Yeah, same here. I got Verizon DSL in October 1999. I use a local ISP for the Internet part, so I pay a bit more than your typical Verizon customer: $34.95 to Verizon, and $64.95 to my ISP.
I called Verizon on a Monday to have it set up, the guy came by on Wednesday, did a little wiring in the house. I hooked up the modem, got three lights. He said, "Have fun," and left. Real quick, real easy, practically painless.
My ISP had already been in touch with Verizon, so all I had to do on my end was configure my gateway and my machines on my LAN, and I was surfing the net.
As for reliability, my system only went down one weekend in December 1999. Verizon changed something on my phone service and didn't inform my ISP who claimed that the changed required that they reset something on their end. Being the whiz that I am, I've never needed tech support beyond that, other than just getting my IP settings from my ISP.
Having multiple machines and running a www server, etc. were the main reasons I chose DSL over cable. Also, I don't think cable was available in my neighborhood until the summer of 2000, so I would have had to wait for quite a while before cable arrived. (We had cable television for ages, just not cable internet.)
Here in Lexington, KY many neighborhoods are like that. You can get cable, but you can't get DSL, or you can get DSL but you can't get cable. A handful of areas still can't get either.:-(
Would reading Das Kapital count?:-) You're right, though, I am agreeing with the common view of Marxism, particluarly as it has played out in recent political climates.
I much prefer Kropotkin's view of the world over that of Herr Marx.
Who says we *NEED* money? Imagine what I said going on in a world without money. I'm not talking about the world you've been told you live in. I'm talking about a world that doesn't exist, but could exist. All it takes is a different perspective.
Large corporations, national gov'ts, what's the difference?
The entrenched institutions and stone age ideologies greatly inhibit freedom when they tell you that your options are more limited than they are.
The first step to achieving anything is to visualize that which you wish to achieve. I ask you to imagine a world without gov'ts, religions or other entrenched interests. I ask you to take the Free Software ethic, which is at it's core the socialist ethic of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," and extend it to every facet of life. Consider it a mental exercise if nothing else. Do it as a favor to your Nintendo-addled brain.
The capitalist system of exchange is predicated on a world of scarcity. No matter what the corps tell you, we DO NOT live in a world of scarcity. There is plenty of food, plenty of land, and plenty of power (a practically unlimited supply of energy hits us on the head every day and we don't utilize the smallest fraction of it efficiently) for everyone. The scarcities that do exist today are artificial ones, created and maintained by the greedy systems of power spawned the very real scarcity of the past.
We now face a very critical juncture in history. We can make choices now that no society on this planet has ever been able to make. We can obliterate ourselves in a heartbeat. We can slowly use up the non-renewable resources on this rock and starve ourselves into oblivion. We can choose to the follow the path of our ancestors, or we can choose to use and to share the world's resources wisely and improve the life of the entire planet, until the Sun goes red giant and swallows us whole.
You can laugh and joke and call me a hippie, a communist, a crackpot, any name you like. (I prefer Anarchist, myself.:-) Take some time to look at the world from a different perspective. Stop thinking about what you want, and focus on what you need, on what we all need. Greedy capitalism is responsible for creating the world we live in today, and are you proud of that world?
Don't point to the Soviet Union and try to tell me communism failed. First, I am not a communist, and second, anyone who has actually read Marx knows that the Soviet Union never even came close to "real" communism. Anyway, Marx is fundamentally flawed because he talks of replacing one tyranny with another. I am for the abolition of all tyranny.
I'll leave you with one last quip: "Free your mind, and your ass will follow."
Until food wants to be free, why should we care what information wants?
For those of us in the industrialized, Western world food is next to free. You'll notice that the majority of the folks working on Free Software fit the description of your early scientists. We must necessarily have our physical needs met, or we would not have time to devote to giving away our software.
So, what is your point? Are you putting scientists down for being "aristocrats" as opposed to proletarians? If so, then you are attacking the Open Source/Free Software folks with the same argument.
Quite frankly, there is no reason that food, fuel, medicine, and shelter cannot be freely given to every inhabitant on this planet so that they are free to do as they please with their time. There is no reason other than the existence of the capitalist system and its oppressive tendencies toward hoarding, bullying and maintaining the "superior" financial position. If the capitalistic greed of petrochemical corporations were removed from the picture, I wonder just how far along geothermal, solar and wind power developments would be today?
