Probably waterfall as in "Git 'er Dun!", shovel in changes to System X, ram them into production, sorry, no time to clean up or put in reliability, security or backup/recovery processes, got to get the next waterfall "Dun!" Then after a while, someone comes and complains that System X doesn't do what it needs to do, drag it back out and send it over the waterfall again.
The world is full of artificially inflated bumps. Just look at executive salaries over the last 3 decades. Do they really work 200x as many hours as anyone else? Do they have Cosmic Wisdom that no one else has? Has their productivity gone up multi-fold over the last 20 years like line-level workers (who are making in purchasing terms less than they did when they were less productive)?
No, but they have particularly effective union - the Good Old Boys Network.
There is no practical reason why we cannot outsource the executive functions to New Delhi and pay them 7 grand a year. We don't do it because they have an "in" with the directors that line-level workers don't. They pay their Union Dues in quid-pro-quo instead of formal paycheck deductions.
But here is the catch. Let's say those guys in suits decided to pay you $10/hr? What would happen? More than likely you would quit and the position would be unfilled. That is called supply and demand.
Throughout most of history, however, that hasn't been the case. If you didn't want to work for $10/hr, they'd be able to find someone else who did. The Market only works when everyone has equal power to bargain. An individual who's got to feed the family this week has no leverage to speak of when facing a corporatin that can afford to sit on its much larger (capitalized) assets and wait for them to starve.
When you get right down to it, a union is basically just a counter-corporation designed to turn the asymmetry around in favor of the workers.
Our company, Bombay Telephone Polishers, LLC stands ready to provide most excellent service with all needful certifications at very low prices.
In other words, don't be silly. If there's one thing outsourcing companies excel in it's cram-and-barf certs, and even when they don't actually have those certs, they'll claim they do just to score the contract with the corporate bargain-hunters. Then, if there is an actual requirement, they'll ram as many junior persons through cram-and-barf as necessary.
Whatever you're smoking is something that's stronger than anything legal in Colorado.
Third party app packaging support for Linux is something that's been around for ages. RPM for Red Hat and friends, dpkg for Debian/Ubuntu, and other lesser-known facilities for other systems. In actuality, probably 80+ percent of the stock repositories of the popular Linux distros are "third party" apps which have been built as distro-specific system packages - they're just part of the official repos, that's all. Other than that, packages I design and build myself of my own apps install and are managed in exactly the same way.
If your complaint is with dependencies, the main repository systems handle that as well. How well a given app will deal with dependencies depends on how well the package maintainer defined its needs, but the installers can do a very good job of making things "just work".
This "monolithic dependency tree" thing you're talking about doesn't even make sense to me. A YUM repo has had its packages scanned by a tool that constructs a dependency database in order to make dependency resolution faster, but by that definition, any read-mostly database is a "monolithic depency tree" or something similar. And you can't just jam in your own package to someone else's repo. The repo servers are designed to permit only authorized personnel to add packages and update the dependency database and to declare via appropriate signatures that assure that the repo isn't being circumvented.
If you use a random third-party repo, you are at risk, yes, but every repo is a risk. It's just that some repos have public trust and others depend on faith. If I was to set up and host repo, it would have the same security capabilities as the master Debian repos, just not the widespread faith.
Now if you want to talk about the problems that come from mixing dependencies from multiple repos where the dependencies were built with different capabilities, that's another issue entirely. There is, unfortunately, no real way to tell if a given repo's version of mencoder comes standard with the codes that my package might require. And it would be an interesting challenge to be able to resolve a problem like that, considering that every app (third party or not) could have a different collection of features and capabilities to be added, excluded or interfere with each other.
Being an incompetent typist does not equate to being an incompetent developer.
Certainly syntax-highlighting IDEs have saved me a lot of grief, but there's still plenty of room for screwups in SQL statements defined as string literals (the IDE checks the programming language, but not the SQL) and not everything that changes the semantics of a statement is actually syntactically invalid. Otherwise people would have a lot less trouble with there software design and it's more frustrating aspects.
It's the most fatal phrase in IT: "It's Simple! All You Have To Do Is..."
AYHTDI is repeated endlessly by people who think that because Little Johnny can write a program to make a block move back and forth on the screen that a Little Johnny could recreate EBay in a day.
Well, Little Johnny is a Boy Scout with a First Aid merit badge and we're scheduling him to do your liver transplant next Thursday.
