Fuck your bosses. People do code better in teams-- they just plain think better in teams. But you're going to burn them out if you force them to sit in circles.
My suggestion is: encourage people to work in a central common area. Put a conference table there. Whiteboard. Snacks. Some stupid toy from ThinkGeek. But also give them a "home base" where they can check their email, make phone calls, have a little privacy. They need a place to recharge.
"Coding errors" are not the problem-- those are easy to fix, because they're mostly typos. "Thinking errors" are the real problem. So make sure that their thinking environment is conducive to correct thinking. Shit-- if more developers used their brains before they touched a keyboard, the world would be a better place. When they're done thinking, they can go back to their desks and hammer out the code, because that's what coding should be: brainless hammering.
We use a wiki (XWiki) with various tables to match machines to replacement FRUs, diagrams done in Dia (or OmniGraffle), and a homegrown inventory DB in MySQL to track parts & other equipment availability. There's no magic solution. You just need to pick a tool and make your staff stick to it. Here, what works well is distributing responsbility for various subsystems to different admins, so that no one admin is overwhelmed with administrative work. You need an FC controller board, you go talk to the person who 'owns' the SAN subsystem parts-- if they're out, no biggie, because it's all in the wiki. Just update the quantity in the DB and let the person know in case they need to order more stock.
Same here. Loved the Exile series, and I bought Exile III and Nethergate. When I was a college freshman, a guy down the hall came into my room and peeked over my shoulder while I played. He said, "Wow, those graphics suck!" I replied "Yeah, but it's a good game." This was 13 years ago.
He still uses the same engine, and the games are still fun. And even better, you can download the source code for Blades of Exile (awesome game), which is a must for any aspiring game developer. I mean, how many successful game devs let you peek under the hood? Thanks Jeff!
For internal consumption only, though. This may be a move into producing hardware for consumers who are less, shall we say, tolerant of addenda to manuals like "Oh yeah, that rail is +5.5V and not +5V. Sorry."
The Daily Show is also childish, though perhaps not on the same scale as South Park. In my opinion, humor is what lets them get the point across in the first place. They always have the brilliant fallback: "What, you mean you took us seriously?" But that doesn't change the fact that their commentary is almost always on point, and needed.
As evidence that TDS is essential commentary, I submit the fact that John Stewart has been a guest (and target) many times on conservative talk shows, that both the Bush and Obama administrations have sent officials to be guests on the show, and that many news anchors take Stewart's criticism seriously. There's a lot of good information on the wiki page.
You can download VMWare Player 3.0 for free. Then go download an Ubuntu 9.10 appliance. Or else, have them download the Ubuntu ISO and install it themselves. You can run VMs off of a thumb drive with no issues-- just make sure that your machines have adequate physical RAM to run both the VM and the base OS. A VM that doesn't know it is swapping is a real performance killer.
I frequently use both VMware and Virtualbox at work and at home. They're both great, but if you work in an enterprise IT shop, the extra features that come with the paid version of VMWare are well worth the cost.
And, as a person who had a pair, they gave me terrible headaches/nausea after long periods of playing. Also, there were very few 3D games, and the Master System in general really started to suffer when the original Nintendo became the de facto console-- I remember that the one place I could get Master System games (KB Toys), stopped carrying them. I had to mail-order them after that, and at the very end, when the Genesis came out, a couple mail-order vendors took my money, but never sent me a game. It sucked, especially since I was buying this stuff with paper route money.
That said, the Master System was awesome. I still have mine, and the built-in game ("Hang On") still works. The location of my controllers, though... who knows...
Sadly, the idea that Ireland's boom was a result of cutting business tax is a myth, and was covered extensively in this On Point broadcast. The real reason for Ireland's boom was easy credit, the same as everywhere else. Only their bubble was bigger-- partly because the Irish people had never before known a time of wealth, and also partly because Ireland became an attractive place to do business (comparatively low-wage, English-speaking labor)-- a property that disappeared around the same time as the crisis as emigration decreased and wages began to rise. What is true, though, is that the deep cutting of business tax had a detrimental effect on the ability of the government to actually do anything about the crisis-- they simply did not have the funds available to lessen its severity like we were able to in the U.S.
