I see no reason to discuss these things with someone intentionally misunderstanding everything I say.
Good day.
Who is misunderstanding whom? I am countering the notion that you and your friends have a higher threshold for disgust than your WW2 vet grandfather because of growing up on modern horror movies. You may simply be misinterpreting and misunderstanding his reaction to gross images.
You claim others haven't adjusted for various variables. Your interpretations/examples seem to suffer from a similar shallow analysis.
My grandfather for example fought in WW2 but I'm pretty sure I could shock or gross him out with stuff that wouldn't really bother most of my peers.
And do you know why? Because those images may be triggering actual memories of close friends being mutilated by enemy fire, of picking pieces of a close friend's guts and brains off his face and uniform, of the smells of decaying corpses that one can not avoid. You, your friends and myself have a very different set of thoughts and memories and emotions for these images to trigger. Your grandfather is not being grossed out by what he sees in the picture, but rather what he experienced in real life. Add to this that memories created during high stress like combat are some of the most vivid and persistent, its nature's way of making sure we don't forget the lessons of a close encounter with death.
I knew a WW2 paratrooper. I asked him if parachuting was scary. He said it was terrifying. That at Normandy he was near the end of the line of troopers to go out the door. That their plane was taking enemy fire and they stood there unmoving waiting for the signal to jump. And when the signal was given it seemed like forever for him to get to the door. He said he didn't "relax" until he hit the ground. He said for the Market Garden jump he was scared sh*tless from the moment he put the parachute on until he hit the ground despite the fact that there was no enemy fire this time. Show this guy a picture of someone parachuting and it is not the thought of hanging high above the ground supported by a piece of nylon and some thin cords that it causing him to feel some anxiety, as my original question attempted to query regarding.
For myself, the next candidate who seems reasonably competent will get my vote, doesn't matter what party.
And that is the only way in which real reform will occur. Voting for the more competent regardless of party, voting punitively against the misbehaving or those that act against the public good regardless of party.
Loyally voting for your party makes a person irrelevant. Their party can ignore them because they have their vote, the other party can ignore them because they cannot attain their vote.
Belonging to a party is fine, just don't let them think they get your vote automatically. If they put up a weak candidate, if the incumbent has a history of misbehaving or acting against the public interest then sorry, maybe next time.
Politics is darwinian. Votes are the true currency of politics. If votes are spent wisely, and punitively, politicians will adapt accordingly. This is how real reform can be achieved.
The Republicans won the house after losing popular vote.
That is actually just trivia since neither side is trying to achieve the popular vote. Both sides are allocating their time, money, personnel and other resources to achieve the electoral/districts(*) vote. For the popular vote to be a meaningful statistics it would need to be what one side was actually going for. As it is the popular vote is merely highly correlated with the electoral/districts vote so it occasionally goes the other way, just trivia when it happens.
Losing sides like to bring up irrelevant statistics to console the fans. In politics its sometimes the popular vote. In football it may be how many yards did the team move the ball while they had possession. That's interesting and all, but yardage was not what the team trying for. Just like the popular vote was not what the political party was trying for.
(*) Note that we are talking about the nationwide results, the results in all districts, not the results in one particular district. Gerrymandering is a problem, it is a local phenomena, and both parties actively engage in it. Gerrymandering is done at the state level, so whatever party controls the state legislature gets to gerrymander to give their party an advantage in federal elections. Thus there is a certain amount of canceling out in the US congress. In no way should this be interpreted to say gerrymandering is not a problem, it is
Apple OS represents a culture and not a technical solution.
The popularity of MacBooks at Linux and Unix conferences indicate you are wrong. Mac won the desktop Unix battle. Consumer friendly GUI on top, with a lot of off-the-shelf commercial support. BSD Unix underneath, most FOSS applications run just fine on Mac OS X. Very few apps are Linux specific.
Personally most *nix things that I need to do can be accomplished on a Mac quite nicely. I mainly use Linux for embedded devices and headless servers sitting in the closet. I have a dual-boot PC with Windows for gaming but I rarely boot into Linux.
