I work in healthcare and my opinion here doesn't necessarily reflect my employer's. That disclaimer aside, I feel for you. I sincerely hope your situation has improved. I will offer one counterpoint, though. If your friend's practice couldn't get it together well enough to store prescriptions in Word, Excel, Access, or even Notepad, should we have any hope that they will be able to participate meaningfully in a fully transactionalized data transfer system without error or confusion?
I don't advocate doing nothing, mind you. I'm very much behind the idea of seeing physicians moving into the 21st century. I just worry that our current method for doing that may be flawed and create more problems than it solved. I could be wrong, though. It's been known to happen.:)
In any case, sorry to hear you had a bad time of things and I hope we all see general improvements soon.
A 30-40 mile commute isn't unheard of (in fact its very typical) where I live, and it tends to be very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter, so that is 60-80 miles both ways, every day.
Then I'd say this car isn't really for your locale. The vast majority of people don't share the dilemma you describe.
I mean, think about it. If she weren't letting those horses listen for free, they might have had to go out and purchase the CDs themselves, which is the very core of her sins against the music artists! I mean, if we allowed this, what next? Would she try to hang a painting up in there for just anybody to enjoy who could see it?!? I think you see the sort of anarchy, mayhem, and potty-mouthed language that would ensue in a world where music was just allowed to carry out over free and unencrypted manure-laden air.
But I do agree with your conclusion. A bailout is not the answer. The market (producers and consumers alike) should decide what will work. These grandiose plans always smack of a planned economy (read: thinly veiled socialism) to me. Honda and Toyota have proved that greater profitability is achievable without the need for a government bailout.
I mean, why shouldn't the government take over basic healthcare---look at the spectacular job they did with military healthcare! The quality of medical oversight and access to the proper treatment and care as discovered by the average enlisted man is just amazing without par.
Who among us hasn't heard about the world class great treatment of our soldiers returning from Iraq with injuries? Who here hasn't seen first hand the all-hands-on-deck attitude of the military health care system when a seaman's wife is diagnosed with cancer? Or the legendary medical expertise brought to the table for the many ailments of our slowly dying "Greatest Generation"?
I, for one, welcome our new misdiagnosing, apathetic overlords.
Some people here will tell you to start dropping managerisms (like those in this message's title) and talk costs. They are correct, if you want to move into management. If you want to stay a programmer, however, just fix the damn problem. Nothing you described is too terribly difficult to correct on your own. Install and use Hudson. It has plug-ins for.net and java language support (and probably more). Make sure you really use its code quality plug-ins (things like fxCop, findBugs, and PMD). In short, do al little every project to improve the development environment. These are free tools and fairly trivial to set up. Getting your environment right is part of your job as a developer. Don't abdicate that responsibility to management, especially if management doesn't understand what your development environment needs.
It is a fact of life that most non-software companies have not yet woken up to the emerging criticality of their software divisions. What you describe isn't surprising or unusual. Be better than 70% of your peers by fixing the problems as you see them. You will learn to be a better developer and management will learn to appreciate your efficiency. If they don't, so what? Move on with all the knowledge you gained building up their development infrastructure.
What makes you think we aren't capable of self-evolution? As a natural process, evolution is ineficient and lengthy. If we need adaptation in the future, I'd rather see that change controlled by us.
I commented on this in previous posts, but yeah, ATMs make them good money. Voting machines are government contract BS work, where the customer is as likely to bitcvh and sue as be happy. They are more trouble than they are worth.
I'm no fan of Diebold, but I don't envy them. I would have just left that industry rather than tarnish my ATM rep with a non-profitable side business.
If you invent a drug you absolutely should have the right to charge for them. But if you invent a drug you should also absolutely have the right to give them away under any damn terms you choose.
I don't work for WotC. I never went to a convention to play the new edition. I am not under an NDA or in any other way a part of a beta testing group for WotC.
I also play 4th ed every weekend right now. We use the pre-release compilation ruleset and the pregen characters and have toyed with character creation to make a thief to add to the party. Not a complete experience, but definitely gives me a clear idea of what 4e is about and how it will play. So let me comment about that.
I have a strong desire to dislike the new edition. I have publicly devcried that it would be crap. I have good reason to dislike their move away from the open source model. I have no love for Hasbro's tenure as keepers of D&D.
