These are two things that the elderly stereotypically are not accustomed to and have not had as a constant requirement throughout their lives. I suspect this will be recognized as a generational issue. The elderly of tomorrow who are today's Gen-X, Gen-Y & Millennial adults will not have this problem. We've been born into a culture that will mow you down if you don't keep yourself up to date.
Weather or not the company (or the developer) thinks the developer NEEDS an extra monitor is not the point. The fact that they have such an unprofessional, blatant disrespect for him or any other employee that they simply take equipment from them is a strong signal of a toxic work environment. The bare minimum of professional courtesy would have been to ask before taking. As a side note, if they can't pay $200 for a spare monitor; the ship is already sinking - get off the boat now!
Do this as ABSOLUTELY CHEAPLY AS POSSIBLE with regard to off-shore labor cost!!! Any business person stupid enough to do this only sees costs, not quality. This will help fail fast and dramatically, since as the saying goes: "Good work aint' cheap, & cheap work ain't good". Anyone in the offshore economy who has good skills won't be working at the cheapest rates. Offshoring any type of knowledge work is only about saving cost at the risk of sacrificing quality and dedication to the work for both the individual and the company. The more business people get burned by this, the quicker at least some of them will learn that this practice is unsustainable and hazardous to future business plans, the local economy, and job prospects of the future.
Take the money and run:) Give them the tools to cover all the basics that a business person would understand. Just enough to run at a sub-standard operational level that might work under the heroic efforts of local labor, but fail miserably given the infrastructure, cultural differences, and adversarial role of contract negotiations (e.g. contractor does what's in contractor's best interest because he's not a long-term employee). Also, do this slowly so as to extract as much money as possible. When this fails, be there to offer a "fix" with mix of on-shore help. When things improve dramatically, slowly shed the contract offshore labor or relegate it to menial crap work the local labor force doesn't want to deal with. We've been doing this rather successfully in the software world for a decade now:)
Yep. It's real nice for Microsoft to be able to hold the monopoly gun to a hardware vendor's head and say, "You can support _OUR_ operating system at _YOUR_ cost, on _OUR_ schedule, regardless of how difficult it is or you can simply fuck off and die. Your choice." It's too bad Linux, BSD or any other OS on the planet can't have a way of doing the same thing. Don't blame Linux, blame the hardware manufacturer and vote your dollars. It's the only power we as consumers have.
I've been voting my dollars as best I can for years: no Linux support? No sale.
...Sure, I still hate them out of habit, but I'm old and tired now. I feel like a bed-ridden, old and gray, Elmer Fudd who still mumbles that he "could have had that wascilly wabbit', but in reality doesn't really care and just wants you to leave him alone so he can watch Diagnosis Murder.
I'm sorry you've given up on your convictions. But you know, it's never too late to change your mind and decide to live your life. For starters, why not back off the "Diagnosis Murder" or at least try to watch only what you bother to record on your DVR. Then, when TV time is done, pick up something new & interesting to learn in the open source world. Spend some time at your local Linux Users Group. Have you revised your "short list" of reasons why Microsoft are a bunch of disgusting assholes? You may not be a gamer, but perhaps your friends & families deserve to know that (just like their software products), Microsoft also cranks out garbage hardware with 40%+ failure rates (see http://www.destructoid.com/new-survey-puts-xbox-360-failure-rate-at-42--171088.phtml). Give the history lessons of Stack Inc., "cutting off Netscape's air supply", the anti-trust case and the fact that before Outlook the whole notion of a virus being spread in an E-Mail as *LITERALLY* an old Internet joke.
I'm approaching 40 and I've been a software developer for almost 14 years now & fighting and hating Microsoft since I first laid my hands on an MCC Interim Linux distro on six 3.5" floppies in 1993 as I learned that there was better, more secure & more capable software in the world than DOS. I've learned a lot, built a career, and I'm not about to give Microsoft a pass to pollute the world with more crap, vicious business tricks & closed "standards" as they always have just because I'm starting to get tired.
"Old" is a state of mind, and once you decide to stop growing and learning you're going to be stuck there...
Besides, higher education is only about coursework the same way international travel is only about airports... Would he like to tell the world how it should approach physical therapy based on the one time he sprained his ankle?
I know the US is permanently emotionally and intellectually scarred due to the impact of fucking puritans, but calling Playboy "porn" is way over the edge. If Playboy is "porn", then looking at images of the Venus de Milo must be considered "viewing amputee fetish porn"...
As a rabid M$ hater, anything that keeps the garbage-ware that is Windows out of the hands of the typical idiot consumer and helps break the retarded view that "Computer must mean windoze" is good for technology in the long run. Good work Intel, and good luck to ABM*. May the beast from Redmond continue to die the death of a thousand paper cuts..
