Google was already investigated by the Irish data protection commissioner when they wanted to launch streetview in ireland.
Ireland is a tax haven for American corporations that don't want to pay their taxes. Consequently, if that gets Zuckerberg in a little hot water I'm all for it.
I'm studying to be an Engineer. Just so you are aware, the signing engineer is personally liable for any harm their project causes. It might be upper management's fault, it might be the fault of the lowliest engineer-in-training, but the signing engineer gets it right in the neck.
The idea is, he better know damn well what it is he is signing. He has to be very confident that his project will not cause harm. And it WORKS. Buildings don't fall down very often around here. Medical devices generally don't murder their patients.
That's only part of it. And once you finish your studies and get out into the real world, you're going to find a very different picture. The reason that bridges don't fall down (very often) and that medical devices don't (generally) murder patients isn't just because one guy somewhere accepts "responsibility" and takes one for the team when things go bad. That's simply not correct, and if it were, nobody would ever be an engineer. So far as I'm concerned, if a bad design goes to production, it's not just the engineer's fault. Design review is there for a reason, as a fundamental acknowledgement that nobody is perfect., and depending upon the consequences of that bad design, smart management allocates sufficient resources to verify the design long before it ever goes near production.
What keeps us reasonably safe are the legal penalties applied to companies that don't perform their due diligence in terms of both the design and manufacture of said products. Face it, companies cut corners. They just do: and if they play the odds like that and somebody gets hurt... well, they they'll get bitchslapped in court.
And you know what? There's one hell of a lot of people involved in designing a bridge, or an infusion pump, or indeed any complex product. And it's management that decides who those people are, what it is they do, and how they do it. The design engineer is only a small part of that process (and not necessarily the most important.)
The point is, this focusing on the engineer as the sole reason for product failure is naive at best, and adding more layers of bureaucracy to mix without addressing the fact that other disciplines in a big organization are also relevant is just stupid. But that's what I expect from politicians looking for an easy "solution".
Same people that bitch about one of the above also bitch about how they can't use their mobile phones at home or while driving their kids around. I won't say any more.
{sigh} Yeah, it kinda makes you want to throw up. The same kind of self-centered assholes that were against offshore windfarms up near Boston because it would destroy their beautiful skyline, even though they wouldn't be visible from shore.
If I had some land and a wireless company wanted to put up a tower, I'd say sure. Just give me a couple of your best smartphones with an unlimited data plan for as long as you have your tower on my property. And make sure you replant the grass when you're done.
I guess I have to ask why do they even need 7% of that since they have a bunch outside of that range and it is a limited and dying hobby?
just wondering, and trying to not be a troll about it
Limited and dying by whose measure? There's a world of amateur radio that exists outside of the United States. In fact, that's often the reason people get into the "hobby", to talk to those from other countries.
Personally, I like the fact that there's a global communications medium available at all times that is completely outside of the comparatively fragile mainstream networks, that is dependent upon no physical infrastructure whatsoever, not even satellites, and cannot be easily blocked or jammed by government. Remember what happened during Katrina: cell phones went offline almost immediately, along with Internet and regular telephones as CO batteries died and generators ran out of fuel. HAMs were communicating worldwide during the whole crisis.
And it isn't just the United States where amateur radio has come in very handy. It would be a mistake to try and eliminate those "hobbyists" (rather a demeaning term to apply to some very accomplished, dedicated and useful people) and furthermore it would require some international accords anyway: the spectrum is used worldwide.
I read TFA and kept waiting for some mention of spectrum utilization by Verizon and AT&T. Instead we see a list of smaller competitors as the "wrong hands" people. By implication if we could just drive these little guys out of the marketplace and let VZ and AT&T extend their oligopoly we'd all be better off? I think not.
Yeah, that' doesn't make much sense to me either. Kinda makes you wonder about the impartiality of the authors.
Of course sometimes families lose a home or business over property taxes, but that is simply the cost of having an efficient economy,
Off-topic: the old "you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" argument. It's morally bankrupt in many situations.
I hope you never have to deal with a tax-sale. It's brutal, and you lose everything over taxes worth only a fraction of the value of your home. That almost happened to a member of my family once: he was very ill and missed one payment. One. I tried to speak to the county attorney to get a little more time, and she told me flatly, "I can't help you. It's your responsibility to pay your taxes. If you lose your home that's really not my problem." Arrogant bitch. On the day of the tax sale I walked in, skipped over a line of people all waiting to pick up his house for a song, and handed over a certified check to the clerk for about seven grand. The collective sigh of disappointment I heard made me want to throw up. Frankly, it's inhumane and just fundamentally wrong the way most counties handle property taxes. The essence of ownership is, in fact, control, and the truth is you don't ultimately control the disposition of what is loosely called "property" in this country. The state can take it from you on a whim, and recent Supreme Court rulings have made that even more likely.
