The whole needing F-22s if we ever get into a conventional war with a Great Power thing is a canard. Great Powers have nuclear weapons, so conventional wars aren't possible; we send in F-22s and 8 hours later half the planet is glass.
Conventional fighting these days is done against guys hiding in caves in third-world countries, and the F-22 does precisely nothing to help in those scenarios.
$20 million+ rollouts for Peoplesoft systems on University campuses are the norm, not the exception. Their salesforce hooks in clueless upper management with tales of little customization and off-the-shelf savings, and then comes the roll-out consulting costs and news that any use of Peoplesoft for financials requires highly complex, site-specific customization at exorbitant consulting fees.
Data migration from the old mainframe systems always turns into a nightmare, cost overruns are legion, political pressure to meet deadlines causes internal staff to rack up huge overtime at huge cost, Oracle licensing runs well into 7 figure territory, etc, etc
This money was gone the second they selected a Peoplesoft "solution", management just didn't know it at the time
Twitter is essentially an SMS aggregation and redistribution tool. SMS is limited to 140 character messages. I do not think you understand the meaning of the word "arbitrary".
He makes the claim that the scoring is not subjective, then goes on to explain the scoring process. So far so good.
When he makes the statement that the starting value is rated on "degree of difficulty" he is describing a subjective judgment.
Therefore, his argument has broken down at that point in the post.
The degree of difficulty is not a subjective judgement made at scoring time; it is specified on a list of valid moves that the judges score from.
So a foobar tuck might be defined as having a degree of difficulty of 5, whereas a bazbang flip might be a DoD of 3.
All accounting systems support outstanding cheques.
Ahahahaha. I am working with a system, right now, that doesn't.
You have no idea how bad some custom business software can get.
As for Cobol programmers, they aren't that rare. I know a couple that did Cobol up until a year or so ago and could, and would switch back with the right incentive. These aren't people with 1-2 years experience 10-15 years ago. These are people with 15-20 years of recent experience.
The problem in this case is entirely political. But hey, if they want to pay me $250K, I'd do it. Literally. one way or or another.
Part of the problem is that, thanks to the same bill that brought in the pay cut, if you don't already work for the Comptroller, it'd be illegal for him to hire you right now.
I took it as a story about how none of the current employees are able to learn a programing language. Seriously, just make someone read some books and learn how to do it. If they make learning the language their full-time job, they should be able to tinker with the payroll system in waaaaay less than 6 months. Hell, most people could probably learn German in six months if they worked at it 40 hours/week, let alone a programing language.
Obviously you have no first-hand experience with the horrors of legacy payroll systems, and little imagination to boot. To begin with this thing is probably hard-wired to pay salaried groups defined in some EBCDIC encoded fixed column bullshit flat-file or proprietary ISAM nonsense out at specific values contained defined in some other EBCDIC encoded fixed column bullshit flat-file or proprietary ISAM nonsense. The formats are documented nowheres.
There's probably no acceptance environment (some bean-counter had it decommisioned and sold for scrap 10 years ago because, shit, it's just sitting there not doing anything and besides we're buying a new system Real Soon Now), and doing things straight in production is the quick road to the wrong end of a multi-million dollar lawsuit, so good news, you get to set one up! You could just gnash your teeth and scrape a clone of the production system for acceptance, but this isn't a Wintel system and VMWare doesn't exactly make anything that targets some gawdawful 23 bit per word little-known IBM/Honeywell/PDP/CorningWare/CountChocula mainframe running who the fuck knows what batch os. God knows how you'll solve this one, but if you do and you're lucky there's a terminal emulator batch job you can connect to to start figuring out how the system works (just hope you can find a good terminal emulator client for something other than DOS 5.0). But you're probably not lucky, so get used to punch cards.
