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Comment Two words: Trade Unions (Score 0) 454

That's what unions are for.
Unfortunately, tech workers are too dumb to unionise.
Either that or tech staff spout some libertarian anti-union nonsense that if implemented wouldn't benefit them anyway.
Why do you think all big companies lobby government? Too get protection and preference from the law, that's why.
Corporations, doctors and lawyers cover their asses with restrictive practices, we should too.
We just sit and take any BS employers and government throw at us.

Ever wonder why the salespeople and suits get the tickets the game and the "drive a ferrari for a day" prize when they deliver?
It's because we tech workers behave like livestock.

Comment Dale Carnegie - oh please (Score 0) 352

This has got to be the most overrated book ever.
It's one man's hopelessly out-of-date, patronising, down-home, folksy BS in the form of boring, repetitive, unsubstantiated anecdotes.
I've never read so much waffle with so little actual content.
It's basically advise on how to butter people up so you can sell them stuff or manipulate them so you can sell more stuff.
Typical manipulative, overblown nonsense from a typical salesman-philosopher.
A 1930s Gareth Cheesman (UK reference).

Don't waste your time.

Java

Java IO Faster Than NIO 270

rsk writes "Paul Tyma, the man behind Mailinator, has put together an excellent performance analysis comparing old-school synchronous programming (java.io.*) to Java's asynchronous programming (java.nio.*) — showing a consistent 25% performance deficiency with the asynchronous code. As it turns out, old-style blocking I/O with modern threading libraries like Linux NPTL and multi-core machines gives you idle-thread and non-contending thread management for an extremely low cost; less than it takes to switch-and-restore connection state constantly with a selector approach."

Comment Hallelujah! (Score -1) 310

First of all, I'm a UNIX guy. However, I'm currently working in a windows environment and encountering Solution and Project files.

What a mess. I don't know quite what it is about older Microsoft technologies but they're just duct-tape and glue (.NET/powershell etc seem interesting by comparison). However, Make is a sharp tool in the UNIX tradition: do one thing and do it well.

Now I'm not a VS expert but when I was learning Make I could sense that there was an underlying logic that made it worth learning. I don't get that feeling with VS.

I tried, but the docking/undocking/hiding/unhiding file/solution/class/whatever explorers just wore me down. I finally gave in when after ages trying I finally discovered that you *can't* use our version of VS over multiple monitors. Er... What?

Give me emacs any day, every day. I switched back.
Ahhhhhhhh. I just use VS for build now.

Comment Re:Working 9 to 5 won't cut it (Score 1) 619

> but considering I've never heard of you,

that's called an ad homimem attack.
just because you've never hear of him doesn't mean anything.

> If you aren't willing to go the extra mile,
> especially in this job market, there is a line
> of 10 guys behind you who are

and that's called "the race to the bottom":
workers competing with each other to see who can be exploited the most. oh, he'll work weekends? I'll top that, I'll never turn my phone off, I'll sleep on the premises. f**k me harder.

you're welcome to be a sucker.
our parents and grandparents fought for the right to leisure and decent working conditions and dorks like you will give up the whole lot in 5 minutes to out-macho some poster on slashdot.

it's simple: employers have a tendency to exploit. given free reign, they'll do so to quite disturbing extremes.
workers should resist exploitation but some workers (like yourself) are either too dumb, too blind or too pathetically eager to impress to look after their own interests.
employers must be laughing their asses off when people like you bat for their team - even if you are just swinging your dick, trying to look like the big man.

talk about turkeys voting for christmas...

> please drop this pretense that you are
> entitled to be

yeah, that's right.
he's not entitled to anything.
f**k him, he's expendable.
if it kills him, there's plenty more where he came from.
f**k human decency,
f**k leisure,
f**k family,
f**k culture,
f**k self-improvement,
f**k civilisation.

from the article:

"Saying that you wouldn't hire somebody for a programming job because they don't program in their spare time is blissfully naive."

you qualify.

Comment Re:More importantly (Score 1) 334

I see you're joking too - but I completely agree.

Legal language is inpenetrable, unreadable and it's runtime environment - the legal system - is horribly unreliable and biased in favour of those who can afford the best lawyers.

Law is software, I *always* thought we should start treating it as such. The most obvious comparison is to a rules based system. Law is software, loopholes and logical contradictions are bugs.

The inefficiency of law was recently brought home to me during a friend's divorce. The two lawyers involved encouraged each party to push for outcomes that were totally unrealistic as a starting position. This resulted in length negotiation (and high fees - what a surprise). The outcome was something approaching a 50/50 split.

Now, IANAL but I'm guessing that people have got divorced before. The starting point should be 50/50 and most of the outcome can be boilerplate law. There is absolutely no need to start from the position that everything is up for grabs - it's not. In software terms: whole areas of the state space are eliminated by law and precedent - they can be immediately and reliably enforced by repeatable processes.

The difficulty of modern law is it's complexity. The more complex the law, the more varied the outcome when applied by human agents. You can see this in the repeated failure of highly complex financial fraud trials.

The key point is this:

Good law and reliable enforcement is much more important than good lawyers.

What is needed is a shift of focus from the practitioners of law to the drafters of law. Of course, lawyers will never allow this because it will undermine them. Lawyers are the problem. Again.

Comment Joel Spolsky: From Coder to Manager (Score 0, Flamebait) 551

it looks like joel spolsky has finally completed the metamorphosis from developer to point haired boss.

for "duct tape programmer" read "programmer who will agree to do any old shit without complaint".
if he wants to rationalise his crap management style let him.

when the software finally implodes as a result of this nonsense, the manager can order a re-write and call it "agile re-factoring" or some such opaque bullshit.

here's a new trendy software methodology for you:

"if you don't actually write code - shut the f**k up"

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