See, if you create job qualifications that are mutually exclusive you can keep the job open for years and then complain to the US government that you need more H-1B visas since you couldn't find any US candidates that meet the job requirements.
"Why? If you spend 5 years at a company and learn 'the trade' on their dime they should be safe from you running to the next company and spilling everything they worked hard to make, at lest for a short time."
That would be true if they just paid you to hang out and learn. Their "dime" goes to pay you for the work you did to help their company prosper.
You can't take any trade secrets with you, but the general knowledge you gained belongs to you.
Your lesson seemed a little muddled. Were you trying to show that tools don't make you creative or were you trying to promote open source tools? I can understand the blank stares.
As far as the advanced class you may be paid to teach someday, what is the point of it? Is the goal to teach students how to design for themselves or to teach them how to design using the tools they're likely to encounter working for somebody else. Promoting open source may possibly be good in the long run, but is it appropriate to do it on the backs of your students? What would they expect from the class?
"And the problem with this theory is that closed source software somehow succeeds the majority of the time, or even a large part of the time."
I'm not saying either of those things. However, I'd hardly be going out on a limb by saying that overall closed source software is more financially successful than open source.
"Get used to failure, with your attitude its going to occur quite a bit in life."
But happily I've at least won this argument with you.
".. the job supports the open source project of course..."
That was my point - in general it doesn't. In fact, even if it does, you'd better check the terms of your NDA - you might be violating it by creating your own side business based on software you write at work.
"Again, you have to think like an entrepeneur as every open source project that wants to make money will be doing."
"Thinking like an entrepeneur" doesn't mean scrounging around for a few crumbs without a real business plan.
I would have majored in creative writing in college. If you don't want to make a living by developing software, why limit yourself to writing books on open source applications? That's going to be a low-volume seller.
In any case, there are a few well-known companies that make money directly from open source software but like diet plans "the results are not typical".
"TCP/IP and SMTP came out the other side, and grew into cornerstones of the largest network this world has ever known, in a shockingly short period of time."
The lesson I see from this is that it wouldn't take that long to transition to newer/better protocols (if they were developed). I'm not sure if TCP/IP needs to be replaced, but we could certaintly use a replacement for our current http/html/browser suite that could be designed from the ground up to support web apps without any kludges.
My point was simply that we had plenty of troops available for Afghanistan had we not held them back for the pre-9/11-planned Iraq war. The problem of multiple tours to Iraq happened because the Bush Administration ignored the advice they were given about planning the post-combat phase of the operation.
"Which enemy was this during the 1990's? As far as I know, the United States closed down a lot of military installations, drew down a lot of its military presence in Europe, and downsized the military over all, hence the United states inability to respond with sufficient force to the war on terror circa 9/11/2001."
I'm not sure what you mean by "inability to respond with sufficient force". We could have sent 10x as many soldiers to Afghanistan as we did but the President and his aids were clueless. We could have sent a lot more troops to Iraq as well (although Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11) but again, clueless.
The so-called "War on terror" was really just an excuse for the President to invade any country he chose to and really had little to do with terrorism. Even if Iraq had had WMDs, they didn't have the intercontinental missiles required to attack the US so it was really a two-level scam.
"If anything he's gonna sit on his severance package a few months and write that OpenOffice patch he hasn't had time to work on."
A severance package in the US that covers more than 2 weeks? That was rare even before the economic turndown. It also might be a good idea to start looking for a job before running out of money.
"Google, Apple (via MobileMe) and most programmers are pushing for a standards-based, browsers-neutral Web 2.0 approach."
By "browsers-neutral" you must mean "it sort of works in most browsers" because Web 2.0 apps certainly don't work identically in all browsers unless browser-specific handling is included.
In any case, I think that the standards should eventually embrace something better than a hack added to a HTTP/HTML/Javascript environment that wasn't designed for web applications.
As with any idea you want to sell, you have to pitch it in terms of what the company wants. Most companies aren't going to be motivated by a philosophical argument. You have to ask yourself: If the company started using open source software, would it have a significant postive effect on the bottom line? If not, your unlikely to succeed.