The software itself predates any inkling of the ideas of functions or separation of concerns, and was written in a time when DRY was what you weren't after a 3 martini lunch. Changing a salaried paygroup to hourly and adding in time tracking for these employee groups isn't a matter of rewriting the pay calculation function, it's a matter of changing the same logic in 30 different places, rewritting the file parser, extending in-memory tables, and catching a thousand little knock-on assumptions besides; you need to understand the whole system to successfully change any of it. Oh, and the entire thing runs in an environment with less memory than your average wrist-watch, so it's chock-full of deep compiler, OS, and hardware specific space-and-time optimizations which aren't covered in COBOL Programming for Slashdot Assholes and have never been seen by anyone under the age of 70 at any rate.
And if you manage to figure all this out, and cajole the umpteen thousand state users (who don't understand testing because shouldn't you just write software that works?) into manually running comprehensive tests based on testing scripts that you had to write from scratch to verify the functionality (unit tests have never been within a million miles of this thing, so you have no way of validating that your changes haven't fucked some other functionality to hell and back), congratulations! It's time to figure out a deployment migration strategy. There sure as shit had better not be any downtime. And who knows what bullshit job control language you're going to be spelunking in.
Six months is a goddamn optimistic schedule; this thing could easily take years to change.
You're comparing a bunch of fucking neck-beards in cheeto-stained penguin shirts wasting peoples' time with vacuous non-questions like:
"In 'Thoughts on Music', Steve Jobs said, "it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in 'open' licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC"."
Can't help it, FSF goes out of their ways a little sometimes. Apple has the right to throw them out, but really FSF is just using the system that is in place. How is this different than gerrymandering or using legal loopholes for all sorts of crap?
It's not that different. It's every bit as asinine, disreputable, and indicative of poor moral fiber as those things.
It demonstrates that the FSF is less concerned about freedom than they are about being dicks to everyone who doesn't buy into their orthodoxy.
It completely undermines the moral high-ground that the FSF's cadre of sanctimonious assholes insists they occupy in every argument.
It ultimate confirms the truth of the argument that it's the BSD that's about freedom for everyone, and that the FSF that stands for nothing more than own hollow rhetoric and craven self-interest.
If the combat seemed kind of shallow in the preview but Peter Molyneux implied that there's a great deal of depth to it, gamers everywhere can rest assured on the strength of Peter Molyneux's track-record that the combat is indeed very shallow.
In the future, mothers will tell children the cautionary tale of The Molyneux Who Cried 'Features'.
Mobile phone companies make it hard to figure out because... well, because they're mobile phone companies in the US, and lock-in and providing confusing non-information to consumers is in their blood. You have to make the effort to keep yourself informed.
The fastest networks available in the US these days are the UMTS (3G successor to GSM) services, where you'll see speeds up to 1.4 Mbps, and CDMA2000-EVDO wireless services, with a max down of 3.1Mbps, max up of 1.8Mbps, More than fast enough for web browsing.
Re:IT field avoidance should be a no-brainer
on
IT Jobs To Drop In 2009
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Don't extrapolate the US's crappy economy to countries you know nothing about, thanks. If you're avoiding the IT field in Canada, you're avoiding a field where, in parts of the country, there are more jobs than people and IT companies are very desperate to hire someone, anyone, with remotely relevant experience.
What is the appeal of wireless internet if this is as good as it gets?
That's not as good as it gets. The 'berry browser sucks rocks, and you're not on UMTS. It's like asking what the big deal about the internet is these days, 'cause it doesn't seem very impressive in NCSA Mosaic on your 14.4 dial up connection.
Long term and with the economy in recession, who do you think holds the stronger cards?
Historically, luxury brands do well during recessions - their customers have enough money that they can exploit the opportunities presented by bear markets.
Middle class brands have a lot of trouble, though, because it's the middle class that gets fucked sideways during recessions.
God, you're right, the GP is being ridiculous. Everyone KNOWS all you have to do is click on the "&^4" to add users and the "(/9er" symbol to remove users. AND If you need help, you simply attach a second monitor, stand on one foot, and pray to Steve Jobs, and the answer you are seeking will be whispered to you in ancient Mayan.
