You are missing the difference. Linux is open-source, and not under the control of any one vendor. Distros go EOL, kernels basically do not; you can always upgrade to a newer kernel, and you're not going to break anything in the process. So if you're an ATM maker and you roll your own Linux distro, it's pretty trivial for you to just keep upgrading to the latest (stable, not bleeding-edge) kernel. Or, if you prefer to have a vendor do your OS work for you, your vendor (like Wind River, Timesys, etc.) can do that too. So basically "yes" to your second paragraph, first sentence. If they're not qualified, they can outsource it to one of the many commercial Linux companies. And if they get sick of their chosen vendor, they can easily switch to a different vendor, or move it in-house; these are options that aren't present with MS.
I'm sick of the "it's more secure" nonsense. It has the potential to be secured properly by the integrator, but that's it.
Aren't you basically contradicting yourself here? If it has the potential to be secured properly (and the alternative does not), then doesn't that make it more secure by definition?
To make a crappy car analogy, let's suppose I have two options for cars, and I want a car that's extremely safe (as in offers the best crash protection). Option 1 is a car that has freely-available design documentation and which I can build myself from cheap, readily-made parts. It's also very cheap and easy for me to add a bunch of airbags, and other advanced features like crumple zones, impact-resistant fuel tank, etc. Other people get this car and build their own versions without some of these options, or they add in other features that render these protective features less effective, but not everyone does, and some build their own version with all the best protective features without any extra fluff that decreases safety. Option 2 is a car with the hood welded shut and which you can't modify at all. It has a drivers-side airbag only, and it claims to have a crumple zone but there's a lot of controversy about exactly how well it actually works in a crash, and there's very little real crash-test data available for it as the company that makes Option 2 is very secretive about the design of this car (Option 1 has been crash-tested numerous different ways by different agencies). You can't add any extra airbags either. Obviously, Option 1 is the safer choice, even though that means you can't just grab some off-the-shelf version put together by someone who doesn't care much about safety.
So basically, we just need to get Obama to adopt all the very worst right-wing policies, and Fox News will push left-wing policies in response, and all the "conservatives" will become leftists? Maybe if we can get Obama to do another about-face on gay marriage, and come out against it, Fox News and its conservative viewers will all suddenly be all for gay marriage.
It has to do with far, far more than just visas and immigration policies, it has to do with all the policies backed by these administrations (and the Congresses during their terms) and their cumulative effect on the American economy: NAFTA and other trade policies, wars, defense spending, spending on research (or lack thereof), corporate welfare, and on and on.
There's two big problems I've seen with companies over my career, aside from the typical problems of salary and unwillingness to train: 1) location 2) work environment
You hit on this with your comment about putting your office in the middle of nowhere. I've seen this many times, in fact some dumb defense company contacted me yesterday trying to recruit me for a job in some podunk town in upstate NY. The salary range sounds reasonable enough (probably quite good in fact considering the lower CoL in that area), and they even offer relocation, but the whole thing is a giant risk. If I were to take the relo, pack up my family's stuff and move there, and then in 2 months decide I hate the job so much I can't do it any more, what then? In a metro area, it's not that big a deal; I can just look for another job. In podunk, I'm screwed; there's no other jobs there, and now I have to pay back the relo bonus (most of them have terms requiring you to stay with the company for a certain amount of time or else pay it back prorated), lose the money I spent relocating, and spend thousands more relocating yet again, plus be on the hook for a year's worth of rent. That's a lot of risk for a job. It's so much safer to stay in a metro area, and this is probably one reason why Silicon Valley is still so popular for tech workers. If you invest in the expensive real estate there, you don't have to move if your job dries up, you just take a job across the street.
The other big problem with companies I see is the work environment. The CEOs whine about not having enough workers, but have they looked at the shitty work environment they give us? They don't even give us cubicles any more, they give us these fucking "open-plan work areas", where you get zero privacy and constant noise and commotion, making it impossible to concentrate. How the hell do they expect programmers to work in an environment like that? Worse, they have the gall to claim it's "good for collaboration", yet these same assholes have walled offices for themselves. It's the height of hypocrisy.
