Pay more attention to spelling, maybe? When I used it, it had a really tiny dictionary, but you could add to it.
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
After I win five or six lotteries, I might invest in one of these beauties; the spec sheet will make any dilettante-or-better photographer drool. You don't see them on eBay every day... :-)
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
Overpriced? Don't agree; back in the early PowerPC days, possibly, but not now. I bought a top-of-the-line 3.06 GHz (64-bit, dual-core) iMac a month ago because the amount of care and feeding required on my existing laptops (a 3-year-old Acer and a year-old Lenovo) had grown to the point where it felt like I was spending an unacceptable amount of time not doing "real work". Most of my "real work" these days is either Web development with PHP and/or Python, C++ development using wxWidgets, or writing on various topics, using DocBook and/or TeX. The Mac has all these covered, and I can still do testing either by booting into Linux (hairy to set up but doable) or run XPSP3 with Boot Camp. My new iMac cost roughly what I originally paid for the Acer notebook, but the user experience is chalk-and-Friday different. I've booted up the old notebooks less than a half-dozen times in the last month, and don't anticipate wanting/needing to use either of them in any serious work-related capacity anytime soon. (Games? The iMac has an nVidia 8800; the notebooks both have Intel 915 chipsets.... need I say more? XP inside Parallels benchmarks almost FOUR TIMES the performance I was getting on the notebooks, and I'm told it can be tuned further....should I ever feel the need.) To the earlier poster who pointed out that Mac folk and Windows people have different cultures, that's absolutely true. In the words of a corporate IT manager I once worked with, "Windows usees like to tell you all they had to do to get their work done. Mac users show you all the great work they got done." A month into this after 20+ years of not touching Apple or compatible systems, I think he understated the difference. Good luck, and as the SuSE guys used to say, have fun!
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
mmmmppphhhh.... must.....not....give in....to....obviously.....brainless.....insipid.....TROLLS!
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
by name? Probably not. by value? Obviously.... it violates the Thirty Second Rule (a single line of code shouldn't take that long to parse in your head) Wirth would be proud. :)
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
Will you need to fit your code into a larger system? what's that system written in? Use that.... Otherwise... what are you most experienced in? have you used the image tools available in either language or both? Which are you more productive in? How comfortable are you with the testing and documentation tools for each language? JUnit is still quite a bit more mature than NUnit, but if you're more comfortable with the latter, then that's a positive for C#. Is the code going to be ported to environments outside .NET? How comfortable are you with the language tools and support on the other platforms you're considering? Porting C# to Linux and Mac can be done with sufficient thought and planning invested beforehand...but Java really is a lot more productive/mature here. Finally, who's going to be maintaining, using or extending your source code? If you're a Microsoft shop with a lot of C# (or even C++) experience in-house, that's a major plus for C#. On the other hand, if you outsource to the lowest bidder and 90% of the work is going to wind up in Chennai, then use the least complex Java code that will accomplish the mission. There is no single answer for "what language should I program in?" There hasn't been for at least the thirty years that I've been developing. Every programmer I know who I consider truly competent has professional-level chops in at least three languages, and learns at least one new language a year. Do you?
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
That would be a South Asian analogue to Junior Samples[^], mayhap? "Friends don't let friends write VB6" -- Tech Sage "Friends don't let friends manage VB6 projects" -- Experienced Manager Sage
Marc Clifton wrote:
It sucks. Employers hold an axe over employee's heads.
When you control the system, you can make it do what you want. The fictitious legal persons won the battle against the real human people a long time ago. Lincoln[^] was an optimist.
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
...about time!
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
when Microhooever tries to make the computerphobes feel at /home ;P Yes, there's a few of old pharts still kicking; before my Apple ][ days, I remember when we replaced our IBM 026 keypunches with 029s, and I'm the only guy born after 1945 I've ever met who's put an IBM 704 through its paces... Of course, that and $10 will buy you a newspaper these days... remember those things?
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
I come not to praise VB, but to bury it. This is but only its due, as it has buried me under hardship and woe for lo! these many years. For if there were ever any man worthy of the "building tech out of stone knives and bearskins" award, then those who have toiled in the Dim recesses have most certainly paid any price, borne any burden. Truly they are men of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Why, in this politically correct age, do I use the exclusive male pronoun? Because most wome I've met in the profession knew better than to try to write any program more than about ten lines long in something, anything, other than Virtual Barfic. You will be more productive in APL, in Forth, in MUMPS. Your COBOL or ALGOL-60 programs will be more powerful and easier to maintain. Your Ada or Eiffel code will be verifiably correct. And your COBOL running on a MOS 6502 will be more responsive than your VB running on a Pentium MCMLXVII. When computer scientists talk about how the forward march of knowledge has been arrested these past couple of decades, VB is their poster child. On the other hand, I suppose it does buy a certain amount of job security for those who choose to do battle against sense, sensibility and progress. It has even led to new heights in wholly-insensitive bad taste. When I was at Microsoft, I heard a senior manager "joke" that he "knew and could prove" that NASA made no use of VB for critical systems. How? "Because, if they had," he said, "there would have been many more than one Challenger incident." (For the record, as the Rogers Commission report[^] makes clear, the fault was primarily managerial cost cutting and poor quality control. Hmmmmm....)
