'Buying' stuff and 'outsourcing' stuff are not the same thing.
Anything for sell in the marketplace that is outside your industry, obviously you should just buy it. A fast food place isn't going to make its own tables. OTOH, a lumbermill might.
The problem is when companies need custom stuff and start leasing it without realizing that. Software requires constant maintenance because requirements change, and if it does, you should make your own.
Otherwise, the company will be forever at the mercy of whatever company they have hired to do that, especially if the software is so shitty that only they can manage it, which is often the case.
Usually, they'd be better off just hiring programmers and writing it themselves.
There are bakeries all of the country making money by supplying hamburger buns to McDonald's. Do you really think McD should bring that all in-house?
At this point in the US economy, with this analogy, McDonalds is a building with a loudspeaker that connects to India to take your order. McDonalds then calls up a Indian burger place (Yes, I know that's crazy.) and have them make a burger for you, and UPS to deliver it.
There's a difference between 'not starting from scratch' and 'not actually making a product'.
Ah, yes, Apple fanbois, who take a post that says 'I don't see any additional value of a Mac, but this article bitching about Macs is bullshit,', and somehow pretends it's a slam of Macs.
Hey, idiot, the reason Macs don't have as much value for me is that they are more expensive, and have absolutely no added benefit that I want, and, no, I don't spend an extra few hundred dollars because 'Hey, there might be some reason that I don't know that this is better', you moron.
Possibly you should actually read my fucking post and notice that the reason I said I didn't use Macs was that I was defending them from this idiotic article, and I didn't want people to think I was goddamn imbecilic like you who thinks absolutely no complaint of Macs is valid. They're more expensive, especially if you have to dual-run Windows. That is a valid reason not to buy them, I'm sorry if I've insulted your religion, fucking deal with it.
This article, OTOH, is an idiotic complaint.
And if you could read instead of being blinded by your irrational inability to comprehend an actual nice post about Macs saying 'They are fine computers that I don't use or even plan to use because PCs are cheaper and work for me', perhaps you would have noticed that I was a web developer and don't give a flying fuck about NeXTStep, or, indeed, any libraries. In fact, 'Web developers develop on web servers, and can use any OS that runs their client tools' was actually the point of my post.
And. incidentally, that part of the post makes you even stupider. If I was an application developer, you know what OS I'd run? The OS my company developed applications for, you idiot.
If you think I'm a teabagger you probably need to learn something about American politics, as my signature is pretty anti-conservative.
No one requires me to lock up my power tools either, but if a kid wonders over to my yard and cuts off a finger, I'm pretty sure I'd be sued and the key word in the case was because I was negligent.
Yes, because you do have a duty to lock up, or at least unplug, your power tools.
I have no idea why you're having trouble with this concept. Hell, you even mentioned 'duty' before I did.
Stop being a douche and go look the word up instead of arguing about something you don't understand. The only thing worse then a grammar and spelling natiz troll, is a wrong grammar and spelling natiz troll.
Instead of me looking up a word that I know full-well the meaning of, perhaps you should find ANY COURT CASE EVER that said people had a duty to lock up their computers and networks.
People are negligent if they don't do something they have a duty to do, and someone gets harmed because of it. They are not negligent if they do not have such a duty, even if someone gets harmed. (They can still end up liable for certain types of harm, but not very often.)
No such duty has ever existed for providing people internet access. People have actually sued under such a theory, and been shot down in court. The courts have, every time, said that people who sell other people an internet connection do not have a duty to monitor it for illegal behavior, do not have a duty to monitor it for harm caused to others, and hence are not negligent for failing to do so.
It's very very simple.
This decision is basically in line with all other services, BTW. You give someone a ride somewhere, you have no duty to make sure passengers aren't carrying drugs. You let someone use your phone, you have no duty to make sure people aren't plotting murder over it. You let someone use your internet connection, you have no duty to make sure they aren't downloading CP over it. You are not negligent if you fail to do check those things, because you have no duty to do so.
You, of course, might be in violation of a law or two, but that is not due to negligence. Perhaps it is illegal to transport drugs, even unknowingly. 'Negligence' and 'illegal' aren't anywhere near synonyms. Shooting someone in the head on purpose isn't negligent, it's just murder.
Or it might just look like you're in violation of the law. If your IP downloads CP the police will be all over you because they mistakenly think you're in violation of the law. But if you don't know about it, you're actually not. (Although have fun proving that in court.)
But that has fuck-all to do with 'negligence', which is a specific legal term that means you failed to do a duty you had, and then either criminal activity or harm was caused by your failure, which means either the police can charge you or you can civilly sued. And the most important part of that is you did have a duty in the first place. If there was no duty, you cannot be negligent in that duty, period.
And this is all a stupid argument in the first place because no one has ever been sued for letting other people access CP over their network anyway, and it's hard to see who the wronged party, who is suing, would be. It would have to be the minor whose pictures it was, they are the only 'wronged' person...but how the hell would they even know?
There may be, for example, a PostgreSQL extension, or a Python module, that is not available for one of the environments you develop in (but is available for the target).
I have to suggest that's a problem with the port, then. Like I've said, I've never worked with Python or PostgreSQL, but the only platform specific modules I've ever heard of are for platform specific things. I.e, if you want to manipulate the Windows registry, that module only works on Windows.
If there's something with his setup where Python or PostgreSQL doesn't work the same on his MacOS box, I have to suggest that either a) He's using platform specific modules, in which case he's a moron and should already know it wouldn't work on MacOS, b) The ports aren't very good, or c) His app isn't very good and hardcoded the wrong paths in or something.
As for embedded linux development: you typically don't want to be anywhere near the target with your dev environment.
Yeah, rereading that, it sounded like I meant you should develop for embedded Linux on...embedded Linux, which would be annoying as hell if even possible.
No, you should be on normal Linux, with a cross compiler. Yes, in theory, you can be on another Unix, but you've just added a random setup to get things right and strange problems, with not really any gain. Or you can use Windows, which is a lot of work, last I heard. (OTOH, I've never tried it.)
Yeah, this article is confusing the hell out of me. Why would people run stuff local? It's a website. When you develop a website, you develop it on a web server.
