You are using theory to mean two different things.
1. An explanation of observations that, in a Popperian sense, could be falsified (this is the sense you mean when you refer to evolution); and
2. Inane, superstitious bullshit spoonfed to credulous sister-humping semiliterates to make them believe that they, too, have descended from the trees. This is the sense you use when speaking of Intelligent Design.
Bush should be impeached, and the rest of his administration should be in jail.
They're just catching up with Pinochet now. I hope to live long enough to see the war crimes trials of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of their merry gang of mass-murderers. And I hope they live long enough to see the inside of cells. Those Iraqi civilians who died (and are still dying) did nothing to deserve what happened to them. There will be justice.
We have long memories. I won't be satisfied until the Republicans are nothing but a gaggle of withered fanatics, a faded memory of evil, like the KKK now. As for the Democrats, I couldn't give a shit. They abdicated their final, vestigial claim to legitimacy when they forced us into the choice of Rich Yalie Bonesman A versus Rich Yalie Bonesman B. That sent the clear message that the purpose of the two-party system is to protect those in power from people like us making a real choice.
Non-free software or no software. What would you rather have?
I'd rather have free software and no false dichotomies. And I've written software for money for over 25 years, and work for a firm that did $100M in business last year providing consulting and development services, much of it to clients using free software. So where's the either/or choice?
The reality is that creators of software seldom benefit from its commoditization. Let me tell you the benefit I derive from the software I've written that my employers got paid for, besides the paychecks when I did it: I got the satisfaction of a job well done.
Your error is in assuming that your salary is in some way derived from the price of the software. It might be, but probably not. The services market has always been huge and is independent of the cost of the software being customized and integrated. Demand for these services doesn't go away just because the underlying OS, or the apps, are free software.
Unless, of course, you think that you know better than those airhead hippies at IBM, which, when faced with a strategic choice between continuing to be a software creator or a professional services firm that uses free software, chose the latter. My guess is that the reason for that was that there was more money in services.
One impact of the GPL is that software becomes more like a service and less like a product. It will take a better economist than either of us to tell whether this increases or decreases the overall value of the software business and of all the economic activities that interact with it.
Some old psychologist (name long forgotten) distinguished between field-dependent and field-independent cognitive styles. The former needs the boundary conditions of the problem to be very clear before they proceed; the latter doesn't.
I've worked with a lot of very bright field-dependent developers. Their intolerance of flux and ambiguity makes them mediocre analysts and even worse project managers. Yeah, PM's need to run a tight ship, but you also have to know when enough analysis is enough. And even more, you need to know how to deal with lots of different people with different agendas. Just about any PHB can build a chart in MS Project (gag) and mush a team through the milestones. But knowing what to make those milestones be, and convincing the buyer that they mean anything, that's the art.
One result of government regulation has been the emergence of requirements management tools like Borland's CaliberRM and Telelogic's DOORS.
Nope. Requirement management tools have been around for at least 15 years as commercial products and existed long before that as home-brew. I used them at the time. The first one I worked with was in 1981. The use of traceability tools to satisfy GMP regulations in pharma was formalized long after that. The financial industry also came relatively late to that game.
And they weren't used originally because of government regulation. They were used because complex projects (aerospace and telecoms) couldn't be managed without them. With no way to manage requirements, meaningful testing is an impossibility, for one thing. I worked on big system integration projects in aerospace; governments were our customers and we were doing it before they required us to. Aerospace firms liked traceability because it took some of the haggling out of system sell-off.
Requirements management tools can indeed facilitate risk management. But they are often used as a substitute for engineering judgement and cannot replace formal risk analysis methodologies.
I do agree with the parent post, though, that doing traceability right is a necessary (though far from sufficient) condition for project success. The other precondition that I'd say is even more important is to have the habit of analyzing the impact of every proposed requirement change. You won't get it right every time, but over time you'll get good at it and that will make a huge difference in your success rate. Especially if your metrics are good enough that they include both your estimates and the actuals when you do the change. You can learn a lot from those numbers really fast. If nothing else, they can tell you whose estimates are soundest. It's not always who you think it is.
And I Use It to Weed Out Staff
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How Do You Use UML?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The way I use UML is as way to select projects I want to participate in. If it uses UML, I'm out. The correlation of using UML with rigid authoritarian organization and fighting with "productivity enhancers" rather than developing software is too high.
