Well, no one is quite the expert at mass murder that the Israelis are, as they're proving in Gaza right now by butchering 4 civilians for every enemy "soldier" that they kill.
Can you imagine the uproar if 80% of those killed in Afghanistan by US forces were civilians?
No, you've hit the nail on the head about the problem with "agile" development. Agile is a team of programmers hacking at a code base without rhyme, reason, or structure. It presumes there are (usually non-existent) regression tests to catch any breakage, and makes no allowance for the fact that without some overshadowing "big picture", people who are new to the team will spend months just trying to figure out what the hell the project does and where to find the pieces of code that need to be tweaked when enhancements are requested.
As far as I'm concerned, agile is the lazy coder's answer to "I hate writing documentation."
I believe he's bemoaning the complexity of frameworks and toolkits rather than the tools used to work with those frameworks and toolkits. Technically he's correct -- things are a lot more complex than they used to be for getting the most basic of tasks done.
But you know what? Business isn't interested in basic tasks any more. They want it secure. They want it scalable. They want a web front end, and a desktop client, and apps for Android and iOS. The days of the old "read billing file, produce accounting records" code have not gone away; those projects were just done 30-40 years ago and don't need to be rewritten, just tweaked from time to time to allow for changes in regulations such as tax law or liability.
Even the last company I worked for wasn't content with a mere rewrite and update of their core business with the new software -- they had a whole new plan of integrating another 5 or 10 vertical functionality features into the system (it was just an autodialer -- they wanted integrated CRM, push button customer calling, call answering, call forwarding, a full phone system with voice mail support and enhancements to the ever popular auto-answering system of branching menus and responses, and the ability to deploy the whole thing as a multi-client web service instead of deploying custom configured hardware to the client sites.)
The frameworks and toolkits have correspondingly become more complex in order to support those needs. Look at the transaction processing systems of old -- you'd buy a number of seperate products including a message queueing system, a report formatting tool, a database engine, and a transaction processor, each of which had their own APIs and documentation. Each tool was relatively simple, but getting them all coordinated and working together was hard as hell. Now you take JEE, buy just about any message processor and database you like, and it all largely works with the same API regardless of which vendor's tools you chose. So while the JEE framework is incredibly complex compared to a transaction processor of old, what it does in total is also saving you insane gobs of time integrating and debugging disparate products. So technically JEE is far simpler than things used to be, despite the ramp-up learning curve.
The same is true of every framework or toolkit I've used for over 10 years -- they tie together multiple vendors products consistently so that only small tweaks are needed to adapt to the vendor's products rather than whole-application re-writes if you decide to swap something out.
Hell, take a look at what I did with Java, six different vendor databases, and JDBC alone for http://msscodefactory.sourceforge.net. The differences between each of those database integration layers are not subtle, but nor are they particularly arcane. All of the products have virtually the same feature set; there are just differences in how you use JDBC and stored procedures for each database. Compared to "the old days", it was a cake walk to do that integration and customization over the past 3-4 years. And remember I worked on that code by myself -- it wasn't a whole team of programmers dealing with the complexity. If one guy can produce that using standardized toolkits in 3-4 years, how can you say things are more complex than they were when it used to take a team of 100-150 programmers 2 years to produce something similar for one database?
And have you listened to what those types of gamers say to everyone they play against? We're talking about mouthy juvenile delinquents of varying ages who've never evolved beyond that of the 12 year old. They're assholes to everyone and they threaten everyone with disembowlment, murder, and other such crap. The only "special" insult they make to women is rape, because they know that will piss them off. And that's all that sort cares about: pissing the opponent off.
Maybe the game industry is worse than others -- I don't know; I've never worked in that sector. But I have never seen women in banking, telecommunications, government, financial services, or the aeronautics industries be subjected to any more or any less jibing and insulting than "the guys" on the team were. Maybe there is just something about gaming that attracts demented juvenile delinquents, but everyone at work received about the same level of respect from their co-workers everwhere I worked over a 30 year period in the tech industry.
