| last updated:20 Jul 2004 10:11 UK time |
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| JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 18 Jul 2004) | View Other Weeks |
| Some ISVs just don't seem to get it | Sun 18 Jul | one programmer's opinion |
| I dont care how many features or how great a software product an individual or company might create, if potential customers have to spend an un-godly amount of time reading or experimenting just to produce something useful with the product then many potential customers are going to spend their money elsewhere or choose a free open source alternative! For me, SmartDraw (a drawing program) is currently a product you would have to pay me to use. SmartDraw might be a simple easy-to-use program or a very sophisticated program. I currently dont know which one it is since I didnt bother to download the trial version of SmartDraw. While I have known about the existence of SmartDraw for some time, I only recently decided to check out what this program had to offer by visiting SmartDraws website (http://www.smartdraw.com). At first, I was really impressed with what this website had to offer potential customers (free trial download of the product, various online tutorials, example pictures of what you can produce with this product, free pictures/clipart, a downloadable PDF manual, etc.) until I spent some time reading the online tutorials and the users guide (a downloadable PDF file). In my opinion the online tutorials and the single tutorial that was provided within the users guide are a total joke. While I expected the Users Guide (a downloadable PDF file) to be nothing more than a reference manual, I didnt expect the online tutorials to be what they turned out to be! For example, one of the tutorial web pages I checked out on your website was the UML tutorial web page. I expected that the material within this section of the website would provide me with some step-by-step instructions on how to create one or more UML diagrams using SmartDraw. Instead of teaching me how to create a class diagram or a sequence diagram all I read there was a description of what UML is and a description (several web pages worth) of the various things that are part of the UML! In my opinion, a tutorial should demonstrate how easy it is to create a class diagram with SmartDraw not what a class diagram is. While I have no problem with the UML related reference material that was provided to me for free, I do have a problem with a company calling that calls that kind of material a tutorial (which it clearly is not). Granted many companies dont have the resources to provide step-by-step examples for everything (expecially for free). That is not what I am complaining about. All that I am really trying to say is that companies shouldnt make things more difficult for a potential customer then they are. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Trying to be a nice guy. | I agree. The problem is that sometimes the ISV doesn't realize what it is doing wrong. Maybe the people over at SmartDraw don't realize that they have not actually written a tutorial. This is where feedback comes in handy. I can understand that you might not want to send them an email but it may be beneficial for both you and them if you let them know. Most ISV's have a message forum or a feedback form in the program and an email address which can be used to notify them of the things you would like them to change. Whether you choose to open their eyes or not is up to you. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | What a strange post. You say you didn't bother to download their product and here is your blistering review of it. You complain that they teach you about UML drawings. I have to ask, if they jumped right in and assumed you knew what a UML diagram is, do you suppose that people would be posting complaints that the tutorial was not helpful because it assumed they already had this knowledge? I think they would! You know why? Because some people just like to complain about everything, that's why! |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | OK, I've had a look at their site and their tutorials and I have to say that you are blatantly misrepresenting their product their site design and the quality of the tutorials. The UML tutorial is clearly labelled as a tutorial to teach you about UML and it is a very fine tutorial, the best I have seen online for free. The manual from the program is a separate download and its purpose and location are made quite clear. Your review is extremely unfair. |
| Does term "Troll" come from "trolling for ..." ? | Sun 18 Jul | Mr. Analogy |
| I always assumed the term TROLL (as in dont feed the troll) referred to the mythical characters (or the AD&D regenerating, hard to kill variety :-). I just realized the other day that it probably evolved from trolling as in fishing or patrolling http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=troll To fish for by trailing a baited line from behind a slowly moving boat. To fish in by trailing a baited line: troll the lake for bass. To trail (a baited line) in fishing. Slang. To patrol (an area) in search for someone or something: “ [Criminals] troll bus stations for young runaways” (Pete Axthelm). |
| Sun 18 Jul | Trying to be a nice guy. | Yup. http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=57819&ixReplies=29 |
| Paul Graham's new book of essays. | Sun 18 Jul | Herr Herr |
| In another thread someone wrote: As for me, Im still contemplating whether I should buy Paul Grahams new book of essays. I bought it two weeks ago and I dont recommend the same. What I considered to be the more interesting and better written articles I had already read online. Namely Why Nerds are Unpopular and A Plan for Spam. The rest of it really seemed pretty average and not worth the money. Some of it was clearly written years ago and given the changes to the IT industry and the Internet since 1995 the information is too outdated to be useful. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Tayssir John Gabbour | The main point of releasing it was for his ideas to gain 'respectability' with the cachet of a pretty O'Reilly hardcover. So people shouldn't feel too bad if the $20 is an issue. Personally though, I found your experience to be 100% different from mine. I had no interest in spam or unhappy nerds, so I skipped that part. Yet I was happy with my purchase. Very good loaner book, wide appeal. So I guess this proves the happy truth that people are different. |
| PHP / MySQL weirdness | Sun 18 Jul | muppet |
| allright, I have a SQL query that, when run directly against my mySQL server through the admin tool, returns two rows. The very same query returns only one row when run via mysql_query( ) in PHP. Ive checked EVERY possible way this could be a bug in my code, or a commit problem on the database end, and Ive even altered the query in the code to remove ALL criteria (so it returns everything) and the row is still missing. (there are currently only two rows in the table). What sort of things could be causing this bug?? its basically like this: Table_1: ID Name Desc --- --------- ---------------------------- 1 foo fubar! Table_2: Other_ID Owner Contact ------------ ----------- ---------------------------- 1 boo booFunction 1 moo mooFunction my query: SELECT B.* FROM Table_2 B INNER JOIN Table_1 A ON (B.Other_ID = A.ID) WHERE A.Name = foo I should get both rows in Table_2 as a return, right? And I do if I run the query in phpmyadmin. But if I run it through PHP I get only the first row. Ive even created a stripped down test script to run just this query, and I get the same result. what gives? This is bizarre! |
| Sun 18 Jul | Clay Dowling | muppet, A better place for these questions might be over at http://forums.devshed.com The forums there are dedicated to just such topics, and you'll find a bigger pool of people to answer you (at times, I'm one of them). |
| Sun 18 Jul | muppet | you've got a point. There's been a few coding questions here, but it's not really the point of the place, is it? OK. |
| Sun 18 Jul | JD | And can you display your PHP code as well so that one can look at it and find the problem? JD |
| Sun 18 Jul | muppet | I found the problem. It was insanely stupid on my part. misplaced return statement took me 5 HOURS to find in my defense, it's a pretty complex system I'm troubleshooting. :-) |
| Sun 18 Jul | Raja O'brien | muppet, you need to simmer down. You make a better case for offshoring than anything else I've ever read. |
| Sun 18 Jul | muppet | LOL ok if you say so I'm the most productive developer in my shop. I just tend to get a little manic while developing. Not necessarily a bad thing. |
| which that? that which? | Sun 18 Jul | hoser |
| ... and somebody smarter than me has sorted out all the whiches and the thats. In grade school, we were specifically told that that and which were pretty much interchangeable. Now, whenever I use which, grammar checkers get annoyed. So what is the rule for which/that - or does it really matter. I have a fix for that bug which/that just needs to be tested. Which is it? My English sucks. Too bad its my only language. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Christopher Wells | MS Word wants to see either ... 'I have a fix for that bug, which just needs to be tested.' ... or ... 'I have a fix for that bug that just needs to be tested.' Note that the first has a comma. You can also google for 'that or which' (include the quotation marks). |
| Sun 18 Jul | Stephen Jones | It's a British/American difference. For non-defining(descriptive) relative clauses such as Joel Spolsky, who writes a blog called 'Joel on Software', is an ex-Micorosoft employee. you must use 'who/which' in both regional variants. For defining relative clauses, such as The guy that writes the 'Joel on Software' blog is called Joel Spolsky. American English insists on 'that' but British English allows either 'that' or 'who/which'. I don't know what happens if you set the grammar checker for Word to check UK English as I never use it. If you still get the pattern Christopher refers to for UK English, then it's a bug and Microsoft should fix it. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Lou | While I don't have my GMAT book in front of me, I believe that it indicates that in Standard Written English (a rigorously defined style) the difference between 'that' and 'which' depends on whether one is using the clause to limit the antecedent or not. I'll dig up their examples and definition later if I can. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Lou | And here's the quote from my GMAT book: That, Which 'That' is the resrictive pronoun. A phrase or subordinate clause introduced by 'that' limits the meaning of the word it modifies. A restrictive phrase or clause is essential to the meaning of the sentence and is not set off by commas. 'Which' is nonrestrictive. e.g., The bus that stops near my house just left. The bus, which stops near my house, just left. |
| Sun 18 Jul | www.marktaw.com | Ah so: > The bus that stops near my house just left. 'The bus that stops near my house' is one item, and it just left. > The bus, which stops near my house, just left. 'The bus' is one item. It happens to stop near my house as well. Oh, and it just left. |
| Full Circle ? | Sun 18 Jul | Steve Jones (UK) |
| I just had a strange thought which I would like to share. Twenty years ago, I was doing Z80 machine code programming and wrote an assembler to make life easier, converting opcodes and arguments into executable code. Now, in my latest project, Im creating a dynamic Business Rules engine, which involves using Reflection.Emit to convert opcodes and arguments into executable code. I must admit that doing this in VS.NET is a lot nicer than writing the assembler in assembler (talk about bootstrap), but I thought it was bizarre that Im doing pretty much the same thing again. Anyone else had this kind of deja vu experience ? |
| Sun 18 Jul | M. Night Shammalammaram | Several years ago at work, a new manager came in and made all sorts of changes. Everyone complained and he gave us the standard lecture about 'change' and how we must 'continually change in order to stay competitive'. A few years later, he leaves and a new manager comes in. He makes all sorts of changes. Everyone complains, we get the same lecture. A few years later, he leaves and a new manager comes in. He makes a lot of changes. Most of his changes put us right back where we started. The more things change the more they stay the same. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Chris Nahr | Steve -- couldn't you use CodeSmith or run-time compiled C# code for the same purpose? Reflection.Emit is not normally something you need to use unless you're writing a compiler. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Evgeny Gesin /Javadesk/ | Managers worry about personal careers. They do the same managerial things learnt from the books, courses, etc. They need a plan and budget. Developers use past experience to write a next software. They write software twise, but when it comes to the third time, they move to a next work to write twise another software. They need work and new experiences. Repeating the same steps is called Patterns. There are should be Managerial Patterns, Software Patterns, 101001011 Patterns.. |
