He is a scientist. He understands the prepetual cycle of theory, proof, counterproof, refined theory. Dogma is lazy thinking.
There is nothing to be gained to compromise on that.
There are three enemies of knowledge:
Circular reasoning. Regressive argument. Dogma.
You chose yours. And I'm offended by your lazy choice. Regressive argument is ours. At least we get closer to knowledge whereas you are stumped by something as simple as evolution.
Thankfully we don't have to remind ourselves that the internet is full of morons. For that we thank you.
Hate speech in general is illegal in Germany and you have to overstep the line quite a bit before you get dragged into a court of law. It is currently under investigation if we want to shut down gaybashing Christianists. Islamists, leftwingists and notorious vegetarians already got their day in court.
Depiction of emblems of illegal organizations is a thing here. Indiana Jones 3 got the same treatment. Not the movie, but the Lucasfilmgames point&click thing. Those were the 90ies and we had to think of the children.
Assuming you live in the US, have you yet had the chance to pick up 1984 or Lolita at your local library? Pot/kettle. Black.
It is simpler than that.
Laws always represent Teh Will Of Da Peoplz.
Those particular morons got caught calling for the overthrow of our pleasant little democracy and replace it with something nasty that hadn't worked before. This is understandably quite illegal. So the group got outlawed. So they get the boot as per German law. And since Twitter most likely formed a legal entity in Germany so they can do business with us(be pay in sausages) they are subjected to German law.
Hate speech in various colours will land you in front of a judge and you will not be tried by a jury of your peers but somebody who actually got some training. Repeat offenders spend time in the hospitality of the German people(they will be fed sausages). We do the same with Islamistic/Christianistic/PETAistic morons who have as of yet install a reign of terror(they get halal/tofu sausages made unless it's Friday which is when we feed them hotdog buns).
Unlawful speech is defined by the lawmaker who in turn got elected by the German people. So this is NOT Joachim Gauck/Norbert Lammert/Angela Merkel taking objection that lands you in the dock.
Next week:
Germany restricts your right to keep and arm bears.
It has a firmware issue and there is a patch. Basically after 5000 hours of uptime it will not return from a SMART check.
I got bitten by that nasty blighter. But I do wonder how you catch a thing like that. This must have been a bitch to debug.
Given that the country was founded on then 500 year old whig ideas you'd think that a political process that'd be based on who prayed the loudest would be utterly rejected one would think that people like him would be utterly rejected as being fit for serving on governmental duties.
In plaing English that would translate to "Stop voting for idiots.".
If you ask types like him what family values are all about you'd be subjected to shameful stammer and be drenched in dribble.
...and on the tenth day He created dinosaurs which were a bit crap so fuck them.
Yes, well big companies don't know how to motivate people. They think money is the sole incentive.
One of our guys wanted to stay at home for 2 months after his 2nd child was born. We let him. He is also entitled to that under German law and the state contributes to his continued pay. Happy young dad and we get to keep on of our youngest and brightest.
Another guy had trouble with kindergarden closing around 2pm. So he'd got to pick his little'un up around that time. His wife couldn't make it. So we let him work from home. That's what Skype is for. We picked his daughter up for him when he was in important customer meetings.
One of our new hires is close to 50 with a sketchy working past. Raising kids can do that to you. She's got a maths degree but not much beyond that. We hired her, trained her and when she performed poorly we tried giving her responsibility and make her own decisions. That did the trick. I gave her a very good review this year.
We trained all our people to be able to do at least two completely different things. That's good for them and it gives us flexibility. Specialisation is for insects.
After especially good performance we hand out iPads, fridges, TVs and parties like candy. My current intern will not only get a good job offer but also a Raspberry Pi(which hopefully arrives soon; I ordered a dozen).
That's how you get and keep employees. If they are not up to scratch THEN IT IS YOUR GODDAM FAULT, your problem, you've got to solve it. And fireing them is a lazy way out. If a raise is the only motivator and money is the only reason why people work for you then you deserve what you get.
