Global Nerdy

Back in December, I wrote in Game Development Called on Account of Vista that Windows Vista was not supported by XNA Game Studio Express, a game development tool built on top of Visual Studio Express for students and hobbyists. The fact that it lets you build write games for Windows is one thing, but the really interesting thing to me is that you can also develop games for the XBox 360 (which I own, thanks to a trivia contest at the last Ajax Experience conference).

The good news — at least for those of us with machines running Vista — is that an update for XNA Game Studio has been released, now with support for Windows Vista. I plan to download it later this week, subscribe to the XNA Creators Club (required to develop games for the 360; sounds dangerously close to the Super Adventure Club from South Park) and take it for a spin.

The prevailing wisdom is that European mobile web use is higher than Americans’, but a survey by the Online Publishing Association says that the opposite is true. Ladies and gentlemen, we have entered the Bizarro World.

In the survey, roughly equal numbers of American, British, French, German, Italian and Spanish people were interviewed, with some weighting to reflect the mobile phone-using populations of each country. In the survey, they found that while 77% of the European respondents had mobile web access compared to 71% of the U.S. respondents, a higher percentage of the Americans made use of it. 41% of the Americans with mobile web access were regular users, compared to 31% of Europeans overall.
Here’s how the countries in the survey compared in regular mobile web use:

• United Kingdom: 54%
• United States and Italy: tied at 41%
• Germany and Spain: tied at 40%
• France: 34%

More survey results are in the article.

The recent New York Times piece about Palm’s response to the iPhone made me all nostalgic for the days when the Handspring Visor with phone attachment (pictured right) was the phone I really wanted.

A couple of quick items related to the Newspapers Need Nerds! article posted on March 8th:

• Adrian “Django” Holovaty says that washingtonpost.com is looking for a web developer. SOunds like a fun job, and you’ll get to work on projects with very high visibility (that’s important to me personally) to boot! Since Adrian’s the alpha geek there, web apps will be developed in Django (but your Ruby on Rails experience won’t be held against you if you’re willing to forget all that “black magic”). Special consideration will be given to candidates who have contributed to open source projects, have some web app side projects, have a weblog or have journalism experience. Examples of the types of sites that the successful candidate will work on include:
  • John McCain’s campaign contributions
  • Faces of the Fallen
  • Mixed Messages
  • President Bush Latin America trip map
  • Clinton’s Golden Voice
  • U.S. Congress votes database
  • Video Game Reviews database
• Howard Owens writes that journalists can program too. “The point here is that if you’re a journalist and have an opportunity to make a contribution to your career, your company or to our industry through programming, don’t let the math thing scare you. You can do it. Eighty percent of programming (if my math is right) is easy. If I can do it, you can.”

5 Ways To Know When It’s Time To Find Another Job is an InformationWeek article based on the advice of experts from Challenger Gray & Christmas and Monster.com that lists five signs that it may be time to dust off the ol’ resume and start looking around.

The article explains the reluctance of high-tech workers to leave their current jobs, even though such reluctance may be unwarranted:

After the dot-com bubble burst several years ago, a lot of high-tech workers simply felt lucky to have a job–any job. Gone were the days when chief security officers, Java developers, and project managers could pick up a new, and better, job as easily as picking up a latte. Human Resources managers stopped worrying about how to keep good employees from leaving for better jobs. People who had decent jobs counted themselves lucky, kept their heads down and just hoped they weren’t next to be outsourced or otherwise pink slipped.

Those days are gone. High-tech jobs are being created. There are new positions to move into. A lot of people, though, aren’t picking up stakes and moving on. They’re stuck in that head-down mentality and maybe they’re missing the opportunity to find that great next job.