On topic, in the case of spectrum, you may very well be right, I don't know. But I do know this: if you tax the hell out of spectrum space that cost will instantly be passed on to consumers as higher prices and even poorer service. The answer is better regulation and control of carriers and their spectrum utilization, but in this age of regulatory capture I don't see it happening any time soon.
Don't forget all those greedy hams! They have a whole 26 MHz at 33 cm they're never using! That's a half of a freaking channel! Just take it! They got no lobbyists!
Ha. You know, I wish they would, and I further wish that the entire Federal Communications Commission, along with the CEO and Board of DIrectors of all the major telecom carriers, would get caught in the middle of some major disaster with no way to communicate or call for help. I then imagine them surrounded by hundreds of ex-HAM operators all staring at them with accusing eyes, "We could have gotten out on 20 meters, but now we're all gonna die because you selfish fucks "reallocated" our spectrum!"
Amateur radio does enough good in the world that it should just be left alone.
his allows them, as they are doing now, to lease some of that bandwidth to the towers to other carriers. Clearwire was always envisioned as a wholesaler.
As Johnny Carson was wont to say: "I did not know that."
The reason bridges cost so much is that they are designed to such a degree of precision so that they DON'T fail and that they last for 50+ years.
Sure, and the reason that software doesn't cost proportionally as much as that bridge, is that society is willing to tolerate a lower standard. In other words it isn't willing to pay for quality. Consequently, misguided government attempts to try to "certify" software engineers and start creating and enforcing all kinds of standards are simply inappropriate. Applications that are mission-critical will get the attention they need: if they don't, the legal system will address the associated corporate failures by suing said corporations out of existence. For everything else, people will get what they pay for. There's absolutely no reason for an email notification program to be written to the same standards as the Space Shuttle navigation system.
The company is paying you to make that call honestly
Correct. However, what your position simply does not account for is that nobody is, after all, perfect, and furthermore the human mind has its limits. And in any project that involves dozens, maybe hundreds of engineers and technical people of all stripes, you can do your job competently, even at genius level, make that call in good faith... and still be wrong. Does that warrant the destruction of your career and possible jail time? Nope. It doesn't, and that's exactly why the corporate veil exists. I would say that in a a situation involving criminal behavior it might be different, but we aren't talking about that. Even the best engineers make mistakes, the organizational structure should expect and account for that: if it doesn't, if it doesn't back him up all the way, then the organization is just plain broken.
The truth is, only an incompetent would hire an incompetent for a critical position. Management is responsible for technical failures: they may not be the actual cause of a problem, but they ultimately bear responsibility for it in the same way that the Captain of a ship is responsible for everything that happens aboard. That's why they make more money than we do, and have more authority. The difference is that managers often manage to weasel out of paying for their mistakes. Ship captains don't.
And here's the thing: the larger the project, the more the chances are that something will slip through. There's a point which occurs fairly early in any major engineering effort where the sheer number of details goes beyond the capacity of a single human mind to encompass. At some level, there has to be trust that those underneath that senior engineer are, themselves, competent, and there needs to be a system in place to try and minimize the errors that do creep in. And I'm sorry, but the selection of those individuals, the choice and enforcement of design verification procedures and other checks-and-balances are indeed the responsibility of management. Were that not so... there would be no need for management.
I don't know if, as a software engineer yourself, you've worked on any really large codebases (or on software projects involving sophisticated interactions with real world equipment) but it's not so easy as you might think to sign off on something that complex with one hundred percent confidence. Bridges, in fact, are downright simple structures in comparison. Hell, look what NASA achieved back in the sixties: the Apollo program was a technological masterpiece on a scale never before attempted, a true "miracle" of engineering and quality control... but serious problems still occurred after launch. That's just the way it is: perfection is a worthy goal but it will never be achieved in this Universe.
At this point in my life, I'm in charge of a relatively lightweight codebase. Maybe a half-million lines of code, it's a mission-critical application for some very, very large industrial complexes. Believe me, failures are not appreciated: downtime can be hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour. Now I've been doing this job for about thirty years, I do it pretty well, but it doesn't matter how competent I may be if all the people who support my efforts fail to do theirs! If you're going to shoot engineers in the head for making a mistake, you'd best be prepared to stick it to everyone else involved.
Even if the software itself is perfectly-designed and bug-free, you have to account for all the unpredictability that invariably arises when the code meets a given customer's installation. Put it this way: it took centuries to get the art of bridge building down to a science. We just haven't reached that point with information technology: that standards that exist today will be obsolete a few years from now.