I LOVE cost centers. You can shift stuff you want to keep Finance out of between cost centers if you like playing dirty. It is the ultimate obfuscation instrument and once you get your management in on that game you can get some actual work done. I've become a master in navigating projects underneath the radar for one of my bigger customers. That's especially easiy if their departments don't really talk and most of them are your clients. One favourite trick is to get them to use the same system, and have them issuing alternating change request. I provide the estimates for what a dedicated system would cost. They can pretend to save money, get an IT budget raise as do my employees. Instant win-win.
The best way to deal with Legal is simply don't ask them for their opinion. Unless you don't want to implement an especially tedious, pointles and crucially underpayed change request.
Once you reach the middle-management tier on the totem pole you may actually get the chance to wreak merry havoc with the instruments that were created to reign you in. Bonus points if you get HR and Legal to lock horns over some technicality.
Product development is boring. I lose interest once version 1.0 actually sells enough to continue development. That's a task best left to the grey-faced, serious and solemn types. I like it fast and loose.
And you have to chant the Ancient Greybeard Mantra for at least an hour everyday. As our fathers did before us:
Ommmmmmm
I am George Clooney.
I am Sean Connery(the good one in the later movies, not the oily tick in the older ones).
I am Gary Cooper
I am Jack's complete lack of irony.
What was good enough for dad will also work for me. Dagnabbit!
There was a flow of tech to the US in the 90ies. But that was mainly in academia due to the pull places like JPL, SRI and MIT had. Their halo has become a bit...rusty.
Now we have a lot of smallish custom software and consulting houses with 20-100 employees. We do mainly custom software for industry players and we do become fat and fatter. Also the perpetual software development cycle does indeed feed us and as long as that exists we will never go out of business. The challenge seldomly is the tech but the customer.
In the beginning there was The Need. And in The Need some cherubim created an Excel sheet. That Excel sheet grew macros and was split over a lot of Excel sheets frolicking on several network shares. And a voice said Let There Be Access! And on the seventh day He saw everything was not good and then He called us to have this thing done properly the following monday. And on tuesday He spotted a dinosaur on the green and Lo! There was The Change Request. And thus He created the concept of paid-for evolution.
That submitter just makes me mad.
But his management has also failed him. If you don't look out for your people then you have no place in management.
This springs to mind: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/01/24/avoiding_the_fez.html
Just a couple of years ago I opened a can of whoop-ass on one of my then 45 year old guys. He transitioned into one of our competent.NET 4.0 people.
Being Abe Simpson at age 40 is a sad thing indeed.
We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere - like the time I caught the VPN over to corporate HQ. I needed a new update for my employee handbook, so, I decided to go to the BBS, which is what they called a web download site in those days. So I tied a 28k modem to my DSL, which was the style at the time. Now, to phone a BBS cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of Steve Jobs on 'em. Give me five jobs for a quarter, you'd say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had a modem around my neck, which was the style at the time. They didn't have 56Ks because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones with a phone set...
...or take the Micheal Lopp approach to management. Somewhat ordered chaos and never yell. Lest it be yelling with enthusiasm since we -PRAISE THE LORD- are truly fucked.
Smells like smells like teen spirit transitioned seemlessly into midlife-crisis. Just without Cobain. Or Mike Patton.
I'd suggest hiring a fulltime ass kicker since the submitter seems to need one. Oh woe is him! He's 40 and still hasn't become Bill Gates. No shit, so have we.
That is only a problem in the US.
In Germany you are not constantly expected to work overtime. In fact it is highly undesired by employers(that'd be me) and employees. Medical insurance is tied to income and in the end comes out of the employees pocket. You may need more salary due to family, kids, mortgage, Porsche and so on but you'll get it if you are worth it.
At the moment and for the last couple of years it has become really hard to hire experienced, battle-scarred techs because there aren't any left on the market.
