No one in the US complained about trade when the first world powers were exploiting cheap labor for huge windfalls. Now that these nations have bootstrapped themselves and are taking ownership of their own labor, Americans cry protectionism.
Money knows no borders. Deal! If you think the wealthy feel a special affinity for you because you were born in the same country as them, forget it! You are simply naive. These people control the government so you can forget about Uncle Sam bailing you out. Why do you think free trade is at the top of every Federal agenda for the last two decades regardless of the plight of American workers????
This is the last refuge of a beaten culture. To characterize all Indian engineers as being "dumb" (which you were indirectly doing, just admit it), is ridiculous, wrong, and ignorant.
Look around major tech companies and you will see people from all over the world holding various positions. Some are smart. Some aren't. By the same token, presuming that all American programmers are intelligent is equally inane. The fact that this gibberish was moderated up just shows you how ignorant and reflexive the users here are .
No one cares if the outsourced company attains your notion of "excellence" (which you had probably overestimated in any case). In the world of business, the cheapest adequate solution wins.
That means if someone can do a minimally acceptable job for less money than you, you're out. I'm not offering this as knee-jerk cynicism, simply observations from years in business. Costs matter, and the corporation left standing is typically the one that has ruthlessly slashed costs everywhere possible. This is why United Airlines is bankrupt and SouthWest is not. This is why most manufacturing is now done outside of the US. This is why outsourcing exists at all.
You can get a Ph.D from the best compsci school in the world without doing any programming whatsoever. In fact people do theory work all of the time and never code up any results. Its called theoretical computer science. I studied it at the graduate level and I can assure you that many in this field only touch a computer to write their papers.
So having a Ph.D has nothing to do with coding. ZILCH. If you are a good programmer, cool, but it is not a result of, or consistent with, having a graduate degree. I would think a person of your "intellectual capacities" would quite easily be able to understand this. Apparently not. Where is your degree from again?
In all my years of interviewing candidates for programming jobs, I have found that educational background is basically irrelevant. As long as you went to college, thats all I want to know.
Everything else depends on how you answer my programming questions. If you have an MIT Ph.D, what good is that if you don't know answers to rudimentary programming questions? I don't care about "capacity to learn" at this point, I want someone who can produce. Being a big thinker is far less important to me than the ability to crank out good code fast. In fact I have found the big thinkers to be more useless than the humble trench soldier.
I agree with you 100% about valuations, and if you read my journal, you will see at least twenty long rants about market valuations being out of whack.
That said, RH is potentially addressing a gigantic market. Even if 20% of Solaris and Win2k installs migrate to RedHat, thats in incredible jump in the number of installed cusomters with credible purchasing power.
I would confidently place RH in the same league as some biotechs in terms of market potential.
The anti-Red Hat rants on this site are utterly baseless and sophomoric. If Red Hat were to exit the market, a significant force for the advancement of linux would vanish. Thank you for your post.
In a down economy, particularly in the gutted software market, RedHat's move to profitability is a great sign.
This company has combined great a great technical staff with the ability to market and profit from products that differentiate them. I have not had any experience with the Advanced Server product, but as a RH8.0 user, I can say that the product is showing great improvements.
The linux market will not support a "Microsoft of linux" if that is your fear, the market for distros is very liquid, in fact, almost infinitely liquid. RedHat will only survive by providing true value above and beyond the hundred or so other distros that happen to be marketed at any given time, most of which are solid products in their own right.
Clustering, fast networks, bigger and better nonvolatile storage technologies...all of these could crank up the apparent performance of a computing utility without much change in the CPU, although CPU speed would ultimately impeded these utilities as well.
Excusing Mozilla flaws as the result of the code only being a technology demonstrator is a bit of a crutch. Mozilla is an open source browser. It is not a demonstration of what a browser could or would be, but an end unto itself.
As it stands, with xft builds, Mozilla is in fact more user-oriented than Phoenix on linux.
Users decide what an application is, not the coders. If users decie that Mozilla is the de facto open source browser, then it is.
There may be a connection. A closed project allows one person to impose their will religiously throughout an interface. Open source ultimately is about concessions and cooperation, which may negate this type of centrist control.
On the other hand, the general trend of open source is to follow the leader in the most positive way possible. If someone builds the perfect UI, open source folks will copy it sooner or later.
If you like the housing in places like Japan, or anywhere else modernist dogma has taken root, please read Wolfe's classic evisceration of the modernist ideal in architecture.
The notion that there is "great housing for the people" is nonsense. Its just a way of ramming the worst modern ideals in architecture down socety's collective throat.
The law says we must have them, so we just install extra incandescent bulbs on another switch and never use the fluorescent lighting. Lights should not make noise.
The Liberty Alliance never had a chance - its only goal was to exist as a foil to Passport. Those types of product strategies never pan out, they end up being mostly PR. Passport itself has very diminished interest from vendors and much less press from MS itself given public hysteria (well deserved as it is) over computer privacy and identity theft.
