On the contrary.... this is normally where communism fails.
Whenever you have a scarce resource, the socialist response is to invoke price controls and try to ration. The capitalist response is that high prices force people to conserve, and the extra money gets poured into new ways to gather that resource.
The easiest example is oil. As supply gets low... prices go high... this spurs investment into harder to reach reserves (oil sands...
In the case of water... if China is short and it spurs higher water prices... it will also spur more desalination plants...
I hear that. If there's one thing I'd have changed about my university life, it would have been better networking. During that time, I had a stutter, so it didn't come naturally to me.
But it's constant improvement. Doing presentations, toastmasters... talking to various groups at work...
We just went through an interview cycle. It was bad... I'm not a great software engineer... but I'm a decent one.
The hardest thing I ever had to do was go through these resumes. Everyone seems to know the game. I compare there resume to mine, and yeah.... I couldn't tell the difference.
Two of our candidates had masters degrees in computer science. Couldn't even talk about variable scoping. It wasn't a trick question or anything. I was blown away. I had a literal WTF going on in my head. Are universities that desperate for funding and grad numbers, they will pass anyone.
The other spend 10 years at a bank doing ASP.NET development. The first question I ask people... is what topic would you like me to ask you a question on? So I ask him what little I know of web development... (impersonation, authentication, how do get a message box up...) I was amazed at how you spend 10 years doing development and not learn anything.
Another I thought would be a good guy to train. He had 5 years at Nortel... seemed like he had hardware exposure. Lots of fancy words on his resume... nothing behind it.
We have a coop student now in her 3rd year at the University of Waterloo (my university... a supposed top engineering university in Canada)... calls me up to solve a problem. I help her out... I tell her to step through some code... she says what? Apparently she has never ran a debugger before. Hooooowwwwwww!!!!
I almost feel the pain HR and recruiters must go through. I'm sure somewhere in the bank of resumes we get are some good candidates... how we'd find them... no idea. To an extent, I saw it coming as software is viewed more and more as a commodity job. Top talent is not going to enter the field. Top talent has gone back to traditional medicine, legal...The industry could burn through some of the older better trained talent from the old days... but those candidates are dwindling in number. I'm still in Canada, and all we have left are 45 year old ex-Nortel people and the last bits of talent from the tech boom of the late 90s.
And now we have a talent shortage. And you can't replace a grade A engineer with a grade C project manager, a grade C product manager, a grade C requirements analyst, a several grade C programmers. Nothing gets done. It's like taking all the C students you had in high school and seeing if they can somehow solve the complex calculus problem. Some jobs just require high caliber individuals. You can't replace a good lawyers with a team of secretaries and a requirements analyst either.
But I digress in my frustrations:P Maybe the industry just needs some good consolidation and the good people can form good teams again. And maybe... just maybe... we can get back to having senior engineers, and real mentors, and training people.... ah the dream world I live in.
"Collapse and rewriting the regulations" is probably not a solution; that's essentially a revolution, "
So revolution is not a solution? Open up a history book... and it is full of revolutions. There's perhaps a reason for that. It's often the only/best way to make change. Let's not take it lightly by any stretch. I'm not starting a revolution because I have to pay 5% more tax:P
I think we'll *hopefully* have relatively orderly collapses. What happened recently in Greece is a positive sign, not a negative in my view. The country was unsustainable, corrupt, and just collapsing. I consider what the EU/IMF are doing in terms of demanding austerity plans a kind of bureaucratic revolution. It's forcing change down the throat of such systems. Perhaps not the best/ideal change... but change none the less. Just as other kinds of revolutions can be for better or worse.
As I said, we won't see any real change until things collapse. Greece certainly wouldn't have fixed its problems until it collapsed. Ditto for most countries in the world.
Unfortunately, you are correct, but the answer is regulation of government.
You talk to people... and they recognize the need to regulate industry. Just look at the BP oil spill. Oil companies need to be regulated to make sure their oil rigs are safe.
The banking sector needs to be regulated to make sure transaction are fair and externalities do not spread to bring down the entire system.
Industries that use chemicals need to be regulated to make sure they don't cause undue harm to people.
Monopolies need to be regulated to make sure they don't abuse their power. Heck the EU goes nuts over Microsoft bundling a media player with their OS.
Yet, how about the most power monopoly in any country... the government... doesn't it need regulations in how it operates? Bundling unrelated laws in bills to gain support... don't we need regulations to ban this? Proving state benefits (pensions, healthcare...) to some citizens, but not others... don't we need regulations to ban this?
I could go on with other examples, but then I'd show my various political biases:P So I'll leave it at this relatively straight uncontroversial example of regulations of government. Of course this is what a constitution is for... but when you have a living constitution... that's like having living regulations created by industry itself. Yet, the constitutions are still useful. People still have the rights... especially the ones they exercise on a daily basis. Americans still own guns no matter what governments have done to curtail it. We still largely have freedom of speech. We still largely have freedom of religion... We still have separation of powers and a court system... We just need to fix all the loop holes...
Unfortunately, the ability to write government regulations in a sane manner is rare... normally just when a country is formed. So we don't often get this chance. And you can't really write it while the 'game of life' is in play. There are too many special interests that would fight it. If we were to say
"Proving state benefits (pensions, healthcare...) to some citizens, but not others... don't we need regulations to ban this?"
Public sector unions would go nuts, because they know they benefit immensely from the money of government.
And no... the courts don't offer us the regulation of government. They should... but they don't. The courts in any country are a political body with political views... often appointed by political parties.
Ultimately, it is up to good citizens and the public at large to insist government obey its regulations. But yeah... I'm pessimistic about any real change until society collapses and we can rewrite the regulations on government.
Indeed, I simply cannot believe how much of lag there is in human resource and management education.
Yes, we came from an industrial age where if you were play pacman, taking a piss, chatting in the coffee room.... then you weren't screwing the bolts on the car or sewing tshirts. You were definitely losing productivity.
Yet, when it comes to 'thinking' jobs, there is little to measure in terms of productivity. Most of what you pay for is the person being in the job, knowing the environment... I'm not programming 8 hours a day I tell you that. There really isn't that much programming to do.
But suppose I left... how many man hour would it take for them to find someone, train someone on the system to work on... to learn all the code... to know what to change...
