| last updated:29 Dec 2003 16:12 UK time |
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| JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 28 Dec 2003) | View Other Weeks |
| pseudo-RAID on a single drive? | Sun 28 Dec | Alex.ro |
| I understand RAID uses two drives in parallel to double the throughput. Whats to stop a single drive being used that way? After all, any drive has more than one head, and just using the two heads on the same platter in parallel would double the throughput. Not to mention using four heads, and so on. Why has this never been done? Is this a bandwidth limitation in the hard drive controller? |
| Sun 28 Dec | Mitch & Murray (from downtown) | Wow ... |
| Sun 28 Dec | MX | This question is discussed in depth at http://www.storagereview.com/ I think it's in the FAQ. |
| Sun 28 Dec | MX | The FAQ question 'Why has no one made a drive with internal RAID 0?' is answered at: http://www.storagereview.com/php/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=InternalRAID0 |
| Sun 28 Dec | Philo | Hm. They don't mention the first reason I thought of: A single drive cannot, by definition, be a RAID - every single word in the acronym defines more than a single drive. Having said that, then the other reason for trying to 'RAIDify' a single drive would be to deliver performance, and obviously drive manufacturers think there are better ways of doing that (SATA, increased drive velocity, increased data density) Philo |
| Sun 28 Dec | Mark Smith | I know that this is totally out of left field... Back in the day, Netware beat the pants off of all other NOSes because of its drive geometry aware disk device driver. The idea was that Netware would sort sector requests in such a way as to minimize drive head movement and maximize the number of platters involved. While this might mean that the sectors asked for might be returned in a different order, the overall performance was *much* better. This sounds akin to what an internal RAID would accomplish for performance. On modern hardware, it's almost impossible to achieve these kind of performance increases because just about all drives lie about their geometry. |
| Sun 28 Dec | MX | This feature of Netware was called elevator seeking, right? |
| Sun 28 Dec | Mark Smith | Yup, I think so. |
| Mem | Sun 28 Dec | GP |
| Dont know if its the place to ask this, but... Does anybody know what this is ? http://joelonsoftware.com/mem.html |
| Sun 28 Dec | Brad Wilson | The name of the people killed in the 9/11 attack (not sure if it's just New York, or includes Washington and Pennsylvania, too). |
| Sun 28 Dec | no name | 9/11 |
| Sun 28 Dec | GP | OK, in fact I had guessed just after asking. I should sometimes think twice. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Snoop | Hey dude, you don't know, you ask then you find out fo' shizzle. Peace! |
| "IT shifting away from Microsoft"? | Sun 28 Dec | Mitch & Murray (from downtown) |
| Wonder if anyone saw this link on Slashdot and has comments on the article referenced: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13350 Basically it postulates that the IT industry is shifting, albeit slowly, away from Microsoft. I have no axe to grind with Microsoft nor am I a Linux cheerleader, but IMHO the article may be drawing a reasonable conclusion. Comments? |
| Sun 28 Dec | Mark Smith | I have noticed an increase in the heterogeneity of large corporate IT shops; 2 years ago you could pick companies off of the Fortune 500 that had a stated Microsoft-centric IT policy. That doesn't appear to be the case anymore. I also do think that MS has more high profile diificulties now than ever before. XBox is a money loser (and battling with Nintendo for *distant* 2nd place), .Net adoption has clearly not proceeded anywhere near the rate MS planned (espcially considering the hype), new versions of Office aren't an automatic upgrade, there's nothing exciting coming down the pike for a long time (Longhorn, Yukon, etc...) and MS blamed security issues are a monthly topic. MS isn't doing anything exciting right now while there's lots of excitement in the Linux community. I can see how the author could relate the two but I don't think that's entirely accurate or fair. For one thing, I don't think that the author entirely understands the corporate volume licensing program. Clearly, there are many corporations that are staying put with software versions and not signing new agreements (i.e. Gartner reports that commercial deployments of WinXP for organizations with 10k+ employees is 6.6%). That definently has an impact. In terms of Wall Street reaction, the fact that MS is having a flat quarter is an important thing to keep an eye on. MS has been accused in the past of shaving revenue off of fat quarters to prop up lean quarters; I believe there was some creative accounting that went on in the past that doesn't go on anymore. Right now, a flat quarter can be written off (economic slow down, IT spending, etc...). However, I believe that in the near future MS will significantly miss analysts estimates and there won't be a good excuse (espcially if firms like Intel and IBM are doing well). Since MS is the company with metrics that always go up, I could see there being something of a panic around the company's future (bad terms like 'market saturation' and 'lack of innovation' come to mind), a slew of downgrades, institutional ownership pull back, and an employee morale hit (since they're so loose with option and stock grants). That will stall MS's market momentum and that's when things could get interesting. |
| Sun 28 Dec | no name | 'MS isn't doing anything exciting right now' what about longhorn, .net, winfx, xaml... |
| Sun 28 Dec | Almost Anonymous | 'what about longhorn, .net, winfx, xaml...' *yawn* |
| Sun 28 Dec | Philo | 'i.e. Gartner reports that commercial deployments of WinXP for organizations with 10k+ employees is 6.6%' That's a silly analysis. For corporations, it's tough to argue WinXP over Win2k. A bigger indicator will be adoption of Win2k3 in the server market. As for the article, well, it *is* the Register, and let me sum up the author's agenda with this one quote: 'Somehow, people didn't buy the fact that $1,000 a head was cheaper than free' If he can't even make a comparative mention of TCO (if you want to argue Linux's TCO is less than Windows, fine, but it ain't ever free), then IMHO that calls the entire article into question. Just my $.02 Philo (obviously, this is solely my opinion and does not reflect the views of Microsoft) |
| Sun 28 Dec | Ankur | There ain't so much exciting going on in Linux right now either. |
| Sun 28 Dec | ...or use a real database... | Why sure there is! In fact, I think MySQL just got transactions a few months ago.... |
| Sun 28 Dec | Shlomi Fish | Well, the article had some flaws, but as a general rule, the trend is there and probably growing. Linux is not exactly the hard to use, guru-friendly that it was some years ago, and it's pretty usable for most clueful or semi-clueful people. (even if they don't know how to use the command line). Not all the software there is up to par or as complete as the equivalent Windows offering. Naturally, there are random problems that may be encountered if you push the system to its limits, but so there are in Windows. (my friend has Windows XP and he can't seem to run Mozilla there for some reason) Whether Microsoft will survive the hole they dug for themselves or not, is hard to tell. What I think will happen is that if it survives in one piece, it will be just one company among many who ships cross-platform UNIX and Linux friendly products. I think there's still room for innovation and software, and Microsoft are known for improving the usability and feature-sets of products to perfection. This skill is still needed. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Walter Rumsby | I couldn't be bothered reading the whole thing. I found the author's tone childish. Anytime anyone holds up Netscape as an example of a company that 'evil Microsoft killed' I roll my eyes - Netscape's incompotence and poor products killed Netscape; in fact most of the companies Microsoft 'killed' really killed themselves through stupidity, unrealistic pricing and poor product quality. I do think the environment is becoming more hetrogenous and this presents a problem for Microsoft. A lot of people seem very wary of Mono, so unless Redmond takes a different tack they're not going to be as ubiquitous as they have been. Personally I don't think that's a big problem - diversity is beneficial. Still, no one is really trying to compete on the desktop (I say this as an OS X user) so most of us will keep seeing that Windows flag every day. |
| Sun 28 Dec | fool for python | 'MS isn't doing anything exciting right now' 'what about longhorn, .net, winfx, xaml...' The technologies are fine, the problem is with the 'right now'. .net is right now. Lonhorn is *years* away. Monopolies have a habit of pre-emptive anouncement designed to freeze the mnarket while the products are developed (because they can). If the current products security were good enough, they might wait. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Scot Doyle | Philo has a good point when he mentions the traditional bias of The Register. It seems to me that the biggest problem MS has is the fact that Longhorn is so far away... not only in release, but even more in market penetration. Let's say it has a significantly better UI. That is great, but what is going to make people upgrade to it in sufficient numbers to create a market for it? The only thing of interest I see happening for MS over the next few years is the penetration of .NET into the market... and I don't see how that is going to help them in terms of revenue. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Philo | Yeah, only monopolies do that. Philo |
| Sun 28 Dec | dmann | IMHO Microsoft's strategy is to be the _only_ company with a major propriety IT-industry standard. That means maintaining the position Windows and Office have and preventing for example Playstation or Symbian from evolving into similar cash cows as the core MS products. I doubt Bill worries too much about Xbox profits as long as it keeps Sony in check. Now can MS maintain it's strategy ? my guess would be no. The reason is simple, there is a huge demand in the market for an MS tech alternative, if not for any other reason than to push prices lower and the general dissatisfaction with the Microsoft Tax. It will take a while and MS will probably keep most of the market but that is still very different from the current 'monopoly' position, and it will hit the bottom line. That said I saw one MS guy (from DirectX team) last month and he was pretty much a genius. I expect very interesting stuff from these boys with big brains and wallets. -dmann |
| Sun 28 Dec | Frederic Faure | BTW, the article is published at the Inquirer, not the Register :-) |
| Sun 28 Dec | no name | The article is a typical Linux cheer squad wish list. Big deal. As with everything Linux, it pays to look to the fundamentals. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Dennis Forbes | 'The article is a typical Linux cheer squad wish list' The article is pure FUD. Indeed, my Slashdot account (yes, I fear to say that I do have a Slashdot account...a 4 digit account no less!) currently has a score:5 post in that discussion deriding the conclusions of the ridiculous article. Having said that, for whatever reason (be it people not having a convincing reason to upgrade, market saturation, etc) Microsoft revenue has flattened and even declined -- This _is_ unprecedented for Microsoft, and in the ramp up to this Microsoft started the whole activation push to try to increase revenue by decreasing piracy (of course the reality is that a lot of the pirates just installed Linux), and by formulated some extremely hostile licensing plans and offensive stances towards business (like forcing you to buy a desktop license for every machine in your organization even if you're buying them pre-loaded from Dell). I expect much more of the same, or worse, as a bit of a desperate campaign to justify the market capitalization continues, as many of the other ventures Microsoft has entered into have been disasterous. |
| Sun 28 Dec | soothsayer | Of course most of you are coming from US, therefore ýou are accustomed to US-centric views of anything, and choose to neglect the growing Linux usage in the other part of the world. Side note: in some countries the only way for MS not having to be replaced by Linux in desktop is not to enforce software piracy. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Skeptic | I agree that the article was pure FUD from a questionable source. Yes it is The Inquirer not The Register, but they were both founded by Michael Magee and are philosophically one and the same. Also, the fact that MSN did report a profit last month and a few other picayune details indicated to me that the writer didn't do his research or put any objective thought into the article. Anyway, opinions aside, just where is Microsoft really losing out to Linux? Their 2 primary sources of profit are the Office Suite and operating systems. In most home and desktop office environments I don't see them losing out to Linux on either of those two fronts. On the server side, where Linux is growing, are they losing business to Linux or is Linux cannabalizing other *nixes? |
| Sun 28 Dec | David Roper | IT shifting away from Microsoft? Absolutely, and not because of any trivial differences between Windows (what ever flavour) and any other OS, but because of global demography. I think most people who post to this forum simply do not comprehend the balance between the US and Western European (which are the key markets for ALL industrial products) and Indo-China. The latter is by far and away the greatest future market, whether for industrial or domestic products or for services. On the balance of probabilities, my estimation is that they will not choose Microsoft (nor Sun, nor Oracle, nor SAP, nor Siebel, nor...). This is not to say that Microsoft (and the others) will not remain a major play in its current (quasi-monopolised) markets, but for a variety of reasons - some economic but mostly social and even more importantly political - I think it will be very hard put to repeat its US/ European penetration on a truly global scale. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Mark Smith | It seems like Linux is eating into the low-mid commodity server share from both MS and other UNIX vendors. It's hard to get reliable stats on servers; you really need to look at work done/transactions processed. Check out the latest Netcraft web server survey: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html You can see from this that IIS peeked around the middle of 2002 and has been losing share ever since. Web serving is definently a commodity and it's clear that Apache is the big winner in that space (and Apache on Linux is far and away the post popular configuration). Now, I realize that this is an apple to oranges comparision (web server vs. all servers) and that there are problems with the way that Netcraft does the survey (web parking skews the results). Nonetheless, there's something to take away from this. Mid size business espcially (200-1200 employees) seem to be flocking to Linux for file serving, network services (DHCP, DNS), web serving, and e-mail. Basically, anywhere that isn't overly driven by 'strategic thinking' seems to be deploying commodity services on Linux instead of the MS Small Business Server type packages. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Philo | Given two installations: 1) MSN, with a few dozen web servers in a farm 2) An ISP with one 4-way box running Apache serving a few dozen picayune websites How does Netcraft count those? Philo |
| Sun 28 Dec | max | Basic 'web serving' has became a commodity. So, Microsoft should offer IIS for free, with every version of Windows they ship. They already do that. They need to work on making IIS a lot easier to configure, and also more secure. And they also need to offer free Windows to educational institutions, and maybe a Windows Free Edition, which will only act as a limited web server. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Walter Rumsby | They need to let me use my X-Box as a CHEAP (Java capable :)) web server. Please. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Michael Koziarski | Philo, The netcraft survey will affect MSFTs share in the same way. I remember reading a while back that in an effort to work around this, some other outfit surveyed just fortune 1000 companies and the percentages were almost identical. I'll dig around for the link. Cheers, Koz |
| Sun 28 Dec | Mark Smith | Philo: Netcraft is looking at domains. So, 1 server that hosts 100 domains would count 100 times. 25 servers in a round robin configuration supporting 1 domain are counted once. Netcraft also doesn't take into account that http://www.ebay.com is more significant in terms of workload than http://www.aiworks.com. |
| Sun 28 Dec | JWA | I have a few comments/questions: I totally didn't follow this comment: 'A lot of people seem very wary of Mono, so unless Redmond takes a different tack they're not going to be as ubiquitous as they have been.' What does that mean? My first blush was that you were referring to the Mono Project, the .NET open source implementation. But that doesn't make sense in the context of your sentence, so maybe you meant it as a shorted Monopoly? What is this FUD I suddenly see everywhere. I've been able to figure out every other weird net-speak acronym, but not this one. Philo getting a job at MS has bummed me out. I've always enjoyed and respected his (your) comments, and I was happy to hear about your cool job. Now, though, it seems as though every one of your posts are defending MS or cheerleading for them and their products. This is totally understandable as this is now your family, and it's true that I agree with everything you've said both technically and in personal opinion. However I just don't read the comments as being completely objective any more. I've never really noticed this phenomenon before and it's interesting to me. --Josh |
| Sun 28 Dec | JWA | Ok, Googled like I should have and result #1 is: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Hills/9267/fuddef.html First line on the page says: 'FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt'. Got it. --Josh |
| Sun 28 Dec | Philo | Josh - for what it's worth, it's bummed me out as well. Working as a salesbeing for MS is interesting, because I truly believe in their products. If you'll look over my posts since I've been posting to JoS, in general I've been a staunch supporter of SQL vs. Oracle or MySQL, .Net, Windows vs. Linux, etc. I personally believe that in each case the MS platform has been made easy enough to maintain that it allowed me as a developer to concentrate on the work I had to do instead of being an admin. The joy of the MS job for me is doing something I truly believe in. Unfortunately, I'm sure my employment will have that tainting effect on what I write now - people will think 'oh it's the Microsoft shill again' My writing's been off-center lately as I've tried to come to terms with my new position, what company policies are about posting, and how to bring it up on here. Obviously pro-MS stuff (esp. in the normal course of discussion, as opposed to in a 'which is better' bunfight) was easier to start on. (An interesting side effect of the job is that some products are even more interesting to me now as I get exposed to a lot of their capabilities I wouldn't have paid attention to before. Thus the new love of Office 2003...) ...and I won't be posting MS vents as much, as I'm more likely to go hunt down the person responsible, now that I can. [grin] In summation - I haven't sold my soul, I'm still trying to speak candidly, and I still, sorry to say, happen to like all of Microsoft's stuff. Philo |
| Sun 28 Dec | JWA | Philo, I understand completely, and I agree that you haven't changed what you're saying (though I've noticed the deeper exposure to other apps). It's just a weird phenomenon that I noticed and for some reason mentioned. By the way, your statement that 'it allowed me as a developer to concentrate on the work I had to do instead of being an admin' is spot-on. Have a good evening, --Josh |
| Sun 28 Dec | Brazilian Dude | LOL, loved the term "Linux cheerleader". |
| Sun 28 Dec | Walter Rumsby | Sentence 1: 'I do think the environment is becoming more hetrogenous and this presents a problem for Microsoft.' The 'new' computing environment is not just Microsoft. I guess this doesn't require further analysis. Sentence 2: 'A lot of people seem very wary of Mono, so unless Redmond takes a different tack they're not going to be as ubiquitous as they have been.' Mono would theoretically allow .NET to run on a Linux (or OS X, or PS2, or ...) box, so while MS might lose licensing $ from people not buying Windows, those people could still use Microsoft applications and frameworks written for .NET running under Mono (and theoretically MS could potentially implement everything so that it runs in the CLR - e.g. SQL Server [or at least something like JET], Visual Studio, ASP.NET, etc). This still earns Microsoft dollars, and doesn't lock them out of consideration for *nix machines (right now you're not going to be deploying SQL Server on your nice new Linux server). Most importantly it keeps users doing things 'the Microsoft way' - users will still look to Microsoft for direction. What I was thinking when I mentioned Mono was that Mono seems to offer a way of embracing the 'new' hetregenity of the corporate computing environment whilst still doing things the MS way (as outlined above). However (and it is probably just FUD) the majority of discussion of Mono I see seems to say something along the lines of 'if Mono ever takes off MS will kill it'. (Somebody, I think it was Dennis Forbes... or perhaps Atkins..., posted something positive here about their view of Mono and that really stands out for me because his perspective was different to almost everything else I've heard on Mono). The general attitude people have towards Mono is important because while people think Mono has no future and if they are planning to use Linux in their organisation, .NET-based development becomes a lot less attractive (sure they could use web services, but once you make that decision you're putting on the ugly suit right there). Hope that clears things up. |
| Simple ASP Question | Sun 28 Dec | Chi Lambda |
| Im pulling PRODUCT_SPECS from my database into a large Recordset and displaying them on my site. Within the specs information sometimes there are titles of products. Desire: Id like to automatically convert each product title found in the specs to be a link to another page. I figure to open another Recordset from the PRODUCT_TITLES table and compare that listing to PRODUCT_SPECS and where a title exists make it into a link. Problem: Some product titles actually contain other titles. Example: - TurboCAM Milling (software) - CAM Milling (machine) Question: Whats the best and simplest way to compare the information and create an automatic link? And how do I make the code differentiate between text found within other text and that which appears alone? Thanks for the help. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Matthew Lock | So we can help post the fields of the product_title and product_specs tables. |
| Sun 28 Dec | dmooney | I'm not sure why you wouldn't have a numeric primary key that you could compare with. I'm also not sure why you wouldn't use join the tables using SQL, even if you did have text keys. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Chi Lambda | Note: the product titles found in the specs do not come from the PRODUCT_TITLES table. |
| Sun 28 Dec | the artist formerly known as prince | hmmm sunday + simple question = Homework? |
| Serving ads in software | Sun 28 Dec | Alex |
| I am developing a piece of shareware software. Can anyone please advise how i may include ads in it? Most of the sites i have been to only server banner ads. How does flashget or kazaa do it? thanks alex |
| Sun 28 Dec | Matthew Lock | Does ad supported shareware actually make any money? I know that a lot of shareware have removed their ads. (Read this http://www.getright.com/statement.html) It's also the quickest way to get your shareware labeled spyware. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Elan Dekel | You might want to check out: http://www.cydoor.com/ Not that I recommend it or anything, I just know that they seem to be making an awful lot of money doing this stuff... |
| Sun 28 Dec | Matthew Lock | Cydoor is exactly what I meant about getting your software labeled as spyware. Check out the pages returned when you search on 'cydoor' http://www.google.com.au/search?q=cydoor |
| Sun 28 Dec | www.marktaw.com | Opera does this and their documentation is pretty good. Banner Advertising Implementation http://www.opera.com/docs/ads/index.dml Advertise In Opera http://www.opera.com/advertise/ You can probably learn a lot from these two links. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Frederic Faure | Ads are anoying. Maybe you'll have more luck making the basic version free, but providing an enhanced but commercial version. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Dennis Forbes | Speaking of ads, I have been quite surprized that there aren't "sponsored" applications -- not banner ads rotating downloaded ads or anything like that, but rather just a particular corporation branding -- i.e. you load up SmartFTP and the splash screen proclaims "Brought to you by coke", and maybe the color theme is red and white with minimal coke branding. Given the proliferation of branding in the rest of the world, the fact that many very popular apps aren't branded seems bizarre to me. I'm, of course, talking about free versions of software -- this does not carry over to pay products. Speaking of that, the wife bought the "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" DVD - Unbelievably there are literally 15 ads before the movie starts. They are all ads by the same company promoting their other garbage movies, but this abuse of customers just blew me away. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Jason | >> I have been quite surprized that there >>aren't 'sponsored' applications -- not banner ads >>rotating downloaded ads or anything like that, but >>rather just a particular corporation branding The Weatherbug http://www.weatherbug.com/aws/index.asp does this. If you use their free version, every so often you pick a sponsor from a list of 20-30 companies and the background of the application becomes a billboard for that company. Jason |
| Sun 28 Dec | Alex.ro | >> Ads are anoying. Maybe you'll have more luck making the >> basic version free I agree. That's why I quit using Opera. Winamp is free as in beer, but they have a paid version with some extra functionality, so they get both ample installed base, and revenue. If you go for the ads, at the very *least*, make sure your ads aren't *animated*. |
| Sun 28 Dec | max | This is BS, in my opinion. The makers of WinAmp are called Nullsoft. Nullsoft was purchased by AOL. So - AOL finances the whole thing - you know how big US companies are - they can afford to drop some money on such a thing. |
| Open source complexity issue | Sun 28 Dec | Mike |
| Ive snipped this from another post on a different topic here. It stood out like a sore thumb. Since this is turning into a discussion of how open source will affect us, let me recommend that everyone read a great article by Marc Fleury. Basically he explains why he CAN and IS making money by providing an open source project such as jboss. No small time ISV is going to be able to come up with a complex Application server (or database program, or operating system, or ...) and make money doing it. BUT, many ISVs can and will make money writing custom software FOR those big, complex applications. Hence the reason OPEN SOURCE WILL MAKE US ALL MONEY.http://www.jboss.org/modules/html/white3.pdf So are we to believe that this is an incentive for OSS to write complex code so they can have hope one in hell of selling documentation and services and so ISVs can help you wade through the muck. If OSS goes this route to make money, that is a bad thing. Although thinking about it, IBM global services springs to mind. I wonder why? |
| Sun 28 Dec | John Rose | I don't see how that's a lot different than an ISV making money off of solutions built on closed-source commercial software like IIS or Oracle. Just because a company can plunk down $___ for Oracle doesn't mean they understand it, just because it comes with manuals and support. They still need to pay skilled people (whether employees/contractors/ISV's/etc) to make sense of it and built on top of it. In terms of 'how can an ISV make money?' I don't think the closed/open source debate is really applicable, except for the costs of the software itself, which is usually a relatively small cost of the overall development effort anyway. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Matthew Lock | The fact that Tim Berners-Lee made the world wide web an open standard certainly made us developers a lot of money. |
| Sun 28 Dec | John | Please look at income and profits of software companies based on commercial software, and at income and profits of software companies based on open source. This information is easily accessible for public companies - you can find it using a search engine. You will see that: - lots of commercial software companies are profitable (even if we take giants like MS and Oracle out of the equation) - very, very few OSS companies are profitable - the OSS companies that are profitable have very low profit and very low income compared to commercial software companies, and thus, can hire fewer programmers For example, fans cheered when Red Hat became profitable in the last quarter or so. But the Red Hat profit was very low, and it's doing much worse than commercial software companies of comparable size. Very few companies can succeed if they sell open source software. I belive that in the long term, open source creates a 'rock star-like' business environment. In the music world, a handful of people are rock stars, and make decent money, while the rest (that is, 98%) barely make a living and have to struggle very hard. In the brave new OSS world, a handful of programmers and 2-3 companies will be rich, while the rest of us will barely scrape by because every piece of software will be free as in beer and free as in freedom. You many not know this, but some open source software companies have simply resorted to begging in order not to tank. Mandrake is a recent example - they cried for help, and asked people to donate. Excuse me, but is this the future we want? Do you want to work for a software company that is in constant danger of tanking, and has to beg people to donate, or do you want to work for a software company which sells it's products, and has a healthy profit? Where do you think you would be happier? Which company do you think will hire more programmers? |
| Sun 28 Dec | T. Norman | There is a big difference between a company whose core products are open source, and companies that use open source to build commercial products or custom solutions or enhance their other products (like IBM selling mainframes that run Linux, or Joel using PHP for FogBugz on *nix). I wouldn't want to work for the first type, but there is plenty of money being made in the other type. |
| Sun 28 Dec | >> TD << | I agree with T Norman. If you want to be profitable you've got to add value to OSS products |
| Sun 28 Dec | no name | The part that sticks out like a sore thumb to me is that to make money off of open source you need to be a service provider. i.e. you need to provide computer consulting or contract programming. I'd much rather be selling a product than providing consulting. Good luck trying to compete with JBoss though. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Frederic Faure | Although some people use OSS tools simply because they're as in beer, others (or the same) use them because they're free as in speech, ie. as much as possible, they'd rather use tools that do not lock them into a proprietary solution, raising the cost of switching to another solution in case the company goes under or raises, lowers the quality of its products or service, or raises its price to an unreasonable level. Business 101: Always have a plan B :-) We are then, however, faced with the issue of how to allow developers to make money off a tool that is freely available. As explained in this thread, OSS tools that require full-time employees for developing it (salaries, rent, etc.) and/or do not require consulting to make it work because it's so basic... are not company-friendly. It's not an easy problem balancing the need for individuals to make $, and those same individuals to share knowledge to improve society (where would scientific knowledge be today if each scientist kept his discoveries to himself, or patented them and forced others to shell out $ to use them?). |
| Sun 28 Dec | Kerry Heffermen | 'where would scientific knowledge be today if each scientist kept his discoveries to himself, or patented them and forced others to shell out $ to use them' Isn't that how it works right now? |
| Sun 28 Dec | Shlomi Fish | Well, I personally always felt that ASP (=Active Server Pages) was a scheme by Microsoft to provide a living for a great deal of people. I mean, I once had to write a simple form handler for IIS, and I scanned the ASP documentation for something that will enable me to send E-mail, and found absolutely nothing. I ended up writing it in Perl, where it worked perfectly. It turns out you need to buy a specialized ActiveX object that can send E-mail. Ditto for using regular expressions, doing encryption, or for opening files (!). And Microsoft does not provide all these things - other vendors do. In Perl you can find almost anything on CPAN, and the core language itself has any system mechanism that someone bothered to write a binding for (files, sockets, users, processes, the works). Ditto for PHP (albeit getting an extension is less straightforward than with CPAN) and I think for Java as well. So they gave people a braindead solution, so there will be an entire culture of vendors springing to complement it. I'm not saying this phenomenon is limited to what Microsoft does. It exists anywhere, even in open source places. However, no software can ever be fully complete to satisfy all needs, or so it can be used out of the box. You just have to make sure it is extensible solution, so other people can build upon your efforts. This is the case for JBoss. From what I know of it JBoss is far from being braindead or incomplete. But many firms who would wish to deploy it (or Perl for that matter) would need to customize it or otherwise implement things above it that don't come by default. It makes no difference whether it is open source or not - that will always be the case. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Shlomi Fish | John: for your information, most of the commercial software startups fail miserably as well. As for the profitability margins: you may be correct. If you hit the jackpot providing a (usually very costy) commercial solution, you can become very profitable, at least until an equivalent open source solution or a better commercial ones comes along and eat your market. BTW, profits do not finance programmers, they just finance new programmers and expansion. In fact, the salaries and other costs involved in hiring programmers is deducted from the total earnings, and after more deductions eventually yield the cost. Of course, in my opinion, at least, open source is more fun and more rewarding. A Freecell solving program I developed would not have had half the features it has now, had I did not make it Public Domain from the beginning. In a way I felt that I did not cheat the community by hiding the source from them or demanding money. Note that I would not mind getting any job, whether in commercial, open source or simply in-house, embedded or whatever software. I just love to program. |
| Sun 28 Dec | no name | >> 'Well, I personally always felt that ASP (=Active Server Pages) was a scheme by Microsoft to provide a living for a great deal of people. I mean, I once had to write a simple form handler for IIS, and I scanned the ASP documentation for something that will enable me to send E-mail, and found absolutely nothing. I ended up writing it in Perl, where it worked perfectly.' You're pretty much a god damn mother fucking stupid piece of shit bastard. Ever hear of CDO. I think you need to shut the fuck up or get the fuck out of the business. Oh yea, I almost forgot mother fucker, learn how to fucking read. You fucking nit wit, you just wanted to find some way to bash Microsoft. You're a complete mother fucking moron. Hence you're retarded name. From now on I'll call you Stupid Fuck. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Dennis Forbes | Good day Shlomi 'It turns out you need to buy a specialized ActiveX object that can send E-mail. Ditto for using regular expressions, doing encryption, or for opening files (!). And Microsoft does not provide all these things - other vendors do.' Regular expressions have been a part of the script interpreter engine for many years now. Opening files (fso) and sending email (CDO, MAPI) have been available pretty much from day one. Encryption is functionality exposed through the CryptoAPI available from 'Win32', but as ASP can't call Win32 functions you do need to fire up Visual Studio, create a basic COM wrapper, and there you go--encryption from ASP. Indeed, COM (via dispatch interfaces) was the ultimate interoperation mechanism in ASP and if you could expose some functionality to COM, you could use it from ASP. So in other words I entirely disagree with you -- Microsoft stated 'here's ASP, and it can talk to anything that knows how to talk via a dispatch interface', and anyone, either closed or open source, could freely release functional 'plug-ins' to be used from your code (and there are tens of thousand of free and commercial products), or alternately you could easily expose your own functionality. Your misunderstanding is quite common, however, and it derives from people looking in the VBScript documentation and looking for the library calls, when instead it isn't a reinvention of the wheel in the VBScript world, but rather is the entire universe of COM components. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Dennis Forbes | As a sidenote, and to demonstrate this point, a friend, whose site is based in ASP (they haven't made the .NET migration), needed a component to pull a thumbnail out of an uploaded video file. Knowing that the .NET Framework has fantastic graphical capabilities, and knowing some DirectX library calls to open a video file, I quickly threw together a .NET component that would pull the image file, resize it to the desired size, and save it in the desired format. Sticking a Com Callable Wrapper on the component and voila, from ASP some pretty advanced image capabilities (I even included multiple layers with various transparency, titling, etc), available via the magic of COM. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Shlomi Fish | Anonymous: what is the meaning of all this swearing? We are civilized people here and I expressed an opinion. Perhaps such that is based on dis-information I mistanekly had but nonetheless it was perfectly innocent me. I wouldn't blame Joel or any other moderator of the forum if he reomved it. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Shlomi Fish | Dennis: I stand corrected. I suppose the cost of having Visual Studio is negligible compared to the entire cost of having IIS+ASP etc., and anyhow a Windows webmaster is not as spoiled as his Linux peer and expects to pay for software. In any case, from what I heard the case was that you indeed needed such stuff to effectively worked with ASP, or at least people used them. Maybe those 'out-of-the-course' ASP winnies, cannot be expected to write a COM object by a long shot, and so would rather convince their deployer to buy something commercial. That may be a case for a great deal of PHP programmers out there as well, only with PHP you can usually get the components for free. If the documentation of ASP did not make it clear how to write a form handler that sends an E-mail message, then it's a bug in the MSDN documentation. After I converted to using Perl, I was able to find several good ways to send an E-mail, and eventually even implemented my own ad-hoc SMTP client stack there, using sockets. (that's because none of them worked on my Apache for Windows Alpha version which I installed there, due to a bug that I eventually reported and was eventually corrected - ;-)) That put aside, I'm not sure I can ever adapt to the philosophy of ASP or JSP. Their assumption is that the language is crippled, and you need to use it as a number of callbacks to either OLE objects or Java beans. In Perl/Python/PHP/etc. you don't need all that, because the core language is full-featured, and you can implement as complex logic as you want inside the script, or supporting modules. What does frustrate me is that high schools in Israel teach ASP, which requires Windows to run on. They should instead teach PHP, Perl, etc. which are cross-platform. Once I met two guys in the 'Go! Linux' Israeli conference (the first large conference of this kind), who saw that I knew my way around computers, and then asked for help with their ASP homework. I told them I only had a Win98 at home, and could not install IIS and all of the required components very efficiently. If they had a problem with PHP or whatever I would have gladly tried to help. They also were representative of one of the companies there (which sells some Linux software), and said on Linux that it was used by many computer introduers. (which is true, but that's not its primary use and value to society). And it was a Linux conference! |
| Sun 28 Dec | So give me your keys or I will say you are selfish and unreasonable | 'I felt that I did not cheat the community by hiding the source from them or demanding money' And I feel you are cheating me my not giving me your car. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Frederic Faure | Kerry Heffermen >> Isn't that how it works right now? In the private sector, yes. Not sure we're better off, though. BTW, maybe Joel should make people pay to access this knowledge they're currently getting for free on his site ;-) |
| Sun 28 Dec | Mike | 'You're pretty much a god damn mother fucking stupid piece of shit bastard. Ever hear of CDO. ' Hey Einstein, please tell us when CDO debutted. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Me | > BTW, maybe Joel should make people pay to access this knowledge they're currently getting for free on his site It takes 60 seconds to read a thread and compose a reply. That's quite different from the effort and time to develop useful software. |
| HELP! data recovery advice | Sun 28 Dec | Roose |
| I just overwrote an important file, and Im not sure if I can recover it. I was using CoolEdit to edit some important music file, and I accidentally made a bad change, so I selected REVERT TO SAVED. So you would think if I hit YES on the next dialog box, it would LOSE the changes and actually revert to saved. But NO, the way its implemented, is that it closes the file and reopens it -- and closing asks: do you want to save your changes? with YES as the default. Doh!!! What retarded design. And you cant undo after saving either, I guess. So I just did this, and didnt touch the computer, so hopefully it didnt actually overwrite the file on disk? Can anyone suggest some sort of software that will recover this? But if I install the software, theres a chance that it ITSELF will overwrite my old file, no? And hopefully leaving Windows on wont overwrite it with some background processes... and I think the swap file is statically allocated as well. Please help Im desperate, this was an important music file! |
| Sun 28 Dec | Roose | By the way, this on a Windows 2000 system with FAT32, not NTFS. thanks! |
| Sun 28 Dec | Matthew Lock | Check whatever temp directory cool edit uses. My wave editing program used to routinely crash but leave the wave in the temp directory where I could recover it. I guess I don't need to tell you to back up important work before you start editing it. ;) |
| Sun 28 Dec | Spider | Your might try the popular undelete program found at http://hccweb1.bai.ne.jp/~hcj58401/ Preferably using another computer (not the one containing the deleted file), download it and unzip it. The result is a single executable which can be run from a floppy, no install needed. This was designed to recover deleted files; depending on exactly what happened in the scenario you describe, it might help. |
| Sun 28 Dec | www.marktaw.com | Cool Edit uses lots and lots of temp files so that almost no changes are permenant. Though once you've saved the file and closed the program, I don't think those temp files will still exist. You should probably ask in an Audio forum. |
| Sun 28 Dec | anon | I can recommend OnTrack EasyRecovery for this job, it's saved me a number of times in the past. I have never used it with CoolEdit, though. http://www.ontrack.co.uk |
| Type of parser used for ASP->PHP compiler | Sat 27 Dec | Matthew Lock |
| Im wondering what kind of parsing technique was used for the Fogcreek ASP->PHP compiler. Was it a recursive decent parser or a simple code filter? |
| Sat 27 Dec | Joel Spolsky | One of these days I'll write about it. It's a real lexer, parser, ast, code generator, which is why I keep calling it a compiler. It is NOT just a simple filter (what someone called "put $ in front of every variable name and cross your fingers). |
| Sun 28 Dec | Matthew Lock | Excellent. Many so called compilers and code converters around are really just a fancy search and replace programs. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Eli Bendersky | Ahh... parsing :-) Lex (Flex) and Yacc (Bison) rule. Creating ASTs from them for well-behaving languages is fun and simple. Dumping code from ASTs when the target language needn't be optimized too much is also fun and simple. Joel, do write about it. It would definitely be a most interesting read. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Shlomi Fish | Yes, I think this article will be very welcome here. The Joel on Software web-log seems to touch a lot on software management issues (which is good), so it could use some more Computer Science-oriented articles. (like Back to Basics, for example) In any case, one should be aware that Lex and Yacc, while commonly used, are not the cutting edge of compiler design. Lex is simply a tokenizer that extract tokens based on regular expressions _without any state_. A simple Perl script can do better than that. As for Yacc - it is nice and all, and very useful. However, it too can be improved upon. One such implementation is the Scannerless Generalized LR parser: http://www.cwi.nl/htbin/sen1/twiki/bin/view/SEN1/SGLR Another is Damian Conway's Parse::RecDescent module: http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Parse-RecDescent-1.94/ which is very powerful and capable, but kind of slow. One thing that should be remembered is that formal languages that are commonly used for parsing languages are not Turing complete. So, a custom parser is needed for some patterns. |
| phone interviews | Sat 27 Dec | anon |
| Going into my 6th interview in 3 months,I was given 3 phone interviews with 3 developers over which I was asked 2 design questions, data structure theory questions, 3 coding questions (coding line by line over the phone), over a period of 3 hours. I guess they wanted to find out if the person can code or not. How are other peoples experiences with phone interviews? Can you really judge tech skills over the phone, at least initially? |
| Sat 27 Dec | Brad Wilson | Most phone screens I've been part of used rather simple technical questions to test some aspect of the person's resume. This wasn't so much to see if they were the right fit, as to filter out a bad fit (usually from over-embelishment on their resume). What it sounds like you were put through was more like a full interview, except on the phone. Is it expensive to get you to their offices, like it's in another country? It seems pretty surprising that anybody would do an interview of that depth over the phone. But maybe with the job market the way it is today... |
| Sat 27 Dec | anon | No it's only the first stage, there's another part face to face if they find me suitable. And yes they are around a 3 hour plane ride away |
| Sat 27 Dec | Philo | By the way, for any interviewers out there, a three hour phone interview (all at once) can be tough on people. Cell/cordless batteries aside, if they don't have a speakerphone (and it's unreasonable to expect someone to have a speakerphone at home) then you're talking about some serious muscle fatigue. I'd strongly recommend breaking it into 3 1-hour interviews. You should also let the candidate know up front that's what's coming: 'you'll have two or three one-hour phone interviews, then if we like you we'll fly you in...' Just my $.02. Philo |
| Sat 27 Dec | George | I live in Bucharest, Romania. Microsoft interviewed me over the phone for about 1 hour. It was a scheduled interview - they first called and asked when it would be a good time to talk for an extended period. They asked a lot of questions - mostly design questions, and some programming questions. Then they asked me to come to the live interview, also held in Bucharest. While I wasn't familiar with their methods, I liked them a lot - they seemed to have a very 'get the job done, no useless stuff' attitude. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Evgeny Gesin /Javadesk.com/ | I inteviewed a few candidates by phone. Usually it takes up to 10 minutes, I ask 3-4 simple technical question, and, if answered, then candidates are invited to office for a more detailed interview. My 0.002$ |
| Sun 28 Dec | son of parnas | We use phone interviews as a simple technical filter. I suck at phone interviews so i don't care for them very much. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Philo | I like phone interviews when they are conversational. I *hate* the 'What is the maximum airspeed of a fully-laden swallow' bullet question type interviews. But then you all know that about me. :) Philo |
| Sun 28 Dec | Mark Pearce | Philo, Not sure about a fully-laden swallow, but this is the data for an unladen swallow: http://www.style.org/unladenswallow True for any given value of 'true' :) Regards, Mark 'Comprehensive VB .NET Debugging' http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=128 |
| Increaseing Speed of Computer - optimizing process | Sat 27 Dec | Techno-phobe |
| Hi: I have an IBM Notebook - lees than two months ole - 256 mb RAM, 1.5G Centrino. When I first got this, it ran like a charm and would boot up in a flash. Now it takes close to 8 minutes before the boot process is complte? How can I best optimize the speed? I have downloaded some software like Oracle 8i, Apache, MS Office, Zonealarm, VMware, Eclipse etc. I refraq frequently. Is there a way I can go about to speed things - I often kill the Oracle process on start up to hasten the process. I have checked the processes listed on Task manager on Google - there does not seem to be any thing nasty running. I was thinking of using Adaware or CWShredder: http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/files/cwshredder.zip But was not sure if the above was any good or if they contained any spyware. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Jim | 1. Run a free online virus scan: http://housecall.trendmicro.com/housecall/start_corp.asp 2. Download and run Ad-aware 6.0 to remove spyware/adware. 3. Uninstall any un-needed apps. 4. Defragment your hard drive. 5. Reboot This should get you back to with 98% of your original computer speed at a cost of $0. |
| Sat 27 Dec | robert | Defragment your hard-disk, using either MS Defrag, or DiskKeeper. DiskKeeper can be found at: http://download.com.com/3000-2094-10224681.html Then, defrag your registry using Innovative System Optimizer. I found that this can make a lot of difference. Innovative System Optimizer can be found at: http://download.com.com/3000-2086-10252167.html?tag=lst-0-1 Finally, run Ad-Aware to remove spyware programs. Ad-Aware can be found at: http://download.com.com/3000-2144-10214379.html?tag=lst-0-1 |
| Sat 27 Dec | anon | You might also want to switch the startup attribute of you some of your services from Automatic to Manual (especially Oracle). |
| Sat 27 Dec | Rhinestone Cowboy | How can one switch processes to start manually from automatic? Thanks. |
| Sat 27 Dec | robert | Start Menu - Run type 'services.msc' then press ENTER |
| Sat 27 Dec | Brad Wilson | You may also wish to consider using Virtual PC for your development environment, and leaving your laptop more or less pristine. Then you boot into the laptop very quickly. The Virtual PCs can be kept in a suspended state. In my experience, it takes about 10 seconds to stop or start a virtual PC w/ 512MB of RAM. One downside is that your laptop would need more RAM. 512MB would probably not be enough, since the host OS will likely be taking at least 50MB for itself. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Brad Wilson | Oh, and for some reason, I thought you had 512MB. Definitely, with the stuff you have installed, you should have more than 256MB, even if you didn't run Virtual PC. I'd recommend seeing how much it would cost to bump the PC up to 1GB. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Brad Wilson | Oh, and as a final alternative, don't shut the machine down. Use Hibernation to speed the shutdown and reboot time of the box. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Jim Battin | I'd strongly recommend upgrading to 1GB of RAM. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Alex | Indeed, why not use 'sleep' instead of shutdown. It's very convenient when you need the computer for only a minute, e.g., to check the mail. |
| Sat 27 Dec | John Rose | Good suggestions so far. Start-->Run-->'msconfig' This will give you a list of what's being started up along with Windows in the Run key of the registry... you can disable each item. Upgrading to 1GB of RAM would be a nice step as well... but even without the ram upgrade, something is definitely funky with your setup... 8 minutes to boot is nooottt normal (as you've deduced). :D |
| Sat 27 Dec | MX | I have got myself a Siemens M55 mobile phone and can now check my e-mail very quickly, even on the street: I make it download the e-mail, and then browse the e-mail offline. I can do this even when driving (when I stop at a red light) or when walking on the street! This is very practical. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Alex | Hey MX, How in the world did you configure your M55? I just got one and the company staff can't configure the GRPS :( |
| Sun 28 Dec | ICBW | For a comprehensive list of all processes that are being run when you boot up, get autoruns from www.sysinternals.com. At last count there were 23 places where startup programs can be specified (not including services). You can also pick up a copy of PageDefrag there, which defrags the registry, page file and event logs. Both programs are free. |
| Sun 28 Dec | MX | Alex, I don't use GPRS. I use my phone just like dial-up - connect, do your stuff, disconnect. I'm not sure if this is called CSD, or WAP, or whatever, but the WAP browser and the e-mail client work! The reason why I don't use GPRS is that in my country, it's very expensive compared to CSD. If you want to discuss about the Siemens M55 mobile phone configuration, please use the link at the bottom of this message - no point of writing this in the forum. |
| Advice for S/W Entrepreneurs: Make More Mistakes | Sat 27 Dec | Jim |
| http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnsoftware/html/software12292003.asp?frame=true *** VERY INTERESTING ARTICLE *** |
| Sat 27 Dec | no name | What do you think is so interesting about it? |
| Sat 27 Dec | Jim | > What do you think is so interesting about it? Its interesting because it's true. It seems to be a different take on the ISV business. Certainly different than what JoS preaches (perfectionism, craftsmanship, mood altering office space, etc...). I mean, nothing against Joel, but who cares if the window next to your cube is big enough and has just the right view? Same goes for the color scheme of your walls and furniture. It seem's that Eric is more pragmatic and is willing to spend money where it counts, on breaking lots and lots of eggs. Learn by doing, etc.. Instead of trying to get it right the first time. Check out the guy's blog, he seems to be the anti-Joel. Similar, but different. Pretty wierd. http://software.ericsink.com/ |
| Sat 27 Dec | Alex | That's why I think the best business reading is the 'mistakes made' kind. Going over others' mistakes instead of making your own, it's priceless. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Philo | I'm not sure how you get that Eric and Joel have different approaches. In case you hadn't noticed, Joel's bionic office was the *second* office for FogCreek, and he just spent a lot of money porting one of his flagship applications to Unix. If he was the indecisive perfectionist you imply, FogCreek never would've been founded, since Joel would've refused to incorporate until he could 'do the office right,' and he would still be online trying to decide what build of Linux he should try installing first. FWIW, I dislike Eric's approach to the article, embodied in the title - the same philosophy was quoted by someone as Microsoft's philosophy of 'you're expected to fail.' What they're both doing is encouraging those who are risk-averse to take chances, but it's too negative for my taste; it's on the wrong side of the fine edge between daring and reckless abandon. But that's just me. :) Philo |
| Sat 27 Dec | no name | Some of those mistakes really are embarassing. So embarrassing it's probably a mistake to disclose them publicly. The "Investing outside our field" story is a classic sucker deal that says "I shouldn't really be in business". |
| Sat 27 Dec | I'm a fan | That is one of the most useful business articles of 2003. Well done, Eric Sink (who occassionally drops by at JOS.) Apart from his business nouse, anyone who elects himself to the hall of software Non Legends with a photo in a corn field marks himself as a special type of person. |
| Sat 27 Dec | no name | I would really like to know where he got all that money to make all those mistakes. Did it all come from sourceoffsite? Any one of those mistakes would've sunk me. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Mitch & Murray (from downtown) | I think he is taking a very well deserved poke at Joel and others like Joel whose primary marketing mechanism for their products is being an industry pundit, telling us what we are doing wrong, and 'oh, by the way, I have something you can buy from me that will make you do things better'. This doesn't make Joel a bad guy, btw. It is just his schtick. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Gwyn | What interests me about this is that the entrepreneurial people (and I've seen this before) do not succeed because they are better at things than other people; it is because they have the entrepreneurial mindset and they keep on trying, banging their heads against walls where most risk-averse people would start thinking 'whoa!' and give up. They're natural risk-takers. And because they are risk-takers that is enough to get them through to some degree of success (eventually). I'm not sure anyone who does not already have this mindset can be an entrepreneur; it's the way people are made. Reading this article was interesting, the guy's made some dreadful decisions that others (including me) would never have made and still (eventually) he's achieved some level (I don't know exactly how much) of success.. I have the problem that I am quite risk-averse and I do not think I could actually be a successful entrepreneur no matter how much I try. I have 2 homes and other valued possessions (cars, motorbike, aircraft) and a pretty comfortable life style... I have a partner and 2 children to support. Would I risk losing these things for some scheme? No, probably not. Thinking about it I actually wonder if entrepreneurs are simply illogical people because logical people would normally be expected to have assessed the risk and run the other way! It would be interesting to know what Myers-Briggs type the entrepreneurs typically are... I'm an INTP and I bet they're not! |
| Sat 27 Dec | no name | "History is rarely made by reasonable men." |
| Sat 27 Dec | Bored Bystander | [quote] I think he is taking a very well deserved poke at Joel and others like Joel whose primary marketing mechanism for their products is being an industry pundit, [/quote] I think there is a co-dependency rampant among some people wherein we look to a pundit to give us the path to success. That's the 'dark side' of blogging and web mentorship by people like Joel, Eric, Janet Ruhl, and others. Some of us waste a lot of time reading other people's opinions about how we're supposed to succeed. I snapped out of it a few years ago when I realized that glib, haughty, or one sided pronouncements of the 'correct' way to do things was holding me back much more than my own resources, talent and energy level. Reading blogs about this stuff can be a distraction, not useful information, since the proof is in making the attempt and not inferring that it's 'no use' to even try. I almost think it would be better at times to have no guideposts and mentors, and just try *something*. Just once, I'd like to read one of these pundits saying 'get the hell off of this column and do something really stupid and daring.' OK, 'fire and motion' was covered already by you know who... ;-) |
| Sun 28 Dec | Tayssir John Gabbour | I wouldn't hold this against Eric. He clearly was in this for the aesthetics, but the rational side eventually overrode it. As for the Joel .ne. Eric issue, these are two different people. What is the point in imposing an ordering on them? Incidentally I'm impressed Microsoft is hosting this. Reminds me of Gabriel's _Patterns of Software_: http://www.dreamsongs.com/NewFiles/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf 'Academics have an interesting view of business: They equate business with war. A company wins because other companies lose -- a classic misunderstanding of evolution. A company keeps everything a secret. A company tries to spy on other companies. A company cannot trust anyone not part of themselves. Because of these beliefs, AI companies rarely made strategic partnerships.' |
| Sun 28 Dec | Mark Hoffman | The 'Investing outside our field' story is a classic sucker deal that says 'I shouldn't really be in business'. And yet...here he is, complete with his Inc. 500 award... So much for common wisdom, huh? I thought it took a little bit of guts to admit to some of those mistakes. Some of those were real doozies. I certainly don't think Eric was advocating that readers rush out and do stupid things. In fact, he says as much in the article. Rather, I think he is telling people don't worry if your thought-out plans turn in to disaster. Learn from it and move on. My first business tanked in a most spectacular way. I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned from them. I picked myself up and moved on and tried again. And even if I manage to plow this one into the ground, I'll figure out what I did wrong, correct it and try again. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Charlotte C. | Gwyn, ENTP is a common entrepreneur profile. INTP and ENTP are worlds apart, remarkably. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Kerry Heffermen | Of course something like 60% of the Inc 500 firms were started by people that didn't have any experience in the field prior to starting the business. I also believe you will find all of the MB Types in entrepreneurship positions. You have to be self aware and know what your style is, and be able to sell. Introverts can be successful in sales, they just have to have the right environment. Ditto what Bored Bystander said, too. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Jim | > I would really like to know where he got all that money to make all those mistakes. He's an ex-Microsoft employee, like others we know. So I would guess that stock options is the most likely answer. |
| Sun 28 Dec | no name | AFAIK: He worked for some company that developed the early version of internet explorer. That company got bought by microsoft. He probably had a significant stake in the company that got bought. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Charlotte C. | 'I also believe you will find all of the MB Types in entrepreneurship positions.' Did I say otherwise? There are people of every personality type in every career. Yet some types are more heavily represented in some careers than others. Of all 16 types, ENTPs, according to actual studies of actual real people, are more represented among entreprenueurs than any other type. http://www.careertypes.com/entrepreneur.asp http://www.geocities.com/lifexplore/entp.htm |
| Sun 28 Dec | Kerry Heffermen | Did I say you said otherwise?