Ironically, it generally seems that I don't spend all that much time - relatively speaking - on the big, deep tech issues.
Where most of the project time gets eaten up is in the stupid little ordinary details. It's not uncommon to lose nearly 2 whole days because of a slipped comma or a dash where there should have been an underscore or a mismatched quote.
A lot of times, it doesn't take a technical wizard to spot such stuff, just someone who isn't seeing what should be there, instead of what is there. That's why it's important that you can rely on constructive criticism, not insults. If I'm going to have my basic competence called into question just because I can't type straight, I'm far more likely to spend the extra time spinning my wheels doing it myself.
It would have been several smaller jumps, but their generous "grandfathering" rules spared people.
Admittedly, the percentage is big, but the dollar amount is small, and even after the hike the whole Netflix bill is still less than adding a channel to most cable services.
The fault lies in the binary assumption that climate can be changing either naturally OR because of human action, but NOT BOTH.
Actual climate is the sum total of a number of contributors that are for the most part (excepting human growth) constantly cycling up and down over longer or shorter periods. What we're concerned with is whether or not the human contribution is pushing things to extremes and whether it's doing so so fast that neither humankind nor the planet can adapt to it.
And even that isn't a boolean variable. If we can physically adapt but the economic consequences are ruinous, that's nearly as bad.
First, inherently aerial surveillance can be (unobtrusively) broad. That plays into the NSA-we're-logging-everyone's-calls-innocent-or-not concern.
Secondly - and this is an area open to debate - there's the reasonable expectation of privacy. Something that has been used to justify a lot of surveillance in these un-private times.
A person who stands at one end of a block and shouts at a person at the other end of the block cannot reasonably expect privacy. People are going to hear whether they want to or not.
A person who stands next to another person and talks in a normal voice doesn't have a true expectation of privacy, but common courtesy typically comes into play here unless they have reason to suspect bystanders.
If the people are being overhead from the other end of the block because someone has unobtrusively trained a shotgun microphone on them, that's exceeding reasonable expectations because people who go around with live shotgun mikes are not the norm and because individuals are being spied on. That's about the same degree as aerial surveillance with an unmuted plane.
A person who's in a house talking to another person does have a reasonable expectation of privacy because even though I could bounce a laser off the window from a hidden location and pick up what was being said, that's something that needs a warrant, or at least provable justification. More or less the same level for a muted plane. Other similar acts incude attaching a GPS to someone's vehicle. or hijacking phone calls with a Stingray.
If instead of actively aiming a spy beam at the house in question, I set up a cosmic ray detector equipped with an audio demodulator, I'm outside all bounds of reasonable expectation. This where stuff like tracking your cellphone's location lies.
Note that these examples have no legal weight. What courts rule as "reasonable" can be quite unreasonable, but once you get into that territory, you're risking a legislative backlash or at least domestic discontent.
The reasonable expectation of privacy in un-private situations isn't a new issue. The Federal Communications Act of 1934 allowed persons to monitor any radio-wave transmissions that they could capture, but communications not explicitly directed as public broadcasts or to the listener were not be be repeated or exploited. When Reagan "got the government off the backs of the people", they narrowed that, making it against the law to monitor selected frequencies, but regardless, private radio conversations were expected to remain private, whether intercepted legally or not.
Probably also a device thing. I've got a $39 Android tablet where the text pixels are definitely pixel-shaped and a more expensive medium-grade unit where they're smooth.
The original e-ink Nook has its downside on readability. It's rather like dirty gray newsprint, so not as sharp a contrast as I'd like. Battery life makes up for it, though.
If you want comic books, forget e-ink. It does render graphics slowly and with annoying fades, you lose the colors, and even monochrome comics won't be as stark and crisp.
I have no problem with e-ink for general reading. The page-render time is about the same as turning a physical page, the text is highly readable and the contrast is good. But not comics.
Actually, I think that there was a study back in the 1960s that determined that a woman's voice was more intelligible in an environment where there was a lot of background noise.
Plus, there's the possibility that people might be less inclined to abuse or outright destroy "female" machinery when they get frustrated with it.
Walk through the software development department of any large corporation in my town and you'd swear you were in Bangalore, not the USA. Not because of the grunt jobs. Many of those were shipped offshore. What's left locally are the "architects". Which means "developer who isn't working offshore" these days.
The more the job pays, the more profitable it is to undercut the local labor force.