Sure, there are some niche scientific uses for suborbital flights. But that is still isn't the same as managing orbital flight. The ASM-135 was also suborbital, you'll note.
Niche? Many satellites are in low earth orbit. The International Space Station is at 211 miles. Hubble is at 370 miles. Earth imaging at 373 to 497 miles. Again the F-15 launched ASM-135 hit a satellite at 345 miles in the 80s.
>Granted, most of the self-taught crowd is weak on specialized algorithms and data structures
This is a bigger weakness than you think.
As someone with 30 years of software development experience I can't emphasize strongly enough that some of the biggest mistakes are made in algorithm and data structure selection and design.
To motivate your students share this from a 10+ year video game developer. When they apply for a job at that Triple-AAA video game development studio they will be tested. The test will not center on the intricacies of OpenGL and other topics / technologies that they expect. They will find the greatest amount of that testing will have to do with algorithms and data structures. It is in algorithms and data structures where the performance killing and RAM consuming mistakes occur. Video games have little tolerance for such errors. If you don't display sufficient knowledge of algorithms and data structures you will not be considered regardless of how pretty an OpenGL demo you put together.
An anti-satellite rocket does not need to achieve orbital velocity, though.
To be more specific about my 1980s tech comment. The antisat rocket was launched from an F-15 at 38,000 feet. The 30 pound payload was delivered to the target satellite at an altitude of 340 miles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
SpaceShip Two reaches a microgravity environment at an altitude of 68 miles. Launching from this altitude is very different than the F15's 7 mile altitude. Now consider an additional 30 years of engineering advancements.
"NASA sRLV program
By March 2011, Virgin Galactic had submitted SpaceShipTwo as a reusable launch vehicle for carrying research payloads in response to NASA's suborbital reusable launch vehicle (sRLV) solicitation, which is a part of the agency's Flight Opportunities Program. Virgin projects research flights with a peak altitude of 110 km (68 mi) and a duration of approximately 90 minutes. These flights will provide approximately four minutes of microgravity for research payloads." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
That's going to take a seriously huge ship, which will be very different from the SpaceShipTwo, not to mention the gigantic plane to carry both of them up.
You are mistaken. An F-15 fighter jet has successfully launched anti-sattelite rockets. 5 launches in the 1980s. Again, I'm referring to small satellites and payloads, not delivery of astronauts to space stations.
Lets put the stated safety into perspective as well. The goal is not to achieve the level of safety offered by a modern jetliner, rather that of commercial aircraft of the 1920s.
"This vehicle is designed to go into the atmosphere in the worst case straight in or upside down and it'll correct. This is designed to be at least as safe as the early airliners in the 1920s... Don’t believe anyone that tells you that the safety will be the same as a modern airliner, which has been around for 70 years." -- Burt Rutan, 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
SpaceShip Two is not a technological dead end. An alternative design of SpaceShip Two can carry a payload rather than passengers. In this alternative design the SpaceShip Two craft is a "mothership carrier" type of vehicle to launch a more conventional but small rocket from. This small rocket will deliver small satellites and payloads to orbit.
The basic idea is to utilize multiple stages of "motherships" to deliver the payload. Each mothership optimized for different environments and stages of the flight. More importantly these early stage vehicle are reusable. Unlike say the early stages of a Saturn 5.
That said, SpaceShip Two's current role is that an a development test bed. The wealthy thrill ride thing is just a method of funding this research and development. This is discussed in a different post.
SpaceShip Two is a test bed for research. A test bed that can help pay for this research by taking a few wealthy people on a thrill ride.
In economics there is a concept called "willingness to pay". Tapping into the higher "willingness to pay" of the wealthy has been used to bootstrap a company or pay for product research, design and development again and again and again.
Among other things SpaceShip Two is researching:
- The mothership carrier concept.
- A hybrid rocket motor design.
- The feathered re-entry concept.
- New materials.