How do you measure productivity, work done... The business management sector needs completely new metrics.
I play the game too. I'll slow down my work. File 2 bugs instead of fixing it right in 1. This way it shows I'm working on bugs and fixing them or doing new features....
You think money is an issue here in BP not fixing this? You know some things are just hard if not impossible.
As to prosecuting them... the government already took action on this kind of thing a long time ago. Basically oil companies have been paying a tax on oil for a long time just for such cases... as oil spills have been happening for a while. The government already has collected the money to be used to clean up the spill.
While I would trust the National Academy of Science to give me answers to... science... I largely trust the scientists to tell me that global warming is happening and their best approximation as to the effect.
Political policy is not science.
There is no 'scientific' answer to political policy. You need to take into account economic policy, social policy, science, taxation policy, industrial policy... mix em all up and maybe you can TRY to come up with a political policy. And with all the experts arguing over which of their fields is dominant, you will never come up with an objective policy.
So at the end of the day, despite your wishes to resign yourself to be ruled by experts, you are just as good as anyone else as coming up with political policy.
As for me, I don't support a carbox tax or cap and trade. I think the natural rising of price and our technology (plugin hybrids are already here...) will have a big enough effect without wasting billions upon billions in government schemes.
Quite frankly, I tire of the you didn't speak up when X, so don't complain now. I'm always been an independent. I complained with George Bush was in power and I'll damn right complain now.
And the left cried like no tomorrow when Bush was in power... and they're silent now that Obama is in power doing many of the same things. Yeah Bush ran huge deficits... he's so bad. But now Obama is running bigger deficits... but that's okay.
Yes, both left and right are hypocritical as to their values and when they choose to speak out. It's like being driven in a car heading towards a cliff. The passenger says 'stop the car! we're heading towards the cliff" Instead of seeing the problem, the driver retorts 'but last time when I warned you, you didn't listen'
Meanwhile the passengers in the back along for this ride (like myself) keep saying 'just stop the car'.
I wish we could all be rational consistent people. But I know that's not possible. I'll take support from the left when they're angry, but right. I'll take the support from the right when they're angry, but right.
At some point as a teacher I have to decide what programming language the kids will be doing the assignments in. Bare in mind, these are high school kids and most have no programming experience, so I cannot just say, do it in any language.If If I were teaching a university level course, I would leave that option open. Most have no idea how to declare variables or even install a compiler. I don't want to frustrate them with installing a compiler, when I'm trying to teach them how to program and move cool graphics across the screen.
So while I teach them the existence of various languages, I have to teach them in a language of quite frankly... my bias. The language I choose will probably influence the language they 'play' around in...
Yet, without me making this choice for them, they won't learn any language. So it is with culture, religion....
Unfortunately, your ideals are precisely what is wrong with our education system.
"I wouldn't object to religion being taught in school - just teach *all* of them, and put it in "Religion" class."
You want some vague attempt at having education be completely unbiased towards anything. It's a great theory, just void of reality.
I taught math and computer science in high school. It's hard enough in these fairly mundane and factual subjects to decide what to teach and focus on.
How do you 'focus' on 'all' religions. There are so many out there. And the more religions you study, the less you can teach anything in depth about any of them.
It's one of the reasons why I have come to the statement
"multiculturalism is better termed no-culturism."
We spend all our time trying to make sure no one is offended, no culture is missed that our kids end up suffering from a lack of culture. I've taught kids from all cultures. The worst problem I see is the kids who have no idea who they are. They are void of any culture. They sit around lost, trying to find any shallow culture to belong to.
It's about time we accepted that a large part of education is *brain washing* kids. I use that term on purpose. We teach our kids to like baseball instead of cricket. We teach them to speak English instead of Mandarin. We teach them to appreciate liberty instead of cultural superiority.
That is brainwashing... for lack of a better word... to make our kids like us. And it is a reality of education. Why do we deny this? To pretend you can have a valueless education system is ignorant as far as I'm concerned. As the child grows up, they will make more and more of their own choices and change value systems.
Which is why, I am of firm belief that having one education system with one curriculum is very flawed. It is better to have diversity. Schools should be diverse in their teaching methods and 'beliefs' they choose to propagate.
We will never have 'one culture' or 'one belief system'. People have tried that for centuries, slaughtering millions in the process of trying to make us all the same. Kids spend 8 hours a day at school. It is just as much a part of their upbringing as their parents. So I have no problem with a school focused on Christianity, or Islam, or Athiesm, or Italian culture, or Indian culture... We can and should set basic education standards for reading/writing/math... but beyond that learn to live and let live.
The changes made to the Texas Curriculum might sound odd, but I wouldn't say they're off the charts to the extend of being completely false. You can make a decent academic case for them. They are justified. My hope is that Texas adopts more school choice so that individual schools can make such choices.
The big worry with school choice is that our kids need to learn together to learn to live together. I call bs on this. I think denying school choice increases segregation. Parents will literally move neighborhoods to be in a good school. I've seen it happen. Parents are segregating their kids by living in different areas. Not to mention the biggest divide is class; not race. A white kid in the ghetto is just as screwed up as an African American in the ghetto. And due to property taxes, home prices... these kids will never learn together. We'd get more diversity if people lived in the same area, but had a choice to go to a different school. Beyond that, all this needless fighting over who controls the schools in the culture wars creates unneeded fighting.
You are assuming that going to university or college make one qualified and educated.
I would venture to say that is not the case, and we have instead lowered the standards of colleges and universities. So everyone gets the piece of paper. But we're not any more qualified than other generations.
I'd venture to say, we're less qualified overall as the people who really should be entering programs are not fulfilling their full potential as they are deprived of a challenging curriculum and individual attention for projects... It's one of the reasons why for example many countries have a more 'educated' population than the US, but the US still ends up with the best of the best and all the best companies.
It's a rare talent that actually creates great innovation. The US really focuses on these great people with its IVY league schools and massive research funding. Many other countries like Canada focus on creating mass semi-smart worker bees.
The more I work (as a semi-smart worker bee Canadian), the more I realize the value in the US system of creating excellence and great leaders.
The other thing of course is that we really don't need that many educated people. Most of jobs people value are not jobs needing a university degree.
