Though I resent that a lot of jobs are sent to India these days, and I do agree that Indian programmers are no different than programmers in the United States, it is just short sighted to say that you will NEVER send work to India.
I believe that the problems that are legion in the software industry will crop up in India as well. I have always seen that a very few software developers do the lion's share of the work. Why would this be different in India? There are obviously a lot of very capable Indians who will be able to crank out the golden-code.
Our industry is plauged by being run as if it is a Fuedal enterprise. We have money-managers and bankers who promote hack-coder-psycophants to management. These butt-plecos don't want competence, they want loyalty. They hire people are generic programmers based upon the number of years in the industry that a candidate has. And they have destroyed the American programmers by putting our jobs in India. But they build the same kind of fuedal businesses in India (Indian are big into caste system, "were better and higher born").
But since fuedalism is a brain-dead philosophy, and since competence always wins out, all we need to do is to wait and the jobs for the good programmers will return. The fakers and the frauds will be exposed. We are only part there now. Scandals keep cropping up, and the bankers (ie the 'fuedal lords' of the modern day) knee-jerk and lay off everyone.
There will be programmers working in India and in the United States. There will not be these fuedal work farms with the cadres of generic programmers. The competent programmers will return.
So, don't blame the Indians for a fault in the way that capitalist bussinesses are run. There were so many software jobs because the venture money whores do the math: each 'prgrammer' added so much to the bottom line of the valuation given to the money mongers at the banks. And then they could go to the IPO with a larger value.
The whole scheme is fraudulent and all of us programmers got burned in the process. They threw away all of the gems with glass (ie there were a lot of fakers in our industry, admit it, who couldn't code or design software)
The diamonds are still diamonds. And bankers and money mongers being greedy, they will sort through the rough of the diritis of what they have done and pull out the valuble programmers from the mix. So don't dispair, all of you good programmers.
But also, don't blame the Indians. There are obviously a lot of very awesome 'diamond' programmers there as well as the fake 'glass' programmers.
Keep your chin up, this stuff isn't over. There will be a lot more layoffs before things turn around. And if there is a war, we don't know what will happen.
What we need to do is to keep programming, keep our skills up and also to debunk the management model that has lead to this dispairing situation.
Please pardon me for throwing water on the OO must be learned paradigm:
It is very popular to believe this as if OO was the second coming. It always seemed to me that OO was just a rewrapping of MODULAR programming. What is the difference? And didn't BIOS calls mimmick what we call proxy objects?
OO was a great boon for publishers and for folks in accedamia. The truth from the trenches is that code that works is what is desired in the real world.
Yes, OO is awesome, and a great new vocabulary. But there are plenty of EXCELLENT old-time programmers who didn't learn the vocabulary of OO and still design awesome modular code.
A lot of folks who have OO as their mantra neglect the fact that a lot of very good software engineers never learned the vocabulary of OO but still write rock-solid code and engineer incredible products.
So, if a guy is good at what he does, why send him back to school to learn a new dialect (which is all OO really is) when the dialect that he currently speaks lets him say what ever he needs to say.
I would suggest to our friend that he follow his bliss and learn something that he likes to do.
What about OS for people with diabilities?
We need to keep working and providing better ways to do things.
It has not all been done. We need to do things for those who can't even pick up a mouse or type because they have handicaps.
Don't stop thinking, don't stop dreaming.
In the Palm OS with power off, the system starts back where the user left off.
This is done with persistent memory.
I recall a model for a file system that just saved everything is series as it was created. That would involve a lot of file storage. As file storage was developed in the past when it was expensive, this kind of a file system was not desirable. But now with DVD Read/Write soon to be obiquitous, that kind of a file system seems to be less of a rediculous idea. If you are worried that you will loose key-strokes: save everyone to a file. Append to that file every time that you type.
But these ideas are not standard. So much was designed in the dinosaur days of small memory space when storage was expensive. The whole UNIX virtual file system is a good example of this. People in control of the industry have a vested interest to keep these dinosaurs alive (service contracts, etc). A lot of us who know how to design next generation system are OUT OF WORK. No one wants us to come in and tell their clients how these large corporations are ripping off the clients. And so we stay out of work. We have new ideas but we are pidgen-holed into deadend work. Our jobs are shipped to Bangalore.
And the dinosuars still rule the earth. . .
Yes, you can save every keystroke. You can have a file system that saves every version. You would want to specify which files would be in this type of a bin.