The CIL/MSIL (the byte code of the CLR) is nearly identical to the JVM byte code."
Like you, I'm not an expert on JVM byte code or CIL so I'll let someone else check your facts on that topic. However, I'm sure you'll agree that there's much more to both Java and.NET than their virtual machines (otherwise nobody would be interested in bringing new languages to those platforms).
Had you been following what I said more closely you'd remember that.NET supports seamless cross-language inheritance and Java does not. That's a significant difference driven by the fact that.NET designers were interested in multiple languages from the beginning and Java designers were not.
"Hardware independence is invented. That is what Java is doing for you."
So any multi-threaded or multi-process Java code I write will run identically on all systems regardless of the processor used or how many cores are present?
The real point is that with.NET you can do things like write a class in VB and inherit and extend it in C#.
The key difference between the Java platform and.Net are the platform designers' fundamental intentions. Java was not designed to support multiple languages, but other languages can be compiled to Java bytecode and run.
Similarly, many.NET libraries were not designed to be platform independent but the CLR can be ported to other hardware/OS platforms so that some.Net apps can run there (e.g. Mono on Linux).
The bottom line is that Java offers weak support for language independence and.NET weak support for platform independence.
I think anyone who wants to establish exclusive rights to a name with only one letter shouldn't be surprised when someone else uses it. In any case, MUMPS couldn't be confused with any language created in the last 20 years.
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I think terms like Windows, Linux, Java, etc are just brand names as far as embedded devices are concerned.
You forgot the experience summary "0-3 years".
See, if you create job qualifications that are mutually exclusive you can keep the job open for years and then complain to the US government that you need more H-1B visas since you couldn't find any US candidates that meet the job requirements.
"Why? If you spend 5 years at a company and learn 'the trade' on their dime they should be safe from you running to the next company and spilling everything they worked hard to make, at lest for a short time."
That would be true if they just paid you to hang out and learn. Their "dime" goes to pay you for the work you did to help their company prosper.
You can't take any trade secrets with you, but the general knowledge you gained belongs to you.
"As if an instructor would just cart in Open Source software one day and tell students they are forbidden to use some in-demand commercial package."
That's, of course, not what I said.
Your lesson seemed a little muddled. Were you trying to show that tools don't make you creative or were you trying to promote open source tools? I can understand the blank stares.
As far as the advanced class you may be paid to teach someday, what is the point of it? Is the goal to teach students how to design for themselves or to teach them how to design using the tools they're likely to encounter working for somebody else. Promoting open source may possibly be good in the long run, but is it appropriate to do it on the backs of your students? What would they expect from the class?
Exactly, because everyone knows that only when you use GIMP will you become a "graphic designer, creative person, illustrator, web designer, etc".
Why don't you teach GIMP instead of Photoshop? Oh, that's right - nobody will pay you to teach it.
You can waste your time doing worthless experiments and get paid for it! Well, at least the full professors.
"And the problem with this theory is that closed source software somehow succeeds the majority of the time, or even a large part of the time."
I'm not saying either of those things. However, I'd hardly be going out on a limb by saying that overall closed source software is more financially successful than open source.
"Get used to failure, with your attitude its going to occur quite a bit in life."
But happily I've at least won this argument with you.
".. the job supports the open source project of course ..."
That was my point - in general it doesn't. In fact, even if it does, you'd better check the terms of your NDA - you might be violating it by creating your own side business based on software you write at work.
"Again, you have to think like an entrepeneur as every open source project that wants to make money will be doing."
"Thinking like an entrepeneur" doesn't mean scrounging around for a few crumbs without a real business plan.
I would have majored in creative writing in college. If you don't want to make a living by developing software, why limit yourself to writing books on open source applications? That's going to be a low-volume seller.
In any case, there are a few well-known companies that make money directly from open source software but like diet plans "the results are not typical".
"TCP/IP and SMTP came out the other side, and grew into cornerstones of the largest network this world has ever known, in a shockingly short period of time."
