Microsoft really didn't even acknowledge security problems as a priority until about 2000, and they made no significant progress until about 2004.
I stand by my statement. Just because they are better now doesn't mean they have much credibility. There are still millions of zombie Windows PCs as a testament to Microsoft's legacy with respect to security..
It seems Creationists do believe that God opted for an Agile design process, whereas I believe He chose the waterfall method and had everything designed and planned out before the project was undertaken.
If the Creationists are correct, I cannot understand what purpose He would find by making a world in which every possible bit of empirical evidence points to a history of reality which is entirely false.
I guess that's why I could never see the point of faith without reason because creationism means His greatest and most potent endowment of human beings (our powerful intellect) serves no purpose in our knowing and serving Him. Of course, I also cannot understand how these folks, who strictly adhere to the concept of "sola scriptura," can reconcile the fact that for most of the first four centuries of Christianity there was no universally-agreed upon "scriptura" to be "sola" (and in many ways there still isn't).
After all, if Scripture is your only basis for truth, how can you decide what is truly Scripture and what isn't? Professor Godel, call your office.
Well, I'm a "creationist" in that I believe God created the universe (as Aquinas' "Uncaused First Cause"), but I also happen to have no problem with the idea that He did it 14 billion years ago, may have done it or is doing it more than once, and in doing so created the means to allow evolution to happen.
I also acknowledge that given the nature of the God it only makes sense that it is entirely possible He could have formed everything out of whole cloth 6000 years ago (on a Saturday evening in October according to Ussher), I see no reason nor evidence to believe this. In fact I would find it particularly cruel that the Almighty would endow us with such great intellect if its use only resulted in deception. In fact, I find it interesting that the so-called "creationists" aren't mired in an endless swamp of existential futility since it seems they cannot know anything because their very beliefs unequivocally infer that their senses and thought processes mercilessly lie to them.
I know I'm not really making much of a relevant point here, I just never understood why so many people insist evolution and divine creation are considered mutually exclusive, or why so many people seem to hold the idea that God cannot and did not create a world that can be understood with our senses and intellect.
Actually, nature doesn't make mistakes. It just does stuff. Some of the stuff works, some of it doesn't. The stuff that works we consider "evolved." The stuff that doesn't we consider "politicians".
Agreed. I had a short stint at a defense contractor where they, in so many words, admitted it they had no interest in my ideas to significantly improve efficiency because there was no absolutely reason to get the work done faster than the contract stipulated, and the contract was padded in the extreme. Needless to say, I wasn't very popular there.
Wow. I'm glad my car only explodes 4 times out of every 1000 times I start it instead of 14. I am now safe.
I don't know if HTML 5 will cause the slow death of Silverlight or.NET, it's Microsoft's modus operandi. They release so many development and application frameworks that the only difference among them is whether they die a slow death or a fast death. While HTML5 is a strategy that Microsoft is using so they can (probably futilely) bolt an iOS-like layer on top of the already gargantuan Windows behemoth and somehow hope that phones will run this, I think it's going to be a long time before that replaces anything used to make desktop apps, even if the only desktop apps being made any more are Office, games and high-end packages like AutoCAD or Maya. And the only reason Office still exists is because of Microsoft's monopolistic legacy. There's no way that hopelessly cryptic, archaic, bug-ridden monstrosity could have survived the last decade on its own merits.
While there is no doubt that this is a FUD move on Microsoft's part, that doesn't preclude the fact that they may be right about WebGL. They lost the browser war, and this is obviously part of their "scorched earth" tactics that are the only way they can ever regain ground.
Nonetheless, Microsoft is here fulfilling the role of the "boy who cried, "Wolf!". They have very little credibility on this topic. That they may happen to be right does not change the fact that these kinds of statements from them are usually 1.) Self-serving, in order to drive support from technologies they do not control, and 2.) Hypocritical, because they are often pointing out problems that they have been or are at least as guilty of.
If, in being self-serving and hypocritical, they also happen to be right, it's really only a marketing win from their point of view, as the security and well-being of the electronic world at large has always and clearly been, or has at least been treated as, almost completely orthogonal to Microsoft's interests.
I won't argue with their facts, but in my experience, McDonald's burgers taste like someone sucked out all the "good" before they were served. (My theory is that they sell it to Wendy's on the side). I won't argue about the beef content, but to me, they just taste awful. And I'm no food snob, I'm perfectly happy with the meat-like substance that Taco Bell serves in their tacos.
