I have never seen anybody who was worth a damn a week after giving notice. As the psychological separation takes place, it gets harder and harder (even for folks with the best of intentions) to get much done.
What your boss should be having you do is document the crap out of everything, and then sweet talking you into accepting calls from whoever replaces you.
Even then, memory fades. You get into your new job and the details of the old job get harder to recall.
You owe your new boss your full intellectual bandwidth, especially in the learning stages, when you are not contributing as much as you will once you know the job.
Educational malpractice! Does your school offer a one term course in chip design for business majors?
I have had _way_ too many bosses, at all levels of the chain of command who thought they knew how to build software. One was the president of the government systems division, who thought he was a software guy because he had hung tapes for a mainframe when he was in the air force 30 years before. Lots of EEs think they know software because they wrote one-off programs to solve homework assignments. I once ran into a PhD (5 degrees actually) who was leaving the academy to run a 400 person project. Biggest thing he had ever done, 5 people for 2 semesters.
If one of these b-students ever gets to be a boss of mine, and acts like they know anything about the industrial software process, I'm going to find you.
Even at the algorithm level, there is no point in optimizing before you need to. Back in my FORTRAN days, I wrote lots of bubble sorts because I could write the code in less time than it took to open an algorithm book. And 99.9% of the time bubble sort was good enough.
Even at the algorithm level, don't optimize before you know that you have a performance/resource problem. But you better write code so clean that changing to a new algorithm isn't major surgery.
Go is needlessly complex to start up playing on reasonable level and as consequence you're going to be having a lot of uneven matches between random players
It seems you know next to nothing about go. Stronger players give weaker players a handicap. The handicap is a number of stones placed on the board before as the game begins. The number of stones is simply the difference is ranking. Beginners start at around 13 Kyu, progressing to 1 Kyu. From 1 Kyu, progress is to 1 Dan up to 9 Dan. When a 4 Dan plays a 1 Kyu, the 1 Kyu should get a 4 stone handicap. (I know about the professional Dan scale, and I'm ignoring it).
If two folks who do not know their ratings play, the handicap can be determined after the first game by dividing the winning margin by 10. Now was that hard?
A handicap game of go is a lot more interesting than a game of chess between a master and a class A player.
All this assumes that you are serious about your games and are willing to work on getting good. If all you want to do is kill time, go still has simpler rules, and you can use the set to play gomoku.
On the contrary, their behavior is best understood in terms of paranoia that they will be swept away by the next New Thing. That's why they went after Netscape so hard. With Linux, they can't undercut the price so they maintain incompatabilities, they fund FUD (and SCO, but I repeat myself), and they drop prices where it works.
Its slicker that you think. He gets credit for "going to Mars" starting a couple of Presidential terms after he leaves office, AND he buys cover for dismantling the space shuttles, and the space station, and hubble and...
"Pro choice" dogma is directly traceable back to Atheism, where by some dodgy atheology the baby is decreed to be sub-human or somehow less evolved so mummy can have him or her murdered with a clear conscience.
You had better do some research on that. It was not until 1869 that the Catholic Church decreed excommunication for all abortions. Prior to the time, abortion was considered a sin against marriage (by breaking the link between sex and procreation) and only murder after the fetus had recieved a human soul. Thomas Aquinas wrote that a fetus first had a vegatative soul, then an animal soul, and finally a human soul when it was fully formed. See this site
The trouble is that this was a replacement for a true enterprise system. It had about 200 database-to-database external interfaces that need to talk to one system, not some of the old and some of the new. The business rules were, essentially, the Federal rules of evidence, which can be changed with no notice by Congress or the courts, but had to be right or defendents walk. There are tens of thousands of users who are perfectly happy using paper, but might give you one shot to convinced them that the system is worth learning.
The trouble with the sticker is that it singles out evolution, and was put on the biology books to support a particular religous point of view. If every science book carried a sticker to the same effect, for example f = ma is a theory then I suspect that the entire endevor would pass constitutional muster, but it would also collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.
Lots of people want humans to be special in the universe. Evolution pretty much trashes that. But they are not so conflicted as to take on the entire scientific establishment that produces obvious, powerful things like atomic bombs and internets. They think that they can cut evolution out of biology without destroying the entire fabric of modern science. But it won't work.
An erupting volcano puts out enough pollution that "green" scientist say it masks all of our human caused global warming.
Not according to this page: Present-day carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from subaerial and submarine volcanoes are uncertain at the present time. Gerlach (1991) estimated a total global release of 3-4 x 10E12 mol/yr from volcanoes. This is a conservative estimate. Man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions overwhelm this estimate by at least 150 times.
