Yes, I do, because I've seen it happen before. For that matter, I've even done it before. This is the kind of knee-jerk suspicion that I railed about.
Now, you are comparing apples and oranges. Microsoft Interactive Developer isn't an independent rag that they own; it's a house publication of Microsoft.
Slashdot has an independent existence and independent readership; it covers topics that VA has no interest in as well as topics that they do.
The point is that slashdot presently has an existence apart from VA. They could shut/. down editorially and install their own staff, or direct/. to report VA preferntially, but I doubt they could do either of these things in secret.
When you hear about slashdot (CmdrTaco and Hemos, really) moving on to positions in other business areas at VA, or being replaced by people from VA, then you should worry. Right now, there's no reason to worry - just to watch.
If I recall the departure of JAMA's last editor, he was sacked (pushed, not jumped) because he ran a study on whether oral sex was really considered sex. Since he ran this during the impeachment process, he could reasonably be considered to be overstepping his mandate.
You're right that most people don't trust their newspapers, but for most people who don't it's a knee-jerk reflex. They don't have any reason not to trust any individual story, they just don't trust. This is as dangerous, and as manipulable, as blind trust in the media, and possibly worse.
I'd be surprised if VA did. They'd be killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Most newspapers, believe it or not, are not family-owned or staff-owned ventures. They're part of larger media conglomerates: Hollinger/Southam, News Co, Thompson, for example. All the US's major TV networks are owned by conglomerates. These conglomerates frequently have business interests elsewhere.
Some media sources have owners that have an active involvement in day-to-day activities. Look at Conrad Black and his pet newspaper (and money sink), the National Post. Some networks blunt coverage of their parent conglomerates, like CBS did when news about pedophiles working at Disney surfaced (see the Brill's Content Mouse-ke-fear issue). Some newspapers run scared from hometown corporations, like the Cincinatti Enquirer did after it ran, then withdrew, a major expose on Chiquita. And some just leave their newspapers alone.
I think, since I have no reason to think otherwise, that VA is going to leave Slashdot alone. They have no media experience and they really have no interest in using Slashdot as a major advertising vessel quite yet. Remember that their equity valuation is largely based on a hugely successful stock offering, not on an especially large market share.
They might be tempted, but even the slightest hint of interference would destroy Slashdot's credibility outright. Things like this have a way of coming up, no matter how deeply buried they are.
If you want to keep up with media watching, get a subscription to Brill's Content or another media magazine, like Adbusters. Be conscious of your media.
The company I work for is currently going through some growing pains - not startup per se, but going from a small company (I joined towards the end of the small company era) to a medium sized one and eventual acquisition by a multinational corp.
Your corporate culture is going to change during the startup and growth phase. Each will require different styles of management and different styles of worker - and sometimes different workers.That may sound cruel, but think about it; the people you want running the show when you have 200 workers aren't necessarily the same that you want when you're running three or four coders out of somebody's garage.
Many companies fold during this transition. Getting a few jobs and contracts and filling these orders is easy compared to attempting steady growth.
Everything in your business model, from billing rates to accounting methods, has to be checked and rechecked. Many companies, especially in high-tech, end up in debt at the start of their existence; then, in order to pay the debt, they incur more debt going after projects with questtionabe margins. They build more debt as growth continues until they become unsalable and unsteady and finally topple.
It didn't happen to us, but it's happened to a number of our competitors - and I'm sure that this kind of growing pain has killed more startups than anything else. Perhaps even everything else combined.
The company I work for is currently going through some growing pains - not startup per se, but going from a small company (I joined towards the end of the small company era) to a medium sized one and eventual acquisition by a multinational corp.
Your corporate culture is going to change during the startup and growth phase. Each will require different styles of management and different styles of worker - and sometimes different workers.That may sound cruel, but think about it; the people you want running the show when you have 200 workers aren't necessarily the same that you want when you're running three or four coders out of somebody's garage.
Many companies fold during this transition. Getting a few jobs and contracts and filling these orders is easy compared to attempting steady growth.
Everything in your business model, from billing rates to accounting methods, has to be checked and rechecked. Many companies, especially in high-tech, end up in debt at the start of their existence; then, in order to pay the debt, they incur more debt going after projects with questtionabe margins. They build more debt as growth continues until they become unsalable and unsteady and finally topple.
Now, I've bad-mouthed my employers once upon a time myself, but when it comes to dealing with bad mouthing staff I think that my last PM said it best: when you're on the clock, you represent the company. Bad mouthing your boss and company while representing them is unprofessional and quite possibly grounds for dismissal.
This might be considered draconian by a lot of people - and myself included. I'd like to emphasize that this applies only when you're on the clock and thus a formal representative of the company. Outside your work, you're constrained only by the bounds of legality - although if someone hates things so much, they should probably quit, for everyone's benefit.
Not all managers are good ones (most are middling to poor, as you might expect) and if you can't influence them directly or they won't listen, you should vote with your feet and demonstrate the error of their ways in the most direct way possible.
In your case, where you're managing the employee, you might have to speak clearly on this matter and tell him straight out what's acceptable to you and to the company. Be sure to cover yourself first, of course; if you're going to tell him that he can say what he wants so long as he's off the clock, but not on it, you might want to consult your boss, or better yet your company's general counsel.
A malcontent subordinate isn't worth risking your future for, and a black mark can kill a manager's ascent quicker than you'd think - there is simply too much competition in junior management unless you have some very special skills.