I value the chef that makes great food when I go out to eat. I value the waiter that provides excellent service. I value the janitors that keep the place clean. I value the construction workers that build our roads and bridges. I value the manufacturing workers who assemble all the widgets. I value the farm workers who pick the fruits all day.
This is not to say educated job are not valued. I'm an engineer and I value skilled people. But there is such a great demand for other jobs that they are under-appreciated.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people say things like 'I have 10 years of education. I should get paid more than some high school grad auto-worker'.
And I ask why? They seem to think its a given that more education=more money. As if it is a right. Whereas in a true free market (which we don't have), you get paid what others are willing to pay you.
I'll gladly pay the auto-worker for making a car I wouldn't make myself. What use is some government bureaucrat meddling in my life about the effects of obesity? How much would I pay for this person to study it? My answer... nothing.
On a side note, its also the reason why most western countries are in so much debt. There is a natural limit as to the wage gap between the service/manufacturing workers and the 'educated' workers. A teacher/nurse/doctor can only earn so much more than a waiter or an auto-worker. There aren't enough rich people to fund a higher difference.
1. Worrying about security threats in closed source software. I'm apt to dismiss. Not because all commercial software is secure or anything. Just that I don't see the government producing anything more secure than Red Hat, Microsoft, Google, Qnx... could not develop on their own and the government can audit it if they want.
2. Preserving technological know how. I'm much more sympathetic here. There are certain industries where you have to have it to have more of it. The old analogy is that you need to keep your military manufacturers alive by ordering from them regularly. If they go broke, that knowledge and process is gone. You can't just restart submarine building on a whim when war breaks out. You need your engineers, assembly line workers... all ready and trained. I'm an engineer, but I certainly wouldn't have any clue how to build a military sub without being in the field. Similarly, with software, the industry and know how needs to be there. This is why Silicon Valley is still so dominant. That's where the trained talent is. The US needs to maintain a critical mass of trained talent in all these areas for improvements to be made in these areas.
But again, this is government trying to push a monopoly position when what is needed is better trade and profession policies. Things like certain software must be written by US engineers; just like working in the US legal system requires you to be a US lawyer. Maintenance of code must also be valued. Every piece of software in use should have maintainers tied to it... For government projects, it can demand open source...
Yeah, you can come up with a 'bad case' to warrant regulation everywhere.
As to the California electricity crises? I don't see anything the government did there that was good. There was a shortage of electricity due to weather and delays in new plants. That drove up prices as it should. Higher prices cause people to conserve and increases revenues to bring new supply online. Government imposed price controls resulted in the bankruptcy of several companies.
As the original point is. Government does not produce things. So it cannot magically make electricity cheaper. What makes things cheaper is production. More electricity supply, more doctors, more nurses, more efficiencies in computing...
I trust direct democracy... which is a free society. Everyone is held accountable to the money they earn by people voluntarily giving them it. Every time you shop at a store, you are voting for that store. Best of all, if you don't like any of the stores, start your own store.
I see no benefit in handing our money and resources to a small group of people. Power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely. There is no great power than those who hold the power of the state and the force of the police. That is where you will find the greatest corruption and evil.
I'm fully aware of what the security is with respect to the browser. The webserver gets to know the full path name of the upload (\\server\dir\abc.txt) instead of just the file name (abc.txt). Not a problem as far as I'm concerned.
Part of the problem with the webstandard folks is they haven't catered to getting things done. I don't consider them gods and that by not adopting 'their' standard I'm sinning. It's 2010 and only now are we even seeing an attempt to standardize video with HTML5. That void sat around for years upon years. I say thank you to Adobe for at least giving us Flash. Pre HTML 5, would you say someone doing video in flash was not doing it correctly because they were not using 'standards'. Sure it's resource hungry proprietary POS, but seeing as to how nothing else was easily available, it made sense and resulted in mass number of people being able to see video easily (youtube...) Pre HTML 5 and even today, I'd say using Flash is correct.
Java as far as I'm concerned suffered from a similar problem. It was only in Mustang (as i recall) that they finally added native support for the system tray icons. That's years upon years after such functionality was available in more linux distros and been there since windows 95. You could get it done, but it wasn't there natively.
Sure I could have imported a server-side file browser or done same javascripting to capture the fullpath locally then send that via a hidden field to the server... but why... It's company policy that all intranet apps be supported under IE. It works fine under IE. I'm perfectly Okay with that. As far as I'm concerned, it is 'correct'. It satisfies the requirements, is designed well (abstraction...), does not have hacks to jump through... and people have little time to worry about a day we theoretically ditch windows and people don't have IE to use.
I have no desire to adhere to the whims of some standards body that doesn't provide an easy native way of doing something and by the time they do, it's 15 years too late. If need be in the future, it's all isolated on one page and we can change it later. That's what bug trackers are for. When there's enough demand for it, we'll make the change.
Maybe the company could have hired a good web developer (I wish they did) who could spend the time and effort doing all these things, but at the end of day, it's not worth the business case and there's holy about web standards committees.
The openfiledialog only gives the full path \\server\dir\abc.txt/
The webserver still needs to have access to \\server in the first place.
if in the upload file dialog you chose c:\dir\abc.txt, the server could not access it as it has no permission to read the contents of your local PC. However, this is not the case we were dealing with. All the data is stored on network shares \\server\dir, which both client computers as well as the web server have full access to.
The problem was communicating the filename/path to the webserver so the webserver knows what directory to process. Firefox and other browsers provide no way of communicating that path. If I to an upload file on \\server\dir\abc.txt, the only thing the webserver can find out is the name (abc.txt). On IE, you can find out the full path (\\server\dir\abc.txt). Thus in IE, we can know to process directory \\server\dir.
I'm an firmware engineer, but I recently built a few sites for internal applications. I wouldn't say I'm a web expert, but IE specific simply make things infinitely easier for an intranet.
For example: We needed a way to submit jobs to a server and it required the full network share of a directory to process.
So we show an openfiledialog. The user chooses a file (abc.tsv). The server processes the entire directory where that file is..
In IE, you can extract the full path name of the file \\server\log\abc.tsv In firefox, you can only get the file name itself (abc.tsv).
I fully understand why firefox does it this way from a security point of view. Anytime you upload a file, you certainly don't want the server knowing the harddrive structure of your local pc.