Because, God knows, it's entirely ridiculous and arbitrary to expect an English speaker to associate "+" with the concept of addition.
Why would a build process dictate those? Choosing which files get compiled and which libraries get linked is as easy as adding files to a list of files and libraries to a list of libraries, and then the IDE writes out the makefile from the template that you have chosen for the platform, not the project
Unless you need to do something at all non-simple, like compiling some files, running custom tools against the results of that compile to generate yet more files, which should then be compiled and referenced during the compilation of yet a third set of files, etc, etc..
Visual Studio is easily the most egregious example of an IDE with a fragile and brain-dead view of compilation. You put the pretty files into pretty lists and it compiles them, but it flat out breaks horribly if you try to do anything reasonably complex with its braindamaged build scripts.
Yeah, eBay is such a monopoly that there's a plug for an eBay competitor in a Score:5 reply to the first post on this article.
Shuttered in 2k7 indeed.
"The Rolex trademark recordation with Customs indicates "Import of Goods Bearing Genuine Trademarks or Trade Names Restricted." This means that genuine Rolex products can only be imported with the permission of the trademark owner, Rolex Watch U.S.A. Inc. A private individual can hand carry one Rolex watch from a trip overseas without obtaining permission. Bring in more than one, and they will all be seized as a trademark violation. Purchasing a Rolex from overseas by mail is also a trademark violation."
Title 19 U.S.C. 1526(a) and (b)
Buy a legitimate Rolex from a foreign seller on eBay and try having it sent to you, and see how your tune changes.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole needing F-22s if we ever get into a conventional war with a Great Power thing is a canard. Great Powers have nuclear weapons, so conventional wars aren't possible; we send in F-22s and 8 hours later half the planet is glass.
Conventional fighting these days is done against guys hiding in caves in third-world countries, and the F-22 does precisely nothing to help in those scenarios.
Any transition offer that involves subjecting oneself to Oracle's pricing plans can accurately be described as being up shit creek.
$20 million+ rollouts for Peoplesoft systems on University campuses are the norm, not the exception. Their salesforce hooks in clueless upper management with tales of little customization and off-the-shelf savings, and then comes the roll-out consulting costs and news that any use of Peoplesoft for financials requires highly complex, site-specific customization at exorbitant consulting fees.
Data migration from the old mainframe systems always turns into a nightmare, cost overruns are legion, political pressure to meet deadlines causes internal staff to rack up huge overtime at huge cost, Oracle licensing runs well into 7 figure territory, etc, etc
This money was gone the second they selected a Peoplesoft "solution", management just didn't know it at the time
Unix influences. Notice that they're networking related; Windows used BSD's TCP/IP stack for a long time
Who reads newspapers?
Old People
What group is most likely to bother to read some long boring public notice and have enough free time and spare outrage to make any noise about it?
Old People
Where do you put things you don't want Old People to find?
The Internet
Twitter is essentially an SMS aggregation and redistribution tool. SMS is limited to 140 character messages. I do not think you understand the meaning of the word "arbitrary".
...or their arable land was, say, destroyed by the Three Gorges Dam project, which has displaced millions of people
He makes the claim that the scoring is not subjective, then goes on to explain the scoring process. So far so good. When he makes the statement that the starting value is rated on "degree of difficulty" he is describing a subjective judgment. Therefore, his argument has broken down at that point in the post.
The degree of difficulty is not a subjective judgement made at scoring time; it is specified on a list of valid moves that the judges score from.
So a foobar tuck might be defined as having a degree of difficulty of 5, whereas a bazbang flip might be a DoD of 3.
Assumptions, try making fewer of them.
All accounting systems support outstanding cheques.
Ahahahaha. I am working with a system, right now, that doesn't. You have no idea how bad some custom business software can get.