The accounting ledger is only of interest today because it is largely all that survives of the culture. You have to be careful when making assumptions about older societies based on a handful of spotty records. If all you can find are commercial records, it far too easy to assume that commerce was the most important thing in people's lives when it very well may not have been.
I'm not worried about what records will survive and won't survive from our era. The Romans, the Greeks, they didn't worry about such things. They worried about what legacy they would leave for the future (fat lot of good it did them) which is what kind of world they were leaving for their children. This is far more important, IMHO.
Something people overlook in these discussions is that there are too many yahoos with guns in the USA for something like this to become widespread. England doesn't have the yahoos with guns, not like here in the USA. Most o' them yahoos vote, too. Congress could never pull something like this off. It would be declared unconstitutional in a heartbeat. It has nothing to do with the Congressional mission. The President might get away with an Executive Order but that would still only affect "Federal Installations," i.e. gov't offices.
Local communities might get away with it, but for how long?
He makes it very clear that he doesn't understand the nature of Free Software and GNU/Linux when he says, The model around Linux is truly bizarre. How much do RedHat or Caldera really make from selling their distributions?
He is focusing on the busines side of things, on the competitive side. He reflects the Micro$oft ethos and figures the only thing that matters are the other corporations and businesses. He overlooks what is really driving the Free Software Movement, the users and developers who actually do the work.
The model around GNU/Linux isn't bizarre at all. It's about what everyone should have learned in kindergarten: sharing, cooperating and playing nice with your friends. These are lessons that Micro$oft still needs to learn.
GNU/Linux isn't about bu$ine$$ or selling software. GNU/Linux is about a guy in Cambridge, MA and a guy in Helsinki who thought that the world would be a better place with a free implementation of a UNIX-like operating system, and the thousands (now millions) of other people who agreed with them.
You'll love this then. For a time, I had to maintain a project that had a code module called "Product Analysis" which was mostly implemented in a file called, prodanal.c. The file was origninally implemented by a Midwestern, church-going lady who never understood why two of us younger developers would always snicker when we'd ask her a question about the Product Analysis code. I don't know why she named the file prodanal.c since it lived on the UNIX server. Although, I later found out that there was an 8.3 convention maintained on the UNIX server before I got there because developers started out with DOS/Win 3.1 machines. I started there in 1996 just after the IT dept. made the switch to Win95 and NT.
Thank the gods of UNIX I got fired from that place!
Yeah, and not just junkbusters is available, there are other, similar products and services out there.
Also, before reading your post, I thought of procmail which could be used to filter emails and throw away and that contain naughty words.
Also, I believe some proxy software can be used to block access to objectionable sites, and of course any decent free OS comes with firewalling software.
No, there's plenty of "filterware" for free operating systems.
It is my totally uninformed opinion that from the very beginning the folks at Salon have wanted to be a subscription-based service. From their format and the types of stories that they run, it is apparent to me that they have wanted to be an online magazine.
For the most part, they have high-quality, original content worthy of a print magazine, and that kind of content doesn't come cheap. It will be interesting to see how the subscription model works for Salon.
IIRC, Nerve has also gone the subscription path, though it has been months since I last visited nerve. Slate also started out with a subscription model and then switched to ad-supported content, 'cause nobody would subscribe.
I'll be watching Salon to see if this model flies.
Some dude in Finland is gonna sue another dude in Canada over a Trademark owned in the U.S.?
Puh-leaze!
Enough with the stupid intellectual propery lawsuits already.
I think Tatu's just pissed that OpenSSH is a better product than his commercial SSH, and that OpenSSH is becoming so widely used that it, and not Tatu's commercial ssh, is what people generally mean when they say, SSH. Shit! Now I've just supported his case.:-)
As a matter of fact, yeah, I've had friends who aren't architects, design and build their own houses, Steve for one, and some friends of my mother were doing it in the seventies, 'cause I recall being 8 and helping to paint it.
In Steve's case, both he and his father worked out detailed prints on a drafting table and built the house themselves. They passed all the zoning commission rules at every step. Neither of them is an architect. Steve's a "software engineer" and his dad's a coal miner.
