Does this mean that if we throw people particles at two slits that we will get a diffrackktion pattern? Maybe we should throw the Koch Bros. first, to see if they defrakk.
Given the quality of life that Facebook and Google create, this battle over available talent is funny indeed. Both companies should be flushed down the toilet for degrading their customers and the quality of computer science applications, that they give computing a big black eye. I laugh at both of them and wish that they and all the engineers they employ would just go away. And I know something about this having followed python as an important application language at Google and experienced the failings of Facebook's UI and I live within a couple of miles of both companies. I am embarrassed for smart people everywhere when I consider the crap of these designs and the poor ethics of social media and Big Data applications generally, they give Capitalism a bad name too. So, screw them all!
This comes in the wake of the announcement that the FBI is investigating milisecond equities traders for violations of SEC laws and for speculation that has ruined the U.S. Economy. The same abuse of Big Data could apply to these companies, but under different law. This is not a new problem for Silicon Valley for the whole high availability computing movement begun by companies like Sun Microsystems and taken up by Oracle has trappings of the same sort of abuses of information and the use of Big Data against citizens. If the NSA data collection is the most obvious example of the abuse of information, remember it is the tip of the iceberg and the hardware was supplied by IBM. Oracle, and HP, remember that. Remember that social media is but a result of the Big Data application and its abuses, so good riddance to all those engineers who do that crap!
Better learn you some geology! There is no direct connection between quakes in California and landslides in Washington state. Thie situation appears to be a well-known risk of incompetent geology managed by incompetant humans, county planning commission, real estate agents, home owners, incompetent all of them, The cause here is human failings, denialism, greed, evasion of responsibility, the same old human condition. As minkind gets more powerful, these failings in human judgement become more lethal.
There is nothing in geologic time or the history of the earth which spares Mankind from the ultimate fate of becoming extinct whether by accident or by his own error, and the earth and universe go on after that.
This discussion reminds me a bit of the one surrounding Windows XP and the thousands of installations that still depend on it. Microsoft is trying to pull the plug on it and encourage those people to change to something else. Doubtless there are some who will not want to change. They are going to have to pay to get under the hood and maintain their systems. That may ultimately apply here, but who is going to pay in terms of time or money? One can hope that there is a stakeholder with enough resources to fix the problem.
I am one of those people with a disability, but I know that I don't have to skill to hack the display driver to fix a problem like the one reported here. The glowing promise of Open Source does me no direct good if I had the problem. I am stuck until someone in the community or some developer supporting the standard creates a fix. If it was a showstopper, I'd have to figure out how to publicize the issue in such a way that it appears on the radar of someone capable of doing something about it. I'd begin with the vendor of the Linux I am running, and if vision or coordination was the accessabilitty issue for me, I'd enlist the help on someone able-bodied to do the necessary research and to present the issue on support forums, maybe at X.org. If the product is used by the government, then the weight of the ADA law might apply, and X.org might have to come out with a patch in short order, for if at least one Federal worker is stopped by the issue, the law can force the vendors to come up with a reasonable fix. There are lots of ways to change priorities on matters like this.
I got Yadrigsil Linux in about 1995. It came with FWM and standard X11. I ran it on an IBM PS2 which had 16MB (!) of ram. I remember being impressed that I could make it look very much like the Sparc 5 desktop I had at work, albeit it slower, and I could run GNUEmacs as a GUI client. It is that familarity and continuity that people like. I have Ubuntu 12.04 and after getting over the Unity nonsense, I can say that my biggest concern is that I'd like to be able to run legacy X11 stuff on it, if I want. I hope that whatever replaces X.org is compatable with legacy.
Also, I think that the Unity type of interface, wanting to support mobile and touch technology, may be put at a disadvantage and soon, by choices that allow for desktop power to be run from mobile phone form factors. If I could run a tiny system with wireless display and keyboard, or maybe even with legacy peripherals from a USB hub, or from a projector in the device that creates a virtual display and keyboard projected on a wall, that makes UI wars moot. Standards and legacy still have a role, especailly with flexible technology.
Recessions don't happen because there was a magic drop in demand. They happen because enough of us were wrong about the world and what things are worth. That massive shift in our collective worldview is what creates the uncertainty and the drop in economic activity characteristic of a recession.
At least investment comes to a halt, and along with it job creation, when predicting the future gets expected worth all wrong. So people who are not Capitalists pay directly for the lack of capital. Were it as simple. When you think of the causes of the Great Recession (2008) much of it was caused by evaluation made by financial and banking concerns, and international investors and governments, that has very little to do with the decisions of individual citizens of the world. And it caused a great malfeasance in the assigning of value and risks to investments made by a tiny minority of individuals. The bank bailouts and other decisions made in 2008-2010 did not really redress the mistakes made in that evaluation process and people who were not to blame are still paying the price., and governments around the world did not pursue the people who caused the collapse as fraudsters, at least not enough, and many of those people are still making economic decisions today.
We can look at the possibility that rising Minimum Wage could accelerate automation and forget that much of the imbalances and injustices of the present world economic order are the direct result of the digital revolution. This is much more than bookkeepers being put out of business by Excel. It is the speeding up of investment and the demand by investors for short-term ROI and the possibility of new forms of speculation made possible by programmed trading. The use of supercomputers to execute trades at milisecond intervals and engage in arbritrage strategies has a far bigger impact on markets than who gets automated, and it is mostly bad for economic systems.
On the other hand, pushing people out of the economy for short-term gain does have far reaching consequences that we are seeing all over the world in unrest that is created when people are given hope of a better life that is taken away for any number of reasons that lead back to poor management of the world economy. The cycle of war and revolution is the little person's answer to the high rollers who mess up the economy. So people who are marginalized and not given a new role may become willing cannon fodder and have the effect of destroying wealth or forcing investors to spend capital to finance war and defense, because they were too short-sighted to invest in people when violence might have been prevented. We are seeing that cycle run in Russia right now. Alexander Putin is an opportunist politician who is using the threat of war to distract from the failure of Russia's domestic economy, and that might be a response to investment or its lack.
