I know that we are techies and we like computers but seriously do we think that the internet is the best thing to get into Africa in a hurry? If you look at what mobile phones have done in terms of communication and micro-payments then its hard to see the point of pushing expensive ($500 in a continent where people live on less than $1 a day) internet access as an important thing. Get the mobile phone network out first. This has the advantage of being lower power and with a built in infrastructure that can help micro-payments.
Arguing for VOIP and other internet based services as a way that internet access would be better ignores some of the basic economics and the experience of most 3rd world countries in the success of mobile phone communications in helping to raise people up out of poverty. Basic communications (voice) is the first step here.
So its good that its being done, but it would be nice to see one of these high profile cases actually support an existing approach that is working rather than always going after the "everyone must have a computer" scenario that makes sense for people sitting in an office in California.
One thing about the Transmeta buzz that I've never understood here on Slashdot is why almost no-one ever raise the ARM challenge that Transmeta faced. Transmeta wanted to be better than Intel at chips and better than ARM at low power design and their differentiation was....
Bugger all.
A massively over-hyped, post.com bubble company that had a better spin machine than a product line. Now can we all as engineers now formally apologise to ARM for thinking that Transmeta was worthy of being considered competition.
So you are against state lotteries, on-course gambling, Las Vegas, the stock market (what is that but gambling on the future direction of stocks), walking across the street (what is that but gambling against the odds of traffic), driving to work (same again). Its not "something for nothing" its a gamble, its placing a stake and playing the odds.
Alcohol causes considerable suffering, smoking causes considerable suffering, guns cause considerable suffering, driving causes considerable suffering, religion causes considerable suffering, the banking industry causes considerable suffering, US foreign policy causes considerable suffering, drowning causes considerable suffering.
What do you want to ban next?
You can keep protecting people based on your view of what morality is, but you'd be blind not to see the idiocy of a policy based on banning something because it causes considerable suffering to a small minority of people.
Which is why in the UK we legalised it, now most of these places have come back onshore because its easier to get the top line development staff and it looks better in terms of security than being in some bolt hole.
Taxes are the reason to legalise it, not the reason to criminalise it. If you want the cash then you need to make it legal.
Seriously what is the issue here? Given that the biggest gambling Mecca in the western world is in the US (Las Vegas) which has the biggest gambling sporting events (Boxing) what is the issue with online gambling?
I'm a Brit, our issue was that we couldn't tax it so they went offshore. Our solution? Change the tax rules so they want to come back onshore. So far society hasn't collapsed and it appears that doing online poker is less risky than trusting your money to a bank right now anyway. I have friends who work in the sector who get nervous when they fly to the US even though they are developers, its just madness that the US seems to thinks gambling is a massive evil, in a country that things gun ownership is a right.
Given the current banking collapse and the way the Fed have clearly gambled on things (house prices going up for ever) it is ranking up there with a Kim Jong Il moment as weirdest things that a government could do.
The scary bit is I don't see anyone pushing back on it, not McCain, not Obama, not congress and certainly not the President. So please someone tell me
What the hell is so fundamentally wrong with gambling?
McDonald's does not "taste awesome" it tastes like a push fried burger made from frozen "meat" which might be 100% but certainly tastes nothing like any burger I've made and BBQ'd myself. I'm pretty much as far away from a vegan as you can get but the fries are crap and the burgers are rubbish, if its 11pm and you have the munchies then fine, but "awesome" for that you need to go to the Fat Duck that man can do things to animals that make them line up to be killed.
Yes its OT, but come one, McDonald's as "awesome" tasting? That's like saying Windows ME was Awesome in the beef eating pantheon of quality.
Interviewer: So it says here you've been developing for the iPhone for 2 years Developer: Yup that's right
I: So what applications have you written D: I've written applications around complex gene folding, stock prediction and a massively multi-player online game
I: Great, can I get them from the App Store D: I can't say
I: Why not? D: I can't say
I: Why? D: There is an NDA covering whether I submitted them and whether they rejected them
I: Can you show me the code? D: Err no
I: Why? D: Because I'm not allowed to share things with other developers
I: Why? D: That's in the NDA too
I: So in summary you say you've written some amazing applications but can't prove it and they aren't on the app store D: Correct
I: So why should I believe you D: Would anyone who hadn't done iPhone development have bothered to read the NDA?
