...but I can't get decent software developers anywhere. The're becoming harder to find alright, but it's not because companies are offshoring, or replacing them with code generation tools, or whatever this whack-job's theory is....it's because too many people were pulled into the industry because of the glitz and glamour (i.e. Money) of the dot-com era, and even the 2002-2003 recession wasn't enough to push them all out. Now we have a situation where idiots employ idiots because they don't know any better.
Good developers will be able to find good jobs for the forseeable future (10 years minimum). The need for them is not going away. And it won't until you can sit a computer down with a domain expert and turn english prose into executable code.
Scientists are speculating that it may have something to do with chicken estrogen left over in manure or perhaps even human hormones dumped in the river from sewage treatment plants.
Why is it that strange behavior (or what seems strange to us) is always seen as unnatural, and somehow our fault? Even the people looking into this case seem to be jumping to the conclusion that it is a pollutant, but in the same sentance they say that they don't really know what's causing it.
IIRC, there are a few species of amphibians that spontanously change gender when there's not enough of the opposite sex around. Evolutionarily speaking, fish and amphibians aren't that different, so why would you jump to the conclusion that that it's a pollutant? Maybe the people investigating this have some evidence to support that theory, but that wasn't mentioned in the article. Actually, the last two paragraphs go on to explain this this section of river has done "well on most aspects of water-quality testing" and that it is "one of our highest-quality fisheries".
Maybe it's a disease. Maybe it's a mutation. Maybe these particular bass cross bred with some frogs. Nobody can say for sure at this point, but they sure can speculate that it's all our fault. And that's just bad science.
You: "Hello. I'm an independent contractor with no experience, no support staff, and no financial backing whatsoever. I'm doing this because I don't want to work for "The Man." Did I mention I'm 20 years old? Please hire me."
Them: "Uh, no."
People become independent IT contractors after they have 20 years of experience and get fed up working for other people. They can do this because they have 20 years worth of personal contacts, industry knowledge and hands-on experience to draw from. You have none of those things.
You say you're willing to work for less. That's good, because you're going to be working for a lot less...like zero. Oh, and were you aware that you'll have to pay more in taxes at the end of the year because you're an independent contractor? Hope you like 1099 forms because you're going to be seeing a lot of them.
This is one of those things where, if you have to ask for help, you're better off not doing it. If and when the time is right for you to quit your 9-5 job and contract yourself, you'll know it. By that time, you won't have very many questions at all, which is a good sign that you might actually be sucessful.
You haven't even given yourself a chance to hate the 9-5 IT job yet. You might as well try. Who knows, you might actually enjoy it! Stranger things have happened.
I was making a reference to Bush Jr.'s tour in the Texas National Guard where he did an excellent job of keeping the North Vietnameese out of Austin.
I thought that was obvious, and I'm sorry for any confusion. I guess not everyone who reads the political posts on slashdot is as politicaly minded as I.
The all of the U.S. armed forces are strictly volunteer only. When you choose to join the military you also choose to accept the risk that you might actually have to use all the training and equipment at your disposal and actually go to war.
Nothing could be more equitable. Instutiting a draft will not improve this system. In fact, if Vietnam is any example, a draft would unfairly pull in working class people because they're less likely to be able to get exceptions because of college or a cushy tour in National Guard.
This bill was Democrat party politicing, plain and simple. It has no real value and was never intended to be passed.
OK I realize that this may be a bit offtopic, but I've got Karma to burn, so here goes:
Arnold is doing a good job as Governor.
Uh oh...I've gone and done it now. I've thrown all my credibility out the window. I must be an idiot for thinking that an actor could be a good governor. I must be stupid for thinking that anyone but a professional politican could actually hold office, not to mention the top executive office of the most powerful state in the union.
To those politically ill-informed among you, I know this may come as a shock. I know that you enjoy following every reference to the Governor with some half-wit, cliche joke about how he's going to 'terminate' something, but guess what? He's actually doing his job well. Balancing the budget, reforming the workman's comp program, and lots of other little-published but much needed reforms (such as this one) are all what California desperately needs.
