What I am saying is that you cannot just throw some sloppy code together and expect to fix everything up in the test process. When you try to do that, you get an endless mountain of bugs. Since the code is so bad, each bug fix just causes additional bugs because new test cases get opened up (or because of unexpected code interactions). When you plan on 2-3 months of testing and it is 8 months later with no end in sight, you start to understand why people just hold their nose and release to customers.
If you want a quality product delivered on time, you have to start by constructing the code with quality in mind and code reviews are an important part of that.
I don't argue that there was plenty of blame to go around, including at management. In some cases, there were contractual obligations to deliver the product by a certain date. Failure to deliver would mean penalties of hundreds of thousands of dollars per week. By the time people figure out the state of the system, you have a mountain of bugs and a contractual deadline bearing down on you. There really aren't many choices you can make at that point.
But all of that is why telecomm sucks and why the stock prices of most telecomm companies is in the toilet.
you need to know: - how much does it cost to conduct the reviews - how many defects are discovered in the review versus how many make it out the door (in other words, how good are you at it) - how how much more does it cost you when a bug gets discovered after deployment?
The great thing is that none of these metrics are that hard to collect. You should already know the cost of production bugs because that is just a basic component of your business.
To collect the cost to conduct reviews, you just need to ask everyone who does a review how long it took them. You can store this on paper or in a simple little database. Reviewers just need to remember to look at the clock when they do the review. Some computerized review systems can collect this for you automatically.
To track the defects, you just need to track when someone says "You need to change this because...". Assigning someone as a secretary in a meeting works well (assuming you have a meeting). Or you can just collect this in the emails or other online system that you use. The harder thing is to estimate the value of these found defects, but it isn't too hard to come up with some simple heuristics that serve as a reasonable approximation.
Clearly, many organizations collect this in a way that is painful and intrusive and that gives these metrics a bad name. But it doesn't have to be that way. I have seen this done in simple ways that flow easily with the rest of the development process. Having this information is extremely powerful because without it everyone is just guessing and you become subject to the hunches of middle management because their guesses have more weight since they are the boss.
If you are shipping bugs your problem is testing, not code reviews.
No, no, no. If you are shipping bugs the problem is that the bugs are introduced in the first place. Blaming testing is not getting at the root cause of the problem. You cannot test quality into a product. I've worked on products where tons of bugs were shipped and people wanted to blame the test group, but the fact is that the test group wrote tons of bug reports that no one had time to look at much less fix. Pretty much every bug report that came from the field had already been found internally. When testing started, the product was already so crappy that a few bug fixes just were not enough.
As a CS person, I view the Software Engineering research discipline with quite a bit of skepticism. But one thing that the research is pretty clear on is that code reviews do work. If the submitter is not seeing that, then he is either on the verge of a major research breakthrough that invalidates decades of SE research or he is doing them wrong.
Really? Most people I hear of using it do so because they're used to Red Hat and want a free version of it, not to be on the "leading edge".
Obviously, I can't speak for why most other people use Fedora. I suspect anyone using it for the reasons you state are misinformed. Fedora's goal is to be bleeding edge. They are pulling the latest versions of almost everything with the philosophy that the only way to stabilize these things is to get them into a real system used by people.
This will mean occasional brokenness as seen with KDE4, pulseaudio, networkmanager, etc. Obviously, Fedora does not want to put out a broken distribution and so they work hard to get things usable. But if you are looking for the stability of RedHat distributions, Fedora is the wrong place to look.
Do not worry about language knowledge as much as domain knowledge. The thing that prevents you from writing an OS kernel is not that you do not know C well enough, it is that you do not know enough about what it is than an operating system must do.
Languages are easy to learn and they come and go with the times so there is no point in specializing in any particular one. Where you really want to specialize in is the domain you will program in.
If you will go into networking, then you need to know all about how protocols and networks work. If you go into the financial field, you will need to know the financial models. If you go into an embedded field, you will need to understand the OS kernel, and drivers, and power management.
Languages are the easy stuff; it is the domain knowledge that is difficult. It is also the domain knowledge that makes you really valuable to businesses.
Honest question - who decides what American workers get paid?
Normally, the free market decides this. A company has to pay me a reasonable salary because I am always on the lookout for something better. There is nothing that prevents me from changing jobs for more money or better benefits.
Where the H1-B system is really broken is that this market dynamic simply does not exist. An H1-B worker must stay at the sponsoring company or leave the country. Most of these workers want to be able to live and work here permanently so they need the company to sponsor them for a green card. This basically makes them indentured servants with no way to leave that company. If H1-B workers were free to go after a better salary, we would not have these abuses. Someone from India or China might take a low salary to get a company to relocate them here, but they will quickly look for a higher salary once they are here.