One of my team members tried to settle down in the US a couple of years ago and he didn't get any offers. A couple of would-be employers even called me in Germany for references(forgetting the whole time-zone thing, I might add) and I can tell you your hiring process, the work conditions and job security suck major ass. The questions they asked me were dorky, fuzzy, and cover-your-ass stuff. In one instance I even had to phone the guy to ask him if it was OK to answer since asking some things during the hiring process is down-right illegal here.
It's like watching the world through Charles Dickens goggles. And we even spent the last 10 years downsizing benefits for everybody.
VB.NET is not VB6. It's not exactly a toy language. But everybody assumes it is. Also all object oriented languages and plattforms are basically the same. They mostly differ in syntax and libs. But the core principles remain.
Also this is the first time I've heard of REXX as a non-toy language. I remember it from my OS/2 days. What's next? TCL/TK? Hot diggity-damn. I've just shipped a version 1.0 of a product written in PHP running pre-packaged on a NAS just to see if it floats. Once the sales guys return with 5 sales and a couple of A leads I'll have it rewritten in something that allows the software to grow into something bigger. If somebody manages to chisel Michelangelo's David from a slab of marble using nothing but his eyebrows it is still a masterpiece. UML or no. And who the hell still does pure UML anymore?
Also.NET 2.0 isn't THAT old. They've added that WPF thing as new hotness in 3.5 and somewhat managed to make it run in 4.0.
I'm a Java guy and have been since 1.2. And I wouldn't steep so low as to declare it the answer to everything. Least of which is reusability, You can avoid creating a complete mess in any language and have to constantly refactor to stay ahead of the curve.
Experience never becomes obsolete. It might become too expensive. But who want's cheap clients anyway.
And experience becomes much easier to market once you become a bit grey.
Same here. And I successfully did the transition into management/consulting. AND I kept up with the tech by coding and owning features and refectoring the code the youngsters thought was good. It's like Joel Spolsky never gave this advice over and over and over again.
Could you people just please STFU? Jeez.
It's like a couple of twens sitting around one of those XBox things talking about how it would be like to be old. Like really old. Like, you know 40.
Stuff doesn't fall off your body. Brain don't go poof. If you are too fat you propably had been when you were 20.
If your mental agility does drop that drastically at age 40 I would STRONGLY suggest visiting a shrink.
Also going down the VB.NET route was a poor choice to begin with. Getting so much out of touch that you are not even able to name a couple of the biggest changes on the plattform(for instance WPF) means you are more out of touch than you thought. Even I know that and I'm a Java guy.
AND FOR FUCK'S SAKE DON'T EVEN ADMIT YOU ARE OUT OF TOUCH! What value is somebody to see in you if you don't see it yourself? Get a book, read up, write a nice Hello World using all the fancy bloat you can find and be done with it.
I'm pretty close to 40 and I can honestly say I've seen everything and there's nothing new really. Only the tech changes(slowly) the WTFs remain the same. We in the industry like to call that "experience". You may have picked up some of that. If that guy were working on my team I'd give him the ass-kicking of the century.I've seen cavemen recently thawed from age-long slumber who weren't that whiny. There is new tech just coming out in form of MS-Tablets which WILL be important in the corporate world. There's a nice bandwagon to hop on nice and early.
Slashdot is not a good place to have a midlife-crysis in. You are supposed to have one in a Porsche with a couple of half naked bimbos and a bag of cocaine next to you.
Why should Jobs be remembered in 50 years? I mean, the world has forgotten Thomas Watson even tho there were two of them.
This jobsian cult of personality is something that absolutely eludes me.
And yet, at this very moment, somewhere somebody is building a shrine to Jobs using the traditional building materials. Mashed potatoes and your own eyebrows.
Madness. Translucent computers and phones you can operate by licking them. Madness, I tell you!
Slashdot Mirror
He is a scientist. He understands the prepetual cycle of theory, proof, counterproof, refined theory. Dogma is lazy thinking.
There is nothing to be gained to compromise on that.
There are three enemies of knowledge:
Circular reasoning. Regressive argument. Dogma.
