umjames

I'm not saying the Sonic games are great, but that it's proof that Nintendo could still keep their brand characters (Mario and friends, Link, Samus, etc) without a console.

Proof that Sega still knows how to make great games:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd1tuZs55Ko&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7sb_qlP8Gs

Isn't Sega a Japanese company that dropped their consoles and went software-only? They're still in business and doing well. If you've been to Japan and have seen or played Border Break (an arcade-only game), you know they've still got it. They also still make Sonic games.

There's no reason that Nintendo couldn't follow suit. Pride is probably the biggest obstacle preventing that from happening, but if/when things get bad enough, they'll make the switch.

Agreed.

Are there people who really want to work at all hours? Maybe eager students right out of college.

Personally, I'm at the point where if I'm going to be working at all hours, I'd better be one of the primary beneficiaries of that work.

Agreed, and the close proximity of their deaths makes me think that that's it for a set of 3.

Isn't there something about deaths happening in 3s?

1. Steve Jobs

2. Dennis Ritchie

3. John McCarthy

I think it highly depends on each person's work situation. It would be nice if we could all have employers who would agree to that kind of arrangement, but unfortunately, that's not always the case.

I figure, if you're bootstrapping a business on the side, you're probably looking to get out of working for your employer anyway. If your employer can't tell the difference between when you're giving them your most productive hours and your least, I wouldn't consider it to be shortchanging.

I've often had the thought that you can split the day into thirds of 8 hours each, 1/3 is work, 1/3 is personal time, 1/3 is sleep.

The usual pattern is work -> personal time -> sleep. Why not reverse personal time and sleep? So when you come home from work, you sleep (thus getting an 8-hour rest), wake up around 2am fully charged and then work on your bootstrapped business during your personal time. You'll get more than 2 hours. Finally, work time comes last.

This way, your business gets your best energy and effort for that day, you get more rest, and work won't notice the difference.

Were these recruiters that your company hired, or were they actual HR employees from your company?

I would have gone just to see the looks on their faces.

Who says the performant code has to be written in Java? It could be another JVM language (Twitter is using Scala for this), or it could be some other non-JVM language if that language better fits the situation's needs.

Cringely's post is pure link bait (or even flame bait). I feel sorry for those who read the post as if the author is knowledgable about this subject matter. Picture the IT manager or CIO who reads that and thinks their continued investment in Java as the "one language to rule them all" was a good decision. That person would be better served reading Steve Yegge's platform rant from earlier today.

No one language is equally great at solving every foreseeable problem. The only good answer is not to be afraid of using multiple languages/technology stacks and be prepared to replace existing pieces with ones that are better when the time comes.

Agreed. Eyesight doesn't get better as you get older, it only gets worse. Why strain your eyes trying not to "look old"? Your eyes should be relaxed when you read.

Shouldn't productivity be measured in number of things done where each "thing" is multiplied by a number that represents the difficulty of the task divided by the time taken to do it?

If hours are the chief measurement, then you can stretch things out to make it take more time. I'm sure this is happening in businesses the world over anyway.

Will they be full closures and remember the state of objects in scope?

What about scheduling some time (daily or weekly) for doing the things that you would normally consider your procrastination activity? Has anyone here tried that? How did it work out? The more details you can provide, the better.

Reminds me of the Chris Rock skit. The money is in the medicine, not the cure.

I'm generalizing, but It seems as if institutions who have made a living researching treatments to major diseases don't seem that interested in cures. That could threaten their existence. So they put their money in providing hospital services instead of research. They can't get government money for research grants if their idea for research seems too unorthodox.

In the end, it's about protecting jobs and finding a way for you to live longer with the disease.

I don't know, but I'm sure it has. If your primary interface to MySQL is a GUI tool where you just click the "create table" button, type in a name and accept the other defaults, you could be using MyISAM tables without knowing anything about table types.

Don't forget, that 10 years of experience could just be 1 year repeated 10 times. A cardinal number of years doesn't always equate to increasing breadth of knowledge.

Agreed. It's refreshing to be able to see knowledgable people arrive at better solutions.