That has always been my problem with the H1-B program. We bring in a bunch of workers that are easily exploited and that hurts everyone. We need a system where qualified people are given the right to work in our country. If they manage to stay employed for a couple of years, then they clearly have some value and they should be on the fast track to a more permanent worker status.
I mean, what are the chances that the plane of the elliptic of a given star system will be edge on towards us?
From the article,
Kepler must monitor many thousands of stars simultaneously, since the chance of any one planet being aligned along the line-of-sight is only about 1/2 of a percent.
Since it can monitor thousands at a time, it is very likely that there are several likely suspects in its field of view at any one time.
But saying that prices are cheap now is bullshit... Prices are low now (relative to a year ago) because risk is high
I agree with this, and I specifically avoided saying that prices are cheap. When you look at P/E ratios on a historical basis, there is evidence to suggest that prices are still a bit high so there is plenty of room for them to fall even further (even if revenues and profits do not decline).
This is actually similar to the housing market. Historically (last 150 years or so), housing prices have risen at the same rate as inflation (which makes sense), so the recent acceleration of home prices over the last 20 years was out of whack and had to have a correction. This could conceivably happen to stock prices, too.
But over the long haul, I still believe that stocks are the safest place to get a good return on investment. If that is the case, I have to invest at some point. Most of us will not be lucky enough to hit the optimal times to buy and sell, but that is okay. We only need to be good enough.
Most people don't realize that the price of a stock today is related to the expected future earnings of the company, not to the earnings of the last quarter. Think about if you were trying to buy an entire business from someone. The price you will be willing to pay depends on how much profit you think you will get over the next few years.
So everyone in the stock market is trying to predict the future over different time lines. Since predicting the future is hard and everyone sees things differently, little things can cause big price changes. Rumors certainly impact the market, but they are not the only thing that drives the market.
Funny, that's what everyone said back in august...
So because prices haven't bounced back in a few months, you think the strategy is wrong? He (and many others) are investing on a long term (20-30 year) basis. No one knows when we will hit the lowest of the low prices. Stock prices may go down further or they might start to climb back up. But we know for sure that they are a lot cheaper today than they were a year ago. There is a wall street saying that I think about in times like this, "When there is blood in the streets, buy!"
People tend to think that the hot shot stock brokers are really smart and know what they are doing. In reality, they are a jittery bunch mostly following a herd mentality. By staying calm and being willing to go against the conventional wisdom, there is a lot of money to be made over longer time periods.
I went into system verification (e.g. testing). At the right organization, this is a really interesting and challenging job. When your company makes a system that sells for a few million dollars and consists of dozens of racks of equipment and is expected to have 99.999% uptime, testing is not something that you hand off to interns. My field was telecom equipment, but there are other fields that have highly complex products where testing is just as hard as product development.
The thing I liked about the job was that I was able to understand the product and its application much better than the software developers because each developer only had a narrow view of the product. I was also able to use my software development skills to develop automation tools to make my testing easier, but I never had to spend all of my job only programming.
As a tester, I had two views of products and the business. I could understand how customers use things and what their expectations and needs are and measure how the product meets that. I could also see the development side and understand the engineering tradeoffs being made and help do low level debugging of system failures.
While in school, I had no idea that there were jobs like this. Most test jobs are crap, because it is considered grunt work and given very little respect. But at the right place, it can be a great way to use your technical skills without just hacking on code all day.
They're at odd with the norms of public behavior in the USA.
Why do you say that public breastfeeding is at odds with the norms of public behavior? Most communities have laws that specifically protect it. When I have seen it in public, no one has even batted an eye. I have never in my life ever seen anyone offended by it. That doesn't sound like deviant behavior to me.
Posting the pictures might stoke the desires of the viewer.
Really?! Is there really a large breastfeeding fetish crowd out there? I know there are many people with feet fetishes (to the point where men have been arrested for licking strange women's feet) so may be we should ban pictures with bare feet. We can all agree that the feet fetishes are weirdos so there is no point in keeping them around. And some people have a fetish for girls with glasses so maybe we should exclude those types of pictures. And then there are the latex, smoking, balloon, etc fetishes. The list of things that "might stoke the desires" is as long as my uh... It's long.
This cracks me up every time I hear someone label the US as puritanical. We invented the Internet for the sole purpose of distributing free porn. (I know that is not the official reason, but we all know that is the truth.) We are home (in Los Angeles) to a huge, worldwide porn industry. On even bland broadcast TV, we have gratuitous sex and violence all the time. There are many places in the world that call us morally depraved.