You chose yours. And I'm offended by your lazy choice. Regressive argument is ours. At least we get closer to knowledge whereas you are stumped by something as simple as evolution.
Nope. He denies the teapot orbiting Mars for that reason. He denies sky fairies because he considers it a superfluous hypothesis.
Thankfully we don't have to remind ourselves that the internet is full of morons. For that we thank you.
Hate speech in general is illegal in Germany and you have to overstep the line quite a bit before you get dragged into a court of law. It is currently under investigation if we want to shut down gaybashing Christianists. Islamists, leftwingists and notorious vegetarians already got their day in court.
We prefer a court of law since rule of boot and fist has already been done. Turns out extremists are better street fighters.
Depiction of emblems of illegal organizations is a thing here. Indiana Jones 3 got the same treatment. Not the movie, but the Lucasfilmgames point&click thing. Those were the 90ies and we had to think of the children.
Assuming you live in the US, have you yet had the chance to pick up 1984 or Lolita at your local library? Pot/kettle. Black.
It is simpler than that.
Laws always represent Teh Will Of Da Peoplz.
Those particular morons got caught calling for the overthrow of our pleasant little democracy and replace it with something nasty that hadn't worked before. This is understandably quite illegal. So the group got outlawed. So they get the boot as per German law. And since Twitter most likely formed a legal entity in Germany so they can do business with us(be pay in sausages) they are subjected to German law.
Hate speech in various colours will land you in front of a judge and you will not be tried by a jury of your peers but somebody who actually got some training. Repeat offenders spend time in the hospitality of the German people(they will be fed sausages). We do the same with Islamistic/Christianistic/PETAistic morons who have as of yet install a reign of terror(they get halal/tofu sausages made unless it's Friday which is when we feed them hotdog buns).
Unlawful speech is defined by the lawmaker who in turn got elected by the German people. So this is NOT Joachim Gauck/Norbert Lammert/Angela Merkel taking objection that lands you in the dock.
Next week:
Germany restricts your right to keep and arm bears.
Not sure if troll or stupid.
It has a firmware issue and there is a patch. Basically after 5000 hours of uptime it will not return from a SMART check.
I got bitten by that nasty blighter. But I do wonder how you catch a thing like that. This must have been a bitch to debug.
US Presidential Elections(dutifully capitalized) are fleeting whims on the arse end of history. Izzard is eternal.
Given that the country was founded on then 500 year old whig ideas you'd think that a political process that'd be based on who prayed the loudest would be utterly rejected one would think that people like him would be utterly rejected as being fit for serving on governmental duties.
...and on the tenth day He created dinosaurs which were a bit crap so fuck them.
In plaing English that would translate to "Stop voting for idiots.".
If you ask types like him what family values are all about you'd be subjected to shameful stammer and be drenched in dribble.
Yes, well big companies don't know how to motivate people. They think money is the sole incentive.
One of our guys wanted to stay at home for 2 months after his 2nd child was born. We let him. He is also entitled to that under German law and the state contributes to his continued pay. Happy young dad and we get to keep on of our youngest and brightest.
Another guy had trouble with kindergarden closing around 2pm. So he'd got to pick his little'un up around that time. His wife couldn't make it. So we let him work from home. That's what Skype is for. We picked his daughter up for him when he was in important customer meetings.
One of our new hires is close to 50 with a sketchy working past. Raising kids can do that to you. She's got a maths degree but not much beyond that. We hired her, trained her and when she performed poorly we tried giving her responsibility and make her own decisions. That did the trick. I gave her a very good review this year.
We trained all our people to be able to do at least two completely different things. That's good for them and it gives us flexibility. Specialisation is for insects.
After especially good performance we hand out iPads, fridges, TVs and parties like candy. My current intern will not only get a good job offer but also a Raspberry Pi(which hopefully arrives soon; I ordered a dozen).
That's how you get and keep employees. If they are not up to scratch THEN IT IS YOUR GODDAM FAULT, your problem, you've got to solve it. And fireing them is a lazy way out. If a raise is the only motivator and money is the only reason why people work for you then you deserve what you get.