SpaceShip Two is an intermediate step in a journey, not a milestone in that journey itself. Technologically speaking that is, it is perhaps a milestone in terms of paying for that journey.
It is also not a dead end itself, I will discuss that in a separate post.
Obviously, you've never had to hire CS graduates. I can't tell you how many of these bozos who've learned in a "formal" setting can barely manage a coherent if/then statement, much less successfully complete even a small in-house application.
If you are talking about some web based business app done in javascript then going to CS/CE grads may be gross overkill. Its probably better to go to a trade school with classes on web programming for that sort of stuff.
Or if its a more involved business app look for a "programming" degree program in a University's school of business, not its school or science or school of engineering. At my university it was called "Computer Information Systems", it focused on software development for corporate and business needs rather than scientific and engineering needs as "Computer Science" and "Computer Engineering tend to do". Note that things will vary wildly from one university to another so you really need to look at the school and or classes, you can't make assumptions based on "Science", "Engineering", "Information Systems", "Information Technology" appearing in the program name. These are sometimes a bit arbitrary.
Obviously, you've never had to hire CS graduates. I can't tell you how many of these bozos who've learned in a "formal" setting can barely manage a coherent if/then statement, much less successfully complete even a small in-house application.
There are people who go into a formal CS/CE program because they have a genuine interest in programming. There are also those who go into a formal CS/CE program because someone told them it is a good career path. While the later (career path) can be decent programmers the former (genuine interest) are the ones who tend to truly excel. The later tend to be both formally trained **and** self taught.
Those with a genuine interest in CS/CE tend to learn a lot on their own. And a university setting **greatly** facilitates this. At the university there is an incredible density of like minded folks to learn from or in partnership with. Online and remote can be useful, but two or three in the same room is often better. Plus professors are actually useful, they are often sick of the "career path" type students as well and often are very supportive and encouraging of those with a genuine interest. Besides the like minded folks the university environment offers access to incredible hardware and software that might otherwise be unaccessible. Whenever I asked for access to some specialized equipment (ex workstations with licensed software normally not available unless you are enrolled in a particular class) the professor in charge would ask why and I was never turned away because my project was a personal one, just curiosity. Even professors in other departments were supportive. In grad school I was considering a CS research project that involved a submersible robotic vehicle. I talked to a mechanical engineering professor about the potential project and he was very generous with his time and supportive.
One nice thing about supplementing genuine interest and curiosity with formal university training is that the formal training tends to be a well thought out somewhat comprehensive tour of important topics. Left to oneself the self-taught tend to focus on the more interesting or the more obviously relevant. However some boring and seeming no-so-relevant topics turn out to sometimes be surprisingly relevant and useful. At least that has been my experience, some classes I would never have selected on my own surprised me with their eventual value. While it is certainly possible that the self-taught can read and learn such a comprehensive set of topics at a university level this is exceptionally rare, incredibly rare. In 30 years I've worked with a lot of talented self-taught individuals but I've only met a handful who have the motivation to read and learn things at this level and over a broad range of topics purely on their own initiative.
I saw a documentary on a US Navy Aircraft Carrier, it had a relevant incident. The carrier has GPS, LORAN, inertial navigation, etc. Yet every day a sailor steps outside the bridge with a sextant and takes readings on the horizon and sun. (does another sailor do so at night with the stars?). He then goes inside and using a WW2 manufactured mechanical chronometer calculates the position of the ship. When asked why the Navy still uses such ancient mechanical technology the sailor replied that this ship is a warship and is expected to be where it needs to be regardless of whether the fancy electronics is working or not.
Interesting. However the staged nature of the photos is a non-issue. The photos are not evidence themselves, they are merely illustrative of a concept. Now the questions of whether birds or bats are the main predators and whether moths rest in the canopy or on trunks, those are excellent questions to pursue.
I recall a video shown in school where moths evolved from light colored to dark colored and back to light colored fairly quickly depending upon whether the local trees with a light colored bark were covered with dark soot from local coal burning factories. Factory started up, moths changed rather quickly. Factory shut down, moths changed back rather quickly. The moths with the wrong camouflage suffered greater predation from birds.
