I think you're preaching to the choir. 8) You know this. I know this. Even the lower level managers who see this issue every day know this.
The problem is with higher level management, like executives who are divorced from the actual operation of the company. They don't know this; or rather they never had experience with this and can't quantify it in the minds so they dismiss it.
Having been in the industry for over 15 years now, I think amongst other causes, I see one major reason why this is happening: The cessation of promoting engineers into upper management. I remember when I first started in the late 90's, there was still talk about expanding from a technical career into management, and then upper management. I heard about how people became CTOs and guided the technology of the company. Sometime in the early 2000's this totally stopped.
I hear and see more of how people from Sales would be put in charge of operations and those with technical ability and experience would only rise to the director level. And of course those from Sales try to run an engineering (computer and traditional engineering) project or department as if it was sales; i.e. big speeches and artifically made schedule pressure. That works for sales, right? It should work for engineers too, is the concept.
It's a good thing that the new management is doing that. I've been in companies similar to yours and if the idiot management stayed, what they would have done would be to cancel all employee training, thus saving themselves that 1.8 million and who cares to revolving door employees. Then they'd give themselves 3.0 million in bonuses for being so smart at coming up with the savings.
Basically a management style similar to: "The beatings shall continue until morale improves."
It was called Fountain of Dreams. I remember playing it and found that the quality was much lower than Wasteland, but I was glad to have any sequel to begin with. My memory is not as clear as back then, but was that the one where you played a bunch of rangers and could mutate as you wandered the wasteland?
Yeah, I get the feeling you two were talking about different things.
Weren't you talking more about, after writing code that you understood, to run through a code coverage test with a debugger, to verify that the system is indeed working the way you intended it to?
I would support this to a limited degree. For complex code, I would do some checks, but I won't be spending any time verifying that simple code like assignments, or if statements, actually work the way they're supposed to work.
This counter tactic won't work for the Islamist sites that need to be populist, but it will work for the ones who have enough men, guns and money to seize power and control through fear, intimidation or murder.
Basically, if you attack them, they can simply murder some innocent person related to you. Say, find someone who studies computers and whether you declare this 'computer' thing an evil or not, simply murder them and publicize that they died in response to the attack. They would just be interested in creating a chilling effect, not in being accurate. This goes for any other group looking to dominate with fear, such as gangs, etc., but it depends on the amount of violence they control.
I'm just looking at this from a sociology point of view. The problem I see with this is the other side will need to be just as callous about the victims caught in the middle of the war in order to continue. Oh well. Change is always very tough. I hope things won't spiral out of control, but I wouldn't put my life on it.
Just to further the discussion, writing code without understanding why it does what it does and then moving it around until you hit some sort of 'win' condition is called Cargo Cult Programming.
A cargo cult programmer on your team can be a huge negative influence in both his work and the reasons behind ways of doing things. At best, they will just be ineffectual members barely able to actually understand the technical issues at hand. At worse, whatever the person does will need to be checked, or basically re-done by someone else who does know what he's doing sooner or later.
It would also make much more sense with the theory that I came up with while watching to explain why the AIs acted so human. The secret being the AIs required human neural patterns to create anything more than a very basic AI. As if the first few AIs really were transferred neural patterns from humans and that this was their great secret that they could never reveal.
Which is why they couldn't just kill all the humans and be done with it and wanted not just to subjugate them but required them to be convinced that their way of doing things was 'right.'
Hugh Pickens? I imagined it was Slim Pickens himself, in a state of despair, at how there will be no need to let the nukes fly at N. Korea. Oh well, plenty of other ways to trigger the Doomsday device.
(I'm going for that -1 Not Obscure Enough Reference Bastard rating!)
Actually, fitting a camel through a real eye of a needle isn't impossible, technically speaking, and no redefinition is required.
I mean, it may involve changing the camel's... uh.. 'shape'... into most likely a very fine slurry, but still, it's technically possible.
Ah, but perhaps rich people weren't comfortable with the idea that they needed to be reduced to a fine red slurry and decided to come up with an alternative interpretation. One which would allow them to at least be looked upon without grimacing in revulsion. I shall think upon this further...