Google, how ironic. I had interviewed there, was unimpressed and now absolutely hate the company, as well as Facebook, and I live nearby but wouldn't think of working for either even if I had the skills. So, talking about very technical interviews must either indicate a ruse or a deception because the way these two companies face the outside should rank as a major shock to any one with a computer science degree who wants to do good deeds, or that person is a total sell out
You would be putting comp. sci. expertise to the most banal of missions to support the low pursuits of social media, of using Python to squeeze garage out of analytics data. What an ignobile use of time, about as bad as microtrading on securities markets letting institutions speculate in stock prices. Both are abominations, quants and quants.
But really it is the intangibles that come into play, not whether a young programmer applies the current best practices to development and his older counterpart may need to get up to speed with these. That is simply a matter of taking the time to tell people what you want. The fact that companies who hire younger staff and discriminate against older people has an answer, reduce the supply of youngsters. If that happens they will have to change their tune and damn fast. This is simply a result of the oversupply of people for too few jobs. Lets suppose we get into a war with the Russians and all the young people have to go into battle, the priorities will be reversed as they were in 1970. People with generic skills will be in demand again.
The other intangible is maturity and tact, and loyalty when things get tough, A bunch of young 20-something programmers might be smart, they might be current on best-practices, they might be energetic and able to work for 72 hours straight and they may need to be paid less to do all those things, but they will bore easily and they may not wait aground when things demand patience and staying power.
Aren't you being too candid here If you ask a candidate what he wants to be paid and you eliminate him from the list of candidates because 1) he has grey hair and 2) He said that he wanted too much pay, then don't wonder that he and others won't bother applying at your company, and don't tell me either, that here is a talent shortage and go plying to the Congress to get more H1B visas.
Also isn't the senior track really unfair to people? People are fairly locked into their personalities, if they became engineers because they are geeks and like to solve technical problems then to tell them by age 35 that they have to start becoming schmoozers and go into management and become bullshit artists is really unfair? This sounds like an idea invented by management theorists at business schools who are already bullshit artists to rig promotions in companies to promote their own.
If you know personality theories, you will have to admit that people's basic personality is set by age seven and that it is impossible to change the basic stance of that personality, so for people in finance and management to demand that people of certain other personality types to change at midlife is not fair, and is indeed cause for a push back that I think is coming.
In terms of one widely-known personality model, Eneagram of Personality, engineers are often types 5 and 6, whereas the management people are often types 8 and 3 in America. Type 5 has some access to point 8, and 6 has some access to 3, But you can really make people change their type, Nor is it wise to force an engineer to sacrifice his talent for unrelated ones.
To me this just proves that their isn't the opportunity to advance in the current economy since generalizations like you are making a just inventions by people in power to protect their control. Such power historically can get undone, and often by force.
Tell me, have you ever been an engineer or scientist? Rereading you post, I would think not. I don't doubt that engineers want to and can do management roles, but people like them often find themselves in those roles against their basic inclinations, and they often don't do good in business politics, so when you assert an inclination to management, aren't you telling us that you never were very technical and always were more outer directed, that you are more type 3 or 8 and not type 6 or 5, and never have been?
As developers, we need to constantly fight stagnation. No matter how much money you're being paid, if you're not learning and growing, you should be considering a move. And if you're not putting out code on Github or the like, whether in your spare time or because you've convinced your employer to open source your work, you're simply not equipped to compete in today's job market.
Are you just discriminating against people, here, who don't make it convenient for you to look at their code? Might it be that they have
a good reason not to post their code to github or another cloud source code repo?
I'm sick of hearing people complain about age discrimination. It doesn't exist. They're discriminating against you because your professional age is younger than your biological age. Ask yourself which of those two you're expecting the employer to honor when determining your title and you'll see why people are telling you no.
When someone tells you that your skills are too generic and out of date, and that you haven't tracked to senior developer or management, isn't that age discrimination? Maybe in fact there is a need for a guy who is older but knows how to do system configuration and software installs starting in the shell, and you are just too uninformed to know of the need. If your only job is to hire younger developers and you don't know anything about all the support roles in your company, you can look at a candidate with grey side burns who has a resume that says he has administered systems and can work from the command line, if your bias is to younger people, because that is where you expect to find people who know whatever fad development environment is current today, be that Javascript, or Java, or Python, whatever, then you are discriminating against people with a different skill set. Your out is to either say "I will look to see if there is a role in our company for your skills." or to come out and say that "We are looking for skills you don't have." The legal distinction that a court would make is over how you communicated, not what you meant to say. If it felt that the employer communicated, "We don't like people with grey hair." or "We don't like people whose career began in 1975." The case would stand up. The tactic of making a job description very specific and saying to a candidate "Your skills are too generic." may get you out of dangerous territory, but it may also make you spend too much time screening candidates.
So, tell us what kind of positions you hire for? Are they customer facing or technical? Are you more concerned with team workers than you are with technical competence? From what you said, it sounds like you may be more concerned with technical support or customer service than with engineering? tell us which it is.
Yeah, I'm with you, the AC is a jackass which is why he doesn't have to balls to say what he said in the open. But, relating to another thread, I said that I thought that HR Dept and Hiring Manager write too specific job descriptions for a reason, to winnow the on slot of a tight seller's market where there are too may applicants for too few jobs in a market. They both make a common error that the detailed specs. will save them effort when it won't. Someone pointed out that hiring law may be creating some of the problem, HR depts. play CYA to avoid discrimination suits and create lots more work, and job security for themselves, by making the process long and exhausting. I also said that the losing effort would be short circuited and the size of the HR dept reduced if managers hired the first available candidate with the minimal skills or a little less and stopped the hiring process. The loss in time and money could be avoided and they would still be money ahead if they had to pay to train this person. The only way an involved hiring procedure makes sense is for hiring senior staff, since not everyone you need is senior you can adjust your hiring and training costs accordingly.
So, do you think it is the law which creates the extra effort in this or the illusion that detail will reduce the effort needed?