And I love the new game so far. I don't want to. But I do. So far, the game is just more fun. More action. More of the good stuff and not so much of the crap that made previous editions tedious. I'm not saying it's perfect (I could give you my personal list of dislikes) but overall, it is an improvement from previous editions. And it just kills me to say that.
Seriously, corporate Intranets lock things down and require changing network passwords. FF makes me type all that in manually, and again every time it changes, and manually log in every time I hit a resource.
Fix NTLM and you will remove a large (but admittedly not the only) obstacle to corporate usage.
Without commenting on the allegations of straight-up fraud, becuase I have no evidence one way or the other, I can offer a perfectly plausible answer to your question:
Diebolds ATMs are more secure because they are more profitable. Look at it this way, if you are a business owner and need to allocate resources. You have one project that nets millions and another that nets less than a tenth of that profit. To which project to you send your heavy hitters? To which project do you allocate the most time and money? The voting machines look like they were written by amatuers becuase they, in essence, were. The good Diebold developers were busy securing bank transactions for millions of people and trillions of dollars.
ATMs are huge busniess for Diebold. Voting machines are almost more trouble than they are worth.
That is not to say they are or are not also rigging votes. That is a different question, really, but your question was more basic than that and the answer, I'm afraid is easier than you think. Money drives progress in the U.S. Put differently, profits are the price of efficiency (as Thomas Sowell put it). Frankly, that has worked out very well historically, but there's always an edge case that demands attention.
Didn't mean to come off as an ass. Sorry.:) I was really just trying to combat what I see as a pervasive misunderstanding about the nature and destiny of Man. Of course, as you said, you were just looking for Funny mods, so perhaps I picked the wrong comment on which to reply.
the predicions of "The Marching Morons" and "Idiocracy" will come to pass.
Well, not to be mean about it (no, really!), but if you thought that Idiocracy was a prediction, then you may have been its inspiration.;-)
Seriously though, That's not how genetics work, you understand? All of human history has shown the reverse---smarter children from slightly dumber parents. If stupid people couldn't have smart kids, then how would you explain our rise from Australeopithicus and earlier hominids?
Don't get me wrong, Idiocracy was funny as hell, but it wasn't a documentary, a warning, or even remotely feasible. Despite dire predictions about the "next generation" for centuries (millenia?), we've steadily improved. Don't beleive me? Ask the average black family in the USA if they'd rather have live 100 years ago? Things are getting better. We stumble. We fail. But we always pick ourselves up and grab the next rung on the ladder. Really, we are a pretty great species (though I'm biased, so don't take my word for it).
Good. DBJDNS is, overall, a solid piece of software that kicks the crap outta Bind and leaves it bleeding in a ditch. I'll be glad to see it under a more open license that allows it to prosper and get some of its problems addressed.
To say otherwise is to make the essential conservative fallacy
First, telling me what I've done is "the essential conservative fallacy" is itself, just a little too close to an argument ad hominem for my tastes, because underlying it is an attempt to direpute my claim by naming it thusly.
That because it was always this way is a valid reason. 140 years ago we had slavery. Should we still have it today?
That is a spurious relationship coupled with blatantly judgmental language designed to get others to side with you without actually addressing the issue I've presented. A cursory reading would suggest a relationship between my position and a pro-slavery stance, or between a small government and a racist regime. Both couldn't be farther from the truth.
I never said we should have small government becuase it's always been this way. Indeed, for most of our history, we've had large government AND IT HASN'T WORKED. We started with a small government. We were designed for a smaller government. We don't need more than a smaller government. I don't need the government as my parental figure. I can get on just fine without it, thank you very much.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." ~ C.S. Lewis
These are words to consider before we give the government more control over our lives. And make no mistake, giving the government size and power IS giving the government control.
Ron Paul makes the ridiculously huge assumption that everyone that takes part in our society is totally informed on everything and that they will use that knowledge in making their choices.
No. Ron Paul makes the ridiculously obvious assumption that the U.S. government was not established or designed to be your parent or babysitter and beyond maintaining itself minimally ought have no stake in your decision-making.
But if you need someone holding your hand through life's difficult choices---like which shampoo to use or which companies best meet your personal ethic---then I can see how you'd mistake his actual assumption for the one you just claimed.
I am a custommer [sic] not a tax payer. End of the story.
You're modded funny, but seem serious in intent. Not sure which you intended, but just so you understand, when we talk about the "Microsoft Tax", we aren't talking about MS products we've willingly purchased, but rather MS products we've actively sought not to purchase, won't use, have no interest in, and yet are forced to pay for.