... Back in the 50s, 60s, early 70s -- before large scale automation and computerization -- businesses had big labor expenses but somehow managed to stay in business...
Your argument fails due to what is perhaps the most common caveat in statistics and economics, "all other things being equal". There are huge factors that make those decades different, post-WW2 factors, deferred labor costs, etc.
Yes, by deferring employee costs to future decades. For example a company like General Motors in the 50s 60s and early 70s negotiated lower labor hourly rates by offering increased retirement benefits. Basically the CEOs of the 50s 60s and early 70s effectively shifted costs from those decades to, well, "now". This shifted cost was one of the major factors in GM's "recent" near bankruptcy.
The other factor that you failed to consider is that the US emerged from WW2 with not only the only intact manufacturing base but an expanded and modernized manufacturing base. Plus a population that did not see their savings and often their homes and worldly possessions lost, rather a population that had been earning good wages during the war and had no real place to spend their money so they saved it.
So in the US we had a population flush with cash, a huge demand for consumer goods, and no competition. It was a business environment where a company could survive the dumbest practices.
Now add a huge government stimulus as the Marshal plan helped rebuild Europe and Japan. This created a huge demand for heavy industry goods and services.
This US industrial and manufacturing dominance had a long tail as it took decades for former industrial nations to recover from the war. In other words a lot of the profitability of the 50s 60s and early 70s was part of that long tail of the post war years.
When the minimum wage went up in San Jose, the downtown pizza parlor raised the per-slice price by $0.25 USD and per pie price by $1.00 USD. Business remained steady and the world didn't come to an end. Never mind that states with higher minimum wage have higher job growth
San Jose is the largest city in Silicon Valley, third largest city in California, and 10th largest city in the United States.
Silicon Valley is a terrible example to demonstrate the effects of a minimum wage increase and corresponding increases in local product/service costs. The area is too wealthy, this distorts the reaction to $1 more per pizza.
"The median household income is $90,000, according to the Census Bureau. The average single-family home sells for about $1 million. The airport is adding an $82 million private jet center." http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
But some flavors say that developers are supposed to work on all parts of the project.
I think that is a misreading. Development teams should be assigned to end to end features. Development teams can be specialized in particular features and the components associated with those features. Development teams should be allowed to work on whatever component is required to implement their features, including some that may only be peripheral to their core components in order to complete a feature.
I think we are describing two very different sized projects. I'm not referring to very large projects that are implemented by multiple development teams. I am referring to more modest sized projects where there is a single development team; several different small projects that are developed/maintained by a single development team; etc.
I'd have to go find the book that a previous manager read and fell in love with, but it was pretty clear. Don't let someone always work in the same area or always avoid a particular area, no team member "owns" or "controls" a particular area, etc. The book didn't make a lot of sense to me, the author was always seemed to be describing examples and success stories from a single internal corporate IT project. I'm sure it all worked wonderfully from him but his experience seemed to be in a very narrow niche and I didn't see the methodology he was promoting being a good fit in many other areas. Unfortunately management felt differently.
And again, I'm not referring to agile in general. Just some particular flavors, especially those with guru champions selling books championing their flavor. Many things in the core of agile make sense -- frequent deliveries of working software, frequent use by / feedback from customers/users, avoid crunch mode, keep code simple / just the essentials, etc -- however it is in the actual implementation of some particular agile process that things can get strange and/or counterproductive. Possibly because of the unsuitability of the chosen flavor of agile.
Slashdot Mirror
I see no reason to discuss these things with someone intentionally misunderstanding everything I say.
Good day.
Who is misunderstanding whom? I am countering the notion that you and your friends have a higher threshold for disgust than your WW2 vet grandfather because of growing up on modern horror movies. You may simply be misinterpreting and misunderstanding his reaction to gross images.
