Sure. So let's look at the examples I've given (real problems I've encountered):
didn't understand the concept of exceptions, were wondering why you can't just insert a string into the middle of a text file and were surprised that you can have more than one table in a SQL database.
Meaning - knowing how the concept of exceptions work, knowing how file system works conceptually and have a basic idea of what relational databases are.
Are you saying these are too specific and not in the scope of CS/SW Engineering degrees? I don't buy that. I KNOW these things are in software and CS related curriculi. I'm just irritated by the fact that people who don't grasp these basic things still get the degree.
Maybe the whole concept of colleges in engineering is broken. I've met with people with a CS masters degree who didn't understand the concept of exceptions, were wondering why you can't just insert a string into the middle of a text file and were surprised that you can have more than one table in a SQL database.
I'm not saying that every graduate is bad but that even the reputable colleges hand out degrees to people who have no business having them.
If I look at the (CS/SW related) degree from the employers perspective, all that it grants is that the holder knows how to use variables, loops and branching in programming and that he/she has a rudimentary idea about what a compiler, an OS and a file system is. Is that really worth the 4-5 years and $100K (and more) spent on a something a high school kid could learn in half a year?
That produces a disconnect between the graduates expectations and the company's requirements - the graduate has invested time and money into his degree and expects a salary of a professional and the company doesn't want to pay that much for somebody with so little training. I believe the really good graduates do actually get god jobs out of school - it's just the average and below average people who cannot get employed.
Not only over thinking - he's thinking in the wrong directions.
His blunt weapons are useless in an airplane - no room to make a swing at a target positioned as high as a human head. Has he seriously not thought about a shiv on a two foot pole? The projectile weapons are little more than an annoyance. Yes, even the crossbow, which could seriously injure one person with a lucky shot and that's it.
His "Plausible attack scenarios" are laughable as well. Even if you manage to keep the cockpit door open, what then? You still have to deal with two non-compliant pilots. There is a person who tried - and not with weapons made of fashion magazines- he had hammers and a freaking dart gun. He failed. And being on a cargo plane he didn't even have to deal with a cabin full of pissed-off passengers
.
Seriously, the only 'plausible' danger would be to quietly set up a bomb as a part of a suicide attack or a timed bomb to explode in the next flight and he didn't demonstrate anything like that.
First off, the jokes (as described) were juvenile, but in no way misogynistic.
This.
She didn't even bother to look up what the term 'sexism' means before going on a tantrum.
What she think it means: Any kind of language oriented on sexual organs or any kind of sexual acts.
What it means: Sexism/noun/ - Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.
A couple of examples:
Not sexism: "I'd like to fondle my dongle." "I want to have sex with that girl".
Sexism: "OMG a woman behind a steering wheel! Everybody run for cover!" "Get back into the kitchen, biatch!"
Of course, there is this other thing, called "sexual harassment" which does include things like asking somebody for sexual favors. However, from what I can gather, this is not what the guys in question did. They were not addressing her or even talking about her. It really was just a case of using foul language.
It's not 'ad hominem'. I did not call the author an idiot. I called him potentially biased. It's like an oil company doing research on global warming. It might not be wrong, but don't take their word for it.
Then he criticized the use of standard metrics without a hint of why they're inappropriate or what alternatives he would suggest.
Salary - of course it's going to be lower considering higher administrative costs of an H1B. Does not automatically mean the person is worse.
rate of patent production - people who produce the most IT patents are generally not innovative
alma mater university rank - yeah, US universities are at the top of the ranking so the US graduates will get better numbers here. But if you take the best 5 students from all lower tier universities and compare them to the average graduate from top 10 universities, are they going to be worse? I don't know but the article does not attempt to consider this.
employment in R&D - this is also biased against the H1Bs. You see, the most renowned employers don't have trouble getting US graduates to apply for their R&D positions. It's the medium sized manufacturer in Cleveland who fails to attract MIT graduates and has to look for an H1B. Does not mean they are worse.
Wow, I can finally appreciate the fact that I can see my frustrated face on the glossy display of my phone as I'm trying to swipe through a webpage because there are no Home/End buttons.