I have two words for Creationists out there: "Flu Shot". If you don't believe evolution is real, you shouldn't take the annual flue shot as recommended by the CCD, and eventually your kin will lose out, exactly as described by Darwin, you will fail to reproduce and people in your lineage will eventually be removed from the population.
The H1N1 virus affected people of reproductive age more than other groups. It could become an agent of Natural Selection.
Creationists want the matter decided as if it were a political referendum. Science operates are a higher standard. It doesn't claim to have absolute knowledge, unlike many theists who thurnp their Scripture, and indeed Creationism is really just a rhetorical position that defends the moral absolution of those who embrace it along with their appeal to force in their reading of Scripture.
That this debate should still be going on might be due to a host of factors, the tax-exempt status of churches, but also the general intellectual backwardness of Americans, the failure of the schools to teach critical thought, and the increasing social divisions between sections of this nation that might lead to its breakup. The Blue Vs. Red, the Urban vs. Rural divides seem to flollow the Evolution vs. Creationism divide somewhat. Even though if the matter was a problem of following evidence and thinking, if Creationists want to make it political in the same way that being Conservative is political, or wanting to own guns and live in the country is political, I say give them their due, but make them become a separate nation from mine.
I know this much, if those Southern Baptists, Jahovah's Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists and the whole host of Evangelical churches want to legislate what is truth and make for themselves a separate nation in the Old South, for instance, they might be as bad off as Hitler calling Quantum Mechanics Jewish Science and losing armed conflict with opponents who believed in science.The contingancy might have been that the first atomic bomb was used on Hitler's Germany, just as biological warfare based on evolution could be used in a war against people who deny evolution. Deny the methods of science at your own risk, true believers.
This guy is a short-term thinker whose horizon is no further than the next quarter, the kind of idiot the bix schools turn out in droves. He has no idea of the complexity of knowledge needed to run most tech operations or develop them. Not to mention the risk to national security of teaching some developing world worker vital technology he can take to a nation that might become our foe tomorrow.
I cringe when I think that somehow some tech worker is regarded as just a commodity in the world economy when I know that many essential skills are hard to come by and to maintain. Technology is still changing fast so while you may know some fashionable technology that the ability to augment your knowledge or to get to some older underlying knowledge are both important.
I think the problem here is that too much time and money is spent on the hiring process and much of that, including a stingy attitude about training, comes from the stress of an oversupply. Taken from the candidate's perspective this is a disheartening effort of blind shots into the wastebasket, something the job-hunting so-call-experts think is worth while. It generally isn't.
From the Hiring Manager's perspective this is highly stressful, if he or she trusts the filtering of the on slot by the HR department, or not, the stress spent talking to candidates takes its toll in time and money. They might save both time and money when hiring non-senior people to find a candidate with at or just below the skill level desired, and to pay to train them, even at the risk of losing them to a competitor.
If training was the only value add of hiring on, maybe the company ought to think about what it offers its employees in the first place. Often the training is not general or applicable to other situations. A market process on the cost and quality of the training would result. So, to talk about forcing employees to pay for training only plays into the greed of employers and then maybe they deserve disloyalty.
My point was that not escalating the standards and writing highly specific job descriptions and paying for training might actually cost less than trying too hard to discourage the unqualified. Then if they really want to hold the feet of candidates to the fire, they do that only with lead employees and even let them recruit the non-lead employees and encourage a shorter hiring process. Or spend less resources on hiring the non-lead employees at the company level.
So it's not that companies are unwilling to do anything about the lack of supply. It's that the ones that do try to do something about it just see the trained employees walk away to be hired by other companies which can offer higher salaries because they didn't have to pay for the training. It creates a race to the bottom where no company is willing to pay for the training.
My experience is that it is demand for talent, not fear of losing an employee that drives this. When the employer is in a seller's market, he can demand that people come to him ready trained and the job descriptions can get ridiculously specific. It is investment that drives job creation not the available talent, so there can be a shortage of slots to be filled and an escalating inflation of standards for whom to hire. Since HR departments and hiring managers are often incompetent, they will fall into the trap of writing too specialized criteria to avoid the on slot of the oversupply, to avoid the social stress of having to talk to lots of people, when their lives would be easier if they found the first just qualified candidate and closed the hiring process. They could save money by training that person to the level needed, even if he walks away. In "at-will" states these is nothing the employer can do about people leaving; that is the price he pays for having it both ways so he doesn't have to answer to employees he lays off on a whim or a market change. The escalation is due to a flaw in human nature which really works against you if you aren't hiring just lead employees. It might be better to hire just leads and let them recruit from their associates, in other words, do away with HR entirely as a useless institution for hiring.
People attack whom they can see, and blame. The politicians are always in react made and they will constantly change their tune as a result. Why blame them when they are at worst just opportunistic? Why not look a bit deeper and look at where the memes come from? If you want to criticize somebody, why not look at economists and investors and the business managements that appeal to them for funds? Why not look at the business schools who train people to think in a certain way. To make it appear that they can assign value to things objectively, when they can't, or that they have too much opportunity to rig evaluation to their personal advantage. And what about the desire to reduce every evaluation to a line item? Isn't the objectivity of that suspect from the start? Some of the people with the most to gain want you to tihnk that their opinions are impartial and objective, maybe the light of scrutiny needs to be shown on these guys as much as on any politicians, on the rating agencies, on the market analysts, on the economists, on the biz schools, on investors, all of them and in a theoretical unity that acccounts for more than just capital.
The more things change the more they stay the same. The failure rate of software projects has always been about that same and the number of good developers has been low. More than 70% of projects eventually get abandoned and maybe 10% of developers are competent. I have written code and managed systems and I do not consider myself to be among the 10% of competent, I am a relative hack having written FORTRAN in my early days, C later on and dabbled in OOD in retirement. Lately I have been interested in Python but dislike Java and see that the impediments to writing good clean code are about the same now as they were 50 years ago. Then it was abuse of GOTO and duplicating code that should have been put in functions, now it is bad design hidden away in class libraries. I balked at being asked to support java applications after legacy compiler experience because of that. I felt that strong typing and poor library design made the learning curve for java applications too steep and that the language was and is too wordy. I am someone with poor vision and I regarded the environment one gets with java to be far too busy and hard to read.
