If I recall, IBM doesn't wield patents like..say.. Oracle. They don't run around suing people for the heck of it.
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.
There was a notorious incident in the 1990s when their lawyers descended upon a small Californian hippy outfit that had started to turn a profit called Sun Microsystems demanding patent royalties.
When the clever people at Sun demolished their patent claims there and then on the whiteboard by demonstrating obviousness and prior art, the Nazgul said they'd go and look for some more patents to wield unless the hippies just paid up.
So they did. t's nothing personal, it's just business.
I have nothing against Indians and Filipinos, but I have problems with incompetence.
I managed to escape from HCL a few months back having been transferred there last September from Xerox as part of its plan to divest itself of product R&D.
Let me tell you that all of the Indians were polite, friendly, welcoming and keen to do a good job, apart from some of their crazy MBA/PHB-type managers (yes, they have them in India too).
Obviously, as an outsourcing operation they need to keep costs to the bare minimum to get as much profit as possible out of the "partner" (in this case Xerox). So what that mad PHBs did, as with US and European PHBs, was to put crazy pressure on the grunts doing the work, insane deadlines, willfully ignoring the scope of the work required by the customer, ignoring input from those in a position to know the facts and all but demanding every corner is cut (i.e. no planning, no analysis, no design, no testing just noise and heat) in order to produce something that an ignorant PHB on the customer side can sign for...
This is the way the world has gone. We've had a double-dip recession, and now the whole world is heading for a whole lot more (worse) trouble.
In my experience, the most illiberal and vocal opponents of things in general tend to be those who have feelings of inadequacy, are scared of something, often due to ignorance, but also as a way of dealing with (i.e. by hiding) personal weakness.
As a natural curmudgeonly and intolerant person, I have to keep reminding myself of these things lest I descent the slippery slope to Tory voting, believing in the supernatural and hating foreigners (since it's far less effort than thinking about things rationally).
My current crop of irrational fears are: spiders, heights and exploding Muslim fundamentalists.
How about it? Do the British (and even Australians) have any similar fascination with hearing American accents?
No. I'd much rather listen to Charlotte Green reading the Shipping Forecast or Stephanie Flanders explaining the intricacies of the current European financial crisis.
...growing up in north-east Scotland, outside of Aberdeen, whenever we played with toys, we always put on American accents. I have no idea why, it just happened automatically.
Maybe it was because we watched so many American TV programmes like the Dukes of Hazard and the Fall Guy, and later the A Team and Knight Rider?
If she's a boss, she'll tell you to get them, and then check out your ass.
What if I get my donkey to get them for me, what will she check out then? Or if I take my donkey to the filing cabinet with me so that he's not left unattended?
as Neil Armstrong pointed out to congress, they value money over safety. and because of that, something is going to fail, and there won't be a backup because backup's cost money.
So how do you explain the space shuttle? Money in spite of safety?
NASA needs to be freed-up from doing the mundane and reinventing the wheel. NASA needs to be free to push the envelope. Putting astronauts into LEO is now mundane.
I often hear "music" in machine noises e.g. dishwashers, central heating systems, washing machines, car engines.
My brain fills in these wonderful rhythms, harmonies and melodies. I try to remember them, but when I stop listening to the machines, they go, almost instantly.
The last time it happened a few weeks ago, I concentrated on it for many minutes, relaxed "decoupled" from the inhibitions part of my brain and let it compose. I consciously tried to remember the tune and ran to my guitar, picked it up and looked for the first note, which turned out to be a C# very high up, near the top of the neck. I just about managed to play the tune which was only a couple of bars worth.
I usually find that when I try to do that, I haven't concentrated long enough to remember the tune, and often trying to find the first note makes me forget it if I have to try more than a couple of notes.
Their only concern is how to be the best human being possible to ensure a pleasureable eternity after death.
I've met a lot of "Christians" over they years whose only concern was being seen to be conforming to their social group's (church friends) idea of "good" (i.e. dogmatic, small-minded, selfish and ignorant) in order to be accepted by that social group, many of whom were labouring under the misapprehension that what they were doing was Christian.
You won't catch me spending eternity in the company of these people.
Responsibilities may include fixing mistakes from outsourced testing, and going to India to handhold them through the testing process.
...If there's anyone left from the original team with the knowledge.
Testing is one of those "costs" that PHBs and Bean-Counters love to cut continually since, to them, it is only cost that could be diverted to profit. They don't understand the importance of testing. After all, if the engineers (who are now a commodity) are doing their jobs properly, everything should be perfect and there should be no need to test things thoroughly, right? In the mean time, the testing that is done can be carried out by inexperienced and under-qualified people that have never done it before since they are cheaper.
I was looking for work recently, too, and got lots of calls from recruiters looking for Software Test Engineers.
