When was it that America tried to enforce justice?
Starting with slavery and moving on to the railroad monopolies, tammany hall, the Chicago political machine, union busting in the 1930's, the company towns of the coal mines, separate but equal and on and on and on. We do try in fits and starts to fix these things, but always the rich and privileged find ways to give themselves privileges and immunity that the average Joe is not entitled to. It is not just American history but world history that teaches us this. So, maybe we should stop being sad about a time that didn't exist and do something about it. Whether we vote with our money or in the ballot box or through protest it is up to us to change things and looking back on a better time that did not really exist will not get it done.
No, McVeigh was executed for killing 186 people including 19 children and injuring 450 others. His beliefs were never the subject of any of the crimes for which he was convicted. He may have done what he did to stand "up to what he believed was an oppresive[sic] government", but he did it in a cowardly and evil way. My own feeling is that a man who killed that many innocent people got what he deserved no matter his beliefs.
I agree. I can't see how any of this is a problem. I am "Forced" to wear an RFID badge at work. Oh and scary they can track me at work. But, I leave it in my car or on the kitchen counter at night. Why can't a school make her were a badge at school. If they wanted to tattoo it on her arm or inject it under her skin I could see all the number of the beast stuff, but "You need this badge to be with you while you are at school so, we know where you are." seems a reasonable and justifiable request.
Your witty Slashdot one-liner tells me every time you see stats, you just say that. RTFA
This exact correlation can be found to any substance that we used in the 60's but banned later and was eliminated in the 90's: DDT, asbestos, CFCs etc. Hell I bet you would find this correlation in the decline in radio listeners and a rise in the quality of American made cars. They didn't prove anything. If they compared blood samples from the prison population and the general population, during that time period, and found that the prison population had higher levels of lead then they would start to have convincing statistics. This is just a guess that maybe these numbers mean something. I would say the correlation is strong enough to warrant further investigation. Until then it is just a guess that maybe somehow lead and crime were related in this time period.
But, correlation is not causation. I'm not necessarily saying that it isn't true. But, I'm pretty sure you would find the same sort of correlation to asbestos whose abatement coincides nicely with this timeline too. The researchers will need to draw some blood samples from the general population at the time to find out for sure. Oh, damn we don't have a time machine.:-)
why don't our tools enforce these standards automagically?
They do. Almost every modern IDE will format to a standard and mark code that is not to that standard. Tools like "checkstyle" can document code that is not correct during the develop or build phase. That is why no one is wasting anyone's time here having a corporate standard. Comments about how many hours where lost "picking nits over whitespace" tell the story of developers who are too uninformed, ignorant or more likely self important to follow simple guidelines that for the most part can be automated. These are exactly the type of developer I want no where near my code base. If they won't follow the style standard they sure a f&*$ won't use the DAL as intended or follow the MVC standards. They are the developers who spend 1000 hours generating their own XML parser because they don't like they way DOM or SAX work. Having a standard does not waste time, but the kind of developer who won't follow it does.
Big companies have got to hate paying the Microsoft tax every couple of years when MS stops supporting an OS. They have to purchase new licenses and often new hardware. Why don't the fortune 1000 get together and turn Ubuntu into something they can all use?
Sure the installer can CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS. And it often does. I've been involved with several such installs. My point was more that at an enterprise level your application has to be deployed into and existing infrastructure and you cannot take all the possible corporate configurations. They might use akamai so custom tags have to go on each page. Or they might deploy to an application server that you have not seen before (OC4J anyone). Maybe they have a password management scheme that means you have to hit LDAP when your server starts up to pull the application password. They might restrict your ability to create tables and only allow their own DBAs to create tables. I have seen all of this and more at the enterprise level. No medium to large company really allows the possibility of just running an install script for anything of any complexity.
Well yes, theoretically I would agree. But, then that damn reality pokes its ugly head in and things are more complicated than we want them to be. Enterprise software, especially web based applications often cannot be packaged as a single file. Companies often want the database to run on their existing Oracle (or whatever) install, which means scripts to build out the tables in their database. There are often existing APIs that need to be called that are custom to the client. That means that after the install you will need to add code to make API calls that the standard install does not necessarily make. Many companies have existing web server farms that they want to run the application on so it will have to be deployed to each of the existing servers or they want to separate the static content from the dynamic. There are a million and one reasons that your simplistic view of the world cannot be achieved in the real world.
