As a liberal, you obviously believe that all rights are assigned to individuals by either collectives or institutions. I just hope that sort of worldview does not become any more dominant than it already is, because in it lies the seeds of damnation (IMO).
I only have true experience of one thing - myself. I can claim to experience your life, but I can't ever really do so. It is always somewhat ineffable and inaccessible. Therefore, the only thing I think I can really speak to is my individual situation. I would appreciate it if all the well-intentioned liberals out there (yoruself included) would quit trying to speak to my situation and my existence, about which you have only a passing conception. It is arrogant and intrusive, at best.
Private property as something enshrined by some institution or some collective would in fact be something granted. Private property, the defacto acknowledgement of posession, a physically demonstrable fact and a personal experiential one, is a little bit different. And for you to write it off as something assigned to me by the generous benevolence of society is also rather presumptous of you, IMO.
Under the doctrine of "I'll mind my own business, you mind yours" or "live and let live" or "mind your own business", I'd ask you and others of your ilk to not try to speak to the situations of others by telling them what their rights should or should not be and by not trying to suggest or ascribe some power on behalf of either a collective or an institution to assign those rights. Quite literally, no one gave you the "right" to make any such determination, individually or collectively or institutionally.
Individuals know their own experiences. They can choose to join societies or not. They may benefit from being in those societies, but one can equally argue that the society benefits from their presence. Trying to figure out which benefits which the most is a bit like arguing about the old question 'How much is a duck?'. For the society or other individuals to blindly presume a right to dictate what is and is not the rights of the individual can never be a doctrine based in any sort of moral authority, at best it can be driven by some sort of resort to physical power. Yes, you can enforce some restrictions or framework upon me by virtue of physical power, but I hardly concede to you a moral or ethical right to establish this power.
Private property, as conceived of as an individual right, is sipmly an ackowledgement that an individual can have posession of a thing. Institutions and collectives have no conciousness. They cannot 'have' a thing in the same sense. Private property, therefore, as a notion of law and culture, is simply an acknowledgement of how things would be in the abscence of law and some nebulous patronizing collective.
As to primitive societies, your education must be a bit particular. There are plenty of primitive societies that have a concept of individual ownership, if not codified, at least in practice. And *certainly* there are numerous examples of those societies believing in both territorial and personal rights on a scale no larger than extended family or small tribe.
These smaller, more informal collectives banded together for pragmatic and biological reasons. And of a consequence, they chose to grant their society some of their posessions in order that they could share in the posessions of others in reciprocity. But the choice was theirs as individuals, not their societies, even if they would not conciously recognize it thus or explain it thus.
Tribalism is alive and doing well - kill your neighbour for threatening your possessions is certainly a way of the primitive world. And in the slightly more developed world, commerce appears pretty early on, and there are well developed ideas of personal property long before there are well developed ideas of some sort of benevolent big brother collective doling out rights!
Further, even if I was to acknowledge the benefits and trade offs of living in society and decide
Your patent is supposed to not duplicate prior art and it is supposed to be non-obvious.
Both of these criteria are criteria honoured in the work to register a patent in good faith (a search for prior art) and after the fact, by the fact your patent can be challenged.
A lot of the most obvious patents will not be upheld if challenged and either meaningful prior art exists or if the patent actually *is* obvious. In the Litigious States of America, this mechanism for defeating patents should not be surprising.
It is, however, expensive to register patents. It is also expensive to challenge them. This gives the leverage to the financially wealthy. It gives even more leverage to larger companies that don't do anything but patent registration and litigation - they don't spend any money inovating, just patenting other people's ideas and chasing down infringers. Usually this results in out of court settlements rather than challenges, since it could cost you $100K to challenge a patent, and $20K to license it from the current patent holder.
We've created a system that has within it a built in niche for a group of butt-sucking parasites who do no actual work. I'm not talking about lawyers, but of patent attack/defense companies that don't *make* anything. They are just storehouses for intellectual property, not with the idea of protecting of the inventors or even their investors, but simply for profit. They act as leghold traps on innovation, rather than incentives.
This is the surest sign that the system is broken. The patent system itself now has so many companies co-opted into the machine that they can't imagine life without it. And their fear keeps the system going strong and growing. And of course, as it grows, it stifles invention and innovation, instead of protecting it as it probably did way back when the patents were first envisioned.
At one time, it did bring together investors and inventors because it helped ensure RoI for the investors, because anyone who knocked off their process or product could be litigated against and punished. Thus it fostered innovation.
That day is long past. What we have left is the rotting carcass of a system that protected innovation, and the only creatures that enjoy hanging around rotting carcasses are maggots, flies, and carrion eaters. And that's what the Patent system has develoved to.
Get rid of it, because it no longer serves the purpose it was meant for.
Not everyone may know about the autobiography and it'd be 'interesting' or 'informative' in this thread, I think. This is meta-moderation of a sort - encouraging mods!;)
Beer irself is 'weak stuff'. Single Malt - the true tipple. A nice 18 year old MacAllan, a Craganmore, or even Cardhu. Something halfway respectable...
Beer... what wee bairns drink....;)
(Of course, there are some lovely beers and stouts in Scotland, in all fairness)
Part of "Free Speech" is standing up for people's right to say things (or write things) you find emminently disagreeable. Another part might be separating written fantasy from any sort of actual act, the latter or which might well be criminal. So far, the thought police haven't made the thinking of unpalatable things illegal, but they are working on that.
If you won't stand up to defend the most disagreeable sorts of free speech, then over time the right will be eroded. Standards of decency vary over time. Legal standards tend to follow this. They also differ culture by culture.
We'd defend the right of women (most of us) not to wear a veil, but I'm sure it is an offense against morality to some. Freedom means that you have to put up with someone else doing, saying or writing crappy things you don't like (as long as they don't hurt anyone directly). And your part is to defend their right to be an ass-face. Because one day, what you think may be what the majority thinks is ass-faced (or ass-hatish, if you have a Farktopian viewpoint).
I don't think most proponents of Free Speech or other Freedoms really buy into that. They think it is some sort of a thing where they can compromise round the edges. But that sets precedents and law and legislation tend to notice those precedents and they often come back to haunt you.
So, it is speak up for the pornographers (at least as far as their right to write and print what they want... if they turn out to be exploiting underage kids which is against the law and is more importantly compromising those kids' rights, then throw their asses in jail FOR THAT, not for what they write or print). And speak up for the Nazis. They're f&@kin morons, IMO, but I want them to have their say. In my view, they'll open their mouths and their stupidity will become evident. Stifling them isn't the answer.
Of course, I've been known to have pronounced opinions on personal Freedoms being eroded by the state.
Ignoring the five million things we could take issue with, let's just focus on the one blatantly (to me at any rate) incorrect statement made:
Yes, I can see how the war in Iraq has directly benefited us. NOT! Do you realize the costs. So far we have not realized any strategic gain either.
This is plainly rubbish. You have secured better access to oil, better intelligence ties in the region where some principal threats may arise, dependent nations who require you to prop them up to exist hence owe you favours, and last but certainly not least, you've got a nice honey-pot operation running. It is drawing out every Islamist (or other) whackjob that wants to kill a Yankee for Allah and getting them to take the short local trip to the Afterlife rather than plotting too extensively to come over to downtown Chicago to do it. And FWIW, it is working marvelously. It may be generating a few more than there were before, but it is killing plenty of them. And you are taking military casualties abroad rather than civilian casualties at home.
Please, honestly, take nothing of what I've just said as an indication of my views of the war, its justifications, its success (or not), and/or my feelings about the military. Especially the US military, for whom I have great respect. But it is a blatant falsehood, IMO, to claim the US has recieved no strategic advantage out of being there. It has recieved advantages in many subtle but important ways.
If there were no advantages, I highly doubt you'd be there, all rhetoric aside. There are plenty of other non-oil-bearing places you could have thrown in a humanitarian and pro-democratic hand. But they had zero resources and no strategic benefits. And so, Iraq. Yes, Americans are enamoured of the idea of converting the world to their way of seeing things (capitalism, democracy, and perhaps some Christianity). But at the same time, the decision makers use realpolitik and pragmatic considerations to arrive at their decisions, and a lack of strategic value would deter intervention, despite the great desire of the populace to spread democracy. The truth is, that desire has to be there, but so does the strategic interest, or very little will happen. Politics is politics and the game of nations has not changed in 5000 years.
And now that you are there, now that you've made your critics angry (and I'm only sometimes one), I just pray that the American will is sufficient (and that American politics allows you) to stay the course for long enough to get Iraq and Afghanistan fully independent. Only if you make this work in the long run, if Iraq and Afghanistan end up stable non-Islamist states or non-failed states, will America be able to truly say this operation worked out okay despite the challenges. If either ends up as a Islamist state or a failed state, then the critics will have been proven right. So please, keep at it until the job is done, don't bail out when the heat is on, as has sometimes happened historically.
