You're absolutely right. But you have to account for ego. There are developers out there that just don't trust anything not written by them. These guys are self righteous know it alls, and they don't take well to criticism. Thus if you ever do get a chance to look at their code you quickly realize a few things:
1. No comments 2. Basic functionality is rewritten all over the place 3. They produce unnecessarily large sloc. 4. The code does not handle non go-path well, if at all. 5. Motherfuckers like pointers....a lot. And think they're so god damn smart that they never ever have to check them for null.
Free software is very much a threat to software engineers. See, we get paid to write software for systems. It's a nice gig. Gives me income to pay the bills. I'd much rather do this than be a ditch digger who hacks at software in my free time.
And guess what, we even use some free software. It's great, saved us some time and money. Thanks for that. And no, any changes made to it were NOT returned to the community. Know why? Because it's all owned by corporate the moment it's taken in. Yes yes, there's license restrictions. Guess what, it's not important because there's not really anyone owning that license to hold you to it. Especially if it's not advertised it's in use.
Why is this a concern, at least to us evil proprietary engineers? The more free packages incorporated, the less work that needs done. Less work = less employees. And in this economic climate, less employees also means less talented employees.
Software engineers have earned good money for decades. All this free stuff undermines that.
Hell no, do not let doctors think they can start using "apps" to handle patient data. Doctors are idiots with technology and this will just end up a nightmare of spilled/stolen data.
Now, if we're talking apps for anyone to maintain their own health data, make suggestions on possible diagnoses, or pretty much anything they want, then hell no it does not need regulation.
Your school employer has tasked you with determining an appropriate system for managing student grades and producing report cards. You take that task and the first thing you do is try to find an open source solution? Why? Why is your first step to limit your choices? Perhaps you are looking at proprietary solutions as well, but your post is incredibly short on details and the phrasing of the question does not imply you have done so.
For a program that is going to affect every teacher, administrator, student, and parent I hope you are considering all options. If a problem pops up, you are fully responsible. Parents will be vocal if somehow the report cards get flubbed. If the teachers find the program clunky or difficult to use, they will definitely make your job difficult.
Look, there may be an ideal FOSS system out there for your needs. I just find the notion of limiting yourself to only FOSS systems to be incredibly short sighted and narrow minded. At least let the companies that offer those systems wine & dine you a bit before making a more informed decision.
You've just reduced computer science to monkeys plugging the right wire into the right socket. 1,000,000 such monkeys can reproduce the collected works of Kernighan and Richie.
Without math you'll be unable to:
Understand big-O algorithm analysis
Analyze the output of a profiler
Understand any encryption algorithm
Work on any data analysis (every application has some element of statistics -- even if it's in the app's own internal call graph)
If you cannot do those things, I wouldn't call you a programmer, I'd call you a monkey.
This ongoing discussion about lack of math is ludicrous. Math is one of those things where if you don't know it, you can't see what it's for, and if you know it, you can't imagine a world without it. You can always argue you don't need knowledge, and if you're nothing but a device for turning food into poop then that's true, but those with knowledge will rule you. EVERY single thing in the world comes down to math. The monkeys don't know that, and they shouldn't program computers. Every single job you can think of can be improved by judicious application of a little math in the right places, and those who can will get ahead.
To be specific, take combinatorics, and as much statistics as you can get your hands on. That in my opinion is the bare minimum for life as a human being. Then you can understand poker odds, political polls and elections, and you'll know enough to not blow your money on lottery tickets. For programming or any scientific/engineering field, you'll also need linear algebra and calculus. If you're smart enough to realize that you don't live in 1-dimensional world, continue with vector calculus and complex analysis, and laugh as everyone around you tries to do linear regression on everything they can find. One or two more courses out of interest and you'll have a math major.
In the end, what people care about is "does it do what we need it to do?", and that's all that anyone is going to remember.