The framers didn't want America to be run by professional policicans. They wanted America to be run by it's people. Average citizens to step for a few years to perform a civic duty, and then go back to the private sector to get on with thier lives. That's what Arnold is doing. He's cleaning up other people's messes because it needs to get done. I'm sure he got lots of other motivations that are not nearly as noble, of course, but the fact remains that he's fixing a problem that needs to be fixed, and you have to give him credit for that.
The only way to be sure is to have a computer engineer with hardware-level access manually check the thing out.
And that's exactly what the election inspector would do.
Depending on exactly how the device is designed, the inspection should consist of two parts: Checking the hardware, and checking the software.
The hardware would be checked in the same manner that current voting hardware is checked. It's not all punch-cards out there, you know. There's lots of old school equipment that is used to collate the results (punch card readers, etc...) that needs to be checked. The only 'new' thing here that needs to be checked is the software, and since you can't inspect that physically, you have to use another verification system.
One option would be to have the inspector remove the hard drive/flashcard/other storage device, and hook it up to a laptop or something and verify it's contents. Another option would simply be to boot the machine, knoppix style, off a read only medium and just validate that.
Publicly accessable source - Whatever licening terms you use, the source code must be easily available to anyone and everyone who wants to read it.
Verifiable binaries - Election inspectors must be able to verify the binaries installed on the machine by generating an MD5 (or equivelent) hashcode and comparing it to the published source.
Paper Trail - The voting machine must keep a human-readble printed record of every vote cast. This is the only meaningful way to do recounts. In case of a discrepancy, the paper record should act as the real ballot...the electronic vote is just a fancy method of counting.
One thing I am opposed to is a "voting receipt" that the voter gets to confirm that thier vote has been cast. While this sounds good in theory, it's too easy for powerful organization (unions, corportations, etc...) to sway elections by paying people for voting by having them turn in thier voting receipts after an election.
North Korea has said that news of recent nuclear experiments in the South has made it even more determined not to abandon its own weapons programme.
You know what else motivates the North Koreans into developing nuclear weapons? Rabbits. And the Goodyear blimp. And sock puppets. North Korea is going to justify thier weapons program using every wack-job idea they can come up with. The color of Bush's tie offends them, so they have to develop nuclear weapons to protect the North Korean people from that horrible shade of cornflower blue.
It wasn't US and S. Korean experiments that caused the north to develop nuclear weapons, it was US and S. Korean existence that caused them to do it.
Companies fine people all the time. If you pay your credit card bill late, they fine you. If you fail to return a movie on time, they fine you. If you cancel a mobile phone contract early, they fine you.
When you agree to the terms of service for paypal, it's like any other contract...you're legally bound to hold up your end of the deal or they can sue you. If the contract says you will be fined for doing XYZ and you do it, you have to pay the penalty. If you don't like it, don't use paypal.
So you think the terms of your job should be "protected" by the government, huh? Obviously you've never heard of the Employment at Will doctrine. The answer to your question is yes, you have rights. You have the right to quit. Don't take that right lightly....you might not miss it until it's gone.
If the government is allowed to set down terms and conditions for when your company is allowed to fire you, what's to stop them from setting down terms and conditions for when you're allowed to quit? Sorry, you can't quit this week, a Hurricane is coming we need every able bodied employee available to stack sandbags. Quitting now would cause "excessive loss of profit" to the company and the "Protect our Jobs Act of 2004" says that's illegal. Try again next week, after the flood subsides.
No thanks. Employment at will means at their will, and yours. If you don't like the job requirements, quit. Get off your ass and find a better job. The market is picking up anyway.
Taking a promotion or a raise instead of leaving for a new job is usually a bad, bad idea.
They think (know) you're disloyal. When it's time for layoffs, you'll be the first to go.
It's possible they're just giving you a raise to give them time to find your replacement. Whenever they're ready, you might be out the door (having passed on your other job offer already).
To use a poker analogy, managers don't like being check-raised. If you think this won't effect their professional/personal opinion of you in the long term, you're wrong.