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
Anytime you're on a notebook (or one of those "slimline desktops" that's basically a notebook on its side, without a directly-attached monitor/keyboard), you're in Dante's Seventh Ring as far as being able to make reasonable guesses about what's where how...one of my clients went on an M&A binge last year and now they're "managing" 27(!) different laptop models...it's going to take a couple of years to get that flushed down to something that a finite number of support people can actually handle... and with many vendors doing their own "especially for X" versions of Windows (XP/2003/Vista), you can't even have a single system image... I'm all for software diversity and really wish we had more of it. But attempting to centralize *hardware* support in a middling-to-large business which was a bunch of small businesses a year ago causes more problems than it solves. I've already recommended to these guys that, next time they throw their checkbook around, they not only leave the previous IT group in place, but they add to it so it can *liaise with* (the new) corporate. Use whatever you want on the desktop, as long as it will take a standard OS image (Windows, *n?x, Mac). But having no more than a half-dozen notebooks corporate-wide is a good target to shoot for (especially if they're the ones that get high marks from both users and support folks). There are some vendors (*cough*Dell*cough*) I'd certainly not deal with again by choice - because I shouldn't have to play Forrest Gump whenever I get handed somebody's notebook. It's *not* a box of chocolates!
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
At the risk of repeating myself elsewhere, take a look at Trac. Does right what it says on the tin - including wiki, ticket (bug) tracking, timeline scheduling notes, all tied together with Subversion and your choice of most major open-source databases (proprietary support is in work). Good support, flexible without being a blank slate, generally positive experiences overall.
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
Have you looked at Trac? I've used it successfully with nearly a dozen different clients; there are several mailing lists, a good support Website and a (usually-)responsive IRC channel on freenode. It lets you specify read- and write-access via user or group names and ACLs. It may not be a dessert topping and a floor wax, but for a medium-duty, securable wiki, it might well be what you're looking for.
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
The link, or your .sig? (been meaning to ask that for a while....) Well done!
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services
Buy a case of Old Milwaukee or Budweiser (or the cheapest, most vile swill locally available), rent a paint shaker from the local contractor-supply place, and leave the shaker working on the case of beer overnight/up to mid-afternoon, ideally on a really sunny day. Then give a "gift" to your least-favorite brother-in-law as a "goodwill gesture." Then stand back....way back. How far back? Let's see...if I'm in Singapore, Albuquerque ought to be just about right. :-D
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
David Stone wrote:
Heck, part of the whole 3.x move was separating the Java language from the Eclipse environment so that you didn't have to use the Java stuff if you didn't want to.
Eclipse has now achieved its true destiny. It is no longer a mere IDE. It is now an extremely non-specific meta-IDE. Define your tools, then define the code to solve your original problem with those tools. If the technology had existed 30 years ago, just think of what emacs could have been by now! Actually, that should be good for a few wake-up-screaming nightmares; an emacs even more inscrutably, impenetrably omnipotent than Emacs 22... everybody who uses it is a geek god, because only geek gods will put in the effort necessary for mastery.... :-P
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
Thomas George wrote:
The assumption that skills of an average off-shore professional is lower than resident ones is naive. The quality of software depends on the skills and enthusiasm of the team, and the processes that they follow.
True but a bit misleading.... in 20 years of working with outsourced/offshored projects, I've seen three or four MIT-level geniuses. But having actually managed (non-US) teams and companies that were doing offshore development for American clients, I can tell you that they are few and far between... and those that do go into the craft tend to burn out fast and leave because the process and environment is so opaque, inefficient and corrupt. Dilbert's PHB is Jack Welch or Edsger Dijkstra in comparison. There are often high-functioning English speakers running the project who push along battalions of generally very young, very inexperienced "developers" who go out onto the Net, find something that looks kind of close to what they (think they) have to do, and then try to modify it to suit - without any real understanding of the problem domain, the code they're swiping (excuse me, "adapting", often GPL-licensed code pushed into commercial apps), or even any sort of best practices or engineering principles. I've seen teams of "certified" Java "developers" whose "certifications" are clearly Xeroxed (not Sun-issued originals), who proudly told me that they got "100%" marks in all their courses - after paying to get copies of the exams beforehand. This is apparently highly prevalent on a well-known, highly populous south Asian subcontinent. But the fictional people (corporations) use these cheaper-by-the-trainload real people to tell their shareholders (other real and fictional people) that they're "saving" so much money in software development, they can afford to give all of the CxOs multi-million dollar bonuses this quarter. When high-profile projects fall behind or deliver crap, that's taken in stride: "The reality of the software business is that nobody does it much better than we do." Pure, unadulterated bullstuff -- and that's the *only* pure thing left in what was once upon a time a proud, decent and honorable craft.
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: &nbs
Virtual Barfic (VB for short) doesn't kill people. Psychopaths who allow Virtual Barfic "code" in the same time zone as safety-critical software kill people. All Redmond gets out of it is the license fees - for VB and the Windows/Office licenses the mortuaries buy to "help" run their business. And then someone starts playing around with VB to scratch an itch...and the cycle is complete. Joe: "Friends don't let friends write bad VB code." Jim: "That's redundant!' Bob: "That's right! And you *absolutely* don't want your enemies doing VB either - the meltdown might spill on you!" My coat? It's the one with the IBM BAL Green Card sticking out of the pocket.... thanks!
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey