Because if you truly want to promote freedom and free code, you also have to let people to profit from it. Freedom isn't picking who gets to enjoy that "freedom" based on some rules.
You're completely missing the point.
The GPL allows anyone to use the software for any purpose, including to make money. It does not allow the software to become part of a product that is closed source, that a company charges money for.
The idea is to keep the code free and open.
If I write code and give it away for free with source, why should some random company that has no intention of opening its source code for the benefit of others to learn from and to use, and charges money under a license restricting the use of the software, get to benefit from my hard work and altruism?
That's the point. That's why I support and use the GPL and LGPL.
If you are happy with someone else using the code that you wrote to make money (without paying you tuppence), probably modifying your code and not giving back the changes and charging people to use a product based on it, that's up to you.
However, that sort of idea is more popular amongst the greedy and the PHB types who never wrote a line of code in their lives than those that actually write code (and use other Open Source).
Anyhow, the military seems to be the our only institution left that's doing any forward thinking and planning past the next quarter. I'm hoping for some neato civilian spin-offs.
If I were a billionaire, I'd "fritter away" my money doing forward-thinking seeing as how now one else except the military.
PHBs and MBAs would scoff but I'd be the one having lots of fun, and all the thousands of people I'd be employing to work on my hare-brained schemes. As the traditional corporations gradually cost-cutted themselves to death, I'd have invented the future.
In my direct experience, where large outsourcing companies are involved, in order to cut costs to the absolute minimum in order to make the maximum profit on the deal, they hire the youngest, most inexperienced developers they can.
So the reason "foreign" outsourcing companies get a bad name is not because they are foreign and foreign people aren't as clever as the ones they're replacing, it's because they are usually much younger and inexperienced, usually just having left university.
From what I can also see, since these outsourcing companies operate as cheaply as possible, all of the training that they provide is computer-based (i.e. of the least effective kind) and usually for pretty mundane and easy things.
I have been to a professional conference where all the attendees---except one---are wearing slacks, collared shirts or business uniforms. The one sore thumb was in a t-shirt, jeans and sneakers. Everyone wondered what kind of company he works for that would allow their representative to come to a conference dressed like that.
As someone who bought an Athlon XP during that era, and in fact did exactly that (Fan failed, possibly due to dust, possibly just bad bearings)
Idiot. The Atlon XP had thermal throttling. The original (600MHz) Athlons didn't, and neither did the Thunderbirds IIRC, but the XP certainly does have it.
I write my own code so I know how to get the best out of the CPUs I buy. The Bulldozer looks like a very interesting design with a great deal of potential. I waited until the Phenom II came out to buy one and I'll buy a Bulldozer when the mark 2 comes out.
My experience with intel chips hasn't been that great. They never scale as well as AMD ones in multi-code/multi-socket set-ups.... And I don't run Windows at all.
However, I question your claims of 3,600 engineers and never requiring unplanned overtime.
I never said there wasn't ANY unplanned overtime. I've been lucky in that my team has been a pioneer of Scrum in the organisation. We do a lot of high-quality work on time and to budget with very few staff and very little unplanned overtime.
The rest of the organisation has had trouble with high defect rate (technical debt), slipping deadlines and high overtime. They've been gradually going to Scrum and Agile over the last 2-3 years and seeing vast improvements.
Scrum/Agile can also be as bad. My last job we had "Scrum meetings" and were confronted if we didn't get at least 6 hours of "work time" on any particular task per day. If we didn't log every single change we made in the issue software we were asked what we were doing during that time. They could have checked the commit logs to see what changes I made during that day, but that's apparently not in their report. Heaven forbid I have a slow day or a meeting that prevents me from logging my 6 hours of time.
They were doing it badly wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned managers who didn't trust their staff to get on with the job.
Their report? What report? They don't need a "report." That's the whole point. The progress is visible for everyone to see on the story board and the burn-down chart. If they want more data (they're mad, but...) they shouldn't be wasting developer time to get it.
At my current location, the management doesn't attend Scrum meetings and it's night and day as far as what is reported. People here actually work together, but there is talk of linking "issue time" to "billed time" and I can see that quickly devolving into a pissing contest as well.
I'm not sure how "billed time" comes into it. I've just been sold (with 600 of my colleagues) to an Indian outsourcing company. The understanding at the moment is that everything we do is for the customer (including investigating issues) so it all gets billed. We'll see how that changes over the next few months, assuming I don't get downsized at the end of January when my project goes to India, or assuming that I don't escape before then to a better job:-)
Actually, I'm a software developer in a global organisation with 3600 permanent engineers plus contractors selling millions of products per quarter globally. I do C and C++ on Linux with TDD, shell scripting, Perl, Ruby... you name it. I've done a bit of scrum mastering myself and have been doing scrum for over 4 years.
If done properly, it works. And we always meet our deadlines, always, with the planned quality a feature set. I've never had to work more than 4 hours unplanned overtime in a week in all that time, and those occasions are only 3 or 4 times a year.
I've worked at mad 80-hour a week places before. They're a complete shambles, run by idiots who treat the engnieers like dirt. I'll not be going back.
When you work in software development, like many other fields, there are times near a release (or whatever milestone) where you have to work a lot of overtime. It's simply a fact of life
Nonsense
If you have to do that, it's due to bad management i.e bad planning and a lack of "alignment" (*cough* - PHB speak) in the organisation.
Note that I didn't say "bad managers": they're only part of the problem.
Try a little bit of Scrum, Agile and Design for Lean Six Sigma.
If you can't handle 80 hour weeks
No one can honestly say that they can work 80 hours in a week. Sure, they may be physically present, but during at least 30-35 of those hours they will be producing next to nothing, and quite probably contributing more problems in terms of mistakes to the project due to fatigue.
You macho people need to get a healthy dose of reality.
I used to work for a company like that. They went bust 18 months after I left for a much better paid job with sensible hours, training and benefits including private health and free gym membership.
Here in the UK you can belong to a union or not and it's entirely up to you. You can leave your union at any time.
Your employer by law only has to recognise a union of more than a certain percentage of the workforce belongs to the union. Otherwise, the union cannot represent you officially.
The union can still offer you advice and support. I joined a union when I started work in 1996 when I worked in the Public Sector. I've worked in the private sector since 2001, but have stayed a member of the union. They've been very helpful. They used to be called the Engineers and Managers Association and are pretty moderate and level-headed. They're not Communist, Socialist or any other "-ist" or "-ism" they just exists to protect their memebers' rights and negotiate on their behalf.
I don't think it's blathering nonsense per se but it is cocky and arrogant,
The main calling card of functional languages is to offset weakness in human cognition. The human brain struggles to convert a functional specification into an optimal state machine without dropping a stitch.
Bingo!
Supposing this assertion is true, knowing what I know now about human nature and human factors (and my beard is starting to go grey), human cognition is the weak link and therefore we should be exploiting this feature of functional languages to help us rather than arrogantly asserting that only the most intelligent and industrious have a right to (or even the ability to) write efficient code because their superior brains can instantly do all the work that a compiler for a functional language can and produce perfectly optimised code in a conventional language.
What I'm trying to say is that any help that the machine or the programming language can give us to solve our problem better (more correctly and more efficiently) should be readily accepted.
Doing commodity work is, by definition, boring and of low value to the market. It's also the stuff that gets outsourced.
Now that you have realised that you are in a rut, pick two or three cool new things to look at, then once you've evaluated them, focus on one and make that your new career direction.
I also don't understand why they think you'll consume an entire litre of fizzy drink during a single movie. I've never seen anywhere else selling that much beverage at one time outside the Oktoberfest
Fizzy drinks are very cheap to make, especially if you have a machine on site. Obviously, they'd like to relieve you of as much money as possible so they sell huge quantities at high prices, but lower price per unit volume that if you bough them in 330ml cans.
The customer needs to get up to use the loo several times during the film as a result, gets wind, rotten teeth and high blood sugar.
To continue the Oktoberfest theme, would it not be better if they sold beer? Smaller independent cinemas often do.
I suspect that it's not cinema per se that's dead, but the mainstream, big name cinema chains that have lost the plot.
I go to the cinema less than once per year on average. I hate it. It's too loud, too smelly, too expensive and the films are rubbish.
Just because it happens all the time doesn't mean it creates good environment for the engineers and makes the company successful.
