One of my first engineering jobs was programming an old milling machine. You wrote the program code in an editor on a computer, then had it output on a roll of punched paper tape. The code was punched into the tape transversely, in simple 8-bit ASCII. Hanging chads would really ruin your day.
My big contribution was a program that could punch a human readable header onto the tape. Written in the finest QBASIC.
How do you propose printing a spring under compression (say as part of a valve train?) How about maintaining the thousandths of an inch precision of a camshaft when it is free to rotate? How about getting the the correct torque on a head gasket bolt?
He pointed out that I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by charging the proverbial windmills with all my might, right to the top. If it was truly as bad as I described it, it certainly couldn't get any worse.
I tried this, too. I had a job where the boss was an a-hole. I was on-call 24x7, overworked, and was asked to violate federal law on at least one occasion. How could it get worse?
I went to the next 2 levels of management and layed out my issues and proposed solutions. I documented the legal issues with HR. What did I get? Told I was a troublemaker and would be denied a raise for the next 2 years.
I was out the door as soon as I found something else.
Programming is hard because almost anything more complicated than 'Hello world' requires that you hold a lot of information in your head - variables, structures, functions, APIs, libraries, algorithms, database schemas, etc. That is why interruptions are so bad. Once you flush all that to answer some suit's question about last month's time sheet it takes forever to get it all back up there.
Add to this the creativity needed in designing and building something complicated and you can understand why programmers like to work off hours (no suits)and why they want weird chairs or desks (no irritating, concentration breaking ergo problems for the individual programmer - and yes, each one is different).
Ever work with a good architect? They have the same eccentricities. So do good design engineers.
This is one of those cases where you need to dig a little deeper.
When you first started programming, you knew very little, and you produced programs whose main worth was in teaching you something. As you gained experience, your programs became good enough that they had value to other people. That value could be given to you as money. Or as recognition. Or in exchange for other software. You get the point.
One of the problems with discussions that focus on the 'worth' of Open Source Software is that people get wrapped up in the ideology of money. Money is just a portable tool to exchange 'value' between people. It doesn't transfer very well in the creation of software (sometimes) for a lot of the same reasons that music and movies are having problems with copyright rules. Once created, software can be easily and endlessly duplicated.
Any economics course will teach you about supply and demand. If the supply goes up, the price falls. If the supply goes down, the price rises.
This is where peole say, "Yes, but it is the creation of software that is valuable!" Yes it is, but imagine if you designed and hand built cars. Each one would be quite valuable if you were good at it. Now imageine that once you built it and gave it to a friend, he could duplicate that car endlessly at zero cost. What would that do to the value of the car? What would that do to your value, since if someone didn't want to go to the effort of designing and building their own, they could just get one for free?
That's how software works. We have broken some of the underlying principles of capitalism. Supply and demand doesn't work right.
What to do about this? Damned if I know. But Stallman and his preaching isn't the answer. He's just saying that it's good to give stuff to your friends 'cause they'll give you stuff if you do.
I disagree. Being a big (as in tall and egg-shaped) programmer, I love shopping on-line at places like Eddie Bauer. They have a wide collection of good stuff, the sizes are consistent, and they don't assume, like most stores that you are in the middle 50% of the population in terms of size.
Realize that we have almost no privacy anyway. Various large companies know a *lot* about me.
Too may people do not understand this! I also have been the subject of at least 2 background checks. Just by living, the government and many, many businesses learn about you! You get junk mail, spam, license renewal notices, tax forms, etc. Think about it! All of these people know something about you.
Why are so many Slashdotters so afraid of someone knowing something about you? If the government says 'Hey, we think we have a bad picture of you at some terrorist training camp on June 3rd! ' wouldn't you like to have a dated credit receipt with your fingerprint from your local gas station? With matching records in the credit card company's db? And maybe an e-mail log at showing you were sending e-mails from your desk all day long? And maybe a security camera picture of you at the local bank?
These records can be used to protect you, as well.
BTW - Bruce Schneier misses the obvious application of this kind of technology. Try to recognize everyone going on the plane. Anyone you can't deserves a closer look and positive identification before boarding. Anyone you can identify that authorities are looking for (and this can be worked out) doesn't get on the plane.