Gnome 3 - like systemd - gave us glitz and glitter while removing functions that we used everyday. Although at least Gnome didn't do a wholesale takeover of systems outside its core function.
They take awayt stuff we need to do our jobs. Then they tell us we're ignorant ingrates for not understanding the true wisdom of the gnew gnome.
On a broadcast of America's Test Kitchen a while back, the host talked about his childhood where they literally raced in from the fields with fresh-picked corn (or maybe it was peas). Because the minute that the produce was picked, the sugars in it began converting to starches, so for full sweetness, you wanted it prepared ASAP.
He did mention that more modern strains are less susceptible to that sort of thing, but there's still a virtue in freshness for many items.
On the other hand, I just about fall on the floor laughing whenever I pass the citrus fruit displays at the local supermarket. They're charging 50 cents a fruit for stuff that I'm begging neighbors to take surplus off me and the stuff I grow isn't small and nasty like theirs is. All for about $20 in fertilizer every few months.
Or the pineapples. On sale, they're still $2.50 or more, off sale closer to $ and the ones in my garden are as big and tasty as the ones imported from Costa Rica. No funny chemicals. Just toss the top of the last one you ate on the ground and hurl some spare citrus fertilizer at it every couple of weeks.
I learned last year why black-eyed peas are such a Southern stereotype. Although they take more space than some of the other crops, they grow like weeds. Ditto for peanuts, but the raccoons steal them. I think I know how Davy Crockett got his hat.
The stuff that I get from the store is stuff that has a short harvest period and short storage life or simply cannot be grown around here because of climate or acreage requirements.
I'm not expecting to become totally self-sufficent, but it is a thrill to get "free" food. Besides, the more land I grow plants on, the less I have to mow!
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Past, present. You get called out on sloppy when it all goes to hell. Then it's your fault, you were sloppy.
The rest of the time, if you try and be meticulous, you're being "unproductive". Nobody got time for unproductive. Costs too much money, too.
Probably waterfall as in "Git 'er Dun!", shovel in changes to System X, ram them into production, sorry, no time to clean up or put in reliability, security or backup/recovery processes, got to get the next waterfall "Dun!" Then after a while, someone comes and complains that System X doesn't do what it needs to do, drag it back out and send it over the waterfall again.
The world is full of artificially inflated bumps. Just look at executive salaries over the last 3 decades. Do they really work 200x as many hours as anyone else? Do they have Cosmic Wisdom that no one else has? Has their productivity gone up multi-fold over the last 20 years like line-level workers (who are making in purchasing terms less than they did when they were less productive)?
No, but they have particularly effective union - the Good Old Boys Network.
There is no practical reason why we cannot outsource the executive functions to New Delhi and pay them 7 grand a year. We don't do it because they have an "in" with the directors that line-level workers don't. They pay their Union Dues in quid-pro-quo instead of formal paycheck deductions.
But here is the catch. Let's say those guys in suits decided to pay you $10/hr? What would happen? More than likely you would quit and the position would be unfilled. That is called supply and demand.
Throughout most of history, however, that hasn't been the case. If you didn't want to work for $10/hr, they'd be able to find someone else who did. The Market only works when everyone has equal power to bargain. An individual who's got to feed the family this week has no leverage to speak of when facing a corporatin that can afford to sit on its much larger (capitalized) assets and wait for them to starve.
When you get right down to it, a union is basically just a counter-corporation designed to turn the asymmetry around in favor of the workers.
Oh come on now. Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line for the next available representative.
Dear Sir:
Our company, Bombay Telephone Polishers, LLC stands ready to provide most excellent service with all needful certifications at very low prices.
In other words, don't be silly. If there's one thing outsourcing companies excel in it's cram-and-barf certs, and even when they don't actually have those certs, they'll claim they do just to score the contract with the corporate bargain-hunters. Then, if there is an actual requirement, they'll ram as many junior persons through cram-and-barf as necessary.
Whatever you're smoking is something that's stronger than anything legal in Colorado.
Third party app packaging support for Linux is something that's been around for ages. RPM for Red Hat and friends, dpkg for Debian/Ubuntu, and other lesser-known facilities for other systems. In actuality, probably 80+ percent of the stock repositories of the popular Linux distros are "third party" apps which have been built as distro-specific system packages - they're just part of the official repos, that's all. Other than that, packages I design and build myself of my own apps install and are managed in exactly the same way.