As for Cobol programmers, they aren't that rare. I know a couple that did Cobol up until a year or so ago and could, and would switch back with the right incentive. These aren't people with 1-2 years experience 10-15 years ago. These are people with 15-20 years of recent experience. The problem in this case is entirely political. But hey, if they want to pay me $250K, I'd do it. Literally. one way or or another.
Part of the problem is that, thanks to the same bill that brought in the pay cut, if you don't already work for the Comptroller, it'd be illegal for him to hire you right now.
I took it as a story about how none of the current employees are able to learn a programing language. Seriously, just make someone read some books and learn how to do it. If they make learning the language their full-time job, they should be able to tinker with the payroll system in waaaaay less than 6 months. Hell, most people could probably learn German in six months if they worked at it 40 hours/week, let alone a programing language.
Obviously you have no first-hand experience with the horrors of legacy payroll systems, and little imagination to boot. To begin with this thing is probably hard-wired to pay salaried groups defined in some EBCDIC encoded fixed column bullshit flat-file or proprietary ISAM nonsense out at specific values contained defined in some other EBCDIC encoded fixed column bullshit flat-file or proprietary ISAM nonsense. The formats are documented nowheres.
There's probably no acceptance environment (some bean-counter had it decommisioned and sold for scrap 10 years ago because, shit, it's just sitting there not doing anything and besides we're buying a new system Real Soon Now), and doing things straight in production is the quick road to the wrong end of a multi-million dollar lawsuit, so good news, you get to set one up! You could just gnash your teeth and scrape a clone of the production system for acceptance, but this isn't a Wintel system and VMWare doesn't exactly make anything that targets some gawdawful 23 bit per word little-known IBM/Honeywell/PDP/CorningWare/CountChocula mainframe running who the fuck knows what batch os. God knows how you'll solve this one, but if you do and you're lucky there's a terminal emulator batch job you can connect to to start figuring out how the system works (just hope you can find a good terminal emulator client for something other than DOS 5.0). But you're probably not lucky, so get used to punch cards.
The software itself predates any inkling of the ideas of functions or separation of concerns, and was written in a time when DRY was what you weren't after a 3 martini lunch. Changing a salaried paygroup to hourly and adding in time tracking for these employee groups isn't a matter of rewriting the pay calculation function, it's a matter of changing the same logic in 30 different places, rewritting the file parser, extending in-memory tables, and catching a thousand little knock-on assumptions besides; you need to understand the whole system to successfully change any of it. Oh, and the entire thing runs in an environment with less memory than your average wrist-watch, so it's chock-full of deep compiler, OS, and hardware specific space-and-time optimizations which aren't covered in COBOL Programming for Slashdot Assholes and have never been seen by anyone under the age of 70 at any rate.
And if you manage to figure all this out, and cajole the umpteen thousand state users (who don't understand testing because shouldn't you just write software that works?) into manually running comprehensive tests based on testing scripts that you had to write from scratch to verify the functionality (unit tests have never been within a million miles of this thing, so you have no way of validating that your changes haven't fucked some other functionality to hell and back), congratulations! It's time to figure out a deployment migration strategy. There sure as shit had better not be any downtime. And who knows what bullshit job control language you're going to be spelunking in.
Six months is a goddamn optimistic schedule; this thing could easily take years to change.
"In 'Thoughts on Music', Steve Jobs said, "it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in 'open' licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC"."
to Mahatma-Mother-Fucking-Ghandi??
Can't help it, FSF goes out of their ways a little sometimes. Apple has the right to throw them out, but really FSF is just using the system that is in place. How is this different than gerrymandering or using legal loopholes for all sorts of crap?
It's not that different. It's every bit as asinine, disreputable, and indicative of poor moral fiber as those things.
It demonstrates that the FSF is less concerned about freedom than they are about being dicks to everyone who doesn't buy into their orthodoxy.
It completely undermines the moral high-ground that the FSF's cadre of sanctimonious assholes insists they occupy in every argument.
It ultimate confirms the truth of the argument that it's the BSD that's about freedom for everyone, and that the FSF that stands for nothing more than own hollow rhetoric and craven self-interest.
