It's software, so it needs to be supported (we aren't talking about things like the notepad program on your home computer). Who better to support it than the person that wrote it? A rational employer would prefer you sit there and twiddle your thumbs until you are needed, rather than quit. Likewise, most managers would quickly get annoyed with you for bugging them constantly for more work to fill the days in between supporting what you have put in place, and creating more of it as the need arises (needs do change and new ones arise).
I've flat out told people bringing me new things that I am not willing to take them on unless they can be automated. We aren't staffed for an ever expanding workload. For example, I don't get paid what I get paid so I can manually FTP data files everyday at 10 AM, or spend hours manually scrolling through log files for irregularities. And what would happen when I am out of office? Consuming my days with busy work just to ensure I don't have any downtime would be stupid and a disservice to my employer, especially when something comes up (and something always comes up eventually) that requires my full attention.
If you have some free time, go train yourself on blockchain, or C#, or AWS, or Azure, or whatever else might make you a better guru when the need rises (if you are really bored, go document your code). It's not like IT requires only a purely static body of knowledge where things don't change.
First off, making more than 40k a year in USD puts you in the top 1% for the world. On that scale, being middle class would scare the hell out of me. Next, people who are the least bit financially literate are going to have a lot more as they near retirement age because that is what they were supposed to be doing, saving for a time when they would no longer be able to earn a decent wage. People who might have been working at entry level jobs with almost no savings in their twenties could easily be millionaires by age 60. But that requires a certain level of self-control and financial literacy. Face it. A lot of people are not financially literate and educating them is only going to help some of them. Not that we shouldn't try to make courses in certain things (managing your credit rating, managing your pay and deductions, how to create a sustainable savings plan, how to create a household budget, needs versus wants, and how to shop for food and necessities when you are out of work) mandatory in high school. Many people could swim all day in the sea of knowledge and never get wet. Even as adults, now, everything they would ever need to know they could pick up in an hour a day on the internet in a month or two for free. What does it say about people that so few make the effort? The only alternative to them blowing it for themselves would seem to be to have their government save and invest some portion of their income for them. Unfortunately, we can't trust politicians access to all that money if it were saved up somewhere as there is no good way to prevent them from sticking their hands in it. Case in point being what happened to Social Security (and it could still be fixed in twenty minutes if the right people in DC got together and agreed to do it, don't hold your breath). So in practice, to help people who never accumulated any savings, this always seems to work out as the government just using tax money to help alleviate the worst of the misery so we don't find dead bodies in the gutter every morning, as used to be the case in the good old days. But, politicians being politicians, once they have all this money flowing through their hands, and so many people dependent on it, they try to find ways to use it to address other issues, from noble but misguided ones, to just retaining their own grasp on power.
In California I believe you can go thirty days without a tag (but you still must have a temporary thing pushed up under your windshield). With neither tag nor temporary thing, I don't know that there is any state that will give you more than three days after purchase. In many or most it seems to be one day or 24 hours.
CBS will probably rue the day, but the idiots that made such poor decisions will evade personal responsibility by moving on, retiring, or just playing the bureaucrat should it be necessary.
And here I thought this was going to have something to do with the seven blind men encountering an elephant and each getting the wrong or incomplete idea of what they'd found.
When they were underdog startups, everybody was cheering for them. Now that they are successful, anything they do is dastardly by definition. People are weird.
If building these things prevented anyone else from building them (which in some cases it might) and they had no plans to actually make money using these things, that would be different. That would be to make sure no one else could compete. Yep, yep, sure would be. Let me read that headline again . . . .
These ultra-low end contract engagements should only be taken as a last resort. They tend to be bad economic choices for the worker in the same way that "rent-to-own" is a bad way to furnish your home.
Can we include botflys (they lay eggs under skin that hatch into worms), chiggers, ticks, fleas, lice, bedbugs, scabies, sand flies, gnats, midges, horseflies, deerflies, and black flies? I count them all as parasites that prey on humans.
We got tiger mosquitoes invading New York. I volunteer them for immediate field trials. What's the risk? That we don't kill off an invasive species of disease carrier that bites people even in broad daylight?
