Nice gallup poll from 2013 GrumpySteen. Typical strawman from a liberal lefty poster.
I'm a proud gun-owner and CCW holder, and I can tell you that you are full of shit with this argument. This isn't a lib versus con type of thing.
The subject is 2015 get with the times grandpa unless you can't keep up.
So are you claiming that in 2 years the proportion of gun ownership has shifted completely? Citations please. Because I fucking see the make-up of customers at gun shops and shooters at gun ranges on a regular basis, and those two are nothing short of a sausage fest.
Obviously, attendance to gun shops, gun shows or gun ranges are not bullet-proof indication of gender distribution of gun owners. But it is a really good proxy for it.
And unless you can provide data that proves that, on 2015 there were more women owning guns than man (a stark reversal from 2013), I'm safe to say you are full of shit, making up shit as you go, and don't know what you are talking about.
I've spent nine years working in teams which religiously follow pair programming.
That is one clusterfuck of a professional experience. To me this tells me a lot of work in those years constituted code monkeying.
For starters, we are engineers. We are supposed to use general principles to solve real world non-trivial problems. This implies a need for adapting processes to issues at hand. Professional discretion is required when performing activities. Following something religiously gives me the notion of people going through the emotions by orders given from above. Good way for herding cats (or to control damage done by a workforce of mediocre skills.)
Now, seriously - who does just coding? As we mature in this industry, our roles takes us progressively away from the keyboard. We have to go meetings, we have to review requirements, we have to bug triage, we have to review documentation, we have to review test cases, we have to lend a hand to product support, we have to get engaged in deployment, we have to be engaged in planning, etc, etc.
Some times, all of that. Most of the time, some of that. And most of the activities mentioned above require participation with different teams. Participation in those activities gradually increase with time as we evolve in the profession.
So, how the hell can someone claim to have been doing 9 years of pair programming? What the hell happened to all the other activities *other than programming* that are required for developing non-trivial software?
9 years of pair programming = wasted opportunity in professional development.
Actually I have learned quite a bit about efficiently running IDEs, debuggers and troubleshooting techniques from pair programming.
The amount of time devoted to efficiently learn *those things* should be very minimal compared to the total activity time.
Coding, not so much- I can pick that up just looking at someone else's code.
Or by doing, or reading, or applying general principles. Coding is such a basal thing. A good student right out of school should already know how to code well. What we get with work experience is the knowledge needed to work in projects, in organizations, in seeing troubleshooting patterns, in foreseeing issues, etc.
At one time a list would have included IBM and DEC . IBM totally dominated the computer market, and DEC had a solid share of the minicomputer and technical market. The fact that they are not in the list now illustrates that any of the above 5 could become an "also ran", or even be bought out.
Correct. And more to the point, IBM and DEC ran their shows for decades. There is nothing to prevent the currently existing big 5 to do the same. Anything can happen, but with all seriousness, I can give these companies (specifically Amazon) at least another decade. And in the software industry, a decade is an eternity.
To tell us how this planet oscillates the chemtrails so the 911 nuclear aliens can open up communications with the illuminati and space lizards to bring on the new world order and force us into fema camps.
But how exactly do you interview for people skills? Give them questions like "Tell me your greatest weakness"? Technical things are testable; people skills really aren't. The best you can do is introduce them to your team, have them hang around a bit, talk to them for a while, and get a "gut feeling" which amounts to nothing more than if you like them or not. A real test would basically be some kind of internship: have them work there for a week and see how they do, but the cost of doing that is pretty high, so no one ever does that.
I tell them, honesty, with a smile. The interviewers' reaction tells me a lot of what I need to know about the work culture (and give me a chance to bail out if I don't like what I see.)
Without the regulations, the only people who'd have known about the Chipotle e-coli outbreak would have been Chipotle.
Regulation doesn't exist to preserve shareholder value.
So the regulation worked to inform people. Good.
I think people would have found out anyway, but a rational person understands there's no way to know what would happen in an alternate future. Maybe a lot more people would have gotten sick in a lot more locations and, when people finally did hear about it, the company would have lost $10 Billion, or $12 Billion and would now be facing hundreds of lawsuits.
The point is: hurting customers is bad for business. There's a big incentive to not hurt customers. It's easier and more lucertive to sell stuff to people when you you don't hurt them.
Of course, this works well as long as the site is going to still be online in 5 (10? or 20?) years time and still have the same URL structure.
You can say that pretty much about everything. Documentation will become stale in much less than 5 years, and it requires revisiting (which includes pruning of things that are no longer applicable.)