| Sun 18 Jul | code is just instructions to a computer | 'Reflection.Emit is not normally something you need to use unless you're writing a compiler.' Er, he is doing that - he's compiling business rules into executable code of some description. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Mr. Analogy | Steven Spielberg has been making UFO-type movies for 25 years: E.T., Close Encounters, Taken, etc. Some archetypes never die. Some basic engineering methods never die. They just get recycled. |
| Has anyone used the product TestComplete? | Sun 18 Jul | Looking for Testing Solutions |
| What are your thoughts? Can you setup individual unit tests somewhat similar to a NUnit/JUnit/CppUnit? We have a large-scale Win32/MFC application, and wed like to start incoporating some automated regression tests to keep everything in check. Any insight on this product or similar products would be greatly appreciated. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Colin | I have, it is pretty good. It does the running of test pretty well automating the ui with a reasonable amount of polish. I haven't had a chance to set it up as a set of tests thus far, I have been using it for another purpose right now. I would advise the use of it's evaluation period, it is a reasonably solid gui automater. |
| One Page Resume's Work! (IMO) | Sun 18 Jul | Mark S |
| In a recent discussion, ( http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=164045&ixReplies=24 ), 2-3 page resumes were advocated because people didnt think they could say everything on one page, or they were concerned that they couldnt describe their entire 20 years as a contractor on a single page without going to a 3 pt font. I must view a resume differently, because I dont see it as technical specification. I just see it more as a marketing piece. When Ive been on the hiring side, and Ive had to go through those multi-page resumes, it didnt bode well for the candidate. Most of them were an attempt to list EVERY FRIGGIN THING that person did. Boring and mostly irrelevent stuff. Ugh! When Ive got 25-50 resumes to choose from, if you cant capture my interest on the first page, youre sunk. If you have a resume of two or more pages, IMO, youre not taking the time to tailor your resume to the job youre applying for. Do you really want this job or did you just SPAM your generic resume out to me. If you catch my interest on a one page resume, and I want to know more about you, I guess Ill have to grant you an interview to tell me more about yourself. Goal of the resume accomplished, you get an interview. If you send me a multi-page resume, and you catch my interest on the first page, Ill want to know more about you. Oh... theres 2 more pages to read... what else is here... an entire history of each project that theyve worked on for the last 25 years... ugh... Every language and OS theyve touched. Yawn... [interest generated on page one now waning a little as Im bored with page 2 and 3] Gee, I feel like I know know the candidates entire history. Why bother with the interview. Probably just drone on about all of this all over again. IMO, the goal of a resume isnt to exhaustively list your skills and detailed achievements. Its to catch the eye of the hiring manager and tweak their interest enough that they want to know more and bring you in for that face-to-face where you can do the real sales pitch of yourself. One page should be enough for the resume. Then theres the cover letter that gives you another chance to catch their eye. (It should be minimal also). Its worked for me. Ive done very well with the one page resume. YMMV I guess. Oh. I chose to make this a new topic because if I tacked it onto the end of the last discussion, I figured most people wouldnt have read far enough to notice my reply. ;-) |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | Yeah OK it probably depends. There was one job I really wanted. I put together a two page resume targetted to them. I attached a 16 page cover letter to it describing in mind-numbing detail why they should hire me. The day after I sent it in the mail, I got a phone call from their vice president who said 'We just got out of a meeting discussing the resume we sent and it is the most compelling thing we have ever read.' So, sure, a one pager works sometimes. And other times a 18 pager works. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Prakash S | did you take that job? how did that work out? |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | Yeah, of course! I loved it it was great! That's where I got my first experience designing chips. It was a blast. Fun people too, though some of them were kind of nuts. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Mark S | Wow Dennis. 18 page cover letter!?! You said that you 'really wanted the job'. I'd make a guess that on the 1st page of your cover letter, you caught their attention with your enthusiasm, and the remaining 17 pages, you continued to do one hell of a sales pitch. Congratulations! I didn't mean to imply that the 1 page was the only way. It's worked well for me. It's what I'd rather see as a hiring manager, and the vast majority of 2-3 page resumes that I've seen were utter failures at catching my interest and didn't translate into interviews as well as the GOOD one-page resumes. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | > I'd make a guess that on the 1st page of your cover letter, you caught their attention with your enthusiasm Yes, absolutely. And put in a bit of weirdness to make sure they read the whole thing out of curiosity. > and the remaining 1[5] pages, you continued to do one hell of a sales pitch. You win the prize! That's absolutely correct. I haven't pulled the same stunt again, as that was a unique situation where I was absolutely perfect for that job and I was absolutely the person they were looking for even though they didn't realize it. I was actually rather bold in the body of the letter and covered a number of subjects including ones that had nothing to do with the job but did have to do with me as a weird character. I guess thinking about it is that I didn't have anything to lose. I didn't have the job and if they ignored the letter I would be right where I was before. The advise I would give here is not to write a long letter but to be willing to take a dangerous risk if you feel inspired to do so. Sometimes it pays off and again they key thing is 'what do I have to lose'. This advise to take a chance and not be afraid to be original also works in the romantic arena, for those of you out there who are still single. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Management Material | Dennis, tell us more please. How are you a weird character? |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | You must be new around here. |
| Sun 18 Jul | www.marktaw.com | Sounds good to me. If you're afraid of what they'll think of you, they can smell it. So just be yourself & go for it. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Stephen Jones | I've said it before and I'll say it again - the trouble with one page resumes is small font size. I've seen over three thousand resumes in the last four years and I hate the one page ones - the fonts go down to 9.5 and you have to squint. Use 11pt for Arial or 12pt for Times New Roman (I prefer the latter but preferences seem to vary according to what side of the Atlantic you're on). Leave a little white space. Use bold and tables or tabs. Everything else the OP says is correct though. |
| Sun 18 Jul | T. Norman | The trouble is that getting past the HR drones and pleasing the hiring manager require two different optimal solutions but you only have one resume with which to do it. HR drones play buzzword bingo, so the more you can list every project and technology you touched, the better your chances of getting past them. Ideally the HR person would not be a drone; they would be well informed about the industry and would actually understand what they read on a resume and thus would not play buzzword bingo. But such HR people are few and far between. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Michael Moser | Can you post two resumes? A long and a short version? - after all, 'there is more than one way to do things' |
| Sun 18 Jul | Tom H | 'If you have a resume of two or more pages, IMO, you're not taking the time to tailor your resume to the job you're applying for' That's the reason I prefer one-page resumes. A three-page dump of everything the caodidate has ever done (even if it's one Stephen received that was crammed into one page by using tiny fonts) shows me that the candidate hasn't taken the time to do a little investigation and update the resume so it will jump out at the person screening it for that particular job. And Dennis' the 18 page cover letter was the same idea, he didn't send it to every place he applied, just the one where the sales pitch would resonate. |
| Sun 18 Jul | ITECS | Also remember when not to use a C.V. (or resume) ! Where I work all applicants have to use a standard application form. It states clearly that a C.V. should not be attached on any account. However the number of applicants who attach a C.V. and have their applications discounted because they can't follow instructions is something to behold. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Mark S | [T. Norman] The trouble is that getting past the HR drones and pleasing the hiring manager require two different optimal solutions but you only have one resume with which to do it. Why would you send your resume to an HR Drone? Why not do the research and find out who the person is that you need to get your resume to in the organization and go direct, with a resume that's tailored to that person. Sometimes HR Drones give the resume to the WRONG person in the organization and it quickly goes into the trash... lost opportunity. Maybe I'm used to dealing with smaller, local companies. I guess in some instances, where you're relying on headhunters to do leg work, or your up against a larger corporate organization, that's a little more difficult (but not impossible). I used to work for an 80,000 person corporation, but the local division was only 100 people. It would be very easy to call the main phone line, and ask the receptionist, 'Can you tell me the name of the Software Development manager at your site?' Better yet, if you're not shy, 'I'd like to talk to the development manager at your site'. Then introduce yourself, ask a few questions and tell them that you'd like to send your resume in... Regarding small fonts on one pages resumes, that's just a degenerate form of the two page resume, IMHO. The point is, don't over-do the information in the resume. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Stephen Jones | Get a page of letter, allow 1.5 line spacing, columns (using tabs or tables) and 12pt Times New Roman font, and try and squeeze the resume into the number of lines required. Can't be done. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Bored Bystander | Are there any guides to writing resumes for hard core technology people? Most book and resume examples are for generic office worker or sales positions. What would REALLY help would be if some kind soul would post tutorial examples of resumes edited for application to specific jobs, with the resume presented side by side with the job ad, RFP or posted requirements. And specifically targeted for development positions. The problem with generic advice in this domain is that it's, ahh, generic. IE: I had no clue how to pare down my hugely bloated resume to a reasonable (but still apparently bloated) size until a peer kindly explained exactly what I needed to do to create clusters of information and reduce redundancy. |
| Sun 18 Jul | T. Norman | 'Why would you send your resume to an HR Drone? Why not do the research and find out who the person is that you need to get your resume to in the organization and go direct, with a resume that's tailored to that person.' Does that actually work? I've known of cases where a resume finds its way directly to a manager, and the manager directly sends it to HR upon seeing that it is a resume. Management doesn't want to see it unless it comes from HR, or was referred by somebody they know. Then again, that's probably not the type of company I'd want to work for. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Philo | 'Most of them were an attempt to list EVERY FRIGGIN THING that person did. Boring and mostly irrelevent stuff. Ugh!' Yeah, that whole 'experience' thing is *completely* overrated. Glad you don't like hearing about it. In all seriousness, my resume is two pages - contact info, education (to pass the 'must have a degree' hurdle), bullet points about experience (must... have... keywords...), then my experience, most recent on back. I make certain that my last three jobs are on the front page. Therefore - one page that should give you enough for a go/no-go, and second page to show that my nine years of IT experience isn't one year nine times, and also why my six years on ships might just matter to you after all. I guess I just hate absolutes. One page may work for some people, nineteen pages may work for others (though not as many). Keep it short, try to make sure the first page is a 'grabber', and remember your resume is living on borrowed time when it's being read. Philo |