The discount is only partly for the Windows license; it's also the per-machine cost of Dell's (or whoever's) software support, which has a very good reputation. This probably runs at well over a hundred bucks, but is worth it in relationship-building for Dell.
Dell also sells directly to consumer (in effect, Dell is its own distribution and retail arm), so the markups are reduced. Not eliminated: the retail arm doesn't run for free, but reduced.
Dell pays between fifteen and twenty dollars a pop for a Windows license (software only, not support). Don't confuse a license as sold to a hardware vendor and one sold as retail; they're entirely different, both in what they cost and what you get.
I think that this, and the Netscape Communicator/Mozilla effort, mark a sea change when it comes to software development. When a body of code had no value to a company, they used to quietly bury the body. Now, more and more companies release the code to the community, gaining a huge investment in goodwill.
Philosophically, it's a move away from the Marxist conception of value (which is paradoxically de rigeur in US business circles), where anything requiring work gained in value. This isn't obviously false, but false it is. Value, at least in the capitalist system, is based on the ability to sell at a profit. If you cannot sell at a profit, either using the technology or the technology itself, then it's valueless.
Most businessmen stick to the assumption that all the work put into this or that piece has made it valuable and worthy of protection. New businessmen are thinking it through - not everything that takes work is valuable, and protecting something valueless is a waste of effort. By open-sourcing the work, they turn a loss into a gain.
That's rather a long stretch. The point of an instructor is to guide you, not necessarily to inform you directly. If you could learn as easily and much faster from a book, you should be reading the book; it's something that you already know.
It's rare that I've taken a course outside the first-year level that's provided anything more than an outline of the material (although I know of other people who received four years of spoon feeeding); the real work is done as part of readings or associated research.
That argument doesn't merely apply to books; it applies to all facets of education. If the knowledge is out there, why don't we liberate ourselves to seek it rather than being directed by some obscure authority figure?
The fact is that this doesn't work. The act of seeking relevant information alone gradually takes more time than absorbing the information itself (as any graduate student can tell you). An instructor, whether at the podium of a lecture hall or at the typewriter, putting together a book, does the initial search for you.
If your time is worth nothing (and some people's time is worth nothing), then you can spend time working through library catalogues and search engine results. You can gain sufficient experience and knowledge to figure out a subject on your own, but it takes time. Most people, including myself, don't have that luxury; we could all reinvent the wheel, too, but why?
The Sun-Blackdown debacle had nothing to do with the merits of the GPL. Blackdown was developing under the Sun Community Source License, which lies nowhere near the GPL and could be liberally translated as "please develop software for us, then let us sell it."
If Blackdown is a bit saddened and deceived by the whole affair, they could have seen it coming. Sun was entirely within its rights through the whole thing. It also took advantage of Blackdown, but the business world exists on principles of bad faith and this is no exception.
If your code is to be stolen, it's almost impossible for you to prove it. This is an argument against all GPL'ed code, for that matter. However, there are two arguments against license violation of a GPL'ed piece: one for you, the other for those who would violate the GPL.
Firstly, there's the fact that for a freely distributed, GPL'ed work, you yourself lose nothing, those to whom you distribue lose nothing, and those who would respect your license lose nothing. There will always be freeloaders, and there will be freeloaders no matter which license you use, even a proprietary one. If you are using the GPL for the right reasons, the benefit of placing free - as in libre - code in the public sphere outweighs the irritation of having ne'er do wells use your code.
Secondly, to create a distinctive piece of software, the advantage from using GPL'ed code is greatly overweighed by the potential for legal action. A lawsuit can kill any product and even any company; the expense of a clean-room rewrite of a tainted product is so much greater than the potential benefit from using restrictively licensed code. Any corporate lawyer could make this call instantly, although I have less faith in PHB's and even less on individual coders. Still, I doubt that your prodct will be thoroughly exploited; snippets yes, the whole thing, no.
Not to rain on your parade, I'd say that a properly engineered project goes at least as fast, and usually faster, than one engineered on an ad hoc basis. This is especially true for work completed for clients rather than internally, since they can use every excuse not to pay you. Having scope and spec on paper denies them that excuse.
Honestly, I wouldn't even consider working on a project without appropriate spec and scope laid out; it's a recipe for exhaustion and doomed to failure. I've done this in the past, but my self-respect is worth more than
However, this is a matter more of project management methadology rather than software engineering methadology. Why is it worth mentioning here? A software engineer isn't, or shouldn't be, just a code hack. They should be a leader, like a P.Eng is. Plain old developers are technicians - talented technicians, quite often, but they don't need to keep their eye on the ultimate goal of the project like an engineer or systems analyst would.
The techniques that you're mentioning are more development techniques than anything else. That isn't to say that they're unimportant, and they can be very important when you're rolling your own code as a researcher, but in the workday world they're of less and less importance as you ascend the food chain.
Comparing OSS and a need for licensing (and there is a need) is a huge red herring. The OSS process is intended to produce maintainable, repairable, and reusable code; who writes the code, on the other hand, is of no concern to the process. It exists whether written by rank amateurs or seasoned professionals. Thus a move towards licensure is neither pro- nor anti-OSS.
However, there are cases where who writes, or at least who signs off on the code is a concern. For example, industrial or other mission-critical software. Reputation may presently be sufficient measure, but over time a quantitative, rather than a qualitative, measure is required.
Licensing is chiefly a matter of lawyer-speak rather than a guarantee of competence (and any manager who expects otherwise is an idiot). This doesn't make it somehow unfair; licensure protects both the developer/engineer and the client through limits on liability and collective organization of developers/engineers. Bringing this back to OSS, any amount of code may be reused or appropriated from an OSS project; what matters is where you can lay the blame for project failure.