In reality, what we have is a organized, vocal group of prudes with sticks up their asses that most businesses are scared to offend. More businesses need to stand up to these people and tell them to lighten up.
You are right on about the "think of the children" attitude. That is everywhere, unfortunately.
Yup, I'm with you. In the end, breastfeeding in public isn't something I would really want to see, but whatever. But posting pictures of yourself breastfeeding just seems like being deliberately provocative.
Those aren't the kind of pictures you need to share with everyone - if you want people to see them, there's always email... but I can guarantee you that the majority of those 400 Facebook "friends" you have really don't want to see that, any more than they want to hear about your newborn's growing poo-poo production or the consistency of his vomit. Parents need to accept that there are a hundred little things that are "cute" to them but pretty distasteful to the general populace.
This is the huge downside to using some third party to manage your socializing. They will inevitably want to set some standards of acceptable use and that will certainly step on someone's toes. Facebook is excluding a small group of people. Since the vast majority aren't posting breastfeeding pictures they have no motivation to get upset over this. Since Facebook is a business they will never do anything to exclude a large number of people, but there is no reason for them not to exclude smaller groups (perhaps large numbers of smaller groups) in the name of "decency" and "family friendliness". Of course no one "needs" to share breastfeeding pictures just like there is no "need" for the vast majority of the crap that is on the Internet. Need is not the point. We do not know this lady or her 400 friends so who are we to say which pictures she shares with them.
Personally, I refuse to use things like Facebook because why should I allow anyone to regulate how I can interact with my friends.
I can tell you to leave for any, or even no, reason.
That is not really true, though. Anti-discrimination laws protect certain classes (e.g. race, religion, gender) so you cannot refuse service on those grounds. If local laws protect breastfeeding, then you are stuck with it. If you as a restaurant owner are so concerned with dealing with the horrors of a breastfeeding mother, then simply do not serve people with infants. Of course, you will lose revenue, but that is your choice as a (soon to be out of business) restraunteur.
How is she forcing her morality on anyone? She is not forcing anyone to do anything. People asking her to stop are forcing their morality on her because they are asking her to stop feeding her baby.
Some religions feel it is wrong for a man to shave. Am I forcing my morality on them by shaving? Some religions think women should always be covered completely from head to toe. Are European/American women forcing their morality on others by not dressing in that way?
I've seen breastfeeding in all sorts of places (e.g. a crowded Newark airport) and it is simply a non-issue. No one even batted an eye.
I can see where a restaurant may want to promote a certain image and a breastfeeding mother may not be a part of their style. But whiny, crying, misbehaved children are a much bigger disturbance because I can't very well ignore them. A restaurant could always just refuse to serve children. By allowing infants in, you have to accept that they may need to be fed in the way that nature intended.
That is easy. If your application can be parallelized that easily, then it is considered embarrassingly parallel. OpenMP exists today and does just this. All you have to do (in C) is add a "#pragma" above the for loop and you have a parallel program. OpenMP is commonly available on all major platforms.
The real problem is that most desktop applications just don't lend themselves to this type of parallelism and so the threads have lots of data sharing. This data sharing causes the problem because the programmer must carefully use synchronization primitives to prevent race conditions. Since the programmer is using parallelism to boost performance, they only want to introduce synchronization when they absolutely have to. When in doubt, they leave it out. Since it is damn near impossible to test the code for race conditions, they have no indication when they have subtle errors. This is what makes concurrent programming so difficult. One researcher says that using threads makes programs "wildly nondeterministic".
It is hard to blame the programmers for being aggressive in seeking performance gains because Amdahl's Law is a real killer. If you have 90% of the program parallelized, the theoretical maximum performance gain is 10X no matter how many cores you can throw at the problem.
By and large board level execs would prefer to spend $5000 on equipment than $2000 on support staff.
Perhaps there is a point to this, after all - it may be easier to place an upper bound on equipment costs whereas support costs for an older set of equipment could be harder to determine.
There is more to it than that. The old equipment is generally usable for several years, so the $5000 capital outlay gets amortized over several years. So while you spend $5000 to buy the equipment, it is not a $5000 expense on the corporate balance sheet (because the total value of the assets of the company has stayed the same). You incur a small expense monthly (as depreciation) to pay for the equipment. And at the end of the equipment's lifetime, you may be able to recover some of the cost by reselling it.
On the other hand, spending $2000 on support staff is just money gone. You didn't get an asset for it. It is also a recurring cost because you probably have to spend $2000 per year maintaining the old equipment. Spending $2000 instead of $5000 can help with short term cash flow, but the $5000 expenditure is probably more profitable over the longer term.