That was part of my point. The rest of my point is that big business has lost the plot. One company embarks on a hare-brained scheme and next thing you know their all at it. [Hint to PHBs: stop trying to copy HP. They're on their way down and the staff only cling on to their jobs there because they haven't found any elsewhere yet.] It (big business) doesn't understand how engineering works, what engineers are, what they do and what they know. It doesn't understand the "value" that engineers provide and the "untapped value potential" they have in their heads, and the future developments that engineers can create by their drive to learn and explore new technology. That was deliberately phrased in PHB speak in case any are reading.
I'm currently the victim of outsourcing to an Indian company. The corporation said that we were forming a partnership and that we were going to be getting offshore help to accelerate our deliveries - to "leverage their talent pool." These are "motivated" and "empowered" people (mostly fresh out of university and costing 0.1 to 0.25 of what we cost to employ).
The outsourcing company told us that as much of our current work would be offshored as possible to get the costs down. Perhaps the other side is still labouring under the misapprehension that all of us with the knowledge and expertise will still be working on their products? They cut the R&D budget then engaged an outsourcing contractor with thousands of its own staff and sold us to them. You do the maths.
The new company is allegedly looking for new work for us from other clients. Meanwhile, I have the honour of training up and Indian for a few months who will then be going back to India to start up a team to do what mine currently does... and we'll be freed up to work on these fabulous new opportunities. But any new work will allegedly be sent to India as quickly as possible after the deals are signed to keep costs down.
Sounds great?
We are finding that these motivated and empowered young Indians are just as naieve and inexperienced as young and enthusiastic (but unemployable by their standards) British and Americans of the same age range.
I'm trying like mad to find a new job. The trouble is recruiters see "test-driven development" on your CV and think that you're a software tester... and C# is the same as C is the same as C++:-(
No company names are being mentioned for obvious reasons.
Many years ago, I worked for a Californian computer outfit called Sun Microsystems, but in the UK. I was doing a very low, unimportant job as I'd just changed careers but I worked in an office staffed by very intelligent and accomplished engineers.
Some very important Solaris projects came out of that office.
When Solaris 10 came out, we had the party on the Friday. On the Monday, we were all (apart from 3 people) made redundant, including some very senior engineers and project leaders.
About five or six weeks later, one very senior guy who had architected and lead a very important Solaris project received an angry phone call from a senior Sun PHB asking where on earth (but in more colourful language) this project was. His reply was, "Well, you tell me mate." After some more foul language, he managed to explain to the PHB that the team had all be laid off before the delivery. The PHB was forced to eat his words and apologise.
The left hand did not know what the right hand was doing.
American jobs were to be protected above those of foreigners. And what serious engineering could those pesky Limeys have been capable of anyway?
huh? Wasn't elvis the first vi clone to do syntax colouring?
Out of the box, on Slackware, the C keywords, pre-processor directives and macros are bold black and everything else is black. The background is white. This is the correct behaviour for a syntax-highlighting editor.
Windows is not exactly known for its multi-processor (multi-core) scalability.
Repeat the test with a real OS (Linux, Solaris...) and I'll be interested, especially Solaris x86 since it is known to be the best at scaling on parallel hardware.
This project is a poster-child of what disasters outsourcing can cause, and yet Western business still continues to pursue relentlessly the most radical outsourcing programmes imaginable with no regard to the reality of the situation and the consequences.
My last employer (a large American corporation) has embarked on such a voyage into oblivion and I've been transferred to the outsourcing company (an Indian Engineering "consultancy").
It's incredibly painful to watch. I'm glad I'm not a shareholder, and I'll be leaving as soon as I can find a new job.
Engineering is now "a commodity that can be bought as and when needed on the open market." Engineers don't maintain state in their brains, apparently.
Another different theory says that the "wise" men from the East were actually astrologers. The star or cosmic event was actually something on their astrology charts which told them about some significant event happening in Palestine. When you have Herod's court mentioning they didn't notice anything in the sky...it was nothing more than astrology being used.
So he's not the messiah, then, he's a very naughty boy?
Slashdot Mirror
Because if you truly want to promote freedom and free code, you also have to let people to profit from it. Freedom isn't picking who gets to enjoy that "freedom" based on some rules.
You're completely missing the point.
The GPL allows anyone to use the software for any purpose, including to make money. It does not allow the software to become part of a product that is closed source, that a company charges money for.
The idea is to keep the code free and open.
If I write code and give it away for free with source, why should some random company that has no intention of opening its source code for the benefit of others to learn from and to use, and charges money under a license restricting the use of the software, get to benefit from my hard work and altruism?