What I am saying is that if you want to start a business your Myers Brigg type or Enneagram or |
| More Linux Developers than Windows ones? | Sat 27 Dec | Shlomi Fish |
| According to: http://technologyreports.net/enterpriseinnovator/?articleID=1849 <<< Linux is becoming the development platform of choice; for example, it is expected that more developers will be developing on Linux than Windows by 2004; >>> Well, 2004 is a few days ahead, but maybe the article meant that it will happen some time into 2004. I just want to speculate what it means. First of all, it doesnt naturally means more users. The fraction of developers that are working on shrinkwrap software that many people download or buy and use is very small. We can expect Windows to have more users for the forseeable future. What it does mean, however, is that Linux is more and more becoming a platform of choice for developing applications that the majority of developers need: embedded software, web-sites software, server applications, software for internal use, computation software, academic software, developed-for-fun software, etc. Development on Windows has a higher initial cost, requires working against a proprietary environment with more flaws than Linux or UNIX has, and its vendor does not attempt to make it compatible with all other systems. (which restricts development there to one platform). So, its a partial victory for Linux, but still not the full monty of conquering the desktop. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Charlotte C. | I agree. Regarding platforms favored by various sorts of developers: 1 All free software will be developed on Linux in the west. 2 All for-profit software will be developed on Windows in the east. And for the home user on a budget: 1 Linux will be the platform of choice for those who do not pirate. 2 Windows will be the platform of choice for those who do pirate. |
| Sat 27 Dec | John | If Linux becomes dominant, this is bad for programmers, because the results of our work will get to be cheaper and cheaper. If cars become free, and everyone knows they are free, then fewer and fewer people will want to pay for accessories. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Shlomi Fish | John: I don't necessarily agree with you here. First of all, I don't understand the car analogy. Do you mean that the entire cars are made free (with all their accessories), or just the cars themselves? If just the cars themselves, then more people will buy car accessories, because they are the cars' complementary product: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html Now as for Linux and whether it is bad for programmers: I don't think so. Granted, more software that can now be bought will be made available for free. (as in beer and as in speech). However, the number of developers who work on developing for-profit software is very small. A great deal of them (like the authors of most shareware programs) don't expect to make a very good living of it, and are doing it mainly for fun, and for the social experience. Linux makes it much easier to develop other types of software (which I enumerated in the body of the post). We can expect that if a system where such solutions are possible becomes more accessible (i.e: Linux is available and popular), then demand for programmers doing something with this system will actually increase. So, I think it would be good for programmers. (at least most of them) This is without getting into software customization and other possibilities that are better done with open-source software. |
| Sat 27 Dec | John | Shlomi, I think that the theory about complements is true in most cases. It's true in general, but it's not true in all cases. I think that when CEOs and business people will see that Linux, Apache, PHP and AbiWord are free, and that they are good alternatives, they will get the impression that software should be free or should have very little value. So, it is only logical that business people and CEOs will offer less money to programmers. They will think 'Hey, Apache, Linux and PHP are excellent and are free. Your work is not better or larger than Linux, so I don't think I'll have to pay you a lot'. So - programmer salaries WILL drop if Linux, Apache, PHP, etc will become dominant in the business world. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Tom Hathaway | 'Your work is not better or larger than Linux, so I don't think I'll have to pay you a lot'. Huh? One has nothing to do with the other. Custom developed or purchased software is a cost of doing business, like the electric bill or a truck. A business will buy it when the return on investment justifies the cost. Any sensible businessman will pay for the best price/performance of the alternatives available, and any sensible programmer will get as much renumeration as he can. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Bongo Drums | You realise you've just proved the point that Linux is stupid for programmers? You say that most programmers 'don't expect to make a very good living out of it.' At to whether there are more Linux developers than Windows ones, I think the figures for 'Linux developers' would include a lot more amateurs and wanna-be's than the figures for Windows developers. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Philo | Tom, in all sincerity, how much contract development experience do you have? Because your first paragraph tells me you haven't done a lot. Convincing people who don't write code the difficulty and value of writing code is one of the hardest things in this job. Philo |
| Sat 27 Dec | Yummy | Just because there are more people developing on Linux doesn't mean that they're doing it for free. I was part of a small consulting house that did custom server software. We'd do everything on Linux, FreeBSD, etc.. and recommend the appropriate OS for the production system (generally it was Linux or Solaris/Intel for the best price/performance). And we sure charged them through the nose for the privilege of hiring us .. usually $2-3K USD per day per developer. |
| Sat 27 Dec | John | I am sure that there are some developers getting a lot of money developing for Linux. However, I am more interested in averages. Some big questions are: 1. If Linux succeeds in the corporate world, will the average developer salary increase, or decrease? 2. If Linux succeeds in the corporate world, will there be more, or less jobs for developers? I belive that if Linux succeeds in the corporate world, the average salary for developers will decrease. Why? Because the people running businesses (who are usually business people with very little IT knowledge) will get used to the idea that lots of software is free - so a programmer's work can't be worth very much. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Tom Hathaway | Philo - Not much contracting, but I think the situation is the same everywhere. The company I work for now would never consider letting a programmer negotiate with a customer; that's the salesmen's job and they are good at it or they are gone. That's what we're really talking about here: salesmanship and negotiating. Very few programmers can sell themselves or their project. It would be interesting to hear your experiences now that you're on that side of the table, although I'll bet when the serious talk starts the engineers are out of the room. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Brad Wilson | How many of those "Linux" developers are really Java developers using a commoditized OS? |
| Sat 27 Dec | Philo | [nod] to Brad - I was just wondering the same thing. Does PHP count as 'Linux development'? If it does, then did they also count all the ASP web wannabes? The more I think about it, the less I think that there can be any value in trying to measure 'linux developers vs. windows developers' Philo |
| Sat 27 Dec | Brad Wilson | Ah, I see now the keyword which comfirms my suspicion. 'more developers will be developing on Linux than Windows by 2004' Note that says ON Linux, not FOR Linux. I don't think it's impossible. There are an awful lot of Java developers, and I imagine the great majority of them are using Linux as their day to day development environment. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Vince | Brad, very good observation. I'd venture to say a *lot*. Also, John, I don't think your correct at all. THe more companies that start using free software like apache, mysql, jboss, etc. the more companies will NEED programmers to program for apache, mysql, jboss etc. Make sense? The more companies that NEED apache programmers, the more DEMAND there will be for apache programmers. How is that not a good thing for developers like us? |
| Sat 27 Dec | John | A company wants to get an IT task done. If they use a free solution (such as GNU C++, for example), some programmers will get paid. The business people get the idea that, since GNU C++ is free, then the work of the programmers in general is not very valuable. If they use a proprietary solution, the same number of programmers will get paid. Plus, other programmers will get paid to develop the proprietary solution. Another important thing: If companies and individuals use commercial software, then a programmer or a group of programmers have the chance to create their own software company, because they can write some software and sell it. This is MUCH harder in a 'open source everywhere' world. Yes, there are some exceptions.. but if you look at the profits of software companies that sell commercial software, vs. the profits of software companies based on open source solutions, you will see that the former are doing a lot better than the latter. Don't you want to at least have a chance of starting your own software company? |
| Sat 27 Dec | Vince | and for what its worth, I love linux for server envoirments, but I wouldn't ever THINK of using linux for my workstation. |
| Sat 27 Dec | T. Norman | The increased spread of Linux and of-the-shelf software is likely to make corporations less willing to pay for off-the-shelf software. They will seek out free alternatives more often. However, most programmers aren't employed to write off-the-shelf type of software; most are paid to create and maintain customized software for a particular company. Companies aren't stupid enough to think that because they can buy a piece of tax software for $50 it means they can pay you peanuts to write programs that do tax calculations unique to their business. As it is, they are already paying us as little as they can get away with. Obtaining free software means development projects will have a greater ROI and be more likely to be approved. Stop crying that you won't be able to make money writing yet another operating system or yet another web server. Go and develop something to solve a business or scientific problem, or figure out something else to create that hasn't been already done 100 times. |
| Sat 27 Dec | T. Norman | >'If companies and individuals use commercial software, then a programmer or a group of programmers have the chance to create their own software company, because they can write some software and sell it.' If individuals didn't have free software tools and platforms, like Perl, C++, Linux, Python, Apache, etc., it would be more difficult for them to start their own company because of the cost of proprietary licenses. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Vince | Since this is turning into a discussion of how open source will affect us, let me recommend that everyone read a great article by Marc Fleury. Basically he explains why he CAN and IS making money by providing an open source project such as jboss. No small time ISV is going to be able to come up with a complex Application server (or database program, or operating system, or ...) and make money doing it. BUT, many ISV's can and will make money writing custom software FOR those big, complex applications. Hence the reason OPEN SOURCE WILL MAKE US ALL MONEY. http://www.jboss.org/modules/html/white3.pdf |
| Sat 27 Dec | Bongo Drums | Vince, developers have been writing complex applications for some time. JBoss didn't create that market and probably hasn't changed anything. T Norman, the cost of a piece of software is typically tiny compared to the cost of developers so I think the argument that it's important is irrelevant. Which leads to the bigger question of why someone would promote such an agenda. I think the argument that free software undermines the generally valuation of programming services is probably closest to the truth. |
| Sun 28 Dec | T. Norman | The combined cost of a set of proprietary software is NOT tiny for small new companies that don't know how they are going to meet next month's payroll, or for people thinking of growing a personal project into a profitable operation. |
| Sun 28 Dec | crapix | That 'analysis' is patently ridiculous. I doubt Linux would come even close to one tenth of Windows development. Furthermore, probably 90% of Linux development is php, in which the programming is done on Windows and the target browser is Windows/IE. 1/10th of 1% sounds about right. When the hype dies away in a few years, I doubt anyone but a handful of core diehards will even remember Linux. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Jim Battin | >When the hype dies away in a few years, I doubt anyone but a handful of core diehards will even remember Linux. Much like 'Linux will take over the world' this has been heard over and over since about 1995. The simple reality is that Windows, Linux, Closed and Open Source is here to stay, at least for the next 5 years. Anyway, if you're seriously worried that Open Source projects will destroy the commercial software market, you should focus more attention towards Commercial Software- as it's entirely that market's fault if OSS takes over. No offense, but if you can't do better then a bunch of 'rag-tag amateur programmers' (these forum's words, not mine), your company doesn't deserve to be in business, nor do you deserve to collect any type of salary. Professional salaries demand professional programmers producing professional software; anything less is unacceptable. Why do you think people use FogBugz instead of Bugzilla? Obviously because of the additional value FogBugz offers, it more then justifies its price and pays for itself in the long run. |
| Sun 28 Dec | foobarista | Outside the EU and US, the competition is between Linux and pirated Windows, with Linux gaining ground quickly. When I visited China recently, it was amazing just how many people there regarded Windows as yesterday's news. I asked a couple of friends about it and it basically boiled down to a combination of not wanting to feel guilty about pirating software, the high cost of MSFT products, and a fair bit of anti-Americanism - Linux is seen as much less 'American' than Windows. (disclaimer: I'm primarily a Linux or Posix-environment embedded systems developer, who develops primarily on Linux, although I do have to support stuff that runs on CE.) |
| Sun 28 Dec | Dennis Forbes | Personally I'd wager that the situation of the average IT employee would improve/stabilize if Linux made a concerted effort to invade the server room. The reason, of course, is economics -- For the majority of organizations IT is a cost-center and a completely non-core operation (which is why most see it as so 'easy' to outsource it to consulting firms) -- the budgets for IT are directly related to the revenue of the core business rather than some artificial manufactured IT requirement list. Given this, removing the 'Microsoft tax', as it is commonly termed, is more money in the pot for the rest of the IT department. Indeed, even if the TCO of Linux in a large enterprise isn't the panacea that it is often made out to be, the spendings on the Linux side will be in local organizational IT workers, rather than in filling the coffers in Redmond. That's one possible scenario. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Mike | Some random comments to the thread 'They will think 'Hey, Apache, Linux and PHP are excellent and are free. Your work is not better or larger than Linux, so I don't think I'll have to pay you a lot.' Not a logical conclusion '1. If Linux succeeds in the corporate world, will the average developer salary increase, or decrease?' If Linux succeeds in the corporate world, will the average developer shower? 'How many of those 'Linux' developers are really Java developers using a commoditized OS?' Great question. 'Much like 'Linux will take over the world' this has been heard over and over since about 1995. The simple reality is that Windows, Linux, Closed and Open Source is here to stay, at least for the next 5 years. ' *nix is like a star that is going to supernova. Linux is the supernova, after that there sure is a lot less star (*nix) Remember *nix is 30 year old foundations. There are fans (mostly sys admins), but the people that choose it at the corporate level would probably rather buy Windows, but are forced to *nix because they NEED something Windows yet lacks (security, scalability, etc) Once Windows comes on 72 processor boxes and is truly a server os, not one line with all the home user features there, Unix will fade. Anyone that mentions the word Dell and scalability in the same sentence does not fathom the type of scalability I am talking about. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Dennis Forbes | 'There are fans (mostly sys admins), but the people that choose it at the corporate level would probably rather buy Windows, but are forced to *nix because they NEED something Windows yet lacks (security, scalability, etc) Once Windows comes on 72 processor boxes and is truly a server os, not one line with all the home user features there, Unix will fade.' Windows Server 2003 (aka Server XP) has a 64-bit edition running on massive Itanium boxes - An 64-cpu Itanium2 HP Superdome running. Without talking about rare research computers, this is generally about as powerful scaled up as systems get in the real-world enterprise space. Having said that, Linux isn't taking over on the big iron -- it's taking over on the small server systems, which comprise the vast bulk of computing center inventory - little one, two, maybe four way servers serving various group apps, etc. People often choose Linux not because of the features it has that Windows lacks, but rather because it has the features that they need for their project to succeed ... why pay for Active Directory or any of the myriad of other Windows features if they are totally inconsequential (and indeed of negative value) to the project? |
| Sun 28 Dec | Charlotte C. | 'However, most programmers aren't employed to write off-the-shelf type of software; most are paid to create and maintain customized software for a particular company.' I disagree - there are more app developers than there are custom one-off database setter-uppers. Not ever sure why the data base administration set up tasks we are talking about are even being considered in the same caliber as real programming. Now I do agree there are more database administrators than app developers, and also more network administrators than app developers and so these are a couple of smart fields to go into since they are less likely to be outsourced. And also a lot less skill is needed to throw together some queries and forms than to do real world app development that has to be usable by Aunt Em and powerful to Geek Gary. But when it comes to actually real programming, most developers work an mass marketed software, not one-off software. Very few companies develop custom apps from scratch nowadays. But lots of people buy new games and other mass-market programs. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Philo | 'They will think 'Hey, Apache, Linux and PHP are excellent and are free. Your work is not better or larger than Linux, so I don't think I'll have to pay you a lot.' Not a logical conclusion ************** No, it's not. Never worked with corporate management, have you? They are not exempt from irrational thought. Philo |
| Sun 28 Dec | Shlomi Fish | Well, it seems that this thread sparked a very active discussion overnight, which is good, I suppose. Here are more of my thoughts. I think we can safely assume that developers who write software on Linux would usually intend it on Linux. While there's Java, Perl/Python/Tcl/whatever, wxWindows, and other cross-platform solutions, you cannot really guarantee they will run correctly on Windows, unless you've tested them there. Some developers still develop for Linux while sitting on a Windows workstation (so they'll have MS Office, etc.). But generally, Windows and Linux/UNIX are so radically different, that most developers will have to choose one over the other. So, we can assume most development will be intended for Linux (or at least for both UNIX and Windows) as well. I again stress the fact that programmers will probably not get paid less to develop on open source platforms. Again, if a company wishes to get its job done, it will want to hire a clueful developer. Even if it does not require any specialized software, it will still need a clueful crew to maintain the computing facilities. (and in the UNIX world a Sys Admin is usually a programmer on ice) The wages of programmers are determined by market dynamics, by how much the organization is willing to pay for them, etc. rather than whether they work on free software or not. A great deal of programmers worked in LAMP environments, (UNIX, Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, and Perl/PHP/Python) and still got adequate wages for years. As for whether proprietary software will still exist in an open-source-dominated world (assuming such a situation will materialize) - I think it will. Some proprietary software is of exceptional quality and scope that no open-source solution of its quality, is yet available . This situation may change, eventually, for individual packages, but as a whole there is a place for proprietary enterpreneurship and innovation. Also, even in markets where there is adequate bug tracking software, one can many times make money selling proprietary software. Joel is still selling FogBUGZ for money, despite the fact that bugzilla, Mantis and many other open source packages for tracking bugs are available and commonly used. (not to mention a lot of other proprietary competition). And naturally, the majority of developers don't work on any kind of shrinkwrap software (open source, proprietary, consultingware, etc), so most of them are generally not going to be out of jobs. |
| Sun 28 Dec | NDA Rules | I've actually encountered the open source effect. An 'open source' web firm commissioned me to develop a sophisticated J2EE backend to perform critical processing for a web site for a government client. When I told them how long it would take and what it would cost, they were incredulous, literally pointing out that they could get this and that software for free, and that surely adding a few little bits couldn't possibly take more than a few days. They didn't understand that the rubbishy little bits of PHP they showed me were worthless, and would form no part of a well designed Java project. The thing that got me was that 1) they seemed to have won the project by offering to 'use open source solutions,' when they weren't actually capable and 2) while they quibbled about my fee, they had no qualms in billing the government for all of their own time. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Stephen Jones | Dear NDA rules, This is not the open source effect at all. If you were doing the project on MS SQL server they would still be incredulous that for a simple VB.Net or VBA solution you were charging them tens or hundreds of times more than they paid for all the powerful software they got from Microsoft. Nor is your problem limited to programming. Any lawyer, corporate trainer, private tutor, plumber or electrician will tell you that people are notoriously averse to paying the going rate for any service. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Shlomi Fish | Re: Linux in China. Well, I don't know if this trend is significant there or not. (I did hear a statistics about Thailand that indicated this was the case). The 'anti-American' opinions they have expressed probably has some anti-Capitalistic roots. I, (and Eric S. Raymond) would very much disagree that Linux is anti-Capitalistic, but I can understand where the analogy is coming from. Even in countries where Capitalism is prelevant, people are inherently not very willing to pay a lot of money for software that can otherwise be distributed for free. I was told, that in Economics, a vendor who sells for money a product which had a certain development cost (possibly very large) and its production cost is zero is called a parasite. (!) But I suppose that whatever trends exist to use Linux, whether in developing or developed countries are positive, because I find it a great product regardless of price. |
| Sun 28 Dec | NDA Rules | Stephen, you're wrong. I've been in business a long time and delivered good work to lots of companies big and small and they usually know what they need to pay and are happy to pay it. This was quite explicitly an effect where they wrongly extrapolated from the availability of free source code to the cost they expected to pay for sophisticated software development. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Mike | 'Windows Server 2003 (aka Server XP) has a 64-bit edition running on massive Itanium boxes - An 64-cpu Itanium2 HP Superdome running.' Itanium is dead. I should have added 72+ procs on a chip architecture with a future. Being a sysadmin type myself, I prefer Unix. I like Linux over Windows and Unix over Linux. I bash the Linux zealots a lot though becasue sometimes Microsoft solutions do make sense. |
| IDE RAID | Sat 27 Dec | Philo |
| Two questions... 1) Im seeing a lot of higher-end consumer PCs coming with RAID 0 installed by default. Has anyone bought one of these? Im wondering if they come with the huge warnings *I* would put about the dangers of striping (namely youre cutting your MTBF by the number of drives). 2) Does anyone know if there are any IDE RAID 5 solutions? I want to increase my storage at home, and Im currently leaning towards a mirrored pair of 160 GB IDE drives, but wouldnt mind going with four 40GB in a RAID 5 array (I know, 25% less storage). ...and Ive gotta go do some SCSI math again... Philo |
| Sat 27 Dec | John Rose | The IDE RAID-0 solutions seem to be mostly aimed at the PC-hot-rodding 'enthusiast' market. I don't think they know or care about the obvious data risks, they just want every bit of performance. Luckily all the IDE RAID solutions seem to do RAID-1 as well, for a more sensible approach. I'm sure IDE RAID wouldn't be very popular with only RAID-1, so I'm glad all the RAID-0 knuckleheads are subsidizing my cheap RAID-1 setups. :P Not sure about IDE RAID-5. Never heard of any manufacturers implementing it, that's for sure. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Philo | Yeah, hard drives are cheap enough to make RAID-1 fine. I actually got to the point of thinking of rebuilding my machine from the inside out, but I think I'll stick with upgrading CPU, video and hard drives, then looking at a new box later in the year. Philo |
| Sat 27 Dec | Jim | Philo, These 3 articles might be quite useful for you: http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20021112/index.html http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20020813/index.html http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20020830/index.html |
| Sat 27 Dec | Jim | Oh, and this recent one too: http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20031128/index.html This solution gives RAID-5 SCSI speed using IDE, but at a cost of only about 10% higher than standard IDE RAID solutions. Check it out. |
| Sat 27 Dec | coresi | High end consumer motherboards come this days with RAID0 (stripping, basically if you lose 1 HD all data is lost), RAID1 (mirroring, after losing 1 HD the information is still intact) and RAID0+1 (nicely described as mirrored pair of striped arrays). I am leaning towards a 120GB RAID1 myself. There are 2 reasons for choosing a RAID: fail-safe data and performance. RAID0 is not fail-safe while RAID1 has a lower performance due to the write penalty. RAID5 is a more expensive combination to alleviate those problems. Anybody has experience with four 7200 RPM hard drives in the same box? I think they will need 2 cooling fans only for themselves. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Philo | I've got four older 7200rpm SCSI drives in a box with two P3's - my box with a single P4 and one drive runs hotter. Philo |
| Sat 27 Dec | Dan G | http://www.3ware.com for all your IDE RAID needs Unlike most other RAID controllers and most of the ones that are inbuilt into the motherboard, the 3ware cards do the majority of the RAID processing in hardware, whereas others will take a slice of CPU time |
| Sat 27 Dec | Brad Wilson | Dan makes an important point. These $10 RAID chips on the motherboard rely almost entirely on software to perform their RAID functionality. The system cannot be ignorant of their presence (as it can in the case of a fully hardware RAID) because the drivers are doing the heavy lifting. RAID 5 is definitely alive and well in SCSI, but the cost is hard to justify for anything but servers. I'm curious about the RAID 5 IDE link that he just posted... I run a SATA RAID 1 120GB array for my desktop development, and it's fast. Not as fast as a fully hardware solution would be, but it's certainly never felt in the way (like a fully software RAID 1 solution does). |
| Sun 28 Dec | John Rose | Thanks for the link to those 3Ware RAID cards. they look quite nice. And in relation, they do support IDE RAID-5, by the way. For the record, I've been using an el-cheapo Highpoint IDE RAID card on my development server for a RAID-1 config. I'm sure it's not as fast as a more hardware-based RAID setup like the 3ware cards, but for what it's worth the Highpoint card+drivers have been an absolute breeze to set up and use. Nothing but smooth sailing... |
| Sun 28 Dec | www.marktaw.com | My MoBo came with RAID but I never used it. The RAID channels though were in addition to the existing IDE channels, so I think my MoBo can support up to a total of 8 drives, or 6 if I want to use RAID. The same cautions as everyone else about RAID 0... I know someone who just lost all his data, I presume it was because of RAID issues. |
| Sun 28 Dec | anon | Adaptec make an IDE RAID-5 card, and very good it is too. It supports upto 128Mb cache in the form of an 168 pin SDRAM DIMM. I would strongly recommend the cache be invested in. Running at RAID-5 on IDE means there can only be one drive present on each channel, on the Adaptec cards this is true at least. Something to do with IDE not being able to read/write to multiple devices on the same channel simultaenously I believe. |
| Software cloning and copyright | Sat 27 Dec | The Thinker |
| Ive seen lots of software being cloned. I am speaking mainly of simple software not something like Photoshop or Dreamweaver. But anyway, is this legal? And lets suppose someone clones the app absolutely perfectly, with the menu positions and captions and message box texts and whatever. Will this still be legal? |
| Sat 27 Dec | Michael H. Pryor (fogcreek) | You'd be better off asking a copyright and patent lawyer, but my instinct is that this is perfectly legal. See this for more info: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/whatis.htm The things you are dealing with are patents, trademarks and copyright. Patents protect you from having others make your widget.. this can be a program. Search google for 'software patents' for all the latest hoopla surrounding this. Provided you have no patent on your program, then is any piece of the program trademarked? Such as a logo or design of the interface? (Maybe a Nike program has its window in the shape of a 'swoosh'. You obviously couldn't reproduce this without violating their trademark.) Finally, the copyright... did you copy any of the source code which was copywritten? You would probably get in trouble if you copied the text verbatim from the captions which is also copywritten. A year or two ago, someone decided they would take our entire FogBUGZ 1.0 program and reproduce it exactly... word for word. Basically as long as they just reproduced the design and layout of the program, we couldn't stop them. This smartie copied our entire help pages and all of our marketing material too (except he did a search and replace on FogBUGZ for his 'new' program name). As annoying as this was, we simply informed him that the text he was using in his program and website was a copyright infringement. He proceeded to replace all the text in the program and his website with really bad english which was a hoot to read. We figured the rewritten text was enough of a bad omen for people to realize this guy was shady. 'Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery' (Colton, Charles Caleb (1780-1832)) |
| Sat 27 Dec | Joel Spolsky | Oh and read up on all the old Borland/Lotus "Look and Feel" lawsuits. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Matthew Lock | This makes interesting reading 'Against User Interface Copyright' http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Copyright/look-and-feel.html |
| Selling software applications to Microsoft | Sat 27 Dec | Enrique A. Woll B. |
| This is probably pure fantasy, but I have been wondering if it is possible to sell simple applications that run on the Office platform to Microsoft. The idea is that these would be packaged within Offices Excel as powerful working examples of what can be done with the spreadsheet program, and be sold by the millions each year even if for pennies per copy. Email encryption, weight-related clinical advise, and real estate rent design might be appealing application areas, amongst hundreds of others. I realize that there is nothing new about the idea, which in a way parallels what Bill did with DOS and IBM, and that there are literally millions of spreadsheets out there, but please wake me up someone. Thanks! |
| Sat 27 Dec | Michael H. Pryor (fogcreek) | The problem as I see it, would be that it would be highly unlikely for Microsoft to invest the time necessary to broker a deal with you for some working examples, when they could pay a college intern to write the same. This isn't to say that you're working examples wouldn't be useful or worth money, but only that Microsoft wouldn't bother to enter into a revenue sharing deal with you since the value to them would be negligible. The amount of money they would spend on their lawyers fees just to email you a few times would already dwarf the revenue they could make selling these things. You'd be better off writing them yourself and setting up as an ISV. Give away sample ones, and charge for the full versions. Do a google search for 'office add-ins' and you'll see there are a bunch of websites already devoted to this. |
| Sat 27 Dec | George | GeCAD, a Romanian company, has managed to sell their antivirus product to Microsoft. http://www.ravantivirus.com/pages/shownews.php?i=153 You could search for more information about how they did it. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Enrique A. Woll B. | Thanks Michael and thanks George! Enrique A. Woll B. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Mitch & Murray (from downtown) | We've sold some of our low-level development tools to Microsoft years ago, and all I can tell you is (1) I don't know what they did with them and (2) they paid their bill on time. I don't think selling to MS is the path to riches unless you have their ass over a barrel in some sort of patent dispute. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Joel Spolsky | Many of the add-in tools in Excel came from outside vendors. For many years the Excel 'solver' was a low-end package from an outside company that also made a high-end package. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Philo | Incidentally, *that* is the path you want- the flexgrid/crystal path. Philo |
| Sun 28 Dec | Enrique A. Woll B. | Thank you Mitch & Murray! I guess you have read the preceding comments, and I wonder what you would think of the Non-Disclosure Agreement proposed by GECAD Software of Romania for use with contributing software developent entrepreneurs that wish to team up with them in the conceptualization, development, and marketing process for new software tools and applications? The contract is brief, and can be read at: http://startit.gecad.ro/start/ Thanks and regards, Enrique A. Woll B. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Enrique A. Woll B. | Thank you Joel Spolsky! I never fail to be amazed at how Excel, a product that clearly bested the competition in practically all respects when it was released, remains relatively dull, with true creativity for any significant improvement of its cutting edges seemingly coming consistently from outside MS! In my case, what I propose to sell is not necessarily add-ons, though I have developed what could become very powerful functios for complex cash flows and related. Rather, I propose for the time being, to market full applications that are not run-of-the-mill and appeal to wide lay audiences, and that run on Excel. Enrique A. Woll B. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Enrique A. Woll B. | Thanks Philo! I appreciate your suggestion. Enrique A. Woll B. |
| Recovering data after HD hosed by Magistr virus? | Sat 27 Dec | Damn them virii |
| Hi Although protected by McAfee (and ZoneAlarm), my mums computer was hosed by the unfamous Magistr virus (all her Eudora mail files removed, most of her .DOC files removed with some of them remaning by with the YOUARESHIT string prepented.) More infos here: http://www.fabian.com.mt/VIRUSalerts/VIRUSALERT57.html I did recover the drive using the open-source TestDisk applet, but obviously, the files are gone. Since the drive also had its MBR hosed, my mum could not longer boot... which is a blessing because most likely, the data are still there. Anybody knows of a good utility that could try to recover the sectors? I heard of an app called Tiramisu, but never used it myself. Thx a bunch |
| Sat 27 Dec | Damn the manufacturer | Merry Christmas, From Microsoft |
| Sat 27 Dec | Damn them virii | ;-) |
| Sat 27 Dec | Insert half smiley here. | Sorry, I can't stop myself: the plural of 'virus' is 'viruses'. 'virii' would be the plural of 'virius'. google gave me this link about it: http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html I use a hex editor called 'frhed'. It has a 'Open disk' option on its menu, with 'goto next sector' and so on. (I hope you'll forgive my not trying it on my PC!) frhed has a search capabitility, which I presume works with disks too. So, this may do what you want. (If the files are fragmented, you are probably out of luck, but you never know.) frhed is here: http://www.kibria.de/frhed.html Good luck! |
| Sat 27 Dec | Damn them virusES | Thanks, but you can imagine the amount of time and the difficulty it would take to rebuild files manually that spread over multiple sectors... which is just about any file since sectors are usually 512 bytes... ... provided the virus doesn't corrupt files before deleting them, which Magist does. I recovered a bunch of files using Ontrack EasyRecovery (previously Tiramisu)... only to find that their contents had been corrupted before deletion. I hear AVG is a good antivirus ;-) Thx anyway |
| Sun 28 Dec | Mike | 'I hear AVG is a good antivirus ;-)' My mom has run this for 2 years without incident. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Damn them virusES | I guess the McAfee antivirus that came with her HP Pavilion is a good program... but more so if its auto-update feature is enabled ;-) I'll write some batch file with NcFTP to automate backing up her important files to her ISP. |
| Statistics - reading code vs. writing code | Fri 26 Dec | JT |
| Im looking for some quotable statistics for some marketing materials. I highly suspect that many developers spend more time reading code (looking for bugs, or just plaing maintenance) then writing new code. Does anyone know where I might find some quotable statistics about this? ...or to the contrary, if Im incorrect. Something like an academic paper or other reference-able source would be great. And for that matter, what about yourselves? Do we spend more time reading existing code, or writing new code? |
| Fri 26 Dec | sgf | I just finished reading Code Complete by Steve McConnell and I'm pretty sure ha gave some statistics in there. Unfortunately I don't have it here right now... |
| Fri 26 Dec | Tom Vu | 'And for that matter, what about yourselves? Do we spend more time reading existing code, or writing new code?' Does a writer spend more time writing or reading? i think it's obvious most programmers spend more time reading than writing. |
| Fri 26 Dec | MSHack | Not to sound like a famous politician, but it depends on what we mean by 'read.' consider any single line of code: x=y; I wrote it once and at a minimum will read it twice. Once while actually typing it and again to verify completeness. Consider any more complex structure: // statements_for.cs // for loop using System; public class ForLoopTest { public static void Main() { for (int i = 1; i <= 5; i++) Console.WriteLine(i); } } While I consider myself fairly good, I would be kidding to say I could type even this simple example, error free without reading it, nor would I want to. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Ori Berger | The *time* spent reading while writing is, I think, attributable entirely to writing. If you insist, adopt a simple rule that says that, on a first day a line of code comes into existence or is modified, you attribute the time it took entirely to writing; From that moment on, every time you read it, it's reading. I think that even for productive programmers, reading:writing is 90:10 or even 99:1. And before you claim that sounds ridiculous, consider that the industry average of production quality lines-per-hour produced (meaning, reasonably bug free and spec compatible). is, last I heard, ~ 10. Now consider, where all that time is spent. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Brad Wilson | Not necessarily on reading code, though. |
| Fri 26 Dec | T. Norman | The 10 lines per day is an average for production-ready code, not including comments or whitespace. The 'days' includes the time in design, and the testing and debugging as well as other activities like meetings, brainstorming, and requirements gathering. I just finished a project that took about 4 months for design and requirements, with 1 month for coding and another month to make it production-ready. So the code produced would get averaged out over 6 months. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Dennis Atkins | Ori, where did you hear 10 per hour? Last I heard was 13 per day average and 40 for top producers. Those numbers are surely old though and I have suspected productivity is higher now and have been looking for some decent stats. Thanks. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Dennis Atkins | And yes, it's understood that these are averaged out across total effort over a year and its non-space non-comment. |
| Fri 26 Dec | T. Norman | Those numbers are also net of rewrites and deletions. If you write 500 lines, then subsequently modify 100 and remove 200 of them to make it production ready, it counts as just 300. |
| Fri 26 Dec | T. Norman | 40 lines for 'top producers'? I guess you mean 'top LOC producers' and not 'top programmers'. Because from what I've read, the top programmers don't really write much more or less code per day than average. They just get much more functionality out of their lines of code, by finding simpler solutions to complex problems. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Me | JT, there are many different types of developers. Maintenance programmers and oss people will spend most of their careers reading code. Developers will spend very little because they create new code. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Brad Wilson | I agree with T. Norman. Better developers tend to write less code, not more. They also tend to relish in ripping out code whenever possible. What's that quote? 'The sign of product maturity is when the code-base starts shrinking instead of growing.' |
| Sat 27 Dec | T. Norman | Still, in extreme cases the top developers probably do write more lines of code per day AND get more functionality per line. Otherwise Doom would probably still be unfinished if they were working at a 10-20 LOC/day rate. Project size also affects things. In general, the more people on a project is the less % of the time you spend coding. So on a smaller project your higher LOC/day can mean actual increased productivity, and not just redundant fluff. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Me | Maybe you've never worked with crap developers, T Norman. These are people who will cut and paste huge blocks of garbage, fiddle with it till it sort of does what's required, then have a great talk with the project manager. They're usually good talkers. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Pakter | I'm happy to see someone ask this question. I've asked it once during a meeting. I gave my personal answer (95:5) and they looked at me like as if I was an E.T. One of my colleagues even answered 5:95. My conclusion was that, as far as code is concerned, accelerating the reading phase is more valuable than accelerating the writing phase. |
| MySQL or Postgress | Fri 26 Dec | Mauricio Macedo |
| Hey all, Im working on a project, to bring something like Friendster to my language - portuguese. I lost a good opportunity to do this with blogs in 1999 (opendiary at the time), because I lacked the resources to keep a server up serving a million people updating it daily. Friendster isnt as resource-hog as a weblog, but it has viral marketing features that makes it grow very fast. Im worried because my current tools (ASP & Access/SQL Server) do not scale well. Im developing the website in ASP, but will convert it to PHP before launching. Now, my server supports MySQL and Postgress databases. Which one should I use? I want speedy, and will not have transactions. But I may have to change my host provider in the future, so I will also need to be able to backup/restore databases with easy. Am I wrong to think that a PHP/(MySQL or Postgress) combo is way better than ASP/(Access or SQL Server)? Ive heard of php websites with moret han 200 users per minute and working well with only a dedicated server. Is that really feasible? Thanks for any suggestions! |
| Fri 26 Dec | Mike | 'I'm worried because my current tools (ASP & Access/SQL Server) do not scale well.' Yes, I could not agree more. You need full blown J2EE for your site. There are no large successful sites written with Microsoft technologies. None. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Mauricio Macedo | Oops, make the options PostgreSQL or MySQL. Sorry! |
| Fri 26 Dec | Jim | I use PostgreSQL on Linux, it is more solid and more SQL-99 compliant than MySQL. Even though MySQL might be slighly faster in certain situations, I'm more concerned about reliability and compatibility. If you want to run on Windows, then your only choice is MySQL. |
| Fri 26 Dec | M | Mauricio - Sounds like your description lends itself to MySQL. It is fast, you don't need transactions and most web hosting companies use the PHP/MySQL combination (or so it seems from where I'm sitting). Mike - 'There are no large successful sites written with Microsoft technologies. None. ' Does dell.com not count? Seems like they are kind of successful. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Mike | I was being sarcastic to the op's view that sqlserver and asp is unscalable. My point was there are many sites that show that "I'm worried because my current tools (ASP & Access/SQL Server) do not scale well." is pure ignorance. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Mauricio Macedo | Mike - I don't a spare 1 Gb of RAM for J2EE. My website is very, very simple. I'm very surprised of the simplicity of Friendster, and how it was able to reach 1 million registered users. The /concept/ is strong. m - you're right, seems like MySQL is the best option, as they even created an acronym for the solution - LAMP! *laugh* I will reasearch a bit more about the backup/restore functionality, though. thanks for the input! |
| Fri 26 Dec | Mauricio Macedo | Mike wrote: I was being sarcastic to the op's view that sqlserver and asp is unscalable. My point was there are many sites that show that 'I'm worried because my current tools (ASP & Access/SQL Server) do not scale well.' is pure ignorance. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. They do not scale well according to my budget. I want to serve thousands of users daily, with a simple server. I will start with a shared server, and can afford a dedicated one in the future. But I can not afford a server farm. Now, if you tell me of a windows box with ASP/SQL Server capable of serving 100 different users per minute without coughing up or crashing and costing $50-$200 per month, then I'll be quite impressed and very thankful! Then again, I have heard of LAMP boxes doing just that. If this is really true, it means that I will be able to support my project for months without outside investors! Mind you, if I am getting into all the trouble of using another platform than the one I know, it is because I know the limitations of the ASP platform for high traffic websites and am trying to find a better solution. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Philo | Mauricio, don't take our word for it - you can get SQL Server on a 120-day demo for the cost of postage. Then get any of the ASP or ASP.Net demo sites available online, or write your own test pages. Then get the Web Application Stress Tool (WAST), the Microsoft Application Center Test (with Visual Studio.Net), or any other stress test tool. And bang on it yourself. I know in a previous contract I had an app with hundreds of users accessing hundreds of thousands of documents via ASP.Net and SQL Server (one box each) - the CPU load was generally 0%. Best of luck with your venture!!! Philo |
| Fri 26 Dec | Eric Debois | By the sound of it, the scalabillity of the languge it self is not something you need to concern yourself with. I.E. It sounds like not a lot of program logic, but tons of database access. In such applications the bottleneck is always the database. My 2 cents are: Avoid Jet. MySQL will probably serve you best since it has (afaik) the best read performance. MS SQL and Postgre will definatly work too though. Use connection pooling. Setting up and dropping database connections is a performance killer. Can you do this in ASP? I pretty sure you can do it in ASP.NET and PHP. Sometimes, when one platform is considred to be the fastest, everyone starts talking like all the other platforms are slow as f*ck. If thinks were like that we wouldnt have to have performance tests to begin with. What I mean to say is, the diffrences are not as big in reality as they are in our heads, and there are other factors that may be more important. |
| Fri 26 Dec | John Rose | I've written some simple stress tools and even on the cruddy K6-450mhz 384mb test machine, MS-SQL handled nearly a thousand simple inserts (no transactions) per second even with 3-4million rows in the database. That's a best-case scenario (no concurrent reads to induce thrashing, no transations or locking, etc) but it was still an impressive showing, I thought. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Mike | Mauricio, With thousands of users without using a web farm you will have to worry about forking with Apache, at least the 1.3x line, not sure how the architecture has changed in 2.0x. If you only have one server you may want to look at Zues, AOL Server, IIS as they have a persistant pool of connections and don't fork. Also you will not want traditional cgi as this is more forking. This is why AOL Server with the embedded TCL was so scalable. I was joking about the J2EE. If you don't like the ram hunger of java because you only have one box, you aren't going to like forking either. Read up on Greenspun's stuff. It is old in web time, but the principles still make sense. http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/index.html and specifically this one http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/databases-interfacing |
| Fri 26 Dec | Clay Dowling | I don't think anybody doubts that MS-SQL Server is a pretty tough database that can handle big loads. It's just that for our inquirer, the budget doesn't support it that well. He will have much better luck with the MySQL/PHP combination on a low budget. What I have found though is that C/MySQL will scale better. If the processing to be done is simple, PHP can hold it's own with a C program. If there is more complex processing, such as processing XSL stylesheets or some variety of template engine, the C program will run faster and put less stress on the server. This comparison was done without connection pooling. I stopped using connection pooling some time back because it was collapsing under high loads, but that was a major version number ago for PHP. If the current version can sustain connections under load, that might make for some real gains. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Oren | Mauricio, from your comments it looks like you intend to use a shared server rather than a dedicated one. In one post you said that you don't want to pay $50-$200 per month, but if you pay less than $50 then you'll probably have to use a shared server. In that case, the choice of DBMS will be far less important than the load placed on your server by the other users on the same machine. See if you can get a guarantee from the hosting company about the amount of CPU and RAM that will be reserved for you. Then you can start worrying about the DBMS... |
| Fri 26 Dec | Philo | Clay - I understand where you're coming from, but his budget concerns seemed to be about 'web farms' and 'database farms' as opposed to the cost of single machine licensing - I was simply saying that it's entirely possible a single machine solution will suit him fine. And if even single-CPU SQL is too high, there's always MSDE, which is nicely suited for small web applications, since connection concurrency is a lot lower. Then growing into SQL if necessary is very easy. Philo |
| Sun 28 Dec | John Rose | 'I don't think anybody doubts that MS-SQL Server is a pretty tough database that can handle big loads. It's just that for our inquirer, the budget doesn't support it that well. He will have much better luck with the MySQL/PHP combination on a low budget.' ------ Oh yeah, good point! I forgot some people have to pay for their software. :P |
| Future of Window API | Fri 26 Dec | Passer-by |
| Pardon me for making a somewhat off-topic post to this rather interesting forum. I program in Xanalys LispWorks, a common lisp implementation. Like most modern common lisp environments, LispWorks has a foreign function interface (FFI). The FFI acts an ambassador between the lisp program and a program written in another language - usually C. This allows lisp to exchange information with a C library. Stable and reliable One use of FFI is to build portable GUIs. LispWorks has a portable lisp library called CAPI. So I write programs with CAPI on Win32 - the program looks like a Win32 application. Then I take the same program and compile it for Mac OS X and Linux. They will look like native applications (except, usually, some changes to the interface font settings is required). The CAPI lbrary uses the FFI to access native widgets. By necessity, in order to assure smooth porting, cross platform GUIs must be simple. I must confess that I have not been paying much attention to .NET and C#. My programs use multiple inheritance, can patch running programs with active instances, and customize the object system (using Common Lisps Meta-Object Protocol). It is unrealistic for me to expect Lisp vendors to produce .NET versions of their environments. Like pushing the toothpaste back into the tube. While browsing other messages, however, I noticed that there is some uncertainty as to the future of the C based Win32 API. Is Microsoft planning to support 2 levels of APIs? Like Mac OS X has Carbon and Cocoa - will Microsoft maintain 2 APIs as well: traditional C based Win32 and new .NET? Its just that I am have not been paying attention. (The Lisp world is so cozy). Thank you for shedding some light for my curiousity. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Tom Hathaway | Read the second half of this article, where Joel talks about Fire and Motion. 'People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it's just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can't, because this is how the game is played, Bubby.' http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html |
| Fri 26 Dec | Chris Nahr | The Win32/64 APIs are going to be around for a looong time, even if they might turn into a translation wrapper on top of a native .NET implementation. There are so many programs written to this API that it would be commercial suicide (even) for Microsoft to drop it. |
| Fri 26 Dec | no name | Interesting that Joel says that in that article, because he has recently said that .NET is so great that fogcreek is writing its internal apps with it and will do new development with it eventually. Wonder if they're writing a .NET => PHP compiler next? |
| Fri 26 Dec | Jim | Take a look at http://www.wxwindows.org It's a C++ API that already has bindings for Python (wxpython), Perl, Ruby, Tcl, and other languages. Check to see if someone did a binding for your Lisp implementation. Your apps will run on Win32, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, AIX, etc... The only bad part about wxWindows is that the documentation is not quite complete, but because wxWindows is open source, you can always look at the source code to the widgets. FWIW, I use wxWindows for several commercial applications on Windows and Mac OS X. |