Anyway, I know for a fact that degrees prove nothing. I've met plenty of folks with CS and Enginerring degrees who couldn't write decent code to save themselves. I've had to fix their crappy designs. I've met plenty of "hackers" w/out degrees who can program circles around me, and yes, I have a MS in Information Science so I have *some* formal programming training.
The reason most software sucks really has nothing to do with the qualifications of the people writing the code or with anything that was cited in the original feature above. The real reason that most software sucks is that business managers impose ridiculously tight deadlines on the programmers, so there isn't time for adequate testing, code review or even real design. Real design involves a lot of prototyping and trial and error before you actually begin work on the final product. That's the real problem.
The real reason that Free Software is better than commercial is that there is no definite release schedule, so you, as the programmer, have the luxury of releasing the code when you think it's ready and not when some arbitrary deadline set in a board meeting tells you have to.
It has also been my experience that managers tend to have one view of what happens in software development, and what actually happens is something totally different, and that has occurred even with managers who had programming experience in the past. They seem to think we're all wizards and we just pull this stuff out of thin, and everything is "a fifteen minute fix" including refactoring and rewriting the entire application from scratch.
So, maybe I exaggerated with the "massive improvements" bit, but I'll tell you that it's certainly more fun to code using some kind of plan/design. In my case, usually OO, and usually in C, C++ or Perl. Nothing better than reuseable objects if you ask me.
At my previous place of employment, there was an attempt made to do that very thing: build a reuseable framework of objects for the business software. There were problems galore with making this work because one of those drag and click types of commercial "programming" tools was chosen, where you create graphical objects on screen and then add code inside the objects, code that's tied to that graphical representation and to that object. In other words, the code was not factored at all, and if you needed a different widget, or even no widget, that implemented the same business rules in code, then you had to rewrite the functionality from scratch. Very poor planning, and just shows that the problems with OO are not really problems with OO but with OO that is misapplied by developers who don't really understand the paradigm.
As someone who has done the exact same kind of programming that the author of the article talks about: small to medium software packages for business, mostly in-house, custom stuff to get the job done. I can sympathize.
However, I don't think his real issue is with OOP, but with general programming practice in that sector. None of the developers with whom I worked took the time to actually design anything. They jumped in with their first idea and hammered at it until it "worked." They didn't care if there was a "better" design or a better way to do something, they just wanted it to work and for the customer (i.e. some other division of the company) to be happy with the software. If it came back for bug fixes later, oh well, that's what keeps us employed.
The real problem is not with OOP itself, but with the kinds of OOP tools (often linked to some RAD package) that are heavily used in this area and with the fact that so few of the programmers have the time to actual do design or code review. The managers were constantly telling us to review each other's code and to design everything, but no one ever did, and what passed for a group code review was a joke. No one actually looked at code. The lead programmer, often the only programmer, for the project stood up and gave a "best case" (i.e. outright lie) description of how the code works. Later, when some poor schmuck (i.e. you) has to maintain that very same code (which you were not involved in designing or coding in the first place) you find out just what a mess the code really is. The software more often than not did not even begin to approach the design discussed at the "code review."
Nah, the problem isn't with OOP, 'cause I have personally seen massive improvements in my coding since I've started using an OOP style with thorough documentation and formal notation. The problem is that in the very sector the author is complaining about, the vast majority of programmers are mediocre, and the managers (who don't do the work, but pick the tools and "methodology") are even worse. The problem is with buzzword programming where you pick tools because they are compliant with all the latest buzzwords, not because they are right for the job at hand, nor because your programmers know how to use them, which the majority don't.
It doesn't matter if there's a shortage of workers or not. CS degrees don't mean shit to anyone who really knows whats going on. I've worked with folks who have CS degrees who don't have a clue how to write decent code. I've often cleaned up after their clueless attempts at programming. In some case distilling 14 lines of useless, broken code to one line that works and does exactly what the spec calls for. I've seen guys with CS degrees write stuff like this:
if (x == Y) x = y;
Yeah, no shit.
Of course, I've worked with people with CS degrees who know what they're doing. I've also worked with some self-proclaimed "hackers" who don't have a clue how to write good code, either.