When you look at the number of frameworks coming out, particularly the number written in javascript, presumably writem to avoid the awful mistakes of that language's design, beginning with the ease to create global variables, one is tempted to avoid both strongly typed languages and those with lots of class libraries, and functional languages do really need sideeffects, even though they can be abused. What is needed is abstraction and delayed typing or weak typing so that all of the complexity that relates to typing can be deferred to runtime. That is what I like about Python. But even python doesn't get around the human failing of most developers to not be able to write clean objects and to write decent documentation. Writing good documentation is almost more of a premium that writing clean code, because if the only thing you have to go on is crappy open source, and OOD tends to produce layers of boilerplate that makes it hard to get to the working code, then not having a good statement of what the software does makes it not worth the effort to use it. Many open source projects do not succeed because their authors either cannot write documentation or lose interest when it comes to that task. If I am a programming hack, I might do better as a technical writer and regard the effort to write good documentation of at least as important than coding itself.
By the way, if you go and look at the Java in a Nutshell book, any edition, you get more than 500 pages. That is is tough nut to crack. The reason is that the complexity of the libraries as authored by Sun, especially, is too much. There have been a couple of successful alternatives, acm.jar, comes to mind, but the sheer size of what is in java leads me to believe that it has been deliberately obfascated as a form of security as it was adopted by security conscious firms with the intent that the sheer size of it, the bolus of class libraries, would make for a steep learning curve and a deterent for many and job security for the rest. That is abuse of technology in my opinion and no better than a FORTRAN programmer from the 1970's hiding what his code does in spaghetti code. The Nutshell book was more than 500 pages, it is was good documentation, the problem is that the complexity came out of abuse of OOD, not in spite of it.
I have a doubt that mobile displays and keyboards are anything more than a transition, although responsive design for narrow screens is valuable for accessabale designs for larger screens. The reason I think that mobile is overplayed is that the screen size limitation is probably going to go away and so desktop designs will gain importance on small form-factor devices when they are used on a hub with standard displays or when mobile devices make use of projection devices to create the keyboard and full-sized display with images painted on a table top or wall. So either a tablet or a projected full desktop will become the norm as the mobile devices become as powerful as current low-end desktop machines. This is already happening, projected keyboards already exist and projectors drawing full desktops on any desired surface can't be far off. The only value of the small cell phone keyboard is for use of the telephone. Maybe future mobile devices that aren't tablets will not even ship with a keyboard or OLED display. They will have projected displays and function exactly like today's desktops or laptops. If your mobile device is a powerful as your desktop, you may find it easier to not put up with that narrow display and keyboard at all.
So its average density must be high, and the number of pits and caves on its surface and the collapse features say that volitile elements have been cooked out of what is left. Maybe someone in the know can tell if there is much S on the surface.
I'm sure that long after we have looked at differentiated planetessimals from the asteroid belt for heavy metals, imagine finding double the reserves of rare Iron group metals, or many times the amount of Au, Pt, Zr, Rh, Pd, Ir, Ti, Zr, out there than on the earth's crust, or better rare earths, that Mercury might be a good place to prospect for refractory heavy metals, ones with high melting points. How Ironic that Hg is probably long cooked off the planet! It would be a tough place to work, though. Most places in the solar system that have metals would have to manufacture refined products out there to make it worthwhile to bring them to earth,
The appearence of the world on Facebook is a cleaver illusion. You really don't need to be able to talk to everybody in the world all the time, not even your circle of friends. In the old days you had a mailing list and that model actually still serves very well. Unless you and a friend are on-line at the same time, the asynchronous communication that you had in e-mail is no different, and if you can chat, maybe you might want to go offline and think a bit before your speak. There is really nothig new here except for the global list of friends. The idea of having a place where your circle of friends is available in once place is convenient and I am not saying that it is unimportant as anyone who has maintained a mailing list can attest, but the model for its use isn't really that different.
One could do away with most of Facebook, really. The only think that is essentially simple is the global list of friends, nothing else is as unique, not where your friends live or where their profiles and data are actually kept. Most people have fewer than 100 friends and most of them are geographically close too. There are geographical outliers but handling them via a distributed network only introduces some latency. Facebook is already latent in that there are already regional servers and old data is moved off in hierarchy storage which is obvious if you have tried to access your oldest posts. Most of the time latency doesn't matter that much, and maybe as a matter of social engineering it might be better if most people slept on their words, so latency is not entirely a bad thing. A scheme like this could be much cheaper than what Facebook does now and it could use third-party services in the cloud and in areas like the interface design. If the operation were cheaper then there would't be so much incentive to sacrifice user satisfaction for advertisers and there is a limit on spamming which the interface is rapidly approaching.
This doesn't address the whole other issue of the structure conversations could have that supports more discussion and better communication than the current blog oriented design. That is a problem of social media generally, you need only go to Google to see the scope of that problem. Ask yourself what the flaws of Google+ really are, and you will get my drift.
But the point of the article is that Facebook's success may be a passing thing. The inflexible and monolithic view the users have of the data is where Facebook is vulnerable, because even though the Big Data application is the play for Facebook's investors, it comes at a huge price to the users, who can leave en masse when they realize what it costs them. They pay in having an inflexible interface, one that Facebook engineering keeps under rigid control and increasing risks due to privacy invasion and spam. So, even if Facebook's plan is to change emphasis and go more mobile, the theory being that small displays are more of a worldwide market than desktop browsers, it could be pointed out that mobile devices could easily evolve from 20 column to 80 columns or more, meaning that responsive designs may not be as important in a couple of years as they are now. There is ample opportunity for a competator, one that can reduce the burden of Facebook's monolithic backend, even though we know that it has to be regionally distributed and is is hierarchical as well, that is obvious. It may be for reasons of capital investment that Facebook is locked into that design, someone could undercut them, provide a more flexible interface and, do it with less risk for users. Facebook is actually quite vulnerable.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean that if we throw people particles at two slits that we will get a diffrackktion pattern? Maybe we should throw the Koch Bros. first, to see if they defrakk.