It will be a while before anyone picks up this hot potato again. Until then, single sign-on is dead.
First, there has been a trend against rail travel as car culture has risen in most US cities. In China car ownership is very low. In Europe, the cities don't have the roads and parking to handle heavy traffic like most US cities (you can look at this as an advantage or a disadvantage).
Also, the geography of the US does not favor trains. The map is heavily populated on the coasts with little population in between. It is simply easier and faster to do most long distance travel in the US by air. Even in special regions like California that may lend themselves to intrastate rail travel, it is unclear if this will be cheaper than air travel. You can get some incredible bargains for LA-San Fran/San Jose flights, and rail operators of the upcoming line between those two regions will be hard pressed to beat these low fares.
Simple economics - employees are far more amenable to changes in their work environment when unemplyment is high. This is exactly the time to make such a change.
MS despererately trying to fight interia
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The 'jack of all trades' model is the natural evolution of a company desperately trying to fight overwhlming market inertia. The biannual PC upgrade is a thing of the past. Intel, Dell and MS need to adjust their thinking more towards that of home electronics - upgrades every five to seven years. How often do you replace your TV?
MS will do their best to yank users into upgrades, but many will not bite. Even with XP, MS is watching inertia erode new product adoption. The only possible savior for these companies is massive improvements in broadband. Give me true 100MB access at home and maybe I see a need for better gear and software. Even with better broadband, a significant slowdown in the PC market at this point is inevitable, and I suspect share prices for INTC, DELL and MSFT will reflect this in years to come.
Gates NOT richest man who has ever lived
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Rockefeller's wealth, adjusted for inflation, is much greater than Gates'. Rockefeller's net worth at his peak was ove a billion dollars, and I'm talking pre-WW1 dollars. Adjust for inflation and he would easily be worth double what Gates is worth today.
Of course open source software is amenable to heavy refactoring - there is no opportunity cost. The developers would not be working on otherwise productive code because they are often tied for some reason or another to one project.
In a commercial setting, there are always new projects that need work, so it is almost always a waste of time to replumb code that won't be used in three years anyway.
Most refactoring advocates seem to make two key assumptions:
Your code will be needed for a long time
Your requirements will not change drastically
Even if they don't state these explicitly, it is asusmed in the premise of refactoring. If code did not have a long productive life ahead of it, you wouldn't waste your time continually replumbing it. If requirements did in fact change rapidly, there would not be time to revisit completed working code.
In my experience most code lives for about four years and then dies. During that time the requirements often shift by at least 25%. Given these observations, refactoring appears to be a waste of time.
As a developer you can explain how cleaning up code is preventative maintenance to make development easier in the future, but if you're not a developer that's a very hard thing to measure.
Even then it is often a wash. How many people "refactored" to support OLE? CORBA? All of those would be a waste of time now. How many people refactored to get OO into their code? Dubious gains there too.
Refactoring is often about injecting the last good idea you had into working code.
I won't dispute that there are legitimate cleanups, but if a developer couldn't do it right the first time, I have my doubts that round two is going to be much better.
I don't think its just the PHB crowd that is suspicious of refactoring. My own opinion is that you should simply try your very best in the first iteration and leave it at that. Constantly reworking code that does the very same thing that it did before is often a pointless exercise - by time you have the internals "clean", new requirements demand a drastic addition or total rewrite anyway.
Requirements tend to move rapidly. That has been my experience. Dwelling upon one particular snapshot of requirements presumes that your code will have a long active lifespan, which it often doesn't. In my own case, my code has lived on in productive use for about four years on average after it has been written (after which it is often junked entirely), with a creation time often near a year. Those type of stats don't lead me to believe that refactoring is worthwhile.
Come on, you are characterizing OSX and Windows in a completely inaccurate manner. Both systems are awash in mysticism, hacks, tricks, and "expertise". At least in a unix system its transparent.
Slashdot Mirror
Money knows no borders. Deal! If you think the wealthy feel a special affinity for you because you were born in the same country as them, forget it! You are simply naive. These people control the government so you can forget about Uncle Sam bailing you out. Why do you think free trade is at the top of every Federal agenda for the last two decades regardless of the plight of American workers????
Look around major tech companies and you will see people from all over the world holding various positions. Some are smart. Some aren't. By the same token, presuming that all American programmers are intelligent is equally inane. The fact that this gibberish was moderated up just shows you how ignorant and reflexive the users here are .
That means if someone can do a minimally acceptable job for less money than you, you're out. I'm not offering this as knee-jerk cynicism, simply observations from years in business. Costs matter, and the corporation left standing is typically the one that has ruthlessly slashed costs everywhere possible. This is why United Airlines is bankrupt and SouthWest is not. This is why most manufacturing is now done outside of the US. This is why outsourcing exists at all.
You can get a Ph.D from the best compsci school in the world without doing any programming whatsoever. In fact people do theory work all of the time and never code up any results. Its called theoretical computer science. I studied it at the graduate level and I can assure you that many in this field only touch a computer to write their papers.
