Assume there is a universal (and extremely long) string U that encodes a countable set containing all problems P_i (encoded as decision problems) that are possible in this Universe. We can trivially see that indeed U must contain all problems that exist for it to represent the Universe. Otherwise, it does not represent the Universe.
Furthermore, if every decision problem P_i in U is decidable, then there is a (not necessarily unique) Turing Machine T_i that halts in finite time for each problem P_i in U. With this assumption, then there would be a Universal Turing Machine T that is a chain of all turning machines T_i that can compute (and thus give meaning) to all problems P_i in U (the string encoding of the universe.) That is, T is the universe.
But the halting problem is not in U. In fact, U cannot contain neither semi decidable nor undecidable problems (which was our base assumption). However, the halting problem (and all other semi-decidable and undecidable problems) exists in the Universe. U then, cannot be an encoding of the universe, and T (a turing machine) cannot be the Universe either.
qed.
It may just be a matter of scale - we simply aren't able to take a large enough view. A turing machine, if you only look at one small part of it, is no longer turing-complete. And the presence of a turing-complete machine doesn't mean the enclosing reality suddenly is turing-complete. Think babushka dolls, as in Soviet Russia, Turing completes YOU!
Dude, the fact that there are problems in this Universe (and thus part of it) that are not turing computable (a mathematical fact indeed) does indicate that the universe is not a Turing complete nor Turing computable. The universe is naturally uncountable.
Publicly traded and un-kosher doesn't mean fuck-all when there's big money at stake and lawyers and accountants involved. Look at what has happened over the last 10 years. Weren't Enron, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, et al. publicly traded companies?
Non sequitur + red herring. Apply some reading comprehension man.
I didn't say that un-kosher agreements cannot happen with publicly traded companies. What I'm saying is that legal settlements of the type being described here (paying royalties) aren't typically done under the table. Why would they? How could they?
Nothing that you have said here (though being true) apply to the argument at hand, nor to the specific litigation/settlements between Sun and MS being described here.
Is it really that fucking hard to display some sort of reading comprehension?
Why does he consider it a mistake to work for IBM?
Does it have something to do with the sales oriented culture at IBM?
I would like some clarification, Thanks.
The only explanation is that even smart people aren't above rhetorical nonsense.
@RightSaidFred99 I would take Gosling's word over you who did some Google searches.. these agreements aren't public and you won't just find them by typing in a search engine. So it really doesn't matter what you believe.. unless you were AT Sun or AT Microsoft when this went down.. your opinion means just a little less then gum on the bottom of a shoe.
Yes, they are (as so any litigation that might lead to these agreements.) These are publicly traded companies. It would be extremely, extremely rare that something of such magnitude would be hidden away from public eyes. In fact, anything hidden like that would typically be considered un-kosher and suspect of investigation.
No. In other words... don't remain sub par (at best) or perennially incompetent (at worst). There is no justification for a IT person with 5-6 years in the field still exhibiting programming skills below junior/senior-year level.
If members of a professional field happens to display sub par or mediocre skills, that's a 1) problem of education at a social level, and 2) a problem of work ethics at a personal level. People like that deserve to be replaced. Period.
This is a problem since most people are average by definition.
It is not a problem if by average people are not incompetent or mediocre. Only in software and IT do we see such amount of mediocrity. And, though the field is still young compared to other engineering fields, it is not a new one either (and thus, there is no excuse anymore for the sorry state of affairs we work with nowadays.)
If it is a problem to a large number of individuals because they are mediocre and easily replaceable, then too bad, even if they allowed their field to turn into shit to the point average == suckage. Tonight at 10PM news, life is not fair.
Meh, that's just splitting hairs. How many IT people are getting outsourced to India? Vs. how many plumbers? Perhaps job security is less important these days than career security.
That is such utter crap. I've been hearing the same crap about how IT people are getting outsourced to India for the last 15 years. People who care or worry about being outsourced should ask themselves whether they have the skills (or inclination to get the skills) that make them irreplaceable or nearly irreplaceable. "Cookie cutter" programmers and tech support are replaceable. High-tech specialists are not. Your career security is your skills and in your ability and drive to stay ahead.
I for one I'm happy to see some people being outsourced. The IT and software industry has been saturated for quite a while, with salaries inflated beyond what a set of skills justify. If you have decent skills (even if fresh out of college) and do your homework and never let your career stagnate (job != career), you'll be fine even in the midst of an outsourcing feeding frenzy.
Wasn't it Blockbuster who ran the mom and pop video rental stores out of business with their corporate muscle?
Yep they were. That's why I don't feel that much of a nostalgia in seeing Blockbuster going the way of the trilobites. The mom and pop
video rental stores? Those are the ones I truly, truly, truly miss. That was one part of Americana (and if I dare to say, part of the
community fabric) that we will never see again.
Blockbuster? Won't be missed.
Mom and Pop video stores? Irreplaceable cultural icons. Sorely missing (even if from an impractical sense of nostalgia) even when confronted with the convenience and economic advantages of video streaming.
i'm not absolving engineering of responsibility. there are certainly plenty blame to go around. There is however a fairly large window in the development of any software where it doesn't work yet. Many of us have had the experience of dealing with unrealistic or flat out wrong views from management within this window.
To me, that seems to closely parallel what's happening with this project. The developers didn't claim they were done. I don't think there is a hard deadline for when it will be done. It's clearly not done.
I have also seen the flip side where developers (never me OF COURSE) have claimed to have finished something but it was shoddy and broken. This is usually where the, "it's a feature, not a bug" argument comes in. That doesn't seem to be what's transpiring with this particular project.