I love the fact that they come up with the best solution that solves the problem based on their skill set at that time; and when either their skill set improves or the technology improves, they actually go back and replace the current solution with a better one (even if the better solution requires a change of programming language)!

It shows the true power behind hiring the right people. It's not as much about the number of years of experience with a technology stack, as it is proof of a person's ability and willingness to learn new skills.

Where do you work, if you don't mind me asking? It sounds like a really great place.

I think their goal was to make GitHub (and by extension git itself) more accessible to people who code, but are not familiar/comfortable enough with command line Unix or SSH to generate SSH keypairs. There are a lot of these people.

Although I agree that SSH keypairs feel more secure than a username/password, it would make setting up a new machine for development a lot easier than generating a new SSH keypair and adding it to my GitHub (or any other git server) account.

He's not writing a blog post to "do better." He's just conveying his thoughts about doing better vs. feeling better.

Nothing wrong with that.

You are correct in my case.

We use Oracle, MS SQL Server, and Sybase because that's what the vendorware we use requires. We do have some open-source software that uses MySQL for administrative purposes.

Meanwhile, the employer keeps a bunch of "dumb and stupid" employees that they refuse to make better. Those employees that are self-starters will make themselves better and, if they want to, will leave anyway.

Seems kind of silly to me. If your better employees regularly leave your company, than you probably have more deeply-rooted organizational problems that need fixing.

My concerns are that Heroku's prices are rather high. I understand paying for what you use, but you get charged for as long as something is on, even if it's not in use. Add to this that there's no built-in shutting down of inactive dynos or workers, and you can't help but feel like you're getting fleeced.

I haven't looked at Rackspace too much. Is deployment as simple as a git push, like Heroku? How's their pricing compared to Heroku? Is rolling your own scalable Rails architecture using AWS directly too complicated?

I quick check of the Ruby documentation (http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/) suggests that raise and fail are the same method.

Is there an actual difference between these methods?

I wonder if they could make rechargeable PSN gift cards. You could put money on it via PayPal, and the only thing Sony stores is how much money is on the card instead of actual credit card info.

Tried to access this site from work and it's blocked by the corporate firewall. When I saw it at home last night, there didn't seem to be anything inappropriate about the site. Maybe I'm missing something?

I guess that means my current job ranks low according to the criteria in this article.

The biggest benefit of a co-working space is that you are in more control of when you want to be around other people. You can always go home when you need pure isolation.

At your employer's workplace, you don't have that control. You can be interrupted at any time by anything.

You don't appreciate that flexibility until you have to use headphones and music to drown out your co-workers' inane personal conversations.

Exactly, a tool (technology-based or otherwise) is just a multiplier for the person wielding it. It's the people wielding the tool that make the difference.

Management is not excluded from this either. They have to:

1. know, in depth, the business they are in and the tools they use (or could use) to achieve their goals

2. listen to what their team tells them and provide an environment where they can do the job right

It sounds like there was a lot of micro-management and putting out fires in this case.

Can't you have both? Take option A for a few years. Save most of that money, then quit. Take option B for a lot longer than you could have if you didn't take option A first.

But seriously, I understand that option A almost never pays that well and is usually not guaranteed. For example, working for stock options that you'll most likely never see vest.

Also option B is not guaranteed to make no money either, and at least you like option B. So, I'd take B too.

I agree. Which type of story resonates more with would-be entrepreneurs? The "I want to help others via my business" story, or the "I hate my crappy job, and want to seek what I perceive to be happiness via my own business" story?

I'm not saying that you can't have a mixture of both, or transition from one motive to the other, but most people's first thoughts are about themselves, others tend to come afterward. We are afraid to admit this in public, but I think we can all agree it exists.

So what's wrong with seeking personal happiness first? Does that preclude you from being more altruistic later in life? If you can put others' needs first, more power to you, but that doesn't make those who cannot worse people.

Never underestimate a company's reluctance to change. Usually, the bigger they are (or the more clueless the decision-makers are), the greater the reluctance.