Your rant is accurate. But which came first, the car that can last 20 years, or the crappy car that fell apart? Now, don't go getting all Model T on me, because that was a pretty sizable good thing, but that wasn't the first car either. Lots of abortive efforts that would have been quite costly preceeded it.
And even today, look at the number of recalls cars have. Ford just recalled a whack of F150s because a weak partition between brake fluid and brake electronics cause engine fires. That kind of stuff still goes on. And yet you pay $30-40K for a fully loaded truck!
And since they started dumping huge amounts of salt on the roads (maybe not where you live...), and since the warranties mostly run to about 7 years at the max (seen some starting to stretch to 10), getting more than that out of your car seems unlikely. And look at how every car manufacturer is trying to get people in to test drive 'the latest and greatest' and they'll gladly finance you beyond your means to buy a car you don't need, can't afford, and that won't be worth a lot five years down the line.
I guess my point is that cars are the same as computers, driven by the same predatory sales schemes. Why do you think we have cars marketed with mountain bikes, flower vases, doggie-friendly setups, etc.? It's trying to pimp a new product to you. And if they could make a car that lasted 20+ years in 1925, why can't they do it now? Why don't they? Because that isn't how Big Car Companies make $$$.
I've got 9.5 years and 260K km on my Mustang GT. It's starting to show some signs of age, but overall (with one notable warrantied catastrophic exception) it has been a reasonably cost effective and reliable car. But the price is now around $33-39K (before taxes/charges/etc) Canadian, when I bought mine for $24K with all taxes and charges in last time. And everyone thinks it is incredible that I've squeezed 10 years out of it by carefully husbanding it and caring for it. But if I hadn't, it would have failed more seriously before now. And if it does that now, the math says buying a new car might be required.
Turning back to computers, I have an NT 4.0 box that has run rock solid like a trooper for the better part of a decade (8+ years, IIRC). It rarely if ever crashes, the apps do exactly what they used to, and the machine does word processing and spreadsheets lickety split. Sure, I'm not running the latest XP on that machine, but there is nothing wrong with either the hardware or software, in terms of reliability. I have a Win 98 box that has been pretty good too. And my XP Pro boxes has proven *very* stable platform for multiple software development projects - both are crammed with tools and IDEs and I can't even *remember* the last time I got a program crash or blue screened while working (one has a bit of a bluescreen issue at shutdown, but that's on account of me having made the mistake of okaying a windows ATI driver automatic update... if I go back to the old driver, I'm sure she'll be solid as before...).
Anyway: 1) Cars have lots of flaws too. Their projected lifespan is about 5-6 years. They can last 10-20, but that's not the norm. They have recalls, they have areas they come up short, and the car companies want you to buy new ones. And they cost $20-40K new. 2) Computers, if you get them setup right and that is easier now out of the box, can be very robust and reliable. Standard office apps can be very stable nowadays as can software development tools. I have computers, including a 486 running Win95, that have been clunking away on and off for more than 15 years. And the new ones are pretty much rock solid as long as I don't patch my graphics drivers (that's still a weak point...). Your computer is envisioned to last 2-4 years (according to the tax people). You can get 5-6 out of them pretty easily and 10+ if you really want to. Yes, they have companies trying to sell you stuff. They have patches (like car recalls).
Seems to me they are a lot the same as cars, except they cost about 1/5th to 1/10th as
You know, its a pity you didn't bother to log in. I'd love to mod a comment like that up. It's pithy and also pointed.
The engineering and science aspects are an emerging part of the Art of Computer Programming and Software Design. In computer software design, we're probably where medicine was in the 1600-1700 period. Things were really starting to happen, but we're not to a point of having formalized good structures and having separated the wheat from the chaff.
With all the methodologies, paradigms, and things like XP out there, we're still sorting out the good stuff, the stuff which will one day move us from the realm of the 'computer hacker' into the realm of people doing actual engineering or actual science.
I suppose a few academics at Universities are actually *doing* computer science, but most CS grads probably are not. Similarly, I guess some few folks in DoD work or NASA or such like are doing computer 'engineering', but the reality is most programmers in the corporate world certainly aren't. It isn't so much, in either case, *what* you do, as *how* you do it.
We've got a long way to go yet before most of us are 'engineering' in a formal sense or practicing 'computer science' in a similarly formal sense.
Add to the 'sign-off' aspect the usually required (at least here in Canada) training in law and ethics and you will find that few P.E.s will sign their names or affix their seals to things they don't have relatively high degrees of confidence in. When a P.E. screws up, they lose their license to practice and quite often their businesss, consultancy, or academic credentials at the same time. Thus, they try very hard not to screw up. This means they are act as a check on poor practices.
But getting to be a P.E. involves overcoming the standard challenges and it isn't for everyone. A lot of engineering in non-software fields seems based around working with known processes and known parameters to produce a product or some result.
The reason bridge building is a pretty sane discipline is that the characteristics of materials and the physics of bridges is pretty well explored. When a Civil Engineer builds a bridge (or designs one), he has good computer aided tools to do it, standard catalogs of parts and materials, and he knows all about tolerances, safety factors, and good processes. He couldn't sign-off on the project otherwise, without taking his head in his hands.
Contrast that with my work, where I have to build applications using an OS I know is inherently flawed (they all are, but some more notably), it must be designed to work on a wide variety of hardware platforms (many of which I don't have on hand), it must often work with other people's code from outside my organization which is bleeding edge and often of dubious standards, and it is built with tools I only mostly trust and on top of libraries from the OS provider and from third parties into which I have no visibility. There are strategies to mitigate risk, but I'd be very damn leery of signing my name or affixing my sigil in a P.E. context to even my best code - because I know the system it is part of has so many components I don't control and so many points of failure.
One risk mitigation strategy involves extensive testing (some say up to 90% of project cost). Anyone interested in paying $1500 for a copy of Office? I don't see many hands.
I'm all for seeing an improvement of professional standards and practices in the field, the injection of more engineering approaches into the field, etc. But the software field moves faster (IMO) than any other technical field. It also is one in which you have the least faith in the parts you build with. Until reform happens *across and throughout* the field, any efforts to go after companies or individual engineers is a waste of time.
Let's put it another way, more succinct: If I had to sign off in a legal liability sense for the code I've been writing for the last two years on the current contract, I'd imagine I'd have written about 10% of the code I have written and I'd have demanded a *lot more* from the people supplying me with 3rd party code to integrate. Since I know the business model wouldn't support that (the costs would kill the product as it stands), I have to think this approach is only viable once we decide we don't want 'the next new thing' in software and that we care about what we get enough to pay for it.
Someone compared the effort to Ford or GM making cars. If you want to spend $15-50K dollars for a computer, I'm sure we can offer you a lot higher level reliability from the software. heck, at those kinds of costs, you might get the same sorts of warranties you get from Ford and GM, though they warrant around as much as they can get away with. But if you want to pay under $1000 for the hardware and under $1000 for the principal software, then you might as well expect something that works about 1/10th as well. And it seems to me you've got that.
So, who here is lining up to buy the first $15K personal computer?
I see what you are saying. I'll just counter with two things:
If someone fails to appreciate the ramifications of something in a license, you can argue that they just failed to do due diligence or are clueless. Or, it could be that the license is not clear enough. Not judging this case, but as a generality, 'clear' is not a binary flag. Things are not 'clear' and 'unclear' but rather 'more clear' and 'less clear'.
As to the loophole, this is again a judgement issue. I see you line of thinking and can acknowledge it. Yet I can see a line of thinking that says "if this tool does not do what I need, then it is broken for our purposes". I think that's what is being said about the loophole - that, for the kind of business model these guys want to follow, the GPL has a loophole that renders it broken for their purposes. Which is correct, from their perspective.
Much of life is about perspective. I think yours is valid for you and theirs is valid for them. There is no absolute right or wrong in these matters, just a relative one.
So, I agree with you and with them. I was just pointing out that the argument that says your strength should be in your differentiation and you should be trying to make money off your differentiated service offering (your advantages over your competitor) is pretty badly hurt when the competitor steals the code lock stock and barrel and if your supposed 'support advantage from detail knowledge' doesn't count for a lot. At that point, you've commited time and money to the problem and someone else is reaping the rewards. That was more the part I took issue with than your comments on the GPL's loopholiness (nice made up word, that) or lack thereof.
This assertion about a so-called loophole in the GPL that has allowed his competitors to take advantage of his company amounts to mere sco-like FUD, IMHO. Might other software concerns see these stories with this rhetoric and come away with the notion that the GPL is in some way broken, and that they'd better avoid it?