I've done development for a very long time and there are few non-trivial projects where modeling, used correctly, doesn't reduce risk and end up delivering a higher-quality product. In fact, I won't hire any developer who refuses to use UML since I'll assume that s/he is lacking in essential software engineering skills and is a "code first, understand the problem later" sort of person. I've burned too many hours fixing that kind of code to ever want to do it again. And I'm about as far from an authoritarian manager as you can get.
The art is to know how much modeling is enough. This depends on the development tools you're using (languages, IDE's), the problem you're trying to solve, and the skill level of the developers and "buyers" of the project. I find it most useful at a higher level of abstraction: activity diagrams are really good afor understanding business processes; a high-level object model is usually a good thing to have early in the project definition phase; and I always want a convincing story on object life cycles before we start: this probably involves realization and sequence diagrams.
I seldom use more than 20% of the semantic richness of UML-- I use it more to "rough out" a description of objects and their behavior. Part of the reason for that is that there is no value in using UML to replicate capabilities that are already built into the development tool suite. And detailed modeling of stuff that doesn't matter is just bullshit. Anyone who documents every page on a website with a sequence diagram that basically tells you nothing should be taken out back and shot. Since I'm usually the tech lead on projects, I'm the one who tells the clients what we use and why. And if they expect some UML feature that we're not using, I tell them why we're saving them money by tailoring it out. If your management aren't capable fo doing that, they aren't fit for their jobs.
My main point is that UML is a common language to make analysis and design more effective. It's only useful when it does that. Knowing when it's helping and when it gets in the way is a judgement call for which somebody had better be prepared to take responsibility. Unthinkingly doing everything everytime to insane levels of detail is nothing but a shameful waste of resources. It should be the yeast, not the flour, in your loaf of bread. It cannot take the place of intelligence.
It seems to me that what you're really doing is persisting object properties, but not using object semantics to do it. THAT's why you get "zombie properties" in Registry-like designs: some object properties are realized on the heap, and some in the persistent store. And when you have the same object realized or partially replicated in multiple places, you need to use transactional semantics to make sure that everything is kept consistent. It's essentially just the garbage-collection problem, except that because of the need to persist properties for so long, part of it has leaked out of your runtime and into persistent storage.
Note that this can be the case whether the designer thought that they were creating objects or not. Even when they're not embodied in an OO design, there are still things out there that behave like objects. Unless they're managed as such, you end up with dangling references, properties without objects, and other artifacts that result from incomplete garbage collection.
Hard_code's comments about the same information being scattered in numerous flat files or relations sounds to me like a plea for refactorization (or maybe just the mechanism to enable it as you're using a system).
The other thing I would urge is to be sure that the API follows, doesn't drive, the object model, and that, where object semantics exist, they're exposed as such. This gives users maximum flexibility and really takes advantage of scripting languages with OO capabilities.
I used to develop system internals, so I am not naive enough to argue that objects are the only abstractions you need to consider during design. But for a large part of the application layer, it often makes a lot of sense to look at things this way. And this has been a historic weakness in *nix app architectures and their integration with OS services.
Of course, I have my own reasons to believe the system doesn't work. I was accused for possession of pot, although they had no proof that it was mine -- it wasn't on my person or in my car. They said "no charges will be filed," 1 year probation, then it gets expunged, so I took your stance (although I was not fined) -- sure, nothing bad will come of it, so I'll just play along.
Something similar happened to me. I was out for a late-night walk, cop came up and picked up a baggie of pot from the ground. I assume it came from his pocket since I wasn't smoking at the time. The only thing that kept me out of the system was that he recognized me from high school and let me go. He was an asshole in school too.
The system works just fine. You're just wrongly assuming that its real purpose is what they taught you in school. It's a protection racket. Maybe a little extortion on the side. In that way it operates just the way it's meant to.
All the comments were not in english, nor were the variables/functions. Even the English content was horribly written. I would expect a generic high school student to write better content.
My experience in this regard has been different: there has been a wide variation in the quality of written English from Indian programmers whose code I've reviewed. American programmers' English is less variable, and on the average better. As for the code, I couldn't draw a conclusion either way.