When I buy a computer from most major OEM's, they pay a license fee to MS whether or not I want Windows, therefore, they charge me that fee. I promptly remove Windows and put Linux on there. But I've been forced to pay for Windows anyway. That is akin to a tax. Only now are we seeing serious options for avoiding the MS Tax.
it's not funny anymore.
It never was funny. I don't find it funny at all that I've put $1 into MS's coffers for products I didn't want or use. I certainly don't find it funny when the EULA that I'm expected to adhere to is disregarded by the OEM and MS when I try to get the EULA's promised refund for said product. If you thought we were telling a joke when we talked about the MS Tax, then your sense of humor needs an overhaul.
I think that overall it's the right decision. One of the benefits of being the underdog (as linux is on the desktop) is that we are less tied to legacy issues. We can make wholesale changes like this with, frankly, not much blowback (in the big picture sense).
On the other hand, I still can't get Ubuntu to let me play a 3D game (e.g., Tremulous or Guild Wars) while Compiz is active. That and other issues are substantive hurdles that they need to overcome if they intend to push it out and on by default. I'd hate to think that by defualt I couldn't run any 3D games. That would kinda suck.
Mostly just to be helpful (i.e., ignore this if it's not what you are looking to do):
Use the upgrade wizard for VS2005 to move to VB.NET from VB6. Then open it in Sharpdevelop (a free IDE that is better than VS Express, but lags a bit behind VS Enterprise) and convert it from VB.NET to C#.
Why? VB.NET is barely similar to VB6. And frankly, if you have to learn the.NET API, C# is a better choice. Also, it'll better support Mono for a cross platform approach.
MoMa will give you a clear report of the API calls that prevent it from running in Mono, and even more importantly, it will give Mono some feedback on the API's they need to step up and support more quickly.
I don't know what your app does, but anytime I see a chance to get more apps on Linux, I like to take the opportunity. I've been on Linux exclusively at home since 2000 and I'm a huge advocate for switching. More apps makes my "sell" easier.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I work in healthcare and my opinion here doesn't necessarily reflect my employer's. That disclaimer aside, I feel for you. I sincerely hope your situation has improved. I will offer one counterpoint, though. If your friend's practice couldn't get it together well enough to store prescriptions in Word, Excel, Access, or even Notepad, should we have any hope that they will be able to participate meaningfully in a fully transactionalized data transfer system without error or confusion?
I don't advocate doing nothing, mind you. I'm very much behind the idea of seeing physicians moving into the 21st century. I just worry that our current method for doing that may be flawed and create more problems than it solved. I could be wrong, though. It's been known to happen. :)
In any case, sorry to hear you had a bad time of things and I hope we all see general improvements soon.
...the rest of the world will hate us for controlling "their" Internet.
(sorry, just read a Digg thread and I'm bitter about dumb people right now)
Tom Caudron
Then I'd say this car isn't really for your locale. The vast majority of people don't share the dilemma you describe.
I mean, think about it. If she weren't letting those horses listen for free, they might have had to go out and purchase the CDs themselves, which is the very core of her sins against the music artists! I mean, if we allowed this, what next? Would she try to hang a painting up in there for just anybody to enjoy who could see it?!? I think you see the sort of anarchy, mayhem, and potty-mouthed language that would ensue in a world where music was just allowed to carry out over free and unencrypted manure-laden air.
Tom Caudron
I have one word for you: DeBeers.
But I do agree with your conclusion. A bailout is not the answer. The market (producers and consumers alike) should decide what will work. These grandiose plans always smack of a planned economy (read: thinly veiled socialism) to me. Honda and Toyota have proved that greater profitability is achievable without the need for a government bailout.
Tom Caudron
I mean, why shouldn't the government take over basic healthcare---look at the spectacular job they did with military healthcare! The quality of medical oversight and access to the proper treatment and care as discovered by the average enlisted man is just amazing without par.
Who among us hasn't heard about the world class great treatment of our soldiers returning from Iraq with injuries? Who here hasn't seen first hand the all-hands-on-deck attitude of the military health care system when a seaman's wife is diagnosed with cancer? Or the legendary medical expertise brought to the table for the many ailments of our slowly dying "Greatest Generation"?
I, for one, welcome our new misdiagnosing, apathetic overlords.
Hey, I think I saw that video!