Given the quality of life that Facebook and Google create, this battle over available talent is funny indeed. Both companies should be flushed down the toilet for degrading their customers and the quality of computer science applications, that they give computing a big black eye. I laugh at both of them and wish that they and all the engineers they employ would just go away. And I know something about this having followed python as an important application language at Google and experienced the failings of Facebook's UI and I live within a couple of miles of both companies. I am embarrassed for smart people everywhere when I consider the crap of these designs and the poor ethics of social media and Big Data applications generally, they give Capitalism a bad name too. So, screw them all!
This comes in the wake of the announcement that the FBI is investigating milisecond equities traders for violations of SEC laws and for speculation that has ruined the U.S. Economy. The same abuse of Big Data could apply to these companies, but under different law. This is not a new problem for Silicon Valley for the whole high availability computing movement begun by companies like Sun Microsystems and taken up by Oracle has trappings of the same sort of abuses of information and the use of Big Data against citizens. If the NSA data collection is the most obvious example of the abuse of information, remember it is the tip of the iceberg and the hardware was supplied by IBM. Oracle, and HP, remember that. Remember that social media is but a result of the Big Data application and its abuses, so good riddance to all those engineers who do that crap!
Better learn you some geology! There is no direct connection between quakes in California and landslides in Washington state. Thie situation appears to be a well-known risk of incompetent geology managed by incompetant humans, county planning commission, real estate agents, home owners, incompetent all of them, The cause here is human failings, denialism, greed, evasion of responsibility, the same old human condition. As minkind gets more powerful, these failings in human judgement become more lethal.
There is nothing in geologic time or the history of the earth which spares Mankind from the ultimate fate of becoming extinct whether by accident or by his own error, and the earth and universe go on after that.
This discussion reminds me a bit of the one surrounding Windows XP and the thousands of installations that still depend on it. Microsoft is trying to pull the plug on it and encourage those people to change to something else. Doubtless there are some who will not want to change. They are going to have to pay to get under the hood and maintain their systems. That may ultimately apply here, but who is going to pay in terms of time or money? One can hope that there is a stakeholder with enough resources to fix the problem.
I am one of those people with a disability, but I know that I don't have to skill to hack the display driver to fix a problem like the one reported here. The glowing promise of Open Source does me no direct good if I had the problem. I am stuck until someone in the community or some developer supporting the standard creates a fix. If it was a showstopper, I'd have to figure out how to publicize the issue in such a way that it appears on the radar of someone capable of doing something about it. I'd begin with the vendor of the Linux I am running, and if vision or coordination was the accessabilitty issue for me, I'd enlist the help on someone able-bodied to do the necessary research and to present the issue on support forums, maybe at X.org. If the product is used by the government, then the weight of the ADA law might apply, and X.org might have to come out with a patch in short order, for if at least one Federal worker is stopped by the issue, the law can force the vendors to come up with a reasonable fix. There are lots of ways to change priorities on matters like this.
I got Yadrigsil Linux in about 1995. It came with FWM and standard X11. I ran it on an IBM PS2 which had 16MB (!) of ram. I remember being impressed that I could make it look very much like the Sparc 5 desktop I had at work, albeit it slower, and I could run GNUEmacs as a GUI client. It is that familarity and continuity that people like. I have Ubuntu 12.04 and after getting over the Unity nonsense, I can say that my biggest concern is that I'd like to be able to run legacy X11 stuff on it, if I want. I hope that whatever replaces X.org is compatable with legacy.
Also, I think that the Unity type of interface, wanting to support mobile and touch technology, may be put at a disadvantage and soon, by choices that allow for desktop power to be run from mobile phone form factors. If I could run a tiny system with wireless display and keyboard, or maybe even with legacy peripherals from a USB hub, or from a projector in the device that creates a virtual display and keyboard projected on a wall, that makes UI wars moot. Standards and legacy still have a role, especailly with flexible technology.
Recessions don't happen because there was a magic drop in demand. They happen because enough of us were wrong about the world and what things are worth. That massive shift in our collective worldview is what creates the uncertainty and the drop in economic activity characteristic of a recession.
At least investment comes to a halt, and along with it job creation, when predicting the future gets expected worth all wrong. So people who are not Capitalists pay directly for the lack of capital. Were it as simple. When you think of the causes of the Great Recession (2008) much of it was caused by evaluation made by financial and banking concerns, and international investors and governments, that has very little to do with the decisions of individual citizens of the world. And it caused a great malfeasance in the assigning of value and risks to investments made by a tiny minority of individuals. The bank bailouts and other decisions made in 2008-2010 did not really redress the mistakes made in that evaluation process and people who were not to blame are still paying the price., and governments around the world did not pursue the people who caused the collapse as fraudsters, at least not enough, and many of those people are still making economic decisions today.
We can look at the possibility that rising Minimum Wage could accelerate automation and forget that much of the imbalances and injustices of the present world economic order are the direct result of the digital revolution. This is much more than bookkeepers being put out of business by Excel. It is the speeding up of investment and the demand by investors for short-term ROI and the possibility of new forms of speculation made possible by programmed trading. The use of supercomputers to execute trades at milisecond intervals and engage in arbritrage strategies has a far bigger impact on markets than who gets automated, and it is mostly bad for economic systems.
On the other hand, pushing people out of the economy for short-term gain does have far reaching consequences that we are seeing all over the world in unrest that is created when people are given hope of a better life that is taken away for any number of reasons that lead back to poor management of the world economy. The cycle of war and revolution is the little person's answer to the high rollers who mess up the economy. So people who are marginalized and not given a new role may become willing cannon fodder and have the effect of destroying wealth or forcing investors to spend capital to finance war and defense, because they were too short-sighted to invest in people when violence might have been prevented. We are seeing that cycle run in Russia right now. Alexander Putin is an opportunist politician who is using the threat of war to distract from the failure of Russia's domestic economy, and that might be a response to investment or its lack.