I think that we should put governmental law making on such a system. Every person accessing the law writting software would need to identify himself. And then any change would be tracked so that we can KNOW who is doing what, who is draining the system.
But I think that I am off topic now. So I will stop.
if the stuff 'isn't being used' are you sure?
I recall hearing something about how you can pass date by using so-called 'unused' bits some IP header format. . .
The system would 'ignore' these bits. But a virus would look to them and the virus could thus get secret data. . .
I remember hearing that this flaw was corrected by actually making sure that the bits were set to some known value (ie fill with zeros).
Otherwise the interface had a big hole in it.
So . . . my question for you is: are your 'unused fields' really not being used by someone? If they are not needed, they should be removed unless you don't worry about malicious virus writters.
just a point, and probably you don't have a problem.
I worked on a very valuble system as a code archiologist. The legacy system was in a million dollar a piece semiconductor furnace. Doing the work involved grepping through old C code that was written by a brillient assmebly language programmer.
If code is working and shipping you don't throw it away. What I did was decouple the various patterns that I found and made something that was more modern. I did all of this work in C. It involved a lot of grepping and creating interfaces.
Just because code is old an kludgey doesn't mean that it is not valuble. Elegance is getting paid a million dollars for a device that only costs a fraction of that to manufacture.
Bottom line: if you don't have the cash you can't stay in business.
There is a difference between bad code and old idiom code. Archaic code that is shipping and works is much more valuble than pie-in-the-sky new code that no one wants.;)
I wrote a copyrighted book called "The Blank Page" thinking that I could get a cut of every printed page saying that it was derivative of my "The Blank Page".
But then I found out that my work was just a translation of an ancient Egyption text called:
"The Wall has no Hyrogliphs".
And I thought that I had an angle . . .
I went to a conference when I worked for the semiconductor industry. I asked the salesman for the equipment manufacturer that was selling his stuff why so many fabs are built on fault lines with high amounts of earthquakes.
I had my own idea: the companies are hoping for an earthquake because then they get big insurance money. Semiconductor equipment goes out of date very quickly and a large insurance check is a kiss for the semicondutor manufacturers.
Then I asked the fellow about the safety of the equipment during an earthquake. I wondered about all of the poison gas that is being piped through the fab, and are their procedures and safeguards in place for the (inevitable) time that an earthquake hits the fab in these danger zones.
The saleman told me that at the time of the earthquake no one worrys about the gasses. They worry about the roof falling on their heads. And, no, there aren't any safeguards for the poison gases.
This was five years ago. I doubt that they worry now.
Should Italy's allotment of CO2 be used up by the natural explosion of Mt. Etna?
Is CO2 really damaging or is the limitation of it a ploy by patent holders of fuel cell technology to sell their expensive product?
Should a large person who uses more air and thus produces more CO2 be taxed higher?
Just wondering. I care about the environment, however I don't believe that the regulators, who are typically very well-fed elites, understand the environment well enough to be telling me that I can't lite a fire to heat my house or run my old car because it is dirty.
If I am poor and living in the hills of Vermont, I will run my old car and cut down trees to heat my house. I will kill a deer to eat.
Is Norway is willing to pay repartions for the Vickings and their warmongering from a thousand years ago? Probably not. Nor do I think that they should. The past is gone.
More taxes are not the answer. Taxes contribute to larger government that is often wasteful.
Providing open source to China is immoral?
So will you stop buying everything made in China?
ya, 1 billion people do not all hate us.
Grow up, China has problems, they are our rivals. But Chinese are no more enemies than Russians were under the Soviets. Most Chinese are moral and peaceloving.
And if they go open source, then they will be heros too.
For single purpose devices, like a telco switch or an embedded device an operating system is not really needed. But what one then needs are experts.
This Princeton guy is blowing wind.
Without an operating system we have too many issues:
1. how do we load the software
2. how do we upgrade the software
3. How do we provide tools that everyone knows how to use so that we can write new software.
Yes, you don't need an OS if you want to turn on power and have your stuff come up and that is waht you get. But even then you need standards and a methodology.
If you don't have an operating system then you need a 'system of interoperating'. In that case the protocols become the operating system. HTTP would thus become very important for interoperability. Thus we could call it an 'interoperating system'.
You need standards to push technology forward. Without an operating system we are stuck flashing proms with code written in C and compiled on a machine that does have an operating system.
For a user machine that is going to do an unknown number of tasks we need an operating system.
If you want connectivity you at least need a UDP connection or a serial port connection. IN any case you need interoperating standards.
