When GM was bailed out the bond holders got screwed, investors got screwed, they lost all of the money, so who won in that deal?
Union workers got their victory. It was a bail out to the union workers and all of the private debt of the failed company was put onto the shoulders of tax payers, because now they own this company, which is going to fail again.
Obama also appeals to GM drivers that their warranty will be made whole by the government, so now not only the unions got bailed out, but GM drivers are also bailed out, again, with more tax payer money.
Of-course GM drivers are also tax payers, but Honda drivers are not covered by this GM warranty.
Now Ford union is threatening to strike and they don't care if the company goes bankrupt now, that they saw GM and Chrysler bail outs (moral hazard).
Not only did Ford get the short end of the stick when its competitors - GM and Chrysler were bailed out, but now the moral hazard created by the bail outs can cause Ford to be destroyed if it gives the unions what they want or it can be destroyed by the union itself, which now believes that even if the company goes bankrupt, it will be bailed out.
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This is how this game is played now if you are an investor: fuck you.
If you are in a large politically connected union, you are bailed out.
If you are American tax payer: fuck you too. You are now the proud owner of these failed businesses with all these insane obligations to the unions, whether you like it or not.
Unfortunately, there's MBA types counting beans and looking for places to save money. They look at IT and see a cost center; IT adds nothing to the bottom line.
- how is that unfortunate? Why shouldn't money be saved?
In competing markets and with actual competition comes the market pressure to reduce costs, so money must be saved and what I predict is that IT will have to become more and more resilient and survive with smaller budgets in those companies that have departments, and in reality challenges that are posed normally are met with solutions.
In fact I expect more interesting development in terms of productivity to come out of IT in near future, as people who work in this industry finally understand that they need to do something if they actually want to have any lives left to live at all instead of spending and average of 10 hours at work 6 days a week.
Innovation does not come without pressure, pressure and challenges bring it about and if you think it's only IT that the Accounting is looking at to save costs, you are way off base. Accounting is there to push people in the entire company to be more productive, which means to come up with solutions that allow them to be more productive. Better and smarter tools, that's what I expect the IT to have due to all this economic pressure.
We clearly mastered some of it, but the further we go, the more questions appear out of everywhere, and the questions are getting more and more complex.
The formal language that is used for mathematics is complex, but it's actually conveying information in a compressed manner that just would take too much time to explain in plain human language, and it would be futile when getting into more and more complex questions and proves, because too much would have to be referenced and re-referenced and re-re-referenced etc.
Actually with current computer tools we could take everything that exists in math so far and translate it into human readable language by using html with references and diagrams, but would it be just as convenient as the formal presentation in math?
Of-course even in math there are redundancies and different ways to present the same data, so there is a way to mis-interpret stuff as well, but people have been doing math for thousands of years, maybe tens and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions even, and we still don't have a way to say it all in a simple way so that a non-specialist would easily understand any and/or all of it.
My point is this: we'll NEVER have what you are talking about. Even if we develop AI that starts writing applications for us, we'll still have to explain to it what we mean by stuff and we'll get details mixed up and wrong in the explanation. So we'll just have to do with what we have now and what we are in progress of developing slowly, just like math, this process will last for thousands of years and will never be over or 'done' in any meaningful context.
But science, by any current understanding of the idea, can never answer WHY the universe is or even if that question has any meaning. It can't supply an answer to what our place in that universe is, how we should organize our lives, culture, civilizations, etc.
- this is too easy.
"Why our universe is" - because the state in which the pre-universe existed was unstable and needed to change.
"what our place in that universe is" - this is a question that is as meaningful as asking: what a photon's place in universe is?
Our place in universe is everything that we can take from it, learn from it and use it to our benefit.
The big questions, the ones that really matter, are all still open
- none of those questions matter.
deeply in the hold of a religious faith
- until somebody proves otherwise, once we die we are dead, and we stay dead. The fact that we are alive is a nice coincidence of meaningless events (meaningless in terms of moral judgment, but quite logical in terms of physics and local entropy).
Any system that proposes an organized philosophical worldview is basically a religion.
- religion is making up stuff that you don't know about. We can only base our knowledge on data and we have no data to show that any religions have anything beyond them than just sociological/psychological value, which may or may not have helped our survival, but if it does help, then it's a matter of evolution coming up with this ability of ours to take things on faith without knowing how things work.
All transcend reason and depend on an appeal to faith at some point, which is where they become a religion.
- reality is much simpler than that of-course. Faith comes up with various answers, which reality didn't provide yet or cannot provide in principle because the questions are meaningless.
You do mean public schools, yes? Because there are plenty of schools that are private and also plenty of private schools that are of various religious denominations.
If Congress passed a law that teachers in public schools must explicitly state to the students that all of the religions are nonsense and BS, even then I am not really sure that this would be unconstitutional! Why is that? Because a teacher stating this as a fact and matter of public policy still does not mean that the students would be discriminated against because of this policy.