Start with teachers playing the role of overpaid coke-addicted managers & sales people with no ethics telling them what to do, when to do it, and how to do it (despite knowing less than the 5th graders). Move on to telling them to steal designs and cut corners on safety in order to meet a deadline for the quarterly numbers. Weather they pull it off or not then becomes irrelevant. Tell them they cost too much and that Chinese and Indian 5th graders can do better work for 1/10th of the cost. Send them home without recess or snack. That'll give them the real experience of any sort of engineering in the western world....
No mention of the Hayes VS. Telebit 14.4K wars??
on
A Brief History of Modems
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Back in the early '90 the whole HST vs V32.bis was a big deal for a couple of years. It's a bit sad to not see this mentioned in terms of the impact to the PC modem world...
Not quite on the 2nd link...
on
Becoming Agile
·
· Score: 1
Steve Yegge's post is (line for line) more of a masturbation session on how cool Google is.
Although he also makes the point quite well that if you're all rock star coders in a company driven by engineering instead of marketing, you don't need no "steenkin'" methodology. But then again, that's more of my first complaint now isn't it;)
He's 100% on. Any 20 person company that needs TPS reports for executives is either trying to become too big too fast or has a bunch of "leaders" who don't understand core business concepts. Either way, the mere existence of that should be a warning sign of impending trouble. Statistics and metrics on anything in the IT/Software Development world are almost alway a poor substitute for sitting down and _LEARNING_ the business from the ground up to understand WTF is going on especially in the scope of a small company or focused division.
For example, I'm in a 42 person software division of a much larger company. Our TPS reports exist because the top brass don't understand jack shit about building quality software. However, they trust us enough to have given us room for 10 years and so we give them pretty pictures:)
I loved the "holy crap" moment I had when reading the section in PCL about "before" "after" and "around" which I've used a career Java developer without seeing so much as a hit of credit from the Aspect Oriented community. Perhaps the props are out there, but I felt some more overt credit was due for the fact the Lisp has had this for some time:)
Haskell is on on my list of things to check out. There's a nifty "easy to swallow intro" at: http://learnyouahaskell.com and I'm hoping to get over a previous slightly abusive exposure I got to it in college. Being young and foolish, I didn't like the instructor and transfered my dislike onto the language:)
Programming, I've been doing this for living for two decades, but I have no clue what those things are. Well, except for Rails I did read a bit about. </p><p> Probably all for the best, I'd guess.</p></quote>
Seriously?!?! Two decades and you've never looked at LISP?!?! I've only got a mere 1.2 decades and I've been in the mode of learning like a son-of-a-bitch on all this stuff after slacking for most of the easy-peasy dot-com boom. Showing up and only learning what you need for your job is not going to help you see a third decade. But hey, your career man...
As in, if you smash the device into an iPhone, you can kill the iPhone and the device in question will keep working. Given what the G1 and Palm Pre have turned out to be, this is the only true valid definition of the term "iPhone killer" in the market today;)
A number of weak typing language zealots like to point out that Design patterns is simply a way to make strongly typed languages "suck less". This can be a compelling argument in terms of simplicity and syntax in examples when you take a look at books like "Design Patterns in Ruby" compared with "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software". There's also an argument that strong typing is a form of tight coupling and antithetical to half of the Object Oriented axiom, "loose coupling, strong cohesion". Given the momentum in popularity that unit testing across multiple languages and development methodologies has (rightfully!) enjoyed, is it time to encourage language designers and programmers to move away from strong typing usage and substitute better testing practices?
You must have attended a private or EXTREMELY large school. Most US schools are nowhere near the described Netherlands system. At best, you've got three tracks - "honors" which targets the cookie-cutter wrote memory college tracked kids, standard for those who aren't fighting or don't care about math scores WRT university applications, and "essentials" for poor suffering masses who are not picking up or don't care to do the work. This is the situation in Washington State, Kent School district which is the 4th largest district in a High School with over 2600 students. Even this delineation of "skill" is still cranked through the un-inspired compulsory process Lockhart complains about. If you want to know why, check out John Taylor Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education" (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/).
Saying knowledge comes from a schooling about as correct as saying milk comes from a store. When you understand in both cases it's just simple packaging and processing, you can start asking questions about what it is, why it is, and how you can get it on your own, and how to evaluate the quality of the sources you get it from.
Microsoft still hasn't removed FTP. That's how I did my last install of Firefox on a system with XP re-installed because I refused to run that IE garbageware for any reason if I can help it.
Check out How to Be Silicon valley (http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html).
Based on the description of the right environment, we're not talking Kalamazoo or Toledo by a long shot. Besides, didn't people try this crap en-mass before the dot.com bust?
Slashdot Mirror
These are two things that the elderly stereotypically are not accustomed to and have not had as a constant requirement throughout their lives. I suspect this will be recognized as a generational issue. The elderly of tomorrow who are today's Gen-X, Gen-Y & Millennial adults will not have this problem. We've been born into a culture that will mow you down if you don't keep yourself up to date.