The Jail-break market was a competition until they launched the 3G iPhone which could only be bought with a long term contract. What is the point of jail-breaking a phone that has to run on one network anyway? In terms of "30% was jail-breaking" do you have any numbers? From what I've seen the App Store has been hugely successful, especially in terms of $$$ which is something that the jail-break market never really competed on.
The issue here isn't about jail-break or Android its about a perception by Apple on what will get them the most marketshare, this means applications that the carriers like, applications that consumers like and enough of a market to make it a valid area for companies to invest in. Do you seriously think that they (or any other mobile vendor) is really concerned about individual developers? Of course they aren't, its about the commercial side of the business and if enough developers come along for the ride then great.
Come on folks we all know that were the Colbert Nation leads the world follows. All this is saying is that politics these days is about Truthiness which is "Truth that comes from the gut, not from books". Back in 2005 Colbert was right.
His latest campaign is that we don't even want answers and should not be allowed to ask questions.
Its very sad how the two best political commentary programmes in the US go out on Comedy Central.
Come on, this is the first bit of upbeat news on the tech sector that the US has had in a while.
The banks might be tanking.
The Hell-desk might be going over seas
But when it comes to Cybercrime the US still leads the way as the Gambinos of the internet.
USA - A OK... come on you know you want to shout it.
China might have a state backed machine, but that is no match for the free market capitalism of corruption and crime that can support a much larger and more effective cybercrime base.
So don't doubt it and say "oooh no we are the good guys, its all China and Russia" like some pinko liberals, embrace the brilliance of US invention in circumventing technological barriers.
Didn't John McCain say that the fundamentals of the US economy were strong as the fundamentals were the ingenuity of the american people? It seems like the old coot is more up to date on technology than any of us thought, he was thinking about cybercrime as being a boom area for Americans.
One citizen, one rootkit. This is a lead that need not be lost.
This isn't satire, this isn't parody, this is just abusive stuff out of the mind of a teenager, they might think its "cool" but in fact accusing a principal in this heavily sensitive times of being a paedophile is just about as low and threatening as a student can get. This isn't free speech in the same way as a John Stewart gag is satire this is just abusive rubbish out of the mind of an immature kid.
Getting kicked out is the least of this kid's problems, they are lucky that they aren't looking down the barrel of a lawsuit with lots of damages attached.
Free Speech is critical to a well functioning democracy and its worth defending, but it isn't a license to just spout off crap. Hell even Spiderman movies know that "with great power comes great responsibility".
Yes what a brilliant idea, just imagine if lots of small countries had AI controlled kill bots, this would clearly help against the tanks and kill bots of their larger foes.
Seriously have we learned nothing from our education^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H movies? AI controlled kill bots have only one true enemy....
US.
Semi-seriously though, given the fragile state of AI and the issues we already have with soldiers making bad decisions is it really smart to start delegating the kill/not decision to robots?
Seriously I can't think of something that is more rubbish. Yes COBOL is out there, but as a mainstay of XML and Web Services? Are you serious? Have you tried getting an old mainframe to talk in Unicode? COBOL is what old apps are written in and what they are maintained in, its not that there are no jobs but you'd be nuts if you are a talented coder to get into COBOL. If you are 50 and want a pension however its an ideal area to get into.
Yes I know COBOL, yes I have developed and maintained in it, and NO it isn't the next thing, its the crap that people wrote when the average IQ in Computing was miles higher than today but the tools were miles worse. What I really pity is the people who are maintaining C++ developed in the 90s. That stuff sucked.
Now I'm sure there will be a bunch of people moaning that this is getting "us" doing "their" job for free. Well hell the time spent here on Slashdot having ago at the Patent office is already high enough so why not be constructive in using that time?