| Fri 26 Dec | njkayaker | .NET might be great but is there really any reason to rewrite quality stuff that works? Too many programmers, given the opportunity, rewrite old stuff in the next shiny new thing. This is a waste. No wonder offsouring is attractive. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Dan Maas | My guess is that Win32 will be completely viable for at least 10 years from now, and people will still be running Win32 apps (perhaps with some kind of emulation) for 20-30 years. Microsoft has a big vested interest in making sure software written for its platforms has a long life. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Passer-by | I'm the original poster - thank you for your replies (and especially that 'Smoke and Fire' article link). A few days ago an intern dragged me to this industry dinner where I almost drowned in acronyms. The food was good, but I've been paralyzed ever since. I've been wondering if it is prudent to ignore .NET and whether I should investigate rewriting in a non functional language. I should be doing something productive, but instead I'm going in circles and distracted by this whole thing. Your replies, however, have helped me break out of this loop. Thanks again. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Brad Wilson | Dan, You sound just like the guys who talked about DOS and 16-bit Windows. Win32 is, for all intents and purposes, just about 10 years old now. How many DOS apps are people running on a regular basis? Time moves on. This too shall pass. :) |
| Sat 27 Dec | Chris Nahr | That's hardly a valid comparison. The step from DOS to Windows, and to a lesser degree from Win16 to Win32, represented a fundamental architectural change. The .NET Framework is currently merely a wrapper over the Win32 API. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Brad Wilson | It also happens to represent the only way to take a single binary base to both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, and still be able to take advantage of the extra memory when it's available. I'm not telling anybody to drop Win32 for .NET. I'm just pointing out that the incredible statement of 'we'll be running Win32 apps 30 years from now' was waaaaaaaay hard to swallow. |
| Sat 27 Dec | pdq | You'd be surprised how many DOS apps are still out there. They may be running a specialized function on obsolete hardware but it's there. Until recently, we had some reports being run off a DBASE application on DOS. It wasn't worth the effort to port it and then we merged with another company and the whole finacial system was scrapped. Also, I think our office telephone system or voicemail is running on a DOS box. Maybe it's been replaced, but when the system was first installed it was a PC running DOS. The functionality hasn't changed and I don't recall there being any sort of upgrade. If it's running, why mess with it? |
| Sat 27 Dec | Noname | Sure, people will run old DOS apps if they get the job done. However, how many people are developing new DOS apps? Maybe Win32 is soon reaching the point where you'll still run your old apps on it but it won't be very profitable to develop new apps for it. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Brad Wilson | It's not there yet, but it most certainly will be there 30 years from now. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Brad Wilson | By the way, the 30 year comment was meant as a generalization. I don't think IN GENERAL that many if any people are using DOS applications on a daily basis today. Yes, some people, and in some cases, a few select heritage apps are still in use, but certainly nothing above the noise. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Albert D. Kallal | >>The .NET Framework is currently merely a wrapper over the Win32 API. Of very import point here is that in the Liunx land, the “wine” project which seeks to emulate/re-produce the win32 api is has made quite large progress. If any of you have read the story of Compaq and how they came out with a compatible IBM BIOS will know EXACTLY what I am talking about here. Once Compaq FINALLY got a working BIOS, then the whole compatible computer industry sprung from this great event. It is only a matter of time before much, or a very high degree of the Linux Wine project runs a large amount of windows software via the win32 api compatabile library. The problem is of course we now have software NOT being written for the win32 api, but now using the .net wrapper. This in effect secures MS future, since new software written will NOT work for Wine. In other words, the wine project is much in trouble, since now new software will requite the CLR. The above means a much more secure future for Microsoft, as they now can work to protect and own the runtime, and the published win32 api is NOT a threat to MS if other platforms try to run windows software. I suppose a project to “emulate” or creating a CLR that is compatible with the MS CLR is possible, but it is a heck of a lot easier to extend, or even change the CLR with software updates as compared to the win32 API which is generally not extended that much (and is generally quite stable). The CLR thus creates a moving target as compared to the stable published win32api. One can argue that the win32 api is not the future, but today, we still use the BIOS that is 20 some odd years old, but we never even give this BIOS a thought. I think the win32 api is about the same thing (base pc technology), and is going to be part of the computer landscape for a very long time, even if the next generation of developers never sees, or even knows of the win32 api. (just like many new develpers have never seen a dos prompt). Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada kallal@msn.com http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn |
| Sat 27 Dec | Shlomi Fish | I don't think Microsoft will drop the C API anytime soon. It reminds me of a rumour I had that said that a new version of Solaris was written in Java, white this was completely not true, as the kernel and core UNIX components were kept as purely C programs. Too many vendors depend on the C API (including Microsoft) and if Microsoft drops it, they can expect to lose a lot of business and customers. .NET is not compatible with C/C++ (as Joel noted) and some people still need the low-levelness of C. (you cannot write device drivers in .NET for instance) What may happen is that new services will only be available as .NET ones or that Microsoft will gradually rewrite some of its programs to be written in .NET. (I personally spoke with one Microsoft hacker who said his team would like to re-write a C++ component of Visual Studio in .NET because C++ causes them a great deal of problems which are a no brainer in .NET). |
| Sat 27 Dec | T. Norman | .NET on Linux: http://www.go-mono.com/ |
| Sat 27 Dec | Yummy | Of cousre they won't drop the C API, just like how we can run DOS apps in Windows XP still. But, eventually the win32 api will become a layer on top of the .NET ... maybe not in Longhorn, but in some future version of Windows. .NET is the platform Microsoft wants to take us into. And while I don't think it's a good idea to rewrite existing apps, it certainly can't hurt to write new apps in .NET (even if for the sole reason of making an easy transition code-wise to 64-bit computing). You youngin's didn't have to live through the pain of rewriting legacy 16-bit code to 32-bit .. ugh! |
| Sat 27 Dec | VPC | Are COM(+), OLE, MTS, etc. part of Win32? They don't look to me as 'designed for C'. I started that thread about Future of C as I finally managed to use IPicture class to display JPEGs from my C app. So, COM made me do it. Win32 as a platform is new to me, less than a year, but I already now that COM is 8 years old or so, and it seems to me that we could see where things are going looking at COM and related stuff. And, does anyone now of a book or a site where I could learn some more about how to use COM from straight C? MSDN and all the rest of documentation that I have is not helping much on that subject. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Yummy | Good article on the future of win32: http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2003/11/24/longhorn_01.htm |
| Sat 27 Dec | Joel Spolsky | At the PDC the Longhorn people said pretty clearly that the new interfaces (things like the pretty Avalon stuff) were being written for .Net, and it's '.Net all the way down' -- e.g., this is .Net on top of hardware drivers, not .Net on top of the Windows API. The question is whether C/C++ programmers will have a native way to call this functionality (if, for example, you want to add a pretty effect to a 'legacy' Win32 GDI app) or if you'll have to use Interop facilities and/or Managed C++, and I don't think even Microsoft has answered this. Think of it this way. CityDesk is written in VB 6 using some C++ and a lot of Win32 API calls. When XP came out, inheriting the new graphical look and feel was mostly a simple matter of adding a weird manifest resource to the EXE. But when Longhorn comes out, will Microsoft give me a way to take advantage of the whizzy new UI features expected on the platform, or will CityDesk forever look 'blah' until we port it to .Net? I'm pretty confident it WILL run forever... I regularly run a DOS application that I wrote in 1987 on Win XP Pro without a problem ... binary compatibility has always been crucial for MS because they know if a new OS breaks ANY existing apps it won't get adopted, period. (See Raymond Chen's recent entries on his excellent blog about the insane trouble they go to to emulate bugs for broken old apps) |
| Sun 28 Dec | Unhappy Mac Developer | 'they know if a new OS breaks ANY existing apps it won't get adopted' Alas, if only it was this way on the Mac. I am finding several points at which 10.3 is not compatible with 10.2 because Apple has silently changed the inner workings of CoreMIDI. Getting the details is a matter of proding Apple employees on development lists and getting them to admit 'oh yeah i changed ohow that works and didn't document it. File a document request bug and if management approves it, some documentation will get made for you showing what changed.' Sigh. |
| I want to be like Andy dufresne | Fri 26 Dec | anon |
| I work in a computing environment ( developing ERP), where the only thing that matters is patience and perseverence, not brilliance. The entire code (written in another country) is so bad that it would probably take 10 years to clean up. And the company is not interested because it works. Now, i consider myself as a very competent programmer. But just looking at the code makes me puke and lose all interest in the program. You need terrific amount of patience and perseverence to set something like that right. So i want to be like Andy Dufresne in the classic Shawshank Redemption movie. Is there anyone who has seen the movie aand believed that it was not the greatest piece of film making? If you have not seen it, i implore you, beg you to see it. It will be the greatest 2 hours you have spent all your life. After seeing the movie, i am actually thinking of ways to set the code right. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Eli Bendersky | Read the book (it's Stephen King's). Although the movie is great, the book is an order of magnitude better. |
| Fri 26 Dec | uncronopio | Watch Terminator 1-3. That will give you a few ideas about what to do with crappy code. Yes, SR is a good movie, but from there to be the greatest movie ever... you need to go more to the movies. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Kevin | You want to be convicted for a murder you didn't commit, given two life sentences, imprisoned, anally raped, beaten, and then forced to live out the rest of your life as a fugitive in another country? It's one of my favorite movies, but I wouldn't go so far as to say I want to be like Andy Dufresne. I'm also, frankly, having a hard time seeing the connection to programming. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Shodan | I think the point is that Mr.Andy never gave up hope, and created himself a solution by patience, persistence... a microt at a time. Much like the programming mess the poster he inherited. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Mike | "Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'" |
| Fri 26 Dec | FredSavage | I've seen/heard the 'yeah it's crap... but it works' argument once too many times also. Maybe he/she has a point? I mean it 'works' (or to the best of his/her knowledge) doesn't it? I mean who cares that nobody (including the original programmer) knows how it works anymore, it's impossible to add new features, and debugging is next to impossible. KISS is my motto when it comes to programming. Make it no more complicated than it has to be. Programming Pearls is my guide... |
| Fri 26 Dec | Cletus | Anon, Why are you being so 'obtuse' :) |
| Fri 26 Dec | Cletus | 'I'm also, frankly, having a hard time seeing the connection to programming.' I think the connection is that patient perserverance can get you through some of the crappy situations in life that you can't easily get out of...bad job, bad relationship, wrongful imprisonment etc etc... Anon, you may also want to consider the Book of Job for inspiration: http://cspar181.uah.edu/RbS/JOB/job.html http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/kjv/job.htm |
| Fri 26 Dec | evil warden | 'obtuse'? I'll show you obtuse!! |
| Fri 26 Dec | Damian | >>I'm also, frankly, having a hard time seeing the connection to programming. Well, he spent the final haul of his 'project' neck deep in a river of shit. Who here hasn't done that ? |
| Sat 27 Dec | Dennis Forbes | For what it's worth, it's ranked #2 on the IMDB 'Best Movie' rankings (beaten only by 'The Godfather'). http://www.imdb.com/top_250_films |
| Sat 27 Dec | pdq | That list is crap if it puts The Maltese Falcon and Bridge over the River Kwai at 49 and 52 and The Usual Suspects at 18. I mean, the Usual Supects is a good movie, but that much better than these? The Two Towers as the fifth best movie ever? Did they do a poll on Slashdot or what? |
| Sun 28 Dec | Dennis Forbes | I don't think you'll ever find any sort of common agreement on any sort of "top" listings that are based on subjective measures rather than empirical metrics. Personally I find "Star Wars" at number 11 to be absurd, as to me that was a B-grade, boring and drawn out waste of time. |
| IEEE reports highest level of unemployment ever | Fri 26 Dec | Tony Chang |
| > [IEEE] reports the highest level of member unemployment ever recorded, more than double the levels reached in the recession periods of the mid-1970s and early 1990s. Since U.S. IEEE members were far less likely to be out of work than their non-IEEE counterparts, these estimates are probably optimistic. The data portend a sharp decline in the overall demand for electrical, electronics, and computer engineers. http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36322 That little tidbit I was not aware of - twice the unemployment level for qualified member engineers from the worse time it ever was! Maybe things arent really getting better after all. |
| Fri 26 Dec | anon | Much of the media here in America is controlled by the republicans. Only fools(there is no other word for it) believe CNN and NY Times when the say that economy is looking up. They have their own agendas and many of these dont coincide with human values like telling the truth. So you can pretty much guess that most of these statistics that claim that economy is improving are simply exagerrated by the media. They are hungry for 4 more years of Bush. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Simon Lucy | The coincidence between IEEE membership and those involved in the computer industry (who are not in the first instance electronic engineers) has become so little as to be irrelevant and probably misdirecting when trying to apply it to hiring trends. It may well show a general deskilling of electronic design (beyond primary research that is), in that a great many products can now be created purely by plugging them together like the proverbial lego. It may also show a decline in R&D budgets as the concentration on practical applications and products seems to relate more to innovation in styling than fundamental technology. |
| Fri 26 Dec | no name | Simon, I don't know what you base that on. A very high proportion of IEEE members work in the computer and software industries. Are you making the mistake of thinking the IEEE is only for electronics designers? |
| Fri 26 Dec | one programmer's opinion | Tony Chang wrote, 'Maybe things aren't really getting better after all.' For the U.S. computer industry this statement might be very true, however, that doesn't mean other sectors of the U.S. economy aren't doing okay. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Charlotte C. | Here's a related article: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=572&e=2&u=/nm/germany_east_men_dc >Shortage of Women in East Germany Causes Turmoil >LIEBENTHAL, Germany (Reuters) - A steady exodus of educated women is worsening a gender gap among eastern Germany's young and could be sowing the seeds of social upheaval. People wonder why there are no women in engineering. The answer is simple -- when smart women see a dead-end situationwe either high tail it out of there, or avoid it like the plague to begin with. Why? Because women have common sense. The IT field has as much going for it right now as living in East Germany. Only losers with no skills and no other prospects would stay on board this sinking ship. |
| Fri 26 Dec | anonymizer | 'Only losers with no skills and no other prospects would stay on board this sinking ship' Bwahahaha. There are many of us making extremely good livings and with absolutely no issue getting gigs that would beg to differ. The reality is indeed that the dregs (and unfortunately some talented people with poor communications/self-sales skills), such as yourself, are getting flushed out, but what is coming out of all of that is a much more mature profession. |
| Fri 26 Dec | sgf | anon, 'media here in America is controlled by the republicans' 'They are hungry for 4 more years of Bush' Ha Ha - you got me. For a second there I thought you were serious. |
| Fri 26 Dec | T. Norman | Isn't the raw number of employed engineers still higher than it was before the start of the dot-com boom and the Y2K frenzy? The all-time high unemployment rate may be more the result of an all-time high number of individuals chasing after the back-to-reality number of jobs. |
| Fri 26 Dec | a | Anonymizer, it is not true that the people without work are the worst, or are no good. In fact, contractors, who tend to be the more capable, in the business market at least, are the hardest hit by the downturn. The full impact of what's been happening is not readily apparent to those with staff jobs until they're forced to find a new job. Anonymizer Friday, December 26, 2003 anon, 'media here in America is controlled by the republicans' 'They are hungry for 4 more years of Bush' Ha Ha - you got me. For a second there I thought you were serious. sgf Friday, December 26, 2003 Isn't the raw number of employed engineers still higher than it was before the start of the dot-com boom and the Y2K frenzy? The all-time high unemployment rate may be more the result of an all-time high number of individuals chasing after the back-to-reality number of jobs. |
| Fri 26 Dec | a | Please excuse the excessive paste. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Charlotte C. | Anon, Read the article on East Germany. Is it the dregs who stay behind or is it the dregs who move on to a better life. The article points out that the ones wha stay behind in a dead end area are mental rejects who will be unlikely to ever have an opportunity to breed. |
| Fri 26 Dec | anonymizer | Uh....the IT sector isn't East Germany moron. Poorly placed analogies are the truest sign of idiots. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Philo | You're a Nazi! Salad Cream! You're a Nazi! Salad Cream! [Godwin & JoS in a shouting match] Philo |
| Sat 27 Dec | I Hate Whiners | 'Much of the media here in America is controlled by the republicans. Only fools(there is no other word for it) believe CNN and NY Times when the say that economy is looking up.' That's funny...Yeah, CNN is just a shill for Bush. LOL. And you keep telling yourself that the sky is falling and that you're doomed. The more people that wallow in self-pity and convince themselves that the end is coming means that the rest of us have more opportunities to choose from. Only fools (there is no other word for it) sit around and work hard to convince themselves how bad off they have it. |
| Sat 27 Dec | a | > Only fools sit around and work hard to convince themselves how bad off they have it. As the frog said to the other frog as they relaxed in the pot of water on top of the stove. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Tim Sullivan | Wow, I've never heard less convincing arguments that the sky is falling. Women are avoiding IT, therefore it's a dud. CNN backs Bush, and is lying about a recovery. Things are a lot more complex than what the IEEE report is being used for in this thread. There are certain facts: 1) The number of jobs in the US is increasing; 2) The number of UI claims is decreasing; 3) The stock market is going up, and has been for months; 4) Consumer and business spending are up; 5) Consumer confidence is up. As the economy improves, all the things that companies stopped working on (like implementing database systems to track their dodads and gizmos) will come back to life, because they'll have the money again to pursue them. This leads to an increase in software company income. So, all the things that software companies stopped doing because they didn't have enough money will come back to life. This will require more people, and that will lead to increased hires. These new hires will suddenly be making more money, and thus will be spending money on things. People who produce these things will make more money, hire more people and pursue more technology. This is, of course, an incredibly simplified version of what is going on. However, I've been seeing it first hand. Our company just had the best year in our history (the last 9 months brought in more money than the 12 before that). We are getting more orders, at a higher price per order. Decision times are reducing... what used to take 4 to 6 months is down to 2 to 4 months. So cry doom if you want; however, instead of making ignorant comments about women having more common sense than men, start looking at some hard numbers and realistic scenerios. |
| Sun 28 Dec | I Hate Whiners | 'As the frog said to the other frog as they relaxed in the pot of water on top of the stove. ' Yeah, and you just keep telling yourself that you're that frog. That'll really help your outlook on life, prosperity and the job market. |
| Sun 28 Dec | a | But if I know I'm that frog, I'm going to jump out of the pot. Sleep well. |
| Sun 28 Dec | I Hate Whiners | 'But if I know I'm that frog, I'm going to jump out of the pot. Sleep well. ' Excellent! One less incompetent, whining hack out of the industry. And yes..I would like fries with that. Thank you. |
| job advice for a new graduate | Wed 24 Dec | joblost |
| Hi, I was supposed to graduate this past semester, but I didnt get a passing grade in my last Electrical Engineering course. On the same day that I got my grade, I also got a job offer from a company that I interviewed with earlier this month. They gave me the option of either starting at the end in a few weeks or possibly in april. My question is how should I go about telling the company about this? Should I just tell them I want to postpone the start date till spring without telling them about my new graduation date? Or should I tell be completely honest and explain my situation? So I guess the subject is a little misleading as it has to do with not graduating :). Oh yeah, my GPA really isnt very good to begin with. It is below a 3.0. Im not sure if that makes a difference. And the job is in software engineering, so the material from the EE course isnt applicable to my new job. Any thoughts you all have would be great as Im really new to the world of employment and I just have no idea how the company will take the news. happy holidays to you all and your families. |
| Wed 24 Dec | anon | Casll up the hiring manager and tell him directly and honestly. |
| Wed 24 Dec | programmer | I can advise you on this because I am a student who just passed out , but had 3 year work experience. I have seen lots and lots of cases like yours. Dozens. Let us get to the bottomline first 1)You want the job 2)You need to be honest I have a suspicion they may not care about your degree, especially because you are in a different field. If they ask you, inform them that your new 'official' graduation date is postponed. Dont tell them any reason. But if they ask, try to wriggle out of it without being dishonest. Simply tell them that you have one more subject to pass. You have not written whether you can work with a subject in balance. I hope you can. But remember, if they question too closely or they seem very particular about your degree certificate, tell them the details. If they just ask for the degree certificate, ask them whether you can give it in april. I think most software companies wont give a damn. A better option for you is to tell them that due to unavoidable reasons, your graduation is postponed till April. Tell them that its some personal problem. Chances are they wont ask. Or Tell them that there is one absolutely great subject you had to study because its useful to you later on. Tell them your professor wants you to take the course. What you actually do is to register for some other class by simply sitting through it. In Purdue, they used to call this 'auditing' It does not make sense to lose the job. Being 'utterly honest' can be self defeating. You would not want them to have a bad opinion of you before you start. Bottomline: Try to find a way in which you can be both honest as well as retain the job and not tell them that you flunked. But if they ask pointedly, be honest and tell them. Make a few enquiries first. ask them whether its ok if you show them your graduation certificate in april and whether you can join in april. Just casually ask them rather than pointedly. Then come to your decision. But remember, NEVER lie. If they find out, you will be kicked out of the company |
| Wed 24 Dec | programmer | Its too late now. But dont post queries like this on a public forum giving all your details. How do you know that someone in your company is not reading this? |
| Wed 24 Dec | Lou | We had two individuals in my company start but still require one course to graduate. They informed the company that they had a final requirement to complete before their official graduation and that they intended to complete it at night and on weekends. They assured everyone that it would not affect their work. They did, it didn't, and we just had a party. |
| Wed 24 Dec | no name | 'But dont post queries like this on a public forum giving all your details.' Yes. From now on, express your messages more like so: I'm a person who's having a dilemma. People did things, and I didn't do other things well, so now I'm wondering if I should tell certain people about certain things. Your thoughts? :) |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dennis Atkins | I agree with the others that you should tell them your graduation has been delayed a semester because you have to take one more class to graduate. Likely they will not ask the details. If they do, tell them what happened: 'It's an EE class in transistor physics and I'm embarassed to say I failed the class.' At this point, they'll probably say 'Yeah, that transistor physics is a hard one.' Whatever you do, don't give up on the degree. You HAVE to get the degree. If your grades are low, I assume you are not a superstar developer. There's nothing wrong with that, few people are superstars. But in the case of an ordinary non-superstar guy, it's especially critical that you have a degree to show that you are a hardworker who is able to follow through. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Philo | 'If your grades are low, I assume you are not a superstar developer' Really a *very* bad assumption. Philo |
| Wed 24 Dec | Floridian | hen my present company hired me, I was one summer away from graduation. I got hired anyways and finished the degree in summer. And yeah, my GPA was a hair off 4.0 :) |
| Wed 24 Dec | Floridian | hen-->When. Oopss... |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dennis Atkins | It's an assumptiion that is generally true, if not specifically. Thus I said 'I assume you are not' and gave advice based on that assumption. That's different from saying 'cleary it is a fact that therefore you are certainly not'. It's considered a normal use of letters and email and situations where one is not face to face to state the assumptions before giving the advice. That way, if the assumptions don't hold, the person need not take the advise. Even so, even for a superstar, a degree can be helpful in his path towards being recognized as a superstar. I know superstarts with great grades and superstars with adequate grades. I can't off hand think of too many superstars with poor grades. did you know that Einstein did well in college and that the stories of him being a dropout and a underachiever are false? I do believe that that myth gives comfort to many though. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dennis Atkins | 'One oft-repeated myth suggests that Albert Einstein, as a schoolboy, was poor at arithmetic. 'On the contrary, he was quite good at it,' says Stein. But when he was a pupil his school inverted the grading system, making a high grade a low one. Anyone looking at Einstein's report card not knowing this would conclude that Einstein was poor in math.' -- from review of Sherman Stein's 'Strength in Numbers: Discovering the Joy and Power of Mathematics in Everyday Life' (John Wiley & Sons, 1996). [review at http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/go/gizmo/gentry.html] |
| Wed 24 Dec | no name | Another vote for just telling them that you need one additional class and that you plan on not letting that class interfere with the new job. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Philo | Dennis, are you a EE? I don't recall. Getting bad grades in EE is *normal*. Then factor in that superstar developers tend to be overachievers, and compound the lack of maturity that generally comes with being college age, and you get someone who has the desire to scale Mount Everest every semester without the self-awareness to realize one's own limits. Add in mind-altering math and physics. Net result: low grades. ;-) *Finishing* a EE degree makes someone a top-1%er. Grades should only be a curiosity. (and for that matter, if someone gets a 4.0 in EE, be wary as to why they're applying at your company if you're not a Fortune 50 or a research center...) I'm not saying low grades in EE make one great, either. I'm simply saying that in general, if you're looking for someone in for the long haul, look for *finishing* an engineering degree, and don't worry too much about the grades. Recognize that you're going to have to do some mentoring and leadership, and evaluate your coder as time goes by. My $.02, anyway. Philo |
| Wed 24 Dec | no name | How about this for comfort. Richard Feynman didn't qualify for MENSA. And his sister beat him by 1 point. Something like 125 to 124. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Me | They've already given you the option of deferring your start so you don't need to tell them all the details. There are occasions when people DON'T want to know all the details, and this is probably one of them. Some ways it might hurt you are that the manager of the hirer might have a different interpretation of the situation. Just say you'll start in April and in the meantime you're finishing one of the courses or doing extra work or something. |
| Wed 24 Dec | flamebait sr. | Alternatively, some schools have stuff in the rules exactly for your situation. i.e. if you are a senior and flunked one required class, you may have the option of taking a profficency test or the like and still graduate. Or talk to the prof, who may or may not be swayed to award you a D if you can show him/her in person that you really did understand the material. (On the other hand, some profs delight in failing you, so that may go nowhere) Not being honest tends to not bite you in the ass immediately, but much much much later, when it's far more devistating and embarrasing. Like getting fired 10 years down the road or being publically exposed when you are a big name executive. Stuff like that. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | Pertinent to the subject of discussion, here's what Bill Gates had to say in an interview, [QUOTE] Q. Do you regret not finishing college? A. I quit college to start Microsoft, and I don't regret that. But I enjoyed college a lot, and I wish there had been time for me to finish. When you hear success stories about people who quit college, it may be tempting to believe that education doesn't matter for the entrepreneurially minded. But unless a person has an idea that's very time-critical, and is concerned that he or she might never have as good an idea ever again, it's probably better to finish. For one thing, it is unusual for a person to be taken seriously in business when he or she is very young. It is hard for a teenager to raise money and hire good people. More importantly, college is full of lessons. Besides coursework, there is valuable learning outside the classroom during the college years. Certainly having a degree can be critical for getting a desirable job later on,. For example, even though Microsoft was founded by a couple of college dropouts, it's pretty unusual for us to hire somebody for a key position who is interrupting his or her educational career. [/QUOTE] Source: http://www.microsoft.com/museum/BillGatesFAQ.doc Besides, I recall an article by Dax Pandhi on VBWorld some years ago that...umm....here it goes... http://www.developer.com/net/vb/article.php/1540171 Read Laryy Ellison's speech on Page 5 of this article. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dennis Atkins | Yeah Philo one my degrees is an EE. Classes are tough and grades you get depend on the university - a C average at MIT is worth more than straight As at Podunk State College. The way the OP presented it was to suggest that his academic record was poor. If it was the case that his grades were low but no different than anyone else in his program because it was so tough, I think he would have clarified that bit. My point remains that most people aren't superstars who can claim that low grades and/or no degree are merely proof of their great genius. Thus, finishing a degree program is a good thing, especially since you seldom get asked about your class standing but you do get asked if you have a degree. I'm not sure why you are opposed to my suggestion he be sure to finish his degree anyway. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dennis Atkins | 'If someone gets a 4.0 in EE, be wary as to why they're applying at your company if you're not a Fortune 50 or a research center...' This must be the gazillionth time I've seen the implication that people with 4.0 averages from top notch universities should be regarded with suspicion. The implication being they must be bad at what they do or they why else would they have to be trying so hard. Frankly I find these suggestions absurd and pathetic as they suggest the person making them is threatened of competant or highly skilled coworkers. Here's a question back? Why would someone who is a top achiever apply to a Fortune 50 company? I can't think of a more pathetic waste of a highly talented life than targetting the comfort and warmth of mother's teat, as is represented by a Fortune 50 position. All Fortune 50 companies are lacking innovation and growth. Same onld sameo old day after day. Same as getting a job working for the government. Now I understand why mediocre people want a safe secure government job but all the really top notch people I have met have either gon into business for themselves or have targetted obscure firms with exciting high risk projects that change the world. |
| Wed 24 Dec | no name | Go visit the businessweek b-school forums. Fortune 100 mgt. is still a very popular goal. Nobody (?) wants to slave away as a coder/peasant in that type of company, but there's a lot of young MBAs-to-be that want to manage them. |
| Wed 24 Dec | no name | Some of the Ivy League colleges have a reputation for grade inflation. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Stephen Jones | Dear blank, Perhaps you could say which ones, are is your evidence on a par with your signature? |
| Wed 24 Dec | no name | Dubya graduated with a B didn't he? Nuff said. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dennis Atkins | Blank probably means these articles: http://www.google.com/search?q=ivy+league+grade+inflation I didn't read them again; I read them before. If things haven't changed the Ivy Leagues feel that all their students are top notch and thus giving them all As is not a problem. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dennis Atkins | Ok I couldn't resist and peeked at them, here's a quote: > Harvard University, for instance, came under sharp criticism for graduating 91 percent of the Class of 2001 with honors MIT, CalTech, Stanford, U of Ill. and the other top notch engineering schools are the ones I am thinking of when I say Cs there are worth more than Cs at Podunk. I'm not talking about harvard. Does Harvard even have a school of engineering? I thought it was a divinity school... |
| Thu 25 Dec | Philo | Dennis, my comment regarding 4.0 EE's is that (assuming we're talking an accredited EE degree) such a person is most likely a genius in some level of personality, and should be able to write their own ticket to anywhere they want to work. Given that, all pride aside, most people gotta ask 'why do you want to work *here*?' At every job interview, I was asked why a lawyer is writing software. I have no problems with the question whatsoever - in fact I expected it, and those times I didn't get it, I got the feeling the interviewer skimmed my resume right before the interview. The question is really 'are you just marking time here until you get a law firm job?' and IMHO it's a fair one. It's not an issue of mistrust - it's one of ensuring both sides understand where they're standing in the relationship. Philo |
| Thu 25 Dec | Philo | And I didn't mean to imply that underperforming grades in EE are any kind of indicator either. I'm saying that grades in EE are no indicator whatsoever as to how that person will perform for you. Philo |
| Thu 25 Dec | Dennis Atkins | I disagree. I think they are no guarantee because there are many exceptions, but the general principle is that hard workers tend to get decent marks. Another indicator of success is going to a really difficult university, majoring in an especially difficult subject, succeeding in school despite having three majors and being employed doing road construction, lots of stuff. Saying there is absolutely no connection is just plain wrong. Yeah, there are exceptions that prohibit absolute guarantees. But no correlation whatsoever? Dream on! |
| Thu 25 Dec | Dennis Atkins | Check it out Philo, your boss Bill is notorious for making a habit of personally phoning the top graduates at several well known top engineering schools and personally asking them to consider working for microsoft. Is Bill just wasting his time here? is he a total retard? Or does ho know something - that top students at top schools make excellent hiring candidates. |
| Thu 25 Dec | What if I called myself "David Jones" | I'm not your research staff. It's an easy google to find out about Ivy league grade inflation. Go ahead. Try it. Screw it. I know you're too fricking lazy: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Ivy+league+grade+inflation |
| Thu 25 Dec | Stephen Jones | So when you presented your thesis you didn't bother to present any sources; you just told the prof to stop being fricking lazy and go and do a Google Search? I suppose if you still passed it's a promafacie case of grade inflation. Actually the top entries aren't accurately summed up by your one liner: 'Some of the Ivy League colleges have a reputation for grade inflation. ' The artioles suggest that Gtade Inflation is standard throughout American universities; the Ivy League is only mentioned because they give the highest grades, but as you have to be pretty bright to get in in the first place this doesn't mean grade inflation is higher there than elsewhere. Incidentally I don't know what grade Bush got, but he got his degree at the beginning of the period under consideration so an inappropriately high grade doesn't back up grade inflation, and anyway am I the only one that feels you need a minimum of talent to become elected President of the US? |
| Thu 25 Dec | Stephen Jones | Sorry prima facie case. Never took 001 typing! |
| Thu 25 Dec | Cognitive Dissonance | I know it's fun to take an extreme position and defend it to the death, but the truth can often be found somewhere in the middle. Grades are significant. They are not the whole story. |
| Thu 25 Dec | flamebait sr. | I don't dismiss people who have excellent GPAs from good schools as cheaters. However, I tend to be extra-rough on them with the interviewing process to make sure that they are really that smart, or if they are just good at regurgitating stuff. I lived with someone who had a 4.0 in CS. He did nothing but study and one or two selected projects. I would never want to work with him because he was obnoxious and a poor team player (especially as an underling). I also felt that he wasn't necessarily smarter than I was, he was just far more focused than I ever could be. |
| Thu 25 Dec | What if I called myself "David Jones" | Don't be a moron. This isn't college and you aren't my professor and it seems everybody _except_ you has heard or read about Ivy grade inflation. You want my sources about whether the sun will come up tomorrow? |
| Thu 25 Dec | Philo | All I'm trying to address is your implication that someone with a low GPA who actually does receive a BSEE in general isn't going to be a superstar. I'm saying that I think there's zero correlation between low grades in EE and superstar ability as a coder. Smart - finished the program Gets things done - finished the program Philo |
| Thu 25 Dec | Dennis Atkins | Well it looks like we've simply arrived at a Mexican standoff then. |
| Thu 25 Dec | dervish | Senior level solid state physics is a tough class. Most 'programmers' simply wouldn't pass, period. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Dennis Atkins | 'my GPA really isn't very good to begin with' -- original poster This discussion that has spun off isn't about the one he failed, it's about his low GPA in general probably means he's no superstar and thus finishing a degree is especially important in such a case, in my opinion. My opinion is not shared by anyone here though. The general consensus is that grades mean absolutely nothing, except that you should be suspicious and extra critical of those who have high achievement because there is clearly something wrong with them. With attitudes like this, no wonder american engineering is in the shithole, the software you buy from the big corporations is total crapola, and when you call for customer support those guys know so little that we're better off hiring people overseas to answer teh phones because at least they have enough common sense to make intelligent guesses. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Philo | 'The general consensus is that grades mean absolutely nothing, except that you should be suspicious and extra critical of those who have high achievement because there is clearly something wrong with them.' You need to work on your logical analysis, or else stop twisting arguments to suit your agenda. ;) My point is simply: - Given someone who has completed an accredited BSEE degree, even a 2.1 does not indicate they are unlikely to be superstars. The amount and type of knowledge necessary to finish a BSEE means that someone who can simply finish the degree has the mental capacity and the the determination to be a top 1%-er in any company. - Given the amount and type of knowledge necessary for a EE degree, then someone who can achieve a 4.0 is an exceptionally gifted individual. And if you're not working for Microsoft, Oracle, Rand, or other similiar high-profile companies, then if someone of that caliber applies, it's fair to ask why. Put it this way - if you got a resume from Chris Sells or Linus Torvalds, you wouldn't ask 'okay, I've gotta ask - why here?' I'm not saying you can't trust them - just that it's worth asking the question. *I* was asked it and never took offense - I thought it was perfectly fair. Philo |
| Fri 26 Dec | Dennis Atkins | OK, sounds like you are repudiating your original statement: 'if someone gets a 4.0 in EE, be *wary* as to why they're applying at your company' Which is fine by me, since I was wary of that statement. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Dennis Atkins | I think we're loosely in agreement now - you do seem to acknowledge that a top graduate in EE is especially talented and will do well anywhere, thus the correlation between grades and success is a positive number, not a negative number and not zero. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Simon Lucy | I had an occasion where I was convinced to give a student a placement for their year out in their CS degree. Naturally his continuing on the degree depended upon him passing the current year. I discovered that he'd actually failed if not all the modules then enough to make it unlikely that he could continue on an honours degree. I gave him the time and the opportunity to let me know this, he didn't. So I fired him. This was within a month of him starting and its the first and only time I've had to do that, always in the past there was something that could be done. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Philo | Dennis, my point the whole time, though I may not have expressed it well, is that the simple fact of completion of an accredited BSEE indicates a person has the potential to be a coding superstar, no matter what their GPA. And to venture all the way back to the beginning, where you said 'If your grades are low, I assume you are not a superstar developer.' I still say that statement is inaccurate on its face. IMHO, 'if you have a BSEE, no matter what your grades are, you have the potential to be a superstar developer.' Philo |
| Fri 26 Dec | no name | 'you do seem to acknowledge that a top graduate in EE is especially talented and will do well anywhere' I wouldn't acknowledge that. I would acknowledge that they are probably extremely intelligent and can do well in a number of places - MS springs to mind. But there's so much more involved in having a successful career besides sheer brainpower. Every joke has a kernel of truth: We all end up working for the guy that carried a 2.0 throughout undergrad business school. First of all most coding jobs don't require heavy brainpower. Secondly, most jobs require more teamwork and interpersonal communication skills than brainpower. I've worked in imaging, a very short stint in data processing, and now 3D graphics. I've worked with CS PhDs, EEs, MIS majors, vo-tech graduates and people that went to work right out of high school. I've only worked in a few places, but so far my experience has been that level or type of education doesn't have much of a bearing on coding ability. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Me | 'you do seem to acknowledge that a top graduate in EE is especially talented and will do well anywhere' I also dispute this quite strongly. I also have worked in many environments at all levels, technical and management. I have worked with a lot of 'top' EE's. I've actually found that I'm a bit suspicious of their capability, unless they're PhD's. I've found that high-mark EE's are mind numbingly narrow, often seem to have used test-handling techniques to get their scores and can't adapt well to broader problems. Top science graduates aren't like that. Top economics and humanities graduates naturally aren't like that. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Me | I think it's because the EE curriculum is so cluttered that only those without other interests get high marks. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Jorel on Software | "Plastics." |
| Fri 26 Dec | Shy Student | Dear list, Please help me with advise. I applied for an engineering job and was hired and supposed to start as soon as I graduated. But in the meantime something terrible has happened - I have graduated with a 4.0 GPA and top honors from CalTech! I admit this is partly me own fault - I was so busy designing projects that I didn't bother to open those report cards they sent me at the end of every semester. Now I am in big trouble. Here is my question -- should I tell the boss at the new place about this and risk him firing me, or s hould I just keep quiet and hope they don't find out. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Career Advisor | Dear Student, What can I say, As hire As, Bs hire Cs and Cs hire Ds. Since you imply your boss is not an A, there is not much hope for you. I would tell them and let them dismiss you and then go work for a real firm. Don't tell me, the first gig was working on business apps. Not a real brain stretcher there and you'd be unhappy at a company made up of retards and social rejects anyway. Go work at a real company and not with a bunch of lame asses! |
| Fri 26 Dec | realist | Shy Student - Accept the job, and be happy with your prospects. I trust when you get the aforementioned phone call from Bill Gates (or Larry Ellison, or IBM, or Intel) offering you three times the money to play with the newest technology in the world, you'll tell them 'Thank you, but I've already accepted an offer to be a junior web developer at Flotsam & Jetsam, Inc.' |
| Fri 26 Dec | T. Norman | 'First of all most coding jobs don't require heavy brainpower.' But aspiring superstars won't look to be employed in 'most coding jobs', and if you hire someone you think is a superstar, you shouldn't give them work that is like 'most coding jobs'. |
| Fri 26 Dec | There you go | That's all fine & dandy T. Norman, but there's more superstars than there are superstar type jobs available. |
| Fri 26 Dec | SCM guy | 'there's more superstars than there are superstar type jobs available' that seems endemic to all fields. |
| Fri 26 Dec | SCM guy | i.e. there's a lot of underemployed people in the workforce. always has been. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Cognitive Dissonance | Shy Student - Have you considered the food service industry? |
| Sat 27 Dec | Ekonimisist | Yes, I am thinking I will have to work either at McDonalds or at WalMart. What was I thinking when I studied hard and did well! If only I got terrible grades, then I could be a superstar developer like my hero Philo! |
| Sat 27 Dec | Shy Student/Ekonimisist | Ah damn I revealed my secret identity. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Shy Student/Ekonimisist | Never post while drunk. |
| Sun 28 Dec | Cognitive Dissonance | 'Never post while drunk.' Good advice. But if we took you up on it, half these threads would be empty. |
| working hard or hardly working? | Mon 22 Dec | T.S. |
| Today our office is pretty empty; most people are on vacation for Christmas week. Those that are here, including me, are taking it easy and not doing that much work. This is such a contrast to the food court in the mall, where just the other day I saw some people older than me who were working their butts off for minimum wage. Thinking about this has made me feel somewhat guilty. It doesnt seem fair that software developers like myself who make meaningless software (in the grand scheme of things) can make a comfortable living, while those people who have more important jobs (social workers, teachers, etc) make considerably less. Is anyone else shocked, especially at this time of year, at the selfishness in themselves and others? |
| Mon 22 Dec | Patrik | Guilt is present at times, but when thinking about it in a greater perspective, when counting all the allnighters, weekends and late evenings during the rest of the year I end up not caring about it. Most other jobs doesnt include as much work at strange times as SW dev. Production upgrades, on call duty and such crap. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Rick | T.S., not everyone measures happiness and success in terms of money. Those teachers probably feel guilty they get to work with kids and make a significant difference in peoples' lives, while other people have to sit in a cube and stare at a computer all day. |
| Mon 22 Dec | GenX'er | I got 2 words for ya: 'Summers' + 'off' = awesome benefits I got one other word for ya that most Dilbert like programmers are envious of: 'Tenure' I feel SOOOOO bad for teachers........ |
| Mon 22 Dec | Barry Sperling | If pay equated to work, then drug dealers, entertainment stars and sports stars would be the hardest working and most deserving of us all. As a retired teacher working writing software, I am making more money now and working much less than I did. When I go home I get to do what I want to. As a teacher there was always grading of projects and tests, writing of plans and tests, quarterly grades, recommendations, etc. to fill up the evenings and weekends. You were never away from the job. Software is easy and a great intellectual challange! |
| Mon 22 Dec | Troy McClure | I don't feel sorry for teachers at all. Great benefits & job security are definitely worth the extra $$$ that I might make. Although near me, with enough tenure, these teachers can make 6 figures. Plus for the last week or so, they haven't been teaching at all. Nothing but parties, plays, etc. |
| Mon 22 Dec | no name | If you feel sorry for teachers, you must have gone to a much better highschool than I did. 90% of the teachers at my high school were incompetant, sadistic, pot heads, alcoholics, deadbeats, and neurotic. |
| Mon 22 Dec | MR | I work in a University as a programmer and right now things are very slow. The students are gone for another couple of weeks and, technically, this whole week is “University Closed” meaning faculty and staff don’t show up unless they feel like it (the first three days of the week are not a paid holiday, so you have to take vacation days; Thursday and Friday are paid holidays). I’m here only because I’m taking three week’s vacation (starting tomorrow) and I wanted to make sure all my tasks got spread over the other developers before I go incommunicado. Also, if you are an unscrupulous University professor you can get by using your same lesson plans, exams, etc. from the previous semester without much work. You can even get TAs or other students to grade them for you! Don’t get me wrong, if I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now I think I would like to teach (programming at a large academic institution gives me the time and opportunity to teach intro programming courses), but from what I’ve seen it’s like any large software project – you spend a ton of up-front time developing your curriculum (or I suppose you could steal it from others; one CS professor I had basically took the lecture notes from different universities and taught from that) then you simply refine it over the years. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Nathan | My wife is in childcare, and currently looking for a job. Only offer on the table right now is working 40 hrs/ week during the school year with at-risk preschoolers. Includes home visits to determine eligibility into the program. Pay? $11,000 a year. Yup, it *just* works out to minimum wage, assuming she won't spend any time out of the classroom making bulletin boards, posters, writing lesson plans, parent-teacher conferences, etc. Taco Bell pays more. |
| Mon 22 Dec | T.S. | Rick, that's a good point that not everyone measures success in terms of money. Perhaps no one should... It just seems wrong to me to work in software development (whether it be pulling all nighters or just goofing off) just so that I can have money for myself. Especially when the software itself doesn't help many people directly. When looking at that objectively it seems very selfish and a waste of a life. Perhaps my teacher example wasn't the best, but how about the fast food workers? I'm not talking about the high school students, but the adults who work there as their career. They don't get great benefits (if they get any at all), and some of them work just as hard as software developers - 2 full time jobs, 80+ hour weeks, etc. It's not always by choice that they end up there either. I guess that is where my guilt is coming from. It's these adults that have to always struggle and never get a break. I was just curious if anyone else felt the same way. |
| Mon 22 Dec | ... | "...the poor will always be among us..." |
| Mon 22 Dec | no name | As someone who worked in food service in high school and 2 years during college so that I would have enough money for tuition, I find your guilt condescending. The people in fast food are either high school students, retarded people, immigrants, or stupid people. The high school students and immigrants are just trying to make some extra money for something else, like college, or a car, or sending their kids to college, or whatever. The retards are there because they can't really work anywhere else, and fast food chains often have programs to help these people out. The stupid people are there because that is all they are qualified to do. In other areas of food service (a sit-down restaurant), the people are either really into food (the chef and sous chef), just trying to earn money for something else (the waitstaff) or else they are criminals (the dishwashers/cooks). If you are going to feel guilty about something, feel guilty about vietnamese children making your tennis shoes. Fast food workers don't need your sympathy. |
| Mon 22 Dec | A cynic writes | T.S. You're right - life's not fair and never has been. Evolution's like that. It is unlikely that anything you do is going to change that. As to your sense of guilt give some time or (better still oddly enough *) money to a cause you feel is worthwhile. It will help both you and society in general. * I say give the money as I've worked for charities over the years and it was always the cash that they needed. |
| Mon 22 Dec | T.S. | Actually, my guilt is more inward focused at myself and not outwardly aimed at fast food workers. I just wish I was doing more to help others. Referring to people as retards and stupid is condescending. I did not mean to be condescending in anything I said. I am not any better than any of these other people although I ended up with a better life. |