So having a Ph.D has nothing to do with coding. ZILCH. If you are a good programmer, cool, but it is not a result of, or consistent with, having a graduate degree. I would think a person of your "intellectual capacities" would quite easily be able to understand this. Apparently not. Where is your degree from again?
Everything else depends on how you answer my programming questions. If you have an MIT Ph.D, what good is that if you don't know answers to rudimentary programming questions? I don't care about "capacity to learn" at this point, I want someone who can produce. Being a big thinker is far less important to me than the ability to crank out good code fast. In fact I have found the big thinkers to be more useless than the humble trench soldier.
Good work laddie
That said, RH is potentially addressing a gigantic market. Even if 20% of Solaris and Win2k installs migrate to RedHat, thats in incredible jump in the number of installed cusomters with credible purchasing power.
I would confidently place RH in the same league as some biotechs in terms of market potential.
The anti-Red Hat rants on this site are utterly baseless and sophomoric. If Red Hat were to exit the market, a significant force for the advancement of linux would vanish. Thank you for your post.
This company has combined great a great technical staff with the ability to market and profit from products that differentiate them. I have not had any experience with the Advanced Server product, but as a RH8.0 user, I can say that the product is showing great improvements.
The linux market will not support a "Microsoft of linux" if that is your fear, the market for distros is very liquid, in fact, almost infinitely liquid. RedHat will only survive by providing true value above and beyond the hundred or so other distros that happen to be marketed at any given time, most of which are solid products in their own right.
Clustering, fast networks, bigger and better nonvolatile storage technologies...all of these could crank up the apparent performance of a computing utility without much change in the CPU, although CPU speed would ultimately impeded these utilities as well.
As it stands, with xft builds, Mozilla is in fact more user-oriented than Phoenix on linux.
Users decide what an application is, not the coders. If users decie that Mozilla is the de facto open source browser, then it is.
On the other hand, the general trend of open source is to follow the leader in the most positive way possible. If someone builds the perfect UI, open source folks will copy it sooner or later.
The notion that there is "great housing for the people" is nonsense. Its just a way of ramming the worst modern ideals in architecture down socety's collective throat.
The law says we must have them, so we just install extra incandescent bulbs on another switch and never use the fluorescent lighting. Lights should not make noise.
It will be a while before anyone picks up this hot potato again. Until then, single sign-on is dead.
Also, the geography of the US does not favor trains. The map is heavily populated on the coasts with little population in between. It is simply easier and faster to do most long distance travel in the US by air. Even in special regions like California that may lend themselves to intrastate rail travel, it is unclear if this will be cheaper than air travel. You can get some incredible bargains for LA-San Fran/San Jose flights, and rail operators of the upcoming line between those two regions will be hard pressed to beat these low fares.
Simple economics - employees are far more amenable to changes in their work environment when unemplyment is high. This is exactly the time to make such a change.
MS will do their best to yank users into upgrades, but many will not bite. Even with XP, MS is watching inertia erode new product adoption. The only possible savior for these companies is massive improvements in broadband. Give me true 100MB access at home and maybe I see a need for better gear and software. Even with better broadband, a significant slowdown in the PC market at this point is inevitable, and I suspect share prices for INTC, DELL and MSFT will reflect this in years to come.
Rockefeller's wealth, adjusted for inflation, is much greater than Gates'. Rockefeller's net worth at his peak was ove a billion dollars, and I'm talking pre-WW1 dollars. Adjust for inflation and he would easily be worth double what Gates is worth today.
In a commercial setting, there are always new projects that need work, so it is almost always a waste of time to replumb code that won't be used in three years anyway.
Your code will be needed for a long time
Your requirements will not change drastically
Even if they don't state these explicitly, it is asusmed in the premise of refactoring. If code did not have a long productive life ahead of it, you wouldn't waste your time continually replumbing it. If requirements did in fact change rapidly, there would not be time to revisit completed working code.
In my experience most code lives for about four years and then dies. During that time the requirements often shift by at least 25%. Given these observations, refactoring appears to be a waste of time.
Coders who suck in round one of a project often suck in rounds two and three.
Even then it is often a wash. How many people "refactored" to support OLE? CORBA? All of those would be a waste of time now. How many people refactored to get OO into their code? Dubious gains there too.
Refactoring is often about injecting the last good idea you had into working code.
I won't dispute that there are legitimate cleanups, but if a developer couldn't do it right the first time, I have my doubts that round two is going to be much better.
Requirements tend to move rapidly. That has been my experience. Dwelling upon one particular snapshot of requirements presumes that your code will have a long active lifespan, which it often doesn't. In my own case, my code has lived on in productive use for about four years on average after it has been written (after which it is often junked entirely), with a creation time often near a year. Those type of stats don't lead me to believe that refactoring is worthwhile.
Come on, you are characterizing OSX and Windows in a completely inaccurate manner. Both systems are awash in mysticism, hacks, tricks, and "expertise". At least in a unix system its transparent.