| Sun 18 Jul | www.marktaw.com | I don't know what's wrong with a 1 page resume. If my resume was HTML it would look something like this: I ROCK! Well, that might be 2 or 3 pages after all. The Adams books are filled with 'real resumes & cover letters that got people jobs.' Some of them have tech sections. IMHO you can't give generic advice on writing resumes. On some level you either have the skills or you don't. On another, you just don't want your resume to look like everyone else's. |
| Sun 18 Jul | managers are all wonderful people | Some people demand a one page resume. Some demand a detailed listing of one's experience and skills. The solution is obvious: buy a roll of fax paper and have one really huge resume on one sheet of paper. Alternatively, accept that 'I hire people and I won't give you an interview unless your resume fits this arbitrary critera' is not a good basis for another rewrite of your resume, particularly as the next manager along will have an entirely different set of prejudices. Oh, and anyone who seriously says 'I hire people and I'ld love to have 500 people call and ask what I want in a resume instead of just skimming through 500 resumes that may or may not fit my personal prejudices precisely' obviously has a weird view of management. Some people insist on advising job seekers to personally call the senior person in charge of hiring and irritate them just to find out what their personal preferences are, but in the real world this is quickly going to stop being 'an impressive display of initiative' and start being 'a serious irritation leading to the phone being damaged beyond repair.' They've apparantly never considered adding the text 'one page resumes only' to their job ad. I guess that's too complicated for them. At least then the problem would become 'unable to follow simple instructions - no hire' instead of 'not telepathic, and realised that I'm actually busy doing real work as well - no hire.' Here's some good advice, though: learn to tell the difference between useful advice and demands that the world caters to one person's personal preferences. |
| Offshore economics | Sun 18 Jul | www.xndev.com (Formerly Matt H.) |
| Someone recently posted that a lot of the problems with offshore work is title inflation. In other words, you have this developing 3rd world country where everyone has a very small (grade school-ish) education as a child. Then the jobs come, and people get the equivilant of a one or two semeter course (may one or two whole semesters) of technology courses without context. So, of course, the hourly rate for the person is ridiculously expensive ($30/hr after 3 kinds of markup and overhead), but you get some one who writes buggy, spagetti code that might not work at all. Other thought: Address some high-school computer science classes in the midwest. Basic theme: I will pay for some college and give you a job when you graduate. Its like ROTC for Computer Science. Heres the program: Summer of Senior Year in high school: Take 2 courses at local community college (Paid for by Local Outsourcers Inc.) Senior Year in high school: AP Computer Science, Calculus, 4 more classes at local community college. Summer After Graduation: 2 more classes. Immediate after that: Begin to work 35 hours a week for Local Outsourcers, Inc. at $15/hour. Take night courses at local CC until associates is completed. The courses would be focused technology courses Thats pretty darn good pay for no degree. I think I could bill $30/hour for someone like that, plus theyd be local. The only problem is that I probably couldnt be proud of the work they would produce. The really brilliant kids would just go to MIT on scholarship anyway. :-) But the point is that if you stack the decks equally, the economic case for offshore doesnt really work that well. Or, at least, I think so. Thoughts? |
| Sun 18 Jul | www.xndev.com (Formerly Matt H.) | >So, of course, the hourly rate for >the person is 'ridiculously expensive' I Should have written 'ridiculously cheap.' Oops. |
| Sun 18 Jul | T. Norman | Those who offshored software 5-10 years ago went about it with much more planning and patience, and it was much cheaper back then. But nowadays the rush to send everything offshore is now driven by fads and the illusions of profits. Sensible economic arguments and evidence won't sway the decision makers. There are a dozen ways other than offshoring by which they could save more, but offshoring is the fad so that is what they will do. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | Agree with you Mr. Formerly (can't you keep youri old name how do I keep track of all this). Some companieds already do stuff like this and have no shortage of qualified people. It's also a good way to invest in one's community and tends to pay dividends even if the kids move on. |
| Sun 18 Jul | . | Matt H, you're correct. A substantial part of the offshoring push has been from what we would call dodgy businessmen. I think the different culture and the large distances help to hide things that would be a lot more obvious if it was locals. For example, if Joe the used car salesman hired five keen guys and gave them a 1-week ASP course, then hired them out as top developers, complete with phoney resumes, it would be easy for us to detect that Joe didn't know the types of things we would expect for someone from the background he claimed. With overseas offshorers, that's not so apparent. Not all the offshorers fit this pattern of course. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Stephen Jones | ----'In other words, you have this developing 3rd world country where everyone has a very small (grade school-ish) education as a child. Then the jobs come, and people get the equivilant of a one or two semeter course (may one or two whole semesters) of technology courses without context.'---- Can you please let on which 3rd World country you are talking about. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Some people just can't stop... | Formerly... ----'In other words, you have this developing 3rd world country where everyone has a very small (grade school-ish) education as a child. --- If at all you are talking about 'India'? This is the wrong picture you are trying to project. ----Then the jobs come, and people get the equivilant of a one or two semeter course (may one or two whole semesters) of technology courses without context.'---- Each Indian state has it's own engineering colleges called REC ( Regional Engineering Colleges) recognised by government. Apart from this we are having many private engineering colleges. They together are producing thousands of engineers in various fields including computers. Do you want to say here people with 'one or two semester technology courses' are getting the job instead of people with engineering degree!? At present, the job market is such, that no one without engineering degree ( Computer engineering/ MCA - Master's in computer application) is able to get a job. If at all you are not convinced, Come on, give the entrance exam for REC ( Regional Engineering Colleges) and IIT's ( Indian Institute of Technology)! You will know where you stand!? |
| Sun 18 Jul | Some people just can't stop... | Formerly.... ---So, of course, the hourly rate for the person is 'ridiculously cheap' ($30/hr after 3 kinds of markup and overhead)--- In this competitive environment, this is the competitive advantage we are having that is to be ' CHEAP' So what's wrong in that! It has everything to do with our life-style and way of living. We are the people who don't spend more, so we don't need more! We are contended and more than happy with what we are getting/earning! Will it not be better that you also learn to be contended and happy :-) ---but you get some one who writes buggy, spagetti code that might not work at all--- These sort of criticism will always be there, especially from people who have the fear of loosing job. And even if you say so, Tell me why pay you 50$/hr ( I don't know the exact rate) when same buggy, spagetti code is ready for 30$!? |
| Sun 18 Jul | . | Many of you here have commented, complained and ranted about how bad and buggy, Indian (mostly) programmers' code is. Could you post the actual code, without revealing the business secrets, of course. It sure must be possible. Loops, CRUD code, generic stuff. Or may be abuse/misuse of tools. Being an Indian programmer hoping to make it in India, if things are really that bad here, I'd be confident of making it, given my fellow programmers will not be able to sustain themselves locally. Or is somehow the proof of the pudding not in the eating over here in India, by your standards? Just asking you indulge me in some self gratification. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Are we ready for this? | Do we really want to talk about the quality of the indian elementary education system? Because I have really been itching to bring it up given, that how unbelievably shitty it is has made front page news all across the US today. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Mr. Analogy | The difficulties with outsourcing to India, from what I've read, is not buggy code it's: a. Programmers don't have domain knowledge, so you have to spec out every little detail. Programming is about making decisions. What color to make a button, where to put the button, what icon to put on it. If you've spec'd out in incredible detai.... you've practically got a program. The Mythical Man Month points out that only 20% of a project is actual coding. The rest is spec'ing (30%) testing (30%), etc. b. Programmers aren't creative problem solvers. This probably relates to (a) above. If you're not comfortable with your domain knowledge (i.e., how a medical office works and will use your Medical Records software) then you won't creatively solve problems b/c you don't UNDERSTAND the problem. BTW, the above are NOT just problems of the Indians. They're problems that MANY US programmers have. That's why a lot of the leading software was created by people with domain knowledge (JASC Photo shop- amatuer programmer, Intuit , etc.). (Not always an amatuer programmer, but always having DOMAIN KNOWLEDGE). And, guess what? If you're from a foreign country, you're not going to have domain knowledge of how a Dr. use Electronic Medical records. But, then, neither will a PhD in computer science that doesn't have a clue about how a Dr.'s office works. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Have you got that? | 'Tell me why pay you 50$/hr ( I don't know the exact rate) when same buggy, spagetti code is ready for 30$!?' Let's say that's true. The advantage locally would be that the guy writing the crappy code is at least present locally to ask how it works and tell him to fix it and he will be able to because it is his code. With an overseas project, the people that wrote the code are no longer available and not even identifiable by the time problems have been identified and something needs to be fixed. |
| Sun 18 Jul | the artist formerly known as prince | I think the problem with most big companies is they put their faith in paper rather than people, lets face it, most companies can get just as much dones with 1/10th the it staff (offshore or not) if they a) eliminated all the unneccessary levels of management, and were selecting people on actual ability rather than paper titles b) consistently sought to reduce complexity in their it systems (i.e. mmmm LDAP looks good lets use that to replace our perfectly good oracle system, but have a seperate synch process anyway, type stuff) c) limited software projects to things that would actually benefit the company (i.e. be very judicious about infrastructure projcts, buy the absolute minimum of software that requires 400/hr expert services consultants from the vendor...) the way I see it, in Large corps L1/B1/Off shored can be very very sharp or dumb as a rock, but to a big company an ee/cs degree is all they see. And why should the vendors care whether the sharp person or the rock gets sent, they are not in the business of shipping code, they are in the business of finding people the CS/EE degrees with a pulse, and until american IT orgs get serious as customers, there is no hope that indian or american IT pimps will get serious as vendors. Think of the analogy this way, it took us as customers to realize (after many years and some bloodshed) that american cars were inefecient, unsafe and not very reliable, and american cars have improved (still drive japanese though) after we started voting with our wallets. The same thing will happen in IT, all big outsourcers (HP,Insurance Companies...) are doing in outsourcing, is simply finding a cheaper way to throw away money. The problem is they are still throwing it away, and that will hurt them enough that they will have to change, and then real competition will be on (i.e. who really does it better rather than who's in) |
| Sun 18 Jul | T. Norman | Good point Mr. Analogy. When you're that far away, your work doesn't immerse you in the domain knowledge and you don't have easy access to domain experts. The same sort of difficulties would happen if US programmers wrote software to run an Indian bank or hospital. |
| Sun 18 Jul | RS | 'The same sort of difficulties would happen if US programmers wrote software to run an Indian bank or hospital.'
Most of the business software used in countries such as India is American made. Even when you exclude consumer software.
And how do there American companies operate. They build it once and then add in these internationalization modules (that are mostly about language).