On the other hand, I worked as an electrical designer and the act of programming (PLC's, but still programming) was frowned upon by the old style EE's (and perhaps frowned is a nice way to say it). The attempt to bring software development into the engineering field can be viewed, and justly, as a power grab by the engineering profession.
I suggest another form of licensing, where a counterpart to the professional engineer's act (modify this as required for your jurisdiction) is enacted. This should give licensed programmers certain limits to professional liability, the right to organize and accredit programs, and a clearly stated purview for software engineering.
I don't, however, think that software engineering should become an exclusive profession with reserved duties, like many professions have become. Programming as an act is too broad for this, and the act of programming is certainly broadly distributed enough that anyone should be able to try their hand at it. With the rapid influx of computers into our daily lives, software should be written by all and sundry, most of all by the people who need them, and professional sw engineers should be only priviledged where absolutely necessary.
I don't think that business requires a take-no prisoners, unethical attitude. That said, the appearance of that can be very good for business.
Take Roy Cohn's law firm (the late Roy Cohn is infamous for being counsel to the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy era, and later belonged to a litigation practise in NYC), where the appearance was that it was totally unethical, utterly without scruple, and would thus get the job done at any cost. It gained a substantial reputation along those lines. As such, it was intimidating to be faced by Cohn or any of his partners or associates. They were able to get settlements on the basis of reputation alone.
Microsoft has that same kind of reputation on Wall Street, a company that will be totally unethical and ruthless in business in order to make a buck. Wall Street being what it is, the corrollary is that if they will do anything to make a buck, they will always make that buck, and are therefore an excellent investment.
It has come out recently that MS has faced SEC investigations for using its cash reserves to smooth out fluctuations in corporate income. This is a serious violation in best practises. However, MS's stock has continued to rise because of their reputation - it's expected that a company that unethical will do that kind of thing, ha ha, but they keep on making money so we don't mind.
Of course, if MS started losing money, the stock would plummet and people would tut-tut that such practises just don't pay, but so long as they continue paying, brokers and institutional investors are more than happy to wink at them for it. Sometimes even praise them for it. I believe that it would take a major act on the part of either the SEC or DoJ to end MS's equity honeymoon.
His 'mission' being, always and ever, a childish plea for attention and approval.
You know, it would seem much more convincing if his readership was going down rather than up. I'm more than capable of ignoring people whom I consider childish and whiny, and while I may be mistaken if I assume the same of other/. readers, I think I'll persist in believing that they could do the same.
He has been given the honorable position of having whatever he chooses to write posted as a headline for all to see on Slashdot
You mean, the priviledge of working for free? Please, grant me no more of these priviledges, Lord, I had enough of them when I was running my own company.
But seriously./. (and andover.net, now) give him a columnist's platform because people read him. It's not a failure in that it attracts readers. The raison d'etre of/. is to be read, always has been, and probably is now more than ever.
That his point of view is often inconsistent with that of the readership is not necessarily a bug. Salon, a popular left-liberal site, has both far-righter David Horowitz and rightist critic Camille Paglia as columnists. Both arouse great gouts of ire from readers and other staffers, but they're both good writers and difficult to ignore. Harmony for all writers and points of view within a publication doesn't make for good journalism; it makes for a circle-jerk.
pulpit from which he attempts to passive-aggressively bully others into supporting him
And that would be unlike any other columnist... how? They don't call it a bully pulpit for nothing.
To be quite frank, I disagree wholeheartedly. I've enjoyed these articles, more for the discussion that they've provoked than anything else. As a columnist, provoking discussion is Katz' job. He is neither an evangelist, in which case he would want to create pieces that were consistently well received, or a literary writer, in which case he would want to create pieces that were consistently aesthetically beautiful. As a columnist, if he does either, it is by happenstance, and/. posters don't seem to understand that very well.
The proof of the pudding is that you've posted and added to the discussion - and not just once, but two times to this one (no.3) and four to the last one (no.2). You may not personally approve (although it doesn't seem to bother you that much), but you grant Katz legitimacy by your participation. Everyone who whines about Katz this and Katz that - they all read him. His mission is accomplished.
I'd like to address a few points which are worthy of note.
The Internet is in most respects genderless.
This is false. Identifiable groups tend to have distinctive common interests and bodies of knowledge. Geeky white men tend to have geeky white man views. Non-geeky white men may share part of these, non-white geeky men others, geeky women still others. This is the basis for demographic analysis and niche marketing, among other fields. It is a primarily statistical argument, but that doesn't invalidate it.
To connect it to the internet, if you go to a site which appeals to geeky white men and covers most of their interests, it isn't a big stretch that most of the people there will be geeky white men. You can make a bet with good odds, even if you don't know the identity of any individual poster but yourself.
Hostility [...]is found in the real world in the same proportions as it is on f.e. Slashdot
I doubt it, unless you spend altogether too much time in riots.
Perhaps I should correct that: there might be an equal amount of hostile thoughts (although I doubt that too), but hostile comment and overt hostility is not.
The internet can promote that kind of hostility the same way a mob does: by breaking the link between act and its consequences. A rioter may see the damage that he causes, but feels no social sanction for it (in fact, they may receive social affirmation). Likewise for J. Random Flamer on/.
I was offended, and yes, I mean offended, by your suggestion that anonymous posts be restricted.