I LOVE cost centers. You can shift stuff you want to keep Finance out of between cost centers if you like playing dirty. It is the ultimate obfuscation instrument and once you get your management in on that game you can get some actual work done. I've become a master in navigating projects underneath the radar for one of my bigger customers. That's especially easiy if their departments don't really talk and most of them are your clients. One favourite trick is to get them to use the same system, and have them issuing alternating change request. I provide the estimates for what a dedicated system would cost. They can pretend to save money, get an IT budget raise as do my employees. Instant win-win.
The best way to deal with Legal is simply don't ask them for their opinion. Unless you don't want to implement an especially tedious, pointles and crucially underpayed change request.
Once you reach the middle-management tier on the totem pole you may actually get the chance to wreak merry havoc with the instruments that were created to reign you in. Bonus points if you get HR and Legal to lock horns over some technicality.
Product development is boring. I lose interest once version 1.0 actually sells enough to continue development. That's a task best left to the grey-faced, serious and solemn types. I like it fast and loose.
And you have to chant the Ancient Greybeard Mantra for at least an hour everyday. As our fathers did before us:
Ommmmmmm I am George Clooney.
I am Sean Connery(the good one in the later movies, not the oily tick in the older ones).
I am Gary Cooper
I am Jack's complete lack of irony.
What was good enough for dad will also work for me. Dagnabbit!
There was a flow of tech to the US in the 90ies. But that was mainly in academia due to the pull places like JPL, SRI and MIT had. Their halo has become a bit...rusty.
Now we have a lot of smallish custom software and consulting houses with 20-100 employees. We do mainly custom software for industry players and we do become fat and fatter. Also the perpetual software development cycle does indeed feed us and as long as that exists we will never go out of business. The challenge seldomly is the tech but the customer.
In the beginning there was The Need. And in The Need some cherubim created an Excel sheet. That Excel sheet grew macros and was split over a lot of Excel sheets frolicking on several network shares. And a voice said Let There Be Access! And on the seventh day He saw everything was not good and then He called us to have this thing done properly the following monday. And on tuesday He spotted a dinosaur on the green and Lo! There was The Change Request. And thus He created the concept of paid-for evolution.
What's not to like?
That submitter just makes me mad. .NET 4.0 people.
But his management has also failed him. If you don't look out for your people then you have no place in management.
This springs to mind: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/01/24/avoiding_the_fez.html
Just a couple of years ago I opened a can of whoop-ass on one of my then 45 year old guys. He transitioned into one of our competent
Micheal Lopp and Joel Spolsky seem to be guys you'd share a beer with. Not all of us are PHBs. Some of us are completely bald, you insensitive clod.
Being Abe Simpson at age 40 is a sad thing indeed.
We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere - like the time I caught the VPN over to corporate HQ. I needed a new update for my employee handbook, so, I decided to go to the BBS, which is what they called a web download site in those days. So I tied a 28k modem to my DSL, which was the style at the time. Now, to phone a BBS cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of Steve Jobs on 'em. Give me five jobs for a quarter, you'd say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had a modem around my neck, which was the style at the time. They didn't have 56Ks because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones with a phone set...
...or take the Micheal Lopp approach to management. Somewhat ordered chaos and never yell. Lest it be yelling with enthusiasm since we -PRAISE THE LORD- are truly fucked.
Smells like smells like teen spirit transitioned seemlessly into midlife-crisis. Just without Cobain. Or Mike Patton.
I'd suggest hiring a fulltime ass kicker since the submitter seems to need one. Oh woe is him! He's 40 and still hasn't become Bill Gates. No shit, so have we.
That is only a problem in the US.
In Germany you are not constantly expected to work overtime. In fact it is highly undesired by employers(that'd be me) and employees. Medical insurance is tied to income and in the end comes out of the employees pocket. You may need more salary due to family, kids, mortgage, Porsche and so on but you'll get it if you are worth it.