If only the government let people keep their hard earned money so they could.
Some people here will tell you to start dropping managerisms (like those in this message's title) and talk costs. They are correct, if you want to move into management. If you want to stay a programmer, however, just fix the damn problem. Nothing you described is too terribly difficult to correct on your own. Install and use Hudson. It has plug-ins for .net and java language support (and probably more). Make sure you really use its code quality plug-ins (things like fxCop, findBugs, and PMD). In short, do al little every project to improve the development environment. These are free tools and fairly trivial to set up. Getting your environment right is part of your job as a developer. Don't abdicate that responsibility to management, especially if management doesn't understand what your development environment needs.
It is a fact of life that most non-software companies have not yet woken up to the emerging criticality of their software divisions. What you describe isn't surprising or unusual. Be better than 70% of your peers by fixing the problems as you see them. You will learn to be a better developer and management will learn to appreciate your efficiency. If they don't, so what? Move on with all the knowledge you gained building up their development infrastructure.
What makes you think we aren't capable of self-evolution? As a natural process, evolution is ineficient and lengthy. If we need adaptation in the future, I'd rather see that change controlled by us.
Tom Caudron
I commented on this in previous posts, but yeah, ATMs make them good money. Voting machines are government contract BS work, where the customer is as likely to bitcvh and sue as be happy. They are more trouble than they are worth.
I'm no fan of Diebold, but I don't envy them. I would have just left that industry rather than tarnish my ATM rep with a non-profitable side business.
-Tom Caudron
If you invent a drug you absolutely should have the right to charge for them. But if you invent a drug you should also absolutely have the right to give them away under any damn terms you choose.
You are mistaken.
I don't work for WotC. I never went to a convention to play the new edition. I am not under an NDA or in any other way a part of a beta testing group for WotC.
I also play 4th ed every weekend right now. We use the pre-release compilation ruleset and the pregen characters and have toyed with character creation to make a thief to add to the party. Not a complete experience, but definitely gives me a clear idea of what 4e is about and how it will play. So let me comment about that.
I have a strong desire to dislike the new edition. I have publicly devcried that it would be crap. I have good reason to dislike their move away from the open source model. I have no love for Hasbro's tenure as keepers of D&D.
And I love the new game so far. I don't want to. But I do. So far, the game is just more fun. More action. More of the good stuff and not so much of the crap that made previous editions tedious. I'm not saying it's perfect (I could give you my personal list of dislikes) but overall, it is an improvement from previous editions. And it just kills me to say that.
-Tom Caudron
Mmmm. That irony tastes delicious.
Tom Caudron
NTLM.
Seriously, corporate Intranets lock things down and require changing network passwords. FF makes me type all that in manually, and again every time it changes, and manually log in every time I hit a resource.
Fix NTLM and you will remove a large (but admittedly not the only) obstacle to corporate usage.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Without commenting on the allegations of straight-up fraud, becuase I have no evidence one way or the other, I can offer a perfectly plausible answer to your question:
Diebolds ATMs are more secure because they are more profitable. Look at it this way, if you are a business owner and need to allocate resources. You have one project that nets millions and another that nets less than a tenth of that profit. To which project to you send your heavy hitters? To which project do you allocate the most time and money? The voting machines look like they were written by amatuers becuase they, in essence, were. The good Diebold developers were busy securing bank transactions for millions of people and trillions of dollars.
ATMs are huge busniess for Diebold. Voting machines are almost more trouble than they are worth.
That is not to say they are or are not also rigging votes. That is a different question, really, but your question was more basic than that and the answer, I'm afraid is easier than you think. Money drives progress in the U.S. Put differently, profits are the price of efficiency (as Thomas Sowell put it). Frankly, that has worked out very well historically, but there's always an edge case that demands attention.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Didn't mean to come off as an ass. Sorry. :) I was really just trying to combat what I see as a pervasive misunderstanding about the nature and destiny of Man. Of course, as you said, you were just looking for Funny mods, so perhaps I picked the wrong comment on which to reply.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Well, not to be mean about it (no, really!), but if you thought that Idiocracy was a prediction, then you may have been its inspiration.
Seriously though, That's not how genetics work, you understand? All of human history has shown the reverse---smarter children from slightly dumber parents. If stupid people couldn't have smart kids, then how would you explain our rise from Australeopithicus and earlier hominids?