Most importantly: If you hate the job enough to look for another one, why would you stay? Is the raise/promotion really worth it?
IANANP (I am not a nuclear physicist), so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but what exactly is the problem with regular old "hot" fusion? Is it just the containment problem? Why can't you regulate and contain a small fusion reaction with control rods or some other mechanism like you can with fission?
FOSS will reverse-engineer and/or come out with far better codecs.
Oh, you mean like the ogg codec? Yeah ogg is great. I love being able to play ogg file on my iPod..oh wait, no. I mean I love being able to stream them to my Tivo. Wait, no I mean, It's great that I can burn ogg files onto a cd and play them in my car mp3...er ogg...wait, no.
Better technical solutions do not prevail simply because they're better. Mandating a patented codec is a very bad thing because now legal (i.e. DMCA) and licensing issues become much more important than the technical merit of the codec in determining it's success. FOSS can't save you from Microsoft's undead army of lawyers and marketing drones in this case.
However, in the world of intelectual property, there is no such thing as scarcity,
Huh? Is there a vast army of top-notch zombie programmers that you have stashed away on a small island somewhere? Do you happen to have a cloning machine that makes fully formed nobel-prize winning biochemists? There is most definitely scarcity in the world of intellectual property...it's called: The Labor Market.
Intellectual property has to be created by someone with talent. Lots of talent, that takes years of training and (as some would argue) a particular kind of mindset. Not everyone can perform these tasks, which means we have a limited resource that needs to be efficently allocated in the marketplace. To think that the rules of the free market do not apply just because you can copy software with little or no cost is missing the point. The scarcity isn't the software...it's the people. Software that's been well understood, and copied over and over, (open-sourced even) is a commodity, sure. But you can run an economy soley based on commodities!
Any sucessful economic system needs to grow...it needs to generate value. To do that, you need smart people making new software (and books, and movies, and graphic art, etc...). As long as the talent needed to create these things is in limited supply, Capitalism will apply to the IP market just as surely as it applies to everything else.
It's offical. Left-wing zealotry has taken hold and reality has left the building.
1) I hate hummers. They're stupid. At no point in my post did I defend the existince of the Hummer.
2) Regarless of the position of the bumper on a semi, if it hits your 500lb. solar car going 80mph. You're toast. It doesn't matter if it's a minvan, and SUV, or a M1-Abrams Tank.
3) True, semi-trucks require a CDL license do drive. This is relevant how? The driver of the solar car lost control and swerved into the other lane.
My whole point, which was evidently overwhelmed by a landslide of anti-SUV rants, what that is accident was a tragedy. Much like the Columbia shuttle explosion, experimental technology failed and people lost thier lives. SUV's are irrelevant. The car didn't even hit an SUV, it hit a minivan. If it had hit a brick wall the outcome would have been the same...the tragic death of a 21 year old working on technology to benefit us all.
But all Slashdot sees is an excuse to bash the Hummer.
this will be a problem as more efficient, lighter cars share the road with Hummers.
Sure, lets blame the big, bad, SUV because your car is unsafe. I realize that the Hummer is the mortal enemy of solar car advoates everywhere but how is this possibly relevant? If you follow that logic we should ban Semi-trucks from the road as well. We've got to make it safe for experimental solar car vehicles, right?
Gimme a break. This is a tragedy, and you're trying to spin in into an anti-SUV infomercial.
If you listen to people like Martin Fowler (and I do, because he's a smart guy). You start to believe that the first and most significant factor in the success of a software project is getting the best people. Most experinced software managers know what Fredrick Brooks figured out in the 1970's, which is that a good programmer can be 10 times more productive than a bad one.
To laypeople, this is so counterintutive as to be absurd, especially considering that you can't measure productivity, but it is nonetheless true. While picking the right development process, management team, tools, etc. are important, nothing is as important as getting the best people that you can find. Although you have to pay them twice as much sometimes, the ROI on a good developer is going to be 200%-500% higher than a bad one.
