Exempt food and medical. That would reduce the percentage impact on the poor. Put a flat tax on everything else including services. Then at least everyone would have confidence that "the others" weren't able to lawyer their way out of their fair share.
Technical debut is a term that accurately describes the sum tradeoffs of the decisions made for each release. The granularity or technicality of the debt metric may vary by management tier but it's real. Refactorings or subsystem re-designs create credit that lets future releases go out the door more smoothly. Rushed changes use up some, or more than all, of that credit putting future releases at risk.
Business wants the changes. IT management doesn't want to be unresponsive. You get tradeoffs.
People who say they never make those tradeoffs are either kidding themselves or they've never worked in a "go to production" IT shop.
That put's them in the same ballpark. My kids tell me almost everyone already has an IPod touch for music and they happen to play games on them also , a lot.
Heh. I bet back in the mid '80s, electrical engineers didn't need to know a blessed thing about programming anything.
Right and we could only run our vacuum tube devices in electrical storms because there was no electrical grid.
I was a lab TA for a micro-electronics course. We used Z8 processors building traffic light controllers and the other projects they still do today. I loved the Z8 either with a built in serial port the piggy back 2K EPROM or the embedded basic interpreter.
I picked up a magnetic core memory based terminal and acoustic coupler in college. It was ancient even when I got it in the early-eighties. The unit weighed about 60 pounds and came with 4(?) ferrite bead memory boards that were maybe 10x10 inches. You could turn it off and unplug it and it would always turn back on with your last screen contents. I chuckled every time I turned it on because it was pretty unusual behavior for a terminal.
ADM3s were popular around that time but I kept the beast of a terminal for years because I thought it was retro-cool.
Redundant SAN setup with replicated offsite storage , redundant paths and really big memory caches. Mongo cache starts having errors but looks like it's working (maybe because of error correction?). Later the backup cache starts having errors but the system appears to still be running. (Supposedly no one had ever see two controllers go bad) Some time later they decide to fail over to the backup site. Turns out the controllers were replicating corrupted data to the offsite storage. Bam!
Bad luck and bad decisions can wipe out any fail safe.
Damage/problems created by Manning's activities are not necessarily the same as any damage due to posting wiki-leaks. I wasn't thinking of Wikileaks in particular. They released a subset of the data but Manning actually downloaded a lot more than that. The entire data set will/has make it into the wild.
The American documents seem to show folks trying to accomplish a goal without getting killed in the process. It's chaotic with most operations taking place in the fog of war. Some folks go over the edge and some folks do whatever they can make sure they get to go home. Bad shit happens. There have been voices in the American military that have tried put more order in the chaos. That has been offset by the fact that their opponents know all civilian casualties will be laid at the feet of the Americans and by the fact that US forces.
Show me the documents that describe how "the other side" planned to blow up markets and mosques. Show me how the various Iraqi neighborhood "tribal cleansing" on their own. Lets see the numbers for the numbers of people beheaded and dumped in the rivers. Then we'll have an idea how much of the operations were a counterbalance to the activities of others.
I don't believe the report said the US killed 100,000 people. It said 100,000 died as a result of the war. Not exactly the same. How many died because of inter-tribal warfare and score settling?
Social Security is not "other people's money". Workers pay into Social Security our whole lives, which the Federal government borrows from to pay for the $TRILLION wars you Teabaggers love instead of, say, better and more universal education, more effective transit infrastructure, or other investments in our people. Social Security gets interest on those extremely safe Treasury bond investments, paying a minimum pension of about $14,000 annually per worker, substantially above the $11,000 poverty line. A government pension that people pay into themselves,
Social Security is a taxpayer funded pension with wealth redistribution components. Low income households get back 27% more income than they put in while middle income get back 5% more than they put in and high income get back less than they put in. That's not a big surprise and is another reminder that it's not really a personally funded pension program. The actual tax is twice the rate most folks realize because the company funded component is passed on to workers in the form of lower wages. (How else do you think companies pay for it?) The surplus borrowed against by the government to pay other bills effectively co-mingling Social Security and regular Federal funds. The notion that the money is sitting somewhere waiting for the day it is needed is ridiculous. The money will only be if we heavily tax future generations to "pay back" the loans on those "high quality" treasuries.
Compare machines of the screen size before insulting someone. An apple refurb is $1349 plus tax and any additional RAM. That's pretty close to $1500 and significantly more costly than a 15" PC.
I wouldn't give my kid a 13" machine for school if I could help it. They spend too much time staring at it over the 4 years.