Sometimes you just have to trust that everyone else did what had to be done. You can't control everything.
Large chunks of IPV4 address space were assigned early on to corporations, universities, government bodies and others who had absolutely no use for so much space, simply because nobody even considered that
anyone other than reasearchers or the military would have a use for "an Internet".
Clearwire is probably underutilized because people don't want the towers which provide the service in their backyards.
We've had a discussion about this in the past which I posted on (I'm too lazy to find it) where I said people in my area shot down a proposed tower because it would go up on a watertower in the park in their backyard.
With so much citizen hatred for "screwing up their home values" perhaps that's the biggest problem facing this "underutilized" spectrum rather than the companies themselves.
NIMBYs are generally a pain in the ass. You can't call them Luddites, since they're not exactly against the technology, they're just selfish pricks.
They should have sold the frequencies by market area (city, zip-codes, etc.) and not nation-wide.
That's the real crux of the problem.
Now we have large nation-wide companies holding up frequencies in large swathes of the country because they're dedicating their efforts in specific markets where they can charge more.
Had the FCC sold the frequency on a market basis and required it to be used within a reasonable time frame, we wouldn't have these issues.
It's similar to the way telephone numbers were allocated: in huge blocks, with no particular guarantee that any significant percentage of them would ever be assigned. That led to the explosion in area codes we've experienced in the past couple decades. The phone companies first claimed that "it's all the fax machines and modems that are in use now" but the reality was just an inefficient allocation scheme.
Large chunks of IPV4 address space were assigned early on to corporations, universities, government bodies and others who had absolutely no use for so much space, simply because nobody even considered that 32-bits just wouldn't be enough. Not nearly enough.
The FCC isn't showing much better judgment when it comes to wireless spectrum, or the Internet in general for that matter. Well, okay... they know exactly what they're doing: generating yet-another artificial scarcity so that their corporate sponsors can continue to make large sums of money from us.
I was wondering how they intend to handle problems related to individuals that look young.
It's doubtful this would work the same way we identify youthfulness. It would probably look at something like the size of the head in proportion to the rest of the body. That would probably keep the number of false positives down. If if you are an adult who's that much out of proportion, you're probably too ugly to have kids anyway and you can just turn the feature off.
Either way, I predict an upswing in sales of wigs and fake mustache kits.
And of course, anyone who's ever been near manufacturing knows that the manufactured cost per unit for the pilot run is the same as it will be after you've refined your processes and established blanket POs with all your vendors./sarcasm
real engineers build things that can kill people if they do things wrong. they have all the same pressures from management, but they still (theoretically) have standards, and licensing bodies, and like, rules and stuff.
Yes, all of which are designed to ensure competence, not to assign blame. If an executive hires an incompetent, the fault for any future problems lies with that executive. Who is more the fool: the fool... or the man who hires him?
so a PE can get out of being liable for a badly designed bridge by putting the blueprints and the bill of materials on a sign before you get on the bridge?
there is a point where i agree that the programmers should be liable for their code - to the extent that it shows negligence. the fact that software for so long has gotten away with "good luck, thanks for the cash" mentality is kinda sad.
I am a programmer - and i would be willing to stand behind my code used in the environment for which it was intended.. but at the same time i would want to be compensated for the risk.. same way a PE gets compensated based on the scope of work they have to sign off on.
What truly irks me about discussions such as this is that everyone wants to lay the blame on the programmer. It is the organization that is at fault. Matter of fact, the responsibility for a defective software product lies squarely with upper management. Frankly, I just don't get this perceived need to roast programmers and software engineers alive, when defective designs in every other industry cause harm, and nobody talks about throwing those engineers under a bus.
Standing by your code is one thing: taking the legal responsibility for a finished, shipping application that has problems that you would certainly have fixed if you knew about them is something else again. Management decides who works on what project, how much (if any) quality control time is assigned to that project, management decides what bugs are minor enough to fix in an update (and sometimes they're wrong about that.) Management decides who to hire in the first place.
I work in an industry where my codebase, if it were to malfunction in any serious way, would be a major problem for some rather large plants worldwide. But here's the thing: if the responsibility (and legal penalties) for such problems were mine, and mine alone... well, guess what. I wouldn't be a software engineer anymore. Why should I go to jail, or be bankrupted with legal fees, when I did a perfectly competent job, but a bug still managed to get by QC? Might as well put the QC team on the hot seat too: they're the ones that missed it. Fact is, the corporate veil is there for a reason.