I, as a programmer, do not fear the Indians, either in their own country or my own. I refuse to utilize companies that I know use Indian labor (ie, HP or Dell), and if I am ever transferred to an Indian on the phone, I refuse to speak with them. I demand to be transferred to someone who speaks English natively in an accent I can readily understand. I encourage my friends & family to do the same - nothing against the Indian workers at all. It's not racism - its a small attempt to punish the company for using outside labor.
But you're not doing that. You're punishing companies who employ VISIBLE foreign labor, an entirely different thing. I can think of few corporations of any appreciable size who don't have either suppliers or some staff outside the US. Most non-trivial supply chains are already globalized.
Of course, outsourcing and H1-B visas are two different things anyway. My problem with the visa program is that it is used by employers to hold down the salaries of local employees. While I hold no grudge against the Indian developers and architects within my own firm, I also don't know of any cases where their skill sets are so unique that an American couldn't have been hired to do the job. That implies that there must be some other reasons for their having been hired. And I know that many companies underpay H1-B recipients despite the alleged presence of safeguards against this abuse.
I'd be curious to see what this would look like if you excluded immigrants - I suspect the US would place a lot higher relative to highly homogenous societies like the ones at the top.
I'm not at all convinced that the US would score better overall without the immigrants. The top kids in math at my kids' school are all immigrants or the children of recent immigrants. Less anecdotally, since much of the legal immigration to the US is of highly skilled professionals, I'd guess that if they and the illegals were excluded, both ends of the bell curve would be pushed down.
Whether the net result would be an increase or decrease of the average score is unclear to me.
He wants there to be a license to publish. Back in the days when communication involved dead trees, the King of England licensed every printing press. That's why freedom of the press was so important in the US constitution. Now Tenet wants the same royal license for the Internet.
These people don't want anything to exist that they can't control. Further evidence that, as I've said all along, terrorism isn't the main threat to them, it's the possibility that we might find out what they're up to and get organized to change things.
No, the problem is ignorant luddites. Nuclear power is NOT inherently bad, nor is it unsafe if used in a well-controlled manner.
I'm not arguing that properly designed and operated nuclear plants are likely to blow up, leaving craters half the size of a small state. I leave that to some of my less-technical friends, who watch too many old movies while in a gullible state and wear hemp underwear. But I would say that, when comparing energy solutions, it's necessary to look at the whole set of costs, from extraction of the resource through waste disposal and decommissioning. On that basis, you'd probably be better off with low-sulfur coal or natural gas, even with the consequent greenhouse problems. And if greenhouse emissions are properly taxed to reflect the real costs they incur, conservation and cogeneration start making sense and are likely to be viable alternatives.
What the fuck do you want us to do, go back to living in caves? Keep burning coal? Use other expensive technology that does not work well enough to be viable, let alone profitable?
Well, our ancestors probably made a bad choice back when they descended from the trees, but I suppose it's too late to fix that now. Based on the current situation, I'd like to see less energy wasted. Western European countries use a far amount of energy to produce a dollar of GDP than the US does, and their living standards aren't that different than ours (I know: I've lived in both places). A punitive tax on gas-guzzlers would help, both vehicles and generation facilities. So would the elimination of grandfathering clauses that prevent the uniform enforcement of environmental regulations on power plants (aging high-sulfur coal-fired plants in rustbelt states often get exemptions and deferrals, for example). The ideal outcome for me would be a system that takes into account the environmental costs of different technologies, and where the government isn't propping up energies because of the political needs of the local Congresscritters. If the playing field is closer to being level, then market mechanisms have a chance of finding an optimal mix. Diversity of sources should also help with reliability. As things now stand, there are so many distortions that this is impossible.
Maybe, based on this scenario, nuclear power might even make sense. But it looks more to me like the nuclear cost curve has a very long, narrow tail, while the benefit (and profit) curve has a hump that's closer to right now. That's the kind of situation that encourages businesses to cut and run, dumping the costs onto someone else (usually the taxpayer). Consider the case of abandoned strip mines as another example.
Sounds like, at least, you'd agree that the decision needs to be made based on objective criteria, rather than the present opaque system where extraneous issues such as the health of the nuclear weapons industry intrude on energy policy choices. From there, it's a matter of reducing the hysteria and also raising the bullshit flag on energy industry propaganda.
Sooooo... why not just employ a new US graduate if they're intent on replacing a 10yr veteran with a new grad on an entry level salary?
