is dominated by people who love the weirdest, least useful parts of the language.
Example: most books on C++ use cout << foo instead of printf. I tried it, hated it, went back to the printf family with a sense of guilt ("it's not typesafe"). Reading code from C++ programmers I respect, I found they use printf too. Iostreams is just trendy crap that unfortunately became part of C++.
I recommend Eckel's Thiking in C++ - written for the skeptical C programmer.
I think the Post is concerned about the recent TV interview in which Bill Clinton became irate when asked about his failure to catch Bin Laden. The Post wants to remind us that the Bush administration may have also dropped the ball.
Java doesn't have function pointers? How do you write code that maps strings to functions? For example, a config file parser that calls a handler for each keyword it encounters? This seems to me an invaluable idiom. For example, in Apache's http_core.c:
...
static const command_rec core_cmds[] = {
{ "NameVirtualHost", ap_set_name_virtual_host, NULL, RSRC_CONF, TAKE1,
"A numeric IP address:port, or the name of a host" },
ap_set_name_virtual_host is a function.
VCs are not in business to finance expansion of retail stores. They invest in high-risk, high-return ventures. Any investor or creditor brings problems to the business. If you can fund your expansion out of operating profits, you remain in the driver's seat and you can probably repeat your recipe for success.
Get another pair of hands on the wheel, and the vehicle may be headed off a cliff.
At least on British trawlers, it was customary to scrub any mold off of meat before cooking it. (Search for "funny coloured".).
If it was done there, it was probably done in many places.
I imagine that the submitter started with "anyone who's used Linux", then remembered the BSD's, then thought of other obscure OS's out there...
And groping for the right adjective (Unixy OS? Open Source OS?) somehow dropped it.
I guess it's a case of "different strokes for different folks". I've used VS (a fair bit) and Eclipse (briefly). While they have some nice productivity-boosters, I found them immensely slow and distracting. Wrestling with the GUI causes me to lose my train of thought.
Now I use Vim, and find it easier and faster.
As for word processors, I avoid them when possible. My company is pretty englightened (by my standards, not yours), and any documents I write are in HTML or Wiki markup. Using, you guessed it, Vim.
(This comment composed in Vim).
I guess I'm one of those complainers. I think typing 'vi' on a unix box should give you something that acts like vi. It's very unpleasant to find that vi acts strangely while trying to get a new box working. It's like having a tool break. Specifically, auto-indent means that if I paste lines into a file, they end up staircased.
The points is not whether it's a good feature. The point is that vi has a specific meaning, just like ls or cat. And it's a critical tool in configuring or rescuing a system. So messing with it was a very poor decision by distro maintainers.
I'm equally disgruntled with Gentoo's decision to only provide nano, and no vi by default.
I think it's great that vim continues to grow as an editor, and I'll happily explore those features in my spare time, but don't force them on me.