Yes, I to worked for a company that decided that everyone would be called "associates". When this was announced, one of the people present asked, "Will it now say 'Associate' on all of our business cards?" Of course, the response was "no".
At the next company meeting, when the name tags were handed out (250 people, most of whom saw each other every day and they thought we needed name tags??), they all had the word "Associate" underneath the names. I taped my business card over the nametag, complete with my job title of "Senior Systems Engineer". When the presisident of the company saw this, he asked about it. I told him that I was proud to be an engineer, and that an associate was someone who sprayedperfume on you in the department store. Severe CLM.
Re:This has been going on for 30 years
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 1
IANA Realtor, but perhaps you have never heard of mortgage completion insurance? This covers your mortgage payments if you cannot make them. This insures your investment. This is different from PMI, which insures the lender against you not making your mortgage payments.
Not a moral obligation, but a legal one.
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 1
You have confused moralities with legalities. Working for a company is entering into a legal contract: You work for them, they pay you.
In the U.S., we have a certain amount of disconnection between laws and morals. For instance, while the moral "Do not kill" is codified as a law, "Don't look at p0rn" is not (at least in most cases). IMHO, this disconnection is due to the two facts that people in the U.S. come from diverse backgrounds and that personal freedoms are (or at least were) highly valued.
Look at what was proposed:
Maximum warning. Employees ought to have between three and six months' notice before they're laid off. That would be nice, but you had better have tham escrow the money, because sh*t happens. Since you want them to tie up a bunch of money, what will you compensate them with? Will you work for free for the first six months to 'escrow' your work in case you die suddenly and you can't be replaced easily?
Continued health benefits. Why would you expect them to pay your benefits for an indefinite time? Again, sh*t happens. They may not have any money to pay those benefits. And if they were willing to make sucha commitment (maybe by purchasing some sort of insurance), what would you offer up to compensate them? A smaller paycheck? The right to have the company mandate you eat right, jog 2 miles a day and get 8 hours of sleep every day so that the insurance is cheaper?
Innovative responses. Actually, this is not a bad idea, although HP is getting racked over the coals for tring something different. The legal environment in the U.S. discourages innovations in a lot of areas, and this is one of them.
Try Hewlett Packard's Unix support. They have bailed me out more than once, and their attention to detail is astounding.
An example:
I had a server that would panic once in while (1 or two times a month) with nothing special about the situation when it went down. I called HP support, sent them one of the core dumps, and 24 hours later they called me back with detailed info on what my problem was - a bad sector in a swap partition. They had already ordered a replacement disk (it showed up via Fedex that afternoon!) and wanted to know when I could schedule downtime for them to replace the disk.
I still buy HP stuff whenever I need a server, because their service has always exceeded my expectations. Of course, they do charge a healthy sum for it!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
The comparison you are making is flawed. Free software is equivalent to free blueprints. The compiled code is analogous to the physical drill press.
Of course, a compiled program is usually licensed: you likely can't reverse engineer it or resell it.
I'm a Mac guy, but Apple's license agreement for OSX has the same kind of limitations on liability and fitness for use.
One of my first engineering jobs was programming an old milling machine. You wrote the program code in an editor on a computer, then had it output on a roll of punched paper tape. The code was punched into the tape transversely, in simple 8-bit ASCII. Hanging chads would really ruin your day.
My big contribution was a program that could punch a human readable header onto the tape. Written in the finest QBASIC.
Maybe they are going for the Bizzaro World market and want to use com.Amazon
C&H gets my vote!
How do you propose printing a spring under compression (say as part of a valve train?) How about maintaining the thousandths of an inch precision of a camshaft when it is free to rotate? How about getting the the correct torque on a head gasket bolt?
I tried this, too. I had a job where the boss was an a-hole. I was on-call 24x7, overworked, and was asked to violate federal law on at least one occasion. How could it get worse?
I went to the next 2 levels of management and layed out my issues and proposed solutions. I documented the legal issues with HR. What did I get? Told I was a troublemaker and would be denied a raise for the next 2 years.
I was out the door as soon as I found something else.
Add to this the creativity needed in designing and building something complicated and you can understand why programmers like to work off hours (no suits)and why they want weird chairs or desks (no irritating, concentration breaking ergo problems for the individual programmer - and yes, each one is different).