I'm ok with WikiLeaks posting documents that shine a light on places it needs to be shown. They haven't surfaced any documents from dictatorships, (actual) terrorist organisations, human traffickers or non-western groups. WikiLeaks may be game changers but not in the way they expect, providing detailed information in only one direction. It may make it impossible for democracies to get cooperation in dangerous areas because identities will end up being public.
Every organisation has internal documents that show the chaos of decision making processes with competing priorities. They also have documents that describe who they work with. Organisations need free flowing discussions to make sure they understand the ramifications of their actions. Publicising intermediate documents makes that impossible.
WikiLeaks has an insurance policy that will get people killed. Their (self preservation) moral code isn't any different than any other self-interested organisation.
"the creator didn't understand the value of name space partitioning in OOP"
Dr Cox certainly understood. He just wanted to keep things as close to "pure" C as possible, and had a different way of partitioning spaces -- use 2 letter codes. This is primitive but surprisingly effective, and why all Cocoa objects begin with NS. Think of all the typing this saves, and you never have to wonder what namespace context you're in.
I like this approach and have used it in some large Java applications with good success. Packaging is great for name space divisions but naming conventions reduce programmer stress. How many "Date" classes are there in Java? How do you know which one is being used at any given time? java.sql.date java.util.Date, org.xxx.Date? Some classes import more than one class of the same name so that you can convert between them. (ugh) Look at Java annotations is that @Required tag? Is it spring, hibernate, libraryXXX or something else? I'd rather that every Apache class started with some standard prefix.
I thought it was an attempt to break the cycle of dependency that held people down across generations. Been to the projects? They were/are people warehouses not neighborhoods.
Countless proxy wars, the division of Europe and a set of policies where any dictatorship was fine as long as it was on our side? That's the time you want to go back to? No Thanks.
How often do folks come forward to say that they can't imagine that their associate/friend/neighbor/spouse couldn't have done the crime. Sometimes they're right and their wrong.
Can I have my unused mod points back? Well run meetings can have a point and can advance the project/business. Poorly organised meetings are a time waster. 15 min standup meetings seem to work well. Recurring status or other meetings that can be great when they only cover the actual agenda.
Electronic meeting support tools like email length the decision making process and provide all kinds of opportunities for misunderstanding. Live meetings can let you close a problem / issue on a schedue.
The bandwidth a meeting run by IM is a loT slower so you you spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for someone to finish typing. Of course that can be good since most of the time you're doing other work during the meeting and not paying attention. How many folks say they like IM meetings but really mean "my other stuff is more important than this meeting"?
A rewrite involves risk and often breaks existing functionality. It's hard to explain to the business whey they went down at $10,000 hr because some developer thought they understood what a module did and "fixed it". I personally believe that we need to recast the code that no one on the team understands the testing expense and risk have to be explained to management.
I had this discussion with some mainframe folks a couple weeks back. They never rewrite code. They don't understand what all the code does so they always wrap existing code with new code when adding functionality. Sometimes the new code just stops the old code from executing in certain situations.
.. and also, you are correct. With code that needs to be deciphered, you're generally better off re-writing it.
Clean code tells you how, good comments tell you why.
Fixing the "how" becomes significantly easier when you know "why" the code was there in the first place.
Why is this so hard to teach developers? My last 3 projects had minimum documentation standards that developers always had trouble with. They would just add comments that said what the code did. We usually don't want comments that describe what the code does. We want to know why the code does what it does did that. "bug report foo said the exception exists because" or "Law X in state YY requires this behavior different from other states".
The exception is of course the hot shot developer who does all kinds optimizations or algorithms beyond the reach of most of the team. We can't always stop them from putting that code in so we force them to describe what it does.
Our current infrastructure relies on highly portable moderately concentrated energy sources. The oil and gas companies deliver that. In the end, they are probably the companies that will convert whatever the new resources are to a form that can be transferred and stored. They have the capital and infrastructure to do it. I hasn't happened yet because the technology isn't there.
Oil companies are losing access to much of the raw materials due to nationalization. They are (or will soon be) highly motivated to deliver synthetic portable power.
Full conversion to electric is never going to happen in the US. We appear to be opposed to the construction of the additional transmission capability that it would require.
They are keeping Opal because they need it
on
A Requiem For Saab
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· Score: 1
A lot of GMs good small platform engineering comes out of Opal. They decided it was foolish to give that operation to a competitor.
As for Saturn and Saab. GM has to weigh the short term cash the get against the creation of a long term competitor. The Saturn sale would have provided a dealer network for Chinese companies.