Not that it shouldn't run local, exactly the same, even on another OS, so I have no idea what the hell the problem is there either. I have a copy of XAMPP installed with various CMSs set up just in case I'm somewhere without internet access, and need to demonstrate exactly how they differ, and you know how much work it took making them work in XAMPP? None at all.
Perhaps this 'Milo' I'm never heard of is a piece of crap, or perhaps it's Python or PostgreSQL or Redis, or perhaps he's just an idiot.
He's having problems he shouldn't be having, doing something he shouldn't be doing. MacOS X is great for web development...you install Adobe's suite or whatever, and upload your website to a fucking web server.
I say this, incidentally, as someone who uses Windows to do web development, and wouldn't buy a Mac as that would be added price for not really much value, or even negative value. I don't like Macs, and I'm never planning on getting one...but the question of web development is 'Do they run web development environment I use and browsers I need to test in?'. That's pretty much the entire question.
Yes, embedded Linux development would suck on any other OS.
Now, what the fuck does that have to do with web development?
What sort of fragile-ass framework is this guy working in? I personally don't see the point in local testing, I test my fucking PHP on a damn web server...but I actually have a copy of XAMPP I can start up inside Windows and poke at if I really need to.
I don't know if the problem is Milo (Whatever that is), Python, PostgreSQL, or Redis, but, if it doesn't run exactly the same way on OSX and Linux, or, fuck, Linux and Windows if it has a Windows port, something is wrong.
If I leave the keys in my car and it's stolen my insurance company won't pay out because I was negligent.
That is between you and your insurance company. They can set up whatever rules they want regarding payment as long as you agree to them.
You are not negligent in the eyes of the law...if someone steals your car and uses it to commit criminal or civil offenses you are not negligent, and, hence, not liable.
If I leave my router unprotected and someone uses it to break the law it was because I was negligent. I did not preform my duty to secure the connection.
You would be if there was any such duty, but there is not. No one is required to secure connections, or police the ways in which people using their connections, any more than a gas station is required to make sure that people don't use their gas to commit arson.
Just ask anti-spammers, who have been trying for more than a decade to sue people who provided connections to spammers.
And nothing you said has anything to do with signing a contract, which is what my post was about.
Signing a contract with a private actor cannot impose additional criminal liabilities, or impose additional civil liabilities for actions between two other parties. You might already have criminal or civil liabilities, but they are irrelevant to any contract.
Dude, you can't sign a private contract making you liable for other people's criminal activity. That simply is not possible under any sort of American law. You could sign one with the government, possibly, and that's sorta what it means be 'released into the care of...', although not to the extent of making a criminal out of anyone. But private actors can't just magically sign things making them liable for criminal actions by someone else.
Likewise, a contract between you and second party (your ISP) cannot make you civilly liable for the actions of the third party(an illegal downloader) against a fourth party(the copyright holder), allowing the fourth party to sue you. That doesn't make any sense either. They can't try to enforce some contract they aren't a party to. Either they could already sue you, or they couldn't.
The owner is responsible because they negligently left the connection unprotected.
That is a misuse of the word 'negligent' if I've ever seen one.
It is negligent to do things that you should have knew people might get harmed by, like leaving a broken board on your front porch that people step through.
It is not negligent to leave things laying around that other people deliberately use to harm others. If an adult picks up a hammer I left on my porch, and attacks, someone, no, that is not negligence.
It's even less negligent, if that's possible, for someone to use them to commit a criminal action that does not, per se, harm someone. Like if I give an adult a beer, and they walk off with down the sidewalk in violation of 'public drunkenness'.
Neither the parent, or the person who tried to respond, actually explained what peak oil is correctly.
Peak oil is the point where prices do not decrease. Well, not meaningfully, obviously there will always be tiny variations, but peak oil is when a running average of oil prices would show them always going up or staying steady, and never going back down.
It doesn't have anything directly to do with the amount of oil. In fact, there's nothing stopping more oil from being found after it.
However, at that point, the demand will be so high, and the supply so low, that even an moderate increase in the supply won't be much more than a blip on the upward price climb. As it's clear that no one else has any extra oil, the new supplier will just slightly undersell them.
That's the peak oil theory. It doesn't assume we know how much oil total there is, although it does assume we won't suddenly discover a huge, cheap amount of oil.
It's not an assumption to do with oil at all, it's an assumption about markets. It assumes if you have a product that's vastly demanded, and supply is functionally a limited resource, at some point the market will just start ascribing near-infinite future value to it, which means prices will never decrease, even if random amounts of supply come in.
Indeed. The Japanese problem is not happening because of a quake, or because of a tsunami.
It is happening because of a fucking stupid power outage. That's it, that's why it's happening. There is no more to explain about it. They are having a nuclear meltdown because of lack of electrical power, due to flooding.
This is a) so inherently stupid it's hard to think about, and b) incredibly easy to keep from ever happening here.
None of the problem is due to the 'earthquake' or 'tsunami' per se. It's due to incredibly poorly designed of shutdown system. Yes, the generators should have been higher up, but that was just one of the problems.
For example, why did they have to run a wire in to run a pump? Why the hell aren't there easy 'pump electricity access points' where you can just roll up and hook to them? Or why couldn't they hook to the grid?
Why do you even need a pump at all? Radioactive stuff is hot. If you have something heating the water, you have a damn self-circulating pool of water if you make it big enough, you don't need a 'pump'. Okay, that's not practical for the reactors, but it's certainly practical for the spent-fuel rods. That should it a big pool a mile away that they just keep topped off, not a tiny pool next to the damn reactor that overheats too.
A reluctant pass...firstly, they are, in all probability, not god-like (see footnote); most likely just a show-off, or someone who's indignant at being given such a trivial exercise. (see footnote)
*The remaining 20% being made up of the 19.99% of people who've been shown the XOR trick and the 0.01% of "god-like" programmers who intuit it.
No, if they can figure out how to make a chain of additions and subtractions come out right for a+b and b-a, they're pretty damn smart.
That's why I didn't give a straight-up 'swap two variables'. That was too easy for either level to memorize, the non-programmers might have memorized the use of a temp variable, and the normal programmers might have memorized some weird math trick.