I have many friends who were affected deeply by this. The family of a good friend of mine was nearly employed in its entirety by Dell's Limerick plant. Dell left for cheaper labor in Poland, around the same time that the financial crisis hit. Nearly all of these folks, who, for the first time in generations, could afford to live in their own houses, and own their own cars, went bankrupt overnight. You can debate the wisdom of putting yourself in debt when your fate is tied to a fickle corporation, but the fact is that Dell was fully aware that this would be the result. Dell can kiss my ass if they think I'll ever buy or recommend their hardware again.
Well, you also need to keep in mind that certain kinds of employees should NOT be doing hands-on stuff. CEOs, for instance. A competent CEO realizes that his role is to carefully manage the division of labor to achieve the company's goals, and that's it. CEOs who get "hands on", even really smart, technically-competent ones, tend to make a mess of things, because they're not inside that problem domain regularly. If they have to know why a particular API function takes 3 parameters instead of 2, middle-management fucked up.
I work at a place that is 90% female, and where meeting attendee counts routinely run into the 20-30 range. By contrast, my own meetings (with my staff) are in the 2-3 range.
Is my dick really that small? Shoot. No wonder my wife lives on the other side of the country.
Actually, there's one other scenario that you can get a "free" upgrade, which is if you pay up for their protection racket, er... "software maintenance" fee, then you get upgrades within a certain window. I believe this is only available to volume license customers, i.e., enterprises.
Considering that our IT staff just got our CS3 folks upgraded to CS4 last week, this is very irritating. Adobe has been spinning the upgrade treadmill faster and faster since the Macromedia acquisition. And don't get me started on Macrovision. Yeah, they're still around, believe it or not.
Keeping an eye on your kids is not the same thing as having a totalitarian regime. I think that logging what your kids do and when is completely acceptable. Whether you reveal this information to them or not is a different story.
When I was a teenager, I got in all kinds of mischief. It turns out that my parents knew about pretty much all of it, but I did not know about this at the time. They didn't interfere unless they thought that I was getting into something over my head... like when I became very depressed, for a long period of time, and I bought myself a bottle of sleeping pills. That was an important intervention.
Children have no right to privacy. Teenagers chafe at the idea, of course, but the fact is that they are children, and good parenting means making decisions that are in their best interests, not their greatest desires. When they're able to weigh their actions with the consequences of those actions (i.e., becoming an adult), then they get privacy.
When your daughter starts googling birth control, it's time to have a chat.
probably because of the odd mixture of superiority and inferiority complexes (are they the same thing? who knows...).
Anyway, I commend you on your efforts to get back into mathematics. I started taking mathematics courses well after I received my B.A. (in Philosophy) and my friends and colleagues gave me no shortage of grief over this. I don't complain when they want to spend their free time painting or water skiing, and yet-- they seem to think there's something wrong with a grown man studying mathematics. The best advice I can give you is: ignore them. Mathematics is a fulfilling and beautiful subject. At the risk of sounding like a stoner, it will open your mind to new possibilities.
You already have the important part: motivation. But motivation is not quite enough. Until you understand the weird (or I should say, counterintuitive) ways of mathematics, you really need a teacher. This is worth the money. I was in your same position about five years ago, and what I did was: start at precalculus. I signed up for a summer course in precalc and trig at the local Uni (UMass Lowell, in case anyone is wondering...), and then I worked my way through calculus, stats, discrete math, set theory, algorithms, and formal languages. I threw in a physics course for kicks, and I found that it reinforced my calculus immensely.
Remember: math is hard. But not for the reason you think. It's hard because you need to change the way you think. The problem sets are essential, because they make you understand what assumptions can be kept, and which must be thrown away. You will be a better person for it. Once you change the way you think, math is easy. It sounds trite, I know, but it is very true.
Also, Bach helps during homework.
Good luck, and do not let your friends and family discourage you. I personally believe that if you are not challenging yourself, you are not living. I would do it again in a heart beat.
You're conveniently forgetting about the BSD license. Considering that most of the success of UNIX until the early 1990's (i.e., the first 20 or so years of its life) was because of BSD-licensed code, I don't really think you can say that RMS's philosophy is the basis for the free software movement. He's definitely the most extreme part of that movement.
If you want a system that works well, try OpenBSD, FreeBSD, or OpenSolaris. These systems run incredibly well, and they have little GPL code in them.
Given that the.NET CLR and C# are ECMA standards, can that be used as a defense against a Microsoft patent threat? I know that other standards bodies don't care about parents (just look at the IETF and Cisco), but I thought that ECMA and ISO at least nominally wanted submissions to be patent-unencumbered.
That snippet from Stallman is disturbing. It's almost like he's completely forgotten why Free Software is actually appealing to people.