I think it may be a result of choosing your own definitions of success. Some people choose to measure success by pure dollar amount in their banks. And sometimes we forget that when we compare ourselves to the 'rich' people that we have placed a greater priority on other things in life than pure money. That's what this guy sounds like he was after. Woe to they who hit the end of their lives and wonder what it was they did with all of it.
I'm not saying money isn't a priority, but I think it's important to remember that time should be spent building up things that can have a more permanent basis, such as family, friends and community. Or things which give you a greater sense of peace (vs. something which causes panic, hate or anger... which causes adrenaline to flow and wears down your body).
This is what the parent post was trying to say, I believe.
The source came from an episode that was parodying SG-1 itself but the message was poignant:
Science fiction is an existential metaphor that allows us to tell stories about the human condition. Isaac Asimov once said, "Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinded critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all."
Not only that. I had a D-Link router before that had to reboot whenever I opened up a port for forwarding. Imagine ALL your connections dropped and reset... Maybe a normal consumer wouldn't care, but the original question was asking us on slashdot. I can't have my connections dropping once in awhile!:)
I have the feeling a 6.0 - 7.0 is big news in most places in the world, where the buildings can't take that. But in Japan, which seems to be able to ride out 7.0 - 9.0 with not much loss of life, (one lady fell off her balcony in Tokyo apparently... that was it) a 6.0 seems barely newsworthy.
And of course like the parent poster said; they've been getting one or two every month. It's starting to become a way of life it seems...
I just want to add something else in support of this.
If I am allowed to use Cory Doctorow as an example; he often gives away his books for free. He generates no income beyond donations with this. But what this creates is an opportunity for us sample his work. Under the "traditional" model he makes no money from this sampling. Instead, he generates interest in his future works of which I would be more than willing to pay for, because I want it *now*. This is assuming he WILL have future works.
But look at what this has done. Be it give away or have works expire under copyright, these past works generate new interest in future works. It makes it so the author can and must continue to write in order to take advantage of this, assuming his works are popular. Spuring on people to create new works is what society and the economy was supposed to do in the first place!
> create one work and sit on your ass for the rest of your life and enrich your grandkids after your demise.
In other words, the opposite of the lack of copyrights is to spur people to work and continue to work so that society may benefit from new ideas being created.
By the way, I put "traditional" model in quotes because this infinite copyright model is not REALLY the traditional model. The real traditional model is the one we're transitioning back to; where works are not under copyright but were made to be performed or shared. This is the model we had been using since the days cavemen drew paintings on the walls. What copyright is now is an artificial scarcity device, used to create a market where there should be none. To argue that we somehow need to have copyright is to argue that nothing was done from ancient history till now.
I was thinking along those lines too and then I remembered; the primary source for their GPS technology would be from the cockpit. Airplanes today would have a GPS tracker and probably enough maps for their route.
In other words, the pilots wouldn't have even made the miscalculation of not flying through the pass far enough; they would've seen that either they had enough fuel to make it or not enough and turned back.
If they did somehow crash, their last GPS position should have been known as well by rescuers. I guess, only if none of the above happened for whatever reason would the GPS data from the cockpit have to be puzzled out by the survivors if there was some kind of log they could access. They could stand a good chance at that, I'd think.
Maybe someone with more aviation experience could speak about this...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571 Hearing of a crash in Chile brings up memories of the Andes flight accident in 1972, or better known to some people as the movie, "Alive". Ok, so this time the crash was nowhere near the Andes, but an island.
But I've always wondered what would've happened if in 1972, they had GPS and mapping technology the way we do today. They could've easily seen where they were without the guesswork and literally strolled off the mountain to the east in less than a day, perhaps. A 20km walk to the east would've gotten them to the highway at least... and at least they would've been off the mountain into thicker and a warmer atmosphere. Not to mention they may have been able to forage for food quickly. ( http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=Uruguayan+Air+Force+Flight+571+-+Mendoza+Province,+Argentina&hl=en )
I hope technology will improve our chances of survival with accidents like this in the future.
I'd like to say yes, but as we all know, the people with lots of money and connection... it's legal. The people without money or connections... it's illegal. That's probably how it'll play out.