Weather or not the company (or the developer) thinks the developer NEEDS an extra monitor is not the point. The fact that they have such an unprofessional, blatant disrespect for him or any other employee that they simply take equipment from them is a strong signal of a toxic work environment. The bare minimum of professional courtesy would have been to ask before taking. As a side note, if they can't pay $200 for a spare monitor; the ship is already sinking - get off the boat now!
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Seems like this would be the business man's Karma coming back to bite him in the ass..
In all honesty, I'm mostly being a joking smart-ass about this. The sentiment towards the company who wants to do this work however...
I don't think I could honestly take the work myself...
Do this as ABSOLUTELY CHEAPLY AS POSSIBLE with regard to off-shore labor cost!!! Any business person stupid enough to do this only sees costs, not quality. This will help fail fast and dramatically, since as the saying goes: "Good work aint' cheap, & cheap work ain't good". Anyone in the offshore economy who has good skills won't be working at the cheapest rates. Offshoring any type of knowledge work is only about saving cost at the risk of sacrificing quality and dedication to the work for both the individual and the company. The more business people get burned by this, the quicker at least some of them will learn that this practice is unsustainable and hazardous to future business plans, the local economy, and job prospects of the future.
Take the money and run:) Give them the tools to cover all the basics that a business person would understand. Just enough to run at a sub-standard operational level that might work under the heroic efforts of local labor, but fail miserably given the infrastructure, cultural differences, and adversarial role of contract negotiations (e.g. contractor does what's in contractor's best interest because he's not a long-term employee). Also, do this slowly so as to extract as much money as possible. When this fails, be there to offer a "fix" with mix of on-shore help. When things improve dramatically, slowly shed the contract offshore labor or relegate it to menial crap work the local labor force doesn't want to deal with. We've been doing this rather successfully in the software world for a decade now:)
Yep. It's real nice for Microsoft to be able to hold the monopoly gun to a hardware vendor's head and say, "You can support _OUR_ operating system at _YOUR_ cost, on _OUR_ schedule, regardless of how difficult it is or you can simply fuck off and die. Your choice." It's too bad Linux, BSD or any other OS on the planet can't have a way of doing the same thing. Don't blame Linux, blame the hardware manufacturer and vote your dollars. It's the only power we as consumers have.
I've been voting my dollars as best I can for years: no Linux support? No sale.
...Sure, I still hate them out of habit, but I'm old and tired now. I feel like a bed-ridden, old and gray, Elmer Fudd who still mumbles that he "could have had that wascilly wabbit', but in reality doesn't really care and just wants you to leave him alone so he can watch Diagnosis Murder.
I'm sorry you've given up on your convictions. But you know, it's never too late to change your mind and decide to live your life. For starters, why not back off the "Diagnosis Murder" or at least try to watch only what you bother to record on your DVR. Then, when TV time is done, pick up something new & interesting to learn in the open source world. Spend some time at your local Linux Users Group. Have you revised your "short list" of reasons why Microsoft are a bunch of disgusting assholes? You may not be a gamer, but perhaps your friends & families deserve to know that (just like their software products), Microsoft also cranks out garbage hardware with 40%+ failure rates (see http://www.destructoid.com/new-survey-puts-xbox-360-failure-rate-at-42--171088.phtml). Give the history lessons of Stack Inc., "cutting off Netscape's air supply", the anti-trust case and the fact that before Outlook the whole notion of a virus being spread in an E-Mail as *LITERALLY* an old Internet joke.
I'm approaching 40 and I've been a software developer for almost 14 years now & fighting and hating Microsoft since I first laid my hands on an MCC Interim Linux distro on six 3.5" floppies in 1993 as I learned that there was better, more secure & more capable software in the world than DOS. I've learned a lot, built a career, and I'm not about to give Microsoft a pass to pollute the world with more crap, vicious business tricks & closed "standards" as they always have just because I'm starting to get tired.
"Old" is a state of mind, and once you decide to stop growing and learning you're going to be stuck there...
Although come to think of it, I do wonder how many bananas Best Buy get's for a crappy Sandisk MP3 player w/ 3 year extended warranty....
Nah. That would require me to RTFA.
Besides, higher education is only about coursework the same way international travel is only about airports...
Would he like to tell the world how it should approach physical therapy based on the one time he sprained his ankle?
I know the US is permanently emotionally and intellectually scarred due to the impact of fucking puritans,
but calling Playboy "porn" is way over the edge. If Playboy is "porn", then looking at images of the
Venus de Milo must be considered "viewing amputee fetish porn"...
As a rabid M$ hater, anything that keeps the garbage-ware that is Windows out of the hands of the typical idiot consumer and helps break the retarded view that "Computer must mean windoze" is good for technology in the long run. Good work Intel, and good luck to ABM*. May the beast from Redmond continue to die the death of a thousand paper cuts..