Google, how ironic. I had interviewed there, was unimpressed and now absolutely hate the company, as well as Facebook, and I live nearby but wouldn't think of working for either even if I had the skills. So, talking about very technical interviews must either indicate a ruse or a deception because the way these two companies face the outside should rank as a major shock to any one with a computer science degree who wants to do good deeds, or that person is a total sell out
You would be putting comp. sci. expertise to the most banal of missions to support the low pursuits of social media, of using Python to squeeze garage out of analytics data. What an ignobile use of time, about as bad as microtrading on securities markets letting institutions speculate in stock prices. Both are abominations, quants and quants.
But really it is the intangibles that come into play, not whether a young programmer applies the current best practices to development and his older counterpart may need to get up to speed with these. That is simply a matter of taking the time to tell people what you want. The fact that companies who hire younger staff and discriminate against older people has an answer, reduce the supply of youngsters. If that happens they will have to change their tune and damn fast. This is simply a result of the oversupply of people for too few jobs. Lets suppose we get into a war with the Russians and all the young people have to go into battle, the priorities will be reversed as they were in 1970. People with generic skills will be in demand again.
The other intangible is maturity and tact, and loyalty when things get tough, A bunch of young 20-something programmers might be smart, they might be current on best-practices, they might be energetic and able to work for 72 hours straight and they may need to be paid less to do all those things, but they will bore easily and they may not wait aground when things demand patience and staying power.
Aren't you being too candid here If you ask a candidate what he wants to be paid and you eliminate him from the list of candidates because 1) he has grey hair and 2) He said that he wanted too much pay, then don't wonder that he and others won't bother applying at your company, and don't tell me either, that here is a talent shortage and go plying to the Congress to get more H1B visas.
Also isn't the senior track really unfair to people? People are fairly locked into their personalities, if they became engineers because they are geeks and like to solve technical problems then to tell them by age 35 that they have to start becoming schmoozers and go into management and become bullshit artists is really unfair? This sounds like an idea invented by management theorists at business schools who are already bullshit artists to rig promotions in companies to promote their own.
If you know personality theories, you will have to admit that people's basic personality is set by age seven and that it is impossible to change the basic stance of that personality, so for people in finance and management to demand that people of certain other personality types to change at midlife is not fair, and is indeed cause for a push back that I think is coming.
In terms of one widely-known personality model, Eneagram of Personality, engineers are often types 5 and 6, whereas the management people are often types 8 and 3 in America. Type 5 has some access to point 8, and 6 has some access to 3, But you can really make people change their type, Nor is it wise to force an engineer to sacrifice his talent for unrelated ones.
To me this just proves that their isn't the opportunity to advance in the current economy since generalizations like you are making a just inventions by people in power to protect their control. Such power historically can get undone, and often by force.
Tell me, have you ever been an engineer or scientist? Rereading you post, I would think not. I don't doubt that engineers want to and can do management roles, but people like them often find themselves in those roles against their basic inclinations, and they often don't do good in business politics, so when you assert an inclination to management, aren't you telling us that you never were very technical and always were more outer directed, that you are more type 3 or 8 and not type 6 or 5, and never have been?
As developers, we need to constantly fight stagnation. No matter how much money you're being paid, if you're not learning and growing, you should be considering a move. And if you're not putting out code on Github or the like, whether in your spare time or because you've convinced your employer to open source your work, you're simply not equipped to compete in today's job market.
Are you just discriminating against people, here, who don't make it convenient for you to look at their code? Might it be that they have a good reason not to post their code to github or another cloud source code repo?
I'm sick of hearing people complain about age discrimination. It doesn't exist. They're discriminating against you because your professional age is younger than your biological age. Ask yourself which of those two you're expecting the employer to honor when determining your title and you'll see why people are telling you no.
When someone tells you that your skills are too generic and out of date, and that you haven't tracked to senior developer or management, isn't that age discrimination? Maybe in fact there is a need for a guy who is older but knows how to do system configuration and software installs starting in the shell, and you are just too uninformed to know of the need. If your only job is to hire younger developers and you don't know anything about all the support roles in your company, you can look at a candidate with grey side burns who has a resume that says he has administered systems and can work from the command line, if your bias is to younger people, because that is where you expect to find people who know whatever fad development environment is current today, be that Javascript, or Java, or Python, whatever, then you are discriminating against people with a different skill set. Your out is to either say "I will look to see if there is a role in our company for your skills." or to come out and say that "We are looking for skills you don't have." The legal distinction that a court would make is over how you communicated, not what you meant to say. If it felt that the employer communicated, "We don't like people with grey hair." or "We don't like people whose career began in 1975." The case would stand up. The tactic of making a job description very specific and saying to a candidate "Your skills are too generic." may get you out of dangerous territory, but it may also make you spend too much time screening candidates.
So, tell us what kind of positions you hire for? Are they customer facing or technical? Are you more concerned with team workers than you are with technical competence? From what you said, it sounds like you may be more concerned with technical support or customer service than with engineering? tell us which it is.
Yeah, I'm with you, the AC is a jackass which is why he doesn't have to balls to say what he said in the open. But, relating to another thread, I said that I thought that HR Dept and Hiring Manager write too specific job descriptions for a reason, to winnow the on slot of a tight seller's market where there are too may applicants for too few jobs in a market. They both make a common error that the detailed specs. will save them effort when it won't. Someone pointed out that hiring law may be creating some of the problem, HR depts. play CYA to avoid discrimination suits and create lots more work, and job security for themselves, by making the process long and exhausting. I also said that the losing effort would be short circuited and the size of the HR dept reduced if managers hired the first available candidate with the minimal skills or a little less and stopped the hiring process. The loss in time and money could be avoided and they would still be money ahead if they had to pay to train this person. The only way an involved hiring procedure makes sense is for hiring senior staff, since not everyone you need is senior you can adjust your hiring and training costs accordingly.
So, do you think it is the law which creates the extra effort in this or the illusion that detail will reduce the effort needed?