Same with those silly certifications. Having a piece of paper doesn't mean you know anything. It just means you've slept through enough lectures and parroted back enough of the instructor's drivel to pass. Yeah, it fools the pointy hairs, but it don't fool the long hairs. You better know what the fuck you're doing, and I don't care how much paper you pile up in order to make yourself look good.
Heh, I even recall fixing some code by a guy on a H1-B visa, too. He no longer works there, but then again, neither do I.:-)
I always build my own computer systems these days. That way, I get just the hardware I need, with just the OS I want, and I don't pay no Windoze tax.
I only pay for Windoze when it's actually going to be used on a machine.
Re:I don't think that's what it says...
on
High-Speed Greed
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, but then you, and a couple hundred million other web users and merchants, hit AT&T with a class action suit. You sue the crap out of them for restraint of trade and everything else. If AT&T were to try something like that, they'd be history. The gov't would have no choice but to carve them up, yet again. I can't imagine anyone dreaming that they could get away with a plan such as you describe. (Oh, yeah, I forgot about Micros~1.)
No, I read the article and I came away thinking, they must be talking about charging those fees for merchants connected via the AT&T backbone and not for customers using the AT&T backbone. The article is ambiguous on that point.
If AT&T comes around asking me for a cut of stuff bought on my web site by @Home subscribers, I'll tell 'em to stuff it, block @Home subscribers, then sue the $ out of them. By the time it's all done, I'll own their a$$ets!
No, I don't see how they can legally charge anyone who isn't already their customer and who also agreed to the charges up front.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, same here. I got Verizon DSL in October 1999. I use a local ISP for the Internet part, so I pay a bit more than your typical Verizon customer: $34.95 to Verizon, and $64.95 to my ISP.
:-(
I called Verizon on a Monday to have it set up, the guy came by on Wednesday, did a little wiring in the house. I hooked up the modem, got three lights. He said, "Have fun," and left. Real quick, real easy, practically painless.
My ISP had already been in touch with Verizon, so all I had to do on my end was configure my gateway and my machines on my LAN, and I was surfing the net.
As for reliability, my system only went down one weekend in December 1999. Verizon changed something on my phone service and didn't inform my ISP who claimed that the changed required that they reset something on their end. Being the whiz that I am, I've never needed tech support beyond that, other than just getting my IP settings from my ISP.
Having multiple machines and running a www server, etc. were the main reasons I chose DSL over cable. Also, I don't think cable was available in my neighborhood until the summer of 2000, so I would have had to wait for quite a while before cable arrived. (We had cable television for ages, just not cable internet.)
Here in Lexington, KY many neighborhoods are like that. You can get cable, but you can't get DSL, or you can get DSL but you can't get cable. A handful of areas still can't get either.
Would reading Das Kapital count? :-) You're right, though, I am agreeing with the common view of Marxism, particluarly as it has played out in recent political climates.
I much prefer Kropotkin's view of the world over that of Herr Marx.
Who says we *NEED* money? Imagine what I said going on in a world without money. I'm not talking about the world you've been told you live in. I'm talking about a world that doesn't exist, but could exist. All it takes is a different perspective.
Large corporations, national gov'ts, what's the difference?
:-) Take some time to look at the world from a different perspective. Stop thinking about what you want, and focus on what you need, on what we all need. Greedy capitalism is responsible for creating the world we live in today, and are you proud of that world?
The entrenched institutions and stone age ideologies greatly inhibit freedom when they tell you that your options are more limited than they are.
The first step to achieving anything is to visualize that which you wish to achieve. I ask you to imagine a world without gov'ts, religions or other entrenched interests. I ask you to take the Free Software ethic, which is at it's core the socialist ethic of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," and extend it to every facet of life. Consider it a mental exercise if nothing else. Do it as a favor to your Nintendo-addled brain.
The capitalist system of exchange is predicated on a world of scarcity. No matter what the corps tell you, we DO NOT live in a world of scarcity. There is plenty of food, plenty of land, and plenty of power (a practically unlimited supply of energy hits us on the head every day and we don't utilize the smallest fraction of it efficiently) for everyone. The scarcities that do exist today are artificial ones, created and maintained by the greedy systems of power spawned the very real scarcity of the past.