Then again, I've been out of the industry for almost five years now. Maybe society has taken this mad rush to the bottom in the intervening five years. If so, that's sad, because tech used to be one of the few industries where women and men were judged more on their skillz than anything else.
I was in the same situation once. Laid off by Northern Telecom in the late '80s, I started work as a contractor at their head office three weeks later for double what I'd been paid as an employee.:)
Even addiction is not a problem. Back in the day when opium was legal, many people were addicted to it. But they had ready access to a cheap supply of their drug of choice, so they were able to function in society, hold down a job, etc.
Caffeine is another good example. Lots of people are addicted to caffeine, but function in society.
Even tobacco (evil though it is) has functional addicts.
The point is that it's not addiction itself that is a problem, but the stigmatization of addicts by society and the crimes they're forced to commit to feed black market pricing. Put an opiate addict on a methadone program, and they stop breaking into houses to feed their habit.
Addiction is not a *good* thing, but it should be a personal choice and health issue, not an excuse for ostracizing someone from society.
This sounds like paper-tracked barter, with a delayed payment on half of the deal. Which is kind of the key problem that money was intended to solve -- money can be traded for *anything*, not just what the issuer has that is of value. This ends up being a throwback to the days of "store scrip", only even more limited.
An interesting experiment, but ultimately futile and pointless.
That taxation is my biggest issue. My bank does not have free, unlimited ATM transactions on my plan. I withdraw my cash, spend it where I will, and don't pay their damned ATM fees.
I have no money to spare for seeing movies. Period.
So when I download a torrent and watch it (and there's a disgustingly small number that I watch more than 15-20 minutes of), there is absolutely NO loss to the studio. Because if I *had* to pay for it, I just wouldn't see it at all.
I *hate* theatres on top of being broke -- they're full of ignorant perfume and aftershave wearing buttheads playing with their cell phones and talking about what they're going to do after the movie. I don't own a TV, so I'd have to play a DVD on my Linux box. If I'm still going to see it on a small computer screen, why *wouldn't* I settle for a low-res torrent instead of a DVD?
The studios like to portray every case of piracy as "lost revenue." It's not. I firmly believe that in most cases where people download a torrent, either they couldn't *afford* to go to the theatre, or they're previewing the flick to decide if it's worth spending money at the theatre. And if it's not worth the money, they'd have been demanding refunds, so there *still* isn't a loss of revenue.
Seriously -- it costs my buddy over $100 to take the family out for a movie. You think he's going to *gamble* that the movie is worth watching with all the crap that Hollywood pukes onto the big screen nowadays?
I agree. It sounds like the most useless concept I've ever heard of.
The only good thing about so-called "smart" watches is that they don't have cameras like Glassholes wear that you need to worry about in public.
I foresee a resounding "thud" from the sales volume on these devices.
But then again, I use a desktop computer and a laptop, and have absolutely no touch devices, portable or otherwise. I wouldn't mind one of the newer Samsung android tablets with high resolution video and a stylus, but it's so far down my list of "would like to purchase" that I expect Android itself to be obsolete by the time there would be money available for one.:P
One of the big issues with flashing lights is that they have to avoid frequencies which set off epileptic seizures. The last thing you want is for the driver of that hunk of metal behind you to have a seizure behind the wheel, stomping on the gas and jerking to the right as they collapse in a frothing fit...
Sure. He's blown his eardrums with 10 years of over-amplified stage work. He probably can't hear worth shit anymore and is constantly going "Hunh?" to his wife.
I can type a copy of whatever I want to paste far more quickly than I can shift my hand to do it with the mouse, or I can use these little features offered by control keys like ^V and ^C. The mouse is a crutch.
You do realize that if you're sending email about a commercial product it's a commercial email, right?
It doesn't have to be advertising -- it just has to be commercial in nature, as in about a product that you charge for, not commercial as in advertising.