Except....that's just proving the point that employers are skinflints.
No. It's the customers who are skinflints. You have to inflate the price of your products if you are paying high salaries. If you do that, companies from other countries will beat you on price.
And I'm not talking about China or India here. You know how much senior SW engineers earn in Germany? Typically around 50 000 Eur and the government eats about 1/3 of that on taxes and mandatory insurance.The wage is determined by collective bargaining and there's no way around it (google IG Metall Tariff Vertrag if you want to educate yourself).
So if you want to pay your engineers 200K or more, you're going to lose to Germany - especially in the industrial area. And no, the american engineers are not more productive than the german ones - not by that much.
If the ruling goes Bowman's way then it will be trivial to use any genetically modified produce without having to pay whoever developed it
If copyright worked that way, somebody could take a brand new game, crack it to remove the DRM and sell it to Gamestop anonymously. From then on that copy could be freely copied around on the internet or in person. Companies would simply stop producing games.
I know Monsanto did some evil things but this is not one of them. If Bowman wins, development in GMO will become unfeasible. The 'organic' crowd would surely rejoice but there are a lot of us who think GMO is really helpful
Note also that Monsanto doesn't really object to farmers having Roundup Ready plants in their crops (such as due to cross-pollination) as long as they don't use the glycosulphate but people still spread lies about them - how they will sue anybody who had the pollen from Monsanto's plants blown to them by the wind. Ironically, the 'terminator' feature would resolve the cross-pollination issue.
Then he should be prosecuted for what he actually did. You seem to conflate the means to commit a crime with the crime itself. If you stab a person in the back, you get persecuted for murdering a person, not for wielding a knife.
No. You get prosecuted for murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to commit a murder, wielding a knife, trespassing, aggravated assault, unlicensed practice of surgery, jaywalking, wearing blue jeans on Sunday and 25 other remotely applicable transgressions and ridiculous ancient county laws.
You are giving politicians (and the lobbyist) in Europe too much credit. There are still a lot of shady financial transactions going on there. See for instance the scandal leading up to the resignation of Christian Wulff last year.
I wouldn't be surprised if the MEPs were receiving more than just sweet words from the publishing lobby
You could hire a senior level guy and they could bust or leave in 9 months
You couldn't. That's what you fail to see. In our case, we've got exactly zero senior sw developer applications. Not even ones demanding outrageous salaries. The ads were up for almost a year.
Sure, you can hire a graduate and somewhere down the road, in 3 years, he may become a Sr. SW Developer. There's kids who could make it in 9 months but guess what - they don't want to work in industrial automation in Cleveland either. So you're looking at the engineer you desperately need 3 years down the road. Maybe. If he/she doesn't leave. Or turn out to be a bust.
Because that's what might have happened to that company that is now looking for a Sr. SW Developer in Cleveland. That's what happened in our team in the case I mentioned earlier.
So if you are talking about pontificating stuff on slashdot vs doing something - well, you're the one just pontificating and I'm the one who had to deal with the real problem
That's just an chicken and an egg problem. High prices are an indication and a consequence of shortage of supply.
Take this ad for instance. They are willing to pay around $100k to an experienced sw engineer to work in Cleveland, OH. That's around 4 times the median income in the area.
I assume there are not many US SW engineers with experience in industrial automation looking for a job in Cleveland. How much will it take for somebody to take that job? 200K? 500K? Might be more than the company can afford. You see, if they payed 500K to software engineers, they could not compete with, say, German industrial automation solutions.
So the options are following: a) outsource/relocate b) hire an H1B c) fold
Here we go again. The supposed shortage of IT workers has been repeatedly shown to be false.
No it hasn't. It's actually quite painful in software development. Pretty much everything we use requires software. Cars, refrigerators, assembly lines, medical equipment, farming equipment, power plants... you name it. And there are just not enough software engineers for the industry.
Or maybe there are some but they don't want to work for a power tool manufacturer in Ohio. That's the problem. CS graduates from US want to work in New York or California for Google or IBM. We were looking for a SW developer in our company (a medical equipment manufacturer in a smaller town) for a year before hiring an H1B. The H1B wasn't cheaper, but it was the only option.