In any organization it's the people at the top (the people who get the big salaries and golden parachutes) who ultimately maintain responsibility for such failures. And that is how it should be: they make the big decisions, they're the ones who allocate resources. Your average code monkey is no more at fault for a product failure than the janitor. That's why, unless there's gross mismanagement, it's the company that is penalized, not the individual employees. There are supposed to be checks and balances. Face it people: we know how to do code right, but most vendors simply don't want to spend the money.
That bridge you were talking about is a perfect example: the reason bridges don't fail very often because of design flaws is because those designs are reviewed and cross-checked and signed-off upon by slew of other engineers and designers who make sure the design is solid. It's that way because nobody is perfect. Again, who decides how much code review and design assurance is necessary? Yeah, you got it: management.
All the disclaimers in the world don't mean squat in court if your software causes significant economic or physical harm. The company that produced it (not the individual developers) certainly can be sued and redress granted. But penalizing individuals for systemic problems within a given organization? Even discussing that is patently ridiculous.
There's no good reason to burn engineers at the stake. Plenty of reason to boil a lot of CEOs and managers in oil though.
Are any of the people you know in the software industry over the age of 25?
All of them. I'm over fifty myself. And why is it the government's job to provide such protection?
The reason that we look at software patents as a bad thing is that we do care about our work, and what we don't want is some big team of lawyers telling us that we can't use or improve algorithms in order to make our products better. The software industry moves at warp speed compared to just about any other: assigning patent protection to algorithms (or at best, the expression of same in code) serves no valid purpose. In any event, how you look at this depends entirely upon what you believe the purpose of software patent protection to be: the advancement of the useful arts and sciences, or the suppression of progress in order to maintain the revenue streams of a comparatively few large patent holders. You decide.
This particular issue, that of codecs, is a perfect example. There's tons of money to be made in this business by every legitimate entity involved regardless of patent protection. The only real beneficiaries here are companies that simply don't want to be bothered by someone outside their little cabalistic group coming up with something better, even though in the long run they too would benefit from such progress.
Granted, much of the debate here centers as much upon the unbelievably poor handling of software patents (indeed, patents in general) by Congress and the United States Patent Office as it does upon the mere existence of this class of patents. Nevertheless, anyone who is concerned about the long-term health of the profession of developer, and the advancement of the state of this particular art, should be very concerned about software patents. You can say what you like about how software needs the dubious "protection" of patents, but the reality is that this industry has not only survived but thrived for decades with nothing but the substantial defenses afforded by copyright. Copyright your work, sue if your rights are infringed by illegal distribution, obfuscate your executables if necessary to maintain your trade secrets. There are plenty of effective ways to protect your intellectual assets, especially in the age of Web applications where your oh-so-valuable code need not reside on the customer's equipment, making reverse engineering impossible. On the other hand, telling me that I can't use a particular mathematical expression in my code is, well... patently ridiculous. Arguably even more batshit insane than universities and corporations that are patenting genes. Genes.
It's pretty clear at this point that software patents are little more than a blunt instrument used by the big boys to suppress potential competition, and trolls to extort money from the organizations they parasitize. They simply don't have much benefit to the little guy, in practical terms: unless you happen to have accumulated a substantial number of relevant patents for defensive purposes and have a correspondingly hefty legal budget, the big boys will do what they want with your world-changing patented "idea". Sure, you can take them to court and try for some degree of redress, but that's a massively expensive undertaking. In the meantime, if your algorithm is truly valuable, they'll be making millions from it. If you're a small developer or startup, depending upon the law to protect your assets is a mistake as it simply does not work in your favor. The odds of winning a patent lawsuit generally work like this (no. of relevant patents x size of legal department) + (relative innumeracy of the judge and jury.)
The Founders perspective (very clearly expressed in the Constitution) was that the ultimate beneficiary of what we now know as "intellectual property" was to be We the People, and that both patents and copyright were, ultimately, to benefit the public domain. So yes, I understand your point: nobod
It's like the old days where gif died cause cmpuserve owned it
It wasn't Compuserve that caused all the hate and discontent. It was Unisys that was making threats and trying to get royalties. Compuserve didn't sue anybody, didn't demand anything from anyone. In fact, I believe they were Unisys' first target.
it helps to know that you can hit the 24 fps target without overheating.
True, and for even lower-powered devices (those with ARM processors like cell phones and tablets) heating and battery life become an issue. As the mobile market continues to grow, the computational efficiency of codecs will be an issue, even if you have hardware support.
Slashdot Mirror
After having a ten minute fight scene, of course.
Where he gets shot anyway after exposing the alien menace.
t isn't the lenses that detect ultravision.
No, but do natural lenses absorb UV?
Google was already investigated by the Irish data protection commissioner when they wanted to launch streetview in ireland.
Ireland is a tax haven for American corporations that don't want to pay their taxes. Consequently, if that gets Zuckerberg in a little hot water I'm all for it.