You claim others haven't adjusted for various variables. Your interpretations/examples seem to suffer from a similar shallow analysis.
My grandfather for example fought in WW2 but I'm pretty sure I could shock or gross him out with stuff that wouldn't really bother most of my peers.
And do you know why? Because those images may be triggering actual memories of close friends being mutilated by enemy fire, of picking pieces of a close friend's guts and brains off his face and uniform, of the smells of decaying corpses that one can not avoid. You, your friends and myself have a very different set of thoughts and memories and emotions for these images to trigger. Your grandfather is not being grossed out by what he sees in the picture, but rather what he experienced in real life. Add to this that memories created during high stress like combat are some of the most vivid and persistent, its nature's way of making sure we don't forget the lessons of a close encounter with death.
I knew a WW2 paratrooper. I asked him if parachuting was scary. He said it was terrifying. That at Normandy he was near the end of the line of troopers to go out the door. That their plane was taking enemy fire and they stood there unmoving waiting for the signal to jump. And when the signal was given it seemed like forever for him to get to the door. He said he didn't "relax" until he hit the ground. He said for the Market Garden jump he was scared sh*tless from the moment he put the parachute on until he hit the ground despite the fact that there was no enemy fire this time. Show this guy a picture of someone parachuting and it is not the thought of hanging high above the ground supported by a piece of nylon and some thin cords that it causing him to feel some anxiety, as my original question attempted to query regarding.
For myself, the next candidate who seems reasonably competent will get my vote, doesn't matter what party.
And that is the only way in which real reform will occur. Voting for the more competent regardless of party, voting punitively against the misbehaving or those that act against the public good regardless of party.
Loyally voting for your party makes a person irrelevant. Their party can ignore them because they have their vote, the other party can ignore them because they cannot attain their vote.
Belonging to a party is fine, just don't let them think they get your vote automatically. If they put up a weak candidate, if the incumbent has a history of misbehaving or acting against the public interest then sorry, maybe next time.
Politics is darwinian. Votes are the true currency of politics. If votes are spent wisely, and punitively, politicians will adapt accordingly. This is how real reform can be achieved.
The Republicans won the house after losing popular vote.
That is actually just trivia since neither side is trying to achieve the popular vote. Both sides are allocating their time, money, personnel and other resources to achieve the electoral/districts(*) vote. For the popular vote to be a meaningful statistics it would need to be what one side was actually going for. As it is the popular vote is merely highly correlated with the electoral/districts vote so it occasionally goes the other way, just trivia when it happens.
Losing sides like to bring up irrelevant statistics to console the fans. In politics its sometimes the popular vote. In football it may be how many yards did the team move the ball while they had possession. That's interesting and all, but yardage was not what the team trying for. Just like the popular vote was not what the political party was trying for.
(*) Note that we are talking about the nationwide results, the results in all districts, not the results in one particular district. Gerrymandering is a problem, it is a local phenomena, and both parties actively engage in it. Gerrymandering is done at the state level, so whatever party controls the state legislature gets to gerrymander to give their party an advantage in federal elections. Thus there is a certain amount of canceling out in the US congress. In no way should this be interpreted to say gerrymandering is not a problem, it is
Apple OS represents a culture and not a technical solution.
The popularity of MacBooks at Linux and Unix conferences indicate you are wrong. Mac won the desktop Unix battle. Consumer friendly GUI on top, with a lot of off-the-shelf commercial support. BSD Unix underneath, most FOSS applications run just fine on Mac OS X. Very few apps are Linux specific.
Personally most *nix things that I need to do can be accomplished on a Mac quite nicely. I mainly use Linux for embedded devices and headless servers sitting in the closet. I have a dual-boot PC with Windows for gaming but I rarely boot into Linux.
Sure, there are some niche scientific uses for suborbital flights. But that is still isn't the same as managing orbital flight. The ASM-135 was also suborbital, you'll note.
Niche? Many satellites are in low earth orbit. The International Space Station is at 211 miles. Hubble is at 370 miles. Earth imaging at 373 to 497 miles. Again the F-15 launched ASM-135 hit a satellite at 345 miles in the 80s.