The only problem I see with this is that they haven't really invested in the tech side of crowd sourcing. How about a SETI style desktop app that just notifies you and lets you go "ooooh that one looks crap, I'm taking it down" rather than a build it and they will come approach. The key here is going to be getting more eyes on the problem which means pushing the patents out rather than just waiting for people to respond. Personally I'd be happy to have a list of patents in my specialised areas that I could dissect and destroy. Its almost worthy of a CV mention, not just the patents that you've been granted but the ones that you've prevented being granted.
Don't bitch and moan, this is a good use of the internet and crowd sourcing to get round a problem of dumb patent submissions from large corps. Yes its your time, but you'll just have to post one less time on Slashdot, and spend 5 minutes less reading comments on Digg.
Seriously the standard of "hotness" is phenomenally low in US politics. We are talking here about someone who came 2nd in Miss Alaska (population 600,000) in a state where less than 50% of the people are female and isn't exactly known as the place where attractive people flock to. Hell this makes her less attractive than the 2nd most attractive person in DETROIT (population over 800k).
Never before has a media image of what you should think been so quickly accepted by people. Palin isn't hot, she isn't an ugly bird but she isn't a stunner. Lets concentrate on her madly insane political views (abstinence teaching working for you kids Mrs Palin?) and not listen to the media's view of attractive. Put it this way, do you think that Fox News would have her as an anchor? Of course not, a we know that hot is their only real criteria.
Hot in Alaska? Let put politics first.
On the other hand look at FRENCH politics if you want seriously hot politicians with incredibly well educated views.
There are two obvious reasons why people get tested in IT
1) People might have passed exams, but can they actually code 2) People might have been on a project where technology X was used, but did they use it?
The first is the case where you have a graduate with a degree in computing and it turns out they did all the "soft" options. So lots of theory but not practice and they don't even know what a compiler is.
The second is the case where you are looking for people with a given skill (say Java) and you want to check that they have that skill.
Its not true to say that other people don't have to sit tests, its just that a lot of the time those tests aren't written tests but are more open, indeed I prefer to test people using such open assignments. Set them a problem (design a system to do X) and then have them respond. This is exactly the same way that lawyers are often tested by their new chambers, they have to defend (or prosecute) a given perspective to show how they would perform and lay out their approach of constructing the case.
The point is that for most jobs they are "soft" jobs where a specific exam makes no sense once you have the qualification and therefore you do soft interview tests. In IT however we have lots of "hard" jobs where a specific skill is required and a specific level of performance is required. This isn't about professional v unprofessional its about the nature of an industry where there are millions of different technologies arriving every year and where the average ability level has been plunging for the last 20 years.
So get off your high horse and stop complaining. You are in an industry that changes, that means that the degree you did gives you a theoretical basis (hopefully) but your practical skills will need to be evolved. I did Ada, LISP, 68k and Prolog at University. Guess what? My first job meant I had to learn C in 1 week to prove I knew it and my 3rd job was the last one where I used any of those languages (I'm now on my 7th job). So did I mind being tested to prove I knew C/Java/XML/MQSeries/etc? No I didn't.
Do I test people to prove they really have the skills they say? You bet, I wouldn't trust an IT CV statement further than I'd trust Dick Cheney at a bird shoot.
All interviews test in any areas where its worth having a job. IT interviews test more because IT changes more and your qualifications become out of date more quickly.
Now for the real question though: Why isn't there a written test for high office, especially a geography test for US Presidents and VPs.
such as H-1B visa limits or tax incentives to keep IT jobs onshore.
Oh its a protectionist thing. The Bar and the AMA are because its a regulated industry with agree entry criteria. As long as you are happy for IT to be subject to the same criteria (hint of the day, more people in India probably have pure IT degrees as a percentage than people in the US) then that is great. If what you mean is some type of Union negotiation on wages then no thank-you I'd like to have my salary dictated by my abilities and ability to negotiate rather than via a Union group bargining.