Because they have better leverage over the H1B person: you put undue pressure on an American and they'll quit and find another job; the only recourse the H1B person has is to be terminated and deported. This is an especially pronounced difference when there's a shortage of tech workers in the US.
The whole system is in place to depress the wages and lower the job security of US tech workers. The skill that's really in shortage in the US is the willingness to put up with employers' abusive behavior.
It's called a breeder reactor and it's as safe as a nuclear reactor is. The problem is that nobody wants to build one because they are afraid of what we did to the people who built the nuclear reactors in the first place. We bankrupted most of them by constantly changing the rules in the middle of the game.
Yeah, here's what we did that was so horrible and unfair: we removed a small part of the free pass they had to avoid the full lifecycle cost of their uneconomic, toxic technology. The only way nuclear power has ever been economically viable is if someone else is picking up the tab for large portions of its lifecycle, particularly waste disposal and fuel production. Add to this the operational risk profile, where there are low-probability failure modes that can cause very costly damage, and the nuke industry is far from viable. And breeders solve some of the problems around the fuel cycle, but still produce large volumes of waste that has to be dealt with. So again, the only route to profitability is to get society at large to suck up the huge externalities.
The nuclear power industry is just another bunch of subsidy whores, sucking money out of the government and at the same time begging for impunity for the damage they cause to the environment and to their workforce.
Since the cat's already out of the bag, we'll need long-term storage. But to prevent the problem from getting worse, this should be coupled with an initiative to shut the nuclear industry (including weapons production) down completely, starting in the US and eventually worldwide. The problem is not regulation: it's nuclear power itself.
Oh, and those of you who thing that space disposal makes sense: look at the enormous volumes of low-level waste that are produced, and the cost per kilo of payload based on even the most optimistic scenarios. You get some ridiculously large numbers.
The RIAA has managed to generate sufficient ill will that some people (including me) will not buy another CD, DVD or download from any RIAA-affiliated artist.
Is this showing up in the statistics yet? If not, what can we do to increase the pressure? After all, it doesn't have to be forever-- only until they moderate their behavior.
As near-monopolies go, Google is certainly technically competent and not too malignant. But with their mearket share they can easily become transformed into just another single point of failure.
We're back to the ecosystem analogy: the only thing that makes the Internet viable is diversity. Governments love monopolies and oligopolies and encourage them at every opportunity-- then it's easy for them to pick up the phone and an embarrassing political problem goes away.
Beware gatekeepers, no matter how benign they are.
The only way the Web will continue to be useful is if we continue to bypass these chokepoints.
Since the lawsuits have started, I have quit buying any products from companies represented by the RIAA. Now I will also boycott MPAA products.
So far, my quality of life is no different than before. Maybe slightly improved by the additional money in my pocket. I spend some of it to see live music. I buy wine and books with the rest.
It's gotten to the point where the best thing to do is to shoot your TV and spend more time taking the dog for a walk. And don't buy another CD or DVD until they end the shakedown. 86 the bastards. It's a luxury, not a necessity.
Many of us in the US
need the rest of the world to stand up against this kind of tyranny.
Don't expect the UK to do it. The government there is even more thoroughly dominated by business than it is in the US, and the Blair government has been as utterly indifferent to civil liberties as the Tories.
You're seeing this land-grab everywhere because of the economic rewards that are salivated over by the Big Content firms. And the corporate tail wags the nation-state dog in many places besides the US.
Just goes to show that democracy doesn't work. And for the same reason as communism: greed.
You have no way of knowing whether democracy works based on the experience of the US. The US has never been a democracy. It was founded and has always operated as a republic, and in practice has always been a plutocracy. There's some quasi-democratic window dressing, but the people don't run the government or make the laws. The US model is more closely based on Rome than on Athens.
Re:Nice flamebait re: GWB
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The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Do expect Bush to continue promoting religious organizations as the only source of welfare and social assistance.
Oh I hadn't heard that was something on his platform. I think this is awesome! Let the people help themselves!
Well, it wasn't really his idea, his lackeys figured it out by observing how Islamic fundamentalism was spread worldwide from Saudi Arabia: by state support of religious fanatics masquerading as charity.
Four years ago, a sizeable chunk of Democratic voters cast their ballots for Nader, using the same logic.