You are right, though, about the benefits of establishing an upper bound on the total cost. When you are trying to run a business, precisely knowing what your costs are allows you to use pricing to compete more effectively. I.e., you know exactly how low you can go on a price and still be profitable.
And she could not possibly be lying, because politicians/bureaucrats are completely trustworthy. (cough)
Of course not. She claims she has a valid birth certificate. Why would she claim that if she didn't? A reporter will ask to see it and she would be forced to provide it. If it comes out that she lied, her political career would be over. So that only leaves the possibility that there is a birth certificate but that it is faked. Unless someone can prove it is faked, it must be accepted as legitimate. Faking a birth certificate so that it appears legitimate would take a lot of work and a lot of people. It is always hard to keep secrets when many people are involved, so where is the whistleblower claiming he/she was forced to fake a government document?
While I have no opinion on the legality of his citizenship (conspiracy seems a bit far fetched - what motive?), how can a citizen "lack standing" to question the election of his government officials?
Because an ordinary citizen is not out anything because one person is president instead of another. An ordinary citizen has no damages so the court can provide no remedy. McCain would probably have standing to sue because he could claim that he was deprived of the presidential office and the court could provide him a remedy by disqualifying Obama. I can't think of anybody else who could really claim damages and therefore have standing to sue.
It is particularly annoying that Obama is beating McCain over the head with this. Of course, Obama phrases this a little differently and calls it a huge tax break for the oil companies. Well, yeah, it is a huge tax break for all corporations. But without that tax break, we will bleed tax revenue for years to come because corporations will make the logical decision to move to a lower tax rate. The US has to drop its price to compete or else we will lose jobs that the middle class (who Obama claims to fight for) needs.
And what we have learned now? That maybe corporations and the free market left unchecked doesn't actually know best either.
Is that really what we are learning now? It seems to me that the market is working great. The people that have been making stupid financial decisions for years (both the borrowers and the lenders) are getting hosed. That is what is supposed to happen. Many banks were not stupid and now they get to buy up the failing banks for pennies on the dollar. They get rewarded for managing their risks properly. Many people who have kept their finances in order will be able to buy houses that they couldn't afford a few years ago because the prices will drop to reasonable levels. This is what the market is supposed to do and it is certainly doing it. The downside is that there is a lot of collateral damage. People that have done things right suffer because it is hard to borrow money right now. No one claims that the market is always friendly; it is a rough world out there, but it does push the global economy towards maximum efficiency.
You are right that complete deregulation is harmful. It can make the swings in the free market way too severe and undermine the market by allowing fraud. But the heart of the current financial crisis is that lots and lots of people made startlingly bad decisions. I don't see how the government can ever enforce anti-stupidity.
Bingo! This is just competition. For most of our history, governments had very little competition (except for the occasional war here and there) and were economic monopolies. That is starting to change with globalization. When companies can easily do business all around the globe, what is the meaning of corporate headquarters? Most modern nations now are roughly equivalent in terms of available talent, language (English is the language of commerce in much of the world), infrastructure, and legal protections. So if you can pay less taxes in country A than country B, then why not relocate? This sort of thing has happened within the US for years as states and cities compete for headquarters and factories. Now it also happens globally.
Is Ireland smarter? I don't know. If the taxes are too low, they may not be able to adequately provide infrastructure and that would hurt them in the long term as they rack up debt and then have to pay for it as companies leave them. But if they are simply more efficient than the US and can support the lower tax base, then good for them. It will force us in the US to become more efficient to compete.
Red Hat doesn't need to change anything about their business model. The fact that many companies are choosing "free" distributions, as opposed to "commercially supported" distributions, is simply a sign that the entire Linux market is growing. Red Hat's business is growing at an amazing rate and that will continue for some time to come. Basically, everyone involved in Linux sees their customer base growing because the entire Linux "pie" is continually getting bigger. If anything, people using these other distributions represent a great opportunity for Red Hat because it is much easier to switch from Ubuntu to RHEL than to switch from Windows.
The other place the CEO of Red Hat is looking for growth is to move from just the operating system to other parts of the application framework. This is why they have purchased JBOSS and other companies. Red Hat wants to provide an entire integrated application platform, instead of merely a kernel and supporting utilities. Just look at the kind of money thrown at companies like Oracle and SAP and it is clear that there is tons of money out there to be made. Worrying about CentOS is just a waste of time for Red Hat.