You document what you know/need NOW, making references to exist NOW to the best of your knowledge, with an expectation that code AAAAAND documentation will evolved and be maintained/pruned/decomissioned.
We are not writing documents to be cast in stone for eons to come man.
Can't wait to see the failure rate of these things, be it with helium or magical farts from unicorns fed nothing but shavings off philosopher's stones.
Interesting. And would you feel the same way about someone who was fired for having AIDS because they were talking with their doctor on the only phone available to them, the one in the office?
Well, that's kind of a ridiculous argument, a non-sequitur. Employers by and large do not care if you use office equipment to do a call to your wife or doctor, or to do online banking during your lunch break at your cubicle. They care when people continuously abuse it - constantly chatting with your girlfriend, or for watching pr0n, or using the printer constantly to print brochures for your on-the-side job.
Things like that. That is what both rulings are about. But hey, feel free to believe your slippery-slope hypothetical of one person not having a cell phone and having to use the one and only office phone for a life-n-death event intercepted by the mythical pointy-haired chupacabra boss actually applies to this case.
The worst thing that can happen is that they start looking for your replacement, who you'll be asked to train.
That can happen at any time, and any person worth a damn in this industry knows how to ride that shit.
Be damn sure that your company values you at the level that you think you should be paid before bringing up this topic. I've renegotiated my salary, and stayed on for several years after that at a nice salary, but I think they resented it
You should always operate with that possibility in mind (and plan your A,B,C contingency plans accordingly.) ALWAYS.
, and I was let go with a chunk of my department the next time layoffs occurred.
Sorry to hear that. Still, I hope you were prepared for that. In this industry, you should always expect a layoff every 2 to 4 years, because it will happen regardless of whether you fight or not for what you want. So you might as well fight for what you want and expect to be let go (regardless of cause.)
And you will quickly be replaced with someone who doesn't whine. Demand too much, and don't let the door hit your ass as you exit.
Only if you suck enough as a worker (or work in a sufficiently toxic environment) to be dismissed just like that. You'd be surprised how much you can argue back with force (while being respectful obviously.)
Once you have worked long enough under enough (and different companies), you will see this. You will see this even more if you do your homework regarding where to work.
"The user does not exist to use the device; the device exists to be used by the user."
Right.
"If the user is unable or unwilling to quickly adapt to the device's UI, the fault is in the UI, not the user."
Wrong.
No. Right. The term "user" does not represent the ubiquitous lazy a-hole who is always difficult to work with. This term represents the broad sample of users, good, average, and bad (because, in general, not every user, or the majority, in a sample population, are bad or lazy or stupid.)
So, in general case, if the "user", meaning the sample population the term represents, is unable or unwilling to use a UI solution, then it is the UI's fault (or the system in question is not solving the problems that truly need solving.)
"If you want your device to be successful, you have to make them want to use it."
Right.
What do all these teach us, children? That things depend if you are to produce a device to be successful or to produce one to be useful.
It doesn't matter if a system is useful if it is not successful. Barring coercion from above, a successful system is adopted for allowing users to be useful with it.
That's a pretty lame excuse, nearly all the google maps competitors cloned the google maps JavaScript API for their services, and the differences are often minor enough that you can write a simple wrapper to handle it.
And that *you* I quoted in bold does not include *you* (yes, you, the poster). Otherwise, you would be doing it yourself. If you cannot or do not want to, for whatever reason, would that also be a "lame excuse"? As Torvald once said, talk is cheap, show me the code.
Google Confirms Next Android Version Won't Use Oracle's Proprietary Java APIs
That's not what Google is doing. It is switching the internals from Apache Harmony to OpenJDK. Seriously, who the fuck writes these titles and headings. Slashdot, news for nerds and hackers? Suuuuuuuuuuuuure.
I don't quite get why Google doesn't address one of the app developer's longest standing complaints, and ditch Java completely. They don't have to do it right away, just next version of Android they should feature a new runtime based on something else, and over oh say 5 years, (when the old apps are probably not terribly relevant) they can hard compile all of the existing apps in the play store that haven't been updated to both ARM and X86 (for e.g. old games that the developer no longer maintains but people still want to play) and then remove the old runtime.
I'm sure is in the works. It was actually a shrewd move, to use Java as it opens up the development field to potentially millions of developers with significant less tech-stack training (comparing to, say, Objective-C, for example.) I'm not saying this is ultimately good or bad. I'm simply saying it made sense at the time.