| Mon 22 Dec | no name | If you truly feel guilty about your situation, perhaps you should quit posting to the internet about it and go work for a soup kitchen. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Anonymous Jerk | I have pretty much the same feeling when I go to the food court and see all those poor people working for peanuts while I get to spout UML and other BS to execs and rake in the dough. Rather than feel guilty about it, I try to remember how superior I am and that god wants me to earn ten times these people's salaries and that the world isn't fair or just. Guilt is for losers and I scrape off the lower class off my shoes when I get in my Mercedes. Sorry, that's just way it is. Do you think I would wait a second to outsource work to cheaper overseas labor, layoff people before christmas, or restate earnings to cheat the pension then you need to wake up and join the 21st century. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | Hello T.S, I understand your sentiment and share in it. Its about the general altruism for the lesser previliged ones. I do feel the same when I see the street jobs in the cold of the night, little children standing for alms and working in brutal conditions when they should be playing. |
| Mon 22 Dec | AnMFCAndJavaProgrammer | '...It just seems wrong to me to work in software development (whether it be pulling all nighters or just goofing off) just so that I can have money for myself. Especially when the software itself doesn't help many people directly. When looking at that objectively it seems very selfish and a waste of a life.' The money that you earn doing software development is subject to taxation (maybe over-taxation, depending on where you live), which supports the various levels of government. It may even go towards helping to support those who need assistance from time-to-time. Imagine what things would be like if enough people were not able to pay taxes... Also, presumably you spend much of that money you earn. That helps keep some of those minimum wage earners working Very few people are able to make a 'meaningful' contribution -- whatever that means. If you aren't a criminal, and are self-supporting, as well as supporting a family, whats so wrong about that? At least you are able to pay taxes and contribute to society instead of being a burden. If you really want to be angry at someone, how about those high level execs who get large salaries and huge bonuses, paying little in taxes, while at the same time they are shipping our jobs offshore... |
| Mon 22 Dec | T.S. | Actually, I think we all get large salaries here in the U.S. If you own a home then you are one of the wealthiest 5% of people in the world. And I also don't see what is so bad about shipping jobs overseas. It's either someone in the U.S. having a job or someone overseas having a job. It's the same thing either way. Plus, people overseas seem to need the jobs more since their nations aren't as wealthy. People without jobs here don't struggle as badly as people in other countries. I'm not saying the execs are wonderful, but I don't think I/we are any better than them. |
| Mon 22 Dec | GenX'er | Anonymous Jerk you are a fool. The points you make illustrate exactly how and why this country has degenerated to the lowest common demonintator of human scum. Maybe one day you'll be the one who is laid off for some others financial gain.... Then your perspective on life may change.... |
| Mon 22 Dec | anon | Quick & dirty pay scale (subject to supply and demand): 1. Menial labor 2. Physical labor 3. Moderate mental labor 4. Higher mental labor 5. Jobs requiring communication / social skills 6. Jobs requiring leadership skills It may not seem fair to you, but reality often isn't. Most people in this country are capable of working at food courts. High supply => lower wages. Fewer are capable of being CEO's. I don't feel too sorry for those who choose not to better their opportunities in life through education. I went into the Army for 3 years for the college fund. I've known people who will not do this because they have a moral objection to being in the military. Fine, I hope they don't have a moral objection to being poor. What is tragic is that some of the most important decisions people make in life are made at an age that they're too immature to make them. |
| Mon 22 Dec | anon | I agree, Anonymous Jerk is a fool. He obviously doesn't know that GenX'ers don't understand biting sarcasm. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Nathan | anon: the problem w/ that pay scale is that jobs requiring the most social skills & communicative ability seem to be paid the least. working with at-risk preschoolers requires more 'skills' than flipping burgers, yet the pay rate is lower. wtf? |
| Mon 22 Dec | no name | working with preschoolers actually does not require any social skills in the usual sense. you are dealing with 4 year olds, and the interaction is much different than talking to an adult. if you are good at interacting with adults, you can get paid a lot of money, or you can get paid not so much money. it depends on what you do. also, in regards to preschoolers. your wife is just working at the wrong place, or she doesn't have any qualifications. I think the barrier to entry for child care is even lower than the barrier to entry of visual basic programming. most child care (even if it is for 'at risk' kids) is just another term for babysitting, and no one expects babysitters to make very much money. if she had a master's in education from harvard and was dealing with pre-schoolers at a snooty pre-school for rich kids, she would be making plenty of money. my wife does speech pathology for elementary school kids and makes 45 bucks an hour. YMMV |
| Mon 22 Dec | GenX'er | Oppps! |
| Mon 22 Dec | Nathan | what sucks is that the barrier to child-care is so low, yet children are the most important resource we have. OK, so pre-school doesn't require knowing calculus or anything like that. But it's certainly not easy. I know I'd rather be programming. And it's not babysitting. Babysitting is making sure the kids don't kill themselves for a couple hours while the parents are out. This kind of preschool program is basically raising your kids. Being a surrogate parent, if you will. That's a heck of a lot more responsibility than a babysitter. My sister has a Master's Degree and makes mid twenties as a 5th grade teacher with 7 yrs experience. Yes, she loves what she does. Yes, she gets summers off. But no, she can't go to the bathroom whenever she wants. Would any of us stand for the type of work environment where you could not leave your desk to go to the bathroom? I wouldn't. The people on this board that think teachers don't work hard because they can point to a couple tenured profs or some crappy high school teachers need to get in touch with reality. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Not a chauvinist | 'It doesn't seem fair that software developers like myself who make meaningless software (in the grand scheme of things) can make a comfortable living, while those people who have more important jobs (social workers, teachers, etc) make considerably less.' There are a bunch of people in India and elsewhere actively trying to relieve you of the reason for your guilt. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Not a chauvinist | 'Fewer are capable of being CEO's.' And your reason for believing this is...? |
| Mon 22 Dec | anon | Nathan, Do you have any kids? Have you ever paid for day care? I have 3 kids, 2 of whom were in daycare. For a while were were paying $1500/month. Rates are higher for infants and in other metro areas. If the barrier to entry were higher, no one could afford it. The best teachers were good because they were educated. They were the best because they were friendly, patient, and truly liked children. As far as my pay scale, it is prefaced by 'quick & dirty', but it you want you can add: 2.5 Government jobs |
| Mon 22 Dec | anon | >>'Fewer are capable of being CEO's.' >>And your reason for believing this is...? If you have to ask, you'd never accept or understand the answer. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Nathan | anon, No, I don't have kids. The program that's offering the whopping $11,000/yr is a grant-funded program. Free to the parents. So I guess that would fall under your 2.5 Gov't jobs category. I guess that's *one* of the reasons I chose computers. The pay is much better. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Katie | I don't work hard any time of the year. I wish to god I could work hard. I feel guilty and stressed when I can't work. I feel obliged to look busy, and do stuff... but in most jobs there's just nothing I can do. 'This lump of code here has a bug report against it. I'll just order in the audit trail of it, and in five weeks when it arrives I'll know what failed. In the meantime I'll tidy up these classes here and document their interface. Oh. I'm not allowed to write documentation, and I'm not allowed to edit code there. Hmm, what about this over here: This code clearly doesn't work. I'll fix it and send it to production. Ah, they won't accept the changes without a bug report. Ah. I'm not allowed to raise bug reports. OK, I'll just... go sleep in the coffee room...' You can only take so many people telling you to shut up and stay small before you just give up trying to do anything. My housemate is a physics lecturer. Basically he goes in to work every day. Some months the university manages to find a reason to pay him. Otherwise he works for free... I know who has more money. But I also know who has more job satisfaction... |
| Mon 22 Dec | John | Well, in my high school, there were: A. people who worked hard to learn and took things seriously B. people who just goofed around, played soccer, had fun, etc Category A got good jobs, category B got bad jobs - some of them work at fast foods. This strikes me as fair. |
| Mon 22 Dec | I work therefore I earn | >>It just seems wrong to me to work in software >>development (whether it be pulling all nighters or just >>goofing off) just so that I can have money for myself. So do you not need money for yourself? If you didn't work to have money for yourself, who would work in order to provide you with food and shelter? >>Especially when the software itself doesn't help many >>people directly. When looking at that objectively it >>seems very selfish and a waste of a life. Technology in general has raised the standard of living for all people in the world, not just the industrialized world. Medical professionals have better access to more consistant information than ever before thanks to software written by people like you and me. Objectively speaking, software is very helpful to humanity and is a very important part of life and the evolution of life. >>Perhaps my teacher ... It's not always by choice that >>they end up there either. They may not have directly chosen to become fast-food workers or work at whatever job it is they are working at that makes you feel like your job is such a blessing and theirs is such a curse. But the choices that we've all made in our lives are what determines our current circumstances. If someone ends up working at Taco Bell or as a teacher or wherever and they are unhappy with their terms of employment, the great thing about this country is that they can learn a new skill, (library books are free) become good at something that they enjoy and move into a job that allows them to use their newly learned skill. They can even become monetarily successful if they're willing to make the right choices. >>I guess that is where my guilt is coming from. It's these >>adults that have to always struggle and never get a >>break. I was just curious if anyone else felt the same >>way. No, I don't feel the same way. I was never 'given' a break. I worked hard, I studied hard and I made choices such as saving my money instead of buying the latest plasma TV so that I could afford to live in a nicer neighborhood, so my child can get a better education. I made choices such as not eating fastfood every day so that my body is healthy and my brain works more effectively. I made choices that allowed me to in the right position when job opportunities became available so that I was the best person for the job. I got my good paying job in the software industry not by someone giving it to me, but because I earned it. I refuse to feel guilty about making good choices in life. I understand feeling sympathy for those that have not made the right choices, but not all of my choices have been right either. I learned from those bad decisions and hopefully won't be stupid enough to go down those paths again. However, feeling guilty for something inwhich you should feel pride makes no sense to me. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Stephen Jones | ---' Technology in general has raised the standard of living for all people in the world, not just the industrialized world. Medical professionals have better access to more consistant information than ever before thanks to software written by people like you and me.'---- Sorry, but the internet hasn't even succeeded in giving tech savvy people such as you the least idea what is happening in the world. 20% or so of the world doesn't even have access to a hospital or health care centre. Most hospitals in the developing world don't even have a telephone, let alone a computer with internet access, and if they did there would be no money to pay the phone bills. Software technology is of no use for the 45% or so of the world's population that don't even have access to electricity. And access to a safe water supply is many times better for health than any advance in either software or medical science. And the privatisation of water supplies, pushed on developing countries by the World Bank, IMF and donor countries such as the UK looking for opportunites for their privatized uitility companies is actually decreasing the number of people with safe, or indeed any, water supplies. The health of the general population has almost nothing to do with medical software and nearly everything to do with a policy of accessible health care, infrastructure in the sense of safe water suppies and electrification, some help towards housing, ante and post natal care, and a policy designed to eradicate insect borne diseases such as dengue and malaria. The US has the best (or at least the most expensive) medical technology in the world, but take a look at its infant mortality figures. As for those who think those that work in fast food franchises are retards or criminals, then all I can hope is that your job gets outsourced fairly quick. Perhaps you could then send us the address of the WalMart you'd be working at so we can come and call you names. |
| Tue 23 Dec | it_ranter | 'The US has the best (or at least the most expensive) medical technology in the world, but take a look at its infant mortality figures.' What on Earth do its infant mortality figures have to do with anything? Look at the childbearing practices of some U.S. population subgroups, with a 70% illegitimacy rate among one in particular. Technology very well has improved the lives of _responsible_ people in the United States. It will never be a substitute for responsible behavior, especially where pregnancy is concerned. Can't afford kids? DON'T HAVE THEM. And especially don't have three. |
| Tue 23 Dec | John C. | Nathan wrote: 'she can't go to the bathroom whenever she wants. Would any of us stand for the type of work environment where you could not leave your desk to go to the bathroom?' Sure. I don't think Dan Rather can leave his desk to go to the bathroom whenever he wants, but I hear he makes a pretty good living. So do quite a few professional athletes, though they don't exactly work at a desk. I'm not certain about this, but I bet surgeons can't just bug out to take a leak in the middle of a complex operation, either. Heck, even BillG does long, bathroom-break-free keynote speeches at trade shows. Some jobs or scenarios within jobs require you to be present in a physical location for a period of time and to subjugate whatever other needs you might have during that time. That doesn't strike me as a prime differentiator between privilege or social status or salary or lack thereof. |
| Tue 23 Dec | John C. | Anyway, back to the original question about why socially valuable roles such as teacher or social worker may be economically undervalued relative to, say, software developer, the reason is quite simple: it has to do with the supply of labor versus the demand of *paying* customers. There are lots of people and companies who are willing to pay for software because they perceive it adds some value to their business enterprise or personal affairs. But how many people are willing to pay directly for the services of teachers and social workers? A large proportion of that payment is indirect, procedured via taxation and administered by government agencies, and few people are keen to see their taxes go up for abstract and distant benefits. You can bet that if parents were personally investing the $10,000 or so annually that it costs to educate each child in the public education system in a major U.S. metro area, they would be demanding better. (Note that I'm not arguing that public education should be abolished or that vouchers are good or taking any other political stance; I just think it's clear that the absence of a proximate economic relationship takes away a lot of the demand drivers that would otherwise force competition and improvement. Education bureaucracies don't really seem answerable to anyone.) |
| Tue 23 Dec | Stephen Jones | The reason that software developers get paid more than teachers and social workers and nurses is that the last three jobs are labour intensive, and in labour intensive industries payrates are low because they effect the bottom line. This is the reason for the apparent contradiction that people doing the same job are paid a lot more in some industries than others. Heavy industries such as oil or steel can afford to pay higher salaries because most of their fixed costs are sunk in machinery and many of their variable costs are in raw materials. A school is typically spending 70% of its budget on salaries, and so cannot afford to pay significantly over the national average. |
| Tue 23 Dec | A cynic writes | It ranter The reason that some of us think infant mortality is important is that we see health care in different terms. To me a low infant mortality is more important than whether some 80 year old millionaire gets his third heart transplant. This cultural bias shows in how health systems operate. I suspect it's because given a settled population any random child is much more likely to be related (albiet distantly), and hence evolutionary pressures kick in. |
| Tue 23 Dec | apw | Teachers don't get "paid" 'cause of teachers unions. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Stephen Jones | Dear apw, Was that last post part of your strategy of cracking up in public, or were you really trying to say something meaningful. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Ged Byrne | IT Ranter, We need to be concerned about infant mortality because we live in a civilised society. What if some miserable IT worker gets his car stolen? Should we be concerned? Should we be concerned about theft? Don't bother buying things if your not able to keep them safe! Is a car more important than a child? |
| Tue 23 Dec | Fernanda Stickpot | 'working with preschoolers actually does not require any social skills in the usual sense. you are dealing with 4 year olds, and the interaction is much different than talking to an adult.' You're right. It's a lot harder than talking to an adult. T.S., I know where you're coming from. I feel saddened, angry, and disgusted by turns at the way so-called 'rich' societies treat their poorest citizens. I think a society is only as 'rich' as its poorest member. And anybody who thinks that your position in life is solely and exclusively determined by your choices, is as deluded as somebody who thinks that all successful people got their success handed to them on a platter. It sounds like you feel you're not living your life as you would like to. Supposing you calculated the smallest amount of money you thought you could live on and maintain a reasonable level of savings, and then tried to live on that sum for a year? At the end of that year you could, for example, give away all or part of the surplus, and find a job where you could use your talents to really constructive ends. |
| Tue 23 Dec | The Not-So-Philosopher | T.S. I sometimes get that same feeling. One book that I found really interesting was 'Live Rich' by Stephen M. Pollan (http://www.diebrokeliverich.com). He basically talks about working for as much money as you can doing what you are good at and using other venues (Church, charity, volunteerism, etc.) to feel good about what you do. The fact is that if you want to make a difference there are a lot of places in your own city (or one near you) where your time and money are very much needed. I know from working with charitable organizations and volunteering at soup kitchens, etc. that they really need folks who will come and help. And since your salary is much higher than a Taco Bell worker or teacher (presumably) you will be able to help a lot of worthy causes that those with less money cannot. So, in a way you can choose where to make a big difference rather being forced into one. Just for the record, I know more teachers that just freaking hate their jobs than love them and feel like they are making a difference. My brother is a public school teacher (high school) and most of the time he feels like he spends more time dealing with crap from students, parents and school administration than making a difference to anyone. The biggest difference that high-paid workers can make in this world is to lower your standard of living and giving more money and time away rather than increasing lifestyle to a point where we have a big house, expensive cars and maxed out credit cards. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Stephen Jones | 'making a difference' is advertising junk put out by government desperate to hire teachers but unable to pay a high enough salary to attract them normally. People who believe that also believe that drinking Coke makes them attractive, young and sexy, that smoking Marlboro is the way to go for a fit outdoor life style, and that Windows opens a wonderful world of new experiences. Education is the casting of false pearls before real swine. |
| Tue 23 Dec | ... | Ouch Mr. Jones, what a harsh rebuke of our education system! Even with it's flaws, there are more kids who leave that system and become productful systems than there would be if the system didn't exist. So if you were in charge, what would you do differently? |
| Tue 23 Dec | apw | '...there are more kids who leave that system and become productful systems....'' hehehe little freudian slip? yep they become little liberal robots, exactly what the gov't wants...... |
| Tue 23 Dec | ... | oops. Nice catch apw. I shall now stick my proverbial foot into my virtual mouth (now where's an emoticon for that!) |
| Tue 23 Dec | ... | However snidely he may have gone about it (:-p), apw does touch on one of the things that I think is wrong with education, the fact that education isn't the main purpose of school (at least in USA), it's 'socialization'. School is the first, and sometimes last, place where we try to make up for differences in background (free breakfast, discounted lunches, etc) as well as try to teach the kids what it means to be 'American'. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Tayssir John Gabbour | Socialization is probably what happens we realize that good teachers are as rare as good parents and developers. So in the US, we attempt to optimize for mediocrity. (Incidentally, I hope my words aren't taken to invite an anti-US bashfest. It's obviously an interesting and deeply messed up country, but our doctrine was ideally about being friends of liberty everywhere yet tending only to our own. Then Europe went nuts and now the whole world has to deal with our problems. Enjoy.) Absent some weird social revolution, tech is the obvious hope for education so that at some point certain apps become ubiquitous and simple enough that educators can scale, motivating and teaching many more people than normal. And working on those useless projects shouldn't make us feel too guilty, since they no doubt stimulate supply of tech through their investments. It's easy to become cynical, especially when the holiday blues set in, but we can't naively expect things to happen overnight. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Dennis Atkins | Nah the real advantage and destiny for tech is to control and enslave the peasants while doing away with the middle class. Big brother is watching. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Tayssir John Gabbour | By the way, noticing I was totally unclear, I actually think socialization is the most important thing school provides. Just that a social environment should provide many things, like a good restaurant just doesn't have good food. Hiding from family, falalala. |
| Wed 24 Dec | it_ranter | Ged: 'We need to be concerned about infant mortality because we live in a civilised society. ...' Well, ok, but what I take issue with is the implication that our infant mortality rate is some failing of our health care system. Hence why it was mentioned as a (rather bitter) response to the assertion that our health care has improved dramatically by way of technology. I'm just pointing out that our health care system is just fine, vis a vis infant care; the failing is in the people who are having children. And I think your car analogy is particularly apt. If one buys a car one cannot afford or properly secure, then they have made a very bad decision. Now, we do need cars and may be forced to make that choice sometimes, but neither a teenager (nor an umarried twentysomething) ever needs to be impregnated with a child for whom she cannot properly care. But in our society, it happens regularly, and we should place the blame where it belongs: poor choices. It's not _always_ a bad choice, but there is a very high correlation. At risk of sounding like a religious right-winger, I don't think there should be any doubts, given our illegitimacy rates, that it's our society's values are at fault and not our health care system, or technology, or any other system that is at the _recieving end_ of poor choices. Which brings me back from that tangent, to the crux of this thread: choices matter, profoundly. I am a software developer largely by choice. Yes, there is an element of luck there, too--the market has been good for software developers. But it's a bit of a stretch to say that I'm either in software development, or else I'll be out working in fast food. There's a certain attitude that underlies success; and people who are successful, should strive to embody it. If we're unlucky sometimes, then that's an obstacle to be overcome, not some permanent blockade. The market isn't fair, but that's not the issue. The issue is the attitude one takes to the game; a willingness to win in spite of circumstances. Otherwise, we either fall into the 'woe is me' trap when we're in down times (as many do here), or the 'undeserving' attitude when we do succeed. Personally, I'm willing to take my particular combination of attitude and luck and do with it what I can. That's the best I can do; it's the best any of us can do. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Fernanda Stickpot | Well put, it_ranter. Occasionally I read articles by social commentators who hammer home the position 'it's people's bad choices that ruin their lives, not bad circumstances!' Some of these are very convincing, and I nod my head all the way through. Theodore Dalrymple is one of these, the old curmudgeon. Occasionally I read articles by social commentators who hammer home the position 'it's people's bad circumstances that ruin their lives, not their bad choices!' Some of these are very convincing, and I nod my head all the way through. David Smail is one of these, the old softie. And I think they're both right. Here's why: people who think that their whole lives are controlled by everything but themselves, are not helped by being told that they can't do anything to change their behaviour or affect their own circumstances. People who spend all their lives struggling, while remaining convinced that things would be better if they *just tried harder*, are not helped by being told that they could do anything if they put their minds to it, no matter how dire their situation. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Stephen Jones | Infant mortaility rates have everything to do with firstly the health care system in force in the socieity and secondly the general level of child poverty. Here is a link to the figures for selected countries: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/tables/2003/03hus025.pdf You will note that the US was 11th in 1960 and Cuba was 23rd. In 1999 the US was 28th and Cuba was 26th. Is it-ranter to have us believe that 43 years of liliving under the umbrella of a totalitiarian communist state has produced more individually responsible citizenry than the same period under capitalist democracy? Illegitimate births has nothing to do with infant mortality. The highest number of single mothers in the world is in Sweden and it has the second lowest infant mortality rate with 3.4 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1999, compared to a figure of 7.1 for the US, and a whopping, and totally inexplicable 47.94 for Saudi Arabia, where illegitimate births are exceptionally rare. It is not just Cuba that surprises by beating the US. In 2003 the US is now ahead of Cuba, but 31st in the rankings behind such unlikely candidates as Guam, Aruba, the Czech Republic, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Slovenia. And before you say that the decline in the US ranking is the result of the moral rot that set in in the 1960's may I point out that the absolute figures were 26.0 in 1960 and 7.1 in 1999. The 2002/2003 figures may be obtained from these two sources, both of which appear to take figures from the CIA world handbook, based on country reporting. http://www.photius.com/rankings/infant_mortality_rate_0.html and http://www.nationmaster.com/red/graph-T/hea_inf_mor_rat&int=-1 Frankly if you think these figures can be explained by individual choice you must be a firm believer in bad karma and reincarnation. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Inexplicable indeed | 'whopping, and totally inexplicable 47.94 for Saudi Arabia, where illegitimate births are exceptionally rare' Don't they just kill girls over there? Sort of adds up, don't it? |
| Wed 24 Dec | it_ranter | Stephen: And the general level of child poverty; that has to do with what, exactly? Is there just some level of child poverty that magically happens to exist? Are the Wal-mart mothers in America and fast food workers being forced to bear children? As to the thinly-veiled, statistical arguments for socialized health care, you're right. When a society decides, as Sweden has, to collectively bend over and take it up the rear to subsidize people's poor decisions, then those poor decisions are indeed mitigated. Unfortunately, I think it's well beyond the scope (or topic) of this thread to go into the various negative side effects of socializing health care. Suffice it to say, I think a little common sense--like DON'T HAVE KIDS YOU CAN'T AFFORD--is a great substitute for, say, Sweden's 53%-of-GDP taxation rate or Cuba's 'communism.' |
| Wed 24 Dec | Stephen Jones | Dear Inexplicable indeed, Your comment is the same as your name. Where on earth did you get the idea from? Dear it-ranter, Your ideas suck. If people did what you suggested there'd be nobody to push you around in your wheelchair when you get senile. Still you do have a point about individual decisions and having children. If your mother had flushed you down the toilet when you were born the world would be a nicer place. Have a merry December 27th |
| Thu 25 Dec | it_ranter | 'If your mother had flushed you down the toilet when you were born the world would be a nicer place.' I don't know, Stephen. I'm not the one making comments like this; but then again, this is a public forum for programmers, and I suppose our hubris is allowed no boundaries. Merry Christmas to you, too. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Stephen Jones | Dear it-ranter, December 27th isn't Christmas. You should be able to find out what it was the anniversary of. Still have a Merry Christmas anyway. If you're with your family tell your mother I won't hold her lack of foresight against her :) |
| Thu 25 Dec | Nathan | December 27th - A Day in History 1503 - Spanish army beats France 1703 - England & Portugal sign Methuen-Asiento-trade agreement 1741 - Prussian forces took Olmutz, Czechoslovakia 1825 - 1st public railroad using steam locomotive completed in England 1845 - Ether 1st used in childbirth in US, Jefferson, Ga 1850 - Hawaiian Fire Dept established 1884 - Netherlands recognizes king Leopold II's Congo Free State 1903 - 'Sweet Adaline,' a barbershop quartet favorite, is 1st sung 1939 - Earthquake in Turkey, about 50,000 die 1945 - International Monetary Fund established-World Bank founded 1947 - 1st 'Howdy Doody Show,' (Puppet Playhouse), telecast on NBC 1951 - 40th Davis Cup: Australia beats USA in Sydney (3-2) 1961 - Belgium & Congo resume diplomatic relations 1968 - Apollo 8 returns to Earth 1976 - Albania constitution goes into effect 1985 - Terrorists kill 20 & wound 110 attacking El Al at Rome & Vienna airports, President Reagan blames Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi 1992 - 'Les Miserables' opens at Ostregaswerks, Copenhagen 1993 - Dow-Jones hits record 3792.93 http://www.brainyhistory.com/days/december_27.html |
| Fri 26 Dec | Stephen Jones | Err, how about 4 BC. Hint; it's to do with the topic it-ranter I were discussing. Hint 2: see if you remember any of the bible readings you heard this Christmas. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Stephen Jones | Woops! Wrong day! Should have been December 28th. Still I'm sure it-ranter would have a very happy 27th looking forward to it :) |
| Fri 26 Dec | Nathan | um, ya. i'm confused. no idea what happened Dec 28, 4 BC. earliest reference i can find is 413 AD. any other hints? |
| Sat 27 Dec | Steve Martin | I see people going to college for fourteen years Studying to be doctors and lawyers I see people getting up at seven-thirty every morning Going to work at the drugstore to sell flair pens But the most amazing thing to me is: I get paid for doing this!!! |
| Sat 27 Dec | Stephen Jones | --'any other hints?'--- Herod? |
| Sun 28 Dec | Nathan | where do you get Dec 28 for the day Herod killed all the males under 2 years old (if that's what you're referring to...)? |
| Sun 28 Dec | Stephen Jones | Ask the Catholic Church. It's the 'dia de los santos innocentes', which commemorates the massacre (if 'commemorates' is the right word). I believe it is because the bible suggests it was the third day after Christmas. In Spain the day is the equivalent of April's Fools day in England and France, and the same practical jokes are played. |
| "he or she" NOT politically correct! | Mon 22 Dec | Alex |
| What is it about the he or she formula that has writers comfortable about being politically correct? If anything, it reinforces the statement that the male sex is superior by always putting he first. I recommend a 50/50 mix of he or she and she or he. And a government/privately funded body to monitor this and issue fair warnings to offenders. Equally incorrect is when the writer shortcuts to (s)he or, even worse, she alone, thus plainly stating that women are inferior and as a concession are used as a common denominator, so to speak. Women should speak up against this condescending abuse. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Matthew Lock | There is a little used word in the English language which means he/she. That word its 'they'. “It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex” (Virginia Woolf) |
| Mon 22 Dec | Matthew Lock | > If anything, it reinforces the statement that the male sex is > superior by always putting 'he' first. Just want to debunk this reasoning too. ;) Does Monday coming before Friday imply that Monday is a superior day to Friday? Sometimes orders are just conventions rather than explicitly stating a ranking. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Patrik | Glad to see a bit of humour this afternoon :-) >I recommend a 50/50 mix of 'he or she' and 'she or he'. I've seen somewhere that when giving the names of their parents most guys name their mothers name first. Chicks named their fathers name first. You can ask around among your friends and see that this tends to be the case. I vote for the 'he she' just becasue of alphabetical order :-) |
| Mon 22 Dec | Jack | > There is a little used word in the English language which > means he/she. That word its 'they'. This usage isn't approved of by all users as it gives rise to very clumsy constructions (e.g., 'tell Chris I'll call them back at 5 o'clock'). It's certainly not standard usage. No attempt to provide a gender-neutral pronoun has yet met with universal acceptance. See the Gender-neutral pronoun FAQ for more interesting info http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/faq.html |
| Mon 22 Dec | no name | Is the term 'douchebag' politically correct? Example sentence: What's the deal with the 'douchebag' who is worrying about gender pronouns on a software development message board? |
| Mon 22 Dec | Fiovaan Sanders | All christian (oops, offended the atheists) first (oops sorry offended the positionists) given names should be neutral so as not to engender (oops sorry offended the feminists) create bias based on narrow minded (oops sorry offended the anthropologists) culturally restricted ideas of worth based on gender (oops sorry offended the grammar nurds) chromasomal distribution. I propose a set of composite unspecific names. I shall start with Fiovaan which neatly encompases Ian, Ann, Fiona and Ivan thus encompassing Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Slavic cultures too. Sorry, couldn't get any others in there. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Fiovaan Sanders | Unless you are able to suggest a use for a douche bag somewhere about the male anatomy, then no it is not politically correct. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Nathan | after reading the FAQ on aetherlumina, I might start using ey, eir, & em. (singular version of they, their, & them). Too bad they aren't recognized in Word as valid words. When I read the sentence aloud in my head, I can't help but say it with a cockney accent. 'Someone called me on the phone, and I told em, 'don't call here!' Then ey hung up on me. Eir number was blocked on the caller id.' um, anyway. back to your regularly scheduled programming. |
| Mon 22 Dec | A cynic writes | 'they' is certainly in common use in spoken *English* English and I see no clear reason why it should be used in written English. Whether or not it's correct in some other dialect is another matter. I did follow the link you gave and I will agree that where you're using a name to use 'they' as a pronoun in the same sentence sounds odd - 'If you see Sally, tell them that i need to get in touch with them.' was the example. However I was under the impression that the reason for a gender neutral pronoun was to be able to speak about a case where gender was unknown, rather than cower from mentioning a gender that was already known. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Jack | > 'they' is certainly in common use in spoken *English* > English and I see no clear reason why it should be used > in written English. Whether or not it's correct in some > other dialect is another matter. I agree with you that it's in common use in spoken English (I'm English too). However, there are plenty of grammatical constructions in common use that are not correct. If we're discussing *correct* usage as opposed to *common* usage, then what I said is true. > I did follow the link you gave and I will agree that where > you're using a name to use 'they' as a pronoun in the > same sentence sounds odd - 'If you see Sally, tell them > that i need to get in touch with them.' was the example > However I was under the impression that the reason for > a gender neutral pronoun was to be able to speak about > a case where gender was unknown, rather than cower > from mentioning a gender that was already known. I do take your point - and a gender neutral pronoun would certainly be useful for the situation you describe. However: - Some people object to having to specify the sex of a person with a pronoun even when it's known - they believe that it's irrelevant and may cause you to jump to conclusions - Using 'they' as a gender-neutral pronoun is not formally correct grammar - When using 'they' as a gender-neutral pronoun, it's not always obvious when to use singular and when to use plural forms, and in some cases this leads to horrible/clumsy sentences Some people aren't terribly concerned about using 'correct' grammar, so these objections may not be relevant to them. However, I personally find that communication is generally enhanced when you use correct grammar: after all, that's why rules were originally codified. |
| Mon 22 Dec | A cynic writes | My reading of history was that formally *correct* grammar as you describe was codified around rules derived from Latin and had little to do with English as spoken. I do feel that a grammatical standard is important but I've always been doubtful as to the worth of imposing it from outside. We should also remember that English has no Academy requiring us to keep to a *correct* language - English is what we make of it. It follows that they is no one who can say 'This usage is correct now'. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Name withheld out of cowardice | I didn't have the attention span to read all the responses in detail. 'They' is gender neutral but, alas, plural. The proper English, gender nuetral singular pronoun is, and has been for hundreds of years, 'he'. If the subject of the sentence is singular and known to be male, or of unknown gender, it is proper to use 'he'. If the gender is known to be female, use 'she'. This is not to imply that men are any better than women, or more likely to participate in certain professions. The following sentence is correct so far as I know: 'If one is concerned about the care a loved one is receiving, ask a nurse and he will set your mind at ease.' |
| Mon 22 Dec | MR | What is wrong with saying: 'I talked with Sally, and she said you're a boob.' Or: 'If you see Joe, tell him he's fired.' Why do I need to say: 'When talking with Bob, remember that ey is hung over most of the time, so speak softly.' Gender can be (reasonably) divined from the name itself -- so until we start mandating that newborns be named gender-neutral names I don’t see why it’s a problem to include the gender in the sentence. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Jack | > My reading of history was that formally *correct* > grammar as you describe was codified around rules > derived from Latin and had little to do with English as > spoken. I do feel that a grammatical standard is > important but I've always been doubtful as to the worth > of imposing it from outside Well, there's a lot in what you say. In particular, there are some grammatical rules (for example, split infinitives) which it's easy to show were introduced in Victorian times. However, I find it hard to believe that you don't respect grammatical rules at *all*. Your sentences are correctly punctuated, for example, and you use apostrophes correctly. It's a continuum: some sentences are clearly correct English, and some sentences are clearly incorrect English. I'm drawing the line in a different place from you. Where I draw the line is based on my knowledge of what great authors do, my personal tendency towards pedantry, and also my belief that being casual about what is and what isn't correct leads to miscommunication. Thus I hold up high standards for my own written (less so spoken) English. > We should also remember that English has no Academy > requiring us to keep to a *correct* language - English is > what we make of it. It follows that they is no one who > can say 'This usage is correct now' Again, I don't want to argue that you're completely wrong here, but I do think you're mistaken in equating the lack of a formal Academy with the statement that there is no one who can say 'This usage is correct now'. As an analogy - there's no written constitution in England, which is why we have judges to interpret and make law. For the law, judges have the power to say 'This usage is correct now'. For language, I'd argue that highbrow media and great writers are the authority that act as a check on changing usage in written English. The written language evolves, but I think it evolves more by consensus of the (relatively speaking) few than by the casual usage of the many. All of which is not to say that you can't write exactly what you want - of course you can, and great writing occurs when people express themselves in new ways. But in so much as there *is* a standard (and I still maintain that there is), 'they' is not a singular gender-neutral pronoun. |
| Mon 22 Dec | A cynic writes | I think Jack we're both arguing from more or less the same perspective. I do believe in taught grammar but not that it is fixed and I distrust authority on it. Too often, 'correctness' seems to be about class and regional distinctions rather than clear communication. On the main point, my reading was that 'they' was an older usage than the 'correct' one. If not it is certainly a convenient and clear usage. Btw I was born ~2 miles from West Ham football ground. As you can imagine my spoken and written English differ. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Fiovaan Sanders | Of course 'programming' is not gender neutral because it contains the word 'ram' and almost the word 'ogre' and therefore carries a subliminal masculine load. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Ged Byrne | Fiovaan, The same goes for the word 'She', which contains the word 'He'. |
| Mon 22 Dec | A cynic writes | If we're going to get silly then the girl's name Carol means "manly". |
| Mon 22 Dec | bpd | But "Carol" isn't (necessarily) a girl's name - think "Carol O'Connor", from the TV sit-com "All In The Family" (and others). |
| Mon 22 Dec | anon | >>Is the term 'douchebag' politically correct? Yes |
| Mon 22 Dec | no name | Using she instead of he as a generic pronoun is actually sexist because it excludes men. Using he as a generic pronoun is understood, where appropriate, to include women, but the opposite doesn't apply for she. That's why the usage is glaring when you see it. It's also why dopey PC types who use it reveal their own low intelligence. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Alex | Come on people, it was meant as a joke. Or is it that people don't get humor any more if there are no smileys in it? |
| Mon 22 Dec | for the love of god | people are more apt to "get" the humor if the "joke" is funny. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Dennis Atkins | 'Some people object to having to specify the sex of a person with a pronoun even when it's known - they believe that it's irrelevant and may cause you to jump to conclusions' Uh huh. There's always a fringe minority with crackpot ideas. Do we base our language on that? 'Using 'they' as a gender-neutral pronoun is not formally correct grammar' So the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare are not formally correct grammar, compared to the formally correct grammars of the first group you mention. Gotcha! |
| Mon 22 Dec | SG | Ever notice how a large majority of MS security bullitens refer to attackers as "she"? |
| Mon 22 Dec | Stephen Jones | The rule against split infiintives dates from an eighteenth century 'grammarian'. To use 'they' in sentences such as 'Everybody should bring their grammar books to tomorrow's lesson' is perfectly correct in written British English. The question of what pronoun to use for one person of inderminate sex is moot because normally if you know its one person you know which sex they are. You still can't use 'they' in either of these sentences. 'The postman called but I wasn't in. He left a message saying I had to pick up the parcel at the post office'. 'The nurse changed the drip while I was sleeping. I'm sure she'll be back to change the dressing later' In both cases you're still forced to use the gender stereoptype. Now possibly the carry-over from 'they' being accepted as gender neutral in cases of mixed gender will mean that in a few years time we will accept they in the cases above but it seems strange to me at present. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Cognitive Dissonance | 'What is it about the 'he or she' formula that has writers comfortable about being politically correct?' Don't know which country you're in, Jack, but in the good ol' USA we've got a conservative President, a conservative Congress, and a conservative Supreme Court. So it seems to me that 'he or she' is politically *incorrect,* no matter what the order. |
| Tue 23 Dec | rm -R / | There is a little used word in the English language which means he/she. That word its 'they' Poor french and spaniards then. They don't even have a gender neutral word for the plural 3rd person. Ils vs Elles (fr) and Ellos vs Ellas (sp) (sp: I think) |
Tue 23 Dec | John Ridout | 'The postman called but I wasn't in. He left a message saying I had to pick up the parcel at the post office'. 'The nurse changed the drip while I was sleeping. I'm sure she'll be back to change the dressing later' In both cases you're still forced to use the gender stereoptype.You are not forced to use the gender stereotype. In the second example you can refer to the nurse as 'he' unless you know that he is a she. Conversly, 'she' is normally used as the second person subject pronoun for the anthropomorphism of an object. This does not cause me to think of my computer as a woman or of a woman as a computer. |
| Tue 23 Dec | A cynic writes | Alex Come on, you given all us pedants a chance to have a really good scrap about grammar *and* be on topic. Joke or no, it's just too good an opportunity to miss. |
| Tue 23 Dec | A cynic writes | correction: for 'you' read 'you've' (tut..tut..7/10 must do better.) |
| Tue 23 Dec | apw | George Carlin said it best, that Political Correctness results in the 'pussification of the USA' -apw 'My Border Terrier Compainion Dog is Smarter Than Your Honor Student' |
| Tue 23 Dec | Stephen Jones | Dear John, True I'm not forced to use 'she' for the nurse; were it in a mental hospital the gender stereotype would probably be 'he', but I must still make a choice. Choosing the less likely of two alternatives, as you suggest, doesn't get one off the hook. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Fernanda Stickpot | As a linguist, I see absolutely no reason to prohibit the use of 'they' as a singular/impersonal pronoun. I agree with the author of this article: http://home.columbus.rr.com/sciences/singular_they.htm In particular, I would like to draw your attention to the following: 'A singular *they* is not some vulgarism of recent coinage threatening to pollute proper diction. *Oxford English Dictionary* presents several citations that use *they* as a genderless third person singular, the oldest from 1526 (*OED Online*, entry 2). If English has long had a singular *they*, why is it now stigmatized?' |
| Tue 23 Dec | Jack | Fernanda - interesting article that you cite. Perhaps the singular 'they' is one example of usage that I should be less pernickety about. I was, however, amused to note that the author makes another common error: 'But none of us--students, teachers, or administrators--have to operate in ignorance or silence' Of course, it should be 'But none of us--students, teachers, or administrators-- *has* to operate in ignorance or silence' |
| Tue 23 Dec | Stephen Jones | Sorry Jack; none of us HAVE to. It's called notional agreement. It simply sounds horrible to have a singular verb after 'us' or 'them', let alone after the next three plurals Fernanda uses. If you want to be a real stickler you can point at that none is not singular, it's zero, so doesn't need a singular verb :) Fernanda is actuallly right about 'they'. The American Heritage book of English Usage gives examples going back to the 14th century. It has an interesting discussion on the various alternatives in 5. Gender: Sexist Language and Assumptions sec 12 (he) to 19 (epicine pronouns). It does say that most members of the usage commitee are prepared to accept 'they' used after anyone, everyone or other indeterminate singular pronouns but most reject using it after a normal singular noun as in the examples I gave in the post above. One thing is clear however; whatever alternative you choose is sure to offend one group or another, whether feminists, grammar nazis, male chauvinsits, simple English believers or whatever, so my advice is decide which of these groups you want to annoy today and choose the appropriate solution. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Fernanda Stickpot | 'None of us has/have' is a matter of personal choice, too, if you ask me. The meaning is perfectly clear whichever choice is made. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Ross | ("They" is very emphatically word...'cause the "hey!" inside of it) |
| Tue 23 Dec | Dennis Atkins | Fernanda is right but let's give credit where it is due! Dennis Atkins is the one who has been pushing the historical reality of singular they long before any of you grammar experts caught on! |
| Wed 24 Dec | Richard P | 'Mom and dad' rolls of the tongue much easier than 'dad and mom'. Likewise, 'mother and father' is slightly easier ('and f--' is easier than 'and m--'). I hypothesize that this is why statisticly people would say their mother's name first when naming both parents. But that's just an unsupported theory... |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dennis Atkins | Richard, I like that theory. Makes sense to me. |
| Sun 28 Dec | John | Luckily 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' by Lynne Truss is this Christmas' bestseller on this side of the Atlantic - should lead to more informed comment on the topic of the final part fo this thread (or should that have been a colon instead of a dash!). |
| Some Thoughts on FogBUGZ for UNIX | Sat 27 Dec | Shlomi Fish |
| First of all, congratulations for Joel for shipping the new port of FogBUGZ for LAMP. Installing an IIS/ASP/Access server was probably something many shops with UNIX-bigots as admins would not have found likable, and this may introduce an extra profit. I contemplated in an early post to this list whether the ASP->PHP converter that a certain summer internet wrote was meant to convert to FogBUGZ to PHP. Still, no clear indication that that was the case was voiced by Joel at any time, in accordance with one of his articles. Now, for some questions. Are both versions of the software going to be maintained from now on? (The ASP version and the LAMP one) PHP can run nicely enough with IIS (faster than ASP, even), but many clueless admins may not know enough to install it there. Maintaining two versions of the software in two different languages is relatively painful. If Joel et al are going to maintain the ASP version and every once and a while convert it to PHP, that may work. (dont know - never tried) Another issue is cross-database compatibility. Databases varry a great deal between themselves, and so far the two versions of FogBUGZ support MySQL, Access and MS-SQL between themselves. How is the compatibility maintained? Using ifs all over the place? By sticking to the greatest common denominator? It is also very painful. Anyway, congrats and keep the good work! |
| Sat 27 Dec | Philo | Installing PHP in an IIS shop means one more thing to track vulnerabilities on: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=php+vulnerability This is not an anti-PHP post; just a comment on 'it is NEVER as easy as 'just install [x]'' Philo |
| Sat 27 Dec | Brad Wilson | Joel has pointed out that the PHP version is made mechanically via an ASP to PHP tool developed by a summer intern. I imagine that as time goes on and the ASP version progresses, additional work may need to done to the conversion tool, but I imagine that's less time than maintaining two code-bases. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Joel Spolsky | Right. In theory we only maintain the ASP version and the PHP version is produced mechanically. I wouldn't try to tell a Windows admin to install PHP, especially since the whole reason for the port was to REDUCE external dependencies. |
| Smallest possible Www + PHP + MysQL package? | Fri 26 Dec | Frederic Faure |
| Joel moving to LAMP is a happy coincidence since I was wondering how to build the smallest possible package to run MySQL-bound PHP apps. EasyPHP http://www.easyphp.org) comes at 10MB for Apache. For the WWW part, I just came accross the free and very small-footprint Abyss Web Server (http://www.aprelium.com) which ran some PHP and Perl apps in CGI with no problem, but I need to find out how to keep just the bare minimum from the C:\PHP and C:\MYSQL parts. Has anybody tried this route, and came up with something smaller? Thx :-) |
| Fri 26 Dec | Tom Hathaway | Just curious, but why is a few meg of disk space important? For a really small system you could install one of the Unix variants without a GUI. You can get a very small and very fast system with something like command line FreeBSD, Apache and modules for PHP/Perl/Python, and one of the databases (Mysql or Postgres). There's no need for X windows on a web/db server. |
| Fri 26 Dec | no name | Be careful with licensing issues distributing MySQL. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Dan Maas | thttpd is my favorite small web server. I don't know about PHP, but I know it can handle CGI executables. |
| Sat 27 Dec | josheli | how about a server written in php itself? comes in at around 650k with all modules and whatnot. http://nanoweb.si.kz and instead of mysql, why not sqlite? it's built in to php 5 and only requires one .dll for php4. as for a bare php, all you really need on windows is... php.exe (cli or cgi) php4ts.dll iconv.dll so i have an app that looks like this.... c:\\myapp\php php-cgi.exe php-cli.exe php4ts.dll iconv.dll php_sqlite.dll php.ini c:\myapp\nanoweb nanoweb.php supporting files.... c:\myapp nanostart.bat nanoweb.php runs off php-cli.exe my webscripts use php-cgi.exe i load the php_sqlite.dll for a database. comes in around 5 mb. |
| Sat 27 Dec | MX | Size may not matter once the program is already on the hard-disk, but it may matter a lot if lots of users download the program. Bandwith is expensive. |
| Sat 27 Dec | dir at badblue com | [plugmode] badblue is also a very tiny PHP server... probably easier to configure for PHP than abyss. if used as a pure PHP server, it is also free. the core executable is < 100K. [/plugmode] |