This sounds like it could be the beginning of the Manna program described many years ago by self-proclaimed futurist Marshall Brain on his web site. Pretty soon they could be wearing the things at work, every day, all day while a computer program monitors their locations, assigns tasks, times them, and collects feedback. Be afraid, be very afraid (although that won't help because it is probably inevitable).
As a consulting software developer, I would (very gently and not in these exact words) tell clients they could have it good, fast, or cheap, pick two. Invariably they would insist on all three, a logical impossibility. Once we got down to it, though, it was always "good" that turned out to be where they would accept the biggest hits. Just like in the movie, The Martian, the first place they would cut corners was in testing (followed rapidly by training). Business people would tell me about how getting the contract depended on us being willing to be "result oriented" which in their minds meant pretty much skipping analysis, requirements, and design. That doesn't just sound stupid, it is stupid, although they tried hard to make it sound reasonable. In my experience most people paying for software don't even understand the first thing about how it is created. Neither do a lot of people creating it. After a few highly successful projects that boosted my rep, I only ever got assigned to ones that were on fire, late, and generally had gotten a few previous project managers fired. In none of those was I ever able to find anything to convince me they hadn't pretty much skipped the requirements phase altogether and just gone straight to coding (no one could ever produce even the most basic list of initial requirements). Another problem is the ephemeral nature of most software. Let's face it, software is here today and gone tomorrow for most things (a very few highly revered games might be the exception). My grandfather was an architect and builder. When I was little he would take me around and proudly show me neighborhoods full of high quality expensive homes he had designed and built when he was a young man, as well as office buildings and even a church. I'll never take my grandkids out on the internet and various corporate intranets and show them some of my great coding projects. Even if that was possible, most of them are already gone and my grandkids haven't even been born yet.
In the words of a great man: "Life is like a sewer, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it."
I value Facebook as it has gotten me back in touch with people who were once central to my life and that I had lost contact with. Even if we only share a few vacation pics or anecdotes, it's comforting to know where they are and that they are doing well. My friends and family account is a nice plus in my life . . . and, of course, I don't post anything that would hurt anyone, let alone me, if it were posted in the local newspaper.
I also maintain an account relating to me as an author and which therefore must be open to the public. Again, I find it to be a good thing with casual readers, fans, and even critics being extremely civil. On the other hand, I am not a politician and don't post about my views in that regard. There is no way to avoid some ugly in any medium if you are going to do that. I'd go so far as to say that public officials, unless they find some magical way to make everyone happy, should probably avoid Facebook and other social media or keep it private and limited to family and friends. In their public internet they might consider confining themselves to a moderated web site, much as they are likely to bring bodyguards in public appearances, as they can be targets for the deranged, even when they are playing a practice game of baseball.
Bad example.
The main reason for US troops in South Korea isn't to fight (although they will surely do that to the best of their ability should it become necessary). The main reason for US troops in South Korea is to tell whichever despot is currently running North Korea that there is no way, none, to attack South Korea with any hope that the US will not get involved.
In the absence of other players and nuclear weapons, the South would not need robots to crush the North with conventional forces should Joffrey, er Kim Jong-un be so foolish as to actually attack . Modern armies tend to brush aside those still equipped with WWII equipment. Even so, autonomous weapon systems are coming and being modern means staying modern.
Lot's of less expensive locations in this country than around San Francisco, in point of fact, aside from putting it in downtown Manhattan, it's hard to see how they could have done much worse. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. And look at all those parking lots! How much land could they have spared if they just put up a parking garage? Pretty sure they could find the funding . . .
The US has public roads, public parks, and public schools. China has private businesses and personal investments. Socialism versus capitalism is just a matter of degree. Humans aren't ants or amoebas and can't deal with extremes and absolutes and, in those cases where someone does manage to fully impose their ideals upon others, it can take generations for things to recover.
Hardly alone is right. You want corrupt? Take a look. Google "corruption_perceptions_index_2016" from the good folks at Transparency International. Just because the US is the most visible country on Earth means people in glass houses feel like they can throw stones.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . for humans.
Artificial plants, sounds promising for a substitute wood material. Going to take it to whole new level when they can grow diamonds as well.
So someday we may have problems with irresponsible countries greedily pulling too much CO2 out of the atmosphere?
Fnord. You don't need to worry about fonts.