That's the point. That's why I support and use the GPL and LGPL.
If you are happy with someone else using the code that you wrote to make money (without paying you tuppence), probably modifying your code and not giving back the changes and charging people to use a product based on it, that's up to you.
However, that sort of idea is more popular amongst the greedy and the PHB types who never wrote a line of code in their lives than those that actually write code (and use other Open Source).
Anyhow, the military seems to be the our only institution left that's doing any forward thinking and planning past the next quarter. I'm hoping for some neato civilian spin-offs.
If I were a billionaire, I'd "fritter away" my money doing forward-thinking seeing as how now one else except the military.
PHBs and MBAs would scoff but I'd be the one having lots of fun, and all the thousands of people I'd be employing to work on my hare-brained schemes. As the traditional corporations gradually cost-cutted themselves to death, I'd have invented the future.
Time for my special pills now...
You have a good point.
In my direct experience, where large outsourcing companies are involved, in order to cut costs to the absolute minimum in order to make the maximum profit on the deal, they hire the youngest, most inexperienced developers they can.
So the reason "foreign" outsourcing companies get a bad name is not because they are foreign and foreign people aren't as clever as the ones they're replacing, it's because they are usually much younger and inexperienced, usually just having left university.
From what I can also see, since these outsourcing companies operate as cheaply as possible, all of the training that they provide is computer-based (i.e. of the least effective kind) and usually for pretty mundane and easy things.
I have been to a professional conference where all the attendees---except one---are wearing slacks, collared shirts or business uniforms. The one sore thumb was in a t-shirt, jeans and sneakers. Everyone wondered what kind of company he works for that would allow their representative to come to a conference dressed like that.
Oh dear. Is modern education that lacking?
Please refer to Book 2, Chapter 3.
Or maybe I have been "wooooooshed?"
As someone who bought an Athlon XP during that era, and in fact did exactly that (Fan failed, possibly due to dust, possibly just bad bearings)
Idiot. The Atlon XP had thermal throttling. The original (600MHz) Athlons didn't, and neither did the Thunderbirds IIRC, but the XP certainly does have it.
I write my own code so I know how to get the best out of the CPUs I buy. The Bulldozer looks like a very interesting design with a great deal of potential. I waited until the Phenom II came out to buy one and I'll buy a Bulldozer when the mark 2 comes out.
My experience with intel chips hasn't been that great. They never scale as well as AMD ones in multi-code/multi-socket set-ups.... And I don't run Windows at all.
However, I question your claims of 3,600 engineers and never requiring unplanned overtime.
I never said there wasn't ANY unplanned overtime. I've been lucky in that my team has been a pioneer of Scrum in the organisation. We do a lot of high-quality work on time and to budget with very few staff and very little unplanned overtime.
The rest of the organisation has had trouble with high defect rate (technical debt), slipping deadlines and high overtime. They've been gradually going to Scrum and Agile over the last 2-3 years and seeing vast improvements.
Scrum/Agile can also be as bad. My last job we had "Scrum meetings" and were confronted if we didn't get at least 6 hours of "work time" on any particular task per day. If we didn't log every single change we made in the issue software we were asked what we were doing during that time. They could have checked the commit logs to see what changes I made during that day, but that's apparently not in their report. Heaven forbid I have a slow day or a meeting that prevents me from logging my 6 hours of time.
They were doing it badly wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned managers who didn't trust their staff to get on with the job.
Their report? What report? They don't need a "report." That's the whole point. The progress is visible for everyone to see on the story board and the burn-down chart. If they want more data (they're mad, but...) they shouldn't be wasting developer time to get it.
At my current location, the management doesn't attend Scrum meetings and it's night and day as far as what is reported. People here actually work together, but there is talk of linking "issue time" to "billed time" and I can see that quickly devolving into a pissing contest as well.
I'm not sure how "billed time" comes into it. I've just been sold (with 600 of my colleagues) to an Indian outsourcing company. The understanding at the moment is that everything we do is for the customer (including investigating issues) so it all gets billed. We'll see how that changes over the next few months, assuming I don't get downsized at the end of January when my project goes to India, or assuming that I don't escape before then to a better job :-)
Actually, I'm a software developer in a global organisation with 3600 permanent engineers plus contractors selling millions of products per quarter globally. I do C and C++ on Linux with TDD, shell scripting, Perl, Ruby... you name it. I've done a bit of scrum mastering myself and have been doing scrum for over 4 years.