Slashdot Mirror
...but I can't get decent software developers anywhere. The're becoming harder to find alright, but it's not because companies are offshoring, or replacing them with code generation tools, or whatever this whack-job's theory is....it's because too many people were pulled into the industry because of the glitz and glamour (i.e. Money) of the dot-com era, and even the 2002-2003 recession wasn't enough to push them all out. Now we have a situation where idiots employ idiots because they don't know any better.
Good developers will be able to find good jobs for the forseeable future (10 years minimum). The need for them is not going away. And it won't until you can sit a computer down with a domain expert and turn english prose into executable code.
Scientists are speculating that it may have something to do with chicken estrogen left over in manure or perhaps even human hormones dumped in the river from sewage treatment plants.
Why is it that strange behavior (or what seems strange to us) is always seen as unnatural, and somehow our fault? Even the people looking into this case seem to be jumping to the conclusion that it is a pollutant, but in the same sentance they say that they don't really know what's causing it.
IIRC, there are a few species of amphibians that spontanously change gender when there's not enough of the opposite sex around. Evolutionarily speaking, fish and amphibians aren't that different, so why would you jump to the conclusion that that it's a pollutant? Maybe the people investigating this have some evidence to support that theory, but that wasn't mentioned in the article. Actually, the last two paragraphs go on to explain this this section of river has done "well on most aspects of water-quality testing" and that it is "one of our highest-quality fisheries".
Maybe it's a disease. Maybe it's a mutation. Maybe these particular bass cross bred with some frogs. Nobody can say for sure at this point, but they sure can speculate that it's all our fault. And that's just bad science.
You: "Hello. I'm an independent contractor with no experience, no support staff, and no financial backing whatsoever. I'm doing this because I don't want to work for "The Man." Did I mention I'm 20 years old? Please hire me."
Them: "Uh, no."
People become independent IT contractors after they have 20 years of experience and get fed up working for other people. They can do this because they have 20 years worth of personal contacts, industry knowledge and hands-on experience to draw from. You have none of those things.
You say you're willing to work for less. That's good, because you're going to be working for a lot less...like zero. Oh, and were you aware that you'll have to pay more in taxes at the end of the year because you're an independent contractor? Hope you like 1099 forms because you're going to be seeing a lot of them.
This is one of those things where, if you have to ask for help, you're better off not doing it. If and when the time is right for you to quit your 9-5 job and contract yourself, you'll know it. By that time, you won't have very many questions at all, which is a good sign that you might actually be sucessful.
You haven't even given yourself a chance to hate the 9-5 IT job yet. You might as well try. Who knows, you might actually enjoy it! Stranger things have happened.
I was making a reference to Bush Jr.'s tour in the Texas National Guard where he did an excellent job of keeping the North Vietnameese out of Austin.
I thought that was obvious, and I'm sorry for any confusion. I guess not everyone who reads the political posts on slashdot is as politicaly minded as I.
The all of the U.S. armed forces are strictly volunteer only. When you choose to join the military you also choose to accept the risk that you might actually have to use all the training and equipment at your disposal and actually go to war.
Nothing could be more equitable. Instutiting a draft will not improve this system. In fact, if Vietnam is any example, a draft would unfairly pull in working class people because they're less likely to be able to get exceptions because of college or a cushy tour in National Guard.
This bill was Democrat party politicing, plain and simple. It has no real value and was never intended to be passed.
Anyone out there move an existing project from CVS to subversion? Can you enlighten the group with your reasons why?
Thanks.
OK I realize that this may be a bit offtopic, but I've got Karma to burn, so here goes:
Arnold is doing a good job as Governor.
Uh oh...I've gone and done it now. I've thrown all my credibility out the window. I must be an idiot for thinking that an actor could be a good governor. I must be stupid for thinking that anyone but a professional politican could actually hold office, not to mention the top executive office of the most powerful state in the union.
To those politically ill-informed among you, I know this may come as a shock. I know that you enjoy following every reference to the Governor with some half-wit, cliche joke about how he's going to 'terminate' something, but guess what? He's actually doing his job well. Balancing the budget, reforming the workman's comp program, and lots of other little-published but much needed reforms (such as this one) are all what California desperately needs.