If your complaint is with dependencies, the main repository systems handle that as well. How well a given app will deal with dependencies depends on how well the package maintainer defined its needs, but the installers can do a very good job of making things "just work".
This "monolithic dependency tree" thing you're talking about doesn't even make sense to me. A YUM repo has had its packages scanned by a tool that constructs a dependency database in order to make dependency resolution faster, but by that definition, any read-mostly database is a "monolithic depency tree" or something similar. And you can't just jam in your own package to someone else's repo. The repo servers are designed to permit only authorized personnel to add packages and update the dependency database and to declare via appropriate signatures that assure that the repo isn't being circumvented.
If you use a random third-party repo, you are at risk, yes, but every repo is a risk. It's just that some repos have public trust and others depend on faith. If I was to set up and host repo, it would have the same security capabilities as the master Debian repos, just not the widespread faith.
Now if you want to talk about the problems that come from mixing dependencies from multiple repos where the dependencies were built with different capabilities, that's another issue entirely. There is, unfortunately, no real way to tell if a given repo's version of mencoder comes standard with the codes that my package might require. And it would be an interesting challenge to be able to resolve a problem like that, considering that every app (third party or not) could have a different collection of features and capabilities to be added, excluded or interfere with each other.
Sorry, no. Not Atual.
Being an incompetent typist does not equate to being an incompetent developer.
Certainly syntax-highlighting IDEs have saved me a lot of grief, but there's still plenty of room for screwups in SQL statements defined as string literals (the IDE checks the programming language, but not the SQL) and not everything that changes the semantics of a statement is actually syntactically invalid. Otherwise people would have a lot less trouble with there software design and it's more frustrating aspects.
It's the most fatal phrase in IT: "It's Simple! All You Have To Do Is..."
AYHTDI is repeated endlessly by people who think that because Little Johnny can write a program to make a block move back and forth on the screen that a Little Johnny could recreate EBay in a day.
Well, Little Johnny is a Boy Scout with a First Aid merit badge and we're scheduling him to do your liver transplant next Thursday.
Ironically, it generally seems that I don't spend all that much time - relatively speaking - on the big, deep tech issues.
Where most of the project time gets eaten up is in the stupid little ordinary details. It's not uncommon to lose nearly 2 whole days because of a slipped comma or a dash where there should have been an underscore or a mismatched quote.
A lot of times, it doesn't take a technical wizard to spot such stuff, just someone who isn't seeing what should be there, instead of what is there. That's why it's important that you can rely on constructive criticism, not insults. If I'm going to have my basic competence called into question just because I can't type straight, I'm far more likely to spend the extra time spinning my wheels doing it myself.
That's right. It's Simple! All You Have To Do Is...
If equal pay for equal hours was such a big thing, the CEO wouldn't be making 200x more than the grunts.
It would have been several smaller jumps, but their generous "grandfathering" rules spared people.
Admittedly, the percentage is big, but the dollar amount is small, and even after the hike the whole Netflix bill is still less than adding a channel to most cable services.
Not everything in Netflix is in their online catalog.
I admit I don't get discs as often as I used to, but occasionally that's still the only way to watch one of their movies.
They lie after they're elected, too. On both sides of the question. Sometimes at the same time.
Climate changes all the time as well.
The fault lies in the binary assumption that climate can be changing either naturally OR because of human action, but NOT BOTH.
Actual climate is the sum total of a number of contributors that are for the most part (excepting human growth) constantly cycling up and down over longer or shorter periods. What we're concerned with is whether or not the human contribution is pushing things to extremes and whether it's doing so so fast that neither humankind nor the planet can adapt to it.
And even that isn't a boolean variable. If we can physically adapt but the economic consequences are ruinous, that's nearly as bad.
Two things:
First, inherently aerial surveillance can be (unobtrusively) broad. That plays into the NSA-we're-logging-everyone's-calls-innocent-or-not concern.
Secondly - and this is an area open to debate - there's the reasonable expectation of privacy. Something that has been used to justify a lot of surveillance in these un-private times.
A person who stands at one end of a block and shouts at a person at the other end of the block cannot reasonably expect privacy. People are going to hear whether they want to or not.
A person who stands next to another person and talks in a normal voice doesn't have a true expectation of privacy, but common courtesy typically comes into play here unless they have reason to suspect bystanders.