Hello! Why the personal attack? Nothing about how I feel about Apple matters to the intial discussion. It is simply that when one wants to be sneaky, one should obviously not re-use the same method. This applies to anyone in the world.
How does this translate into being disappointed in Apple? Or do you have something in mind here which you are reading into other people's replies?
What does seem strange is that they would use the exact same leak 'method.' i.e. once again leaving a phone at the bar. Do they actually *want* people to suspect they're leaking the phone on purpose?
How about some different venues, like... a public toilet? At the desk of some Apple journalist? At a White House briefing?
Maybe once they've started gathering data, they can share it with Google, and I can drag that Street View icon into the ocean and see what life is like down there...
I didn't want to dig into the specifics of the wording, as you may have just accidently made this mistake, and I apologize if this ends up sounding offensive...
But, the grandparent post was talking about 'politeness' vs. 'weakness' rather than 'kindness' vs. 'weakness.' There's a big difference between politeness and kindness as well, and the two are very different than weakness.
Just thought I should bring that up. Excuse me. (And I am trying to be polite and not meaning this as a joke. And yes, I am Canadian...)
The court didn't say "APIs are protected by copyright".
This I am well aware of, but it seems that there is a chance to decide that APIs are copyrightable. Regardless of how 'creative' APIs are, I believe that as the point of inter-operability, they need to be non-copyrightable in order to allow people to reverse engineer. I can see how the courts cannot offer a summary judgement, but at the same time I don't have much faith in the U.S. court system to always come up with the right decision...
By the way. and this is just a side point, but there are 'creative' works out there that are non-copyrightable, such as culinary recipes. http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html
We may need a lawyer to speak up on this, but it seems that the creative work would be the food itself, and the mere listing of its ingredients aren't copyrightable. Maybe the API definition will fall under this, being merely a list of functions and not the actual code itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're preaching to the choir. 8) You know this. I know this. Even the lower level managers who see this issue every day know this.
The problem is with higher level management, like executives who are divorced from the actual operation of the company. They don't know this; or rather they never had experience with this and can't quantify it in the minds so they dismiss it.
Having been in the industry for over 15 years now, I think amongst other causes, I see one major reason why this is happening: The cessation of promoting engineers into upper management. I remember when I first started in the late 90's, there was still talk about expanding from a technical career into management, and then upper management. I heard about how people became CTOs and guided the technology of the company. Sometime in the early 2000's this totally stopped.
I hear and see more of how people from Sales would be put in charge of operations and those with technical ability and experience would only rise to the director level. And of course those from Sales try to run an engineering (computer and traditional engineering) project or department as if it was sales; i.e. big speeches and artifically made schedule pressure. That works for sales, right? It should work for engineers too, is the concept.
Oh well.
It's a good thing that the new management is doing that. I've been in companies similar to yours and if the idiot management stayed, what they would have done would be to cancel all employee training, thus saving themselves that 1.8 million and who cares to revolving door employees. Then they'd give themselves 3.0 million in bonuses for being so smart at coming up with the savings.
Basically a management style similar to: "The beatings shall continue until morale improves."
It was called Fountain of Dreams. I remember playing it and found that the quality was much lower than Wasteland, but I was glad to have any sequel to begin with. My memory is not as clear as back then, but was that the one where you played a bunch of rangers and could mutate as you wandered the wasteland?
(Wasteland was followed in 1990 by a less-successful intended sequel, Fountain of Dreams, set in post-war Florida. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_(video_game)#Legacy )
Not saying that I wouldn't appreciate another sequel if it was done well... *cough*
Yeah, I get the feeling you two were talking about different things.
Weren't you talking more about, after writing code that you understood, to run through a code coverage test with a debugger, to verify that the system is indeed working the way you intended it to?
I would support this to a limited degree. For complex code, I would do some checks, but I won't be spending any time verifying that simple code like assignments, or if statements, actually work the way they're supposed to work.
This counter tactic won't work for the Islamist sites that need to be populist, but it will work for the ones who have enough men, guns and money to seize power and control through fear, intimidation or murder.
Basically, if you attack them, they can simply murder some innocent person related to you. Say, find someone who studies computers and whether you declare this 'computer' thing an evil or not, simply murder them and publicize that they died in response to the attack. They would just be interested in creating a chilling effect, not in being accurate. This goes for any other group looking to dominate with fear, such as gangs, etc., but it depends on the amount of violence they control.
