Posts by jwenting

employers must redouble their efforts if they are to attract and hold on to skilled employees as the sector grows

which it doesn't, hence employers have no incentive to increase pay and benefits as employees aren't going to voluntarilly pack up and switch jobs in a playing field where the differences in pay between companies are marginal at best and a switch would be bad for your job security.

Last year Tech employees felt they were working the equivalent of one and a half jobs, and it’s clear teams are still as lean as possible.

so what else is new? Death marches, midnight marathons, and understaffed teams have been a constant in the software development industry for decades, at different points either for lack of potential hirees, lack of funding, or both.

Workload management, alongside professional development, should be high on an employer’s agenda for maintaining morale

and recognition... All too often programmers end up being blamed for every failure and problem in a company, but get no praise when things go right, that instead being showered on sales, marketing, and management.

Dialysis doesn't have to cause bone problems IF accompanied by a diet to compensate for the loss of minerals.
Problem is most people (including most kidney patients) refuse to eat a healthy diet, and sadly a lot of dieticians and physicians alike don't take the trouble to find out what a healthy diet is either, instead just prescribing the mantra "low fat, high fiber" they've been spewing out for decades to all their customers irrespective of physical and medical background.

So we have patients getting bad advice about the diet they're to follow, then getting osteoperosis because of the dialysis and getting that treated with pills which require more pills to counter the side effects when a diet with a bit more calcium and potassium (probably) would have prevented the problems before they got started but their dietician was so obsessed with the "low fat" that she ordered them on a diet without any dairy products (or worse, was a vegan and ordered the patient on a vegan diet not because it is good for the patient but because of her own personal lifestyle convictions).

What you need to do is first of all set some priorities. Dont' chase bug counts like a headless chicken as, as you found out, it won't work.

Which product is closest to a new release? Start getting that one in order, probably (unless you've a critical patch to make for one of the others to keep a major customer happy).

Once that's stable enough to ship, repeat for the next product, etc. etc.

Get to an overall more or less stable platform that way, THEN start worrying about getting rid of trivial and minor bugs.
You might even appoint one or two people whose sole task will be for a few weeks to sift through the mass of issues and filter out those that can be safely discarded or shifted to the backlog as "nice to haves"

localhost may be there, it's just the name for "this computer I'm myself". But if there's no mySQL installed on it, or no database with the name in the connect string, or no user with those credentials who has access to that database, you're still not going to get a connection.

The Sun (now Oracle) code conventions for Java are so universally accepted that it makes little sense to deviate from them without very good reason (working in an environment with a very large investment in some other technology where a smithering of Java is used on the side might be a place to do so, using the common conventions from that platform instead, but even there I'd advocate using the Java standards for Java most likely).

Not only is it good for the learner to get used to the conventions 99.99% of all Java code being produced follows, and which he'll almost certainly be expected to adhere to for the duration of his career writing Java code, but what code he writes and needs to be maintained by others will be much easier to read and maintain by those others if it is written in a format they instantly recognise (which is the reason for code conventions after all).

So just adhere to the Sun conventions, it'll safe you a lot of trouble later on.
And learn to use whatever is the commonly accepted standard for a platform when using that platform. You're using Java now, don't insist on using the Sun Java conventions when for example writing Fortran next year, use Fortran conventions when writing Fortran.

if you don't know what you're looking for, how would you know when you've found it?

simplest form of course is

public String dcrypt(long input) {
    return "Hello";
}

:)

And do realise that as soon as you filter the numbers to (for example) not have duplicates they're no longer random.

nope, any quality florist could order anything you want for you and get you higher quality fresh flowers in the arrangement you want in a few days.
And probably cheaper too.

my €200 Android phone does the same for me as would a €700 iPhone. Case closed.
Plus I can write software for it using the Android SDK on my PC. To do the same for an iPhone I'd need in addition to buy a €1700 Apple computer (replacing my PC with one that has similar specs would cost me maybe €700).

In all, a savings of at least €1500. What's not to like about that?

most larger companies already have that, an intranet that can be accessed by employees (at least in part) over the internet by logging in through a firewall.

what complete bollocks. These vulnerabilities are extremely rare and hard to trigger, and I seriously doubt Oracle is going to pump out new JVM versions 3-4 times a day, which is the rate of database updates for serious AV products.
Or do you suggest most people update their AV product only when they get a new PC, which is roughly how often most people update their Java plugin?

Last year I was still maintaining applications written for 1.4 JVMs, the customer was considering an eventual upgrade to 1.5 sometime mid 2013 at the earliest.