The framers didn't want America to be run by professional policicans. They wanted America to be run by it's people. Average citizens to step for a few years to perform a civic duty, and then go back to the private sector to get on with thier lives. That's what Arnold is doing. He's cleaning up other people's messes because it needs to get done. I'm sure he got lots of other motivations that are not nearly as noble, of course, but the fact remains that he's fixing a problem that needs to be fixed, and you have to give him credit for that.
The only way to be sure is to have a computer engineer with hardware-level access manually check the thing out.
And that's exactly what the election inspector would do.
Depending on exactly how the device is designed, the inspection should consist of two parts: Checking the hardware, and checking the software.
The hardware would be checked in the same manner that current voting hardware is checked. It's not all punch-cards out there, you know. There's lots of old school equipment that is used to collate the results (punch card readers, etc...) that needs to be checked. The only 'new' thing here that needs to be checked is the software, and since you can't inspect that physically, you have to use another verification system.
One option would be to have the inspector remove the hard drive/flashcard/other storage device, and hook it up to a laptop or something and verify it's contents. Another option would simply be to boot the machine, knoppix style, off a read only medium and just validate that.
- Publicly accessable source - Whatever licening terms you use, the source code must be easily available to anyone and everyone who wants to read it.
- Verifiable binaries - Election inspectors must be able to verify the binaries installed on the machine by generating an MD5 (or equivelent) hashcode and comparing it to the published source.
- Paper Trail - The voting machine must keep a human-readble printed record of every vote cast. This is the only meaningful way to do recounts. In case of a discrepancy, the paper record should act as the real ballot...the electronic vote is just a fancy method of counting.
One thing I am opposed to is a "voting receipt" that the voter gets to confirm that thier vote has been cast. While this sounds good in theory, it's too easy for powerful organization (unions, corportations, etc...) to sway elections by paying people for voting by having them turn in thier voting receipts after an election....between this and Groovy?
From the article you linked:
North Korea has said that news of recent nuclear experiments in the South has made it even more determined not to abandon its own weapons programme.
You know what else motivates the North Koreans into developing nuclear weapons? Rabbits. And the Goodyear blimp. And sock puppets. North Korea is going to justify thier weapons program using every wack-job idea they can come up with. The color of Bush's tie offends them, so they have to develop nuclear weapons to protect the North Korean people from that horrible shade of cornflower blue.
It wasn't US and S. Korean experiments that caused the north to develop nuclear weapons, it was US and S. Korean existence that caused them to do it.
What right does paypal have to fine people.
Companies fine people all the time. If you pay your credit card bill late, they fine you. If you fail to return a movie on time, they fine you. If you cancel a mobile phone contract early, they fine you.
When you agree to the terms of service for paypal, it's like any other contract...you're legally bound to hold up your end of the deal or they can sue you. If the contract says you will be fined for doing XYZ and you do it, you have to pay the penalty. If you don't like it, don't use paypal.
So you think the terms of your job should be "protected" by the government, huh? Obviously you've never heard of the Employment at Will doctrine. The answer to your question is yes, you have rights. You have the right to quit. Don't take that right lightly....you might not miss it until it's gone.
If the government is allowed to set down terms and conditions for when your company is allowed to fire you, what's to stop them from setting down terms and conditions for when you're allowed to quit? Sorry, you can't quit this week, a Hurricane is coming we need every able bodied employee available to stack sandbags. Quitting now would cause "excessive loss of profit" to the company and the "Protect our Jobs Act of 2004" says that's illegal. Try again next week, after the flood subsides.
No thanks. Employment at will means at their will, and yours. If you don't like the job requirements, quit. Get off your ass and find a better job. The market is picking up anyway.
Nice link.
I also like Rasmussen Reports.
IANANP (I am not a nuclear physicist), so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but what exactly is the problem with regular old "hot" fusion? Is it just the containment problem? Why can't you regulate and contain a small fusion reaction with control rods or some other mechanism like you can with fission?