By making it slightly different, you blow up the memorization.
It's why I don't like the FizzBizz problem. It's too easy to have learned by rote. But change it to the Fibonacci sequence, and you haven't really made it harder, it's still simple enough for any programmer to figure out in five minutes. But it's near impossible for a non-programmer, who happens to have a CS degree and think they're a programmer, to figure out.
And while there may be some sequence of math operations that will do what I said, it sure isn't something they will have come across before, no one's memorized it like they have 'swap two variables', they just invented that on their own, and you can probably skip the rest of the test, you know they're an actual programmer. (OTOH, as you point out, they're an actual programmer who comes up with very over complicated things, so you might not want to hire them. But they don't need any more _testing_.)
Sometimes the simplest do the trick. I mentioned temp variables. (Although it turned out I didn't need them.) Non-programmers don't understand logic flow, which I think is the major difference between programmers and others. So something like:
You have three variables, a, b, and c. You need to make a end up holding b-a, and b end up hold holding a+b. c can end up with anything you want.
A real trained programmer will use c as a temp variable. c=a;a=b-a;b=b+c;. They won't even have to think about it, it's obvious why you gave them c.
Anyone else is going to attempt a=b-a; b=a+b, because they don't grasp that the first instruction changes things, which seems to be the fundamental perceptual issue of a non-programming mind. They see everything happening at once.
A real untrained programmer, someone who thinks like a programmer but has somehow never come across the problem before, will write it wrong at first, and then stare, baffled, for a second, until they think of using c, and then fix it. (I am not sure where you'd find such a person, though.)
And some God-like programmer is going to come along and demonstrate that you don't have to use c at all, you can magically XOR things or have a long string of a += b -= c += a or something and make it all work with only two variables. Obviously, they pass also.
Tests used to use 'swap these two variables', but people have been trained how to do that. But if you disguise what's going on, if you want them to swap and do math at the same time, non-programmers won't figure it out.
Non-programmers are not able to break things down into discrete instructions. They do not understand that. (I feel like a sighted person trying to describe how a blind person sees.) It's why the first programming class ever, at every college, starts off with something like 'break down your morning routine into steps', to try to get them thinking like that, but a good percentage of the people cannot.
Which, incidentally, is probably not a 'deficit' on their part. Seeing things as a unified whole instead of a bunch of tiny instructions is probably better for most things in life, in fact. For example, you can't read if you try to parse each word of a sentence individually.
Actually, right after I posted this, I realized you didn't need a temp variable. I thought you needed temp = current; current = current + last; last = temp;
But presumably, you have a counter variable somewhere else, so you can do current = current + last; last = counter;
Duh, that's what happens when I try to describe code without actually coding it.
Programming is both a skill and an art, like painting or cooking. There is a skill, which is mostly knowledge, that you have to train up. But there is also a binary switch...you either have it, or you don't. You either grasp the concept, or you don't.(1)
If you're ever in a CS program, you'll notice that between 25%-50% of the people actually understand 'programming' by the second year or so. (The number is probably higher in better schools.) Most of these people who understand had already dabbled going in, but sometimes you'll find someone who hadn't ever done it before but managed to suddenly just get it.
Everyone else is trying to program by rote. Sometimes they can do this, sometimes they can't. If they can't, they flunk out, if they can...well, they get degrees, and will spend their life doing what you said.
And FizzBuzz is a good example of a weeding tool. Any actual programmer should be able to create a pseudocode FizzBuzz in under five minutes, and probably faster than that. Although I might recommend something slightly different, just in case these non-programmers with degrees have memorized it.
I once had the idea that 'Fibonacci Replace'. might be a useful test. Almost everyone who's been through a CD degree knows the Fibonacci sequence, and it's easy enough to describe. The test is just...print all numbers from 1 to 100, except replace all numbers in the Fibonacci sequence with a 'Fib'.
People who actually grasp programming will start with a loop from 1 to 100, and have a 'current' and 'last' variable which start with '1' and '1'. When they hit current, they print 'Fib', add last to current, and copy old current into last. Otherwise print the number. (I think, it's a lot harder to write it out descriptively than to psuedocode it, and I don't want to even try to write pseudocode for the forum to mangle.)
People who do not grasp programming will be baffled by having to do two things at once, much like they get confused by FizzBuzz. But even having memorized the FizzBuzz example won't help. What's worse, they might recall the program to print the Fibonacci sequence, and try to fill in the blanks between numbers, which is a totally nonsensical way to solve the problem if you're a programmer. (Actually, a real programmer might just calculate it pre-loop and stick it in an array, but it's obvious if they do that.)
In addition, they have to use at least one temporary variable to store value as they swap numbers around, something they really don't grasp. You start with two variables, you end up with one holding the starting value of the other, and the other holding the two original values summed. You need a temp variable _somewhere_ in there.
1) Strictly speaking, there are a bunch of switches. You can grasp procedural programming but not be able to deal with a functional thing like LISP, you can not understand object-oriented programming, you can not really understand databases, etc, etc. You can learn them technically if you're a programmer, but not have have the 'art'. But there is a 'circuit breaker', that all those switches are hung off. If that's not on, you won't grasp any of it.
No, he's not a script kiddie. He's just a bad programmer.
Script kiddies don't do anything new, they just run code written by other people. Someone who tries to write code, even if not very good, is one step above them.
This, right here, sums up the entire problem with your world view. I mean, your total ignorance of farming is an issue, also, but this is a much bigger problem. As long as you can go around saying "sure, these people are better off, but the factory is still TEH EEEEVIL!!", we really have nothing to discuss.
I notice you totally ignored my point that, in your universe, the lack of child labor laws make children better off, because they can earn more money in a factory than at school.
There's plenty of other examples, that demonstrate 'immediate economic interests for a worker' is not actually 'the long term interest for everyone', but I think that's the most obvious one. Please address this, or admit you don't want child labor laws.
Another example would be pollution. Sure the 300 people working a factory might be better off. The 5000 people living downstream of it who lived off the now-unusable water...they're a lot worse off.