What gets me is these guys think, oh lets just outsource this to India and China. Forgetting that then India and China get the factories, trained work force, supply chains, technical know how, etc. And while the managers still control trademarks, patents and distribution, that won't last either.
So what's the problem? India and China get the factories and know-how, and for now the American companies control patents and trademarks and distribution. The executives at the American companies make lots of money. In a decade or two, the American companies aren't needed any more and dry up, and Indian and Chinese companies dominate, but the American executives don't care because they've all retired with generous golden parachutes, and are sitting on a tropical beach being waited on by beautiful women. Why would they care about the state of the US at that point?
Oh please; no one buys that "professional association" bullshit any more, unless you're in the civil engineering industry. There's countless software engineers who don't have any licenses, nor should they, and you're going to try to claim they're not "true engineers"? Give it up.
There's some problems with your assumptions (though they might even out some as you said); women are fertile more years than that, though the level of fertility is much lower in older women and there's higher risks of problems. (I'll also assume we haven't lost our medical technology here, so no more risk of a woman dying in childbirth than now.) Also, while some women are highly fertile and can have a baby a year, not all are; many aren't very fertile at all and have a hard time conceiving. Also, not all women are going to want to pump out babies continuously; having children is very hard on a woman's body, and not all women are like Ms. Duggar, able to keep up a high birthrate for decades. So in more real-world numbers, where the entire population hasn't suddenly decided to go into extreme baby-making mode, it's going to take more than 40 years, though perhaps not multiple centuries.
However, my prior assumption was that the birthrate wouldn't be radically changed, maybe just increased a reasonable amount to account for the sudden lack of population (e.g. women decide they want to have an average of 4 children instead of 1.6). In that case, it would take multiple centuries (or more) to recover the population level, whereas with 90% of men disappearing, it wouldn't take that long at all.
I'm not an entomologist either, so you could be right. Still, even though insects lay eggs instead of gestating, I'd think there's a maximum capacity to how many eggs a female can produce in a given timespan, even if she's surrounded by males.
Yes, but even so, female insects can only make so many eggs at a time. Male insects aren't limited to how many females they can fertilize. But I guess the ultimate question is: what's the biggest limiter of population in mosquitos? Obviously it's something environmental, not their birth rate.
But still, my point is, if you just kill off males, you're not doing as much damage as killing off females; the remaining males will just mate more. Now if you sterilize the males so they continue to "mate", this will have a big effect, since the neutered males will still be competing with the normal ones, keeping them from breeding as much. So if that's what the eradication programs are doing, that makes perfect sense. But just eliminating males doesn't seem to make much sense at all to me for the reasons stated above.
It only takes one male to fertilize countless females. If you want to eliminate a species, you focus your efforts on the females, not the males. We could lose 90% of the human male population tomorrow and our population would be back to normal in a generation or less. If we lost 90% of the human female population, it'd take centuries to get back to our present population. Males simply don't affect population much; kill off a bunch, and the remaining ones have more sex partners.
Yep, that's why everyone just uses Windows now, since it's freely available thanks to Microsoft releasing the full source code in their Shared Source program. When that happened, other companies just took it and sold it as their own.
You've proven my point. They're not bald, so they don't count. I added bald there for a reason. There's no beefy, bald, biker-gang members who get in bar brawls who are female. Also, are the biker dykes in gangs? I added that in there for a reason too. Not all bikers are in gangs and wear gang vests; that's almost universally men.
The problem here is that men don't do this kind of thing. You will never hear a story of a woman who's a company founder or executive, and her stay-at-home husband targets other men in the company and intimidates them and tries to get them fired. This kind of underhanded behavior is entirely female. It doesn't mean that most women are like this, but a subset of them are. It's just like how most men are not beefy, bald-headed biker gang members who like to get into bar brawls, but you won't find a single woman like that, only men. I'm sorry if that's "sexist", but it's reality, and the reality is that men and women ARE different, no matter how much people try to deny it.