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What I am saying is that you cannot just throw some sloppy code together and expect to fix everything up in the test process. When you try to do that, you get an endless mountain of bugs. Since the code is so bad, each bug fix just causes additional bugs because new test cases get opened up (or because of unexpected code interactions). When you plan on 2-3 months of testing and it is 8 months later with no end in sight, you start to understand why people just hold their nose and release to customers.
If you want a quality product delivered on time, you have to start by constructing the code with quality in mind and code reviews are an important part of that.
I don't argue that there was plenty of blame to go around, including at management. In some cases, there were contractual obligations to deliver the product by a certain date. Failure to deliver would mean penalties of hundreds of thousands of dollars per week. By the time people figure out the state of the system, you have a mountain of bugs and a contractual deadline bearing down on you. There really aren't many choices you can make at that point.
But all of that is why telecomm sucks and why the stock prices of most telecomm companies is in the toilet.
you need to know:
- how much does it cost to conduct the reviews
- how many defects are discovered in the review versus how many make it out the door (in other words, how good are you at it)
- how how much more does it cost you when a bug gets discovered after deployment?
The great thing is that none of these metrics are that hard to collect. You should already know the cost of production bugs because that is just a basic component of your business.
To collect the cost to conduct reviews, you just need to ask everyone who does a review how long it took them. You can store this on paper or in a simple little database. Reviewers just need to remember to look at the clock when they do the review. Some computerized review systems can collect this for you automatically.
To track the defects, you just need to track when someone says "You need to change this because ...". Assigning someone as a secretary in a meeting works well (assuming you have a meeting). Or you can just collect this in the emails or other online system that you use. The harder thing is to estimate the value of these found defects, but it isn't too hard to come up with some simple heuristics that serve as a reasonable approximation.
Clearly, many organizations collect this in a way that is painful and intrusive and that gives these metrics a bad name. But it doesn't have to be that way. I have seen this done in simple ways that flow easily with the rest of the development process. Having this information is extremely powerful because without it everyone is just guessing and you become subject to the hunches of middle management because their guesses have more weight since they are the boss.
If you are shipping bugs your problem is testing, not code reviews.
No, no, no. If you are shipping bugs the problem is that the bugs are introduced in the first place. Blaming testing is not getting at the root cause of the problem. You cannot test quality into a product. I've worked on products where tons of bugs were shipped and people wanted to blame the test group, but the fact is that the test group wrote tons of bug reports that no one had time to look at much less fix. Pretty much every bug report that came from the field had already been found internally. When testing started, the product was already so crappy that a few bug fixes just were not enough.
As a CS person, I view the Software Engineering research discipline with quite a bit of skepticism. But one thing that the research is pretty clear on is that code reviews do work. If the submitter is not seeing that, then he is either on the verge of a major research breakthrough that invalidates decades of SE research or he is doing them wrong.
Really? Most people I hear of using it do so because they're used to Red Hat and want a free version of it, not to be on the "leading edge".
Obviously, I can't speak for why most other people use Fedora. I suspect anyone using it for the reasons you state are misinformed.
Fedora's goal is to be bleeding edge. They are pulling the latest versions of almost everything with the philosophy that the only way to stabilize these things is to get them into a real system used by people.
This will mean occasional brokenness as seen with KDE4, pulseaudio, networkmanager, etc. Obviously, Fedora does not want to put out a broken distribution and so they work hard to get things usable. But if you are looking for the stability of RedHat distributions, Fedora is the wrong place to look.
Do not worry about language knowledge as much as domain knowledge. The thing that prevents you from writing an OS kernel is not that you do not know C well enough, it is that you do not know enough about what it is than an operating system must do.
Languages are easy to learn and they come and go with the times so there is no point in specializing in any particular one. Where you really want to specialize in is the domain you will program in.
If you will go into networking, then you need to know all about how protocols and networks work. If you go into the financial field, you will need to know the financial models. If you go into an embedded field, you will need to understand the OS kernel, and drivers, and power management.
Languages are the easy stuff; it is the domain knowledge that is difficult. It is also the domain knowledge that makes you really valuable to businesses.
Honest question - who decides what American workers get paid?
Normally, the free market decides this. A company has to pay me a reasonable salary because I am always on the lookout for something better. There is nothing that prevents me from changing jobs for more money or better benefits.
Where the H1-B system is really broken is that this market dynamic simply does not exist. An H1-B worker must stay at the sponsoring company or leave the country. Most of these workers want to be able to live and work here permanently so they need the company to sponsor them for a green card. This basically makes them indentured servants with no way to leave that company. If H1-B workers were free to go after a better salary, we would not have these abuses. Someone from India or China might take a low salary to get a company to relocate them here, but they will quickly look for a higher salary once they are here.