Yes, yes, we all know about the first amendment, but andover.net isn't Congress (and thus the first amendment doesn't apply). There is no obligation to provide a soapbox for whoever happens to be passing through.
Now, the people who are passing through can be very valuable posters. Whenever I get to moderate, I try to spend at least half on AC's and lower my threshold to let me read them and pick out the best. It doesn't mean that the existence of AC's is a given, and if AC's become more of a drain on/. than a bonus, then it is time for anonymous posting to go.
I find your ideas somewhat fascist.
Fascism: a political system based on a very powerful leader, state control and extreme pride in country and race, and in which political opposition is not allowed. (Cambridge Dictionaries online).
Katz's ideas are nowhere near fascist. He's not even on the right, much less the far right.
With all the resources readily available on the internet, resorting to a base epithet out of ignorance is unforgivable. Of course, calling Katz a liberal or social democrat probably doesn't have the same knee-jerk sting.
It's not ironic at all. Progress in technology fields tends to be cataclysmic, growing in leaps and bounds, rather than progressive, making smooth and gradual ascents.
Now, nVidia may be somewhat of a johnny-come-lately, but I'm certainly not going to turn my nose up at them (or their money) for that reason. So long as he open-sourced his code, I'd accept improvements to Linux's graphics subsystem from Satan himself.
ObMSBash: Of course, Satan's probably too busy at Microsoft, with Ballmer taking over his old job and all.
Likewise for my alma mater, Queen's University at Kingston. Queen's has had network ports in the residences for four years now - maybe five, but I think four. A friend of mine ran the program during those early years.
This inevitably causes problems, of course, with shared resources, such as QLink (the student unix server - 16k accounts on one box). And it causes intermittent network degradation, although not as much as you'd think.
turkey-sandwiches that explode on contact with saliva
Not if you like turkey *g*.
But seriously, the web is the perfect place to recruit for scientific/mathematical trades. No professional organization can be run entirely through cronyism (aka, the old school tie - and I know, I've benefitted from my old school tie. Cha Gheill!).
The other traditional recruitment base for intelligence work is the military, and it's not exactly well stocked with scientific and technical trades. And if they are - they're probably just that, tradesmen, rather than the professionals GCHQ neeeds.
It's possible to educate someone in a profession from the ground up with an apprenticeship and further education, if you have time and money. But that would mean that GCHQ ends up with both the successful and the responsibility for disposing with many more unsuccessful candidates (and hopefully not in a shallow grave). Putting the onus on the individual to get a suitable education and the private/public sector to provide it is quite a business advantage. If you hire someone who's credentialled and who does well in an interview, they may still be inept but at least they won't be totally ignorant.
They feel the need to classify because classifications work. I wouldn't be surprised if you did a fair amount of classification yourself - after all, it is a fundamental cognitive process.
As for the personality typing, well, I know a few things about that. And while it has its share of skeptics, the tedium (as opposed to the glory) of software development has overwhelming appeal to only a few personality types. I don't belong to one of them. Software design, on the other hand...
Actually, it sounds like you may have a claim against them, given that you were injured while pursuing duties assigned you. Of course, they might, in turn, claim that you fell because of the unshoveled driveway - and that's your house, your problem, and your negligence in not shovelling, not theirs.
Likewise for the cat scratch, the malfunctioning furnace, etcetera: they're dangers of your own creation, and not risks undertaken on behalf of your employer over the course of your employment.
If you drove to work drunk and got in an accident because of it, it would be on your head, not theirs. However, if you drove to work sober and got in an accident, you would most likely be eligible for some kind of worker's compensation.
IANAL, but the number one mistake that people make when learning about law is that they assume that it corresponds to their own particular brand of common sense. It doesn't and, considering most people's short supply of common sense, shouldn't.
Both you and the other poster use what's called a red herring - an argument of distraction. All the hazards that you mention above are of your causing; if you bring a gun to work and shoot yourself, you can expect the same sympathy from OSHA.
A hazard of the employer's causing, on the other hand, would be something like carpal tunnel, caused (or exacerbated) by the keyboard work you're doing at an unsuitable workstation. This is work that you do on their behalf, which you would not otherwise do, and which is a condition of employment. It's not a difficult concept - it might even, believe it or not, be common sense.
The law should, in general, be a reflection of common sense (or, more precisely, the common sensibilities of the general population)...
That's exactly what the law should not do, IMHO. The common sense or sensibilities of the general population are contradictory and much less decent than one might suppose. Common sense, as the old saw goes, is quite uncommon.
The interests of the general population are hardly shared as well - I suppose it would be to my boss' interest for me to work for a dollar a day, but it's certainly not in my best interests. To insist that there's a general good in all but the most general of circumstances is to be rather myopic. In the end, someone's ox is inevitably gored.
The law, on the other hand, should strive to become as self-consistent as possible, and measure out the competing interests according to their merits; to do otherwise is utterly unworkable (or at least a prescription for anarchy), since the laws will lay in conflict to one another.
The law does not "exist to serve itself", like it was dropped on America by a vagrant spaceship. It was written by people who sought to enshrine just those community standards; the process of law-making, by both the legislative and judiciary, is reconciling those with many other community standards. That means seeking consistency and harmony on as much as possible.
The law can't make society one bit better, nor is the law as a whole guaranteed to be any good itself - garbage in, garbage out. What it can do, at best, is provide balance to society's competing interests. I certainly don't expect any more of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I do, because I've seen it happen before. For that matter, I've even done it before. This is the kind of knee-jerk suspicion that I railed about.