What this reads as is "we want to be a like the Bar, but without the qualification requirements and we want to act like a Union for waiters in the way we negotiate".
The IEEE would be a good avenue, or the ACM. Unless you really do want the professional qualification bar at which point I'm all in for it and lets compete on a global basis for the best talent and let the less talented become the IT equivalents of Legal Clerks with their salary negotiating Union.
All this realism stuff gets on my nerves. Sure it looks more realistic but is it actually a better game? Are the graphics on the Wii "realistic" hell no, they are basically cartoons but the games play well and I don't care about the graphics. So the eyes flicker around in this new game like the eyes of people in a meeting just waiting for it to finish, flicking to the clock, back to the notes and then gazing out of the window in a day-dream before flicking back into the room in case they are asked a question.
Realism isn't always the best way to convey the most emotion and impact, look at the finest paintings from the likes of Rembrandt, and its that impact that games companies should concentrate on rather than on yet another way to make a dull game look pretty.
Looking at some of the news there appears to be some chap called McCain who is in Minnesota(?) who is behind all this, there doesn't appear to be much coverage in the news around Gustav but this McCain guy is so obvious that he even has sites set up for himself where people can give money directly to him. Pretty bare faced cheek. His "cover" story appears to be that there is some Republican Event going on, but I checked and Bush, Cheney and the Governator are all at home so its clearly just made up.
Seriously though the Republican party claims to be the party of God, do you think this "Act of God" is getting through to them who the big guy is backing?
What I'm seeing across Europe is a growing use of not ABW (Anything but Windows) but WIW (What I Want). So developers are using Linux, and supporting it themselves, and execs are using Macs. A very common pattern is to see the "standard" corporate image run inside a virtual machine which gives access to the corporate email and other MS apps while the user spends lots of their time in the native machine doing their work. As a way to do "home working" this also works well as it means the corporate contamination of your home machine is limited to just the virtual image.
With more and more things being browser surfaced the need to have an MS box is reducing and people are choosing to use what they want and support it themselves. The corporate desktop therefore becomes virtual.
Personally I've a Linux laptop for Dev and a Mac OSX for the rest of my work, the Mac runs a windows VM for my corporate access.
This isn't a big religious thing its just that it works.
Answer: Yes you can both criticise the US and the People's Republic of Putin that doesn't make either one any better.
The big difference however between the PRP and the US is that the impact of the criticism is more direct and obvious. There is no "Daily Show" in Russia, they just have the equivalent of Fox News wall to wall. What this means is that dissent is very hard to see inside the country.
The other difference is the risk of them going postal. The US administration might have done some very bad things on the way into Iraq, but there is at least the perception of some accountability and sanity within parts of the US. In Russia you have Putin and his puppet President and dictatorship style popularity figures in elections.
That gives us the final challenge. There has always been an expectation that one day the current US administration would be held to account by Congress or a court of law, this appears to be a ill-founded expectation but it is what people however thought. In Russia however the rule of law is clearly subservient to the rule of Putin.
That is why they will be condemned differently because their systems of government are so different. Russia has never pushed itself as the land of the free and a shining beacon of democracy, the US has. This is why the US is judged to a higher standard, it has asked to be.
In these days of sloppy journalism and down right bias on mainstream channels in the US then surely the most "effective" is to learn from the real scum of the political process the people who do the anonymous negative campaigning, shooting malicious falsehoods out into the world via leaflets and other approaches.
Nerds could go hugely further than this by creating fake sites, bombarding social networking sites and editing wikipedia to spread these rumours and even create "verifiable" sources. Low quality videos suggesting illegal or immoral behaviour could be uploaded onto YouTube and main stream news channels could be bombarded with votes/emails/text pushing an agenda, view or revelation.
Oh or did you mean what nerds could do on their own rather than what they will be paid to do in this campaign?
Slashdot Mirror
I know that we are techies and we like computers but seriously do we think that the internet is the best thing to get into Africa in a hurry? If you look at what mobile phones have done in terms of communication and micro-payments then its hard to see the point of pushing expensive ($500 in a continent where people live on less than $1 a day) internet access as an important thing. Get the mobile phone network out first. This has the advantage of being lower power and with a built in infrastructure that can help micro-payments.
