Unfortunately, this is another example where software developers are not a profession.
One could argue that Intel isn't going to spend the time and money to do all those things. They require man power to fund, and so they're not likely to do them.
Microsoft was/is one of the better companies in this regard and they mainly did it because you were locked into their platform and APIs. Their whole money making scheme was based around software being made for their platform.
But ultimately, this gap is what differentiates a profession from a regular job. A profession mandates certain behavior and standards. It's not all about money or efficiency.
Yes, as a professional, you might tell someone to fck off is they just handed you a bare spec and a compiler. Just like a lawyer might tell you to fck off if you handed them some contract scribbled written by pen and paper by your cousin on a napkin.
There was a time this was done more in certain fields. I have co-workers who used to work for some of the older telecoms. They complain about the amount of documentation and verification they used to have to provide internally. But that is what made things professional to some extent.
But we're not professionals. We might like to act like them and some of us manage to get away with it because we really are that valuable. But in the end, we're just worker bees. We suck it up and deal with the lack of professionalism. We will hack something to work. We will do our own performance tests and verification instead of demanding the professionals on the other end do their job. Most of all, we'll pride ourselves on being able to make it all work in the end and mock anyone who has better expectation of the field as not being to hack it.
Pretty much any political ideology has it's followers as children who just don't want to do thing or be responsible.
But the actual ideology itself is generally pretty academic. Whether it is communism or progressivism or classical liberalism/libertarianism...
What is particularly annoying about Stross and people like him who detest BitCoin is they take it as a given that progressivism/capitalism is the only real way. Anything else is just for stupid rebellious children.
It's as if the whole enlightenment and people like Adam Smith, John Locke, Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus... were just children in the basement.
It's as if he cannot see that every point he makes is actually a very big positive for many people.
As for me, I'm rather blah about political ideologies.
Not really. If you take a step be, you quickly see most people belief's in anything they care about resemble religion.
People talk about their political beliefs, their love for LRT transit, technology, art, their healthcare career... with all the good and bad of religion.
I sometimes find when people talk about these things, they're actually more passionate in both the good and bad way, than religious people are.
I would assume this is because religion is pretty vague and many things are left for the unseen. Hell is a concept, but its all imaginary as far as we can see.
But the earthly things people care about are huge and they carry real life consequences. If you have political beliefs, you see the consequences right away. Poor people, wars, infringements of freedom...
If you care about transit. You see the consequences every day. Traffic jams, taxes, crowded busses and subways, late for work...
And if you care about code, you see the consequences every day. Bugs and bugs, performance problems, documentation, crashes, rewriting bad code...
When you get down to it, most people are far more religious about such things than religious people are about religion.
Well this affects a lot of people. You'll often hear American Democrats say the 'poor' vote against their self interest.
That's actually a remarkably arrogant statement. As if they 'know' Democratic policies benefit the poor.
In reality, it is much more complex.
1. I'm in Canada and a lot of poor people anecdotally have changed to either vote NDP (very left) or conservative. Their reasons are that the Liberals (more similar to Democrats in the US) aren't working for their interests. They work for the public sector unions and special interests groups... Some have enough hope in government and vote NDP. Other say screw it, the government will never care about the poor and just vote conservative hoping to at least keep what they can.
2. A lot of people really do wish to be left alone. It's not against their interests, if their goal is to be left alone. I grew up in Africa. One thing I can tell you is that apart from the violence, I liked the life down there. I don't know what my poverty level was, but it was probably pretty poor. The thing is, we had a roof on our head and lived pretty much okay. I suspect a lot of people in 'red states' might appreciate the independent living and simple life more than those in other states. You can live very cheaply in red states. It might not be the best life. It might not have the best healthcare. It might not bring them above certain poverty threshold numbers. But they can live in their own home and do their own thing.
I honestly couldn't picture myself poor in a 'blue state' I'm currently in a city (Toronto) in Canada. I certainly couldn't bring myself to live poorly here. Housing and property taxes up the wazoo. Fees, fees, and more fees.
If I ever lost my job or became poor, I would also seek the best way to reduce my cost of living and live a simple life. I'd move out to the boonies somewhere.
I know this is not everyone's cup of tea. But it is what it is.
3. The US is not some socialist state that helps the poor. I think Canadians are starting to see this in their own policies as well. If you look at Europe and others, you'll start to see the same thing as money gets tight. But it's especially true in the US. The Democrats aren't 'left' enough to really help the poor. Much like in Canada, they really just help the public sector unions, and a few sectors like the auto industry and healthcare... They're not out there giving poor people jobs. Sure, they speak in the name of the poor. But people have heard that before.
4. This last point, I think is more on the values level for the red-state. They know everything has a cost and things will have to be paid for. Also values play an interesting role. You mentioned the 'multi-coloured worker-bees vote left'. Well think about that from the red-state American. These 'colored' people are leaving their ghetto country and have ghetto leftist values that made their country ghetto. If we need to keep America prosperous, we need the values that made America great.
Again, I'm not saying I agree with that, but let it sink in for a second. Red-states aren't getting immigrants on mass from Finland/Germany. They're getting it from Mexico.
The interesting thing is that the real test of ObamaCare will not be in this website.
Yes, I suppose anti-ObamaCare people can say they couldn't even get the website right. The rest of it must be a disaster.
On the other hand, we have pro-ObamaCare people cheering when the website gets fixed or more people sign up.
