Someone, for the love of all that is good in the world, mod parent up!!!
As it applies to CS/EE/CE students, learning C then C++ better positions students in the long term. Once you understand C and C++, it should be a relatively trivial exercise to go up and down the stack. At that point, you have the base skills necessary to learn how a lot more things than if you learned just Java or Python.
Having said that, I can see the benefit of having a "programming fundamentals" course in something like Python for those people who have never programmed before or for those who are not in the CS/EE/CE programs, e.g., Mechanical Engineers, Physicists, Business students, etc.
Essentially what they're admitting is that they cannot attract enough tax-paying US residents to Detroit. Therefore, they need to look elsewhere for people who are willing to work hard enough to generate the necessary tax revenues needed pay for the services which current residents want and to rescue Detroit from their woes.
This is the ultimate representation of the failure of a community.
Showing them how its done accomplishes nothing, because they do not watch and learn but simply let you do the work, then they go on break or go home content that the work is over.
Let me fix that for you:
Showing them how it's done accomplishes nothing, because they do not watch and learn but simply let you do the work, then they go on break or go home content that the work is over.
As a manager you quickly learn where you need to focus and how to prioritize. If you want to lead great teams you have to know how to assemble a great team without going on a safari to track down qualified candidates. Finding the proverbial diamond in the rough will take you a lot longer than saying "find me a candidate with demonstrable experience in something related to X with a degree in Y from a top Z school". Of course, don't be completely rigid and if you happen across the diamond in the rough - all the better. You just can't send all your time looking for her/him.
In the early 2000's, during the middle of an interview for a SWE position, the hiring manager (proverbial MS in Systems Engineering) indicated to me that I was an ideal candidate except for one shortcoming: I didn't have the 15yrs of Java experience they were looking for. I expressed my disappointment, shook the woman's hand and wished her the best of luck finding the right candidate. I later heard the project was an abysmal failure...
Good discussion, but you might be forgetting something... productivity and long term impacts. What will the long term costs be of not doing a tech refresh? How are the departments likely to respond (e.g. buy their own computers) and what are the costs to the institution? Inaction will inevitably have a cost.
50% sounds like [s]he either pulled it out of their ass or like someone else mentioned - the financial situation is dire.
Like most discussions, you want to frame the conversation in the best possible way for you to win it. In your case, I would work with your boss to re-frame the discussion around cutting the right part 50%. Moving all engineering related expenses to line of business accounts would be a good first step, then you can take a look at the real enterprise IT. Of what remains, consider what you can outsource within the limits allowed by applicable security and regulatory constraints. Of the IT enabling expenses in line of business accounts, consider what portion of those are O&M vs new expenditures. Can new expenditures be deferred without impacting productivity/revenue? Can you consolidate, outsource, or invest/buy-down continual obligations (it's amazing how many orgs won' consider that b/c they're too short sighted)? Ensure each of those areas is related to an overarching business strategy... that's your justification for those areas. Make sure that the linkage includes a rough discussion about the revenue/productivity impact of each area both for new purchases/continual obligations for both the engineering and enterprise IT expenses.
Obviously, you're not going to cut 50% of all IT spending and still have the full level of effectiveness and efficiency, not within a FY. Perhaps you should consider a more phased approach?
I've spent 8 years in Europe and one thing I can tell you is that culturally they
1) have a longer view
2) favor process over results (whereas we Americans favor results over process)
The two things combined, in my experience, go a long way to explaining this and a lot of other differing view points.
The greatest benefit of the SSDs aren't in what they do today, it's their future potential.
For a long time HDD access has been one of the biggest bottlenecks. The best thing about SSD is that it _opens the door_ to persistent storage that is not limited by it's mechanical mechanisms. There will be a lot improvements that can be built on this path whereas the mechanical HDD has almost run it's course.
Why anyone wants Federal control of anything is beyond me
Given that large scale projects are impossible without forcing somebody to move, do you feel comfortable granting eminent domain to private industry?
Aww, that's cute....
Hate to break it to you but private industry has been officially granted eminent domain, though indirectly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
(See earlier Berkman v. Parker (1954) for where the definition of "use by the public" was expanded to include "public advantage")
and in fact has been unofficially for some time:
See Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393, 43 S. Ct. 158, 67 L. Ed. 322 (1922) where the Supreme Court ruled that coal mining under an owner's property was not a taking, despite a subsidence, or settling, of the property's surface
I know a 100 Billion+ digit prime number....figured it out in my sleep about 10 years ago. But it would take me like 6 years speed writing 24/7 to write it out....not to mention the 500,000 trees it would take to make all the paper.