McD's fries, OTOH, are fine. I hear they have a lot of beef (fat) in them too. And sugar.
Sony has been periodically introducing new formats ever since VHS stole their thunder. There's a definite business advantage to being the company that creates the new standard. The hard part, which they've always failed at, is getting people to use your new proprietary format when there are perfectly good existing ones that do the job, and as we saw with VHS, they don't even need to be as good.
I guess the Memory Stick was Sony's one format that was half successful, although it's rare to see a non-Sony device that supports them (besides those all-in-one card readers, that is).
Many managers don't get where they are by being complete idiots, it's just that they have a completely different way of seeing things, and it's all about short-term results.
While I think your point is valid, that doesn't mean management is _not_ stupid because that is a stupid way to do things. Cleverly doing stupid things is still stupid, and the country is littered with the corpses of companies destroyed by such genius-level stupidity.
First, someone who's tried and failed knows a whole lot more than someone who's never even tried.
Second, you neglect to mention two terms as a pretty popular governor. I'm not a big fan of Bush, but he wasn't even in the same ballpark of incompetence as Obama.
Again, the guy is completely and utterly ignorant of how anything in the world works. Of course, he is only the culmination of the pervasive ignorance that elected him. Our political system has devolved to the point where they are driven solely by the lowest common denominator. How else could we have elected as a President a man who has never run anything in his life, has never created anything of value, has never spoken an original idea, someone who literally contributes nothing to society? And it's not like the alternative candidates were much better (although some of them at least had relevant executive experience).
Obama is really only a symptom, though, of a society that so little values the ability to actually do something that they think the only thing it takes to be an executive is a pretty face and the ability to make Santa Claus-like promises. The real problem isn't that President has no idea how the real world works, but that the people who elected him have no idea how the real world works. He is merely the logical conclusion of the mentality of people who think economics is a zero-sum game and that wealth cannot be created, only spread around. He is the Platonic ideal, as well as the intellectual and philosophical leader of those people who literally contribute nothing to society.
I engaged in an intellectual exercise recently: If a group of people were lost in the wilderness and they had, say, Teddy Roosevelt to lead them, he would not only be able to lead them, but could also teach them how to survive: hunt, build shelter, defend themselves, etc. If they had Ronald Reagan, he probably couldn't do most of those things himself, but he would have been able to organize people, utilize their different skills and motivate them to do what they needed for the group to survive. If they had Obama, I don't see how he could bring anything to the table but a bunch of whining and motivating people to feel entitled, because that's all he's done as President: complain a lot, act as a grievance-monger for his supporters and let everyone else do the actual thinking and work. He is the quintessential useless person, he has no practical skills, and is sadly ignorant of how things actually work... honestly the only redeeming value I can find in him as a person at all (leave alone the President of the U.S.) is that he seems to be a decent husband and father. He might be the President of the U.S., but I doubt he could run even the smallest of businesses.
I think there's tremendous overlap between a good engineer and a good craftsman and people like you are the proof. You didn't so much change careers, as you simply switched to a job where your skill to create, perfect and innovate are valued and rewarded.
I am also a software developer and I feel pretty much the same way about the industry that you do. Fortunately, I happen to work at a place where my immediate boss understands what good software developers can accomplish and what motivates them. Of course, we acquired a new IT director that is essentially bigoted against developers, and who thinks there nothing a couple of sharp programmers can do in a couple months that isn't better done in a year with a couple million dollars of consulting and a suite of "enterprise" software applications that everyone hates because it makes IBM software from the 1980s look easy and friendly.
As much as I love software development, I spend a good deal of time considering what else I could be doing because 99% of the industry is absolutely horrible.
See, I sort of disagree. I agree with you that many, perhaps most, arts degrees don't add much value to society, but in many ways I feel the same for science degrees (one of which I happen to hold).
The problem with college education in general is that it has devolved into training, as opposed to _education_. Engineering, computer science (my field), and to a less extent, hard science degrees have become little more than vocational training, and as a result, tend to turn out what are cultural and civic idiots savant who are highly skilled in very narrow fields, but in all the aspects that make a classical liberal education valuable, very ignorant. I read and shared a NYT editorial that elaborated on this very problem.