I think I understand what you are saying, but I don't think it applies to this specific case. It is not that the software is not done (as in partially functioning). It is that the things that are done, are done wrong, and wrong specifically on security (which was supposed to be the warcry behind Diaspora.)
Take a look at the article, look at the errors. These aren't caused by code being pre-alpha, but by... I'll dare not to say. Developers need to understand that web development is more than just making dynamic web pages. And when it comes with a project with specific security and integrity ambitions like Diaspora, they need to learn a bit about security. Not a dis, but an observation (even if it is a cold one.)
Yeah, volunteers have never put up a building before.
Existence of a past event (volunteers for X) is not a guarantee for the occurrence another independent event (volunteers for Y where Y has no relation to X). You don't rely on work being done with resources you cannot reliable predict to count on.
Because if Diaspora is dependent on the OSS community their users are screwed.
Isn't that a bit like saying "if getting this building completed is dependent on construction workers, we're screwed"? Why would you make such a disparaging remark about the very people that will be keeping this thing going?
Because the problems encountered seem to be fundamental and numerous and which would require a reliable and consistent work force to fix them fast enough to make the whole enterprise workable. That is, the task seems monumental. This is not the same as starting a OSS project from a solid, workable core, buggy as it may be, but workable for the intended goals.
Since the goal of Diaspora (its entire reason of existence) was security and privacy, they really f* up. And the OSS contributors that are behind it are it. They are it. Can you actually predict with sufficient reliability that sufficient OSS volunteers will arise to the challenge? Maybe so. Maybe not. As poetic and commendable the hope might be, it is not something that you base a project on.
Not trying to be mean, and kudos for those behind Diaspora, but what matters from an engineering point of view is not whether a statement is disparaging, but whether if it is true.
it didn't "launch". as i understand it, they released some kind of alpha. I know i've worked for many managers who have this weird idea that software should be perfect before it's even done, but i didn't expect so many people in this community to hold that ideal.
There is a difference between perfect and free of fundamental errors in numbers so large that their correction became problematic if not resource-infeasible. There seem to be engineers who failed to understand this particular tenet (usually blaming managers as the ones who "never get it".)
Really? How much "interest" does the janitor cleaning Microsoft's floors really have?
None because the janitor is not one of those citizens who owns Microsoft. Epic failz in economics right there.
Sure it's a job but I don't hear MS speaking-out for the rights of janitors.
It's not MS job to speak about the rights of others except for its own.
Often they do just the opposite.
Example please.
Which is why Corporations, Rocks, Trees, and other things should all be treated the same - no rights.
Rocks and trees do not pay taxes, nor provide payroll to employees, nor conduct business. Corporations do. And if you argue that corporations have obligations (obey the lay,pay taxes and incur in expenses for their day to day operations), then they are also entitled of rights. As much as you would like to do so for the sake of building strawmen, you can't divorce obligations from rights.
If you don't have a right to vote in the ballot box, neither should you have any of the other rights.
In that case my 20-month old daughter has no rights since she cannot vote in the ballot box.
Let Human Rights be for humans. Only.
Not all rights are human rights, not even those enjoyed by humans. Stop the rhetorical nonsense.
Newspapers used to have a position called a "fact-checker" and rather than just reprinting corporate and political press releases verbatim, they fact checked them first and would write a story about the release, pointing out any falsehoods. It isn't about book sales versus newspaper sales, it is about journalistic integrity.
That stopped being true a long time ago with newspaper running the ideological gamut to the detriment of journalistic integrity. It only took a long time (starting with Dan Rather) for people to realize journalistic integrity is, for the most part, not a guaranteed attribute.
I can study inside out postgres on my own -or- I can pay for formation -or- I can pay external expertise
No argument there.
you can't with oracle. you need trainig, you need schools or you need external expertise, no manuals provided with the software help you in administering an advanced oracle configuration
I'm going to forward this to several of my Oracle-inclined colleagues so that they chuckle a little. That there are no manuals or reading material available for free (online both inside and outside of Oracle's sources) with which to study, nor material that you get when you pay for technical support SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO DO SO, that's just unsubstantiated baloney.
but you don't want to see the differences between the constraints for the software utilizations so meh.
There are differences, but they aren't as constrained and as money-bleeding as you would like them to be as you build your strawmen.
And I'm not even an Oracle guy (though I've worked with Oracle installations.) I'll use (and I've used) Postgres, MySQL, even jdbm and non-relational database systems and desktop databases (FoxPro, Clipper, DBase) in the old days. Both in small and large systems.
I would not use Oracle for many situations at all.
But I don't work by drinking rhetorical kool aid. I don't exaggerate the difficulties so that I can build a fictitious soap box from which to praise my favorite open source database system.
Everything you keep saying, in particular about the inability to study for an Oracle certification without free sources (or working with it as if it were an herculean effort) is absolute bull. One has to wonder the technical abilities or lack thereof if these efforts truly appear herculean.
As Jon Stewart told Tucker Carlson in Crossfire. "No. No. I'm not going to be your monkey." I don't see your imaginary differences; kool aid does not induce me to see what does not exist.
anything oracle provides beyond postgres feature set is so hard to setup that you need an oracle consultant or a sysadm trained on some level of oracle dba certifications;
And what's the problem with having a certification? People get RH certification to make sure they actually know RH. People get Oracle certifications to understand the material. Java developers like myself use certifications to keep ourselves up to date with all the details required for building large scale enterprise systems. Computer security experts get cissp certificates to make sure they know their crap (and to demonstrate they have been examined on their knowledge.)
So what's your point? What's the problem?