Binary formats have little to do with it, except that it's much harder to figure out how they tick if you don't already know. Binary formats are very useful, when used appropriately-- for instance, nobody complains that TCP packets are binary format, because the format is well-known. They are much more compact than textual formats, and they can be much easier to parse. The problem is when they are used to keep out prying eyes, and I have no doubt that Microsoft often employs them to this effect. They sure ain't using them to make Word files smaller!
Apple's plists are a good example of a proprietary binary format that is both used for the right reasons and is trivially read by a human. IIRC, in 10.4, they made them binary by default, but provided a converter (plutil) to make them plain-text. Since their structure is obvious when in plain-text, and because their plist parser is very forgiving (it doesn't care if you never convert the file back to binary), these are very useful. Apple even documents the plist format in their man pages and website. So the formats themselves aren't the problem-- it's how they're being used. Apple clearly doesn't see any value in keeping people out of plists.
Fingerprints are probably something like hash functions. There are collisions now and then, enough to make them useless as a global identity function, but very useful when you need to be able to say "this ID does not belong to you", because the likelihood of someone possessing stolen identification, and their fingerprint actually matching, is infinitesimal.
Yes, but 'citizenship' is not private information. It is essential, for a government of any kind, to know whether you are a member or not, in order to function. So the issue here is whether biometric information is a heavy-handed way of determining membership.
Given the difficulties with such a large population, widespead illiteracy, and issues with identity fraud (which the West still struggles with), I'm not sure how else you would do it. I'm inclined to say that a photo and a fingerprint are not private information.
Genetic information, on the other hand, reveals quite a bit more about a person, and I think you could make a reasonable case that collecting those kinds of information is overkill if your goal is identification. A fingerprint doesn't reveal much at all, except whether it matches your finger or not. Which is the whole point.
Studios have been employing tricks for a long time to make artists sound better than they actually are. This is nothing new.
I know a former studio engineer who (among the many stories he told me) once had to do a similar trick. A well-known folk artist (who happens to live in my hometown... so keeping quiet about his name here) was having trouble hitting a particular note. After dozens of re-takes (and this is in the tape era, when do-overs were expensive), this guy just says "good job, everyone" and up and walks out. The engineer and producer look at each other in momentary panic... and then call in a session musician. She comes in, sings one note, and leaves. IIRC, this story was in reference to how good union scale can be if you're a professional musician.
Anyway, I'm OK with auto-tune. I mean, it's not like any of you who hate it would like T-Pain or Cher if they didn't use it. Employed properly (i.e., not for effect), it makes an engineer's job a heck of a lot easier. If it also makes a recording more tolerable, power to them. I think auto-tune inherits people's general distaste for pop music.
There are some legitimate problems with cap and trade (fraud being a major problem), but there are two things that any change must take into account, and I have yet to see something other than cap and trade that we can do. Those things are:
Putting pollutants into the environment must not be free. It should cost enough that the cost is a deterrent.
There must be a global cap, and it must reduce pollution until the goals (when and how much) are met.
"Costs" don't have to be paid in dollars, but it is very useful if a system allows for those costs to be fungible. Such a property lowers the barrier to entry, and makes it easier to get everyone onboard. I'd love to hear of an alternative that satisfies those two conditions.
Unfortunately, the video you linked to is really light on details. For one, it offers no real alternatives ("we have the power, so legislate"... OK, legislate what?), and it resorts to ad hominem attacks (the Enron stuff). Sure, financial people like trade but so does everyone else. Trading is a very natural behavior for people, so why not take advantage of that?
Cap and Trade itself is not an "incentive" program, it's a punishment program.
Avoiding punishment is an incentive. You don't entice your son to stop hitting his sister with candy, do you?
It doesn't even reduce pollution, since business can just buy their way out of that by planting a forest in South America.
Cap and trade, done right (I'm not saying that the existing bill is "right"... but you do need to start somewhere), puts a cap on pollution globally, which is really where the problem matters, and it addresses scenarios like when you put a restriction on a factory, and they just move it out of the country to where there are no restrictions. All you did was create an incentive for people to move jobs out of the country. Pollution is decreased, but not necessarily locally.
The key thing here is that if you only offer positive incentives, many people will continue doing business as usual, because they won't see the effort as worth the cost of changing. That's a problem because business as usual is how we got in the mess in the first place. You need to make people change their behavior if a change in behavior is what you want.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck your bosses. People do code better in teams-- they just plain think better in teams. But you're going to burn them out if you force them to sit in circles.