Those are just the obvious things. There's a lot less obvious ones, where the factory itself makes things so bad that they have to work at the factory. Perhaps the food won't grow due to pollution, perhaps the factory 'bought' the land that had just been laying around for centuries that no one had bothered to define ownership of so no one can farm, etc.
And then there's the hidden costs, the risks. People are bad at judging risks, especially if the company hides it. Workers have no idea what specific machine will cut their fingers off, or what substance they're using is toxic. They just think they're better off.
Saying 'Everyone is better off' is idiotic. Each worker at a factory thinks they are better off than they would be if they didn't work there.
Of course, a) they could be wrong, perhaps they are being slowly killed, or will one day be suddenly killed, b) the factory itself could have caused a drop in their outside conditions, and working there is only better than being out there now, and c) there are people not working the factory who can't be argued to be better off at all, and are probably worse off.
I thought I responded to this post the other day, but it's not here, so let me clarify: I am not attacking people from other countries. In fact, I think an fairly open immigration policy is a good thing.
I'm not even one of those 'as long as they came here legally' , half of whom are secret racists who want some sort of justification. I understand it's nearly impossible to come here legally, and that Mexico's turned into a shithole because of our drug war there. So I've got no problem with people here illegally, although obviously I'd rather they were here legally. (If only because there are some people we should keep out, and having a system where hundreds of thousands of people are smuggled in makes them hard to spot, whereas if most came in legally and only 100 people a year were smuggled in, we might be able to notice them.)
In fact, my major problem with illegal immigration is that they don't have any political power. If I was in charge, we'd see another constitutional amendment which made everyone who was in this country for five years, legally or illegally, a citizen, period, and made the only way anyone could lose Federal voting rights was a conviction of treason.
Having people permanently live here unable to vote is very dangerous for the democratic process. We're just incredibly lucky that we have the 14th amendment that stops that at one generation.
And I have no problem with foreign workers who get hired to do our jobs. That is either a better choice for them, or they were forced into it somehow. Either way, they are not the problem. No worker is the problem.
The problem is, as usual, the superrich and the amoral corporations that have purchased the government and rendered the US unable to...hell, not even 'protect' ourselves. They've rendered the US unable to even stop hurting itself, because even the US government buys from overseas.
We've turned the world economy into a race to the bottom for workers. What country will treat their workers the worst so they can get precious American corporate bribes? Let's find out!
You can stand there and insult the US's behavior all you want, but I don't see what it has to do with my point, which is that the US needs to concentrate on its own problems and not worry about 'helping' the entire world out of poverty. (And by 'helping', I mean 'exploiting'.)
See, I don't want to call you ignorant, because this is pretty typical for someone who grew up in a big city, and never left except for flying to a resort for a vacation. I would suggest that you do some research on the subject of farming, especially as it's generally practiced in low-tech agrarian societies. I can't discuss the subject with someone who honestly believes that farming is a 6-hour-a-day job.
And I can't discuss the subject who thinks 'subsistence farmers' work the job of farming.
Farming in America is a manufacturing job. People get up, punch a clock, work their hours, and make as much as they can. They grow between 1000 and 10,000 times as much food as they eat, depending on what they're growing, with modern technology.
That is not what subsistence farmers do, at all. They just have to grow enough to live on. They don't generally pay any money, or have any expenses at all. they grow food, and they eat it. Sometimes they would trade this food with others, and so grow slightly more than they live on. (This is the definition of 'subsistence farmer'.)
That is trivial to do. Hell, for a good portion of time, humanity simply randomly ate growing stuff as they walked around. It is not difficult at all to operate a farm that feeds your family if all you have to do is feed your family.
That is not the same as the 'profession of farmer' in the civilized world, who is a essentially a factory worker with a strange factory.
Sure! It's quite simple: with the exception of forced labor,
Yes, with the exception of exactly the sort of places we're talking about.
people generally choose the best work they can find ("best", of course, being a balance between money and effort that's different for each individual). If there are people working at these factories, and they aren't being forced to be there at gunpoint, then it means that the factory jobs are better than whatever other alternatives these people have. QED.
Or that the big company that moved into town pushed 'land reform' that required them to start paying property taxes, in an economy where money didn't exist before, so they can't keep working their land. Or maybe it turns out it never was their land, it was the government's, and now it's been given to the company. Or maybe someone dammed up the water. Or someone lied to them.
Your logic is idiotic.
Moreover they're selective; you overemphasize the dangerous conditions in the factories, while ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the workers were there willingly because their alternatives were worse
You don't seem to understand that 'worse' and 'better' can vary depending on viewpoint, so here are some fun questions:
If a family is so poor it is starving, is it better or worse for them to have their 10 year-old child work in a factory?
Is it better, or worse, to cross a picket line to get a job?
Yes, individually, in each individual instance, it is better for someone to work in a factory. But just because you can say 'This person is now slightly better off' does not mean that the factory is a good thing.
and ignoring the fact that one third of deaths during the "industrial revolution" were caused by disease.
Erm, you might be able to claim that if I'd cited numbers or something, but I didn't, so I don't know what you're talking about.
And a lot of people are still dying from disease. Or do the people dropping over dead from air pollution in Bejing not count as 'disease'?
You have no grasp of what the situation was actually like at the time, because you can't fathom a society where malnutrition and the lack of awareness about basic hygiene are the norm.
I have no idea why you think that, I can imagine it fi
Yes, it's entirely possible to live off the scrapes of society when society is functioning.
However, you seemed have forgotten the premise here, which was talking about our economy crumbling. The people you are talking about only can exist because our society is wasteful.
As our economy crumbles, we cannot all fucking live off the scraps of each other. We cannot all magically live off a dollar a day when bakery closes because no one can afford bread. A thousand people in a city can squat in unused buildings and steal electricity and water, a million people cannot, because no one's paying for electricity and water. When the roads crumble, when the food stops being shipped in, the entire damn city will starve.
Economies do not work like you think they worse. They do not degrade like you think they degrade.
You're basically arguing that a car with a hole in the gas tank should be able to go half the speed. No, some things require a minimum level of support to operate at all, and don't slowly 'get slightly worse'...they operate to a point, and then they break. They just stop working.