Why should anyone go to jail for making a mistake at work? That's absurd.
Well, if your goal is to eliminate the last vestiges of engineering actually performed in this country it's a great idea.
I'm studying to be an Engineer. Just so you are aware, the signing engineer is personally liable for any harm their project causes. It might be upper management's fault, it might be the fault of the lowliest engineer-in-training, but the signing engineer gets it right in the neck.
The idea is, he better know damn well what it is he is signing. He has to be very confident that his project will not cause harm. And it WORKS. Buildings don't fall down very often around here. Medical devices generally don't murder their patients.
That's only part of it. And once you finish your studies and get out into the real world, you're going to find a very different picture. The reason that bridges don't fall down (very often) and that medical devices don't (generally) murder patients isn't just because one guy somewhere accepts "responsibility" and takes one for the team when things go bad. That's simply not correct, and if it were, nobody would ever be an engineer. So far as I'm concerned, if a bad design goes to production, it's not just the engineer's fault. Design review is there for a reason, as a fundamental acknowledgement that nobody is perfect., and depending upon the consequences of that bad design, smart management allocates sufficient resources to verify the design long before it ever goes near production.
... well, they they'll get bitchslapped in court.
What keeps us reasonably safe are the legal penalties applied to companies that don't perform their due diligence in terms of both the design and manufacture of said products. Face it, companies cut corners. They just do: and if they play the odds like that and somebody gets hurt
And you know what? There's one hell of a lot of people involved in designing a bridge, or an infusion pump, or indeed any complex product. And it's management that decides who those people are, what it is they do, and how they do it. The design engineer is only a small part of that process (and not necessarily the most important.)
The point is, this focusing on the engineer as the sole reason for product failure is naive at best, and adding more layers of bureaucracy to mix without addressing the fact that other disciplines in a big organization are also relevant is just stupid. But that's what I expect from politicians looking for an easy "solution".
Same people that bitch about one of the above also bitch about how they can't use their mobile phones at home or while driving their kids around. I won't say any more.
{sigh} Yeah, it kinda makes you want to throw up. The same kind of self-centered assholes that were against offshore windfarms up near Boston because it would destroy their beautiful skyline, even though they wouldn't be visible from shore.
If I had some land and a wireless company wanted to put up a tower, I'd say sure. Just give me a couple of your best smartphones with an unlimited data plan for as long as you have your tower on my property. And make sure you replant the grass when you're done.
I guess I have to ask why do they even need 7% of that since they have a bunch outside of that range and it is a limited and dying hobby?
just wondering, and trying to not be a troll about it
Limited and dying by whose measure? There's a world of amateur radio that exists outside of the United States. In fact, that's often the reason people get into the "hobby", to talk to those from other countries.
Personally, I like the fact that there's a global communications medium available at all times that is completely outside of the comparatively fragile mainstream networks, that is dependent upon no physical infrastructure whatsoever, not even satellites, and cannot be easily blocked or jammed by government. Remember what happened during Katrina: cell phones went offline almost immediately, along with Internet and regular telephones as CO batteries died and generators ran out of fuel. HAMs were communicating worldwide during the whole crisis.
And it isn't just the United States where amateur radio has come in very handy. It would be a mistake to try and eliminate those "hobbyists" (rather a demeaning term to apply to some very accomplished, dedicated and useful people) and furthermore it would require some international accords anyway: the spectrum is used worldwide.
And no I'm not a HAM, but I play one on TV.
I read TFA and kept waiting for some mention of spectrum utilization by Verizon and AT&T. Instead we see a list of smaller competitors as the "wrong hands" people. By implication if we could just drive these little guys out of the marketplace and let VZ and AT&T extend their oligopoly we'd all be better off? I think not.
Yeah, that' doesn't make much sense to me either. Kinda makes you wonder about the impartiality of the authors.
Of course sometimes families lose a home or business over property taxes, but that is simply the cost of having an efficient economy,
Off-topic: the old "you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" argument. It's morally bankrupt in many situations.
I hope you never have to deal with a tax-sale. It's brutal, and you lose everything over taxes worth only a fraction of the value of your home. That almost happened to a member of my family once: he was very ill and missed one payment. One. I tried to speak to the county attorney to get a little more time, and she told me flatly, "I can't help you. It's your responsibility to pay your taxes. If you lose your home that's really not my problem." Arrogant bitch. On the day of the tax sale I walked in, skipped over a line of people all waiting to pick up his house for a song, and handed over a certified check to the clerk for about seven grand. The collective sigh of disappointment I heard made me want to throw up. Frankly, it's inhumane and just fundamentally wrong the way most counties handle property taxes. The essence of ownership is, in fact, control, and the truth is you don't ultimately control the disposition of what is loosely called "property" in this country. The state can take it from you on a whim, and recent Supreme Court rulings have made that even more likely.