And that is absolute bullshit for I've seen oracle installations set up by people w/o a certification (though we have had a need for sysadmins with a good grasp of system tuning for efficient I/O (and clustering if you need it), but that's a given for any non-trivial system.
either way you're paying a tax on oracle for using a feature you already paid for.
Only if you are having trouble setting it up. And it's not a tax, it's a service fee for a service that you need if you can't install the software whose license you are paying for.
Again, 10 years of work in very large ente
tell me, ever used oracle clustering where the master is also in HA?
And the fact that people actually grade the post I'm replying to as insightful shows the actual degree of industrial exposure sported by many of these/. fanboys. I mean really, can't these fools think in engineering terms without choking into whatever flavor of pseudo-liberating koolaid currently en vogue?
There are sometimes unavoidable complexities, however I know first-hand companies providing 'product' and 'services' rapidly prioritize services. At first, the services may be a 'necessary evil' to enable the complex software, but the revenue quickly becomes intoxicating and soon any effort toward ease-of-use and out-of-the-box usability becomes a threat to services revenue.
This is absolutely true, but at least my experience with Oracle (for supporting Oracle databases), former BEA for their EE containers, and Sun and HP (for supporting their hardware) has not been like that. Rarely in the companies I've worked with I've seen the constant remora-like latching of consultancy as described here. In 10 years working in Solaris/HP-UX/Linux environments, I can count with less than half of my fingers a need of bringing expensive vendor consultancy. In fact, I can only remember three incidents within the last 8 years were we had to bring Sun engineers to help with catastrophic hardware failures... out of several dozens of hardware boxes running almost non-stop, 24x7 on production environments serving global traffic. And only two tech support tickets with BEA (and that was for container versions past their end-of-life.) Not bad to be honest.
Having capable sysadmins, network admins and database admins (which is a must in any large organization) ensure transparent operations without much incidences. This is not stuff that I'm pulling out of my ass. I have actual data from actual work places supporting applications that weren't sometimes that well-written, supporting actual operations.
The greatest costs have always been in software development and application-specific deployments. Not on expensive, vendor-specific consultancy fees. Maybe my work experiences as a developer and sysadmin make me an outlier, but when I talk to many of my colleagues on both sides of the UNIX/MS fence, that's their experience, too.
I would suggest people take what I say here with a grain of salt, for they might have actual sour experiences when it comes to vendor consulting draining their pockets. However, that has never been the case in any place I've worked in the last 10 years in large enterprises (nor in 15 years of software development.)
If the idea was to cause panic or start a conspiracy theory, it failed miserably. Nothing to see.
Oracle is simply making a new kernel available which is newer and has more enhancements. Instead of waiting for RH, they are taking control of that piece of the distribution (if customers want it).
Oracle should do the same with the rest of the OS and try to innovate there, instead of simply distributing pristine RHEL with their logos. But then, they already have Solaris which is much more suited for the markets they are aiming at (high-end enterprise servers), so why waste the time ?
Market and product development. For people and businesses that run Oracle products, this is actually a good thing. For people who don't use/want/need Oracle products, it is not necessarily relevant. For/. fanboys, this is is good stuff for building strawmen (the later not directed at you, but the hacker-wannabes that seem to pollute the/. forums with their ramblings.)
oh please, oracle customer complexities are a result from the oracle usage and not the motivation for it.
Oh wow, what a revelation. Using a complex software causes usage complexity. Here, have a banana as a price.
Yeah, usage of Oracle causes usage complexity. Does that mean that fine tuning a Linux distro to ease the pain of configuring a box suitable for Oracle products is something trivial, or non important, or what? What was exactly the point?
It doesn't even have to be for running Oracle database-related problems. When you run a EE container, be it JBoss or WebLogic (now a Oracle product) on a HP-UX, Linux or Solaris box that sits between a HTTP server and a database server, you are still bound to tune it for efficient performance according to the specifics of the system. I cannot think of anyone simply dropping a box with software on it on production without the necessary configuration.
That configuration is repetitive, tedious and specific for any non-trivial product for non-trivial usage. It is hardly an Oracle side effect. Typically sysadmins have to automate those configuration changes (or keep a golden ghost pre-configured image.) No matter what, that is still a burden. Better yet to have a vendor backing a set of configuration items already packaged into a turnkey solution.
oracle is one of those business providing useless solution so they can charge you twice for the consultancy.
Just because you don't like it and like to apply partisan ideologies to engineering, that does not mean that what they do is useless. It might be useless to you, might be useless in some (actually many) business contexts. But that does not mean anything on the general case where having an Oracle solution (not just an oracle database) is a useless solution.
So you really think you can eliminate the Taliban by war?
Reading comprehension. Elimination doesn't simply mean erradication. It means beating them to the point of being combat ineffectual so that the transitional government can take up his defense. Again, you read too much of history without actually understanding it.
They're not an army, they are an idea.
Rhetorical nonsense. They are a militant group fueled by an idea and by ethnic tensions. They are to be eliminated or contained by military means and by reconstructing Afghanistan (so that youth have better alternatives.) As it is, they are a fringe even among the conservative Pashtuns.
It strikes me as the same stupidity the romans exhibited when they thought they could eliminate christians by feeding them to the lions.
More rhetorical nonsense.
It is this illusion of america as the world power, the guys who can go into bad places to "fix" them.
And how long have you been holding that close to your dear heart to say it? It has nothing to do with illusion. Right or wrong, 9/11 happened and the only recourse of action was to attack them, and to assist those Afghans already at war with the Taliban, or are they an illusion, too?
If my history serves correctly, it worked once in the entire american history - with Germany after WW2.
So? You keep trying to come up with analogies as if trying to impart a lesson.