That may be technically the case, but IBM, Oracle, and Sybase/SAP have all asked for permission to keep sending technical newsletters. No one wants to take a chance that some bozo is going to interpret a technical notice as being spam and laying charges accordingly.
What were simple mailing lists now require an authorization database to comply. In many cases companies are just going to shut down the lists rather than go to the expense/hassle of authorization databases or risking non-compliance claims.
On the bright side, it's nice to see US companies abiding by foreign laws for a change. For far too long they've gone with the attitude "we're on US soil, so we only have to follow US law", but now they're finally waking up to the fact that they have to follow the laws of every jurisdiction they do business in, or stop doing business there.
The whole approach reminds me of a "graphical programming" tool for web interfaces that I used a few years back. While I was intrigued to try something new, I soon realized it was the slowest and clumsiest means of programming I had ever used, and just as prone to errors (though not syntax errors -- but those are but a small fraction of the mistakes programmers make, especially with any decent syntax highlighting editor.)
The whole point of a shell is to not need the mouse. Keyboarding is inherently faster than mousing -- you're using 8 fingers, not one pointer -- especially if you're a touch typist.
Being able to put your commands in a script for re-execution is an added bonus.
It's not about who has it harder. It's about the fact that it's supposed to be illegal to make hiring decisions based on race or sex and a host of other criteria, yet companies are encouraged to do precisely that -- so long as they discriminate against whites and men. If you can't recognize that as being an absurd situation, there's no hope for you ever being anything but a bigot.
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I suggest an autopsy to determine the truth. :P
An Israeli defense company, eh?
Well, no one is quite the expert at mass murder that the Israelis are, as they're proving in Gaza right now by butchering 4 civilians for every enemy "soldier" that they kill.
Can you imagine the uproar if 80% of those killed in Afghanistan by US forces were civilians?
No, you've hit the nail on the head about the problem with "agile" development. Agile is a team of programmers hacking at a code base without rhyme, reason, or structure. It presumes there are (usually non-existent) regression tests to catch any breakage, and makes no allowance for the fact that without some overshadowing "big picture", people who are new to the team will spend months just trying to figure out what the hell the project does and where to find the pieces of code that need to be tweaked when enhancements are requested.
As far as I'm concerned, agile is the lazy coder's answer to "I hate writing documentation."
I believe he's bemoaning the complexity of frameworks and toolkits rather than the tools used to work with those frameworks and toolkits. Technically he's correct -- things are a lot more complex than they used to be for getting the most basic of tasks done.
But you know what? Business isn't interested in basic tasks any more. They want it secure. They want it scalable. They want a web front end, and a desktop client, and apps for Android and iOS. The days of the old "read billing file, produce accounting records" code have not gone away; those projects were just done 30-40 years ago and don't need to be rewritten, just tweaked from time to time to allow for changes in regulations such as tax law or liability.
Even the last company I worked for wasn't content with a mere rewrite and update of their core business with the new software -- they had a whole new plan of integrating another 5 or 10 vertical functionality features into the system (it was just an autodialer -- they wanted integrated CRM, push button customer calling, call answering, call forwarding, a full phone system with voice mail support and enhancements to the ever popular auto-answering system of branching menus and responses, and the ability to deploy the whole thing as a multi-client web service instead of deploying custom configured hardware to the client sites.)
The frameworks and toolkits have correspondingly become more complex in order to support those needs. Look at the transaction processing systems of old -- you'd buy a number of seperate products including a message queueing system, a report formatting tool, a database engine, and a transaction processor, each of which had their own APIs and documentation. Each tool was relatively simple, but getting them all coordinated and working together was hard as hell. Now you take JEE, buy just about any message processor and database you like, and it all largely works with the same API regardless of which vendor's tools you chose. So while the JEE framework is incredibly complex compared to a transaction processor of old, what it does in total is also saving you insane gobs of time integrating and debugging disparate products. So technically JEE is far simpler than things used to be, despite the ramp-up learning curve.