It's software, so it needs to be supported (we aren't talking about things like the notepad program on your home computer). Who better to support it than the person that wrote it? A rational employer would prefer you sit there and twiddle your thumbs until you are needed, rather than quit. Likewise, most managers would quickly get annoyed with you for bugging them constantly for more work to fill the days in between supporting what you have put in place, and creating more of it as the need arises (needs do change and new ones arise). I've flat out told people bringing me new things that I am not willing to take them on unless they can be automated. We aren't staffed for an ever expanding workload. For example, I don't get paid what I get paid so I can manually FTP data files everyday at 10 AM, or spend hours manually scrolling through log files for irregularities. And what would happen when I am out of office? Consuming my days with busy work just to ensure I don't have any downtime would be stupid and a disservice to my employer, especially when something comes up (and something always comes up eventually) that requires my full attention. If you have some free time, go train yourself on blockchain, or C#, or AWS, or Azure, or whatever else might make you a better guru when the need rises (if you are really bored, go document your code). It's not like IT requires only a purely static body of knowledge where things don't change.
First off, making more than 40k a year in USD puts you in the top 1% for the world. On that scale, being middle class would scare the hell out of me. Next, people who are the least bit financially literate are going to have a lot more as they near retirement age because that is what they were supposed to be doing, saving for a time when they would no longer be able to earn a decent wage. People who might have been working at entry level jobs with almost no savings in their twenties could easily be millionaires by age 60. But that requires a certain level of self-control and financial literacy. Face it. A lot of people are not financially literate and educating them is only going to help some of them. Not that we shouldn't try to make courses in certain things (managing your credit rating, managing your pay and deductions, how to create a sustainable savings plan, how to create a household budget, needs versus wants, and how to shop for food and necessities when you are out of work) mandatory in high school. Many people could swim all day in the sea of knowledge and never get wet. Even as adults, now, everything they would ever need to know they could pick up in an hour a day on the internet in a month or two for free. What does it say about people that so few make the effort? The only alternative to them blowing it for themselves would seem to be to have their government save and invest some portion of their income for them. Unfortunately, we can't trust politicians access to all that money if it were saved up somewhere as there is no good way to prevent them from sticking their hands in it. Case in point being what happened to Social Security (and it could still be fixed in twenty minutes if the right people in DC got together and agreed to do it, don't hold your breath). So in practice, to help people who never accumulated any savings, this always seems to work out as the government just using tax money to help alleviate the worst of the misery so we don't find dead bodies in the gutter every morning, as used to be the case in the good old days. But, politicians being politicians, once they have all this money flowing through their hands, and so many people dependent on it, they try to find ways to use it to address other issues, from noble but misguided ones, to just retaining their own grasp on power.
In California I believe you can go thirty days without a tag (but you still must have a temporary thing pushed up under your windshield). With neither tag nor temporary thing, I don't know that there is any state that will give you more than three days after purchase. In many or most it seems to be one day or 24 hours.
Fun until you take off the goggles from that roller coaster simulation and discover the motion part wasn't part of the illusion.
CBS will probably rue the day, but the idiots that made such poor decisions will evade personal responsibility by moving on, retiring, or just playing the bureaucrat should it be necessary.
And here I thought this was going to have something to do with the seven blind men encountering an elephant and each getting the wrong or incomplete idea of what they'd found.
I can hear Gomer Pyle getting this news now: "Well, Shazam!"
When they were underdog startups, everybody was cheering for them. Now that they are successful, anything they do is dastardly by definition. People are weird.
If building these things prevented anyone else from building them (which in some cases it might) and they had no plans to actually make money using these things, that would be different. That would be to make sure no one else could compete. Yep, yep, sure would be. Let me read that headline again . . . .
If there was never a Greek god of finance then it looks like they may be trying to rectify that oversight.
These ultra-low end contract engagements should only be taken as a last resort. They tend to be bad economic choices for the worker in the same way that "rent-to-own" is a bad way to furnish your home.
Can we include botflys (they lay eggs under skin that hatch into worms), chiggers, ticks, fleas, lice, bedbugs, scabies, sand flies, gnats, midges, horseflies, deerflies, and black flies? I count them all as parasites that prey on humans.