Ford was smart at least in the mid term. They sold their biggest sources of red ink to a possible future competitor. It will take years for Tata to recover from their mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
Exempt food and medical. That would reduce the percentage impact on the poor. Put a flat tax on everything else including services. Then at least everyone would have confidence that "the others" weren't able to lawyer their way out of their fair share.
Technical debut is a term that accurately describes the sum tradeoffs of the decisions made for each release. The granularity or technicality of the debt metric may vary by management tier but it's real. Refactorings or subsystem re-designs create credit that lets future releases go out the door more smoothly. Rushed changes use up some, or more than all, of that credit putting future releases at risk. Business wants the changes. IT management doesn't want to be unresponsive. You get tradeoffs. People who say they never make those tradeoffs are either kidding themselves or they've never worked in a "go to production" IT shop.
That put's them in the same ballpark. My kids tell me almost everyone already has an IPod touch for music and they happen to play games on them also , a lot.
Heh. I bet back in the mid '80s, electrical engineers didn't need to know a blessed thing about programming anything.
Right and we could only run our vacuum tube devices in electrical storms because there was no electrical grid.
I was a lab TA for a micro-electronics course. We used Z8 processors building traffic light controllers and the other projects they still do today. I loved the Z8 either with a built in serial port the piggy back 2K EPROM or the embedded basic interpreter.
I picked up a magnetic core memory based terminal and acoustic coupler in college. It was ancient even when I got it in the early-eighties. The unit weighed about 60 pounds and came with 4(?) ferrite bead memory boards that were maybe 10x10 inches. You could turn it off and unplug it and it would always turn back on with your last screen contents. I chuckled every time I turned it on because it was pretty unusual behavior for a terminal. ADM3s were popular around that time but I kept the beast of a terminal for years because I thought it was retro-cool.
Redundant SAN setup with replicated offsite storage , redundant paths and really big memory caches. Mongo cache starts having errors but looks like it's working (maybe because of error correction?). Later the backup cache starts having errors but the system appears to still be running. (Supposedly no one had ever see two controllers go bad) Some time later they decide to fail over to the backup site. Turns out the controllers were replicating corrupted data to the offsite storage. Bam! Bad luck and bad decisions can wipe out any fail safe.
Damage/problems created by Manning's activities are not necessarily the same as any damage due to posting wiki-leaks. I wasn't thinking of Wikileaks in particular. They released a subset of the data but Manning actually downloaded a lot more than that. The entire data set will/has make it into the wild.
He provided raw operational and tactical data to groups shooting at his fellow soldiers and people cooperating with them.
The American documents seem to show folks trying to accomplish a goal without getting killed in the process. It's chaotic with most operations taking place in the fog of war. Some folks go over the edge and some folks do whatever they can make sure they get to go home. Bad shit happens. There have been voices in the American military that have tried put more order in the chaos. That has been offset by the fact that their opponents know all civilian casualties will be laid at the feet of the Americans and by the fact that US forces.
Show me the documents that describe how "the other side" planned to blow up markets and mosques. Show me how the various Iraqi neighborhood "tribal cleansing" on their own. Lets see the numbers for the numbers of people beheaded and dumped in the rivers. Then we'll have an idea how much of the operations were a counterbalance to the activities of others.
I don't believe the report said the US killed 100,000 people. It said 100,000 died as a result of the war. Not exactly the same. How many died because of inter-tribal warfare and score settling?
You know they send you DVDs because they're in your request queue, right? Empty your queue and send the disk back. Problem solved!
Social Security is not "other people's money". Workers pay into Social Security our whole lives, which the Federal government borrows from to pay for the $TRILLION wars you Teabaggers love instead of, say, better and more universal education, more effective transit infrastructure, or other investments in our people. Social Security gets interest on those extremely safe Treasury bond investments, paying a minimum pension of about $14,000 annually per worker, substantially above the $11,000 poverty line. A government pension that people pay into themselves,
Social Security is a taxpayer funded pension with wealth redistribution components. Low income households get back 27% more income than they put in while middle income get back 5% more than they put in and high income get back less than they put in. That's not a big surprise and is another reminder that it's not really a personally funded pension program. The actual tax is twice the rate most folks realize because the company funded component is passed on to workers in the form of lower wages. (How else do you think companies pay for it?) The surplus borrowed against by the government to pay other bills effectively co-mingling Social Security and regular Federal funds. The notion that the money is sitting somewhere waiting for the day it is needed is ridiculous. The money will only be if we heavily tax future generations to "pay back" the loans on those "high quality" treasuries.