FOSS will reverse-engineer and/or come out with far better codecs.
Oh, you mean like the ogg codec? Yeah ogg is great. I love being able to play ogg file on my iPod..oh wait, no. I mean I love being able to stream them to my Tivo. Wait, no I mean, It's great that I can burn ogg files onto a cd and play them in my car mp3...er ogg...wait, no.
Better technical solutions do not prevail simply because they're better. Mandating a patented codec is a very bad thing because now legal (i.e. DMCA) and licensing issues become much more important than the technical merit of the codec in determining it's success. FOSS can't save you from Microsoft's undead army of lawyers and marketing drones in this case.
Hank: By the way, Homer, what's your least favorite country; Italy or France?
Homer: France.
Hank: [chuckles] Nobody ever says Italy. [sets the coordinates of a giant laser gun]
Err, that should be "But you can't run an economy soley based on commodities!"
Damn preview button. Always making me not hit it.
However, in the world of intelectual property, there is no such thing as scarcity,
Huh? Is there a vast army of top-notch zombie programmers that you have stashed away on a small island somewhere? Do you happen to have a cloning machine that makes fully formed nobel-prize winning biochemists? There is most definitely scarcity in the world of intellectual property...it's called: The Labor Market.
Intellectual property has to be created by someone with talent. Lots of talent, that takes years of training and (as some would argue) a particular kind of mindset. Not everyone can perform these tasks, which means we have a limited resource that needs to be efficently allocated in the marketplace. To think that the rules of the free market do not apply just because you can copy software with little or no cost is missing the point. The scarcity isn't the software...it's the people. Software that's been well understood, and copied over and over, (open-sourced even) is a commodity, sure. But you can run an economy soley based on commodities!
Any sucessful economic system needs to grow...it needs to generate value. To do that, you need smart people making new software (and books, and movies, and graphic art, etc...). As long as the talent needed to create these things is in limited supply, Capitalism will apply to the IP market just as surely as it applies to everything else.
Don't buy it.
It's offical. Left-wing zealotry has taken hold and reality has left the building.
1) I hate hummers. They're stupid. At no point in my post did I defend the existince of the Hummer.
2) Regarless of the position of the bumper on a semi, if it hits your 500lb. solar car going 80mph. You're toast. It doesn't matter if it's a minvan, and SUV, or a M1-Abrams Tank.
3) True, semi-trucks require a CDL license do drive. This is relevant how? The driver of the solar car lost control and swerved into the other lane.
My whole point, which was evidently overwhelmed by a landslide of anti-SUV rants, what that is accident was a tragedy. Much like the Columbia shuttle explosion, experimental technology failed and people lost thier lives. SUV's are irrelevant. The car didn't even hit an SUV, it hit a minivan. If it had hit a brick wall the outcome would have been the same...the tragic death of a 21 year old working on technology to benefit us all.
But all Slashdot sees is an excuse to bash the Hummer.
this will be a problem as more efficient, lighter cars share the road with Hummers.
Sure, lets blame the big, bad, SUV because your car is unsafe. I realize that the Hummer is the mortal enemy of solar car advoates everywhere but how is this possibly relevant? If you follow that logic we should ban Semi-trucks from the road as well. We've got to make it safe for experimental solar car vehicles, right?
Gimme a break. This is a tragedy, and you're trying to spin in into an anti-SUV infomercial.
If you listen to people like Martin Fowler (and I do, because he's a smart guy). You start to believe that the first and most significant factor in the success of a software project is getting the best people. Most experinced software managers know what Fredrick Brooks figured out in the 1970's, which is that a good programmer can be 10 times more productive than a bad one.
To laypeople, this is so counterintutive as to be absurd, especially considering that you can't measure productivity, but it is nonetheless true. While picking the right development process, management team, tools, etc. are important, nothing is as important as getting the best people that you can find. Although you have to pay them twice as much sometimes, the ROI on a good developer is going to be 200%-500% higher than a bad one.
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