The same is true of every framework or toolkit I've used for over 10 years -- they tie together multiple vendors products consistently so that only small tweaks are needed to adapt to the vendor's products rather than whole-application re-writes if you decide to swap something out.
Hell, take a look at what I did with Java, six different vendor databases, and JDBC alone for http://msscodefactory.sourceforge.net. The differences between each of those database integration layers are not subtle, but nor are they particularly arcane. All of the products have virtually the same feature set; there are just differences in how you use JDBC and stored procedures for each database. Compared to "the old days", it was a cake walk to do that integration and customization over the past 3-4 years. And remember I worked on that code by myself -- it wasn't a whole team of programmers dealing with the complexity. If one guy can produce that using standardized toolkits in 3-4 years, how can you say things are more complex than they were when it used to take a team of 100-150 programmers 2 years to produce something similar for one database?
Most companies are happy to turn a 10% profit after expenses, employees, and so forth. 20% is a fantasy for them.
Yet the greedy Wall Street pricks aren't happy with a 20% profit.
And have you listened to what those types of gamers say to everyone they play against? We're talking about mouthy juvenile delinquents of varying ages who've never evolved beyond that of the 12 year old. They're assholes to everyone and they threaten everyone with disembowlment, murder, and other such crap. The only "special" insult they make to women is rape, because they know that will piss them off. And that's all that sort cares about: pissing the opponent off.
Maybe the game industry is worse than others -- I don't know; I've never worked in that sector. But I have never seen women in banking, telecommunications, government, financial services, or the aeronautics industries be subjected to any more or any less jibing and insulting than "the guys" on the team were. Maybe there is just something about gaming that attracts demented juvenile delinquents, but everyone at work received about the same level of respect from their co-workers everwhere I worked over a 30 year period in the tech industry.
Then again, I've been out of the industry for almost five years now. Maybe society has taken this mad rush to the bottom in the intervening five years. If so, that's sad, because tech used to be one of the few industries where women and men were judged more on their skillz than anything else.
I was in the same situation once. Laid off by Northern Telecom in the late '80s, I started work as a contractor at their head office three weeks later for double what I'd been paid as an employee. :)
That's kind of the whole point. This is another "but on the internet/with a computer" idea that's tried and failed many times throughout history.
Even addiction is not a problem. Back in the day when opium was legal, many people were addicted to it. But they had ready access to a cheap supply of their drug of choice, so they were able to function in society, hold down a job, etc.
Caffeine is another good example. Lots of people are addicted to caffeine, but function in society.
Even tobacco (evil though it is) has functional addicts.
The point is that it's not addiction itself that is a problem, but the stigmatization of addicts by society and the crimes they're forced to commit to feed black market pricing. Put an opiate addict on a methadone program, and they stop breaking into houses to feed their habit.
Addiction is not a *good* thing, but it should be a personal choice and health issue, not an excuse for ostracizing someone from society.
Any company which lays off 10% of their workforce should be banned from the H1B program for at least 5 years.
This sounds like paper-tracked barter, with a delayed payment on half of the deal. Which is kind of the key problem that money was intended to solve -- money can be traded for *anything*, not just what the issuer has that is of value. This ends up being a throwback to the days of "store scrip", only even more limited.
An interesting experiment, but ultimately futile and pointless.
That taxation is my biggest issue. My bank does not have free, unlimited ATM transactions on my plan. I withdraw my cash, spend it where I will, and don't pay their damned ATM fees.
Why the hell should I pay them to spend my money?
I have no money to spare for seeing movies. Period.
So when I download a torrent and watch it (and there's a disgustingly small number that I watch more than 15-20 minutes of), there is absolutely NO loss to the studio. Because if I *had* to pay for it, I just wouldn't see it at all.