If done properly, it works. And we always meet our deadlines, always, with the planned quality a feature set. I've never had to work more than 4 hours unplanned overtime in a week in all that time, and those occasions are only 3 or 4 times a year.
I've worked at mad 80-hour a week places before. They're a complete shambles, run by idiots who treat the engnieers like dirt. I'll not be going back.
No, actually "computer understanding" has more to do with logic than (non-trivial) mathamatics anyways.
Logic is a branch of Mathematics.
When you work in software development, like many other fields, there are times near a release (or whatever milestone) where you have to work a lot of overtime. It's simply a fact of life
Nonsense
If you have to do that, it's due to bad management i.e bad planning and a lack of "alignment" (*cough* - PHB speak) in the organisation.
Note that I didn't say "bad managers": they're only part of the problem.
Try a little bit of Scrum, Agile and Design for Lean Six Sigma.
If you can't handle 80 hour weeks
No one can honestly say that they can work 80 hours in a week. Sure, they may be physically present, but during at least 30-35 of those hours they will be producing next to nothing, and quite probably contributing more problems in terms of mistakes to the project due to fatigue.
You macho people need to get a healthy dose of reality.
I used to work for a company like that. They went bust 18 months after I left for a much better paid job with sensible hours, training and benefits including private health and free gym membership.
Here in the UK you can belong to a union or not and it's entirely up to you. You can leave your union at any time.
Your employer by law only has to recognise a union of more than a certain percentage of the workforce belongs to the union. Otherwise, the union cannot represent you officially.
The union can still offer you advice and support. I joined a union when I started work in 1996 when I worked in the Public Sector. I've worked in the private sector since 2001, but have stayed a member of the union. They've been very helpful. They used to be called the Engineers and Managers Association and are pretty moderate and level-headed. They're not Communist, Socialist or any other "-ist" or "-ism" they just exists to protect their memebers' rights and negotiate on their behalf.
It's not unpossible.
G. Dubya, is that you? It's great to have you back. Let's kick that pinko-commie liberal's ass clean outta the Whitehouse!
On a more serious note, why can't you leave a union? That sounds very un-free to me.
I don't think it's blathering nonsense per se but it is cocky and arrogant,
The main calling card of functional languages is to offset weakness in human cognition. The human brain struggles to convert a functional specification into an optimal state machine without dropping a stitch.
Bingo!
Supposing this assertion is true, knowing what I know now about human nature and human factors (and my beard is starting to go grey), human cognition is the weak link and therefore we should be exploiting this feature of functional languages to help us rather than arrogantly asserting that only the most intelligent and industrious have a right to (or even the ability to) write efficient code because their superior brains can instantly do all the work that a compiler for a functional language can and produce perfectly optimised code in a conventional language.
What I'm trying to say is that any help that the machine or the programming language can give us to solve our problem better (more correctly and more efficiently) should be readily accepted.
This post was produced with the help of beer.
Very good advice.
Doing commodity work is, by definition, boring and of low value to the market. It's also the stuff that gets outsourced.
Now that you have realised that you are in a rut, pick two or three cool new things to look at, then once you've evaluated them, focus on one and make that your new career direction.
I also don't understand why they think you'll consume an entire litre of fizzy drink during a single movie. I've never seen anywhere else selling that much beverage at one time outside the Oktoberfest
Fizzy drinks are very cheap to make, especially if you have a machine on site. Obviously, they'd like to relieve you of as much money as possible so they sell huge quantities at high prices, but lower price per unit volume that if you bough them in 330ml cans.
The customer needs to get up to use the loo several times during the film as a result, gets wind, rotten teeth and high blood sugar.
To continue the Oktoberfest theme, would it not be better if they sold beer? Smaller independent cinemas often do.
I suspect that it's not cinema per se that's dead, but the mainstream, big name cinema chains that have lost the plot.
I go to the cinema less than once per year on average. I hate it. It's too loud, too smelly, too expensive and the films are rubbish.
Just because it happens all the time doesn't mean it creates good environment for the engineers and makes the company successful.
