It would probably help if more of the story links worked. Most of them are ending in 404's currently which doesnt make any type of testing very useful.
I think its a little more complicated then just "what bank". I think choosing a bank is a lot like choosing a network provider to host your whatever. When you choose a network provided you probably talk to the staff, try to figure out if they have a clue, what hardware / software they use; etc. Choosing a bank isnt all that different.
Banks are all basically the same, the do about the same thing. The things that matter to you may be location, online banking, service, or something else all together. Personally all of these things matter to me. I want a bank that has a local branch, who has a clueful staff and provides olb.
There seems to be a growing trend at banks, atleast the smaller banks (ie, not boa/bone, etc) to use "off the shelf" online banking packages. I know of atleast three companies that produce online banking software; Digital Insight, Qup, and FundsXpress.
Does it matter who wrote it? Well, that depends, if you care about security / the safty of your account - you probably should. Is your banks software run under NT or *nix; was it done in C/Perl/VBasic? Does the software company host the machines, or are they physically at the bank tied into their core? What sort of security experince do the people desiging the software have?
Qup and Digital Insight, for example are NT based shops. Qup goes as far as putting a NT box in the bank and attaching it directly to the core processor - is that really a good idea? How about performance / scalability. As the need/desire for online banking grows how well will the service scale?
Security issues aside, interface and features also matter. What do you want out of your online banking package? Do you just want to see your balance? How far back? BoA limits your history to 60 days is that enough? Do you need to pay bills online? Should the bills be paper, or electronic (when possible) ? Do you want to be able to transfer money between accounts ? Wire Money ? Apply for loans? Intergration of finnical services into a sigle consistant interface ?
What about 1-2 years down the road? What then? Will your bank / banking software be able to do that?
IETF's IMPP Working group (charter) Maybe this was mentioned deeper in someones thread, but all the same i figured I would point out that there is a standard being developed. Last I heard the group was getting fairly close to having a spec.
When I was in middle school, I wore a Simpsons teeshirt to school that said "I'm bart simpson who the hell are you?" (or something to that effect). I was ofcourse sent to the principals office, he told me I had a few options: Change shirts, Go home, or allow him to cover the word up with a black marker. If you havn't guessed, the problem was the word "Hell", back then it was a big deal to say hell - in the massmedia sense. Socity blamed radio and televisions for the violence in schools.
Later in highschool this card game came out called magic. Lots of us played it then, and for about a year it was okay with everyone. However like all things something happened to someone who had a magic card somewhere on their person for some reason in the last few days - so obviously magic==problems in school. Sortly after whatever happened the game was banned. The game was just a step in the pathway to worshipping satan, in their eyes, I guess. Occultism was another nice area of distress, people wearing magic-stars and ankhs were "danger signs".
Around this time I think was when the first seeds agaisnt video games were planted. I clearly remember getting strange and concerned looks from various teachers the day I bought Ultima 8: Pagan .
The point of all this being that none of this is new, its just the same old crap happening again. The problem is its not just repeating itself, it seems recursive. What I mean by that is: each time something like this happens subculture gets pushed harder and harder.. and people snap. Its just numbers, of n people some % of n are going to snap.
I agree to some extent. At first I looked a the people i've interviewed/hired, the people i know who work at other companies. It occures to me that our hr people throw out about 90 of 100 resumes based on some simple filters. Of the 10 that we call in , lets say they all come in - about 1/20 will leave before finishing the test because its "too hard" (its not hard at all). About 50% of the rest fail the interview, so leaving about 4.5-5.5 people. About 2-3 of them will just not fit in, and we will try to hire 2-3 people. At best this suggests 5/100 people are worthwhile (not by anymeans a solid, accurate, or reasonable statistic). However even as a rough guess, it says something about the other ~95 people.
The "filters" arn't anything special , we try to look for people who don't look like code monkeys. The test asks questions like "write a function in perl to swap two variables". Not hard, but shows a little about the person.
So assuming that about 70 of thoes 95 people really are just worthless as anything but code monkeys , there are infact a lot of bad, lazy, slow programmers.
Even if LOC was a reasonable way to measure productivity - is it reasonable to count Generated LOC, or just "handwritten". For example, I hate writing CGI scripts, and i'm "lazy" so we (fundsxpress.com) wrote a system that inlines perl in html (like many others) and builds CGI scripts from that. On average it generates ~30k lines per "pile". No one "wrote" that code, but it exists all the same.
So i'm curious, why do all the programmers I know spend 60-100 hours a week at work? (myself included)
Further, that paper takes no account for the quality of the code - I can write a functional hack in a few hundred lines of code , and then have to rewrite it to do something a little different. OR I can designe one thing, which is abstract enough to do all of what i need. It takes less code, but more time to do correctly? Does this make me slack?
Slashdot Mirror
It would probably help if more of the story links
worked. Most of them are ending in 404's currently
which doesnt make any type of testing very useful.