It doesn't matter that other people have bicycles....we don't. We don't even have damn shoes so we can walk. Before you think this is crazy, no one, society or individual, ever builds backwards like that. People assume infrastructure will get better.
Interstates either are passable, or are not, they don't magically turn into dirt trails, and they'd be unusable for shipping even if they did. Power plants either have enough money to operate, or they don't, they don't magically turn into village-sized generators. The fire department is either funded, and there's water in the line, or fires burn half the city down, houses don't burn down into magical grass huts, and you can't operate a bucket line on a forty story building.
Slashdot Mirror
'Buying' stuff and 'outsourcing' stuff are not the same thing.
Anything for sell in the marketplace that is outside your industry, obviously you should just buy it. A fast food place isn't going to make its own tables. OTOH, a lumbermill might.
The problem is when companies need custom stuff and start leasing it without realizing that. Software requires constant maintenance because requirements change, and if it does, you should make your own.
Otherwise, the company will be forever at the mercy of whatever company they have hired to do that, especially if the software is so shitty that only they can manage it, which is often the case.
Usually, they'd be better off just hiring programmers and writing it themselves.
There are bakeries all of the country making money by supplying hamburger buns to McDonald's. Do you really think McD should bring that all in-house?
At this point in the US economy, with this analogy, McDonalds is a building with a loudspeaker that connects to India to take your order. McDonalds then calls up a Indian burger place (Yes, I know that's crazy.) and have them make a burger for you, and UPS to deliver it.
There's a difference between 'not starting from scratch' and 'not actually making a product'.
Ah, yes, Apple fanbois, who take a post that says 'I don't see any additional value of a Mac, but this article bitching about Macs is bullshit,', and somehow pretends it's a slam of Macs.
Hey, idiot, the reason Macs don't have as much value for me is that they are more expensive, and have absolutely no added benefit that I want, and, no, I don't spend an extra few hundred dollars because 'Hey, there might be some reason that I don't know that this is better', you moron.
Possibly you should actually read my fucking post and notice that the reason I said I didn't use Macs was that I was defending them from this idiotic article, and I didn't want people to think I was goddamn imbecilic like you who thinks absolutely no complaint of Macs is valid. They're more expensive, especially if you have to dual-run Windows. That is a valid reason not to buy them, I'm sorry if I've insulted your religion, fucking deal with it.
This article, OTOH, is an idiotic complaint.
And if you could read instead of being blinded by your irrational inability to comprehend an actual nice post about Macs saying 'They are fine computers that I don't use or even plan to use because PCs are cheaper and work for me', perhaps you would have noticed that I was a web developer and don't give a flying fuck about NeXTStep, or, indeed, any libraries. In fact, 'Web developers develop on web servers, and can use any OS that runs their client tools' was actually the point of my post.
And. incidentally, that part of the post makes you even stupider. If I was an application developer, you know what OS I'd run? The OS my company developed applications for, you idiot.
If you think I'm a teabagger you probably need to learn something about American politics, as my signature is pretty anti-conservative.
No one requires me to lock up my power tools either, but if a kid wonders over to my yard and cuts off a finger, I'm pretty sure I'd be sued and the key word in the case was because I was negligent.
Yes, because you do have a duty to lock up, or at least unplug, your power tools.
I have no idea why you're having trouble with this concept. Hell, you even mentioned 'duty' before I did.
Stop being a douche and go look the word up instead of arguing about something you don't understand. The only thing worse then a grammar and spelling natiz troll, is a wrong grammar and spelling natiz troll.
Instead of me looking up a word that I know full-well the meaning of, perhaps you should find ANY COURT CASE EVER that said people had a duty to lock up their computers and networks.
People are negligent if they don't do something they have a duty to do, and someone gets harmed because of it. They are not negligent if they do not have such a duty, even if someone gets harmed. (They can still end up liable for certain types of harm, but not very often.)
No such duty has ever existed for providing people internet access. People have actually sued under such a theory, and been shot down in court. The courts have, every time, said that people who sell other people an internet connection do not have a duty to monitor it for illegal behavior, do not have a duty to monitor it for harm caused to others, and hence are not negligent for failing to do so.
It's very very simple.
This decision is basically in line with all other services, BTW. You give someone a ride somewhere, you have no duty to make sure passengers aren't carrying drugs. You let someone use your phone, you have no duty to make sure people aren't plotting murder over it. You let someone use your internet connection, you have no duty to make sure they aren't downloading CP over it. You are not negligent if you fail to do check those things, because you have no duty to do so.
You, of course, might be in violation of a law or two, but that is not due to negligence. Perhaps it is illegal to transport drugs, even unknowingly. 'Negligence' and 'illegal' aren't anywhere near synonyms. Shooting someone in the head on purpose isn't negligent, it's just murder.
Or it might just look like you're in violation of the law. If your IP downloads CP the police will be all over you because they mistakenly think you're in violation of the law. But if you don't know about it, you're actually not. (Although have fun proving that in court.)
But that has fuck-all to do with 'negligence', which is a specific legal term that means you failed to do a duty you had, and then either criminal activity or harm was caused by your failure, which means either the police can charge you or you can civilly sued. And the most important part of that is you did have a duty in the first place. If there was no duty, you cannot be negligent in that duty, period.
And this is all a stupid argument in the first place because no one has ever been sued for letting other people access CP over their network anyway, and it's hard to see who the wronged party, who is suing, would be. It would have to be the minor whose pictures it was, they are the only 'wronged' person...but how the hell would they even know?
There may be, for example, a PostgreSQL extension, or a Python module, that is not available for one of the environments you develop in (but is available for the target).
I have to suggest that's a problem with the port, then. Like I've said, I've never worked with Python or PostgreSQL, but the only platform specific modules I've ever heard of are for platform specific things. I.e, if you want to manipulate the Windows registry, that module only works on Windows.
If there's something with his setup where Python or PostgreSQL doesn't work the same on his MacOS box, I have to suggest that either a) He's using platform specific modules, in which case he's a moron and should already know it wouldn't work on MacOS, b) The ports aren't very good, or c) His app isn't very good and hardcoded the wrong paths in or something.