| Sat 27 Dec | Mike | The 10 mb matters for the same reason that it matters for software written to jvm or dotnet. The download sucks. Yes hard drive is cheap, getting it to the hard drive takes time and money. Not a problem to corporate environs, but anyone trying to write desktop apps for sale to large numbers of individuals will have to have a demo available, and nobody wants to mail cd's. .Net is not attractive to desktop developers for this reason, nor is Java for the same reason, plus the UI sucks (yes, still!) VB6 and Delphi really rocked for this type of app. |
| Sat 27 Dec | John S. | I am using Abyss Web Server since 2002 and I recommend it. It's rock solid and is very small (the installer is less that 150KB). I wonder how they can put all these features in a so small .exe! I think it is now available for all major platforms (Win32, Linux, MacOS X and even FreeBSD). |
| Sat 27 Dec | Damn them virusES | Thx everyone! Tom Hathaway >> Just curious, but why is a few meg of disk space important? Because 1. as others have pointed out, hard disk space is cheap, but bandwith isn't, and 2. This is for non-techies, so anything beyong clicking on an EXE will prove to be too complicated. Trust me :-) Unknow >> Be careful with licensing issues distributing MySQL. Thx :-) >> thttpd is my favorite small web server. I don't know about PHP, but I know it can handle CGI executables. Awesome :-) Couldn't find the binary for Windows on that page (only source), but it must be available somewhere. josheli >> how about a server written in php itself? comes in at around 650k with all modules and whatnot. Another goodie :-) BTW, the !nanoweb_2.1.1+php431.exe installer doesn't prompt the user where to install the files (forced to C:\NANOWEB and C:\PHP). I happened to already have PHP installed under C:\PHP... You might want to ask users :-) >> as for a bare php, all you really need on windows is... Great :-) dir at badblue com >> badblue is also a very tiny PHP server... I'll check it out too, although, according to the online doc, PHP must be fetched and installed separately. I'd rather package the whole thing in a single EXE with Inno or NSIS. John S. >> I am using Abyss Web Server since 2002 and I recommend it. It's rock solid and is very small (the installer is less that 150KB) Yup, looks real nice :-) |
| network games | Fri 26 Dec | anonymous for now |
| anyone know any good intranet games? its the day after Christmas and kinda slow here in the office... no big installs like UT or Doom - just looking for lightweight games that we can play over the network for a few hours then uninstall at the end of the day. thanks! |
| Fri 26 Dec | Just me (Sir to you) | http://www.subspacehq.com/whatis.php rocks!!! (4.78MB) |
| Fri 26 Dec | anonymous for now | Continuum looks like fun, but poses problems for us. Some of us can't see outside the firewall, so I'm looking specifically for games that can be played solely on the intranet. |
| Fri 26 Dec | no name | What's the modern day equivalent of doom, quake II, unreal? I haven't played games in a while. |
| Fri 26 Dec | dmooney | Unreal Tournament 2K3 and Halo 2 are probably to the two most modern, big name FPSes right now. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Dan Maas | Samurai is small, fun, and works over a network. http://www.klear.com/samurai/ |
| Sat 27 Dec | Warren Henning | Doom is not a "big install." |
| Sat 27 Dec | www.marktaw.com | Doom is in install? I thought it ran from 1 directory in DOS. Configure the video, sound card and network options and go... |
| Outsourcing and the law of unforeseen consequences | Fri 26 Dec | Philo |
| Aspects of outsourcing that may bite either the outsourcing company or the country as a whole: - When you import cheap labor, the money you pay them goes back into the US economy, improving it. You also grow your own - create the next generation of thinkers and leaders. When you outsource, you are exporting both money and training to another nation. (globalists may cheer, but is this what US CEOs want?) - An in-house IT staff, if treated well, contributes more than just code for cash. They will improve your infrastructure, generate additional labor-savings with pet projects, and build a corporate knowledge of your business. When you outsource, you get exactly what you pay for, and not a penny more. If you have one and only one IT project, this is fine. Id be interested to see a company that has one and only one IT project. - The proprietary knowledge and data issues discussed previously on here. These issues bolster the thought in the IEEE thread that outsourcing may boost profits in the short term, but are there long-term costs that will outweigh the benefits? Philo |
| Fri 26 Dec | njkayaker | Not much of this really 'matters'. (Warning generalities ahead.) The CEOs are largely interested in gaining wealth in the sort term. They really have no interest in the health of the business. Businesses don't want to be left out of the current fad. The way Wall Street works encourages this. Again, it's an interest in the short term. CEOs and big investors want quick jumps in stock prices. IT is very expensive and low quality (think of all of the examples of cost and schedule overruns). It's also hard (for business) to understand. Business does understand salaries. So business looks at it as 'the same crap for less money'. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Dennis Forbes | At the same time, though, it is a world economy. i.e. the ascent of India represents a massive new market for the world's producers (some billion+ people), and these are people that will buy a copy of Windows YZ, and a new Ford Escape. Having said that, I entirely believe in the local money cycle philosophy, and even try to only buy gas in my hometown as it supports, even to a marginal degree, a local owner and local employees. If I have choices of products and one is made in China while another is made in locally, and the prices and quality are similar, I buy the local product (for example http://www.kushies.com/ baby wear -- excellent quality, and only marginally more expensive). As a sidenote, for all of the worry about India and outsourcing, that is just a tiny drop in the bucket -- if you want to see money disappearing from your local economy, never to return, start paying attention to how much of the goods that you buy are made in China -- it is absolutely staggering. Given that the vast majority of these are plastics or electronics that are overwhelmingly put together by automation, and hence the manpower cost difference is marginal, I am prone to believing that it must be because of lax Chinese environmental laws -- that's one of those things that the WTO needs to equalize. |
| Fri 26 Dec | John Rose | I agree with Philo about the things you lose with outsourcing, especially the 'brain drain' and loss of accumulated domain knowledge. In all the programming jobs I've worked, understanding the underlying business goals is pretty crucial to creating successful software. Half of the skill in software development is sussing these out. Theoretically, with outsourcing, the in-house project manager is responsible for distilling all of that knowledge into detailed specs for the outsourced programmers to follow, so theoretically the programmers don't really need to know any of that stuff. But I think we all know that's never quite the case. |
| Fri 26 Dec | MSHack | I agree, especially with the In-house staff point. Being a consultant, the past couple of companies I have been at, only allow 40 hours to be entered into their time systems, so employees working 45 - 60 hours, still show 40 hours. Consultants, can enter EVERY hour they worked, in order to get paid. These are then compared against each other and then the dollars true costs look skewed. |
| Fri 26 Dec | one programmer's opinion | Dennis wrote, '...if you want to see money disappearing from your local economy, never to return, start paying attention to how much of the goods that you buy are made in China -- it is absolutely staggering' Just a small quibble with what you wrote. I bet that SOME of the money you speak of does return to the United States (or some other industrialized country) it simply doesn't return to the 'local economy' and enrich the heavily taxed average Joe citizen. While there are lot of manufactured goods currently being produced in low labor cost countries such as China and Mexico that doesn't necessarily mean that ALL the companies that are producing those goods are actually Chinese or Mexican owned businesses (i.e. multi-international corporations comes to mind). Dennis wrote, 'As a sidenote, for all of the worry about India and outsourcing, that is just a tiny drop in the bucket ' That might be true, but when it comes to the computer industry India really is a country you should be worried about simply because so many of its citizens can speak English and have cheap (if not free) access to just about any software development material they might need to compete for work. Imo, njkayaker's post hit the nail on the head. I agree that in general most business leaders probably look at the offshoring of IT work as, 'we will be getting the same crap as before but at least it will cost the company less money and that means more bonus money for me'. |
| Fri 26 Dec | the artist formerly known as prince | but you guys are only considering contractor style outsourcing, what about where you outsource an entire division, like Sun did with the core java development team, and now those are perms working there not contractors |
| Fri 26 Dec | one programmer's opinion | MSHack wrote, '...Consultants, can enter EVERY hour they worked, in order to get paid.' What you wrote really depends on the client, what those consultants are doing, and what their employment situation is like. Many so called consultants actually work for a consulting firm as a salaried employee. |
| Fri 26 Dec | dir at badblue com | outsourcing should be especially terrifying to financial services/insurance organizations. given the fact that their lifeblood is truly a set of business processes (i.e., moving bits around)... handing this domain knowledge to a group in India, Romania, etc. could very well breed a new global competitor. a bank or insurance company that farms out IT may, in fact, be building and training their own competition... ten, fifteen or twenty years from now, watch out. Of course, I suspect some CEOs and boards are starting to get it. Bank One, I believe, stopped outsourcing and brought everything back in house. |
| Fri 26 Dec | mb | 10-15 years in the future? who cares, i'll have sold all my stock and retired with a nice golden parachute by then. -- signed, typical short-term CEO |
| Fri 26 Dec | Bill Carlson | I agree with Philo in that an in-house employee adds 'hidden value' that is hard to put a price on. This value may only be conspicuous by its absence. The question I have, which I've yet to see an answer to: Are firms which are agressively outsourcing software development happy with their decision? With the quality of output, cost savings, etc. Long term, I'm not as worried about what CEOs are thinking right now as much as I'm worried that outsourcing may actually be a good business decision. Yes, outsourcing is happening. But does it 'work' for most who try it? Does anyone really know the answer to this? |
| Fri 26 Dec | T. Norman | Oddly enough, the number of CxOs who say the company has actually saved a lot by offshoring their IT appears to be much smaller than those who say they *must* outsource because of the 'massive cost savings'. The reasons for that include (1) it doesn't really save much if at all, and (2) they don't know if and how much they are saving, because they haven't made any honest attempts to measure the productivity of their own employees vs. the outsourcers. Unlike Bill C., my fear is that outsourcing *won't* be a good business decision, given that it is happening anyway. If it brings real savings and increased profits, other opportunities will be created in the economy as a result of cheaper products and a stronger stock market. If it doesn't, it means the losses will become worse, resulting in even more layoffs in the long run. By the time reality hits and it becomes clear that the savings are nonexistent, the damage may be too much to recover from. See http://www.cio.com/archive/090103/money.html 'The truth is, no one saves 80 percent by shipping IT work to India or any other country. Few can say they save even half that. As just one example, United Technologies, an acknowledged leader in developing offshore best practices, is saving just over 20 percent by outsourcing to India.' |
| Fri 26 Dec | it_ranter | Well, everyone wants a panacea. 80% cost savings, eh? Makes me wonder what the benefit savings are. I imagine they're quite high. I think one of the persistent traits I've seen in this field since day one, is the 'castle in the sky' mentality among management. IT in a sense is building castles in the sky; because computers are intangible and immediate, the idea that much can be done with little, magically, is persistent, and it breeds a certain level of irrational optimism. Outsourcing is a natural extension of that. Computers have brought us the promise of magical interconnectivity over global boundaries; and so, the wishful thinking endemic to management has leapt continents. This industry would be much better off if we grounded ourselves in the harsh realities of software and IT development. Software development is a kind of intangible trench warfare; the slippery nature of it makes it very expensive, and elusive to traditional business processes. Even the 8-5 workday. There just aren't any management miracles. That line of code I wrote, is a liability. The code an Indian writes, is a liability 2000 miles away. And until management accepts the liability inherent to developing, and stops shortchanging people on schedules and fostering cultures of waste and regret, then IT is frankly going nowhere. Even if its physical location hops continents. Outsourcing is a bad idea; anyone who's worked in this industry knows that. It's just common sense. How can people read Joel's advice and develop software, and let this affront to basic, common sense slip past their radars? |
| Fri 26 Dec | it_ranter | ^ ...where '2000 miles away' is slang for 'very far.' :) n thousand, even...:) |
| Fri 26 Dec | Bill Carlson | T. makes a good point. The U.S. economy had a great run while much manifacturing was being sent overseas. I don't see very many people crying that hard drives or toys are made in the Pacific rim. On the contrary, disposible income has gone up as a result of consumer electronics, computers, and household items becoming so cheap that they barely merit a budget line item in Quicken. This disposible income has been pumped back into the economy here in ways that have benefited the highly skilled worker. I think we will reach a point of diminishing benefit from cheap foreign goods and labor. When this will be, it's hard to say. It's difficult to imagine the entire U.S. economic engine depending on cutting-edge technology, natural resources, and jobs that require 'touch'. Maybe it's possible; I don't know. I've yet to be convinced that a rising tide always lifts all boats, but I'm not an economic expert. My concern is basically selfish. If outsourcing doesn't work out, there will be a glut of failed projects that need fixing and a lack of new meat in the industry due to the 'sky is falling' predictions. This translates to higher demand and salary. If outsourcing works out, the in-demand skills may shift to business process analysis, spec writing, etc. After all, writing code is only a portion of software development. Writing detailed specs could take as much time as the actual coding and is less likely to be outsourced. Any predictions on how long it is before we know whether outsourcing is 'where it's at'? 5 years? |
| Fri 26 Dec | T. Norman | >'My concern is basically selfish. If outsourcing doesn't work out, there will be a glut of failed projects that need fixing and a lack of new meat in the industry due to the 'sky is falling' predictions.' If it fails flagrantly -- meaning that they not only don't save money, but they also have failed projects 90%+ of the time, then sure, there will be a glut of work for locals to cleanup. If it succeeds exceedingly, it will free up money in other aspects of the economy. However, there is a scenario between the extremes that could be very bad for us. If it offshoring works to the extent that they get functional systems but they fail to actually save money doing so, they may still decide to stay with the outsourcers because of the difficulty of transitioning the work back in-house. By that time, so many people may have been pushed out of the field or left the field and don't want to return, and few people will be graduating in CS or related fields, and they would have lost the institutional knowledge required to take resume full control of their systems. As a result the CxOs may conclude that they are 'locked in' with the outsourcers, and the jobs don't come back. |
| Fri 26 Dec | a | All this speculation about whether outsourcing is good or bad ... of course it's bad for the people who work in the jobs being outsourced. The issue is what are you going to do about it. As to the near-term consequences, I think it's pretty obvious there will be a lot of dodgy work to be fixed up, and a lot of structural damage to companies, but I don't think that will help the programming profession at all. Locals (Americans) will be hired to fix the problems, and then be lumped in as part of the problem. ('IT never delivers blah blah ...' and because programmers as a profession are not assertive, they will cop it.) The big problem with this job is that there's no mileage in being good or excellent, unless you run your own business. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Ekonimisist | 'it will free up money' So there's only a fixed pie of money and once it's gone it's gone. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Matt Conrad | I'm sure there are niches where outsourcing makes sense, but I suspect after things shake out there will still be plenty of jobs for local programmers, for reasons mentioned by Philo and also discussed elsewhere. In the long run, I think the technologizing of India and China is really exciting. Not to get all new agey on folks, but there is a whole lot of human potential there that's been languishing and can kinda start to spread its wings. I look forward to seeing what those guys produce over the next couple of decades. New software frontiers, new opportunities, doesn't matter if they start in Silicon Valley or Hyderabad. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Ekonimisist | Yeah in India they could create a fantastic database to keep track of everybody by caste so that the low caste people don't use the wrong sort of bathrooms. And in China, they can develop massive databases to keep track of all he potential thought crimes going on and to identify patterns that indicate the location of illegal house churches to be raided. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Tony Chang | Outsourcing is no longer maintenance projects or well-specified projects for banks. the latest trend in outsourcing is innovative, cutting edge projects with sketchy requirements and requiring completely agile methods. This article says that such projects can ONLY be successfully accomplished overseas due to the simple economic facts: http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q244356E6 >After launching five start-ups, Solidcore chief executive Rosen Sharma says he would never build a company without outsourcing the relatively expensive and highly skilled tech jobs to low-paid contractors or local hires in developing countries. >'The British empire bought raw cotton inexpensively in India and sold the finished goods back in England,' said Sharma, 31, who earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University. 'Our raw material is intellectual power, which is cheap in India, and the finished product, our software, can be sold around the world.' But don't worry, folks, there will still be plenty of IT jobs for you once we get rid of all the 'dead-weight' that's been burdening the industry. Soon, all you extra special people with extra special skills will have extra high paying jobs. yours won't be outsourced. That's onle going to happen te the OTHER guy. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Happy Pirate | Yeah that stuff doesn't bother me anymore. I used to pay for software but now that I've been downsized I just pirate all the software I want and I'm making some money on the side pirating software for small businesses who can't afford software anymore either. The system works. The spending money I have left at the end of the month is more than it used to be and quite frankly, I don't feel guilty about pirating at all anymore. |
| Sat 27 Dec | www.marktaw.com | The money that goes to China for manufactured goods is miniscule, pennies on the dollar earned, so the lion's share of the profits do return to our own economy, and get recycled in the form of advertising, building stores and so forth. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the vast majority of companies that outsource anywhere, and especially to India aren't technology companies. AOL is a content provider, not a technology company, for example. We don't care where the techonology comes from the same we we don't care where the shoes come from, and we don't care if the next generation's technical geniuses are in India (remember how briefly the Internet geniuses ruled). America isn't a manufacturing giant. America isn't even a technological giant (though for the time being we are, just as we were manufacturing giants during the 19th century). America is a marketing giant. Nobody else on earth is as good as we are at getting you to buy something you don't need, or spend 10 times more on the things you do. We've spent billions of dollars over the past 6 decades figuring out how to push the buttons of our consumers, and that is what makes our economy move. Critics may predict the fall of the second Roman Empire. I predict that in 100 years time, perhaps within our lifetimes, the world will become America. A MacDonalds in everyone's belly, and Nike on everyone's feet. Does it matter that the people who are currently making the Nike's can't afford them? Remove America from the world economy and all the programmers in India will be out of work. Remove India from the world economy, and America marches on. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Zahid | 'Yeah in India they could create a fantastic database to keep track of everybody by caste so that the low caste people don't use the wrong sort of bathrooms. And in China, they can develop massive databases to keep track of all he potential thought crimes going on and to identify patterns that indicate the location of illegal house churches to be raided.' - Ekonimisist Clearly typed by someone who knows very little about either country in the twenty-first century. |
| Sat 27 Dec | ek | Wow Zahid you really think that they don't raid house churches in China? And you really think that members of different castes are treated the same in india? |
| Sat 27 Dec | ek | http://www.worthynews.com/christian-persecution/features/church-leaders-rearrested-china.html >Three House Church Leaders Imprisoned In China >SANTA ANNA, CA (Aug. 5, 2003) - On July 13, police raided a house church in Xiaoshan City, Zhejiang province, China, and arrested at least three church leaders. According to a China Aid Association press release dated July 24, the raid came at 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning while the Christians were meeting for prayer and worship. Eighty-year-old Shen Shaocheng, who helped found the church more than 25 years ago, was among those arrested. Xu Weimin and Gao Chongdao, two other house church leaders, were also taken into custody. The three men are being held at an unknown location. Authorities have not revealed their location to their families or allowed them visitors. The church, which has about 1,500 members, belongs to the 'Little Flock,' one of the largest house church 'streams' active in China. The Little Flock is best known in the West for their famous founder, Watchman Nee, whose writings are widely read by Christians all over the world. Nee was martyred in a labor camp in 1973, and his followers in China still suffer persecution. The Xiaoshan church has been destroyed three times by the authorities over the last 25 years, but it was rebuilt each time - even without government permission. During the recent SARS scare, authorities ordered the church to stop meeting. However, members continued to gather. The local Religious Affairs Bureau (PSB) has repeatedly tried to convince the church to register and join the government-controlled 'Three Self Patriotic Movement.' Little Flock theology, while urging Christians to be model citizens, stresses the lordship of Christ over the church and strongly resists government attempts to control the spiritual affairs of each local assembly. More than 300 PSB officers raided an affiliated congregation in Hengpeng village during a Sunday service on July 6 and demolished the church building. This church has also refused to register with government religious authorities. The believers continue to meet in their homes and other locations. 'Continuing persecution, which includes the brutal demolition of believers' homes and places of worship, has done nothing to assure the world that Beijing has truly reformed its ways and is a worthy venue for the 2008 Olympics,' a China watcher told Open Doors. Johan Companjen, president of Open Doors International, says Christianity is flourishing in China despite the recent crackdown on Christian believers. 'The government wants us to believe there are no problems in China. Yes, the official church has its own kind of program -- but we are really serving the house churches,' he says. 'It seems that the government is afraid to lose control, and that's why it has clamped down. But they cannot stop what God is doing.' Open Doors is training 6,000 leaders in China, according to Companjen. Also, Open Doors hopes to send 2.2 million Bibles to China in 2003. --- http://members.aol.com/biblprof/no-dec95.htm Christians Arrested in Church Raid For the fourth time in four months, Guangzhou house church preacher Li Dexian was kicked and beaten by police on April 29. With his wife and a coworker, he was arrested for holding an illegal church meeting. 'At least they didn't break my ribs this time,' he said with a thin smile. In another area of China, three believers were arrested for preaching on a bus. According to reports, the entire bus with all its passengers was taken to the police station in Zhenping, Henan Province. Each person was interro- gated as to whether he or she was a Christian. Those who said yes were fined and had all their goods confiscated. In Anhui Province, the leader of a house church had his head shaved in the shape of a cross by police, the culmination of a campaign to force all churches in the area to register with the government. Struggling for Control And on it goes, with constant reports of arrests, threats and intimidation by the Chinese government, bent on bringing the blossoming house church movement under strict control. In the Anhui case, the campaign began when the authorities asked the leaders of known underground churches to attend a seminar on legal matters, only to detain and fine them (which the leaders refused to pay). Then the Public Security Bureau began destroying unregistered church buildings. Police and Communist Party officials led a convoy of 200 people in trucks and tractors to the sites of three churches, where the workers demolished them. All materials, including Bibles, hymnbooks and furniture, were confiscated and the leaders were detained. 142 Arrested Government officials recently surrounded a house church and stormed in to arrest a Taiwanese pastor and 142 Chinese Christians in a government raid near the city of Zhoukou in central China. The Christian gathering was a Bible training class for local house church leaders. Officers arrested the entire assembly and detained them for more than two months, forcing them to pay fines of $118, about one year's salary in many parts of rural China. Local Christians say it is very likely that the raid was violent, saying that security officers are routinely armed with electric stun batons which they use to administer powerful shocks to religious dissidents. Chinese pastors in the area say that this kind of action is not unusual. Seven key house church leaders fled their homes after receiving warnings that government officials were seeking their arrest. Bible League representatives confirm these reports. 'We met Christians who have spent time in prison for their faith,' said one Bible courier who carried Bibles through Chinese customs. 'I wish I could have brought just one more book with me. One couple traveled 2,600 miles over three and a half days to collect just 28 pieces of Christian materials. I asked myself,'How far would I travel to obtain one more book about Christ?'' Despite the continuing threat of arrest, Chinese pastors plead with American Christians to send more Bibles. 'There is a need for many more Bibles! In one area where I have preached there are three congregations and more than 150 believers, but only two Bibles to share between them all. Influencing the Party One reason authorities are so determined to crack down on independent Christians is the alarming ' infiltration' of the Communist Party by the hated influence of religion. According to a report from the party's Central Committee, up to nine percent of its members have joined religious organizations or taken part in religious activities. More-over, in major cities the rate of increase in religious affiliation among party members is much greater than the rate of people joining the party, according to the report. The party surveyed retired intellectuals and professionals, the best and brightest in China, and found that nearly one-quarter of them regularly participate in religious activities... (continued...) -- http://www.everythingchristian.org/news/psalms_n5.ihtml?nid=2258&catid=2 News from BEIJING, China (EP) — A recent raid on a house church in Henan Province, China lead to the arrest of at least 170 Christians in one evening. Voice of the Martyrs (VOM) reports that the house church is located in the region of Nanyang, one of the strongest Christian centers in China. On the evening of Sept. 2, officers from the Public Security Bureau (PSB) burst into the underground church meeting and arrested everyone there. Christian ministry Asia Harvest reported that the PSB officers were interrogating many in order to determine the leaders of the group. The majority of the Christians were fingerprinted, issued fines and then released, but 14 others remained in custody with more serious charges threatened against them by communist officials, said VOM. http://www.forerunner.com/mandate/X0042_Church_News_From_Chi.html * PERSECUTION INTENSIFIES New regulations issued by the Chinese government last year give police sweeping authority, including liberty to arrest Protestants associated with house churches (those not registered with the government), Catholics who don't belong to the Catholic Patriotic Association (which denies the authority to the Pope), and all others considered guilty of 'disrupting public order, or doing harm to the public interest through other means.' These regulations widen the scope of persecution of Christians already fined heavily for listening to broadcasts from overseas, having any contact with foreigners, or owning a Bible printed outside China. (Rutherford Institute) * DAWN IN CHINA A project to start a million more churches in China has begun - via radio. From Hong Kong, the Far East Broadcasting Company (FEBC) broadcasts programs into the mainland, including two 15-minute 'DAWN China' programs and a daily half-hour training program on discipleship training, personal evangelism, church growth, and missions. FEBC and two other organizations are sending training booklets into China to help new church members. (Pulse) * HENAN CHURCH MEMBERS ARRESTED A Taiwanese preacher and 169 local Chinese Christians remain in detention following a Public Security Bureau raid on a house church near Zhoukou, Henan Province. Sources describe the raid on the unregistered house church as a 'major police operation.' While it is not known if any of the local Christians were injured during the incident, one source said it is 'very likely' that the assault was violent. Following a similar raid in Fangcheng, Henan Province, last year, the number of Christians in the area grew dramatically. (NNI, Charisma) http://www.forerunner.com/mandate/X0058_Church_News_From_Chi.html * CHRISTIANS ARRESTED, TORTURED Jin Zhiming, 45, a leader of China's growing house church movement, was arrested in Changzhi, Shanxi Province. During the raid, five officers from the Public Security Bureau confiscated Bibles, books, and Jin's personal belongings. The vast majority of China's estimated 50-70 million Christians belong to unregistered house churches. Because they do not register with the government, which would subject them to restrictions and regulations, they are frequently arrested, fined, or sentenced to labor camps. There have been several reports of Christians subjected to torture while in detention, resulting in a number of deaths. (Christian Solidarity International) ---- Zahid, i can go on if you like. I have hundreds and hundreds of articles just like these on the issue of the chinese government's outrageous human rights violations. Do you still see yourself as a big expect on what life in China is like in the 21st century? Or are you one of the officials doing the torturing? |
| Sat 27 Dec | ek | Now that I have shown how ignorant and uninformed on the subject oof China you are, allow me to prove how sensationally unaware of facts you are when it comes to the subject of India, Mr. Zahid: http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/09/wcarcaste.htm 'The Indian government tried for a year and a half to deny that caste discrimination is a form of racial discrimination. But as a result of this conference, even the Secretary-General of the United Nations has acknowledged the gravity of work and descent-based discrimination, and India will have a hard time from now on avoiding international scrutiny.' Smita Narula, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch http://www.imadr.org/project/dalit/smita.html The caste system in India, particularly, is an extreme form of discrimination most affecting the Dalits, who comprise one-sixth of India's population, or 160 million people. Human Rights Watch, through research on these human rights violations and the exploitation and segregation of the Dalits over 6 states in India, concluded that Dalits are subject to the most extreme forms of discrimination and abuse. Some of these include having to live in separate segregated colonies from the upper-caste Indians, being forced to perform the filthiest occupations in society, and being restricted from marrying members from upper-castes. And out of this research, Human Rights Watch has also learned that violence has become a defining characteristic of this particular form of discrimination. As there are many similarities between the situation of the Dalits and the Buraku people in Japan, some common features we can observe of caste-based discrimination throughout the world are: As people in the lower-caste community are physically indistinguishable from members of the upper-caste community, discrimination does not rely on racially visual differences. This aspect of caste-based discrimination has led some governments to try to evade its responsibilities and escape international scrutiny by claiming caste-based discrimination does not exist because it is not linked to racism. Caste-based discrimination is often masked by the abject surrounding poverty. Though lower-caste people are bearing the brunt of poverty, many poverty-stricken communities are sharing the same problems, such as bonded labor, high personal debt, low wages, lack of access to education, illiteracy, etc. Despite anti-caste-based discrimination laws in many constitutions, none of these laws are implemented due to a lack of political will to raise consciousness and, in effect, disrupt economic status quo. Similarly, these same laws are not upheld by law enforcement agencies since these particular bodies depend financially on the upper-caste communities. There is a deeply rooted religious sense of purity, or cleanliness, associated with the upper-castes, and qualities of pollution or filthiness with lower-caste communities. In South Asia, lower-caste people exclusively hold the occupation of city sanitation. Many people feel religiously justified in their maltreatment of lower-caste members. http://www.indianet.nl/statem.html The International Dalit Solidarity Network (IDSN) is deeply disappointed that governments attending the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR) in Durban failed to address the issue of caste discrimination and related forms of discrimination based on work and descent. This form of discrimination affects the lives of an estimated 250 million Dalits in South Asia, as well as 3 million Burakumin in Japan and an unknown number in parts of Africa. Dalit representatives from India and representatives of affected peoples from several other countries greatly impressed the participants at the WCAR and at the preceding NGO Forum with their testimonies of systematic discrimination and oppression, and with the similarity of their experiences in different national contexts. Nevertheless the government of India vigorously opposed even the very circumspect language of paragraph 73 of the draft Programme of Action, calling for measures against discrimination on the basis of work and descent. To our surprise and dismay, the European Union did not express clear and timely support for this paragraph. However, the IDSN strongly welcomes the concern that, among others, the National Human Rights Commission of India, the European Parliament and the Inter-Parliamentary Union have shown for the large number of people who suffer discrimination because of their low-caste status. The National Human Rights Commission of India has recognized the 'manifest inadequacies' in implementation of the relevant laws protecting and promoting the rights of Dalits, and has encouraged exchange of views on these matters in India and at the international level. The European Parliament, in its Human Rights Report adopted on 5 July 2001, urged the EU and its member states to 'voice its concern regarding caste discrimination and to formulate strategies to counter this widespread practice [of untouchability]'. It also called upon the EU to 'investigate to what extent its policies contribute to the abolition of caste-discrimination and the practice of untouchability in India'. http://india_resource.tripod.com/caste.html In fact, there are many concrete ways in which the international community could help. Even a cursory look at where caste discrimination in India is most egregious will show that caste discrimination tends to be greater in areas of the country that are very densely populated, and relatively less urbanized and industrialized. Wherever the economy is stagnant, social problems are aggravated. Thus, problems of caste discrimination are greatest in states like Bihar (pop. density 880 per sq. km), UP (689) and Tamil Nadu (478). --- http://www.hrdc.net/sahrdc/inthenews/2002/220702.htm Jaipur, July 21: Dalit human rights activists have warned that Durban was only a “trailer” and the real action would take place at such international conclaves in future. “The world’s eyes are on India where the greatest racial discrimination after the Apartheid is being perpetuated on the basis of caste,” the speakers at a lecture on “Bringing accountability to issues of Dalit rights in Rajasthan’ cautioned. Expressing concern over the dismal state of affairs in the country, and especially in Rajasthan, the Dalit rights activists indicated that they had no other way but to internationalize the issue of caste discrimination. “We are the people without wings. As we start growing wings, they come and clip them,” lamented P. L. Mimroth, Dalit activist and convener of the Centre for Dalit Human Rights, which organized the lecture. The issue of caste would again figure in the forthcoming meeting of the UN Commission on Elimination of Racial Discrimination to be held in Geneva in the second week of next month, observed Ravi Nair, Executive Director of South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre. “India’s position is a very weak when it comes to protection of rights of Dalits,” he charged. In case any complaint by any Dalit about atrocities was going unattended, the UN Special Rapporteur appointed for India could ask the Centre for an explanation, Mr. Nair observed. The countries no longer had, the traditional soverignity when it came to human right violations. New laws permit arrest of those who have human rights violation cases pending against them in India when they visit a foreign country like the UK or Belgium, he pointed out. There was a general atmosphere of non-accountability when it came up holding Dalit rights, the participants noted. Back in 1996, maximum cases of atrocities against Dalits were registered in Rajasthan. In the next year, it was only the second largest, it was pointed out. Within a 30-km radius of the Rajasthan capital, one could come across untouchability and other caste discrimination, it was observed. The caste structure continued to prevail in the State even after Indpendence, partly due to its feudal past. The Dalits still had to face both the societal violence and the State violence, they charged. Dalits were the productive class of society but there had been no recognition of their contribution, noted Prakash Louis, Executive Director of he Indian Social Institute. Even now 60-70 percent Dalits in the country remained landless labourers while only 15-20 per cent of htem were literate, he pointed out. However, even within the Dalit community case system was prevalent. “Dalits in Rajasthan alone have 60 sub-castes,”Dr. Louis noted to drive home the difficulties in fighting for Dalit rights. The former acting Governer of Rajasthan, Justice N. L. Tibrewal, and the retired judge of the Rajasthan High Court, Justice Vinod Shankar Dave, suggested intensive educational drive among Dalits to improve their lot and to make them aware of their rights. Mr. Dave specially referred to the unfortunate role of Dalits in the recent Gujarat carnage. Dalits should shed their complex of being Dalits as well as the obsession that all from the so-called upper castes were perpetrators of the caste order, it was suggested. |
| Sat 27 Dec | T. Norman | From Tony Chang's link: 'Three years later, Silicon Valley investors are pressuring entrepreneurs to shrink personnel costs by as much as 60 percent by sending jobs overseas.' So we're talking about reducing costs by 60 percent from the sky-high excess expenditures of the boom, in the top 0.1% costliest place in America. They could probably save more than that by moving work to Atlanta or Houston. |
| Sat 27 Dec | T. Norman | >'Soon, all you extra special people with extra special skills will have extra high paying jobs. yours won't be outsourced. That's onle going to happen te the OTHER guy.' No, I know that any given day could be my last day on the job, which could become my last day in IT. But I have a plan B, plan C, and plan D for other forms of employment. Plus enough saved up that I don't have to work for a year, even without touching my 401K or collecting unemployment. I am no sitting duck. What about you? |
| Sat 27 Dec | www.marktaw.com | Bravo T. Norman. I believe that the ability to save money, even more than the ability to own it, is one of the most important skills we can nurture in ourselves and others, and one of the greatest sign of maturity that I know. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Dennis Forbes | Tony, regarding your quote. 'After launching five start-ups, Solidcore chief executive Rosen Sharma says he would never build a company without outsourcing the relatively expensive and highly skilled tech jobs to low-paid contractors or local hires in developing countries.' You do realize, of course, that Mr. Sharma is an Indian, and plans on relocating back to India, right? He's hardly a unbiased observer, and is trying to sell the benefits of his own personal approach to potential investors. I've found that a large percentage of the 'offshoring is the salvation for all of life's ills' quotes of the sort are either the representative of Indian offshoring companies, Indians, or other people with vested interests. It's hardly surprizing. I could provide a infinite number of quotes from 'Western' software developers who would proclaim that offshoring is a staggering failure, blah blah blah. Of course the most hilarious thing of all is that that entire article is about vague, 'stealth' ventures, with not a single reference to such a _successful_ product. Instead it's better to pump $20 million into a unsubtantiated, ethereal product than it is $40 million...with your millions you get to yield something amazing like http://www.solidcore.com/. |
| Sat 27 Dec | pdq | I'd like to comment on Philo's original point. If you are worried about keeping knowlege in the company, then outsourcing to local companies is just as bad. On the other hand, if you hire people in the 3rd world country as your employees (or of a subsidary, etc) then you still have the knowlege in the company. Secondly, not everyone is looking to outsource existing jobs. Often people can't find affordable trained people. The company that I work for would be happy to hire good local people in the SF Bay Area at $60-$80k a year for experience programmers, but there aren't any. Good people are far more expensive if available at all. Most of the fallout in the dotcom bust are non-technical or semi-technical people (PR, HR, Marcom, HTML Jockeys, etc) not programmers themselves. We've given up looking for quality programmers, testers, tech pubs people in CA and have oursourced all new hires overseas and to Lousianna. I don't know what all the wailing and knashing of teeth is about. Jobs that can be done cheaper are being done cheaper. It's the american way even if has it's shortcomings. Granted that outsourcing and offshoring are becoming a business fad which only means that it will be old news in a year or so when the next big thing comes along. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Gwyn | Regarding the earlier comment trivialising a reduction of 20% development costs.. If I'm a company that makes 10% profit on its turnover and 50% of its costs are development then saving 20% of those development costs by outsourcing means reducing costs by 10%... which means I've just doubled my profit, which is an enormous increase! |
| Sat 27 Dec | T. Norman | Except that the 20% comes with added risk and longer time-to-market, and it isn't likely to last long, because the cost of offshoring is going up by more than 10% a year. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Philo | ...and you can't outsource *all* your development, and if 50% of your line of business is development, then you've got some very high risks in outsourcing it at all. Philo |
| Sat 27 Dec | Gwyn | I don't disagree with either of the previous 2 posts... my point was to illustrate that he significance of a small reduction in cost can result in a relatively huge increase in profit. |
| Sat 27 Dec | The ugly side of India | National Geographic, June 2003 Who does this Untouchable think he is, buying a small plot of land outside the village? Then he dared speak up, to the police and other authorities, demanding to use the new village well. He got what Untouchables deserve. One night, while Maurya was away in a nearby city, eight men from the higher Rajput caste came to his farm. They broke his fences, stole his tractor, beat his wife and daughter, and burned down his house. The message was clear: Stay at the bottom where you belong. Discrimination against India's lowest Hindu castes is technically illegal. But try telling that to the 160 million Untouchables, who face violent reprisals if they forget their place. The sins of Girdharilal Maurya are many, his attackers insisted. He has bad karma. Why else would he, like his ancestors, be born an Untouchable, if not to pay for his past lives? Look, he is a leatherworker, and Hindu law says that working with animal skins makes him unclean, someone to avoid and revile. And his unseemly prosperity is a sin. To be born a Hindu in India is to enter the caste system, one of the world's longest surviving forms of social stratification. Embedded in Indian culture for the past 1,500 years, the caste system follows a basic precept: All men are created unequal. The ranks in Hindu society come from a legend in which the main groupings, or varnas, emerge from a primordial being. From the mouth come the Brahmans—the priests and teachers. From the arms come the Kshatriyas—the rulers and soldiers. From the thighs come the Vaisyas—merchants and traders. From the feet come the Sudras—laborers. Each varna in turn contains hundreds of hereditary castes and subcastes with their own pecking orders. A fifth group describes the people who are achuta, or untouchable. The primordial being does not claim them. Untouchables are outcasts—people considered too impure, too polluted, to rank as worthy beings. Prejudice defines their lives, particularly in the rural areas, where nearly three-quarters of India's people live. Untouchables are shunned, insulted, banned from temples and higher caste homes, made to eat and drink from separate utensils in public places, and, in extreme but not uncommon cases, are raped, burned, lynched, and gunned down. |
| Merry Christmas! | Thu 25 Dec | anonymizer |
| I hope all of you celebrating Christmas got shiny new techno-gadgets that fulfilled your every wish. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Guillermo | Best Wishes to all JOS members and specially to Joel and people in FogCreek. Guillermo. Madrid, Spain. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Philo | Merry Christmas to all those who observe it, and to the rest of you, have a nice day at work! Happy Holidays to all!!! Philo |
| Thu 25 Dec | Floridian | Amen |
| Fri 26 Dec | Bored Bystander | Late. Merry belated Christmas to all, and have a happy and safe New Year's. How about this for a geek gift: my wife got me the complete 'Space:1999' DVD set... plus a compressor for the shop. No 'shiny' tech gifts though. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Gwyn | God how I fancied that bird in Space 1999 who could change into animals and things... I went out for a girl for about 2 days when I was 10 who looked just like her and it was like all my birthdays had come at once! |
| FS-Portability of data-LCD-FAT? | Thu 25 Dec | Indian Developer in India |
| Disregarding for the moment the talk about MS and their licensing issues about FAT, I am not a Hardware implementor, what is the Least Common Denominator for File Systems across operating systems and hardware? FAT, FAT32....? The reason I ask is, all of a sudden what started off as an indulgence in curiosity, has turned into some lucrative jobs in installing and configuring Linux Networks. So, for existing data to be available for a rollback in case of design faults in the networking premises and assumptions, or for maintaining data to be shared across platforms, which filesystem is the safest bet. Additionally, though not required at the moment, what would be the LCD, should Security Descriptors also be a prerequisite? Regards KayJay |
| Thu 25 Dec | Stephen Jones | I'm not quite with you. It doesn't matter in the least what the file system is if the data is to be stored across a network. The data is sent via a network protocol so a Linux machine can receive data stored on a Mac or PC and vice-versa. On a local machine if you want data read/srite accessible from a Linux/windows dual boot configuration you use FAT32 but on a network you wouldn't want to use it as a file system. Normally on a mixed network you would keep files on a Samba server, but think of the Intenet. You can access any file on any computer in the world independently of the file system if you have the correct seciurity clearances. Most of the intenet is data stored on Linux machines accessed by Windows or Macs. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Indian Developer in India | Sorry! I was not clear. That was not my Q. Here goes..... Only File Sharing on LANs for the moment. Of course, SAMBA will be configured. That part's ok. But most PCs will have to have Dual Boot and a Slave Disk where the data will reside for actual day-to-day work. The Master will be partioned and 2 OSes will be installed with equivalent software installed on each, so that work remains un-interrupted. And that is where the problem arises as Linux cannot write to NTFS. Windows does not even recognize Ext2. Ext3, JFS, Resier, etc.. on Linux. Access from Windows? So FAT32 seems to be the only choice, but then folder security cannot be enforced. ? |
| Thu 25 Dec | Brad Wilson | That is correct. If you're dual booting, then FAT is the only file system that read/write on both Windows and Linux. And no, Windows does not have any security on FAT. |
| Thu 25 Dec | John Rose | There are products that let you mount NTFS on Linux, or Ext2/3fs on Windows. http://www.mount-everything.com/ It doesn't look like any security is enforced, though... Not sure if there are free alternatives that do that... that's just the first thing that Google turned up. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Indian Developer in India | Thanks for the info. Much appreciate it. I'll look up the site. Commercial solutions are not ruled out. On a more general note, is FAT recognized by *all* OSes? Or are there any exceptions? Once again, thanks. Regards KayJay |
| Fri 26 Dec | John Rose | There are hundreds of OS's out there- there are a huge number on x86 alone, and countless more on other architectures. Is FAT the closest thing to a lowest common denominator? Yes. It is recognized by the majority? Yeah. Is it recognized by all? No, proabably not, given the huge number of OS's. It's better to ask this question relative to a list specific OS's, rather than a vague term like 'all OS's' because I highly doubt any one person is qualified to answer that. :P |
| Fri 26 Dec | Indian Developer in India | Interesting. Are there really hundreds of OSes on x86? Or are they variants of some common base and therefore support FAT (About 30 years since invention, right?)? A (not so?) comprehensive list of OSes can be found at http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/os.html & http://www.linuxmafia.com/cabal/os-suck.html Any one that stands out as not supporting FAT? |
| Fri 26 Dec | Curmudgeon | Do you have a real application? Your question is pedantic beyond belief. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Stephen Jones | Dear Indian developer, Forget about FAT 16. Use FAT32, and no it isn't supported by all operating systems; NT4 won't read it and nor does Wndows 95 A or B (you need Win 95 OSR/2, sometimes called Win 95C or Win 97). I agree with the previous poster though; the setup you are talking about seems most strange. If you're using an office network why do you want to have all machines dual boot, and why are you keeping all data on the local drive? |
| Fri 26 Dec | Brad Wilson | 'Use FAT32, and no it isn't supported by all operating systems; NT4 won't read it and nor does Wndows 95 A or B (you need Win 95 OSR/2, sometimes called Win 95C or Win 97).' That's not correct. NT 4 does not support it natively, but a 3rd party driver is available. Nor does NT 3.x, obviously. Nobody should be using NT 4 any more. Windows 95 was the first OS with FAT32. And yes, I mean _original_ Windows 95. The original is not 95A, it's just 95. OSR2 is 95B, not 95C. There was never any 97. Oh, and nobody should be using Windows 95 any more. Prior consumer OSes (DOS and Windows 3.x and earlier) support FAT 16, although I suppose if you went all the way back to DOS 1.x you could find an OS that doesn't even support FAT16. That was an impressive number of errors for one (admittedly compound) sentence. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Brad Wilson | You know what? I take it back, it was OSR2 that added FAT32. My bad. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Indian Developer in India | Its a real situation. A small office of 25 machines. The job's sort of done. Proposals been accepted and implementation has begun. My apologies for being pedantic. Generalization. The bane of my life! And thanks again, one and all. Regards KayJay |
| Sat 27 Dec | Stephen Jones | If there are errors Brad please take them up with Microsoft Press. All the information comes from the Windows 98 Resource Kit. ---' And yes, I mean _original_ Windows 95. The original is not 95A, it's just 95. OSR2 is 95B, not 95C. There was never any 97. '--- The Resource Kit states, in the section that deals with comparing FAT32 with FAT16 that you will need Windows 95 OSR/2. The naming of Windows 95 A, B and C is a matter of confusion because MS changed the binaries they sent out but didn't actually change the version numbers. So you have Windows 95 A, B, and OSR/2, often referred to on compilations of software sold in India and the Gulf as Windows 95 C or Windows 97. The OP is from India remember. I was talking about FAT32 not being supported by all operating systems, so your comments on DOS and FAT 16 are irrelevant to my posting. There are still plenty of offices running NT4. Bear in mind that it is quite common for developing countries to buy older hardware second hand, that either may have NT4 still installed, or simply doesn't have the specs to successfully run W2k. The fact that there are third party utlilities is irrelevant. It's like saying there's no problem running MS Office on Linux because you can use Wine. If you trust third party programs there are programs available that claim to let you write to NTFS partitions under Linux. To paraphrase you Brad, that's rather a lot of misplaced pedantry for one post. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Indian Developer in India | Stephen Jones,
That's right. Old co. Old H/W. Old OSes (There's even one 486 with 3.1!). Moved OSes mainly to avoid upgarding H/W since the org. is not an IT co. and as the main applications include only Word Processing and Accounting. Until our recent changeover proposal, they did not even have a E-Mail/Web access.