The problem with your answer is this: You're saying "If you want to use GPL, you'd better understand all the ramifications and deal with all of them". That's fine, but if you want people to use the GPL in the real world for real things, then the license has to be easy to suit to their business models, not the other way around. Yes, you can say they didn't understand the implications of the GPL completely. Yet there is now one less company using it. Maybe the GPL is fine. Or maybe its success is a product of how many people use it, and if people percieve it isn't helpful to what they wish to do, that's what matters.
Re:The choice was probably about cost...
on
Nessus Closes Source
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Um, if you write good enough code, support is minimal.
Let us assume this is the case, then you've only got the quality of your code and your extra features over the competition. Oh wait, they're USING YOUR CODE!
Hmmm, suddenly, there is pretty near zero differentiation. Oh wait, you are trying to pay for having invested the time and money to write it. They are not. So there is a differentiation. In their favour!
No, I can see why they'd want to go back closed source. Open source is no panacea. It has some excellent products, but integration with for-profit corporate ops can lead to a lot of unfortunate results.
Okay, normally I don't get my dander up with slashdot posters, even trolls (not saying this is one example).
But here, I have to say it: I like cubicles! I've worked in four companies over the past ten years - one of 200-1800 people (got bigger with the buy out)... cubicles for 4 years, then a shared office with another developer, and a brief stint in the Faraday cage, one of 50 people for about 3 years... cubicles all the way, and one of 14 people.... only two at our sight, with a shared basement which was like semi-private office.
I LIKE CUBES! Cubes do require an ability to concentrate, to lock on your work solidly enough that the world around is not a disruption. That level of concentration is an asset to develop for many reasons. Cubes also have better airflow than a lot of offices. Private offices often are either too hot, too cold (vagarities of building air), too stuffy, or just become a place for people to tune out and surf the web.
Cubes don't allow you the total luxury to pooch your day away. They're a subtle 'keep you honest' environment. They also give you some social contact with your co-workers. You hear about lunch plans, you hear about interesting design discussions, you don't get left out of key impromptu design meetings, and you get some nice shared whiteboard space to noodle things around with other developers in your quad. It's like the bee hive!
Sometimes it can be distracting, depedning on office layout. A well laid out office doesn't suffer that issue. It can be noisy, but again, there are things you can do design wise to make for reasonably quiet cubes. Heck, if I could get rid of the HF noise from the four computers, three hubs, and 7-10 phones + TLS in my cube, that'd be far better than moving out of a cube!
A cube offers easy access to others, to be used judiciously. A cube offers an environment that has some social aspects. It also offers a situational awareness you lack in an office. It also removes some of the isolation sense people develop in an office.
It's shortcoming can be overcome by focus, by developing concentration, by some good headphones, and by good office planning.
I've worked in shared offices, which weren't much unlike cubes, except for the layout. I've worked in cubes. Both are about the same, AFAICS. Compared to a solitary office, unless it has a lovely rural or waterfront view, a walk out patio, and a built in bar, I'll take my Cuborg 9000 to a solitary office.
Now, for the record: Our little cube world has a pool table, a big MAME machine, a foozball table, an entire movie theater (formerly commercial!), a working bar with 4 taps, all the free pop and juice you want, an office sound system (not used during office hours normally) and an office staff that are very oriented towards pooling of knowledge, social networking, and on bringing up people with weaker skills to a higher standard. We also seem to have a lot of 'extra-curricular activities' like the recently past Oktoberfest pub crawl. YET, with all that said, I've been known to put in a few OT hours. I've probably logged more than 2500 OT hours in my career, at a guess. So I have spent more time in cubes than most... and I like them just fine.
Maybe in your neck of the woods. In Canada, the last time I was involved in public safety CDPD-networked software deployment and development, we had segregated channels. So this issue never came up. We segregate voice and data channels up here and that seems to work pretty well. Maybe it has some technical drawbacks in terms of utilization rates, but it kinda removes some potential for abuse.
My comments on both of those would have been identical.
What the hell was that with the crane, the device, and the barrel roll? Wouldn't a manhole cover have been suitable and a *hell* of a lot more believable?
Yes, this movie thought it should be bigger, louder, more outrageous and stunty than the last one. The last one was okay because it wasn't so bogus as to smash to flinders all believability. Yes, it was fake, but sort of 'yeah, I can get with that' kinda fake. This one just hit the 'faker than fake, so fake I can't choke it down' fakeness level. AAAARGH!
The concept wasn't bad, film one wasn't bad. Do yourself a favour and send the producers and director (wankers!) a message by NOT seeing this. It won't be in theaters long and isn't worth viewing on video.
The real thing to keep in mind is that it is business. As a computer geek, I got axed from a company I dearly loved when the tech bubble went boom. The three founders had a helluva time that day, with the speech saying they had to let go about 33% of the work force. I knew I was done before I got the call - just finished a successful project, not sure what would be coming next, not a newbie (low salary) or a subject matter expert (high guru of some key business area). Just a mid level developer - fairly costly, can be replaced (ish, somewhat) by a cheaper developer with a bit of 'masterly oversight' from one of the SMEs. So, a bunch of us in the mid-rank took it on the chin.
But you know what? It was unexpected. But I'd set aside money when times were good. Contingency planning. Keep at least 3 months, and preferably 6 months, salary in an account you don't touch. That way you've got a cushion and that equates to freedom. It also equates to contingency safety and reduces panic when business downturns as it sometimes does.
The guys that started the company didn't want to let anyone go - they'd carried some of us for a few weeks and that cost them. They had a brutal time, since most of us were friends and the company had a pretty tight relationship with employees. If I told you how tight, most of you might be a bit green with envy.
But business (ie work not being landed and previously landed work being dried up due to the tech crash gutting some large US telecom firms) of consulting just went bust. You can't pay people with no money coming in. So you have to cut. It hurts. But you have to.
But for me, I took it with aplomb. Some folks left crying - no cushion, overbought houses or SUVs, families, lost of worry about a new job. I had little worry (I'm competent and a hard worker and had the aforementioned cushion). So I tried to reassure my disturbed boss. I think he appreciated that. I shook his hand and walked out head up. Sad for people, but knowing it wasn't about who I was - it was about business.
So, what happened? I've been in and out four or five times now (to the tune of about 24-26 months work) since then on contracts. I'm a contractor now. They give me fairly regular work. Their use of contractors minimizes the chance that they'll be forced to hack off so many people in a market dip. They're smarter now. But, at the same time, they're a great employer still. And the fact I was competent, hard working, a team player while I was there, and took the layoff with the right perception contributed to let them think I'd be a good guy for future work - I wasn't bitter and I had enough insight to know how business works. That has parleyed into a lot of good work.
So I guess, I'd say prepare. Get aside money for a rainy day. Think twice about overbuying homes or big SUVs or expensive sportscars. Save a goodly big cushion. Keep skills current even if you do it at your expense and on your time. And if crap happens, don't burn bridges. Every bridge you don't burn is one more opportunity for a future relationship. Sometimes business is just business - for too long many of us have thought that there's some sort of life path through companies. That's not the business cycle in many cases. But instead of griping about it (we didn't gripe when tech was sizzling and we were getting yearly double digit raises and signing bonuses and stock options), adapt. Plan ahead. And expect to spend some time out of work. Set aside the cash, realize this is part of business. And don't take it personally.
In my experience, this has paid off in peace of mind and further work.
The guy who made the offhand comment about this being the first slashdot discussion he wanted to read had it right. Lots of good meatn here.
A few rules taught to me by another consultant:
No free work. Work hard while you are there, don't begrudge sometimes coming in for long hours, but get paid. You don't have to bill every last minute, but don't do eight hours unpaid work a week. That doesn't show up on radar and won't help them predict the next job any more accurately. Stay focused, deliver, hit deadlines, warn well in advance if you can't and provide good estimates of what you can manage and for the stuff that won't make it, when it will be ready. Give bad news early and be up front about it. Honesty. Honest work and an honest invoice.
And when you do an extra thing outside your normal taskings (don't let it eat much time, because you're paid for X, do X or get permission to do Y), get credit for it. Make sure your successes and extra efforts are visible. Don't be afraid to bring quiet attention (I don't mean be a self-aggrandizing ass) to your work. Some seemingly offhanded status updates ("I just finished X, and since it didn't take long, I also fixed Y which was going to cause us big problems in the next release...") can be one method for letting your management know what you've managed. Always keep in mind your audience - the project money/time guy doesn't necessarily need technical details as to why something will take more time, beyond a general comment. OTOH, your technical leads and architects will want to know if a team isn't going to hit its marks. Figure out what it is your boss needs from you (often times, he needs to give numbers/estimates/progress reports up the chain, so he needs dependable data and he needs to trust what you tell him - overestimation is the bane of this relationship) and deliver. Get him warnings in a timely manner if their are issues. Get him assessments of scope regularly for problems or work effort required. If he knows you can not only technically assess and issue and fix it, but also determine its scope and impact with a high degree of confidence (or identify clearly where you *can't* do this so he can be doubly cautious and allow more margin), then he's not going to hang his own nuts in the proverbial fire. So he doesn't get burnt, neither do you.