Arguing for VOIP and other internet based services as a way that internet access would be better ignores some of the basic economics and the experience of most 3rd world countries in the success of mobile phone communications in helping to raise people up out of poverty. Basic communications (voice) is the first step here.
So its good that its being done, but it would be nice to see one of these high profile cases actually support an existing approach that is working rather than always going after the "everyone must have a computer" scenario that makes sense for people sitting in an office in California.
One thing about the Transmeta buzz that I've never understood here on Slashdot is why almost no-one ever raise the ARM challenge that Transmeta faced. Transmeta wanted to be better than Intel at chips and better than ARM at low power design and their differentiation was....
Bugger all.
A massively over-hyped, post .com bubble company that had a better spin machine than a product line. Now can we all as engineers now formally apologise to ARM for thinking that Transmeta was worthy of being considered competition.
state has an obligation to protect its citizens from certain fraud
Remind me how that went in Florida again?
Are you serious?
So you are against state lotteries, on-course gambling, Las Vegas, the stock market (what is that but gambling on the future direction of stocks), walking across the street (what is that but gambling against the odds of traffic), driving to work (same again). Its not "something for nothing" its a gamble, its placing a stake and playing the odds.
Alcohol causes considerable suffering, smoking causes considerable suffering, guns cause considerable suffering, driving causes considerable suffering, religion causes considerable suffering, the banking industry causes considerable suffering, US foreign policy causes considerable suffering, drowning causes considerable suffering.
What do you want to ban next?
You can keep protecting people based on your view of what morality is, but you'd be blind not to see the idiocy of a policy based on banning something because it causes considerable suffering to a small minority of people.
Land of the Free?
Which is why in the UK we legalised it, now most of these places have come back onshore because its easier to get the top line development staff and it looks better in terms of security than being in some bolt hole.
Taxes are the reason to legalise it, not the reason to criminalise it. If you want the cash then you need to make it legal.
Seriously what is the issue here? Given that the biggest gambling Mecca in the western world is in the US (Las Vegas) which has the biggest gambling sporting events (Boxing) what is the issue with online gambling?
I'm a Brit, our issue was that we couldn't tax it so they went offshore. Our solution? Change the tax rules so they want to come back onshore. So far society hasn't collapsed and it appears that doing online poker is less risky than trusting your money to a bank right now anyway. I have friends who work in the sector who get nervous when they fly to the US even though they are developers, its just madness that the US seems to thinks gambling is a massive evil, in a country that things gun ownership is a right.
Given the current banking collapse and the way the Fed have clearly gambled on things (house prices going up for ever) it is ranking up there with a Kim Jong Il moment as weirdest things that a government could do.
The scary bit is I don't see anyone pushing back on it, not McCain, not Obama, not congress and certainly not the President. So please someone tell me
What the hell is so fundamentally wrong with gambling?
Because it tastes awesome.
Some things just can't be ignored.
McDonald's does not "taste awesome" it tastes like a push fried burger made from frozen "meat" which might be 100% but certainly tastes nothing like any burger I've made and BBQ'd myself. I'm pretty much as far away from a vegan as you can get but the fries are crap and the burgers are rubbish, if its 11pm and you have the munchies then fine, but "awesome" for that you need to go to the Fat Duck that man can do things to animals that make them line up to be killed.
Yes its OT, but come one, McDonald's as "awesome" tasting? That's like saying Windows ME was Awesome in the beef eating pantheon of quality.
Interviewer: So it says here you've been developing for the iPhone for 2 years
Developer: Yup that's right
I: So what applications have you written
D: I've written applications around complex gene folding, stock prediction and a massively multi-player online game
I: Great, can I get them from the App Store
D: I can't say
I: Why not?
D: I can't say
I: Why?
D: There is an NDA covering whether I submitted them and whether they rejected them
I: Can you show me the code?