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Though I resent that a lot of jobs are sent to India these days, and I do agree that Indian programmers are no different than programmers in the United States, it is just short sighted to say that you will NEVER send work to India. I believe that the problems that are legion in the software industry will crop up in India as well. I have always seen that a very few software developers do the lion's share of the work. Why would this be different in India? There are obviously a lot of very capable Indians who will be able to crank out the golden-code. Our industry is plauged by being run as if it is a Fuedal enterprise. We have money-managers and bankers who promote hack-coder-psycophants to management. These butt-plecos don't want competence, they want loyalty. They hire people are generic programmers based upon the number of years in the industry that a candidate has. And they have destroyed the American programmers by putting our jobs in India. But they build the same kind of fuedal businesses in India (Indian are big into caste system, "were better and higher born"). But since fuedalism is a brain-dead philosophy, and since competence always wins out, all we need to do is to wait and the jobs for the good programmers will return. The fakers and the frauds will be exposed. We are only part there now. Scandals keep cropping up, and the bankers (ie the 'fuedal lords' of the modern day) knee-jerk and lay off everyone. There will be programmers working in India and in the United States. There will not be these fuedal work farms with the cadres of generic programmers. The competent programmers will return. So, don't blame the Indians for a fault in the way that capitalist bussinesses are run. There were so many software jobs because the venture money whores do the math: each 'prgrammer' added so much to the bottom line of the valuation given to the money mongers at the banks. And then they could go to the IPO with a larger value. The whole scheme is fraudulent and all of us programmers got burned in the process. They threw away all of the gems with glass (ie there were a lot of fakers in our industry, admit it, who couldn't code or design software) The diamonds are still diamonds. And bankers and money mongers being greedy, they will sort through the rough of the diritis of what they have done and pull out the valuble programmers from the mix. So don't dispair, all of you good programmers. But also, don't blame the Indians. There are obviously a lot of very awesome 'diamond' programmers there as well as the fake 'glass' programmers. Keep your chin up, this stuff isn't over. There will be a lot more layoffs before things turn around. And if there is a war, we don't know what will happen. What we need to do is to keep programming, keep our skills up and also to debunk the management model that has lead to this dispairing situation.
Please pardon me for throwing water on the OO must be learned paradigm: It is very popular to believe this as if OO was the second coming. It always seemed to me that OO was just a rewrapping of MODULAR programming. What is the difference? And didn't BIOS calls mimmick what we call proxy objects? OO was a great boon for publishers and for folks in accedamia. The truth from the trenches is that code that works is what is desired in the real world. Yes, OO is awesome, and a great new vocabulary. But there are plenty of EXCELLENT old-time programmers who didn't learn the vocabulary of OO and still design awesome modular code. A lot of folks who have OO as their mantra neglect the fact that a lot of very good software engineers never learned the vocabulary of OO but still write rock-solid code and engineer incredible products. So, if a guy is good at what he does, why send him back to school to learn a new dialect (which is all OO really is) when the dialect that he currently speaks lets him say what ever he needs to say. I would suggest to our friend that he follow his bliss and learn something that he likes to do.
What about OS for people with diabilities? We need to keep working and providing better ways to do things. It has not all been done. We need to do things for those who can't even pick up a mouse or type because they have handicaps. Don't stop thinking, don't stop dreaming.
In the Palm OS with power off, the system starts back where the user left off. This is done with persistent memory. I recall a model for a file system that just saved everything is series as it was created. That would involve a lot of file storage. As file storage was developed in the past when it was expensive, this kind of a file system was not desirable. But now with DVD Read/Write soon to be obiquitous, that kind of a file system seems to be less of a rediculous idea. If you are worried that you will loose key-strokes: save everyone to a file. Append to that file every time that you type. But these ideas are not standard. So much was designed in the dinosaur days of small memory space when storage was expensive. The whole UNIX virtual file system is a good example of this. People in control of the industry have a vested interest to keep these dinosaurs alive (service contracts, etc). A lot of us who know how to design next generation system are OUT OF WORK. No one wants us to come in and tell their clients how these large corporations are ripping off the clients. And so we stay out of work. We have new ideas but we are pidgen-holed into deadend work. Our jobs are shipped to Bangalore. And the dinosuars still rule the earth. . . Yes, you can save every keystroke. You can have a file system that saves every version. You would want to specify which files would be in this type of a bin. I think that we should put governmental law making on such a system. Every person accessing the law writting software would need to identify himself. And then any change would be tracked so that we can KNOW who is doing what, who is draining the system. But I think that I am off topic now. So I will stop.
if the stuff 'isn't being used' are you sure? I recall hearing something about how you can pass date by using so-called 'unused' bits some IP header format. . . The system would 'ignore' these bits. But a virus would look to them and the virus could thus get secret data. . . I remember hearing that this flaw was corrected by actually making sure that the bits were set to some known value (ie fill with zeros). Otherwise the interface had a big hole in it. So . . . my question for you is: are your 'unused fields' really not being used by someone? If they are not needed, they should be removed unless you don't worry about malicious virus writters. just a point, and probably you don't have a problem.