You forget, however, that this was with a people that were looking up to the US, considered it a land of dreams and were from a similar culture anyways.
Now try to put yourself into the average Afghan's shoes. There are some people, not from any foreign country, but from the Great Satan.
Unfortunately, you seem to forget that the majority of Afghans were against the Taliban yoke to begin with, in particular among the non-Pashtun and moderate Pashhuns (the bulk of the population.) You are still trying to make this as if it were a war of assimilation. It is not.
They speak only gibberish in their own language and come over to tell you - after all you've endured with the russians and the Taliban and the warlord and the drug trade and everything else - how to run your life. They are also heretics at best, followers of an outright evil religion at worst, some even those guys you've heard about slaughtering your brothers in far away Palestine.
Oh, and they bombed the village next door yesterday. Some people you knew died.
Yeah, you are sure to listen to them. Well, if you treasure your survival, you will pretend to, wait until they leave (like every invader before them) and then go back to your old ways.
If they go their old ways, that's their problem. Our problem is the containment of the Taliban and Al Qaeda till the moment we can live the Afghan government to their devices. Hopefully, we will help in the reconstruction (it's the moral thing to do.)
But there is nothing for us to prevent them to go their old ways. There is no pretension from our part, even if you like to think of it for the sake of building a strawman to argue with.
Reality is that they might go back their old ways. It's a given, but it is also a given that the non-Pashtun are far more favorable to amicable relation with the US, sort of like the Kurds in Iraq. That will be a different state of affairs that will have to be evaluated accordingly.
You call me arrogant. I call you partisantly disingenuous at best (and hypocrite at worst).
As I have no part in american politics, I mostly find both parties equally distasteful. Though the republicans under Bush certainly set new standards.
You are a partisan in the sense that you decide to look at things through myopic partisan eyes, attributing connotations that do not exist simply for the sake of expressing the arguments you harbor. As far as I know in the english language, partisanship has not been confined to partake in American politics, has it?
Had the Iraq war never started, chances are we would have been out of Afghanistan quite a while ago.
You would've been the first foreigners in over 2000 years to win a war in Afghanistan. Please. I find the Iraq war as offensive as anyone with a brain, but claiming that "if only (whatever) we would have won in Afghanistan" is arrogant at best.
Why? Why arrogant? In fact, the arrogant is you since you seem to forget two things:
1. The war in Afghanistan wasn't meant to be a war of conquest but one of extermination of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. That's what the American people signed for. That we got something else (thanks to Bush), that's another thing.
2. The Northern Alliance was a great participant, committing the bulk of the fighters in the drive through Kabul down to Kandahar. So it was not then (as it is not now) a war between a Western power and the Afghans, but a war between Afghan combatants, one of them backed by the coalition.
Had Al Qaeda (an organization foreign to the Afghans) been eliminated - which we could have had we had the focus - we could have obtain the rightful objectives of the war. We could have had forced the Taliban to the negotiation table at best (or liquidate them if needed), and the transitional Afghan government would have been in better shape to take the reigns of its own defense. We could have started the reconstruction of Afghanistan (which is still taking place, but at a much slower and painful pace.)
That would have meant to win the war. That would have meant the measure to victory. It is infantile to think the measure of victory in a war is one of complete conquest.
It also is disingenuous and dishonest to compare the colonial wars of old with the war effort of dislodging and eliminating Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan (and if possible, correct wrongs committed against that nation by us and the USSR during the cold war.)
You call me arrogant. I call you partisantly disingenuous at best (and hypocrite at worst).
1. Maybe "UnknownFool" meant that now that a "CNN-approved" president is in office, we no longer see coverage of Code Pink, Sheehan, lists of dead soldiers, etc.
Not sure what you are talking about. We are still getting coverage of the war in Afghanistan, and we don't see much from Iraq cuz... GASP... we pulled out?
2. According to Code Pink (http://wwww.codepinkforpeace.org) they are a group of women opposed to war. They don't justify the war in Afghanistan any more than they justify the war in Iraq.
There is always a group that will oppose something. Wow, what a great revelation captain obvious. What matters is not whether a group based on an opinion exists, but whether it is 1)( significant and 2) effective in spreading their opinion if such is their desire.
I suspect though, that if a Republican were to hold office after 2012, we'd see coverage of their protests.
That's just bullshit, and I say this as a lifetime registered Republican who voted against Obama. One of the main reasons the GOP lost is because its pandering to the fringe right and their stupid rhetorical nonsense. Stop drinking the koolaid; it's choking your brain off oxygen.
I wonder if they've been co-opted?
Wonder if you must.
3. A common theme among the various Tea-Partiers is an observation of hypocracy by media, progressives, etc. Note speeches that begin with "they don't get it...". Progressives ignore the Tea Party movement's valid comments and focus on the lunatic fringe at their peril.
Progressives and even Republicans like me ignore the Tea Party exactly because of their lunatic fringes. It is impossible dialog with them. It's all about fear mongering. And I don't really care if they have a point so long as they tacitly pander to individuals who do not see me (or other fellow Americans) as equal but instead as what is wrong with America (as if there were anything wrong enough to cause such partisan stupidity.)
At the end of the day, it is a calm, rational voice that will prevail. Enough of the smarmy, snarky, patronizing, gotch-ya-based screeds. Enough already, we're all convinced that you must be the smartest guys in the chat room, who cares? - is anyone listening?
A calm, rational voice would never think that war coverage has been reduced by a news media conspiracy just because Obama is the white house.
Slashdot Mirror
Prove it.
Easy. Proof by contradiction:
Assume there is a universal (and extremely long) string U that encodes a countable set containing all problems P_i (encoded as decision problems) that are possible in this Universe. We can trivially see that indeed U must contain all problems that exist for it to represent the Universe. Otherwise, it does not represent the Universe.