We got tiger mosquitoes invading New York. I volunteer them for immediate field trials. What's the risk? That we don't kill off an invasive species of disease carrier that bites people even in broad daylight?
Doing this research must have required a lot of intestinal fortitude.
This sounds like it could be the beginning of the Manna program described many years ago by self-proclaimed futurist Marshall Brain on his web site. Pretty soon they could be wearing the things at work, every day, all day while a computer program monitors their locations, assigns tasks, times them, and collects feedback. Be afraid, be very afraid (although that won't help because it is probably inevitable).
As a consulting software developer, I would (very gently and not in these exact words) tell clients they could have it good, fast, or cheap, pick two. Invariably they would insist on all three, a logical impossibility. Once we got down to it, though, it was always "good" that turned out to be where they would accept the biggest hits. Just like in the movie, The Martian, the first place they would cut corners was in testing (followed rapidly by training). Business people would tell me about how getting the contract depended on us being willing to be "result oriented" which in their minds meant pretty much skipping analysis, requirements, and design. That doesn't just sound stupid, it is stupid, although they tried hard to make it sound reasonable. In my experience most people paying for software don't even understand the first thing about how it is created. Neither do a lot of people creating it. After a few highly successful projects that boosted my rep, I only ever got assigned to ones that were on fire, late, and generally had gotten a few previous project managers fired. In none of those was I ever able to find anything to convince me they hadn't pretty much skipped the requirements phase altogether and just gone straight to coding (no one could ever produce even the most basic list of initial requirements). Another problem is the ephemeral nature of most software. Let's face it, software is here today and gone tomorrow for most things (a very few highly revered games might be the exception). My grandfather was an architect and builder. When I was little he would take me around and proudly show me neighborhoods full of high quality expensive homes he had designed and built when he was a young man, as well as office buildings and even a church. I'll never take my grandkids out on the internet and various corporate intranets and show them some of my great coding projects. Even if that was possible, most of them are already gone and my grandkids haven't even been born yet.
In the words of a great man: "Life is like a sewer, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it." I value Facebook as it has gotten me back in touch with people who were once central to my life and that I had lost contact with. Even if we only share a few vacation pics or anecdotes, it's comforting to know where they are and that they are doing well. My friends and family account is a nice plus in my life . . . and, of course, I don't post anything that would hurt anyone, let alone me, if it were posted in the local newspaper. I also maintain an account relating to me as an author and which therefore must be open to the public. Again, I find it to be a good thing with casual readers, fans, and even critics being extremely civil. On the other hand, I am not a politician and don't post about my views in that regard. There is no way to avoid some ugly in any medium if you are going to do that. I'd go so far as to say that public officials, unless they find some magical way to make everyone happy, should probably avoid Facebook and other social media or keep it private and limited to family and friends. In their public internet they might consider confining themselves to a moderated web site, much as they are likely to bring bodyguards in public appearances, as they can be targets for the deranged, even when they are playing a practice game of baseball.
Bad example. The main reason for US troops in South Korea isn't to fight (although they will surely do that to the best of their ability should it become necessary). The main reason for US troops in South Korea is to tell whichever despot is currently running North Korea that there is no way, none, to attack South Korea with any hope that the US will not get involved. In the absence of other players and nuclear weapons, the South would not need robots to crush the North with conventional forces should Joffrey, er Kim Jong-un be so foolish as to actually attack . Modern armies tend to brush aside those still equipped with WWII equipment. Even so, autonomous weapon systems are coming and being modern means staying modern.
Lot's of less expensive locations in this country than around San Francisco, in point of fact, aside from putting it in downtown Manhattan, it's hard to see how they could have done much worse. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. And look at all those parking lots! How much land could they have spared if they just put up a parking garage? Pretty sure they could find the funding . . .
The US has public roads, public parks, and public schools. China has private businesses and personal investments. Socialism versus capitalism is just a matter of degree. Humans aren't ants or amoebas and can't deal with extremes and absolutes and, in those cases where someone does manage to fully impose their ideals upon others, it can take generations for things to recover.
Hardly alone is right. You want corrupt? Take a look. Google "corruption_perceptions_index_2016" from the good folks at Transparency International. Just because the US is the most visible country on Earth means people in glass houses feel like they can throw stones.