Swinx43

It becomes even more of a challenge when you compare pure Hadoop against cloud native solutions such as Google Big Query. The costs of running your own Hadoop clusters on AWS, Azure or GCP is much higher than what using cloud native solutions will be in the future.

This is quite a harsh analysis but not too far from the truth. The limitations placed on H1Bs and the fact that you are really easier to exploit is one of the main reasons I have chosen in the past to go to a different country for work. If an H1B had the same rights as say a Tier 1 migrant in the UK you would see A LOT less abuse of this system.

A Tier 1 migrant in the UK has total freedom over who they can work for. They are not tied to a particular company and as such can leave for a better job without any administration overhead for them. They also have the ability to start their own company without any restrictions. This places them on equal footing with any local job applicants as they cannot be forced to work for lower than the industry going wage.

You are spot on! For what you pay for top $$ products they fall WAY short of what is required. If you do end up doing a write up please send me the link. I sometimes feel like the only person in the room that can see the end result just being a glorified ETL tool with some rudimentary dashboard porn that is of no use to anyone, all of this exactly due to the problem you described.

I have been working in Business Intelligence for almost a decade now and you are spot on with you comment.

Every BI tool sells an entire ecosystem with it that ties the purchasing organisation into the platform. It is shocking to see that none of the things you mention exist as FOSS.

Unfortunately a lot of the open source BI tools out there are really still very immature compared to the commercial products.

On the WiFi issues I have noticed that when using a normal 2.4GHz router in combination with any Bluetooth mouse, keyboard etc. causes lots of issues for me.

Typically I would be getting really slow speeds and intermittent disconnects.

Switching to a 5GHz WiFi router solved a lot of problems in the WiFi department for me on both El Capitan and Yosemite.

Slack is definitely a better option than Facebook at Work in my opinion. Social networks are a time suck at best and marketing one to an enterprise is simply inviting cynicism and negativity from those people that actually have work to do (obviously almost everyone except HR).

Slack is not positioned as a social network but as a productivity and collaboration tool, a role it fulfils really well.

If I had to choose I would pick Slack over Facebook at Work any day of the week.

I could not agree more! To me it seems that most of what is happening today is an exhausting chase by some developers to fill their CV / Resume with the latest buzz word technology, resulting in a shallow understanding of deep fundamental concepts and years of experience on a CV that means absolutely nothing.

It looks like the HMCR in the United Kingdom have got some potentially disastrous ideas about targeting freelancers, independent contractors and consultants.

If this legislation gets pushed through it will create an almost unworkable solution for Freelancers, contractors and independent consultants.

Does anyone have any suggestions based on past experience on the best countries to work in as a freelancer in Europe?

I have not noticed any service interruption at all. Well done in handling this attack! This is just one more reason why I will remain a loyal FastMail customer.

The level of damage you will inflict on functioning eco-systems by "engineering" predators out of the equation will be truly catastrophic. What you might not realise is that by removing predators you will also have to change each and every other animal or organism that is currently alive in the world. You are talking about re-engineering almost all living creatures on our planet.

Let me explain by way of an example that is close to home for me. In my country of birth we have many areas which normally used to have free roaming wildlife including predators like lions and leopards. These areas where subsequently taken over as farm land and the big cats removed. This allowed the pray, usually antelope and other herbivores, to breed out of control causing immeasurable damage to the vegetation and if left unchecked would cause these animals to die of starvation in the end. It might sound far fetched but these ever increasing herds do cause damage to the vegetation if their numbers become too big. Given this situation farmers and conservationists either have to organise regular culls of these animals or capture and relocate them. Unfortunately there is only so many place you can relocate them to before the natural environment cannot accommodate them anymore and starvation due to destroyed vegetation sets in.

Predators in these natural eco-systems serve a very necessary function.

I am not talking about Human predators here so please dont confuse the above example with justifying why some human beings prey on others. Human predators need to be removed from our society. We are not animals and have the ability to reason which sets a different standard for us.