|
| Sun 18 Jul | Some people just can't stop... | Are we ready for this?: Do we really want to talk about the quality of the indian elementary education system? Yes,I agree! India is in real bad shape. We are having not just one problem but many.... Hopefully things will improve for the better! Now, should we talk about the crime rate, divorce rate, suicide rate of elderly people because no one really cared about them-not even their own children, school shoot-out's, moral conduct of your citizens including your president, moral conduct of your soldiers, lack of dicipline in your armed forces and above all your authority to go on WAR and kill other's ???? So do you want to say, you have no problems!!!!! |
| Sun 18 Jul | Stephen Jones | The problem in India is that a large proportion of the school age population doesn't go to school, and in plenty of cases even if the parents wanted them to, the teachers don't go anyway. This means that there is a vast difference between the education of the urban elite and the rural poor. However, programmers do not come from the latter. As has been pointed out Indian programmers nearly always have a degree in the appropriate field. Hell, even the call centre guys there are graduates, whereas in the States or UK they're much more likely to be graduates of the local pen. |
| Sun 18 Jul | . | I insist. Irrespective of the educational qualifications, notwithstanding socio-economic status, leaving aside political repercussions, what is the code that you have seen, worked with, torn your hair over, that makes you a) brand Indian programmers as inept, if not incompetent b) so sure of it that every 3rd post on JoS has a comment on it. |
| Sun 18 Jul | T. Norman | 'Most of the business software used in countries such as India is American made.' Including software custom-written to run in a specific Indian company? If Indian developers are so good and so cheap, why would an Indian company want to deal with the hassles and costs of sending the work to America? |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | > Now, should we talk about the crime rate, divorce rate, suicide rate Sure if you think it relevant to the matter of educational qualifications of developers. And then we can talk about wife burning, dowries, the caste system, cholera from dirty water supplies, dead bodies in the Ganges, cobra and tiger attacks, and villagers killing people who they suspect of being possesed monkey-men. :-) |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | I forget train bombings of hindus my muslims, ransaking of muslim villages by hindus, religious persecution of christians, and the nuclear bomb saber you're rattling at pakistan. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | Maybe we can each make a list and put it on some sort of web site somewhere and people can vote on it! It might even make a fun strategy game like SimCivilization. I'l be the New World and you be India. We'll see which one of us develops space colonies on distant planets in time before we destroy our own planet! |
| Sun 18 Jul | . | Dear other dot, I and probably others wouldn't post code here because code is big and bulky and discussion of it here would be hopelessly irrelevant. I'm not interested in discussing minutiae of 10,000 lines of code. A few things I've seen in Indian programmers' code is giant functions where horrible amounts of functionality is mashed into a single thing, as if the guy had never done much programming, and was just applying some recipe approach to his work. Other examples are the so-called 'God classes' approach to object orientation, where the programmer simply stuffs everything into a single class like an App class, possibly with a few irrelevant bits and pieces. Those characteristics mark an incompetent programmer. I have seen this in some Indian programmers, but never in working Americans. An American who can't program well can be detected, but there's an infrastructure that lets 5-minute Indian programmers hide, and even actively works to hide them. This doesn't apply to everyone or everything, of course. |
| Sun throws in the towel | Sat 17 Jul | Dennis Atkins |
| Call it what you will, these are the death thralls of a dying company: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1738&e=17&u=/zd/131671 Perhaps the most outlandish move in Suns consumer branding push in the mobile device space is its sponsorship of an upcoming television series in Europe.... Shows will feature programs like the ringtone remixing package Sun President and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Schwartz showed off in his keynote at JavaOne last month, as well as offer unusual items such as a look at the social phenomenon of text dating, according to a Gamer.tv press release. |
| Sun 18 Jul | M. Night Shammalamma | But Scott McNealy is rich, so what does he care? |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | Hey Night, what's next after the sham biography? Any new thrillers in the works? |
| Sun 18 Jul | Anon-y-mous Cow-ard | Cool to hear Dennis. Let the record show that you called it first. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Prakash S | there are some really smart people working at sun and they are doing some interesting things, but they are taking a beating in hardware (solaris losing out to linux) and software (LAMP instead of Java) so its hard to say how they are going to genrate cash! Are they going to be a hardware company or a software company or a services/ subscription company or a hybrid model? That Jonathon Schwartz is trying to do some interesting things but looks more like market research for all the other companies. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Will | business week has a big Sun feature http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_30/b3893001_mz001.htm My predictions: Look for the board to get rid of McNealy this year and the stock to rebound to about $10 as the company gets some much needed direction. Also out with McNealy Johnathon Schwartz according the the article he is smart but alienates people too much. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | > there are some really smart people working at sun I agree! > and they are doing some interesting things I agree! > but they are taking a beating in hardware (solaris losing out to Mac OS X) I agree! > and software (LAMP instead of Java) True dat! > so its hard to say how they are going to genrate cash! How they gonna do it no one knows. What. Is. Their. Plan. ? > Are they going to be a hardware company or a software company or a services/ subscription company or a hybrid model? Beats me, I bet they do neither! Maybe they will start to mak0e TV shows about text messaging! do you think they might do this? > That Jonathon Schwartz is trying to do some interesting things I'm sorry, I didn't follow you there. > but looks more like market research for all the other companies. True dat. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Prakash S | http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan President & COO os Sun. There are some interviews of his on ITConverstions.com |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | See what I am talking about - there he is using that darn monitize word AND commoditization on the same page!!! He is stealing my schitick! But he's doing it wrong - he says software development is not a commodity, and then on the same page he says we gotta do open source. Hello Scott! Hello! You mentioned there's a lot of smart folks at Sun. It's true. I know a few of them. I think this guy is squandering the best years of their lives. I do not think Scott is very bright. A lot of what he says does not make sense. His dumb ideas are blowing the amazing potential of his employees. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | Er I guess I mean jonathan. Ah dang I am confused I thought Scott was the president. Which one is the dumb one -both of them? I need a card to keep track of the players. Darn it - look at the LIE on top of his w ebx log claiming that the Mars Rover is runing an Java. That is utter bullshit! The little app they use for planning routes is written in java - you can even download it. It is a piece of crap that crashes constantly. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | Can you BELIEVE the doublespeak example he gives of how software is not being commoditized - he names a piece of software that trounces its competitors because it is being given away free by Sun after spending millions developing it! Hello! jonathon! It is a commodity example - you di d that yourself! Don't you remember? Were you drunk??? |
| Sun 18 Jul | Prakash S | reminds me of one paul graham article (don't know the name) where oracle puts an ad saying Viaweb runs on Oracle. The only place oracle was used in viaweb was for accounting.... pimpin ain't easy :-) |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | Man he's just rambling on and it doesn't make any sense. Also, serious 12 errors in his HTML which doesn't render properly anyway. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | Sun - we put the dot in polka-dotted horsey. |
| Sun 18 Jul | . | If Sun plays their cards right, they could so some offshoring work for Infosys or Tata. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Matthew Lock | Prakash: 'During the Bubble, Oracle used to run ads saying that Yahoo used Oracle software. I found this hard to believe, so I asked around. It turned out the Yahoo accounting department used Oracle.' http://www.paulgraham.com/gfaq.html |
| Sun 18 Jul | M. Night Shammalamma | The problem (not only with Sun, but with all companies) is that the Board of Directors is nothing but a Good Ol' Boys club. I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine. I'll sit on your board and pay you millions, and you'll sit on my board and pay me millions. And if your arrogance/stupidity drives the company into the ground, so what, we still get to keep all those millions we paid ourselves. That's the problem: If Sun goes belly-up, Scott McNealy is still rich. If he knew that he would have to give back all those millions that Sun has paid him over the years, he wouldn't been such a bonehead. |
| Sun 18 Jul | M. Night Shammalamma | 'During the Bubble, Oracle used to run ads saying that Yahoo used Oracle software.' Microsoft uses to run ads touting websites that did all sorts of cool stuff using Active-X. Then somebody did some checking and found that all the animation and other 'neat stuff' was mostly old technology like animated GIFs and CGI scripts. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Prakash S | thanks Matthew ... |
| Sun 18 Jul | M. Night Shyamalan | 'Hey Night, what's next after the sham biography? Any new thrillers in the works?' Just for you Dennis, I whipped out a new movie - check it out next week: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368447/ |
| Sun 18 Jul | Wolf Blitzer | I wonder if he movie is a cool as his name? |
| Worst Use of Technology | Sat 17 Jul | Dennis Atkins |
| Lets take a vote on what it could be. My vote: FLOATING TOOLBARS I hate hem so much! Let me get at my dawn window without having to drag all thes f-in floating toolbars out of the way you stupid m-fers at design outhouse adobe I hate all you adobe sons of camels! |
| Sat 17 Jul | Fernanda Stickpot | Pestiferous password configuration in Lotus Notes that means I have to re-enter my password every half-hour and if I don't, I don't get any of the reminders I set so that I could concentrate on my work for a whole 45 minutes without having to watch the clock. Then when it says 'You have new mail' and I go 'Open mail' and I can't, because I'm locked out, and it doesn't bother opening the new mail or even fetching it. Not having enough admin rights to set my own damn configuration, either. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Dennis Atkins | > I have to re-enter my password every half-hour Yes I hate that too! Darn them! Darn them all! Fooey I say! Double fooey with fiddlesticks! |
| Sat 17 Jul | muppet | Floating toolbars are absolutely necessary in Adobe Photoshop |
| Sat 17 Jul | matt | Yeah floating toolbars in photoshop annoy me sometimes, I wish there were easier ways of 'docking' them. |
| Sat 17 Jul | muppet | they dock fine, to the parent window, to each other, or to the edges of the screen. How much more docking you want? |
| Sat 17 Jul | Li-fan Chen | Dennis Atkins, *lmao* If it was just one bad design that'd be okay. I think it's about time settings survive forever and the windows user interface receives a slight overhaul (much of the purported 1 billion Windows users knows the same flaws as you and me). |
| Sat 17 Jul | Neil Johnson | Don't get me started on Lotus Notes. I use to think OutLook/Exchange was horrible....until I starting using Lotus Notes. I'd switch back in a heartbeat (or another client if are company would enable POP or IMAP access). I think Peter Gutman sums up Notes best: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/misc/notespotting.pdf (CAUTION: Strong Langauge ! Of course Peter says strong language is common amongst Notes Users) -Neil |
| Sat 17 Jul | muppet | why do folks insist on using .pdf for web publishing? BAD BAD BAD |
| Sat 17 Jul | Ankur | Why PDF? because unlike HTML, PDF will render correctly cross-platform, including on print media - no need to make like 5 different style sheets. Also, Acrobat is a richer experience than most browsers (hey, it zooms text!). |
| Sat 17 Jul | muppet | and I have to wait 20-30 seconds to view your content, during which time I'll almost certainly change my mind about how important it is. Not to mention, if the server is under load, chances are I won't see it at all. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Nathan Ridley | 'they dock fine, to the parent window, to each other, or to the edges of the screen. How much more docking you want?' No, actually they don't. They do dock to each other, and the fact that they float is great for putting them on the second monitor, but most people don't use two monitors, they use one. And I really don't count putting them in the little tab box up top right of the screen as acceptable docking. You need to be able to dock them fully and completely the edge of the screen, thus reducing the work client area, but preventing your work from disappearing underneath the toolbars. Think how annoying it would be if all the toolbars in Visual Studio were forced to be floating and your code kept disappearing underneath them. |
| Sat 17 Jul | muppet | 'most people don't use two monitors' most people serious about graphic design on the computer do. I have dual monitors and couldn't dream of using photoshop OR any of my code editors without them. It's INSANELY useful to have my app in one screen, and the source in the other. Actually, I can only think of one person I know who uses Photoshop and codes regularly and DOESN'T have two monitors. I recall PS toolbars docking to the screen, but even if they don't, it's never caused me any trouble. Maybe it would if I were arthritic or had a twitch... |
| Sat 17 Jul | Mr. Analogy | Computerized voting booths.