Furthermore, if every decision problem P_i in U is decidable, then there is a (not necessarily unique) Turing Machine T_i that halts in finite time for each problem P_i in U. With this assumption, then there would be a Universal Turing Machine T that is a chain of all turning machines T_i that can compute (and thus give meaning) to all problems P_i in U (the string encoding of the universe.) That is, T is the universe.
But the halting problem is not in U. In fact, U cannot contain neither semi decidable nor undecidable problems (which was our base assumption). However, the halting problem (and all other semi-decidable and undecidable problems) exists in the Universe. U then, cannot be an encoding of the universe, and T (a turing machine) cannot be the Universe either.
qed.
It may just be a matter of scale - we simply aren't able to take a large enough view. A turing machine, if you only look at one small part of it, is no longer turing-complete. And the presence of a turing-complete machine doesn't mean the enclosing reality suddenly is turing-complete. Think babushka dolls, as in Soviet Russia, Turing completes YOU!
Dude, the fact that there are problems in this Universe (and thus part of it) that are not turing computable (a mathematical fact indeed) does indicate that the universe is not a Turing complete nor Turing computable. The universe is naturally uncountable.
Publicly traded and un-kosher doesn't mean fuck-all when there's big money at stake and lawyers and accountants involved. Look at what has happened over the last 10 years. Weren't Enron, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, et al. publicly traded companies?
Non sequitur + red herring. Apply some reading comprehension man.
I didn't say that un-kosher agreements cannot happen with publicly traded companies. What I'm saying is that legal settlements of the type being described here (paying royalties) aren't typically done under the table. Why would they? How could they?
Nothing that you have said here (though being true) apply to the argument at hand, nor to the specific litigation/settlements between Sun and MS being described here.
Is it really that fucking hard to display some sort of reading comprehension?
Why does he consider it a mistake to work for IBM? Does it have something to do with the sales oriented culture at IBM? I would like some clarification, Thanks.
The only explanation is that even smart people aren't above rhetorical nonsense.
@RightSaidFred99 I would take Gosling's word over you who did some Google searches .. these agreements aren't public and you won't just find them by typing in a search engine. So it really doesn't matter what you believe .. unless you were AT Sun or AT Microsoft when this went down .. your opinion means just a little less then gum on the bottom of a shoe.
Yes, they are (as so any litigation that might lead to these agreements.) These are publicly traded companies. It would be extremely, extremely rare that something of such magnitude would be hidden away from public eyes. In fact, anything hidden like that would typically be considered un-kosher and suspect of investigation.
tags!!!(10+1)
In other words...don't be average.
No. In other words... don't remain sub par (at best) or perennially incompetent (at worst). There is no justification for a IT person with 5-6 years in the field still exhibiting programming skills below junior/senior-year level.
If members of a professional field happens to display sub par or mediocre skills, that's a 1) problem of education at a social level, and 2) a problem of work ethics at a personal level. People like that deserve to be replaced. Period.
This is a problem since most people are average by definition.
It is not a problem if by average people are not incompetent or mediocre. Only in software and IT do we see such amount of mediocrity. And, though the field is still young compared to other engineering fields, it is not a new one either (and thus, there is no excuse anymore for the sorry state of affairs we work with nowadays.)
If it is a problem to a large number of individuals because they are mediocre and easily replaceable, then too bad, even if they allowed their field to turn into shit to the point average == suckage. Tonight at 10PM news, life is not fair.
Meh, that's just splitting hairs. How many IT people are getting outsourced to India? Vs. how many plumbers? Perhaps job security is less important these days than career security.
That is such utter crap. I've been hearing the same crap about how IT people are getting outsourced to India for the last 15 years. People who care or worry about being outsourced should ask themselves whether they have the skills (or inclination to get the skills) that make them irreplaceable or nearly irreplaceable. "Cookie cutter" programmers and tech support are replaceable. High-tech specialists are not. Your career security is your skills and in your ability and drive to stay ahead.
I for one I'm happy to see some people being outsourced. The IT and software industry has been saturated for quite a while, with salaries inflated beyond what a set of skills justify. If you have decent skills (even if fresh out of college) and do your homework and never let your career stagnate (job != career), you'll be fine even in the midst of an outsourcing feeding frenzy.
Wasn't it Blockbuster who ran the mom and pop video rental stores out of business with their corporate muscle?
Yep they were. That's why I don't feel that much of a nostalgia in seeing Blockbuster going the way of the trilobites. The mom and pop video rental stores? Those are the ones I truly, truly, truly miss. That was one part of Americana (and if I dare to say, part of the community fabric) that we will never see again.
Blockbuster? Won't be missed.
Mom and Pop video stores? Irreplaceable cultural icons. Sorely missing (even if from an impractical sense of nostalgia) even when confronted with the convenience and economic advantages of video streaming.
Let's say it: they were just a bunch of RoR hipsters thinking they shat the Philosopher's Stone and they will bring salvation to the world.
NOT.
Strawman? Is that you?
i'm not absolving engineering of responsibility. there are certainly plenty blame to go around. There is however a fairly large window in the development of any software where it doesn't work yet. Many of us have had the experience of dealing with unrealistic or flat out wrong views from management within this window. To me, that seems to closely parallel what's happening with this project. The developers didn't claim they were done. I don't think there is a hard deadline for when it will be done. It's clearly not done. I have also seen the flip side where developers (never me OF COURSE) have claimed to have finished something but it was shoddy and broken. This is usually where the, "it's a feature, not a bug" argument comes in. That doesn't seem to be what's transpiring with this particular project.