That's all they remember today, when it's first released. Tomorrow they look at it and go.."gee I wish it did X" or "gee, this doesn't look right" or "gee it sure would be nice if it ran faster". That's when having quality software becomes important. Especially with the flexibility that modern languages like C#, C++, Java, even Ada despite its age and style give. It's maintainable. Anyone else can go in and figure out what functions and classes are doing by reading the inline documentation and a quick glance at the code. If I have to spend more than 2 minutes looking at a function to figure out everything it does, then it's piss poor code. If I can't look at a variable and instantly get a basic understanding of what it is and why it probably exists just by its name, then it's piss poor. When "genius" programmers get all cutesy with the syntax and try to do as many possible operations in a single line just because they can, it's piss poor.
And when all those and more piss poor practices are in place in any program, you inevitably have a steaming pile that does whatever it is intended to do. But only in the intended way, and only on the intended system, and never shall it do more without paying through the nose in both money and time to get anything done. I know there's programmers out there now screaming, "But it's only supposed to do X on Y, and nobody paid to do Z". That's no excuse for bad programming though.
I would much rather he do listen. My office brought in an old man, late 50s, who "used" to code. Well turns out, the old man couldn't even figure out how to do C# worth a shit. Yet we are stuck with him. Much like we are stuck with a large number of "programmers" who suck. They are at best no more than script monkeys. Idiots who can spew out code that eventually works for their use case only, but is completely unmaintainable, only works in the go path, and fails miserably at error checking. Oh, and it's completely unscalable and very duplicitous. It's a good idea to rewrite basic operations over and over in each class of the project right??
It's garbage code like that that ends up causing the good developers a LOT more time being forced to debug that garbage and eventually rewrite it. But who in the end gets the flak? The good developer who is tasked in a very short timeline to fix the garbage that was produced by script monkey #1 because the delivery is due and management finally noticed the shit don't work. Not a word gets said to the original moron who couldn't get it to work.
Perhaps my office management is very inept. I definitely wouldn't argue.
Look, I'm ranting. Not necessarily at you, just at the notion that anyone can code. Sure, anyone can code just like anyone can be a racecar driver because they can learn to drive. When you look around and see all the buggy and craptastic programs floating around, there's reasons for that. One of which, is having script monkeys do the work of software engineers.
I don't dispute that peaceful protest is merely the first step on the road to violent uprising when the populace is not satisfied. In fact, I'm surprised more crazy individuals have not lashed out violently at the uber rich. What I do not see is the oppression reaching such extreme levels that a large percentage of the population is willing to risk theirs and their family's lives in an effort to right what they feel is so grievously wronged.
That said, to infer that the public is satisfied with laws and procedures in place with something merely because there has been no violent uprising where the poor American internet users have risen up to kill the Board of Directors at Paramount Pictures and fire-bombed their properties is rather silly. It detracts from the rest of your post.
I do however, agree that the general population is mostly ok with the DMCA stuff as is. It doesn't directly cost them money or time. Until it does, these types of laws will remain to be controlled by the parties that have the most interest and money.
It's my understanding that the general public is okay with this, since they haven't stormed the castle and killed the royalty.
So you're advocating that the only way for the laws to better reflect the "people" as opposed to corporations is for a civil uprising resulting in murder of the "ruling" class?
I cannot do programming any more. I cannot do the kind of mental models needed to choose an appropriate algorithm or apply it to a specific situation. I cannot visualize abstractions the way I must have been able to do earlier.
You've answered your own question. You cannot be a good programmer anymore. From this and other posts, you sound to me more like a script monkey than a software engineer. If you want to get into hobby gaming code that only you work on, that may work for you. It would not work, or at least not work well, for any group project.
Either you haven't used Windows in a very long time, or your use of hyperbole regarding it demonstrates your bias. Windows won the desktop.
Here's the kicker, the battle for the desktop is OVER. I love my desktop, but it's not hard to see a near future where a tablet/smartphone is more than capable of doing everything a home user needs (sans good gaming) 90% of the time. Linux is better positioned to dominate that emerging market.
That emerging market has Microsoft scared shitless. That's why Windows 8 looks the way it does right now. No one is going to want to put it on a desktop. But on a tablet, it just might be right.
"Suck it up, do as you're asked, don't give us feedback"
It's not the field, it's being an employee. Unless you own the company, you are always subject to being someone else's bitch somehow. Why do you think the older guys didn't want to deal with this problem? I guarantee it is at least in part to wanting to fuck the company a little bit. You haven't been beaten down by the system yet.