On topic, in the case of spectrum, you may very well be right, I don't know. But I do know this: if you tax the hell out of spectrum space that cost will instantly be passed on to consumers as higher prices and even poorer service. The answer is better regulation and control of carriers and their spectrum utilization, but in this age of regulatory capture I don't see it happening any time soon.
Don't forget all those greedy hams! They have a whole 26 MHz at 33 cm they're never using! That's a half of a freaking channel! Just take it! They got no lobbyists!
Ha. You know, I wish they would, and I further wish that the entire Federal Communications Commission, along with the CEO and Board of DIrectors of all the major telecom carriers, would get caught in the middle of some major disaster with no way to communicate or call for help. I then imagine them surrounded by hundreds of ex-HAM operators all staring at them with accusing eyes, "We could have gotten out on 20 meters, but now we're all gonna die because you selfish fucks "reallocated" our spectrum!"
Amateur radio does enough good in the world that it should just be left alone.
his allows them, as they are doing now, to lease some of that bandwidth to the towers to other carriers. Clearwire was always envisioned as a wholesaler.
As Johnny Carson was wont to say: "I did not know that."
But, their focus is on full-size towers, which is spectrum inefficient.
Yes, but right-of-way efficient.
The reason bridges cost so much is that they are designed to such a degree of precision so that they DON'T fail and that they last for 50+ years.
Sure, and the reason that software doesn't cost proportionally as much as that bridge, is that society is willing to tolerate a lower standard. In other words it isn't willing to pay for quality. Consequently, misguided government attempts to try to "certify" software engineers and start creating and enforcing all kinds of standards are simply inappropriate. Applications that are mission-critical will get the attention they need: if they don't, the legal system will address the associated corporate failures by suing said corporations out of existence. For everything else, people will get what they pay for. There's absolutely no reason for an email notification program to be written to the same standards as the Space Shuttle navigation system.
The company is paying you to make that call honestly
Correct. However, what your position simply does not account for is that nobody is, after all, perfect, and furthermore the human mind has its limits. And in any project that involves dozens, maybe hundreds of engineers and technical people of all stripes, you can do your job competently, even at genius level, make that call in good faith ... and still be wrong. Does that warrant the destruction of your career and possible jail time? Nope. It doesn't, and that's exactly why the corporate veil exists. I would say that in a a situation involving criminal behavior it might be different, but we aren't talking about that. Even the best engineers make mistakes, the organizational structure should expect and account for that: if it doesn't, if it doesn't back him up all the way, then the organization is just plain broken.
... there would be no need for management.
... but serious problems still occurred after launch. That's just the way it is: perfection is a worthy goal but it will never be achieved in this Universe.
The truth is, only an incompetent would hire an incompetent for a critical position. Management is responsible for technical failures: they may not be the actual cause of a problem, but they ultimately bear responsibility for it in the same way that the Captain of a ship is responsible for everything that happens aboard. That's why they make more money than we do, and have more authority. The difference is that managers often manage to weasel out of paying for their mistakes. Ship captains don't.
And here's the thing: the larger the project, the more the chances are that something will slip through. There's a point which occurs fairly early in any major engineering effort where the sheer number of details goes beyond the capacity of a single human mind to encompass. At some level, there has to be trust that those underneath that senior engineer are, themselves, competent, and there needs to be a system in place to try and minimize the errors that do creep in. And I'm sorry, but the selection of those individuals, the choice and enforcement of design verification procedures and other checks-and-balances are indeed the responsibility of management. Were that not so
I don't know if, as a software engineer yourself, you've worked on any really large codebases (or on software projects involving sophisticated interactions with real world equipment) but it's not so easy as you might think to sign off on something that complex with one hundred percent confidence. Bridges, in fact, are downright simple structures in comparison. Hell, look what NASA achieved back in the sixties: the Apollo program was a technological masterpiece on a scale never before attempted, a true "miracle" of engineering and quality control
At this point in my life, I'm in charge of a relatively lightweight codebase. Maybe a half-million lines of code, it's a mission-critical application for some very, very large industrial complexes. Believe me, failures are not appreciated: downtime can be hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour. Now I've been doing this job for about thirty years, I do it pretty well, but it doesn't matter how competent I may be if all the people who support my efforts fail to do theirs! If you're going to shoot engineers in the head for making a mistake, you'd best be prepared to stick it to everyone else involved.
Even if the software itself is perfectly-designed and bug-free, you have to account for all the unpredictability that invariably arises when the code meets a given customer's installation. Put it this way: it took centuries to get the art of bridge building down to a science. We just haven't reached that point with information technology: that standards that exist today will be obsolete a few years from now.