I dare say, all this website stuff will be worked out eventually. It's all rather irreleevant. The real test of ObamaCare will be in its costs, subsidies, who it affects business/people, payments to medical providers, how it impacts MediCare, how it impacts innovation, how it impacts rationing, how it affects current insurance plans, how it distorts the labor market, how it reduces costs, how it provides better healthcare...
I taught high school computer science for a while and I an a software developer.
I think almost anyone will agree that teaching how to think, understand and create algorithms, and critical thinking is the goal of computer science.
However, how do you express those thoughts? You could do it through the use of abstract mathematical symbols or perhaps pseudo-code.
Or you can express thoughts same thoughts via a programming language.
Better still, using a programming language lets you see the actual results of what you programmed, debug, find problems, view variable contents...
People who criticize the teaching of computer science always seem to hate on the choice of programming language. Look, I agree sometimes schools pick a practical or industry used programming language.
But this is not a problem. The problem resides in what you do with that language. If all you teach kids about programming is calling into libraries, then yeah, it is a problem. But if you teach them logic and control and variables, which most programming languages provide, then you're doing fine.
Even languages like Java which hide memory allocation are not that bad. This is high school computer science. If you can get them to understand variables and a for-loop, you're a miracle worker:)
They can learn the details of memory management in college/university or another advanced high-school class.
While I agree, I think you overstate what they wanted.
People aren't that complicated. They aren't really interested in getting a cut of the profits. They aren't particularly interested in income distribution.
What people want is to be OK. It really doesn't get any simpler than that. And people who used to be OK and then were suddenly not OK being displaced by a machine... are going to protest.
And there's nothing wrong with that. I find the language we have to use today absolutely silly. As if you need to have a moral reason to just want to be OK. We feel the need to demonize profits and say its only fair workers get a cut of the profits. And what about the person who ever had a good job to begin with? And they suddenly not deserving of the cut of profits?
Let's be honest about it. People want to be OK. And when you have something disruptive, the society had better make sure there are ways to be OK.
Maybe it's income redistribution. Maybe it's government creating jobs for people. Maybe it's getting out of government so the cost of living goes down. Maybe it's organizing work sharing programs so more the actual work is spread out. Maybe it's training people for new work....
Whatever it is... but people just want to be OK... and that's a good enough moral reason to do something. You don't need anything else beyond that. You are a person and you want to live a comfortable life.
I personally favor work sharing because there's going to be a very long period where human work will need to be done. You won't motivate people to do work if you're handing out enough money for people to do nothing and live a decent life.
Sure, we can all imagine doing interesting or fulfilling work for free or when other people are getting free money. Maybe a university professor, family doctor, researcher...
But would you want to be a doctor working the midnight shift in the ER all the time? Would you want to be the practical nurse cleaning up after the elderly? Would you want to be the guy working in a mine for lithium? Would you want to be the person loading and unloading trucks for supermarkets?
I'd much rather we work share the work we can all do.
Everything seems to swing. But one thing is certain, always follow the money.
This whole 'contracting' affair on both the public and private sector does not produce the highest quality products. Why should it? None of the incentives are there.
The contracting company doesn't want to build something that works without flaws for a minimal profit. They want to have continuing profits. This is not unique to big corporations. Just try dealing with any contractor or mechanic. Sure if you *know* them, you can deal with them honestly somewhat. Or if you pay them enough... and they can cost a lot, you can get an honest deal.
At best, you hope they do a good job and that means you build a good relationship, and that means more business in the future. But of course, when this comes to government contracts, what that natural process means is that it gets called corruption.
On the other hand, you can have the builder operate it. There's some incentive there for them to do a good job as they get a cut of continuing operations. I think there is some hope that the 'cloud' will actually provide for better overall software. Although of course this results in vendor lockin and could potentially cause all kinds of other business problems.
Or you could build it in house. Then of course you run the risk of an overstaffed bureaucracy and unionized government workers.
There's no real easy solution. But I do think the dominant view has swayed too far towards contracting.
Other fields have much more standard functionality. no matter what car you drive, the steering wheel is in the same spot, brakes...
In practice, software for example is not about the syntactical difference between C# and Java. In that case, i would agree on it being 50ml beakers versus 75 ml beakers.
But it's not. It's learning to program in Visual Studio with C# frameworks and libraries versus learning Java with Spring or Apace... or whatever else. Learning the details of such fields is very complicated.
Or so is learning to configure a Cisco router versus some other piece of network equipment.
Now yes, technology moves quickly and tech lacks standards to make the knowledge stick, so it is better to hire a smart generalist.
However, that was my point, that is unique to tech and the rest of the world doesn't operate like that. So don't put all the blame on HR. They have been trained in HR and that is how the rest of the world works.
We have a big responsibility to let people know why our field is different.
But I think it is changing to more general requirements.
The other thing of course is that tech should learn a thing or two about the rest of the world. Sometimes you don't need a new programming language. Sometimes you need to enforce quality by having skilled, experienced, and well trained people doing the work.
For example, how many people work with security (tls, ssl...) but don't know anything about it other than what library call to make?
Heck, how many times have we had to just dive in and muck around with some code we really have no idea about, or enter an entirely new domain without in depth knowledge?
Just to give you an example. I used to work in telecom. My first job at a major telco equipment provider was a little whacky. I was doing microcode on the line cards with some c in the processor. Anyways, it was an entirely new domain for me (ip multicast). First month on the job, I'm literally thrust into a situation where a major router had gone down in Qatar or something... and I'm the guy assigned to 'fix' the problem. Yeah... I barely know the code base or multicast or any of the other network equipment to be that guy. But I was.