Maybe it would be unconstitutional, I am not sure of this, it's an interesting question actually, but it wouldn't be discrimination as long as all that teachers did was stated this and continued grading as they normally would only based on the material taught in classes and not on anything else.
So if a student wrote an excellent paper on evolution of species and as a side not wrote: "I am writing all of this but I don't believe a word of what I am saying", the teacher could not then grade the student based on that last statement but only would have to grade the student based on the actual knowledge presented in the paper.
somebody would immediately write a script to automate it.
- maybe yes, but most likely no. In my past life, when I did contracts in software instead of building my own stuff, I did all sorts of automation, maybe another 2-3 guys would do it, but majority of people around me would not. The management wouldn't be open to that idea either, because that would specifically go out of the normal parameters of what was accepted as the framework/pattern combination to do that work.
So say an internal web application is built that requires dozens and dozens of screens. I did not see anybody doing what I did eventually: taking the final screens produced in Struts, the actions, forms, beans, data layer and business layer, factoring out the parts of those that were repeated over and over again throughout all screens and writing a generated that would take in templates and some property file with settings specific to the data model for the page and then produce the data layer with all the CRUD and list/filter/sort stuff, the business layer stub, the action with all CRUD related activities, the form, the mappers, the JSPs and java scripts and even struts-config entries.
Once I had that done, I showed it to management, they were impressed, but only 2-3 people really ended up using it, and those again, where the people who would do automation like that in the first place. The rest of the coders would not, because they would not bother learning how to construct the property files for the generator and the management was not trying to push anybody towards that, as it was not some wide spread framework.
And you see, they are mostly correct in not pushing towards it, as they want to be able to replace anybody in a team quickly and as painlessly as possible, but they were fine with the 3 guys that were already doing stuff like that, it wasn't a consideration there, because those were basically top paid contractors who were retained time and time again, even a week at a time when funds were tight.
It often seems to developers that the top management does not know who their power horses but they likely do know this.
Now that I've been building my own software suits for sale for the last 2 years, have a much deeper understanding of what the entire process is from owning the success of the business to owning any task in it, from setting up and maintaining hardware and networks, to figuring out marketing and sales strategy and doing whatever it takes in accounting to avoid taxes, all while looking for investment capital and partnering with other complementing businesses to collaborate on sales. I am going to tell you something: I believe that top management is constrained by money and profit first and foremost and whatever/. crowd believes is coming from "misunderstanding" of developers or of systems development and in general is in reality related to the constraints on competition and survivability of business.
usually because of poor decisions by upper management that could have been prevented with a little bit of planning.
- it seems to you to be that way, in reality in many cases it's not about poor decisions by upper management, but it is about competition with the other guy.
Competition is about who is going to land the contract, it's about who is going to get that VC money, it's about whether you can get that bank loan, etc.
If you didn't realize this yet, I'll educate you: it is all about money.
There is always not enough money to hire more people, and it's not due to poor planning, it's because of various laws that make it very expensive hiring people. If you hire somebody, you can't just lay them off once the crunch time is over and in software it's also not exactly the simplest task, to bring somebody in for a very short time period. However if there were no such things as labor regulations, minimum wage, etc. People could be hired at very low salaries to sit there, learn the process, people who don't even have any education.
There are millions upon millions of unemployed Americans, yet you have crunch times and you have to do insane overtime and burn out, and at the end, guess what, your job will still be outsourced somewhere with fewer regulations.
The decisions in front of top management is all about money, and often you can't just pour money into a problem because you are living on a slim margin. You have to balance the accounts receivables and accounts payables and you have to come up with all the salaries, with all the payments for all the expenses, with all the loan interest etc.etc. And you have to satisfy your customer and you have to win over the competition.
If you think there is just a 'little bit of planning' that can always be done to prevent crunch time, think again. You can't run a shop with negative margins, but if you try to not have crunch time, then you can't run the shop with positive margins at all due to all of the regulations.
The side problem with this is: there are millions of unemployed people with no money to get a better education and with no opportunity to try and get themselves employed at very low prices, so they could be trained at those low prices and they could be effectively on staff for some time at least, until they gain experience to get a better job, but giving the opportunity to the employer to even out the man power at any moment.
It is really necessary for any business, but especially for business with as many unknowns in projects as there are in software business, to be able to hire at very very low prices, but government prevents this very practice, preventing people from having opportunities of studying new stuff without attending any colleges and even being paid a very small amount for this opportunity.
The jobs are and will continue leaving countries with high regulations and taxes to countries with low regulations and taxes for these reasons and you will continue having those crunch times.
The frameworks, the patterns, the libraries, the tools, all of this is aimed at producing the same results to the same questions over and over in a way, that is proven that it will work.