/. down editorially and install their own staff, or direct /. to report VA preferntially, but I doubt they could do either of these things in secret.
Now, you are comparing apples and oranges. Microsoft Interactive Developer isn't an independent rag that they own; it's a house publication of Microsoft.
Slashdot has an independent existence and independent readership; it covers topics that VA has no interest in as well as topics that they do.
The point is that slashdot presently has an existence apart from VA. They could shut
When you hear about slashdot (CmdrTaco and Hemos, really) moving on to positions in other business areas at VA, or being replaced by people from VA, then you should worry. Right now, there's no reason to worry - just to watch.
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If I recall the departure of JAMA's last editor, he was sacked (pushed, not jumped) because he ran a study on whether oral sex was really considered sex. Since he ran this during the impeachment process, he could reasonably be considered to be overstepping his mandate.
You're right that most people don't trust their newspapers, but for most people who don't it's a knee-jerk reflex. They don't have any reason not to trust any individual story, they just don't trust. This is as dangerous, and as manipulable, as blind trust in the media, and possibly worse.
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I'd be surprised if VA did. They'd be killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Most newspapers, believe it or not, are not family-owned or staff-owned ventures. They're part of larger media conglomerates: Hollinger/Southam, News Co, Thompson, for example. All the US's major TV networks are owned by conglomerates. These conglomerates frequently have business interests elsewhere.
Some media sources have owners that have an active involvement in day-to-day activities. Look at Conrad Black and his pet newspaper (and money sink), the National Post. Some networks blunt coverage of their parent conglomerates, like CBS did when news about pedophiles working at Disney surfaced (see the Brill's Content Mouse-ke-fear issue). Some newspapers run scared from hometown corporations, like the Cincinatti Enquirer did after it ran, then withdrew, a major expose on Chiquita. And some just leave their newspapers alone.
I think, since I have no reason to think otherwise, that VA is going to leave Slashdot alone. They have no media experience and they really have no interest in using Slashdot as a major advertising vessel quite yet. Remember that their equity valuation is largely based on a hugely successful stock offering, not on an especially large market share.
They might be tempted, but even the slightest hint of interference would destroy Slashdot's credibility outright. Things like this have a way of coming up, no matter how deeply buried they are.
If you want to keep up with media watching, get a subscription to Brill's Content or another media magazine, like Adbusters. Be conscious of your media.
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The company I work for is currently going through some growing pains - not startup per se, but going from a small company (I joined towards the end of the small company era) to a medium sized one and eventual acquisition by a multinational corp.
Your corporate culture is going to change during the startup and growth phase. Each will require different styles of management and different styles of worker - and sometimes different workers.That may sound cruel, but think about it; the people you want running the show when you have 200 workers aren't necessarily the same that you want when you're running three or four coders out of somebody's garage.
Many companies fold during this transition. Getting a few jobs and contracts and filling these orders is easy compared to attempting steady growth.
Everything in your business model, from billing rates to accounting methods, has to be checked and rechecked. Many companies, especially in high-tech, end up in debt at the start of their existence; then, in order to pay the debt, they incur more debt going after projects with questtionabe margins. They build more debt as growth continues until they become unsalable and unsteady and finally topple.
It didn't happen to us, but it's happened to a number of our competitors - and I'm sure that this kind of growing pain has killed more startups than anything else. Perhaps even everything else combined.
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The company I work for is currently going through some growing pains - not startup per se, but going from a small company (I joined towards the end of the small company era) to a medium sized one and eventual acquisition by a multinational corp.
Your corporate culture is going to change during the startup and growth phase. Each will require different styles of management and different styles of worker - and sometimes different workers.That may sound cruel, but think about it; the people you want running the show when you have 200 workers aren't necessarily the same that you want when you're running three or four coders out of somebody's garage.
Many companies fold during this transition. Getting a few jobs and contracts and filling these orders is easy compared to attempting steady growth.
Everything in your business model, from billing rates to accounting methods, has to be checked and rechecked. Many companies, especially in high-tech, end up in debt at the start of their existence; then, in order to pay the debt, they incur more debt going after projects with questtionabe margins. They build more debt as growth continues until they become unsalable and unsteady and finally topple.
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Now, I've bad-mouthed my employers once upon a time myself, but when it comes to dealing with bad mouthing staff I think that my last PM said it best: when you're on the clock, you represent the company. Bad mouthing your boss and company while representing them is unprofessional and quite possibly grounds for dismissal.
This might be considered draconian by a lot of people - and myself included. I'd like to emphasize that this applies only when you're on the clock and thus a formal representative of the company. Outside your work, you're constrained only by the bounds of legality - although if someone hates things so much, they should probably quit, for everyone's benefit.
Not all managers are good ones (most are middling to poor, as you might expect) and if you can't influence them directly or they won't listen, you should vote with your feet and demonstrate the error of their ways in the most direct way possible.
In your case, where you're managing the employee, you might have to speak clearly on this matter and tell him straight out what's acceptable to you and to the company. Be sure to cover yourself first, of course; if you're going to tell him that he can say what he wants so long as he's off the clock, but not on it, you might want to consult your boss, or better yet your company's general counsel.
A malcontent subordinate isn't worth risking your future for, and a black mark can kill a manager's ascent quicker than you'd think - there is simply too much competition in junior management unless you have some very special skills.
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The discount is only partly for the Windows license; it's also the per-machine cost of Dell's (or whoever's) software support, which has a very good reputation. This probably runs at well over a hundred bucks, but is worth it in relationship-building for Dell.