So while, yes, we need to gear our education system more towards producing people with concrete skills to do concrete things (and of course, we need an economic and business climate that encourages and rewards people who do concrete things, which the real problem... the supply is only adapting to the changes in demand), we still need to be mindful that the humanities is still (and always) an integral part of a well-rounded education.
I think your distinction is a little too sharp. I think offshoring can be poisonous and outsourcing can be rewarding. I think both strategies have their places, but both are also way overused because of the apparent costs. The problem is, as you describe, the intangibles, and in my opinion most management is not savvy enough to properly take those into account. As with everything else, companies are way to willing to treat human resources as an interchangeable commodity. In my experience, all that does is reduce the value of your employees to the lowest common denominator.
Blunt question: even if it costs half as much to hire someone working in a third world country, isn't this made up for by the inefficiency of long-distance communication of and delays in understanding across cultures?
I would suggest that most management is too stupid for this to occur to them.
I would suggest shows like "Mythbusters" and "Junkyard Wars", etc. would be more likely to spur an interest in fields like engineering. All "CSI" does is make people think technology is magic.
Oddly enough combining Christianity with science resulted in the history of Western Civilization.
There, FTFY.
Just because a lot of current Christians (e.g., the Fundamentalists) have some weird and fairly novel ideas that Christianity and science are at odds with each other doesn't mean its true. That isn't to say there haven't been issues along the way (like Galileo) but the reason Western Civilization totally took off, while many other societies stagnated or declined is precisely because Christianity, specifically Catholicism, is compatible with science and reason in ways that many other religions fail. For a much better summary of the idea, see Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech from a few years ago.
Meanwhile, I downloaded several books last night and found a couple I would like to buy. John Derbyshire has written two really excellent books about math that I have read and learned a lot from. They are both definitely worth reading again: Unknown Quantity and Prime Obsession.
I know you're trying to be a smartass, but as a faithful and devout Catholic, I can say you understand Catholic beliefs better than a lot of Catholics themselves do. Make of that what you will.
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Microsoft really didn't even acknowledge security problems as a priority until about 2000, and they made no significant progress until about 2004.
I stand by my statement. Just because they are better now doesn't mean they have much credibility. There are still millions of zombie Windows PCs as a testament to Microsoft's legacy with respect to security..
It seems Creationists do believe that God opted for an Agile design process, whereas I believe He chose the waterfall method and had everything designed and planned out before the project was undertaken.
If the Creationists are correct, I cannot understand what purpose He would find by making a world in which every possible bit of empirical evidence points to a history of reality which is entirely false.
I guess that's why I could never see the point of faith without reason because creationism means His greatest and most potent endowment of human beings (our powerful intellect) serves no purpose in our knowing and serving Him. Of course, I also cannot understand how these folks, who strictly adhere to the concept of "sola scriptura," can reconcile the fact that for most of the first four centuries of Christianity there was no universally-agreed upon "scriptura" to be "sola" (and in many ways there still isn't).
After all, if Scripture is your only basis for truth, how can you decide what is truly Scripture and what isn't? Professor Godel, call your office.
Well, I'm a "creationist" in that I believe God created the universe (as Aquinas' "Uncaused First Cause"), but I also happen to have no problem with the idea that He did it 14 billion years ago, may have done it or is doing it more than once, and in doing so created the means to allow evolution to happen.
I also acknowledge that given the nature of the God it only makes sense that it is entirely possible He could have formed everything out of whole cloth 6000 years ago (on a Saturday evening in October according to Ussher), I see no reason nor evidence to believe this. In fact I would find it particularly cruel that the Almighty would endow us with such great intellect if its use only resulted in deception. In fact, I find it interesting that the so-called "creationists" aren't mired in an endless swamp of existential futility since it seems they cannot know anything because their very beliefs unequivocally infer that their senses and thought processes mercilessly lie to them.
I know I'm not really making much of a relevant point here, I just never understood why so many people insist evolution and divine creation are considered mutually exclusive, or why so many people seem to hold the idea that God cannot and did not create a world that can be understood with our senses and intellect.
Actually, nature doesn't make mistakes. It just does stuff. Some of the stuff works, some of it doesn't. The stuff that works we consider "evolved." The stuff that doesn't we consider "politicians".
Agreed. I had a short stint at a defense contractor where they, in so many words, admitted it they had no interest in my ideas to significantly improve efficiency because there was no absolutely reason to get the work done faster than the contract stipulated, and the contract was padded in the extreme. Needless to say, I wasn't very popular there.