Again, contrast to other fields that are legally protected like doctors, lawyers...
Yes, the HR and hiring managers need to learn a lot, but tech needs to learn a lot too.
People in IT tend not to understand that how the rest of the world operates is vastly different.
We rightfully or wrongly think we should just learn on the job. That we have the skills in terms of general programming and people should just hire us and we will learn whatever specifics are needed.
The rest of the world simply does not work this way. They operate on a you go to school/learn a trade and then you do that specific job... and you should be able to do it. As a result, when you have people trying to hire for a technical position, the HR person will tend to put in the requirements as they know.
Now some HR people are getting about this. Some hiring managers are getting smarter and putting in more general requirements. Some HR people are getting smarter in terms of not screening so much for key words... but the general problem is the same.
The rest of the world operates very specifically. A brain surgeon doesn't just get hired as a heart surgeon. A divorce lawyer doesn't just get hired into a corporate law position. A bus driver doesn't just get hired as a truck driver. An electrician doesn't just get hired as a plumber. A fork lift operator doesn't just get hired as a crane operator...
And if you take yourself out of the tech bubble for even just a second, you would see how the rest of the world works. The amount of training someone else gets before they touch a new piece of equipment or even a process.
Again, I'm not saying how we do things is right or wrong. There are pros and cons to everything. But just understand the rest of the world operates much more like the very specific certifications that you complain about.
Yeah, I don't see how a 5c fee or tax is going to affect plastic bag use.
I'm in Toronto, and we also had the 5c bad thing. I think it was repealed, but our grocery store still has charges it (loblaws).
Here's the thing.
1. The fee on the bags has basically no impact on our use of them. I'm spending $100 on groceries... you think I'm going to care about 20 cents worth of bags?
2. What has had an impact is simply having the reusable bags. Loblaws has this amazing one with a sturdy flap that goes on the bottom for extra support. We use these most of the time.
3. We still need plastic bags for garbage / recycling, so once in a while, we leave/forget our reusable bags and just pay the fee to get proper bags and use them for recycling and garbage.
Better still if they could develop plastic bag alternatives that degrade. That would be very useful.
What's interesting is the question on why public transit is viewed so differently than other public functions.
I'm in Canada. Land of public healthcare. We cannot charge people to see a doctor or anything like that.
Ditto for public education.
Yet, even in Canada, transit remains that elusive thing that while it is publicly run and subsidized, it is 'unthinkable' that people shouldn't pay for it. This is even true of roads, with increasing calls for more tolls to make drivers pay...
For the life of me, I cannot fathom why we treat public infrastructure (like roads and mass transit) so much differently than we do healthcare and education.
Yes, there are various nuances. Things like making sure people don't overuse or congest the system. Of course you could just as easily make that argument for healthcare:P But I think the overwhelming argument is simply that transit is not viewed on the same social level as healthcare or education despite the fact that transit is something we used every single day in and out... and quite frankly relative to the size of government budgets, transit itself is fairly inexpensive.
I laugh with despair when my home province of Ontario spends like 40% of its budget on healthcare, throws billions and billions into education... then people fight and squabble over a hundred million here or there with transit.
The idea that women are more social and men are more technical is not some law written in stone. Might we have tendencies? Probably. But part of being human is being able to improve oneself beyond one's tendencies. As a male, I have read that I have a genetic predisposition to spreading my seed and raping lots of women. But you know, I, like countless other men, don't do such things.
Now, of course I am fully aware of the bias in this field. I haven't seen any kind of equal push to get men into 'female' fiends like nursing, early childhood education, teaching... There is some, but it's a fraction of the push towards getting more female CEOs or engineers...
Nonetheless, perhaps it is 'better' to get more women into the field so they can grow their technical ability in the same vein as maybe men should take other roles like nursing and improve their caring ability. Hey, who knows, maybe you would really like it more.
The second problem is there is no reason software engineering should not be a social job. Perhaps the only reason it is viewed that way is because you have a large percentage of men with very anti-social tendencies in the field. In this manner, it is very imperative to get more women (but I would also say, more social men) into software engineering, such that the field is not as antagonistic to social people. Granted, many of the anti-social people might be brilliant, but I would suggest that the need for such brilliance is perhaps relegated to the top 5% (at most) software engineering positions.
This is further exemplified today. Even as a male, the field is become too anti-social for me. With contractors, off-shoring, focusing too much on being super-hero code fixers instead of proper designers... it can be tough.
So yes, maybe fewer women want to be software engineers, but the whole point of it all is both females and the software engineering job can and should change.
Hmmm... How is not grounds for a lawsuit? I'm not saying they should win, but it is a defect in the product.
Yes, many things do drain power while idle. They tend to be designed that way. You have a TV that takes full power while ON, but consumes less power while it is not on.
This however is a bug.
The car was designed to operate in 'sleep' mode and still be able to detect the key fob.
Does it make the car unusable? Nope.
But that part is broken. They kludged a work around to disable sleep mode so the key fob will work.
Hence, the promises of various software update to fix the issue.
And yes, I am not a lawyer. However, in my book if you buy a product with a certain expectation, it should meet those expectations or you should be able to sue. If they manufacturer wishes to release a product with defects, they better make it absolutely clear to you (clear as in advertising).