What's the old saying? "It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools?";-)
yeah, that's certainly one way to look at it... here are a few others:
"when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"
and my personal favorite "the right tool for the right job; would you strike a nail with a fly swatter or kill a fly with a hammer?"
I think you might have misused the quotation. The real point behind your above quotation is that craftsman should know how to choose, use, and maintain his/her tools. In our industry we often find ourselves falling in on other peoples poor choices, i.e. my brother was asked to maintain some code to search M$ Office files that was written in FORTRAN. I could go on, but we all have experienced this.
It's all about the scalability in processor architecture. And unfortunately, your analogy about diesel engines only goes so far. You can only chain so many pistons together before you have to worry about how effecient you can transfer the energy to the drive train. There is an upperbound of effectiveness. Concentrating on the number of pistons and ignoring each pistons' capabilites will leave you with a lot of hourse power but little torque.
The same problem exists in multiple core designs, namely: only so many things can be done in parallel. This is because most programs are sequential in nature and benefit very little from executing their code in parallel. And eventually, you'l get down to something sequential like the bus or acess to memory or paging to the hard diskwhich is where the real bottle neck is anyway).
About the only thing this will help with is if you're doing some sort of mathmatical computing (using MPI or somethigg like that as was previously mentioned) or you're playing Doom3 while you're your rendering the spcial effects for Star Wars III. In which case you need to get out more;)
This basically sums up our view of each other:
SOCIALISM : You have 2 cows and you give one to your neighbor.
COMMUNISM : You have 2 cows, the Government takes both and gives you some milk.
FASCISM : You have 2 cows, the Government takes both and sells you some milk.
NAZISM : You have 2 cows. The Government takes both and shoots you.
BUREAUCRATISM : You have 2 cows; the Government takes both, shoots one, milks the other and throws the milk away...
TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.
AN AMERICAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow dropped dead.
A FRENCH CORPORATION: You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows.
A JAPANESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called Cowkimon and market them World-Wide.
A GERMAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You reengineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.
AN ITALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows, but you don't know where they are. You break for lunch.
A RUSSIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 2 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.
A SWISS CORPORATION: You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you. You charge others for storing them.
A CHINESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported the numbers.
AN INDIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You worship them.
A BRITISH CORPORATION: You have two cows. Both are mad.
-Spot
This is what differentiates European and (traditional, although changing) US beliefs. In the US you have the right to pursue happiness, not the right to happiness. There's a critical distinction there.
In the US you have the right to work and that does not extend to the guarantee of a job. Bluntly put in the American psyche: It's the owners' company and the E-class was put into position to execute in the best interest of the owners, NOT the employees. Because.... the owners OWN the company. By virtue of working FOR them, you have at -some level- subjugated yourself to their decisions, which inevitably revolve around how to make the owners happy. Such level of subjugation of course depends on cultural norms and legal process and THAT is where the European model is different than the American model.
Europeans feel they have a right to continue working for a company once they have been hired. Which is why new jobs are far more uncommon in Europe than in America. This is because it is far harder to get cut jobs in Europe than in America. In almost every manner that I have ever seen (and I have spent a 3rd of my life in Europe), European companies and their governments are FAR less flexible than their American counterparts. They tend to favor equity and process whereas the American system tends to favor flexibility and results.
Here's what it comes down to: America respects and rewards risk takers. Europe (by and large) wants to look after the little guy. Here's a case in point: In America the corporate cleaning crews go to work after I'm done my day. In my European experience, they have always been working a 9-5 and based on my American way of thinking, they get in my way... I do not like hearing a vacuum running while I'm trying to work, it's disruptive. When this happens, my European co-workers don't have a problem, they go take a coffee break. This whole scenario would never fly in an American office (of the type I work in).
-Spot
Slashdot Mirror
Someone, for the love of all that is good in the world, mod parent up!!!
As it applies to CS/EE/CE students, learning C then C++ better positions students in the long term. Once you understand C and C++, it should be a relatively trivial exercise to go up and down the stack. At that point, you have the base skills necessary to learn how a lot more things than if you learned just Java or Python.