|
| Sat 27 Dec | Stephen Jones | Ah, now I understand why you want to do the dual booting and keep stuff on the local drives. One thing to beware of is the Linux distro you install. Most modern distros have hefty hardware requirements, so you would probably need at least two separate linux ihstalls, one for the old machines and one for the newer ones. With really old stuff ask them to think about upgrading; Pentium II's are now going for about 6000Rs second hand without the monitor which you will already have. Finding 100Mhz memory may be a problem though. |
| The Programmer Species | Wed 24 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy |
| How many of you programmers find yourself in an uncomfortable when in a conversation not concerning of your work with a stranger or a conversation about day-to-day routine type stuff that does not relate to your work? Is this a behavioural abberation or a thing that rubs off on programmers? |
| Wed 24 Dec | fw | I don't know. Crap is crap any way you put it. If anybody asks me what I work as, I say 'generic computer crap' and if they mention their jobs and the silly process they had to go through that day, I tend to tell them to shutup, I hope if I do the same as them they'll do the same. Boring crap is boring any way you paint it. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | What's your age, fw? |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dennis Atkins | SC, I'm not sure what you're asking. Are you asking if others have difficulty talking about nonnechnical subjects with others? |
| Wed 24 Dec | no name | I despise small talk beyond the 2 sentences I have to utter when buying a coffee. I also find that when I get in a conversation beyond pleasantries, there comes a time when someone will go beyond what I can swallow and it becomes too much... My wife takes care of a little girl after school. Her mother came over for an x-mas beverage and we exchanged the usual. After about 3 Nogs, we started to descend into her divorce, her belief in psychics, etc. This woman is the Director of Child Welfare in a large North American City. Big Cheese, Head Honcho, Buck stops here type of person and all I could think was 'What an idiot!' Probably my failing but it inevitably reaches this point. It's not that I can't or don't want to have these exchanges, it's just that they are so unsatisfying. Must be age and cynicism. Who the hell knows? And this is not to say that she didn't think the exact same thing about me. I touched briefly on physics, elegant universe on Nova and was met with the usual, 'Oh, you're a geek' look. 'How 'bout them Yankees?' |
| Thu 25 Dec | Thomas | Many people have a tendency to dislike, despise and ridicule that which we don't understand. That includes both geeks and non-geeks. Many geeks find small-talk boring because it's intellectually unsatisfying. There's little to engage the mental gears. Curiously enough, it's our focus on the mental and intellectual that makes us disliked by most people. Most people want to feel good and have fun -- and they have neither the inclination nor the intelligence to engage in intellectual discourse. My girlfriend, for example, refers to this website as 'Fog Geek'. I've found that there is a lot of value in kicking back and just having fun with people, instead of being bored by their lack of ability to participate in a discussion that requires a PhD and 150 IQ. -Thomas |
| Thu 25 Dec | Philo | I thrive on it. I love meeting new people, and despite spending half my life thinking I'm an introvert, I'm actually pretty gregarious. Did I mention my recent transition from 'geek' to sales? [grin] Philo |
| Thu 25 Dec | Dennis Atkins | I agree with Thomas. There's an old saying, "That dude needs to get laid." it's applied to people who are too uptight to know how to kick back and relate to people. I admit it's a bit hard for some -- I used to be s hy and it was hard to approach people. One key is to find a common interest. Another is to MAKE the conversation interesting for you. Are they interested in psychics? Fine, well I happen to be a psychic. Let's get out these playing cards my friends and I will introduce you to the amazing world of what is known as the Cold Reading. Soon you'll be the life of the party. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Warren Henning | 'Many geeks find small-talk boring because it's intellectually unsatisfying. There's little to engage the mental gears.' That's the most pretentious thing I've read in a while. Why does every last word that comes out of someone's mouth have to be 'intellectual'? What the hell do you say to someone when they've just rolled out of bed? 'Gee, you know, I was just pondering Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem and...' No. Does a 'good morning' pain your intellectual mind so much? Is that too much to ask, O Prodigious One? (Not addressing the author but that attitude in general.) No wonder so many of us have a tough time getting girls. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Tom Hathaway | You might have it backwards: Do programmers have bad social skills? Or do people with bad social skills flock toward programming? http://www.autism.org/temple/jobs.html 'In conclusion: a person with Asperger's syndrome or autism has to compensate for poor social skills by making themselves so good in a specialized field that people will be willing to 'buy' their skill even though social skills are poor' |
| Thu 25 Dec | Konrad | I definitely think other human beings are a lot more interesting and important than programming and science in general. There are some people that I know quite well that disagree and prefer to lose themselves in scientific findings or code. Usually these people have had pretty tough upbringings. I've certainly used work and programming as a distraction from human matters which are altogether more important. Programming is a process with extremely predictable results which you can easily control. The exact opposite of humans. I guess it is easier to talk about things in the context of science and/or programming - it is safe, and you aren't going to be hurt. To talk about peoples lives, their experiences, what things mean to them, and what they have learnt might not be as safe. Because you'll find that many other people have 'more' of what you want in their lives and it can be painful to hear about it. Easier to talk about coding huh? I certainly find it that way. Probably a sign that I should be talking about something else. Says he triumphantly, hanging around in JoelOnSoftware forums on Christmas day =). |
| Thu 25 Dec | Cletus | 'I despise small talk beyond the 2 sentences I have to utter when buying a coffee.' Ok we got it, hermit. I think you qualifiy for the 'needs to get laid' category... |
| Fri 26 Dec | Tired of geeks. | 'I despise small talk beyond the 2 sentences I have to utter when buying a coffee.' Gotta agree with Cletus, anyone who can't withstand withstand more than two sentences of dialogue has a problem. I used to hate small talk, like people talking about their dumb pet cat, their kids, etc. But it's so easy to learn to spew forth. Don't find it 'mentally stimulating'!? Then use it as a springboard for improvised jokes, daily levity, etc. It's disturbing how a so many people kid themselves into believeing their social dysfunction is somehow a symptom of some kind of imagined mental superiority. Either learn to socialize, or just be a happy hermit and shut up already! |
| Fri 26 Dec | Cletus | I can venture to guess that those who work and interact with the 'nameless hermit geek' feel they can't speak more then two sentences to him either. I can imagine some of the conversations going like this: Hapless Associate (HA) says, 'Hey, Nameless Hermit Geek (NHG), so how 'bout them Yankees? ' NHG replies, 'Did I ever tell you about Big O notation?' Hapless associate replies, 'Big O what? Who are they? Is that like some kinda new G spot or something' NHG then replies, 'H'about Little Endian vs. Big Endian' HA then remarks, 'What are those, AA baseball teams?' I wonder if there is some kind of 'Socializing for dummies' or 'The art of simple conversation for dummies & geeks' |
| Fri 26 Dec | MX | When I was young, I had the same problem - didn't know how to make smalltalk. The solution for learning how to smalltalk :) is simple: - for that moment, forget about thinking a lot - forget about the filter between your brain and your mouth - The essential rule is: just say what comes to mind - anything, even if it seems stupid I know these rules seem tough, but they work very well. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Thomas | >I wonder if there is some kind of 'Socializing for dummies' or 'The art of simple conversation for dummies & geeks' How about http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/155977505X/002-5955537-8351211?v=glance for starters :). -Thomas |
| Sat 27 Dec | www.marktaw.com | That book looks interesting, but my personal choice would be http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446676888 |
| Working at Microsoft | Wed 24 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy |
| Althought all the web articles Ive read till date about experiences of working at Microsoft have been on the positive side, I found this interesting article that speaks just the opposite. Ive a positive bias for Microsoft but this article made quite an interesting reading and I wanted to share with all you guys. http://archive.salon.com/sept97/21st/gates970925.html Merry Christmas! |
| Wed 24 Dec | Joel Spolsky | To be fair this person wasn't a programmer... |
| Wed 24 Dec | Code Monkey | Oh so....if one is not a programmer one should not expect to be treated decently at Microsoft? I am a programmer myself but I would never imagine treating a non-programmer with such disdain |
| Wed 24 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | Joel, would you know this guy who worked on the Excel team around 1994? http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2003/10/my_microsoft_wo.html |
| Wed 24 Dec | Joel Spolsky | Let's put it this way. If one is a programmer, one will be treated extra-well at Microsoft. Same applies to program managers and to a lesser extent testers. And it's still considered a great place to work, no matter what the job, although they do tend to rather take advantage of 'temps' who often end up being temps for years on end. But look -- Microsoft has something like 50,000 employees now and different people are going to have different experiences. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | The same site has also another article with a diammetrically opposite view. http://archive.salon.com/sept97/21st/apple970925.html But this isn't as interesting because its commonplace to hear goodies about Microsoft. I too would love to work at Microsoft and I won't mind at all the insane working hours. I am already used to them. At least one gets to do the work they love to do most, and then be appreciated. http://research.microsoft.com/news/monthlyfeature/intern.aspx That apart, think free Diet Coke, T-shirts, three week out of town vacations after a fire drill and all. This guy has got wonderful things to say on Chris's site about his getting interviewed there. http://www.sellsbrothers.com/fun/msiview/ Philo, its time you come up with a prolix detailing the interview process you underwent. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | >Microsoft has something like 50,000 employees now and different people are going to have different experiences Yuck! I agree with you. There's no debate in that, Joel. It was just that I found the article very interesting besides being written well. Of course, I dig that it isn't the same for all. For me particularly, I am sure like many others, MSFT is my dream workplace I'd like to be in. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Brad Wilson | And, also to be fair, that person worked at Microsoft a decade ago. Who says it's anything like that anymore? |
| Wed 24 Dec | Code Monkey | >MSFT is my dream workplace I'd like to be in Yeah I am sure like those Microsoft geeks you cannot resist the temptation to look down upon those whom you deem to be 'non-programmer'....probably the place to hone your for anti-social skills. I accept that there is a bias against temps everyplace e.g when I was a contractor at HP were were supposed to have our voice mail message say 'Hi I am XXXX a HP contractor' but never was I or even the other non-technical people like tech writers treated badly. I shudder to think how Microsoft must treat those 'non-programmer' janitorial temps. And for all the well treatment of programmers one would think that atleast those programmers would have delivered something original over the years :-) |
| Wed 24 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | It was dramatic in her description of the way she met Melinda. |
| Wed 24 Dec | K | Hopefully you learn some valuable things from your work experience no matter where you are. Clearly the author of this article learned some valuable things about herself and the kind of work environment in which she can thrive, though Microsoft was not that place. We should all be so lucky. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | >Yeah I am sure like those Microsoft geeks you cannot resist the temptation to look down upon those whom you deem to be 'non-programmer'... Good you braught this up. I was itching to post a question last night about this. I believe it is not so much about haughtiness than it is about seclusion and lack of sociability. I'll speak for myself. I, for instance, find it extremely difficult to relate to a conversation out of work when amoung a group of people. Unlike others, I do not enjoy loud routine type trite conversations. For the most part, I find myself trying to avoid a conversation beyond banalaties and/or an exchange of pleasantries. The other day, at the coffee vending machine, I found myself utterly helpless when my only companion, a guy from the marketing team, who was also a complete stranger to me just started to talk to me about things like how difficult he found it getting his toddler an admission in one of the pre-nursery schools. It left me in a completely helpless and embarrassing situation just counting time when I would relieve myself of this claptrap. Does it happen with you too? |
| Wed 24 Dec | fw | Look, some companies are good to work for, some aren't, it's all down to the leadership, it's also down to the guy who you report to. Say you work at google, and people may say it's great to work for, or microsoft, but the guy right over you is making your life hell, but things are getting done. 1) Work is happening. 2) You life is hell. 3) 99% of the people in the company may feel treated great. 4) You believe you're being treated like crap. Is that a good company to work for? Ideals are great, they are, but life isn't perfect, that company would still be great to work for, alas a small group may have issues with somebody. Don't paint 100,000 people with the brush, if it's good or bad. |
| Wed 24 Dec | JF | I wonder how much it has changed since September 1997. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Me | Sathyaish, I suspect you're probably in a certain sort of company that attracts certain sort of people. It is perfectly OK to dislike brash, loud people. I can't stand them either. There are lots of other types of people though, including in marketing and other fields. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Warren Henning | Salon, as a psuedo-hipster publication, is obligated by its status and reputation to shit on the acheivements of successful corporations such as Microsoft. Because we all know that big companies are evil establishments run by heartless white males. All programmers are antisocial geeks incapable of thinking about anything besides Star Wars the same way black people are naturally funky and talented at dancing and white people are unhip lamers who can't play basketball well. Lousy hack writers will always fall back on stereotypes and play to the reader's preconceived notions in a pinch. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Stephen Jones | The article is actually quite interesting, not because it says anything new. but because it states clearly and concisely what has been said in any other book I know about Microsoft. The tensions between programmers (normally male) and 'content' or 'design' (normally female) has always been there. The standard book to describe this is 'I sing the body electric', which describes the writing of a multi-media children's encyclopaedia. Now in that case the designers had the whip hand to some extent over the programmers because they were the ones who were deciding the way the project went, but when the product is mature then the 'designers' get low grade maintenance jobs, like going through every entry in Encarta to see if it should be cross-referenced. Now, we actually have complaints just like that woman's all the time on JOS; Bored Bystander is the most vocal in this respect. The difference is that instead of it being liberal arts graduates viewed as unimportant low level production workers by overweening programmers, it is tech-savvy geeky programmers being viewed as low level production workers by business types and rednecks. And sales and marketing of course looks down on all three, but is equally despised as parasitic, loud-mouthed and brash by all those who depend on its success for its salary. Geeky bullying is very common; I think it was Paul Graham who pointed out that whereas physical bullies had to learn to adapt when they left school, intellectual bullies found that with the importance of IT and the knowledge economy they could get away with it all the way through college, grad school and all the way up to VP. However much of what she is complaining about is simply a lack of social skills among programmers; most of us have been told that when introduced to somebody we are not supposed to say what we think ('Do I really need to know you') but to effusively shake their hand and say how pleasure meeting them gives, even if we are going to forget their name immediately (hint for those that have to meet a lot of people; do what actors do and call everybody 'darling' - saves alllocating stacks of memory). And much of it is simply that what she takes for rudeness is simply unawareness; people often complain that they see me in the corridor or the street and I walk straight past them. I tell them I hadn't seen them because I was thinking of something else, but to them the idea of walking down the street while having an internal debate is as alien as the idea of walking down the street and keeping your mind blank so you can respond to random stimulae and greetings is. The final problem is that the girl was just too inexperienced. She went to MS straight from college, and found that her first 'real job' was working in a completely alien environment for which she had no sympathy. Anybody who can work for years with software developers and not udnerstand why it is both normal, healthy and necessary to argue for hours, or even days or weeks about whether a button should go at the bottom or top, is clearly in the wrong place, and lacking some kind of empathy. Her inexperience sometimes turns into breathtaking naivety. Look at this comment: 'Microsoft was simply offering money-making schemes aimed at the young -- just a small notch above Joe Camel. ' This woman clearly has never ever worked with the mainstream educational companies that provide the textbooks that children everywhere in the world use. Microsoft is a Yale and Harvard combined compared to those places. We once went down to the office of the Spanish Catholic churches leading educational publisher with hundreds or thousands of captive schools. We were supposed to be rewriting their English textbooks. We passed by marketing, and the chief salesman's comment was 'We've got to have these books out in time to put them on the Disneyland promotion; what do they mean they can't write three textbooks in six weeks!'. The article does remind us of one thing; that most companies have a core culture, and that it is incredibly difficult to push things if you are outside the core culture. With MS it's code, but that has proved successful. Britannica had everything going for it in the online Encyclopaedia market; after all it was content oriented, and that is what Encyclopaedias are about. But it's programming was such crap Encarta took over most of its market. (I think with the 1999 version you had to actually manually change the proxy settings in Internet Explorer if you connected to the Internet through a proxy even though you were running the encyclopaedia offline, and it would throw a javascript exception (object not known) that meant you had to stop WDM from running automatically (an MS idiocy that one) or you couldn't run Britannia at all). There is also a final thing to bear in mind here; Gates tries to hire the best even for non-programming positions. However very often the work they are given is many levels below their intellectual ability. To use somebody with a major in education to cross reference every entry in Encarta is just asking for dissatisfied staff. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Just wanted to try the darling thing yeah it works for me that's cool | Darling, I want to thank you so much for your post! I enjoyed every moment of it! Really I did! |
| Fri 26 Dec | xMsft | Oh Come On. She said she never wanted to work there to begin with. That alone would taint her entire experience. And then to blame it all in Bill?! Ridiculous! I worked as MS straight out of college. It was a blast. Yes I am a geeky programmer. And sure there were some 'not friendly people'. But MS is full of happy, enthusiastic, commited and friendly people who want to be there. They hire at least 3K new employees every year, so you can always find fellow newbies. IIRC retension is way above average about 95%, and the average MSFTie works for 5 years. ( Conincidently options vest in 4.5 years ). My group and my building were ~85% Male( we counted), thats just a reality of our field. And yes we would sometimes have lunch in other building where there were more women. Hey, there is nothing wrong with enjoying the company of women. It was a running joke that single women didnt last long at MSFT, they got married. I left MS to join a startup. Mostly I dont regret it, but I got lucky... |
| Fri 26 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | Only if I were that lucky, xMsft. I wish I worked at MSFT. I really do. |
| Sat 27 Dec | T. Norman | The situation with the woman in that article seems to be more about not fitting in, and having a disdain for, the culture that existed in Microsoft, and not about any systematic mistreatment from them (except maybe the contractor vs. employee aspect). She could hardly be from a more foreign background. Female, an English major, with no experience in a technical firm. The things she said showed that she had no desire to go near any techie types in college. And she took the job out of desperation. I'm not surprised she had a bad time there. Both Microsoft and she are better off that she's gone. |
Sat 27 Dec | Albert D. Kallal | >>The situation with the woman in that article seems to be more about not fitting in, and having a disdain for, the culture that existed in Microsoft
I can’t agree more with the above.
Most, if not a VERY large portion of the people who get education at University do so for reasons of prestige. You know the types, and the only real important thing is people with a bunch of degrees (and, if you don’t have one, then who now is getting the dis-respect? No degree = dog)
In other words, the commodity in people is based on the degrees and letters after your name, NOT what you can actually accomplish. Microsoft is the exact opposite! Even Joel’s has some amazing stories about how even seniority and number of years of service to the company in many cases DOES NOT hold weight when trying to complete a project. In other words, instead of things like political in-fighting, and seniority being the rule of the day, the rule at MS is simply incredible people get incredible things done.
To quote from her article:
No matter your number of degrees, your ageOrThe developer was probably 5 feet 6 inches tall and around 25 years old; the editor had a law degree and at least five years on the guy, not to mention a few inchesSure, the law degree is what should harbor the most respect here? The fact is the law degree means bunkus at MS. I sure this person wishes that MS was like most institutions where things like gossip, politicking, and in fighting, and climbing the corporate latter is the most important aspect of work. Of, and lets not forget all the gossip about what people are doing, who they are dating, and the kind of clothes they wear! (gee, really important stuff to be sure for a women like this). A large portion simply live for this type of stuff, and going to a company where all the fluff is gone was most certainly a culture shock. Unfortunately, the culture at MS is simple one of performance, and getting the job done seems to be the only commodity that has any value. For most people, this is not the kind of company they want to work for. This is especially so if you are not a performance based type of person. For a lot of other people, a company based on performance and skills is exactly what they are looking for. (and for many others, a company where you can get by on social climbing skills is the most value) Each to their own. I certainly know I hated the arts in school since everything was so opinion based. At least in math and physics, even if I did not like the teacher, or the teacher did not like me...there was usually a right answer to be found (I could get great marks, and still be my own person). In the arts, if the teacher did not like me...I was sunk, since so much of the results was based on opinion, and not a definable answer. If they don’t like you, you get crap marks. The same goes for companies like General Motors. If you are a bit different, or don’t like to get involved the local gossip train, forget about EVER GETTING promotion. The real smart people can’t bail out and get away from companies like GM. You can see the trouble in GM, as they have been loosing the car market for 30 years in a row, and are now in danger of loosing the entire passer car market to competitors. As a company, they need a serious culture change to turn around this terrible slide. In fact, as a company they are now in danger is having to get out of the passenger car market altogether! This whole issue is much like many teachers and educators who now want to remove exams and testing as to not hurt people’s feelings. The problem is, we as a society need companies that are based on good skilled people, and in the real world, good skills do in fact count. Worse, is we need to know how well the schools are doing! Many wish we could wish away performance...but we can't. I can certainly see why this person did not like working for a company that is not based on the yours vs my opinion arts type crowd. There is nothing wrong with her attitude, but in survey after survey, MS comes out consistently as one the best companies to work for. She really belongs in a Government job. Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada kallal@msn.com http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn |
| Sat 27 Dec | Philo | Sometimes I wish we could declare threads as finished, because IMHO there's some good discussion here, and Albert expertly summed up the whole thing. I honestly don't think there's anything more to be said. :-) Philo |
| Sat 27 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | We'd all sure love it if we could email this thread to the lady who wrote that article. |
| Hackers and Painters | Wed 24 Dec | Dustin Alexander |
| http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html Just stumbled on this when a colleague pointed it out. Im sure others here have linked to Mr. Grahams work in the past. What do you think of these analogies and thoughts? |
| Wed 24 Dec | K | If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stomping 'lambda' on a human face, forever. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Matt Latourette | Well, considering that I am both a programmer and a watercolorist and I'm writing a novel as well, I'd say he's onto something. |
| Wed 24 Dec | no name | How do you figure Matt? I was thinking that we were more like plumbers. Why, just today I (a programmer, note) was fixing a clog in my bathtub drain. See my point? |
| Wed 24 Dec | Matthew Lock | I particularly liked the idea that each task should take around an hour. I have adopted that way of breaking up my tasks and it's great for morale. |
| Wed 24 Dec | no name | > Well, considering that I am both a programmer and a watercolorist and I'm writing a novel as well, I'd say he's onto something. You too? I used to do oil landscapes and will again when I get the time, but am also embarked on a novel. And, yes, I know what I'm doing. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Robbert de Groot | I won't say I'm anywhere pro but I like pen and ink myself. Easy to do anywhere especially when waiting for a plane. Shameless link (www3.telus.net/robbert) For me, I was deciding on Architecture or Computer Science when I entered University. CS won out. I still like to draw. I know I'm not a great writer though but I have a couple or comic book projects (slow going) that I do that needs some story planning and writing. You really don't want to see the scripts. (shudder.) But I'd like to improve that. Then again, I'm the only programmer in my company with any artistic talent so I get to do all the icons. (Icon Man! Ping!) So not every programmer is artistically inclined. Everyone is different. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Just me (Sir to you) | 'I'm sure others here have linked to Mr. Graham's work in the past. ' indeed: http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=42386 |
| Sat 27 Dec | www.marktaw.com | K, are you a Theodore Steurgon fan? I seem to recall that quote from one of his stories. Though it was probably from 1984 and he was quoting. |
| Q for Independent Consultants - end user focus? | Wed 24 Dec | Bored Bystander |
| Which of you guys or gals actively market to and work with end users in your business? As opposed to either working through a body shop (agency) for an IT organization, or free lancing to an IT or programming organization? For those who market to end users, please describe how you got started and how you got away from working for IT manager types or other technical/managerial go-betweens. (I assume that almost everyone who programs for a living in the western world got started on someones payroll working on previously defined requirements.) Any other comments on that type of work appreciated. Thanks! |
| Wed 24 Dec | Simon Lucy | Most if not all of the end user type clients I've had and still have came by word of mouth or recommendation and a lot of them are accounting system users where I've provided some adaptation to their particular kind of business often at the ordering end, but not always. One kind of difference in these clients is the amount of trust placed on you and the reliance of your recommendations. Which means when you get it wrong you work twice as hard to put it right. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Tom Vu | 'I assume that almost everyone who programs or a living in the western world got started on someone's payroll working on previously defined requirements' I didn't. I started by writing programs for myself and then helped someone I knew for free, then was recommended by him to someone else, and so on. As far as marketing, if you can't do it through word of mouth then perhaps write articles, a book, website blog, offer a free simple application. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | At all places I've always worked directly with clients. The greatest advantage is that if you get things right, when you do, they pamper and respect you a lot. It feels great. Luckily, I've had wonderful people as clients, most of them worked as programmers earlier, at Netscape or other organizations, so it was easy for them to understand SDLC issues and the practicalities of software development. They are more enduring than the honchos in the adminisphere that pester you when you don't code crazy to deliver a feature that should take 10 weeks in 10 days. But I wouldn't know how to place yourself in an employment where you get to directly interact with the client. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Bored Bystander | Thanks for the responses. I thought this would be a topic that would interest people because it's an avenue to being independent. I take the few responses to indicate that not very many programmers actually work with end users in their own businesses. Or that my title was poor. Or something. I guess everyone wants to be on someone else's salary. (blatant troll to get more traffic... ;-) ) |
| Fri 26 Dec | There you go | I'll add another little troll: I've said numerous times that most programmers are socially retarded. The exact thing you cannot be if you want to have a succesful practice. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Bored Bystander | And I'll raise your troll by one more. ;-) I see that the 'non-Emacs editor' thread now has 24 posts. What an important issue - who cares how anyone does business when the text editor has to be decided? A customer doesn't give a rat's @$$ whether you use vi, notepad or a Scrabble board to edit text. Perhaps the techie infatuation with the best possible tech creates a genuine opportunity for anyone who wants to do whatever it takes (without exchanging bodily fluids in the process ;-) ) to earn a buck. |
| Sat 27 Dec | T. Norman | Text and code editors are tools of the trade, which can make a difference in productivity. Photographers will debate each other about brands of film, and carpenters will debate about the best drill. So ain't nothing wrong with programmers talking about text editors, as long as they don't take that talk to the client, just as plumbers don't discuss their tools with homeowners. |
| Joel on installing Debian | Mon 22 Dec | Jonas B. |
| Joel mentioned that Debian is close to impossible to install. I understand this is an exaggeration to make a point but please note that Debian is very much a community software and there are several ways of installing it. The one Joel probably tried is the one you get from downloading the official CD images. This is sadly enough an antique version and you probably dont want to use that, unless your aim is to write yet another rant about how hard to use free software is. Probably the easiest way, and what I personally believe is the future of OS installers, is to use a live CD. The method isnt very polished. Expect some rough edges still, but it will be much easier than the old method. The one for Debian is called Knoppix and you will find all the installation instructions you need here (taken from a simple Google search): http://bofh.be/clusterknoppix/knx-install.htm (the ISO files are at http://www.knoppix.org/ .) There is also the next generation of the Debian installer as it works on the official CDs available. It is only in beta status but I have used it many times and have had no trouble with it. There are some minor glithes, such as in the LILO step which imho is still too hard, but at least it will detect your hardware for you. Find images here (this URL will probably move as the software matures): http://freedesktop.org/~daniel/d-i/ There is also a third new installation method of Debian. It is the Red Hat installation program for Debian. This is the least ready of the three projects and I would not recommend an end user to try this yet. Find more info here: http://platform.progeny.com/anaconda/ Remember that it doesnt matter which method you use to install the software. When it is installed it will look the same no matter how you install it. Please note that I am not a member of the Debian project, I only use it from time to time. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Joel Spolsky | Yes, I used the official ISOs. I just followed the instructions on the Debian home page. They didn't mention anything about Knoppix. I'm glad there's an easier way to do it, but it's too bad you need to know the secret to find the easier way. This is kind of typical of Unix, I'm afraid to say: if you already know what to do, it's not so hard, so the veterans don't realize what a hard to use world they've constructed. They see screens that say, 'please choose a root password' and they don't even see the word 'root' as being something an amateur might not know already. To them it looks like a completely usable screen. |
| Mon 22 Dec | christopher baus (www.baus.net) | I real amateur might wonder what a password is for. What do you do in that situation? At some point you have to make some assumptions about your user. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Portabella | I've had trouble installing Debian as well. I tried to do an install using an existing Linux box, which sounds like a great idea: you download all the sources, do a chroot to the sources directory and make it look like what you want to see when you boot up. I never could get it to work; debootstrap always reported an error. I asked for help on one of the IRC channels, and got total silence. I gave up, and tried some other things which did work (*) All in all, not a very positive experience... and this after I'd heard so many good things about the distribution. * If you're curious, I was trying to get Linux to run from a Compact Flash card instead of a hard disk (after recovering from one too many disk crashes), and I was having lots of trouble with the bootloaders. I finally used a program called syslinux which works flawlessly. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Almost Anonymous | I've posted this before, but here we go again: Try one of the debian-based distrubtions instead of just debian. They are easier to install, come with a nice setup, and are otherwise pure debian. I recommend Libranet which you can download from http://www.libranet.com/ Also, I believe that Lycoris desktop/lx is also debian based. http://www.lycoris.com/products/desktoplx/ -- you can download it from linuxiso.org Of course, you can also install Lindows (also debian-based)... |
| Mon 22 Dec | christopher baus (www.baus.net) | Actually ... thinking about this some more... As a seasoned Unix admin, I'd like to know when I am setting the root password. I don't want that be hidden. If the installer said Administrative password, I might not be sure if that is a user account or indeed the root account. Also is calling it the Administrative password really that much better? Many users don't want to be Administrators. In my opinion, there is no such thing as the one size fits all UI or the the one size fits all installer. Joel, have you considered rolling your own distro and selling a dedicated fog bugz server? Then you could have any installer you want for your target audience. Just ship an ISO for x86 systems. No making 5 different install types. I've thought about doing this myself... |
| Mon 22 Dec | Stephen Jones | I've never even thought about the root problem both times I've installed Mandrake. It may be because I know what root means, but I think Joel is wrong about it being a barrier for entry. Your grandma won't know what root means but she will know that it is her job to provide a password, and she'll do that without any more ado. I suspect that the jargon that Joel refers to is still there because it hasn't been too much of a problem. Perhaps Joel could tell us how Red Hat gets round this problem. It certainly would be better if you didn't need to use the term root, but if Red Hat lets you leave the root password blank, then I'm sorry but I reckon Mandrake's way is superior. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Joel Spolsky | I can't remember precisely; I think that Red Hat had some help on the side which explained what root was. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Gamut | >I real amateur might wonder what a password is for. >What do you do in that situation? >At some point you have to make some assumptions about >your user. Are you really serious? Any decent person would know what a password is for. How about 'root'? Do you think non-unix users would know what a 'root' user is? |
| Mon 22 Dec | Stephen Jones | You could argue that the explanation would simply confuse, and wouldn't be suitable during an install. A short explanation saying 'Root is what you might need later on if you want to install more programs; just put in the password for now' would probably be OK. A little button marked 'more info' would probably be the best of both worlds. I would think that everybody faced with a dialog box asking you to provide a root password would simply fill in a password. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Brad Wilson | I've used Linux in one form or another for at least a decade, pre-dating 1.0 and 'distributions' (Slackware being the first) by a healthy margin. I'm not a Linux expert, but I'm about 3 miles from the Newbie Camp(tm). I couldn't install Debian to save my life. The one time I tried I was thoroughly confused. I've even installed Gentoo easily and successfully! That doesn't speak very kindly to Debian. |
| Mon 22 Dec | John Rose | A couple of years ago, I installed Debian without much trouble. And I'm a near-complete Linux newbie. Maybe I just got lucky or something, but I didn't think it was too terribly difficult. |
| Tue 23 Dec | christopher baus (www.baus.net) | >I real amateur might wonder what a password is for. >What do you do in that situation? >At some point you have to make some assumptions about >your user. Yes I'm serious. When I startup my DVD player it doesn't ask for a password. I'm sure it would confuse my grandma. 'What was my password again, sonny? grandma@internet.com' |
| Tue 23 Dec | Dan Maas | I am dumbfounded why there aren't any Linux installations that just copy a complete filesystem image to your disk. Why have all these complex steps to install things, when you could just untar an image of the system and be done with it?! I use this method on new systems here. When I buy a new machine I don't run an installer, I just clone the disk from the last machine. Works great. (I do have to remember to change the hostname and generate unique SSH host keys, but those steps, and any additional custom setup, are trivially automated) |
| Tue 23 Dec | Stephen Jones | ---'I am dumbfounded why there aren't any Linux installations that just copy a complete filesystem image to your disk.'---- For the same reason that there aren't any Windows installations that do that either (unless you buy the OS preinstalled on a machine and you can get Linux preinstalled as well). What you are doing is installing Windows on one machine and then making an image. Anybody installing Linux on to multiple identical machines will do exactly the same thing. But for a couple of machines it's not worth it. Remember that a Linux distro installs everything, whereas with Windows you need to install each program separately. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Dominic Fitzpatrick | Installing (well, trying to) Debian today reminds me of my first Linux attempts 6-7 years ago with early verisons of SuSe (frustration and abject failiure to get anything working except bash). Maybe the next full release will be better. If you want complete control over the installation process and high performance, I would suggest Gentoo. Caveats - have a fast PC since you will be compiling all your software and don't massively optimize gcc, glib etc. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Ori Berger | Dan - Knoppix comes very close to your ideal. First, it's actually usable directly from CD, no need to install or anything. But when the time comes that you need to install new software, which, sadly, can't be done to a CD, you boot it again, saying the magic combination 'knoppix hdx-install' at the boot prompt (to which you answer by pressing the 'enter' key if you want to run from CD), and though you will need to answer a few questions, it basically just copies the CD to the hard disk. Really, anyone thinking that Linux is hard to get working, download a recent version of Knoppix (which I've played with), Mepis, Texstar (which I haven't played with, but heard great things about) or MandrakeMove (which I heard is reasonably ok). You're in for a surprise. On my 'vintage' Athlon-800, Knoppix goes from boot prompt to loaded desktop at 45 seconds. That includes hardware detection, configuration, loading of window manager, etc. No knowledge required, just pop the CD into the drive, boot from CD, and count to 45. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Portabella | > Why have all these complex steps to install things, when you could just untar an image of the system and be done with it?! There are some distros that do work exactly that way (eg, Pebble), and that's what I do to clone the Compact Flash distribution that I use. It's easy, but at the same time very limiting. Also, a simple untar typically will not create a bootable aystem, you have to run a script to do that. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Florian | Every Linux user MUST know the concept of the root user. I see no sense in trying to hide this well established principle of anything Unix from new users who come from DOS/Windows. The probability of someone who has no idea about "root" installing Linux on his PC to know someone who does have Unix knowledge and whom he can ask is very high. Equally high as communication problems to arise when this person's local Linux guru keeps talking and asking about "root" and the Linux newcomer has never heard that term. And when the newcomer keeps mentioning something like an "administrative password" which the personal Linux guru won't be able to make any sense of. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Philo | 'Every Linux user MUST know the concept of the root user. I see no sense in trying to hide this well established principle of anything Unix from new users who come from DOS/Windows' Agreed. The question is - why not teach it? IMHO the problem with the Linux community isn't the level of technical knowledge required - it's that nobody ever seems to want to bother teaching it. Try this in any Linux forum: 1) Ask 'What does 'root' mean?' 2) If you get reasonable, meaningful answers, then say 'So it's like 'Administrator' on a Windows machine?' I'll bet you that at step 2 all help will cease and the forum will devolve into name-calling, talk about monopolies, and complaints about Windows vulnerabilities. Philo |
| Tue 23 Dec | Stephen Jones | Sorry, Florian and Philo, but you're both wrong. The average win XP Home user probably does not know what Administrator means, and unless he wants to install software won't ever need to. If you're just using Linux for Word Processing, picture imaging and surfing the web you might never need to install any programs and will never come across root. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Portabella | > The average win XP Home user probably does not know what Administrator means Administrator is a common, well-understood English word with an unambiguous mapping to the computer domain ('adminster the computer'), while root is not. If the UserLinux folks are serious, they'll call the root password the 'Administrator password'. I'd still like a Power Users install. In my aforementioned Compact Flash saga, many of the common distros simply would not install to a 256 MB CF card because it didn't have enough space to run a desktop. Mandrake apparently had a minimal installation option but deleted it in the interest of user friendliness :( |
| Tue 23 Dec | Portabella | > the forum will devolve into name-calling, talk about monopolies, and complaints about Windows vulnerabilities. As opposed to *this* forum, with its name-calling, talk about OSS, and complaints about Linux... anything, really. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Philo | Where's the namecalling in this thread? It reads to me like a reasoned discussion of the vagaries and drawbacks of a non-Linux user installing Linux. In all sincerity, I cannot *imagine* a thread like this about installing Windows on a Linux board/channel/froup. Philo |
| Tue 23 Dec | old_timer | Well Joel, welcome to my world. Bwahahahaha! Seriously, Stephen is right. No Linux distribution is quite ready for Joe Sixpack yet. There is a basic assumption that one has a passing knowledge of unix terminology from the beginning. It is a system by programmers for programmers. Again, you have to read the E.S. Raymond book, 'The Art of Unix Programming' to understand where they are coming from. I would agree that a simple line or two of text explaining what a root user is would dispell some confusion. But there should be a default install that requires NO THOUGHT at all for the mom and pop home users. Unix developers would rather die a slow and agonizing death than do that. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Portabella | > In all sincerity, I cannot *imagine* a thread like this about installing Windows on a Linux board/channel/froup How many of those do you actually *read*, Philo? I've picked up some great ideas for Windows this-n-that on Slashdot, and it excels, for obvious reasons, at Windows-Linux integration discussions. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Portabella | > Unix developers would rather die a slow and agonizing death than do that. This sounds like wishful thinking from the Windows world. Oh, I'm not doubting that there are Unix guys who feel that way, but there's a steady progression of usability, and all the finger-pointing at the old die-hards won't change it. |
| Tue 23 Dec | anonymous | I agree with Stephen Jones; the average Windows user does not really know what the Administrator account is for. This entire discussion is about a problem that doesn't exist anyways. The average user doesn't install operating systems. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Florian | I don't think he was referring to increased usability but rather Unix developers leaving the root account unprotected in order to make an installation easier for grandma. I would even agree that an average XP home user wouldn't know what an Administrator account means and what to do with it. Which makes me wonder how MS deals with this. Because simply not setting a password for root can't be the solution. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Portabella | I think the ultimate answer is that grandma-type end users will not do their own administration. We basically can't do that in the current scheme of things, but I think that's how it's going to turn out. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Philo | 'How many of those do you actually *read*, Philo?' A LOT. Not as much now as when I was running a Linux firewall, tho. Back then (all of 18 months ago) was when I got my real taste of the 'much vaunted Linux user community', which is why I finally got frustrated and tossed Linux. The problem is that there's a circular logic attitude - if you don't know the basics, you can't learn the basics. 'RTFM' doesn't help when the man page assumes the knowledge you're trying to gain. I still subscribe to slashdot's daily summary, and read stories now and then. I generally only get about 5-10 articles down before the anti-Redmond vitriol gets too thick to stomach. 'I've picked up some great ideas for Windows this-n-that on Slashdot, and it excels, for obvious reasons, at Windows-Linux integration discussions.' Uh-huh. I have to ask - how much of that is from the point of view of 'well, if you simply *must* deal with Windows...' [grin] Philo |
| Tue 23 Dec | Portabella | > how much of that is from the point of view of 'well, if you simply *must* deal with Windows.. Who cares? The discussions have useful info, and at the end of the day that's what counts. The Linux community is also well-known for HOWTOs, and I've gotten a lot of mileage out of them. A good HOWTO tells you what to do, and (in a separate section) why it works, and the background info to understand what you're doing *if you want to*. I wish the Windows world had them. |
| Tue 23 Dec | JBaugher | Oh, but the Windows World (tm) does have them. And it's quite easy to get to. On Windows 95 through XP, all you have to do is go 'Start -> Help' then enter a topic you need information about. Granted, Win95/98 didn't have the How-Tos, but ME, 2000,and XP do. And a good portion (I'd say 95%+) give you step-by-step instructions on how to do things. And you also get good information about the hows and whys of things in Windows, as well. But, for some odd reason, I see many, many people complain that Microsoft documents nothing, and how *agonizing* it is to search Microsoft.com (I've never had troubles with that) for information. And all they have to do is open Windows Help. Granted, it's not as technically descriptive as man pages are, but it gives you the information you need. |
| Tue 23 Dec | DCP | Joel caught my eye with this one because I just installed Debian in vmware myself a few days ago. This is without ever having installed Debian before, although I have previous linux/unix experience. I really didn't have any problems at all speeding through the install process. I was surprised when I read his article because I took it to mean Joel as an experienced computer user was having problems installing Debian. I got that impression from the sentence : 'Debian is very close to impossible, even for geeks'. But reading the comments what I'm getting is that he's saying that if he were a amateur (i.e not a tech person ) it might be hard to install. I don't think there's any argument about that. Grandma doesn't know what root is. Got it. However, Joel should and so should you. The Debian install is not particularly hard if you have a small basis of knowledge in unix or linux. It's the original supposition that bothers me ( that it is a hard install even for geeks ) not the revised ( that it is a hard install for grandma ). |
| Wed 24 Dec | Stephen Jones | You've misread the article. It was Mandrake he was saying might be a hard install for Grandma. He had genuine difficulties installing Debian, his exact words being. ---'Debian is very close to impossible, even for geeks.' |
| Wed 24 Dec | Richard P | And how does Windows Server 2003 eliminate the need for the user to know what a Domain is? Would you like to format using FAT32 or NTFS? OMG! So hard even a geek couldn't install it!!!!!! Debian has never claimed to be a Joe Sixpack distribution. It is dedicated to being the best Linux it can be for those functions where Linux excels now. Debian stable is nowhere near cutting edge. It's all about being a secure, easily maintained, flexible system. I think Joel's comments on Debian are a little bit of hyperbole. So maybe Debian shouldn't be your first distro, but I sure stopped distro-shopping once I got the hang of it. |