I'm just looking at this from a sociology point of view. The problem I see with this is the other side will need to be just as callous about the victims caught in the middle of the war in order to continue. Oh well. Change is always very tough. I hope things won't spiral out of control, but I wouldn't put my life on it.
"Next time on Jackass! The boys are paid a special visit by the Boys in Uniform and their special new toy!"
I'd watch it.
Just to further the discussion, writing code without understanding why it does what it does and then moving it around until you hit some sort of 'win' condition is called Cargo Cult Programming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming
A cargo cult programmer on your team can be a huge negative influence in both his work and the reasons behind ways of doing things. At best, they will just be ineffectual members barely able to actually understand the technical issues at hand. At worse, whatever the person does will need to be checked, or basically re-done by someone else who does know what he's doing sooner or later.
It would also make much more sense with the theory that I came up with while watching to explain why the AIs acted so human. The secret being the AIs required human neural patterns to create anything more than a very basic AI. As if the first few AIs really were transferred neural patterns from humans and that this was their great secret that they could never reveal.
Which is why they couldn't just kill all the humans and be done with it and wanted not just to subjugate them but required them to be convinced that their way of doing things was 'right.'
Hugh Pickens? I imagined it was Slim Pickens himself, in a state of despair, at how there will be no need to let the nukes fly at N. Korea. Oh well, plenty of other ways to trigger the Doomsday device.
(I'm going for that -1 Not Obscure Enough Reference Bastard rating!)
Actually, fitting a camel through a real eye of a needle isn't impossible, technically speaking, and no redefinition is required.
I mean, it may involve changing the camel's... uh.. 'shape'... into most likely a very fine slurry, but still, it's technically possible.
Ah, but perhaps rich people weren't comfortable with the idea that they needed to be reduced to a fine red slurry and decided to come up with an alternative interpretation. One which would allow them to at least be looked upon without grimacing in revulsion. I shall think upon this further...
I think it may be a result of choosing your own definitions of success. Some people choose to measure success by pure dollar amount in their banks. And sometimes we forget that when we compare ourselves to the 'rich' people that we have placed a greater priority on other things in life than pure money. That's what this guy sounds like he was after. Woe to they who hit the end of their lives and wonder what it was they did with all of it.
I'm not saying money isn't a priority, but I think it's important to remember that time should be spent building up things that can have a more permanent basis, such as family, friends and community. Or things which give you a greater sense of peace (vs. something which causes panic, hate or anger... which causes adrenaline to flow and wears down your body).
This is what the parent post was trying to say, I believe.
The source came from an episode that was parodying SG-1 itself but the message was poignant:
Science fiction is an existential metaphor that allows us to tell stories about the human condition. Isaac Asimov once said, "Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinded critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all."
"Kissenger is a robot with highly-sensitive and motor-actuated lips, which you can use to transmit a kiss to another Kissenger."
Did anyone else get the image of making out with a robot with the appearance of Henry Kissinger? Or am I the crazy one here...
Not only that. I had a D-Link router before that had to reboot whenever I opened up a port for forwarding. Imagine ALL your connections dropped and reset... Maybe a normal consumer wouldn't care, but the original question was asking us on slashdot. I can't have my connections dropping once in awhile! :)
I have the feeling a 6.0 - 7.0 is big news in most places in the world, where the buildings can't take that. But in Japan, which seems to be able to ride out 7.0 - 9.0 with not much loss of life, (one lady fell off her balcony in Tokyo apparently... that was it) a 6.0 seems barely newsworthy.
And of course like the parent poster said; they've been getting one or two every month. It's starting to become a way of life it seems...
I just want to add something else in support of this.
If I am allowed to use Cory Doctorow as an example; he often gives away his books for free. He generates no income beyond donations with this. But what this creates is an opportunity for us sample his work. Under the "traditional" model he makes no money from this sampling. Instead, he generates interest in his future works of which I would be more than willing to pay for, because I want it *now*. This is assuming he WILL have future works.