I love animals too. But, pigeon shootings? The town council in most small towns would buy the shells if you would kill the pigeons that flock to the town square. Sorry about their little toy helicopter, but you get what you deserve.
Wow, So, when does it turn out that you are wrong. I mean a 30 year slide is a pretty long slide. If another 100 years pass and we haven't "gone to hell" will it turn out that you were wrong? I think you are like the end of the world people. The end is always just a day away. Luckily that tomorrow has not yet come.
We need a better set of qualifications for the job. Engineers don't have a union but they won't let you design a bridge unless you are an engineer. The current "Computer Science" major does not make a qualified developer. Reading c++ or java in a weekend does not make a good developer. Yet companies hire these people and allow them to create big balls of mud that don't work. We need apprenticeships and a way to communicate what level a developer is to the "lay" community. Sr Developer and Web Guru are not the same thing to you and I, but from the outside it sounds like that Guru is the guy to go with. I'm not sure how we do this, but the profession really needs it. As a consultant I've worked with a number of companies that when I got there didn't even have reasonable source control, and the developers were didn't have any knowledge of "SOP" in the industry. We need a way to differentiate in the business community between professional programmer and somebody who can type into an IDE.
If you are a programmer and want to have fun learning about math you might look at Project Euler. http://projecteuler.net/
Not a book I know. But, very fun and educational.
I have to agree with dkf here. I don't think you understand CI or how it is valuable. You don't need test first or any of that. Your code should always build. CI is a guarantee that the codebase will always build. A guarantee that developers are not committing broken code. From that vantage you can add lots of good stuff: Unit Testing, Style Reviews, Automated Bug Checks, Automated Dependency Updates... But, you have to start with a codebase that compiles and CI does that.
Not saying this is some kind of a cure all, but I've seen package level javadocs that run to pages and provide a very good overview of the system and how to use it.
Well first read the Javadocs before you start. I agree that the best way to provide good documentation for developers is to have some good examples of using the API. You need a "Manual", but more than that you need good examples and good Javadocs. I have found that if the Javadocs are good I can spend an hour or so reading through the classes that make up the public API. Run some of the examples that do close to what I need to be done. Then I am ready to code and usually do so without issue. The only time this doesn't work is when some "obvious" thing (to the original developers) has been left out of all the documentation. You know, the PATH variable you have to setup or the property file that has to be in classpath. That lack of stating the "obvious" is the worst.
NOOO. Bacon is the central pillar of my diet. BLTs, Bacon Omelets, Bacon wrapped meat of all kinds, Bacon wrapped bacon. How will I live without my lovely bacon?
What, What the left controls the media and the right has nowhere to speak. Except that then you talk about all the places where the right not only speaks, but allows no other points of view. The left wing controlled media you disparage in your first paragraph allows discussion from both sides. While it might lean to the center or center left it allows the debate from both sides to be heard. Fox news and its ilk simply call all who disagree communist Unamerican traitors. We hear this lie from the right so often that people begin to believe it. The loudest most heard political talk comes from the far right. Please stop with the victim of the lame stream media act. It wears very thin. Poor poor right wing victims.
Not true. The bible itself is logically inconsistent. You cannot decide what is "true" or "false" based on it using logic alone. Sometimes you must love your neighbor and sometimes you must kill them all and their women and animals down to the last one. If the bible could be parsed logically and you just did what it said then we would not have 2000 years of church doctrine and disagreement about what the bible says. If you start with the premise that is not consistent then none of the statements in your logic are valid. The bible is not consistent ergo cannot be used to generate logical action.
Christianity is blasphemy to a Muslim. Islam is blasphemy to a Jew. Mormonism is blasphemy to a Christian. And us atheists, well no religion thinks that ain't blasphemy. So, would this mean that everybody just shuts up about their particular brand of religion or does the world have to pick just one? Because, otherwise it is a joke of an idea.
Slashdot Mirror
When was it that America tried to enforce justice?