Here are the five signs…

1. If you’re not learning anything anymore. “If you’re no longer learning, the indication is that your time there is over. If you have a really good boss, it can be hard to leave that. But if you’ve learned everything you can from that company and that great boss, you’re not helping yourself by staying.”
2. If the rumor mill says things are going to get worse, especially if your company’s just been merged or acquired. “It’s rare that rumors stay alive when there’s nothing behind them. Pay attention to the rumor mill when it’s about acquisitions, mergers and layoffs. Mergers and acquisitions are a real red flag that some of you will go, if not all of you. There’s a lot of rumors but when everybody is talking about layoffs and it’s being said and said and management isn’t coming out and denying it, then that’s not good Your job is in the most jeopardy if your company has just been acquired.”
3. If you have a toxic co-worker (or worse, more than one). “Is there a bully roaming your office? Is someone else always taking credit for your work? What about that jerk who takes obvious glee in getting under your skin or that one person who makes you dread walking through the office door every morning? Answering yes to any of these questions probably means you’re working in a toxic environment.”
4. If you and the boss have irreconcilable differences. “Are you not receiving challenging work? Are you not getting plum assignments? Is there room for advancement or do you feel like your advancement is being blocked? Are you not being recognized sufficiently, either monetarily or within the organization, for your efforts? Everybody feels all those issues at one time or another. It’s about your level of concern and do you have more than one of these issues?”
5. If you are underpaid and overworked. “Are you not earning what you think others of equal stature are either at this company or at competitors? Are you not getting raises or bonuses? If so, it’s time to do some homework.”

Link

Employee dissatisfaction is at an all-time high, according to a national survey released Monday by the Conference Board, a New York-based private research group.In a survey of 5,000 U.S. households, more than half of all respondents said they dislike their current jobs, compared to less than 40 percent in a similar survey conducted 20 years ago.

These days, the lowest levels of job satisfaction are among younger workers, the survey found. Only 39 percent of respondents aged 25 and younger said they liked their current jobs — the lowest level in the survey’s 20-year history — compared to 45 percent for workers between 45 and 54.

By contrast, job-satisfaction levels are highest among older workers, with nearly half of all respondents between 55 and 64, and 65 and over, feeling satisfied by their employment situation.

Job-satisfaction levels tend to rise as the hours worked per week increase, survey results indicated, but at 60 or more hours, satisfaction levels drop again. Additionally, respondents who expect to remain in their current position a year from now reported higher satisfaction levels than those who see themselves working elsewhere.

Link

[via Reddit]

Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood writes about why he’s not getting full use of the 4 gigs of RAM he put into his computer. He’s got a 32-bit system, which means that the largest amount of space that it can address without resorting to jiggery-pokery is 2³² bytes, which is 4 gigabytes, which is 4,096 megabytes or 4,294,967,296 bytes. Any address outside the zone bounded by 0 and 4,294,967,296 is “out of its field of vision”.

After installing extra RAM in his machine for a grand total of 4 gigs (which according to this article is the “sweet spot” for Vista), Jeff wondered why the System Information window on his machine said that there was only 3,454 megs of RAM on his machine. “Where, exactly,” asks Jeff, “did the other 642 megabytes of my memory go?”

It turns out that it went to memory-mapped I/O. CPUs access things in the system via their addresses. Most of a computer’s address space is devoted to RAM, some to ROM, and the rest is pretty much for I/O. In order to have I/O (without which your computer would be largely useless to you), you’ve got to sacrifice some address space that would otherwise go to RAM. Jeff explains it in detail quite well and ends with these two points:

1. ” Although the performance benefits of 64-bit are somewhat dubious on the desktop, a 64-bit OS is absolutely essential if you run applications that need to use more than 2 GB of memory. It’s not common, but we’re getting there.”
2. “Here’s one final bit of advice: if, like me, you’re planning to stick with a 32-bit operating system for the next few years, don’t waste your money on 4 GB of RAM. You won’t be able to use it all. Buy 3 GB instead. Every motherboard I’m aware of will happily accept 2 x 1 GB and 2 x 512 MB DIMMs.”

I myself have been spared the 4 gig limitation. The Taint (my name for the Acer Ferrari laptop sent to me by Microsoft in their controversial campaign to promote Vista in the blogosphere) has a 64-bit AMD CPU and runs the x64 version of Windows Vista Ultimate. From a RAM expansion point of view, I’m set for a while.

Now when considering the availability of drivers, that’s another story…

Link