It is amazing that folks will repeat a claim without taking 5 minutes on Google to see if it is true.
One volcanic eruption spews more particulate matter into the atmosphere than years of human activities.
Better check your facts. According to the Seattle TimesMount St. Helens produces between 500 and 1,000 tons a day of carbon dioxide, he estimates.
Nothstein, of the state energy office, says the Centralia coal plant puts out about 28,000 tons a day. Statewide, automobiles, industries, and residential and business heating systems emit nearly 10 times that amount.
"The volcanos did it" is a nice myth, but utterly false.
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
on
Business Under Fire
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· Score: 1
Actually, there have been Jews in Palestine since before Roman times. When the Crusaders took Jerusalem the first thing they did was round up all the Jews they could find, herd them into the synagog, nail the door shut, and set the place on fire.
The Muslims, on the other hand, were happy to live with the Jews for centuries. There was a Jewish population in Palesine when the Brits took it from the Turks.
There are several issues that are all being referred to as "UML."
There is the model driven architecture (MDA) issue (that isn't being talked about here much).
There is the waterfall vs. agile vs. sloppy issue.
There is the authoritarian martinet boss vs. childish coder run amok issue.
The "the tools suck so UML sucks" issue.
And finally, there is the "It sucks so I'll never use it" vs. "Use the right tool for the job" issue.
MDA first. UML is only the first part of OMG.org's attempt to revolutionize software engineering. I find MDA silly beyond words, and so I will not do it justice. Go visit OMG if you are interested in their side. The MDA folks want to be able to build universal models that get reused, transformed to fit domains, manipulated by tools to do all manner of wonderous things. I personally think they are having wet dreams, but it would be great if they could pull it off. That said, if you fully drink the OMG kool aid, you wind up thinking that all we need is a few high priests of models and really smart tools. right.
As for the lifecycle issues, all of us who have been on more that one project know that the waterfall doesn't work; the "let's just write stream-of-consciousness code and screw everything else" doesn't work; and XP requires especially disciplined troops to make it work at all and then only or relatively small projects. What is also clear to anybody who has ever done maintenace, is that unless your code will never be used by anybody but you or it is small enough and well enough written to be understood by a complete noob before lunch the first day he looks at it, it is unprofessional not to document your design. It is also stupid to tackle anything but the tiniest projects without a design (and I count XP's emergent design as a design). So what are you going to use to express your design? How about the notation that all the books about software now use -- UML?
I have worked for more authoritarian bosses than I care to remember. But I have also worked with too many nightmare developers who either simply didn't know what they were doing, had emotional problems, or were just jerks. This has nothing to do with UML, these same types were poinioning the same wells in the days of FORTRAN.
Tools. The three amigos are the worst possible thing that could have happened to UML. They all work for Rational, so bosses think that Rational must have the best tools. **gag** Go look at Magic Draw, or Together, or Embarcadero Describe. I've had reasonable luck with all three. BTW, the three amigos are also behind MDA. I haven't been paying close attention to UML 2, but it seems to me they are making UML less useful for real work to make it more friendly to MDA.
Sometime UML does suck for a particular job, or a particular implementation of UML sucks. That doesn't mean that is should be forever foresworn. It is a good tool for some tasks. Use it for those tasks. If the boss is so stupid as to think that the teams' best guess at a design at the start of the project should be cast in stone, then it is immaterial how you express your design, cuz you are screwed no matter what. (but don't be so silly as to neglect doing any design just to spite a stupid boss)
RTFA! He worked for Battelle, a not-for-profit research organization. They paid him to tinker. They patented his discoveries. They sold the patents.
Besides, he didn't give us portable storage, Phillips did that. This guy figured out how to use a laser to mark and read glass, a square piece of glass. A fine contribution, but a long way from CDs.
I like Amazon, but I (almost) never use it for technical books. I use addall to find the cheapest price. It saves me maybe a couple of hunderd dollars a year. It even finds books internationally, which are sometimes spectacularly cheaper than domestic.
Why cheapen programmers but not cheapen doctors and lawyers also?
the irony is that doctors and lawyers are going to get hit as well, just not at first. If the upper middle class goes down the toilet, who can afford a lawyer? The economy is like an ecosystem. Drain the techie swamp and clear-cut the architect forest and all sorts of species get whacked. Like real estate agents when all those ex-upper middle class folks default on their mortgages.
Look through history and find a "third-world" country with complete military superiority.
Consider Spain. The richest, most powerful country in Europe while the gold from the colonies rolled in. But they tended to import goods rather than improve local industry. And they ended up one of the poorest counties in Europe.