Notice that nowhere here am I talking about computer science. I am very specifically talking about software development: coding and architecture.
As to new hardware platforms appearing and software being written for them - again, the same frameworks are transfered to those platforms, the same paradigms, patterns, even the same languages are adopted for them. Virtual machines, tool sets.
Everything is aimed at making software development process more and more into an assembly line type of work. If you, yourself ever came up with any 'framework', ever did anything that would standardize an approach to development within a project and then through multiple projects, then you are also complicit in this very activity - trying to make software development into a conveyor belt/assembly line type work.
I am not saying it's bad, I am convinced that it is the right thing to do to minimize costs and maximize output, so no argument from me that this is bad in any way. There will always be space/place/time for people who do more creative things, but majority of things must be turned into assembly type work if only to maximize the success rate of software project delivery.
Sure engineers are second class citizens in the Western world today, especially in USA.
I said something about that in this very thread. Software architecture is similar to engineering (not the same without legal liability of-course), but it's similar.
However software development is a bit of a broad term, I'd say somebody hired as a coder to a spec is definitely an assembly line worker. He is supposed to follow established procedures to get results that are similar to results that are achieved followed the established procedures.
Every time a new framework is created, every time a new pattern is introduced, what do you think it means? It means that the conveyor belt just got an upgrade and removed yet another manual part of the assembly line, hopefully replaced it with a standardized way of doing the same thing 20 times an hour, or whatever the frequency is.
All of the infrastructure libraries, all of the frameworks, patterns, any tools it's all work in progress to provide the software development with more resources/tools to be more efficient, it is all about creating an assembly line, and the coders are the assemblers on it.
Sure, the architecture is about translating the business requirement to more precise instructions about how to produce the widget (whatever feature or functionality) in a way that would fit into the entire system, so it's more about integration of parts and description of the spec of the parts, but the parts are then assembled, they are all linked together, integrated into a system, connected to other existing systems and that's the process.
Architecture is about making overall decisions on direction of development, then it's about components, interactions between components and interfaces between them; data model and fitting the data into the components. It's also supposed to be about foreseeing the soon to come features and making sure that the design will not prevent an easy enough continuation of development to accommodate future development and maintenance. It's sort of engineering.
Development of components is supposed to be assembly line activity and frameworks and patterns, etc., those are there as tools to ensure repeatability, similarity, uniformity, anything that makes developers being interchangeable.
Even if it is not always like that in real life (it's rare for things to go really as smooth as a well oiled assembly line of an auto-manufacturer, because there are still decisions that are left up to the developer and often the design is incomplete, left to the best judgment of a developer), the point is to make it like that.
And it should be like that actually. Software is becoming very important, it's in everything, there needs to be more and more of it and like it or not, the number of people who know what they are doing while building it is very small to number of people who are really needed to work in this industry but who are just not that great and who really need all of the crutches that an assembly line style development approach can provide.
As I replied earlier in the thread: what Constitutional issue?
Congress was not making a law, it was a guy arguing a point. Even if he was a Congressman and a teacher at the same time (contrived), there is no way to say that he would have been in violation of Constitution somehow. 'He says something' is not the same as he is trying to push a law forward in Congress.
Great way to avoid having to abide by the document.
But even then, it's unnecessary. Even if the teacher was also a Congressman while teaching (a contrived assumption), while he is passing an opinion absolutely does not mean he is making a law that prohibits a religion or even deals with a religious matter, so he cannot be in violation of the Constitution of USA. On the other hand he has freedoms, one of which is freedom of speech.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
Software developers are assembly line workers. They do the same proven thing over and over and over and over again, there is nothing new invented anywhere in software development.
Systems architecture is closer to engineering.
Business analysis is understanding the needs of specific business function and translating it into overall systems requirements.
Running a business that needs any of the above is answering the question: why being in this business is more profitable than being in any other business with the same investment capital.
IANAA but good business accountants are not simply calculators and tax form filers. They actually find ways to minimize costs, foresee various implications of current business decisions and use that foresight to plan a better execution, which means cost cutting. They can work on financing business via leases, overdrafts, loans. Tax planning is a huge issue of-course, nobody would make any profit if all taxes were paid 100% and exactly as they are on the books.
but I for one, am happy to pay a bit more for clean water and happy critters.
At some point in US history saying "pay a little more" was equivalent to saying "work a little more", but it hasn't been that way for a few generations now, that "pay a little more" now means "borrow a little more".
The decision stems from a lawsuit filed by a student charging that the teacherâ(TM)s hostile remarks about creationism and religious faith violated a First Amendment mandate that the government remain neutral in matters of religion.
1. Yes, if the school is public then the salary of the teacher is paid from taxes, however it's not necessary that the taxes are Federal in nature, though of-course States cannot dismiss parts of US Constitution as it stands (but they can and need to challenge the federal government that it is not following the US Constitution, but that's a different topic).