No, people voted for him because he was marginally better than the Republican. That doesn't really mean they supported him. "Support" seems to imply some level of enthusiasm. Among many, there was no enthusiasm.
However, there were many who did really support him (enthusiastically). The Obama voters seemed to break into two camps: one camp of disillusioned people angered by his broken promises and continuation of Bush policies, but who voted for him anyway because Romney would likely have been worse in their opinion, and another camp of idiotic sycophants who changed their opinions to fit Obama's actions, and became enthusiastic defenders of NSA spying.
There's no difference between watching and gawking. Gawking and staring are the same thing, and it's pretty hard to not stare at someone who's intentionally making a spectacle of themselves, with the intention of gaining attention. If you don't want people staring at you, stop making a spectacle of yourself.
The hula-hooping women surely weren't forced to display themselves that way, just like people who sing karaoke aren't usually forced into it by someone. If you don't want to be the object of attention, there's no one forcing you to grab a hula hoop and spin your hips around. You can complain about this being "unprofessional" all you want, but the fact remains that these women did this on their own.
So the men are supposed to look the other way when women are hula-hooping? Please.
Maybe they shouldn't have brought any hula hoops to the party to begin with. But they did, and women used them; you can't expect men not to look at them when they put themselves on display like that.
If some male in the office got up in front of everyone and tried dancing (in a horrible, Elaine-like way), you don't think everyone would stare at him too?
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You are missing the difference. Linux is open-source, and not under the control of any one vendor. Distros go EOL, kernels basically do not; you can always upgrade to a newer kernel, and you're not going to break anything in the process. So if you're an ATM maker and you roll your own Linux distro, it's pretty trivial for you to just keep upgrading to the latest (stable, not bleeding-edge) kernel. Or, if you prefer to have a vendor do your OS work for you, your vendor (like Wind River, Timesys, etc.) can do that too. So basically "yes" to your second paragraph, first sentence. If they're not qualified, they can outsource it to one of the many commercial Linux companies. And if they get sick of their chosen vendor, they can easily switch to a different vendor, or move it in-house; these are options that aren't present with MS.
I'm sick of the "it's more secure" nonsense. It has the potential to be secured properly by the integrator, but that's it.
Aren't you basically contradicting yourself here? If it has the potential to be secured properly (and the alternative does not), then doesn't that make it more secure by definition?
To make a crappy car analogy, let's suppose I have two options for cars, and I want a car that's extremely safe (as in offers the best crash protection). Option 1 is a car that has freely-available design documentation and which I can build myself from cheap, readily-made parts. It's also very cheap and easy for me to add a bunch of airbags, and other advanced features like crumple zones, impact-resistant fuel tank, etc. Other people get this car and build their own versions without some of these options, or they add in other features that render these protective features less effective, but not everyone does, and some build their own version with all the best protective features without any extra fluff that decreases safety. Option 2 is a car with the hood welded shut and which you can't modify at all. It has a drivers-side airbag only, and it claims to have a crumple zone but there's a lot of controversy about exactly how well it actually works in a crash, and there's very little real crash-test data available for it as the company that makes Option 2 is very secretive about the design of this car (Option 1 has been crash-tested numerous different ways by different agencies). You can't add any extra airbags either. Obviously, Option 1 is the safer choice, even though that means you can't just grab some off-the-shelf version put together by someone who doesn't care much about safety.
Because apparently all of them are equally incompetent.
So basically, we just need to get Obama to adopt all the very worst right-wing policies, and Fox News will push left-wing policies in response, and all the "conservatives" will become leftists? Maybe if we can get Obama to do another about-face on gay marriage, and come out against it, Fox News and its conservative viewers will all suddenly be all for gay marriage.
