The name "Gandalf" was lifted by Tolkien from Norse mythology(along with a shitload of other stuff), and was actually the name of a dwarf.

Norse mythology is worshiped as Asetro today, and is a legit faith in Scandinavia, so if you try to trademark a name like that, you'd be violating human rights.

It would be like trying to trademark a name from the Christian Bible, which I don't think is possible, even in USA.

If so, I think I'll write a novel with this guy, lets call him Jesus, and sue for rights infringement!

-H

You're right, though there are some extra considerations.

Almost always, the idea guy has no or little knowledge of the technology required to realize the idea, so what he really needs is a translator that can translate and architect his idea to a language and understanding that can be processed by a programmer, where as the actual programming, can be done in India or any other popular outsourcing country. Many idea makers tend try to skip this step, which gives them a lot of grief and misery, many fine ideas died because of this.

You also need the translator to take management of the application into account, I've seen many projects that require huge amounts of manpower due to bad design, which steals the overall profit, making TCO go insane. Sure, if you launch a start-up and hope for a quick buy-out, this would be a valid strategy, it's often seen that the buyers of start-ups have to invest money to optimize, stabilize and rationalize the systems in order to make a profit.

Question is, if you're a programmer, do you sit and wait for more cheese hoping that your job isn't going to be outsourced, or do you
hop up a level in the food-chain?

-H

Thecus are selling NAS that use Linux software RAID, and it bloddy well suck!

Sure it's fast, but it corrupts the data, I've lost 1TB data, and a friend of mine who bought one also, recently lost about the same. The forums are full of people who lost data, so now Thecus include a disclaimer in their firmware that they are not accountable for any dataloss, how secure does that make you feel?

It can be that Thecus fucked up the embedded Linux they run on it(n5200), but my next NAS is going to be a server pc with internal disks, running ZFS and OpenSolaris or Windows with NTFS.

-H

Regarding the flowers, you'd be able to smell them if you didn't have your head so far up your ass :-)

-H

I can't believe you're not being marked either troll, flamebait or at least offtopic on that, but hey, this is Slashdot, a place where the blind are leading the blind, and real world experience doesn't count.

I wonder why I even post anything in the first place.

So just stick to your "neverland" theme park, I'll get out of here and get some work done instead.

-H

Wake up and smell the flowers :-)

You obviously don't know what you're talking about, but argue from some sort of idealistic picture of the world.

In theory, theory is the same as practice, but not in practice.

-H

In some companies, yes, but one of my top programmers is 58!!

Older people is generally better for your company than younger, more stable, grown up kids, less sickdayes, you just have to weed out the ones that got tired at some point and stopped developing themselves.

Young people tend to require much more micromanaging, are sick all the time if a little stressed, got sick small kids etc.

Fortunately, most management people believe the constant crap they are told by consultants that promotes getting young and hip people, so the experienced "no-nonsense" people can get to work in a company that values their assets :-)

-H

Problem with being a good manager, is that the rest of the organization expect you to promise deadlines like the crappy manager.

If you give them a realistic deadline, they will have a fit, and your job will be on the line, because they can get 10 other guys who can promise them an ealier deadline.

So you have to promise unrealistic deadlines, and then get extension after extension after exstension... Only to end up with the date that you knew in the first place.

This is because of the political behavior of upper management, which isn't quite logical, and that's the hardest thing to grasp for techies going management, letting go of logical thought, and start thinking in politics.

Having made the transition successfully myself some time ago, I know exactly what I'm talking about, even though I still keep up to date because computers always been a hobby of mine, and doesn't mind rolling up my sleeves and help some of my programmers solve a hard problem from time to time.

Many things can be said about Bill Gates, but he was originally also a techie, but that didn't stop him from keeping up to date as he moved into management, I've meet him from time to time at conferences, and He sure does know his tech stuff, prob. mainly because every techie had a wet dream about outsmarting him :-)

-H

This is excactly why people buy Microsoft software, pure and simple.

-H

"Frame Dragging" is because of low fps in the Matrix due to poor hardware.

Don't worry, I've talked to some guy named Smith about it, they'll upgrade shortly.

-H

The reason many Scandinavians(And I'll point out to our American readers that's Denmark, Norway and Sweeden) are pretty good at English, is because we had a huge influence on the language some 1000 years ago, when we occupied England.

Quite some of the words in the english language are actually derived from old norse language, which was the language that was spoken in Scandinavia through the iron age and viking age, which later turned into Danish, Norwegian and Swedish.

The reason some people think that people from Finland is good at English, is either because they only heard the very few that actually can speak understandable English, or lack of knowledge about the fact that Finnish is of a complete different origin than other Scandinavian languages.

Also, here in Denmark, they up until recently always had tv/movies for children texted and in the original language, but the German and French way of voiceovering are slowly creeping into our contry for some reason, damn lazy youth!

So in the future you'll probably see people with poorer English language skills from here, sad but true.

-H