But from a get things done point of view, I went with the IE way. I didn't have to have a special server file browser or anything like that. The user is presented with a standard windows file browser... As I said, I'm not a web developer, so maybe there were more elegant ways around this. Yet I don't consider my case very strange.
The fact that IE gave me a relatively straight forward and familiar way to do something solved my problem. Firefox and other browsers don't. Hence, my app is now IE independent (well it works on all versions of IE).
I can only assume others have taken a similar path.
Indeed, the one country that actually used nuclear weapons says 'we won't ever use them... promise'. Not to mention America doesn't just stockpile weapons. Last I checked, they bombed the crap out of Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm not here to debate the morality of the bombings... just that they happened.
I'm not here to debate whether or not the nuking of Hiroshima was warranted or not, but the rest of the world has a slightly longer memory than to think weapons are just kept around... They are used.
I don't know if we'll have a big war again that would warrant people bringing out such heavy weapons as nukes... but I certainly wouldn't put it by us. It was barely over 50 years ago, we had WW2. And not long before that WW1. We can say: 'never again', but I'm sure there were people post WW1 who said... 'shit, that was hell, we can never go through this again. we're too civilized'... then along came WW2. So pardon me for not being as optimistic as yourself. We've only had 50+ years of relative peace in the West. The rest of the world has certainly not been as peaceful... and that is an insignificant amount of time in history. Maybe I'll come around if we have a 1000 years of peace.
Shit happens. Just like the financial crises just happened. With all our institutions; all our experts; all our civility, all our knowledge of history... shit happens. I'd rather be prepared than hope shit never happens again.
I certainly don't think decommissioning nukes is a given or an easy decision.
Now I await the professionalization of the software field.
Who in the company is going to oversee such rules and regulations? Hmm, perhaps all software projects must be handled by a certified software engineer. They can make sure the software is up to standards... and will have to take out liability insurance like other professionals.
And of course, they must be US citizens to comply with US law.
I'm smelling job protection like doctors and lawyers. Oh I can dream can't I?
Ultimately, all laws and regulations could be setup to be a computer program. What is a programming language, but a way to exactly specify algorithms and data structures? In this case, we only need the algorithm part.
Now, you'll never be able to get rid of human judgment. All the input parameters will be up in the air. But what does get you to do is focus on the assumptions you make on the numbers you put in. The best example I can think of now is filing my taxes. I use a computer program and all my energy is focused on inputting the data. Wouldn't it be great if banks/employers/brokers.... could talk to the tax program... then my inputting is done for me and I could just focus on which years I want to claim things. how to split things up.
Heck, I think all legal documents should be written in a programming language. English and other languages are not precise enough.
So you would have this as part of your program:
var cost = 0; if( supplier.job == completed ) then cost += $50000. if(supplier.job.lateby 10 days ) then cost -= $40000...
Now of course you have to work out the meaning of 'completed'. You will have to be subjective there... or maybe you can write a full specification detailing all the requirements of what it means for a job to be complete... yet... dealing with technical requirements as a programmer... I know that's a much harder task... and always ends up being subjective.
But again... the legal framework as a program means the contract is set and you battle on what counts... the input variables and everyone has equal access to it. Even someone who cannot fully understand boolean logic can 'play' with the contract and the input paramters to see what happens if things change...
But good luck with my fantasy. Lawyers depend on legaleez and preventing the ordinary person access to the law as their job protection.
You'd also have to throw in the possibility that young people's interest in the field has declined.
If you're in the western world, you'd be a little naive to dive into the field. The people who are doing it are doing it a very shallow level, even if they're capable of serious development work. It's not wroth the time or investment of knowledge. Probably the brigtest guy in my uni-class went on to found an e-store. If you're in one of the outsourcing countries, you're not rich enough to waste your time coding for free. You're doing it for a job.
Pardon my generalizations here, but it's what I see everyday. Those young bright eyed young excelling nerds are just not going into the field. We can't find them to hire. I can't blame them either. They're smart enough to do anything else (law, medicine, public sector...).
So it might not be a linux kernel development issue, but a problem with the field in general. Another personal anecdote, the last serious embedded place I worked at had almost no one under 37... except me. The overseas team (india) was full of young people. And no... it wasn't that we weren't looking to hire here.
Just my thought. I know that even though I absolutely love software, I probably wouldn't go into the field today... It's not worth pursuing as a serious career. And so, why would I think spend countless hours in the core details of an open source project?
Nothing operates in a vacuum... however my main point relates to how government wastes money.
I take it as a given that is what government does. It wastes money. Period. If people actually found the things government did useful, they would voluntarily fund it... like they choose to buy food or clothing...
The only thing I've learned to care about is how it wastes money. Waste money prosecuting a drug war that never ends just to keep police/lawyers employed = bad. Spend money going to space = good Spend money on national grid = good
I'm not an expert on a national grid. Suffice to say either one would be a good choice. I would personally go for more space funding as electricity seems to work just fine for me. Yet, we still can't get to space easily. But that's just me. maybe your wish is a national grid. I can't argue with that, nor would I. They bother result in productive gains.
So while you may come at it trying to look for a return on investment for government projects (as you want to sell nuclear designs...), I do not. I see them all as a waste of money.
It's not just that. It's also a question of getting something for your money.
Government all around the world give unemployment or 'make work' projects. The one good thing about Asia is their make work projects tend to be productive. Japan creates lots of jobs as it builds infrastructure like rail and roads and bridges... Maybe it's a waste of money. But hey, at least when they're done creating jobs, they have something to show for it. Not just the physical results, but also the retained skill sets.
Contrast that to just spending money on employment insurance, or making more BS government jobs with bureaucrats and lawyers and tax people.
So yes, maybe the space program is a waste of money. But I'd rather have my tax money go to people working at NASA pushing the envelope of space and engineering, than have people paid to do nothing productive (unemployed, bureaucracy, lawyers...).
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On the contrary.... this is normally where communism fails.
Whenever you have a scarce resource, the socialist response is to invoke price controls and try to ration.
The capitalist response is that high prices force people to conserve, and the extra money gets poured into new ways to gather that resource.
The easiest example is oil. As supply gets low... prices go high... this spurs investment into harder to reach reserves (oil sands...
In the case of water... if China is short and it spurs higher water prices... it will also spur more desalination plants...