We should be suing companies a lot more for their lack of quality in my view. Facebook security settings not being enforced or being reset... sue them. Toyota possible issues with software for throttling, sue them.
At the end of the day, people need to understand the scope of their job.
Yes, try and do a good job. Yes, inform your superiors of problems.
But at the end of the day, if your company is structured that way, your superiors are in charge.
The best thing you can actually do is to not do things outside your scope for an unresponsive management. Only then, will they see the results of their problems and will possibly change.
Sadly, their change might be to take it out on the department, but that's a risk:P
At the end of the day, what reason would they have to change, when you guys were covering the flaws. They weren't getting enough calls from customers yelling at them about quality. They weren't getting enough RMAs. They weren't hearing too many complaints from customers about misconfiguration of devices.... So why change anything?
As I said, yes, if you have a responsive management, take proactive action and do more than your assigned role.
But beyond that, stick to your role and let them see the results of their decisions, so they can then adapt.
Just finding libraries, configuring them, and learning to use them is pretty hard some times..NET/Java makes this a bit easier, just import the jar/.dll and away you go.
Some PERL distributions make this easier with a package manager.
I have no idea what Wolfram has, but it would be pretty cool if it managed to do a lot of this. Centralized package management. Maybe it scans your code, sees what you're trying to do and then chooses an optimal function in some library (hopefully offers it to you)...
How it would do that, I have no idea... but still it would be pretty good.
You don't see a link between a political party being able to fire all people not loyal to him, ruining an entire industry... and nationalization?
The beauty of not nationalizing things is that if the leader of Microsoft is a complete nutjob or just incompetent, only Microsoft goes down. Google/Apple/new company will survive.
You put an awful lot of control and power in one set basket when you nationalize things. Maybe you can make it more efficient? Maybe you can run it for less profit?
Fundamentally, I can't think of anything aside from bitcoin that would serve its purpose.
Real mining creates the scarcity by the fact that mining gold or silver is work and fairly rare. That said, it is pretty wasteful and costly to the environment... all to create a currency of scarcity.
Fiat currency are essentially virtual currency with the 'database' controlled by central bankers / government. They control the scarcity. Basically though, whoever is in charge gets to manipulate the currency directly. This turns a lot of people off this method. In my view, the 'miners' in this case is the financial services sector (bankers, debt...). Some have suggested tying the monetary base to a set level of inflation or something like that. But still controlled and highly susceptible to politics...
Something like bitcoin that essentially makes scarcity a function of computing power. At least the miners will advance and utilize computing power. Better than mineral mining in my view. Unfortunately, trust is pretty hard in this kind of distributive system. I have no idea if I can trust it.
Unfortunately, the line is very much blurred in software development.
Prototype code quickly gets incorporated as production code if it works.
In some ideal world, prototype code never touches the real world. It is always rewritten by production engineers. Yet, the fact that their prototype code is being maintained suggests otherwise as it is in most places of software development.
I worked as a developer in electronic healthcare for a bit. I got out quite soon.
A quick example, when people started talking about electronic medical records, their eyes light up and it turns to databases of information, classification of everything, optimizing treatments and data... MORE DATA... MORE DATA
In reality, the first use case for medical records that most people and physicians see is just being able to see the healthcare records. If a patient shows up at a walk-in clinic at another provider, the doctor there is able to pull up the record.
Something as simple as just being able to store the scanned copies of documents and test results would have been an amazing first step. You don't need a very high resolution copy. I know the storage equation might be an issue, but they don't really write essays. From there, they could move on to more standardization of others...
I'm glad Kentucky kept it simple. It really is the best way to get something going out of a complex system.
It's a common stereotype that the problem with business people is that all they care about is money.
If only that was the case.
The reality is we all tend to have some model of how things should be paid for and what makes our company different from another.
But, we always need to step back and look at it objectively.
Open Source is not some enemy of revenue on its own. The old telecom companies (Bells, ATTs...) used to have all kinds of open source products. They knew their revenue was from having a monopoly position over communication.
This is very similar to Google today. They saw that they could be very friendly to open source as their revenue model was service/ad based. I'm sure there are bean counters at Google, but they're not simplistic bean counters who simply say people are using X amount of Google service, so they need to pay Y dollars.
I don't quite know the model for hardware companies. But perhaps just name recognition is enough. Sure with open hardware, anyone could make a copy, but most people, me included, would still pay for the name, to ensure it is done 'right'. I know I could buy a $20 router, but I end up with the Cisco/LinkSys/DLink... Perhaps enough of a market develops that large companies start paying to support projects while reaping the manufacturing benefits.
Maybe I'm just a simpleton, but I recently went out to get a new monitor.
I ended up getting a 1080p 23 inch LED TV instead and just plug in my PC via HDMI.
Now, like I said, I'm a simpleton, and I'm sure other people can make use of much higher resolutions or other characteristic that my simple eyes and brain cannot process.
But for me, I sat there staring at the monitor and then the TVs. Then I looked at the price; they're about the same and it just made sense to get the TV. It comes with built in sound, a remote control (good for sound control too).
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, this is another example where software developers are not a profession.
One could argue that Intel isn't going to spend the time and money to do all those things. They require man power to fund, and so they're not likely to do them.
Microsoft was/is one of the better companies in this regard and they mainly did it because you were locked into their platform and APIs. Their whole money making scheme was based around software being made for their platform.
But ultimately, this gap is what differentiates a profession from a regular job. A profession mandates certain behavior and standards. It's not all about money or efficiency.