What makes you think that the US will retain complete military superiority? US superiority rests on our technical prowess. If we allow the destruction of our technical class in the name of profits, China will surpass our military in a generation.
I don't care for the H1B program, but I can't come up with a rational reason for denying someone from another country work that doesn't boil down to "I don't want my job at risk.".
I think you ask the wrong question. The proper question should be "Why do we need to import labor?" The real answer is "to drive down wages." There is no shortage of technical talent, indeed I recall that earlier this year the unemployment rate among engineers was higher than the general rate. And even if there were a shortage, the market-centric solution is to let wages rise until more workers enter the field, then wages will fall.
These programs are part of a long-term assault on labor by the corporate class. The goal of the visa programs, outsourcing, and the neutering of unions is to push down the cost of labor.
When the New Deal is completely undone, we will be back in the environment where it was not unusual for someone to go bankrupt 3 or 4 times in their life. Remember that "depression" was introduced as a euphomism for "panic." The explosion of US prosperity after WWII has many roots, but the restraint of predatory capitalists was one of the most important.
The problem with cutting out work visas is that American schools do a lousy job preparing American students for college.
I know some really bright US-born college kids, so let's not decide that all US students are slackers.
And even if bulk of US students are totally unprepared to pursue technical fields, consider that today's students are making rational choices. If we want kids to make the investments of time, energy, sweat, and money that are required to get a BSEE, then we should be able to demonstrate that there will be some payoff. And of course there won't be a payoff. EE, CS, architecture, radiology, financial research, and almost all of the "knowledge worker" fields are headed overseas. So all of these fields turn into the new sociology, where a PhD has almost no economic value outside of academia. (I once knew the head of a sociology department. He used to advise undergrads who wanted to major in soc that there were soc PhDs driving cabs, so a BS wouldn't get them a job.)
Why, exactly, should someone invest 4/5 years and 50-200K$ to qualify for work that gets $3/hr in the global economy?
How do you analyze 5.7 million lines of code except to run it through a static analyzer? Static analyzers can't detect most errors, which tend to be data dependent. So a company selling an uberlint donates their tool, 5 academics run it and write a paper. *Blech*
Commercial software typically has 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code Bull. Software with 20-30 errors per KSLOC doesn't work. (I know, I just spent a year trying to save a project that had 10 errors per KSLOC. Even at that defect density (found and fixed) it was undeliverable. Notice that the link in TFA doesn't take you to anything that supports this assertion, just to the organization's home page. I could't find anything to support these numbers.
Weasely non-comparisons: 2.6 Linux production kernel,... contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code as opposed to Windows XP, by comparison, contains about 40 million lines of code, with new bugs found on a frequent basis.What, bug in Linux are found on an infrequent basis?
My Navy contract got cut, and I got laid off. After 7 weeks looking I had 3 offers. I'm a java guy, but I've also got 30 years experience (major minus!). Northern Virginia is as hot a job market as I have ever seen. If you have skills, you'l get a job.
Today (my second day on the job) I was roped into 2 interviews. Neither candidate could explain how they would go about designing a solution. One had 6 years experience and the other 10. *sigh* Good talent is rare.
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What your boss should be having you do is document the crap out of everything, and then sweet talking you into accepting calls from whoever replaces you.
Even then, memory fades. You get into your new job and the details of the old job get harder to recall.
You owe your new boss your full intellectual bandwidth, especially in the learning stages, when you are not contributing as much as you will once you know the job.
I have had _way_ too many bosses, at all levels of the chain of command who thought they knew how to build software. One was the president of the government systems division, who thought he was a software guy because he had hung tapes for a mainframe when he was in the air force 30 years before. Lots of EEs think they know software because they wrote one-off programs to solve homework assignments. I once ran into a PhD (5 degrees actually) who was leaving the academy to run a 400 person project. Biggest thing he had ever done, 5 people for 2 semesters.
If one of these b-students ever gets to be a boss of mine, and acts like they know anything about the industrial software process, I'm going to find you.
And hurt you.
Even at the algorithm level, don't optimize before you know that you have a performance/resource problem. But you better write code so clean that changing to a new algorithm isn't major surgery.
It seems you know next to nothing about go. Stronger players give weaker players a handicap. The handicap is a number of stones placed on the board before as the game begins. The number of stones is simply the difference is ranking. Beginners start at around 13 Kyu, progressing to 1 Kyu. From 1 Kyu, progress is to 1 Dan up to 9 Dan. When a 4 Dan plays a 1 Kyu, the 1 Kyu should get a 4 stone handicap. (I know about the professional Dan scale, and I'm ignoring it).