I have two words for Creationists out there: "Flu Shot". If you don't believe evolution is real, you shouldn't take the annual flue shot as recommended by the CCD, and eventually your kin will lose out, exactly as described by Darwin, you will fail to reproduce and people in your lineage will eventually be removed from the population. The H1N1 virus affected people of reproductive age more than other groups. It could become an agent of Natural Selection.
Creationists want the matter decided as if it were a political referendum. Science operates are a higher standard. It doesn't claim to have absolute knowledge, unlike many theists who thurnp their Scripture, and indeed Creationism is really just a rhetorical position that defends the moral absolution of those who embrace it along with their appeal to force in their reading of Scripture.
That this debate should still be going on might be due to a host of factors, the tax-exempt status of churches, but also the general intellectual backwardness of Americans, the failure of the schools to teach critical thought, and the increasing social divisions between sections of this nation that might lead to its breakup. The Blue Vs. Red, the Urban vs. Rural divides seem to flollow the Evolution vs. Creationism divide somewhat. Even though if the matter was a problem of following evidence and thinking, if Creationists want to make it political in the same way that being Conservative is political, or wanting to own guns and live in the country is political, I say give them their due, but make them become a separate nation from mine.
I know this much, if those Southern Baptists, Jahovah's Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists and the whole host of Evangelical churches want to legislate what is truth and make for themselves a separate nation in the Old South, for instance, they might be as bad off as Hitler calling Quantum Mechanics Jewish Science and losing armed conflict with opponents who believed in science.The contingancy might have been that the first atomic bomb was used on Hitler's Germany, just as biological warfare based on evolution could be used in a war against people who deny evolution. Deny the methods of science at your own risk, true believers.
So who moded this down? A dice.com employee perhaps? :-)
Rotary IS assoc. with sex. TAI!
This guy is a short-term thinker whose horizon is no further than the next quarter, the kind of idiot the bix schools turn out in droves. He has no idea of the complexity of knowledge needed to run most tech operations or develop them. Not to mention the risk to national security of teaching some developing world worker vital technology he can take to a nation that might become our foe tomorrow.
I cringe when I think that somehow some tech worker is regarded as just a commodity in the world economy when I know that many essential skills are hard to come by and to maintain. Technology is still changing fast so while you may know some fashionable technology that the ability to augment your knowledge or to get to some older underlying knowledge are both important.
I think the problem here is that too much time and money is spent on the hiring process and much of that, including a stingy attitude about training, comes from the stress of an oversupply. Taken from the candidate's perspective this is a disheartening effort of blind shots into the wastebasket, something the job-hunting so-call-experts think is worth while. It generally isn't.
From the Hiring Manager's perspective this is highly stressful, if he or she trusts the filtering of the on slot by the HR department, or not, the stress spent talking to candidates takes its toll in time and money. They might save both time and money when hiring non-senior people to find a candidate with at or just below the skill level desired, and to pay to train them, even at the risk of losing them to a competitor.
If training was the only value add of hiring on, maybe the company ought to think about what it offers its employees in the first place. Often the training is not general or applicable to other situations. A market process on the cost and quality of the training would result. So, to talk about forcing employees to pay for training only plays into the greed of employers and then maybe they deserve disloyalty.
My point was that not escalating the standards and writing highly specific job descriptions and paying for training might actually cost less than trying too hard to discourage the unqualified. Then if they really want to hold the feet of candidates to the fire, they do that only with lead employees and even let them recruit the non-lead employees and encourage a shorter hiring process. Or spend less resources on hiring the non-lead employees at the company level.
So it's not that companies are unwilling to do anything about the lack of supply. It's that the ones that do try to do something about it just see the trained employees walk away to be hired by other companies which can offer higher salaries because they didn't have to pay for the training. It creates a race to the bottom where no company is willing to pay for the training.
My experience is that it is demand for talent, not fear of losing an employee that drives this. When the employer is in a seller's market, he can demand that people come to him ready trained and the job descriptions can get ridiculously specific. It is investment that drives job creation not the available talent, so there can be a shortage of slots to be filled and an escalating inflation of standards for whom to hire. Since HR departments and hiring managers are often incompetent, they will fall into the trap of writing too specialized criteria to avoid the on slot of the oversupply, to avoid the social stress of having to talk to lots of people, when their lives would be easier if they found the first just qualified candidate and closed the hiring process. They could save money by training that person to the level needed, even if he walks away. In "at-will" states these is nothing the employer can do about people leaving; that is the price he pays for having it both ways so he doesn't have to answer to employees he lays off on a whim or a market change. The escalation is due to a flaw in human nature which really works against you if you aren't hiring just lead employees. It might be better to hire just leads and let them recruit from their associates, in other words, do away with HR entirely as a useless institution for hiring.
People attack whom they can see, and blame. The politicians are always in react made and they will constantly change their tune as a result. Why blame them when they are at worst just opportunistic? Why not look a bit deeper and look at where the memes come from? If you want to criticize somebody, why not look at economists and investors and the business managements that appeal to them for funds? Why not look at the business schools who train people to think in a certain way. To make it appear that they can assign value to things objectively, when they can't, or that they have too much opportunity to rig evaluation to their personal advantage. And what about the desire to reduce every evaluation to a line item? Isn't the objectivity of that suspect from the start? Some of the people with the most to gain want you to tihnk that their opinions are impartial and objective, maybe the light of scrutiny needs to be shown on these guys as much as on any politicians, on the rating agencies, on the market analysts, on the economists, on the biz schools, on investors, all of them and in a theoretical unity that acccounts for more than just capital.
The more things change the more they stay the same. The failure rate of software projects has always been about that same and the number of good developers has been low. More than 70% of projects eventually get abandoned and maybe 10% of developers are competent. I have written code and managed systems and I do not consider myself to be among the 10% of competent, I am a relative hack having written FORTRAN in my early days, C later on and dabbled in OOD in retirement. Lately I have been interested in Python but dislike Java and see that the impediments to writing good clean code are about the same now as they were 50 years ago. Then it was abuse of GOTO and duplicating code that should have been put in functions, now it is bad design hidden away in class libraries. I balked at being asked to support java applications after legacy compiler experience because of that. I felt that strong typing and poor library design made the learning curve for java applications too steep and that the language was and is too wordy. I am someone with poor vision and I regarded the environment one gets with java to be far too busy and hard to read.