I've worked very hard to get to being a developer, so I resisted and eventually got a better paying and infinitely more stimulating development job.
Software Test Engineers are sort-of developers, but the emphasis is on understanding requirement to be able to implement a "test matrix" that will (perhaps exhaustively) exercise a system (hardware and software as a whole) through all of the "use cases" that a user might be expected to do i.e. how J Random Luser will use the product.
Practically, this means implementing hundreds (or maybe thousands) of automated tests driven from something like Fitness. If you're lucky, you'll get to implement your test cases in something like Ruby. If you're unlucky, it might be C#...
It's quite a skilled job. You need to know a bit of statistics (statistical significance, confidence levels, variance and all that), about Combinatorial Testing (test coverage) and a bit about scripting and good software design. You would also need to understand the difference between white- grey- and black-box tests and when they are appropriate.
There are two ways in, from being a "tester" upwards or sideways from being a developer. (Note I didn't say "down." It's a skiled job, but I've done it for a few weeks for the experience and I got bored quickly).
In the spirit of cost-cutting, most Western companies are offshoring their testing. For example, Xerox just got rid of their manual and automated test to HCL in India. McAfee have done the same.
Stick to development unless you're starving/about to have your house repossessed or want a little extra experience on the side (which is a good thing for your CV as long as you don't make it your whole life).
One last thing: clueless recruiters see "Test-Driven Development" on your CV and think, "Aha! A software tester!" I had hundreds of phone calls under that misapprehension. (They also don't know what a kernel is (Windows and Linux both have one so they must be the same, right?) or the difference between C, C++ and C#...)
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If I recall, IBM doesn't wield patents like ..say .. Oracle. They don't run around suing people for the heck of it.
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.
There was a notorious incident in the 1990s when their lawyers descended upon a small Californian hippy outfit that had started to turn a profit called Sun Microsystems demanding patent royalties.
When the clever people at Sun demolished their patent claims there and then on the whiteboard by demonstrating obviousness and prior art, the Nazgul said they'd go and look for some more patents to wield unless the hippies just paid up.
So they did. t's nothing personal, it's just business.
I have nothing against Indians and Filipinos, but I have problems with incompetence.
I managed to escape from HCL a few months back having been transferred there last September from Xerox as part of its plan to divest itself of product R&D.
Let me tell you that all of the Indians were polite, friendly, welcoming and keen to do a good job, apart from some of their crazy MBA/PHB-type managers (yes, they have them in India too).
Obviously, as an outsourcing operation they need to keep costs to the bare minimum to get as much profit as possible out of the "partner" (in this case Xerox). So what that mad PHBs did, as with US and European PHBs, was to put crazy pressure on the grunts doing the work, insane deadlines, willfully ignoring the scope of the work required by the customer, ignoring input from those in a position to know the facts and all but demanding every corner is cut (i.e. no planning, no analysis, no design, no testing just noise and heat) in order to produce something that an ignorant PHB on the customer side can sign for...
This is the way the world has gone. We've had a double-dip recession, and now the whole world is heading for a whole lot more (worse) trouble.
Xerox.
Google will tell you everything.
One word: Christian Right
That's one plus another one...
In my experience, the most illiberal and vocal opponents of things in general tend to be those who have feelings of inadequacy, are scared of something, often due to ignorance, but also as a way of dealing with (i.e. by hiding) personal weakness.
As a natural curmudgeonly and intolerant person, I have to keep reminding myself of these things lest I descent the slippery slope to Tory voting, believing in the supernatural and hating foreigners (since it's far less effort than thinking about things rationally).
My current crop of irrational fears are: spiders, heights and exploding Muslim fundamentalists.
Trying to remove floating point when damned near every load a consumer has IS floating point heavy? That's just retarded.
I thought the future is having an on-chip GPU core for doing the FP-intensive work? (I know Bulldozer doesn't have one, but will later ones?...)
I don't even have a basement. Just don't tell the tornadoes.
Don't worry: God only sends tornadoes to His most devout Christian fundamentalists to test their faith.
How about it? Do the British (and even Australians) have any similar fascination with hearing American accents?
No. I'd much rather listen to Charlotte Green reading the Shipping Forecast or Stephanie Flanders explaining the intricacies of the current European financial crisis.
...growing up in north-east Scotland, outside of Aberdeen, whenever we played with toys, we always put on American accents. I have no idea why, it just happened automatically.
Maybe it was because we watched so many American TV programmes like the Dukes of Hazard and the Fall Guy, and later the A Team and Knight Rider?
Star UK, 16-year-old, and sports cars... Cafe Society? Was that in Aberdeen?
I seem to remember the whizz-kid basically took too much money out of the business to spend on toys and hanging out with other flash people.
If she's a boss, she'll tell you to get them, and then check out your ass.