If the combat seemed kind of shallow in the preview but Peter Molyneux implied that there's a great deal of depth to it, gamers everywhere can rest assured on the strength of Peter Molyneux's track-record that the combat is indeed very shallow.
In the future, mothers will tell children the cautionary tale of The Molyneux Who Cried 'Features'.
Alberta, and any company with more than 2 computers.
Mobile phone companies make it hard to figure out because... well, because they're mobile phone companies in the US, and lock-in and providing confusing non-information to consumers is in their blood. You have to make the effort to keep yourself informed.
The fastest networks available in the US these days are the UMTS (3G successor to GSM) services, where you'll see speeds up to 1.4 Mbps, and CDMA2000-EVDO wireless services, with a max down of 3.1Mbps, max up of 1.8Mbps, More than fast enough for web browsing.
Don't extrapolate the US's crappy economy to countries you know nothing about, thanks. If you're avoiding the IT field in Canada, you're avoiding a field where, in parts of the country, there are more jobs than people and IT companies are very desperate to hire someone, anyone, with remotely relevant experience.
Our economy is just fine, thanks.
What is the appeal of wireless internet if this is as good as it gets?
That's not as good as it gets. The 'berry browser sucks rocks, and you're not on UMTS. It's like asking what the big deal about the internet is these days, 'cause it doesn't seem very impressive in NCSA Mosaic on your 14.4 dial up connection.
Long term and with the economy in recession, who do you think holds the stronger cards?
Historically, luxury brands do well during recessions - their customers have enough money that they can exploit the opportunities presented by bear markets.
Middle class brands have a lot of trouble, though, because it's the middle class that gets fucked sideways during recessions.
God, you're right, the GP is being ridiculous. Everyone KNOWS all you have to do is click on the "&^4" to add users and the "(/9er" symbol to remove users. AND If you need help, you simply attach a second monitor, stand on one foot, and pray to Steve Jobs, and the answer you are seeking will be whispered to you in ancient Mayan.
Because, God knows, it's entirely ridiculous and arbitrary to expect an English speaker to associate "+" with the concept of addition.
I mean, really, the university isn't even the best in Ontario, let alone the country and Waterloo itself is in the middle of nowhere.
Depending on what you're studying, Waterloo actually is the best University in the country.
Did you have the option of downloading Redhat over broadband in 1997?
Yes.
I feel old that someone even had to ask that.
Why would a build process dictate those? Choosing which files get compiled and which libraries get linked is as easy as adding files to a list of files and libraries to a list of libraries, and then the IDE writes out the makefile from the template that you have chosen for the platform, not the project
Unless you need to do something at all non-simple, like compiling some files, running custom tools against the results of that compile to generate yet more files, which should then be compiled and referenced during the compilation of yet a third set of files, etc, etc..
Visual Studio is easily the most egregious example of an IDE with a fragile and brain-dead view of compilation. You put the pretty files into pretty lists and it compiles them, but it flat out breaks horribly if you try to do anything reasonably complex with its braindamaged build scripts.
I didn't think I'd ever see a site that offered even fewer legitimate watches for sale than eBay.
Yeah, eBay is such a monopoly that there's a plug for an eBay competitor in a Score:5 reply to the first post on this article. Shuttered in 2k7 indeed.
"The Rolex trademark recordation with Customs indicates "Import of Goods Bearing Genuine Trademarks or Trade Names Restricted." This means that genuine Rolex products can only be imported with the permission of the trademark owner, Rolex Watch U.S.A. Inc. A private individual can hand carry one Rolex watch from a trip overseas without obtaining permission. Bring in more than one, and they will all be seized as a trademark violation. Purchasing a Rolex from overseas by mail is also a trademark violation." Title 19 U.S.C. 1526(a) and (b)
Buy a legitimate Rolex from a foreign seller on eBay and try having it sent to you, and see how your tune changes.