End of Microsoft support for XP does not mean XP must go away for all machines. I still have to interface with NT machines periodically. Granted they're few and far between, but they exist because there's a specific program that runs on it and the program is more important to keep, but not important enough to upgrade or replace.
In my line of work, supporting Legacy systems is just as important if not more important than getting the shiny new development fully functional. To support that Legacy system, it requires XP. Further, just for laughs, it only compiles on Visual Studio 2003. There's a lot of contract money to continue supporting that project now and for the next several years. Moving to Win7 and a newer compiler may or may not be possible, but is irrelevent because the customer does not want to pay for it.
I use that example to point out a very valid business reason to maintain older systems, supported or not. Just because you're not privy to the reasons for your work to keep XP does not mean there are none. No offense, but you're not experienced enough to question those above you. Perform the tasks you're given well, and provide appropriate feedback where necessary. You continue to secondguess the management, and disparage your coworkers and you'll be looking for a new job with questionable references.
Why should they be Win7? These are not home PCs, so there must be a legit business reason to keep XP.
Perhaps those boxes are to be used by software engineers who have legacy products that are only certified to work on XP. Transitioning to Win7 can have unintended consequences for XP designed programs. Those consequences have to first be discovered, and then be corrected, and that costs money. If the customer is not funding the migration to Win7, then it's not happening. Just a very recent example that my office is going through with the transition to Win 7 because we were finally funded to do so.
In response to both David and plover, what is the device manufacturer's incentive to publish their proprietary source to allow for public scrutiny? There's 3 consequences to allowing that.
1. Process must be established to allow reporting of defects, evaluation of the defect, code correction, unit testing, and finally QA testing. (ongoing costs) 2. Competitors now have full access to all of your device's capabilities. Unscrupulous though it is, they have a competetive advantage as well as the ability to just flat out steal your code to shorten their development time. They keep it black box, you'll be hard pressed to ever prove otherwise. 3. The public and more importantly your competition are now potentially aware of your defects. This can definitely affect future purchases. Hospitals and other facilities don't buy in a vacuum, they get sales pitches from multiple vendors.
Code signing can provide several valuable features. The most common use of code signing is to provide security when deploying; in some programming languages, it can also be used to help prevent namespace conflicts. Almost every code signing implementation will provide some sort of digital signature mechanism to verify the identity of the author or build system, and a checksum to verify that the object has not been modified. It can also be used to provide versioning information about an object or to store other meta data about an object.
Where in that statement does it also convey that the software is defect free? Zero bugs?? Look, I'm not even arguing against malware or malicious intent here. Rather that there are few, perhaps even zero, engineers out there qualified to do software updates for all manner of medical devices from different manufacturers if it were done in house. Downloading some "code signed" version from joe schmo does not protect the hospital from fault if the device then malfunctions.
That's my biggest gripe. If a device malfunctions, and someone has put ANYTHING other than the manufacturer provided software on it, then the facility has tampered with it and they are then liable for anything that may happen as a result of the malfunction. No hospital would be willing to expose themselves to even more potential lawsuits because of that. Maybe more importantly, no insurance company may be willing to cover a hospital if it were discovered to be doing that.
The open source zealots love these types of comments. It's not a valid solution, and if you allowed yourself to think outside the open source box you're in you might see it too.
Allowing anyone to view the code means anyone can then modify it. Last time I checked, hospitals and other healthcare facilities were not exactly employing highly skilled and knowlegeable software engineers. Engineers that also have a solid working hardware level knowledge of EVERY medical device in use so that they understand just what happens when they decide to "tweak" the software. You do understand that any facility large enough to justify employing someone with that level of knowledge, and required pay, is going to have dozens of different devices from different manufacturers.
Allowing end users to tweak the software will also lead to ANY failure of the device to be absolved from fault. It's now the facility's sole problem of whether their equipment functions as intended. No more warranty, possibly no more manufacturer maintenance either.
And that same equipment can no longer be viewed as a blackbox that functions the same across all facilities. I'm sure the Department of Health would absolutely love that scenario. X ray machines spitting out different levels of radiation for the same procedure because some "expert" engineer decided he would tweak the software of his x ray machine and somehow screwed it up.