An interesting graphic:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
>Granted, most of the self-taught crowd is weak on specialized algorithms and data structures
This is a bigger weakness than you think.
As someone with 30 years of software development experience I can't emphasize strongly enough that some of the biggest mistakes are made in algorithm and data structure selection and design.
To motivate your students share this from a 10+ year video game developer. When they apply for a job at that Triple-AAA video game development studio they will be tested. The test will not center on the intricacies of OpenGL and other topics / technologies that they expect. They will find the greatest amount of that testing will have to do with algorithms and data structures. It is in algorithms and data structures where the performance killing and RAM consuming mistakes occur. Video games have little tolerance for such errors. If you don't display sufficient knowledge of algorithms and data structures you will not be considered regardless of how pretty an OpenGL demo you put together.
No, being a kinetic weapon it would gain a lot of destructive power by not being in a nearby orbit. The satellite would slam into it at orbital speed.
I expected my point would not be clear. See other comment.
An anti-satellite rocket does not need to achieve orbital velocity, though.
To be more specific about my 1980s tech comment. The antisat rocket was launched from an F-15 at 38,000 feet. The 30 pound payload was delivered to the target satellite at an altitude of 340 miles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
SpaceShip Two reaches a microgravity environment at an altitude of 68 miles. Launching from this altitude is very different than the F15's 7 mile altitude. Now consider an additional 30 years of engineering advancements.
"NASA sRLV program
By March 2011, Virgin Galactic had submitted SpaceShipTwo as a reusable launch vehicle for carrying research payloads in response to NASA's suborbital reusable launch vehicle (sRLV) solicitation, which is a part of the agency's Flight Opportunities Program. Virgin projects research flights with a peak altitude of 110 km (68 mi) and a duration of approximately 90 minutes. These flights will provide approximately four minutes of microgravity for research payloads."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
An anti-satellite rocket does not need to achieve orbital velocity, though.
Since it was a kinetic weapon it needed to achieve and maneuver in actual satellite orbits. Again, 1980s tech.
That's going to take a seriously huge ship, which will be very different from the SpaceShipTwo, not to mention the gigantic plane to carry both of them up.
You are mistaken. An F-15 fighter jet has successfully launched anti-sattelite rockets. 5 launches in the 1980s. Again, I'm referring to small satellites and payloads, not delivery of astronauts to space stations.
Lets put the stated safety into perspective as well. The goal is not to achieve the level of safety offered by a modern jetliner, rather that of commercial aircraft of the 1920s.
... Don’t believe anyone that tells you that the safety will be the same as a modern airliner, which has been around for 70 years." -- Burt Rutan, 2008
"This vehicle is designed to go into the atmosphere in the worst case straight in or upside down and it'll correct. This is designed to be at least as safe as the early airliners in the 1920s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
You are wrong about SpaceShip Two being a dead end, see http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
You are mistaken about SpaceShip Two being a dead end. See post http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
SpaceShip Two is not a technological dead end. An alternative design of SpaceShip Two can carry a payload rather than passengers. In this alternative design the SpaceShip Two craft is a "mothership carrier" type of vehicle to launch a more conventional but small rocket from. This small rocket will deliver small satellites and payloads to orbit.
The basic idea is to utilize multiple stages of "motherships" to deliver the payload. Each mothership optimized for different environments and stages of the flight. More importantly these early stage vehicle are reusable. Unlike say the early stages of a Saturn 5.
That said, SpaceShip Two's current role is that an a development test bed. The wealthy thrill ride thing is just a method of funding this research and development. This is discussed in a different post.
SpaceShip Two is a test bed for research. A test bed that can help pay for this research by taking a few wealthy people on a thrill ride.
In economics there is a concept called "willingness to pay". Tapping into the higher "willingness to pay" of the wealthy has been used to bootstrap a company or pay for product research, design and development again and again and again.