And most importantly, you work to live. I've broken this commandment many times and tried to live to work. If you're a born team-player and company man like I used to be, this is an easy stage. But at the end of the day, you are a resource. Maybe a good one, who likes where he works and likes the people, but when the economy crashes and there is no work, you're a resource without an income and therefore expendable. It isn't personal - its a business. Never burn bridges you might one day use, always go out if you can on a high note as one day that might be a good way to secure further work. Sometimes, the guy below you might one day be the guy above you (or vice versa).
And relax when you aren't at work. You need to let off the stress and let it wash out of you, or it'll wash you out.
That has paid off very well for me in my career. Of course you can't be a whining ass hat about telling the truth. Be tactful, stick to the facts, and focus on freakin' solutions to the actual problem(s) , not pointing fingers.
Damn! Wish I had mod points. This is one of my biggest gripes in general in work and especially in bureaucracies. People are more concerned in many cases when a problem arises with assigning fault and blame than with resolving the problem. Fault-finding environments get people to do a lot of CYA (and when doing that, not doing productive work) and it gets them to go full defensive not-my-fault whenever anyone asks them a question.
I find having to wade through that (by repeatedly beating it into their heads that I don't care whose fault it is and all I want to know is their recommendation for assessing and fixing the problem) means wasting time...eventually, you can get through to them, but it is much nicer to not have to work in that sort of an environment.
The reality is that the practice of not focusing on the problem gets you no closer to a solution. Most clients I know are more interested in solutions than post-mortem blame. They have a problem, they want it fixed. Fix it quickly, or at least assess it, get them the information, then fix it as quickly as feasible, and you win respect. Problems happen. Most people accept that. The full force push to inform clients and to handle the issue with vigour and efficacy wins you a lot of good cred. Dicking around wins you negative cred.
Problem focus! Assess, then fix. Then, if you need to do a post-mortem for the purpose of helping to avoid a similar issue in the future (NOT for chopping heads off, which is rarely useful) , then you can do that afterwards (and this is a good idea). I've convinced my company here to do project post-mortems and try to feedback lessons learned into process improvement.
Ultimately, you want to create a work environment where the people that work with you and for you and that you work for see you as a problem solver. They see you as focused on the problem, not trivia, and they know you won't headhunt but instead will correct and educate. Problems won't get repeated not because you've killed the messenger, but because you've helped everyone get better and avoid a repetition.
If you feel that you're getting work done in spite of process, you have either a terrible process or far too much of it.
There is too little process, too much process, and a just right amount. Too little has as many dangers as too much. And there is no one size fits all for process - the kind of process that can manage a four person project versus a forty person project is not the same. And the kind of management process for a project delivering on a fixed price contract for a customer and one putting out shrink wrapped product for sale is not going to be the same. You have to have flexibility and adapt process to environment.
You know you have too much process when your process and procedures prohibit this kind of adaption!:)
Although I agree with some of what you say, I have to disagree in places. (disclaimer: I taught TCP/IP and OSI at a technical college and have been a programmer of mobile and more classic network-enabled software for about 12 years now).
Prototyping is fantastic. But sometimes people just never bother to finish a job. TCP/IP seems to be one example. How many systems have ported original TCP/IP stacks? Why is it that I see the same unimplemented methods in stack after stack? Someone had enough wit to realize they'd be handy, but the guts of a TCP/IP stack are no trivial matter. And the protocol went out and became ubiquitous long before it was complete. And now, bits of it never will be.
You can damn OSI for being slow off the mark, and that's typical of standards bodies. But for all you say about TCP/IP, I've also written an OSI prototype over TCP/IP as a proof of concept and a goodly portion of the services can be easily delivered (the parts that map well together). And the OSI semantics are probably more intelligible than the TCP/IP ones. (That's an opinion, YMMV).
The OSI model, on the other hand, is a perfectly good *model* for understanding the role of a tiered networking stack. Why is this so useful? Sure people abuse it in the real world and many apps span several layers of the stack, etc. But the conceptual idea of encapsulation of function and also the conceptual ideas of what the layer's functions should be is a good start. This lets you look at real world divergences and then realize where they might be good, bad and what the tradeoffs might be. If you never had the reference model, you'd have a harder time quantifying these differences between real world implementations and understanding why they might be good or bad.
I ran across one instance of this not long ago where someone had taken a shortcut in a networking stack and not exposed some lower level service primitives. Sure, as long as all you wanted to do was the basic subset of tasks as imagined by their developers using their higher layer interfaces, you were okay. But if you wanted to do something a bit different, you didn't have access to some key lower level primitives. This is a case where the developers didn't think beyond their own application and they didn't obviously have much of a concept of a tiered set of functions. And lo and behold, a less useful result.
OSI isn't the holy grail, but it is an instructive learning tool. All standards are produced in some ivory tower and where the rubber meets the road things are different. Yet at the same time, those standards and those theoretical models have great value, especially as individual implementations come and go (TCP/IP has got a lot of traction and has had a long life with no end in sight, but the same cannot be said of many other technologies and even TCP/IP may one day see the a twilight of its days).
To blindly say the OSI model must be killed because TCP/IP got out there and did some things is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
This is the most brilliant thing you've ever seen here?
Resisting my immediate Pythonesque urge to say "No, it isn't." and start an argument (the long course), I thought about that.
I guess that might make Slashdot the antithesis of the US Air Force then. Their slogan is "aim high". Slashdots might be "aim low and keep sinking" (as far as particularly sharp witticisms go).
Obviously, this post just proves the point. My IronyDetector(TM) is in overload mode.
Anyway, I don't seal what the big flapper is about this cod-forsakenly-bad humour. This isn't the funniest bit since Noah's shark. And we keep hoping it dolphin ish up soon. Further posts could make folks crabby. You'd have to be a strange manta want more. It's an eel impulse, I tell you. Perch the thought!
(Okay, that was a poor copy of the original few, who used up most of the good seafood...)
Just an interesting tidbit. A friend of mine is a CMDR in the USCG. He is a helo pilot. He wasn't involved in the first tier of response because he was needed to fly security for the UN event happening in NYC. But as soon as that was over, he got tapped to help setup an air plan and get more units in place and conduct more rescues. That translated into him now being the deputy director of the Rescue Coordination Center - your one stop shop for medevac in the New Orleans region. They had to work very long hours (he was working 18+) getting the coordination environment setup and running rescues, but it seemlessly integrates Army, Navy, presumably Air Force, and USCG evac/rescue ops.
The CG has been given (after the fact) a lead role in getting this situation sorted and they seem to be pushing hard and everyone (all the members of the forces) seem to be doing their damndest to get the people safe, taken care of, and to start getting them sorted out for the future.
I take your point that some of the mobilization orders were slow. I heard a rumour the aircraft carrier was kept chilling its heels for several days waiting to be given orders to deploy. That doesn't seem so good. But that's a post-facto analysis. For now, I think the effort should focus on the rescue and long term rehabilitation of survivors. A placeholder can be made that says 'yes, we need to look at how this went down and possibly change some things and/or people', but now isn't the time. Now, the only reason to remove someone is if you've got someone better to put in his place (such as putting the CG into the breach to coordinate rescues and sending Brown back to DC). Time enough for identifying where things went wrong afterwards. Well afterwards.
And one more thing to keep in mind: States in the US have always battled for strong rights. There are many who fear the power of a strong federal government. A strong federal government may be capable of responding more effectively than a group of individual states to things of this magnitude. But things like the Posse Comitatus act limit how that response can occur. Yes, this looks bad right now if that's the case, yet at the same time that helps safegaurd the US democracy by keeping the federal military out of local matters. I'm not saying you can't work out an effective way for Feds + State to work together for big disasters like this, but the existing frameworks have reasons for being and any quickly cobbled together replacement or any changes may have other repercussions. So, yes, I think this whole area should be examined, and some will think this augurs for stronger centralized command and control and coordination (and perhaps purchasing for stuff like comms gear), others will argue this was the problem and state leaders should have more power and resources. So the debate should definitely be held, but all aspects must be considered and adequate time alloted before premature judgements are reached.
I'm not saying there aren't areas to improve, things that make you scratch your head (which may have reasons we don't know about or the reporting may be incorrect), etc. My point is we'll only know the true facts very much later on. Right now, we have rumour, supposition, GodsEyeView armchair quarterbacking, etc. That's what I'm taking issue with, I guess.
I'm sure there will be decisions and processes to go through, analyze, critize, and amend. Perhaps censure to be handed out in some cases for execrable judgment. But that will only come once time passes and fact finding and substantiation are done, or at least that's how it should work.