For these, and probably other reasons, medical device software should definitely NOT be open source. That's not to say that the manufacturers aren't being diligent enough in producing good software to begin with, they obviously aren't. But open sourcing just shifts all of the problems to the end users, and healthcare facilities will not, and maybe even can not, accept that responsibility.
It sounds like the thing to do is get some solid offers for similar positions elsewhere
I disagree with this. He's already been offered the position and had discussions with HR and his bosses about it. Interviewing and getting competing offers will definitely piss management off. Look at it this way, they have gone out on a limb (from their perspective) to offer this guy an opportunity to become something more than a technical person. They're not offering more money because he doesn't have some specific skill/experience they want or are using to justify not offering a raise. It's total bullshit from his perspective, but that's what corporations do to all employees. Profit and shareholder value trump all.
The way I see it, he has 2 choices.
1. Accept the position without a raise, knowing he will gain a significant new title and experience. His resume becomes something more than technical ace. It requires swallowing his pride a bit, at least in the short term. It sucks, but has different and potentially greater long term goals.
2. Turn down the position and remain as a technical guy. Pride remains intact, and career path remains strictly technical. Another management position at this company will NEVER happen.
It's one of those 2 options. I really don't see anything else that isn't antagonistic towards the company which jeopardizes future happiness or even employment. Of course there's always other jobs, but since he claims 20 years in the field finding a new job may not be highly desirable depending on his longevity at this place. His seniority and reputation there, as well as whatever vacation and retirement perks he may have accrued have value that do not transfer to a new job.
I know a Ph.D. geneticist who refused to take the Organic Chems at my school. They were that hard (or maybe that poorly taught). I've always had a sour taste for chemistry after my own experience with it.
Anyone who can get through it and understand it is definitely a smart person in my book.
90% of the chemistry at that level, as you put it, is not teaching chemistry. It's showing a kid how to perform a few Mr. Wizard type tricks. And yes, that is an acceptable thing for the vast majority of parents to do. Show their kids some tricks to pique their interest, hopefully get them to pursue it some more as they can.
But that's NOT what I take the poster's question to mean. This isn't a kid who is going to get interested and then be able to take that interest further by a teacher who (at least in theory) knows chemistry well enough to teach properly. This is a grandfather who's trying to figure out how to teach his grandson, or have him taught, chemistry as part of the homeschool teaching he's receiving.
I agree it's too early for true chemistry, but that is chemistry. Chemistry is equations and understanding. At least until Organic when it becomes absurd. A 10 year old is probably more set for basic science, but that was not what the person asked for.
Listen, Chemistry is not like Reading Riting and Rithmetic. Chemistry is a complex science. It cannot just be suddenly dropped upon an interested 10 year old and hope it sticks. The child needs to fully understand advanced mathematics like Algebra. He must also have proficient reading comprehension because Chemistry texts are not light reading. A basic understanding of Biology would also be greatly helpful. Then there's being able to conduct basic lab experiments to help the child grasp what actually happens with chemical reactions that just can't be appreciated on paper.
That said, from your post you or whoever is available in your family is grossly unqualified to teach this subject. Heck even in schools Chemistry is not usually taught to students that young. Your grandson is already behind. You acknowledge that. If the parents are unwilling to enroll him in school, then in order to get a proper science program taught he needs to have a professional tutor brought in. Not some random tutor who knows basics, but a tutor who can teach the math concepts as well as the introductory science concepts required before he can get into Chemistry. Having someone unqualifed even attempt to teach this will fail. Further, do not rely on the internet for this. Chemistry truly requires hands on experiments to understand and appreciate it.
I'm certain you could contact the local school and try to get more information from them. It's possible the local chemistry teacher would be open to helping.
Find a new teaching job in another district. Undoubtedly, somewhere within 30 miles or so of where you live there exists another school that she could apply to. There's no concrete reason why she must find a new career.
point and click is gross oversimplification. You're talking about most all desktop applications being different. No Office suite and any homegrown applications may or may not work. You dismiss my argument because you have no trouble working with linux. The majority of workers are not going to be comfortable doing so, and that will affect productivity. Thus, Linux will not become the standard desktop OS within business.