Myself, I think a higher level language like Python or Ruby, or something along the lines of Swift (with a shim/support for native C development when needed) would have been better, but that would have involved a learning curve that was critical to flatten at the time Android was being taken off the ground.
I believe at some point Google will start migrating off Java, or create an abstraction on top of it. It has too if the shenanigans with Oracle continue. But if that shit abates, then Java, as is, will remain.
It is not perfect. It is not even ideal. But it is adequate enough, plus it automatically leverages a large, almost two-decade long accumulated body of knowledge. That is not something to sneeze at.
It's an entire industry transforming itself. A paradigms shift.
We are living in a post PC world, and it's never going to come back.
With everything centralized, the hardware commoditized...there will not be any decent jobs left in this field (for somebody that lives in a Western nation).
Then ride that shit. That's how we get through times (source, survival of several paradigm shifts.)
The experts in the flavor of the month technologies (i.e. the buzzwords of which have arrived at the C-Level table) are in demand, the experts in the flavor of last year technology not so.
That's really astonishing. Who would have thought? How insightful, how unexpected!
No. The prediction is not just about buzzwords, but about trends that are taking place now (in particular DevOps and the "cloud" - I hate that term.
Anyways, whether those trends are for better or worse are beyond the point. I can see a dip occurring in 2016 and 2017. And we are bound to have one if we expect a 4-year cycle between dips and our last dip was in 2012 (a mild dip) preceded by the much worse dip of 2008.
Some places are more immune to such cyclic occurrences than others, but the general rule seems to apply. Expect a dip every 4-6 years. I've been through enough of them (and managed to get through them more or less in good footing), by paying attention to those cycles, to the trends and to always keeping my skills up to date.
Unless you are of Linus Torvald's caliber, ignore this at your own peril.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice gallup poll from 2013 GrumpySteen. Typical strawman from a liberal lefty poster.
I'm a proud gun-owner and CCW holder, and I can tell you that you are full of shit with this argument. This isn't a lib versus con type of thing.
The subject is 2015 get with the times grandpa unless you can't keep up.
So are you claiming that in 2 years the proportion of gun ownership has shifted completely? Citations please. Because I fucking see the make-up of customers at gun shops and shooters at gun ranges on a regular basis, and those two are nothing short of a sausage fest.
Obviously, attendance to gun shops, gun shows or gun ranges are not bullet-proof indication of gender distribution of gun owners. But it is a really good proxy for it.
And unless you can provide data that proves that, on 2015 there were more women owning guns than man (a stark reversal from 2013), I'm safe to say you are full of shit, making up shit as you go, and don't know what you are talking about.
I've spent nine years working in teams which religiously follow pair programming.
That is one clusterfuck of a professional experience. To me this tells me a lot of work in those years constituted code monkeying.
For starters, we are engineers. We are supposed to use general principles to solve real world non-trivial problems. This implies a need for adapting processes to issues at hand. Professional discretion is required when performing activities. Following something religiously gives me the notion of people going through the emotions by orders given from above. Good way for herding cats (or to control damage done by a workforce of mediocre skills.)
Now, seriously - who does just coding? As we mature in this industry, our roles takes us progressively away from the keyboard. We have to go meetings, we have to review requirements, we have to bug triage, we have to review documentation, we have to review test cases, we have to lend a hand to product support, we have to get engaged in deployment, we have to be engaged in planning, etc, etc.
Some times, all of that. Most of the time, some of that. And most of the activities mentioned above require participation with different teams. Participation in those activities gradually increase with time as we evolve in the profession.
So, how the hell can someone claim to have been doing 9 years of pair programming? What the hell happened to all the other activities *other than programming* that are required for developing non-trivial software?
9 years of pair programming = wasted opportunity in professional development.
Actually I have learned quite a bit about efficiently running IDEs, debuggers and troubleshooting techniques from pair programming.
The amount of time devoted to efficiently learn *those things* should be very minimal compared to the total activity time.
Coding, not so much- I can pick that up just looking at someone else's code.
Or by doing, or reading, or applying general principles. Coding is such a basal thing. A good student right out of school should already know how to code well. What we get with work experience is the knowledge needed to work in projects, in organizations, in seeing troubleshooting patterns, in foreseeing issues, etc.
At one time a list would have included IBM and DEC . IBM totally dominated the computer market, and DEC had a solid share of the minicomputer and technical market. The fact that they are not in the list now illustrates that any of the above 5 could become an "also ran", or even be bought out.