My suggestion is: encourage people to work in a central common area. Put a conference table there. Whiteboard. Snacks. Some stupid toy from ThinkGeek. But also give them a "home base" where they can check their email, make phone calls, have a little privacy. They need a place to recharge.
"Coding errors" are not the problem-- those are easy to fix, because they're mostly typos. "Thinking errors" are the real problem. So make sure that their thinking environment is conducive to correct thinking. Shit-- if more developers used their brains before they touched a keyboard, the world would be a better place. When they're done thinking, they can go back to their desks and hammer out the code, because that's what coding should be: brainless hammering.
We use a wiki (XWiki) with various tables to match machines to replacement FRUs, diagrams done in Dia (or OmniGraffle), and a homegrown inventory DB in MySQL to track parts & other equipment availability. There's no magic solution. You just need to pick a tool and make your staff stick to it. Here, what works well is distributing responsbility for various subsystems to different admins, so that no one admin is overwhelmed with administrative work. You need an FC controller board, you go talk to the person who 'owns' the SAN subsystem parts-- if they're out, no biggie, because it's all in the wiki. Just update the quantity in the DB and let the person know in case they need to order more stock.
Same here. Loved the Exile series, and I bought Exile III and Nethergate. When I was a college freshman, a guy down the hall came into my room and peeked over my shoulder while I played. He said, "Wow, those graphics suck!" I replied "Yeah, but it's a good game." This was 13 years ago.
He still uses the same engine, and the games are still fun. And even better, you can download the source code for Blades of Exile (awesome game), which is a must for any aspiring game developer. I mean, how many successful game devs let you peek under the hood? Thanks Jeff!
old and older. I still play Spaceward Ho! (version 4) in Basilisk, on Linux. It's the fastest 68k Mac I've ever owned!
For internal consumption only, though. This may be a move into producing hardware for consumers who are less, shall we say, tolerant of addenda to manuals like "Oh yeah, that rail is +5.5V and not +5V. Sorry."
The Daily Show is also childish, though perhaps not on the same scale as South Park. In my opinion, humor is what lets them get the point across in the first place. They always have the brilliant fallback: "What, you mean you took us seriously?" But that doesn't change the fact that their commentary is almost always on point, and needed.
As evidence that TDS is essential commentary, I submit the fact that John Stewart has been a guest (and target) many times on conservative talk shows, that both the Bush and Obama administrations have sent officials to be guests on the show, and that many news anchors take Stewart's criticism seriously. There's a lot of good information on the wiki page.
You can download VMWare Player 3.0 for free. Then go download an Ubuntu 9.10 appliance. Or else, have them download the Ubuntu ISO and install it themselves. You can run VMs off of a thumb drive with no issues-- just make sure that your machines have adequate physical RAM to run both the VM and the base OS. A VM that doesn't know it is swapping is a real performance killer.
I frequently use both VMware and Virtualbox at work and at home. They're both great, but if you work in an enterprise IT shop, the extra features that come with the paid version of VMWare are well worth the cost.
And, as a person who had a pair, they gave me terrible headaches/nausea after long periods of playing. Also, there were very few 3D games, and the Master System in general really started to suffer when the original Nintendo became the de facto console-- I remember that the one place I could get Master System games (KB Toys), stopped carrying them. I had to mail-order them after that, and at the very end, when the Genesis came out, a couple mail-order vendors took my money, but never sent me a game. It sucked, especially since I was buying this stuff with paper route money.
That said, the Master System was awesome. I still have mine, and the built-in game ("Hang On") still works. The location of my controllers, though... who knows...
Sadly, the idea that Ireland's boom was a result of cutting business tax is a myth, and was covered extensively in this On Point broadcast. The real reason for Ireland's boom was easy credit, the same as everywhere else. Only their bubble was bigger-- partly because the Irish people had never before known a time of wealth, and also partly because Ireland became an attractive place to do business (comparatively low-wage, English-speaking labor)-- a property that disappeared around the same time as the crisis as emigration decreased and wages began to rise. What is true, though, is that the deep cutting of business tax had a detrimental effect on the ability of the government to actually do anything about the crisis-- they simply did not have the funds available to lessen its severity like we were able to in the U.S.