We now face a very critical juncture in history. We can make choices now that no society on this planet has ever been able to make. We can obliterate ourselves in a heartbeat. We can slowly use up the non-renewable resources on this rock and starve ourselves into oblivion. We can choose to the follow the path of our ancestors, or we can choose to use and to share the world's resources wisely and improve the life of the entire planet, until the Sun goes red giant and swallows us whole.
You can laugh and joke and call me a hippie, a communist, a crackpot, any name you like. (I prefer Anarchist, myself.
Don't point to the Soviet Union and try to tell me communism failed. First, I am not a communist, and second, anyone who has actually read Marx knows that the Soviet Union never even came close to "real" communism. Anyway, Marx is fundamentally flawed because he talks of replacing one tyranny with another. I am for the abolition of all tyranny.
I'll leave you with one last quip: "Free your mind, and your ass will follow."
It's not a troll if you sincerely believe what you've posted. It's not a troll if you want to start a discussion.
A troll is posted only to get an argument started. Flamebait and troll are really just synonyms.
Fact is, large corporations do often stand in the way of true progress. Take a good look at history.
Until food wants to be free, why should we care what information wants?
For those of us in the industrialized, Western world food is next to free. You'll notice that the majority of the folks working on Free Software fit the description of your early scientists. We must necessarily have our physical needs met, or we would not have time to devote to giving away our software.
So, what is your point? Are you putting scientists down for being "aristocrats" as opposed to proletarians? If so, then you are attacking the Open Source/Free Software folks with the same argument.
Quite frankly, there is no reason that food, fuel, medicine, and shelter cannot be freely given to every inhabitant on this planet so that they are free to do as they please with their time. There is no reason other than the existence of the capitalist system and its oppressive tendencies toward hoarding, bullying and maintaining the "superior" financial position. If the capitalistic greed of petrochemical corporations were removed from the picture, I wonder just how far along geothermal, solar and wind power developments would be today?
Anarchy roolz! :-)
NASA is using Windows for most of their computing functions,
In that case forget it. I'm not setting foot on that death trap! I think I'd rather take my chances on Mir! Oh wait, too late....
The accounting ledger is only of interest today because it is largely all that survives of the culture. You have to be careful when making assumptions about older societies based on a handful of spotty records. If all you can find are commercial records, it far too easy to assume that commerce was the most important thing in people's lives when it very well may not have been.
I'm not worried about what records will survive and won't survive from our era. The Romans, the Greeks, they didn't worry about such things. They worried about what legacy they would leave for the future (fat lot of good it did them) which is what kind of world they were leaving for their children. This is far more important, IMHO.
Something people overlook in these discussions is that there are too many yahoos with guns in the USA for something like this to become widespread. England doesn't have the yahoos with guns, not like here in the USA. Most o' them yahoos vote, too. Congress could never pull something like this off. It would be declared unconstitutional in a heartbeat. It has nothing to do with the Congressional mission. The President might get away with an Executive Order but that would still only affect "Federal Installations," i.e. gov't offices.
Local communities might get away with it, but for how long?
Bugs? What bugs? Those are undocumented features.
He makes it very clear that he doesn't understand the nature of Free Software and GNU/Linux when he says, The model around Linux is truly bizarre. How much do RedHat or Caldera really make from selling their distributions?
He is focusing on the busines side of things, on the competitive side. He reflects the Micro$oft ethos and figures the only thing that matters are the other corporations and businesses. He overlooks what is really driving the Free Software Movement, the users and developers who actually do the work.
The model around GNU/Linux isn't bizarre at all. It's about what everyone should have learned in kindergarten: sharing, cooperating and playing nice with your friends. These are lessons that Micro$oft still needs to learn.
GNU/Linux isn't about bu$ine$$ or selling software. GNU/Linux is about a guy in Cambridge, MA and a guy in Helsinki who thought that the world would be a better place with a free implementation of a UNIX-like operating system, and the thousands (now millions) of other people who agreed with them.