The lesson I see from this is that it wouldn't take that long to transition to newer/better protocols (if they were developed). I'm not sure if TCP/IP needs to be replaced, but we could certaintly use a replacement for our current http/html/browser suite that could be designed from the ground up to support web apps without any kludges.
My point was simply that we had plenty of troops available for Afghanistan had we not held them back for the pre-9/11-planned Iraq war. The problem of multiple tours to Iraq happened because the Bush Administration ignored the advice they were given about planning the post-combat phase of the operation.
"Which enemy was this during the 1990's? As far as I know, the United States closed down a lot of military installations, drew down a lot of its military presence in Europe, and downsized the military over all, hence the United states inability to respond with sufficient force to the war on terror circa 9/11/2001."
I'm not sure what you mean by "inability to respond with sufficient force". We could have sent 10x as many soldiers to
Afghanistan as we did but the President and his aids were clueless. We could have sent a lot more troops to Iraq as well (although Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11) but again, clueless.
The so-called "War on terror" was really just an excuse for the President to invade any country he chose to and really had little to do with terrorism. Even if Iraq had had WMDs, they didn't have the intercontinental missiles required to attack the US so it was really a two-level scam.
"You know what people will say now if you use F/OSS: "What, are you communist or something?"."
Weren't they saying that already?
"If anything he's gonna sit on his severance package a few months and write that OpenOffice patch he hasn't had time to work on."
A severance package in the US that covers more than 2 weeks? That was rare even before the economic turndown. It also might be a good idea to start looking for a job before running out of money.
"This is the kind of moron who gets written up on TheDailyWTF, and derisively laughed at for years to come."
As opposed to the kind of moron who writes people up on the TheDailyWTF.
"Google, Apple (via MobileMe) and most programmers are pushing for a standards-based, browsers-neutral Web 2.0 approach."
By "browsers-neutral" you must mean "it sort of works in most browsers" because Web 2.0 apps certainly don't work identically in all browsers unless browser-specific handling is included.
In any case, I think that the standards should eventually embrace something better than a hack added to a HTTP/HTML/Javascript environment that wasn't designed for web applications.
As with any idea you want to sell, you have to pitch it in terms of what the company wants. Most companies aren't going to be motivated by a philosophical argument. You have to ask yourself: If the company started using open source software, would it have a significant postive effect on the bottom line? If not, your unlikely to succeed.
"That is a common FUD/missconception.
The CIL/MSIL (the byte code of the CLR) is nearly identical to the JVM byte code."
Like you, I'm not an expert on JVM byte code or CIL so I'll let someone else check your facts on that topic. However, I'm sure you'll agree that there's much more to both Java and .NET than their virtual machines (otherwise nobody would be interested in bringing new languages to those platforms).
Had you been following what I said more closely you'd remember that .NET supports seamless cross-language inheritance and Java does not. That's a significant difference driven by the fact that .NET designers were interested in multiple languages from the beginning and Java designers were not.
"Hardware independence is invented. That is what Java is doing for you."
So any multi-threaded or multi-process Java code I write will run identically on all systems regardless of the processor used or how many cores are present?
The real point is that with .NET you can do things like write a class in VB and inherit and extend it in C#.
The key difference between the Java platform and .Net are the platform designers' fundamental intentions. Java was not designed to support multiple languages, but other languages can be compiled to Java bytecode and run.
Similarly, many .NET libraries were not designed to be platform independent but the CLR can be ported to other hardware/OS platforms so that some .Net apps can run there (e.g. Mono on Linux).
The bottom line is that Java offers weak support for language independence and .NET weak support for platform independence.
"The average consumer doesn't give a rip."
That's because the average consumer has never touched a Mac.
Sun has had its share of white papers as "products".
I think anyone who wants to establish exclusive rights to a name with only one letter shouldn't be surprised when someone else uses it. In any case, MUMPS couldn't be confused with any language created in the last 20 years.
"2. Not everybody has a computer, but everybody has a TV"
This is an argument for people buying a TV?