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right. But you have to account for ego. There are developers out there that just don't trust anything not written by them. These guys are self righteous know it alls, and they don't take well to criticism. Thus if you ever do get a chance to look at their code you quickly realize a few things:
1. No comments
2. Basic functionality is rewritten all over the place
3. They produce unnecessarily large sloc.
4. The code does not handle non go-path well, if at all.
5. Motherfuckers like pointers....a lot. And think they're so god damn smart that they never ever have to check them for null.
Free software is very much a threat to software engineers. See, we get paid to write software for systems. It's a nice gig. Gives me income to pay the bills. I'd much rather do this than be a ditch digger who hacks at software in my free time.
And guess what, we even use some free software. It's great, saved us some time and money. Thanks for that. And no, any changes made to it were NOT returned to the community. Know why? Because it's all owned by corporate the moment it's taken in. Yes yes, there's license restrictions. Guess what, it's not important because there's not really anyone owning that license to hold you to it. Especially if it's not advertised it's in use.
Why is this a concern, at least to us evil proprietary engineers? The more free packages incorporated, the less work that needs done. Less work = less employees. And in this economic climate, less employees also means less talented employees.
Software engineers have earned good money for decades. All this free stuff undermines that.
Hell no, do not let doctors think they can start using "apps" to handle patient data. Doctors are idiots with technology and this will just end up a nightmare of spilled/stolen data.
Now, if we're talking apps for anyone to maintain their own health data, make suggestions on possible diagnoses, or pretty much anything they want, then hell no it does not need regulation.
Your school employer has tasked you with determining an appropriate system for managing student grades and producing report cards. You take that task and the first thing you do is try to find an open source solution? Why? Why is your first step to limit your choices? Perhaps you are looking at proprietary solutions as well, but your post is incredibly short on details and the phrasing of the question does not imply you have done so.
For a program that is going to affect every teacher, administrator, student, and parent I hope you are considering all options. If a problem pops up, you are fully responsible. Parents will be vocal if somehow the report cards get flubbed. If the teachers find the program clunky or difficult to use, they will definitely make your job difficult.
Look, there may be an ideal FOSS system out there for your needs. I just find the notion of limiting yourself to only FOSS systems to be incredibly short sighted and narrow minded. At least let the companies that offer those systems wine & dine you a bit before making a more informed decision.
You've just reduced computer science to monkeys plugging the right wire into the right socket. 1,000,000 such monkeys can reproduce the collected works of Kernighan and Richie.
Without math you'll be unable to:
If you cannot do those things, I wouldn't call you a programmer, I'd call you a monkey.
This ongoing discussion about lack of math is ludicrous. Math is one of those things where if you don't know it, you can't see what it's for, and if you know it, you can't imagine a world without it. You can always argue you don't need knowledge, and if you're nothing but a device for turning food into poop then that's true, but those with knowledge will rule you. EVERY single thing in the world comes down to math. The monkeys don't know that, and they shouldn't program computers. Every single job you can think of can be improved by judicious application of a little math in the right places, and those who can will get ahead.
To be specific, take combinatorics, and as much statistics as you can get your hands on. That in my opinion is the bare minimum for life as a human being. Then you can understand poker odds, political polls and elections, and you'll know enough to not blow your money on lottery tickets. For programming or any scientific/engineering field, you'll also need linear algebra and calculus. If you're smart enough to realize that you don't live in 1-dimensional world, continue with vector calculus and complex analysis, and laugh as everyone around you tries to do linear regression on everything they can find. One or two more courses out of interest and you'll have a math major.
Absolutely love this post.
In the end, what people care about is "does it do what we need it to do?", and that's all that anyone is going to remember.
That's all they remember today, when it's first released. Tomorrow they look at it and go.."gee I wish it did X" or "gee, this doesn't look right" or "gee it sure would be nice if it ran faster". That's when having quality software becomes important. Especially with the flexibility that modern languages like C#, C++, Java, even Ada despite its age and style give. It's maintainable. Anyone else can go in and figure out what functions and classes are doing by reading the inline documentation and a quick glance at the code. If I have to spend more than 2 minutes looking at a function to figure out everything it does, then it's piss poor code. If I can't look at a variable and instantly get a basic understanding of what it is and why it probably exists just by its name, then it's piss poor. When "genius" programmers get all cutesy with the syntax and try to do as many possible operations in a single line just because they can, it's piss poor.