Sometimes you just have to trust that everyone else did what had to be done. You can't control everything.
Large chunks of IPV4 address space were assigned early on to corporations, universities, government bodies and others who had absolutely no use for so much space, simply because nobody even considered that
anyone other than reasearchers or the military would have a use for "an Internet".
Yah. That too.
Clearwire is probably underutilized because people don't want the towers which provide the service in their backyards.
We've had a discussion about this in the past which I posted on (I'm too lazy to find it) where I said people in my area shot down a proposed tower because it would go up on a watertower in the park in their backyard.
With so much citizen hatred for "screwing up their home values" perhaps that's the biggest problem facing this "underutilized" spectrum rather than the companies themselves.
NIMBYs are generally a pain in the ass. You can't call them Luddites, since they're not exactly against the technology, they're just selfish pricks.
They should have sold the frequencies by market area (city, zip-codes, etc.) and not nation-wide.
That's the real crux of the problem.
Now we have large nation-wide companies holding up frequencies in large swathes of the country because they're dedicating their efforts in specific markets where they can charge more.
Had the FCC sold the frequency on a market basis and required it to be used within a reasonable time frame, we wouldn't have these issues.
It's similar to the way telephone numbers were allocated: in huge blocks, with no particular guarantee that any significant percentage of them would ever be assigned. That led to the explosion in area codes we've experienced in the past couple decades. The phone companies first claimed that "it's all the fax machines and modems that are in use now" but the reality was just an inefficient allocation scheme.
... they know exactly what they're doing: generating yet-another artificial scarcity so that their corporate sponsors can continue to make large sums of money from us.
Large chunks of IPV4 address space were assigned early on to corporations, universities, government bodies and others who had absolutely no use for so much space, simply because nobody even considered that 32-bits just wouldn't be enough. Not nearly enough.
The FCC isn't showing much better judgment when it comes to wireless spectrum, or the Internet in general for that matter. Well, okay
I was wondering how they intend to handle problems related to individuals that look young.
It's doubtful this would work the same way we identify youthfulness. It would probably look at something like the size of the head in proportion to the rest of the body. That would probably keep the number of false positives down. If if you are an adult who's that much out of proportion, you're probably too ugly to have kids anyway and you can just turn the feature off.
Either way, I predict an upswing in sales of wigs and fake mustache kits.
And of course, anyone who's ever been near manufacturing knows that the manufactured cost per unit for the pilot run is the same as it will be after you've refined your processes and established blanket POs with all your vendors. /sarcasm
True. I think the only BOM here is this estimate.
real engineers build things that can kill people if they do things wrong. they have all the same pressures from management, but they still (theoretically) have standards, and licensing bodies, and like, rules and stuff.
Yes, all of which are designed to ensure competence, not to assign blame. If an executive hires an incompetent, the fault for any future problems lies with that executive. Who is more the fool: the fool ... or the man who hires him?
so a PE can get out of being liable for a badly designed bridge by putting the blueprints and the bill of materials on a sign before you get on the bridge?
there is a point where i agree that the programmers should be liable for their code - to the extent that it shows negligence. the fact that software for so long has gotten away with "good luck, thanks for the cash" mentality is kinda sad.
I am a programmer - and i would be willing to stand behind my code used in the environment for which it was intended.. but at the same time i would want to be compensated for the risk.. same way a PE gets compensated based on the scope of work they have to sign off on.
What truly irks me about discussions such as this is that everyone wants to lay the blame on the programmer. It is the organization that is at fault. Matter of fact, the responsibility for a defective software product lies squarely with upper management. Frankly, I just don't get this perceived need to roast programmers and software engineers alive, when defective designs in every other industry cause harm, and nobody talks about throwing those engineers under a bus.
... well, guess what. I wouldn't be a software engineer anymore. Why should I go to jail, or be bankrupted with legal fees, when I did a perfectly competent job, but a bug still managed to get by QC? Might as well put the QC team on the hot seat too: they're the ones that missed it. Fact is, the corporate veil is there for a reason.
Standing by your code is one thing: taking the legal responsibility for a finished, shipping application that has problems that you would certainly have fixed if you knew about them is something else again. Management decides who works on what project, how much (if any) quality control time is assigned to that project, management decides what bugs are minor enough to fix in an update (and sometimes they're wrong about that.) Management decides who to hire in the first place.