2. No, even if the teacher was clearly a government representative, his remarks do not violate anything in the Constitution. His remarks are in fact his own opinion and are also free speech and thus government cannot prevent the teacher from expressing his views, which is his right.
3. If the teacher used his attitude towards the religions to discriminate against people, and by discriminate I mean apply government power against them in any way based on their religious associations, then it would have been a violation.
The appeals court side-stepped the question of whether Dr. Corbettâ(TM)s comment on creationism and other derogatory remarks about religious faith were unconstitutional.
They should not have sidestepped it, seems like the judge didn't want to pass any real ruling here, he didn't want to be on record. Shows how weak and pathetic the justice system has become.
Instead, the panel concluded that since Corbett was entitled to qualified immunity it was not necessary for the appeals court to determine whether his comments actually violated the Constitution.
What is this magic immunity? Is it the right to free speech, because that's the only real immunity.
-- Everybody is wrong in this case, the teacher shouldn't be trolling his obviously religious students, the students shouldn't be starting these frivolous lawsuits and the judge should grow a pair.
I understand that governments like to strike a pose, but how can they argue that Apple's prices must be lower in Australia, it's not like Apple has a monopoly on all devices, phones, smart pads, etc. Apple has a monopoly on 'cool' (and that's the best monopoly to have, because I believe they can sell turds and ice to penguins if they style the stuff and slap their logo on it, and there will be line ups for the stuff), but having a monopoly on 'cool' is not the same as having monopoly on a product and even if you break the company apart by a silly government legislation, it's not like 'cool' will all of a sudden be picked up by the competitors.
As to having prices in USA being lower than in the rest of the world - well that's not a surprise, nor should it be. USA as a nation mainly exports inflation, but it's exactly that - an export. As long as the inflation is exported outside of the country the prices will not rise much at all inside USA but they are rising outside with all that newly printed money that is printed by foreign central banks to buy all of those US dollars. Eventually this will stop and prices in Australia and elsewhere will fall, because Apple won't be able to sell to anybody in USA, as almost nobody in USA can actually buy their stuff legitimately, because there is almost no production in USA and trade is not about exchanging funny money for products, it's about exchanging products for products.
if they truly end up doing this, then why not go a few steps further, and make decisions on policy questions based on on-line voting?
Do you want to know what real democracy looks like? Like the real mob rule I mean, just implement this: have an on-line referendum for each and every question.
We have a story on/. saying that feelings expressed on Twitter can predict market moves. Well, hell, so the wisdom of crowds works there, come on, do the experiment. Have the crowds use its wisdom for every policy decision, have real direct democracy, I want to see this. It's going to be insanely great - it will end up voting for every single tax increase above certain income level (whatever the national median is, anybody making over that will always pay more and more taxes with every new referendum), and the subsidies for 'poor' and 'middle-class' will be increased with every vote as well.
I want to see this. It's going to be interesting to look at, sort of like a train crash.
IFF any of this is true, then this methodology maybe useful for day trading, quickly getting into market, quickly getting out of it, things like that. This is not for investments made based on understanding of market fundamentals. Of-course none of the advices that are given by main stream 'economists' and speculators have anything to do with fundamentals. If you want to invest and not day-trade, you have to understand the fundamentals, and to do this you cannot rely on anything that is considered main-stream, because main-stream is all completely off, it's all Keynesian in nature, most of it is about 'sentiment', so they are talking about feelings and things they consider to be 'fair' or 'unfair'. Hopes and feelings have nothing to do with the fundamentals, there you have to follow real economics, and it's Austrian, so for fundamentals look at Jim Rogers, Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, Max Keiser, Marc Faber, people like that. Why does it make sense? Well, consider that by understanding the fundamentals Ron Paul predicted where the US economy was going to (see my sig), Schiff predicted the Internet and Housing bubbles, same with Rogers (the guy made over 4000% profit in the last decade alone.)
oh, please, stop with the fanboyism, I've been using unix variants since 1992 now. If the noobs can't spot the clear difference between gnome 2 and windows XP interfaces it does not make the differences magically disappear. Ever tried using Eclipse for java in GNU/Linux environment? I've been using it that way for 2 years now, and I am constantly forcing myself to continue doing it on a linux platform, though every time I boot into XP and use it there I just start hating myself more for all that masochism.
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When GM was bailed out the bond holders got screwed, investors got screwed, they lost all of the money, so who won in that deal?
Union workers got their victory. It was a bail out to the union workers and all of the private debt of the failed company was put onto the shoulders of tax payers, because now they own this company, which is going to fail again.
Obama also appeals to GM drivers that their warranty will be made whole by the government, so now not only the unions got bailed out, but GM drivers are also bailed out, again, with more tax payer money.