And when all those and more piss poor practices are in place in any program, you inevitably have a steaming pile that does whatever it is intended to do. But only in the intended way, and only on the intended system, and never shall it do more without paying through the nose in both money and time to get anything done. I know there's programmers out there now screaming, "But it's only supposed to do X on Y, and nobody paid to do Z". That's no excuse for bad programming though.
I would much rather he do listen. My office brought in an old man, late 50s, who "used" to code. Well turns out, the old man couldn't even figure out how to do C# worth a shit. Yet we are stuck with him. Much like we are stuck with a large number of "programmers" who suck. They are at best no more than script monkeys. Idiots who can spew out code that eventually works for their use case only, but is completely unmaintainable, only works in the go path, and fails miserably at error checking. Oh, and it's completely unscalable and very duplicitous. It's a good idea to rewrite basic operations over and over in each class of the project right??
It's garbage code like that that ends up causing the good developers a LOT more time being forced to debug that garbage and eventually rewrite it. But who in the end gets the flak? The good developer who is tasked in a very short timeline to fix the garbage that was produced by script monkey #1 because the delivery is due and management finally noticed the shit don't work. Not a word gets said to the original moron who couldn't get it to work.
Perhaps my office management is very inept. I definitely wouldn't argue.
Look, I'm ranting. Not necessarily at you, just at the notion that anyone can code. Sure, anyone can code just like anyone can be a racecar driver because they can learn to drive. When you look around and see all the buggy and craptastic programs floating around, there's reasons for that. One of which, is having script monkeys do the work of software engineers.
I don't dispute that peaceful protest is merely the first step on the road to violent uprising when the populace is not satisfied. In fact, I'm surprised more crazy individuals have not lashed out violently at the uber rich. What I do not see is the oppression reaching such extreme levels that a large percentage of the population is willing to risk theirs and their family's lives in an effort to right what they feel is so grievously wronged.
That said, to infer that the public is satisfied with laws and procedures in place with something merely because there has been no violent uprising where the poor American internet users have risen up to kill the Board of Directors at Paramount Pictures and fire-bombed their properties is rather silly. It detracts from the rest of your post.
I do however, agree that the general population is mostly ok with the DMCA stuff as is. It doesn't directly cost them money or time. Until it does, these types of laws will remain to be controlled by the parties that have the most interest and money.
It's my understanding that the general public is okay with this, since they haven't stormed the castle and killed the royalty.
So you're advocating that the only way for the laws to better reflect the "people" as opposed to corporations is for a civil uprising resulting in murder of the "ruling" class?
I cannot do programming any more. I cannot do the kind of mental models needed to choose an appropriate algorithm or apply it to a specific situation. I cannot visualize abstractions the way I must have been able to do earlier.
You've answered your own question. You cannot be a good programmer anymore. From this and other posts, you sound to me more like a script monkey than a software engineer. If you want to get into hobby gaming code that only you work on, that may work for you. It would not work, or at least not work well, for any group project.
Either you haven't used Windows in a very long time, or your use of hyperbole regarding it demonstrates your bias. Windows won the desktop.
Here's the kicker, the battle for the desktop is OVER. I love my desktop, but it's not hard to see a near future where a tablet/smartphone is more than capable of doing everything a home user needs (sans good gaming) 90% of the time. Linux is better positioned to dominate that emerging market.
That emerging market has Microsoft scared shitless. That's why Windows 8 looks the way it does right now. No one is going to want to put it on a desktop. But on a tablet, it just might be right.
Sadly no mod points for this, but I fully agree with this post.
"Suck it up, do as you're asked, don't give us feedback"
It's not the field, it's being an employee. Unless you own the company, you are always subject to being someone else's bitch somehow. Why do you think the older guys didn't want to deal with this problem? I guarantee it is at least in part to wanting to fuck the company a little bit. You haven't been beaten down by the system yet.
End of Microsoft support for XP does not mean XP must go away for all machines. I still have to interface with NT machines periodically. Granted they're few and far between, but they exist because there's a specific program that runs on it and the program is more important to keep, but not important enough to upgrade or replace.