I *hate* theatres on top of being broke -- they're full of ignorant perfume and aftershave wearing buttheads playing with their cell phones and talking about what they're going to do after the movie. I don't own a TV, so I'd have to play a DVD on my Linux box. If I'm still going to see it on a small computer screen, why *wouldn't* I settle for a low-res torrent instead of a DVD?
The studios like to portray every case of piracy as "lost revenue." It's not. I firmly believe that in most cases where people download a torrent, either they couldn't *afford* to go to the theatre, or they're previewing the flick to decide if it's worth spending money at the theatre. And if it's not worth the money, they'd have been demanding refunds, so there *still* isn't a loss of revenue.
Seriously -- it costs my buddy over $100 to take the family out for a movie. You think he's going to *gamble* that the movie is worth watching with all the crap that Hollywood pukes onto the big screen nowadays?
I agree. It sounds like the most useless concept I've ever heard of.
The only good thing about so-called "smart" watches is that they don't have cameras like Glassholes wear that you need to worry about in public.
I foresee a resounding "thud" from the sales volume on these devices.
But then again, I use a desktop computer and a laptop, and have absolutely no touch devices, portable or otherwise. I wouldn't mind one of the newer Samsung android tablets with high resolution video and a stylus, but it's so far down my list of "would like to purchase" that I expect Android itself to be obsolete by the time there would be money available for one. :P
The whole reason we used to get paid extra to provide support was to provide support. That meant weird hours, weekends, and late nights.
If you don't like it, get another job.
One of the big issues with flashing lights is that they have to avoid frequencies which set off epileptic seizures. The last thing you want is for the driver of that hunk of metal behind you to have a seizure behind the wheel, stomping on the gas and jerking to the right as they collapse in a frothing fit...
There's a big difference. Dish pays for broadcast rights. Use of the internet is not a question, legally. It's just a transmission medium.
So as long as Dish is paying their fees, they should be free and clear.
Sure. He's blown his eardrums with 10 years of over-amplified stage work. He probably can't hear worth shit anymore and is constantly going "Hunh?" to his wife.
I can type a copy of whatever I want to paste far more quickly than I can shift my hand to do it with the mouse, or I can use these little features offered by control keys like ^V and ^C. The mouse is a crutch.
It's a good thing for everyone but the US, so fuck the US.
You do realize that if you're sending email about a commercial product it's a commercial email, right?
It doesn't have to be advertising -- it just has to be commercial in nature, as in about a product that you charge for, not commercial as in advertising.
That may be technically the case, but IBM, Oracle, and Sybase/SAP have all asked for permission to keep sending technical newsletters. No one wants to take a chance that some bozo is going to interpret a technical notice as being spam and laying charges accordingly.
What were simple mailing lists now require an authorization database to comply. In many cases companies are just going to shut down the lists rather than go to the expense/hassle of authorization databases or risking non-compliance claims.
On the bright side, it's nice to see US companies abiding by foreign laws for a change. For far too long they've gone with the attitude "we're on US soil, so we only have to follow US law", but now they're finally waking up to the fact that they have to follow the laws of every jurisdiction they do business in, or stop doing business there.
The whole approach reminds me of a "graphical programming" tool for web interfaces that I used a few years back. While I was intrigued to try something new, I soon realized it was the slowest and clumsiest means of programming I had ever used, and just as prone to errors (though not syntax errors -- but those are but a small fraction of the mistakes programmers make, especially with any decent syntax highlighting editor.)
The whole point of a shell is to not need the mouse. Keyboarding is inherently faster than mousing -- you're using 8 fingers, not one pointer -- especially if you're a touch typist.
Being able to put your commands in a script for re-execution is an added bonus.
It's not about who has it harder. It's about the fact that it's supposed to be illegal to make hiring decisions based on race or sex and a host of other criteria, yet companies are encouraged to do precisely that -- so long as they discriminate against whites and men. If you can't recognize that as being an absurd situation, there's no hope for you ever being anything but a bigot.