A threat to democracy. There's no paper trail or auditing. Hmmm... since Howard Dean was the biggest user of technology, maybe that'd have gotten him elected |
| Sat 17 Jul | muppet | no paper trail? Sure, there's an electronic record. Do you somehow think that an actual paper paper trail is any more secure? Seriously? |
| Sat 17 Jul | mb | don't know if it's a bad use of technology or just a bad idea. but yeah, a paper trail is much more secure. pure efficiency of scale here. harder to stuff a ballot boxes with thousands of pieces of paper than to flip a few bits. (and yes, both events have happened and will happen.) read up on the electronic voting stuff and you'll find it extremely scary. shouldn't even be hard to solve, supposedly the indians did a good job in their most recent election though who knows if that's not just grass-is-greenerism. |
| Sat 17 Jul | mb | by hard to solve I mean "write simple software which can do the job in a reasonable fashion", not "make resistant to fraud". i think it'd be quite hard to make a system more resistant to fraud than a scantron or similar system. or a more scalable or less expensive system for that matter. |
| Sat 17 Jul | z | I've been looking for an opportunity to rant about mailling labels, so I'll jump in here. Yes, magazine mailing labels. Something so simple you'd hardly think there could be a problem. Maybe that's why they get screwed up. To be specific, there is at least one magazine mailing label generating system out there that truncates address lines at 30 characters. For me that is a problem because my apartment number gets chopped off when it's on the same line as the street address. This system has been out there for years and no one has fixed it. In fact, it is spreading. Last month one magazine that I had been getting for over 10 years switched to this broken format. Another one that I had been getting for almost as long switched about two years ago. I could never get them to fix it and after a couple of years of delayed, lost or misdelivered issues I just dropped the subscription. I find it quite frustrating that this trivial piece of technology that one should hardly have to give a thought to is not only defective, but in the past it worked right and now no one seems able to fix it. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Dennis Atkins | >Do you somehow think that an actual paper paper trail is any more secure? Troll! |
| Sat 17 Jul | muppet | How is it a troll? Do you really think it's that much harder to screw with a paper record if you want to? If you've got the "in" to allow you to mess with the electronic record, you've got the "in" to screw with a physical one, too. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Dennis Atkins | If the paper receipt shows a different result that what you voted, you are certainly going to call the precinct worker's attention to it right away and any tampering will be found out. So you must be talking about screwing with the paper records AFTER the voter has left. You are claiming that changing millions of these paper records is just as easy as changing millions of electronic records. This is such an outlandish and basically stupid claim that you are clearly trolling as no person with more than half a brain could think you are serious. |
| Sun 18 Jul | muppet | once the voter has left? Yes, a person with the requisite access could fuck with millions of paper records just as well as electronic ones. Quite as physically easy? No. Just as possible? Yes. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | OK, so you agree that it is a LOT HARDER. Stuff that's harder to beat is generally considered more secure, agree? So den electronic not as secure as paper. |
| Sun 18 Jul | FullNameRequired | ??? its not anywhere near as possible. think about it, currently all the votes are counted and tallied and the totals phoned in. In order for me, bob, to mess with the totals I either have to physically repace all the votes, subvert the counters and those watchign them, subvert the person who calls the vote count in, or subvert the person who receives the tallies. Some of those options are physically impossible (try replacing the millions of votes in thousands of different locations with new pieces of people and count the # of people who notice). and some are just not that much good...subverting the person who receives the tallies will result in a failure because when the count is reported for location x the people who counted will notice the difference. subverting the counters themselves (and those who watch them) is unrealistic because of the sheer # of people I would have to subvert.....*someone* is gonna refuse and report me. overall changing the result in a major way under a paper system is very difficult to impossible....the best you could hope for is to locate a few key locations and focus on changing their results....possible but still very difficult and very likely to cause notice at one or other of the levels. OTOH electronic voting means that only 2 places are aware of the vote I cast....myself and the computer. At the most basic level, if the computer simply records my vote as something other than what I entered, who is ever going to know? as you work up the chain, the opportunities for uncheckable mistake to be made increases....when reporting the results to the central computer, if it is misreported...who is going to know? instead of a verifiable trail you end up with a black box that just spits out the results, and no one can verify their accuracy. paper voting is the only sensible method IMO, its possible for it to be accurate, quick and efficient and *trusted* Even adding a paper receipt to the electronic voting process merely duplicates the paper voting system....as soon as you do that you may as well just dump the electron system altogether. the best approach IMO is to use touch screens for the actual voting process that simply spit out the vote in human readable form and then let the standard paper voting system take over....that way you get all the benefits of an electron interface and none of the drawbacks of a completely electronic system. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Stephen Jones | A paper trail is absolutely necessary. Sure it can be abused; South Asia is full of ballot stuffing, and it is not at all uncommon for the dead to vote, but that is what you have observers and election commissioners for. The best system is for the vote to be entered in a computer, which prints out a paper ballot, which is then handed in. This allows for the provisional results to be issued instantaneously on close of polls, and for a physical count to be held to avoid software bugs or irregularities. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Nathan Ridley | 'most people serious about graphic design on the computer do' To disclaim, I use two monitors myself, but three of my coworkers who aren't graphic designers still have reason to use it, and when I have to help them do this or that, it's still annoying having to call back all the toolbars they closed because they'd been getting in the way. This was the case at my last job as well. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Tom H | 'If the paper receipt shows a different result that what you voted, you are certainly going to call the precinct worker's attention to it right away and any tampering will be found out' How could you possibly know the paper is different? Doesn't the coulrty you live in have what's known as a 'secret ballot'? But back to the OP, my vote for worst technology is forcing me to use a mouse/click to get anything done, without giving me access to the underlying API so I can automate the task. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Sam Livingston-Gray | Dennis: Surely you know about the Tab key? That one little Adobe feature makes up for a *lot* of wasted screen real estate. Now if only Macromedia would take a clue from that... |
| Sun 18 Jul | Sam Livingston-Gray | Oh, and FullNameRequired: << (try replacing the millions of votes in thousands of different locations with new pieces of people and count the # of people who notice) >> Pieces of people? I think the smell would tip someone off rather quickly... ;> |
| Sun 18 Jul | JWA | 'Surely you know about the Tab key?' Sam - wow, thanks for that tip. I don't use PS very much, but that sure makes it better. I wonder, in OS X does it fly them out like Expose, that would be cool (not more functional, but cool). --Josh |
| Sun 18 Jul | KayJay | The most irritating feature, IMO, is the splitting of functions into tabs. I feel more comfortable drilling down a tree on the left and make changes in the right than bringing to front the various tabs. Especially when there are three or more rows of them. An example would be the properties window of a user in Active Directory. Throw in Exchange and try tabbing through the settings. One has to keep looking at the tabs to know which ones are in which row, as they keep changing their positions. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Clay Dowling | Worst Use of Technology Ever: Automated telephone menuing systems. After I punch the ten numbers to talk to somebody at a company, I don't want to talk to a bloody machine and press a lot more buttons. Second worst: the predictive dialing systems used by telemarkets and pollsters. I know that there are some degenerates who read this board who are involved with such devices. May you be forced to work only in COBOL in your next life. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | Wow, thanks. Rummaging through by hard drive, I see that that tab key trick has been in Photoshop at least since 1993's Photoshop 2.0. This could be a whole thread or book about extremely useful features that are not used because no one knows of it - I have given the toolbar rant to dozens of Photoshop users over the years and you are the first person who had an answer other than 'get a second monitor'. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | KJ, I like tabs when they make sense, where you have different documents or panels like in a file cabinet that those tabs bring a folder to front, say like tabbed browsing, the gift of the gods! But anytime that it gets to more than 1 row, the interface has failed. I too am driven BATTY by playing whack-a-mole with moving tab rows. |
| Monetizing no-service commodities | Sat 17 Jul | Dennis Atkins |
| Been hearing MBAs talk about monetizing again. Monetizing means to make money off of something instead of giving it away for free like we been doing. Honestly how someone with an MBA even gets themselves in such a business situation that they have to ask such a question is not a good sign. But anyway, the latest is they want to monetize these communities like Friendster. Now, yahoo made the switch in their online personals stuff but that is because lonely people are desperate and willing to pay good money for an introduction. So that makes sense. Yahoo was hoping to monetize their expanded email service until the price of hard drives allowed google to shoot yahoos plan all to hell. Were switching to a service economy, right? Gotcha. Heres the thing -- Friendster and these sorts of online communities dont really provide personalized service, they provide a bunch of computer programs. If you have a problem with their service that its too slow or doesnt show up right in your browser, and write them, they dont write back. Probably they dont even read your email. What these companies are actually doing is COMMODITIZING their own products! They are not providing any additional value. if one of them starts charging a fee, then all the customers will get up and leave to the free one across the street wha was able to buy his hard drives at a lower cost. I propose that if we are indeed going to go to a service economy (I am not sure that we are but it might be so), then that means customers will distinguish competing products on the quality of the service. In such a environment, services with no service are not going to be able to charge more than commodity pricing. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Anon-y-mous Cow-ard | If you work for one of these companies, that is doing exactly this, better to keep this info to yourself. Otherwise, you might find yourself getting a "pink slip", which means, *YOUR ASS IS FIRED, SECURITY WILL ESCORT YOU OUT NOW*, as you have punched a hole in the toilet paper that was keeping the scheme together. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Not Dennis Atkins | 'Moving to a service economy'? Do you wear clothes? Drive a car? Have any furniture or appliances? These are not services, these are products which need to be manufactured. 'Moving to a service ecomony' is merely a euphamism for 'moving all manufacturing to third world sweat shops'. |
| Sat 17 Jul | www.marktaw.com | Dennis.... um... duh? Didn't the world have this conversation 5 years ago with Instant Messaging, 10 years ago with Search and 2 years ago with community based software like Friendster? |
| Sat 17 Jul | www.marktaw.com | Wait, 5 years ago it was SixDegrees.com, which folded because they weren't smart enough to get over the revenue hump. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Dennis Atkins | Yeah, well exactly - how much you paying for your search service? And IM? Nada, right? And if you write a letter to google asking them for new features, you don't expect to get a response. So I missed a discussion 2 yrs ago about Friendster I suppose. For some of the business types they have just heard that it is the next big thing but they are always behind the ball. Yeah it's pretty obvious to me that charging the customers is not going to work. However, they do have a lot of private information about you since you specifically agree taht they can read your mail and postings. So they know that you like sisters with big bootys and that you live in a certain neighborhood and you own a handgun and a stuffed ocelot. That info is going to come in handy if I want to monitize yo sorry ass. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Dennis Atkins | > the toilet paper that was keeping the scheme together Right -- you mean the plan to make the whole set up look mone-ti-ZABLE long enough to get some greenbucks from the VCs, cash out and move to Brazil where it's Carnival every day. Getting my congas ready... |
| Sat 17 Jul | www.marktaw.com | As far as I know, IM is for brand recognition mostly, nobody's making any money off of it. Search, well Google seems to have solved that, and isn't Yahoo profitable now? (as I go to finance.yahoo.com to check their stock I realize why). I suspect these friendster type services are going to have to do what Hotjobs does. Make 0 money from their web presence, and make a ton of booty on the back end from B2B clients managing large relational databases, or in the case of hotjobs, outsourced HR stuff. |