As for embedded linux development: you typically don't want to be anywhere near the target with your dev environment.
Yeah, rereading that, it sounded like I meant you should develop for embedded Linux on...embedded Linux, which would be annoying as hell if even possible.
No, you should be on normal Linux, with a cross compiler. Yes, in theory, you can be on another Unix, but you've just added a random setup to get things right and strange problems, with not really any gain. Or you can use Windows, which is a lot of work, last I heard. (OTOH, I've never tried it.)
Yeah, this article is confusing the hell out of me. Why would people run stuff local? It's a website. When you develop a website, you develop it on a web server.
Not that it shouldn't run local, exactly the same, even on another OS, so I have no idea what the hell the problem is there either. I have a copy of XAMPP installed with various CMSs set up just in case I'm somewhere without internet access, and need to demonstrate exactly how they differ, and you know how much work it took making them work in XAMPP? None at all.
Perhaps this 'Milo' I'm never heard of is a piece of crap, or perhaps it's Python or PostgreSQL or Redis, or perhaps he's just an idiot.
He's having problems he shouldn't be having, doing something he shouldn't be doing. MacOS X is great for web development...you install Adobe's suite or whatever, and upload your website to a fucking web server.
I say this, incidentally, as someone who uses Windows to do web development, and wouldn't buy a Mac as that would be added price for not really much value, or even negative value. I don't like Macs, and I'm never planning on getting one...but the question of web development is 'Do they run web development environment I use and browsers I need to test in?'. That's pretty much the entire question.
Yes, embedded Linux development would suck on any other OS.
Now, what the fuck does that have to do with web development?
What sort of fragile-ass framework is this guy working in? I personally don't see the point in local testing, I test my fucking PHP on a damn web server...but I actually have a copy of XAMPP I can start up inside Windows and poke at if I really need to.
I don't know if the problem is Milo (Whatever that is), Python, PostgreSQL, or Redis, but, if it doesn't run exactly the same way on OSX and Linux, or, fuck, Linux and Windows if it has a Windows port, something is wrong.
If I leave the keys in my car and it's stolen my insurance company won't pay out because I was negligent.
That is between you and your insurance company. They can set up whatever rules they want regarding payment as long as you agree to them.
You are not negligent in the eyes of the law...if someone steals your car and uses it to commit criminal or civil offenses you are not negligent, and, hence, not liable.
If I leave my router unprotected and someone uses it to break the law it was because I was negligent. I did not preform my duty to secure the connection.
You would be if there was any such duty, but there is not. No one is required to secure connections, or police the ways in which people using their connections, any more than a gas station is required to make sure that people don't use their gas to commit arson.
Just ask anti-spammers, who have been trying for more than a decade to sue people who provided connections to spammers.
And nothing you said has anything to do with signing a contract, which is what my post was about.
Signing a contract with a private actor cannot impose additional criminal liabilities, or impose additional civil liabilities for actions between two other parties. You might already have criminal or civil liabilities, but they are irrelevant to any contract.
Dude, you can't sign a private contract making you liable for other people's criminal activity. That simply is not possible under any sort of American law. You could sign one with the government, possibly, and that's sorta what it means be 'released into the care of...', although not to the extent of making a criminal out of anyone. But private actors can't just magically sign things making them liable for criminal actions by someone else.
Likewise, a contract between you and second party (your ISP) cannot make you civilly liable for the actions of the third party(an illegal downloader) against a fourth party(the copyright holder), allowing the fourth party to sue you. That doesn't make any sense either. They can't try to enforce some contract they aren't a party to. Either they could already sue you, or they couldn't.
The owner is responsible because they negligently left the connection unprotected.
That is a misuse of the word 'negligent' if I've ever seen one.
It is negligent to do things that you should have knew people might get harmed by, like leaving a broken board on your front porch that people step through.
It is not negligent to leave things laying around that other people deliberately use to harm others. If an adult picks up a hammer I left on my porch, and attacks, someone, no, that is not negligence.
It's even less negligent, if that's possible, for someone to use them to commit a criminal action that does not, per se, harm someone. Like if I give an adult a beer, and they walk off with down the sidewalk in violation of 'public drunkenness'.
Neither the parent, or the person who tried to respond, actually explained what peak oil is correctly.
Peak oil is the point where prices do not decrease. Well, not meaningfully, obviously there will always be tiny variations, but peak oil is when a running average of oil prices would show them always going up or staying steady, and never going back down.
It doesn't have anything directly to do with the amount of oil. In fact, there's nothing stopping more oil from being found after it.
However, at that point, the demand will be so high, and the supply so low, that even an moderate increase in the supply won't be much more than a blip on the upward price climb. As it's clear that no one else has any extra oil, the new supplier will just slightly undersell them.
That's the peak oil theory. It doesn't assume we know how much oil total there is, although it does assume we won't suddenly discover a huge, cheap amount of oil.
It's not an assumption to do with oil at all, it's an assumption about markets. It assumes if you have a product that's vastly demanded, and supply is functionally a limited resource, at some point the market will just start ascribing near-infinite future value to it, which means prices will never decrease, even if random amounts of supply come in.
Indeed. The Japanese problem is not happening because of a quake, or because of a tsunami.
It is happening because of a fucking stupid power outage. That's it, that's why it's happening. There is no more to explain about it. They are having a nuclear meltdown because of lack of electrical power, due to flooding.
This is a) so inherently stupid it's hard to think about, and b) incredibly easy to keep from ever happening here.
None of the problem is due to the 'earthquake' or 'tsunami' per se. It's due to incredibly poorly designed of shutdown system. Yes, the generators should have been higher up, but that was just one of the problems.
For example, why did they have to run a wire in to run a pump? Why the hell aren't there easy 'pump electricity access points' where you can just roll up and hook to them? Or why couldn't they hook to the grid?
Why do you even need a pump at all? Radioactive stuff is hot. If you have something heating the water, you have a damn self-circulating pool of water if you make it big enough, you don't need a 'pump'. Okay, that's not practical for the reactors, but it's certainly practical for the spent-fuel rods. That should it a big pool a mile away that they just keep topped off, not a tiny pool next to the damn reactor that overheats too.