Why are those "Democratic" voters? Do the Democrats own them? How do you know they wouldn't have just stayed home if Nader weren't on the ballot?
IMO, if you don't see the differences between the parties in this country, your overwhelming cyncism is impairing your ability to think critically.
I see differences: they represent two slightly different corporate constituencies. But I have become convinced that a system that even makes it possible for someone like Bush to hold office is fundamentally broken. Alternating every four or eight years between periods of vandalism and halfhearted repair to the damage is not progress. It's punctuated decay.
(for the record -- I am a Bush-hating moderate who regularly votes Republican and Democrat.
Good for you! Since you're a centrist, you might actually feel that your views are represented. Me, I'm a Bush-hating pacifist environmentalist who might hold my nose and tactically vote for Democrats but will give my money and time only to political groups that intend to make a difference. Reallocating pork from Halliburton to AOL Time Warner, or fine-tuning how much the middle class's share of the pie is compared to the rich is far from the magnitude of change I'm talking about.
Look, it's like Iraq: Bush wants to stay in. Kerry wants to stay in with some eventual exit strategy. I might be satisfied to see Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz snarling from Plexiglas cages at the Hague like Milosevic as they face war-crimes charges. That's not a position that can be accommodated in the millimeter of space between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. This is not cynicism. It's an assessment of the constraints of the existing system compared with the magnitude of change needed to achieve the just and sustainable society that is our only hope of survival. It's a very narrow box the 2-party system keeps us in. We can try expanding it or we can get out. Based on what I've learned from history, the latter is the more effective way to achieve meaningful change, despite the risks and frustrations. Remember how much the Democrats led the Civil Rights and environmental movements: they didn't. They were dragged along by forces outside their party. That's the only place non-brain-dead politics will originate in the US: outside the parties. The big parties are just ballast.
The Republicrats (or is it the Demopublicans?) differ on most fundamental topics so little as for it to be irrelevant. That is the essence of Clintonian triangulation. It existed long before it had that name and has been used by both parties. The Republicans want to launch neo-colonialist wars and enslave those of us back here in the Heimat (sorry, homeland). The Democrats want to do it more slowly, and to try to smile benevolently rather than sneering while doing it. But this is mainly a difference of style, not substance. Neither questions their corporate masters. And neither accepts limitations on state power in times of crisis. The only difference is which corporations get their snouts into the public trough first.
The story behind the story is interesting: to thrive in high-stress corporate environments, you have to have experience coping with dysfunction.
1. Does this mean that capitalist society offers limited opportunities to the well-adjusted, and that only those from disrupted family backgrounds can tolerate the distorted, inhuman environment of the workplace?
2. Is the whole study nothing more than a self-selected sample from those who work in dysfunctional firms that demand heroic effort from their employees rather than taking responsibility for managing properly?
3. The authors of the study seem to imply that coping with this catastrophic situation is somehow healthy. Isn't it healthier to recognize it for the disaster that it is and try to change it? What is the stress level of someone who fights back? If it's high, does it make them less right?
Considering how many questions have been raised as to whether Moore's movie presents truth or propaganda
Look, if the Republican party starts claiming that the sun revolves around the earth, I'll see a posting on Slashdot that "many questions have been raised about the Copernican model."
No analysis of events is free of bias. News organizations that pretend to be fair are just being hypocritical. "Fairness" in that context generally means "in careful alignment with majority prejudices." The main reason that Moore gets more flak than others is because he's picking a fight with those in power.
This highlights a conservative bias I've often noticed: it's OK to say that you have rights. But to actually exercise them means that you're a troublemaker and fair game for character assassination or worse.
Slashdot Mirror
You are using theory to mean two different things.
1. An explanation of observations that, in a Popperian sense, could be falsified (this is the sense you mean when you refer to evolution); and
2. Inane, superstitious bullshit spoonfed to credulous sister-humping semiliterates to make them believe that they, too, have descended from the trees. This is the sense you use when speaking of Intelligent Design.
We have long memories. I won't be satisfied until the Republicans are nothing but a gaggle of withered fanatics, a faded memory of evil, like the KKK now. As for the Democrats, I couldn't give a shit. They abdicated their final, vestigial claim to legitimacy when they forced us into the choice of Rich Yalie Bonesman A versus Rich Yalie Bonesman B. That sent the clear message that the purpose of the two-party system is to protect those in power from people like us making a real choice.
