Incorrect. Exclusive use of Land, spectrum, and other natural monpolies is not property, it's Privilege.
The government passes a law that says you and only you can broadcast in Detroit at 73.1 FM; that's a privilege. You should pay money to compensate everyone else for their loss of freedom.
The government passes a law that says you and only you can build stuff on, and keep people out of, parcel 32-1019141; that's a privilege. You should pay money to compensate others for their loss of freedom.
The thing that makes me think you're right about programming not moving offshore well is my experience with out-of-state outsourcing. I worked on a project once where the client including their IT department was in Philadelphia while I remained in Cleveland. (Save the jokes.) I did the best work I could, but I was always out of the loop on those informal spec meetings, the ones that happen when you pop your head over the cube wall and ask a question. It was next to impossible to sustain productivity.
Now this company was an extreme case--they pretty much refused to write anything down, and the business-side customers used the production system as a whiteboard for idea development.
But this is not unusual! Few mid-market companies have enough formality in their processes--very few have any processes at all!--to communicate effectively out of their own headquarters, let alone halfway around the world.
Outsourcing to Cleveland is hard enough, and many companies simply aren't up to it. I don't think they'll be able to outsource to Hyderabad effectively.
All that having been said, the cost savings are incredible. If you can get it to work, it would be hard for me to tell you why you shouldn't. Cutting IT expenses by two thirds is impressive.
It would have been comparable had there been anything resembling a "consensus of scientists" claiming those "weapons of mass destruction" existed. Your argument practically refutes itself.
If I were to point a gun at your head, would you wait for true solid evidence that it were loaded before you ducked? Of course not - the only truly solid evidence is your brains splattered on the wall, by which time it's too late. Same with global climate change.
Fascinating... with our current US leadership that argument is good enough to invade a country, but not good enough to tone down our own energy use.
No, it is not a straight election. It is two elections. The recall is a yes/no question: Do you want to remove Davis from office? Davis must win a majority (or tie I suppose) to keep his job. If he is removed, then the other question on the ballot is who will replace him, for which a mere plurality is required.
"Me too." I've been a self-employed I.T. consultant for seven and a half years, counting a few contract gigs where I mostly acted as an employee of the agency. (That was a hassle but it sure beat not being able to get health insurance.) As a self-employed person you have to be good at picking up the phone and talking to people, checking up on all your professional contacts from time to time, finding things in common to discuss, and generally helping people understand that they can trust you with problems and things will work out. Just about any business is a "people business."
I'm reminded of the part of The Millionaire Mind (great book) that points out most millionaires in their survey were either in established professions (typically medicine and law) or very non-glamorous businesses. The businesses were junkyards, metal refining, cleaning services, that sort of thing. It is a rare millionaire who made it in an exciting speculative or high-tech industry.
I don't quite have a comparable story, but I've sold several Appgen accounting systems. When the prospect asks me to spec hardware, I say something like, "Whatever you have lying around is fine if it's stable and has a backup device." The system runs great on pretty much anything that runs Linux.
If they really insist on more advice, I sell them whatever is new and in a reasonable middle-price range. Performance is simply not a problem. Granted, I haven't needed to run Appgen with more than a couple dozen simultaneous users, but we rarely go over about 3% CPU utilization as it is.
Yes, this is a perfect example of "fighting the last war." Hijacking planes 9/11 style is over. Of course there are always new wrinkles in old plans, but who's to say whether the "soft walls" will help or hinder a clever and unanticipated new attack?
Why do Microsoft apologists spread the urban legend that you can sue Microsoft for flaws in its software? You can't. It's explicitly disclaimed in the EULA of every Microsoft product. The "who do you sue" argument is 100% red herring.
Great book: "The Millionaire Next Door." Check it out of the library next chance you get. The author studied hundreds of people with high net assets and found that a very high proportion created their own very unglamorous businesses, live pretty modestly, and take well-calculated risks. All very interesting.
Tale of two interviewers
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 1
I interviewed for a contract programming gig at a major investment company a couple years ago. The guy I talked to was about my age (I'm 37), and even though he didn't have direct hiring authority I'm sure I clinched the job when we traded war stories that included UUCP and VT-class terminals. I think he was pretty impressed (Hi Mike!) that I'd hacked the DOS version of UUCP to work over INT14 modem pools.