The problem is of course that MS already lost this battle.
Had Microsoft actually be on the ball, the blackberry would have never existed.
MS had the mail server (exchange)
MS had the mobile platform (WinMo)
Yet, it took a third company, RIM, to properly push exchange mails to a phone.
Granted the new activesync is quite good... but it's years too late.
The problem with MS in mobile has always been that they *should* have owned the market... but they never did.
"You can. Learn to network. "
I hear that. If there's one thing I'd have changed about my university life, it would have been better networking. During that time, I had a stutter, so it didn't come naturally to me.
But it's constant improvement. Doing presentations, toastmasters... talking to various groups at work...
C'est la vie.
We just went through an interview cycle.
It was bad...
I'm not a great software engineer... but I'm a decent one.
The hardest thing I ever had to do was go through these resumes. Everyone seems to know the game. I compare there resume to mine, and yeah.... I couldn't tell the difference.
Two of our candidates had masters degrees in computer science. Couldn't even talk about variable scoping. It wasn't a trick question or anything. I was blown away. I had a literal WTF going on in my head. Are universities that desperate for funding and grad numbers, they will pass anyone.
The other spend 10 years at a bank doing ASP.NET development. The first question I ask people... is what topic would you like me to ask you a question on? So I ask him what little I know of web development... (impersonation, authentication, how do get a message box up...)
I was amazed at how you spend 10 years doing development and not learn anything.
Another I thought would be a good guy to train. He had 5 years at Nortel... seemed like he had hardware exposure. Lots of fancy words on his resume... nothing behind it.
We have a coop student now in her 3rd year at the University of Waterloo (my university... a supposed top engineering university in Canada)... calls me up to solve a problem. I help her out... I tell her to step through some code... she says what? Apparently she has never ran a debugger before. Hooooowwwwwww!!!!
I almost feel the pain HR and recruiters must go through. I'm sure somewhere in the bank of resumes we get are some good candidates... how we'd find them... no idea.
To an extent, I saw it coming as software is viewed more and more as a commodity job. Top talent is not going to enter the field. Top talent has gone back to traditional medicine, legal...The industry could burn through some of the older better trained talent from the old days... but those candidates are dwindling in number. I'm still in Canada, and all we have left are 45 year old ex-Nortel people and the last bits of talent from the tech boom of the late 90s.
And now we have a talent shortage. And you can't replace a grade A engineer with a grade C project manager, a grade C product manager, a grade C requirements analyst, a several grade C programmers.
Nothing gets done. It's like taking all the C students you had in high school and seeing if they can somehow solve the complex calculus problem. Some jobs just require high caliber individuals.
You can't replace a good lawyers with a team of secretaries and a requirements analyst either.
But I digress in my frustrations :P Maybe the industry just needs some good consolidation and the good people can form good teams again.
And maybe... just maybe... we can get back to having senior engineers, and real mentors, and training people.... ah the dream world I live in.
"Collapse and rewriting the regulations" is probably not a solution; that's essentially a revolution, "
So revolution is not a solution? Open up a history book... and it is full of revolutions. There's perhaps a reason for that. It's often the only/best way to make change. Let's not take it lightly by any stretch. I'm not starting a revolution because I have to pay 5% more tax :P
I think we'll *hopefully* have relatively orderly collapses. What happened recently in Greece is a positive sign, not a negative in my view. The country was unsustainable, corrupt, and just collapsing. I consider what the EU/IMF are doing in terms of demanding austerity plans a kind of bureaucratic revolution. It's forcing change down the throat of such systems. Perhaps not the best/ideal change... but change none the less. Just as other kinds of revolutions can be for better or worse.
As I said, we won't see any real change until things collapse. Greece certainly wouldn't have fixed its problems until it collapsed. Ditto for most countries in the world.
Unfortunately, you are correct, but the answer is regulation of government.
You talk to people... and they recognize the need to regulate industry. Just look at the BP oil spill. Oil companies need to be regulated to make sure their oil rigs are safe.
The banking sector needs to be regulated to make sure transaction are fair and externalities do not spread to bring down the entire system.
Industries that use chemicals need to be regulated to make sure they don't cause undue harm to people.
Monopolies need to be regulated to make sure they don't abuse their power. Heck the EU goes nuts over Microsoft bundling a media player with their OS.
Yet, how about the most power monopoly in any country... the government... doesn't it need regulations in how it operates?
Bundling unrelated laws in bills to gain support... don't we need regulations to ban this?
Proving state benefits (pensions, healthcare...) to some citizens, but not others... don't we need regulations to ban this?
I could go on with other examples, but then I'd show my various political biases :P
So I'll leave it at this relatively straight uncontroversial example of regulations of government.
Of course this is what a constitution is for... but when you have a living constitution... that's like having living regulations created by industry itself. Yet, the constitutions are still useful. People still have the rights... especially the ones they exercise on a daily basis. Americans still own guns no matter what governments have done to curtail it. We still largely have freedom of speech. We still largely have freedom of religion... We still have separation of powers and a court system... We just need to fix all the loop holes...
Unfortunately, the ability to write government regulations in a sane manner is rare... normally just when a country is formed. So we don't often get this chance. And you can't really write it while the 'game of life' is in play. There are too many special interests that would fight it. If we were to say
"Proving state benefits (pensions, healthcare...) to some citizens, but not others... don't we need regulations to ban this?"
Public sector unions would go nuts, because they know they benefit immensely from the money of government.
And no... the courts don't offer us the regulation of government. They should... but they don't. The courts in any country are a political body with political views... often appointed by political parties.
Ultimately, it is up to good citizens and the public at large to insist government obey its regulations.
But yeah... I'm pessimistic about any real change until society collapses and we can rewrite the regulations on government.
Indeed, I simply cannot believe how much of lag there is in human resource and management education.
Yes, we came from an industrial age where if you were play pacman, taking a piss, chatting in the coffee room.... then you weren't screwing the bolts on the car or sewing tshirts.
You were definitely losing productivity.
Yet, when it comes to 'thinking' jobs, there is little to measure in terms of productivity. Most of what you pay for is the person being in the job, knowing the environment...
I'm not programming 8 hours a day I tell you that. There really isn't that much programming to do.
But suppose I left ... how many man hour would it take for them to find someone, train someone on the system to work on... to learn all the code... to know what to change...