Open up any job search engine and look for 'software' positions in not-so-stellar cities around US and you'll find thousands of offers.
And no, 'training' is not an option. You would have to put at least a full year of training into a person before you had any chance of getting a software developer out of him/her and chances are it would not work anyway.
You're right, they don't care about foreigners. What you fail to see is that they don't care about the locals either. They're not charity. They're charging as much as they think they can get away with. And what they can get away with differs from country to country.
I'm not saying they are 'evil' for doing that. I'm charging my employer as much as I can get from him. I could live with less but I'd be stupid ask for a lower wage. And I'm pretty sure I couldn't get the same pay in India and that I could ask for more in Canada.
And what if they just say "We found that people still buy our shit at this price level". Because that's pretty much the truth of it. What is the government supposed to do about that?
I think it is already irrelevant. It just takes years for a discovery to gain momentum and become 'big'.
General public didn't know anything about Einstein decades after his breakthrough discoveries - only after he emigrated to US in the 1930's. Similarly, Louis Pasteur was largely ignored by his academic peers - it took a new generation of researchers to replace the old one before he became famous and pasteurization became a thing.
So what big breakthroughs are happening right now? How about last year's Nobel price in medicine given to Gourdon and Yamanaka for inventing a procedure that turns ordinary cells into stem cells? General public doesn't care about it much now, but it is an amazing and completely unexpected discovery that will pay off in a not-so-far-off future. Maybe in twenty years when people will receive organ/bone/limb transplants that body accepts as its own without a problem, they will praise these two guys a little more because their discovery is up there with Pasteur's findings.
...by getting exclusive rights to create artificial scarcity. Like if iTunes or Google Play tries to implement it Amazon will sue the shit out of them?
The problem is it wasn't crime for the most part that caused the collapse in 2008. Just like it's not illegal for a car dealer to sell you a crappy car for 20K it's not illegal for a banker to sell you a crappy CDO for more than it's worth.
Instead if they get to the point that they need a bail out they are nationalized.
But this is pretty much what happened
The institutions that needed a bail out were forced to emit new stock that was bought by Fed. If the bank with a total worth of $1 billion needed a $1 billion bailout, they would emit $1 billion worth of stock that was bought by the government. The effect was 1) The government now owns 50% of the bank, 2) The original shareholder's stock price dropped 50% (well a bit less than that because of other factors but still...)
There were no C?Os indicted because of the mess because unfortunately the activities that led to the collapse were not illegal (unlike the LIBOR scandal where people were doing illegal things and have to stand trial. Not informing your customers about the low quality of your products is not illegal - just straight out lying is. And they were careful enough that they were not lying, legally speaking.
I'm not the original poster, so can't comment on this. I would just say more generally that he was a possible patent enforcer
how b) that makes a damned bit of difference either way to the case
He has a vested interest on patent infringement damages being awarded regardless of the content of the patent. In this concrete case he manipulated the jury to disregard the instructions to consider the validity of the patents. It's like having an insurance company owner deciding on a case of insurance coverage.
c) what exactly the judge is supposed to do about it even if he was?
The judge could have annulled the jury decision based on them not following the jury instructions and she could have sent them back to do their work properly.
Why would you ever design a product that's completely and utterly dependent on a service provided by someone else.
But this happens all the time in all areas of engineering and business. It's not a bad business model at all. People that base their business model on getting oil from OPEC have gotten rich beyond your dreams doing it, and they don't get 'scorched earth' contracts either (unless they're the US government).
The problem is that the service provider should know better than scare away mediators of its services. Especially Facebook, who is no OPEC and people can live just fine without it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. So let's look at the examples I've given (real problems I've encountered):
didn't understand the concept of exceptions, were wondering why you can't just insert a string into the middle of a text file and were surprised that you can have more than one table in a SQL database.
Meaning - knowing how the concept of exceptions work, knowing how file system works conceptually and have a basic idea of what relational databases are.
Are you saying these are too specific and not in the scope of CS/SW Engineering degrees? I don't buy that. I KNOW these things are in software and CS related curriculi. I'm just irritated by the fact that people who don't grasp these basic things still get the degree.