If two folks who do not know their ratings play, the handicap can be determined after the first game by dividing the winning margin by 10. Now was that hard?
A handicap game of go is a lot more interesting than a game of chess between a master and a class A player.
All this assumes that you are serious about your games and are willing to work on getting good. If all you want to do is kill time, go still has simpler rules, and you can use the set to play gomoku.
And you just adimtted to the world that you violated the DMCA. Pity, I was starting to like you...
On the contrary, their behavior is best understood in terms of paranoia that they will be swept away by the next New Thing. That's why they went after Netscape so hard. With Linux, they can't undercut the price so they maintain incompatabilities, they fund FUD (and SCO, but I repeat myself), and they drop prices where it works.
Its slicker that you think. He gets credit for "going to Mars" starting a couple of Presidential terms after he leaves office, AND he buys cover for dismantling the space shuttles, and the space station, and hubble and ...
You had better do some research on that. It was not until 1869 that the Catholic Church decreed excommunication for all abortions. Prior to the time, abortion was considered a sin against marriage (by breaking the link between sex and procreation) and only murder after the fetus had recieved a human soul. Thomas Aquinas wrote that a fetus first had a vegatative soul, then an animal soul, and finally a human soul when it was fully formed. See this site
The trouble is that this was a replacement for a true enterprise system. It had about 200 database-to-database external interfaces that need to talk to one system, not some of the old and some of the new. The business rules were, essentially, the Federal rules of evidence, which can be changed with no notice by Congress or the courts, but had to be right or defendents walk. There are tens of thousands of users who are perfectly happy using paper, but might give you one shot to convinced them that the system is worth learning.
This system could not be deployed piecemeal.
Lots of people want humans to be special in the universe. Evolution pretty much trashes that. But they are not so conflicted as to take on the entire scientific establishment that produces obvious, powerful things like atomic bombs and internets. They think that they can cut evolution out of biology without destroying the entire fabric of modern science. But it won't work.
Not according to this page: Present-day carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from subaerial and submarine volcanoes are uncertain at the present time. Gerlach (1991) estimated a total global release of 3-4 x 10E12 mol/yr from volcanoes. This is a conservative estimate. Man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions overwhelm this estimate by at least 150 times.
It is amazing that folks will repeat a claim without taking 5 minutes on Google to see if it is true.
Better check your facts. According to the Seattle Times Mount St. Helens produces between 500 and 1,000 tons a day of carbon dioxide, he estimates. Nothstein, of the state energy office, says the Centralia coal plant puts out about 28,000 tons a day. Statewide, automobiles, industries, and residential and business heating systems emit nearly 10 times that amount.
"The volcanos did it" is a nice myth, but utterly false.
The Muslims, on the other hand, were happy to live with the Jews for centuries. There was a Jewish population in Palesine when the Brits took it from the Turks.
Direct US aid to Israel is running about $400 per person per year. (Israeli person) Loan guarentees are extra.
There is the model driven architecture (MDA) issue (that isn't being talked about here much).
There is the waterfall vs. agile vs. sloppy issue.
There is the authoritarian martinet boss vs. childish coder run amok issue.
The "the tools suck so UML sucks" issue.
And finally, there is the "It sucks so I'll never use it" vs. "Use the right tool for the job" issue.
MDA first. UML is only the first part of OMG.org's attempt to revolutionize software engineering. I find MDA silly beyond words, and so I will not do it justice. Go visit OMG if you are interested in their side. The MDA folks want to be able to build universal models that get reused, transformed to fit domains, manipulated by tools to do all manner of wonderous things. I personally think they are having wet dreams, but it would be great if they could pull it off. That said, if you fully drink the OMG kool aid, you wind up thinking that all we need is a few high priests of models and really smart tools. right.
As for the lifecycle issues, all of us who have been on more that one project know that the waterfall doesn't work; the "let's just write stream-of-consciousness code and screw everything else" doesn't work; and XP requires especially disciplined troops to make it work at all and then only or relatively small projects.
What is also clear to anybody who has ever done maintenace, is that unless your code will never be used by anybody but you or it is small enough and well enough written to be understood by a complete noob before lunch the first day he looks at it, it is unprofessional not to document your design. It is also stupid to tackle anything but the tiniest projects without a design (and I count XP's emergent design as a design). So what are you going to use to express your design? How about the notation that all the books about software now use -- UML?
I have worked for more authoritarian bosses than I care to remember. But I have also worked with too many nightmare developers who either simply didn't know what they were doing, had emotional problems, or were just jerks. This has nothing to do with UML, these same types were poinioning the same wells in the days of FORTRAN.