D: Err no
I: Why?
D: Because I'm not allowed to share things with other developers
I: Why?
D: That's in the NDA too
I: So in summary you say you've written some amazing applications but can't prove it and they aren't on the app store
D: Correct
I: So why should I believe you
D: Would anyone who hadn't done iPhone development have bothered to read the NDA?
I: Good point, you're hired.
The Jail-break market was a competition until they launched the 3G iPhone which could only be bought with a long term contract. What is the point of jail-breaking a phone that has to run on one network anyway? In terms of "30% was jail-breaking" do you have any numbers? From what I've seen the App Store has been hugely successful, especially in terms of $$$ which is something that the jail-break market never really competed on.
The issue here isn't about jail-break or Android its about a perception by Apple on what will get them the most marketshare, this means applications that the carriers like, applications that consumers like and enough of a market to make it a valid area for companies to invest in. Do you seriously think that they (or any other mobile vendor) is really concerned about individual developers? Of course they aren't, its about the commercial side of the business and if enough developers come along for the ride then great.
Come on folks we all know that were the Colbert Nation leads the world follows. All this is saying is that politics these days is about Truthiness which is "Truth that comes from the gut, not from books". Back in 2005 Colbert was right.
His latest campaign is that we don't even want answers and should not be allowed to ask questions.
Its very sad how the two best political commentary programmes in the US go out on Comedy Central.
Come on, this is the first bit of upbeat news on the tech sector that the US has had in a while.
The banks might be tanking.
The Hell-desk might be going over seas
But when it comes to Cybercrime the US still leads the way as the Gambinos of the internet.
USA - A OK... come on you know you want to shout it.
China might have a state backed machine, but that is no match for the free market capitalism of corruption and crime that can support a much larger and more effective cybercrime base.
So don't doubt it and say "oooh no we are the good guys, its all China and Russia" like some pinko liberals, embrace the brilliance of US invention in circumventing technological barriers.
Didn't John McCain say that the fundamentals of the US economy were strong as the fundamentals were the ingenuity of the american people? It seems like the old coot is more up to date on technology than any of us thought, he was thinking about cybercrime as being a boom area for Americans.
One citizen, one rootkit. This is a lead that need not be lost.
This isn't satire, this isn't parody, this is just abusive stuff out of the mind of a teenager, they might think its "cool" but in fact accusing a principal in this heavily sensitive times of being a paedophile is just about as low and threatening as a student can get. This isn't free speech in the same way as a John Stewart gag is satire this is just abusive rubbish out of the mind of an immature kid.
Getting kicked out is the least of this kid's problems, they are lucky that they aren't looking down the barrel of a lawsuit with lots of damages attached.
Free Speech is critical to a well functioning democracy and its worth defending, but it isn't a license to just spout off crap. Hell even Spiderman movies know that "with great power comes great responsibility".
Yes what a brilliant idea, just imagine if lots of small countries had AI controlled kill bots, this would clearly help against the tanks and kill bots of their larger foes.
Seriously have we learned nothing from our education^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H movies? AI controlled kill bots have only one true enemy....
US.
Semi-seriously though, given the fragile state of AI and the issues we already have with soldiers making bad decisions is it really smart to start delegating the kill/not decision to robots?
Gandhi the ignorant... a new one on me. Your COBOL information seems similarly accurate.
Seriously I can't think of something that is more rubbish. Yes COBOL is out there, but as a mainstay of XML and Web Services? Are you serious? Have you tried getting an old mainframe to talk in Unicode? COBOL is what old apps are written in and what they are maintained in, its not that there are no jobs but you'd be nuts if you are a talented coder to get into COBOL. If you are 50 and want a pension however its an ideal area to get into.
Yes I know COBOL, yes I have developed and maintained in it, and NO it isn't the next thing, its the crap that people wrote when the average IQ in Computing was miles higher than today but the tools were miles worse. What I really pity is the people who are maintaining C++ developed in the 90s. That stuff sucked.