I find it very strange that we're getting this flood of high profile "security warnings" about Java only AFTER Oracle has taken over the product, usually from companies that look like they are closely tied with those that would benefit greatly from Oracle's demise...
Of course a lot of the core dev team responsible for the Java platform left Sun during the takeover, which may have something to do with it, and the increasing reliance of amateurs adding "fixes" to the openJVM codebase can't be helping either.

not only is it idiotic to claim people should stop using Java for development because of potential applet security problems (applet code is rarely used, and then mostly in intranet and extranet applications where security is provided through other means) but the claim that an applet "has no business using JMX in the first place" is just as idiotic. There are very valid reasons for an applet to have access to that, not the least of them being applet based application server administration consoles.

I strongly suspect most of these stories are thought up by people who have a vested interest in seeing either Java and/or Oracle lose market share.

everything can be decompiled into machine instructions, that's what the operating system does after all (and you can hook into the operating system and see exactly what it is doing) :)
Someone with an understanding can read those and figure out what is happening.

The only way to prevent decompilation completely is to not provide any executable code to the user.
This is what web applications do, all the business logic is executed on a server in a trusted environment.

Not to forget Sir Albert Einstein's hair, Dennis Ritchie's long beard, or Steve Jobs' simple blue jeans black T. They never cared about all these things , because they were busy "working", and eventually people started caring about their work too rather than their looks.

Einstein's portrait with that hair was done very late in life, well after he retired from having to go to job interviews or get "performance reviews" done.
Same with Ritchie's beard.
Jobs of course no doubt would wear a suit when on serious business, like when visiting venture capitalists or politicians whose favours he needed.

Looks matter, A LOT, unless and until the people you're dealing with already know and respect your credentials.
Which means that unless you're very near to retirement you'd best try to be able to look your best in a suit and tie if you're in this business if you want to have a broad base of potential employers open to you. And that means no pierced nose, lips, tongue, eyebrows, etc., no large or offensive tattoos you can't cover up.

There is no "best". Any such lists are either subjective and/or based on who paid the person creating the list the most money to be on it.

replace "might" with "will"... Most larger companies won't hire you, especially as a junior, if you have piercings, tattoos, etc. in places that will be visible to customers (they couldn't care less if you've the name of your SM mistress tattoo'd on your butt or have a pierced penis).

most hobbyists (which is most of the people here) don't have access to the tooling needed to use asp.net, hence they tend to ignore its very existence.
The Microsoft "hatred" many religiously claim doesn't help (all the while using Windows, MS Office, and other Microsoft products...).

what about actually doing your homework so you have a chance of fixing those failing grades and actually graduating?

You forget another effect, and a big one, that's especially prevalent in Apple buyers: replacement envy.

Many of them will buy every single new Apple device that gets released, whether it is an improvement (let alone an improvement warranting the cost of replacement on any objective basis) or not.
Thus I would estimate that possibly as many as 75% of iPhone 4S models sold are replacements for older iPhones (and most of them for iPhone 4 models).
While this happens to a degree in the Android market as well, it's not nearly as big an effect (and where it happens it's often people skipping to another Android vendor because of problems with an older device, or because of a major leap in functionality).

Learn how to use the command prompt for your operating system. The "NoClassDefFoundError" indicates it can't find the classfile you just compiled, so you're in the wrong directory.
This can be solved either by changing to the right directory to launch the program or by changing the command line of the Java command to include the proper directory on its classpath or by modifying your system classpath to include that directory (the last is not recommended, but included just to be complete).

Also learn to always put your classes in packages, but that's secondary.

if you don't trust your kids to the point where you think you need stuff like this, you've no business giving them cellphones, tablets, or indeed any device with internet capabilities.

Google is not at all Evil! I think the millions of spammers out there is making google look like one, if the honest practices are used, the google wont work so much on changing algorithms and site drops!

that's not what we're talking about. It's Google's collecting and handling of private information about everyone, and what they can and are likely to do with that data.
If a government department were to collect all that data they'd be villified (and rightly so) and in many countries be in direct violation of the law, yet Google (despite in many countries violating laws by doing this) gets away with it.

Statistical analysis shows 90% of all statistics are flawed.

an entry level programmer should be able to read, should be able to type, and should be able to learn. Anything else is a bonus.

indeed, and commercial services are strictly against the terms of service of most mmos.
Most such services are run by computer criminals and goldsellers, requiring access to your account details so they can log in and play your toon for you, but in reality to use it for gold farming and scamming other players before stripping it of all its posessions and stealing your creditcard in the process.

This guy however seems to offer an on the face of it genuine service to a community where there is no sense of community (as if there were there'd be no market for people demanding pay for helping each other).

if you don't know any programming languages inside and out, trying to write a game is not something you should attempt. Set your goals a lot lower...

Neither programming nor networking are games where you gain "levels" as you get experience.
And there's no "max level" programmer who can one-shot a noob by just looking at them.