I think I understand what you are saying, but I don't think it applies to this specific case. It is not that the software is not done (as in partially functioning). It is that the things that are done, are done wrong, and wrong specifically on security (which was supposed to be the warcry behind Diaspora.)
Take a look at the article, look at the errors. These aren't caused by code being pre-alpha, but by... I'll dare not to say. Developers need to understand that web development is more than just making dynamic web pages. And when it comes with a project with specific security and integrity ambitions like Diaspora, they need to learn a bit about security. Not a dis, but an observation (even if it is a cold one.)
Yeah, volunteers have never put up a building before.
Existence of a past event (volunteers for X) is not a guarantee for the occurrence another independent event (volunteers for Y where Y has no relation to X). You don't rely on work being done with resources you cannot reliable predict to count on.
Because if Diaspora is dependent on the OSS community their users are screwed.
Isn't that a bit like saying "if getting this building completed is dependent on construction workers, we're screwed"? Why would you make such a disparaging remark about the very people that will be keeping this thing going?
Because the problems encountered seem to be fundamental and numerous and which would require a reliable and consistent work force to fix them fast enough to make the whole enterprise workable. That is, the task seems monumental. This is not the same as starting a OSS project from a solid, workable core, buggy as it may be, but workable for the intended goals.
Since the goal of Diaspora (its entire reason of existence) was security and privacy, they really f* up. And the OSS contributors that are behind it are it. They are it. Can you actually predict with sufficient reliability that sufficient OSS volunteers will arise to the challenge? Maybe so. Maybe not. As poetic and commendable the hope might be, it is not something that you base a project on.
Not trying to be mean, and kudos for those behind Diaspora, but what matters from an engineering point of view is not whether a statement is disparaging, but whether if it is true.
it didn't "launch". as i understand it, they released some kind of alpha. I know i've worked for many managers who have this weird idea that software should be perfect before it's even done, but i didn't expect so many people in this community to hold that ideal.
There is a difference between perfect and free of fundamental errors in numbers so large that their correction became problematic if not resource-infeasible. There seem to be engineers who failed to understand this particular tenet (usually blaming managers as the ones who "never get it".)
Really? How much "interest" does the janitor cleaning Microsoft's floors really have?
None because the janitor is not one of those citizens who owns Microsoft. Epic failz in economics right there.
Sure it's a job but I don't hear MS speaking-out for the rights of janitors.
It's not MS job to speak about the rights of others except for its own.
Often they do just the opposite.
Example please.
Which is why Corporations, Rocks, Trees, and other things should all be treated the same - no rights.
Rocks and trees do not pay taxes, nor provide payroll to employees, nor conduct business. Corporations do. And if you argue that corporations have obligations (obey the lay ,pay taxes and incur in expenses for their day to day operations), then they are also entitled of rights. As much as you would like to do so for the sake of building strawmen, you can't divorce obligations from rights.
If you don't have a right to vote in the ballot box, neither should you have any of the other rights.
In that case my 20-month old daughter has no rights since she cannot vote in the ballot box.
Let Human Rights be for humans. Only.
Not all rights are human rights, not even those enjoyed by humans. Stop the rhetorical nonsense.
Newspapers used to have a position called a "fact-checker" and rather than just reprinting corporate and political press releases verbatim, they fact checked them first and would write a story about the release, pointing out any falsehoods. It isn't about book sales versus newspaper sales, it is about journalistic integrity.
That stopped being true a long time ago with newspaper running the ideological gamut to the detriment of journalistic integrity. It only took a long time (starting with Dan Rather) for people to realize journalistic integrity is, for the most part, not a guaranteed attribute.
Someone needs to tell PC Pro's Jon Honeyball about these two.
I can study inside out postgres on my own -or- I can pay for formation -or- I can pay external expertise
No argument there.
you can't with oracle. you need trainig, you need schools or you need external expertise, no manuals provided with the software help you in administering an advanced oracle configuration
I'm going to forward this to several of my Oracle-inclined colleagues so that they chuckle a little. That there are no manuals or reading material available for free (online both inside and outside of Oracle's sources) with which to study, nor material that you get when you pay for technical support SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO DO SO, that's just unsubstantiated baloney.
but you don't want to see the differences between the constraints for the software utilizations so meh.
There are differences, but they aren't as constrained and as money-bleeding as you would like them to be as you build your strawmen.
And I'm not even an Oracle guy (though I've worked with Oracle installations.) I'll use (and I've used) Postgres, MySQL, even jdbm and non-relational database systems and desktop databases (FoxPro, Clipper, DBase) in the old days. Both in small and large systems.
I would not use Oracle for many situations at all.
But I don't work by drinking rhetorical kool aid. I don't exaggerate the difficulties so that I can build a fictitious soap box from which to praise my favorite open source database system.
Everything you keep saying, in particular about the inability to study for an Oracle certification without free sources (or working with it as if it were an herculean effort) is absolute bull. One has to wonder the technical abilities or lack thereof if these efforts truly appear herculean.
As Jon Stewart told Tucker Carlson in Crossfire. "No. No. I'm not going to be your monkey." I don't see your imaginary differences; kool aid does not induce me to see what does not exist.
anything oracle provides beyond postgres feature set is so hard to setup that you need an oracle consultant or a sysadm trained on some level of oracle dba certifications;
And what's the problem with having a certification? People get RH certification to make sure they actually know RH. People get Oracle certifications to understand the material. Java developers like myself use certifications to keep ourselves up to date with all the details required for building large scale enterprise systems. Computer security experts get cissp certificates to make sure they know their crap (and to demonstrate they have been examined on their knowledge.)