Ever work with a good architect? They have the same eccentricities. So do good design engineers.
You missed something.
The page says that the version with Solaris 9 and 4GB RAM is due in winter 2002.
When you first started programming, you knew very little, and you produced programs whose main worth was in teaching you something. As you gained experience, your programs became good enough that they had value to other people. That value could be given to you as money. Or as recognition. Or in exchange for other software. You get the point.
One of the problems with discussions that focus on the 'worth' of Open Source Software is that people get wrapped up in the ideology of money. Money is just a portable tool to exchange 'value' between people. It doesn't transfer very well in the creation of software (sometimes) for a lot of the same reasons that music and movies are having problems with copyright rules. Once created, software can be easily and endlessly duplicated.
Any economics course will teach you about supply and demand. If the supply goes up, the price falls. If the supply goes down, the price rises.
This is where peole say, "Yes, but it is the creation of software that is valuable!" Yes it is, but imagine if you designed and hand built cars. Each one would be quite valuable if you were good at it. Now imageine that once you built it and gave it to a friend, he could duplicate that car endlessly at zero cost. What would that do to the value of the car? What would that do to your value, since if someone didn't want to go to the effort of designing and building their own, they could just get one for free?
That's how software works. We have broken some of the underlying principles of capitalism. Supply and demand doesn't work right.
What to do about this? Damned if I know. But Stallman and his preaching isn't the answer. He's just saying that it's good to give stuff to your friends 'cause they'll give you stuff if you do.
Here's the data. (You do know how Google works, don't you?)
The largest nuclear weapon detonated was 50MT.
Mt. St. Helens released 24MT of energy.
I disagree. Being a big (as in tall and egg-shaped) programmer, I love shopping on-line at places like Eddie Bauer. They have a wide collection of good stuff, the sizes are consistent, and they don't assume, like most stores that you are in the middle 50% of the population in terms of size.
Too may people do not understand this! I also have been the subject of at least 2 background checks. Just by living, the government and many, many businesses learn about you! You get junk mail, spam, license renewal notices, tax forms, etc. Think about it! All of these people know something about you.
Why are so many Slashdotters so afraid of someone knowing something about you? If the government says 'Hey, we think we have a bad picture of you at some terrorist training camp on June 3rd! ' wouldn't you like to have a dated credit receipt with your fingerprint from your local gas station? With matching records in the credit card company's db? And maybe an e-mail log at showing you were sending e-mails from your desk all day long? And maybe a security camera picture of you at the local bank?
These records can be used to protect you, as well.
BTW - Bruce Schneier misses the obvious application of this kind of technology. Try to recognize everyone going on the plane. Anyone you can't deserves a closer look and positive identification before boarding. Anyone you can identify that authorities are looking for (and this can be worked out) doesn't get on the plane.
At the next company meeting, when the name tags were handed out (250 people, most of whom saw each other every day and they thought we needed name tags??), they all had the word "Associate" underneath the names. I taped my business card over the nametag, complete with my job title of "Senior Systems Engineer". When the presisident of the company saw this, he asked about it. I told him that I was proud to be an engineer, and that an associate was someone who sprayedperfume on you in the department store. Severe CLM.
IANA Realtor, but perhaps you have never heard of mortgage completion insurance? This covers your mortgage payments if you cannot make them. This insures your investment. This is different from PMI, which insures the lender against you not making your mortgage payments.
In the U.S., we have a certain amount of disconnection between laws and morals. For instance, while the moral "Do not kill" is codified as a law, "Don't look at p0rn" is not (at least in most cases). IMHO, this disconnection is due to the two facts that people in the U.S. come from diverse backgrounds and that personal freedoms are (or at least were) highly valued.
Look at what was proposed:
An example:
I had a server that would panic once in while (1 or two times a month) with nothing special about the situation when it went down. I called HP support, sent them one of the core dumps, and 24 hours later they called me back with detailed info on what my problem was - a bad sector in a swap partition. They had already ordered a replacement disk (it showed up via Fedex that afternoon!) and wanted to know when I could schedule downtime for them to replace the disk.
I still buy HP stuff whenever I need a server, because their service has always exceeded my expectations. Of course, they do charge a healthy sum for it! ;-)