| Fri 26 Dec | F.O. Tempel | Normally I tend to avoid responding in forums belonging to a blog. But alas, this particular subject is dear to my heart as avid debian user and advocate. A few points I've seen come up in the thread: - 'Pure' debian is hard to install, use Knoppix/Lindows/Gnoppix/Xandros/Libranet/etc instead. Joel didn't see the mention of these distributions at all when he did the one proper thing: Read the installation manual on www.debian.org. There's a good reason for that, the Debian project is not in any way affiliated with said distributions. They're only Debian derived. Worse yet, these are pure desktop distributions, which might not even include all of Joel's requirements for running his server based software without going through a lot of headaches trying to install 'Official' packages from the Debian repository on them. - Why can't an installer simply copy all required files onto the harddisk instead of doing everything the hard way? Well, that's basically what debootstrap does for you. It untars the base packages for you into a mountpoint, which will become the root filesystem after the next reboot. But after the initial setup of the system, this method doesn't work anymore (as Slackware users should be able to confirm), and you'll want to use a decent package manager and database for all software you install. Repeat: The reason is that it's much better manageable that way. However, that's usually not the problem. Most users don't seem to have an immediate problem getting the basic installation up and running (you know, the curses based 'text' installer, which, IMHO is still one of the better in the market...it will guide you through the installation step by step, in the right order) but with the next step...tasksel, and worse: dselect. Both these tools are horribly inadequate with today's standards. Luckily it's being worked on, as mentioned above. Anyway, part of the impossibility for Joel to install debian is likely because of the use of VMware. I don't know offhand whether or not VMWare for windows uses IDE or SCSI disk emulation by default, but if it's SCSI Joel would have to load the proper driver module first, else there won't be any disks to install on. And that is something which is *not* something which is done easily with the default text installer of debian, unless you're a bit familiar with it. In fact, I don't even think the right module is supplied with the default installer kernel, so you're stuck with using a floppy to load the module, which implies a second machine handy to actually be able to compile the module. If it was IDE emulation which was used, then I don't really see the problem, unless picking the right network card module was...(hint: pcnet32). Anyway, to make a long story short: Debian can be hard to install, but Joel's claim of it being impossible even to a geek...I can't go along with that one. - The last 'big' thing raised is the 'Linux community' and its attitude. These points are usually raised by people who are not part of said community (which, btw, I don't think exists as such), and desperately expect help and support the same way as they got their Linux distribution in the firstplace: For free. Well, sometimes you can get lucky. There are a lot of places people can go to for their free support. Distribution's mailing lists and forums, forums like those found on www.linuxquestions.org, etc. Sometimes even on IRC, if you manage to pick the right network and channel. But hey, since it's free support, your mileage may vary. As a reasonably experienced and seasoned linux user I can assure you that it's much more enjoyable to help someone out who is able to ask a coherent question about a challenging problem than to reiterate the answers as they are found in HOWTOs, FAQs and even online manual pages over and over again. So, if someone sees a RTFM from someone with some 'seniority' in the support channel in question (i.e. moderators, operators and users which are treated with respect by the first two groups), it's probably something which you should have done a long time ago. Following posting guidelines, channel rules, reading FAQ URLs, sticky topics, and in general http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html usually helps a lot too. In short: We CANNOT and WILL NOT provide you your free support in sufficient quality if you're not willing to work with us! If that turns you away from using Linux, or whatever else you're looking support for, well, so be it. It may sound elitist, and maybe it is, but since it's free support you're looking for, I preserve the right to decide in which form and to who I provide it. Pay me my usual consultancy fee, and I'll be more than happy to provide support on *your* terms. Okay, I think, that should about cover all I have to say. Joel, keep up the good work on your products and site, and kudos for not forgetting Debian in your supported configurations. Some URLs which might be of use to you: http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/ http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/ Because if anything, at least Debian documents its packaging guidelines for its distribution. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Clay Dowling | Joel, Before you claim that these free UNIX products are too difficult to use, you'd better sit down and do some thinking about your product and how it's going to be used. If you don't you're in for some rude shocks when your product hits the streets, and you'll be dropping the UNIX product within the year. First, you tried to install these distributions under emulation, not actually on the raw hardware. You're lucky you got anything to install at all. As a CEO your time is very valuable; you need to spend it as effectively as possible. Hard disks are cheap. Buy a few and install to those, instead of wasting your time with a virtual machine. Your end users certainly aren't going to be setting up their servers with a virtual machine. Their product is going to be running on the hardware 24/7. Second, your product is being sold to developers. Think like a developer here, not Grandma. Developers are used to doing hard things. If they have a UNIX machine in their shop, they'd better know what the root account is. Think about your product in terms of the intended audience, not in terms of one that won't ever exist. This is important, because it will help you put your efforts into the right place, not the wrong place. One of the things this means is that you shouldn't be spending a lot of time making installers. Installing a PHP application should usually be as simple as copying the files to their destination, setting up a database, and modifying some config files. At least the file copying should be manually; usually by extracting a tarball. Scripts to manage configuration files and database setup are fine, but they should be pretty universal. All free UNIX distributions come with scripting languages, and writing one in PHP is also simple. I've just given you advice that a lot of people would be happy to charge you thousands of dollars for, under the guise of consulting. You've just gotten it for free. If I sound a little harsh, then my tone came through correctly. You're not living up to your reputation as a smart guy that people should listen to about the computer business. We all expect better. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Just me (Sir to you) | Clay, I have the feeling you should try VMWare. If you are curently doing QA for multiple setups by rebooting and reimaging different harddisks, you are really, and I mean really really, going to like it. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Clay Dowling | I use the faster solution of keeping four systems available at all times. That covers the different machines that I need. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Stephen Jones | ----' and desperately expect help and support the same way as they got their Linux distribution in the firstplace: For free.'------ What they are expecting is the same level of civility and support they get from the Windows community when they have a problem there. And they are unlikely to be simply told to refer to the Help File, let alone search the Knowledge Base or read the Resource Kit, even though all three of these are probably a lot more accessible than the Linux docomentation. |
| Fri 26 Dec | F.O. Tempel | 'And they are unlikely to be simply told to refer to the Help File, let alone search the Knowledge Base or read the Resource Kit, even though all three of these are probably a lot more accessible than the Linux docomentation.' Give the man a fish, and he'll eat for the day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat the rest of his life. I disagree that the knowledge base and the resource kit are more accessible than random linux documentation. I know, I wade through it daily in search for answers so I can support the 800+ users on the Windows network I administer. (There, I've said it...I'm not a programmer, I'm a system engineer/administrator.) Searched through the Microsoft knowledge base recently? It's a steaming pile of dogpoo. And what exactly is wrong with referring people to the builtin help function? That's what it's there for...to provide help. I can't help but think that what the 'Windows community' does provide in the form of help and support pollutes the views of how Linux support should work. See above mantra. If someone is unwilling to learn, only looks for a free ride, and in general doesn't provide anything back in return aside from 'You guys suck because you didn't want to help me', why should we as 'Linux community' go through that ordeal in the firstplace? So maybe we like to pick which kind of users we want. Maybe we couldn't care less about Joe Sixpack, because basically he's a burden on the support mechanism which is geared towards people who are not afraid of some effort. Besides, there's always the easy Windows System waiting, loyally, for their defected users, who though the grass was greener on the other side of the fence, but found out the hard way that the fence is aligned with barbed wire. Elitest? You bet. Offtopic? Indeed. The truth? Who knows, I can only see things from my standpoint...and thusfar it's not a pretty sight. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Stephen Jones | So you've proved that the Windows community is much nicer and welcoming than the Linux community. Perhaps Bill or Steve could put it in their next marketing campaign. Windows: made by bastards for really nice guys as opposed to Linux: the altruists' present to the sociopath. |
| Sat 27 Dec | F.O. Tempel | Hmm, you're one having your heart set on proving something. Oh well, I guess I should have stayed in the woodworks instead of commenting on blogs. Oh well, my mistake. Luckily I learn from mine, as opposed to some. |
| Sat 27 Dec | Stephen Jones | What happened Mr. Tempel is that about four years back a friend had a query in MS Office I couldn't answer and I wnet to an online forum andasked for help. I got it, and have asked maybe a dozen or so questions on different forums in the last four years. I have alse answered thousands of questions posed by other people. Now if somebody had told me to RTFM, (and yes the answer to my very first question could have been found through Office help if I'd have really searched) then I would probably never have bothered using an online forum again. The point is that most of the times I have seen people being told to RTFM, look in the help file, search the knowledge base or 'stop being fricking lazy and google for it', it has not been at all clear what search terms they should have used, or they had already done so, or they just hadn't done any of these things before. In fact I would say that RTFM is normally the kind of reaction you get from somebody who is not prepared to even read the original question properly and sees onlne communites as ways of bolstering his ego. |
| Clear the console output | Fri 26 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy |
| Ive Googled and also gone through the .NET Frameworks Console class members but I dont seem to find an equivalant of [CMD]tput clear[/CMD] or [CMD]clrscr()[/CMD]. Is there a way I can clear the console ouput using VB.NET? |
| Fri 26 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | There seems to be a [METHOD]Clear[/METHOD] in the LongHorn prelim. documentation but none that I can find for .NET 1.0.3705. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Chris Nahr | Yes, there doesn't seem to be any way to directly manipulate the contents of .NET consoles. That's probably because they're attachable to text streams. If it's important to your application you might want to use the Platform SDK functions instead -- Win32 provides all the console functions that you'll ever need, including cursor positioning and directly changing chars & attributes. But I don't know how you would make Win32 functions operate on a .NET console, if it's at all possible. Perhaps you can convert the window handle somehow? |
| Fri 26 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | I've developed Win32 console apps too, but to my knowledge, even Win32 does not expose an entry point to clear the console, while it does provide for flushing console buffers. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Chris Nahr | There's no Clear() function but you can directly manipulate the screen buffer to achieve the same effect. To clear the console, either use FillConsoleOutputCharacter with a space character or use ScrollConsoleScreenBuffer to scroll away all existing lines. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | Thanks for the help. I guess you are right. This guy uses FillConsoleOutputCharacter too. http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=246654 |
| Fri 26 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | Someone also pointed me a MSKB which seemed to have the answer, if anyone else is also interested. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;319239&Product=vbNET |
| Shipping high quality software | Fri 26 Dec | >> TD << |
| Is there any article or book (even if its just one chapter) which talk about how to ship high quality software. Any recommendations will be appreciated Happy New Year To All Of You! >> TD << |
| Fri 26 Dec | Eddy | 2 books that i find useful Cleanroom Software Engineering: Technology and Process by Stacy J. Prowell (Author), Carmen J. Trammell (Author), Richard C. Linger (Author), Jesse H. Poore (Author) Toward Zero Defect Programming by Allan M. Stavely (Author) |
| Cable Modem I-net Connection and Viewing Cable TV | Thu 25 Dec | Bob |
| Can you somehow view Cable TV programming on a PC if its connected to the internet via a cable modem? If so, is that legal? (I *do* legally subscribe to both digital cable as well as high-speed internet services.) |
| Thu 25 Dec | anon | Can you not just connect the decoder box to your TV card instead of a telly? |
| Thu 25 Dec | sgf | I do it all the time. Use a splitter to split the signal before the cable modem, and run the second cable to a TV-PC card. Here is a site with some details and caveats: http://www.dslreports.com/faq/cabletech |
| Thu 25 Dec | Bob | Thanks! |
| Thu 25 Dec | Dennis Forbes | My guess is that Bob is being polite, and what he's really asking is whether a cable modem can receive, and then software can demodulate, the digital cable signal for digital channels. I, too, have digital cable, and a cable modem, and have wondered the same thing, but would guess that the digital TV channels are encoded on entirely different frequency ranges. |
| Fri 26 Dec | www.marktaw.com | Sure, it sounds similar to the telephone lines & DSL. Telephones run on frequencies up to around 20khz (the upper limit of human hearing), and the DSL runs above that. You put filters on all the regular phones to prevent the two from interfering with each other - noise that gets into the phone that's above 20khz, and artifacts of the digital noise that can disturb your phone calls. Cable TV has been around long enough that my guess is the encoding standards were designed well before broadband, though if the company controls the decoder box (some demand you use their decoder boxes), they can use any method they want. Plus now there's digital cable, which would be different from analog cable. Also with this digital cable, we have interactive programming - chose your show, and so forth. So... In short, I don't know. As other people have said, the best way would be to get a video card that can decode video. I have one and it's great. It's also fun to look at computer things on the television and see just how low resolution TV is. |
| iTunes store design | Wed 24 Dec | Philo |
| Got my daughter an iPod for xmas, and I wanted to set up an allowance account through iTunes so she can download songs. http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/ Yep, theres the description of it. Now how do I do it? Im *guessing* I have to download the software to do it. Not that it says that anywhere. And thats a pretty poor design - dad wants to set an online allowance for his kid, *Dad* has to install iTunes? Tsk. Well, Im off to install it. Just wanted to share. :) Philo |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dennis Atkins | Not sure the point, but if it's that the apple web site is poorly organized and laid out, I agree with you. |
| Wed 24 Dec | NC | From here... http://www.apple.com/itunes/overview.html ...I found this... https://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/72104/wo/9Q2dOOhf1Wz82wON0HMT6eGBWSy/0. ...is that what you're looking for? I'm not sure. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Philo | No, but thanks. ...and my point exactly. :-) Philo |
| Thu 25 Dec | www.marktaw.com | http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/ 'iTunes 4 is the best software jukebox in the world, with a great music store inside.' You download the software. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Trogdor | Just download the software and be happy with iTunes. Maybe one day you'll get yourself an iPod. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Philo | s'okay - no rush. Idiot that I am I forgot that Jobs used the iPod for another crusade, and I didn't buy a firewire-USB adapter. Philo |
| Thu 25 Dec | Brad Wilson | How could it be for a crusade? Apple was on the USB bandwagon before PCs, just as they were on the Firewire bandwagon before PCs. They don't have a vested interesting in killing one at the expense of another. (Besides, I thought the new Windows friendly iPod came with USB capabilities... no?) |
| Thu 25 Dec | Philo | 'Syncing with USB 2.0 (Windows-only) requires optional USB 2.0 + FireWire Cable.' My apologies about the crusade comment - I was basing my opinion about the iPod's firewire bias on the whole 'iMac doesn't come with a floppy drive because Steve Jobs thinks floppies are passe' thing of 1999. I'm still annoyed it didn't come with the USB cable, but of course it's my job to make sure I get the appropriate interfaces necessary for any hardware purchase. Philo |
| Fri 26 Dec | James'Smiler' Farrer | Hope your daughter wasn't too disappointed! |
| Advice on best MP3 software | Wed 24 Dec | Alex Chernavsky |
| Next week I will be visiting an out-of-town friend who wants me to set up his computer to download MP3s. My friend is quite computer-phobic, so the system needs to be easy to use. He wants to make conventional music CDs from the MP3s. He has a broadband connection. I dont really have much experience with this. Is Kazaa Lite still the way to go? Ive heard rumors that it will soon be shut down. What about software to burn CDs? He has a CD player that doesnt play MP3 files, so it would have to be regular old music CDs. Again, ease-of-use is the primary consideration here. Thanks. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | Around here, the eLearning guys at my company use MusicMatch and it seems its worth its reputation. |
| Wed 24 Dec | JBaugher | iTunes is excellent for those that wish a friendly UI. It's very use-friendly and the music you can purchase is freely burnable to disc as an audio CD. |
| Wed 24 Dec | John Rose | Definitely iTunes. Simple, powerful interface. MusicMatch is a *horrible mess* of an interface, IMHO. Soulseek will cover legal music downloads, online music previews, burning, etc. As far as possibly-illegal downloads go, Soulseek (http://www.slsknet.org/) is the best. That's strictly a peer-to-peer filesharing service only, no burning or anything. |
| Wed 24 Dec | John Rose | 'Soulseek will cover legal music downloads, online music previews, burning, etc.' --------------------------- I'm sorry. Typo. Replace 'Soulseek' with 'iTunes' in that sentence. |
| Wed 24 Dec | dmooney | Another vote for iTunes. Rhapsody is also good and for $10/month you can stream over one quintillion songs. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Brad Wilson | +1 for iTunes. I shook it off because I'm already too heavily invested into WMA (and it would be downright stupid to have two sets of music that required two different players). The UI is not typical Windows, though, so familiarize yourself with it, so that when your friend starts using it, you can help them out. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Brad Wilson | Oh, and since your friend is computer-phobic, do NOT put him on one of the illegal services like KaZaA. The last think you want is the phone call that's been sued, and told them you were the one who set up him to the illegal downloads. :-p |
| Wed 24 Dec | John Rose | +1 for iTunes. I shook it off because I'm already too heavily invested into WMA (and it would be downright stupid to have two sets of music that required two different players). -------- I can't really fathom why one would want to become heavily invested in WMA.... just too restrictive... compared to mp3, is the slightly better quality-to-filesize ratio of WMA really worth it? Whatever makes you happy, though. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Brad Wilson | Yes, it's worth it, when you rip 3,000 CDs. |
| Wed 24 Dec | GuyIncognito | www.allofmp3.com |
| Wed 24 Dec | Chris Altmann | I used to use MusicMatch because I liked how the music library worked (I like to organize by artist then album, and don't use playlists). It has CD ripping but not CD writing last I knew. The rest of it's UI is rather crappy and slow IMHO. I've since switched to Window Media Player 9 (!). It has a similar song organization capability, rips CDs (to WMA, or mp3 if you spend $10 on the encoders as I did), makes audio CDs, talks to my Nomad Zen mp3 player, and will minimize to a neat little taskbar control. For music downloading, who knows. I've lost track of the best illegal methods (arrr). Rhapsody is pretty good for streaming music. They have a decent catalog. I haven't used their CD burning feature yet (some < 1$ price per track). I tend to go and buy the CDs I like after test driving them on Rhapsody for a while. |
| Thu 25 Dec | ICBW | A little off topic-- Has anyone else noticed any problems with the latest release of Winamp (version 5.01)? I used it for a few days, but stopped because there are slight crackles heard from time to time in either speaker. Very annoying. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Simon Lucy | MusicMatch (8.x) will burn CDs and has done for a very long time, either as a bunch of MP3s or as music CDs. |
| Highly programmable non-Emacs editor? | Wed 24 Dec | Junkster |
| Im an editor junkie. Ive used dozens of them. Im currently using with EditPlus for Windows, but its still not my perfect editor. These days, it should be easy enough to have a more componetized editor: a simple visual display component, plus ways of shooting text to Perl or Python (or your favorite language) to do fancy grunt work. Instead, text editor authors tend to take a GUI-heavy approach, building everything into one, monolithic application. I have seen two alternatives. One is Emacs. I dont want to get into a flame way about Emacs. Ive used it. But its more a lifestyle than a text editor. And then theres Wily, which is a clone of an editor for Plan9 called ACME. Wily looks interesting, but it is a UNIX-only program--no Windows version. And, okay, someone is going to mention vi. Yes, Ive used vi. Ive written tens of thousands of lines of code with vi. But in the end both vi and Emacs strike me as editors from another era. The cleanliness that comes from an editor like EditPlus or BBEdit (a Mac editor), is something I dont want to lose. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Bruce Perry | What about CodeWright? It's been a while since I've used that, but IIRC it is highly programmable. It wasn't cheap then, but it may be worth looking into. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Tom Payne | VIM, http://www.vim.org/, is wonderful. It's very hard to learn at first, but once you 'get it' it is incredibly powerful: many high-level operations can be accomplished with very few keystrokes -- you'll become very productive (or rather, the editor won't slow you down!). Traditional editors will feel awkward and clunky by comparison. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Tom Payne | The VIM homepage is http://www.vim.org/ . The forum software erroneously including the following comma in the URL. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Mark Smith | I really like Visual Slickedit ( http://www.slickedit.com ). It has a fantastic expanded regular expression engine. It's also heavily extenable by programming macros in Slick-C (intepreted C like language). In reality, the whole editor is written in Slick-C and the binary code is just the Slick-C interpretor. |
| Wed 24 Dec | the editor | I second Visual SlickEdit |
| Wed 24 Dec | Lally Singh | votes[BBEdit]++; |
| Wed 24 Dec | eclectic_echidna | c /EditPlus/SlickEdit/* -- ee |
| Wed 24 Dec | Nathan | I just downloaded the trial version of Visual SlickEdit. Figured I'd give it a try, since it's highly recommended & I don't really feel like working here on Christmas Eve. So I downloaded it, and received the Thank_you_for_choosing_Visual_SlickEdit email. SlickEdit opens, and tells me to 'Request a FREE Trial License...' No problem, I do that, and it fails. Can't get through the proxy here at work, because we have to enter a password. That's fine - I go in and try to manually configure it - there's no where to enter my password. I close SlickEdit, somewhat frustrated. Now I am faced with a decision. Do I email SlickEdit & ask for a license key manually? eh, I'm not that excited about it anymore. I know it doesn't seem like a big deal, but since they already have my email address (had to provide it for the download) why couldn't they just email the key with that welcome email? Why should I have to tell them my network info? So I just uninstalled SlickEdit. Oh well. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dan Maas | Eclipse (http://eclipse.org/). I don't use it, but I know people who swear by it. I tried BBEdit when I got a Mac, but was shocked that it didn't seem to use OSX's excellent AA text rendering engine, which would be the whole point of editing code on a Mac for me. So I went back to Emacs :) |
| Wed 24 Dec | Burninator | --1 for SlickEdit I've used SlickEdit and found it to be pretty mediocre as a text editor (and boy, it sure has an ugly UI). I use UltraEdit as my general purpose text editor, and various IDEs for working with my code (IDEA, mostly). However, UltraEdit isn't highly programmable as the original poster requested. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Junkster | Yes, I've used UltraEdit. It's essentially the same as EditPad Pro and EditPlus. But they're all very closed systems (in the extensibility sense, not the open source sense). An editor can just be shell and use Perl, for example, to do the real grunt work. I have also tried vim, which I consider to vi plus some much needed extensions. It still comes across as dated and clunky under Windows. The interface in a typical Windows editor is so invisible compared to vim and Emacs. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Simon Lucy | I also use Ultraedit, I'm interested in how programmable really helps. I can write macros in UE and if I really needed some new filter I could write it and use it as an installable tool, but I've never needed to. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dennis Atkins | I second CodeWright. Expensive, but i think they will even ship you a trial version in a box with a manual and you only pay if you lke it. Maybe they don't do that anymore, but you gotta admit they hava lotta confidence in their product. And I like it. Great editor. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Junkster | Extreme programmability is important for several reasons. The first is that it offers up a lot of options, letting you do things that the author hadn't thought of. For example, I often use non-mainstream programming languages that would benefit from being syntax colored in non-standard ways (certain types of lines colors a specific way, rather than just keywords). I'd also like to be able to extend an editor to context-sensitive tab completion; build custom, interactive project management systems, etc. All of this stuff is business as usual in Emacs. But Emacs is a relic of the past otherwise. Text munging is easy. We have entire programming languages devoted to it. An editor just needs to be a thin interface with hooks to routines written in such a language. It shouldn't be a monlithic application. I'm surprised that no one has followed this road, other than Stallman's Emacs. |
| Wed 24 Dec | christopher baus (www.baus.net) | I used to be a emacs bigot, but I'm over it. I still write code nearly every day in Emacs on Unix, and VC++ on Windows, but having seen a demonstration of XCode, I've decided to move my Unix development over to the Mac. What I think is interesting is that emacs it is completely unique approach to application development, and it worth learning just for the alternative look at software applications. I has certainly influenced Gosling's (who used to work on emacs), NeWS and Java -- not to mention autocad which orginally had a lisp based scripting language. Lisp had a VM and garbage collection a million years ago. Emacs is powerful enough that it is still useful 25+ years after it was orginally written. But I'm not a student anymore, and I don't have time to endlessly tune my .emacs and custom makefiles. Plus I've grown so used to modern IDEs that emacs + gud is painful. What I think might be interesting is a editor or platform built with emacs as the model, but assuming a modern windowing environment. Maybe we have it in .NET, but it doesn't seem quite the same. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Mac | Visual slickedit is a good alternative. But slick-c is a crappy hacked scripting language. I have written dozen of functions to do things that I want similiar in emacs and vim, but slick-c just can't live up with any other scripting languages that I have used (lisp, perl, python, js). And the source code that came with vslick are not horrible mess. Good luck trying to learn and understand those source code - it's like I haven't had enough reading my peer's code... Just my $0.02 |
| Wed 24 Dec | Mac | And the source code that came with vslick are JUST horrible mess. BTW, the API provided by slick-c is very inconsistent (I'm not saying elisp is WAY better, but at least it's still managable...) |
| Wed 24 Dec | Phillip J. Eby | jEdit. It's scriptable with Jython and BeanShell. It has syntax highlighting for a bazillion languages, and it has a flurry of plugins available for every imaginable want or need. I use the XML plugin, the LaTeX plugin, the project management plugin, and there are many many many more available out there. It's hugely configurable, lots of GUI options. Extremely extensible, cross platform, and of course it's FLOSS. It's written in Java, and startup takes a while on older machnes; 20-30 seconds on an old 400Mhz machine. My newer machines start it in 10 or 15. But I've never had any performance issues once it's loaded, even on slower machines. Oh yeah, the syntax highlighting also configures lots of nifty features like autoindenting, block comment, bracket matching (tag matching in XML mode), code folding, and suchlike features. It's a *very* complete programmer's editor, and should not be confused with Eclipse (which is a generic IDE/tool platform with some editing capabilities, and whose plugins are heavily slanted towards Java development). |
| Wed 24 Dec | Phillip J. Eby | Oops, forgot to include the URL: http://www.jedit.org/ |
| Thu 25 Dec | Slartibartfast | Interesting that nobody mentioned Multi-Edit. http://www.multiedit.com/ Their kernel is Delphi, then everything else is built using CMAC, their scripting language. Their community is very active, and a new version was just released. - Hector |
| Thu 25 Dec | Nils | I just played a bit with jEdit on my WinXP notebook. Can someone please explain to me why the font rendering sucks like a typical Java application? No AA. My XEmacs looks nice on Win XP. It's also a bit embarrassing that you have to reload the entire app to change the text font. (XEmacs is a fork of Emacs, not the X11 version) There seems to be no viable alternative to Emacs or Vim... |
| Thu 25 Dec | C Rose | jEdit does offer anti-aliasing of text, and you enable it via Utilities -> Global options... -> Text Area. Choose Smooth text and Fractional font metrics (depending upon system spec.). jEdit is an excellent modern editor. Emacs suffers from massive complexity -- there's so much to remember. The modal design of vi/m is just weird. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Pakter | I have JEdit installed, and it's not bad at all. JEdit had the same plugins as Eclipse, and more. But I don't feel 'at home' with it. Like Junkster, I use mostly EditPlus. As Junkster probably knows, you can do a lot with EditPlus, though it's not extensible in the usual sense. At home, I also use ConText, which is similar to EditPlus, just a little less powerful. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Bored Bystander | I also use Multi-Edit and have ever since its DOS days. ME is a great value ($80-$120 or so depending on upgrade or new purchase) since it includes features like file differencing and a generalized compiler interface to act as a sort of self contained IDE to host command line tools. The only drawback I've ever seen to ME is that you have to customize its key command mappings quite a bit in order to get reasonable behavior (ctrl-F for search, F3 for search again, Ctrl-F4 for close window, etc). ME has very strange notions about common shortcuts. And I have not found a way to make these definitions portable to a new system. (Or, I just don't know the MultiEdit configuration system as well as I 'should'.) So every time I move ME to a new PC I have to spend about 1/2 hour re-customizing it. |
| C++? Opinions? | Wed 24 Dec | Lally Singh |
| So, what does everyone here think of C++? I really dont want to read through another flamewar :-) My $.02: Lots of very useful tools, very good (but not yet complete) libraries, but a very idiosyncratic language. A good C++ programmer has to have an acute awareness of what theyre doing and strong discipline to use just the features necessary to get the job done. Its my favorite language, but I still think its ugly and can be a pain to use :-) |
| Wed 24 Dec | Æ | The thing about C++, is that it's |
| Wed 24 Dec | David Jones | Pro: Unencumbered language environment w.r.t. licensing. If you use Java or .NET then you are beholden to their creators' potentially changing business and licensing models. Con: Decrepit development environments. Visual studio is not bad, but we really need to move away from a flat-file translation unit model to something like Java's database model. Right now, a C++ class definition defines both public interface and private implementation details. You can't change the implementation without recompiling anything that depends on the interface. Devices such as the pimpl idiom try to mitigate this, but the development environments should be smart enough to not require this. I haven't tried Eclipse for C++ development. I'm not sure if it would do anything useful. Anyway, it requires Java so it is legally questionable if I can run it on any of my machines. Yes, legally questionable. Sun's license grants you the right to use their JDK and JRE for the purpose of development and testing of your own Java applications. It does not explicitly permit you to run other people's applications (presumably all of which ship with a licensed copy of the JRE. Yeah, right.) |
| Wed 24 Dec | Junkster | After programming in Python--or any other language that's attempting to be higher-level and more modern--C++ feels very retro and awkward to me. I'm still shocked that C++ doesn't have any kind of real module system, instead leaning on header files and #include hackery. A module system is 1970s tech, but they're so hard to leave once you've used a language with one: Modula-2, Object Pascal, Oberon, Ada, Python, Perl, etc. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Tom Hathaway | C/C++ and Java are for programmers who like to write code, lots of code. Every study I've seen comparing them to scripting languages like Python, Perl, or TCL shows about 3-10 times as much code to do the same thing. http://www.cis.udel.edu/~silber/470STUFF/article.pdf The other interesting thing you find from those studies is that lines of code per hour and bugs per line of code are roughly the same across all the languages. You do the math on productivity/quality. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Philo | 'You can't change the implementation without recompiling anything that depends on the interface' I'm not a C++ guy, but doesn't COM take care of this? (And I'm guessing CORBA on the other side of the fence) Philo |
| Wed 24 Dec | K | The strengths of C++ are, IMHO, its facilities for generic programming, its static type system, and such maligned attributes as multiple inheritance and deterministic destruction. In a certain context, these features are incredibly important and very very powerful. However, as has been noted by another poster, they have some overhead -- so in certain cases, scripting languages with less 'rigidity' (eg: dynamic typing, dynamic interfaces [message passing over method invocation]) are a better choice. If you want to analyze the importance of a language with respect to speed of development, there's more than one way to look at it. On the one hand, you'll find lots of problems like generating web pages or defining agent behaviors in video games where a scripting language affords much more flexibility and (in that market) it's important to have that flexibility. In such a circumstance, the scripting language has a tremendous benefit over traditional static languages like C++. But that flexibility comes at a cost, and it's increased variability of behavior in certain circumstances. For example, subtle type coercion issues must be considered, as must message interpretation details and such. You have to be much more rigorous with testing large dynamic programs because huge classes of errors can only be caught by visiting every branch of the code. If you send a message to an object but you misspell the name of the message, you might not find out until that odd edge case where it's really critical (but by then it's too late). Also, with C++ you're not locked into a particular development paradigm. To some extent this is true with other languages as well, because you can emulate a sort of Turing machine model in Lisp just as well as you might emulate a sort of lambda calculus model in C++. However, it's very important to be able to turn off the garbage collector or force static analysis of code sometimes. It's not just for performance reasons, as some people frequently claim, but it's for simplicity of maintaining the program as well. |
| Wed 24 Dec | David Jones | Philo: Please point me to an implementation of COM for Unix-like systems. Involving layers of Microsoft proprietary technology is not appropriate for large-scale high-performance databases used in semiconductor chip design. I am not aiming for application interoperability, just avoiding unnecessary recompilation during development. |
Wed 24 Dec | enjoy! | You can't change the implementation without recompiling anything that depends on the interfaceThat's wrong. You can't change the class definition w/o recompiling, but as long as you use seperate compilation units, you can change the implementation to your hearts desire and only have to recompile the changed implementation. doesn't COM take care of thisIt can, but it doesn't have to. Please point me to an implementation of COM for Unix-like systemshttp://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/ |
| Wed 24 Dec | Grumpy Old-Timer | 'You can't change the implementation without recompiling anything that depends on the interface'. See 'Cheshire Cat'. |
| Wed 24 Dec | sgf | 'you can change the implementation to your hearts desire and only have to recompile the changed implementation.' Not if the implementation change adds/deletes/changes any private members. Then all client code must recompile. |
| Wed 24 Dec | enjoy! | true dat sgf! |
| Wed 24 Dec | Philo | 'Please point me to an implementation of COM for Unix-like systems.' You could have kept reading to where I mentioned CORBA, or I could point out that *you* mentioned Visual Studio, somewhat setting the stage for a 'windows' answer. :-D 'Involving layers of Microsoft proprietary technology is not appropriate for large-scale high-performance databases used in semiconductor chip design.' With all due respect, you're all over the map here. 1) You're *writing* the databases? Or consuming them? 2) Neither 'Microsoft' nor 'proprietary' by definition excludes 'large-scale' or 'high-performance' 'I am not aiming for application interoperability, just avoiding unnecessary recompilation during development.' Here we get to the crux of the matter - that the issue may be that COM is too heavy-weight for what you're trying to accomplish, which I can appreciate. I wasn't sure if C++ worked like COM (I thought it did, others have confirmed) - that so long as you isolate the interface, you are free to change the implementation without recompiling consumers of the interface. Sorry to have muddied the waters. :-) Philo |
| Wed 24 Dec | mb | This is veering off topic, but COM's pretty simple, and I believe fully specified. (At least for Windows--it's a binary system so might be hard to specify across all Unixes.) Basically take the Vtable similar to what C++ objects have, make sure it's a particular format (it just happens to match what the Microsoft compilers produce for C++, but can be tweaked with either compiler setting or generated C structs), and load the vtables at runtime with a known method call, using some specfic rules about refcounting to manage object lifetimes. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Brian | > doesn't COM take care of this? Not really any better than you can do in straight C++. Usually, you define a COM interface in an idl, and then implement it in a (C++) class. Client code only has to be recompiled when the interface changes. If you do the analogous thing, ie define the interface in an abstract C++ class, you get the same benefit. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Raist3d | Tom- 'C/C++ and Java are for programmers who like to write code, lots of code. Every study I've seen comparing them to scripting languages like Python, Perl, or TCL shows about 3-10 times as much code to do the same thing.' That may be the case, but when you are writting or doing console game development, Python, Perl or TCL just don't cut it due to performance issues and low level control. I am sure embedded system programmers with realtime requirements are probably in the same boat here. Even C looks like a good solution in these domains. - Raist |
| Fri 26 Dec | Clay Dowling | Philo, COM and C++ aren't words that go well together. It may be that I'm just clueless about it, but in the past I've found COM interfaces to be a major pain in the tail when accessed from C++. Fortunately it is a language blessed with utility libraries to handle nearly any task you can think of. This goes a long way to avoid the need for COM. This falls down, of course, when you need to explicitly use COM objects like MS-Office documents. |
| Fri 26 Dec | no name | Clay, COM was built on C++, I find them to play very well together. If you grok abstract base classes and dynamic loading, that's really all there is to it. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Chris Tavares | COM at it's heart is really just a set of C++ coding conventions. You can do COM style programming in straight C++ without a single API call. Go to a bookstore or library and read Chapter 1 of 'Essential COM' by Don Box. He explains this better than anyone else. The complications in using COM arise from three factors: 1) The idea of location transparency - being able to do an inprocess, cross process, or cross network call without the client needing to code differently implies constraints on the programming model. For example, this is the reason that COM methods can only use the return values for error codes; the networking stack needs a standard place to put failure information. Useful in DCOM, it gets in the way when you're using DLL's. 2) Performance. A large class of COM infrastructure is all about optimization. Apartments. The free-threaded marshaller. The Global Interface Table. Aggregation. The rules of QueryInterface. 3) Visual Basic. Microsoft handed over the architecture of COM to the VB team at one point, and we've all been paying the price for that ever since. Type libraries, automation, and that VB programmers don't understand what a GUID is are all artifacts of this. This one is particularly galling to me, because if the VB people had just thought outside their tiny little box for half an hour, most of the pain of automation would just be gone. But they didn't, and as a result each and every COM object will be implementing IDispatch until the end of time. |
| Why does FogBugz need PHP? | Tue 23 Dec | Serge |
| PHP was publicly ashamed by Joel on October 10: "PHP has almost complete ignorance of character encoding issues, blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near impossible to develop good international web applications" Does it mean that FogBugz is bad international web application or that FogCreek team made the impossible? And a more general question: why doesnt FogBugz use more advanced template engine? |
| Tue 23 Dec | don't kid yourself | PHP is cross-platform and free. ASP.NET is neither. Same goes for JSP. I think Joel is less inclined to pay licensing fees and/or royalties than being a stickler on Unicode minutia. Money always trumps sophmoric 'software design' ideals. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Serge | Correct me if I'm wrong but FogBugz doesn't use PHP on Windows. |
| Tue 23 Dec | ChrisO | and ASP.Net and JSP are actually free? (Once you have the Windows Licence) |
| Tue 23 Dec | ChrisO | and JSP runs on WIndows and *NIX? and from what I understand in an earlier thread the MONO project is able to run ASP.Net on Apache on LINUX? |
| Tue 23 Dec | Walter Rumsby | How is JSP not 'cross platform and free'? Since FogBugz for *nix runs on LAMP (Linux, Apache, My-SQL, PHP) and since, I would assume, FogBugz for Windows (at least) did run on ASP + IIS isn't the process of creating the *nix version (at least) close to rewriting the whole thing? Since Fogcreek isn't committing to .NET yet I'm guessing solutions like Visual J# (anyone had any experience with this - would it be feasible to create, say, a Velocity-based solution that works under a JVM and .NET?) and/or Mono weren't considered. |
| Tue 23 Dec | don't kid yourself | > How is JSP not 'cross platform and free'? I would think that if you include JSP in a major shrinkwrap software product, Sun might want some kind of royalties and/or licensing fees. PHP doesn't have this problem. Of course there is the whole Open Source realm, where you might get away with shipping Tomcat with JSP, but you would probably fall under GPL and be forced to reveal your own source code. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Glyph Lefkowitz | Was this available when FogBugz got ported to UNIX? http://www.go-mono.com/asp-net.html I wonder if Joel knows about it... |
| Tue 23 Dec | Joel Spolsky | We wrote an ASP->PHP compiler. FogBUGZ is written in ASP and compiled to PHP. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Tom Hathaway | Anybody using Python Server Pages?
Personally I don't care much for the whole ' |
| Tue 23 Dec | Walter Rumsby | Re: Joel's answer. Ah! Coming soon... FogCreek ASP -> PHP compiler! Re: 'Sun might want some kind royalty'... right like they obviously do with every single website using JSP out there. FUD FUD FUD. |
| Tue 23 Dec | the artist formerly known as prince | There is nothing in the Apache software license that will make you do anything like a GPL, also Sun may very well want a piece of your successful app but it can't legally make you give it to them |
| Tue 23 Dec | don't kid yourself | > Re: 'Sun might want some kind royalty'... right like they obviously do with every single website using JSP out there. FUD FUD FUD. Using JSP for what it was designed and shipping JSP as part of your own commercial product are two very different things. Check Sun's license. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Walter Rumsby | In the case of something like FogBugz it seems pretty clear they would be using JSP for 'what it was designed' (i.e. templating) and if it really is a problem (which I doubt) then Velocity is free (Apache license) and tends to perform better than JSP too. The real licensing hurdle FogBugz/similar would have is with My-SQL. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Eric Debois | Hold your horses there fellas.. shipping JSP? You write a JSP/Servlet app.. this is yours to do what you want with.. You run it on a servlet engine+webserver like tomcat or jetty. Same licence as the PHP engine. I think you can distribute it if you want to. The engines need Java/JRE to be on the system, this you DL from sun. Redistribution is not common but I dont think youd need to pay much to do so. Ive seen it on magazine covers. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Joel Spolsky | We don't ship either MySQL or PHP (or Linux or Apache) -- we expect our customers to get those themselves. PHP was chosen for ubiquity. Since the goal is to run on as many systems as possible, I try to make platform decisions based on lowest-common-denominator. That means that our programmers suffer using outdated, skimpy languages like VB 6.0 and VBScript in order to run on the largest possible installed base. |
| Tue 23 Dec | don't kid yourself | Getting your users to DL and install MySQL is one good way to get around the licensing issues, but makes it hard on your customers. Why not just use PostgreSQL? It has a BSD-style license, so you can include it pre-configured with FogBUGZ. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Tom Vu | 'We wrote an ASP->PHP compiler. FogBUGZ is written in ASP and compiled to PHP. ' Do you sell this 'compiler'? I think it is more valuable than FogBugz. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Vince | Why not write it in JSP/Servlets to begin with? It is completely free, open source, or you can switch to the commerical app servers if you like. Personally, I think thats the biggest advantage of J2EE. You have a strong open source community supporting it, but if your adverse to open source (lots of gov. agencies are), you have big companies like IBM, SUN, and BEA. Come to think of it, *every* major software company has a J2EE App server wiht the exception of microsoft: Borland, Apple, Novell, Macromedia, Oracle, etc. Sure, its a little more complicated to develop, but you don't have any vendor lock in, and your also not dependant on open source if you don't want to be. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Walter Rumsby | For what it does ASP or PHP seems like a reasonable choice (vs. J2EE) for implementing FogBugz. I'd be curious to know the differences between FogBugz and something like JIRA (the J2EE issue tracker that holds mindshare in the J2EE space). Perhaps I should look at the feature matricies... |
| Wed 24 Dec | Richard P | FogBugz is not a hype-hype-hype product. As soon as you start talking about 'J2EE Application Servers', and 'you can use OSS runtime environment or you could buy a commercial implementation from IBM, BEA, or Sun', you lose a large segment of customers instantly. They think, 'someone's trying to sell me expensive, bloated 'middleware' that will suck up hardware resources like nobody's business and require 2 or 3 full-time administrators'. Joel sells FogBugz to a market segment that wants lightweight. I've yet to see anything involving Java that is lightweight. As soon as you start doing Servlets, you've completely lost lightweight as a selling point. Yes, I know what I'm talking about. I've been doing web application development professionally for a good while now. ASP and PHP are painfully inadequate for what I do (though they can be shoehorned into the job). I use Java and ASP.Net a whole lot. However, I think ASP and PHP are good choices for Joel's particular product given his *real market requirements*. |
| Wed 24 Dec | dir at badblue com | Vince: ...'Sure, [J2EE is] a little more complicated to develop...' Much more expensive to develop, maintain and deploy by every metric I've seen. Unless we're talking transactional systems (i.e., session failover), I'm not sure J2EE would ever be required. PHP sites like sourceforge handle a huge amount of complexity and scale. You can't beat the bang for the buck. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Ziad | Joel, I would be interested in the story of building an ASP to PHP compiler... Why this decision, and what type of roadblocks you went into (data accesss layer comes to mind)... I don't know about others here, but we frequently get requests from our customers for type of tools (we want to go from ASP to JSP, etc...) and I've never found an elegant solution to handle that... |
| Wed 24 Dec | Vince | Richard, when I said J2EE, I really meant JSPs and maybe servlets. You can write a perfectly usable application using only jsps and POJOs. Yes, even still it would take more time, but the portability issue would be taken care of. I think a lot of people make J2EE much more complicated then need be. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Just me (Sir to you) | 'That means that our programmers suffer using outdated, skimpy languages like VB 6.0 and VBScript in order to run on the largest possible installed base. ' Hey, you should put that in your next job ad! :-) |
| Fri 26 Dec | Chris Tavares | Why not JSP? Well, aside from the ubiquity issue that Joel already mentioned, there's the fact that the original version of FogBugz is written in ASP, not ASP.NET. PHP is very, VERY similar to ASP, so translation would have been fairly mechanical. Building a 'proper' PHP site requires that you do the same basic stuff you'd do in an ASP site. To properly use JSP, on the other hand, often requires a very different approach using Java tag libs. This is much closer to the ASP.NET approach. So, in general, ASP -> PHP = simple translation. ASP -> JSP = redesign/rewrite. |
| Why The Flip Flop, Joel? | Mon 22 Dec | Justin Johnson |
| I remember debates in the past where Joel said that he wouldnt bother porting FogBugz to Unix because it wasnt worth it--even to the extent of not considering any sort of code-sharing arrangement with a third party who would port in under contract or franchise. What changed, Joel? The percentage of Unix servers in development shops? Had some spare time to kill? Leaving the dark side of the software world for the light of open source? Okay, I almost got through that last one without smirking. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Confucius | A wise man revisits the sites of decisions past made. He often finds those decisions still hold up under renewed scrutiny |
| Tue 23 Dec | Hanul | I appreciate Joel's change of mind. Getting a fine piece of software like FogBUGZ for MacOS X is great. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Just me (Sir to you) | Will it be free? :-) |
| Tue 23 Dec | Portabella | My old company did this too; they developed a product for Solaris and Windows, then ported to HPUX and AIX. The reasons were basically that the product was good enough that changes on the core platforms were either too expensive or unlikely to pick up new customers, but a port to a new platform was fairly cheap and offered some immediate sales, namely the people who'd heard about it by didn't buy 'because it doesn't run on platform X'. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Justin Johnson | What surprises me about the flip flop is that Joel had solid reasons for not porting that still make sense: the minority share of unix/Mac customers for this product, and the large porting costs of going from an MS platform (IIS, SQL Server) to LAMP. I'm not aware that those reasons have been invalidated by any circumstances lately, so I'm wondering what I missed. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Brad Wilson | I'm going out on a limb here, but the dominance of Windows is a desktop thing, not a server thing. It probably stopped enough deals from going through when the IT people were told they'd have to run the bug tracking software on Windows. For some offices, that might be the one and only Windows box in the back office, with admins not really equipped to deal with it. When IT is involved with the sale, it gets to be a lot more complex, in my experience. This breaks down what is likely to have been the single largest stopping point in the process. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Alex | I'd agree. With IT involved having a unix/linux solution is a plus, especially for relatively cheap software like FogBugz. It disarms the people who don't want yet another windows box and also lets yourun on some hardware you have "lying around" without having to get a windows license. Even if that never actually happens it offers the buyers a choice instead of saying "my way or the highway" you now say "windows or unix". The choice is between two ways to buy instead of between buying and not buying. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Mark Smith | Plus, hasn't Fogbugz moved away from a strict bug tracking tool to something that looks more like a general help desk tool (which is a different market with different concepts, ideas, standards, etc...). I'll be curious to see some essays on maintaining code for both platforms. Since that doesn't appear to have been the intent all along, I would think the code base would be skewed away from multiplatform reusability. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Philo | I suspect it's not about sales, it's about credibility. Joel can write a heckuva lot more in the 'windows v. unix' realm when he's written a dual-platform app. Philo |
| Tue 23 Dec | dmooney | Perhaps Joel wants to create the FogCreek FogBugz Appliance like the Google Search Appliance. http://www.google.com/appliance/ But the real reason is the 'Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements.' http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html Hence the move to make FogBugz work with different web servers, databases and operating systems. Those are all of the complements necessary to run FogBugz. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Joel Spolsky | Right! |
| Tue 23 Dec | Alex | So the rise of Linux and other free software is actually good for those not directly competed against them as it tends to make the complementary products cheaper? Cheap OS, cheap DB, cheap web server means cheaper TOC for FogBugz and so more sales? Interesting for those on this forum who complain about OSS doing them out of a job, probably true if you make a commodity product, but not if you're a value add? |
| Tue 23 Dec | Just me (Sir to you) | He only 'commoditizes' the Windows licence for a Unix shop. FogBugz still needs an OS, but now you have more choices as to which one you can pick. I hope you will be profitable with this, Joel. Pricing will be interesting. Caught between the 'we can charge you an arm and a legg, and you'll beg for more' world of Unix and the 'We want it for free and we need the code' of Linux lies a sea of ... OS X? |
| Tue 23 Dec | Sam Livingston-Gray | Just me: I'd been assuming Joel would charge the same for the *nix version that he charges for the current one -- namely, enough to be profitable without losing too many sales. And since I have a Linux-based web host, I'll get more use out of it than I would out of running it just on my local machine -- which makes me more likely to buy it now, especially if it's available by end of calendar year (to make the accountant happy). |
| Tue 23 Dec | Eric Bowersox | The beauty of it is, now that Joel and his intrepid team have ported FogBUGZ to the PHP/Apache/MySQL platform, this can be the mainline version of the product from here on out, as all those tools run under Windows as well as Unix. There's no longer any need to keep around a version of the code that's written to MS ASP/IIS/.NET/whatever proprietary lock-in Microsoft's pushing this week.