No, if they can figure out how to make a chain of additions and subtractions come out right for a+b and b-a, they're pretty damn smart.
That's why I didn't give a straight-up 'swap two variables'. That was too easy for either level to memorize, the non-programmers might have memorized the use of a temp variable, and the normal programmers might have memorized some weird math trick.
By making it slightly different, you blow up the memorization.
It's why I don't like the FizzBizz problem. It's too easy to have learned by rote. But change it to the Fibonacci sequence, and you haven't really made it harder, it's still simple enough for any programmer to figure out in five minutes. But it's near impossible for a non-programmer, who happens to have a CS degree and think they're a programmer, to figure out.
And while there may be some sequence of math operations that will do what I said, it sure isn't something they will have come across before, no one's memorized it like they have 'swap two variables', they just invented that on their own, and you can probably skip the rest of the test, you know they're an actual programmer. (OTOH, as you point out, they're an actual programmer who comes up with very over complicated things, so you might not want to hire them. But they don't need any more _testing_.)
If I had meant MMORPGs I would have said them. I meant standalone ones, exactly like Fallout 3 and Fallout NV.
Or other Obsidian offerings like NWN2 and KOTOR2. Or the Bioware games like NWN and Dragon Age.
Basically, every RPG of note in the last decade, and RPG company, seems to have modding capabilities.
Sometimes the simplest do the trick. I mentioned temp variables. (Although it turned out I didn't need them.) Non-programmers don't understand logic flow, which I think is the major difference between programmers and others. So something like:
You have three variables, a, b, and c. You need to make a end up holding b-a, and b end up hold holding a+b. c can end up with anything you want.
A real trained programmer will use c as a temp variable. c=a;a=b-a;b=b+c;. They won't even have to think about it, it's obvious why you gave them c.
Anyone else is going to attempt a=b-a; b=a+b, because they don't grasp that the first instruction changes things, which seems to be the fundamental perceptual issue of a non-programming mind. They see everything happening at once.
A real untrained programmer, someone who thinks like a programmer but has somehow never come across the problem before, will write it wrong at first, and then stare, baffled, for a second, until they think of using c, and then fix it. (I am not sure where you'd find such a person, though.)
And some God-like programmer is going to come along and demonstrate that you don't have to use c at all, you can magically XOR things or have a long string of a += b -= c += a or something and make it all work with only two variables. Obviously, they pass also.
Tests used to use 'swap these two variables', but people have been trained how to do that. But if you disguise what's going on, if you want them to swap and do math at the same time, non-programmers won't figure it out.
Non-programmers are not able to break things down into discrete instructions. They do not understand that. (I feel like a sighted person trying to describe how a blind person sees.) It's why the first programming class ever, at every college, starts off with something like 'break down your morning routine into steps', to try to get them thinking like that, but a good percentage of the people cannot.
Which, incidentally, is probably not a 'deficit' on their part. Seeing things as a unified whole instead of a bunch of tiny instructions is probably better for most things in life, in fact. For example, you can't read if you try to parse each word of a sentence individually.
It's just not better for programming.
Actually, right after I posted this, I realized you didn't need a temp variable. I thought you needed temp = current; current = current + last; last = temp;
But presumably, you have a counter variable somewhere else, so you can do current = current + last; last = counter;
Duh, that's what happens when I try to describe code without actually coding it.
Programming is both a skill and an art, like painting or cooking. There is a skill, which is mostly knowledge, that you have to train up. But there is also a binary switch...you either have it, or you don't. You either grasp the concept, or you don't.(1)
If you're ever in a CS program, you'll notice that between 25%-50% of the people actually understand 'programming' by the second year or so. (The number is probably higher in better schools.) Most of these people who understand had already dabbled going in, but sometimes you'll find someone who hadn't ever done it before but managed to suddenly just get it.
Everyone else is trying to program by rote. Sometimes they can do this, sometimes they can't. If they can't, they flunk out, if they can...well, they get degrees, and will spend their life doing what you said.
And FizzBuzz is a good example of a weeding tool. Any actual programmer should be able to create a pseudocode FizzBuzz in under five minutes, and probably faster than that. Although I might recommend something slightly different, just in case these non-programmers with degrees have memorized it.
I once had the idea that 'Fibonacci Replace'. might be a useful test. Almost everyone who's been through a CD degree knows the Fibonacci sequence, and it's easy enough to describe. The test is just...print all numbers from 1 to 100, except replace all numbers in the Fibonacci sequence with a 'Fib'.
People who actually grasp programming will start with a loop from 1 to 100, and have a 'current' and 'last' variable which start with '1' and '1'. When they hit current, they print 'Fib', add last to current, and copy old current into last. Otherwise print the number. (I think, it's a lot harder to write it out descriptively than to psuedocode it, and I don't want to even try to write pseudocode for the forum to mangle.)
People who do not grasp programming will be baffled by having to do two things at once, much like they get confused by FizzBuzz. But even having memorized the FizzBuzz example won't help. What's worse, they might recall the program to print the Fibonacci sequence, and try to fill in the blanks between numbers, which is a totally nonsensical way to solve the problem if you're a programmer. (Actually, a real programmer might just calculate it pre-loop and stick it in an array, but it's obvious if they do that.)
In addition, they have to use at least one temporary variable to store value as they swap numbers around, something they really don't grasp. You start with two variables, you end up with one holding the starting value of the other, and the other holding the two original values summed. You need a temp variable _somewhere_ in there.
1) Strictly speaking, there are a bunch of switches. You can grasp procedural programming but not be able to deal with a functional thing like LISP, you can not understand object-oriented programming, you can not really understand databases, etc, etc. You can learn them technically if you're a programmer, but not have have the 'art'. But there is a 'circuit breaker', that all those switches are hung off. If that's not on, you won't grasp any of it.
No, he's not a script kiddie. He's just a bad programmer.
Script kiddies don't do anything new, they just run code written by other people. Someone who tries to write code, even if not very good, is one step above them.
RPGs are about the only genre left where mods seem to be accepted and made possible by the game developer.
I notice you totally ignored my point that, in your universe, the lack of child labor laws make children better off, because they can earn more money in a factory than at school.