The team I was eventually assigned to, I was the oldest worker bee by a couple of years, and in fact I was a few months older than my manager, which was a first for him. He got over it well enough.
No real point to this, just one more old geek anecdote.
It positively drives me nuts, for instance, that my state's Department of Revenue is ksrevenue.org instead of revenue.ks.us like it should be, and the main site for state info is accesskansas.org . . . ORG? Please.
Actually, it should be revenue.state.ks.us, as state agencies have.state.$STATE.us reserved.
But don't get me started on atrocities like cityofcleveland.org.
You should declare ValidatePostalCode as pure virtual, and make it a protected member of the base Country class for all country environments. A "factory" class (CountryFactory) can instantiate a Country object of proper subtype as needed.
Away goes the ugly switch or multiway if statement.
Fully aware the IBM minis are not mainframes, I'm going to back you up on this. Fresh outta college with my VAX/VMS and Sun experience, I find myself in a System/38 shop.
Oh. My. God.
Absolutely nothing is the same. There is just barely a command line on the '38. The database is practically part of the OS. There is no "shell" as we know it. The programming languages (AFAIK, just COBOL and RPGIII) were as far as you could get from C-ish stuff, lacking anything remotely like printf() or even puts() for output, handling input through a faux-VSAM file interface.
Totally, totally alien. I caught on reasonably quickly, but what a culture shock. I learned an amazing amount in the first few months.
They don't even use freaking ASCII! Barbarians!
IBM minis are a whole different world from the Unix family. I can say with some certainty that going from Unix to Microsoft OSen is much less of a jump than Unix to mainframes or proprietary minis.
I saw the original Matrix movie in Pittsburgh with a bunch of attendees from Yet Another Perl Conference. Having perhaps 80% of the seats at that showing, we managed to turn it into the geek version of Rocky Horror. I feel bad for the other 20%.... something blows up on Neo, a voice in the audience yells, "Aaaah! You didn't use strict and hyphen-w!" and the crowd breaks up laughing.
I bet there were a lot of refunds that night for the 20%.
Darn. Pity there's no "-1 incoherent" mod here either. The point is, no, you don't have anyone to sue when your commercial software fails. Not unless it's a high-end vertical application, probably highly customized, and that just isn't where OSS is competing per se.
the problem with OSS as far as gov't/schools are concerned is that when you have a company that makes the software, hardware, buildings, etc., you have somebody a) at the other end of the phone line and b) someone to sue.
That old chestnut! I wish this was Plastic so I could mod you "-1 disingenuous." Every time there's an OSS vs. commercial software debate, someone brings up the "someone to sue" line as if it had never been thought of before.
Now go read a commercial software license. Any commercial software license. You don't have someone to sue. MS Office could wipe out your backups and take your children hostage, but Microsoft isn't liable, because you agreed to their EULA. You don't have someone to sue. You might possibly get your purchase price back in an extreme case.
if you don't think that is important, you're mistaken.
<sarcasm>Oh, never mind. Now you've set me straight.</sarcasm>
Say, why is it that the most clueless, argumentative posts include a self-referential line that ostensibly clears up that sort of confusion? How thoughtful.
This is an old, old criticism of institutional use of OSS and it has never been valid.
Rather than look for a new name, they should be working on describing a lists of talents, duties, and capabilities that define a system administrator. This should be augmented with a level of competence to allow for Junior Systems Administrator, Systems Administrator, Senior Systems Administrator, and finally Master Systems Administrator.
It probably also needs two paths. One Unix/Linux and one Windows. You could probably even make an argument for splitting Unix/Linux if you wish.
I'm sorry, no, India is a huge country full of intelligent, hard-working, well-educated people. (And also millions of very poor people with no education, but look at what's left.) There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of excellent programmers in India and similar countries.
I say this as a US-born American programmer. On the types of projects for which international development is well suited, it will be very, very hard for us in the richer countries to compete. That's nobody's fault, it's just the way things are when you have many able people in a relatively poor country with a very low cost of living.