Dell also sells directly to consumer (in effect, Dell is its own distribution and retail arm), so the markups are reduced. Not eliminated: the retail arm doesn't run for free, but reduced.
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Dell pays between fifteen and twenty dollars a pop for a Windows license (software only, not support). Don't confuse a license as sold to a hardware vendor and one sold as retail; they're entirely different, both in what they cost and what you get.
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I think that this, and the Netscape Communicator/Mozilla effort, mark a sea change when it comes to software development. When a body of code had no value to a company, they used to quietly bury the body. Now, more and more companies release the code to the community, gaining a huge investment in goodwill.
Philosophically, it's a move away from the Marxist conception of value (which is paradoxically de rigeur in US business circles), where anything requiring work gained in value. This isn't obviously false, but false it is. Value, at least in the capitalist system, is based on the ability to sell at a profit. If you cannot sell at a profit, either using the technology or the technology itself, then it's valueless.
Most businessmen stick to the assumption that all the work put into this or that piece has made it valuable and worthy of protection. New businessmen are thinking it through - not everything that takes work is valuable, and protecting something valueless is a waste of effort. By open-sourcing the work, they turn a loss into a gain.
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That's rather a long stretch. The point of an instructor is to guide you, not necessarily to inform you directly. If you could learn as easily and much faster from a book, you should be reading the book; it's something that you already know.
It's rare that I've taken a course outside the first-year level that's provided anything more than an outline of the material (although I know of other people who received four years of spoon feeeding); the real work is done as part of readings or associated research.
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That argument doesn't merely apply to books; it applies to all facets of education. If the knowledge is out there, why don't we liberate ourselves to seek it rather than being directed by some obscure authority figure?
The fact is that this doesn't work. The act of seeking relevant information alone gradually takes more time than absorbing the information itself (as any graduate student can tell you). An instructor, whether at the podium of a lecture hall or at the typewriter, putting together a book, does the initial search for you.
If your time is worth nothing (and some people's time is worth nothing), then you can spend time working through library catalogues and search engine results. You can gain sufficient experience and knowledge to figure out a subject on your own, but it takes time. Most people, including myself, don't have that luxury; we could all reinvent the wheel, too, but why?
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The Sun-Blackdown debacle had nothing to do with the merits of the GPL. Blackdown was developing under the Sun Community Source License, which lies nowhere near the GPL and could be liberally translated as "please develop software for us, then let us sell it."
If Blackdown is a bit saddened and deceived by the whole affair, they could have seen it coming. Sun was entirely within its rights through the whole thing. It also took advantage of Blackdown, but the business world exists on principles of bad faith and this is no exception.
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If your code is to be stolen, it's almost impossible for you to prove it. This is an argument against all GPL'ed code, for that matter. However, there are two arguments against license violation of a GPL'ed piece: one for you, the other for those who would violate the GPL.
Firstly, there's the fact that for a freely distributed, GPL'ed work, you yourself lose nothing, those to whom you distribue lose nothing, and those who would respect your license lose nothing. There will always be freeloaders, and there will be freeloaders no matter which license you use, even a proprietary one. If you are using the GPL for the right reasons, the benefit of placing free - as in libre - code in the public sphere outweighs the irritation of having ne'er do wells use your code.
Secondly, to create a distinctive piece of software, the advantage from using GPL'ed code is greatly overweighed by the potential for legal action. A lawsuit can kill any product and even any company; the expense of a clean-room rewrite of a tainted product is so much greater than the potential benefit from using restrictively licensed code. Any corporate lawyer could make this call instantly, although I have less faith in PHB's and even less on individual coders. Still, I doubt that your prodct will be thoroughly exploited; snippets yes, the whole thing, no.
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Not to rain on your parade, I'd say that a properly engineered project goes at least as fast, and usually faster, than one engineered on an ad hoc basis. This is especially true for work completed for clients rather than internally, since they can use every excuse not to pay you. Having scope and spec on paper denies them that excuse.
Honestly, I wouldn't even consider working on a project without appropriate spec and scope laid out; it's a recipe for exhaustion and doomed to failure. I've done this in the past, but my self-respect is worth more than
However, this is a matter more of project management methadology rather than software engineering methadology. Why is it worth mentioning here? A software engineer isn't, or shouldn't be, just a code hack. They should be a leader, like a P.Eng is. Plain old developers are technicians - talented technicians, quite often, but they don't need to keep their eye on the ultimate goal of the project like an engineer or systems analyst would.
The techniques that you're mentioning are more development techniques than anything else. That isn't to say that they're unimportant, and they can be very important when you're rolling your own code as a researcher, but in the workday world they're of less and less importance as you ascend the food chain.
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Comparing OSS and a need for licensing (and there is a need) is a huge red herring. The OSS process is intended to produce maintainable, repairable, and reusable code; who writes the code, on the other hand, is of no concern to the process. It exists whether written by rank amateurs or seasoned professionals. Thus a move towards licensure is neither pro- nor anti-OSS.
However, there are cases where who writes, or at least who signs off on the code is a concern. For example, industrial or other mission-critical software. Reputation may presently be sufficient measure, but over time a quantitative, rather than a qualitative, measure is required.
Licensing is chiefly a matter of lawyer-speak rather than a guarantee of competence (and any manager who expects otherwise is an idiot). This doesn't make it somehow unfair; licensure protects both the developer/engineer and the client through limits on liability and collective organization of developers/engineers. Bringing this back to OSS, any amount of code may be reused or appropriated from an OSS project; what matters is where you can lay the blame for project failure.