Tools. The three amigos are the worst possible thing that could have happened to UML. They all work for Rational, so bosses think that Rational must have the best tools. **gag** Go look at Magic Draw, or Together, or Embarcadero Describe. I've had reasonable luck with all three. BTW, the three amigos are also behind MDA. I haven't been paying close attention to UML 2, but it seems to me they are making UML less useful for real work to make it more friendly to MDA.
Sometime UML does suck for a particular job, or a particular implementation of UML sucks. That doesn't mean that is should be forever foresworn. It is a good tool for some tasks. Use it for those tasks. If the boss is so stupid as to think that the teams' best guess at a design at the start of the project should be cast in stone, then it is immaterial how you express your design, cuz you are screwed no matter what. (but don't be so silly as to neglect doing any design just to spite a stupid boss)
Besides, he didn't give us portable storage, Phillips did that. This guy figured out how to use a laser to mark and read glass, a square piece of glass. A fine contribution, but a long way from CDs.
I like Amazon, but I (almost) never use it for technical books. I use addall to find the cheapest price. It saves me maybe a couple of hunderd dollars a year. It even finds books internationally, which are sometimes spectacularly cheaper than domestic.
the irony is that doctors and lawyers are going to get hit as well, just not at first. If the upper middle class goes down the toilet, who can afford a lawyer? The economy is like an ecosystem. Drain the techie swamp and clear-cut the architect forest and all sorts of species get whacked. Like real estate agents when all those ex-upper middle class folks default on their mortgages.
Consider Spain. The richest, most powerful country in Europe while the gold from the colonies rolled in. But they tended to import goods rather than improve local industry. And they ended up one of the poorest counties in Europe.
What makes you think that the US will retain complete military superiority? US superiority rests on our technical prowess. If we allow the destruction of our technical class in the name of profits, China will surpass our military in a generation.
That's the right answer, of course. But it won't pay your bills.
Would you be a lawyer instead?
If I had to to feed my kids, yeah, I'd be a lawyer.
I think you ask the wrong question. The proper question should be "Why do we need to import labor?" The real answer is "to drive down wages." There is no shortage of technical talent, indeed I recall that earlier this year the unemployment rate among engineers was higher than the general rate. And even if there were a shortage, the market-centric solution is to let wages rise until more workers enter the field, then wages will fall.
These programs are part of a long-term assault on labor by the corporate class. The goal of the visa programs, outsourcing, and the neutering of unions is to push down the cost of labor.
When the New Deal is completely undone, we will be back in the environment where it was not unusual for someone to go bankrupt 3 or 4 times in their life. Remember that "depression" was introduced as a euphomism for "panic." The explosion of US prosperity after WWII has many roots, but the restraint of predatory capitalists was one of the most important.
I know some really bright US-born college kids, so let's not decide that all US students are slackers.
And even if bulk of US students are totally unprepared to pursue technical fields, consider that today's students are making rational choices. If we want kids to make the investments of time, energy, sweat, and money that are required to get a BSEE, then we should be able to demonstrate that there will be some payoff. And of course there won't be a payoff. EE, CS, architecture, radiology, financial research, and almost all of the "knowledge worker" fields are headed overseas. So all of these fields turn into the new sociology, where a PhD has almost no economic value outside of academia. (I once knew the head of a sociology department. He used to advise undergrads who wanted to major in soc that there were soc PhDs driving cabs, so a BS wouldn't get them a job.)
Why, exactly, should someone invest 4/5 years and 50-200K$ to qualify for work that gets $3/hr in the global economy?
How do you analyze 5.7 million lines of code except to run it through a static analyzer? Static analyzers can't detect most errors, which tend to be data dependent. So a company selling an uberlint donates their tool, 5 academics run it and write a paper. *Blech*
Commercial software typically has 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code Bull. Software with 20-30 errors per KSLOC doesn't work. (I know, I just spent a year trying to save a project that had 10 errors per KSLOC. Even at that defect density (found and fixed) it was undeliverable. Notice that the link in TFA doesn't take you to anything that supports this assertion, just to the organization's home page. I could't find anything to support these numbers.
Weasely non-comparisons: 2.6 Linux production kernel, ... contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code as opposed to Windows XP, by comparison, contains about 40 million lines of code, with new bugs found on a frequent basis.What, bug in Linux are found on an infrequent basis?
This is all hot air.
will have no trouble deciding what animal to put on the cover of this book.
Today (my second day on the job) I was roped into 2 interviews. Neither candidate could explain how they would go about designing a solution. One had 6 years experience and the other 10. *sigh* Good talent is rare.