I think its a little more complicated then just "what bank". I think choosing a bank is a lot
like choosing a network provider to host your whatever. When you choose a network provided you
probably talk to the staff, try to figure out if they have a clue, what hardware / software they use; etc. Choosing a bank isnt all that different.
Banks are all basically the same, the do about the
same thing. The things that matter to you may be
location, online banking, service, or something
else all together. Personally all of these things
matter to me. I want a bank that has a local branch, who has a clueful staff and provides olb.
There seems to be a growing trend at banks, atleast the smaller banks (ie, not boa/bone, etc) to use "off the shelf" online banking packages.
I know of atleast three companies that produce
online banking software; Digital Insight, Qup,
and FundsXpress.
Does it matter who wrote it? Well, that depends,
if you care about security / the safty of your
account - you probably should. Is your banks
software run under NT or *nix; was it done in
C/Perl/VBasic? Does the software company host
the machines, or are they physically at the bank
tied into their core? What sort of security
experince do the people desiging the software
have?
Qup and Digital Insight, for example are NT based
shops. Qup goes as far as putting a NT box in the
bank and attaching it directly to the core processor - is that really a good idea? How about
performance / scalability. As the need/desire for
online banking grows how well will the service
scale?
Security issues aside, interface and features also
matter. What do you want out of your online banking package? Do you just want to see your balance? How far back? BoA limits your history to
60 days is that enough? Do you need to pay bills
online? Should the bills be paper, or electronic (when possible) ? Do you want to be able to transfer money between accounts ? Wire Money ?
Apply for loans? Intergration of finnical services into a sigle consistant interface ?
What about 1-2 years down the road? What then? Will your bank / banking software be able to do
that?
impp.. se the message about it.
The group has existed for about a year, maybe a little more. Design takes time.
IETF's IMPP Working group (charter) Maybe this was mentioned deeper in someones thread, but all the same i figured I would point out that there is a standard being developed. Last I heard the group was getting fairly close to having a spec.
When I was in middle school, I wore a Simpsons teeshirt to school that said "I'm bart simpson who the hell are you?" (or something to that effect). I was ofcourse sent to the principals office, he told me I had a few options: Change shirts, Go home, or allow him to cover the word up with a black marker. If you havn't guessed, the problem was the word "Hell", back then it was a big deal to say hell - in the massmedia sense. Socity blamed radio and televisions for the violence in schools.
Later in highschool this card game came out called magic. Lots of us played it then, and for about a year it was okay with everyone. However like all things something happened to someone who had a magic card somewhere on their person for some reason in the last few days - so obviously magic==problems in school. Sortly after whatever happened the game was banned. The game was just a step in the pathway to worshipping satan, in their eyes, I guess. Occultism was another nice area of distress, people wearing magic-stars and ankhs were "danger signs".
Around this time I think was when the first seeds agaisnt video games were planted. I clearly remember getting strange and concerned looks from various teachers the day I bought Ultima 8: Pagan .
The point of all this being that none of this is new, its just the same old crap happening again. The problem is its not just repeating itself, it seems recursive. What I mean by that is: each time something like this happens subculture gets pushed harder and harder.. and people snap. Its just numbers, of n people some % of n are going to snap.
I agree to some extent. At first I looked a the people i've interviewed/hired, the people i know who work at other companies. It occures to me that our hr people throw out about 90 of 100 resumes based on some simple filters. Of the 10 that we call in , lets say they all come in - about 1/20 will leave before finishing the test because its "too hard" (its not hard at all). About 50% of the rest fail the interview, so leaving about 4.5-5.5 people. About 2-3 of them will just not fit in, and we will try to hire 2-3 people. At best this suggests 5/100 people are worthwhile (not by anymeans a solid, accurate, or reasonable statistic). However even as a rough guess, it says something about the other ~95 people.
The "filters" arn't anything special , we try to look for people who don't look like code monkeys. The test asks questions like "write a function in perl to swap two variables". Not hard, but shows a little about the person.
So assuming that about 70 of thoes 95 people really are just worthless as anything but code monkeys , there are infact a lot of bad, lazy, slow programmers.
Even if LOC was a reasonable way to measure productivity - is it reasonable to count Generated LOC, or just "handwritten". For example, I hate writing CGI scripts, and i'm "lazy" so we (fundsxpress.com) wrote a system that inlines perl in html (like many others) and builds CGI scripts from that. On average it generates ~30k lines per "pile". No one "wrote" that code, but it exists all the same.
So i'm curious, why do all the programmers I know spend 60-100 hours a week at work? (myself included)
Further, that paper takes no account for the quality of the code - I can write a functional hack in a few hundred lines of code , and then have to rewrite it to do something a little different. OR I can designe one thing, which is
abstract enough to do all of what i need. It takes less code, but more time to do correctly? Does this make me slack?
Alternativly you could go the way of things like crystal meth / nodoze.. etc.