It was a more generalized comment, not particularly directed at a particular parent post. Sorry if it may have looked that way. And I have been accused of verbosity on occasion...;)
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As a liberal, you obviously believe that all rights are assigned to individuals by either collectives or institutions. I just hope that sort of worldview does not become any more dominant than it already is, because in it lies the seeds of damnation (IMO).
I only have true experience of one thing - myself. I can claim to experience your life, but I can't ever really do so. It is always somewhat ineffable and inaccessible. Therefore, the only thing I think I can really speak to is my individual situation. I would appreciate it if all the well-intentioned liberals out there (yoruself included) would quit trying to speak to my situation and my existence, about which you have only a passing conception. It is arrogant and intrusive, at best.
Private property as something enshrined by some institution or some collective would in fact be something granted. Private property, the defacto acknowledgement of posession, a physically demonstrable fact and a personal experiential one, is a little bit different. And for you to write it off as something assigned to me by the generous benevolence of society is also rather presumptous of you, IMO.
Under the doctrine of "I'll mind my own business, you mind yours" or "live and let live" or "mind your own business", I'd ask you and others of your ilk to not try to speak to the situations of others by telling them what their rights should or should not be and by not trying to suggest or ascribe some power on behalf of either a collective or an institution to assign those rights. Quite literally, no one gave you the "right" to make any such determination, individually or collectively or institutionally.
Individuals know their own experiences. They can choose to join societies or not. They may benefit from being in those societies, but one can equally argue that the society benefits from their presence. Trying to figure out which benefits which the most is a bit like arguing about the old question 'How much is a duck?'. For the society or other individuals to blindly presume a right to dictate what is and is not the rights of the individual can never be a doctrine based in any sort of moral authority, at best it can be driven by some sort of resort to physical power. Yes, you can enforce some restrictions or framework upon me by virtue of physical power, but I hardly concede to you a moral or ethical right to establish this power.
Private property, as conceived of as an individual right, is sipmly an ackowledgement that an individual can have posession of a thing. Institutions and collectives have no conciousness. They cannot 'have' a thing in the same sense. Private property, therefore, as a notion of law and culture, is simply an acknowledgement of how things would be in the abscence of law and some nebulous patronizing collective.
As to primitive societies, your education must be a bit particular. There are plenty of primitive societies that have a concept of individual ownership, if not codified, at least in practice. And *certainly* there are numerous examples of those societies believing in both territorial and personal rights on a scale no larger than extended family or small tribe.
These smaller, more informal collectives banded together for pragmatic and biological reasons. And of a consequence, they chose to grant their society some of their posessions in order that they could share in the posessions of others in reciprocity. But the choice was theirs as individuals, not their societies, even if they would not conciously recognize it thus or explain it thus.
Tribalism is alive and doing well - kill your neighbour for threatening your possessions is certainly a way of the primitive world. And in the slightly more developed world, commerce appears pretty early on, and there are well developed ideas of personal property long before there are well developed ideas of some sort of benevolent big brother collective doling out rights!
Further, even if I was to acknowledge the benefits and trade offs of living in society and decide
Your patent is supposed to not duplicate prior art and it is supposed to be non-obvious.
Both of these criteria are criteria honoured in the work to register a patent in good faith (a search for prior art) and after the fact, by the fact your patent can be challenged.
A lot of the most obvious patents will not be upheld if challenged and either meaningful prior art exists or if the patent actually *is* obvious. In the Litigious States of America, this mechanism for defeating patents should not be surprising.
It is, however, expensive to register patents. It is also expensive to challenge them. This gives the leverage to the financially wealthy. It gives even more leverage to larger companies that don't do anything but patent registration and litigation - they don't spend any money inovating, just patenting other people's ideas and chasing down infringers. Usually this results in out of court settlements rather than challenges, since it could cost you $100K to challenge a patent, and $20K to license it from the current patent holder.
We've created a system that has within it a built in niche for a group of butt-sucking parasites who do no actual work. I'm not talking about lawyers, but of patent attack/defense companies that don't *make* anything. They are just storehouses for intellectual property, not with the idea of protecting of the inventors or even their investors, but simply for profit. They act as leghold traps on innovation, rather than incentives.
This is the surest sign that the system is broken. The patent system itself now has so many companies co-opted into the machine that they can't imagine life without it. And their fear keeps the system going strong and growing. And of course, as it grows, it stifles invention and innovation, instead of protecting it as it probably did way back when the patents were first envisioned.
At one time, it did bring together investors and inventors because it helped ensure RoI for the investors, because anyone who knocked off their process or product could be litigated against and punished. Thus it fostered innovation.
That day is long past. What we have left is the rotting carcass of a system that protected innovation, and the only creatures that enjoy hanging around rotting carcasses are maggots, flies, and carrion eaters. And that's what the Patent system has develoved to.
Get rid of it, because it no longer serves the purpose it was meant for.
Not everyone may know about the autobiography and it'd be 'interesting' or 'informative' in this thread, I think. This is meta-moderation of a sort - encouraging mods! ;)
Beer irself is 'weak stuff'. Single Malt - the true tipple. A nice 18 year old MacAllan, a Craganmore, or even Cardhu. Something halfway respectable...
;)
Beer... what wee bairns drink....
(Of course, there are some lovely beers and stouts in Scotland, in all fairness)
Part of "Free Speech" is standing up for people's right to say things (or write things) you find emminently disagreeable. Another part might be separating written fantasy from any sort of actual act, the latter or which might well be criminal. So far, the thought police haven't made the thinking of unpalatable things illegal, but they are working on that.
If you won't stand up to defend the most disagreeable sorts of free speech, then over time the right will be eroded. Standards of decency vary over time. Legal standards tend to follow this. They also differ culture by culture.
We'd defend the right of women (most of us) not to wear a veil, but I'm sure it is an offense against morality to some. Freedom means that you have to put up with someone else doing, saying or writing crappy things you don't like (as long as they don't hurt anyone directly). And your part is to defend their right to be an ass-face. Because one day, what you think may be what the majority thinks is ass-faced (or ass-hatish, if you have a Farktopian viewpoint).
I don't think most proponents of Free Speech or other Freedoms really buy into that. They think it is some sort of a thing where they can compromise round the edges. But that sets precedents and law and legislation tend to notice those precedents and they often come back to haunt you.
So, it is speak up for the pornographers (at least as far as their right to write and print what they want... if they turn out to be exploiting underage kids which is against the law and is more importantly compromising those kids' rights, then throw their asses in jail FOR THAT, not for what they write or print). And speak up for the Nazis. They're f&@kin morons, IMO, but I want them to have their say. In my view, they'll open their mouths and their stupidity will become evident. Stifling them isn't the answer.
Of course, I've been known to have pronounced opinions on personal Freedoms being eroded by the state.
Ignoring the five million things we could take issue with, let's just focus on the one blatantly (to me at any rate) incorrect statement made:
This is plainly rubbish. You have secured better access to oil, better intelligence ties in the region where some principal threats may arise, dependent nations who require you to prop them up to exist hence owe you favours, and last but certainly not least, you've got a nice honey-pot operation running. It is drawing out every Islamist (or other) whackjob that wants to kill a Yankee for Allah and getting them to take the short local trip to the Afterlife rather than plotting too extensively to come over to downtown Chicago to do it. And FWIW, it is working marvelously. It may be generating a few more than there were before, but it is killing plenty of them. And you are taking military casualties abroad rather than civilian casualties at home.
Please, honestly, take nothing of what I've just said as an indication of my views of the war, its justifications, its success (or not), and/or my feelings about the military. Especially the US military, for whom I have great respect. But it is a blatant falsehood, IMO, to claim the US has recieved no strategic advantage out of being there. It has recieved advantages in many subtle but important ways.
If there were no advantages, I highly doubt you'd be there, all rhetoric aside. There are plenty of other non-oil-bearing places you could have thrown in a humanitarian and pro-democratic hand. But they had zero resources and no strategic benefits. And so, Iraq. Yes, Americans are enamoured of the idea of converting the world to their way of seeing things (capitalism, democracy, and perhaps some Christianity). But at the same time, the decision makers use realpolitik and pragmatic considerations to arrive at their decisions, and a lack of strategic value would deter intervention, despite the great desire of the populace to spread democracy. The truth is, that desire has to be there, but so does the strategic interest, or very little will happen. Politics is politics and the game of nations has not changed in 5000 years.
And now that you are there, now that you've made your critics angry (and I'm only sometimes one), I just pray that the American will is sufficient (and that American politics allows you) to stay the course for long enough to get Iraq and Afghanistan fully independent. Only if you make this work in the long run, if Iraq and Afghanistan end up stable non-Islamist states or non-failed states, will America be able to truly say this operation worked out okay despite the challenges. If either ends up as a Islamist state or a failed state, then the critics will have been proven right. So please, keep at it until the job is done, don't bail out when the heat is on, as has sometimes happened historically.