Correct. And more to the point, IBM and DEC ran their shows for decades. There is nothing to prevent the currently existing big 5 to do the same. Anything can happen, but with all seriousness, I can give these companies (specifically Amazon) at least another decade. And in the software industry, a decade is an eternity.
To tell us how this planet oscillates the chemtrails so the 911 nuclear aliens can open up communications with the illuminati and space lizards to bring on the new world order and force us into fema camps.
^^^ Pure win.
But how exactly do you interview for people skills? Give them questions like "Tell me your greatest weakness"? Technical things are testable; people skills really aren't. The best you can do is introduce them to your team, have them hang around a bit, talk to them for a while, and get a "gut feeling" which amounts to nothing more than if you like them or not. A real test would basically be some kind of internship: have them work there for a week and see how they do, but the cost of doing that is pretty high, so no one ever does that.
I tell them, honesty, with a smile. The interviewers' reaction tells me a lot of what I need to know about the work culture (and give me a chance to bail out if I don't like what I see.)
Without the regulations, the only people who'd have known about the Chipotle e-coli outbreak would have been Chipotle.
Regulation doesn't exist to preserve shareholder value.
So the regulation worked to inform people. Good.
I think people would have found out anyway, but a rational person understands there's no way to know what would happen in an alternate future. Maybe a lot more people would have gotten sick in a lot more locations and, when people finally did hear about it, the company would have lost $10 Billion, or $12 Billion and would now be facing hundreds of lawsuits.
The point is: hurting customers is bad for business. There's a big incentive to not hurt customers. It's easier and more lucertive to sell stuff to people when you you don't hurt them.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ba...
Of course, this works well as long as the site is going to still be online in 5 (10? or 20?) years time and still have the same URL structure.
You can say that pretty much about everything. Documentation will become stale in much less than 5 years, and it requires revisiting (which includes pruning of things that are no longer applicable.)
You document what you know/need NOW, making references to exist NOW to the best of your knowledge, with an expectation that code AAAAAND documentation will evolved and be maintained/pruned/decomissioned.
We are not writing documents to be cast in stone for eons to come man.
Can't wait to see the failure rate of these things, be it with helium or magical farts from unicorns fed nothing but shavings off philosopher's stones.
Interesting. And would you feel the same way about someone who was fired for having AIDS because they were talking with their doctor on the only phone available to them, the one in the office?
Well, that's kind of a ridiculous argument, a non-sequitur. Employers by and large do not care if you use office equipment to do a call to your wife or doctor, or to do online banking during your lunch break at your cubicle. They care when people continuously abuse it - constantly chatting with your girlfriend, or for watching pr0n, or using the printer constantly to print brochures for your on-the-side job.
Things like that. That is what both rulings are about. But hey, feel free to believe your slippery-slope hypothetical of one person not having a cell phone and having to use the one and only office phone for a life-n-death event intercepted by the mythical pointy-haired chupacabra boss actually applies to this case.
Why do you alias boxes to new names instead of just giving the new names their own boxes and retiring the old names?
Exactly my thoughts. I'm like WTF does what the OP describes?
Oh, and it's worth pointing out that dial-a-yield nuclear bombs are often effectively neutron bombs at their lower yield settings.
Oh, thanks for that. As if I didn't need something else to make me feel more hopeful about our world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No, chances are they were going to lay you off anyway. That has nothing to do with asking for a higher salary. Silliness.
Exactly. Layoffs every 2-4 years have been the norm in this industry for the last 20 years. Amazing that people still do not get this.
The worst thing that can happen is that they start looking for your replacement, who you'll be asked to train.
That can happen at any time, and any person worth a damn in this industry knows how to ride that shit.
Be damn sure that your company values you at the level that you think you should be paid before bringing up this topic. I've renegotiated my salary, and stayed on for several years after that at a nice salary, but I think they resented it
You should always operate with that possibility in mind (and plan your A,B,C contingency plans accordingly.) ALWAYS.
, and I was let go with a chunk of my department the next time layoffs occurred.
Sorry to hear that. Still, I hope you were prepared for that. In this industry, you should always expect a layoff every 2 to 4 years, because it will happen regardless of whether you fight or not for what you want. So you might as well fight for what you want and expect to be let go (regardless of cause.)
And you will quickly be replaced with someone who doesn't whine. Demand too much, and don't let the door hit your ass as you exit.
Only if you suck enough as a worker (or work in a sufficiently toxic environment) to be dismissed just like that. You'd be surprised how much you can argue back with force (while being respectful obviously.)