*Anyone But Microsoft
Start with teachers playing the role of overpaid coke-addicted managers & sales people with no ethics telling them what to do, when to do it, and how to do it (despite knowing less than the 5th graders). Move on to telling them to steal designs and cut corners on safety in order to meet a deadline for the quarterly numbers. Weather they pull it off or not then becomes irrelevant. Tell them they cost too much and that Chinese and Indian 5th graders can do better work for 1/10th of the cost. Send them home without recess or snack. That'll give them the real experience of any sort of engineering in the western world....
Back in the early '90 the whole HST vs V32.bis was a big deal for a couple of years. It's a bit sad to not see this mentioned in terms of the impact to the PC modem world...
Steve Yegge's post is (line for line) more of a masturbation session on how cool Google is.
Although he also makes the point quite well that if you're all rock star coders in a company
driven by engineering instead of marketing, you don't need no "steenkin'" methodology. But
then again, that's more of my first complaint now isn't it;)
He's 100% on. Any 20 person company that needs TPS reports for executives is either trying to become too big too fast
or has a bunch of "leaders" who don't understand core business concepts. Either way, the mere existence of that should
be a warning sign of impending trouble. Statistics and metrics on anything in the IT/Software Development world are almost
alway a poor substitute for sitting down and _LEARNING_ the business from the ground up to understand WTF is going on
especially in the scope of a small company or focused division.
For example, I'm in a 42 person software division of a much larger company. Our TPS reports exist because the top brass don't understand jack shit about building quality software. However, they trust us enough to have given us room for 10 years and so we give them pretty pictures:)
I loved the "holy crap" moment I had when reading the section in PCL about "before" "after" and "around" which I've
used a career Java developer without seeing so much as a hit of credit from the Aspect Oriented community. Perhaps
the props are out there, but I felt some more overt credit was due for the fact the Lisp has had this for some time:)
Haskell is on on my list of things to check out. There's a nifty "easy to swallow intro" at: http://learnyouahaskell.com
and I'm hoping to get over a previous slightly abusive exposure I got to it in college. Being young and foolish,
I didn't like the instructor and transfered my dislike onto the language:)
Programming, I've been doing this for living for two decades, but I have no clue what those things are. Well, except for Rails I did read a bit about.
</p><p>
Probably all for the best, I'd guess.</p></quote>
Seriously?!?! Two decades and you've never looked at LISP?!?! I've only got a mere 1.2 decades and I've been in the mode of learning like
a son-of-a-bitch on all this stuff after slacking for most of the easy-peasy dot-com boom. Showing up and only learning what you need
for your job is not going to help you see a third decade. But hey, your career man...
O'Reilly might not want to bother...
Check it out: http://gigamonkeys.com/book/
.. and don't even get started on how bad my pictograms are...
As in, if you smash the device into an iPhone, you can kill the iPhone and the device in question will keep working. Given what the G1 and Palm Pre have turned out to be, this is the only true valid definition of the term "iPhone killer" in the market today;)
A number of weak typing language zealots like to point out that Design patterns is simply a way to make strongly typed languages "suck less".
This can be a compelling argument in terms of simplicity and syntax in examples when you take a look at books like "Design Patterns in Ruby" compared with "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software". There's also an argument that strong typing is a form of tight coupling and antithetical to half of the Object Oriented axiom, "loose coupling, strong cohesion". Given the momentum in popularity that unit testing across multiple languages and development methodologies has (rightfully!) enjoyed, is it time to encourage language designers and programmers to move away from strong typing usage and substitute better testing practices?
You must have attended a private or EXTREMELY large school. Most US schools are nowhere near the described Netherlands system. At best, you've got three tracks - "honors" which targets the cookie-cutter wrote memory college tracked kids, standard for those who aren't fighting or don't care about math scores WRT university applications, and "essentials" for poor suffering masses who are not picking up or don't care to do the work. This is the situation in Washington State, Kent School district which is the 4th largest district in a High School with over 2600 students. Even this delineation of "skill" is still cranked through the un-inspired compulsory process Lockhart complains about. If you want to know why, check out John Taylor Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education" (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/).
Saying knowledge comes from a schooling about as correct as saying milk comes from a store. When you understand in both cases it's just simple packaging and processing, you can start asking questions about what it is, why it is, and how you can get it on your own, and how to evaluate the quality of the sources you get it from.
Microsoft still hasn't removed FTP. That's how I did my last install of Firefox on a system with XP re-installed because
I refused to run that IE garbageware for any reason if I can help it.
Check out How to Be Silicon valley (http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html).
Based on the description of the right environment, we're not talking Kalamazoo or Toledo by
a long shot. Besides, didn't people try this crap en-mass before the dot.com bust?