Your rant is accurate. But which came first, the car that can last 20 years, or the crappy car that fell apart? Now, don't go getting all Model T on me, because that was a pretty sizable good thing, but that wasn't the first car either. Lots of abortive efforts that would have been quite costly preceeded it.
And even today, look at the number of recalls cars have. Ford just recalled a whack of F150s because a weak partition between brake fluid and brake electronics cause engine fires. That kind of stuff still goes on. And yet you pay $30-40K for a fully loaded truck!
And since they started dumping huge amounts of salt on the roads (maybe not where you live...), and since the warranties mostly run to about 7 years at the max (seen some starting to stretch to 10), getting more than that out of your car seems unlikely. And look at how every car manufacturer is trying to get people in to test drive 'the latest and greatest' and they'll gladly finance you beyond your means to buy a car you don't need, can't afford, and that won't be worth a lot five years down the line.
I guess my point is that cars are the same as computers, driven by the same predatory sales schemes. Why do you think we have cars marketed with mountain bikes, flower vases, doggie-friendly setups, etc.? It's trying to pimp a new product to you. And if they could make a car that lasted 20+ years in 1925, why can't they do it now? Why don't they? Because that isn't how Big Car Companies make $$$.
I've got 9.5 years and 260K km on my Mustang GT. It's starting to show some signs of age, but overall (with one notable warrantied catastrophic exception) it has been a reasonably cost effective and reliable car. But the price is now around $33-39K (before taxes/charges/etc) Canadian, when I bought mine for $24K with all taxes and charges in last time. And everyone thinks it is incredible that I've squeezed 10 years out of it by carefully husbanding it and caring for it. But if I hadn't, it would have failed more seriously before now. And if it does that now, the math says buying a new car might be required.
Turning back to computers, I have an NT 4.0 box that has run rock solid like a trooper for the better part of a decade (8+ years, IIRC). It rarely if ever crashes, the apps do exactly what they used to, and the machine does word processing and spreadsheets lickety split. Sure, I'm not running the latest XP on that machine, but there is nothing wrong with either the hardware or software, in terms of reliability. I have a Win 98 box that has been pretty good too. And my XP Pro boxes has proven *very* stable platform for multiple software development projects - both are crammed with tools and IDEs and I can't even *remember* the last time I got a program crash or blue screened while working (one has a bit of a bluescreen issue at shutdown, but that's on account of me having made the mistake of okaying a windows ATI driver automatic update... if I go back to the old driver, I'm sure she'll be solid as before...).
Anyway:
1) Cars have lots of flaws too. Their projected lifespan is about 5-6 years. They can last 10-20, but that's not the norm. They have recalls, they have areas they come up short, and the car companies want you to buy new ones. And they cost $20-40K new.
2) Computers, if you get them setup right and that is easier now out of the box, can be very robust and reliable. Standard office apps can be very stable nowadays as can software development tools. I have computers, including a 486 running Win95, that have been clunking away on and off for more than 15 years. And the new ones are pretty much rock solid as long as I don't patch my graphics drivers (that's still a weak point...). Your computer is envisioned to last 2-4 years (according to the tax people). You can get 5-6 out of them pretty easily and 10+ if you really want to. Yes, they have companies trying to sell you stuff. They have patches (like car recalls).
Seems to me they are a lot the same as cars, except they cost about 1/5th to 1/10th as
You know, its a pity you didn't bother to log in. I'd love to mod a comment like that up. It's pithy and also pointed.
The engineering and science aspects are an emerging part of the Art of Computer Programming and Software Design. In computer software design, we're probably where medicine was in the 1600-1700 period. Things were really starting to happen, but we're not to a point of having formalized good structures and having separated the wheat from the chaff.
With all the methodologies, paradigms, and things like XP out there, we're still sorting out the good stuff, the stuff which will one day move us from the realm of the 'computer hacker' into the realm of people doing actual engineering or actual science.
I suppose a few academics at Universities are actually *doing* computer science, but most CS grads probably are not. Similarly, I guess some few folks in DoD work or NASA or such like are doing computer 'engineering', but the reality is most programmers in the corporate world certainly aren't. It isn't so much, in either case, *what* you do, as *how* you do it.
We've got a long way to go yet before most of us are 'engineering' in a formal sense or practicing 'computer science' in a similarly formal sense.
Add to the 'sign-off' aspect the usually required (at least here in Canada) training in law and ethics and you will find that few P.E.s will sign their names or affix their seals to things they don't have relatively high degrees of confidence in. When a P.E. screws up, they lose their license to practice and quite often their businesss, consultancy, or academic credentials at the same time. Thus, they try very hard not to screw up. This means they are act as a check on poor practices.
But getting to be a P.E. involves overcoming the standard challenges and it isn't for everyone. A lot of engineering in non-software fields seems based around working with known processes and known parameters to produce a product or some result.
The reason bridge building is a pretty sane discipline is that the characteristics of materials and the physics of bridges is pretty well explored. When a Civil Engineer builds a bridge (or designs one), he has good computer aided tools to do it, standard catalogs of parts and materials, and he knows all about tolerances, safety factors, and good processes. He couldn't sign-off on the project otherwise, without taking his head in his hands.
Contrast that with my work, where I have to build applications using an OS I know is inherently flawed (they all are, but some more notably), it must be designed to work on a wide variety of hardware platforms (many of which I don't have on hand), it must often work with other people's code from outside my organization which is bleeding edge and often of dubious standards, and it is built with tools I only mostly trust and on top of libraries from the OS provider and from third parties into which I have no visibility. There are strategies to mitigate risk, but I'd be very damn leery of signing my name or affixing my sigil in a P.E. context to even my best code - because I know the system it is part of has so many components I don't control and so many points of failure.
One risk mitigation strategy involves extensive testing (some say up to 90% of project cost). Anyone interested in paying $1500 for a copy of Office? I don't see many hands.
I'm all for seeing an improvement of professional standards and practices in the field, the injection of more engineering approaches into the field, etc. But the software field moves faster (IMO) than any other technical field. It also is one in which you have the least faith in the parts you build with. Until reform happens *across and throughout* the field, any efforts to go after companies or individual engineers is a waste of time.
Let's put it another way, more succinct: If I had to sign off in a legal liability sense for the code I've been writing for the last two years on the current contract, I'd imagine I'd have written about 10% of the code I have written and I'd have demanded a *lot more* from the people supplying me with 3rd party code to integrate. Since I know the business model wouldn't support that (the costs would kill the product as it stands), I have to think this approach is only viable once we decide we don't want 'the next new thing' in software and that we care about what we get enough to pay for it.
Someone compared the effort to Ford or GM making cars. If you want to spend $15-50K dollars for a computer, I'm sure we can offer you a lot higher level reliability from the software. heck, at those kinds of costs, you might get the same sorts of warranties you get from Ford and GM, though they warrant around as much as they can get away with. But if you want to pay under $1000 for the hardware and under $1000 for the principal software, then you might as well expect something that works about 1/10th as well. And it seems to me you've got that.
So, who here is lining up to buy the first $15K personal computer?
Nice idea, don't see it happening anytime soon.
I see what you are saying. I'll just counter with two things:
If someone fails to appreciate the ramifications of something in a license, you can argue that they just failed to do due diligence or are clueless. Or, it could be that the license is not clear enough. Not judging this case, but as a generality, 'clear' is not a binary flag. Things are not 'clear' and 'unclear' but rather 'more clear' and 'less clear'.
As to the loophole, this is again a judgement issue. I see you line of thinking and can acknowledge it. Yet I can see a line of thinking that says "if this tool does not do what I need, then it is broken for our purposes". I think that's what is being said about the loophole - that, for the kind of business model these guys want to follow, the GPL has a loophole that renders it broken for their purposes. Which is correct, from their perspective.
Much of life is about perspective. I think yours is valid for you and theirs is valid for them. There is no absolute right or wrong in these matters, just a relative one.
So, I agree with you and with them. I was just pointing out that the argument that says your strength should be in your differentiation and you should be trying to make money off your differentiated service offering (your advantages over your competitor) is pretty badly hurt when the competitor steals the code lock stock and barrel and if your supposed 'support advantage from detail knowledge' doesn't count for a lot. At that point, you've commited time and money to the problem and someone else is reaping the rewards. That was more the part I took issue with than your comments on the GPL's loopholiness (nice made up word, that) or lack thereof.
The problem with your answer is this: You're saying "If you want to use GPL, you'd better understand all the ramifications and deal with all of them". That's fine, but if you want people to use the GPL in the real world for real things, then the license has to be easy to suit to their business models, not the other way around. Yes, you can say they didn't understand the implications of the GPL completely. Yet there is now one less company using it. Maybe the GPL is fine. Or maybe its success is a product of how many people use it, and if people percieve it isn't helpful to what they wish to do, that's what matters.