Maybe the whole concept of colleges in engineering is broken. I've met with people with a CS masters degree who didn't understand the concept of exceptions, were wondering why you can't just insert a string into the middle of a text file and were surprised that you can have more than one table in a SQL database.
I'm not saying that every graduate is bad but that even the reputable colleges hand out degrees to people who have no business having them.
If I look at the (CS/SW related) degree from the employers perspective, all that it grants is that the holder knows how to use variables, loops and branching in programming and that he/she has a rudimentary idea about what a compiler, an OS and a file system is. Is that really worth the 4-5 years and $100K (and more) spent on a something a high school kid could learn in half a year?
That produces a disconnect between the graduates expectations and the company's requirements - the graduate has invested time and money into his degree and expects a salary of a professional and the company doesn't want to pay that much for somebody with so little training. I believe the really good graduates do actually get god jobs out of school - it's just the average and below average people who cannot get employed.
Not only over thinking - he's thinking in the wrong directions.
His blunt weapons are useless in an airplane - no room to make a swing at a target positioned as high as a human head. Has he seriously not thought about a shiv on a two foot pole? The projectile weapons are little more than an annoyance. Yes, even the crossbow, which could seriously injure one person with a lucky shot and that's it.
His "Plausible attack scenarios" are laughable as well. Even if you manage to keep the cockpit door open, what then? You still have to deal with two non-compliant pilots. There is a person who tried - and not with weapons made of fashion magazines- he had hammers and a freaking dart gun. He failed. And being on a cargo plane he didn't even have to deal with a cabin full of pissed-off passengers
.
Seriously, the only 'plausible' danger would be to quietly set up a bomb as a part of a suicide attack or a timed bomb to explode in the next flight and he didn't demonstrate anything like that.
First off, the jokes (as described) were juvenile, but in no way misogynistic.
This.
She didn't even bother to look up what the term 'sexism' means before going on a tantrum.
What she think it means: Any kind of language oriented on sexual organs or any kind of sexual acts.
What it means: Sexism /noun/ - Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.
A couple of examples:
Not sexism: "I'd like to fondle my dongle." "I want to have sex with that girl".
Sexism: "OMG a woman behind a steering wheel! Everybody run for cover!" "Get back into the kitchen, biatch!"
Of course, there is this other thing, called "sexual harassment" which does include things like asking somebody for sexual favors. However, from what I can gather, this is not what the guys in question did. They were not addressing her or even talking about her. It really was just a case of using foul language.
First the OP used the ad hominem circumstantial.
It's not 'ad hominem'. I did not call the author an idiot. I called him potentially biased. It's like an oil company doing research on global warming. It might not be wrong, but don't take their word for it.
Then he criticized the use of standard metrics without a hint of why they're inappropriate or what alternatives he would suggest.
Salary - of course it's going to be lower considering higher administrative costs of an H1B. Does not automatically mean the person is worse.
rate of patent production - people who produce the most IT patents are generally not innovative
alma mater university rank - yeah, US universities are at the top of the ranking so the US graduates will get better numbers here. But if you take the best 5 students from all lower tier universities and compare them to the average graduate from top 10 universities, are they going to be worse? I don't know but the article does not attempt to consider this.
employment in R&D - this is also biased against the H1Bs. You see, the most renowned employers don't have trouble getting US graduates to apply for their R&D positions. It's the medium sized manufacturer in Cleveland who fails to attract MIT graduates and has to look for an H1B. Does not mean they are worse.
First thing - the Economic Policy Institute is clearly a political think tank rather than a pure research institution. Biased.
I was wondering how would you evaluate the skill of IT workers on a large scale so I looked at the actual article. These are their metrics:
- salary
- rate of patent production
- Ph.D. dissertation awards
- alma mater university rank
- employment in R&D
The data then comes from surveys.
I call BS on this study!
Wow, I can finally appreciate the fact that I can see my frustrated face on the glossy display of my phone as I'm trying to swipe through a webpage because there are no Home/End buttons.
Except....that's just proving the point that employers are skinflints.
