AFAIK this constitutes an illegal wire-tap. Remember during the last presidential campaign, a Florida couple got into legal trouble for shopping around a recording of one of the candidates cell phone calls. --
This behaviour - including flaming the technical press - goes back to the beginning of the personal computer.
Let's see:
Apple II vs TRS-80
C64 vs Atari 800
Mac Fanatics vs IBM PC'ers
And my personal vote for most rabid partisans of all time...
comp.sys.amiga.advocacy vs the known universe
Don't get me wrong - I dearly loved my Amiga and still believe it was far in advance of it's competitors, but the way those guys would flame the press made me want to white-out the logo on my machine.
they are trying to destroy an old tradition going back to the early 80's.
Back to the early 80's???? Hacking goes back a lot longer than that. Friend, you need to read the Jargon File. The term "Hacker" goes back to the 1960s, if not even before.>
Don't know if they still do it, but in the late '80s, the ultimate backup computers for the shuttle were the HP41CV calculators that the pilot and commander carried with them. They had a special ROM cartridge burned for calcuating re-entry burns.
I remember that because at the time I had just written an adventure game for the HP41CV and gotten it published in a national user's group mag. Wee-hah! 256 rooms in 4k of RAM, baby! --
The Shuttle computers are proprietary IBM designs that have very little memory or I/O. This is one of the big reasons weather changes screw up the launches - the computers don't have the storage to hold multiple sets of weather data at one time.
They've talked about upgrading for years, but fear of buggy operating systems (look what happened with the Sojourner probe) and buggy hardware (Pentium division bug, anyone?) has prevented it.
Back when Byte was still a good magazine, they had an article on the difficulty of verifying that a computer chip design was correct. They noted that the UK Ministry of Defense had commisioned a team to develop a mathematically-proven-correct design for a CPU chip for use in military avionics. The chip was excruciatingly simple even by mid-80's standards (I think it was comprable to the 8080A) and the proof only covered the design. They planned to correct for fabrication bugs by using three different fab plants using different technologies.
*grin* that reminds me, my dad used my C= 128 to maintain his tax records (using a BASIC program I wrote for him) until he died last year. I was terrified that the floppy or monitor would blow, but they never did. I have an urge to go over, slap a game cartridge in it and fire it up...
I didn't know the TI machines were Z-80 based! Cool to hear it. I taught myself Z-80 assembler by writing a BASIC program to POKE successive memory addresses as I typed the op-codes in. I'd sit in math class writing string manipulation routines....
Your gapping on how patents work. It doesn't matter how many companies are using the technology TODAY, it matters how many were using it in 1996 when the patent was FILED.
The problem is that the patent office simply doesn't run on internet time and doesn't have the knowledge to judge whether something is trivial or not.
Hell, I can remember that all the 8 bit computer companies (Apple, Commodore, Atari) had to pay protection money to some guy who had the patent on using XOR to make the cursor blink on text based computer screens. I know C= fought the patent for years before finally caving in.
Whether that history comes from one of your old men screaming at you or hitting a book or asking a coworker I believe the end result is the same and that is the point I was trying to make.
But when your coworker doesn't know either, you end up doing a lot of work from scratch for no great gain, and repeating lots of old mistakes. Lousy data-searching because the coder doesn't know how to code a hash, let alone a partially ordered heap, code-bloat because the coder doesn't understand the relationship between data structure design and memory consumption, and I could go on forever.
However, my programming has a purpose (astronomy) and often it is easier to code up certain critical routines myself (never mind if you would find them inefficient) because I can't depend on a pure CS student to understand the nuances and I don't want to have to constantly look over their shoulders. In other words, my assistants handle the sundries and I make sure the critical bits work right.
That's great - and I've worked with image processing experts in that same mode. They handled the nitty-gritty subroutines and I handled the entire data-collection/presentation/distribution system. But what has that to do with the certification of professional programmers? And in what sense does you mastery of astrophysical math make you qualified to be a professional programmer? I strongly doubt the number-crunching work you need done rises to the complexity of a full text-editor, let alone a major three-tier distributed system.