What if I get my donkey to get them for me, what will she check out then? Or if I take my donkey to the filing cabinet with me so that he's not left unattended?
as Neil Armstrong pointed out to congress, they value money over safety. and because of that, something is going to fail, and there won't be a backup because backup's cost money.
So how do you explain the space shuttle? Money in spite of safety?
NASA needs to be freed-up from doing the mundane and reinventing the wheel. NASA needs to be free to push the envelope. Putting astronauts into LEO is now mundane.
Or, if you're chasing it down with a conventional aircraft and pointing your 12 gauge out the window
Flash Gordon could do it, on Jupiter, without the rivets shaking loose!
Hogwash, poppycock and santorum!
Didn't look at the clip. It was late, and Mrs Turgid would get suspicious if I started looking at Bjork videos... :-)
No. When I was a young man, I was moderately amused by the humour I perceived in some of her solo stuff. But now I am an old curmudgeon.
I often hear "music" in machine noises e.g. dishwashers, central heating systems, washing machines, car engines.
My brain fills in these wonderful rhythms, harmonies and melodies. I try to remember them, but when I stop listening to the machines, they go, almost instantly.
The last time it happened a few weeks ago, I concentrated on it for many minutes, relaxed "decoupled" from the inhibitions part of my brain and let it compose. I consciously tried to remember the tune and ran to my guitar, picked it up and looked for the first note, which turned out to be a C# very high up, near the top of the neck. I just about managed to play the tune which was only a couple of bars worth.
I usually find that when I try to do that, I haven't concentrated long enough to remember the tune, and often trying to find the first note makes me forget it if I have to try more than a couple of notes.
Yes, but we have a Service Level Agreement with them and they have to initiate a fix within Four Hours!
Too bad there isn't an ebook. It sounds fascinating!
Are you allergic to paper?
Someone with a clue.
I might say that if something happens that proves the existence of one God or another, I'll become a believer
If something happens that proves the existence of a god, there will be no need for you to believe, since it's existence will be a scientific fact.
I believe this one of the things that Douglas Adams was alluding to when he wrote of the existence of the Babelfish.
You might well be on to something there...
Dude, I have seen people using Excel to write letters!
I've seen senior accountants use pocket calculators to sum columns of numbers in Excel.
Their only concern is how to be the best human being possible to ensure a pleasureable eternity after death.
I've met a lot of "Christians" over they years whose only concern was being seen to be conforming to their social group's (church friends) idea of "good" (i.e. dogmatic, small-minded, selfish and ignorant) in order to be accepted by that social group, many of whom were labouring under the misapprehension that what they were doing was Christian.
You won't catch me spending eternity in the company of these people.
Responsibilities may include fixing mistakes from outsourced testing, and going to India to handhold them through the testing process.
...If there's anyone left from the original team with the knowledge.
Testing is one of those "costs" that PHBs and Bean-Counters love to cut continually since, to them, it is only cost that could be diverted to profit. They don't understand the importance of testing. After all, if the engineers (who are now a commodity) are doing their jobs properly, everything should be perfect and there should be no need to test things thoroughly, right? In the mean time, the testing that is done can be carried out by inexperienced and under-qualified people that have never done it before since they are cheaper.
I was looking for work recently, too, and got lots of calls from recruiters looking for Software Test Engineers.
I've worked very hard to get to being a developer, so I resisted and eventually got a better paying and infinitely more stimulating development job.
Software Test Engineers are sort-of developers, but the emphasis is on understanding requirement to be able to implement a "test matrix" that will (perhaps exhaustively) exercise a system (hardware and software as a whole) through all of the "use cases" that a user might be expected to do i.e. how J Random Luser will use the product.
Practically, this means implementing hundreds (or maybe thousands) of automated tests driven from something like Fitness. If you're lucky, you'll get to implement your test cases in something like Ruby. If you're unlucky, it might be C#...
It's quite a skilled job. You need to know a bit of statistics (statistical significance, confidence levels, variance and all that), about Combinatorial Testing (test coverage) and a bit about scripting and good software design. You would also need to understand the difference between white- grey- and black-box tests and when they are appropriate.
There are two ways in, from being a "tester" upwards or sideways from being a developer. (Note I didn't say "down." It's a skiled job, but I've done it for a few weeks for the experience and I got bored quickly).
In the spirit of cost-cutting, most Western companies are offshoring their testing. For example, Xerox just got rid of their manual and automated test to HCL in India. McAfee have done the same.
Stick to development unless you're starving/about to have your house repossessed or want a little extra experience on the side (which is a good thing for your CV as long as you don't make it your whole life).
One last thing: clueless recruiters see "Test-Driven Development" on your CV and think, "Aha! A software tester!" I had hundreds of phone calls under that misapprehension. (They also don't know what a kernel is (Windows and Linux both have one so they must be the same, right?) or the difference between C, C++ and C#...)