| Sat 17 Jul | www.marktaw.com | And as I visit Yahoo Hotjobs to try to see if the hotjobs corporate website is still around I find: http://hotjobs.promotions.yahoo.com/apprentice Yes, do you want to be the next Apprentice? Apply on Hotjobs! |
| Sat 17 Jul | Tom H | To me, monetizing means either: 1) Bait and switch, now that we've got you hooked we can try to squeeze some cash 2) Advertising isn't keeping us afloat. We either charge for the service or give up, so let's charge and hope we can find new jobs before the lights are turned off. |
| Sat 17 Jul | RP | I went to the 6 degrees page and apparently they're relauching soon. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Dennis Atkins | First, yes, yahoo is almost entirely profitable on their on/line personals service. They are one of hte few who managed to use their brand name build up to actually grab marketshare, as a result their personals section has more people than anyone else and therefor is the only game in town for a lot of people. Ebay is to auctions, amazon is to book sales, yatoo is to personals. And now moving on... Ok sorry I think that the point I find interesting is lost in the background noise. These companies are pursuing a plan to COMMODITIZE their own products! Commoditize it to the point where they can afford to give it away for free. This is not really a service economy strategy, it's a manufacturing strategy - make the product so cheap we can give it away. But it doesn't make sense unless you can make money advertising (google has that one locked down) or selling highly personalized marking information - one reason why the recent court decision that net services are allowed to read any and all email passing through their service as long as it is stored in their memory for even a nanosecond. Right now, today, there are several companies taking advantage of this decision to change their software to filter for useful information and built a database of information about your most secret preferences and fetishes. Are you a doctor with a thingfor buxom redheads? The pharmaceutical companies can now know this about you and the next rep visit will be from just such a lady... |
| Sat 17 Jul | Management Material | Providing products for free and selling the resulting eyeballs to advertisers is called a media strategy. Service economy means talent and expertise have been commoditised so they can be exploited by people without talent. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Dennis Atkins | So if I go to see a mechanic to work on my mercedes, they are all masically the same. There is no disticnction. All are as good as the other. All cost the same. Or if I go out to eat. McDonalds is the same as La Sparta, no difference, indistinguishable food, tables the same, no difference in price. To say that service is a commodity you have to be making this claim. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Prakash S | Ross has some intersting things to say on his blog: http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2004/07/tech_commoditie.html check it out. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | Steel is a commodity. Oil is a commodity. Gold is a commodity. Sugar is a commodity. His definition of commodities seems OK. I don't agree that software development is a commodity. He makes a ok point that in a way, open source software might be seen as a commodity. It's not exactly the same but the idea that all providers are the same (download.com, sourceforge) and no provider is making any more (0) than any other one. And for that too - a business model that depends on commoditizing the very thing you specialize in is a poor strategy if your goal is to work professionally. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Management Material | Software development isn't a commodity. That's true. But lots of people want it to be. That opens the door for smooth talkers to make money while other people do the actual work. That's what service economy basically means. Open source comes into that too. Notice one of the 'benefits' of open source that's being pushed to corporates is that developers become interchangeable. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | Agreed. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Tom H | 'That opens the door for smooth talkers to make money while other people do the actual work. That's what service economy basically means. Open source comes into that too.' The first part is just the difference between those who work in management and those who work in engineering or R&D, it's everywhere, not at all unique to software. I think of a service job as providing a service directly to another person, whether the server is a waitress or a doctor. Does a farmer who grows corn work in a service economy? I don't think so. Offering software at low or no cost doesn't make programming a service job, nor does it make software a commodity any more than broadcasting a television program make entertainment a commodity. The comment about open source is nonsense. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Management Material | My comment about open source - that corporates are being pitched that open source makes developers interchangeable - is not nonsense at all. That's what's happening. If corporates use the same source code as lots of other people, they can replace developers without incurring any learning curves. On the service economy, there is more to it than the division between technical staff and management. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Tom H | 'If corporates use the same source code as lots of other people, they can replace developers without incurring any learning curves.' Okay, I can see that argument. But how is it different than being a Microsoft shop? Do you know .Net? C#? Sit in the third cubicle on the right and start coding... |
| Sun 18 Jul | Bored Bystander | Dennis, your original post is spot-on. Most free dot com services are tissue thin junk with no support or service. Ezboard (www.ezboard.com), a discussion board site, is another example of a no-service commodity. I use one Ezboard forum to excess so I registered a login as an 'Ezsupporter' account, which costs $14 per year and has a few functional benefits. So, these Ezboard geniuses recently changed servers around or something; now I cannot log into the 'ezsupporter' account that I paid for so I have basically lost control of my account. The tech support idiot that got my original complaint tells me to do exactly the same things to attempt to log in that I summarized in my first message that I had already tried. In other words, dumbass tech support person that doesn't read because the dumbasses are in too much of a hurry to bother paying attention. Well, the tech support person then escalated my complaint to engineers, and it has been a week. To fix a crummy login problem. The hilarious think is, Ezboard pitches Ezboard for business collaboration services. I would pay *REAL* money or risk my professional image with clients to work with the losers at Ezboard who can't find their own asses with a Ouija board? Gimme a break... The thing that so many fast buck wanna bes do not comprehend is that you have to be trustworthy with the small things in order to be trusted with more responsibility. No-service dot coms are at the opposite end of the axis from any notion of such trust. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Dennis Atkins | > you have to be trustworthy with the small things in order to be trusted with more responsibility Yes, exactly. And they have a long way to go before they get to this point. i think many of these companies thing that since its the internet they can just scrap customer service and its pesky costs and fly by the seat of their pants and hope it all works out in the end while charging a small discount from hte price of a full-service bureau. For companies that aren't established to make real money, they need to have top flight service and be responsive to the needs of customers. In the business arena, that means 24/7 personalized support, even if they have to charge big $ for it, they have to have that as an option. |
| Need a good Realty Portal | Sat 17 Jul | Justin J. |
| Hi, I need to develop a real estate portal, but have come across some premade ones on the net, I have got the go-ahead from the supervisor to proceed with the premade ones. Does anyone have any knowledge in this field and give recommendations as to the best realty portal around?. Or is there a forum out there that someone knows of which discuss such topics?. Any help is much appreicated |
| Sat 17 Jul | Bored Bystander | A vendor called Rappatoni provides a fairly common shrink wrapped web portal solution for hosting publicly viewable MLSs. Some large cities host their public MLS sites on it. I heard a development manager at a web site design company that used to be a client of mine liberally cursing Rappatoni, so they can't be too bad... ;-) |
| Sat 17 Jul | Justin J. | Ok, but if possible, I would prefer the portal to be in php/mysql platform. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Sliqamut Frgsignad | Earthling, who told you of the portals? Who? Tell us where you got this information and you may yet be allowed to live! Oh wait, you said *realty* portals. Never mind. |
| Sun 18 Jul | QTExtender.com | Just a side note, I hate the word portal because A) It's about as generic as they come for there are too many definitions out there and B) it seems to be a buzz-word that managers throw around to try and make them sound 21st century-ish. Portal, what do you mean? A series of links like Yahoo, a place to post stories and customize content like slashdot? There is a system called OpenRealty ( http://www.open-realty.org/ ). I don't think this is a portal, but more of just a real-estate listing system, but who knows, maybe that's what your manager had in mind? Here's a link to the demo : http://www.open-realty.org/demo/ The product is Open Source and free. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Clay Dowling | Justin, I have an associate who has produced a very nice real eastate 'portal', which she'll happily install and customize for reasonable amounts of money. Contact me via private message and I can put you in touch. |
| Microsoft (or other) Partnerships | Sat 17 Jul | Mongo |
| Other than access to cheap software, has anyone here ever found _any_ benefit from partnering with Microsoft, or any other software company? This is not intended as a rant, Im really curious. Ive really only had partnering experience with Microsoft, but over the course of about a decade Ive been involved as a Microsoft partner for a two person firm, for the worlds largest Internet consultancy, for a moderately sized regional tradition software and hardware engineering firm, and for a small non IT firm. I mean, does anyone really think a client is going to be impressed byMicrosoft Partner on a website or business card? I confess, I just dont get it. Id also be really curious to hear about experiences with other suppliers ... |
| Sat 17 Jul | Chris Tavares | The outfit I'm working for is a Microsoft Gold partner. It's a big benefit for us, because when somebody in our area calls Microsoft saying 'we need this work done and we want to use Microsoft stuff to do it' Microsoft sends them to us. We get tons of work that way. So yes, it's been well worth it. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Neat Chi | There are no such things as Microsoft 'Partners'. There are Microsoft 'Bitches', but Microsoft is genetically incapable of being a 'partner' to any company in the spirit of the definition of the word. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Mike | Microsoft sent me a very nice usb flash drive the other day. Only benefit I've seen so far. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Philo | Mongo - has your company been in direct contact with a Partner or ISV manager at MS? Or are you talking about just participating in the program? To maximize the value of MS partnership, it's just like any other competition - differentiate yourself, excel in what you do, and network (with MS and MS customers) See, we make tools, but in general we don't do the work - we want our partners to do the work (maximizing the value of our tools). So the best thing you can do is to make the Partner Manager for your region aware of your presence, so when a customer needs something done, we send them your way. Be unique Be good Be known Philo |