Of course, I've probably overlooked something...perhaps the Unix version doesn't implement all the nice doodads of the Windows-specific version (yet). Perhaps Joel is looking to keep in MS' good graces by pointing to the 'optimized for Windows' version of the product. I dunno.
All I know was that, when I saw the words 'FogBUGZ for Unix,' I went ' |
| Tue 23 Dec | Li-fan Chen | I recall past write-ups say FogBugz was written in C# or VB.NET or vbscript (I can't remember)... none of these languages are fully* supported on Linux, how did you guys do it? * In the case of C#, Mono C# comes close. In the case of vbscript, Chiliware (now Sun) comes close but doesn't support COM. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Li-fan Chen | Or is it written in Visual Studio 6.0 (Visual C++)? |
| Tue 23 Dec | Just me (Sir to you) | I'm not sure how many Windows shops would like to run Apache/MySQL/PHP. Why go against the culture, especially when the platform includes already all you need (IIS, Jet)? It is interesting that e.g. Sourcegear takes a different approach: helping the Mono project financially to bring it to the point of being able to run their .NET for Windows stuff on *nix with a larger common codebase. Maybe the next intern at FCS can do a .NET port project of FogBugz (that also runs on Mono)? |
| Tue 23 Dec | Portabella | > run their .NET for Windows stuff on *nix I'm curious how this will play out. In the short term, I think Microsoft will encourage .NET on *nix, to sow discord and undermine J2EE. In the long run, I'm sure they reserve the right to pull the rug out from any real competitors, probably via lawsuits. |
| Tue 23 Dec | null fame | Just wanted to say we've been happily using FogBUGZ for over a year. We're a mostly-Mac department in a mostly Windows company so it wan't too hard to get the guys to set us up a Windows box with MS-SQL. However, I would have much preferred to put it onto an old G4 with OS X an MySQL and manage it by ourselves. (Among other things, it could have stayed up when IT went 'round the company turning off all Windows boxes, twice this year.) Plus, we wouldn't have to pay annually for yet another installation of MS-SQL. Way to go, Joel! Commoditize those compliments! Then, once you see how easy it is to develop for OSS platforms and the flexibility and portability--oops, sorry, wrong forum. :-) |
| Tue 23 Dec | Just me (Sir to you) | Just out of interest: why did you go for the MS-SQL backend? Did you have >200 users? |
| Tue 23 Dec | Robert Jacobson | 'I'm curious how this will play out....' Ditto. It's rather smart of Microsoft to tacitly encourage the Mono project for now -- it helps to give .Net 'street cred' with the Slashdot crowd. If Mono ever succeeds, however, it will be easy for Microsoft simply to FUD it into obscurity. |
| Tue 23 Dec | christopher baus (www.baus.net) | Perhaps Joel wants to create the FogCreek FogBugz Appliance like the Google Search Appliance. http://www.google.com/appliance/ But the real reason is the 'Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements.' http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html Hence the move to make FogBugz work with different web servers, databases and operating systems. Those are all of the complements necessary to run FogBugz. dmooney Tuesday, December 23, 2003 ==== Right! Joel Spolsky ==== Joel, Sometimes I wonder where you stand on the whole Microsoft issue. Last week you came down against unix programmers, this week you raise your hand as one. On one hand you run a .NET forum, and write apps in VB and discuss its virtues, on the other you talk about commoditizing your compliments by writing cross platform apps. If you are serious about commoditizing the OS, then using VB or .NET doesn't seem like the way to go about it. So where do you stand here? In my opinion as a small ISV it is in your interest to get MS out the picture as much as possible. Am I missing something? |
| Tue 23 Dec | Frederic Faure | Maybe because OSS is getting better, gaining market share, so at some point, it's only common sense for a company, especially a small shop, to use those tools. If FogCreek can easily port its code to PHP, MySQL, etc., it'd be stupid to stick to proprietary tools. I'd be curious to know, though, how easy it was to go from an MS-centered code to LAMP. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Justin Johnson | 'Last week you came down against unix programmers...' Joel didn't come out against Unix programmers; he just observed the differences in the cultures that led to demonstrable differences in the *character* and virtues of the platforms. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Wayne Earl | Joel, I commend you on the business risk you are taking. Because FogBugz will be available on a Unix platform, I can evaluate and test it for use with my clients (all of which are strictly unix/linux only). In my opinion, it's not all about platform/OS zeal - it's about markets., and being flexable enough to serve those markets. Please contact me via email once it is released. I most definately want to purchase (at least) a single user version of it for evaluation. |
Tue 23 Dec | christopher baus (www.baus.net) | Hmm..
... the Unix world is so full of self-righteous cultural superiority, 'advocacy,' and slashdot-karma-whoring sectarianism while the Windows world is more practicalI think the article would have been right on, minus that entire paragraph, which wasn't much more than a dig. Joel makes some good points. I think the old school way of doing things in Unix has to end. For instance look at sendmail configuration... ...but Linux is going to get better. There is no stopping it. |
| Tue 23 Dec | christopher baus (www.baus.net) | BTW, I totally support Joel going to Linux for FogBugz. It proves that the OS has legs... |
| Tue 23 Dec | ChrisO | But if they drop the Windows/IIS/ASP version with the line that 'Apache and MySQL and PHP all run on Windows' he will be losing alot of customers as well. Just like a UNIX shop doesn't have the expertise (read time) to manage a Windows Box, we don't have the time to manage a Windows box with all that junk on it. And I can assure you that there are many like us out there, and as soon as we need more licences for FogBugz we would definately consider looking at something else. BUT - I do recall that they got an intern to write a ASP>PHP compiler. Does that mean that you are still only maintaining the WIndows version and then running it through ASP2PHP to generate the PHP version? If that is the case (which I doubt would be very reliable) then I assume the ASP/IIS Version will be around for a while longer. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Joel Spolsky | Correct. The source is ASP. The PHP version is automatically generated from the ASP version using our proprietary compiler. |
| Tue 23 Dec | ChrisO | Thats good news Joel, have you got any info on how reliable your PHP compiler is? (Like how much effort you have to put into the compiled code to make it run, or is it perfect?) If its perfect will it be released as a product? |
| Tue 23 Dec | T. Norman | It isn't a 'compiler', it's more of a translator because it produces source code in another language. I would guess that it (1) only understands a subset of ASP and (2) it isn't provably perfect, so they have to tweak or at least read the converted PHP code before releasing it. |
| Tue 23 Dec | christopher baus (www.baus.net) | Wayne said: In my opinion, it's not all about platform/OS zeal - it's about markets., and being flexable enough to serve those markets. I couldn't agree more. I think it important to not be tied to certain platform. Look at really successful application vendors that do not control the OS. They are platform neutral. Take for instance Adobe. They are equally strong on the Mac and Windows. PostScript runs on just about anything. PDF runs on anything. Had they stayed Mac only they probably wouldn't be here anymore. Platform vendors want you to use into the technologies that tie you into the platform (ie Win32, COM, VB, .NET), but is this really good for most developers? |
| Wed 24 Dec | Mike Grace | This is a very interesting topic. I have just launched into dot net for all new product development. Currently only a web site has been created in asp.net/c#. Are you saying that long term I would be better in something like Java or C++ in order to stay platform independent? We are a small code shop in a very niche market. However, we will be trying to sell into corporates in the future. Will there be more of a resistance to windows there? It is not too late for me to U-turn. |
| Thu 25 Dec | jumbo | Well... PHP+MySQL hosting is a lot cheaper than ASP+Access or SQL Server hosting. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Brad Wilson | Mike, if by "platform indepedent" you mean the platform that the server runs (as opposed to the browser), then yes, using C# and .NET will lock you into Windows. Mono has ASP.NET functionality, but unless something major happens, those guys will constantly be playing catch-up to Microsoft. Realistically, you should plan that your servers will always run Windows and IIS and Microsoft's .NET. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Justin Johnson | On the other hand, Mike, you could write code in C# that's easy to port--which is to say, put a lot of care into designing and documenting it so that you leave open relatively inexpensive options to either translate it (like Joel did with FogBugz), have it work on Mono/dotGnu with minimal alterations, or be easily re-written in another language like Java. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Mike Grace | The web site can stay in dot net for the time being. We have our own server so the ASP/SQL server bit isn't really much of an issue. Our main application is currently xbase++ ( a clipper variant ) and it is a desktop app. Would this be better to keep cross platform? |
| sql query question | Mon 22 Dec | anon |
| I have a table with a field say cust_num which is a char field (to accomadate values like 1, 11, 3 and also abc12, xyz456 etc.). I have need to contruct queries with order by cust_num. Since cust_num is a char field I get the output like 1 11 3 abc12 xyz456 But I would like to get the output like 1 3 11 abc12 xyz456 I want to be able to sort this char field numerically instead of alphabetically. Is this possible? I have been trying different things like casting etc., but no luck yet. Any thoughts? Thanks for the help in advance. |
| Mon 22 Dec | anon | Forgot to mention, I am using SQL Server 2000. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Dave B. | You might try changing the collation for the column to one with a different sort order such as binary. This will behave differently based on the locale your machine is set to, the datatype of the field you are sorting on and the collation you choose. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Ged Byrne | Anon, You can right justify the expressions within a string using a function like this: right(replicate(' ', 12) + CustomerId, 12) You would want to replace both 12s with an appropriate width for the field. This will sort the numbers correctly. You don't have to display the field in this format, just use this expression in the 'order by' clause. |
| Mon 22 Dec | anon | Ged, Thanks, thats a neat trick. But that doesn't exactly solve my problem. It works if I have values like {1, 2, 3, 10, abc12, xyz34}. I get the desired output like, 1 2 3 10 abc12 xyz34. But if I have values like {1, 2, 3, 10101010, abc12, xyz34} then I get the output like 1 2 3 abc12 xyz34 10101010 instead of 1 2 3 10101010 abc12 xyz34 Dave, I am looking into chaning the collation for the column. Thanks for the help so far. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Ged Byrne | Anon, 101010101 shouldn't cause any problems unless it is bigger than the value your padding to. Did you leave the value at 12, or did you change it to a value less than 8? |
| Mon 22 Dec | anon | I am sorry Ged. I thought I was supposed to pad it with field width. So I used 15. But I guess I didn't understand the solution properly. And now I am totally confused :) What's the significance of that number there? Will you be kind enough to explain? Thanks. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Ged Byrne | Anon, The field length is probably the best values to choose. Here is how it all works. The field in question is a string. String sorting is done as follows. Check the first character. If it is equal, check the next character, keep going to you find one that is different and compare using that. So, if you have ANT and BAT, ANT comes first based on the first letter, A. It is more difficult for ANT and ANIMAL. A and N are equal, so ANIMAL come first because I is lower than T. The fact that ANIMAL is longer means nothing. The comparison just moves from left to right until a difference is found. This is different from numbers, because numbers read from the right. 1 is less than 10. 10 is less than a 100. The number of digits is significant. The problem is that in your text field everything is treated as text. When 10 is compared to 2 it compares the first character, and since they differ the sort is based upon that. 2 is greater than 1 so 10 comes first. The easiest solution to this is to add preceeding zeros. 02 compares to 10 correctly because 0 comes before 1. If we have 100, 010, 020 and 001 then it will all sort correctly. If we add 3 to the list, however, it would all go wrong. 3 comes after 1! Rather than using zeros, we are using spaces so it doesn't look so messy for the string values. The effect is exactly the same. Space-1 comes before 20 because space comes before 2. What I cannot understand is whey 10101010 is failing to sort correctly if you are padding to 15. You should have 7 spaces in front so that it sorts corrently. Are you sure none of those are Is or Os? |
| Mon 22 Dec | anon | Ged, Thank you very much for explaining this. I think I get it. But here is the problem I have. I have the values for cust_num with field length 15 as {1, 2, abc1, dsfd, 3, 10101010}. They are all 1's and 0's. if I use right(replicate(' ', n) + woundnumber, n) where n = 2 to 4 then I get the output as 1 2 3 10101010 abc1 dsfd which is what I want. But if I use right(replicate(' ', n) + woundnumber, n) where n = 5 to 15 then I get the output as 1 2 3 abc1 dsfd 10101010 This is bit confusing to me. Any thoughts? |
| Mon 22 Dec | Philip Dickerson | The output [using right(...) with n=15] as: 1 2 3 abc1 dsfd 10101010 IS correct. The value '10101010' is correctly sorted after ' abc1' (with leading space characters). This also seems logically correct to me - why would you want '10101010' to be ordered before 'abc1'? The reason that the order changes using n=4 is that this truncates the values to ('...1', '...2', '...3', '1010', 'abc1', 'dsfd') [where '.' represents a space character] and '1010' comes before 'abc1' in text ordering. |
| Mon 22 Dec | anon | Oops, my mistake. Should have looked into it bit more before posting the previous post. I have to use n=15(field length), if i use any other value for n it's going to truncate the field values depending on thier length. So that part is clear to me now. I want to have all the numbers sorted first and listed together and then the alphabets. Hence the desired output is 1 2 3 10101010 abc1 dsfd Once again, thanks for all the help. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Philip Dickerson | If you want all the numeric values first, you can use a UNION with 2 separate queries, similar to this: SELECT myval, ' ' + RIGHT(REPLICATE(' ', 15) + myval, 15) AS X FROM MYTABLE WHERE ISNUMERIC(myval) = 1 UNION ALL SELECT myval, 'Z' + RIGHT(REPLICATE(' ', 15) + myval, 15) AS X FROM MYTABLE WHERE ISNUMERIC(myval) = 0 ORDER BY X Note that the expression returned as 'X' is used only for ordering of the entire result set; also, the expression 'X' has either a space character or a 'Z' character prepended depending on whether it's numeric or non-numeric. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Ged Byrne | Doh. I knew that. We are also padding the words, so they are no longer being sorted based on there first letter. We only want to pad the numbers, and leave the text alone. select case isnumeric(userid) when 1 then right(replicate('-', 15)+ customer_num, 15) when 0 then customer_num end from table Check books online for more details about case and isnumeric. Another solution exploits the fact that isnumeric returns 1 or 0. right(replicate(' ', 15 * isnumeric(Customer_num) + Customer_num, 15) When it is non numeric 15 * 0 = 0 so there will be no padding. |
| Mon 22 Dec | Philip Dickerson | Note that this may not give you the order that you want for the non-numeric entries, so you may want to change the query to (not padding the text entries with leading spaces): SELECT myval, ' ' + RIGHT(REPLICATE(' ', 15) + myval, 15) AS X FROM MYTABLE WHERE ISNUMERIC(myval) = 1 UNION ALL SELECT myval, 'Z' + myval AS X FROM MYTABLE WHERE ISNUMERIC(myval) = 0 ORDER BY X |
| Mon 22 Dec | Ged Byrne | Leap frog! |
| Mon 22 Dec | HeWhoMustBeConfused | The proposed SQL queries are a band-aid solution to more fundamental problems of data design. Firstly, the fact that characters are valid input for the customer means that 'customer number' is not an appropriate attribute name. Secondly, what possible business value is achieved by producing a list/report/query in ascending sequence of customer ID? Look further at this requirement ... it may be that producing the list in alphabetic sequence of customer NAME would be a much better solution. Finally, rather than butchering the collating sequence for the DBMS, or hacking awful SQL queries, if you truly need to produce the list in alphabetic sequence of customer ID, then consider transforming the code into an appropriate number at time of entry. Fix the problem PROPERLY and future developers / maintainers will love you for it. Clutter your database and code with SQL hacks like those shown above, and you'll be cursed for eternity. |
| Mon 22 Dec | anon | Ged, Philip Thanks. They do work. I was trying with unions but was still having some problems. Philip, your solution helped me on that. HeWhoMustBeConfused, I inherited this database design and I have to work with this. And this table(which is not exactly a table of customers) already has a 'customerID' and this 'customer_num' is entered by the users and it can not be only numeric. Now I have to figure one more thing as far as this queries are concerned. I just realized the value set is more like {1, 1a, 2, 10101010, abc1, dsfd} and these queries so far give me the output of 1 2 10101010 1a abc1 dsfd I need to get the output as 1 1a 2 10101010 abc1 dsfd So I have to look more into that. But thank you very very much for your help. All you posts helped me a lot in moving in the right direction. Thank you once again. |
| Mon 22 Dec | HeWhoMustBeConfused | I understand your problem of maintaining an older application. You have a problem of logic. I can't think of a collating sequence or algorithm that will sort 1->1a->3->11->30a->300. Why is the data required in this sequence? Are these realistic data values, or are we actually talking about a semi-structured code that requires some interpretation? |
| Mon 22 Dec | anon | These values are entered by the users and it can not be limted to numbers only. And I have to sort the entire dataset based on this field. I have the same doubt about sorting a character field such that I get the output 1, 1a, 2, 10101010, abc1, dsfd (if it is possible or not). I will have to look more into that. Thanks. |
| Tue 23 Dec | HeWhoMustBeConfused | Anon, the question I am asking, perhaps not too well, is WHY do you have to sort on this field? I'm perfectly clear that you can't control the data entry, given the limitations of the system design. Even without that limitation, there is a data design principle that an identifier (CUST_NUM in your case) should be totally free of meaning, with only uniqueness (it must not be the same as any other row) and perpetuity (it must never change) as its attributes. If these are realistic data values, then there seems to be no intrinsic meaning in the data. It doesn't give you the sequence in which they were entered, it doesn't give you a broad grouping, and it doesn't appear related to any other value. What is the purpose of this sort? Is it for reporting? If so, that report may be practically useless in this sequence, and may be more suitable in another format. Is it for a match/merge? If so, an alternate merge/update design might be more appropriate. If you tell us more about the REAL problem we might be able to give better advice. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Ged Byrne | Anon, You seem to be 90% of the way there. The positioning of 1a seems to be somewhat arbitary. I'm suprised it isn't 'good enough,' which is what you usually have to accept in these circumstances. Why is the order required so strict? |
| Tue 23 Dec | anon | HeWhoMustBeConfused and Ged, Let me give you a better analogy than this 'customer_num', so that I can explain you why this sorting has to be done this way. I have this set of patients with many cases per patient. I have the 'tbl_Patient' with PatientID and all the other data. Then I have this tbl_case with 'caseID' which has a'case_num' field. CaseID is unique, generated by database and is numeric only. But 'case_num' is entered by the user(nurses, physicians etc) which is alphanumeric. I have to sort on this 'case_num' because this is the unique field which our users refer to. And different users have different format of 'case_num'. This sorting is for both reporting as well as just the presentation of data. I hope I have been able to explain the situation better with this. Thanks for all your help again. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Zahid | It sounds like the union takes care of ordering the second half of the list (those entries that begin with alphas) perfectly. But I think you're going to need something more procedural for the numeric values. In addition to sorting 1a before 2, I'm assuming you want 10a to sort after 10 (not before 2 as it would if you treated these values as alphas). In that case, it feels like you'll have to 'peel off' the opening numerics and order those first. For instance, {1, 2, 10, 1a, 10a, 10b} becomes {1, 2, 10, 1, 10, 10). Sort those as numerics to {1, 1, 2, 10, 10, 10}, then add on the suffixes in alpha order to get {1, 1a, 2, 10, 10a, 10b}. And I have no idea how you could do that in SQL. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Ged Byrne | Zahid is right, I can't see any simple way to do this in SQL. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Just me (Sir to you) | Could something like SELECT case_num FROM tbl_case ORDER BY CASE WHEN PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%', case_num) = 1 THEN '0000000000' + case_num WHEN PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%', case_num) = 0 THEN RIGHT('000000000' + case_num, 10) ELSE RIGHT('000000000' + LEFT(case_num, PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%', case_num) - 1), 10) + SUBSTRING(case_num, PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%', case_num), LEN(case_num)) END work? You want to replace the number of zeros and the 10's in this example to suit the maximum lenght of your numbers. The general idea is the numbers at the start are 'normalized' to lenght 10 by padding zeros onto them as much as nescessary. First case is for 'starts with a letter' second is for 'all numbers' and third is 'number followed by letters. I don't have a SQL Server here to test at the moment, so could be all bollocks. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Tom Hathaway | Come on, this is easy: select theField from junk order by case when isnumeric(theField)=1 then 0 else 1 end, case when isnumeric(theField)=1 then convert(int, theField) else 999999 end, theField |
| Tue 23 Dec | Just me (Sir to you) | Tom, wouldn't that still put 1a after 2? |
| Tue 23 Dec | Troy King | I prefer Tom's method, but it doesn't produce the requested sort order. If it were me, and Tom's method produced a correct answer, even if not the preferred answer, I'd go with that. If the sort order produced by Tom's code isn't acceptable, this script produces the requested order via a couple functions. It's probably not right, and there's probably an off-by-one in it, but I have work to do so this is probably as much effort as I'm going to put in to it: create table #ids (i varchar(15)) insert #ids values('2') insert #ids values('1') insert #ids values('10101010') insert #ids values('1a') insert #ids values('abc1') insert #ids values('dsfd') insert #ids values('abc2') SELECT i AS i , dbo.left_of_chars(i) AS left_of_chars , dbo.right_of_chars(i) AS right_of_chars FROM #ids ORDER BY dbo.left_of_chars(i), dbo.right_of_chars(i) ALTER FUNCTION left_of_chars (@string_in VARCHAR(15) ) RETURNS BIGINT AS BEGIN DECLARE @curpos INT DECLARE @string_out VARCHAR(15) DECLARE @curchar CHAR(1) SELECT @curpos = 0 WHILE @curpos IS NOT NULL BEGIN SELECT @curpos = @curpos + 1 IF @curpos > DATALENGTH( @string_in) BREAK SELECT @curchar = SUBSTRING( @string_in, @curpos, 1) IF ( ISNUMERIC( @curchar) = 1) BEGIN SELECT @string_out = COALESCE( @string_out, '') + @curchar END ELSE BEGIN BREAK END END IF @string_out IS NULL SET @string_out = '999999999999999' RETURN CONVERT(bigint, @string_out) end ALTER FUNCTION right_of_chars (@string_in VARCHAR(15) ) RETURNS BIGINT AS BEGIN DECLARE @curpos INT DECLARE @string_out VARCHAR(15) DECLARE @curchar CHAR(1) SELECT @curpos = DATALENGTH( @string_in) + 1 WHILE @curpos IS NOT NULL BEGIN SELECT @curpos = @curpos - 1 IF @curpos < 1 BREAK SELECT @curchar = SUBSTRING( @string_in, @curpos, 1) IF ( ISNUMERIC( @curchar) = 1) BEGIN SELECT @string_out = COALESCE( @string_out, '') + @curchar END ELSE BEGIN BREAK END END IF @string_out IS NULL SET @string_out = '999999999999999' RETURN @string_out end |
| Tue 23 Dec | Troy King | If trying my stab at it, change the ALTER FUNCTIONs to CREATE FUNCTIONs. It would suck to overwrite real functions with those names. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Philip Dickerson | Tom's method (a few entries above) may not correctly handle the mixed number-alpha entries (such as '1a'). Just me's method (a very good approach) should work if you change the first case to NOT prefix it with '0000000000' (to allow the entries that start with alpha characters to sort in the correct position). Here's another possible approach (that idnetifies the leading numeric portion of the field and sorts by that first): SELECT case_num, CASE WHEN ISNUMERIC(SUBSTRING(case_num, 1, 15)) = 1 THEN CAST(SUBSTRING(case_num, 1, 15) AS money) WHEN ISNUMERIC(SUBSTRING(case_num, 1, 14)) = 1 THEN CAST(SUBSTRING(case_num, 1, 14) AS money) [.....] WHEN ISNUMERIC(SUBSTRING(case_num, 1, 1)) = 1 THEN CAST(SUBSTRING(case_num, 1, 1) AS money) ELSE CAST(900999999999999 AS money) END AS NUM_PART FROM tbl_case ORDER BY NUM_PART, case_num Note there are some restrictions because of the maximum value of a money data type (+922,337,203,685,477) - this won't work if the field length is greater than 15, and will sort incorrectly any actual numeric entries that are greater than 900999999999999. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Simon Lucy | Just an aside as to why the hell you'd ever want to do this (and agreed something like Customer ID probably isn't a great example). If you have a system which allows alphanumeric document numbers, invoices, order numbers etc, etc and you ship that software to different customers with different requirements, some will want to use purely numeric numbers and others will want some combination you can't forsee. In this case you need the padding tricks just to get sane output for everyone. Even within a single organisation's database they'll have supplier documents with varying numbering systems, its useful to see them in supplier's order as well as your own sometimes, especially when trying to track down missing documentation. |
| Tue 23 Dec | anon | Thank you for all your responses. Just Me(Sir to you), Your solution works. I still needs to test with more cases. Only thing I had to change was to pad with 9's instead of 0's for the first case. Tom, like Just me(Sir to you) mentioned it doesn't take care of the '1a' situation. I will look more into it. Troy, I am yet to try what you suggested. Thank you again. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Just me (Sir to you) | Oops, Philiph 's right of course. Leave out the '00000..' in the first case and everything should be OK. The check will be in the mail ;-) |
| Tue 23 Dec | anon | If I get my christmas bonus, why not :) In all seriousness, you guys have been really helpful. This board is great!! Thank you. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Just me (Sir to you) | Thank Joel (or 'the elves'), if he hadn't 'bolded' the topic I probably wouldn't even have looked at it. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Li-fan Chen | What Philip's said, though that's what I would do though, I do admir those who grok collation enough to recommend it. |
| Fri 26 Dec | Just me (Sir to you) | I believe SQL Server 2000 lets you specify collation on the collum level, and even should you not be able to do this (if your app does not own the data definition) on the SELECT level. |
| a nice sql elearning site | Thu 25 Dec | j b |
| I though the content and tone of this site was brilliant. http://sqlzoo.net/ You can pick your database engine, youre working with interesting data (the cia world factbook and the imdb), and the problems start trivial and get interesting. Plus, it sets a friendly tone with the text. e.g: That is definitely enough. Students should, under no circumstances look at the next tutorial, concerning outer joins. Anyone else have any examples of good, interactive elearning sites for programmers? |
| Thu 25 Dec | no name | sweet! |
| Thu 25 Dec | . | http://www.sqlcourse.com/ http://www.sqlcourse2.com/ they're free and quite good too, and they let you play with an SQL server on their site |
| Thu 25 Dec | j b | I also found this 'Gentle Introduction to XML' http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~andrew/xml/ linked to from the sqlzoo site (looks like it's by the same guy). I haven't tried it yet, but it looks quite detailed. |
| Locking physical memory on NT based OSes | Wed 24 Dec | christopher baus (www.baus.net) |
| In reference to my previous topic: http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=94904&ixReplies=20 I colleague of mine pointed me to this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/memory/base/address_windowing_extensions.asp I was considering the problem, and I realized there is no way SQL server could be putting out the kind of performance numbers it has w/ out something like this. Sure enough, there are many articles on tuning AWE and SQL Server. This is giving me more confidence in the single threaded server approach. If performance is a concern, Ill lock pages. There really isnt an excuse to run a server low on RAM anyway. Merry Christmas ~christopher |
| Wed 24 Dec | christopher baus (www.baus.net) | Opps... I realized that it applies to the 32bit+ memory addressing extensions. Feel free to kill the thread. I'm still looking for a solution. |
| Thu 25 Dec | coresi | Maybe this has already been suggested: you may want to consult “Programming Applications for Microsoft Windows” by Jeffrey Richter. Even though the book title does not suggest this, actually the book explains the win32 internals in a very straight language. It allocates huge spaces to the internals of win32 threading, memory architecture, memory mapped files, paging and other goodies. If the page faults are causing you problems I don't know of any better place to look for a solution. |
| Looking for a SOM overview | Wed 24 Dec | FireMode |
| I am looking for a SOM technical overview. SOM is IBMs System Object Model (a cousin of Microsofts COM technology) designed in the early 90s. I googled but most of the links I found were broken or contained very simple descriptions of SOM. Thank you in advance. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Mark Smith | Whoa... SOM was big under OS/2; the Workplace Shell (OS/2's high-level GUI) was built around SOM. I found 1 link that has something: http://www.edm2.com/0208/wps1.html I would recommended searching for 'Workplace Shell.' I'm sure that IBM has a redbook on the topic ( http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/ ). |
| Wed 24 Dec | Mark Smith | Here's another possibility: http://reference.dexis.net/vajava/redbooks/sg244390.pdf It describes using SOM with Smalltalk. And: http://wi.wu-wien.ac.at/rgf/rexx/orx11/orx11_wps.pdf It describes SOM with ObjectREXX. |
| Thu 25 Dec | FireMode | Thank you Mark. That's exactly what I was looking for. |
| Latest on SCO/Linux thing | Tue 23 Dec | Dennis Atkins |
| OK, so SCO has actually provided the 65 files that it claims are exact verbatim copies of their unix distribution that were allegedly stolen and incorporated into Linux: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/23/technology/23linux.html Linus has examined them and discovered that most of these files that are part of SCOs unix distribution are actually files that Linus himself personally wrote, and were included as far back as the very first 0.001 version release of Linux. Sounds like he has a pretty good case. And since those files were GPLd we know what that means -- SCOs distribution has just been GPLd. SCO shouldnt have stolen those files from Linus. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Ori Berger | Using GPL code in a product does NOT make that product GPL, despite what may slashdotters seem to think. It just takes away the right to distribute the derived work UNLESS it is distributed under the GPL. Said differently, no judge will ever make you open up your source even if it is derived from a GPLd source. If you don't GPL your own code, however, you may be liable for copyright infringement -- which, if I recall correctly, is $150,000 per copy in some US states. Now, take your peek - GPL your own code, or pay up $150,000,000 (If you distribute just 1000 copies). |
| Tue 23 Dec | Ori Berger | s/your peek/your pick/g |
| Tue 23 Dec | Eric Debois | It begins to look like thats what they have done. OR they just picked some likely looking files and are trying to pull a scam. Either way, to me, this proves that what they are up to is not what they claim. They are not trying to protect their IP, and the lawsuit againt IBM is likely to be bullsh*it aswell. For some reason they are trying to buy time, and divert attention. Pump and dump maybe? |
| Tue 23 Dec | Dennis Atkins | 'Said differently, no judge will ever make you open up your source even if it is derived from a GPLd source. ' I disagree. IP law is changing. Shrink wrap licenses are now being upheld by the courts -- if you use the software and the only way you can use it is by agreeing to the license, then in the US at least it is considered the same as signing a contract in blood. When a company that owns Unix IP mixes that IP with GPL'd code and distributes the result, the law is clear -- the company has accepted the GPL the same as if they filed a notorized affidavit with the FSF. Unix is wide open now. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Me | Hey, here's an idea. What if Linus is the one who's telling porkies? |
| Tue 23 Dec | Mike | 'And since those files were GPL'd we know what that means -- SCO's distribution has just been GPL'd.' 'Unix is wide open now.' I'd like to add a couple more gems. -No one needs more than 640k or ram. -There is a world market for personal computers of about five. The courts will decide. Not SCO, Not IBM, and most of all not Linus or Groklaw. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Dennis Atkins | He could be, but it'd be a pretty bold move and unlike his style. Also, the claim to have been the actual programmer who created from scratch 100% of a file is very different from a claim that some unknown programmer in the past may have created something that you own the copyright to but you can not find any copies of older than that which the other guy has had since day 1. |
| Tue 23 Dec | A Software Build Guy | Dennis, As much as this looks good for IBM and Linux, it will more then likely come down to who can convince a jury. (This assumes that the case is not thrown out). And until the jury comes back with its verdict, don’t assume a cakewalk. IANAL but there have been cases in the US declared copyright infringement where had been ‘influenced’ by a prior work (I remember news of a copyright infringement case against George Harrison where the plaintiffs proved that he unknowingly plagiarized their music and he lost). By extension if Linus had access to any of the ability to access source code for UNIX when he was writing LINUX an extremely good lawyer may parlay that into “copyright infringement” and using sympathy for the “Little Guy” Get mean Ol’ IBM and that foreigner stealing US copyrighted material too. So I will wait till either 1) IBM wins or 2) The case is dismissed before gloating over SCO’s stupidity. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Eric Debois | Well, these 65 files are not a part of the lawsuit, and the lawsuit is against IBM and not linux. IBM, as far as I know, are only accused of donating their own code to linux, which may be a breach of contract. All these other things SCO have been talking about... saying that THEIR code is in linux and that all linux users owes them money, is a different matter. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Dennis Atkins | OK Build guy, I agree with you this is a possibility. Just so no one's confused, my initial position based on SCO's statements and having seen some excerpts of the code that were shown at the SCO slide show, was that Linux was infringing since the code was obviously identical to some old AT&T unix code that SCO owns. But hearing that Linux says that he personally wrote that code seems a very bold step and at least moves this case to a new understanding -- both sides agree that the exact same copyrighted code, line for line, exists in both code bases. That's a little different from an issue of influence. Let's say Linus was influenced by some unix code he once saw. OK, but then how did his code end up in the standard unix codebase? That seems rather strange. Mysterious actually. Either Linus wrote the code that is part of standard unix or he didn't. If he didn't, then the Linux OS is in trouble. If he did then, I suppose it could be asked whether he was influenced by some proto-unix code that existed before his own code was copied into the original unix. That seems a strange case to make. I'm skeptical a jury would buy it. I think the jury is going to side with whichever side actually wrote the identical code that is in each codebase. Wouldn't you? |
| Wed 24 Dec | Michael Koziarski | Bear in mind that this highly important code is simply the values of the constants defined in errno.h and the like. SCOs argument is not that anyone copied these files or cut-n-pasted etc. But that Linus (or whoever) deliberately took values for these symbolic constants that were the same as UNIX. As this allows ABI compatibility, you are infringing. So the super secret code that SCO is threatening lawsuits over is about 100 lines like this: #define EPERM 1 #define ENOENT 2 #define ESRCH 3 Well hell, that's worth 50B or whatever they're claiming!?! Now, the ancient linux archives are useful here, back in 0.0.1 linus had the following to say about the values he chose: 'as I hadn't got any other source of information about possible error numbers, I was forced to use the same numbers as minix. Hopefully these are posix or something. I wouldn't know (and posix isn't telling me - they want $$$ for their f***ing standard).' So he just took the values minix. No conspiracy to nuke SCO's business here. I've given up even trying to be impartial in this matter. SCO lie, then they get caught, so they make stuff up and lie again. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Andres | Dennis, I am not a lawyer and all that, but you don't have to agree to the GPL if you don't want to, it says so in the licence itself, 'You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program', it also says: 'it is not the intent of the section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you'. So if GPL code if found in a company's product they can be ordered to stop distributing all the code until they clean it up and they may have to pay damages but they can't be told to GPL their own code. There is a more technical explanation: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031214210634851 About that code you have seen, can you tell anything more about it? |
| Wed 24 Dec | Stephen Jones | One advantage of Open Source is that it is very clear what went in and when, who from and how. It's all documented. Nobody who's looked at the case in details seriously believes SCO is doing anythng else than fishing. And if it's talking about code that goes back to 1991, then why has the copyright owner waited until now to claim copyright infringement. I suspect all they have done is look at the Linux code base and see if they can find places where it is the same as Unix. Anyway the odds are that you can find GPL'd code that is the same as the SCO code and then the boot will be on the other foot. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Simon Lucy | If SCO's case depends upon the content of errno.h then it will fail. Whilst its likely that Linus just used the regular errno.h constants which have been around since at least the late 70's (and SCO has yet to prove it has unfettered title to the original Bell Labs source, Novell disputes it ever sold title), its pretty much impossible not to have a Posix compliant OS without those same constants. Indeed, I'd guess the same argument could be used against MS, Ultrix, Minix, QNX, Vax/VMS and for all I know Next as well as AIX. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dennis Atkins | 'About that code you have seen, can you tell anything more about it?' The slide show code? If I recall correctly, it was some code from within a malloc that was included in one of the standard unix distros - I think it was an AT&T unix and I think it was supposed to be an early unix, predating linux, but I've not been following this stuff closely. i think there are others that have more formal opinions about what was shown. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Dennis Atkins | Andres, I reasonable interpretation of that section would be that you are not being forced to accept the GPL, but if you are using GPL'd code, you have accepted the license since there is no other way provided for you to use the code. The license doesn't provide for this remarkably flexible 'use of GPL code until sued and then it's ok to stop using it and everything will be fine' clause that I keep hearing advocated. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Brad Wilson | Because the GPL is written is English, rather than Lawyer, then it will take legal precedents before we truly know what you can and cannot do. The imprecise language of the GPL is comforting to a non-lawyer, but very very scary in a court of law. The truth is, this 'use it until you get sued' might very well be something the judge can read out the GPL, and once it's set into precedent, that'll be how it works. |
| Wed 24 Dec | mb | Do note that the GPL was written by a lawyer. What's ambiguous in it? As for SCO, the opinions here are more all-over-the-place than on slashdot (at least when viewing high-scored comments there). Anyone have a pointer to a basic summary? I could write an uninformed one: 1. Collect various organizations with 'unix IP' (Caldera, the SCO name (thi is not the original SCO), some other stuff.) 2. Make up stories/threats and publicize them. 3. Sell stock. 4. Repeat steps 2-4 until something stops it. Next deadline is 1/5, when they have to submit evidence to the court. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Me | Do note that contracts written by lawyers get questioned and pulled to pieces every day. McBride clearly has principles and believes in this case. I would say he has very good prospects. It's the first time anyone has called all these little oss weenies to account. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Brad Wilson | 'Do note that the GPL was written by a lawyer.' Last I knew, lawyers spoke both Legal and English, and nothing says they necessarily have to do either one very well. I've seen my share of legal documents, and the GPL doesn't resemble one in the least. |
| Wed 24 Dec | mb | Do you remember the old Borland 'like a book' license? That was in plain English. I don't think there's any requirement that legal agreements be written in jargon understood only by those in the self-protecting bar association. And interpreted randomly by judges. My assumption is that the author of the GPL understands how to write a legal agreement in non-jargon. Dear 'me': Even if you don't like open source, do you want YOUR software business destroyed by some company which claims to own the intellectual propery rights to what you wrote? |
| Wed 24 Dec | Eric Debois | Its been said before but it bares repeating: If the GPL is invalid, the code does not fall into public domain. Copyright simply remains with the authors and no copying or redistributing is allowd. Hence, arguning that the GPL doesnt hold water as a reason to exploit GPL:ed works wont work. |
| Wed 24 Dec | Phillip J. Eby | Dennis: AFAICT, SCO is not claiming that those files are exact copies of some files in UnixWare or some such variant. What they're claiming is that the files 'contain verbatim copying' - as Michael Koziarski said above, they're claiming that declaring SIGKILL to be 9 is verbatim copying of SIGKILL and the number 9. (Ironically, a few months ago an official SCO spokesperson specifically said they weren't going to make an issue of this, that the ABI was GPL, and they were only concerned about usage of SCO library files being run on Linux illegally. (A legitimate concern, IMO, but one that really only affects SCO and their customers, not Linux users at large.) So, this new twist is yet another reversal in their ongoing PR posturings.) As it happens, however, a judge declared almost ten years ago that these exact header files were unlikely to be copyrightable, since they are not 'expressive'. Copyright law requires creative expression as distinguished from mere facts. Arguably, '9 means sigkill' is a fact, and the expression of the fact is constrained by the medium used. IOW, since a dozen programmers given those facts would produce nearly identical header files, there is no creative expression to be protected, and therefore nothing copyrightable. Which means that if I had access to the UnixWare source and copied these files and started passing them around, I'd almost certainly be immune to any copyright claims. There are, of course, other causes of action relating to contract breach or trade secrets, but Linus is immune to these since he's not a Unix licensee (no contract to breach) and he obtained the relevant facts from public sources (no trade secret). Finally, even if the header files *were* copyrightable, copyright infringement applies only to *copying*! Independent creation of an identical work is perfectly legal under copyright law. And independent creation by way of reading a spec is 100% by-the-book 'clean room' implementation. Linus never saw Unix source, he wrote from a spec, just as Compaq created their BIOS by having one group of people write a spec, and another group write the code. If SCO ever brings something as crazy as this anywhere near the courtroom, they will be seriously screwed. Judges are responsible for findings of law, and they decide what the jury gets to hear. The defense would move to strike the copyright claims based on the non-copyrightability of the subject matter, and the judge will be able to do so because it doesn't require a finding of fact. That is, because even if Linus *did* copy the code, he'd be innocent of copyright infringement. So, any claim based on copyright infringement for these files will never get anywhere a jury. (And that's even if we make the generous assumption that they *first* manage to prevail in their dispute with Novell over who owns the Unix copyrights in the first place!) |
| Wed 24 Dec | Phillip J. Eby | me: '''McBride clearly has principles and believes in this case''' That's for sure. I'm not sure what those principles *are*, exactly, or what 'this case' is, because he has yet to show anybody anything meaningful. I keep thinking there must be some deeper scam to all this, that all the lies and backflips and dodging and stupidity from SCO are all to mask some deeper secret conspiracy. But then I sigh and remind myself not to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity and ignorance, of which the McBrides have so far exhibited in apalling abundance. I suspect that McBride really *does* believe in this case, which unfortunately for him would just make him a sincere fool, rather than the lying thieving scum he appears to be. |
| Wed 24 Dec | T. Norman | Every time SCO and Darth McBride (or Darl Vader, if you prefer) make a statement about Linux they come with something different, often contradicting themselves. It's like they have a strategy of constantly throwing up bogus arguments hoping that if they do it enough, one of them will eventually hit the bulls' eye. Unfortunately for them they aren't even in the same room as the dart board. |
| Thu 25 Dec | Me | > Even if you don't like open source, do you want YOUR software business destroyed by some company which claims to own the intellectual propery rights to what you wrote? My company does not steal other people's work so there's absolutely zero chance of that happening. Why is it that oss people are so thick? |
| Thu 25 Dec | Stephen Jones | Dear me, Does your company use hyperlinks? Well British Telecom would have claimed that your are infringing one of their patents. Use MS SQL server; then you are almost certainly infringing patents that MS put into the code but didn't pay a license for, meaning that you can be sued (this one actually appears to be a case with merit). Do you have lines like 'OnError Goto' in your VB code? I bet you somebody has written that before and could try and claim that you've breached their copyright? And it's true you 'stole it'. You're not telling me you didn't use it because you saw it somewhere else, probably in a book. |
| Future of straight C dev on Win & Linux GUI | Tue 23 Dec | VPC |
| Less than a year ago Ive bought Petzold and later 15 or so Win32 dev books and it seems to me that I did it at the last moment. These kinds of books just disappeared over the year an now theres only .Net! (and the new and improved C# Petzold). What do you guys think about future of C development on Windows and Linux? After 10 years on Mac, I switched to Win because after several attempts to learn and use Java or C++ I just gave up, and since new Mac is so Objective I decided to bite the bullet and move on to Windows and over the year I have built my library so I could link it to 8 MB of C source code created for Mac. I am not over yet, but I am close and now I am thinking about Linux. Is Linux GUI development also C++ or something even worse? Is it time to start buying books or downloading pdfs before its too late. And does anyone know which toolkit and environment should I use in the sense of latest politics on Linux GUI scene if all I want is just to convert my library to Linux and use my old but virtually bug-free source code. |
| Tue 23 Dec | Keith Wright | Won't objective C link to C? And something seems horribly wrong if there is no C-based Unix UI (though I assert my ignorance on the topic). Is there really any platform you can't program in C on? |
| Tue 23 Dec | Ain't no buffer wide enough..... | C(++) development will certainly keep declining on all platforms, it's inevitable. There's no upside strong enough to bring it back. That's the future, deal with it. |
| Tue 23 Dec | don't kid yourself | www.wxwindows.org end of thread |
| Tue 23 Dec | Mitch & Murray (from downtown) | 'C(++) development will certainly keep declining on all platforms, it's inevitable' I don't see this. As the great Alec Guiness said in 'Smiley's People': 'Expand, define ...' Basically let's hear some rationale for this statement. I think C and C++ will be around for a gazillion years. It is the closest thing to a machine independant assembly language around, and IMHO will always be the most valuable tool for those who really understand how to use it. |
| Tue |