Yes, as a professional, you might tell someone to fck off is they just handed you a bare spec and a compiler. Just like a lawyer might tell you to fck off if you handed them some contract scribbled written by pen and paper by your cousin on a napkin.
There was a time this was done more in certain fields. I have co-workers who used to work for some of the older telecoms. They complain about the amount of documentation and verification they used to have to provide internally. But that is what made things professional to some extent.
But we're not professionals. We might like to act like them and some of us manage to get away with it because we really are that valuable. But in the end, we're just worker bees. We suck it up and deal with the lack of professionalism. We will hack something to work. We will do our own performance tests and verification instead of demanding the professionals on the other end do their job. Most of all, we'll pride ourselves on being able to make it all work in the end and mock anyone who has better expectation of the field as not being to hack it.
Pretty much any political ideology has it's followers as children who just don't want to do thing or be responsible.
But the actual ideology itself is generally pretty academic. Whether it is communism or progressivism or classical liberalism/libertarianism...
What is particularly annoying about Stross and people like him who detest BitCoin is they take it as a given that progressivism/capitalism is the only real way. Anything else is just for stupid rebellious children.
It's as if the whole enlightenment and people like Adam Smith, John Locke, Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus... were just children in the basement.
It's as if he cannot see that every point he makes is actually a very big positive for many people.
As for me, I'm rather blah about political ideologies.
Not really. If you take a step be, you quickly see most people belief's in anything they care about resemble religion.
People talk about their political beliefs, their love for LRT transit, technology, art, their healthcare career... with all the good and bad of religion.
I sometimes find when people talk about these things, they're actually more passionate in both the good and bad way, than religious people are.
I would assume this is because religion is pretty vague and many things are left for the unseen. Hell is a concept, but its all imaginary as far as we can see.
But the earthly things people care about are huge and they carry real life consequences. If you have political beliefs, you see the consequences right away. Poor people, wars, infringements of freedom...
If you care about transit. You see the consequences every day. Traffic jams, taxes, crowded busses and subways, late for work...
And if you care about code, you see the consequences every day. Bugs and bugs, performance problems, documentation, crashes, rewriting bad code...
When you get down to it, most people are far more religious about such things than religious people are about religion.
Well this affects a lot of people. You'll often hear American Democrats say the 'poor' vote against their self interest.
That's actually a remarkably arrogant statement. As if they 'know' Democratic policies benefit the poor.
In reality, it is much more complex.
1. I'm in Canada and a lot of poor people anecdotally have changed to either vote NDP (very left) or conservative. Their reasons are that the Liberals (more similar to Democrats in the US) aren't working for their interests. They work for the public sector unions and special interests groups... Some have enough hope in government and vote NDP. Other say screw it, the government will never care about the poor and just vote conservative hoping to at least keep what they can.
2. A lot of people really do wish to be left alone. It's not against their interests, if their goal is to be left alone. I grew up in Africa. One thing I can tell you is that apart from the violence, I liked the life down there. I don't know what my poverty level was, but it was probably pretty poor. The thing is, we had a roof on our head and lived pretty much okay. I suspect a lot of people in 'red states' might appreciate the independent living and simple life more than those in other states. You can live very cheaply in red states. It might not be the best life. It might not have the best healthcare. It might not bring them above certain poverty threshold numbers. But they can live in their own home and do their own thing.
I honestly couldn't picture myself poor in a 'blue state' I'm currently in a city (Toronto) in Canada. I certainly couldn't bring myself to live poorly here. Housing and property taxes up the wazoo. Fees, fees, and more fees.
If I ever lost my job or became poor, I would also seek the best way to reduce my cost of living and live a simple life. I'd move out to the boonies somewhere.
I know this is not everyone's cup of tea. But it is what it is.
3. The US is not some socialist state that helps the poor. I think Canadians are starting to see this in their own policies as well. If you look at Europe and others, you'll start to see the same thing as money gets tight. But it's especially true in the US. The Democrats aren't 'left' enough to really help the poor. Much like in Canada, they really just help the public sector unions, and a few sectors like the auto industry and healthcare... They're not out there giving poor people jobs. Sure, they speak in the name of the poor. But people have heard that before.
4. This last point, I think is more on the values level for the red-state. They know everything has a cost and things will have to be paid for. Also values play an interesting role. You mentioned the 'multi-coloured worker-bees vote left'. Well think about that from the red-state American. These 'colored' people are leaving their ghetto country and have ghetto leftist values that made their country ghetto. If we need to keep America prosperous, we need the values that made America great.
Again, I'm not saying I agree with that, but let it sink in for a second. Red-states aren't getting immigrants on mass from Finland/Germany. They're getting it from Mexico.
The interesting thing is that the real test of ObamaCare will not be in this website.
Yes, I suppose anti-ObamaCare people can say they couldn't even get the website right. The rest of it must be a disaster.
On the other hand, we have pro-ObamaCare people cheering when the website gets fixed or more people sign up.
I dare say, all this website stuff will be worked out eventually. It's all rather irreleevant. The real test of ObamaCare will be in its costs, subsidies, who it affects business/people, payments to medical providers, how it impacts MediCare, how it impacts innovation, how it impacts rationing, how it affects current insurance plans, how it distorts the labor market, how it reduces costs, how it provides better healthcare...
You know, all the important stuff.
I taught high school computer science for a while and I an a software developer.