| Sun 18 Jul | Mongo | Thanks for the feedback; I suppose I should have mentioned that at the moment we're _not_ a partner with MSoft, other than the Empower program, which is a great deal. Philo: 'Mongo - has your company been in direct contact with a Partner or ISV manager at MS? Or are you talking about just participating in the program?' Ok, maybe I did need to rant. My first experience with MS partnering came in 1996/97, in Calgary, when a partner and I started a small web programming business, using mostly MS stuff. We happened to be in the same building as MS at the time, and I remember actually talking to the area manager (Bill somebody -- no, really) about becoming a certified partner. Things were cool until we were almost done, and I asked if he could give me some idea of what sort of leads we might expect as a new certified partner. He immediately got huffy and said, I quote, 'we don't try to force people to partner with Microsoft, perhaps you should come back in a year or two when you are larger.' I don't mind telling you I was stunned. I still find it hard to believe, but you can bet I've told lots of other tech people about it. Interestingly, I chatted with a local MS partner about a month after this, and his story was the similar: a complete waste of time and money, other than the discounted software. Three years later in Phoenix (after an interesting little Redmond stint), I worked for what was at that time the world's largest Internet consultancy. The local office had upwards of 130 people, and we did some pretty cool work on airlines and other stuff. We had full time sales people, and had one MS consultant pretty much _full time_ in our office for quite a while (at full rates, of course). At that time, I was only brought into the sales and marketing as the 'senior dev/tech guy', you know the routine. I don't recall we received even one good lead in the two years I was there. I would have heard of it, because I was agitating about it and was considered the senior guy on the Microsoft side of things at the time. After that, I went to a smaller, more traditional hardware and software engineering firm, where I and my boss, the regional manager, went to every Microsoft event we could. I argued that it was a waste of resources, but he was adamant that Microsoft would come around. Of course, that gig ended with the late unpleasantness we all recall. Total leads: 0. 'Be unique' 'Be good' 'Be known' Wothwhile advice, to be sure, but what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Of course those are great things to be, but it has nothing to do with the benefits, or lack thereof, of partnering with Microsoft. I like to think that I do and have done those things, but I've seen no benefit from Microsoft, nor really known anyone who has. Hence this thread. This question was also partly driven by the fact we have a client who's just sprung for somewhat less than a million dollars worth of PCs and software, on our advice, and is going to have to do quite a bit more (not so much hardware, though). It'd be nice to be able to call on Microsoft for advice, etc., but I'm frankly uncomfortable doing so, as I really don't trust them as an organization (not you, personally, Philo). Ok, I feel better now, thanks. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Steve Jones (UK) | My experience of Microsoft is quite similar to Mongo's I think. My business is currently in the middle of a multi-million dollar project for a major player in the London financial market. I would love to be able to join the Microsoft Partner programmes, but whenever I've tried it seems to be a paperwork tidal wave, with little actual benefit to anyone. So I get a few quid off my software bill (no pun intended), who cares, it is all deductable from profits anyway. Apart from that, what do we get? It is hard to know, maybe nothing. Perhaps Microsoft shouldn't bother with 'partner' programmes, or if they want to do them, be more open about what you get. Or, are we supposed to be thankful for the right to put those ugly logo pics on our websites? |
| PDA recommendations | Fri 16 Jul | snotnose |
| My wife has Rhemetoid (I botched that spelling) arthritis. Its hard for her to hold a pencil or pen nowdays, so she wants a PDA. Where are good sites I can send her to that has reviews of PDAs? She is 100% computer illiterate, and proud of it. The other option is shes been thinking of getting a Mac laptop. I know nothing of Macs. My understanding is IBM has major yield problems with the chip, and Apple quit making the older laptops a few months back (oops). Is this true? Can I get a 2 minute tutorial on Mac laptops somewhere? |
| Fri 16 Jul | Li-fan Chen | A cheaper iBook would be an excellent value. The keyboards on macs are well designed and have clear tactile feedback. Her fingers will love them (or at least loath them less than most other keyboards). If she's a PC person introduce her to the Microsoft Natural keyboards. They are more gentle on her wrists. |
| Sat 17 Jul | snotnose | Thanks. She's a 2 finger typist, a natural keyboard would make no sense for her. And now that I don't have dinner on the BBQ I'll prove I can use dictionary.com to spell Rheumatoid :) It's a nasty ass disease, we've been dealing with it for about 4 years now. Neither of us can ride bikes anymore, she stays in shape doing yoga and I'm just getting fat :( |
| Sat 17 Jul | JWA | You didn't mention what she wants to use it for, but I'd have to assume that holding a tiny stylus would be even worse for her than a pencil. I recently bought a Palm Tungsten C, which has a built-in keyboard (and WiFi), which I love, but this too might be rough on her hands. Mac laptops have excellent keyboards, as was mentioned above. I'd agree with the recommendation for an iBook G4. You an get them for under $1,000 (12') on eBay, or slightly more new. If she's not into computers, I'd have to guess that Mac is easier to pick up than Windows. If she knows Windows, then you may want to spend an hour showing her the differences. The 'The Missing Manual' book on OS X is a smooth read and nicely shows off all that she could do with it. As to the production, what you've heard is about the iMacs, the home line of desktops. They are readying a major upgrade to the iMac line, so they are running the channel dry for the time being. There were some chip shortages that held back release of the PowerMac G5 desktops as well, but both laptop lines are readily available, with no upgrades imminent. Hope that helps, and that he condition gets better. --Josh |
| Sat 17 Jul | . | 'She's a 2 finger typist, a natural keyboard would make no sense for her.' So instead of spending half an hour to adapt to the split keyboard she;s going to abuse her arthritis on a regular one? Doesn't seem a good tradeoff to me. Most PDAs use styli (i.e. pens) for input; so a laptop is a better idea unless she wants to carry it in her vanity purse. In that case, Palm with the folding keyboard is still the best deal for the money (and for you since its interface is Mac-based). |
| Sat 17 Jul | snotnose | This is the feedback I'm after. She isn't sure what she wants, and as I don't have the disease I can only guess at what she goes through daily. She wants to use it to communicate. I don't think either of us has really thought of the ramifications. A stylus would be a major step backwards. She needs either a small keyboard she can hunt and peck on, or something similar. She doesn't want to do the whack-the-key-till-the-letter-comes-up games she plays on her cellphone sending messages. For 'communicate', she can talk and listen fine. I need to clarify with her what exactly she wants to do. I know she leaves me and her mom notes, we can't make out her writing anymore. I really think that's the key, just something she can write with. That of course means a built in printer, which as far as I know doesn't exist. A wifi link is sorta ok with me (um, what's that on the grocery list honey? Lemme go check my IM, hang on), but her mom doesn't own a computer. We're saying PDA because it's all we can think of. I really think she would be happy for 2-3 years with something that would let her keep notes, either to herself, or to send messages to myself, her mom, or whomever. This disease doesn't get better. You can just slow it down. In 2-3 years we'll be looking for something else. |
| Sat 17 Jul | JWA | If you want somethign to allow her to make notes, from a PC/Mac there are those new DYMO label printers: http://tinyurl.com/2mybh Or, there are a number of thermal mini printers for Palm Pilots. Like this standalone unit: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005LDPI/002-4202210-4431202?v=glance There are also some that clip onto the PalmPilot itself. You mentioned that she uses her cell phone for this sometimes, so I assume that SMS would be fine. In that case you could go with a cellphone network device with a built-in keyboard like a Palm Tungsten W ($75 on eBay), an older Treo 300, or maybe a T-Mobile SideKick would work - that can send SMS, browse the web, and AIM. Otherwise there are all kinds of Motorola & Blackberry devices that should work. Just a few ideas. --Josh |
| Sat 17 Jul | _ | It's not what you asked for but would a mini voice recorder do what she needs for leaving 'notes'? |
| Sat 17 Jul | Pete | PDA is dead. The new king is pda-phone-camera hybrid. |
| Sat 17 Jul | . | Get from under the bridge, Pete. |
| Sat 17 Jul | . | On the other hand, it's easy to write on Palm using a finger nail, instead of the stylus. Just like using your finger dipped in ink, only letter forms are even simpler. You could try to borrow a sample for your wife to see how easy it turns out for her. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Liam | You may also want to consider a Tablet PC -- power of laptop with Windows XP, but using pen as input. Regarding PDA's -- I had a Palm III (.. very old) and recently upgraded to a iPaq 4150. Great PDA but sadly -- I miss my Palm. Serious stability problems with the iPaq -- at least once every few weeks it hangs for no apparent reason. always when using the internet explorer. |
| Sat 17 Jul | mb | can you write big with a palm? by that i mean write one letter at a time using the entire screen? i'd imagine this would be the biggest advantage of a palm over any other system. tablet sounds cool, but you must use the special stylys. with most PDAs you can use anything--finger, easy to grip stylus, whatever. many PDAs do have voice-recoding features, which might be very useful. there must be a support group for this issue, probably even online. it might be a bit hard to find since it's self limiting. (typing about not being able to type.) |
| Sat 17 Jul | JWA | You know, depending on the context of where she's using it, there are plenty of voice input options available, and most of them very workable, if not really good. Mac OS X has a well regarded system built-in, and Tablet PC's have what's supposedly a good system too. On Windows in general I always hear mention of Dragon Naturally Speaking (?). Maybe that would work even better for her. --Josh |
| Sun 18 Jul | www.marktaw.com | I don't know what you mean by communicating, and the mac does sound like a good idea, but I thought I'd mention that the Sony Clie` is well built & one model or two does have a little qwerty keyboard. Make sure the mouse is comfortable for her. The Thinkpad tiny eraser mouse sucks, but a regular rectangulary area type laptop mouse may be ok. The best kind is the kind you can just tap to click instead of having to click the button with your thumb. The Toshiba Tablet PC's ($$$) may be a good mix, but I'm not sure if you need to use the pen to write on the screen or if your finger will do. Anyway, it looks cool, and you can go between typing & tablet mode. See if you can test one out. Weight & size may be an issue if she really wants to carry it around, and you have to worry about laptop theft. Finding a good ergonomic bag may be a problem. The Danger Sidekick (T-Mobile offers this) does a handful of communications things & is a cell phone. I think it's discontinued, and I heard reliability on those things is horrible. It has a qwerty keyboard. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Pete | Why don't she wait for Nokia 9500 ? |
| Sun 18 Jul | Albert D. Kallal | Most new palms allow writing anywhere on the screen. However, you DO REALIZLIE that most modern pda’s are of NO use without good access to a full functional pc? In other words, a pda all by its self is not going to cut it very well. For any installing, saving of data etc, someone will have to a have a good working PC available for that pda to work with. These things are generally NOT stand alone units. I also second the idea that perhaps a small keyboard might be better. However, one should test/try a pda and see how the writing input works. For a handicapped person, I just simply don’t know how well a pda for data input would work. (it might very well be the best possible input here…or perhaps the worst!). If someone who aids this person’s care has a good working pc, and willing to make that pc a extension for the pda, then setup could work well. Most pda’s now support email exchange with the desktop pc. You can write/read/reply to email, and the you “sync” this with the desktop pc, and all incoming/outgoing email gets sent. It would be MOST interesting to see how well this kind of setup could help a handicapped person. I do think that if the person could well use the pda, then a whole new world would be opened up for that person. However, how well this works would depend on the person setting up the pda on the pc side. Also, as mentioned, I really don’t know how well the input/writing would work for a handi capped person. I would check with any organization that has expanse in this area, as then you might avoid a lot of problems, and save learning some hard lessons. Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada kallal@msn.com http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn |
| Sun 18 Jul | Kura-Kura | Charles W Moore, a Mac columnist, says that he has 'problems with neuritis that sometimes makes typing pretty uncomfortable for him'. I believe that he uses ViaVoice and iListen on his Macs to reduce his typing load. His review of iListen at http://www.applelinks.com/mooresviews/il16.shtml may give you some insight. |
| Visual Studio 2005 Team System | Fri 16 Jul | GStark |
| I havent figured out if this edition (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/default.aspx) will support the testing features they have added in both unmanaged C++ or if it only supports C#/.NET ??? Anyone know the answer? Thanks, Gavin Stark |
| Sat 17 Jul | Anon-y-mous Cow-ard | Yes. |
| Sat 17 Jul | no | No |
| Sun 18 Jul | Mr Fancypants | Maybe |
| Sun 18 Jul | no name | quantum boolean algebra |
| PHP Weirdness | Fri 16 Jul | muppet |
| ok, Ive got a file external to my script which contains a class definition. Im loading up the contents of the file with file_get_contents(), and then passing the return from that to eval(). After this, I attempt to create an instance of the class defined in the file, but I get the error Cannot instantiate nonexistant class or something very similiar to that. What gives? Is it impossible to load new class/function definitions at runtime? I mean.. I suppose that makes sense.. but.. bummer. |
| Fri 16 Jul | bah_humbug | Why don't you just include the file? include_once( 'file_with_class_definition' ); |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | what if I wanted to load class definitions out of the database? Is it just impossible? |
| Fri 16 Jul | Almost Anonymous | It should work -- done it before. Also a few packages rely on that behaviour. You must be doing something wrong.. post some code! |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | function load_plugin($pluginName) { global $q_params; if (isset($this->loadedPlugins[$pluginName])) { return 1; }else{ $widgetFile = $WIDGET_PATH . $pluginName . '.php'; $codeString = file_get_contents($widgetFile); eval($codeString); $this->loadedPlugins[$pluginName] = new $pluginName ($q_params); return 1; } } I pass in the name of the plugin, which in this case is 'newsColumn' (and yes, I have the case of each character correct) and I get: Fatal error: Cannot instantiate non-existent class: newscolumn in ... One thing that jumps out at me is the case non-agreement, but that's not coming from me. What gives? |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | I don't get any parse errors from eval or anything. But one thing is weird. During my debugging I added the line "echo $codeString" after $codeString gets assigned, and got nothing in the output at all. But the file most definitely is not empty! |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | apparently I have some sort of stupid path error. That has to be it. But why doesn't get_file_contents throw an error? |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | that was it, a f*cking path error but no error from file_get_contents for being called on a non-existant file. That's.... yucky. |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | still get the 'non-existant class' error even once the path issue is resolved, though. w.t.f. if I echo the contents of the file, I get all the code for the class def, but I can't instantiate it after calling eval. |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | found it had the wrong version of the !@#$ library on the server. after posting a hojillion times thanks AA |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | nope, still doesn't work aaaahahahahahaahaha I'm going off to cry now. Sorry for the 8 mile long thread. |