How do you measure productivity, work done...
The business management sector needs completely new metrics.
I play the game too. I'll slow down my work. File 2 bugs instead of fixing it right in 1. This way it shows I'm working on bugs and fixing them or doing new features....
Classic bureacrat here...
You think money is an issue here in BP not fixing this?
You know some things are just hard if not impossible.
As to prosecuting them... the government already took action on this kind of thing a long time ago.
Basically oil companies have been paying a tax on oil for a long time just for such cases... as oil spills have been happening for a while.
The government already has collected the money to be used to clean up the spill.
On the contrary.
While I would trust the National Academy of Science to give me answers to... science...
I largely trust the scientists to tell me that global warming is happening and their best approximation as to the effect.
Political policy is not science.
There is no 'scientific' answer to political policy. You need to take into account economic policy, social policy, science, taxation policy, industrial policy... mix em all up and maybe you can TRY to come up with a political policy. And with all the experts arguing over which of their fields is dominant, you will never come up with an objective policy.
So at the end of the day, despite your wishes to resign yourself to be ruled by experts, you are just as good as anyone else as coming up with political policy.
As for me, I don't support a carbox tax or cap and trade. I think the natural rising of price and our technology (plugin hybrids are already here...) will have a big enough effect without wasting billions upon billions in government schemes.
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Quite frankly, I tire of the you didn't speak up when X, so don't complain now.
I'm always been an independent. I complained with George Bush was in power and I'll damn right complain now.
And the left cried like no tomorrow when Bush was in power... and they're silent now that Obama is in power doing many of the same things.
Yeah Bush ran huge deficits... he's so bad. But now Obama is running bigger deficits... but that's okay.
Yes, both left and right are hypocritical as to their values and when they choose to speak out.
It's like being driven in a car heading towards a cliff.
The passenger says 'stop the car! we're heading towards the cliff"
Instead of seeing the problem, the driver retorts 'but last time when I warned you, you didn't listen'
Meanwhile the passengers in the back along for this ride (like myself) keep saying
'just stop the car'.
I wish we could all be rational consistent people. But I know that's not possible.
I'll take support from the left when they're angry, but right.
I'll take the support from the right when they're angry, but right.
Just a little example.
At some point as a teacher I have to decide what programming language the kids will be doing the assignments in.
Bare in mind, these are high school kids and most have no programming experience, so I cannot just say, do it in any language.If If I were teaching a university level course, I would leave that option open. Most have no idea how to declare variables or even install a compiler. I don't want to frustrate them with installing a compiler, when I'm trying to teach them how to program and move cool graphics across the screen.
So while I teach them the existence of various languages, I have to teach them in a language of quite frankly... my bias.
The language I choose will probably influence the language they 'play' around in...
Yet, without me making this choice for them, they won't learn any language.
So it is with culture, religion....
Unfortunately, your ideals are precisely what is wrong with our education system.
"I wouldn't object to religion being taught in school - just teach *all* of them, and put it in "Religion" class."
You want some vague attempt at having education be completely unbiased towards anything.
It's a great theory, just void of reality.
I taught math and computer science in high school. It's hard enough in these fairly mundane and factual subjects to decide what to teach and focus on.
How do you 'focus' on 'all' religions. There are so many out there. And the more religions you study, the less you can teach anything in depth about any of them.
It's one of the reasons why I have come to the statement
"multiculturalism is better termed no-culturism."
We spend all our time trying to make sure no one is offended, no culture is missed that our kids end up suffering from a lack of culture. I've taught kids from all cultures. The worst problem I see is the kids who have no idea who they are. They are void of any culture. They sit around lost, trying to find any shallow culture to belong to.
It's about time we accepted that a large part of education is *brain washing* kids. I use that term on purpose.
We teach our kids to like baseball instead of cricket.
We teach them to speak English instead of Mandarin.
We teach them to appreciate liberty instead of cultural superiority.
That is brainwashing... for lack of a better word... to make our kids like us.
And it is a reality of education. Why do we deny this? To pretend you can have a valueless education system is ignorant as far as I'm concerned. As the child grows up, they will make more and more of their own choices and change value systems.
Which is why, I am of firm belief that having one education system with one curriculum is very flawed. It is better to have diversity. Schools should be diverse in their teaching methods and 'beliefs' they choose to propagate.
We will never have 'one culture' or 'one belief system'. People have tried that for centuries, slaughtering millions in the process of trying to make us all the same. Kids spend 8 hours a day at school. It is just as much a part of their upbringing as their parents. So I have no problem with a school focused on Christianity, or Islam, or Athiesm, or Italian culture, or Indian culture... We can and should set basic education standards for reading/writing/math... but beyond that learn to live and let live.
The changes made to the Texas Curriculum might sound odd, but I wouldn't say they're off the charts to the extend of being completely false. You can make a decent academic case for them. They are justified. My hope is that Texas adopts more school choice so that individual schools can make such choices.
The big worry with school choice is that our kids need to learn together to learn to live together. I call bs on this. I think denying school choice increases segregation. Parents will literally move neighborhoods to be in a good school. I've seen it happen. Parents are segregating their kids by living in different areas. Not to mention the biggest divide is class; not race. A white kid in the ghetto is just as screwed up as an African American in the ghetto. And due to property taxes, home prices... these kids will never learn together. We'd get more diversity if people lived in the same area, but had a choice to go to a different school. Beyond that, all this needless fighting over who controls the schools in the culture wars creates unneeded fighting.
Live and let live.
Norway = oil country.
You are assuming that going to university or college make one qualified and educated.
I would venture to say that is not the case, and we have instead lowered the standards of colleges and universities.
So everyone gets the piece of paper. But we're not any more qualified than other generations.
I'd venture to say, we're less qualified overall as the people who really should be entering programs are not fulfilling their full potential as they are deprived of a challenging curriculum and individual attention for projects...
It's one of the reasons why for example many countries have a more 'educated' population than the US, but the US still ends up with the best of the best and all the best companies.
It's a rare talent that actually creates great innovation. The US really focuses on these great people with its IVY league schools and massive research funding.
Many other countries like Canada focus on creating mass semi-smart worker bees.
The more I work (as a semi-smart worker bee Canadian), the more I realize the value in the US system of creating excellence and great leaders.