I am at least semi-literate astronomically; I scratch-built my own 8" Dobsonian. But I don't think that means I deserve a place at the head table at your next symposium.
My experience, and I'm sure a lot of people will agree, is that the entire process is screwed up. The customer doesn't know what they want, the project manager changes the specs w/o telling the user, ambiguity in requirements, and yes, idiotic programmers. The whole process needs to be changed
Wow. Great that you noticed. But, people have been remarking on this since the late 1960's - starting about a month after someone noticed that good programming is hard to do. The problem is that managers have no incentive nor requirement to change the process, and (good) programmers have no way to force the change. Oh, and don't forget that the industry is full of self-taught people who insist that because they don't need certification, nobody needs it.
One last thing about these "case studies". For each "programming since some single-digit age" crack professionals who would supposedly lose their job, there are 50 incompetent programmers-for-dummies getting the same level of credit and recognition in the work place. I for one would like to be recognized as a qualfied employee who is professional and aims for the highest quality. Regardless of my "background", no employer can check up on my supposed skills since they were all obtained via NDA's and intellectual property agreements. With certification, I can walk proudly into a hiring manager's office, write a number on a piece of paper and walk out with the manager happy and myself happy. No muss. No fuss.
And software isn't? It's attitudes like that that caused the Y2K problem.
The world is full of thirty year old software. The only reason it isn't full of 100 year old software is that we didn't have programmable computers in 1899.
Programmer as woodcarver? No one dies because of a lousy wood-carving. People have died because of buggy software. Programmer as potter? Maybe, but guess what? The USA has a ton of laws restricting the sale of ceramics and defining what constitutes good pottery. You know why? To prevent people from being sick or dying because they ate or drank from a lousy piece of crockery.
I think people in this discussion need to read comp.risks more.
Yeah, but could you design or manage a software application that consumes 5 million lines of code? I have. To do it you need the knowledge of data structures and systems engineering that only comes from sitting in school for 4-5 years listening to old men scream at you for your lousy commenting techniques and spaghetti coding style.
Programming is something that any logical person can do - but why invent all the tools and techniques to manage large systems when you can build upon the tools and techinques created by others? When you were an undergrad, did you design your own spectroscopic tools and techniques or did you learn to use the ones created by others?
This industry is far to dominated by people who have no idea that they are working on solving problems that were solved thirty years ago on an IBM 360. - And as it often said, if you don't know history, you repeat it.
Sounds like you've collected a lot of shit in your life frpm people who assume that your lack of a degree means you lack the skills, too.
Do you see why that is? Say a hiring manager is looking at you and someone else who has a piece of paper that says "I know my shit". So, you've got an impressive resume. So what? So did Jeff Papows, till people discovered how much of it was fake. That hiring manager has no way to tell you really do know what you're doing. The degree might be worthless, but it gives him a security blanket he can cling to while he makes that hiring decision.
There are several such "Guilds" - the ACM, the IEEE, to name two.
The problem is that programming is so dominated by "revolutions" and so driven by young people who (a) don't know they exist and, anywate are (b) too busy burning out to see that the guilds could offer them.
My advice to a smart young programmer is to skip all the formal BS of college and certification and actually BUILD something that's impressive and cutting edge. Put it on your resume. Demo it. You'll get hired by a company. Maybe it won't be a corporate CYA-oriented environment, but maybe that's OK.
That's great. And how is that smart young programmer supposed to actually prove that he knows his stuff? You are doing programmers a huge disservice by telling them that since a BS or MS is the only form of certification programmers have today, and it's one that corporate HR people definitely look for.
I've given up trying to convince HR or even programming managers that I've mastered over twenty computer languages, a comprable number of operating systems and that I generate faster, better, more maintainable code than 95% of the people in the business. Why can't I convince them? Because everyone claims that kind of thing and I have no way to prove that in my case it's true. Moreover, even once you're hired into any kind of team development effort it's nearly impossible for management to tell which programmers are really good and which are being carried by the others.
How can they measure it? Lines of Code? I'm infamous for attacking other peoples code and ripping two-thirds out of it - while still getting the same results.
A common system of certification would allow me to lay it all out in black and white and would allow management to accurately estimate skill-levels and capabilities amoung their staff.