So what's your point? What's the problem?
And that is absolute bullshit for I've seen oracle installations set up by people w/o a certification (though we have had a need for sysadmins with a good grasp of system tuning for efficient I/O (and clustering if you need it), but that's a given for any non-trivial system.
either way you're paying a tax on oracle for using a feature you already paid for.
Only if you are having trouble setting it up. And it's not a tax, it's a service fee for a service that you need if you can't install the software whose license you are paying for. Again, 10 years of work in very large ente
tell me, ever used oracle clustering where the master is also in HA?
Yes. Your point? That it was hard *for you*?
And the fact that people actually grade the post I'm replying to as insightful shows the actual degree of industrial exposure sported by many of these /. fanboys. I mean really, can't these fools think in engineering terms without choking into whatever flavor of pseudo-liberating koolaid currently en vogue?
There are sometimes unavoidable complexities, however I know first-hand companies providing 'product' and 'services' rapidly prioritize services. At first, the services may be a 'necessary evil' to enable the complex software, but the revenue quickly becomes intoxicating and soon any effort toward ease-of-use and out-of-the-box usability becomes a threat to services revenue.
This is absolutely true, but at least my experience with Oracle (for supporting Oracle databases), former BEA for their EE containers, and Sun and HP (for supporting their hardware) has not been like that. Rarely in the companies I've worked with I've seen the constant remora-like latching of consultancy as described here. In 10 years working in Solaris/HP-UX/Linux environments, I can count with less than half of my fingers a need of bringing expensive vendor consultancy. In fact, I can only remember three incidents within the last 8 years were we had to bring Sun engineers to help with catastrophic hardware failures... out of several dozens of hardware boxes running almost non-stop, 24x7 on production environments serving global traffic. And only two tech support tickets with BEA (and that was for container versions past their end-of-life.) Not bad to be honest.
Having capable sysadmins, network admins and database admins (which is a must in any large organization) ensure transparent operations without much incidences. This is not stuff that I'm pulling out of my ass. I have actual data from actual work places supporting applications that weren't sometimes that well-written, supporting actual operations.
The greatest costs have always been in software development and application-specific deployments. Not on expensive, vendor-specific consultancy fees. Maybe my work experiences as a developer and sysadmin make me an outlier, but when I talk to many of my colleagues on both sides of the UNIX/MS fence, that's their experience, too.
I would suggest people take what I say here with a grain of salt, for they might have actual sour experiences when it comes to vendor consulting draining their pockets. However, that has never been the case in any place I've worked in the last 10 years in large enterprises (nor in 15 years of software development.)
If the idea was to cause panic or start a conspiracy theory, it failed miserably. Nothing to see. Oracle is simply making a new kernel available which is newer and has more enhancements. Instead of waiting for RH, they are taking control of that piece of the distribution (if customers want it). Oracle should do the same with the rest of the OS and try to innovate there, instead of simply distributing pristine RHEL with their logos. But then, they already have Solaris which is much more suited for the markets they are aiming at (high-end enterprise servers), so why waste the time ?
Market and product development. For people and businesses that run Oracle products, this is actually a good thing. For people who don't use/want/need Oracle products, it is not necessarily relevant. For /. fanboys, this is is good stuff for building strawmen (the later not directed at you, but the hacker-wannabes that seem to pollute the /. forums with their ramblings.)
oh please, oracle customer complexities are a result from the oracle usage and not the motivation for it.
Oh wow, what a revelation. Using a complex software causes usage complexity. Here, have a banana as a price.
Yeah, usage of Oracle causes usage complexity. Does that mean that fine tuning a Linux distro to ease the pain of configuring a box suitable for Oracle products is something trivial, or non important, or what? What was exactly the point?
It doesn't even have to be for running Oracle database-related problems. When you run a EE container, be it JBoss or WebLogic (now a Oracle product) on a HP-UX, Linux or Solaris box that sits between a HTTP server and a database server, you are still bound to tune it for efficient performance according to the specifics of the system. I cannot think of anyone simply dropping a box with software on it on production without the necessary configuration.
That configuration is repetitive, tedious and specific for any non-trivial product for non-trivial usage. It is hardly an Oracle side effect. Typically sysadmins have to automate those configuration changes (or keep a golden ghost pre-configured image.) No matter what, that is still a burden. Better yet to have a vendor backing a set of configuration items already packaged into a turnkey solution.
oracle is one of those business providing useless solution so they can charge you twice for the consultancy.
Just because you don't like it and like to apply partisan ideologies to engineering, that does not mean that what they do is useless. It might be useless to you, might be useless in some (actually many) business contexts. But that does not mean anything on the general case where having an Oracle solution (not just an oracle database) is a useless solution.
Engineering != rhetorical bile.
So you really think you can eliminate the Taliban by war?
Reading comprehension. Elimination doesn't simply mean erradication. It means beating them to the point of being combat ineffectual so that the transitional government can take up his defense. Again, you read too much of history without actually understanding it.
They're not an army, they are an idea.
Rhetorical nonsense. They are a militant group fueled by an idea and by ethnic tensions. They are to be eliminated or contained by military means and by reconstructing Afghanistan (so that youth have better alternatives.) As it is, they are a fringe even among the conservative Pashtuns.
It strikes me as the same stupidity the romans exhibited when they thought they could eliminate christians by feeding them to the lions.
More rhetorical nonsense.
It is this illusion of america as the world power, the guys who can go into bad places to "fix" them.
And how long have you been holding that close to your dear heart to say it? It has nothing to do with illusion. Right or wrong, 9/11 happened and the only recourse of action was to attack them, and to assist those Afghans already at war with the Taliban, or are they an illusion, too?