I think almost anyone will agree that teaching how to think, understand and create algorithms, and critical thinking is the goal of computer science.
However, how do you express those thoughts? You could do it through the use of abstract mathematical symbols or perhaps pseudo-code.
Or you can express thoughts same thoughts via a programming language.
Better still, using a programming language lets you see the actual results of what you programmed, debug, find problems, view variable contents...
People who criticize the teaching of computer science always seem to hate on the choice of programming language. Look, I agree sometimes schools pick a practical or industry used programming language.
But this is not a problem. The problem resides in what you do with that language. If all you teach kids about programming is calling into libraries, then yeah, it is a problem. But if you teach them logic and control and variables, which most programming languages provide, then you're doing fine.
Even languages like Java which hide memory allocation are not that bad. This is high school computer science. If you can get them to understand variables and a for-loop, you're a miracle worker :)
They can learn the details of memory management in college/university or another advanced high-school class.
While I fully agree with the workers affected and there needs to be something done for them, it is not immoral or unethical to work in the field.
Personally, the workers should be redeployed and workshare as needed.
Instead of hiring 1 person at 90k/year, hire 2 at 45k and have them work half time. More families are supported. More people have free time.
Yes, this might not be possible in certain fields, but it is possible in most fields.
Keep spreading the jobs and reducing the hours worked so all people contribute something and get paid.
While I agree, I think you overstate what they wanted.
People aren't that complicated. They aren't really interested in getting a cut of the profits. They aren't particularly interested in income distribution.
What people want is to be OK. It really doesn't get any simpler than that. And people who used to be OK and then were suddenly not OK being displaced by a machine... are going to protest.
And there's nothing wrong with that. I find the language we have to use today absolutely silly. As if you need to have a moral reason to just want to be OK. We feel the need to demonize profits and say its only fair workers get a cut of the profits. And what about the person who ever had a good job to begin with? And they suddenly not deserving of the cut of profits?
Let's be honest about it. People want to be OK.
And when you have something disruptive, the society had better make sure there are ways to be OK.
Maybe it's income redistribution. ...
Maybe it's government creating jobs for people.
Maybe it's getting out of government so the cost of living goes down.
Maybe it's organizing work sharing programs so more the actual work is spread out.
Maybe it's training people for new work.
Whatever it is... but people just want to be OK... and that's a good enough moral reason to do something. You don't need anything else beyond that. You are a person and you want to live a comfortable life.
Basic income is one way.
Work Sharing is another.
I personally favor work sharing because there's going to be a very long period where human work will need to be done.
You won't motivate people to do work if you're handing out enough money for people to do nothing and live a decent life.
Sure, we can all imagine doing interesting or fulfilling work for free or when other people are getting free money. Maybe a university professor, family doctor, researcher...
But would you want to be a doctor working the midnight shift in the ER all the time? Would you want to be the practical nurse cleaning up after the elderly? Would you want to be the guy working in a mine for lithium? Would you want to be the person loading and unloading trucks for supermarkets?
I'd much rather we work share the work we can all do.
Everything seems to swing. But one thing is certain, always follow the money.
This whole 'contracting' affair on both the public and private sector does not produce the highest quality products. Why should it? None of the incentives are there.
The contracting company doesn't want to build something that works without flaws for a minimal profit. They want to have continuing profits. This is not unique to big corporations. Just try dealing with any contractor or mechanic. Sure if you *know* them, you can deal with them honestly somewhat. Or if you pay them enough... and they can cost a lot, you can get an honest deal.
At best, you hope they do a good job and that means you build a good relationship, and that means more business in the future. But of course, when this comes to government contracts, what that natural process means is that it gets called corruption.
On the other hand, you can have the builder operate it. There's some incentive there for them to do a good job as they get a cut of continuing operations. I think there is some hope that the 'cloud' will actually provide for better overall software. Although of course this results in vendor lockin and could potentially cause all kinds of other business problems.
Or you could build it in house. Then of course you run the risk of an overstaffed bureaucracy and unionized government workers.
There's no real easy solution. But I do think the dominant view has swayed too far towards contracting.
I think this is very disingenuous by IT people.
Other fields have much more standard functionality.
no matter what car you drive, the steering wheel is in the same spot, brakes...
In practice, software for example is not about the syntactical difference between C# and Java. In that case, i would agree on it being 50ml beakers versus 75 ml beakers.
But it's not. It's learning to program in Visual Studio with C# frameworks and libraries versus learning Java with Spring or Apace... or whatever else. Learning the details of such fields is very complicated.
Or so is learning to configure a Cisco router versus some other piece of network equipment.
Now yes, technology moves quickly and tech lacks standards to make the knowledge stick, so it is better to hire a smart generalist.
However, that was my point, that is unique to tech and the rest of the world doesn't operate like that. So don't put all the blame on HR. They have been trained in HR and that is how the rest of the world works.
We have a big responsibility to let people know why our field is different.
Yeop, I agree.
But I think it is changing to more general requirements.
The other thing of course is that tech should learn a thing or two about the rest of the world. Sometimes you don't need a new programming language. Sometimes you need to enforce quality by having skilled, experienced, and well trained people doing the work.
For example, how many people work with security (tls, ssl...) but don't know anything about it other than what library call to make?
Heck, how many times have we had to just dive in and muck around with some code we really have no idea about, or enter an entirely new domain without in depth knowledge?