When you look at the number of frameworks coming out, particularly the number written in javascript, presumably writem to avoid the awful mistakes of that language's design, beginning with the ease to create global variables, one is tempted to avoid both strongly typed languages and those with lots of class libraries, and functional languages do really need sideeffects, even though they can be abused. What is needed is abstraction and delayed typing or weak typing so that all of the complexity that relates to typing can be deferred to runtime. That is what I like about Python. But even python doesn't get around the human failing of most developers to not be able to write clean objects and to write decent documentation. Writing good documentation is almost more of a premium that writing clean code, because if the only thing you have to go on is crappy open source, and OOD tends to produce layers of boilerplate that makes it hard to get to the working code, then not having a good statement of what the software does makes it not worth the effort to use it. Many open source projects do not succeed because their authors either cannot write documentation or lose interest when it comes to that task. If I am a programming hack, I might do better as a technical writer and regard the effort to write good documentation of at least as important than coding itself.
By the way, if you go and look at the Java in a Nutshell book, any edition, you get more than 500 pages. That is is tough nut to crack. The reason is that the complexity of the libraries as authored by Sun, especially, is too much. There have been a couple of successful alternatives, acm.jar, comes to mind, but the sheer size of what is in java leads me to believe that it has been deliberately obfascated as a form of security as it was adopted by security conscious firms with the intent that the sheer size of it, the bolus of class libraries, would make for a steep learning curve and a deterent for many and job security for the rest. That is abuse of technology in my opinion and no better than a FORTRAN programmer from the 1970's hiding what his code does in spaghetti code. The Nutshell book was more than 500 pages, it is was good documentation, the problem is that the complexity came out of abuse of OOD, not in spite of it.
I have a doubt that mobile displays and keyboards are anything more than a transition, although responsive design for narrow screens is valuable for accessabale designs for larger screens. The reason I think that mobile is overplayed is that the screen size limitation is probably going to go away and so desktop designs will gain importance on small form-factor devices when they are used on a hub with standard displays or when mobile devices make use of projection devices to create the keyboard and full-sized display with images painted on a table top or wall. So either a tablet or a projected full desktop will become the norm as the mobile devices become as powerful as current low-end desktop machines. This is already happening, projected keyboards already exist and projectors drawing full desktops on any desired surface can't be far off. The only value of the small cell phone keyboard is for use of the telephone. Maybe future mobile devices that aren't tablets will not even ship with a keyboard or OLED display. They will have projected displays and function exactly like today's desktops or laptops. If your mobile device is a powerful as your desktop, you may find it easier to not put up with that narrow display and keyboard at all.
So its average density must be high, and the number of pits and caves on its surface and the collapse features say that volitile elements have been cooked out of what is left. Maybe someone in the know can tell if there is much S on the surface.
I'm sure that long after we have looked at differentiated planetessimals from the asteroid belt for heavy metals, imagine finding double the reserves of rare Iron group metals, or many times the amount of Au, Pt, Zr, Rh, Pd, Ir, Ti, Zr, out there than on the earth's crust, or better rare earths, that Mercury might be a good place to prospect for refractory heavy metals, ones with high melting points. How Ironic that Hg is probably long cooked off the planet! It would be a tough place to work, though. Most places in the solar system that have metals would have to manufacture refined products out there to make it worthwhile to bring them to earth,
Subject says it all.
The appearence of the world on Facebook is a cleaver illusion. You really don't need to be able to talk to everybody in the world all the time, not even your circle of friends. In the old days you had a mailing list and that model actually still serves very well. Unless you and a friend are on-line at the same time, the asynchronous communication that you had in e-mail is no different, and if you can chat, maybe you might want to go offline and think a bit before your speak. There is really nothig new here except for the global list of friends. The idea of having a place where your circle of friends is available in once place is convenient and I am not saying that it is unimportant as anyone who has maintained a mailing list can attest, but the model for its use isn't really that different.
One could do away with most of Facebook, really. The only think that is essentially simple is the global list of friends, nothing else is as unique, not where your friends live or where their profiles and data are actually kept. Most people have fewer than 100 friends and most of them are geographically close too. There are geographical outliers but handling them via a distributed network only introduces some latency. Facebook is already latent in that there are already regional servers and old data is moved off in hierarchy storage which is obvious if you have tried to access your oldest posts. Most of the time latency doesn't matter that much, and maybe as a matter of social engineering it might be better if most people slept on their words, so latency is not entirely a bad thing. A scheme like this could be much cheaper than what Facebook does now and it could use third-party services in the cloud and in areas like the interface design. If the operation were cheaper then there would't be so much incentive to sacrifice user satisfaction for advertisers and there is a limit on spamming which the interface is rapidly approaching.
This doesn't address the whole other issue of the structure conversations could have that supports more discussion and better communication than the current blog oriented design. That is a problem of social media generally, you need only go to Google to see the scope of that problem. Ask yourself what the flaws of Google+ really are, and you will get my drift.
But the point of the article is that Facebook's success may be a passing thing. The inflexible and monolithic view the users have of the data is where Facebook is vulnerable, because even though the Big Data application is the play for Facebook's investors, it comes at a huge price to the users, who can leave en masse when they realize what it costs them. They pay in having an inflexible interface, one that Facebook engineering keeps under rigid control and increasing risks due to privacy invasion and spam. So, even if Facebook's plan is to change emphasis and go more mobile, the theory being that small displays are more of a worldwide market than desktop browsers, it could be pointed out that mobile devices could easily evolve from 20 column to 80 columns or more, meaning that responsive designs may not be as important in a couple of years as they are now. There is ample opportunity for a competator, one that can reduce the burden of Facebook's monolithic backend, even though we know that it has to be regionally distributed and is is hierarchical as well, that is obvious. It may be for reasons of capital investment that Facebook is locked into that design, someone could undercut them, provide a more flexible interface and, do it with less risk for users. Facebook is actually quite vulnerable.