Of-course GM drivers are also tax payers, but Honda drivers are not covered by this GM warranty.
Now Ford union is threatening to strike and they don't care if the company goes bankrupt now, that they saw GM and Chrysler bail outs (moral hazard).
Not only did Ford get the short end of the stick when its competitors - GM and Chrysler were bailed out, but now the moral hazard created by the bail outs can cause Ford to be destroyed if it gives the unions what they want or it can be destroyed by the union itself, which now believes that even if the company goes bankrupt, it will be bailed out.
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This is how this game is played now if you are an investor: fuck you.
If you are in a large politically connected union, you are bailed out.
If you are American tax payer: fuck you too. You are now the proud owner of these failed businesses with all these insane obligations to the unions, whether you like it or not.
Wouldn't you rather have a person as POTUS who saw all of the current problems coming ten and more years away?
One, whose potential win scares the shit out of establishment, so they are fighting it with everything they deem necessary?
One who does not in fact change his opinion to compromise over decades on the important issues, but who admitted that there was a case where opinion needed to be changed?
What are the alternatives?
I answered this question
Unfortunately, there's MBA types counting beans and looking for places to save money. They look at IT and see a cost center; IT adds nothing to the bottom line.
- how is that unfortunate? Why shouldn't money be saved?
In competing markets and with actual competition comes the market pressure to reduce costs, so money must be saved and what I predict is that IT will have to become more and more resilient and survive with smaller budgets in those companies that have departments, and in reality challenges that are posed normally are met with solutions.
In fact I expect more interesting development in terms of productivity to come out of IT in near future, as people who work in this industry finally understand that they need to do something if they actually want to have any lives left to live at all instead of spending and average of 10 hours at work 6 days a week.
Innovation does not come without pressure, pressure and challenges bring it about and if you think it's only IT that the Accounting is looking at to save costs, you are way off base. Accounting is there to push people in the entire company to be more productive, which means to come up with solutions that allow them to be more productive. Better and smarter tools, that's what I expect the IT to have due to all this economic pressure.
would you say that we have mastered mathematics?
We clearly mastered some of it, but the further we go, the more questions appear out of everywhere, and the questions are getting more and more complex.
The formal language that is used for mathematics is complex, but it's actually conveying information in a compressed manner that just would take too much time to explain in plain human language, and it would be futile when getting into more and more complex questions and proves, because too much would have to be referenced and re-referenced and re-re-referenced etc.
Actually with current computer tools we could take everything that exists in math so far and translate it into human readable language by using html with references and diagrams, but would it be just as convenient as the formal presentation in math?
Of-course even in math there are redundancies and different ways to present the same data, so there is a way to mis-interpret stuff as well, but people have been doing math for thousands of years, maybe tens and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions even, and we still don't have a way to say it all in a simple way so that a non-specialist would easily understand any and/or all of it.
My point is this: we'll NEVER have what you are talking about. Even if we develop AI that starts writing applications for us, we'll still have to explain to it what we mean by stuff and we'll get details mixed up and wrong in the explanation. So we'll just have to do with what we have now and what we are in progress of developing slowly, just like math, this process will last for thousands of years and will never be over or 'done' in any meaningful context.
But science, by any current understanding of the idea, can never answer WHY the universe is or even if that question has any meaning. It can't supply an answer to what our place in that universe is, how we should organize our lives, culture, civilizations, etc.
- this is too easy.
"Why our universe is" - because the state in which the pre-universe existed was unstable and needed to change.
"what our place in that universe is" - this is a question that is as meaningful as asking: what a photon's place in universe is?
Our place in universe is everything that we can take from it, learn from it and use it to our benefit.
The big questions, the ones that really matter, are all still open
- none of those questions matter.
deeply in the hold of a religious faith
- until somebody proves otherwise, once we die we are dead, and we stay dead. The fact that we are alive is a nice coincidence of meaningless events (meaningless in terms of moral judgment, but quite logical in terms of physics and local entropy).
Any system that proposes an organized philosophical worldview is basically a religion.
- religion is making up stuff that you don't know about. We can only base our knowledge on data and we have no data to show that any religions have anything beyond them than just sociological/psychological value, which may or may not have helped our survival, but if it does help, then it's a matter of evolution coming up with this ability of ours to take things on faith without knowing how things work.
All transcend reason and depend on an appeal to faith at some point, which is where they become a religion.
- reality is much simpler than that of-course. Faith comes up with various answers, which reality didn't provide yet or cannot provide in principle because the questions are meaningless.
You do mean public schools, yes? Because there are plenty of schools that are private and also plenty of private schools that are of various religious denominations.
If Congress passed a law that teachers in public schools must explicitly state to the students that all of the religions are nonsense and BS, even then I am not really sure that this would be unconstitutional! Why is that? Because a teacher stating this as a fact and matter of public policy still does not mean that the students would be discriminated against because of this policy.