I work in an industry where my codebase, if it were to malfunction in any serious way, would be a major problem for some rather large plants worldwide. But here's the thing: if the responsibility (and legal penalties) for such problems were mine, and mine alone
In any organization it's the people at the top (the people who get the big salaries and golden parachutes) who ultimately maintain responsibility for such failures. And that is how it should be: they make the big decisions, they're the ones who allocate resources. Your average code monkey is no more at fault for a product failure than the janitor. That's why, unless there's gross mismanagement, it's the company that is penalized, not the individual employees. There are supposed to be checks and balances. Face it people: we know how to do code right, but most vendors simply don't want to spend the money.
That bridge you were talking about is a perfect example: the reason bridges don't fail very often because of design flaws is because those designs are reviewed and cross-checked and signed-off upon by slew of other engineers and designers who make sure the design is solid. It's that way because nobody is perfect. Again, who decides how much code review and design assurance is necessary? Yeah, you got it: management.
All the disclaimers in the world don't mean squat in court if your software causes significant economic or physical harm. The company that produced it (not the individual developers) certainly can be sued and redress granted. But penalizing individuals for systemic problems within a given organization? Even discussing that is patently ridiculous.
There's no good reason to burn engineers at the stake. Plenty of reason to boil a lot of CEOs and managers in oil though.
The SCOTUS already provided the details, we can only react to those realities in one way or another.
You don't have to understand the weather to look outside the door and choose good boots.
Congress still has the power to change matters. They have no particular incentive to do so, but they could. Theoretically.
Are any of the people you know in the software industry over the age of 25?
All of them. I'm over fifty myself. And why is it the government's job to provide such protection?
... patently ridiculous. Arguably even more batshit insane than universities and corporations that are patenting genes. Genes.
The reason that we look at software patents as a bad thing is that we do care about our work, and what we don't want is some big team of lawyers telling us that we can't use or improve algorithms in order to make our products better. The software industry moves at warp speed compared to just about any other: assigning patent protection to algorithms (or at best, the expression of same in code) serves no valid purpose. In any event, how you look at this depends entirely upon what you believe the purpose of software patent protection to be: the advancement of the useful arts and sciences, or the suppression of progress in order to maintain the revenue streams of a comparatively few large patent holders. You decide.
This particular issue, that of codecs, is a perfect example. There's tons of money to be made in this business by every legitimate entity involved regardless of patent protection. The only real beneficiaries here are companies that simply don't want to be bothered by someone outside their little cabalistic group coming up with something better, even though in the long run they too would benefit from such progress.
Granted, much of the debate here centers as much upon the unbelievably poor handling of software patents (indeed, patents in general) by Congress and the United States Patent Office as it does upon the mere existence of this class of patents. Nevertheless, anyone who is concerned about the long-term health of the profession of developer, and the advancement of the state of this particular art, should be very concerned about software patents. You can say what you like about how software needs the dubious "protection" of patents, but the reality is that this industry has not only survived but thrived for decades with nothing but the substantial defenses afforded by copyright. Copyright your work, sue if your rights are infringed by illegal distribution, obfuscate your executables if necessary to maintain your trade secrets. There are plenty of effective ways to protect your intellectual assets, especially in the age of Web applications where your oh-so-valuable code need not reside on the customer's equipment, making reverse engineering impossible. On the other hand, telling me that I can't use a particular mathematical expression in my code is, well
It's pretty clear at this point that software patents are little more than a blunt instrument used by the big boys to suppress potential competition, and trolls to extort money from the organizations they parasitize. They simply don't have much benefit to the little guy, in practical terms: unless you happen to have accumulated a substantial number of relevant patents for defensive purposes and have a correspondingly hefty legal budget, the big boys will do what they want with your world-changing patented "idea". Sure, you can take them to court and try for some degree of redress, but that's a massively expensive undertaking. In the meantime, if your algorithm is truly valuable, they'll be making millions from it. If you're a small developer or startup, depending upon the law to protect your assets is a mistake as it simply does not work in your favor. The odds of winning a patent lawsuit generally work like this (no. of relevant patents x size of legal department) + (relative innumeracy of the judge and jury.)
The Founders perspective (very clearly expressed in the Constitution) was that the ultimate beneficiary of what we now know as "intellectual property" was to be We the People, and that both patents and copyright were, ultimately, to benefit the public domain. So yes, I understand your point: nobod
It's like the old days where gif died cause cmpuserve owned it
It wasn't Compuserve that caused all the hate and discontent. It was Unisys that was making threats and trying to get royalties. Compuserve didn't sue anybody, didn't demand anything from anyone. In fact, I believe they were Unisys' first target.
it helps to know that you can hit the 24 fps target without overheating.
True, and for even lower-powered devices (those with ARM processors like cell phones and tablets) heating and battery life become an issue. As the mobile market continues to grow, the computational efficiency of codecs will be an issue, even if you have hardware support.