I have many friends who were affected deeply by this. The family of a good friend of mine was nearly employed in its entirety by Dell's Limerick plant. Dell left for cheaper labor in Poland, around the same time that the financial crisis hit. Nearly all of these folks, who, for the first time in generations, could afford to live in their own houses, and own their own cars, went bankrupt overnight. You can debate the wisdom of putting yourself in debt when your fate is tied to a fickle corporation, but the fact is that Dell was fully aware that this would be the result. Dell can kiss my ass if they think I'll ever buy or recommend their hardware again.
We have a defacto two party system only because too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe there is no third (or 4th-nth) option.
I suspect that the real reason is more insidious than that: the present system reaches equilibrium with two parties.
Well, you also need to keep in mind that certain kinds of employees should NOT be doing hands-on stuff. CEOs, for instance. A competent CEO realizes that his role is to carefully manage the division of labor to achieve the company's goals, and that's it. CEOs who get "hands on", even really smart, technically-competent ones, tend to make a mess of things, because they're not inside that problem domain regularly. If they have to know why a particular API function takes 3 parameters instead of 2, middle-management fucked up.
I work at a place that is 90% female, and where meeting attendee counts routinely run into the 20-30 range. By contrast, my own meetings (with my staff) are in the 2-3 range.
Is my dick really that small? Shoot. No wonder my wife lives on the other side of the country.
Actually, there's one other scenario that you can get a "free" upgrade, which is if you pay up for their protection racket, er... "software maintenance" fee, then you get upgrades within a certain window. I believe this is only available to volume license customers, i.e., enterprises.
Considering that our IT staff just got our CS3 folks upgraded to CS4 last week, this is very irritating. Adobe has been spinning the upgrade treadmill faster and faster since the Macromedia acquisition. And don't get me started on Macrovision. Yeah, they're still around, believe it or not.
Keeping an eye on your kids is not the same thing as having a totalitarian regime. I think that logging what your kids do and when is completely acceptable. Whether you reveal this information to them or not is a different story.
When I was a teenager, I got in all kinds of mischief. It turns out that my parents knew about pretty much all of it, but I did not know about this at the time. They didn't interfere unless they thought that I was getting into something over my head... like when I became very depressed, for a long period of time, and I bought myself a bottle of sleeping pills. That was an important intervention.
Children have no right to privacy. Teenagers chafe at the idea, of course, but the fact is that they are children, and good parenting means making decisions that are in their best interests, not their greatest desires. When they're able to weigh their actions with the consequences of those actions (i.e., becoming an adult), then they get privacy.
When your daughter starts googling birth control, it's time to have a chat.
Wow. You are quite the photographer.
probably because of the odd mixture of superiority and inferiority complexes (are they the same thing? who knows...).
Anyway, I commend you on your efforts to get back into mathematics. I started taking mathematics courses well after I received my B.A. (in Philosophy) and my friends and colleagues gave me no shortage of grief over this. I don't complain when they want to spend their free time painting or water skiing, and yet-- they seem to think there's something wrong with a grown man studying mathematics. The best advice I can give you is: ignore them. Mathematics is a fulfilling and beautiful subject. At the risk of sounding like a stoner, it will open your mind to new possibilities.
You already have the important part: motivation. But motivation is not quite enough. Until you understand the weird (or I should say, counterintuitive) ways of mathematics, you really need a teacher. This is worth the money. I was in your same position about five years ago, and what I did was: start at precalculus. I signed up for a summer course in precalc and trig at the local Uni (UMass Lowell, in case anyone is wondering...), and then I worked my way through calculus, stats, discrete math, set theory, algorithms, and formal languages. I threw in a physics course for kicks, and I found that it reinforced my calculus immensely.
Remember: math is hard. But not for the reason you think. It's hard because you need to change the way you think. The problem sets are essential, because they make you understand what assumptions can be kept, and which must be thrown away. You will be a better person for it. Once you change the way you think, math is easy. It sounds trite, I know, but it is very true.
Also, Bach helps during homework.
Good luck, and do not let your friends and family discourage you. I personally believe that if you are not challenging yourself, you are not living. I would do it again in a heart beat.
You're conveniently forgetting about the BSD license. Considering that most of the success of UNIX until the early 1990's (i.e., the first 20 or so years of its life) was because of BSD-licensed code, I don't really think you can say that RMS's philosophy is the basis for the free software movement. He's definitely the most extreme part of that movement.
If you want a system that works well, try OpenBSD, FreeBSD, or OpenSolaris. These systems run incredibly well, and they have little GPL code in them.
Decided to respond instead of mod. Thanks! This is awesome! Don't know why I never thought to do this...