That has always been my problem with the H1-B program. We bring in a bunch of workers that are easily exploited and that hurts everyone. We need a system where qualified people are given the right to work in our country. If they manage to stay employed for a couple of years, then they clearly have some value and they should be on the fast track to a more permanent worker status.
I mean, what are the chances that the plane of the elliptic of a given star system will be edge on towards us?
From the article,
Kepler must monitor many thousands of stars simultaneously, since the chance of any one planet being aligned along the line-of-sight is only about 1/2 of a percent.
Since it can monitor thousands at a time, it is very likely that there are several likely suspects in its field of view at any one time.
But saying that prices are cheap now is bullshit... Prices are low now (relative to a year ago) because risk is high
I agree with this, and I specifically avoided saying that prices are cheap. When you look at P/E ratios on a historical basis, there is evidence to suggest that prices are still a bit high so there is plenty of room for them to fall even further (even if revenues and profits do not decline).
This is actually similar to the housing market. Historically (last 150 years or so), housing prices have risen at the same rate as inflation (which makes sense), so the recent acceleration of home prices over the last 20 years was out of whack and had to have a correction. This could conceivably happen to stock prices, too.
But over the long haul, I still believe that stocks are the safest place to get a good return on investment. If that is the case, I have to invest at some point. Most of us will not be lucky enough to hit the optimal times to buy and sell, but that is okay. We only need to be good enough.
Most people don't realize that the price of a stock today is related to the expected future earnings of the company, not to the earnings of the last quarter. Think about if you were trying to buy an entire business from someone. The price you will be willing to pay depends on how much profit you think you will get over the next few years.
So everyone in the stock market is trying to predict the future over different time lines. Since predicting the future is hard and everyone sees things differently, little things can cause big price changes. Rumors certainly impact the market, but they are not the only thing that drives the market.
You want to buy stocks when the prices are low.
Funny, that's what everyone said back in august...
So because prices haven't bounced back in a few months, you think the strategy is wrong? He (and many others) are investing on a long term (20-30 year) basis. No one knows when we will hit the lowest of the low prices. Stock prices may go down further or they might start to climb back up. But we know for sure that they are a lot cheaper today than they were a year ago. There is a wall street saying that I think about in times like this, "When there is blood in the streets, buy!"
People tend to think that the hot shot stock brokers are really smart and know what they are doing. In reality, they are a jittery bunch mostly following a herd mentality. By staying calm and being willing to go against the conventional wisdom, there is a lot of money to be made over longer time periods.
I went into system verification (e.g. testing). At the right organization, this is a really interesting and challenging job. When your company makes a system that sells for a few million dollars and consists of dozens of racks of equipment and is expected to have 99.999% uptime, testing is not something that you hand off to interns. My field was telecom equipment, but there are other fields that have highly complex products where testing is just as hard as product development.
The thing I liked about the job was that I was able to understand the product and its application much better than the software developers because each developer only had a narrow view of the product. I was also able to use my software development skills to develop automation tools to make my testing easier, but I never had to spend all of my job only programming.
As a tester, I had two views of products and the business. I could understand how customers use things and what their expectations and needs are and measure how the product meets that. I could also see the development side and understand the engineering tradeoffs being made and help do low level debugging of system failures.
While in school, I had no idea that there were jobs like this. Most test jobs are crap, because it is considered grunt work and given very little respect. But at the right place, it can be a great way to use your technical skills without just hacking on code all day.
They're at odd with the norms of public behavior in the USA.
Why do you say that public breastfeeding is at odds with the norms of public behavior? Most communities have laws that specifically protect it. When I have seen it in public, no one has even batted an eye. I have never in my life ever seen anyone offended by it. That doesn't sound like deviant behavior to me.
Posting the pictures might stoke the desires of the viewer.
Really?! Is there really a large breastfeeding fetish crowd out there? I know there are many people with feet fetishes (to the point where men have been arrested for licking strange women's feet) so may be we should ban pictures with bare feet. We can all agree that the feet fetishes are weirdos so there is no point in keeping them around. And some people have a fetish for girls with glasses so maybe we should exclude those types of pictures. And then there are the latex, smoking, balloon, etc fetishes. The list of things that "might stoke the desires" is as long as my uh ... It's long.
In a Puritan society such as the United States
This cracks me up every time I hear someone label the US as puritanical. We invented the Internet for the sole purpose of distributing free porn. (I know that is not the official reason, but we all know that is the truth.) We are home (in Los Angeles) to a huge, worldwide porn industry. On even bland broadcast TV, we have gratuitous sex and violence all the time. There are many places in the world that call us morally depraved.