No. It's the customers who are skinflints. You have to inflate the price of your products if you are paying high salaries. If you do that, companies from other countries will beat you on price.
And I'm not talking about China or India here. You know how much senior SW engineers earn in Germany? Typically around 50 000 Eur and the government eats about 1/3 of that on taxes and mandatory insurance.The wage is determined by collective bargaining and there's no way around it (google IG Metall Tariff Vertrag if you want to educate yourself).
So if you want to pay your engineers 200K or more, you're going to lose to Germany - especially in the industrial area. And no, the american engineers are not more productive than the german ones - not by that much.
I'm kinda with Monsanto on this.
If the ruling goes Bowman's way then it will be trivial to use any genetically modified produce without having to pay whoever developed it
If copyright worked that way, somebody could take a brand new game, crack it to remove the DRM and sell it to Gamestop anonymously. From then on that copy could be freely copied around on the internet or in person. Companies would simply stop producing games.
I know Monsanto did some evil things but this is not one of them. If Bowman wins, development in GMO will become unfeasible. The 'organic' crowd would surely rejoice but there are a lot of us who think GMO is really helpful
Note also that Monsanto doesn't really object to farmers having Roundup Ready plants in their crops (such as due to cross-pollination) as long as they don't use the glycosulphate but people still spread lies about them - how they will sue anybody who had the pollen from Monsanto's plants blown to them by the wind. Ironically, the 'terminator' feature would resolve the cross-pollination issue.
Then he should be prosecuted for what he actually did. You seem to conflate the means to commit a crime with the crime itself. If you stab a person in the back, you get persecuted for murdering a person, not for wielding a knife.
No. You get prosecuted for murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to commit a murder, wielding a knife, trespassing, aggravated assault, unlicensed practice of surgery, jaywalking, wearing blue jeans on Sunday and 25 other remotely applicable transgressions and ridiculous ancient county laws.
Ok, these are the ACTUAL complaints in the article:
1) Microsoft has purposefully locked out small developers from contributing to XBox.
2) Cluttered interface that bombards the user with unnecessary and confusing pop-ups.
3) Apple may be able to get control of the console business if they open up their Apple Store ecosystem to Apple TV
You are giving politicians (and the lobbyist) in Europe too much credit. There are still a lot of shady financial transactions going on there. See for instance the scandal leading up to the resignation of Christian Wulff last year.
I wouldn't be surprised if the MEPs were receiving more than just sweet words from the publishing lobby
You could hire a senior level guy and they could bust or leave in 9 months
You couldn't. That's what you fail to see. In our case, we've got exactly zero senior sw developer applications. Not even ones demanding outrageous salaries. The ads were up for almost a year.
Sure, you can hire a graduate and somewhere down the road, in 3 years, he may become a Sr. SW Developer. There's kids who could make it in 9 months but guess what - they don't want to work in industrial automation in Cleveland either. So you're looking at the engineer you desperately need 3 years down the road. Maybe. If he/she doesn't leave. Or turn out to be a bust.
Because that's what might have happened to that company that is now looking for a Sr. SW Developer in Cleveland. That's what happened in our team in the case I mentioned earlier.
So if you are talking about pontificating stuff on slashdot vs doing something - well, you're the one just pontificating and I'm the one who had to deal with the real problem
That's just an chicken and an egg problem. High prices are an indication and a consequence of shortage of supply.
Take this ad for instance. They are willing to pay around $100k to an experienced sw engineer to work in Cleveland, OH. That's around 4 times the median income in the area.
I assume there are not many US SW engineers with experience in industrial automation looking for a job in Cleveland. How much will it take for somebody to take that job? 200K? 500K? Might be more than the company can afford. You see, if they payed 500K to software engineers, they could not compete with, say, German industrial automation solutions.
So the options are following: a) outsource/relocate b) hire an H1B c) fold
Here we go again. The supposed shortage of IT workers has been repeatedly shown to be false.
No it hasn't. It's actually quite painful in software development. Pretty much everything we use requires software. Cars, refrigerators, assembly lines, medical equipment, farming equipment, power plants ... you name it. And there are just not enough software engineers for the industry.