Given that the .NET CLR and C# are ECMA standards, can that be used as a defense against a Microsoft patent threat? I know that other standards bodies don't care about parents (just look at the IETF and Cisco), but I thought that ECMA and ISO at least nominally wanted submissions to be patent-unencumbered.
That snippet from Stallman is disturbing. It's almost like he's completely forgotten why Free Software is actually appealing to people.
Binary formats have little to do with it, except that it's much harder to figure out how they tick if you don't already know. Binary formats are very useful, when used appropriately-- for instance, nobody complains that TCP packets are binary format, because the format is well-known. They are much more compact than textual formats, and they can be much easier to parse. The problem is when they are used to keep out prying eyes, and I have no doubt that Microsoft often employs them to this effect. They sure ain't using them to make Word files smaller!
Apple's plists are a good example of a proprietary binary format that is both used for the right reasons and is trivially read by a human. IIRC, in 10.4, they made them binary by default, but provided a converter (plutil) to make them plain-text. Since their structure is obvious when in plain-text, and because their plist parser is very forgiving (it doesn't care if you never convert the file back to binary), these are very useful. Apple even documents the plist format in their man pages and website. So the formats themselves aren't the problem-- it's how they're being used. Apple clearly doesn't see any value in keeping people out of plists.
Fingerprints are probably something like hash functions. There are collisions now and then, enough to make them useless as a global identity function, but very useful when you need to be able to say "this ID does not belong to you", because the likelihood of someone possessing stolen identification, and their fingerprint actually matching, is infinitesimal.
Yes, but 'citizenship' is not private information. It is essential, for a government of any kind, to know whether you are a member or not, in order to function. So the issue here is whether biometric information is a heavy-handed way of determining membership.
Given the difficulties with such a large population, widespead illiteracy, and issues with identity fraud (which the West still struggles with), I'm not sure how else you would do it. I'm inclined to say that a photo and a fingerprint are not private information.
Genetic information, on the other hand, reveals quite a bit more about a person, and I think you could make a reasonable case that collecting those kinds of information is overkill if your goal is identification. A fingerprint doesn't reveal much at all, except whether it matches your finger or not. Which is the whole point.
Studios have been employing tricks for a long time to make artists sound better than they actually are. This is nothing new.
I know a former studio engineer who (among the many stories he told me) once had to do a similar trick. A well-known folk artist (who happens to live in my hometown... so keeping quiet about his name here) was having trouble hitting a particular note. After dozens of re-takes (and this is in the tape era, when do-overs were expensive), this guy just says "good job, everyone" and up and walks out. The engineer and producer look at each other in momentary panic... and then call in a session musician. She comes in, sings one note, and leaves. IIRC, this story was in reference to how good union scale can be if you're a professional musician.
Anyway, I'm OK with auto-tune. I mean, it's not like any of you who hate it would like T-Pain or Cher if they didn't use it. Employed properly (i.e., not for effect), it makes an engineer's job a heck of a lot easier. If it also makes a recording more tolerable, power to them. I think auto-tune inherits people's general distaste for pop music.
"Costs" don't have to be paid in dollars, but it is very useful if a system allows for those costs to be fungible. Such a property lowers the barrier to entry, and makes it easier to get everyone onboard. I'd love to hear of an alternative that satisfies those two conditions.
Unfortunately, the video you linked to is really light on details. For one, it offers no real alternatives ("we have the power, so legislate"... OK, legislate what?), and it resorts to ad hominem attacks (the Enron stuff). Sure, financial people like trade but so does everyone else. Trading is a very natural behavior for people, so why not take advantage of that?
Cap and Trade itself is not an "incentive" program, it's a punishment program.
Avoiding punishment is an incentive. You don't entice your son to stop hitting his sister with candy, do you?
It doesn't even reduce pollution, since business can just buy their way out of that by planting a forest in South America.
Cap and trade, done right (I'm not saying that the existing bill is "right"... but you do need to start somewhere), puts a cap on pollution globally, which is really where the problem matters, and it addresses scenarios like when you put a restriction on a factory, and they just move it out of the country to where there are no restrictions. All you did was create an incentive for people to move jobs out of the country. Pollution is decreased, but not necessarily locally.
The key thing here is that if you only offer positive incentives, many people will continue doing business as usual, because they won't see the effort as worth the cost of changing. That's a problem because business as usual is how we got in the mess in the first place. You need to make people change their behavior if a change in behavior is what you want.