If the US gov't shut down, basically all public sector employees would stop being paid and all gov't services would be shut. This includes
some low importance things like passport offices,
some moderately important things like EI, pension payments, research/scholarship payments, the military, prisons,
some highly important things like border controls (shut down of international trade and tourism), police, firefighters, medicare/medicaid,

most pension plans are outsourced to the private sector and would continue to be paid out.
most r&d and scholarship funding comes from the private sector as well
without border control, international trade etc doesn't stop, in fact it will flourish as there'll be no more duties, tariffs, etc. increasing the price of imported goods. Of course the flow of criminals from Mexico won't even be slowed down again, providing work for a lot of former police and military personel in the private security industry (and for the weapons industry to supply them).
many hospitals and fire services are already privately funded, this will increase rapidly, with service levels depending on what the customer is willing to pay for them rather than what's pushed through his throat by government decree.

Under the constitution, the federal government has 2 functions:
- international relations (thus, allowing the states to have a single voice in the world at large for things like trade agreements)
- defense
I'd add interstate infrastructure to that as a duty that couldn't have existed at the time …

you're supposed to do your own homework, and coming up with a project title IS part of your homework.

If you can't even do that, how can you be expected to be a creative professional?

he can't answer right now, all his fingers have been reduced to bloody stumps by all the typing he's done over the last 3 years and he's still only 20% done with his 6000 page work :)

1) find a project
2) join the mailing lists
3) read the bug database
4) download the source
5) get working
6) submit patches/bugfixes
7) eventually, maybe, get commit status

with disk images and/or virtual machines, it should be a breeze.
Just make a vmware image, and for each candidate remove the used image and put a new one with the same name in its place.

Of course if you're inviting a thousand people over for the test your recruitment process is fundamentally flawed, as 990 of them should have been set aside before ever getting to that stage.

Anyone using a Razor Mouse? I am using a logitech one. I don't really see a point in paying more for a mouse unless you are a hardcore gamer. lol

A good mouse (as in, good ergonomics) is vital for those working with computers for long periods. It can prevent or at least delay the onset of repetitive strain injuries related to mouse use, which is more precious than spending an extra 50 or even 100 Euro on your input devices.

Which is why I at work have a 100 Euro touchpad and a 200 Euro keyboard, at home using a 100 Euro mouse and 80 Euro keyboard.
That they're great for gaming as well is a nice side effect, not the primary purpose I have them.

And for flight simulators, a 300 Euro joystick and some 1000 Euro in other hardware :)

is it still open in a debugger somewhere maybe?

as you're having a requirement for scalability, php becomes a poor choice (it's generally less (easily) scalable and maintainable than other technologies).
Of course it all depends on how scalable it needs to be, both JEE and ASPx are designed for scaling into the near unlimited requests per second :)

Apart from that, much IMO depends on the available hosting environments, existing knowledge with the customer, and things like that far more than which is "better" as both can be used to create much the same things with similar effort.
Given free choice I'd employ JEE because I'm far more familiar with that than with .NET, but that's not related to technical issues but personal expertise.

That said, JEE hosting tends to be more expensive, with ASP development requiring more expensive tooling.
The tooling is your cost, the hosting that of your customers.

and println will not print \n on most operating systems (it will print either \n, \r, \r\n, or \n\r on most depending on system definitions).

more complete explanation:
"String" will refer to a String constant on the String constant pool.
" String " refers to another String constant on the String constant pool.
" String ".trim() refers to a String instance on the heap.

The left and right operand of your comparison then are two different String instances. The == operator compares whether two object instances refer to the same instance, not whether they have a content identity (iow, whether two object instances are identical on a field comparison).
the equals() member method (as indicated in the previous answer) does that.

== will work for low Number instances referring to Integers and Longs because it has been specifically overridden for that purpose, but that's an exception to a very strict rule.

As a practical matter, it can't be 100% Java. There needs to be some kind of bootstrap or microkernel for the lowest level stuff to build upon. But one can make an operating system that is nearly all Java. (Well hey; Unix/Linux is/was *mostly* C.)

wrong. It can be done if you pick or design the right hardware (effectively you'd be implementing the JVM microkernel in hardware, this has been done) :)

i think now days c++ are rarely used..but it is a good programming language.

and you'd be dead wrong about it being rarely used.
It may be used rarely by ignorant schoolkids, but that's IMO a good thing for a language (the frequent use by such kids is one of the main reasons there's so much crap in the Java community for example).