Among other things SpaceShip Two is researching:
- The mothership carrier concept.
- A hybrid rocket motor design.
- The feathered re-entry concept.
- New materials.
SpaceShip Two is an intermediate step in a journey, not a milestone in that journey itself. Technologically speaking that is, it is perhaps a milestone in terms of paying for that journey.
It is also not a dead end itself, I will discuss that in a separate post.
Obviously, you've never had to hire CS graduates. I can't tell you how many of these bozos who've learned in a "formal" setting can barely manage a coherent if/then statement, much less successfully complete even a small in-house application.
If you are talking about some web based business app done in javascript then going to CS/CE grads may be gross overkill. Its probably better to go to a trade school with classes on web programming for that sort of stuff.
Or if its a more involved business app look for a "programming" degree program in a University's school of business, not its school or science or school of engineering. At my university it was called "Computer Information Systems", it focused on software development for corporate and business needs rather than scientific and engineering needs as "Computer Science" and "Computer Engineering tend to do". Note that things will vary wildly from one university to another so you really need to look at the school and or classes, you can't make assumptions based on "Science", "Engineering", "Information Systems", "Information Technology" appearing in the program name. These are sometimes a bit arbitrary.
Obviously, you've never had to hire CS graduates. I can't tell you how many of these bozos who've learned in a "formal" setting can barely manage a coherent if/then statement, much less successfully complete even a small in-house application.
There are people who go into a formal CS/CE program because they have a genuine interest in programming. There are also those who go into a formal CS/CE program because someone told them it is a good career path. While the later (career path) can be decent programmers the former (genuine interest) are the ones who tend to truly excel. The later tend to be both formally trained **and** self taught.
Those with a genuine interest in CS/CE tend to learn a lot on their own. And a university setting **greatly** facilitates this. At the university there is an incredible density of like minded folks to learn from or in partnership with. Online and remote can be useful, but two or three in the same room is often better. Plus professors are actually useful, they are often sick of the "career path" type students as well and often are very supportive and encouraging of those with a genuine interest. Besides the like minded folks the university environment offers access to incredible hardware and software that might otherwise be unaccessible. Whenever I asked for access to some specialized equipment (ex workstations with licensed software normally not available unless you are enrolled in a particular class) the professor in charge would ask why and I was never turned away because my project was a personal one, just curiosity. Even professors in other departments were supportive. In grad school I was considering a CS research project that involved a submersible robotic vehicle. I talked to a mechanical engineering professor about the potential project and he was very generous with his time and supportive.
One nice thing about supplementing genuine interest and curiosity with formal university training is that the formal training tends to be a well thought out somewhat comprehensive tour of important topics. Left to oneself the self-taught tend to focus on the more interesting or the more obviously relevant. However some boring and seeming no-so-relevant topics turn out to sometimes be surprisingly relevant and useful. At least that has been my experience, some classes I would never have selected on my own surprised me with their eventual value. While it is certainly possible that the self-taught can read and learn such a comprehensive set of topics at a university level this is exceptionally rare, incredibly rare. In 30 years I've worked with a lot of talented self-taught individuals but I've only met a handful who have the motivation to read and learn things at this level and over a broad range of topics purely on their own initiative.
I saw a documentary on a US Navy Aircraft Carrier, it had a relevant incident. The carrier has GPS, LORAN, inertial navigation, etc. Yet every day a sailor steps outside the bridge with a sextant and takes readings on the horizon and sun. (does another sailor do so at night with the stars?). He then goes inside and using a WW2 manufactured mechanical chronometer calculates the position of the ship. When asked why the Navy still uses such ancient mechanical technology the sailor replied that this ship is a warship and is expected to be where it needs to be regardless of whether the fancy electronics is working or not.
Interesting. However the staged nature of the photos is a non-issue. The photos are not evidence themselves, they are merely illustrative of a concept. Now the questions of whether birds or bats are the main predators and whether moths rest in the canopy or on trunks, those are excellent questions to pursue.