Now I'm sure there will be a bunch of people moaning that this is getting "us" doing "their" job for free. Well hell the time spent here on Slashdot having ago at the Patent office is already high enough so why not be constructive in using that time?
The only problem I see with this is that they haven't really invested in the tech side of crowd sourcing. How about a SETI style desktop app that just notifies you and lets you go "ooooh that one looks crap, I'm taking it down" rather than a build it and they will come approach. The key here is going to be getting more eyes on the problem which means pushing the patents out rather than just waiting for people to respond. Personally I'd be happy to have a list of patents in my specialised areas that I could dissect and destroy. Its almost worthy of a CV mention, not just the patents that you've been granted but the ones that you've prevented being granted.
Don't bitch and moan, this is a good use of the internet and crowd sourcing to get round a problem of dumb patent submissions from large corps. Yes its your time, but you'll just have to post one less time on Slashdot, and spend 5 minutes less reading comments on Digg.
Seriously the standard of "hotness" is phenomenally low in US politics. We are talking here about someone who came 2nd in Miss Alaska (population 600,000) in a state where less than 50% of the people are female and isn't exactly known as the place where attractive people flock to. Hell this makes her less attractive than the 2nd most attractive person in DETROIT (population over 800k).
Never before has a media image of what you should think been so quickly accepted by people. Palin isn't hot, she isn't an ugly bird but she isn't a stunner. Lets concentrate on her madly insane political views (abstinence teaching working for you kids Mrs Palin?) and not listen to the media's view of attractive. Put it this way, do you think that Fox News would have her as an anchor? Of course not, a we know that hot is their only real criteria.
Hot in Alaska? Let put politics first.
On the other hand look at FRENCH politics if you want seriously hot politicians with incredibly well educated views.
There are two obvious reasons why people get tested in IT
1) People might have passed exams, but can they actually code
2) People might have been on a project where technology X was used, but did they use it?
The first is the case where you have a graduate with a degree in computing and it turns out they did all the "soft" options. So lots of theory but not practice and they don't even know what a compiler is.
The second is the case where you are looking for people with a given skill (say Java) and you want to check that they have that skill.
Its not true to say that other people don't have to sit tests, its just that a lot of the time those tests aren't written tests but are more open, indeed I prefer to test people using such open assignments. Set them a problem (design a system to do X) and then have them respond. This is exactly the same way that lawyers are often tested by their new chambers, they have to defend (or prosecute) a given perspective to show how they would perform and lay out their approach of constructing the case.
The point is that for most jobs they are "soft" jobs where a specific exam makes no sense once you have the qualification and therefore you do soft interview tests. In IT however we have lots of "hard" jobs where a specific skill is required and a specific level of performance is required. This isn't about professional v unprofessional its about the nature of an industry where there are millions of different technologies arriving every year and where the average ability level has been plunging for the last 20 years.
So get off your high horse and stop complaining. You are in an industry that changes, that means that the degree you did gives you a theoretical basis (hopefully) but your practical skills will need to be evolved. I did Ada, LISP, 68k and Prolog at University. Guess what? My first job meant I had to learn C in 1 week to prove I knew it and my 3rd job was the last one where I used any of those languages (I'm now on my 7th job). So did I mind being tested to prove I knew C/Java/XML/MQSeries/etc? No I didn't.
Do I test people to prove they really have the skills they say? You bet, I wouldn't trust an IT CV statement further than I'd trust Dick Cheney at a bird shoot.
All interviews test in any areas where its worth having a job. IT interviews test more because IT changes more and your qualifications become out of date more quickly.
Now for the real question though: Why isn't there a written test for high office, especially a geography test for US Presidents and VPs.
such as H-1B visa limits or tax incentives to keep IT jobs onshore.
Oh its a protectionist thing. The Bar and the AMA are because its a regulated industry with agree entry criteria. As long as you are happy for IT to be subject to the same criteria (hint of the day, more people in India probably have pure IT degrees as a percentage than people in the US) then that is great. If what you mean is some type of Union negotiation on wages then no thank-you I'd like to have my salary dictated by my abilities and ability to negotiate rather than via a Union group bargining.