Um, if you write good enough code, support is minimal.
Let us assume this is the case, then you've only got the quality of your code and your extra features over the competition. Oh wait, they're USING YOUR CODE!
Hmmm, suddenly, there is pretty near zero differentiation. Oh wait, you are trying to pay for having invested the time and money to write it. They are not. So there is a differentiation. In their favour!
No, I can see why they'd want to go back closed source. Open source is no panacea. It has some excellent products, but integration with for-profit corporate ops can lead to a lot of unfortunate results.
Okay, normally I don't get my dander up with slashdot posters, even trolls (not saying this is one example).
But here, I have to say it: I like cubicles! I've worked in four companies over the past ten years - one of 200-1800 people (got bigger with the buy out)... cubicles for 4 years, then a shared office with another developer, and a brief stint in the Faraday cage, one of 50 people for about 3 years... cubicles all the way, and one of 14 people.... only two at our sight, with a shared basement which was like semi-private office.
I LIKE CUBES! Cubes do require an ability to concentrate, to lock on your work solidly enough that the world around is not a disruption. That level of concentration is an asset to develop for many reasons. Cubes also have better airflow than a lot of offices. Private offices often are either too hot, too cold (vagarities of building air), too stuffy, or just become a place for people to tune out and surf the web.
Cubes don't allow you the total luxury to pooch your day away. They're a subtle 'keep you honest' environment. They also give you some social contact with your co-workers. You hear about lunch plans, you hear about interesting design discussions, you don't get left out of key impromptu design meetings, and you get some nice shared whiteboard space to noodle things around with other developers in your quad. It's like the bee hive!
Sometimes it can be distracting, depedning on office layout. A well laid out office doesn't suffer that issue. It can be noisy, but again, there are things you can do design wise to make for reasonably quiet cubes. Heck, if I could get rid of the HF noise from the four computers, three hubs, and 7-10 phones + TLS in my cube, that'd be far better than moving out of a cube!
A cube offers easy access to others, to be used judiciously. A cube offers an environment that has some social aspects. It also offers a situational awareness you lack in an office. It also removes some of the isolation sense people develop in an office.
It's shortcoming can be overcome by focus, by developing concentration, by some good headphones, and by good office planning.
I've worked in shared offices, which weren't much unlike cubes, except for the layout. I've worked in cubes. Both are about the same, AFAICS. Compared to a solitary office, unless it has a lovely rural or waterfront view, a walk out patio, and a built in bar, I'll take my Cuborg 9000 to a solitary office.
Now, for the record: Our little cube world has a pool table, a big MAME machine, a foozball table, an entire movie theater (formerly commercial!), a working bar with 4 taps, all the free pop and juice you want, an office sound system (not used during office hours normally) and an office staff that are very oriented towards pooling of knowledge, social networking, and on bringing up people with weaker skills to a higher standard. We also seem to have a lot of 'extra-curricular activities' like the recently past Oktoberfest pub crawl. YET, with all that said, I've been known to put in a few OT hours. I've probably logged more than 2500 OT hours in my career, at a guess. So I have spent more time in cubes than most... and I like them just fine.
LONG LIVE THE CUBE!
Maybe in your neck of the woods. In Canada, the last time I was involved in public safety CDPD-networked software deployment and development, we had segregated channels. So this issue never came up. We segregate voice and data channels up here and that seems to work pretty well. Maybe it has some technical drawbacks in terms of utilization rates, but it kinda removes some potential for abuse.
My comments on both of those would have been identical.
What the hell was that with the crane, the device, and the barrel roll? Wouldn't a manhole cover have been suitable and a *hell* of a lot more believable?
Yes, this movie thought it should be bigger, louder, more outrageous and stunty than the last one. The last one was okay because it wasn't so bogus as to smash to flinders all believability. Yes, it was fake, but sort of 'yeah, I can get with that' kinda fake. This one just hit the 'faker than fake, so fake I can't choke it down' fakeness level. AAAARGH!
The concept wasn't bad, film one wasn't bad. Do yourself a favour and send the producers and director (wankers!) a message by NOT seeing this. It won't be in theaters long and isn't worth viewing on video.
The real thing to keep in mind is that it is business. As a computer geek, I got axed from a company I dearly loved when the tech bubble went boom. The three founders had a helluva time that day, with the speech saying they had to let go about 33% of the work force. I knew I was done before I got the call - just finished a successful project, not sure what would be coming next, not a newbie (low salary) or a subject matter expert (high guru of some key business area). Just a mid level developer - fairly costly, can be replaced (ish, somewhat) by a cheaper developer with a bit of 'masterly oversight' from one of the SMEs. So, a bunch of us in the mid-rank took it on the chin.
But you know what? It was unexpected. But I'd set aside money when times were good. Contingency planning. Keep at least 3 months, and preferably 6 months, salary in an account you don't touch. That way you've got a cushion and that equates to freedom. It also equates to contingency safety and reduces panic when business downturns as it sometimes does.
The guys that started the company didn't want to let anyone go - they'd carried some of us for a few weeks and that cost them. They had a brutal time, since most of us were friends and the company had a pretty tight relationship with employees. If I told you how tight, most of you might be a bit green with envy.
But business (ie work not being landed and previously landed work being dried up due to the tech crash gutting some large US telecom firms) of consulting just went bust. You can't pay people with no money coming in. So you have to cut. It hurts. But you have to.
But for me, I took it with aplomb. Some folks left crying - no cushion, overbought houses or SUVs, families, lost of worry about a new job. I had little worry (I'm competent and a hard worker and had the aforementioned cushion). So I tried to reassure my disturbed boss. I think he appreciated that. I shook his hand and walked out head up. Sad for people, but knowing it wasn't about who I was - it was about business.
So, what happened? I've been in and out four or five times now (to the tune of about 24-26 months work) since then on contracts. I'm a contractor now. They give me fairly regular work. Their use of contractors minimizes the chance that they'll be forced to hack off so many people in a market dip. They're smarter now. But, at the same time, they're a great employer still. And the fact I was competent, hard working, a team player while I was there, and took the layoff with the right perception contributed to let them think I'd be a good guy for future work - I wasn't bitter and I had enough insight to know how business works. That has parleyed into a lot of good work.
So I guess, I'd say prepare. Get aside money for a rainy day. Think twice about overbuying homes or big SUVs or expensive sportscars. Save a goodly big cushion. Keep skills current even if you do it at your expense and on your time. And if crap happens, don't burn bridges. Every bridge you don't burn is one more opportunity for a future relationship. Sometimes business is just business - for too long many of us have thought that there's some sort of life path through companies. That's not the business cycle in many cases. But instead of griping about it (we didn't gripe when tech was sizzling and we were getting yearly double digit raises and signing bonuses and stock options), adapt. Plan ahead. And expect to spend some time out of work. Set aside the cash, realize this is part of business. And don't take it personally.
In my experience, this has paid off in peace of mind and further work.
The guy who made the offhand comment about this being the first slashdot discussion he wanted to read had it right. Lots of good meatn here.
A few rules taught to me by another consultant:
No free work. Work hard while you are there, don't begrudge sometimes coming in for long hours, but get paid. You don't have to bill every last minute, but don't do eight hours unpaid work a week. That doesn't show up on radar and won't help them predict the next job any more accurately. Stay focused, deliver, hit deadlines, warn well in advance if you can't and provide good estimates of what you can manage and for the stuff that won't make it, when it will be ready. Give bad news early and be up front about it. Honesty. Honest work and an honest invoice.
And when you do an extra thing outside your normal taskings (don't let it eat much time, because you're paid for X, do X or get permission to do Y), get credit for it. Make sure your successes and extra efforts are visible. Don't be afraid to bring quiet attention (I don't mean be a self-aggrandizing ass) to your work. Some seemingly offhanded status updates ("I just finished X, and since it didn't take long, I also fixed Y which was going to cause us big problems in the next release...") can be one method for letting your management know what you've managed. Always keep in mind your audience - the project money/time guy doesn't necessarily need technical details as to why something will take more time, beyond a general comment. OTOH, your technical leads and architects will want to know if a team isn't going to hit its marks. Figure out what it is your boss needs from you (often times, he needs to give numbers/estimates/progress reports up the chain, so he needs dependable data and he needs to trust what you tell him - overestimation is the bane of this relationship) and deliver. Get him warnings in a timely manner if their are issues. Get him assessments of scope regularly for problems or work effort required. If he knows you can not only technically assess and issue and fix it, but also determine its scope and impact with a high degree of confidence (or identify clearly where you *can't* do this so he can be doubly cautious and allow more margin), then he's not going to hang his own nuts in the proverbial fire. So he doesn't get burnt, neither do you.