Wow. I'm glad my car only explodes 4 times out of every 1000 times I start it instead of 14. I am now safe.
I don't know if HTML 5 will cause the slow death of Silverlight or .NET, it's Microsoft's modus operandi. They release so many development and application frameworks that the only difference among them is whether they die a slow death or a fast death. While HTML5 is a strategy that Microsoft is using so they can (probably futilely) bolt an iOS-like layer on top of the already gargantuan Windows behemoth and somehow hope that phones will run this, I think it's going to be a long time before that replaces anything used to make desktop apps, even if the only desktop apps being made any more are Office, games and high-end packages like AutoCAD or Maya. And the only reason Office still exists is because of Microsoft's monopolistic legacy. There's no way that hopelessly cryptic, archaic, bug-ridden monstrosity could have survived the last decade on its own merits.
While there is no doubt that this is a FUD move on Microsoft's part, that doesn't preclude the fact that they may be right about WebGL. They lost the browser war, and this is obviously part of their "scorched earth" tactics that are the only way they can ever regain ground.
Nonetheless, Microsoft is here fulfilling the role of the "boy who cried, "Wolf!". They have very little credibility on this topic. That they may happen to be right does not change the fact that these kinds of statements from them are usually 1.) Self-serving, in order to drive support from technologies they do not control, and 2.) Hypocritical, because they are often pointing out problems that they have been or are at least as guilty of.
If, in being self-serving and hypocritical, they also happen to be right, it's really only a marketing win from their point of view, as the security and well-being of the electronic world at large has always and clearly been, or has at least been treated as, almost completely orthogonal to Microsoft's interests.
I won't argue with their facts, but in my experience, McDonald's burgers taste like someone sucked out all the "good" before they were served. (My theory is that they sell it to Wendy's on the side). I won't argue about the beef content, but to me, they just taste awful. And I'm no food snob, I'm perfectly happy with the meat-like substance that Taco Bell serves in their tacos.
McD's fries, OTOH, are fine. I hear they have a lot of beef (fat) in them too. And sugar.
Sony has been periodically introducing new formats ever since VHS stole their thunder. There's a definite business advantage to being the company that creates the new standard. The hard part, which they've always failed at, is getting people to use your new proprietary format when there are perfectly good existing ones that do the job, and as we saw with VHS, they don't even need to be as good.
I guess the Memory Stick was Sony's one format that was half successful, although it's rare to see a non-Sony device that supports them (besides those all-in-one card readers, that is).
Many managers don't get where they are by being complete idiots, it's just that they have a completely different way of seeing things, and it's all about short-term results.
While I think your point is valid, that doesn't mean management is _not_ stupid because that is a stupid way to do things. Cleverly doing stupid things is still stupid, and the country is littered with the corpses of companies destroyed by such genius-level stupidity.
Or if you prefer, change "stupid" to "evil".
First, someone who's tried and failed knows a whole lot more than someone who's never even tried.
Second, you neglect to mention two terms as a pretty popular governor. I'm not a big fan of Bush, but he wasn't even in the same ballpark of incompetence as Obama.
Yeah, I didn't mention President Polk either. It's a conspiracy.
I included enough examples to make my point. Take your knee-jerk politics elsewhere.
Again, the guy is completely and utterly ignorant of how anything in the world works. Of course, he is only the culmination of the pervasive ignorance that elected him. Our political system has devolved to the point where they are driven solely by the lowest common denominator. How else could we have elected as a President a man who has never run anything in his life, has never created anything of value, has never spoken an original idea, someone who literally contributes nothing to society? And it's not like the alternative candidates were much better (although some of them at least had relevant executive experience).
... is to make US workers earn less than Indian and Chinese workers ...
Wait, didn't you just say exaggeration doesn't help and then you proceed to exaggerate even more than the parent poster?
Ditto. Every project attempted these days by the IT department I work at fails for exactly the reasons I can predict before the thing is even started.
Honestly, I think that we, as a society, have collectively lost the ability to manage.
Obama is really only a symptom, though, of a society that so little values the ability to actually do something that they think the only thing it takes to be an executive is a pretty face and the ability to make Santa Claus-like promises. The real problem isn't that President has no idea how the real world works, but that the people who elected him have no idea how the real world works. He is merely the logical conclusion of the mentality of people who think economics is a zero-sum game and that wealth cannot be created, only spread around. He is the Platonic ideal, as well as the intellectual and philosophical leader of those people who literally contribute nothing to society.