There are many projects for which international outsourcing doesn't work out so well. There will be a new equilibrium, somewhat less favorable to current programmers in wealthier countries, and life will go on.
Slashdot Mirror
In what "state of nature" did you ever own land, including the right to keep others away from it? Who did you buy that right from?
Land ownership is like intellectual property--it doesn't exist until the sovereign says it exists. It's not a natural right.
Incorrect. Exclusive use of Land, spectrum, and other natural monpolies is not property, it's Privilege.
The government passes a law that says you and only you can broadcast in Detroit at 73.1 FM; that's a privilege. You should pay money to compensate everyone else for their loss of freedom.
The government passes a law that says you and only you can build stuff on, and keep people out of, parcel 32-1019141; that's a privilege. You should pay money to compensate others for their loss of freedom.
The thing that makes me think you're right about programming not moving offshore well is my experience with out-of-state outsourcing. I worked on a project once where the client including their IT department was in Philadelphia while I remained in Cleveland. (Save the jokes.) I did the best work I could, but I was always out of the loop on those informal spec meetings, the ones that happen when you pop your head over the cube wall and ask a question. It was next to impossible to sustain productivity.
Now this company was an extreme case--they pretty much refused to write anything down, and the business-side customers used the production system as a whiteboard for idea development.
But this is not unusual! Few mid-market companies have enough formality in their processes--very few have any processes at all!--to communicate effectively out of their own headquarters, let alone halfway around the world.
Outsourcing to Cleveland is hard enough, and many companies simply aren't up to it. I don't think they'll be able to outsource to Hyderabad effectively.
All that having been said, the cost savings are incredible. If you can get it to work, it would be hard for me to tell you why you shouldn't. Cutting IT expenses by two thirds is impressive.
It would have been comparable had there been anything resembling a "consensus of scientists" claiming those "weapons of mass destruction" existed. Your argument practically refutes itself.
Fascinating... with our current US leadership that argument is good enough to invade a country, but not good enough to tone down our own energy use.
No, it is not a straight election. It is two elections. The recall is a yes/no question: Do you want to remove Davis from office? Davis must win a majority (or tie I suppose) to keep his job. If he is removed, then the other question on the ballot is who will replace him, for which a mere plurality is required.
"Me too." I've been a self-employed I.T. consultant for seven and a half years, counting a few contract gigs where I mostly acted as an employee of the agency. (That was a hassle but it sure beat not being able to get health insurance.) As a self-employed person you have to be good at picking up the phone and talking to people, checking up on all your professional contacts from time to time, finding things in common to discuss, and generally helping people understand that they can trust you with problems and things will work out. Just about any business is a "people business."
I'm reminded of the part of The Millionaire Mind (great book) that points out most millionaires in their survey were either in established professions (typically medicine and law) or very non-glamorous businesses. The businesses were junkyards, metal refining, cleaning services, that sort of thing. It is a rare millionaire who made it in an exciting speculative or high-tech industry.
I don't quite have a comparable story, but I've sold several Appgen accounting systems. When the prospect asks me to spec hardware, I say something like, "Whatever you have lying around is fine if it's stable and has a backup device." The system runs great on pretty much anything that runs Linux.
If they really insist on more advice, I sell them whatever is new and in a reasonable middle-price range. Performance is simply not a problem. Granted, I haven't needed to run Appgen with more than a couple dozen simultaneous users, but we rarely go over about 3% CPU utilization as it is.
So does it scale to 10 CPUs/ Who cares?
Nah. The market for accountants has been awful for a few years now, at least here by the Great Lakes.
Yes, this is a perfect example of "fighting the last war." Hijacking planes 9/11 style is over. Of course there are always new wrinkles in old plans, but who's to say whether the "soft walls" will help or hinder a clever and unanticipated new attack?
Sure. With the same answer: nobody.
Why do Microsoft apologists spread the urban legend that you can sue Microsoft for flaws in its software? You can't. It's explicitly disclaimed in the EULA of every Microsoft product. The "who do you sue" argument is 100% red herring.
Please keep such FUD out of this.