But look at what this has done. Be it give away or have works expire under copyright, these past works generate new interest in future works. It makes it so the author can and must continue to write in order to take advantage of this, assuming his works are popular. Spuring on people to create new works is what society and the economy was supposed to do in the first place!
> create one work and sit on your ass for the rest of your life and enrich your grandkids after your demise.
In other words, the opposite of the lack of copyrights is to spur people to work and continue to work so that society may benefit from new ideas being created.
By the way, I put "traditional" model in quotes because this infinite copyright model is not REALLY the traditional model. The real traditional model is the one we're transitioning back to; where works are not under copyright but were made to be performed or shared. This is the model we had been using since the days cavemen drew paintings on the walls. What copyright is now is an artificial scarcity device, used to create a market where there should be none. To argue that we somehow need to have copyright is to argue that nothing was done from ancient history till now.
I was thinking along those lines too and then I remembered; the primary source for their GPS technology would be from the cockpit. Airplanes today would have a GPS tracker and probably enough maps for their route.
In other words, the pilots wouldn't have even made the miscalculation of not flying through the pass far enough; they would've seen that either they had enough fuel to make it or not enough and turned back.
If they did somehow crash, their last GPS position should have been known as well by rescuers. I guess, only if none of the above happened for whatever reason would the GPS data from the cockpit have to be puzzled out by the survivors if there was some kind of log they could access. They could stand a good chance at that, I'd think.
Maybe someone with more aviation experience could speak about this...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571
Hearing of a crash in Chile brings up memories of the Andes flight accident in 1972, or better known to some people as the movie, "Alive". Ok, so this time the crash was nowhere near the Andes, but an island.
But I've always wondered what would've happened if in 1972, they had GPS and mapping technology the way we do today. They could've easily seen where they were without the guesswork and literally strolled off the mountain to the east in less than a day, perhaps. A 20km walk to the east would've gotten them to the highway at least... and at least they would've been off the mountain into thicker and a warmer atmosphere. Not to mention they may have been able to forage for food quickly. ( http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=Uruguayan+Air+Force+Flight+571+-+Mendoza+Province,+Argentina&hl=en )
I hope technology will improve our chances of survival with accidents like this in the future.
I'd like to say yes, but as we all know, the people with lots of money and connection... it's legal. The people without money or connections... it's illegal. That's probably how it'll play out.
Sigh.
Hello! Why the personal attack? Nothing about how I feel about Apple matters to the intial discussion. It is simply that when one wants to be sneaky, one should obviously not re-use the same method. This applies to anyone in the world.
How does this translate into being disappointed in Apple? Or do you have something in mind here which you are reading into other people's replies?
What does seem strange is that they would use the exact same leak 'method.' i.e. once again leaving a phone at the bar. Do they actually *want* people to suspect they're leaking the phone on purpose?
How about some different venues, like... a public toilet? At the desk of some Apple journalist? At a White House briefing?
Maybe once they've started gathering data, they can share it with Google, and I can drag that Street View icon into the ocean and see what life is like down there...
Or not.
I didn't want to dig into the specifics of the wording, as you may have just accidently made this mistake, and I apologize if this ends up sounding offensive...
But, the grandparent post was talking about 'politeness' vs. 'weakness' rather than 'kindness' vs. 'weakness.' There's a big difference between politeness and kindness as well, and the two are very different than weakness.
Just thought I should bring that up. Excuse me.
(And I am trying to be polite and not meaning this as a joke. And yes, I am Canadian...)
For @#$!'s sake, even the NAME of the movie pre-dates Apple's patent!
The court didn't say "APIs are protected by copyright".
This I am well aware of, but it seems that there is a chance to decide that APIs are copyrightable. Regardless of how 'creative' APIs are, I believe that as the point of inter-operability, they need to be non-copyrightable in order to allow people to reverse engineer. I can see how the courts cannot offer a summary judgement, but at the same time I don't have much faith in the U.S. court system to always come up with the right decision...
By the way. and this is just a side point, but there are 'creative' works out there that are non-copyrightable, such as culinary recipes.
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html
We may need a lawyer to speak up on this, but it seems that the creative work would be the food itself, and the mere listing of its ingredients aren't copyrightable. Maybe the API definition will fall under this, being merely a list of functions and not the actual code itself.