In my line of work, supporting Legacy systems is just as important if not more important than getting the shiny new development fully functional. To support that Legacy system, it requires XP. Further, just for laughs, it only compiles on Visual Studio 2003. There's a lot of contract money to continue supporting that project now and for the next several years. Moving to Win7 and a newer compiler may or may not be possible, but is irrelevent because the customer does not want to pay for it.
I use that example to point out a very valid business reason to maintain older systems, supported or not. Just because you're not privy to the reasons for your work to keep XP does not mean there are none. No offense, but you're not experienced enough to question those above you. Perform the tasks you're given well, and provide appropriate feedback where necessary. You continue to secondguess the management, and disparage your coworkers and you'll be looking for a new job with questionable references.
Why should they be Win7? These are not home PCs, so there must be a legit business reason to keep XP.
Perhaps those boxes are to be used by software engineers who have legacy products that are only certified to work on XP. Transitioning to Win7 can have unintended consequences for XP designed programs. Those consequences have to first be discovered, and then be corrected, and that costs money. If the customer is not funding the migration to Win7, then it's not happening. Just a very recent example that my office is going through with the transition to Win 7 because we were finally funded to do so.
In response to both David and plover, what is the device manufacturer's incentive to publish their proprietary source to allow for public scrutiny? There's 3 consequences to allowing that.
1. Process must be established to allow reporting of defects, evaluation of the defect, code correction, unit testing, and finally QA testing. (ongoing costs)
2. Competitors now have full access to all of your device's capabilities. Unscrupulous though it is, they have a competetive advantage as well as the ability to just flat out steal your code to shorten their development time. They keep it black box, you'll be hard pressed to ever prove otherwise.
3. The public and more importantly your competition are now potentially aware of your defects. This can definitely affect future purchases. Hospitals and other facilities don't buy in a vacuum, they get sales pitches from multiple vendors.
taken from wikipedia:
Code signing can provide several valuable features. The most common use of code signing is to provide security when deploying; in some programming languages, it can also be used to help prevent namespace conflicts. Almost every code signing implementation will provide some sort of digital signature mechanism to verify the identity of the author or build system, and a checksum to verify that the object has not been modified. It can also be used to provide versioning information about an object or to store other meta data about an object.
Where in that statement does it also convey that the software is defect free? Zero bugs?? Look, I'm not even arguing against malware or malicious intent here. Rather that there are few, perhaps even zero, engineers out there qualified to do software updates for all manner of medical devices from different manufacturers if it were done in house. Downloading some "code signed" version from joe schmo does not protect the hospital from fault if the device then malfunctions.
That's my biggest gripe. If a device malfunctions, and someone has put ANYTHING other than the manufacturer provided software on it, then the facility has tampered with it and they are then liable for anything that may happen as a result of the malfunction. No hospital would be willing to expose themselves to even more potential lawsuits because of that. Maybe more importantly, no insurance company may be willing to cover a hospital if it were discovered to be doing that.
The open source zealots love these types of comments. It's not a valid solution, and if you allowed yourself to think outside the open source box you're in you might see it too.
Allowing anyone to view the code means anyone can then modify it. Last time I checked, hospitals and other healthcare facilities were not exactly employing highly skilled and knowlegeable software engineers. Engineers that also have a solid working hardware level knowledge of EVERY medical device in use so that they understand just what happens when they decide to "tweak" the software. You do understand that any facility large enough to justify employing someone with that level of knowledge, and required pay, is going to have dozens of different devices from different manufacturers.
Allowing end users to tweak the software will also lead to ANY failure of the device to be absolved from fault. It's now the facility's sole problem of whether their equipment functions as intended. No more warranty, possibly no more manufacturer maintenance either.
And that same equipment can no longer be viewed as a blackbox that functions the same across all facilities. I'm sure the Department of Health would absolutely love that scenario. X ray machines spitting out different levels of radiation for the same procedure because some "expert" engineer decided he would tweak the software of his x ray machine and somehow screwed it up.