The reality is that creators of software seldom benefit from its commoditization. Let me tell you the benefit I derive from the software I've written that my employers got paid for, besides the paychecks when I did it: I got the satisfaction of a job well done.
Your error is in assuming that your salary is in some way derived from the price of the software. It might be, but probably not. The services market has always been huge and is independent of the cost of the software being customized and integrated. Demand for these services doesn't go away just because the underlying OS, or the apps, are free software.
Unless, of course, you think that you know better than those airhead hippies at IBM, which, when faced with a strategic choice between continuing to be a software creator or a professional services firm that uses free software, chose the latter. My guess is that the reason for that was that there was more money in services.
One impact of the GPL is that software becomes more like a service and less like a product. It will take a better economist than either of us to tell whether this increases or decreases the overall value of the software business and of all the economic activities that interact with it.
Some old psychologist (name long forgotten) distinguished between field-dependent and field-independent cognitive styles. The former needs the boundary conditions of the problem to be very clear before they proceed; the latter doesn't.
I've worked with a lot of very bright field-dependent developers. Their intolerance of flux and ambiguity makes them mediocre analysts and even worse project managers. Yeah, PM's need to run a tight ship, but you also have to know when enough analysis is enough. And even more, you need to know how to deal with lots of different people with different agendas. Just about any PHB can build a chart in MS Project (gag) and mush a team through the milestones. But knowing what to make those milestones be, and convincing the buyer that they mean anything, that's the art.
And that's why I seldom build an all-techie team.
And they weren't used originally because of government regulation. They were used because complex projects (aerospace and telecoms) couldn't be managed without them. With no way to manage requirements, meaningful testing is an impossibility, for one thing. I worked on big system integration projects in aerospace; governments were our customers and we were doing it before they required us to. Aerospace firms liked traceability because it took some of the haggling out of system sell-off.
Requirements management tools can indeed facilitate risk management. But they are often used as a substitute for engineering judgement and cannot replace formal risk analysis methodologies.
I do agree with the parent post, though, that doing traceability right is a necessary (though far from sufficient) condition for project success. The other precondition that I'd say is even more important is to have the habit of analyzing the impact of every proposed requirement change. You won't get it right every time, but over time you'll get good at it and that will make a huge difference in your success rate. Especially if your metrics are good enough that they include both your estimates and the actuals when you do the change. You can learn a lot from those numbers really fast. If nothing else, they can tell you whose estimates are soundest. It's not always who you think it is.
The art is to know how much modeling is enough. This depends on the development tools you're using (languages, IDE's), the problem you're trying to solve, and the skill level of the developers and "buyers" of the project. I find it most useful at a higher level of abstraction: activity diagrams are really good afor understanding business processes; a high-level object model is usually a good thing to have early in the project definition phase; and I always want a convincing story on object life cycles before we start: this probably involves realization and sequence diagrams.
I seldom use more than 20% of the semantic richness of UML-- I use it more to "rough out" a description of objects and their behavior. Part of the reason for that is that there is no value in using UML to replicate capabilities that are already built into the development tool suite. And detailed modeling of stuff that doesn't matter is just bullshit. Anyone who documents every page on a website with a sequence diagram that basically tells you nothing should be taken out back and shot. Since I'm usually the tech lead on projects, I'm the one who tells the clients what we use and why. And if they expect some UML feature that we're not using, I tell them why we're saving them money by tailoring it out. If your management aren't capable fo doing that, they aren't fit for their jobs.
My main point is that UML is a common language to make analysis and design more effective. It's only useful when it does that. Knowing when it's helping and when it gets in the way is a judgement call for which somebody had better be prepared to take responsibility. Unthinkingly doing everything everytime to insane levels of detail is nothing but a shameful waste of resources. It should be the yeast, not the flour, in your loaf of bread. It cannot take the place of intelligence.
This seems an odd discussion.
It seems to me that what you're really doing is persisting object properties, but not using object semantics to do it. THAT's why you get "zombie properties" in Registry-like designs: some object properties are realized on the heap, and some in the persistent store. And when you have the same object realized or partially replicated in multiple places, you need to use transactional semantics to make sure that everything is kept consistent. It's essentially just the garbage-collection problem, except that because of the need to persist properties for so long, part of it has leaked out of your runtime and into persistent storage.