If my history serves correctly, it worked once in the entire american history - with Germany after WW2.
So? You keep trying to come up with analogies as if trying to impart a lesson.
You forget, however, that this was with a people that were looking up to the US, considered it a land of dreams and were from a similar culture anyways.
Now try to put yourself into the average Afghan's shoes. There are some people, not from any foreign country, but from the Great Satan.
Unfortunately, you seem to forget that the majority of Afghans were against the Taliban yoke to begin with, in particular among the non-Pashtun and moderate Pashhuns (the bulk of the population.) You are still trying to make this as if it were a war of assimilation. It is not.
They speak only gibberish in their own language and come over to tell you - after all you've endured with the russians and the Taliban and the warlord and the drug trade and everything else - how to run your life. They are also heretics at best, followers of an outright evil religion at worst, some even those guys you've heard about slaughtering your brothers in far away Palestine. Oh, and they bombed the village next door yesterday. Some people you knew died.
Yeah, you are sure to listen to them. Well, if you treasure your survival, you will pretend to, wait until they leave (like every invader before them) and then go back to your old ways.
If they go their old ways, that's their problem. Our problem is the containment of the Taliban and Al Qaeda till the moment we can live the Afghan government to their devices. Hopefully, we will help in the reconstruction (it's the moral thing to do.)
But there is nothing for us to prevent them to go their old ways. There is no pretension from our part, even if you like to think of it for the sake of building a strawman to argue with.
Reality is that they might go back their old ways. It's a given, but it is also a given that the non-Pashtun are far more favorable to amicable relation with the US, sort of like the Kurds in Iraq. That will be a different state of affairs that will have to be evaluated accordingly.
You call me arrogant. I call you partisantly disingenuous at best (and hypocrite at worst).
As I have no part in american politics, I mostly find both parties equally distasteful. Though the republicans under Bush certainly set new standards.
You are a partisan in the sense that you decide to look at things through myopic partisan eyes, attributing connotations that do not exist simply for the sake of expressing the arguments you harbor. As far as I know in the english language, partisanship has not been confined to partake in American politics, has it?
Had the Iraq war never started, chances are we would have been out of Afghanistan quite a while ago.
You would've been the first foreigners in over 2000 years to win a war in Afghanistan. Please. I find the Iraq war as offensive as anyone with a brain, but claiming that "if only (whatever) we would have won in Afghanistan" is arrogant at best.
Why? Why arrogant? In fact, the arrogant is you since you seem to forget two things:
1. The war in Afghanistan wasn't meant to be a war of conquest but one of extermination of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. That's what the American people signed for. That we got something else (thanks to Bush), that's another thing.
2. The Northern Alliance was a great participant, committing the bulk of the fighters in the drive through Kabul down to Kandahar. So it was not then (as it is not now) a war between a Western power and the Afghans, but a war between Afghan combatants, one of them backed by the coalition.
Had Al Qaeda (an organization foreign to the Afghans) been eliminated - which we could have had we had the focus - we could have obtain the rightful objectives of the war. We could have had forced the Taliban to the negotiation table at best (or liquidate them if needed), and the transitional Afghan government would have been in better shape to take the reigns of its own defense. We could have started the reconstruction of Afghanistan (which is still taking place, but at a much slower and painful pace.)
That would have meant to win the war. That would have meant the measure to victory. It is infantile to think the measure of victory in a war is one of complete conquest.
It also is disingenuous and dishonest to compare the colonial wars of old with the war effort of dislodging and eliminating Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan (and if possible, correct wrongs committed against that nation by us and the USSR during the cold war.)
You call me arrogant. I call you partisantly disingenuous at best (and hypocrite at worst).
1. Maybe "UnknownFool" meant that now that a "CNN-approved" president is in office, we no longer see coverage of Code Pink, Sheehan, lists of dead soldiers, etc.
Not sure what you are talking about. We are still getting coverage of the war in Afghanistan, and we don't see much from Iraq cuz... GASP... we pulled out?
2. According to Code Pink (http://wwww.codepinkforpeace.org) they are a group of women opposed to war. They don't justify the war in Afghanistan any more than they justify the war in Iraq.
There is always a group that will oppose something. Wow, what a great revelation captain obvious. What matters is not whether a group based on an opinion exists, but whether it is 1)( significant and 2) effective in spreading their opinion if such is their desire.
I suspect though, that if a Republican were to hold office after 2012, we'd see coverage of their protests.
That's just bullshit, and I say this as a lifetime registered Republican who voted against Obama. One of the main reasons the GOP lost is because its pandering to the fringe right and their stupid rhetorical nonsense. Stop drinking the koolaid; it's choking your brain off oxygen.
I wonder if they've been co-opted?
Wonder if you must.
3. A common theme among the various Tea-Partiers is an observation of hypocracy by media, progressives, etc. Note speeches that begin with "they don't get it...". Progressives ignore the Tea Party movement's valid comments and focus on the lunatic fringe at their peril.
Progressives and even Republicans like me ignore the Tea Party exactly because of their lunatic fringes. It is impossible dialog with them. It's all about fear mongering. And I don't really care if they have a point so long as they tacitly pander to individuals who do not see me (or other fellow Americans) as equal but instead as what is wrong with America (as if there were anything wrong enough to cause such partisan stupidity.)
At the end of the day, it is a calm, rational voice that will prevail. Enough of the smarmy, snarky, patronizing, gotch-ya-based screeds. Enough already, we're all convinced that you must be the smartest guys in the chat room, who cares? - is anyone listening?
A calm, rational voice would never think that war coverage has been reduced by a news media conspiracy just because Obama is the white house.