The other thing of course is that we really don't need that many educated people. Most of jobs people value are not jobs needing a university degree.
I value the chef that makes great food when I go out to eat.
I value the waiter that provides excellent service.
I value the janitors that keep the place clean.
I value the construction workers that build our roads and bridges.
I value the manufacturing workers who assemble all the widgets.
I value the farm workers who pick the fruits all day.
This is not to say educated job are not valued. I'm an engineer and I value skilled people.
But there is such a great demand for other jobs that they are under-appreciated.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people say things like 'I have 10 years of education. I should get paid more than some high school grad auto-worker'.
And I ask why? They seem to think its a given that more education=more money. As if it is a right.
Whereas in a true free market (which we don't have), you get paid what others are willing to pay you.
I'll gladly pay the auto-worker for making a car I wouldn't make myself.
What use is some government bureaucrat meddling in my life about the effects of obesity? How much would I pay for this person to study it? My answer... nothing.
On a side note, its also the reason why most western countries are in so much debt. There is a natural limit as to the wage gap between the service/manufacturing workers and the 'educated' workers. A teacher/nurse/doctor can only earn so much more than a waiter or an auto-worker. There aren't enough rich people to fund a higher difference.
There are two issue here.
1. Worrying about security threats in closed source software. I'm apt to dismiss. Not because all commercial software is secure or anything. Just that I don't see the government producing anything more secure than Red Hat, Microsoft, Google, Qnx... could not develop on their own and the government can audit it if they want.
2. Preserving technological know how. I'm much more sympathetic here. There are certain industries where you have to have it to have more of it. The old analogy is that you need to keep your military manufacturers alive by ordering from them regularly. If they go broke, that knowledge and process is gone. You can't just restart submarine building on a whim when war breaks out. You need your engineers, assembly line workers... all ready and trained. I'm an engineer, but I certainly wouldn't have any clue how to build a military sub without being in the field. Similarly, with software, the industry and know how needs to be there. This is why Silicon Valley is still so dominant. That's where the trained talent is. The US needs to maintain a critical mass of trained talent in all these areas for improvements to be made in these areas.
But again, this is government trying to push a monopoly position when what is needed is better trade and profession policies. Things like certain software must be written by US engineers; just like working in the US legal system requires you to be a US lawyer. Maintenance of code must also be valued. Every piece of software in use should have maintainers tied to it... For government projects, it can demand open source...
Yeah, you can come up with a 'bad case' to warrant regulation everywhere.
As to the California electricity crises? I don't see anything the government did there that was good.
There was a shortage of electricity due to weather and delays in new plants.
That drove up prices as it should. Higher prices cause people to conserve and increases revenues to bring new supply online.
Government imposed price controls resulted in the bankruptcy of several companies.
As the original point is. Government does not produce things. So it cannot magically make electricity cheaper. What makes things cheaper is production.
More electricity supply, more doctors, more nurses, more efficiencies in computing...
I trust direct democracy... which is a free society. Everyone is held accountable to the money they earn by people voluntarily giving them it.
Every time you shop at a store, you are voting for that store.
Best of all, if you don't like any of the stores, start your own store.
I see no benefit in handing our money and resources to a small group of people. Power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely.
There is no great power than those who hold the power of the state and the force of the police. That is where you will find the greatest corruption and evil.
Define correctly.
I'm fully aware of what the security is with respect to the browser. The webserver gets to know the full path name of the upload (\\server\dir\abc.txt) instead of just the file name (abc.txt). Not a problem as far as I'm concerned.
Part of the problem with the webstandard folks is they haven't catered to getting things done. I don't consider them gods and that by not adopting 'their' standard I'm sinning.
It's 2010 and only now are we even seeing an attempt to standardize video with HTML5. That void sat around for years upon years. I say thank you to Adobe for at least giving us Flash. Pre HTML 5, would you say someone doing video in flash was not doing it correctly because they were not using 'standards'. Sure it's resource hungry proprietary POS, but seeing as to how nothing else was easily available, it made sense and resulted in mass number of people being able to see video easily (youtube...) Pre HTML 5 and even today, I'd say using Flash is correct.
Java as far as I'm concerned suffered from a similar problem. It was only in Mustang (as i recall) that they finally added native support for the system tray icons. That's years upon years after such functionality was available in more linux distros and been there since windows 95. You could get it done, but it wasn't there natively.
Sure I could have imported a server-side file browser or done same javascripting to capture the fullpath locally then send that via a hidden field to the server... but why...
It's company policy that all intranet apps be supported under IE. It works fine under IE. I'm perfectly Okay with that. As far as I'm concerned, it is 'correct'. It satisfies the requirements, is designed well (abstraction...), does not have hacks to jump through... and people have little time to worry about a day we theoretically ditch windows and people don't have IE to use.
I have no desire to adhere to the whims of some standards body that doesn't provide an easy native way of doing something and by the time they do, it's 15 years too late. If need be in the future, it's all isolated on one page and we can change it later. That's what bug trackers are for. When there's enough demand for it, we'll make the change.
Maybe the company could have hired a good web developer (I wish they did) who could spend the time and effort doing all these things, but at the end of day, it's not worth the business case and there's holy about web standards committees.
No you misunderstand.
The openfiledialog only gives the full path \\server\dir\abc.txt/
The webserver still needs to have access to \\server in the first place.
if in the upload file dialog you chose c:\dir\abc.txt, the server could not access it as it has no permission to read the contents of your local PC.
However, this is not the case we were dealing with. All the data is stored on network shares \\server\dir, which both client computers as well as the web server have full access to.
The problem was communicating the filename/path to the webserver so the webserver knows what directory to process. Firefox and other browsers provide no way of communicating that path. If I to an upload file on \\server\dir\abc.txt, the only thing the webserver can find out is the name (abc.txt). On IE, you can find out the full path (\\server\dir\abc.txt). Thus in IE, we can know to process directory \\server\dir.
Hope that clears it up.
I'm an firmware engineer, but I recently built a few sites for internal applications. I wouldn't say I'm a web expert, but IE specific simply make things infinitely easier for an intranet.
For example:
We needed a way to submit jobs to a server and it required the full network share of a directory to process.
So we show an openfiledialog. The user chooses a file (abc.tsv). The server processes the entire directory where that file is..