Note that this can be the case whether the designer thought that they were creating objects or not. Even when they're not embodied in an OO design, there are still things out there that behave like objects. Unless they're managed as such, you end up with dangling references, properties without objects, and other artifacts that result from incomplete garbage collection.
Hard_code's comments about the same information being scattered in numerous flat files or relations sounds to me like a plea for refactorization (or maybe just the mechanism to enable it as you're using a system).
The other thing I would urge is to be sure that the API follows, doesn't drive, the object model, and that, where object semantics exist, they're exposed as such. This gives users maximum flexibility and really takes advantage of scripting languages with OO capabilities.
I used to develop system internals, so I am not naive enough to argue that objects are the only abstractions you need to consider during design. But for a large part of the application layer, it often makes a lot of sense to look at things this way. And this has been a historic weakness in *nix app architectures and their integration with OS services.
The system works just fine. You're just wrongly assuming that its real purpose is what they taught you in school. It's a protection racket. Maybe a little extortion on the side. In that way it operates just the way it's meant to.
Of course, outsourcing and H1-B visas are two different things anyway. My problem with the visa program is that it is used by employers to hold down the salaries of local employees. While I hold no grudge against the Indian developers and architects within my own firm, I also don't know of any cases where their skill sets are so unique that an American couldn't have been hired to do the job. That implies that there must be some other reasons for their having been hired. And I know that many companies underpay H1-B recipients despite the alleged presence of safeguards against this abuse.
Whether the net result would be an increase or decrease of the average score is unclear to me.
He wants there to be a license to publish. Back in the days when communication involved dead trees, the King of England licensed every printing press. That's why freedom of the press was so important in the US constitution. Now Tenet wants the same royal license for the Internet.
These people don't want anything to exist that they can't control. Further evidence that, as I've said all along, terrorism isn't the main threat to them, it's the possibility that we might find out what they're up to and get organized to change things.
Well, our ancestors probably made a bad choice back when they descended from the trees, but I suppose it's too late to fix that now. Based on the current situation, I'd like to see less energy wasted. Western European countries use a far amount of energy to produce a dollar of GDP than the US does, and their living standards aren't that different than ours (I know: I've lived in both places). A punitive tax on gas-guzzlers would help, both vehicles and generation facilities. So would the elimination of grandfathering clauses that prevent the uniform enforcement of environmental regulations on power plants (aging high-sulfur coal-fired plants in rustbelt states often get exemptions and deferrals, for example). The ideal outcome for me would be a system that takes into account the environmental costs of different technologies, and where the government isn't propping up energies because of the political needs of the local Congresscritters. If the playing field is closer to being level, then market mechanisms have a chance of finding an optimal mix. Diversity of sources should also help with reliability. As things now stand, there are so many distortions that this is impossible.
Maybe, based on this scenario, nuclear power might even make sense. But it looks more to me like the nuclear cost curve has a very long, narrow tail, while the benefit (and profit) curve has a hump that's closer to right now. That's the kind of situation that encourages businesses to cut and run, dumping the costs onto someone else (usually the taxpayer). Consider the case of abandoned strip mines as another example.
Sounds like, at least, you'd agree that the decision needs to be made based on objective criteria, rather than the present opaque system where extraneous issues such as the health of the nuclear weapons industry intrude on energy policy choices. From there, it's a matter of reducing the hysteria and also raising the bullshit flag on energy industry propaganda.
The whole system is in place to depress the wages and lower the job security of US tech workers. The skill that's really in shortage in the US is the willingness to put up with employers' abusive behavior.
The nuclear power industry is just another bunch of subsidy whores, sucking money out of the government and at the same time begging for impunity for the damage they cause to the environment and to their workforce.
Since the cat's already out of the bag, we'll need long-term storage. But to prevent the problem from getting worse, this should be coupled with an initiative to shut the nuclear industry (including weapons production) down completely, starting in the US and eventually worldwide. The problem is not regulation: it's nuclear power itself.
Oh, and those of you who thing that space disposal makes sense: look at the enormous volumes of low-level waste that are produced, and the cost per kilo of payload based on even the most optimistic scenarios. You get some ridiculously large numbers.
The RIAA has managed to generate sufficient ill will that some people (including me) will not buy another CD, DVD or download from any RIAA-affiliated artist.