Or maybe there are some but they don't want to work for a power tool manufacturer in Ohio. That's the problem. CS graduates from US want to work in New York or California for Google or IBM. We were looking for a SW developer in our company (a medical equipment manufacturer in a smaller town) for a year before hiring an H1B. The H1B wasn't cheaper, but it was the only option.
Open up any job search engine and look for 'software' positions in not-so-stellar cities around US and you'll find thousands of offers.
And no, 'training' is not an option. You would have to put at least a full year of training into a person before you had any chance of getting a software developer out of him/her and chances are it would not work anyway.
You're right, they don't care about foreigners. What you fail to see is that they don't care about the locals either. They're not charity. They're charging as much as they think they can get away with. And what they can get away with differs from country to country.
I'm not saying they are 'evil' for doing that. I'm charging my employer as much as I can get from him. I could live with less but I'd be stupid ask for a lower wage. And I'm pretty sure I couldn't get the same pay in India and that I could ask for more in Canada.
And what if they just say "We found that people still buy our shit at this price level". Because that's pretty much the truth of it. What is the government supposed to do about that?
I think it is already irrelevant. It just takes years for a discovery to gain momentum and become 'big'.
General public didn't know anything about Einstein decades after his breakthrough discoveries - only after he emigrated to US in the 1930's. Similarly, Louis Pasteur was largely ignored by his academic peers - it took a new generation of researchers to replace the old one before he became famous and pasteurization became a thing.
So what big breakthroughs are happening right now? How about last year's Nobel price in medicine given to Gourdon and Yamanaka for inventing a procedure that turns ordinary cells into stem cells? General public doesn't care about it much now, but it is an amazing and completely unexpected discovery that will pay off in a not-so-far-off future. Maybe in twenty years when people will receive organ/bone/limb transplants that body accepts as its own without a problem, they will praise these two guys a little more because their discovery is up there with Pasteur's findings.
...by getting exclusive rights to create artificial scarcity. Like if iTunes or Google Play tries to implement it Amazon will sue the shit out of them?
Sounds great to me!
The problem is it wasn't crime for the most part that caused the collapse in 2008. Just like it's not illegal for a car dealer to sell you a crappy car for 20K it's not illegal for a banker to sell you a crappy CDO for more than it's worth.
Instead if they get to the point that they need a bail out they are nationalized.
But this is pretty much what happened
The institutions that needed a bail out were forced to emit new stock that was bought by Fed. If the bank with a total worth of $1 billion needed a $1 billion bailout, they would emit $1 billion worth of stock that was bought by the government. The effect was 1) The government now owns 50% of the bank, 2) The original shareholder's stock price dropped 50% (well a bit less than that because of other factors but still...)
Khan Academy has some pretty good explanatory videos on the matter.
There were no C?Os indicted because of the mess because unfortunately the activities that led to the collapse were not illegal (unlike the LIBOR scandal where people were doing illegal things and have to stand trial. Not informing your customers about the low quality of your products is not illegal - just straight out lying is. And they were careful enough that they were not lying, legally speaking.
how he was a) a wannabe patent troll
I'm not the original poster, so can't comment on this. I would just say more generally that he was a possible patent enforcer
how b) that makes a damned bit of difference either way to the case
He has a vested interest on patent infringement damages being awarded regardless of the content of the patent. In this concrete case he manipulated the jury to disregard the instructions to consider the validity of the patents. It's like having an insurance company owner deciding on a case of insurance coverage.
c) what exactly the judge is supposed to do about it even if he was?
The judge could have annulled the jury decision based on them not following the jury instructions and she could have sent them back to do their work properly.
"You forgot Poland!".
Why would you ever design a product that's completely and utterly dependent on a service provided by someone else.
But this happens all the time in all areas of engineering and business. It's not a bad business model at all. People that base their business model on getting oil from OPEC have gotten rich beyond your dreams doing it, and they don't get 'scorched earth' contracts either (unless they're the US government).
The problem is that the service provider should know better than scare away mediators of its services. Especially Facebook, who is no OPEC and people can live just fine without it.