If the people are being overhead from the other end of the block because someone has unobtrusively trained a shotgun microphone on them, that's exceeding reasonable expectations because people who go around with live shotgun mikes are not the norm and because individuals are being spied on. That's about the same degree as aerial surveillance with an unmuted plane.
A person who's in a house talking to another person does have a reasonable expectation of privacy because even though I could bounce a laser off the window from a hidden location and pick up what was being said, that's something that needs a warrant, or at least provable justification. More or less the same level for a muted plane. Other similar acts incude attaching a GPS to someone's vehicle. or hijacking phone calls with a Stingray.
If instead of actively aiming a spy beam at the house in question, I set up a cosmic ray detector equipped with an audio demodulator, I'm outside all bounds of reasonable expectation. This where stuff like tracking your cellphone's location lies.
Note that these examples have no legal weight. What courts rule as "reasonable" can be quite unreasonable, but once you get into that territory, you're risking a legislative backlash or at least domestic discontent.
The reasonable expectation of privacy in un-private situations isn't a new issue. The Federal Communications Act of 1934 allowed persons to monitor any radio-wave transmissions that they could capture, but communications not explicitly directed as public broadcasts or to the listener were not be be repeated or exploited. When Reagan "got the government off the backs of the people", they narrowed that, making it against the law to monitor selected frequencies, but regardless, private radio conversations were expected to remain private, whether intercepted legally or not.
Probably also a device thing. I've got a $39 Android tablet where the text pixels are definitely pixel-shaped and a more expensive medium-grade unit where they're smooth.
The original e-ink Nook has its downside on readability. It's rather like dirty gray newsprint, so not as sharp a contrast as I'd like. Battery life makes up for it, though.
If you want comic books, forget e-ink. It does render graphics slowly and with annoying fades, you lose the colors, and even monochrome comics won't be as stark and crisp.
I have no problem with e-ink for general reading. The page-render time is about the same as turning a physical page, the text is highly readable and the contrast is good. But not comics.
Actually, I think that there was a study back in the 1960s that determined that a woman's voice was more intelligible in an environment where there was a lot of background noise.
Plus, there's the possibility that people might be less inclined to abuse or outright destroy "female" machinery when they get frustrated with it.
No it isn't.
Walk through the software development department of any large corporation in my town and you'd swear you were in Bangalore, not the USA. Not because of the grunt jobs. Many of those were shipped offshore. What's left locally are the "architects". Which means "developer who isn't working offshore" these days.
The more the job pays, the more profitable it is to undercut the local labor force.
Gnome was good.
Gnome 3 - like systemd - gave us glitz and glitter while removing functions that we used everyday. Although at least Gnome didn't do a wholesale takeover of systems outside its core function.
They take awayt stuff we need to do our jobs. Then they tell us we're ignorant ingrates for not understanding the true wisdom of the gnew gnome.
On a broadcast of America's Test Kitchen a while back, the host talked about his childhood where they literally raced in from the fields with fresh-picked corn (or maybe it was peas). Because the minute that the produce was picked, the sugars in it began converting to starches, so for full sweetness, you wanted it prepared ASAP.
He did mention that more modern strains are less susceptible to that sort of thing, but there's still a virtue in freshness for many items.
Until I saw the photo, I took it for granted they'd be piping in natural light.
Failing that, what about the great German Solar Farm experiment?
In many cases, bulk-farmed items are cheaper.
On the other hand, I just about fall on the floor laughing whenever I pass the citrus fruit displays at the local supermarket. They're charging 50 cents a fruit for stuff that I'm begging neighbors to take surplus off me and the stuff I grow isn't small and nasty like theirs is. All for about $20 in fertilizer every few months.
Or the pineapples. On sale, they're still $2.50 or more, off sale closer to $ and the ones in my garden are as big and tasty as the ones imported from Costa Rica. No funny chemicals. Just toss the top of the last one you ate on the ground and hurl some spare citrus fertilizer at it every couple of weeks.
I learned last year why black-eyed peas are such a Southern stereotype. Although they take more space than some of the other crops, they grow like weeds. Ditto for peanuts, but the raccoons steal them. I think I know how Davy Crockett got his hat.
The stuff that I get from the store is stuff that has a short harvest period and short storage life or simply cannot be grown around here because of climate or acreage requirements.
I'm not expecting to become totally self-sufficent, but it is a thrill to get "free" food. Besides, the more land I grow plants on, the less I have to mow!