You're kidding, right? I've visited European capitals, and I've seen the tank traps and razor wire that surround your public buildings. We have children with guns, true - but you have nail bombs going off in your capital cities. It seems to me that you people live with a lot more fear than Americans do. --
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK this constitutes an illegal wire-tap. Remember during the last presidential campaign, a Florida couple got into legal trouble for shopping around a recording of one of the candidates cell phone calls.
--
This behaviour - including flaming the technical press - goes back to the beginning of the personal computer.
Let's see:
And my personal vote for most rabid partisans of all time...
Don't get me wrong - I dearly loved my Amiga and still believe it was far in advance of it's competitors, but the way those guys would flame the press made me want to white-out the logo on my machine.
--
Back to the early 80's???? Hacking goes back a lot longer than that. Friend, you need to read the Jargon File. The term "Hacker" goes back to the 1960s, if not even before.>
--
Didn't Cendant close Sierra On-Line's doors a few months ago and lay off all the programmers?
Is this a new company just re-using the old name?
--
Don't know if they still do it, but in the late '80s, the ultimate backup computers for the shuttle were the HP41CV calculators that the pilot and commander carried with them. They had a special ROM cartridge burned for calcuating re-entry burns.
I remember that because at the time I had just written an adventure game for the HP41CV and gotten it published in a national user's group mag. Wee-hah! 256 rooms in 4k of RAM, baby!
--
Nope.
The Shuttle computers are proprietary IBM designs that have very little memory or I/O. This is one of the big reasons weather changes screw up the launches - the computers don't have the storage to hold multiple sets of weather data at one time.
They've talked about upgrading for years, but fear of buggy operating systems (look what happened with the Sojourner probe) and buggy hardware (Pentium division bug, anyone?) has prevented it.
Back when Byte was still a good magazine, they had an article on the difficulty of verifying that a computer chip design was correct. They noted that the UK Ministry of Defense had commisioned a team to develop a mathematically-proven-correct design for a CPU chip for use in military avionics. The chip was excruciatingly simple even by mid-80's standards (I think it was comprable to the 8080A) and the proof only covered the design. They planned to correct for fabrication bugs by using three different fab plants using different technologies.
Don't know if they ever actually got that far...
--
*grin* that reminds me, my dad used my C= 128 to maintain his tax records (using a BASIC program I wrote for him) until he died last year. I was terrified that the floppy or monitor would blow, but they never did. I have an urge to go over, slap a game cartridge in it and fire it up...
--
I didn't know the TI machines were Z-80 based! Cool to hear it. I taught myself Z-80 assembler by writing a BASIC program to POKE successive memory addresses as I typed the op-codes in. I'd sit in math class writing string manipulation routines....
--
Your gapping on how patents work. It doesn't matter how many companies are using the technology TODAY, it matters how many were using it in 1996 when the patent was FILED.
The problem is that the patent office simply doesn't run on internet time and doesn't have the knowledge to judge whether something is trivial or not.
Hell, I can remember that all the 8 bit computer companies (Apple, Commodore, Atari) had to pay protection money to some guy who had the patent on using XOR to make the cursor blink on text based computer screens. I know C= fought the patent for years before finally caving in.
--
And how did your resume get past the HR people that did the pre-screen?
--
But when your coworker doesn't know either, you end up doing a lot of work from scratch for no great gain, and repeating lots of old mistakes. Lousy data-searching because the coder doesn't know how to code a hash, let alone a partially ordered heap, code-bloat because the coder doesn't understand the relationship between data structure design and memory consumption, and I could go on forever.
However, my programming has a purpose (astronomy) and often it is easier to code up certain critical routines myself (never mind if you would find them inefficient) because I can't depend on a pure CS student to understand the nuances and I don't want to have to constantly look over their shoulders. In other words, my assistants handle the sundries and I make sure the critical bits work right.That's great - and I've worked with image processing experts in that same mode. They handled the nitty-gritty subroutines and I handled the entire data-collection/presentation/distribution system. But what has that to do with the certification of professional programmers? And in what sense does you mastery of astrophysical math make you qualified to be a professional programmer? I strongly doubt the number-crunching work you need done rises to the complexity of a full text-editor, let alone a major three-tier distributed system.
