The customer is always blight. Tristan Louis, not so happy with Palm:
So I asked employee C11329 to be transfered to her manager. She told me she was the most senior person at Palm. I asked her again politely to transfer me to her manager. She told me she had none. I asked to be transfered to the person that was reviewing her work, giving her assignments, etc.. I was told she had none. I told her I felt that was odd as, apart from the chairman and CEO, I didn’t know of anyone in a company not having a manager. She told me she was the CEO.
I’m getting a feeling of deja vu.
My theory goes that every time a company tanks, its first course of action is to shed all existing customers. So watch the stock, and when it goes down, cancel the service, sell the product on eBay, and do whatever it takes to not be on the receiving end.
That bastard … Excellent commentary on breaking up with your Java ex:
“Well Oprah, Java is no good, let me tell you about what he did, in the beginning he was so nice, always bringing me flowers, but now he just sits on the sofa an plays video games, why even last week, when I got home, working hard to pay the bills, he’s just sitting there…”
Ivory closures. Earlier this month I asked, ” So how hard would it be to put a closure on this theoretical debate and just test it in practice?” Neal Gafter clues me in, there is in fact a version of the JDK with closure support.
It’s a ztar file. ZTar … sounds like a sword-yielding mystical hero from a fantasy world, but some Googling reveals it to be a musical instrument. Sweet, but probably not relevant.
Fortunately, it also opens up as a tgz file, a common packaging format for UNIX, not so common on Windows. Once you open it up, you discover (no documentation) a new javac you can use from the command-line. If I was bored enough, I could figure out how to plug this into Eclipse or NetBeans, or just run Vim and try it out.
Except I’m not the target audience. If you’re trying to solicit impression from average developers, it helps to remove ivory tower barriers.
The most important part is: The great majority of programmers in practice are average programmers. Many will never make it to expert status, and almost none of us become gurus. For Java to work well as a tool, it must serve the average programmer. There’s your target user group.
The other important fact is: the design is done by the gurus.
Idiot proof. Unfortunately our repeated attempts to dumb down the population by serving them a daily dose of random ramblings, gossip and knee-jerk opinions, laced with SMS-short haikus, time-wasting videos and edit-your-own encyclopedias, has failed. Miserably.
The survey showed 62 percent of Generation Y respondents said they visited a public library in the past year, with a steady decline in usage according to age. Some 57 percent of adults aged 43 to 52 said they visited a library in 2007, followed by 46 percent of adults aged 53 to 61; 42 percent of adults aged 62 to 71; and just 32 percent of adults over 72.
Friendly reminder. The world is a better place than it used to be.
Picture, one of the many inspiring graphics on Graphic Exchange.