I worked on a very valuble system as a code archiologist. The legacy system was in a million dollar a piece semiconductor furnace. Doing the work involved grepping through old C code that was written by a brillient assmebly language programmer.
;)
If code is working and shipping you don't throw it away. What I did was decouple the various patterns that I found and made something that was more modern. I did all of this work in C. It involved a lot of grepping and creating interfaces.
Just because code is old an kludgey doesn't mean that it is not valuble. Elegance is getting paid a million dollars for a device that only costs a fraction of that to manufacture.
Bottom line: if you don't have the cash you can't stay in business.
There is a difference between bad code and old idiom code. Archaic code that is shipping and works is much more valuble than pie-in-the-sky new code that no one wants.
If we specify the exact font then we don't leave the visually impaired the ability to choose what they would like.
I wrote a copyrighted book called "The Blank Page" thinking that I could get a cut of every printed page saying that it was derivative of my "The Blank Page". But then I found out that my work was just a translation of an ancient Egyption text called: "The Wall has no Hyrogliphs". And I thought that I had an angle . . .
I went to a conference when I worked for the semiconductor industry. I asked the salesman for the equipment manufacturer that was selling his stuff why so many fabs are built on fault lines with high amounts of earthquakes. I had my own idea: the companies are hoping for an earthquake because then they get big insurance money. Semiconductor equipment goes out of date very quickly and a large insurance check is a kiss for the semicondutor manufacturers. Then I asked the fellow about the safety of the equipment during an earthquake. I wondered about all of the poison gas that is being piped through the fab, and are their procedures and safeguards in place for the (inevitable) time that an earthquake hits the fab in these danger zones. The saleman told me that at the time of the earthquake no one worrys about the gasses. They worry about the roof falling on their heads. And, no, there aren't any safeguards for the poison gases. This was five years ago. I doubt that they worry now.
Should Italy's allotment of CO2 be used up by the natural explosion of Mt. Etna? Is CO2 really damaging or is the limitation of it a ploy by patent holders of fuel cell technology to sell their expensive product? Should a large person who uses more air and thus produces more CO2 be taxed higher? Just wondering. I care about the environment, however I don't believe that the regulators, who are typically very well-fed elites, understand the environment well enough to be telling me that I can't lite a fire to heat my house or run my old car because it is dirty. If I am poor and living in the hills of Vermont, I will run my old car and cut down trees to heat my house. I will kill a deer to eat. Is Norway is willing to pay repartions for the Vickings and their warmongering from a thousand years ago? Probably not. Nor do I think that they should. The past is gone. More taxes are not the answer. Taxes contribute to larger government that is often wasteful.
Clean rooms are NOT clean for the people, but for the chip. Should we be making these things in outer space? maybe in 100 years.
Providing open source to China is immoral? So will you stop buying everything made in China? ya, 1 billion people do not all hate us. Grow up, China has problems, they are our rivals. But Chinese are no more enemies than Russians were under the Soviets. Most Chinese are moral and peaceloving. And if they go open source, then they will be heros too.
For single purpose devices, like a telco switch or an embedded device an operating system is not really needed. But what one then needs are experts. This Princeton guy is blowing wind. Without an operating system we have too many issues: 1. how do we load the software 2. how do we upgrade the software 3. How do we provide tools that everyone knows how to use so that we can write new software. Yes, you don't need an OS if you want to turn on power and have your stuff come up and that is waht you get. But even then you need standards and a methodology. If you don't have an operating system then you need a 'system of interoperating'. In that case the protocols become the operating system. HTTP would thus become very important for interoperability. Thus we could call it an 'interoperating system'. You need standards to push technology forward. Without an operating system we are stuck flashing proms with code written in C and compiled on a machine that does have an operating system. For a user machine that is going to do an unknown number of tasks we need an operating system. If you want connectivity you at least need a UDP connection or a serial port connection. IN any case you need interoperating standards.