Once you have worked long enough under enough (and different companies), you will see this. You will see this even more if you do your homework regarding where to work.
Pedantic distinction without a difference, from the user's perspective.
"The user does not exist to use the device; the device exists to be used by the user."
Right.
"If the user is unable or unwilling to quickly adapt to the device's UI, the fault is in the UI, not the user."
Wrong.
No. Right. The term "user" does not represent the ubiquitous lazy a-hole who is always difficult to work with. This term represents the broad sample of users, good, average, and bad (because, in general, not every user, or the majority, in a sample population, are bad or lazy or stupid.)
So, in general case, if the "user", meaning the sample population the term represents, is unable or unwilling to use a UI solution, then it is the UI's fault (or the system in question is not solving the problems that truly need solving.)
"If you want your device to be successful, you have to make them want to use it."
Right.
What do all these teach us, children? That things depend if you are to produce a device to be successful or to produce one to be useful.
It doesn't matter if a system is useful if it is not successful. Barring coercion from above, a successful system is adopted for allowing users to be useful with it.
The expiry date for Windows 8.1 is different from that of Windows 8 - that one
Now, now, don't quote facts. That's not how we idiots play in slashdot.
That's a pretty lame excuse, nearly all the google maps competitors cloned the google maps JavaScript API for their services, and the differences are often minor enough that you can write a simple wrapper to handle it.
And that *you* I quoted in bold does not include *you* (yes, you, the poster). Otherwise, you would be doing it yourself. If you cannot or do not want to, for whatever reason, would that also be a "lame excuse"? As Torvald once said, talk is cheap, show me the code.
Google Confirms Next Android Version Won't Use Oracle's Proprietary Java APIs
That's not what Google is doing. It is switching the internals from Apache Harmony to OpenJDK. Seriously, who the fuck writes these titles and headings. Slashdot, news for nerds and hackers? Suuuuuuuuuuuuure.
I don't quite get why Google doesn't address one of the app developer's longest standing complaints, and ditch Java completely. They don't have to do it right away, just next version of Android they should feature a new runtime based on something else, and over oh say 5 years, (when the old apps are probably not terribly relevant) they can hard compile all of the existing apps in the play store that haven't been updated to both ARM and X86 (for e.g. old games that the developer no longer maintains but people still want to play) and then remove the old runtime.
I'm sure is in the works. It was actually a shrewd move, to use Java as it opens up the development field to potentially millions of developers with significant less tech-stack training (comparing to, say, Objective-C, for example.) I'm not saying this is ultimately good or bad. I'm simply saying it made sense at the time.
Myself, I think a higher level language like Python or Ruby, or something along the lines of Swift (with a shim/support for native C development when needed) would have been better, but that would have involved a learning curve that was critical to flatten at the time Android was being taken off the ground.
I believe at some point Google will start migrating off Java, or create an abstraction on top of it. It has too if the shenanigans with Oracle continue. But if that shit abates, then Java, as is, will remain.
It is not perfect. It is not even ideal. But it is adequate enough, plus it automatically leverages a large, almost two-decade long accumulated body of knowledge. That is not something to sneeze at.
ignorant rant mixed with bleats, snorts and narfs
You work in the real world, eh? It sure shows.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/...
This is not a bubble bursting.
It's an entire industry transforming itself. A paradigms shift.
We are living in a post PC world, and it's never going to come back.
With everything centralized, the hardware commoditized...there will not be any decent jobs left in this field (for somebody that lives in a Western nation).
Then ride that shit. That's how we get through times (source, survival of several paradigm shifts.)
The experts in the flavor of the month technologies (i.e. the buzzwords of which have arrived at the C-Level table) are in demand, the experts in the flavor of last year technology not so.
That's really astonishing. Who would have thought? How insightful, how unexpected!
No. The prediction is not just about buzzwords, but about trends that are taking place now (in particular DevOps and the "cloud" - I hate that term.
Anyways, whether those trends are for better or worse are beyond the point. I can see a dip occurring in 2016 and 2017. And we are bound to have one if we expect a 4-year cycle between dips and our last dip was in 2012 (a mild dip) preceded by the much worse dip of 2008.
Some places are more immune to such cyclic occurrences than others, but the general rule seems to apply. Expect a dip every 4-6 years. I've been through enough of them (and managed to get through them more or less in good footing), by paying attention to those cycles, to the trends and to always keeping my skills up to date.
Unless you are of Linus Torvald's caliber, ignore this at your own peril.