Maybe it would be unconstitutional, I am not sure of this, it's an interesting question actually, but it wouldn't be discrimination as long as all that teachers did was stated this and continued grading as they normally would only based on the material taught in classes and not on anything else.
So if a student wrote an excellent paper on evolution of species and as a side not wrote: "I am writing all of this but I don't believe a word of what I am saying", the teacher could not then grade the student based on that last statement but only would have to grade the student based on the actual knowledge presented in the paper.
somebody would immediately write a script to automate it.
- maybe yes, but most likely no. In my past life, when I did contracts in software instead of building my own stuff, I did all sorts of automation, maybe another 2-3 guys would do it, but majority of people around me would not. The management wouldn't be open to that idea either, because that would specifically go out of the normal parameters of what was accepted as the framework/pattern combination to do that work.
So say an internal web application is built that requires dozens and dozens of screens. I did not see anybody doing what I did eventually: taking the final screens produced in Struts, the actions, forms, beans, data layer and business layer, factoring out the parts of those that were repeated over and over again throughout all screens and writing a generated that would take in templates and some property file with settings specific to the data model for the page and then produce the data layer with all the CRUD and list/filter/sort stuff, the business layer stub, the action with all CRUD related activities, the form, the mappers, the JSPs and java scripts and even struts-config entries.
Once I had that done, I showed it to management, they were impressed, but only 2-3 people really ended up using it, and those again, where the people who would do automation like that in the first place. The rest of the coders would not, because they would not bother learning how to construct the property files for the generator and the management was not trying to push anybody towards that, as it was not some wide spread framework.
And you see, they are mostly correct in not pushing towards it, as they want to be able to replace anybody in a team quickly and as painlessly as possible, but they were fine with the 3 guys that were already doing stuff like that, it wasn't a consideration there, because those were basically top paid contractors who were retained time and time again, even a week at a time when funds were tight.
It often seems to developers that the top management does not know who their power horses but they likely do know this.
Now that I've been building my own software suits for sale for the last 2 years, have a much deeper understanding of what the entire process is from owning the success of the business to owning any task in it, from setting up and maintaining hardware and networks, to figuring out marketing and sales strategy and doing whatever it takes in accounting to avoid taxes, all while looking for investment capital and partnering with other complementing businesses to collaborate on sales. I am going to tell you something: I believe that top management is constrained by money and profit first and foremost and whatever /. crowd believes is coming from "misunderstanding" of developers or of systems development and in general is in reality related to the constraints on competition and survivability of business.
usually because of poor decisions by upper management that could have been prevented with a little bit of planning.
- it seems to you to be that way, in reality in many cases it's not about poor decisions by upper management, but it is about competition with the other guy.
Competition is about who is going to land the contract, it's about who is going to get that VC money, it's about whether you can get that bank loan, etc.
If you didn't realize this yet, I'll educate you: it is all about money.
There is always not enough money to hire more people, and it's not due to poor planning, it's because of various laws that make it very expensive hiring people. If you hire somebody, you can't just lay them off once the crunch time is over and in software it's also not exactly the simplest task, to bring somebody in for a very short time period. However if there were no such things as labor regulations, minimum wage, etc. People could be hired at very low salaries to sit there, learn the process, people who don't even have any education.
There are millions upon millions of unemployed Americans, yet you have crunch times and you have to do insane overtime and burn out, and at the end, guess what, your job will still be outsourced somewhere with fewer regulations.
The decisions in front of top management is all about money, and often you can't just pour money into a problem because you are living on a slim margin. You have to balance the accounts receivables and accounts payables and you have to come up with all the salaries, with all the payments for all the expenses, with all the loan interest etc.etc. And you have to satisfy your customer and you have to win over the competition.
If you think there is just a 'little bit of planning' that can always be done to prevent crunch time, think again. You can't run a shop with negative margins, but if you try to not have crunch time, then you can't run the shop with positive margins at all due to all of the regulations.
The side problem with this is: there are millions of unemployed people with no money to get a better education and with no opportunity to try and get themselves employed at very low prices, so they could be trained at those low prices and they could be effectively on staff for some time at least, until they gain experience to get a better job, but giving the opportunity to the employer to even out the man power at any moment.
It is really necessary for any business, but especially for business with as many unknowns in projects as there are in software business, to be able to hire at very very low prices, but government prevents this very practice, preventing people from having opportunities of studying new stuff without attending any colleges and even being paid a very small amount for this opportunity.
The jobs are and will continue leaving countries with high regulations and taxes to countries with low regulations and taxes for these reasons and you will continue having those crunch times.
Is there anything "proven" yet in software?
- I answered this question.
The frameworks, the patterns, the libraries, the tools, all of this is aimed at producing the same results to the same questions over and over in a way, that is proven that it will work.