There's plenty of other examples, that demonstrate 'immediate economic interests for a worker' is not actually 'the long term interest for everyone', but I think that's the most obvious one. Please address this, or admit you don't want child labor laws.
Another example would be pollution. Sure the 300 people working a factory might be better off. The 5000 people living downstream of it who lived off the now-unusable water...they're a lot worse off.
Those are just the obvious things. There's a lot less obvious ones, where the factory itself makes things so bad that they have to work at the factory. Perhaps the food won't grow due to pollution, perhaps the factory 'bought' the land that had just been laying around for centuries that no one had bothered to define ownership of so no one can farm, etc.
And then there's the hidden costs, the risks. People are bad at judging risks, especially if the company hides it. Workers have no idea what specific machine will cut their fingers off, or what substance they're using is toxic. They just think they're better off.
Saying 'Everyone is better off' is idiotic. Each worker at a factory thinks they are better off than they would be if they didn't work there.
Of course, a) they could be wrong, perhaps they are being slowly killed, or will one day be suddenly killed, b) the factory itself could have caused a drop in their outside conditions, and working there is only better than being out there now, and c) there are people not working the factory who can't be argued to be better off at all, and are probably worse off.
I thought I responded to this post the other day, but it's not here, so let me clarify: I am not attacking people from other countries. In fact, I think an fairly open immigration policy is a good thing.
I'm not even one of those 'as long as they came here legally' , half of whom are secret racists who want some sort of justification. I understand it's nearly impossible to come here legally, and that Mexico's turned into a shithole because of our drug war there. So I've got no problem with people here illegally, although obviously I'd rather they were here legally. (If only because there are some people we should keep out, and having a system where hundreds of thousands of people are smuggled in makes them hard to spot, whereas if most came in legally and only 100 people a year were smuggled in, we might be able to notice them.)
In fact, my major problem with illegal immigration is that they don't have any political power. If I was in charge, we'd see another constitutional amendment which made everyone who was in this country for five years, legally or illegally, a citizen, period, and made the only way anyone could lose Federal voting rights was a conviction of treason.
Having people permanently live here unable to vote is very dangerous for the democratic process. We're just incredibly lucky that we have the 14th amendment that stops that at one generation.
And I have no problem with foreign workers who get hired to do our jobs. That is either a better choice for them, or they were forced into it somehow. Either way, they are not the problem. No worker is the problem.
The problem is, as usual, the superrich and the amoral corporations that have purchased the government and rendered the US unable to...hell, not even 'protect' ourselves. They've rendered the US unable to even stop hurting itself, because even the US government buys from overseas.
We've turned the world economy into a race to the bottom for workers. What country will treat their workers the worst so they can get precious American corporate bribes? Let's find out!
You can stand there and insult the US's behavior all you want, but I don't see what it has to do with my point, which is that the US needs to concentrate on its own problems and not worry about 'helping' the entire world out of poverty. (And by 'helping', I mean 'exploiting'.)
And I can't discuss the subject who thinks 'subsistence farmers' work the job of farming.
Farming in America is a manufacturing job. People get up, punch a clock, work their hours, and make as much as they can. They grow between 1000 and 10,000 times as much food as they eat, depending on what they're growing, with modern technology.
That is not what subsistence farmers do, at all. They just have to grow enough to live on. They don't generally pay any money, or have any expenses at all. they grow food, and they eat it. Sometimes they would trade this food with others, and so grow slightly more than they live on. (This is the definition of 'subsistence farmer'.)
That is trivial to do. Hell, for a good portion of time, humanity simply randomly ate growing stuff as they walked around. It is not difficult at all to operate a farm that feeds your family if all you have to do is feed your family.
That is not the same as the 'profession of farmer' in the civilized world, who is a essentially a factory worker with a strange factory.
Yes, with the exception of exactly the sort of places we're talking about.
Or that the big company that moved into town pushed 'land reform' that required them to start paying property taxes, in an economy where money didn't exist before, so they can't keep working their land. Or maybe it turns out it never was their land, it was the government's, and now it's been given to the company. Or maybe someone dammed up the water. Or someone lied to them.
Your logic is idiotic.
You don't seem to understand that 'worse' and 'better' can vary depending on viewpoint, so here are some fun questions:
If a family is so poor it is starving, is it better or worse for them to have their 10 year-old child work in a factory?
Is it better, or worse, to cross a picket line to get a job?
Yes, individually, in each individual instance, it is better for someone to work in a factory. But just because you can say 'This person is now slightly better off' does not mean that the factory is a good thing.
Erm, you might be able to claim that if I'd cited numbers or something, but I didn't, so I don't know what you're talking about.
And a lot of people are still dying from disease. Or do the people dropping over dead from air pollution in Bejing not count as 'disease'?
I have no idea why you think that, I can imagine it fi
Yes, it's entirely possible to live off the scrapes of society when society is functioning.
However, you seemed have forgotten the premise here, which was talking about our economy crumbling. The people you are talking about only can exist because our society is wasteful.
As our economy crumbles, we cannot all fucking live off the scraps of each other. We cannot all magically live off a dollar a day when bakery closes because no one can afford bread. A thousand people in a city can squat in unused buildings and steal electricity and water, a million people cannot, because no one's paying for electricity and water. When the roads crumble, when the food stops being shipped in, the entire damn city will starve.
Economies do not work like you think they worse. They do not degrade like you think they degrade.
You're basically arguing that a car with a hole in the gas tank should be able to go half the speed. No, some things require a minimum level of support to operate at all, and don't slowly 'get slightly worse'...they operate to a point, and then they break. They just stop working.
It doesn't matter that other people have bicycles....we don't. We don't even have damn shoes so we can walk. Before you think this is crazy, no one, society or individual, ever builds backwards like that. People assume infrastructure will get better.
Interstates either are passable, or are not, they don't magically turn into dirt trails, and they'd be unusable for shipping even if they did. Power plants either have enough money to operate, or they don't, they don't magically turn into village-sized generators. The fire department is either funded, and there's water in the line, or fires burn half the city down, houses don't burn down into magical grass huts, and you can't operate a bucket line on a forty story building.