Don't get me wrong, Idiocracy was funny as hell, but it wasn't a documentary, a warning, or even remotely feasible. Despite dire predictions about the "next generation" for centuries (millenia?), we've steadily improved. Don't beleive me? Ask the average black family in the USA if they'd rather have live 100 years ago? Things are getting better. We stumble. We fail. But we always pick ourselves up and grab the next rung on the ladder. Really, we are a pretty great species (though I'm biased, so don't take my word for it).
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Good. DBJDNS is, overall, a solid piece of software that kicks the crap outta Bind and leaves it bleeding in a ditch. I'll be glad to see it under a more open license that allows it to prosper and get some of its problems addressed.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
First, telling me what I've done is "the essential conservative fallacy" is itself, just a little too close to an argument ad hominem for my tastes, because underlying it is an attempt to direpute my claim by naming it thusly.
In any case, I am not a conservative. If I must be pigeonholed, I'm more of a Classical Liberal than a Political Conservative.
That is a spurious relationship coupled with blatantly judgmental language designed to get others to side with you without actually addressing the issue I've presented. A cursory reading would suggest a relationship between my position and a pro-slavery stance, or between a small government and a racist regime. Both couldn't be farther from the truth.
I never said we should have small government becuase it's always been this way. Indeed, for most of our history, we've had large government AND IT HASN'T WORKED. We started with a small government. We were designed for a smaller government. We don't need more than a smaller government. I don't need the government as my parental figure. I can get on just fine without it, thank you very much.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." ~ C.S. Lewis
These are words to consider before we give the government more control over our lives. And make no mistake, giving the government size and power IS giving the government control.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
No. Ron Paul makes the ridiculously obvious assumption that the U.S. government was not established or designed to be your parent or babysitter and beyond maintaining itself minimally ought have no stake in your decision-making.
But if you need someone holding your hand through life's difficult choices---like which shampoo to use or which companies best meet your personal ethic---then I can see how you'd mistake his actual assumption for the one you just claimed.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
You're modded funny, but seem serious in intent. Not sure which you intended, but just so you understand, when we talk about the "Microsoft Tax", we aren't talking about MS products we've willingly purchased, but rather MS products we've actively sought not to purchase, won't use, have no interest in, and yet are forced to pay for.
When I buy a computer from most major OEM's, they pay a license fee to MS whether or not I want Windows, therefore, they charge me that fee. I promptly remove Windows and put Linux on there. But I've been forced to pay for Windows anyway. That is akin to a tax. Only now are we seeing serious options for avoiding the MS Tax.
It never was funny. I don't find it funny at all that I've put $1 into MS's coffers for products I didn't want or use. I certainly don't find it funny when the EULA that I'm expected to adhere to is disregarded by the OEM and MS when I try to get the EULA's promised refund for said product. If you thought we were telling a joke when we talked about the MS Tax, then your sense of humor needs an overhaul.
And that is the real end of the story.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
I think that overall it's the right decision. One of the benefits of being the underdog (as linux is on the desktop) is that we are less tied to legacy issues. We can make wholesale changes like this with, frankly, not much blowback (in the big picture sense).
On the other hand, I still can't get Ubuntu to let me play a 3D game (e.g., Tremulous or Guild Wars) while Compiz is active. That and other issues are substantive hurdles that they need to overcome if they intend to push it out and on by default. I'd hate to think that by defualt I couldn't run any 3D games. That would kinda suck.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
yes, because we can never underestimate the strong economic power brought to bear by the average school play. ;-)
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Mostly just to be helpful (i.e., ignore this if it's not what you are looking to do):
.NET API, C# is a better choice. Also, it'll better support Mono for a cross platform approach.
:-)
Use the upgrade wizard for VS2005 to move to VB.NET from VB6. Then open it in Sharpdevelop (a free IDE that is better than VS Express, but lags a bit behind VS Enterprise) and convert it from VB.NET to C#.
Why? VB.NET is barely similar to VB6. And frankly, if you have to learn the
In any case, once you have it running in VB.NET or C#, run it through the Mono Migration Analyzer.
MoMa will give you a clear report of the API calls that prevent it from running in Mono, and even more importantly, it will give Mono some feedback on the API's they need to step up and support more quickly.
I don't know what your app does, but anytime I see a chance to get more apps on Linux, I like to take the opportunity. I've been on Linux exclusively at home since 2000 and I'm a huge advocate for switching. More apps makes my "sell" easier.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/