Is this showing up in the statistics yet? If not, what can we do to increase the pressure? After all, it doesn't have to be forever-- only until they moderate their behavior.
As near-monopolies go, Google is certainly technically competent and not too malignant. But with their mearket share they can easily become transformed into just another single point of failure.
We're back to the ecosystem analogy: the only thing that makes the Internet viable is diversity. Governments love monopolies and oligopolies and encourage them at every opportunity-- then it's easy for them to pick up the phone and an embarrassing political problem goes away.
Beware gatekeepers, no matter how benign they are. The only way the Web will continue to be useful is if we continue to bypass these chokepoints.
Since the lawsuits have started, I have quit buying any products from companies represented by the RIAA. Now I will also boycott MPAA products.
So far, my quality of life is no different than before. Maybe slightly improved by the additional money in my pocket. I spend some of it to see live music. I buy wine and books with the rest.
It's gotten to the point where the best thing to do is to shoot your TV and spend more time taking the dog for a walk. And don't buy another CD or DVD until they end the shakedown. 86 the bastards. It's a luxury, not a necessity.
You're seeing this land-grab everywhere because of the economic rewards that are salivated over by the Big Content firms. And the corporate tail wags the nation-state dog in many places besides the US.
Protecting them from us, not vice versa.
I see differences: they represent two slightly different corporate constituencies. But I have become convinced that a system that even makes it possible for someone like Bush to hold office is fundamentally broken. Alternating every four or eight years between periods of vandalism and halfhearted repair to the damage is not progress. It's punctuated decay.
Good for you! Since you're a centrist, you might actually feel that your views are represented. Me, I'm a Bush-hating pacifist environmentalist who might hold my nose and tactically vote for Democrats but will give my money and time only to political groups that intend to make a difference. Reallocating pork from Halliburton to AOL Time Warner, or fine-tuning how much the middle class's share of the pie is compared to the rich is far from the magnitude of change I'm talking about.
Look, it's like Iraq: Bush wants to stay in. Kerry wants to stay in with some eventual exit strategy. I might be satisfied to see Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz snarling from Plexiglas cages at the Hague like Milosevic as they face war-crimes charges. That's not a position that can be accommodated in the millimeter of space between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. This is not cynicism. It's an assessment of the constraints of the existing system compared with the magnitude of change needed to achieve the just and sustainable society that is our only hope of survival. It's a very narrow box the 2-party system keeps us in. We can try expanding it or we can get out. Based on what I've learned from history, the latter is the more effective way to achieve meaningful change, despite the risks and frustrations. Remember how much the Democrats led the Civil Rights and environmental movements: they didn't. They were dragged along by forces outside their party. That's the only place non-brain-dead politics will originate in the US: outside the parties. The big parties are just ballast.
The Republicrats (or is it the Demopublicans?) differ on most fundamental topics so little as for it to be irrelevant. That is the essence of Clintonian triangulation. It existed long before it had that name and has been used by both parties. The Republicans want to launch neo-colonialist wars and enslave those of us back here in the Heimat (sorry, homeland). The Democrats want to do it more slowly, and to try to smile benevolently rather than sneering while doing it. But this is mainly a difference of style, not substance. Neither questions their corporate masters. And neither accepts limitations on state power in times of crisis. The only difference is which corporations get their snouts into the public trough first.
The story behind the story is interesting: to thrive in high-stress corporate environments, you have to have experience coping with dysfunction.
1. Does this mean that capitalist society offers limited opportunities to the well-adjusted, and that only those from disrupted family backgrounds can tolerate the distorted, inhuman environment of the workplace?
2. Is the whole study nothing more than a self-selected sample from those who work in dysfunctional firms that demand heroic effort from their employees rather than taking responsibility for managing properly?
3. The authors of the study seem to imply that coping with this catastrophic situation is somehow healthy. Isn't it healthier to recognize it for the disaster that it is and try to change it? What is the stress level of someone who fights back? If it's high, does it make them less right?
No analysis of events is free of bias. News organizations that pretend to be fair are just being hypocritical. "Fairness" in that context generally means "in careful alignment with majority prejudices." The main reason that Moore gets more flak than others is because he's picking a fight with those in power.
This highlights a conservative bias I've often noticed: it's OK to say that you have rights. But to actually exercise them means that you're a troublemaker and fair game for character assassination or worse.