+1 Never mod points when I need them ....
Compare machines of the screen size before insulting someone. An apple refurb is $1349 plus tax and any additional RAM. That's pretty close to $1500 and significantly more costly than a 15" PC. I wouldn't give my kid a 13" machine for school if I could help it. They spend too much time staring at it over the 4 years.
I'm ok with WikiLeaks posting documents that shine a light on places it needs to be shown. They haven't surfaced any documents from dictatorships, (actual) terrorist organisations, human traffickers or non-western groups. WikiLeaks may be game changers but not in the way they expect, providing detailed information in only one direction. It may make it impossible for democracies to get cooperation in dangerous areas because identities will end up being public.
Every organisation has internal documents that show the chaos of decision making processes with competing priorities. They also have documents that describe who they work with. Organisations need free flowing discussions to make sure they understand the ramifications of their actions. Publicising intermediate documents makes that impossible.
WikiLeaks has an insurance policy that will get people killed. Their (self preservation) moral code isn't any different than any other self-interested organisation.
Named parameters are "a good thing". It is a piece of smalltalk syntax that works for any language.
"the creator didn't understand the value of name space partitioning in OOP" Dr Cox certainly understood. He just wanted to keep things as close to "pure" C as possible, and had a different way of partitioning spaces -- use 2 letter codes. This is primitive but surprisingly effective, and why all Cocoa objects begin with NS. Think of all the typing this saves, and you never have to wonder what namespace context you're in.
I like this approach and have used it in some large Java applications with good success. Packaging is great for name space divisions but naming conventions reduce programmer stress. How many "Date" classes are there in Java? How do you know which one is being used at any given time? java.sql.date java.util.Date, org.xxx.Date? Some classes import more than one class of the same name so that you can convert between them. (ugh) Look at Java annotations is that @Required tag? Is it spring, hibernate, libraryXXX or something else? I'd rather that every Apache class started with some standard prefix.
I thought it was an attempt to break the cycle of dependency that held people down across generations. Been to the projects? They were/are people warehouses not neighborhoods.
Countless proxy wars, the division of Europe and a set of policies where any dictatorship was fine as long as it was on our side? That's the time you want to go back to? No Thanks.
How often do folks come forward to say that they can't imagine that their associate/friend/neighbor/spouse couldn't have done the crime. Sometimes they're right and their wrong.
Can I have my unused mod points back? Well run meetings can have a point and can advance the project/business. Poorly organised meetings are a time waster. 15 min standup meetings seem to work well. Recurring status or other meetings that can be great when they only cover the actual agenda. Electronic meeting support tools like email length the decision making process and provide all kinds of opportunities for misunderstanding. Live meetings can let you close a problem / issue on a schedue. The bandwidth a meeting run by IM is a loT slower so you you spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for someone to finish typing. Of course that can be good since most of the time you're doing other work during the meeting and not paying attention. How many folks say they like IM meetings but really mean "my other stuff is more important than this meeting"?
I had this discussion with some mainframe folks a couple weeks back. They never rewrite code. They don't understand what all the code does so they always wrap existing code with new code when adding functionality. Sometimes the new code just stops the old code from executing in certain situations.
.. and also, you are correct. With code that needs to be deciphered, you're generally better off re-writing it.
Clean code tells you how, good comments tell you why.
Fixing the "how" becomes significantly easier when you know "why" the code was there in the first place.
Why is this so hard to teach developers? My last 3 projects had minimum documentation standards that developers always had trouble with. They would just add comments that said what the code did. We usually don't want comments that describe what the code does. We want to know why the code does what it does did that. "bug report foo said the exception exists because" or "Law X in state YY requires this behavior different from other states".
The exception is of course the hot shot developer who does all kinds optimizations or algorithms beyond the reach of most of the team. We can't always stop them from putting that code in so we force them to describe what it does.
Oil companies are losing access to much of the raw materials due to nationalization. They are (or will soon be) highly motivated to deliver synthetic portable power.
Full conversion to electric is never going to happen in the US. We appear to be opposed to the construction of the additional transmission capability that it would require.
A lot of GMs good small platform engineering comes out of Opal. They decided it was foolish to give that operation to a competitor.
As for Saturn and Saab. GM has to weigh the short term cash the get against the creation of a long term competitor. The Saturn sale would have provided a dealer network for Chinese companies.
Ford was smart at least in the mid term. They sold their biggest sources of red ink to a possible future competitor. It will take years for Tata to recover from their mistake.