What I am trying to illustrate is the logical conclusion of your very well intended desire to reduce suffering. I applaud your desire to reduce animal suffering, of which we humans have a lot of blame for, but to extrapolate that to natural eco-systems could have disastrous effects.

I agree, it will be truly sad if it never happens.

What on earth is wrong with us humans? We seem to hunt animals to extinction for nothing more than a trinket manufactured from them! It has no life saving medicinal value or any such other kind of intrinsic value.

One day our children will look at us with disbelief and disdain as one of the most idiotic unenlightened "civilised" generations.

Yes py2exe and freeze etc. I agree the tooling for python is very good and I find the community to be one of the better ones as you have mentioned.

Coming from a pure Microsoft background, and that not being C# but databases and cubes, I find some of the freedom in the ways of working with Python "scary" at times. Microsoft tends to build a nice set of tracks that their developers seem to follow so it all ends up very corporate and "best practice". (Just my personal opinion) It thus feels like there are much more "training wheels" applied for beginners in something like C# and .Net than what you have in most open source technologies.

Thanks again for your replies.

I have never heard of haxe, it sounds very interesting and I will definitely have a look at it.

I have noticed that JavaScript seems to have never ending support. Strangely I have never been tempted to go full JavaScript, probably due to me not having much exposure to it in my day to day work.

Thank you very much for the feedback, it is greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much for the advice.

Thank you very much for the feedback. If I may ask, how do you tackle the short comings of the language such as battling with "freezing" an application to work from an executable on windows?

I find myself bashing my head against the Windows platform way too many a time. (A hangover from my current day job)

Are there any significant drawbacks to using Python? (Other than the usual cries about the GIL and it being interpreted voiced by certain groups in the programming world.)

I could not agree more! After many years slogging away in the gym I started rock climbing and never looked back.

Crazy fun and a super workout.

I could not agree more. F# has made me feel exactly the same.

This looks really interesting. Another course / book that I have used in the past which was great for getting to grips with the ideas of an entire system from scratch was http://www.nand2tetris.org/

I have unfortunately also been having some very bad experiences with books from PACKT Publishing recently. In the beginning the books were of high quality but somehow things have slipped as of late.

I definitely agree. The question I have is if it is worth paying for a verified certificate? It is $250 for the certificate and if it does not really count towards anything I would rather take the course for free and then go write a Linux certification instead.

This looks like a good starting point for people from a predominantly Windows background that want to make the jump to Linux. Does anyone know if it is worth doing the Verified Certificate? I would be more than happy to sign up to it if it has any worth in the job market.

I have never been a fan of EF, mainly because my background is more on the database side. That said it has its place but to do everything blanket EF is not always a good idea.

Your troll-craft is weak. For your own sake move to another platform where such blatant attempts at trolling might yield a response.

I would most definitely like to also know why? There are many developers that work using Microsoft technology, everyone organisation does not build their services or products on open source.

This is spot on. There is a lot of us that are in such employment agreements and do work for corporate clients that require NDAs. I find it short sighted to believe that your skill should be solely measured by your Open Source projects placed on github since that is sometimes just not possible.

Just out of interest, how much worker participation does big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple or Facebook really have? From what I can tell it is all perceived participation and the CEO and more importantly the investors have the final say. There is a massive difference between worker participation and investor control, workers are rarely investors or share holders in big companies.

That sounds extremely likely if you look at the way they are going. I completely agree that I have never looked back since I started using Linux instead. If I truly need a Windows machine I will spin up a virtual machine.

Although this is a much better looking concept than what is currently available in Windows 8 I still do not understand how it solves anything for people who actually need to do development on these machines. I would hate to have to do development in an IDE such as Visual Studio or Eclipse while being restricted to this sort of interface.

Trying to force a tablet interface on a desktop machine is simply not acceptable. It makes matters even worse when you look at a server operating system such as Windows Server 2012. That is simply the biggest FAIL for an interface on a server OS I have ever seen.

Definitely worth doing that as it is actually a lot more common in the UK for these clauses to be part of any developer's contract than what people realize.

Believe me I had to learn it the hard way.