That was part of my point. The rest of my point is that big business has lost the plot. One company embarks on a hare-brained scheme and next thing you know their all at it. [Hint to PHBs: stop trying to copy HP. They're on their way down and the staff only cling on to their jobs there because they haven't found any elsewhere yet.] It (big business) doesn't understand how engineering works, what engineers are, what they do and what they know. It doesn't understand the "value" that engineers provide and the "untapped value potential" they have in their heads, and the future developments that engineers can create by their drive to learn and explore new technology. That was deliberately phrased in PHB speak in case any are reading.
I'm currently the victim of outsourcing to an Indian company. The corporation said that we were forming a partnership and that we were going to be getting offshore help to accelerate our deliveries - to "leverage their talent pool." These are "motivated" and "empowered" people (mostly fresh out of university and costing 0.1 to 0.25 of what we cost to employ).
The outsourcing company told us that as much of our current work would be offshored as possible to get the costs down. Perhaps the other side is still labouring under the misapprehension that all of us with the knowledge and expertise will still be working on their products? They cut the R&D budget then engaged an outsourcing contractor with thousands of its own staff and sold us to them. You do the maths.
The new company is allegedly looking for new work for us from other clients. Meanwhile, I have the honour of training up and Indian for a few months who will then be going back to India to start up a team to do what mine currently does... and we'll be freed up to work on these fabulous new opportunities. But any new work will allegedly be sent to India as quickly as possible after the deals are signed to keep costs down.
Sounds great?
We are finding that these motivated and empowered young Indians are just as naieve and inexperienced as young and enthusiastic (but unemployable by their standards) British and Americans of the same age range.
I'm trying like mad to find a new job. The trouble is recruiters see "test-driven development" on your CV and think that you're a software tester... and C# is the same as C is the same as C++ :-(
No company names are being mentioned for obvious reasons.
Big companies do this all the time.
Many years ago, I worked for a Californian computer outfit called Sun Microsystems, but in the UK. I was doing a very low, unimportant job as I'd just changed careers but I worked in an office staffed by very intelligent and accomplished engineers.
Some very important Solaris projects came out of that office.
When Solaris 10 came out, we had the party on the Friday. On the Monday, we were all (apart from 3 people) made redundant, including some very senior engineers and project leaders.
About five or six weeks later, one very senior guy who had architected and lead a very important Solaris project received an angry phone call from a senior Sun PHB asking where on earth (but in more colourful language) this project was. His reply was, "Well, you tell me mate." After some more foul language, he managed to explain to the PHB that the team had all be laid off before the delivery. The PHB was forced to eat his words and apologise.
The left hand did not know what the right hand was doing.
American jobs were to be protected above those of foreigners. And what serious engineering could those pesky Limeys have been capable of anyway?
huh? Wasn't elvis the first vi clone to do syntax colouring?
Out of the box, on Slackware, the C keywords, pre-processor directives and macros are bold black and everything else is black. The background is white. This is the correct behaviour for a syntax-highlighting editor.
The developers at Fedora can do whatever the heck they like. Pat knows what he's doing, and that's good enough for me.
Elvis knock vim into a cocked hat!
No garish colour schemes or any of that nonsense.
Which would you rather use: an editor named after a Rock Star or one named after a brand of toilet scourer? I rest my case.
Unfortunately, the Wintel world has thrived on this philosophy for 20 years.
Windows is not exactly known for its multi-processor (multi-core) scalability.
Repeat the test with a real OS (Linux, Solaris...) and I'll be interested, especially Solaris x86 since it is known to be the best at scaling on parallel hardware.
Quite.
This project is a poster-child of what disasters outsourcing can cause, and yet Western business still continues to pursue relentlessly the most radical outsourcing programmes imaginable with no regard to the reality of the situation and the consequences.
My last employer (a large American corporation) has embarked on such a voyage into oblivion and I've been transferred to the outsourcing company (an Indian Engineering "consultancy").
It's incredibly painful to watch. I'm glad I'm not a shareholder, and I'll be leaving as soon as I can find a new job.
Engineering is now "a commodity that can be bought as and when needed on the open market." Engineers don't maintain state in their brains, apparently.
Another different theory says that the "wise" men from the East were actually astrologers. The star or cosmic event was actually something on their astrology charts which told them about some significant event happening in Palestine. When you have Herod's court mentioning they didn't notice anything in the sky...it was nothing more than astrology being used.
So he's not the messiah, then, he's a very naughty boy?