At the moment and for the last couple of years it has become really hard to hire experienced, battle-scarred techs because there aren't any left on the market.
One of my team members tried to settle down in the US a couple of years ago and he didn't get any offers. A couple of would-be employers even called me in Germany for references(forgetting the whole time-zone thing, I might add) and I can tell you your hiring process, the work conditions and job security suck major ass. The questions they asked me were dorky, fuzzy, and cover-your-ass stuff. In one instance I even had to phone the guy to ask him if it was OK to answer since asking some things during the hiring process is down-right illegal here.
It's like watching the world through Charles Dickens goggles. And we even spent the last 10 years downsizing benefits for everybody.
VB.NET is not VB6. It's not exactly a toy language. But everybody assumes it is. Also all object oriented languages and plattforms are basically the same. They mostly differ in syntax and libs. But the core principles remain.
.NET 2.0 isn't THAT old. They've added that WPF thing as new hotness in 3.5 and somewhat managed to make it run in 4.0.
Also this is the first time I've heard of REXX as a non-toy language. I remember it from my OS/2 days. What's next? TCL/TK? Hot diggity-damn. I've just shipped a version 1.0 of a product written in PHP running pre-packaged on a NAS just to see if it floats. Once the sales guys return with 5 sales and a couple of A leads I'll have it rewritten in something that allows the software to grow into something bigger. If somebody manages to chisel Michelangelo's David from a slab of marble using nothing but his eyebrows it is still a masterpiece. UML or no. And who the hell still does pure UML anymore?
Also
I'm a Java guy and have been since 1.2. And I wouldn't steep so low as to declare it the answer to everything. Least of which is reusability, You can avoid creating a complete mess in any language and have to constantly refactor to stay ahead of the curve.
Experience never becomes obsolete. It might become too expensive. But who want's cheap clients anyway.
And experience becomes much easier to market once you become a bit grey.
That guy has problems. Age being the least of them.
Same here. And I successfully did the transition into management/consulting. AND I kept up with the tech by coding and owning features and refectoring the code the youngsters thought was good. It's like Joel Spolsky never gave this advice over and over and over again.
Could you people just please STFU? Jeez.
It's like a couple of twens sitting around one of those XBox things talking about how it would be like to be old. Like really old. Like, you know 40.
Stuff doesn't fall off your body. Brain don't go poof. If you are too fat you propably had been when you were 20.
If your mental agility does drop that drastically at age 40 I would STRONGLY suggest visiting a shrink.
Also going down the VB.NET route was a poor choice to begin with. Getting so much out of touch that you are not even able to name a couple of the biggest changes on the plattform(for instance WPF) means you are more out of touch than you thought. Even I know that and I'm a Java guy.
AND FOR FUCK'S SAKE DON'T EVEN ADMIT YOU ARE OUT OF TOUCH! What value is somebody to see in you if you don't see it yourself? Get a book, read up, write a nice Hello World using all the fancy bloat you can find and be done with it.
I'm pretty close to 40 and I can honestly say I've seen everything and there's nothing new really. Only the tech changes(slowly) the WTFs remain the same. We in the industry like to call that "experience". You may have picked up some of that. If that guy were working on my team I'd give him the ass-kicking of the century.I've seen cavemen recently thawed from age-long slumber who weren't that whiny.
There is new tech just coming out in form of MS-Tablets which WILL be important in the corporate world. There's a nice bandwagon to hop on nice and early.
Slashdot is not a good place to have a midlife-crysis in. You are supposed to have one in a Porsche with a couple of half naked bimbos and a bag of cocaine next to you.
Why should Jobs be remembered in 50 years? I mean, the world has forgotten Thomas Watson even tho there were two of them.
This jobsian cult of personality is something that absolutely eludes me.
And yet, at this very moment, somewhere somebody is building a shrine to Jobs using the traditional building materials. Mashed potatoes and your own eyebrows.
Madness. Translucent computers and phones you can operate by licking them. Madness, I tell you!