In reality, what we have is a organized, vocal group of prudes with sticks up their asses that most businesses are scared to offend. More businesses need to stand up to these people and tell them to lighten up.
You are right on about the "think of the children" attitude. That is everywhere, unfortunately.
Yup, I'm with you. In the end, breastfeeding in public isn't something I would really want to see, but whatever. But posting pictures of yourself breastfeeding just seems like being deliberately provocative.
Those aren't the kind of pictures you need to share with everyone - if you want people to see them, there's always email... but I can guarantee you that the majority of those 400 Facebook "friends" you have really don't want to see that, any more than they want to hear about your newborn's growing poo-poo production or the consistency of his vomit. Parents need to accept that there are a hundred little things that are "cute" to them but pretty distasteful to the general populace.
This is the huge downside to using some third party to manage your socializing. They will inevitably want to set some standards of acceptable use and that will certainly step on someone's toes. Facebook is excluding a small group of people. Since the vast majority aren't posting breastfeeding pictures they have no motivation to get upset over this. Since Facebook is a business they will never do anything to exclude a large number of people, but there is no reason for them not to exclude smaller groups (perhaps large numbers of smaller groups) in the name of "decency" and "family friendliness". Of course no one "needs" to share breastfeeding pictures just like there is no "need" for the vast majority of the crap that is on the Internet. Need is not the point. We do not know this lady or her 400 friends so who are we to say which pictures she shares with them.
Personally, I refuse to use things like Facebook because why should I allow anyone to regulate how I can interact with my friends.
I can tell you to leave for any, or even no, reason.
That is not really true, though. Anti-discrimination laws protect certain classes (e.g. race, religion, gender) so you cannot refuse service on those grounds. If local laws protect breastfeeding, then you are stuck with it. If you as a restaurant owner are so concerned with dealing with the horrors of a breastfeeding mother, then simply do not serve people with infants. Of course, you will lose revenue, but that is your choice as a (soon to be out of business) restraunteur.
She's forcing her morality on everyone there.
How is she forcing her morality on anyone? She is not forcing anyone to do anything. People asking her to stop are forcing their morality on her because they are asking her to stop feeding her baby.
Some religions feel it is wrong for a man to shave. Am I forcing my morality on them by shaving? Some religions think women should always be covered completely from head to toe. Are European/American women forcing their morality on others by not dressing in that way?
I've seen breastfeeding in all sorts of places (e.g. a crowded Newark airport) and it is simply a non-issue. No one even batted an eye.
I can see where a restaurant may want to promote a certain image and a breastfeeding mother may not be a part of their style. But whiny, crying, misbehaved children are a much bigger disturbance because I can't very well ignore them. A restaurant could always just refuse to serve children. By allowing infants in, you have to accept that they may need to be fed in the way that nature intended.
How about a "parallel foreach(Thing in Things)" ?
That is easy. If your application can be parallelized that easily, then it is considered embarrassingly parallel. OpenMP exists today and does just this. All you have to do (in C) is add a "#pragma" above the for loop and you have a parallel program. OpenMP is commonly available on all major platforms.
The real problem is that most desktop applications just don't lend themselves to this type of parallelism and so the threads have lots of data sharing. This data sharing causes the problem because the programmer must carefully use synchronization primitives to prevent race conditions. Since the programmer is using parallelism to boost performance, they only want to introduce synchronization when they absolutely have to. When in doubt, they leave it out. Since it is damn near impossible to test the code for race conditions, they have no indication when they have subtle errors. This is what makes concurrent programming so difficult. One researcher says that using threads makes programs "wildly nondeterministic".
It is hard to blame the programmers for being aggressive in seeking performance gains because Amdahl's Law is a real killer. If you have 90% of the program parallelized, the theoretical maximum performance gain is 10X no matter how many cores you can throw at the problem.
By and large board level execs would prefer to spend $5000 on equipment than $2000 on support staff.
Perhaps there is a point to this, after all - it may be easier to place an upper bound on equipment costs whereas support costs for an older set of equipment could be harder to determine.
There is more to it than that. The old equipment is generally usable for several years, so the $5000 capital outlay gets amortized over several years. So while you spend $5000 to buy the equipment, it is not a $5000 expense on the corporate balance sheet (because the total value of the assets of the company has stayed the same). You incur a small expense monthly (as depreciation) to pay for the equipment. And at the end of the equipment's lifetime, you may be able to recover some of the cost by reselling it.