Just to give you an example. I used to work in telecom. My first job at a major telco equipment provider was a little whacky. I was doing microcode on the line cards with some c in the processor. Anyways, it was an entirely new domain for me (ip multicast). First month on the job, I'm literally thrust into a situation where a major router had gone down in Qatar or something... and I'm the guy assigned to 'fix' the problem. Yeah... I barely know the code base or multicast or any of the other network equipment to be that guy. But I was.
Again, contrast to other fields that are legally protected like doctors, lawyers...
Yes, the HR and hiring managers need to learn a lot, but tech needs to learn a lot too.
People in IT tend not to understand that how the rest of the world operates is vastly different.
We rightfully or wrongly think we should just learn on the job. That we have the skills in terms of general programming and people should just hire us and we will learn whatever specifics are needed.
The rest of the world simply does not work this way. They operate on a you go to school/learn a trade and then you do that specific job... and you should be able to do it. As a result, when you have people trying to hire for a technical position, the HR person will tend to put in the requirements as they know.
Now some HR people are getting about this. Some hiring managers are getting smarter and putting in more general requirements. Some HR people are getting smarter in terms of not screening so much for key words... but the general problem is the same.
The rest of the world operates very specifically. ...
A brain surgeon doesn't just get hired as a heart surgeon.
A divorce lawyer doesn't just get hired into a corporate law position.
A bus driver doesn't just get hired as a truck driver.
An electrician doesn't just get hired as a plumber.
A fork lift operator doesn't just get hired as a crane operator
And if you take yourself out of the tech bubble for even just a second, you would see how the rest of the world works. The amount of training someone else gets before they touch a new piece of equipment or even a process.
Again, I'm not saying how we do things is right or wrong. There are pros and cons to everything. But just understand the rest of the world operates much more like the very specific certifications that you complain about.
Yeah, I don't see how a 5c fee or tax is going to affect plastic bag use.
I'm in Toronto, and we also had the 5c bad thing. I think it was repealed, but our grocery store still has charges it (loblaws).
Here's the thing.
1. The fee on the bags has basically no impact on our use of them. I'm spending $100 on groceries... you think I'm going to care about 20 cents worth of bags?
2. What has had an impact is simply having the reusable bags. Loblaws has this amazing one with a sturdy flap that goes on the bottom for extra support. We use these most of the time.
3. We still need plastic bags for garbage / recycling, so once in a while, we leave/forget our reusable bags and just pay the fee to get proper bags and use them for recycling and garbage.
Better still if they could develop plastic bag alternatives that degrade. That would be very useful.
What's interesting is the question on why public transit is viewed so differently than other public functions.
I'm in Canada. Land of public healthcare. We cannot charge people to see a doctor or anything like that.
Ditto for public education.
Yet, even in Canada, transit remains that elusive thing that while it is publicly run and subsidized, it is 'unthinkable' that people shouldn't pay for it.
This is even true of roads, with increasing calls for more tolls to make drivers pay...
For the life of me, I cannot fathom why we treat public infrastructure (like roads and mass transit) so much differently than we do healthcare and education.
Yes, there are various nuances. Things like making sure people don't overuse or congest the system. Of course you could just as easily make that argument for healthcare :P But I think the overwhelming argument is simply that transit is not viewed on the same social level as healthcare or education despite the fact that transit is something we used every single day in and out... and quite frankly relative to the size of government budgets, transit itself is fairly inexpensive.
I laugh with despair when my home province of Ontario spends like 40% of its budget on healthcare, throws billions and billions into education... then people fight and squabble over a hundred million here or there with transit.
It's ridiculous quite frankly.
There are a few ways to look at it.
The idea that women are more social and men are more technical is not some law written in stone. Might we have tendencies? Probably. But part of being human is being able to improve oneself beyond one's tendencies. As a male, I have read that I have a genetic predisposition to spreading my seed and raping lots of women. But you know, I, like countless other men, don't do such things.
Now, of course I am fully aware of the bias in this field. I haven't seen any kind of equal push to get men into 'female' fiends like nursing, early childhood education, teaching... There is some, but it's a fraction of the push towards getting more female CEOs or engineers...
Nonetheless, perhaps it is 'better' to get more women into the field so they can grow their technical ability in the same vein as maybe men should take other roles like nursing and improve their caring ability. Hey, who knows, maybe you would really like it more.
The second problem is there is no reason software engineering should not be a social job. Perhaps the only reason it is viewed that way is because you have a large percentage of men with very anti-social tendencies in the field. In this manner, it is very imperative to get more women (but I would also say, more social men) into software engineering, such that the field is not as antagonistic to social people. Granted, many of the anti-social people might be brilliant, but I would suggest that the need for such brilliance is perhaps relegated to the top 5% (at most) software engineering positions.
This is further exemplified today. Even as a male, the field is become too anti-social for me. With contractors, off-shoring, focusing too much on being super-hero code fixers instead of proper designers... it can be tough.
So yes, maybe fewer women want to be software engineers, but the whole point of it all is both females and the software engineering job can and should change.
Hmmm... How is not grounds for a lawsuit? I'm not saying they should win, but it is a defect in the product.
Yes, many things do drain power while idle.
They tend to be designed that way. You have a TV that takes full power while ON, but consumes less power while it is not on.
This however is a bug.
The car was designed to operate in 'sleep' mode and still be able to detect the key fob.
Does it make the car unusable? Nope.
But that part is broken. They kludged a work around to disable sleep mode so the key fob will work.