For these, and probably other reasons, medical device software should definitely NOT be open source. That's not to say that the manufacturers aren't being diligent enough in producing good software to begin with, they obviously aren't. But open sourcing just shifts all of the problems to the end users, and healthcare facilities will not, and maybe even can not, accept that responsibility.
It sounds like the thing to do is get some solid offers for similar positions elsewhere
I disagree with this. He's already been offered the position and had discussions with HR and his bosses about it. Interviewing and getting competing offers will definitely piss management off. Look at it this way, they have gone out on a limb (from their perspective) to offer this guy an opportunity to become something more than a technical person. They're not offering more money because he doesn't have some specific skill/experience they want or are using to justify not offering a raise. It's total bullshit from his perspective, but that's what corporations do to all employees. Profit and shareholder value trump all.
The way I see it, he has 2 choices.
1. Accept the position without a raise, knowing he will gain a significant new title and experience. His resume becomes something more than technical ace. It requires swallowing his pride a bit, at least in the short term. It sucks, but has different and potentially greater long term goals.
2. Turn down the position and remain as a technical guy. Pride remains intact, and career path remains strictly technical. Another management position at this company will NEVER happen.
It's one of those 2 options. I really don't see anything else that isn't antagonistic towards the company which jeopardizes future happiness or even employment. Of course there's always other jobs, but since he claims 20 years in the field finding a new job may not be highly desirable depending on his longevity at this place. His seniority and reputation there, as well as whatever vacation and retirement perks he may have accrued have value that do not transfer to a new job.
I know a Ph.D. geneticist who refused to take the Organic Chems at my school. They were that hard (or maybe that poorly taught). I've always had a sour taste for chemistry after my own experience with it.
Anyone who can get through it and understand it is definitely a smart person in my book.
90% of the chemistry at that level, as you put it, is not teaching chemistry. It's showing a kid how to perform a few Mr. Wizard type tricks. And yes, that is an acceptable thing for the vast majority of parents to do. Show their kids some tricks to pique their interest, hopefully get them to pursue it some more as they can.
But that's NOT what I take the poster's question to mean. This isn't a kid who is going to get interested and then be able to take that interest further by a teacher who (at least in theory) knows chemistry well enough to teach properly. This is a grandfather who's trying to figure out how to teach his grandson, or have him taught, chemistry as part of the homeschool teaching he's receiving.
I agree it's too early for true chemistry, but that is chemistry. Chemistry is equations and understanding. At least until Organic when it becomes absurd. A 10 year old is probably more set for basic science, but that was not what the person asked for.
Listen, Chemistry is not like Reading Riting and Rithmetic. Chemistry is a complex science. It cannot just be suddenly dropped upon an interested 10 year old and hope it sticks. The child needs to fully understand advanced mathematics like Algebra. He must also have proficient reading comprehension because Chemistry texts are not light reading. A basic understanding of Biology would also be greatly helpful. Then there's being able to conduct basic lab experiments to help the child grasp what actually happens with chemical reactions that just can't be appreciated on paper.
That said, from your post you or whoever is available in your family is grossly unqualified to teach this subject. Heck even in schools Chemistry is not usually taught to students that young. Your grandson is already behind. You acknowledge that. If the parents are unwilling to enroll him in school, then in order to get a proper science program taught he needs to have a professional tutor brought in. Not some random tutor who knows basics, but a tutor who can teach the math concepts as well as the introductory science concepts required before he can get into Chemistry. Having someone unqualifed even attempt to teach this will fail. Further, do not rely on the internet for this. Chemistry truly requires hands on experiments to understand and appreciate it.
I'm certain you could contact the local school and try to get more information from them. It's possible the local chemistry teacher would be open to helping.
IBM??? Ha ha ha ha ha. You ever use any of the Rational products? Or god forbid BuildForge....that behemoth of shit is something real special!
Find a new teaching job in another district. Undoubtedly, somewhere within 30 miles or so of where you live there exists another school that she could apply to. There's no concrete reason why she must find a new career.
point and click is gross oversimplification. You're talking about most all desktop applications being different. No Office suite and any homegrown applications may or may not work. You dismiss my argument because you have no trouble working with linux. The majority of workers are not going to be comfortable doing so, and that will affect productivity. Thus, Linux will not become the standard desktop OS within business.