I am at least semi-literate astronomically; I scratch-built my own 8" Dobsonian. But I don't think that means I deserve a place at the head table at your next symposium.
--
Wow. Great that you noticed. But, people have been remarking on this since the late 1960's - starting about a month after someone noticed that good programming is hard to do. The problem is that managers have no incentive nor requirement to change the process, and (good) programmers have no way to force the change. Oh, and don't forget that the industry is full of self-taught people who insist that because they don't need certification, nobody needs it.
--
Well said.
--
Hippocrates' version certainly did. The one given by modern universities has apparently been watered down a lot.
--
And software isn't? It's attitudes like that that caused the Y2K problem.
The world is full of thirty year old software. The only reason it isn't full of 100 year old software is that we didn't have programmable computers in 1899.
--
I'm guessing that you don't have any children, do you?
--
Programmer as woodcarver? No one dies because of a lousy wood-carving. People have died because of buggy software. Programmer as potter? Maybe, but guess what? The USA has a ton of laws restricting the sale of ceramics and defining what constitutes good pottery. You know why? To prevent people from being sick or dying because they ate or drank from a lousy piece of crockery.
I think people in this discussion need to read comp.risks more.
--
No. But it does mean you're going to have a very hard time proving to HR people that you have any skills at all.
--
Yeah, but could you design or manage a software application that consumes 5 million lines of code? I have. To do it you need the knowledge of data structures and systems engineering that only comes from sitting in school for 4-5 years listening to old men scream at you for your lousy commenting techniques and spaghetti coding style.
Programming is something that any logical person can do - but why invent all the tools and techniques to manage large systems when you can build upon the tools and techinques created by others? When you were an undergrad, did you design your own spectroscopic tools and techniques or did you learn to use the ones created by others?
This industry is far to dominated by people who have no idea that they are working on solving problems that were solved thirty years ago on an IBM 360. - And as it often said, if you don't know history, you repeat it.
--
Sounds like you've collected a lot of shit in your life frpm people who assume that your lack of a degree means you lack the skills, too.
Do you see why that is? Say a hiring manager is looking at you and someone else who has a piece of paper that says "I know my shit". So, you've got an impressive resume. So what? So did Jeff Papows, till people discovered how much of it was fake. That hiring manager has no way to tell you really do know what you're doing. The degree might be worthless, but it gives him a security blanket he can cling to while he makes that hiring decision.
--
There are several such "Guilds" - the ACM, the IEEE, to name two.
The problem is that programming is so dominated by "revolutions" and so driven by young people who (a) don't know they exist and, anywate are (b) too busy burning out to see that the guilds could offer them.
--
That's great. And how is that smart young programmer supposed to actually prove that he knows his stuff? You are doing programmers a huge disservice by telling them that since a BS or MS is the only form of certification programmers have today, and it's one that corporate HR people definitely look for.
I've given up trying to convince HR or even programming managers that I've mastered over twenty computer languages, a comprable number of operating systems and that I generate faster, better, more maintainable code than 95% of the people in the business. Why can't I convince them? Because everyone claims that kind of thing and I have no way to prove that in my case it's true. Moreover, even once you're hired into any kind of team development effort it's nearly impossible for management to tell which programmers are really good and which are being carried by the others.
How can they measure it? Lines of Code? I'm infamous for attacking other peoples code and ripping two-thirds out of it - while still getting the same results.
A common system of certification would allow me to lay it all out in black and white and would allow management to accurately estimate skill-levels and capabilities amoung their staff.
--
If people were more accepting of "goths", the goths wouldn't feel driven to act out their ostracism by adopting outlandish clothing or behaviours.
--
As if I enjoyed being beaten up once a week for four years.
I used to sneer at the idea that homosexuality was something you were born with, till a gay geek made me see the parallels.
--
You're kidding, right? I've visited European capitals, and I've seen the tank traps and razor wire that surround your public buildings. We have children with guns, true - but you have nail bombs going off in your capital cities. It seems to me that you people live with a lot more fear than Americans do.
--