Notice that nowhere here am I talking about computer science. I am very specifically talking about software development: coding and architecture.
As to new hardware platforms appearing and software being written for them - again, the same frameworks are transfered to those platforms, the same paradigms, patterns, even the same languages are adopted for them. Virtual machines, tool sets.
Everything is aimed at making software development process more and more into an assembly line type of work. If you, yourself ever came up with any 'framework', ever did anything that would standardize an approach to development within a project and then through multiple projects, then you are also complicit in this very activity - trying to make software development into a conveyor belt/assembly line type work.
I am not saying it's bad, I am convinced that it is the right thing to do to minimize costs and maximize output, so no argument from me that this is bad in any way. There will always be space/place/time for people who do more creative things, but majority of things must be turned into assembly type work if only to maximize the success rate of software project delivery.
Sure engineers are second class citizens in the Western world today, especially in USA.
I said something about that in this very thread. Software architecture is similar to engineering (not the same without legal liability of-course), but it's similar.
However software development is a bit of a broad term, I'd say somebody hired as a coder to a spec is definitely an assembly line worker. He is supposed to follow established procedures to get results that are similar to results that are achieved followed the established procedures.
Every time a new framework is created, every time a new pattern is introduced, what do you think it means? It means that the conveyor belt just got an upgrade and removed yet another manual part of the assembly line, hopefully replaced it with a standardized way of doing the same thing 20 times an hour, or whatever the frequency is.
All of the infrastructure libraries, all of the frameworks, patterns, any tools it's all work in progress to provide the software development with more resources/tools to be more efficient, it is all about creating an assembly line, and the coders are the assemblers on it.
Sure, the architecture is about translating the business requirement to more precise instructions about how to produce the widget (whatever feature or functionality) in a way that would fit into the entire system, so it's more about integration of parts and description of the spec of the parts, but the parts are then assembled, they are all linked together, integrated into a system, connected to other existing systems and that's the process.
Architecture is about making overall decisions on direction of development, then it's about components, interactions between components and interfaces between them; data model and fitting the data into the components. It's also supposed to be about foreseeing the soon to come features and making sure that the design will not prevent an easy enough continuation of development to accommodate future development and maintenance. It's sort of engineering.
Development of components is supposed to be assembly line activity and frameworks and patterns, etc., those are there as tools to ensure repeatability, similarity, uniformity, anything that makes developers being interchangeable.
Even if it is not always like that in real life (it's rare for things to go really as smooth as a well oiled assembly line of an auto-manufacturer, because there are still decisions that are left up to the developer and often the design is incomplete, left to the best judgment of a developer), the point is to make it like that.
And it should be like that actually. Software is becoming very important, it's in everything, there needs to be more and more of it and like it or not, the number of people who know what they are doing while building it is very small to number of people who are really needed to work in this industry but who are just not that great and who really need all of the crutches that an assembly line style development approach can provide.
As I replied earlier in the thread: what Constitutional issue?
Congress was not making a law, it was a guy arguing a point. Even if he was a Congressman and a teacher at the same time (contrived), there is no way to say that he would have been in violation of Constitution somehow. 'He says something' is not the same as he is trying to push a law forward in Congress.
Great way to avoid having to abide by the document.
But even then, it's unnecessary. Even if the teacher was also a Congressman while teaching (a contrived assumption), while he is passing an opinion absolutely does not mean he is making a law that prohibits a religion or even deals with a religious matter, so he cannot be in violation of the Constitution of USA. On the other hand he has freedoms, one of which is freedom of speech.
Which part of
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
is hard to understand?
Software developers are assembly line workers. They do the same proven thing over and over and over and over again, there is nothing new invented anywhere in software development.
Systems architecture is closer to engineering.
Business analysis is understanding the needs of specific business function and translating it into overall systems requirements.
Running a business that needs any of the above is answering the question: why being in this business is more profitable than being in any other business with the same investment capital.
It doesn't seem to me that you want a union, it seems to me that you want a dictatorship.
Banning the use of IE6 by a company? What are you, their CEO?
IANAA but good business accountants are not simply calculators and tax form filers. They actually find ways to minimize costs, foresee various implications of current business decisions and use that foresight to plan a better execution, which means cost cutting. They can work on financing business via leases, overdrafts, loans. Tax planning is a huge issue of-course, nobody would make any profit if all taxes were paid 100% and exactly as they are on the books.
In early 1920s cars were taking over the world.
Assembly workers were still 2nd class citizens.
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Those who know "HOW" will always have employment.
Those who know "WHY" will always be employers.
but I for one, am happy to pay a bit more for clean water and happy critters.
At some point in US history saying "pay a little more" was equivalent to saying "work a little more", but it hasn't been that way for a few generations now, that "pay a little more" now means "borrow a little more".