On the other hand, I worked as an electrical designer and the act of programming (PLC's, but still programming) was frowned upon by the old style EE's (and perhaps frowned is a nice way to say it). The attempt to bring software development into the engineering field can be viewed, and justly, as a power grab by the engineering profession.
I suggest another form of licensing, where a counterpart to the professional engineer's act (modify this as required for your jurisdiction) is enacted. This should give licensed programmers certain limits to professional liability, the right to organize and accredit programs, and a clearly stated purview for software engineering.
I don't, however, think that software engineering should become an exclusive profession with reserved duties, like many professions have become. Programming as an act is too broad for this, and the act of programming is certainly broadly distributed enough that anyone should be able to try their hand at it. With the rapid influx of computers into our daily lives, software should be written by all and sundry, most of all by the people who need them, and professional sw engineers should be only priviledged where absolutely necessary.
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Getting WinNT to do almost anything erratically is hardly an achievement, and certainly doesn't merit a significant causal relationship.
In other words, it could be anything. Blame the geniuses behind the NT registry if you want to blame anyone.
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I don't think that business requires a take-no prisoners, unethical attitude. That said, the appearance of that can be very good for business.
Take Roy Cohn's law firm (the late Roy Cohn is infamous for being counsel to the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy era, and later belonged to a litigation practise in NYC), where the appearance was that it was totally unethical, utterly without scruple, and would thus get the job done at any cost. It gained a substantial reputation along those lines. As such, it was intimidating to be faced by Cohn or any of his partners or associates. They were able to get settlements on the basis of reputation alone.
Microsoft has that same kind of reputation on Wall Street, a company that will be totally unethical and ruthless in business in order to make a buck. Wall Street being what it is, the corrollary is that if they will do anything to make a buck, they will always make that buck, and are therefore an excellent investment.
It has come out recently that MS has faced SEC investigations for using its cash reserves to smooth out fluctuations in corporate income. This is a serious violation in best practises. However, MS's stock has continued to rise because of their reputation - it's expected that a company that unethical will do that kind of thing, ha ha, but they keep on making money so we don't mind.
Of course, if MS started losing money, the stock would plummet and people would tut-tut that such practises just don't pay, but so long as they continue paying, brokers and institutional investors are more than happy to wink at them for it. Sometimes even praise them for it. I believe that it would take a major act on the part of either the SEC or DoJ to end MS's equity honeymoon.
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His 'mission' being, always and ever, a childish plea for attention and approval.
/. readers, I think I'll persist in believing that they could do the same.
/. (and andover.net, now) give him a columnist's platform because people read him. It's not a failure in that it attracts readers. The raison d'etre of /. is to be read, always has been, and probably is now more than ever.
... how? They don't call it a bully pulpit for nothing.
You know, it would seem much more convincing if his readership was going down rather than up. I'm more than capable of ignoring people whom I consider childish and whiny, and while I may be mistaken if I assume the same of other
He has been given the honorable position of having whatever he chooses to write posted as a headline for all to see on Slashdot
You mean, the priviledge of working for free? Please, grant me no more of these priviledges, Lord, I had enough of them when I was running my own company.
But seriously.
That his point of view is often inconsistent with that of the readership is not necessarily a bug. Salon, a popular left-liberal site, has both far-righter David Horowitz and rightist critic Camille Paglia as columnists. Both arouse great gouts of ire from readers and other staffers, but they're both good writers and difficult to ignore. Harmony for all writers and points of view within a publication doesn't make for good journalism; it makes for a circle-jerk.
pulpit from which he attempts to passive-aggressively bully others into supporting him
And that would be unlike any other columnist
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To be quite frank, I disagree wholeheartedly. I've enjoyed these articles, more for the discussion that they've provoked than anything else. As a columnist, provoking discussion is Katz' job. He is neither an evangelist, in which case he would want to create pieces that were consistently well received, or a literary writer, in which case he would want to create pieces that were consistently aesthetically beautiful. As a columnist, if he does either, it is by happenstance, and /. posters don't seem to understand that very well.
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/. than a bonus, then it is time for anonymous posting to go.
The proof of the pudding is that you've posted and added to the discussion - and not just once, but two times to this one (no.3) and four to the last one (no.2). You may not personally approve (although it doesn't seem to bother you that much), but you grant Katz legitimacy by your participation. Everyone who whines about Katz this and Katz that - they all read him. His mission is accomplished.
I'd like to address a few points which are worthy of note.
The Internet is in most respects genderless.
This is false. Identifiable groups tend to have distinctive common interests and bodies of knowledge. Geeky white men tend to have geeky white man views. Non-geeky white men may share part of these, non-white geeky men others, geeky women still others. This is the basis for demographic analysis and niche marketing, among other fields. It is a primarily statistical argument, but that doesn't invalidate it.
To connect it to the internet, if you go to a site which appeals to geeky white men and covers most of their interests, it isn't a big stretch that most of the people there will be geeky white men. You can make a bet with good odds, even if you don't know the identity of any individual poster but yourself.
Hostility [...]is found in the real world in the same proportions as it is on f.e. Slashdot
I doubt it, unless you spend altogether too much time in riots.
Perhaps I should correct that: there might be an equal amount of hostile thoughts (although I doubt that too), but hostile comment and overt hostility is not.
The internet can promote that kind of hostility the same way a mob does: by breaking the link between act and its consequences. A rioter may see the damage that he causes, but feels no social sanction for it (in fact, they may receive social affirmation). Likewise for J. Random Flamer on
I was offended, and yes, I mean offended, by your suggestion that anonymous posts be restricted.