Great book: "The Millionaire Next Door." Check it out of the library next chance you get. The author studied hundreds of people with high net assets and found that a very high proportion created their own very unglamorous businesses, live pretty modestly, and take well-calculated risks. All very interesting.
I interviewed for a contract programming gig at a major investment company a couple years ago. The guy I talked to was about my age (I'm 37), and even though he didn't have direct hiring authority I'm sure I clinched the job when we traded war stories that included UUCP and VT-class terminals. I think he was pretty impressed (Hi Mike!) that I'd hacked the DOS version of UUCP to work over INT14 modem pools.
The team I was eventually assigned to, I was the oldest worker bee by a couple of years, and in fact I was a few months older than my manager, which was a first for him. He got over it well enough.
No real point to this, just one more old geek anecdote.
Actually, it should be revenue.state.ks.us, as state agencies have .state.$STATE.us reserved.
But don't get me started on atrocities like cityofcleveland.org.
...or, most likely, it will be shuffled off to committee and ignored.
You should declare ValidatePostalCode as pure virtual, and make it a protected member of the base Country class for all country environments. A "factory" class (CountryFactory) can instantiate a Country object of proper subtype as needed.
Away goes the ugly switch or multiway if statement.
Fully aware the IBM minis are not mainframes, I'm going to back you up on this. Fresh outta college with my VAX/VMS and Sun experience, I find myself in a System/38 shop.
Oh. My. God.
Absolutely nothing is the same. There is just barely a command line on the '38. The database is practically part of the OS. There is no "shell" as we know it. The programming languages (AFAIK, just COBOL and RPGIII) were as far as you could get from C-ish stuff, lacking anything remotely like printf() or even puts() for output, handling input through a faux-VSAM file interface.
Totally, totally alien. I caught on reasonably quickly, but what a culture shock. I learned an amazing amount in the first few months.
They don't even use freaking ASCII! Barbarians!
IBM minis are a whole different world from the Unix family. I can say with some certainty that going from Unix to Microsoft OSen is much less of a jump than Unix to mainframes or proprietary minis.
I saw the original Matrix movie in Pittsburgh with a bunch of attendees from Yet Another Perl Conference. Having perhaps 80% of the seats at that showing, we managed to turn it into the geek version of Rocky Horror. I feel bad for the other 20%.... something blows up on Neo, a voice in the audience yells, "Aaaah! You didn't use strict and hyphen-w!" and the crowd breaks up laughing.
I bet there were a lot of refunds that night for the 20%.
Fun though.
robots.txt only works if the client side chooses to observe it. We are talking about spammers.
Darn. Pity there's no "-1 incoherent" mod here either. The point is, no, you don't have anyone to sue when your commercial software fails. Not unless it's a high-end vertical application, probably highly customized, and that just isn't where OSS is competing per se.
That old chestnut! I wish this was Plastic so I could mod you "-1 disingenuous." Every time there's an OSS vs. commercial software debate, someone brings up the "someone to sue" line as if it had never been thought of before.
Now go read a commercial software license. Any commercial software license. You don't have someone to sue. MS Office could wipe out your backups and take your children hostage, but Microsoft isn't liable, because you agreed to their EULA. You don't have someone to sue. You might possibly get your purchase price back in an extreme case.
<sarcasm>Oh, never mind. Now you've set me straight.</sarcasm>
Say, why is it that the most clueless, argumentative posts include a self-referential line that ostensibly clears up that sort of confusion? How thoughtful.
This is an old, old criticism of institutional use of OSS and it has never been valid.
You, uh, do know what SAGE is, right?
Indeed. Google "Henry George". Locking up nature is a human invention, as artificial as any industrial policy or government regulation.
I'm sorry, no, India is a huge country full of intelligent, hard-working, well-educated people. (And also millions of very poor people with no education, but look at what's left.) There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of excellent programmers in India and similar countries.
I say this as a US-born American programmer. On the types of projects for which international development is well suited, it will be very, very hard for us in the richer countries to compete. That's nobody's fault, it's just the way things are when you have many able people in a relatively poor country with a very low cost of living.
There are many projects for which international outsourcing doesn't work out so well. There will be a new equilibrium, somewhat less favorable to current programmers in wealthier countries, and life will go on.