What this reads as is "we want to be a like the Bar, but without the qualification requirements and we want to act like a Union for waiters in the way we negotiate".
The IEEE would be a good avenue, or the ACM. Unless you really do want the professional qualification bar at which point I'm all in for it and lets compete on a global basis for the best talent and let the less talented become the IT equivalents of Legal Clerks with their salary negotiating Union.
The only thing in the Universe that is more dense and unexplained
The intelligence and Ego of George W Bush
All this realism stuff gets on my nerves. Sure it looks more realistic but is it actually a better game? Are the graphics on the Wii "realistic" hell no, they are basically cartoons but the games play well and I don't care about the graphics. So the eyes flicker around in this new game like the eyes of people in a meeting just waiting for it to finish, flicking to the clock, back to the notes and then gazing out of the window in a day-dream before flicking back into the room in case they are asked a question.
Realism isn't always the best way to convey the most emotion and impact, look at the finest paintings from the likes of Rembrandt, and its that impact that games companies should concentrate on rather than on yet another way to make a dull game look pretty.
Looking at some of the news there appears to be some chap called McCain who is in Minnesota(?) who is behind all this, there doesn't appear to be much coverage in the news around Gustav but this McCain guy is so obvious that he even has sites set up for himself where people can give money directly to him. Pretty bare faced cheek. His "cover" story appears to be that there is some Republican Event going on, but I checked and Bush, Cheney and the Governator are all at home so its clearly just made up.
Seriously though the Republican party claims to be the party of God, do you think this "Act of God" is getting through to them who the big guy is backing?
What I'm seeing across Europe is a growing use of not ABW (Anything but Windows) but WIW (What I Want). So developers are using Linux, and supporting it themselves, and execs are using Macs. A very common pattern is to see the "standard" corporate image run inside a virtual machine which gives access to the corporate email and other MS apps while the user spends lots of their time in the native machine doing their work. As a way to do "home working" this also works well as it means the corporate contamination of your home machine is limited to just the virtual image.
With more and more things being browser surfaced the need to have an MS box is reducing and people are choosing to use what they want and support it themselves. The corporate desktop therefore becomes virtual.
Personally I've a Linux laptop for Dev and a Mac OSX for the rest of my work, the Mac runs a windows VM for my corporate access.
This isn't a big religious thing its just that it works.
Answer: Yes you can both criticise the US and the People's Republic of Putin that doesn't make either one any better.
The big difference however between the PRP and the US is that the impact of the criticism is more direct and obvious. There is no "Daily Show" in Russia, they just have the equivalent of Fox News wall to wall. What this means is that dissent is very hard to see inside the country.
The other difference is the risk of them going postal. The US administration might have done some very bad things on the way into Iraq, but there is at least the perception of some accountability and sanity within parts of the US. In Russia you have Putin and his puppet President and dictatorship style popularity figures in elections.
That gives us the final challenge. There has always been an expectation that one day the current US administration would be held to account by Congress or a court of law, this appears to be a ill-founded expectation but it is what people however thought. In Russia however the rule of law is clearly subservient to the rule of Putin.
That is why they will be condemned differently because their systems of government are so different. Russia has never pushed itself as the land of the free and a shining beacon of democracy, the US has. This is why the US is judged to a higher standard, it has asked to be.
In these days of sloppy journalism and down right bias on mainstream channels in the US then surely the most "effective" is to learn from the real scum of the political process the people who do the anonymous negative campaigning, shooting malicious falsehoods out into the world via leaflets and other approaches.
Nerds could go hugely further than this by creating fake sites, bombarding social networking sites and editing wikipedia to spread these rumours and even create "verifiable" sources. Low quality videos suggesting illegal or immoral behaviour could be uploaded onto YouTube and main stream news channels could be bombarded with votes/emails/text pushing an agenda, view or revelation.
Oh or did you mean what nerds could do on their own rather than what they will be paid to do in this campaign?