The decision stems from a lawsuit filed by a student charging that the teacherâ(TM)s hostile remarks about creationism and religious faith violated a First Amendment mandate that the government remain neutral in matters of religion.
1. Yes, if the school is public then the salary of the teacher is paid from taxes, however it's not necessary that the taxes are Federal in nature, though of-course States cannot dismiss parts of US Constitution as it stands (but they can and need to challenge the federal government that it is not following the US Constitution, but that's a different topic).
2. No, even if the teacher was clearly a government representative, his remarks do not violate anything in the Constitution. His remarks are in fact his own opinion and are also free speech and thus government cannot prevent the teacher from expressing his views, which is his right.
3. If the teacher used his attitude towards the religions to discriminate against people, and by discriminate I mean apply government power against them in any way based on their religious associations, then it would have been a violation.
The appeals court side-stepped the question of whether Dr. Corbettâ(TM)s comment on creationism and other derogatory remarks about religious faith were unconstitutional.
They should not have sidestepped it, seems like the judge didn't want to pass any real ruling here, he didn't want to be on record. Shows how weak and pathetic the justice system has become.
Instead, the panel concluded that since Corbett was entitled to qualified immunity it was not necessary for the appeals court to determine whether his comments actually violated the Constitution.
What is this magic immunity? Is it the right to free speech, because that's the only real immunity.
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Everybody is wrong in this case, the teacher shouldn't be trolling his obviously religious students, the students shouldn't be starting these frivolous lawsuits and the judge should grow a pair.
I understand that governments like to strike a pose, but how can they argue that Apple's prices must be lower in Australia, it's not like Apple has a monopoly on all devices, phones, smart pads, etc. Apple has a monopoly on 'cool' (and that's the best monopoly to have, because I believe they can sell turds and ice to penguins if they style the stuff and slap their logo on it, and there will be line ups for the stuff), but having a monopoly on 'cool' is not the same as having monopoly on a product and even if you break the company apart by a silly government legislation, it's not like 'cool' will all of a sudden be picked up by the competitors.
As to having prices in USA being lower than in the rest of the world - well that's not a surprise, nor should it be. USA as a nation mainly exports inflation, but it's exactly that - an export. As long as the inflation is exported outside of the country the prices will not rise much at all inside USA but they are rising outside with all that newly printed money that is printed by foreign central banks to buy all of those US dollars. Eventually this will stop and prices in Australia and elsewhere will fall, because Apple won't be able to sell to anybody in USA, as almost nobody in USA can actually buy their stuff legitimately, because there is almost no production in USA and trade is not about exchanging funny money for products, it's about exchanging products for products.
if they truly end up doing this, then why not go a few steps further, and make decisions on policy questions based on on-line voting?
Do you want to know what real democracy looks like? Like the real mob rule I mean, just implement this: have an on-line referendum for each and every question.
We have a story on /. saying that feelings expressed on Twitter can predict market moves. Well, hell, so the wisdom of crowds works there, come on, do the experiment. Have the crowds use its wisdom for every policy decision, have real direct democracy, I want to see this. It's going to be insanely great - it will end up voting for every single tax increase above certain income level (whatever the national median is, anybody making over that will always pay more and more taxes with every new referendum), and the subsidies for 'poor' and 'middle-class' will be increased with every vote as well.
I want to see this. It's going to be interesting to look at, sort of like a train crash.
IFF any of this is true, then this methodology maybe useful for day trading, quickly getting into market, quickly getting out of it, things like that. This is not for investments made based on understanding of market fundamentals. Of-course none of the advices that are given by main stream 'economists' and speculators have anything to do with fundamentals. If you want to invest and not day-trade, you have to understand the fundamentals, and to do this you cannot rely on anything that is considered main-stream, because main-stream is all completely off, it's all Keynesian in nature, most of it is about 'sentiment', so they are talking about feelings and things they consider to be 'fair' or 'unfair'. Hopes and feelings have nothing to do with the fundamentals, there you have to follow real economics, and it's Austrian, so for fundamentals look at Jim Rogers, Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, Max Keiser, Marc Faber, people like that. Why does it make sense? Well, consider that by understanding the fundamentals Ron Paul predicted where the US economy was going to (see my sig), Schiff predicted the Internet and Housing bubbles, same with Rogers (the guy made over 4000% profit in the last decade alone.)
oh, please, stop with the fanboyism, I've been using unix variants since 1992 now. If the noobs can't spot the clear difference between gnome 2 and windows XP interfaces it does not make the differences magically disappear. Ever tried using Eclipse for java in GNU/Linux environment? I've been using it that way for 2 years now, and I am constantly forcing myself to continue doing it on a linux platform, though every time I boot into XP and use it there I just start hating myself more for all that masochism.
I am using Gnome 2. It's nowhere near that. Things don't work right, mouse and keyboard are doing weird shit, it's not terrible, but it's not XP.