Having said that, I can see the benefit of having a "programming fundamentals" course in something like Python for those people who have never programmed before or for those who are not in the CS/EE/CE programs, e.g., Mechanical Engineers, Physicists, Business students, etc.
Essentially what they're admitting is that they cannot attract enough tax-paying US residents to Detroit. Therefore, they need to look elsewhere for people who are willing to work hard enough to generate the necessary tax revenues needed pay for the services which current residents want and to rescue Detroit from their woes.
This is the ultimate representation of the failure of a community.
Showing them how its done accomplishes nothing, because they do not watch and learn but simply let you do the work, then they go on break or go home content that the work is over.
Let me fix that for you:
Showing them how it's done accomplishes nothing, because they do not watch and learn but simply let you do the work, then they go on break or go home content that the work is over.
Other that,I concur!
As a manager you quickly learn where you need to focus and how to prioritize. If you want to lead great teams you have to know how to assemble a great team without going on a safari to track down qualified candidates. Finding the proverbial diamond in the rough will take you a lot longer than saying "find me a candidate with demonstrable experience in something related to X with a degree in Y from a top Z school". Of course, don't be completely rigid and if you happen across the diamond in the rough - all the better. You just can't send all your time looking for her/him.
In the early 2000's, during the middle of an interview for a SWE position, the hiring manager (proverbial MS in Systems Engineering) indicated to me that I was an ideal candidate except for one shortcoming: I didn't have the 15yrs of Java experience they were looking for. I expressed my disappointment, shook the woman's hand and wished her the best of luck finding the right candidate. I later heard the project was an abysmal failure...
Good discussion, but you might be forgetting something ... productivity and long term impacts. What will the long term costs be of not doing a tech refresh? How are the departments likely to respond (e.g. buy their own computers) and what are the costs to the institution? Inaction will inevitably have a cost.
50% sounds like [s]he either pulled it out of their ass or like someone else mentioned - the financial situation is dire. Like most discussions, you want to frame the conversation in the best possible way for you to win it. In your case, I would work with your boss to re-frame the discussion around cutting the right part 50%. Moving all engineering related expenses to line of business accounts would be a good first step, then you can take a look at the real enterprise IT. Of what remains, consider what you can outsource within the limits allowed by applicable security and regulatory constraints. Of the IT enabling expenses in line of business accounts, consider what portion of those are O&M vs new expenditures. Can new expenditures be deferred without impacting productivity/revenue? Can you consolidate, outsource, or invest/buy-down continual obligations (it's amazing how many orgs won' consider that b/c they're too short sighted)? Ensure each of those areas is related to an overarching business strategy ... that's your justification for those areas. Make sure that the linkage includes a rough discussion about the revenue/productivity impact of each area both for new purchases/continual obligations for both the engineering and enterprise IT expenses.
Obviously, you're not going to cut 50% of all IT spending and still have the full level of effectiveness and efficiency, not within a FY. Perhaps you should consider a more phased approach?
I've spent 8 years in Europe and one thing I can tell you is that culturally they
1) have a longer view
2) favor process over results (whereas we Americans favor results over process)
The two things combined, in my experience, go a long way to explaining this and a lot of other differing view points.
I think they stand on their own .. hell just getting a band who is willing to cover their songs might do well enough ...
The greatest benefit of the SSDs aren't in what they do today, it's their future potential. For a long time HDD access has been one of the biggest bottlenecks. The best thing about SSD is that it _opens the door_ to persistent storage that is not limited by it's mechanical mechanisms. There will be a lot improvements that can be built on this path whereas the mechanical HDD has almost run it's course.
We call this Eminent Domain.
Why anyone wants Federal control of anything is beyond me
Given that large scale projects are impossible without forcing somebody to move, do you feel comfortable granting eminent domain to private industry?
Aww, that's cute ....
Hate to break it to you but private industry has been officially granted eminent domain, though indirectly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London (See earlier Berkman v. Parker (1954) for where the definition of "use by the public" was expanded to include "public advantage")
and in fact has been unofficially for some time:
See Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393, 43 S. Ct. 158, 67 L. Ed. 322 (1922) where the Supreme Court ruled that coal mining under an owner's property was not a taking, despite a subsidence, or settling, of the property's surface
I know a 100 Billion+ digit prime number....figured it out in my sleep about 10 years ago. But it would take me like 6 years speed writing 24/7 to write it out....not to mention the 500,000 trees it would take to make all the paper.
lemme guess 0000....00003?