I recall a video shown in school where moths evolved from light colored to dark colored and back to light colored fairly quickly depending upon whether the local trees with a light colored bark were covered with dark soot from local coal burning factories. Factory started up, moths changed rather quickly. Factory shut down, moths changed back rather quickly. The moths with the wrong camouflage suffered greater predation from birds.
... Back in the 50s, 60s, early 70s -- before large scale automation and computerization -- businesses had big labor expenses but somehow managed to stay in business ...
Your argument fails due to what is perhaps the most common caveat in statistics and economics, "all other things being equal". There are huge factors that make those decades different, post-WW2 factors, deferred labor costs, etc.
Yes, by deferring employee costs to future decades. For example a company like General Motors in the 50s 60s and early 70s negotiated lower labor hourly rates by offering increased retirement benefits. Basically the CEOs of the 50s 60s and early 70s effectively shifted costs from those decades to, well, "now". This shifted cost was one of the major factors in GM's "recent" near bankruptcy.
The other factor that you failed to consider is that the US emerged from WW2 with not only the only intact manufacturing base but an expanded and modernized manufacturing base. Plus a population that did not see their savings and often their homes and worldly possessions lost, rather a population that had been earning good wages during the war and had no real place to spend their money so they saved it.
So in the US we had a population flush with cash, a huge demand for consumer goods, and no competition. It was a business environment where a company could survive the dumbest practices.
Now add a huge government stimulus as the Marshal plan helped rebuild Europe and Japan. This created a huge demand for heavy industry goods and services.
This US industrial and manufacturing dominance had a long tail as it took decades for former industrial nations to recover from the war. In other words a lot of the profitability of the 50s 60s and early 70s was part of that long tail of the post war years.
Yes and we could also elect a dictator who would set price controls and order stores to sell certain items. It worked great in Venezuela.
No need to go that far. The US instituted wage and price controls in the 1970s in an attempt to fight inflation, it didn't work.
When the minimum wage went up in San Jose, the downtown pizza parlor raised the per-slice price by $0.25 USD and per pie price by $1.00 USD. Business remained steady and the world didn't come to an end. Never mind that states with higher minimum wage have higher job growth
San Jose is the largest city in Silicon Valley, third largest city in California, and 10th largest city in the United States.
Silicon Valley is a terrible example to demonstrate the effects of a minimum wage increase and corresponding increases in local product/service costs. The area is too wealthy, this distorts the reaction to $1 more per pizza.
"The median household income is $90,000, according to the Census Bureau. The average single-family home sells for about $1 million. The airport is adding an $82 million private jet center."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
But some flavors say that developers are supposed to work on all parts of the project.
I think that is a misreading. Development teams should be assigned to end to end features. Development teams can be specialized in particular features and the components associated with those features. Development teams should be allowed to work on whatever component is required to implement their features, including some that may only be peripheral to their core components in order to complete a feature.
I think we are describing two very different sized projects. I'm not referring to very large projects that are implemented by multiple development teams. I am referring to more modest sized projects where there is a single development team; several different small projects that are developed/maintained by a single development team; etc.
I'd have to go find the book that a previous manager read and fell in love with, but it was pretty clear. Don't let someone always work in the same area or always avoid a particular area, no team member "owns" or "controls" a particular area, etc. The book didn't make a lot of sense to me, the author was always seemed to be describing examples and success stories from a single internal corporate IT project. I'm sure it all worked wonderfully from him but his experience seemed to be in a very narrow niche and I didn't see the methodology he was promoting being a good fit in many other areas. Unfortunately management felt differently.
And again, I'm not referring to agile in general. Just some particular flavors, especially those with guru champions selling books championing their flavor. Many things in the core of agile make sense -- frequent deliveries of working software, frequent use by / feedback from customers/users, avoid crunch mode, keep code simple / just the essentials, etc -- however it is in the actual implementation of some particular agile process that things can get strange and/or counterproductive. Possibly because of the unsuitability of the chosen flavor of agile.