Hence, the promises of various software update to fix the issue.
And yes, I am not a lawyer.
However, in my book if you buy a product with a certain expectation, it should meet those expectations or you should be able to sue. If they manufacturer wishes to release a product with defects, they better make it absolutely clear to you (clear as in advertising).
We should be suing companies a lot more for their lack of quality in my view. Facebook security settings not being enforced or being reset... sue them.
Toyota possible issues with software for throttling, sue them.
I'd hardly call this a protest.
At the end of the day, people need to understand the scope of their job.
Yes, try and do a good job.
Yes, inform your superiors of problems.
But at the end of the day, if your company is structured that way, your superiors are in charge.
The best thing you can actually do is to not do things outside your scope for an unresponsive management. Only then, will they see the results of their problems and will possibly change.
Sadly, their change might be to take it out on the department, but that's a risk :P
At the end of the day, what reason would they have to change, when you guys were covering the flaws. They weren't getting enough calls from customers yelling at them about quality. They weren't getting enough RMAs. They weren't hearing too many complaints from customers about misconfiguration of devices.... So why change anything?
As I said, yes, if you have a responsive management, take proactive action and do more than your assigned role.
But beyond that, stick to your role and let them see the results of their decisions, so they can then adapt.
I fully agree with this.
Just finding libraries, configuring them, and learning to use them is pretty hard some times. .NET/Java makes this a bit easier, just import the jar/.dll and away you go.
Some PERL distributions make this easier with a package manager.
I have no idea what Wolfram has, but it would be pretty cool if it managed to do a lot of this. Centralized package management. Maybe it scans your code, sees what you're trying to do and then chooses an optimal function in some library (hopefully offers it to you)...
How it would do that, I have no idea... but still it would be pretty good.
You don't see a link between a political party being able to fire all people not loyal to him, ruining an entire industry... and nationalization?
The beauty of not nationalizing things is that if the leader of Microsoft is a complete nutjob or just incompetent, only Microsoft goes down. Google/Apple/new company will survive.
You put an awful lot of control and power in one set basket when you nationalize things. Maybe you can make it more efficient? Maybe you can run it for less profit?
But it's a hell of a lot less resilient.
Fundamentally, I can't think of anything aside from bitcoin that would serve its purpose.
Real mining creates the scarcity by the fact that mining gold or silver is work and fairly rare. That said, it is pretty wasteful and costly to the environment... all to create a currency of scarcity.
Fiat currency are essentially virtual currency with the 'database' controlled by central bankers / government. They control the scarcity. Basically though, whoever is in charge gets to manipulate the currency directly. This turns a lot of people off this method. In my view, the 'miners' in this case is the financial services sector (bankers, debt...).
Some have suggested tying the monetary base to a set level of inflation or something like that. But still controlled and highly susceptible to politics...
Something like bitcoin that essentially makes scarcity a function of computing power. At least the miners will advance and utilize computing power. Better than mineral mining in my view. Unfortunately, trust is pretty hard in this kind of distributive system. I have no idea if I can trust it.
Unfortunately, the line is very much blurred in software development.
Prototype code quickly gets incorporated as production code if it works.
In some ideal world, prototype code never touches the real world. It is always rewritten by production engineers. Yet, the fact that their prototype code is being maintained suggests otherwise as it is in most places of software development.
I worked as a developer in electronic healthcare for a bit. I got out quite soon.
A quick example, when people started talking about electronic medical records, their eyes light up and it turns to databases of information, classification of everything, optimizing treatments and data... MORE DATA... MORE DATA
In reality, the first use case for medical records that most people and physicians see is just being able to see the healthcare records. If a patient shows up at a walk-in clinic at another provider, the doctor there is able to pull up the record.
Something as simple as just being able to store the scanned copies of documents and test results would have been an amazing first step. You don't need a very high resolution copy. I know the storage equation might be an issue, but they don't really write essays. From there, they could move on to more standardization of others...
I'm glad Kentucky kept it simple. It really is the best way to get something going out of a complex system.
It's a common stereotype that the problem with business people is that all they care about is money.
If only that was the case.
The reality is we all tend to have some model of how things should be paid for and what makes our company different from another.
But, we always need to step back and look at it objectively.
Open Source is not some enemy of revenue on its own.
The old telecom companies (Bells, ATTs...) used to have all kinds of open source products. They knew their revenue was from having a monopoly position over communication.
This is very similar to Google today. They saw that they could be very friendly to open source as their revenue model was service/ad based. I'm sure there are bean counters at Google, but they're not simplistic bean counters who simply say people are using X amount of Google service, so they need to pay Y dollars.
I don't quite know the model for hardware companies. But perhaps just name recognition is enough. Sure with open hardware, anyone could make a copy, but most people, me included, would still pay for the name, to ensure it is done 'right'. I know I could buy a $20 router, but I end up with the Cisco/LinkSys/DLink...
Perhaps enough of a market develops that large companies start paying to support projects while reaping the manufacturing benefits.
Maybe I'm just a simpleton, but I recently went out to get a new monitor.
I ended up getting a 1080p 23 inch LED TV instead and just plug in my PC via HDMI.
Now, like I said, I'm a simpleton, and I'm sure other people can make use of much higher resolutions or other characteristic that my simple eyes and brain cannot process.
But for me, I sat there staring at the monitor and then the TVs. Then I looked at the price; they're about the same and it just made sense to get the TV. It comes with built in sound, a remote control (good for sound control too).