Starting with slavery and moving on to the railroad monopolies, tammany hall, the Chicago political machine, union busting in the 1930's, the company towns of the coal mines, separate but equal and on and on and on. We do try in fits and starts to fix these things, but always the rich and privileged find ways to give themselves privileges and immunity that the average Joe is not entitled to. It is not just American history but world history that teaches us this. So, maybe we should stop being sad about a time that didn't exist and do something about it. Whether we vote with our money or in the ballot box or through protest it is up to us to change things and looking back on a better time that did not really exist will not get it done.
No, McVeigh was executed for killing 186 people including 19 children and injuring 450 others. His beliefs were never the subject of any of the crimes for which he was convicted. He may have done what he did to stand "up to what he believed was an oppresive[sic] government", but he did it in a cowardly and evil way. My own feeling is that a man who killed that many innocent people got what he deserved no matter his beliefs.
I agree. I can't see how any of this is a problem. I am "Forced" to wear an RFID badge at work. Oh and scary they can track me at work. But, I leave it in my car or on the kitchen counter at night. Why can't a school make her were a badge at school. If they wanted to tattoo it on her arm or inject it under her skin I could see all the number of the beast stuff, but "You need this badge to be with you while you are at school so, we know where you are." seems a reasonable and justifiable request.
Your witty Slashdot one-liner tells me every time you see stats, you just say that. RTFA
This exact correlation can be found to any substance that we used in the 60's but banned later and was eliminated in the 90's: DDT, asbestos, CFCs etc. Hell I bet you would find this correlation in the decline in radio listeners and a rise in the quality of American made cars. They didn't prove anything. If they compared blood samples from the prison population and the general population, during that time period, and found that the prison population had higher levels of lead then they would start to have convincing statistics. This is just a guess that maybe these numbers mean something. I would say the correlation is strong enough to warrant further investigation. Until then it is just a guess that maybe somehow lead and crime were related in this time period.
But, correlation is not causation. I'm not necessarily saying that it isn't true. But, I'm pretty sure you would find the same sort of correlation to asbestos whose abatement coincides nicely with this timeline too. The researchers will need to draw some blood samples from the general population at the time to find out for sure. Oh, damn we don't have a time machine. :-)
Flying cars and personal jet packs.
why don't our tools enforce these standards automagically?
They do. Almost every modern IDE will format to a standard and mark code that is not to that standard. Tools like "checkstyle" can document code that is not correct during the develop or build phase. That is why no one is wasting anyone's time here having a corporate standard. Comments about how many hours where lost "picking nits over whitespace" tell the story of developers who are too uninformed, ignorant or more likely self important to follow simple guidelines that for the most part can be automated. These are exactly the type of developer I want no where near my code base. If they won't follow the style standard they sure a f&*$ won't use the DAL as intended or follow the MVC standards. They are the developers who spend 1000 hours generating their own XML parser because they don't like they way DOM or SAX work. Having a standard does not waste time, but the kind of developer who won't follow it does.
Now you know how to make a car analogy!! Rock on my friend.
Thank you for your serious and thoughtful comment. You piss head. (now technically that was a complement)
Big companies have got to hate paying the Microsoft tax every couple of years when MS stops supporting an OS. They have to purchase new licenses and often new hardware. Why don't the fortune 1000 get together and turn Ubuntu into something they can all use?
Sure the installer can CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS. And it often does. I've been involved with several such installs. My point was more that at an enterprise level your application has to be deployed into and existing infrastructure and you cannot take all the possible corporate configurations. They might use akamai so custom tags have to go on each page. Or they might deploy to an application server that you have not seen before (OC4J anyone). Maybe they have a password management scheme that means you have to hit LDAP when your server starts up to pull the application password. They might restrict your ability to create tables and only allow their own DBAs to create tables. I have seen all of this and more at the enterprise level. No medium to large company really allows the possibility of just running an install script for anything of any complexity.
Well yes, theoretically I would agree. But, then that damn reality pokes its ugly head in and things are more complicated than we want them to be. Enterprise software, especially web based applications often cannot be packaged as a single file. Companies often want the database to run on their existing Oracle (or whatever) install, which means scripts to build out the tables in their database. There are often existing APIs that need to be called that are custom to the client. That means that after the install you will need to add code to make API calls that the standard install does not necessarily make. Many companies have existing web server farms that they want to run the application on so it will have to be deployed to each of the existing servers or they want to separate the static content from the dynamic. There are a million and one reasons that your simplistic view of the world cannot be achieved in the real world.