| Fri 16 Jul | Almost Anonymous | You never did mention what the contents of the file are? Perhaps you need to do a simple example... create a simple file, gets its contents, instatiate the class. If that works, make it more complex until you get what you are looking for. |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | if the class definition in the file is bad, then I should get a parse error from eval() |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | I simplified the file, it contains: id = 1; } } ?> that's it, I still get 'cannot instantiate nonexistant class newscolumn1'. |
| Fri 16 Jul | Almost Anonymous | Take out the blocks.. you're evaling code remember... eval('1+1'); |
| Fri 16 Jul | Almost Anonymous | And there's a little trick if you still want those tags in there: eval('?>'.$yourfilecontents.' |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | no dice, same error I'm getting ready to throw in the towel on this whole project over this. |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | now I found some parse errors in the eval'ed code. Eval wasn't throwing them, but if I feed the raw file through the php interpretter, I get uh-oh's. I don't understand why eval didn't choke on it. |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | ok, not to hijack my own topic, but where is the syntax error in this: SELECT S.CREATED AS STORY_CREATED, S.POST_SUBJECT, S.POST_BODY, S.POST_BODY_EXT, S.ID AS STORY_ID, C.*, U.DISPLAYNAME, U.ID AS USER_ID, FROM DBF_THREAD_MESSAGES S INNER JOIN DBF_GRANDPARENT_OBJECTS C ON (S.GRANDPARENT_ID = C.ID) INNER JOIN DBF_USERS U ON (S.CREATED_BY = U.ID) WHERE NOT (C.OBJECT_FLAGS & 0) AND C.OBJECT_TYPE = 'newsColumn' ORDER BY S.CREATED DESC LIMIT 0,5 on MySQL 4.x I've been beating my head against this query for the past 45 minutes. MySQL reports an error near 'FROM DBF_THREAD_MESSAGES S INNER JOIN DBF_GRAN' I don't see it |
| Fri 16 Jul | Almost Anonymous | Dude, the name of your class is Newcolumn but your trying to instanciate newscolumn1!! 'cannot instantiate nonexistant class newscolumn1' |
| Fri 16 Jul | Almost Anonymous | You need a few 'AS' sprinkled around... as in: DBF_THREAD_MESSAGES AS S |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | actually.. .it was the comma after 'U.ID AS USER_ID' :) |
| Fri 16 Jul | Almost Anonymous | I hate debugging MySQL SQL statements... the errors are not helpful enough. |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | AA - I mentioned the case sensitivity above. The error contains 'newscolumn' but it's DEFINITELY being called as newsColumn. The object is being instantiated now, I'm just having some trouble with the guts. ah well.. time to troubleshoot all night. :) thanks for your help! |
| Fri 16 Jul | muppet | oh, and the '1' was a typo (in my post, not the code) sorry :) |
| Fri 16 Jul | Almost Anonymous | No problem. Class names in PHP are case-insensitive so (in PHP4 anyway) you'll always see classes lowercased. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Stalking the trolls | ..and when such is the state of technical capacity, it is no wonder that we get angry and annoyed when they, who are not us, indulge and exhibit the very same capacity. |
| Sat 17 Jul | . | Excuse me, but where is $WIDGET_PATH declared? I do not see it declared as 'global' in your function, so my best guess of what's going on is that PHP is treating it as a local variable - it's the default. No wonder you get all sorts of errors then, because unless you declare $WIDGET_PATH as global inside the function, or assign something to it inside the function, it will be treated as empty value. One of those charming PHP disasters; one by one the two (the implicitly declared vars and the explicitly declared globals) are just features, but when they are present in the same language combined, they become a real bug factory and debugging nightmare. |
| Sat 17 Jul | muppet | yep, part of the problem was that I had to add a global declaration for WIDGET_PATH, too. Forgot to mention that. I'm wondering if that would still be necessary if it were defined as a const. |
| Sat 17 Jul | muppet | oh wait.. I mean: How spell PHP? Please to be emailing me with response quickly. For contract!! |
| Sat 17 Jul | Anon-y-mous Cow-ard | Stop stealing our livelihood, you fucking job whore, Indian free-loader! Better? |
| Sun 18 Jul | Clay Dowling | You two should really consider checking in to some sort of mental clinic for your own eval() function. Long strings of posts with only one poster is a sign that something is amiss. Also, this place is starting to look like it's inhabited by junior high students. |
| Qt : Panacea or Menace? | Fri 16 Jul | Jim Howard |
| Ive got a medium sized MFC application that a customer wants me to port to the Mac. Ive also had nibbles on it for vairous embedded platforms (phones and pdas). Its got a clean seperation between the functionaliy dll an the MFC GUI, so I could move the GUI first and then then then port the functional part. It is a consumer mass market product for that has some custom eye candy kind of GUI objects, its not a utilitarian industrial interface. I looked at Qt when I started this project a few months ago, but decided I didnt want to spend the money. At that time I didnt think there was a cross platform market, but it looks like I was wrong about that. I could absorb the cost now , especially if the learning curve from MFC isnt too steep. Is Qt a good tool for cross platform work with a consumer levell GUI? |
| Fri 16 Jul | Tom H | I looked at Qt a while ago, but didn't like the idea of programming a GUI in C (or C++, whatever) because it's such a clunky language to use. You might try wxWindows (or wxWidgets as its called now). I like using it in Python with the wxPython wrapper. |
| Fri 16 Jul | Mark Bessey | Most Qt applications I've seen for the Mac look a little weird. I think you'd probably be better off with something else. Actually, you might find implementing a native Mac GUI surprisingly easy, if you use the Cocoa framework. You can download Apple's developer tools at http://developer.apple.com/ -Mark |
| Fri 16 Jul | John Rusk | Perhaps Mono might be handy. Version 1.0 has just been released and '...allows developers to write rich client, web services and server-side applications and deploy them on Linux, Solaris, MacOS X, Windows NT/XP and various other Unix systems on a variety of architectures'. http://www.mono-project.com/about/index.html |
| Fri 16 Jul | Clutch Cargo | Menace. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Tony Edgecombe | I think you will find wxWindows/wxWidgets is closer in style to MFC than Qt is, you might be better looking their first. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Not going to tell my name! | QT is neither, it is a consistent Gui-toolkit with a cleaner API than MFC. The downside of QT is cost. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Jim Howard | I bought a MAC in 1985, but have long since forgotton what little I ever knew about developing for them. I know I'll need to get a Mac guy on my team, but I'm trying to get smart enough on this to at least an intelligent interview question. I'll spend the money if there is a system that would let me generate native feel guis for both Mac and PC from the same code base. I'm skeptical about mono, but others have suggest it also so I'll take a serious look at that also. |
| Sat 17 Jul | matt | Yep, wxWindows all the way. Results in some very nice clean portable code especially if you use the wxPython bindings. |
| Sat 17 Jul | mb | if it's just a mac gui, and you already have a windows gui with a clean separation between ui & the code, why not just build a separate mac ui? make it look and feel 'mac-like' too. what you learned in 1985 won't be much use anyway, i don't think the NeXT existed yet. what little i've done with Cocoa and Objective C and NIB leads me to believe that building Mac UI now is remarkably simple. of course, having two UI mechanisms means more maintenence and different support costs (support people need to know both UIs, but users don't need to learn the weirdness from whatever cross-platform system you chose). |
| Sat 17 Jul | Mark Bessey | You could try RealBasic - That could be your portable UI, then you'd just have to call into shared libraries on each platform (I believe the Pro version supports that functionality). -Mark |
| Sun 18 Jul | Jim Howard | Thanks to all for the excellent comments. 'if it's just a mac gui, and you already have a windows gui with a clean separation between ui & the code, why not just build a separate mac ui? make it look and feel 'mac-like' too.' I figure that the functionality will have to be platform specific, since it talks to ethernet and wireless lan cards and other devices via device drivers. I was hoping to have one gui so that one guy could do both guis, and one each windows and mac guys could work on the functionality. If there is no good cross platform gui then I wind up having to have a seperate mac progam, so I have to everything twice and probably need at least another 1/2 person. And of course, those high strung mac zealots hate it when you cut them in two. But then again they all do drugs and might feel less pain..... hmmmm. |
| Joel Book | Fri 16 Jul | Camilo Telles |
| Where is the pre-order link? :) |
| Fri 16 Jul | GiorgioG | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1590593898/qid=1090008229/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-8430951-1159020?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 |
| Fri 16 Jul | bpd | Well, at least this answers all the blather regarding what Joel's been up to lately and why he's not been visible on the forum. He's been busy writing a book! |
| Fri 16 Jul | Dennis Forbes | From what I gather it is simply a reprint of a lot of the essays he's written on joelonsoftware, with the only real difference being that they've been professionally edited (which was likely detrimental to them given how readable they already are). |
| Fri 16 Jul | .NET Developer | A perfect gift for management and coworkers. |
| Fri 16 Jul | Anon-y-mous Cow-ard | Aha! I true nature of his motives is revealed! Shameless monetary gain! |
| Fri 16 Jul | Karthik | < |
| Fri 16 Jul | Anon-y-mous Cow-ard | Shit, I must be less "affluent" than I thought...15-20K is nothing these days, huh? Poor old me... |
| Fri 16 Jul | Li-fan Chen | Congrats! |
| Fri 16 Jul | Camilo Telles | 'Yes, it's mostly reprints of articles which you've already read on this site over the last four years' Let us see what is diferent. Camilo |
| Sat 17 Jul | Rank Merida | I better save on disk all the articles. Just in case Joel decides to take them offline. I can't afford a printed book :-( |
| Sat 17 Jul | Steve Jones (UK) | It is kind of sad that the Amazon link above has a section called 'About the author' and then goes on to describe the careers of several distinguished people, none of whom are Joel. He doesn't even get a mention. Maybe these are the editors, or the ghost-writers. Or maybe he should work with people who just pay more attention to detail. Not that we'd want to be accused of 'perfectionism', but getting the credit on your own book would seem like a good idea. Maybe it is just me, but when I was published (many moons ago now), I was happy to see my name on there, not someone else's. |
| Sat 17 Jul | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | Stevie, What book have you written? I am curious. |
| Sat 17 Jul | mb | does anyone know about book publisher data management? i went into the bookstore last month to look at a computer book. months ago it was listed as being written by jon doe, but it seems jon doe bowed out and it was written by jane smith. some computer systems, including the one in the bookstore where the book was sitting, still listed jon doe as the author. amazon lists both authors. |
| Sat 17 Jul | MT Heart | Hmmm. I think Amazon's halo must be have slipped a bit. 'Availability: This item has not yet been released. You may order it now and we will ship it to you when it arrives.' 'Customers who bought this book also bought: ... a list of books about Oracle...' Unless of course Amazon thinks they ARE the oracle. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Steve Jones (UK) | Sathyaish Chakravarthy: 'Stevie, What book have you written? I am curious.' Well, Sathi, I haven't been published in many years, as I indicated in my post. However, as in all these cases, Google is your friend. |
| Sun 18 Jul | Shlomi Fish | Well, I just wanted to give a big congratulations for Joel for publishing this book. I surely enjoyed reading the articles on this site, and gained some new insights from them. As for me, I'm still contemplating whether I should buy Paul Graham's new book of essays. |
| Sun 18 Jul | RP | Are you this Steve Jones? http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/jones.html |
| More IQ-ism | Fri 16 Jul | Dr. Real PC |
| There are some devout believers in IQ here, I see. First, I am not anti-IQ because my own is low. Its definitely better than 95% and possibly better than 98%. My reason for questioning the whole IQ concept is that I disagree with the IQ carved in stone and passed on through the DNA idea. I agree with my old friend Stephen Jones that IQ is totally misunderstood in our society. I am definitely not complaining about meritocracy, and I definitely do not want to get rid of grades and standardized tests; I am definitely not a socialist ,and I do not think everyone is equal. Just to get all that out of the way. What I am trying to say is a little hard to explain. I will start with the statement that those of you here (and there are many) who feel |