You'll love this then. For a time, I had to maintain a project that had a code module called "Product Analysis" which was mostly implemented in a file called, prodanal.c. The file was origninally implemented by a Midwestern, church-going lady who never understood why two of us younger developers would always snicker when we'd ask her a question about the Product Analysis code. I don't know why she named the file prodanal.c since it lived on the UNIX server. Although, I later found out that there was an 8.3 convention maintained on the UNIX server before I got there because developers started out with DOS/Win 3.1 machines. I started there in 1996 just after the IT dept. made the switch to Win95 and NT.
Thank the gods of UNIX I got fired from that place!
Yeah, and not just junkbusters is available, there are other, similar products and services out there.
Also, before reading your post, I thought of procmail which could be used to filter emails and throw away and that contain naughty words.
Also, I believe some proxy software can be used to block access to objectionable sites, and of course any decent free OS comes with firewalling software.
No, there's plenty of "filterware" for free operating systems.
It is my totally uninformed opinion that from the very beginning the folks at Salon have wanted to be a subscription-based service. From their format and the types of stories that they run, it is apparent to me that they have wanted to be an online magazine.
For the most part, they have high-quality, original content worthy of a print magazine, and that kind of content doesn't come cheap. It will be interesting to see how the subscription model works for Salon.
IIRC, Nerve has also gone the subscription path, though it has been months since I last visited nerve. Slate also started out with a subscription model and then switched to ad-supported content, 'cause nobody would subscribe.
I'll be watching Salon to see if this model flies.
Some dude in Finland is gonna sue another dude in Canada over a Trademark owned in the U.S.?
:-)
Puh-leaze!
Enough with the stupid intellectual propery lawsuits already.
I think Tatu's just pissed that OpenSSH is a better product than his commercial SSH, and that OpenSSH is becoming so widely used that it, and not Tatu's commercial ssh, is what people generally mean when they say, SSH. Shit! Now I've just supported his case.
As a matter of fact, yeah, I've had friends who aren't architects, design and build their own houses, Steve for one, and some friends of my mother were doing it in the seventies, 'cause I recall being 8 and helping to paint it.
In Steve's case, both he and his father worked out detailed prints on a drafting table and built the house themselves. They passed all the zoning commission rules at every step. Neither of them is an architect. Steve's a "software engineer" and his dad's a coal miner.
Anyway, I know for a fact that degrees prove nothing. I've met plenty of folks with CS and Enginerring degrees who couldn't write decent code to save themselves. I've had to fix their crappy designs. I've met plenty of "hackers" w/out degrees who can program circles around me, and yes, I have a MS in Information Science so I have *some* formal programming training.
The reason most software sucks really has nothing to do with the qualifications of the people writing the code or with anything that was cited in the original feature above. The real reason that most software sucks is that business managers impose ridiculously tight deadlines on the programmers, so there isn't time for adequate testing, code review or even real design. Real design involves a lot of prototyping and trial and error before you actually begin work on the final product. That's the real problem.
The real reason that Free Software is better than commercial is that there is no definite release schedule, so you, as the programmer, have the luxury of releasing the code when you think it's ready and not when some arbitrary deadline set in a board meeting tells you have to.
It has also been my experience that managers tend to have one view of what happens in software development, and what actually happens is something totally different, and that has occurred even with managers who had programming experience in the past. They seem to think we're all wizards and we just pull this stuff out of thin, and everything is "a fifteen minute fix" including refactoring and rewriting the entire application from scratch.
Yeah, exactly.
So, maybe I exaggerated with the "massive improvements" bit, but I'll tell you that it's certainly more fun to code using some kind of plan/design. In my case, usually OO, and usually in C, C++ or Perl. Nothing better than reuseable objects if you ask me.
At my previous place of employment, there was an attempt made to do that very thing: build a reuseable framework of objects for the business software. There were problems galore with making this work because one of those drag and click types of commercial "programming" tools was chosen, where you create graphical objects on screen and then add code inside the objects, code that's tied to that graphical representation and to that object. In other words, the code was not factored at all, and if you needed a different widget, or even no widget, that implemented the same business rules in code, then you had to rewrite the functionality from scratch. Very poor planning, and just shows that the problems with OO are not really problems with OO but with OO that is misapplied by developers who don't really understand the paradigm.
As someone who has done the exact same kind of programming that the author of the article talks about: small to medium software packages for business, mostly in-house, custom stuff to get the job done. I can sympathize.
