dkarl

2096 ms·

3961.
by dkarl 18y ago
You're absolutely right about the quality of internal development. Corporations should take advantage of hard economic times like these to recruit good developers (for more than corporations are accustomed to paying, but less than good dev
3962.
by dkarl 18y ago
I agree. Isn't it a bit arrogant that every time we see somebody displaying ingenuity, inquisitiveness, or any other intellectual virtue, we think, "Hey, just like a computer programmer!"
3963.
by dkarl 18y ago
A somewhat useless list -- who cares about the 100 Best? I care about which book I'll learn the most from right now. I forced myself through a bunch of classics in high school without learning much from them. Eventually I realized that I
3964.
by dkarl 18y ago
They suck because: 1. The people who build them are told it's fine that they suck. People who "own the process" (or whatever) don't know anything about software and discount programmer warnings -- "Don't worry, that's not a concern, we ar
3965.
by dkarl 18y ago
MBAs should think in terms of firing the programmer who writes his own XML parser or generator, or uses a language lacking a mature XML library for production work. Really, who in their right mind uses a homebrew XML parser for anything t
3966.
by dkarl 18y ago
You have to wonder what their primary goal was. Perhaps they pursued their primary goal (a modern Unix with elegant internals) very intelligently and diligently and hoped that their secondary goals (users, developers, and influence) would
3967.
by dkarl 18y ago
The various flavors of Enterprise Linux are products. Since Red Hat provides paid support for Enterprise Linux, they have every incentive to make sure core Linux functionality is as stable and efficient to manage as possible. You might say
3968.
by dkarl 18y ago
I agree that the GPL is vital for getting contributions from commercial entities. In my company, management reacts very strongly to the possibility of giving another company an advantage and getting nothing in return. If I release code fo
3969.
by dkarl 18y ago
Funny how people are so eager to attribute bad design to the design philosophy it attempted to follow. This guy at least acknowledges that as a trap, but he doesn't convince me that he isn't falling into it. Furthermore, if you read his o
3970.
by dkarl 18y ago
People will pay. They care about hassle more than money. I absolutely detest the process of creating an account at a site to see content, and I use bugmenot all the time for free sites. However, I pay a decent chunk of change for a subsc
3971.
by dkarl 18y ago
The software was part of a scientific computing system. We were an upstart product competing against a decrepit seventies-era product with an eighties-era interface. The competition was markedly inferior in performance and usability, but
3972.
by dkarl 18y ago
I worked at a company where we very seriously talked about adopting Ada. Let me tell you what else takes the fun out of programming besides an overly strict language: knowing that if the customer encounters a bug, he will send you an emai
3973.
by dkarl 18y ago
You're talking about cultures that already value education, hard work, and obedience to elders. I'm talking about Americans. We have less automatic respect for elders, so poor parents have very little credibility with their kids. Poor ki
3974.
by dkarl 18y ago
The same as in any other job: we rely on the honesty, skill, and self-interest of their bosses and peers. Honest and accurate evalution of performance is the signal, stupidity and bias is the noise. Somehow, though it's pretty frickin' a
3975.
by dkarl 18y ago
To the best of my knowledge, such a salary spread in engineering would span different jobs with different job titles. Inside software engineering, you don't get promoted from Junior Software Developer to Architect by seniority. Heck, bein
3976.
by dkarl 18y ago
How consistent do they have to be? Law abounds in absolute-sounding formulations that are never interpreted absolutely in practice. By policy (though probably not by law) my company has a consistent salary scale across the company. There
3977.
by dkarl 18y ago
Public education often inadvertently acts as an amplifier for class differences, but your system seems designed to that end. What would be the upside of that? Upper-class and lower-class kids' paths would start to diverge at a very young
3978.
by dkarl 18y ago
What a farce. It's disgusting that they pay new teachers so little, and very few of the older teachers are worth $100k. This is nothing but two things. First, senior teachers control the unions and take care of themselves at the expense o