And most importantly, you work to live. I've broken this commandment many times and tried to live to work. If you're a born team-player and company man like I used to be, this is an easy stage. But at the end of the day, you are a resource. Maybe a good one, who likes where he works and likes the people, but when the economy crashes and there is no work, you're a resource without an income and therefore expendable. It isn't personal - its a business. Never burn bridges you might one day use, always go out if you can on a high note as one day that might be a good way to secure further work. Sometimes, the guy below you might one day be the guy above you (or vice versa).
And relax when you aren't at work. You need to let off the stress and let it wash out of you, or it'll wash you out.
That has paid off very well for me in my career. Of course you can't be a whining ass hat about telling the truth. Be tactful, stick to the facts, and focus on freakin' solutions to the actual problem(s) , not pointing fingers.
Damn! Wish I had mod points. This is one of my biggest gripes in general in work and especially in bureaucracies. People are more concerned in many cases when a problem arises with assigning fault and blame than with resolving the problem. Fault-finding environments get people to do a lot of CYA (and when doing that, not doing productive work) and it gets them to go full defensive not-my-fault whenever anyone asks them a question.
I find having to wade through that (by repeatedly beating it into their heads that I don't care whose fault it is and all I want to know is their recommendation for assessing and fixing the problem) means wasting time...eventually, you can get through to them, but it is much nicer to not have to work in that sort of an environment.
The reality is that the practice of not focusing on the problem gets you no closer to a solution. Most clients I know are more interested in solutions than post-mortem blame. They have a problem, they want it fixed. Fix it quickly, or at least assess it, get them the information, then fix it as quickly as feasible, and you win respect. Problems happen. Most people accept that. The full force push to inform clients and to handle the issue with vigour and efficacy wins you a lot of good cred. Dicking around wins you negative cred.
Problem focus! Assess, then fix. Then, if you need to do a post-mortem for the purpose of helping to avoid a similar issue in the future (NOT for chopping heads off, which is rarely useful) , then you can do that afterwards (and this is a good idea). I've convinced my company here to do project post-mortems and try to feedback lessons learned into process improvement.
Ultimately, you want to create a work environment where the people that work with you and for you and that you work for see you as a problem solver. They see you as focused on the problem, not trivia, and they know you won't headhunt but instead will correct and educate. Problems won't get repeated not because you've killed the messenger, but because you've helped everyone get better and avoid a repetition.
If you feel that you're getting work done in spite of process, you have either a terrible process or far too much of it.
:)
There is too little process, too much process, and a just right amount. Too little has as many dangers as too much. And there is no one size fits all for process - the kind of process that can manage a four person project versus a forty person project is not the same. And the kind of management process for a project delivering on a fixed price contract for a customer and one putting out shrink wrapped product for sale is not going to be the same. You have to have flexibility and adapt process to environment.
You know you have too much process when your process and procedures prohibit this kind of adaption!
Goblin, if you are the Goblin of COTI fame, I'll have to check out the work in question.
:)
But you mentioned the greatest city in the world. I didn't know he wrote about Edinburgh?
Although I agree with some of what you say, I have to disagree in places. (disclaimer: I taught TCP/IP and OSI at a technical college and have been a programmer of mobile and more classic network-enabled software for about 12 years now).
Prototyping is fantastic. But sometimes people just never bother to finish a job. TCP/IP seems to be one example. How many systems have ported original TCP/IP stacks? Why is it that I see the same unimplemented methods in stack after stack? Someone had enough wit to realize they'd be handy, but the guts of a TCP/IP stack are no trivial matter. And the protocol went out and became ubiquitous long before it was complete. And now, bits of it never will be.
You can damn OSI for being slow off the mark, and that's typical of standards bodies. But for all you say about TCP/IP, I've also written an OSI prototype over TCP/IP as a proof of concept and a goodly portion of the services can be easily delivered (the parts that map well together). And the OSI semantics are probably more intelligible than the TCP/IP ones. (That's an opinion, YMMV).
The OSI model, on the other hand, is a perfectly good *model* for understanding the role of a tiered networking stack. Why is this so useful? Sure people abuse it in the real world and many apps span several layers of the stack, etc. But the conceptual idea of encapsulation of function and also the conceptual ideas of what the layer's functions should be is a good start. This lets you look at real world divergences and then realize where they might be good, bad and what the tradeoffs might be. If you never had the reference model, you'd have a harder time quantifying these differences between real world implementations and understanding why they might be good or bad.
I ran across one instance of this not long ago where someone had taken a shortcut in a networking stack and not exposed some lower level service primitives. Sure, as long as all you wanted to do was the basic subset of tasks as imagined by their developers using their higher layer interfaces, you were okay. But if you wanted to do something a bit different, you didn't have access to some key lower level primitives. This is a case where the developers didn't think beyond their own application and they didn't obviously have much of a concept of a tiered set of functions. And lo and behold, a less useful result.
OSI isn't the holy grail, but it is an instructive learning tool. All standards are produced in some ivory tower and where the rubber meets the road things are different. Yet at the same time, those standards and those theoretical models have great value, especially as individual implementations come and go (TCP/IP has got a lot of traction and has had a long life with no end in sight, but the same cannot be said of many other technologies and even TCP/IP may one day see the a twilight of its days).
To blindly say the OSI model must be killed because TCP/IP got out there and did some things is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
This is the most brilliant thing you've ever seen here?
Resisting my immediate Pythonesque urge to say "No, it isn't." and start an argument (the long course), I thought about that.
I guess that might make Slashdot the antithesis of the US Air Force then. Their slogan is "aim high". Slashdots might be "aim low and keep sinking" (as far as particularly sharp witticisms go).
Obviously, this post just proves the point. My IronyDetector(TM) is in overload mode.
Anyway, I don't seal what the big flapper is about this cod-forsakenly-bad humour. This isn't the funniest bit since Noah's shark. And we keep hoping it dolphin ish up soon. Further posts could make folks crabby. You'd have to be a strange manta want more. It's an eel impulse, I tell you. Perch the thought!
(Okay, that was a poor copy of the original few, who used up most of the good seafood...)
Just an interesting tidbit. A friend of mine is a CMDR in the USCG. He is a helo pilot. He wasn't involved in the first tier of response because he was needed to fly security for the UN event happening in NYC. But as soon as that was over, he got tapped to help setup an air plan and get more units in place and conduct more rescues. That translated into him now being the deputy director of the Rescue Coordination Center - your one stop shop for medevac in the New Orleans region. They had to work very long hours (he was working 18+) getting the coordination environment setup and running rescues, but it seemlessly integrates Army, Navy, presumably Air Force, and USCG evac/rescue ops.
The CG has been given (after the fact) a lead role in getting this situation sorted and they seem to be pushing hard and everyone (all the members of the forces) seem to be doing their damndest to get the people safe, taken care of, and to start getting them sorted out for the future.
I take your point that some of the mobilization orders were slow. I heard a rumour the aircraft carrier was kept chilling its heels for several days waiting to be given orders to deploy. That doesn't seem so good. But that's a post-facto analysis. For now, I think the effort should focus on the rescue and long term rehabilitation of survivors. A placeholder can be made that says 'yes, we need to look at how this went down and possibly change some things and/or people', but now isn't the time. Now, the only reason to remove someone is if you've got someone better to put in his place (such as putting the CG into the breach to coordinate rescues and sending Brown back to DC). Time enough for identifying where things went wrong afterwards. Well afterwards.
And one more thing to keep in mind: States in the US have always battled for strong rights. There are many who fear the power of a strong federal government. A strong federal government may be capable of responding more effectively than a group of individual states to things of this magnitude. But things like the Posse Comitatus act limit how that response can occur. Yes, this looks bad right now if that's the case, yet at the same time that helps safegaurd the US democracy by keeping the federal military out of local matters.
I'm not saying you can't work out an effective way for Feds + State to work together for big disasters like this, but the existing frameworks have reasons for being and any quickly cobbled together replacement or any changes may have other repercussions. So, yes, I think this whole area should be examined, and some will think this augurs for stronger centralized command and control and coordination (and perhaps purchasing for stuff like comms gear), others will argue this was the problem and state leaders should have more power and resources. So the debate should definitely be held, but all aspects must be considered and adequate time alloted before premature judgements are reached.
I'm not saying there aren't areas to improve, things that make you scratch your head (which may have reasons we don't know about or the reporting may be incorrect), etc. My point is we'll only know the true facts very much later on. Right now, we have rumour, supposition, GodsEyeView armchair quarterbacking, etc. That's what I'm taking issue with, I guess.
I'm sure there will be decisions and processes to go through, analyze, critize, and amend. Perhaps censure to be handed out in some cases for execrable judgment. But that will only come once time passes and fact finding and substantiation are done, or at least that's how it should work.
It was a more generalized comment, not particularly directed at a particular parent post. Sorry if it may have looked that way. And I have been accused of verbosity on occasion... ;)