On the other hand, spending $2000 on support staff is just money gone. You didn't get an asset for it. It is also a recurring cost because you probably have to spend $2000 per year maintaining the old equipment. Spending $2000 instead of $5000 can help with short term cash flow, but the $5000 expenditure is probably more profitable over the longer term.
You are right, though, about the benefits of establishing an upper bound on the total cost. When you are trying to run a business, precisely knowing what your costs are allows you to use pricing to compete more effectively. I.e., you know exactly how low you can go on a price and still be profitable.
And she could not possibly be lying, because politicians/bureaucrats are completely trustworthy. (cough)
Of course not. She claims she has a valid birth certificate. Why would she claim that if she didn't? A reporter will ask to see it and she would be forced to provide it. If it comes out that she lied, her political career would be over. So that only leaves the possibility that there is a birth certificate but that it is faked. Unless someone can prove it is faked, it must be accepted as legitimate. Faking a birth certificate so that it appears legitimate would take a lot of work and a lot of people. It is always hard to keep secrets when many people are involved, so where is the whistleblower claiming he/she was forced to fake a government document?
While I have no opinion on the legality of his citizenship (conspiracy seems a bit far fetched - what motive?), how can a citizen "lack standing" to question the election of his government officials?
Because an ordinary citizen is not out anything because one person is president instead of another. An ordinary citizen has no damages so the court can provide no remedy. McCain would probably have standing to sue because he could claim that he was deprived of the presidential office and the court could provide him a remedy by disqualifying Obama. I can't think of anybody else who could really claim damages and therefore have standing to sue.
It is particularly annoying that Obama is beating McCain over the head with this. Of course, Obama phrases this a little differently and calls it a huge tax break for the oil companies. Well, yeah, it is a huge tax break for all corporations. But without that tax break, we will bleed tax revenue for years to come because corporations will make the logical decision to move to a lower tax rate. The US has to drop its price to compete or else we will lose jobs that the middle class (who Obama claims to fight for) needs.
And what we have learned now? That maybe corporations and the free market left unchecked doesn't actually know best either.
Is that really what we are learning now? It seems to me that the market is working great. The people that have been making stupid financial decisions for years (both the borrowers and the lenders) are getting hosed. That is what is supposed to happen. Many banks were not stupid and now they get to buy up the failing banks for pennies on the dollar. They get rewarded for managing their risks properly. Many people who have kept their finances in order will be able to buy houses that they couldn't afford a few years ago because the prices will drop to reasonable levels. This is what the market is supposed to do and it is certainly doing it. The downside is that there is a lot of collateral damage. People that have done things right suffer because it is hard to borrow money right now. No one claims that the market is always friendly; it is a rough world out there, but it does push the global economy towards maximum efficiency.
You are right that complete deregulation is harmful. It can make the swings in the free market way too severe and undermine the market by allowing fraud. But the heart of the current financial crisis is that lots and lots of people made startlingly bad decisions. I don't see how the government can ever enforce anti-stupidity.
Bingo! This is just competition. For most of our history, governments had very little competition (except for the occasional war here and there) and were economic monopolies. That is starting to change with globalization. When companies can easily do business all around the globe, what is the meaning of corporate headquarters? Most modern nations now are roughly equivalent in terms of available talent, language (English is the language of commerce in much of the world), infrastructure, and legal protections. So if you can pay less taxes in country A than country B, then why not relocate? This sort of thing has happened within the US for years as states and cities compete for headquarters and factories. Now it also happens globally.
Is Ireland smarter? I don't know. If the taxes are too low, they may not be able to adequately provide infrastructure and that would hurt them in the long term as they rack up debt and then have to pay for it as companies leave them. But if they are simply more efficient than the US and can support the lower tax base, then good for them. It will force us in the US to become more efficient to compete.
Red Hat doesn't need to change anything about their business model. The fact that many companies are choosing "free" distributions, as opposed to "commercially supported" distributions, is simply a sign that the entire Linux market is growing. Red Hat's business is growing at an amazing rate and that will continue for some time to come. Basically, everyone involved in Linux sees their customer base growing because the entire Linux "pie" is continually getting bigger. If anything, people using these other distributions represent a great opportunity for Red Hat because it is much easier to switch from Ubuntu to RHEL than to switch from Windows.
The other place the CEO of Red Hat is looking for growth is to move from just the operating system to other parts of the application framework. This is why they have purchased JBOSS and other companies. Red Hat wants to provide an entire integrated application platform, instead of merely a kernel and supporting utilities. Just look at the kind of money thrown at companies like Oracle and SAP and it is clear that there is tons of money out there to be made. Worrying about CentOS is just a waste of time for Red Hat.