I engaged in an intellectual exercise recently: If a group of people were lost in the wilderness and they had, say, Teddy Roosevelt to lead them, he would not only be able to lead them, but could also teach them how to survive: hunt, build shelter, defend themselves, etc. If they had Ronald Reagan, he probably couldn't do most of those things himself, but he would have been able to organize people, utilize their different skills and motivate them to do what they needed for the group to survive. If they had Obama, I don't see how he could bring anything to the table but a bunch of whining and motivating people to feel entitled, because that's all he's done as President: complain a lot, act as a grievance-monger for his supporters and let everyone else do the actual thinking and work. He is the quintessential useless person, he has no practical skills, and is sadly ignorant of how things actually work... honestly the only redeeming value I can find in him as a person at all (leave alone the President of the U.S.) is that he seems to be a decent husband and father. He might be the President of the U.S., but I doubt he could run even the smallest of businesses.
I think there's tremendous overlap between a good engineer and a good craftsman and people like you are the proof. You didn't so much change careers, as you simply switched to a job where your skill to create, perfect and innovate are valued and rewarded.
I am also a software developer and I feel pretty much the same way about the industry that you do. Fortunately, I happen to work at a place where my immediate boss understands what good software developers can accomplish and what motivates them. Of course, we acquired a new IT director that is essentially bigoted against developers, and who thinks there nothing a couple of sharp programmers can do in a couple months that isn't better done in a year with a couple million dollars of consulting and a suite of "enterprise" software applications that everyone hates because it makes IBM software from the 1980s look easy and friendly.
As much as I love software development, I spend a good deal of time considering what else I could be doing because 99% of the industry is absolutely horrible.
Sure. Everyone likes to have someone they can look down on.
Not saying that's a good way to "advance"...
See, I sort of disagree. I agree with you that many, perhaps most, arts degrees don't add much value to society, but in many ways I feel the same for science degrees (one of which I happen to hold).
The problem with college education in general is that it has devolved into training, as opposed to _education_. Engineering, computer science (my field), and to a less extent, hard science degrees have become little more than vocational training, and as a result, tend to turn out what are cultural and civic idiots savant who are highly skilled in very narrow fields, but in all the aspects that make a classical liberal education valuable, very ignorant. I read and shared a NYT editorial that elaborated on this very problem.
So while, yes, we need to gear our education system more towards producing people with concrete skills to do concrete things (and of course, we need an economic and business climate that encourages and rewards people who do concrete things, which the real problem... the supply is only adapting to the changes in demand), we still need to be mindful that the humanities is still (and always) an integral part of a well-rounded education.
I think your distinction is a little too sharp. I think offshoring can be poisonous and outsourcing can be rewarding. I think both strategies have their places, but both are also way overused because of the apparent costs. The problem is, as you describe, the intangibles, and in my opinion most management is not savvy enough to properly take those into account. As with everything else, companies are way to willing to treat human resources as an interchangeable commodity. In my experience, all that does is reduce the value of your employees to the lowest common denominator.
Blunt question: even if it costs half as much to hire someone working in a third world country, isn't this made up for by the inefficiency of long-distance communication of and delays in understanding across cultures?
I would suggest that most management is too stupid for this to occur to them.
I would suggest shows like "Mythbusters" and "Junkyard Wars", etc. would be more likely to spur an interest in fields like engineering. All "CSI" does is make people think technology is magic.
Oddly enough combining Christianity with science resulted in the history of Western Civilization.
There, FTFY.
Just because a lot of current Christians (e.g., the Fundamentalists) have some weird and fairly novel ideas that Christianity and science are at odds with each other doesn't mean its true. That isn't to say there haven't been issues along the way (like Galileo) but the reason Western Civilization totally took off, while many other societies stagnated or declined is precisely because Christianity, specifically Catholicism, is compatible with science and reason in ways that many other religions fail. For a much better summary of the idea, see Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech from a few years ago.
Meanwhile, I downloaded several books last night and found a couple I would like to buy. John Derbyshire has written two really excellent books about math that I have read and learned a lot from. They are both definitely worth reading again: Unknown Quantity and Prime Obsession.
I know you're trying to be a smartass, but as a faithful and devout Catholic, I can say you understand Catholic beliefs better than a lot of Catholics themselves do. Make of that what you will.