Yes, that's exactly the point I was trying to make. Obama is just the latest in a long line of shitty presidents, all with mostly identical policies.
It has to do with far, far more than just visas and immigration policies, it has to do with all the policies backed by these administrations (and the Congresses during their terms) and their cumulative effect on the American economy: NAFTA and other trade policies, wars, defense spending, spending on research (or lack thereof), corporate welfare, and on and on.
There's two big problems I've seen with companies over my career, aside from the typical problems of salary and unwillingness to train:
1) location
2) work environment
You hit on this with your comment about putting your office in the middle of nowhere. I've seen this many times, in fact some dumb defense company contacted me yesterday trying to recruit me for a job in some podunk town in upstate NY. The salary range sounds reasonable enough (probably quite good in fact considering the lower CoL in that area), and they even offer relocation, but the whole thing is a giant risk. If I were to take the relo, pack up my family's stuff and move there, and then in 2 months decide I hate the job so much I can't do it any more, what then? In a metro area, it's not that big a deal; I can just look for another job. In podunk, I'm screwed; there's no other jobs there, and now I have to pay back the relo bonus (most of them have terms requiring you to stay with the company for a certain amount of time or else pay it back prorated), lose the money I spent relocating, and spend thousands more relocating yet again, plus be on the hook for a year's worth of rent. That's a lot of risk for a job. It's so much safer to stay in a metro area, and this is probably one reason why Silicon Valley is still so popular for tech workers. If you invest in the expensive real estate there, you don't have to move if your job dries up, you just take a job across the street.
The other big problem with companies I see is the work environment. The CEOs whine about not having enough workers, but have they looked at the shitty work environment they give us? They don't even give us cubicles any more, they give us these fucking "open-plan work areas", where you get zero privacy and constant noise and commotion, making it impossible to concentrate. How the hell do they expect programmers to work in an environment like that? Worse, they have the gall to claim it's "good for collaboration", yet these same assholes have walled offices for themselves. It's the height of hypocrisy.
What gets me is these guys think, oh lets just outsource this to India and China. Forgetting that then India and China get the factories, trained work force, supply chains, technical know how, etc. And while the managers still control trademarks, patents and distribution, that won't last either.
So what's the problem? India and China get the factories and know-how, and for now the American companies control patents and trademarks and distribution. The executives at the American companies make lots of money. In a decade or two, the American companies aren't needed any more and dry up, and Indian and Chinese companies dominate, but the American executives don't care because they've all retired with generous golden parachutes, and are sitting on a tropical beach being waited on by beautiful women. Why would they care about the state of the US at that point?
Oh please; no one buys that "professional association" bullshit any more, unless you're in the civil engineering industry. There's countless software engineers who don't have any licenses, nor should they, and you're going to try to claim they're not "true engineers"? Give it up.
You mean "Thanks Obama and Bush and Clinton and Bush and Reagan!"
LONG TERM sleep deprivation. As in your lifestyle - swing shifters, etc.
So what about people who permanently work 3rd shift? Is it just a problem for people who keep shifting their schedule around?
There's some problems with your assumptions (though they might even out some as you said); women are fertile more years than that, though the level of fertility is much lower in older women and there's higher risks of problems. (I'll also assume we haven't lost our medical technology here, so no more risk of a woman dying in childbirth than now.) Also, while some women are highly fertile and can have a baby a year, not all are; many aren't very fertile at all and have a hard time conceiving. Also, not all women are going to want to pump out babies continuously; having children is very hard on a woman's body, and not all women are like Ms. Duggar, able to keep up a high birthrate for decades. So in more real-world numbers, where the entire population hasn't suddenly decided to go into extreme baby-making mode, it's going to take more than 40 years, though perhaps not multiple centuries.
However, my prior assumption was that the birthrate wouldn't be radically changed, maybe just increased a reasonable amount to account for the sudden lack of population (e.g. women decide they want to have an average of 4 children instead of 1.6). In that case, it would take multiple centuries (or more) to recover the population level, whereas with 90% of men disappearing, it wouldn't take that long at all.