I'd say this "report" is overhyped.
The main reason Androis is seeing the seeming rise in popularity it does is because it's relatively new and the release cycle of Android phones is extremely rapid (and we all know that a lot of people want to be "kewl" and end up buying every new model released by their favourite brand, one more reason HTC is in front of Samsung as HTC tends to have more models and shorter release cycles than does Samsung, as well as being rooted more in the lower price market segment where Samsung is more prevalent in the corporate market where devices are replaced at a lower frequency than in the consumer market.

I think we can expect a similar rise in popularity of Windows phones were manufacturers to release consumer grade (and priced) phones based on the platform, accompanied by similar marketing campaigns as accompany the release of new Android based models.
Symbian IMO is indeed dead, or nearly so, as the number of available devices mounting the platform declines.
Blackberry (always centered in the highend corporate market) suffered hard from the bad press about their security policies after the censors in several countries got them to essentially turn their secure platform into an open one. This alone has caused many corporate customers (their main userbase) to reconsider their choices and in some cases switch to other suppliers.

Expect Apple to show up above Android in the next report right after …

do learn to use your tools. You NEVER run the JDK tooling from the installation directory.
Run them from the root of your source directory, setting the appropriate environment variables to point to the JDK tooling, and the appropriate commandline parameters for the compiler to direct its input and output directories as well as its classpath.

Documentation for both is available with your tooling and operating system.

What a waste of life right? Maybe she died that way to serve as a warning to other young people who are doing the same way as she did..

no, she died because she was a druggie and an attention whore.
We can only hope her death leads to youngsters steering clear of drugs, and not (as is often the case) to them trying to emulate her and gain fame by od'ing themselves.

well, those ones were wicked to humanity

you just went against your own rule to never speak bad about the dead...
So what'll it be? Tell the truth about people or cosy them over just because they're goners?

Interesting video clip. I didn't know who the hell Ron Paul was or what he looked like until that clip. There's little to disagree with if you're an agnostic/independent, but methinks the Fox Live interviewer had his tongue firmly up the congressman's derriere.

yes, anyone who doesn't agree with your leftist ideas must be a rightwing christian fundamentalist racist radical.
that's exactly the Dhimmycrat Partei official position, after all.

The problem with the US isn't that taxes are too low, far from it.
It's that

1. taxes are way too high, causing people to not invest
2. taxes are way too high, causing people to have no money to spend on goods and services (related to prior of course)
3. people are punished for success through taxes, thus there's no incentive to innovate or excel at your job and gain promotions (and thus higher pay)
4. there are FAR too many bureaucrats doing effectively nothing except pushing paper to "regulate" and "control" meaningless, stifling, laws and regulations (if they're doing anything at all, there's very regular reports about government workers being found to have been at home, with full pay, not doing any work, for over a decade, while technically still having a job to do, before being finally found out and fired (and then often heavily compensated to prevent wrongful termination suits)
5. those regulations often make (even without the skyhigh taxes) investment and starting/expanding businesses impossible or so unattractive people just give up trying and either flee the country …

If you're a freelancer taking on projects where you agree to a fixed price but not a fixed set of requirements and deliverables, it's nothing but your own fault.
Same goes for any contract.

Nothing special about freelancers there, except they often lack the expert knowledge in reading and writing contracts, think they know everything about requirements gathering etc., and try to wing it where a professional consultancy firm has dedicated people for all that and a professional legal team in place.

$16 for a few days' work? Forget it. As a freelancer you're going to need at least 10 times that much per hour to break even.
We're as a big consultancy now charging at least $100 an hour for our people, and that's down from >$150 a few years ago and barely enough to break even. For a freelancer its worse as his income situation is less predictable so he has to charge more just to cover the risk of being without a contract for a while.

and another release intent on making Java a clone of C#, Ruby, and C++ all at the same time.
Maybe it's time to move to another platform, one where the maintenance/dev group does recognise its own strengths and doesn't sacrifice them for a popularity contest in some online poll.

still waiting for that "final year project idea generator". Given the insane number of lazy kids who can't even be bothered to come up with project ideas, it'd be a major seller.

If I wanted a lecture in jihad appeasement from the politically correct, I would have requested one. I'm not interested in discussing the issues. Maybe one of the members has the guts to offer up something on the requested subject.

no, typical of your leftist ilk you just want people to bow to your opinion and march in line to the gas chambers when they don't agree with you.

maybe she should have said "no, no, no" to all those drugs dealers...

Nothing personal, but I won't miss her. The world's a cleaner place with every druggie that takes an od.

You are absolutely right. If a hacker attac your google+ account your Gmail account will be affected since they are all connected to each other.

as will your blogger account, your youtube account, and your google payment account (which contains your credit card details).
Your orkut account, if you have one, is also linked to that.

And of course gmail allows you to link your yahoo and msn/Windows Live accounts to your gmail account, so those could be compromised as well.