Pigeons, also known as rock doves or rock pigeons, are classified as a pest species, not a game species, and can be shot year-round.
What exactly are they complaining about. Sounds like lawful activity to me.
I love animals too. But, pigeon shootings? The town council in most small towns would buy the shells if you would kill the pigeons that flock to the town square. Sorry about their little toy helicopter, but you get what you deserve.
Wow, So, when does it turn out that you are wrong. I mean a 30 year slide is a pretty long slide. If another 100 years pass and we haven't "gone to hell" will it turn out that you were wrong? I think you are like the end of the world people. The end is always just a day away. Luckily that tomorrow has not yet come.
We need a better set of qualifications for the job. Engineers don't have a union but they won't let you design a bridge unless you are an engineer. The current "Computer Science" major does not make a qualified developer. Reading c++ or java in a weekend does not make a good developer. Yet companies hire these people and allow them to create big balls of mud that don't work. We need apprenticeships and a way to communicate what level a developer is to the "lay" community. Sr Developer and Web Guru are not the same thing to you and I, but from the outside it sounds like that Guru is the guy to go with. I'm not sure how we do this, but the profession really needs it. As a consultant I've worked with a number of companies that when I got there didn't even have reasonable source control, and the developers were didn't have any knowledge of "SOP" in the industry. We need a way to differentiate in the business community between professional programmer and somebody who can type into an IDE.
If you are a programmer and want to have fun learning about math you might look at Project Euler. http://projecteuler.net/
Not a book I know. But, very fun and educational.
A hog farming I will go.
I have to agree with dkf here. I don't think you understand CI or how it is valuable. You don't need test first or any of that. Your code should always build. CI is a guarantee that the codebase will always build. A guarantee that developers are not committing broken code. From that vantage you can add lots of good stuff: Unit Testing, Style Reviews, Automated Bug Checks, Automated Dependency Updates... But, you have to start with a codebase that compiles and CI does that.
Not saying this is some kind of a cure all, but I've seen package level javadocs that run to pages and provide a very good overview of the system and how to use it.
Well first read the Javadocs before you start. I agree that the best way to provide good documentation for developers is to have some good examples of using the API. You need a "Manual", but more than that you need good examples and good Javadocs. I have found that if the Javadocs are good I can spend an hour or so reading through the classes that make up the public API. Run some of the examples that do close to what I need to be done. Then I am ready to code and usually do so without issue. The only time this doesn't work is when some "obvious" thing (to the original developers) has been left out of all the documentation. You know, the PATH variable you have to setup or the property file that has to be in classpath. That lack of stating the "obvious" is the worst.
NOOO. Bacon is the central pillar of my diet. BLTs, Bacon Omelets, Bacon wrapped meat of all kinds, Bacon wrapped bacon. How will I live without my lovely bacon?
What, What the left controls the media and the right has nowhere to speak. Except that then you talk about all the places where the right not only speaks, but allows no other points of view. The left wing controlled media you disparage in your first paragraph allows discussion from both sides. While it might lean to the center or center left it allows the debate from both sides to be heard. Fox news and its ilk simply call all who disagree communist Unamerican traitors. We hear this lie from the right so often that people begin to believe it. The loudest most heard political talk comes from the far right. Please stop with the victim of the lame stream media act. It wears very thin. Poor poor right wing victims.
Not true. The bible itself is logically inconsistent. You cannot decide what is "true" or "false" based on it using logic alone. Sometimes you must love your neighbor and sometimes you must kill them all and their women and animals down to the last one. If the bible could be parsed logically and you just did what it said then we would not have 2000 years of church doctrine and disagreement about what the bible says. If you start with the premise that is not consistent then none of the statements in your logic are valid. The bible is not consistent ergo cannot be used to generate logical action.
Christianity is blasphemy to a Muslim. Islam is blasphemy to a Jew. Mormonism is blasphemy to a Christian. And us atheists, well no religion thinks that ain't blasphemy. So, would this mean that everybody just shuts up about their particular brand of religion or does the world have to pick just one? Because, otherwise it is a joke of an idea.