What's the old saying? "It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools?" ;-)
yeah, that's certainly one way to look at it ... here are a few others:
"when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"
and my personal favorite "the right tool for the right job; would you strike a nail with a fly swatter or kill a fly with a hammer?"
I think you might have misused the quotation. The real point behind your above quotation is that craftsman should know how to choose, use, and maintain his/her tools. In our industry we often find ourselves falling in on other peoples poor choices, i.e. my brother was asked to maintain some code to search M$ Office files that was written in FORTRAN. I could go on, but we all have experienced this.
Which is why you have
development -> testing -> live
Bureaucracy doesn't create quality, testing does.
Couldn't disagree more: testing just finds defects it doesn't _produce_ quality. Quality engineers produce quality requirements, quality architecture, quality design, quality implementation, quality V&V, etc, etc.
It's all about the scalability in processor architecture. And unfortunately, your analogy about diesel engines only goes so far. You can only chain so many pistons together before you have to worry about how effecient you can transfer the energy to the drive train. There is an upperbound of effectiveness. Concentrating on the number of pistons and ignoring each pistons' capabilites will leave you with a lot of hourse power but little torque. The same problem exists in multiple core designs, namely: only so many things can be done in parallel. This is because most programs are sequential in nature and benefit very little from executing their code in parallel. And eventually, you'l get down to something sequential like the bus or acess to memory or paging to the hard diskwhich is where the real bottle neck is anyway). About the only thing this will help with is if you're doing some sort of mathmatical computing (using MPI or somethigg like that as was previously mentioned) or you're playing Doom3 while you're your rendering the spcial effects for Star Wars III. In which case you need to get out more ;)
This basically sums up our view of each other: SOCIALISM : You have 2 cows and you give one to your neighbor. COMMUNISM : You have 2 cows, the Government takes both and gives you some milk. FASCISM : You have 2 cows, the Government takes both and sells you some milk. NAZISM : You have 2 cows. The Government takes both and shoots you. BUREAUCRATISM : You have 2 cows; the Government takes both, shoots one, milks the other and throws the milk away... TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income. AN AMERICAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow dropped dead. A FRENCH CORPORATION: You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows. A JAPANESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called Cowkimon and market them World-Wide. A GERMAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You reengineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves. AN ITALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows, but you don't know where they are. You break for lunch. A RUSSIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 2 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka. A SWISS CORPORATION: You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you. You charge others for storing them. A CHINESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported the numbers. AN INDIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You worship them. A BRITISH CORPORATION: You have two cows. Both are mad. -Spot
This is what differentiates European and (traditional, although changing) US beliefs. In the US you have the right to pursue happiness, not the right to happiness. There's a critical distinction there. In the US you have the right to work and that does not extend to the guarantee of a job. Bluntly put in the American psyche: It's the owners' company and the E-class was put into position to execute in the best interest of the owners, NOT the employees. Because .... the owners OWN the company. By virtue of working FOR them, you have at -some level- subjugated yourself to their decisions, which inevitably revolve around how to make the owners happy. Such level of subjugation of course depends on cultural norms and legal process and THAT is where the European model is different than the American model.
Europeans feel they have a right to continue working for a company once they have been hired. Which is why new jobs are far more uncommon in Europe than in America. This is because it is far harder to get cut jobs in Europe than in America. In almost every manner that I have ever seen (and I have spent a 3rd of my life in Europe), European companies and their governments are FAR less flexible than their American counterparts. They tend to favor equity and process whereas the American system tends to favor flexibility and results.
Here's what it comes down to: America respects and rewards risk takers. Europe (by and large) wants to look after the little guy. Here's a case in point: In America the corporate cleaning crews go to work after I'm done my day. In my European experience, they have always been working a 9-5 and based on my American way of thinking, they get in my way ... I do not like hearing a vacuum running while I'm trying to work, it's disruptive. When this happens, my European co-workers don't have a problem, they go take a coffee break. This whole scenario would never fly in an American office (of the type I work in).
-Spot