However, I don't think his real issue is with OOP, but with general programming practice in that sector. None of the developers with whom I worked took the time to actually design anything. They jumped in with their first idea and hammered at it until it "worked." They didn't care if there was a "better" design or a better way to do something, they just wanted it to work and for the customer (i.e. some other division of the company) to be happy with the software. If it came back for bug fixes later, oh well, that's what keeps us employed.
The real problem is not with OOP itself, but with the kinds of OOP tools (often linked to some RAD package) that are heavily used in this area and with the fact that so few of the programmers have the time to actual do design or code review. The managers were constantly telling us to review each other's code and to design everything, but no one ever did, and what passed for a group code review was a joke. No one actually looked at code. The lead programmer, often the only programmer, for the project stood up and gave a "best case" (i.e. outright lie) description of how the code works. Later, when some poor schmuck (i.e. you) has to maintain that very same code (which you were not involved in designing or coding in the first place) you find out just what a mess the code really is. The software more often than not did not even begin to approach the design discussed at the "code review."
Nah, the problem isn't with OOP, 'cause I have personally seen massive improvements in my coding since I've started using an OOP style with thorough documentation and formal notation. The problem is that in the very sector the author is complaining about, the vast majority of programmers are mediocre, and the managers (who don't do the work, but pick the tools and "methodology") are even worse. The problem is with buzzword programming where you pick tools because they are compliant with all the latest buzzwords, not because they are right for the job at hand, nor because your programmers know how to use them, which the majority don't.
Some folks need to go back to school!
Don't buy this junk. Just 'cause it's "digital" doesn't mean you got to buy it.
Only use the tools and toys you like. Nobody's twisting your arm here. It's your house, not your job.
Come on, do we need this? Let's just solder motherboards and cellphones into our brains and get it over with already...
"Yeah, I'll have a half-caf, no-fat, double latte, mocha swirl with the Firewire upgrade." Sheesh!
Just for the record, let me clarify that I do have two Masters Degress, one in French Language and Literature and the other in Information Science.
Also, I'm speaking from my own experience, so there's no "degree envy" going on here.
It doesn't matter if there's a shortage of workers or not. CS degrees don't mean shit to anyone who really knows whats going on. I've worked with folks who have CS degrees who don't have a clue how to write decent code. I've often cleaned up after their clueless attempts at programming. In some case distilling 14 lines of useless, broken code to one line that works and does exactly what the spec calls for. I've seen guys with CS degrees write stuff like this:
:-)
if (x == Y) x = y;
Yeah, no shit.
Of course, I've worked with people with CS degrees who know what they're doing. I've also worked with some self-proclaimed "hackers" who don't have a clue how to write good code, either.
Same with those silly certifications. Having a piece of paper doesn't mean you know anything. It just means you've slept through enough lectures and parroted back enough of the instructor's drivel to pass. Yeah, it fools the pointy hairs, but it don't fool the long hairs. You better know what the fuck you're doing, and I don't care how much paper you pile up in order to make yourself look good.
Heh, I even recall fixing some code by a guy on a H1-B visa, too. He no longer works there, but then again, neither do I.
I always build my own computer systems these days. That way, I get just the hardware I need, with just the OS I want, and I don't pay no Windoze tax.
I only pay for Windoze when it's actually going to be used on a machine.
Yeah, but then you, and a couple hundred million other web users and merchants, hit AT&T with a class action suit. You sue the crap out of them for restraint of trade and everything else. If AT&T were to try something like that, they'd be history. The gov't would have no choice but to carve them up, yet again. I can't imagine anyone dreaming that they could get away with a plan such as you describe. (Oh, yeah, I forgot about Micros~1.)
No, I read the article and I came away thinking, they must be talking about charging those fees for merchants connected via the AT&T backbone and not for customers using the AT&T backbone. The article is ambiguous on that point.
If AT&T comes around asking me for a cut of stuff bought on my web site by @Home subscribers, I'll tell 'em to stuff it, block @Home subscribers, then sue the $ out of them. By the time it's all done, I'll own their a$$ets!
No, I don't see how they can legally charge anyone who isn't already their customer and who also agreed to the charges up front.
That said, I would still go.
Where do I sign up?