Yes, yes, we all know about the first amendment, but andover.net isn't Congress (and thus the first amendment doesn't apply). There is no obligation to provide a soapbox for whoever happens to be passing through.
Now, the people who are passing through can be very valuable posters. Whenever I get to moderate, I try to spend at least half on AC's and lower my threshold to let me read them and pick out the best. It doesn't mean that the existence of AC's is a given, and if AC's become more of a drain on
I find your ideas somewhat fascist.
Fascism: a political system based on a very powerful leader, state control and extreme pride in country and race, and in which political opposition is not allowed. (Cambridge Dictionaries online).
Katz's ideas are nowhere near fascist. He's not even on the right, much less the far right.
With all the resources readily available on the internet, resorting to a base epithet out of ignorance is unforgivable. Of course, calling Katz a liberal or social democrat probably doesn't have the same knee-jerk sting.
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It's not ironic at all. Progress in technology fields tends to be cataclysmic, growing in leaps and bounds, rather than progressive, making smooth and gradual ascents.
Now, nVidia may be somewhat of a johnny-come-lately, but I'm certainly not going to turn my nose up at them (or their money) for that reason. So long as he open-sourced his code, I'd accept improvements to Linux's graphics subsystem from Satan himself.
ObMSBash: Of course, Satan's probably too busy at Microsoft, with Ballmer taking over his old job and all.
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Likewise for my alma mater, Queen's University at Kingston. Queen's has had network ports in the residences for four years now - maybe five, but I think four. A friend of mine ran the program during those early years.
This inevitably causes problems, of course, with shared resources, such as QLink (the student unix server - 16k accounts on one box). And it causes intermittent network degradation, although not as much as you'd think.
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turkey-sandwiches that explode on contact with saliva
Not if you like turkey *g*.
But seriously, the web is the perfect place to recruit for scientific/mathematical trades. No professional organization can be run entirely through cronyism (aka, the old school tie - and I know, I've benefitted from my old school tie. Cha Gheill!).
The other traditional recruitment base for intelligence work is the military, and it's not exactly well stocked with scientific and technical trades. And if they are - they're probably just that, tradesmen, rather than the professionals GCHQ neeeds.
It's possible to educate someone in a profession from the ground up with an apprenticeship and further education, if you have time and money. But that would mean that GCHQ ends up with both the successful and the responsibility for disposing with many more unsuccessful candidates (and hopefully not in a shallow grave). Putting the onus on the individual to get a suitable education and the private/public sector to provide it is quite a business advantage. If you hire someone who's credentialled and who does well in an interview, they may still be inept but at least they won't be totally ignorant.
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They feel the need to classify because classifications work. I wouldn't be surprised if you did a fair amount of classification yourself - after all, it is a fundamental cognitive process.
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As for the personality typing, well, I know a few things about that. And while it has its share of skeptics, the tedium (as opposed to the glory) of software development has overwhelming appeal to only a few personality types. I don't belong to one of them. Software design, on the other hand
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This is why this is bullshit
Actually, it sounds like you may have a claim against them, given that you were injured while pursuing duties assigned you. Of course, they might, in turn, claim that you fell because of the unshoveled driveway - and that's your house, your problem, and your negligence in not shovelling, not theirs.
Likewise for the cat scratch, the malfunctioning furnace, etcetera: they're dangers of your own creation, and not risks undertaken on behalf of your employer over the course of your employment.
If you drove to work drunk and got in an accident because of it, it would be on your head, not theirs. However, if you drove to work sober and got in an accident, you would most likely be eligible for some kind of worker's compensation.
IANAL, but the number one mistake that people make when learning about law is that they assume that it corresponds to their own particular brand of common sense. It doesn't and, considering most people's short supply of common sense, shouldn't.
Both you and the other poster use what's called a red herring - an argument of distraction. All the hazards that you mention above are of your causing; if you bring a gun to work and shoot yourself, you can expect the same sympathy from OSHA.
A hazard of the employer's causing, on the other hand, would be something like carpal tunnel, caused (or exacerbated) by the keyboard work you're doing at an unsuitable workstation. This is work that you do on their behalf, which you would not otherwise do, and which is a condition of employment. It's not a difficult concept - it might even, believe it or not, be common sense.
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The law should, in general, be a reflection of common sense (or, more precisely, the common ...
sensibilities of the general population)
That's exactly what the law should not do, IMHO. The common sense or sensibilities of the general population are contradictory and much less decent than one might suppose. Common sense, as the old saw goes, is quite uncommon.
The interests of the general population are hardly shared as well - I suppose it would be to my boss' interest for me to work for a dollar a day, but it's certainly not in my best interests. To insist that there's a general good in all but the most general of circumstances is to be rather myopic. In the end, someone's ox is inevitably gored.
The law, on the other hand, should strive to become as self-consistent as possible, and measure out the competing interests according to their merits; to do otherwise is utterly unworkable (or at least a prescription for anarchy), since the laws will lay in conflict to one another.
The law does not "exist to serve itself", like it was dropped on America by a vagrant spaceship. It was written by people who sought to enshrine just those community standards; the process of law-making, by both the legislative and judiciary, is reconciling those with many other community standards. That means seeking consistency and harmony on as much as possible.
The law can't make society one bit better, nor is the law as a whole guaranteed to be any good itself - garbage in, garbage out. What it can do, at best, is provide balance to society's competing interests. I certainly don't expect any more of it.
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