I'm not an entomologist either, so you could be right. Still, even though insects lay eggs instead of gestating, I'd think there's a maximum capacity to how many eggs a female can produce in a given timespan, even if she's surrounded by males.
But mosquitoes breed prolifically.
Yes, but even so, female insects can only make so many eggs at a time. Male insects aren't limited to how many females they can fertilize. But I guess the ultimate question is: what's the biggest limiter of population in mosquitos? Obviously it's something environmental, not their birth rate.
But still, my point is, if you just kill off males, you're not doing as much damage as killing off females; the remaining males will just mate more. Now if you sterilize the males so they continue to "mate", this will have a big effect, since the neutered males will still be competing with the normal ones, keeping them from breeding as much. So if that's what the eradication programs are doing, that makes perfect sense. But just eliminating males doesn't seem to make much sense at all to me for the reasons stated above.
If you want to forgo vaccinations and medical treatment, go right ahead.
It only takes one male to fertilize countless females. If you want to eliminate a species, you focus your efforts on the females, not the males. We could lose 90% of the human male population tomorrow and our population would be back to normal in a generation or less. If we lost 90% of the human female population, it'd take centuries to get back to our present population. Males simply don't affect population much; kill off a bunch, and the remaining ones have more sex partners.
Yep, that's why everyone just uses Windows now, since it's freely available thanks to Microsoft releasing the full source code in their Shared Source program. When that happened, other companies just took it and sold it as their own.
Oh wait, that never happened.
You've proven my point. They're not bald, so they don't count. I added bald there for a reason. There's no beefy, bald, biker-gang members who get in bar brawls who are female. Also, are the biker dykes in gangs? I added that in there for a reason too. Not all bikers are in gangs and wear gang vests; that's almost universally men.
The problem here is that men don't do this kind of thing. You will never hear a story of a woman who's a company founder or executive, and her stay-at-home husband targets other men in the company and intimidates them and tries to get them fired. This kind of underhanded behavior is entirely female. It doesn't mean that most women are like this, but a subset of them are. It's just like how most men are not beefy, bald-headed biker gang members who like to get into bar brawls, but you won't find a single woman like that, only men. I'm sorry if that's "sexist", but it's reality, and the reality is that men and women ARE different, no matter how much people try to deny it.
Check out KDE's BasKet.
No, people voted for him because he was marginally better than the Republican. That doesn't really mean they supported him. "Support" seems to imply some level of enthusiasm. Among many, there was no enthusiasm.
However, there were many who did really support him (enthusiastically). The Obama voters seemed to break into two camps: one camp of disillusioned people angered by his broken promises and continuation of Bush policies, but who voted for him anyway because Romney would likely have been worse in their opinion, and another camp of idiotic sycophants who changed their opinions to fit Obama's actions, and became enthusiastic defenders of NSA spying.
There's no difference between watching and gawking. Gawking and staring are the same thing, and it's pretty hard to not stare at someone who's intentionally making a spectacle of themselves, with the intention of gaining attention. If you don't want people staring at you, stop making a spectacle of yourself.
The hula-hooping women surely weren't forced to display themselves that way, just like people who sing karaoke aren't usually forced into it by someone. If you don't want to be the object of attention, there's no one forcing you to grab a hula hoop and spin your hips around. You can complain about this being "unprofessional" all you want, but the fact remains that these women did this on their own.
So the men are supposed to look the other way when women are hula-hooping? Please.
Maybe they shouldn't have brought any hula hoops to the party to begin with. But they did, and women used them; you can't expect men not to look at them when they put themselves on display like that.
If some male in the office got up in front of everyone and tried dancing (in a horrible, Elaine-like way), you don't think everyone would stare at him too?
At big companies, probably almost never. At small companies, however, anything goes, and nepotism like this is actually very common.