In IE, you can extract the full path name of the file \\server\log\abc.tsv
In firefox, you can only get the file name itself (abc.tsv).
I fully understand why firefox does it this way from a security point of view. Anytime you upload a file, you certainly don't want the server knowing the harddrive structure of your local pc.
But from a get things done point of view, I went with the IE way. I didn't have to have a special server file browser or anything like that. The user is presented with a standard windows file browser...
As I said, I'm not a web developer, so maybe there were more elegant ways around this. Yet I don't consider my case very strange.
The fact that IE gave me a relatively straight forward and familiar way to do something solved my problem.
Firefox and other browsers don't.
Hence, my app is now IE independent (well it works on all versions of IE).
I can only assume others have taken a similar path.
Indeed, the one country that actually used nuclear weapons says 'we won't ever use them... promise'.
Not to mention America doesn't just stockpile weapons. Last I checked, they bombed the crap out of Afghanistan and Iraq.
I'm not here to debate the morality of the bombings... just that they happened.
I'm not here to debate whether or not the nuking of Hiroshima was warranted or not, but the rest of the world has a slightly longer memory than to think weapons are just kept around...
They are used.
I don't know if we'll have a big war again that would warrant people bringing out such heavy weapons as nukes... but I certainly wouldn't put it by us. It was barely over 50 years ago, we had WW2. And not long before that WW1. We can say: 'never again', but I'm sure there were people post WW1 who said... 'shit, that was hell, we can never go through this again. we're too civilized'... then along came WW2. So pardon me for not being as optimistic as yourself. We've only had 50+ years of relative peace in the West. The rest of the world has certainly not been as peaceful... and that is an insignificant amount of time in history. Maybe I'll come around if we have a 1000 years of peace.
Shit happens. Just like the financial crises just happened. With all our institutions; all our experts; all our civility, all our knowledge of history... shit happens.
I'd rather be prepared than hope shit never happens again.
I certainly don't think decommissioning nukes is a given or an easy decision.
Now I await the professionalization of the software field.
Who in the company is going to oversee such rules and regulations? Hmm, perhaps all software projects must be handled by a certified software engineer. They can make sure the software is up to standards... and will have to take out liability insurance like other professionals.
And of course, they must be US citizens to comply with US law.
I'm smelling job protection like doctors and lawyers.
Oh I can dream can't I?
Ultimately, all laws and regulations could be setup to be a computer program.
What is a programming language, but a way to exactly specify algorithms and data structures? In this case, we only need the algorithm part.
Now, you'll never be able to get rid of human judgment. All the input parameters will be up in the air. But what does get you to do is focus on the assumptions you make on the numbers you put in.
The best example I can think of now is filing my taxes. I use a computer program and all my energy is focused on inputting the data. Wouldn't it be great if banks/employers/brokers.... could talk to the tax program... then my inputting is done for me and I could just focus on which years I want to claim things. how to split things up.
Heck, I think all legal documents should be written in a programming language. English and other languages are not precise enough.
So you would have this as part of your program:
var cost = 0; ...
if( supplier.job == completed ) then cost += $50000.
if(supplier.job.lateby 10 days ) then cost -= $40000
Now of course you have to work out the meaning of 'completed'. You will have to be subjective there... or maybe you can write a full specification detailing all the requirements of what it means for a job to be complete... yet... dealing with technical requirements as a programmer... I know that's a much harder task... and always ends up being subjective.
But again... the legal framework as a program means the contract is set and you battle on what counts... the input variables and everyone has equal access to it. Even someone who cannot fully understand boolean logic can 'play' with the contract and the input paramters to see what happens if things change...
But good luck with my fantasy. Lawyers depend on legaleez and preventing the ordinary person access to the law as their job protection.
You'd also have to throw in the possibility that young people's interest in the field has declined.
If you're in the western world, you'd be a little naive to dive into the field. The people who are doing it are doing it a very shallow level, even if they're capable of serious development work. It's not wroth the time or investment of knowledge. Probably the brigtest guy in my uni-class went on to found an e-store.
If you're in one of the outsourcing countries, you're not rich enough to waste your time coding for free. You're doing it for a job.
Pardon my generalizations here, but it's what I see everyday. Those young bright eyed young excelling nerds are just not going into the field. We can't find them to hire. I can't blame them either. They're smart enough to do anything else (law, medicine, public sector...).
So it might not be a linux kernel development issue, but a problem with the field in general. Another personal anecdote, the last serious embedded place I worked at had almost no one under 37... except me. The overseas team (india) was full of young people. And no... it wasn't that we weren't looking to hire here.
Just my thought. I know that even though I absolutely love software, I probably wouldn't go into the field today... It's not worth pursuing as a serious career. And so, why would I think spend countless hours in the core details of an open source project?
Nothing operates in a vacuum... however my main point relates to how government wastes money.
I take it as a given that is what government does. It wastes money. Period. If people actually found the things government did useful, they would voluntarily fund it... like they choose to buy food or clothing...
The only thing I've learned to care about is how it wastes money.
Waste money prosecuting a drug war that never ends just to keep police/lawyers employed = bad.
Spend money going to space = good
Spend money on national grid = good
I'm not an expert on a national grid. Suffice to say either one would be a good choice. I would personally go for more space funding as electricity seems to work just fine for me. Yet, we still can't get to space easily. But that's just me. maybe your wish is a national grid. I can't argue with that, nor would I. They bother result in productive gains.
So while you may come at it trying to look for a return on investment for government projects (as you want to sell nuclear designs...), I do not. I see them all as a waste of money.
It's not just that. It's also a question of getting something for your money.
Government all around the world give unemployment or 'make work' projects. The one good thing about Asia is their make work projects tend to be productive. Japan creates lots of jobs as it builds infrastructure like rail and roads and bridges... Maybe it's a waste of money. But hey, at least when they're done creating jobs, they have something to show for it. Not just the physical results, but also the retained skill sets.
Contrast that to just spending money on employment insurance, or making more BS government jobs with bureaucrats and lawyers and tax people.
So yes, maybe the space program is a waste of money. But I'd rather have my tax money go to people working at NASA pushing the envelope of space and engineering, than have people paid to do nothing productive (unemployed, bureaucracy, lawyers...).